Industry sign banking louisiana living will secure
hello there I'm Amira David this is boom-bust and these are the stories we are tracking for you today the waters begin to recede in Louisiana but with thousands of people displaced the state is now facing a possible housing crisis I've got details coming right up then has the cost of saving your child's life gotten more expensive will tell you about the pharma company that's jacking up the price for a life-saving drug that story straight ahead plus turkey's economy is in the spotlight after a failed coup in today's big deal will break down the factors now threatening growth in the country we've got that and a whole lot more lined up for you on today's show don't go anywhere Boombah starts right now we begin today in Louisiana now experiencing its worst flooding in history we're now learning that an estimated forty thousand homes have been damaged by tremendous downpours over the last several days with almost two feet of rain falling in some parts of the state 30,000 people have been rescued as part of that completely displaced from their homes and from their communities and that's raising some alarm over what could be the biggest housing crunch we've seen in the state since Hurricane Katrina while normally the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA would rely on rehousing people by offering rental assistance there seems to be a problem in this particular case with finding enough habitable homes for rent FEMA says there just isn't a whole lot out there that hasn't already been damaged however state officials are already urging landlords to allow short-term leases for what is available they're also encouraging people to rent out any empty spaces whatsoever FEMA says it will be offering grants of up to thirty three thousand dollars to help with repairs outside of that homeowners will be forced to rely on their insurance and for those that don't have insurance the road to recovery will prove to be even longer all right and moving right along here private prison stocks in the US are starting to climb back some of their losses after plummeting by more than forty percent in midday trading on Thursday of course all of this was an outgrowth of the big announcement that the US Justice Department was planning to stop using private contractors to run its prisons altogether it was a bold and unexpected decision from the Justice Department it came by way of a memo from Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates who said of private prisons that they simply did not provide the same level of Correctional Services programs and resources and that they do not save substantially on costs she went on to say that rehabilitative services that the Bureau provides such as educational programs and job training have proved difficult to replicate an outsourced and these services are essential to reducing recidivism zone the two publicly traded prison companies who contract with the government did begin to see their shares stabilize on Friday nevertheless Moody's revised its outlook on both companies to negative from stable citing substantial uncertainty on how this will impact cash flows alright the cost of a life-saving drug used in the event of severe allergic reactions has just become more expensive mylan pharmaceuticals the maker of the EpiPen has announced that the price for the portable emergency injection will arise will rise from a hundred dollars to five hundred dollars or even more concerns over the price hike are being heard across the country from patients and doctors alike artis men while Rob Lowe has been tracking this story and he joins me right now with the details mani so tell me a little bit more about the EpiPen and why exactly this company has decided to jack up the price so much sure so I happen to have an EpiPen on me right now I borrowed this from one of our colleagues who has a deadly peanut allergy we don't have to mention who that is but the way it works it comes out of this container and it has this blue cap that you pop right off will show the camera over here and there's a needle on this end you stick this in your thigh and it delivers a dose of epinephrine to counteract the effects of a otherwise potentially deadly allergic reaction now based on the research that we've done today the drug inside of here the epinephrine only costs about two dollars to four dollars to produce so the important thing for someone watching this program trying to understand what the price hike is what you're paying for in this case is the delivery mechanism which is this plastic disposable container and the name mylan pharmaceuticals right and so this is what has so many physicians and patients so concerned because this device right here this could mean the difference between life or death for someone with severe peanut allergies or any other food allergy or any allergy that could lead to anaphylaxis now Vermont senator Bernie Sanders posted a statement earlier today that I want to read to you he said quote the drug industry's greed knows no bounds there's no reason in epi pen which cost Milan just a few dollars to make should cost families more than six hundred dollars the only explanation for Milan raising the price by six times since 2009 is that the company values profits more than the lives of millions of Americans now this is certainly a strong indictment by senator Bernie Sanders but it's a sentiment that a lot of Americans feel all across the country as the more that they see situations like these continuing to happen now conversely my land has told reporters that they made improvements to front to product features that really merit merit the value of this product but again just to reiterate this is a plastic device it's disposable in fact it expires after one year so patients are having to repurchase these every year if they have these allergies i'm talking about roughly two percent of the american of the american population so milan is making a lot of money off of there properly and they enjoy a monopoly on this drug so they absolutely are raking in a lot of money the question is what options are there really for someone who doesn't want to or can't afford to pay five or six hundred dollars well you but you that's a fair question you mentioned something important in last year uh Sanofi us who had a version of the EpiPen they left the market this is a competing company who left the market because of a recall of their product in milan does have an almost exclusive monopoly over these pens the company isn't hurting last year the profits from EpiPen alone 2015 were 1.2 billion dollars and you asked about the options that people are left with who are now having to face paying upwards of five hundred dollars for this if they're uninsured my lands website gives you an opportunity to purchase a savings card or a coupon but that does not apply if you are uninsured now literally minutes ago I got an email from my landed contacted them earlier today trying to get a comment about the statement from Bernie Sanders they didn't comment about that but they did tell us quote for a great number of patients insurance coverage coupled with my lands EpiPen savings card means that they could be eligible to receive up to three pak cartons per prescription at no cost in 2015 nearly eighty percent of commercially insured patients using the savings card received EpiPen auto-injector for zero dollars but again if you're uninsured this means no savings for you and I think one of the just to mention very quickly a bigger obstacle that people are facing even though there are other options is that the FDA does not recognize auto-injectors as medically equivalent so if you get a prescription for an EpiPen that doesn't mean that you can go to the pharmacy and get yourself a lower-cost one this is what you're stuck with right very difficult especially for parents were gearing up for the school year to everybody's 5x exactly all right Manny Rockville oh thank you so much for that reporting well the age of drones is upon us it's an exciting time for hobbyists photographers and companies like Amazon eager to deploy drone deliveries but as millions more take to the skies in the next several years artis Simone del Rosario tells us there are security risks we need to take into account their cyber security there is a physical security but what industrial facilities have yet to consider is cyber physical security Jeff Melrose is a technology strategist at yokogawa us which makes industrial sensors and controls he's concerned that security for industrial facilities is old school no match for a new wave of drone technology there's plenty of people in the physical security realm that have a fence line and have physical distance from their plants or from their facilities deliberately put that way because it would be difficult for someone to traverse without being seen in the case of a drone that can traverse it really quite quite in a abrupt manner but also it can jump over any physical boundary that you have like a fence or that type of thing the issue came up when melrose company's clients started finding down drones on their properties the question of course is why is it there and what was it trying to achieve from a physical security standpoint a chemical plan or a refinery or whatever should definitely start doing it more three-dimensional if you will search physical search of their property whereas normally they would walk the perimeter or normally they'd walk various areas you have to start thinking of areas where a drone or a three you know basically something that can fly might end up accidentally or deliberately but also perch if you will for surveillance drones that breach the perimeter of a power plant or oil refinery can deviant ly do all sorts of damage armed with an electric jammer it can knock out transmitters disrupt or control important utilities for entire communities surveil from above or even navigate through open doors into buildings melrose recommends locking cabinets and doors within what used to be considered secure perimeter they would not want their you know a drone to come into their control room and take a picture of their there hm is there human machine interfaces yes drones can be manipulated that precisely from afar but as melrose demonstrates they can also autonomously lock in and follow targets hacking shipments on the move previous designs may have assumed that oh if I'm moving at a reasonable speed of course I'll get out of any type of cone of silence if you will or cone of interference but that can actually follow you if it's deployed by a drone the Federal Aviation Administration estimates there will be seven million drones flying over America by 2020 melrose says the FAA notoriously slow and conservative when it comes to aviation standards is feeling pressure to make it possible for the drone industry to take off I'm very concerned that we're rushing into this future and people are not really thinking about like are we naively thinking just because this normally works that somebody can't perturb it you know much like autonomous driving vehicles you know it works really well until it doesn't and it'll take devious minds to determine what drones are capable of doing then secure against that threat before something dangerous happens in Washington C Mon del rosario RT alright still ahead here on boom bus will talk about the prospects for a job guarantee here in the US could it boost the economy that's straight ahead but turkeys economy is in the spotlight after a failed coup will tell you why on the other side stay with us and as we go to break here are the numbers at the closing bell earlier today President Obama would employ think I'm responsible for poisoning people and firms always that's what goes on with a generous women supposed to do leave here's something else teen out in the US there's always some degree of boss in this huge difference colony announced that nobody saw by the story goes it's garbage real genuine signature should every person in the US who wants a job be guaranteed one my next guest pavlina churn Ava says yes as a research associate at the levee economics institute she's long advocated for a job guarantee program that can act as an income safety net for those who need it the most however there are a lot of skeptics out there who argue against it saying it will disincentivize workers to find a job in the private sector thereby making it overly burdensome on the government but here's her argument to that alright so there is there is little evidence that people are going to lose their incentives in fact this is a stepping stone this is how we want to see it we want to see it as a stepping stone so we provide a basic income or basic wage base living wage at a employment opportunity where a person can actually get the on-the-job training and education so that is a crucial component of this program that we help people transition into private sector employment should they desire to move to better paying jobs and one you know one way we call this program is actually a transitional job program the other thing is that we have seen programs around the world and we have some evidence to see that people are not disincentivize in fact they really like their public employment opportunity options they have better a labor force attachment their children do better they're they're able to climb the economic ladder and of course they're they're sort of able to stabilize their incomes as they transition to other forms of employment so I don't think we should see this in terms of costs we had can only see this in terms of benefits because we already bear extraordinary costs that are already paid for that from mass unemployment there are health crime other political instability costs there are mental and physical problems that come with unemployment there are long-term effects on families and their children and so we are bearing the cost what we are saying is let's treat this as a disease let's inoculate this problem and let's simul taneously inoculate all the problems that are associated with it by putting the unemployed to work in a public project for the public purpose so it's a win-win any way you look at it yeah there could be some social benefits as you mentioned long-term long-lasting social benefits now recently at Jeremy Corbyn the UK's labor leader released a ten-point plan and in that plan he pledged to quote create a million good quality new jobs and guarantee a decent job for all now it doesn't seem like the news media really parsed that out as a job guarantee however they are picking up on his openness to a separate program called universal basic income we've talked about this on the show before now in this case instead of being guaranteed a job of course people are guaranteed a set amount of money every single month and I have heard you say in the past that you are not a huge fan of this program I mean what is the case against universal basic income over the job guaranteed okay so the the basic income and the job guarantee advocates tend to share the same kind of social objectives and goals the difference is that the job guarantee actually provides the structure and the institutional means through which to achieve poverty alleviation to provide public goods and services to the needy from elevating them from their poverty and most importantly stabilize the business cycle the basic income does not have this counter cyclical stabilization function it is supposed to be provided at all times irrespective of the macroeconomic conditions so it ever fiscal policy has a counter-cyclical feature except the basic income guarantee what is worse than what is very troublesome to me is that supporters of the basic income program come from both the left and the right and in a sense of formed i would say an unholy alliance to fund quote-unquote this program by scaling back a lot of other social programs and to me this is a really a Trojan horse kind of policy where it promises that all social ills will be cured by the single grant while at the same time undermines and potentially eliminates all the hard fought for welfare programs that we have that are very carefully targeted to the specific needs of those that are most needy and there are different iterations of the universa
basic income that have been proposed and what you're saying what I'm hearing you say is that you don't like a basic income that outright replaces the current safety net but the arguments of that is I mean what is the case for keeping a program like welfare as robust as it is today if people are going to be guaranteed an income or guaranteed a job so we what's missing is the job component there's a misdiagnosis of the problem you know poverty is not simply an absence of income poverty is multifaceted and we know that employment opportunities are very effective at alleviating people from poverty because poverty people associate with being isolated from their community from not being respected for the work that they're doing from not being part of mainstream society and economic activity so this is a complex problem and so while I'm very sympathetic to the goals and objectives of the basic income guarantee proposal it is a bit of a magic wand solution where there's a lot of wishful thinking about what the same grant could possibly achieve to alleviate those who have been most marginalized discriminated and you know pushed outside of the political process can benefit from it so yes modern income support programs need a reform but what they need really is that jobs component let's provide income support but let's at the same time provide an employment opportunity and if we marry these two you will see how naturally a lot of the expenditures on of the other social programs that address poverty unemployment etc actually decline on their own so we should expect in much smaller welfare state per se by simply guaranteeing employment to all well one country we can seemingly look to for an example of this is Argentina that's a country as far as I understand that you have studied greatly and unfortunately poverty in that situation was not alleviated by the program but tell me a little bit more about how it operated there and whether it could be a model of what could work in western countries like the UK or the US for example he has very interesting case in Argentina it was not a job guarantee fall but it was a direct employment program that provided guaranteed employment opportunity to a head of household and so the program actually very quickly ballooned beyond what policymakers expected whereas about thirteen percent of the of the labor force ended up participating in this program at the depths of the crisis and if this is where I get actually my inspiration for my proposal is that it was federally funded but it was administered through localities and municipalities on the call for proposal kind of basis where the unemployed and community organizations themselves propose the kinds of projects they need in their communities to address their needs now what's interesting about this program is that even though it wasn't a job guarantee it exhibited many of the features that I am emphasizing for example within a year the payrolls of the federal government began shrinking rapidly the economy recovered so quickly that people started transitioning out of this program into private sector employment it did not alleviate poverty because the income offered was very low it was below poverty below the poverty line so while the minimum wage increased in Argentina the wage provided through this program didn't really increase above poverty nevertheless it immediately reduced extreme poverty which is called we called indigence and I had gone and visited a number of projects and interviewed people and these are sort of the unquantifiable the the great impact that this had on the social fabric on people on their dignity on their families so there is a lot we could learn from these from these projects and what is interesting is that as a macroeconomic policy it tended to serve precisely the function that I'm emphasizing it shrinks in good times and grows in bad times alright big deal time i'm sitting here with ed Harrison and we are talking about turkey now in the wake of a failed attempted coup the Turkish economy is under pressure just today turkeys Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek said that turkeys 720 billion dollar economy will expand less than projected in January the government had targeted four-point-five percent growth in 2016 and the economy did grow four point eight percent in the first quarter of the year but the most recent estimates now forecast the economy at just three point five percent growth for 2016 so add let's start right there now interestingly back in 2013 going back for a second Morgan Stanley coined turkey a part of this group this concept the fragile five along with some other countries who have really been experiencing you know shortfalls in the wake of the fed's tapering program tapering of QE but interestingly turkey along with India as a part of those countries has seemed to outperform isn't that right yeah so I mean the question is whether or not that was a good term or not and you know there were five countries there's we're saying there's Brazil there's turkey it is Indonesia South Africa and India and some of those countries haven't done so well for instance Brazil and South Africa have really spiraled out of control in a negative way but really what Morgan Stanley was getting out with their fragile five was about a balance of payments that is currency and current account deficit so they weren't necessarily talking about the economy per se but rather the ability for external liabilities to create a problem I would say that you know basically with regard to Turkey you know following a thirty percent increase in the official minimum wage household expenditures which make up two-thirds of the economy rose by six point nine percent in the quarter that you were talking about and that's the highest pace that they had seen since the third quarter of 2011 so almost five years and government spending grew 10 point nine percent that's the most since 2009 and basically they've beaten their forecast every quarters since the fourth quarter of 2014 so yes they have done really well but I'm making the case that even though Turkey has done well there was a reason to put them in the fragile five and that was because of balance of payments something that they've really gotten a grip on you know since that that happens they did deserve to be there but they don't necessarily deserve to be there now is what you're saying right exactly and I think that both India and Turkey as you were saying have outperformed in a way that has minimize any negative effects on their economy okay well tell me about what's happening now in the wake of this failed coup how is the economy faring yeah so I would say that the economy in the wake of the failed coup is not feeling faring as well that the tourism industry in particular suffered a German German tourism is down thirty percent hotel occupancy in 2016 is down forty percent because of what happened with Russia and Turkey we saw of complete ban on travel to Turkey for Russians ninety percent drop in Russian tourism but of course obviously the reproach manin Turkey and Russia is going to actually have a boost there as a result so the numbers are actually fairly negative especially with regard to tourism but I think that they're going to take some measures to get that under control yeah tourism is a huge industry for them and what does turkey do now to mitigate you know the downside going forward yeah so the things that they can do one of the things obviously is this reproach meant with Russia that I talked about that's going to definitely help them mitigate some of the downside and I think certainly if it means more foreign direct investment that's a good thing for the economy they also interestingly enough I saw recently they they have a sovereign wealth fund with an initial capital of 50 billion turkish lira which is about 15 million dollar fifty million dollars not billion but million they're going to ramp this thing up into a bigger stage I think eventually this thing is going to get to be 200 billion in size this is what the economy minister said and they're going to use this to you know take assets that work state-owned you privatize those and then invest the assets through this sovereign wealth fund and other things they're doing a lot of stuff there's fiscal stimulus this monetary stimulus so they really are going all out to make sure that this failed coup doesn't derail the economy yeah and it could if they don't pay very very close attention to how things unravel from here at Harrison thank you so much for that we love hearing from you guys tweet at all of us Edward NH Simone reports at Manuel underscore raffle oh and at Amira David remember you can see all the segments featured in today's show on youtube youtube.com slash boom-bust RT from all of us here boom bye thanks for watching have a wonderful weekend
