The World Bank which is supposed 
to be about developing societies,
and fighting poverty
around the world.
One of the ways that it thinks
that you fight epidemics,
is the creation of special bonds
called pandemic bonds.
and pandemic bonds are loans
that are sold to investors,
sold to pension funds,
sold to hedge funds.
And they pay a return to those big
investors until a pandemic happens.
and when the pandemic happens the
original capital that was invested,
in the bond that used to help countries
deal with that pandemic.
The problem is that in order to encourage
big investors to buy these bonds,
they've been structured in such a way 
that they don't really work at all.
They've effectively never 
paid out to date,
despite the Ebola crisis and whatever
else they've never paid out.
Now with corona virus pandemic
bonds have finally been triggered,
so we hope now that those
bonds are going to pay out.
However, these bonds
have been paying out,
high rates of interest for the entire time
that they've been issued to rich investors.
So a lot of people have made money.
It would be far far better if
we put society's resources,
into trying to take money out of tax havens,
tax the super rich, tax big business.
So that countries are able to develop
decent universally accessible,
public health care systems so that
when something like this happens,
they have a head start they're ready to
begin dealing with a public health crisis.
In a way that can actually meet the
needs of everybody but especially,
those they were going
to struggle otherwise.
The idea that you can kind of persuade
the financial market to behave,
as if it was a development institution,
as if it was something that was interested
in solving poverty around the world,
is ludicrous and we shouldn't tie
ourselves up in knots like this.
We need to tax and
we need to regulate,
and we need to build up
decent public services.
I always like to think that after
the Second World War,
my grandparents generation
suddenly thought:
We've been through this war, we've
been through horrendous suffering,
we want to build a better society 
how do we do that?
And one of the things they did
in this country was to say;
health care is too important
to be dictated by the market.
Whether I get treated or not
how much I suffer or not,
should not depend upon how much
money I've got in my bank account.
Health care should be a given it should
be available to everybody in society,
no matter where they come from.
And that's where they created
the National Health Service,
and it was a very effective
way of trying to re-level,
some of the inequalities that had evolved
in society over a long period of time.
And I think most people in Britain
probably regard the NHS,
as kind of the pinnacle of civilisation,
of what if we put our minds to it we can
achieve to create a better way of living.
Exactly that kind of solution
needs to be rolled out,
right the way around
the world today.
Unfortunately the very institutions
like the World Bank,
that are creating these ridiculous
pandemic bonds have spent years,
and years and years telling countries
they need to slash public spending,
they need to privatise everything in sight
they need to liberalise their economies,
they've made those kind of solutions
that much more difficult.
And we need to reverse course 
now very, very rapidly.
And hopefully one of the few positives
that might come out of this crisis,
is that we finally wake up to the
damage that's been done,
to our ability to meet our
needs as human beings,
by the ravages of the market
for decades now.
The mainstream media has become more
and more dominated by vested interests.
That's why alternative media
is so utterly vital,
if we're to create the kind of better world
that most of us want to create.
And it's why things like Double
Down news are so important,
so please, please, please
support it if you possibly can.
