‘Thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality

“Those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the ‘exploited’ but the outcast, the ‘leftovers’.” – Pope Francis. Image: L’Osservatore Romano

Pope Francis has issued, a month before Christmas, a blunt and plain message to the political and financial masters of our societies. That message is: the economics of exclusion and inequality must stop.

The message comes early in his ‘exhortation’ (called ‘Evangelii Gaudium’) and which has just been released by the Vatican. You will find it in Chapter 2 which is titled ‘Amid the crisis of communal commitment’. The main body of the exhortation has a lot of the usual evangelical language that such messages from the Vatican typically contain, but this chapter rings stark and true.

Francis has begun this section with: “It is not the task of the Pope to offer a detailed and complete analysis of contemporary reality, but I do exhort all the communities to an ‘ever watchful scrutiny of the signs of the times’. This is in fact a grave responsibility, since certain present realities, unless effectively dealt with, are capable of setting off processes of dehumanisation which would then be hard to reverse.”

He gives a nod to the proponents of technological remedies to many of our contemporary problems: “We can only praise the steps being taken to improve people’s welfare in areas such as health care, education and communications.” And then gets to the root of the issue with “at the same time we have to remember that the majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day, with dire consequences. A number of diseases are spreading. The hearts of many people are gripped by fear and desperation, even in the so-called rich countries. The joy of living frequently fades, lack of respect for others and violence are on the rise, and inequality is increasingly evident”.

“It is a struggle to live and, often, to live with precious little dignity. This epochal change has been set in motion by the enormous qualitative, quantitative, rapid and cumulative advances occurring in the sciences and in technology, and by their instant application in different areas of nature and of life. We are in an age of knowledge and information, which has led to new and often anonymous kinds of power.” This is a complaint as plain as any we have seen from those suffering from the effects of climate change, from the forced economics of austerity, from the land grabs and the perversions of democracy. It is possible that in the last sentence, Francis has also warned against the global spying (by the USA and its feckless allies) which included the Vatican too.

In the sub-section titled ‘No to an economy of exclusion’ Francis has made plain his opposition [get the English pdf here] to the current systems of power and control:
“Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.”
“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion. Can we continue to stand by when food is thrown away while people are starving? This is a case of inequality. Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalised: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”

“Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a ‘throw away’ culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the ‘exploited’ but the outcast, the ‘leftovers’.”

And in one angry paragraph, Francis effectively sends packing the army of macro-economists and financial manipulators who continue to claim that constant growth (GDP, economy, consuming, and so on) brings people out of poverty thanks to the ‘free market’.

“In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralised workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”
“To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalisation of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”

This is indeed revolutionary material from the Vatican. Now let’s see what effect it has on the suits in the G20, the banking parasites, the stock marketeers, the land grabbers, the ecological criminals in all our countries.

Appraising World Food Day 2013

It must be difficult to be a senior official in the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN these days, especially if the official is above 40 years old and has spent the last two decades working “in the field” (which usually means away from some capital city somewhere, in discomfort that is amusingly relative to most of us proletarian toilers). For, I do think that there is still a majority of folk in the FAO who care about their work and the aims of the organisation, muddled though these get when 190-odd member states each bring their own version of reality (and ambition) into the proceedings.

More difficult it is nowadays in an FAO that is being shepherded more closely into the embrace of the OECD, the World Bank-International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organisation embrace, with its murmuring old boys’ clubs all shadowy in their suits, adept at facilitating the trade of political positions for corporate board seats. And more difficult it is nowadays in an FAO that is scrutinised every day by NGOs and civil society groups that have successfully ensured that negotiations called ‘multi-lateral’ must be open before public gaze and can no longer hide behind empty principles when hunger – FAO’s single problem – stalks the planet.

Perhaps that is one reason why the FAO has called this year’s World Food Day ‘Sustainable Food Systems for Food Security and Nutrition’ – and notice the addition of ‘nutirion’, there’s no getting away from the N-word these days, so loaded has it become. The theme, to borrow from the typically bland FAO pronouncement, “gives focus to World Food Day observances and helps increase understanding of problems and solutions in the drive to end hunger”. Well said, for the umpteenth time.

But there have been departures from the corporate script lately which are surprising. On 2013 October 04 the Director General of FAO, José Graziano da Silva, formalised a tie with La Via Campesina, recognising it as the most important voice of small food producers worldwide. This is seen by Campesina as “yet another welcome step in a series of ongoing reforms of the FAO, which have created a unique and unprecedented space to collaborate with civil society and democratize the arena of global food policy”. Easier wished for than done, as Campesina well knows, because the financiers and bankers, agri-commodity trading oligopolies and mafioso, the crooked politicians in the European Union and their willing partners in the ‘developing’ world are not going to quietly let this happen.

These reforms are aimed at giving the FAO not just more political legitimacy by becoming more inclusive, but also at reviving it as the cornerstone for international cooperation in the area of food security, starting to take such policy decisions out of the hands of the World Bank (WB) or the World Trade Organization (WTO.) While these developments are welcome, the global peasants’ movement remains realistic about the amount of energy that should be put into the UN, maintaining its greatest strength on the ground mobilizing farmers and building alternatives.

The IFPRI Global Hunger Index 2013 world map, blatantly patronising in its North-South exclusion. The white areas are not even in the map legend. They correspond to the OECD/’industrialised’ world, and the IFPRI/CGIAR view is that the chronic mis-nutrition of western societies has no place in a report on global hunger. Nor does this map consider the growing effects of working class poverty in the OECD countries.

In 2012, at the 39th session of FAO’s Committee on Food Security (CFS), the G20 approached the CFS and asked the Committee to agree with what it said on price volatility in agricultural commodities, which since 2007 has dragged tens of millions of households in South and North into hunger and debt. When that happened, and when a compromised CFS agreed, the civil society delegation to the session walked out. The NGOs, social movements, representatives of peasants’ federations and associations who were present had, on the contrary, demanded strong regulation of the commodity futures markets that fuel price volatility and the food insecurity of the poorest. But the G20 (and that means the investors in a global agribusiness industry) won that round.

With the help of the CGIAR, what for the sake of convenience we call the G20 will want to win every time. The CGIAR is the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research which runs 15 centres around the world that are described as “independent, non-profit research organizations, innovating on behalf of poor people in developing countries” and as being “home to almost 10,000 scientists, researchers, technicians, and staff working to create a better future for the world’s poor”. The descriptions about ‘independent’, ‘non-profit’ and ‘for the poor’ are lies, as they have been for every single one of the 40 years of this plague called the CGIAR. But the CGIAR system is large, powerful, almost invisible and little understood except by those in agricultural research systems (such as those in the Indian Council of Agricultural Research) in ‘developing’ countries.

And that is why the release, a few days ago, of the ‘Global Hunger Index’ 2013 needs to be interpreted for what it is, because it is the product of one of the CGIAR centres, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The annual index offers a ranking of hunger, or food insecurity/security for many countries but not all (see the image of the map and its caption). The IFPRI functions worldwide as a motivated think-tank that commissions carefully scripted research to fulfil pre-determined outputs that serve the interests of those who profit from the industrial agricultural system and retail food system.

That such an obvious fifth column finds residence and a willing ear in India ought to be a matter of shame to us. Here is a small example why. The IFPRI, in the 2013 Global Hunger Index, has distributed its ‘recommendations’ which are from the typical neo-liberal charter of subjugation of the working classes and the denial of choice, all camouflagued by whichever development jargon is found to be currently in vogue.

The cover of the Global Hunger Index 2013 report. Read the recommendations to grasp why this has been released, ignore the data.

Hence “broader policy coherence for development is also a key requirement for efforts to strengthen resilience. Policies that undermine resilience must be revised. To foster resilience to undernutrition, policies should be designed with the intention of improving nutrition outcomes and realising the right to adequate food” in fact means – do away with policies that still see a role for the state and the public sector, hide this behind trendy concepts like ‘resilience’ and ‘right to food’, but include nutrition (which I mentioned earlier) because that is the route the MNCs have successfully used.

Hence “encourage and facilitate a multisectoral approach to resilience (as the Scaling Up Nutrition movement encourages a multisectoral approach to nutrition, for example), coordinating plans and programs across line ministries” in fact means – phase out your thinking and replace it with ours, which comes with a United Nations endorsement and which places private business at the centre of policy and its implementation.

Hence “adjust policies and strategies that undermine the resilience of poor and vulnerable groups, such as the low import tariffs or the structural neglect of smallholder agriculture in Haiti” in fact means – remove barriers to food imports, stop subsidies and subventions that the poor, marginalised and vulnerable have a right to in your country (consider the ruckus the World Trade Organisation has been making about India’s new National Food Security Act) and spout righteous claptrap about ‘neglect’.

Hence “ensure that policies and programs draw on a wide range of expertise such as collaborative, multiagency, and multisectoral problem analysis. National governments should support the emergence of multistakeholder platforms and make active use of such forums” in fact means – the expertise will be foreign and provided by the CGIAR and its numerous allies in all garbs, these ‘multi’ platforms will be public showcases to conceal an agenda already set.

[The full IFPRI Global Hunger Index 2013 report is here. The ‘issue brief is here’ for those who want a condensed dose of dangerous neo-liberal vitamins. And the obligatory data set used to support the well-set arguments is here.]

There is no comparison between the IFPRI propaganda and the annual report of the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch 2013, the sixth edition of which was released in 2014 October. The Watch identifies a number of policies that generate hunger and malnutrition instead of reducing them. The Watch insists on the need for meaningful participation – at every level – of people and communities in the development of those public policies which affect their lives.

You will find here national case studies and analysis that show (1) policies that foster violence and discrimination against women with regard to equal access to natural resources, inheritances, equal wages and political decision-making, (2) policies that systematically limit and exclude large groups, including peasants, agricultural workers, fisherfolks, pastoralists and indigenous peoples from participating in those decisions that affect their very livelihoods and (3) policies on a global level that facilitate land grabbing, concentrated ownership of natural resources and the commodification of public goods that deprive smallholders and other people of their food resources.

Who’s poor and who isn’t – the flawed $1.25 formula

The $1.25 a day poverty line is neither realistic nor is it any use to governments of less industrialised countries. It is time this ‘global poverty line’ is rejected.

An early stage shanty settlement of rural labourers, in Maharashtra, western India

Once again a major international thinktank has released a ‘big picture’ prognosis about global poverty. Once again the $1.25 a day line has been used to confirm that in developing countries, poverty is on the retreat and that the current model of economics is working for the poor by yanking them over that troublesome dollar line.

This time, the thinktank is the Brookings Institution, USA. Here’s their bottomline. Most of the poverty reduction we have seen in the last decade has happened because of the economic growth in China and India, where, until the end of the 20th century, a large number of the world’s poor lived. That growth in Asia not being matched by similar growth in Africa is the reason, Brookings has explained, for Nigeria heading towards being home to the largest population of poor by 2015, more so even than India. Poverty will be an African problem, according to Brookings.

As many other high-profile thinktanks have done over the years, Brookings has proferred its poverty prognostications [pdf] based on a few givens in the world of macroeconomics. One is that $1.25 a day, the World Bank’s revision of its own dollar-a-day definition which is now of some vintage, is the most reliable way to set a global poverty line. Two is that economic growth has brought many people in developing countries out of poverty and will continue to do so. Three is that the kind of growth that we have witnessed (and participated in) in China is the best anti-poverty solution to be found.

A vegetable vendor pushes his cart over a bridge across the river Ganga, near Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India

Based on these ‘givens’, which I shall turn to in a moment, the world’s development specialists and macroeconomists who measure poverty have lately been waxing enthusiastic about the prospect of providing all poor people in the world cash supplements, which they are sure will bring them out of poverty. The cost, they say, is relatively quite small, at about $66 billion. This cash transfer, to each and every poor person, will cost less now than it would have done only five years ago, they have said.

Well, yes and no. All programmes, even ones that distribute cash to people, cost money to run. If you have to distribute on a regular basis enough money to enough poor people at the rate of more than $1.25 a day, that distribution itself is going to be huge and enormously complicated, and of course quie expensive too. Faced with this question, they do have a ready answer, which goes something like this: recent advances in biometric identification technologies—such as fingerprint and iris scanning—have greatly expanded the promise of implementing large-scale welfare programs in poor countries. No doubt, the technology is there and it has been proven to work. However we who work in the field know well that a gizmo in the hand is not exactly worth a meal on the table, so to speak.

That’s the nuts-and-bolts part of the proposal to buy our way out of poverty. A far more troublesome set of questions concerns the ‘givens’ this whole idea is based on. Let’s look again at $1.25 a day to start with. In most developing countries, this is in mid-2011 equivalent to about a litre of petrol. It will buy about three kilos of rice in some countries, pay for two autorickshaw commutes in others, or buy 10-15 litres of water in some cities (this year on World Water Day the UN said that “Someone living in an informal settlement in Nairobi pays 5 to 7 times more for a litre of water than an average North American citizen”).

Built-up shanties along a Mumbai highway, leading to suburbs bristling with expensive new high-rise residential blocks.

That daily line also works out to $37.50 (EUR 26.25) a month. What can an individual buy with that much for a month? Can she buy shelter which does not leak when it rains, can she buy baby food for her children and medicines for her aging parents? Can she pay for schoolfees? Can she afford even a kilowatt hour of electric power a day with that money? Can she stock her kitchen with the cereal, fresh vegetable and lentils her family needs? Never mind $1.25 a day – can she do this on $2 a day in Cairo, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro or Nairobi?

I can’t see a ‘yes’ answer to any of those questions, anywhere. Next, on what basis do the thinktanks and multilateral lending banks (World Bank, IMF) continue to say that economic growth removes poverty? They use variations of the GDP-divided-by-population formula, and ask th macroeconomists to make the appropriate adjustments for income categories and rural-urban distribution. The trouble is, the real world of poverty doesn’t function the way these models and formulae do. Economic growth has meant the continuing and deepening inequality of income. The ‘richer’ a country gets based on GDP, the more unequal the distribution of the money amongst its people. That’s the very reason the ‘advanced’ economies of Western Europe and North America put in place social safety nets (whose very much poorer cousins are the cash transfer programmes in vogue nowadays).

The truth is plainer and far more visible. There is no let-up in poverty, not in the numbers of poor, and not in how far under the poverty line they are. Any other view may be well-intentioned but misguided. [Thanks to From Poverty To Power, the blog by Duncan Green of Oxfam, for mentioning the Brookings report.]

Universal health coverage in India, economic growth, and social justice

The Lancet has published, in its 08-14 January 2011 issue, a series of papers on India’s path to full health coverage. Taken together, the papers and comments show that a failing health system is perhaps India’s greatest predicament. The papers (pay only, the comments are free to read) reveal the full extent of opportunities and difficulties in Indian healthcare, by examining infectious and chronic diseases, availability of treatments and doctors, and the infrastructure to bring about universal health care by 2020. This Lancet issue with the India health coverage special brings together a rapidly growing body of evidence to show that Indian health is in grave crisis. As the country with the largest democracy in the world, India is well positioned to put health high on the political agenda.

Introduction to the Lancet Series – Indian health: the path from crisis to progress – Can India’s vibrant political process and civil society create the public demand for health reform? Do Indian health institutions — the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the health professions, for example — have the capacity to lead reform? In India, community identity rivals individual identity in importance. How do community identities shape attitudes and policies towards health? – Richard Horton, Pam Das (The Lancet)

Universal health care in India: the time is right – India’s record in expanding social opportunities has been uneven. The health and nutritional status of children and women remains poor, and India is routinely ranked among countries performing weakly on overall health performance. But there is good reason for hope. The country has withstood the recent global financial crisis and quickly returned to rapid economic growth. There is a refreshing openness to participation by civil society and to the power of ideas to improve performance and governance. We are enthused by India’s recent commitments to invigorate the public health-care system to address health disparities. – Vikram Patel, A K Shiva Kumar, Vinod K Paul, Krishna D Rao, K Srinath Reddy (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK and Sangath Centre, Goa, India; UNICEF India; All India Institute of Medical Sciences; Public Health Foundation of India)

Securing the right to health for all in India – The health status of people transcends the health-care sector, and the social determinants of health, such as food, water, sewerage, and shelter, still elude large numbers of the poorest citizens in India. Inequity in social determinants of health and health care in a market-based system itself becomes a pathogenic factor that drives the engine of deprivation. These inequities are set to increase even further in the near future even as major investments are being projected and planned in the health sector from 0·9% to 3·0% of the gross domestic product. The stunted public health system is hardly geared up to absorb this increased allocation; already state governments are returning allocated money because of the inability to absorb increased allocations. – Binayak Sen (Christian Medical College, Tamil Nadu, India) (The Lancet writes: “One notable absentee from the launch of the Series on Jan 11, 2011 is paediatrician and Comment author Binayak Sen. He remains in prison, an appalling situation discussed in an Editorial in the Jan 8-14 issue of The Lancet.”)

Gender equity and universal health coverage in India – The findings presented on health-care coverage in India emphasise that maternal health concerns, such as fertility and maternal mortality, continue to affect large numbers of women and girls in India. Although these concerns are diminishing, present trends indicate that India is not on target to reach national and Millennium Development Goals. Too many Indian women and girls are unnecessarily affected by gender-based violence and inequities in health-care access and use. – Anita Raj (Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health)

India: access to affordable drugs and the right to health – Competition from generic companies is the key to affordable drugs. Generic companies in India can therefore produce drugs at prices that are among the lowest in the world. This cost advantage means more than 89% of the adult antiretroviral drugs purchased for donor-funded programmes in the developing world are supplied by companies in India. The European Union and India free-trade agreement seeks to introduce TRIPS-plus and other measures, such as patent term-extensions, data exclusivity, increased border and enforcement measures, and investment protection agreements, all of which would impede generic competition. – Anand Grover, Brian Citro (Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit, Mumbai)

Good governance in health care: the Karnataka experience – The health sector, with high public interaction and large societal impact affecting almost the entire population, was the second most corrupt sector in India. Bribes related to health care comprised the highest portion of all bribes paid in the state of Karnataka in 2008, at 40%. More than 150,000 estimated households below the poverty line paid bribes for seeking basic health care in 2005 in the state. In 2008, 64% of all bribes paid in the state for basic services was by people living below the poverty line and amounted to INR650 million. – Hanumappa Sudarshan, N S Prashanth (Karuna Trust, Karnataka, India; Institute of Public Health, Bangalore, Karnataka, India)

Research to achieve health care for all in India – Many of the leading causes of disease burden across communicable diseases, non-communicable diseases, and injuries continue to be under-represented in this published research output, indicating that even among the limited papers on public health research, a large proportion do not address public health priority conditions in India. Distinct from published papers, an analysis of public health research reports produced in India also showed that the leading chronic non-communicable diseases and injuries were under-represented between 2001 and 2008. – Lalit Dandona, V M Katoch, Rakhi Dandona (Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, India; Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington; Department of Health Research and Indian Council of Medical Research, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India)

Universal health care in India: missing core determinants – India’s growing economic strength is based on an economic model that has enhanced the very disparities that the call is concerned about. Promotion of medical tourism at the cost of universal primary health care has not been accidental, but the result of a policy that places the market above people’s basic needs. All health-care reforms have to respond to this political dichotomy in the economy of health. Any health-care reforms, including the national health bill and integrated national health system suggested, have to be placed within a national effort to provide food, water, shelter, sanitation, education, and other basic needs. – Ravi Narayan (Centre for Public Health and Equity, Society for Community Health, Awareness, Research and Action, Bangalore, India)

Towards a truly universal Indian health system – The current framework of economic growth is not designed to address the concerns of very large sections of the population, for whom it has directly perpetuated the situation of ill health and inadequate health care. This position is not one of mere semantics, since any sustainable recommendation needs to be set in an honest and robust analysis of the causes of ill health in India. Little mention is made of the severe, persistent, and near ubiquitous poverty that has characterised this era of so-called economic growth, in which 77% of Indians live on less than INR20 a day. – Amit Sengupta, Vandana Prasad (People’s Health Movement-India [Jan Swasthya Abhiyan], Uttar Pradesh, India)

Please see this page on the Lancet series for longer summaries of the comments.

“If climate change is the ‘biggest market failure’, what the hell is poverty?”

Dr Ashok Khosla is President of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Co-President of the Club of Rome. He is also founder and chairman of the New Delhi-based Development Alternatives Group.

Some uplifting straight talk by Dr Ashok Khosla, President of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Co-President of the Club of Rome. He was interviewed by the website of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Khosla is also founder and chairman of the New Delhi-based Development Alternatives Group, a social enterprise that innovates and delivers commercially viable, environmentally friendly technologies.

Excerpts from the interview, which is short and no-nonsense:

“After about 60 years of so-called international development, it should amaze the powers that be that we’ve ended up with 3 billion people left outside. This is as thorough an indictment of the trickle-down theory as one can imagine. But the powers that be seem to be quite oblivious to all this. If policies are based, as they almost always are today, on what is good for the rich, what is good for the stock markets, what is good for foreign direct investment, if they are designed to make more money on defense, on wars, on exploiting the earth, then it is only logical that the world will end up with three billion poor people. There’s just no way around that. Even if you believed that neo-classical economics had any meaning in the 1950s or 1960s, you cannot believe in it now. Much less [can you believe in] neo-liberalism, which dominates the world of decision making today.”

“There are people going around saying that climate change is the biggest market failure. What the hell, then, is poverty, for goodness sake? If there’s one market failure that humanity ought to be ashamed of, it’s the massive poverty that exists. Our entire focus today ought to be, how to  remove poverty, because poverty is not only degrading for the poor, even the rich are paying a heavy cost for it. The bigger the population, the more the resources it needs.”

“I don’t know of many countries that nurture civil society any more. India, like the US and, to some extent, the UK, had a vibrant, huge civil society. The whole freedom movement in India was a civil society movement, and for thousands of years, philanthropic and voluntary work has been the basis of Indian society as much as it has been, more recently, in the US, a country that one can admire greatly for its commitment to voluntarism. But this is now under threat both in the US and in India. There are some very large countries, like China, that don’t even have civil society movements, and their future generations will pay a heavy price because of that. All sectors are needed: government, business, civil society, but unfortunately, the mix has lost its balance. The big corporations are now so influential, so heavy, in most countries that even governments don’t have much say any more, and civil society has virtually none.”

“I have devoted a lot of time and effort trying to convince businessmen to see things differently. Every time I talk to business about socially responsible investment, however, the response I get is, “Yes, but our first responsibility is to our shareholders.” I don’t know of any businessman who takes the long view, unless that long view happens to mean very good profits within the tenure of that particular CEO.”