Organisers hope for late surge of interest with half of tickets still unsold just days before opening ceremony

Less than a week before the Paralympics opens, organisers are hoping that a late surge of interest will help them to fill seats, stretch budgets and avoid criticism that the second stage of Rio 2016 will be remembered as the neglected Games.

Financial cuts, downgraded facilities, volunteer shortfalls and poor ticket sales have overshadowed the countdown to the opening ceremony at the Maracan Stadium on Wednesday, prompting fears that the events could be even more sparsely attended than for the Olympics last month.

However, athletes who are now arriving at Galeo international airport hope the atmosphere can be salvaged by a late marketing push.

The Paralympic torch relay, which got under way last Thursday, is seen as the best opportunity to drum up public enthusiasm. Barely half of the 2.5 million tickets for the 500 medal events have been sold, despite prices as low as 10 reais (2.30) a quarter of the cheapest seat prices at the Olympics.

An online campaign was launched in the UK last week #filltheseats to buy tickets for Brazilian children. With support from major donors, including Sainsburys and Allianz, it was already 10 times above its initial target after eight days. Donovan Ferreti, the ticketing director of Rio 2016, said he had been encouraged by a pick-up in local demand from Rio residents in the past week. We have a long way to go, but we are happy with the last-minute demand, he said. Its really affordable cheaper than going to see a movie. We are telling people they can have a great time with high-performance competition and have a great day out in the Olympic Park.

Activists said that filling seats was important not just to boost support for competitors, but to maximise the transformative impact of the Paralympics. We hope an experience like this can change the way people without disabilities think about people with disabilities. Its a unique opportunity, said Vanessa Goulart, executive director of the Independent Life Centre.

Preparations have been plagued by funding problems. Brazil is suffering from the worst recession in decades. Last month organisers were forced to scale down venues as a result of a gaping hole in the budget.

The Deodoro Olympic Park, the second-biggest cluster of venues, was partially closed and some events such as wheelchair fencing have been relocated to the main Olympic Park in Barra. Parties have been cancelled, big screens taken down and 1,900 temporary staff laid off. The number of seats has also been reduced (originally the organisers hoped to sell 3.4 million).

The British Paralympic Association described the situation as worrying, but the chef de mission, Penny Briscoe, said the countrys athletes were prepared to make sure the sport was at the same high standard as four years ago.

This Games is not without its challenges, but with a very experienced team on the ground, and the huge support of the British public back at home, we will give our athletes the very best opportunity to shine now that the Paralympic Games is under the spotlight, said Briscoe.

Critics suggested unforeseen costs such as draining and refilling the Olympic pool were passed on to the Paralympics, but organisers blamed lower than forecast sponsorship and ticket revenues. Even with the cuts, the organisers have had to go cap in hand to the city and national government for 150 million reais (34.6 million) to cover travel and food costs for the athletes.

Sir Philip Craven, International Paralympic Committee president, said: I am fully confident Rio 2016 will be the best Games ever in terms of athletic performance … The opportunity we have here to make Rio, Brazil, Latin America and the world a more equitable place for all does not come around very often.

There have been modest signs of improvement in recent years. New public transport systems are accessible to wheelchair-users, though the vast majority of buses are not. A few areas of the city, such as the Olympic Park and the Praa Mau waterfront, have wide, smooth boulevards, though most pavements in the city are potholed. Galeo airport has increased the number of lifts, disabled toilets and other facilities before the arrival of 2,000 athletes with wheelchairs and 30 with guide dogs.

But the overall situation remains tough, and there is only so much the Paralympics can change. The situation in Rio is very difficult, said Teresa Costa dAmaral, of the Brazilian Institute for the Rights of People with Disabilities, an organisation that is constantly having to battle in the courts for medicine, wheelchairs and other equipment for those in need.

People are put at the margin of society because a wheelchair cant get on a bus, or because there arent enough schools teaching braille. People with disabilities have to fight a lot to have their basic right to access health and education. Its not an easy life, being disabled in Rio.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/sep/03/rio-de-janeiro-paralympics-tickets-slashed

Mylans EpiPen controversy is just the latest example of the negative ripple effects of corporations performance-based compensation on society at large

Heres a figure that could have you reaching for an EpiPen, assuming you can afford one: one billion dollars. Thats how much additional revenue the Institute for Policy Studies calculates the federal government might have collected over a four-year period if it werent for a pesky loophole that allows US corporations to deduct performance-based compensation from what they have to pay in corporate taxes each year.

The just-released study comes amid the latest example of how basic salary on share price performance leads to bad decisions that have negative effects on society at large: Mylan, the drug company whose decision to hike the price of the lifesaving EpiPen has triggered a sky-high share price and a massive pay day for its CEO, Heather Bresch.

The IPSs report is the latest in a series devoted to excessive executive compensation and wealth inequality, the research firm takes aim at the loophole as it relates to Wall Streets banks. The top 20 banks forked over more than $2bn in performance-related bonus payments to each of their top five executives between 2012 and 2015, IPS says.

Between the financial crisis and up until 2012, those banks werent allowed to take advantage of the loophole. As part of a widespread attempt to rein in the worst of the compensation practices that contributed to the crisis, Congress imposed a raft of new restrictions and rules governing pay at the banks as long as they still owed money borrowed under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp).

Once those Tarp funds were repaid, the banks were free to dole out performance-based bonuses once more and they rushed to do so. The study notes that the share of vested stock paid out as bonuses to the top five bank employees at the banks it studied rose from about 5% (when they were still under Tarp oversight) to 50% today.

The Institute for Policy Studies uses the banks as a case study in arguing for the demolition of the executive pay bonus loophole. Their broad argument couldnt be more accurate or more timely. We need to revive the debate about all the wrongs committed in the name of delivering value to shareholders, and performance-based compensation is the tip of that particular iceberg.

The pursuit of shareholder value has become a cult devoted to delivering maximum profits to shareholders, at all costs. Just look at how Mylan Pharmaceuticals has responded to the virtual evaporation of competitors to its lifesaving EpiPens by raising the price it charges for the auto-injector pens (which treat deadly allergic reactions to bee stings and food allergies) from $50 apiece to $600 for a two-pack over the course of eight years.

Just why on earth did Mylan do this?

Well, it could. It has a virtual monopoly on a critical product one that millions of people with an allergy rely on. Theres a bonus: the active ingredient, epinephrine, degrades rapidly, so they need to buy new EpiPens every year.

Mylan blames the insurance industry a convenient scapegoat. Consumers were never supposed to pick up the full price tag: if insurers arent paying, thats because the Affordable Care Act has left the health insurance system in a mess, distorting drug pricing.

Its worth noting, however, that EpiPen price increases began before the Obama administrations healthcare law was put in place, and that in Canadas single-payer insurance market, people suffering from allergies can pick up an EpiPen two-pack for less than $100. Of course, in Canada, its not Mylan that sets the price, but Pfizer, which has licensed the injectable medication from Mylan.

Lets circle back to the pesky question of what it is that motivates CEOs like Bresch, why they make decisions like this and what they conceive their responsibilities to be.

Since the summer of 2007, the Standard & Poors 500-stock index has climbed 47%, while Mylans shares have outperformed dramatically, soaring 178%. And yes, you-betcha, Bresch has benefited from some of that same performance-linked compensation. Not only has it deprived the taxpayer of potential income, but it has rewarded Bresch for doing something that is just as clearly against the public interest just as leveraging the banking system to the hilt was in the run-up to the financial crisis in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Bresch clearly should have been rewarded for savvy marketing that made EpiPen a must have item in schools, airplanes and theme parks. But should Bresch have been rewarded so lavishly simply for being able to hike those prices and profit from the fact that Mylan had no viable rivals? It wasnt as if the company was being rewarded for years of costly research and development. On the contrary; about half of its revenue was pure profit. And a lot of that went to pay Breschs increasingly lavish compensation package, which rose at an even faster clip than did EpiPens price. In 2007, Bresch pocketed $2.45m; in 2015, her compensation totaled nearly $19m.

In whose interests are companies like Mylan and the Wall Street banks being run?

The basic argument based on law that dates to the early 20th century, when Henry Fords shareholders sued him for trying to make cars more affordable to customers is that a company has a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for its investors. It has been seized on, amplified and raised to the status of holy writ by short-term thinkers among those on Wall Street.

The result? Publicly traded businesses, fearful of being pummeled by hedge fund investors, end up increasingly detached from the realities of the real world. They reward CEOs lavishly for delivering outsize profits and big stock price gains, even if that is done by keeping wages and salaries for employees at rock bottom levels. Thats how we end up with firms like Walmart and McDonalds ostensibly employing people full time, who still rely on various forms of government assistance to keep them above the poverty line.

Doing away with tax deductibility for performance-based compensation, as the Institute for Policy Studies suggests, would be a great start. At a stroke, there would be one less incentive for companies to give outsize rewards that are geared exclusively to a measure of performance that may not be in everyones interest. As the financial crisis should have taught us, a boom in a companys profits and a run-up in the companys stock price as a result, isnt always an unquestioned good thing. Making performance-based pay more costly to a company might force the boards compensation committee to think more critically about the criteria that theyre using.

The real value of the IPS report isnt in the fine details like how many dollars might have flowed into the US Treasury (much less how many teachers jobs might have been funded as a result as if government budgets worked that smoothly ). Rather, it has drawn attention to the crucial issue of performance-based compensation and the pesky questions that underpin it. If, as some legal scholars suggest, its possible for companies to go beyond the narrow, toxic pursuit of maximizing profits and think about what is good for their employees, consider their customers, take the environment into consideration and pursue innovation, then the debate about how we get from here to there has to start somewhere. Performance-based compensation is a logical point.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/sep/02/wall-street-ceo-bonus-loophole-mylan-epipen

(CNN)The closer we get to Election Day, the more we must reflect on the type of presidency we can expect from the winning candidate. Will the country get the “Team of Rivals” described by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her book about Lincoln’s cabinet or, perhaps, a collection of Yes Men of the sort who helped Richard Nixon self-destruct?

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/02/opinions/trump-failures-business-politics-dantonio/index.html