Best of the Web

  • Economic Crisis for June 27th, 2009

    Compiled by Cy Gonick | June 27th 2009 | Economic Crisis

    “Lobbyists for financial institutions—the people responsible for the collapse of our economy—-have been scheming and wrangling to gut the reforms that could stop another economic breakdown” says Mediachannel News Director Danny Schechter. He further informs that many observers see a deeper crash still coming with a depression quietly deepening, “even if most us cling to our perennial optimism and trust in the changemaker we can believe in.”

    Truthdig Editor Robert Scheer says that “the Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks to solve the mortgage crisis is a huge bust. The financial moguls, while tickled pink to have $1.25 trillion in toxic assets covered by the feds, along with hundreds of billions in direct handouts, are not using that money to turn around the free fall in housing foreclosures.” And, “aside from a tight mortgage market, the problem in preventing foreclosures has to do with homeowners losing their jobs. Although President Obama was wise enough to at least launch a job stimulus program, a far greater amount of federal funding benefits Wall Street as opposed to Main Street.”

    Further, with state and local governments beingforced into draconian budget cuts, firing workers who are among the most reliable in making their mortgage payments, the Obama administration won’t spend even a small fraction of what it has wasted on the banks to cover state shortfalls.

    New research by economic historians Eichengreen and O’Rourke, Financial Times Editor compare the current economic crisis with the early phase of the Great Depression, in terms of the stock market crash and the collapse of world trade: “Globally we are tracking or doing even worse than the Great Depression … This is a Depression-sized event.”

    Financial Times editor Martin Wolf, quotes approvingly from their work which also predicts that because current governments are applying the lessons taken from the Great Depression, that the thirties disaster need not be repeated. Two opposing dangers arise, he writes. One is that the stimulus is withdrawn too soon, as happened in the 1930s. The other danger is that stimulus is withdrawn too late resulting in unsustainable government funding and continued deficits.

    “Marxism has been out of favour so long, even its jargon sounds refreshing,” writes Ian Brown as he surveys and interviews well known Marxists Leo Panitch, Paul Street and Doug Henwood about how they interpret the collapse of the world’s largest corporations and the state’s decision to take them into partial public ownership.

    Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich surveys the perennially poor and the working poor to determine how the economic crisis is affecting them.

    Canadian journalist Murray Dobbin argues that the dual economic and climate crises “have arrived just in time to wake us up, just in time for us to choose to save the planet and ourselves from a truly grim future. Not just rising oceans and the loss of coastal communities — but a nightmarish dystopia characterized by global social unrest, the rise of fascism, mass starvation and wars over energy and water”.

  • Climate Change for June 20th, 2009

    Compiled by Cy Gonick | June 20th 2009 | Environment and Climate Change

    APOCALYPSE NOW

    Globe and Mail Environment Reporter Martin Mittelstadt reviews new books by three heavyweights James Lovelock, Lester Brown and John Michael Greer each of whom warns of dire consequences of global warming and peak oil.

    NEEDED: A DIFFERENT GUARDIAN OF THE ARCTIC

    Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier argues that as the Northwest Passage sea-ice coverage is lost, instead of aggressively facing climate change, Canada has decided the best way to keep foreign ships from running the passage is with our military. She advocates instead for co-operative management of the Arctic, by means of an Arctic treaty that charges circumpolar indigenous peoples with the stewardship of the Arctic and international co-management boards that would integrate traditional and scientific knowledge to ensure sound and peaceful management of the Arctic’s natural resources.

    CLIMATE CRUNCH

    The economic crisis is leading to falling carbon emissions - so why is it not good for the climate? By Oscar Reyes. Reyes shows how, in the midst of recession, Europe¹s carbon trading systems presents polluting industries a lifeline by cashing in their unwanted permits, while the Œprice signal¹ that is meant to change their polluting ways is rendered largely meaningless.

    Video: Leon Panitch, co-editor of Socialist Register , author of Renewing Socialism , explains why capitalist mechanisms like cap and trade won¹t end CO2 emissions.

    Economic Crisis and Food Sovereignty

    Video: Around the world, hunger is growing, while millions of working farmers face ruin. Even in Canada, unsound and dangerous corporate practices menace our food supply. The worldwide movement for food sovereignty aims to ensure peoples¹ capacity to shape their own food production systems, free from control by agribusiness giants.

    The world should brace itself for millions of climate refugees in coming decades, a mass migration that will be larger than any in human history, says a new report.

    Even European governments, with the strongest public commitment to reduce carbon emissions, are using stimulus packages to subsidize fossil fuels to a far greater degree than renewable energy sources.

    While the recent convention of the Saskatchewan NDP passed an anti-nuclearization, pro-renewable development resolution, its newly elected leader Dwaine Lingenfelter’, is strong commitment to nuclear development and the linking of nuclear energy to the tar sands development in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

  • Obama in Cairo for June 18th 2009

    Compiled by Matthew Brett | June 18th 2009 | USA Politics and Foreign Policy

    Those critical of Western imperialism are doubly tasked under the Obama administration and Michael Ignatieff’s rapid ascent to Prime Minister. The first task remains unchanged: to monitor centres of power. The second, more difficult task, is to strip away the “saintly glow” that emanates from these supposed humanitarian and altruistic liberal elites.

    The notion that the world is a better place under Obama is dangerous, granting the president extreme latitude. So long as this image persists, and Obama’s team is spending millions to insure it does, the possibility of any real change is distant and unlikely. The lies and distortions of Obama need to be exposed. This edition of War Zones focuses on some of the best recently published articles that grapple with Obama’s foreign policy:

    Chomsky went unpublished for months, only to produce two consecutive articles condemning the Obama administration.

    In his “reaching out” in Cairo, as in his “anti-nuclear” speech in Berlin, as in the “hope” he spun at his inauguration, this clever young politician is playing the part for which he was drafted and promoted. This is to present a benign, seductive, even celebrity face to American power, which can then proceed towards its strategic goal of dominance, regardless of the wishes of the rest of humanity and the rights and lives of our children.”

  • Canadiana for June 16th, 2009

    Compiled by Andrea Levy | June 17th 2009

    Abetting rainforest destruction

    Indigenous people in Peru engaged in protesting the development of the Amazon rainforest have been the target of violent and deadly government repression. Canada is implicated in two ways: Canadian companies are behind some of the oil and gas projects at issue, and Canada is about to sign a free trade deal with Peru. The Council of Canadians is calling on citizens to oppose the free trade agreement:

    Blowing in the wind

    Minister of Natural Resources Lisa Raitt, currently in disgrace for remarks about the “sexy” shortage of isotopes for medical testing that were brought to light by a stray digital recording, commented during the same taped conversation that she suspects money which had been slated for wind energy development was funneled into the tar sands by Environment Minister Jim Prentice. Stephen Maher of the Chronicle Herald reports:

    Federal science minister attacks academic freedom

    The Canadian Association of University Teachers is calling for the resignation of Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for Science and Technology, the same Minister who made headlines for hedging when asked if he believed in evolution. In question this time is not the Minister’s doubts about evolution, but rather his effort to have the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council defund a York University academic conference on Israel Palestine. CAUT has also criticized the SSHRC President for his complicity. Read the statements:

    The dark underbelly of the maple leaf

    In his Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, author Yves Engler takes the shine off Canada’s image as an international do-gooder. He is interviewed by Sean Mullen on Redeye:

    GDP poor measure of well-being

    Notwithstanding steady increases in GDP, over the last 20 years, housing costs rose, job quality declined and income inequality intensified, according to a study by top researchers headed up by former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow. The researchers, who are developing a new index intended to improve on GDP as an overall indicator of how Canadians are faring, found that young people aged 15 to 24 have experienced a decline in both economic and physical health. Globe and Mail Economics reporter Heather Scoffield highlights the study:

    Sign of the times?

    Leo Panitch and Marxism make the Globe and Mail in an essay by Ian Brown:

  • European Report for June 9th, 2009

    Compiled by Henry Heller | June 9th 2009

    The European Report

    Name of the image

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