finance

The Assembly of States Parties is meeting this month in The Hague to review the work of the International Criminal Court and to discuss the ICC’s budget. The ASP is the International Criminal Court’s management oversight and legislative body. The Assembly also elects the judges and prosecutors and decides the Court’s budget. The court’s proposed budget for 2016 amounts to €153.32 million, representing an increase of €22.66 million, or 17.3 per cent, over the 2015 approved budget.

Roots
I remember ageism striking me right between the eyes, in Oaxaca, while I was climbing a pyramid at Monte Alban. Running, really. A silly sight from afar, trying to beat the veronica of the sun so I could get the “perfect” dusk shot with my Nikon.
Two elderly ladies on the side of the steps were selling beautiful weavings, something for which the Zapotec Indians of that region are known.

The re-enserfment of Western peoples is taking place on several levels. One about which I have been writing for more than a decade comes from the offshoring of jobs. Americans, for example, have a shrinking participation in the production of the goods and services that are marketed to them.

The TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the corporate Mega-deal on “free trade” has been concluded between the partner states, and is now in the final stages of its ratification.  This deal involves the US and 11 other countries (Canada, US, Mexico, Chile, Peru; Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, Brunei, Japan) of the Pacific Rim, representing 40% of global economic activity.  The text was secretly negotiated by hundreds of corporate lobbyists.  It has now been released, and Congress will have 90 days to examine the 6000 page text before approving, which will allow the President to sign it in

With the collapse of the Communist countries in the 1990s and their conversion to capitalism, followed by the advent of neo-liberal regimes throughout most of Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America, the imperial regimes in the US and EU have established a new political spectrum, in which the standards of acceptability narrowed and the definition of adversaries expanded.

Green-investment co-operative ArBolivia aims not only to preserve the Amazon ecosystem, but to use planting native trees to support local livelihoods and create a financially viable investment opportunity

Ellen Hodgson Brown, a West Coast writer with a law degree, or perhaps more accurately, an attorney who likes to write in order to right, is one of the few people around who talks sense about banksters in general, central banking in particular, and the international excuse for both that prevails these days.

Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile.
— Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1935

Meretricious means “based on pretense, deception, or insincerity.” That makes it the perfect word to describe the creation and spread of Roth individual retirement accounts (IRAs), especially the claim that they’re a plus for the Treasury. Just the opposite: the initial boost from Roths is largely a ruse, and the accounts in fact are a fiscal train wreck.
Let’s see what gives the myth a veneer of truth, why it persists, and what needs to happen to stem the losses that Roths are inflicting on the Treasury—and will be inflicting for decades.

Nathan Schneider investigates how transforming the financial system could shift the way debts are formed and dealt with; from a system where the chief reason to lend is for profit, to one where the wellbeing of both parties takes priority