markets

“World agrees to historic climate accord” — Toronto Star
“Nearly 200 countries agree to historic pact in Paris to reduce emissions and fight climate change” — Vancouver Sun
“Climate deal: World praises France’s diplomacy, showing it’s still a master of the art” — Winnipeg Free Press
With these headlines appearing in newspapers across the country, Canadians must have been relieved that they don’t need to worry about climate change nearly as much now that everything has been worked out in Paris.
Unfortunately, this assumption couldn’t be further from the truth.

You Can’t Fight City Hall?
Sometimes David is Patricia and Goliath is the FCC and AT&T. If anyone has been keeping an eye on rare articles printed in the Spokane (WA) daily and weekly, the reader might have seen the news about one neighborhood – the Grandview-Thorpe – losing the fight to stop Verizon Wireless from building a cell tower in their community, while another neighborhood group –Cliff-Cannon – helped put monkey wrenches (tiny ones) into the gear work of the cell phone-telecommunication engines.

As adoptees, we are used to this drill. Adoptive parents, in a fit of what they believe to be enlightenment, deem themselves worthy of writing up our adoption experiences. These narratives are designed to be consumed by those of the very class which allowed our adoption in the first place. Ironically, we are left out of this equation, and this becomes the flip side of a double-edged sword should we decide to try to turn this narrative around.

… society appeals to an individual exploiting a commons to restrain himself for the general good–by means of his conscience.
—from Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin

It is wrong to believe that postwar American suburbanization prevailed because the public chose it… Suburbanization prevailed because of the decisions of large operators and powerful economic institutions supported by federal government programmes… ordinary consumers had little real choice in the basic pattern that resulted… Essentially city planners saw the atomic threat as a means to accelerate the trend of suburbanization.

Water and air are the most important resources on the planet. Breathing clean air seems to be accepted as a noble goal and the cost attributed to its improvement is usually universally accepted. However, the same cannot be said about access to fresh water as big business interests often argues. Many corporate interests contend that private ownership of public water out- weighs the rights of actual property owners. Corporate agriculture is quite different from traditional family farming.

For example, when we say that the Chilean state should become a true guarantor of material rights, that is certainly antithetical to the neoliberal capitalist vision which turns rights into a business to be regulated by the market.
— Camila Vallejo (former Chilean student protest leader)1

Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell, says the target of low oil prices is Russia and Iran, throwing their economies into turmoil and opening their doors to sovereign raiders.

A dangerous new trend is the successful manipulation of the financial markets by the Federal Reserve, other central banks, private banks, and the US Treasury. The Federal Reserve reduced real interest rates on US government debt obligations first to zero and then pushed real interest rates into negative territory. Today the government charges you for the privilege of purchasing its bonds.

“Can America Contain China?” it is often asked in the West. But given America’s endless wars and assaults on the developing nations of the world, the question ought to be, “Can China Contain America”? Or at least, can China restrain the U.S. from doing more damage in East Asia and perhaps elsewhere in the developing world?