Briarpatch Magazine » 2008 » April

The Black Hole of Debt: Haiti can’t feed itself, and is sending millions abroad in loan payments

dave — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:53:39 +0000

By Nick Dearden Counterpunch.org In recent weeks, Haiti has been gripped by violent protest yet again. And yet again the inhabitants of this impoverished country are suffering the most brutal consequences of the fallout of the global economic crisis. This time it is the rise in global food prices, which has sparked riots in Port au Prince, [...]

Beware the rise of the 40-year mortgage

dave — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:20:19 +0000

Stretched buyers fuel boom in housing: Engine behind the country's housing boom has been increasingly leveraged first-time buyers

By Tavia Grant Globe and Mail April 23, 2008 Canada may not have the sizable subprime market of the U.S., but the engine behind the country's housing boom has been increasingly leveraged first-time buyers. Legions of first-timers are adding years of extra mortgage payments so they can buy a house, or putting little or no money into a down payment, a Re/Max survey revealed yesterday. Nearly two-thirds of buyers in major centres now favour extended amortization periods of up to 40 years, while putting little or no money down was prevalent in 38 per cent of regional markets surveyed across Canada.

The April B-List

dave — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:21:11 +0000

The B-List is your monthly media supplement of 7 recommended readings from beyond the Briarpatch. Sign up to have the B-List delivered to your inbox at briarpatchmagazine.com

1. "Everybody in the World Except US Citizens Should Be Allowed to Vote and Elect the American Government": An interview with Slavoj Žižek By Amy Goodman Democracy Now! March 11, 2008

"In the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left, however, effectively offers global capitalism with a human face: more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not."

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/11/everybody_in_the_world_except_us

Letter from the editor: The politics of debt

dave — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:37:24 +0000

“Buy this car to drive to work drive to work to pay for this car.” Metric When the world is combusting all around us, it seems a little petty to devote an entire issue of Briarpatch to questions of debt and personal finance. But in many ways, the subject couldn’t be more pressing or more in need of [...]

Das Crapital: A spectre is haunting the suburbs of North America . . .

dave — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:36:19 +0000

**By Don Sawyer Briarpatch Magazine May 2008**

In fighting plans for a mammoth big box store that would devour the small city I call home, I have made a startling discovery: a dangerous cult has spread from the heart of darkest Arkansas, jumped the border and brainwashed millions of innocent Canadians into its doctrine of diabolical materialism.

Freedom 25: Financial independence in the first quarter-century

dave — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:35:22 +0000

By Calvin Neufeld Briarpatch Magazine May 2008 The plan: save money, buy land, build a house, grow food, heat with wood, quit jobs, and self-sustain — all without going into debt. Although I was raised in the suburbs of Montreal, my life today resembles that of my Mennonite ancestors. In the winter I bathe in a tub of snow [...]

Debt Cemetery: Will the carnage from the U.S. housing and credit crises spread northward?

dave — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:34:47 +0000

By Geordie Gwalgen Dent Briarpatch Magazine May 2008 Ah, springtime, 1930. U.S. stock markets had slightly recovered from the “Black Tuesday” crash of the year before. Credit was cheap and the Western world was spending freely. Though people had been spooked, optimism reigned again. Few people knew that the entire global economy was on the edge of a [...]

Four reasons to get out of debt, nine ways to do it

dave — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:32:56 +0000

**By Dave Oswald Mitchell Briarpatch Magazine May 2008**

"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender."

Proverbs 22:7

Reasons to get out:

1. We are a nation of debt slaves

"Debt throughout most of history has been little more than a slight variation on slavery," wrote Michael Hudson in his prescient May 2006 article in Harper's ("The New Road to Serfdom: An illustrated guide to the coming real estate collapse"). Today, however, perceptions have changed to such a degree that a mortgage is now seen as an "investment," and levels of personal indebtedness for both Canadians and Americans have never been higher.

The Vanier Institute of the Family recently reported that Canadians' household debt rose seven times faster than income between 1990 and 2007. This debt now represents a record 131 per cent of average household income, meaning that for every $100 of net income earned in Canada last year, $131 was owed.

Parting Shots: A Concrete Investment Plan

dave — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:31:03 +0000

**By Kubate Baba Edward Briarpatch Magazine May 2008**

My thoughts on money and investing have been shaped by my upbringing. I was raised in a 20-person household in northern Ghana. Six of us shared a small hut, beautifully roofed with thatch. The rest of my relatives lived in adjacent huts. We sustained ourselves on earnings from a small rice and millet farm. Whatever little money or food came into the home was shared equally among us.

MediaScout: Scarcity hits the headlines

dave — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:16:19 +0000

By Daniel Tencer MediaScout An easily overlooked article, buried in today’s La Presse and the Star, suggests that the human race came within a whisker of extinction seventy thousand years ago, when the homo sapiens population may have dropped to as few as two thousand people. That should give us pause for thought as we look at today’s news cycle, which is, almost without exception, focused on the apparently sudden arrival of serious problems with our supply of two basic necessities: food and energy. CIBC economist Jeff Rubin is all over last night’s broadcasts and today’s papers, announcing that we can expect a serious shock at the pumps: By this summer, Rubin says, we’ll be paying $1.40 per litre of gas, and that will rise to $2.25 per litre over the next several years, bringing the cost of an average tank of gas to around $100. And, in a not unrelated story, Canadians can soon expect to pay considerably more for basic foodstuffs as well, as grain prices (and therefore, by extension, meat prices) soar over the next few years. The two issues come down to a basic problem that is at the heart of all economics, but one that we, in our age of affluence and seemingly endless economic growth, have mostly forgotten about: scarcity. As developing nations become wealthier, the demand for food and energy rises, while the supply remains stagnant. That is what is happening, and the result appears to be a return to an us-or-them, zero-sum mentality. As Rubin told The National last night: “For every new driver who gets on the road in India or China or Russia, someone’s got to get off the road in [our] part of the world.” In all fairness, we could have seen this coming. Economists and academics have been warning us for years that oil supplies are peaking, and will begin to decline, and that increasing demand for food will put pressure on the planet’s ability to sustain the human race. The predictions of social unrest and war arising from the problem of scarcity continue to be ignored, even as food riots break out in poor countries and the US continues to fight a war in the middle of the world’s largest oil pool. What is conspicuously absent from the Big Seven’s coverage of this issue today is any discussion as to how to solve these problems. There are few questions posed on how to increase food production, no discussion of alternative energy sources. Yet it is becoming increasingly obvious that, if we want to maintain our standard of living, then finding alternatives to fossil fuels and reforming the creaky, at times senseless structure of global agricultural trade can no longer be treated as political footballs to be accepted or rejected-they have to be seen, quite literally, as matters of survival. If we fail to rise to the challenge, then nature itself will no doubt provide a draconian solution. As an example, take another lesson from pre-history in today’s news cycle, an item in The National (not available online) and the Star regarding the fate of the king of the dinosaurs, the tyrannosaurus rex. New genetic evidence suggests that, when conditions became unfavourable for the enormous creature, the t-rex evolved into something more manageable-the everyday barnyard chicken, and the ostrich, to be precise. If we fail to address the problems facing us now, nature could reduce us, too, to a species that is less demanding.