The slice-of-life radio documentary show This American Life has just put out a show on the U.S. housing/credit crisis. TIL does an excellent job of teasing out the complex causes and devastating consequences of the subprime disaster.
Read one of our Briarpatch blogs.
Tags: debt, documentary, economics, money, U.S. politics
(May 4th, 2008) Eight days ago, on Friday, April 25th, 2008, my husband, Shawn Brant, was arrested and detained on assault and weapons charges. Since that time, Commissioner Julian Fantino and the Ontario Provincial Police have issued public statements that have, it seems, misstated the events leading to my husband’s arrest.
I believe it is important to the public good for people to understand the circumstances that have lead to Shawn’s incarceration at this time. Those circumstances are as follows:
We need a national white-collar crime system that can take on finance bigwigs and hold them accountable.
by Ken Georgetti
Rabble.ca
April 30, 2008
In recent months, as U.S. hedge funds have imploded south of the border, working Canadians have been told our economy isn’t “subprimed.”
Sure, the experts say, current problems in global credit markets may mean less cash is available for Canadian companies. It will certainly mean fewer buyers for Canadian exports as U.S. workers face house foreclosures and higher costs for basic necessities.
But be thankful, the experts reassure, you could be someone else. You could be one of the two million Americans who recently lost their homes after shady mortgage brokers sold them on crooked contracts.
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, Haiti’s capital, where UN peacekeepers used rubber bullets and tear gas against protesters attempting to storm the presidential palace. Days later the prime minister was fired.
It is therefore particularly appropriate that on Tuesday this week -the anniversary of the death of Haiti’s dictator, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier - hundreds of debt campaigners fasted for Haiti’s debt to be cancelled. Haiti’s fate has been tied up with the issue of international debt more than any other country. Despite the fact that its debt is illegitimate by any standards and despite Haiti’s sorry position as the poorest country in the western hemisphere, it still owes $1.3bn. Every year debt repayments flow from Haiti to multilateral banks, just as its resources once enriched the French empire.
Tags: debt, food politics, foreign policy, haiti
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 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
2. The Canadian Nixon: Stephen Harper’s feud with Elections Canada is just the latest front in his war against government institutions
By Dimitry Anastakis and Jeet Heer
The Guardian
April 24, 2008
“Canadians have never had a prime minister who has literally made his career attacking and undermining the legitimacy of Canadian institutions. Until now.”
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dimitry_anastakis_and_jeet_heer/2008/04/the_canadian_nixon.html
3. To hell with good intentions: The case against volunteering abroad
By Ivan Illich
An address to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects
April 20, 1968
“All you will do in a Mexican village is create disorder. At best, you can try to convince Mexican girls that they should marry a young man who is self-made, rich, a consumer, and as disrespectful of tradition as one of you. At worst, in your ‘community development’ spirit you might create just enough problems to get someone shot after your vacation ends — and you rush back to your middle-class neighborhoods where your friends make jokes about ’spits’ and ‘wetbacks.’”
http://www.augustana.ab.ca/rdx/eng/activism_illich.htm
4. The other Eliot Spitzer: Why the $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked
By Greg Palast
Air America Radio
March 14th, 2008
“Instead of regulating the banks that had run amok, Bush’s regulators went on the warpath against Spitzer and states attempting to stop predatory practices. Making an unprecedented use of the legal power of ‘federal pre-emption,’ Bush-bots ordered the states to NOT enforce their consumer protection laws. Indeed, the feds actually filed a lawsuit to block Spitzer’s investigation of ugly racial mortgage steering. Bush’s banking buddies were especially steamed that Spitzer hammered bank practices across the nation using New York State laws.”
http://www.gregpalast.com/elliot-spitzer-gets-nailed/
5. Want to save the economy? Spread the wealth and give workers a raise
By Mike Whitney
Counterpunch.org
April 12, 2008
“Working people don’t need lectures on saving money; they need a raise. The big-wigs at Bear Stearns are still dining on crab-cakes at the Four Seasons while the working folk are just trying to make their way through Greenspan’s nuclear winter living on beef jerky and Big Gulps. Where’s the justice?”
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney04122008.html
6. The Politics of Food is Politics: An alternative agriculture is possible
By De Clarke and Stan Goff
Counterpunch.org
April 24, 2008
“The Food Underground is already here. It has been invisible to many of us, because our eyes were fixed on ‘higher’ ideological struggles, while the basis of effective counter-ideology — skill and design — quietly passed us by. It is time to change that. Political resisters need to learn and apply the skills and designs of the food underground; and the food underground needs deeper, more focused and intentional politicization.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/goff04242008.html
7. Take action on the global food crisis
Avaaz.org
April 28, 2008
“Petition to G8, UN and EU leaders: We call on you to take immediate action to address the world food crisis by mobilizing emergency funding to prevent starvation, removing perverse incentives to turn food into biofuels and managing financial speculation, and to tackle the underlying causes by ending harmful trade policies and investing massively in sustainable agricultural productivity in developing nations.”
http://www.avaaz.org/en/global_food_crisis/1.php?cl=82304029
Psst! Are you an online news hound? Do you use del.icio.us to tag your favourite articles? Then you’ve got what it takes to become a B-List stringer! All you have to do is tag the best articles you can find (radical, insightful analyses of current events and important trends) with the tag briarpatchb-list. We’ll then select the best articles for inclusion in the next B-List. If you want more info, just drop us a line.
This month’s B-List compiled by Dave Oswald Mitchell
The B-List is made possible through the generous support of the print subscribers of Briarpatch Magazine.
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.
Tags: energy, food politics, scarcity
By De Clarke and Stan Goff
CounterPunch.org
“The Food Underground is already here. It has been invisible to many of us, because our eyes were fixed on ‘higher’ ideological struggles, while the basis of effective counter-ideology — skill and design — quietly passed us by. It is time to change that. Political resisters need to learn and apply the skills and designs of the food underground; and the food underground needs deeper, more focused and intentional politicization.”
In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance. As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable.
This is how one cascade pours into another, as the manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify. Tourism, which was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations — an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping — turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.
Tags: food politics, praxis
By John W. Warnock
Leader Post
In early April, the international price for WTI crude rose to $110 per barrel. The price of gasoline was $1.23 for a litre. Both have since risen even higher. Oil corporations are reporting record profits. Land sales for exploration and development rights for oil are at an all-time high in Saskatchewan.
What’s happening?
At a recent conference in Washington sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, experts argued that the world production of conventional crude oil peaked in May 2005 at 74 million barrels a day. The gap to the current production level of 88 million barrels a day is now being filled by much more expensive and difficult to access non-conventional sources.
Of the remaining oil reserves, 77 per cent are controlled by producing countries with state-owned national oil companies (NOCs) where the privately owned international oil companies (IOCs) are excluded. Another 11 per cent of reserves are in countries with NOCs where the private companies have some access through production sharing agreements. Russia has six per cent of the remaining reserves and is re-establishing state-ownership and control.
Only seven per cent of the remaining world reserves of crude oil are in countries like Canada, where the IOCs have full access to the resource.
Tags: petro-politics, Saskatchewan
Don’t Let Canwest SLAPP* Mordecai Briemberg and YOU !
Imagine you go to a public meeting on the Middle East; you see a humorous parody of the local daily, pick up a few copies and hand them out. Six months later you are served with a writ of summons that charges you with producing the parody, that threatens to cost you tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, that takes up hundreds of hours of your time and aims to prevent you from expressing your opinions in future. Impossible? A Kafkaesque fantasy? This is what is happening to Mordecai Briemberg in Vancouver today and we need your help to stop it.
Tags: free speech, Israel/Palestine, media, SLAPP, take action
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