A Committee to Protect Bloggers strikes me as a good idea.
Archive for February, 2005
CorpWatch provide us with this interesting insight into the future world of Carbon Trading and the under Kyoto.
Firstly that world leaders, despite their commitment (or perceived commitment) to addressing issues of Global Warming, still put their faith in the market to contain it. Markets work on zero sum equations, so someone will necessarily loose from this set-up of carbon trading and, inevitably, it will be the majority world that suffers. While it is an encouraging sign that these issues are now being linked to markets, there is still too much faith in them. Markets can be excellent in its allocation of resources, they can also be particularly poor and quite discriminatory.
It also makes a point for me about the Global Justice Movement (which I consider my self and CorpWatch a part of). It is unique in that a Pro and Anti-Kyoto position can reside in the one person. I’m firmly of the belief that Howard should sign the Protocol and am encouraged by Labor stating that they will. However I’m fully aware and highly critical of the Protocol for not going nearly far enough and for its over reliance on markets.
The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) seems to have largely slipped under the radar in the Australian media but is quite significant for a few reasons.
The CAFTA is an expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has lead too, amongst other things, the displacement of indigenous peoples and the revoking of their constitutional right to land in Mexico (the result of a long and bloody civil war), environmental atrocities, an uneven trade balance favoring America and the rise of the Zapatista is response to it.
I though that the CAFTA negotiations had failed, it turns out that, while not everyone signed on, the weaker – and therefore more vulnerable states – have joined on.
As the Citizens Trade Campaign point out: “In addition, CAFTA would remove all tariff barriers in the five Central American countries on imported agricultural products. This would allow cheaply grown and heavily subsidized U.S. corn and other basic grains to flood local markets (subsidies that almost exclusively benefit giant agribusiness in the U.S.). Small farmers in Central America, already devastated by the importation of cheaply grown agrbusiness U.S. grains, years of drought, and the massive fall of coffee prices on the world market, would face the extinction of their livelihoods. CAFTA would likely force a massive migration of erstwhile farmers to large urban areas to work in the informal sector or maquilas (sweatshops), or to risk a dangerous journey to seek work in the U.S.”
Here’s an interesting Federal Government press release: “Australia leads the way in tackling greenhouse gas emissions”
..If you say so
More on Industrial Relations: “The union movement’s peak council has warned that radical changes being considered by the Federal Government to the way minimum wages are calculated in Australia could confine national wage cases to the pages of history.”
Get angry people!!
Greenpeace have a petition to get Howard to sign the Kyoto Petition.
Needless to say this is a highly significant issue.
Doyle is surely the most irrelevant man in Australian politics. How he is the leader of a political party is beyond me.
He wants to sweet the streets clean of beggars for the Commonwealth Games for fear of being dubbed ‘the begging city’ by our international visitors. Not only is he completely devoid of any compassion, he actually thinks we have a lot of beggars.
So instead of dealing with issues of substance abuse, broken homes, and homelessness he simply wished to sweep them from the streets.
It reads like satire. Doyle you really are a unique character, and would be quite funny if you weren’t the alternative government in Victoria.
