Neoliberals Do The Amazon

By RACHEL GODFREY WOOD

Ever since its opening to the double edged sword known as “development,” debates over the Amazon rainforest repeatedly have degraded into an international tragi-comedy of hypocrisy and shirked responsibilities. Development’s fate, in reality, has been shaped by two contradictory trends: on the one hand, shrill opposition to ecological destruction from large swathes of the developed conservation-minded world, and on the other, runaway deforestation. This duality has intensified in recent years, with ever greater awareness of the importance of the rainforest failing to hold the line against the prevention of the acceleration of its destruction.

The CDOs mess is still here.

The Financial Times has been keeping tabs on the results, or perhaps more accurately, the lack thereof, of collateralized debt obligations. A couple of weeks ago, it highlighted research by Morgan Stanley and Wachovia that concluded that nearly half the CDOs made from asset backed securities.

Today, Gillian Tett of the FT discusses research on CDOs by JP Morgan and Wachovia. I’m assuming that JP Morgan released an additional study (as opposed to the first article having mistakenly mentioned Morgan Stanley, as opposed to JP Morgan). Tett mentions not only the impressive level of failures, but also the horrid recovery rate.

The “Great Financial Crisis”

Interview with John Bellamy Foster by Mike Whitney

MW: The financial crisis is quickly turning into a political crisis. Already governments in Iceland and Latvia have collapsed and the global slump is just beginning to accelerate. Riots and street violence have broken out in Greece, Latvia and Lithuania and worker-led protests have become commonplace throughout the EU. As unemployment skyrockets and economic activity stalls, countries are likely to experience greater social instability. How does one take deep-seated discontent and rage and shape it into a political movement for structural change?

Capitalism, Agribusiness and the Food Sovereignty Alternative

“Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet.” —Fidel Castro, 1998

When food riots broke out in Haiti last month, the first country to respond was Venezuela. Within days, planes were on their way from Caracas, carrying 364 tons of badly needed food.

The people of Haiti are “suffering from the attacks of the empire’s global capitalism,” Venezuelan president Hugo Chàvez said. “This calls for genuine and profound solidarity from all of us. It is the least we can do for Haiti.”

The Swedish company BioGaia patented a indigenous American gene and made huge profits on global scale

BioGaia made its first profits in 2006 – ten years after its stock was floated – and in September 2008 Nestlé Nutrition and BioGaia signed an agreement that gives Nestlé worldwide rights to use BioGaia’s Lactobacillus reuteri in infant formula. The first products are planned for 2009. It’s a development that could transform this already successful company.

BioGaia, based in Stockholm, Sweden, owns worldwide patents on L. reuteri, which is a probiotic bacteria found occurring naturally in human breast milk.The particular strain used by BioGaia was extarcted from the breast milk of a woman in Peru.

Latin Natives Take Action to Stop U.S. and Europe Genetic Piracy

The lack of protection for the human and cultural rights of the Native Central Americans has awoken their fears of being submitted to genetic slavery by unscrupulous scientists.
The first alarm was sounded several years ago when the genes of a Panamanian Ngobe-Bugle woman were patented in the United States as a scientific discovery by two US researchers.
The woman, resident in the Caribbean province of Bocas del Toro and whose name was reserved to protect her identity, was carrier of the HLV2 virus, similar to that which produces AIDS.
The U.S., Japan, and the Europe are accelerating the creation of dispositions to allow them to research and patent the “discoveries” made from human beings

Take a Step Back

Here is the story how Wall Street Charlatans used the Academic Theory to destroy the financial system and “kill you”.

In the mid-’80s, Wall Street turned to the quants—brainy financial engineers—to invent new ways to boost profits. Their methods for minting money worked brilliantly… until one of them devastated the global economy.

A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li’s work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

USA:War Made Easy – New Clip

In Debt We Trust: How Did the US Get Into This Mess?