Human Rights and Gender Equality Vague in Post-2015 Agenda
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- Written by Ida Karlsson
- Category: Analysis
With the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda currently under discussion, civil society actors in Europe are calling for a firmer stance on human rights and gender equality, including control of assets by women.
“The SDGs are a unique opportunity for us. The eradication of extreme poverty is within our grasp. But we still face very major challenges. Business as usual is not an option,” Seamus Jeffreson, Director of Concord, the European platform for non-governmental development organisations, told at a meeting in Brussels with the European Parliament Committee on Development on September 3.
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UN votes to enact process bankruptcy treaty and stop vulture funds
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- Written by JubileeUSA
- Category: News
The UN General Assembly passed a historic resolution to begin treaty negotiations to enact a global bankruptcy process and stop predatory hedge funds.
The resolution passed by a super-majority vote of 124-11 with 41 abstentions. The US voted no along with 10 other countries.
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Sensational new study on FTT revenues in Germany
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- Written by Peter Wahl
- Category: Analysis
The German finance ministry has released a study on the expected revenues of the FTT, written by Copenhagen Economics.
The study has received a very large echo in the German mainstream media today making the headline for instance in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (biggest national daily).
The main message is, that Germany could expect at least 17,5 bn. Euro revenues, which is much more than has been discussed previously.
Our economic model is at war with life on earth
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- Written by Naomi Klein
- Category: Analysis
In Naomi Klein's new book:
"In December of 2012, a complex systems scientists walked up to the podium at the American Geophysics Union to present a paper," the narrator of the video—Klein herself—says as footage begins of urban high rise developments and burnt out croplands.
And the voice-over continues:
The paper was titled, "Is the Earth Fucked?" His answer was: "Yeah. Pretty much."
That's where the road we're on is taking us, but that has less to do with carbon than with capitalism.
Our economic model is at war with life on Earth.
We can't change the laws of nature, but we can change our broken economy.
And that's why climate change isn't just a disaster. It's also our best chance to demand—and build—a better world.
Change or be changed. But make no mistake... this changes everything.
Watch:
According to Klein's U.S. publisher Simon & Schuster, This Changes Everything is a "brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core 'free market' ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems."
Described as more important and further-reaching than her previous best-seller, The Shock Doctrine, Klein's new book will argue
that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives.
Those arguments won't be new to those who have followed Klein's work—and the similar arguments of many others in recent years—but the expectation is that as with her previous exploration of modern capitalism in the Shock Doctrine, Klein will present her most rounded and complete vision for the predicament of the moment and her vision for the future.
In a speech to one of Canada's largest labor unions last year, Klein told the members of UNIFOR that it was well past time that working people and industrial interests get their minds around what the climate science is dictating to humanity about the current economic model of corporate-dominated global capitalism. She also discussed her idea that climate change should not be framed as a disaster, but as an enormous opportunity to reshape the political paradigm and the fight for global justice. She told the crowd of workers:
The case I want to make to you is that climate change—when its full economic and moral implications are understood—is the most powerful weapon progressives have ever had in the fight for equality and social justice.
But first, we have to stop running away from the climate crisis, stop leaving it to the environmentalist, and look at it. Let ourselves absorb the fact that the industrial revolution that led to our society’s prosperity is now destabilizing the natural systems on which all of life depends.
"Climate change," she added, is "not an 'issue' for you to add to the list of things to worry about it. It is a civilizational wake up call."
G20 Plans for World Without Tax Evasion
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- Written by Kenneth Rapoza
- Category: Analysis
Good luck hiding your money in a Swiss bank account, people. The G-20, a group of the world’s largest economies, are going to discuss ways to make hiding your cash off-shore next to impossible during their finance ministers and central bankers summit meet in Australia Sept 21.
THE SOVEREIGN, ITS CREDITORS AND THE LAW
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- Written by Roberto Bisso
- Category: Analysis
The Group of 77 and China tabled at the United Nations a draft resolution to start negotiating a multilateral multilateral legal framework establishing a legal regulatory framework for the sovereign debt restructuring processes.
Trillion Dollar $candal
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- Written by ONE
- Category: News
Globally, extreme poverty has been halved in 20 years, and could be virtually wiped out by 2030. But much of the progress that has been made is at risk – not because of natural disasters or new diseases, but because of something far more insidious.
Delivering (Financing) Development after 2015
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- Written by Molly Elgin-Cossart
- Category: Analysis
World leaders are set to meet in September 2015 to agree on a set of goals to replace the Millennium Development Goals, which will expire in 2015. People from all over the world have been engaged in opining, discussing, debating, and even voting on what those new goals should be.
While significant attention is being paid to the vision of the post-2015 agenda, less attention has focused on the details of how to achieve this vision by 2030, the assumed deadline for the next set of goals.
Fortunately, the conversation is now turning from the “what” to the “how” with the recent announcement of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development, or FFD, conference to take place in July 2015 in Addis Ababa, just ahead of the September 2015 U.N. summit to adopt the post-2015 framework.
Exposing the great 'poverty reduction' lie
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- Written by Jason Hickel
- Category: Analysis
The UN claims that its Millennium Development Campaign has reduced poverty globally, an assertion that is far from true.
The received wisdom comes to us from all directions: Poverty rates are declining and extreme poverty will soon be eradicated. The World Bank, the governments of wealthy countries, and – most importantly – the United Nations Millennium Campaign all agree on this narrative. Relax, they tell us. The world is getting better, thanks to the spread of free market capitalism and western aid. Development is working, and soon, one day in the very near future, poverty will be no more.
The long and ugly tradition of treating Africa as a dirty, diseased place
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- Written by Laura Seay and Kim Yi Dionne
- Category: Analysis
This week’s Newsweek magazine cover features an image of a chimpanzee behind the words, “A Back Door for Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a U.S. Epidemic.” This cover story is problematic for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that there is virtually no chance that “bushmeat” smuggling could bring Ebola to America. (The term is a catchall for non-domesticated animals consumed as a protein source; anyone who hunts deer and then consumes their catch as venison in the United States is eating bushmeat without calling it that.) While eating bushmeat is fairly common in the Ebola zone, the vast majority of those who do consume it are not eating chimpanzees. Moreover, the current Ebola outbreak likely had nothing to do with bushmeat consumption.
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Promoting the social commons
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- Category: News
