heureusement, ici, c'est james

"The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months as inflation paralyses the major central banks.

'A very nasty period is soon to be upon us - be prepared,' said Bob Janjuah, the bank's credit strategist.

A report by the bank's research team warns that the S&P 500 index of Wall Street equities is likely to fall by more than 300 points to around 1050 by September as "all the chickens come home to roost" from the excesses of the global boom, with contagion spreading across Europe and emerging markets.

Such a slide on world bourses would amount to one of the worst bear markets over the last century."

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Labels: credit crunch, dead paradigms, debt, delusions of grandeur, globalization, growth, mass consumption, psychopathic behaviour

Judging by its soulless anti-democratic swagger across the global village, the Chinese government thinks it can habitually brainwash the global population -- the same way it brainwashes its own -- into believing it's simply pursuing its national interest.

Today Chinese troops are on the streets of a Zimbabwean city, aiding Mugabe's cronies with another illegal helping at the government trough. This coincided with the arrival of a Chinese weapons shipment in South Africa bound for Zimbabwe.

This is the latest in a string of Chinese transgressions aimed at subverting the political behaviour of other states in their favour. Consider the purblind genocide-for-oil arrangement with Darfur and the habitual cover the Chinese provide for Burmese leadership at the UN. During the Olympics, we should be bearing in mind more than their domestic repression of human rights in Tibet and the live organ harvesting of Falun Gong members -- to say nothing of their gross contribution to a worsening environmental crisis.

Those at the top of the political food-chain in that country must not fool themselves into thinking that global citizens would naively shrug off those of China's problems which extend well beyond their borders.

And for those of us who consider ourselves global citizens, we have to ask ourselves how much we should be opening our pockets in support of this kind of arrogant criminality.

Labels: china, Darfur, environment, globalization, psychopathic behaviour, Tibet, Zimbabwe

Amid warnings of "global economic collapse" if oil and gas habits are not drastically altered, the Worldwatch Institute's 2008 "State of the World" report contains kudos for the global economy, highlighting a change in our business practices:

"Once regarded as irrelevant to economic activity, environmental problems are drastically rewriting the rules for business, investors, and consumers, affecting over £50bn in annual capital flows"Main financial recipients included "clean energy projects, carbon trading and environmental and energy hedge funds."

The impact of this financial shift has yet to demonstrate a positive impact on the global environment, they say, since aggregate trends indicate that the global economy continues to rapidly destroy its own ecological resource base.

Labels: global warming, globalization

"Canada-U.S. income gap widens" - Globe Report on Business, Nov. 18, 2007.

[According to the University of Toronto's Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity], Canada's “prosperity gap” with the United States was wider in 2006 than in previous years, and will continue to widen unless policy-makers and business leaders take significant steps to boost productivity.

Quick, somebody call the prosperity police.

"Canada-U.S. income gap narrows" - Globe Report on Business, Nov. 22, 2007.

[According to Statistics Canada] Canada's per capita real income grew by 15.5 per cent between 2000 and 2006, nearly two-thirds faster than the 9.1 per cent growth in the U.S.

Whoops, I guess we don't have to feel so poor and unwashed after all.

The Statscan report measured "real income growth," which measures the actual change in our purchasing power, while the first report focused on Canada's low productivity and manufacturing output per person.

So what we call "growth" in Canada has nothing to do with good economic planning or innovation at home. It's solely due to a rise in commodity prices, the fruits of which then finance our lucrative foreign investments.

In other words, In Canada, we're raping the Earth and proudly enjoying every minute of it. Not only are we making more money, but we're making more by doing less. We can sit and watch the world go round, extract a few somethings out of our home and native land, sell it to China or the US, and then use that money to cherry-pick a few sweet deals overseas. Then we move the money around a bit and buy a bigger set of widgets to stare at or drive in; and then we do it all over again, but with more gusto.

All the while, policy makers and business leaders are lamenting the fact that we don't manufacture anything of great value here at home.

Why bother?

We can't justifiably whine about Canada's low productivity while also celebrating globalization or the "integration of global markets" or whatever else we happen to enthusiastically call it on any given day. The whole point of globalization was to become a cog in the global economic machine! If we get rich just by digging in the dirt and finding shiny things, hard metals and combustible liquids, why should we have to do anything else?

In this machine, we have become a proud nation of extractor-investors. From here on in, we Canadians can officially retire our brains and just enjoy the widgetfest until the worlds melts into oblivion.

Labels: canada, environment, globalization, income gap, productivity, prosperity