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Published by the Kingston Greens
GREEN LIGHT KINGSTON #236 |
Issue #236
Monday, July 05, 2010 |
Printed in cyberspace on recycled electrons
Compiled and edited using 100% clean, renewable power (wind and low-impact hydro) from Bullfrog Power.
To publicise future events, corrections and/or if you have comments, please email Green Light Kingston:
We welcome new submissions!
Quote of the Week:
A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.
-- Michael Pollan, author, journalism professor (b. 1955)
In This Issue:
| 1. Website of the Week | |
| 2. Cartoon | |
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| 3. Current Events | |
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| 4. Coming Events | |
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| 5. Elsewhere Events | |
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| 6. Community Action | |
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| 7. Worth Reading | |
| 8. Community Notices | |
| 9. Wanted! | |
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| 10. Local Organic Produce | |
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1. Website of the Week
| New! Kingston - 1000 Solar Rooftops Challenge |
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http://www.switchkingston.ca/solar |
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2. Cartoon
3. Current Events
4. Coming Events
5. Elsewhere Events
6. Community Action
7. Worth Reading
| New! How Goldman Sachs Caused a 'Silent Mass Murder,' Gambling on Starvation in the Developing World |
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From The Independent UK / By Johann Hari
How Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and others caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world. July 2, 2010 | http://www.alternet.org/story/147414/how_goldman_sachs_caused_a_%27silent_mass_murder%2C%27_gambling_on_starvation_in_the_developing_world?page=entire By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world - Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more - have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world. It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions." Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis as if they had been struck by a tsunami. "My children stopped growing," a woman my age called Abiba Getaneh, told me. "I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died." Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either: as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand actually fell by 3 per cent. Other factors - like the rise of biofuels, and the spike in the oil price - made a contribution, but they aren't enough on their own to explain such a violent shift. To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache - but not half as much as they made the poor world's stomachs ache. For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer, he'll lose some cash, but if there's a lousy summer or the global price collapses, he'll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked. Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into "derivatives" that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in "food speculation" was born. So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutsche Bank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merrill Lynch - and on and on until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles's crop at all. If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, explains: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the 20th century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts - a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English." Poetry found its break with realism when T S Eliot wrote "The Wasteland". Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn't fully understand. So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba's plate? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was already deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in food contracts based on theoretical future crops - and the speculators drove the price through the roof. Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldmans pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market. They reckoned food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked, so they switched their funds there. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded on to this ground. So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for derivatives based on food massively rose - which meant the all-rolled-into-one price shot up, and the starvation began. The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home. When I asked Merrill Lynch's spokesman to comment on the charge of causing mass hunger, he said: "Huh. I didn't know about that." He later emailed to say: "I am going to decline comment." Deutsche Bank also refused to comment. Goldman Sachs were more detailed, saying they sold their index in early 2007 and pointing out that "serious analyses ... have concluded index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices", offering as evidence a statement by the OECD. How do we know this is wrong? As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period - but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows that speculation was "the main cause" of the rise. So it has come to this. The world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. Their Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict so much pain? If we don't re-regulate, it is only a matter of time before this all happens again. How many people would it kill next time? The moves to restore the pre-1990s rules on commodities trading have been stunningly sluggish. In the US, the House has passed some regulation, but there are fears that the Senate - drenched in speculator-donations - may dilute it into meaninglessness. The EU is lagging far behind even this, while in Britain, where most of this "trade" takes place, advocacy groups are worried that David Cameron's government will block reform entirely to please his own friends and donors in the City. Only one force can stop another speculation-starvation-bubble. The decent people in developed countries need to shout louder than the lobbyists from Goldman Sachs. The World Development Movement is launching a week of pressure this summer as crucial decisions on this are taken: text WDM to 82055 to find out what you can do. The last time I spoke to her, Abiba said: "We can't go through that another time. Please - make sure they never, never do that to us again." |
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| New! New Report on Wind Turbine Effects |
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Ontario's Chief Medical Officer claims,
"According to the scientific evidence, there isn't any direct causal link between wind turbine noise and adverse health effects." http://news.ontario.ca/mohltc/en/2010/05/new-report-from-ontarios-chief-medical-officer-of-health-says-there-is-no-direct-causal-link-between.html |
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| New! Ontario and Solar Energy |
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News from the government.
http://news.ontario.ca/mri/en/2010/05/supporting-new-solar-energy-technology.html |
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| New! Letter to Green Light - Oil spill coverage one-sided |
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I have been a supporter of the Green movement since becoming involved in sustainable agriculture issues in university. As a dual Canadian-American citizen, I found that the Greens were ahead of the real issues and saw the bigger picture. However, I feel that the Green Light Kingston that was sent out today [Issue #235 - June 21 - http://www.kingstongreens.ca/mainpages/ViewHTML.asp?Issue_ID=191 ] presents a view of the BP oil spill that is limited, irresponsible, and offensive.
As Charles Wohlforth said in an interview on the US National Public Radio last Friday, "We're using the oil. We create these systems. We create the laws. We create the society.. look at the oil spill as a symptom of that system that we've created... which we all regret and wish weren't happening, and yet we don't seem to be able to solve." Yes, corporate culture is greedy and BP made serious mistakes. Yes, American society is incredibly consumptive. And yes, the US government failed to adequately to regulate this drilling operation with horrific results. However, to blame only the US and a company for a world culture dependent on petroleum-based products is naive. I work for a nonprofit conservation organization that operates in the midst of one of North America's largest oil and gas fields. I've also worked in the fields as a biologist. One thing that I can tell you is that if one of EnCana's hundreds of wells blew up today that we wouldn't be pointing fingers at Canada. We haven't held you personally responsible for the air quality here. We haven't blamed the greedy Canadian corporate world for the exploitation of the resources we have here that you want. When I look out an EnCana well pad covered in invasive weeds that are nearly impossible to remove and have destroyed tens of thousands of acres of habitat for endangered species, I don't think that Canadians are to blame. The truth of the matter is that unless you dog sled in to work everyday, we rely on petroleum products and other energy sources and processes for transportation - and heating, shelter, food, clothes, computers, etc. I am tired of the biased coverage of this tragedy - PLEASE get real... and some perspective. - K. Teson [Ed. Note: The Green Light newsletter is not an official publication of the Green Party, but is instead a vehicle for the Kingston Greens membership and the greater community to stay abreast of local and global news pertaining to green and progressive issues, community events listings, and community notices etc.. - a means of fostering communication between the progressive community. It is largely made up of submissions from readers - whatever the readership is finding interesting or of importance and is submitted, usually is printed, provided it is not hateful, irrelevant, or needlessly inflammatory. We try as much as possible to highlight solutions and positive articles when we can. Unfortunately, it often seems like bad news is more available. Obviously, the spill in the Gulf is foremost on everyone's mind and so for this latest issue, we received many submissions on that topic (only some were included). The number of articles and their content reflects that concern, frustration, and outrage. If readers have articles and news items that paint a different picture of the situation unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, they are encouraged to submit them - one of our priorities is to inform. The several articles in Green Light about the spill do not seem critical toward Americans. There is a lot of deep sympathy for the residents of Florida, Louisiana, and the many, many other areas of the U.S. eastern seaboard that are affected. BP is an enormous multi-national corporation based in the UK operating in the Gulf and all over the world. Nationality doesn't seem to be relevant in any way. Rather, it seems to be more a matter of a corporation having too much power and not enough accountability and regulation (for which governments all over the world are responsible). The Green Party is and has been quite consistent in their call for governments to evolve away from fossil fuels and into alternative, less destructive, energies. While it's true that society is currently set up to consume fossil fuels, the Green Party isn't satisfied with the status quo. They DO point the finger at the current Canadian government which stands in the way of progressive policies and holds the country back. That is why the Green Party continues to advance and campaign for their alternative vision for our economies and infrastructures. The Green Light newsletter is similarly consistent in its criticism of ALL petroleum giants, EnCana included. Previous issues have discussed the terrible consequences of the tar sands and the irresponsibility of the Canadian government in supporting that project, to the detriment of alternative energies. The Green Light newsletter has printed scores of articles dedicated to describing how societies and economies can break the oil habit, as the saying goes. And the Green Party and the Green Light spend as much time criticizing non-Green practices at home, as abroad. In fact, it's our home turf we want to change most and first. Yes, Canada is just as oil-addicted and consumptive as the U.S.. We'd like to see the whole continent progress.] |
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8. Community Notices
| New! 1000 Solar Rooftops Challenge Could Make Kingston A Solar Leader |
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The official launch of SWITCH Kingston's 1000 Solar Rooftops
Challenge took place from 10:30 am to 12:00 noon on Tuesday, June 29 at the St. Lawrence College Energy House. The Honourable John Gerretsen, MPP Kingston and The Islands, Minister of the Environment, Ontario was the keynote speaker for the launch of the program which aims to make Kingston the first community of its size to reach 1000 solar energy installations. The event was open to the public and included refreshments and a tour of the Energy House facility. The 1000 Solar Rooftops Challenge, which received funding from Ontario's Community Go Green Fund, seeks to raise awareness of the benefits of solar energy through a door to door campaign that will carefully target homes based on their solar potential. "It's a great time for people in Ontario to go solar," said Challenge Coordinator Tyson Champagne. "The 1000 Solar Rooftops Challenge will help spread the word." SWITCH Kingston is a non-profit organization dedicated to making southeastern Ontario a leading centre for sustainable energy. |
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| New! Grow-a-Row Drop off at the Kingston Public Market |
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Drop off any extra produce from your garden as a Grow-a-Row donation at
the Kingston Public Market. Find us at the Loving Spoonful booth every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday from 2-4pm. |
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| New! Workbees at the Acorn Garden |
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Every Tuesday from 4-6pm, join Loving Spoonful staff and volunteers in
planting, picking, weeding, and watering at the Acorn Garden located at the Oak Street Community Garden. All of the food grown in this learning and donation garden is given to local emergency meal providers. Workbees are a fantastic opportunity to meet fellow gardeners and to contribute to your community! |
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| New! Community Harvest Market at the Wally Elmer Centre |
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Community Harvest Market at the Wally Elmer Centre - every Wednesday from 3pm to 7pm.
Local food producers, artisans and community groups. ALL ARE WELCOME! Thank you, Kathy Sturmey Community Harvest Market Coordinator 1-613-257-1582 |
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| Join the Kingston Greens |
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Free newsletter, articles, talks etc.
Get involved in community actions (for example: Lobbying Council for a Ban
on the Cosmetic use of Pesticides, Fighting Urban Development on
Conservation Land, Survey on Green Issues that affect Kingstonians, Election
Canvassing etc.). Green momentum is building in Kingston. Come out and help us bring a sustainable future to Kingston! Membership to Kingston Greens is free but we encourage membership to the Green Party of Ontario ($10) and the Green Party of Canada ($10). Remember: You can get up to 75% of your donation to the Kingston Greens back at tax time! The current government will help you subsidize the greening of their own non-Green policies! Give generously and you'll receive a generous dividend in return: a 75% tax credit and more progressive government. Please send your cheque made to: KINGSTON GREENS (please specify Provincial or Federal membership on your cheque. Unfortunately, separate cheques are required for each.) - P.O. Box 1691, Kingston ON, K7L 5J6 More info: 384-8504 or ( |
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9. Wanted!
10. Local Organic Produce