The chance to hear joined-up policies to solve the triple crunch of the credit crisis, climate change and high oil prices comes to Stroud. It looks set to be great....read more below plus links to a several articles looking more at the issues re the Credit Crunch and Iceland including a petition.
Photos: More shots of Randwick woods - trees are loosing leaves rapidly now but still look sensationalThe Stroud launch of the 'New Green Deal' will be at the Subscription Rooms in Stroud at
7.30pm on Thursday 27th November. The speakers will include Colin Hines, author and co-director of Finance for the Future, Cllr. Martin Whiteside, the Green Party Parliamentary candidate for Stroud, and Molly Scott Cato, Green Party Economics Speaker and European Parliamentary candidate.
Martin Whiteside, speaking at a Green Party meeting in Stroud earlier this month, said, “We need Green economics, not greed economics. The planet is the source of all real value. It is errors in the systems of accounting, most fundamentally in the system of national accounting and the use of GDP as a measure, that have led us to undervalue so significantly our fundamental resource. Politicians in Europe and elsewhere are beginning to argue that the recession will make finding a solution to climate change more difficult. This only illustrates their inability to grasp that the real problems facing the planet are economic in nature, and that we need to change the way our economies are designed and directed.”
Molly Scott Cato, who lives in Stroud said, "
A capitalist economy is like a shark - without forward motion it dies. This explains the roller coaster of boom and bust. A green economy would aim for a steady state, meeting human needs without exceeding the capacity of the planet to provide. Taking limits seriously, and recognising the need to end economic growth, underlines the importance of sharing the available resources fairly rather than competing over supplies of oil or water.”
Read more interesting stuff:Insightful article on how the crisis has hit Iceland, a nation of 300,000 people. Read how the country's banks - virtually unregulated - borrow more than 10 times their country's gross domestic product from the international wholesale money markets - then effectively gamble to create the current financial meltdown:
http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto111420080703072135&page=2'As the New Scientist' Special Issue Oct24th editorial says,
"we might be able to bail out the banks when they run out of assets, but we can't do the same for the planet."
Amazingly to tackle the Iceland banking crisis, last month the British Government invoked Anti-terrorist legislation, aimed at the people of Iceland. There is a petition to Gordon Brown sign here:
http://www.indefence.is/
Looking more closely it would seem that Iceland was an experimental station for neo-liberalism - even more so than Thatcher's Britain was in the 1980s. A Green colleague sent a link
here to the Mont Pelerin Society, which gives some background including that it was in 1991, Oddsson became Prime Minister and instigated an ambitious (and successful [/sic/]) programme of reform, liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, stabilisation and tax reduction.'Indeed there is more on Trollblog
here.
Naomi Klein, author of
The Shock Doctrine comments
: “The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington’s handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal,” says . See/listen to more
here. Plus of course Stroud's own
Gaian Economics blog here with various comments on recent stuff re Credit Crunch.
Whiteshill Primary School have won a competition that they entered when raising money for the Myasthenia Gravis Association during last year. The prize is £1,000 worth of vouchers to put towards a garden project. Mrs Browning is to be mentioned especially for all her hard work in putting together the school profile for the entry.
