Capitalism

The Hupacasath First Nation may not have succeeded the first time around, but its fight to keep the federal government from ratifying the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Act (FIPPA) is heating up again. The tiny Vancouver Island nation has filed an appeal with the Federal Court of Appeals and expects the Crown to file by March 17.

Arguably the single most important mistake the revolutionary movements of the 60s and 70s made was to overlook the resilience of capitalism. The idea – catastrophism, as it is often called – that the system was going to crumble under the pressure of its own contradictions, that the bourgeoisie produces its own "gravediggers" (as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto) has been disproved.

World stock markets may be over-valuing companies with fossil fuel assets that may be unburnable, UK lawmakers warned Thursday. The UK's Environmental Audit Committee released a report warning that over-priced fossil fuel assets pose a systemic risk to global markets. "The UK government and Bank of England must not be complacent about the risks of carbon exposure in the world economy," said committee chair and member of parliament Joan Walley.

Please allow me hail this meeting of the European Left and, in the name of our President, of our country and of our people thank you for inviting us to exchange a whole body of opinions and ideas on the platform of this most important Congress of the European Left. Please allow me to be blunt but also to put forward proposals. How do we see Europe from the outside? We see a Europe that is flagging, we see a demoralised Europe, withdrawn and tuning inwards yet very self-satisfied, and we see a Europe rather apathetic and tired.

Time to get excited, everyone: There’s a freshly leaked document from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in town, courtesy of the Peruvian website Redge.org.

How much is Canada worth? About $33 trillion according to one recent reckoning, based only on our oil and timber resources. Those two commodities alone make Canada the fourth richest country on Earth, and number two on a per capita basis -- just behind Saudi Arabia. Divided between 35 million Canadians, every one of us is close to being a millionaire. Like the TV commercial says, you're richer than you think.

Getting radical anti-capitalist ideas wrong and ignoring those ideas  completely are timeworn traditions for U.S. intellectuals. The habits go back a long way and have continued through the current millennium. The consequences can be deadly, as is seen with two short books printed by leading U.S.

The global financial system displays the same bounded resilience that many complex systems in nature display. Within certain limits the system maintains its integrity but when those limits are broken positive feedback loops can rapidly move the system to a very different state. We refer to such events in the financial markets as “crashes”. Given that the financial system is central to the allocation of capital and liquidity, such crashes rapidly impact the “real” economy.

Two recent communications from respected global organizations have underscored the long-term impacts of climate change – and the potential vast effects on business. Communiques from the World Bank and the United Nations both highlighted the complex, long-lasting and extraordinarily costly nature of the problem.

The creator of The Wire, David Simon, delivered an impromptu speech about the divide between rich and poor in America at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, and how capitalism has lost sight of its social compact. This is an edited extract.