Capitalism

Recently Wikileaks offered a reward for the text of the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). A people's hero must have stepped forward because today Wikileaks released the full text of the chapter on Intellectual Property Rights. Click here to see their report. The TPP has been kept secret by the Obama Administration for nearly 4 years because they know that if people find out what is in it, they will strongly oppose it.

In 2011, the top 11 richest carbon emitters spent an estimated $74 billion on fossil fuel subsidies, or seven times the amount spent on fast-track climate financing to developing nations, according to a recent report by the Overseas Development Institute. Worldwide, nations spent over half a trillion dollars on fossil fuel subsidies in 2011 according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). "The status quo encourages energy companies to continue burning high-carbon fossil fuels and offers no incentive to change," said the report's author Shelagh Whitley.

The cradle-to-grave cost to Canadian taxpayers to acquire new warships will exceed $100-billion, the federal government says – tens of billions of dollars more than Ottawa has previously disclosed. It is the first time the federal government has gone public with its best guess on the full life-cycle cost of up to 15 surface combat vessels. The political demand for transparency has changed in Ottawa since a controversy over the true cost of a plan to buy F-35 fighter jets, and the Harper government feels pressure to open the books.

As global capitalist economic growth accelerates planetary ecological collapse, this article, originally published on November 10, 2013, argues that - impossible as it may seem at present - only the most radical solution - the overthrow of global capitalism, the construction of a mostly publicly-owned and mostly planned eco-socialist economy based on global "contraction and convergence," on substantial de-industrialization, on sharing, on much less work and much more play and on bottom-up democratic management - is, in fact, the only alternative to the collapse of civilization and ecolo