Felix Dodds comments on sustainable development, coffee & life

The Newish Declaration Well we have the text forthe final negotiations for the Post 2015 Declaration . Don’t those attending the Finance for Development (FfD) wish they had our facilitators? Well I much more like the preamble than last time! I am a sucker for People, Planet and Prosperity part as it was the slogan for the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development and adding Peace and Partnerships (also a WSSD priority) is pretty cool. On the targets the co-facilitators have taken a lead and put into the text the technical revisions that they had proposed in the zero draft. Hmmmmmm that is going to be interesting to see how that plays. The proposed change to the ocean target 14c is left still to be discussed. I am sure the changes in the targets will be a central part of the negotiations in the first week. I think the human rights and gender text seems better and it does look like the mention of CBDR in para 10 will cause the usual fights. I tried in a previous blog ...

I have blogged on the bankers before who I believe have ‘privatized the profits and socialized the losses’. We have paid for their mismanagement. After the 2008 financial disaster you would have thought that the bankers would have learnt. The reality is of course few went to jail and the consequences was financial misery for many normal people losing their jobs, their house and so much more.   Of course Thomas Jefferson warned of this in a letter to John Taylor in 1816 : “And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." Of course it was Gordon Brown in the UK and President Clinton in the US who took away the restrains that kept apart the banking and casino speculation of banks that had been put in after the 1930s recession. Only a year ago there was the Libor interest ra...

Paul Mason, Channel 4's Economics Editor, Is Sick And Tired Of Banks Behaving Badly How is it that the Bank directors and financial institutions that caused so many people to lose their homes and jobs have managed to get away with it and still in virtually all cases still have great wages and are not in jail. Even now we are finding out how crooked they are with 5 banks now being fined 2.6 billion UK bounds by US and UK regulators (HSBC, RBM, UBS, JP Morgan, Chase, Citibank and Bank of America) for what is insider trading ripping off their own clients in foreign exchange trading.. But no criminal charges. Paul Mason  Channel 4 News' economics standing outside the Royal Bank of Scotland HQ in London tells it as we ALL think it .  "I am actually just sick of that corner," he say. "That corner over there where RBS HQ is. I’m just sick of it, after six years, why do we keep having to come and do it?" "Well I’m here again at RBS because yet again the...