Extractive Industries Transparancy Initiative

Can this really be true? Or have congressional Democrats reverted to normal form, rolling in the dirt at the feet of Republicans yet again?

the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), or NAFTA 2, isn’t substantially different and remains a document of corporate domination. It would appear that appearances, not substance, drove Democrats in the House of Representatives to approve the deal.

So the expectation of a profit across the spectrum of business activities is well covered here, and of course the expectation of a profit — in actual practice, the demand for the biggest possible profit regardless of cost to others — is what the owners of capital expect these agreements to help deliver. The secret tribunals used to adjudicate disputes, frequently presided over by corporate lawyers who in their day job specialize in representing the corporations who sue in the tribunals, consistently interpret the language of “free trade” agreements to mean corporations are guaranteed maximum profits above all other considerations.

Mike Dunleavy, announced a draconian plan to slash appropriationsuvcuxssc for the university system by 41 percent. Defending the decision, he repeated a phrase that increasingly accompanies budget cuts: that the university couldn’t continue being “all things for all people.”

People who can afford to invest in their own future should pay for themselves, and only those who really need it should receive help. We shouldn’t force “poor” Americans to pay for “rich” college students — even though broader-based funding of public higher education overwhelmingly and disproportionately helps the poor.

The story of how the language of scarcity and individual investment became bipartisan orthodoxy begins with the marginal ideas of neoliberal economists in the years after World War II.

Starting roughly a year ago, in Sudan and Algeria and then spreading to Lebanon, Iraq and Iran, a series of mostly non-violent protests rocked the foundations of autocratic rule. A long-standing dictator was toppled in Khartoum and several heads of government were forced to step down in Algiers, Beirut and Baghdad. Even in Iran, Hassan Rouhani was facing pressure to resign.

It was forced to acknowledge the death of innocent lives and offer bereaving families financial compensation. To date, the Iranian government has refused to release an official death toll.

This development was a huge political and ideological gift to Iranian hardliners and their regional allies who were the target of many of these regional protests, especially in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.

He talks about [how] the Western worldview substitutes time as the universal for place.

So when the missionaries came to America, it didn’t matter what was going on here. It didn’t matter what the beliefs were. They already had this Utopian vision that superseded anything else that they saw here.

It’s all about laying this other template on top of that and saying that all doesn’t matter… No plants, no things that happened on the land, the ceremonies that were held, [and] the appreciation, whether it was for Salmon culture or Acorn culture or Pinenut culture or Buffalo culture. It’s just as if none of that mattered.

Yet where these environmental ordeals did not so much draw the kind of activism now swelling at Standing Rock today, they have similarly intensified attention to the greater systemic problems that exist whenever ancestral tribal lands are targeted for energy development.

Yellow Jr., 37, added, “It’s why a lot of people say that we’re stuck here.” The social problems, many tribal residents say, began when treaties were broken and ancestral lands were lost to colonizers. The existing land base of the Standing Rock Sioux was determined by the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. When the U.S. government claimed victory 11 years later, following the Great Sioux War, the terms of that treaty were amended. Threatened by starvation, the tribe, under duress, ceded a great deal of Laramie land to the federal government. In partial recognition of this painful history, modern federal Indian law today accords certain rights to tribes, including entitlement programs linked to health care, housing, education, and even gaming.

But there’s one catch: All IDs must have a current address. “In Indian Country we all know damn well that we don’t have physical addresses,” said Iron Eyes.  The 38-year-old attorney and member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe is running for Congress, challenging incumbent Kevin Cramer, a Republican, who’s been the U.S. representative for North Dakota’s at-large congressional district since 2013.

Kemal Özkan, assistant general secretary of IndustriAll, said the deaths of 33 gold miners when a tunnel collapsed at a Rio joint venture mine in Indonesia last May could have been avoided.

But said Rio's board believed both safety and environmental issues would not be improved by the company pulling out of the operation in Papua.

He claimed that the Indonesian human rights commission found that the operators of the Grasberg mine, owned with US company Freeport, "had the ability to prevent this from happening but didn't"."The lack of effort jeopardised the lives of others. The gravity of this case is serious," he quoted Indonesian human rights commissioner Natalius Pigai as saying in a report into the incident.

Fifty years later, many of the issues problematised by post-independent generations remain with us today and we are resolute that they must and should be addressed. It is amongst the huge ironies of the sector, that according to the Mckinsey Report entitled “Reverse The Curse: Maximising the Potential of Resource Driven Economies of December 2013”, that “69 per cent of people in extreme poverty are in resource-driven countries and that almost 80 per cent of the countries, whose economies have historically been driven by resources have per capita income levels below the global average.” This is a situation that must be untenable to us all, to governments and international organisations as much as it should be to mining executives, financiers, investors and professionals.

Central to the African Mining Vision is, therefore, the development of the sector on the continent, out of the enclaves, into a sector that can “catalyse and contribute to the broad-based growth and development of, and is fully integrated into, a single African market.” We have to get serious and work sector by sector, and region by region on the building of down-stream linkages into mineral beneficiation and manufacturing and up-stream linkages into mining capital goods, consumables and services industries.

Africa is also a large producer of the mineral Columbite-tantalite (or coltan, the colloquial African term) and as the second fastest growing cell phone market in the world, also needs to look at this sector, as a producer rather than as consumer only. We often talk about African growth being driven by demand for its commodities in Asia and other parts of the world, but as our economies reach the critical tipping point of sustained 7 per cent and above growth, with greater diversification and industrialisation, and with our population set to reach two billion by 2050, we must also pay attention to stimulating and meeting domestic African demand.

“Development is coming, but the development is going to certain areas and certain people,” Mr. Chachoka said, taking a break from trying to coax enough food from his scraggly field to feed his six children.

Yet, after a substantial drop in the first postwar decade, gains against poverty have slowed substantially, analysts say, leaving millions stuck below the poverty line and raising tough questions about whether Africa’s resource boom can effectively raise the standard of living of its people.

the new gas and coal deals are wrapped up in multibillion-dollar megaprojects that rarely create large numbers of jobs or foster local entrepreneurship, according to an analysis by the United States Agency for International Development.

"This is a new colonial era. This time it's not government; it's corporations," Lemos says.

"I think everything is new to them, but according to our social department, the people are very happy because they have all the infrastructure," Adachi says.

On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), charged with overseeing U.S. stock exchanges, approved rules on the implementation of two widely anticipated provisions of a broad financial reform package passed by the U.S. Congress in mid-2010, known in part as Dodd-Frank.

The first provision, section 1502, is aimed at cutting off financial support for so-called conflict minerals, whose extraction and sale has been blamed in part for financing rebel groups in several countries, particularly those at the centre of the violence raging in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Indeed, the legislative text of section 1502 specifically notes the situation in the DRC.

While proponents of the provisions suggest that the SEC has no mandate to actually reject laws enacted by Congress, there has been much anticipation during the course of the SEC deliberations. There has also been mounting frustration from across the ideological spectrum as the SEC has failed to act, in part citing massive public response on the issue.

From the perspective of the global South, the primary extraction of raw materials like coal, the subjugation of popular autonomy, the implementation of debt as a form of social control and the continued expansion of climate change are clearly intertwined.

Under its current form, that is imperialism-controlled, debt is a cleverly managed re-conquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules.

Speaking at the memorial service for the miners killed by South African police (above), Julius Malema reprised these themes on Thursday, calling again for nationalization of the mines: The democratically elected government has turned on its people.