Saturday Links for the Week — June 30, 2007

What’s Important This Week:

Hedge Funds are Next Domino in US Housing Market Collapse: With houses sitting vacant, prices tumbling and mortgage foreclosures soaring, it was only a matter of time before hedge funds, the absurdly overpriced financial instruments used by greedy lenders to try to spread the risk of reckless mortgages going bad, started to fall as well. The SEC is belatedly investigating. Duck.

US Supreme Court Abandons Role of Impartial Judiciary: The bloc of Bush and Reagan-appointed right-wing extremists in the US Supreme Court this week abandoned all pretense of interpreting laws and began injecting their extremist ideology into rulings designed solely to advance the neoconservative agenda. The rulings will allow bogus issue ads by moneyed interests to pollute the 2008 electoral campaign, prevents citizen challenges to massive government grants to right-wing religious groups, and cripples students’ rights to free speech.

China Watch: Fake veterinary drugs, dead lakes, and poison toothpaste: This week:

•  we learned that 20% of drugs for veterinary use made in China are useless or dangerous, cheap fakes. 
• we learned that most of China’s largest lakes are so polluted that they are choked with algae, dead, and toxic for drinking water use even with treatment. 
• and we learned that prisoners and hospitals in the US have thousands of tubes of Chinese-made toothpaste poisoned with antifreeze. It just goes on and on.

The Impact of Global Warming on US Plant Ecosystems: The Arbor Day Foundation shows how radically global warming is changing natural vegetation in all areas of the US. Watch the animation and note especially what’s happened in Idaho and N.Michigan. At least someone in the US administration seems to get it. Thanks to John Frost for the link.

The Great Biofuel Hoax: Eric Holt-Gimenez neatly sums up why biofuels will do nothing to increase energy self-sufficiency or reduce global warming, how they could wreck local agricultural economies, and why Big Agribusiness is lobbying politicians to perpetuate this scam out of simple greed. Thanks to Mike Yarmolinsky for the link.

Why Local Sustainable Food?: Local Flavour Plus is an Ontario-based organization working to certify local, sustainable, cruelty-free farms and encourage major retailers to buy from them. It’s a great working model, and needs to expand to enable consumers to identify and buy direct from certified farms and press their retailers as well. Thanks to the CBC’s Metro Morning for the link.

Thought for the Week: Bill McDonough at the TED talks (thanks to Zaadz founder Brian Johnson for the link) explains Cradle to Cradle design and how it can make businesses and whole economies sustainable. Bill’s newest project is a massive one with — wait for it — the Government of China. This should be interesting. Great presentation, and it contains thislovely ‘primary design objective’ that Bill presented to — George Bush: