Posts Tagged ‘Finance’
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Patricia Karvelas; 3/5/10; (2 Items)
Members of Australia’s new national Aboriginal representative group will be subject to police checks and its decisions will be vetted by an ethics council in an effort to avoid the scandals that destroyed the reputation of the former indigenous body ATSIC. The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, launched in Sydney yesterday, is the first indigenous representative body since 2005, when the Howard government abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission amid corruption scandals. The Rudd government has bankrolled the new group, pledging $29.2 million in keeping its election promise to establish a national Aboriginal body. The group will represent Aboriginal interests in government, business and international forums, and establish a wide-ranging agenda based on thorough research and “evidence.” It will aim to also become a think tank, creating visionary leadership on issues affecting Aborigines.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Finance
Posted in Aboriginal, Aid / Trade, Australia, Human Rights | No Comments »
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Patricia Karvelas; 3/5/10; (2 Items)
Members of Australia’s new national Aboriginal representative group will be subject to police checks and its decisions will be vetted by an ethics council in an effort to avoid the scandals that destroyed the reputation of the former indigenous body ATSIC. The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, launched in Sydney yesterday, is the first indigenous representative body since 2005, when the Howard government abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission amid corruption scandals. The Rudd government has bankrolled the new group, pledging $29.2 million in keeping its election promise to establish a national Aboriginal body. The group will represent Aboriginal interests in government, business and international forums, and establish a wide-ranging agenda based on thorough research and “evidence.” It will aim to also become a think tank, creating visionary leadership on issues affecting Aborigines.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Finance
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Human Rights | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
Maureen Dowd, 27/4/10
You kept expecting Tom Hagen to jump up and object to a senator’s question on behalf of his Don. The wood-paneled Senate committee room had an old-school look. The combed-over committee chairman, Carl Levin, had an old-school look. And the Congressional hearing trying to illuminate surreptitious and avaricious behavior by an amoral, macho gang was the 2010 equivalent of the 1950s Mafia hearing depicted in “Godfather II.” “Government Sachs,” as the well-connected Goldman Sachs is known, was called to account by the actual government on Tuesday. And the traders and executives who dreamed up the idea of packaging smoke were every bit as slick, evasive and dismissively unapologetic as Michael Corleone. He only claimed to trade in olive oil; they actually delivered the snake oil.
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Tags: Finance, Trade, USA
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Tuesday, April 20th, 2010
Ross Clark; 20/4/10;
How clever of Goldman Sachs to announce pound stg. 3.5 billion ($5.81bn) worth of bonuses for its staff in the week it was sued for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is not hard to guess what will happen next. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic will undergo another bout of frothing at the mouth over bonuses – and will continue to procrastinate over the real problem: that banks remain too big to fail. Goldman Sachs’s profits and bonuses wouldn’t matter a fig if the US government was prepared to let it go bust – but that won’t happen because when it did with Lehman Brothers in 2008, it caused such havoc that governments effectively underwrote all banks. Goldman Sachs’s staff know full well that however great the risks they take with other people’s money, the taxpayer will always bail them out.It is now 18 months since the banking crisis, and there has been a complete lack of reforms to prevent practices of the kind of which Goldman Sachs is accused.
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Tags: Finance, Human Rights, Trade, USA
Posted in Aid / Trade, Human Rights, USA, Workers | No Comments »
Monday, March 8th, 2010
Peter Gregory; 8/3/10
From little things big things grow. Rarely has this iconic refrain been more apt than in describing microfinance and its rise to prominence. When Muhammad Yunus lent $US27 ($A30) to 42 poor women in the Bangladeshi village of Jobra in 1976, it is questionable whether he envisaged the global development phenomenon that microfinance would become. Professor Yunus is visiting Australia this week for a presentation to the Australian business community called “The Power of the Small”.
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Tags: Finance, Global, Human Rights
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Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Nicola Berkovic; 23/11/09
Almost five years after the abolition of ATSIC, the Rudd government has announced details of a new national indigenous representative body, which will receive $30 million in funding. Members of the new National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples will be subject to unprecedented probity checks to avoid the corruption problems that besieged ATSIC, and will be made up equally of men and women.Announcing that the government had accepted a blueprint for the body handed to it in August, Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said yesterday the government was committed to “resetting” its relationship with indigenous people and creating a new partnership based on trust, goodwill and mutual respect. “Indigenous Australians must have a voice if we are to achieve change,” she said. “We look forward to working with the new body to close the gap in indigenous life outcomes and opportunities.”
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Finance
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Human Rights | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
Rose Marie Berger, 9-10/09;
Sojourners associate editor, she is a Catholic peace activist and poet.
In July, Pope Benedict wrote you a love letter. Like all love letters, it’s worth savoring. I say he wrote it to you because Charity in Truth, his third encyclical, isn’t just for Catholics. Its addressed to “all people of good will.” I call it a love letter because the opening word is caritas — love. And because any social change worth its salt must spring from love and pursue love as its ultimate goal. The media says this encyclical is about globalisation, international development, transnational governance, and the financial crisis. It’s about all those things. It’s also about fostering sensitivity to life, healthy sexuality, human ecology, and the way technology reveals our human aspirations. But its bookends are love. If you’ve watched your 401(k) plummet in the last two years or sweated to make your mortgage payment, then there is something in Charity in Truth for you. If you wonder what good it does to dump billions of dollars in aid money to developing countries while we’ve got 9.7 percent unemployment at home, there’s something for you.
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Tags: Christianity, Finance, Global, Poverty
Posted in Aid / Trade, Christianity, Human Rights | No Comments »
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
Natasha Robinson; 27/8/09; (2 Items)
Many of the nation’s most recognised Aboriginal leaders have had no input into the creation of a national indigenous body, raising concerns that the new council will fail to bridge the divide between urban and remote indigenous communities. Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma will today present a report to Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin, compiled following extensive discussion among indigenous representatives over the form and scope of a new leadership body. Mr Calma is expected to endorse a body that will elect its own representatives and will perform an advisory role to governments but, unlike its predecessor ATSIC, will not have a direct hand in service delivery.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Finance, Human Rights
Posted in Aboriginal, Aid / Trade, Australia, Human Rights | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
Matt Chambers; 18/3/09; (2 Items)
Rio Tinto executive and former Alcan boss Dick Evans stands to reap $US11million ($16.6million) in salary and bonuses this year, although he is leaving the company next month and other executives are deferring their bonuses. Mr Evans has already netted about $US60million from Rio’s $US38billion cash takeover of Alcan in 2007, debt from which is the main reason Rio has been forced to ink a $US19.5billion rescue package from China. The huge potential cash bonus for Mr Evans, which is enshrined in his contract and immune from bonus deferrals foisted on other executives, comes as Rio has shed about 3000 jobs from its West Australian iron ore operations as part of a plan to reduce its global workforce by 14,000.
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Tags: Australia, Finance, USA, Workers
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Tuesday, December 16th, 2008
Patricia Karvelas; 17/12/08; (4 Items)
An outspoken critic of the Northern Territory intervention will play a key role in formulating the design of a new indigenous representative body to be formed after a roundtable of 100 Aboriginal leaders next year. Tom Calma, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner who instigated a report on indigenous representation that recommended the proposed new body be given legislative functions, was picked by the Government to head the roundtable process as Labor moves to increase momentum towards forming the organisation. Aboriginal interests have not had a national representative body since the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was scrapped by the Howard government in 2004, ending a failed 14-year experiment in indigenous self-determination. The national board was immediately abolished, with its 35 regional councils phased out a year later. ATSIC’s $1billion budget was redirected into “mainstream” programs.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Education, Finance, Reconciliation
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Health & Children, Human Rights, Racism | No Comments »
Thursday, December 11th, 2008
Jim Wallis: 11/12/08
This week GM printed a full page ad in Automotive News magazine to make a public apology. They said: “While we’re still the U.S. sales leader, we acknowledge we have disappointed you. At times we violated your trust by letting our quality fall below industry standards and our designs become lackluster. We proliferated our brands and dealer network to the point where we lost adequate focus on our core U.S. market. We also biased our product mix toward pickup trucks and SUVs. And we made commitments to compensation plans that have proven to be unsustainable in today’s globally competitive industry. We have paid dearly for these decisions, learned from them and are working hard to correct them by restructuring our U.S. business to be viable for the long-term.” This gesture could easily be interpreted as “too little too late,” a desperate P.R. campaign, or as a “bizarre” and “pointless exercise” as some analysts have put it.
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Tags: Finance, Trade, USA, Workers
Posted in Aid / Trade, Human Rights, USA, Workers | No Comments »
Sunday, October 26th, 2008
Editorial: 26/10/08; (2 Items)
Governments have already thrown trillions of dollars into their own financial systems to save banks from going bust. They have also made it clear they will find whatever trillions more are necessary to stave off global financial meltdown. Now set these massive sums against the maximum of $60 billion a year that the United Nations said in 2000 was necessary to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to slash Third World poverty by 2015. At the very most the program to attack key issues such as destitution, high mortality, disease, polluted water sources and lack of education would have cost the First World $900 billion — a fraction of the cash that has been found to save the financial system. Yet even when rich countries were prospering, governments with a few exceptions such as the UK, fell seriously behind on their MDG promises. It can with justice be asked how they could not find such relatively small sums for the world’s poorest people but can conjure up far bigger amounts when their own prosperous societies are threatened.
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Tags: Finance, Morality, USA
Posted in Aid / Trade, Human Rights, USA | No Comments »
Monday, October 20th, 2008
Joan Chittister; 20/10/08
Sometimes it isn’t just one thing, sometimes it takes a confluence of things to make the invisible visible and the dark light. Things like butterflies and somebody else’s mortgage and Irish bookies and attitudes all coming together, at once, and apparently independent of one another. But, underneath, not really isolated or unconnected at all. In fact, together, they say something very important to us all. If you were wondering what “globalization” really means, for instance – before, that is, you found yourself living in the middle of it – the answer lies in all of the above. A piece at a time. All leading to more of the fullness of the definition of that reality than any one of them alone might suggest. “The Butterfly Effect,” according to the work of physicist Edward Lorenz in 1961, is the awareness that a slight change in one part of a system can cause cataclysmic effects in another. Depending on other conditions in the atmosphere, “One flap of a seagull’s wings,” he said, “could change the course of the weather forever.” Bird wings on one side of the globe, he went on, can cause or avert a hurricane on the opposite side of the globe. That’s an interesting concept at best when considered in a science lab. It’s a potentially devastating one when practiced in politics.
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Tags: Finance, USA
Posted in Aid / Trade, Human Rights, USA | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
1/10/08
As the Bush administration attempts to stabilise the nation’s economy, we are witness to the final chapter of a period of perverse and dishonest leadership that has used its own crises to justify the expansion of its own power. This was a president who came to office on promises of modesty – who championed a “humble nation”, scorned nation building and promised a more limited role for government in the lives of its citizens. Then he presided over a six-year attempt to tear down and rebuild the nations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now has embarked on the most profound expansion of the federal government’s role in the private economy since the Depression. In both cases, the pattern is the same. Ineptitude led to crisis; crisis then became the argument for the radical expansion of executive power.
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Tags: Finance, Terrorism, USA
Posted in Aid / Trade, Human Rights, USA | No Comments »
Saturday, August 16th, 2008
Paige Taylor; 16/8/08
Aboriginal entrepreneur Barry Taylor, whose company last year won the largest contract ever awarded to an indigenous business in Australia, claims the resources sector is still getting it wrong when it comes to indigenous employment. Mr Taylor, a Nyamal Aborigine from the Pilbara and executive chairman of indigenous contractor Ngarda Civil and Mining, yesterday labelled as farcical Fortescue boss Andrew Forrest’s plan to create 50,000 jobs for indigenous people within two years. Mr Taylor said Australia’s richest man had failed to understand the importance of doing business with more indigenous companies such as Ngarda. He is also critical of Rio Tinto, which employs more than 1500 indigenous workers. Ngarda cemented its position in the Pilbara last year when it won a $300 million, five-year deal to run BHP Billiton’s Yarrie mine.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, Finance, Land, Workers
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, Human Rights, Workers | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
Padraic Murphy; 13/8/08
Two families struggling with child abuse yesterday became the first to appear before the Families Responsibilities Commission – the next stage in welfare reform in indigenous communities. The FRC hearing on Cape York made legal history by being the first deliberative body with the power to quarantine welfare payments and take control of an individual’s finances. It is hoped the initiative masterminded by Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson to improve behaviour in four Cape York communities will be rolled out across the country. Sitting in Coen yesterday with two local representatives, Commissioner David Glasgow denied the measures were paternalistic.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Children, Finance
Posted in Aboriginal, Australia, Health & Children, Human Rights | No Comments »
