In case anyone in the Democratic party is wondering why support disappeared in Massachusetts, perhaps examining the score card of the Obama administration will reveal why some people feel the behaviour of the executive is little different from the war criminal he replaced.

• Gave money to the banking executives and left the majority of victims of their predatory lending with no support. He should have just nationalised any bank going bust, sacked the executive boards, and established a means to renegotiate usury mortgages.
• Attacked a country (Pakistan) which had not attacked the U.S. in the first week of taking office. Even Bush took 9 months before he acted like Hitler.

To help the people of Haiti, I recommend donating to Partners in Health that already have offices in Haiti and a long history of provision of aid, without preconditions and excessive bureaucracy. I have donated to them during the flooding that occurred in 2004 and they do great work. They have already provided two trucks of medical equipment into Port-au-Prince from their office in another town.

Of course, if you choose another aid organisation, that's still great.

Via Jill, I learned of a documentary that is currently seeking funding, following the people of Carteret Island in the Pacific who are being displaced by rising waters. There are other climate refugees, such as people fleeing the conflict in Darfur, due ultimately to the evaporation of Lake Chad and loss of arable lands. However, the issue of impending loss of low lying islands due to erosion from sea level rise has been raised by many island nations such as Tuvalu and the Maldives. The film illustrates the effect on the people of Carteret island of forced emigration to nearby Bougainville island as the first refugees solely due to climate change. The film is seeking funding online, which is in the form of pledges.

Dear Prime Minister,

I urge you to recognise Australia's obligations to the world in it's negotiations at the Copenhagen COP-15 summit. Australia heavily burdens the world with it's continued reliance on coal and natural gas export industries. This is a short-sighted economy which is extremely exposed to changes in production, demand and political influence from multinational corporations. While successive Australian governments have provided enormous taxpayer subsidies to these carbon intensive industries, we have invested relatively tiny amounts of money in renewable energy industries. This is holding back Australian research and development in knowledge intensive renewable technologies.

As an expat Aussie living in France and watching the climate debate in Canberra, it is with a sense of shame and disbelief to watch the Labour and Liberal parties obscure the real issues of climate change. Prime minister Rudd's concessions to the Liberal party climate deniers is simply enormous corporate welfare of $5.8 billion to be paid by taxpayers to keep the coal industry polluting. An emissions trading scheme is just permission to pollute by industries who's era is over. Europe has already demonstrated how ineffective an ETS is at reducing carbon, while leading to spiking electricity costs. Australia needs a flat carbon fee that is not able to be manipulated, to properly reflect the cost the country and our children will continue to pay into the future.

There seems to be more intrigue in the situation of dollar stability. The financial news outlet Bloomberg reported about a month ago (this completely missed me) the story of two Japanese businessmen arrested in Italy for trying to smuggle $134B in U.S. Treasury bonds into Switzerland.

I'm sure many people have been following the Iranian uprising. What we could also be seeing is the death of corporate journalism.

The control by the government regime of corporate and foreign journalists has put the power and obligation of reporting of the uprising back in the hands of the Iranian people. With the current state of Orwellian control over media distribution, it is now possible to shut down corporate web sites and identify and gag corporate journalists.

As I've mentioned before, the U.S. currency has been under threat of massive deflation if it reverts from it's reserve currency status. In the past, the threat has been from the rise of PetroEuros due to the diversified European political decision making and it's oil dependence. This Clark hypothesis saw oil as the main trigger to a change in security of the U.S. currency through OPEC adopting multiple oil trading currencies instead of relying on the U.S. dollar.

It only takes a short time before the spectre of disaster capitalism appears in relation to the devastating Australian bush fires. In this case, it is attempting to scapegoat environmentalists as the cause of the bush fires. The claim is that the blazes are due to not clearing undergrowth and that was prevented by lobbying from environmentalists.

The news that the Israeli defence force (IDF) is now using artillery only emphasises the indiscriminate nature of their attacks against the Gaza strip. Artillery is uncontrolled and practically untargetted (even with observers several rounds have to be fired to fix a target). It is almost guaranteed to kill innocent people. Gaza is one of the most overcrowded bodies of land in the world. The indiscrimination in the attacks alone constitutes a war crime.