As a basis for understanding the financial world and why it and the current “free market fundamentalism” is totally unsuited to the survival of the Earth as we know it, this 4 part documentary is a must see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWU65Zbka4E&feature=related     Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqBlVBhv0ag&feature=related   Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBhAvUTW5ZE&feature=related   Part 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZwMIIJLWOw&feature=related    Part 4.

It is notable that (then) French finance minister Christine Lagarde is prominent in this series, she now occupies the post that head of the I.M.F. Dominic Strauss Kahn then held. Ms Lagarde’s “strategies” of “including what can be measured” are a damning indictment of how free market economics seeks to “commodify” and “internalise” what is now regarded as an “externality” – the environment.

Given recent revalations of the myopic nature of stock traders and Goldman Sachs, open trading of environmental elements in an emissions trading scheme would be the worst thing that could happen.

A recent U.N.E.P. report has “valued” the natural elements (earth water sky) at $72 Trillion. What hubris is this when we have no idea how the biodiversity of a forest works, or what species lie deep under the ocean’s surface ? This is just an indication how fossilised the free market has become, and what, in the light of the above documentary, lies in store for the Earth.