The economy is to serve the people, not the people to serve the economy -- Manfred Max-Neef
Acclaimed economist Manfred Max-Neef, author of the award-winning book From the Outside Looking in: Experiences in 'Barefoot Economics' recently appeared in a must-see interview on Democracy Now where he says a second, more catastrophic crisis is unavoidable because our economic model is "dramatically poisonous." Max-Neef explains that "Greed is the dominant value today in the world and as long as that persists, we're done!" But he doesn't just mean done economically, he means done as a species.
Going beyond facts and figures to describe economics, his philosophy is based on a macro-world view, where he accounts for the biosphere, human creativity, security and happiness, and life in all of its manifestations. He reveals that the majority of economists have great knowledge, more than ever before, but they lack understanding. The two differ as, "knowledge is a function of science, whereas understanding is holistic," explained Max-Neef. Using the metaphor of love to simplify: we may read and accumulate great knowledge about love, but we can never fully understand it until we fall in love and experience it.
His philosophy of humanizing economics, or "Barefoot Economics," stems from spending years living in and studying the culture of poverty to better understand the economics of it. He concludes that the poverty culture has entirely different principles than our modern culture, where they must depend on enormous creativity, cooperation and solidarity of people. In poverty, "you cannot be an idiot if you want to survive," he quipped.
Society's Child
In hopes that I will be permitted to make a point, permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, fire-bombed Tokyo, that Great Britain and the US fire-bombed Dresden and a number of other German cities, expending more destructive force, according to some historians, against the civilian German population than against the German armies, that President Grant and his Civil War war criminals, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, committed genocide against the Plains Indians, that the US today enables Israel's genocidal policies against the Palestinians, policies that one Israeli official has compared to 19th century US genocidal policies against the American Indians, that the US in the new 21st century invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on contrived pretenses, murdering countless numbers of civilians, and that British prime minister Tony Blair lent the British army to his American masters, as did other NATO countries, all of whom find themselves committing war crimes under the Nuremberg standard in lands in which they have no national interests, but for which they receive an American pay check.
I don't mean these few examples to be exhaustive. I know the list goes on and on. Still, despite the long list of horrors, moral degradation is reaching new lows. The US now routinely tortures prisoners, despite its strict illegality under US and international law, and a recent poll shows that the percentage of Americans who approve of torture is rising. Indeed, it is quite high, though still just below a majority.
The aid ship the Mavi Maramara was brutally attacked by Israeli soldiers on May 31st 2010
"The fact-finding mission concluded that a series of violations of international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law, were committed by the Israeli forces," said the 56-page report.
The report described the circumstances of the deaths of "at least six of the passengers" as being "consistent with ... an arbitrary and summary execution."
Israel has maintained its troops used force on the activists in May after they were attacked by those on board one boat. Soldiers were attacked with knives, metal poles and other objects, Israeli officials have said.
But passengers on board the boat insist Israeli troops fired on them without provocation.
© Robert Hare PhD
The must-read book about humanity's intra-species predator
The must-read book about humanity's intra-species predator
Law enforcement officials from around the world pulled back the curtain on the previously undisclosed probe in extraordinary detail for Scripps Howard News Service.
The agents revealed the workings of what they call the most significant commercial child porn bust in the Internet's history, in which multiple authorities from the United States, Canada, England, Italy, Belarus, Ukraine, Australia, and other countries, plus Interpol and Europol banded together to close down 230 websites, dismantling what is believed to be the most sophisticated commercial child porn operation to date.
Since the websites -- with names like "Excited Angels" and "Boys Say Go" -- went offline in January, the number of active commercial child porn sites has nosedived from perhaps 300 to the single digits, said Matt Dunn, of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Custom's Enforcement (ICE), which was the lead law enforcement agency.
"You've taken an organization that was distributing large scale child porn and removed them," said Dunn, of the Child Exploitation Section of ICE's Cyber Crimes Center.
FBI special agent Michael Dzielak investigated the ring with Dunn and other international partners. Like Dunn, he believes the bust has dealt a fatal blow to the child-porn-for-money market -- at least for now.
© whistleblower.org
This is no doubt in response to a decade of GM crop sabotage efforts around the globe. Since the publicly-announced introduction of GM crops in 1996, concerned citizens have vandalized such crops every single year somewhere on the planet. Several thousand GM plants have been partially or wholly destroyed.
Blackwater is most notorious for its Nisour Square Massacre in 2007. Seventeen innocent civilians died when Blackwater goons opened fire in a busy market square. The hit team was later acquitted in a U.S. court.
Scahill reports that through its web of companies, Blackwater (now Xe Services) spied on and/or infilitrated groups opposing Monsanto in 2008 through early 2010. He writes:
© SOTT.net
No, I'm not talking about the Tea Partiers. I'm talking about the rich.
These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. Young people can't find jobs; laid-off 50-somethings fear that they'll never work again.
Yet if you want to find real political rage - the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason - you won't find it among these suffering Americans. You'll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don't have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.
© n/a
South Africa's biggest healthcare company Netcare has been implicated in Israel's international organ trafficking racket
South Africa's biggest healthcare company Netcare has been implicated in Israel's international organ trafficking racket
The South African government said that the head of the Netcare company and a director of the St. Augustine's Hospital in Durban, Richard Friedland, had been aware of illegal kidney trade at the hospital, but "nevertheless permitted these operations" to take place, South African daily The Times reported on Wednesday.
The police said that wealthy Israelis paid organ dealers between 2001 and 2003, the year when the ring was exposed, the German Press Agency (DPA) reported.
"Israeli citizens in need of kidney transplants would be brought to South Africa for transplants at St. Augustine's Hospital," read the charge sheet.
Comment: U.S. Hospitals Secretly Promote Black Market Trading of Harvested Organs for Transplants
Another organ trafficking ring surfaces in Israel
Jenny Tonge: Investigate IDF stealing organs in Haiti
Hamas to take Israel to court over organ thefts
Is Israel a State or An Organ-Stealing Mafia?
Top Pathologist Says Doctors Also Involved in Organ Stealing - Israeli Video Confirms Theft of Palestinian Organs
Ukrainian Kids, New Victims of Israeli "Organ Theft"
© Unknown
The Netherlands on Sunday cancelled a tour of the country by a forum of Israeli mayors because their group included representatives of West Bank settlements.
The professional delegation, funded by the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish-American charity, was supposed to fly to the Netherlands next month to study public policy and local governance.
But when the Dutch Foreign Ministry found out that regional council heads from the Judea and Samaria regions - including from the West bank settlements Efrat and Kiryat Arba - were due to participate, they decided to cancel the tour.
Where You Can And Can't Dig At The Beach, WEAR ABC, September 17, 2010
© Desconocido
At the same time, the global weather is turning extreme again - this time in the form of torrential rain and floods. In some countries the storms have come after harsh droughts. Such drastic changes destroy crops and affect our food supply, which in turn affect food prices. This would not be the first time the world has faced a food crisis, but now it comes two years into an economic recession that more are beginning to realise is a full-blown 'depression'. As people reach their limits of desperation, they are more likely to take to the streets to voice their anger.
Our leaders, however, are showing no interest in covering the basic needs of the masses nor delivering economic justice. On the contrary, war is all they wish to bring, starting with the Middle East.
Comment: Read the full report here