Source: The Independent By Robert Fisk. Sunday, December 11, 2011
Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other "story" – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.
But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.
Source: Truthout Tuesday 20 September 2011 by: Thom Hartmann, Berrett-Koehler Publishers | Book Excerpt fas-cism (fâsh'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism. [Ital. fascio, group.] -fas'cist n. -fas-cis'tic (fa-shis'tik) adj.
— American Heritage Dictionary, 1983
There are resources and there are resources. For corporations, resources include raw materials, labor, the property and the equipment they use, the talents of the people they employ, and cash. For humans, resources include air, water, food, shelter, clothing, health care, and the means of exchange to ensure these.
I remember growing up fifty-plus years ago in an America where an employer’s responsibilities to their community were so well understood that bosses who laid off people were considered either evil or failures. There was a dramatic recalibration of this during the 1980s, as the word layoff was replaced with the more politically tolerable euphemism downsizing and then further euphemized to rightsizing. In England the same event is described much more directly: “I was made redundant.”
Source: Roarmag.org by Jérôme E. Roos on August 20, 2011
Warren Buffet wants to tax the rich, Forbes warns about a global class war and Nouriel Roubini says that Marx was right about capitalism. What’s going on?
It was a week of opposites. As stock markets around the world continued to nosedive into financial meltdown, the world’s third wealthiest man told US Congress to stop coddling the super-rich; Forbes, the ultimate magazine of the rich and famous, warned about the “coming global class war“; and Nouriel Roubini, one of the world’s leading economists, told the Wall Street Journal that Karl Marx was actually right in saying that capitalism is doomed.
Many elements of Japanese culture have taken a stable foothold in the West. One is Judo, but there are many others in figurative art, literature, philosophy and other fields. Here, I discuss what we can learn from Japanese culture in terms of sustainability, referring in particular to the "Edo Period" from about 1600 AD to mid 19th century. The Japanese society of that period is one of the few historical examples we have of a "steady state" economy. How did the Japanese managed to attain that? Here I am suggesting an explanation on the basis of the old Japanese story of "the cuckoo that won't sing."
Unthinkable Not to Rethink Policy in This Catastrophe
Japan seems on the verge of a second defeat. The March 11 magnitude 9.0 East Japan earthquake shoved the entire country 2 metres and brought even more mayhem in a tsunami that wrecked whole communities and snatched away the lives of thousands. Now we see 100,000 troops from the Self-Defense forces dispatched to rescue operations amidst the pall rising from massively damaged nuclear reactors. Radioactivity is drifting out to sea and over the surrounding prefectures, poisoning farm produce and forcing restrictions on their shipment and sale. The crisis has extended even to drinking water in the capital of Tokyo. The scale of disasters evokes embedded memories of the cusp of postwar reconstruction, the moment when rebuilding economy and society was about to harness prodigious resources and time.
So it is urgent, right now, to confront the question of how Japan should be rebuilt, and in whose interests. Recall the press conference held a few hours in the wake of the earthquake. The authorities repeatedly assured us the worst was already over, that "the situation is not grave" and "it’s safe so let's be calm." And when matters predictably worsened, Prime Minister Kan Naoto merely lost his cool and erupted at the utility TEPCO. The crisis-management centre eventually occupied the offices of TEPCO, but it was already too late to bring the crisis under control.
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