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NATO Comes to Chicago!
Nato talks security and peace, Chicago has neither
“Nato is not an impartial arbiter in this state of affairs but the military wing of a political and economic project that makes it possible. Neoliberal globalisation, and the inequities that come with it, cannot exist without force or the threat of it. "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist," Thomas Friedman, an ardent advocate of free market globalisation, argued. "McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."
The paradox of such a city hosting this summit lays bare the brutal way in which inequality is globally maintained and locally replicated
…”The next morning world leaders started arriving in Chicago for the Nato summit where, just 20 minutes from Brighton Park, they would discuss how to maintain international security. The dissonance between the global pretensions of the summit this weekend and the local realities of Chicago could not be more striking. Nato claims its purpose is to secure peace through security; in much of Chicago neither exists.
When the city mayor Rahm Emanuel brought the summit to Chicago he boasted: "From a city perspective this will be an opportunity to showcase what is great about the greatest city in the greatest country." The alternative "99% tour" of the city, organised by the Grassroots Collective that came to Brighton Park, revealed how utterly those who claim to export peace and prosperity abroad have failed to provide it at home.
…This violence, be it at the hands of the state or gangs, is both compounded and underpinned by racial and economic disadvantage. The poorer the neighbourhood the more violent, the wealthier the safer. This is no coincidence. Much like the Nato summit – and the G8 summit that preceded it – the system is set up not to spread wealth but to preserve and protect it, not to relieve chaos but to contain and punish it.”
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Capitalism at a crossroads: We need Hope, Justice and Trust
“All we want to do is work, to be able to support ourselves”-The Voice of the Global Youth
Rarely have the world's most powerful people looked so impotent, so hopeless and so miserably vision-less. Today, they are all gathered, this time at Camp David, USA. For what, you may justifiably ask, given the outcome of their previous extremely expensive organised gatherings? It seems, whatever they touch, goes from bad to worse. This is so, because they have so tragically failed to understand and appreciate that “Our Crises are not merely Economic but Spiritual”, and that the marketplace is not just an economic sphere, ‘it is a region of the human spirit’. Thus, we must combine the need for economic efficiency with the need for social justice and environmental sustainability. This, therefore, requires a different set of policies to the ones that they have been dishing out for the past very long years.
Given the failures of the political and economic leadership, there is a void in true understanding that: living happily is “the desire of us all, but our mind is blinded to a clear vision of just what it is that makes life happy”. The root of happiness is ethical behaviour, and thus the ancient idea of moral education and cultivation, is essential to ideal of joyfulness.
It is therefore, abundantly obvious that the G8 political leaders, alongside others, are in urgent need of educating themselves in value-based economics and business studies, moral philosophy and spirituality; something that for sure they have not been taught whilst studying at their so-called “prestigious” business schools and universities.
As time is short and needs are great, I wish to offer them a couple of speedy online modules, all free of charge, with no password or login requirements.
1-The World is Revolting Against the neo-liberal Economic and Business Model: A Call to Action
“Hundreds of thousands of people, young and old, employed and unemployed, black and white, men and women, have come together in a continuing and lasting global unity, partaking in a dialogue of civilisations, faiths, cultures and peoples in consideration for the common good. This global movement has risen in a thousand cities on six continents: from Tahrir Square to Alexandria and Tunisia; Rio de Janerio to Bogota; Santiago, Chile to Barcelona; Zuccotti Park to Oakland; Wall Street to St. Paul’s; Frankfurt to Brussels: Rome to Athens; Toronto to Vancouver, Chicago to Philadelphia, Sydney to Brisbane and more, rejecting neo-liberalism and its prevailing economic and business models, demanding a better, kinder and more humane world.
Across the globe there is an unquestioning, deeply justified sense that governments have capitulated to big business and big finance at the expense of the people and the environment. Both centralised states and free markets are separated and divorced from society, and society in turn is thus subjugated by a global market-state, dominated by corporate elites and the self-serving lobbyists.”
Read the Call to Action:
2-World Poverty is a Justice and Ethics Issue - Open Letter to G8 Leaders
I wrote this Open Letter to the G8 Leaders in 2005, when eradicating poverty in Africa was the main global news. The words in that letter are as true today as the day I wrote them. Not only have they not improved Africa and the lives of the Africans, but, now they have also brought misery, poverty and hunger to Europe, N. America and everywhere else for that matter.
Read the Open Letter:
3- Our Crises are not merely Economic but Spiritual: A Time for Awakening
Many sages, philosophers and theologians throughout history have reminded us that there are two forces at work in society, the material and the spiritual. If either of these two is neglected or ignored they will appear to be at odds with one another: society will inevitably becomes fragmented, divisions and rifts will manifest themselves with increasing force and frequency.
It is clear that this is exactly what has happened today. We have a situation of disequilibrium and disharmony. Only the reawakening of the human spirit will save us from our own worst extremes. Physical wealth must go hand in hand with spiritual, moral and ethical wealth.
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Our Crises are not merely Economic but Spiritual: A Time for Awakening
4-Small is Beautiful: The Wisdom of E.F. Schumacher
In the name of profit and technological progress, Schumacher argued, modern economic policies had created rampant inefficiency, environmental degradation and dehumanising labour conditions. "Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful," he wrote.
The remedy he proposed - a holistic approach to human society, which stressed small scale, localised solutions - flew in the face of economic orthodoxies of the time: "I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful."
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Cost of Greek exit from euro put at $1tn
"We have been through a big global financial crisis, the biggest downturn in world output since the 1930s, the biggest banking crisis in this country's history, the biggest fiscal deficit in our peacetime history and our biggest trading partner, the euro area, is tearing itself apart without any obvious solution." –Sir Mervyn King, Governor, Bank of England
… “A planned breakup of the single currency would cost 2% of eurozone GDP ($300bn) but a disorderly collapse would result in a 5% drop in output, a $1tn loss. "The end of the euro in its current form is a certainty," as noted by the Centre for Economic and Business Research.
And now the rest:
“The Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, told parliament that his country faced trouble financing itself as borrowing costs shoot up to "astronomic" levels. The Irish finance minister, Michael Noonan, said Dublin's plan to return to capital markets in late 2013 might not be achievable because of the uncertainty.”...
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2012/may/16/cost-greek-exit-euro-emerges/print