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Category Archives: 2019.

THE BEADY EYE ASK’S. IS THIS THE WORLD YOU WANT TO LIVE IN NEVER MIND LIVE ON.

14 Thursday Nov 2019

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2019., Artificial Intelligence., Humanity., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The Obvious., The state of the World., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World

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Capitalism and Greed, Climate change, Distribution of wealth, Inequility, Technology, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future., World aid commission

 

(Twenty-minute read) 

Never mind standing on the moon here are some depressing reality about your planet Earth.

We live in a world of trillions of living organisms and billions of humans and few millions of other species.

There are over 35 major conflicts going on in the world today.

There are nearly 210 million orphans in the world.

More than 500 million small arms and light weapons are in circulation around the world.

There are approximately 30,000 nuclear warheads in the world today.

Current global military spending is approximately $800 billion per year; more than the total annual income of the poorest 45% of the global population.

Genocide and other mass murders killed more people in the 20th century than all wars combined.

AND THAT JUST FOR OPENERS. 

35% of the world’s people live in countries in which basic political rights and civil liberties are denied (such as freedom of speech, religion, press, fair trials, democratic political processes, etc).

Over 100 million people live in slums.

1 billion people – 1/3rd of the world’s labour force, are unemployed or underemployed.

Cows earns more than 1.2 billion of the world’s poorest people.

An estimated 27 million people are enslaved around the world, including an estimated 20 million people held in bonded labour (forced to work in order to pay off a debt, also known as ‘debt bondage’). 

At least 700,000 people annually, and up to 2 million, mostly women and children, are victims of human trafficking worldwide (a modern form of slavery — bought, sold, transported and held against their will in slave-like conditions)..

About 246 million, or 1 out of 6, children ages 5 to 17 worldwide are involved in child labor

3 billion of the world’s people (one-half) live in ‘poverty’ (living on less than $2 per day). 1.3 billion people live in ‘absolute’ or ‘extreme poverty’ (living on less than $1 per day). Both in rich countries and poor, a staggering 30-50% of all food produced rots away uneaten.homeless

By 2025, at least 3.5 billion people or nearly 2/3rd’s of the world’s population will face water scarcity. More than 2.2 million people, mostly children, die each year from water related diseases.

The richest 1% of the world’s people earned as much income as the bottom 57% (2.7 billion people) The top 5% of the world’s people earn more income than the bottom 80%. One fourth of humanity lives without electricity.

The wealth of the world’s 7.1 million millionaires ($27 trillion) equals the total combined annual income of the entire planet.

The combined wealth of the world’s richest 300 individuals is equal to the total annual income of 45% of the world’s population. 

The world’s 3 wealthiest families have a combined wealth equal to the annual income of 600 million of the world’s people.  The wealthiest one-fifth of the world’s population receive an average income that is 75 times greater than the poorest one-fifth.

Half of the forests that originally covered 46% of the Earth’s land surface are gone.

Between 10 and 20 percent of all species will be driven to extinction in the next 20 to 50 years.

Almost a quarter of the world’s mammal species will face extinction within 30 years. Up to 47% of the world’s plant species are at risk of extinction.

60% of the world’s coral reefs, which contain up to one-fourth of all marine species, could be lost in the next 20-40 years.

Land degradation threaten nearly one-quarter of the land surface of the globe.

An estimated 40-80 million people have been forcibly evicted and displaced from their lands to make way for the construction of large dams,

Global warming is expected to increase the Earth’s temperature by 3C (5.4F) in the next 100 years.

While we witness the horrific events that are occurring within our society and world today now with a blink of an eye, our world is constantly changing, for the good, but also for the worst.

With technology, we are losing sight of what is important.

We have begun to categorize people based on how they act, what they wear, their political party, their skin color, where they live and so many other factors. 

We are always forgetting ourselves until someone wakes up to remind us of who we really are.  Humans?

The world was always beautiful. It’s only becoming lesser and lesser.

There is only this world, only this single reality, and its shared by everybody, everyday… Not created.

 Were economically and morally bankrupt.

THIS IS THE WORLD WE LIVE IN.

The world has no one society. Surely its time we started to vote with our eyes not our ears. 

All human comments appreciated

. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin. 

 

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THE BEADY EYE ASKS: ARE WE LOOKING NOT JUST AT THE BEGINS OF A FAILED STATE BUT THE FINAL DEATH THROBS OF A EMPIRE

26 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in Brexit v EU - Negotiations., Brexit., Capitalism, Climate Change., Democracy, Environment, European Commission., European Union., Fourth Industrial Revolution., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Inequality, Life., Our Common Values., Politics., Populism., Post - truth politics., Reality., Social Media, Sustaniability, The essence of our humanity., The new year 2109, The Obvious., The Queen., The state of the World., The world to day., Twitter, Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What needs to change in European Union., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASKS: ARE WE LOOKING NOT JUST AT THE BEGINS OF A FAILED STATE BUT THE FINAL DEATH THROBS OF A EMPIRE

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Brexit v EU - Negotiations., Capitalism, Capitalism and Greed, Capitalism vs. the Climate., Climate change, Community cohesion, Earth, Environment, European Union, Inequility, The Future of Mankind

 

(Fifteen-minute read)

The British Empire was the largest in history existing from the sixteenth century into the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, it squandered all that it acquired on a victorian class system.

Queen Elizabeth II

It killed with famine, sword and fire more people than Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler or Stalin.

In the defence of its imperial interests, it precipitated in two World Wars.

Now it is presiding with “Mad cow disease” it’s very own self-destruction.

At stake are fundamental ideas about British sovereignty and whether in a

a progressively globalized world in which some claimed that the individual

the nation-state was becoming unviable with the can sovereignty in its

existing forms remain intact.

Queen Elizabeth II in 1992, referred to the year as the royal family’s “annus horribilis.”

SHE WAS WRONG.

Why?

Because along came a five-year austerity plan aimed at reducing the country’s massive deficit, which had been fueled by bank bailouts and stimulus spending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and resultant recession which resulted in 52 per cent of voters opting to leave the EU, (making the United Kingdom the first country to ever do so)

Manufactured by Magie Thatcher who turned the market into replacing society as the model of state governance. 

Not surprising as worldwide political culture has in fact transformed from one based on class to a new sort of populist, demotic politics, shaped at least as much by the mass media, especially the popular press, as by the politicians.

A sort of firestorm has broken out not just in Brazil but all over the world.

Why?

Because the relationship between public culture and consumer capitalism, while the very Earth itself is struggling with climate change has been close, in many ways the one constantly trying to outguess the other.

This game of one-upmanship, marked by ironic knowingness, has been labelled “postmodern, Brexit or Donal Trump trade wars”.

It points to the growing understanding of the relative nature of truth, itself a reaction against the prevailing supposedly “modern” certainties of the 20th century (reason, freedom, humanity, and truth itself), which indeed have often had and are having appalling outcomes.

However, it is a sign of the times that these antifundamentalist currents, themselves critical of much of Western culture, emerged at much the same time as new fundamentalisms emerged in the forms of American neoconservatism and certain strains of radical Islam. The ferment of intellectual and cultural changes involved are inextricable from the massive changes underway in the transition to the novel forms of society made possible by new information technologies.

What the Smartphone and Social Media have and are doing since the 1960s onward for Africa are also unravelling England and the EU with the perception of poor economic performance and calls for the modernization of not just for British society and the British economy but the EU and the world at large.

Both England and the European Union need to reform.

Optimism only carries you so far.

History rhymes rather than repeats are what is required.

A society where elites are widely loathed, where the political parties are polarized by demographic echoes is on the brink of collapse.

Why?

Now as then — much more now than then, in fact — there is a pervasive mistrust of institutions, a sense that governments are rotting from the head down.

The abject failure of rulers in improving human values has resulted in a downgrading of human to sub-human levels with a race to expect dishonest money is the net result of the ultimate degradation of society.

How do you trick someone into giving you something they have?

First, you offer them something worthless, while convincing them that actually much better than what they have. Second, you convince them that what they do have is worthless.

This is a typical approach used by both con artists and governments.

These huge scams are just diversions from the ultimate crime Climate change.

Our survival instinct has to quickly override our conditioned naiveté and passivity that has been bred into us. We are not just threatened as countries but as species at the same time.

A twitter/ facebook driven world will be a world of shallow values- unravelling our societies.

The thin veneer of civilization that we all depend upon on a daily basis is disappearing at a staggering pace and its not just the melting of ice.

The question now is.

Do we follow the trodden path where we only find all the grass eaten?

Creativity and imagination are what is needed as we are not getting across the problems of probability.

How we discuss and what we discuss is vital.

We must know the facts. We need a world brain bus.

Who is more likely to embrace the marginalized, to work for the disenfranchised?

Who will work for those of all backgrounds, all races and ethnicities, all religions, sexual preferences, gender identities?

Who will work to promote respect and equality for all people in the World?

Who sends a message that I want our children to believe in?

The rich and the poor, the entitled and the marginalized—they all make up the threads that a country needs to weave a unified society. When not include we weaken the material that fabricates our entire fabric of the world.

There has never been such a thing as an empire only a company called East India Company merchants. The British Empire did not exist in the Middle Ages. In the early Middle Ages, England was part of other empires: 

The British Empire was a commercial, not a military or political one.

Originally, holding an empire was about power. Throughout history, kings and queens have invaded territories in order to gain strength and power. With colonies, a country gains space, a larger army, more trade markets and the chance to make money out of whatever resources are on offer in them.

The formation of the empire was thus an unorganized process based on piecemeal acquisition, sometimes with the British government being the least willing partner in the enterprise.

An ‘Empire’ is a group of countries ruled over by a single monarch or ruling power. An empire doesn’t need an ’emperor’. The British Empire comprised of Britain, the ‘mother country’, and the colonies, countries ruled to some degree by and from Britain.

(British Empire, a worldwide system of dependencies—colonies, protectorates, and other territories—that over a span of some three centuries was brought under the sovereignty of the crown of Great Britain and the administration of the British government.)

To this day Britain’s ‘cultural imperialism’, suggesting that it was based on nationalism and racist scorn for other people.

With a handshake and the commitment “On the word of an Englishman,”
Captain James Cook claimed it for the British crown.In the century 1815–1914, 10 million square miles of territory and 400 million people were added to the British Empire. By the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, Britain was the ‘Mother Country’ of a worldwide empire which covered a fifth of the land in the world, and Britannia ‘ruled the waves’.

Sorry but Empires have benefited no one nor will any future trade deals that are not attached to sustainability do anything to resolve Climate change.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY .

08 Saturday Jun 2019

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2019: The Year of Disconnection., DIGITAL DICTATORSHIP., Fourth Industrial Revolution., Humanity., Modern Day Communication., Modern day life., Natural World Disasters, Our Common Values., Politics., Populism., Post - truth politics., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The new year 2109, The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., United Nations, WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Organisations., World Politics

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Algorithms., Capitalism and Greed, Climate change, Earth, Environment, Globalization, Technology, The Future of Mankind, THE UNITED NATIONS, Visions of the future.

 

(Five-minute read)

The international community is a phrase used in geopolitics and international relations to refer to a broad group of people and governments of the world. It slips off the tongue of BBC correspondents and newsreaders as if it is just good old plain common sense.

The international society thinks this … believes that … is concerned about.

HOW OFTEN HAVE WE HEARD COUNTRIES APPEALING TO THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY.

Are they wasting their breath?

If you were to asked me I would say that activists, politicians and commentators often use the term in calling for action to be taken in order to deflect their own countries dismal response.

We all know what is meant by the term ‘international community’, don’t we?

It’s the west, of course, nothing more, nothing less.

Just look at the global issue of climate change which could not be more International which urgently requires a common strategy with binding targets that must be defined on a planetary scale. The central driver of climate change risk is mainstream economic (development) models which aspire to carbon-intensive industrialization.

It is speculated that our global interconnectedness, instead of (only) making us more resilient, makes us more vulnerable to global catastrophe.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of the international community"

Solving climate change will take a global effort not an international effort.

Take Aviation pollution alone it is forecasted to triple by 2050 if there are no global policy measures are agreed.

The Earth can not appeal to an International community but our world in which no individual, and no country, exists in isolation, is now facing perhaps its final disaster.

The involvement of Muslim countries – and from contrasting traditions to those of the Arab world – would be most valuable.

It would also represent a most welcome redefinition of the “international community.

Take China for example:  

In fact, the Chinese have their own definition of “international community” to counter what they see as a western-dominated and defined international community.

Take Lebanon, for example:

What did the beloved “international community” think:

Take War-torn Syria, for example:

It is one country where there are sharply divided views between the West on the one side and China and Russia on the other.

Take India, or Latin America, or Africa, or South East Asia?

What do they think?

We are never told. Nobody bothered to find out.

Take Brexit.

Everyone seems to have someone, perhaps some group of people, on whom he or she looks down or whom he or she considers inferior. That is why, for example, the west finds it almost impossible to win votes on many issues in the UN general assembly.

If we are brutally honest with yourself it comes from sheer ignorance.

There is no international community. There is merely a group of states motivated by self-interest.

The international community is a mythical joke.

There will never be one that is worthy of respect rather than a cheap joke.

What we got is a digital dictatorship in its infancy. A world run by Algorithms mostly for profit.

What is needed is an global awaking.

Image associée

All Human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

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THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: AS TRUE AS DAY FOLLOWS NIGHT THE TRUE MEMORIAL TO THE 75 ANNIVERSARY OF D DAY IS.

06 Thursday Jun 2019

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2019., 2019: The Year of Disconnection., Brexit v EU - Negotiations., Climate Change., Communication., Democracy, Donald Trump Presidency., England., European Commission., European Elections., Fake News., Fourth Industrial Revolution., History., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Inequality, Life., Modern Day Communication., Modern Day Democracy., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Politics., Populism., Post - truth politics., Reality., Social Media, Sustaniability, Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The far-right., The Future, The new year 2109, The Obvious., The world to day., Trade Agreements., Unanswered Questions., United Nations, War, WHAT IS TRUTH, What needs to change in European Union., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Organisations., World Politics

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE SAY’S: AS TRUE AS DAY FOLLOWS NIGHT THE TRUE MEMORIAL TO THE 75 ANNIVERSARY OF D DAY IS.

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Artificial Intelligence., Brexit v EU - Negotiations., Climate change, Democracy, Earth, European Union, Global warming, Technology, The Future of Mankind, THE UNITED NATIONS, Visions of the future.

 

( Five minutes read and twenty minutes listen)

THE EUROPEAN UNION WAS BORN OUT OF WORLD WAR TWO ON THE 25/MARCH/ 1957 TEN YEARS AFTER IT ENDED TO CHAMPION PEACE.

By establishing a unified economic and monetary system, to promote inclusion and combat discrimination, to break down barriers to trade and borders, to encourage technological and scientific developments, to champion environmental protection.

Fifty-two years later even as it adapts to meet the evolving challenges of the modern world, with all its faults, it has delivery just that- Peace.

Let us all remember the price the world paid to agree with these shared values.

The lessons of World War II — on whose ashes the United Nations was also founded emphasizing that remembrance is a debt owed to those who had lost their lives in World War II.Slide 3 of 18: Navy, Army and Merchant Marine servicemen in New York read the Daily News on June 6 for information about the D-Day invasion.

(By the end of the war, the total deaths ranging from 70 million to 85 million. Civilians deaths totalled 50 to 55 million. Military deaths from all causes totalled 21 to 25 million.)

However, the ideals and spirit that inspired the creation of the United Nations and the EU remain to be transformed into reality.

It is still necessary to remember the causes and overcome the legacies of the Second World War.

To reject and condemn any attempts to rewrite history or undertake attempts to glorify Nazism or any type of fascism.

Today, tolerance and restraint continued to be considered in world policy as signs of weakness and the use of violence and sanctions were praised; the world could therefore not say that the Second World War had been properly remembered.

Indeed it is our duty to revere and preserve and reform both the United Nations and the European Union because too much was paid for them, and too much is now at stake for succeeding generations.

So here below for all the Donald Trumps, Brexiteers, and Populous is a Speech that tells the TRUTH. 

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WILL POPULISM BE THE ULTIMATE STRESS TEST OF REPRESENTATIVE POLITICS.

19 Sunday May 2019

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2019., Democracy, European Elections 2019, European Union., Humanity., Inequality, Modern Day Democracy., Politics., Populism., Post - truth politics., Reality., Social Media, The common good., The far-right., The new year 2109, The Obvious., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What needs to change in European Union., World Leaders, World Organisations., World Politics

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WILL POPULISM BE THE ULTIMATE STRESS TEST OF REPRESENTATIVE POLITICS.

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Democracy, DiEM25, Distribution of wealth, European Union, Inequility, Visions of the future.

 

(Twenty-minute read)

Is democracy unravelled in the face of nationalism, racism, violence and populism? It seems even with the publicly supported compromise between countries and political parties are unable to cooperate to deliver anything.

If one takes a look at the world today 9/11 and the “war on terror” helped bring the idea of a “clash of civilisations” between Islam and the west to the forefront of political debate leaving all the rest in the dustbin of democracy.

As a result in the last few years, a new kind of far-right activism has emerged.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of far right"

This new activism, comprised largely of online anger and offline protest, crosses borders, yet is heavily nationalist and growing.

In Britain, its icons tend to be entrepreneurial social media personalities, celebrities of a sort, who use their following to exert pressure on mainstream politics.

Nobody in England embodies the dynamics of this new movement more than Mr Fraieg with his tutor in the USA Mr Dump who both gave support to Yaxley-Lennon better known as Tommy Robinson. ( The founder of the founder and former leader of the English Defence League (EDL) now the voice of UKIP which was founded by Nigel Farage, has today more than 950,000 followers.)

We all know that Data-driven algorithms exert great influence on the political world by analyzing our voting potential.  By logging what we do, where we do it, how we do it, with whom we do it, – Facebook- Twitter – Social Media, TV, U Tube, Google.

The marketplace of ideas, with the best arguments, no longer win out.

Even more worrying is the extent to which it is “normalising” extreme right-wing ideas and ideologies helping to form governments rooted in racism and fear of others – with anti-establishment crusader, online propagandists attracting large amounts of the wrong type of money and attention.

Throwing its opponents into a fierce disagreement about how to respond with the potential to have quite dangerous and dire consequences.

Indeed, one of the goals of right-wing extremists has always been to appear “normal”.

But all of this is not inevitable, and it can be stopped if we recognise that keeping the far right out of power is only one part of the problem.

We need a better understanding of what “free speech” is and is not.

There is still no public control or oversight of what we should regard as our platforms.

The logical consequence of free speech at any cost is that someone will soon be successful in rallying together enough impressionable voters to form an electable far-right party.

It has happened before and it will happen again.

The accusation of betrayal by the elites is central to the way that far-right movements operate with single-issue campaigns mostly conducted via social media without any commitment to wider political action.

For many years, far-right views were outside the acceptable bounds of debate and should be denied a platform.

But the breaking down of these boundaries presents a dilemma: what does the anti-fascist principle of “no platform” mean when a far-right activist has their own independent platform anyway?

The majority of their supporters, have no formal political affiliation and answered to no party hierarchy.

The ideas of extreme right-wing movements are dangerous, as they are not institutional actors.

While only a few years ago such groups would have been widely reviled, in today’s more populist atmosphere, such views are now more mainstream, sideling voters from the political movements that were originally created for their benefit.

For me Far Right is a slippery term and one that people should rarely if ever, apply to their own politics. In everyday use, it describes a range of extreme nationalist activity.

For instance: Stephen Bannon, a white nationalist who has said the west is at the start of a civilisational war with Islam.

Luckily different currents within the far right do not always get on and may also see one another as enemies.

So far it is not a cohesive movement. Their various aims are profoundly undemocratic: A majoritarianism defined by race, ethnicity or religion, and the violent exclusion of internal and external enemies.

The best defence is a political movement that has anti-racism at its core and seeks to give people greater democratic control over the way their society is organised and run.

However in recent years, pushed by the election of Donald Trump in the US, and political changes in Europe, we have seen the breaking down of the taboo that kept far-right political ideas largely outside mainstream culture.

This can be rectified. It is mostly the result of technological change, which can be fixed by regulating social media companies.

In order to win political power, for any group, it should first be necessary to push for wider cultural acceptance of the ideas that underpinned their movements.

This is not to say that the claims being made by activists and the views of people who might support the far right should be ignored – either in political debate or in everyday life.

But the question is how these issues are presented, and how they are challenged: who is speaking, and why, matters as much as whether or not an issue is in the news.

Big media organisations must be aware that legitimisation of the far right is not acceptable. They cannot normalise nor be seen to give permission to what are, in truth, hateful ideas and ideologies.

They are most effective when unaffiliated and unaccountable, disavowed by politicians and commentators who echo his views but wish to look respectable.

But the greater danger is in the cumulative effect of the various types of far-right activism – political parties, websites, social media personalities, funding and coordination from wealthy US thinktanks and entrepreneurs – on the political mainstream.

The problem is that ordinary joe soap is becoming more and more detached from the political area paying more and more taxes in order to live a decent life while feeling shut out of the system.

With the views of the far right how taking advantage of wider political failures all fueled by food banks, benefits cuts, homeless, job insecurity, pension erosion shifting the mainstream debate in its favour. Its public messages are focusing on popular fears about identity and economic security.

IE: Europe is overrun by Muslim immigrants; liberal elites have allowed all this to happen.

So far no alternative vision has won out.

Simply pointing out their factual mistakes is insufficient they must be challenged, locally and internationally, before it starts to do serious damage.

Why?

Because we are mechanistically sleepwalking towards an inability to effectively confront problems such as Brexit, Inequality and Climate Change.

There is only one way to get the voters to engage with the modern world and that is not by voting every five years as an expression of free will. 

It is offering the citizens of a country to own some of its prosperity by:

ISSUING CITIZENS GUARANTEED (NON-TRANSFERABLE BONDS.)

Résultat de recherche d'images pour "picture of bonds certificate"

These bonds could be bought for as little as a Dollar to as much as?

They could mature in as little as a year or?

They could be inherited but not sold.

They could be for every environmental, health, or whatever project that is not for profit for profit sake.

They will engage people in the direction of a country countermanding

negativity, allowing all citizens no matter what their political views,

creed, or colour to take pride in their nation.

They will countermand inequality and stop the rise of the far right.

THEY WOULD IF ADOPTED BY DIEM 25 FORFILL MOST IF NOT ALL OF ITS POLITICAL ASPERATION FOR EUROPE.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WHAT IS THE VALUE OF A HUMAN TO DAY ?

01 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in #whatif.com, 2019., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Climate Change., Democracy, Education, Environment, Fourth Industrial Revolution., GDP., Happiness., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Humanity., Inequality, Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Politics., Populism., Post - truth politics., Reality., Sustaniability, Technology, The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Obvious., The world to day., Trade Agreements., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE ASK’S: WHAT IS THE VALUE OF A HUMAN TO DAY ?

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Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Capitalism, Capitalism and Greed, Climate change, Distribution of wealth, Earth, Environment, Inequility, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

 

( Seven minuter read)

At the best of times, money is a touchy subject but when it comes to putting a value on a human there is a vast array of circumstances that all boil down to pain and pleasure.

Whatever rest assured with the Forth Industrial Revolution and Climate change we are going to learn the real value of human life. Résultat de recherche d'images pour "can we put a monetary value on ourselves" Should the value of life be variable depending on age?  UTILITARIANISM.

Have you been thinking about putting yourself up for sale lately?

Ever wonder how much money you could get on the open human market?

Money is merely an arbitrary store of value, wars and natural disasters bear witness to this fact.

In a system where capitalism is a prime determinant of value, how can we preserve what we truly value as humans, what matters to us beyond money?

No matter where we stand on the socioeconomic ladder, the future of the “normal life” doesn’t look good.

CAN WE DO ANYTHING?

Humanity is more important than money — it’s time for capitalism to get an

upgrade.

So how can we change capitalism so that it focuses on what humans really

want and need?

There have been many different forms of capitalist economies ever since money was invented around 5,000 years ago. The current form of institutional capitalism and corporatism is just the latest of many different versions with the current revolution in technology promoting another form of materialism, by and large, is a psychological trap.

Profit-seeking algorithms recognise that money is inherently neutral that it is merely a vessel for the exchange of experience between two people. Its value only becomes realized when it’s put into motion.

Technology will not be the key which frees us from this precipitous world.

Most people these days aren’t even conscious of what they’re using to determine their self-worth.

No matter how much you own, how much you buy, how much you earn, the disease of more never goes away- just look at the current state of the world.

Old-style protection of nature for its own sake has badly failed to stop the destruction of habitats and the dwindling of species. It has failed largely because philosophical and scientific arguments rarely trump profits and the promise of jobs.

In one of my recent post, I addressed the power of your back pocket – buying power as a means of effecting change. It needs to be supported by Social Credits. (See below)

Instead of having our humanity subverted to serve the marketplace, capitalism has to be made to serve human ends and goals.

Of course some time ago it dawned on someone that, by making it possible for people to buy and sell natures services, we could save the world and turn a profit at the same time. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. Nature by capital.

(Sorry, did I say nature? We don’t call it that any more. It is now called natural capital. Ecological processes are called ecosystem services because, of course, they exist only to serve us. Hills, forests, rivers: these are terribly out-dated terms. They are now called green infrastructure. Biodiversity and habitats? Not at all à la mode my dear. We now call them asset classes in an ecosystems market. I am not making any of this up. These are the names we now give to the natural world.)

WHAT IS NEEDED NOW IS FOR SOMEONE TO REALISE THAT:

1. Humanity is more important than money.
2. The unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar.
3. Markets exist to serve our common goals and values.

True wealth occurs when the way we spend our money is not simply compensating for how we earn it. The welfare of a nation or the world can… scarcely be inferred from a measurement of GDP.

The real value of money begins when we look beyond it and see ourselves as better, as more valuable, than it is.

Rarely will the money to be made by protecting nature match the money to be made by destroying it.

I’m talking about the development of what could be called the Natural Capital Agenda: the pricing, valuation, monetisation, financialisation of nature in the name of saving it by Social Credits.

They could put a stop to the risk of a progressive “privatisation” and “commodification” of nature.

We’re staring at trillion-dollar problems in the world with climate change, that is about to speed up and we need commensurate solutions.

One of the main problems is engaging the population of a country or countries to part take in the need to effect change.

We can harness the country’s ingenuity and energy to improve millions of lives if we could just create a way to monetize and measure goals by Social Credits.

People could buy them or win them.

For Example:

What if governments and world corporations were to introduced 100 million SCs to reduce obesity levels.

What if governments were to reward green energy projects with SCs.

What if governments were to use SCs to replace pensions/ treasury bonds.

What if countries used SCs to reflect fair trade.

What if education and reduction of inequality were promoted by SCs.

To protect the world from the despoilation and degradation which have done it so much harm. After all, it is not most environmentalists who have misunderstood the realities that come with ‘growth’ a finite Earth, but most economists.

Forget what society tells you about what it means to have succeeded, and endeavour to create your own definition of success based on those human qualities and virtues that you value most.

We are fundamentally empathetic creatures in an evolutionary process that started with blood ties, then tribes, religion, and currently nations but could extend to humans as one, then to creatures, plants and finally our planet.

The adage that money makes the world go round is the saddest reality of life.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Is the first generation of digital natives and sharing is their norm, could it be that collaborative consumption rather than consumer capitalism will be their norm?

If so, what will the next generation bring?

Time is the one resource all of us use to have, but it’s also painfully finite in nature. You can’t bank it — all you can do is invest it wisely.

Money is fluid.  Therefore, money is a reflection of the owner’s values and intentions.

We all have some sort of measuring stick that we use to determine our value as a human being.

Put another way, if we have access to all we need, would we need money?

all human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT THE FAR RIGHT AS A VOTING PROPOSITION.

07 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2019., Democracy, European Elections 2019, European Union., Freedom, Modern day life., Our Common Values., Politics., Post - truth politics., Reality., The common good., The far-right., The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., WHAT IS TRUTH, What needs to change in European Union., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage., World Leaders, World Politics, World Racism

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT THE FAR RIGHT AS A VOTING PROPOSITION.

Tags

Elections in the European Union 2019, European Union, Far Right political parties, Far-right.

 

(Fourteen-minute read)

BEFORE YOU VOTE IN THE FORTHCOMING EUROPEAN ELECTION YOU SHOULD BE WELL ADVISED TO KNOW WHAT EXACTLY DO THE FAR RIGHT PARTIES STAND FOR.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "PICTURES OF THE FAR RIGHT"

The European far right represents a confluence of many ideologies: nationalism, socialism, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism.

Given the significant variations that exist between these parties and groups, any term that groups them together and compares them will have limitations.

But the term “far right” is the least problematic precisely because it can be used, on the one hand, to identify the overarching similarities that make them comparable, and on the other to distinguish between different variants.

Though Europe’s far-right parties differ in important respects, they are motivated by a common sense of mission: to save their homelands from what they view as the corrosive effects of multiculturalism and globalization by creating a closed-off, ethnically homogeneous society.

Under the “far right” umbrella, we must distinguish between two sub-categories: extreme and radical right.

The extreme right includes both vigilante groups and political parties that are often openly racist, have clear ties to fascism and also employ violence and aggressive tactics. These groups may operate either outside or within the realm of electoral politics or both.

The term “right-wing populism”, however, is less appropriate.

Populism is an even broader umbrella that often includes disparate parties and groups.

To narrow down this category, we often tend to conflate populism and nationalism, identifying a party as populist, not on the basis of its populist attributes – what party doesn’t claim to speak on behalf of the people in a democracy? – but on the basis of its nationalist attributes.

But despite the similarities between “populism” and “nationalism” – both emphasise conflict lines, focus on the collective, and put forward a vision of an ideal society – the two are conceptually different. While the former pits the people against the elites, the latter pits the in-group against the out-group.

In part, both can be seen as a backlash against the political establishment in the wake of the financial and migrant crises, but the wave of discontent also taps into long-standing fears about globalisation and a dilution of national identity.

This civic nationalist rhetoric presents culture as a value issue, justifying exclusion on purported threats posed by those who do not share “our” liberal democratic values.

The justification is that certain cultures and religions are intolerant and inherently antithetical to democracy.

They tend to oppose procedural democracy with some common themes, such as hostility to immigration, anti-Islamic rhetoric and Euroscepticism.

The forthcoming elections are going to expose just who are they, where they are, what are their political programmes and why they have risen from the political fringes.

So where does this leave Europe’s political landscape?

Will the far right triumph in Europe in 2019?

Will the far right redraw the political map of Europe?

Is the European Union being pulled inexorably towards the agenda of the far

right? 

There is little point here in listing party after party, it is sufficient to say that they all to some degrees or other blame and want to get rid of migrants. While conveniently ignoring that their countries are for the most part made up of refugees in one form or another.

If the far right wins 100 seats in the new European parliament this year, and the EPP group’s drift to nationalism and xenophobia continues, it is safe to say the projects of integration and social liberalism will be on hold.

They believed in what Trump promised in the USA.

The reality is that the EU in the forthcoming elections needs to look at the next distribution of structural funds. It needs to redefine the allocation criteria to reflect the preparedness of regions and authorities to receive and integrate migrants.

What is the solution?

It is surely this:

For the centre-left and the radical left to seek tactical unity with as many green and liberal parties as possible to defend democracy, suppress fascism and end austerity.

At the moment it’s hard to get the leaders of the European radical left to occupy the same room, let alone persuade social democratic politicians to collaborate with them.

However, the migration issue is the starting point of a continental power struggle pitching two very different versions of the principles that should bind Europe together.

One is liberal democratic, and attuned to the notion of an open society; the other is fortress-minded, illiberal and intolerant.

These far-right leaders are now uniting to attempt a national-populist takeover of the EU as we’ve known it.

There is, however, one wild-card option with a non-negligible chance of happening:

Theresa May falls, a second referendum cancels Brexit, Article 50 is revoked, Britain elects new MEPs and a new, left-led British government appoints a commissioner to match its politics. A unilateral cancellation of Brexit would merely leave Britain with all its rights under the status quo: but it would alter the dynamics of Europe.

Because even at 40 per cent of the vote, a new raft of left-affiliated MEPs would shift the balance in the parliament, while a feisty, communicative left commissioner from the fifth-largest economy in the world would tilt the balance in the EU.

For the democratic-minded across Europe, Europe needs to get its priorities right before it’s too late.

We all need to ask ourselves why should we relive the pain and terror today of far-right policies?

Surely if we Europeans have learnt anything it is that we all must distance ourselves from fascism in order to appeal to broader electorates.

And so herein lies the problem.

If nationalism is always a feature of the far right, as most researchers agree, what is the added value of the term “populism”? To put it another way, what is the difference between a radical right-wing party and a populist radical right-wing party? While populism may or may not be an attribute of some far-right parties, it is not their defining feature. Rather, nationalism is.

But while these parties differ in many ways, their progressive entrenchment in their national political systems raises similar questions about out-group exclusion, anti-immigration narratives and mainstream responses.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, a leading advocate of the alt-right in the United States, is hoping the movement can lead Europe’s nationalist and populist parties to a strong showing next May.

For me “Bannon is American and has no place in a European political party.

It is disrespectful and unnecessary!

Many of the themes of Bannonism/Trumpism do not translate well in Europe.

For far-right groups, the migrant issue is something of a zero-sum game:

One country’s “gain” (by refusing refugees) is necessarily another’s nation’s “loss”.

Ultimately, as national right-wing groups chart their paths forward, few will find their domestic legitimacy bolstered by linking up with other groups on the far right.

Allusions to transnational links complicate matters for most of them.

The history of far-right activism is replete with examples of efforts to develop international links, and their failure.

The reason why far-right populists in Europe do not coordinate more systematically is that most of them are profoundly different, both in policy and style.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "PICTURES OF THE FAR RIGHT"

The sad truth is that it does not take Steve Bannon to build a strong far right in Europe. The voters are doing his job perfectly well – by not voting, and by supporting nationalist, anti-EU forces in their home countries.

History repeats itself, sadly, so don’t vote with false news spread by social media.

There are more than 40 million Muslims and 1.6 million Jews in Europe.

Do they need our votes?

I don’t think they need our votes. They need our kosher stamp.

No country can be forced to take in refugees. Every country has the right to say, ‘We don’t want others coming here.’ But the moment we’re talking about [engaging with parties that talk of] restriction on freedom of religion and racism.

The old world order is going through a lot of turbulence and is in danger of collapsing.

Those who believe in social democratic, green or liberal agendas have become accustomed to viewing far-right populists as automatically anti-EU.

Faced with this ideological flexibility, pro-EU politicians will need to think long and hard about how to protect the EU from those who would misuse it to promote a darker vision of Europe. These right-wing parties should be ostracized.

Make an informed choice rather than a mere expression of frustration with the EU in May.

There’s no steady political weathervane pointing in only one direction.

FOR ME:

OVER THE NEXT TWELVE YEARS WITH ALL OF US TREATED BY CLIMATE CHANGE  THAT IS GOING TO MAKE EVERYTHING IRREVELENT WHY WASTE A VOTE ON A FAR RIGHT OR INDEED FOR THAT MATTER ON A FAR LEFT PARTY WHEN WHAT IS NEEDED IS A VOTE THAT BRINGS US ALL TOGETHER TO ACT.

The far right has never had the slightest interest in the unknown.

It wants to be told the news it wants to hear, and the atmosphere of mystery it cultivates—like the pseudo-science to which it often gives rise—only exists to provide obvious lies with a vague cover of authority, a comfortably blurred prestige.

The tinder is dry, waiting for a lighted match.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

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THE BEADY EYE WISHES YOU A HAPPY NEW YEAR BY SPREADING SOME GOOD FALSE NEWS FOR 2019.

03 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2019., Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Environment, Evolution., Facebook, Fake News., HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, Life., Modern day life., Our Common Values., Post - truth politics., Reality., Social Media, Sustaniability, Technology., The common good., The essence of our humanity., The Future, The new year 2109, The Obvious., The world to day., Unanswered Questions., What Needs to change in the World, Where's the Global Outrage.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE WISHES YOU A HAPPY NEW YEAR BY SPREADING SOME GOOD FALSE NEWS FOR 2019.

Tags

Algorithms., Artificial Intelligence., Climate change, Distribution of wealth, Inequility, Social Media, Technology, The Future of Mankind, Visions of the future.

 

(Seven-minute read)

Despite the dire state of the world today here is some good false news.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "fake news images"

Let’s start with an issue that has not received enough attention in the media and popular understanding.

The Earth is finite and this fact will have real-world physical, economic, social, and political implications.

Thus, we are using an economic theory that is simply incapable and inapplicable for informing an unprecedented transformation of the economy by technology.

We need a discussion as to what political leaders, business leaders, and citizens think is an appropriate distribution of wealth across the entire population of the world. This focuses on the real question (how many people have what, independent of the size of the economy, though the two are linked) instead of discussing how to shape policies and taxes to achieve an unspecified growth target independent of wealth distribution.

Trump, Brexit, and Le Pen are representations that people understand growth only for the elite in the West are no longer tenable. Neoclassical economics ignores this obvious fact, yet it is used to guide most policy (eg, economic projections and scenarios), including that for climate change mitigation.

Perhaps a summary is that the human enterprise has outgrown the long-ability of the planet’s renewable resources to support us at our current numbers and our current rates of consumption and waste generation.

Climate change is just one piece of evidence of this fact.

By 2050, over 7 billion people will live in cities (80% of the world), and cities will be responsible for 75% of global carbon emissions. The battle for sustainable development will be won or lost in cities.

Urban planning needs to incorporate total populations, not simply the rich and middle classes; this is the only way that the economic potential of the majority can be harnessed for the national good.

The reality is that any activity that is not sustainable HAS TO STOP.

So far, non-renewable resources are what is primarily driving our economic engine. But by definition, non-renewables are being depleted and for the most part, will stop being economically available in this century. So we must plan rapidly for the day when humanity can live using just renewable resources while maintaining the biodiversity that makes the planet habitable.

In truth, sustainability is the ultimate environmental issue, the ultimate health issue, and the ultimate human rights issue.

The days when scientists could not care about the impact of their work on cultural, values and society are over. If they ever existed, which they didn’t, but that’s water over the dam.

Data-driven technologies are increasingly being integrated into many different parts of society, from judicial decision-making processes to automated vehicles to the dissemination of news.

Each of these implementations raises serious questions about what values are being implemented and to whom these implementations are accountable.

There is an increasing desire by regulators, civil society, and social theorists to see these technologies be “fair” and “ethical,” but these concepts are fuzzy at best.

As we are developing more and more ways to let computers take over reasoning through adaptive learning, we are faced with an existential question: What is it – long term – that makes us human?

AI, although very useful, will never approach human intelligence until it is embodied.

My #1 issue is not the future of democracy. The future is a complicated subject.  Now more than ever, it’s fast-moving, complicated, increasingly immediate. We can’t keep thinking about the future as a far-off intangible. Today, things move so quickly, that the future already is happening, and already affecting us. And in many ways, we’re struggling to adapt quickly enough.

That’s only the beginning of the genetics, robotics, information and nano revolutions – which are advancing on a curve.

Meanwhile, we humans are trying to process this exponential change with our good old v. 1.0 brains. With precious little help at all from those creating this upheaval.

Algorithms by their very nature reason probabilistically and as uncertainty increases in the world, uncertainty increases in an algorithm’s ability to successfully and safely come to a solution.

Presently we have no commonly-accepted approaches and without an industry standard for testing such stochastic systems, it is difficult for these technologies to be widely implemented.

As technological developments increasingly drive social change, how can democratic societies empower ordinary people to have a say in the decisions that shape the technological trajectories that will, in turn, determine what the future looks like?

How can the public have meaningful input into the character of the algorithms that will increasingly determine both the nature of their relationships with other people on social media and their access to various important social goods?

How can we prevent an underwater arms race involving autonomous submersibles over the coming decades?

How can we ensure that questions about meaning and values, and not just calculations of risks and benefits, are addressed in decisions about human genome editing?

If there are people who are willing to blatantly refuse to believe that something is a lie, no matter how hard you try, they won’t listen. I’m not sure what amount of evidence is needed in this new paradigm of journalism to get newsreaders out of their new bubbles.

Human psychology is the main obstacle, unwillingness to bend one’s mind around facts that don’t agree with one’s own viewpoint.

The fundamental challenge we now face is how to handle a setting where anybody can get their views disseminated without intermediaries to prevent the distribution.

Somehow there still has to be some process of collectively coming to some agreement of what we are going to believe and what we think are consensual facts.

Instead, we have the golden age of the algorithm surveillance, automation, virtual reality, gene editing, the widening gap between wealthy and impoverished people, the worldwide questions of immigration, social media inserting a new level of governance in society, rapid urban growth isolating us from nature, smartphones isolating us from each other.

The challenge now is to make sure everyone benefits from this technology. It’s important that machine learning is researched openly, and spread via open publications and open source code, so we can all share in the rewards.

Our major challenge is related to our new capability of digitizing human beings.

The scale of popular social networks has democratized publishing, which effectively lets anyone – regardless of their intentions or qualifications – produce content that can appear journalistic.

Rather than waiting for politicians to make decisions and then we all argue over whether what they say reflects reality, we could have tools that engage people much earlier in the process so they can be involved in formulating ideas and drafting legislation.

As we begin in 2019 we have only 48.8% worried by Climate change/destruction of nature, 29.2% of us worried by Poverty, 22.7% worried by Government accountability and transparency/corruption, with only 18.2% worried by Food and water security.

Water is a social issue, a political issue, an energy issue, even a gender issue

– and how clean water scarcity triggers a host of problems, from disease

outbreaks to government feuds.

So the challenge before us is to begin to construct a truth signalling layer into the fabric of facts, particularly online. Even if we have structures that impose constraints on people in power and we put pressure on powerful people to be honest with us, in a sense, all of that is being circumvented by social media.

We need to turn social media upside down by changing the algorithms in Facebook or on Google to nudge people into sharing or consuming news that is slightly outside their normal comfort zone. We have to have a setting where we trust other people.

Fix it. Get out of your silo. If you can’t figure out the societal and cultural

implications of what you’re doing, start seeking out people who might.

A major issue most people face, without knowing it, is the bubble they live in.

Our world is far too beautiful to allow Social Media and profit-seeking algorithms to rip it apart.  Happy New year.

All human comments appreciated/ All abuse and like clicks and false news chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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THE BEADY EYE LOOK’S AT THE PROSPECTS FOR THE EURO IN 2019.

31 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by bobdillon33@gmail.com in 2019., Brexit v EU - Negotiations., Enegery, European Commission., European Union., Populism., Sustaniability, The common good., The Euro, The new year 2109, The Obvious., Unanswered Questions., What needs to change in European Union.

≈ Comments Off on THE BEADY EYE LOOK’S AT THE PROSPECTS FOR THE EURO IN 2019.

Tags

European Union, Italy and the Euro., Italy., The Euro, The Euro zone.

 

( SIX MINUTE READ)

While we are all distracted by Brexit which has several possible outcomes in March 2019, all given a certain probability by market analysts:
– No-deal
– Canada-style trade deal
– Chequers plan
– EFTA/Norway agreement.
– Suspension of Article 50
– Reversal of Article 50.

Each is given a probability in terms of its likelihood but I would pay little attention to those probabilities as market analysts are not political insiders and in general, a lot of experts have misjudged the EU, as its rule-based way of operating has caught many out, not least the British negotiation team.

No matter how you look at the European Union it is a market run by rules which Independent Countries join to trade in a currency called Euros.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of the euro currency"

Although the creation of the euro, in particular, was deemed to be a key component helping to move the EU to an “ever closer union,” riding the continent of centuries of historic enmities, in reality, it has and is doing the opposite.

The monetary union and the austerity-linked conditions governing membership in the eurozone continue to create conditions ripe for extreme nationalist movements in Italy, France, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere.

The two principal goals of prosperity and political integration … are now more distant than they were before the creation of the eurozone.

The euro crisis was always likely to have a second act, and the stage was always likely to be Italy. (The only member yet to come to terms with the single currency. To do that, Italian democracy must be allowed to rise to the challenge.)

Were a further divorce to happen within the Union it would create a tremendous financial fallout for the rest of us, and likely mean the end of the euro itself.

The Euro to date has been both the glue and dissolvent of the European market.

Since the financial crisis of 2007-09, after dealing with Greece and the potential for defaults that led to a bailout of the EU member just a few short years ago, Italy is now on the list.

As such, these “states” are or were subject to solvency risk, because they themselves cannot create the euros to fund their debt.

With Brexit, it will become clear that we shouldn’t wait for the next crisis.

The next one could be very harmful, if not destroy the euro altogether.

A construction like the eurozone only partly rests on rules, technical procedures, institutions, etc. It relies on the fact that governments can trust each other at a minimum level. Take that away, and the whole edifice suddenly becomes much more fragile and the willingness to reform shrinks.

In these terms, a sustainable European currency requires either the export of the foundations of German economic strength to the periphery or Germany’s willingness to relinquish its obsession with ordo-liberalism and achieving a large current account trade surplus.

To date, its willingness to act to save the euro has not in fact been put to the test.

Far from involving domestic sacrifices imposed to save the euro, Germany’s handling of the eurozone crisis thus far has been, first and foremost, an opportunity for Germany to ‘Europeanise’ the burdens of its banks.

Germany may, therefore, end up with total dominance over something that doesn’t work, and holding the creditor bag on a currency that eventually may not exist.

Barring a wholesale shift in ideology, any short-term stitch-up will just set the stage for a bigger problem down the road, likely provoking more nationalist backlashes against the EU, which continues to play with fire, backed by Berlin.

So can the euro survive an Italian Bank/Country collapse?

Italy’s GDP has shrunk by a massive 10%, regressing to levels last seen over a decade ago. In terms of per capita GDP, the situation is even more shocking: According to this measure, Italy has regressed back to levels of 20 years ago, before the country became a founding member of the single currency.

As a result, around 20% of Italy’s industrial capacity has been destroyed, and 30% of the country’s firms have defaulted.

Its competitiveness can only be restored, therefore, via an “internal devaluation,” which in essence means crushing the living standards of the Italian people, so that they can compete in the global export market, rather than using fiscal policy to enhance the country’s domestic economy.

Understandably, the current coalition government in Rome doesn’t want to play along.

Its component parties were elected to defend the interests of the Italian people and deliver a different sort of economic program, which doesn’t consign the electorate to another decade of declining living standards. And Italy’s voters remain supportive if the most recent polls are anything to go by.

Hence the coalition’s resistance to Brussels/Berlin–imposed spending limits.

Europe’s central bank was (and is) the only institution that could credibly backstop the debt without limit because it is the sole issuer of the euro. However, the ECG has recently decided to put a stop to Quantitive Easing.

(Quantitative easing is a modern version of the printing press. It consists of the central bank creating money to buy government or private bonds held by investors on the market. The goal is for the latter to reinject the cash they get back into the economy by lending to households and businesses, which in turn must stimulate growth and inflation.)

As it concerns nineteen countries using the same currency, the ECB’s purchasing program is more framed than that of the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England or the Bank of Japan.

It may have taken Trump, Brexit and the threat of a global trade war, but the markets in Europe are finally waking up to what the end of QE will look like.

The markets are finally facing up to a reality where fundamentals actually matter and are no longer being swept away by ‘QE infinity’.

That should be a relief, given the huge distortions that QE has created in the global economy, most notably in asset price inflation and a consequent widening of inequality throughout the developed world.

The political implications are obvious and are still continuing. But how quickly and safely central banks can be weaned off this great monetary experiment remains to be seen.

If QE is no longer an active policy instrument what will replace it?

Quantitative easing is – and always has been – a dangerous monetary experiment and these are not the times to experiment. Especially not in Europe, where the political gap between north and south has widened in a disturbing way and interdependencies grow bigger and bigger.

What if Germany, France and the Netherlands continue to grow, and Italy, Greece and Portugal don’t?

Then the gap between the higher income rates they have to pay and their lack of growth becomes even bigger.

The political and economic instability of the southern European democracies is eroding the political basis of the euro – and therefore its stability. Because of this everyone suffers.

THE QUESTION IS WILL ITALY BE ALLOWED TO GO THE WAY OF GREECE?

That could prove economically calamitous, exposing the country’s international creditors (including other eurozone nations, such as Germany and France) to literally trillions in liabilities. To be repaid in what? Euros?

A reconstituted, and possibly heavily devalued, lira?

What happens to the pension funds? What about capital flight? Runs on the banks?

The point is that Italy does have leverage, but deploying the leverage will be costly for all concerned.

Considering the political turbulence in Italy which wants to raise its budget deficit by 2.4% in 2019, ( Its current debt is more than 2billion euros 131% of its GDP.)

Driving Italy out of the euro makes no sense at all. Italy is facing not just a financial but a democratic reckoning.

The euro debacle has tested the democratic integrity of the weakest eurozone member states to a breaking point. In Ireland, Spain and Portugal – the other countries affected by the single currency’s woes – democracy not only survived the test but flourished after it.

In 2019 we are going to see Italy’s political class discredited, its economy exposed as a sham, and it can only be rescued with other people’s money on other people’s terms.

It has now brought Italy to the brink of another failure of state as dangerous as the one that occurred during the confrontation with the Mafia in the early 1990s.

One of the major challenges for members of the euro area has always been not simply to rectify external imbalances, but to do so at reasonably high levels of employment. The fact that failures to meet this challenge are encountering political difficulties in Italy and elsewhere is hardly surprising.

So to stabilize the euro area and foster the financial integration across countries, we need to end the vicious circle of youth unemployment in the Southern countries of Europe and not penalise breached of budgetary Rules.

The euro is neither the problem nor the solution.

Italy’s profound problems lie at home — especially in central and southern Italy — and need to be addressed at home.

Both Europes and Italy’s problems arise out of acute regional imbalance.

You can not look at Italy as one economy, but two or perhaps three: North, Centre, South which is reflected in the whole of Europe’s problem.

Take the hyper-competitiveness of Germany.

Its massive current account surplus (8% of GDP) combined with its virtually full employment implies unambiguously that for Germany the euro is significantly undervalued, just as for Italy the evidence suggests that it is overvalued.

So we have an interesting, but risky, game of chicken developing.

Even though virtually every country within the eurozone, including fiscally virtuous Germany, has routinely breached budget limits, these rules do matter because, under Maastricht Treaty terms, countries can be punished by European institutions and also by markets, as has happened to Greece and now is increasingly happening to Italy.

Its debt load is the third-largest in the world and will eventually become unsustainable if the country is unable to revive economic growth.

What can Europe do – that is not already being done – to get its millions of jobless young people into work?

Things cannot be implemented overnight and will never be unless there is a willingness to move on with euro area reforms.

On top of all our problems is the Automation of the job market.

WILL THE EURO SURVIVE?

YES.

Boosting productivity is essential to resolve both problems.

So here is a suggestion.

Why not make the two most Southern Countries of Europe where the sun does shine – Italy Spain – the new green energy hobs of Europe – implementing a huge investment into solar power to supplement the energy requirements of the Northern member states.

All human comments appreciated. All abuse and like clicks chucked in the bin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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