Category Archives: The Future

The Beady Eye looks at history’s greatest Frauds

28 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by in Corruption., Privatization, Technology, The Future

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We think we know it all.

We all know there are Political Frauds, Military Frauds, Cover-ups & Conspiracies.

Other than mentioning some of them here I will leave it to you to look and make up your own minds.

John F. Kennedy, Aliens & UFOs, Pearl Harbor, CIA Drug Testing On Civilians, Catholic Church — 3 Secrets Of Fatima, James Earl Ray & Martin Luther King, Big Tobacco’s Big Denial, Jimmy Hoffa, The Philadelphia Experiment, Celebrity Deaths, Watergate, and Iraq War.

Then we have the others.

The below list unfortunately leaves out the greatest: Cons Scams Frauds (what ever you want to call them) of all.

The Sale of the Roman Empire (193 A.D.)

The Mississippi Scheme (1719)

The Diamond Necklace Hoax (1785)

The Wright Panic (1900)

The Original Ponzi Scheme (1920)

The Eiffel Tower Sale (1925)

The Match King Hoax (1929)

The Baker Estate Swindle (1936)

ZZZZ Best Cleaners (1986)

The Great Insider Trading Scam (1986)

The Savings & Loan Scandal (1989)

Tyco International (1996)

CEO Dennis Kozlowski (pictured)and CFO Mark Swartz soaked Tyco for more than $150 million in unearned bonuses and loans from 1996 until 2002.

Cendant (1997)

Shortly after the company was created by the merger of CUC International and HFS in 1997, a massive, decade long accounting fraud at CUC was uncovered.

Fannie Mae (1998)

Fannie Mae paid the SEC $400 million in 2006 to settle charges of misstating financial statements from 1998 through 2004.

Qwest Communications (2000)

Qwest’s stock traded as high as $64 in 2000 before plummeting in 2002 to less than $1 because of a multiyear accounting fraud.

Enron (2001)

The energy company’s bankruptcy in 2001 after allegations of massive accounting fraud wiped out $78 billion in stock market value.

World Com (2002)

The 2002 fraud-induced bankruptcy of the telecom company wiped out a firm that once had $103.9 billion in assets on its books.

Health South (2003)

In March of 2003, the SEC accused CEO Richard M. Scrushy of overstating earnings by at least $1.4 billion over four years.

Bernard Madoff (2008)

New York money manager Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme, the largest fraud ever by an individual.

Lehman Brothers (2008)

Investment bank Lehman, with $600 billion in assets, failed in late 2008. It was the largest bankruptcy in history and a spark to the worldwide financial crisis.

MF Global (2008)

The brokerage firm, led by former Goldman Sachs Chairman and former New Jersey Senator then Governor Jon Corzine, had $41 billion in assets.

The Great Wall Street Rip-Off (Ongoing)

Zhang Shuguang, a former railway-ministry official, admitted to having spent nearly half of $7.8m in bribes that he had collected trying to get himself elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Bell Labs.  Jan Hendrik Schön (born 1970 ) is a physicist German, who enjoyed a brief fame after a series of advanced scientific apparent that eventually turn out to be fraud.

HSBC. (2014) ongoing.  Helped customers to hide millions from taxman.

La Cour.  The VAT fraud costs 10 billion euros per year.

Sadly, it seems that corruption/fraud is to be found wherever there are human beings.

THE GREATEST OF ALL:  

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest Fraud.   

 A sweeping statement. Not on your nanny.

Now you might think it cannot get any worse.  Read and learn.

Wheat: 

Manipulated us to its advantage, not the other way around. (Which by the way was a wild grass)

We became enslaved by its master plan.

With in a few short millennia it was growing all over the world.  World wise it covers 2.25 million square kilometers of the globe’s surface.

It demanded a lot of attention from Mankind. It did not like sharing its space with others so we spend every hour of our waking day weeding. It got sick so we spend billions on fighting its enemies worms and blight. It was attacked by locust and rabbits so we build fences and stood guard. It has an unquenchable thirst so we built irrigation canals and dams. It even has us collecting animal faeces to feed the ground it grew in. We did not domesticate wheat it domesticated us.

How did it convince us to exchange a rather good life for a miserable life of existence.?  What did it offer in return?.

Not a better diet. Hard to digest it is bad for our gums and teeth. It did not give economic security. When it was hit by a drought or a swarm of locusts we died by the thousands or fought each other because we could not move.

It did nothing for us as individuals but it allowed us as a species to grow exponentially.

It created armies.  It created Political Systems. Being the most successful plant in the history of the Earth it created Capitalism.

Capitalism:

Which we are now beginning to see its true colors. One of the biggest Scams, Con jobs, or Fraud what ever label you like to attach en flicked on mankind.

It has allowed a few elitist to become wealth on the promise that some of the wealth might rub off on all of us.

It sure did.

It has turned us all into trading commodities in order to acquire more wealth for the greedy few.

It has produced Poverty, Inequality, Migration, Wars, Terrorist Groups, Corruption, Disease, Racism, Climate Change, treating the very existence of Our Common Planet. You name it and you can be sure that the free Global Greed Market it created will exploit it to create more short-term Profit.

It has and it is robbing all of our common resources to create profits for Corporations that now want Legal Rights to sue Nations. (See Previous post: The TTP and TTIP TRADING AGREEMENTS.)

It has promoted Massive theft of government (i.e., taxpayer) funds and property, which is going on and is tolerated decade after decade.

It has produced Sovereign Wealth Funds currently plundering the World.

Not forgetting the Stock Markets, where Capital greed has no bounds. 

And where are we to-day in the Technology Age (A product of Capitalism) that has little or no regulation using our vanity to pilfer all knowledge which will be sold back to us or others to make profit. Google, Facebook, Twitter. Amazon, Apple. The Cloud.

Google has already changed the world by altering the way we interact with technology.

As it enters its second decade as a public company, Google wants to repeat the trick.

Fuse man and machine. Drive Your Cars. Bring the Internet to everyone, everywhere.  Solve Death.

How exactly does Google plan to pull this off?

Apart from announcing some high-profile hires, Google hasn’t shared much about its vision.  Last month Google announced a new medical company called Calico, whose explicit aim is to take on aging itself.

In the absence of any real information, many commentators have speculated that Calico will pursue a “big-data approach to health: gathering massive amounts of information from patients and ‘crunching it’ to help speed the way to health care discoveries. Some have suggested that Calico’s new CEO will take the view that the best way to tackle aging is to focus on preventing diseases.

All pretty bright for a plant don’t you think.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "pictures of wheat plants"

 

Corruption, Fraud, Scams, whatever you want to call it cannot be tackled in isolation, but only in the context of efforts to reduce world poverty.

If we are not vigilant we are all going to end up Slave of the Wheat of Technology. Call Data.

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Your World is being stolen right in front of your eyes.

13 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by in Climate Change., Environment, Natural World Disasters, Politics., Privatization, Sustaniability, The Future

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If your eyes could speak, this is what they would say.

Unfortunately for us technology is blurring our global vision of what humanity means or can achieve.

The question is how long are we going to keep our eyes shut to a world run by Private Corporations, and out of date World Organisations, and Elected Corrupt Governments that are signing trade deals that put Corporate power above people power called TTIP ( The Transatlantic Trade Deal or tee-tip for short) that none of us have a say in.   https://youtu.be/YVrDF0nSIAU

Now I know that Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Exxon Mobil,  Express Scripts Holdings, Wal-Mart Stores, Google and World Fuel Services by the year 2025 will have made vast profits in the trillions.  But they are likely to take our species to the brink of extinction. Why because if we continue to allow Capitalism to serve the bottom line of the Balance Sheet and not to contribute to resolving global problems we are all insane. ( See Previous Post:  ) 0.05% WORLD AID COMMISSION)

How long are we going to allow all of our values along with the Earth just to become products to fuel the Stock Exchanges and Balance sheets of Privatization and Greed.

There is one thing sure about life. It makes no promises.

But I make you a promise THAT our eyes are going to be opened by Climate Change.

If we do not reduce emissions ( Don’t tell me with the mountain of data dealing with global warming that you  STILL believe it will resolve itself or that teleology will be your Savior. ) they will not only threaten Society as a whole with food shortages, refugee crises, flooding, wars, and mass extinction of plants and animals, but make us all realize to late that Capitalism is the ultimate cause of global warming and climate change.

Our City bit living and greed along with our Social Media interconnected world has not only blinded us to the crises it is also eroding our understanding of what it means to live a fulfilled life.

The must have materialism that is dumped within months irrelevant of where it comes from other than it is affordable must stop.

Imagine an alternative where Capitalism and collectivism live together.

Open your eyes and take a look at our world in 2015. (see previous post)

The Planet currently seems on the cusp of a decidedly unharmonic convergence.

The world is rife with crime, corruption, growing inequality and militarism.

The USA was once about the little guy– the rights of individual — the success of small business– it has gone big in the worst possible way.

The International community ( what ever that is) is now facing an unholy trinity of authoritarian politics, cutthroat economics and big brother surveillance, and far-right party anti-immigrant.

Indeed even if you were to take a squint through those eyes of yours. No matter whether we live under Capitalism or Communism they are both struggling to adapt to the same environmental factors.

You would think that the forces of modernity — of technological development, of growing bureaucratization would push both systems in the same evolutionary direction.  Not on your nanny. Just look at their feeble reactions to ISIS.

If you cant rely on visual clues, listen to the sound waves rippling around the Globe.

Currently 2.5 degrees centigrade warming by 2100 is cited as the tipping point for catastrophe.  However by 2050 at the current levels of Co2 emissions never mind the methane we will be at twice the pre-industrial level.

(The permafrost in the Arctic is melting pumping Methane into the atmosphere adding to the Co2. The Greenland ice sheet will be totally melted causing a sea level rise of 39″ and so forth and so forth.)

If no MAJOR POLICY CHANGES ARE ACHIEVED Now to curtail the greed of Capitalism which exist on the rampant, uncontrolled use of natural resources the human race can kiss its ass goodbye.

Capitalism depends upon the exploitation of natural resources at the highest possible level. And we are, of course, not talking just about fossil fuels. With no thought to conservation, recycling and what will happen when the sources, from iron ore to copper, to say nothing of the fossil fuels themselves, run out.

But capitalism can exist only if the rampant, uncontrolled use of natural resources continues unabated, for that is within the very nature of the system.

But when the natural resources go, so will capitalism and by that time it will be too late to replace it with anything else.

“The suicide of capitalism.”

By it’s very nature, operating to the greatest degree possible with no thought to anything other than the accumulation of profit, capitalism is leading to this possible outcome.

When the critical resources are gone, or at least the supply is reduced to such an extent that their cost makes making profit from their exploitation increasingly difficult, capitalism will die, even without workers’ revolution.

Indeed, by its very nature of focusing exclusively on profit-making, it will eventually kill itself, as well as taking many humans and many other species along with it.

According to a recent report in Nature, 41 percent of amphibians, 26 percent of mammals and 13% of birds are threatened with extinction, if nothing is done about global warming.

But the point here is that even without global warming, with no controls on the utilization of natural resources other than fossil fuels, capitalism is essentially killing itself.

And so, what is to be done?

There is of course hope.

While it may be too late to slow carbon emissions down enough to prevent reaching the “tipping point,” as some scientists think, it may very well be possible to develop a series of environmentally safe methods for capturing carbon and methane, shielding the earth from the increasing heat levels, and so on and so forth.

It is definitely possible to institute economic planning on a massive scale to conserve and re-use natural resources that will otherwise run out.

But that will require the replacement of capitalism with some form of socialism.

What form that system might take and how we will get there are matters for further consideration.

But given historical experience and an analysis of how capitalism has dealt with the socialist experiments that have come along so far (see, e.g., The 75 Years War Against the Soviet Union), we will not get there spontaneously, we will not get there without the formation of a series of leading parties and universal world organisations with clout, around the world to promote Humanity other than religions dominance.

If that series of events does not occur, then indeed capitalism will commit involuntary suicide with disastrous results for ours and many other species. It will indeed vault us into a full-blown “Sixth Extinction.”

The burning question: Can any of this be achieved other than Extinction.

A world where one is for all and all are for one.  History tells us highly unlikely.

So I will leave you with another promises.  That is–  You and I will be long departed.  So why bother?  Because we and earth are worth It.

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This is where you Live.

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Climate Change., Education, Environment, Natural World Disasters, Politics., Sustaniability, The Future

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The other day I was wondering how one would describe Earth to an alien or a classroom of our modern-day interconnects kids.

Where would one start.

Is it round?  Not quite it is an oblate spheroid instead of a perfect sphere. It takes the Earth on solar day to rotate upon its axis.

An alien might come to earth and attempt to understand the planet by reading the literature of the planet, or just the dictionary. Looking up the word “earth” the alien may be surprised to see the this term has multiple meanings, referring to a planet and to a substance (soil/dirt).

May be the best place to start is to give an perspective of where we are in space.

As you look outward into space, you’re actually looking backwards in time. The light you see from your computer is nanoseconds old. The light reflected from the surface of the Moon takes only a second to reach Earth. The Sun is more than 8 light-minutes away. And so, if the light from the nearest star (Alpha Centauri) takes more than 4 years to reach us, we’re seeing that star 4 years in the past. There are galaxies millions of light-years away, which means the light we’re seeing left the surface of those stars millions of years ago. For example, the galaxy M109 is located about 83.5 million light-years away.

A radio signal to travel once around Earth in 1/7 of a second.  To get to the moon from Earth, so the round-trip time is twice this or 2.46.

From the sun to earth at the speed of light  seconds.https://youtu.be/Bw-I9JimhOM

If aliens lived in those galaxies, and had strong enough telescopes, they would see the Earth as it looked in the past. They might even see dinosaurs walking on the surface.

Only a few of us have ever seen Earth from afar.  It’s mankind’s rarest view of all.

To see it without borders, see it without any differences in race or religion, we would all have a completely different perspective. Because when you see it from space you cannot think of your home or your country. All you can see is one Earth….”Earth, our home planet.

It is a beautiful blue and white ball when seen from space.  the only planet in our solar system known to harbor life.

All of the things we need to survive are provided under a thin layer of atmosphere that separates us from the uninhabitable void of space.

HERE IS HOW I WOULD DESCRIBE IT;

It was formed about 4.5 billion years ago.

Earth is made up of complex, interactive systems that are often unpredictable. Air, water, land, and life—including humans—combine forces to create a constantly changing world that we are striving to understand.

It is the third planet from the sun and the fifth largest in the solar system.

About 71% of its surface is covered by water; the rest by land.

It is orbited by one satellite, the Moon.

Earth’s total surface area is 196,950,000 sq. mi. The area covered by the oceans is 139,480,000 sq. mi. Total land area is 57,470,000 sq. mi.

Earth’s diameter is just a few hundred kilometers larger than that of Venus.

The Earth’s crust is about 6.5 miles thick beneath the oceans, and about 25 miles thick under the continents.

Our planet’s rapid spin and molten nickel-iron core give rise to a magnetic field, which the solar wind distorts into a teardrop shape. The magnetic field does not fade off into space, but has definite boundaries.

Our planet completes its elliptical orbit around the sun in an average solar year, 365.24219 days. Its average distance from the sun is 80,777,537.8 n.mi.

The Earth’s axis is tilted 23.45 deg away from the perpendicular to its orbital plane.

It wobbles very slightly.

The Moon orbits the Earth about once a month (every 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, 2.9 seconds) The average distance from the Earth to the Moon is 238,857 mi., about 30 times Earth’s diameter.

The Earth’s crust is about 6.5 miles thick beneath the oceans, and about 25 miles thick under the continents. The surface layer is made of rock. This outer layer formed a hard, rocky crust as lava at the surface cooled 4.5 billion years ago.The crust is broken into many large plates that move slowly relative to each other. Mountain ranges form when two plates collide. The plates move about one inch per year. About 250 million years ago, most of the land was connected together, and over time has separated into seven continents. So millions of years ago the continents and the oceans were in different positions.

Scientists had previously concluded that the Earth was slightly older than 4.5 billion years old, but had not found a piece of the Earth’s primitive mantle.

The solid shell that is between the Earth’s crust and the outer core makes up about 84 percent of the Earth’s volume. Until recently, researchers generally thought that the Earth and the other planets of the solar system were chondritic. This means that the mantle’s chemistry was thought to be similar to that of chondrites, some of the oldest, most primitive objects in the solar system. Chondrites contain certain isotope ratios of the chemical elements of helium, lead and neodymium.

Sixty-five million years ago it looked quite different than it does to-day.

There are about 300,000 plant species and about 1,400,000 animal species on Earth.

In the next 6.4 billions of years it will be eating by it nearest star the Sun which is 149,597,891 kilometers away.  It will take a little more than 8 minutes before we realized it is time to put on a sweater. It takes Sunlight an average of 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth.

It weighs 5.9736×1024kg.  That is about 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds (or 5,974,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms).

80% of its fresh water is in its polar ice caps. Fresh water exists in the liquid phase only within a narrow temperature span (32 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit/ 0 to 100 degrees Celsius). The surface is unique from the other planets because it is the only one which has liquid water in such large quantities.

Its greatest present day threats come from humanity which is at a crossroads now, where we have to make an active choice.

Evolution, the Big Bang, and climate change are all things that were first proposed as hypotheses long ago.

Climate change is not. What are we doing about it. The same as always. Turn it into a product for profit.

One choice is to acknowledge these issues and potential consequences and try to guide the future (in a way we want to). The other choice is just to throw up our hands and say, ‘Let’s just go on as usual and see what happens.’ My guess is, if we take that latter choice, yes, humanity is going to survive, but we are going to see some effects that will seriously degrade the quality of life for our children and grandchildren.

The ongoing wars, the distortions of truth we have witnessed, the widening gaps between rich and poor disturb us more than we can say; but we have had so many reminders of powerlessness that we have retreated before the challenge of bringing such issues into our classrooms of our brains.

The best effort so far is the creation of an Earth Day this year.  One day!

Population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation. No one knows how close Earth is to a global tipping point, or if it is inevitable.

Life on Earth is constantly changing and only the fittest organisms survive.

Every few of us appreciate how thin our little atmosphere is that supports all life here on Earth. So if we foul it up, there’s no coming back from something like that. The dictionary offers a firm set of definitions for this term, but no single definition, which leads to a sense of complexity. The complexities of perception are, in part, what post-modernism is all about.  I describe it as pure insanity.

The Earth system now includes human society, Our social and economic systems are now embedded within the Earth system. In many cases, the human systems are now the main drivers of change in the Earth system. Earth system changes, natural or driven by humans, can have significant consequences without involving changes in climate. Global change should  not be confused with climate change; it is significantly more. indeed, climate change is part of this much larger challenge.

Throughout history human societies have had to confront and adjust to climatic and environmental hazards. A long-term perspective that draws on such experiences must inform today’s climate policies. I argue that climate policies aimed at mitigating and adapting to hazards should be informed by our knowledge of past human experience.

In today’s globalised world our food tends to take a long route from farm to table, relying on international trade routes that pass through several bottlenecks. Sudden disruption of such delivery systems – via climate change or political volatility – can severely affect the food security of particular regions.

Large-scale governance is unavoidable in today’s world where hazards are regional and often transcend political boundaries, unfortunately at the moment we are relying on out of date World Organisations that are incapable of putting the  Earth First!

<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/32001208″>EARTH</a&gt; from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/michaelkoenig”>Michael K&ouml;nig</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/79771046″>Climate Change &mdash; The state of the science</a> from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/anthropocene”>WelcomeAnthropocene</a&gt; on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

 

Take a trip into the unknown.

https://youtu.be/YzMrNFd4oOk

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The Beady Eye, Looks at Our Common Future Under Climate Change.

01 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in Climate Change., Environment, The Future

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The hope of the twentieth century rests on its recognition that war and depression are man-made and needless as is so with Climate Change.

Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel.

All can be avoided in the future by turning from … nineteenth-century characteristics … and going back to other characteristics that our Western society has always regarded as virtues: generosity, compassion, cooperation, rationality, and foresight, and finding an increased role in human life for love, spirituality, charity, and self-discipline.

We now know fairly well how to control the increase in population, how to produce wealth and reduce poverty or disease. We may, in the near future, know how to postpone senility and death but to what avail if we continue to deny Climate Change.

It certainly should be clear to those who have their eyes open that violence, extermination, and despotism do not solve problems for anyone and that victory and conquest are delusions, as long as they are merely physical and materialistic.

Our problem is that capitalism provides very powerful motivations for economic activity because it associates economic motivations so closely with self-interest.

Money and goods are not the same thing but are, on the contrary, exactly opposite things. Most confusion in economic thinking arises from failure to recognize this fact.

Goods are wealth which you have, while money is a claim on wealth which you do not have. Thus goods are an asset; money is a debt.

You would think that policymakers with the dark future of Climate Change ahead would be addressing a new set of existential questions.

Such as: Should Economics that grew wealth bear more of the burden to stop climate change.  Another words developed countries should take the lead allowing less developed countries to maintain emissions.

As we all know to date no international mitigation and abatement efforts have taken place on a large enough scale to freeze emissions. We don’t see any intense geopolitical cooperation. Countries will not do anything on behalf of other that requires them to sacrifice their own interests.

Off course when you introduce future generations into the question democracy as it stands is not equipped to represent the interests of future generations never mind the here and now. Humans that don’t exist have no say as to what will it mean to live a meaningful life in a world that has eliminated all wildness, and forms of life from the planet.

So here we are poised to become agent of the greatest catastrophic events ever to hit our planet which could have to support over 10 billion people by 2050.

We are currently on a trajectory to warm the planet 4°C. In such a 4ºC world most of us will not be able to adapt never mind our natural systems.

As we move beyond the stable state we are already well beyond the zone of uncertainty.  The risk for all species – including ours- grow and grow.

planetary boundaries

We need to start thinking in terms that we are just not used to thinking of as a human species.

Will it be left to the market to decide.  With businesses as hubs for democratic engagement this could unfairly shift costs onto either consumers or taxpayers.

I’m not convinced.. that we’ve ended up with a society that’s really able to harness the innovation potential of business.

Climate change challenges democracy. But climate change also needs democracy.

We live in a carbon dependent world. And for the most part, we are loath to forego this somewhat cosy arrangement. Carbon dependency is promoted in part by technology which gives us many good things on the cheap: electricity, personal mobility, affordable consumer goods, cooling and warmth. It is also encouraged by governments which promise easy options to low-carbon outcomes, without delivering these options. And for the most part, we do not seem to care, as the goodies continue to arrive.

We all know in our hearts that this is a cop out: we are duped but we connive in the deceit. Democracy is not a system that forces us to face up to these contradictions. We want to live in a sustainable society but the political system does not reward or support the innovators and entrepreneurs who would guide us to it.

Political institutions manipulate us, as do the power brokers who shape political opinion and guide policy.  Democracy shuns the long-term.

The goal of equipping democracy to mitigate and adapt to climate change is not a one-time endeavor but a continuous process.

Today, the formerly contented European middle classes, sitting in the gap between the rich minority and the poor majority, for the first time in living memory cannot be sure their children will be better off than they are. Confronted by this austere prospect, this group – the natural allies of climate stability – will become unsettled.

The world’s nations are desperately looking for guaranteed techno-fixes to climate change. Democracy around the world has suffered as governments seek to lean on eco-technocrats to cut back on investment in education and health and invest instead in technology for climate mitigation and adaptation.

I really do believe that people can provide the answers – if only we could unleash the real power of that creative potential. Environmental innovation has to be about much more than technology. I’ve realized that, and I’m going to make it my business to ensure that as many other people as possible do too.

So where best to start than requesting your Television Stations to highlight Climate Change in their Weather Forecast.   Join me. This is a war against no enemy other than ourselves.

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THE BEADY EYE: TAKES ANOTHER LOOK AT CAPITALISM.

31 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in Politics., The Future, Uncategorized

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An organization is only as strong as the humans within it.

The Current Capitalist global political economy which you can see all around you is on the point of no return.

Our world Organisations creak with overburden demands, lack of funds, and self -control, and taciturnity of action.

Capitalism  cannot expand as it did in the past as it has consolidated wealth into the hands of a tiny global elite. It is losing its hold on the imagination of large numbers of people who are not benefiting from this global system. The system is seizing up.

Yet the global capitalist system that I condemn has also produced incredible advances in life expectancy, raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and showered the world in technology innovation.

In all directions, the stage is set for a great planetary debate that will define the dawning Age of Technology – one that will inevitably be focused on how to implement the principle of sharing into world affairs.

If we truly believe in equality, we need to organise ourselves with a clear sense of equality.

The secrets of sustainability and well-being in society lies not in the Technology but in the imbalance in living standards and life opportunities between the global North and South – and between rich and poor within every country to varying degrees – is a crisis that lies at the heart of all world tensions.

Nothing will change unless our collective cognition’s change.1652331

Sustainability cannot be achieved by simply switching technologies. The future will happen anyway but just look at the tragic cost of human life, injury and exploitation we are witness to every day. Also, the cost to the planet from pollution and water use.

How can we keep ourselves and our organizations in tune with the exponentially expanding needs, problems, and opportunities posed by the world around us?

Business practices have worsened. Consumerism has reached a cruel momentum speed.

However if we collectively decide that we don’t accept what we and they are doing we can have a future for all.

It seems to me that Capitalism with its ideology of the trickle down effect has lost the plot and is being exposed as a lie.

With the Elite corrupted, the ordinary Joe soap doesn’t  seem to come into the equation until after it’s produced, if you get what I mean.

The Imbalances in our Capitalist Societies are forcing people to live with chronic debt a form of social and political control.

No one or any Organisation on its own can handle, Aging, diversity, intellectual capital, technology, generations, education, personalization, human ingenuity, continuous improvement, ethics, planetary security, polarization, interdependence, personal meaning, poverty, and careers, just to mention a few.

Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight. They’re more powerful and do more things than the most advanced computer at IBM corporate headquarters 30 years ago.

Clearly, our prevailing socio-economic structures in no way reflect the inner connectedness and equality of human beings across the world.

If we take Climate change; it might turnout to be our Savior.

It can only be tackled by an equitable “global” climate deal that can tackle the climate crisis effectively; a deal that clearly spells out the commitments of each and every player.

The possibilities of this happening  in a world where it is seldom mentioned that around 40,000 people are still dying in poverty each day from largely preventable causes – mainly due to lack of access to sufficient food, clean water, adequate shelter and health care, are Zero.

Although we live in a bounteous world that has more than enough wealth and resources available for everyone to meet their essential needs (a fact that can no longer be taken for granted), this wealth divided reality makes a mockery of ageless teachings on right human relations and our innate spiritual unity.

We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. This is the very reason that our World Organisations are far from embodying the spiritual impulse toward planetary synthesis, wholeness and union.

So let me state one hard fact; There will be no solution without Money.

Economic relationships between rich and poor countries remain predicated on the opposing objects of national self-interest, aggressive competition and materialistic acquisition.

International travel, trade and telecommunications may have led to a growing understanding that we are part of a global community, yet economic globalisation in its present form is failing to promote and safeguard the needs of humanity as a whole.

It does not seem realistic to think that certain specifics issues, such as environment and labour standards, should be considered as negotiating positions which are defended exclusively by developed countries. This reality is so out of touch with basic moral values, let alone spiritual law or divine principles.

Drastic changes are now needed to prevent increased turmoil and catastrophe in the years ahead.

The implications for our competitive, profit-driven institutions and outmoded ideologies are all-encompassing, yet nothing less will suffice to guarantee an end to poverty and the inauguration of a viably spiritual mode of global economic organisation.

The environmental crisis is waking us up to a new ethic based on the sacredness of nature and all living beings, and the need for simpler lifestyles that respect planetary boundaries and the rights of future generations.

These issues should be of common concern, protecting global interests, however difficult it has been to realise this obvious truth in our structures of international relationship: That a more equitable sharing of wealth, technology, skills and knowledge is the fundamental basis of a just and peaceful world order.

What have we got instead is a world full of many organizations that exist to make
 a profit.

Each organization exists for a purpose: to bring something to the world, make it available to people, and enable those people to capitalize upon it. Whether for profit or not, all organizations seek to sustain themselves, so they can continue bringing their things to the world.

Change is inevitable. Progress is optional.

The lavish lifestyles of the affluent nations are effectively financed by the poverty of the majority world, while a wholly inadequate overseas aid system and philanthropic activity masks the systemic injustices of the global economy. After centuries of colonialism and the exploitation of weaker populations by the more powerful, wealth and resources continue to be extracted from developing countries through illicit financial flows, profit repatriation, corporate tax abuses, unjust debt servicing and other means.

Governments have to acknowledge that the natural resources and produce of the world belongs to no one nation but must be shared by all, as embodied in the wise pooling and distribution of essential resources for the benefit of everybody.

Rich nations in particular have to understand that they cannot remain islands of prosperity in a sea of deprivation, and that a more equitable sharing of wealth, technology, skills and knowledge is the fundamental basis of a just and peaceful world order.

The major spiritual lesson for humanity in the twenty-first century could not be simpler or more urgent in this regard, however the difficult has been to realise this obvious truth in our structures of international relationship.

In an era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter, we’re all required to do several things at once. But this constant multitasking is taking its toll we are all become increasingly out of touch with our fast-changing world.

Many injustices have been spawned, from large-scale atrocities, to out-of-touch campaigns and services, no longer serving those they began operating in the names of.

Ensuring that all of those involved have an equal voice in shaping what we do is not just working as it ignored  the needs and demands of society to navigate through the one accelerating constant–change.

Organizations change directions repeatedly in order to sustain themselves.

One way to clarify what the intentions of man is to go back in history to the beginning of your existence.  What was written then about the purpose being pursued?  With long-lived organizations, this original purpose surely shifts.

Here is the wish of most of us.

I wish that we lived in a functioning democracy where real electoral and social reform is possible.Résultat de recherche d'images pour "free pictures of capitalism"

As long as corporate power has a stranglehold on our institutions and our government, including our mass media, it will do what it’s designed to do and that is to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.

In all my reading, one of the most simple, yet profound ideas I discovered was that principles (or certain natural laws or rules) govern how and why things happen in all of life.  This truth is well accepted in the fields of physical science, but unfortunately less so in other areas of study.

In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths or first principles upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend.

It boils down, in its essence, to the basic idea that all men are free to choose liberty and life, or captivity and death. Sadly, too many of us have been trained and conditioned to wait – perpetually – for someone else to rescue us.  We are being acted upon by the pressure of expectations outside ourselves. Too often, we fail to question our day-to-day assumptions.

We live at a time when the dominant social paradigm actually undermines the philosophical revolution that enabled us to become the most free, prosperous, and generous people in modern times.

dollarmembership

Right I can hear you saying. We have heard it all before. What is the solution. It’s not Communism, it’s not Socialism, it’s a mix of all three with God is a Capitalist.

So why does this matter to you or anyone else? Answer.  In a nutshell, it means everything if we as a planet of humans are to remain so.

There is only one solution we must make Capitalism contribute by placing a 0.05% World Aid Commission on all High Frequency Trading, on all Sovereign Wealth Fund Acquisitions and on all Foreign Exchange Transactions ( Over $20,000).

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The Beady Eye: Over 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030.

27 Wednesday May 2015

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Roughly 50% of all the jobs on the planet that is how quickly things are about to change.

You might think that this is bull shit, but the Technological revolution is only beginning.

It will have a per found effects on Five Industries.

So its important that beady eye lets academia know that much of the battle ahead will be taking place at their doorstep.

The Power or Energy Industry will change from the inside out.

Technologies will shift utilities around the world from national grids to micro grids that can be scaled from a single home to entire cities.

The industry will go through a long-term shrinking trend and the immediate shift will cause many new jobs to be created.

After that Power generation plants will begin to close down. All remaining Coal plants will begin to close down.

Many railroad and transportation workers will no longer be needed.

Even wind farms, natural gas, and bio-fuel generators will begin to close down.

Ethanol plants will be phased out or re purposed.

Utility company engineers, gone.

Line repairmen, gone.

Next is the Automobile and Transportation Industry.

The first wave of autonomous vehicles will be hitting the roads.

Going Driver less will be with us in the next 10 years.

We will see some of the first inroads made by vehicles/drones that deliver packages, groceries, and fast-mail envelopes.

With over 2 million people involved in-car accidents every year in the U.S. and god only knows how many more around the world it won’t take long for legislators to be convinced that driver less cars are a substantially safer and more effective option.

The privilege of driving is about to be redefined.

Taxi and limo drivers, gone.
Bus drivers, gone.
Truck drivers, gone.
Gas stations, parking lots, traffic cops, traffic courts, gone.
Fewer doctors and nurses will be needed to treat injuries.
Pizza (and other food) delivery drivers, gone.
Mail delivery drivers, gone.
FedEx and UPS delivery jobs, gone.
As people shift from owning their own vehicles to a transportation-on-demand system, the total number of vehicles manufactured will also begin to decline.

Then we have Education.

In 2004 the Khan Academy was started with a clear and concise way of teaching science and math. Today they offer over 2,400 courses that have been downloaded 116 million times.

Now we have the 8,000 pound gorilla in the Open Course ware space is Apple’s iTunes U.

This platform offers over 500,000 courses from 1,000 universities that have been downloaded over 700 million times. Recently they also started moving into the K-12 space.All of these courses are free for anyone to take.

So how do colleges, that charge steep tuitions, compete with “free”?

As the Open Course ware Movement has shown us, courses are becoming a commodity. Teachers only need to teach once, record it, and then move on to another topic or something else.Teaching requires experts.

Learning only requires coaches. So jobs of Teachers – Trainers- Professors will more than half.

Manufacturing.

3D Printers an object creation technology where the shape of the objects are formed through a process of building up layers of material until all of the details are in place.

Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands of items and thus undermines economies of scale.

It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did during the Henry Ford era.

If we can print our own clothes and they fit perfectly, clothing manufacturers and clothing retailers will quickly go away.

Similarly, if we can print our own shoes, shoe manufacturers and shoe retailers will cease to be relevant.

If we can print construction material, the lumber, rock, drywall, shingle, concrete, and various other construction industries will go away.

Robots:

Nearly every physical task can conceivably be done by a robot at some point in the future.

  • Fishing bots will replace fishermen.
  • Mining bots will replace miners.
  • Ag bots will replace farmers.
  • Inspection bots will replace human inspectors.
  • Warrior drones will replace soldiers.
  • Robots can pick up building material coming out of the 3D printer and begin building a house.

In these five industries alone there will be hundreds of millions of jobs disappearing.  But many other sectors will also be affected.

Certainly there’s a downside to all this. The more technology we rely on, the more breaking points we’ll have in our lives.

For instance driver less drones can deliver people. These people can deliver bombs or illicit drugs as easily as pizza.

Robots that can build building can also destroy buildings.

All of this technology could make us fat, dumb, and lazy, and the problems we thought we were solving become far more complicated.

We are not well-equipped culturally and emotionally to have this much technology entering into our lives. There will be backlashes, “destroy the robots” or “damn the driver less car” campaigns with proposed legislation attempting to limit its influence.

At the same time, most of the jobs getting displaced are the low-level, low-skilled labor positions.

Our challenge will be to upgrade our workforce to match the labor demand of the coming era. Although it won’t be an easy road ahead it will be one filled with amazing technology and huge potentials as the industries shift.

The underbelly of all of this will be that there will be huge opportunities but no pensions or retirement.

It wont be too long before an individual will have the power to destroy the world.

So we will need a new awareness on the consequences of Inequality, Migration, Climate Change, and technological desert in the World.

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The Beady Eye. Let’s looks at the faceless future of banking

25 Monday May 2015

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The banking system was saved from collapse by billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, which in turn led to anger that the public was having to bail out bankers, who were perceived as risk-taking and “greedy”.

We were told back then that they were to big to fail.

To day there are far bigger. Today, the top banks are larger than they were before the crisis and are engaged in many of the same behaviors that led to the financial meltdown, including using large amounts of short-term borrowing to fund purchases of speculative securities.

One would expect a stark public assessment of what went wrong with the post-crisis reform of our financial system but the largest banks have used their political muscle to shield their enterprises and individual bankers from criminal prosecution and to resist the toughest reforms.

While global banks have reportedly paid $100 billion in legal settlements with the U.S. the data is indisputable: The top six bank holding companies in the US—JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—are larger than they were before the 2008 crisis.

Together they hold 37 percent more assets than they did five years ago.

These six bank holding companies have two-thirds of the total assets in the entire banking system, which includes nearly 7,000 banks.

While most of us worry about making ends meet they enjoy the comfort of an expanded government safety net. These giant firms and their executives can continue to create and benefit from boom-and-bust cycles, privatizing profits in the bountiful years and socializing their losses when they fall.

The question now is:

How big do the biggest banks have to get before we consider breaking them up? . . . Do they have to double in size? Triple in size? Quadruple in size?”

The banking industry is more than likely to undergo significant changes over the next few decades.

The majority of transactions are now processed electronically, reducing the need for physical branches. No more paper money by 2043? From 3-D banking to digital currency, within 10 years.

The economic payments system will begin to ‘know us,’ either through bio metrics, optical sensor or facial recognition. That’s already happening to some extent with smartphones – the new iPhone 5S, for example, uses fingerprint scanning to unlock the phone.

So why not break them up. The big ones are always going to be the most dangerous.

They have recently exhibited “breathtaking flagrancy” setting up a group they called “the cartel” to manipulate a market valued at $5trn a day.(Each day, £3.5tn changes hands in the foreign exchange markets. Each week, the equivalent of a year’s global trade in physical goods takes place.)

Resulting in new fines for fixing the forex markets. Six major banks were fined £2.6bn in November 2014. This takes the total penalties to date to£6.3bn.

Considering the gigantic profits (more than double their average over the seventy years ending in 1999) they have all taken these fines as a drop in the ocean with little or no effect on how they operate.  Instead, the banks and their shareholders have picked up the check whether it’s for the interest rate rigging scandal or fiddling the Foreign Exchange Markets.  They had more than likely already made provision on their balance sheets for the lost, which by the way would reduce their profits saving corporation tax.

Rarely have we seen any of the Directors been held personally responsible.

Only prison sentences will deter future abuses.

The agenda for change within the global corporate and investment banking (CIB) industry remains significant.

So where are we?

It’s agreed that the Banking Industry needs profound structural changes.

The Global debt is now in the region of a staggering $ 200 trillion almost three times the size of the global economy. It is long past the time for policymakers to right the global economy, is impossible. We that is the World have amassed mountains of new unplayable debts expanding 25% in the last six years. Post recession growth has never been so anaemic in recent history despite the unprecedented wave of money printing intended to boost the economy.

The world of economics is ill-equipped to deal with the next crisis.

We now have an equity bubble which will bust as demand for increased wages cuts into corporate profits.

Pension Funds and insurers will not have the cash to meet future obligations causing them to liquidate assets.

China could devalue the Yuan, making it impossible to export and there are no policy tools left to deal with such event, dragging the world into another recession.

If interest rates rise the cost of serving debts will be beyond the world economy.

Gold will be back in fashion.

Where do the Big banks come into all of this.

” If you ain’t cheating,” said one of the traders involved in the recent currency exchange scandal, ” you ain’t trying.”

What I say is “If we’re not addressing the financial sector’s systemic threat to the world economy, or its affronts to our system of justice, then we ain’t trying either”.

Our banks have a rotten core.

In what other sector would we tolerate the frequency and severity of such damaging behavior? All are repeat offenders with long records of serial fraud. The banking industry’s incentive system, combined with our governments refusal to prosecute has taught them that the old saying is wrong: crime does pay. They are immune from real punishment.  

Royal Bank of Scotland RBS which is 79% owned by taxpayers, was fined £430m – on top of the £400m of penalties announced in November has dismissed three employees, and suspended two more, following its role in the manipulation of the foreign exchange markets.

Barclay’s. fined £1.5bn by five regulators, including a record £284m by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority fire eight people, as part of a deal with regulators. Yet Barclays’ stock market value rose by £1.5bn as a result of a 3% rise in its share price amid relief the fine was not even larger.

Barclay’s also became the first bank to be fined for fixing another benchmark, known as the ISDA fix. It is paying £74m to the US regulator the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Barclay’s paid a “lone wolf” star trader £170m in the five years following the financial crisis, a payout which dwarfed those of Bob Diamond, the bank’s former boss he was at the center of a row over his £2.7m bonus for 2012 in the months before he quit.

Citigroup was fined £770m,

PJ Morgan the biggest bank in the US – which has paid fines totalling more than £26bn since 2009 – was fined another £572m.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch fined $205m.

However there is hope.

Crowdfunding/ Kickstarter, created in 2009 has funded a wide range of projects(over 60 000 in July 2012).

Kickstarter is financed by taking 5% of the funds raised; Amazon captures an additional share of between 3 and 5% of the amount.

A recent report from the Financial Stability Board put assets for non bank lending institutions at $75 trillion after growing more than 7 percent in 2013.

Lending Club staged a highly successful initial public offering earlier in December, raising $870 million in its debut, and others are expected to follow in 2016.

Despite pronouncements and promises of sweeping reform, many of the conditions that caused the financial crisis of 2008 persist six years after the multi-trillion-dollar bank bailouts began.

There time is almost up.

But we should also not be naïve:

You can rest assured that before the clock chimes they will have reinvented themselves. ( See What will Money look like in the Future. 6/12/2014)

It is therefore time to make clear to the Industry how the future regulatory landscape will look before Google/ Apple/Amazon are all Bankers.

Perhaps returning to where Insurance companies were Insurance companies, where Supermarkets were Supermarkets not selling insurance and Banking Facilities, and stop cross contamination of different Service Industries.

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Just building a clean tech innovation economy is not enough.

20 Wednesday May 2015

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A society that holds out for the younger generation prospects that are worse than those held out to their parents and grandparents is a society that has ceased to progress and begun to regress—one that has lost any claim to historical legitimacy even if it is technologically advanced.

The common experience for millions of young people is permanent economic insecurity.

Youth unemployment in the European Union stands at more than 23 percent, while in Spain it is 56.1 percent and in Greece 62.9 percent. There are 26 million young people in the “developed world” who are classified as not in employment, education or training (NEETS). Poverty and homelessness have become mass phenomena.

While the world may not be one big village in terms of lifestyle, it shares an image of “the good life” that’s proffered in movies, TV, and the Internet. That’s what teenagers in Afghanistan have in common with teenagers in England; they’ve been fed the same image of success in the global community and they know it’s inaccessible. They are angry and, ultimately, their anger has the same target — multinational corporations (and the governments that support them).

The political implications of these social transformations are far-reaching – ISIS.

Capitalism as we know it today—is an amoral culture of short-term self-interest, profit maximization, emphasis on shareholder value, isolationist thinking, and profligate disregard of long-term consequences—is an unsustainable system. Only today five of the biggest banks are fined Billions for fixing the Foreign Exchange Market.

Capitalism must change itself, from the inside. This kind of change will require a radically new leadership ethic, one driven by a new set of motivations and a broader understanding of wealth.

With global population rapidly marching toward 11 billion and with it the demand for food, health services, energy and security, we need to reexamine the models that have gotten us to this point.

There are far better men than I to undertake this reexamination.

The word “capitalism” was coined by the socialists and has historically described a system of state-granted privilege and plutocracy.“

Free market capitalism may be viewed as a system in which individuals make voluntary arrangements involving the exchange of capital.

Free market” implies voluntary arrangements, whereas “capitalism” has become (rightly so)  known as a system in which business and coercive state forces collude to serve whatever arbitrary interests may be lobbied for by the businesses or championed for reasons of power by the politicians.

If it’s a free market, it’s not capitalism. And if it’s capitalism, it’s not a free market.

So why bother trying to apologize for “capitalism” when “free markets” are what you (and I) really wish to obtain?  That is, if you really do believe in “free markets”, then you should probably distance yourself from the word “capitalism”.

The modern world is ruled by multinational corporations and governed by a capitalistic ideology that believes:

Corporations are a special breed of people, motivated solely by self-interest.

Corporations seek: to maximize return on capital by leveraging productivity and paying the least possible amount for taxes and labor. Corporate executives pledge allegiance to their directors and shareholders. The dominant corporate perspective is short-term, the current financial quarter, and the dominant corporate ethic is greed, doing whatever it takes to maximize profit.

Capitalist society is guided by the play of the market mechanism.

There is no better evidence of this than- The “recovery” of 2009-10 ensured that “too big to fail” institutions would survive and the rich would continue to be rich. Meanwhile millions of good jobs were either eliminated or replaced by low-wage jobs with poor or no benefits.

We’re living in the age of corporate dinosaurs that take the path of least resistance to profit; they’ve swallowed up their competitors and created monopolies, which have produced humongous bureaucracies.

There achievements are far to numerous to list here, but here are a few in no particular order.

Climate Change. Inequality of Opportunity, Stock Exchanges, Poverty, Wars, Lack of Fresh Water, Sovereignty Wealth Funds plundering the finite Natural Resources for short-term profit, Corruption, Privatization, People Trafficking, Drugs, ect  You could say without fear of contradiction that conditions are far worse today than at any time since the 1930s.

The nearly universal opinion expressed these days is that the economic crisis of recent years marks the end of capitalism. Capitalism allegedly has failed, has proven itself incapable of solving economic problems, and so mankind has no alternative, if it is to survive, then to make the transition to a planned economy, to socialism.

Corporate executives don’t care about the success or failure of any particular country, only the growth and profitability of their global corporation.

Global corporations are ruining our natural capital.  Four of the top 10 multinational corporations are energy companies, with Exxon Mobil leading the list. Global corporations have ravished the world and citizens of every nation live with the consequences: dirty air, foul water, and pollution of every sort. The world GDP is $63 Trillion but multinational corporations garner a disproportionate share — with banks accounting for an estimated $4 trillion (bank assets are $100 trillion). Global black markets make $2 trillion — illegal drugs account for at least $300 billion.

The past five years have demonstrated the impossibility of changing anything within the existing political system. Inequality has grown enormously. The stock market is booming, the Forbes 400 are richer than ever, yet the conditions for youth and workers are disastrous. War continues without end.

However the historical bankruptcy of capitalism does not bring about its automatic collapse as it will if not already doing so turn Climate Change into profits.

 It is from the market that the capitalist economy receives its sense.

So what if anything is to be done.

At the start of this post I said that Capitalism must change itself, from the inside.

Is this possible. Yes but only by making it pay for our values. By putting humanity back into human.

We needed to make the private enterprise economy work better in a redistribution of wealth and income toward greater equality.

This can only be done by placing:

A World Aid Commission on all High Frequency Stock Exchange Transactions, on all Foreign Exchange transactions (over$20,000) and on all Sovereign Wealth Funds Acquisitions. 

A capitalist economy is inherently unstable” It is one thing to recognize the instability of capitalism, but another to show that an alternative to it is possible.

Clearly no one has got a clue” about what might replace it.

What ever it is we can not going on tolerating a world … in which the needs of the many come before the greed of the few. It is time to recognize that “ Like what, exactly?” is an honest and profound question that demands straight and worked-out answers. And it is time to start working out those answers. I am not advocating abstract revolutionism here.

When questions about the future are bound up so intimately with day-to-day struggles, a new human society surely cannot emerge through spontaneous action alone. To transcend this impasse, people need to know not just what to be against, but what to be for, not just “ what is to be done,” but what is to be undone— what is it exactly that must be changed in order to have a viable and emancipatory socialism?

Unfortunately, this issue received almost no attention throughout most of the last century.

So it is only in recent years that any significant attention has been paid to whether another world is possible. But now, when the future of capitalism is a live issue, it seems to me that this issue needs to be understood as the central problem of revolutionary thought today.

The younger generation is “lost” not just in the sense that it has no future under capitalism, but also in the sense that it is increasingly “lost” to the ruling class and its political establishment. The forms through which the bourgeoisie seeks to maintain political control are losing their hold. Their conscious political experience has been dominated by unending economic crisis, war, the dismantling of democratic rights, political gangsterism and corruption.

And if that not bad enough The global economy is splintering with new and devastating trade agreements like the TTP.

If the function of the market as regulator of production is always thwarted by economic policies in so far as the latter try to determine prices, wages, and interest rates instead of letting the market determine them, then a crisis will surely develop.

It would be disastrous merely to call for socialism while ignoring the problems of mass unemployment. This brings me to the notion of developing socialism within capitalism, enlarging the space of the commons or whatever. Unfortunately, it cannot be done. It has been tried (for instance, in the Israeli kibbutzim ) and it does not succeed. The economic laws of the larger system will not allow it. If you buy from the capitalist world “ outside,” you also have to sell to it in order to get the money you need to buy from it, and you will not sell anything if your prices are high because your costs of production are high. And if you have debts, you have to repay them.

So it appears there is only the one option as I suggest : Make Global Capitalism contribute by a World Aid Commission.

We live in interesting times. The stakes are high. The time has come to face the future with sober senses. The good news is we’re witnessing the failure of global corporate capitalism. The bad news is we don’t know what will replace it.

Financial inequality in the 21st century is on the rise, and accelerating at a very dangerous pace turning into a conflict between billionaires.

Complete change will not happen overnight. It will not be built on the back of one investor or one innovative entrepreneur. It will be something that business owners, investors, political leaders, consumers and entrepreneurs must all work together toward.

Neither of these categories (Investor-Innovator) makes or produces anything but their wealth, which is really a super-wealth that has broken away from the everyday reality of the market, which determines how most ordinary people live.

Worse still, they are competing with each other to increase their wealth, and the worst of all case scenarios is how super-managers, whose income is based effectively on greed, keep driving up their salaries regardless of the reality of the market. This is what happened to the banks in 2008, for example.

So when you look at Climate change what you see is that it is true that it will take time to roll out the infrastructure and technologies to get off fossil fuels, and we will burn a lot of fossil fuel in the process.

What explains our collective failure on climate change? Why is it that instead of dealing with the problem, all we seem to do is make it worse?

Here’s is the inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away.

What would it take to radically reduce global carbon emissions and to do so in a way that would alleviate inequality and poverty? The World Aid Commission.

Just building a clean tech innovation economy is not enough. We have to reinvent our economy from the ground up if we are to successfully address these challenges.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS GOING TO CHALLENGE EVERYTHING THAT CAPITALISM OR ANY SOCIAL SYSTEM STAND FOR.

What we need is “ethical capitalism,” Business leaders must become servant leaders, leaders who serve not just themselves and share holders, but leaders who serve employees, customers, the community, the planet, humanity, future generations, and life itself.

Science has made huge steps, society has not.

The sooner we fix Capitalism the sooner we move to the future we imagine.

If anyone has a better idea, I would be all ears. 

 

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Is man going to recreate himself?

25 Saturday Apr 2015

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Determination of the entire DNA sequence contained in the human genome will not answer the question:

What is a human?

 

 

Geneticists will not be able to look at a person’s DNA sequence and predict everything about the appearance and characteristics of that person. Even if geneticists can identify segments of DNA as genes, the vast majority of the genes they discover still will have unknown functions.

In addition, many human traits such as body stature and intelligence result from multiple genes, and the exact number of genes that might contribute to such a trait is not obvious, nor are the ways in which those genes interact.

An individual’s genetic make-up greatly contributes to the type of person he or she is, but environmental variables such as diet, education, climate, family values, and access to health care also play a considerable role in determining an individual’s characteristics.

Before I go any further I have to declare that this subject is away beyond me, so if there is any one who has gone to the trouble of reading this far please feel free to contribute. All I can say if we do recreate ourselves I hope we do a better job than the first time around.

The increased understanding of the human genome is driven largely by rapid advances in technology. And the single most profound advance has been in the cost and the speed of sequencing.

The chromosomes of a sperm or egg contain about 3 billion base pairs, so a body cell has 6 billion. The whole set of base pairs in a gamete is the genome.

I don’t think it is possible to know all of the future effects of the human genome project, because people are coming up with new ways to use the information all the time.

Of course, the farther we peer into the future, the cloudier is our vision.

And it has a Scary side.

You will have read recently that scientists in China are editing the genetic code in human embryos.

So What wrong with that?

Is this unethical and will it be used to further the goals of those who wish to become ‘ creators’ in their own eyes.

Science has struggled to understand the mysteries of “less-than-human” beings since the late 1400s when the Spanish Inquisition first formalized state persecution of Jews and Muslims. And while the horrors of Nazi Germany exposed fatal flaws in science’s quest to build the master race, the ethical dilemmas posed by the science of eugenics are far from behind us.

While I understand that there are or will be many benefits to man from genetic engineering this is another step to manipulation for enhancing.

So are we on the threshold of modifying our own germ line and take control of our genetic destiny.?

The genetic engineering of humans — tools more powerful than a Nazi’s wildest dreams is unlocking life’s code.

The prospect of creating heritable modified genes and manufacturing designer babies that are more intelligent and beautiful than their peers is unthinkable for some.

But you would be naive to think that is wont happen . The potential for profit, in terms of both cash and the welfare of humanity, is almost limitless.

Understanding the genome will undoubtedly be the most important achievement of the 21st century, and perhaps of all time.

People looking back 50 years from now will consider medicine a barbaric, random process. If the promise of genomics is fulfilled, it will transform the lives of everyone.

It will spark many complex questions both ethical and not.

Human societies are not inferior or superior to one another but they could become so in not the so distant future.

The sequence of the human genome will underpin bio medical research for decades:

Genetic testing is not only a medical procedure. It is also a way of creating social categories that will be discriminated against based on their genetics, never mind race or religion.  Genetic discrimination” will be on our heads.

Is sequencing the human genome an intellectually appropriate project for biologists?”

How close actually are we to personalized medicine?

When will we begin to see the benefits of the Human Genome Project?

To Date the genomic mapping of humans can even be used to track the migration of humans from Africa over 50,000 years ago, as well as unlock the evolutionary timeline of the origin of man.

Genomics will be used to create better crops, better meat, more sophisticated robotics, new materials, and even whole new forms of life.

However in man the things which are not measurable are more important than those which are measurable.

Because of the ethical issues that it raises and the potential that it has to change human reproduction, and ultimately human society, it is crucial that we start to establish the boundaries of this science before the technology advances even farther.

On the other hand.

If man is to colonize the vastness of the Universe he will have to be recreated.

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