CRISIS - CRISIS - CRISIS

The paramount need for an INTEGRAL approach to address … the crises of politics, science & religion - is well exemplified by ALL that has been written here - blog & comments alike - particularly when one considers the global issues of concern that Colin Mason has so lucidly brought to our attention in his - A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE surviving the 2030 SPIKE

Herein lies THE seeds of an answer to the question …
 
                                              ” WILL our children be their slaves ?? ”

AND 99 years later - after Hong Kong was restored to Chinese rule in 1997 artists feared that their activities might be censored in line with mainland Chinese cultural policy, and a new level of social and political concern became evident in the work of younger choreographers such as Helen Lai, Danny Yung (co-founder of Zuni Icosehedron), and Jacky Yu (founder of E-Side Dance Company).

Rosalind Newman, who taught at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts from 1989, founded her own company in 1999, Dance HK/NY. In 2000 the region hosted a European Union festival of modern dance.

States of Fear: Science or Politics? - Question and Answer

Our members of parliament (MPs) now are largely professional politicians, which is the root of the problem. They go into politics to make, if not money, then certainly a decent living. Because they are no longer considered to be implicitly honourable they have to enter details of their earnings and spendings in all sorts of registers, where they can be policed like convicts on parole. Desperate to raise cash for campaigning or for their parties, they seem to have abdicated a sense of what is proper or right, and instead suck in the money from whichever reservoir happens to offer it.

If you really want to be immiserated in gloom, go to a library and look up an MP at random in Dod’s Parliamentary Companion, and just see the sort of person you are dealing with. They boast about careers as student politicians. They have worked as research assistants and special advisers and have been local councillors. And that’s just the Tories: Labour and Lib Dem MPs tend to be even less qualified, unless you count working for a trade union or lecturing in an ex-polytechnic as a measure of greatness.

Our coarsened nation is thus matched with coarsened politicians. The few who are not stand out like beacons, and we revere them. The rest are grasping, expensive for the state to run, achieve little, and are rewarded chronically for failure. They have little idea how to behave, are incapable of acting decently when found out in doing wrong, and see no harm in consorting with the most shocking people. That is where professionalism has got us: politics is no longer a fit calling for a respectable young or middle-aged person.

And as we survey this swamp of oily people on the make, whatever can it portend for democracy ?

                

             Simon Heffer | THE DAILY TELEGRAPH  | Wednesday, December 5, 2007

TRUTH is best understood as …

an actual direction of evolution in consciousness & culture.

                       Steve McIntosh - Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution

We LIVE in a state of emergency: and we are GETTING ANGRIER

Having just got around to reading  Jasper Becker's book called THE CHINESE, following on from his Hungry Ghost's: China's Secret Famine , one cannot come to any other conclusion than that the state of the world is so sickening and so unbelievable … but this IS, of course, how it was anticipated 2B … & the justification for an individual & collective mind-set switch.

… in the face of …

You know the litany, pollution, global warming, the administration in the US for the last 8 years and its domestic and international policies, but there is more. War. War in Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia, Sudan (today’s government attack on a refugee camp) and elsewhere. Armed conflict in many, many other places. Frequent examples of crimes against humanity, including what I believe, for the first time I have been aware of it, such crimes committed by Americans, at least with the approval, support and urging of the political leadership of this country. Instable governments, even today in Pakistan, a country that has only recently moved from military dictatorship, as benevolent as it tended to be. The energy crisis in the face of growing demand. The financial crisis with a threatened world-class recession, if not worse. A food crisis of rising prices and local/regional scarcity. And a crisis in ethics, morality and leadership in the world of business that has contributed so mightily to many of these crises.

” Total household debt is the same in the UK as in the US. But the US has 5 times the population therefore the Briton is 5 times more personally indebted than the American.

If the US Treasury has to go to such enormous lengths to prop up mortgage banks devastated by a debt-propelled housing crash, how much further will the British Treaury have to go in order to bail out a banking and propery sector reeling under five times as much debt as in the US?

This is the big unanswered question, and gives us an idea of the black hole into which the British economy is staring…  ”

                                                                                                         Peter B.

Fantasy finance , as Jeff Randall reports today in The Daily Telegraph …

cuts many of the giants of global banking down to size …

BUT Capitalism, however painful,  in its CONSCIOUS CAPITALIST form  …

remains as the only financial mechanism by which the global community can survive.

WHERE NEXT ?  … IS there a doctor in the house ?

… in the meantime If you were surprised by the financial crisis, wait until you hear what's coming next …

Is Britain going bankrupt ?

With Gordon Brown dreaming that China is in any position to bail out the International Monetary Fund, the 1930s beggar-thy-neighbor fears as China devalues … are hardly surprising.

The jury really is out on this one and ONLY TIME will TELL !

Has the recession REALLY made the world go mad ? as the result of Ponzi and other schemes being sown form the ”seed” of Gordon Geeko GREED

… well IF IT hasn’t gone mad, IT certainly seems possible that Britain will AGAIN have to declare bankruptcy by A.N.OTHER LABOUR GOVERNMENT consequent to the fact that …

The pound isn’t only down against the euro. Against the dollar, sterling has
shed a quarter of its value since July. I say this with trepidation, but our
currency could be “cut loose” by investors – sparking a hugely damaging
plunge. And the more Brown goes on about “bail-outs” and rate cuts, the more
chance that will happen.

China’s purge on Charter 08 activists makes ACTION even more important.

… and the Queen’s banker faces mutiny !

” Two cultural systems interacted through globalisation,
locking each other into a funeral dance.

The point is that this experiment has now blown up.
Whether or not we slam straight into a global depression
depends on how we – East, West, all of us – handle this.”

                                          Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Today’s TIMES headline … 

Gordon Brown pins his hopes of recovery on Barack Obama

must be seen in the context of Gordon Brown’s claim to have already
“saved the world” from total economic collapse and his last ditch attempt
to bring the NEW Labour Party ”back from the dead”, as a result of a successful response to his proposals to the coming G20 summit in London. ALL of which IS, quite frankly, a figment of his own politically obsessed imagination; and none other than an embodiment of Nero and his fiddle !

When Gordon Brown addresses both Houses of US Congress next week, BOTH HE, Obama and the US Congress would serve themselves well to be cogniscent of Lord Derwent’s recent letter to THE DAILY TELEGRAPH in which he quite rightly stated that …

” Gordon Brown repeatedly blames the United States for triggering the current banking collapse. The real blame rests with the British Government.

In America, the Glass-Steagall Act had protected deposit-taking commercial banks from the risky activity of investment banks. Congress was effectively obliged to repeal the Act in 1999 because New York was losing its business to London, which had no such restrictions and the ”light touch” regulation encouraged by Gordon Brown.

Had Britain enacted similar legislation to Glass-Steagall, the US Act would NOT have been repealed, the City would have made less money but the banking collapse in both America and Britain would have been avoided.”

The argument for preserving Glass-Steagall (as written in 1987):

1. Conflicts of interest characterize the granting of credit – lending – and the use of credit – investing – by the same entity, which led to abuses that originally produced the Act

2. Depository institutions possess enormous financial power, by virtue of their control of other people’s money; its extent must be limited to ensure soundness and competition in the market for funds, whether loans or investments.

3. Securities activities can be RISKY, leading to enormous losses. Such losses could threaten the integrity of deposits. In turn, the Government insures deposits and could be required to pay large sums if depository institutions were to collapse as the result of securities losses.

4. Depository institutions are supposed to be managed to limit risk. Their managers thus may not be conditioned to operate prudently in more speculative securities businesses. An example is the crash of real estate investment trusts sponsored by bank holding companies (in the 1970s and 1980s).


The argument against preserving the Act (as written in 1987):

1. Depository institutions will now operate in “deregulated” financial markets in which distinctions between loans, securities, and deposits are NOT well drawn. They are losing market shares to securities firms that are not so strictly regulated, and to foreign financial institutions operating without much restriction from the Act.

2. Conflicts of interest can be prevented by enforcing legislation against them, and by separating the lending and credit functions through forming distinctly separate subsidiaries of financial firms.

3. The securities activities that depository institutions are seeking are both
low-risk by their very nature, and would reduce the total risk of organizations offering them – by diversification.

4. In much of the rest of the world, depository institutions operate
simultaneously and successfully in both banking and securities markets. Lessons learned from their experience can be applied to our national financial structure and regulation.^[6]


IN “the event” of ALL THIS “wisdom”, however, the Republicans, on behalf of their greedy banking supporters, enacted the Gramm-Leach-Biley Act which Bill Clinton was unable to veto and therefore forced to sign into being.

SO the die WAS cast … and ENRON, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Madoff et al became history !

WASN’t the collapse of Barings Bank enough of a warning to our new masters of the globe ???

WE the peoples of the world can ONLY assume that their self-sophistication, arrogance and greed won the day …

BUT isn’t that EVER THUS ?

Will Barack Obama be able to pull HIS “G20 ARMY” together, to even endorse a Julius Ceasar-like plan of ACTION to overthrow the OLD ORDER, let alone be brave enough to cross the NEW ORDER “rubicon”.

What should the British PM have said to Congress?

… and here we go YET AGAIN !

Why WE are in the mess WE ARE and how …

The forthcoming Group of 20 meeting is a make-or-break event.

UNLESS it comes up with practical measures to support the less developed 
countries, which are even more vulnerable than the developed ones, markets are going to suffer another sinking spell just as they did last month when Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary, failed to produce practical measures to recapitalise the US banking system.

THIS CRISIS is different from all the others since the end of the second world war. Previously, the authorities got their act together and prevented the financial
system from collapsing.

THIS TIME, after the failure of Lehman Brothers last September, the system broke down and was put on artificial life support. Among other measures, both Europe and the US in effect guaranteed that no other important financial institution would be allowed to fail.

… and THE result in Ireland shows that Europe's usurpers have succeeded !

GREED isn't good - IT's DANGEROUS

… just ”watch the video” and ask yourself

“what the hell happened to TAKING RESPONSIBILITY for your OWN ACTIONS?”

and reflect on the statement that “everybody should be their own leader”

and DO YOUR THINKING FOR YOURSELF

There was little doubt at the start of this recession that, contrary to Gordon Brown’s insistence …

Britain was uniquely vulnerable to an extremely painful slowdown.

Its reliance on the City for large chunks of economic growth, the worrying state of the housing market, the excessive levels of debt held by consumers around the country were worrying enough, and that was before you started to consider the terrifying budget deficit. But it is only now, more than a year and a half into what many leading economists are classifying as a depression, that such concerns have been borne out in cold, hard statistical evidence.

                                                          Edmund Conway - Daily Telegraph

“SO I've come to conclude that ALL predictions – both good and bad – tell us absolutely NO THING about what is possible. Trends and events only relate to what is probable. Probabilities are abstractions. Possibilities are the stuff of life, visions to act upon, doors to walk through. Pessimism and optimism are both distractions from living life fully.”

         Tom Atlee - “Crisis Fatigue and the Co-creation of Positive Possibilities”