Image by wsilver via Flickr
The Big Picture RT on Jul 21, 2015
Economist Dr. Richard Wolff, Democracy At Work joins Thom. China – the world’s second biggest economy – recently saw its stock market plummet 30 percent in a month. Does this mean that next big economic crisis is right around the corner?
see also:
Bubbles, bounces and busts in China
from the archives:
Greece is a Nation Under Occupation by Andrew Gavin Marshall
Chris Hedges and Richard D. Wolff at the Left Forum 2015: Marx: The System is the Problem
Michael Hudson: Institutional Discontent
Not A Gaffe, But The Real Romney by Ralph Nader + Whose Taxes Would Mitt Romney Raise?
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The European Union should be turned into the European Commonwealth, allowing each member nation to retain it’s sovereignty and looking after their affairs as best suits it’s population. This notion that ‘one size fits all’ just doesn’t work. Never has and never will.
It’s really quite a sensible idea Vera….this is what Mikhail Gorbachev had in mind for the 15 former Soviet Republics, until he was betrayed and stabbed in the back by the US inspired coup puppets.
The trouble is so many people default to what they believe to be the reliable old “familiar” models, we need new thinking and new concepts. We are all part of a global society, but we need to figure out what works for whom, why, how, and just what we can all learn from each other’s experience; rather than imposing our prejudices, and assuming we always know what is best.
India is a case in point and so is Spain. Hispanic culture has enormous influence around the world; and India despite its massive problems, in many respects has folded within their national sari many of the solutions most of the “developing” world can adopt.
“American” economic decadence and the promise of illusory luxury are the enemies of progress, of earth jurisprudence and intelligent design.
The expansion of the internet is changing the game. It has precipitated us into a convergent global conversation that not only embeds the individual in a systemic scale-free matrix of electro-magnetic feedbacks, but also nurtures the irreversible growth of (literally) radical communities of ethical intent.
China is a big problem! It wants its cake and eat it; it wants to be “just like America, but more so….” at the same time as displaying its uniquely ostentatious innovative credentials as a powerful “green” economic player, whilst actually restricting access to the internet. Watch this space, especially Hong Kong.
These two positions are incommensurable, not to mention the ecosystemic collapse it all entails ~ the impact of trade and resource externalities, in Africa, Latin America and Eurasia; the murderous impacts on the integrity of our biosphere.
To be “American” not only requires the equivalent of extra planets, just to support existing USA greed; but for China to have the same avaricious appetite and indulge the same guzzling redundancies related to consumer privilege will mean not just 3 or 4 extra planets but a dozen!!
Even a child could reason the impossibility of this madness. We know the Chinese love to gamble and are also deeply superstitious, but the current situation is a nightmare of unprecedented proportions. There is no way to avoid the implications.
Successfully navigating these complex “virtual” pathways, requires a certain acuity of information thrift tempered by a rational capacity for cognitive discretion.
Polity now means something so completely different, it is just absurd to try to think in the old ways. A totally new consensus is emerging that is entirely private, yet paradoxically, telemetrically & mutually exponential . This makes conventional lust for speed & the illusions of power, almost meaningless in terms of physical (re-location) & the criteria of “success.” Our time is now infinitely more valuable, but in direct proportion to its rooted experiential contexts.
This novel awareness of specific planetary difference, empowers conversation by choice, & action from knowledge at a distance reinforcing local grounded engagement. It no longer favours didactic selection by necessity from authority, but opens the system to novelty and the opportunity of (minority)self-determination, providing we have access to the ground under our feet.
Our international forecasts are rapidly mutating into a species of multi-cultural rune-reading, rather than prescriptive formulae reliant upon habituated logics ~ since those logics themselves are so readily reducible to perennial archetypal tropes of conditioned expectation.
This inherent ambiguity of diverse language functions and received tendencies, is rendering tactical knowledge universally challenged by a vastly expanded depth of field; while at the same time uniquely and strategically limitless by context, that make boundaries fluid and quite ambivalent, it is also a liberating agency for personal initiatives.
Teaching and education itself is mutating. In the West it is manifesting a process not dissimilar to ceremonial divination & passage rites. Life is becoming its own inscrutable metaphor for evolution. A reciprocal method of reflexive cultural immersion has arisen, that affords us the hitherto unprecedented opportunity to re-code our hereditary metaphysical glyphs of consciousness into subjective empirical mysteries and new models of life-support experience.
When the intensity of these (epigenetic) forms or impressions exceeds our absorption capacity to grapple with them successfully, then the media of their dissemination, like vulgar corporate PR “spells,” the wizardry of religious slogans and Silicone Valley information gestalts, redundant nationalistic reflexes, or psychiatrically approved diagnoses by “neuro-technologies” still inevitably dominate our sense of “us.”
However, once we are fit to entrain the rapidity and power of these meta-tropes, and recognise their manageable sequential relations as significant but not inevitable, we can internalise their representational content by rejecting external artifice.
For any medium to be its own “message” suggests a dynamic of inverted anonymity; but no such thing can exist so long as consciousness remains sovereign and unique; because ethical intent is autonomous. A cuneiform message for example that was read to mean solely “Adam is made of clay,” is just meaningless and irrelevant.
When we begin to control or “own” our media, like we exercise our neural networks, then we can resist & overcome the seductive allure that misdirects.
Spontaneous sharing through reciprocal open intelligence, may be the most obvious extant means of scientifically calibrating the coherent integrity of individuated behaviours, as nothing occurs without recourse to something else. The unpredictable expressions that so terrify oligopolistic paranoiacs ~ be they symbolic initiatives, social commitments, practical ecological exercises or planetary meditations ~ are becoming agencies of irreversible change, especially among youth. We should not underestimate these things, nor neglect the radical agendas that they embody.
This new alchemy is therefore truly geo-mantic and electronically simultaneous. It is reshaping our burgeoning biospheric understanding and will only find political acceptance when it becomes the only viable synergetic tool for preserving the resilience of our planetary food-web, embodying the pure conceptual morality of all common needs ~ governed by conscious aspiration as pure intent. This is not tea-leaf reading, it is practical symbiosis, the basis of all life patterns.
It is not a digital calculus, but the hydrological cycle that actually nourishes the Earth into a functional habitat ~ Owe Aku! The machinery of the Universe lives and breathes. It is sacred. Therefore it is beautiful.
Only when we realise this eternal beauty through our ephemeral actions can we expect to enjoy a heritable tomorrow. Much will change, much will fail, but core energies endure. The universe indwells us.
To survive and thrive we must align ourselves with those cosmic energies; not emulate the vain pretentions of “pseudo politicians” and “curocratic” despots….the imbecile sock puppets who deceive themselves and make a mockery of sanctity.