In the News (OpEdNews.com): “Right now, the Wisconsin legislature is considering a bill that would make Wisconsin the nation’s 25^th right-to-work-for-less state. Workers in right to work-for-less-states make less money, get skimpier health benefits and are more likely to die on the job than the workers in non-right-to-work-for-less states.

“The line from Wisconsin Republicans, of course, is that the proposed right-work-for-less law will improve their state’s economy and help build the middle class. But in reality, the exact opposite will happen.

“That’s because right-to-work-for-less laws bring capitalism a lot closer to its natural, unregulated state, and capitalism in its natural, unregulated state tends toward massive levels of inequality that we usually associate with feudalism.

“It looks a lot like this:

“At the top, there is a very small class of super-rich oligarchs and financiers. They’re the monarchs of capitalist society.

“Below them, there is a slightly larger, but still very, very small, class of professionals and mercantilists —doctors, lawyers, shop-owners — who help keep things running for the super-rich and supply the working poor with their needs. They’re nobles or knights of capitalist society.

“And at the very bottom there is the great mass of people who make up the working poor. They have no wealth — in fact they’re typically in debt most of their lives and can barely survive on what little money they make. They’re the peasants of capitalist society.

“So, for average working people, there is no such thing as a middle class in natural capitalism. Wealth accumulates at the very top among the elites, not among everyday working people. Inequality is the default option, just as it was in medieval Europe under feudalism.

“The only ways a true middle class can emerge in a capitalist society are by massive social upheaval (a middle class emerged after the Black Plague in Europe in the 14^th century) or by government intervention.

“Historically, the government is the only thing that can put a check on the growth of feudalism, and it’s what we used here in the United States, from the founding of the republic until the Reagan revolution, to fight the elite and build a middle class from the ground up.

“Tariffs, workers’ rights legislation, the Glass-Steagall Act, higher taxes on the rich, you name it — our government used all of these things to restrain the natural tendency of capitalism towards inequality and to create a middle class.

“But ever since Reagan came to town and brainwashed everyone into believing that ‘government is the problem, not the solution,’ we’ve gutted regulations, busted unions and, as a result, returned capitalism to something resembling its natural, brutish state.

“Inequality is now at a record high, and the richest three percent of the population now controls more than half of all wealth.

“And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the child poverty rate here in the US is now among the worst in the developed world.

“Things have arguably gotten even worse since the recession, as the top one percent has absorbed almost all of the gains of our so-called ‘recovery.’

“The kings and noblemen may be long gone, but here in the US, the business and financial elite reign supreme, and corporate feudalism is the name of the game.”

My Comment: Egoism, if it is not restricted, is itself unlimited, and therefore constantly strives to boundless expansion and fulfillment. The more it gets, the more it feels emptiness. “Having received 100, it desires 200, and having received 200, it desires 400,” according to the law of expansion of the desire by the Light.

And thus until its death; when it dies, there is not even half of the desired in its hands. It is impossible to restrict egoism, because it is the basis of nature, and the only force of nature, except for the Light, the quality of bestowal and love. The pull to balance egoism (the middle line) is only by the knowledge of the wisdom of Kabbalah, which is the science of using egoism correctly.
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Opinion (Mark Leonard, director, European Council on Foreign Relations): “In 1914, the world’s economic order collapsed because its most powerful nations went to war. A century later, the great powers are averse to shedding blood — and perversely, that could be the trigger for another unravelling of the global economy.

“Rulers once sent in the cavalry when they wanted to redraw the map. Now, the main battleground is economic. In many theatres, sanctions have taken the place of military strikes. Competing trade regimes becoming as important as military alliances. The American historian Edward Luttwak calls this a contest of geoeconomics, defined by the ‘grammar of commerce but the logic of war.’

“Trade talks, too, have become an economic weapon. With fading hopes for a global deal, a maze of bilateral and regional trade talks is taking place. But rather than linking the world in a single system, strong regional players are trying to create gated markets with preferential access for their own companies at the expense of weaker states.

“An optimistic theory once held that multinational companies would make once-hostile nations more dependent on each other, and that this would make them a force for peace. Governments, it was held, had an enlightened interest in guaranteeing open, predictable rules that would allow companies to thrive, unimpeded by political borders.

“But rising tensions between the great powers are turning these sometime knights of the corporate world into pawns. The multilateral institutions that were supposed to be the benign invigilators of a new era of win-win co-operation are becoming a battleground for geopolitical competition.”

My Comment: It cannot be otherwise since the world is developing through the development of egoism, so evil is pushing the world forward. Thus, to be optimistic means not to know the basis for the development of the world. It is written, “I created egoism and created the Torah for its correction,” and without the knowledge of correcting egoism by its opposite force, we have only one negative force in the world, which controls it and pushes it to destruction.
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In the News (from OpEdNews.com): “The U.S. economy is picking up steam, but most Americans aren’t feeling it. By contrast, most European economies are still in bad shape, but most Europeans are doing relatively well. What’s behind this? Two big facts. …

“American lawmakers respond to the demands of wealthy individuals (typically corporate executives and Wall Street moguls) and of big corporations — those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.

“The second fact is most big American corporations have no particular allegiance to America. They don’t want Americans to have better wages. Their only allegiance and responsibility is to their shareholders — which often requires lower wages to fuel larger profits and higher share prices. …

“By contrast, big corporations headquartered in other rich nations are more responsible for the wellbeing of the people who live in those nations. …

“Governments in other rich nations often devise laws through tri-partite bargains involving big corporations and organized labor. This process further binds their corporations to their nations.

“Meanwhile, American corporations distribute a smaller share of their earnings to their workers than do European or Canadian-based corporations. ….

“The U.S. middle class is no longer the world’s richest. After considering taxes and transfer payments, middle-class incomes in Canada and much of Western Europe are higher than in U.S. The poor in Western Europe earn more than do poor Americans.

“Finally, when at global negotiating tables – such as the secretive process devising the “Trans Pacific Partnership” trade deal – American corporations don’t represent the interests of Americans. They represent the interests of their executives and shareholders, who are not only wealthier than most Americans, but also reside all over the world.

My Comment: As a result, our egoism will divide the world into several million very rich and the rest in billions of extremely poor, and then it will proceed to destroy unwanted mouths…
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Opinion (Paul Craig Roberts, American economist and columnist for Creators Syndicate): “According to the official economic fairy tale, the US economy has been in recovery since June 2009. This fairy tale supports America’s image as the safe haven, an image that keeps the dollar up, the stock market up, and interest rates down. It is an image that causes the massive numbers of unemployed Americans to blame themselves and not the mishandled economy. Industrial production, properly deflated, remains well below the pre-recession level.

“Economists it appears, have simply vanished from the earth. Or, if some are still present, they have lost their voices and do not speak.

“Consider ‘globalism.’ Every country has been convinced that globalism is imperative and that not to be part of the ‘global economy’ means economic death. In fact, to be part of the global economy means death.

“Understand the economic destruction that globalism has wreaked on the United States. Millions of middle class factory jobs and professional skill jobs such as software engineering and Information Technology have been taken away from the American middle class and given to people in Asia. In the short-run this drops labor costs and benefits the profits of the US corporations that offshore the jobs, but the consequence is to destroy the domestic consumer market as jobs that permit the formation of households are replaced with lowly paid part-time jobs that do not.

“When manufacturing jobs are offshored, the US plants are closed, and the tax base of state and local governments declines. When the governments have trouble servicing their accumulated debt, the tendency is not to meet their pension obligations. This reduces retiree incomes, incomes already reduced by zero or negative interest rates.

“If households cannot form, the demand for housing, home appliances and furnishings declines. College graduates return home to live with their parents.

“Part-time jobs hurt the ability to save. People are only able to purchase cars because they can get 100 percent financing, and more in order to pay off an existing car loan that exceeds the vehicle’s trade-in value, in a six-year loan.

“This unraveling of consumer demand, the basis for our economy, was entirely obvious at the very beginning. Yet junk economists or hired corporate mouthpieces promised Americans a ‘New Economy’ that would provide them with better, higher paying, cleaner jobs to take the place of the jobs moved abroad. As I have pointed out for more than a decade, there is no sign of these jobs anywhere in the economy.

“Globalism, like neoliberal economics, is an instrument of economic imperialism. Labor is exploited, while peoples, cultures, and environments are destroyed. Yet the propaganda is so powerful that people partake of their own destruction.”

My Comment: Egoism is invincible! The Book of Zohar says  that we are being prepared for the poison on the end of the blade that the angel of death brings to the mouth, and the unfortunate human being has no other option but to open his mouth and swallow the drop of poison.

After all, he feels pleasure in it and only afterward—death! Only by the influence of the Upper Light can we bring about its correction. This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah explains to us.
[155660]

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Opinion (Robert B. Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies): “How would you like to live in an economy where robots do everything that can be predictably programmed in advance, and almost all profits go to the robots’ owners?

“Meanwhile, human beings do the work that’s unpredictable – odd jobs, on-call projects, fetching and fixing, driving and delivering, tiny tasks needed at any and all hours – and patch together barely enough to live on.

“Brace yourself. This is the economy we’re now barreling toward. …

“New software technologies are allowing almost any job to be divided up into discrete tasks that can be parceled out to workers when they’re needed, with pay determined by demand for that particular job at that particular moment.

“Customers and workers are matched online. Workers are rated on quality and reliability. The big money goes to the corporations that own the software. The scraps go to the on-demand workers.

“Consider Amazon’s ‘Mechanical Turk.’ Amazon calls it ‘a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence.’

“In reality, it’s an Internet job board offering minimal pay for mindlessly-boring bite-sized chores. Computers can’t do them because they require some minimal judgment, so human beings do them for peanuts — say, writing a product description, for $3; or choosing the best of several photographs, for 30 cents; or deciphering handwriting, for 50 cents. Amazon takes a healthy cut of every transaction.

“This is the logical culmination of a process that began thirty years ago when corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary workers, independent contractors, free-lancers, and consultants.

“It was a way to shift risks and uncertainties onto the workers – work that might entail more hours than planned for, or was more stressful than expected.

“And a way to circumvent labor laws that set minimal standards for wages, hours, and working conditions. And that enabled employees to join together to bargain for better pay and benefits.

“The new on-demand work shifts risks entirely onto workers, and eliminates minimal standards completely.

“In effect, on-demand work is a reversion to the piece work of the nineteenth century – when workers had no power and no legal rights, took all the risks, and worked all hours for almost nothing.

“Amazon’s Mechanical Turks work for pennies, literally. Minimum wage? Time-and-a half for overtime? Amazon says it just connects buyers and sellers so it’s not responsible.

“Defenders of on-demand work emphasize its flexibility. Workers can put in whatever time they want, work around their schedules, fill in the downtime in their calendars. …

“An opportunity to make some extra bucks can seem mighty attractive in an economy whose median wage has been stagnant for thirty years and almost all of whose economic gains have been going to the top. …

“On this measure, the share-the-scraps economy is hurtling us backwards.”

My Comment: I have to repeat again that without connecting people through integral education, they will pointlessly and endlessly exploit each other until they return to the Stone Age. In store for us are sufferings that will show us a way out of this dead end where egoism drives us. But this is the path of suffering.

The path of Light is also possible—drawing the force of correction by our unity in integral education. As soon as we begin to implement it, we will immediately discover its remarkable properties in all aspects of our lives.
[154735]

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In the News (The Economist):  “’VIRTUE,’ according to George Bernard Shaw, ‘is insufficient temptation.’ But new research on the consumption patterns of the environmentally minded suggests that virtue and self-indulgence often go hand-in-hand.

“A recent paper by Uma Karmarkar of Harvard Business School and Bryan Bollinger of Duke Fuqua School of Business finds that shoppers who bring their own bags when they buy groceries like to reward themselves for it. For two years the authors tracked transactions at a supermarket in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, shoppers who brought their own bags bought more green products than those who used the store’s bags. …

“A study from 2011 on water-conservation in Massachusetts shows how. In the experiment, some 150 apartments were divided into two groups. Half received water-saving tips and weekly estimates of their usage; the other half served as a control.

“The households that were urged to use less water did so: their consumption fell by an average of 6% compared with the control group. The hitch was that their electricity consumption rose by 5.6%. The moral licensing was so strong, in other words, that it more or less outweighed the original act of virtue.

“Moral licensing does not seem to occur when virtuous conduct is obligatory. In one study, participants imagined themselves doing community service. Then they were asked to pick between two rewards: an indulgent one (a pair of designer jeans) and a practical one (a vacuum cleaner). If they were told to imagine that they had been sentenced to community service for a driving violation, they were much less likely to choose the jeans than if they pictured themselves as volunteers. The best way to get people to do good, it seems, is to make them feel bad about themselves.”

My Comment: We are commanded to act either by nature (the path of suffering) or by Kabbalah (the path of Light) in order to realize the insignificance of our egoistic nature, from which, in this case, there is an opportunity to escape.
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Opinion (Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum):

“The post-crisis era is over, and the ‘post-post-crisis world’ is upon us. It is time to adopt a new framework of realistic solutions that promote shared prosperity within the global economy of today and tomorrow.

“In this new era, economic growth will occur more slowly – but potentially more sustainably – than it did before the crisis. And technological change will be its driving force.

“The pace of change has been accelerated by the interconnected nature of today’s world. Technological progress is occurring within a complex and deeply integrated ecosystem, meaning that it simultaneously affects economic structures, governments, security arrangements, and people’s daily lives.

“In order to prepare a country to reap the benefits of rapid, far-reaching change, policymakers must account for the entirety of the ecosystem in which it is taking place, ensuring that government, business, and society all adjust to every shift. In other words, competing in the twenty-first century economy will require relentless adaptation.”

My Comment: The changes will positively manifest in us only if we become like them, i.e., will take care to meet them in an integral society. Otherwise, we will be forced to change to more positive relationships with each other, and we will perceive this enforcement as great suffering.
[154747]

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In the News (The Independent): “The world has entered an era of ‘peak food’ production with an array of staples from corn and rice to wheat and chicken slowing in growth – with potentially disastrous consequences for feeding the planet.

“New research finds that the supply of 21 staples, such as eggs, meat, vegetables and soybeans is already beginning to run out of momentum, while the global population continues to soar.

“Peak production refers to the point at which the growth in a crop, animal, or other food source begins to slow down, rather than the point at which production actually declines. However, it is regarded as a key signal that the momentum is being lost and it is typically only a matter of time before production plateaus and, in some cases, begins to fall – although it is unclear how long the process could take.

“‘Just nine or 10 plants species feed the world. But we found there’s a peak for all these resources. Even renewable resources won’t last forever,’ said Ralf Seppelt, of the Helmholtz Centre.

“The simultaneous peaking of crops and livestock comes against a backdrop of a growing population, which is expected to reach nine billion by 2050, requiring the world to produce twice as much food by then as it does now, according to a separate study by the California Academy of Sciences.

“‘That trajectory [of needing to double food production] is not a given but more of a warning. It means we have to change how we eat and use food,’ said Jonathan Foley, the director of the California Academy of Sciences.”

My Comment: When there is overproduction of food in the world and the only problem is correct distribution, nature will drive us forward to the correction of our egoism by all possible means: hunger, climate, military, social, terrorist, family, and all the other problems. There will arise such problems, the existence of which we did not even suspect.
[154309]

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Opinion (Gerald Celente, American trend forecaster, publisher Trends Journal, business consultant): “Today the top trends forecaster in the world spoke with King World News about why the shocking Swiss move is only the beginning of a much larger global meltdown that will lead to the panic he predicted will happen on Wall Street and around the world in 2015.

“It’s finally beginning to dawn on people that there has been no recovery — it has all been a coverup. The quantitative easing money has flooded the globe and created a completely phony markets. The tens of trillions of dollars that were injected into global markets did nothing of any substance to improve the general economy. We see a global collapse. There’s no recovery — it’s been a coverup.”

My Comment: This author predicted the 2008 crisis. We are not able to deal with the crisis because we think it is purely an earthly manifestation, and that its causes are in our eco-political-social blunders.

But the real cause of the crisis is in our miscalculations of the program of nature. Our relationships with each other and with the environment should be developed towards a state of Adam (man), the similarity to the upper force of nature and the property of bestowal and love. It is the complete interaction of the whole of humanity, as all parts of nature on the still, vegetative and animate levels are connected with each other.
[154055]

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Opinion (N. Rubini, Economist): We have to solve problems associated with debt by relying on ourselves rather than reassigning problems to a higher level. Among other reasons, the crisis of the advanced economies is triggered by excessive debt in the private sector – households, banks, and the corporate sector. The financial crisis resulted in disproportional debt at the level of regional, municipal and national governments.

Indebtedness is not exclusively a European problem; it also exists in Chinese economy and constitutes 80% of its GDP. Transferring debt to a higher level is not a legitimate solution since there are no such things as a “Cosmic Ministry of Finances” or some kind of “Central Bank” that can step in and save everyone. We should stop pretending that we are solving the problem when we are in fact simply postponing it to a future date. The difficulties we’re experiencing now will only increase in the future and we’ll eventually hit a wall that will bring all economies to an end.

Comment: The fact is that none of the decision makers can resolve the situation because the solution lies in a new integral perception of society and economics. The crisis will force them to re-evaluate their attitude towards the world instead of looking through the panacea of obsolete theories.
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