In the News (from tothetick): “Switzerland is the country that is the most in debt in the world with regard to per-capita debt. Each Swiss citizen is in debt to the tune of an average of 76, 200 euros. But, Switzerland is also the richest country in the world with regard to per-capita financial net assets with an average of 141, 890 euros per person at the end of 2012. …

“Switzerland is also ahead of the USA and Japan. So, does debt bring wealth or is it the other way round?”

My Comment: Today the world has debts and no one is concerned about debts; it’s clear that no one is going to pay the debts. And indeed, they cannot be. No one knows what will happen in the future.

Humanity will reach a state of complete chaos, and only the need to survive will force accepting the method of changing of human nature.
[117808]

Related Material:
The Looming Debt Crisis Will Bury Everyone
A Rich Frenchman Is 205 Times Wealthier Than A Poor Frenchman
We Need To Save The World

Filed under: Crisis, Economy - No Comments →

In the News (from nakedcapitalism): “Over the past few years, I have written a series of articles arguing that the ageing of populations across the globe would have major adverse implications for consumption spending, asset values, and government revenues and taxation.

“I have also argued that the impacts from ageing would likely be most acute in Western Nations, although some developing countries, most notably China, would also be negatively affected.

“The problem stems primarily from the coming end of the demographic ‘sweet spot. ’That is, where there is a high proportion of working age people supporting only a small pool of dependents. Such an advantageous age structure has affected almost all of the world’s major economies and produced a population structure optimal to economic growth – that is, where the largest segments of the population were neither young nor old, but in the middle (i.e. working age). …

“The danger is not in the slower growth. Slow growth is not a bad thing. It’s still growth. The danger is in an expectations gap, in which we consider slower growth unacceptable….

“The high growth rates experienced in the decades leading-up to the global financial crisis were an anomaly and growth is likely to be far more sedate going forward as the population ages and dependency ratios worsen.”

My Comment: Growth will not happen; the world will nonetheless come to equilibrium when we produce exactly what is necessary not to enrich, but to provide everyone with the necessary goods and services and no more. Nature will destroy everything manufactured in excess of this by any means at its disposal: epidemics, natural disasters, wars. Indeed, the plan of nature is to bring all its parts, including humanity, in balance.
[117128]

Related Material:
Jobless G20
The US Works Part-Time
EU Summit To Solve Unemployment

Filed under: Crisis, Economy, Globalization, News - No Comments →

Opinion (Michael Khazin, economist): “The word crisis is losing its original meaning. In fact, the crisis is a tangible change in the quality of life, a decent apartment, a car, clothing, home appliances – a middle-class standard.

“The problem is that the society of welfare of the middle class has encountered a problem called ‘massive credit.’ Today, the average citizen in developed countries spends 25% more than his real income. Equilibrium is achieved by the drop in the level of income of the middle class. Consumption should reach a new equilibrium point – when the mass consumer’s spending will fall by 50% from the current level, that is, will fall twice as much.

“The whole world that stands on the middle class awaits the painful disappearance of the middle class – that will be a real crisis.

“They will become the lumpen, and as a consequence, there will be increased drug abuse, falling birth rates, lowering of cultural level. So, the real crisis is not the economic but social problem.”

My Comment: When we now turn to the middle class, we are met with a complete misunderstanding and inattention to our ideas about the re-education of society and individuals. After all, they still do not feel any threat, and due to their shortsightedness, of course, they do not wish to take part in changing themselves and society.

But the blow will come, and we need to prepare for their readiness to get closer to us. In the meantime, we need to work with part of the lower-middle class, which already feels the crisis and despair.
[117723]

Related Material:
“Inequality Is Holding Back The Recovery”
The European Crisis: Homelessness Spreads To Middle Class
Class Struggle Forms A New World

Filed under: Crisis, Economy, Globalization - No Comments →

In the News (from Zawya): “Global trade is likely to remain sluggish for many years, and emerging economies that have depended on exports to fuel their transformation will have to find new sources of growth, says a UN report.” (Source: inagist)

“’Developing and transition economies are likely to face sluggish import demand for their goods as a result of a protracted period of slow growth in developed countries,’ said The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in a report published September 12. ‘Thus, for policymakers in the former set of countries, reverting to the pre-crisis policy stance with its emphasis on export-oriented growth is not an option.’

“The report suggests that exports from developing and transition economies to developed economies before the global recession seemed to justify the adoption of an export-oriented growth model.

“But the expansion of the world economy, though favorable for many developing countries, was built on unsustainable global demand and financing patterns. Thus, reverting to pre-crisis growth strategies cannot be an option. Rather, in order to adjust to what now appears to be a structural shift in the world economy, many developing and transition economies are obliged to review their development strategies that have been overly dependent on exports for growth. …

“The way the crisis has affected global trade patterns also calls into question the future value of the export-oriented growth model that fuelled the emergence of China and other developing world champions over the past three decades.”

My Comment: Before us there is not a long-term decline, which is then replaced by a rise. It is necessary to find a solution to this progressive fall. But to find it, you first need to make the correct diagnosis, to discover the true cause of our deteriorating condition. Talking about the nature of the periods of crisis and repeating that the crisis is already passing is naive. They did not even want to admit it at all for many years, not until 2008. But this does not solve the problem itself.

It is proposed to create a permanent international unified forum that will accept all the explanations, sort, and publish them. Thus we will attract people’s attention to our common problem. This alone would be its partial solution, because it would unite people. Further, selecting the proposed solutions, addressing their respective authors, asking them to explain (with all this to be shown in the media, our TV, and website). And thus gradually we could select the options to work out the method of Integral Education (IE).
[117224]

Related Material:
The Global Financial Market Is Dead And Is Not Going To Rise
Don’t Be Fooled By The Rise Of The Markets
“The World On The Edge”

Filed under: Crisis, Economy, Globalization, Integral Upbringing, News - No Comments →

Opinion (David Goldman, author of How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)): “Population decline is the elephant in the world’s living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98% over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates – indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere – in the Muslim world.

“The world faces a danger more terrible than the worst Green imaginings. The European environmentalist who wants to shrink the world’s population to reduce carbon emissions will spend her declining years in misery, for there will not be enough Europeans alive a generation from now to pay for her pension and medical care. For the first time in world history, the birth rate of the whole developed world is well below replacement, and a significant part of it has passed the demographic point of no return.

But Islamic society is even more fragile. As Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe’s catastrophically low fertility as if in time-lapse photography. …  By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe. The Islamic world will have the same proportion of dependent elderly as the industrial countries – but one-tenth the productivity. A time bomb that cannot be defused is ticking in the Muslim world.

“Imminent population collapse makes radical Islam more dangerous, not less so. For in their despair, radical Muslims who can already taste the ruin of their culture believe that they have nothing to lose.

“Political science is at a loss in the face of demographic decline and its consequences. The wasting away of nations is an insoluble conundrum for modern political theory, which is based on the principle of rational self-interest. At the threshold of extinction, the political scientists’ clever models break down. We “do not negotiate with terrorists.”…

“A good deal of the world seems to have lost the taste for life. …  In the past, nations that foresaw their own demise fell to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Plague, Famine, and Death. Riding point for the old quartet in today’s more civilized world is a Fifth Horseman: loss of faith. Today’s cultures are dying of apathy, not by the swords of their enemies.

European apathy is the opposite side of the coin of Islamic extremism. Both apathetic Europeans and radical Muslims have lost their connection to the past and their confidence in the future. There is not a great deal of daylight between European resignation to cultural extinction at the hundred-year horizon. …

“Situations of this sort have arisen frequently in history, but never as frequently as today, when so many of the world’s cultures are not expected to survive the next two centuries. A people facing cultural extinction may well choose war, if war offers even a slim chance of survival.

“That is just how radical Islamists view the predicament of traditional Muslim society in the face of modernity. The Islamists fear that if they fail, their religion and culture will disappear into the maelstrom of the modern world. …

“A wealthy and successful Jewish state next to a poor and dysfunctional Palestinian state may imply the end of the moral authority of Islam, and some Palestinians would rather fight to the death than embrace such an outcome. Rather than consign their children to the Western milieu of personal freedom and sexual license, radical Muslims will fight to the death.”

My Comment: That’s why all of humanity is becoming able to accept the method of integral education so that even in this existence and gradually implement the exit to a new dimension of immortality and perfection. Humanity has no other way out . By disseminating the method of integral education, we are accelerating, revealing the only possible solution, and strengthening awareness of the need to make this transition before the forces of nature compel us to do this.
[117343] 

Related Material:
Autumn In The Countries Of “The Arab Spring”
USA: The Rise Of The Anti-Islam Campaign
All The Different Religions Are A Reflection Of Our Disunity

Filed under: Crisis, Globalization - No Comments →

In the News (from The Independent): “King Willem-Alexander delivered a message to the Dutch people from the government in a nationally televised address: the welfare state of the 20^th century is gone.

“In its place a ‘participation society’ is emerging, in which people must take responsibility for their own future and create their own social and financial safety nets, with less help from the national government. …

“’The shift to a ‘participation society’ is especially visible in social security and long-term care,’ the king said, reading out to lawmakers a speech written for him by Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government.

“’The classic welfare state of the second half of the 20^th century in these areas in particular brought forth arrangements that are unsustainable in their current form.’ …

“The king said Tuesday some costs for the care of the elderly, for youth services, and for job retraining after layoffs will now be pushed back to the local level, in order to make them better tailored to local circumstances. …

“Willem-Alexander said that nowadays, people expect and ‘want to make their own choices, to arrange their own lives, and take care of each other.”

My Comment: Ahead there is either savagery or development in integral education, the path of suffering or the path of Light, as predicted by Kabbalah.
[117543]

Related Material:
IMF Tells US To Sort Out Debt, Quickly
No One Has Any Chances
Europe And Demographic Decline

Filed under: Crisis, News - 1 Comment →

Question: There are many signs that predict that humanity is heading towards a global war. Our task is to make people rethink their lives. But it turns out that is some excitement inherent in a potential. Many people even want it…

Answer: In society there are many who want war. During wars, they get rich and climb the rungs of the societal ladder. Wars reorganize and restructure the entire society, overturn monarchies, change presidents, etc. Wars trigger immense reforms.

But the fact is that now the changes should take place in society; that is, society must become globally interconnected. And so if there is a war, it would be terrible as it would reveal all our negative qualities, I would say, the miasmas, which we have to correct particularly through integral interaction. The next war would be universal, not just somewhere in Europe, but also in Africa, Australia, where people currently don’t even feel anything.

This is because the world is global today and people still do not want to adjust to new conditions, do not want to be globally interconnected; the war would have to disclose the necessity for us to connect.

Either we disseminate our knowledge and help others realize that there is no choice but to integrate or nature will unite us by forcing us to go through enormous tragedies such as a nuclear war.
[81510]
From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing,” 5/24/12

Related Material:
Clouds Over The Horizon
The World Must Know The Truth
The Powerlessness Of Billionaires And Governments

Filed under: Crisis, Integral Upbringing - No Comments →

Opinion (Michael Schuman, correspondent for TIME, author of The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia’s Quest for Wealth):“Asia in the latter decades of the 20^th century witnessed perhaps the most remarkable record of poverty alleviation in human history — all thanks to the very capitalist tools of trade, entrepreneurship and foreign investment. … Marx theorized that the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the masses as the world’s wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few, causing economic crises and heightened conflict between the rich and working classes.

“A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right. It is sadly all too easy to find statistics that show the rich are getting richer while the middle class and poor are not. … But the consequence of this widening inequality is just what Marx had predicted: class struggle is back. Workers of the world are growing angrier and demanding their fair share of the global economy. From the floor of the U.S. Congress to the streets of Athens to the assembly lines of southern China, political and economic events are being shaped by escalating tensions between capital and labor to a degree unseen since the communist revolutions of the 20^th century. …

“So far, though, Marx’s revolution has yet to materialize. Workers may have common problems, but they aren’t banding together to resolve them. … Protesters, says Jacques Rancière, an expert in Marxism at the University of Paris, aren’t aiming to replace capitalism, as Marx had forecast, but merely to reform it. ‘We’re not seeing protesting classes call for an overthrow or destruction of socioeconomic systems in place,’ he explains. ‘What class conflict is producing today are calls to fix systems so they become more viable and sustainable for the long run by redistributing the wealth created.’

“Despite such calls, however, current economic policy continues to fuel class tensions. … That leaves open a scary possibility: that Marx not only diagnosed capitalism’s flaws but also the outcome of those flaws.”

My Comment: Egoism will grow to such a size that the force to rise above it —people will feel themselves in it, like in the Egyptian bondage, and will be obliged to get out of it —to switch to a life in the property of mutual bestowal, care, equality, and then to “love thy neighbor as yourself.” Nature leaves us nothing else! The question is only in the transition to a new level of existence—through awareness (integral education and upbringing) or through hard struggles.
[104142]

Related Material:
“Inequality Is Holding Back The Recovery”
Social Inequality Is Killing Everyone
America Is No Longer The Land Of Opportunity

Filed under: Crisis, Economy, Globalization, News - No Comments →

It is common knowledge that valuable raw materials are not renewable and eventually will run out. If oil resources are depleted or the price for oil skyrockets even more, it will trigger an immediate and complete collapse because the majority of goods that we use are made from  oil products.

Even the food we eat is comprised of oil, 90% contains petroleum products. Machines, manufacturing, the delivery of goods, etc. run on oil. In other words, a deficiency of oil will lead us to hunger and misery.

That’s why we must transition to a model of responsible consumption and cease producing and consuming only in order to generate sales of products for short-lived use, quickly throw them away, and buy new things. This kind of consumption contaminates oceans, pollutes land, and depletes the Earth of its finite resources. Eventually, we will arrive at complete devastation.

We have no other choice but to turn to a very rigorous economic model of responsible consumption. In fact, we need much less than we have at this time. We have no need for constructing huge buildings, producing excess food, possessing extra clothes, and so forth. Neither do we need endless plane flights.

We must begin acting rationally; otherwise, we will deprive our children and grandchildren of the hope of leading normal lives. We simply will run out of energy sources. It’s our duty to restructure our modern-day economy. Changes can be achieved only through correct integral upbringing.
[80599]
From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/22/12

Related Material:
Curb Your Appetite
No To Unemployment, Yes To Real Work
Liberation From Excess

Filed under: Crisis, Globalization, Integral Upbringing - No Comments →

Opinion (Michael Khazin, economist): “The EU is faced with the crisis in the next 1.5 years. There are four possible scenarios: the formation of union around Germany, a union around Germany and France, the collapse of the EU in individual countries and the war between them, the blossoming of the EU with possible accession of Algeria, Ukraine, Syria and other countries. In this case, the fate of the EU is not discussed by its leadership. In crisis, the natural geo-economic clusters that exist within the EU will be merged and Europe might fall apart into two clusters: the ‘Roman Empire’ and the ‘Protesting Core.’

“The crisis processes in the EU will be accelerated, and in 1.5 to 2 years very serious problem will begin in the EU that could lead the EU towards dictatorship: not many will be able to save parliamentary democracy. Today’s gay pride parades are growing those who would be hanged on lamp posts—the elite realized that people’s anger needs to be discharged on someone.”

My Comment: Although Khazin visited me and we discussed, as an option, the adoption by the elite of integral education for the EU population, he argues in the line of suffering (Beito), but not in the line of correction (Achishena). I still hope for the best outcome; it depends on our efforts, and not on the summits …
[117406]

Related Material:
Is Europe Ready For Integration?
European Crisis Could Take Years To Solve
Where Are You, Common Europe?

Filed under: Crisis, News - No Comments →