In the News (from The Times): The Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King warns Gordon Brown to stop spending.

My Comment: This is correct! Money should be saved for food and a global re-education. This is what the people really need, and what will enable them to come out of the crisis – to come out of egoism.

In the News (from Yahoo): “EU presidency: US stimulus is ‘the road to hell’” The head of the European Union slammed President Barack Obama’s plan to spend nearly $2 trillion to push the U.S. economy out of recession as “the road to hell” that EU governments must avoid.

My Comment: And the same goes for all the other proposals too! They are all based on outdated, egotistical social and economic models.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: Where Did Obama’s Billions Go?
Laitman.com Post: What Will It Take to Make the New Economy Work Right?
A Conversation between the Kabbalist M. Laitman and the Russian economist, publicist, and political scientist M. Khazin
Humankind vs. Human Kindness

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In the News (from The Guardian): “Gordon Brown brokers massive financial aid deal for global economy” World leaders yesterday agreed on a $1.1 trillion injection of financial aid into the global economy. Brown has claimed: “This is the day that the world came together, to fight back against the global recession.” He insisted the deal would save jobs in Britain. The $1.1tn will allow the IMF, the World Bank and others to increase lending to vulnerable countries. There will be a tenfold increase to $250bn in the IMF’s facility allowing members to borrow from other countries’ foreign currency reserves.

My Comment: None of these measures will help. Eventually we will tumble down into another crisis, with only a brief respite in between, like with the Egyptian plagues.

All of this is happening with the sole purpose of helping us recognize that our egoistic nature is evil. Once we recognize this, we will want to get rid of the evil, much like a cancer patient who desires to rid himself of the illness that is spreading throughout his body, yet it cannot be detected or removed.

Precisely this desperate desire enables a person to rid himself of the evil. This is the true exit from Egypt. It is an exit into the world of Light – the revelation of the Upper World and the Upper Force. But how many more summits will it take until we get there?

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: Brown’s Appeal to Bankers’ Conscience Will Go Unheard
Laitman.com Post: The Crisis Will Continue Until We Cry Out, “Enough Egoism!”
Laitman.com Post: The Global Crisis Is the Labor Pains of Birthing a New World

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In the News (from The Brookings Institute): “U.S.-Russian leadership for global, financial and energy security” Andrey Vavilov, Chairman of Institute for Financial Studies in Russia said, “The countries’ consumers of energy resources right now, also, go ahead with their actions, which are not good for the cooperation between them and the countries who produce energy… And unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, the most prosperous way of action doesn’t deal with the actions of one country only. It can be efficient only in the framework of the global cooperation.”

My Comment: With each passing day, the economists, politicians and analysts will become more enlightened. The solution is clear: we need a single, universal governing body. And this is something that can be accomplished by politicians and economists.

However, they will not know by which criteria they should govern unless they learn the structure of the new world, as explained by the science of Kabbalah.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: “God Will Help” Is Not Our Remedy
From Chaos to Harmony: “The Crisis as an Opportunity to Restore Balance”

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In the News (from Number10.gov.uk): A portion of the speech delivered by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at St Paul’s Cathedral on March 31 2009: “Most people who have worked hard to build up their firm or shop understand responsible risk taking but don’t understand why any company would give rewards for failure or how some people have grown fabulously wealthy making failed bets with other people’s money. And our task today is to bring our financial markets into closer alignment with the values held by families and business-people across the country.”

My Comment: The bankers will not understand these words. Here’s why.

Our egoism undergoes gradual development, from bodily desires (food, sex, and home) to social desires, which develop under societal influence (wealth, power, fame, knowledge). Some people have one desire that prevails over all the other desires, and such a person cannot understand the other desires. For example, someone who is on the level of “wealth” cannot be attracted by the higher desires like power, fame, or knowledge. And this is how bankers are.

Politicians, on the other hand, are bit higher. They have desires for “power” and “fame,” and are willing to buy these things for money, whereas bankers are willing to give up anything for more money. Therefore, Brown’s appeal to them simply won’t be heard.

What should we do instead? Provide an education using the society’s influence. This will accelerate people’s development, since society affects the social desires by considering them more or less important.

The practical steps we need to take are to teach the public about the new global world using all the media channels. People must learn the concept of global interdependency, where every person  depends on every other. This is a law of Nature, and we must begin to apply it to ourselves. We cannot avoid implementing this Law, and by implementing it, we will benefit in all aspects of life.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: “God Will Help” Is Not Our Remedy
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In the News (from Bundespraesident): “German President Calls for Unity in Face of Economic Crisis” The crisis is now teaching us that destruction lies at the core of freedom that knows no constraints. But the market must have rules and a sense of ethics. That is precisely why the crisis confirms the value of the social market economy. It is more than an economic system. It is a system of values. And we must subject the major financial institutions to uniform international supervision.

My Comment: However, as soon as they begin to create such a system, they will either discover that it’s unfeasible or twist it into a Soviet-like system that will only lead to further conflicts and wars. Only by disseminating Kabbalah – the method of man’s correction – will we be able to create a correct system of interconnections between us on all levels – social, political, economic, moral, domestic, and so on.

Meanwhile, the crisis will continue to progress step by step, in waves, affecting the economy, our health, the ecology, the harvests, and so on. Through these storms and descents, humanity will begin to realize that there is an intelligent force of Nature controlling the crisis in order to develop us. Humanity will then begin to search for a connection with this force and will come to Kabbalah on their own. However, our dissemination will accelerate this path.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: We Must Rise to a Higher Level of Consciousness to Solve Our Problems
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In the News (from The Wall Street Journal): “WTO Details Rising Protectionism, Pushes Countries to Reverse Course” A steady buildup of protectionist measures could “slowly strangle” international trade and undercut the effectiveness of national stimulus plans, according to a report the World Trade Organization sent its 153 members.

My Comment: Moreover, since estrangement of countries goes against Nature’s general tendency, which favors our unification, we will sink into an even greater crisis. We will then see the appearance of Nazi regimes and the Third World War.

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A question I received: Many of the students studying in our virtual Learning Center live in North America – the place that has been hit by the crisis the most. How should they look at the crisis? How can their situation be eased, and what can they do?

My Answer: Unlike other countries, America has several unique qualities. First of all, it is a melting pot containing the whole of “Babylon” – all 70 nations of the world, and this is beneficial to it. On the other hand, Americans are at the extreme edge of egoism: each person desires to receive everything for himself only and demands personal freedom, and this is the reason America is receiving such enormous blows. So, on one hand, they are in difficult circumstances, but on the other hand, it may be easier for them to accept the concepts of community and reciprocity.

Their enormous strength will help them to quickly realize that even this cannot save them. A person with no money thinks that if he had money, he would be saved from the crisis. However, one who has money and an opportunity to print dollars will quickly find that he has no power at all, despite the fact that he owns the Bank of America.

Americans wished to set an example for the whole world as the country of consumerism. But this concept is already outdated and they are realizing their mistake. America is the right place to study the world’s egoism. It is the only place in the world where egoism dominates in the open, in a form that’s understood and accepted by everyone, without any compromises or pretenses. This is why what is happening in America will influence the entire world. Let’s hope the understanding will come quickly.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: Will “My House Is My Fortress” Become the New American Ideology?
Laitman.com Post: The Moment of Truth for the American People
Laitman.com Post: “The End of America” – Or Is It?

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In the News (from The New Scientist): The meeting in London last week marked the revival of the Club of Rome, the think tank that almost 30 years ago gave the world the phrase “limits to growth.” Now the club is back, in our hour of need. Yvo de Boer, the UN’s chief climate negotiator, agreed that “the financial crisis is the result of our living beyond our financial means. The climate crisis is a result of our living beyond our planet’s means.”

My Comment: For now we must try to find ways to optimize consumption on the global scale, not via international agreements that we’ve been using until now, but forcibly, and without delay or exceptions. To this end, we need a global government, or at least a single government for North America, Europe and Russia. Together they’ll be able to impose the method on the rest of the world. But then again, Russia, which always seems to do things “its own way,” may not be all that necessary.

This unification will put these countries in balance, in relative equivalence to Nature (the Creator), and this will yield good results. It will also serve as an example to others, as Baal HaSulam writes in “The Future Generation.”

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: The Way Out of the Recession Is to Change Our Attitude
Laitman.com Post: Prince Charles on the Crisis: “We Have to Alter Our Perspective of the World”
Laitman.com Post: Excessive Production Is a Thing of the Past
Laitman.com Post: How Can We Reach Balance With Nature and Stop Global Warming?

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In the News (from The Financial Times): “Obama’s bank plan could rob the taxpayer” A thinly veiled attempt to transfer up to hundreds of billions of dollars of US taxpayer funds to the commercial banks, by buying toxic assets from the banks at far above their market value … is dressed up as a market transaction but that is a fig-leaf, since the government will put in 90 per cent or more of the funds and the “price discovery” process is not genuine. It is no surprise that stock market capitalization of the banks has risen about 50 per cent from the lows of two weeks ago. Taxpayers are the losers, even as they stand on the sidelines cheering the rise of the stock market. It is their money fueling the rally, yet the banks are the beneficiaries.

My comment: People are being cheated – the banks are getting the profits, while the people are cheering at the fake numbers they’re given, not understanding that they are being swindled.

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Laitman.com Post: Bankers’ Greed Will Wreck the World Unless We Take the Needed Measures
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I just received a letter from one of my students in America, who writes that when he and his wife went to a store, they saw a lot of people in line to buy weapons. There were different kinds of weapons on sale, even a machine gun. The store clerk said that some of the weapons were out of stock and they were waiting for an additional order to come in. He explained that it’s because people have been buying weapons like crazy! In the past, people used to stock up on food before a famine, and in a similar way, they’re now stocking up on guns. But who will these guns be used on?

Are they scared that someone will attack America? Or are they scared that hunger will bring them to a situation where they’ll have to start attacking and stealing from each other? It will be the same all over the world, and this is exactly where the recognition of evil will come from!
Today every person wants to lock himself up in his house (or bunker) where he will have food, medicine, and other necessities for the rest of his days. And he wants this bunker to be able to withstand the entire world. This is what our ego instinctively wants.

People have to think about tomorrow, and they have to take care of themselves. Yet, at the same time, they should also think about how to have a connection with others tomorrow, since then they won’t have to use others in order to get the necessities.

Today Americans are isolating from each other more and more, and this is bringing them closer to the recognition of evil. However, all of this is the dawn of a good state. The Americans will realize that it is the wrong path only after they have gone through some of it.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: In the News, “US a Likely Candidate for Civil Violence”
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Laitman.com Post: We Have to Reveal the Magnificence of the System We’re In

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