Opinion (Michael Schuman, correspondent for TIME, author of The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia’s Quest for Wealth): “With the global economy in a protracted crisis, and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant incomes, Marx’s biting critique of capitalism — that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive — cannot be so easily dismissed. 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. …

“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.

“That leaves open a scary possibility: that Marx not only diagnosed capitalism’s flaws but also the outcome of those flaws. If policymakers don’t discover new methods of ensuring fair economic opportunity, the workers of the world may just unite. Marx may yet have his revenge.”

My Comment: And there will be the Spanish, Greek, and then the EU and then the U.S. “spring” … if the method of correction of people and society is not accepted.
[103889]

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In the News (from Reuters): “Standard and Poor’s sees a high risk that Spain, Italy, Portugal and France will not be able to carry through necessary reforms as the unemployed become less willing to put up with austerity, S&P’s Germany head Torsten Hinrichs told a newspaper.

“The high unemployment in Spain, Italy and France is socially explosive,” Hinrichs was quoted as saying in Monday’s Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung.

“’There has to be a social consensus for saving measures. High unemployment … does not help.’

“Hinrichs said the people of Spain and Portugal had already proven they were willing to bear with austerity measures, but ‘this cannot continue forever.’”

My Comment: It is necessary to immediately announce the introduction of integral education among the recipients of unemployment benefits and to test its effectiveness in a month, then social explosion would not be a threat, and on the contrary, “out of nowhere” a general sense of security and wellbeing will rise. It is elementary psychology …
[103602]

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Opinion (Lars Seier Christensen, co-chief executive officer of Saxo Bank): “There’s a lot of political capital invested in the euro. It is very much a political project rather than an economic project. But at the end of the day, I believe that the challenges are so great that something has to give. And unfortunately, reality has a way in the end of reinforcing itself over policies, and I think that’s exactly what’s going to happen here.”

“’… The euro’s recent rally is illusory and the shared currency is set to fail because the continent hasn’t supported it with a fiscal union.

“‘The whole thing is doomed,’ Christensen said in an interview at the bank’s Dubai office. ‘Right now we’re in one of those fake solutions where people think that the problem is contained or being addressed, which it isn’t at all’” (Source: Bloomberg).

My Comment: I don’t feel like gloating with respect to this issue, but feel only pain when just 20 years ago, on a trip to the French Atlantic coast, I saw big campaign trucks everywhere that had cards and literature about the importance and profitability of the European Union. And I was saying to my companions how impossible it all was because the economy is the CONNECTION between us, and if it is between egoists, then it would not lead to anything good. That is, a human being has to be corrected first. Today, we have come to this result.
[103518]

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Opinion (Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management, author of Enterprise 2.0 and Race Against the Machine (with Erik Brynjolfsson): “As it turns out, when tens of millions of people are unemployed or underemployed, there’s a fair amount of interest in what technology might be doing to the labor force. And as I look at the conversation, it strikes me that it’s focused on exactly the right topic, and at the same time, it’s missing the point entirely. The topic that it’s focused on, the question is whether or not all these digital technologies are affecting people’s ability to earn a living, or, to say it a little bit different way, are the droids taking our jobs? And there’s some evidence that they are. …

“Corporate profits are quite high. In fact, if you include bank profits, they’re higher than they’ve ever been. And business investment in gear, in equipment and hardware and software is at an all-time high. So the businesses are getting out their checkbooks. …

“So, in short, yeah, the droids are coming for our jobs. In the short term, we can stimulate job growth by encouraging entrepreneurship and by investing in infrastructure, because the robots today still aren’t very good at fixing bridges. But in the not-too-long-term, I think within the lifetimes of most of the people in this room, we’re going to transition into an economy that is very productive but that just doesn’t need a lot of human workers, and managing that transition is going to be the greatest challenge that our society faces. Voltaire summarized why. He said, ‘Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.’”

My Comment: If we exclude people’s revolt against machines and technological progress in general, then the only thing that remains is for us to occupy the unemployed—the most reliable and necessary for this—is integral education in which people begin to understand the essence of the era and of the necessary changes that should occur in them and in society.
[103456]

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Opinion (Robert McChesney, communication professor, author of Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy): “‘When capitalism is mentioned, it is usually as the ‘free market,’ which is taken as a benevolent given, almost a synonym for democracy,’ McChesney writes. Yet ‘really existing capitalism’ doesn’t fit with the free-market ‘catechism’ or with democracy, he writes, ‘the crisis of our times is that capitalism undermines democracy.’

“The Internet has been transformed from the noncommercial and public space that many dreamed of in its earlier days to one that ‘has been commercialized, copyrighted, patented, privatized, data-inspected, and monopolized,’ McChesney writes.

“As part of that process, advertising has been transformed online in a way that eliminates previous notions of privacy, and the government has surveillance powers that were once unimaginable. Large telecommunication and entertainment corporations that once appeared to be vulnerable, because of the Internet, have prospered through their influence in a ‘corrupt’ policymaking process.

“The Internet giants that have risen over the last two decades are not the progressive force some think them to be, and have prospered as the result of monopoly privileges, exploited labor, and government policies and subsidies, he says. …

“This book comes now, McChesney writes, because he sees the Internet as having crystallized to a significant degree. ‘We are in a position, in some respects for the first time, to make sense of the Internet experience and highlight the cutting-edge issues it poses for society,’ he writes.

“We also are in a better position to understand what decisions can be made that might determine the future of the Internet and its influence in shaping the society, he says in the book.

“Among his prescriptions: broadband availability to all for free as a basic right, strict regulation of advertising and a sharp reduction or elimination of the tax write-off of advertising as a business expense, heavy regulation of digital “natural monopolies” or conversion of them to nonprofit services, large public investments in journalism, net neutrality, strict privacy regulations that make online activities as private as correspondence in the mail, and strong legal barriers against militarization of the Internet and use of it for warrantless surveillance.”

My Comment: The Internet is an imprint of modern society, and all our vices appear on it in an exaggerated form since admission is free, reaction is instant, and distribution is unlimited. As long as we don’t start changing ourselves, our Internet will not change. So, all the attempts are in vain.
[103346]

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In the News (from Huffington Post): “The idea of the universe as a ‘giant brain’ has been proposed by scientists – and science fiction writers – for decades.

“But now physicists say there may be some evidence that it’s actually true. In a sense.

“According to a study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, the universe may be growing in the same way as a giant brain – with the electrical firing between brain cells ‘mirrored’ by the shape of expanding galaxies.

“The results of a computer simulation suggest that ‘natural growth dynamics’ – the way that systems evolve – are the same for different kinds of networks – whether it’s the internet, the human brain or the universe as a whole. … The result, they argue, is that the universe really does grow like a brain. The study raises profound questions about how the universe works.”

My Comment: All the worlds are arranged by a single scheme HaVaYaH—four stages of development, everything and every part of them. A unified force of absolute bestowal dominates the entire system, manages it, and predetermines everything, including our destiny. We have an opportunity to  change ourselves, to keep “up” with its step-by-step development all the time, and thus feel comfortable. Moreover, we can predict the future states in advance, and changing ourselves, we perceive them not as suffering, but as desirable. This is the purpose of the science of Kabbalah.
[103284]

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Opinion (Evgeny P. Bazhanov, President of the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Russian political scientist, historian, writer, and diplomat): “In a globalizing world, even the countries located at opposite ends of the earth cannot live without each other. Moreover, the neighbors must learn to work together. In Europe, which for centuries was torn by conflicts and bloody wars, the most advanced integrated alliance has been forged, which practices a common strategy for security and development.

“In South-East Asia, they have learned to co-operate in the framework of the ASEAN states with a complex history of relationships with each other, with different ideological and religious preferences. Integral processes are developing in North and South America, in South Asia, and Africa. There is an understanding of the importance of integration in the blazing Middle East.

“In its turn, the post-Soviet region is bound to integration by a common historical heritage, geographical proximity, economic  interdependence and cultural closeness, similarity of the addressed problems. Integration processes will develop gradually, not without delay, even failures, but, of course, no divorce threatens us.”

My Comment: As a result of our development, the complete unification of all of humanity must occur in full similarity to nature, but the question is in what way will we come to a common decision about it and its realization as the only true condition. Kabbalah says that the third state, the corrected state, already exists, but the path to it is to be selected—the short good path or the long painful path.
[103280]

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In the News (from PsyBlog): “No matter what it is—a pair of jeans, a car or even a house—in that moment when an object becomes your property, it undergoes a transformation.

“Because you chose it and you associate it with yourself, its value is immediately increased. If someone offers to buy it from you, the chances are you want to charge much more than they are prepared to pay.

“That is a cognitive bias called ‘the endowment effect.’

“It’s the reason that some people have lofts, garages and storage spaces full of junk with which they cannot bear to be parted. Once you own something, you tend to set its financial value way higher than other people do.

“When tested experimentally the endowment effect can be surprisingly strong. One study found that owners of tickets for a basketball match overvalued them by a factor of 14. In other words people wanted 14 times more than others were prepared to pay. However, this is a particularly high one and the ratio will vary depending on what it is.

“The endowment effect is particularly strong for things that are very personal and easy to associate with the self, like a piece of jewelry from your partner. Similarly we also overvalue things we’ve had for a long time.”

My Comment: Such is the effect of our egoism. Loss is felt more painfully than a lost opportunity of an acquisition of equivalent value because egoism includes a thing in “its” possession, and “one’s own” has more value than “outside of oneself.”
[103186]

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In the News (from Lettera): “Expenses are being cut back on everything (health, school education, social assistance), but not on the military needs. The crisis prompts reducing military spending; moreover, it is possible to join forces to cut costs.

“But no country is going to reduce military spending, even when there are no drugs in hospitals or a supply of blood for transfusions. The EU pays the salary of members of the armed forces, the number of whom is three times greater than in the USA – $ 360 billion a year. The US military spending is $ 711 billion.

“The creation of a unified European army would save more than 100 billion euros, but the military industry is one of the most corrupt; each year, $ 20 billion is spent on bribes. If EU leaders showed rigidity in relation to the military industry, the voters would not have voted against a unified Europe.”

My Comment: Everything is tied to one problem—our egoism. It must be corrected at its root instead of wasting time on investigations because the Hydra’s heads always grow in new places! There is only one remedy against egoism: the force of bestowal, which can be attracted through integral workshops. You can try it and make sure!
[103023]

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Opinion (Lars Seier Christensen, CEO of the SAXO Bank): “It is difficult to describe the weekend bailout package to Cyprus in any other way. The confiscation of 6.75 percent of small depositors’ money and 9.9 percent of big depositors’ funds is without precedence that I can think of in a supposedly civilised and democratic society. But maybe the European Union (EU) is no longer a civilised democracy? …

“Depositors in other prospective bailout countries must be running scared – is it safe to keep money in an Italian, Spanish or Greek bank any more? I don’t know, must be the answer. …

“This is a major, MAJOR game changer and the fallout will be with us for a long time to come. I believe it could be the beginning of the end for the Eurozone as this is an unbelievable blow to the already challenged trust that might be left among investors. Talk about a possible own goal.

“Market reaction? it must be very good for gold – and for safe-haven countries like Switzerland, Singapore and economically more healthy non-Euro countries in, for example, Scandinavia. I would think the EURO and associated markets will be undermined by increasing lack of confidence when the full implications become clear for investors.

“This is full-blown socialism and I still cannot believe this really happened.

“Be careful out there…”

My Comment: We are being forced to change all the rules, then the game itself, and then the players, that is, it will force people to correct their nature because they will become convinced that there is no other way out.
[103181]

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