Opinion (Shawn Tully, senior editor-at-large, CNNMoney): “From a quick look at the headline numbers, France doesn’t appear nearly as stressed as the derisively titled ‘PIIGS,’ Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. …

“A deeper look shows that France is mired in no less than an economic crisis. The eurozone’s second-largest economy (2012 GDP: 2 trillion euros) is suffering more than any other member from a shocking deterioration in competitiveness. Put simply, France’s products – its cars, steel, clothing, electronics – cost far too much to produce compared with competing goods both from Asia and its European neighbors, including not just Germany but even Spain and Italy. … Even tourism is suffering because of the France’s high prices. …

“In fact, it’s France – not Greece or Spain – that now poses the greatest threat to the euro’s survival. …

“It’s unclear when the crisis that’s going mostly unacknowledged by investors and the Hollande government will erupt into a panic. The chance that France will lower labor costs by the 20% to 30% needed to restore growth is practically zero. Reforms can only happen when the economy is expanding and citizens feel good about the future, the antithesis of the gloom now enveloping France.

“France is heading towards an economic Bastille. The longer it stays on that path, the more possible that the eurozone regime it labored so hard to create will crumble.”

My Comment: The roller of evolutionary development inevitably pushes humanity to become aware of a new system of global interconnection. In our unity, we must reveal the property of bestowal without nullifying the will to receive but above it. In this case, we will have two properties at the same time and will be able to reveal the property of Creator in their being opposite and complements.

Only in connection with each other can we be in two opposite properties (desires, vectors): the natural—to receive and the acquired one—to bestow. We develop them as two planes: the lower one, the desire to receive, develops through the revelation of broken Reshimot naturally, and the upper one, the desire to bestow, we develop by our efforts. Their relative location is called “faith (bestowal) above reason (reception).”
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Opinion (Slavoj Žižek, Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, professor at the European Graduate School): “The idea is that, in a complex economic situation like today’s, the majority of the people are not qualified to decide – they are unaware of the catastrophic consequences that would ensue if their demands were to be met.

“This line of argument is not new. In a TV interview a couple of years ago, the sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf linked the growing distrust for democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a ‘valley of tears.’ After the breakdown of socialism, one cannot directly pass to the abundance of a successful market economy: limited, but real, socialist welfare and security have to be dismantled, and these first steps are necessarily painful. The same goes for Western Europe, where the passage from the post-second world war welfare state to the new global economy involves painful renunciations, less security, less guaranteed social care. For Dahrendorf, the problem is encapsulated by the simple fact that this painful passage through the ‘valley of tears’ lasts longer than the average period between elections, so that the temptation is great to postpone the difficult changes for the short-term electoral gains.

“For him, the paradigm here is the disappointment of the large strata of post-communist nations with the economic results of the new democratic order: in the glorious days of 1989, they equated democracy with the abundance of western consumerist societies; and 20 years later, with the abundance still missing, they now blame democracy itself. …

“What is new today is that, with the financial crisis that began in 2008, this same distrust of democracy – once constrained to the third world or post-communist developing countries – is gaining ground in the developed west itself: what was a decade or two ago patronising advice to others now concerns ourselves.

“The least one can say is that this crisis offers proof that it is not the people but experts themselves who do not know what they are doing. In Western Europe we are effectively witnessing a growing inability of the ruling elite – they know less and less how to rule. Look at how Europe is dealing with the Greek crisis: putting pressure on Greece to repay debts, but at the same time ruining its economy through imposed austerity measures and thereby making sure that the Greek debt will never be repaid. …

“And therein resides the true message of the ‘irrational’ popular protests all around Europe: The protesters know very well what they don’t know; they don’t pretend to have fast and easy answers; but what their instinct is telling them is nonetheless true – that those in power also don’t know it. In Europe today, the blind are leading the blind.

My Comment: The process of growing should break out in the leading countries to force management to recognize its inability to understand and control what is happening. At the same time, more people will recognize the need to change their attitude towards themselves and the world, feeling the necessity to change not the world, its management, system, but to change the human being first, by way of the widespread implementation of a short course (2-3 months) in integral education, to raise awareness of the general population to the level where nature forces us to rise. After that, it is possible to introduce gradual reforms at all levels and systems of society.
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In the News (from Delovaya Gazeta): “During the financial crisis, consumers are not only buying fewer goods, but also returning to barter – the exchange of goods, which allows customers to save money. In addition, social networks influence the behavior of European consumers. Considering the expenses of Europeans, they increasingly resort to alternative ways to get the desired goods, exchanging things. …

“Sharing accommodations, wholesale purchase and mainly purchasing second-hand goods are increasingly helping customers make profit. …

“At the same time, there is a growing awareness of social responsibility. 55% are trying to reduce the consumption of water and energy for the sake of environmental conditions; the demand on organic products is rising.

“These changes in people’s behavior are influenced by the Internet. Today, it plays a significant role in the development of social consciousness and behavior. A quarter of respondents also believe that people’s views are shaped by the social networks (Facebook, Twitter), where they look for reviews before buying.”

My Comment: Under the pressure, egoism will be forced to yield and look for new opportunities for fulfillment. This gradually trains people by pressuring them. It is much easier and faster to become adjusted to new conditions by the method of integral education.
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In the News (from DailyMail): “Brain scans could reveal whether new couples have found long-lasting love, researchers have revealed.

“Scientists noticed patterns in the brain activity of volunteers who had recently fallen in love and found they could predict whether the couples would be together three years later.

“The findings showed even if volunteers believed they were passionately in love when their brains were scanned, by examining their neuron activity scientists could detect whether those feelings were strong enough for the relationship to last.

“Volunteers were shown photographs of their partner and were asked to think of memories of them while their brains were scanned.

“Where volunteers’ brains showed more activity in the caudate tail area – which reacts emotionally to visual beauty – but less in the medial orbitofrontal cortex – the area linked to criticism and judgment – their relationships tended to last.

“Professor Arthur Aron, a ­social psychologist at Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, said: ‘All of those involved in the study felt very intensely in love with their partner and this was reflected in their scans, but there were some subtle indicators that showed how stable those feeling were.

“If that strong feeling was combined with signs that they could regulate emotions, to see the partner positively and deal with conflict, then it seems to be really productive in staying with the person.”

My Comment: Everything has to be balanced in nature. There are only two forces, positive and negative, giving and receiving, and they should be in harmonious balance. This is the guarantee of stability in any system: the family, the country,or the world.
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Opinion (Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University and Nobel laureate): “The long malaise into which the economy seems to be settling, and the growing divide between the 1 percent and the rest — an inequality not only of outcomes but also of opportunity. To me, these problems are two sides of the same coin: with inequality at its highest level since before the Depression, a robust recovery will be difficult in the short term, and the American dream — a good life in exchange for hard work — is slowly dying.

“There are four major reasons inequality is squelching our recovery. The most immediate is that our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven our economic growth. …

“Second, the hollowing out of the middle class since the 1970s, a phenomenon interrupted only briefly in the 1990s, means that they are unable to invest in their future, by educating themselves and their children and by starting or improving businesses.

“Third, the weakness of the middle class is holding back tax receipts. ….

“Fourth, inequality is associated with more frequent and more severe boom-and-bust cycles that make our economy more volatile and vulnerable. … The International Monetary Fund has noted the systematic relationship between economic instability and economic inequality, but American leaders haven’t absorbed the lesson.

Inequality leads to political inequality and a broken decision-making process. High unemployment, of course, depresses wages. Adjusted for inflation, real wages have stagnated or fallen. … Since the Great Recession, most of the increase in the nation’s wealth has gone to the very top.

“Meanwhile, as incomes have stagnated or fallen, tuition has soared. … We could have recognized that when young people are jobless, their skills atrophy. We could have made sure that every young person was either in school, in a training program or on a job. Instead, we let youth unemployment rise to twice the national average.  The children of the rich can stay in college or attend graduate school, without accumulating enormous debt, or take unpaid internships to beef up their résumés. Not so for those in the middle and bottom. We are sowing the seeds of ever more inequality in the coming years. …

“Globalization, and the unbalanced way it has been pursued, has shifted bargaining power away from workers: firms can threaten to move elsewhere, especially when tax laws treat such overseas investments so favorably. This in turn has weakened unions.”

My Comment: Inequality is the principle criterion of our world—egoism; it can be eradicated only through integral education which everyone should go through so that humanity can get rid of its evil and survive.
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Opinion (Christophe Bernard, Chief Strategist of the Vontobel Group): “Money serves as a foundation for trust. We take for granted that we can go to a bakery and exchange it for bread. A banknote itself costs nothing, in contrast to silver and gold coins, which have material value. …

“The current situation is quite new because the relationship between currencies and gold was destroyed only 40 years ago, but gold as payment was introduced in the time of Croesus, the king of Lydia, in 560 BC and since then has maintained its purchasing power. In Babylon, an ounce of gold could buy 350 loaves of bread, about the same as in our days.

“The attachment to gold is unreasonable in our time because the amount of gold that can be extracted is limited, and if the amount of money depended on it, it would slow down economic growth. …

“If since 2008, the central banks had not flooded markets with cheap money, we would not have a depression with unpredictable consequences. So far, these measures were correct. But I wonder how they are now going, on the one hand, to reduce the mountain of debt and, on the other hand, to reduce incredibly inflated balance sheets?”

My Comment: Gold and silver were used as a payment more than 3,000 years ago; we read in the Torah that Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah for 400 shekels of silver. And even before that, in ancient Babylon, that is, 3,500 years ago, gold coins were in use.

The strategists writes, “The attachment to gold is unreasonable in our time because the amount of gold that can be extracted is limited, and if the amount of money depended on it, it would slow down economic growth.” But precisely this economic progress has to be gradually stopped! And it is no longer progress, but accumulation of empty monetary mass.

What will banks do with cheap money? Either we will do this ourselves or Nature will correct everything itself: The entire mass of money will be reduced to the mass needed for existence. There is no need for a big mass of money, and no more gold is mined!
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Opinion (George Soros, investor, philanthropist, chairman of Soros Fund Management): “As Open Europe blog notes, Soros fears that ‘there is a real danger that the [Euro] solution to the financial problem creates a really profound political problem.’ The interview with Dutch TV shows Soros’ grave concerns that the Southern nations are ‘being pushed unwittingly… into a long lasting depression,’ as Germany’s austerity program is ‘counter-productive – cannot actually succeed.’ Just as we recently noted the similarities between the European Union and the Soviet Union, so Soros believes the ‘Euro’ itself is ‘bound to break up the European Union.’ It may take generations, he notes, as a terrible tragedy of ‘lost political freedom and economic prosperity.’”

Opinion (Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament): “As President of the European Parliament I was forced to acknowledge that in October 2012 the EU was already essentially insolvent. Although the bills for November and December had not yet been submitted, in October the shortfall already amounted to EUR 9 billion. … In a laborious process which did indeed see some Member States refuse for weeks on end to make outstanding payments, two-thirds of the shortfall of EUR 9 billion was scraped together. The remainder was carried over to the financial year 2013, as were the shortfalls for November and December 2012, which had not even been taken into account in the supplementary budget. Accordingly, we effectively began 2013 with a deficit of EUR 16 billion.”

My Comment: Undoubtedly, any attempt to impose unification without appropriate education to change a person from egoistic to integral will give the same results in different countries and systems because we are dealing with the system of nature, that is, with science, so we should comply with its laws!
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Opinion (Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in economics and professor at Columbia University): “The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos has lost some of its pre-crisis panache. After all, before the meltdown in 2008, the captains of finance and industry could trumpet the virtues of globalization, technology, and financial liberalization, which supposedly heralded a new era of relentless growth. …

“Those days are gone. But Davos remains a good place to get a sense of the global zeitgeist.
“It goes without saying that developing and emerging-market countries no longer look at the advanced countries as they once did. But a remark by one mining company executive from a developing country caught the spirit of change. In response to one development expert’s heartfelt despair that unfair trade treaties and unfulfilled promises of aid have cost the developed countries their moral authority, he retorted: ‘The West never had any moral authority.’ Colonialism, slavery, the splintering of Africa into small countries, and a long history of resource exploitation may be matters of the distant past to the perpetrators, but not so to those who suffered as a result.

“If there is a single topic that concerned the assembled leaders the most, it is economic inequality. The shift in the debate from just a year ago seems dramatic: no one even mentions the notion of trickle-down economics anymore, and few are willing to argue that there is a close congruence between social contributions and private rewards.

“While the realization that America is not the land of opportunity that it has long claimed to be is as disconcerting to others as it is to Americans, inequality of opportunity at the global scale is even greater….

“The Associated Press organized a sobering session on technology and unemployment: Can countries (particularly in the developed world) create new jobs – especially good jobs – in the face of modern technology that has replaced workers with robots and other machines in any task that can be routinized? …

“Those suffering the most are the young, whose life prospects will be badly hurt by the extended periods of unemployment that they face today. …

“… If the euro was to survive in the long run, there would have to be a fiscal and banking union, which would require more political unification than most Europeans are willing to accept. …

“In the last 25 years, we have moved from a world dominated by two superpowers to one dominated by one, and now to a leaderless, multi-polar world.”

My Comment: It may seem that the world is better and more equal without strong leaders, but in the right system, there is always a hierarchy, as in the body, the one who is more caring and responsible is higher, as in the body, the brain and other vital organs that live not for themselves, but for the entire body.
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In the News (from Popsci): “If you need an American to do something, don’t mention the common good, team work or caring for others. A new study in Psychological Science this month found that trying to get Americans to think and act interdependently failed-and may have even decreased motivation.

“After being prompted to think about either independence or interdependence, a group of Stanford students were given difficult word puzzles to solve, and later, a physical challenge (squeezing a handgrip for as long as possible).

“’Chronically independent European Americans’ fared much worse when primed to think about interdependence while completing the task. For bicultural Asian-American students exposed to both the independence-loving culture of America and a more communally based East-Asian culture, thinking about either value set was equally motivating.

“In another test, students viewed a website about a class promoting environmental sustainability. White American students said they would put less effort into the course when the description emphasized things like working together and taking other people’s views into account, rather than when it prioritized taking charge and being unique. …

“’Currently, if we want to inspire Americans to think and act interdependently, it may work best to actually emphasize their independence to motivate them to do so,’ suggests MarYam Hamedani, one of the study’s authors. ‘Tell them, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’ instead of ‘We’re all in this together.'”

My Comment: Awareness of individualistic egoism will occur in the USA in an acute form. In advertising independence, freedom, competition, and individualism, the whole world will manifest the process of recognizing these trends as evil and the need to correct them and will force society to change it. A person must experience much stress and the realization of evil of his nature to begin to see the world connected in a single harmony, instead of focusing on each one separately.
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Opinion (Bill Gross, PIMCO founder and co-chief investment officer): “Bill Gross, the Pimco bond guru, said on Thursday a heavy reliance on credit has put the U.S. economy on a trajectory toward extinction, and he warned of an investor exodus from financial markets.

“The level of credit needed to spur economic growth has grown five-fold since the 1980s, said Gross, who is a founder and co-chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management Co….

“Using a supernova as a metaphor for the U.S. financial system, Gross said the universe is expanding so rapidly now that in the far future it will end in a ‘big freeze.’ Dependence on credit for growth will produce similar results, he said.

“U.S. government, corporate, household and personal debt is now $56 trillion, a monster that needs ever increasing amounts of fuel, Gross said, calling it a ‘supernova star that expands and expands, yet, in the process begins to consume itself.’…

“The end of credit markets will begin, said Gross, when assets offer too much risk and too little return, causing an investor exodus into alternatives such as cash or real assets.”

My Comment: But exit to other markets is not a cure from the capitalist approach to life; the individualistic view of the world itself should explode like a bubble and expose the only alternative–mutual responsibility, agreement, and complement.
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