In the News (from Workers World): “As of the last count by the Census Bureau, there are almost 19 million EMPTY housing units in the United States.

“Many are brand new but have no buyers; people can’t afford them. Others have been lived in for years, but now lie empty after their occupants were chased out and their belongings dumped on the street by foreclosure enforcers.

“Allowing an average of only three people per housing unit, the statistic above means that at least 57 million people in the U.S. who are now homeless, in shelters, doubled or tripled up with relatives or friends, or living in trailers, campers or other vehicles, could have a real home to live in.”

My Comment: This will only grow more and more until humanity decides that it is necessary to change its attitude to the world from reception to bestowal, from egoism to participation, unity, love.
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In the News (from BBC News): “…in the next few weeks, half a dozen US states are expected to pass legislation that will for the first time protect companies which value their social impact as much as the bottom line.

“Whether it’s buying locally, protecting the environment or launching community projects, the new ‘benefit corporations’ have a common mission – to do well by doing good.

“‘It’s becoming a national movement,’ says Penny Jones-Napier, owner of the Big Bad Woof pet store in Hyattsville, Maryland, the first business in the US to adopt the new benefit corporation designation. ‘What started with small businesses is moving into the mainstream.’

“As a benefit corporation, Big Bad Woof is protected from legal action if it makes decisions that aren’t in the financial interests of its shareholders.

“The company can support local suppliers for instance, even though that might not be the cheapest option and could reduce the profit margin.

“Ms Jones-Napier says her customers are also happy to pay extra to support the company’s values. …

“‘Benefit corporations are brilliant because they allow companies to pursue profit – for which no one should apologise – and at the same time have a positive impact on society,’ says corporate legal expert Laura Jordan of The Capital Law Firm in Washington DC.

“Whereas the two goals were once seen as incompatible, people in their 20s and 30s regard them as complementary, she says. ‘They want to use the power of business to change the world.’

“Seven states, including New York and California, have already adopted the new business class. These seven states combined produce a third of America’s annual economic output, which makes their support for benefit corporations significant, says Andrew Kassoy, co-founder of B Lab. …

“There are still fewer than 100 benefit corporations in the US, but Mr Kassoy expects that number to grow rapidly over the next few years.”

My Comment: This initiative would be wonderful if it weren’t egoistic and confined within one country or one state. In the end, since this is contrary to the law of nature, to bring us to a total interconnected system, this initiative has no future! It will only delay the end and will bring us to a greater devastation.
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Opinion (Tim Jackson, professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey): “Productivity — the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy — is often viewed as the engine of progress in modern capitalist economies. Output is everything. Time is money. The quest for increased productivity occupies reams of academic literature and haunts the waking hours of C.E.O.’s and finance ministers. Perhaps forgivably so: our ability to generate more output with fewer people has lifted our lives out of drudgery and delivered us a cornucopia of material wealth.

“But the relentless drive for productivity may also have some natural limits. Ever-increasing productivity means that if our economies don’t continue to expand, we risk putting people out of work. If more is possible each passing year with each working hour, then either output has to increase or else there is less work to go around. Like it or not, we find ourselves hooked on growth.

“What, then, should happen when, for one reason or another, growth just isn’t to be had anymore? Maybe it’s a financial crisis. Or rising prices for resources like oil. Or the need to rein in growth for the damage it’s inflicting on the planet: climate change, deforestation, the loss of biodiversity. Maybe it’s any of the reasons growth can no longer be safely and easily assumed in any of today’s economies. The result is the same. Increasing productivity threatens full employment.

“One solution would be to accept the productivity increases, shorten the workweek and share the available work. …

“But there’s another strategy for keeping people in work when demand stagnates. Perhaps in the long run it’s an easier and a more compelling solution: to loosen our grip on the relentless pursuit of productivity. By easing up on the gas pedal of efficiency and creating jobs in what are traditionally seen as ‘low productivity’ sectors, we have within our grasp the means to maintain or increase employment, even when the economy stagnates.

“At first, this may sound crazy; we’ve become so conditioned by the language of efficiency. But there are sectors of the economy where chasing productivity growth doesn’t make sense at all. Certain kinds of tasks rely inherently on the allocation of people’s time and attention. The caring professions are a good example: medicine, social work, education. Expanding our economies in these directions has all sorts of advantages. …

“The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar ‘commodity.’ It can’t be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade. It isn’t delivered by machines. Its quality rests entirely on the attention paid by one person to another. Even to speak of reducing the time involved is to misunderstand its value. …

“In short, avoiding the scourge of unemployment may have less to do with chasing after growth and more to do with building an economy of care, craft and culture. And in doing so, restoring the value of decent work to its rightful place at the heart of society.”

My Comment: Namely, by building mutual support, passing many functions of the state, the service sector and industry, to the mutual aid organizations, leaving only the necessary part of production within the enterprise, we will get rid of the concept of “work to live” and “live to work” and will be free to create the new integral society.
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In the News (from the European Commission): “The European Commission has proposed that 2012 be designated as the ‘European Year for Active Ageing.’

“The initiative aims to help create better job opportunities and working conditions for the growing numbers of older people in Europe, help them take an active role in society and encourage healthy ageing. …

“The EU is in a process of significant population ageing. From 2012, the European working-age population will start to shrink, while the over-60 population will continue to increase by about two million people a year. The strongest pressure is expected to occur during the period 2015-35 when the so-called baby-boom generation will enter retirement. …

“Active ageing includes creating more opportunities for older people to continue working, to stay healthy longer and to continue to contribute to society in other ways, for example through volunteering needs to be supported by a wide range of policies at all levels of governance.”

“The financial crisis has intensified what has long been a simmering problem; what to do about ageing populations with ever fewer workers supporting ever more pensioners, living longer?

“Trying to defuse the demographic timebomb and cut budgets to avert a financial meltdown, governments are further raising the retirement age and reining in benefits. …

“As unions threaten more strikes in the New Year the showdown over pensions is not likely to go away any time soon.” (Source: Euronews)

My Comment: Here, instead of explaining in the process of integral education and upbringing when the same retired and unemployed people could become conscious participants in what is happening now—the process of transformation from an individual egoistic society into an integral society when a person himself changes—the change comes from above, which triggers protest.

Integral education encourages understanding of what is happening now as a natural process of human development, which aims to change today’s humanity as a society of individualists to a society of mutual responsibility and care. Integral education and upbringing of the masses is intended to begin this change consciously (easily, quickly, gently).
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Opinion (Peter Schiff, CEO & Chief Global Strategist, Euro Pacific Capital): “I first came to national attention back in 2008 and 2009 when the housing and credit markets imploded. I became known as the guy that other market “experts” laughed at when I warned of trouble brewing in the seemingly indestructible American economy. After the wheels ground to a halt in mid-2008, people noticed that my book Crash Proof, originally released in early 2007, read like a detailed preview of many of the events that eventually unfolded. …

“However, they mistakenly assumed that the crash I was warning about was solely a housing led credit bubble. While that was part of it, I never saw it ending there. The crash that most concerned me was the one that would result from the government’s response to the initial crisis. My concern was not that our economy would succumb to the disease that I had diagnosed, but instead would be taken down by the ‘cure’ that the government unleashed to combat it.

“When the government’s delaying tactic, which involves continuous borrowing and money printing is no longer tenable, the dollar could collapse, interest rates and consumer prices could soar and the U.S. economy could implode. That’s the real crash that I was warning about, and the one we all need to be worried about now. …

“When looking back from a point in the future, I believe that the years immediately after the credit collapse of 2008 will stand out as a period of dangerous economic negligence. We have bought ourselves some time by sweeping enormous problems under the rug. Through a combination of political cowardice, economic ignorance, and false confidence, we are digging ourselves into a hole so deep that it may take generations to crawl out. …

“Immediately prior to the crash, the United States economy was experiencing unprecedented consumer debt levels, persistently high trade deficits, historically large government budget deficits, high-energy prices, and a moribund manufacturing sector. Four years later, all of these problems have gotten worse. And unlike four years ago, we are now saddled with the highest unemployment rate in generations and levels of public debt that would have been unimaginable then. Yes we are no longer technically in recession. But I believe that is just an illusion created by perhaps the cheapest, and most obvious, trick ever devised. …

“I felt certain before writing Crash Proof that the government would never let the economy contract far enough to restore balance and sustainability. I knew the spending and deficits would head off the charts. I thought those realities would push down the dollar and cause foreign creditors to shun American government debt. However, I did not factor in the reprieve we have gotten from the false perception that Europe is in even worse shape than we.

“As the curtain eventually falls on the drama unfolding in Europe, the world will refocus its attention on the more spectacular events in the U.S. The sovereign debt crisis that is now playing out in Europe will cross the Atlantic, and when it opens here The Real Crash may indeed finally begin. The average American will have a front row seat but will hardly enjoy the show.”

My Comment: This time is given to us to organize worldwide centers of integral education and upbringing, to prepare specialists (lecturers, course teachers, tutors, and organizers) to carry out explanatory work. And then we will meet with a distraught society, next to the shattered economy, family, education, and other “achievements” of humanity.
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In the News (from BBC News): “The eurozone crisis is the single biggest threat to the global economy, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. …

“Failure to act today could lead to a worsening of the European crisis and spillovers beyond the euro area, with serious consequences for the global economy.’ …[said OECD chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan]

“‘Reform fatigue is increasing and tolerance for fiscal adjustment may be reaching a limit. …’

“’Rising unemployment and social pain may spark political contagion and adverse market reaction”, with countries outside the euro also at risk of being hit,’ he added.”

My Comment: This is the opinion of the most competent EU authority. But no one has the levers of influence because the process turns from the linear (individual egoistic) development to the integral (round) one, which we cannot control. We have been creating all our economic and social tools in the state of linear egoistic development (evolution) of humanity for thousands of years.

But today, when our egoism has reached its maximum linear (individual, independent) development (as seen by the general crisis and depression, that is, the absence of new desires) and turned into “round” in the global and total (integral) egoism, we discover that we cannot understand it and moreover manage it by the methods, developed in the past.

Only Kabbalah, as the science of our nature, desire, its change and fulfillment, can give us the tool of influence over everything that happens to us. Kabbalists are called to convey this knowledge to humankind. There is a hope that people will be able to discern the truth through their preconceived notions.
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In the News (from DailyMail): “’At first it was the immigrants and the illegals; the homeless. Now they’ve been joined by the young, the professionals, the middle class. And every day more come. …’

“‘We’re seeing them younger and younger,’ [volunteer Dimitria Kollia] says. ‘And also professional couples who’ve lost their jobs. In three months the queue has changed, and that is very frightening for our future.’

“… A quarter of Greek firms have gone bust in three years; employment is at 22 per cent and rising; new property taxes have hit all, as have massive salary, pension and welfare cuts. …

“Quietly every day, and the figure is rising, at least 4,000 are fed by the charity of the city [Athens], the churches and individual communities. Some say that figure is a woeful underestimate. Schools have been given extra meals for children who have been fainting with hunger.”

My Comment: It’s impossible to feed the hungry in this way; there will be up to 50% of them and more. All manufacturing and services are being reduced to a reasonable limit, the economy of reasonable consumption. We should accept growing unemployment as a fact, as a trend rather than a sudden and temporary phenomenon, create a new approach to the new world—for this our program of integral education and upbringing is intended.
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In the News (from The Independent): “The crises in Europe and the Middle East are very different but they are beginning to cross-infect each other, creating a general mood of uncertainty and fear. In the Middle East, the Arab Spring was at first seen as wholly positive, as dictatorships and police states tumbled or came under democratic assault from Tunis to Bahrain. A bright dawn was breaking across the region. …

“In the past decade, the Muslim world had its grim reminders of the national egotism of great powers, notably that of the US. In Europe, people in states belonging to the European Union have had a different, less blood-soaked but no less compelling, demonstration of how little we have moved on from the Europe of contending nationalities. …

“The European and Middle East crises are in their different ways exposing as claptrap optimistic talk of European solidarity, globalisation being beneficial to all, and ‘humanitarian’ intervention. As mutinies against the powers-that-be spread across Europe, the natural conduit for political activism is strongly nationalist parties on the right and the left. Many voters may feel that angry nationalists may be able to cut a better deal with Brussels than their over-complaisant predecessors. The age of competing nationalities, which never really ended, is back with a vengeance.”

My Comment: Egoism has not been corrected, so what can we hope for? It will be manifested more and more, until it forces us to correct it by means of the method of integral upbringing.
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In the News (from The Guardian): “As our meeting places fall silent, save for tapping on screens, it seems we have mistaken ubiquitous connection for the real thing

“I first noticed it in a restaurant. The place was strangely quiet, and at one table a group seemed deep in prayer. Their heads were bowed, their eyes hooded and their hands in their laps. I then realised that every one, young and old, was gazing at a handheld phone. People strolled the street outside likewise, with arms crooked at right angles, necks bent and heads in potentially crippling postures. Mothers with babies were doing it. Students in groups were doing it. They were like zombies on call. There was no conversation.

“The MIT professor and psychologist Sherry Turkle claims that her students are close to mastering the art of sustaining eye contact with a person while texting someone else. It is like an organist playing different tunes with hands and feet. To Turkle, these people are “alone together … a tribe of one”. Anyone with 3,000 Facebook friends has none. …

“Psychologists have identified this as “fear of conversation”. People wear headphones as “conversational avoidance devices”. The internet connects us to the entire world, but it is a world bespoke, edited, deleted, sanitised. …

“There is now apparently a booming demand for online “conversation” with robots and artificial voices. Mobiles come loaded with customised “girlfriends”. People turn to computerised dating advisers, even claim to fall in love with their on-board GPS guides. A robot seal can be bought to sit and listen to elderly people talk, tilting its head and blinking in sympathy.

“We have, says Turkle, confused connection with conversation – “the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship”. Human friendship is rich, messy and complicated. It requires patience and tolerance, even compromise. As we push other people off into a world of question and answer, connection and information, friendship becomes ersatz virtuality.

“All that said, the death of conversation has been announced as often as that of the book. …

“A hundred online universities are no substitute for a live campus any more than Facebook is a substitute for sex or Twitter for debate. …

“Those obsessed with faddish connectivity and personal avoidance are not escaping reality. … Deep down they still crave friendship. They just want a better class of talk.!”
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In the News (from The Wall Street Journal): “At least 20,000 people held a major rally of the local Occupy movement in Frankfurt on Saturday to decry austerity measures affecting much of Europe, the dominance of banks, and what they call untamed capitalism. …

“Last year, thousands in Germany took to the streets in rallies during the world-wide Occupy movement. But as Germany’s economy is robust and unemployment at a record low, those protests mostly have fizzled out.

“But Europe’s lingering debt crisis has given new fuel to some demonstrations.

“Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, suffers none of the austerity measures now heavily affecting southern European nations, such as Greece, Portugal and Spain. But Germany has championed sometimes-harsh spending cuts across Europe to get budget deficits under control.”

My Comment: After all, saving is against the modern economy of a consumer society, which rests only on growth and expansion, rather than reasonable consumption. As society has become, like the world, globally interconnected, Germany will get a boomerang reaction from all the EU countries. There comes a  time when the strong one is not strong on his own, but strong in its connection with others in a united system. The world turns from individual, egoistic, and discrete into round, integral, altruistic, and analog.
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