In the News (from Google): “The International Monetary Fund issued a clarion call to bickering US politicians Tuesday, urging them to solve the country’s debt problems before a still-vulnerable economy is tipped over the brink.

“In a hallmark semi-annual report, the Washington-based fund warned policymakers on the other side of the US capital that, while the world’s largest economy is improving, they invite trouble by not addressing a looming debt crisis. …

“So far the United States has avoided the type of debt crisis that has ravaged Europe – with the dollar’s safe-haven status and moderate growth providing a sizable safety net even as agencies have downgraded the country’s credit rating. …

“A flare-up in the euro area from increased sovereign and bank stress could easily undermine confidence in the US corporate sector and thereby squeeze investment and demand undermining growth. …

“Spending cuts will automatically come into effect and major tax breaks will end in the next year if Congress does not act.”

My Comment: There is no doubt that today’s rates are pre-election and everyone understands that this will be over, and they will have to pay their bills.
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Opinion (Amartya Sen, the Indian Nobel Laureate professor of Economics, Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University): “Several features of policy making are worrying, particularly in Europe. The first is a democratic failure. An economic policy has to be ultimately something that people understand, appreciate and support. That’s what democracy is all about. The old idea of “no taxation without representation” is not there in Europe at the moment. …

“If you are living in a southern country, in Greece, and Portugal and Spain, the electorates’ views are much less important than the views of the bankers, the rating agencies and the financial institutions. One result of European monetary integration, without a political integration, is that the population of many of these countries has no voice. Economics is de-linked from the political base. That I think is a mistake and it goes completely against the big European movement that began in the 40s and fostered the idea of a democratic, united Europe.”

My Comment: It depends upon how you define democracy. If we consider the quality of equality, Europe has been always ahead of the rest in terms of arrogance and humiliation of others. The mutual hatred of the EU countries and peoples is known in the world as a bad example. And within countries with respect to the influence of people on politics or economy, then the masters have always played tricks on their people, and people followed them. Today, the crisis is not about democracy but the opportunity to no longer “play” at it—everything is exposed.
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Two of our books about the crisis were recently published in Chinese (traditional characters) in Taiwan:

The Crisis: Do You Want to Know Why?

Salvation. How to Survive the Global Crisis.
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The online magazine “Semana,” the most popular in Colombia, published the interview that I gave to the correspondent of the magazine during my visit to the country. The hard copy of the magazine comes out this week.
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In the News (from The New York Times): “Europe’s long-running euro crisis may be cooling. But the economic distress it has left in its wake is pushing a rising tide of workers into precarious straits in France and across the European Union. Today, hundreds of thousands of people are living in campgrounds, vehicles and cheap hotel rooms. Millions more are sharing space with relatives, unable to afford the basic costs of living.

“These people are the extreme edge of Europe’s working poor: a growing slice of the population that is slipping through Europe’s long-vaunted social safety net. Many, particularly the young, are trapped in low-paying or temporary jobs that are replacing permanent ones destroyed in Europe’s economic downturn.

“Now, economists, European officials and social watchdog groups are warning that the situation is set to worsen. As European governments respond to the crisis by pushing for deep spending cuts to close budget gaps and greater flexibility in their work forces, ‘the population of working poor will explode,’ said Jean-Paul Fitoussi, an economics professor at L’Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris.

“The trend is most alarming in hard-hit countries like Greece and Spain, but it is rising even in more prosperous nations like France and Germany.

“‘France is a rich country,’ Mr. Fitoussi said. ‘But the working poor are living in the same condition as in the 19th century. They can’t pay for heating, they can’t pay for their children’s clothes, they are sometimes living five people in a nine-square-meter apartment — here in France!’ he exclaimed, speaking of an apartment of about 100 square feet.”

My Comment: Unfortunately, because of the government’s near-sightedness and a lack of political will, the population sufferers, not the government. Integration and union—these are not just words but a state of society! The fathers of the European integration didn’t take this into account. They wished to reach their egoistic goals without making social changes.

Unification must be above all contradictions; otherwise, the “European Union” that never existed in reality will collapse burying the entire developed Europe. Even at the beginning of the creation of the EU, I wrote what was necessary for a union:

Upbringing: How to bring up a person, (Hinuch in Hebrew), when a person is not yet formed, bringing up a child through attitudes, frameworks, and through creating an environment, using exercises until the age of 13. Concurrently, but to the extent of the assimilation of upbringing, learning is added.

Learning: To learn (Lemidah in Hebrew), the assimilation of the past human experience. This brings a person to education.

Education: To educate, to shape the image of the future in a person, that is, his ability to think about the future and move forward.
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In the News (from The Wall Street Journal Blog): “The world needs to create about 200 million jobs to reach full employment.

“That’s one finding from a new report released Friday by the International Labor Organization and the World Bank. The two groups, based on a request from the Group of 20 advanced and developing economies, are unveiling a database that tallies policy responses to the financial crisis and global economic downturn. …

“The employment tally found that the world lost 27 million jobs between 2007 and the height of the crisis in 2009. But labor force growth adds about 40 million people to the global labor market each year, and overall economic growth—even before the crisis—hadn’t been strong enough to absorb them. That created a long-run jobs gap of 177 million, on top of the 27 million jobs lost in the downturn. …

“The impact of the crisis on employment has been deep, and with no appreciable recovery, particularly in the developed countries. Table 2 shows that between 2007 and 2009—at the height of the crisis—an estimated 27 million jobs were lost globally. Half of these jobs were lost in the advanced economies, five million in East Asia, three million in Latin America and the Caribbean, and one million in South Asia. …

“The rate of youth unemployment rose globally from 11.7 percent in 2007 to 12.8 percent in 2009, the advanced economies being hit particularly hard, where this rate jumped from 12.5 percent to 17.3 percent over this period.” Source: ILO/World Bank

“While the world experienced ‘an unprecedented widespread policy response to the crisis,’ the report says, ‘policy responses led to a recovery in GDP growth but not a significant increase in jobs.’

“Among the study’s other findings:

–Policies of high-income countries focused on access to credit, while low- and middle-income nations prioritized direct job creation and employment incentives.

–About 55% of high-income countries used unconventional monetary policy vs. 33% of low- and middle-income countries.

–About 86% of high-income countries in the sample used a fiscal stimulus, while 84% of low- and middle-income countries did so.”

My Comment: The solution is to restructure the whole system of a society based on growing consumption. If our system of consumption were really unlimited, then there would have been no end to “America.” But since we exist in a limited, finite system of society, resources, and environmental limits, the “pyramid” must fall apart. See the post “The Pyramid Economy.”
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In the News (from Scientific American): “Crop losses from climate-related challenges are already affecting the nation’s ability to feed more than 1.3 billion Chinese…

“In north China, where wheat fields have dominated the landscape for centuries, the crop is becoming increasingly difficult to grow as the land gets drier and warmer. In southern China, droughts in recent years have replaced rainy seasons, drying up rice paddies on a large scale. …

“That raises the question of whether 1.34 billion Chinese — accounting for almost one-fifth of the world’s population — would be able to feed themselves. Currently, China produces slightly less grains than its people consume. Crop losses caused by extreme weather events, insect attacks and other problems associated with climate change are rocking the already delicate balance.”

My Comment: The problem of famine is not in drought, but first of all, in the incorrect relationship within the human society: It has long been calculated that with equal distribution, there would be enough of everything! And with egoistic consumption, there will always be hungry people. Nature will force us to reach an equitable distribution.
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Opinion (Alexander Timofeev, from Gidepark.ru): “Nowadays I occasionally think back to the Soviet times with nostalgia, but not for the repressive regime and perpetual shortages, but for the confidence in the future, soulfulness, and kindness of people that existed in those years. This is why I, an aging optimist living in an era of change, want to go forward into the past—so that the time would come when we would be just as cheerful and kind as in the ‘80s, while at the same time free, well-fed, and beautifully dressed like in the modern times. Perhaps this is Utopia, but it is for its sake that I want to live.”

My Comment: All kindness and fullness can be arranged only after our prior reasoned and conscious unification, which requires something that wasn’t present before in any attempt to create an anti-egoistic (counter-natural) society:

1. The presence of fully developed egoism and awareness of it as the carrier of destruction to our entire civilization—the condition of nature, and

2. The revelation of integral upbringing as the means for changing man and society from egoism to altruism by using the property of nature (Ohr Makif) and not through violence.

The sooner we reveal this opportunity to ourselves and to others, the more we’ll reduce the suffering and accelerate the creation of a single integral humanity. It’s programmed into our development as our next step, but how to come to it—whether involuntarily through suffering or through conscious aspiration—that is our choice, our freedom of will.
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Opinion (Gary Shilling, from Business Insider): “…Shilling writes that ‘consumer spending is the only major source of strength in the U.S. economy this year,’ but now all signs point to retrenchment:

“While consumers should be “reduc[ing] debt and rebuild[ing] net worth, they have been doing the opposite lately. …”

“Last but not least, Shilling says the clamor for a new age of ‘Nifty Fifty’ stocks demonstrates that investors are actually quite skeptical of the recovery, preferring instead to place safe bets on companies with such ‘wonderful long-term growth prospects that investors could simply buy them and never worry about selling.’

“He explains: ‘The zeal for Apple, whose share price is up more than 50 percent this year alone and is almost double its year-ago level. …’

“Not to mention that the possibility of renewed crisis in Europe and a hard landing in China—compounded by a decline in demand for Chinese products from Europe—continue to hang heavy on prospects for the global economy.

“Thus, he concludes, a new recession is inevitable: ‘The U.S. economy is overdue for a recession. I believe that it entered the down phase of the long cycle in 2000, and the five to seven years that remain in the age of deleveraging are part of this period of weak economic growth and more frequent recessions.’”

My Comment: By the way, the crisis didn’t disappear anywhere, all of its ups and downs are the temporary hiding and manipulation of records; it’s no more than a temporary reviving of the dying—the world economy of network marketing, which will collapse without constant expansion!
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The Lithuanian magazine Business Class published the interview which I gave to the magazine’s correspondent before the beginning of the European convention in Vilnius.

The magazine is intended for business people and comes out once a month as a supplement to the newspaper Business News; the magazine’s circulation is 22,000 copies.

[Show slideshow]

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