Reproduced from: http://www.defenddemocracy.press/president-belgian-magistrates-neoliberalism-form-fascism/ The President of Belgian Magistrates: Neoliberalism is a form of Fascism Neoliberalism is a species of fascism By Manuela Cadelli, President of the Magistrates’ Union of Belgium The time for rhetorical reservations is over. Things have to be called by their name to make it possible for a co-ordinated democratic reaction to be initiated,… Read More
“Fundamentalist movements in all faiths share certain characteristics. They reveal a deep disappointment and disenchantment with the modern experiment, which has not fulfilled all that it promised. They also express real fear. Every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied is convinced that the secular establishment is determined to wipe religion out. This is not… Read More
Reproduced from: http://www.islandnet.com/plethora/mai/cancer.html Our social immune system is being overwhelmed by growing out-of-control money market cancer By John McMurtry [John McMurtry, professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph, uses the metaphor of modern capitalism as a cancer to describe the recent uncontrolled spread of global capitalism. Its invasive growth, he argues, threatens to break down… Read More
Reproduced from: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/money-print-your-own/beyond-greed-and-scarcity Beyond Greed and Scarcity Few people have worked in and on the money system in as many different capacities as Bernard Lietaer. He spent five years at the Central Bank in Belgium, and he was president of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System. Bernard Lietaer posted Jun 30, 1997 He has helped developing countries improve… Read More
Uploaded on Jun 4, 2008 Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology — and invents ways to keep itself alive. https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes https://www.ted.com/speakers/susan_blackmore Published on Nov 27,… Read More
I would like you for a moment to forget everything you have learnt and the interpretatations of all the experiences of your encounters. I would also like you to imagine there are no nation states, no religions, no money and no schools of thought or any other concepts that usually divide us, like race, ethnicity,… Read More
ABSTRACT This analysis maps the deepening global crisis and the principles of its resolution by life-value analysis and method. Received theories of economics and justice and modern rights doctrines are shown to have no ground in life value and to be incapable of recognizing universal life goods and the rising threats to them. In response to this system failure at theoretical and operational levels, the unifying nature and measure of life value are defined to provide the long-missing basis for understanding the common interest, human rights and social justice—that is, the universal life necessities of humanity across cultures and the evolving civil commons infrastructures to ensure them. In contrast, the treaty-imposed corporate rights system miscalled “globalization” is structured to predate life means and support systems at all levels with no accountability beyond itself. Only the logic of life value, human rights and life-protective law, it is concluded, can comprehend or govern this inherently life-blind and cumulatively eco-genocidal regime.
Reproduced from: https://artsonline.uwaterloo.ca/rneedham/sites/ca.rneedham/files/needhdata/McMurtry-1.html How Unexamined Premises Lead to World Oppression: John Locke, The Theory of Private Property and Money John McMurtry College of Arts Department of Philosophy University of Guelph The most fundamental principle of the market doctrine is the grounding of human right and freedom in private property. This principle is foundational because one… Read More
Human beings are integrally natural and social creatures, dependent upon natural life-support systems for their physical existence and socio-cultural life-development systems for the nurturing and realization of their emotional, cognitive, and practical-creative capacities. Societies whose developmental dynamics become alienated from their natural conditions of existence face inevitable doom. Oblivious to the ways in which their reproductive dynamics undermining the physical foundations of social life, they collapse the very basis upon which their institutions and value systems depend. Let us say that any society which unsustainably converts scarce natural resources into tokens of social power (as, for example, capitalism converts natural systems and elements into money) faces a material crisis of life-reproduction. The manifold environmental crises unleashed by capitalism, crises which persist even in the midst of on-going economic stagnation, are evidence that capitalism will ultimately face a problem of material life-reproduction. Yet, this material crisis is not the only crisis that capitalist civilization faces. Since human beings require not only life, but meaningful, purposive life, societies can also fall into what I will call spiritual crises of life-development.
Spiritual crises arise when the ruling value system and institutional structure of a society becomes alienated from citizens’ need to feel that they belong to a socio-cultural whole which values their contributions to its reproduction and development. More precisely, spiritual crises arise when the ruling value system and institutional structure of a society actively alienate citizens by treating them as mere tools of its material reproduction. When people are treated as mere tools of system-reproduction, their moral being as intrinsically life-valuable centres of experience, action, and interaction, cognizant of the social conditions of their freedom and well-being, and desirous of enhancing the social foundations of their individuality, are attacked. In these alienated circumstances social problems are presented to the populace as technical problems to be solved by political and economic experts working in the service of the established asymmetries of wealth and power. Spiritual crises thus arise when ruling classes attempt to solve a material crisis of social reproduction by treating subaltern groups not as participating members of a social whole, but as passive objects whose life-interests must be sacrificed to the health of the system understood as a reified whole indifferent to the life-requirements of the people who live under it.
Source: Holt-LunstadJ, Smith TB, Layton JB (2010) Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review. PLOS Medicine 7(7): e1000316.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
