On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company’s shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock ruined his plans, and he skipped town leaving £550,000 in debt. Much of this was owed to the Ayr Bank, which imploded. In less than three weeks, another 30 banks collapsed across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill. On July 15, the directors of the Company applied to the Bank of England for a £400,000 loan. Two weeks later, they wanted another £300,000. By August, the directors wanted a £1 million bailout. The news began leaking out and seemingly contrite executives, running from angry shareholders, faced furious Parliament members. By January, the terms of a comprehensive bailout were worked out, and the British government inserted its czars into the Company’s management to ensure compliance with its terms.
How have global rivalries shaped the world we live in, and how do they continue to affect the way some of the most crucial geopolitical decisions of our time are made? In this interview with renowned political scientist Kees van der Pijl, we look at some of the most pivotal events of recent years, from 9/11 to the Arab Spring and the current crisis in Ukraine, to reveal the surprising underlying forces at work.
The Bitcoin phenomenon has now reached the mainstream media where it met with a reception that ranged from sceptical to outright hostile. The recent volatility in the price of bitcoins and the issues surrounding Bitcoin-exchange Mt. Gox have led to additional negative publicity. In my view, Bitcoin as a monetary concept is potentially a work of genius, and even if Bitcoin were to fail in its present incarnation – a scenario that I cannot exclude but that I consider exceedingly unlikely – the concept itself is too powerful to be ignored or even suppressed in the long run. While scepticism towards anything so fundamentally new is maybe understandable, most of the tirades against Bitcoin as a form of money are ill-conceived, terribly confused, and frequently factually wrong. Central bankers of the world, be afraid, be very afraid!
In this extraordinary 5-hour discussion, Frederic Laloux and Ken Wilber take an extensive tour through Frederic’s groundbreaking new book, Reinventing Organizations, which offers an in-depth look at many integrally-structured organizations that are beginning to emerge all across the planet.
Western industrial society tells a story about itself that goes like this: "A long time ago, our ancestors were 'primitive'. They lived in caves, were stupid, hit each other with clubs, and had short, stressful lives in which they were constantly on the verge of starving or being eaten by saber-toothed cats. Then we invented 'civilization', in which we started growing food, being nice to each other, getting smarter, inventing marvelous technologies, and everywhere replacing chaos with order. It's getting better all the time and will continue forever."
The full transcript for this exclusive Money Morning interview with Directory of Technology, Michael Robinson is here: http://pro1.moneymappress.com/174681/
In ancient Rome, especially during the late Republic, oligarchs resorted to mob violence to block, intimidate, assassinate or drive from power the dominant faction in the Senate. While neither the ruling or opposing factions represented the interests of the plebeians, wage workers, small farmers or slaves, the use of the ‘mob’ against the elected Senate, the principle of representative government and the republican form of government laid the groundwork for the rise of authoritarian “Caesars” (military rulers) and the transformation of the Roman republic into an imperial state.
Before 1975, the computer was an exotic and expensive tool for engineers, scientists, and businesses. By 1985 the computer had been "democratized", and anyone with the need, the interest, and a few thousand dollars could have one of their own.
One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority. While all cultures are different, in many non-modernized societies children enjoy wide latitude to learn by free play, interaction with other children of multiple ages, immersion in nature, and direct participation in adult work and activities. They may have meaningful responsibilities in the economic life of the family and may be expected to treat elders with respect, but there is often little direct adult control over their individual moment-to-moment movements and choices, and they learn by experience, experimentation, trial and error, by independent observation of nature and human behavior, and through voluntary community sharing of information, story, song, and ritual. Local elders and community traditions are autonomous and respected as sources of wisdom and practical knowledge, and children are integrated into local livelihoods, knowledge systems, and ethical and spiritual awareness through elegantindigenous pedagogies that have been honed over generations to minimize conflict while effectively transmitting what each child needs to know to be a successfully functioning member of the community.
How is it possible that fifty people can stop a forced eviction? Not just once, but over and over again (as many as six hundred times). This question has been on my mind for a while. During the 25-S protests in Madrid 1, we saw for ourselves that the police can evict any number of protesters from anywhere. So, exactly what sort of strength allows those fifty people to stop a foreclosure eviction? What does it mean to have strength, if it’s not quite the same as having power (physical, quantitative, economic, institutional, etc.)? The following is my attempt at an answer that, by no means, fully exhausts the question. That is to say, there’s room for more answers and, above all, to keep asking the question – this, I believe, is the most important thing.
So I would advice all the tablets brands to create an entire documentary about the evolution and origins of tablet. It can be a wonderful recognition for the human innovation and also an inspiration for the new generation of collective intelligence .
In November 1933, less than a year after Hitler assumed power in Berlin, a 47-year-old socialist writer on Vienna’s leading economics weekly was advised by his publisher that it was too risky to keep him on the staff. It would be best both for the Österreichische Volkswirt and his own safety if Karl Polanyi left the magazine. Thus began a circuitous odyssey via London, Oxford, and Bennington, Vermont, that led to the publication in 1944 of what many consider the 20th century’s most prophetic work of political economy, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most the people were only identified by the real communities they were part of. An average European saw scarcely a hundred different faces in their whole life. The small, local, real community, with its barely-monetized agrarian economy, gave each person an identity that allowed him/her to understand who was who in the social system, and what role each one was playing in the production of everyone’s well-being. This is still the dominant identity in a good part of the rural world in developing countries.
If some ‘laws of History’ could be taken seriously, in Italy we should feel predestinated to be first in conceiving a better democracy. Not because of the glories of our remote past, rather for the simple fact that our democracy is more disfunctional than other ones in the West.
The scars are still raw five years after one of the worst financial crises in modern memory came to an end. Ever since the Dow Jones Industrial Averagebottomed out in 2009, investors have been bombarded by warnings and predictions of imminent collapse from every corner of the punditsphere, and millions have listened, choosing to stay on the sidelines to nurse their portfolio's wounds.
aron Carapella, a Cherokee Indian and Oklahoma native, has created a map of the original 595 tribal nations of America and their areas of residence—labeled in their own languages—prior to European contact. Of those 595 tribes, 150 are without descendants and are now considered extinct due to genocide, disease, or tribe consolidation. - See more at: http://thislandpress.com/roundups/map-of-the-week-native-american-nations/#sthash.O8KMIoCP.OfWFTnm5.dpuf
Devaluation and revaluation are official changes in the value of a nation’s currency in relation to other currencies. The terms are generally used to refer to officially sanctioned changes in a currency’s value under a fixed exchange rate regime. Thus, devaluation and revaluation are typically one-time events – although a series of such changes can occasionally occur – that are usually mandated by the government or central bank of a nation.
In human history, the so-called sharing economy is older than money and capitalism. Before anyone came up with the clever idea of giving set values to bits of metal and paper, people figured out that everyone could benefit by bartering and sharing. Sometimes this took the form of barter. You give me some of the fish you caught and I give you some of my crops. You help me harvest my field and I help you harvest yours. Sometimes it takes the form of gifts, seemingly given altruistically, but almost always returned at some point by a reciprocal gift or favor.
"In the late 1960’s, the critical, political theologian Jürgen Moltmann, Professor of Theology at Tübingen University in Germany, was a Visiting Professor of Systematic Theology at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, USA. While here, Moltmann [1969, 1967], who was greatly influenced in the development of his theology of hope and of Christian eschatology by Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of hope, presented the theological doctrine of Christian eschatology in terms that expressed the influence of Bloch’s Marxist thinking on utopia, e.g., “The Prophecy of the New,” “Religion, Revolution, and the Future,” “Christians and Marxists Struggle for Freedom,” “God in Revolution,” “The Future as New Paradigm of Transcendence,” etc. In the language of hope, Moltmann spoke about and wrote on the notion of utopia, its history, and its Judeo/Christian religious roots.
Ruth Benedict first made the distinction between “shame cultures” and “guilt cultures” (source). Pervasive feelings of guilt are part of a behavioral package that enabled Northwest Europeans to adapt to complex social environments where kinship is less important and where rules of correct behavior must be obeyed with a minimum of surveillance. Is this pervasive guilt relatively recent, going back only half a millennium? Or is it much older?
James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps recurring. The pictures below, from the book (used with permission from the author) graphically and literally illustrate the central concept in this failure pattern, an idea called “legibility.”
In addition, the depoliticization of politics and the increasing transformation of the social state into the punishing state have rendered possible the emergence of a new mode of authoritarianism in which the fusion of power and violence increasingly permeates all aspects of government and everyday life.[ix] This mad violence creates an intensifying cycle rendering citizens' political activism dangerous, if not criminal. On the domestic and foreign fronts, violence is the most prominent feature of dominant ideology, policies and governance. Soldiers are idealized, violence becomes an omniscient form of entertainment pumped endlessly into the culture, wars become the primary organizing principle for shaping relations abroad, and a corrosive and deeply rooted pathology becomes not the mark of a few individuals but of a society that, as Erich Fromm once pointed out, becomes entirely insane.[x]Hannah Arendt's "dark times" have arrived as the concentrated power of the corporate, financial, political, economic and cultural elite have created a society that has become a breeding ground for psychic disturbances and a pathology that has become normalized. Greed, inequality and oppressive power relations have generated the death of the collective democratic imagination.
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