How can we regain peace and how can we keep it? (tags)
There is no doubt that Mahatma Gandhi is right. Peace does not come from the motivation of fear, on the contrary, only from the strength of one’s own person; through loyalty to oneself, and through the courage to have one’s own conscience. In Indian: Satyagraha (persistent adherence to the truth), “think for yourself” Kant would have said, “remain yourself.”
Nord Stream as a reason for war (tags)
Only the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines ultimately cleared the way for the EU, and Germany in particular, to become long-term buyers of U.S. natural gas surpluses and to keep the price at a profitable level for U.S. fracked gas producers, even in the long term.
The final system question Parts 1 and 2 (tags)
The enrichment elites of the West in particular have been trying for decades to extend their influence to the whole world. That is their declared concept. The worldwide "final victory" has been part of capitalism and imperialism from the very beginning.
No nuclear war in Europe! and Glorification of violence (tags)
The well-read do not believe in Russia's sole guilt anyway. They remember the promise made to Gorbachev not to expand NATO eastward. They know that the U.S. organized and financed a coup on the Maidan in 2014 to install a puppet government.
War in Ukraine. Nato taboos fall (tags)
This military-scientific glorification of a war that has long been hopeless for both sides, which is also supported by some media, leads to the postulation of the prospect of victory against one's better judgment. What is meant, however, is more likely a victorious peace.
The American century was yesterday (tags)
"The people can always be made, with or without the right to vote,to follow the orders of the leaders. It is very simple. One need nothing to do but to tell the people that they are being attacked, and to reproach the pacifists of their lack of patriotism and putting the country in danger. This method works in every country." (Hermann Goering,1946)
Russia's war in the mirror of western international law nihilism and propaganda (tags)
With Russia's war of aggression on Ukraine and the Western response, the world may be headed in leaps and bounds toward the nuclear abyss: The escalation dynamic is gaining speed. More and more conventional weapons are being moved by the West to Ukraine.
Misjudgments and Biden's foreign policy (tags)
Russia is to blame for our gas shortage, rising prices and high inflation. That's what the newspapers say, that's what you hear on the news and that's what presenters claim. Of course, this is not true. But the constant repetition shapes the public consciousness.
The New NATO Strategic Concept: 6 Articles (tags)
Collective pressure in a broad societal dimension is necessary for a cease-fire - in a viable European security architecture... At the core of a sustainable compromise between Russia, Ukraine and the US could be a guarantee of Ukraine's full sovereignty and military neutrality.
The historic push of East Central Europe into Nato (tags)
What is the end of the war song? It is and was destruction, death, human suffering and traumatized populations. And in our time, in addition, it is the suspension of the necessary global and joint efforts of all nations in the fight against the threat of climate catastrophe.
Ukraine's decoupling was foolish and dangerous (tags)
Promote peace, don't fuel conflict. There are only two ways to end a war. Either with a negotiated settlement. Or with the annihilation of one side or the other. That's how wars end, unfortunately, when there is no negotiated settlement...There must be a diplomatic solution.
Children suffer strongly from homeschooling in Lockdown (tags)
The situation, which UNICEF described as a "catastrophic education crisis" at the beginning of March, continues. In addition, errors, stereotypes, misjudgements and trivialization prevail in the discussion about children, Corona and digital distance learning.
Liberty restrictions such as lockdowns, contact restrictions, or mandatory masks are authoritarian by their very nature. Authoritarian action, however, does not correspond to a liberal state, but to a state of authority, as it was realized in the GDR (East Germany).
Collective working-time reduction is long overdue (tags)
The overall economic fact is further that from 1960 to 2019 the volume of work (despite reunification) increased only from 56.2 to 62.6 billion hours (by 11.4%), while the potential labor force grew from 26.3 to 46.5 million persons, i.e. by 76.8%.
How the financial market redistributes from poor to rich (tags)
"Some business models, such as high-frequency trading, where huge blocks of shares are shuffled back and forth every millisecond, have no added value for society, but bring profits to a few financial professionals at the expense of everyone else."
There is currently no alternative to national debt (tags)
A private economy left to its own devices is completely incapable of immanently combating the crisis. This is especially true for future-oriented investments for ecological modernization that serve climate protection. The vaccine against Covid-19, which will apparently be available shortly, would not exist without govt funding.
Corona Measures: When children are the ones who suffer (I and II) (tags)
The government seems to be abdicating its responsibility by 1) not supplying the population with masks, 2) not compensating people so they can stay away from workplaces, 3) eliminating school meals for hundreds of millions of children and 5) not including children in decision-making.
Invitation to New Thinking (tags)
The pandemic has made the risk of our extensive lifestyle tangible. For this global crisis is not an exogenous shock. Rather, crass, profit-oriented globalization has fueled its spread.
On the prohibition of the war of aggression (tags)
Happy Anti-War Day Sept 1, 2020! Peace is not everything but without peace, everything is nothing (Willy Brandt). The German Basic Law mentioned in this article is equivalent to our constitution.
Corona epidemic and Yemen (tags)
Authorities first wanted to calm down and played down the pandemic. Afterward, they had to convince the population to keep unusual physical distance, to wash their hands well at all times, and to refrain from major events. Finally, they wanted the population to accept the lockdown.
Democracy - a Plea toStrengthen It and Fight for It (tags)
We as democrats must take care of democracy as a learning system. If we do not do so, democracy will wither away.
Good Housing for All and Rent Madness (tags)
Apartment rents have increased faster thant he incomes of wage earners. Real estate decays to an object of speculation. Capital seeks lucrative investments. Hectic activity and bustle replaces inactivity and idleness since the protests of renters cannot be ignored any more.
Economists criticize the austerity religion and demand investments. Germans ardently believe in economic fairy-tales that the 2007/2008 world financial crisis was a crisis of state indebtedness and that state debts burden future generations,
State Debts - The Primal German Fear (tags)
Unlike a private homebuilder, the state can be indebted and never expect the entire debt to be repaid. For most, taxes are a book with seven seals. A tax-cutting lobby exploits our unease over taxes for their purposes. Social cohesion declines and milieu egoism increases.
The Criminality of the Elites (tags)
The offenses of the upper classes are hardly publicized. People wait in vain for strong interventions in the economic realm. Financial criminality harms the state, the community and economic growth (e.g. high-frequency trading, shadow banking, financial products)
Interview with Social Philosopher Friedhelm Hengsbach (tags)
The financial markets have uncoupled from the real economy since the middle of the 1970s. Politicians listen and react to every sound from the financial sector. Who paid for the bank bailout? The general public or the state made itself poor and guaranteed capital.
Detente Policy and Media Hysteria (tags)
Antje Vollmer is a Green politician who was vice-president of the German Bundestag from 1994 to 2005. She urges a robust public debate over the new hard-line German foreign policy that forgets the war and Russian help in reunification. What has the politics of regime change brought?
Limits to Growth Published Forty Years Ago (tags)
The MIT scholars under Dennis Meadows came to four core conclusions: 1) there are limits to economic growth on finite planet, 2) the economy and population are growing exponentially, 3) exceeding limits will lead to collapse and 4) collapse could be avoided by turning from growth
Competition Ideology and Power Reality (tags)
Competition cannot be an end-in-itself. Uncontrolled private power leads to misuse. Uncontrolled competition increasingly destroys itself through concentration and centralization processes. Bastard Keynesianism helps the banks. People diverted from real cause of crises
Democracy and the Uncanny Power of Money (tags)
Growing inequality is the greatest political problem of our time. Governments are often only actors or puppets of an anonymous regime for the benefit of the privileged where the interests of simple people do not count.
Manipulation of Public Opinion (tags)
Timocracy-rule of the propertied-threatens to replace democracy. The large majority is blocked from political participation and from forming their social future-unlike what was intended in the model of the majority principle in democracy.
Growth Criticism and Reduced Working Hours (tags)
Today's growth critics speak of the necessity of a post-growth society, a "renunciation society" or at least of a "green" capitalist model... A political transformation process is necessary. The economist John Maynard Keynes dreamt of a time when his grandchildren would only have 15hr wk.
38 Arguments Against TTIP (tags)
TTIP (Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership) agreement continues an old thinking instead of everyone sharing int he profits of a few. The private arbitration courts enable corporations to sue states and could have a chilling effect on labor and environmental protection.
TTIP and CETA Must Be Prevented (tags)
Under TTIP, TPP and TiSA, corporations can sue states for lost profits. The German Judges Union calls additional protection of foreign investors "nonsense" that undermines democracy and the constitutional state.
This crisis is only another warning shot of the current economic system and offers a window of opportunity to leave behind the neoliberal path of development taken since the end of the 1970s. The root of the problem is the economic model based on growth and exploitation of nature.
Free trade agreements serve geo-political goals. They are the "weapons," so to speak, in the global economic war. Critical persons see through this and rebel against "corporate rule" and against the dissolution of the primacy of politics by the primacy of the economy.
Cochabamba: Water as a Human Right (tags)
The economy should be part of life, not a steamroller crushing self-determination and creativity. The TTIP, TPP and TISA trade agreements create a parallel private arbitration system that gives corporations special rights to sue states. Labor and environmental arein danger.
"Crisis children" can't find a job despite study, four foreign languages and four hundred applications. They earn one-thousandth what a top manager rakes in. Youth unemployment has reached unbearable levels in Greece and Spain.
A Partial Privatization of Justice (tags)
On www.socialeurope.eu, Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO warns that the TTIP is a secret tribunal where only foreign investors can sue. The TTIP brings a crisis for democracy and the constitutional state by creating a parallel private arbitration system with irrevocable decisions.
Growth, Prosperity and Quality of Life (tags)
"Our understanding of a modern economic and social system is strongly influenced by the phase between 1950 and 1975 when the social market economy was created and democracy was re-stabilized. Since then conditions have changed. New answers are necessary."
George Orwell in the Government (tags)
Writing in 1948 off the coast of Scotland, George Orwell foresaw the time when war would become a domestic necessity to divert the people from economic contradictions. Newspeak is used so lies are called truth and slavery freedom.
anti-war
The European Commission suspended the secret TTIP negotiations for four months to get citizen consultation on the Investor-State-Dispute SettlementThis proposed parallel system with 3-person courts of arbitration allows corporations to sue for lost profits. Decisions are irrevocable.
Political economies are calibrated to a form of economics oriented exclusively in competitiveness and high profits...The selling off of public services through the agreement on trade with services and the new edition of MAI were prevented because of social protest.
Political Myths and Elite Misanthropy (tags)
In his new book "Political Myths and Elite Misanthropy," professor Herbert Schui explains the myth of the achiever, the myth of state indebtedness, the myth of the market and competition and the myth of market conforming democracy.
Market-conforming Democracy (tags)
Market-conforming democracy," Angela Merkel's guiding idea, is a pleasant-sounding description of plutocracy where the forms still exist but their substance is "financialized," where myths of privatization. corporate beneficence and self-healing markets are zombie gods.
Who is System Relevant - Banks or the People? (tags)
We are experiencing the most brutal form of the neoliberal credo since the financial crisis: privatization of profits and socialization of losses. EU crisis policy bails out banks and drives the population into misery. We must change direction. We need a change of paradigms in policy.
Lobbyism: The Erosion of Democracy (tags)
The developments of the last decades point in a dangerous direction. Democracy threatens to become an empty husk with formal demands for democratic decisions while the contents are defined by tiny elite circles (catchword “post-democracy”). A living democracy is vital.
Less Growth = More Happiness (tags)
The question about alternatives to the dominant western model of life and greowth becomes increasingly urgent together with the looming-or already occurred-surpassing of Peak Oil. New measurements of prosperity include life satisfaction, access to health care and education
People still believe in the “faster, higher and bigger.” This fiction is maintained through over-chemicalization, over-technization, genetic manipulation or simply bribery of the judges. People lie to themselves.
Are Reforms of the Financial Sector Enough? (tags)
This article focuses on seven errors and seven remedies of the financial crisis. The financial crisis was also a crisis of easy money. For years and again today, speculators exploited the situation that money was and is very easy to borrow in the US and Japan.
Growth Euphoria and Distribution Reality (tags)
The chasm between poor and rich opens even more. The uncoupling of growth and quality of life on one side and productivity and work volumes on the other side make clear that "business-as-usual" leads to growing problems. German GDP grew 300% with 20% fewer workers.
"We need a new economic balance" (tags)
If the US removed the cap on social security taxes, public spirit and generational fairness would return to the states. At present, there is a cap at $106K. If you make $4 million, you only pay social security tax on the first $106K.
George Orwell in the Government: The Rich Come from the Poor (tags)
In Germany as in the US, the rightwing insists poverty is not a question of money but of attitude and thus of one's own making. Falling wages are said to be a sign of structural improvements on the labor market!
On the Way to the Digital Society (tags)
The net must be understood for what it is: a marvelous creative space that forces us to question traditional norms and values, organizational forms and superficially accepted conditions to find new ways into the future.
Another Road for Europe (tags)
Europe is in crisis because it has been hijacked by neoliberalism and finance. Along the road to another Europe, visions of change, protest and alternatives have to be woven into a common framework. Finance should be prevented from destroying the economy.
Citizen X is no longer represented by politician U... In the best case, Liquid Democracy can reinvent the vision of deliberative and interactive democracy, giving demonstrators a platform for the public discussion of public problems.
The state became indebted to bailout the banks. Now the state pays them ever higher interests. The state should guarantee the deposits of small savers, not the debts of banks to other banks or hedge funds. The financial sector must be shriveled, the sector that uncoupled.
Democracy in Crisis: The Terror of the Economy is a Danger to Democracy (tags)
There is a powerful crisis dynamic that is stronger than the will of the sovereign and its democratic institutions. When capital relations fall into crisis, everything can be instrumentalized: the basic law, democracy, human rights and human life. Economic pressure creates extremism of middle.
Millionaire's Tax is the Best Debt Brake (tags)
Sahra Wagenknecht is a leader of the Left party, Die Linke, in the German Bundestag and author of "Freedom instead of Capitalism." Learning from other cultures is a strength, not a weakness. The University of British Columbia had a tuition freeze for 6 or 7 years and kept tuition at $2300.
What is the Origin of Wealth? (tags)
"Europe faces the choice of falling apart in the crisis or taking steps to another economic model," 50 scholars from the advisory board of Attac Germany declared. They make the connection between the chaos of the financial markets and the scandalous distribution of wealth
The history of the crisis of the western world that we all experience more or less consciously or unconsciously (or partly ignore) is a history of boundless lobbylism, political corruption, market fetishism and unbroken faith in growth..Economic theories were and are children of their time.
Attac's Bank Tribunal: The Jury's Verdict (tags)
This crisis did not break out over society like a force of nature. Financial managers spread the legend that financial crises belong to capitalism as water belongs to the ocean and that euphoric phases of bubble formation and the bursting of bubbles come and go like the seasons.
"War never serves peace" (tags)
War never serves peace just as lies never serve truth and cats are not dogs. We wage war against the nature that we exploit and against the starving whom we drive into misery. As soon as one says war, we fall back thousands of years to the Stone Age and lose the option for the future.
The Vacuum of World Trade Breaks Down (tags)
The unbridled free market was an illusion that gave free rein to greed and speculation and the dominance of the financial markets. Shareholder value made the profits of shareholders absolute and set short-term gain over long-term necessity.
GERMANY: Oscar Lafontaine on the Financial Markets (tags)
"The present crisis cannot be overcome without a regulation of the financial markets.. When banks are given billions through the so-called bank bailout and these billions disappear somewhere, that is a misappropriation or embezzlement of tax funds.."
Hunger, GMOs and Speculation (tags)
Like many other countries, Kenya provided its own staple foods until the 1980s. Today the country imports 80% of its food. To buy up the entire grain harvest of the US, only $120 billion is needed-a small amount for speculators on currency market
ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative) Has Brought Nicaragua out of Darkness (tags)
Nicaraguan foreign minister Samuel Santos explains how twice as many children are in school one year after the new government assumed power. Nicaragua now exports beans instead of importing beans. The South is helping itself.
Another Economy is Possible (tags)
The world economy increasingly has the character of a plutonomy, a wealth economy where the rich appropriate an ever larger share of the social wealth. Imagine an economy that serves justice, peace and creation, where competition and cooperation coexist and the future is safeguarded
Soaring Capital Profits and the Mountain of Corpses (tags)
For the first time in the historyof humanity, a surplus of goods could satisfy the basic needs of all earthlings. The moral imperative lives in all of us. Capital rule, the rule of finance capital over the economic events of the world, is nearly total.
Reforms and the System Question (tags)
According to Marxist perspectives, capitalism develops with crises and ruptures. Possibilities of revolutionary social upheavals open up in these crises. The old wisdom of the Fordist age that cars cannot buy cars has lost all value to the elites.
Working Without Coercion (tags)
Basic income is not a plant-closing bonus. Labor productivity will continue growing if the tax burden on the factor labor is reduced. The belief that full employment could return through economic growth is wishful thinking. Ecologically it could prove a horror.
"War-Mongerers Become Prisoners of Their Own Words" (tags)
The conclusion is that the peaceful use of nuclear energy must be ended..The core of the problem is that the nuclear powers refuse to meet their obligation to nuclear disarmament..A two-class international law is impossible.
Alternatives: Another World is Possible! (tags)
"The neoliberal policy of the last years is entangled in a deep legitimation crisis. Unemployment is not lowered through social cuts..Dismantling democracy and increased repression go along with militarization.. Another world is possible..."
60 Years Ago Dietrich Bonhoeffer was Murdered (tags)
"Translated in nearly all the languages of the world, Bonhoeffer's texts encourage liberating the Bible from the godless bonds of fundamentalist interpretations and protesting increasingly perfect weapons.."
China's Rise to a Political and Economic Superpower (tags)
The US is increasingly losing its economic sovereignty..For the Chinese the third Iraq war was the harshest defeat in the short history of reintegration in the world economy. The more the US becomes entrenched in unilateralism the easier China finds allies.
Court rules HIV not proven to cause 'AIDS'. (tags)
After years of claims by the AIDS establishment that a link between HIV and immune supression had been established a High Court found the claim without merit and a unfounded deception. This is the first legal trail of the HUV/AIDS hypothesis and a historic defeat for AID$ Inc.
Against Social Darwinism (tags)
"The conquest of Africa and large parts of Asia was not morally justified by anything. Only peace is morally justified. Today social Darwinism appears in the guise of Anglo-Saxon capitalism..Ecology and pure market ideology are in conflict.." Translated German
Against Social Darwinism (tags)
"The conquest of Africa and large parts of Asia by invading European forces was not morally justified. Only peace is morally justified..Today social Darwinism appears in the guise of Anglo-Saxon capitalism..Ecology and pure market ideology are in conflict."
Terror and Energy Security (tags)
The US will need 6 million more barrels of oil every day by 2020..Both the supply and the security of the US would be helped far more if energy savings and promotion of regenerative energy were vigorously emphasized. Translated from the German