Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis
VIDEO
from Journeyman Pictures
In times of crisis people seek strong leaders and simple solutions. But what if their solutions are identical to the mistakes that caused the crisis? This is the story of the greatest economic crisis of our age, the one that awaits us.
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Manufacturing Dissent: the Anti-globalization Movement is Funded by the Corporate Elites
FROM GLOBAL RESEARCH
The People’s Movement has been Hijacked
by Michael Chossudovsky
In this article, we focus on a related concept, namely the process of “manufacturing dissent” (rather than “consent”), which plays a decisive role in serving the interests of the ruling class.
Under contemporary capitalism, the illusion of democracy must prevail. It is in the interest of the corporate elites to accept dissent and protest as a feature of the system inasmuch as they do not threaten the established social order. The purpose is not to repress dissent, but, on the contrary, to shape and mould the protest movement, to set the outer limits of dissent. Read on »
Those Who Don’t Build Must Burn
ARTICLE FROM ZEROHEDGE
Submitted by Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform
“Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more. School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?” ~ Captain Beatty in Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury wrote his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 in 1950. Most kids were required to read this book when they were seventeen years old. Having just re-read the novel at the age of forty-seven makes you realize how little you knew at seventeen. It is 165 pages of keen insights into today’s American society. Bradbury’s hedonistic dark future has come to pass. His worst fears have been realized. The American public has willingly chosen to be distracted and entertained by electronic gadgets 24 hours per day. Today, reading books is for old fogies. Most people think Bradbury’s novel was a warning about censorship. It was not. It was a warning about TV and radio turning the minds of Americans to mush. Read on »
R. Buckminster Fuller and the Critical Path
RECOMMENDED
Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller
Author, inventor and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller first published Critical Path in 1981. It is one of Fuller’s most popular works. Critical Path suggests ways that we can re-invent our environment that are more organic and more conducive to human life. I’m a newbie to Fuller’s ideas, but find them appealing. The old system of economics and politics doesn’t work anymore and Fuller gives us a refreshing model to replace it. From Wikipedia: “Fuller describes his vision of the development of human civilization, economic history, and his highly original economic ideology based, amongst other things, on his detailed description of why scarcity of resources need no longer be a decisive factor in global politics. Read on »
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. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth » Grunch of Giants » The Buckminster Fuller Institute » Credit to wepollock. His blogs turned me on to Bucky. .
More on Fuller
by Buckminster Fuller
by Buckminster Fuller
The 2010 Index of Economic Freedom
STUDY
For over a decade, The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation, Washington’s preeminent think tank, have tracked the march of economic freedom around the world with the influential Index of Economic Freedom.
What is economic freedom?
Economic freedom is the fundamental right of every human to control his or her own labor and property. In an economically free society, individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please, with that freedom both protected by the state and unconstrained by the state. In economically free societies, governments allow labor, capital and goods to move freely, and refrain from coercion or constraint of liberty beyond the extent necessary to protect and maintain liberty itself. Read on »
Rank 2010
(100 is a perfect score/change from ’09)
1. Hong Kong…89.7…-0.3
2. Singapore…86.1...-1.0
3. Australia…82.6…0.0
4. New Zealand…82.1...+0.1
5. Ireland…81.3...-.9
6. Switzerland…81.1...+1.7
7. Canada…80.4…-0.1
8. United States78.0...-2.7
9. Denmark…77.9…+1.7
10. Chile…77.2…-1.1
A related study with slightly different results can be found from the Fraser Institute »
2. Singapore…86.1...-1.0
3. Australia…82.6…0.0
4. New Zealand…82.1...+0.1
5. Ireland…81.3...-.9
6. Switzerland…81.1...+1.7
7. Canada…80.4…-0.1
8. United States78.0...-2.7
9. Denmark…77.9…+1.7
10. Chile…77.2…-1.1
Drive: The Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us
VIDEO
This RSA Animate, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA, illustrates the unexpected truths about what really motivates us at work and at home.
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RSAnimate »
The Century of The Self
VIDEO
by Adam Curtis for the BBC
A fascinating four-part series about Edward Bernays and how he helped shape consumerism in the 20th century. Based on political propaganda and Sigmund Freud’s studies in psychoanalysis as behavior models, Bernays created the public relations profession that helped turn productive American capitalism into a mercenary, debt-based culture. Part 1 below. The full series can be watched here »
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America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, JULY – AUGUST 2010
by Angelo M. Codevilla
As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. Read on »
The Global Political Awakening and the New World Order
ARTICLE
The Technological Revolution and the Future of Freedom
by Andrew Gavin Marshall
There is a new and unique development in human history that is taking place around the world; it is unprecedented in reach and volume, and it is also the greatest threat to all global power structures: the ‘global political awakening.’ The term was coined by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and refers to the fact that, as Brzezinski wrote:
“For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. Global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination.”
Grunch of Giants
ONLINE BOOK
by R. Buckminster Fuller
There is no dictionary word for an army of invisible giants, one thousand miles tall, with their arms interlinked, girding the planet Earth. Since there exists just such an invisible, abstract, legal-contrivance army of giants, we have invented the word GRUNCH as the group designation — “a grunch of giants.” GR-UN-C-H, which stands for annual GROSS UNIVERSE CASH HEIST, pays annual dividends of over one trillion U.S. dollars. Read the book »
The Welfare-Warfare Crackup
ARTICLE
by Jacob G. Hornberger
For decades, libertarians have been warning Americans of the coming crack-up of the welfare-warfare state. Of course, we couldn’t predict when the crack-up would finally occur. All we could do is to say that the road to statism, both welfare and warfare, was a road to national bankruptcy.
Keep in mind that the welfare-warfare state depends on a vibrant private sector. Why is this so? Because the welfare-warfare sector is fundamentally a parasitic sector. That is, unlike the private sector, the public sector produces no wealth. The public sector attaches onto the private, productive sector and sucks lifeblood out of it in order to survive.
Thus, a government that is committed to providing welfare and warfare must ensure that the private sector remains vibrant and productive. The parasite instinctively knows that if the host dies, there is no more lifeblood that the parasite can suck. Read on »
The Practical Rules of Bureaucracy
ESSAY
from The Friesian School
To Hegel, bureaucrats were the “universal class” whose interests were identical to those of the state. This was questioned by Marx, who expected that bureaucrats simply pursued their own interest, regardless of that of the state, or of anyone else. Now this is a large part of modern economics, Public Choice Theory, which is discussed here with Rent Seeking. I was in a candidate forum, running for California State Assembly, in the mid-90’s, when one of the participants asserted that things done by government are always done more efficiently than when done by private business. There were so many ways in which this assertion was preposterous, but I did want to be able to give one essential reason why it was impossible. This first rule of bureaucracy provides us with that reason. Read on »
The Voluntaryists
ESSAY
The Voluntaryists are advocates of non-political strategies to achieve a free society. We reject electoral politics, both in theory and practice, as incompatible with libertarian principles. Governments must cloak their actions in an aura of moral legitimacy in order to sustain their power, and political methods invariably strengthen that legitimacy. Voluntaryists seek instead to delegitimize the State through education, and we advocate withdrawal of the cooperation and tacit consent on which State power ultimately depends. Voluntaryists are exclusively committed to using nonviolent strategies to oppose the State. Read on »
I Must Speak Out
Becoming a Sovereign Citizen
ADVOCACY
The Self-Sovereign Individual Project
A program to achieve freedom from government coercion for those who understand it, want it and are responsible enough to live it. Learn more »
Declaration of Individual Independence
EXCERPT: When in the course of his life any individual achieves a clear understanding that the realization of his human potential for the ultimate promotion of his Lifetime Happiness is being severely Constrained and UnPermittedly Modified by the regulations of those governing his life, and at the same time he appreciates that increasing his Lifetime Happiness is solely his own responsibility, then it becomes necessary for him to declare his refusal to sanction the necessity, Effect and the very Existence of such regulations over him, to unilaterally dissolve those Connection Attributes by which he has been Involved with his governors, and to assume his place among other Freemen with the independence of thought and sovereignty of Action which his and their nature entitles and requires of them as shown by the Theory of Social Meta-Needs.
Learn more »
The Right to Ignore the State
ESSAY
by Herbert Spencer (1820-1902)
As a corollary to the proposition that all institutions must be subordinated to the law of equal freedom, we cannot choose but admit the right of the citizen to adopt a condition of voluntary outlawry. If every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man, then he is free to drop connection with the state — to relinquish its protection, and to refuse paying toward its support. It is self-evident that in so behaving he in no way trenches upon the liberty of others; for his position is a passive one; and whilst passive he cannot become an aggressor. It is equally self-evident that he cannot be compelled to continue one of a political corporation, without a breach of the moral law, seeing that citizenship involves payment of taxes; and the taking away of a man’s property against his will, is an infringement of his rights. Government being simply an agent employed in common by a number of individuals to secure to them certain advantages, the very nature of the connection implies that it is for each to say whether he will employ such an agent or not. If any one of them determines to ignore this mutual-safety confederation, nothing can be said except that he loses all claim to its good offices, and exposes himself to the danger of maltreatment — a thing he is quite at liberty to do if he likes. He cannot be coerced into political combination without a breach of the law of equal freedom; he can withdraw from it without committing any such breach; and he has therefore a right so to withdraw. Read on »
A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century
ESSAY
by John Henry MacKay
First of all, this: Let him who does not know me and who would, perhaps, in the following pages, look for such sensational disclosures as we see in those mendacious speculations upon the gullibility of the public from which the latter derives its sole knowledge of the Anarchistic movement, not take the trouble to read beyond the first page.
In no other field of social life does there exist to-day a more lamentable confusion, a more naïve superficiality, a more portentous ignorance than in that of Anarchism. The very utterance of the word is like the flourish of a red rag; in blind wrath the majority dash against it without taking time for calm examination and consideration. They will tear into tatters this work, too, without having understood it. Me their blows will not strike. Read on »
Complete History of the Soviet Union
in under seven minutes
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A Whole New Mind: Why Right-brainers Will Rule the Future
BOOK PREVIEW
by Daniel H. Pink
A Whole New Mind: Why Right-brainers Will Rule the Future is a book by Daniel H. Pink, author of Free Agent Nation. A Whole New Mind posits that the future of global business belongs to the right-brainers. Read More »
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Red Tape 