Europe moves ahead with fiscal union, UK isolated

Europe secured an historic agreement to draft a new treaty for deeper economic integration in the euro zone on Friday, but Britain, the region's third largest economy, refused to join the other 26 countries in a fiscal union and was isolated.

The outcome of a two-day European Union summit left financial markets uncertain whether and when more decisive action would be taken to stem a debt crisis that began in Greece in 2009, spread to Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain and now threatens France and even economic powerhouse Germany.

A new treaty could take three months to negotiate and may require risky referendums in countries such as Ireland.

Two ECB sources told Reuters the European Central Bank would keep purchases of euro zone government bonds capped for now and take no extra firefighting action. Debt markets were wary. Interbank lending rates eased but Italian 10-year bond yields rose to around 6.5 percent.

Twenty-six of the 27 EU leaders agreed to pursue a tougher budget discipline regime with automatic sanctions for deficit sinners in the single currency area, but Britain said it could not accept proposed EU treaty amendments after failing to secure concessions for itself.

"This is a breakthrough to a union of stability," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. "We will use the crisis as a chance for a new beginning."

After 10 hours of talks that ran into the early hours of Friday, all 17 members of the euro zone and nine of the 10 outsiders resolved to negotiate a new agreement alongside the EU treaty.

Britain's few allies melted away in the Brussels dawn. All the other nine non-euro states said they wanted to take part in the fiscal union process, subject to parliamentary approval.

The rift, which could widen into a permanent divide between London and the continental mainland, occurred 20 years to the day after European leaders agreed at the Maastricht summit to create the single currency, with Britain opting to stay out.

Prime Minister David Cameron insisted at a news conference that it remained in Britain's interest to stay in the EU and take advantage of its single market.

One senior EU diplomat called Cameron's negotiating tactics "clumsy". Among other things, he had sought a veto on a proposed financial transaction tax, which may now be voted through by a majority over the objections of the City of London financial centre.

Continue reading - Reuters - Europe moves ahead with fiscal union, UK isolated

Occupy The Movie

Occupy The Movie will interweave viral vignettes - documenting each event that shapes the movement - with candid interviews of leading figures around the movement - academics, politicians, philosophers, economists - to answer this historical question.

Completion date to be announced.

Source: Occupy The Movie

Bloomberg Forever - short film - Occupy The Movie

Occupy Venice Talks with The Zeitgeist Movement

Occupy Venice Talks with The Zeitgeist Movement LA (Wall St) Peter Joseph, Jason lord, Jen Wilding

Libertarianism

Work Sucks!


Workers' Self-Management

Visions of a Free Society

Left Libertarianism Part 1 of 2

Left Libertarianism Part 2 of 2

Occupation Nation: US cops serve & protect the 1%

American anti-corporate Occupy protesters are being allowed back into a New Orleans park, after getting permission from a federal judge. A lawmaker has already called for an investigation into claims of police misconduct in dealing with activists. The movement shows no sign of dying down across America, with thousands demonstrating nearly three months after the first protests in New York. The heavy police presence isn't being scaled back either, as Marina Portnaya reports.

Occupation Nation: US cops serve & protect the 1%

Mandelbrot Beats Economics in Fathoming Markets

The possible collapse of the European monetary union, at least in its current form, brings home the truth that there’s little in economics that is certain. We’re again “thinking the unthinkable,” as we were a few years ago when we suddenly realized that financial engineering hadn’t banished financial crises, and that 70 years of relative stability since the Great Depression didn’t guarantee a thing.

It seems that we’re complete suckers for the illusion of certainty and the seeming unlikelihood of the unthinkable, even though financial and economic history is one long string of crises. This time always seems different, until it turns out not to be.

Nothing in mainstream “neoclassical” finance theory explains these persistent crises. Almost without exception, economists since Adam Smith have viewed economic systems as being in balance or equilibrium, and as having a natural tendency to return there after any disturbance. In this view, crises can be understood only as anomalies, the consequences of unusual outside shocks.

All this makes for tidy and comforting theory, with simple mathematics, but it fails utterly to account for the most basic market dynamics. Most notably, large and violent events -- like the stock market crash of 1987 or the flash crash of last May -- happen far more frequently than equilibrium theories suggest. In fact, the pronounced frequency of market upheavals is precisely what’s most constant in economics.

Over the past 15 years or so, physicists have demonstrated this in mathematical studies of market volatility. Inspired by work of the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in the 1960s, these scientists have used enormous sets of historical data -- hundreds of millions of minute-by-minute prices stretching over more than a decade, and daily and monthly prices over half a century -- to show that large market movements, up or down, follow a single mathematical pattern.

Larger movements of, say, 10 percent to 15 percent, are less likely than movements of 3 percent to 5 percent. And the probability of a movement decreases in simple inverse proportion to the cube of its size: If moves of 5 percent or more have a certain likelihood, then moves of 10 percent or more are 8 (2 cubed) times less likely, and moves of 20 percent or more are in turn 8 times even less likely. But they still occur with some regularity.

This pattern, it turns out, can be seen in markets for stocks, foreign exchange and futures around the world. And it is every bit as regular as the statistical patterns physicists know for the movements of molecules in solids, liquids and gases, or for innumerable other physical phenomena. It’s too regular to be an accident, and it is as deserving of fundamental explanation as anything in the rest of science.

‘The Fat Tail’

There are practical implications, of course, as Nassim Taleb explored in his book “The Black Swan.” Among other things, this particular pattern -- scientists describe it as a “fat tail” in the probability distribution -- suggests that really big movements are much more common than we might suppose. Thinking of markets in terms of the usual statistics that apply to things like people’s heights or weights or test scores leads to gross underestimation of the risks of rare catastrophes.

A credible economic theory of markets -- something we do not yet have -- would explain why the distribution of market returns shows such a preponderance of large events. It would account for why the mathematical form of this distribution is so uniform in markets the world over.

And, importantly, it would explain why markets share the same pattern with many other natural systems. Look, for example, at the flow of traffic on the Internet, solar flare activity on the Sun, the course of biological evolution or earthquake frequency on the San Andreas fault, and you see patterns strikingly similar to those in financial markets. All these systems and many others exhibit a naturally irregular rhythm in which long periods of relative quiescence are sporadically broken by bursts of intense upheaval.

The mathematical similarity between markets and other natural systems goes deeper still. Consider volatility -- a measure of the momentary vigor of a market’s erratic movements up and down. Eugene Stanley, a physicist at Boston University, and his colleagues have shown in recent studies that bursts of high volatility in the stock market tend to cluster in time in the same way that earthquake aftershocks do. They follow a precise pattern known as Omori’s Law -- named for Fusakichi Omori, the Japanese seismologist -- which describes the likelihood of aftershocks in the days and weeks following an earthquake.

This similarity between market movements and earthquake aftershocks seems weird if you think of a financial market as a system in equilibrium that naturally balances people’s conflicting aims and desires. But it looks less weird and even quite natural if you think of a market as just another system that, like the Earth’s crust, is perpetually driven out of balance by the action of various forces, and responds to those forces in complex, dynamic ways.

It’s not so surprising that the best emerging models of markets look a lot like models of disequilibrium processes in other areas of science. They eschew the “rational agents” of neoclassical economic theory and instead view markets as systems involving interactions among people and companies with realistic characteristics -- prone to mistakes, always learning and adapting, and often copying what others do. These models see markets as driven by feedback and instability, as is the case with most other natural systems.

It’s fair to say these models don’t yet give us an adequate understanding of the basic patterns we see in markets, but they at least move in the right direction by taking the historical data seriously and trying to explain it. Nothing in mainstream economics seems as likely to succeed in this. “I urge students to read narrowly within economics, but widely in science,” Vernon Smith wrote in his 2002 Nobel Prize for economics lecture, because “within economics there is essentially only one model to be adapted to every application.”

Simple ideas of equilibrium and balance may flatter our Platonic prejudices, but they don’t fit the real world. Nothing in the mathematics and physical science of the past 30 years stands out so much as the increasing importance of the irregular, the chaotic and the disordered in every part of the natural world. In many cases, this disorder isn’t simply random, but rather contains important regularities. Finding the expected disorder in the marketplace, and understanding its origins, could give economics a much stronger scientific foundation.

Source: Bloomberg - Mandelbrot Beats Economics in Fathoming Markets: Mark Buchanan

Mandelbrot's Famous Quote:
It is beyond belief that we know so little about how people get rich or poor, about how it is they come to dwell in comfort and health or die in penury and disease. Financial markets are the machines in which much of human welfare is decided; yet we know more about how our car engines work than about how our global financial system functions. We lurch from crisis to crisis. In a networked world, mayhem in one market spreads instantaneously to all others—and we have only the vaguest of notions how this happens, or how to regulate it. So limited is our knowledge that we resort, not to science, but to shamans. We place control of the world's largest economy in the hands of a few elderly men, the central bankers.
-Benoît B. Mandelbrot

David Deutsch - The Unknowable & How To Prepare For It

TEDxBrussels - David Deutsch - The Unknowable & How To Prepare For It

FAN MADE - Ron Paul: The 45th President Of The United States

Ron Paul: The 45th President Of The United States

Read Also: FORBES: Ron Paul Should Be The Next President Of The United States

New Ron Paul Ad - BIG DOG

China's Hard Landing

The state-led growth model is leading the country into trouble.

The People's Bank of China's surprise announcement Wednesday of a half percentage point cut in banks' required reserve ratio is an admission that the economy is facing stiff headwinds. Consumer price inflation remains relatively high at 5.5%, and the true level of inflation as reflected in the GDP deflator is probably closer to 10%.

Most analysts expected monetary easing to start next year when inflation had subsided further. But then most China analysts were predicting a "soft landing" for the economy. The data in recent days suggest the stagflation trend will continue and the landing may be bumpy.

Property prices have fallen for three consecutive months and the trend is accelerating. HSBC's and the government's own purchasers managers' indices of corporate sentiment took a big tumble in November, falling into negative territory for the first time since early 2009. This time China can't export its way out of its domestic problems, since external demand is shrinking.

China is a poster child for the Austrian school of economics' theory of the business cycle. After undertaking the biggest stimulus program the world has ever seen in response to the global financial crisis, the country is drowning in unproductive investments financed with credit.

The government spent 15% of GDP largely on public works projects in inland regions, financed with loans from the state-owned banks. Investment as a share of GDP soared to 48.5% in 2010, and the M2 measure of money supply ballooned to 140% that of the U.S.

Now comes the hangover. The public works projects are winding down, unleashing a wave of unemployment and an uptick in social unrest. The banks' nonperforming loans are rising, and local governments are insolvent. The country is littered with luxurious county government offices, ghost cities of empty apartment blocks, unsafe high-speed rail lines and crumbling highways to nowhere.

One effect of negative real interest rates was a nationwide bubble in private housing, with the average price of an urban apartment reaching eight times the average annual income. Real estate is the most popular investment for the wealthy, according to a central bank survey in September. Millions of luxury apartments are vacant, even as there is a shortage of affordable housing for the poor.

Property construction became "the most important sector in the universe," in the words of UBS economist Jonathan Anderson. It directly accounts for about 13% of the economy, 20% if one includes related industries like concrete and steel. It also provided 40% of local government revenues through land sales.

Worsening inflation forced the government to put on the brakes this year. As with most property busts, transactions dried up, followed by a free fall in prices. Land prices were down 60% year on year in September. Property developers are slashing prices of new homes to stave off bankruptcy.

Beijing recognizes the dangers of a property bubble and deliberately popped this one by telling banks to cut back loans to developers. The government seems to be determined to force some of the smaller developers to the wall, both to force consolidation in the industry and convince the remaining developers to get on board with the state-run program of building low-income housing.

Earlier this year banking regulators conducted stress tests that supposedly showed the financial system can withstand a 40% fall in property prices. Loans to developers and mortgages account for about 20% of the banks' loan books. But since the health of the wider economy is tied to property, China could face a scenario close to that of the U.S. in recent years. Because the private market for housing was tiny 10 years ago when the current boom began, the country has never experienced a broad-based decline in property prices.

The government and the more sanguine analysts say low-income housing construction will pick up the economic slack, as activity at the top end of the market contracts. The problem is that even if the government meets its goals, the program is still too small to save the economy. Barclays estimates that it will contribute one percentage point to growth in 2011, and 0.5 percentage points in 2012.

There is no easy way to avoid the bust that is coming. The silver lining is that China's increasingly state-led growth model will be discredited, and a debate will begin on restarting the reforms that stalled in the mid-2000s. A financial sector that allocates credit based on politics rather than price signals led China into this mess. Popular pressure to dismantle crony capitalism is building, and the Communist Party would be wise to get in front of it while it can.

Source: WSJ - China's Hard Landing

The Value of Science | Richard Feynman

There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages
before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, or what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.

Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the sun
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe.

Eric Drexler: Physical Law and the Future of Nanotechnology

Dr. Eric Drexler speaks at the Inaugural Lecture of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. Introduced by Professor Nick Bostrom.

Exploring a Timeless Landscape: Physical Law and the Future of Nanotechnology

In the inaugural lecture of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, Eric Drexler explores the implications of physical law for the future potential of nanotechnology, then describes the prospects for productive technologies that can solve global problems on the scale of climate change.

Abstract:

A methodology grounded in physics and engineering can answer a limited yet illuminating range of questions about the potential of physical technology. This line of inquiry leads to a crucial question: What can physics tell us about the potential of advanced nanotechnologies? Well-established physical principles show that this potential embraces productive nanotechnologies that have the potential to transform the material basis of civilization. This prospect calls for re-evaluating both research opportunities and broader choices with consequences for the human future.

Eric Drexler: Physical Law and the Future of Nanotechnology

Peter Joseph on RT - Monetary System, Debt, & Resource-Based Economy

..So, with all of the problems in the world today, how do people begin to think about, let alone implement solutions that can improve their lives and those of others in society? Economists like Steve Keen support debt jubilees, others like Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul support sound money as the solution, but what about something more radical? What about getting grid of money, profit and competition all together? Well, Peter Joseph, author of the Zeitgeist series, believes that society can evolve to do just that. He joins us during the show to talk about the role of debt, the monetary system, and social norms that encourage what he views as inefficient and destructive behavior that does more harm for society than good.

Peter Joseph on Russia Today [Dec 2 '11] Monetary System, Debt, & Resource-Based Economy

An Interview with the Director of the Imaginary Foundation

The Imaginary Foundation says "Great art expands the way we see—it uplifts the human spirit from the barbaric and thrusts it toward the numinous." - An Interview with The Director of The Imaginary Foundation

The Imaginary Foundation is a think tank from Switzerland that does experimental research on new ways of thinking and the power of the imagination. They hold dear a belief in human potential and seek progress in all directions. The small clandestine team is headed up by the mysterious "Director," a 70-something über-intellectual whose father founded the Dadaist movement. Avoiding direct publicity, the team has sought clothing as an unlikely vehicle for bringing their ideas beyond the academic realm and into popular culture. A multicultural design team based in San Francisco articulates The Director’s ideas and translates them into consumable formats for the new generation. The questions for this interview with The Director were asked by members of the Imaginary Foundation community via Facebook.

1) How did The Imaginary Foundation come to be? What was the inspiration? –Matt Zeutenhorst

It's a rather amusing story, actually: I was having a coffee with my dear friend at the time, Jean-Paul Sartre, at this great little place on the left bank in the early 1960s. Somewhere during our animated exchange, Jean-Paul uttered the words, "because we can imagine we are free." I dropped my brioche in astonishment, my synapses standing on end, awestruck by his profound insight. All at once, I felt every cell in my body command me to create a context for this idea to come alive, to unleash the conditions for this ontological liberation to manifest and to surround myself with a group of people who felt the same compulsive urge to give power to the imagination. I had a moment of synesthetic ecstasy as I watched my favorite pastry tumble down the cobblestone street only to be finally intercepted by a hungry crow (I think it was a corneille noire, native to the area). Sadly, a little while after that Jean-Paul and I had a falling out, as he felt I'd become a little too bourgeois, but the glow of his inspiration stayed with me and in 1973 I formed The Imaginary Foundation.

2) What is it about The Imaginary Foundation that makes you wake up in the morning? What compels you to work with this foundation? –Rebecca Renberg

The unquenchable yearning to experience nature's elegant truths and her exquisite interrelationships. I feel it's profound that atoms have assembled into entities which are somehow able to ponder their own origins. I am humbled by each and every moment that I'm conscious enough to engage in this mysterious and poetic byproduct of cosmic evolution. IF we at The Imaginary Foundation can imbue our work with the most minuscule twinkle of this reverence, and in doing so inspire someone to act with the strength and courage to accomplish something positive, then this is worth getting out of bed for.

3) Why is the imagination so important? –Marshall Harding

Imagination is the factory that makes legends. It is the beginning of all achievement. To imagine is to perceive many potential futures, select the most delightful possibility, and then pull the present forward to meet it. Imagination has transported us from shivering in dark caves to triumphantly floating above our precious blue earth. It reminds us that reality is malleable and we are the architects of our own fate.

4) So, what is beauty? –Pierre Mâché

Beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. It can spontaneously arise at any moment given the right circumstances, point of view, and context. Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace. It can be a rousing symphonic climax, or just the way the light catches the edge of a rusty old trash can. To seek beauty is to have the willingness, the inclination, and the impetuous desire for this chance encounter to transpire. IF you look at history, great art expands the way we see—it uplifts the human spirit from the barbaric and thrusts it toward the numinous.

5) Why do you have so much faith in creativity? –Everett Ruskin

Because there is a moment that emerges when the creative process itself seems to "talk" to the artist. Those who have listened deeply to this "voice" that echoes the rhythms of the universe, and can recite its reverberations back into the stream, are capable of creating work that can enchant the very cosmos itself. So I have faith in the surrender and acceptance of the creative act and the humility to know that a great artist is but a conduit for an expression that resonates with something that is greater than him or herself.

6) Who creates reality? –Donald Maynard

Our experience of reality is created by our perception of it. Robert Anton Wilson asserted that our "reality tunnel" could be likened to a perception filter. The pores of this filter are in the shapes of embodied metaphors. To make biological survival possible, the immensity of perception has to be funneled through the "reducing valve" of the brain and the nervous system. The function of the brain and sense organs is thus to eliminate, or filter, data. Each person is, at each moment, capable of perceiving the totality of awareness—the function of the brain is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely irrelevant knowledge. We do, however, erratically make contact with other realms where we perceive a more absolute knowledge of reality. At this more fundamental level, the "who" dissolves and there only "is." In this realm we're not the centre of things, but merely one of the vertices of the infinite polygon that unites nature, reason, and imagination to the multiverse.

7) What attitudes, practices, and precautions should people adopt now in preparation for the technological singularity that will better ensure the sustainability and security of the planet and future generations, without curtailing our drive to transcend our limits and realize the impossible? –Toussaint Egan

We must be mindful of our current trajectory and the fragility of the moment in history that we now occupy. It may be argued that science and technology have already outrun our morality and we are on an inevitable path to extinction. Indeed, in 1966, Carl Sagan and Boris Shklovskii suggested that technological civilizations will tend to either destroy themselves within a century of developing interstellar communicative capability or master their self-destructive tendencies and survive for billion-year timescales. The time in which we find ourselves is certainly full of unique challenges, but there has always been struggle when facing new paradigms—it's how we deal with these upheavals that matters. As my dear friend Marshall McLuhan noted: "It is how we perceive [cataclysmic changes] and react to them that will determine their ultimate psychic and social consequences. If we refuse to see them at all, we will become their servants. It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us all about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can come through." I believe we can influence events. Yes, there are powerful forces that can determine the direction of the future, but I truly believe the future doesn't happen only passively and inevitably. The future is CREATED—it is imagined and realized by visionaries who work and sacrifice for it. "There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality—and then there are those who turn one into the other." –Douglas Everett So let’s become entangled in empathy, absorbed in altruism, deified through diversity, and cajoled into cooperation. Let's coalesce reason, knowledge, logic, data, metrics, intuition, passion, romance, poetry into a single note, and sing it in the key of synergy. It will be these qualities, and more, that will help us take the next perilous step into the journey of our collective destiny, allowing us to gaze into the mirror of naked self-truth and know that we can be wonderful.

8) Do we create the idea of imagination or does the idea of imagination create what we perceive? –Graham Marousek

Hmmm a strange loop, indeed. In formal systems in mathematics these "strange loops" take on an interesting quality. Douglas Hofstadter states in the 20th anniversary preface to Godel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid: "It is a loop that allows a system to 'perceive itself,' to become 'self-aware.' By virtue of having a loop, a formal system acquires a self. The key to consciousness is not the stuff out of which brains are made, but the patterns that can come to exist inside the stuff of a brain. Brains are media that support PATTERNS that mirror the world, of which, needless to say, those brains are themselves denizens--- and it is in the inevitable self-mirroring that arises that the strange loops of consciousness start to swirl. In other words, An "I" comes about via a kind of vortex, whereby patterns in a brain mirror the brain's mirroring of the world and eventually mirror themselves, whereupon the vortex of "I" becomes a real, causal entity. The more self-referentially rich such a loop is, the more conscious is the self to which it gives rise." So perhaps it could be argued that consciousness is a nascent quality of the patterned self-organization of emergent complexity that seems to be an inevitability to the known universe. I, thus, consider myself a man of principle, even IF that principle does seem to be a little weak and anthropic.

9) In terms of business entrepreneurship, what do you think is next for our country/the world/society in general? –Rebecca Renberg

The evolution of technology has morphed the relationship between consumer and creator forever. The communal ownership of the means of production, the production of ideas at least, is a reality today. But I feel we're experiencing a seismic shift in many aspects of human culture and the shift in business is part of a much larger process—the birth of a supermassively parallel collective consciousness. This "Global Mind" may still be a little groggy, but it is clearly waking up. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said to me, "Just as Earth once covered itself with a film of interdependent living organisms which we call the biosphere, so mankind's combined achievements are forming a global network of collective mind." The monumental consequences of this unfolding process and the labyrinth of realtime feedback within the process make it almost unfathomable to speculate on outcomes. Our future cannot be parsed into the simple binary of a utopia or dystopia. The complex, volatile, and chaotic nature of the future we're beginning to glimpse is as daunting as it is encouraging. However, I remain positive. We may be stumbling, fumbling, flawed primates, but when we work together, we are primates that can fly!

10) Do you think there will be a point in human evolution where we can fully understand the very nature of life? –Alexander D. Beckwith

As we move from a world defined by objects into a world extensively defined by relations, the human experience will begin to dissolve into the greater universal flux of cosmic processes. We will cross the boundary into the extended reality of the virtualized grid, where the actions of body manifested through clicks and hyperconnected technology will become a field of mediated sense thoughts. The filters will be removed and the deeper metapatterns will become revealed. It will be then that the interdependent co-extensive nature of the omniverse will explode into being. A vision of the previously flawed but now upgradeable primate, once known as mankind, will finally emerge, understood in its true nature—a dynamic holographic pattern integrity, surfing the wholly extended wave-particle structure of the universe. Until then, I myself will be paying attention to all things with openness and wonder. Henry Miller once said, "The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself." I don't think grass gets much greener than the grass here in the Swiss Alps.

11) What do you think about sharing? –Creative Comomons

Sharing is the mechanism that propels culture forward. Cultural evolution, like its biological counterpart, is driven by random mutation. This process of recombination, iteration, and sharing enables the stickiest ideas to survive. When we share, it is as though the global imagination is breathing. To inhale is to be nourished by inspiration—to exhale is to evoke it.

Continue reading - An Interview with the Director of the Imaginary Foundation

Visit: Imaginary Foundation | The Undivided Mind

Beginning of Infinity - A Mashup of techno-optimism!

INDONESIA REVOLT - As Indonesia strikes it rich, workers start to strike

When the Jakarta governor offered a hefty pay rise last week to workers, he successfully headed off a major strike. But almost immediately, workers went on the rampage in another part of the country demanding a wage hike too.

It is another illustration of the most recent and, for investors, troubling risk they face in what has become one of the darlings of the emerging economies.

The big drivers for the strikes have been high prices for the commodities that are the backbone of the Indonesian economy, rising costs and a strong sense that the country's widely trumpeted economic successes have not been shared.

"Workers are not dumb. They are going to see prices are high. They're going to say 'we want our just rewards'," said Dick Blin, spokesman for the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM), which covers the bulk of Indonesia's main industries.

The highest profile -- and so far most costly -- strike has been going on since September at the giant Freeport McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc mine where 8,000 miners in the remote eastern province are demanding better pay.

Though union leaders in other industries deny that the Freeport strike was their trigger, the number of strikes has begun to mushroom across a broad range of industries from supermarket to telecoms, threatening to temper investor enthusiasm for one of Asia's fastest growing economies.

"These strikes are dangerous and show how weak the government is in facing industrial disputes," said Sofjan Wanandi, a leading businessman and chairman of the Employers' Association of Indonesia.

"With this situation, businesses will re-consider their expansion and investment plans, as well as plans to relocate factories from China to Indonesia," he said.

Businessmen from South Korea, a top investor, were also expressing concern, he said.

Investors in Southeast Asia's biggest economy have long factored in industrial-scale corruption, a complex and lethargic bureaucracy and even militant attacks.

But industrial disputes in the densely populated society, which has had little more than a decade of democracy, is a much newer hurdle.

Union membership is still quite low in a country where militant union leaders just a few years ago could expect to be hounded into jail, or worse.

RISING PRICES

The Freeport strike has come after gold prices doubled in the past two years. Prices for many commodities of which Indonesia is a leading exporter, such as tin, copper, coffee and cocoa, have also hit record highs in recent years.

"These commodity prices are a good opportunity to negotiate for better welfare, pay and wages," said Khoirul Anam, president of the Indonesian Forestry and Allied Workers' Union.

He said conditions were often little different from the days under Dutch colonial rule, arguing, for example, that palm oil workers should be paid three times as much.

"The bargaining position of labor in Indonesia has increased. However, it is not that much. They have slowly understood their rights and are demanding more," said Andriko Otang from the Trade Unions Rights Centre.

BILLIONAIRES AND LOW SALARIES

The strikes have coincided with growing wealth on the back of the global price commodity boom and a burst in consumerism.

On the day workers rioted in Batam, others were injured in a 5,000-strong crush to get half price Blackberry mobile phones in the capital. Also that day, Forbes released a report saying the country had created four more billionaires, with the wealth of its Indonesia "Rich List" up by 19 percent to $85 billion.

Indonesia is creating millionaires faster than any other in the Asia-Pacific, according to wealth manager Julius Baer.

Yet monthly wages average $113, less than a half that in Thailand and a third of China's, according to the Asian Development Bank's latest data. And half the population survives on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank.

Low-wage workers, seeing pay rises cancelled out by food prices climbing 15 percent last year, are being surrounded by growing consumerism and displays of wealth. Their expectations and perceptions of inequality are rising too.

"Many of us don't see any improvements in our life," said Sari, a worker making Adidas shoes in a footwear factory, a sector where plants have relocated from China and Vietnam in the past year after wage costs rose there.

"A factor that would make a person go on strike is when one feels trapped. We are going in that direction, so the likelihood for more strikes in garment, textile and shoe factories is huge."

Continue reading - Reuters - As Indonesia strikes it rich, workers start to strike

100 Reasons to End The Fed

1. The Federal Reserve System constantly decreases the value of our dollar by printing money out of thin air. (inflation)

2. Graph: The value of a $1 Federal Reserve Note in 1913 dollars (the year the Fed was created).

3. The Fed even recognizes its inflationary activity. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston says: “When you or I write a check there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover the check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check there is no bank deposit on which that check is drawn. When the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money.”

4. American economist Irving Fisher said: “Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess.”

5. If you or I did what the Fed does when it prints money, we would be found guilty of counterfeiting and locked up for a very long time!

6. The reason you or I would be arrested for counterfeiting is it’s theft! Every bill you create in bad faith, which doesn’t actually represent the creation of real goods and services, real value that has improved life by directing resources to their most productive uses, is a lie and an appropriation of value from the rest of the world, which gives the counterfeiter goods and services in exchange for nothing, because he or she did not actually create anything of value in return.

7. This is true of what the Federal Reserve does: “Neither paper currency nor deposits have value as commodities, intrinsically, a ‘dollar’ bill is just a piece of paper. Deposits are merely book entries.” – Modern Money Mechanics Workbook, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 1975

8. “The Fed creates absolutely nothing. It does not produce a single grain of wheat to feed people, a single drop of oil to power the engines of an industrial economy, nor a single ingot of metal from the ground to build the products and buildings that improve our lives.” -Wesley Messamore

9. This situation, in which you or I would be arrested for doing something the Federal Reserve does every day, is the hallmark of institutionalized theft and a legal system turned on its head. As French economist Frederic Bastiat said in the 19th century: “But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply… See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”

10. The inflation that results from the Federal Reserve’s massive counterfeiting operation steals from hardworking Americans by diminishing the value of the money they earn.

11. This destroys the purchasing power of the American people by causing the price of everything (like groceries and gasoline) to rise.

12. In this way, inflation works as a hidden tax– one of the steepest and worst taxes Americans have to pay.

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