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Muslim Academy

La persécution des Musulmans en Birmanie - 0 views

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    Les Musulmans dans le monde entier sont considérés comme une nation selon le Coran et l'Islam, mais malheureusement, le concept est différent de nos jours. Les nations musulmanes au lieu de s'entraider en temps de crise préfèrent vivre leurs vies indépendamment. Ils ne se sentent pas concernés des peines, des souffrances, des tortures et des crises auxquelles font face les pays Musulmans. Le sujet de la Birmanie est un sujet délicat ces temps-ci. L'armée a pris le pouvoir en Birmanie en 1962 et les mauvais jours ont commencé pour la population Musulmane. Les Musulmans en Birmanie subissent une grande violence. Mais aucun pays Musulman n'est venu à la rescousse jusqu'à présent. La population totale de Mianmar/Birmanie est de trois millions tandis que le nombre de Musulmans vivant en Birmanie est de un million.
Muslim Academy

9/11 and it's after effects - 0 views

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    The human race has witnessed many crises that have changed the course of history. These crises brought destruction to the world peace. The most destructive events in world history were the world wars which lead to loss of human life and resources. After the world war the crisis that has engulfed the whole world is the 9/11. The incident of 9/11 was seen as the direct threat by the Americans but the steps taken by America have now made the entire world a dangerous place to live in. The aftershocks of the 9/11 were observed in every part of the world. The United States of America blamed Muslims for the 9/11 incident which was made the reason for war against terrorism. This war against terrorism was started by Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq and other parts of the world. American believes that Islamic extremists are a big threat to American existence and they should be finished to bring peace to the world. For this, America first blamed Afghan mujahedeen and started a war there. The war is still on the go but it sees that America has lost the war as the death toll of the allied forces is still high.
thinkahol *

Bernard Lietaer: Money diversity - YouTube - 0 views

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    Bernard Lietaer argues that the monoculture of money is what creates economic instability, leading to liquidity crises. He calls for a greater diversity of alternative currencies, citing innovative and enormously successful initiatives like the Lithuanian Doraland Economy, the Torekes in Belgium and Switzerland's famous alternative currency, the WIR.
thinkahol *

Today's Must-See Animated Capitalist Takedown from RSA and David Harvey | The New York ... - 0 views

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    If you watch just one funny and handsome Marxist critique of the financial crisis, make it the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce's animated version of David Harvey's RSA speech "Crises of Capitalism." It's been making the rounds this afternoon, and for good reason: Mr. Harvey, a Marxist scholar who heads CUNY's Center for Place, Culture & Politics, describes not just the failures that caused the ongoing fiasco, but the failure of how we've explained it.
thinkahol *

House Passes State Aid Bill To Help Teachers Over GOP Protests | TPMDC - 0 views

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    It's a ready-made campaign commercial as Democrats plan to hail their own votes as heroic when states are facing massive budget crises. And -- you guessed it -- Republicans will say it's another big-spending government plan.
thinkahol *

t r u t h o u t | Why Millions March in France, but Not in the US - 0 views

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     The basic issue is the same there and here. Capitalism generates another of its regular, periodic crises, only this one is really bad. It begins, as often happens, in the financial sector where credit invites the competition-driven speculation, the excess risk-taking, and the corruption that explodes first. But precisely because the non-financial rest of the economy is already on shaky feet -- resulting from the growing economic divides between the mass of workers and the corporate profiteers -- the financial breakdown is spread by the market to the entire economy.
thinkahol *

Model citizens: Building SimEarth - tech - 04 November 2010 - New Scientist - 0 views

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    People don't behave the way economics says they should. Massive simulations of human interactions will warn us of coming crises - from finance to flu
thinkahol *

As the Country Falls Apart, It's Time for Our Revolution | Books | AlterNet - 0 views

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    You can feel it. Or maybe you can't. It doesn't matter whether you feel it or not. It's happening. The story of the United States of America as we know it -- not merely as the world's dominant superpower, but as a discrete political, economic, and geographic entity -- is drawing to a close due to a convergence of emerging economic, environmental, and political crises. Nothing lasts forever, empires least of all. And this one, which only began to expand in earnest circa the year 1900, doesn't feel like it has the staying power of ancient Rome. Not at all.
thinkahol *

2011: Calling Time on Capitalism | CommonDreams.org - 0 views

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    Recent decades have seen a massive redistribution of wealth, imposing the cost of successive crises on the poorest. Enough!
thinkahol *

Ronald Reagan's 30-Year Time Bombs - 0 views

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    The time element of "30 years" keeps slipping into American official reports and news stories about the origins of crises - the latest in "The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report" - but rarely is the relevance of the three-decade span explained, and there is a reason.
thinkahol *

Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, under current policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the United States has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way toward international norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.
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    These problems have very little to do with short-term or even medium-term budget arithmetic. The U.S. government is having no trouble borrowing to cover its current deficit. It's true that we're building up debt, on which we'll eventually have to pay interest. But if you actually do the math, instead of intoning big numbers in your best Dr. Evil voice, you discover that even very large deficits over the next few years will have remarkably little impact on U.S. fiscal sustainability. No, what makes America look unreliable isn't budget math, it's politics. And please, let's not have the usual declarations that both sides are at fault. Our problems are almost entirely one-sided - specifically, they're caused by the rise of an extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than give an inch on its demands.
thinkahol *

The Quiet Coup - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

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    The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government-a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time.
Dave Walther

They were so stupid.... How stupid were they? - 0 views

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    Why are LED lights more expensive than CFLs? LED has fewer environmental disposal requirements compared to CFLs due to the mercury... the LED last longer, are brighter, and use less energy...
Bakari Chavanu

Capitalism's Self-inflicted Apocalypse - 0 views

  •  The present economic crisis, however, has convinced even some prominent free-marketeers that something is gravely amiss. Truth be told, capitalism has yet to come to terms with several historical forces that cause it endless trouble: democracy, prosperity, and capitalism itself, the very entities that capitalist rulers claim to be fostering.
  • Some eighty  years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy.
  • In the early days of the Republic the rich and well-born imposed property qualifications for voting and officeholding. They opposed the direct election of candidates (note, their Electoral College is still with us). And for decades they resisted extending the franchise to less favored groups such as propertyless working men, immigrants, racial minorities, and women.
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  • The conservative plutocracy also seeks to rollback democracy’s social gains, such as public education, affordable housing, health care, collective bargaining, a living wage, safe work conditions, a non-toxic sustainable environment; the right to privacy, the separation of church and state, freedom from compulsory pregnancy, and the right to marry any consenting adult of one’s own choosing.
  • About a century ago, US labor leader Eugene Victor Debs was thrown into jail during a strike. Sitting in his cell he could not escape the conclusion that in disputes between two private interests, capital and labor, the state was not a neutral arbiter. The force of the state--with its police, militia, courts, and laws—was unequivocally on the side of the company bosses.
  • Any nation that is not “investor friendly,” that attempts to use its land, labor, capital, natural resources, and markets in a self-developing manner, outside  the dominion of transnational corporate hegemony, runs the risk of being demonized and targeted as “a threat to U.S. national security.”
  • Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is neither prosperous nor particularly democratic. One need only think of capitalist Nigeria, capitalist Indonesia, capitalist Thailand, capitalist Haiti, capitalist Colombia, capitalist Pakistan, capitalist South Africa, capitalist Latvia, and various other members of the Free World--more accurately, the Free Market World.
  • Corporate investors prefer poor populations. The poorer you are, the harder you will work—for less. The poorer you are, the less equipped you are to defend yourself against the abuses of wealth.
  • In the corporate world of “free-trade,” the number of billionaires is increasing faster than ever while the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. Poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.
  • To the extent that life is bearable under the present U.S. economic order, it is because millions of people have waged bitter class struggles to advance their living standards and their rights as citizens, bringing  some measure of humanity to an otherwise heartless politico-economic order.
  • There is a third function of the capitalist state seldom mentioned. It consists of preventing the capitalist system from devouring itself.  Consider the core contradiction Karl Marx pointed to: the tendency toward overproduction and market crisis. An economy dedicated to speedups and wage cuts, to making workers produce more and more for less and less, is always in danger of a crash. To maximize profits, wages must be kept down. But someone has to buy the goods and services being produced. For that, wages must be kept up. There is a chronic tendency—as we are seeing today—toward overproduction of private sector goods and services and underconsumption of necessities by the working populace. 
  • Instead of trying to make money by the arduous task of producing and marketing goods and services, the marauders tap directly into the money streams of the economy itself. During the 1990s we witnessed the collapse of an entire economy in Argentina when unchecked free marketeers stripped enterprises, pocketed vast sums, and left the country’s productive capacity in shambles. The Argentine state, gorged on a heavy diet of free-market ideology, faltered in its function of saving capitalism from the capitalists.
  • These thieves were caught and convicted. Does that not show capitalism’s self-correcting capacity? Not really. The prosecution of such malfeasance— in any case coming too late—was a product of democracy’s accountability and transparency, not capitalism’s. Of itself the free market is an amoral system, with no strictures save caveat emptor.
  • Perhaps the premiere brigand was Bernard Madoff. Described as “a longstanding leader in the financial services industry,” Madoff ran a fraudulent fund that raked in $50 billion from wealthy investors, paying them back “with money that wasn’t there,” as he himself put it. The plutocracy devours its own children.
  • The classic laissez-faire theory is even more preposterous than Greenspan made it.  In fact, the theory claims that everyone should pursue their own selfish interests without restraint.
  • Capitalism breeds the venal perpetrators, and rewards the most unscrupulous among them.  The crimes and crises are not irrational departures from a rational system, but the converse: they are the rational outcomes of a basically irrational and amoral system.
  • Worse still, the ensuing multi-billion dollar government bailouts are themselves being turned into an opportunity for pillage. Not only does the state fail to regulate, it becomes itself a source of plunder, pulling vast sums from the federal money machine, leaving the taxpayers to bleed.
  • But the 2008-09 “rescue operation” offered a record feed at the public trough. More than $350 billion was dished out by a right-wing lame-duck Secretary of the Treasury to the biggest banks and financial houses without oversight--not to mention the more than $4 trillion that has come from the Federal Reserve.  Most of the banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of New York Mellon, stated that they had no intention of letting anyone know where the money was going.
  • In sum, free-market corporate capitalism is by its nature a disaster waiting to happen.
  • If the paladins of Corporate America want to know what really threatens “our way of life,” it is their way of life, their boundless way of pilfering their own system, destroying the very foundation on which they stand, the very community on which they so lavishly feed.
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