Barr, M. (2008). With These Hands: The Story of an American Furniture Factory. DVD. USA. Released 12-2008. Producers Matthew, Barr and David, Williams. 80mts
Paul Wildman [Kalgrove Pty/Ltd - http://www.kal.net.au/ ] PO 73 Northgate 4013 Brisbane Australia ph +61 7 32667570. Mob 0412027818'Treat our Earth well - it was not given to us by our parents - it was loaned to us by our grandchildren'
From: Paul Wildman [mailto:paul@kalgrove.com] Sent: Friday, 10 April 2009 8:22 AM
Subject: inclusion in my work
Technique - Hand Labour: international comparative hourly rates Skilled machine operator – technique: Vietnam – operator’s labour - $00.20/hr+$00.05/hr oncosts=∑00.25/hrAUD 2006 figs China – operator’s labour - $01.40/hr+$00.10/hr oncosts=∑$1.50/hrAUD 2006 figs Malaysia – operator’s labour - $02.5/hr+$00.25/hr oncosts=∑$02.75/hrAUD 2009 figs
Australia – operator’s labour - $20/hr+$05/hr oncosts=∑$25/hrAUD 2009figs US – operator’s labour - $18/hr+$07/hr oncosts=∑$25/hrAUD 2006 figs[Act. is $18.20/hr + $8.40/hr oncosts = $26.60/hr]
Observations: (1) Aust and the US have similar labour cost structures.
(2) Vietnam’s labour cost is 01% of Australia’s comparative hourly rate (3) China’s labour cost is 06% of Australia’s comparative hourly rate (4) Malaysia’s labour cost is 11% of Australia’s comparative hourly rate (5) So $1AUD buys 2.5 mts labour in Aust and the US and 20mts labour in Malaysia, 40mts labour in China and 4hrs labour in Vietnam. Source: Barr (2008)....
Oil is a finite resource, and by some estimates, is declining rapidly. This will mean dramatic changes in the way we as individuals and as a society function. Oil provides not only fuel for our vehicles and power plants, but also plastics, pesticides, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, etc. Hydrogen, an often-touted replacement fuel, still has a myriad of problems to overcome, including energy efficient production, transportation and storage. As oil begins to grow more expensive, the potential for our society to continue commuting long distance to work or play will be the first to go, followed by deliveries of consumable products and then, essential products (both manufacturing and delivery of the same).
Beginning in October of 2004, Dr. Jason Bradford began showing the film 'The End of Surburbia' to those interested in the Willits Community. Interest grew and after several showings, the seeds of WELL began to develop, drawing a diverse cross section of the community into its folds.
From this diverse group, the primary objectives for WELL became
Determining the current resource use in the community of Willits, California (energy, transportation, food, housing, etc.),
Examining how the community can reduce its consumption of those resources imported,
Over the past few months the American mainstream chatter has experienced a sudden spike in the gratuitous use of the term "Socialist." It was prompted by the attempts of the federal government to resuscitate insolvent financial institutions. These attempts included offers of guarantees to their clients, injections of large sums of borrowed public money, and granting them access to almost-free credit that was magically summoned ex nihilo by the Federal Reserve. To some observers, these attempts looked like an emergency nationalization of the finance sector was underway, prompting them to cry "Socialism!" Their cries were not as strident as one would expect, bereft of the usual disdain that normally accompanies the use of this term. Rather, it was proffered with a wan smile, because the commentators could find nothing better to say -- nothing that would actually make sense of the situation.
Not a single comment on this matter could be heard from any of the numerous socialist parties, either opposition or government, from around the globe, who correctly surmised that this had nothing to do with their political discipline, because in the US "socialism" is commonly used as...
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One of the world's top climate scientists has written a personal new year appeal to Barack and Michelle Obama, warning of the "profound disconnect" between public policy on climate change and the magnitude of the problem.
With less than three weeks to go until Obama's inauguration, Professor James Hansen, who heads Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, asked the recently appointed White House science adviser Professor John Holdren to pass the missive directly to the president-elect.
In it, he praises Obama's campaign rhetoric about "a planet in peril", but says that how the new president acts in office will be crucial. Hansen lambasts the current international approach of setting targets through "cap and trade" schemes as not up to the task. "This approach is ineffectual and not commensurate with the climate threat. It could waste another decade, locking in disastrous consequences for our planet and humanity," the letter from Hansen and his wife, Anniek, reads.
The letter will make uncomfortable reading for officials in 10 US states whose cap and trade mechanism - the...
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That war is a racket has been told us by many, but rarely by one of this stature. Though he wrote the landmark book War is a Racket in 1935, the highly decorated U.S. General Smedley Butler (two Congressional Medals of Honor) deserves to be heralded for this timeless message, which rings true today more than ever. Below is an engaging two-page summary.
WAR IS A RACKET – by General Smedley Butler
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. In the World War [World War I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted huge gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns...
The theme of this blog, which will extend to a series of articles, was generated by a TED lecture by Karen Armstrong, entitled Charter for Compassion, in which she made a plea for understanding between the three great religions of montheism - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - along with all ethical traditions, on the basis that the uniting core of all spiritual paths is the so-called "Golden Rule", otherwise known as the Ethic of Reciprocity.
The series will look at the ways in which religions violate the Golden Rule in strategies of dominance, while at the same time espousing it to their followers, and how, to live in the closing circle of a single planet, we now have to come to terms with a new deeper ethic of diversity in coexistence, in applying the Gaia principle, as a 'Grim-Reaper' shibboleth, to resolve intractable apocalyptic divisions and avoid triage of our living futures.
In presenting her charter of compassion, Karen firstly enunciated the statement of Confucius:
Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.
She then recounted the anecdote of the Jewish sage Hillel, who when...
This article in the Gaia Shibboleth series covers two in-depth reviews of the social effects and possible social evolutionary basis of religiosity.
The first "The Origin and Evolution of Religious Prosociality" by Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff (Science 322 58-62 2008) examines how religions contribute to various forms of altruism, trust and personal reputation under the banner of 'prosociality'.
Social science theories have long pointed to religion as a cultural facilitator of social cohesion and ingroup solidarity often at the expense of rival groups. Various evolutionary theories of religion all predict that religious beliefs and behaviors have facilitated human prosocial tendencies. Some argue that at least certain religious beliefs and behaviors are evolutionary adaptations for group-living in large communities that have maximized genetic fitness.
Two evolutionary accounts are compatible with cultural variability. One proposes that religious content is a cultural by-product of a suite of psychological tendencies evolved in the Pleistocene for other purposes, such as detecting and inferring the content of other minds and sensitivity to one’s prosocial reputation in the group. Religious beliefs, to the extent that they were compatible with these psychological tendencies, could then culturally spread through social learning mechanisms and could solve adaptive...
- DNA is more than just an instruction for protein's production for life. In fact, genes may actually function more like a well-orchested symphony of information communication .
Some Scientists are finding that DNA—the blueprint of life – is really more like a musical antenna than a static blueprint. Some information about genes of DNA are active constantly, like the sound of a piano in some symphonies, while others protein's interactive information wait for the right signal, to reply to the DNA's signalling in a resonant system .
Till now researchers on the issue DNA-MUSIC report in the Science journals their studies looking at the root cells of the wild mustard plant, in thi case they've found that its genes turn on and off in complex and rhythmic ways.
Another team looked at sea urchin eggs and found a jazz-like feedback between genes, with each one affecting the performance of others. Understanding the role of timing in DNA expression could lead to new insights into developmental disorders, in plants, animals and even humans.
Starting from those reseachers we are searchin for...
We've outgrown ourselves and we can't crawl back inside. The shell shatters inward as our economy and aggressive culture implodes.
After the peak, it's all down hill from here. Back in the summer, with record oil prices that meant some people somewhere were making a whole lotta money, one might have suspected the peak of funny-money and paper/electronic wealth would happen sometime. Turns out it was weeks away.
Now what? There's confusion about what's going on and what will happen, especially for those who trusted corporate media. After all, who could wrap their minds around a corporate bailout of a trillion dollars that, despite its absurd size, didn't even approach the size of the loss in derivatives' value of over $500 trillion on Wall Street?
As peaks go, such as with crude oil extraction of 86 million barrels a day globally, physical limits can be anticipated from a scientific basis. But money -- what we love even more than petroleum products -- was seemingly limitless and had become abstract in its infiniteness.
The former supplies of cheaply produced, abundant energy played a major role in...
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Redesigning Money Systems to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions
December 17, 2008
Redesigning Money Systems to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions By Hazel Henderson
Editor's note: Hazel Henderson is the celebrated, longest running alternative economist. A reader of Culture Change, she endorsed our Alliance for a Paving Moratorium in the 1990s. She famously observed that "Economics is a form of brain damage." Hazel supports "accelerating the growing green economy" and "ethical markets." This may conflict with a vision of sustainability based on simplicity, but this article provides timely insights on financial politics.
Here's some important advice from Hazel for the Obama transition:
Unfortunately, President-elect Obama has too many special-interest, tainted economic advisors. He needs to fire Robert Rubin ("Mr. Leverage," former Goldman-Sachs chief and now presiding over the demise of Citibank and its billions of toxic "assets"); Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary, who together with Rubin blocked lawyer Brooksley E. Born, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, from regulating credit default swaps. She testified before Congress in the late 1990s that they could blow up the global financial system. Summers, Rubin and Alan Greenspan severely criticized Born, and she resigned.
As ministers and officials gather in Poznan one year ahead of the Copenhagen summit on global warming, the second part of a major series looks at the crucial issue of targets.
At a high-level academic conference on global warming at Exeter University this summer, climate scientist Kevin Anderson stood before his expert audience and contemplated a strange feeling. He wanted to be wrong. Many of those in the room who knew what he was about to say felt the same. His conclusions had already caused a stir in scientific and political circles. Even committed green campaigners said the implications left them terrified.
Head of the world's top climate scientists Rajendra Pachauri, seen here on October 23, 2008, says he is stunned at the trillion-dollar cheques that have been signed to ease the banking crisis when funding for poverty and global warming is scrutinised or denied.
Anderson, an expert at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University, was about to send the gloomiest dispatch yet from the frontline of the war against climate change.
Despite the political rhetoric, the scientific warnings,...
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1) The world is heading into a severe slump, with declining output in the near term and no clear turnaround in sight.
2) Consumers in the US and the nonfinancial corporate sector everywhere are trying to “rebuild their balance sheets,” which means they want to save more.
3) Governments have only a limited ability to offset this increase in desired private sector savings through dissaving (i.e., increased budget deficits that result from fiscal stimulus). Even the most prudent governments in industrialized countries did not run sufficiently countercyclical fiscal policy in the boom time and now face balance sheet constraints.
4) Compounding these problems is a serious test of the eurozone: financial market pressure on Greece, Ireland and Italy is mounting; Portugal and Spain are also likely to be affected. This will lead to another round of bailouts in Europe, this time for weaker sovereigns in the eurozone. As a result, fiscal policy will be even less countercyclical, i.e., governments will feel the need to attempt precautionary austerity, which amounts to a further increase in savings.
Obama Sounds the Sustainable Development Horn December 2008
Terry Mock Executive Director
During the tension-filled press conference to announce key members of his economic team on November 24th, U.S. President-Elect Obama laid out the broad strokes of his plan to revitalize the U.S. economy by focusing on massive investment in development infrastructure designed to boost the economy short-term, and better position the country for long-term prosperity:
“Beyond any immediate actions we may take, we need a recovery plan for both Wall Street and Main Street, a plan that stabilizes our financial system and gets credit flowing again, while at the same time addressing our growing foreclosure crisis, helping our struggling auto industry and creating and saving 2.5 million jobs – jobs rebuilding our infrastructure, our roads, our bridges, modernizing our schools and creating the clean energy infrastructure of the 21st century.”
In concluding, Obama described his plans by specifically injecting the word “sustain(able)” five times:
“Not only do I want the stimulus package to deal with the immediate crisis. I want it also to lay the groundwork for long-term sustained economic growth. We've got to make sure that the investments are made to sustain economic growth over the...
You are fighting WW III but you don't know it. World War three is being fought in silence in the US and other parts of the world. It is fought without the knowledge of the American public and without debate by the Presidential Candidates. We the ordinary people are losing. To win, the American public must know about the war and help fight against it.
Who is the enemy? No, I am not talking about the war in Iraq, I am talking about a much more subtle and dangerous war. In this war the battle lines are drawn by giant corporations, backed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and trade treaties, aggressively pursuing a silent war against billions of people around the globe. At stake is the very survival of over 1.5 billion small and marginal farmers, and the prize is your money and your freedom. In 1997, ten corporations controlled almost every aspect of the world's food chain. With the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, global and national politics here and abroad are now driven by corporate financial priorities. Corporations set the agenda for the the European Union (EU), the North American...
the following idea seems social cradle constructive.
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From Robert Popes book the true Meaning of the da Vinci Code’ When the brilliant and compassionate Jesuit scholar, Teilhard de Chardin, was developing the human survival science, he wrote that the gates to the supra-human future, would only open for “all together” and “at the same time”91. He explained that concepts of a chosen race or a privileged few opening those gates was impossible, because it contravened natural spiritual (holographic) law. In 1962 the Holy Office issued a warning against uncritical acceptance of his ideas.
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http://www.montessorisanfrancisco.com/school_philosophy.html
RE GOLDEN GATE.
Montessori realized that humankind is not fulfilling its function and potential. Instead , it is wasting its special energy in greed, competition, hostility and war. She deplored the possibility of humankinds' decline and extinction through entropy, the unwinding of energy, as suggested by the French philosopher Eric Bergson. Instead, she wholeheartedly embraced the theory of another French philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, that the antidote to entropy is agape, the universal unconditional love. (From the lost ancient Greek Science-Art of Universal Love)
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In ancient Greek Science-Art the name for entropy was Plato’s god of universal chaos, Diabolos, the Devil, destroyer of...
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But while it’s shocking, and sad, to think that the soldiers pledging their lives to defend the United States are being used as guinea pigs for unknown vaccinations, it’s nothing new.
How Many Vaccines Does the U.S. Military Require?
This information is not easy to come by, but the following table was derived from Air Force Joint Instruction 48-110, Army Regulation 40-52, BUMEDINST 6230.15, CGCOMTINST M6230.4E, dated May 12, 2004 on About.com:
Immunizing Agent
Remarks
Basic Training and Officer Accession Training
Adenovirus, Types 4 and 7
Air Force recruits receive adenovirus vaccination only when there is evidence of active disease transmission. Coast Guard Recruits only receive this when specifically directed by the Coast Guard Commandant.
Influenza (Flu Shot)
Navy and Marine Corps officer and enlisted accessions receive the influenza vaccine year round in basic training. Other service recruits receive this shot in basic only during the designated flu season (October - March)
Measles
Measles Mumps and rubella (MMR) are administered to all recruits regardless of prior history.
Meningococcal
Quadrivalent meningococcal vaccine (containing A, C, Y, and W-135 polysaccharide antigens) is administered on a one-time basis to recruits. The vaccine is given as soon...
Yesterday, after work, I snaked my battered little car up into the mountains above Boulder, bringing with me a single DVD and a heart full of anticipation. I was visiting a friend for a specific reason: I had a copy of the first volume of The Global Oneness Project, and everyone I knew who'd seen the films told me I shouldn't watch them alone.
"They're powerful," strangers told me. "They're beautiful," my friends said.
They were right.
The Global Oneness Project is a film project that resulted in me staying up way past my bedtime, watching and reflecting and talking far into the night about meaning and purpose and transformation and hope. And though I can't come visit each of you, DVD in hand, to sit and watch these incredible short films together, I can do the next best thing: point to where you can find these films online, and encourage you to grab a friend, or two or three or four, and sit down to see them yourself.
The films from The Global Oneness Project are available for free on their website. (Or, if you'd like to show the...
THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron
“Not to lie about the future is impossible and one can lie about it at will” - Naum Gabo
As the Dam Bursts…
At the end of the twentieth century, the long predicted convergence of the media, computing and telecommunications into hypermedia is finally happening. Once again, capitalism’s relentless drive to diversify and intensify the creative powers of human labour is on the verge of qualitatively transforming the way in which we work, play and live together. By integrating different technologies around common protocols, something is being created which is more than the sum of its parts. When the ability to produce and receive unlimited amounts of information in any form is combined with the reach of the global telephone networks, existing forms of work and leisure can be fundamentally transformed. New industries will be born and current stock market favourites will swept away. At such moments of profound social change, anyone who can offer a simple explanation of what is happening will be listened to with great interest. At this crucial juncture, a loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded...
The latest results of the cultural indoctrination stakes are in. Triviality leads, followed closely by frivolity, superficiality, and mindless distraction. Vanity looks great, while profundity is bringing up the rear. Pettiness is powering ahead, along with passivity and indifference. Curiosity lost interest, wisdom was scratched, and critical thought had to be put down. Ego is running wild. Attention span continues to shorten and survival is a long shot.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Half a century ago, humanistic thinkers were heralding a great awakening that would usher in a golden age of enlightened living. Pathfinders like Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Rollow May, and Viktor Frankl were laying the groundwork for a new social order distinguished by enlightened living. This tantalizing vision was the antithesis of our society of blinkered narcissists and hypnogogic materialists. Dumbness was not our destiny. Planetary annihilation was not the plan. By the 21st century, we were supposed to be the rarefied “people of tomorrow,” inhabiting a sagacious and wholesome world.
Erich Fromm's 1955 tome The Sane Society signaled the debut of the one-dimensional “marketing character” -- a robotic all-consuming creature who is...
Asking people to make sacrifices to stop Global Warming is political suicide, right? Evidently not.
Bill McKibben has been sounding the alarm on climate change since his 1989 book, The End of Nature. He lives in Ripton, Vermont, where he teaches, writes, and works to counter climate change. Photo by Channing Johnson for YES! Magazine
At any given moment we face as a society an enormous number of problems: there’s the mortgage crisis, the health care crisis, the endless war in Iraq, and on and on. Maybe we’ll solve some of them, and doubtless new ones will spring up to take their places. But there’s only one thing we’re doing that will be easily visible from the moon. That something is global warming. Quite literally it’s the biggest problem humans have ever faced, and while there are ways to at least start to deal with it, all of them rest on acknowledging just how large the challenge really is.
What exactly do I mean by large? Last fall the scientists who study sea ice in the Arctic reported that it was melting even faster than they’d predicted. We blew by the old record for ice loss in...
Since I spend most of my time haplessly battling global warming, I encounter a fair number of climate-change skeptics. They're usually clutching some tattered study about tropospheric temperatures from six years back, or muttering about sunspots, but they're almost never carefully weighing the actual current science. The wellspring of their skepticism lies not in chemistry or in physics but in ideology, and their syllogism goes something like this:
Markets solve all problems; Markets are not solving global warming; QED, global warming is not a problem.
This proof has certain logical shortcomings, beginning with the fact that it's illogical. But it is emotionally comforting. For those who wanted to stop thinking about politics and responsibility and morality and science and all that stuff, the advent of Reagan-era market fundamentalism was a godsend, and anything that threatens to disrupt it is an identity-challenging tilt of the psychic pinball machine.
So what I tend to say to these people is, I hear you. Markets are powerful. Let's think about why they've failed here and how to make them work.
for most of human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That's why the centuries since Adam Smith launched modern economics with his book The Wealth of Nations have been so single-mindedly devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production. Smith's core ideas—that individuals pursuing their own interests in a market society end up making each other richer; and that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth—have indisputably worked. They've produced more More than he could ever have imagined. They've built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading these words. It is no wonder and no accident that Smith's ideas still dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.
But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. And that changes everything. Now, with the...
For a hundred years we've been steadily extending the supply lines of our economy, becoming ever more globalized. But some have begun to question that trend, and even to form the foundations of a newer, more local economy. The main reasons are two-fold: our ever-growing globe-spanning economy is increasingly vulnerable to the ecological disruption it is causing, with global warming the prime example; and despite record affluence Americans report ever-growing feelings of disconnection and loss of community, trends that can only be reversed if we manage to rebuild local institutions that draw people together.
To wit, the farmer's market: energy-efficient local food, and the average shopper has ten times as many conversations as a supermarket shopper. No wonder they're the fastest-growing part of our food economy. Now we need to get going on other sectors too.
Tips for Launching a Local Business Alliance
The following forms provide tips for independent booksellers interested in initiating a local business alliance, but they can be adapted by any local business owner interested in uniting the other local businesses in a community and forming an alliance to local merchants and service providers.
http://www.billmckibben.com/
Deep Economy
Available now in paperback
Masterfully crafted, deeply thoughtful and mind-expanding.Los Angeles Times
In this powerful and provocative manifesto, Bill McKibben offers the biggest challenge in a generation to the prevailing view of our economy. Deep Economy makes the compelling case for moving beyond growth as the paramount economic ideal and pursuing prosperity in a more local direction, with regions producing more of their own food, generating more of their own energy, and even creating more of their own culture and entertainment. Our purchases need not be at odds with the things we truly value, McKibben argues, and the more we nurture the essential humanity of our economy, the more we will recapture our own. More about the book.
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“Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival.”—Neil Postman
The Media Ecology Association (MEA) is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to promoting the study, research, criticism, and application of media ecology in educational, industry, political, civic, social, cultural, and artistic contexts, and the open exchange of ideas, information, and research among the Association’s members and the larger community.
The Media Ecology Association (MEA) has selected Richard Barbrook's 'Imaginary Futures: from thinking machines to the global village' as the winner of the 2008 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology.
The official presentation of the award will at the MEA's annual convention which is being held at Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley, California, USA on 19th-22nd June 2008.
Dr. Richard Barbrook will be attending the awards ceremony on Friday 20th June and will give a lecture about his book.
Karen Armstrong's TED lecture
