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China has already declared its intent to retaliate against US President Donald Trump’s new tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports, a move set to raise prices on consumer goods for both countries.

Several analysts have demonstrated how Trump’s tariffs will blowback on the US economy. Moody’s Investment Service previously warned that the tariffs would reduce US GDP by 0.25 percent in 2019, to about 2.3 percent. The American economy could take an even bigger hit if Trump proceeds with tariffs on $200 bn worth of Chinese products, Moody’s warned.

But whatever the impact on the American economy, an assessment by the British government’s Foreign Office (FCO) confirms that China’s stock market has indeed taken a direct hit from Trump’s tariffs, that so far is much worse than anything the US has experienced.

The newsletter report, China Financial Policy Focus, published in July by the Foreign Office’s China Economics Network based out of the British Embassy in Beijing, says that:

“Rising trade tensions between the US and China have only added further fuel to the fire, causing the stock market to fall more than 20% against its peak in January and leading the currency to depreciate substantially against the dollar.”

The biggest impact is visible in the Shanghai Composite Index, which has “declined more than 20% since its January 2018 peak. By 28 June the index was below 2800 points.”

Source: FCO, China Financial Policy Focus (Q2 2018)

And it’s not just the Chinese stock market that has been hit — so has the Chinese currency, the Renminbi (RMB).

“The Chinese currency has been depreciating against the dollar, hitting a one-year low in early July.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Global 1% Is Destroying Democracy

September 14, 2018

The Global 1% Is Destroying Democracy

Unraveling a web of dark money

“Wherever you live in the world, you’ve been robbed. Not by a hidden bandit, but a global kleptocracy: the super-rich who’ve managed to rob the poor blind in every corner of the globe for the past seven decades.” — Michelle Chen

We’re living in a time of global income inequality on a scale never before seen in history. Money is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people around the world, and every year they have more of it than ever before. According to the 2018 World Inequality Report, those belonging to the wealthiest 0.1 percent of the global population have, since 1980, increased their combined wealth by as much as the poorest 50 percent. The combined net worth of all 2,208 of the world’s known billionaires is twice that of the poorest 2.5 billion people. By 2030, members of the wealthiest one percent of the global population are projected to hold 64 percent — a full two-thirds — of the world’s wealth.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. The world’s top economists sat down in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, to figure out how to prevent the world economy from ever again becoming as destabilized as it was in the years leading up to World War I. They envisioned a global financial system that would stop countries from manipulating their exchange rates, curtail unrestricted international cash flows, and lock speculative capital behind national borders.

At first, financial globalization — which generated international institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and tied currencies to the U.S. dollar, which was tied to gold — worked exactly as intended. It laid the economic foundation for a period of unprecedented prosperity and stability in the second half of the 20th century.

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Equality: A Beneficial Alternative to Collapse

September 13, 2018

Equality: A Beneficial Alternative to Collapse

What future shall we choose? Equality or inequality? Deep democracy or more limited forms? Sustainability and wise stewardship of resources, or exploitation for profit? You have a good idea of where current systems are taking us. A viable alternative path exists, and that path is science based.

InMarch 2018, Bloomberg news reported that income inequality in the United States had hit a disturbing new high. Not unlike atmospheric carbon dioxide, income and wealth inequality in the United States have been rising since at least the 1980s, under Democratic and Republican presidents, and Democratic and Republican Congresses. The Occupy Wall Street movement crystallized public attention on inequality in 2011 with its slogan “We are the 99 percent.” In 2014 the French economist Thomas Piketty wrote a masterful book on the subject that became a global best seller. His take-home message? Capitalism itself produces severe income inequality.

Yet with all the written words and public discourse on inequality, very little attention has been paid to its complement, income and wealth equality (or near-equality, essential equality). That discussion is long overdue.

Obviously, severe inequality of income and wealth benefits those at the top. But what about everyone else? Pick any dividing line, say the 70th, 80th, 90th, or even 99th percentile of family income or wealth. It’s difficult to argue that inequality helps those below the line as much as those above it. If it benefits everyone evenly, there would be little reason to prefer the 60th over the 40th percentile, for example, or the 90th over the 60th.

But we do have preferences. We toil and sweat, even sometimes step on each other’s heads, in hopes of climbing one rung higher. Higher is almost always preferred to lower, all else being equal. That’s because wealth has real benefits.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The next financial crash is imminent, and China’s resource crisis could be the trigger

September 13, 2018

The next financial crash is imminent, and China’s resource crisis could be the trigger

Over three decades, the value of energy China extracts from its domestic oil, gas and coal supplies has plummeted by half

China’s economic slowdown could be a key trigger of the coming global financial crisis, but one of its core drivers — China’s dwindling supplies of cheap domestic energy — is little understood by mainstream economists.

All eyes are on China as the world braces itself for what a growing number of financial analysts warn could be another global economic recession.

In a BBC interview to mark the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney described China as “one of the bigger risks” to global financial stability.

The Chinese “financial sector has developed very rapidly, and it has many of the same assumptions that were made in the run-up to the last financial crisis,” he warned:

“Could something like this happen again?… Could there be a trigger for a crisis — if we’re complacent, of course it could.”

Since 2007, China’s debts have quadrupled. According to the IMF, its total debt is now about 234 percent of gross GDP, which could rise to 300 percent by 2022. British financial journalist Harvey Jones catalogues a range of observations from several economists essentially warning that official data might not reflect how bad China’s economy is actually decelerating.

The great hope is that all this is merely a temporary blip as China transitions from a focus on manufacturing and exports toward domestic consumption and services.

Meanwhile, China’s annual rate of growth continues to decline. The British Foreign Office (FCO) has been monitoring China’s economic woes closely, and in a recent spate of monthly briefings this year has charted what appears to be its inevitable decline.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

July 9, 2018

The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority

(Chapter from Skin in the Game)

How Europe will eat Halal — Why you don’t have to smoke in the smoking section — Your food choices on the fall of the Saudi king –How to prevent a friend from working too hard –Omar Sharif ‘s conversion — How to make a market collapse

The best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom).

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in way not predicted by the components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will never (one can safely say never for most such situations), never give us an idea on how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters is the interactions between such parts. And interactions can obey very simple rules. The rule we discuss in this chapter is the minority rule.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Govt economic advisor warns British defence planners that growth is ending

July 6, 2018

Govt economic advisor warns British defence planners that growth is ending

Study charts the protracted collapse of industrial economic growth and why prosperity must be built on a new economic model. And no, the Singularity won’t save us.

Economic growth isn’t coming back. While some level of growth might continue in coming decades, the boom era of seemingly unlimited material throughput we became accustomed to in the middle of the twentieth century is unlikely to ever return again as we enter a fundamentally new age of diminishing returns

These are the conclusions of a new working paper by leading ecological economist Professor Tim Jackson, Director of the University of Surrey’s Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP).

And the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is taking notes.

An earlier draft of the paper, notes Jackson, was “prepared as input into the UK Global Strategic Trends Review”, a forecasting research programme run by the MoD’s Defence Concepts and Doctrines Centre (DCDC), which every few years produces an updated Global Strategic Trends report for the MoD and wider UK government. Jackson also acknowledges feedback from MoD officials in revising that draft to create the concurrent version.

Jackson is former Economics Commissioner for the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission. From 2010 to 2014, he was Director of the Sustainable Lifestyles Research Group, funded by the UK Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Scottish Government, and the Economic and Social Research Council. He also advised many other government departments, and held advisory roles for the UN Environment Programme, the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the UN Industrial Development Organissation, the European Environment Agency, the European Parliament, and the New Zealand Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why do we need to think and act more systemically?

June 26, 2018

Why do we need to think and act more systemically?

The power and majesty of nature in all its aspects is lost on one who contemplates it merely in the detail of its parts and not as a whole.

— Pliny the Elder

An increasing number of people are beginning to understand that the world we participate in is too complex, magnificent and changeable for any single perspective to do justice to its diversity and complexity. There is more to life than a ‘theory of everything’ that reduces the awe-inspiring diversity, creativity and beauty surrounding us to a series of abstract mathematical equations.

We live in networks of relationships defined by qualities that make life worth living. Most qualities escape quantification and mathematical abstraction. We need to acknowledge and value multiple perspectives and find ways to integrate their different contributions into a framework of thinking that can inform wise action.

In order to achieve a collaborative way of acknowledging, integrating and evaluating multiple perspectives, we need to move beyond dualistic either-or logic which suggests that, if two perspectives seem to contradict each other, one of them must categorically be wrong in order for the other perspective to be right. Yet, at a time when our cultural belief in the ability of science and technology to fix all our problems is beginning to wane, we also need ways to evaluate and compare different perspectives.

Science might not offer us the ‘objective’ picture of reality we were taught in school, but it remains a powerful method of inter-subjective consensus-making and constitutes a fairly reliable basis upon which to act — more so, say, than the opinion, intuition or spontaneous insight of a single individual — in most but certainly not all cases. We should neither exclusively favour inter-subjective ‘rational’ reasoning nor only rely on individual insight and intuition, but let ourselves be informed by both, as and when appropriate.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Transformation of consciousness

June 11, 2018

Transformation of consciousness

Excerpt from the Worldview Dimension of Gaia Education’s online course in Design for Sustainability

“The materialistic consciousness of our culture … is the root cause of the global crisis; it is not our business ethics, our politics or even our personal lifestyles. These are symptoms of a deeper underlying problem. Our whole civilization is unsustainable. And the reason that it is unsustainable is that our value system, the consciousness with which we approach the world, is an unsustainable mode of consciousness.”

— Peter Russell (Lazlo, Grof, & Russell, 1999, p.5)

Many people who have lived relatively conventional and successful lives within the Westernized industrial growth society, that has spread across the planet in the wake of economic globalization and the neoliberal “free”-market agenda, have recently woken up to a feeling of having raced at full tilt aiming for success and getting ahead, only to find out that the goals they were perusing, once reached, seemed shallow, meaningless, and forced them into a life-style or into keeping up a persona that they really felt unhappy with.

Why does this irrational behavior pattern prevail throughout the consumer society? (image)

The last of the economic shock waves that have rippled through the global system in 2008 as a result of the so-called sub-prime mortgage lending put in question whether this experience is in fact an isolated experience of some people, or much rather, the realization that our entire society and its guiding aims has been steaming all engines ahead into an altogether undesirable direction. Both individuals and the western ‘financial success driven’ society as a whole seem to find themselves in a situation described by Joseph Campbell as “getting to the top of the ladder and finding that it stands against the wrong wall.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Propaganda, Human Consciousness, And The Future Of Civilization

May 23, 2018

Propaganda, Human Consciousness, And The Future Of Civilization

A duck floats past two fish, looks down and says “Morning boys! How’s the water?” The fish swim on for a bit, then one of them turns to the other and says, “What the fuck is water?”

Corporatist propaganda is to western civilization what water is to fish. Our culture is saturated in it; it informs so many levels of our worldview and most of us never even examine any of them. It informs all aspects of culture, from our beliefs about what’s going on in the world to our understanding of history to what issues we think we’re supposed to care about on a given day to what opinions we think we’re allowed to choose from. People think they know what’s going on in their society, why their country fought this or that war, how their nation’s government and economy operate, when really they don’t know any of those things. All their most basic assumptions about their world, their culture, and even who they are as individuals is fully pervaded by mass media propaganda narratives.

In early tribal cultures, humans depended on campfire stories passed on from one generation to the next to tell them what the world is and how to interpret their experiences in it. Now that role has fallen exclusively to a few highly consolidated corporate media conglomerates whose billionaire owners have a vested interest in maintaining the warmongering plutocratic power establishment that is loosely centralized in the United States, because in that power establishment they get to live as kings.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Only ‘collective intelligence’ can help us stave off an uninhabitable planet

May 11, 2018

Only ‘collective intelligence’ can help us stave off an uninhabitable planet

Humanity needs new tools to overcome the global crisis of collective insanity

Published by INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfundedinvestigative journalism platform for people and planet. Support us to report where others fear to tread.

The world faces an unprecedented convergence of crises. The ecological crisis, which points to a near uninhabitable planet by end of century if business-as-usual continues, is perhaps its most apocalyptic dimension. But the ecological crisis is intimately bound up with the business-as-usual political, economic, and cultural structures of industrial civilization-as-we-know it.

The crisis

Last year, I reported on an analysis by British investment firm Scroders, which concluded that at our current rate of burning fossil fuels, global average temperatures would rise by as much as 7.8C by 2100. The catastrophic collapse of GDP at this point, by more than 50%, would be the least of our problems. Also unleashed would be uncontrollable amplifying feedback processes that would lead to the loss of most of the world’s coral reefs; the disappearance of major mountain glaciers; the total loss of the Arctic summer sea-ice, most of the Greenland ice-sheet and the break-up of West Antarctica; acidification and overheating of the oceans; catastrophic sea-level rise swamping major cities from London to New York; the collapse of the Amazon rainforest; and the loss of Arctic permafrost; to name just a few.

The ecological crisis is, then, bound up with both our civilization’s addiction to oil, gas and coal; and its addiction to endless economic growth. The imperative to continuously grow our economies has pushed forward an escalating hunger for hydrocarbons as the fuel for that growth. And yet, with every year, we encounter increasing evidence that we are depleting the planet’s natural resources at unsustainable levels — beyond the planet’s capacity to renew itself.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Your Privacy Is Over

May 3, 2018

Your Privacy Is Over

A plausible case for a future with no privacy, and why it should concern you

Three Things Should Frighten You

In China, the government is using data to control the country’s population. By building a firewall around China and then replacing the blocked global tech services with locally owned versions it can control, the government is able to create a digital profile of each person’s actions, affiliations, statements, acts, and misdemeanors. On this, people are “scored” within a “social credit” system and rewarded or penalized accordingly.
The recent coverage of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook shows just how much corporations in the West know about us without us knowing. The sting on Cambridge Analytica and extensive reporting by Carole Cadwalladr, along with the Facebook Senate hearings, have shown how companies that manipulate public opinion are operating in a way that very few people, and clearly not our lawmakers, can really understand.
Quantum computing will soon be able to break modern encryption, laying open everything we so far thought was private and safe, and more powerful computers will be able to search and map this data going back through digital time. Yes, today’s quantum computing is far off from doing this, but think of your current iPhone compared to your first PC, and assume that somewhere in the future, computers will be more powerful and capable than anything we can imagine today.

In all three scenarios, let alone all three combined, privacy is threatened on a scale we have never thought about. We are entering the post-privacy age.

Most of all, I feel for our children. They are growing up in a world where everything is connected, viewable, shared. They obsess over their image, worry about their following and who likes their posts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Escape the Echo Chamber

April 26, 2018

Escape the Echo Chamber

First you don’t hear other views. Then you can’t trust them. Your personal information network entraps you just like a cult

Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no longer share basic foundational beliefs. Maybe nobody cares about the truth anymore, as some have started to worry. Maybe political allegiance has replaced basic reasoning skills. Maybe we’ve all become trapped in echo chambers of our own making — wrapping ourselves in an intellectually impenetrable layer of likeminded friends and web pages and social media feeds.

But there are two very different phenomena at play here, each of which subvert the flow of information in very distinct ways. Let’s call them echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Both are social structures that systematically exclude sources of information. Both exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs. But they work in entirely different ways, and they require very different modes of intervention. An epistemic bubble is when you don’t hearpeople from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trustpeople from the other side.

Current usage has blurred this crucial distinction, so let me introduce a somewhat artificial taxonomy. An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission. That omission might be purposeful: we might be selectively avoiding contact with contrary views because, say, they make us uncomfortable. As social scientists tell us, we like to engage in selective exposure, seeking out information that confirms our own worldview. But that omission can also be entirely inadvertent. Even if we’re not actively trying to avoid disagreement, our Facebook friends tend to share our views and interests.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

BBC Reporter Discourages Syria Questions Due To “Information War” With Russia

April 18, 2018

BBC Reporter Discourages Syria Questions Due To “Information War” With Russia

A BBC interview is making the rounds today among opponents of western interventionism in Syria. The subject of the interview, Admiral Alan West, voiced some much needed skepticism about the establishment narrative around the alleged gas attack in Douma. Everybody’s talking about it because West is an empire loyalist that nobody in their right mind would accuse of being an “Assad apologist” or “useful idiot of the Kremlin”, as anyone else who doesn’t swallow the official story hook, line and sinker is uniformly labeled.

West made some sensible comments about the White Helmets and the fact that Jaysh al-Islam had far more incentive to stage such an attack than Assad had to perpetrate it. Even more helpful was his personal account of having been aggressively pressured to make false reports about the success of the British bombing campaign in Bosnia, suggesting that those pressures can lead to bad intelligence and erroneous military responses.

“I just wonder, you know we’ve had some bad experiences on intelligence,” West said. “When I was chief of defense intelligence, I had huge pressure put on me politically to try and say that our bombing campaign in Bosnia was achieving all sorts of things which it wasn’t. I was put under huge pressure, so I know the things that can happen with intelligence.”

So that’s a very significant addition to the dialogue. For me, though, the most interesting comments made in that interview came not from West, but from the BBC reporter who was interviewing him.

In the latter half of the interview, BBC’s Annita McVeigh asked the following questions after West’s comment about Bosnia:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Beyond Sustainability? — We are living in the Century of Regeneration.

April 18, 2018

Re-greening the Forest Planet (Image Source)

Beyond Sustainability? — We are living in the Century of Regeneration.

Valuing Ecosystem Function higher than material things is the paradigm shift that determines whether we understand the meaning of our lives and survive or whether we remain ignorant and selfish and destroy our own habitat trying to gain more wealth or more power. If we reach this level of understanding, not only can everyone live on the Earth but the natural systems on Earth can reach their optimal ability to sustain life.

— John D. Liu (2016)

There are some practitioners who work on sustainability with a regenerative development mindset. The reason why I would say it is time to move beyond sustainability is twofold. On the one hand the term itself has been coopted and some people now call their company sustainable because it has sustained growth and profits for a number o years in a row. The term sustainability begs us to explain what it is we are trying to sustain.

The term regenerative development, on the other hand, carries within it a clear aim of regenerating the health and vitality of the nested, scale-linking systems we participate in. At a basic level regeneration also communicates not to use resources that cannot be regenerated, nor to use any resources faster than they can be regenerated. Development in this context is “co-evolving mutuality” (Regenesis Group) — so biological and cultural evolutionary development, not in the sense of economic development (only).

The second reason is that I believe we need a reframe that honours the importance of getting to ‘sustainable’ while opening the possibility to deepen our practice and go beyond merely being sustainable to actually regenerating the damage humanity has wrecked on the planet since the dawn of agriculture, city states and empires.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The unacceptable collateral damage of overconsumption

April 16, 2018

Source: The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme

The unacceptable collateral damage of overconsumption

The Great Acceleration, un-burnable carbon, and global impacts

We are living in extraordinary times and transformation is already happening and accelerating all around us. Many technological, social, and environmental changes are racing up the steep end of the exponential curve. In almost every area of our lives old structures are breaking down as we are witnessing the unfolding impacts of unprecedented technological innovation and its rapid deployment in a globally expanding consumer culture.

Exponential growth on a finite planet

‘The Great Acceleration’ is happening within the context of an expanding human population, profound societal and economic transformation on all continents, and — most urgent of all — a dangerous destabilization of global and local climate patterns. There is a scientific consensus that we need to take immediate action if we are to avoid catastrophic climate effects on the future of humankind, the diversity of life and the entire planet.

Unsustainable exponential growth in many aspects of human and ecological systems (Source)

Already hundreds of thousands of people die every year due to climate change related extreme weather events and millions lose their homes, go hungry or are forced to migrate. Ecosystems everywhere, and the biosphere as a whole, are reaching dangerous tipping points. The prolonged impact of an industrial growth society addicted to fossil fuels and the rapid extraction of non-renewable resources is pushing against planetary boundaries.

Our current economic system is structurally committed to ever-increasing economic growth and intertwined with a financial system that generates money out of nowhere based on debt, and currencies that are not backed up by real material value (see module two). Attempts to resuscitate this structurally dysfunctional system are getting more and more expensive, as the cycles of economic crisis and costly (temporary) recovery are getting shorter and shorter.

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China’s economic slowdown could be a key trigger of the coming global financial crisis, but one of its core drivers — China’s dwindling supplies of cheap domestic energy — is little understood by mainstream economists.

Three Things Should Frighten You

Exponential growth on a finite planet

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