The truth - ?

Couple of news/opinion sites that promise to look beneath the headlines

http://www.truthdig.com/

"The purpose of our news Web site is to provide you with insightful and accurate reporting on current subjects and on issues that need to be brought to your attention. We want to challenge conventional wisdom. We seek to offer a solid and reliable resource for those of you who want to explore particular topics".

oOo

"Truthout works to broaden and diversify the political discussion by introducing independent voices and focusing on under-covered issues and unconventional thinking. Harnessing the expanding power of the Internet, we work to spread reliable information, critical thought and progressive ideas.

Collaboratively consuming everyday things

http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/collaboratively-consuming-everyday-things/

I found this link in the article "can we evolve beyond money?" (see previous post), and it contains a link to a video that is well worth 19:25 of your time (IMHO). The video is on you tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpv6aGTcCl8 and is given by Rachel Botsman, author of What's mine is yours - see http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/.

The talk is stuffed with good ideas and interesting information, to which I am not going to give you links here, but which may provoke further posts here in my blog

Can we evolve beyond money?

http://news.yourolivebranch.org/2011/01/10/can-we-evolve-beyond-money/

Thought provoking and intelligent written article by Christopher Doll - which I must try to read properly myself!

Here's a little taster:

"Solutions that come from linear thinking hold a special appeal because we know where they come from. Very often we cannot countenance that the system in which we live may be flawed; we point to all the benefits and try and tweak the system to eliminate the less desirable elements only for another problem to emerge elsewhere. The end result is a perpetual ‘ whack-a-mole’ game where we are forced to innovate quicker than the speed at which ‘unforseen’ problems appear.

The country

UK Prime Minister David Cameron, in his New Year podcast, said that of the current financial crisis, "this is not the Government's debt, it's the country's debt." Presumably "the country" is the same "the country" that is "held to ransom" whenever there's a strike.

This, I assume, is another way of saying "we're all in this together". We are, but some up to their ankles and some up to their necks. I assume that the PM is not talking about private debt - such as many of us owe for mortgages and on credit cards - but money that the Government has borrowed from the banks. We'll all be paying it back through our taxes to the Government, but surely it is still the Government's debt?

Many argue for monetary reform, and in particular the government taking back the sole right to issue money, which should be taken back from the banking system, which creates money from thin air by writing a debt on one side of its balance sheet and an asset on the other. To the asset is added the interest the debtor must pay, but as all money comes from banks, the interest must be paid from more loans.

The dignity of labour

In an RBE the need for human work would be minimised by automation, and by ensuring that only what needs to be done to sustain life on this planet - especially human life - gets done. No work is created for people to do so they can "earn" the right to a share of the earth's resources.

A possible counter to this aim for ever decreasing work is that there is dignity in labour. Well, if that's true, people will labour to gain the dignity it imbues, and aren't only motivated by money. Freed from the drudgery of working to survive, people can find their true métier and work at that, if they wanted to. An RBE frees people up to do what they want to do.

War as a unifier

The Revd Canon Dr Giles Fraser mentioned in his Thought for the day address on Radio 4's Today Programme  this morning the idea that wars are fought abroad as a way of trying to bring unity to a country. He didn't say that this is the only motivation for war, and perhaps he wouldn't argue that, but it is unusual to hear such a view put forward in the mainstream (at least in my experience). More usually war is portrayed as protecting us from attacks against our country and way of life.

We want the miners out!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00w6bzp/The_Indian_Doctor_The_Van/

In the TV drama series 'The Indian Doctor', the dastardly coal mine manager of the south Wales pit village in which the drama is set manages to convince the miners - or to allows them to conclude - that the reason the eponymous GP has set up a chest x-ray programme for them is not because he wants to discover how badly their health is suffering from coal dust inhalation, but because he is colluding with the coal-board to have the mine shut (in fact the manager has been compromising safety to make more money and is on the brink of promotion).

Several miners as well as the manager point out that the village cannot survive without the jobs the mine provides, and thus the miners apparently willingly gamble their lives for a livelihood. Although the manager is portrayed as a nasty piece of work throughout, I think the audience is invited to agree that there is a dilemma. On the one hand coal mines are dangerous places, but on the other they also provide jobs - jobs that are harder to come by as technology takes over some roles and makes mining more efficient.

Setting aside any arguments about the pros and cons of coal, in a resource based economy resources are extracted as efficiently as possible, which means technological advances are sought after and deployed wherever they can save humans doing work. This is especially vital where there are real and present dangers to humans working on recovering the resource. The technology may either aid those humans that have to go into the mine (if a machine can't do the job), or it may go into the mine in place of the human, but either way, the technology brings efficiency.

We can't do this is our current system because we have invented the rule that people have to work to get things and therefore we have to find work for them to do. Workers will therefore resist and/or campaign against the efficiency that technological advances can bring.