The Secret History of the Global Financial Collapse
Opinion: (Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund in Meltdown Documentary part4):"I think everyone has changed in this crisis. When the real estate and financial bubbles burst, it caused an examination of conscience about the creation of wealth, how resources should be allocated, the sharing of wealth, how countries relate to each other, what defined well-being. On those issues, we have all evolved, the President included."
Our Future: Consumerism Or Humanism
Opinion: (Jagdish Kapur, 1920-2010, Co-Chairman and Founder of the WPF “Dialogue of Civilizations,” from wpfdc.com):
“The fundamental mistake of industrially developed civilization is that
it treats any person with the same measure, so he turns into an
abstract economic entity, an element of the herd… and the reverse
movement of machine – consumption is serviced here. But that is a
violation of the laws of nature. Remaining in the hands of this misfortunate, illusory economy,
they do not realize how close they are to a collapse of the whole
system… We rapidly approach complete indifference to anything in the
world with the exception of bank notes.”
‘We must recognize that the world is not just a globalized loot-haven, but a family of nations in a true sense, where all members of the family have a right to pray, work, and establish life styles of their choice. A state or a group of states in the name of freedom, democracy, and human rights or any other contrived or media projections have no right to impose their neo-imperial designs, will, and shattered moral and ethical consumerist frame over others. They have already done enough damage to the human system. It is time to stop.’
Let’s Be Together
Opinion: (Sufi Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani):
“We as communities and people who love peace must always come to such
meetings in order to find ourselves because when you share with each
other then you can understand more about yourself and about the others.
You can find your mistakes from the others when they advise you and they
can find their mistakes when you advise them; and that’s what keeps
everything in harmony. That is what Rumi meant when he said ‘I don’t
know myself, I am a Zoroastrian or I am Muslim or I am Christian or I am
Jew or I am this or I am that… I am everything.’ It means let us share,
let us be together, let us mix together, let us mingle together, let us
unite together in order that we can bring a happy musical life to
humanity."
Gordon Brown: The World Is Drifting
Opinion: (Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom): "The answer lies in the individual’s internalization of human power and destination, and a rejection of the externalization of power and human destiny to a global authority of which all but a select few people have access to. To internalize human power and destiny is to realize the gift of a human mind, which has the ability to engage in thought beyond the material, such as food and shelter, and venture into the realm of the conceptual. Each individual possesses – within themselves – the ability to think critically about themselves and their own life; now is the time to utilize this ability with the aim of internalizing the concepts and questions of human power and destiny: Why are we here? Where are we going? Where should we be going? How do we get there?
Isn’t that what is remarkable, that you can have countries that would never even have sat round the table a few years ago coming round a table and coming to agreement? The reason we have to meet together and come to agreement is that unlike a few years ago when you could run national financial systems without thinking about what was happening in the rest of the world, every bank affects every other bank, and a bad bank in one country affects good banks in every country. That is why we have to come together, so that we have rules and supervision on financial institutions that are global; we have that cross-border regulation that is necessary; we have the international regulators coming together so that we know what is happening not just in one continent but all continents.
foundations of a new and progressive era of international cooperation. We have resolved that from today we will together manage the process of globalisation to secure responsibility from all and fairness to all and we’ve agreed that in doing so we will build a more sustainable and more open and a fairer global society....and I think the issue for me is how you can get the world to work together. So, this candidate, whoever does it, has got to be able to bring a consensus of the world together. And I think that's going to be a very important thing - Because if I'm right that global problems cannot be solved simply by one country or two countries working together on their own, but needs this form of global cooperation, then whether it's climate change, or whether it's security, or whether it's terrorism itself, or whether it's population and migration, but particularly when it's economics and financial stability, we have got to find a way of working together better."
The Recipe For Saving The Economy
Opinion: (Rachel Ziemba,
Director for macroeconomic issues of Central and Eastern Europe, Middle
East and Africa (CEEMEA), Roubini Global Economics, USA, from voanews.com):
‘The recession, which plunged the U.S. economy, is not a problem of one
country.’....‘Recipe for economic salvation is simple: to bet on
technologies,
intensively develop the agricultu ral sector and inter-regional
cooperation.’ …‘It already sounds like a constant mantra—to develop
cooperation between countries….’
One thing for sure!
Opinion: (Mohamed ElBaradei , an Egyptian diplomat & the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency - Nobel lecture (2005): "One thing is certain. Since the beginning of history, human
beings have been at war with each other, under the pretext of religion,
ideology, ethnicity and other reasons. And no civilization has ever
willingly given up its most powerful weapons. We seem to agree today
that we can share modern technology, but we still refuse to acknowledge
that our values - at their very core - are shared values.''
Our Reality
Opinion: (Kofi Atta Annan, diplomat and the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations-Nobel lecture, Oslo (2001): "Scientists tell us that the world of nature is so small and
interdependent that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon
rainforest can generate a violent storm on the other side of the earth.
This principle is known as the "Butterfly Effect." Today, we realize,
perhaps more than ever, that the world of human activity also has its
own "Butterfly Effect" — for better or for worse."
What's beneath the surface?
Opinion:
(Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the
Commonwealth): 9/11 Belongs to a wider series of phenomena affecting the
West: the disintegration of the family the demise of authority, the
build up of personal debt, the collapse of financial institutions, the
downgrading of the American economy, the continuing failure of some
European economies, the loss of a sense of honour, loyalty and integrity
that has brought once esteemed groups into disrepute, the waning
throughout the West of a sense of national identity; even last month's
riots. These are all signs of the arteriosclerosis of a culture, a
civilisation grown old. Whenever Me takes precedence over We and
pleasure today over viability tomorrow, a society is in trouble. If so,
then the enemy is not radical Islam it is us and our by now
unsustainable self-indulgence.
The West has expended much energy and courage fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq abroad and defeating terror at home. It has spent far less, if any, in renewing its own morality and the institutions - families, communities, ethical codes, standards in public life - where it is created and sustained. But if I am right, this is the West's greatest weakness in the eyes of its enemies as well as its friends. The only way to save the world is to begin with ourselves. Our burden after 9/11 is to renew the moral disciplines of freedom. Some say it can't be done. They are wrong: It can and must. Sure we owe the dead no less.
Opinion: (Barbara Marx Hubbard, prolific futurist, author & public speaker): "...in the last fifty years this huge crisis has matured and the great thing about the decoration of global emergency is the awaken us to a crisis, and what we know about evolution is the crisis precedes transformation. Problems are evolutionary drivers. If we don't know we have a terrible crisis, and if we don't know that our problems are driving us somewhere, we will be passive or we will be afraid or we want act.
But if we know that the global crisis is possibly leading us to something desirable, attractive and new, we would wake up; and in my language it's a crisis of birth, of something emergent, something creative. And once we know that that's a possibility, that out of this crisis something new is emerging, than we realize that there are innovations that breakthroughs in every field,in every function, small yet unconnected. But if you do connect them you see a global emergency is leading to global emergencies and if connected they are leading to a new world.
"... if you know this that in times of crises and times of problems nature has a tendency to connect that which is creative in non linear, exponential, interaction of that which is created takes a system to a higher order."
Paul Hawkins - Entrepreneur, Environmentalist & Author
“The real challenge today is to change our way of thinking not just our systems, institutions or policies. We need the imagination to grasp the immense promise and challenge of the interconnected world we have created. The future lies with more globalization,, not less, more co-operation, more interaction between people and cultures, an even greater sharing of responsibilities and interests."- DirectorGeneral Pascal Lamy, Panglaykim Memorial Lecture on " Harnessing Global Diversity" on 14, June 2011
"A transformative paradigm suggests change and change can only begin with the individual." - Selby (1991) believes that "an emerging awareness of the world goes hand-in-glove with a growing sense of self-awareness"
- Thomas Friedman - Auther of "The world is flat"
“Globalization is a fact. Every major problem we face will require more international knowledge and cooperation than ever before."- James B. Hunt, Former Governor of North Carolina
- Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter-Dürr, a well known nuclear physicist and philosopher
"I have now reached the point where I m ay indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society." - Albert Einstein
"What makes human - for good and bad - is our social nature. Nowhere is this complex, wonderful and sometime dark part of us more clearly revealed than in connected. In a social world exploding with new ways to interact." - Dan Ariely, Auther of "Predictably Irrational