How can we regain peace and how can we keep it? (tags)
There is no doubt that Mahatma Gandhi is right. Peace does not come from the motivation of fear, on the contrary, only from the strength of one’s own person; through loyalty to oneself, and through the courage to have one’s own conscience. In Indian: Satyagraha (persistent adherence to the truth), “think for yourself” Kant would have said, “remain yourself.”
Noam Chomsky on Why This is the Most Dangerous Point in Human History (tags)
We live in a world facing existential threats while extreme inequality is tearing our societies apart and democracy is in sharp decline. The U.S., meanwhile, is bent on maintaining global hegemony when international collaboration is urgently needed to address the planet’s numerous challenges.
Charity means toppling the powerful from their thrones and The cry of the poor (tags)
There is no distinction between structural violence, which is the basis of the capitalist social order, and counter-violence. "First of all, I would like to state that there is a violence from which all other violence derives: the violence of oppression." (Dom Helder Camara).
Question sanctions and The cry of the poor (tags)
In Germany, we tend to moralize and romanticize in politics. This prevents us from taking a sober view of world events. We fail to recognize that the U.S. is ruthlessly asserting its own interests, against enemy and friend. The interests of the EU and the U.S. have long since ceased to coincide.
"The victor is not the one who wins the battles" (tags)
Stubborn resistance Although the war is still in its infancy, it is no walk in the park for Russian forces, which are facing fierce resistance. It will be difficult for the Russian army to gain control of cities, towns, and highways and hold them in the face of attacks by regular and guerrilla forces...
The true costs of capitalist wealth (tags)
What drives the capitalist mode of production is the endless compulsion to increase abstract wealth, or, put more simply, the compulsion to turn money into more money... Society is richer than it knows, because it does not take all kinds of wealth factors into account in GDP.
Justice, Impoverishment and Fear (tags)
The defense of the welfare state is the defense of democracy...Democracy is as strong as it is fragile. It is strong when it is defended. It is strong when we do not allow ourselves to be fobbed off with answers that do not tolerate questions. But it disappears when we become indifferent to it.
The long struggle for a post-capitalist society (tags)
The (Corona) crisis has relentlessly exposed the inability of neoliberal capitalism and its political personnel to meet the elementary needs of the people. Even if it is not felt to the same extent in Germany due to the depressing political conditions: the neoliberal offensive is in a deep existential crisis.
Everything works, nothing has to Is it even conceivable that after the crisis everything will continue as before? 28 realistic-utopian proposals for a completely renewed society after Corona
On the Power of Money: Three by Eugen Drewermann (tags)
Only faith (as in a religion), the "invisible hand," the "law" of the "free" market can judge everything. State interventions can only be annoying. The market itself is allegedly "social". Everyone acts according to his advantage. The system is not social but criminal and unjust.
Casino Capitalism and Profit Maximization (tags)
In the 1960s the average holding time for stocks was 10 years. Now the holding time is not 9 months but 22 seconds. Like shareholder value, profit maximization leads to exploding inequality and the waste of resources. States are weakened by tax cuts.
Victory of the Economy over Democracy and the Constitutional State (tags)
The person exists as an end-in-him/herself and not merely as a means... On the other hand, the principle of the worldwide market economy is based on treating persons and their needs as means to the end of profit realization.
Casino Capitalism and Profit Maximization (tags)
“The state is consciously weakened to speed up the redistribution from bottom to top because that corresponds to the dogmas of the neoliberal ideology.” Our state was systematically weakened in the last 15 years by extensive tax cuts. I remember the lowering of the top income tax rate.
Opposing Doctrines: Putin v. Obama (tags)
anti-war
The Way to Revolt: Appropriating Knowledge (tags)
We must go beyond ourselves. Enlightenment is the exodus of the person from lack of come-of-age existence of his/her own making. Have the courage to use your own intelligence! (Kant) We have to find our way back to social community, morality, ethics and conscience.
Book Review: "The Great Crash or the Century Crisis" by Elmar Altvater (tags)
Capitalism is at an end and the whole world is drawn into the mess. Preventing this is an ethical imperative and a political duty. The multiple crisis has dragged on for years. The political class allows this to happen. Political answers to the debacle can only be found with clarity on causes.
There Is No God — and He Can Prove It (tags)
There is no God, says 85-year-old author and ex-Roman Catholic Horacio Hanson — and he can prove it. That’s the claim he makes in his self-published book There Is No Creator: Religion Is a Fraud: What Now? — a title he readily admits is a deliberate in-your-face challenge to believers — and repeated when he spoke about it to the San Diego Humanist Association at the San Diego Public Library downtown on March 13. After noting that the worst insult in the Arabic language is, “May God deprive you of your religion,” Hanson launched into an hour-long presentation that made it clear that depriving his listeners — and the rest of humanity — of religion is precisely his intention.
Working for a Community of Life (tags)
Today Boff doesn't speak of liberation but of life protection for the excluded. Sixty years ago Gandhi explained the earth has enough for all people. That is still true today. But the earth will never produce enough for the squanderers.
The Nature of the Christian Faith and the New Atheism (tags)
New atheism fights against fundamentalism, human religion, sees all violence as the product of faith, doesn't recognize the positive good in the church and theology and conflates all faith with fundamentalist literalism and reductionism. That Jesus is the way means no mone is alone.
Egoism versus Pluralism: The Crucifix Decision (tags)
The truth of faith can only prevail without worldly authority through the word of proclamation. The Christian chruch must affirm pluralism relativizing its own existence. The state has the task of limiting egoism.
Welfare State in the Market Trap (tags)
"The crisis of the welfare state is a crisis in the heads of the economic and political elites. The welfare state is a political barrier against the marketing of human labor. The welfare state can be regained through democratic solidarity.. Today one farmer feeds 88 non-farmers."
Soaring Capital Profits and the Mountain of Corpses (tags)
For the first time in the historyof humanity, a surplus of goods could satisfy the basic needs of all earthlings. The moral imperative lives in all of us. Capital rule, the rule of finance capital over the economic events of the world, is nearly total.
History, Sublime, Terror: Notes on the Politics of Fear (tags)
"The new powers of violence that are out of the box after 1945 belong to the state. They are properties and prerogatives of the modern nation-state."
The Midas-Excess and Pleonexia (tags)
The Midas-excess, the more-addiction or pleonexia is similar to the grand delusion of self-righteousness. Our narcissist culture, the dance around the golden ego, must be fought on all fronts. The vulgar materialist dismisses everything inward, spiritual and divine.
Christian Morality and Economic Reason (tags)
Finance capital circling anonymously around the globe seeking only short-term profit must expect the resistance of the affected and of the church that turns to the affected. The question is who profits from globalization.
Against the Despisers of the Body: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Today (tags)
We need Bonhoeffer's earth piety today. A new ecological theology must oppose religious and practical world denial. We humans came from the earth and belong to this earth. There is no salvation for humans without the salvation of the earth.
Armageddon and the Apocalyptic "Holocaust" (tags)
Originally Chriistianity was community opposing the idols of war and wealth. In the 20th century, Chrisitanity in the US was corrupted to a prosperity religion. To end-time fundamentalists, the worse it becomes the better.
The main characteristic of the hairspliter is reversal of the burden of proof.. We are at the next stage of the suspension of international law created after 1945 and its replacement by the right of the stronger.
The New Creation of All Things (tags)
Christ's end was his true beginning. If Christian hope is reduced to the deliverance of the soul in a heaven beyond death, then its life-renewing and world-changing power is lost..The hope of Jews and Christians is also hope for the nations and hope for the earth.
Iran's strategic position today is better than ever. The EU was the first to feel this. America now feels this and wisely renounces on military strikes.. What lessons must America draw from this strategic fiasco?
Money, Power and the Human Psyche (tags)
Slavery still exists as money slavery all over the world where more than a third of humanity must survive at the subsistence level..Our relation to money has characteristics of madness. . When value blindness occurs in a person, his sense of reality becomes dead.
Economism, Economic Ethics and Donations (tags)
Economism is the great ideology of our time. It claims that (1) resisting the market is impossible and (2) submitting to the market is best for everyone. Both are not true. Embedding the market in principles of useful-ness to life has a priority as an ordering task.
Human Dignity is Inviolable (tags)
The Christian faith is obviously losing ground. Disorientation and superstition spread. The merciless religionof the market has long replaced faith in the humanitarian God..Act so you always trat people as ends in themselves and never as means to an end (Kant).
Which Rogue State is Destroying Global Arms Control? (tags)
The US is offering humanity a choice: extinction or hegemony.
LaRouche Issues a Blunt Warning (tags)
The two most urgent American responses to the attacks on the country on Sept. 11, have not yet been carried out. Those required responses are to push through a peaceful solution to the Middle East conflict, which otherwise is headed toward the general religious war conflagration the conspirators of Sept. 11 wanted; and to take measures to stop the collapse of the U.S. and world economy.