SHOCK DOCTRINE // LA DOCTRINA DEL SHOCK

To understand the current crisis, as a continuous manipulation, until we stand up and together we say: enough is enough

Para entender la actual crisis, el continuum de la manipulacion, hasta que unamos y juntxs digamos: ya basta

Two lesbians raised a baby and this is what they got

Moral panic? No. We are resisting the pornification of women

"Sexualisation" has become a much-debated issue in recent years, and a noticeable feature is the assumption that feminists who oppose sexual objectification are generating a "moral panic". Ever since sociologist Stanley Cohen introduced the term in 1972 it has been used as a shorthand way of critiquing conservatives for inventing another "problem" in order to demonise a group that challenges traditional moral standards.


So apparently feminists are now the conservatives fomenting unnecessary panic about the proliferation of "sexualised" images while the corporate-controlled media industry that mass produces these images is the progressive force for change being unfairly demonised. What a strange turn of events.

To suggest feminists who oppose the pornification of society are stirring up a moral panic is to confuse a politically progressive movement with rightwing attempts to police sexual behaviour. We can, of course, identify just such a conservative strand in current debates in Britain: interventions of the coalition government include calls for girls to be given lessons in how to practise abstinence and attacks on abortion rights. But feminists who organise against pornification are not arguing that sexualised images of women cause moral decay; rather that they perpetuate myths of women's unconditional sexual availability and object status, and thus undermine women's rights to sexual autonomy, physical safety and economic and social equality. The harm done to women is not a moral harm but a political one, and any analysis must be grounded in a critique of the corporate control of our visual landscape.

The left has a long history of fighting capitalist ownership of the media. From Karl Marx to Antonio Gramsci to Noam Chomsky, leftist thinkers have understood the corporate media to be the propaganda machine for capitalist ideas and values. By mainstreaming the ideologies of the elite, corporate-controlled media shapes our identities as workers and consumers, selling an image of success and happiness tied to the consumption of products that generate enormous wealth for the elite class. Alternative views are at best marginalised and at worst ridiculed.

No one in progressive circles would suggest for a moment that criticism of the corporate media is a moral panic. Chomsky has never, as far as we know, been called a "moral entrepreneur", yet those of us who organise against the corporations that churn out sexist imagery are regularly dismissed as stirring moral panic.

The industry-engineered image of femininity has now become the dominant one in western society, crowding out alternative ways of being female. The clothes, cosmetics, diets, gym membership, trips to the hair salon, the waxing salon and the nail salon add up to a lot of money. Even in these dark economic times, when women are experiencing the most severe financial hardship, the UK beauty business is booming.

Women's self-loathing is big business, and supports a global capitalist system that, ironically, depends heavily on the exploitation of women's labour in developing countries. Adding insult to injury, many of these underpaid women are spending a significant proportion of their wages on skin-whitening products that promise social mobility out of the sweatshops.

In the west, cosmetic surgery is increasingly normalised. Last year in the UK, almost 9,500 women underwent breast augmentation surgery, and the number of labiaplasties has almost tripled in five years. One plastic surgeon helpfully explains on his website that labiaplasty "can sculpture the elongated or unequal labial [sic] minora (small inner lips) according to one's specification … With laser reduction labiaplasty, we can accomplish the desires of the woman". If this is not evidence of living in a sexualised culture, what is?

The emotional cost of conforming to hypersexualisation is enormous for girls and young women who are in the process of forming their gender and sexual identities. We construct our identities through complex processes of interaction with the culture around us, but today images of hypersexualisation dominate. Where is a girl to go if she decides Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Rihanna or Britney Spears aren't for her?

An American Psychological Association study on girls' sexualisation found that it "has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality, and attitudes and beliefs". Some of these effects include risky sexual behaviour, higher rates of eating disorders, depression and low self-esteem, and reduced academic performance. Of course, there are girls who resist, but there are real social penalties to be paid by those who do not conform to acceptable feminine appearance.

This weekend feminist campaigners are hosting a conference on the pornification of culture. In the buildup, mass protests were held outside the London Playboy Club and Miss World beauty contest to highlight the relationship between corporate interests and the objectification of women. The fight against the increasingly narrow and limiting image of femininity is inextricably connected to the progressive fight for democratic ownership and control of the media. This is a political struggle. Feminists are rightly concerned, but we're not panicking. We're organising.

Gail Dines and Julia Long

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 December 2011 19.29 GMT

curso basico de machismo y racismo *

Por algo fueron mujeres las víctimas de las cacerías de brujas, y no sólo en los tiempos de la Inquisición. Endemoniadas: espasmos y aullidos, quizá orgasmos, y para colmo de escándalo, orgasmos múltiples. Sólo la posesión de Satán podía explicar tanto fuego prohibido, que por el fuego era castigado. Mandaba Dios que fueran quemadas vivas las pecadoras que ardían. La envidia y el pánico ante el placer femenino no tenían nada de nuevo. Uno de los mitos más antiguos y universales, común a muchas culturas de muchos tiempos y de diversos lugares, es el mito de la vulva dentada, el sexo de la hembra como boca llena de dientes, insaciable boca de piraña que se alimenta de carne de machos. Y en este mundo de hoy, en este fin de siglo, hay ciento veinte millones de mujeres mutiladas del clítoris.

No hay mujer que no resulte sospechosa de mala conducta. Según los boleros, son todas ingratas; según los tangos, son todas putas (menos mamá). En los países del sur del mundo, una de cada tres mujeres casadas recibe palizas, como parte de la rutina conyugal, en castigo por lo que ha hecho o por lo que podría hacer:

—Estamos dormidas— dice una obrera del barrio Casavalle de Montevideo. —Algún príncipe te besa y te duerme. Cuando te despertás, el príncipe te aporrea.

Y otra:

—Yo tengo el miedo de mi madre, y mi madre tuvo el miedo de mi abuela.

Confirmaciones del derecho de propiedad: el macho propietario comprueba a golpes su derecho de propiedad sobre la hembra, como el macho y la hembra comprueban a golpes su derecho de propiedad sobre los hijos.

Y las violaciones, ¿no son, acaso, ritos que por la violencia celebran ese derecho? El violador no busca, ni encuentra, placer: necesita someter. La violación graba a fuego una marca de propiedad en el anca de la víctima, y es la expresión más brutal del carácter fálico del poder, desde siempre expresado por la flecha, la espada, el fusil, el cañón, el misil y otras erecciones.

*Fragmento

Patas arriba: la escuela del mundo al revés, Eduardo Galeano

con dePPresion

a very powerful poem

I am OVER it!

I am over rape.

I am over rape culture, rape mentality, rape pages on Facebook.

I am over the thousands of people who signed those pages with their real names without shame.

I am over people demanding their right to rape pages, and calling it freedom of speech or justifying it as a joke.

I am over people not understanding that rape is not a joke and I am over being told I don't have a sense of humor, and women don't have a sense of humor, when most women I know (and I know a lot) are really fucking funny. We just don't think that uninvited penises up our anus, or our vagina is a laugh riot.

I am over how long it seems to take anyone to ever respond to rape.

I am over Facebook taking weeks to take down rape pages.

I am over the hundreds of thousands of women in Congo still waiting for the rapes to end and the rapists to be held accountable.

I am over the thousands of women in Bosnia, Burma, Pakistan, South Africa, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Afghanistan, Libya, you name a place, still waiting for justice.

I am over rape happening in broad daylight.

I am over the 207 clinics in Ecuador supported by the government that are capturing, raping, and torturing lesbians to make them straight.

I am over one in three women in the U.S military (Happy Veterans Day!) getting raped by their so-called "comrades."

I am over the forces that deny women who have been raped the right to have an abortion.

I am over the fact that after four women came forward with allegations that Herman Cain groped them and grabbed them and humiliated them, he is still running for the President of the United States.

And I'm over CNBC debate host Maria Bartiromo getting booed when she asked him about it. She was booed, not Herman Cain.

Which reminds me, I am so over the students at Penn State who protested the justice system instead of the alleged rapist pedophile of at least 8 boys, or his boss Joe Paterno, who did nothing to protect those children after knowing what was happening to them.

I am over rape victims becoming re-raped when they go public.

I am over starving Somalian women being raped at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, and I am over women getting raped at Occupy Wall Street and being quiet about it because they were protecting a movement which is fighting to end the pillaging and raping of the economy and the earth, as if the rape of their bodies was something separate.

I am over women still being silent about rape, because they are made to believe it's their fault or they did something to make it happen.

I am over violence against women not being a #1 international priority when one out of three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime -- the destruction and muting and undermining of women is the destruction of life itself.

No women, no future, duh.

I am over this rape culture where the privileged with political and physical and economic might, take what and who they want, when they want it, as much as they want, any time they want it.

I am over the endless resurrection of the careers of rapists and sexual exploiters -- film directors, world leaders, corporate executives, movie stars, athletes -- while the lives of the women they violated are permanently destroyed, often forcing them to live in social and emotional exile.

I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you?

You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren't you standing with us? Why aren't you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?

I am over years and years of being over rape.

And thinking about rape every day of my life since I was 5-years-old.

And getting sick from rape, and depressed from rape, and enraged by rape.

And reading my insanely crowded inbox of rape horror stories every hour of every single day.

I am over being polite about rape. It's been too long now, we have been too understanding.

We need to OCCUPYRAPE in every school, park, radio, TV station, household, office, factory, refugee camp, military base, back room, night club, alleyway, courtroom, UN office. We need people to truly try and imagine -- once and for all -- what it feels like to have your body invaded, your mind splintered, your soul shattered. We need to let our rage and our compassion connect us so we can change the paradigm of global rape.

There are approximately one billion women on the planet who have been violated.

ONE BILLION WOMEN.

The time is now. Prepare for the escalation.

Today it begins, moving toward February 14, 2013, when one billion women will rise to end rape.

Because we are over it.

Eve Ensler

Act like it!

So you plan to change the world huh? Well….what if you don’t?

I’m incredibly blessed to be part of a community of some of the most inspired, inspiring…..and downright fun people I have ever met. These are a group of people with clear missions, passionate visions, who really want to make a dent in the universe through whatever industry they have chosen to devote themselves to.

I’ve been part of many groups and communities but never quite like this one.  They are simply awe-inspiring.  I could marry them all.  If that was legal.  And if I didn’t have to live with them all…or do stuff married people do….well you get it: the point is I just love them to bits.

BUT…..just between you and I, there is one little thing that worries me sometimes.  I listen to these huge inspiring plans to change the world – some bigger than my peripheral vision will stretch – and I have no doubt many will do just as they plan to do.  And more. But here is what I can’t help thinking…………

…..what if you die tomorrow?

Now before you think I’m being dramatic or morbid just remember that every day I talk to and work with people who have lost someone they love.  And very often this is an unexpected death, a death ‘too early’, a death ‘before their time’.  A death of someone who didn’t get to do all they planned. So I tend to look at things a little differently and have a heightened awareness of the fact that it could end any day. For any one of us.

So if you have amazing plans to change the world, if every day you look in the mirror and tell yourself the difference you are making and going to make…..what happens if it all ends tomorrow and you don’t get to do it?  Would that mean you haven’t changed the world?  Would that mean you didn’t do what you were here to do?  Seriously, would you feel as proud of the achievements you’ve already made as you will be of the ones you plan to make?

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting for a second that you don’t make those big plans. By all means, make them even bigger!  That isn’t my point.  My point is that I worry that people say they are ‘going to’ change the world…..and that they don’t think they have already. And that breaks my heart.

How many people do you have to have helped before you’ve officially changed the world?  Have many books or articles have to have been written about you?  How many people have to know your name before you are considered a world-changer, a thought-leader, a star?

Want my answer?  One.  You only have to have changed one person’s life to have changed the world.  Don’t imagine that once you do a, b and c you will then have made an impact on this planet.  You have already done it.  You do it every single day of your existence.

There are people out there who, if asked who has made a difference in their life, who has touched them, helped them, taught them, loved them, would name you.  There are people who would not be where they are without you. There may even be people who would not exist had it not been for you (hands up all parents).

Every day of your life, like it or not, try or not, you have impacted the lives of others.  And the impact you have had on their lives will affect the impact they have on the lives of others…and so on.  I’ve learnt in the past year that some of the people who made the biggest impact in my life had no idea that they had.  And I bet you don’t either. I bet you underestimate just exactly how much you’ve changed the world already.  Well….stop it.

If your life flashed before your eyes or you were on your proverbial death-bed and reflecting on your life…who would you be thinking about? Richard Branson? Oprah? Steve Jobs?  Or would it be your mum, your best friend, a teacher that taught you to believe in yourself, the first guy or gal who you fell in love with, the person who stuck up for you, the person who helped you up the last time you fell down?

One of the lives that you’ve changed may well have been mine.  And to me that means that despite the fact that Oprah is my hero…she hasn’t had anywhere near the impact you have.  Not on my world.

So make your plans to change the world in huge ways….and go out and do that…I’m 100% behind you. But always remember the difference you have made already, the difference you make every single freakin’ day. So that no matter what happens in your life you know, with absolute certainty, that you have touched this planet.  In a massive way.  Because you truly have.

And hey, surely it’s easier to go out and change the world when you realise that actually…….you’ve been doing it all along.

Kristie

xx

son estos tiempos

Tiempos de acción para que nadie fusile en ningún rincón del planeta el derecho a una vida libre de violencia. Tiempos para entender que ningún horror nos es ajeno. Tiempos para tratar con la misma sensibilidad y contundencia en España y en el resto del mundo sobre los derechos de toda víctima de actos inhumanos.

10 years ago and today....

punctuation is powerful

I am powerful

Jerusalem

un homenaje a los libros

the spirit for a new era?

in their own words

a curiosity (on how much time people have in their hands)

un homenaje paterno

wow.....

Protestas en los muros del facebook

"La píldora del día después ya es un aborto. Entonces me surgen algunas dudas desde el ámbito Jurídico: - La paja: Es homicidio premeditado? - El sexo oral: Es canibalismo? ... - Podemos considerar el coito interruptus como abandono de menor?... - Y que decir del preservativo? será homicidio por asfixia mecánica? - Y el sexo anal? Es mandar los hijos a la mierda? Copia esto en tu muro para que los católicos se preocupen mas por los curas pederastas y menos por el sexo!!! "


"Por que meter las imágenes horripilantes en paquetes de cigarrillos ? ¿Por qué no fotos de niños hambrientos en envases de McDonald ? ¿Por qué no animales torturados en productos cosméticos ? ¿Por qué no poner fotos de las víctimas de conductores ebrios, en botellas de cerveza y vino ? ¿Por qué no fotos de políticos deshonestos, ladrones disfrutando de nuestro dinero, en declaraciones de impuestos ? Aunque el 100% de ustedes estarán de acuerdo ! Apuesto a que el 99% no lo copia...."

Positive Advertising for Women

An example of taking responsibility and doing sthg about it

I’ve written so many articles over the years laying bare and polemicising against the errors and idiocies of other people. This time, I am writing an article laying bare and polemicising against the errors and idiocies of myself. If you give it out, you have to take it. If you demand high standards of others, you have to be just as damning when you fail to uphold them yourself.

I did two wrong and stupid things. The first concerns some people I interviewed over the years. When I recorded and typed up any conversation, I found something odd: points that sounded perfectly clear when you heard them being spoken often don’t translate to the page. They can be quite confusing and unclear. When this happened, if the interviewee had made a similar point in their writing (or, much more rarely, when they were speaking to somebody else), I would use those words instead. At the time, I justified this to myself by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the interviewee thought, in their most considered and clear words.

Related articles

• Independent columnist apologises for plagiarism
• Search the news archive for more stories

But I was wrong. An interview isn’t an X-ray of a person’s finest thoughts. It’s a report of an encounter. If you want to add material from elsewhere, there are conventions that let you do that. You write “she has said,” instead of “she says”. You write “as she told the New York Times” or “as she says in her book”, instead of just replacing the garbled chunk she said with the clear chunk she wrote or said elsewhere. If I had asked the many experienced colleagues I have here at The Independent – who have always been very generous with their time – they would have told me that, and they would have explained just how wrong I was. It was arrogant and stupid of me not to ask.

The other thing I did wrong was that several years ago I started to notice some things I didn’t like in the Wikipedia entry about me, so I took them out. To do that, I created a user-name that wasn’t my own. Using that user-name, I continued to edit my own Wikipedia entry and some other people’s too. I took out nasty passages about people I admire – like Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot, Deborah Orr and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. I factually corrected some other entries about other people. But in a few instances, I edited the entries of people I had clashed with in ways that were juvenile or malicious: I called one of them anti-Semitic and homophobic, and the other a drunk. I am mortified to have done this, because it breaches the most basic ethical rule: don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you. I apologise to the latter group unreservedly and totally.

If it was the other way round – if a journalist I disapprove of had done something analogous – I’d be withering. I’d say, it’s not hard: get your quotes right, and don’t be mean about other people in a way you find painful when it’s directed at you. Spare me the self-pitying excuses. Plenty of people have your problems and pressures and none of your privileges, and they don’t do anything half as awful.

Good old Christian Love

re-learning History, understanding "the Other"

Get your rosaries off my ovaries

For all the liberal language, independent counselling is just an underhanded anti-abortion tactic
Suzanne Moore, Guardian.co.uk


[..] I know what having an abortion is like myself so I could make a terrible joke about it running in the family. Actually, my point is that abortion is a very common experience. Nor am I trying to suggest that the proposed amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill concerning counselling mean a return to these dark old days. The reason I am telling you all this is because I admired my mother's refusal to be ashamed of her own experience. Now this new breed of anti-abortionists snip round the edges of the process with their strategies of delay ... er, sorry, "independent counselling". But beware their language of care. This is not about care but about control. This control absolutely depends on shame: sexual shame. This shame keeps us quiet. Shame keeps us locked into individual guilt. Shame even makes us stupidly grateful that we are allowed to have any choice at all.

This whole debate around counselling pivots on the idea of deep and private shame, positing the idea of counselling being used to sell an evil procedure. Women are always "vulnerable" dupes, never simply adults who have made decisions. Some weird pension analogy has been brought in, though health care is nothing like it as advice and services do often come from the same people ie: doctors. [...]

There is little point trying to persuade those who are religiously opposed to abortion (though I am intrigued at the Catholic attitude to the foetus – miscarried babies are not buried as they are not baptised) but we can simply remind ourselves we are living in a largely secular democracy.

Loving the unborn more than the born is politically convenient, as the unborn do not have to be housed or educated or parented. [..]

We are repeatedly told this is an "emotive" issue. The new vocabulary of the anti-abortion lobby is full of vaguely feminist platitudes – not feminist enough to counsel the men who walk away from pregnancies but still. Underneath, we are fallen women, damaged goods and so terribly stupid that we can be persuaded to have a quick abortion by wicked charities. When we could be what? Wombs to provide babies for "proper couples" or go it alone as the root of all evil: single mothers?

This is nauseating. A vote of conscience? If MPs had one they would say it is not the business of the legislature to control women's reproduction. They would stop telling us what is "emotive" and ask what actually is. I didn't want counselling in order to have an abortion. I certainly did after a miscarriage – again an awfully common experience – but none was offered. No, instead let's bring on an army of "independent" zealots who can tell us that abortion leads to cancer, mental health issues and infertility, and sod the evidence that having a baby is more risky than having an abortion. Anyone who talks about how easy it is and how the reality is glossed over is ignorant. You have a scan. You know and see what you are doing. It's not a walk in the park but it is a huge relief. The emotive part is the enforced waiting.

Now the tactics are to further that wait. This is nothing short of cruelty dressed up in the language of concern. [..]

The relationship between money and happiness is surprisingly weak

Buy experiences instead of things;

buy many small pleasures instead of a few big ones;

pay now for things you can look forward to and enjoy later.

by the prominent scholars Elizabeth W. Dunn, Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson

The evasive motive

Robert Fisk: For 10 years, we've lied to ourselves to avoid asking the one real question

[...] almost all (literature on 9/11) avoiding the one thing which any cop looks for after a street crime: the motive.


Why so, I ask myself, after 10 years of war, hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, lies and hypocrisy and betrayal and sadistic torture by the Americans – our MI5 chaps just heard, understood, maybe looked, of course no touchy-touchy nonsense – and the Taliban? Have we managed to silence ourselves as well as the world with our own fears? Are we still not able to say those three sentences: The 19 murderers of 9/11 claimed they were Muslims. They came from a  place called the Middle East. Is there a problem out there? [...] 

Publication of the official 9/11 report – in 2004, but read the new edition of 2011 – is indeed worth study, if only for the realities it does present, although its opening sentences read more like those of a novel than of a government inquiry. "Tuesday ... dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States... For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey. Among the travellers were Mohamed Atta..." Were these guys, I ask myself, interns at Time magazine?

But I'm drawn to Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan whose The Eleventh Day confronts what the West refused to face in the years that followed 9/11. "All the evidence ... indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators – at every level," they write. One of the organisers of the attack believed it would make Americans concentrate on "the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel". Palestine, the authors state, "was certainly the principal political grievance ... driving the young Arabs (who had lived) in Hamburg".

The motivation for the attacks was "ducked" even by the official 9/11 report, say the authors. The commissioners had disagreed on this "issue" – cliché code word for "problem" – and its two most senior officials, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, were later to explain: "This was sensitive ground ...Commissioners who argued that al-Qa'ida was motivated by a religious ideology – and not by opposition to American policies – rejected mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... In their view, listing US support for Israel as a root cause of al-Qa'ida's opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy." And there you have it.

So what happened? The commissioners, Summers and Swan state, "settled on vague language that circumvented the issue of motive". There's a hint in the official report – but only in a footnote which, of course, few read. In other words, we still haven't told the truth about the crime which – we are supposed to believe – "changed the world for ever". Mind you, after watching Obama on his knees before Netanyahu last May, I'm really not surprised.

When the Israeli Prime Minister gets even the US Congress to grovel to him, the American people are not going to be told the answer to the most important and "sensitive" question of 9/11: why?

Noam Chomsky sees hegemonic powers showing extreme contempt for democracy – and acting in ways they know will increase terrorism

Food for thought en forma de rap

Razones económicas para rechazar el acuerdo neoliberal entre el PSOE y el PP

El acuerdo entre el PSOE y el PP para incorporar a la Constitución española un precepto que impida que los gobiernos incurran en déficit no es fruto de la casualidad.

Responde a la ideología neoliberal dominante en los últimos años que ha tratado de justificar el principio de estabilidad presupuestaria para poder tapar las vergüenzas de unas políticas neoliberales que son incapaces de generar suficiente actividad económica y empleo y la necesaria estabilidad de las economía a medio y largo plazo. [...]

Pactos de estabilidad, pactos contra la democracia y el bienestar social

Además de las consecuencias puramente económicas que acabo de señalar, el principio de estabilidad presupuestaria (y más concretamente su imposición a través de mandatos constitucionales) significa en la práctica impedir que la ciudadanía pueda elegir libremente a la hora de enfrentarse a los problemas económicos de nuestra época.

Al imponerlo en cualquier momento y condición, como ahora han acordado en España el PSOE y el PP, se impide que los gobiernos puedan suscribir pactos con sus electores si no es en los términos prescritos por la ortodoxia económica dominante. Se obliga de esta forma a que las única política posibles sean las neoliberales.

Es decir, la imposición del principio de estabilidad implica que no puedan darse soluciones negociadas y, por lo tanto democráticas, al conflicto social inevitable que es consustancial con la generación y distribución de la renta y la riqueza. [...]

La democracia y las políticas de bienestar se basan en la posibilidad de negociación frente al conflicto social y en una idea claramente expuesta por Stiglitz (2002:16): "no existe una única política Pareto-dominante (óptima) en la que puedan estar de acuerdo todas las personas ´razonables´".

Llevar a la constitución el principio de estabilidad presupuestaria es imponer de facto una dictadura económica porque para evitar el déficit público se impone un gigantesco déficit democrático que impide que todos las personas se encuentren en igualdad de condiciones a la hora de decidir sobre los problemas económicos. Por eso podemos decir que la imposición de un principio de estabilidad presupuestaria en las condiciones en que se impone es algo radicalmente contrario al sentido más elemental de la democracia.

¿Se puede actuar de otra forma?

La historia económica demuestra que cuando los gobiernos han actuado poniendo en marcha políticas fiscales y monetarias discrecionales y combinadas han logrado mejores resultados que en los últimos años de rechazo neoliberal a la fiscalidad discrecional y progresiva.

Y el sentido común indica que afirmar que la estabilidad presupuestaria es buena por principio, en cualquier caso, es una soberana tontería. Como lo sería afirmar que una economía puede endeudarse ilimitadamente sin problema ninguno.

¿Qué adelantaría un país con tener estabilidad presupuestaria si al mismo tiempo carece del capital social y de las estructuras –físicas, educativas, sanitarias, sociales, culturales, relacionales o empresariales…- que son imprescindibles para que sus empresarios puedan crear riqueza y sus ciudadanos adquirir el imprescindible capital humano y el bienestar adecuado?

Lo importante no es garantizar en todo caso que no haya déficit.

Lo razonable y lo que proporciona progreso a una nación es disponer de la dotación de capital social necesario para satisfacer las necesidades sociales. Esta debe ser la variable de partida y no el saldo cero del presupuesto público.

Y lo que sabemos, porque la historia es indiscutible en este aspecto, es que eso no se puede conseguir sin una suficiente dotación de gasto público. Por tanto, lo primero es asegurar este y luego encontrar las vías adecuadas de financiación.

El problema que tienen las políticas neoliberales y quienes las defienden es que son incapaces de generar esa financiación por tres razones. Primero, porque quieren evitar que las clases de mayor renta paguen impuestos. Segundo, porque provocan una gran desigualdad y eso deprime a las economías y hace que puedan generar muchos menos ingresos para las arcas del estado. Y tercero porque incentivan que el ahorro vaya a los mercados financieros en lugar de a financiar la actividad productiva. Y como son incapaces de generar ingresos no tienen más alternativa que imponer la reducción del gasto con las consecuencias que he señalado.

De hecho, el problema que está padeciendo una economía como la española en relación con la deuda (dejando al margen el inadecuado modelo de crecimiento de los últimos años) no es su cuantía sino que su financiación está a expensas de los especuladores.

La alternativa, [...], es poner en marcha otro tipo de políticas que frenen la desigualdad, que promocionen un nuevo tipo de actividad económica y se basen en una mayor justicia fiscal y social y que así procuren nuevos y mayores ingresos para no tener que reducir la dotación de los bienes y servicios de bienestar que necesita la inmensa mayoría de la población. Es muy posible que eso requiera cierto nivel de endeudamiento, que ni siquiera tiene por qué ser muy elevado, aunque desde luego mayor al déficit cero que se impone. Pero si se aplican políticas generadoras de ingresos productivos, si se fomenta el uso razonable del ahorro y si se acaba con la especulación financiera no tiene por qué ser un escollo para alcanzar los mayores niveles de rendimiento empresarial, de bienestar social y de progreso que España necesita.

Por el magnifico Juan Torres Lopez, el articulo completo en su blog Ganas de Escribir

Back to the start, food for thought

El deseo.....

[....] Vivimos en la cultura del tener, en la que corremos tras los logros, el poder, las posesiones, las personas, los objetos y las modas. Llega un momento en el que no sabemos hacia dónde corremos ni cuál es el sentido, ya que seguimos en una insatisfacción permanente.

Nuestros espacios son cada vez más pequeños y abarrotados de cosas. Espacios pequeños no solo a nivel físico, sino también a nivel interno: no nos queda espacio para pensar ni sentir desde el ser. Mientras la mente está abarrotada de pensamientos y de deseos, no hay espacio para la inspiración ni para la creatividad. Nos falta el espacio interior que permita un fluir de energía creativa. Solo cuando creamos y vivimos de dentro a fuera llenamos nuestra vida de sentido.

[..] El hombre no vive. Lo viven. [..]

[...] Los deseos son uno de nuestros motores. La pregunta clave es: ¿cuál es el deseo por el que vale la pena luchar y satisfacer?

El deseo esencial está conectado con tres ejes. El primero es el deseo de conocer y ampliar nuestros horizontes. Desde pequeños nos mueve la curiosidad por saber y por comprender el mundo que nos rodea. 

El segundo eje es el impulso de hacernos completos. "Tu conciencia proviene de la unidad", dice Deepak Chopra. Por eso deseamos la unión, sentirnos el uno con el otro. Es un deseo que nos conduce fuera de nosotros. Amamos y buscamos ser correspondidos. Nos damos al otro desde nuestros dones, sintiendo así alegría. 

El tercero es el impulso a actuar para expresar la creatividad. Así nos damos al mundo desde nuestro talento y nuestros dones. Una acción con la que aportamos y construimos un mundo mejor nos llena de sentido.

Cuando nos desviamos de estos tres ejes esenciales nos invade la sensación de carencia. Tenemos carencias afectivas, estamos faltos de conocimiento o nuestras acciones están vacías de sentido. El resultado es que sentimos un estado de necesidad.

La necesidad crea un vacío que nos impulsa a relacionarnos para cubrirlo con amor y con poder. Nos atrae el amor. Nos atrae el poder. Sin darnos cuenta, caemos en la trampa de un amor que no es amor, sino deseo, y de un poder que no es poder, sino codicia.

Cuando el deseo invade el alma y esta no lo puede contener, este se convierte en algo destructivo y devastador como el cáncer que devora todo lo que encuentra a su paso. Se convierte en una dependencia que pasa a ser una adicción. Adicción al sexo, a la bebida, a los malos tratos, a la sumisión, a someter, al dinero... Entonces el deseo nos esclaviza. Perdemos la soberanía interior. Somos marionetas del deseo. No es de extrañar que vivamos insatisfechos y frustrados. Para huir de estas sensaciones, nos distraemos. Y así seguimos en la rueda del deseo insaciable.

Deje de ser marioneta del deseo. El primer paso para lograr dominio sobre uno mismo es, precisamente, desearlo. El poder mental es capaz de canalizar los pensamientos de manera positiva. Solo cuando uno se da cuenta de lo que subyace a sus deseos puede transformarlos. ¿Qué encubre el deseo que nos vence? ¿Qué es lo que realmente desea? Buscamos amor, paz, respeto, atención, o bien queremos huir de una situación que nos sobrepasa. Aunque la mente suele pedir cosas visibles y materiales, sus necesidades son más profundas y ninguna cosa superficial y efímera puede satisfacerlas.

La meditación nos conduce hacia lo auténtico y eterno. También ayudan las afirmaciones y la visualización. Visualizar consiste en crear imágenes positivas en su mente y, de esta forma, reforzar el pensamiento y fortalecer su voluntad para alcanzar aquello que afirma.

Las afirmaciones son pensamientos determinados. Son promesas que nos hacemos a nosotros mismos. Sirven para romper los hábitos negativos o pensamientos débiles. Por ejemplo: "Hoy haré que el pasado sea pasado y miraré al futuro con una nueva visión". El pasado tiene buenas y malas experiencias. Sin embargo, tendemos a evocar lo negativo. El efecto de esto es que nuestra actitud hacia el futuro se contamina. Un método efectivo para soltar el pasado es ver el beneficio que hubo. Cuando se reconoce un beneficio en lo que sucedió, es más fácil terminar con el resentimiento o la aflicción.

LA DIGNIDAD DE LO ESENCIAL

"Tú eres lo que estás buscando" (Deepak Chopra)

Primero averigüe su deseo esencial y lo que es bueno para usted. Alinee sus deseos con lo que realmente quiere. Así no se dejará llevar por otros deseos que supongan una huida ni una distracción. Finalmente céntrese en este compromiso. Con ello se fortalece, se siente seguro, y su caminar por el mundo es más digno.

Marionetas del deseo, El Pais

Ahead Stop

Show: el mc murciano

no tiene edad de votar todavia, y ya es asi de listo
brindo por la juventud y l@s poetas modernos
todos sus temas aqui

An absolute must read, a brilliant analysis and fucking scary possibilities

Israeli-Arab Crisis Approaching

By George Friedman
In September, the U.N. General Assembly will vote on whether to recognize Palestine as an independent and sovereign state with full rights in the United Nations. In many ways, this would appear to be a reasonable and logical step. Whatever the Palestinians once were, they are clearly a nation in the simplest and most important sense — namely, they think of themselves as a nation. Nations are created by historical circumstances, and those circumstances have given rise to a Palestinian nation. Under the principle of the United Nations and the theory of the right to national self-determination, which is the moral foundation of the modern theory of nationalism, a nation has a right to a state, and that state has a place in the family of nations. In this sense, the U.N. vote will be unexceptional.
However, when the United Nations votes on Palestinian statehood, it will intersect with other realities and other historical processes. First, it is one thing to declare a Palestinian state; it is quite another thing to create one. The Palestinians are deeply divided between two views of what the Palestinian nation ought to be, a division not easily overcome. Second, this vote will come at a time when two of Israel’s neighbors are coping with their own internal issues. Syria is in chaos, with an extended and significant resistance against the regime having emerged. Meanwhile, Egypt is struggling with internal tension over the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the future of the military junta that replaced him. Add to this the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the potential rise of Iranian power, and the potential recognition of a Palestinian state — while perfectly logical in an abstract sense — becomes an event that can force a regional crisis in the midst of ongoing regional crises. It thus is a vote that could have significant consequences.


Read more: Israeli-Arab Crisis Approaching | STRATFOR 

Verdades como puños

A poem

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;


Where knowledge if free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, may Father, let my country awake.

Rabindranath Tagore poem 35, from Gitanjali

Initial reactions to the attacks in Norway showed a "clash of civilisations" exists, but not in the way many understood.

[..] This tragedy underlines the urgency with which normal people around the world must combat fundamentalist nationalists and chauvinists wherever they may be. But it also demonstrates the extent to which reactionary bigotry has infected mainstream thought.

Many reacted to the news from Oslo with wide eyes and a pointed finger. The most animated reactionaries took to the pages of the New York Times comment section to issue sweeping proclamations about the Clash of Civilisations and something called "the cult of death". In many ways, readers were merely reinforcing the paper's woefully editorialised reportage. As Glenn Greenwald helpfully pointed out, the editors of the NYT - America's allegedly liberal newspaper - reserve the word "terrorist" solely for use in conjunction with the word "Muslim".

When news emerged that the perpetrator of the murders - the terrorist - was a man whose religion and skin pigmentation closely resembled those of the editors of the NYT, the story changed. The terrorist became a deranged "Christian extremist" whose tactics clearly mirrored "Al Qaeda's brutality and multiple attacks". In that way, the paper linked the terrorist with Muslims, despite his strong antipathy for them. [..]

But the combatants are not Islam and the West. Instead, the war is between the normal, sane people of the world and the right-wing zealots who see doom, destruction, hellfire and God's Will at every turn. [..]

These men are insecure, violently inclined, and illiberal. The outside world scares them. They hate homosexuals and strong women. For them, difference is a source of insecurity. Their values are militarism, conformism, chauvinism and jingoism. Worst of all they seek to pressure us into compliance while they work frantically to destroy themselves - and the rest of us with them. [..]

It is a credit to the Norwegian people that their prime minister did not respond to the terror attack with scorched-earth rhetoric or a carpet-bombing campaign. A real liberal with strong principles, he did not succumb to fear or vicious speculation.

Instead, he pledged to strengthen Norwegian democracy. This is what he said shortly after the terrorist attacks: "Our answer is more democracy, more openness to show that we will not be stopped by this kind of violence." His words illustrate the difference between a society that takes liberal principles as a foundation and one that treats them as an inconvenient luxury.

Norway's attacks reveal world of hatred : Initial reactions to the attacks in Norway showed a "clash of civilisations" exists, but not in the way many understood.

National Geographic`s 2010 Photo Contest

A sample of the fantastic pictures:

more here

Towards understanding 'the other'

"Rageh Omaar ( /ˈræɡi ˈoʊmɑː/; Somali: Raage Oomaar, Arabic: راجح عمر‎), (born 19 July 1967) is a Somali born British journalist and writer. 
His latest book Only Half of Me deals with the tensions between these two sides of his identity. He used to be a BBC world affairs correspondent, where he made his name reporting from Iraq. In September 2006, he moved to a new post at Al Jazeera English, where he presented the nightly weekday documentary series Witness until January 2010. The Rageh Omaar Report, first aired February 2010, is a new one-hour, monthly investigative documentaries in which Rageh Omaar reports on the world's most important current affairs stories."


I like the way he explains things, the variety of points of views he gets in his reporting without judging, and above all his very human approach to any subject matter. In these episodes, precisely because of the two sides of his identity he tries to explore notions of history and depict reality as perceived by many. Understanding differences and bridging divides is important. The first step in any case, is to be informed.