Will Allen is a former professional athlete who played basketball throughout college at the University of Miami and post-college in Belgium. Though he has also held jobs in corporate America, Allen has spent the last 21 years in a completely different profession: urban farmer. http://www.cornucopia.org/2015/05/meet-will-allen-the-urban-farmer-starting-his-own-revolution/ #farmer #food #urbanfarmer
A 3 minute clip here of Will speaking about urban gardening
Who Owns the World?
People have been separated from the land planet wide, the root of many of our ills. Less than 15 pc have ever owned the land. This is a crime/injustice that’s been covered up. Read Kevin Cahill’s ‘Who Owns the Planet’ or watch videos of his lectures. Very revealing. The Queen owns one sixth on her own. And has been well active in confiscating lands for eons. Indigenous peoples were frequently made to work for the colonizer by introducing taxes only payable in the colonizer’s currency … presto. Off the land, off traditional means of survival, growing food. Now today paupers on their previously owned lands and growing food for agribusiness. This is why the so called ‘third world’ starves. For an expose on that read Susan George’s ‘How the Other Half Dies’.
In summary, our spiritual connection with the land has been severed, along with our ability to properly nourish our bodies with fresh living food …. and the roots of this state of affairs can be found largely in capitalism and greed for profits … where earth’s land, peoples and resources have all been co-opted for that purpose.
The feature image is from Taihape’s (NZ) Vanessa’s blog here. She is also on our page here along with more info on Ron Finley (also on Youtube) who is quoted as saying ” Growing your own food is like printing your own money”.
From the Daily Blog … a look at how capitalism works and why the rich are getting richer on the backs of everybody else:
By Douglas Renwick
“There is a standard view of how capitalism is supposed to work given by the media. It goes something like this; capitalism is a system where people come together to freely exchange goods and services, including labour. Businesses compete competitively to give the most efficient outcome, and the profit motive gives incentive for innovation. People who become rich do so because they work hard to offer the market what it wants while the poor do not, so this wealth inequality is to a large extent the natural workings of the market. This is an imperfect but the best possible system.
That is I think the standard view given in the media, and I think most of it can be debunked while the rest can be turned on its head. I’ll be critiquing this view, but also give my own view of how I think Global Capitalism works. I’ll give what I think are realistic and viable solutions to the faults of Global capitalism at the end.
Capitalism is always seeking to make profit, and it was able to make profits in the period from 1945-1971 in the productive sector of the economy, and under this system there was high economic growth which was relatively egalitarian
the productive sector reached a certain capacity in the 1970’s, increasing productivity became less profitable … profits went into the FIRE economy … finance, insurance, real estate
the banking sector became wealthier and got turned into an institution that gambles rather than investing in productive things
the economy is now a system that is normally stagnant, and only grows when it is driven by speculative bubbles which eventually crash
real wages stagnate, as they have in New Zealand since 1984, while corporate profits go way up ……”
A 13 minute clip that explains the money system. Many notable people have referred to the banking fraternity’s control over the planet … one was Reginald McKenna, who had served as Chancellor of England’s Exchequer. In 1924 he said:
“I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create money, and they who control the credit of a nation direct the policy of the governments and hold in the hollow of their hands, the destiny of the people”
“All facts in this movie have been independently confirmed. Sources are documented athttp://thrivemovement.comHistory will repeat itself as long as these bankers and their corrupt politicians are in charge…” (Source)
Give me control over a nation’s economy, and I care not who writes its laws
From the Daily Blog in NZ, a thought provoking look at the world of economics where policy fallout on human populations is of no particular importance. Discussing also the incentives (are there any?) for mothers to leave their babies in day care and take up paid employment. Many are apparently worse off for working full time.
Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way. (David Korten)
Economists after economist pontificated on whether interest rates and exchange rates are going up or down and why and the virtues of quantitative easing that didn’t happen soon enough, apparently, except in the US. Never a mention of fiscal policy, except the bad effects of increase in GST in Japan…
…of course, there was no mention by the economists of high rates of poverty, , casualisation, low pay and uncertain hours, rampant speculative activity in real estate and growing inequality, even though the IMF and the OECD are regularly warning of the dangers…
When the inevitable downturn produces higher unemployment, more foodbank demand, foreclosures and widespread mental illness, who asks or cares whether the economic system works for low and middle income people and their children?”
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JP Morgan and other Western mega-banks have already begun stealing depositors’ money, according to sources at the Asian Development Bank and an American millionaire who reported his own funds were stolen.
Here is some enlightening weekend viewing. Learn why our respective nations have undergone such radical changes in recent decades. The oldies among us will tell you this. Things are not as they were.
New Zealand has changed dramatically since the late ’80s when the new neo liberal economic policies called Rogernomics set in. We are now the reapers of that earlier Government’s folly, and paying a price. Where once we had full employment and no debt, we are now in debt … big time (climbing $27 million per day) and subject to the control of big business. Borrowing millions per week to stay afloat? Our grandparents must be turning in their graves. That was the unfortunate ‘NZ Experiment’ that sold us down the river, and with our assets now going … going … gone, we no longer enjoy the sovereignty we once had. They sold off our family silver as it were under the fancy name of ‘privatization’. (A new term, note, that gives a professional air and shifts the focus off what is really happening). We were told it was to pay our national debt but we are now more in debt than ever … it clearly hasn’t worked. Our country is now a corporation registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and our government departments likewise. There is your clue. Corporations have one bottom line: PROFITS.
As an early NZ settler of colonial times stated:
The whole and entire object of everyone here is making money, the big fishes eating the little ones (‘The Rich List’, G Hunt p 29)
So ‘filthy lucre’ if you like was uppermost back then as well … the driving motive for expansion to other shores was not as we’ve been led to believe … to bring civilization and Christianity … these were merely by-products.
With this corporatisation everything began to operate on a business model, and instead of people with related background experience matching the kind of government department they served, we saw people appointed with purely business skills. Their focus became figures and profitability, not people, so social service and health departments were required to predict their costs in advance based on historical data. Quite a feat when dealing for instance with child abuse. Government departments were subjected to restructuring (the new catch word given to the changes … known also in other countries by other names like ‘structural adjustment’) and told it was so they could all work smarter. In fact, where I worked at the time, I likened it to musical chairs. When the music stopped there were less bums on seats in the office. And the music kept playing, and the seats kept disappearing. The folks on the ground inherited more work from their now absent colleagues, and the CEOs inherited fatter salaries to ensure (I suspect) the new status quo remained. It was a classic case of smoke and mirrors and happened across the board. Friends of mine in other professions complained of being buried in mountains of new paper requirements, the face of their jobs completely changing, and leaving less time for people.
So now we see evidence of this business model everywhere, with their whole raison d’etre being profits, while the memory of a caring welfare state is becoming more and more elusive by the year. In rural communities it still sticks out like a sore toe because it clashes with their longtime ethic of community and caring.
On that note, as you ponder on the origins of our (and many other countries’) demise into the debt abyss … grasp an overview of the root cause of these problems in ‘The Biggest Bank Heist Ever’. It is all about making money, the big fishes eating the little fishes. Remember, it is a mythical illusion that all can succeed under capitalism. Wakefield himself of the NZ Company openly stated that they would keep the price of land high enough so that not all could own any (1).
References
(1) Miller J (Early Victorian New Zealand) p 4
Video Description
Video info: “The award winning documentary ‘Inside Job’ [2011 | US] by the veteran crusader, Charles Ferguson is the most insightful and illuminating amongst a number of such attempts that deal with the global financial crisis, which is wrecking lives and economies across the world to this day.
The reason is that it successfully challenges the myths and lies surrounding the root causes of the crisis and tells us exactly how and why it happened, in a simple and straightforward way that anyone can understand.
IsuruFoundation® highly recommends this great film to anyone who wants to know why we the public are paying with our lives for the treacherous shenanigans of the filthy rich and the powerful.”
This article from filmsforaction echoes the entire philosophy of this website. Yes … it is very do-able. Very. This is life without the middle men in the form of profiteering banksters who not only create money out of thin air (as in type your loan onto their computer screen) and then charge you interest for it. The Spanish town of Marinaleda has a local Mayor of 35+ years who has been known to seize food from the local supermarket & give it to the poor…. and people get a cheaply priced, comfortable house to live in, so long as it’s never sold for a profit (as in speculation)…
“With virtually no police, crime or unemployment, meet the Spanish town described as a democratic, socialist utopia. Unemployment is non-existent in Marinaleda, an Andalusian village in southern Spain that is prosperous thanks to its farming cooperative…..
Since the financial crisis began in 2008, Marinaleda has shot to fame — and so has its maverick mayor Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, who earned the nickname,”The Spanish Robin Hood,” after organizing and carrying out a series of supermarket raids in a direct action protest last August. Basic groceries such as oil, rice and beans were loaded into carts, wheeled from the store and taken to a local food bank to help the poor, as helpless cashiers looked on, some crying….”
This signals a warning to folks with money in the bank. Banks are not averse to trimming your accounts as they already did in Greece. That was the Open Bank Resolution (OBR). When their poor practices fail it is you the customer who tends to be paying for their mistakes. Educate yourself and be warned. Here your savings will be taxed.
“The new compulsory control is provided in the 2015 Australian budget, so that everyone who has any savings must pay taxes on their savings. The measure is expected to serve as a global test balloon for Europe and North America, who will watch for the outcome in Australia. If there is no massive resistance of Australian savers, the rest of the world should expect this outright confiscation very rapidly…”
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