jose ramos's List: Alternative Globalisations

"#GOLDMAN is an indefinite real-time, live-action game to have some fun while shutting down each of these locations. Points will be awarded for speed, spectacle, courage, and innovation."

"Future Challenges affect everyone. They concern all of us, not only a handful of decision-makers. We are highly and widely connected people living in a interdependent world, people of different cultures, religions and political backgrounds. We all share the same common basic values. The internet gives us a face and the opportunity to take part in the global commons debate. Fc-Org invites you to step into this global forum and join the conversation."

"WASHINGTON, Nov 15 2012 (IPS) - A widely respected advocate for U.S. farmworker rights received a prestigious award on Capitol Hill here Wednesday, using the occasion to highlight pending state legislation that could significantly improve lives and working conditions that some have likened to modern-day slavery."

"This month Bolivia passed the world's first ruling that grants all nature equal rights to humans. The “Law of Mother Earth,” agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the South American nation's mineral deposits as "blessings" and is supposed to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry."

"BEIJING — The mother of China’s prime minister was a schoolteacher in northern China. His father was ordered to tend pigs in one of Mao’s political campaigns. And during childhood, “my family was extremely poor,” the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said in a speech last year.
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The People’s Premier
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The Wen Family Empire
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Obtaining Financial Records in China (October 27, 2012)
The Lede Blog: Ask About the Wealth of Chinese Officials (October 25, 2012)
China Blocks Web Access to Times After Article (October 26, 2012)
Series: Changing of the Guard in China

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But now 90, the prime minister’s mother, Yang Zhiyun, not only left poverty behind, she became outright rich, at least on paper, according to corporate and regulatory records. Just one investment in her name, in a large Chinese financial services company, had a value of $120 million five years ago, the records show. "

"Something interesting is going on in the city of Stuttgart, one of the regional success stories of the German system of Mitbestimmung, or ‘co-determination’, where workers have a role in the management of companies.

The dominant trend in Germany is of co‑determination becoming ‘crisis corporatism’, in which the unions concede low wages and increases in hours, ostensibly to save jobs. But in Germany’s southern manufacturing centre, in contrast, trade unionists are holding out for workers having real control over the conditions and hours of work – and over the purpose of their labour too. "

"On September 17, we will occupy Wall Street with non-violent civil disobedience and flood the area around it with a roving carnival of resistance. After assembling in parks throughout the Financial District at 7am, we will converge on the Stock Exchange at 7:30am and surround it with the “People’s Wall” sit-in. We will then fill the Financial District with “99 Revolutions,” a swirl of mobile occupations of corporate lobbies and intersections. At 10am, the Eco Cluster will gather at Bowling Green to “Storm Wall Street” and demand it stop bankrolling climate change. At 11am, we will assess the day, and decide on how to proceed through direct democratic process. After a period of downtime and spontaneous actions, we will conclude the day at 6pm by holding a Popular Assembly at Foley Square and marching to Liberty Plaza for a final celebration."

"It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens.”"

"My friend and colleague Benjamin Kerstein has published a number of books, and this summer he released what is perhaps the most blistering critique of the radical leftist ideologue Noam Chomsky ever to appear in book form. It’s called Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite and is a collection of essays, reviews, and take-downs that originally appeared on his blog of the same name during a three-year period from 2004 through 2007."

"On March 23rd, China's vice minister of health, Huang Jiefu, publicly declared the country's intention to end "organ donations" from executed prisoners. Yet the euphemism didn't conceal the reality, for on the night of February 6th, Wang was in a unique position to reveal one more story-specifically, how the party has been harvesting the organs of their political enemies for years."

Do new information and communication technologies (ICTs) empower repressive regimes at the expense of civil society, or vice versa? For example, does access to the Internet and mobile phones alter the balance of power between repressive regimes and civil society? These questions are especially pertinent today given the role that ICTs played during this year’s uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond. Indeed, as one Egyptian activist stated, “We use Facebook to schedule our protests, Twitter to coordinate and YouTube to tell the world.” But do these new ICTs—so called “liberation technologies”—really threaten repressive rule? The purpose of this dissertation is to use mixed-methods research to answer these questions.

It was the holy grail of investors. The Black-Scholes equation, brainchild of economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, provided a rational way to price a financial contract when it still had time to run. It was like buying or selling a bet on a horse, halfway through the race. It opened up a new world of ever more complex investments, blossoming into a gigantic global industry. But when the sub-prime mortgage market turned sour, the darling of the financial markets became the Black Hole equation, sucking money out of the universe in an unending stream.

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Mar 9, 2012 (IPS) - The upcoming Rio+20 conference has to be the moment in human history when the nations of the world come together to find ways to ensure the very survival of humanity, many science and environmental experts believe.

Del 24 al 29 de enero 2012, Porto Alegre (Brasil) y Área Metropolitana, En preparación de la Cumbre de los Pueblos Río+20
Los pueblos se ponen en movimiento,  Occupy Wall Street se extiende por los Estados Unidos. Las protestas y movilizaciones indígenas producen una gran efervescencia en la ya agitada región andina. Un inusual nivel de actividad de los movimientos de masas alcanza incluso a países conocidos por su estabilidad social. El 15 de octubre hemos tenido casi un millar de manifestaciones en ciudades de 82 países.