News

"This is what democracy looks like: Occupying Wall Street and Bay Street"

By Rob Winters - Published on Monday, 17 October 2011 07:52

"Has the revolution finally arrived?

Chances are you hadn’t heard of the Occupy Wall Street movement three weeks ago, when a few hundred mostly 20- and 30-something activists first occupied a park in Manhattan to protest corporate greed and corrupt party politics. For as long as they could get away with it, the corporate media greeted the occupation of the heart of global financial power with an information blackout. Many suspected, not unreasonably, that the occupiers would lose momentum and the movement would simply fizzle out and die.

They were wrong. Occupy Wall Street has grown exponentially since its inception on Sept. 17."

"Occupy movement a protest no politician can afford to ignore "

By Rob Winters - Published on Monday, 17 October 2011 07:49

"It is occasionally disorganized, its demands unclear and diverse. But one thing that’s certain about Occupy – the movement has gone global.

What began in New York as a rallying cry against income inequity – a post-bailout backlash at a recovery that seemed to restore wealth to the happy few and leave many behind – has vaulted from Wall Street to Chicago, London and Rome; and to Toronto, Vancouver and cities across Canada."

"How Many People Can Earth Support?"

By Rob Winters - Published on Friday, 14 October 2011 10:12

"The power of population is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race."

The late-18th century philosopher Thomas Malthus wrote these ominous words in an essay on what he saw as the dire future of humanity. Humans' unquenchable urge to reproduce, Malthus argued, would ultimately lead us to overpopulate the planet, eat up all its resources and die in a mass famine.

But what is the maximum "power of the Earth to produce subsistence," and when will our numbers push the planet to its limit? More importantly, was Malthus' vision of the future correct?

Earth's capacity

Many scientists think Earth has a maximum carrying capacity of 9 billion to 10 billion people. [How Do You Count 7 Billion People?]

One such scientist, the eminent Harvard University sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, bases his estimate on calculations of the Earth's available resources. As Wilson pointed out in his book "The Future of Life" (Knopf, 2002), "The constraints of the biosphere are fixed."

Aside from the limited availability of freshwater, there are indeed constraints on the amount of food that Earth can produce, just as Malthus argued more than 200 years ago. Even in the case of maximum efficiency, in which all the grains grown are dedicated to feeding humans (instead of livestock, which is an inefficient way to convert plant energy into food energy), there's still a limit to how far the available quantities can stretch."

"5 Facts about the Wealthiest 1 Percent " - A revolution is coming?

By Rob Winters - Published on Friday, 14 October 2011 10:09

"Protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began in New York City's financial district and has since spread to hundreds of cities around the country, call themselves "the 99 percent": They say they're protesting on behalf of all but the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.

The protesters object to corporate control of government policies, which they say has led to unfair tax loopholes, job outsourcing, cuts to public programs and gross overcompensation of executive employees, all of which have caused an ever-widening wealth disparity between the top 1 percent and the rest of the country.

So what is the disparity? How is wealth distributed in the United States?

FACT #1: The wealthiest 1 percent of households own 34.6 percent of all privately held wealth, and 42.7 percent of all financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home)."

"Robot Financial Workers to Replace Human Traders"

By Rob Winters - Published on Friday, 14 October 2011 10:05

"Human financial traders complicit in precipitating the Great Recession may soon find themselves as unemployable as many others, put out of work by robots as if they were factory workers or stevedores. According to a new report by the British Government's Foresight panel, automated trading by computer algorithms will replace a significant proportion of financial services workers over the next decade. Huge investment banks and hedge funds already deploy many such algorithms in the battle to profit from lightning-quick trades on tiny movements in stock prices. One such set of computer programs even caused a miniature crash of the Dow Jones last summer. As these robot traders become more and more sophisticated, financial services workers will be forced to trade in their corner offices for the unemployment window.

"Just as real physical robots revolutionized manufacturing engineering, most notably in automobile production, in the latter years of the 20th century, leading to major reductions in the number of employees required at car plants, so the early years of the 21st seem likely to be a period in which a similar revolution (involving software robot traders) occurs in the global financial markets," the Foresight report said."

Page 45 of 152

Start
Prev
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
Next
End