I would regard anyone as my leader a) whom I have met personally, b) with whom I work or interact directly face to face on a more or less daily basis c) has proved themselves friendly, kind, sympathetic, compassionate and giving. I only trust someone who demonstrates behaviour in accordance with the positive human virtues and eschews negative actions. They[Read More…]
meditation preparing for unemployment what I would say to anyone who asks me what I say to myself thoughts on Louise Glueck’s short speech on being congratulated for receiving the Nobel Prize for her poetry she said the driver is waiting, he has to earn his living, let me go — preparing for unemployment prepares us for unemployment provided we[Read More…]
Machines are not bodies. A body knows how it feels, a machine does not. The goal and purpose of life for humans and other living beings is to create and contribute to the peace and harmony in our environment so that we can be in touch with the feelings in our bodies and in those around us. To be happy[Read More…]
Before the fast, during the lockdown, I had been eating alot of home-made bread and not walking much let alone running. After the lockdown I walked and ran a bit more but my kidney was not working properly, the urine was scanty. So I read about the health benefits of fasting and decided to try it. It started out as[Read More…]
In his book The Rise of Professional Society England since 1880, Harold Perkin wrote: “The 20th century has seen the dissolution of the concept of absolute property. It has been replaced by a contingent concept of property based on professional service, which has inserted a series of intermediated subinfeudated tenants or beneficiaries into the hierarchy of ownership. This system is[Read More…]
In the First Biennial Update Report to the UNFCCC, the Government of India projected that India’s primary energy use would go from 397 Mtoe in 2006-07 to 1823 Mtoe in 2030. GDP would grow at the rate of 9%. Primary energy supply including gathered noncommercial fuels such as fuelwood and dung would grow at 5.8% per year. Commercial energy supply[Read More…]
The National Green Tribunal had asked all States to finish preparing People’s Biodiversity Registers by end of January 2020. This made various States make greater efforts to mobilise volunteers in local government in Taluk Panchayat. Collecting and documenting wild plants is a beautiful task and a never ending one, as new species are added to these registers every day by[Read More…]
The great thing about the COVID-19 crisis is that the bourgeoisie has been revealed to be sheeplike in their behaviour, which is very good news for climate justice. An example comes from India. When the Government called for a lockdown, the 15 million tax payers in India took to home isolation like fish to water. If India had been the[Read More…]
Co-Written by Anandi Sharan and Nihal Ahmed After the declaration of a COVID-19 pandemic by the WHO, around 4 billion people are locked down. In India the loss of GDP due to the COVID-19 pandemic may be 10% of GDP and there may be zero growth and very low prospect of recovery of the industrial sector in India. The[Read More…]
Treating others with trust and happiness, and hoping for their self-realisation seems to be natural behaviour that follows natural laws. 2500 years ago the Buddha had to leave his sheltered home and venture into the alleyways and bye-ways of Greater Magadha to learn about common sense and natural laws. The habit of treating others with trust and affection is[Read More…]
What Greta Thunberg did is to mobilise the children who live in the Empire, the most powerful, the only, international Empire. The leaders of the Empire sit in Washington, in control of the most powerful military in the world, that controls its area of influence through its capital and post-truth politics. It is inevitable that their campaign, Greta Thunberg’s campaign,[Read More…]
This article is a criticism and condemnation of a self-declared “major” “modern money theory – green new deal initiative” written by the economist Bill Mitchell and disseminated on his website. According to his wikipedia page William Francis Mitchell was born March 1952 and is a professor of economics at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia and a notable[Read More…]
In the light of the recent IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems, (Ref 1), it is interesting to recap some of the salient features of the runaway global heating emergency that we humans find ourselves in. Slow changes of carbon dioxide, methane, and oxygen concentrations[Read More…]
For 500’000 years before 1958 around 100 Gigatonnes of carbon (around 360 Gt of carbon dioxide) were fixed in the biosphere through photosynthesis every year. Carbon dioxide fixation equalled carbon dioxide production by organic decomposition: the biosphere’s natural entropy turnover from the late Pleistocene till 1958 was around 100 Gigatonnes carbon per year. There was a perfect correlation between carbon[Read More…]
Indian Medical Association has over 325,000 doctors as its members. As with everything in India including the Republic itself, the upper castes inherited whatever the Brits left behind. There was no revolution to democratise society after Independence. Instead the ideology of this ruling upper class that took over was nothing other than the ideology of various professional associations be they[Read More…]
Today in India the fascist BJP Government at the Centre announced that henceforth all District magistrates in all States of India have the power and are encouraged to track and investigate putative foreigners. Despite the fightback by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee against the Muslim-hating Hindu Nazis who today are in power at the Centre and in most States,[Read More…]
Fascism is always latent in a Republic, and makes its appeal in underhand ways. They incite you to believe that the survival of your family is dependent on the survival or expansion or maintenance of the Republic itself and scoop up your vote in their net. As a consequence 174 fascists were elected to the Europe of Nations and Freedom[Read More…]
Last month I suggested a limit of USD 5000 and 1 tCO2e ration per person per year for an equitable and sustainable world. (1) Today’s update concerns an article I wrote five years ago about the role of sequestration in reversing anthropogenic climate change. (2) After this year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report came out in October, Peter[Read More…]
The chart shows the Greenhouse Gas emissions trajectories of the world’s 4 largest countries. We can devise and predict and hope for a politics in each of these regions to match both what needs to be done and what is going on in each. INDIA India is an important country for making projections about the trajectory of global climate change[Read More…]
Gilets Jaunes! Greetings on your fourth week of Revolutionary struggle! Dalit Marxists extend our Solidarity and Revolutionary Greetings! We offer you an analysis of the world’s crisis we are all struggling against in the hope that you in turn gain strength from our solidarity and we gain strength from your solidarity with us! The first information we need is the[Read More…]
In the last few years I have become aware of the impossibility of removing misery externally to myself. But even very recently when a dire issue presented itself to my senses whether through mind ears etc, like the rape of girls and women housed up a few steps from their NGO newspaperman protector, I was furious and reached into[Read More…]
The news (1) today that the State Government of Karnataka has been betrayed by public sector banks who initially agreed to buy zero interest bonds from the State Government and then backed down, should be protested up and down the State on the streets and on the highways. The Indian Express reports that all nationalised banks refused to accept[Read More…]
The 15th Finance Commission is about to write its recommendations in India. The Chairman NK Singh is the same man who wrote a report on the functioning of the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act 2003 (FRBMA2003) on January 19th 2017, in which he found it reasonable to repeat that State and Central Governments should stick to the Act and[Read More…]
The Kerala State Government is absolutely right to disregard FRBMA limits and raise its own funds for reconstruction. (1) We should further bring out how a new Government at the centre next year can then monetise the fiscal deficit not only of Kerala but of all States, akin to a debt jubilee. (2) This is the way in other words[Read More…]
Brijesh Thakur is the man accused of sexually abusing 34 out of 44 young women in his care as sex slaves, and terrorising 11 others to flee from another care home run by him. Aman Sharma in the Economic Times on August 1 2018 sums up the fascist reality of rape in India in his article about this man,[Read More…]
As Earth is in a condition of runaway climate change, – as feedback effects from warming oceans unleash dramatic temperature extremes on Earth, – there are more and more people who need first aid to save them from the negative effects of heat during the hot season. In some regions the hot season may be becoming longer and longer.[Read More…]
In an interview recently, and in several published papers before (1), Wendy Brown, the American political theorist, said she blames neoliberalism for the destruction of liberal democratic institutions and practices across the world including America. It seems surprising to me that an educated person like her should claim by implication that there were functioning liberal democratic institutions in the USA[Read More…]
Small and marginal farmers, sharecroppers, landless labourers and other farm and forest workers in India are the single largest natural resource being exploited for capitalist accumulation in India. The market pays the manual work of those who produce their own food and that of others at below social reproduction cost. This is a fundamental market failure in relation to the[Read More…]
I have been thinking about and reading a bit about psychotherapy. Psychotherapy for sad people is very important. Psychotherapy is very important for example because sadness and tension and stress are the leading cause of heart disease, one of the leading chronic illnesses in women, and of premature death. But at the present moment in history the idea of[Read More…]
In the latest survey by Swiss television 59% of the citizens surveyed will vote yes to a reform of the money system in Switzerland. The Full Reserve Money referendum scheduled for Sunday June 10th 2018 will ask Swiss citizens to vote on a proposed change to the Swiss constitution to require the federal government to supply the national economy[Read More…]
In a recent case at Uttarakhand High Court at the end of April 2018 a person accused under the Indian Penal Code of cheating, of being party to a criminal conspiracy, of wrongfully confining a person, of receiving and detaining against his will a person as a slave, and also of rendering his services for purposes of transplantation and[Read More…]
Once the Brits came and imposed their capitalism in India the upper castes and the Brits took the common property resources and shared them out by privatising them. Everyone got to do what the hell they wanted and the poor lost everything. Now the end of capitalism is happening because the commons are getting wiped out. Now if anything[Read More…]
Since Narendra Modi came to power in India in 2014 a few hundred thousand upper caste Indians not only acquire Audis, Ferraris and Mercedes Benz vehicles to prove that the loans for their real estate businesses translate into private luxury. No developer in India is complete without a picture of himself next to an excavator these days. Whilst the[Read More…]
The average, declared, moveable and immovable assets of the 70 Union Cabinet members is around Rs 16 crores. The Union Budget 2018-2019 is Rs 1866418 crores after subtracting the 23% that will go on interest payments on borrowings (at interest rates and repayment terms set by the Government itself). Assuming this average per cabinet minister extends to all politicians[Read More…]
Why is there resistance to working to reduce the imbalances in earth’s systems? What is this resistance? What are these imbalances? What is earth? What are systems? What is a life that reduces imbalances? Today the world cloud, the electronic communications sector, uses much more energy than the global aviation sector. It is not possible to have a conversation[Read More…]
Western man, to whose numbers we count men and women beneficiaries of capitalism in all its facets, must mend his ways or accept the extinction of the human race. One of the mistakes he must rectify is his psychological tendency to foist the job of mitigating global warming on the poor in the name of meeting sustainable development goals. For[Read More…]
Hindu Rashtra benefits from the miserable underfunding of the Indian judiciary leading to what is objectively speaking a dysfunctional and for the poor more or less non-functional judiciary. The millions of cases pending at all levels of the Indian judiciary benefit Narendra Modi and Amit Shaw’s Hindu Rashtra project by encouraging extra-judicial settlement of disputes. In a functioning system[Read More…]
The last Judge of the National Green Tribunal southern bench retired last week. Now there are none. Narendra Modi and Amit Shaw who head the most anti-environment Government and political party India has ever had, must be happy. In this year’s Finance Act they and their Yogis had smuggled in changes to how Tribunal members should be appointed in[Read More…]
Ignoring this morning Friday January 12 2017 press conference held by Justice Chelameswar the senior most Justice of India after the Chief Justice, along with the next three senior most judges of the Supreme Court, at his home in New Delhi, the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra continued with business as usual at the Supreme Court. At their[Read More…]
The Political Economy of Hindu Rashtra is a mix of manic use of State power to line the pockets of the upper castes combined with abject subjection of the State to the globalisation of finance. By this means since 2014 BJP may have achieved its aim of establishing Hindu Rashtra in India and communalising the political discourse for the[Read More…]
59% of Indians, or 781,261,099 men and women in India, are of working age, that is to say, over the age of 20. India has 394600000 acres of cultivable land and 196250791 acres of forests, a total of 590850791 acres of land where man and animals may stay and live. India thus has a labour availability, that is to[Read More…]
When they amended paragraph 3 section 182 the Companies Act 2013 in part XII of the Finance Act 2017-2018 in Parliament on March 22 2017, Narendra Modi, Arun Jaitley and the BJP committed the crime of bribery. Under the Representation of People Act 1951 section 123, bribery, that is to say the receipt or agreement to receive, any gratification[Read More…]
Yesterday 15 December 2017 ANI reported that police in Kalaburagi, Karnataka, India have filed an FIR against Telangana BJP MLA Raja Singh for inciting communal hatred. An FIR has been registered against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Telanagana MLA Raja Singh, a leader of the militant Hinfu outfit Ram Sene, one of the Sangh Parivar organisations. The leadership position is[Read More…]
It was reported in the Hindustan Times today that Mohan Bhagwat on Sunday in Tripura said that “The Muslims in India are also Hindus” and that “Anybody living in India is a Hindu.” Section 153A of The Indian Penal Code punishes whoever by spoken words promotes on any ground whatsoever, disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will between[Read More…]
As part of their efforts to be more nationalist than capitalist Indian capitalists who are the undivided financiers of the BJP need to introspect. They should give up insisting on turning human and ecological material into capital. The Sangh Parivar and the BJP are in league with the capitalists in pursuit of the glory of Hindu Rashtra. The alliance[Read More…]
Why is there a gag order on Yogi Adityanath’s hate speech trial in Allahabad? What is the public interest in covering up these crimes? The hate speeches by Yogi Adityanath were the precursor to extra judicial killings by the Uttar Pradesh Government once he became Chief Minister. Police encounter killings were not only threatened but carried out. In his speech[Read More…]
Recently I criticised the cost of money inflicted on electricity consumers by the Power Finance Corporation. I mentioned that India has always been and can always be self sufficient in electricity and that forcing us to pay six Rupees per kWh to foreign rentiers is shameful. The same is true for food and money. The purpose of the constitution[Read More…]
Last month the Power Finance Corporation of India (PFC) issued a so-called green bond in London. It is a 10-year green bond and raised USD 400 million, paying a 3.75 per cent semi-annual coupon and listed on London Stock Exchange’s new International Securities Market (ISM). The cost of money therefore, ignoring the semi-annual payment, is 3.75% of USD 400[Read More…]
The difference between debt and sovereign money is that debt has to be paid back, with interest, but sovereign money does not, though it can be taxed out of circulation by the local government if we have minted too much of it. 60 central banks got together recently to discuss the algorithms for creating and managing a sovereign electronic[Read More…]
“Rajya ke khajane par aapda-prabhaviton ka pehla haq hai…” Nitish is quoted as saying on the title page of the government of Bihar’s roadmap for disaster risk reduction 2015-2030.Considering 73% of Bihar is annually subject to floods, that is practically everybody. In the roadmap it says that a resilient village programme will be initiated in partnership with Panchayats and[Read More…]
An excellent review of global debt in the Economic and Political Weekly last month concludes that capitalism is probably insolvent. The article by T Sabri Öncü is entitled Debts That Cannot Be Paid Will Not Be. The author makes the excellent observation that whilst total global debt has increased to USD 217 trillion or about 327% of global GDP,[Read More…]
The JD(U) have joined up with the BJP again, a damning indictment of the INC that failed to mobilise a united let alone effective opposition to the NDA. There is a tendency in the national press to judge the political parties in Bihar on the basis of their caste composition. The argument is that the JD(U) is a good[Read More…]
The BJP’s new Bankruptcy and Insolvency Rules 2016 in India bluntly provide that individuals with debts over Rupees one thousand will lose their assets to a resolution professional if declared bankrupt or insolvent. The only excluded assets under fresh start rules are tools, books, vehicles and other equipment as are necessary to the debtor or bankrupt for his personal[Read More…]
The Government of India has decided to set up a committee to report back within six month with recommendations on how to regulate digital currencies. Digital currencies are cropping up on the internet to address some fundamental short comings of capitalism and world trade. Whilst some might want to allow only Rupee in India and reform the Reserve Bank[Read More…]
Here is my suggestion for a Single Point Anti-Incumbency Manifesto for 2019 against the BJP for the Grand Coalition of Socialist and Communist Parties. 95% of Indians are agricultural labourers, cultivators and other landless labourers in the informal economy, and outside of the tax regime in India. We depend above all for our survival with dignity on the availability[Read More…]
Every day in the papers we are reading about the impacts of the starvation politics of demonetisation by the BJP on agricultual labourers, cultivators and other agricultural workers. During my years long study of the social, political and economic implications of man-made climate change, I found obviously that economists looked into the economic implications, politicians study the political implications,[Read More…]
Economic, Ecological and Agricultural Science Illiteracy of Elites Having already been investigated by the Income Tax Department and the Enforcement Directorate, we now get news that NDTV, one of the most viewed nation-wide news channels of India, is again being investigated, this time by the Central Bureau of Investigation. A First Information Report has been filed by or on[Read More…]
Today we were treated to a story in a national newspaper in India that gave a heart-rending list of damning statistics about the sorry plight of India’s Scheduled Tribes, written by none other than Varun Gandhi. Gandhi, a Bharatya Janata Party Member of Parliament and accused under the Representation of People Act 1951 of illegally appealing to religion in[Read More…]
Quite some years ago, and as he described in a talk to the Club of Rome in 2011, David Wasdell had concluded along with John Schellnhuber, – and taking Hansen’s and other people’s work into account -, that 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is where we are at today, has irreversibly committed the biosphere[Read More…]
For the life of me I cannot understand the reasoning behind demonetisation. I think the hidden underlying motivation is as that the only people India’s politicians are willing to attack are the poorest. Hindutva fascism is the system of turning the 90% into miserable wrecks through #demonetisation in order that the 1% super rich and the 9% who use[Read More…]
On Monday the 31st of October 2016 the Madhya Pradesh police assassinated eight alleged associates of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) after an alleged escape from prison near Bhopal. This was not coincidentally a day when the Prime Minister Narendra Modi was hyping Hindu nationalism on Diwali, the Hindu festival that celebrates the return of the mythic god[Read More…]
On 19 and 20 October 2016 the Supreme Court held its first two days of hearings to review the Hindutva Judgement that had been pending for 20 years. The next hearing is on October 25. In the two days of discussions to kick off a process that according to Supreme Court Advocate Rana Raj K Singh may last up to[Read More…]
Today Tuesday 18 October 2016 a seven-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court of Chief Justice TS Thakur and justices MB Lokur, SA Bobde, AK Goel, UU Lalit, DY Chandrachud and L Nageswara Rao will be constituted to examine the scope of inquiry to be conducted when charges of corrupt practices under Section 123 (3-A) of the Representation of the[Read More…]
The new paper ‘A Framework for Reforming India’s Forest Biodiversity Management Regime’ by Dr S. Faizi and Dr M. Ravichandran published in the UN journal Natural Resources Forum in its August 2016 issue provides a rare insight into India’s forest management and outlines a trajectory for reforming the forest management departing from the colonial approach and taking on board the[Read More…]
Devinder Sharma is a founder member of Kisan Ekta, – that claims to be a union of 65 farming organisations. He has no doubt that his Ekta represents ‘400 million farmers, fishermen and farm workers’, and he a member of the three person coordinating committee of the recently launched outfit. But does Devinder Sharma, a close associate of the controversial[Read More…]
Even the most ardent capitalists/imperialists know that they and their predecessors have destroyed earth. For this reason alone the material conditions are right for those forces to self-destruct. After this happy event, – to which we are all of course joyously contributing by every means possible, – the world’s forests and coasts and other natural landscapes will be handed over[Read More…]
I was travelling in Europe last month, and was very disappointed by what I saw and heard. There is a lack of unity between Western workers and the workers of the world. The gap between the prosperity of a few highly professionalised workers in the West who are more and more aligned with the capitalists and managers, and the[Read More…]
There are professionals from NGOs and academic institutions associated with supporting developing countries to make their biodiversity plans for 2018-2022. Some NGOs and academic institutions are good and some are bad. And it may well be that the 43 countries whose projected budgets for 2018-2022 are uploaded on the CBD website did not take any advice from the appointed[Read More…]
The United States and Norway this week announced (1) they would offset the greenhouse gas emissions from their aviation industry by buying voluntary emission reduction credits from reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in tropical forests. The plan would violate the Rio Declaration in two ways. The Declaration says that States have, in accordance with the Charter of[Read More…]
We, the CBD Alliance, the global platform of civil society and academic organisations working on the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), congratulate your government for the decision to re-join the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The three Rio conventions including the UNCCD are of great importance to developing countries and Indigenous Peoples. The Rio Declaration that is incorporated in the UNCCD gives States the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. The same responsibility is contained in Article 3 and Article 14 (d) of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Other than the fact that elections are being conducted it cannot be said that there is Government in India. The upper caste, which constitutes barely 5 to 7% of the population of the country, has hijacked it. In 2015 2 crore Indians travelled abroad, or around1.6% of the population. If each of these 2 crore people had one crore in[Read More…]
One does not have to read Marx to understand how debt-based money in the form of credit to corporations, – chosen by banks on the basis of their ability to make profit, – leads to an accumulation of money in the hands of those few who create the money and are given the credit. Profiteering, in short, capitalism, is incompatible[Read More…]
G20 Biofuel Alliance threatens Food security 
Thousands Of Auto Workers Strike In Three U.S. Plants, Face Financial Hardship 
Submission To Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission, NACC: Mainstream Media Lying 
In The Name of Decolonization 
Is This the End of French Neo-Colonialism in Africa? 
Tel Aviv’s Losing Brands: Israeli ‘Coup’ and the Death of False Democracy 
Tackling Global Emergencies – UN International Day of Peace 
The Futility of Feudalistic Democracy 
Bayer over-riding Bhartiya Krishi 
Pulwama Bombing 14th February 2019: Unanswered Questions 
Himalayan Apple Growers Worried Over Increasing Threat from Imports 
After protests in flood-hit Derna, Libyan officials order journalists to leave 
International Day of Peace: Fostering Harmony and Unity in a World of Diversity 
More Butterflies, Fewer Billionaires — Unrigging the Global Economy 
Veganic Farming: How My Tiny Plot Produced 5,000 Pounds of Food Without Using Manure 
Fighting the Diaspora: India’s Campaign Against Khalistan 
CAIR Files Lawsuit to End Islamophobic No Fly List 
N.D.Mahanor, The Poet Who Taught Us to See Culture in Agriculture 
Dark and light streaks in India-China relations 
Why the Central Government Should Rush Special Aid Package for Himachal Pradesh 
Special Session: Another Image-Boosting Move? 
Eddelu ( Wake up) Karnataka: The Great Citizen’s Wall Against BJP 
Urgency of Improving Dam Safety Re-Emphasized in Libya and Ukraine 
Climate Crisis Threatens Largest U.S. Cities 
Little Amal Entertains and Informs on Refugee Children’s Strife 
Google Trial Must Fuel the Global Movement Against Digital Capitalism 
Linking Aadhaar With NPR Records: Is it Based on Informed Consent? 
In the debates before 2024 Elections in India, Agenda for Justice, Peace, Democracy and Environment Most Needed 
US imperialist hypocrisy and the Libyan flood 
Some Remarks on Russia in Global Politics Today 
A climate of Insanity 
Brief for Murder: Pinochet’s Apologists Five Decades On ‘Epidemic’ or Revolution: The Other Side of the West Africa Upheaval 
White Nationalism and Donald Trump 
How Arab Leaders Betrayed Islam and Defied the Logic of Political Change, Peace and Security? 
Providing Schools for the Most Marginalized Children in Remote Villages 
Three Former French Sahel Colonies Form Military Alliance 
Resisting Genetically Mutilated Food and the Eco-Modern Nightmare: Together, ‘Just You and Me’ 
Ramasamy Naicker Periyar’s Uttar Pradesh connection 
The Bicycle-Selected Writings on Bicycle 
My Amma (Malayalam word for Mother) passed away on August 22, 2023 at 3.10 AM. It is always difficult to deal with the passing of a parent, that too one’s mother. I thought the grief would go away. No it didn’t. All those bitter sweet memories won’t go away. At night I lie awake for hours. My friend, guide and[Read More…]
