1. New Bolivian legislation that gives rights to Nature.

“Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country’s rich mineral deposits as “blessings” and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.”

2. The real effects of the cuts in Britain:

“While foodbanks may be an alien concept to many living in Britain today, the number of these centres helping the needy has grown rapidly in the past few years. The Trussell Trust, which runs most of the UK’s foodbanks, says the number of its centres has risen from 20 in 2008 to 65 today.

Disability experts believe that being forced to rely on charitable food handouts will seriously damage the health of people already battling chronic illnesses such as multiple sclerosis and ME. They warn that some may even turn to crime, such as shoplifting, to make ends meet.”

3. So this experiment with capitalism obviously isn’t going so well at the moment, but luckily there are some alternatives out there, such as participatory economics.

“As defense giants like Boeing, Raytheon (RTN, Fortune 500), and Lockheed Martin (LMT, Fortune 500) increasingly seek to peddle their wares to well-financed (sometimes by the U.S.) international customers, they have a surprising ally: the President. “Obama is much more favorably disposed to arms exports than any of the previous Democratic administrations,” says Loren Thompson, a veteran defense consultant. Or, as Jeff Abramson, deputy director of the Arms Control Association, puts it: “There’s an Obama arms bazaar going on.”

7. Whales make and share their own pop music!

8.  The biggest company you’ve never heard of: Serco

“As well as thanking God for his success, CEO Chris Hyman is a Pentecostal Christian who has released a gospel album in America and fasts every Tuesday. Coincidentally he was in the World Trade Centre on 9/11 on the 47th floor addressing shareholders.  Serco run navy patrol boats for the ADF, as well as search and salvage operations through their partnership with P&O which form Maritime Defence Services. Serco run two Australian Jails already, Acacia in WA and Borallon in Queensland. Theyre one of the biggest companies In the UK for running electronic tagging of offenders under house arrest or parole.Serco are in one of the two favoured bid consortiums for the new Sydney metro rail line. Here are some amazing corporate videos from Serco, we fully recommend both if youre a fan of Verhoeven-esque corporate propaganda. You can watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jo4_dF_Z1q0“

9.  How we were convinced Climate Change is a hoax, by Chomsky.

10. The Authoritarians.  Why do people follow leaders when they know its is causing harm?

“Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want–which often is  something undemocratic, tyrannical and brutal.”

In the spirit of provocation I am referencing an article here by American uber economist Paul Kruger where he makes an argument in Praise of Cheap Labour.  The entire article can be read here. I have pasted a sizable excerpt below.  To me the crux of the provocation comes not from different priorities about human needs, but from a different view on reality.  Many people that might be called anti-globalization folk share a idealist view of the world, seeing through a prism of how things should be and how people should be treated.   I don’t mean this as a veiled criticism, its an invaluable position.  But it is one that contrasts strongly with the utilitarianism of many economists (I’m excluding the obviously corrupt ne0-liberal groups here that just spout their own terrible idealism) who have a deep understanding of the present vast inequalities and are able to argue that what might look like terrible-ness to our eyes is infact improvement for people.  I can’t bring myself to entirely support the position that cheap labour is necessarily a good thing, but I do entirely encourage reading articles as this as they do fundamentally challenge what are often the safe but naive intellectual positions of the left.

“Global poverty is not something recently invented for the benefit of multinational corporations. Let’s turn the clock back to the Third World as it was only two decades ago (and still is, in many countries). In those days, although the rapid economic growth of a handful of small Asian nations had started to attract attention, developing countries like Indonesia or Bangladesh were still mainly what they had always been: exporters of raw materials, importers of manufactures. Inefficient manufacturing sectors served their domestic markets, sheltered behind import quotas, but generated few jobs. Meanwhile, population pressure pushed desperate peasants into cultivating ever more marginal land or seeking a livelihood in any way possible–such as homesteading on a mountain of garbage.

Given this lack of other opportunities, you could hire workers in Jakarta or Manila for a pittance. But in the mid-’70s, cheap labor was not enough to allow a developing country to compete in world markets for manufactured goods. The entrenched advantages of advanced nations–their infrastructure and technical know-how, the vastly larger size of their markets and their proximity to suppliers of key components, their political stability and the subtle-but-crucial social adaptations that are necessary to operate an efficient economy–seemed to outweigh even a tenfold or twentyfold disparity in wage rates.

And then something changed. Some combination of factors that we still don’t fully understand–lower tariff barriers, improved telecommunications, cheaper air transport–reduced the disadvantages of producing in developing countries. (Other things being the same, it is still better to produce in the First World–stories of companies that moved production to Mexico or East Asia, then moved back after experiencing the disadvantages of the Third World environment, are common.) In a substantial number of industries, low wages allowed developing countries to break into world markets. And so countries that had previously made a living selling jute or coffee started producing shirts and sneakers instead.

Workers in those shirt and sneaker factories are, inevitably, paid very little and expected to endure terrible working conditions. I say “inevitably” because their employers are not in business for their (or their workers’) health; they pay as little as possible, and that minimum is determined by the other opportunities available to workers. And these are still extremely poor countries, where living on a garbage heap is attractive compared with the alternatives.

And yet, wherever the new export industries have grown, there has been measurable improvement in the lives of ordinary people. Partly this is because a growing industry must offer a somewhat higher wage than workers could get elsewhere in order to get them to move. More importantly, however, the growth of manufacturing–and of the penumbra of other jobs that the new export sector creates–has a ripple effect throughout the economy. The pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise. Where the process has gone on long enough–say, in South Korea or Taiwan–average wages start to approach what an American teen-ager can earn at McDonald’s. And eventually people are no longer eager to live on garbage dumps. (Smokey Mountain persisted because the Philippines, until recently, did not share in the export-led growth of its neighbors. Jobs that pay better than scavenging are still few and far between.)”