April 5, 2021, Yes! Magazine
https://www.yesmagazine.org/video/portland-mutual-aid-food-insecurity

Gabriel Baron first heard about Crisis Kitchen through a call for support he saw on Facebook. The mutual aid group was providing free meals around Portland, Oregon, to combat food insecurity exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. “I’m a believer in local communities supporting local communities” Baron says. So he volunteered to deliver meals for the kitchen. As he did so, he started having conversations with folks in the organization.

Baron, a filmmaker, decided to bring his camera to the Crisis Kitchen. He said he was interested in demystifying mutual aid for viewers. It’s not an unwieldy and hierarchical institution. It was as simple as laid-off restaurant employees asking to use the kitchen to prepare food for people in their community. And the effort has snowballed from there. The group now delivers about 1,000 free, restaurant-quality meals around the city every week.

Crisis Kitchen is one of a network of mutual aid groups in Portland working to build a more supportive and just community. In the film, Adrian Garcia Groenendyk, the co-founder of Crisis Kitchen, says mutual aid demonstrates what can be done to meet people’s needs and help them thrive in our society. Long-term, he says this critical work shouldn’t be dependent on community donations. The goal should be to take money out of institutions of violence and put it into institutions of care, like Crisis Kitchen. Baron continues to deliver meals for Crisis Kitchen every week.

With food prices steadily rising over the last several years, by as much as five percent, families are scaling back and going without many staples just to put a meal on the table. Or worse, resorting to ‘bargains’ like fast food specials, subsidized SNAP junk food or just plain instant noodles to fill a hungry belly.

We have reached the point where self-sufficiency is not a luxury any longer, it’s a real necessity. In response, many are carving out a small homestead niche, even in the middle of lively cities. An encouraging example is found with a micro-farm in the heart of Southern California.

The downward spiral of dwindling food supplies

It isn’t much of a stretch to see our food dollars are shrinking. A combination of droughts, erratic weather patterns and astronomical fuel costs have all contributed to an inflated food bill. The use of GMO seeds isn’t helping the matter either with horrible crop yields. Couple this with a nose dive of world economies and we have a recipe for wide spread shortages of quality, nutritious food. Individuals are waking up to these realities and taking matters into their own hands — not only growing their own food, but removing themselves from the grid as much as possible, even within the bounds of a bustling city. A shining model of exceptional self-sufficiency, survival and ecological action is the  Urban Homestead.

You can read the whole inspiring story here: https://wakeup-world.com/2013/03/13/inspiring-urban-farm-grows-an-astonishing-three-tons-of-produce-a-year-on-a-mere-110-of-an-acre/

You’re likely familiar with the works of Steve Cutts, a London-based illustrator who aptly depicts our daily grievances and society’s many shocking truths that we absurdly accept as normal. In his most recent animation short titled “Happiness”, Steve uses rats to  symbolize the rat race we’re all so familiar with.

You’ll soon see other startling similarities — a clearly depressed, overcrowded society surrounded by ads guaranteeing happiness via cologne, clothes, film and drugs. You may watch this and recognize these behaviours in others, but consider whether you have fallen victim to them as well.

“Feeling down? Nothing a glass of red wine won’t fix.” When we search for happiness in external things, we soon have a real problem that nothing material or external can fix. See, all that is ever offered to us are ‘quick fixes’ to problems that have been festering for years. Steve accurately portrays our need for feeling happy and shows we will do and buy practically anything to ensure we can feel that emotion all the time — a futile struggle that leaves us depleted and miserable.

The Story of Stuff, originally released in December 2007, is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the Stuff in your life forever.

Download the Fact Sheet
Story Of Stuff, Referenced and Annotated Script By Annie Leonard

Credits
The Story of Stuff was written by Annie Leonard, Louis Fox, and Jonah Sachs, directed by Louis Fox and produced by Free Range Studios. Executive Producers included Tides Foundation and the Funders Workgroup for Sustainable Production and Consumption.

Show full list of credits

Global developments in finance and geopolitics are prompting a rethinking of the structure of banking and of the nature of money itself. Among other interesting news items:

• In Russia, vulnerability to Western sanctions has led to proposals for a banking system that is not only independent of the West but is based on different design principles.

• In Iceland, the booms and busts culminating in the banking crisis of 2008-09 have prompted lawmakers to consider a plan to remove the power to create money from private banks.

• In Ireland, Iceland and the UK, a recession-induced shortage of local credit has prompted proposals for a system of public interest banks on the model of the Sparkassen of Germany.

• In Ecuador, the central bank is responding to a shortage of US dollars (the official Ecuadorian currency) by issuing digital dollars through accounts to which everyone has access, effectively making it a bank of the people.

Read the whole article here.

The Higher Learning :  22 Oct 2015

Since the 1990s, a major part of Chinese foreign policy has been to invest in developing countries around the world.  This includes private investments, like the billion-dollar solar project being spearheaded by a Chinese energy company in Ghana or the multi-billion-dollar canal being built by a Chinese infrastructure firm in Nicaragua.  It also includes public investment projects like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which was launched earlier this year to help fund infrastructure projects in impoverished Asian countries (and to reduce the amount of influence wielded by the U.S.-led investment banks).

On Saturday, Chinese President Xi Jinping made yet another commitment to help economic growth in the developing world, announcing that China would be canceling the debts of the world's least developed countries.  President Xi made the announcement while addressing a United Nations summit on global development goals. During his speech, he also pledged to establish a $2 billion fund dedicated to improving conditions in the most impoverished countries around the world.

"Looking around the world, the peace and development remain the two major themes of the times," President Xi told attendees at the summit in New York. He continued, "To solve various global challenges, including the recent refugee crisis in Europe, the fundamental solutions lie in seeking peace and realising development. Facing with various challenges and difficulties, we must keep hold of the key of the development. Only the development can eliminate the causes of the conflicts."

Xi's speech came a day after the UN unveiled its new Global Goals for Sustainable Development, an ambitious plan that aims to eradicate poverty and hunger in the next 15 years.  Coincidentally, China played a key role in helping the UN achieve its previous poverty reduction goals as well — BBC correspondent James Robbins explains, it was China's extraordinary record shifting so many families out the ranks of the poor which ensured that the overall global record in poverty reduction under the previous Millennium Development Goals was substantial.

China's new pledge of financial support, as well as its promise to forgive the debts of the world's poorest countries, show a continued commitment to the goal of reducing poverty worldwide.  "The world is going through a historical process of accelerated evolution. The sunshine of peace, development and progress will be powerful enough to penetrate the clouds of war, poverty and backwardness." President Xi said.

Read more from the BBC. Read a full transcript of President Xi's speech from Quartz.

Published on 15 Dec 2012

From "Thrive: What on Earth Will it Take?"
To see full movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEV5AF...
Featured: Nassim Haramein, Steven Greer, Duane Elgin, Adam Trombley, Nikola Tesla, James Gilliland, Jack Kasher.

May 23, 2013 – CHINA - Steady deterioration of water bodies is one of the most pressing problems facing the world today. In Asia, degradation of water quality and the problems it spawns are so extensive and serious that they are threatening to harm economic growth and affect the health and quality of life of billions of people. China’s high economic growth has had an adverse impact in terms of access, volume and quality of water as well as equity, management and investment requirements. While the magnitude of the water quality problem has steadily widened, planning, management and institutional capacities have not improved commensurately and thus complicated matters further.

Water scarcity and pollution of water sources are two of the most serious problems for China. Pollution has now spread from the coastal region to inland water bodies, affecting both surface water and groundwater. More than 53 billion tons of (untreated or inadequately treated) wastewater is discharged into China’s water bodies every year. And as early as 2006, water in a stretch of more than 25,000 km of rivers failed to meet the quality standards for aquatic life and about 90 percent sections of rivers in and around urban areas were seriously polluted. The World Bank estimates that water scarcity and pollution are costing China about 2.3 percent of GDP – 1.3 percent due to water scarcity and the rest as a direct impact of water pollution.

Water quality is a bigger problem in North China, where shortage of water prevents pollutant discharges from being diluted. In the northern region, about 40 percent of the rivers have the two worst water quality standards: grades V and VI. This means water is so highly polluted that it is not only unsafe to drink (a serious health issue in itself), but also very difficult and expensive to treat. Pollution is a serious problem in rural areas, too. Ministry of Water Resources data show that more than 300 million people don’t have access to safe drinking water. While in terms of money the cost is a staggering 66 billion yuan ($10.72 billion), the main cost is in terms of human life as diseases like diarrhea, cholera and cancer continue to afflict people. Although the impact of water pollution on health is very serious, it cannot be quantified because of lack of reliable data both on the pollutants and the households that use poor quality water.

Water pollution is also harming China’s south-to-north water transfer project. Along the “East Route,” for example, industrial pollution has affected many of the poorer areas of northern Jiangsu and western Shandong provinces, delaying the construction of the project. Speaking at a forum in September 2000, Zhu Rongji, then premier, said the initial stage of the project should follow the principle, “first save water, then transfer it; first clean up pollution, then let the water flow; first protect the environment, then use water.” Unfortunately, more than a decade later, pollution problems along the East Route have still not been fully solved. In addition, industrial accidents and illegal dumping of wastes often worsen the quality of water in rivers and lakes. Such incidents include the Songhua River toxic chemical spill in 2005, the algae bloom in Taihu Lake which polluted the source of drinking water for people of the surrounding areas in 2007 and the dumping of more than 13,000 pig carcasses in the Huangpu River earlier this year. –China Daily

Published on 4 May 2012 by angeloz318

The creators of 'Debtocracy', a documentary with two million views broadcasted from Japan to Latin America, analyze the shifting of state assets to private hands and the consequences of doing this. 

They travel round the world gathering data on privatization in developed countries and search for clues on the day after Greece's massive privatization program.