Posts Tagged ‘equality’

So Long Privacy, Hello Transparency

Saturday, April 14th, 2012

Patsy politicians pandering to plutocratic priorities threaten to pilfer our precious privacy. Lousy legislation like ACTA, SOPA and now CISPA have come to the forefront of this fight, and these bills will all be, hopefully, crushed without mercy beneath  the feet of millions of vigilant citizens.

Still, as disheartening as it may be to hear, these exercises could ultimately prove pointless because privacy is fast going extinct. (more…)

Operation Robin Hood

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix5ZitgE464

Hacktivist groups Anonymous and TeaMpOisoN have joined forces in a bid to transfer funds from powerful corporations into the pockets of non-profit institutions. PoisAnon, as the cyber-coalition is now known, has already begun operations with breaches into two American banks.

Sure, PoisAnon might seem like a criminal enterprise, and I suppose it is. But banks and corporations have been stealing from the public for decades with little to no accountability. So it only seems fair that the wealth and power these mega-institutions have amassed gets redistributed amongst the bulk of the people.

Of course, the ultimate goal of Operation Robin Hood should be to legitimize a more egalitarian economic model. Instead of being perpetrated by a rag-tag bunch of cyber-protesters, our governments and elected leaders should be the ones mandating a more just system. And one way to make that happen is with the collective noise made by the shouts of millions of angry citizens.

The astute among you will have noted that this is precisely what the Occupy protests are doing right now. While there are potentially years of work left to do, once the people’s uprising comes to fruition, our world’s economic and political systems will have internalized a healthy respect for the wishes of the general population.

And why not redistribute some of the world’s wealth?

Suppose we were to agree upon an upper limit for profits earned by corporations. So, for example, instead of earning $20 Billion in annual profits, oil giant Shell could only earn up to a maximum of $5 Billion, with the rest being distributed democratically according to the will of the people. (Of course, such a plan would have to be enforced globally so that corporations can’t just weasel their way into another jurisdiction.)

If we managed to do this, do you think the whole company would just up and cease working? Probably not, although with less intense pressure to perform, CEO’s might not resort to such egregious and unethical behavior.

It is great to see some of the world’s brightest and technically proficient minds taking on the role of planetary freedom fighter. Edmond Burke once remarked that ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,’ and as long as we have brave souls willing to stand up for what is right, the world will never succumb to the forces of tyranny.

Democracy in a Box

Monday, October 10th, 2011

What’s the point of overthrowing one evil King if another will just take his place? Get the freedom your uprising deserves!

No more tyrants, no more corruption. It’s like a viral outbreak of equality and empowerment.

Democracy-in-a-Box, the ultimate solution for your revolution.

Walmart Women Woeful

Saturday, July 2nd, 2011

Saving women from repression by patriarchal Islamic extremists was one of the rationales used to justify the US-led military campaign across the Middle East. Of course this is a lie, since the wars are really about money, power and control of resources, but the stated goal of empowering ladies sure has a nice ring to it.

A recent US Supreme Court ruling shows just how much the United States establishment really cares about gender equality.

In a class action suit against the world’s biggest corporation – Walmart – compensation was sought for the disproportionately lower wages earned by women as compared to their male counterparts. The suit was dismissed on the grounds that female Walmart employees, as a group, lack the necessities to be deemed a class.

American war rhetoric is about spreading liberty and freedom, but if they can’t get a functioning democracy at home, then what exactly can they hope to export?

 

Video – 3D Printers

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

One single tool, and we’ll end global poverty forever. Just one incredible machine will help us easily meet the basic needs of every single human.

This amazing device? A 3-D printer.

If you haven’t heard of 3-d printers before, they’re technological marvels that can take in raw materials (like metal and plastic) and build actual 3-dimensional objects. Sounds a bit like star trek, right?

Well, these things already exist! For about a thousand dollars, you can assemble your own from a kit. and make objects out of plastic. But today we have some high end models that can make things out of metals, like titanium.

At the rate we’re progressing, perhaps within a decade, 3-D printers will produce any tool we need: machines, solar panels, computers, you-name-it, anything we want, designed from blueprints we share online and constructed out of two of the most abundant elements on earth – silicon and carbon.

Now, if you consider how 3-D printers can be used to make even more 3-D printers, well, the implications are staggering. With a way to create and power any tool we need, we’ll be able to shift away from today’s centralized system of dependence, to a distributed system of self-reliance where we manufacture goods, grow food and generate energy all on the local scales.

3-d printers are set to make our world one of abundance and equality, which will be awesome. When we are no longer starving or living in squalor, we’ll find it easier to co-exist without murdering each other, at least not on industrial scales like we do with wars today, which may be about as much world peace as we humans can hope for.

So there you have it. Another great reason to be optimistic for the future.

Transparency for Peace

Saturday, June 19th, 2010

Empowering individuals and communities – shifting the power to the people – will continue to be one of the most important steps for ushering in a world of peace. When the world’s system is more in tune with the demands of the vast majority, we will have peace and prosperity for all people.

A great step we can take towards empowering ourselves is to demand more transparency throughout all levels of government and the political system. The more we can see the inner-workings of the system, the more we open up our leaders to public scrutiny, the less corruption and mismanagement we will have.

If we were to demand it, we could have a system that lets us know specific numbers, broken down by region, by city, by department, to know exactly where OUR money is being spent. It could be made widely accessible and easily searched so that all dollars coming in and going out could be tracked.

We could do the same for the electoral process. Knowing were campaign contributions were coming from, and being spent, would give great insight into knowing a politician’s agenda. For example, if Politician X was mostly funded by oil lobbyists and the NRA, we would expect Politician X to vote for pro-oil and pro-gun policies. Of course, if it were right out in the open, this kind of corruption would be hard to hide from the public, which is exactly the idea behind transparency.

Demanding such high-levels of transparency may seem extreme, and certainly frightening to the pork-barrel politicians whose pockets are lined by corporations and special interests, but steps in this direction would help us hold government officials accountable to the people they represent – you and me. The government should be afraid of the people, not the other way around.

Fortunately for us, and for the prospects of world peace, transparency has been consistently increasing throughout the world. The US has been pushing an Open Government Initiative. Citizens and bloggers armed with cell-phones cameras can break damning stories as they happen. Whistle-blower havens like Wikileaks expose corruption in corporations and governments alike.

Our world is becoming more open and increasingly tighter-knit, helping us to hold accountable the actions of those who hold power over us. The more transparency we have in our world’s system, the more power will reside in the hands of the people. The more power we have, the more we can make our world one of peace, equality and prosperity for everyone.