Philip Pullella And Daniela Desantis — Pope closes South America trip urging youths to 'make a mess'

Pope Francis left for Rome on Sunday at the end of a trip to South America during which he censured capitalism, championed the rights of the poor, warned of irreversible damage to the planet and urged youths to "make a mess".

In passionate speeches, the Argentine pontiff urged the destitute to change the world economic order and branded the unfettered pursuit of money as the "dung of the devil". He also sought forgiveness for the sins committed by the Catholic Church against native Americans during the colonial era.

At a final rally in Paraguay, Francis urged tens of thousands of youths to look after their less fortunate peers and fight for a dignified life filled with hope and strength.
"They wrote a speech for me to give you. But speeches are boring," the Argentine pontiff said to loud cheers, casting aside his script. "Make a mess, but then also help to tidy it up. A mess which gives us a free heart, a mess which gives us solidarity, a mess which gives us hope."

I guess the pope approved of Occupy.

Reuters
Pope closes South America trip urging youths to 'make a mess'
Philip Pullella And Daniela Desantis

They're A Bit More Honest In Canada? Maybe ETI Will Contact Them First?

(commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Generation Screwed: Youth [have no purpose] struggle for jobs, home ownership

That's telling it like it is. Luddites are winning? Winning what?

Nevertheless, even Canadians are only a bit more honest than us here in the states. After all, what kinds of "experts" totally miss the point like the experts quoted in the next newsline from Canada?

BMO job cuts have little to do with sky-high profits
"Technology, sluggish economy mean job losses would occur despite how much banks make, experts say."

Huh?

Translation: We're squeezing water from a stone ... because we don't know what else to do with our citizens and nation. Might as well extract rising rents from our own citizens .. until our nation withers and dies. Our mantra is to do ANYTHING EXCEPT set new goals worthy of re-dedicating our nation, culture and populous to.

Why?

Is there a endgame plan at work here, even by default? I mean, other than parasites consuming the host they THINK they own? That's a dead-end game, not an endgame leading to expanding options. What on Earth has happened to homo sapiens? They used to be a social species, but seem to be reverting to hermit, cultural cannibals before our very eyes. Maybe we're lacking a cultural mirror ... more than any other missing piece of technology? Maybe banksters could hire all those citizens they deem "useless" to work on a cultural mirror system, and thereby help us regain group intelligence?

Until then, we'll continue with unchecked, purposeless rent extraction? Simply because we can? What is the Desired Outcome behind that?

That kind of pea brain outlook is equivalent to a parent saying they ate half the neighborhood children because technology made it possible ... and because they couldn't imagine any other options.

A little more imagination might be called for?

Personally, I'm sure that youth of this age have plenty of imagination - since they always have had, or else evolution wouldn't have occurred. Just because you CAN do things, that doesn't mean you SHOULD. Imagine being more adaptively selective! Isn't that what homo sapiens was named for? Are homo sapiens being replaced by NeoLiberals, or just stuck, temporarily in the no-evolution land between feudalism and further evolution? Growing an Output Gap for three thirds of us doesn't seem like much of a "way."

Adequate youthful imagination would likely be expressed quickly enough, as further cultural evolution ... if only the old farts would quit trying to hoard REAL national options that they can't take with them to the grave? Ya think? These are our kids, grandkids and great-grandkids we're talking about here. Why aren't we managing THEIR options, instead of uselessly trying to constrain OUR current fiat?

What kinds of "experts" miss that point? Those designing their own extinction? Like dinosaurs? Perhaps the kind that never interacted enough with their own kids to notice that there's no adaptive point in economic cannibalism?

We haven't seen such an anal, "bankster" outlook this widespread since ... well, really, since the pre-Christian era in Europe, or the pre-Buddhist & pre-Jain era in Asia. Certainly not since the Reformation and Renaissance. The bankster mentality has degenerated all the way back to class war and the culture of class-based vs nation-based mercantilism. Do we really want to return to squabbling subunits that pit "our" classes, clans, castes and tribes against all others ... INSTEAD of at least sticking together by national allegiance, reaping the insane return-on-coordination, assimilating all citizens, and creating even more, newer cultures, more ethnic diversity and more, newer mythologies?

Sure, we may envision a time when there is once again guaranteed mobility, at least for honest, non-toxic individuals & sub-groups whose negative reputations don't precede them. But do we really want to let a tiny cabal of existing uber-merchants (instead of Communists) Centrally Plan and rush this transition, without more careful consideration? Are we to trust Merchant Central Planners, just because they claim to be OUR central planners? Something seems amiss in the message they promote. Every prior rush to deregulate without re-regulating even more productively - by decentralized consensus - has only ushered in a chaotic period of rampant looting by whomever can get away with the initial deregulation. Somehow the CP-deregulators themselves never get around to decentralized re-regulation again. By definition, it's beyond them. It's simply not in their repertoire.

Well, gag me with a Luddite and call me stupid! 'Cuz I don't see the point in being NON-SELECTIVE about deregulation. At all. We're throwing our entire next generation out with the nominal, fiat bathwater this time. Tune the damn system, carefully, rather than just looting components willy nilly?

There is no way to hoard static assets without growing a group Output Gap.

And tempo matters. 50% cultural degradation this year is FAR, FAR worse than 100% cultural growth next year.

Why? Because the evolutionary value of Dynamic Assets leaves the value of Static Assets in the dust. That's why social species succeed, and why homo sapien cultures outstripped other primate species. It's far smarter to stay fully invested in growing dynamic assets, than to stupidly hoard static assets. That means investing in Democracy, NOT just in personal ownership of more static assets. The whole strategy of social species is 2-stage optimization: keep the components alive AND grow the system (faster than either can grow when working at cross purposes). Instead, humans in NeoLiberal regimes are reverting to negative rates of interest in expanding group intelligence.

"Banksterism AND Busted Evolution" - that's become our motto. Some twisted minds even posit that as doing the work of one or more gods. SETI results are suggesting otherwise.

The morphing of Occupy into an alternatives countercultural movement — Back to the Sixties

Government has finally abandoned the public interest for good, Kirkland says. He sees little potential for taking it back.
It’s now “about building self-sufficient communities that can support themselves without the government,” he said. “It’s no longer political. It’s social. 

The Occupy movement, Kirkland says, teaches people how to cope with the absence of government. As social programs, school offerings and health and pension benefits get cut, working-class people will have to learn to take charge of their own communities.

Because of the movement, “they’ll be prepared for when there is no government to serve them,” he said.

Kirkland and Seidewitz do not agree with notions in the mainstream media that the Occupy Wall Street movement has died out.

“The parks were magical,” said Seidewitz, “but they served as a place where we all met each other.”

The encampments were educational. They helped people build connections and form social groups. But camping in a park and talking to like-minded people, she said, can only do so much.
“It’s now about creating alternative media sources, which is easier to do now that we have all these connections,” she said. “We’ve all woken up. So it’s not about a park anymore.”

truthdig
One Year Later: Lessons Learned From Occupy Wall Street
Thomas Hedges, Center for Study of Responsive Law

Pew — 24% of Kids Have Moved Back In With Their Parents

Read it at Mother Jones
Survey Says 24% of Kids Have Moved Back In With Their Parents
by Kevin Drum

Public cost of one jobless youth — $14,000 a Year

With 6.7 million American youth out of work and out of school, the country faces a fiscal time bomb, according to a new report

Read it at The Atlantic
What Does One Jobless Youth Cost Taxpayers? $14,000 a Year

by Jordan Weissman

(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

Shocking, although out of paradigm. Just switch "taxpayer cost" to "public cost."

In one year, a single lost youth will cost all taxpayers $13,900. The total cost to the economy is $37,450, with most of that coming from crime -- including the price of cops, courts, and prisons, as well as the cost to victims....

This lost generation will cost taxpayers $437 billion over the next five years, and $1.15 trillion over the course of their lifetime. The total impact to the economy will reach $4.7 trillion over the next few decades.

Pew — Socialism on the uptick with US youth

Young people -- the collegiate and post-college crowd, who have served as the most visible face ofthe Occupy Wall Street movement -- might be getting more comfortable with socialism. That's the surprising result from a Pew Research Center poll that aims to measure American sentiments toward different political labels.

The poll, published Wednesday, found that while Americans overall tend to oppose socialism by a strong margin -- 60 percent say they have a negative view of it, versus just 31 percent who say they have a positive view -- socialism has more fans than opponents among the 18-29 crowd. Forty-nine percent of people in that age bracket say they have a positive view of socialism; only 43 percent say they have a negative view.

And while those numbers aren't very far apart, it's noteworthy that they were reversed just 20 months ago, when Pew conducted a similar poll. In that survey, published May 2010, 43 percent of people age 18-29 said they had a positive view of socialism, and 49 percent said their opinion was negative.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

Young People More Likely To Favor Socialism Than Capitalism: Pew

The single most salient Occupy demand

"You don’t need a weatherman"

"You don’t need a weatherman

To know which way the wind blows"

Bob Dylan — Subterranean Homesick Blues



"Media reports often fail to connect recurring demonstrations in Greece and Spain with those in the Middle East and North Africa (Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain). After all, the MENA demonstrations are ostensibly about democracy, while European countries already have functioning electoral systems. Protestors in Greece and Spain are instead decrying austerity programs resulting from governmental efforts to rein in deficits and debt burdens.

"At the core, though, all of these uprisings are about the simultaneous failure of modern economics and modern politics—even though systems differ somewhat from country to country. People in all of the nations mentioned have one thing in common: crushed expectations. Economists and politicians have promised jobs and growth, but instead citizens are seeing spreading unemployment, rising food and energy prices, and increasing economic inequality. Nowhere are there realistic prospects for a political remedy to worsening economic conditions. Thus, while unrest seems destined to spread and intensify in the months and years ahead, it has no clear long-term strategy or goal..."

Richard Heinberg makes the case in Energy Bulletin, Post Carbon Insitute that this is not only a financial crisis, but also a long-term problem involving real resources, especially, dwindling sources of abundant cheap energy that fueled extraordinary economic development in contemporary times.

Read the rest at Global Youth Uprising: Dashed Hopes, Anger, and Realism.

World Bank Concern

BBC: World Bank president: 'One shock away from crisis'

Robert Zoellick cited rising food prices as the main threat to poor nations who risk "losing a generation"....

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn raised particular concerns about high levels of unemployment among young people....

"Especially because of youth unemployment... there is now a risk that this will be turned into a life sentence, and that there is a possibility of a lost generation," he said.

Hmm. Rising food prices and no income. Sounds like a powder keg to me.