Poor Arjay, he is so obsessed and committed to his one-dimensional adolescent "libertarianism" that he finds it impossible to begin to see the bigger picture.

Yes big-brother government is undoubtedly a problem, but what about these related quotes.

" The power of industry and money has actually become senior to the power of governments, and is now controlling the entire world".

By the way this is essentially the thesis of The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

" The modern "idealization" of the individual is, actually, a social and political device for isolating, fragmenting, and dis-empowering EVERYONE--so that humankind as a whole has no collective power.....Thus, the global promotion of the notion that people should focus on their individual interests and concerns--inclined toward "self"-indulgent purposes and illusions of "self"-fulfillment--is a global power-game that subverts both the integrity of the human person and the inherent power and rightness of the totality of humankind.

In the present-day, the culture and politics of illusion controls the world. The underlying idea that personal and collective egoic "self"-fulfillment is what life is supposed to be about is the root-source of the current global chaos.. As a result, there are more than six billion human individuals....that are, characteristically, and even strategically, out of touch with each other---like dust, and bombs, and petty traffic, all blowing in the wind. That wind steadily blows all prior unity into the bits and particles of human chaos."

And of course TV IS the principal generator of this "culture" of illusions.

"If anything lasts one generation beyond your lifetime, you imagine it is eternal.
Humanity is like rubble in its present state. You are destroying the Divine Gift.
All is Energy---and Energy Is all there is. But you are using Energy as if it were mud.
Look again, and find the Beautiful, the Unlimited, the Bright of Consciousness Itself."

Peter referenced the ongoing lack of availability of basic food and water supplies, and in particular cited the newly rising powers of China and India as countries facing serious water shortages.

As Vandana Shiva points out in the following Reith 2000 lecture, western corporations have continued their insidious creep into traditional societies changing farm practices and destroying the rich diversity and sustainable systems of food production that have supported communities for hundreds of generations.

www.http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_2000/lecture5.stm

It honestly should not require so much public funding for education if these academic experts can do nothing more than stating the bleedin' obvious. Why for crying out loud don't they for once come up with their own findings before getting into parrot mode & wait for someone to do all the work first & then repeat it all.
Of course there's more disasters as time goes on, more people perish & go hungry because there simply are more people to perish & go hungry. Yes climate change is happening & it doesn't matter one iota what causes it because we simply do not have the mentality & technology required to do so. To date, the only real obvious side effect due to global warming is the near cooking of academics' brains.

oops ! I meant to say to change it instead of to do so. Appololgies.

I'll have to disagree with the author of this article.

Anyone who thought that some magic would emerge from Copenhagen,
IMHO lacks understanding of humans as a species. As Keating
once observed, in the race of life, always back self interest.

I don't think that Obama has been a disappoinment at all. His
one claim for office was, that he shows good judgement. I think
that he continues to show that. Obama never claimed to own a
magic wand, he's a realist, working within the system that is
there, trying to repair the absolute disaster that Bush/Cheney
left behind. That will not happen overnight, but till take
years to sort out.

So anyone who was disappointed in 2009, IMHO had unrealistic
expectations to begin with.

Poirot, I read the Reith lecture and it seems to me that its a
bit simplistic, to simply blame Indias troubles on those "evil"
corporations.

Globalisation has reduced the cost of food for those Indians living
in cities. What country Indians practised, was more like a system
of permaculture and they can continue to do so if they wish, to
feed their families. OTOH, Indians living in city slums, cannot
be expected to subsidise their country cousins, whose main problem
is an ever growing population.

When farming gets down to farming a couple of acres, because those
farms became smaller and smaller over the generations of rising
population, its little more then a large veggie patch. India should
have addressed its population issues 50 years ago, its all a bit late
now.

Yabby,

Many of India's troubles do indeed stem from massive overpopulation and, therefore, it may seem simplistic to you to blame globalization and "evil corporations". There is, however, a noticeable link between development projects initiated by the centralized Indian Government and the flight of rural peasantry to the cities.
People don't just migrate to the slums because they think they have any kind of future or opportunity there - they migrate out of a desperation, usually initiated by forced displacement.
One of the major catalysts for displacement in India this century has been the modern practice of building dams.
In Arundhati Roy's book, "The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile", it is stated that: "Forty percent of the big dams that are being built in the world today are in India. Tens of millions of Indians have already been displaced. India has constructed thirty-three hundred dams in the last fifty years".
Roy says, "What happens to the people that are driven from their village by these development projects and by the general garrotting of India's rural economy? They migrate to the cities".
She cites an example: "One day they just filled the reservoir. One hundred and fourteen thousand people, almost twice the governments projection, were displaced and one hundred and sixty-two villages were submerged...Ten years later, that dam irrigates five percent of the land they said it would - it irrigates less land than it submerged...No irrigation project has ever been more than thirty-five percent efficient in India".
Many development projects, including those of dam construction undertaken by the Indian government are initiated in partnership with organizations like the IMF, WTO and the World Bank, which then act as doormen to let in the "evil corporations".
The sort of opportunistic pressure exercised on developing countries by powerful organizations only serves to make the poor in this world even more dependent - like the slum dwellers in India.