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American economist Professor, Jeffrey Sachs exposes how America, its Western allies, the CIA and the defence industry have rigged the system to keep Africa from being prosperous. It is a stunning expose and rebuke to the present world order and why it must change. Jeffrey David Sachs is an American economist, academic, public policy analyst and former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, where he holds the title of University Professor. He is also a renowned leader in sustainable development, a senior UN advisor and a bestselling author. TFF’s work with global structural change, abolition of militarism and our long-term engagement with Somalia and Burundi has always emphasised one or more of the dimensions Sachs highlights so brilliantly – with both knowledge, eloquence and passion. Please share widely!

By Xinhua writers Tao Fangwei and Gu Yu July 20, 2021 — Despite the Xinjiang cotton boycott instigated by some Western politicians under the pretext of “forced labor,” the region’s cotton and textile industry has shown resilience by further tapping markets and winning over more customers with its superior quality. — In the first four months of this year, China’s export volume of cotton textiles and garments hit 19.7 billion U.S. dollars, up 44 percent year on year. — “China’s cotton has contributed a lot to the global cotton industry and we deserve fair treatment and due respect,” said Gao Fang, director of the China Cotton Association. Originally posted on CCTV’s English website on July 9th, 2021 URUMQI, July 8 (Xinhua) — In a textile plant in the city of Shihezi, northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, machines with 100,000 spindles rumbled to spin cotton into yarn. “We are producing...

Photo: Pankaj Mishra By Radmila Nakarada and Jelena Vidojević June 29, 2021 This conversation with the Indian-born essayist, novelist and historian Pankaj Mishra, took place before the US elections. Q: In your major writings you deal with the Western model of modernisation and in the suffering involved in its evolution, expansion and emulation. You have emerged as a prominent critic of the empire and its links to liberal ideas. Reviewers often depict you as the voice of the marginalised and excluded, humiliated, the victims. How would you define yourself today?  A: I think I was fortunate to write for mainstream publications in the United States and Britain from the late 1990s onwards, when the illusions of Americanising the world were at their strongest. Britain and America were being held as models for the rest of the world to imitate and no attention was being paid to their long past of slavery and...

 Raghav Kaushik May 19, 2021 Gandhi is not well-known for his views on the environment. Indeed, in his vast output, there is little explicit mention of the environment. Yet, in Gandhi’s views, one finds a lot that is relevant to environmentalism. Like most great thinkers, Gandhi’s views are flawed; however we learn a lot by studying his views critically. Let us begin by examining Gandhi’s views on materialism and consumerism. In his lecture on economic and moral progress delivered in 1916, he offers one of the most searing critiques of materialism: “This land of ours was once, we are told, the abode of the gods. It is not possible to conceive gods inhabiting a land which is made hideous by the smoke and the din of mill chimneys and factories and whose roadways are traversed by rushing engines dragging numerous cars crowded with men mostly who know not what they...

Photo taken on April 17, 2021 shows the Boao Forum for Asia International Conference Center in Boao Town, South China’s Hainan province. [Photo/Xinhua] Tom Fowdy April 28, 2021 At the Boao Forum for Asia, a regional summit for government, business and academia typically hosted in Hainan province, China said that it does not seek hegemony and that it does not strive to displace the United States, only seeking fairness and justice in the international system. This came amid the Western mainstream media repeatedly framing Washington and Beijing as being in a competition for global dominance. Unfortunately, this view is shared by many politicians in the United States increasingly depicting China as a threat and a strategic competitor – espousing the language of the Cold War. Originally published at china.org.cn What is hegemony? In international relations, a hegemon is a state that wields so much undisputed power that has almost complete...

The world’s rising powerhouse In 1986 on returning for my first 3-week visit to China, I wrote an article, “China: Key Player in a New World Game” in The Futurist, December 1986. I had been invited by China’s State Council at the recommendation of my good friends, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, best-selling authors of Future Shock (1970), who both had, and still, have a big following in China. This surprise invitation was to speak at “The First International Conference on Creativity”, co-sponsored by the United Nations Education & Scientific Cooperation Organization (UNESCO), along with Edward de Bono of Britain and US psychologist/philosopher Jean Houston, author of The Possible Human (1982). Mystified, I called the phone number in China of Professor Xu, the convenor at Shanghai-based Jiaotong University, and asked why I had been invited to this event, all expenses paid. Professor Xu replied in perfect English, “In China, you are a great scholar and your...

A new report, published on 14 March, 2021, in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ journal Ambio, points out that humanity is hurtling towards destruction unless we have the collective wisdom to change course quickly. The Ambio article was written as part of the preparation of a meeting of Nobel Prize winners to discuss the state of the planet. The virtual meeting will be held on April 26-28, 2021. We Must Achieve a Steady-State Economic System A steady-state economic system is necessary because neither population growth nor economic growth can continue indefinitely on a finite earth. No one can maintain that exponential industrial growth is sustainable in the long run except by refusing to look more than a short  distance into the future. Of course, it is necessary to distinguish between industrial growth, and growth of culture and knowledge, which can and should continue to grow. Qualitative improvements in human society are possible and...

Photo credit: ChannelNewsAsia A U.S. State Department transcript April 3, 2021 Editor’s noteThere are several reasons to assume, or predict, that this meeting will be seen in the future as a serious turning point. One can’t blame the Chinese side for thinking that this is not the way to start dialogues about common matters. Indeed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken here reveals a surprisingly impolite and amateurish style of diplomacy – a style not exactly indicative of global leadership. The Chinese may well have felt, even concluded, that it is, at least at the moment, a hopeless idea to seek long-term cooperation with the United States. Therefore, we bring you the full transcript from the opening day. China’s Yang: ‘Is that the way that you had hoped to conduct this dialogue?’ NEW YORK — This is a U.S. State Department transcript of the opening remarks at the U.S.-China meeting in...

Pankaj Mishra January 13, 2020 It’s time to abandon the intellectual narcissism of cold war Western liberalism. In Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), Jonathan Lear writes of the intellectual trauma of the Crow Indians. Forced to move in the mid-nineteenth century from a nomadic to a settled existence, they catastrophically lost not only their immemorial world but also “the conceptual resources” to understand their past and present. The problem for a Crow Indian, Lear writes, wasn’t just that “my way of life has come to an end.” It was that “I no longer have the concepts with which to understand myself or the world…. I have no idea what is going on.” It is no exaggeration to say that many in the Anglo-American intelligentsia today resemble the Crow Indians, after being successively blindsided by far-right insurgencies, an uncontainable pandemic, and political revolts by disenfranchised minorities. For nearly three decades...

Image credit: Pixabay Dr Andrew Glikson January 20, 2021 As the world is trying to hopefully recover from the tragic effects of COVID-19, it is reminded there is no vaccine for the existential threat for its life support systems posed by global warming, nor for the looming threats of future wars and nuclear wars fueled by warmongers and $trillion preparations by military-industrial complexes. Originally published at Countercurrents Between 1740 and 1897 some 230 wars and revolutions in Europe suggested war remained deeply ingrained in the human psyche and civilization. The question is whether the currently approaching catastrophes can be averted. No one wishes to believe in the projections made in the recent book ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’, except that these projections, made by David Wallace-Wells, are disturbingly consistent with the current shift in state of the climate toward +4 degrees and even +6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as indicated by the current trends (Figure 1) and...

China 1983 © Jan Oberg, Oberg PhotoGraphics Documentary with Lawrence Robert Kuhn January 6, 2021 When the history of the 21st century is to be written, there is no doubt that the story of China’s eradication of poverty – i.e. lifting about 700 million people out of it – will be seen as a milestone, a turning point for humanity. China’s poverty rate fell from 88 per cent in 1981 to 0.7 per cent in 2015, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms. On November 23rd 2020, China announced that it had eliminated absolute poverty nationwide by uplifting all of its citizens beyond its set ￥2,300 (CNY) per year, or less than a dollar per day poverty line. This result has been achieved within just four decades, after Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping declared the...

Lund, Sverige – 22. december, 2020 Deklarationen for TFFs Globale Omstillings-kampagne Vær rar at skrive på!Sammen med millioner kan du gør en forskel. Og bed dine familie og venner om at skrive på den også (længst nede). Hvis du ikke vil læse hele deklarationen, så læs blot denne korte udgave og gå ned til “Jeg støtter forslaget…” Kort udgaveOveni de store globale problemer, vi skal have løst, er så kommet Coronaen. Deklarationen argumenterer for at verdens prioriteter er – lad os sige, perverse. For eksempel så koster alt hvad FN gør bare 3% af verdens militære udgifter.TFF – Den Transnationale Stiftelse for Freds- og Fremtidsforskning i Lund – foreslår derfor at alle lande omgående reducerer militærudgifterne med 50%. Det vil frigøre 1000 milliarder dollar – ja, du læste rigtigt. Dette ufatteligt store beløb skal bruges til at få løst de globale problemer – som klimaforandringen, fattigdommen, sulten etc – og...