JAMAICA: National Council of Senior Citizens Needs More Resources

QKINGSTON (Jamaica Information Service), August 28, 2008: Beverly Hall Taylor, Director of the National Council for Senior Citizens, is appealing for additional financial and human resources for the Council, to improve its efficiency in fostering a better quality of life for the aging. Mrs. Hall Taylor said in an interview that the Council is in need of more field officers in order to be in a better position to identify senior citizens islandwide. "We really need more assistance. What we really need is more field officers because we want to be able to identify seniors islandwide," the Director outlined. According to Mrs. Taylor, the majority of persons within the Council are volunteers who are employed elsewhere and will not be able to give their full attention at all times. "The Council need some more hands, so we need funding to employ more people. We need day care coordinators, nurses' aids, and art and craft persons, because the volunteers have to go to work and we can't rely on them to do everything," she added. Mrs. Taylor also emphasised that with the senior citizens population growing, the Council is also in need of transportation. "The Council is in need of a thirty-seater bus so that when we are ready to take the seniors on educational tours we won't have a problem. Sometimes the different parishes need to travel long distances with these seniors but don't have transportation to do so, so it is well needed. The nation must also take into consideration that the seniors population is growing and we need to prepare for them and help them age gracefully," she added. She is however, grateful for the assistance from service clubs over the years, and is calling on other Jamaicans to give a helping hand. "I am also calling on the non-governmental organisations (NGOs), private sector companies and Jamaicans at large to assist the Council so that we can take care of our seniors. Thanks to the service clubs such as the Rotary Club and Kiwanis Club of Kingston and St. Andrew, for their assistance over the years. They have always been helpful to the Council," Mrs. Hall Taylor outlined. The National Policy for Senior Citizens indicates that by the year 2020, the number of the senior citizens is expected to double. Earlier this year State Minister of Labour and Social Security, Andrew Gallimore said the Government is seeking to identify all senior citizens across Jamaica. Copyright © 1996 -2007, Jamaica Information Service

U.K.: The shift to thrift

Social Exclusion The Shift to Thrift: People will soon have to live more modestly as the age of turbo consumerism comes to an end and the rich-poor gap grows wider __________________________________________________ Melissa Benn The Guardian, Wednesday July 2, 2008 __________________________________________________ "We need to live more modestly because we're using up the Earth's resources," says Bob Holman. Photograph: Brendan McDermid/Reuters "Greed blunts social compassion. The rich take too much, leaving the poor with too little. Where do we hear the case for modest living? Not in parliament. Not much from the church or the broadsheets." These stirring words come not from a Victorian novel or disillusioned new Labour MP. Instead, they are spoken, in lilting tones with just a remaining trace of his cockney origins, by the Christian Socialist and renowned community worker Bob Holman, 71, who, in typically low-key fashion, has recently launched a new moral movement for what he calls Modest Living, calling on his fellow citizens to live according to "need rather than greed". Holman's noble old-style challenge, largely promulgated in Christian circles and in his regular column in the Glasgow Herald, has little to do with the kind of quirky cutbacks - such as using thrift shops or growing your own fruit and veg - so beloved by eco-aware feature writers. Instead, Modest Living presents a hard-hitting political and economic challenge to contemporary society, and is likely to arouse guilt and irritation in equal measure - particularly among policy makers and politicians, who wrestle with these problems every day but rarely talk in overarching moral tones about poverty and wealth, and tend to think of their own lives and choices as a quite separate issue. Consumerist god "The last liberty is choosing a way of life," Holman says. "I choose to live modestly, and it's a statement against greed. I am not advocating we become poor. I am simply advocating that we live modestly. Does anyone really require more than £40,000 a year? We could take cheaper holidays close to home - I haven't flown abroad in 20 years - and reject the consumerist god and not buy plasma TVs, the latest mobile phones, iPods, expensive wines and 4-wheel drives. We need to live more modestly because we're using up the Earth's resources. "Research by people such as Danny Dorling at Sheffield University shows that Britain is becoming ever more socially segregated. But we can make a stand against it by living in areas with those who have less than us. I live in an ex-council house with two bedrooms, close to a block of asylum seekers. Moving here and making friends with them, I realise they are gentle, dignified, educated and family oriented. It's about being able to identify with people on the minimum wage." His ideas run counter to most contemporary political rhetoric, which lauds aspiration. "Hard-working families", as politicians like to refer to them, are usually considered to have made it at precisely the point when they can move away from deprived areas to join the respectable property-owning classes. As for iPods and the latest mobiles, such purchases are currently the marker of social success, not, as in Holman's universe, the first sign of a moral quasi-degeneracy. Tell most teenagers that they should renounce the latest gadget in order to benefit the asylum seeker they may see only on their (plasma) TV screen, and they are likely to look at you as if you just stepped out from the pages of a Louisa May Alcott novel. But political moods change exceedingly fast, and we are on the cusp of new times. Even a year ago, the ideas behind Modest Living might have sounded like the dying knell of an ancient utopianism, but there is a deep unease at the unequal direction of society and our helplessness to effect even modest change. Now, the rapid economic downturn may force individuals and the state to reconsider everything from our spending to our housing choices, just as environmental crisis and campaigners have had a huge impact on domestic consumption and organisation. Holman renounced the material life when, as a young, successful professional, he began to reflect on the conditions of his life. "A well-paid professorship. A detached house and two cars. I had got there, but I was dissatisfied. I could not square my lifestyle with the Jesus who lived humbly and gave priority to the alienated and excluded." In 1976, Holman moved his family to a nearby council estate in Bath, to establish a community project. After 10 years, he moved to one of the poorest estates in Europe, Glasgow's Easterhouse, where he worked for a community project. Such community spirit has won Holman nationwide admiration from political figures as diverse as Iain Duncan Smith and Labour minister Stephen Timms. Helena Kennedy, now Lady Kennedy, once memorably suggested, just before 1997, that "future cabinet ministers should go and sit at the feet of Bob Holman". Clearly, that didn't happen. As Holman notes wryly: "I've never been asked to sit on a single committee or make an official contribution to any government policy about poverty. New Labour MPs would probably laugh at me." In fact, they are more likely to groan and mutter slightly unflattering things about sackcloth-and-ashes socialism. Holman's political purity and deliberate simplicity niggles at a political class virtually united in their commitment to market forces and the positive aspects of wealth creation. But Holman is on to something when he points to growing evidence of public unease at the rising gap between the rich and the poor. Today, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation publishes its proposals for minimum income standard (MIS), after widespread consultation. For a single person, the annual MIS is proposed at £13,400. Yet even that figure is below what many on benefits are required to survive on. Alan Simpson, the Labour MP for Nottingham South, is a long-time admirer of Holman's community work. He says: "That conversation about the gap between the rich and the poor is being had on almost every street and in every coffee bar these days. It's only in parliament, which is in thrall to the City of London and PFI, that it is taboo. Parliament is obsessed with micro managing the social conduct of the poor, but it's terrified of intruding into the lives of the rich." Sealed off Compass, currently the most influential pressure group inside the Labour party, agrees. In its recent discussion document, How to Live in the 21st Century, it condemns the fact that "half the UK's population shares just 6% of Britain's wealth, while the top 1% own a quarter of it; 11 million people - among them 3 million children - live in poverty . . . while the rich's privileges seal them off from the rest of society". Compass calls on the government to tax the super-rich more fairly, refuting the myth that "if we do so they will jump ship to another country". Neal Lawson, Compass's chair, echoes Holman's criticisms of "the seductive power of turbo consumerism". He believes that many are already signed up to a Modest Living approach, citing "four to five million who have chosen to downsize their life in recent years, making time for more meaningful activities". In the end, economic crisis may be the spur to truly radical change and a rather more enforced form of mutuality. According to Simpson, spiralling energy prices, the chronic oil shortage and its knock-on effect on food production mean "we will soon move to more localised food systems. The same is true of travel, where the emphasis will once again be on common or shared provision, with personal provision a kind of luxury add-on. "The nature of the collapse now facing us means that many of the measures that Bob proposes may turn out to be things we have to engage with. It's just unlikely to be addressed in a spirit of self-denial. Either way, within 10 years we will all be living very different lives." Melissa Benn is a writer and journalist. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

NEW ZEALAND: Funeral directors in short supply

WELLINGTON (OneNews), April 19, 2008:

A dire shortage of funeral directors has the industry on edge.

The number of funeral directors is down and with the population profile ageing things aren't looking too flash.

The Funeral Directors' Association of New Zealand (FDANZ) says resources are being stretched as funerals become more time-consuming.

"They are more of an event as families want video and power point presentations or other special arrangements when they say their farewells. There are now more speakers at funerals. Organising this takes more time and the services are much longer than they were," says FDANZ President Neil Little.

Added to that Little says the industry is suffering from a skills shortage and high turnover of staff.

"The way things are going we will have too few experienced people to readily cope when the mortality escalation occurs," says Little.

About 30,000 people die in New Zealand each year and that is expected to jump by about a third in coming years.

FDANZ says running waiting lists for funerals is not something that people want to do

"In some services sectors waiting lists are grudgingly accepted. It is not the wish of our profession that such circumstances should extend to the funeral industry" says Little.

The FDANZ has surveyed its members for possible solutions and hopes to be able to attract back people who have left the industry as well as encouraging others into it.

Source: ONE News/Newstalk ZB

CANADA: Is an International Financial Conspiracy Driving World Events?

Global Research

By Richard C. Cook

Center for Research on Globalization
Montreal, Quebec, Canada . March 27, 2008:

"They make a desolation and call it peace." -Tacitus

Was Alan Greenspan really as dumb as he looks in creating the late housing bubble that threatens to bring the entire Western debt-based economy crashing down?

Was something as easy to foresee as this really the trigger for a meltdown that could destroy the world’s financial system? Or was it done, perhaps, "accidentally on purpose"?

And if so, why?

Let’s turn to the U.S. personage that conspiracy theorists most often mention as being at the epicenter of whatever elite plan is reputed to exist. This would be David Rockefeller, the 92-year-old multibillionaire godfather of the world’s financial elite.

The lengthy Wikipedia article on Rockefeller provides the following version of a celebrated statement he allegedly made in an opening speech at the Bilderberg conference in Baden-Baden, Germany, in June 1991:

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government which will never again know war, but only peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in the past centuries."

This speech was made 17 years ago. It came at the beginning in the U.S. of the Bill Clinton administration. Rockefeller speaks of an "us." This "us," he says, has been having meetings for almost 40 years. If you add the 17 years since he gave the speech it was 57 years ago—two full generations.

Not only has "us" developed a "plan for the world," but the attempt to "develop" the plan has evidently been successful, at least in Rockefeller’s mind. The ultimate goal of "us" is to create "the supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers." This will lead, he says, toward a "world government which will never again know war."

Just as an intellectual exercise, let’s assume that David Rockefeller is as important and powerful a person as he seems to think he is. Let’s give the man some credit and assume that he and "us" have in fact succeeded to a degree. This would mean that the major decisions and events since Rockefeller gave the speech in 1991 have probably also been part of the plan or that they have at least represented its features and intent.

David Rockefeller at Harvard in 2006. Therefore by examining these decisions and events we can determine whether in fact Rockefeller is being truthful in his assessment that the Utopia he has in mind is on its way or has at least come closer to being realized. In no particular order, some of these decisions and events are as follows:

The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement by the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations has led to the elimination of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs as well as the destruction of U.S. family farming in favor of global agribusiness.

Similar free trade agreements, including those under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, have led to export of millions of additional manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere.

Average family income in the U.S. has steadily eroded while the share of the nation’s wealth held by the richest income brackets has soared. Some Wall Street hedge fund managers are making $1 billion a year while the number of homeless, including war veterans, pushes a million.

The housing bubble has led to a huge inflation of real estate prices in the U.S. Millions of homes are falling into the hands of the bankers through foreclosure. The cost of land and rentals has further decimated family agriculture as well as small business. Rising property taxes based on inflated land assessments have forced millions of lower-and middle-income people and elderly out of their homes.

The fact that bankers now control national monetary systems in their entirety, under laws where money is introduced only through lending at interest, has resulted in a massive debt pyramid that is teetering on collapse. This "monetarist" system was pioneered by Rockefeller-family funded economists at the University of Chicago. The rub is that when the pyramid comes down and everyone goes bankrupt the banks which have been creating money "out of thin air" will then be able to seize valuable assets for pennies on the dollar, as J.P. Morgan Chase is preparing to do with the businesses owned by Carlyle Capital. Meaningful regulation of the financial industry has been abandoned by government, and any politician that stands in the way, such as Eliot Spitzer, is destroyed.

The total tax burden on Americans from federal, state, and local governments now exceeds forty percent of income and is rising. Today, with a recession starting, the Democratic-controlled Congress, while supporting the minuscule "stimulus" rebate, is hypocritically raising taxes further, even for middle-income earners. Back taxes, along with student loans, can no longer be eliminated by bankruptcy protection.

Gasoline prices are soaring even as companies like Exxon-Mobil are recording record profits. Other commodity prices are going up steadily, including food prices, with some countries starting to experience near-famine conditions. 40 million people in America are officially classified as "food insecure."

Corporate control of water and mineral resources has removed much of what is available from the public commons, and the deregulation of energy production has led to huge increases in the costs of electricity in many areas.

The destruction of family farming in the U.S. by NAFTA (along with family farming in Mexico and Canada) has been mirrored by policies toward other nations on the part of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Around the world, due to pressure from the "Washington consensus," local food self-sufficiency has been replaced by raising of crops primarily for export. Migration off the land has fed the population of huge slums around the cities of underdeveloped countries.

Since the 1980s the U.S. has been fighting wars throughout the world either directly or by proxy. The former Yugoslavia was dismembered by NATO. Under cover of 9/11 and by utilizing off-the-shelf plans, the U.S. is now engaged in the military conquest and permanent military occupation of the Middle East. A worldwide encirclement of Russia and China by U.S. and NATO forces is underway, and a new push to militarize space has begun. The Western powers are clearly preparing for at least the possibility of another world war.

The expansion of the U.S. military empire abroad is mirrored by the creation of a totalitarian system of surveillance at home, whereby the activities of private citizens are spied upon and tracked by technology and systems which have been put into place under the heading of the "War on Terror." Human microchip implants for tracking purposes are starting to be used. The military-industrial complex has become the nation’s largest and most successful industry with tens of thousands of planners engaged in devising new and better ways, both overt and covert, to destroy both foreign and domestic "enemies."

Meanwhile, the U.S. has the largest prison population of any country on earth. Plus everyday life for millions of people is a crushing burden of government, insurance, and financial fees, charges, and paperwork. And the simplest business transactions are burdened by rake-offs for legions of accountants, lawyers, bureaucrats, brokers, speculators, and middlemen.

Finally, the deteriorating conditions of everyday life have given rise to an extraordinary level of stress-related disease, as well as epidemic alcohol and drug addiction. Governments themselves around the world engage in drug trafficking. Instead of working to lower stress levels, public policy is skewed in favor of an enormous prescription drug industry that grows rich off the declining level of health through treatment of symptoms rather than causes. Many of these heavily-advertised medications themselves have devastating side-effects.

This list should at least give us enough to go on in order to ask a hard question. Assuming again that all these things are parts of the elitist plan which Mr. Rockefeller boasts to have been developing, isn’t it a little strange that the means which have been selected to achieve "peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity" involve so much violence, deception, oppression, exploitation, graft, and theft?

In fact it looks to me as though "our plan for the world" is one that is based on genocide, world war, police control of populations, and seizure of the world’s resources by the financial elite and their puppet politicians and military forces.

In particular, could there be a better way to accomplish all this than what appears to be a concentrated plan to remove from people everywhere in the world the ability to raise their own food? After all, genocide by starvation may be slow, but it is very effective. Especially when it can be blamed on "market forces."

And can it be that the "us" which is doing all these things, including the great David Rockefeller himself, are just criminals who have somehow taken over the seats of power? If so, they are criminals who have done everything they can to watch their backs and cover their tracks, including a chokehold over the educational system and the monopolistic mainstream media.

One thing is certain: The voters of America have never knowingly agreed to any of this.

See report
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Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Promise of Monetary Reform is in preparation. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, "the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years." His website is at www.richardccook.com.

Richard C. Cook is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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© Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca

CANADA: Take care of elderly

Editorial SAULT STE-MARIE, Ontario (The Sault Star), March 13, 2008: We all want what's best for the elderly and frail in society. If you conducted a poll that asked whether we should improve the quality of care in our nursing homes it would be a resounding yes. But if the question mentions that improving care will require more money out of our pockets, many of us start to get wobbly in the knees. Reports that deteriorating conditions in Canadian nursing homes, where elderly and demented residents are allegedly attacking their caregivers in an ever-increasing spiral of violence, doesn't surprise a union representative at Sault Ste. Marie's largest long-term care facility. It's a question of resources and personnel shortages that lead to frustration, which results in violent outbursts. "Residents are agitated and frustrated at the lack of caregivers available for daily care; the lack of personal support workers means they (the workers) are overwhelmed with the number of residents they assist and the time they spend with each resident," said Christine Bird, the local CUPE representative at F.J. Davey Home. But what do we do? First, we can look to jurisdictions that appear to have a more successful approach. According to reports, Canadian nursing home workers are seven times higher than their counterparts in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden to be the victim of aggressive behaviour. What are they doing that we aren't? Let's recognize that the 2.6 hours of daily care in Ontario is not close to being acceptable. To be fair the Ontario government has been making progress, but we should accelerate the efforts. Finally, we may need to add another term to the lexicon describing social issues. Along with the familiar phrase "deadbeat parents," we could add deadbeat sons, daughters and family members. It may be tough to legislate, but taking care of family members who are getting older and sick is the right thing to do. It's a question of respect. Copyright: Osprey Media

JAPAN: Is Growth Always Good - An Indian Viewpoint

CHENNAI (The Hindu), January 13, 2008: By Bala Balasubramanian OPINION: Is growth always good? We live in a world today that is obsessed with economic growth. Little thought is spared to its relevance or to the cost of this growth. The moot question is whether an obsession with growth is indeed such a desirable end as it is made out to be. Growth does have an important role to play. However, what we need to think about is whether there is a point of balance to stop at. Nature offers some important lessons here. Every organism on this planet grows and needs to grow. However, after a point it reaches a state of balance and stops growing. This state of balance is both at an individual and collective level. And when something does not stop growing, we call it a cancer. In many ways the same applies for economic or material growth. There is a point at which it has to stop and a balance has to be established. That is a fundamental necessity. Relentless race However, today what we see around us is a relentless race for growth. Every country wants to keep growing faster than the rest. Every corporation wants to grow faster than its competitors. There is never seen to be such a thing as too much growth. Most individuals have no end to their material growth ambitions. While countries at the low end of the economic scale do need growth to surmount basic survival imperatives till they reach a level of affluence where they can free their minds from basic questions of survival and security, the problem starts when prosperous nations fret over lack of growth. Recently I was watching a news report presenting a certain country in a sorry plight due to its paltry decimal growth rates over the last decade or so. Given the grim portrayal, the reporter could well have been talking about Somalia. But it so turned out that he was talking about Japan, a country with one of the highest per capita GDP levels! The disappointment evidently is about the fact that the people of Japan are not splurging more and more way beyond their already high consumption levels. We should realise that Japan has perhaps reached that desirable state of balance, which should be what every country should aspire to. Growth from this point should be defined not in economic terms but in terms of their other contributions to the world — spiritual for example. One may ask: what do we lose by growing? The answer is quite simple. The world. Let me explain. Most of the growth we see around us draws on natural resources. Let us take an example of a corporate, which manufactures, say, soaps. The purpose of the corporate is to grow. The strategy adopted by this corporation is all about how to make its consumers consume more and more of its product. It is not just about fighting for share, but also about increasing per capita usage of the product. And marketers thrive on the dharma of making people want things they never wanted. Looked at purely from a capitalist point of view, this may be the right thing to do. But what does it mean to the world? Every extra bar of soap a person consumes increases demand for the oil and many other natural resources that went into it. So we are ultimately increasing the pressure on natural resources in the name of corporate growth for even an innocuous product like soap. Likewise every product and service directly or indirectly puts pressure on the planet’s natural resources. All talk about global warming today just scrapes the surface of the problem and the most visible part of it — the emissions. What it does not yet address is the impact of all the effort that goes towards increasing per capita consumption and whether it is indeed necessary. We need to realise that if humanity is not to be seen as a cancer on this planet we need to achieve a state of balance with respect to consumption and consumption led growth and rethink our goal of relentless material growth. Copyright © 2008, The Hindu

WORLD: Tidal Wave Of Senior Citizens Will Be Big Challenge

A senior citizen works on her laptop computer in Des Plaines, Illinois. The first of the vast US baby boom generation goes into retirement in January, setting off a demographic tidal wave with wide-ranging economic, political and social implications.

AFP/Getty Images/File/Tim Boyle. Copyright © 2007 Yahoo
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New Age Thinking
By John B. Shoven

WASHINGTON, DC (FOREIGN POLICY), January/February 2008

There is a looming catastrophe stalking the developed world. It promises to devastate the global economy, overwhelm hospitals, and decimate armed forces.

What is the calamity that promises such misfortune? Not a killer virus, deadly terrorist attack, or natural disaster.

It’s the aging of the world’s baby boomers, the coming tidal wave of senior citizens who will live longer, consume more, and produce less, seriously challenging societies’ ability to care for their graying ranks.

At least that’s how the dire warnings generally sound. Alarming forecasts bombard us about an impending demographic crisis in the United States, Europe, Japan, and even China that will reshape the way we live and work.

In just two decades, we’re told, there will be more Americans who are older than 65 than younger than 15.

By 2040, at least 45 percent of the populations of Spain and Italy will be 60 years or older. That same year, China will have 400 million elderly citizens.

And in Japan, which is aging faster than any other country, more than 40 percent of the population will be elderly by the middle of this century.

The fiscal burden of supporting this rapidly expanding segment of the global population not only threatens to bankrupt national healthcare systems and shrink armies as countries’ median ages run past military age, but also revolutionize electoral politics, with political clashes no longer governed by right versus left, but young versus old.

If it sounds distressing, it shouldn’t. The gloomy projections are deeply flawed.

The reason lies in the misleading way in which we measure age. Typically, a person’s age has been determined by the number of years since his or her birth. We are so accustomed to measuring age this way that most of us have never given it a second...

See report in FOREIGN POLICY



© 2007 ForeignPolicy.com