The Futures Foundation

Is this the year we will change the country?
Written by Jan Lee Martin   
Thursday, 08 February 2007
jlmcropped080207What will follow Westminster-style democracy in Australia?   That’s a question futurists have been asking for years.  Now, perhaps, we are seeing the seeds of the future in an emergence of the long-predicted electronic democracy.  

To some extent the significance of this deep shift in political process is being masked by the urgency of current content.   And that's not surprising: even the attention of futurists has been diverted lately from the challenge of inventing better systems of governance to a more defensive focus -- the need to protect and rescue the  democracy we thought we could take for granted (see Future News March 2002). 

Last Updated ( Friday, 16 February 2007 )
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Changing the subject: from Messo-potamia to Peril in Persia
Written by Tom Turnipseed   
Thursday, 08 February 2007

tom_turnipseedPresident Bush faces a rebellion among the American people and Congress against his call for a surge of troops that will escalate the killing in his Iraq war of choice. So Bush is now attempting to change the subject from the monumental mess of his making in Mesopotamia to an even more monstrous peril in Persia. Iraq and Iran are contemporary names for the ancient civilizations known as Mesopotamia and Persia. Bush lacks public and Congressional support to widen the war in Iraq. His oft-stated cause for war---that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction for imminent use against the U.S. and was complicit in the 9/11 attacks---has proven to be fabrication. Bush appears puppet-like under the influence of Vice-President Cheney and his cabal of neo-con warmongers, the principle architects of the imperialistic mis-adventure in Iraq. We are facing another fear driven, made-up run-up to an even more costly war against Iran to divert our attention from the debilitating debacle in Iraq that has taken such a terrible toll in lives, suffering and money, and to make more money for oil and war profiteers.

By February 1, 2007, Bush/Cheney’s Iraq War had killed 3088 U.S. military personnel, 130 Brits and 123 more coalition troops. 770 U.S. civilian contractors were also killed by January 28th. Bush/Cheney’s war of folly has killed about 655,000 Iraqis, according to a study led by Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. By January 28, 2007, 23,114 U.S. military personnel had been wounded in action.

Last Updated ( Thursday, 08 February 2007 )
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The value of values: whose life counts?
Written by Fabienne Goux-Baudiment   
Sunday, 04 February 2007
A new book from Professor Mahdi Elmandjra, a respected futurist based in Morocco, explores the question of values and society.   It was reviewed by Fabienne Goux-Baudiment in the World Futures Studies Federation's Futures Bulletin in January 2007.

Better intercultural communication, free from deceit and discrimination, would greatly contribute to the building of peace, says Mahdi Elmandjra.   Respecting the values of "others" would help to put into perspective the concept of "universal values" without insisting on their artificial adaptation to a reductionist and meaningless universalism, bearing in mind the scale of human history.

Professor Almandjra points out that some western states, although they proclaim themselves as champions of values regarding human rights and democracy, violate them here and there with impunity.  The test of this highly claimed universalism will be the day when the life of a Third World citizen will be worth as much as the life of an American, a European or an Israeli.

He shows how the last conflicts in Israel, Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon; the blind support from the western world of the American mega-imperialism and the unacceptable cowardice of most, if not all Arabic governments are as many proofs that w are very far away from these "universal" values.    

The world of Professor Elmandjra's earlier book -- The First Civilizational War (1991) is mutating into a war of values.

Last Updated ( Monday, 05 February 2007 )
 
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