Organs for sale

The great organ bazaar : By Susanne Lundin who is Professor of Ethnology at Lund University, Sweden.

The Web site 88DB.com Philippines is an active online portal that allows service providers and consumers to find and interact with each other. Naoval, an Indonesian man with “AB blood type, no drugs and no alcohol,” wants to sell his kidney. Another man says, “I am a Filipino. I am willing to sell my kidney for my wife. She has breast cancer and I can’t afford her medications.” Then there is Enrique, who is “willing to donate my kidney for an exchange. 21 years old and healthy.”

Is a World War III scenario unfolding?

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” by Michel Chossudovsky

The World is at a critical crossroads. The Fukushima disaster in Japan has brought to the forefront the dangers of Worldwide nuclear radiation.Coinciding with the onset of the nuclear crisis in Japan, a new regional war theater has opened up in North Africa, under the disguise of a UN sponsored “humanitarian operation” with the mandate to “protect civilian lives”.

Sweatshop Manufacturing: Engine of Poverty

On a global scale, the reign of free market ideology has wrought deep changes. Manufacturing jobs in the developed nations are rapidly shrinking while abroad there has been a rise in sweatshop manufacturing, with conditions reminiscent of the worst of the 19th century. The effect has been to widen the gulf between the living conditions of the wealthy and those who labor for them.

Inequality has reached such an astounding level that it requires an act of willful blindness on the part of Western media not to notice it. Over half of the world’s population subsists on less than $2 a day, while the 200 richest individuals own more wealth than 41 percent of the world’s population, or in other words, more than 2.6 billion people.

The Great Chinese Takeout.

An unfathomably vast terrain comprising 49 nations, the sub-Sahara represents nearly one-fifth of the earth’s landmass. Yet its total economy is tinier than Florida’s. Here, 300 million people get by on less than $1 a day. Until they don’t: It is the planet’s biggest tomb, where compared to the 1960s, twice as many children under the age of 5 are now dying each day from disease; a bottomless badland where $500 billion of Western aid since World War II (more than four Marshall Plans) has barely made a dent in the poverty; a region whose market share of world trade is shrinking by the hour as it gets left behind, perhaps permanently, in the dust of globalization; a place so desperate for everything — cash, trade, investment, infrastructure — and so powerless to negotiate strategically, that it’s pretty much up for sale to the highest bidder.

George Ayittey on Cheetahs vs. Hippos

Economist George Ayittey sees Africa’s future as a fight between Hippos — complacent, greedy bureaucrats wallowing in the muck — and Cheetahs, the fast-moving, entrepreneurial leaders and citizens who will rebuild Africa.