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The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Wall Street.

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COLUMN OSWALDO DE RIVERO
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DOSSIER
GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS


The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Wall Street
geopolitical consequences. 14/11/2008


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The fall of the Berlin Wall the collapse of Wall Street.

(*) Oswaldo de Rivero

Published in the Journal Le Monde Diplomatique in its issue of November. Article submitted by the author for publication in the Democratic Network. Any reference to this information, mention the source is appreciated.

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DOSSIER: Global financial crisis

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Wall Street.

(*) Oswaldo de Rivero

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(RED-Geneva)

When the Berlin Wall was torn down there was no private bank in the Soviet Union. Today there are many in Russia, while in the U.S., is just quasi-nationalize major banks and financial institutions. This unimaginable situation is a great trick that history has done to all who claim to know their place. So we can be sure that the international instability and lawlessness that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall have not ceased with the collapse of Wall Street.


Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the sharp ex-Soviet Director of the Institute of USA and Canada, Georgi Arbatov, said the worst damage they had caused the USSR to the United States is depriving him of an enemy . (1) The current situation seems to confirm this prediction. No enemy, the Bush administration, his neoconservative advisors, Pentagon generals and bankers on Wall Street believed the "Masters of Universe", seeking perpetual military supremacy and global financial dominance.

With the Bush administration, the Pentagon became more powerful than ever, even began to dictate the agenda of preemptive war illegal and continued arming the U.S. with a range of expensive weapons in the state of the art, to achieve supremacy against any military power, but ultimately did little to fight asymmetric conflict against terrorism. In addition, the U.S. entangled in a misguided war in Iraq, now it is physically and financially hemorrhaging.

At the same time, the bankers of Wall Street set out to invent a variety of complicated financial products that made Wall Street and the international financial system today a huge casino has collapsed at an approximate cost of $ 2.8 trillion, (2) affects millions of people including who never played in it, as is the case with the new 20 million unemployed International Labour Organization estimates there will be in 2009 as a result of the global financial crisis (3).


Lack of market and market excess


The U.S. military and financial degradation, makes one think, not only in the prediction of Georgi Arbatov, but also in what he said once the physical Leo Szilard nuclear, that the two superpowers could not live without each other, that the collapse of the Soviet empire would collapse the American Empire. The truth is that this has not happened yet. However, if we examine the collapse of the USSR and current deterioration of U.S. geopolitical power we see that both are related to the market. The Berlin Wall collapsed due to lack of market and Wall Street has collapsed due to excessive market. The first resulted from a centrally planned system to supplant the market wanted and ended up planning for the shortage. The second was the result of market deregulation that led to speculation of financial products and nothing complicated clear that eventually engulf the entire global financial market.

However, the difference between the two collapses, is that the Berlin Wall and it was always centrally planned economies and brought down the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, while the collapse of Wall Street not the end of the market economy, but an extreme form of this (deregulated finance) and it has not collapsed to the United States and its NATO allies.

Today there is no economic instrument that can replace monetary exchange of goods and services making the market. Had various forms can capitalism depending on how they regulate or not regulate the market, but the market is not a product of capitalism, but on the contrary, it is an economic instrument invented long before Jesus Christ, who in his time merchants who were already expelled from the Temple and also used the Cesar currency.

The fall of the Berlin Wall caused the disappearance of the USSR as a global superpower and made the world stage to return to Russia as a Eurasian regional power. According to Putin was a huge geopolitical cataclysm. In contrast, the collapse of Wall Street is a major geopolitical earthquake, which does not convert the U.S. into a regional power, but is strong enough to completely degrade the global unipolar power.

Indeed, the Wall Street crash and severe recession that will affect strategic military power of the United States and is degraded by the failure of the occupation and nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan as viable states and democratic. Also the financial crisis and economic downturn will make it more difficult to maintain 700 military bases the U.S. has to project its power globally. (See sidebar: "A Bankrupt Superpower")

Wall Street's collapse also occurs when the Bush administration has demolished softpower (ideological power) American. The promotion of human rights and democracy that were the foundation of the American ideology is now in tatters, after the scandals of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the torture and the famous "renditions" that is, the abduction of terror suspects to be sent to interview close friends in non-human rights. Softpower This destruction of the United States will further increase the rescue of Wall Street banks because it demonstrates that the U.S. does not practice the neoliberal ideology that preaches.

With the global financial crisis, the world begins to realize that neoliberalism is a false liberalism that financial markets not self-correcting, they need regulation to avoid becoming financial weapons of mass destruction. Soon also the ordinary people will realize that neoliberalism is also a false trade liberalism. The crisis, global recession and protectionist tendencies that emerge, reveal that free trade is practiced in only one direction. The only ones who have released their trade are developing countries, through adjustments of the IMF and free trade, while the United States, the European Union and OECD all spend hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to their agriculture , hundreds of branches with excess industrial and protect intellectual property. So many people wonder why the radical left attack a global free trade, which actually does not exist.


The non-polar disorder and instability


Just as the collapse of the Berlin Wall changed the world power bipolar unipolar, severe financial crisis and global recession will end the American unipolar power and will open a apolar new geopolitical era, where neither the U.S. nor any other major power, have the strategic ability to control a growing international anarchy and establish a new world order. (4)

this unipolar system being replaced by a non-polar and not by a multipolar, as some believe, because there multipolarity is necessary that the most powerful, the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France split the world power, or Otherwise, fight, including him. None of this is happening. Today the United States can not dominate the world and its allies, the European Union and Japan, are far from able to do so, in contrast, need to be protected by the United States if they have problems with Russia and China, which , after replacing the autocratic capitalism communism do not compete against the U.S. for world domination. China only want the United States not to interfere in the problems of Tibet and Taiwan. Russia wants the same thing, against the ex-Soviet republics that it considers its sphere of influence.

Thus the world, not unipolar or multipolar system, up to the apolarity. United States is no longer the sheriff of the global village and no one can replace him. We are witnessing the birth of a new geopolitical era, where all the great powers are conspicuous by their impotence in front of a chaotic and fragmented world of poverty, terrorism, civil wars, genocide, ethnic cleansing, trafficking in drugs, weapons and people.
apolar
This new era, now the financial crisis and global recession force propelled, may cause specific geopolitical situations such as those listed below:

-End of unilateral diplomacy of the United States through close coordination with allies and other states.
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U.S. Withdrawal from Iraq within 18 months and focus more forces in Afghanistan and it's border with Pakistan. Intensification of the war with the Taliban and their tribal allies. (Barak Obama)

-Consolidation of the Shiite alliance, between the governments of Iraq and Iran after the U.S. unemployment. Possibilities of civil war with Sunnis and Kurds.

-Continuation of the difficulties for peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority because of divisions among Palestinians and in the Government of Israel and especially the loss of power of persuasion of the United States in the Middle East-Mayor

use of mercenaries by the United States in its military operations.

-strengthening Russian influence over its ex-Soviet environment and China on Tibet.

-Continuation of nuclear proliferation in Iran and possibly other states. Difficulties in

advocacy humamos rights and democracy in Russia, China and other countries with autocratic regimes and authoritarian in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

-Return of the United States to Latin America to consolidate and strengthen democratic allies in Latin American armies to combat terrorism, drug trafficking and crime. Increased

-ethnic wars, religious and political and the collapse of poor countries ungovernable chaotic entities (ECIS), mainly in Africa and other underdeveloped regions. Increase in gross violations of human rights and crimes against humanity.

-significant increase in overall crime, drug trafficking, weapons and people.

-Degradation of operations of United Nations peace through indifference or disagreement among the permanent members of the Security Council and also by lack of resources due to global economic crisis.

In conclusion, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Wall Street have shown that ideological concepts, for and against the market, such as those inspired central planning and wanted to supplant that inspired the so-called invisible hand directs and corrects him are false, dangerous and above all, ethically unacceptable. The first because it only works under totalitarianism and the second because he preaches that the sum of all selfishness creates prosperity. Ultimately, the fall of real socialism and the collapse of deregulated financial capitalism are the result of moral decay that has been stripped of ethical content of economic activities and has opened a non-polar geopolitical era, full of instability and violence.

Geneva, October 30, 2008

NOTES.

1 .- William Pfaff. Herald Tribune. October 3, 2008. 2 .-
BBC News. November 28, 2008.
3.-Report of the Director General. International Labour Organization. ILO Website. November 28, 2008. 4.-
Oswaldo de Rivero. Power without power. Make that 153. March-April 2005
(*) Former Ambassador of Peru to the United Nations

My Oovoo Camera Isn't Working

Economic Growth Can Be Reconciled with sustanaible development? (Inglés Version)

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Can economic growth be reconciled with sustanaible development ?
On a knife-edge between climate change and Millenium Development goals

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ECONOMIC GROWTH CAN BE

RECONCILE WITH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT? ON A KNIFE-EDGE BETWEEN CLIMATE CHANGE AND MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS

26/6/2008

I do not think
Economic Growth That Can Be Reconciled with Sustainable Development in the near future and Possibly not for Many Decades. I Wish It Could But it can not. In FACT, we use the term Sustainable Development very easily. In reality, we are using an oxymoron, because sustainable development is not yet possible since all the production of goods and services in the global economy, utilizes fossil fuels, and these polluting energies will not easily be replaced.

Today, more than 75 per cent of energy used globally is made up of oil, coal and gas and our civilization is far from being able to do without these energies which are highly polluting and emit large quantities of greenhouse gases. Renewable energies, which would make sustainable development possible, are certainly not just around the corner.

To date, there is not one single form of renewable energy that could be used to replace the almost 90 million barrels a day of oil needed, to generate the 320 billion kilowatts/hour required, to produce the 58 trillion dollars of goods and services by the global economy.

However, the problem with achieving sustainable development is not only to replace fossil energy in order to stop global warming but is, above all, to change our patterns of consumption, which are polluting our cities, oceans, lakes, rivers and destroying forests and bio diversity.

Today the global model of consumption is what I call the “California Model.” It consists of an unsustainable urban expansion over agricultural land, which consumes more and more water, food and oil, whose principal economic activity is “shopping” and where the private automobile is the king. This is a model that produces enormous amounts of emissions of carbon dioxide and garbage.

Following the California Model, our urban civilization has gone beyond the footprint of the human species on the planet. This footprint should be, as a maximum, the use of 1.8 hectares of the earth’s resources per person but now it is 2.2 hectares. Therefore we are 25 per cent overdrawn on the sustainable use of the planet’s resources.

What would happen if all the 5.5 billion inhabitants of the poor countries were provided with 5.5 billion credit cards, so that they could consume like the people of the rich countries? According to Professor Jared Diamond, the one billion inhabitants of the rich countries consume 32 times more than the 5 billion of the poor countries. Therefore if these 5.5 billion were to consume as much as the populations of the rich countries, it will be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billon people. A number, which the planet simply cannot sustain. We would have to buy one o two more planets.

So, if we want sustainable development we have to change our patterns of consumption and this change must be focused, first of all, in the rich consumer societies that are today transmitting, through publicity and global trade, the California Model to hundreds of millions of people around the world.


The Report of the organization, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, carried out by some 1,300 experts from 95 countries, concludes that over the last 50 years in order to satisfies our consumption patterns the growth of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in particular in the industrial countries, has degraded ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any other period in history. The GDP grows but the planet doesn’t grow.

To change our consumption patterns we cannot continue with the fiction of interpreting an annual rise in GDP, that destroys non-renewable natural resources, as an increase in nations’ wealth. However, the World Bank, the IMF, even the United Nations itself, and the majority of economists and politicians venerate the annual growth of GDP as the indicator of development and happiness. This worship of the destruction of our own habitat is as illogical as venerating the growth of a cancerous cell, which also grows destroying its own organism. Perhaps, the future generations in the next millennium, when they study the way of consumption of our civilization, will classify GDP as the indicator of our barbarism.

For example, the rate of growth of the GDP of China is glorified as a paradigm of development. The majority of the international media only describe the China of the economic miracle, but the reality behind this miracle is that the urban population in China grows at an incredible rate of some 29 million every year, in a context where a third of the land suffers from erosion and is unfit for agriculture, where 75 per cent of the rivers and lakes are contaminated, and where 90 per cent of underground water sources are also polluted. Today 400 Chinese cities suffer from water shortages and almost all of them suffer, in addition, from some of the most polluted air in the world, which, according to the World Bank, causes almost 400 thousand premature deaths every year.

The catastrophic situation of the environment in China has triggered hundreds of thousands of unexpected protests. Concerned by this new social protest, the Communist Party of China adopted a “Green” GDP, which would discount from growth the costs of the destruction of non-renewable resources. This new GDP was never applied because it would imply admitting that the average growth of China over the last twenty years (1985 – 2005) was not 8 per cent but only 5.8 per cent.

Fortunately, there are researchers who seek a different calculation from that of GDP. In 1989, Professors Herman Daly and John Cobb of the University of Maryland, created the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), which discounts from the GDP air pollution, destruction of agricultural land and the deterioration of the ozone layer. This index, applied to the economic growth of the United States, demonstrated that the per capita income of the American people had dropped by ten per cent since 1976.
Another new indicator known as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) was created in 1995 by the NGO Redefining Progress. This indicator also discounts the external costs caused by the destruction of non-renewable resources, such as air pollution, the depletion of energy due to traffic congestion and also the costs of crime. In the light of this new indicator, the GDP of the United States that, according to the statistics grew by 56 per cent for the period of 1982 – 2002, in reality only grew by 2 per cent.
Recently, President Nicholas Sarkozy ser up a Committee of Experts, with the cooperation of Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, to change the way French GDP is calculated. The purpose is to include quality-of-life factors,
The idea of replacing the unsustainable GDP is advancing. More groups of experts are working on this issue and I think that the academic centres, which study development, also need to adopt a critical attitude towards the unsustainable GDP and investigate alternatives.
With regard to Millennium Development, I consider that its principal Goals are not in fact Development Goals, because the reduction by half of the number of those who live on our planet with one dollar a day, as well as the number of those who suffer hunger, does not constitute development, but rather damage control of human misery. Raising the miserable income from 1 dollar to 2 dollars a day is not development, because those who earn 2 dollars are still living in poverty, even those who earn 3, 4, and 5 dollars a day are still poor, particularly now that the prices of food and fuel have increased.

When these Millennium Development Goals were reviewed, I was Ambassador to the United Nations in New York. During this review, I maintained that the principal Millennium Development Goals were not laying the foundations for a process of sustainable development, because they do not include a coherent strategy to correct the dangerous imbalance that exists today between the growing urban population in the developing countries and their decreasing access to water, food and energy.

Since the dawn of humanity, the fundamental balance for a civilization to survive is that the size of the population does not exceed the decisive resources available to sustain life, such as water, foodstuffs and energy. This balance is what I called, in my book the Myth of Development: the “Physical and Social Balance”. All civilizations have been dependent on having sufficient water, food and energy for their population, and when they do not, they collapse. However, the Millennium Development overlooked this and left the invisible hand of the market to look after the physical and social balance. Today we can see the consequence of that, reflected in the global food and energy crisis.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the growing physical and social imbalance between food, energy, water and the growing urban population of the poor countries is like a socio-political seismic fault line, which can cause a series of tremors followed by the cataclysm of the national disintegration of many poor countries.

However, this physical and social imbalance has been ignored not only in the Millennium of Development but also in the national agendas of the developing countries. The majority of the Governments of these countries, overwhelmed by their external debt, have dedicated their policies more towards complying with the adjustments forced on them by the IMF and the World Bank, than addressing a physical and social imbalance which could convert their countries into non-viable nation states.

Most of national, as well as international technocrats never address the possibility of the non-viability of nation states. The discussion of this issue is taboo, because they still live under the influence of more than half a century of the myth of development, which predicates that all underdeveloped nation states will one day become developed nations, prosperous consumer societies with instant gratification, like a mirror image of the industrialized consumer societies.

In the actual ecological situation of the world, we need to free ourselves from the myth of development, to abandon the search for El Dorado. We need to replace the elusive agenda of the richest of the nations with an urgent agenda for the survival of nations. Today, the priority must be to stabilize the growth of the urban population and increase access to water, food and renewable energy to ensure that urban life in the poor countries is not converted into an ecological hell.

The achievement of this physical and social balance is not related to any ideology. Therefore, it should be possible to agree on a “National Pact for Survival” among all the political actors in any developing country where the urban population is exploding and there are alarming symptoms of water, food and energy insecurity.

These National Pacts for Survival should emerge from a wide-ranging national dialogue and democratic exchange between the government, political parties, business managers, workers, the academic community and civil society. Only an ongoing democratic exercise of this nature can help to overcome the challenges posed by the physical and social imbalance and in this way prevent many developing countries from becoming non-viable nation states.

Thank you very much.

Oswaldo de Rivero

Open Gyms Basketball Nj

economic growth and sustainable development. (June 2008). Narco enclaves goblales

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original English Translation


INSTITUTE OF SENIOR
AND DEVELOPMENT INTERNATIONAL STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF GENEVA



Conference Ambassador Oswaldo de Rivero

CAN ECONOMIC reconciled with the growing

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT? 06/26/1908




I do not think that economic growth may be sustainable today. I hope so, but it is not. Very easy to use the term sustainable development, but what we're using, there is nothing that an oxymoron. Sustainable development does not exist for the simple reason that almost all production of goods and services in the global economy is made with non-renewable fossil fuels and pollutants, which are very far from being replaced.

Over 75% of energy used globally is composed of fossil fuels, oil, coal and gas, our civilization is far from overcome these polluting energy. The most one can do now is more radically reducing their emissions. Renewable energies that would enable sustainable growth of GDP are not just around the corner. Today oil is the king and are not renewable energy heir to any successor to his throne. There

enthusiastically about hydrogen but this element is not a power in itself to put it directly into the gas tank of the car because it is always mixed with oxygen in the water. To remove it take a lot of fossil energy. Another possibility is fusion energy hydrogen plasma, this energy would be like find the Holy Grail and start producing energy from the sun in the Earth itself, but not so easy, it is still very expensive but it takes many years of research and billions of dollars.

solar energy and wind have been developed considerably in recent years in industrialized countries but the problem that both of them is still the cost, the size of their facilities and especially the storage of surplus energy for days without sun or wind . The biofuel are is another possible alternative, but this proved that using food for cars has not been a good idea and also that this energy can replace oil would require doubling available agricultural land which would be ethically and politically unacceptable.

Today there is still no single renewable energy capable of replacing the nearly 90 million barrels of oil needed to generate 320 billion kilowatt-hours annually to produce 54 trillion dollars in goods and services in the global economy .

Fossil fuels will only be replaced only in part, by a combination of renewable energy is cheaper and can be stored as hydrocarbons, but to get there still requires many years of research, billions of dollars and especially political will Governments with more advanced science because there are market forces alone which will replace the oil alone. Experience has shown that the recent technological revolution achieved with satellite communications, integrated circuits, computers and the Internet were products of state policies during the military competition of the Cold War.

Today a global economy driven by the intensive use of polluting fossil fuels to heat up the planet has made our civilization in one of the most serious dilemmas I have ever experienced. In fact, low per capita consumption of fossil fuels leads to the economic infeasibility of an nation, but a high per capita consumption by all nations leads to the impossibility of our civilization. For the first time, the energy dilemma has put ecology at the center of the target, not only of countries but of all mankind.

Indeed, today to find out where our civilization will need to know more ecology than economy. Economic science was a civilization that dominated the production of smoke that began 200 years ago and today is ecologically dead. Now ecology science is becoming a sustainable civilization, yet far, which tells us that not only need new renewable energy to survive but, above all, we need to change our consumption patterns.

Today, the global consumption pattern is what I call in my book The Myth of Development, "California model." It's an unsustainable urban expansion on agricultural land, which consumes more water, food and energy, whose main economic activity is "shopping" and where the private car is king. A model that produces an enormous amount of emissions of carbon dioxide heats the planet and unsustainable mountain of garbage and toxic waste.

California global replica model has exceeded our urban civilization, the imprint of the human species on the planet. This should be a maximum of 1.8 hectares of use of nonrenewable resources per person on Earth is now, of 2.2 hectares. And 25% are overdrawn on the sustainable use of the planet.

What if we gave them 5 billion credit cards to all inhabitants of poor countries to consume as the 1000 million people in rich countries. According to Professor Jarred Diamond inhabitants of rich countries use 32 times more than those of poor countries so if they consume as the inhabitants of rich countries, it would be ecologically world population of 72 billion, something the planet can not hold, we would have to buy another.

If we want sustainable development, not only have to change the pattern of energy but also have to change our consumption patterns. This change should be done mostly in affluent societies the consumption of industrialized countries are those that are now transmitting the California model unsustainable, through advertising and global trade, hundreds of millions of people around the world.

However, changing consumption patterns of the California model is extremely difficult, because the poor aspire to live like the rich who already live like Californians. Change the aspirations of the poor and lifestyle of the rich is not easy because it involves, rather than a socio-political revolution, an ethical revolution that will allow us to exercise self-control over our ego's desire to possess and consume the material objects that have other and new creating relentless advertising and marketing.

may begin to change our consumption patterns as a result of significant increase in the coming decades, energy prices, water, food and forced to the great ecological disasters, droughts, famines, hurricanes, mega -forest fires, loss of glaciers and rising sea levels as a result of global warming the planet. In any case, history teaches us that homo sapiens only change ethically as a result of great suffering and tragedy.

According to the study of the organization "Evaluation of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, conducted by 1,300 experts from 95 countries, reveals that 60% of the ecosystems that support life on Earth are being degraded because they are used in a non- sustainable. This study concludes that in the last 50 years the GDP growth to keep consumption patterns, particularly in developed consumer societies has deteriorated ecosystems more rapidly and deeper than at any other time in history. The GNP is growing but the planet is not growing.

can not continue with fiction to interpret an annual growth of GNP, which prey on non-renewable natural resources and using the environment as a raw material increased the wealth of nations. However, the World Bank, IMF and United Nations itself and most economists and politicians revere this growth as the indicator of the progress and happiness. This veneration of the destruction of the habitat itself is as illogical as thinking venerate the growth of cancer cells, which grow also destroying their own bodies Perhaps future generations in the next millennium, when considering the way we produce and consume of our civilization, classified GNP as the measure of our barbarity.

Despite this reality, for example, now comes to China for its high growth of GNP, as an example of development for all countries. Today, most international news only describe the Chinese economic miracle but say almost nothing of the unprecedented ecological disaster that submerged China.

The reality behind the miracle is that China's urban population is growing at an incredible rate of around 30 million a year within a habitat, where a third of the land suffers from erosion and is disabled for agriculture, where 75% of rivers and lakes contaminated, with 90% of underground sources of water is contaminated. Today there are 400 Chinese cities are short of water and almost all of them also suffer from one of the worst air pollution and water in the world that causes almost 400 000 premature deaths annually, according to the World Bank. The mega-

environmental devastation produced by the Chinese miracle is over the fulminate to be hundreds of thousands of unexpected social protest. Concerned about the increasing protests, the Chinese Communist Party drew up a "Green GDP" which after deduction of growth, the cost of nonrenewable resources. This green growth rate came not apply because if had been made, would have had to admit that the average growth of GDP of China, during the last 20 years (1985-2005) had not been about 10%, because he would have had to discount, according to World Bank , 5.8% for ecological costs. It would then only an annual average of 4.2%. Fortunately today there

researchers seeking other than the GDP calculation. Within this new approach to the wealth of nations teachers Daly and Cobb, created in 1980, the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare GNP discounting air pollution, destruction of agricultural land and deterioration of the ozone layer. This index applied to economic growth United States showed that the per-capita income of Americans had fallen 10% since 1976. Other U.S. non-governmental group created a new indicator called Genuine Wealth Indicator (IRG). This measure also discounted, the external costs caused by the destruction of nonrenewable resources such as air pollution, energy waste by automobile traffic congestion and the costs of crime. Under this new indicator, the GNP of the States, according to statistics, grew by 56% between 1982-2002, would have grown only 2% in reality.

The idea of \u200b\u200breplacing the unsustainable rate of GDP this progress. More groups of experts are working on it, but it is necessary that the academic centers involved in development also have a critical attitude on the unsustainable growth of GNP. Recently, President Nicolas Sarkozy has set up an Expert Committee with the cooperation of the Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, to change the way it calculates the GDP of France. The purpose is to include factors on the quality of life.

As for Millennium Development Goals, I think that their goal principial is not really a development goal for halving the number of people living on Earth in extreme poverty, with dollar a day is not doing development, but to control the damage caused by global poverty. Making poor spend more than $ 2 per day earning is not development because they are still very poor who get 2, dollars, including those earning today 3, 4 and even $ 5 a day, now that food has risen and energy.

When we reviewed these goals of the millennium I was as Ambassador to the United Nations, the review coincided with the publication of my book The Myth of Development in New York that the UN was seen as an iconoclastic work by some and other realistic . I argued during the review of the goals of the Millennium goals were not addressed or even to create the foundations for a sustainable development process because it contained a coherent strategy to destroy the imbalance that exists today among the growing urban populations in poor countries and the availability of water, food and energy.

technocrats who designed the so-called Millennium Development Goals did not realize that since the dawn of humanity, the fundamental balance for a civilization to survive is that the population does not exceed the availability of resources critical to life as water , food and energy. This balance is what we call, in Myth of Development: Balancing Social and Physical. " All civilizations have depended on having enough food, water and energy for people, when they did it collapsed. However, the technocracy forgot this and let the invisible hand of market deal of physical and social imbalance. Today we see the consequences with the global food and energy crisis

Today the greatest threat to international stability was the physical and social imbalance that is forming in the world between the expansion of the global urban population in poor countries and the availability water, food and energy. In 2020, the population of poor countries reached about 6 600 million and is almost entirely urban. Unless there is a fall brutal and unprecedented birth rate and especially rural migration and an increase also unprecedented availability of food, water and energy, much of the world's population will live in urban physical and social imbalance in chaotic and mega cities with millions of poor and unemployed, malnourished, surrounded by pollution, socio-political turmoil and violence.

At the beginning of XXI century, the physical and social growing imbalance between food, energy, water and urban population is a socio-political fault line may cause a series of tremors and after the cataclysm of national disintegration. However, physical and social imbalance was ignored in the national agendas of underdeveloped states. In most of the governments of these countries has been a total disregard for the urban population growth and future water availability, food and energy. During the past 20 years burdened by debt were devoted more to obey the settings that are dictated by the IMF and World Bank to meet the growing physical and social imbalance that could now return viable nation states.

The technocrats also national and international non-viability never discuss national issues and problems of survival of the so-called developing countries. These issues are a kind of national and international taboo because they still live under the influence of more than half a century the myth of development, according to which all states underdeveloped nations will be a day nation states developed, prosperous societies of consumption and instant gratification to the image and likeness of industrialized societies and societies of mass consumption.

The truth is that, after more than fifty years of theory and policy development, real per capita income in more than seventy countries developing misnamed, is lower than they were twenty years ago. In a population of 5.5 billion in the developing world, there more than 4.000 million survive on only two or three dollars a day and more than 1.000 million less than a dollar a day. This reality invites rid of the myth of development, to abandon the quest for El Dorado and replace the elusive agenda of the wealth of nations in the urgent task of the survival of nations even more now that climate change and water shortages , food and energy are a reality. Priority today is to stabilize the urban population growth and increase the availability of water, energy and food to make urban life in poor countries will not become an inferno.

Achieving this balance physical and social is unrelated to any ideology and therefore likely to be concluded as the National Pact for Survival by all political actors in any poor country where the urban population is growing considerably and alarming symptoms of insecurity perceived water, energy and food.

The only condition for achieving Covenants Survival in poor countries is that there genuinely democratic regimes. Survival of Covenants must emerge from a large national dialogue and a great democratic consensus between governments, political parties, entrepreneurs, workers, academics and civil society in general and should work permanently so. Only with a constant exercise of this nature may help overcome the challenges the physical and social imbalances and climate change pose to the viability of many nation states subdesarrollaos. Thank

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Copyright © Oswaldo de Rivero 2008