Actual Text: "There is no hope for immortality through riches."
Response: This part, taken from the scriptures caught my eye because it is a reality that I try to remember daily. Ever since I was young my parents stressed the need to give what you can and never be greedy; simply because at the end of the day, you can't take your riches, or treasures with you. It also makes me think about the ancient Egyptians and how they actually would bury the pharaohs in tombs with their treasures for the journey to the afterlife. But I think the riches that lead to immortality are those within the spirit and soul that come from the Freedom discussed in this passage.
Actual Text reading 2 "And what will happen now that everyone else in the world wants to be just like us, with our three televisions, two cars, and a personal monthly energy bill greater than the annual income per capita of some poor countries? Can the planet sustain us, or are the three-legged frogs now cropping up in fresh water ponds all over America one of many warning signs that it cannot?"
Response: This text reminded me of the stuff video we watched in regards to the statistic that we would need three to five more worlds if everyone produced like America. Therefore, like the odd three legged frogs and other elements like global warming and an absurd rise in natural catastrophe's I do not think this world can support anymore than it is now. And even at the rate it is currently producing waste it may not last much longer so to think of others copying this trend of wastefulness is horrifying.
Text: "I believe that the most valuable asset that congregations and other faith-based organizations can leverage is faith. The core of this faith is the belief that there is great love at work in the universe that seeks justice, mercy, peace, and joy. Our various faith traditions and practices teach us how to stay open to that love, tap into it, align ourselves with it, and be empowered by it."
Response: I really liked this part of the reading because it used something intangible, such as faith, as the most valuable asset! I feel like when talking about assets a lot of people try to equate that to tangible things like buildings and such. This is a really nice way of talking about something that creates value and actually unites all on a ground level.
Text "The emphasis on relationship and community inspires the leadership to see the needs of the whole person and want to help."
Response: This is a great point! If there is a commitment to a community which is formed through a relationship then there is a deeper need to do better. There is a want to help in the best way possible because there is that foundation of a relationship. This, in my opinion is essential to a successful change in any area of life. If there is no relationship, there is no real commitment that pursues another's best interests.
Community Of Equals “The solution to our global social crisis is not that the poor become rich, which is neither feasible nor desirable, but that the rich join with the poor.”
I liked this part in particular because a lot of ignorant people think that its about giving the poor the money of the rich. However, it is more about collaboration in the sense that we are all human and at a basic level no one person is greater than another. Just because you have money does not mean you are rich and just because you lack money does not mean you are poor. Everyone needs to look out for one another on a basic level of human rights, clothing, food, water and shelter. No one should be disrespected because of their finances. Every human being deserves the same treatment in order to live a life of true freedom and enjoyment. This needs to be a team effort everyone needs to connect in order to put everyone on an equal playing field, and again this has nothing to do with money but with rights!
RUMI- “Wanting wealth, power, and more tasty food have made you drunk. When you can’t have what you want, you get headaches. That hungover disappointment is proof that what made you drunk was desire. Let a more measured necessity govern the intensity of wanting.” This is very relevant in the world we live in today swallowed by consumerism and the “need” to have “things”. This desire to want more and more has left us hungover and disappointed when we cannot get more of the more we already have allotted. We already have so much more stuff then necessary that this desire grows and feeds itself to a point where I do not think many people can ever find satisfaction, especially just within the simple beauties of life itself. We miss out on the actual “stuff” and “things” that do not leave us hungover such as beautiful sunsets, sunrises, ocean tides, stars, love and why? For what? because we need to have the newest IPhone to record everything we see or think we are “experiencing”. You cannot experience life stuck behind things that “capture” the moment. You are living through technology and with all the advertisements technology has you are beginning again the perpetual cycle of consumerism. Meaning, now you need the newer version because the old one was not good enough so you throw it out and buy again what you need. Meanwhile, you forget to just live and experience I mean actually feel and experience the world. You are left drunk in a haze of materials that you “needed” so badly.
Actual Text: "40% of the waterways have become undrinkable"
Response: This is so scary to think about. Not only in the sense of lack of drinking water but what does this do to water life? How can we let 40% become undrinkable when every human being is dependent on water. What is going to happen when this percentage increases? How will we get water to drink? There is no substitute so therefore our waterways should be one of the most protected aspects of the planet!
Actual Text:"The food at the top of the food chain with the highest level of many toxic contaminants human breast milk.That means the smallest members are getting the highest lifetime dose of toxic chemicals from their mothers. Breast feeding is still best and mothers should definitely keep breast feeding"
Response: This caught my ear because umm its like an oxymoron! How can this woman go on and on about the contaminants in breast milk but then say its "still the best". I'm sorry I get her point here but this aspect made no sense to me. She just defeated her own argument. Why would a mother knowing this factoid she just shared with us ever think about breast feeding again? That would be like poisoning your baby and knowing about it.
Text 1: "Before our model, residents of public and subsidized housing were evicted from their units when they could no longer live independently. With few, if any, options, these residents became homeless or moved to costly and depressing nursing home care, prematurely taxing the states' Medicaid budgets."
Response: Mia has found the niche that is a win win for all parties involved. The realism however, that those unable to live independently end up evicted is horrifying. One would think that those unable to live independently would be served with the most help possible just on a human empathy level, but this is not the case. You can see in this excerpt the domino effect that does trickle to our Medicaid budget being that there are premature taxes due to the initial eviction and inevitable depressing nursing home that is to follow the fate of one who cannot live independently. Now, with Mia's new model this is all about to change and not only make sense on a monetary level but on a human respect level.
Actual Text 2: "For the first time in the history of this country, older people will outnumber teenagers two to one."
Response: This fact surprised me because I never really thought about that statistic. But it makes sense being that the baby boomers' generation is aging. With this thought in mind Mia could not have happened at a better time. If they can have this movement spread for the largest older generation ever, then we will have a bright future.
Actual Text 1 "For Machiavelli, and later for Thomas Hobbes, the individual person is wicked, fearful, brutish,and cunning, words which became the anthropological vocabulary of modernism."
Response: I think that due to the events witnessed this view of the individual was formed. However, it goes hand in hand with no one being perfect, and humanity as a whole flawed. But, this is not applicable to all persons and I think that is often the case. Just because the events in Italy were bad for Machiavelli there is still always a positive choice, it may be the harder of the two but it does exist. People are intrinsically good in my opinion, ad those who have bad can learn to be good. I do not believe that everyone has bad intentions but that sometimes the situations they are forced in makes them behave accordingly which is unfortunate. But if you look around there are good people everywhere.
Text 2:"The businesses foster communion with employees by paying particular attention to their health, well-being, and development."
Response 2: This stood out to me because one of the biggest lessons you learn in GSB is that fair treatment of employees is crucial. Any successful business case study we have done has had a business that not only pays their employees the fair wage, but also has amazing packages for vacation, child accommodations, understanding absences. This reason is because a happy employee is a good employee. By showing that you as an employer genuinely care about what is going on in your employees life, and their well-being you are creating a connection of loyalty that they will notice and thus they will not only have incentive to work but they will have a valuable reason to stay with your company.
Video Part 1 About ten minutes into the video I was taken back by the women who were reading off the names of their children that were missing. In particular, the poor woman who named four of her sons(Mendoza).
Video Part 2 "It was the height of the recession when they caught and beheaded people and dumped the bodies for people to see. They wanted to instill fear"
Response to Part 1 I was taken back by how horrifying it must have been for thee elderly mothers to know that their sons "disappeared" after seeing the violence all around they must have known inside that the chances of seeing their children, let alone them being alive were slim to none. No parent should ever have to bury their child but this is a whole new level knowing that they were taken by member of ORDEN and the national guard and most likely tortured before death.
Response to Part 2 I was really shook up after seeing the graphic footage of those men decomposing in that ditch. It made the documentary very real at that moment. Not that it did not move me in some kind of way before but after a visual of flies and bugs literally eating these men as they lay dead so young it really effected me. And to think this was a daily occurrence for these people to see being as they wanted to "instill fear" there was many brutal visuals they must have seen. That is so scary to think that any human can lose themselves so far in evil that they go to the extreme of killing in such a way that it was for show.
1) "These three cases- of nuclear waste siting, charitable fund-raising, and late day-care pickups- illustrate the way introducing money into a nonmarket setting can change people's attitudes and croud out moral and civic commitments."
2) "Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all."
Responses
1) I was perplexed to see that adding monetary rewards or disciplines, in the day care example, actually swayed people's moral sentiments in the opposite way it was intended to. I would think that people would agree more to the nuclear plant, for example, because they would be gaining some money reward for doing so, however, that was not the case. Rather, they saw this as more of an incentive for them to disagree with the plant than they did in the first place, minus the money! The group of children selling for charity that were paid did a worse job then those who weren't paid because of the feeling of moral obligation rather than work. And the parents who left their kids late, after implementing a penalty fee continued to leave them at a higher rate then before! I had never thought about money making people act as such I really thought it would be a motivator instead. When it comes to civic commitments I now know that money really cannot win here.
2)How can such a big and well known firm lose its culture? It's very sad to see that the clients are really being abused here and not even treated like human beings. All they represent is a dollar sign. Business ethics teaches you to keep a culture with strong morals and respect, not only for your employees but your clients and the world as a whole. Goldman Sachs should be ashamed of putting money above all else. Money is supposed to follow an idea, a corporate mission, it is not supposed to be the main concern at all other expenses. I wonder how many other corporations are like Goldman and if they will ever be revealed or change.
Actual Text 1) "And unfortunately we cant "grow" our way beyond this $9,000 a year figure, since at the current level of $65 trillion GWP we have already OVERSHOT BY 30% what the Earth actually produces"
2) "We actually need to "shrink" that down to $6,000 just to come back to a level where humanity is merely using 100% of everything the Earth produces"
Response
1) I agree with the author that $9,000 a year seems way too little to the average American but on a large scale this income would be way more than the average of $900 a year that almost half of the people in the world live on. If we already OVERSHOT by 30% of what the Earth actually produces then what damage have we done already, and is there coming back from that? Rent in Manhattan is more than $900 a month, and this is the yearly income for nearly half of the population.
2) In order for humans to create an environment that is sustainable, we need to be able to live on $6000 a person. This would reduce world output so that humanity is using exactly what humanity produces. We can focus on moving towards wave power and different green energy sources. More people need to be aware of this because it is a group effort as a human family and in order for this to be possible everything in regards to pricing and buying power needs to change.
1) Actual Facts from the disposable people video: A) 27 million slaves in the world today more then any other time in history. B) Slavery is not legal anywhere, but happens everywhere. C) At least 14,500 slaves are trafficked into the US each year. D) $90 is the average cost for a human slave around the world. E) It is possible to end slavery in 25 years but EVERYONEmust play a part.
2)Actual Text from the reading:
"We believe that the more you produce, the more profit you will make. In the case of these growers, the more they produced and the harder they worked, the more they "went into the hole.""
Actual Response
1) This may sound very naive, but I was not aware that in the world we live in today, there are more slaves then ever before. I was under the impression that yes, injustices do happen and there is a level of human trafficking present but this number of 27 million is actually frightening. We learn in grammar school, high school, and even college about slavery from the past, however, I have not taken any course that has remotely touched on the current massive amount of trafficking that occurs regularly. 14,500 humans are trafficked into the US in a year, but where is this in our news? Why does this not make front page? That is bothersome to me especially because we live in such a technologically advance area of the world and this information should be made apparent just as frequently as the advertisements on television or the internet to buy a new car! $90 is the average cost of a human slave... how can we put a price on a persons life? I have friends who spend $90 on shoes and to think of this as the price to own somebody is absolutely mind blowing. And finally, it will take 25 years to end this if, and only if, everyone gets involved. This links back to my point on the massive 27 million slaves that I did not even know existed at such high masses. Education is the issue here, this is a global issue that needs to be brought to light on all social media outlets. If everyone really made this number known just as everyone knew when Beyonce was going to have her baby, or when Kim Kardashian was to have hers, then I believe this could come to an end. Until then, I am appalled!
2) In the documentary "Black Gold", the story of the coffee growers in Ethiopia, the need for fair trade is seen clearly. These workers were not paid or let alone respected on a human level. I was raised to believe if you work hard you will be rewarded, and in many cases this is not true. If the more they worked the less they received then where is the incentive to even work? Where do these workers find the faith and good spirit to continue life as such? There is no motivation, there is no Universal Declaration of Human Rights that they know of. This is injustice at its finest.
Wed Nov 20, 2013 3:17 am
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