Rapporteurs 2. Block
Social organization and the environment
Rapporteurs participating in the area: Right & Law, Politics and Economics
Hervé Andrès (1966) is a doctor of political science from the Université Paris 7 Denis Diderot (2007). He works as an engineer in the national centre of scientific research in Nice, in a laboratory that specialises in research about migration and interethnic relations. His PhD deals with the question of voting rights for foreigners and is seen as a revealing insight into the democratic model of modern sovereign states crisis. New possible subjects for further research are leading him to also study sports entertainment as a political phenomenon, mainly the question of nationality in sport.
TITLE OF THE INTERVENTION
The exclusion of foreigners from voting: key contradiction between sovereignty and democracy.
ABSTRACT
In one in three countries in the world, foreigners can vote, at least in some ballots. Yet no country in the world recognises a strict political equality between their nationals and their resident foreigners. Thus, the paradigm that views citizenship as a relationship of allegiance to a sovereign state is predominant in practice and even more so in their minds. Nowadays, the right to vote is the main tool - symbolic and instrumental at the same time - that marks the formation of a political community and contributes towards legitimizing their decision-making mechanisms. Foreigners, if resident in the political community in question, are subject to the same political decisions as the nationals. If they are excluded from the right to vote, they do not contribute to the decisions that affect them, and this causes a democratic legitimacy problem. The solutions adopted by numerous countries to include at least a few categories of foreigners for at least some electoral categories circumvent the basic problem, this being the link between sovereignty and democracy. Modern democracies are often developed through the fiction of the people’s (or nation’s) sovereignty. But a demanding formation of democracy, beyond legalistic definitions, leads to interrogation about the link between the two principles of democracy and sovereignty. The issue of voting rights for foreigners is thus seen as key point of conflict between the two, and it paves the way for renewed reflection about a conception of democracy for the people who come.
Stefano D’Errico
Stefano D'Errico (1953) participated in the student movement of 1968 and subsequently to several community experiences of that period. Active in the Roman anarchism, he worked for a long time with the magazine "A" and “Umanità Nova”. He is one of the founders of the Cooperative Bravetta 80, a pilot Capitoline experience, self-managed area of the "movement" against the institutionalization of drug addiction and the recovery of the urban underclass. He developed a long collective research in the field, as reported in AA. VV., and La diversità domata. Cultura della droga, integrazione e controllo nei servizi per tossicodipendenti (edited by R. De Angelis, Istituto Placido Martini - Officina Edizioni, Rome 1987).
He was among the leaders of the Base Committees of the School in 1990, d'Errico became the national secretary of the Italian Confederation of Base Unicobas first real example of interbranch trade unionism in Italy. In the 90s, he also contributed in the development of the cultural association "l’AltrascuolA" and was active in the field of upgrading of teachers, promotion of studies and conferences. He wrote the introduction of A scuola fra le culture del mondo (D. Rossi, Teti Editore, Milan 2000) and a book on trade unions, Tutti i contratti. Manuale per l’uso (U Book – Rubbettino, Catanzaro 2000).
Enrico Longo
Doctor of Economics and Commerce. In 2001, he began his activities in the Humanist Movement and in 2003 he resigned from office in the world of banking and finance. He is now responsible for ESF projects and professor of economics in the ambit of Agenzie Formative of Piedmont. He co-founded the Associazione Culturale Jak Bank Italia, an organization that aims to reproduce the Swedish model of banking without interest in Italy and in 2008 he was elected president. In the same year, he was a speaker in the International Conference on Financial Ethics held in Turin, in co-partnership with Jak Medlemsbank, representatives of international financial ethics, the University of Turin, the circuit MAG and Banca Popolare Etica.
The Role of Banks in Inequality and a Future Without Interests
ABSTRACT
The dawn of a new civilization is near. Seven hundred years have passed since the Florentine and Venetian merchant-bankers perceived the law of best yield, experimenting empirically, that which centuries later the English pragmatism formalized the thesis of the invisible hand. The slavery imposed by the banks has long produced its own antithesis and now it badly needs the synthesis that allows the overcoming of the old by the new.
The supertanker of the free market economy has sailed the oceans of economy advancing slowly and silently, navigating through with a dark vibration. Its slowness revealed a destructive power, given its size and weight. A new global consciousness has given the order of arrest, but the commanders know that their huge ship will not stop without first having covered dozens of miles yet. In the short time that remains, they can not save the precious cargo and, in the attempt, will sink with it.
The superstructure of the interests generated by the laws of seigniorage and implemented from the vile mechanism of fractional reserve has for centuries allowed the creation of money ex nihilo. From nothing, from virtual accounts, the banks sucked the wealth generated by working people like unstoppable draining pumps. We gave them our money and our money has fueled the cancer of finance, a skyscraper built on a foundation of paper and designed to feed only the (banking) sector for greater yields.
In recent years, the banks have dramatically increased their activities. Some have budgeted assets in excess of gross domestic product of their countries. The real situation is, after having dictated the Treaty of Maastricht, it has revealed its power, politics and money as the ultimate act of force. For those who want to know more, there is no need to explain the details of the massacre. Just look at hunger, death and suffering as a dark cloak covering the entire planet.
The foundation gave way. It is for all of us to implement a new model. The cloud of debris and dust that has for too long obscured the view, is thinning out, and the light of a new civilization shows its rays.
Luciano Lanza
Journalist, in charge of the “Volontà” collection from the Eleuthera series. He is one of the founders of the monthly magazine "A-rivista anarchica", for which he was editor for ten years. He has been in charge of the quarterly publication of “Volontà” since 1980.
Alessandro Pizzoccaro
Entrepreneur, founder of GUNA, the 5th pharmaceutical company in the world in the field of natural and organic medicines. Active supporter of a nonviolent medical paradigm, he brought his company to become the best-in-class in social commitment. He was the main supporter of the Italian section of the World March for Peace and Nonviolence in 2009.
Topic
Gross National Happiness: From the Paradigms of the 20th Century to the True Measure of Welfare
Numerous signals indicate that the two fundamental paradigms of our society are becoming inappropriate to say the least: the economic paradigm and the medical paradigm.
A social system where one per cent of the population owns 40 per cent of its riches, where 34,000 children die of malnutrition every day, where more than 50 per cent of the people on this planet live on less than two dollars a day. Is this acceptable? As for business management, the key should be “social responsibility”, in other words, attention must be paid to profit gain and optimisation of resources that can and should have a fully integrated and permanent consideration towards the social consequences of the decisions made by these companies. These businessmen must take responsibility for their business growth, employee satisfaction and adopt an honest approach to competition. They must also realise that the objective of obtaining maximum profit needs to be balanced and carried out alongside human, environmental and community projects. Moving from the economic field to the health sector we find the same basic paradox and contradiction: the commercial paradigm, the scientific paradigm - so functional for technological excessiveness, but not for humanity, health or well-being.
Public funding, private investments, research, biotechnologies and advanced medicine, quite paradoxically, fail to improve real health issues and do not necessarily lead to real cures or contribute to general well-being. Thus it would be very interesting to identify and validate a method of verifying the matters that measure the overall health of citizens and society through an innovative index, a kind of « Gross Domestic Energy » indicator…
Rapporteurs participating in the area: Education and Health
Mario Betti
Holder of a degree in Medicine and Surgery and specializes in Psychiatry, he completed the training course in Relational Psychotherapy. He is an author of numerous books and articles. He had four years of training in Psychosomatic Medicine at the Institute of Riza in Milan and has deepened the study of mesmerism and altered states of consciousness. He has been cooperating with the Global Village of Bagni di Lucca for three years and has introduced the use of transpersonal holistic treatments (techniques in meditation, bioenergetics, breathing therapy, hypnosis) in the treatment of psychic disorders. Transpersonal treatments: diagnosis and psychotherapeutic treatment; integrated use of meditation techniques, relaxation, voice and sound, bioenergetics; breathing and psychopyshical techniques suitable for neurotic disorders and psychotic disorders of affection, depression, phobias, obsessions and dissociative disorders.
Cinzia Mion
Scholastic Administrator from 1974 to 2001 with assignments in Conegliano, Perugia and Treviso. Founding member of the National Association of School Administrators where she served as vice president from 1989 to 1995, then president of the National Council of the same association, and now a member of the Council. She chaired the group that developed the Code of Ethics for School Administrators (1993) in the same association. She is a registered psychologist in the Veneto Region since 10/19/1993 with number 1054. From 1989 to 2000 she was a member of the Equal Opportunities Committee Woman-Man at the Ministry of Education, Office of Studies and Planning. The Committee is concerned in the formation of gender identity of boys and girls, as much as possible free from stereotypes, starting from age three. The cultural revolution of Equal Opportunities start from this premise. She is an honorary fellow on the subject "Psychology of Learning” at the University of Perugia - College of Education and a contract professor in the same University and at the University of Udine.
Expert and trainer in relational approach in corporeal mediation with adults (teachers, local health workers, psychologists, doctors, physiotherapists, etc.); trainer in relational psychomotricity; expert and trainer in the field of relational dynamics in the form of psychosocial analysis; trainer in the management of “Group as a Work Tool; theoretical and practical skills in the psychology of learning, with particular reference to socio-cultural approach, methodological and teaching skills relating to evaluation, continuity, inter-culture, etc; trainer in the education of the citizenry.
Topic
Educating the Citizenry Today
ABSTRACT
The lack of public ethics that is growing continuously in Italy today characterizes the difficulty of educating the citizenry. A citizenry that checks not only the capacity in constructing the mental category and the ethics of the common good - which takes into account not only their own interests but also of the community - but also the evolution of the citizens’ characteristic, unfortunately, still pervasive and always looking for protectors, privileges, favors, among true citizens. This transformation, which is based on the ethics of responsibility, instead, should make us proud to pay any price, such as withdrawing hypothetical benefits, in order not to enslave us.
The drift of the current economic neo-liberalism that has legitimized an unbridled individualism, along with strengthened social tendencies of consumerism and conformity, gave birth to recklessness and disregard for others and the planet. The historic amoral familism that has long characterized the whole Italian people with the tendency to present widespread narcissism at all levels, which counteract any ethical limit, making it more difficult to educate the citizenry.
The school, raising awareness to this problem so with the family, should accept this essential challenge which is now unavoidable in educating the real citizenry in order to save Italy from the disturbing bend that we are under everyone’s scrutiny and that which is taking us farther and farther away from the Democratic Republic that our Constitutional Fathers envisioned.
Pat Patfoort
Belgian Flemish anthropologist born in 1949. She is a lecturer, trainer and an international level mediator dealing with conflict transformation and non-violent conflict management. She authored several books and articles translated into several languages. She is the co-founder and director of "De Vuurbloem" (The Fireflower), Center for Non-violent Conflict Management in Brugge, Belgium. She lectures in several universities and speaks in conferences around the world (in Belgium, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, USA, Russia and elsewhere).
Topic:
Nonviolence education: not a utopia, but a concrete and effective choice.
Nonviolence education is when we truly put our values, such as listening, respect, tolerance and love, both for others and for ourselves, into practise in our relationships with our children. When we don’t do this, it isn’t usually because we don’t want to, but rather because either we don’t realise we should be doing it, or because we don’t know how to do it.
The MmE (or major-minor Equivalence) method provides us with a way of achieving what we so deeply and passionately desire: constructing with and through our children a world where every man and woman can feel happy to be leading a fulfilling life.
Pat Patfoort, who devised the MmE method, and who has used and tested it all over the world for many decades, with several groups of people in varying situations, is coming to present this method to us, which she illustrates with many true-life examples, some of which stem from her own personal experiences.
Rapporteurs participating in the area: Environmen
Dominique Béroule
Cognitive Science Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, where he’s devised an associative memory model with inspiration from neurobiology. As an activist, between 2005 and 2007, he started Joint International GMO Opposition Day, as well as AlterTour “for a non-doped planet” in 2008
Topic
Environment Undergoes the Test of Generalized Doping
The modern human cannot avoid the statement that his environment is going bad, and that he is mainly responsible for it. Our energy resources will run dry in a few decades; the natural resources essential to survival - air, water, vegetation - and with them the life diversity, are being degraded like never before.
However, privileged people continue their unbridled consumption, followed now by the rest of the world population.
However, a competitive spirit dominates international relationships, which involves the unrestrained and non-coordinated working of natural resources.
However, some scientists still support the economic doping, claiming that they will bring solutions to the related environmental problems.
How is it possible to explain this inappropriate development of the society with regard with the planet safety?
An answer may be found in another irrational behaviour: the one of the smoker who discovers the side effects of cigarette smoking, without stopping it. The modern human, including the smoker, is dominated by the search for an immediate satisfaction, which implies neglecting the consequences of his acts on the long run. He became dependent on products promoted by the ruling political and financial system, such as chemistry for the farmer, as well as the credit, permanent electricity, the car and the cell phone for everyone.
To renounce this lifestyle first implies to become aware of our addictions and their negative effects, and then find substitutes to various “drugs” that touch the economy, agriculture, transport, energy production, telecommunication…: models which respect the Environment and generate personal satisfaction. This search for alternatives to various types of doping of the current society constitutes an approach to the general objective in which we are interested here, illustrated by an experiment of itinerant collective life: the “AlterTour for a non-doped planet”.
* Definition of generalized doping: Any process which temporarily increases abilities, but generates long term degradations and addictions
Jacopo Fo
He is a writer, comic actor and Italian director. He is the son of Dario Fo and Franca Rame. He is the founder of the magazine, Cacao, which he eventually brought online together with the project of the Libera Università di Alcatraz (Free University of Alcatraz) he launched in 1979.
Fo also published in installments, and in twelve volumes, the Enciclopedia del sesso sublime (Encyclopedia of Sublime Sex). He is engaged in civil struggle and social solidarity and maintains a personal blog where he expresses his own political and social opinions. He supported the V-Day. He is against nuclear power generation and supports solar-wind energy.
Topic
The Experiences of the Free University of Alcatraz in the Construction of a New Civilization
Alessandro Ronca
Born in Rome on 27 March 1967. As a child he expressed a strong curiosity on how things work around him and this strong curiosity accompanies him to date. It is his thirst for knowledge that led him to undertake many activities and experiences from an early age, ranging from being a musician to sound engineer to Director of CET, the Mughal school of music; from a diving instructor of an international hotel to being a manager and a guide in safari camps in Africa; from a Project Manager in the construction of accommodation facilities in Central America to a teacher in tourism and marketing in comunitarian courses; from an electronics engineer to a designer of passive buildings, biomass, solar, wind and thermosolar plants; experimented techniques in cultivation of agricultural crops in arid culture; patented low-energy equipment and prefabricated building systems. Today, as an expert in “renewable” energy and systems, he designs and manufactures in full self-financing, PER – Parco dell’Energia Rinnovabile (Renewable Energy Park), together with some friends. It is a popular educational tourism structure where one experiences a sustainable way of managing the planet’s resources and where it intends to arouse one’s "desire" and "pleasure" to change.
Topic
The PER Experience, an Eco-Park for Food Farming Self-suffiency