Opinion Sur

Revista Mensual y Gratuita
Nº116, April 2013

Loving kindness and understanding

Loving kindness is strengthened by understanding how the processes that generate and reproduce circumstances of deprivation are born and developed. This way, loving kindness would present itself in two equally valuable dimensions; one of care and direct attention to the ones in need and another of working to remove the causes that generate the situation they are in. Intertwined, loving kindness and understanding can generate a tremendous transformational synergy.

Transformations

Once again vulture funds: the case of Argentina

Eugenio Diaz Bonilla

The struggle between vulture funds and Argentina keeps developing and its resolution may open new options on how to stop the perverse extraction of value mechanism that weighs down on those who restructure sovereign debt. Opinion Sur wonders whether it is possible that justice, in this case of the State of New York, would reward financial speculation which has damaged and keeps damaging the world with no limitation, regulation and much less remorse. The author of this article, an economist of broad international experience, presents a clever analysis of the legal process that is approaching a definition.

Geopolitics

Springtime for Germany and Winter in Spain

Juan Eugenio Corradi

While Southern Europe is in a depression and subject to political wild cards, Germany (and Northern Europe) are complacent. Germany has it both ways because it sustained its own growth by lending to the South, and now that those customers can’t pay their bills, the imposition of German-driven austerity will help solve the Fourth Reich’s looming labor shortage.

Initiatives worth knowing

Initiatives

Cooperanza: an alternative model to the traditional mental institution
Rugby in support of youth from precarious settlements
Refuot Community Medicine Bank

Reflections

Reflections

About a tired Church
About how finance has usurped democracy
About the creation of man (irony)

Editor’s note

Hurts, outrages, mobilizes

While the crisis strikes immense majorities in affluent countries and spreads towards the rest of the world, greed and financial speculation keep going for more; they do not feel the slightest remorse for the suffering they generate. Hundreds of millions of people endure a setback in their standards of life and just as many agonize in poverty and destitution; jobs, incomes, housing, hopes are taken away from them. At the same time, unscrupulous groups accumulate larger fortunes, eager to take advantage of the defenselessness of the growing number of vulnerable families. It hurts, outrages, and mobilizes.

On many fronts efforts are made to take down the unbridled wealth and decision making concentration process; so that the indignation that infuriates may lead to a formidable transformational action. There are interests that will be necessary to overcome and others realign; they are not minor and still have the ability to steer trajectories. Facing the challenge it is necessary, a must, to mobilize every possible energy. This march for full democracies, without traps or manipulations, requires among other issues to discern what happens in Europe as to rightly face injustice and privilege arrogance, enrich with understanding the loving kindness that nests deep within the human conscience, and unveil the action of human vultures that take any crack in the system to ruthlessly profit at the expense of whoever is at their reach. In this April issue, Opinión Sur tackles these critical dimensions of the democratic march. We trust they will be of your interest.

Cordial greeting.

The Editors