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PEOPLE WILL DIE - From Thomas M. Kostigen
The harsh reality of the economic fallout isn't that Joe the plumber can't buy his business or that people's retirement funds are being lost or that unemployment is rising; the harsh reality is that people will die.
Already, since food prices began to rise 100 million more people have been pushed into poverty, according to the World Bank, with as many as two billion on the verge of disaster. Almost half the world's population, let's remember, live on less than $2.50 per day. Millions die annually of hunger and starvation, and more than a billion do not have access to fresh water.
 
These numbers are poised to rise dramatically with population growth, dwindling natural resources and higher consumer prices across all goods and services. So as the stock market tumbles and the world economy falters, it's important to remember that it's more than financial losses we are talking about, it's the loss of life.
 
And increasingly it isn't just people in far-off places around the world who are succumbing to such extreme hardships. Note this: Job losses in the state of Indiana have caused the child poverty rate there to spike 29% since 2000. The wealth gap in the United States and around the world is at record levels -- and it has serious consequences.
 
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported this week that the gap between the rich and the poor is getting bigger around the world, and that the U.S. is experiencing the biggest dichotomy. It's largest wealth gap in history. Further erosion of the economic floor will only send more people plunging into destitution.
 
This is why it's so important to fix the economic crisis -- now. We're all linked
 
Wealthy nations are trying mightily to correct the daily economic woes plaguing the world. An emergency economic summit has been called. Brash measures have been taken. Interventions of all sorts have been enacted.Developed nations realize that they are intricately tied to one another's economies because of sophisticated financial instruments. When one nation loses so do the others, as we are finding out these days from as far away as China and Korea.
 
But there's another link that hasn't been much talked about: the emerging markets. The emerging markets rely on the strength of the bigger economic powers to grow, more so even than bigger economic powers rely on each other. The capital-markets erosion has yet to be fully felt in these countries as the trickles they rely on may stop coming down.
 
And here is the sad end game of the ripple effect: it takes food out of the mouths of children, it shuts the water taps and it sends hordes of people into lives of despair. We need to solve the world's economic crisis not only for ourselves so we can continue to live at the standard to which we are accustomed, but also so people can continue to live -- period.
 
The economic crisis we are facing today and likely tomorrow is about more than numbers. There are faces to go along with every digit of value lost. And that is something we will never be able to quantify.
 
Thomas M. Kostigen is the author of "You Are Here: Exposing the Vital Link Between What We Do and What That Does to Our Planet". www.readyouarehere.com

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Man was matter
By Sean Maguire

In comparison to other passages from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 it isn't often quoted, but it should be.

The haunting and beautifully simple piece reads:

'Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. Ripeness was all'.

The passage takes place after the protagonist Yossarian watches young Snowden die in the back of his plane. The event is repeatedly told throughout the novel always teasing at this great revelation that Yossarian had experienced- the revelation that 'man was matter'.

Not special, not a product of a breath of divinity but matter like everything else. 

After being in a potentially fatal car accident last week this line has been constantly coming back to me. I remember waking up just after the accident in a hospital with a doctor telling me I was having a cat-scan to check if I had brain damage.

Man was matter, and the centre of man (the mind) was also matter. We might generally conceive of the mind as somehow separate to the body- a floating you that is intangible and neverending, but in one fell swoop it can be brought back to what it really is: a fragile and spongy bit of tissue that can be destroyed in the stupidest and swiftest of seconds.