....THE WESTERN WORLD HAS A SECOND COMING IN DR. RAJ PATEL!!!!!! Simonelurati.com Raj Patel is The Messiah (aka The Buddha, aka Maitreya, aka Brown Jesus) who got the Colbert Bump with an unexpected result. The boost launched Raj Patel into the Pantheon of the Divine. Clearly this is a sign that Stephen Colbert is God, not only is he a King-maker but also a God-maker!! After an appearance to promote his book "The Value of Nothing - Why Everything Costs So Much More Than We Think," on The Colbert Report in January, 2010, Raj Patel's inbox started to fill with “a trickle, and then a flood” from apparent followers of Share International, a fringe religious group in Britain, asking if he was the Maitreya – a spiritual leader also known as the World Teacher, Messiah or Buddha. And then a few days after Mr. Patel's TV appearance, the leader of the religious movement, Benjamin Creme, who had been waiting 35 years for this moment, proclaimed that the Maitreya had just appeared on American television....Mr. Patel has made himself fascinating to the western economy by his following thinking themes:  “From the 1970s onward, our economy was hijacked by free-market fundamentalists whose mantra was greed is good, regulation is bad,” Patel says on his website. “But it gets darker still: We were all along for the ride. We bought, ate and drove more. And paid for it with debt, diabetes and pollution. “We mortgaged our future,” he argues. “And called it freedom.” The economy fails to properly value resources, Mr. Patel told them. Hamburgers, for example, should cost around $200 when the full toll of environmental destruction, low wages and health-care costs are factored in. "Big business is bad, free markets are evil." “The opposite of consumption isn't thrift,” says Patel. “It's generosity.”  He is not the Messiah, he says, before quoting the Monty Python scene  in which a man is mistaken for Jesus.  “I'm just a very naughty boy.” This weekend PVAF brings to you a this amazing zooming of Raj Patel to attract western economic world  audiences as a globalization food activist he never would have imagined when he graduated with Masters degree from Oxford, the London School of Economics and a Ph. D from Cornell University, and/or when he worked at the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, and protested against them both as a globalization activist in his life of 38 years after being born in London to a Indian origin father from Fiji and Indian origin  mother from Kenya, and living in Switzerland, France, Germany, Poland, India, Zimbabwe and South Africa. and is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, with his wife and one-year-old son ......you can read his biography by clicking on his name above.... Please click on the next line to read about this amazing personality made famous by Colbert and the recent financial meltdown and also read the review of his best seller book....

....and now read this weekend's amazing faming of  a global food activist.... Who says Raj Patel is the Messiah? (From: Canadian Globe and Mail: Feb. 11, 2011: Tavia Grant; a reporter with Report on Business) For a man who says he is sick to death of “the Messiah thing,” Raj Patel is still perfectly willing to field questions about it. The economist, activist and academic was in Toronto last week to speak at a conference and discuss his book, The Value of Nothing, a New York Times bestseller on how prices don't reflect the hidden social and environmental costs of producing things. But his fame over the past year has grown from far odder phenomena in which he has played a starring role. After an appearance to promote his book on The Colbert Report in January of last year, his inbox started to fill with “a trickle, and then a flood” from apparent followers of Share International, a fringe religious group in Britain, asking if he was the Maitreya – a spiritual leader also known as the World Teacher, Messiah or Buddha. It turns out, a few days after Mr. Patel's TV appearance, the leader of the religious movement, Benjamin Creme, who had been waiting 35 years for this moment, proclaimed that the Maitreya had just appeared on American television. It was left to interested parties to figure out who that was. Some zoomed in on Mr. Patel. He could, presumably, have deleted the e-mails, ignored the Facebook comments and YouTube videos. Instead, he blogged about it, pasting a clip of Monty Python's The Life of Brian. And a month later, his story appeared in a column syndicated by The New York Times penned by a friend, Scott James. “He has no desire for deification,” he wrote. “But he may not have a choice.” A reluctant god Mr. Patel may seem, but the story has kept him in the headlines. Devotees have made pilgrimages, a YouTube video, posted by MarcLA13 titled “Was this the first Maitreya Interview?” has garnered 71,000 hits and some have called him the Antichrist. It landed him back on Stephen Colbert's comedy spoof in March while The New Yorker ran a seven-page article entitled “Are You the Messiah?” in late November. Though apparently frustrated with the whole issue, he remains willing to talk to the media about it. Has it helped to publicize his ideas? “Maybe,” he says. ‘I'm a mutt of globalization' The Messiah chatter, some might argue, is what most differentiates Raj Patel from the left-leaning, anti-globalization crowd. His ideas seem familiar: We should place more value on forests, pay people a fair wage for picking our produce. But a few other things set him apart. First, the packaging. He looks like a movie star. His slick YouTube video has garnered nearly 100,000 clicks. He speaks in clear BBC diction, animated, funny and articulate. He's 38 and looks younger, active on both Facebook and his blog. He also mirrors this globalized age. “I am a mutt of globalization,” he says over coffee – born in London to a father from Fiji and mother from Kenya, he has lived in Switzerland, France, Germany, Poland, India, Zimbabwe and South Africa. He now lives in San Francisco, where he is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, with his wife and one-year-old son when he's not traipsing around the world. He was educated at Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, and, as his biography says, “has worked at the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, and protested against them both.” His origins are humble. Born in 1972, he helped out in his parents' convenience store in central London. One of his favourite activities was using the price gun “like a Glock for junior capitalists” to slap stickers on Mars bars and one-pence tags on his little brother. It's an anecdote in his latest book, which argues for shifting today's market culture toward more sustainable economies. It begins with an Oscar Wilde quote: “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Bits of his thinking are predictable: Big business is bad, free markets are evil. But he draws on conversations with ordinary people around the world, from farmers in Chiapas to shack-dwellers in South Africa and tomato pickers in Immokalee, Fla., to ground his argument that local democracies should be strengthened. He also has the luck of timing. The world has emerged from the financial crisis on shaky ground. People are looking for new models, be they offered by the Tea Party or would-be saviours, and much of what Mr. Patel talks about – imbalances in global food systems, the dangers of unfettered markets – happens to be in areas where people are looking for answers. His global views are what brought Mr. Patel to Toronto last week. It wasn't his usual speech to the converted. It was a gathering of human-resources professionals. At 8:30 a.m. on a snowy Friday, about 1,800 of them turned up. For an hour, he paced the stage, brow furrowed, speaking without notes, draped in a green scarf with a black blazer and jeans. “I feel a little out of place here,” he joked at the outset. “I'm self-employed.” The economy fails to properly value resources, Mr. Patel told them. Hamburgers, for example, should cost around $200 when the full toll of environmental destruction, low wages and health-care costs are factored in. Food protests around the world reflect how broken the market system is. On just what the human-resources profession should do about it, he fell a little short. If it seemed a little incongruous – the man who helped to orchestrate anti-globalization protests in Seattle is invited by corporate Canada to preach his own gospel – the audience seemed fairly attentive. His basic message, to share, be generous, co-operate, protect public spaces, buy local, resonated with some in the crowd. “Raj Patel was amazing!” one attendee tweeted. “Impactful and thought-provoking,” tweeted another. Bill Greenhalgh, chief executive of the Human Resources Professionals Association, which hosted the conference, said he asked Mr. Patel to speak because his members need to have a global perspective. “It's a borderless world and trends that are occurring in other countries have a major impact on what's happening in Canada,” he said. “The one thing Raj was pointing out is we are very interconnected – what happens in Beijing one day impacts Berlin the next day.” The making of a Messiah Which brings us back to the stranger-than-fiction year he has had. Mr. Creme's proclamation last year that the Messiah had appeared on U.S. TV sent people scurrying to identify who it might be. Mr. Patel seemed to fit for several reasons. According to Mr. Creme, the saviour flew from India to London in 1977. He is part of the South Asian community. He possesses a sense of humour. He's male. He speaks “earnestly of the need for peace, achievable only through the creation of justice and the sharing of the world's resources” – issues that Mr. Patel happens to be quite fond of. Share International has taken pains to distance itself from the outing of Mr. Patel. Todd Lorentz, who lives in Edmonton and is the group's Canadian spokesman, emphasizes that Share has never officially identified Mr. Patel as the Maitreya. “Anyone who has carefully read the information put out by Share International over the years would not make that mistake.” If it is a mistake, the group hasn't done itself any favours by refusing to directly deny that he is the Messiah. Mr. Patel responded to the Messiah questions with a blog post titled “Call Me Brian” last year, which had the effect of egging them on. “As it happens, I do think that sharing, fraternity, justice and co-operation are terrific things,” he wrote. “I also think that prioritizing the needs of the poor, hungry and oppressed is a non-negotiable part of a sustainable future.” He is not the Messiah, he says, before quoting the Monty Python scene in which a man is mistaken for Jesus. “I'm just a very naughty boy.” ......AND NOW TO UNDERSTAND WHY RAJ PATEL HAS GOT  THE ATTENTION OF THE WESTERN ECONOMY YOU CAN READ THE REVIEW OF TODAY'S NEWS PERSONALITY RAJ PATEL'S NEW YORK BEST SELLER ......   Reviewed by Gordon Laird who is the author of The Price of a Bargain: The Quest for Cheap and the Death of Globalization. From Saturday's Globe and Mail Feb. 12, 2010 It isn’t every day that video trumps the written word, but the video trailer for Raj Patel’s The Value of Nothing is such a pithy introduction to this challenging and important book, it bears repeating: “From the 1970s onward, our economy was hijacked by free-market fundamentalists whose mantra was greed is good, regulation is bad,” Patel says on his website. “But it gets darker still: We were all along for the ride. We bought, ate and drove more. And paid for it with debt, diabetes and pollution. “We mortgaged our future,” he argues. “And called it freedom.” br /> Sound timely? It is. The Value of Nothing: Why Everything Costs So Much More Than We Think, by Raj Patel, HarperCollins, 250 pages, $26.99 . This book comes at an important juncture. At a time when every major Western nation is betting hard on a full recovery from the great global recession, this unprecedented attempt to spend our way back to normal – through hundreds of billions in bailout and stimulus dollars – is creating new risk. And it’s not just because of incomplete reform of a financial system prone to collapse: More profoundly, many nations are depleting their very ability to govern and address critical problems like unemployment, health care and climate change simply because they are increasingly overspent on salvaging a broken status quo. Amazingly, the United States now boasts an unemployed pool that is nearly equal to Canada’s entire population, where as many as six million households continue to live off food stamps, with no other income. TThe cost of normal is becoming unsustainable, something that became clearer this month when President Barack Obama reported a budget of $3.8-trillion and unprecedented deficits for the next decade. That's quite a price tag for a recovery attempt that has thus far failed to rescue millions from destitution and foreclosure. Today's financial crisis is no mere anomaly, Patel argues. “There's a widely shared opinion that normality will ultimately return to the world economy,” writes Patel, a renowned economist who divides his time among several institutions. “But it is a consensus view that rests on a narrative of [economic] bubbles being exceptions to the standard.” If our assumptions about the stability and wisdom of markets were flawed, as former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan famously admitted to U.S. Congress in 2008, “then our faith in a gentle return to earth is misplaced, for there is not, and never has been, any solid ground beneath our feet.” br /> Patel argues that our problem isn't just the size of our stimulus package, but a deep misapprehension about the relationship between society and economy that dates back well before the great crash of 2008. And, more to the point, it is our propensity to over-value destructive things – such as financial derivatives and crude oil – and under-value truly valuable things – such as sustainable food production, our global climate and other so-called externalities that market society has often neglected. This results not only in bad outcomes, but “indelible inequalities in power.” In other words, if today's quest to regain yesterday's growth fails under the stress of 21st-century challenges, it likely won't be Wall Street paying the price. Consequently, today's financial crisis is no mere anomaly, Patel argues, but a continuation of a struggle over resources, property and government that dates back to the privatization of common lands in the early decades of England's Industrial Revolution. “The perpetual quest for economic growth has turned humankind into an agent of extinction, through the systematic undervaluing of the eco-systemic services that keep our Earth alive,” he writes. “In short, the consumer economy takes a great deal for granted, for free, and is constitutionally unable to pay for it.” With epic scope, The Value of Nothing poses a spirited exploration of everything from the influence of market extremist Gary Becker of the Chicago School of Economics (and contemporary of Alan Greenspan) to social movements on food sovereignty and participatory budgeting that show us what real democracy is, or should be, about. Even the Dalai Lama's views on economic justice are tied into Patel's own views about how to fix things (hint: more democracy and more activism). What I like about this book is that is a work of engaged ideas, particularly Patel's investigation into the consciousness of market society. (“Seeing the world through markets not only distorts our sense of our selves, but projects our disability onto everyone else.”) What I like less is the book's nascent ideological assumption that readers, alongside governments and financial elites, need to be disabused of any attachments to markets or private property. We're told that it is corporations, not people, who are to blame for the great environmental disasters of our time, despite the fact that, at last count, the planet boasted approximately 600-million climate-killing automobiles and a great many more drivers. Private property and sustainability may seem fundamentally incompatible, an assertion that is interesting but lacks proof. Patel also rejects the use of market-based tools like carbon pricing to combat things like climate change. In other circumstances, this might be a tremendous statement of principle, but given that we have relatively little time to reshape whole economies in the face of advancing climate change – and eliminate vast energy and environmental subsidies in the process – rejecting carbon pricing or any other solution tainted by capitalism seems, well, a little precious. Clearly, ideology is still the catnip of the global left, and this occasional weakness for portraying the world as a clash of malevolent ideas versus social movements often blinkers its proponents to over-focus on things that reflect a dialectical and neo-liberal bent, like the World Bank, American finance and Ayn Rand. Patel is hardly the worst offender on this point, but it does constrain his analysis. Simply put, free-market fundamentalism is an obvious factor, but it cannot explain the fullness of our crisis. Nor does it suitably explain major transformations like China's rise to power – which is literally rewriting the playbook on globalization and capitalism – or the mechanisms behind our deep dependence on affordable consumerism. Patel's arguments are well-crafted and will likely, and predictably, find agreement among many who will purchase the book. But his real contribution is something bigger than another attack on neo-liberalism and the Chicago School of Economics. This is someone who has done field work around the world, listened prolifically to non-experts, and come away with a political modality that isn't just ideology, but speaks to human flourishing itself. “The opposite of consumption isn't thrift,” says Patel. “It's generosity.”

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