This is about as clearly put as you can get it. I’m wondering just how much further down this road we’ll have to travel before we finally see that treating humans as consumers and nature as raw materials is the impossible dream it always has been.

Just for once I’d like to see a leader in the industrial world admit the truth, but the dream continues, we can have sustainable growth (an oxymoron if ever there was one). Failure to deal with this situation in rational terms within the very near future can have only one, very unpleasant outcome, the beginnings of which we are starting to see today.

As you read this, you’ll probably be thinking, oh, some nutcase hippy, some liberal environmentalist, driving their Volvo to pick up the kids from soccer practice, or something. But read to the end, and you’ll see, not every country in the world is run by idiots who can see only the money lobbyists keep fluttering in front of their faces.

Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world. It generates luxury, ostentation and waste for a few, while millions in the world die from hunger in the world. In the hands of capitalism everything becomes a commodity: the water, the soil, the human genome, the ancestral cultures, justice, ethics, death … and life itself. Everything, absolutely everything, can be bought and sold and under capitalism. And even “climate change” itself has become a business.

“Climate change” has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.
Save the planet from capitalism

Makes you wonder what our ‘leaders’ are thinking about, doesn’t it? At least I hope it does.
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Good transcript of Bill Moyer’s interview with Bacevich, author of The Limits to Power.

ANDREW BACEVICH: Our foreign policy is not something simply concocted by people in Washington D.C. and imposed on us. Our foreign policy is something that is concocted in Washington D.C., but it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we want, we the people want. And what we want, by and large – I mean, one could point to many individual exceptions – but, what we want, by and large is, we want this continuing flow of very cheap consumer goods.

And make sure to check out this ‘picture is worth a thousand words’ image of the Total Credit Market Debt as a % of GDP over the last 90 years or so. If you have a hard time understanding where we are about to go, take one more look, it’s all you should need.

Read this recent article about the roots of our new economic collapse.

I’m not going to paraphrase this, it’s an excellent analysis and historical overview.

These events are not a short term bump on the road, but the culmination of the decision a generation ago to use paper to buy oil, to inflate that paper by allowing those at the very highest reaches of a social elite to engage in a “race to the top” with the suppliers of oil. This system was accepted by both parties, and it created a neo-liberal era where any restriction to creating paper wealth had to be removed. This was not a matter of left or right, everyone was a neo-conservative, and every one was a neo-liberal.

I didn’t want to lose this, here’s the transcript of his recent testimony

Same old stuff, but it’s getting more intense by the week.

And Senators, ladies and gentlemen, simply stated, our main energy problem begins and ends with imported oil. Seventy percent of the oil we use is imported. With current oil prices, we are getting close to exporting $700 billion a year overseas because of our addiction to imported oil. That’s nearly four times the cost of the Iraqi war. We purchase it from a few friends and a lot of enemies. We are paying for the war against ourselves and we have got to stop it, some way, somehow.

And the price of oil will go up further. Over the next 10 years, you’re looking at exporting $10 trillion out of this country. It will be the greatest transfer of wealth from one country to other parts of the world in the history of mankind. It is a clear and growing threat to our national security, and our national economy. It has to be stopped. We are on the verge of losing our Super Power status. It’s time to quit the blame game, and look for solutions and leadership to solve the problem.