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.
(more…)

Another good one, an interview with Kevin Phillips, author of Bad Money: RECKLESS FINANCE, FAILED POLITICS, AND THE GLOBAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM.

Like the previous links, this one is somewhat refreshing, because the author is an ex-Nixon White House person, who I think fairly accurately notes the serious problems with both the Democratic and Republican parties in the USA.

BILL MOYERS: So you have it — for this disaster has bipartisan parentage.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: But yet you say it’s come to an end. You say there’ll be no pretense any longer that the financial system is supreme.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Oh, there may be a pretense in some quarters. I mean, obviously people who were doing the bailouts are saying how important it is that we don’t rock or endanger the financial system. Some would say to the contrary that the best thing we could do would be to put its failings out there and let the making cure it.

Like so many he sees things fairly clearly, but also, sadly understands that it is now too late. The bubble has to burst, and pumping in hundreds of billions of dollars to keep it inflated, and to keep debt holders buying more, is just not going do anything but make it worse.

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.

This is from the July Issue of the ASPO newsletter, Issue 91.

One of the more interesting articles in it was a decent timeline for what’s happened to us as a species, I’m quoting the whole section since they don’t mind reproduction of the material.

By odd coincidence, Nate Hagens from the theoildrum.com also just published a new article on human development and oil addiction, which fits in quite well with the following ASPO article, being largely historical/biologically oriented too.

1061. Peak Oil : A Turning Point for Mankind

The term Peak Oil now enters the dictionary as the importance of the issue finally hits the mainstream. The International Energy Agency, which is the OECD watchdog, has long been aware of it having issued a warning in 1998 that demand would outpace supply by 2010 save for the entry of a mysterious element, termed Unidentified Unconventional, which was evidently a coded term for shortage. But recent statements made to the Press suggest that it is finally going to come clean in the 2008 issue of the World Energy Outlook to be published in November, and explain the true position in no uncertain terms.

Given the central role of oil and gas in the modern economy, the peak of production is likely to be a turning point for mankind of almost unparalleled magnitude. It prompts consideration of the historical evolution of societies as a basis for evaluating what the reactions might be.

(more…)