The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menaces of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side. Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes -- but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil."
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It's kind of ironic that for several years being an atheist I still celebrated Christmas reflexively because that's what I'd always done. The last several years I've been gradually winding down my participation. I still gather with family and friends, but each year I buy less. This year I have gone the whole way - a total Buy Nothing Christmas.
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As our 44th President prepares to enter the Oval Office, bank lending has seized up, some of the nation’s largest banks are on life support, and the big three automakers are bankrupt. Housing continues to crash, and so does the economy.
Little wonder that Obama is being compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who entered the White House in similar financial straits in 1932. Even before taking office, Obama has started his version of the “fireside chats” (updated from radio to online video) given by Roosevelt nearly weekly to reassure the public. He said on November 22 that he plans to create 2.5 million new jobs by 2011 and kick-start the economy by building roads and bridges, modernizing schools, and creating technology and infrastructure for renewable energy. These are excellent ideas, but what will they be funded with—more government debt?
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Learning about self-deception is important for all people today. That's because many of our problems, both as individuals and as a society, are rooted in self-deception, and many of the ways in which others abuse us relate to our inherent tendency to self-deceive. We can overcome these problems, and have a decent chance at long-term survival as a species, only if we learn about such limitations, and strive to control them. One great way to rapidly learn about self-deception, and other forms of deception, is to learn about the events of September 11th.
It's easy to see widespread self-deception with regard to 9/11. For one thing, most people don't know the actual official story, given by the 9/11 Commission and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This is despite the fact that everyone, at least in the US, has invested essentially their entire future in that story, whether they know it or not.
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Suddenly, we ran out of money and, to avoid collapse, we quickly pumped liquidity back into the system. But behind our financial crisis a much more ominous crisis looms: we are running out of nature… fish, forests, fresh water, minerals, soil. What are we going to do when supplies of these vital resources run low?
There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human experiment of ours on Planet Earth: we have to consume less.
It will take a massive mindshift. You can start the ball rolling by buying nothing on November 28th. Then celebrate Christmas differently this year, and make a New Year’s resolution to change your lifestyle in 2009.
It’s now or never!
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Though Citicorp is deemed too big to fail, it's hardly reassuring to know that it's been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the US Treasury has become and sucked out a multi-billion dollar dose of embalming fluid so it can go on pretending to be a bank for a while longer.
I employ this somewhat clunky metaphor to point out that the US Government is no more solvent than the financial zombies it is keeping on walking-dead support. And so this serial mummery of weekend bailout schemes is as much of a fraud and a swindle as the algorithm-derived-securities shenanigans that induced the disease of bank zombification in the first place. The main question it raises is whether, eventually, the creation of evermore zombified US dollars will exceed the amount of previously-created US dollars now vanishing into oblivion through compressive debt deflation.
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One week before Buy Nothing Day focuses the attention of activists around the world on the perils of overconsumption, groundbreaking economist, Herman Daly, zeroes in on the root cause of our financial meltdown.
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The financial crisis has put to rest the myths that our economic institutions are sound and markets work best when deregulated.
Our economic institutions have failed, not only financially, but also socially and environmentally. This, combined with the election of a new president with a mandate for change, creates an opportune moment to rethink and redesign.
President-elect Obama has promised to grow the economy from the bottom up. That would be a substantial improvement over growing the top at the expense of the bottom. The real need, however, is a bottom-up transformation of our economic values and institutions to align with the imperatives and opportunities of the 21st century. It involves a five part agenda: clean up Wall Street, play by market rules, self-finance the real economy, measure what we really want, and convert to debt-free money.
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A new study shows that after being exposed to information contradicting their ideas, most people still cling to their prejudices.
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