Compare the following statement from the article above:

“Banks of all stripes chafe against the restraints that federal and state regulators place on their ability to make money. By cleverly exploiting regulatory loopholes, investment banks created new types of high-risk investments that did not appear on their balance sheets. ...”

with:

“If the contagion spreads, the conventional wisdom holds that the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world can step into the breach caused when consumers and investors start to lose their confidence…”

That’s how neoliberal globalisation has been working for the last 40 odd years.  Privatising the benefits and socialising the losses.  Transnational corporations (TNCs) will do what they bloody well feel like and our Governments will ensure that the taxpayer will bail them out if things go wrong.  After all, a government that robs its citizens to pay big business can always rely on the support of the latter at election time.

Heedless, self-interested corporations have been supported by the US, UK and Australian neoliberal governments.  They have excelled in screwing the workers and peoples of nations all around the world.  So much so that there is no longer a market for industry’s excessive supply of (mostly) crap.  Their greed has always been bad economics.

We’ve been induced to go into debt up to our necks in order to sustain demand for industrial products.  Excessive levels of credit - even to the point of the proliferation of widespread global fraud in the financial markets.

We’ve now got a credit crunch along with a liquidity and solvency crisis. But the biggest and most frightening crisis has not yet been described by most economists.

Unconstrained industrial processes have produced cheap consumables by literally raping the planet.  The earth’s predicament is now so bad that IF they manage to sustain current global demand for their dubious products our biosphere will carck it!  Gone will be our last remnants of safe drinking water, habitable oceans, native forests, breathable air, biodiversity and livable climate.

I believe that we need to start describing and living a different way in the very near future.  It would be unwise to rely on economic and other types of ‘experts’.  They are the ones who steered us into this dead end.

“and all its million years
that will not last another decade.
You go back to the car, turn a key
And the dream land slides away.”

[Excerpt from a poem entitled ‘Visit’, Mark O’Connor]

“We (the transnational corporations) are now in the driver’s seat of the global economic engine. We are setting government policies instead of watching from the sidelines.” (quoted in CCPA Monitor, 1996).

David Rockefeller, 1996

This is an important, well written article, covering complex ground in (relatively) plain English.

While I agree with the general thrust of your sentiment and reasoning, #1, I still feel no pangs of guilt when I think of the bagless vacuum cleaner, the dishwasher and the prospect of green electricity charged vehicles running on Lithium Ion batteries containing the latest, indestructible nanotube Carbon layer technology.

How do we get a system that continues to produce quality recyclable, yet well built consumer goods, sustainably without producing an “excessive supply of (mostly) crap”. This is the challenge of humanity. That every family in China have reticulated potable water AND a bagless vacuum cleaner so they don’t die of broom-dust silicosis.

Who will design the dirty dish carrier, so we can do dishes at our friends places instead of leaving them to the dishwasher while we go visiting?

NC