I have to say that if there is a capitalist on this planet I admire, he would exist in the person of Ray Anderson. I first heard of him and his company in a film documentary that sought to view corporate behavior through the lense of a psychosis: ie, seeing corporate actions as the product of a psychotic mindset. Can't remember the name of the film. Sorry. But the film maker presented Mr. Anderson as the sane side of capitalism. Which, I suppose by inference, means that most capitalists are psychotic. Can't say I disagree. Most of the business people(bosses, business owners) I've met consider human life an impediment to profitability, and are thus expendable in EVERY way.

The mellotron is your friend.

When will our side drop the illusion of the "free" market and it's fabled "efficiency"?

With massive government bail out and even industry and banking nationalization all over the planet, most former "free" marketeers have started to cloister their religious faith in reaganomics.  They hesitate to admit it in public.

When will environmentalists feel that they can stop pandering to "free" market efficiency?  And stop apologizing for government policy designed to propell green revolution with subsidies, government planning, and massive government contracts.

It won WW II and pulled us out of the great depression, government contracting of specific technology can pull us out of this depression too.  A pox on so-called free market efficiency, in reality it is nothing more than a religious illusion designed to justify a massive global Ponzi scheme.  And the bill for the scam is due now.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Do you think we have reached a point when we can say, however tentatively, that the global manmade economic colossus {a veritable and proverbial, modern Tower of Babel in all its glory} could crash before the overproduction, over-consumption and overpopulation activities of the human species worldwide collapse the frangible biological systems and finite physical resources of the planetary home God has blessed us to inhabit and not to ravage, I suppose?

Steven Earl Salmony

AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,

established 2001

We are so far ahead that we dare not stop living off of tomorrow.    

Instead of GDP and balance of trade, we need to focus on a metric that internalizes the missing environmental and cross-generational aspects of sustainability for societal well-being.

The Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) is one metric which I'd like to see more widely applied and reported on a daily basis.  Along with CSR reporting and transparent analyses thereof in every corporate quarterly and annual report.  Likewise, I'd be interested in other workable transparent metrics that may exist or be developed along similar principles.

An old pop tune comes to mind. with these lyrics:
"Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop-- It'll soon be here...
It'll be here, better than before.
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone..."

Just like the fossil fuels that were burned last week to power the SUVs, incandescent light bulbs and all the other inefficiencies wasted in our economy.   They're gone.  Along with the mined renewable resources that were not replaced or conserved.  

How will tomorrow be "better" ?  Only if we can all begin to make truly sustainable-based choices.  Doing so will require all the information that so-called "free" markets on their own, can't really provide.  (Note to EU and others: I'm thinking it will require more than a 20 percent cut in GHG emissions by 2020.)

Environmentalism is the true conservatism.  It's based on values like quality of life and nature for its own sake, on equality and diversity, as opposed to crass personal greed.  

Somehow I have to be optimistic that solutions will be found and implemented in time to make the future sustainable.  Otherwise I would not bother caring at this point in time.

Moving toward sustainability with hopefulness, one revolution at a time.

     Free market socialism with the government stepping in from time to time and preventing the pure capitalist from melting down the economy will be the new norm. The trickle down, no union, deregulate crowd has run its course and left he country wounded and sick. A healthy one third of the economy should be manufacturing and outsourcing for cheap labor and dumping health care and retirement destroyed the middle class. Without a healthy, vibrant middle class you don't have a  country for long. I love the new antiseptic, innocuous term legacy cost. Almost as catchy as outsourcing which means there goes your job, legacy cost means there goes your retirement and health care. This is what the big 3 auto bridge loan is about, going into a structured bankruptcy and dumping your legacy cost. it's a charade and a well choreographed dance between the white house and the big three right now. The UAW will be history but the big 2 or three will survive.
      Where was the big 3 when Hillary tried to get us universal health care. They would have been the largest beneficiary. Well we will have to dump all health care and retirement on the government so we can stay completive with the countries who use this model. The new green technology jobs can and will be a new industrial revolution if we are smart enough to go back to our manufacturing base and outsource some lobbyist and congressmen. What good does it do to get off oil and then become dependent on China for batteries.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

I'll answer for Lester too, since he seems to have gone mute.

Ponzi scheming:  About 90% of the currency circulating the globe in electronic accounts, seems to be imaginary.

So, yes I think... "the global manmade economic colossus {a veritable and proverbial, modern Tower of Babel in all its glory} could crash before the overproduction, over-consumption and overpopulation activities of the human species worldwide collapse the frangible biological systems and finite physical resources of the planet...".

It has crashed for the poorest one third of humanity and is well into crashing for the next poorest third.

I guess we are next.  We are the ones who most likely will not starve to death or die from bad water or disease.

Let's try as hard as we can to make this depression short, by making the recovery earth friendly.  Symbiosis will save the biosphere and the humans at the same time.

If we had a real currency that was based not on imaginary economic theories, or gold and silver as it once was, but on the commodities we depend on day after day, just maybe the labor of honest people could be turned into financial security without global scammers taking a 150% cut.

I have no idea how this would work, scrap metal future certificates maybe?  Or some average of all relevant commodities?  Or maybe labor hour certificates.

Start over with a global currency, based not on the whims of hedge fund scammers and their cronies in "regulatory" agencies.  A global electronic market where anyone holding this new currency could exchange it for the underlying commodities at anytime would make the "paper" have a real value that can't be simulated with normal currency.

Could the dollar be placed on this standard?  And the euro and other currencies, as a transition to one standard global currency proceeds over a few decades?  Sci-fi economics 101, hehey.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

...........to John Schneider.

Great link!  Check it out Steven.

I want to see what Ellen says about the Incan corn based "federal reserve".  

Are any sort of commodity futures just a form of derivatives?  Were options the first derivatives?

"Star Trek" evolved beyond money, how do we do that in real life?  Hehey.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

is just that, garbage -- at least there are no physical clean-up costs.  I mean, so somebody bought a derivative that is worth nothing.  That doesn't mean that the real economy has to crash.  And if the currencies were completely polluted, trash them too , reboot, and come back up with greenbacks, money based on the wealth of the country, that can't be manipulated financially.  Check out Krugman today in the opinions section of the N.Y. Times, he takes a well-deserved swipe at the financial sector.

Glad you brought this up, since so many people seem to have major delusions that Big Solar and Big Wind don't also have MASSIVE externalities, both for the environment (enormous GHGs, total destruction of millions of acres of open space, including the highly effective carbon sink of the Mojave, depletion of aquifers, species decimation, erosion, etc.) and for the economy (wasting hundreds of billions of taxpayer and ratepayer dollars on re-centralizing monopolistic infrastructure rather than investing it in local, point of use solutions).

They are just as bad as any other Big Energy paradigm, so why do people adorn them with halos and look the other way as these New Robber Barons destroy millions more acres of our open spaces for private profits, and we are denied cost-effective opportunities to become TRULY clean energy producers ourselves?  This remote genration/lengthy transmission model was always crap, but while technology was still in its infancy, we traded its gross inefficiencies for what was then improved reliability.  those tables have completely turned (see the hundreds of thousands of homes that lose power in every fire, flood, hurricane, ice storm, etc.), and now the ONLY SENSIBLE PARADIGM is point of use efficiency, generation and storage, with (smart) grids used for load balancing and distribution.

we cant just re-enslave ourselves to yet another wilderness-killing, Big Energy boondoggle in the era of sun and wind.  policies must focus on getting every structure as close to net zero as possible, and generating excess sun and wind power on all structures sited for that opportunity, and R & D needs to focus on storage, efficiency and conservation, not on Big Energy Profiteering.

the greenest energy is that which you needn't ever produce.