Here are a few selected statements from the book to give the reader a taste of the content.
If the objective of someone was to drive our civilization to ruin, nothing could do it more effectively than the invention of the currently dominant economic system—neo-liberalism.
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The basic problem is that the eurozone structure was poorly designed from the beginning——from day one it was only a question of time before a crisis developed.
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Therefore, I will go on record again with the pretty much the same statement that I made over ten years ago. The current global financial system is systemically unstable and flawed and continues to be an accident waiting to happen.
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More than any other country, the United States stands to benefit from a shift to a more egalitarian society, resulting not only in better average health and fewer social ills, but in tremendous reductions in health care expenses and the costs of treating the symptoms of social dysfunction.
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The overriding objective of effective global governance in a Gaian world will be to ensure survival of the human species—an objective that is beyond ideology.
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The WTO rules are nothing less than a frontal attack on the welfare state and the environment, making them one of the major drivers of destruction.
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The reality is that without the availability of cheap resources and cheap labor from the 100 or so developing countries that are financial colonies of the dominant Western powers, the standard of living in the rich countries could not possibly be sustained, and the Western elite knows it.
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The USA’s elected leaders seem to live on a different planet and have no choice but to lie to the people and basically ignore their wishes due to the influence of their business bosses. This is the major failure of democracy in our time.
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What has happened over the past decades is that political power in the United States has been transferred to a sociopathic “corporatocracy”.
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All financial crises can be explained by some combination of these three—deregulation, unrestricted capital flows, and naked derivatives.
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There can be little doubt that we are on a journey toward a different kind of world for the simple reason that this one is on an unsustainable path.
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If the Gaian League should degrade into just another international organization to promote and protect the interests of the founders, then the project will fail.
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My approach is radical in the original sense of the word—dealing with the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that not a single country on this planet takes ecological sustainability seriously.
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A majority of the members of the United States Congress no longer represent the people, but rather their corporate backers, who have a very different set of priorities.
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Whatever the outcome of the ongoing European sovereign debt crisis, it will be nothing like the coming energy descent crisis, which will be far more serious.
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“Poverty” should be seen not so much a function of material possessions as a matter of perception of one’s social status. The way to reduce poverty is not to increase average income, but rather to change perception.
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In spite of spending more per person on health care than any other country, the United States has by far the worst score on the Index of Health and Social problems.
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The Neoliberal Project is intentionally preventing the developing counties from developing. The last thing neoliberals want is competitive developing countries.
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The historical record provides strong evidence for the argument that the United States can no longer be considered a democracy, except in the narrow sense of formal elections.
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A business administration student that considered part of the invested capital as yield would flunk his exam—yet this is precisely what economists do when arguing the benefits of industrial agriculture as opposed to organic farming.
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The last thing the West wants to see is developing countries running their own economies the way they want to, growing sustainably and equitably and, in general, running their countries according to their own priorities.
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Marxism, for example, can be seen as a particular form of capitalism with a focus on who owns the means of production.
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In Joseph Tainter’s language, the marginal costs have exceeded the marginal benefits for about thirty years in the United States, suggesting that a collapse may have begun already back in the 1970s.
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A fatal energy trap could condemn humanity to become a permanent subsistence civilization if we are not very careful with how we use the remaining fossil fuel resources.
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The reality is that we are heading for a major economic crisis in a few years, with demand for oil permanently exceeding supply and with the shortfall increasing year after year.
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The failure of the 2009 and 2010 UN Climate Conferences to deal decisively with the looming danger of climate change raises a worrisome thought—it may not be politically possible to deal with the many global crisis that our civilization faces.
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Economics has always served its political masters.
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The dilemma seems to be: those who can, will not; those who will, cannot.
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It is absolute rubbish to claim neoliberal economics to be inevitable. If anything is inevitable, it is the opposite, steady-state economics, without which our civilization is unlikely to survive
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It is probably too late to avoid a collapse of civilization as we know it due to an obsession with economic growth on a finite planet that cannot tolerate much more without collapsing.
