Video of Patrick Bond’s talk in Toronto on March 4
Socialist Project has posted video of Patrick Bond’s talk at:
http://www.socialistproject.ca/environment/patrick_bond.html
Many thanks to Pance Stojkovski for the video and the SP website.
Video: Patrick Bond on the Global Fight for Climate Justice
Are unsustainable activities recklessly driving economic globalization taking the family of humanity toward some sort of colossal ecological wreckage?
What could be happening?
Perhaps powerful people and huge human institutions are driving the relentless, and soon to be unsustainable, expansion of the global political economy, that is requiring unbridled increases of economic production/distribution capabilities, conspicuously unrestrained per-capita consumption of resources and the continuous growth of absolute global human population numbers.
But why?
As we having been observing in recent months, another huge “bubble” has been “manufactured” by economic powerbrokers and allowed to grow ominously within the world economy. Not unexpectedly, the sub prime “bubble” is doing now what bubbles eventually do. Bubbles burst. We can readily observe how the credit markets of the world banking system are seizing up, stocks are tumbling and the value of the dollar is sinking. Who knows, a financial meltdown of the economic system worldwide could be in the offing.
How could this be happening?
For a moment, let us consider that the organizers, managers and Wall Street whiz kids overseeing the global economy (and the unraveling of the worldwide sub prime swindle) are running the artificially designed economy of the human community as a pyramid scheme. This is to say straightforwardly that the international financial system is being operated so that most of the wealth rises pyramidally into the hands of a small minority of people at the top of the world economy where this wealth is accumulated and consolidated endlessly. At the same time, the vast majority of people on Earth, near the bottom of the global economic pyramid, are left with very little wealth. In the 1980s, this global financial operation was called a “trickle down” economy. We have been told over and over again how this economic scheme “raises all ships.” From this limited scope of observation, the billion people living on resources valued at less than one dollar per day and the additional 2.7 billion people being sustained on two dollars per day of resources in 2008 appear to be stuck in squalid conditions. The ‘ships’ carrying these billions of people do not appear to be lifting them out of poverty.
Could anything be done to beneficially change these unfair, inequitable and, in so many billions of instances, intolerable circumstances?
Of course. There is plenty to do. The global economy is undeniably a manmade construction. Because the world’s economy is a product of human activity, our economic system is known to one and all to be imperfect. Afterall, human beings can better themselves and their imperfect products can be ameliorated. Only works of God are perfect, I suppose. With this in mind, if it is so that the human economy is imperfect, it is just as obvious that the global economy of the family of humanity can be re-designed, modified and otherwise changed, as necessary. The system of economic globalization can be reorganized, “downsized” and “powered down” so that the global economy meets the primary needs of majority of people. In this way, the economy of the human community could be sustainably reconstructed so as to realize more fully and more equitably the principles of democracy.
What are the principles of sustainable ENVIRONMENTAL ECO:NOMICS?
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/