Its very difficult to have a discussion about politically correct semantic rubbish. This is nothing but repeated the political correct mantra's of an academic elitist, trying to promote using the same failed institutions and political approaches creating the problems.

Noel, you don't have the will capacity nor understanding to do anything but use semantics to make you feel good. I bet the blokes at the local pub could come up with more constructive answers than this learned drivel. Why don't you say something useful, if you can.

Well there ya go Noel, you'll be fighting a losing battle simply to get taken seriously.

Some say love makes the world go round. Well it doesn't. Greed does, or more to the point, profit motive. Infuse business with ethics and all you have is an entity ripe for takeover.

This article covers so much ground it'd need several volumes to convince any point-nosed economist to consider it. Nice to dream, though.

Greed doesn't make the world go around, but it seems to at the moment because it has become the orthodox paradigm. Money and material possessions/conspicuous consumption is seen as indicative of value as a person. To replace that goal with something else I don't see as a task that is impossible or even that hard, but it does present many problems.

To create an ethical understanding in the business world, as has just been mentioned, is seen as weakness, or inefficiency. In reality, many business people are willing and eager to engage in areas of, for example, triple bottom line accounting, corporate social responsibility, business ethics codes etc. This, I like to believe, is because they regard themselves as more than businesspeople, they are members of a society, of a world, as well as parents/children/siblings of others, as well as a moral self that most people are keen to develop.

The mindset of the modern world, I strongly believe, is a product of the reaction of the baby boomers generation, and their parents, to both the horror of the reality of the stories of the second world war and human rights understandings; and the uneasiness of the cold war and property, civil and political rights. This reaction created a system of rights as the key feature of ethics and politics over and at the expense of virtue based theories and by and large over duty based theories. One's place in the world was about what they were entitled to as a person, not what they were obliged to be as a person, or how they were obliged to treat others (and Others), especially anonymous others.

Like the generation that created it, this system will pass with the realisation of its faults. What it will pass into is the cause for concern.

Yes, the very first post on this topic highlights the difficulty of breaking through the resistance of entrenched ideologies. I have found it illuminating (and sometimes saddening) to read through the posts in this particular 'zine which purport to represent the "ordinary" person in the street. If we are to regard readers of OLO as a microcosm of Australian socio-political thought then blog streams provide a useful indication of the kinds of opposition to be found when not preaching to the converted.

It is for this reason that it apears that education is the key to social change. Yes, a lot of time and preparation is spent looking for quick fixes, but I suggest that to turn around existing mind sets, especially those of older Australians, would take a cataclysmic change. By which time it would be too late as the avoidance of such cataclysmic events is precicesly what is being argued for.

As well as tilting at windmills in the present perhaps it is not yet too late to ensure we don't perpetuate abuse of the planet or each other in the future? We have made a right old stuff up of our guardianship of this planet which each one of us posting here will one day sign out from, leaving the next generation to cope with our mistakes.

It would seem imperitive that to help those in the future with our problems, we should start now educating them and providing them with the tools to ensure they don't perpetuate our mistakes.

The opening line of:
"We live in a world where, according to Jeffrey Sachs in Time Magazine (March 2005) more than 20,000 people die each day because of extreme poverty." This reminds me of the quote "lies, damn lies and statistics."
The statistics are not explained or put into context. 20,000 deaths a day equals 7,300,000 a year. If we added another 7.3 million poor people to the present annual population increase and we would be alot poorer.
What to do?
Increase the number of deaths and we are heading into the right direction and the only way to do that legally is to make "war' and "killing" sustainable.
War and killing is becoming more commonplace in the world.
To make the world rich we need to convince the poor to die for the cause.

"In 1960 the income gap between the fifth of the world’s people living in the richest countries and the fifth in the poorest countries was 30:1." I'm guessing that those figures are from the New Economic Foundation's "Growth isn't working - relieving poverty", although I can't immediately locate them. But they are wildly different from data in Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist," which drew on impeccable sources. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, which began just over 200 years ago, there had been little change in incomes for millennia. Looking at world income quartiles, by the end of the unprecedented income growth of the 20th C, those in the lowest quartile had reached the level of the second quartile in 1900, something their ancestors could not have dreamed of. Between 1960 and 2000 there was a great reduction in poverty, as China, India and other Asian nations had phenomenal rates of growth, raising the living standards of their huge populations. Those who missed out are generally in African countries beset with bad government and war, and with a relatively small share of world population. So the starting point for this article appears to be flawed. And some of the prescriptions are out of touch with any feasible reality.

Faustino: Yikes! Who'd want to go against the orthodox view and suggest that Africa's woes are in large part due to a predilection for corrupt and tyrannical governments and a wholesale subscription to world views born in the Dark Ages at best?

Nah, it's all colonialism or neo-colonialism, the white man is evil and greedy, etc. Except that (inconveniently) doesn't explain Asia's (re-)emergence and the fact that in real terms, on the whole, most people (ie. Asia) are doing better than ever before. I have admiration for many of the Asian nations, yet I somehow can't feel sorry for a continent of people who won't help themselves and instead, make a complete balls-up of everything they do.

I also wonder how much vested interest there is in peddling the line that humanity has it so bad. If and when North Korea finally comes into the real world and we all see how shockingly backward it is, no doubt Kim Jong-il and his ilk will be off the hook and it will somehow be the fault of some guy in western Sydney or downtown Boise, Idaho, evil white oppressors that they are.

Not long ago wealthy folk used to answer Noel’s question via the ‘trickle down’ theory. Namely, “If I get filthy rich, that’s fine because people down the bottom will get some falling crumbs, so everybody will move up the ladder, thanks to me!”

If that rationalisation had a whisker of credibility, it is now it tatters as the world comes up against the brick wall of finite resources and environmental limits.

The drive for endless wealth has given our children a future defined by bleakness - oil wars, food wars, land wars, destructive droughts and hurricanes, endless health risks and global insecurity (labelled as terrorism). No amount of new gizmos can make us happy in such an age of uncertainty and chaos.

I am truly amazed how so many people – many on the progressive side of politics - are falling for the line that the drivers of wealth, the corporate sector, can now fix it all up.

To be sure, many corporate owners can maximise profits by setting standards that are expected of them. Its not hard for a tourist company or a confectionary manufacturer to establish strict ethical guidelines for running their businesses and even use these as a hard sell. And we should not stop applying pressure to make them do so.

But what of those in other lines of business – those who own the coal and oil and uranium? Or those who have vested interests in genetic food technology? When push comes to shove, appealing to ethical standards will fall on deaf ears when there are megabucks to be made from exploiting the world and its people – or putting them at great risk.

The next generation of humans will know what is valuable and what is not. Rich and poor alike, they will find out the hard way. Having created a non-sustainable society, the onus is on us to limit the carnage by coming to our senses as soon as possible.

Noel Preston is on the right track in asking the questions even if nobody as yet knows the answers to them.

Sorry about posting an ad, but it is on topic.

kalkadoon.org presents

Gunya Gossip

An evening of discussion, music, poetry and dance
Saturday August 26
At
INDIGE-N-ARTS
270 Montague Rd. West End (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia)
opposite Davies Park

Forum begins at 7.30
“What relevance do environment and social justice movements have to Aboriginal Australia?”

Speakers

Baganan Kurityityin Theresa Creed
Director of Gunya 21 and kalkadoon.org and the principle researcher of kalkadoon.org’s “Out of the Box” reports for the Gunya 21 Link Tank.

Senator Andrew Bartlett
Member of Gunya 21 Link Tank. Deputy leader of the Australian Democrats and national spokesperson in indigenous issues.

Drew Hutton
Convenor of Gunya 21 Link Tank. Veteran environment and human rights campaigner and the Qld. Greens state spokesperson in indigenous issues.

Followed by entertainment including
The 2 hard basket ensemble featuring poetry and dance by Baganan Kurityityin Theresa Creed
Plus guest artists and jam session.

Entry by donation
Snacks and non-alcoholic drinks available
Gunya Gossip is the launch of the Gunya 21 Link Tank, a sustainable housing resource network assisting Aboriginal development projects on Palm Island.
Contact homeland@kalkadoon.org

A special thank-you to INDIGE-N-ARTS gallery and workshop for providing the venue for Gunya Gossip
INDIGE-N-ARTS is an indigenous owned and operated art gallery that runs indigenous art and craft workshops, cultural tours and stocks a wide range of art including clothing, jewellery and ceramics.

kalkadoon.org Aborigininity, Sustainability, Art and Education

From my understanding of R. Buckminster Fuller, when the initial commerce empires were started (at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution ~200 years ago) they worked under two key ideas:
1. Thomas Malthus - we will never be able to provide enough(food) for the increasing number of growing mouths.
2. Charles Darwin - survival of the fittest, the rich believing that they were naturally superior due to position for survival (at the top).

Reading about altruism among vampire bats, they provide a small portion of their meal of blood to colony mates (most likely to be related) because if 5% of their meal is given to unsuccessful foragers it can protect them from starvation for hours whereas that small loss has a neglible consequence to those that forfeit it.

recent understandings in genetics, particularly epigenetics, provides a concrete scientific explanation of the Indigenous American idea of thinking ahead seven generations - How your grandparents lived has direct consequences on your children.

We are constantly gaining greater insight in how to make do with less materials.
We should bypass this concept of hand-me-down solutions to problems plaging less advanced countries when we have already developed superior methods of dealing with those issues.
EG. selling polluting coal technologies to China when energy efficiency combined with biomas, wind or solar power produced and consumed locally will do a much better job.

The solution to the world's poverty is called contraception,not confiscation of others hard earned savings.Introduce death taxes and soon all will pay have to pay it.China and India will consume the world's energy thus escalating prices and soon we will see our living standards fall dramatically.

Charity begins at home.Do gooders need to find another way of satisifying their attention seeking behaviour rather than sending us all on the usual guilt trip.Poverty will continue to worsen as the world population increases.The more we give ,so will the pop increase.We are only hastening our own demise.