I am yet to be convinced that capitalism is the cause of climate change. Climate change is an evolution of the earth just as we humans are evolving. Capitalism has provided many of us living in Australia with choices. We can choose what products we wish to buy, how much water we use on our gardens, what forms of transport we take. There are times when i think the green movement has become so fearful, that it becomes undemocratic itself.

Liz
You fall into to the same hole most people do. Humanity is facing some serious global problems. The only way (I think) to overcome them is if we all (left/right, capitalist/socialist, theists/atheists, us/them, etc) work together in tackling them. There is really no point in bashing and blaming the "other side" if you need their help.

It's not easy, but leaders of the world's governments, major cities and captains of industry are trying via the UNFCCC process. The relatively short term problem of the global financial crisis will impact on this process, but the bigger issues remain.

I really can't see how your article (or movement) can engender support (that is required) from the very people you pillory. All I see is another rant that tries to use political ideology to draw lines in the sand when in fact something else is more important - the environmental, ecological and economic sustainability of the planet.

reforming capitalism is futile
it must under the market it rules by
be let to devour its own young

without workers nothing happens[but just name anything the govt couldnt provide better than some greedy banker seeking his highest return?

we have let the american nightmare become a dream, yes you get it all [and all paid for via a credit card [but if your debt increases more than your wages [then you loose it all][the rich as much as those they trod upon to gain it

we DONT need capitalists THEY NEED US

govt can plan damms , can and did build, the railways , the comunication pipes, the roads, BUT then did give to their mates the assets GOVT DID BUILD[that the people paid for and built once [now must pay off for the thief that STOLE IT via indexed price increases]

we NEED govt do do that buisness didnt see enough return for to do.
govt thus would better be getting on with doing what needs to be done

capitalists are bankrupted by their own need for ever more[by them doing ever less] they only rule over their advisers ,govt could better rule over them for their peoples betterment[not subsidising a failed[bankrupted] system

just to have it collase again in 7 years time
BOOM?BUST

in the process removing yet again the things we earned but never actually bothered paying for[thus we lost]the rich only lost more , but be it their fancy mansion[or humble dirt floor hut] what system can in all morality take away a mans home?[take away 10,000 americans homes each day]

rerform the rules of ursury

no one should be morrally obligated to repay intrest over 10 percent[that is pure capitalistic EXCESS]

Having read both of the articles by Liz, I can see that there is a lot of idealism there. Not necessarily a bad thing, but let's get a bit real.

While I am not a fan of out-and-out capitalism, I also don't subscribe to socialist doctrine either. One suggests a complete level of individualism that would lead to disastrous levels of greed along woth financial and mental burtality. This is likley to to lead to physical clashes in the long run. The other puts people in their 'boxes' and tells them they have to be happy with their lot in life, a recipe for much then same as the first option.

The government's role is to reign in capitalism to something that is manageable, and mix in bits and pieces of social doctrine to enure those less fortunate or broken members of society are not swept to oneside in the rush for the dollar. We would all, I would hope, like to see the problems of hunger and poverty solved, and a capitalist approach certainly wouldn't achieve this, and nor would a socialist approach. It's a mix, and it's a delicate balance. One which has not been achieved anywhere yet.

Once again ignoring the base cause of the worlds problems as seen by the socialists.
The world cannot support 6 billion people living the life style of the western world, yet this is the lifestyle that the workers of the world aspire to.
A Demographer's conferrence held in Canberra around 2004 came to the conclusion that the world could support sustainably, at western lifestyle levels, about 2 billion people.
It seem's arrogant on the part of SA to tell Rural Chinnese, Indians Indonesians, Africans etc etc that they will have to stay outside the room and just look in through the window at how workers in Europe, America, Australia, etc live.
Until groups like the Socialist Alt address the population issue the rest of the argument is moot.

“force companies to go green with legislation that has real teeth or use financial incentives to encourage sustainable production.”

Should government "force" companies, beyond the right of government to regulate and legislate?

Bearing in mind “companies” employ the majority of the electorate, should not there be some room for ‘listening’ and reflecting the will of the electorate, rather than ‘forcing’?

“So if the ruling class cannot provide the answers” here we go again. . . .

Wedge politics

Like “Workers and bosses”

“And more specifically it’s workers’ labour power that is the source of profit that the system so relies on.”

No it is the risk capital which the employer deploys and uses to fund the workers pay, rent or buy premises and equipment, fund debtors and stock (all easily seen in a start-up situation), before anything is even sold, which is the “source of profit”.

“Marx famously puts it” but Marx is a discredited moron.

“small numbers of active socialists around today” and hopefully turning extinct (probably because no one with any sense would breed with them).

“To begin to build a socialist society that can lay the basis for a sustainable world for the whole planet.”

Well, maybe the best thing is they cannot breed, “sustainability” is directly linked to population numbers

Three cheers again OUG! Indivisible!

I shouldn't prod the SA guys too much - part of their hearts and part of their heads are in the right place. The rest is mysterious: are they really pushing truly "socialist", social-democratic, anarcho-syndicalist, libertarian socialist, or just green-feudalist society? Going by rougey's predictably Malthusian filth and its reptilian eugenics poison, I'd say the last few ideologies seem more apt to describe this latest SA contribution. I avoid playing any historical-ideological pun on "SA" itself; suffice to say that they'd need an "SS" to enforce their draconian green vision.

This planet can support all its people in comfort and technological sophistication, provided it lets its free-trade schysters go bankrupt (or to prison) and reverts to popular state sovereignty taking care of its people. Protectionism, state-controlled capital and credit, international regulation of trade on sound "other's benefit" legal principle. All to realize humanity's potential.

Carbon dioxide's good too, always has been - helps the plants, forests and agriculture. We need more. And the imperialist free-trade parasites want instead a "carbon trading system" or fart taxes, all to create another fictitious and disastrous monetarist bubble to keep their dysfunctional rubbish alive!

The article itself is basically a load of nonsense. Little Brother and Col Rouge have got to the nub of the problem. The workers are the ones who are basically to blame for the situation in which we find ourselves. They are the ones who have been spending on their credit cards like there is no tomorrow and they are the ones who are largely responsible for the huge increase in the population in the past fifty years. Until both these problems are addressed, we will continue on the road to oblivion, the rest will have a negligible effect on our ultimate survival.

David

So there you have it Liz. These are the sorts of critters that the Green dogma encourages: eugenicist, degenerate snobs, with very limited cognitive abilities. Often these creepies try to cover their intellectual shallowness with glib provocation, just to seem clever and in charge. Consider the bizarre situation: QUADRILLIONS of a debt black hole ignored continually among these smug free-trade pundits. That's no "elephant in the room"; it's the Death Star.

Fascism's their secret fetish, and the only logical political conclusion to the binary and limited thought processes in monetarism and AGW/IPCC-stamped environmentalism. Therefore, snap out of such blinkered and hopeless misanthropic determinism, and the lies that drive it!

Btw, your initial assertion is absurd: "It is possible that capitalism can spend its way out of a planetary meltdown". The spending - just like the bail outs - is a sure recipe for hyperinflation. It's a no-brainer, but further proof that the head shed lacks brains as well as lacking guts.

vk3auu[quote]..>>The workers are the ones who are basically to blame for the situation in which we find ourselves...>>

that is so much nonsense;ge is the largest credit card supplier,its reportedly doing just fine

we have seen big buisness debt double and tripple[because of the absurd ammount of buyouts the multunationals conduct]
credit swaps have added to the problem

debt swaps have swamped the system[selling my loss for your unrecoverable LOSS is a sale both ways apparently

securitising big buisness debt is not fault free either;their credit card debt is more than offset by their COMPULSORY super DEDUCTIONS bankers securitised into worthless paper

defaults for credit cards are short of 3 percent[of a tiny pool owed by many]big buisness debt is unable to be announced,because not only dont the regulators know where it is [many of the bankers claim not to know either]

that being my minour adjustment,i conquere with the rest[but not its accorded cause]

>>..They are the ones who have been spending on their creditcards like there is no tomorrow..>>

next we move into murdering all the poor people?
WHY?

>>.. and they are the ones who are largely responsible for the huge increase in the population in the past fifty years.Until both these problems are addressed,we will continue on the road to oblivion..>>

road to oblivion?bro someone has been lying to you,you know russia will be a bread basket for the world or africa,there are people out there think only they got a right to live[these selfish people are retards,accepting lies as an excuse to hate others]

which races we begin with bro?capitalists?let the poor eat the rich?

once they wake up to you lot genociding them[making them sterile, pumping mind numbing mercury into their mouths,their'vacines'and medicines,i cant wait till you nutters start killing each other because your genes are deemed'bad'

>.. the rest will have a negligible effect on our ultimate survival...>>

our deaths is YOUR delusion
grow up you retarded EUgeneCYSTS

think;who next?

when you lie down with those who kill,how safe you think you will be at the next CULL?

One under god is speaking absolute gobidlegook. I cant understand his mindless postings.

For goodness sake, when are we all going to focus on the positives! We live in a very fortunate country. That is the bottom line.

All of us can make a difference by spending time giving back to our community and find some peace. One Under God, i suggest you seek some therapy.

Truly, some of these posts on this topic are speaking such intellectual diatribe - i cant understand clearly the points you are trying to make.

Can you keep it a bit more simpler with a few positive actions please? Its not all doom and gloom. I mean, whats the worst that can happen?

The Workers are to blame?
They must be the same Workers who were convinced by the politicians and the media that the good times were here to stay and that they had all mysteriously become richer.
Buy a couple of houses or borrow for some shares now or miss out on the never-ending boom.
Borrow now and you can retire in just five years and live off your investments.
Everybody's doing it - there are entire TV shows dedicated to this strategy.
Need cash? Just use the ever-increasing value of your house as your own personal ATM or apply for a few more credit cards - it's easy!
Reverse mortgages - now that's a great idea. Now those retired pensioners can live the good life too.

Yes the Workers probably are to blame for believing all that spin and being blinded by their own greed.

Never mind those who actually created and used the spin for the same reason. They'll be back again for the next boom-bust cycle.

Unfortunately they've dragged everybody else down with them.

Although I disagree with the main premise in the two articles and I think that articles like this do significant damage to achieving sustainability, Online Opinion should be applauded for publishing ideas that are so far outside the mainstream. It gives me faith that we live in a free society.

The issue that socialists never seem to address is that when socialists take over all the socailist leaders will be "good" and really look after the needs of the people. Even though we have seen that doesn't happen (Hello Stalin), somehow socialists don't recognise that one of their own could be "bad." Capitalists, to their credit, have recognised some of their own can be "bad" and have developed systems of government with checks and balances.

The reason I say that articles like this do damage to becoming sustainable is that when I recommend policies that would lead us to being more sustainable, those in opposition just say, "That is just more socialist hogwash. That is just the thin edge of the wedge until we are all living in a totalitarian regime." Policies such as a carbon tax to replace some of the income tax or setting aside more public land for "ecosystem services" rather than grazing and logging would harm developers who are counting on using those resources, but they wouldn't stop capitalism.

Hopefully in a free society we will be used to assessing all sides of the debates and sorting out the things that are best.

ericc is probably the most calmly expressed Malthusian fruitcake that I've ever read on OLO. He just keeps mouthideceptive quips about any and all forms of development being only a means for "the rich getting richer", but then "I'm no socialist"! Pity too that he misses how fart taxes (the "carbon" term is a revealingly silly misnomer) and "ecosystem services" are just another source of speculation for the parasitic to get more bloated and dependent on our workers' blood.

It is an unredeemable - indeed unsustainable - insult to humanity in general, and humans in Australia particularly, to persist in the blanket and unsubstantiated claims of such a fanatical dogma as that blinkered and dishonest Malthusian claptrap. This country's population has survived with little problem against its supply of procured and traded resources, despite the long-term degradation to actual production and infrastructure, and the characteristically western, post-contraceptive-pill demographic imbalance that has forced more and more younger locals and (more belatedly) migrants into the direct task of feeding baby boomers and older.

That we have survived such irresponsible, negligent and corrupt government is remarkable enough. It is worth remembering that we have done so within a largely fictitious and fraudulent economy, increasingly removed from true notions of productive "growth", to the point where "consumer spending" and other monetarist indices count towards that definition!

Nonetheless, our survival against such fraud and neglect should be a source of hope for just how great the country can become again when returned to a protective and truly productive regime based on proven principles - not on the imperialist quackery of eugenics and associated anti-human dogma borne of parasitic oligarchics' own in-breeding, aggressive sponsorship of their own mediocrity, and other degeneracy.

As OUG and wobbles suggest, the eugenicist snobs reveal more about themselves with their quackery. The parasitic are indeed "unsustainable" in a moral sense. However, we workers must not succumb to the temptation of applying the same nastiness to bring about their demise; there's no need to, provided the system returns to responsible and moral governance.

Hard to know where to begin refuting such a jumble of fallacies.

All you have said is based on ideas that were disproved in theory over a hundred years ago.

However socialists, not content with the disproofs in theory, went right ahead anyway and, at a cost of over a hundred million deaths, produced all the disproofs in practice that anyone could ever want.

To start with, the problems that come from the use of natural resources to support modern human life are going to afflict any other social system, so long as it supports the same amount of human life to the same standard. The problem you have is with human life, not capitalism. Obviously if you kill off large numbers of people either directly, or through starvation caused by banning productive activities, this will preserve the environment – at a cost in human deaths. But none of that is an argument against capitalism.

The labour theory of value does not explain the price of something: the theory of marginal utility does. If you pay someone $40,000 for a year to make a wheelbarrow, the value of the wheelbarrow is what someone will pay you for it, not $40,000. This means Marx’s central tenet was wrong.

Also, Marx got to volume three of Capital and stopped at the chapter where he was supposed to define class. His whole theory depended on it. Yet thirty-five years later he died without finishing it. The reason is because, once you think about it, the theory cannot withstand critical scrutiny. For example, a worker who has superannuation is a capitalist in his capacity as a shareholder. So is he a member of the ruling class, or the ruled class? Marx’s theory is demonstrably wrong. It is nonsense.

The only theory of class struggle that has real explaining power in modern western society is the struggle between the class of those whose work or savings goes to produce all the wealth the re-distributionists want to plunder, and the class of tax-consumers, the objects of government’s handouts and privileges.

when the socialists collapsed the'shares'were dispersed[creating tempory capitalists]now capitalism is collapsed we get our dividend [essentially a fractional tax refund[for some,but not the dole bludgers]anyhow go out and buy food with it while you can afford it,because the plan is hyper/inflation[the only way to'clear'fiat debt[that creates the debt but not the intrest to repay it]

[thus it ONLY cure is hyperinflation and this ressesion[we have to have]and will shortly get,their[capitalists]only cure for debt is create a bigger debt[then get'too_big'to fail]but the capitalists cure is more credit for themfrom govt coorperate welfare]then hyper inflation for US

CAPITALISM needs a new[cascow]tax[but how can we get this new global tax be sold to the serfs?fear;global warming[or is it global cooling]

regardless its the tax the capitalists need us to have thus we will get it,and then get yet more via hyperinflation[ie by deflating what money can buy] capitalism dont you love it[if you own the bank you do what you like to who you dis like]the rest[your mates]get credit and the serfs get all the blame

go spend[then in june you get blamed]or dont spend and watch it hyper inflate away

so what we do is what they do[fix your intrest,before june]cause by next xmass capitalisms delusions wil be clear to all[blood in the streets by 2010?

the poor will be eating the rich by then[better we buy food now
when capitalists get their new tax[oh who cares do as you chose
just remember capitalists got more to lose]or is it nothing left to lose?

sleep sheeple sleep govt will feed you poisen[soon even their fiat deception,s cant grow any more food]

dont say you didnt know,when we hit the streets the cull begins[but they cant take your home[because they sold off the mortgauge doicument they MUST present[the origonal]not a copy to reposess ya home[if you got no address they cant take/find your car]

what is they new ism?
sceptisism

enjoy the game[they sure are [be they the social;lists,or the mark-cysts or the DAS-capital-ists]the neo-[neo means new]-con zionist banker capa-till-lists,ursury is morally corrupt

so is car-bon?tax
[bon is good ; nyet com-rad?]