At a time when many of us in the environmental movement are feeling frustrated by offshore drilling and $700 billion in tax payer dollars going to Wall Street instead of renewable energy and green jobs, it is uplifting to watch Paul Hawken's inspiring talk about the Social and Environmental Justice Movement - "fundamentally a civil rights movement, a human rights movement, this is a democracy movement. It is the coming world."
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Among the bought-and-paid-for politicians in Washington, DC, the Greedy Boys of Greenwich and the Wonder Boys of Wall Street, is there one human being in this "Axis of Arrogance and Greed" who will speak out for something other than their own selfish interests?
Who is going to stand up and speak out clearly, loudly and often as President Barack Obama is doing?
Many voices are needed now.
Written in May
Posted on Sept. 30, 2008. Listed in:
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Why are only the American taxpayers bailing out the whole global economy?
A billion members of the human family exist on resources valued at less than one dollar per day. Africa is suffering from "slow drip" problems. Europe is getting warmer fast. Arctic ice is retreating and the arctic coast of Alaska is eroding.
Where are the new ideas, the financial backing, and the innovations needed to address these problems? There are tens of trillions of dollars in the global human economy. Where has all that money gone?
The front page of the NYTimes tells the family of humanity that we are on the verge of a global economic catastrophe. Are the taxpayers of the American family, acting alone, to become responsible for the problems now presented to the human community by the greed of a small group of rich and powerful people worldwide?
Why are an astonishingly small number of greedy people, holding hundreds of billions of dollars of ill-gotten gains from what are now recognizable as failed business models and Ponzi-like financial schemes, not taking responsibility for their avarice?
Who are the people behind the mess we see splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world this morning? Perhaps they need to be named, shamed and held to account.
Some greedy people are easy to identify. They are ones who have proclaimed themselves "Masters of the Universe" or Bohemians or the Greedy Boys of Greenwich or the Bilderbergers or members of The Trilateral Commission or the many too many outrageously enriched 'experts' and politicians who say and do anything to enhance wealth and power of themselves and their benefactors.
At least to me, it appears the problems in the global economy we are seeing today are the results of greed having reached its limits or, to put it another way, having "hit the wall" of unsustainability. That is to say, greediness of self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe and their minions has reached the point of greed's unsustainability. The global economy can no longer support the conspicuous, patently unsustainable behavior of a small segment of the family of humanity.
Yes, definitely yes, something new and different needs to be done. Bold action is needed; but, more of the same, old business-as-usual behavior appears insufficient. Limits need to be placed on patently unsustainable behavior. People who are responsible for the mess need to account for their behavior.
The American family is not responsible for the world's economic mess; but at the moment American taxpayers are being held solely accountable. There is something not quite right about such unfair and inequitable circumstances.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
Written in October 2008