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Tag Archive | "capitalism"

A review before the exam

Monday, August 16, 2010

102 Comments

Actually, this review is too late for the many people who have already endured economic collapse. As any of those folks can tell the rest of us, we do not want to receive the lesson after the exam. I’ve written all this before, but I have not recently provided a concise summary. This essay provides [...]

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Teetering

Thursday, June 10, 2010

28 Comments

The industrial economy, that is. On the brink, yet again. The real economy — not the born-again exuberance in the world’s stock markets — is stalling as the effects of easy money wear off. Indeed, investor fund flows haven’t been this bad since Lehmann Brothers collapsed in the autumn of 2008. The IMF says risks [...]

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Surveying the field and charting a course

Friday, April 16, 2010

64 Comments

It’s all the rage to talk about a double-dip in the industrial economy. That would be an economic trend in the shape of a W. I think an M is far more likely. The assumption of never-ending growth underlies all neoclassical economic assessments, but I think that assumption is about to break up on the [...]

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Throwing off the shackles of debt

Monday, March 1, 2010

18 Comments

by Guy R. McPherson, Keith Farnish, Dave Pollard, and Sharon Astyk Indebtedness is a form of servitude, usually involuntary, and, in extreme cases imprisonment. Consider, for example, current rates of interest, usurious compared to what savers earn on their savings in the same banks that charge that interest. Many religious organizations loath interest rates as [...]

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Politically viable solutions for peak oil and global climate change

Saturday, January 9, 2010

18 Comments

As I’ve written and said many times, I see no politically viable solutions to peak oil or global climate change. There is simply no way to tell the masses the truth about economic contraction and then get re-elected. Ditto for declining accessibility to fossil fuels even as the human population continues to grow, with every [...]

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Fanning imperial embers: Barack Obama channels John Maynard Keynes

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

7 Comments

Who was John Maynard Keynes, and what did he have to say about people, society, and economics?

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Can we handle the truth?

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

36 Comments

The International Energy Agency (IEA) released World Energy Outlook 2009 today. Even before the sham was shipped, it was exposed as a big 'ol bucket of lies. Seems the current administration thinks Americans can't handle the truth, so we need to apply some pressure to keep the lid on the facts. If this country's paragon of transparency (i.e., world's leading liar) and master of hope (i.e., wishful thinking) actually trusted the American people, perhaps we could avert chaos.

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Economic dominoes continue to fall

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

31 Comments

The property of rich folks has always been more important than the lives of the poor, a fact that will continue to create misery for the "other" 99% of us until the entire industrial economy fails. Personally, I can hardly wait.

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Politics and personal responsibility

Saturday, August 1, 2009

26 Comments

I've long recognized the two-party, one-ideology basis of American politics, and I was calling Barack Obama a neoconservative long before it was popular to recognize him as the Teflon President 2.0. But even I can hardly believe this tidbit from a guy I thought was pretty damned smart: From the I-cannot-believe-this-is-happening camp, Obama is appointing a Monsanto man as food safety czar. Welcome to Farmageddon, land of the free.

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Neocon nation, redux

Monday, May 18, 2009

3 Comments

We cannot use politics as usual to deal with energy decline. Ditto for runaway greenhouse. In other words, there is no viable political solution to deal with either issue.

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