What I worry about is climate change, because that would have untold effects that we can't even measure yet.
If the economy becomes disembodied from society it can only lead to disaster.
Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.
There is no degree of human suffering which in and of itself is going to bring about change. Only organisation can change things.
Having enough to eat, being able to educate your children, have reasonably stable employment, and being able to live in a society which isn't collapsing around you-all of these things have been generally eroded.
As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.
The World Bank is now the biggest culprit in the debt crisis.
This erosion of the middle class is happening all over the place. The opening of a wider gap between rich and poor is always accompanied by such a process.
Only around 2% of the earth's surface is cultivatable land.
We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.
What it missing, I think, is this notion of the common good.
If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.
There's people coming in who've never done any politics at all, who've never been in a trade union, they've never been in a political party, they've never done anything, but they do feel a kind of urgency.
The real fight is about what should be in the marketplace and what should not. Should education be a marketable commodity? Should healthcare?
Cost recovery is the polite way of saying, make families pay to educate their children.
Everything has to be done to build some sort of international democracy. We've seen only the tiniest beginnings of that.
Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing.
The Sierra Club in the United States has now really come out for population control and reduction.
There are a lot of people who don't contribute anything to consumption and production.
Whats immediately profitable is the only kind of logic that capitalism understands.
Markets cant think about anything beyond about three months. This is very long-term for markets, which is why the important things in life have got to be taken outside of the marketplace.
What you need if you want jobs are small and medium sized enterprises, local initiatives, labour intensive work, community development, service providers and the like.
We have the most crude accounting tools. It's tragic because our accounts and our national arithmetic doesn't tell us the things that we need to know.
Now we are flying off into outer space, there is no clear curb on what can be done in the name of the economy.
How do we get democracy at the international level? That's our problem. and it's essentially the same problem people faced in the 18th Century when they tried to get democracy nationally. Now we need it internationally.
