http://itsourmoney.podbean.com/e/it’s-our-money-with-ellen-brown-–-you’ve-been-strip-mined-–-042716/ (McMurtry’s interview starts at 28:00) Economies are life forces – interdependent systems built upon the facts of life and living. “Life capital” as Ellen’s noted guest Dr. John McMurtry says, is at the heart of true economic reckoning, and money is merely one derivative. McMurtry describes Capitalism as being in a cancerous stage in which… Read More
Published on Apr 10, 2016 https://www.thersa.org/events/2016/02/why-we-should-own-the-banks/ Wednesday 17th February 2016 at 13:00 – 14:00 at Durham Street Auditorium, RSA House Banks create money – nearly all of it. Should we recapture the sovereign power to create money by reclaiming ownership of the banks? Today virtually the entire circulating money supply consists of bank credit issued as… Read More
Reposted from: https://www.scribd.com/doc/79475313/Sahtouris-Jan-2012-Capitalism-in-Crisis-FT-My-Response-1 Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D. 23 Jan 2012 contact: elisabet@sahtouris.com Solving the Crisis in Capitalism Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D In the FT’s series on the Crisis in Capitalism http://www.ft.com/intl/indepth/capitalism-in-crisis what I read, even when purporting to hit the deep issues, takes on isolated aspects or surface features of the problem rather than truly getting at root causes. For example, in the… Read More
Reposted from: https://philosophersforchange.org/2012/05/10/wise-capitalism/ by Tom Atlee at Philosophers for Change, philoforchange.wordpress.com. Wise capitalism? by Tom Atlee Wisdom involves taking into account the larger truths about what is and why it is that way — and then living into that understanding in one’s everyday actions. When I speak of ‘wise capitalism’, I’m not speaking of wise business. I’m speaking of… Read More
Reposted from: https://philosophersforchange.org/2012/10/30/money-and-the-turning-of-the-age/ by Charles Eisenstein at Philosophers for Change, philoforchange.wordpress.com. Money and the turning of the Age by Charles Eisenstein As the economic meltdown proceeds to its next phase, we begin to see the unreality of much that we thought real. The verities of two generations become uncertain, and despite a lingering hope that a return to normalcy… Read More
Published on Jul 8, 2013 In June 2013, John Fullerton, Founder and President of Capital Institute, explored “The Road to Regenerative Capitalism” with a small, interdisciplinary group convened at New York University. Transforming Finance and The Regenerative Economy By Hunter Lovins and John Fullerton for the Capital Institute http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/january-2014/transforming-finance/ Summary: The global economy, which is… Read More
Human beings are integrally natural and social creatures, dependent upon natural life-support systems for their physical existence and socio-cultural life-development systems for the nurturing and realization of their emotional, cognitive, and practical-creative capacities. Societies whose developmental dynamics become alienated from their natural conditions of existence face inevitable doom. Oblivious to the ways in which their reproductive dynamics undermining the physical foundations of social life, they collapse the very basis upon which their institutions and value systems depend. Let us say that any society which unsustainably converts scarce natural resources into tokens of social power (as, for example, capitalism converts natural systems and elements into money) faces a material crisis of life-reproduction. The manifold environmental crises unleashed by capitalism, crises which persist even in the midst of on-going economic stagnation, are evidence that capitalism will ultimately face a problem of material life-reproduction. Yet, this material crisis is not the only crisis that capitalist civilization faces. Since human beings require not only life, but meaningful, purposive life, societies can also fall into what I will call spiritual crises of life-development.
Spiritual crises arise when the ruling value system and institutional structure of a society becomes alienated from citizens’ need to feel that they belong to a socio-cultural whole which values their contributions to its reproduction and development. More precisely, spiritual crises arise when the ruling value system and institutional structure of a society actively alienate citizens by treating them as mere tools of its material reproduction. When people are treated as mere tools of system-reproduction, their moral being as intrinsically life-valuable centres of experience, action, and interaction, cognizant of the social conditions of their freedom and well-being, and desirous of enhancing the social foundations of their individuality, are attacked. In these alienated circumstances social problems are presented to the populace as technical problems to be solved by political and economic experts working in the service of the established asymmetries of wealth and power. Spiritual crises thus arise when ruling classes attempt to solve a material crisis of social reproduction by treating subaltern groups not as participating members of a social whole, but as passive objects whose life-interests must be sacrificed to the health of the system understood as a reified whole indifferent to the life-requirements of the people who live under it.
The failure of the Durban Conference on Climate Change, (December, 2011) to agree to anything more substantial than that all nations would work together to develop binding targets for reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 is a metonym for the life-crisis besetting globalised capitalism.[1] Because global capitalism subordinates what John McMurtry calls “life-value” to the expansion and accumulation of money-value, it progressively undermines the conditions of planetary life-support, human life-requirement satisfaction, and meaningful human life-capacity development and enjoyment.[2] Resources, relationships, practices, norms, institutions, and forms of life-activity have life-value when they: a) satisfy objective requirements of human life-maintenance, reproduction, and development, b) thereby enabling the expression and enjoyment of the human life-capacities of sentience, imaginative and cognitive thought, and creative activity in ways which are, c) life-coherent. McMurtry’s principle of life-coherence asserts that in order to be good, expressions of life-capacity must not only follow from the free choices of the agents who enjoy them, but must also, “consistently enable ecological and human life-together.”[3] In other words, good forms of individual life-capacity expression must contribute to, rather than undermine, the natural field of life-support and the social field of life-development within which individual life-activity is grounded. The vaunted “liberties” of liberal-capitalist society are blind to the natural and social grounds upon which all good lives ultimately depend. Hence, capitalism is a system that necessarily generates crisis in all important dimensions of being alive. In the present essay I will explore the four most fundamental dimensions of capitalist life-crisis and the adequacy of egalitarian liberal, human rights-based cosmopolitan, and twenty-first century socialist responses to them.
JUSTICE is the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on public television. Nearly a thousand students pack Harvard’s historic Sanders Theatre to hear Michael Sandel, “perhaps the most prominent college professor in America,” (Washington Post) talk about justice, equality, democracy, and citizenship.
The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development http://www.thenaturalstep.org/sustainability/the-framework-for-strategic-sustainable-development/ Human society is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Earth environment. If our “parent company” destabilizes, our society and our economies go down with it. This is another way of expressing the funnel metaphor. Science has proven we are currently destabilizing our Earth environment, and this in turn is producing escalating… Read More
Source: Holt-LunstadJ, Smith TB, Layton JB (2010) Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review. PLOS Medicine 7(7): e1000316.
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
