ANDY FLEMING details how we need to completely replace our current economic paradigm if we are to have a future on the Earth.
It’s so easy to be negative about the current global economic system. And of course there is every reason. Most readers will be aware that the economies of virtually all major developed nations including China are well, stuffed.
When it comes to a solution however, yesterday’s Labour Party European Election broadcast brought home our dilemma. In its theatre and comedy it was excellent, vividly portraying the economic abyss we have descended into as a nation. Character assassinations of Cameron and Clegg flowed freely, highlighting their promotion of the philosophies of greed, inequity, deceit, self-advancement and privilege.
There was of course no reference to Labour’s immense culpability in our economic plight. Neither was there one positive economic policy proposal of how the people’s party was going to fix things. Apart, that is, from the usual rhetoric of economically castrating the bankers, with whom until late 2008 they were so intimate.
They offered no practical policies because here’s the thing; there aren’t any. That’s because the whole current global economic paradigm based on greed, central banks, drugs, money laundering, the military industrial complex and war is quite simply not fit for the new millennium. Tinkering around at the edges with an economic system originating in the sixteenth century simply won’t work, and here’s my rational for saying this, based surprisingly not in politics but in science.
Cast your mind back to your high school biology lessons. Do you remember Petrie dishes? Those shallow glass containers into which a food substrate was poured, such as agar jelly. A small sample of bacteria was introduced onto the surface of the agar, the lid was replaced and within a few days the organisms had reproduced exponentially covering the entire surface of the jelly.
The spectacular success in the growth of the bacteria was tragically short-lived. A few more days and they would not only be seen to have exhausted their raw materials (i.e. food substrate), they would also have poisoned themselves with their own toxic waste products.
