Capitalism is Dead

Money should be a token to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. What has been happening, however, is that instead of the economy serving the people, the people have been serving the economy. A complete reversal is needed.
Our economy needs to be of service to the people. This is going to take a massive change in thinking.

During these last months of the economic crisis, people were beginning to discover that they could actually survive without buying more stuff.
That’s what we have to do environmentally anyway. So this was a good start. However, governments don’t want us to be self-sufficient, they want us to keep on spending. That’s why in many countries they are offering thousands of dollars for people to trade in their old cars and buy new ones with a subsidy from the government. On September 11th 2001, President Bush asked the American people to go out shopping and spend more money. This has been the root of all our problems. We are living on borrowed money and it cannot continue. Our economic structures are collapsing and the governments are trying desperately to prop them up by pouring more and more taxpayers money into failed corporations.

We need to see this very differently. The recession is the best thing that could happen. We need to reduce our emissions by 80% in the next 30 years and the recession is going to force us to do just that.

Capitalism has to change. Humankind has lived on its income for hundreds and thousands of years e.g. agriculture. We were dependent on what was available at the time. But in the last 25 years, we have been living beyond our means as
we thought we could engineer our way to utopia through having more and more cars, planes, etc. Now it is technological advances that are drawing us more and more into debt. The idea has been that our technology will take us to utopia.

There has been a failure of wisdom in our society. For the last 200 years we have been grossly incompetent. Do you realise that 80% of technology goes into the military to make weapons for killing each other? What if that money was spent on health, education etc?

The structures of our societies in general have been based on a hierarchy e.g. emperors, generals, cardinals, popes etc. This is a primitive state.

Evolution follow 3 stages:
dependence – the lowest stage,
Independence – next stage
Interdependence

Historically, humanity has been dependent on the hierarchy and recently we have been rebelling against that dependence. There has been a decline in the respect for leadership.

Our banks and financial institutions used to be pillars of our society. They were honorable and earned our respect. We used to have 80% respect for those institutions. Now less than 10% respect them and they are on a par with 2nd hand car salespeople and double-glazing salespeople.

This hierarchy needs to be replaced by self-responsibility. But when you take the authority away (even if it was benevolent or malevolent) – there was a certain order produced by the authority, so when you take it away – people are not used to being self-responsible. There is a breakdown of leadership and people are going crazy for a while.

There is an urgent need for society to shift into proper responsibility.

The hierarchy began to break down about 25 years ago.

If we took self-responsibility for our health – the health care budget would drop by 75%.

The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer

How can this be fair? The CEO of Target earns $75000K per day while staff pay is $64 per day.

Capitalism has failed and it’s time we admitted it. We have an economy that people are in service to. The money is the first consideration, not the people. The money has become the goal in itself. It’s a complete distortion of trade.

In the last decade there has been a huge increase in the number of crises such as tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, HIV, Swine Flu, economic crises we are facing. It has gone from 40 a year to over 400 a year. This is a huge awakening. It is time for us to take responsibility for ourselves and for our world.