Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In his latest commentary, Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach, perhaps the only Wall Street economist who at least partially comprehends the looming economic danger, once again lamented that a “co-dependent global economy can’t live without the excess consumption of Americans.”
The longing for the simpler times of my childhood when the unreliable third world electrical grid went down and my extended family of aunts came outside to sit in the dark and talk to me. It was an awake-to-the-moment, off routine, no TV, intimacy that was somehow magical. This, if we could get through the dark times of loss and chaos, was something to look forward to.
Sharp-tongued Mahathir Mohamad, scourge of currency traders worldwide, has said the US dollar is headed for a ‘catastrophe’ and will never regain its old strength.
Late last year … I was contacted by someone close to the Bush administration … The Bush administration was keen on achieving some semblance of stability in Iraq before June 2005, I was told … because that was when the Pentagon was told to be prepared to launch a massive aerial attack against Iran.
There exists today almost no social movement of a kind that leads human industrial society into a new, safe direction. This may be because (1) the anti-war movement, for example, offers little to the public in terms of a vision of sustainable living, and (2) the likely participants and leaders of a vanguard have no territory.
Subir Raha, the government-appointed head of India’s biggest oil company, said the U.S. would be “stupid” to attack Iran and risk imposing record oil prices on the global economy.
The quest for a sustainable, ecologically sensible society in the Pacific Northwest. (Special edition, with several articles, including a long interview with Ernest Callenbach, author of Ecotopia.)
On the pretext of fighting international terrorism the United States is trying to establish control over the world’s richest oil reserves, Leonid Shebarshin, ex-chief of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence Service, who heads the Russian National Economic Security Service consulting company.
It has often been predicted that the next war in the Middle East would be fought not over land, not over oil, but over water.
Excerpt from William Catton’s classic 1980 book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Plus, a recent letter from William regarding his current book project.
It is implicit in Malthus’s writings that uncontrolled population growth, failing “moral restraint”, would stall near the natural limits of the food supply. Like many who have commented on population growth, Malthus did not understand overshoot.
The US dollar’s status as the world’s main reserve currency is under threat as Asian banks back away from the superpower’s ballooning twin deficits.
