Should this system be saved?

[eridani]

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/outofwork/2009/02/200921712329491425.html

What few Americans, politicians and ordinary citizens alike, have thought to consider is whether the financial system that the new administration is trying to rescue - essentially, the "American way of Life" - should even be saved.

After all, a long-term drop in global consumption is one of the few conceivable ways to stop the slide toward the tipping point of global warming and environmental degradation, not to mention the increasingly violent resource wars and global poverty, that are the inevitable outcome of a world economic system premised on limitless growth and consumption.

Obama's biggest challenge, then, will be to figure out how to create millions of jobs while steering the US economy away from the economically and environmentally unsustainable model of growth that helped generate the present crisis.

To do this will require more than spending hundreds of billions of dollars on rebuilding crumbling infrastructure and encouraging "green" technologies.

It will require designing an architecture for a 21st century economy that much more equitably distributes limited resources among an expanding population than has the debt/consumption system that is now collapsing globally.

It is hard to imagine how such a system could be devised, and put in place with public approval in time to stop the projected loss of tens of millions of jobs globally that now seems the likely, if not inevitable, outcome of the current recession.

[Triana]

1. "equitably distributing limited resources" would be claimed to be *gasp!* SOCIALISM

by the Repetulant Party - I wish Obama luck with that. I'll support him because that IS what needs to be done and ASAP - but am also realistic that the Reputulants will never, ever support it. Besides wanting Obama to fail (and not supporting anything he does for that reason alone) - they would label this "socialism". Even if it ISN'T. As we know, they've never been big on the proper use of the term. Or many others, for that matter.

[Jeep789]

2. Some of it, yes. The rest should be scrapped.

(Starting with the last 8 years of it.)

[960]

3. It's a moot question. The system CAN'T be saved.

We can try to make a more gentle landing, but the jig's up.

[napoleon_in_rags]

4. That's my feeling: YAWN.

Of course things have to change, we've been headed for a brick wall for a long time. The really interesting question is what paths we will choose to take in reinventing ourselves. Thats really where its at right now.