j_b

I am not sure what you meant w.r.t. to Rousseau but he didn't think that primitive people never imposed their will on the weak or never took stuff that wasn't theirs. Sauvage man was 'innocent' insofar whatever he did was for self-preservation by opposition to accumulating wealth or finding rewards/pleasure in diminishing/hurting others. The social contract permitted sauvage man to become an intelligent man but the terms of the contract are so skewed toward the interests of the elite that it is bound to fail.

Brzezinski who started funding and arming islamist extremists in Afghanistan/Pakistan in the late 70's just rode in on Obama's coattails. I am sure he'll have some brilliant scheme to clean up the mess they enabled 30 years ago ... nobody's quite sure of the blowback that will entail but who's counting?

Such acute understanding of the casino economy should be rewarded in the traditional fashion: make him treasury secretary or put him in charge of the Fed. reserve.

Yes, the terms of the bailout were very poor for the reasons you indicated but I don't think it was intended to be more than a short term stop gap to prevent the laying off of millions of people, which could take what's left of the economy into a death spiral.

Classic regurgitation of corporate lies by a useful idiot.

Enablers? DO you mean enabling like your type did when you gave them money and missiles to fight the russians in the 80's?

No. I also discussed Haiti and the terminal depletion of its soils. The women feeding mud cakes to their children are still waiting for these famous "exchanges between people" that you keep saying will solve their wittle starvation problem. Note that Haiti isn't an isolated example but merely one of the most salient. The truth is that developing nations shouldn’t expect any reasonable solutions to their resource problems since they cannot offer you anything in return that you want. What is especially odd is your wanting to frame the issue of resource/ecosystem service depletion as being a non-issue until the resource is completely depleted and it becomes a global crisis. In fact, (as I have already said but you unsurprisingly keep ignoring) depletion affects human societies on a regional basis first and usually quite dearly. I could cite countless examples of the above but it is obvious that no matter what anyone says you’ll keep repeating your creed about self-correcting markets that somehow will avoid hardship for all concerned (on avrerage or at least in your neighborhood). Also note that even if you can replenish the stocks, the populations will have different characteristics than the original ones but why should you care if "on average" it doens't translate into a dietary loss for "mankind". It's quite rich to hear someonme who continuously appeal to individual economic rights somehow be only concerned with conditions on average. Are your readers supposed to think that rehashing the same pablum, however verbosely, and calling me silly names is the answer to my posts?

Off_White shouldn't be confused because the red/terror-baiting issue has come up here regularly over the years since I have never accepted the "liberal are traitors" bullshit of rightwing goons. Last time I retired from posting on this board was exactly because I got tired of being baited by PP and others. All of it being condoned by some moderators who thought it was funny.

Central Valley farms are among the most productive in the world - in $. Your next step forward is to decrease productivity? Are you channeling j_b? For how long will they be the most productive since their irrigation pratices are simply not sustainable. There is no need to channel me; reading the specialized litterature should be amply sufficient: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1257392

Plan which pol to buy to defeat CAFE standards in congress.

This is false. Fish stocks eventually crash precipitously. During the northern cod collapse, 10,000’s of fishermen in Canada alone lost their jobs in a matter of a couple years while it was one of the few mainstays of the regional economy and nothing could replace the fishing industry. Other collapses have occurred elsewhere. Yours is a strange world indeed. Outside interests can come loot the resource a culture depends on and you think that people will find an equivalent job that doesn’t really exist. Of course, you refuse to acknowledge the 10,000lbs gorilla in the room: it simply isn’t sustainable or even plain reasonnable to deplete a resource for the short-term gain of a few people. Fish depletion issues are widespread today and are often related to similar conflicts in resource allotment like for example the subsidized logging industry or agro-business destroying salmon habitat in western North America. Extreme resource/services depletion is linked to the political history (notably colonialism) of these regions. There are no more soils left in Haiti since it is almost completely deforested; all food has to be imported. Do tell what? Many variables condition economic fortunes, but resources and ecosystem services (such as climate) are usually the most important besides geographical location for trade centers. Which explains why advanced economies are mostly located in temperate regions. I am surprised I have to explain this to you, but perhaps I shouldn’t be.

The idea that scarcity has to be global to deeply affect regional populations is bunk. For example, in commercial fishing, stock depletion affects regions without the global market necessary feeling the loss of the regional resource. Thanks to fast boats and ever more refrigeration, international fleets move on to other far away regions were they deplete different stocks and change foreever the lives of those who traditionnally exploited the resource. But perhaps you ought to talk to the haitian women who feed mud cakes mixed in with fat to their children about "societies echanging things" to resolve local resource/services depletion. How do you think canadians will like sharing fresh water with Vegas and LA? As if the difference between the relative well being of Saudis and Yemenis was better explained by their politico-economic systems and not what they have under their soils.

Easy: the northern cod fisheries collapse. And mankind subsequently ran out of food? The total number of calories available per capita has declined as a result? This isn't what you asked. We have another 30-40 years of global fisheries at current rates of depletion and there is no sign that we will act before it is too late. The northern cod collapsed because of overfishing despite much scientific warning that fishing should be curtailed. Hundreds of communities lost their entire economy and way of life.

Sorry, I just sprayed coffee all over the keyboard trying to stifle my laughter. Good luck in your new 'no resources required' universe. Once you've cleaned off the keyboard, can you show me an example of a critical resource that was completely depleted before substitution, conservation, and innovation made the problems presented by the scarcity of the said resource manageable - if not null and void? Easy: the northern cod fisheries collapse.

No abundant source of energy has the energy density of oil. Productivism and over the top consumerism needs an unlimited supply of cheap oil. It isn't replaceable. Neither are fresh water, soils, and ecosystem services that are being destroyed at unprecedented rates. To keep pretending our ways are sustainable is dangerous religion. If technology were static, and scarcity relative to demand didn't drive conservation, substitution, and innovation then Malthus would have been vindicated long before we got to the point where mankind used very much oil at all, much less had occasion to predict catastrophe and gleefully ponder the consumer's final comeuppance when it "runs out" and the final day of reckoning arrives. Malthus? You've got to be kidding! Malthus wrote before the industrial revolution and way before the great acceleration of the last 50 years. You could at least update your references a little. But, of course, then you couldn't derisively dismiss what we know about resource use and environmental impact today.

I have no idea if he is/was a card carrying Bircher but his rhetoric is basically the cold war anti-communist conspiracy paranoia of the jbs. Don't be fooled by the innocuous looking jargon you'll find today on their website. They are basically a corporate financed far right group which sees: "collectivism" as the main threat to Western Civilization, and liberals as "secret communist traitors" who provide cover for the gradual process of collectivism, with the ultimate goal of replacing the nations of western civilization with one-world socialist government. "There are many stages of welfarism, socialism, and collectivism in general," he wrote, "but Communism is the ultimate state of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that direction." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society

Having economic freedoms isn't the same as having a free market or laissez faire. I think we all agree to say we don't have free markets today, yet entrepreneurship is fine.

A mixed economy is a mix of private and public ventures. It fosters entrepreneurship yet acknowledge natural monopolies, the role of public policy in funding and choosing which technologies to promote, and regulates economic activity to preserve the commons, consumer rights, etc ...

ah well, you heard it here first, I'm a goon too. i'm either for you or against you. Exactly, which part of my post said or implied you were a "goon too"? What about stopping making it up as you go along? huh?

See, how the john Birchers like your failed logic, bradleym. I have said many times that I was for a mixed economy.

Once again you have no comments whatsoever about the facts I cited to support my assertion that the Economist continuosly spews laissez faire propaganda; yet, you have plenty to say about me and what I didn't say. I think we get the drift.

No abundant source of energy has the energy density of oil. Productivism and over the top consumerism needs an unlimited supply of cheap oil. It isn't replaceable. Neither are fresh water, soils, and ecosystem services that are being destroyed at unprecedented rates. To keep pretending our ways are sustainable is dangerous religion.

What exactly did you try beside repeatedly not addressing anything I said and ad-hominem attacks? Considering that until your last post you hadn’t yet said anything relevant to the issue at hand, I was kind enough to once again string a few salient facts to impress on you the extremist nature of their rhetoric. How could it surprise me since I already discussed their endorsing Obama? Note that they very grudgingly endorsed Kerry in 2004, probably because Bush had become an embarrassment and it was impossible to both endorse him and remain credible with their educated (but poorly informed) readership. I also said earlier that thinking (pretending) that Bush was competent in 2000 (same for Reagan btw) is beyond belief and completely strips them of any credibility. They may occasionally have a token departure from neoliberal orthodoxy but almost at all time they frame their mostly unsigned articles with a radical rightwing agenda: privatization of quasi everything, deregulation of all sectors including natural monopolies, repeatedly advocating the opening of all labor markets to put pressure on wages (they are against the minimum wage), they are against all corporate tax and advocate other trickle down gibberish: they regularly spew the “tide that lifts all boats” mantra despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They claim to be pro-environment but refuse most environmental regulations, and dismiss environmental constraint on growth. They cheered all deregulations experiments that have all ended in economic debacles for the last 20 years (Latin America, Russia, Asia, .. and now the world economy) and they supported all US-UK wars. Don’t you see that being critical of the execution of the war yet saying it nevertheless had to be waged is another rightwing canard to deflect criticism of their warmongering and not discuss the real cause of the war? The Economist like the rest of the corporate media regurgitated the blatant lies fed to them by Blair and Bush and to this day they still refuse to acknowledge it was wrong to go into Iraq. I fail to see how pushing for no corporate tax, for unfettered capitalism, against the minimum wage, spewing war propaganda, etc… isn't advocating extremist policies. The demographics of their audience is different than that of FOX and the WS, so their discourse is geared toward the managerial class that is more tolerant on morality issues and likes to think of itself as enlightened but is unfortunately not so.

Too funny. The anarcho-capitalists who used to argue that we ought to shrink government to be better able to drown it in a bathtub, who argued in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that attacking Iraq was the right thing to do (and killed 100's of thousands in the process), now try to present themselves as centrists who can do nuances and bring reasonnable solutions to the debacle their extremists policies have caused. George Orwell is probably doing somersaults in his grave right now.

Well, if you presented 'arguments' as you say, then I suppose I could reply to them. What you offer are assertions, though, which can only be responded to by counter assertions, ad infinitum. I gave plenty of facts in my post that you could contest if you really wanted to have a discussion but you seem more interested in dismissing off hand my entire post. The fact you had to make up this fake exchange instead of quoting my post speaks volume about your methods. YOu don't know what the hell you are talking about. The goons have been at it on this board for years. It's interesting how you are doing precisely what you accuse me of doing. In 2 posts you haven't presented a single fact to counter anything I said; yet, you feel that you can make blanket assertions without evidence. The Economist is pro-war, pro-deregulation and 100% pro-"free" market, pro-Bush, pro-Reagan: they are extremist, I am not.