The Global Free Trade Economy

"The global economy is a rigged game, rigged so Third World politicians, rich investors and global corporations win – and American taxpayers lose." – Patrick J. Buchanan

"Nearly 70 percent of world trade is controlled by just 500 corporations, and one percent of all multinationals own half the total stock of foreign direct investment. In both the U.S. and across the globe, many large corporations - either directly or through intermediaries - are obeying the implacable logic of capital by creating barriers to entry, stifling local economies, and racing to liquidate finite resources. " - Donald O. Mayer

"Until our global economy is fueled by more than unfettered markets and an insatiable appetite for profit at the expense of human dignity, history will repeat itself." - Marie Dennis

"The threat posed by humans to the natural environment is nothing compared to the threat to humans posed by global environmental policy." – Fred L. Smith

"American economic hegemony has generated enormous hostility to an American dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allies who thought America was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them."- Francis Fukuyama

"To base an economy on endless building and continuos population growth is greed disguised as progress." - Tim Viselli

"Edward Abbey once said that "an economic system that can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human." Some part of society must soon step up and begin to figure out how to end "progress", if not reverse it, until the world reaches a steady state of ecological sustainability." - Fred S. Barker

In 2007 the United States owed $10 trillion, nearly a quarter of the global debt total of $44 trillion.

"Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries." - Point 9 Communist Manifesto, Karl Heinrich Marx aka Karl Heinrich Mordechai

In the 2006 Mexican Presidential election it was revealed that for every maquiladora job created (job created by NAFTA) there were four jobs lost in the Mexican agricultural sector.

At the end of 2005 69,000 troops are stationed in Germany and 40,000 troops are stationed in Japan. Why does America need to have 109,000 men and women in Germany and Japan?

160,000 troops were stationed in Iraq at the end of 2005. The rest, which totaled 500,000 in 2004 are stationed in nearly every country on Earth to protect resources deemed critical to American aristocracy. American aristocracy would be wiser to build resilience into a whole host of fundamental infrastructures by diversifying energy production and by using American technological expertise to create sustainable resource systems. But with such systems it would be harder to create the conditions that produce the windfall profits needed for American aristocracy to play with.

"People do lose their jobs as a result of globalization, and it's painful for those who lose their job." - George W. Bush

"Unemployment makes people very unhappy." - Carol Graham, co-director of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics, Brookings Institute

"Our global economy is outgrowing the capacity of the Earth to support it, moving our early twenty-first century civilization ever closer to decline and possible collapse.

In our preoccupation with quarterly earnings reports and year-to-year economic growth, we have lost sight of how large the human enterprise has become relative to the Earth's resources. A century ago, annual growth in the global economy was measured in billions of dollars. Today it is measured in trillions.

"Can we just realize that there are limits to growth? That "smart growth", at best, delays the moment when we must concede the limitations of a finite world? After observing the mindless expansion of the Los Angeles region, predicated on a future of cheap energy that will not be realized, I have to ask, are we smarter than a colony of bacteria that reproduces and proliferates until it suddenly dies off from an exhaustion of resources?" - David M. Marquez

Fortunately, there is a consensus emerging among scientists on the broad outlines of the changes needed.

The throwaway economy will be replaced by a comprehensive reuse/recycle economy.

The good news is that we can already see glimpses here and there of what this new economy looks like.

No economy, however technologically advanced, can survive the collapse of its environmental support systems.

Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being consumed in a single human lifespan.

Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late.

We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic decline were environmental, not economic.

"We are dependent on oil for our food, transportation, commerce, medicine, communication, sanitation and the job specialization that provides the vast majority of our livelihoods. Breaking our dependency will involve wholesale change in the way we live and who we are as a people." - Sara Anne Edwards

Although these ecologically destructive trends have been evident for some time, and some have been reversed at the national level, not one has been reversed at the global level.

In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, who now heads the Global Footprint Network, concluded that humanities collective demands first surpassed the Earth's regenerative capacity around 1980.

We are meeting current demands by consuming the Earth's natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot and collapse phenomenon.

Overshoot leads sometimes to decline and sometimes to a complete collapse.

The most recent mid-level U.N. demographic projections show the Earth's population increasing from 6.1 billion in 2000 to 9.1 billion in 2050. But such an increase seems highly unlikely, considering the deterioration in life-support systems now under way in across the face of the Earth.

We thus face two urgent major challenges: restructuring the global economy and stabilizing the Earth's human population.

The International Monetary Fund recorded a world wide 23% rise in food prices between January 2006 and June 2007.

In this new global order of high oil prices basic food commodities such as wheat, corn, soybeans and sugarcane will also become major energy sources.

"The government is overspending on the defense budget and underspending on more effective ways to bring peace and stability to the Earth. Why are we fueling what looks to be an unending "war on terror" when we could spend a fraction of it on helping people struggling with extreme poverty, people living on less than $1 a day? What people don't realize is that, by helping the poor, we create stability and promote democracy in Third World countries without shedding any blood." - Jackie Steinle

In effect, the rising price of oil is generating a massive new threat to the Earth's genetic diversity.

Now as humanity turns to wind, solar cells, and geothermal energy in this century, we are witnessing the localization of the global energy economy. The globalization of the Earth's food economy will also be reversed, as the higher price of oil raises the cost of transporting food internationally.

The Earth is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity, which is already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and other developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies.

This geopolitics of scarcity is an early manifestation of civilizations in an overshoot and collapse mode, much like the one that emerged among the Mayan cities competing for food in that civilization's waning years. You do not need to be an ecologist to see that if recent environmental trends continue, the global economy eventually will come crashing down.

China has replaced America as the leading consumer of basic commodities.

That China has overtaken America in consumption of basic resources gives us license to ask the next question.

The inevitable conclusion is that there are not enough resources for China to reach American consumption levels.

"We are shipping our middle class jobs to countries that make almost no products for their citizens; instead, they export back to us. Meanwhile, all we can sell them is our means of production. Farmers call what we have been doing "eating our seed corn." As our depleted middle class reaches a tipping point, we will no longer be able to support the trade imbalances.: - Larry Severson

The western economic model - the fossil fuel based, automobile centered, throwaway economy - will not work for China's 1.45 billion in 2031. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India either, which by 2031 is projected to have even more people than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the "American Dream."

Our twenty-first century global civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline.

The early Sumerian civilization of the fourth millennium BC was an extraordinary one, advancing far beyond any that had existed before.

The New World counterpart to Sumer is the Mayan civilization that developed in the lowlands of what is now Guatemala.

As with Sumer, the Mayan demise was apparently linked to a failing food supply.

One unanswerable question about these earlier civilizations was whether they knew what was causing their decline.

These are just three of the many early civilizations that moved onto an economic path that nature could not sustain.

We, too, are on such a path.

Today the annual addition of more than 70 million people to a world population of over 6 billion at a time when water tables are falling, temperatures are rising, and oil supplies will soon be shrinking suggests that the food supply again may be the vulnerable link between the environment and the economy.

The way the Earth accommodates the vast projected needs of China, India, and other developing countries for grain, oil, and other resources will help determine how the world addresses the stresses associated with outgrowing the Earth.

Earlier civilizations that moved onto an economic path that was environmentally unsustainable did so largely in isolation. But in today's increasingly integrated, interdependent global economy, if we are facing civilizational decline, we are facing it together.

The fates of all the peoples of Earth are intertwined.

This interdependence can be managed to our mutual benefit only if we recognize that the term "in the national interest" is in many ways obsolete.

The question facing governments is whether they can respond quickly enough to prevent threats from becoming catastrophes. The peoples of Earth have precious little experience in responding to aquifer depletion, rising temperatures, expanding deserts, melting polar ice caps, and a shrinking oil supply.

The dysfunctional global economy of today has been shaped by distorted market prices that do not incorporate environmental costs. Many of our environmental travails are the result of severe market distortions.

If these costs, which in 1998 the International Center for Technology Assessment calculated at roughly $9 per gallon of gasoline burned in America, were added to the $3 cost of the gasoline itself, motorists would pay about $12 a gallon for gas at the pump. Filling a 20-gallon tank would cost $240. In reality, burning gasoline is very costly, but the market tells us it is cheap, leading to gross distortions in the structure of the economy.

The challenge facing government is to incorporate such costs into market prices by systematically calculating them and incorporating them as a tax on the product to make sure its price reflects the full costs to society. If we have learned anything over the last few years, it is that accounting systems that do not tell the truth can be costly. Faulty corporate accounting systems that leave costs off the books have driven some of America's largest corporations into bankruptcy, costing millions of people their lifetime savings, retirement incomes, and jobs. Distorted global market prices that do not incorporate major costs in the production of various products and the provision of services could be even costlier. They could lead to global bankruptcy and economic decline."

"Our global economy is "driving ahead full speed". As a species we are consuming the Earth's resources and upsetting ecosystems much faster than nature can rectify the damage we inflict." - Robert Sollen

"The time is long past that we end the placing of Band-Aids on lethal wounds. We must put the same innovation and energy that we used in placing men on the moon into a sustainable future. In the balance, I have little doubt, is the survival of civilization." - Don Malvin

"America requires 8.9 million barrels of oil a day to fuel its vehicles. Replacing our cars with prize-winning vehicles would reduce consumption to about 1.8 million barrels a day. It would also slash carbon dioxide emissions. It is critical to American national interests to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The growth of the Chinese and Indian economies increases global demand for oil. Our economic lifeblood must be immunized against the dictates of a global petroleum cartel. We must not allow our potential energy vulnerability to become our Achilles heel. The challenge before us transcends traditional ideological barriers. I hope this proposal will contribute to a much needed rethinking of our national energy policy." - Dan Lungren