So The Need For Another Economic Model

It Doesn't Have The Ability To Think Rationally This Economic Model. It Thinks Like A Drug Addict: 'where Can I Get My Next Fix?' It Doesn't Learn Wisely. Any Kind Of Measure Of Natural Wisdom Would Be: You Make A Mistake, You Correct It The Next Time Around. But A Drug Addict Feels Terrible... And Then Says: 'i Want More'. Unfortunately We Have An Economic Model That Thinks Like A Crack Addict.

Despite Different Cultures, Middle-class Youth All Over The World Seem To Live Their Lives As If In A Parallel Universe. They Get Up In The Morning, Put On Their Levi's And Nikes, Grab Their Caps And Backpacks, And Sony Personal Cd Players And Head For School.

I Do Think That At This Moment In Late Capitalism It Is Easier In Our Minds To Imagine Raising Florida 30 Feet To Escape The Rising Seas Than It Is To Regulate Capitalism To Make It Serve Human Beings.

Either Greed Belongs In A War Zone, Or It Doesn't. You Can't Unleash It In The Name Of Sparking An Economic Boom And Then Be Shocked When Halliburton Overcharges For Everything From Towels To Gas, When Parsons' Sub, Sub, Sub-contractor Builds A Police Academy Where The Pipes Drip Raw Sewage On The Heads Of Army Cadets And Where Blackwater Investigates Itself And Finds It Acted Honorably. That's Just Corporations Doing What They Do And Iraq Is A Privatized War Zone So That's What You Get. Build A Frontier, You Get Cowboys And Robber Barons.

It Is Eminently Possible To Have A Market-based Economy That Requires No Such Brutality And Demands No Such Ideological Purity. A Free Market In Consumer Products Can Coexist With Free Public Health Care, With Public Schools, With A Large Segment Of The Economy -- Like A National Oil Company -- Held In State Hands. It's Equally Possible To Require Corporations To Pay Decent Wages, To Respect The Right Of Workers To Form Unions, And For Governments To Tax And Redistribute Wealth So That The Sharp Inequalities That Mark The Corporatist State Are Reduced. Markets Need Not Be Fundamentalist.