Does Anyone Know What Capitalism Is?

Capitalism is “survival of the fittest”… capitalism is rooted in the idea of merit; everyone should be compensated according to his or her contribution (to the common good?)… capitalism is about the movement of capital; the more it moves, the richer everyone gets… capitalism is an upgraded feudalism, where the capitalist is an overseer of an abstract terrain made up of investments, not of arable lands… capitalism is democracy; the free spirit of an open society requires capitalism to support the liberties of individual citizens, and protect against government overreach… capitalism is virtue… or, capitalism is the absence of virtue…

The Fiction of Automatic Wealth is Bankrupting the U.S.

America’s banks have, over the last decade, entered into a dangerous fictional world of projected automatic wealth in which they expect that all payments they might receive will without fail materialize, regardless of circumstance. They treat the human beings with whom they have major financial relationships as if they were nothing more than endless fonts of easy money. This is the crisis of reasoning and cash flow we are, as a people, as a global society, trying to solve.

Carbon Offsetting May Be Means of Fighting Global Poverty

Carbon offsets allow the use of carbon-emitting processes to help fund and develop clean alternatives, which can then compete with and possibly replace the offending carbon-emitters. But there are also ways in which carbon offsetting can be used to combat poverty around the world. If offsets are focused on reducing bad habits, resulting from those engaging in those habits having either no alternative or no training to find alternatives, people living in the poorest conditions can find themselves benefitting from the clean energy revolution.

Capping Credit Card Rates: How Usury Undermines Democracy & Capitalism

The biggest banks in the United States have been engaging in practices designed to nudge US economic policy and banking regulation toward permitting nearly any sort of interest-rate manipulation and ignoring, or erasing, necessary anti-usury laws. It’s been part of a concerted effort to try to shape policy to make it easier for banks to come into fresh money and claim new levels of profit from what would otherwise be considered escalating risk.

Big Oil Needs to Adjust to Non-fuel Long-term Business Model

The converging crises of carbon-induced climate destabilization and unsustainable transport-related costs and land-use are pushing global society toward a moment of major change, in which “fuel” as we know it will be less a matter of resourced-fuel combustion and more a matter of renewable clean electric power storage and delivery. The petroleum industry needs to adjust its business model to operate in a world where burning its prime resource is not the goal.

Stimulus is Needed & Will Mean Big Spending

Whether you are an avid supporter of Barack Obama, a perennial political skeptic, a critic, or a staunchly ideological opponent, it is clear that there must be some sort of vast, perhaps unprecedented economic stimulus put into effect in order to slow or reverse a now spiraling economic downturn. And, all have to admit as well, it is a very risky thing to gamble one’s political capital, at such a crucial moment in American history, on a huge spending package that might not have a very visible effect in the immediate short term.

Toward a ‘Transactional’ Cosmology: Web Dynamics for the Information Age

Each information transaction, sometimes as exemplary, sometimes as single element added to a sweeping aggregate of historical sway, is a precedent, which can motivate, influence or redirect the push of future happenstance. And, we must take note, every transaction involving matter or energy contains information, traces of a history of its coming into being, and generates a “footprint”, a trace of its appearance and its transition into something beyond the transactional moment.

Transparency Network as Means of Restoring Financial Confidence

One of the major innovations that could adapt the most intelligent organizational tools for information management to financial reporting and monitoring would be a vast network of open information, regarding the management of investment funds, securitized loan holdings, and lending practices at a given institution. This system need not reveal any personal private information about individual investors or bank customers, but would be made available to the public so that the maximum possible amount of information be searchable for anyone wishing to vet the claims of in-house analysts and facilitate the proliferation of new smart-reporting economic databases…

The Age of Hyper-exploitation & its Aftermath

As the “perfect storm” gathers from inchoate, deceptively non-threatening winds, we can look ahead, backward and into the mirror and ask how crisis comes, or why, if it is inevitable, if we might just fall right out of it, as we fell into it. But the answer is simple: human crisis comes from excess, from [...]

Ripe for Change: What will this season of turning bring? (photos + essay)

Seasonal photography, by Café Sentido editor J.E. Robertson, a visual essay about a season of historic, urgent & uneasy change
A “wave election”, with public sentiment clearly moving in a new direction, calling for principled governance, with a new focus on progressive aims… economic crisis, having built up over a decade, hidden in the esoteric workings [...]

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