Tonight's Canadian Economy Debate Will Be About the Capitalist Myth Endless Growth

In a few hours the Globe and Mail, will host a debate among three of the Federal Parties Leaders on their slightly different versions of how to keep the wheels of consumer capitalism eating up the globe's limited resources growing. None of them, including the only real progressive leader Elizabeth May who wasn't invited just in case she might speak up for the 'great unwashed' even accidentally, dares confront the inescapable fact that the endless growth of consumption of resources is impossible in a closed system - like the Earth.

They all will refuse to mention the phantom menace of their growth dreams. All of the political parties are captured by one arm or another of the Bankers and Billionaires Club, all of them dance to the same irrational economic tune. What the capitalists and their captured politicians refuse to refer to is that their is another way - slow degrowth driven by mild deflation - which is nothing but common sense because there are no profits, no good jobs, no dreams for your children on a dead planet.

The main problem for our environment and the economy that rides on its back is the continued and increasing demand of energy to satisfy production and consumption patterns in the Global North. It is, in sum, the economic system based on exploitation, extraction, industrial production and expanded consumption. The capitalist model itself is the main cause of the current climate crisis. In this way, the solution lies in a fundamental change of the system, based on new non-exploitative ways of relating between humans and nature. Harmonious relations with nature, but also just relations within society, are key to change the anthropocentric paradigm that has put humans and growth at the centre of society. - Resilience .org

my stake in capitalism

One of the big reasons why our western democracies have been so successfully captured by the Banker and Billionaires Club is some decades ago the few contrived to rob the many of not only their common sense but the future of their descendants in the service of more short-term profit for the Club's gluttonous members. The elites somehow convinced the middle classes that their future well being was tied to the speculator's myth of endless growth. Now so many people have bought into this disastrous scheme where their pensions, their mutual funds, their tax free savings accounts, their 'portfolio' are all tied to the growth myth through the 'market' that they believe that they have a stake in capitalism when the reality is that, other than the elites, the common person gets to fight over a few fallen crumbs best.

The unavoidable truth is that the economy is a small subset of the environment. For instance, just as the stock market rises on the sale of industrial agriculture's 'growth' of soil killing fossil fuels through fertilizers, equipment manufacture, shipping and supporting infrastructure while in reality those very actions are killing the biosphere that underlies everything, so too does all parts of the mythical endless growth economy exist only as long as the living world that supports them does too.

We milk the cow of the world, and as we do We whisper in her ear, "You are not true."
- Richard Wilbur, 1950