Recovery is at the top of the agendas of the world richest nations — rapid recovery at all costs; growth stimulation through positive action; waste reduction and efficiency savings wherever possible; injections of cash where it really matters…

…you know what I’m talking about, don’t you, and it’s got nothing to do with preventing ecological collapse, and it’s got nothing to do with ensuring humanity has a survivable future: it’s all about making sure we keep spending money at all costs. That’s the way civilization is:

When you turn on the television news, listen to the radio or read a newspaper, the state of the global ecology is shown clearly as improving or reducing in quality overall, with x number of species having been created or become extinct, and certain trophic levels becoming more or less dominant. Or rather, this is what we should be seeing and hearing: instead, we learn about the state of the global economy, whether the markets are rising or falling; how many jobs have been gained or lost; which companies are taking over others, and which sectors of the economy are thriving or failing. The economy is king; the ecology is a footnote.

Appalling, isn’t it, that it is acceptable to encourage people to buy as much as possible in order to sustain a system that is the reason we are killing the planet? Yet, despite national governments claiming to support efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent habitat destruction, this is what we see when the integrity of the global killing machine is threatened:

Alistair Darling will make a high-risk bid to lead Britain out of recession tomorrow, when he is expected to cut VAT and entice the British people to go on a pre-Christmas spending spree.

The move by the Chancellor and Gordon Brown won the support last night of Charles Clarke, one of the Prime Minister’s most high-profile critics, a sign that the economic crisis is at last uniting Labour and focusing minds on the battle against the Tories. With high-street stores slashing prices to attract customers, Darling will offer help with his pre-Christmas price cut in an attempt to limit the collateral damage from the global financial crisis.

(from The Guardian)

The government will earmark NT$500 billion (US$14.9 billion) over the next four years to sustain a new wide-ranging economic stimulus plan, Premier Liu Chao-shiuan said Friday.

Amid a global economic slowdown, the government has worked out a new stimulus package that includes a shopping voucher program, the launch of public construction projects, urban renewal plans, and incentives to encourage private investment and industrial upgrading, with an aim to prop up Taiwan’s economy.

Commenting on the shopping voucher plan, he said each Taiwanese citizen, regardless of age or income level, is entitled to receive shopping vouchers worth NT$3,600. Each package will be comprised of six vouchers with a face value of NT$500 and three with a face value of NT$200. The program will require a special budget of some NT$82.9 billion. The vouchers are slated to be distributed to the public on Jan. 17 or Jan. 18.

(from Taiwan News)

And then, of course, in the USA there is the commercial horror that is “Black Friday”, a time when retail-addicted Americans are encouraged to queue (physically or virtually) for hours in order to get even more stuff they don’t need for less — and this year it’s especially relevant, being the good, patriotic thing to do! How refreshing it is to see at least one person who sees something wrong in all this fervour:

So let me see if I understand this: We’re supposed to go shopping for the good of the country. We don’t have a president standing on the rubble of the American economy saying as much this time, but that’s the message again. If, this holiday season, we don’t buy electronics we don’t need, if we don’t buy new cars instead of fixing old ones, then this whole thing is going to fall apart, and we’ll be in for a much longer, colder recessionary winter than already feared.

That’s what I’m getting from Washington and the Democrats’ push for a new stimulus package of as much as $100 billion to consumers.

That’s what we’ve come to – pinning hopes for a recovery on shopping.

This goes deeper than just pinning hopes for a recovery on shopping, though: the economy is, essentially, all about shopping; about relying on the end-user — the “consumer” (for that’s what we have been labelled as) — to use the money they earn from the job they do to buy stuff from the companies who employ people to sell their stuff and make their stuff, who themselves are encouraged by other companies and the government to buy stuff with the money they earn, and so it going round and round and round, expanding ever more from the resources scraped from the surface of the Earth that will never return, along with the loans that will never be paid back, along with the ethereal “value” placed on things that become worthless the moment we stop believing in them.

That way lies madness. Are we really insane?

Judge for yourself: do you really think that the way to a good life is buying a new car, or a huge TV, or a vacation that only serves to remind you how crap your life is when you come back home? Do you really think that this commercial death machine deserves to be stimulated again and again, just so it can accelerate the demise of our global life support machine? Do you really think politicians and corporations do things to serve the best interests of the people?

If you really believe those things then you probably are insane; but you’re not alone: you only have to look in the eyes of the millions who will be flocking to the stores in the coming weeks — the poor, deluded consumers, who think shopping really does make things better.