Money is not wealth. Money is a claim on wealth.

Entranced by promises of a material paradise of limitless luxury, humanity has too long ignored the mismatch between the imperatives of our existence as living beings on a finite planet and the imperatives of the institutions of money that chart our path to the future. Created to build colonial empires in service to kings, global corporations are ill suited to the task of building just, sustainable, and compassionate civil societies that nurture sufficiency, partnership, and respect for the whole of life.

But we can also take the radical view that the test of an economy has to do with the extent to which it is providing everybody with a decent means of living.

To achieve true sustainability, we must reduce our "garbage index" - that which we permanently throw away into the environment that will not be naturally recycled for reuse - to near zero. Productive activities must be organized as closed systems. Minerals and other nonbiodegradable resources, once taken from the ground, must become a part of society's permanent capital stock and be recycled in perpetuity. Organic materials may be disposed into the natural ecosystems, but only in ways that assure that they are absorbed back into the natural production system.

Europeans say they are proud of their social fabric, of strong rights for workers and the weak in society.

We should be moving toward local currencies not global or European currencies.

It is interesting to note that the 200 richest people have more assets than the 2 billion poorest.