Everybody is in trouble, including the up-and-coming economic miracles of China, Brazil or India.

It is easy now to break the vows. It is even easier to part your ways if vows haven't been taken.

Our consumer-oriented economy wouldn't survive without economic growth. The whole mechanism depends on invention and insinuation of novelties, arousing new wants, seduction and temptation. This is the problem we face - much more than recapitalizing the banks. The question is: Is that kind of economy sustainable?

As to describing me as an outsider throughout, and an outsider through and through - I have no reason to disagree.

Ingeniously, capitalism discovered that the economy may be moved not by satisfying existing needs, but by creating new ones.

The planet is full and we will be rubbing shoulders forever. There is nowhere else to go.

We already have plenty of fundamentalism and fundamental sects like for instance Rabbi Schneerson and Chabad Lubavitch. They feel more secure because they are in the warm, caring/sharing community. This is the difference between community (Gemeinschaft) and what Ferdinand Tönnies called Gesellschaft: a kind of setting in which you have no rights to do anything unless you pay for it, and no right to get anything unless you prove that you are 'credit worthy'. In a Gemeinschaft, however, you have a place at the table guaranteed whatever happens.