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Now welcome to the award-winning Best of a Left Podcast with clips today from the next system project,

the Tom Hartman program, Open Source, The Goldman School, Democracy Now, the BBC,

Economic Update with Professor Richard Wolff, and Counter-Spin.

Well, I think it's fair to say that we're in a structural crisis for the following reason.

There are two very large problems that the system faces, the first is climate change,

global warming, and the fact that the ordinary operation of our economy creates levels of greenhouse

gases which are incompatible with a functioning planetary ecosystem.

The US in particular has emitted very large amounts of greenhouse gases, so we've got to rapidly

decelerate our emissions. That runs into a conflict with the other major problem of our system,

which is that it's generating enormous levels of inequality, as well as economic deprivation

and hardship for large numbers of people, those two things are related. You could have inequality

in a situation where everybody pretty much has a reasonable standard of living, but what's happened

is that the rapid movement of wealth to the very top has been at the expense of people throughout

the income distribution. So we have now very large numbers of people in poverty. We have very high

unemployment and under-employment. We have large numbers of people just struggling to

make their basic needs like food and shelter and so forth. The reason I say it's a systemic crisis

or a structural crisis is that typically the solution to that economic problem is to expand the

economy, but that makes the climate problem much worse because emissions move pretty closely with

economic activity. So we've got to find a new path that allows us to solve both climate and economic

deprivation at the same time, and we can only do that with a whole different kind of system.

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