Vandana Shiva, on the casino economy: false growth vs. real growth

From my notes to this video by philosopher, environmentalist and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva, her language potent and elemental:

No society can carry on if people cannot even eat. This is going to be a social volcano. You cannot have a 100 trillionaires in the world mopping up the wealth of the world by the tricks that they have played, and the world starving. Those trillionaires will not be able to make it — unless they want to escape to the Moon.

Nothing could be further from the truth than that what we call the economic system is unchangeable, it’s arrived from heaven, like the ten commandments. It’s manmade, made by certain men. It was not made by the women of the world. By the peasants of the world. By the animals and trees around us.

The reason why people can be dragged into this economic system, is because they get dragged into its illusions of consumerism.

My life cannot be separated from the environment. And the more my consumerism [toxifies] the environment, the poorer I become.

Three perversions [of the casino econom]y:

1. Nature doesn’t count. Every time nature is destroyed, it is counted as “growth.”

1. People don’t count. For the first time, this economic system has made it possible to take food out of the mouths of two billion people.

3. It is based on totally fictitious constructs. Economics is supposed to be about managing the household. The false growth of the economy is destroying the real growth. The more we can remove money from our lives, the more we will have real growth. We have spread seeds in millions of towns by now, without money.

The system is going to self-destruct, and destroy a lot of people [in the process].

The rise of globalization is the death of democracy.

The most important reason why governments have ended up working against the people and for the corporations is because their interests have become one. The rise of the corporate state.