Ulrich Beck goes somewhat further:
This free-market farce proves the state is crucial | Comment is free

There are surprising parallels between the Chernobyl reactor disaster, the Asian financial crisis and the threat of the collapse of the international financial system today. The traditional methods of management and control are proving unreliable and ineffective in the face of global risks. The millions of unemployed and poor cannot be financially compensated; it makes no sense to insure against the consequences of global recession. At the same time the social and political explosive force of global market risks is becoming palpable. Governments are overthrown, civil wars become a threat. As the public begins to recognise the risks, the question of responsibility is increasingly raised. This dynamic leads to a reversal of neoliberal policy - not the economisation of politics, but the politicisation of the economy. Not even the most liberal national economy functions without macroeconomic coordinates. It's with a certain degree of bewilderment that one asks oneself: how could anyone in his right mind assume that the world economy is any different?

Jerome has proposed some state led initiatives around sustainable energy and laments the retreat of enarchs from statesmanship to banking.  Migeru extols the Keynesian road building exploits of Zapatero - saying even environmentally regressive toll roads can be politically progressive if done in a Keynesian spirit.

My problem is that we now live in a Unipolar world where the USA calls almost all the shots - and the US financial elite at that.  They have successfully destroyed almost all US and international regulation so that there is now effectively no global financial governance.  This will probably cost the US$ its pre-eminence as the global reserve currency but it is anything but clear that the Euro/ECB will pick up the slack.  

Financial speculators will move from derivatives to commodities like oil - increasing the price out of all proportion to what the actual  supply/demand curve might otherwise do.  Poorer countries will feel the pinch most, as oil will simply become unaffordable for many primary producers and a severe world depression seems unavoidable. (NB - a depression in sub Sahara is another word for famine).

In the meantime the "world community" will fiddle anxiously but ineffectually as it is now over completely avoidable famine in Zimbabwe.  It took two World Wars to lead to the formation of the League of Nations and the UN.  This latest crisis is a lesson in Global Governance for slow learners.  We will need a far more effective EU and UN if it is to be managed and overcome.  And yes - did I forget to mention:  A revolution in the US.

"It's a mystery to me - the game commences, For the usual fee - plus expenses, Confidential information - it's in my diary..."

In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand -- because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance. As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, "package" vacation resorts, etc. are considerable.

This is how one cascade pours into another, as the manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify. Tourism, which was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations -- an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping -- turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.

The end of cheap air tourism may seem like a good thing. And yet the collapse of tourism, in economies where the culture and scenery have become a last-ditch cash crop, can have effects just as disastrous as the collapse of any other external commodity market in a country that has been sucked into the undertow of global capitalism.

How much more devastating is the catastrophic cascade of food price inflation? (It's also directly related, by the way, to the plateau of global oil production in the face of relentless expansion of "demand" -- more on this below.) They're intertwined; the downsizing of air tourism reduces money income for populations dependent on the global capitalist economy for staple foods, just at the moment when scarcity, uncertainty, and rampant speculation are causing staple food prices to spike.

It's not a pretty picture, and the mainstream media are reporting on it with breathless alarm and utterly unjustified surprise; commentators from various  perspectives (left, environmental, anti-colonialist, even libertarians) have seen this coming for a while.

I'm having a hard time trying to offer a coherent summary.  Saying "go read it" isn't too compelling, but it's the best I can do.

1. Henry George (who I like) based his ideas on a system which no longer exists. This is one where land is the primary source of wealth. He was looking backwards to the days where agriculture was the most important economic activity. This is no longer true. Land devoted to agriculture is not a significant portion of the total stock. Taxing land, therefore, does not capture the type of wealth concentration he was after.

2. Herman Daly (who I like even more) was cited with regard to steady-state economics. I've written about this often, so I won't repeat the links, the essays are on my web site, if anyone is interested. Daly, correctly, identified the fact that the planet is finite. He hasn't been able to come with a viable alternative economic system, even with 40 years of trying. Diagnosis and cures are different phases of treatment.

3. Jeffrey Sachs (not mentioned) can be taken as representative of the technology fix school of economics. The argument runs something like this. Malthus was wrong because technology solved the problems he foresaw, therefore neo-Malthusian ideas are also wrong. Unfortunately historical analogy is not a proof. There are no solutions at present which are comprehensive enough to address the issues of resource depletion coupled with overpopulation and the need to control pollution simultaneously.

What if the looming disasters are really unavoidable? How will the resources be apportioned? Who will be thrown overboard? Will there be some plan or will it just be dog eat dog? The US military has been planning for several decades for this scenario. There are complete plans on how to deal with China and the Middle East militarily, if required.

The support of the present level of militarism in the US shows that the population approves of a world where the strong take what they need from the weak - even if they won't admit it openly.

The public in the developed nations is being desensitized. Nowadays the death of a million or more in Darfur, or Congo, or Rwanda hardly makes the news. When the numbers go up to 100 million will people be more concerned? Will the press devote any more attention to this than it does to such cases at present? A loss of 100 million people would be made up in 18 months a current rates of growth.

If all the options are bad, then what?

Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

But the establishment has become adept at keeping ideas that challenge the status quo firmly out of public view. This process is partly directed by the vested interests of minority wealth and privilege, but has also become embedded in the institutions and long-held assumptions which shape today's economic landscape. Perhaps the best example is the concerted campaign against the ideas of Henry George.

For an excellent example of how and why they became so adept see The Campaign of the Century, Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics by Greg Mitchell, Random House, 1992.

The homepage, http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/index.html , of the School for Cooperative Individualism, on whose site  Mason Gafney's fine paper is found is itself a treasure trove of helpful on-line articles.

Social recession is an apt description of the stultifying effects on the body politic of both the The Neo-Classical Strategem as described by Gafney and the "cultural capitalism" discussed in the Compass article.  While perhaps we should not be surprised that the right has made the most effective use of the possibilities inherent in the post modern observation that perceptual reality is a social construct, i.e. to buttress their own position, we should take heart from the more optimistic possibilities.  

Social justice, economic democracy and a more prosperous and sustainable world are possible. As the Bard said: "Nothing is but that thinking makes it so." But that thinking has to be shared among a significant number of people in order for it to have any effect. Another poet said of this dilemma: "Here I stand, ticket in my hand, waiting on the train to the promised land. Waiting for Everyman."--Jackson Browne

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.