I suppose the wikipedia entry is as good a starting place as any.

My concern is that no one seems to be much concerned that it is not the core value that the world can agree upon. Maybe people just don't understand it. And maybe that is because it is not being taught.

Which form of government or economic system would best promote it? Which ones currently do?

Can this topic be sustained?

The Danish island of Samso is a paragon of sustainable self-sufficiency. It is defeatist to believe that the example can not be modified and adapted to other parts of the western world. They may live with fewer gadgets than most, and more efficiently than many, but we could learn from them and others.

Likewise financiers might learn from the Triodos Bank which has managed to maintain financial profitability better than most during the recent economic downturn. It's founding philosophy is social rather than socialistic - just as one can serve a common interest without being communist.

A crucial tenant of the bank: is a policy that has been recommended by true finance reformers, even in this country.

Most financial crimes and unethical behavior on Wall Street is practiced in the darkness of "privacy".

But do they deserve to be able to hold information about what they are doing with someone elses money private - even from the individuals they invest for? If initial investors cannot trace their money do they own?

A key to financial recovery will be the regulation of usury, which unfortunately is limited to a Judeo-Christian era definition in wikipedia, but is more broadly and acurately defined and discussed in more scholarly articles such as A Short Review of the Historical Critique of Usury by Wayne A.M. Visser and Alastair McIntosh.

It is always risky when risk assessment is left to a so-called free-market, but what is clear in the recent financial meltdown in the US is that such assessments were out of accordance with reality.

Also clear is that whenever money is made purely based on the risk that it will not be repaid, it assumes that the value of what is produced will exceed the value of the loan.

How that relationship is determined now will be the focus of either an economic recovery or simply building the platform for a future even more dramatic correction.

Since the USA has become, by default, the insurer of last resort through large loans to financial institutions that apparently did a poor job of assessing risk, it now has the responsibility of picking winners and losers.

When some argue that government does a poor job of that, they must offer a better "free-market" authority.

Placing carbon footprint labels on products is becoming fashionable lately.

But I wonder whether it is possible to show the carbon footprint of individuals. The average inhabitant of a developed country consumes far more of the earth's resources than one from an agrarian developing country once the energy consumption is traced.

I doubt we will see people wearing symbols like the stars used by the Nazis (wouldn't that get the right-wingers going? ) but it is probably easy to calculate the footprint of a given income.

So why hasn't anyone bothered to do so. It would make for interesting comparisons.

And those bonuses going to financiers whose activities nearly borught us another Depression would look very interesting. USA citizens are very expensive to raise. And these folks cost a bundle.

But then one may argue that this merely shames people for earning more money. Say what!? If we are going to have a society where greed is glorified then these footprints might become fashionable.

Belittling anything "green" is great pasttime for comedians. They could even make fun of their own footprint.

It has taken over 60 years but even western economists are finally coming to the conclusion that current economic models are unsustainable. And the primary impediment to that realization now appears to have been racism. But only because current "free market" concepts developed in - and benefitted - the West.

Economists such as those from India and South Korea have long argued that the "free market" model is not beneficial to their nations.

Politicians, being the same worldwide: diplomatic rather than straightforward, have either caved to the IMF and allowed their poor to be exploited to the benefit of the wealthy (both within their own country as well as outside); or have humored the IMF while using economic tools to protect and build native economies in the midst of powerful external forces (either private like USA companies, or public like China Incorporated) with ready-built infrastructures controlled by self-interested and well-heeled individuals - whether large company CEOs or party apparatchiks.

Japan, mentioned in the first link, has been one of the "success" stories of managed markets rather than so-called "free markets". But the question is "Can Japan remain a sustainable market in the presence of a world economic downturn caused by the devotees of Capitalism who have sanctified neoFinance Capitalism?"

Few things make it more clear that we are fiddling with politics while the world burns as shown by the ineptness of this United Nations site on energy statistics worldwide.

Though the underlying concept is profoundly important - and the statistics are no doubt critically important - the fact that they are not presented clearly and honestly demonstrates how the international influence of a perverse economic system that favors those who already have money has damaged the utility of such an enlightened organization as the UN.

Fortunately some news organizations perform the function for which they should all be intended and plow through the data to make it clear to the literate and the wise just what is necessary for the planet to be deterred from climatic change that will exceed the ability of most inhabiting organism to adapt and survive.

This article on the progress of Portugal in converting to renewable energy is one of those performances. And this map from that article is the crescendo of that performance. Clearly the prevention of conversion to sustainable energy sources is most hampered by negative economic systems that self-perpetuate through financial influence on the politics of nations that encourage the use of ethnic tensions to exploit selfish action.

The bipartisan commision's suggestions for balancing the budget requires cuts that are roughly the equivalent in amount to allowing ALL of the Bush tax cuts to expire in January 2011.

In this alarmist and pessimistic assessment of the USA economy I suggested how the budget could be easily balanced, though it has apparently been removed: not only should the Bush cuts be allowed to expire but rates should be gradually raised progressively until the budget is balanced, and then only lowered - again gradually - once the budget has been balanced. This would create incentives for tax-payers - mostly the upper income ones - to invest in a way that does not cause damage to the USA and world economy.

The USA and other nations have already started to take measures to mitigate international capital flows, or at least limit the damage they can do to any economy when they rush in to one that can not absorb them.

This has happened before. FDR's policies proponed and instituted constructive so-called "protectionism" that allowed the USA to again get its own house in order before trying to reorder that of the rest of the world.

Eventually we will have to do that ourselves or the world economy will do it for us with a Greater Depression.

Also unsustainable is the substitution of charity from the wealthy for the redistributive authority of a democratically-elected government. The efforts by Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and others to do so could end as soon as the names of the wealthy change. Most wealthy Chinese ignored them, as do many in the USA.

Europe long ago abandoned this system of feudalism in which smaller unelected potentates establish mini-kingdoms at the grace of a central ruler whose authority was enforced by dictate and violence.

Most of the wealthy have clear requirements of their "charity", which generally includes some say in how it is distributed. Intelligent though they may be, they are not always well-intentioned.

The purpose of a Democracy is that the majority should have a say in how any funds generated by taxes is used. This has replaced one in which little or no tax is paid and the needy must wait for the unpredictable charity of the wealthy to survive. Healthy, able workers given the tools (infrastructure) create wealth.

We often state in historical references that "such-and-such" wealthy person "built an empire" or a "mansion" or a "monument" when it is the skilled labor of workers that did the building while the wealthy only finance it.

What they choose to finance with their wealth is their choice. But if the infrastructure decays so does wealth.

The Indian minister of the environment Jairam Ramesh has called the the US lifestyle "most unsustainable in the world today" and a 'recipe for disaster'.

But he praises the Bill Gates Foundation for its public health initiative.

This initiative is a far cry from making the cradle-to-grave responsibility for all manufactured goods - such as the internet hardware Microsoft manufactures and all of these communications is dependent upon - incumbent upon those who profit from it the most.

No one at Cancún will dare make such a demand of private industry. And the public politicians are there to serve the interests of the private industry in each of their respective nations.

Only a body independent of those private interests could regulate the maintenance of the planet.

The alternative is the looming disaster that is now only peripherally distorting medical research into the causes or exacerbations of most of the world's illnesses through the poor choices of energy sources and the manufacturing techniques currently in use around the world. All nations adopt the usury system of rich ones.

Private industry has created an investor class that can only survive by extrating money from the working class.

A society dependent on investors more than producers is not viable when the investors no longer need to invest in production.

Accumulated wealth is stored, invested poorly (purely for profit without calculation of the harm the productive activity causes to the environment and society as a by-product) or passed on to others within the investors' small circle, creating more non-producers.

Taxation by a democratically elected government has worked as a damper on this kind of stagnation in the USA and elsewhere in the past. It could work again.

With the added factor that modern technology requires fewer workers to produce the same, it is inevitable that unemployment occurs.

These unemployed cannot create their own wealth or means of self-support in modern societies in which those means are controlled by the same investors who do not need them. Wealth can be spread through employment in a capitalist society only when work is needed by those who have centralized wealth by usury.