Obama is as bad as Bush

Guardian: Obama is as bad as Bush at watering down or blocking environmental regulation.

UTS: Australian news coverage of climate change is seriously unbalanced. No prizes for guessing the worst culprit.

Monbiot: EU farm subsidies continue to give tens of billions to the wealthy, which isn't a problem because Europe is of course swimming in cash at the moment.

New Matilda: What is happening at Sydney University? Nothing other than one battle in an ongoing war for the soul of the university occurring in most societies dominated by current economic orthodoxies.

UN: New FAO report says that 25% of the world's land area is "highly degraded" from human activities.

Independent: The dying Dead Sea.

Guardian: UK government secretly supporting Canadian tar sands - yet another piece of disconnected thinking from the "greenest government ever".

Gittins: What does it profit a corporation to gain the whole world and lose the souls of all its employees and customers? Gittins thinks Michael Schluter from the Relationships Forum is a genius.

Can Christians be capitalists?

"God is a relational being, whose priority is not economic growth, but right relationships both between humanity and himself and between human beings. Christ's injunction to 'love God and love your neighbour' points to the priority of relational wealth over financial wealth because love is a quality of relationships."

- Ross Gittins, summarising Michael Schulter

Ross Gittins, economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, has done a good job summarising a paper by Michael Schluter of the Relationships Foundation, a Christian think tank dedicated to re-conceptualising social and economic relations from a relational rather than purely economic standpoint.

Schluter's short paper makes five main criticisms of capitalism as we know it today: its exclusively materialistic vision; its tendency to offer rewards without responsibilities; its limitation of liabilities on shareholders; its tendency to disconnect people from places; and its undermining of social safeguards. Whether these criticisms apply to all forms of capitalism or only to what Schluter calls "corporate capitalism" is a question for further discussion, but as a brief and accessible Christian critique of trends in contemporary economic theory and practice, it's not a bad effort.

The whole paper is worth reading, but if you'd like a slightly condensed version, then at least look at Gittens' summary in the SMH. If you enjoyed Schluter's critique, you might also like to look at his brief outline of a possible alternative approach, called Beyond Capitalism: Towards a relational economy.
H/T Dad, John Shorter and Josh Kuswadi, who all sent me links to this article. I'm touched to know that so many people associate me with anti-capitalism.