Let's not forget how toxic smartphones are. They use rare earths linked to radioactive waste. Conflict minerals linked to several million deaths in the Congo since 1998. Toxic solvents, heavy metals, slave wages etc. Kids addicted to their screens affecting their brains and behavior. The giant power needs to cool the server rooms. The wifi making some kids ill at school. I can wait for someone to upload a video from the Rio+20 summit about saving the planet. Maybe they'll shed a tear while staring into the camera lens. Should be priceless.

Perhaps we can turn the High North Into a tourist desttination and advertise in Places like Florida, the Caribbean and Hawaii for the people there to cvome to Canada to escape the heat.

If we make everything illegal maybe we can fill those jails and give the jet fighters something to shoot at. Plus everybody can get a job being a cop or lawyer. After all, cops and lawyers are people too.

Our jobs are going to come from people outraged that our economy is not sustainable, but it could be. The right to have an honest chance at a career is going to be a human right.

Closed communities such as the Amish have no concept of unemployment. Some of us will go the closed community route. Others will go the third party verification route so that we have jobs.

Because it's needed, we are called to close our local economies to slave children in West Africa gathering our chocolate, to slaves in India processing our cotton clothing, to people dying on Chinese assembly lines for our dollar store trinkets. We might open our community economics to fair trade goods, or we might seek full employment within our groups.

Where?

Same place as jobs are going to come from in the U.S.....

HAHAHAHAHahahahehhehsobsob

Closed communities such as the Amish have no concept of unemployment.
----------------------------
This is a key concept, maybe *the* key concept.

Every single "job" today has the same main purpose: to keep some wealthy person or persons wealthy.

Suppose we rejected that model, and declared that every job must help maintain or increase the Common Wealth rather than an owner class, and that every citizen in good standing is entitled to draw a fair share from that Common Wealth, however much or little that amounts to.

It seems somewhat clear to me that the majority of people would be out of work the next morning and have to find something else to do. On the other hand, whatever they found would probably be more personally satisfying because it would be *important*, which is not true of most jobs today, We know it's not true because very few people voluntarily spend more time working at "the job" than they must to keep going.

Reading the early Foxfire books from Rabun County, Georgia was eye-opening for me. The people whose lives and skills were documented in the books lived "primitive", unassuming lives that were nevertheless culturally and socially rich. They lived in ways that are common in non-hierarchical societies but virtually unknown to people under urban Capitalism.

One of the respondents, an artist and craftsperson who must have been in his mid/late '70s but didn't look more than maybe 50-ish, mentioned disapprovingly how much life had sped up in recent years. In his younger days it had been commonplace to meet someone in the road and spontaneously decide to spend an hour or more, even a whole afternoon, in conversation. Whole-community activities were frequent, and while nobody had any money, people lived by sharing their skills in a free and easy way.

Which is broadly how the Amish do it too. If someone needs a house or barn built, everyone gets together and builds it, safe in the knowledge that if *they* find themselves needing a new house, everyone will rally round for them, too. There's no concept of house-building being a profit center for some third party -- they're places to live, nothing more or less, and everyone is entitled to have one.

We could do that, too. Production for use. When something is needed, as many people as are needed step in and do what needs to be done, potluck style. Everyone finds their own level, the way Adam Smith described the workings of the perfect economy. No owner class, no Capitalists, no stocks or bonds, just people doing what needs done so that they have a legitimate claim on the community whenever it's their turn.

Dunno about anyone else, but it sounds a better way of life t'me.

It's amazing to me that in this day and age some very smart and caring people (as I have no doubt Mr. Saddiqui is) say things like "we must find new ways to grow the economy…" This myth of eternal economic growth, this unthinking, reflexive belief that we can just grow and grow and grow, is the fundamental issue, and this reality of physical, environmental limits will be the ultimate wall against which this form of thinking crashes and is destroyed. As Mairead notes above, economies based on creating ever greater amounts of physical wealth cannot continue. It's about the community and the planet, and we seriously need to change the way we think - and behave - if we're gonna survive, let alone have "jobs."

At least the Canadian unemployed have health care. Something that unemployed Americans don't have. You can change your government. Here in the US it doesn't seem to matter which party is in power. They are both bad and serve no one but the rich. The USA is an example to the rest of the world in what no to do. Millions of Americans would move out of the country if they could. If they could find another country willing to take them.

Alberta is getting set to privatize health care and once it's lost in one jurisdiction, NAFTA rules dictate the rest of Canada MUST then be open to privatization. The two conservative parties battling it out to win in the coming election both intend to take the province to a private, for-profit system, so Americans, no longer can you look North with envy. While Canadians purport to LOVE their medicare, they're awfully careless about electing ever more Rightwing governments who are intent on killing it.

Who is this author....does he not understand any science at all..?.....We are burning already..... and he really wants to solve the jobs problem with helping the mining and oil business? Why is the obvious not obvious to enough people... ? ..... He really does not have a mind that can even understand the problem....let alone think outside the box......for a solution other than energy that destroys the very "home" we live on.....

Wasn't Siddiqui the political editor at The Star?

-30-

What is so great about "JOB"? Most people go to work because it pays them money so that they can buy stuff they need to live on. However, if person's basic needs for shelter, energy , water and food can be satisfied without money, very few people would chose to go to work every day into the rat race!

We do not need this industrial monster that swallows humanity and turns people into cogs in a large machine that serves a few while enslaved the majority. as Charlie Chaplin demonstrate in his great movie some 70 years ago. If you go off the grid and harvest solar and wind energy and water off your roof or geothermal, then you can decrease your utility bills to ZERO. Same with replacing your lawn with vegetable garden...so that you do not have to buy food (most of it) in supermarket and thus use money.

Simplify your life, and you will not need expensive gadgets that keep you enslaved, such as TV and fancy phones to communicate mostly nonsense. Go see your neighbor and solve community problems rather then wasting time of all this electronic discussions of abstract problems that most of us cannot do anything about.

When you satisfy most of your basic needs in the community you live, the large corporations will become irrelevant and their CEOs and other employees can start taking care of their needs without large salaries too...Diffusion of power harvesting, both in a physical and political world is the way to go, not some silly stuff proposed by this highly MIS-educated journalist, who had been brainwashed into "economy of growth". Let him grow his own veggies to get in touch with REAL life ;-)!

"When Barack Obama asked Steve Jobs last year why some of his 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other Apple products could not be manufactured in the U.S., the president was told point blank that that was not economically feasible"

Not that O'Bamba really cares. And not that Merkans really need Apple produkts. But the people are beginning to see that it does really matter that we make our own tools. They are beginning to see not with the help of elites, but with the help of their own minds and each other. This leaves no role for elites.

Jobz went overseas because elites wanted more profitz, and could sell more gadgets for a higher markup if the labor was exploited more relentlessly. Labor in China was set to be more highly exploited, because the Chinese government followed the western industrialization formula. It's instructive to review this formula because it largely explains Merka's predicament. The industrialization formula taken to its extreme gives you Merka today, where the people have been turned into mindless konsumers. Their pay scale was inflated early on to get them to konsume more, to drive ekonomic growath. Now the elites propel their unsustainable rackets feeding das konsumption appetite with exploited Chinese labor. Robert Reich, et al, salivate frantically. Meanwhile, China will take the industrialization formula up to a lesser point, stopping at exploiting the labor of other societies, like all other Asian states stopped. This is good, but not great. Because the Chinese will be left as heavy konsumers nonetheless.

Instead of the western industrialization/plunder formula, the people today are adopting the organic economic formula that comes out of their own common sense. The economy does not grow. We instead refine production to make things work longer, with less inputs. Efficiencies are increased. Hours worked are reduced. Everything makes sense, with the goal to have reasonable standards of living at minimum cost to the biosphere. The elites and their plunder/slavery formula are now irrelevant. The people don't need them. The people are building their local economies, local trade, small farmers, craftsmen, and merchants abound. We don't need Apple, or anything like it.

To answer the author's question, the jobz are coming from the people themselves, naturally. There's been a huge investment of energy toward the people's enterprise over the past decade especially. And it's starting to pay off in spades. Just look around you. For example, we notice that before, small-scale industrial initiatives lasted only a year or two before they went kaput if no godzilla snapped them up. But today they keep rolling, and they're NOT FOR SALE. Just one of many new developments indicating a big movement to the far left. Exciting times for the people. End of the road for elites.

Softly, softly he tip-toes in
The pallid face with the Cheshire grin...
Chip away here, and chip away there
Then sadly pronounce it`s beyond all repair
This race to the bottom is well under way
And that Cheshire grin smiles wider each day
He`s slick and he`s quick, and one step ahead
But once he takes charge this mask he will shed
And that smug little grin will grow to reveal
Those fangs he no longer has need to conceal.
Beware the cat with the Cheshire grin
His gentle demeanor is as thin as his skin
But his claws are sharp and ready for use
He rules the Land, and he`s on the loose
So now you`ve been warned that the danger is great
And just hope for my country it will not be too late.