The Economic Crisis Isn't All Bad; It's a Chance for Us and Obama to Reimagine How We Live Our Lives

clipped from www.alternet.org Capitalism is on its knees and now we have a chance to create higher ideals beyond career climbing and mindless consumerism. As America, recession mired, enters the hope-inspired age of Barack Obama, a silent but fateful struggle for the soul of capitalism is being waged. Can the market system finally be made to serve us? Or will we continue to serve it? George W. Bush argued that the crisis is "not a failure of the free-market system, and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system." But while it is going too far to declare that capitalism is dead, George Soros is right when he says that "there is something fundamentally wrong" with the market theory that stands behind the global economy, a "defect" that is "inherent in the system." The issue is not the death of capitalism but what kind of capitalism -- standing in which relationship to culture, to democracy and to life? The crisis in global capitalism demands a revolution in spirit -- fundamental change in attitudes and behavior.