Letter from a friend of mine to the Nation in concert with my OP "From Black Friday to a Better Way", an article from "The Daly News" from earlier today
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9649109 ...
He pretty well sums up what we're fighting against:
------------------------------------------
Dear Editors:
William Greider, whose work I have admired for decades, presents a logical framework for how Obama should move in the next two years (The End of Free-Trade Globalization). Problem is, all of his arguments, like those of so many conventional economists, imply that we need to continue with the “growth economy” model. For example, Greider writes “the US economy expanded in the second quarter of 2010 by an anemic annualized rate of 1.7 percent”. However, as he understands well, the necessity for growth is mainly an artifact of our method of creating money by borrowing from privately owned banks. After all, how will we pay the interest on the loans if we don’t have economic growth?
Unfortunately, the traditional growth model ignores the fact that we are in a post-peak oil period, that other resources fueling the growth economy are diminishing rapidly, that marine fisheries are declining at an alarming rate (even without BP’s intervention), that global warming will have profound effects on global economy, and so on.
A key factor in keeping the US economy humming along is our habit of treating everything we buy or produce as disposable. So rather than design an appliance that will last a lifetime, or will be repairable with inexpensive spare parts, we choose to consign the old product to the trash heap and rush out to buy the latest model with all its useless bells and whistles. In one of our major industrial sectors – military equipment manufacture – we pour hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into products that either self-destruct or are declared obsolete after a single year. These behaviors part and parcel of the growth economy, which cannot tolerate a slowdown in buying or production.
In any case, we have followed the growth model for a hundred years and what has it brought us? Boom, bust, boom, bust, etc – which might not be so bad except that during the boom years the majority of wealth somehow is garnered by the elite of the elite classes, while during the bust periods you can guess who takes all the punishment. On top of that, the growth economy has brought us polluted air and water, hugely increased rates of cancer, global warming, toxic food, depleted soil, and a variety of other ills.
Can we not contemplate an economy that approaches a steady state, in which food and manufactured goods are produced and consumed locally and our landfills decrease in size rather than grow exponentially? It’s not such a stretch to imagine a world in which energy is consumed only as absolutely needed, banks make loans based on the amount of depositor capital on hand, agriculture serves the needs of people living within a reasonable distance, i.e. not requiring the consumption of millions of barrels of oil (or the equivalent in other forms of energy).
Such a word would also have people working far fewer hours than they do today, and provide many more options for choosing a satisfactory form of work as opposed to a “job” that is determined by somebody else’s capital.
To reiterate, we need to stop thinking and planning about growth economies, because it is so obvious that the old model is not working at all – unless you happen to be one of the super-wealthy, a beneficiary of the system that transfers wealth into the hands of a few at the expense of the many.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
