From Black Friday to a Better Way

[ProudDad]

"The day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States is called Black Friday. For retailers the day marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. While the origin of the term is debated, it is today associated with special sales and extraordinary promotions that retailers use to induce shoppers into spending the holiday weekend on a shopping spree.

"Our modern economy is structured such that its stability depends upon ever increasing consumer spending. In my first economics course in college in 1961, the professor told the class to go out and shop because it is good for the gross national product (GNP). Then and now, mainstream economics continues to treat the Earth as if it were a business in a liquidation sale."

http://steadystate.org/from-black-friday-to-a-better-way/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DalyNews+%28The+Daly+News%29

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There will be no "economy" on a resource dead planet...

[Locrian]

1. agree 100% - but it goes back farther

>>>We have options. We can do better than liquidating our natural bounty for consumer novelty, we can refrain from pitching unnecessary products to our children, and we can stop pursuing growth for growth’s sake. The steady state economy is a better choice than continuous pursuit of economic growth, but the transition starts with better choices about what and how we consume.


While we can - by various degrees *slow* it - the overall economy that we created *forces* this behavior. Read Douglas Rushkoffs book "Life Inc" for a truly thorough analysis of the history behind our unquestioned economics.

http://rushkoff.com/books/life-incorporated/

•Money is not a part of nature, to be studied by a science like economics, but an invention with a specific purpose.
•Centralized currency is just one kind of money – one not intended to promote transactions but to promote the accumulation of capital by the wealthy.
•Banking is our society’s biggest industry, and debt is our biggest product.
•Corporations were never intended to promote commerce, but to prevent it.
•The development of chartered corporations and centralized currency caused the plague; the economic devastation ended Europe’s most prosperous centuries, and led to the deaths of half of its population.
•The more money we make, the more debt we have actually created.

[ProudDad]

3. Yep, it goes back to the dawn of the "industrial age"

and further back to the beginning of the rise of the dominator hierarchy about 10,000 years ago...

And has now overshot the carrying capacity of the Earth...

And Mother Nature bats last...

[truedelphi]

2. Sadly, it is the Green Party that asks us to consider devising another way of

Looking at economics. That we need to do so with regards to the impact of how our products and activities benefit or negatively impact the ecological hemisphere.

They are the only Party I know of that has this as one of their main talking points.

[ProudDad]

4. And having been on the Steering Committee of my local GP

they are one of the most "effective" circular firing squads I know of...

Because they believe that the "political party" is the dog that wags the Movement...

When it's the other way around...

Without a Movement to support it, a 3rd "political party" is worthless...

(If voting could change anything, they'd make it illegal...)

But the GP is so busy following the rules and regulations and procedures meant to emasculate any "political parties" that are not one of the two right-wings of the Corporate War Party(tm) that they have no time left to build any Movement...

That's why I resigned from the Committee...

And am doing my small part to build the Movement...

[truedelphi]

5. I'd love a short summary of what you experienced.

Feel free to PM to me some time if you have a chance.

[ProudDad]

6. More - from a friend of mine

His letter to the Editors of the Nation...

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.