Re-Visioning Capitalism

"If all activity of every institution, organization, and individual must answer to economic viability as the final arbiter, then decisions will always be made about dollars and cents."

 

I am not sure how you envision a world without economic viability? In what ways do you find it to be a "final arbiter." Why do non-profit organizations exist? http://www.theemotionmachine.com

Even a non-profit has to pay the bills at the end of the day. And that demand, that "have to" scenario means there is a compromise at some other level, and it often ends up either minimizing the effectiveness of the non-profit's original intentions.

Imagine if food production, government, health care, and education were all exempt from the economic arena. Right now, under the current situation, each of these domains are suffering from a great distortion resulting in a less than satisfactory fulfillment of the original purpose and mission of each of them. And it shows.

When I hear that a friend's grade 7 kid is coming home from school espousing the values of genetically modified food and how it will feed everybody and end starvation, I wonder how Monsanto managed to introduce information into the public school education stream. I wonder how it is that there is poison in the water, food, medicine, and air, and that it continues to be permitted to be introduced. I wonder how it is that a system entitled "health care" only treats sick people, and aside from pamphlets, doesn't seem to do much educating about actual "health care". I wonder how billions of dollars have been funneled to cancer research without some more results. I wonder how a provincial "Energy Minister", supposedly the best person to make decisions on behalf of millions of people, can say that he can't see any other option than continuing to process tar/oilsands for oil, when there's this large blazing star that's likely to be burning very cleanly for the next few billion years. And I wonder how much longer these so-called leaders will continue to permit the despoiling of the shared resources on a planet where nothing is coming in and (at present) very little is going out.

I wonder these things, because in my own living room, as just "some guy", the numbers don't add up. I see a huge lack of imagination, and I see a great deal of excuse making. And this is leading to a great deal of suffering, not just among those without food, clothing, or shelter...but even among the affluent, even among the middle class, or whatever label you want to attach to the sick, disenfranchised, disempowered majority of people who are at the mercy of an economy that has, for a couple of thousand years now, failed to provide for the basic needs of life first.

If these domains were able to make choices without the influence of dollars and cents, my feeling is that the decisions would be much more life-affirming. Isn't that obvious?

Show me an economy that provides the basic needs for every living being on the planet and doesn't lead to suffering, and I'll be happy to participate. Presently, however, I'm unconvinced that the current form of economy is viable or sustainable. The answer is not going to come from one person...these things are like puzzles, and the only solutions that work will come from the collective input of many who each hold a piece of the puzzle.

And not to say that this fellow doesn't have a piece of the puzzle...I'm sure he does. But there's a lot of ego involved, from the sounds of it, and that's always a distraction and detraction from the actual subject matter. There's been so much talk...where's the action? I think there's a great deal of ignorance involved if someone is trying to describe an economics system from within capitalist corporate America...let's see what he has to say from within a country like Nigeria. Not on account of the people, but on account of needing other perspectives.

Wasn't it Einstein who said something like, "We can't solve problems with the same mentality that created them."??

"Howard Bloom will tell Daniel Pinchbeck why American civilization has just begun to live--and how it will be saved and upgraded by - guess who? - YOU." "Special presentation and invitation to join Time Interchange New York (TINY), a complimentary currency system that is re-visioning capitalism here on our own doorstep." Jct: Whoever uses the complementary currency to effect repair will be the winner of the debate. With Africa trading with mobile-phone minutes, Arabia trading with phone cards, with Hours being traded in Ithaca and TINY New York, with Greencredits being traded in LETS, the banks get no interest. And the movement to cut the middleman out of the usury is growing. With Facebook, Twitter, Graigslist, offering social currencies to their databases, with governments doing inter-national barter deals, the use of these new self-created social credits all around the world is undergoing unheralded growth but the use of interest-free time-based currency is key. When the local currency is pegged to the Time Standard of Money (how many dollars per hour of volunteer labor, children too) Hours earned locally can be intertraded with other timebanks globally! In 1999, I paid for 39/40 nights in Europe with an IOU for a night back in Canada worth 5 Hours. You can too. U.N. Millennium Declaration UNILETS Resolution C6 to governments is for a time-based currency to restructure the global financial architecture. See http://youtube.com/kingofthepaupers on growth of the international time-trading network.