Silver Lining to Economic Downturn

Article by Mike Nickerson, author of Life, Money, and Illusion: Living on Earth as if we want to stay

Here are some highlights from the article:
"Among the first things societies can do, as we acknowledge our maturity, is to shift investment into education and health care. Unlike cars and expanding highway networks, which are resource and waste intensive, education and health care (particularly care at the preventative level) consist almost entirely of knowledge and good will.

Another step will be to revive local, small-scale agriculture. Food produced in this way requires less fuel and other natural resources and has been shown to produce more food per acre, of a higher nutritional quality, than industrial scale farming."

"the world is awash in so much capital that, a continuous stream of speculative bubbles is necessary to give it places to invest."

"At present, if there is a natural disaster, toxic spill or a health epidemic, the costs of dealing with the problems are added to the GDP, giving the false impression that we are better off. While more money might be flowing, life is degraded by such things. If we were to measure social and environmental factors of well-being with the same authority and enthusiasm with which we measure GDP, much of the confusion would be avoided. A Genuine Progress Index (GPI) would provide a broader spectrum of information, enabling the costs and benefits of different activities to be assessed with greater accuracy."

"By identifying resource draw-down, pollution, and disruptions to communities, with a GPI, external factors would enter the picture. Presently externalized costs are not included in the price of goods. When such costs are added to production costs, those goods that are socially and environmentally friendly would be less expensive and those that cause problems would cost more. Both consumers and producers would then be inclined toward responsible products.

Taking the additional step of shifting the skill, ingenuity and persuasive effort that is presently applied toward engineering obsolescence, and, instead, using it to design durable, easily repaired goods, and to reclaim pride in objects that have long served us, could cut up to 50% off of our material and energy consumption and consequent impacts."

"We celebrate when our children grow. If an adult continues to grow like a child, however, it is cause for serious concern. Developing a healthy steady-state economy is no more frightening than the prospect of becoming adult is for a teenager"

He makes a lot of sense. We need to figure out now what things are preventing this kind of change from happening. Who is invested in the status quo, in the need for growth? The obvious answer seems to be - BANKERS. Who else is highly dependent on the use of debt?

Apparently in the U.S. the money supply is loaned to the federal government by the federal reserve, with interest. This trickles down, so the whole monetary/economic system is predicated on loaning money and credit. That’s why the media pushes the importance of unfreezing credit in the midst of the crisis. They aren't interested in the true causes of the economic crisis.

The people, the citizens, are tied up in the current system so they are mostly concerned about their investments and jobs. This lack of interest from the media (corporations selling audiences to other businesses) and citizens allows the true causes of the crisis and the underlying, fundamental flaws with our way of life to go largely undiscussed.


More from Mike Nickerson:
Sustainable living: Things You Can Do

Internet Censorship?

Lebanon's migrant workers

Recent news article about the treatment of migrant workers in Lebanon

Brzezinski on why he support(ed) Obama

The Men Behind Obama

Designing the future

Zeitgeist - The Movie

I can't find the frickin video anywhere. Anyway this is kinda funny
Who's More Grizzled script

Funny how some sports team's take the name of the thing they eradicated in that region....

Colorado Buffaloes,
Florida State Seminoles
Atlanta Braves
Toronto Maple Leafs

you piss in your pants, you only stay warm for so long...
-robert duvall's character in 'we own the night'

a good summation of the history of human existence since the full-scale adoption of agriculture as the one way to live.

give students a taste of freedom in the classroom, and maybe they will demand it when they leave

We are the biggest parasite in the history of existence. We are the mosquito that drinks itself to obesity before the human squeezes the skin and blows it up.

The human even tries to warn the mosquito. But it sees all the others biting the humans so it decides to continue. The human then says to it - I'M GOING TO KILL YOU RIGHT NOW - but it can't help itself. It knows there is some kind of danger but it can't fully bring it to focus. Its tiny brain can't fully process the message. All it can think about is blood...more blood...more blood...

SMACK.

News report - NJ Supreme Court ruling on factory farms

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2008/2008-07-31-093.asp

We are in the midst - maybe near the end - of a huge tech boom. Crazy amounts of new technologies, etc.

When we run out of non-renewable resources all of our new products are going to have to be made from recycled materials. Maybe before it gets to that point we can change our way of living by the choices we make, and maybe keep a little saved money (oil) in the account for emergencies...

Looking around your classes, you realize that it's all on us. We have to step up and take responsibility for our actions. Obviously this applies to life in general, and it might be the most important lesson anyone can ever learn.

Who Killed The Electric Car? - movie trailer

The foundations of any society:

education
health care
legal system

And these mostly suck right now. They need to be changed. The best one right I guess is health care. Education is so much more important though because it is the formative years of every single human being. I have no idea what it will look like but I am imagining a world where the other two cease to exist in their current forms. Imagine if you could walk or take the bus to the clinic like you go to the convenience store. Everything needs to be decentralized. The concentration of power and thinking and money is the worst fucking thing in the world. It's killing us.

Education has to give people a chance to learn. Teach people how to learn, and then fucking let them do it! You don't even need to teach people how to learn. They know how to learn, and they are only going to really learn about the shit that they are interested in. We are destroying spirit the way we do things - at best we are stifling it's potential, but no - people are sick (why do we differentiate between physical and mental illness?), they steal from each other, they kill each other, they fucking hate each other for reasons that are so superficial it's insane. It is absolutely insane. There has to be some metaphor for this....

We are obsessed with compartmentalizing everything. We have chopped the world up into pieces - yours, mine, whatever. It's not ours! It's not fucking ours. What we need is freedom. You can't even kill yourself. Now that is beyond belief - you don't have a choice about being born but you can't kill yourself. Not that I think people should kill themselves, I don't. But that's just one example of our society making legislation to try and control. We need to give up trying to control each other to the fullest extent possible.

Current controls that need to go:

• Prescriptive education - telling people what they need to know. Give them skills then set them free
  
• Criminal penalties for using drugs - why don't we fine people for crimes? Make some money instead of spending it all on keeping them in jails. Of course you want to lock up the dangerous people or send them to Siberia to work or something, but the people who don't cause any harm? It's a total waste.
• feel free to add to the list

I guess the environment has to be added to the list of pillars of a society. It seems a bit redundant but maybe not, because everything is the environment. So to re-state that, the natural environment should be a top priority.

Think about it in terms of time-value. Compare the environment's value to that of a human life. A human life lasts for approximately 75 years. The environment is responsible for the whole population on the earth's existence. We can't live on a planet that doesn't have trees, clean water, clean air, grass, animals.... the advent of big, urban cities where people are removed from nature, has caused people to think that we don't need it! The stuff is removed from another part of the world, processed - causing pollution and destroying some other place, and then shipped into the city. So the city people don't care about the environment because they are insulated from it. I suppose the cities on the gulf coast hit by the hurricane might disagree...