A better world is possible - Global Commons Institute

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Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only. www.brucenixon.com Today our institutions are designed to achieve the wrong purposes – consuming and producing more and making corporations and relatively few people richer and more powerful. Instead they should be designed to meet our needs sustainably, lift the poor out of poverty and benefit everyone without damaging the earth on which all life depends. We get caught in pointless pursuit of ever higher levels of income, consumption, competition and overwork. We are subtly subjected to propaganda, brainwashed into believing we’ll feel better with more and bigger and it leads to greater happiness. Clearly it never does. The pressure on us is to display wealth, be cool, compare ourselves with others and we end up feeling bad. We have a sense that there is no alternative. The pressures to conform are enormous. Anyone who fundamentally questions or challenges the system is marginalised and portrayed as weird. The media is a major part of it. This figure sums it up. Free Market Capitalism and Big Business out of control • Belief in “Great God Growth” and economic growth and having more stuff • Fuels climate change and consumes more than “spaceship earth” can provide • Destroys the ecosystem and diversity on which all life depends • Pursuit of cheaper everything • Not making us happier or creating more wellbeing and security • Systematically transfers wealth from poor to super rich. Bears down on people who make things, serve and feed us • Big Co’s externalise cost, abuse power, subvert democracy, dominate the media and keep us misinformed and mesmerised • Big government, big tech fixes – not small solutions or precautionary principle. Ideology – not what works • Centralising power and diminishing democracy at all levels and civil rights • Mono-thinking creates mono-culture, mono-everything, “clone towns” • Supported by a huge military economy that does great harm and diverts us from the biggest fundamental challenges we have ever faced Essentially we are robbed and disempowered – how can we be so gullible? Underlying the global economic system is an unsustainable debt money system. The financial crisis makes that clear. An unsustainable money system Debt Money – 95% of our money created by banks – “creating money out of thin air” Creates massive debt burden especially for poor countries Debt -systematically transfers wealth from poor to rich Inherently unsustainable - need to repay debt and interest drives unsustainable development Lack of regulation and due diligence – e.g. subprime crisis, credit crunch, recession, bailouts -the taxpayer pays Perverse taxation – bears down on poorer people, fails to reward the sustainable and penalise the unsustainable UK personal debt £1.35trn exceeds GDP £1.31trn 96
Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only. www.brucenixon.com Unstable financial markets – about 90% transactions are speculative Vast avoidance and evasion, UK tax havens, laundering and blue suit corruption – a denial of responsibility - an industry The big Irony is that governments are trying to get us out of the mess caused by borrowing and debt, by borrowing our way out of it and creating more debt! There is an alternative: only central banks create money. “An economy that does not enslave people to debt is one in which they retain their freedom and empowerment”. Brian Goodwin, Resilience, Resurgence, July /August 2009. In Part 2, I put forward proposals for radical system change. However, before doing so, I offer a summary of Mahatma Gandhi’s far-sighted thinking which contains many of the solutions to the crises which we face today. Further reading: Bob Doppelt, The power of sustainable thinking, Ecologist, 20th February, 2009. 97
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