April/May 2008
Moving Immense Possibilities Into the World
Jeff Golden
How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and
Restore America’s Original Vision
Thom Hartmann
Beyond the New Deal
Howard Zinn
Democratizing Capital
Sherle R. Schwenninger
If We Want to Survive the Climate Crisis We Must Change
Bill McKibben
A Green Corps
Bill McKibben
Moving in Harmonious Relationship With
Our Environment
Angelika Thusius
Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic
Dr. Bruce E. Levine
Numbing Attractions
Peter Moore
Mediation Works: A Center for Community Dispute Resolution
Jody Woodruff
Liberation: An Interview with Mukti
Margaret Brownlie
The Feminine Face of Awakening
Rita Robinson, M.A.
Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain
By Deborah Mokma
Last March the Commerce Department released a report on the “sustained weakness” of the US economy which stated:
“Consumers, jolted by a credit crisis, turned in the weakest spending performance in 17 months in February … the perfor-mance of the consumer is closely watched since consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of total economic activity.”
The idea that people who are supposed to be financial experts consider citizen’s spending performance to be a key factor in improving our dysfunctional economy is appalling. The ongoing economic meltdown continues thanks to the many poor choices made by those who control what is claimed to be a free market economy—including unregulated financial scheming which caused the collapse of the subprime-mortgage industry, the loss of family wage jobs, the ever-diminishing production of real goods, the unrestrained fossil fuel energy business. Asking We the People—aka “consumers” whose incomes have not kept up with inflation—to spend more of the money we don’t have is not the solution to this mess.
The kind of economic activity we should be focusing on, which will address both the economic and climate change crises, is the creation of a Green Economy. Jim Hightower (www.hightowerlowdown.org) explains how this can work: “Rather than wait … let’s do it ourselves … with a clean-energy revolution [which] would enlist people directly to achieve the goal. Making every home and building in America energy efficient and developing clean, high-speed rail networks between population centers would employ millions of people at every skill level. Backyard tinkerers and computer whizzes could develop and improve technologies, local businesses would be able to pioneer new products and services, union apprentice programs would train workers, and inner-city poor people would be recruited into jobs that can provide a career path out of poverty. Yes, this would take an up-front investment, but the payoff is staggering … the Powers That Be can no longer pretend that such a grassroots recovery program is the sort of big-government undertaking that’s unaffordable. After all, they’ve already frittered away at least a couple of trillion dollars to destroy, occupy, and try to rebuild Iraq, and now they’re dumping $168 billion in a fizzler of a stimulus that completely ignores the fundamental need for a shared prosperity.”
How will this Green Economy become a reality? Community organizing is the key. I must admit that as one who relies on “to do” lists my mind becomes overwhelmed at the thought of the numbers of lists it will take to accomplish this collective goal, but with enough of us participating it is indeed possible. Truly, it is the best chance we have.
Michael Lerner, in a recent article in Tikkun Magazine (www.tikkun.org), sums it up well: “What really counts is … the creation of an ongoing movement that will last … people to meet weekly in their neighborhoods in small groups to begin to build ongoing projects of social change that would embody their highest ideals. Groups organized, for example, around universal health care, environmental sanity, the Global Marshall Plan as the path to homeland security, corporate social responsibility, and electoral reform. If the millions of people who have been touched by the [presidential] campaigns … were to begin working now for the changes they want their candidate to bring to the country, then these campaigns would stop resembling horse races and start resembling the building of mass movements and the reclaiming of social space from all those columnists, politicians, and public opinion leaders whose impact historically has been to deaden our hopes and convince us that we should just attend to our own personal lives.”
There is nothing more personal than having our shared home threatened by global climate change, or our economy undermined by short-sighted greed which ignores the greater good. It’s up to as many of us as possible to participate, in whatever large or small way we can, to create the change we wish to see. And, as writer and radio talk show host Jeff Golden points out in this issue, engaging with others in civic life could also make our lives more vital, more meaningful, and yes, even more fun.
