MORPHEAL'S COMMENTARY - March 28 2009 - What Should G20 Do ?, About Medals for Bravery, And About God
Morpheal
Medals for Economic Bravery, AND About God
WHAT SHOULD G20 DO ?
G20 needs to come up with a “new deal” for the world’s future and all
of humanity.
They ought to:
1). Come to understand as a group of all that needs to be done in the
world in infrastructure, energy, modernization, housing,
transportation, environment, conservation, desert reclamation,
agriculture, education, health, etc. Consider every nation’s
immediate, neglected, and long term needs. We must recognize that this
also requires concerted planning, measurement of progress, and some
standards so that common goals can be agreed to, to set priorities
where necessary.
2). Realize the world has people, raw natural resources,
manufacturing potential, enabling doing what needs to be done. The
list in item 1) is sufficient to provide work for many generations,
not only for today’s population. All of those needs cannot be met in
one generation.
3). The missing resource is piles of printed paper (money).
4). List the needs, plan the progress, and provide the money for a
"new deal" for humanity.
5). Establish a funding mechanism that allows enterprises to remedy
deficiencies, and make improvements, without severely impacting their
bottom line survival. The fund should gain revenue from those who are
able to contribute, according to their ability to contribute, and
disperse it to those who are in need, according to the merits of their
need. For instance where a factory lacks stack scrubbers to remedy air
pollution, but cannot afford to remain in business and remedy the
defect, the fund would provide the stack scrubbers to maintain that
company’s competitive position in relation to its competitors. This
will end the fact that the current system only rewards those who avoid
doing what is right, because their bottom line remains unimpacted by
the costs of doing what is right for the future. We cannot, of course,
allow enterprises that are lagging in this regard to be driven out of
business, if they make products of value to society and if they
maintain reasonable conditions of competition within the market. They
must be helped up to an even footing with others, not simply crushed
and eliminated by oppressive regulations and rising costs related to
the imposing of that hardship. This will answer many currently
unanswerable environmental issues in a much faster way, with less
damage to society, than any other potential method of handling the
problem.
This is to be considered a form of legitimate subsidy unlike subsidies
which only tend to prop up margins, reducing prices, below what they
would have been based on cost accounting models that avoid the type of
capital investment that we are discussing. This also permits
improvements in working conditions and maintaining of competitive
livelihoods where that can become seriously compromised due to lack of
any such system. The greater good of society is better served by the
increased stability and job security that that type of consideration
can offer. It is a fact that were capital pressures increase
significantly the workers always tend to lose out, as a corporate
entity attempts to cut back to attempt hard pressed survival.
6). Recognize the need for a “value economics” rather than the
currently prevalent paradigm of cost / margin based economics. Many of
the costs of our economic activities are really not factored into the
equation of cost and margin. There are other costs, not calculable in
that immediacy, and not calculated into the accounting picture. An
example is the effect on the environment, and the costs of subsequent
remediation, if remediation is possible. Similarly the value of
reclaiming African or Chinese desert land is larger than any currently
calculable gain in agricultural productivity from that land, and
particularly in relation to the costs of that productivity. So desert
reclamation tends to lose out in a strictly cost / margin equation,
but in a value economics equation the reclamation of desert gains
significant priority. Many projects suffer a similar accounting of
cost and margin barrier. There is no calculable profit in the existing
system for determining worth and so the project does not get done when
in fact a system of real values would immediately place that project
high on the list of desirable outcomes based on a more comprehensive
consideration of values. Values take into account the negative and
positive impact upon the future of the environment and humanity. Cost
and margin accounting has no such capability. It cannot provide a true
picture of worth, and therefore it cannot provide a good and true
basis for determining what ought to be done.
7). That leads to the need for price controls on many commodities as
an enabling feature and to provide greater stability and more
equitable access to meeting needs. Subsidy of commodity prices where
value is high, and costs are excessive, to encourage more local
sufficiency has positive merits. For example, wheat grown on reclaimed
desert lands is more costly to produce than wheat from non desert
lands. The value of growing that wheat to provide for more local needs
is larger than the cost differential can indicate, and so the price of
wheat, and thus of bread, in an instance of valuable reclamation of
desert lands, needs to be effectively subsidized to enable true value
economics. In some instances we must realize that costly production is
better than no production, providing local societies with meaningful
work, contributing to the local economy. This is far preferable to
avoiding costly means of production in favor of international charity
as the primary means of sustenance. Peace and security are not served
by the currently prevalent economic behavior patterns in regard to
that issue.
8). Recognition that world population needs to be brought under
control and in some instances it must be reduced so that local
populations are locally sustainable. While this is not universally
possible it can be achieved in the economic sphere even if it cannot
necessarily be achieved in terms of food production. A population
plan, and the establishing of treaties for its achievement is the most
essential ingredient in any plan for future world peace and security.
WE GIVE MEDALS FOR DEATH AND DESTRUCTION BUT NO MEDALS FOR BRAVERY IN
BUILDING AND PRESERVING WHAT IS OF VALUE:
The economic crisis brought to the forefront many situations that
indicate that business ethics, self interested greed, and blatently
illegal activities for the purpose of gaining wealth, are a serious
problem in the world. While renewed emphasis on education in ethics
can help something else is necessary. Stricter penalties and
enforcement can also help, but these need additional assistance from
those involved in the relevant areas of activity. What then can be
done to facilitate ethical progress ?
Our military traditions and systems tend to offer us an idea. Soldiers
are given recognition, awards such as the medals of honor, promotions
in military and civilian life, and medals for bravery and
distinguished service.
Those involved in the stock market, in finance, leaders in business,
and those who work under those business leaders, have no such
recognition and award available to them. Acts of heroism and bravery
in economics are unrewarded. Acts of cowardice, avaricious greed,
extreme self interest, and even law breaking for personal gain, are
often rewarded with money and promotion. Whistle blowers tend to lose
on money and promotion, and most often have no other form of reward or
recognition available to them to open up new doors of opportunity.
Unlike soldiers who are sent out to kill and destroy the enemy, the
“whistle blower”, no matter how heroic and brave, never receives any
recognition in our society for that bravery and the immense levels of
risk that are involved. We must recognize that bravery exists without
cessation of life and without spilling of blood. We must recognize
that bravery occurs where social, financial, and psychological risks
occur.
When a similar system, of recognition and reward, at a national
government level, is instituted for bravery and heroism in the
economic sphere, comparable to that which exists for military bravery
and heroism, the economic world will begin to change very appreciably.
It will change in support of its heros, and it will begin to encourage
real heroism. The idea of the hero has become under significant siege,
due to the perception that economic heroism is exclusive rather than
inclusive of “rocking the boat” or “whistle blowing”. That heroism
does not question authority and existing practices, instead heroism
has become equated solely with the gain of money. That distortion in
the economic sphere needs correction or the trend we see in terms of
faltering ethics and increase in illegal practices, will continue to
worsen. It is time for medals for economic heroism, and for medals and
public recognition for “whistle blowers” enabling those people to gain
in status, rather than losing status in our society. We must change
the negative trends in that area, if we are to hope to change and
improve the future.
We need positive change in how those who are “soldiering” in the ranks
of the economy, can begin to be positively empowered, recognized, and
adequately rewarded for the sake of good rather than evil. We must
begin to reward and regard those who show remarkable ethics and
bravery in the building of our society, and those who better it, at
least as much as we reward and regard those who defend it, and risk
their lives to destroy and kill our enemies. This will greatly assist
in identifying, by means of real and positive recognition, those whom
thus recognized, the world will be once again inclined to follow. We
must begin to reward and recognize constructive progress the way we
have always, traditionally, recognized and rewarded destructive
progress, and the battle to build society, its culture, and its
progressive institutions, must become as vital and recognized as has
always been the battle to defeat, destroy, and eliminate enemies and
their cultures, societies and institutions. We must defeat our own
history of death and destruction, and revise our concepts of heroism
and bravery to include building, preserving, and real progress.
GOD AND NATURE - ARCHBISHOP WILLIAMS IS CORRECT:
Dr. Williams is correct when he claims that God will not intervene to
prevent humanity from wreaking disastrous damage to the environment
and destroying itself.
Humanity must also comprehend that they have a history of imposing
their own ideas about themselves onto God. God is not what you think
it is. You are denying God its own individual nature, radically
different from your own and beyond your comprehension. If the human
species fails to demonstrate its own intelligent and wise progress,
God will favor another species elsewhere in the universe and humanity
to perish in a Hell of their own creation, forfeiting salvation.
If you were to look at the face of the living God you would perish.
When you look at what you believe God’s face is, you look at yourself
and see nothing more than your own self interest and vain false
beliefs. The face of God is not your own face, or those others you see
around you in the world. While it is true that you share in God’s
image by virtue of the spark of intelligence, that enables you to
reason, understand and to invent and create, the understanding of that
identity is continually in process, not something wholly accomplished
and known already. It is the ultimate mystery concerning the universe
and humanity’s place within that infinity of potential.