The first road sign I saw in Bhutan read: Start early/Drive
slowly/Arrive safely. I knew instantly this place and this trip was going to be
different.
Bhutan is a country so small -- fewer than 1 million people
live there -- that, tucked between China to the north and India to the south, it
is very easy to miss. But this little country is having more and more impact on
the rest of the world every day.
There's something about being confronted
by the obvious in the midst of the unquestionable, however, that makes a person
rethink all of life in the process. I know that's true because it just happened
to me. In Bhutan I saw what obviously could be start to eclipse what is now
unquestionable in society as we know it.
What has become obvious and
unquestionable in a world of superpowers and global systems is that small
nations have little weight to add to the scales of more modern and powerful
nations. And yet what is astounding is the fact that one of the smallest
countries on the planet -- the tiny monarchical democracy of Bhutan -- may very
well be developing a great deal of international influence.
In June, the
Global Peace Initiative of Women convened a body of religious leaders and
professional scholars to study a recent declaration of the king and government
of Bhutan. In Bhutan, the Parliament has declared, the GNP -- the Gross National
Product by which the wealth of a nation is measured -- has been abandoned. In
its place, the government has defined the achievement of Gross National
Happiness as their new standard of success. They have, in other words, chosen a
spiritual rather an economic metric of achievement.
Our task was to consider the practicality of such an
ideal as well as its message to the rest of society.
As one social
absolute after another -- money, power, social status and productivity -- came
under scrutiny, I asked myself what I was seeing. To be truthful, it was a bit
of the old story of Shangri-La, from James Hilton's 1933 novel about a hidden
kingdom of peace and happiness, mixed with a touch of the 1959 film "The Mouse
that Roared," the story of a small kingdom that, by accident, manages to upset
the entire geopolitical order.
Bhutan's capital city, Thimphu, has a
population of barely 100,000. The country is nestled in forests and rice paddies
at the bottom of the Himalayas. Scattered villages run up and down the
mountainsides of 14 districts and the last village in the country, their
newspaper reported the week we came, will finally be electrified by the end of
the month.
And yet in so many ways, Bhutan, a country once isolated from
the outside world by the Himalayan Mountains that encircle it and insulated from
the more progressive or "developed" world around it, is far beyond anything that
world has to offer.
The concept of Gross National Happiness in a people
formed in Buddhist values rests on four major principles:
sustainable and
equitable socioeconomic development;
conservation of a fragile ecology;
the promotion of culture and the purpose of a human civilization; and
good governance that looks beyond greed to human development. A Romantic
model, I know, but impossible. Except that here, it isn't.
The little
kingdoms that are now Bhutan, though loosely associated in the 17th century,
were not united into a single country under a hereditary monarchy until 1906. A
little more than a century later, they are still emphasizing national unity. So
they wear traditional dress for work and all formal occasions, the gho, or short
tunic, for men and the kira, or box jacket, for women. They build their houses
on a single model and use only traditional triple-arched windows and icons on
them as decoration to define their common culture, as well. They take days to
celebrate communal festivals and national historic events.
This newest
declaration, then, of the search for Gross National Happiness under what is only
its fifth hereditary king is like watching a country be born under your very
eyes. They are deciding together in the midst of a world built on money,
military might and unlimited consumption to simply reject all of those things.
In Bhutan, the national emphasis is on sustainable development, the preservation
of cultural values, the conservation of the natural environment and the
establishment of good governance -- governance that puts human well-being and
happiness before business, productivity or rugged individualism. And it's not
mere sloganeering.
In Bhutan, national success is about development that
does not destroy, ecological protection that does not drain resources,
government that seeks human development before money and a proper balance
between the production of goods and the happiness of the people.
For
instance, in Bhutan, fishing and hunting -- except under the rarest of
situations -- is forbidden because care for nature, including the animals, is
paramount.
At this time, 72 percent of the country is forested, and the
constitution requires that that figure never be less than 60 percent. Buying
this land to sell off its wood on the open market is, then,
illegal.
Bhutan makes its money on tourism and by selling hydropower to
India, not on mass production or cash crops.
The main industry of 60
percent of the population is still farming. One young farmer told us he wants to
be a farmer because he "wants to feed his people." How many people, I thought,
ever think of farming anymore as more than just one more global corporation like
any other? Now that agribusiness has managed to gobble up truck farms and sell
genetically modified seeds that cannot reproduce themselves, the whole notion of
a country's being able to "feed itself" is, at best, quaint, if not
obsolete.
Another young leader we met makes shoes to sustain himself and,
on the side, operates a "shoe laundry" to clean and give shoes away to those who
need them.
A third, born with three kidneys when many people, he says,
barely have one good one, decided what he needed to do for his fellow citizens
was to begin a kidney foundation.
A woman whose child became severely
handicapped got a degree in London then returned to Bhutan to open a center to
train other parents in a similar situation.
The theme is constant: Life
is for human service, not financial profit. The citizen does what the country
needs, not what globalism demands.
Do they have problems with all of
this? Yes, they do, and they know it. They have refugee problems that arise out
of citizenship responsibilities. They have technology problems that create age
gaps in the family. They have issues of balance in a society that is balancing
one world against another. So they are fashioning an educational system to
integrate the principles of GNH into everything they teach. In order to ensure
these ideals will shape their future as well as their present, they must all be
faced, all be resolved.
They know they cannot keep the world out of
Bhutan anymore, and they don't want to. They lifted the restrictions on the
Internet in 1999, for instance, because they see its value to their development.
But they are concerned about its use and its influence. And they do want
balance. They do not want an economy based on money, greed and ruthless
individualism to take over a culture based on family, nature and human
compassion. Or as Bhutan's Education Minister, Thakur S. Powdyel, puts it, "A
Bhutan of Gross National Happiness will be a moral giant 'where everyone cares
enough and everyone shares enough so that everyone has enough.' "
They
make a person think.
Imagine what our own country would look like if we
refused to do anything that would compromise our national resources, the care of
the people, the preservation of the environment rather than its exploitation and
the protection of our animal species, as well as the purity of the human
environment. Just the way we once did.
The temptation, of course, is to
call such a thing impossible in a modern world. But it's only impossible if we
choose short-term profits over human community.
Perhaps before we get any
spiritually weaker than we are right now, we ought to find some politicians who
are not in the pockets of Washington lobbyists and willing to listen to what
these young people in this young nation are calling the whole world to
consider.
From where I stand, the problem does not lie in making
something like this the basis of human and national happiness. Obviously, there
are those who want it.
No, the problem lies in the fact that the United
States as it functions now -- in gridlock, under destructive partisanship, as an
oligarchy, and, like Pilate, pronouncing things like freedom, natural resources,
education and mutual support good then washing our hands of any responsibility
for them -- has chosen to be Sparta rather than Athens.
We don't even
pretend to aspire to values like these anymore. It's more money for the rich
that we're about and more power for the powerful that we seek rather than more
opportunities for the middle class, more support for the poor and more
compassion for the weak.
Maybe we could use a few conversations on Gross
National Happiness ourselves before the next election, before Gross National
Greed strikes the final blow and destroys us all. ++
Fed
Head
John Nichols, The Nation
July 30, 2013
The big election race of 2013 is for the position of Federal Reserve
chairman.
The United States is not an economy democracy, however. So
there will be no popular vote on who will make the most critical decisions on
jobs, investments, interest rates and a host of other defining issues for
working families, communities, states and the nation.
But there is a
campaign going on. In order to influence the selection of a new chair by
President Obama and the Senate confirmation process: contenders are positioning.
Camps and caucuses are organizing. Endorsements are being made. Issues are being
placed on the table.
So let’s invite the American people into the
process.
Let’s tell them how powerful the Fed is, and what it could do to
address poverty, unemployment and the economic challenges faced by cities like
Detroit.
One member of Congress, Michigan Democrat Dan Kildee, is already
inviting us to imagine the possibilities.
In response to the threat of
bankruptcy that looms for Detroit and other cities, Kildee has argued that the
Fed should be actively engaged in developing solutions for cities that are in
economic turmoil after decades of deindustrialization and federal and state
neglect. “While Detroit’s problems may be extreme, they are certainly not
unique,” says Kildee.
“Municipalities in Michigan and across the country
are increasingly facing insolvency that requires us to rethink the way we
support our cities.”
When Fed Chair Ben Bernanke appeared before the
House Financial Service Committee in mid-July, the congressman said, “I would
ask if you would think about how you would advise Congress or how the Fed itself
might pursue policy that would have the effect of potentially avoiding—but
certainly mitigating—the economic effect of municipal financial
failure.”
Kildee’s point is well taken, not merely with regard to the
debate over Detroit—but with regard to the debate over who will head the
Fed.
One potential contender for the job, Lawrence Summers, has a record
of delivering for Wall Street and the big banks—as an advocate for deregulation,
privatization and the elimination of essential regulatory protections such as
the Glass-Steagall Act. As economist Dean Baker noted after the economy melted
down in 2007 and 2008, “The policies [Summers] promoted as Treasury Secretary
and in his subsequent writings led to the economic disaster that we now face.”
But Summers is also an over-the-top advocate for the sort of free trade
agreements that have left communities across this country with shuttered
factories and high unemployment. He’s so disinclined toward the public
investments that might renew those communities that Congressman Peter DeFazio,
D-Oregon, has said, “Larry Summers hates infrastructure.”
So count
Summers out.
There are better choices, such as Janet Louise Yellen, who
in her writings and in her tenure as the vice chairman of the Board of Governors
of the Federal Reserve System has evidenced a higher commitment to the Fed’s
mandate to promote high employment. She’s clearly a candidate—so much so that on
Tuesday she got her first newspaper endorsement: from The New York
Times.
But Senator Bernie Sanders has suggested a pair of dark-horse
contenders who—in a real race for the Fed chairmanship—would offer working
Americans a genuine choice.
Declaring that “it’s time for new leadership
at the Federal Reserve and a new approach to our troubled economy,” Sanders has
identified Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and former US Labor
Secretary Robert Reich as “excellent candidates” to replace Chairman Ben
Bernanke when the chairman finishes his term January 31.
“We need a new
Fed chair who will act with the same sense of urgency to combat the unemployment
crisis in America today that has left 22 million Americans without a full time
job,” argues Sanders. To that end, Sanders rejects Summers as a contender,
writing to President Obama that “it would be a tragic mistake to nominate anyone
as chair of the Fed who continued those failed policies. Instead, we need a new
chair who will have the courage to hold Wall Street accountable for their fraud,
recklessness and illegal behavior, and stand up for the needs of ordinary
Americans.”
But Sanders also recognizes that in the race for the Fed
chairmanship progressives should have a contender. Or, perhaps, two.
“As
you consider whom to nominate as the next chair of the Federal Reserve, I urge
you to consider someone who will put the needs of the disappearing middle class
ahead of the interests of Wall Street and the wealthy few,” Sanders wrote to the
president. “There are a number of excellent candidates who are capable of doing
that. Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz and former US Secretary of Labor
Robert Reich are just two names that come to mind.”
The reality is that,
while the names of Stiglitz and Reich come quickly to the mind of Sanders and
other progressives, they may not be at the top of the White House list. But they
should be. On the immediate issue of Detroit, Reich has written brilliantly on
the importance of recognizing, “in an era of widening inequality,” that the real
question is whether Americans are going to “[write] off the poor” who reside in
urban America. On the broader question of the economy, Stiglitz is arguing that
“so-called ‘free trade’ talks should be in the public, not corporate
interest.”
Those are not ideas that are now at the center of the
discussion about who should head the Fed.
But they should be.
And
they can be.
This is the point of treating the race for the Fed
chairmanship as an election, rather than an anointment.
By putting
Stiglitz and Reich in the running, Sanders invites organized labor and economic
justice and urban policy groups to join the debate. By highlighting the
progressive economic approaches advanced by Stiglitz and Reich, as an
alternative to those advanced by Larry Summers, they expand the understanding of
what the Fed can and should do—for Detroit, for cities across the country and
for neglected rural communities.
The debate is essential.
A
quarter century ago, my colleague William Greider wrote the groundbreaking book:
Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (Simon &
Schuster). The Fed still operates behind veils of secrecy. Most Americans do not
know what it does and, more critically, what it can do.
Treating the race
for Fed head as a race, as a real campaign, invites citizens into the
process.
Urging the selection of Stiglitz or Reich might not lead to the
actual choice of a progressive-populist as Fed chair. But it could turn the tide
against Summers. It might help Yellen. And it would almost certainly create
pressure on whoever takes charge of the Fed to recognize and embrace the full
potential of the Federal Reserve. ++
New Monetary Systems for
a Sustainable Democracy and "The Great Turning"
Margaret Flowers
and Kevin Zeese, Truthout | News Analysis
Wednesday, 31 July 2013
My Address to the United Nations Meeting: “Happiness and
Wellbeing: Defining A New Economic Paradigm”
Joel Magnuson
March
28, 2012
Evolution to Cooperation: Life Experiences Lead to
Enlightened Economic Views
A rEvolution of Cooperation: Transitioning to sustainable
communities
Cooperatives: The Co-op Alternative to Corporate
Capitalism
Democratizing the Electric Grid: Innovative Financing for
Local Renewable Energy
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will
have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is
stronger than evil triumphant.”
~ The Reverend Martin Luther King
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