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Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Moreover, the current financial collapse provides an incontestable demonstration that it is unable to self-correct.
It did not happen, because Wall Street is not in the business of financing the real economy. The failure of the credit system is only one manifestation of a failed economic system that is wildly out of balance with, and devastatingly harmful to, both humans and the natural environment. Wages are falling in the face of volatile food and energy prices. Consumer debt, housing foreclosures, and executive pay are setting historic records. The middle class is shrinking. The unconscionable and growing worldwide gap between rich and poor, with its related alienation, is eroding the social fabric to the point of fueling terrorism, genocide, and other violent criminal activity.
Climate change and the related increase in droughts, floods, and wildfires are serious threats. Scientists are in almost universal agreement that human activity bears substantial responsibility. We face severe water shortages, the erosion of topsoil, the loss of species, and the end of the fossil fuel subsidy. In each instance, a failed economic system that takes no account of the social and environmental costs of monetary profits bears major responsibility.
Spending trillions of dollars in an effort to restore a failed system to normal function is a reckless waste of time and resources and, in the absence of action to replace the failed system, is the greatest misuse of federal government credit in history. The more intelligent course is to acknowledge the failure and to set about redesigning our economic system from the bottom up to align with the realities and opportunities of the twenty-first century.
We face a monumental economic challenge that goes far beyond anything being discussed by the administration, the U. Congress, or the corporate press.
An economic crisis created by an unstable global financial system that favors speculation in asset bubbles over investment in the production of beneficial goods and services, drives continuing cycles of boom and bust, mires people and governments in debts they cannot pay, and holds national governments hostage to the interests of global financiers concerned only with maximizing their own profits.
A social crisis of extreme and growing inequality within and among nations created by a focus on maximizing returns to money — which means to the people who already have the most money. A tiny minority of executives and financiers experience soaring incomes and accumulate grand fortunes at the expense of working people whose wages are largely stagnant or falling relative to the cost of living.
The enormous disparities undermine institutional legitimacy, human health, and the social fabric of families and communities and thereby feed violence. An environmental crisis of climate chaos, loss of fertile soil, shortages of clean freshwater, disappearing forests, and collapsing fisheries created by an economic system prone to collapse if excessive forms of consumption do not continuously grow. Can our planet support the demands of the ten billion people anticipated to be the world's population by the middle of this century?
While it is common to hear about the problems of overpopulation, might there be unexplored benefits of increasing numbers of.
Environmental Social Work. Social work has been late to engage with the environmental movement. It builds on Agenda I to issue a call for a national Declaration of Independence from Wall Street and provide a handbook for a nonviolent Main Street revolution. Agenda2 identifies the system by which money is created and allocated as the ultimate instrument of social control in modern society.
It breaks new ground in outlining a clear and coherent plan to replace the corrupted life-destroying phantom-wealth Wall Street money system with a life-serving living-wealth Main Street money system that favors life values over financial values, roots power in people and community, and supports local resilience and self-organization within a framework of living markets and living democracy.
Agenda2 builds on the simple premise that the only legitimate purpose of an economy is to support people in meeting their needs for the basic goods and services needed for a full and healthy life in ways that are dignified and spiritually fulfilling.
If existing economic institutions fail to fulfill this purpose, it is the democratic right of the people to change them. Perhaps the greatest barrier to change is the false belief that we are limited to the choice between a capitalist system that subjects people to rule by unaccountable self-serving financiers and a socialist economic system that subjects them to rule by unaccountable self-serving bureaucrats.
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