Annie Birdsong's Homepage



    To Create Right Livelihood for All    


Creating jobs by recreating local economy
Only the Well Off Can Start a Business -- Unless You Live in Hardwick, Vermont


__________________________________________________________________

Let's get pro-active in our communities.
Prince Charles Helps Preserve Small Family Farms and the Countryside


__________________________________________________________________

It's time to rethink our world.
Capitalism Has Collapsed

The United States has lost 50,000 factories, which have moved overseas to take advantage of cheap labor.

We so much to have jobs for our sons and daughters when they graduate from college. We do not.

We need now to hear from our scholars and to hold a bold, robust national conversation to explore the best, most progressive ideas in the entire world for how to rebuild our economy -- learning from the past on how to avoid the many drastic failures of capitalism.

I say the nation should give low interest loans to groups within communities to form community owned co-ops and worker owned co-ops.

This should be accompanied by tariff barriers that prevent cheap products made in China from competing with the newly formed co-ops.

We also must then have co-ops in the local communitys that sell things made in the locally: shoes, jewelry, dresses, pies, bread, baskets, quilts, greeting cards, purses, calendars etc.

We can understand what such an economy might look like by looking at the economy created by the Amish. Click here to see a photo gallery of products hand-crafted by the Amish.
__________________________________________________________________

Europe leads the way.
Lets Create Millions of Farming Jobs by Reinventing Farm Subsidies




We want to leave behind some topsoil for future generations.
Another Way To Subsidize Farmers While Generating Many Jobs

In my opinion, a very good subsidy for our local small family farmers would be for each city to set up a community composting program that delivers them tons of free compost.

We have 39,044 local communities in the United States. If each community had a composting program, we could GENERATE MANY JOBS.

The compost could be made in anerobic digestors that yield not only compost, but also methane, which can be made into electricity for the grid.

The money paid for the electricity generated may be enough money to offset the costs of the program. We could also pay for the program by transferring money from the program that now subsidizes wealthy agribusinesses.

Every week, men could gather food waste from grocery stores -- about a ton per week per grocery store, food waste from restaurants, nursing homes, schools and prisons.

Food waste can also be gathered from local residences. Seattle, Washington, gives residences a big container in which to put grass clippings, tree limbs, peelings and scraps etc. or we might make available for purchase compostable bags made of plastic derrived from corn starch or sugar cane bagasse (the dry pulpy residue left over when the juice has been extracted from sugar cane) rather than plastic made of fossil fuels, in which to put peelings and scraps.

I think it would also be excellent to accept humanure and pet poop from people. The compostable bags can line buckets in which people collect their feces, dry solids. There could be a layer of humanure, then a layer of soil, a layer of humanure, then a layer of soil. (A large bag of topsoil can be purchased at Lowes or Walmart Super Center for $2.)

An additional benefit of this community composting program is that it will help us have much cleaner water, for when people grind up their peelings and scraps in the garbage disposal and rinse it down the drain, it puts nutrients in our water bodies, which causes eutrophication. Eutrophication is when algae flourish and rot causing bacteria to flourish, which take the oxygen out of the water. With no oxygen in the water, aquatic biota die.

Approximately 40 percent of the Chesapeake Bay is a dead zone due to eutrophication.


__________________________________________________________________

Only the left has solutions.
Communities Need Emergency Action to Rescue the Unemployed

As capitalism collapses, we can not wait for the government to solve our problems. We need community solutions to the crisis of unemployment.

Many developing countries faced this crisis decades ago, and they knew what the solution was. Land reform.

As Prince Charles of Wales wrote, "agriculture ... is the engine of rural employment and the foundation stone of culture, even of civilization."

Our own style of land reform is taking place -- the "buy local" movement, where across the country, people are committed to buying from the farmers markets and CSA's (Community Support Agriculture Programs.) It helps generate farming jobs in the local community while also helping farmers already in business stay afloat. (More of the food dollar goes to the farmer. And often the food is cheaper.)

But we need to go a step further and make it possible, in our communities, for many people to enter into farming -- even if they have little or no start up money.

We need to raise money for a community land trust to purchase startup rental plots of land that we can loan out to the unemployed in exchange for guarantees that they will protect our water resources, support wildlife biodiversity and protect the soil by farming organically.

We could purchase things for a tool and equipment library that can be loaned to the farmers, such as a tractor, hoes and hosepipes etc.

We could even make available videos that new farmers view to learn farming skills.

How could we raise money? Applying for grants, holding bake sells and concerts, taking up monthly donations from those who can afford to pay etc.

We could even use our parks for startup rental plots until we are through the crisis.
__________________________________________________________________

Let's shore up our small family farmers.
Why We Should Eat Locally Grown Food, As Much As Is Possible

In the video below, Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, promotes the local food movement.


__________________________________________________________________

Now unemployment will surge.
How Bush Remade Agriculture in Iraq

It was heart breaking to me to hear how the socialist system of agriculture in Iraq was threwn out by the Bush Administration and replaced with the failing, horrible, no good, very bad U.S. model of agriculture where huge agribusinesses take over and push most little guys out.

The farm support system there proped up the small family farmer, generating employment for the people -- 50 percent of the people were farmers.

"In the old Iraq, the state provided the seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, sprinklers, tractors and other necessities to farmers at a low cost, often a third or even a fourth of the market price," said the Washington Post.

"It leased land for 1 cent per donam per year. (A donam is about six-tenths of an acre.) It bought the country's main crops, wheat and barley, at a fixed price, whether they were usable or not. And it ground the grain and handed it out as flour to the people free. Each month, every family received a basket of flour, sugar, tea and other necessities.

"Occupation authority officials are debating whether the subsidies to Iraqi farmers will continue and, if so, for how long. Much of the argument, one agriculture adviser said, is between 'the economists and the military, with the economists wanting laissez faire as soon as possible and the military worried that yanking subsidies too soon could lead to social unrest, which would further destabilize the country.'"

(Laissez faire means free market, where the government does not intervene to assist or regulate. Another word for laissez faire is far right -- or conservative.)

It is a human rights violation to interfere with the internal affairs of another country. The Iraqi people should decide how their economy is ran -- not Americans. (We should not have attacked Iraq in the first place. There were no weapons of mass destruction.)

We can predict what will happen in Iraq. Tarrif barriers will drop and small family farmers in Iraq won't be able to compete as cheap grain from the U.S.A. pours in and our agribusinesses take over their production, territory and livelihoods. Globalization is a form of cancer as the big guys choke out the hope and life of the little guys.

In contrast, local economy creates decentralization, busting up huge concentrations of wealth and power while generating employment.

Click here to read the Washington Post's story about Bush remaking agriculture in Iraq.
__________________________________________________________________

Will our policies support small farmers or giant agribusinesses?
Wendell Berry's Vision of Local Economy

"The promoters of the so called global economy ... believe that a farm or a forest is or ought to be the same as a factory; that care is only minimally involved in the use of the land; that affection is not involved at all; ... that the topsoil is lifeless and inert; that soil biology is safely replaceable by soil chemistry; ... that there is no value in human community or neighborhood," wrote Wendell Berry in an essay called "Conserving Communities."

Wendell Berry, who has written 40 books,is a small family farmer in Henry County Kentucky that plows his land with horses and is a teacher of literature and education at the University of Kentucky.

He says the country's farm population declined by an average of almost a half-million people a year for forty-one years. Moreover, he says this demise happened on purpose: "It was the result of great effort and of principles vigorously applied," said Berry. It has been achieved "with the help of expensive advice from university and government experts" and by the "tireless agitation and exertion of the agribusiness corporations."
__________________________________________________________________

Small family farms or agribusinesses? We must choose.
There is an Appropriate Scale for Our Farms

In the preview of the video "Food Inc.," below, you will see why we need small family farms -- not agribusinesses.

There are many reasons for this. The video focuses on food safety and environmental protection issues that arise when farms operate on too large a scale.

Another reason we need small family farms is so we can secure full employment and rural communities. Perhaps one-third of our population should be doing sustainable organic farming -- husbanding the soil, and caring for the environment while producing much much safer food.

To bring this about, we need to subsidize only small organic farmers -- not millionarie agribusinesses. And we need radically different trade policies.

To keep land from being bought out by agribusinesses or developers, community co-ops might buy the land and allow it to be used by farmers who agree to take a course in sustainable agriculture and who agree to farm organically. After all, communities must feed themselves off the land for generations to come. They don't want it made toxic and erroded with pesticides.



Click here to see the entire film by purchasing it from Amazon.com for $9.69 or renting it for $2.99. Instant download.

__________________________________________________________________

What is needed is localization rather than globalization
The Scourge of the Industrial Revolution

In the 20th Century, India began importing cheap, factory-made cloth from England, which put local weavers and spinners out of work. Unemployment surged.

Mahatama Gandhi led the people to buy cloth made by the local people rather than these imported goods. Thousands followed his lead.

The spinning wheel became a national symbol.

The words of Gandhi are sorely needed today in the United States as free trade agreements flood our markets with foreign-made goods. Hats, gloves, scarves, are made in China. Bookbags, purses, dishes are made in China and on and on. What's left for us to do? Take a look around in the Wal-Mart and see if you can find one item made in the local community.

A few years ago, there were 14,000 homeless people in Washington D.C. That number is probably much increased today.

The goods made with cheap overseas labor are often not less expensive. When Nike moved its factories overseas, their shoes actually became more expensive.

Moreover, when our labor force must compete with cheap overseas labor, wages are driven down. Since 1973, real and hourly earnings have dropped 16.4 percent, according to the U.S. Dept. of Labor.

The problem is not merely the loss of jobs. William Morris, who lived in the mid 1800s called attention to other problems of the industrial revolution that we never dealt with, such as the human degradation of work. A woman sits at a sewing machine in a sweatshop sewing one zipper after another fro people in distant places she has never met.

Every day, all day, she sews zippers.

It's efficient. But is that all what really matters?

To me, it would be far better to a woman to sew clothes for people she interacts with in her local community: a dress for the lovely young bride, a warm nightgown for an elderly woman, a bookbag for a young student, a warm hat for a little boy.

Another week she might gather with ladies in a sewing bee to make quilts.

Meanwhile, magic happens. Instead of isolated, self obsessed individuals we evolve into a community, the highest form of social development. Work is then not just work, but a highly creative, deeply satisfying act of love and joy.

In contrast, Morris said with the Industrial Revolution, art and beauty have no place. He felt that "human dignity lay in ruins" and thus "set out to rediscover the lost techniques of embroidery, stained -glass window making, illumination and callligraphy, textile dying, printing and weaving," wrote Prince Charles of Wales.

Morris was also deeply distraught about the land being contaminated with pollutants that leach into our water we drink from the tap.

Factories in the United States annually release 90 billion pounds of waste into 55,000 toxic waste sites, according to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency.)

In Maryland, where I lived for many years, there were more than 1,000 pipes from businesses that were dumping water into the Potomac River or the tributaries that lead into the Potomac.

Pollution is greatly exaserbated by free trade. For instance, if one wants to create plastic lizards for stores across the globe, the amount of toxic pollutants generated is much increased.

We need to recognize the pollution of water as a form of child abuse. The chemicals in the water and hundreds of chemicals in the tissues of fish, when consumed, store in the body fat and other organs and increase in number over the years.

When a woman is pregnant, these chemicals pass to the unborn fetus through her maternal cord blood. When the infant is born, the chemicals pass to the newborn through her breast milk.

This is very serious because fetuses and the unborn are very vulnerable to chemical injury.

We need young mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles to rise up and say, "We won't have it!"

In the mid 1900s, a man named E.F. Schumacher jumpstarted a movement for right livelihood -- a movement for appropriate technologies and small-scale, decentralized production of goods and services with his book "Small is Beautiful."

This growing movement is energized by the E.F. Schumacher Society in the U.K. that teaches classes and makes material on its website.

Also leading the way are the Amish. "Eighty or 90 percent of products we consume are made within our community,' said an older Amish man with a scraggly beard and a broad smile. He drives from Pennsylvannia to Germantown, Maryland, three days a week to help run the Lancaster County Dutch Market there.

Perhaps the first step in creating local economy is to establish a store where natural food and locally made products, are sold -- perhaps a community-owned co-op with many people in the community buying a share.

People in the community might give interest-bearing loans, or even donations, to get the co-op started.

Perhaps we could build a co-op with our own hands. We could raise money for lumber and other supplies by holding bake sales, car washes, quilting bees, dinners and other events.
__________________________________________________________________

Compassion in Action
How People in Local Communities Can Stimulate Employment

In our local communities, we need an ever-expanding group of people that comes together to hire people to provide services to them.

For instance, a group of 30 people could come together and put up a help-wanted sign to find someone local to sew clothes for them.

They might even hire someone to can locally grown vegetables and make vegetable soup, etc. (We need to provide them with a shared-use commercial kitchen, certified by the health department, that they can rent at a low price or use for free.)

The group of people -- perhaps retired citizens -- might visit schools, businesses and government offices to encourage them to stock vending machines with locally prepared products, such as muffins, cookies, pumpkin pie etc and purchase food grown by the small local farmer.
__________________________________________________________________

A simple way to stand up for local economy
May We Please Participate In The Economy?

Our stores are meant to be markets for what we produce, as much as is possible. (Though we'll always want some trade.) Yet walk around in the Walmart and see if you see anything made locally. (They are selling some locally grown peaches.)

Shouldn't our city, state or federal government require that local stores sell a certain percentage of goods made by local people?

The speaker in this video, Satish Kumar, who is the editor of the Resurgence Magazine and the founder and director of programs of the Schumacher College, tells us one simple thing we can do to take a stand.


__________________________________________________________________

What could be made in our local communities?
Unleash Your Creativity! Making Things on a Local Level



To have local economy, you must have a market place where locally made things are sold.

We need year-round Saturday markets where people can sell products made locally: purses, rugs, pottery, jewelry, greeting cards, calendars, baskets, soap, muffins, bread, canned vegetable soup, etc.

We also need community-owned natural food co-ops that sell food processed or grown locally and regionally, as much as is possible.(We'll always want some things that are not locally made.)

We need to hang brochures and pass out flyers to promote the "buy local" movement.

How can we use our churches, places of work and local government to encourage an ethic of buying things made in the local community?

We also need to hold meetings to talk about local economy. We have meeting rooms in the local library.

Click here to see a photo gallery of ideas of just of few of the kinds of products that could be made in our local community. (I found the photos on the web. Fair use.)


__________________________________________________________________

Free trade is not the solution to unemployment
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Increased Our Unemployment Rate

"We've suffered massive job losses because of NAFTA -- 750,000 jobs lost at the minimum," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. in his book "Take This Job and Ship It."

According to him, the agreement exploded our trade deficit with Mexico. "In 1994, the United States had a $1.3 billion trade surplus with Mexico. Ten years later it has become a $45 billion trade deficit," he said, adding, "And still, some argue it is a success."
__________________________________________________________________

Let's prop up farming jobs -- not destabilize the world.
Bill Clinton Apologises for Forcing Rice Farmers Off the Land in Haiti


In a landslide victory in Haiti, the people voted for Aristide, a priest who is very left-wing -- for land reform and more.

However, he was ousted in a coup, apparently by the George Herbert Walker Bush Administration. Here's what the Guardian newspaper wrote: "Mr. Artistide arrived yesterday in the Central African Republic and claimed he was abducted by American soldiers and forced from his homeland against his will."

Cedras was put back in power, an armed thug who carried out a reign of terror. His people executed children, raped women and killed priests.

When Bill Clinton took office, he restored Aristide to the presidency but made him powerless -- completely undermining democracy -- by forcing him to sign a structural adjustment agreement.

Structurual adjustment reforms are policies a country has to undergo to get loans from the IMF or World Bank, such as privatization of government-owned businesses that provide revenues for education and health, opening doors to private investment, eliminating foreign-exchange rules etc. (Meddling in the internal affairs of another country, a human rights violation.)

One of these right-wing reforms in Haiti was to relax tarrif barriers that protected their small businesses and small farmers. The result was that U.S. farmers came in and took over 40 percent of the rice trade.

It has "completely devastated" peasant agriculture, said Juliette Beck, a coordinator with Global Exchange, a research and education center. "People are now starving in Haiti."

Now we will soon do this to South Korea. As the rich in both countries get richer, not only will unemployment surge, Nobel Prize-winning economist Dr. Paul Krugman explains that globalization leads to an increase in inequality.

But the rich have all the power, so hunker down South Korea! You're about to be hit in the face.



Note: Today, President Clinton's Foundation has done incredible work pulling together donations from 100,000 individuals and organizations to assist Haiti in relief work after the 2010 earthquake.
__________________________________________________________________

Why so many Mexicans immigrate to the United States
How the NAFTA Free Trade Agreement Pushed 7.3 Million Mexican Farmers Off the Land

The loss of tariff barriers is destabilizing agriculture and creating unemployment as the big guys get bigger and the little guys collapse, as explained in the video below by Dr. Timothy A. Wise, the Policy Research Director at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University.


__________________________________________________________________

We must strip the rich of power by decentralizing and localizing the economy
Korean Farmers Will Soon Be Forced To Compete With Giant Agribusinesses in the USA

The U.S.A. has negotiated a free trade agreement with Korea that will soon be approved by Congress and the Republic of Korea.

Many are desperately unhappy since small farmers and small businesses in both countries will face stiff competition with global giants. It is estimated that 200,000 Korean rice farmers will be pushed off the land if the agreement is signed, according to an article in the Korea Times.

As the newly unemployed farmers trudge to the city, factories from the USA will relocate there to take advantage of cheap labor.

The video below was filmed below shows the rage of those in Korea who care about small farmers.



Read more about this free trade agreement.

__________________________________________________________________

Serving the rich at the expense of society
Free Trade Deepens Unemployment

With staggering unemployment, many embrace free trade, in spite of the staggering increase in resource consumption and pollution it foments.

While free trade can bring economic growth, does it really lead to more employment?

"We must remember the example of France, where, over the past twenty years, spectacular growth in GNP (Gross National Product) has been surpassed by even more spectacular rise in unemployment. This has taken place while Europe has progressively opened its market to international free trade. How can we accept a system that increases unemployment from 420,000 to 5.1 million during a period in which the economy has grown by 80 percent," wrote James Goldsmith, in an essay adapted from his 1994 book, "The Trapp," which was a best-seller in France.

With global free trade, he explained that businesses move overseas to take advantage of cheaper labor. In the case of France, he said a business could employ 47 Vietnamese for the cost of hiring only one French person.

In the essay, called "The Winners and the Losers," Goldsmith described the great tradedy in the Third World where free trade is uprooting people from the land.

"It is estimated that there are still 3.1 billion people in the world who live from the land," he said. "If GATT (a global free trade agreement) manages to impose worldwide the sort of 'productivity' acheived by the intensive agriculture of nations such as Australia, then it is easy to calculate that about two billion of these people will become redundant."

"In India, there have been demonstration of up to one million people opposing the destruction of their rural communities, their culture, and their traditions. In the Philippines, several hundred thousand farmers protested against GATT because it wouild destroy their system of agriculture," wrote Goldsmith.*

As small farmers are forced to compete with huge agribusinesses from across the globe, who flood their markets with cheap subsidized produce, millions trudge to the cities where they live in squalor looking for work.

It seems to me these uprooted farmers we have pushed off the land take jobs from us, for our businesses move our factories overseas to take advantage of this abundance of cheap labor. Some of the uprooted farmers migrate to the United States where they take jobs from us.

*James Goldsmith's essay, "The Winners and the Losers" is found in a collection of essays called "The Case Against the Global Economy," edited by Jerry Mander and the brother of James Goldsmith, Edward Goldsmith, a Right Livelihood Award-winner and founder of "The Ecologist" magazine.
__________________________________________________________________

How many jobs will be sent overseas?
Book By Former Sen. Byron Dorgan, Democrat: "Take This Job and Ship It"


__________________________________________________________________

The party you vote for matters.
Obama Says Republicans Spent Billions to Send Jobs Overseas

Click here to hear an excerpt from a speech by Obama on how we can ease unemployment by changing policies set up by Republicans that give tax breaks to corporations that send jobs overseas.
__________________________________________________________________

The party you vote for matters.
Republicans Oppose Legislation That Would Help Stem the Flow Of Jobs Moving Overseas

A bill written by Sen. Byron Dogan (D-N.D.), that would end tax breaks for U.S. companies that move jobs and manufacturing plants overseas was shot down by Republicans on Sept. 2010.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Ne) called the bill "simple common sense." But Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, accused Democrats of "pretending to be concerned" and said this is "as pure a political exercise as you can get."

Three Democrats and one independent sided with Republicans: Joe Liberman (I-Ct), Ben Nelson (D-Ne), Mark Warner (D-Va) and John Tester(D-Mt).


__________________________________________________________________

We need right livelihoods and local economy
Sen. Bernie Sanders Said Trade Agreements Helped Send 50,000 Factories Overseas


__________________________________________________________________

There is no more common sense
Whatever Happened To Old Fashioned Tariffs?

I believe we will suffer another Great Depression if we don't make wider use of tariffs so that factories that wish to sell in the United States can not send relocate overseas.

What need to do research to discover the kind of tariff barriers Sweden was using during the 80 or 90 year period of time when they maintained a 2 percent unemployment rate.
__________________________________________________________________

Washington is weak.
Loss of Jobs to China


__________________________________________________________________

Common sense missing on the right
Only the Left Has for Solutions to Unemployment


__________________________________________________________________

We must have bold reform
Again, Only the Left Has Solutions to Unemployment


__________________________________________________________________

To be good people, we must end unemployment.
Stand By the Black Man

Only 43 percent of African-American men aged 18-29 have a full time job, according to Dr. Andrew Sum, an economics professor at Northeastern University in Boston. That means 57 percent of them are unemployed.

A young man shivering in the cold needs a coat so he steals a car.

Unemployment not only leads to stealing, it leads to drug dealing, prostitution, broken homes, low self esteem, drunkenness and mental illness.

We don't want people to be in such despair they jump off a bridge.

Communities must take responsibility to create an economic system that provides employment for all, even if it means listening to those on the left of the political spectrum.


__________________________________________________________________

We need right livelihoods and local economy
The Hidden Face of Globalization


__________________________________________________________________

For appropriate scale, appropriate technology and right livelihood
E.F. Schumacher: Small is Beautiful

If environmentalists have a rallying cry, it is "Small is Beautiful," inspired by the book Small is Beautiful: Economics As if People Mattered (1973) by the late E.F. Schumacher. In the book, he promotes simplicity and explained the need for a new lifestyle and economic structure based on ecological and spiritual values. Click here to read more.
__________________________________________________________________

Globalization causes unemployment & destroys the earth
We Need Small-Scale, Decentralized, Local Businesses

There is an economic form of cancer where businesses no longer recognize their natural boundaries and continue to grow unimpeded while taking over the production, territory and livelihoods of others.

Eventually there is death to the economy -- unemployment.

Here are selected passages from an article by Donella Meadows, now deceased, who was an organic farmer, environmentalist, world-reknown author and founder of the Sustainability Institute, from an article in the magazine "YES! A Journal of Positive Futures," Summer 2001:

"The first commandment of economies is: Grow. Grow forever. Companies must get bigger. National economies need to swell by a certain percent each year. People should want more, make more, earn more, spend more -- ever more.

"The first commandment of the Earth is: Enough. Just so much and no more. Just so much soil. Just so much water. Just so much sunshine. Everything born of the Earth grows to its appropriate size and then stops. The planet does not get bigger, it gets better. Its creatures learn, mature, diversify, evolve, create amazing beauty and novelty and complexity, but live within absolute limits.

"Economics says: Compete. Only by pitting yourself against a worthy opponent will you perform efficiently. The reward for successful competition will be growth. You will eat up your opponents, one by one, and as you do, you will gain the resources to do it some more.

"The Earth says: Compete, yes, but keep your competition in bounds. Don't annihilate. Take only what you need. Leave your competitor enough to live. Whereever possible, don't compete, cooperate. pollinate each other, ... build firm structures that lift smaller species up to the light. Pass around the nutrients, share the territory. Some kinds of excellence rise out of competition; other kinds rise out of cooperation. Your're not in a war, you're in a community.

"Economics says: Use it up fast. Don't bother with repair; the sooner something wears out, the sooner you'll buy another. That makes the gross national product go round. Throw things out when you get tired of them. Throw them to a place where they become useless. Grab materials and energy to make more. Shave the forests every 30 years. Get the oil out of the ground and burn it now. Make jobs so people can earn money, so they can buy more stuff and threw it out.

"The Earth says: What's the hurry? Take your time building soil, forests, coral reefs, mountains. Take centuries or millennia. When any part wears out, don't discard it, turn it into food for something else. If it takes hundreds of years to grow a forest, millions of years to compress oil, maybe that's the rate at which they ought to be used.

"Economics discounts the future. Ten years from now, $2 wil be worth $1. You could invest that dollar at 7 percent and double it in ten years. So a resource 10 years from now is worth only half what it's worth now. Turn it into dollars.

"The Earth says: Nonsense. Those invested dollars grow in value only if something worth buying grows, too. The Earth and its treasures will not double in 10 years. What will you spend your doubled dollars on if there is less soil, dirtier water, fewer creatures, less beauty? The Earth's rule is: Give to the future. Lay up a fraction of an inch of topsoil each year. Give your all to nurture the young. Never take more in your generation than you give back to the next. ...

"Economics says: Worry, struggle, be dissatisfied. The permanent condition of humankind is scarcity. The only way out of scarcity is to accumulate and hoard, though that means, regretably, that others will have less. Too bad, but there is not enough to go around.

"The Earth says: Rejoice! You have been born into a world of self-maintaining abundance and incredible beauty. Feel it, taste it, be amazed by it. If you stop your struggle and lift your eyes long enough to see Earth's wonders, to play and dance with the glories around ou, you will discover what you really need. It isn't that much. There is enough. As long as you control your numbers, there will be enough for everyone and for as long as you can imagine."
__________________________________________________________________

Putting a human face on our economics
Prince Charles of Wales Decries Globalization

"There are many treacherous rocks, and rearing before us is the vast machine of economic globalization, which at the moment certainly does not wear a human face," said Prince Charles of Wales in his book "Harmony: a new way of looking at our world."

"It is quite clear from all of the evidence we now have that this leviathan needs to be tamed and given that human face, rather than the one it wears at the moment, that of the 'machine' in a science fiction movie than ruling our real lives."
__________________________________________________________________

Localizing our economy
Film Preview: The Economics of Happiness

Below is a preview of a film developed by the International Society for Ecology and Culture.



__________________________________________________________________

We need to be alert, informed, thinking and collaborating.
When a Self-Reliant Community is Faced With Globalization

Below is a film developed by the International Society for Ecology and Culture, which is headed by a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, Helena Norberg Hodge. Learn more about the Ladakh in Hodge's widely acclaimed book "Ancient Futures."


__________________________________________________________________

Immense suffering
Democracy, Innovation Tightly Restrained by Free Trade Agreement (GATT)

Below are quotes from a recipient of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award, economist Dr. Herman Daly, a professor of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland, College Park, from his book, "Beyond Growth."

"A single country can no longer follow a separate wage policy, or its own full-cost pricing policy, or even its own population control policy -- unless it can convince the rest of the world to follow the same policy.

"Instead of hundreds of separate national 'laboratories' independently trying out different policies, some of which may work, we will have just one big global experiment, which, given the reality of standards-lowering competition, is almost designed to fail."

Annie's note: when the people of Sweden had a voice and more freedom to be innovative, unrestrained by corporations working through free trade agreements, they had 2 percent unemployment for 80 or 90 years. In 2010, it climbed to 9.8 percent.

Also in Dr. Daly's book, he said, "The problem of getting U.S. citizens off welfare and into jobs at which they can earn a living is made unsolvable if we insist on immediately throwing them into competition with the poor masses of the world. Expecting disadvantaged fellow citizens to go right off welfare into competition with all the cheap and able labor of an overpopulated world is a denial of community with them."

May we care about each one.
__________________________________________________________________

Cutting through the fog
Robert Reich: Why Tax Cuts for Rich Won't Ease Unemployment

In the video below, former President Clinton's Sec. of Labor, Dr. Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, explains that tax cuts for the rich are not what is needed at this time.