By Shea Howell

Prof. Communication

GUEST COLUMNIST

The current economic crisis is an opportunity for all of us to do some hard thinking. It is an opportunity to not only talk about what got us into this mess but to talk about what we can do to create economic relationships based on principles that value people and the earth that sustains us.

This crisis is the result of long standing structural imbalances. We have created a global economic system where only a relatively few and a diminishing number of people are needed to produce an abundance of goods. The production and distribution of these goods sucks up ever-larger shares of limited natural resources, turns these precious resources into items that most people don’t need and most of us dispose of within six months of purchase.

As a result, we have an economy based on the production of trash, making the question of where to put our garbage an environmental nightmare.

In this arrangement, most people living in aging industrial societies find that our role is not to produce these goods but to consume them. Work that challenges our imaginations, that gives us a sense of meaning, that connects us to others and gives the satisfaction of making a useful contribution to our communities, seems like an unrealistic expectation.

Separating consumption from production, judging the worth of people by what they can buy, not by what they do or how they live, has fostered a superficiality and irresponsibility in our economic and political life. This superficiality and irresponsibility has encouraged us to dedicate our energies to buying more and more without looking at the tremendous inequities we have created to protect our consumption.

While capital flowed ever more freely around the world expanding the global market, and brewing this crisis, a declining number of people have become extravagantly wealthy while the vast majority of the world has come ever closer to starvation. Now the existence of all of us is threatened by the global catastrophe that this dysfunctional system of consumption and production has created. According to CARE, in the last two years alone the number of people living on the “edge of emergency, increasing the deficit” has doubled from 110 million people to 220 million.

Politicians, commentators and economists encourage us to think about the current economic crisis as a mortgage crisis or a credit crunch. Almost all the news focuses on the current $700 billion bailout. Very few news sources  point out that this bailout is following on the heels of a year in which we have already committed $900 billion in piecemeal efforts to shore up the flagging stock market titans. This includes the recent $200 billion for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, $300 billion for the Federal Housing Authority to rescue mortgages, $85 billion for AIG and $87 billion in repayments to JP Morgan Chase, according to Reuters.

With the new effort to provide an additional $700 billion, the federal government will have invested roughly $1.6 trillion dollars in three years, increasing the deficit and systematically debasing the value of the dollar.   

Rarely is anyone adding to this cost the daily effort to maintain a military capable of protecting this arrangement.

In the midst of another war, Martin Luther King Jr. warned us that the triple threat of racism, militarism and consumerism was pitting our nation against the best hopes of humankind for peace and productive living.

This crisis is an opportunity to unravel the ways of living that have been so destructive to much of the earth and her people and begin to create economic relationships that serve our communities and sustain our earth.