October 25, 2008

Financial Crisis: Seeking a non-neo-liberal solution

By admin

I’ve done a little bit of searching to back up this request, but didn’t come up with much.

Basically, I believe that we have the wrong people at the table discussing the financial future of the planet.  As these meetings transpire with folks like Sarcozy, Harper (&Flaherty), Brown, the IMF and the World Bank and other neo-liberal institutions, we put our fate into the hands of the people that created the crisis in the first place.

If that happens, things will get tremendously worse, and I do not use that word with any sense of hyperbole.  Taxes will sky-rocket to pay for the theft that is happening on a daily basis, basic public services will be reduced or eliminated on a global scale and public infrastructure will be sold off at fire-sale prices to the only folks that are sitting on cash:  the mega-corporations that are consuming the globe on our behalf.  Expect things like tap water to become polluted and electricity to become an extreme luxury that only the super-rich can enjoy.

Those who protest will be imprisoned or beaten by hired mercenary thugs.

If you don’t believe me, dig into the history books a little.  Chile in the 70s under Pinochet.  In fact, most of Latin America in the 60s and 70s.  Germany in the 30s.  Poland in the 80s.  Afghanistan and Iraq today.  The list goes on.

Despite the doom and gloom, at the core of my being, I remain an optimist, but only if we collectivley accept the problem (as identified above) and then act on the issue, creating a solution that the rest of the world can stomach.

The are a lot of options.  We can protest.  We can rant in blogs.  We can cry in our pillows at the end of the day.

However, I believe that we can also develop a plan that is bullet-proof, inclusive of all of the world’s citizens and not just a select few, and make it digital and open-source so that it grow organically.

As I mentioned at the outset of this article, I haven’t found a lot of work that’s being done in this space, so we need to act fast and we need to act in a comprehensive, agreeable manner.

I’ll host the discussion, I’ll organize the materials and I’ll even get together with anyone I know that has the pull to actually present something like this to the UN or other governing bodies.  If I don’t do this, I won’t be able to sleep knowing that I’m not acting on the most disgusting level of financial corruption that the planet has ever seen.

So … who’s with me?  I know from my site stats that there are hundreds of folks reading this blog and that they know tonnes of people who could also provide some input into this model.  Our future depends on it.

By the way, we’ve got until the main summit in mid-November to present our views on this.