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The Big Picture series will focus mostly on (1); the
core issues of human population growth, an evolved monetary/economic
system that demands exponential growth, and the human propensity
to ignore unpleasant truths, and (2) some of the many ideas and
strategies that show hope in dealing with the dilemma of today.
Abstract
The
Growth Syndrome
This paper
was presented at the, Fourth Interdisciplinary Conference On The
Evolution of World Order, October 2004 at Ryerson University,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The paper attempts to separate cause
from effects regarding connected elements of the human predicament,
as coined by The Club Of Rome, and to point out that the vast
majority of organizations and agencies that struggle for social
change, are targeting the symptoms, while relatively little effort
is made toward the two key elements of cause.
These two
key causal elements are growth in human population, and
growth in resource throughput. And that while there is
some attention given to the population growth issue today, very
little effort is directed toward the resource throughput issue
because it can be seen as an ideology inherited from previous
generations, who lived in a world that seemed infinite. This ideology
is so strong that most of us promote growth in our daily lives.
This paper
hopes to expose this paradoxical dilemma, in hopes of awaking
and directing our survival instincts toward this fatal flaw in
our current sociopolitical environment.
_________________________
Dealing
with the Growth Syndrome
The Ideology
of Growth Oriented Governance
&
Human Activity VS Gaia
Let’s
take the liberty to begin with a couple of loose presumptions:
Presumption
(1): is that everyone at this conference is familiar with
the results of exponential growth of any item, and how, when shown
on a graph over linear time, the line at the left H side of the
graph appears to head off scale toward infinity. We see this in
a graph of human population growth over the past two 2000 years
where the last 200 years growth looks somewhat like a spike at the
end, the point we are at today. See www.dieoff.org
And also we’ll presume that we are all consciously aware that
global Human Activity (HA) is affecting the Gaian
systems of life on Earth, causing global warming, vital resource
depletion, mass extinctions, etc., etc.
Presumption
(2): is that virtually everyone here that voted in the
past few state/provincial or federal elections, voted for a government
that will measure its success in governance as a measure of growth
in Human Activity, wherein success shows a 2 to 4% annual growth,
roughly measured by Gross National Product, and when more jobs have
been created, and when we have sold off more natural resources and
manufactured products.
If my general
presumptions are correct, please consider this behavioral paradox.
In (1) we recognize
that Human Activity is altering Earth’s ecological systems,
our only source of life, and yet in (2), we vote for governments
that promise to make it worse. When pondering this view of the human
dilemma the words Syndrome, Malignant, and Ideology come to mind.
Syndrome
- word from Webster's:
1: a group
of signs and symptoms that occur together and characterize a particular
abnormality 2: a set of concurrent things (as
emotions or actions) that usually form an identifiable pattern
And there is
a wide range of signs and symptoms emanating from the human predicament
that sparks the need for reform activist originations in many disciplinary
fields. But the abnormality, I feel, is that humans, the most reasoning
animal on the planet, deal primarily with symptoms while virtually
failing to address the primary causes of our dilemma. Primary causes
that we have created.
Malignant
- words from Webster's:
Cancerous.
A growth with a tendency to invade and destroy nearby tissue
and spread to other parts of the body: evil in nature, influence,
or effect: passionately and relentlessly malevolent: aggressively
malicious: tending to produce death or deterioration: tending to
infiltrate, metastasize, and terminate fatally.
Like cancer,
we-the-people through our governments promote growth in Human Activity
in various ways, and we are indeed relentless, malevolent and aggressive,
as will be discussed a bit later.
Ideology
– words from Webster's:
1: visionary
theorizing 2 a: a systematic body of concepts
especially about human life or culture. 2b: a manner
or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group,
or culture. 2c: the integrated assertions, theories
and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program
Perhaps a useful
way of categorizing our syndrome today is that we individuals of
the industrial society have grown up within it, and like fish that
fail to notice water we fail to notice that the economic/money system
we swim in has become toxic. It will take a strong blunt provocation
to awaken us, but this provocation is at our door in the form of
global warming and the oil peak. When Human Activity began serious
acceleration with the beginning of the fossil fuel era, the dominant
influence of religion became intertwined with the growth mantra
and growth has been somewhat exponential ever since. Not only have
both human population and gross industrial throughput continuously
increased, but growth in one now depends on growth in the other
in a self-perpetuation spiral. In her book, FAITH AND CREDIT:
The World Bank's Secular Empire. Susan George compares the
economic and religious ideologies as she says:
The Bank
resembles the Church and this will be a guiding analogy in these
pages. Both believe themselves invested with a mission, both (the
Church historically, the Bank at present) have set themselves
against the state. Both celebrate the poor rhetorically while
refraining from actually improving their capacity to change their
earthly lot.
And paradoxically,
within today’s defining ideology, when the bull and bear markets
oscillate, we are collectively relieved when the bull regains, and
the numbers at the world’s stock exchanges start to go up
again - jobs will flourish - media tells us all is well. Our elected
politicians have carried the day!
Input
Output of the Growth Ideology where the:
Input = cause and the Output = symptoms
The inputs
to Human Activity we categorized as:
1): growth
in human population, and;
2): growth in economic/resource throughput.
The output
of Human Activity is the sum of all the things we do that affect
Gaia. When these effects are measured by the Ecological
Footprint processes, it tells us that if all people had the
per capita resources throughput of Canadians or Americans, we would
require the living systems of four or more planet Earths. This very
fact should send shock waves to our personal moral foundation, but
unfortunately, relatively few people actually feel it. Perhaps the
rest are immune or unaware. Nevertheless, it is in dealing with
the output symptoms that thousands of ecological and social change
activists and organizations toil.
Population
Even
relatively conservative media, such as the National Geographic openly
discuss excess humans as a problem issue. But some progress is being
made in this front because population growth rates in most developed
countries are vastly reduced from a few decades
ago, and in some cases, without immigration populations would
reduce. Ironically, on the dark flip side of this optimistic statistic
we often hear politicians state that we need higher levels of immigration
and higher birth rates to sustain our economic well-being.
Please note
that we recognise that population growth in most developing countries
is still a threat to global ecology and global peace, as well documented
by Homer Dixon of University of Toronto.
Economic/Resource
Throughput
The
human predicament is a multidisciplinary problem. But many politicians
and social activists do not study the money system, leaving monetary
reformists working alone, and thereby relatively ineffective. They
desperately need the help of all the other enlightened social change
activists.
In literature
today reference to the Growth Ideology has various names.
The book Gaia Democracies,‘03 refers to the Global
Monetocracy as the pervasive force that usurps all efforts
at ameliorating change to the human predicament. Some writers refer
to the Elite, or an unseen ruling class beyond politics pulling
the strings. This pictorial image is portrayed on the cover of John
Pilger’s bestseller book called, The
New Rulers Of The World ’02. Ten years ago writer
and documentary film producer, Edward Griffin, wrote:
The effect
of monetary control is more powerful than mega-tons of atomic
energy. It reaches into every shop and home, a feat that could
never be accomplished by standing armies. It can be used with
precision against one nation, one group, or even one person while
sparing or benefiting all others.
Although the
evolved industry of economics and finance is enormously specialized
and complex, a working knowledge of the essential basics has been
made relatively easily available from economic reformists in many
internet sources and books.
Four points
about Growth Ideology and money and limits to growth
Point
One: In seeking ways around limits to growth, growth
ideology influenced leaders to become creative. The existing
commodity based monetary system based on physical realities, such
as gold, was too confining. Therefore, in 1964 President Nixon set
money free by abandoning gold and made the $US$ fiat. Money now
is sort of a faith-based system that is created by the stroke of
a pen. There is no gold or grain or silver or beaver pelts or other
physical commodity in a government vault somewhere to back it up.
Commenting on the avoidance of physical limits George Manbiot said
in The Guardian Dec. 31, 2002:
Capitalism
is a millenarian cult, raised to the status of a world religion.
Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless exploitation.
Just as Christians imagine that their God will deliver them from
death, capitalists believe that theirs will deliver them from
finity. The world's resources, they assert, have been granted
eternal life.
Point
Two: is that the original constitutions of most countries
provided for a National Bank and it’s purpose was to provide
the money needed to facilitate the country’s trade and commerce.
Also, private banks were authorized and sanctioned to provide monetary
services to people and corporations with the money provided by the
National Bank. But over the past century or so, most governments,
moved by the pervasive Growth Ideology governments enabled
the private banks to actually create money in a variety of creative
ways.
This change
is a key reason why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Another absurd outcome that should make every taxpayer angry enough
to revolt is that even the government now borrows money from private
banks and it pays interest on the national debt. This is totally
unnecessary because it could/should borrow money from the National
Bank at zero interest. Today’s interest payment on the national
debt takes a large proportion of your annual tax dollar, whereas
it could have gone toward social services such as medicine or education.
But a major
tenet of the growth ideology is that money flow should be principally
toward the rich, not the middle class and the poor. See Internet
sources and books on economic/monetary reform links in the notes.
Point
Three: Today, all of the G8 nations have aligned themselves
nicely along similar monetary/economic lines, in order to be part
of orchestra playing the current theme of economic globalization
where the World Trade Organization (WT) is the maestro and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) is the enforcer. For one, they all use the fiat
$USA$ dollar as the standard. Also, each has transferred the right
to create money from each country’s National Bank into the
hands of private banks as mentioned above. This process has created
a debt based money system that cannot possibly operate
in a zero growth or negative growth climate. In other words, your
national government and mine have closed the door and locked us
into growth forever! For the middle class and the poor, there are
many ugly side effects from this change but the main point here
is that until this basic component of the money system is changed,
Human Activity must continue to grow or else the
economic/industrial infrastructure will collapse.
Before starting
this paper I consulted three reformist economists and asked them
this question. “If the Bank of Canada (or any national bank)
were to regain its primary job of being in control of the money
supply, could the system function in a zero or negative growth economy?
i.e., could they begin to put the imaginary money back into the
black hole from which it came?”
Fortunately
the answer is yes! as stated by James Roberson
in the notes. In Canada, for example the legislative infrastructure
is still in place, but just not used, as pointed out on the
COMER web page as part of its short tutorial on economics.
This is good
news, because if we have the will to carry out the needed global
intellectual revolt against the Growth Ideology and we
enter the era of human controlled negative growth, at least
the existing basic economic infrastructure could function with minor
changes as we reduce our Ecological Footprint, perhaps in only semi
chaotic conditions: And it will be at least semi chaotic because
significant social change will be needed in other sociopolitical
areas, such as in dealing fairly with those whose jobs are no longer
needed.
The
Fourth point: The Fourth point is to verify
that the political/economic/monetary systems of the Growth Ideology
fits the definition of malignancy:
A growth
with a tendency to invade and destroy nearby tissue and spread
to other parts of the body: evil in nature, influence, or effect:
passionately and relentlessly malevolent: aggressively malicious:
tending to produce death or deterioration: tending to infiltrate,
metastasize, and terminate fatally.
Debate about
money systems started long ago. Here are a few quotes by bright
people that may help make my point:
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Thomas Jefferson
-- The Debate Over The Recharter Of The Bank Bill (1809):
If the American people ever allow the banks to control the
issuance of their currency, first by inflation, and then by deflation,
the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will
deprive the people of all property, until their children wake
up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing
power of money should be taken from banks and restored to Congress
and the people to whom it belongs. I sincerely believe the banking
institutions having the issuing power of money, are more dangerous
to liberty than standing armies.
-
100 years
later Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, said in1907:
Since
trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists
on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow
him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him
must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must
be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty
of unwilling nations be outraged in the process.
-
William Lyon
MacKenzie King, in a 1935 election speech said:
Until
money creation and control of credit is restored to government
as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of
sovereignty of the nation and democracy is idle and futile
-
Warren Wagar,
Professor of History, State U, of New York at Binghamton
Capitalism
is the relentless accumulation of capital for the acquisition
of profit. Capitalism is a carnivore. It cannot be made over
into a herbivore without gutting it, i.e., abolishing it.
-
The law locks up both man and woman
Who steals the goose off the commons.
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the commons off the goose.
-
The origins
of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism
to set up a self-regulating market system.
-
David Korten,
points to the systemic flaws in the 2nd Annual Feasta
Lecture, Dublin, 2000
Because
it is destructive of life and spirit, the capitalist economy
must be considered a social pathology. Even its apparent capacity
to create vast wealth is largely illusory, because though it
is producing ever more sophisticated gadgets and diversions,
it is destroying the life support systems of the planet and
the social fabric of society. It is therefore destroying our
most important wealth. Its institutions function as cancers
that forget they are part of a larger whole and seek their own
unlimited growth without regard to the consequences.
-
And finally
words from Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
In the
End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence
of our friends.
What we hear
from our friends, we-the-people, is only the crushing silence that
King speaks of. We allow election after election in our “free”
countries in pure cognitive dissonance of the deadly Growth Ideology
that we support. We vote for:
-
governments
that will measure their success by job creation and higher economic
throughput i.e., Gross Domestic Product (GDP);
-
governments
that will color the obscenity of growth ideology by calling
it smart growth, or may use the Brundtland Commission’s
infamous oxymoron, sustainable development;
-
governments
that will enter into, or honor, international trade agreements
that promise to sell our national resources even at our ecological
peril and the end of our sovereignty, as decried by people like
David Orchard or Paul Hellyer.
-
a system
of governance that accepts such blatant social imbalance and
injustice as highlighted by Forbes Magazine
that tell us this in one year, the exponentially gushing growth
of the money supply enabled the 2004 crop of USA billionaires
to grow from 262 to 313. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s
a 15% increase in just one year!!!
Regarding the
first three quotes above, Thomas Jefferson in 1808 warned that the
state must always remain in control of the money supply: This warning
was echoed in 1935 by Mackenzie King. But by the time King said
this it was already too late. Pandora’s box was open. The
ideology was building as spoken back in 1907 as US President Woodrow
explained that powerful nations must batter down the sovereignty
doors of any nations that resist the corporation’s malignant,
but fundamental, need to trade.
And if you
read books and journals by world-renowned investigative journalists
like John Pilger, or Noam
Chomsky or Naomi Klein, or social philosophy
professors like Michel Chossudovsky , or John
McMurtry, the battering down of sovereign door has virtually
never stopped, and hundreds of thousands of innocent people have
died as a direct result.
In an interview
labeled, Our Good Neighbor policy, Noam Chomsky elaborates
on the subversive activities or direct intervention in many many
countries such as Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Chili, Cuba, Argentina,
etc. At one point in the interview Chomsky states:
“I
think, legally speaking, there's a very solid case for impeaching
every American president since the Second World War. They've all
been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war
crimes.
And so there
is little wonder why George Bush, in his first and second debate
with Kerry, emphatically stated that USA would never support the
efforts of the World Court: because war crimes, after all, are essential
to carry out the Growth Ideology mandate.
Suggested Solutions???
Humanity has
dug itself a hole that is very deep and without precedent. Many
global observers anticipate a massive human die-off. If this to
be avoided, or at least mitigated, the collective human spirit will
have to escape the mental bonds of All ideologies in determining
new pathways based on conscious acceptance of the scientific and
social wisdom that we have accumulated over the years.
Perhaps a permanent
interdisciplinary organization could be established:
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that would
act as a broker between social change individuals and organizational
efforts that now toil separately from each other;
-
to digest
the individual complexities that motivate various social change
movements, and paraphrase their basic reason-to-be so others
will understand their passion.
-
and also
would work toward finding a basic minimum of common values in
order to promote trust between seemingly disconnected disciplinary
efforts.
-
.that would
write the story of a pathway toward truly a sustainable civilization,
that could represent the holy grail at the end of our tunnel.
-
that would
determine democratic means of applying pressure on the existing
political infrastructure, in order that it may transform itself
to some degree following the suggestions of systems scientist
pioneer Stafford Beer in his book Designing Freedom:
I
am proposing simply that society should use its tools to redesign
its institutions, and to operate those institutions quite differently.
You can imagine all the problems. But the first and gravest problem
is in the mind, screwed down by all those cultural constraints.
You will not need a lot of learning to understand what I am saying:
what you will need is intellectual freedom. It is a free gift
for all who have the courage to accept it. Remember: our culture
teaches us not intellectual courage, but intellectual conformity.
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Gaia,
the name scientist James Lovelock gave to the energy activate interactive
systems on earth that includes all living things, the air, an chemistry
of the surface area that are a part of. See more at http://www.gaiapc.ca/
Our
Ecological Footprint ‘92 written by Mathis Wackernagel
and William Rees (U British Columbia), illuminate a new way of measuring
Human Activity regionally, provincially nationally and globally. It
was determined that to be sustainable, the global Human Activity in
1992 would require three the ecosystems of three planet earths. Since
then, your government and mine, in addictive-like adherence to Ideology
One, has strived for exponential throughput growth. And yet we have
only one planet Earth.http://www.rprogress.org/
Birth
Dearth http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6040427/site/newsweek
As would be expected, this Newsweek Business article looks at population
decline as a bad thing, nevertheless, it is a nice summary of population
trends in different countries.
Professor Thomas
Homer-Dixon, the Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program
of the University of Toronto, was the Director of the Project on
Environment, Population and Security. He was also the principal
investigator for the Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict,
which took place from 1990 to 1993 and was organised jointly by
the Peace and Conflict Studies Program and the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences.
The Project
on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict found that scarcities
of renewable resources - including cropland, forests, water and
fish - are already contributing to violent conflicts in many parts
of the developing world, even though these conflicts often appear
to be caused solely by political, ethnic or ideological factors.
The project concluded that these conflicts foreshadow a surge of
similar violence in coming decades as environmental scarcities worsen
in many developing countries. The Project on Environment, Population
and Security continued to explore the linkages among environment,
population, security and governance.
John
Pilger In his 2002 book, The New Rulers Of The World,
Pilger starts the chapter on Indonesia with how the island appeals
as an available resource to the president of the USA. On page 17 he
quotes Richard Nixon in 1967:
With its
100 million people and its 300-mile arc of islands containing the
region’s richest hoard of natural resources, Indonesia is
the greatest prize in South-East Asia.
Action was taken
on this tempting hoard of natural resources leading the WTO/US puling
strings that dumped Sukanro a popular elected president of Indonesia,
paving the way for Suharo to become the puppet ruler. On the back
cover of Pilger’s book is the following commentary that indicates
some of the results:“
John Pilger
is one of the world’s renowned investigative journalists and
documentary film-makers. In this fully updated collection, he reveals
the secrets and illusions of modern imperialism. Beginning with
Indonesia, he shows how General Suharto’s bloody seizure of
power in the 1960s was part of a western design to impose a ‘global
economy’ on Asia. A million Indonesians died as the price
for being the World Bank’s “model pupil’. In a
shocking chapter on Iraq, he allows us to understand the true nature
of West’s war against the people of that country. And he dissects,
piece by piece, the propaganda of the ‘war on terror’
to expose it’s Orwellian truth.”
Noam
Comsky: From the back cover of one of his books: Noam Comsky
is a world renowned political activists, writer, professor of linguistics
at MIT, where he has taught since 1955. Among his works are: Powers
an Prospects: World Orders; Old and New; Deteriorating Democracy;
Manufacturing Consent, The Conquest Continues; Profit Over People,
The New Military humanism; The Rogue State. Chomsky’s efforts
for greater democracy are celebrated by peace and social justice moments
worldwide.
Naomi
Klein: is a journalist and writer on big picture issue, including
her book, No
Logo ‘2000
John
McMurtry, professor of Philosophy at University of Guelph
has written many books pointing out the hypocrisy of our current socioeconomic
policies that continue to favor the rich and take away form the poor.
A couple of his titles hint at their content, with, The Cancerous
State of Capitalism, or Unequal Freedoms.
Comer page “One
of the major problems facing Canadian policy makers and activists
today is a misunderstanding of or refusal to consider the uses of
The Bank of Canada (BoC). This problem is exacerbated by a media blackout
on information about the Bank's uses- which will be discussed in the
tutorial. This problem exists in all G-8 countries!
The tutorial
details the nature of the problem in Canada, and how it may be resolved
From Chapter
two:The fallacy of "economic man"
Economists,
like others who work in their own narrow fields, tend to ignore
whatever has been learned in other disciplines, notably psychology
in their case. They have invented "economic man" who always
acts rationally in terms of his economic interest (this idea having
been handed down from a time when women were not thought worth considering).
Technically, he makes all choices to "maximize his marginal
utility." Having used this concept in their analyses, they
don't usually recognize that their results are based on a fiction
rather than a real person.
“My
current work is mainly about the worldwide need for change in the
system of money and finance.It now helps to create systemic inefficiency
and injustice in most other spheres. Putting that right is a priority
for people who care about other things, not just people with a special
interest in money and finance.
“I
hope this website will provide helpful ideas and information to
people with a wide range of concerns.”
James
Robertson… in response to my question about negative
growth money supply, James said:
Yes. The
Huber/Robertson proposal is that the central bank should create
whatever new electronic bank account money it decides is needed
to increase the money supply by writing it into existence and GIVING
it to the government as public revenue - to be used either to reduce
existing taxes or government debt or to increase public spending.
If a time should ever come when the central bank decides that the
money supply should be reduced instead of increased, it would exercise
the power (which we propose it should have) to call on the government
to provide it with the sum it decides should be subtracted from
the existing money supply so that it could then wipe that sum out
of existence altogether. The government would have to find that
sum out of higher taxes or reduced public spending - or higher borrowing
of money which, after the proposed reform, could not simply be created
by commercial banks for the purpose of lending it to government
but would have to be borrowed from lenders who would lose the use
of it for the time being. In that way that sum would be taken out
of circulation altogether and the money supply would be reduced
by its amount.
James Robertson
is Co Author of Monetary Reform: Making it Happen ‘03.
A great little book with big ideas. The other author is John Bunzl
who has created the International Simultaneous
Polity Organization, ISPO, which is a tool waiting for widespread
use toward global governance reform.
* If human
consumption growth continues, the planetary life support system
will be disabled and humanity will itself become endangered. * If
consumption growth is stopped, the viability of the world's economic
and financial systems will be threatened, and the stability of governments
and society will deteriorate.
Our
Common Future: The World Commission on Environment and Development
- 1987 - (Sometimes known as The Brundtland Report) - By a commission
of the United Nations headed by the Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro
Harlem Brundtland. On page169 the book states:
"The
period ahead must be regarded as transitional from an era in which
energy has been used in an unsustainable manner. A generally acceptable
pathway to a safe and sustainable energy future has not yet been
found. We do not believe that these dilemmas have yet been addressed
by the international community with a sufficient sense of urgency
and in a global perspective."
The problem of
lack of energy is then ignored, as the book discusses industrial and
technical transfers to the third world countries which will vastly
increase the rate of global energy consumption. The repugnant energy
reality slides numbly into the abyss - forgotten. In the summary of
the book, the authors coin the expression, sustainable development,
in order to imply sustainability but to not offend the Growth
Ideology.
Paul
Hellyer was a Federal Cabinet Minister under various leaders
from for1949 to 1969. He formed the Canadian Action Party of Canada,
and led it until 2003. He has written several easy to read books in
an attempt to wake up Canada to the Growth Ideology. In the book called
Stop Think ‘99, he says about debt based money:
The problem
is that all bank-crated money is crated as debt – and debt
that is interest bearing. You have to pay interest on every cent
you borrow. But if no one creates the money with which to pay the
interest, what do you have to do? You have to borrow the money in
which to pay the interest on which you already owe, and go deeper
and deeper into debt in the process. It should be obvious to anyone
who takes eve a few minutes to stop and think about it that this
system is not sustainable.
Toronto
Star Sept 28/04 It’s been a good year for billionaires.
The article speaks of the enormous one-year increase in billionaires
from 262 to 313 in USA alone. The net worth of the 400 at the top
of the money pile is $1trillion$. The fiat money generating mechanisms
have no relationship to the physical realities of the world
Earth
Charter is a document intended to provide a uniform set of
human values, that are acceptable to all. It has been many years on
making, and there is hope that it can be adopted as a UN document.
PREAMBLE:
We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when
humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly
interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril
and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the
midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are
one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny.
We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society
founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic
justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative
that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one
another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.
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