Without vision, the people perish. The future could be full of community centers, exchanging roles, free Internet books and reduced working hours if we could shift from quantitative to qualitative growth, from building stories on office buildings to telling stories, from being monads living to work to interdependent beings yearning to live.
Neoliberal finance capitalism confuses the goat and the gardener, distorts risk and liability, encourages speculation instead of public investment and threatens language and democracy. The neoliberal model promotes profits, not investments (cf. Nicolaus Krowall). The motor, model and myths must be reexamined and the rights of nature and community empowerment championed. Economics is pluralist, not monolithic. Empirical reality and fictional models wrestle as private affluence and public squalor live side-by-side, as John Kenneth Galbraith grieved in the 1970s.
Security, health, strength, happiness and work must be redefined, work must be shared and social security protected by eliminating the $118K cap on social security taxes to reverse the exploding inequality and enable people to feel integrated and participating.
Focusing only on increasing oil production idealizes or transfigures business as usual, sidesteps systemic questions and makes alternatives taboo.
Needs can be satisfied in a non-economic and non-commodified way.
John Maynard Keynes distinguished between absolute needs (e.g. food) and relative needs (e.g. recognition and luxury goods) before he died in 1946. The corporate world, academia and politicians intent on raising funds for the next election trivialized and narrowed Keynes and FDR and now we face an incredulous media and a paralyzed/polarized government ready to send us down the rabbit hole like Alice.
You can watch “The 99% – Occupy Everywhere!,” “Capitalism- a Love Story,” “War Made Easy,” “Iraq for Sale,” “The Flaw” and “We’re Not Broke” as free movies on
http://www.hulu.com/
Links to 700 free movies and 700 free E-books await you at
http://www.openculture.com/
(including the 1915 silent movie Alice in Wonderland), concerts by the Grateful Dead and The Clash.
Enjoy the feast! A little time-prosperity amid the neoliberal hocus pocus/ stagnation and paralysis!
