Financial Institutions Admit Austerity Failed

The Market Giveth and Taketh Away
by KEN KLIPPENSTEIN


The first part of 2013 has been something of a confessional period for the economic managerial class. The IMF’s chief economist, Olivier Blanchard, conceded that “forecasters significantly underestimated the increase in unemployment and the decline in domestic demand associated with fiscal consolidation.” (‘Fiscal consolidation’ is a polite way of saying ‘austerity’.) U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew admitted that “there has to be a focus on what the impact on unemployment is” of austerity policies; also, that “you cannot be in the world where austerity just leads to more austerity”; and finally, that “the rush to do all the [austerity] front-end has actually made the problem harder in some countries.” He even suggested that “Europeans need to look as well what they can do to generate more demand in their economy.”

Managing Director of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, confessed that “we don’t see the need to do upfront, heavy duty fiscal consolidation as was initially planned”; and “the best way to create jobs is through growth.” EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said that the IMF and the US’ recent calls for less austerity “are preaching to the converted.”

Meanwhile, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the Harvard economists responsible for one of the more influential studies used to defend austerity, have admitted that “austerity is not the only answer to a debt problem.” This came after three economists at the University of Massachusetts accused them of “selective exclusion” of data. Reinhart and Rogoff have since admitted that their critics “correctly identified a spreadsheet coding error.” In my view, their most striking error is being ignored: the failure to recognize that austerity didn’t work during the Great Depression and won’t work now, during the Great Recession. Anyone can make a spreadsheet error. It takes a Harvard professor to forget basic history.

It’s not particularly interesting when doctrinal managers like Reinhart and Rogoff change positions. The ability to turn on one’s heel and switch from one ideological conviction to its opposite, like a schoolchild running the pacer test, is probably the ideological manager’s main duty. The ones who collapse from exhaustion are weeded out long before they become IMF chiefs. What’s more interesting is why the coach is having them run in the opposite direction now.

In a correspondence I had with economist Jack Rasmus, he explained the economic managerial class’ reversal:

First, it may signal a future shift to business-investor tax cuts as a preferred ‘stimulus’ (which doesn’t work either). However, since tax cuts will raise the deficit, they have to justify an increase in the deficit if they’re going to move ahead with the tax cuts. Thus, the attack on ‘austerity’ (stimulus in reverse) as not as productive as they thought is first necessary. On the other hand, it’s important to note that the shift to ‘stimulus’ doesn’t mean a shift from social spending cuts; it means a shift to more deficit via corporate tax cuts.

Second, the abandonment of austerity may represent a prelude to a still greater reliance on monetary policy. Let the central bank bear all the burden (and blame) and take the heat off politicians more visibly responsible for spending cut austerity. Monetary policy (i.e. increasing liquidity to banks, investors and businesses) has in turn two prime goals. One: to boost the stock and financial securities markets and ensure more profits for speculators, and, second, to lower their currency’s exchange value to allow competition with other currency centers…A sure sign that capitalist policymakers are getting more desperate and trying to grow by beggaring their competitors. It’s competitive devaluations—not by fiat as in the 1930s—but by liquidity-exchange rate manipulation.

Whatever the case may be, the financial institutions’ current ideological inflection should probably be regarded with suspicion. It is much too sharp an inflection to indicate any sort of honest change in thinking.

The solutions that the economic managers are advocating demonstrate a useful point. They simultaneously demand stimulus and deficit reduction. As Treasury Secretary Jack Lew put it, “We shouldn’t choose between growth and job creation and getting our fiscal house in order.” This is like a child wishing he could stay up all night and get a good night’s sleep: either choice negates the other. These mental exercises in self-contradiction further illustrate the way in which the elite must accept mutually conflicting views. Orwell called this ‘doublethink.’

Today we call it things like ‘nuance.’ Example: Reinhart and Rogoff said that “the recent debate about the global economy has taken a distressingly simplistic turn,” by which they mean austerity is finally being firmly rejected. In elite circles, ‘simplistic’ explanations are any which involve elementary truths: that authentic stimulus increases the deficit, as do corporate tax cuts; that privatization makes things unaccountable to the public; that a middle and under-class recovery requires an upper-class tax. (These simple facts are incomprehensible to the elite because they suggest a world in which extreme wealth causes injustice rather than eradicates it.) Derivatives and credit default swaps, on the other hand, are ‘nuanced’ tools which anyone without an advanced degree in finance shouldn’t comment on.

An outgrowth of this tendency toward ‘nuance’ is the peculiarly mystical tone that the economics profession has taken on. For example, the view that the business cycle will inevitably restore us to prosperity, and that the present downturn is just some sort of random misfortune. I recall a friend in university remarking that he planned to enter a PhD program in hopes of “waiting out the recession,” as though it were a spell of rain or some other act of god. The market giveth and taketh away. To suggest any sort of human agency behind these downturns—namely, a relationship between the wealth and poverty—is to commit the dreaded error of viewing economics as a zero-sum game. This of course is a fallacy, because economics is a magical process by which the concentrated wealth simultaneously diffuses its wealth (i.e. trickle-down theory).

It's funny cuz it's sad...

Deadly Human-Made 'Cocktail' Threatening World’s Insect Pollinators (mostly Bees)

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 by Common Dreams
Decline of 'unsung heroes' will have drastic impacts on world's ecosystems, food supply
- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer


A "cocktail" of human-made "pressures" are threatening insect pollinators across the world, whose decline will have "profound environmental, human health and economic consequences," according to a new report released Monday by the Insect Pollinators Initiative.

Insect pollinators such as bees provide pollination for up to 75% of crops and enable reproduction in up to 94% of wild flowering plants, meaning their current decline greatly "threatens human food supplies and ecosystem function" around the world, the group urges.

According to the study Threats to an Ecosystem Service: Pressures on Pollinators, published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, the steady disappearance of these essential creatures cannot be tied to one factor, but to a multitude of anthropogenic reasons such as "the loss of food resources in intensively-farmed landscapes," pesticides, climate change, and "the spread of alien species and diseases."

Dr. Adam Vanbergen from the UK’s Center for Ecology & Hydrology and science coordinator of the IPI led the review and stated:

There is no single smoking gun behind pollinator declines, instead there is a cocktail of multiple pressures that can combine to threaten these insects. For example, the loss of food resources in intensively-farmed landscapes, pesticides and diseases are individually important threats, but are also likely to combine and exacerbate the negative impacts on pollinators.

“Pollinators are the unsung heroes of the insect world and ensure our crops are properly pollinated so we have a secure supply of nutritious food in our shops," said co-author Professor Simon Potts from the University of Reading. "The costs of taking action now to tackle the multiple threats to pollinators is much smaller than the long-term costs to our food security and ecosystem stability. Failure by governments to take decisive steps now only sets us up for bigger problems in the future.”

How Conservative Economic Policies Are Destroying the US

We've been in the clutches of conservative economic orthodoxy since 1980, and this is the result.
April 1, 2013 | These were compiled by Dave Johnson at Campaign for America's Future:

In each of the charts below look for the year 1981, when Reagan took office.

Conservative policies transformed the United States from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years, and it has only gotten worse since then:

 

Working people’s share of the benefits from increased productivity took a sudden turn down:

 

This resulted in intense concentration of wealth at the top:

 

And forced working people to spend down savings to get by:

 

Which forced working people to go into debt: (total household debt as percentage of GDP )

 

None of which has helped  economic growth much: (12-quarter rolling average nominal GDP growth.)

 

There are, of course, many reasons for all this. But there is no doubt that we've been in the clutches of conservative economic orthodoxy since 1980 and this is the result. Whether it's the cause or whether it's because it has no capacity to react to external events properly doesn't matter. It has failed. And is still failing.

The Crime of Punishment

The late Bill Stuntz was America’s leading thinker on criminal justice—and its hardest to categorize.
Lincoln Caplan

The Collapse of American Criminal Justice 

By William Stuntz • Harvard University Press • 2011 • 408 pages

Crime began to plummet in the United States more than 15 years ago, defying all predictions. It did so for nearly a decade. It happened in every part of the country and in every category of crime. While the rate of decline has leveled off in recent years, to many this social achievement has meant that the country need not worry about crime anymore: The problem has been solved. That view is wrong. In reality, the problem simply exists in two places most Americans (and the media) don’t often bother to look: in crime-ridden sections of cities where minorities live, and in the overcrowded prison system that gives America the world’s highest rate of incarceration. The good news masks an ever-worsening tragedy in criminal justice.

The black homicide rate across the nation is six times that of the white rate. Chicago’s Washington Square neighborhood is poor and close to 100 percent black. The city’s Hyde Park neighborhood is affluent and mostly white. The homicide rate in the first is 26 times that of the second.

The most compelling explanation for the different crime patterns for blacks and whites is the effect of the criminal justice system’s breakdown on poor young black men, who have continued to commit crimes at a high rate, including violent ones, especially against blacks, and who regard the system as dramatically unfair and unworthy of their respect. The rate of imprisonment among white men is the highest it has been in American history, yet the rate is seven times higher among black men.

America’s prison system is now studied largely because of its failure. The prison population is unsustainably high—petty offenders are locked away with hard cases, overcrowding makes conditions dangerous and unhealthy, and financial costs to states are through the roof. The last time the country significantly reduced them, however, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the rate of crime skyrocketed. Neither option is acceptable. So what do we do?

In his posthumously published book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, William Stuntz argues that reform today should involve putting more control over decisions about what and who should be punished—and for how long—in the hands of neighborhoods most hurt by crime and decimated by punishment. It should, he writes, involve many more cops on the street and many fewer convicts in prison.

But the book is less a blueprint for how to make things right than an explanation of what went wrong over the past century. Its value comes from seeing American criminal justice whole, in an elaborate analysis of a complex system, and challenging the theories of retribution and deterrence that lead to an emphasis on punishment and that have dominated thinking about the field for the past generation.

“Today,” Stuntz explains, “our cities are considerably more violent than before the great crime wave of the twentieth century’s second half, yet the nation’s imprisonment rate is quintuple the rate before that crime wave began. If punishment deters crime, we seem to be getting much less deterrent bang for the imprisonment buck than we once did. Add it all up, and the picture is quite different than the conventional wisdom allows.”

Stuntz’s thesis is that the misrule of politics has replaced the rule of law, with a ratchet of ever-expanding criminal laws giving boundless discretion to police and prosecutors, leading to a system that wrongly punishes too many poor young black men. When the law gives that much discretion, he writes, it stops functioning as law and instead becomes an assertion of power. The recent decline in crime is less a sign of success than of pathology. The encouraging numbers are misleading. They conceal devastating failure.

William Stuntz was one of the most influential and revered legal scholars of his generation, by acclamation the country’s leading thinker about criminal justice. His 25 years as a scholar, first as a law professor at the University of Virginia, then at Harvard, began when crime was a highly politicized issue and ended (tragically early—he died of cancer at the age of 52 in March) when crime had seemingly ceased to be an issue at all.

He developed an original, sweeping, and brilliant understanding of his field, which he sought to synthesize in this work. Three highly respected legal scholars to whom his book is dedicated—Carol Steiker and Michael Klarman of Harvard Law School and Daniel Richman of Columbia Law School—shepherded the essentially finished volume through production and into print after his death. While he co-authored a shelf full of respected textbooks about criminal law and criminal procedure, this is his only book for a general readership. It is his masterwork. The book is written in direct, energetic, and forceful prose, without stinting on nuance. It is a form of purposeful history, with close analyses of Supreme Court cases and doctrine; crime data by race, class, and geography; the workings of American politics at the national, state, and local levels; the interplay of legal, political, economic, and social forces; and attention to seminal documents of law and governance, especially the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

The Collapse of American Criminal Justice is at once a far-reaching indictment and a vision tinged with hope. Stuntz was concerned with how to make sure that the criminal justice system charges and convicts those who deserve punishment while reducing the share of people caught in it who are innocent. He was convinced that “criminal punishment is both too severe and too frequent” and that “legal condemnation is a necessary but terrible thing—to be used sparingly, not promiscuously.” His biggest idea is that criminal justice can only be understood—by non-experts as well as experts—through a grasp of the interactions among its major elements. By showing that the division between criminal law (the elements of crime the government must prove to convict a defendant) and criminal procedure (the steps a police officer must follow to interrogate a suspect) that is respected by most scholars is in fact artificial and misleading, he demonstrated the benefits of approaching the field as a whole.

The history of criminal procedure, he showed, was “not really about procedure at all but about substantive issues, about what conduct the government should and should not be able to punish.” The most important change in this area came in Miranda v. Arizona, the landmark 1966 ruling requiring police, under the Constitution’s guarantee against self-incrimination, to give suspects taken into custody warnings about their right to remain silent and to call a lawyer, because that intimidating situation is likely to make a suspect feel he must talk. The purpose of Miranda was to give every defendant the opportunity to protect himself in the criminal justice system, not just wealthy suspects with access to skilled lawyers who could help make a case that a confession was coerced and therefore involuntary.

But the effect of Miranda was the opposite, Stuntz contended: The new rules gave suspects who could afford a skilled lawyer a “right to avoid police questioning altogether.” That was about one-fourth of criminal suspects. As for the other three-quarters, the warnings afforded few of them protection, because they didn’t understand what the warnings meant or, if they did, had no access to anyone who could enforce them. As long as the police could show they gave the warnings to the other three-quarters, they easily induced most suspects to waive their rights. Stuntz’s criticism underscored that, without provision of criminal defense lawyers for the poor, Miranda had much less beneficial impact than it promised.

Stuntz was a registered Republican and considered himself a conservative, and his reputation as such was buttressed by some truly conservative positions (for instance, he favored forms of profiling after the September 11 attacks). But it was more important to Stuntz that he appeal to both liberals and conservatives than that he be identified as either. The distinctiveness of his outlook was reinforced by his keenness to make his evangelical Christian faith part of his identity as a scholar. His best-known article about the role of Christian ideas in law suggests that Christianity’s most significant lesson in the face of the “arrogance” of contemporary legal theory is the faith’s “humility” about how hard it is to find definite answers to fundamental questions. His humility sometimes gave his writing the tone of an elegy.

Stuntz writes, “Discretion and discrimination travel together.” The percentage of adults who are black, white, and Latino using illegal drugs is roughly the same (10 percent, 9 percent, and 8 percent, respectively), but blacks are three times more likely than Latinos to do prison time for drug crimes and nine times more likely than whites. Why? The misrule of politics, according to Stuntz. Specifically, the misrule results from suburban voters in counties having a lot of say in who gets elected as prosecutors in the urban areas where serious crime is concentrated. As Stuntz writes, prosecutors “are usually elected at the county level” and “counties that include major cities have a much higher percentage of suburban voters than in the past.” Think here, for example, of Fulton County, Georgia, or of Wayne County, Michigan, both so much larger than Atlanta and Detroit, respectively, that they even include some rural stretches. In other words, it is voters for whom crime is largely an abstract problem who exercise sway, while residents for whom the problem is real have less power.

The disappearance of the jury trial symbolizes this shift. Almost all felony criminal convictions today—96 percent—come from guilty pleas obtained by prosecutors elected with the support of suburban voters, not from verdicts reached by juries drawn from residents in areas where crime is concentrated. The system, in Stuntz’s words, has become an “arbitrary, discriminatory, and punitive beast,” which is undemocratic in vesting decisions about punishment in those who aren’t part of the community where those being punished live. Stuntz’s main remedies for this include putting more cops on the street, making more lawyers available to represent criminal defendants, letting local rules about sentencing prevail, and shifting responsibility between local and state governments for who pays for local police and state prisons.

More cops would mean fewer prisoners and more robust local democracy. More lawyers for criminal defendants would mean better-prepared cases, fewer coerced pleas, and more reliable outcomes. Letting local rules about sentencing prevail would reduce the severity and the racial disparity in sentencing, and, with judges presiding over this phase, reduce the power of prosecutors. Shifting responsibility for payment, by having local governments pay a larger share of prison costs and a smaller share of local police costs, would give them an incentive to sentence fewer prisoners—and remove a disincentive from hiring more cops.
 
Stuntz was troubled by “institutional design and incentives” in criminal law and politics that push toward ever harsher rules and sentences. Power over criminal law is allocated to the three branches of government—the legislature makes it, the executive branch enforces it, and the judiciary interprets it—but they are not checks on one another in this sphere. In fact, legislators and the executive branch’s prosecutors both benefit from “more and broader crimes”: Legislators get more power when they define crimes more broadly because they reduce the role of judges in deciding who is guilty; and prosecutors have more power because they have more discretion about what and how to prosecute. As a result, legislators and prosecutors tacitly cooperate with each other, leading to both more law and less: more on the books, and less on the street, in the sense that the laws are so broad the police and prosecutors get to decide whom to go after and find guilty. Those decisions are about power. In the “rule of too much law,” Stuntz advises, “too much law amounts to no law at all.”

His solution to this set of problems is to replace the vicious cycle that creates them with a virtuous cycle based on cultivating a relationship between those who break the law (or are tempted to) and those who enforce it. For most of the twentieth century in the Northeast and Midwest, the ratio of police officers to prison inmates was two to one. Today, it is less than one to two. “More than any other statistic,” Stuntz writes, “that one captures what is most wrong with American criminal justice.” More cops mean more deterrence. More deterrence means fewer arrests and fewer convictions. In the 1990s, New York City had the biggest drop in urban crime during the decade. It also had the biggest increase in its police force.

Another important component would be fewer prisoners. This would require reducing the severity of sentencing, which is now “more punitive than Russia’s,” reducing the discrimination that contributes to blacks outnumbering whites among prisoners, and reducing “excessive prosecutorial power”—which is “unchecked by law and, given its invisibility, barely checked by politics.” And too much power for prosecutors doesn’t mean there are enough of them: Stuntz calls for many more, so there are more lawyers to litigate cases and the pressure on them to obtain plea bargains is alleviated. That would also require more money for public defenders to represent defendants in court.

A more drastic aspect of his reform vision would be sweeping changes in criminal laws—defining more crimes vaguely so courts would need to resort to jury trials to decide who was guilty. This would excuse from liability for the most serious offenses the least guilty members of a group of criminals and would even allow some guilty defendants to claim that, though their conduct fit the definition of a crime, it wasn’t so “wrongful” that it merited punishment. This would mean “constitutionaliz[ing]” much of basic criminal law, by asking courts to define its boundaries instead of legislators and prosecutors—and giving courts more power when many perceive them to have too much power already.

This unlikely element of his vision is also the most inventive. Stuntz contends that the Warren Court, instead of fixating on procedures addressed in the Bill of Rights, could have focused on equality as called for in the Fourteenth Amendment. In case after case where it settled on a procedural solution, the Court could have insisted that a black defendant who was plainly treated differently and less respectfully than a white defendant be guaranteed the equal protection of the laws. He called for the Warren Court to do what its conservative critics have usually attacked it for: to take an approach to constitutional reform that was “less legally grounded, more intuitive than lawlike.” This would surely have been lambasted as extreme judicial activism. But Stuntz believed that the Warren Court did not go far enough. He was a conservative who criticized the liberal Warren Court for its conservatism because he was convinced it would have been better for the justices to take a radical path.

The United States of the years right after World War II is unrecognizable in major ways because of changes wrought by the Warren Court. Landmark decisions it rendered about racial equality, school prayer, voting rights, and freedom of the press, as well as criminal justice, made our democracy more inclusive, more representative, more tolerant, and better informed, not to mention fairer to people accused of crimes.

But Stuntz wanted more. His hunger for more justice and mercy and, as a result, less crime and punishment made his work great. In this brave book, as contrarian as it is utopian, he constructs a powerful explanation about the vast and costly failure of the American criminal justice system and why the quest to reform it must be a high priority. He left an inspiring model of how.

Who Will Feed the People?

Obstacles to Small-Scale Agriculture in the US
By KOLLIBRI terre SONNENBLUME

"In the future, more people will have to grow their own food" has become a truism among pundits and observers who are paying attention to the changing state of western industrial civilization, and of the U.S. in particular. Declining energy resources, ecological degradation, and global financial disolution are a few of the trends that are and will be impacting agriculture-as-we-know-it, and forcing agriculture-as-it-will-be.

That chemical-based farming is a failing experiment has been well-documented elsewhere; numerous books and articles have explored declining soil fertility, chemically-resistant weeds and pests, the tainting and depletion of irrigation water, the shrinking diversity of seeds, the dangers of genetically modified crops, and the plummeting nutritional value of fruit, vegetables, and grains. I will not reiterate these issues here, except through examples that address my points, which concern the future of agriculture.

The "need" for a smaller-scale, non-chemical-based agriculture is clear. So are the attributes that it must have. This agriculture will be regionally-based, because the means for shipping produce around the world will no longer be profitable. This agriculture will be based more on animal power (two-legged and four-legged), because machines will be few, and the fuel for them too expensive or unavailable. This agriculture will focus on soil-building rather than chemicals, because the chemicals are sourced from the same raw materials that make the fuel. This agriculture will break with monocropping over hundreds of acres and instead utilize small parcels intercropped. And, this agriculture will have to involve much more than 2% of the population, even if that population is in decline.

I must mention that, in my opinion, the forces at work in the world today -- energy, ecology, economics -- are of such a large scale and their inertia so powerful that we are being coy when we say we "need" to switch to a smaller-scale, non-chemical agriculture. I suspect that we "will be" making that switch, like it or not, planned or not. No need to rally for the ball that was tossed in the air to come back down. It's on its way, like all things that go up. But the transition -- the beginning of which we are living to see right now -- is a very tricky one, to say the least!

Despite appearances -- which include the mainstreaming of "Organic", and the growth of farmers' markets, CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), and urban agriculture -- very little fieldwork (pun intended) is happening that meaningfully addresses the emerging challenges of our time. A "100 mile diet" for more than a few "sustainability" geeks is still the stuff of fantasy. The mega-farming system born of the 60's "Green Revolution" is still what puts food on the table of almost everyone in the U.S.

I am a farmer in Oregon's Willamette Valley. This season I have partnered with two other farmers and we are working about seven acres together, trying to grow vegetables, medicinal herbs (not OMMP) and staple crops such as legumes and grains. In the recent past, we were urban farmers in Portland, growing produce for our CSAs in little yards and empty lots while experimenting with staple crops on larger suburban and exurban plots.

Among us, we have over ten years of farming experience, a botany degree, and work in the restoration field, as well as above-average intelligence, impressive resourcefulness and a dawn-to-dusk work ethic rarely seen anymore these days in the U.S. (at least among white people). We are not trying to get $-rich, but we are not idealistic money-haters. Until the seed-and-feed, gas station, and hardware stores take barter, we need the cash. We do not limit ourselves to a single doctrine, such as permaculture. We are unconcerned with the pettiness of politics or the vagaries of the nation's culture. We are simply people who are aware of the emerging food crisis, and want to see what it takes to grow a sustenance-providing amount of food and medicine for ourselves and a few friends and family who threw investment our way.

We are farming on land that was formerly used for grass-seed production, and has been hammered with chemicals and big machines for decades. Over 50% of the cropland in the Willamette Valley is planted in grass-seed, so the lessons we are learning are potentially valuable for future farmers who will be attempting the same in this area. But the issues we are facing -- lack of soil fertility, residual chemical effects, out-of-balance insect populations -- will be found across the nation for anyone trying to farm on land that was conventionally abused.

While in the city, my bicycle-based CSA operation gained much media attention, so I was able to raise enough resources to give urban farming a very serious try. Unlike most urban farmers, I did not have rent or other bills to pay, so was able to devote myself full time. Having thus immersed myself in the practice, theory, and context of agriculture, both urban and rural, for the last several years, the following obstacles to sustainable farming have become obvious to me.

1) Not Enough Farmers

Less than 2% of the U.S. population is directly involved in farming. Two hundred years ago, it was over 90%, and as recently as the 30's it was still 40%. Increased mechanization and cheap fuel were the paired enablers of this historic shift to giant farms manned by a handful of people. The so-called "Green Revolution" of the 60's, with its "better living through chemistry" was the hammer that nailed shut the coffin on small-scale farming, which has been dying a drawn-out death in the decades since. Despite a small uptick in the number of small farms over the last decade -- due largely to the Organic trend -- most agriculture is still huge and corporate-run. The population of the U.S. and much of the world is utterly dependent on this system for sustenance, and will remain so while any transition takes place.

This 2% will have to grow, but how? Who wants to give up a working week of five 8-hour days for one that is seven 12-16 hour days? Who wants to give up a regular check for financial uncertainty and perhaps impoverishment? Who wants to give up their city socializing and entertainments (both increasingly electronic)? Or maybe their electricity and hot running water? Not most people I have met, whether the proposition is to farm in the country or in the city.

Many Portlanders I met were inspired by the urban farming beginning to take place in the city, and some dreamed of Havana. As portrayed in the film, "The Power of Community", a radical rearrangement of agriculture took place in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union and the attendant loss in resources. Non-chemical farming became the only viable option, and the practice of urban farming grew dramatically. The makers of the film claimed that Havana was now growing over 50% of the produce it consumed within its own city limits. Impressive and inspiring, on the face of it.

But Portland is and was not Havana. A few dozen people starting CSAs and selling to restaurants does not a food revolution make, and besides, Cuba's very different style of government was likely the major steering and empowering force in that shift. Most Portlanders would probably not appreciate the contrast in ownership models, etc., used on that island, were they to be imposed to them and their neighborhoods (which is not to denigrate Cuba or its response in any way).

Portland is a hypey town, and the press that urban farming got made it look much more impressive than it was. I know this from reading the articles about myself and my own operation, all of which but one had glaring errors that presented things not quite like they were. One result of the press coverage was that people made the assumption that "OK good, somebody's taking care of that," and went on with their days.

But no, nobody's taking care of that yet, really. Urban farming has still not attracted enough practitioners to be taken seriously.

2) Lack of Equipment for Small Scale Farming

Suppose you want to plant an acre each of wheat, soup beans, and millet. How does one plant, cultivate, harvest, and process crops on this scale? Wheat can yield over two tons per acre, beans and millet half a ton each. You can't efficiently seed plots of these size by hand. Or weed them, or harvest them, or thresh and winnow them. Not without a lot of people, that is, and the days are over when the whole village would drop what they were doing and turn out to bring in the harvests from the fields.

The vast majority of machinery available on the market today in the U.S. is geared toward the hundreds, or thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of acres. It's too big to move around in such a small area.

The equipment needed for small acreage farming is no longer manufactured in the U.S., and hasn't been on a mass scale since the 70's. Most of the old stuff is sitting in rusty heaps at the edges of fields or has been repurposed as "yard art". Earlier this season, we watched helplessly as scrappers hauled away an old combine they had found in the blackberry brambles on the property we are farming. Being lessees, we were unable even to buy enough time to see if it was repairable, but we saw pieces go by that could have been used on their own for seed-cleaning at our scale.

Equipment for small acreage farming is still manufactured and sold in other parts of the world, including Europe, China, and India. The technology has continued to develop in these places, with new innovations improving on tried-and-true designs. We farmers have drooled over the beautiful machines that Ferrari is making. But the cost of purchasing and shipping this equipment to the States is a prohibitive factor for our operation.

The Amish and a few hobbyists have been keeping alive draft animal practices, but these folks are also few and far between. Animal husbandry is not a skill learned overnight, and, as with vegetables, some heirloom breeds that are good for field work have been lost or are dwindling.

In the city, the situation is easier, because the plots are usually small enough to be polished off with a walk-behind rototiller. Here, too, there are serious quality issues, and the best machines are made overseas, many of them in Italy. Regardless of how good the equipment is, some knowledge of small-engine repair will really help the farmer, especially to avoid costly by-the-hour fix-it shops, who might or might not do the job right.

Additionally, for farmers rural and urban, parts could eventually become an issue. If the economic fabric frays to the point where shipping becomes expensive, then the next skill the farmer will have to take up -- or better yet, find in someone else who wants to barter for food -- is metal fabrication, including welding. If you don't feel like picking up a pitchfork, consider enrolling in a VoTech.

3) Lack of Knowledge about Small-Scale Farming

The knowledge of how to grow on a smaller scale is also disappearing. The average age of an Oregon farmer is 67. If he (usually) even remembers how things were done before, who knows if he is capable of changing, or if there are enough of him around who are willing or able to teach younger people. The big equipment he uses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and isn't paid off yet. What else is he supposed to do? Federal agricultural subsidies aren't going to Grandpa Grass Farmer; they're going to ConAgra, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland.

We have the pleasure of knowing the farmer in our area, Harry McCormick of Sunbow Farm, who founded the Willamette Valley Grain and Bean Project. Harry has been farming near Corvallis since 1972, and has a wealth of knowledge and experience about growing horticultural and field crops. He started the Grain and Bean Project a few years back to try to help farmers get out of the grass-seed business and start growing food. Thanks to his efforts, thousands of acres are in transition, but that's not as impressive as it sounds. Harry himself describes this work -- the work of cultivating staple crops on a small-scale basis -- as "fringe".

Old USDA publications from the early 20th Century (and earlier) will become more useful again, as they describe in detail many practical, reliable techniques that don't involve 40+ foot wide combines.

4) Lack of Financial Resources

Will there be a Marshall Plan for small-scale agriculture in the U.S.? Not from a president who appointed someone from Monsanto to the USDA. How about from the cities, counties or states? Nope. They're going broke and cutting essential services already. The private sector? There's no money in it. The non-profits with their grants? Only if you fit their ideological stripe and promise to play by their rules. Ralph Nader's bizarre vision of the super rich saving us is only slightly less far-fetched than the idea that the Galactic Federation will be raising us to the next level of consciousness in December 2012.

Though I had no difficulty selling shares to my produce CSA in Portland (and could in fact have kept a long waiting list), I have not had similar success with raising funds for our current project. I don't know why, for sure. Possible reasons: Staple crops and herbal medicines, delivered once at the end of the season, doesn't offer the same gratification as twice-weekly produce. Or, grains and beans lack the trendiness of urban farming, which in Portland has reached the status of sexy (for which I will gladly accept some credit!). Or, having moved to the country, I am now out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Or, I was just too outspoken for some people's standards, and their self-obsession led them to take personally what I meant culturally. Who knows?

The bottom line is that there ain't much of one. In our case, the only way we were able to invest as much as we have (a low five-figure amount), is because one of us had an inheritance from a recently deceased mother to draw on. Which is not exactly what most people would wish for, or that many can even look to as a possibility. Going into this year's season we had seeds, tools, books, and other hard-good resources (altogether worth another low five-figure amount) only because we had invested in those things so well during the urban farming years. We were not starting from scratch. In these ways, we had a financial and material advantage that other people can't count on.

Not that these resources have been adequate to the task; they haven't. We estimate that our project could only be truly effective if we had a low six-figure sum for a three year period. Who is going to hand that out, to tens of thousands of farmers across the nation?

5) Lack of Market

One farmer in the Grain and Bean project is sitting on 17,000 lbs. of garbanzo beans because he could not find a buyer willing to pay a reasonable price. While the big boys are continuing to be subsidized -- not just by the USDA, but by the U.S. military holding control of various regions and their resources -- the non-chemical farmer coming up in this country is unable to compete on price.

One year in the city, I calculated that my hourly wage was something like 5 cents. Even in a so-called "Foodie Town" like Portland, it was challenging to find a market for my produce. Most consumers, including restaurant owners, are still shopping for produce with a list in their hand, rather than learning from the farmer about what can and can't be grown in their region. On the first hot day of Summer, which happens sometime in late June in the mild Northwest, everyone wants tomatoes, watermelon, and corn. Nevermind that those crops are still 2-3 months away at that time of year (if they ripen at all).

The farmers bring some of this on themselves, by choosing to cater to perceived customer desires, rather than by concentrating on what grows best and presenting a balanced, nutritious diet to the customer, and educating them about it. For example, the Pacific Northwest is the best place in the U.S. to grow parsnips: the roots can winter in the ground and don't need to be dug up and stored, and, the sweet flavor comes out only after a couple-three freezes, but the ground doesn't get cold enough to kill them. For this second reason, California parsnips never taste as good. The temps just don't go down enough. Here is a delicious -- almost sugary when roasted -- vegetable to get you through the winter, along with carrots and turnips also from the ground through the cold months, and very few Oregon farmers are growing them.

Even if you grow something people want, making a profit is still a challenge. Restaurant owners want to pay a wholesale price that compares well with Cash-and-Carry, and farmers' market customers are often looking for a bargain, too. Farmers' Markets can be expensive to attend for the starting-out farmer, what with the costs of a tent, table, bags, a legal scale, etc., and with market policies such as mandatory liability insurance. Most Farmers' Markets would more accurately be called Farmers'-Market-Manager-and-Their-Non-Profit-Board Markets, as they have become highly regulated structures, making demands of farmers in the interest of creating their own personal vision of a market that matches their effete tastes. Gone are the days when you could just drive a truck up and sell produce out of the back, with no cost except gasoline and a tarp.

6) The Wasteland Left Behind by Conventional Farming

Much of the farmland in the United States is a wreck and not ready to eat out of. Here in the Willamette Valley, over 50% of cultivated acres are in grass-seed. Another sizeable percentage is in Christmas trees, for which very poisonous chemicals are used, including Atrazine, a ground water contaminant. Nurseries of ornamental plants account for another chunk. Only 5% of the Valley is in food production. That's a lot of poisoned, not-ready-to-farm land.

We are seeing first-hand the issues in making a grass-seed-to-food transition, and the picture is sobering. The first thing we discovered is that you can't simply till the grass under and plant. The list of crops that can grow unaided in our particular toxic circumstance doesn't go much beyond jerusalem artichokes, chicory and horehound. Soon after arriving, we transplanted healthy perennial medicinals into the ground and watched as they turned red immediately. Some grew out of it, some did not. They have all been stunted and in some cases misshapen.

These were the kinds of plants that are said to thrive in poor soils, and which we had never amended before. Tough old birds reduced to clipped weaklings. Sad to see.

Without the money to amend all the soil, we took to carefully dressing each spot or row where we would be seeding or transplanting. This has worked somewhat well, but is not a farming-technique that I would recommend. The result has been a field that is still predominantly infertile, with little "pots" of short-term fertility plugged into it. An act that's difficult to follow the second season, and not at all a long-term solution.

We were able to get a list of the chemicals used by the grass-seed farmers. Broad-leaf herbicides, 10-10-10 fertilizer, fungicides, and growth regulators were their main tools, with Round-Up at the end of the five to seven year planting cycles. A toxic brew, to be sure, but not nearly as intense as what people will find at sites where other crops were farmed.

The effects of these chemicals are persistent, even when the chemicals themselves are (allegedly) not. Fungicides take out the mycorrhyzal bacteria so important for healthy root growth, and must be re-introduced. When artificial nitrogen is used, the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil stop fixing, and must be restarted. When broad-leaf herbicides are used, the diversity of plant life becomes constricted to those tenacious weeds that can survive the pounding, and their vigor in the absence of chemicals can quickly overcome the organic farmer's new crop.

Cover-cropping and other methods could eventually fix these hurting lands, but they take years. So, when people realize that they can't wait any longer to switch to small-scale, non-chemical farming, will it be too late? If it's going to take empty shelves in stores to make more farmers, then the future will bring starvation.

Interestingly, we found that the soil in the city was much cleaner and more productive than any of the country land we have worked (five different locations). The image in city minds of a pristine countryside is false. Many agricultural chemicals are flat illegal to use in urban areas. Nope, the country has become a toxic wasteland, and people have another thing coming if they think we'll just be able to fan out into the fields around the cities and start growing our own food when the machine breaks down.

7) Extreme Weather

The apparently more common instances of extreme climate events such as droughts and flooding are leading to crop losses around the world and in the United States. I will take no stand here as to whether these events are caused by human industrial activity, HAARP and weather modification, or are merely another trend like the "Little Ice Age" or "Medieval Warming" of the past. But as a farmer who closely observes the local weather, and who keeps up-to-date about other farmers' weather, it is clear to me that we definitely are in a period of increasing climatic instability as relative to immediately preceding decades.

Hundreds of hours of work and many months of growing can be wiped out by an early frost, a record heat-wave, or an unseasonable rain. You can't eat your insurance policy, even if you have one. This year, in our location, we experienced precipitation high above average in March, April and May, preventing tilling and hence the planting of spring grains. Then, in June, we got rain twice, the second time only a sprinkle. In July, we had one two-day rain event. Last year, the rains didn't stop until early July, also preventing tilling. Then the October rains started in September. Going back season-by-season, each year of the last six has been marked by different extremes of wet, dry, hot and cold, all considered atypical. So, abnormal is the new normal, which makes it very difficult to plan, if not plant.

Historically, agriculture has been marked by famine on a regular basis. That the U.S. has not experienced widespread crop-failure since the Dust Bowl is an historical abberration. With the floods in the Midwest and the droughts in Texas and the Southwest, perhaps we are witnessing the end of that lucky streak currently. In any case, the drama of weather will play itself out region-by-region, farm-by-farm, farmer-by-farmer, and does not seem likely to be easily predictable.

8) The Social Challenges

Sometimes when I'm out there in the field doing repetitive and arduous by hand because there's no other way to do it (sometimes because that's just how it's done and always has been done), I find myself wondering, "How do people think we are going to switch from conventional to 'sustainable' agriculture?" The on-the-ground facts paint a picture of mind-boggling challenges, tangled (by nature) logistics, steep learning curves, tremendous labor, and radical lifestyle change for which no one seems ready.

The people of the U.S. are, by and large, the pampered children of Empire, unaware and uninterested in their own priveledge, taking their war-won comforts as an entitlement and their narcissism as a birthright. For much of the rest of the world, the view is different: the globe is a plantation, its people slaves, and the U.S. is the master's house on the hill. The flabby inhabitants of that mansion don't want to go out into the fields for fear of getting their hands dirty. Or chop their own wood, or carry their own water, or so on.

Why does this matter? Because although we are all individuals, we are all -- whether we like it or not -- "in this together". U.G. Krishnamurti put it in terms of the cells in the body; each cell is its own individual entity, but each cell is dependent for its survival on all the cells immediately surrounding it, each of which is dependent on the cells around them, etc. There is no going-it alone. "Rugged individualism" has always been a myth.

When it comes to my own current dedication to farming, I have personally experienced what I can only describe as some kind of instinct with a species-centered focus, to work on our collective survival. I do not consider myself better or worse than anyone else for choosing this work. There is not for me a political, philosophical, or sentimental motivation. I offer no vision and have no hope. And I do not believe that I will survive trying times just because I am trying. I say all this to dissuade you from your own delusions of hope, if you have any.

Wishing, praying, or (a la Portland) "manifesting through intention" do not grow crops. Neither does hard work on a piece of land if that land is poisoned, or you lack the equipment or resources, or if the weather knocks you for a loop. Those are the circumstances that all the farmers, old and new, will be facing. Agriculture has always been a crapshoot, and it looks to me like the odds against are rising.

Ron Paul: ‘Government is in the process of failing’

By Nathan Diebenow RAW Story
Friday, February 11th, 2011
Is he running for US Senate? Is he signaling his bid for US president? Or is he hinting at something deeper within the US political climate?

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) sounded like he was about to hit the campaign trail again during his speech at a right-wing forum Friday, but before he left the podium, he warned Americans that their federal government was in trouble.

"Tragically, you're going to have the opportunity [to not ask the federal government for anything], because government is in the process of failing, and they can't deliver on the goods, just as the Soviets couldn't deliver the goods and maintain their own power," he said during the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Rep. Paul continued, "We will have those same problems domestically. We face serious economic problems as this dollar crisis evolves."

Paul has hinted in recent weeks that he might seek the Senate seat that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison plans to vacate after nearly two decades in Congress. If he should win, he would join his newly-elected son, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

However, Paul, 75, seemed to be cultivating his position in the libertarian wing of the Republican Party.

"I'm glad to see that the revolution is continuing," he said, adding, "We don't need to just change political parties. We need to change our philosophy about what this country is all about."

Paul drew thunderous applause for bashing his favorite targets: the Patriot Act, US aid to foreign nations, and US military bases overseas. After his call for the Federal Reserve banking system to be audited, the crowd chanted, "End the Fed! End the Fed!"

Paul became the chair of the House financial services subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology after Republicans retook the House last fall. He held his first meeting on the Federal Reserve this week.

"The Federal Reserve will end itself," he added. "They have eliminated 98 percent of value of the 1913 dollar, and it's continued erosion."

Paul used the newly-extended Patriot Act as a sign that grassroots activists were pulling the grip on power away from Washington.

"We didn't get a majority vote, but they didn't pass it automatically with a 2/3rds majority vote, sending a message that this country is waking up," he said. "We want to protect our civil liberties as well as our economic liberties."

Paul, who was the only Republican to bring up the situation in Egypt at the conference, blamed US foreign aid to other countries for the instability in the United States, and he warned that the revolutionary spirit against US-backed dictators sweeping the Middle East would soon envelop Saudi Arabia.

"All of the Middle East is unstable because of this [foreign aid]," he said.

Paul continued, "Now it's Tunisia. Next it's Egypt. And it's going to keep going because all the problems are there because the people don't like us propping up their dictators, no more than we would like it if a foreign country came here to prop up a dictator in our country."

The conference was not without its own revolution. On Thursday, Paul's supporters chanted "war criminal" at former Vice President Dick Cheney, who is seen as one of the masterminds behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Defend liberty," Paul closed.

This video was published at YouTube, broadcast Feb. 11, 2011, via RonPaul2008dotcom.

Capitulation--by the people, of the people, for the "people" (who never die and never have to obey the law)

Starting to think this week's election was ultimately about capitulation. The people saw how much money the corporate run GOP and its billionaire financed "righter" wing, the tea party, had to throw at a midterm--not a presidential election (only time most people vote) or constitutional amendment ratification ballot, but a midterm during the worst economy of modern times. We gave the Democrats two years to get it done, they failed, economy still sucks, let's switch sides!

So, the Republicans will get two or more years--more if the Perry-Palin ticket (or Beavis and Butthead Do America) unseat an Obama, who after yesterday's speech, seems to have conceded the 2012 election already. Appealing to the lowest common denominator by exploiting irrational fears and mixed with so they'd resemble actual concerns, the corporations have their paid for men in place to enact complete deregulation of every industry; bankers with unfettered sway over and access to all the money in the world (damn near), and a return to simpler times in which the world is 6000 years old; minorities drink from separate drinking fountains and can't enter most establishments--including public restrooms; a time when "duck and cover" protects a child from nuclear annihilation; a time when actions committed by US Armed Forces in another part of the world never makes the news until its urgency has expired; a time when garbage trucks remove all our garbage and take it away, and that's all that mattered, not where they took it away to; a time when you never question product safety--cigarette commercials said cigarettes were healthy, and that's all we needed then; and a time when unfair, inaccurate corporate/pro-war/propaganda was delivered with a straight face by the "unbiased" newscaster trusted by us Americans (though that never changed--neither did the propaganda, no matter which avatar claimed the presidential seal).

The Democrats were no match for the cash the GOP spent, or the extreme discontent with their policies held by a confused electorate, or the fact that Democrats serve the same corporate interests that the Republicans do, but much less convincingly. And the economy still sucks. And the Democrats have the ignorant gall to tell us the economy is improving (but leave out "improving at a barely substantial rate that can recede just as much next quarter as it might have expanded the previous one). The same rah rah bullshit that convinced the electorate that Obama would bring in real change, when what he brought in was the same thing we see every time leadership lists to the right or left, to whichever side is due up next: the same faces that ran things the last time the Dems had power. It's a really predictable ping-pong game with lots of manufactured drama and odds that always remain at 50/50.

When you can base a campaign and legislative agenda on opposing everything presented by the other side, you will always stand a good chance of being elected, even when you are a corrupt and babbling idiot. Moreso, even.

Being entrenched in the two-party system will always mean never being able to progress forward without taking too many corresponding steps backward to even the playing field. It means that corporate influence over lawmaking will continue unabated, protecting and expanding the rights of corporations rather than those of the people. And see, voting out the bums who proved ineffectual to begin with is a valid statement to make at the polls--but not if there is just one other choice. In that case, there isn't really a choice at all. It either/or, and when it comes down to bad or worse, then there can be no improvement in this or any situation we face. When distracted from real issues by intentionally divisive "right/left" moral debates that are never resolved though perpetually debated, we don't tend to use our rational thought processing skills.

We willingly contribute to this downward spiral that to some people might not seem worth getting riled up over now, because they are sufficiently distracted (after all, over 78% of Americans able to work are gainfully employed and work many hours  they inherited due to layoffs in their dept). Why make waves? If corporate ownership is what we get, might as well get used to it. Rights were needed back in the days before they were so plentiful, right? we can abridge them now in the name of an unregulated free market economy, in which environmental preservation is voluntary, and the free market determines whether products sold to the public are safe to use or consume, even when the manufacturer has no competition in the market to help kick in that free market self-regulation to protect consumers from harmful defects, unhealthy additives, or fatal side effects, "overlooked" during trial periods.

We, the people, capitulated. If we were the man in front of the tank in China in 1989, then we just picked up our bags and scuttled across the street, hoping no one saw our momentary fit of courage and principle. We are the lesser of pack dogs, rolling over and exposing our bellies to the m uch more powerful and aggressive corporate alpha dog and his pack of bankers, lawyers, and media PR reps:

 "You got all the money, what could I possibly do to oppose your agenda?" we shrugged. "Eight years under Republican control sucked donkey piss, but after two years under Democratic control, we're ready to try again the failed policies that contributed to the widespread corruption and economic failure we continue to endure. And we'll flip back, or maybe not depending on how well each side sells it message. We could stay pat on the right, or go left again...so many options!" 

I wonder how many voters woke up Wednesday morning to see the hot chick they "picked up" Tuesday at the polling place, was now some fat white dude in his 60s with a wallet so fat, it gives him back problems...

Somehow, we were again sold the same bullshit we supposedly rejected in favor of the same bullshit with a different brand new label two years ago. Lewis Black said it best:

"The democrats and republicans are a bowl of shit looking at itself in the mirror. "

Our intentions were respectable: vote in new blood, reject incumbents. But all we ever do really, is dosi-do with two partners. "Swing yer partner round and round, dance with the other feller's partner, well there's your other partner again--look, there's someone new, oh it's the partner before last..." And it's a pretty messed up square dance.

We buy it. We don't question it. We live with, then endure it. Ultimately, our acceptance means WE are the sellouts. We don't resist corporate control--rather in our moment of glory, we instead crowned corporate control king, we licked it on the cheek, and we rolled over on our backs, exposing our soft under-bellies. Confident we didn't do anything to make things worse, right?

Expecting what? Whether we admit it out loud, or just to ourselves, or if we refuse to admit it at all, we know that we have not improved anything. Our lives, the economy, the wars, the environment, human rights. We have made things worse. No matter which of the two choices was the one to which we capitulated.

Political optimism lasts only as long as it takes to wake up enough to notice the fat white guy in his 60s still in your bed, and you remember the previous night perfectly...no drunken blackout on which to lay blame.--jef

Iraq: Requiem for a Profound Misadventure

By JOE KLEIN Thursday, Aug. 05, 2010

It is a matter of some relief that Barack Obama did not announce the end of major combat operations in Iraq under a banner that said "Mission Accomplished." He did it in a speech to the Disabled American Veterans (DAV), the most grave and sober audience imaginable. And appropriately so, after a war that should never have been fought, a war that by some estimates will cost $3 trillion before it's done (including the health care services rendered to those represented by the DAV), a war whose casualties number in the hundreds of thousands. Iraq hasn't been much in the news over the past year, but this is an important milestone — even if our mission there will continue on a much smaller scale for 16 more months — a moment for reflection and humility in the face of a national embarrassment.

There is no "victory" in Iraq, nor will there be. There is something resembling stability, for now. There is a semblance of democracy, but that may dissolve over time into a Shi'ite dictatorship — which, if not well run, could yield to the near inevitable military coup. Yes, Saddam is gone — and that is a good thing. The Kurds have a greater measure of independence and don't have to live in fear of mass murder, which are good things too. But Iran's position in the region has been strengthened. Its Iraqi allies, especially Muqtada al-Sadr's populist movement, will play a major role — perhaps one more central than ours — in shaping the future of the country. Our attempt to construct an Iraq more amenable to our interests will end no better than the previous attempts by Western colonial powers. Even if something resembling democracy prevails, the U.S. invasion and occupation will not be remembered fondly by Iraqis. We will own the destruction in perpetuity; if the Iraqis manage to cobble themselves a decent society, they will see it, correctly, as an achievement of their own.

There are other consequences of this profound misadventure. The return of the Taliban in Afghanistan is certainly one. If U.S. attention hadn't been diverted from that primary conflict, the story in the Pashtun borderlands might be very different now. The sense of the U.S. as a repository of tempered, honorable actions may never recover from the images of the past decade, especially the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison.

The idea that it was our right and responsibility to rid Iraq of a terrible dictator — after the original casus belli of weapons of mass destruction evaporated — turned out to be a neocolonialist delusion. The fact that Bush apologists still trot out his "forward strategy of freedom" as an example of American idealism is a farce. That feckless exercise in naiveté brought us a Hamas government in Gaza, after a Palestinian election that no one but the Bush Administration wanted. It raised the hopes of reformers across the region, soon dashed when the Bush Administration retreated, realizing that the outcome of democracy in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be the installation of Islamist parties that might prove more repressive than the dictatorships they would replace. Freedom may well be "God's gift to humanity," as Bush insisted, radiating a simpleminded piety that never reflected another of God's greatest gifts — the ability to doubt, to think difficult thoughts and weigh conflicting options with clarity and subtlety. But I'm pretty sure God never designated the U.S. to impose that freedom violently upon others.

It is appropriate that Obama's speech to the DAV will not be remembered as vividly as George W. Bush's puerile march across the deck of an aircraft carrier, costumed as a combat aviator against a golden sunset, to announce — seven years and tens of thousands of lives prematurely — the "end of combat operations." Obama's announcement was no celebration. It was a somber acknowledgment that amends will be made to those whose lives were shattered and that their courageous service in an unnecessary cause will be honored. A national discussion about America's place in the world, and the military's excessive place in our foreign policy, would also be appropriate in the wake of this disaster, but I'm not holding my breath.

As for myself, I deeply regret that once, on television in the days before the war, I foolishly — spontaneously — said that going ahead with the invasion might be the right thing to do. I was far more skeptical in print. I never wrote in favor of the war and repeatedly raised the problems that would accompany it, but mere skepticism was an insufficient reaction too. The issue then was as clear as it is now. It demanded a clarity that I failed to summon. The essential principle is immutable: we should never go to war unless we have been attacked or are under direct, immediate threat of attack. Never. And never again.

Roadmap to a New Economics: Beyond Capitalism and Socialism

But what about the children?

We can all be leaders in building a social and economic system that really meets human needs.
By Riane Eisler, Tikkun
April 13, 2010

When thinking of a new economics, let's not think of stocks, bonds, derivatives, or other financial instruments. Let's think of children. Let's ask what kind of economic policies and practices are good for children. Let's ask what's needed so all children are healthy, get a good education, and are prepared to live good lives. More fundamentally, let's ask what kind of economic system helps, or prevents, children from realizing their great potentials for consciousness, empathy, caring, and creativity -- the capacities that make us fully human.

Once we address these questions, we can start designing the road map to the economic system we want and need: one that promotes not only human survival but also full human development.

We must design such a system, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the economically sensible thing to do, particularly as we move into the postindustrial knowledge-information era where the most important capital is what some economists call "high-quality human capital." Indeed, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen concurs that the aim of sound economic policy must be human capacity development.

This I agree with. But I want to add that for a truly new economic system, we need a broader definition of human capacity development than a purely economic one. Which brings us back to the children and to our human capacities for caring, empathy, consciousness, and creativity.

When children are the starting point for a new economic paradigm, the first step is to go beyond the tired debate of capitalism versus socialism and all the other old isms. Both capitalist and socialist theory ignore a fundamental truth: the real wealth of nations -- and the world -- consists of the contributions of people and nature.

Adam Smith and Karl Marx ignored the vital importance of nature's life-sustaining activities. For them, nature exists to be exploited, period. As for the life-sustaining activities of caring for people starting in childhood, they considered this merely "reproductive" labor, and not part of their "productive" economic equation.

In other words, their focus was on the market -- for Smith to extol it and for Marx to excoriate it. Neither included in his economic model the life-sustaining sectors, without which there would be no market economy: the household economy, the natural economy, and the volunteer economy.

The first step toward building a truly new economics is a full-spectrum economic model that includes these sectors and gives real visibility and value to the most essential human work: the work of caring for people and for our natural environment.

The move to this comprehensive economic model in turn requires understanding something else ignored in conventional economic discussions. This is that economic systems don't arise in a vacuum: they are influenced by, and in turn influence, the larger cultural system in which they are embedded.

The Failures of Capitalism and Socialism

In the wake of the global economic meltdown that began in 2008 has come an outcry against capitalism, especially against its latest stage of "neoliberalism" with its massive deregulation of powerful moneyed interests. Critics point not only to the havoc wreaked by deregulating banks and other financial institutions but also to the gargantuan size and power of multinational corporations; the widening gap between haves and have-nots, both between and within nations, caused by the globalization of "free markets"; and the decimation of our natural environment by irresponsible business practices. Some argue that capitalism must be replaced with socialism because historically capitalism has been unjust, violent, and exploitive of both people and nature.

But this argument reflects yet another old way of thinking that we must re-examine and transcend: classifying societies in terms of conventional categories such as socialist vs. capitalist, religious vs. secular, rightist vs. leftist, Eastern vs. Western, industrial vs. postindustrial, and so forth. None of these categories describes the totality of a society's beliefs and institutions — from the family, education, and religion, to politics and economics. Since these old categories focus only on particular aspects of a society, they are useless for understanding what a more equitable, sustainable, and caring system really looks like.

The social categories of partnership system and domination system reveal the core configurations of societies that support two very different kinds of relations. The domination system supports relations of top-down rankings: man over man, man over woman, race over race, religion over religion, nation over nation, and man over nature. The partnership system supports the relations we want and urgently need at this critical juncture of history: relations of mutual respect, accountability, and benefit.

If we re-examine the critique of capitalism as unjust, violent, and exploitive, from this perspective we see that, in reality, it is a critique of the structures, relationships, and values inherent in domination systems -- be they ancient or modern, Western or Eastern, feudal, monarchic, or totalitarian. Long before capitalist billionaires amassed huge fortunes, Egyptian pharaohs and Chinese emperors hoarded their nations' wealth. Indian potentates demanded tributes of silver and gold while lower castes lived in abject poverty. Middle Eastern warlords pillaged, plundered, and terrorized their people. European feudal lords killed their neighbors and oppressed their subjects.

A domination system of top-down rankings has also characterized the two large-scale modern applications of socialism: the former Soviet Union and China. Both turned out to be authoritarian and violent. And while they alleviated some economic disparities, they were hardly egalitarian.

In 1984, I visited the Soviet Union as one of two U.S. delegates with Nordic Women for Peace, which marched on both Washington, D.C., and Moscow to enlist support for nuclear disarmament. While ordinary Russians lived in overcrowded quarters, often with two families crammed into a small flat, we were put up in a luxury hotel's royal suite with gilded furniture and a grand piano in its foyer. And while most Russians lacked even the most basic consumer goods, we and the Soviet officials hosting us drank champagne and ate caviar and other delicacies.

Nor did these regimes protect our environment any more than capitalist nations did. In fact, their record is just as abysmal -- as evidenced by disasters such as Chernobyl and Lake Baikal in the USSR and the strip mining, air pollution, and other environmental calamities of China.

In short, the historic records of neither capitalism nor socialism hold real promise for a new, more sustainable and equitable economic system. Since capitalism has gained ascendancy, its failures are more evident. And it is true that, at this point, we need to leave the destructive aspects of capitalism behind.

This does not mean we should discard everything from capitalism and socialism. We need both markets and central planning. But to effectively address our problems, we have to go much deeper, to matters that conventional economic analyses and theories ignore.

To construct a more equitable and sustainable economic system, we have to take into account the larger social contexts out of which economics derive -- specifically, the degree to which these orient to either a partnership system or a domination system.

Economics, Societies, and Values

Economics is above all about values. So to change economics, we must also look at cultural beliefs about what is valuable or not valuable. And one of the distinctions between partnership and domination systems is what is and is not considered of economic value.

In both the Soviet Union and China, socialism was imposed in cultures that oriented closely to the configuration of the domination system. The core configuration of this system consists of top-down rankings in the family and state or tribe maintained by physical, psychological, and economic control; the ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half, and with this, the devaluation by both men and women of anything stereotypically considered feminine; and a high degree of culturally accepted abuse and violence — from child- and wife-beating to pogroms, terrorism, and chronic warfare.

A close orientation to this configuration can be found in societies that have little in common when looked at through the lenses of conventional social and economic categories such as communist or capitalist, Eastern or Western, secular or religious, and so forth. For example, viewed from the perspective of conventional categories, Hitler's Germany (a technologically advanced, Western, rightist society), the Taliban of Afghanistan and fundamentalist Iran (two Eastern, religious societies), and the would-be regime of the rightist-fundamentalist alliance in the United States seem totally different. But all have the same basic dominator configuration.

Neoliberalism, for example, was part of a regression to a domination system. It can best be understood as a means of maintaining top-down control. Although neoliberal rhetoric is about freedom, what this really means is freedom for those in control to do what they wish, free from government regulation. Neoliberal policies were designed to reconsolidate wealth and power in the hands of those on top, and its mantra of "trickle-down economics" conditioned people to accept the "traditional" order, under which those on the bottom have to content themselves with the crumbs dropping from their masters' opulent tables. The neoliberal promotion of "pre-emptive war" against Iraq also continued the traditional reliance on violence by dominant groups to impose their control. And the neoliberals' alliance with the so-called religious Right reinforced still another core component of domination systems: a "traditional" male-headed family where the ranking of one half of humanity over the other half is presented as normal and moral, and children learn early that it's very painful to question orders, no matter how unjust.

Moreover, with this ranking of male over female came another distinguishing feature of neoliberalism: its contempt for the "soft" or stereotypically "feminine," as in their vitriolic attacks on what they called the "nanny state." Accordingly, a key neoliberal requirement was that government programs designed to care for people, such as health care, child care, and aid to poor families, be defunded both in the United States and through "structural adjustment policies" in the "developing" world. In short, neoliberalism was really dominator economics.

The partnership system has a very different configuration. Its core elements are a democratic and egalitarian structure in both the family and state or tribe; equal partnership between women and men; and a low degree of violence, because it's not needed to maintain rigid rankings of domination.

No society is either a pure partnership or domination system. But the degree to which it is affects everything: from the society's guiding system of values to the construction of all its institutions -- from the family, education, and religion to politics and economics.

Economics and Caring

Nordic nations such as Sweden, Norway, and Finland are the contemporary countries that have moved most closely to the partnership side of the partnership-domination continuum. They have more equality in both the family and the state; a higher status of women (approximately 40 percent of their national legislators are female); and concerted efforts to leave behind traditions of violence (they pioneered the first peace studies and the first laws prohibiting physical discipline of children in families, and have a strong men's movement to disentangle "masculinity" from its equation with domination and violence).

Supported by their more partnership-oriented social configuration, these nations developed economic policies that combine positive elements of socialism and capitalism -- but go beyond both to an economics in which caring for people and nature is a top priority. These nations have government-supported child care, universal health care, stipends to help families care for children, elder care with dignity, and generous paid parental leave.

These more caring policies, in turn, made it possible for these nations to move from extreme poverty (famines in the early twentieth century) to societies with a generally high standard of living for all. Today these nations not only rank high in the United Nations annual Human Development Reports in measures of quality of life; they are also in the top tiers of the World Economic Forum's annual global competitiveness reports.

Nordic countries don't have the huge gaps between haves and have-nots characteristic of dominator-oriented nations. While they're not ideal societies, they have succeeded in providing a generally good living standard for all. They have low poverty and crime rates and high longevity rates. Their children score high on international tests. And studies show that workers in these nations are more satisfied and happier than people in countries such as the United States where the gross national product is higher.

Nordic nations also pioneered environmentally sound industrial approaches such as the Swedish "Natural Step." And some of the first experiments in industrial democracy came from Sweden and Norway, as did studies showing that a more participatory structure, where workers play a part in deciding such basic matters as how to organize tasks and what hours to work, can be extremely effective.

Moreover, Nordic nations have a long history of business cooperatives, jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprises that have included, as one of their guiding principles, concern for the community in which they operate. Their cooperatives have also been heavily involved in renewable energy projects. For example, many Swedish housing cooperatives are switching to alternative energy sources to help meet Sweden's goal of oil independence by 2015.

The Nordic nations' success has sometimes been attributed to their relatively small and homogeneous populations. But in smaller, even more homogeneous societies such as some oil-rich Middle-Eastern nations where absolute conformity to one religious sect and one tribal or royal head is demanded, we find large gaps between haves and have-nots and other inequities characteristic of the domination system.

So we have to look at other factors to understand why the Nordic nations moved out of poverty to develop a prosperous, more caring and equitable economic system in a relatively short time. Once we do, we see that what made these nations successful was their move toward the partnership configuration, which made it possible for them to become what they sometimes call themselves: "caring societies."

The core components of this configuration are mutually supporting and reinforcing. And one of its core components, in contrast to the domination system, is equality between the male and female halves of humanity. So women can, and do, occupy the highest political offices in the Nordic world. And this higher status of Nordic women has had important consequences for the values that guide Nordic policies.

In domination-oriented systems, men are socialized to distance themselves from women and anything stereotypically considered feminine. But in partnership-oriented cultures, men can give more value to caring, caregiving, nonviolence, and other traits and activities deemed inappropriate for men in dominator societies because they're associated with "inferior" femininity. So, along with the higher status of Nordic women, many men and women back more caring policies -- policies that give value and visibility to the work of caring for people and nature.

With the ascendancy of neoliberalism and the globalization of unregulated capitalism, over the last decades of the twentieth century Nordic nations too began to move somewhat toward more privatization. Nonetheless, they have been able to maintain most of their caring policies and hence their high rankings in international surveys of quality of life -- ranging from infant mortality rates (where the United States by contrast fell behind every industrialized nation and even behind poor ones like Cuba) to human rights and environmental ratings.

The basic reason is that these nations continue their massive investment of resources in caring for people and nature. Indeed, these nations contribute a larger percentage of their gross domestic product than other developed nations to caring international programs: programs working for fair economic development, environmental protection, and human rights.

Making the Invisible Visible

All this takes us back to where we started: the need to restructure economic systems in ways that go beyond the old capitalism vs. socialism debate. To effectively address our growing economic, social, and environmental problems, we need a new economics. We need a system that leaves behind the dominator elements of capitalism and socialism, preserves their partnership elements, and is governed by economic structures, policies, and practices that give visibility and real value to caring for ourselves, others, and our Mother Earth.

A first step is recognizing that the exclusion of caring and caregiving from mainstream economic theory and practice has caused enormous, and unnecessary, human suffering. Indeed, the systemic devaluation of the activities that contribute the most to human welfare and development lies behind a kind of economic insanity that is reflected in, and perpetuated by, conventional indicators of productivity such as GDP (gross domestic product) and GNP (gross national product).

These measures of "economic health" actually place activities that harm life (like selling cigarettes) and the profits derived from those activities (like the medical and funeral costs that result from smoking-related illnesses and deaths) on the plus side. Yet they give absolutely no value to the life-sustaining activities of both the household economy and the natural economy. So an old stand of trees is included in GDP only when it's cut down -- whereas the fact that we need trees to breathe is ignored. Similarly, the caring and caregiving work performed in households is given no value whatsoever, and economists speak of parents who do not hold outside jobs as "economically inactive" -- even though they often work from dawn to late at night.

Some people will say that this household work -- without which there would be no workforce -- cannot be quantified. But the reality is that it is already being quantified. Thanks to the activism of women's organizations worldwide, many nations now have "satellite" accounts that quantify the value of the work of caring for people and keeping healthy home environments that has traditionally been considered "women's work." For instance, a Swiss government report shows that if the unpaid "caring" household work were included, it would make up 70 percent of the reported Swiss GDP! Yet none of this information is found in conventional economic treatises — be they capitalist or socialist.

The devaluation of this work is further reflected in the fact that, in the market economy, professions that involve caregiving are paid far less than those that do not.

So in the United States, people think nothing of paying plumbers, the people to whom we entrust our pipes, $50 to $100 per hour. But child care workers, the people to whom we entrust our children, according to the U.S. Department of Labor are paid an average of $10 an hour, with no benefits. And we demand that plumbers have some training, but not that all child care workers have training.

This is not logical. It's pathological. But to understand, and change, this distorted system of values -- and to effectively address seemingly intractable problems such as poverty and hunger -- we again have to look at matters that are only visible once we recognize the configurations of the partnership system and the domination system.

Economic Policy, Poverty, and the Hidden System of Gendered Values

Many people, including politicians, think it's OK to have big government deficits to fund prisons, weapons, and wars -- all stereotypically associated with men and "real masculinity." But when it comes to funding caring for people -- for child care, health care, early childhood education, and other such expenditures -- they say there's not enough money.

If we look back just a few hundred years, we see this devaluation of the "feminine" in stark relief. At that time, Western culture still looked like some of the most repressive societies do today. The norm was an authoritarian structure in both the family and the state. Wars and religious persecutions were chronic. And women and anything associated with them were so devalued that some theologians seriously doubted that women have immortal souls.

There has obviously, since then, been movement toward the partnership system -- albeit against enormous resistance and periodic regressions. But the gendered system of valuations we inherited is still extremely resistant to change -- so much so that when men embrace traits considered "soft" or "feminine" they are tarred with derisive terms such as "effeminate" and "sissy." Another symptom of this devaluation of women and anything associated with them is that discrimination against the female half of humanity is still generally seen as "just a women's issue" — to be addressed after more important problems are solved.

So while politicians often say their goal is ending, or at least decreasing, poverty and hunger, they hardly ever mention a staggering statistic: women represent 70 percent of those in our world who live in absolute poverty, which means starvation or near starvation. Also ignored in conventional discussions of poverty is that globally, women earn an average of two-thirds to three-fourths as much as men for the same work in the market economy and that most of the work women do in families -- including child care, health and elder care, housekeeping, cooking, collecting firewood, drawing and carrying water, and subsistence farming -- is not remunerated.

This is by no means to say that only women suffer economically from our domination heritage. Men also suffer, and this is particularly true of the men at the bottom of the domination pyramid. Yet women are still the most oppressed, the "slaves of the slaves," as John Lennon wrote.

Even in the rich United States, woman-headed families are the lowest tier of the economic hierarchy. In addition, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate of women over sixty-five is almost twice that of men over sixty-five.

The fact that worldwide poverty and hunger disproportionately affect women is neither accidental nor inevitable. It is the direct result of political and economic systems that still have a strong dominator stamp. For example, the fact that older women are so much more likely to live in poverty than older men, even in an affluent nation like the United States, is not only due to wage discrimination in the market economy; it is also largely due to the fact that these women are, or were for much of their lives, caregivers -- and this work is neither paid nor later rewarded through social security or pensions.

Again, this is not to say that economic inequities based on gender are more important than those based on class, race, or other factors. These inequalities are all inherent in domination systems. But a basic template for the division of humanity into "superiors" and "inferiors" that children in dominator families internalize early on is a male-superior/female-inferior model of our species. And this template can then be applied to ranking race over race, religion over religion, and so forth.

Economics through a New Lens

When societies move toward the partnership side of the partnership-domination continuum (and it's always a matter of degree), women and the "feminine" are not devalued. And this benefits not only women but also men and children of both genders.

We have empirical evidence of this -- although once again it is ignored in conventional economic and social analyses.

The study "Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life," conducted by the Center for Partnership Studies, compared statistical measures on the status of women using measures of quality of life such as infant mortality, human rights ratings, and environmental ratings from eighty-nine nations. We found that in significant respects the status of women can be a better predictor of quality of life than can gross domestic product.

Other studies also verify this relationship between the status of women and a society's general quality of life. The World Values Survey is the largest international survey of attitudes and how they correlate with economic development and political structure. For the first time, in 2000 this survey focused attention on attitudes about gender. Based on data from 65 societies representing 80 percent of the world's population, it found a strong relationship between support for gender equality and a society's level of political rights, civil liberties, and quality of life.

There are many reasons for a correlation of the status of women with a higher or lower quality of life for all. One, of course, is that women make up half of any population. But the reasons go much deeper, to the still largely unrecognized and undiscussed dynamics of domination systems. Here are just two examples:

Dominator Male Preference:

In some world regions, the ranking of males over females is so ingrained that parents (both mothers and fathers) not only deny girls access to education and give them less health care but also often feed girls less than boys. These practices obviously have extremely adverse consequences for girls and women. But giving less food to girls and women also adversely impacts the development of boys.

It is well known that children of malnourished women are often born with poor health and below-par brain development. So this gender-based nutritional and health care discrimination robs all children, male or female, of their birthright: their potential for optimal development. This in turn affects children's and later adults' abilities to adapt to new conditions, tolerance of frustration, and propensity to use violence -- which in their turn impede solutions to chronic hunger, poverty, and armed conflict, and with this, chances for a more humane, prosperous, and peaceful world for all.

Dominator Intra-Household Resource Allocation:

The above is just one consequence of something else left out of conventional economic analyses: the patterns of intra-household resource allocation characteristic of domination systems.

There is empirical evidence across diverse cultures and income groups that women have a higher propensity than men to spend on goods that benefit children and enhance their capacities. How much higher this propensity is was shown by Duncan Thomas in his report "Intra-Household Resource Allocation." He found that in Brazil, $1 in the hands of a Brazilian woman has the same effect on child survival as $18 in the hands of a man. Similarly, Judith Bruce and Cynthia B. Lloyd found that in Guatemala an additional $11.40 per month in a mother's hands would achieve the same weight gain in a young child as an additional $166 earned by the father.

Of course, there are men even in rigidly male-dominated cultures who give primary importance to meeting their families' needs. Typically, however, men in these cultures are socialized to believe it's their prerogative to use their wages for non-family purposes, including drinking, smoking, and gambling, and that when women complain, they are nagging and controlling. As Dr. Anugerah Pekerti, chair of World Vision, Indonesia, notes, many fathers seem to have no problem putting their immediate desires above the survival needs of their children.

Yet traditional economic theories, capitalist and socialist, are based on the assumption that the male head of household will expend the resources he controls for the benefit of all family members. Not only that, development aid programs still allocate enormous funds to large-scale projects in which women have little or no say -- and from which poor women and children derive few if any benefits. Even microlending or "village loan" programs that largely target women generally provide only minimal amounts -- often at exorbitant interest rates. And the bulk of large bank loans go to businesses owned by male elites or to male "heads of household."

Indeed, it is well known that much of the humanitarian government aid from developed to developing nations winds up in the hands of elites who deposit it in Swiss banks, build mansions, and otherwise line their pockets with it. Even when funds go directly to the poor, these too often end up in the pockets of men who use them for themselves rather than for their families. The effect of this on the general quality of life is not hard to see.

I want to again emphasize that what I'm reporting is not intended to blame men for our world's economic ills. We're dealing with a system in which both women and men are socialized to accept the notion that one half of our species is put on earth to be served and the other half to serve, and that mothers, but not fathers, must subordinate their needs and desires to those of their families.

This economic double standard, and with it the subordination of the stereotypically feminine to the stereotypically masculine, not only hurts women; it hurts us all. It hurts men in a myriad ways -- from the psychological pain of having to disassociate themselves from the "feminine," including their own mothers, to the economic and political consequences of devaluing and subordinating women and anything associated with them.

Domination, Our Environment, and Technology

Even our environmental crisis is largely a symptom of the distorted values inherent in domination systems. We're often told that the scientific-industrial revolution that began to gain momentum in the eighteenth century is to blame for the havoc we're wreaking on our natural life-support systems. But the "conquest of nature" worldview goes back much further.

We've inherited an economics based on the premise that man is entitled to control both woman's and nature's life-sustaining activities. In Genesis 1:28 we read that man is to "subdue" the earth and have "dominion ... over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." In Genesis 3:16 we read that man is to rule over woman, who is to be his subordinate.

I want to emphasize that this notion of male control over nature and woman was not introduced in the Bible. We already find it millennia earlier. For example, the Babylonian Enuma Elish tells us that the war god Marduk created the world by dismembering the body of the Mother Goddess Tiamat. This myth superceded earlier myths about a Great Mother who created nature and humans as part of nature through her life-giving powers with a story where the violence of a male deity brings forth the world. It not only signals the beginning of a period when female deities, along with women and anything associated with them, were subordinated; it also signals a shift to a domination system in which masculinity is equated with domination and conquest -- be it of women or of nature.

Domination systems have always despoiled nature. This goes way back to a time of massive climate change when prehistoric herders created scarcities that, in turn, fostered relations based on domination.

Using a large computerized database correlating information on climate change over thousands of years with archaeological data, geographer James DeMeo mapped these changes in the great desert belt he calls Saharasia (extending roughly from North Africa through the Middle East into central Asia). He found that what was once a garden of plenty gradually became a barren, cruel land. But climate change was only part of the story. When the land grew drier, farming became impossible, so herding became the primary technology. And, as vegetation became ever sparser, human agency itself became a cause of desertification.

Trees were felled to open up more grazing land. As trees and plants disappeared, there was even less rain, as happens when forests are decimated to our day. As herds overgrazed more pastures, soils became even more barren.

In this ever harsher environment, habits of domination and exploitation became routine. Some groups began to fight others for access to grassland and water, and as men increasingly relied on brute force for a livelihood, women lost status and power. Gradually, raiding and killing spread from deserts to more fertile areas. The nomadic tribes of the wastelands began to encroach on the more fertile areas, first in occasional incursions and later as conquerors who imposed their rule.

As cultural historian Brian Griffiths notes, everything was now geared to conquest and control -- of women, "inferior" men, and the land. And this conquest mentality -- of nature, women, and other men -- continues to this day.

At our level of technological development, this ethos of domination threatens not just one region but our entire ecosystem. Already in 2005, the UN-sponsored Millennium Ecosystems Assessment reported that over the past fifty years human activity has depleted 60 percent of the world's grasslands, forests, farmlands, rivers, and lakes. Emissions from cars and power plants are responsible for higher temperatures that are melting polar ice so fast that glaciers on Greenland are slipping into the ocean twice as fast as they were just five years ago. Polar bears are drowning. And scientists warn that rising seas may engulf coastal cities in just a few decades.

Almost every day another study details the insanity of our present course. But the plunder of nature, now aided by powerful technologies that cause terrible harm in a matter of years, or even months and days, continues unabated.

Yet none of this is inevitable. It can be changed.

Endings and Beginnings

The mix of high technology and an ethos of domination is not sustainable. Therein lies the danger. But the upheavals and dislocations of our time also offer an opportunity for a fundamental social and economic shift.

It's not only that the old economic models -- both capitalist and socialist -- came out of the industrial era and we're rapidly moving into the postindustrial era. The current economic meltdown and the meltdown of the ice caps are not isolated events: both are symptoms of the domination system reaching its logical end.

We must build economic structures, rules, policies, and practices that support caring for ourselves, others, and nature in both the market and the nonmarket economic sectors. At the same time, we must accelerate the shift to partnership cultures and structures worldwide so that anything stereotypically considered "soft" or "feminine" -- such as caring and caregiving -- is no longer devalued.

Market rules -- both locally and globally -- must be changed to reward caring business practices and penalize uncaring ones. To make these changes we must show that this benefits not only people and nature but also business.

Hundreds of studies show the cost-effectiveness of supporting and rewarding caring in the market economy. To give just one example, companies that regularly appear on the Working Mothers or Fortune 500 lists of the best companies to work for -- that is, companies with good health care, child care, flextime, parental leave, and other caring policies -- have a higher return to investors.

On the national policy level, we already saw how in Nordic nations, caring policies played a major role in their move from dire poverty to a high quality of life for all. Other examples abound, such as reports of the enormous financial benefits that have come from investing in parenting education and assistance (as shown by the Canadian Healthy Babies, Healthy Children program) and investing in high-quality early childhood education (as shown by follow-up studies of the U.S. Abecedarian Project).

There are many ways of funding this investment in our world's human infrastructure -- which should be amortized over a period of years, as is done for investments in material infrastructure, such as machines and buildings. One way is to shift funding from the heavy investment in weapons and wars characteristic of domination systems. Another is through the savings a society gains when it no longer has to pay the immense costs of not investing in caring and caregiving: the huge expenditures of taxpayer money on crime, courts, prisons, lost human potential, and environmental damage. Taxes on financial speculation and other harmful activities, such as making and selling junk food, can also fund investment in caring for people and our natural habitat.

Good care for children will ensure we have the flexible, innovative, and caring people needed for the postindustrial workforce. Both psychology and neuroscience show that whether these capacities develop largely hinges on the quality of care children receive.

Educating and remunerating people for caregiving will help close the "caring gap" -- the worldwide lack of care for children, the elderly, and the sick and infirm. And it will eventually lead to a redefinition of "productivity" that gives visibility and value to what really makes us healthy and happy -- and in the bargain leads to economic prosperity and ecological sustainability.

Economic systems are human creations. They can be changed. We must build a political movement to pressure policymakers to make these changes — or change the policymakers. We must see to it that our world's governments make a massive investment in parenting education, paid parental leave, and innovative measures such as tax credits for caregivers and social security credit for the first years of caring for a child (as is already done in Norway).

We can all be leaders in building a social and economic system that really meets human needs -- not only our material ones but also our emotional and spiritual ones. The sidebar next to this article describes the six foundations needed for a truly new economic system. If we join together, we can build these foundations and create a future in which all children can realize their great potentials for consciousness, empathy, caring, and creativity -- the capacities that make us fully human.