Existential Challenges

The limitations of our current global systems failure to address the needs of Earth and Humanity are glaring in what they prevent our collective imaginations into reality.

Our centuries-old nation states are no longer adequate to deal with what is emerging in our time. We’ve outgrown them, and you can easily see that by looking at the Internet, or at the impotence of nations facing multinational corporations, global financial markets, and global commodities markets, or at Asian countries leasing the agricultural land in Africa to feed hungry populations in Asia.

Antiquated systems and policies react to our crises through hundreds of disconnected lenses on macro-developments, and conflicting national interests—each crisis seen as a silo independent from the rest, laid out by specialized experts in business, government, technology, the media or academe.

We are now in a period of history that can best be described as an era of a cascade of planetary crises. Most connect to the climate crisis, which is already here. Today’s collection of crises is worse than anyone predicted: food and drinking water crises; droughts, floods and extreme weather; rising sea levels, drowning most seaports and coastal areas; peak oil; melting arctic permafrost, releasing huge amounts of methane and accelerating climate change; massive climate refugee problems; a unstable global financial system; religious terrorism and ethnic conflicts worsening; and climate-caused wars.

In a dynamic systems model of our current period, a fork in our historical road results: we can fall into a death spiral, or we can rebound to a higher level than the depths of the crises, and quite possibly to a higher level than before the crises. New dimensions are emerging that describe potential paths our planetary system can take. This creates both dangers and opportunities as our emerging system wanders far from equilibrium. Innovation creates new system dimensions and new strategic opportunities.

Many people appear paralyzed with fear by the dangers before us, or are in denial. Yet in our era in history, powerful trends are now occurring worldwide that point to new Emancipatory Futures that are already emerging.

Growing Inequality

According to Oxfam, 82% of the wealth generated in 2018 went to the richest one percent of the global population, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth.

Wealth distribution in America has become so skewed that the middle class has really become the working poor, while the bottom 20% of the population have been pushed off of the edge. This does not lead to a healthy economy, or social cohesion. Studies have shown that where income distribution is extremely distorted the health of all members of society, including the very rich, is reduced.

This diagram highlights the disparity between what people think the ideal distribution of wealth is, and the actual distribution. In America, inequality has already reached levels not seen since the First World War. According to a recent UN report, forty million Americans now live in poverty, including 5.3 million “in Third-World conditions of absolute poverty.” The richest fifteen Americans, meanwhile, have a combined wealth of more than a trillion dollars. 

These gaps make clear why social tensions are rising. Solutions within our current entrenched and antiquated political and economic systems have no ability to articulate alternative futures, or address income inequality and our global existential ecological crisis.

Scarcity Economics is Killing Us

Total cost for Carbon Renewal and Green New Deal like programs $120 + Trillion between now and 2030.

Total amount of money in the world created by scarcity economic systems $90 Trillion Dollars

Our sacristy based monetary and the political system that reinforce it do not recognize the sacredness of the earth and all life. In order to begin the process of addressing our current global crisis we must move into new systems that are centered in Peace, Love and Purpose.

Some Immediate Needs

1. Health Care - Only a fraction of “American” citizens have or can afford access to Health Care. To be profitable or to be provided at cost the modern medical service of private enterprise will be priced beyond the means of most global citizens. One option is to have public enterprise subsidize health care cost. Most global citizens cannot pay health care insurance premiums. Cost estimate for a decade of Universal Health Care in American = $30 Trillion Dollars.
2. Student Debt - In American we have a student debt crisis. Specialized training and Higher Education should be taken on as a public enterprise and be subsidized. Cost estimate to pay off existing student loans and to pay for ten years of Specialized Training and Higher Education = $2 Trillion dollars.
3. Child Care - In most families both parents are working or only have a single parent that is working. Private enterprise usually provides child care services. To be profitable the price for private enterprise provided health care cannot be afford by most Americans. Public Enterprise must produce and pay for high quality child care for all American families. Cost Estimate to pay facilities and labour for Child Care for all  for 10 years  = $1 trillion dollars.
4. Affordable Housing - Private Enterprise produces housing for profit and sets prices far higher than most Americans cannot afford to pay. Public Enterprise must play a  major roll in the construction and ownership operations of strategic sections of the housing industry. Cost Estimate to pay for land acquisition, building, design, construction and management of 7 million national housing coop units over the next 10 years $1 trillion dollars.
5. Physical Infrastructure - Repair current infrastructure without modernization over the next 10 years $4 trillion dollars.

* Current total without Green New Deal is $38 Trillion or 3.8 Trillion per year.

* These are funds that cannot be created by zero sum monetary theory. 

*  2020-2030 - We need to remove one trillion tons of Carbon from the Atmosphere.

* Cost of extracting 1 trillion tons of Carbon = $40 Trillion Dollars.

* Cost of subsidizing needed change in Human behavior and changing manufacturing and energy infrastructure that is needed to reduce carbon output = $1 Trillion a year for 10 years for U.S. This figure is easily doubled if we include a global effort.

* Total cost for Carbon Renewal and Green New Deal like programs $60 + Trillion between now and 2030.

* The total for the green new deal plus the other four initiatives is $98 + Trillion Dollars

* Current estimate of available money in the world under standard monetary theory is only $90 Trillion Dollars.

* This can only be solved with Douglass' New Modern Money and Beloved Community Economics.

*  It is willfully self-harming to confront a collective need—for which the labor and materiel are available to provide a remedy—but refuse to  employ/ that labor and materiel by arguing that doing so will create an imbalance in a zero sum monetary system.