What Time Is It?

What Time Is It? V, U, or L O’clock?

“How long before the economy recovers?” is now a frequent question. In this economic moment, the clock is ticking. What time is it? Is this the year of recovery? Or, is it the time when Earth’s support systems cannot support the demands placed on her by humanity’s economic recovery plans, now nine trillion dollars worldwide and growing?

Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank and now professor at Columbia University, speaks of economists wondering about how this current economic downturn will be graphed. Will there be a sharp upturn, graphed in a “V” shape? Will the bottom linger with a gradual upturn, graphed as a “U” shape? Or are we in an “L” shape graph in which the downturn is not followed by an upturn at all? (See Jonathan Shell, “Obama and the Return of the Real,” The Nation, Feb. 9, 2009)

Indeed, what time is it?

Any global economic recovery that further depletes Earth’s natural resources and raises atmospheric carbon levels is sure to be followed in the near future by a downturn even more difficult to manage than this one, if it doesn’t kill us along with thousands of other Godcreated species.

This is the time to change direction—not to bail out and put back in place systems that have led us to this hour of downturn, but to significantly alter and convert economic systems. It is the hour for moral reflection in which we face the spiritual barrenness of recent decades of economic practice and make new decisions guided by the Spirit of truth, showing compassion, and rooted in the wonder of our cosmos. It is the hour to turn to scores of structures that have been developed by alternative thinkers and entrepreneurs over the past thirty years and to evaluate how each of them can be useful on a larger scale, making sure to thank and reward the valiant innovators who boldly swam upstream against those creating economic bubbles and all who paid handsomely to debunk Earth-warming evidence.

This is not the time to make the too-big-to-fail and too-big-to-jail even bigger, but to embrace the small innovators; give them the policy and economic breaks they have not had while creating alternatives, federate them, and reward them for their courage of showing what we can do instead of creating policy around the nay-sayers in corporations so big they cannot or will not adjust to this economic and ecological moment.

Some of the structures that have been improvised in the past decades can be found on this Jubilee Economics Ministries website. Fair Trade is a workable alternative to “free” trade. “Free” trade agreements such as NAFTA have been used long enough now to show how they have hurried the depletion of natural resources and reduced the middle class in the U.S. while structuring low wages for the working poor worldwide. Fair Trade strengthens workers, their cooperatives, and their environment, bringing right relationships to people and creation. A second structure is that of Community Land Trusts (CLTs). These empower neighborhoods to resist the dislocation of people caused when big money and development processes enter a neighborhood. Development too often equals displacement rather than organizing the people and equipping them to work toward the vision that they have for their community. Scores of strategies such as Fair Trade and CLTs now exist.

Jubilee Economics is now one of many names given to economic practices and theory that have both ancient and contemporary track records. Link on this website to Solidarity Economics Network and Center for the Advancement of Steady State Economics and we see many more.

All of these “alternative” economic ideas and practices now need to become complementary if not mainstream. The alternative to these still-called “alternatives” is more failure. Now is the hour for the changeover in economic models. What will it look like? Some of the ingredients of the next model will be:

1. An economy that can be very strong without perpetually needing to grow. By copying nature, we can see life-cycles without unending growth. Nature shows us that unending growth is what happens in cancer cells and when exotic species take over and destroy the local and natural bioregion.
2. An economy that is less focused in consumer spending. Currently, consumer spending comprises 70% of the U.S. economy’s gross domestic product (GDP). Contrast that with Germany, which has a strong standard of living but counts on consumer spending for only 50% of its GDP. Our planet will not remain inhabitable by a growing population and economies requiring that population to spend and consume fervently to sustain an economy. Such an economic model will fail.
3. An economy redirected toward community. It will reduce the extremes to which privatization and commoditization have evolved as the current systems frantically seek to privatize new resources and make commodities for new markets. To do so, global corporations lobby governments for policies that externalize true costs onto the environment even though it can no longer sustain life, or ultimately, their business.

If the hour is now “L” o’clock, then it is time for spiritual change. Our inherent spiritual capacities, engaged by the Divine Spirit of Life in the universe, are already responding. As we change, we will be met by the many whose courageous innovative work is already well along in developing what we need to align us economically with what Creation can support ecologically.