HodgBlog

I have been thinking a lot lately about economic growth. It seems like the news media, and practically everyone else, assumes that if the economy is growing, it’s a good thing, and if it isn’t, something terrible is occurring. This assumption has been bothering me for a while, and I recently read a book that put my vague uneasiness into words: Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben. In this book, McKibben makes the following points:

• When you measure the economy, only things that cost money count. So, for instance, increases in things like hospital stays, divorces, and burning coal in out-dated power plants count towards economic growth, whereas things like volunteer work, walking rather than driving, and spending time reading a library book with your child don’t.
• Economic growth in recent decades has not actually increased most Americans’ real earnings or standard of living.
• We are already facing food and energy crises, which will get worse if we keep “growing” the way we have been, and we can’t afford the global warming that would result. (See my previous articles on The Energy Future and Biofuels for more information.)
• Economic growth that raises individuals’ income up to the point where their basic needs are reliably met (roughly $10,000 per person per year) certainly makes them happier, but after most people have reached that point, economic growth does not increase people’s happiness.

So the problem is clear: economic growth is not improving the world or our happiness, and it isn’t sustainable. Unfortunately, the solutions are not easy. Here are McKibben’s key ideas:

• In the area of measuring the economy: When we measure the the value of economic activities, put a value on the natural resources they use up, as well as the pollution they produce, and count that against their economic benefit. Also, rather than only measuring things that cost money, attach an economic value to happiness and to beneficial activities like teaching, volunteer work, and child raising.
• In the area of sustainability: Work on making our economy more localized instead of more globalized, letting each local community come together to figure out how to make itself better. McKibben is convinced that if we all try to make more of our economic activities local, we will both solve our larger economic problems and make ourselves happier, as we get more of a sense of being involved in a community. His ideas include using building materials that come from nearby; eating food that is grown on nearby, small organic farms; adding small wind turbines and solar panels to our cities; and building sidewalks, bike lanes, and bus rapid transit. It’s hard to argue that any of those would be a bad idea.

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I recently read a book called The Middle of Everywhere, by Mary Pipher. In it, Ms. Pipher shares stories of refugees who were settled in Lincoln, Nebraska over the past 10-20 years.

Many of the stories Ms. Pipher shared in her book were somewhat familiar to me — I’ve traveled a lot, I make an effort to follow the international news, and here in Seattle I have a lot of contact with immigrants in my volunteer work (teaching English as a Second Language and Spanish-English interpreting). Certainly, all immigrants have some things in common: they have to adjust to a new culture, in many cases a new language, and often a completely different job from what they did before. But this book focuses on refugees, who have additional difficulties, such as mental health issues arising from their history of being subject to war, political persecution, death threats, and the like in their home countries. So, as I read the stories in this book, at times I thought that the refugees it describes had little in common with the immigrants I normally come in contact with. But really, the differences are not as large as I thought at first. Even immigrants who lack official refugee status (it’s pretty hard to get) may have been persecuted at home for their beliefs, gender, or membership in an ethnic group, or may be trying to leave a country at war. Some of the women and children who come here are escaping domestic violence. And even the average undocumented Mexican immigrant worker has probably come here to work because he didn’t have any chance of making a living wage at home. All of these types of immigrants have a lot in common with refugees, in that they came here because they felt they really had no choice.

So, I really think this book is relevant and important for everyone living in a more privileged country to read. It is also well-written, and even though many of the stories might make us uncomfortable, we still need to know about them.

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I finally finished reading Chalmers Johnson’s book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which prompted me to think about the differences between the United States that our founding fathers envisioned, and wrote into the Constitution, and the United States we are living in today. Here are some thoughts.

• The Constitution set up a system of government with a separation of powers into three branches (legislative, executive, and judicial), specifying a system of checks (each branch has the ability to hold the other two branches accountable and reign in their power) and balances (each branch holds some of the power). However, today’s executive branch has upset the balance of power, and the legislative and judicial branches are not exercising their checks on its power. For instance, the Constitution gives the legislative branch the power to declare war, but instead the President declared war and gave Congress misleading “intelligence” so they would approve his declaration. Also the President is currently asserting that he is above the law, and can detain people without charges and use domestic electronic surveillance without a warrant; although the Constitution requires the President to uphold all the laws of the land, Congress and the judicial system have allowed these actions to continue. Finally, as I discussed in an earlier article, several presidents’ use of the CIA has also gone well beyond the bounds of the Constitution.
• The Constitution also specified that the US was supposed to be a democracy. However, there is no true democracy without an informed citizenry, and (as I wrote about briefly in a previous article), we have a situation today where the executive branch regularly feeds misinformation to the media, and the media reports it as fact instead of investigating. So, the public has no basis for understanding what its elected officials are really doing, and what is really going on in our government, and we don’t really have the ability to make informed decisions on whether to retain or get rid of our elected officials.
• The Constitution also specified that the US was supposed to have a representative government, where the elected officials would represent the public interest. However, with all the money it takes to get elected and then stay in office, our “representatives” are currently representing the interests mainly of their large donors and lobbyists, not the public. I believe that if the public was really informed about the effects of our policies, they would demand better representation, but since the news media are mostly owned by large corporations, the same ones who can afford to buy representation, they don’t have much incentive to provide us with this type of information.
• Finally, in direct conflict with the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence, stating that all people in the world have a fundamental right to self-government, the United States has become an empire whose aim is the domination of the entire planet through both economic and military means. I’ve written about these ideas in several previous articles and I believe that the evidence is clear; if you are unconvinced, read Chalmers Johnson’s book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which documents the world-domination strategy of the military-industrial complex and the CIA, and John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which documents the methods of economic domination.

I am not certain what can be done about these issues… I think the first step would be to make sure the public is aware of what is really happening in the world, but I don’t think this will happen any time soon. For instance, the public is increasingly aware of what is going on in Iraq, but that doesn’t seem to translate into skepticism about other actions of our government. I think this is in part because the news media (as discussed above) is controlled by corporate interests that do not want the present situation to change. Also, the people in the United States who would have the means (time and ability) to seek out good information, if they wanted to, are living pretty comfortably and probably don’t have much incentive to make changes.

Probably it will take a major crisis to bring the situation to the attention of the public. Chalmers Johnson thinks that this crisis will come soon, and he may be right: the current level of military spending is not sustainable, the overseas military presence we have now is not sustainable, and clearly some people in the world are rebelling against our domination strategies. Eventually we’ll also have an acute energy crisis to deal with. The question is whether either crisis will lead to further erosion of the Constitution, or whether the public will insist that those responsible be held accountable, and demand restoration of the system of government our founding fathers envisioned. We’ll see.

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In my earlier Where We Send Money post, I collected some facts about where the US government is sending aid, but didn’t say too much about those facts. Here are a few thoughts.

USAID says that we are sending out foreign aid in order to further US policy interests and improve the lives of people in the developing world. However, the effect (and I believe the intention) of much of our foreign aid is really to subjugate developing countries to US business interests. There’s much more on this subject in the excellent book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. In this book, John Perkins describes how he and others created totally fake economic analyses and used covert threats to convince developing countries to accept loans from the US. They spent the money hiring US companies to build unnecessary infrastructure, and the countries ended up with these “improvements” in exchange for large quantities of debt. The vast majority of very poor people in these countries received no benefit at all from the “aid”, and became even worse off when their governments were later forced to adopt new policies (such as cutting budgets for education and public health care) in order to put more money into paying off their debts.

I do not want to say that none of our foreign aid is going towards helping people — certainly, if we send food to hungry people in Africa, some of the food will likely go to people who would otherwise have nothing to eat. However, I believe that not much of the foreign aid money is actually helping people, and that this trend needs to be reversed.

So, I will continue with my research and see if I can more fully substantiate my beliefs. Stay tuned!

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My main reason for starting this blog was to collect some thoughts and facts about foreign aid, though I will probably put some unrelated posts in the blog as well.

Basically, I have been generally dissatisfied for many years with the effects on the world of US foreign policy and foreign aid, and suspicious about our government’s motivations in that arena. At the end of 2005, I read a very thought-provoking book about US foreign aid policy, called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins, which had some startling stories in it that confirmed my suspicions about what was really going on. Soon after reading that book, I went on a six-week trip to Nicaragua, where I saw some of the effects of US foreign aid, as well as foreign aid from other countries to Nicaragua. This was not my first trip abroad or to the less-well-off parts of Latin America, so nothing I saw was really new to me. However, this time I came back from my travels filled with the desire to do something: to make a change in the way the US, World Bank, and related agencies send foreign aid to Latin America (and probably to the rest of the developing world as well, though I know less about that).

But what can one person do? I have no intention (or chance) of becoming a high-ranking official in the cabinet, so I probably cannot have much direct effect on US foreign aid decisions. However, I have the sense (or at least hope) that if people in the US knew what was really going on in the arena of foreign aid, they would want to change our policies, and if enough people wanted to change our policies, eventually the politicians would have to listen to them and do something. So, my thought was that if I were going to try to educate people about what was going on, the first step would be to have some coherent information to give them, and that is what I plan to gather in this blog. It’s a small first step, and maybe it will not change anything, but it is, at least, something that is worth trying. We’ll see how it goes.

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