Creating a game plan for the transition to a sustainable U.S. economy

[depakid]

The Obama administration should take advantage of the economic crisis to redefine the country’s social goals to prioritize sustainable human well-being and not just grow the economy. We should strive for a future that has full employment and more leisure time to spend with friends and family, thereby reducing conspicuous consumption and poverty. This article envisions what that society might look like with redefined goals, and includes specific ideas as to how to achieve this vision.

Key Concepts

* The economic crisis should be viewed as an opportunity to drastically reprioritize our goals to emphasize sustainable design and healthy living over economic growth

* If we take small steps, we will never achieve real reform. Now is the time for bold action

* China has a vision for moving forward, while the U.S. is on the defensive

* Five key steps must be taken: getting off fossil fuels, taking money out of politics, shifting values, changing the structure of the corporation, and moving to a full-cost accounting system

The United States—indeed, the global community—is at a crossroads. We have a choice between two futures.

The first is business as usual. In an effort to continue economic growth in the conventional sense (growing Gross Domestic Product with little concern for distribution of wealth), we exacerbate all of the problems that GDP growth is increasingly causing. We fail to recognize that such growth in the developed countries is not improving human well-being. We fail to recognize that distributing our wealth more fairly would actually improve overall well-being. We do not address the growing climate and other environmental problems and continue to damage the ecological life-support systems on which we all depend, particularly the poor. We fail to anticipate and deal with the constraints inherent in our dependence on finite resources such as fossil fuels. It is a future that is not sustainable and also not desirable to the vast majority of humans.

The second future is much brighter: Extreme poverty is eradicated. Our energy economy in the United States and worldwide shifts to clean, renewable resources. Ecological design becomes business as usual, and humankind finally accepts its role as an integral participant in and steward of the environmental systems upon which true prosperity depends.

In short, we have a choice to become victims of the future or its architects.

We have not yet made a choice in the United States, although as President Barack Obama has noted, this is the moment we can. And this is the moment when we must if we wish to avoid Future No. 1 and to create a future of genuine prosperity and security in the 21st century.

So how do we begin?

When President Obama made his first visit to China in December 2009, the American media did some soul searching. Why was China such a vibrant economy and an emerging superpower, while the world's sole superpower and largest economy—the United States—seemed in trouble? What could the United States learn from China?

"The energy that so many outsiders feel when they are in China and that President Obama may see when he is there comes not just from the frenetic activity that is visible everywhere," Time magazine reported on the eve of President Obama's trip. "It comes also from a sense that it's harnessed to something bigger. The government isn't frantically building all this infrastructure just to create make-work jobs . . . ou get a sense of what a forward-looking country this once very backward society has become."

In short, China has a vision and a plan. America, particularly in this time of deep political division, does not. We would argue that the greatest challenge facing the United States is not health care reform, not the recession, not the flu pandemic, not the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and not the federal budget deficit. Our greatest challenge, shared by leaders and citizens alike, is to envision what we want to become and how we will get there, taking into account the new realities of the 21st century, with all the risks they imply for national security, public health and safety, and economic stability.

America needs a vision and a five-year plan that redirects us toward it. In 2009, Solutions convened several of America's experts in sustainability, broadly defined, and asked them to brainstorm about such a plan. What is the roadmap to a truly sustainable and desirable society? What are the stepping-stones and milestones?

As one might expect from so fertile a group, the ideas that emerged are too numerous to report here. Solutions has posted many of them online at www.thesolutionsjournal.org. In this article, we take a few of the most salient ideas and present them as elements of a five-year plan to achieve—or at least to set us on the road toward.

More: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/53153

[Rosa Luxemburg]

1. forming workers' cooporatives

form a coop and make things to sell etc and profit belongs to workers not to some rich Joe.