Not to worry, they tell us, we’re pulling out of this recession, we’re making progress – the key is more liquidity, more stimulus, more credit, more consumption, more growth.
The time has come to call their bluff.
We need to band together and challenge this powerful intellectual army, whose generals include Greenspan, Summers, Bernanke, Geithner, who have boots on the ground in Blankfein, Buffett, Bloomberg, Straus-Kahn, whose propaganda ministers include Wolf, Friedman, Krugman and textbook authors Samuelson, Nordhaus, Mankiw, and whose foot soldiers are the business and economics professors in universities around the world. Their combined efforts perpetuate the great economic myth of our time: the necessity of ever-increasing growth and consumption, a myth that keeps the ghost ship of consumer capitalism sailing perilously toward certain destruction.
There has never been a better time to wage this meme war. In the aftermath of the meltdown of 2008 (which not even one in a hundred economists saw coming), the profession is demoralized and ripe for a monumental mindshift … the very kind that transformed the science of astronomy 400 years ago, when we suddenly woke up to the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around. Today, as climate catastrophe looms, threatening the greatest market failure the world has ever seen, we are experiencing another mass awakening. We are beginning to realize that our human money economy is not the center of the world, but rather just a subset of the planetary bioeconomy.
You are feeling restless, the public has grown uneasy, and the internet is buzzing with dissent. The movement to overhaul curricula, pioneer new measures of progress and usher in a true-cost global market regime suddenly feels unstoppable.
Have some fun, whip up debate, slap up posters, invite dissenting guest speakers to address your class and relish the thrill of playing cat and mouse with your professors. We are standing at the beginning of a new era in which a new kind of economy, a sustainable economy, is struggling to be born.
Go to kickitover.org, read some articles, share them with a friend, print some posters and be a part of it.