Is anyone really addressing the global crisis?

By Dennis Bumstead, PhD

I’ve just returned to the USA, after some weeks in the Third World, in part on a spiritual retreat. I’m struck more than ever by the lack of productive address to our multi-toothed-and-clawed Global Crisis – and by the lack of any comprehensive critique in the mainstream media.

The dire situation in the Third World

For those in the Third World, the escalating global crisis comes on top of long-established deprivations caused by poverty, malnutrition and environmental degradation. They also suffer the effects of the many wars which are often conducted, sponsored or ignored (and always armed) by the so-called “developed” nations .

Yet the mainstream media seems unable to connect the dots in global crisis. For example Dean Baker writes in The Guardian on Economics in a bubble: The cheerleaders for America’s toxic boom want us to bail out US banks. They were wrong then – and are wrong now.

Baker offers an intelligent critique of a significant aspect of the mainstream view of current economic problems. But his critique is very much limited to a litany of economic woes in advanced economies (the housing bubble; financial institutions; government response and so on) and never mentions the broader global implications, or anything beyond the confines of the dismal science itself.

The Financial Times reported on 22 April that the IMF sharply cut back their outrageously optimistic and inaccurate world economic forecast of only three months prior. Doubtless the revisions are still optimistic. The IMF continues its role of trying to prop up the status quo, and accruing benefits to its masters in the “developed” nations. The report does not point out that, even if the IMF’s revised optimism were to prove justified, their forecast signals a death sentence for thousands, perhaps millions more Third World people. These are people who would not need to die if the global system were managed for the benefit of all, instead of for the few.

Millions in the Third World are already sentenced to death by the effects of disease and malnutrition.

Cynics in the mainstream western media seem to assume that a few hundred thousand more during a recession is collateral damage as the system is fixed. Calling the Third World the “developing world” is supposed to make us all feel better about these depredations visited on poor countries by our systemic global “fixes”.

A very sanitized explanation of the effects, all price statistics and no dead bodies, is found in a UN News Center report on food prices in developing countries:

High food prices persist in developing countries despite an improved global cereal supply situation and a sharp decline in international food prices, FAO warned today in its latest Crop Prospects and Food Situation report. This is creating further hardship for millions of poor people already suffering from hunger and undernourishment.

In all the acres of newsprint dedicated to the current crisis, nothing I am seeing in the mainstream media addresses the global totality of the escalating crisis we are in. Nothing.

An alternative: The Ordinary People’s Way of Global Cooperative Order

However, in the newly published edition of the book Not-Two Is Peace, The Ordinary People’s Way of Global Cooperative Order (2009), the author Adi Da has spelled out in detail:

• what the problems are,
• why the system cannot and will not continue – and that
• it will be determined, by our understandings and actions, “in the next handful of years” that

“The future is either going to be catastrophic disaster, or it is going to be the turnabout moment in human history, in which humankind will step out of its dark ages of “tribalism” into a new mode of human cooperative order.”

Adi Da points out that the world’s political economy simply can not continue, built as it is on a model of growth for the rich and depletion for the poor. The system as is simply unsustainable, as more and more nation-”tribes” try to get in on the so-called “good life”.

Can we expect the “G-establishment”, (the G8, G20, GSacks, GM etc etc) and creatures thereof, (the World Bank and IMF) and personages thereof (the Geitners, Summerses, Gordon Browns, Sarkozys et al) to lead us anywhere except toward the vain attempt to re-establish the status quo / business-as-usual?

The mainstream economist critics I read, such as Krugman, Stiglitz, Roubini and Sacks, indicate that proposed solutions may not be enough, but also confine their proposals to sub-sectors of the total system.

Many propose change. But who is proposing real change? Change which is political, and social, and cultural, and psychological and spiritual, not just economic?

Al Gore has been a sustained and effective communicative voice for environmental change. But that is only part of the problem and environmental challenges are not soluble without radical change in other arenas. Many alternative writers / activists like Hazel Henderson and David Korten likewise address critical sub-sets of the issues. Hawken’s book Blessed Unrest suggests there is a mostly invisible movement already tackling many of these issues.

Adi Da is the only writer I have come across who fully addresses the issues that others treat in isolation. He proposes the formation of a Global Cooperative Forum, functioning on the basis of “prior unity” and managing the globe for the benefit of all instead of the few.

These ideas are likely to appeal to ‘early adopters’, those who are already beginning to notice that attempting to reinstall the status quo is very unlikely to work and interested in exploring real alternatives.

The book is fundamentally very clear. But it’s a challenging read none the less. In part because – well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? It addresses the conventions of global life that we have all been taught to assume but really no longer make sense.

Not-Two Is Peace :The Ordinary People’s Way of Global Cooperative Order, by Adi Da can be read on line.

Take a look, and let me know what you think in the comments area below.

Dennis Bumstead

Dennis grew up on three continents and studied economics, sociology and psychology, at Cambridge and Manchester and M.I.T. He taught at Manchester University, M.I.T., London and Antioch Universities, and was a consultant for Shell companies, for I.C.I., British Airways, J. Walter Thompson, Motorola and on the staff at the World Bank. For the past 10 years he has been working in the non-profit world. Since 2006 he has been the General Manager of the Global Cooperation Project.