Hot talks about G20 (PART I)

(bbs.chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2009-03-27 15:32

From Robert Ezergailis Hamilton, Canada

NOTES TOWARDS A NEW SOCIETY - WHAT CAN G20 DO ? (Part One)

NOTES TOWARDS A NEW SOCIETY - WHAT CAN G20 ACCOMPLISH ?

WHAT SHOULD THE G20 ACHIEVE ?

1. Establish a needs based subsidy fund to provide hard pressed industries to modernize and meet environmental standards, with contributions based on ability to pay.

This is a fundamental step towards values based economics. What is good and right for humanity’s future, most often in terms of the conditions of work and environmental achievements, is often in conflict with traditional cost and profit margin analysis. It is that conflict which must be eliminated. While some might argue that those economic entities unable to meet the costs of standards should be put out of business, the impact of following that line of thinking, has long been proven as highly damaging to maintaining a healthy economy, minimizing local economic impact, and avoiding the rise of a dangerous form of monopoly capitalism. We must remember that the viability of the subsidiaries of even the largest corporations tends to be independently assessed, in terms of cost and margin. The fact that that subsidiary can borrow capital more readily, and often exists in a more captive supplier and customer relation, does not eliminate the fact that if it becomes “unprofitable” it is typically closed down. This has stood in the way of many ideals in terms of working conditions, modernizations, productivity improvements, and environmental achievement.

Cost cutting and maintenance of margins can be even more acute when large corporations are applying pressure on what are often deemed very expendable subsidiaries to maintain their existence by maintaining and increasing “bottom line” profits. To achieve social, environmental, cultural, long term values becomes difficult or impossible. Working conditions (including economic stability) and the environment tend to be the first victims. To achieve those values and maintain economic viability, there needs to be a source of money that is made available to corporations, small and large, which is made available according to the model of to each according to their real needs, and from each according to their ability to contribute. That type of values oriented fund, more fairly subsidizing good work and good economic activity, would achieve progress attainable by no other means other than complete nationalization and total government regulation of economic activity. The cost and profit accounting model has not proven its capability in regards to achieving long term values and adequate corporate ethics and citizenship. Clearly industry needs the help, rather than only the destructive pressures to conform to new and more stringent rules. While the rules are a necessity, in the long term, a means must be found to alleviate the problem of many being forced out of business, or forced to relocate, due to those pressures. The fund resolves that problem.

2. Establish a means to subsidize production where human needs and high costs are in conflict (eg. desert reclamation for agriculture).

This is another step towards a values based economics, away from reliance on cost and profit margin analysis as the absolute standard for “right” economic action. It is a system where commodity prices are negotiated and set, within limits, and subsidies are utilized to assist economic production of commodities where human needs, in the broadest long term sense of needs, justify subsidization of that economic activity. Desert reclamation in Africa and China would be high priorities today, for that type of subsidization, due to the potential for serious food crisis situations and due to long term environmental needs. Nevertheless, the commodity pricing must be maintained for the commodities produced, within limits that do not allow the full attribution of all the costs of production to the price of the commodity produced. The values involved in producing that commodity stand above the actual cost and margin calculations, unable to rely on that calculation for economic decision making and also needing to avoid the damage that is brought about by price inflation.

3. Reduce world economy's reliance on consumer lending.

There needs to be a return to economics based on living within actual means, rather than living on the basis of borrowing. However, that means that a new effort must be made to assure that those means are in fact adequate and that means adequately competitive within the society in which those means are to be achieved. Excessive borrowing is often the result of inadequate means within the society in which it occurs. We are referring to consumer borrowing, not business borrowing. Different criteria need to be applied in the two very different cases.

4. Establish R&D cooperation for goods of greater lasting value, reducing reliance on fads and obsolescence.

Obsolescence and scrap of poorly made, of little or no lasting value, goods is one of the most damaging trends in modern societies. That trend must be reversed to one that supports the making of goods of lasting value, increasing the value attributed to quality materials used to make quality things. The human and environmental impact of this change in thinking is immense beyond measure. In fact how people are valued is largely tied to the changing value of the things that they produce and that they consume and use. Social and cultural value have been eroded by the destruction of material value in a society relying on poorly made, poorly designed, things without real craftsmanship and artisanship maintaining any significant role in their production. People become devalued as things become devalued. Few things today are made to be passed on from generation to generation. Few things are made to be truly valued and cherished. We must reassert a true materialism where things of value are once again raised up to a more traditional role, against the destructive garbage culture of fads and obsolescence.

Motor vehicles are a prime example. I can envision a completely redesigned vehicle, designed for a life expectancy of more than 20 years, of economically serviceable life, eliminating more than half of the costly waste that current vehicle production creates, and improving environmental achievement. It would take a total redesign, involving new concepts, previously unimplemented and perhaps unthought of within the automotive industry. It does mean that those vehicles can be financed over a ten year period, making them more accessible to a larger portion of the population. They would be more economically serviceable due to factors in the redesign that would revolutionize how we design complex things that we regularly rely on and use, setting new ideals and principles into place that would become applicable to a wide range of products, to meet new long term environmental standards and to revolutionize values. Due to the fact that the automobile is at the core of many major economies, and is an object of envy for economies that have not yet achieved the same levels of growth, it is necessarily at the core of revolutionized values. It’s total redesign in terms of those values is essential.

5. Funds for cultural resurgence.

Culture has been steadily reduced down to an ever growing stress on the “rewards” that come manifest as the material acquisition and consumption of goods that are poorly made and of little or no lasting worth. The arts have been suffering as much as the sciences. People are increasingly reduced to being spectators, barely able to participate culturally and not really knowing how or able to question what is at the root of the growing mass discontent. Dramatic theatre, opera, orchestras, the real worth of film making of real artistic merit (rather than pandering to technical prowess and the declining quality of mass tastes that are increasingly craving for sensation), are all in decline as to means and ways. They are increasingly unsupported. The work in art galleries is in similar decline discouraged from competing with mass culture of poorly made things which are destined for the garbage heap that society is itself rapidly turning into. In some regards it is the lack of money, experienced by the average person, that is eroding and eliminating what is potentially “good”, and as that happens we see a deterioration of appreciations and “tastes” seen as a natural evolution of social trends, but in fact it is the rapid destruction of society itself. Standards of quality, and understanding and appreciation of true cultural values is in decline. Education in cultural values and aesthetics is in decline. Some are increasingly comparing our modern urban cultures to primitive tribalism and a “jungle”. It is tending towards that type of decay with much of architecture and cultural life, deteriorating along with it, furthering that same persistence of decay into total cultural nihilism.

There is a growing need for greatly increased funding for education, achievement, and promotion of a resurgence of true cultural values. This must include education in the arts, in music, and in theater. The trend to thoughtless consumption of poorly crafted, disposable, media product, as the predominant standard of participation, needs to be countered with a resurgence of real values.

THANK YOU.

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