It's Time to Think Boldly About Building a New American System

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:


It's Time to Think Boldly About Building a New American System
The inability of politics to address poverty, climate change, and other basic challenges has fueled extraordinary experimentation in American communities. Welcome to a new conversation on how we make change happen.

Editor's note: This video and statement are part of the Next System Project, a multi-year initiative to spark deep conversations on how to deal with systemic change in the coming decades.

It’s time for everyone who cares about our troubled country to face the depth of the systemic crisis we now confront as a nation. We must step back from the daily fray and ask: How do we actually get on a path to the kind of society—and world—we’d like now and for future generations? We must begin a real conversation—locally, nationally, and at all levels in between—on how to respond to the profound challenge of our time in history.

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending,” Lincoln said, “we could better judge what to do.” Today’s answer to Lincoln’s charge is grim. If one looks at “where we are” among advanced democracies across more than a score of key indicators of national well-being—including relative poverty, inequality, education, social mobility, health, environment, militarization, democracy, and more—we find ourselves exactly where we don’t want to be: at or near the bottom.

We face a systemic crisis

The challenging realities of growing inequality, political stalemate, and climate disruption prompt an important insight. When big problems emerge across the entire spectrum of national life, it cannot be due to small reasons. When the old ways no longer produce the outcomes we are looking for, something deeper is occurring. We have fundamental problems because of fundamental flaws in our economic and political system. The crisis now unfolding in so many ways across our country amounts to a systemic crisis.

Today’s political economic system is not programmed to secure the wellbeing of people, place and planet. Instead, its priorities are corporate profits, the growth of GDP, and the projection of national power. If we are to address the manifold challenges we face in a serious way, we need to think through and then build a new political economy that takes us beyond the current system that is failing all around us. However difficult the task, however long it may take, systemic problems require systemic solutions. .................(more)

http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/its-time-to-think-boldly-about-building-a-new-american-system

[obxhead]

1. k and r

[Ron Green]

2. THIS is the most important topic we could discuss on DU.

Not which rapists get harsher sentences, or why it's Hillary's turn, or what percentage of cops are bad. All worthy topics, sure, but when THIS thread builds as many responses as those (or all the Jerry Springer food-fights,) then we're on the way to somewhere.

[father founding]

3. It's ironic

That there won't be anything left for those who keep on trying to gain control of the world.

[Nay]

6. What's really sad is that those who are trying to control the world DON'T CARE

if there is anything left -- they just care that they have more than anyone else before it all goes to hell. It's the definition of sociopathic.

[tblue37]

4. KnR. nt

[libdem4life]

5. Here's a quick way to get started

www.copwatch.org Community Organizers. They have a GoFundMe account, as well.

Yes, we need a more formal system, but for now...for recent, former or new victims, this is very important.

How do we make these horrible tragedies worth something...prevent them from happening, at least as often.

[Carfuffle]

7. YES!

Cooperative businesses, community gardening, each of us caring for the other until we take our country back.

We CAN do this... one neighborhood, one community at a time. This is something we should be talking about here as well as sharing links to organizations we can support that are helping to move these ideas forward.

[Sanity Claws]

9. I agree

These things take money and power away from the large corporations and the concentrated wealth.

As part of this, all members of the 99 per cent should avoid using the large banks. Keep your money at a credit union.

[dotymed]

8. America. Adapt or Die.

Our country has become a pariah on the world. I miss the America that I grew up in. It had many problems and inequalities which I don't miss but today we are a fascist nation.

[niyad]

10. k and r

[LongTomH]

11. When I started reading future studies four decades ago........

.......I actually encountered the idea that both capitalism and socialism as we know them are obsolete and must be replaced by a new system. Sadly, since then futurism has largely been captured by conservative / libertarian think tanks like the Cato Institute; but, there are a few progressive voices speaking up, and they echo that earlier idea. One of those is Kim Stanley Robinson, best known for his Mars Trilogy, had a character in Green Mars make the statement that both capitalism and socialism contain elements both of the old feudalism and emerging, real democracy.

Think about it. Socialism actually embodies noblesse oblige, the idea that the lord of the manor had some responsibility for the well-being of the people under his rule. Some capitalists actually have a similar sense of responsibility; however, more and more just consider people markers in the quest for power and wealth, just like the slave-holding aristocracy of the old south.

The question is: What kind of economic system can we build? The new technologies can displace workers while increasing shareholder value; thereby increasing the gap between the very rich and everyone else. The real meaning of those same technologies is, that we have the capability to provide a decent standard of living for everyone on this planet; that's what the late R. Buckminster Fuller was trying to tell us.

[Ron Green]

12. When Hillary starts talking about this, and we quit talking about

her logo, we have a chance.