Jobs: A Main Street Fix for Wall Street’s Failure

The Democracy Collaborative was one of 15 participating organizations contributing to the report, authored by John Cavanagh and David Korten, and published by the New Economy Working Group.

Emphasizing the failure of “Wall Street” to respond adequately to the unemployment crisis, the authors highlight the systemic issues that have arisen as a result of our increasingly financialized system of wealth which is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and advocate instead for a “new economy” whose principles would aim at restoring a broader distribution of wealth, insuring ecological sustainability, and building a more empowered “living democracy.”

Beyond quick fixes, the report ultimately argues that we must rewrite the rules of the global economy—rules which had most recently been rewritten in the wave of deregulation that spawned the current economic crisis—in order to truly meet the challenge of “job creation” in a meaningful way. More specifically, the authors suggest we need a new economy that can:

Redefine our economic priorities by replacing financial indicators with real-wealth indicators as the basis for evaluating economic performance.
Restructure the money system to root the power to create and allocate money in Main Street financial institutions that support Main Street job creation.
Restore the middle class by restoring progressive tax policies and a strong and secure social safety net.
Create a framework of economic incentives that favor human-scale enterprises that are locally owned by people who have a natural interest in the health and well-being of their community and its natural environment.
Protect markets and democracy from corruption by concentrations of unaccountable corporate power.
Organize the global economy into substantially self-reliant regional economies that align and partner with the structure and dynamics of Earth’s biosphere.
Put in place global rules and institutions that secure the universal rights of people and support democratic self-governance and economic self-reliance at all system levels.

While certainly ambitious in scope, the report—written in clear prose and intended for a general audience—is a very useful synthesis of many emerging insights and established best practices.

Posted by John Duda on 11/30/2011 at 03:08 PM

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