Theories about the global economy

I'll be starting a thread about responses to global systemic issues. In that thread I'll want to see ideas for *responses*, and I don't want to have to wade through a lot of theory to see them, so I'm asking people to post their theories here, about what's wrong with the global system, if you haven't already posted them somewhere else. Then in the responses thread, when you need to refer to your theory, you can link to it.

I've seen most of what I would say about the global system, in the talks and writings of Chomsky. Briefly I see the current economic system of the world as partly a kind of monopoly game, in which the national governments have been largely reduced to agencies of the few hundred or few thousand leading players, confusing, distracting, demoralizing and subjugating everyone else, and turning them against each other. Part of the game is murderous campaigns of plundering and pillaging, which continually ravage neighborhoods, regions and entire nations, all over the world. The leading players are apparently relying more and more on camouflage, fear and violence to seize and secure their plunder; and less and less on motivating their employees with rewards and promises.

As I see it, we are *all* part of the problem. It would be impossible for the leading players to get where they are, and stay where they are, without all the help they're getting from the rest of us. One example is people selling their capacities to the highest bidder, rather than looking for the most beneficial ways to use them. Another example is people isolating themselves from each other in ideological camps. Another example is people depreciating and defaming each other on the Internet, which I imagine is feuling the flames in the physical world, that are ravaging its people. Another example is people fighting each other, and stabbing each other in the backs, to get crumbs from the feast table. Another example is the growing and spreading worship of treachery, cruelty, brutality and ugliness, and continuing widespread contempt for moral and cultural values in economic development.

Thinking about the feuding around feminism, I see more clearly than ever before how *all* the feuding around social issues is between people competing with each other for privileges and advantages that are partly sustained by murderous campaigns of plundering and pillaging all over the world, and how that competition helps perpetuate those campaigns.

I'm not sure what that changes for me, if anything. It might make it easier for me to resist temptations to debate about those issues. It might give me some ideas about where and how to look for people to collaborate with in my efforts to help improve the world.

For me it might mean promoting the idea of measuring what we do to help improve the world, at least partly by how we think it might affect the world's most ravaged people, now and in the future. That might mean learning more about what helps perpetuate the plundering and pillaging, and how to help reduce it and counteract its effects; about how ravaged people can help themselves; and about what other people, near and far, can do to help them. It might include searching for initiatives and programs that genuinely address those issues, rather than using them to compete for shares in donation markets.

In my lifetime I've seen a growing and spreading awareness of the role of growth economics ideology in camouflaging and excusing the plundering and pillaging, and of the role of the nuclear powers in crushing all resistance to it. Unfortunately whatever motivation to action that has aroused, is mostly being diverted into activities that only make things worse.

That brings me back to the idea of searching for initiatives and programs that might actually help stop the plundering and pillaging, and reverse the effects of the ravaging of the earth and its people, and try to learn to encourage, support and promote them.

I think one thing about world problems is they are so big and massive, so backed by such extreme power, that to try to tackle them as a monolithic block is hopeless, depressing, demoralizing, and useless. I think it's useful to try to break it into the most specific and objective terms possible. And focus on small or medium particular issues that are a part of it. It's not so hard to hack away at one small weed of terribleness, and if you get enough of those the garden of earth starts to look a little better, right?

Some of the specific problems:

Weapons flowing into malevolent hands.
Free movement of goods and foods but not the people whose land was used to produce them. Example: We let coffee and bananas into the US, but not hungry Central Americans who grew coffee instead of mangos...
Lack of contraceptive access. This leads to hunger stuff and war because of competition for resources pretty quickly for all kinds of reasons. Which of the millions of children from thousands of people get to live near water? I've heard that's a big reason for some of the conflict in Sudan.
Poor use of resources.
A lack of education at home and abroad. Especially of non-technical and philosophical but not religious education. Ideas and history are really important if we don't want to keep making the same mistakes.
Religion getting in the way of more beneficial memes. Example: Be fruitful and multiply means less fruit for every mouth in a finite world.
People shopping at big corporations instead of shopping locally when possible.

They all tie into each other and are interrelated, but focusing on something specific makes it understandable and manageable, I think...

dandelionc, thank you for those ideas.