Love the Quakernomics website.

Would it be possible for you to post our fairtrade fortnight video onto your page on fairtrade fortnight(http://www.quakerweb.org.uk/blog/campaigns/%E2%80%98the-big-swap%E2%80%99-fairtrade-fortnight-22-february-%E2%80%93-7-march-2010/)
our video is available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O1L-o9FK1Y

Regards,
Adam

They say “once the capital cost has been incurred, the more people sharing the benefits the better” – a simple statement but one profoundly divergent from the ethos behind econocapitalism – to the extent that I read it, had to re-read it, and thought “how on earth would that work?”
Later on they say: “From the point of view of society as a a whole, the tendency for technological change to reduce marginal costs is rapidly tipping the balance away from allowing profit-maximising corporations to to control the distribution of goods. Increasingly they can only rely on the remnants of monopolistic power provided by patents or copyright. We need to find new ways to pay organisations and individuals for life-enhancing research, creativity and innovation – the geese which lay the golden eggs – which does not then restrict access to the benefits.”

In terms of paradigm shift, I’m also thinking of Michael Sandel’s 2009 Reith Lectures and how they deconstructed the science of (capitalist) economics to show that something that was intended as a tool to assist government and the understanding of social issues has become the dominant, almost religiously exclusive, rationale for deciding on and evaluating any particular policy direction. These can still be accessed on the BBC website.

There was also a recent edition of Resurgence magazine devoted entirely to the theme of money and concepts of money and finance that has interesting references.

Money talks !!!!!!!!

http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/thebigswap/the_big_swap_needs_you.aspx

I have finally got around to reading Arblaster’s book on liberalism. It is really challenging. It is great in pointing up from nineteenth century sources just how amoral the idea of growth was in its origins and then linking this to the development of neoliberalism as a resurgence of those early 19th century ideas. A new book by Serge Latouche ‘A Farewell to Growth’ seems to be bringing it all together – I say ’seems’ because I haven’t quite finished reading it. So far there is a lot about ‘the local’ and I’m hoping he will get on to what needs to be done at the global level to support this.
To me it seems that this is all about putting equality first in all our thinking along with ethics, because these two all important features of human life have been sadly missing from the development of political ideas over the last century. When we thought our society was making progress in this direction it was fundamentally still locked into those early 19th century assumptions of elites and power and disposable poor,… perhaps fundamentally through ‘economics’ as a discipline?

If economics and the corporations are part of the problem then let’s for instance change the legal constitution of the corporation. David Korten who has been writing about globalisation for some time now focuses on this on his web site. Hertie School of Governance have a paper on adding human rights responsibilities to obligations of corporations to allow people to sue them under Human rights legislation (lots of other sources there) and I found on the web something on NGO Alternative Treaties on the UN web site for 2002 Sustainability summit… so these ideas are around. Any more suggestions?