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Think Big

Now that we see what our collective and personal impact is on the planet, let's think big!

What big and bold ideas do you have for reducing personal, community, country and even global carbon footprints?

Use this space to develop and discuss your big ideas! Who knows- maybe one of these ideas can be the next key solution to the global climate challenge!




Think Big >

Our economic Structures

Jake Roux

For hundreds of year our economics structures have incentivized exploitation of labor, resources, and the environment around us with basing our market structure around the accumulation of capital and profit. This is obvious when we take a brief look at how corporations and governments that are in the pocket of western business' interests treat the natural resources of nation states. In classical economic theory one of the first things a nation should do is to extract resources to increase the capital flowing through a nation. Colonialism justified by religious, eugenics, or any other pseudoscience to just accumulate wealth off of our world. In Neocolonialism we go to impoverished nations with high quantities of resources and put them in debt traps by the IMF and World Bank(institutions specifically created  to invest in developing countries that are desperate for funding and investment after centuries of colonialism ruining the possibility for the nations to develop independently.) We created funding to shift the directions of these nations legally by creating as already mentioned debt traps and contracts that

"Cutting expenditures or raising revenues, also known as austerity.
Focusing economic output on direct export and resource extraction,
Devaluation of currencies,
Trade liberalisation, or lifting import and export restrictions,
Increasing the stability of investment (by supplementing foreign direct investment with the opening of facilities for the domestic market),
Balancing budgets and not overspending,
Removing price controls and state subsidies,
Privatization, or divestiture of all or part of state-owned enterprises,
Enhancing the rights of foreign investors vis-a-vis national laws,
Improving governance and fighting corruption,"

Well, by forcing these nations contractually to extract resources and purchasing them for pennies on the dollar it not only exploits the already battered nations but the people within the nations, the resources, but also not allow for more sustainable practices by removing "export restrictions"

This is just one part of a larger system that will go beyond nation states and geopolitics just to create profit so how do we stop or fix these systems that are the main reasons for the world we live in today? How do we stop a system that plays off the weaknesses of humanity if we want to save the protentional of humanity? How do we create a system that puts people and the world over profit when the system is what Thomas Hobbes wrote about, The Leviathan. "A powerful force of nature resistance against which was to be futile if all bowed before and contributed to the establishment of a powerful state that state would in return secure the well-being of all who were part of it that through a collective effort a collective good."

It might not be a nation state that the leviathan was supposed to be but this Leviathan is more powerful then any nation-state could ever be for one reason, you can't escape it. How do you fix  a undemocratic, market driven, all powerful institution that only cares about creating capital while humanitarianism is sidelined and our world burns for this creature of our make?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati … etary_Fund
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/aa/

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