Real Simple Economics
by Katrina vanden HeuvelLink to article
This is an excerpt from The Nation.com/blogs. Click on link to read entire article.
Chuck Collins, co-founder of United for a Fair Economy and a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, describes the difference between this financial crisis and those of the past.
“The risk of this economic crisis is that people stay isolated, hunkered down and afraid,” Collins says. “What’s different from the serious economic crises of the past is the much greater potential for fragmentation and isolation–because we’ve lived through a couple generations of ‘you are on your own’ economics. So the idea that we can trust any kind of shared response is broken.”
That’s why in January 2009 the Institute for Policy Studies piloted Common Security Clubs to break through the isolation, and bring people together to learn, help one another increase their economic security, and ultimately take political action. The clubs are not an effort to turn away from government, in fact they are in part an effort to develop the skills and solidarity needed to advocate for a government that work for the common good.
“It’s a way to organize the vast, anxious, unconnected public,” Collins says. “It’s really important to get people together, away from their isolation, and the sense that they should figure this out on their own. Learning together–people learn the economy is not a weathered event here, people caused this economic crisis, this could have been prevented. Now we have to get active to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Tags: Chuck Collins, Common Security Clubs, Institute for Policy Studies, The Nation, United for a Fair Economy
November 26th, 2009 at 10:18 pm
I believe in what Chuck, the Institute, and the Common Security Clubs are doing. But I live in a part of the country where the leadership (professional/business) do not want activism or serious change. They support the idea that we “brought the crisis on ourselves,” i.e. don’t look into the role deregulation, free trade, globalization, or privatization play in destabilizing the economy and putting millions out of work. The reason the economy faltered last year was because we lower income went into debt and expect too much. Leadership is perfect and makes no errors, and extreme income inequality is just the way things go when you have a lot of losers who don’t know how to make investments and advance themselves. (by the way, I live in the Dayton, Ohio suburbs) They focus on teaching us “better financial management,” which seems a subset of the whole point of a human life is how much money you can accumulate, and your life is worth the money you have. I have yet to hear any major public figure acknowledge any wrongdoing in the form of Gramm-Bliley Act, or acknowledge that free trade and deregulation exacerbate inequality and serve only the interests of the elite, or that we should work for a more just society. So I often feel totally alone out here (though I know I’m not) and that any work to support change by faraway groups does no good in my life. I’ve even developed new health problems out of this sense of irrelevance and powerlessness. So – how to effect change when I’m a nobody with no influence?