“The stories we tell literally make the world. If you want to change the world, you need to change your story. The truth applies to individuals and institutions.” Michael Margolis.
I had two recent posts on this blog (Spiritual Crisis is the World’s Greatest Problem Part 1 & 2) in which I try to convey a root problem with humanity today. It is clearly seen in how our economic systems run – we value money as everything necessary to create a good life. Most people think that if only they had enough money then everything would resolve itself, never considering that while money is a good tool when applied well, it is a just a concept. We can print up more money but that merely devalues it since it seems that a scarcity of it is what makes it more valuable. As we crave this rare item (money) we find that our personal and societal focus is money itself and not the things that money can do in making society work more effectively. Since money has become the focus, the worst aspects of humanity become heightened by its corrupting influence – in essence the gross inhumanity we see on the planet occurs because we are focused on the acquisition and control of this one concept.
The world Bank estimates that the Global GDP for 2018 is about $85 trillion. Recall that GDP is merely a measure of money moving – so that figure includes all the worlds trade plus all the relief effort money, and money spent on wars, etc. That is up from about $81 trillion in 2017, and the projection for 2019 is $88 trillion. With all that money moving around, one should expect that some improvements in planetary living are occurring. Yet, the opposite seems true with even the so-called prosperous countries losing ground in Standard of Living. It’s hard to envision what one trillion U.S. dollar looks like (a one followed by 12 zero’s). That means for annual world GDP, $11,000 is being spent for every single person on this planet. To many in the poorest places on Earth this would mean a gigantic leap in standard of Living, but no prizes for recognizing that this is not happening. (Nearly 3 billion people living on less than $2.50 a day ($912/yr) with another 1.3 billion living in extreme poverty of less than $1.25 a day ($456/yr). Over 80% of the world’s population live on less than $10/day ($3560/yr). Statistics about global poverty gets quite depressing.) As just indicated, negative GDP (e.g. wars that destroy and build little people and a handful profiting from the war materials being provided for this craziness) is eating up a lot of that spending, but you might now be thinking – what happens with all that money every year? Obviously, there are a lot of manufacturing of goods and services going on with trading between nations. We tell ourselves this story that globalization is merely how countries interact and integrate their economic systems as one big global economy. The reality is that it just a modern form of colonialism – economic colonialism.
Now I am NOT advocating simple redistribution of that money – that social experiment has been tried and failed miserably. What I am advocating is that we stop using money as the yardstick of whatever that it is, we consider as a measure of success. Again, I have said several times in this blog that what we focus upon becomes the point at which we put our energy! If we focus on society and people’s well-being and happiness and measure those outcomes, money becomes just a tool to help in that goal. Until we change our story of what is important, we will be stuck with money as the end-goal.
As an example of how corrupting money can be let me highlight some aspects of the USA (although what I am talking about is true for any nation you might think about). The U.S., despite its financial wealth, is a country that runs on fear – fear of not having enough money to make ends meet and even more fear about that money disappearing. It’s a great way to manipulate and control people with different groups being blamed for reasons of money shortages (real or imagined). To that end, supposed national security is there to ensure everything runs smoothly.
Most everyday people are so fixed on their daily fears that they do not bother to keep stepping back to look at the bigger picture. In a dream world we look at our leaders to manage how things that society needs to run is financed. In most democratic countries, we elect representatives to do this on our behalf. In the U.S. all government spending is approved by the Congress and the laws require that there is an accounting of how all public money was spent. That sounds like quite a reasonable thing. The institution responsible for this accounting is the Government Accounting Office (GAO- the supreme audit institution for the United States. Federal and state auditors look to GAO to provide standards for internal controls, financial audits, and other types of government audits – GAO website). Since 1947 (the National Security Act), the need for money to run covert operations and finance unscrupulous things on behalf of national security and secret dealings meant funds had to be diverted from public scrutiny. In the early 1990s the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) was set up to improve government accountability by issuing federal financial accounting and reporting standards that adhere to industry best practices. Except it didn’t do that. The secret and dark funds just continued as before. Then in 2019, FASAB 56 was enacted to stop lax accountability habits that did not address the dark funds. Indeed, the new benchmarks of accountability specifically allowed confusing reporting, even allowing the concealment of specific financial situations. Essentially, national security concerns remove the need for financial transparency to the public.
Economic professor, Mark Skidmore, did an independent audit of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) financial statements. What he found was that about $1-2 trillion (yes with a T) of congressionally approved funds are unaccounted for every year. So, to date over $21 trillion are missing. This is not corruption from $680 naval toilet seats or $100 military screwdrivers, but the total value of unaccounted for adjustments of the accounts (the spreadsheets of money out versus money spent don’t match). Indeed, money for military (such as the Pentagon) cannot account for over 25% of what it gets every year (i.e. $2.3 trillion missing in 2000). Things such as technology development through the military industrial complex are mostly accounted. What is not accounted for is what is $1-2 trillion per year being spent on – and it is being spent and not just going into elite’s bank accounts. I am not going to speculate how and to what the money is being spent, but merely to ask, since we apparently have that much ‘spare cash,’ How do we make that money work for us all of us for sustainability goals? That is our spiritual crisis. How do we change our thinking to benefit everyone and not just some special projects we know nothing about that maintain a failed status quo?
To be Continued…….
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