The Happiness Economy - Part 1

Portland was alive on Wednesday, August 3rd.  The Farmers' Market invaded Monument Square (as it does every Wednesday) with an expeditionary force of beautiful colors and tastes!  These farmers (through the Portland Farmers' Market Association--at Monument Square and Deering Oaks) have banded together with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Women, Infants and Children (WIC) - along with other federal food benefits organizations - to make nutritious food more available to low income people in Portland and the public in general; by offering the ability to pay with credit, debit and EBT (food stamps) cards.  There is also a "wooden token" system for EBT recipients, where you buy a $1, $5 or $10 token and are then able to use it at any of Portland's Farmers' Markets and it never expires.  As with strictly food EBT purchases, you cannot receive cash back in change.  But it is a neat idea, allowing people to save the tokens and spend them regardless of whether they also have their EBT card on them.  This beneficial program was introduced on that Wednesday by Mayor Nicholas Mavodones, Jr. (Dem), right in Monument Square; an event that I happily attended.

Now I plan to come in to Portland every Wednesday that I am able, to enjoy the festive atmosphere, fruits, herbs, vegetables and friendly people.  It is a wonderful way to revive the "town square" feel of the old days.  People were milling around, having lunch, talking business, soaking up the sun...  I watched a woman I've seen many times in Portland, who I know is very poor and living on the street, buy cucumbers and tomatoes--rather than her usual cigarettes and beer.  She pulled out a cucumber and walked down the street eating it and talking to herself (as is her way) about how delicious it was.

On this particular day the atmosphere brought to mind many ideas about how the nature of a new kind of business - capitalizing on quality of life, rather than quantity of money - might help to protect us economically, while better satisfying a disillusioned society; one that has been blinded by purely material concerns.

At the market I bought a REAL Maine-grown tomato; a "Black Krim."  Eating it was a delicious orgy of sweet, tangy, juicy, wrist-dripping glory.  The taste was simply magnificent!  And it was huge.  I had to take out my leatherman knife and cut it down to bag it for later.  I hadn't had a Maine tomato in quite some time.  What a difference!

I had recently heard a Fresh Air episode "How Industrial Farming Destroyed the Tasty Tomato" on NPR, about how nearly all supermarket tomatoes in the country (about 80%) come from Florida (NOT a proper state for tomato cultivation!).  In this Fresh Air episode, I was disappointed to learn about the artificial means of production and appalled by the abusive and illegal labor practices in Florida tomato cultivation.  It is kind of a disgraceful process for such a dignified and important fruit. 

These moncultured, factory-farmed tomatoes are tasteless monstrosities, forced to turn red before they are ready (via the artificial application of high levels of ethylene gas--a gas naturally released by the fruit over the much longer natural ripening stage, and used by the Florida growers for appearance only) and then harvested, literally, by slave labor.  This is what agricultural philosophy has come to in this country.  Further, the Florida tomato serves is apt metaphor for how big business puts greed and profit ahead of natural processes and even human rights.  I don't mean to generalize...but in order to play in that corporate league, no matter how egalitarian you think you are, somewhere, your good company is likely being strongly influenced by unethical companies as well. 

We all know this problem of blind greed is an age-old one.  Since the domestication of animals - and well after the settling of agricultural villages and their subsequent development in towns, cities, states, nations and empires - the quantity of assets held, played a bigger and bigger role in daily life and thence, collectively in society's psychology. 

While discovering that possessing and storing grains and seeds from year to year benefited the positive stabilization of the home, people (men, mostly) also stumbled into the increasingly more negative tendency to want power over other people.  That was how  the security of one's property could be maintained.  The desire to plan for the future has subsequently been used as an excuse to wield absolute power whenever possible.  The hierarchical structure branching out of patriarchal society was what I call a "nose-dive development" in regard to the civility of cultures for thousands of years, and it still is.

The male primate instinct to temporarily overpower woman, and woman's instinct to willingly (and sometimes unwillingly) submit to both the penetration of her body and then the extreme discomfort of giving birth as a later result of that submission, set up a purely human problem that has only grown in complexity and scope over the last ten to twelve thousand years.  I say "purely human," because non-human animals may prepare the way for their children, but they have no conscious concern at all for fortifying their environment in anticipation of grandchildren.

Once man learned that woman was no longer needed as a partner in his own survival - but only necessary as (1) as a menial-duty slave, (2) for the procreation of sons and grandsons, (3) for sexual-gratification - she became just another possession, and so did her often unwanted daughters.  Mankind - even with the relatively recent political liberation of womankind - has not abandoned its need to be in control.  He may have socially submerged this formerly-outward need to rule over his castle and everything else around him, but the unconscious training of his fathers and grandfathers, and their fathers and grandfathers before them, remains alive and well. 


In more modern times money has increasingly allowed even the "common man" to abuse his power.   This proclivity is coupled to the fact that man has also been exceeding slow to relinquish the power he has over his money.  And to connect the dots, it isn't even the money that is the problem, but rather, his lack of self control in not abusing that power once he has it.  And surely, this can be true of woman as well. 


All human beings crave material power because they have a need for spiritual control over their future.  But the two states (power and control) are mutually exclusive.  They are a kind of uncertainty principle, where if you know a lot about one you know a lot less about the other.  Capitalism has been a liberating tool for power.  And the results of such an unholy union were aborted social progress and miscarried natural resource management, in the name of high, but temporary, profits. 

The misconception of "capitalism" today, as an answer to all the world's problems and the antidote to so-called "socialism," "communism," and "anarchy," was introduced by Adam Smith in his The Wealth of Nations (1776).  What we think of as such a sacred premise for business expansion has only been around for 235 years.  Though, less-loosely defined ideas may have existed (as I said above) since the agricultural revolution, capitalism has become a way to crystallize and codify the male instinct into an economic theology that he could then point to and say, "look at all the benefits we have from chasing profit and accumulating things, at any cost."


The worst philosophical problem of all comes from the confusion of equating the very noble idea of free enterprise with capitalism.  But even the quickest glance around should tell us that capitalism is hostile to free enterprise.  Strictly speaking, a good capitalist spends every waking hour trying to monopolize everything.  Free markets just get in the way...too much uncertainty.  Free markets are a democratic ideal.  But, where democracy says, "every human being has equal worth," capitalism encourages people to "die with the most toys."


Yet, indeed, until the post World War II era of the 20th Century, the assertions of capitalism seemed to have some merit.  The US (getting a jump start on this, in a parallel evolution with capitalism--both becoming independent and self-acting entities in 1776) was able to mine massive advantages from the classic European model of global colonialism.  By exploiting weaker nations and peoples, ostensibly by extending carrots, while being very quickly willing to turn those tasty roots into great big sticks whenever necessary, America and Europe were able to enjoy virtually unstoppable growth for over two centuries.

Unfortunately, problems began to arise that would force the shiny crown of capitalism to appear more tarnished.  Sacrifices in moral and ethical standards became necessary in order to facilitate the economic growth of Western capitalist expansion.  Meaning: capitalism was a flawed concept from the beginning, because it was not self-sustainable.  It NEEDED exploitation in order to function properly.

One initial change came right off the bat, as the institution of American slavery brought unheard-of profits for international investors in the early 19th Century.  Britain - going through a severe down-turn at the time - was only too willing to overlook its own distaste (and legal prohibition) of the trafficking in human beings, by eagerly supplying "free" ports in the Empire where cotton could be exchanged for human cargo which would then be sent across the Atlantic to the plantations of the Southern United States.  To illustrate this more clearly... 

It was an almost perfect capitalist circle:  Cotton and tobacco, farmed by cheap slave labor in the America, would be exchanged for sugar, rum and spices in the Caribbean, which the American merchants would then bring back to the States and sell at a profit.  This then allowed British shipping companies to earn themselves an even-heftier profit from the re-sale of American cotton on their own island - whose exploding population was in desperate need, having used up most of their own natural resources - and then sell tobacco at a giant mark-up to European and more distant Asian markets.  This, in-turn, financed British trips to East Africa where more slaves would be bought and then transported to British free ports, for sale back to American traders.  "Hand over fist" doesn't even begin to describe the monetary-value gained by that wicked circle.  Of course we know that eventually moral standards more-or-less caught up in the US, where 600,000 young American men (the flower of a generation) had to die; butchering each other during the American Civil War, but finally ending legal slavery.  Definitely a high price to pay for amending capitalism.  And still (if the Florida tomato industry is any indication) some folks are willing to bring slavery right back again.

These kinds of profit-to-destruction-to-reform patterns would occur again and again throughout the 20th Century.  The divide between rich and poor grew wider through the industrial growth of the early part of the century, leading to a swing away from the gold standard as a base for the American dollar, and replacing it with a speculative, debt-based system.  Why?  Because the Federal Reserve (which, by the way, is NOT part of the Federal Government, and thus not answerable to the people) learned that issuing paper money eliminated the need to back those notes up with anything of substance--like gold or silver.   And to their eternal delight, the financial rewards of printing money out of thin air was discovered--something that is now reaching it's ugly conclusion as we speak.

This was the birth of what would end up being a system not based on the exchange of goods, but on something less substantial: confidence.   Now the global economy balances entirely on psychology.  Like fickle, lazy, greasy, spoiled, little children, the markets whine and complain, but always grow fatter.  The "bubbles" this produces by this model CAN pop, with disastrous results.  One popped in 1929, leading to the "Great Depression," and and another in 2008 leading to the "Great Recession."  All that extra cash (credits actually) comes as a direct consequence from irresponsible lending; where banks give a loan to a consumer or each other and then immediately take back what they've lent from ALL consumers, as a credit (thin-air, printed money).  And this "cash back" deal is sweetened by an increase for more than they lent in the first place, due to interest returns.  This is a sweet little set up until...well...just about anything at all happens!  Then confidence dives and instabilitty tips the vase off the window sill.


The point I'll be trying to make in the coming posts in this thread is that, even after the big scare we had in 2008, no one is even seriously questioning the wisdom of continuing to blindly follow capitalist models still.  No one dares to suggest just how revolutionary an economic change would have to occur in order to save the democratic form of free enterprise as a new (and yet-unrealized) ideal.  Yet, I believe it can be done.  If the markets are ruled by psychology it is time to psych them out.

I theorize that if we were to relax, appreciate what we already have as comfort as being good enough - knowing when to say when to what I call "accumulation syndrome," and deeply question WHY it is that we are doing what we are doing, and what do we REALLY want to be doing. 

The world - even with its seven billion people - produces plenty of food to feed itself, can store enough water to quench itself, can produce energy from natural, safe and renewable sources to power itself, can focus life-saving emergency missions to the sites of any natural disaster that might strike.  Big business, militarists and capitalist materialists don't care about these beneficial things yet, but they will be forced to.  Either the world-civilization will no longer accept preventable environmental destruction, poverty, hunger, violence and pain from the oppressors who literally capitalize on these things, or it is going to be a very, very dark, hot and miserable future for everyone.

The garden party is over.  It is time to start tending the garden again.

[Please stay tuned for the next post on this thread.]