This article by Jane Anne Morris (DemocracyThemePark.org) was originally published in the Spring 2009 edition of Synthesis/Regeneration.
Today as many hundreds of billions of dollars are flying out of federal coffers to bail out and bulk up The Economy, it is instructive to review a few of the places we have not put enough money in the last decades. Universal single-payer health care; living wages for all; effective and affordable public transit systems; facilities and programs for all disabled persons; worker safety measures in all industries; community gardens; bike paths; and renewable energy-powered off-grid public buildings, to name but a few.
In addition to those community-oriented needs that we just could not fund, we also lacked resources, it seems, to protect and restore our environment. Cleanups of Superfund sites, and many other terribly fouled areas, are incomplete, stalled, or not even begun. We lacked funds for state-of-the-art pollution controls on all power plants, factories, and refineries; for cleaning up our lakes, rivers, and aquifers; and for healing the habitat destruction, degradation, and erosion wrought by corporate agriculture, mining, clearcutting, and the like.
Yet now, after repeatedly finding that it was always too expensive—for government, for corporations, for taxpayers—to take care of Community and Environment, suddenly the care and feeding of The Economy trumps all. What is this creature Economy that is more important by far than Community and Environment, and so must be “saved” at all costs? …
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