08131 Macroeconomics and the subjugation of peoples

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. — Robert F. Kennedy

If you look up “subjugate” in the dictionary, you read words to this effect —

To enslave, conquer, bring under control.

Macroeconomics is the study of large economic systems at the national and international levels.

In our era, economics is a method of war and conquest.

It is more effective than the traditional military approach. Infrastructure is not destroyed. It is less expensive. In fact, by clever methods of financial manipulation, conquering powers can make peoples targeted for domination finance their own subjugation.

This isn’t just an affair of the economic aristocracy — the citizens, who are economic actors — of the colonizing economic powers bear responsibility for the process of economic subjugation of peoples. Our willing participation is often necessary for the conquest to succeed. We certainly get a share of the profit from the conquests.

In other words, one reason we have it so good in the developed world is that we the peoples of the “First World” enable the oppression of others by our own manipulated participation in the financial conquest campaigns of the globalized economy. It is a "willing" participation to the extent that these decisions are made by our own personal volition. Yet, all of us swim in a sea of propaganda campaigns that manipulate consciousness and conscience to drive gluttony that satiates the greeds of the economic and political elites.

We buy products like coffee, chocolate, and bananas without any regard for economic justice for the peasant producers of these important products. Our manipulated consciences do not register a word in protect.

Our manipulated gluttonies for out of season cheap produce snatch food from the mouths of hungry children in poor countries to satiate our jaded appetites and enrich corporations. Our menu choices drive land grabs that dispossess traditional peoples producing for local markets to convert their land to production for the developed worlds markets, under the control of transnational corporations.

When the economic elites decide its time for a military adventure, we can be counted on to cheer for our politicians’ rush to wars that ensure steady supplies of cheap resources to exploit. Like Pavlov’s dogs, our politicians punch our buttons and we obediently shout Crucify them, Crucify them.

We elect the politicians that create the laws and economic systems that rent-seeking economic aristocrats use during their campaigns of economic subjugation. We open our minds and drench our consciousness with their propaganda lies. So it comes to pass that we give our consent for their schemes by the way we live our lives.

World peace, justice, and sustainability are incompatible with the politics of economic subjugation. The permaculture ethics of caring for people, caring for the planet, and caring for the future are the practical alternatives that lead to an end to economic colonialization and offer true freedom with justice and sustainability for all.

Our job is to become intentional — and discriminating — in our consumption. The planet and its peoples need for us — the wealthy peoples of the First World — to stop harming ourselves, the human race, and the planet by our excessive consumption.

Examine your own life. What do you buy? Where does it come from? If imported from a less developed country, do you help or hurt the ordinary people there with your purchase? Change what you buy so you help, not harm. Buy fair-traded products.

Don’t buy out-of-season produce.

Don’t vote for politicians that use war as an instrument of national economic policy.

Withdraw your consent from the system of international subjugation and colonialism by changing the way you live your life.

Write this into your plan —

I will stop killing poor people in poor countries with my lifestyle.

This is what it takes to break free of the mindless consumption pattern that is so popular these days.

Getting out of that evil system is one of the beneficial connections of the lifestyle change decisions you contemplate by participating in permaculture design. Never doubt for a minute that our lifestyles of the rich and economically powerful are serious-as-a-heart-attack life-and-death issues for billions of people who aren’t rich and aren’t economically powerful.

Deliberate acts of economic subjugation contribute to the deaths of tens of thousands of people every day due to the consequences of poverty.

As we praxis the permaculture ethics, our willing participation in this economic subjugation of peoples ends. Every person who withdraws his or her consent from this evil system by living a better life gives light and life to a world desperately in need of both. As we gather our strength, we can impact the larger invisible structures as we make it easy to do good and hard to do bad.

We look forward to the day when a critical mass of people living in accordance with the permaculture ethics begins to form.

They fight with money. We resist with time. They will run out of money before we run out of time.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. C. S. Lewis