Is the financial crisis leading to a Global Marshall Plan?

Chris Bieber just sent out an email about President Bush's new idea how to spend some of the $700 billion bailout.

"The administration plans to spend $250 billion of the $700 billion government rescue program passed by Congress on Oct. 3 to make stock purchases this year. The first purchases will be in nine large banks, officials said. The industry and government officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the details were yet to be formally released.

"The decision represents a remarkable turnaround for the $700 billion rescue program, already the largest bailout in U.S. history. As the plan sped through Congress, the administration said the money was needed to purchase bad mortgage-related assets that are weighing on the books of financial institutions, never mentioning direct stock purchases.

"However, as the financial crisis gained new intensity last week, sending U.S. stocks down by a record amount, the administration decided to shift focus and adopt a bolder program modeled more along the lines of bank rescue efforts being put together in Britain and other European countries."http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/financial_meltdown

Amitai Etzioni says we need to seek a "balance" between the unfettered rights of the individual and the rights of the community, and that the world needs a new global architecture. His book, "From Empire to Community" is now being used to train top US military professionals. But we don't need to know anything about that, right?

Here's The Global Marshall Plan to "Balance the World"
http://www.globalmarshallplan.org/

Global Marshall Plan
http://sustsci.aaas.org/content.html?contentid=692
Submitted By: Ralf Klemens Stappen
Contact Person: Franz Josef Rademacher, Clube of Rome
Contact Email: info@globalmarshallplan.org

"Project Description: As a result of economic globalization and driven by the information technology revolution, the world-wide economic system is unleashed by factors prescribed by nations. The pre-eminence of policy becomes lost, because the core structures thereof remain either national or continental, but are never global. The rapid growth of the world's population is aggressively moving towards the 10 billion-mark and pushing hundreds of millions of people into the resource-focused lifestyles of the major industrialized nations. The consequences of these effects can prove to be a strain on our ecological systems.

"Representatives from economic politics, science, media and non-government organizations around the world and across all party lines therefore met in 2003 to begin the Global Marshall Plan Initiative. Included in this group are representatives from the Club of Rome, the Eco-Social Forum, ATTAC, BUND and churches, as well as members of the Federal Association for Economic Development and Foreign Trade, UN organizations, the European Parliament, and many other national parliaments.

"It is our goal to establish a world-wide economic, political and civil society system for a new era of cooperation which will achieve global security, peace and prosperity for everyone. The Global Marshall Plan is modelled after the success of the United States' Marshall Plan for Europe after the second world war and applies the positive experiences of the European Union expansion process to the rest of the world.

The Global Marshall Plan combines a pragmatic concept for achieving the Millennium Development Goals with the long-term perspective of a worldwide Eco-social market economy as the framework of global order. This presumes that the richer countries are ready to co-finance development in financially poorer countries, which would lead to a global economic miracle.

Project Website: http://www.globalmarshallplan.org
Project Publication:
Paper: Franz Josef Rademacher. 2004. "Global Marshall Plan: A Planetary Contract for a Worldwide Eco-Social Market Economy." Hamburg: Global Marshall Plan Initiative.

"The text provides considerations on a Global Marshall Plan in terms of a Planetary Contract, i.e. in response to the difficult situation of world politics at the beginning of the new century. This Contract is intended as a step towards a global Eco-Social Market Economy, which we regard as an attractive win-win alternative in compliance with the idea of a sustainable development, versus the extensively unregulated globalization processes prevalent today." {boldface added ~ Niki}

Looked through the long list of supporters and organizations supporting the Global Marshall Plan and almost all of them are German. I guess that's because the Germans are the experts on how the Marshall Plan was implemented. Every now and then I hear from someone who's been to Germany lately, and they tell me their society has been completely communitarianized, far beyond what can be noticed in the US. I'm guessing Germany was a pilot test of many of the new behavior modifications. We all have to be taught to become responsible, eco aware, global citizens, and we must be properly trained how to CHANGE our outdated notions of national and individual sovereignty and to respect and OBEY the new global laws that protect the whole planet.

History of the European Marshall Plan: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/marshall/

In related news, "On Thursday at the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, Spain, WWF and Indonesian authorities announced a political agreement – signed September 18 in the Indonesian capital Jakarata between all 10 governors on the island and four federal ministers – to "agree to save and conserve the ecosystem of Sumatra Island."" (because it's a "global problem") http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/agreement-forged-to-save-vanishing-sumatran-forests/

And if you ever wondered why the highly respected and trusted New York Times never tells you anything about communitarian programs, policies or laws... go poke around the dot earth blog and you'll see exactly what kinds of policy changes the NYT supports.