ome say the economy has collapsed or is collapsing and we must get back to work. Others say, let the economy collapse. COVID-19 has shone a light on how our enormous wealth inequality is killing people but we have an unprecedented opportunity to use this crisis to change fundamental issues within our society.
What if we shifted our thinking to “there is enough, we simply need to distribute resources differently?” Let’s start with the four basic needs and fundamental rights of each and every human being: housing, food, income, and health.
There Is Enough Housing
In Housing and Urban Development’s 2019 report to Congress, nearly 568,000 people are homeless in America, with California and New York State having the highest homeless populations. In New York City, authorities report that 114,659 children in New York City public schools are either homeless or living in temporary housing—that means one out of every 10 children is without a home. These numbers are actually low. In 2011, Amnesty International identified approximately 3.5 million people in the U.S. as homeless—about 1% of the U.S. population today. At the same time there were 18.5 million vacant homes in the U.S. Simple math shows we have enough homes to provide all people experiencing homelessness a home.
There are tremendous racial disparities in homelessness. African Americans represent 13% of the general population but account for 40% of people experiencing homelessness, and more than 50% of homeless families with children. Structural racism created and sustains this disproportionality. Homelessness has surged 75% in Los Angeles, California, over the past six years.
There is a disturbing trend evolving with this crisis: if homelessness is disproportionally afflicting African American, so is COVID-19. Moreover, the pandemic is spreading a lot more rapidly amongst homeless populations.
“What the HUD report did not say: homelessness is solvable,” explains NLIHC president and CEO, Diane Yentel. “We have proven solutions to end homelessness and, in the wealthiest nation in the world, we have the resources to solve the problem. We lack only the political will to fund the solutions at the scale necessary.”
Coupled with unsolved homelessness today, many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and have not had a meaningful increase in income or wages in 40 years. Even if they do receive raises, they’re facing a housing market where prices have continued to grow at a steady rate of around 6% annually over that same time frame. In places like the Bay Area, it is growing 14.5% annually.
The situation is worse for renters. Before COVID-19 21 million Americans were considered rent-burdened to the point where they have to cut back on necessities like food and healthcare, or take on extra labor to afford their home. With the COVID-19 pandemic, over 26 million Americans are now unemployed. Governors in several states have placed moratoriums on rent and mortgage payments, however, the rent and mortgages will be due in the future.
The 2019 Homes for All Report recommends four policy changes, which need to be carried out concurrently, especially in light of COVID-19:
1) We must provide rental vouchers to renters and cap rent increases to avoid millions being evicted this summer.
2) We must end racist exclusionary zoning and allow multi-unit dwellings in neighborhoods.
3) We must make homes for people, not for capital investments.
4) We must reverse decades of divestment and build millions of homes/apartments that are publicly owned or grounded in affordable housing principles like co-housing to house low- and extremely low-income individuals.
We also need to look to how other countries and cities ensure that all their residents have access to affordable housing. In Austria, the government owns 75% of the rental housing market. In Singapore, 80% of the people live in developments that are publicly developed and governed. We need to look at healthier designs for our neighborhoods so they are livable, resilient, and sustainable.
Simply put, we must rethink our housing systems with the foundational understanding that housing sits at the crossroads of economic, racial, health, and environmental justice. Safe, secure housing is necessary for every person to thrive. If we have a future, it will be a future which we accomplish together as an integrated body of well-cared-for individuals. The right to be and remain housed is a human right.
There Is Enough Food
Much of the food harvested is processed and then transferred into global food supply chains that are then distributed to restaurants and cafeterias, etc. In the last four weeks with “Stay at Home” orders, much of that has shut down. This is why we have seen stories emerging of farmers dumping milk, or tilling crops over without picking them from the fields. Farmers are choosing to not harvest because it costs money and they don’t have immigrant workers to pick the crops.
We are seeing industrial meat processing plants become sites of COVID-19 hotspot outbreaks and shut down. Meat processing workers are particularly susceptible to the virus because they typically stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the line and congregate in crowded locker rooms and cafeterias. Neither of these situations bodes well for the resiliency of our food system, which is actually industrialized agriculture dependent upon fossil fuels, based on rapid, mass production, not all rooted in the needs of local economies.
The global food and beverage industry is now worth over USD $ 8 trillion, representing more than 10% of the world’s GDP, according to a report from Plunkett Research. A handful of corporations—Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz Company, Danone, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Unilever, Diageo, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars, Heineken, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez—control our food, from farm to fork. Their unbridled power grants them increasing political influence over the rules that govern our food system and allows them to manipulate the marketplace—pushing down the prices paid to family farmers and driving them out of business.
In 2008 Michael Pollen wrote an open letter to then President-Elect Obama saying, “agriculture is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, is a national security risk, and is built on cheap oil.” It is worth re-reading the letter now and its bottom line: “we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.” Pollan recommends three policy changes: 1) food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume; 2) policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world; and 3) policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.
We must rethink our industrial food system and build strong local food-sheds where people are buying food from local farmers within 100 miles of their city. Communities need to finance/sponsor new farmers working on the land and ending the industrial de-localized agriculture. We must support the growth of regenerative agriculture that builds social health, biodiversity, and yields a nutritious and profitable farm product. We must spend our research dollars on agroecology rather than exploitation of industrial agriculture.
We Must Rethink Our Value Systems
To change how we distribute things we must rethink the medium through which we do so much of the distribution. We must rethink money and reinvent money systems that are in alignment with human values and value human life and living systems.
Money is entirely a social construct and contract. We created it and we can change how it works. It is literally all in our collective heads. Consider the case of Brazil. The country ended inflation by creating a virtual currency that was stable. The current rules of money mean that money comes into existence when debt is created. We have created a system where the hoarding of money is rewarded and debt is encouraged. We must rethink this. According to Edward Cahn, the core operating system of a society is family, neighborhood, and community. We are seeing the widespread emergence of mutual aid networks that can be nurtured and supported during and after the COVID-19 crisis has passed. Established mutual aid systems will enable societies to be much more ready to endure the next pandemic but more importantly mutual aid brings human civilization into alignment with nature.
These non-market systems are not in good shape; they have been underutilized and replaced by money. The operating system is no longer reliably performing basic functions such as transmitting values, creating support and consensus, and preserving memories. Money represents that abstract value that can be exchanged in a naked market. There is a role for this type of exchange in a complex society with millions of goods to be exchanged and produced through supply chains of raw materials. However, our current economy isn’t built on these types of substantive transactions yet. Much of the consumer spending is on things that aren’t directly related to human needs but instead human wants, to fill emotional voids created by over marketization.
The future society can be rooted in local communities, our connection to each other and our interdependence with the land, water and air for our nurturance. It will require going through a process of letting go of the old way of doing things, and re-thinking our value systems. People are the true wealth of society. Reciprocity is a fundamental principle of human life. This happens when we come together in community to care for one another, to learn from each other, to celebrate and to console one another.
a global affairs media network
We Need to Rethink Our Value Systems
May 18, 2020
S
ome say the economy has collapsed or is collapsing and we must get back to work. Others say, let the economy collapse. COVID-19 has shone a light on how our enormous wealth inequality is killing people but we have an unprecedented opportunity to use this crisis to change fundamental issues within our society.
What if we shifted our thinking to “there is enough, we simply need to distribute resources differently?” Let’s start with the four basic needs and fundamental rights of each and every human being: housing, food, income, and health.
There Is Enough Housing
In Housing and Urban Development’s 2019 report to Congress, nearly 568,000 people are homeless in America, with California and New York State having the highest homeless populations. In New York City, authorities report that 114,659 children in New York City public schools are either homeless or living in temporary housing—that means one out of every 10 children is without a home. These numbers are actually low. In 2011, Amnesty International identified approximately 3.5 million people in the U.S. as homeless—about 1% of the U.S. population today. At the same time there were 18.5 million vacant homes in the U.S. Simple math shows we have enough homes to provide all people experiencing homelessness a home.
There are tremendous racial disparities in homelessness. African Americans represent 13% of the general population but account for 40% of people experiencing homelessness, and more than 50% of homeless families with children. Structural racism created and sustains this disproportionality. Homelessness has surged 75% in Los Angeles, California, over the past six years.
There is a disturbing trend evolving with this crisis: if homelessness is disproportionally afflicting African American, so is COVID-19. Moreover, the pandemic is spreading a lot more rapidly amongst homeless populations.
“What the HUD report did not say: homelessness is solvable,” explains NLIHC president and CEO, Diane Yentel. “We have proven solutions to end homelessness and, in the wealthiest nation in the world, we have the resources to solve the problem. We lack only the political will to fund the solutions at the scale necessary.”
Coupled with unsolved homelessness today, many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and have not had a meaningful increase in income or wages in 40 years. Even if they do receive raises, they’re facing a housing market where prices have continued to grow at a steady rate of around 6% annually over that same time frame. In places like the Bay Area, it is growing 14.5% annually.
The situation is worse for renters. Before COVID-19 21 million Americans were considered rent-burdened to the point where they have to cut back on necessities like food and healthcare, or take on extra labor to afford their home. With the COVID-19 pandemic, over 26 million Americans are now unemployed. Governors in several states have placed moratoriums on rent and mortgage payments, however, the rent and mortgages will be due in the future.
The 2019 Homes for All Report recommends four policy changes, which need to be carried out concurrently, especially in light of COVID-19:
1) We must provide rental vouchers to renters and cap rent increases to avoid millions being evicted this summer.
2) We must end racist exclusionary zoning and allow multi-unit dwellings in neighborhoods.
3) We must make homes for people, not for capital investments.
4) We must reverse decades of divestment and build millions of homes/apartments that are publicly owned or grounded in affordable housing principles like co-housing to house low- and extremely low-income individuals.
We also need to look to how other countries and cities ensure that all their residents have access to affordable housing. In Austria, the government owns 75% of the rental housing market. In Singapore, 80% of the people live in developments that are publicly developed and governed. We need to look at healthier designs for our neighborhoods so they are livable, resilient, and sustainable.
Simply put, we must rethink our housing systems with the foundational understanding that housing sits at the crossroads of economic, racial, health, and environmental justice. Safe, secure housing is necessary for every person to thrive. If we have a future, it will be a future which we accomplish together as an integrated body of well-cared-for individuals. The right to be and remain housed is a human right.
There Is Enough Food
Much of the food harvested is processed and then transferred into global food supply chains that are then distributed to restaurants and cafeterias, etc. In the last four weeks with “Stay at Home” orders, much of that has shut down. This is why we have seen stories emerging of farmers dumping milk, or tilling crops over without picking them from the fields. Farmers are choosing to not harvest because it costs money and they don’t have immigrant workers to pick the crops.
We are seeing industrial meat processing plants become sites of COVID-19 hotspot outbreaks and shut down. Meat processing workers are particularly susceptible to the virus because they typically stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the line and congregate in crowded locker rooms and cafeterias. Neither of these situations bodes well for the resiliency of our food system, which is actually industrialized agriculture dependent upon fossil fuels, based on rapid, mass production, not all rooted in the needs of local economies.
The global food and beverage industry is now worth over USD $ 8 trillion, representing more than 10% of the world’s GDP, according to a report from Plunkett Research. A handful of corporations—Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz Company, Danone, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Unilever, Diageo, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars, Heineken, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez—control our food, from farm to fork. Their unbridled power grants them increasing political influence over the rules that govern our food system and allows them to manipulate the marketplace—pushing down the prices paid to family farmers and driving them out of business.
In 2008 Michael Pollen wrote an open letter to then President-Elect Obama saying, “agriculture is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, is a national security risk, and is built on cheap oil.” It is worth re-reading the letter now and its bottom line: “we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.” Pollan recommends three policy changes: 1) food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume; 2) policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world; and 3) policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.
We must rethink our industrial food system and build strong local food-sheds where people are buying food from local farmers within 100 miles of their city. Communities need to finance/sponsor new farmers working on the land and ending the industrial de-localized agriculture. We must support the growth of regenerative agriculture that builds social health, biodiversity, and yields a nutritious and profitable farm product. We must spend our research dollars on agroecology rather than exploitation of industrial agriculture.
We Must Rethink Our Value Systems
To change how we distribute things we must rethink the medium through which we do so much of the distribution. We must rethink money and reinvent money systems that are in alignment with human values and value human life and living systems.
Money is entirely a social construct and contract. We created it and we can change how it works. It is literally all in our collective heads. Consider the case of Brazil. The country ended inflation by creating a virtual currency that was stable. The current rules of money mean that money comes into existence when debt is created. We have created a system where the hoarding of money is rewarded and debt is encouraged. We must rethink this. According to Edward Cahn, the core operating system of a society is family, neighborhood, and community. We are seeing the widespread emergence of mutual aid networks that can be nurtured and supported during and after the COVID-19 crisis has passed. Established mutual aid systems will enable societies to be much more ready to endure the next pandemic but more importantly mutual aid brings human civilization into alignment with nature.
These non-market systems are not in good shape; they have been underutilized and replaced by money. The operating system is no longer reliably performing basic functions such as transmitting values, creating support and consensus, and preserving memories. Money represents that abstract value that can be exchanged in a naked market. There is a role for this type of exchange in a complex society with millions of goods to be exchanged and produced through supply chains of raw materials. However, our current economy isn’t built on these types of substantive transactions yet. Much of the consumer spending is on things that aren’t directly related to human needs but instead human wants, to fill emotional voids created by over marketization.
The future society can be rooted in local communities, our connection to each other and our interdependence with the land, water and air for our nurturance. It will require going through a process of letting go of the old way of doing things, and re-thinking our value systems. People are the true wealth of society. Reciprocity is a fundamental principle of human life. This happens when we come together in community to care for one another, to learn from each other, to celebrate and to console one another.
