Beyond the crisis: a plea for a Parliament of the Future

In the North of the Netherlands is the island Terschelling, or Skylge in Gaelic, which means Rock in the Sea. Like Skye, Skilligs, Skallingen, all localities around the North Sea, once the realm of the Kelts.

From my house on Terschelling I can overlook the Wadden Estuary, which stretches from here to Denmark, 3,000 km2 large, home to millions of migrating birds and water fowl. The 5,000 islanders are virus-free. Friesland is the old mainland on the horizon, where the disease has hardly been detected. It is safe here, and that gives space to reflect.

An aggressive virus circulates, but it is not the Plague, this virus seems more like a regular flu, is more contagious and more fatal. It is less catching for strong healthy people, but more so for sickly old men and women. In the end everyone can see that the costs to lengthen each ailing persons' life for another 2 years rises beyond this pandemic, millions of euros per intensive care hospital-bed. You can expect this soon not to be accepted anymore. Cramps of the masses will always look for an escape and rarely these will go in a disciplined manner. Anger will become our part.

Therefore it is necessary to outline a promising perspective for the world Beyond the Crisis. After the financial blows of 2008 the guilty were not punished and the pendular swung back to their financial bastions. It was paid for by the public and they have not forgotten this. This time it results in bankruptcies, stones in stomachs and deadlocks.

It is obvious that there are structural flaws within the financial sector. They are hardly prepared. We also know there are concept- and organization defects in the complete World System, but diagnose and therapy is not public property and a Global intensive care treatment is not expected.

To enable recovery we must turn to the community, the world society of people. In Plunder of the Commons the British author Guy Standing describes how since the Middle Ages the English nobility has taken over the land. Landed gentry hardly existed, until the pack of robbers killed the population and put fences around the grounds. Later they called themselves Dukes and Earls. This process is till going on, now the commons exist of healthcare, climate, nature, education, public space, taxes and fair income distribution. To avoid plunder we draw up laws, agreements, contracts, tax systems and together we abide to the social codes of conduct.

Unfortunately this is not sufficient since if it is not supported by a stable collective value-system to serve as Providence. The common land, emancipation and equality are such systems, the erosion of which was once introduced by Thatcher and her credo 'There is no such thing as society', in other words there is nothing more that binds us, and from now on all power is to the marketplace. This started the next robbery on the commons.

Since then we face the new feud of the rich getting richer at the expense of all pillars of society of yesteryear. The new unprotected servants and slaves of the Middle Ages are now called the Independent Professionals. They will crash. The new illiterates are all the ones that cannot comprehend the complexities of the world. According to the organization expert Eddie Obeng, the speed of their learning capability cannot keep up with the change-pace around us. The moment this pace overtakes our learning capacity he calls Midnight, and occurs around the Millennium change. God had already disappeared from our mother's village.

Without Society and without a God, new space arises for the Individual. Through the marketplace the result of all individual dynamics since then is called the Modern World. But while the common people were not allowed to form a society, it opened the cage from where the right of the strongest escapes. And thus the whole collapses. Inequality, greed, a financial sector adrift, climate change, sea level rise, loss of biodiversity, climate fugitives, plastic soup oceans and so destruction of giant protein sources, felled forests, the list is long. I have seen it all, in all corners of the world. It will end badly.

In search if the origin of this derailment you end up with the debt economy. The total debt of trade, industry and governments amounts to hundreds of billions. The (non monetary) debts to the future is its multiple. The uninhabitable situation inflicted by this generation is the burden of the next generation. Calculations by a.o. Stefan Brunnhuber and David Korten to pay off these debts and redeem the damage to the planet and the repair the house called Society, will amount to €5 trillion per year until approx. 2050. The belief in progress we have expressed in economic growth, in thousands of aid-programs, to one day realize global recovery.

This is like whistling in the dark. The monetary standard exists by back-and-forth movement of debts, disguised in exchange rates, credits, interests, fiscal laws, white laundering en black money, as labeled by Hazel Henderson's the Global Casino and the Funny Money Game. Macro-economic theories have braided a framework of systems and national budget-principles, creating a difficult to understand complexity of currencies, inflation and supply of money.

The GNP is still not counting the external effects to economic growth as a loss, but as growth and thus progress, -with a cynical example that war and a prospering weapon industry increase the GNP and again shows up as growth on the balance sheets. Thanks to this casino China and India have indeed lifted millions of people from poverty in less than 40 years, which is seen as proof of accuracy of the financial complex. One denies its turbulent shockwaves, the caused damages. Investigating these analyses in the archives from 50 years ago you will find the same calculations. Little seems to have changed. Today we know much better.

We know that the financial sector is the engine of success and of austerity, conflict and inequality. We know that income inequality degrades its success. We know that we should acquit debts every 25 years, which used to be customary and practiced for centuries. The weight must come off in order to be able to move. E.g. we know that a base income is inevitable: it removes existential fears, it advances equality and welfare, and it is much more affordable than the present system of allowances, charities and refugee support. We have discovered that NOW suddenly there is an Everest of money available to rescue the population.

Hundreds of billions now roll from the printing press, all monetary principles are thrown overboard. Why can't these be put into climate, nature, new energy, better education, care of the elderly, asylum seekers, or ocean clean-ups? Or defense of the threatened coasts? We know with what and how we have to deal with it all? Thatcher's Non-Society does not exist, the community is nearly dissolved, but on the journey to new solidarity some ideological stones obstruct the way. And they are the market-ideologists. The free market has never existed; what we call economy is an anthill of activities, rules, legislation, directing and restraints, no corner of the market is free of all this. Populists and dictators make use of chaos on this financial flee-market, which they either would like to dominate, where market and money agglomerate, or by exploiting the lost and discontented victims and their fears.

If we want to understand the market ideology better and dismantle the defects of the building then we must change the existing system of decision-making, legislation, planning, law-making and income policies. There is no difference between citizen, consumer, producer and market parties. The VOC (United East India Company) was an enterprise undertaken by governments, directors, politicians, navy and army and lasted for 300 years. World-trade is from all times and illnesses always hitchhiked along. The difference is the scale. The seven plagues of Egypt now come from China and South America, they travel in the hand-palms of millions of tourists and in the proteins of trade of perishable goods. We know enough about the reset of the system, which has to commence now.

We plea for a Parliament of the Future, which will assemble without political colour, like the Congress of Vienna of Von Metternich and Wellington between 1815 and 1820; like the Paris Peace Conference of Clemenceau, Wilson and Lloyd George between 1918 and 1920, the cradle of the United Nations. Or the Conclave of Bretton Woods, that after 1945 founded the post-war economic arrangement based on the vision of John Maynard Keynes. There are numerous examples that formulated a new elan, ignited by wars and crises and inspired by visionairs. Party politics play no role, the Parliament of the Future stands above it. It will save this civilization. Viruses will loose out. 

Wouter van Dieren