Global Marshall Plan  . . . A National Security Strategy of Generosity and Care

Security Through Domination:   The Current Paradigm 

We all want to live in a loving and compassionate way.   The problem is, we feel that to do so puts us in danger of being taken advantage of by everyone else.    Our culture has a deeply embedded belief that the only rational way to live is to look out for ourselves first and to try to stay on top of the heap, even when that comes at the expense of others.   For five thousand years, "common sense" has told us that the only way to achieve personal and collective safety is through domination of others. 

This powerful belief has profoundly shaped not only our personal lives but  also our public policy.    Most of our elected officials, regardless of their political affiliation, believe that their job is to make decisions that advance a narrowly conceived set of "American interests."  In both Democratic and Republican administrations, terms like "negotiations" and "sanctions" are code words for using power to push for our way.    Likewise, "sovereign defense" and "national security are invoked by both parties to justify spending vastly more on the military than on social programs -- again, for the purpose of getting our way both at home an abroad.   And "our way" usually ends up being shaped by a commitment to protect the economic and political interests of the most powerful corporations and their allies.  

Because our politics, our media, our work lives, even our schools, are steeped in the belief that the only realistic way to be safe is to compete and win, no mater the cost to others, people have stopped trusting each other.    When people can no longer believe in the shared humanity and decency of others, they develop a vulnerability to fundamentalist reactionaries and their campaign to instill “Fear of the Other.”    Nationalism and religious fundamentalism foster a false sense of “us” versus “them.” 

The result has been century upon century of war and violence.   A world divided by nationalist struggles and vain fantasies of dominating the resources of the earth on behalf of a few of the more powerful nations must be recognized as increasingly self-destructive for the human race.   Yet very many decent and moral people, having been talked into accepting the current construction of politics as “the given” within which one must work, end up participating in this insanity and calling it “realistic.” 

Security Through Generosity:  The New Paradigm

The Network of Spiritual Progressives rejects a reality based on fear of others.   We believe it is time for a fundamentally new approach to security and foreign policy.  We suggest that generosity and genuine caring for others can be a much more efficient and morally coherent approach to human safety, peace and development.   We call this approach the “Strategy of Generosity.” 

Building the Strategy of Generosity requires that we reconnect with the human capacity to recognize others as embodiments of the sacred, or, in secular language, as fundamentally worthy because of who they are and not just because of what they can do for us.   This profound and intuitive connection among people must become the center of our campaign for peace and environmental sanity.   The bonds of caring among human beings can and must be fostered by our policies. 

The key to our alternative, what we call the Strategy of Generosity, is our commitment to reestablishing trust and hope among the peoples of the world so that we might begin to reflect and act coherently on ending world poverty in our lifetimes and saving the global environment from almost certain destruction. “What best serves the interests of American economic and political geo-power?”  we want a foreign policy that asks “What best serves all people and the survival of the planet itself?”

What is the Global Marshall Plan? 

The Global Marshall Plan is a plan for all the world’s people to work in solidarity to eliminate poverty once and for all and to heal the environmental crisis.   

The Global Marshall Plan takes its name from the post-World War II Marshall Plan, a massive and successful project to provide aid to Western European countries, including German, which had been our antagonist in the war.   The motive behind this plan may have been partially altruistic.    Part of it was also a desire to strengthen capitalist economies in Europe to prevent them from becoming communist.  

Over the past 25 years, various ideas have emerged for a similar massive relief effort for developing nations.    We believe such a plan is an effective means of containing terrorism, and we are joining the Centre for Global Negotiations in calling for a series of international meetings to help shape the details of the plan. 

Here are the essential of the plan developed so far by the Network of Spiritual Progressives: 

• Provide enough funding to eliminate global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate health care, plus restore the global environment.   The most modest estimates for this would be to dedicate 1-2% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the world’s developed nations toward funding this goal each year for the next twenty years.   We do not want to wait until all of the G-8 nations are involved in this project; we believe that the U.S. must lead by example, dedicating at least 1% of its GDP toward this goal starting as soon as we can get Congress to fund it. 
• Create an international, unbiased, nongovernmental mechanism for receiving the funds (including both foreign aid and alternative sources of financing) and distributing them in a way that is environmentally sensitive, respectful of native cultures, safeguarded against corruption, protected from manipulation to serve elite interests, and empowering of the people in each region.    This agency or mechanism should be governed by a board of ethicists, religious leaders, artists, writers, social theorists, philosophers, economists, scientists, and social change activists, all of whom have demonstrated that they give higher priority to the well-being of others than to the well-being of corporations or wealthy elites. 
• Revise trade agreements in which the U.S. is currently involved so that they no longer privilege the most powerful and economically successful Western countries and the elites of other countries at the expense of the poor of the world.   Global trade must be both multilateral and equitable.    New agreements must provide support and encouragement for working people to organize, receive a living wage, and work under adequate safety and health conditions and environmental safeguards.   Trade agreements must also protect farmers, both at home and abroad, encouraging food prices that make it possible for farmers to make a living and poorer people to buy adequate food.  
• Ensure hands-on involvement from peoples of the Western world, starting with the United States .   We wish to greatly expanded Peace and Justice Corps of the United States (PJCUS) which would provide ways for people with useful skills to volunteer two years (at any age) toward the goals of the Global Marshall Plan.   High school graduates would receive college tuition and room and board following their service, and older Americans would receive a salary equivalent to their average salary for the past five years of work, as well as a guaranteed job after service is complete.  
• Retain the armies of nations around the world to become experts in ecologically sensitive construction of those aspects of their own societies that need relief and reconstruction, including agriculture, health care, housing, infrastructure, education and computers, and other appropriate technology.  
• Train everyone on the planet in techniques of nonviolent communication, diversity, environmental sustainability, family and parental support, stress reduction, emergency health techniques, diet and exercise and caring for others who are in need of help.  

We estimate that this program, if fully implemented, could cost as much as 3-5% of the GDP of the world.   Our commitment is to start with the 1% of US GDP and move from there. 

People will be tempted to dismiss this plan as “too unrealistic.”   We must break through our entrenched assumptions about what is realist so that people can look at the Strategy of Generosity not through the frame of existing inside-the-beltway assumptions or the “common sense” thrown at us daily by a corporate-dominated media, but rather through the frame of what the human race and the planet earth urgently need.   

A Spirit of Humility

We offer this plan with a commitment to humility and a conviction that it cannot work unless it is understood as deriving from our own commitment to the well-being of everyone on the planet and not primarily as a self-interested plan to advance American power or influence.  

We must also insist that the plan be implemented with a clear message that although the West has superior technology and material success, we do not equate that with superior moral or cultural wisdom.    On the contrary, our approach must reflect a deep humility and a spirit of repentance for the ways in which Western dominance of the planet has been accompanied by wars, environmental degradation, and a growing materialism and selfishness. 

We have much to learn from the peoples of the world, their cultures, their spiritual and intellectual heritage, their ways of dealing with human relationships.  

“Realistic” and Right

It is in our own interests as human to recognize that our individual and societal well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet.   The Global Marshall Plan could save the planet from nuclear and conventional wars and jumpstart the process of global environmental planning. 

But there is an even more crucial reason to adopt it, and that is because it reflects our deep need to care for each other as momentary embodiments of God (or whatever name you use for the goodness and love and generosity of the universe at its current stage of evolutionary development).   We wish to foster an ethos of caring and love for others because it is ethically and spiritually right to do so, not only because it is instrumentally the only sane policy for saving the planet and saving the lives of our children and grandchildren. 

Ironically, what turns out to be the most ethical path is also the most practical and self-interested from the standpoint of saving the human race and protecting the planet that sustains us.   We reject any approach to the Global Marshall Plan which attempts to take it outside of the ethical and spiritual framework articulated here.    It will work if it is perceived as more than a new attempt to dominate the world through “aid” or some new way to open the gates for further penetration by Western corporate interests.    It can only be perceived as a genuine attempt to change the terms of global interaction.    Support for the Global Marshall Plan depends on our ethical vision of a world in which generosity and caring for others is valued because it is right, not only because it is a smart and savvy way to protect the United States. 

To our friends in Congress and in the various political parties, to those who wish to work with us on this project, and to the media we offer the following caution:   Do not take these ideas and try to “win” with them by abandoning the core vision and only achieving support for some of the details.   Global issues must be discussed and supported in an interdependent fashion, reflecting our human and spiritual interdependence.   The global common good must be our goal.   The Global Marshall Plan is worthy only if it is a way to actualize a new approach to human relations, an approach which has been taught for millennia by our religious, spiritual, and secular ethical traditions.