Two calls for a "New Marshall
Plan"
Cornell president and Network of Spiritual Progressives both
urge this big step forward
[6-7-07]
A call from the President of Cornell
University:
This note comes to us from Witherspooner Betty Hale:
It was electrifying! I went to graduation
exercises Sunday expecting the usual commencement blather, and
instead am filled with hope! Cornell's president, David Skorton,
called for a New Marshall Plan spearheaded by a network of
universities "to reduce inequalities in the world." Cornell's
background and current vision mean that "Cornell stands poised
to be a prime mover in a new Marshall Plan of research, teaching
and outreach to address the inequalities and global health
challenges that threaten our world," pledged Skorton, "[m]agnified
by the efforts of other major research universities, and by the
redoubling of our own efforts, energized by a substantial and
sustained national commitment...."
Witherspooners likely want to alert university
communities they inhabit to Skorton's call to action – and urge
them to read and cheer!
Read Skorton’s address >>
Or look at a few excepts that we’ve prepared:
One of the challenges that you [graduates] will
face—and one that we are all confronting as a society in the U.S.
and around the globe—is the enormous problem of societal
inequalities. Here in the U.S., 37 million people lived in poverty
in 2005, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The poverty rate for
non-Hispanic Whites that year was 8.3 percent, while the poverty
rate was 24.9 percent for African-Americans and 21.8 percent for
Hispanics. Perhaps most troubling, the poverty rate for children
under 18 years of age was 17.6 percent or 12.9 million children.
Worldwide, of course, the statistics are enormously sobering: More
than 2 billion people—nearly 7 times the entire population of the
United States—currently live on less than $2 per day.2
Some 1.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.9
billion people have inadequate access to sanitation. About 150
million children are malnourished, and more than 10 million children
under five years of age die each year, many of them from causes that
would be preventable with better nutrition and access to basic
health care.
This is a humanitarian crisis of the first order,
and it is also a threat to the stability of a world community, to
intercultural understanding, to peace, to your future as new Cornell
graduates. At a time when the world is becoming smaller and more
interconnected, when our economy and our futures—your futures—are
linked to what is going on elsewhere, all of us should be concerned
that the economic strength and growth we take for granted in the
U.S., and that are beginning to benefit an increasing number of
people in places like India, China, South Korea, and Singapore, are
bypassing hundreds of millions of others in Asia, in the Middle
East, in parts of Latin America, and in Africa, and, indeed, here in
the U.S. as well.
As the WorldWatch Institute noted, "Globalization
has raised expectations, even as modern communications make the
rising inequality between a rich, powerful, and imposing West and
the rest of the world visible to all. Poverty and deprivation do not
automatically translate into hatred. But people whose hopes have
worn thin, whose aspirations have been thwarted, and whose
discontent is rising, are far more likely to succumb to the siren
song of extremism."
...
Individual action, pursued individually, is
necessary for human progress. Necessary, but not sufficient. The
problems facing our world are so great and the inequalities so
unfair—and so explosive, if they are not ameliorated—that the U.S.
must provide leadership here, as it did in the rebuilding of Europe
after World War II. Sixty years ago, almost to the week, on June 5,
1947, U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, speaking at a Harvard
Commencement, suggested the need for a massive program of aid and
redevelopment for Europe that came to be known as the Marshall Plan.
...
Over the years there have been many calls for new
Marshall Plans to address various needs elsewhere in the world. But
none of the plans of which I am aware has grasped the potential of
universities, through comprehensive programs of teaching, research
and outreach, to assist countries struggling to meet the needs of
their citizens.
Universities? What do our universities have to do
with these urgent questions of inequality and poverty? One of the
greatest contributions that our great research and land-grant
universities have made over time—beginning long before the Marshall
Plan and continuing to this day—is the development of human capacity
through the dissemination of our research, teaching and outreach.
Enhancement of human capacity relies on and ensures political
stability, security, robust public health, and effective education,
which, in turn, lead to inquiry, discovery, and innovation in places
where they are most needed. Since the Industrial Revolution and
increasingly in the last half-century, innovation has led to
enormous economic growth; the foundation of innovation is research;
and the seat of fundamental research is the university. The
university is also the seat of undergraduate, graduate and
professional education—education that leads to new generations of
those who inquire, who discover, who innovate.
...
Since the end of the Cold War, when the U.S. stood
as the world's sole superpower, there has been a steady erosion of
America's stature in the world. Other nations are now challenging us
economically and on religious, moral and ideological grounds. Our
credibility has waned and, although seen as a powerful nation, we
are not universally seen as devoted to helping our global neighbors
in ways and on terms of their own design and aspiration. Indeed,
much of the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent on
development aid in the last 40 to 50 years has not produced
sustainable progress in many countries, and in some cases may have
been counterproductive, for reasons that range from poor governance,
internal conflict and corruption to badly designed programs and
inconsistent funding. Even our cherished ideals of freedom and
democracy no longer have the power to motivate and inspire that they
once did.
Yet our major universities continue to be a beacon
of hope and opportunity for the world. For example, faced with the
challenge of meeting the educational needs of its middle class,
expected to expand to 400 million by 2020, India has more than
doubled the number of its universities and colleges since the turn
of the millennium and is on track to quadruple the number over the
next 7 to 9 years. In Africa, as noted in last Sunday's New York
Times, even some of the best universities are in a state of
near-collapse at a time when Africa desperately needs local
expertise and an educated citizenry to lift itself out of poverty.
The efforts of universities like Cornell will be critical to
empowering young women and men throughout the world who seek to
better their fortunes through education.
...
But we must also join together to voice a more
forceful call for transformed U.S. economic, political and military
policy on international relations that would encourage and support
capacity building by the nation's universities. In this transformed
policy, our government, our private sector including
non-governmental organizations or NGOs, our philanthropic
organizations and, most importantly, our colleagues overseas would
all play a critical role.
...
I call on my counterparts—presidents and
chancellors of the nation's great research and land-grant
universities—as well as leaders in the organizations that represent
our universities' interests nationally, in the private sector and
the NGOs, and in the American foreign policy community to join me in
advocating for a larger unified, cooperative and carefully planned
national strategy for reducing global inequalities. We must find
ways to move beyond the market-driven relations among universities
that our competition for students and research dollars have
generated and work cooperatively to address the problems I have
outlined here. I call for us to join with our counterparts in other
countries, developed and developing, to forge alliances based on
enlightened self-interest through which we can tackle common or
complementary problems. In the years to come, the number of young
people looking for a higher education will rise exponentially
worldwide. Without a plan commensurate to the challenge, we will
have a very unhappy and unprepared generation instead.
Network of Spiritual Progressives issues a
similar call
The Network of Spiritual Progressives, along with
the progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun, are voicing the same
call for a "Global Marshall Plan," which will reflect their
conviction that people of faith must shift our nation’s (and
world’s) thinking away from the competitive, self-centered values of
the market system, to an ethic of care and respect for others, a
"new bottom line."
So they are calling for a new "Strategy of
Generosity" which would be expressed most practically in a new sort
of Marshall Plan.
Read the full statement, "An Introduction to the Network of
Spiritual Progressives' version of The Global Marshall Plan >>
Or find excerpts (slightly edited) here >>
A few excerpts (slightly edited)
After a century of wars and violence, and five
thousand years of societies that thought it was "common sense" to
believe that the only way to achieve personal and societal safety
was through domination of others, culminating in the world wars of
the 20th century, the Vietnam war, and most recently in the Iraq
war, we at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are calling for a
fundamentally new approach which emphasizes that generosity and
genuine caring for others can be a much more effective and morally
coherent approach to human security, peace and development.
We know that when people feel that they can’t
trust others, and that everyone is just out for themselves, they are
drawn to paranoid pseudo-communities that are sometimes offered to
them through extremes of nationalism or through right-wing religious
communities. When people can no longer believe in the shared
humanity and decency of others, they develop a vulnerability to the
fundamentalist reactionaries and their campaign to instill "Fear of
The Other."
But it’s not just reactionaries who use that approach—it is embedded
in the fundamental thinking of both the Democratic and Republican
political parties. The language of "negotiation" and" sanctions" as
used in contemporary politics during both Democratic and Republican
administrations are code-words for less extreme forms of using our
power to push for our way.
...
The key to our alternative, what we call the
Strategy of Generosity, is our commitment to reestablish 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 the almost certain
destruction it faces unless we reverse our policies and give highest
priority to protecting the earth. Instead of asking "what serves the
interests of American economic and political geo-power best?" we
want a foreign policy that asks "What best serves all the people on
this planet and best serves the survival of the planet itself?"
...
Building that Strategy of Generosity requires that
we reconnect with the human capacity to recognize the other as an
embodiment of the sacred, or, in secular language, as fundamentally
valuable for who they are and not as only instrumentally valuable
for what they can do for us. This pre-reflective, pre-nationalist
connection between 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.
...
Here are the essentials of the plan developed
so far by the Network of Spiritual Progressives [condensed]:
• Providing enough funding to once-and-for-all eliminate global
poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate
health care, plus restore the global environment
• Creating an international, unbiased, nongovernmental mechanism for
receiving the funds ... and distributing them in a way that is
environmentally sensitive, respectful of native cultures,
safeguarded against corruption, protected from manipulation to serve
corporate profit motives or the interests of elites, and empowering
of the people in each region.
• Changing all global and regional 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.
• Ensuring hands-on involvement from peoples of the Western world,
starting with the United States. We wish to create a greatly
expanded Peace and Justice Corps of the United States (PJCUS) which
would provide ways for people with useful skills to volunteer two
years of their life (at any age of their life) in donating their
talents toward the goals of the Global Marshall Plan.
• Using the PJCUS program not only to build the capacities of people
around the world to ensure their own future economic well-being ,
but also to deliver certain necessities including emergency food
supplies, ... housing ... the rebuilding of crumbling city
infrastructure, and the training of hundreds of millions of people
with the skills necessary to do well in the economic marketplace.
• Retraining of 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.
• Training for everyone on the planet in techniques of nonviolent
communication, respect for ethnic and religious diversity and
differences, family and parental support, stress reduction, child
and elderly care, emergency health techniques, diet and exercise,
and caring for others who are in need of help.
• Training for everyone on the planet in the essentials of living in
accord with the survival and sustainability needs of the planet.
