HOW THE POOR CAN SAVE CAPITALISM

HEADLINES OF THE DAY: ANOTHER 15,000 PEOPLE DIED YESTERDAY BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO POOR TO LIVE. THE RICH INCREASED THEIR WEALTH YESTERDAY BY $0.3 BILLION. THE 21st CENTURY VERSION OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IS ONE DAY NEARER.

“O Ye rich ones on earth! The poor in your midst are My trust; guard ye My trust, and be not intent only on your own ease.”
Bahá’u’lláh

A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis at willisdavid167@gmail.com. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE TO POVERTY (Part 95). This blog is a review of HOW THE POOR CAN SAVE CAPITALISM: REBUILDING THE PATH TO THE MIDDLE CLASS by John Hope Bryant, published in 2014.

Foreword by Andrew Young, former UN ambassador, civil rights organizer, and mayor of Atlanta
John Hope Bryant has made a wonderful, original, and visionary contribution for all those who want to see economic inequality shrink in their life time. This book is in the tradition of John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written in 1919 and ignored until the Marshall Plan was proposed in 1947. It is in the tradition of University of Michigan professor C.K. Prahalad, who wrote about The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. It is in the tradition of Muhammed Yunus, the “poor people’s banker,” and the Grameen Bank experience in Bangladesh.

Cities must join together in a global economy
As mayor of Atlanta I learned that, as far as cities are concerned, national economies are mostly irrelevant. To survive, cities must join together in a global economy. And technology, which transcends borders, is far more powerful than any laws created by councils, legislators, or congress.

There is greater access to technology than ever before
There is more wealth in today’s world than has ever existed in history. There is a greater capacity for, creation of, and access to technology than ever before. At the same time, there is also a greater understanding of the world’s needs than ever before. We can predict droughts and we can analyze the failure of the earth’s surface to regenerate its topsoil, as Howard Buffet reminds us in his book Forty Chances.

The survival of humanity depends on generating another one billion or two billion jobs
John Bryant is a watchman who sees the terrorism that plagues the Middle East and the restlessness among the masses in Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, and Russia. He has experienced firsthand the statistics that Jim Clifton records in his prophetic book The Coming Jobs War, which says that a planet of seven billion people cannot be sustained with only 1.2 billion jobs, that the very survival of humanity, rich and poor alike, depends on finding ways to mobilize, innovate, and generate another one billion or two billion jobs.

Jobs must evolve through the interaction of vision, need, energy, and even a little greed
Jobs cannot be created by wars or by governments. Jobs must somehow evolve through the interaction of vision, need, energy, and even a little greed. I think that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be proud of his efforts to inspire us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, set at liberty those who are oppressed, and, in the process, create and enjoy the abundant life that the Bible promises for all of God’s children.