Examine the Plan - Part 2: Thoughts on the Global (and Domestic) Marshall Plan    

After the second World War, General George Marshall suggested that U.S. interests would be best served by a massive project to provide aid to Western European countries, including Germany, our antagonist in the war. His proposals for relief and reconstruction were backed in the U.S., partly by our desire to make Western Europe more economically successful than Eastern Europe, which was dominated by the Soviet Union at the time. We believed that with greater economic resources, Western Europeans would not democratically elect a communist government.

What is The Global (and Domestic) Marshall Plan?

The idea of a similar massive relief effort for developing nations gradually emerged and there are now various conceptions of a Global Marshall Plan to provide aid to impoverished areas all over the world.

These plans vary widely in focus and scope. We join the Centre for Global Negotiations in calling for a series of international meetings to shape the details of such a plan. In the meantime, we are interested in further developing our own plan. And we are inviting members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives to brainstorm to help refine our ideas.

However, at this time, our ideas for an NSP style Global Marshall Plan are developed enough to form a solid and compelling plank for American politics. We will eventually need to prepare a full book's worth of details before the Plan is actually implemented. However, for the moment, it is enough to try to convince the American public of the need for this kind of Plan as quickly as possible.

In the next few years, if we can get the idea of the Generosity Strategy and the Global Marshall Plan into mainstream conversation in the U.S., we will have accomplished a great deal. We are not in danger of Congress and the President immediately accepting the Plan, and then being caught without enough details. Therefore, the NSP will continue to work with others in the next few years to develop these ideas, and will give top priority to building coalitions with other groups that can endorse our version of the Global Marshall Plan.

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

1. Provide enough funding to once and -for all eliminate global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate health care. These funds will also restore the global environment, healing it from 150 years of irresponsible forms of industrialization in both capitalist and self-described socialist countries. The most modest estimates for this funding would be to dedicate 1-2% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the world's developed nations toward this goal each year, for the next twenty years.

   We do not want to wait until all G-8 nations or the world's 29 OECD nations are involved in this project. Rather, 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 the Congress to vote for and fund it.

2. Create an international, unbiased, nongovernmental agency for receiving the funds (including both foreign aid and alternative sources of financing) and distributing them. This method of receiving and distributing funds must be environmentally sensitive, respectful of native cultures, safeguarded against corruption, protected from manipulation to serve corporate profit motives or elitist interests, and should empower the people in each region. This agency should be governed by a board of ethicists, religious leaders, poets, writers, social theorists, philosophers, economists, scientists, and social change activists.

   All members of the agency must demonstrate that they give higher priority to the well being of others than to the wellbeing of corporations or wealthy elites. They will carefully scrutinize, supervise, and if necessary, override the decisions of a staff. Their staff must be committed to the goals of the project, want it to succeed, and have no ideological commitments or conflicts of interest that run counter to the creation of a successful international agency for the elimination of global poverty.

3. Change all global and regional trade agreements in which the U.S. is currently involved so they no longer unfairly benefit 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 allowing working people to organize, paying them a living wage, and providing adequate safety, health conditions and environmental safeguards. Only by doing so, will economic growth be encouraged in ways that respect the rights of working people, promote their well-being, and ensure their dignity and human rights. 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.

4. Ensure hands-on involvement from peoples of the Western world, starting with the United States. We want to create an International Generosity Corps (IGC) to provide ways for people with useful skills to volunteer two years of their life, at any age, and donate their talents toward the goals of the Global Marshall Plan. To make this viable for professionals and others who with valuable skills who fear losing their jobs, we envision a guaranteed "return" job for anyone volunteering two years in the IGC. That return job would pay the same salary as the job they held before they entered the program.

   While participating in the IGC, people would receive the average salary that they were receiving in the five years before volunteering so they could continue to help their families. However, they would be encouraged to bring their families with them to spend in the countries where they were working. Their salaries in the IGC would be the same as those of that people in the host countries received for doing comparable work.

   For high school graduates, three years of volunteer service in the Global Marshall Plan would be rewarded with a fully paid college or professional school tuition, plus student housing and food for four years. The only stipulation would be that volunteers make satisfactory progress in an accredited college or graduate or professional school.

5. Use the IGC program to build the capacities of people around the world to ensure their own future economic wellbeing, as well as deliver certain necessities. These necessities include emergency food supplies, housing, infrastructure, and training. In terms of housing, the IGC program will build environmentally sound housing for the millions who are currently homeless and for the hundreds of millions of people soon to be born into poverty before the program can fully succeed. In terms of infrastructure, the IGC program will rebuild crumbling city infrastructure, dams, levees, roads, bridges, ports, and railroads in environmentally sound ways. In terms of training, the IGC program will train hundreds of millions of people with the skills necessary to do well in the economic marketplace and to survive those aspects of environmental collapse that at this point may be impossible to avoid.

6. Retrain 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. This includes agriculture, health care, housing, infrastructure, education and computers, and other appropriate technologies.

We estimate that this program, 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.

In Part 3, we'll look at building support for the Plan. 

-- Written by Rabbi Michael Lerner, edited by Martha Roden  

Our profound thanks to Martha for her professionalism and generosity in volunteering to help us out; if you would like to volunteer with Tikkun or NSP central, please click here.