Nobel Prize Winner Speaks Clear, Simple Truth

Sometimes it takes a Nobel Prize winner to say something clear and strong and compelling about our world.

No, not our Nobel Prize winner — Bangladesh’s.

Muhammad Yunus is this week’s person answering 10 questions from Time Magazine readers. He is the genius behind local microloans that help people in Bangladesh start tiny businesses so they can support their families while making the local economy viable.

He is asked by a Brit, “How would you help the world out of recession?” His answer is the kind of thing that makes you smack your forehead and say, “Yeah, duh.”

The system failed us. There’s no reason why we should resuscitate it. We have to make absolutely sure that we don’t go back to same old normalcy. We should be creating a new normalcy. That opportunity has to be taken.

How simple. How clear. A sharp statement of the obvious — that isn’t obvious to a whole lot of people.

Wall Street speculation, a hands-off government policy that let the speculators gamble with our jobs, our retirement and college funds and our entire economy, and the philosophy that letting those with the most capital acquire more will be good for everybody — these things (and our own individual greed and irresponsibility) got us where we are today. Without enough resources available for cops, schools, libraries, health care, job development, infrastructure. American economic and political policies of the past 50 years have transferred wealth from the poor and the middle class to the already-wealthy. As the speculators, burping after eating their own meals, reached across us to grab even more of our meals off our plates, they knocked over the dinner table and brought down the whole house — although they still walked away with their mouths and their bellies full.

“The system failed us. There’s no reason why we should resuscitate it.”

Pretty simple, pretty clear, pretty obvious.

Is our Nobel Peace Prize winner, and our Democratic Congress, going to make any real change in the system, or just resuscitate what’s failed all but the upper few percent?

– Bruce Benidt
(Photo from Time.com)