This past holiday season, millions again tuned into reruns of It's a Wonderful Life, a 1940s film that has long been a Christmas classic:

A small Midwestern town survives the Great Depression with the help of George Bailey, head of a small savings & loan, who keeps the local economy afloat with generosity and creative community organizing--while managing to foil a crafty slumlord bent on monopolizing the town's business sector. A sudden financial setback drives him to the brink of suicide, but he has a change of heart after his guardian angel appears to show how the town would have succumbed to poverty, injustice, ugliness, and moral corruption if he had never been part of it.

The film is a moving tribute to both the "power of one" and the "power of community." It also overrates the effectiveness of individual efforts in our increasingly globalized world. It doesn't acknowledge the bigger economic players at work behind most local Grinches. It doesn't hint at the unseen manipulations of trusts and cartels, Wall Street speculators, and bought-off legislators and regulators. It is silent about national banking policies that encouraged the 1920's financial bubble and failed to soften the impact of mass bank failures on the general population.

In the early 21st century, global predatory economic forces continue to strengthen their grip, chewing up communities, cultures, local economies, and ecosystems. Local George Baileys are still resisting, but often they aren't able to turn back the onslaught.

So how did a handful of soulless, multinational corporations and financial Goliaths acquire such power over the rights and well-being of the whole planet?

The Empire's power comes largely from us. Somehow we have been persuaded--in spite of abundant cultural wisdom and history lessons to the contrary--that our happiness depends on cheap manufactured goods, highly processed foods, easy mobility, and wasteful energy consumption far in excess of what is required to meet our basic material needs, in an atmosphere of competition for diminishing resources.

Recent studies have debunked this hollow notion of happiness. While material consumption has skyrocketed over the past half-century, affluent people on average don't seem to be any happier for it.

That is why a new video in the QEW lending library, The Economics of Happiness, may contribute to the healing of what really ails us. Using the Ladakhis, an indigenous community in the western Himalayas, as a case study, the filmmakers show how today's economic, energy, and ecological crises are really a single crisis of the human spirit. The Ladakhis once thrived on farming and regional trade, had a vibrant community and family life, and suffered no hunger or unemployment. Then they were invaded by the consumer culture in the mid-1970s. Commercial advertising, based on Western models and values, convinced Ladakhi young people that they were backward, primitive and poor and that their traditional culture wasn't worth following. Shifting attitudes and deteriorating relationships led to pollution, unemployment, divisiveness, depression, and a widening wealth gap.

This kind of general unraveling of happiness, sovereignty, and well-being has been happening everywhere—a logical result of a system that values profits over people.

Emphasizing that the corporations wield only the economic and political power that has been yielded to them by citizens, the video urges us to withdraw that legitimacy by supporting alternative economic systems. This can begin by imagining an economy that isn't based on growth and by replacing Gross National Product with more accurate and comprehensive economic metrics, such as the Genuine Progress Index.

Another essential goal is to remove fiscal and other supports that grant unfair advantage to globalization and corporate capitalism. That wouldn't eliminate trade or make self-reliance absolute. It would simply favor economic activities that are sustainable and would put local needs first.

These are not pipe dreams. The video documents a growing global network of decentralized agricultural, financial, and manufacturing activities that operates very differently from globalization and bears very different fruits. It is providing more jobs, more food per acre, and better soil health than industrial operations. It is protecting local identity, local knowledge, self-respect, a sense of belonging to a nurturing community, and a deeper sense of interdependence with each other and the natural world.

This and other videos can be borrowed from the QEW Video Library at <www.quakerearthcare.org> for $10 to cover postage and handling.

—Louis Cox