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This I wondered today when learning of how the Maidan civil rights web site was being blocked from Naltalka Zubar. Apparently it was closed following a Russian complaint. 

In his 1996 paper on people-centred economics, our founder Terry Hlaman wrote:

The question has been raised in Guardian sustainable business

Without hesitation I'd say yes, because that's the point we've been making for nearly 20 years since it was pitched to Bill Clinton by a member of the steering group for The Committee To Re-Elect the President.

It considered what is tangible and observable within our current economic paradigm.and how it enabled social injustice.

Yesterday's Guardian published an article by Larry Elliot on the Greek crisis and the original Marshall Plan which describes the speech made at Harvard by General George Marshall in 1947.

"In the days to come, the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, will be arguing that was good for Germany in 1953 would be good for Greece in 2015."

Here's part of the 1947 speech at Harvard:

The recent discussion about collaboration between business and NGOs reminded me of an approach we made to Oxfam in 2008 with regard to our work in Eastern Europe on microenterprise development. By this time, our proposal for business and NGO collaboration on a 'Marshall Plan for Ukraine had been widely disreibuted and read.

Oxfam were appealing for business donors, I offered the gift of our experience for mutual benefit:     .  

In human history there's nothing new about people being used as tradeable commodities, nor is there any novelty in opposing this.

The argument  for a people-centered approach to economics, began with an assertion for the need  to measure profit in a different way: 

Today as the second conference on Inclusive Capitalism comes to London, Mark Goldring of Oxfam makes the interesting assertion that people should replace profit as the "bottom line" in business

"We have somehow constructed a sphere of public debate where people are secondary to numbers; where the well-being of millions is too often secondary to the economic indicators.

As Janis Joplin sang, in Me and Bobby McGee:

"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose
And nothin' ain't worth nothin' but it's free
Feelin' good was easy, Lord, when Bobby sang the blues
And buddy, that was good enough for me
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee."

Another word for "nothing keft to lose" is revolution, the kind of civic uprising seen all over the world in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis.

"We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all."  Pope Francis writes in his recent encyclical

Many I'm sure have tried to begin such a conversation. They include our late founder who presented to the international Economics for Ecology Conferences in 2009, concluding:  

"Allowing that some people do not matter, as things are turning out, allows that other people do not matter and those cracks are widening to swallow up more and more people. Social enterprise is the first concerted effort in the Information Age to at least attempt to rectify that problem, if only because letting it get worse and worse threatens more and more of us. Growing numbers of people are coming to understand that “them” might equal “me.” Call it compassion, or call it enlightened and increasingly impassioned self-interest.

In 2009, I read something which seemed quite remarkable. It came from the UN   and a speech by Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, the President of the United Nations General Assembly.