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Luna Crow writes on Facebook:
If you want to hit Wall Street where it hurts, hit them in the wallet. Find your local credit union and take your money out of the big banks. Step one...next step, embrace sharing and bartering as an alternative form of economics. Form communities that are integrated and interrelated...interconnected and self sustaining. That is the path to ending corporatocracies' control. Consume less, produce more and make the economy an exchange without empowering the manipulative bankers and elite orchestrating corporations who own global politics through their filthy energy and their corrupt banKING schemes.
Luna is tapping into a major area of change. Our monetary system. We must get our economics out of the hands of the international bankers' elite and place it back into our hands, as a community, and as individuals. I would also add that our economy needs to be varied. As any two steps in a forest reveals a wide variety of life, our economy must be varied to be robust and able to change according to conditions. For example, there is an increasing interest in local time banks where groups of people offer their services in exchange for "time dollars." Each dollar is thus equal to one hour of work. For example, a craftsman who builds a chair that takes 10 hours plus materials may charge 10 time dollars plus the dollar cost of materials. If the materials were bought at time dollar rates, then perhaps it would cost 15 time dollars.
Another area we need to change is how we make decisions as a community. As I watched a video on the Occupation of Wall Street, I saw where people who were not allowed to use microphones or bullhorns working together to make messages and questions heard. I also saw a type of consensus decision making process that truly empowered all those involved. I have worked in small groups using consensus decision making practices, and it does indeed empower each person in the decision making process that ultimately affects their lives. In the case of the people in the video, the process was on a much larger scale than what I was accustomed to.
The point is that this type of governance is indeed placing power in the hands of the people. At present we are told we live in a free democracy, but any working class woman or man knows better. Their lives are under the control of the corporations they work for, the corporations they pay their mortgage to, the corporations that make their clothes and the corporations that provide food for a cost.
Unfortunately, the consumer of the products, be they clothes, food or some other commodity, are at the mercy of the corporations that often enslave the people manufacturing and processing those clothes or that food. Furthermore, it is those same corporations that often employ the consumer. In these days, if people are working, they are working for less money, less benefits and oftentimes have to work more to make ends meet.
Is this ok? Or do we make some drastic changes?
How do we put power back into our hands?
There are movements at hand that can lead us this way. For example, Transition Town, which arose in England in response to Peak Oil, is a movement in which we can individually become empowered within our community. How? By building local economies and utilizing local resources for food, clothing and shelter. The larger promise of such a movement is in the building of a sense of belonging to a community with the full knowledge that what you are doing is affecting the lives of those you can at least make eye contact with.
These movements are further embedded with helping to rekindle a healthy planet that can support future generations. For example, closely related to Transition Town is Permaculture Gardening and Farming in which the process of Nature is mimicked in working the land for food, clothing and other necessities. In this case, variety is the key to a healthy environment and farming systems. This process is much different than the standardization thrust of most corporations of this day and age. Standardization is seen in all walks of life today, from education to manufacturing to the goals of genetic engineering of the foods you eat. Yet, as many ecologists realize, a forest that has only one type of tree, or animal, is not going to survive. Extinction is on the horizon for these forests. It is the same for us. In a forest, if a tree in a standardized forest caught an invasive disease, the entire forest would be destroyed. With a variety, there is less chance that the entire forest would go the way of the dinosaur for while some would die, others would live and recreate.
In other words, the assembly line actions initiated by Henry Ford are simply not healthy for our planet. A rich variety in our world is what is needed. Likewise, we do not need, nor should we want, standardized kids taught in standardized classrooms. If we continue in this standardization vein, our kids will become robots while we continue to create an environment on land, in the sea and in the air which will lead to extinctions throughout the planet. Indeed, these extinctions are occurring as I write.
Another driver in this mix is our being short sighted. We want what we want when we want it, which is now. Our ancient fore-parents did not think in this way. Indeed, many of the Native American tribes would identify the impact of a decision to the 7th generation. Today, we are more likely to think about our profits in relationship to the quarter we are in.
The impact of our short -- sightedness is given in the following excerpt from a Public Broadcasting site (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/2/l_032_04.html)
The background level of extinction known from the fossil record is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria , and fungi , not just the large vertebrates we are most familiar with). In contrast, estimates based on the rate at which the area of tropical forests is being reduced, and their large numbers of specialized species, are that we may now be losing 27,000 species per year to extinction from those habitats alone.
Obviously we have to think short-term to get to long --term interests. However, the short-term is created by giving thought for the long-term impact.
We have to be about more than ourselves. We have to be for those around us, those we don't see, the future generations and the overall health of the planet. Indeed, it would be a good exercise for you to look into the face of a young child, perhaps your own, and identify what you can do to make the world a better place for that child and his or her children.
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