Looking for Econ/Finance people

It looks like i need to try and get into looking at modern economic thinking, as in progressive stuff to deal with whats going on. I've read a few articles online, summing up current trends and crises and had a go at Michael Alberts Parecon book Thinking Forward: Learning how to Conceptualize Economic Vision, but I must confess to finding it a little inaccessible for my mind. I have to work harder at this kinda stuff basically. Great blog anyway, hope the sites successful

I love rationalizing subjects like this and questing for truth, why not? However, i've seen simplified energy debates go nowhere valuable-- In effect a huge waste of time and money can just buy one delay or two. Whereas, the carbon tax issue definitely needs to launch inertia for public discourse-- Read- 'leap', way before the election, way, way before! In my mind to ratchet forward truth underlying the 'decentralization rights' vs 'centralized control of everything'. Centralization of everything nailed down or "kill the free market, best seen in "kill the self-contractor form of commerce". I moved on to a place between liberty and freedom, in hopes of the original American promise. No matter how hard it/was is to live, keeping self-sufficiency close to one hand at all times.

Crystal clear why financiers can feel richer with centralized control in there unelected pocket! Decentralized energy should allow equal opportunity for decentralized production instead of all eggs in the centralist's basket. Read big energy, big finance, all in one hot little hand, powers that be. Read military industrial complex. So weird that profiteers and pillagers deviate human consciousness from freedom of exchanging ideas. Also weird that it took so long before intellectually-free exchanges manage to exist, at all. Narrowly hanging-on. Hanging from threads of the internet. Grab it fast! Water on the ropes!

The web at least has a following of Tesla-friendly experimenters who are branching onward. Point is, that if decentralized efforts are stripped from hearing range, then big brother takes over. Then and then, again and again, enough is enough! Example: So you don't think Tesla offered the greatest gifts to technological commerce?? Really? If so answer why his Magnifying Transmitter got suppressed-- Take note that Wardenclyffe photos do not match the # 1,119,732 US Patent! Point is that Tesla's docs were snatched by the military complex in 1943 as any half eye can see. To hide a liberating mode of commerce, much better than oil! Academia cowers about this subject, as they know well the hand that feeds them. The hot little hands with ways, the hand with da atom bomb. "Dare to be naive", as Bucky Fuller actually said, again say i! Say i!

This one tax around carbon could make or break the next noose on freedom. Win it or loose all (freedom). One route to more freedom might be: To explore progressive thought exchanging with thoughts of libertarian thinking. I see tons of possibilities here. Sacrifice false egos and all is possible, at least in thoughts moving forward from stalemates.

Me

Report on first Los Angeles/Westside local currency salon of Sept. 2009. This article is “distribution encouraged” by the author, Bruce Dickson of ToolsThatHeal.com
Local money that STAYS local

How would you like it if you had to continually circulate part of your blood thru a tube to another person for the rest of your life

If money is the blood stream of Los Angeles, every dollar we spend at Wal-Mart or Amazon.com circulates out of our local body, never to be seen again.

Local Exchange Trading Systems, hundreds of efforts over 39 years, are one way to keep money in a community. Many of these systems have developed all over the world, to varying degrees of success.

Greg Wendt, a member of the Board of Green Business Networking (http://www.greenbusinessnetworking.com/aboutus) convened the first “Emerging Currency Salon” at Rawvolution, on Main Street in Santa Monica, Sept. 16th. The first 40 people were lucky to get in. Over 50 requests to attend were received.

Greg introduced Chris Lindstrom of BerkShares (www.berkshares.org) who started a local currency and also has software to facilitate local currency efforts. Hollis Doherty spoke on the famous Austrian “free money” experiment of 1933 (here http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=103723).

After a delicious meal and lively conversation, the evening’s topic was Changing our story about money: From ‘too big to fail’ to ‘small is beautiful.’ Hollis says, “The shift in thinking about money is likely to be as momentous as the shift from thinking the world is flat to knowing that it is round.

Our mainstream money system is a cultural blind spot. Whenever public polls are taken on the question, “Tell me what money is and how it works,” few know, even people working in finance get tongue-tied trying to explain where money comes from.

Currency activists Are interested in creating a new story of money, one that works for more people, that honors sustainability, Earth’s limited resources, and the social impact of commerce.
Lots of face to face conversations--with examples—need to happen showing why “spending money that goes around is better than spending money that goes away.” Money that comes back to you beats money that goes out and never comes back to you. In other words, money that stays in a local economy is better than money that leaves the locality to a centralized corporation where few profit mightily, and the many are disenfranchised by not receiving the most benefit for their labor. Conventional businesses have a similar concept. They call it a "loyalty program." Local currency is money that stays in a community that wishes to take back control of its financial vitality and destiny.

Chris Lindstrom added: We believe in our present US central currency system like we believe in the Law of Gravity. But how money circulates is not a Law of Nature!

We have to become more conscious of money, what it means, what the consequences of our spending are. A “sustainable economy” means “meeting the needs of the present, without compromising the needs of future generations.”

Local currencies thrive where Cultural Creatives wish to meet each other and build local community. “Thrivability” and resilience mostly take this form today: “I prefer to spend all my dollars at green-conscious businesses. Can you give me a way to do that?“ Greg Wendt hopes to create a local currency within green businesses in the Los Angeles region making it very easy to support local Cultural Creative and Green businesses.

Local currencies are legal. For instance, people pay taxes on Ithaca Dollars. Universities and larger orgs are starting to accept “complementary currencies.”

Back to money as blood. Raise your hand if you take blood out of your body and store it away for a rainy day. No one? Our blood works best when it circulates! What would our internal body economy be if we tried to save our blood? You can’t hoard blood; we have to circulate!

This raises the question of interest paid on loans and savings. Ellen Hodgson Brown (http://www.WebofDebt.com) suggests harnessing interest to public works, as the early Quakers did in Pennsylvania (Look Ma, no taxes!) and as Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln proposed and tried successfully. Ellen has a way for a Calif. state bank to solve many aspects of the current CA budget crisis.

Changing our story about money ultimately challenges us to change our story, all the way back to Original Sin, and abandon images of ourselves as inherently sinful, separated, and disempowered, says Chris. The story has to move to: “These are my people; what can I do to support us, with how I spend my dollars?” All local currencies increase opportunities for gratitude and highlight the gift of service we do for each other, in our labor for each other.

It's not who has a good idea. It's who can make it happen. If you think you can help make it happen, contact greg@gregwendt.com

Bruce Dickson runs Healing Each Other Medical Intuition and started Westside Holistic Chamber of Commerce.