Everything You Know About Money is WRONG ! And here's why...

For most people in the U.S., life revolves around acquiring and spending money. This is true for all industrialized countries, and in many developing nations. Yet money is a creature of belief; it's only worth something so long as we believe it to have value. This becomes obvious when you consider all the failed currencies past and present, in places where people suffer from chronic disillusionment with governments and institutions. Like Zimbabwe in South Africa, where inflation rages at 27,000% a month, and wheelbarrows full of currency won't buy a loaf of bread, or Brazil, which has been forced to discard, and reissue half a dozen different currencies in the last 30 years, each time hoping the new money the government issues will hold its value. Money in its physical form has no obvious value - merely colorful slips of printed paper or bits of metal stamped with symbols. At least bills and coins can be touched. But they represent less than 3% of the money in circulation. The other 97% is even more ephemeral - it exists as electronic traces on computer hard drives stored in bank's back offices. Money is a phantom. It is "created" and "destroyed" instantaneously by governments and financial markets. It is created every time a bank makes a loan (via the dark magic of "fractional reserve" banking, where for every $2 a bank deposits with the Federal Reserve [the U.S. central bank], it can issue $100 in loans - money created out of thin air). It is created every time financial market prices rise, as most types of securities (i.e. stocks, bonds, and other financial "instruments") are traded and used as collateral in the money markets - a massive, "legitimate" ponzi scheme whereby corporations issue debt (bonds) and pieces of ownership (stocks), which in turn are used as collateral for larger loans, and so on and so forth. As a small example, the options markets (options are agreements between brokers and traders where money changes hands whenever the price of something rises or falls - U.S. or European interest rates, say, or the value of a currency) currently trade contracts with a "notional" value of some $500 TRILLION (that's NOT a misprint) U.S. dollars. Trillion, with a 'T'. All of that - which is merely one part of the gargantuan network of financial markets, is based purely on one bank or corporation loaning or borrowing imaginary money to or from another. For those who have access to the machinery of credit - financial brokers, owners of bank licenses, large corporation owners and officers, and the like, money is not scarce or difficult to obtain. It is allocated in a way that is grossly unfair; those who can't create money and credit - the vast majority of the world's population - either prospers or suffers at the whim of the system's masters, at the mercy of central banks and bankers. Those running the system decides who "deserves" credit, who'll gain access to the money markets, and who will be deprived of credit and shut out. Money and credit, however, are only symbols. They represent the power to buy and sell pieces of the natural world, reshaped by humans. As "capital" (the supply of money) grows, nature shrinks. The simple fact is, financial markets divert and destroy the resource base for the survival of living things - both in nature, and in human communities, in pursuit of profit. The Western world is relentlessly focused on the control and manipulation of nature in the service of accumulating material things. In pursuit of that goal, our culture compulsively (and obsessively) goes on a rampage to acquire the "unit of account", also called the "medium of exchange" - money. The way we treat nature and each other is attributable to the belief system we maintain about money. Our society and culture accept without question the many assumptions money forces us to make about the world. These economic beliefs can be summarized in one phrase - as the 'commodification of nature'. This set of beliefs sees the planet as a kind of global warehouse of commodities, a bunch of "stuff" that is ours to do with as we please; to buy and sell it, destroy it or use it as we see fit. This is a brutal and vicious distortion of the way humans viewed the cosmos for most of our existence as a species. Our primal view was that humans are one small part of a great family of living things, existing within a sacred natural world. Our kind lived in rough equilibrium with nature for nearly 200,000 years with these beliefs.

Money twists this relationship, and insists we are the "owners" of nature, with rights free of responsibilities. Money dictates that human concerns are the ONLY concerns. Of course, our alienation from and our endless striving to dominate nature predates the introduction of money into societies by millennia. Societies founded on patriarchal coercion and control, fearing what is female, natural, and wild, date back to the first agriculture and cities, between 12,000 and 8,000 BCE. The violent patterns set by these first civilizations still poison our lives today with their legacies of social control through hierarchies, which in turn cause us to pervert our sexuality (for example, inisisting sex is somehow "dirty" or disgusting so as to limit or control it), foments violence (by crushing nonconformity, oppressing the poor, and forcing a dynamic of pitiless competition and cruelty among the rest of society), and warps our emotions (thanks to rigid gender roles and relationships based on force and domination), to name but a few evils. The invention of money, in the form of precious metal coinage, first minted circa 640 BCE (in ancient Lydia, along the Black Sea coast of what is now modern Turkey), just forced a more radical transformation of the societies in which it spread in the same direction they were already headed - toward more authoritarian, top-down structures of power, and away from personal autonomy. The result was (and is) an assault on the interdependent web of life that creates and maintains our ecosphere. It is a system of destruction - misnamed "production", that ruthlessly converts the wild and the living into the tamed and the dead. Trees become lumber, animals become meat, hides, and experimental test subjects, mountains are reduced to ore and gravel, and on and on. All things are judged by whether or not they have value to us, their treatment dependent on how great that value is determined to be. Tellingly, the greater the value, the more merciless the treatment. This belief system was made still more vicious by the widespread adoption of the principles of economics (the supposed "science of money") byt the European great powers during the Industrial Revolution. This 18th Century paradigm, first articulated by Scotsman Adam Smith in the late 1700's, still controls the way we think about money and value. Economics focuses solely on things like investment, trade, deficits, money supply, and interest rates, to the exclusion of every other human concern, such as health, satisfaction, meaning, and the quality of life. Economics, stripped of its jargon and its pretensions to scientific credibility, is just a set of rules (and rules that are frequently inaccurate or grossly misleading, at that) that claims to explain the hows and whys of interactions between people. Left unspoken is the fact that these rules are derived from cultural values and goals (and are therefore arbitrary - almost random - not at all "universal"). Unlike psychology, however, which as a scientific discipline at least has the decency to admit its understanding is limited, and that human motives are often murky, economics insists its interpretation of why humans behave the way they do is the only correct one. These rules establish and govern what work is considered important (and thus highly paid), and what is not, what has value, and what doesn't. The rules also determine access to resources, and who has control over capital and profits. What economics values is money, a stand-in for ownership; the possession of power and control over property and wealth. What can't be or isn't assigned a monetary value is valued at zero. The values of economics arise from its core opinions about what matters. These should horrify anyone who cares about social justice or the natural world, yet these foundational beliefs are the ones the control the entire decision making process of governments and corporations. Every time we unthinkingly accept the jargonladen economic reasoning (and statistics) of politicians and bureaucrats we are agreeing with this sick, violent, and monstrous worldview.

For instance, economics insists that only competition and maximizing your self-interest at the expense of others is "rational" behavior. Altruistic behavior and cooperation are "irrational", and are ignored by economic statistics and measurements. A moment's reflection reveals how harmful and damaging this belief has been in organizing our society. Economics also claims (quite falsely) that economies - and the people that create them, are able to act "rationally" and are at liberty to make good choices collectively about what a given society/economy will produce. This assumption - that society will choose the "best" mix of such things as guns, butter, education, prisons, types of investments, etc., is a particularly misleading one. The overwhelming evidence of harsh reality is that governments and corporations control society, and make spending decisions to suit themselves, and to hell with the best interests of society and its members as a whole. Hard experience teaches - repeatedly, that governments and corporations misallocate resources to the terrible disadvantage of the majority of the governed, and frequently cause financial bubbles and busts, wars and colossal waste of lives and treasure, and make a mockery of this belief. For instance, the U.S. government spent over $700 billion on the military last year (2010), a record increase which follows year after year of such increases. Yet spending to alleviate the needs of the poor, who've been hammered by the appaling recession that began in 2008, was less than 5% of that sum. This despite the fact that poverty has risen astronomically over the past three years, while simultaneously social budgets have been cut to the bone. Similarly, in the latest financial meltdown (2007-present), over $14 trillion (yes, with a 'T') was given to banks and financial markets in the form of interest-free loans and other freebies, subsidizing those responsible for the disaster. By comparison, a pittance - $35 billion, was offered as a sop to small businesses (through the SBA, notoriously slow and nitpicking about paperwork) to aid their terrible credit crunch. The credit crunch, unsurprisingly, is caused by the banks refusal to lend out any of the $14 trillion - thereby defeating the sole purpose of those loans and goodies - to get the economy moving again and extend credit to average people. In both of these instances, elites and those in power benefit, while the rest of the population suffers needless agony due to misallocation of resources. A "good" or "rational" choice was made in neither case, nor was such a choice even possible with the current power structure. Economics considers the distribution of wealth, income, power, and information as irrelevant to its calculations, although this distribution determines the very nature and structure of society. Economists consistently support laissez faire capitalism, which is well-known as the root cause of monstrously unequal societies, with masses of the poor living in misery at the bottom, supporting a small elite controlling everything from the top. This is the system running the world today. Economics believes nature's "capital" - clean air and water, fertile soil, and a healthy environment is free and inexhaustible. It treats the natural world as if the planet can absorb toxic wastets forever, and that ecosystems - valued at zero, have no limits on the abuse and insults they can tolerate and still support life. Ecological horrors like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill - hundreds of millions of gallons of oil devastating the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico (one spill among thousands that occur every year there on a lesser scale), or the atrocities of corporations like Monsanto and Archer-Daniels-Midland, dumping billions of tons of pesticides every year into our soil and water, and are thus responsible for untold numbers of people dying from cancers and other diseases, are the direct result of economic beliefs about what is important. Following economic principles often leads to perverse outcomes and lose-lose choices. The simple fact is, not all economic activity is good. By economic standards, cancer and diseases are "good", as they increase the GNP (Gross National Product), they bring jobs in healthcare, hospital investment, 3. and medical research. The pain and suffering of the sick and the dying are treated as irrelevant, and are valued at zero (unless there's an insurance settlement involved). In the same vein, war is seen as a tremendous stimulus, employing millions and boosting whole economies. The horror, destruction, slaughter, and numerous other evils it causes are dismissed as unimportant, or at worst the price to be paid for "prosperity". Using this sort of logic, economics considers drift nets as an economic positive because they increase the number of fish caught, thus improving the all-important productivity and efficiency of fishermen. The fact that drift nets have a horrific impact on sea-life, killing hundreds of millions of other commerically "valueless" sea creatures "by accident" annually, (whose bodies, called "by-catch", are thrown away in the ocean to rot as garbage) is of no significance. Until, of course, the results - a collapse of the marine ecosystem worldwide and the death of the oceans, force a reconsideration of this insane "logic". Examples like these could be cited indefinitely. Perhaps economic's worst belief, and one that is accepted implicitly by all economists, governments, and businesses, is (as Bill McKibben calls it) the "Cult of Growth" that economics worships. Endless growth is impossible, as any sensible person realizes. Tumors grow until they kill their hosts, and out-ofcontrol growth in nature is always a sign of grave sickness, not health. There are limits to what the natural world can endure, limitations of space, of materials, and so on. Economies must be sustainable, or they will destroy the landbase upon which they depend. Sustainability means living within natural limits, restricting human taking from nature beyond the ecological ability of renewal. Yet those making the decisions in our society ignore this obvious fact, and press on for a constant increase in growth at any cost, a kind of madness or blindness that consumes the world. There are many similar prejudices in economics: ideas about efficiency, productivity, prices and profits, what constitutes happiness, and how all this should be measured. Presently, economic measurements focus on the means, not on the crucial ends. Economics concerns itself only with immediate gratification, and its long-term results are wholly disregarded. Economics dismisses the things humans hold dear; love, cooperation, community, wilderness, and a host of others, instead catering to the needs and desires of those in power. The things that exist outside of monetary exchange - the ecosystem, and social systems of all kinds, are deliberately left out of economic calculations. Money and economics are the key belief systems used as justification by modern governments to dominate populations worldwide. The "logic" of domination is at once simple and ruthless; WE own the world, and will take whatever we want. If you get in our way, we will crush you. Money and economics defines everything according to its relationship with wealth and property. Those in power believe they own the earth, and that power equals ownership, which in turn equals control over property. Those societies that embrace and use economics (which means the entire world, except for a tiny and quickly vanishing sliver of humanity living in remote, pre-agrarian communities) tend to be violent, patriarchal, and dismissive of the rights of women, the poor, and indigenous peoples, and see the exploitation of nature as some sort of "divine right", to the degree they believe in industrialized laissez faire capitalism. A classic example of this domiantion in action is the spuriously named "Free Trade". As noted physicist and political thinker Vandana Shiva has pointed out, "Trade based on false prices and unfair exchange is not trade, it is exploitation." According to economists, free trade is an economic competition between nations conducted on a roughly level playing field. In theory, free trade benefits all the players, transferring goods and services from the nations best able to produce them at the lowest price, to other nations that provide a different good or service that they specialize at in return. In reality, very like colonialism, the rules are heavily weighted in favor of powerful market players, 4. mainly gigantic multinational corporations, and place commerce above all other local, national, and international goals and concerns, including human rights, social justice, self-determination, local matkets, the informal economy, and the environment. Free trade is a race to the bottom, as huge corporations roam the world looking fror the cheapest available labor and resources, and countries broker their workforces, natural wealth, and biodiversity on the global auction block. Free trade leads to lower wages, both domestically and internationally (as corporations force down the cost of labor by threatening to move to ever-cheaper locations for their factories if wage concessions are not met), and more joblessness as jobs are 'outsourced' from rich countries to poor ones. Further, it worsens debt and living standards for the poor and middle classes, causes environmental destruction, and other ills. In short, true losses are not subtracted against the supposed market 'gain'. Companies like mining giant Freeport-McMoRan rape the earth for metals, leaving lethal messes behind wherever they've been, while textile and shoe manufacturers such as Calvin Klein and Nike, to name just two, routinely exploit Third World workers, paying them just enough for bare survival while reaping huge profits. Free trade encourages the practice of social, environmental, and cultural "dumping". This is the exporting of cheap goods made inexpensive by exploiting the people and coercively underpriced assets of one country, and then negatively impacting the economy of the other country in which they're sold (by ruining local markets and producers, who can't compete with the price of the dumped goods and services). These goods are "cheap" because of hidden governmental subsidies and externalized costs borne by nature. Free trade and economics causes wars, brings diseases, fosters cultural decay, and contributes to social disintegration. Becasuse of the massive transfer of wealth from poor nations (robbed of their resources) to rich ones, almost always over the protests of marginalized and indigenous peoples, conflict and chaos are on the rise around the planet. This inequitable economic order, enforced by military power and aided by international institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and others, allows rich countries to plunder poor ones under the pretense of bringing them "development" and "foreign direct investment". It is a devil's bargain, whereby the post-industrial nations make use of the best and brightest of the Third World at slave wages, and buy vital materials for artificially low prices, leaving toxins and economic ruin behind. By one measure, from the Statistical Division of the U.N. Development Programme, industrial countries of the 'Global North' owe a 'pollution debt' to the Global South for environmental clean-up of $15-20 trillion. This enormous sum doesn't include the many other costs of predatory corporations doing business without restraints, such as desertification, deforestation, habitat destruction, the social injustice of supporting parasitic elites robbing their nations of natural welath, and its attendant costs in poverty and oppression, and other malignancies with heavy social and environmental costs. This is just an all-too-brief sampling of the sort of ills brought by economics and its assumptions. In every instance, economics favors destructive practices; is harmful to the things humans hold dear, and acts as justification for a system that keeps the masses of people poor, and the vast majority of the world's population in a state of bondage. We MUST break free of the deadly worldview of economics and its vicious traps if we hope to survive. One way out is to broaden the picture so it includes ALL human and natural activity. Becoming aware of all the exchanges made between humans, between humans and the ecosphere, and between species within the natural world reveals the absurd limitations of economics, and the need to take in other exchanges to get an accurate understanding of reality. 5. In human social relations, for example, there are three kinds of exchanges. There are interactions conducted under threats, based on fear; interactions that are truly free exchanges, based on barter and reciprocity, and interactions prompted by love, such as gifts, altruism, and long-term values. Economics likes to claim it is based on reciprocity and free exchange, but in reality it is based on threats, relying on fear and scarcity-based social strategies to compel people to act in ways favoring capitalism. Coercion is integral to our social system, so much so that we no longer recognize it. Consider, how many people would willingly go to jobs they hate and despise, wasting their entire lives unhappily, if not under threat of homelessness and starvation (imposed by a system they have no way of changing) ? How many people would continue to spend their days and nights at boring, soul-deadening drudgery, work that humiliates and alienates them, work that endangers their health and sanity, or loathsome tasks that harm others and the environment, were they not conditioned into an amoral stupor, and threatened with dire consequences if they do not obey ? There are other considerations here, of course, but the essence of economic "choices" are not really choices at all, but are thinly disguised threats designed to coerce obedience to authority, and force support for the economic status quo that principally benefits the elite. Similarly, it is military force, not fair or free trade, that keeps Thrid World countries locked into trade agreements that are virtual economic slavery, subservient to wealthy industrialized ones, using repression to keep their restive populations under control. Indigenous freedom movements, usually demanding repudiation of corporate ownership of national treasures, are crushed by the U.S. wherever they pop up, so corporations (and the native elites they support) can continue to extract resources with a minimum of fuss and expense. Half the world's population - over 3 billion people, live on less than $2 a day, and find daily life to be a battle against hunger, thirst, and the violence of governments and societies denying their dignity and right to life. Food, clean water, and shelter are a distant dream for most of the planet. Death stalks this majority; due to the fact that over 2 billion lack access to clean water, tens of millions die annually from easily preventable diseases. Starvation and malnutrition kill millions more, mostly children and the elderly. Does anyone think this is by choice, or that this is the result of a fair and equitable sharing of wealth from natural resources ? The economic system we currently endure has made a practice of eliminating alternatives and rival systems, typically by genocide of indigenous peoples who offer a model of living in sustainable harmony with their environment, and by destroying wilderness so that "living off the land" is made impossible or impractical. But it has not entirely succeeded in supplanting its rivals. In fact, most human interactions are still based on barter and reciprocity or on love and affection. This 'informal' economy accounts for as much as half of all activity in the industrialized world, and often as much as three-quarters of the economy in Third World countries. Economics purposely fails to take note of the enormous amount of work done out of love, and the work which sustains life outside of cash transactions - home and community gardening, subsistence farming, handicrafts, handmade items, homemade beer, wine, cheese, etc., the vast majority of works of art, music and literature, the care and raising of children, family members nursing sick and elderly relatives, energy and resources given as gifts to charity, and the huge outpouring of volunteer assistance to nonprofits working for a better world, locally and internationally. There are enormous eforts being made to shift the world from the coercive, conflict-driven paradigm of economics and power politics to life-affirming, ecologically sensitive systems that are sustainable and concerned with social justice. 6. One alternative that has flourished is the mutual aid barter systems called cooperatives, or 'co-ops'. Although the corporate-owned 'mainstream' media take great care to completely ignore it, as it represents a serious threat to the materialistic, competitive, profit-driven model favored by government and business. Co-ops are, as their name implies, about cooperation, sharing, fairness, and helping those who are severely marginalized by the current economic system. Home gardeners are able to usefully trade their excess produce; unemployed tradesmen are able to trade their skills for needed items, and so on, exchanges made difficult or impossible by the regulations of the cash economy. Co-ops are a major movement worldwide, and involve tens - perhaps hundreds - of millions of people. In the U.S. alone, at least 50 million people participate in co-ops like ZService Credits and Time Dollars in New York and Florida; Ithaca Money in New York (whose 'Ithaca Hours' program has been duplicated in over 300 places around the globe), and thousands of similar barter exchanges. Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) have gained popularity internationally with over 200 LETS in Britain, 200+ LETS in Australia, and hundreds more in Canada and New Zealand. There are over a 1,000 co-ops in Japan, such as the Seikatsu Club of Yokohama, Japan, a women's co-op in operation for over 30 years that works with local farmers and has thousands of members. Various Japanese organizations involve some 15-20 million people. Europe is keen on such systems, and in the Third World they flourish wherever government mismanages monetary affairs. Mutual societies, associations, and social networks pursue similar goals. The most creative forces addressing the planet's problems, however, are grassroots citizen's movements. Over 26,ooo NGO's gathered at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and more and more such groups have attended subsequent Global Forums. The Slow Food Movement, the Permaculture Movement, the Radical Simplicity Movement (all are prominent in the U.S. and Europe), Kenya's Greenbelt Movement, India's Chipko Movement, the Sarvodya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka (a Buddhist development program operating in over 8,000 villages), SEWA - Self=employed Women's Assoc. of India, and ACCION of South America, along with Women's World Banking (which operates micro-lending projects in over 50 countries), Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Rocky Mountain Institute, First Nation Development Institute (a U.S. Native American organization), Peace-Net, Eco-Net, Soka Gakkai, Appropriate Technology International, these are just a tiny random sampling of the groups working for sustainable development and social justice. There are other, healthier systems that value human - not machine concerns, and these are the ones we must put in place. Still, all this work to transform cultures and societies based on economics and coercion has yet to make a major impact, or to change the paradigm of money under which the masses labor. With the almost overwhelming complexity and difficulty of the problems facing humanity in the 21st Century, where does one begin to fight the evils spawned by these belief systems ? Long-term solutions must include a plan for the poor, eliminating the idea of "disposable people", who have no wealth and therefore no rights, a commonplace in the present social order. One of the most urgently needed (and empirically demonstrated) of solutions is the education and empowerment of women. Women produce over half the world's food, and manage 70% of small businesses, but receive only 10% of wages and own (in the Third World) only 1% of the property. Study after study (and the programs associated with them) has shown that educating girls and women dramatically reduces birthrates, and is in fact trhe single most effective means of controlling population growth so that it recedes to replacement levels (i.e. where death and birth rates match, as in most industrialized countries). This in turn reduces the human impact on the environment, and improves the quality of life and economic status of poor families. Empowerment programs, most notably micro-lending projects paired with literacy, hygiene, health, and other education focusing on women, such as Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, lead to a host of 7. positive changes in poor communities. With micro-lending (where sums as small as $50 are lent out at low interest rates to poor people without credit or hope of obtaining a bank loan), women spend the increased income they earn from small business start-ups to improve the health and quality of life for their families (unlike men, who tend to spend micro-lending money on liquor or vices, and are poorer credit risks than women). This kickstarts a beneficial cycle that benefits families, communities, and ecosystems as basic needs are met. Micro-lending is no panacea, naturally, keeping people in the same vicious trap of economics. Also, there are predatory lenders mixed in with firms of integrity, causing great hardship, and many countries have legal and economic barriers in place that make small business start-ups beyond the reach of the poor. Likewise, empowerment programs often meet with fierce resistance from existing patriarchal power structures, who rightly sense the danger these programs represent (threatening, as they do, to overturn women's subservient role in society, and instead insisting on gender equality). There are numerous others who oppose change, and cling to tradition on principle, stymying efforts to free women from oppression and servitude. Nevertheless, widespread support and increased efforts by people in developed nations to educate and empower girls and women, especially in the Global South and Third World will generate a powerful force for positive transformation, if average people in the U.S. and Europe take up this vital cause. Another desperately needed change is to tame the global corporations and financial markets that have been allowed to run amok. A critical mass of people in industrialized countries must demand that corporations show social responsibility, and force these behemoths to either adopt sustainable practices or cease to exist. Much progress on this front has been made in Europe, where labot laws, development restrictions, environmental health and safety regulations, and community relations all play important roles in keeping corporations in check. The U.S. is a different story, though, and sadly the world's largest corporations are American ones, operating by American rules. There are many tools at hand that a large, noisy block of concerned citizens can use to spark a public debate, and force change. For one, insisting on a recalculation of Gross National Product (GNP), and GDP, which is presently a kind of vast theater curtain hiding suffering. Huge sums spent on luxury buying by those at the top conceals the lack of buying of necessities by those at the bottom. Further, by adding work not done for money, such as work within communities and families, the value of the functions of the oceans and atmosphere and earth, and subtracting social and environmental costs, a much more realistic understanding of the costs of industrial capitalism will become possible. So-called "green accounting" is beginning to catch on. It calculates the true value of intact ecosystems, the cleansing of water by wetlands, the clean air provided by forests, the renewal of soil by microbes, and so on, and then adds it to the cost of pollution, habitat destruction, and clean-up costs for removing toxins. This radically amended valuation reveals the true price of corporate production and its effects on the environment. If enforced so that it changes the prices of goods and services, then unsustainable practices become unaffordable, and many perverse economic behaviors would cease. Pressure can also be applied by social groups angry about corporate destruction of local economies. Such groups can insist on policies that combat unfair competition (and trhe wipe-out of communities due to the death of small businesses this entails), such as the successful grassroots actions against WalMart, the largest U.S. employer (with over 1 million employees), notorious for paying its workers so poorly many are eligible for foodstamps. Groups in California, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, and elsewhere have successfully banned WalMarts from opening in their communities, preventing the gutting of small businesses that inevitably follows the implementation of the WalMart business model. 8. Though difficult, local groups can unite and enforce environmental consciousness and social responsibility on corporations, as with the fight by activists against the developers of the Plum Creek Resort in maine. Sarcastically renaming the company "Scum Creek", and exposing the damage the corporation would inflict on pristine forests and lakes in maine, development has been delayed, with a good chance of a halt to the destructive plans. If dedicated and xclever, groups can force corporations to act like honest citizens instead of vandals and psychopaths in pursuit of profits. This includes making changes in tax laws so that corporations are no longer rewarded for cutting jobs, encouraging employment insterad of automating and outsourcing it out of existence, and demanding corporate pollution taxes and value extraction taxes that are sufficient to truly restore the environments that corporations destroy. This means forcing a radical change in standard business principles, away from corporate efforts to achieve ever-greater efficiency and productivity, which lead to increasing unemployment and joblessness, and towards intermediate labor-intensive technology. It means favoring the needs of the average citizen over the desires of the elites and the markets. It means more human skills, and fewer machines; production BY the masses, not mass production. This could create rural self-sufficiency, slow or stop the cancerous growth of cities, and reduce social inequalities and poverty gaps. Governments must also be pressured to eliminate corporate welfare, and stop subsidizing corporate waste and pollution. Many suggestions have been made on how to accomplish this. Boycotts to force corporations to change their behavior and obey ethiocal codes of conduct (as in successful shaming campaigns, a la Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty [SHAC], which crippled Huntington Laboratories, a British company that tested products on animals in vicious ways), demanding states change corporate charters so that social and ecological impacts must be given equal weight with shareholder profits, and forcing local elected officials to hold corporate offciers criminally liable for the devastation they wreak in poisoning landscapes. Even the simple act of removing yourself slowly from the cash economy, and encouraging others to do the same, depriving the system of your contributions, is helpful. None are sufficient in themselves; these and many more must be tried repeatedly until change is achieved. Thirdly, people in the industrialized countries must be persuaded to embrace sustainability as the main principle governing life. It requires nothing less than redefining wealth and progress as having loving relationships, healthy communities, and lives filled with sharing and made elegant by simplicity. It requires a widespread switch to non-money alternative forms of exchange, such as the previously discussed barter, co-ops, informal economies, and much greater support for local agriculture, production, and trade. It requires that the poor, the marginalized, the struggling working classes be educated to recognize their exploitation by corporate elites, and unite to demand change. This is not so far-fetched as it seems. The recent outpouring of anger and protest in the Occupy Wall Street Movement (which has spread to Occupy many cities across the country, protesting corporate greed and malfeasance in creating the current economic crisis) proves the power of the Internet to reach vast audiences and as a tool to mobilize. Further, the spread of computer technology to even the poorest of places means that the potential for global organizing and protest finally exists (as the many Global Forums and Earth Summits held annually since the 1990's proves, with participants from the most remote and poverty-stricken of regions able to attend and contribute). To over come the monstrous outrages and criminality of economics and industrial capitalism, all those seeking social justice must begin organizing now, and make the demands that will transform the world. The poor must be united to make common cause and demand social justice. The power of the poor is in the streets, and in numbers, and this must be part of any plan for change. 9. We must demand an end to massive military spending, and reallocate those resources to create equitable societies, offering decent food, water, shelter, education, and opportunities for all. As Martin Luther King Jr. said: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." We must demand that the environment be restored, the toxic wastes and chemicals removed from the ecosphere and use so that people and the natural world are no longer poisoned by industry. We must demand that systems of production and distribution be redesigned to be sustainable, and if this is impossible, that unsustainable products and practices be phased out. We must demand that all of this be done equitably and peacefully, and that wealthy First World nations bear the brunt of the costs for the mess they have made of the earth. We must prioritize people and nature above commerce and profits, and internalize social and ecological costs into the fabric of daily living. Shattered communities, broken families, unemployment, homelessness, poverty, crime, violence, pollution, all these ills and more can be solved if we reject the domination opf hierarchies and elites, recovgnize the false reality created by our economic belief system, and dedicate ourselves to making a world where global resources are shared fairly and generously.