I am quite inspired these days by the folks I am working with on sustainability issues here in Tennessee. (Example: see Financial Permaculture ) I asked one of our sustainability leaders recently for a definition of “green.” She said that
GREEN = NO WASTE
What an inspiring definition! It is unleashing continuous ideas about how to integrate our work with all the good things I see going on in green development efforts. “No waste” is a mission that is totally in sync with the Solari model – our goal being to create a financial and investment system that allows individuals to optimize the total energy in a place and between places on an emergent basis. (This is what some of us still call democracy and markets despite their hijacking to justify organized crime.)
One of the reasons I am so keen for folks to understand Tapeworm Economics, is that reducing a great deal of the waste within a community is not within the control of community members to change or it requires exceptional amounts of organization, time and risk. If change comes, it is typically with the top-down dictum that it must generate more money and power for a handful of folks outside the community. My definition of local self-sufficiency includes growing local financial equity.
Here are some of my candidates for the greatest sources of waste within American communities:
• Suppression of renewable energy technologies
• Fiat currency and financial and commodities market manipulation
• Centralized education standards and laws
• Taxation that is not reported or spent in legal ways
• hard narcotics trafficking and related enforcement and the related drain on labor availability to small
business and farms
• Manipulation of savings flows and cost of capital to significantly raise small business and farm cost of capital and reduce corporate cost of capital
• Agricultural practices incentivized/dictated by federal government laws, regulation and subsidy programs, including those that promote GM food, seed control and drain topsoil and decrease local food self sufficiency
• Suppression of health care technologies
• Federal transportation policies and regulations
• Predatory lending practices supported by federal credit and subsidy programs
• Suppression of disclosure regarding sources and uses of government money, including by place
• Harm to the moral of productive people to consistently see the unproductive people and behavior rewarded, honored, empowered
• Time invested in corporate media and TV and related exposure to entrainment technology and subliminal programming
• Poor diet and preventative health practices
• Environmental pollution
• Break down in communication between men and women, races, and generations
• Use of the defense budget to subsidize large corporations and banks, including the black budget and public funding of private armies and corporate intelligence agencies
• Minimal recycling of material locally or regionally
Many of the unenlightened practices in communities are emergent from a variety of positive and negative incentives engineered by federal government laws, regulation, spending, contracts and enforcement combined with private economic warfare interests that drain extraordinary time and ingenuity from productive small business people, small farmers, local professionals and leaders as well as all citizens.
It never ceases to amaze me how invisible these forces are to many of the people struggling within these constraints and the local tensions, factions and politics they create. Those seeking to enrich themselves in distant financial centers can always depend on the inability of most people to fathom evil along with local veins of greed and small mindedness. There are always a few local folks who are delighted to serve the “in crowd” in hopes of getting what our ally Franklin Sanders refers to as the “treats of the Tapeworm.”
One of the most important aspects of organizing for change is to understand the boundaries of power and control in a place relative to all the living energy in that place. What changes are within an individual’s control? What changes are within a family’s control? What does a group of individuals and families organizing in circles or other associations in a neighborhood control? What does an entire neighborhood control?
Good organization means taking actions within your power that keep shifting the power boundaries in a manner that incrementally gives you more collective time, knowledge and resources that allow you to take more actions that then shift the power boundaries out some more. So sequencing the reduction of waste is critical to increasing bottom up power. Otherwise, sustainability and the green movement simply become another way to implement more central control and further drain the energy of the folks I call the “Community Wizards.”
In the great game of economic warfare, it helps to see the game. For example, not just the macroeconomic game of who engineered the sub-prime mortgage crisis, but how and why your community and the responsible people in it went along with it. These are things many of us would rather not look at. Who wants to recognize intentionally evil policies being implemented by ourselves and other good-hearted people around us? Looking at this can seem overwhelming at times.
However, looking at the waste of all living energy within a place and who and what is causing it to happen is a step that can gather real power for real change.
The truth is always available if we are willing to face it. That is where solutions begin – with the truth.