The parallel, yet different reactions occurring on
multiple levels are a response to the same predicament. Grass roots communities want to keep
capital at home. Nations are seeking to do the
same. A new financial and trade architecture is
being constructed independently yet simultaneously among communities, and emerging economic powers such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India,
China and South Africa). They are responding to
the neo-liberal monolithic globalization model that
has already run its course.
launched. Otherwise we will boycott their products. In the end, government must respond with
trade policies and fiscal incentives that guide
corporations toward new patterns of behavior.
Otherwise we will need to change those governments too.
Austerity as such, applied in Europe in accordance
with the prescription of the IMF and the weakness
of the European Union to stand up for European
interests, is not stimulating economies. However, the intuitive activism of self-interest to keep
capital at home and re-invigorate communities is
having a marked effect. Communities are going it
alone and seeking their own solutions in the void
of political leadership and in the lack of financial
creativity from a neo-liberal order that has been
in-breeding ideas for too long. In Spain alone
some 20 local currencies have been issued along
the lines of America’s “Berkshire Bucks” -- for the
same reason. Keep capital in the community.
Empower people with the means to empower
themselves.
These local initiatives are not anti-business. They
are anti the established neo-liberal order, which
do not want them to have the right to have their
own businesses, at least locally. This is a grass
roots financial response to a top down cementing of communities with shopping malls and
globalized brands, a system that judge retail by
the stock price and the options in that stock being
traded. It is about the upward power of diversified localization responding to a downward push
of monolithic globalization.
A New Earth Consensus Unites!
A new financial architecture is being constructed
that does not see free capital flows as necessarily benefitting economies. It does not see
extreme market fundamentalism as a panacea for
all economic order. It does not see a flat world
but rather one that is round, uneven, requiring
local solutions to local predicaments and also to
a global one. It is calling for capital back to communities, back to people, back to ways of life that
are local. It is calling for an end to a monolithic
order envisioned by a few for their own benefit.
The response is occurring on multiple levels at the
same time in diverse regions. It is happening locally in America too.
Governments must reexamine their own responses, too. Stimulus to create rapid consumption does not solve economic hardship because
too much consumption is one of the problems.
We share a planet of diminishing resources. So
consumer behavior must change as well. Stimulus
funding needs to be invested into communities,
education, upgrading infrastructure and power
grids that accommodate renewable energy – all
of which will create new jobs.
Meanwhile emerging global configurations like
BRIC, G20 or G77, continue to shift the tectonic
plates of global financial order. Their economic
rise could create a new global financial order by
the sheer weight of their economic momentum,
different values and more realistic – rather than
theoretic – experience with development.
Protest in itself is not enough. Yes, civil disobedi-