This video shows the dilemma: individuals only count as consumers, voters and, possibly, as demonstrators.
What else is there to do? How can “we, the people” stop what Occupiers identify:
- the 1% have dominant political power over both parties
- Bill Black, a senior federal regulator and lecturer in economics and law, who says that what we have is
recurrent intensifying financial crises, driven by elite fraud, and now it’s done with almost absolute impunity.
We seem to have lost our capacity for outrage.
To me, Bill Black’s level of analysis is more relevant than Bill Moyers’. But nearly everybody seems to have a hard time getting to the essence of what money is and who creates it – for what purpose…
In the Spirit of the Forum for Stable Currencies 
Sabine, It was a man fasting for economic rights which led me into P-CED. Terry Hallman was fasting from a tent in Chapel Hill NC for the US govt to sign the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights. I became a messenger between him and his senator John Edwards who was at the time delivering his Two Americas campaign. ICESCR became the guiding principle in our 2004 business plan..
It was Terry who got close enough to Clinton in 1996 to pitch for an alternative to capitalism and the core argument from his white paper, became a manifesto in July 2008:
http://www.p-ced.com/1/about/background/
What we can do is change the nature of economics such that people rather being irrelevant, unimportant and often disposable are the primary focus of business. This approach which some have begun to call the Fourth Sector had been alluded to by the Vatican 3 years ago:
‘This is not merely a matter of a “third sector”, but of a broad new composite reality embracing the private and public spheres, one which does not exclude profit, but instead considers it a means for achieving human and social ends. Whether such companies distribute dividends or not, whether their juridical structure corresponds to one or other of the established forms, becomes secondary in relation to their willingness to view profit as a means of achieving the goal of a more humane market and society’
“Striving to meet the deepest moral needs of the person also has important and beneficial repercussions at the level of economics. The economy needs ethics in order to function correctly — not any ethics whatsoever, but an ethics which is people-centred. .”
http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=132188
Very true, Jeff!
A kind of ‘ethical capitalism’ may be possible. But it doesn’t seem to be on the agenda of those who could make it happen! Hence everybody has to find the solution for himself…
Sabine, The problem now seems to be that we are a wash with all kinds of rhetoric for responsible capitalism, with a fairly dilute interpretation of responsible. We who have ideas however, have value in IP which could be used to build localised sustainable economies.
“By going with the normal flow of free-market enterprise and the emerging replacement of monetary capital with intellectual capital as the dominant form of basic enterprise capitalization, it becomes easier to set up new companies primarily on the basis of invested intellectual capital. (See Post-Capitalist Society, by Peter Drucker). In plain English, socially responsible and forward-thinking companies can be set up quickly and cheaply–and these companies have indefinite potential for earnings and localized, targeted economic development. The initial objective is to develop model enterprises and communities, then implement successful strategies from those models into surrounding communities regionwide or nationwide, as needed.”
http://www.p-ced.com/1/about/history/
And here’s the case against Philanthrocapitalism, from Leo Tolstoy
http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=175806