Here's something I found buried deep during a clean up mission of my cluttered hard drive. I thought some of you might find this interesting...


Buy Nothing Day comes only once a year, but beyond the carnival antics lies a deeper threat to consumer capitalism. The sun is finally setting on the unaccountable, global bully economy, and rising on a network of local, cash-free alternatives.

There'ss the growing web of Local Economic Trading Systems, for example. These community information systems score and track the barter of goods and services among members. It's home-grown, informal and does an end run around the Dow Jones. See Lets-LinkUp.Com <www.lets-linkup.com/> for hundreds of LETS spanning the globe.

A group of over 300 residents and merchants in California's Bay Area has established a local currency called BREAD (a rough acronym for Bay Area Regional Exchange and Development), based on hours of work valued at $12 an hour. Through the BREAD network, which now has over $20,000 worth of currency in circulation, members can pay for dinner, carpentry, childcare, tutoring, clerical assistance or organic produce. Tired of traditional activism, founder Miyoko Sakashita wanted to create a positive local economy and stop our resources from supporting global corporations that are not accountable to people and the environment. Check it out at Breadhours.org <www.breadhours.org/>

Trading in hours avoids the tussle with the taxman . . . you beat the system by simply exchanging your time. The concept has gone quasi-formal with the Time Dollar Institute (www.timedollar.org), which turns karmic acts of kindness into a closed-loop system. An hour helping another turns into one Time Dollar. With a little help from some on-line resources, a group of neighbors can start to trade snow shoveling for counselling, plumbing for prayers, all on an equal, hour-for-hour footing.

In Ithaca, New York, residents set up a local currency called Ithaca Hours printed in denominations of hours with the slogan In Ithaca We Trust. Founder Paul Glover said the hours help them fight the addiction to dollars, which make us increasingly dependent on transnational corporations and bankers.

They've managed to fend off big-brand stores and fast food outlets from their downtown, while recycling our wealth locally. Critics such as Mark Wallace in Harper's magazine call Ithaca Hours a protectionist scheme. But there's a difference, says Glover, between protecting one's community and full-on protectionism, which is rendered by big entities, corporations, governments with powerful, automatically effective implements such as taxes, boycotts, loan policies, interest rates, favorable trade status [and] allocation or withholding of large-scale resources such as jobs.

In Japan, environmental activists have printed up a new currency called Earthday Money. You earn it doing something good for the world, such as collecting trash or donating to environmental projects (www.earthdaymoney.org). The bills can be redeemed in cafes and participating grocery stores. Earthday Money, they say, flips consumers who use conventional money to burden the environment and expand the rich-poor gap into contributors and people rebuilding the earth and society.

Ecologically minded economists like E.F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) and Herman Daly (Common Good) have heralded a way to a future where money means something, and the planets finite resources are factored into the equation. With a growing acceptance of participatory economics, or what Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel call parecon (www.parecon.org), we're seeing more middle ground open up between capitalism's endless-growth fundamentalism and socialism's central controls.

In this new century of unprecedented corporate power and weak-kneed government, the mood is turning to a global mindshift. A new economics is no longer an academic solution, it is the people's choice, the Buy Nothing Day spirit carried into the whole of the year.

- Aiden Enns