Three Steps Toward Economic Populism for the 99%

The complex of movements and organizations swirling around the general concept that our American economy and politics no longer serves the vast majority of us ... perhaps even up to 99% of us ... comes at a time when we also have great opportunities for economic populism. We just have to figure out what we need a financial system for, and use or develop alternatives that are more inherently populist.

• Abandoning for-profit banks in favor of credit unions is an obvious first step. This may not hurt the bankers very much, and that's o.k.; it empowers the 99% which is more important. If you haven't already moved YOUR money, check out http://moveyourmoney.org
• Developing alternate sources of accumulating capital. Until recently, accumulating capital meant gathering it in large amounts for a few Wise Investors to control, but that's become as disfunctional as it is unnecessary. A variety of crowdsourced alternatives are developing. For example, for small nonprofit ventures, http://www.kiva.org may be a good place to start. For small creative endeavors, there's  http://www.kickstarter.com. These models may be replicated for other fields of endeavor.
• National and local resiliency efforts can help populist movements. Resiliency is formally about being able to survive a disaster, but the more that communities and households that can feed themselves, power themselves and communicate among themselves without relying on a distant centralized authority, the more that control devolves locally. While it is probably impossible and undesirable for most communities to be completely "off-the-grid", a community that can generate its own electricity and grow its own staple foods is both more able to survive natural disasters AND human-made ones such as financial meltdowns.

These developments would have been hard to image when I was a child, but they are pretty real now and give me hope that We The People may take our country back from the 1%.