Micro Projects VS. Micro-Supporting macro Poilicies

Article from dollars and cents –

I was quite excited to see the google link for Ethan Miller's article on Solidarity economics

- partly becuase there are so few and because they are usually not about economics or policy

- just ideals and dreams and other New Age crap!

I had high expectations becuase i noticed that Ethan was a member of the Riot Folk music collective

- and I have met sime of them  -  AND THEY ARE GREAT. 

And even if they are not as rad as I would like them (and everyone - or someone ) to be...

they do care and they know that realy really radical things are needed Now or yesterday

- even forgetting all about global warming!  The trump card of the Capitalists!

BUT - However - unfortuneatly this article - though well written and well-meaning is the same non-economics, non-political economy and non-workable and non-educating rant...

Sorry Ethan, and I would be happy to debate a bit - but I don't really think we have much to talk about

- your work (like so many others) is about little micro-projects

built in the sahdow of the Beast eocnomy that is devouring the people and the planet.

Everyone should go back and read Ghandi and Small is Beautiful and then study the Venezuelan Program for a few years befiore thinking they can talk about a real economics...

I find many otther errors or misperceptions in the article - but it is this different way of wseeing the pronblem or understanding the solutiojn or the motivation that peopl ebeneed to fight...

blah blah - this is why we have witghdrawn - probably permanently  - from the econ and opiltical debate

- IT"S NOT REAL

- there are no more radicals in the US and there never was a radical movement

- and never will be...

See you in the Andes or on a Pirate boat in the Black Sea...

someday

maybe...

Say Hi to RT and the goofy kids!!!

I love them...

BELOW IS THE ARTICLE ON SOLIDARITY ECONOMICS THAT ETHAN MILLER WROTE

 -  AND WHICH HAS RECEIVED SOME INTERST AND DEBATE AT DOLLARS AND CENTS

MAGAZINE.

[BOLD TYPE IN BRACKETS INDICATES COMMENTS BY RACHEL GUEVARA]

After Ethan's article is a link from Dollars and Cents magazine's web blog...

Enjoy, Lear and Take Opinions to their limit!

SO far I would say that the article says nothing new – it is a nice survey with some novel sources and phrasing – but nothing macro or micro or based in the real world of struggle, imperialism and elite domination and consumer fetishism -- !!  But there is no economics in this article, no political economy and very little coherent politics or broadmindedness!!!!!!

Other Economies Are Possible!   by Ethan Miller

Can thousands of diverse, locally-rooted, grassroots  economic projects form the basis for a viable democratic alternative to capitalism?

[Not an alternative – but after a revolution these practices could be the basis of a new society – maybe – maybe if they are well known before the crisis and depending on the outcome of the civil war and who and what is left to work with.]

It might seem unlikely that a motley array of initiatives such as worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives, community currencies, urban gardens, fair trade organizations, intentional communities, and neighborhood self-help associations could hold a candle to the pervasive and seemingly all-powerful capitalist economy. These “islands of alternatives in a capitalist sea” are often small in scale, low in resources, and sparsely networked. They are rarely able to connect with each other, much less to link their work with larger, coherent structural visions of an alternative economy.

Indeed, in the search for alternatives to capitalism, existing democratic economic projects are frequently painted as noble but marginal practices, doomed to be crushed or co-opted by the forces of the market. But is this inevitable? Is it possible that courageous and dedicated grassroots economic activists worldwide, forging paths that meet the basic needs of their communities while cultivating democracy and justice, are planting the seeds of another economy in our midst?

[Not all seeds grow – in fact in adverse conditions few or no seeds grow, and we have been planting these seeds for thirty or forty years and as a percentage of the national or global economy, their yield (economic or numbers involved has shrank greatly!]

Could a process of horizontal networking, linking diverse democratic alternatives and social change organizations together in webs of mutual recognition and support, generate a social movement and economic vision capable of challenging the global capitalist order?

[Maybe in 50 years or at the least moment of the collapse of capitalism, but of course that will be too late for a noble cause – but maybe not to late for some to survive – This is essentially the heart of the Newness of Rising Tide Rap – good education – but it takes too long and is likely to fail or be crushed – intentionally!]

To these audacious suggestions, economic activists around the world organizing under the banner of economía solidaria, or “solidarity economy,” would answer a resounding “yes!” It is precisely these innovative, bottom-up experiences of production, exchange, and consumption that are building the foundation for what many people are calling “new cultures and economies of solidarity.”

 Origins of the Solidarity Economy Approach

The idea and practice of “solidarity economics” emerged in Latin America in the mid-1980s and blossomed in the mid to late 90s, as a convergence of at least three social trends. First, the economic exclusion experienced by growing segments of society, generated by deepening debt and the ensuing structural adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund, forced many communities to develop and strengthen creative, autonomous and locally-rooted ways of meeting basic needs. These included initiatives such as worker and producer cooperatives, neighborhood and community associations, savings and credit associations, collective kitchens, and unemployed or landless worker mutual-aid organizations.

Second, growing dissatisfaction with the culture of the dominant market economy led groups of more economically privileged people to seek new ways of generating livelihoods and providing services. From largely a middle-class “counter-culture”—similar to that in the Unites States since the 1960’s—emerged projects such as consumer cooperatives, cooperative childcare and health care initiatives, housing cooperatives, intentional communities, and ecovillages.

There were often significant class and cultural differences between these two groups. Nevertheless, the initiatives they generated all shared a common set of operative values: cooperation, autonomy from centralized authorities, and participatory self-management by their members.

A third trend worked to link the two grassroots upsurges of economic solidarity to each other and to the larger socioeconomic context: emerging local and regional movements were beginning to forge global connections in opposition to the forces of neoliberal and neocolonial globalization. Seeking a democratic alternative to both capitalist globalization and state socialism, these movements identified community-based economic projects as key elements of alternative social organization.

At the First Latin Encuentro of Solidarity Culture and Socioeconomy, held in 1998 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, participants from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Colombia, and Spain created the Red latinoamericana de la economía solidaria (Latin American Solidarity Economy Network).

In a statement, the Network declared,

“We have observed that our experiences have much in common: a thirst for justice, a logic of participation, creativity, and processes of self-management and autonomy.”

By linking these shared experiences together in mutual support, they proclaimed, it would be possible to work toward “a socioeconomy of solidarity as a way of life that encompasses the totality of the human being.”

Since 1998, this solidarity economy approach has developed into a global movement. The first World Social Forum in 2001 marked the creation of the Global Network of the Solidarity Socioeconomy, fostered in large part by an international working group of the Alliance for a Responsible, Plural, and United World. By the time of the 2004 World Social Forum  in Mumbai, India, the Global Network had grown to include  47 national and regional solidarity economy networks from nearly every continent, representing tens of thousands of democratic grassroots economic initiatives worldwide. At the most recent World Social Forum in Venezuela, solidarity economy topics comprised an estimated one-third of the entire event’s program.

[SO where are the hundreds of documents that should of come out of this???]

Defining Solidarity Economics

But what exactly is this “solidarity economy approach”? For some theorists of the movement, it begins with a redefinition of economic space itself. The dominant neoclassical story paints the economy as a singular space in which market actors (firms or individuals) seek to maximize their gain in a context of scarce resources. These actors play out their profit-seeking dramas on a stage wholly defined by the dynamics of the market and the state.

Countering this narrow approach, solidarity economics embraces a plural and cultural view of the economy as a complex space of social relationship in which individuals, communities, and organizations generate livelihoods through many different means and with many different motivations and aspirations—not just the maximization of individual gain. The economic activity validated by neoclassical economists represents, in this view, only a tiny fraction of human efforts to meet needs and fulfill desires.

What really sustains us when the factories shut down, when the floodwaters rise, or when the paycheck is not enough? In the face of failures of market and state, we often survive by self-organized relationships of care, cooperation, and community. Despite the ways in which capitalist culture generates and mobilizes a drive toward competition and selfishness, basic practices of human solidarity remain the foundation upon which society and community are built. Capitalism’s dominance may, in fact, derive in no small part from its ability to co-opt and colonize these relationships of cooperation and mutual aid.

In expanding what counts as part of “the economy,” solidarity economics resonates with other streams of contemporary radical economic thought.

Marxist economists such as Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, for example, have suggested that multiple “modes of production” co-exist alongside the capitalist wage-labor mode. Feminist economists have demonstrated how neoclassical conceptions have hidden and devalued basic forms of subsistence and caregiving work that are often done by women.

Feminist economic geographer J.K. Gibson-Graham, in her books The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) (1998) and A Postcapitalist Politics (2006), synthesizes these and other streams of thought in what she calls the “diverse economies perspective.” Addressing concerns that are central to the solidarity economy approach, she asks, “If we viewed the economic landscape as imperfectly colonized, homogenized, systematized, might we not find openings for projects of noncapitalist invention? Might we not find ways to construct different communities and societies, building upon what already exists?”

Indeed, the first task of solidarity economics is to identify existing economic practices—often invisible or marginal to the dominant lens—that foster cooperation, dignity, equity, self-determination, and democracy.

As Carola Reintjes of the Spanish fair trade association Iniciativas de Economía Alternativa y Solidaria (IDEAS) points out, “Solidarity economy is not a sector of the economy, but a transversal approach that includes initiatives in all sectors.” This project cuts across traditional lines of formal/informal, market/non-market, and social/economic in search of solidarity-based practices of production, exchange and consumption—ranging from legally-structured worker cooperatives, which engage the capitalist market with cooperative values, to informal affinity-based neighborhood gift networks. (See “A Map of the Solidarity Economy,” pp. 20-21.)

At a 2000 conference in Dublin on the “Third Sector” (the “voluntary” sector, as opposed to the for-profit sector and the state), Brazilian activist Ana Mercedes Sarria Icaza put it this way:

“To speak of a solidarity economy is not to speak of a homogeneous universe with similar characteristics. Indeed, the universe of the solidarity economy reflects a multiplicity of spaces and forms, as much in what we would call the ‘formal aspects’ (size, structure, governance) as in qualitative aspects (levels of solidarity, democracy, dynamism, and self-management).”

At its core, solidarity economics rejects one-size-fits-all solutions and singular economic blueprints, embracing instead a view that economic and social development should occur from the bottom up, diversely and creatively crafted by those who are most affected.

[This is escapist – and exactly why this type of article and the whole concept of ignoring power relationships and solidarity will always fail…

People need a blueprint in order to grasp these concepts and they need guidelines to learn from and to judge progress and the policies of their leaders – Blueperints are guides – they can be changed or adapted at will – but to build a house with no blueprint – that’s ridiculous and people who propose such things in politics or economics are crazy – or worse – the enemy of thought and democracy!!! ]

As Marcos Arruda of the Brazilian Solidarity Economy Network stated at the World Social Forum in 2004, “a solidarity economy does not arise from thinkers or ideas; it is the outcome of the concrete historical struggle of the human being to live and to develop him/herself as an individual and a collective.”

Similarly, contrasting the solidarity economy approach to historical visions of the “cooperative commonwealth,” Henri de Roche noted that “the old cooperativism was a utopia in search of its practice and the new cooperativism is a practice in search of its utopia.”

Unlike many alternative economic projects that have come before, solidarity economics does not seek to build a singular model of how the economy should be structured, but rather pursues a dynamic process of economic organizing in which organizations, communities, and social movements work to identify, strengthen, connect, and create democratic and liberatory means of meeting their needs.

[The main problem with this is that it takes lots of time and for sure many failures for people to just do what they want and tryout building an economy in different ways – plus the US has a long history f interfering or eliminating such efforts.

There are very few alternative ways to build a sustainable, democratic, decentralized economy or society.  This is especially rue as you look out at the world and the threats we face from war, climate change and the brainwashing and fear that dominate the world! This whole article relies on the false premise – the straw man – of someone supposedly saying that there is ONLY ONE WAY – in order to justify not being clear and specific about what will and will not probably work…]

Success will only emerge as a product of organization and struggle.

 “Innovative practices at the micro level can only be viable and structurally effective for social change,” said Arruda, “if they interweave with one another to form always-broader collaborative networks and solidarity chains of production-finance-distribution-consumption-education-communication.”

[This is true but can only happen in a reasonable amount of time if done at the national level after a revolution! ]

This is, perhaps, the heart of solidarity economics—the process of networking diverse structures that share common values in ways that strengthen each. Mapping out the economic terrain in terms of “chains of solidarity production,” organizers can build relationships of mutual aid and exchange between initiatives that increase their collective viability. At the same time, building relationships between solidarity-based enterprises and larger social movements builds increased support for the solidarity economy while allowing the movements to meet some of the basic needs of their participants, demonstrate viable alternatives, and thus increase the power and scope of their transformative work.

In Brazil, this dynamic is demonstrated by the Landless Workers Movement (MST). As a broad, popular movement for economic justice and agrarian reform, the MST has built a powerful program combining social and political action with cooperative, solidarity-based economics. From the establishment of democratic, cooperative settlements on land re-appropriated from wealthy absentee landlords to the development of nationwide, inter-settlement exchanges of products and services, networks of economic solidarity are contributing significantly to the sustenance of more than 300,000 families—over a million people. The Brazilian Solidarity Economy Forum, of which the MST is a part, works on an even broader scale, incorporating twelve national networks and membership organizations with twenty-one regional Solidarity Forums and thousands of cooperative enterprises to build mutual support systems, facilitate exchanges, create cooperative incubator programs, and shape public policy.

 [Yes and after 20 years the MST controls about one percent of the Brazilian economy and half of one percent of the people. And they are having the usual problems of holding on to people  – especially the brainwashed and spoiled youth – who did not have to struggle like their parents did.]

Building a Movement

The potential for building concrete local, national, and even global networks of solidarity-based support and exchange is tremendous and yet barely realized. While some countries, notably Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Spain, and Venezuela, have created strong solidarity-economy networks linked with growing social movements, others have barely begun. The United States is an example. With the exception of the Rural Coalition/Coalición Rural, a U.S.-Mexico cross-border agricultural solidarity organization, the United States has been nearly absent from global conversations about solidarity economics. Maybe it’s harder for those in the “belly of the beast” to imagine that alternatives to capitalism are possible. Are alternative economic practices somehow rendered more invisible, or more isolated, in the United States than in other parts of the world? Are there simply fewer solidarity-based initiatives with which to network?

Perhaps. But things are changing. An increasing number of U.S. organizations, researchers, writers, students, and concerned citizens are questioning capitalist economic dogma and exploring alternatives. A new wave of grassroots economic organizing is cultivating the next generation of worker cooperatives, community currency initiatives, housing cooperatives and collectives, community garden projects, fair trade campaigns, community land trusts, anarchist bookstores (“infoshops”), and community centers

[Finally, since the last generation failed or became yuppy!]

Groups working on similar projects are making connections with each other. Hundreds of worker-owners from diverse cooperative businesses across the nation, for example, will gather in New York City this October at the second meeting of the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives (see p. 9). In the realm of cross-sector organizing, a broad coalition of organizations is working to create a comprehensive public directory of the cooperative and solidarity economy in the United States and Canada as a tool for networking and organizing.

It takes no great stretch of the imagination to picture, within the next five to ten years, a “U.S. Solidarity Economy Summit” convening many of the thousands of democratic, grassroots economic projects in the United States to generate a stronger shared identity, build relationships, and lay the groundwork for a U.S. Solidarity Economy Alliance. Move over, CEOs of the Business Roundtable!

[Such ridiculous pie in the sky crap – even in your wildest dreams this would amount to 2 percent of the economy and 1 percent of the consumers??? Do we even have 10 years to change the US? Prove it…]

Wishful thinking? Maybe not. In the words of Argentinian economist and organizer Jose Luis Corragio, “the viability of social transformation is rarely a fact; it is, rather, something that must be constructed.” This is a call to action.

Our Vision

A vibrant movement for a cooperative and democratic economy is growing in North America. Offering innovative and effective alternatives to the "business as usual" of the distant, unnacountable corporations that dominate our economic, social and political landscape, cooperative enterprises and the organizations that support them are working to build an economy that truly works for people and the planet.

These grassroots efforts offer tremendous resources to workers, citizens, communities and the world. Joined together and strengthened in their common efforts, their message and example can be powerful and clear: another economy is possible.

The Data Commons Project is a collaborative effort among a diverse array of organizations in the U.S. and Canada who share a mission of building and supporting the development of a cooperative economy.

Our goal is to develop a democratically controlled, accurate, comprehensive publicly searchable and updatable database of cooperative economic initiatives in North America.

Thousands of these initiatives currently work in relative isolation, fragmented by geography, sector, and even organizational form. For them to succeed in changing the economic status-quo, they need to find each other, help each other, work together, and be counted. With a comprehensive, dynamic directory and communication system, cooperative businesses and initiatives can link together into a strong, mutually-supportive network--one capable of catalyzing broader social and economic change.

An essential first step in this long-term work, the Data Commons Project is developing a powerful tool that will strengthen connections, facilitate resource sharing, and lay the groundwork for developing a system of mutual exchange among enterprises working to build a cooperative and democratic economy.

--- FROM THE BLOG OF DOLLARS AND CENTS MAGAZINE::: 

Monday, October 02, 2006

Solidarity Economics

& Participatory Economics

by Dollars & Sense

Can't housands of diverse, locally-rooted, grassroots economic projects form the basis for a viable democratic alternative to capitalism? It might seem unlikely that a motley array of initiatives such as worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives, community currencies, urban gardens, fair trade organizations, intentional communities, and neighborhood self-help associations could hold a candle to the pervasive and seemingly all-powerful capitalist economy.

 

An economy of the future will have an allocation system. All economies do. If it is markets or central planning, then that economy will not be a solidarity or participatory economy.

An economy of the future will have a division of labor. All economies do. And if this includes sequestering empowering work into the hands of a few while most do only rote and obedient work, the future economy will not be a solidarity or a participatory economy.

To have solidarity requires classlessness. Solidarity won’t be extensive if some own the economy and others only labor in it. It won’t be extensive if some rule the economy and others only obey in it.

So yes, we need an economy which is the product of the will of its members, of course. And we need an economy that is created by an open and hugely democratic process, of course. But we also need an economy that arrives at institutions that attain its stated aims—or else the aims will only be nice rhetoric, disappearing once contrary institutions push them aside.

10/02/2006 02:14:00 PM   

April 07 Ecosolidarity Update

APRIL 07 UPDATE:::

This remains quite fuzzy – the polished version of an Ecosolidarity Economics awaits the day that a few broadly educated economists and a few million dollars can be brought to bear on the only long run issue that is still relevant:

How do we live and how do we acquire what we need to live.

Awaiting that day… Rachel Guevara.

P.S. We have a team that could lead these efforts, but without a major commitment from others that would speed the process up, many of us are busy researching other problems and dealing with health and other problems of poverty. many of our associates are in prison, in exile or so intimidated that their lives have been ruined and their families destroyed.

Small donations are always useful, but time is ticking away and only major infusions of skill, effort and finances can get this project moving at the speed and with the force required trio make it relevant – and powerful. It’s up to you…

See Quotes from EF Shumacher here: (Or scroll down to page: )

Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful

"Modern economics measures the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. . . . The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity…

Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man's work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products…

Modern industry requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed….

"Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful…

The modern private enterprise system ingeniously employs the human urges of greed and envy as its motive power…

April 2007;

ECOSOLIDARITY ECONOMICS PROGRAM

 UPDATE

Farming is a way of life for half of the world’s people. Another quarter of the world’s population were once farmer and now they and their children live in urban slums. In most developing countries, rural families comprise a majority of the population. For these families, land represents a fundamental asset: it is a primary source of income, security, and status. Half of  rural families—some 230 million households—either lack access to land or a secure stake in the land they till. As a result, acute poverty, and related problems of hunger, social unrest, and environmental degradation persist.

INTRODUCTION:::

Improving rural economies and lives has always been the key to reducing population growth, the overcrowding of mega-city slums and environmental degradation. With global warming the future of most countries lies in their farmers hands.

Ecosolidarity draw on the examples of Mahatma Gandhi, EF Schumacher (Small is Beautiful), and the billions of humans who have lived and continue to live simple lives as peasants, artisans and educators.

Originally we wrote these ideas down because we were worried that the accepted models of economic development: capital intensive market driven or state directed export growth were both extremely detrimental; to the people, their culture and the environment.

Further we were convinced that reformist measures – Local and International were doomed to failure.

So we drew up a simple program that would work under the extreme situations that any country that chooses not to follow the dictates of the US and the international banks will find itself in.

The Ecosolidarity Program is not particularly original. It draws on a number of economic development concepts: import substitution and agricultural priorities. In its newest evolution it also draws on state planning concepts as applied to war times. In the Ecosolidarity Case the planning is still local, but the directives (or hopes?) of the national planners are considered locally – instead of the other way around.

Now that global warming has brought terrible consequences to all planning and the future of human kind, we hope that more attention will be given to our efforts.

A wide and deep debate is what we had hoped for, but actually we have been unable to get any comments from anyone about the program of Ecosolodarity. Hugo Chavez began to introduce many of our suggestions shortly after we published them. The efforts for a more humane development in Venezuela are admirable and it would be nice to have many more years to debate, test and learn from this new type of development. Sadly there is not enough time for this and real changes must be made now, if countries or regions are to take advantage of the security and sustainability advantages of the Ecosolidarity Program.

There has to be economic democracy. If an elite owns and controls big business such as oil, the farmland or the mines there can be neither real democracy nor social equality. Control over the productive apparatus of society has to be distributed.

This can take forms such as community ownership, self-managed enterprises and cooperatives. Call for a people’s revolutionary constituent assembly to help reconstruct from below the state and the nation. All nations have resources. If  the national capital is used to process resources into basic products that the poor need to live, then it can sow the seeds of a new continent and a new development.

PART I. ::: Beginning the Orientation to Long-Run Priorities

Prioritize productive factors: money, skills, workers and materials for long run production of basic goods.

Plan for the inputs and related needs to secure the factors required to produce: Food, electricity, transport services, housing, health care, communications, environmental/sanitation and water.

Criteria for Anti-Imperialist Governments:

A Minimum Framework for Revolucionarias Verdes: The Non-Fascist Response to Capitalism and Climate Catastrophe

1. Cancel all foreign debt to US and European banks.

2. Nationalize and then turn over to regional control all important industries.

3. Restrict imports through tariffs and trade preferences for friendly countries.

4. Boycott the USA dollar, hold your reserve currencies in gold, silver, platinum or Euros until a revolutionary currency or a Liberated Block SDR is available.

5. Eliminate regressive labor, pension and minimum wage legislation.

6. Deport the IMF, their agreements, and all USA government or commercial agents.

7. Impose austerity (severe taxes) on the rich.

8. Abolition/prohibition of all genetically modified organisms (GMOs) (and high restrictions on research); abolition/prohibition on toxic chemicals and the overuse of agricultural chemicals. Support regional agriculture research and seed production.

9. End the Expansion of Mass Transit and utilize ration coupons for transit options.

10. No private cars in urban areas; motorized transport in urban areas primarily for business deliveries, the handicapped and elderly.

11. High fuel taxes (3 - 4 dollars per gallon) on private fuel sales. High vehicle registration/disposal fees on all private vehicles.

12. Abolition/prohibition on corporate business structures employing more than 100 people.

13. Beyond these restraints on transport, economic concentration and toxic materials we believe that a democratic and sustainable government will reduce imports, end dependency and invest in the localized production of basic needs goods (food, water, energy, building materials and all of the tools required to produce each of these necessities.). This will employ all of the people.

14. The sign that a sane government is operating will be seen when the workers are given the factories they work in and people the homes they live in – debt free. Once that is done and food is prioritized we won’t have to worry about economics.

What is novel and truthful about this program is that it would work for 8 billion people.

No other plan can make this claim (14.)

PART II. ::: A NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY – Structures and Guides

Capitalism pretends that all needs are provided for by maximizing corporate profits. But despite huge expensive bureaucracies the rich countries still have serious social problems concerning health, education and crime. The Solidaristic model maximizes food security; health and well being; participation; a practical education; the values and benefits of cooperation; and a goal of many equalities. We are sure that such policies can produce enough (social) profits to satisfy basic needs for development: the people empowered.

Examples from the Ecosolidarity Program

1. Extreme taxation of all foreign and elite owned businesses, bank accounts and resources to accomplish state takeover at the lowest cost and minimal disruptions.

2. Extreme tariffs on all non-aligned nations' imports.

3. Extensive programs for the relocation of urban people to rural areas for production and for defense.

4. Education for solidarity and revolutionary economics, society and consciousness.

5. Increase the sustainability of the lives of the poor by promoting six core

objectives:

(1) more secure access to, and bettermanagement of, natural resources;

(2) more secure access to financial resources;

(3) a policy and institutional environment that supports multiple livelihood strategies

and promotes equitable access to competitive markets;

(4) better nutrition and health; improved access to high quality education, information, technologies, and training;

(5) a more supportive and cohesive social environment; and

(6)better access to basic and facilitating infrastructure.

What Kind of Economy Do We Want ? - What Kind of Economy Can We Have?

We observe that capitalist-oriented market systems are inefficient from moral, social, environmental and sustainability perspectives. Rather than maximize output and then support government bureaucracies and complex legal systems in order to compensate for all the externalities and problems of a growth oriented market system, we propose a new orientation evolving around an Agrarian Based Market Socialism, or Solidarity Economics. More profits stay inside the country when trade – or imports - are reduced.

In the Solidarity model the neoliberal fixation on growth and maximizing output are a low priority. Those capitalist goals are replaced with a priority to invent economic policies that provide for the sustainable production of the basics of life: food, housing, education, health and dignity. In the Solidarity model social equity, community self-reliance and sustainability are maximized first. This is accomplished through import substitution at the national then the regional and finally the community level.

A nation gradually replaces its imports starting with the easiest first and through education and investment moves up to other goods and services. Simultaneously this program prepares for regional and community import substitution.

The goal of Solidarity Economics is to increase the availability of basic needs goods and to accomplish this with a declining impact on the environment. The real choice that people have is: Do they want a sustainable and just economy that is kind to people and neighbors or do they want the US to destroy the planet and debase humanity fighting ugly resource wars?

An economic system is only as complex as a people allow it to be. People can have the sustainable economy that they want. It will be different and poorer in many ways than the late 20th Century US economic model. But it will be understandable because it is local, open (transparent) and decided on by the people themselves.

The problem with markets is that corrupt governments write the laws to benefit the wealthy, the big companies and growth. These are corporate subsidies and state socialism for the rich.(30) The invisible hand of government policies shapes the production costs and the prices that consumers are willing to pay. If people want a country with many small farms producing organic products then they will be able to employ many people in a labor-intensive program. But people will pay more for food in the short run than they would if they continued to let rich people gobble up farmland and poison it with chemicals, pesticides, herbicides and GMOs.

Prices are only lower in the corporate farm system because so many of the externalized costs are not paid by the corporation. These costs include slave labor, child labor, cheap loans, social suffering from the displacement of small farmers, repression of farm workers and impacts on the environment.

The safest way to improve the social benefits of markets is to keep all the market players of similar size, knowledge and security. Complex markets or complicated choices for a democracy make it likely that prudence is lost among poor information and the rush of events. Venezuela's development of Community Councils shows that people want to participate and direct their lives. The experiments with participatory budgeting in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (a state of 12 million people) suggest that average people can solve these problems simultaneously. The problems encountered in Brazil also show how difficult any program is when the government has to pay half its budget to foreign bankers for debts caused by previous corrupt governments.

Instead of a profit maximizing and export-based decision-making criteria Solidarity Economics would create a long-run soil conserving and biologically diverse system of farming where inputs - especially imported inputs - were not needed and expensive machinery would be replaced with labor, local resources and ingenuity.

TOOLS FOR ECOSOLIDARITY

 Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA) is a methodology for rural development research. RRA techniques require the researchers to talk extensively and informally with rural people and to observe local conditions, while also making use of secondary information such as administrative records and maps. RRA is used to obtain information in a timely, cost-effective, accurate and insightful manner as a basis for development planning and action.

In RRA interviews, farmer interviewees are not respondents to a questionnaire, but active participants in a semi-structured interview. RDI researchers use a checklist of issues as a basis for questions, not necessarily addressing all questions in each interview and sometimes departing from the basic questions to pursue interesting, unexpected, or new information.

The RDI field researchers randomly select interviewees, typically visiting one household at each stop. Researchers take extra measures to avoid the company of local officials in order to maximize the candidness of interviewees. Typical interviews last from one to two hours.

Compared with questionnaire surveys, RRA interviews enable the collection of more detailed information on the issues that are of greatest importance to the individual interviewee, and of greatest interest to the interviewers.

OTHER AREAS For Which New Tools Are Needed:

General land policy and reform

Women’s rights to land and related assets

Common property resources and management regimes

Credit and mortgage

Land market development

Privatization and collective farm efficiency

Titling and registration

Dispute resolution

Legal advocacy and aid

Land administration

PART III.  ::: Agrarian-Based Localization: Directions of Priority

Prioritizing the basic needs of any society, results in an eventual transformation of a society. A new type of economic structure is then born along the lines of a green local-socialist decentralization program.

People should organize and reprioritize state and local policies for:

Women and Children; Education for a Solidarity Society of Pure Food, Dignity for Indigenous People and All Workers; and Health for All Including the environment.

Any country or region that seeks to provide these basic needs in a sustainable way will have little additional funds to waste on militaries and corporate subsidies. In parts of Latin American one can see a new world being born. It’s a world where people create the space and freedom to be themselves and care for themselves and their families. New economic structures can accomplish this in ways that build thriving, sustainable communities.

The sciences of Agro-Ecology and Watershed Management can guide localization planning with prioritization for sustainability and equity.

With common sense, lessons learned from the past and citizen empowerment through participation, all aspects of this world will evolve differently than the chaotic and cruel dictates experienced when international capital and the powerful elite force rapid change and modernization on every corner of the planet.

A Structure for Solidarity, Local Power and Sustainable Economics

Solidarity Economics argues for a bias toward rural areas and a policy structure of localization where local resources are used sustainably to produce most of the basic needs goods and a surplus for trade with its nearest neighbors first

This structure solves the problems of bureaucracies, political conflict and concentration of wealth. Markets are used locally, but trade is regulated beyond regions through toll roads and high fuel taxes. Toxic chemicals, genetically altered organisms (GMOs) and  inappropriate technologies would be banned. Many other questionable products, inputs and technologies would be highly regulated.

Combined with ecological guidelines and additional restrictions on trade and land ownership, the market would create economic conditions that support small, medium and cooperative-based farms and rural enterprises. The importance of political democracy beyond a locality will eventually decline because most of the decisions over public policy are set in a well-biased (science-based) constitution or made locally.

These polices set the stage for a market economy that has its priorities built in and guaranteed.

Agrarian Reform: The Unfinished Revolution

Even poorly endowed places must take advantage of whatever will grow. Trees and riparian areas protect the water and biological resources. Some food, fish or export crops are necessary output from all places. Protecting renewable resources like the soils, forests, estuaries and fisheries is a duty and the basis of natural wealth.

The “Who owns the good farmlands” determines the wealth distribution of a region.

The “What is farmed” determines the food dependency/food sovereignty of a place.

The “Where” of farming determines the impacts on the ecology and the long run productivity of the country. Overproduction near rivers or steep hills has a potentially large impact. Light grazing rotations and tree crops would be chosen by a community if it exercised control over the use of its resources.

The “Why of farming” – or the Why Subsidize Small Farms and rural communities - determines the importance of culture, respect, sustainability and the connections of the people to the land and the ecology that they live in and depend on.

The “How” of farming is connected to and grows out of all of these factors. Investments and trade polices accelerate or control trends in production and growth and thus affect all aspects of rural life and the well being of the whole country. For decades investments in Latin America have been capital intensive (with an urban – industrial bias) thus creating greater unemployment and a rural exodus to mega-city slums.

Government commissions and scientific research panels (drawn from local and regional experts, students and faculty) will draw up detailed lists of each region’s resources: grazing lands, farmlands (in several categories of richness and environmental sensitivity), damaged lands, forests, special wildlands or habit zones, erosion zones, fishing zones and tourist or recreation areas.

After these studies are completed lands would be redistributed for free to competent farmers and ranchers.

Compensation for seized lands will not be possible in most places because of a lack of funds and the revolutionary perceptions that will accompany these drastic changes. Current owners of land could retain twice the standard limit that is set locally for a particular land type (typically 5 to 10 hectares for the highest quality lands and 20-40 hectares for marginal or grazing lands). Adults over 21 can only own the land that they live on and their vehicle license plate must be from that parcel’s address.(35)

Initially land is redistributed to three sectors: small holders, coops and locally owned lands held for distribution to newcomers and population growth.

Next the government would analyze imports and exports at national and regional levels.

A plan or recommendation is drawn up that considers priority for basic needs goods and the national and regional production advantages: resources, skills, interests and existing complimentary infrastructure. From this point in the process the popular assemblies and research panels devise the final plans for land use, investments and subsidies.

PART IV. ::: BANKING

OWNED AND MANAGED BY LOCAL COMMUNITIES and audited by the central government. Only local lending would be allowed and must meet community prioritization guidelines. Banks are to serve long-term needs and emergencies not to make money at the highest profit. Since the rich - even in a new system - cannot take their money out of the country legally and the local/national currency would be worth little outside (eliminating smuggling) the rich would be forced to invest or put their money in the local banks.

Government and the research panels (drawn locally and regionally) draw up lists of resources: grazing lands, farm land (both in several categories of richness and eco impact), damaged lands, forests, special wildlands or habit zones, erosion zones, fishing zones and tourist areas.

Then government analyzes  imports  nationally and in each region/state. A plan is drawn up based on basic needs and national production advantages for production and sustainability. A plan for rural resettlement areas would match people’s interests in destinations and activities, skills, customs.

The key to reducing waste and equalizing incomes is to utilize ration coupons and to charge for services (like water, power, garbage, schools and health care) according to a sliding scale. Everyone would receive monthly coupons for transport, basic foods, utilities and medicines.

Home ownership would be very cheap as land trusts would capture increased speculative values and yearly community-issued coupons for basic building supplies would make improvements and maintenance cheap. The charges for basic levels of water, power, medicine, health care and garbage/sanitation would be about equal to the coupons received by households.

Those wanting to consume more would pay steeply increasing rates. Those people who consume less than the basic levels could sell their coupons on the open market – though the coupons would be numbered to control excess graft.

The major expense of non-farm families would be food.

Community councils could grant temporary emergency rate relief in special circumstances – such as: a severe cold spell where energy consumption goes up, a widow with many children, or say a company that lost its bio-diesel generator and needs to buy extra electricity. Flexibility and a joy of learning will be important to the success of experiments in New Democracy and Sustainability.

Radical Restructuring:

Part I. Applying Revolutionary Transition Designs to Develop A New Socialism

Poor Countries and Revolutionary Movements cannot expect any help from anyone. They cannot wait for Chavez in Venezuela or a worldwide movement of aid to attend to their needs. They must prepare for the worst: USA invasions or USA collusion with elite sabotage and a collapse of economic relations with most of the world.

The Ecosolidarity program addresses this real world context and what countries must do. It is also meant as a guide for revolutionary groups to present workable and visionary manifestos of the path to a sustainable and equitable design for living.

Our dreams are utopian, but we aim for real and enduring results. To re-build the foundation of a people start with education – once you know what you want to teach...

Part II. Revolutionary Policies for Transitional Survival:

Democratic Redistribution and Radical Restructuring for a New Beginning

The following program will typically be required of the revolutions in the Andes and throughout Latin America (the pace of adaptation and implementation may vary) :

PHASE TWO: 1. National Constituent Constitutional Convention

A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION should consider all aspects of a nation's future and the means to establish democratic, transparent and productive structures for the whole nation. For the first month of its meeting Positions should only be adopted by a two thirds vote, after one month a 51 percent vote should be adopted. Care should be given to assure that the votes and voices of all significant sectors of the nation are included in the Convention: women, students, workers, soldiers, indigenous groups, young people, slum dweller organizations, unions representing poor workers, small farmers and landless farmers.

PHASE THREE: Recommendations for a New Constitution:

a. Prioritize: The needs of the whole population for a new revolutionary/solidarity education; water for drinking and for crops; pure and affordable food/national food security; equitable land distribution; indigenous, campesino and small farm agricultural support; and enhanced popular participation in all decisions.

b. Secondary priorities: Community and national defense; housing with long term use/needs taken into account (priority for slum, rural and border areas); cooperative production units; Watershed restoration; and public spending for the sustainable development of natural and other resources.

c. Policies:

1. Expropriation of all foreign, elite or important land, structures and businesses. In cases where this is too difficult or too dangerous then the Constitution should institute extreme taxation of all foreign and elite owned businesses, bank accounts and resources to accomplish state takeover at the lowest cost and minimal disruption.

2. Extreme tariffs on all products imported to or from non-aligned nations. Quotas on imports from friendly nations to protect local businesses.

3. Extensive long-term programs for the relocation of urban people to rural areas for production and for defense.

4. Education for solidarity and revolutionary economics, society and consciousness. 5. (to be continued and updated)

Part III. An Agrarian-Based Socialist Economics

In The Solidarity Model there is a market economy but the government at all levels – directed by the people’s budget prioritizations – intervenes in the market to create sufficient basic goods and to satisfy basic needs within sustainability guidelines.

( LINKS…)

A Typical Program for a Revolutionary SUSTAINABLITY in a place like Bolivia or Ecuador or Peru

I. The Short Transition Period:

Immediate Priorities (Go-Slow Option)

The development path for Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru is quite similar. The poor and their allies must seize most of the land and all valuable industries, assets and bank accounts. The first thing that a new government does is to seize the banks (including the Central Bank), institute currency controls, and seal its borders to prevent capital or equipment flight. We assume that the armed forces and the police remain loyal to the people and all suspect individuals and units would be demobilized or jailed.

Security and law and order are the next responsibilities. Soldiers and police not required for protection of vital installations should be assigned to neighborhood or regional assemblies to be deployed as requested by these local authorities (worker-soldier alliance). Lists of critical jobs should be drawn up by the assemblies and the positions necessary are filled. Garbage collection, water supply, electricity (rationed), and emergency medical needs are at the top with sewage disposal and heating or cooling next. The central government's primary role other than security is to seize all food supplies and critical parts (equipment) and to distribute it fairly according to need and circumstances (weather, poverty and breakdowns). The government (local, regional and national) should also distribute transport vehicles and fuel supplies as best it can.

II. Phase II of Transition Period (First 3 months):

Beginning the Orientation to Long-Run Priorities (The "Go-Slow" Option)

The primary requirements during the first months of a popular uprising are to further develop and secure the neighborhood and regional assembly operations, effectiveness and organization; to prioritize productive factors (money, skills, workers and material) for long run production of basic goods; and the planning for the inputs and related needs to secure the factors required to produce: Food, electricity, transport services, housing, health care, communications, environmental/sanitation and water.

III. ECONOMIC POLICIES: "Go Slow" Option

1. Credit and Currency Controls.

2. Public Land given to organizations and sustainable farming coops.

3. Modest Credit programs for key sectors of the economy.

4. Increased property and income taxes on corporations, the rich and idle lands.

5. Partial decentralization of administration, armed forces and large state enterprises.

6. Increased minimum wages and health clinic access.

7. Regional Employment Programs in agriculture, land improvements, transportation and import substitution enterprises (public and private).

8. Import Substitution becomes the main industrial and cooperative sector focus, with attention to interconnections (linkages and input factors).

9. Modest re-nationalization of progressively smaller foreign and then domestic monopolies, oligarchies and concentrations of ownership.

10. Encourage South American Countries (or all countries) to abrogate the UN drug treaty and launch new legalization and crop substitution programs.

11. Direct the national and regional universities and trade schools to study and compliment research in organic farming, solidarity enterprises, import substitution and ways to assist other countries (Cuba, Bolivia etc... )

12. Limit News Media ownership and require more PSAs (public or educational) and programming by organizations representing poor people and minorities. Institute high fines for lies and media misinformation ...

IV. Phase III - of The "Go Slow" Option

1. All of Part II, but more and faster...

2. Subsidize linkages that support import substitution enterprises managed by workers collectively or through cooperatives. Extend these programs both locally, regionally and beyond the country with friendly regimes.

3. Military construction projects: schools, hospitals, sanitation, water, market places, environmental restoration and infrastructure. Creation of a civil militia and dual-purpose roles for military units.

4. Links across borders and funding for a variety of rural development approaches. Eco and activista tourism, aid programs and fair trade networking (high valued crops and crafts).

5. Government purchases of lands and increased confiscations.

6. Increase taxes on medium size farms and some on small farms that are profitable.

7. Limits tightened on land ownership. Require divestment (break up) of business conglomerates.

8. Re-location projects to rural areas for urban people. Grant urban land titles and increase urban and near-urban land and business confiscations and purchases.

9. Education for Solidarity at all levels of society.

10. Establish regionally owned and locally operated retail food stores to sell stable goods at subsidized prices in poor neighborhoods and rural areas. Community cafeterias and Free Stores (for rationed clothing, toys, household products) established as possible.

11. TACTICS of Strategic Effect: High and progressively increased corporate Taxation can be used to Bankrupt FOREIGN OR ELITE factories and other business interests. Use the governmental powers of condemnation and the justification of the public's goods/benefits... Can also use buyouts with low fixed exchange rates (an low interest) payments - and then devalue the currency a lot. - Or just simply nationalize and promise to pay... or not.

Part IV. The Crisis Program:

The Fast or Crisis Transitional Economic Program

In this scenario communities in all regions will be forced to hold clandestine or rushed meetings of Popular Assemblies to form political cadres and self-defense arrangements. Hopefully, the majority of people in many nations by this time will have seen and embraced the connection of all struggles for sovereignty, autonomy, resistance, food security and radical restructuring of all aspects of all countries. This consciousness will empower people knowing that their struggle is one of many and an important part of a continental struggle whose success will sustain and re-enforce their efforts and eventual triumph – both in the struggle and in the re-construction of humane societies.

Significant damage may be done to valuable infrastructure such as businesses and institutions that were seen as supporters of the former corrupt regime: public service utilities like water, power, education, mass transit or telephone (general communications) that had been privatized or run corruptly. Foreign corporations, banks and local partners of large foreign corporations may also be targeted. Large landowners will be ruthlessly driven from their vast properties and genetically altered seed and chemical suppliers may well be destroyed. Media broadcast facilities are often ransacked and export facilities (ports) are sure to be looted or damaged.

Crisis Policies

Implement all of the Slow Program policies quickly, over the course of a few months. Get rid of US $ and the previous currency. End trade with those aligned with the US. Fire most of the upper level military. Put half of the military to work like in Venezuela' Plan Bolivar and welcome Cuban, Venezuelan and international aid workers (doctors, engineers, advisers).

Everywhere people will denounce the US and demand leaders like Hugo Chavez and public policies that redistribute power to the people, land to the poor and dignity for all. Nationalize, and then localize a people's democratic news and entertainment media network to educate and inform the people and to spread the message of resistance to the imperialists. Ban all advertising for money and replace with consumer reports and tests of products.

For the Preservation of Domestic Security and Self Defense

(Originally written for Venezuela but applicable everywhere):

1. Restrict travel by the wealthy of your country (Venezuelans and others) and require background checks of US, Colombian and Haitian citizens entering Venezuela (or other aligned places).

2.Maintain strict currency controls and broaden investigations of tax paying compliance by US and opposition connected businesses and organizations.

3. Expose the connections between the Cisneros clan (or your local and national elite), the AUC/Colombian elite, the Miami-Cuban CIA mafia and Spanish rightwing drug dealers (and US, Spanish and Mexican Banks!)

4. Phase out US Embassies, all US government operations, most US NGOs and all US corporations and other related associations.

5. Accept only Euro currency for oil and other exports (until a regional currency is adopted). Institute surcharges on all US ships, airplanes and US exports and imports. Venezuela Econ Policies http://vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=16154

6. Stop oil and other exports to US client regimes in the region: Colombia, Dominican Republic, Aruba, Curacao (Israel).

7. Sell national assets that are outside of your country (CITIGO in Venezuela's case). Assist Bolivia and other friendly countries with their energy projects and operations. Start palm oil (bio-diesel) plantations and processing facilities in regions with few energy sources.

8. Place high tariffs on luxury goods and services.

9. Slow down, shut down and sell businesses or properties owned outside of your country (CITGO in Venezuela's case).

Part V. Issues of Revolutionary Change:

Many people have known about policies that can improve conditions for rural people. An example is found in the demands made by highland Indians in Ecuador. CONAIE and Ecuarunari led the Indian uprising of 1990, helped by Confeniae. From the platform that the occupation of the Santo Domingo church provided, the leadership disseminated a succinct program:

1. Return of lands and territories taken from indigenous communities, without costly legal fees

2. Sufficient water for both human consumption and irrigation in the indigenous communities, and an environmental plan to prevent contamination of water supplies

3. No payment of the municipal taxes levied on the small properties owned by indigenous farmers

4. Creation of long-term financing for bilingual education programs in the communities

5. Creation of provincial and regional credit agencies under the control of CONAIE

6. Debt pardon for all debts indigenous communities have incurred with government ministries and banks

7. Reform of the first article of the Ecuadorian Constitution such that it recognizes Ecuador as a multinational state

8. Immediate delivery of funds and credits currently assigned to the indigenous nationalities

9. A minimum two-year price freeze on raw materials & manufactured goods used by communities in agricultural production, & a reasonable price increase for agricultural products sold by the communities, relying on the free-market.

10. Initiation & termination of all necessary & priority construction of basic infrastructure in the indigenous communities

11. Unrestricted import and export privileges for indigenous artisans and merchants of artisan-craft

12. Strict protection and controlled exploration of archaeological sites under the supervision of CONAIE

13. Expulsion of Summer Institute of Linguistics (a missionary group), in accordance with Executive Decree 1159 of 1981

14. Respect for the rights of children and the raising of consciousness in the government regarding the actual state of affairs extant among children

15. National support for the practice of indigenous medicine

16. Immediate dismantling of organizations created by the political parties that parallel governmental institutions at the municipal and provincial levels, and which manipulate political consciousness and elections in the indigenous communities (Hoy 6/29/90)

Part VI. Consider your revolution an experiment in developing an alternative to corporate dominated globalization.

Implement the kinds of policies that:

1. Show that poor people in the 3rd world can generate significant economic growth without international corporate investment;

2. create an economy with substantial resistance barriers to corporate domination: Generate jobs that are insulated from multinational corporate practices of moving into a region and then leaving to escape upward wage pressures;

3. make more efficient use of local raw materials than would a vertically integrated international corporate production process;

4. reinforce local democracy, participation, and empowerment of ordinary people. The goals of new projects include developing an economy that is egalitarian and a political structure that allows for the greatest possible democratic participation of workers and consumers in designing their own products.

5. provide an example to others of the power of cooperatives as engines of economic growth and development that simultaneously promote social justice and support communities.

Development Guides and Ideas:

Do inventories of natural resources, public resources (lands and schools etc ); Collect data on trade, fair trade inputs, forest resources and problem areas (pollution, erosion, corruption); Hydro potentials with a priority to the cheapest, least disruptive and the development needs of a place (social harmony, or small scale economic development priorities.)

Inventory crafts outputs and investigate their expanded market potential. Analyze potentials for tourism and the risks associated with it.

Natural resources - especially coal, oil, gas and forests (and the impacts of their development) - are set to the highest criteria for development and wise, long–run sustainable management. Sustainability and the future value of resources are carefully considered (long term yields and profits realized by slow development of the resource). Another factor is the future availability of improved techniques for mitigating ecological problems. Also, less public funding of infrastructure investments are needed in the short term under a "go-slow" regime (pipelines, ports and roads). Instead, national and regional governments can invest in schools, teachers and revolutionary criteria that will help people come up with more creative, practical and socially profitable goals and methods of resource and social development.

Reduce erosion, build smarter (infrastructure, industry, utilities) and focus skills and investments on import substitution (ISE ) products and techniques. The goals and the planning for the university system and most secondary school research is directed at how to improve and facilitate the alternative economic program of solidarity and social economy  For example: students would design or compare (dissect) foreign models of motors or engines and test them and see which were best and worst and then redesign them for local production - or a cheap method of remanufacturing used items (justified by overall ISE program).

VIII. Ideas for Local Solidarity Projects and Import Substitution with Value Adding

Practical Uses for the Military and Ideals –

The key structure is to have vehicle licenses issued from each locality. Each time that you cross a border checkpoint your vehicle is weighed and you are required to fill your fuel tank. The border that you are crossing into receives the funds including a tax per pound of the vehicle. The tax per pound would be the same at all borders for all products. This encourages value adding to all trade products.

The price of fuels would not be regulated. You must be over 21 to own a vehicle and over 25 to own a truck over a certain weight. All land would be redistributed for free to competent  farmers and ranchers. Current owners of land could retain twice the standard limit that is set locally for a particular land type. Adults over 21 can only own the land that they live on and their vehicle license plate must be from that locality too. People can lease land with trade restrictions outside their locality at twice the standard rental rate of the new locality. [ redo this with simple answers to what to do with  urban areas ]

NEW FOOTNOTES Draft -- 

LINKS TO SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL::: 

ENGLISH:::

SPANISH:::

HUNGARIAN:::

Quotes from F Schumacher on Buddhist Economics:::

Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful

"[A modern economist] is used to measuring the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. . . . The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity."

"It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man's work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products."

"The most striking about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed."

"Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful."

"[N]o system or machinery or economic doctrine or theory stands on its own feet: it is invariably built on a metaphysical foundation, that is to say, upon man's basic outlook on life, its meaning and its purpose. I have talked about the religion of economics, the idol worship of material possessions, of consumption and the so-called standard of living, and the fateful propensity that rejoices in the fact that 'what were luxuries to our fathers have become necessities for us.'

"Systems are never more no less than incarnations of man's most basic attitudes. . . . General evidence of material progress would suggest that the modern private enterprise system is--or has been--the most perfect instrument for the pursuit of personal enrichment. The modern private enterprise system ingeniously employs the human urges of greed and envy as its motive power…

--  The answer is self-evident: greed and envy demand continuous and limitless economic growth of a material kind, without proper regard for conservation, and this type of growth cannot possibly fit into a finite environment. We must therefore study the essential nature of the private enterprise system and the possibilities of evolving an alternative system which might fit the new situation."

"Education can help us only if it produces “whole men”. The truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even the man who knows all the details of all subjects (if such a thing were possible): the “whole man” in fact, may have little detailed knowledge of facts and theories…  he will be truly in touch with the centre.

References

^ Schumacher, E. F.; Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered : 25 Years Later...With Commentaries !1999). Hartley & Marks Publishers ISBN 0-88179-169-5

See also: A Guide for the Perplexed Appropriate technology

Simple living Buddhist Economics  

Phase One:

1. All cities, towns and rural districts form popular assemblies that document the Demands, Expectations and Policies that the residents support. A two-thirds vote should be attempted on these positions from the participants of the assemblies. Failing that, the vote tallies for the majority and minority positions should be recorded. In forming these assemblies care should be given to balance participation and functionality with size.

New Program Ecosolidarity 2006

The Short New Program Version;

Februrary 8, 2006

..... SOLIDARITY ECONOMICS:

 ...THE ECOSOLIDARITY APPROACH

“The first city in the world to have more than one million people was Rome at the height of its Empire in 5 A.D. At that time, world population was only 170 million. But Rome was something new in the world. It had developed its own sophisticated sanitation and traffic management systems, as well as aqueducts, multi-story low-income housing and even suburbs, but after it fell in 410 A.D. it would be 17 centuries before any metropolitan area had that many people.

The first large city in the modern era was Beijing, which surpassed one million population around 1800, followed soon after by New York and London. But at that time city life was the exception; only three percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 1800. People and the Planet reports that by 2007, 3.2 billion people—a number larger than the entire global population of 1967—will live in cities… In Caracas, more than half the total housing stock is squatter housing. Jakarta’s environment has been deteriorating rapidly, with serious air pollution and the lack of a waterborne sewer. Jakarta officials have only recently begun to acknowledge the source of over half of the city’s air pollution, and have begun to take action against automobile congestion. The Blue Skies Program, founded in 1996, is dedicated to updating the city’s public and private transportation technology. The project’s successes to date include an increase in the percentage of vehicles meeting pollution standards, a near-complete phasing out of leaded gasoline, and an increase in the number of natural gas-fueled vehicles to 3,000 taxis, 500 passenger cars and 50 public buses. The Blue Skies Project is pushing Jakarta toward a complete natural gas conversion and is working towards the installation of dedicated filling stations, establishing a fleet of natural gas-fueled passenger busses, supplying conversion kits for gasoline-fueled cars, and creating adequate inspection and maintenance facilities.” [Will Blue Skies help? Probably not!]

     --  http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2849

PART I. INTRODUCTIONS

     ….ECOSOLIDARITY ANDES – 

      .....ECONOMIC PROGRAMS ::

BALANCING NATIONAL & REGIONAL        

SELF-RELIANACE WITH EQUITY, JOBS & ECOLOGICAL PROTECTION...

FOR LONGTERM SUSTAINABILITY…  …..

..............Request for assistance, referral and cooperation:

1.1.  Ecosolidarity Andes is conducting socio-economic studies of Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru and Nepal. Our current focus concerns the Energy and Transport Sectors. Assistance is solicited in all aspects of these studies with Spanish and Portuguese translations an important unmet need.

We are looking for information about your experiences or the methods used for NATURAL AND HUMAN RESOURCE ANALYSIS.  Information on the Transport Sector – particularly about truck numbers, hauling tonnage, commercial transport costs and ownership concentration is also important.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: BOLIVIA 2006

THE ECOSOLIDARITY OPTION; February 8, 06

The program of Ecosolidarity is based on import substitution and the localization of economic production and decision-making (Planning with Participatory Budgeting) ( 1.)

The Mundos de Escuelas (MER) have developed a partial political program for the transition of countries toward citizen design and local organization (Link: mer130.tripod.com). MER compliments the Ecosolidarity economic design when combined with the indicators (criteria) of self reliance; jobs/equity; and ecological protections. The MER program decentralizes the national government, giving real power to departments or sub-units. The duties and responsibilities of the national and then regional governments are transferred to more local units (2.) This only makes sense – or is possible – under an Ecosolidarity Program. We believe that this is best done when the structure of the economy – the long term goals – are codified (set) into national and regional constitutions. In time the higher levels of government would simply observe, make recommendations and collect border taxes for the smaller (local) government assemblies. ( 3.) Government from above withers away.

An idea for a new kind of politics is to have national, regional and local voting – where people go and express their priorities for production and government  (popular services), rather than elect unknown representatives to cut deals in secret rooms (as most "democracy" is now done). This serious national poll would be used by sub-regions as they planned their budgets. Everyone would have a feel for how the nation and each region is thinking and valuing changes, problems and opportunities.

In preparation for establishing a national (and regional) constitution, a country (and the sub-units) performs resource studies. (4.) These studies are used to identify human and natural resources that fit into a localization and import substitution economics program (Ecosolidarity).  Originally, Ecosolidarity Andes prioritized the agricultural sector for most countries and we still do! Agriculture (fisheries, and grazing) and making sustainable use of your natural resources (minerals, forests, water) is always the first step in sustainable development design. (5.)

However, the fact that many poor countries in Latin America have energy resources and face daunting transport sector choices, has directed our research at these problems as they apply to sustainability and equitable development. The energy and transport sectors must be decided upon before a complete national program of Ecosolidarity can be developed and put into law. Part Four of this study examines the transport sectors of Bolivia and the choices to be made. Comparisons with Nepal and Peru give insights to what other societies face in their paths to sustainability in crisis times. (6.)

Our objective is to develop practical guidelines and methods to help policymakers (local/national) develop diagnostics to assess agricultural, transport and infrastructure needs and to ensure that strategies to address them are as cost effective as possible within the Ecosolidarity criteria for balanced development. Special emphasis is placed on data collection and explanations of some of the quantitative methodologies that can serve as inputs to the studies needed to ensure that the interests of the poor and other marginalized groups are accounted for. The methods for accurate planning must be made easily understandable. (7.)

1.2.  Solidarity Economics 2006:

An Outline:

I. ELIMINATING PRIVATE CARS FOR NEW DEMOCRACY:

See: http://newswire.indymedia.org/en/2006/02/832879.shtml

a. Costs; b. Pollution; c. Capitalism; d. Alternatives

II. POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS:  MER TRANSITION GUIDELINES

Mer130.tripod.com

III.  ECOSOLIDARITY ECONOMICS

a.) Other models: Cuba; Market Socialism; Ecological Economics; Social Economy

LINKS:

Part I: http://www.tagworld.com/solidarity/PostDetail.aspx?id=451e6395-dc49-471b-bcd0-97f0562a03a8

Part II: http://www.tagworld.com/solidarity/PostDetail.aspx?id=14a92423-fcde-433c-993a-9f7bff3d1828

PartIII: http://www.tagworld.com/solidarity/PostDetail.aspx?id=e5cccd2b-6f71-4146-94cc-2e8f9b79d0a2

b.) Definitions

SOCIAL ECONOMY:

SOLIDARITY ECONOMICS:

ECOSOLIDARITY:  NEW PROGRAM AND CRITERIA :

IV.  A NEW ECONOMICS OUTLINE:

SIMPLIFIED AND MICRO DIRECTED

a.) TRANSPORT

b.)  ENERGY

c.) AGRICULTURE

d.)  ECOSOLIDARITY CRITERIA:

Modeling Sustainability and Equity.

e.) The BOLIVIAN PROJECT: 

1. Energy Sector: Data, Comparisons, and Options; 

2. Resources – Natural,  Human and Industrial: 

Models for Analysis: US Forest Service; LEISHA; Other Models:

a. Quality of Farmlands; Potential Farmlands; Rangelands; Forests; Scrub; Water: irrigation, Drinking, Hydroelectric, Micro-hydro and Fish; b. Minerals: Oil/Gas, Metals... c. Damaged Lands; d. Locations for New Communities; e. Land Productivity; f. Labor Productivity; g. Current investments; h. Investment Opportunities.

3. Current Uses of Sections a. and b.:

4. Consumption by Class: Lower Class and Middle Class

5. The Transport Sector: a. Data: Compare and Contrast; b. Transport Options: NGVs, Bio-diesel and Efficiency.

6. Input Factors of Agriculture and the Transport Sectors: Costs, Criteria and Options.

1.3.  Reflections: -- “I saw innumerable hosts, foredoomed to darkness, dirt, pestilence, obscenity, misery and early death.”  -- Dickens, ‘A December Vision’, 1850

“Indeed, throughout Latin America, the 1980s deepened the canyons and elevated the peaks of the world’s most extreme social topography. (According to a 2003 World Bank report, Gini coefficients are 10 points higher in Latin America than Asia; 17.5 points higher than the OECD, and 20.4 points higher than Eastern Europe.) [68] The real macroeconomic trend of informal labour, in other words, is the reproduction of absolute poverty. But if the informal proletariat is not the pettiest of petty bourgeoisies, neither is it a ‘labour reserve army’ or a ‘lumpen proletariat’ in any obsolete nineteenth-century sense. Part of it, to be sure, is a stealth workforce for the formal economy and numerous studies have exposed how the subcontracting networks of WalMart and other mega-companies extend deep into the misery of the colonias and chawls. But at the end of the day, a majority of urban slum-dwellers are truly and radically homeless in the contemporary international economy.  Slums, of course, originate in the global countryside where, as Deborah Bryceson reminds us, unequal competition with large-scale agro-industry is tearing traditional rural society ‘apart at the seams’. [89] As rural areas lose their ‘storage capacity’, slums take their place, and urban ‘involution’ replaces rural involution as a sink for surplus labour which can only keep pace with subsistence by ever more heroic feats of self-exploitation and the further competitive subdivision of already densely filled survival niches. [90] ‘Modernization’, ‘Development’ and, now, the unfettered ‘Market’ have had their day. The labour-power of a billion people has been expelled from the world system, and who can imagine any plausible scenario, under neoliberal auspices, that would reintegrate them as productive workers or mass consumers?" --Megacities  (9.)

1.4.  ............. AN APPEAL FOR AID:

Join us! The Andes Research Team and Revolutionary Green:  Please consider the importance of the events unfolding in the Andes: Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru.

Contact:::  solidarityeconomy@

revolutionary@mail.com

Link to longer appeal

PART II. Radical Restructuring: The Politics of Change

2.1.  Applying Revolutionary Transition Designs to Develop A New Socialism

Poor Countries and Revolutionary Movements cannot expect any help from anyone. They cannot wait for Chavez in Venezuela or a worldwide movement of aid to attend to their needs. They must prepare for the worst: USA invasions or USA collusion with elite sabotage and a collapse of economic relations with most of the world. The Ecosolidarity program addresses this real world context and what countries must do. It is also meant as a guide for revolutionary groups to present workable and visionary manifestos of the path to a sustainable and equitable design for living. Our dreams are utopian, but we aim for real and enduring results. To re-build the foundation of a people start with education – once you know what you want to teach...

2.2.  Revolutionary Policies for Transitional Survival:

Democratic Redistribution and Radical Restructuring for a New Beginning

The following program will typically be required of the revolutions in the Andes and throughout Latin America (the pace of adaptation and implementation may vary):

Phase One: Popular Assembly Formation

“Although participation in a neighborhood council is voluntary, “those who do not attend receive social sanctions by way of rumors claiming the neighbor does not respect the neighborhood or the council.” To avoid this negative image, practically all the inhabitants participate in the monthly assemblies. Those who do not attend marches, actions, blockages, or the assemblies receive a fine, which tends to serve as a symbolic punishment. Moreover, the neighborhood council makes a habit of intervening in conflicts and quarrels between neighbors, and in very serious cases, will administer justice with sanctions like community service, which takes it much further than a traditional association and likens it more to agricultural communities. The neighborhood councils are the spinal column of the social movement in El Alto and provide insights into the power of the movement.

Forms of Action of the Urban Community: The neighborhood councils are a form of horizontal organization of the “neighborhood community.” Together they make up extensive networks on the neighborhood and district scale that act without intermediaries, a feature only beginning to appear on the larger scale of FEJUVE. At the level of the FEJUVE, the communal culture dissolves and gives way to the “other” culture – the mestizo-white culture, according to anthropologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, characterized by clientelism, nationalism, and colonialism. But it is precisely the experience of a horizontal structure “that successfully intensified during the periods of civil uprising in October of 2003.”  --  (8.)

Full statement at: Section 2.2 of:

PHASE TWO:  National Constituent Constitutional Convention

A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION should consider all aspects of a nation's future and the means to establish democratic, transparent and productive structures for the whole nation. soldiers, indigenous groups, young people, slum dweller organizations, unions representing poor workers, small farmers and landless farmers.

PHASE THREE: New Constitutions:

a. Prioritize: The needs of the whole population for a new revolutionary/solidarity education; water for drinking and for crops; pure and affordable food/national food security; equitable land distribution; indigenous, campesino and small farm agricultural support; and enhanced popular participation in all decisions.

b. Secondary Priorities: Community and national defense; housing with long term use/needs taken into account (priority for slum, rural and border areas); cooperative production units; Watershed restoration; and public spending for the sustainable development of natural and other resources.

See Full Document at Section :

Part III.  THE NEW PROGRAM :::

3.1.  Criteria for Anti-Imperialist Governments: A Minimum Framework: The Non-Fascist Response to Capitalism and Climate Catastrophe

1. Cancel foreign debt to US and European banks. All debts subject to cancellation.

2. Nationalize and then turn over to regional control all important industries.

3. Restrict imports through tariffs and trade preferences for friendly countries.

4. Boycott the USA dollar, hold your reserve currencies in gold, silver, platinum or Euros until a revolutionary currency or a Liberated Block SDR is available.

5. Eliminate regressive labor, pension and minimum wage legislation.

6. Deport the IMF, their agreements, and all USA government or commercial agents.

7. Impose austerity (severe taxes) on the rich.

8. Abolition/prohibition of all genetically modified organisms (GMOs) (and high restrictions on research); abolition/prohibition on toxic chemicals and the overuse of agricultural chemicals. Support regional agriculture research and seed production.

9. End the Expansion of Mass Transit and utilize ration coupons for transit options.

10. No private cars in urban areas; motorized transport in urban areas primarily for business deliveries, the handicapped and elderly.

11. High fuel taxes (2-4 dollars per gallon) on private fuel sales. High vehicle registration/disposal fees on all private vehicles.

12. Abolition/prohibition on corporate business structures employing more than 100 people.

13. Beyond these restraints on transport, economic concentration and toxic materials we believe that a democratic and sustainable government will reduce imports, end dependency and invest in the localized production of basic needs goods (food, water, energy, building materials and all of the tools required to produce each of these necessities.). This will employ all of the people.

14. The sign that a sane government is operating will be seen when the workers are given the factories they work in and people the homes they live in – debt free. Once that is done and food is prioritized we won’t have to worry about economics.

3.2.  An Agrarian-Based Solidarity Economics : BASIC POLICES

In the Solidarity Model there is a market economy but the government at all levels – directed by the people’s budget prioritizations – intervenes in the market to create sufficient basic goods and to satisfy basic needs within sustainability guidelines. ( LINKS…)

The development path for Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru is quite similar. The poor and their allies must seize most of the land and all valuable industries, assets and bank accounts.

Orientation to Long-Run Priorities :

The primary requirements during the first year of a new program are to further develop and secure the neighborhood and regional assembly operations, effectiveness and organization; to prioritize productive factors (money, skills, workers and material) for long run production of basic goods; and the planning for the inputs and related needs to secure the factors required to produce: Food, electricity, transport services, housing, health care, communications, environmental/sanitation and water.

The key to reducing waste and equalizing incomes is to utilize ration coupons and to charge for services (like water, power, garbage, schools and health care) according to a sliding scale. Everyone would receive monthly coupons for transport, basic foods, utilities and medicines. Home ownership would be very cheap as land trusts would capture increased speculative values and yearly community-issued coupons for basic building supplies would make improvements and maintenance cheap. The charges for basic levels of water, power, medicine, health care and garbage/sanitation would be about equal to the coupons received by households. Those wanting to consume more would pay steeply increasing rates. Those people who consume less than the basic levels could sell their coupons on the open market – though the coupons would be numbered to control excess graft.

The major expense of non-farm families would be food. Community councils could grant temporary emergency rate relief in special circumstances – such as: a severe cold spell where energy consumption goes up, a widow with many children, or say a company that lost its bio-diesel generator and needs to buy extra electricity. Flexibility and a joy of learning will be important to the success of experiments in New Democracy and Sustainability.

The following economic policies are implemented in approximately this order:

1. Expropriation of all foreign, elite or important land, structures and businesses. In cases where this is too difficult or too dangerous then the Constitution should institute extreme taxation of all foreign and elite owned businesses, bank accounts and resources to accomplish state takeover at the lowest cost and minimal disruption.

2. Credit and Currency Controls. All debts subject to cancellation.

3. Extreme tariffs on all products imported to or from non-aligned nations. Quotas on imports from friendly nations to protect local businesses.

4. Extensive long term programs for the relocation of urban people to rural areas for production and for defense. Public Land given to organizations and sustainable farming coops.

5. Education for solidarity and revolutionary economics, society and consciousness.

6. Modest Credit programs for key sectors of the economy.

7. Increased property and income taxes on corporations, the rich and idle lands.

8. Partial decentralization of administration, armed forces and large state enterprises.

9. Increased minimum wages and health clinic access.

10. Regional Employment Programs in agriculture, land improvements, transportation and import substitution enterprises (public and private). Import Substitution becomes the main industrial and cooperative sector focus, with attention to interconnections (linkages and input factors).

11. Modest re-nationalization of progressively smaller foreign and then domestic monopolies, oligarchies and concentrations of ownership.

12. Direct the national and regional universities and trade schools to study and compliment research in organic farming, solidarity enterprises, import substitution and ways to assist other countries (Cuba, Bolivia etc... )

13. Limit News Media ownership and require more PSAs (public or educational) and programming by organizations representing poor people and minorities. Institute high fines for lies and media misinformation.

14. Subsidize linkages that support import substitution enterprises managed by workers collectively or through cooperatives. Extend these programs both locally, regionally and beyond the country with friendly regimes.

15. Military construction projects: schools, hospitals, sanitation, water, market places, environmental restoration and infrastructure. Creation of a civil militia and dual purpose roles for military units.

16. Links across borders and funding for a variety of rural development approaches. Eco and activista tourism, aid programs and fair trade networking (high valued crops and crafts).

17. Government purchases of lands and increased confiscations.

18. Increase taxes on medium size farms and some on small farms that are profitable.

19. Limits tightened on land ownership. Require divestment (break up) of business conglomerates.

20. Re-location projects to rural areas for urban people. Grant urban land titles and increase urban and near-urban land and business confiscations and purchases.

21. Expanded education for Solidarity Values and Programs at all levels of society.

22. Establish regionally owned and locally operated retail food stores to sell basic goods at subsidized prices in poor neighborhoods and rural areas. Community cafeterias and Free Stores (for rationed clothing, toys, household products) established as possible.

3.5.  Crisis Policies

Link: See Sections 3.3 – 3.8 at:

3.9. Implement the kinds of policies that :

1. show that poor people in the 3rd world can generate significant economic growth without international corporate investment;

2. create an economy with substantial resistance barriers to corporate domination: Generate jobs that are insulated from multinational corporate practices of moving into a region and then leaving to escape upward wage pressures;

3. make more efficient use of local raw materials than would a vertically integrated international corporate production process;

4. reinforce local democracy, participation, and empowerment of ordinary people. The goals of new projects include developing an economy that is egalitarian and a political structure that allows for the greatest possible democratic participation of workers and consumers in designing their own products.

5. provide an example to others of the power of cooperatives as engines of economic growth and development that simultaneously promote social justice and support communities.

3.10. Development Guides and Ideas:

a.) Do inventories of natural resources, public resources (lands and schools etc ); Collect data on trade, fair trade inputs, forest resources and problem areas (pollution, erosion, corruption); Hydro potentials with a priority to the cheapest, least disruptive and the development needs of a place (social harmony, or small scale economic development priorities.) Government and the research panels (drawn locally and regionally) draw up lists of resources: grazing lands, farm land (both in several categories of richness and eco impact), damaged lands, forests, special wildlands or habit zones, erosion zones, fishing zones and tourist areas.

b.) Inventory crafts outputs and investigate their expanded market potential. Analyze potentials for tourism and the risks associated with it.

c.) Natural resources - especially coal, oil, gas and forests (and the impacts of their development) - are set to the highest criteria for development and wise, long–run sustainable management. Sustainability and the future value of resources are carefully considered (long term yields and profits realized by slow development of the resource). Another factor is the future availability of improved techniques for mitigating ecological problems. Also, less public funding of infrastructure investments are needed in the short term under a "go-slow" regime (pipelines, ports and roads). Instead, national and regional governments can invest in schools, teachers and revolutionary criteria that will help people come up with more creative, practical and socially profitable goals and methods of resource and social development.

d.)  Reduce erosion, build smarter (infrastructure, industry, utilities) and focus skills and investments on import substitution (ISE ) products and techniques. The goals and the planning for the university system and most secondary school research is directed at how to improve and facilitate the alternative economic program of solidarity and social economy  For example: students would design or compare (dissect) foreign models of motors or engines and test them and see which were best and worst and then redesign them for local production - or a cheap method of remanufacturing used items (justified by overall ISE program).

e.)

3.11.  A NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY: ECOSOLIDARITY

Structures and Guides

What Kind of Economy Do We Want ?  What Kind of Economy Can We Have?

In the Solidarity Economics model the neoliberal fixation on growth and maximizing output are a low priority. Those capitalist goals are replaced with a priority to invent economic policies that provide for the sustainable production of the basics of life: food, housing, education, health and dignity. In the Solidarity model social equity, community self-reliance and sustainability are maximized first. This is accomplished through import substitution at the national then the regional and finally the community level. A nation gradually replaces its imports starting with the easiest first and through education and investment moves up to other goods and services. Simultaneously this program prepares for regional and community import substitution.

The goal of Solidarity Economics is to increase the availability of basic needs goods and to accomplish this with a declining impact on the environment. The real choice that people have is: Do they want a sustainable and just economy that is kind to people and neighbors or do they want the US to destroy the planet and debase humanity fighting ugly resource wars? An economic system is only as complex as a people allow it to be. People can have the sustainable economy that they want. It will be different and poorer in many ways than the late 20th Century US economic model. But it will be understandable because it is local, open (transparent) and decided by the people themselves.

The problem with markets is that corrupt governments write the laws to benefit the wealthy, the big companies and growth. These are corporate subsidies and state socialism for the rich.(30) The invisible hand of government policies shapes the production costs and the prices that consumers are willing to pay. If people want a country with many small farms producing organic products then they will be able to employ many people in a labor-intensive program. But people will pay more for food in the short run than they would if they continued to let rich people gobble up farmland and poison it with chemicals, pesticides, herbicides and GMOs. Prices are only lower in the corporate farm system because so many of the externalized costs are not paid by the corporation. These costs include slave labor, child labor, cheap loans, social suffering from the displacement of small farmers, repression of farm workers and impacts on the environment.

The safest way to improve the social benefits of markets is to keep all the market players of similar size, knowledge and security. Complex markets or complicated choices for a democracy make it likely that prudence is lost among poor information and the rush of events. Venezuela's development of Community Councils shows that people want to participate and direct their lives. The experiments with participatory budgeting in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (a state of 12 million people) suggest that average people can solve these problems simultaneously. The problems encountered in Brazil also show how difficult any program is when the government has to pay half its budget to foreign bankers for debts caused by previous corrupt governments. Instead of a profit maximizing and export-based decision-making criteria Solidarity Economics would create a long-run soil conserving and biologically diverse system of farming where inputs - especially imported inputs - were not needed and expensive machinery would be replaced with labor, local resources and ingenuity. The sciences of Agro-Ecology and Watershed Management can guide localization planning with prioritization for sustainability and equity.

See Sections 3.11- 3,15 ???? 

3.15. Agrarian Reform: The Unfinished Revolution

Even poorly endowed places must take advantage of whatever will grow. Trees and riparian areas protect the water and biological resources. Some food, fish or export crops are necessary output from all places. Protecting renewable resources like the soils, forests, estuaries and fisheries is a duty and the basis of natural wealth.

The “Who owns the good farmlands” determines the wealth distribution of a region. The “What is farmed” determines the food dependency/food sovereignty of a place. The “Where” of farming determines the impacts on the ecology and the longrun productivity of the country. Overproduction near rivers or steep hills has a potentially large impact. Light grazing rotations and tree crops would be chosen by a community if it exercised control over the use of its resources. The “Why of farming” – or the Why Subsidize Small Farms and rural communities - determines the importance of culture, respect, sustainability and the connections of the people to the land and the ecology that they live in and depend on. The “How” of farming is connected to and grows out of all of these factors. Investments and trade polices accelerate or control trends in production and growth and thus affect all aspects of rural life and the well-being of the whole country. For decades investments in Latin America have been capital intensive (with an urban – industrial bias) thus creating greater unemployment and a rural exodus to mega-city slums.

Government commissions and scientific research panels (drawn from local and regional experts, students and faculty) will draw up detailed lists of each region’s resources: grazing lands, farmlands (in several categories of richness and environmental sensitivity), damaged lands, forests, special wildlands or habit zones, erosion zones, fishing zones and tourist or recreation areas. After these studies are completed lands would be redistributed for free to competent farmers and ranchers. Compensation for seized lands will not be possible in most places because of a lack of funds and the revolutionary perceptions that will accompany these drastic changes. Current owners of land could retain twice the standard limit that is set locally for a particular land type (typically 5 to 10 hectares for the highest quality lands and 20-40 hectares for marginal or grazing lands). Adults over 21 can only own the land that they live on and their vehicle license plate must be from that parcel’s address. (35)

All land would be redistributed for free to competent farmers and ranchers. Initially land is redistributed to three sectors: small holders, coops and locally owned lands held for distribution to newcomers and population growth Current owners of land could retain twice the standard limit that is set locally for a particular land type. Adults over 21 can only own the land that they live on and their vehicle license plate must be from that locality too. People can lease land with trade restrictions outside their locality at twice the standard rental rate of the new locality. Land could not be divided or sold, except to the local cooperative land trust with the only profits being the increased value from improvements.

INDUSTRIAL POLICY:

Next the government analyzes imports and exports at national and regional levels.

A plan or recommendation is drawn up that considers priority for basic needs goods and the national and regional production advantages: resources, skills, interests and existing complimentary infrastructure. From this point in the process the popular assemblies and research panels devise the final plans for land use, investments and subsidies.

Localization is a key guide for an evolving economic structure where the priorities are: import substitution, rural support and regional integration. As with the land reform program a structure of laws and subsidies would be enacted to establish and cultivate an alternative economics and then the ability to change the program negatively would require consensus or votes over several years in all regions affected. A key part of any new structure will be a new educational curriculum that emphasizes cooperation, participation and all the concepts of solidarity economics and ecological land use planning.

Localization is the economy of ecology. It is Solidarity Economics when the economics of social peace and ecological stewardship are balanced and complimentary. The bias toward the local creates a countervailing power to that of the corporations and the central government. Through import taxes to protect infant industries and industries that enhance localization (value adding, specialty and high quality PRODUCTS) a new structure can be phased in without extreme disruption. Taxes on luxury goods help to fund the program and transfer wealth from the rich to the poor.

3.16.  BANKS: OWNED AND MANAGED BY LOCAL COMMUNITIES

All pension funds, insurance policies, credit and banking would be done through public institutions and audited by an elected regional Board of Supervisors.(37) Only local lending would be allowed and it must meet community prioritization guidelines. Banks are to serve long-term needs and emergencies not to make money at the highest return. With currency controls in place that limit the amount of withdrawals and how much cash can be taken out of the country, the rich would be forced to invest or put their money in the local banks. Forcing businesses to apply for foreign currency use has been effective in Venezuela at identifying businesses and individuals that have not paid taxes which is a huge problem throughout Latin America and most poor countries.(38) Tax avoidance and illegal businesses would have a difficult time if banks were small, local, public and well-audited.

To combat inflation and avoid some corruption possibilities banks will maintain a 90 percent reserve requirement on most deposits. Audits will be open to the public and independent audits will be done every other year before the elections of the Board of Supervisors. When a crisis deepens or a new government comes to power, banks should be nationalized with strict currency controls. Reserves and deposit withdrawals are prioritized for key imports and the lower classes. Gradually the banks would be turned over to the communities.

Micro-Finance and Social Economy

The social economy project of the Chavez government promotes cooperatives and micro-finance. The micro-finance program has several different institutional bases. Banco de la Mujer (Women’s Bank), Bandes (Bank for Economic and Social Development, Banfoandes (Bank for the Promotion of the Andean Region), and the Banco del Pueblo (People’s Bank) are involved in micro-finance as are institutions such as the Fund for the Development of Micro-Finance and the Ministry of Development of the Social Economy. A banking law requires all conventional banks to dedicate a certain percentage of their loans to micro-finance.

Between 2001 and 2003 about $50 million worth of micro-credits have been lent out by the banks named above. The Women’s Bank and the People’s Bank have given 70,000 micro-credits between them. In 2004, the government intends to expand the micro-credits program, according to the Minister for the Social Economy, Nelson Merentes.(43) Private and public banks also gave out micro-credits for a total of $75 million during the month of September 2003.(44)

Among the important beneficiaries of the micro-credit program are cooperatives. Venezuela had only 800 cooperatives when Chavez came to power, it is now estimated that there are over 40,000. The promotion of cooperatives boosts the small business sector, which is generally known to be the first place new jobs are created in an economy. For a discourse on social economy and solidarity in Venezuela and cooperatives see the interview of Felipe Perez-Marti at http://venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php/articles.php?artno=1019

3.17.  Local Solidarity Projects & Import Substitution with Value Adding

Millions of people in Brazil have poor housing and tens of millions more throughout Latin America are without roofs – Sin Techos. In Buenos Aires, Argentina the piqueteros and asembleas have formed voluntary roofing collectives to repair old houses. They have also set up thrift stores to clothe the poor and the penniless; bakeries to feed the hungry and schools for children and adults where people can also learn about imperialism and the socialist solutions to capitalism’s crimes. Market gardens; sewer and water repair cooperatives; community-based TV and radio facilities; clothing manufacture and repairs; barter networks; and food processing are examples of local enterprises that governments and communities should subsidize. In remote areas or in nations lacking petroleum, a program for bio-diesel derived from African Palm plantations could be a beneficial enterprise for collectives and communities.

In a livestock industry keep as much as possible of the leather industry, the by-products (bonemeal, bloodmeal, manure, tallow), fencing material production, dairy, feedstocks, agricultural extension, veterinary services and training and livestock breeding in the community and certainly in the region. This builds local links to a variety of businesses, small and large, and guides education programs (University and Secondary) to create diverse skills in the region. Other examples are micro-credit small business development lending and advice for import substitution enterprises (Grameen Banks); soya farming with seed production, storage, experiments, exports, processing (tofu-feed-soy milk) or direct conversion to animal products (meat and egg industries). And all of these activities would be kept in the hands of local or regional businesses.

Ideas for Transport Regulation:

The key structure is to have vehicle licenses issued from each locality. Each time that you cross a border checkpoint your vehicle is weighed and you are required to fill your fuel tank. The border that you are crossing into receives the funds including a tax per pound of the vehicle. The tax per pound would be the same at all borders for all products. This encourages value adding to all trade products. The price of fuels would not be regulated. You must be over 21 to own a vehicle and over 25 to own a truck over a certain weight. All land would be redistributed for free to competent farmers and ranchers. Current owners of land could retain twice the standard limit that is set locally for a particular land type. Adults over 21 can only own the land that they live on and their vehicle license plate must be from that locality too. People can lease land with trade restrictions outside their locality at twice the standard rental rate of the new locality

The border that you are crossing into receives the funds including a tax per pound of the vehicle. The tax per pound would be the same at all borders for all products. This encourages value adding to all trade products. The price of fuels would not be regulated. You must be over 21 to own a vehicle and over 25 to own a truck over a certain weight.

TRANSPORTATION ISSUES (52)

a. Phase out private car use; Provide small shopping markets and housing near to people’s jobs.

b. Put the Localization Alternative first; more local production, import substitution and support to infant industries and cooperatives.

c. Urban Transport Polices: no car zones and increased fees for vehicle registration.

d. Taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel (60-90% of price)

e. Free buses and trains; a clean moped exchange program..

f. Bicycle manufacture, repair and price subsidies.

g. Lower speed limits to save energy, lives and the costs of high-speed roads.

More Solidarity Economics Ideas:  Mission Mercal – Food Distribution

Mission Mercal is a network for distributing food throughout the country at slightly below market rates at government supported supermarkets. As of November 2003 there were 100 government markets around the country. The government is accelerating the building of these supermarkets, so that the number will double to 200 in December. Critics say that the Mercal markets undermine the private sector. Mercal markets primarily serve areas that are neglected by the private sector. Venezuela’s government places emphasis on education: a strategy which takes time to bear fruit. May 2003 marked the beginning of a fourth phase of the Chavez Presidency when the country’s oil industry recovered and the rightwing opposition began to fall apart. The government had more resources to implement short-term anti-poverty measures and to refocus on its medium term strategies, placing particular emphasis on land reform and on the Bolivarian University. Conferences are often held in Caracas now as people from all over the world come to see this popular experiment called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Indigenous leaders and agrarian reform students have flocked here and there is planning for a hemisphere-wide school for teaching peasant agriculture and policy studies. Venezuela is well on its way to an Economics of Solidarity. (48)

Extending Solidarity Economics: See section

Rural Land Reform

Because Venezuela has high unemployment and imports much of its food, agriculture is a key import substitution target. Venezuela’s rural land reform was introduced in November 2001, as one of the package of 49 laws, which were passed at the same time concerning the state oil industry and other reforms. The law states that all adult Venezuelans have a right to apply for a piece of land for their family. This land is to be taken from state-owned land holdings, which are enormous and make up the largest part of Venezuela’s agriculturally viable land. The law opens up the possibility for the state to redistribute privately held land, if it is part of an estate of more than 100 hectares of high quality agricultural land or 5,000 hectares of low quality land. The land would be expropriated at market rates, making Venezuela’s land reform a relatively non-radical program.

The government distributed little land in 2002 due to the coup attempts. The next year it turned over 1.5 million hectares to about 130,000 families. This comes to an average of 11.5 hectares per family and a total beneficiary population of 650,000 (based on 5 persons per household). So far no land has been expropriated. There has been conflict over land which the government considers state land, but which large land owners claim to be theirs, even though they lack the documents to prove it.

The land reform is a comprehensive program that aims to avoid the typical problems by making sure that the new farmers have the skills, credit, technology, and marketing channels to actually make a living off of their newly acquired land. In addition to the national land institute (INTI), there is an institution that provides credit and skills training and an organization for marketing agricultural products that are produced by beneficiaries of the land reform. In the long-term, the reforms contribute to the diversification of the economy and to assure food sovereignty. In the medium term, the program is aimed at reducing rural poverty and also urban poverty, to the extent that people move out of urban slums and into the countryside. (40)

Urban Land Reform

Another important anti-poverty measure is the urban land reform, which will redistribute the land of the barrios (urban slums) to its inhabitants. Similar to the one Hernando de Soto has promoted in Peru, it incorporates elements that make this program an example for other countries. When people acquire title to their own self-built home in the barrio, they have security for the first time that they will not be expelled. They can use the home as collateral for a small loan, to improve their home, to buy a better home, or to invest in a small business. The process of acquiring urban land titles is a collective process, which brings the neighborhood together in the interest of improving the neighborhood’s infrastructure, such as roads, access to utilities, security, comfort, etc. (41)

The collective nature of the process is perhaps the most innovative aspect of the government’s urban land program. To acquire titles, 100 to 200 families in a neighborhood have to get together and form a land committee, which then acts as a liaison with the government on regularizing the land ownership of the families that the committee represents. A positive consequence in many cases is that the land committees have begun working on many more issues besides the negotiation and acquisition of land titles. They have also formed sub-committees that deal with public utility companies, such as the water and the electric company.

About a third of the barrio land is on government property (another third is on private property and one third on land where ownership is as yet undetermined). The process is slow because it involves many technical and legal steps. By November 2003, throughout Venezuela, about 45,000 families (befitting 225,000 individuals) had received titles to their homes, with another 65,000 families (or 330,000 individuals) to receive them soon. In February, 2003 Agriculture and Lands (MAT) Minister Efren Andrades announced a series of food production projects for urban areas across the country. A pilot project for two slums in southern Caracas is supported by a UN FAO grant that will also finance near-urban poultry farms.

CONCLUSIONS

The biggest hurdle that we all must face is to give up on economic growth, to give up on any kind of prosperity that is measured in the old ways. As many of the on-the-farm MST have decided in Brazil: “we want to be simple, to survive with dignity and perfect our subsistence technique and customs.” That is all: community, a healthy life for the children and enough to eat. (49) There are gleanings of this perspective in the social economy project of the Chavez government. It is not "just" an anti-poverty measure, but constitutes a central element in Chavez’ Bolivarian project. It is designed to alleviate poverty and is also a central aspect for creating a more egalitarian, democratic, and solidaristic society. The government’s website defines the social economy as encompassing the following seven elements: (50)

1. The social economy is an alternative economy, where democratic and self-governing practices dominate.

2. It is driven by forms of work based on partnership and not on wage-earning.

3. Ownership over the means of production is collective (except in the case of micro-enterprises).

4. It is based on the equal distribution of surplus.

5. It is solidaristic with the environment in which it develops.

6. It holds on to its own autonomy in the face of monopolistic centers of economic or political power.

7.It teaches sharing the Solidarity Economics Alternatives to War and Global Collapse: Lower consumption world wide, especially of fossil fuels and high energy products like cars, steel and port facilities.

8. The social economy researches biodiversity, threats to the Amazon Basin region and other key biodiversity zones.

Severe penalties for bribery or fraud related to the following policies:

a. Phase-out private land ownership beyond subsistence needs and reduce the area required for subsistence with improved knowledge and techniques.

b. Restrict water use for non-essential uses

c. Identify economic bottlenecks, excess profits, pollution sources, corruption and beneficial economic activities (import substitution potential).

d. Watershed planning for ecological development with land reform (condemnation) to protect and to wisely share available resources

e. Research and experimentation on small development projects: State and regional micro credit for sustainability; Mini canteens locally or coop-owned to travel remote areas and sell things cheap (trade/barter) with some subsidies for important, health, education and sustainable farming items; Donations of Cattle, pig or chicken herds with the condition that in the second year the community turnover a part of the herd to neighboring communities (or farmers chosen by ballot or lot) A condition being that the operations are run collectively or as a cooperative.

g. Farming bottlenecks are common in transport, marketing, sales, value adding, packaging and promotion, so locally owned and operated cooperatives should be subsidized to provide abundant employment in these enterprises.

h. More equitable and democratic processes for economic planning that incorporate participatory budgeting, popular assemblies, planning from below and new mixtures of all of these.

i. Develop weighted criteria for participatory budgeting and new social accounting practices.

j. Enforced environmental regulation of all uses of petroleum products and other chemicals. Large taxes on all toxic products to pay for their regulation and disposal.

k. Improve the usefulness and facilitation skills of the rotating panels of scientists, planners and citizens (some from other regions) who review and investigate communities to see how their development plans operate, were arrived at.

l. Mechanisms for appeal and precaution, avenues for citizen feedback.

m. Rural repatriation programs.

Solidarity Economics answers these questions convincingly:

How much land and wealth redistribution; How to create new structures to restrain the State, guarantee local autonomy and individual freedoms; and What is the role of economic growth.(55) How much democratic choice is desired or possible is something that people will have to configure once they have explored Solidarity Economics in their everyday lives and conflicts. The final question -- and one that is difficult to predict -- is the one of agency: who will fight, who will lose?(56)

The landless peasants want land where they can live and produce. The workers, victims of restructuring plans (IMF), want employment with all their rights. Everyone wants to improve social security keep it public and based on workers’ solidarity. The homeless want homes. The youth want a future, education and real jobs.(57) The small and medium farmers and the landless workers can fly under the Solidarity banner for it offers them land in a thriving rural community with credit, marketing and technical assistance to reduce the dangers of chemicals, GMOs and bankruptcy from foreign competition. The poor urban dwellers will have more food, health care, education, opportunity and the choice to return to a rural renaissance or at least to not see their barrios further overcrowded with rising crime.

To the middle classes Solidarity offers peace of mind and a society working together that they can be proud of. In the medium term, there will be a niche economy for some of their skills as import substitution is established. The transition may not be easy for the middle classes, but it is hoped that their lowered (money) standard of living (poverty will be reduced but there eventually won’t be much of a middle class) will be compensated for by increased stability and normalcy – something that the middle classes all over the world will never have again under neoliberalism.

Women stand to gain the most from localization policies and a solidaristic society because women and children make up most of the poor and they have been the most neglected in the areas of health care, education and respect. Children will benefit from all aspects of Solidarity Economics, from a cleaner environment, and a real (revolutionary) education where their skills are needed for practical applications that increase the sustainability of solidarity and the new society. This usefulness will contribute to their personal growth as they contribute to important projects in their communities – communities that will be full of cultural activities, music and the excitement of hope.

For workers a solidaristic society means a great victory over capitalism and greed. Workers cooperatives will manage and operate most factories and businesses. With import substitution and wealth redistribution, the local and regional demand for products will remain high. For teachers and universities solidarity is a new page – as new discipline – one that renews their purpose and their value to local communities and the whole of society. Technicians, teachers, doctors and engineers will all be in great demand and many students will rise up quickly to fill positions of responsibility.

We welcome comment and challenges from Marxists, Liberals, Libertarians and anyone interested in reducing economic impacts on the planet and surviving global warming.

SOLIDARITY ECONOMICS:  THE ECOSOLIDARITY APPROACH

PART IV.  

The BOLIVIAN PROJECT: 

Ecosolidarity Objectives: To realize increased funds for the local government and the nation through better energy and transport policies. The criteria for success include ecological; equity; and self reliance goals. Develop practical guidelines and methods to help policymakers (local and national) develop diagnostics to assess agricultural, transport and infrastructure needs and to ensure that strategies to address them are as cost effective as possible within the Ecosolidarity criteria for balanced development. Special emphasis is placed on data collection and explanations of some of the quantitative methodologies that can serve as inputs to the studies needed to ensure that the interests of the poor and other marginalized groups are accounted for.

BENEFITS OF A NEW ENERGY – TRANSPORT POLICY FOR BOLIVIA;

Things to Consider Economics and Policies for a New Bolivia

I. Macro factors: 1. Loans and Debt to International, National and Domestic lenders.

Solution: Cancel them.

2. Future Loans: From Venezuela, other neighbors, NGOs, generally not considered important when the government and its taxing authority are controlled by the people.

3. Foreign Ownership: a. Large or Strategic Industries;  b. Medium sized and importance industries/sectors.

Solution: Nationalize (expropriate) all large/important industries and negotiate taxes, management and investments with smaller industries, businesses and organizations... Use taxes to drive some bankrupt and huge performance or cleanup bonds on others. Restrict exports of any capital (machine) goods.

4. Currency: Given the reduced importance of trade (non-contract) and the sizeable currency reserves that should be available, currency issues are not as pressing as in older scenarios.  Either maintain strict currency controls or use non-convertible currency and severe penalties for cheaters.

5. Central Bank: Under direct control and supervision of the congress with full transparency and public access.

6. Taxation: Income: zero taxes for 80 percent of people; 40 to 80 percent taxation for top 5 to 15 percent of income earners. Steep fines for fraud.

7. Size and Functions of Government:  (Data to compare to other countries, Peruvian States, Venezuela and US states)  a.) National b.) Regional:  c.) Local:

8. Trade Partners and Agreements: Preferences given to neighbors, friends and price factored in only as a minor factor.

SOLIDARITY ECONOMICS: THE ECOSOLIDARITY APPROACH (Draft Feb. 4,06)

SOLIDARITY ECONOMICS:

THE ECOSOLIDARITY APPROACH

“The first city in the world to have more than one million people was Rome at the height of its Empire in 5 A.D. At that time, world population was only 170 million. But Rome was something new in the world. It had developed its own sophisticated sanitation and traffic management systems, as well as aqueducts, multi-story low-income housing and even suburbs, but after it fell in 410 A.D. it would be 17 centuries before any metropolitan area had that many people.

The first large city in the modern era was Beijing, which surpassed one million population around 1800, followed soon after by New York and London. But at that time city life was the exception; only three percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 1800. People and the Planet reports that by 2007, 3.2 billion people—a number larger than the entire global population of 1967—will live in cities… In Caracas, more than half the total housing stock is squatter housing.

Jakarta’s environment has been deteriorating rapidly, with serious air pollution and the lack of a waterborne sewer. Jakarta officials have only recently begun to acknowledge the source of over half of the city’s air pollution, and have begun to take action against automobile congestion. The Blue Skies Program, founded in 1996, is dedicated to updating the city’s public and private transportation technology. The project’s successes to date include an increase in the percentage of vehicles meeting pollution standards, a near-complete phasing out of leaded gasoline, and an increase in the number of natural gas-fueled vehicles to 3,000 taxis, 500 passenger cars and 50 public buses.

The Blue Skies Project is pushing Jakarta toward a complete natural gas conversion and is working towards the installation of dedicated filling stations, establishing a fleet of natural gas-fueled passenger busses, supplying conversion kits for gasoline-fueled cars, and creating adequate inspection and maintenance facilities.” -- http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2849

PART I. INTRODUCTIONS

  ….ECOSOLIDARITY ANDES –  ECONOMIC PROGRAMS:::   

           BALANCING NATIONAL AND REGIONAL SELF-RELIANACE WITH  

           EQUITY, JOBS AND ECOLOGICAL PROTECTION FOR LONGTERM

           SUSTAINABILITY……………………………………………………………..

.......................Request for assistance, referral and cooperation:

1.1.  Ecosolidarity Andes is conducting socio-economic studies of Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru and Nepal. Our current focus concerns the Energy and Transport Sectors. Assistance is solicited in all aspects of these studies with Spanish and Portuguese translations an important unmet need.

We are looking for information about your experiences or the methods used for NATURAL AND HUMAN RESOURCE ANALYSIS.  Information on the Transport Sector – particularly about truck numbers, hauling tonnage, commercial transport costs and ownership concentration is also important.

          SUSTAINABLE DEVLOPMENT IN BOLIVIA:

         THE ECOSOLIDARITY OPTION; By STAFF, January 31

The program of Ecosolidarity is based on import substitution and the localization of economic production and decision-making (Planning – Participatory Budgeting) ( 1.)

The Mundos de Escuelas (MER) have developed a partial political program for the transition of countries toward citizen design and local organization (Link: mer130.tripod.com). MER compliments the Ecosolidarity economic design when combined with the indicators (criteria) of self reliance; jobs/equity; and ecological protections. The MER program decentralizes the national government, giving real power to departments or sub-units. The duties and responsibilities of the national and then regional governments are transferred to more local units (2.) This only makes sense – or is possible – under an Ecosolidarity Program. We believe that this is best done when the structure of the economy – the long term goals – are codified (set) into a National and regional constitution. In time the higher levels of government would simply observe, make recommendations and collect border taxes for the smaller (local) government assemblies. ( 3.) Government from above withers away.

One idea for a new kind of politics is that rather than elect unknown representatives to cut deals in secret rooms (as most "democracy" is now done)  to have national, regional and local voting – where people go and express their priorities for production and government  (popular services). This serious national poll would be used by sub-regions as they planned their budgets. Everyone would have a feel for how the nation and each region is thinking and valuing changes, problems and opportunites.

In preparation for establishing a national (and regional) constitution, a country (and the sub-units) performs resource studies. (4.) These studies would be used to identify human and natural resources that fit into a localization and import substitution economics program (Ecosolidarity).  Originally, Ecosolidarity Andes prioritized the agricultural sector for most countries and we still do! Agriculture (fisheries, and grazing) and making sustainable use of your natural resources (minerals, forests, and water) is always the first step in sustainable development design. (5.)

However, the fact that many poor countries in Latin America have energy resources and face daunting transport sector choices, has directed our research at these problems as they apply to sustainability and equitable development. The energy and transport sectors must be decided upon before a complete national program of Ecosolidarity can be developed and put into law. Part Four of this study examines the transport sectors of Bolivia and the choices to be made. Comparisons with Nepal and Peru give insights to what other societies face in their paths to sustainability in crisis times. (6.)

Develop practical guidelines and methods to help policymakers (local and national) develop diagnostics to assess agricultural, transport and infrastructure needs and to ensure that strategies to address them are as cost effective as possible within the Ecosolidarity criteria for balanced development. Special emphasis is placed on data collection and explanations of some of the quantitative methodologies that can serve as inputs to the studies needed to ensure that the interests of the poor and other marginalized groups are accounted for.

1.2. Draft Outline: 4 SECTIONS: A New Economics

 (Book Proposal)

I.  INTRODUCTION AND ABSTRACTS TO OTHER SECTIONS

I. INSANITY OF PRIVATE CARS: a. Costs; b. Pollution; c. Capitalism; d. Alternatives

II. POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS:  MER

III. . OLDER ECOSOLIDARITY ECON UPDATED LIKE MERECON WITH SUMS AND LINKS TO Full documents

a.) Other models

b.)

IV.  A NEW ECONOMICS OUTLINE – SIMPLIFIED AND MICRO DIRECTED

a.) TRANSPORT

b.)  ENERGY

c.) AGRICULTURE

d.) AN ECOSOLIDARITY CRITERIA: Modeling sustainability and equity.

e.) The BOLIVIAN PROJECT: 

1. Energy Sector: Data, Comparisons, and Options; 

2. Resources – Natural,  Human and Industrial; 

3. Current uses of sections a and b;

4. Consumption by class;

5. The Transport Sector: a. Data: Compare and contrast; b. Transport options; 

6.

1.3. Some Reflections:

“Although participation in a neighborhood council is voluntary, “those who do not attend receive social sanctions by way of rumors claiming the neighbor does not respect the neighborhood or the council.” To avoid this negative image, practically all the inhabitants participate in the monthly assemblies. Those who do not attend marches, actions, blockages, or the assemblies receive a fine, which tends to serve as a symbolic punishment. Moreover, the neighborhood council makes a habit of intervening in conflicts and quarrels between neighbors, and in very serious cases, will administer justice with sanctions like community service, which takes it much further than a traditional association and likens it more to agricultural communities. The neighborhood councils are the spinal column of the social movement in El Alto and provide insights into the power of the movement.

Forms of Action of the Urban Community: The neighborhood councils are a form of horizontal organization of the “neighborhood community.” Together they make up extensive networks on the neighborhood and district scale that act without intermediaries, a feature only beginning to appear on the larger scale of FEJUVE. At the level of the FEJUVE, the communal culture dissolves and gives way to the “other” culture – the mestizo-white culture, according to anthropologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, characterized by clientelism, nationalism, and colonialism. But it is precisely the experience of a horizontal structure “that successfully intensified during the periods of civil uprising in October of 2003.”

-- “I saw innumerable hosts, foredoomed to darkness, dirt, pestilence, obscenity, misery and early death.”  -- Dickens, ‘A December Vision’, 1850

“Indeed, throughout Latin America, the 1980s deepened the canyons and elevated the peaks of the world’s most extreme social topography. (According to a 2003 World Bank report, Gini coefficients are 10 points higher in Latin America than Asia; 17.5 points higher than the OECD, and 20.4 points higher than Eastern Europe.) [68] The real macroeconomic trend of informal labour, in other words, is the reproduction of absolute poverty. But if the informal proletariat is not the pettiest of petty bourgeoisies, neither is it a ‘labour reserve army’ or a ‘lumpen proletariat’ in any obsolete nineteenth-century sense. Part of it, to be sure, is a stealth workforce for the formal economy and numerous studies have exposed how the subcontracting networks of WalMart and other mega-companies extend deep into the misery of the colonias and chawls. But at the end of the day, a majority of urban slum-dwellers are truly and radically homeless in the contemporary international economy.

Slums, of course, originate in the global countryside where, as Deborah Bryceson reminds us, unequal competition with large-scale agro-industry is tearing traditional rural society ‘apart at the seams’. [89] As rural areas lose their ‘storage capacity’, slums take their place, and urban ‘involution’ replaces rural involution as a sink for surplus labour which can only keep pace with subsistence by ever more heroic feats of self-exploitation and the further competitive subdivision of already densely filled survival niches. [90] ‘Modernization’, ‘Development’ and, now, the unfettered ‘Market’ have had their day. The labour-power of a billion people has been expelled from the world system, and who can imagine any plausible scenario, under neoliberal auspices, that would reintegrate them as productive workers or mass consumers?

1.4.  .....................AN APPEAL FOR AID:

Join us! The Andes Research Team and Revolutionary Green

We are unaware of other groups producing aids for revolutionary transitions, but we hope to find them. We ask for input, for collaboration (translations) and a website where these issues can be addressed, debated and made available to people in several languages. Time is slipping away and the capitalists, imperialists and elite are always far ahead of the people and the poor. Please consider the importance of the events unfolding in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela (not to mention the cruel disasters of Colombia and the inevitably of Peru.)

– from Jasse Martinque at Revolutionary Green (the Article on Cars encouraged us to look more at the transport sector);

Contact:::  revolutionary@mail.com

“Beginning the Orientation to Long-Run Priorities

The primary requirements during the first months of a popular uprising are to further develop and secure the neighborhood and regional assembly operations, effectiveness and organization; to prioritize productive factors (money, skills, workers and material) for long run production of basic goods; and the planning for the inputs and related needs to secure the factors required to produce: Food, electricity, transport services, housing, health care, communications, environmental/sanitation and water.”

 – Mundos de Escuelas (MER); mer130.tripod.com

 "There has to be direct democracy, people’s government with popular assemblies and congresses where the people retain the right to remove, nominate, sanction, and recall their elected delegates and representatives… As well as political democracy there has to be economic democracy. If an elite owns and controls big business such as oil and the mines there can be neither real democracy nor social equality. Control over the productive apparatus of society has to be distributed.

This can take forms such as community ownership, self-managed enterprises and cooperatives. We call for a people’s revolutionary constituent assembly to help reconstruct from below the republic, the state and the nation of Venezuela…[Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru... Belize...everywhere] We have resources of energy, gold, silver, petroleum and steel. If we use national capital and process them here in Latin America we can sow the seeds of a new continent and a new development. " Hugo Chavez (Hugo Chavez; São Paulo Forum, El Salvador; July 1996; CISLAC magazine Venceremos.)

Eight years later, at the opening of a social debt forum in Caracas Hugo Chavez set the outline for a continuing debate asking the question:

"If it isn't Capitalism, what is it? I have no doubts ... its Socialism ... which Socialism of the many that exist? ... we must invent it ... therefore, the importance of debate ... 21st Socialism has to be invented."

1.5.    Criteria for Anti-Imperialist Governments: A Minimum Framework:

     The Non-Fascist Response to Capitalism and Climate Catastrophe

1. Cancel all foreign debt to US and European banks.

2. Nationalize and then turn over to regional control all important industries.

3. Restrict imports through tariffs and trade preferences for friendly countries.

4. Boycott the USA dollar, hold your reserve currencies in gold, silver, platinum or Euros until a revolutionary currency or a Liberated Block SDR is available.

5. Eliminate regressive labor, pension and minimum wage legislation.

6. Deport the IMF, their agreements, and all USA government or commercial agents.

7. Impose austerity (severe taxes) on the rich.

8. Abolition/prohibition of all genetically modified organisms (GMOs) (and high restrictions on research); abolition/prohibition on toxic chemicals and the overuse of agricultural chemicals. Support regional agriculture research and seed production.

9. End the Expansion of Mass Transit and utilize ration coupons for transit options.

10. No private cars in urban areas; motorized transport in urban areas primarily for business deliveries, the handicapped and elderly.

11. High fuel taxes (2-4 dollars per gallon) on private fuel sales. High vehicle registration/disposal fees on all private vehicles.

12. Abolition/prohibition on corporate business structures employing more than 100 people.

13. Beyond these restraints on transport, economic concentration and toxic materials we believe that a democratic and sustainable government will reduce imports, end dependency and invest in the localized production of basic needs goods (food, water, energy, building materials and all of the tools required to produce each of these necessities.). This will employ all of the people.

14. The sign that a sane government is operating will be seen when the workers are given the factories they work in and people the homes they live in – debt free. Once that is done and food is prioritized we won’t have to worry about economics.

What is novel and truthful about this program is that it would work for 8 billion people.

No other plan can make this claim (14.)

1.6. FROM THE NEW PROGRAM :::

The key to reducing waste and equalizing incomes is to utilize ration coupons and to charge for services (like water, power, garbage, schools and health care) according to a sliding scale. Everyone would receive monthly coupons for transport, basic foods, utilities and medicines. Home ownership would be very cheap as land trusts would capture increased speculative values and yearly community-issued coupons for basic building supplies would make improvements and maintenance cheap. The charges for basic levels of water, power, medicine, health care and garbage/sanitation would be about equal to the coupons received by households. Those wanting to consume more would pay steeply increasing rates. Those people who consume less than the basic levels could sell their coupons on the open market – though the coupons would be numbered to control excess graft.

The major expense of non-farm families would be food. Community councils could grant temporary emergency rate relief in special circumstances – such as: a severe cold spell where energy consumption goes up, a widow with many children, or say a company that lost its bio-diesel generator and needs to buy extra electricity. Flexibility and a joy of learning will be important to the success of experiments in New Democracy and Sustainability.

We welcome comment and challenges from Marxists, Liberals, Libertarians and anyone interested in reducing economic impacts on the planet and surviving global warming.

PART II.

Radical Restructuring: The Politics of Change

2.1.  Applying Revolutionary Transition Designs to Develop A New Socialism

Poor Countries and Revolutionary Movements cannot expect any help from anyone. They cannot wait for Chavez in Venezuela or a worldwide movement of aid to attend to their needs. They must prepare for the worst: USA invasions or USA collusion with elite sabotage and a collapse of economic relations with most of the world. The Ecosolidarity program addresses this real world context and what countries must do. It is also meant as a guide for revolutionary groups to present workable and visionary manifestos of the path to a sustainable and equitable design for living. Our dreams are utopian, but we aim for real and enduring results. To re-build the foundation of a people start with education – once you know what you want to teach...

2.2.  Revolutionary Policies for Transitional Survival:

Democratic Redistribution and Radical Restructuring for a New Beginning

The following program will typically be required of the revolutions in the Andes and throughout Latin America (the pace of adaptation and implementation may vary):

Phase One:

1. All cities, towns and rural districts form popular assemblies that document the Demands, Expectations and Policies that the residents support.

2. Based on these Position decisions, each assembly would designate a national subdivision (contiguous or nearby) that it chooses to affiliate with.

3. The assemblies of the cities, towns and rural areas would then choose Delegates to a Regional Popular Assembly for each autonomous region.

4. Regional Assemblies would vote on Positions and select Delegates for a National Constituent Constitutional Convention; one delegate per 30,000 people in the region. Roughly, 160 Delegates from each Region would then attend the Constitutional Convention.

5. Regional Assemblies would continue to meet, vote on evolving Positions and send updates to the Constitutional Convention.

6. Regional Assemblies would assume all roles of the government pending the ratification of a new constitution.

Full statement at: Section 2.2 of:

PHASE TWO:  National Constituent Constitutional Convention

A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION should consider all aspects of a nation's future and the means to establish democratic, transparent and productive structures for the whole nation. soldiers, indigenous groups, young people, slum dweller organizations, unions representing poor workers, small farmers and landless farmers.

PHASE THREE: Recommendations for New Constitutions:

a. Prioritize: The needs of the whole population for a new revolutionary/solidarity education; water for drinking and for crops; pure and affordable food/national food security; equitable land distribution; indigenous, campesino and small farm agricultural support; and enhanced popular participation in all decisions.

b. Secondary Priorities: Community and national defense; housing with long term use/needs taken into account (priority for slum, rural and border areas); cooperative production units; Watershed restoration; and public spending for the sustainable development of natural and other resources.

c. Policies:

1. Expropriation of all foreign, elite or important land, structures and businesses. In cases where this is too difficult or too dangerous then the Constitution should institute extreme taxation of all foreign and elite owned businesses, bank accounts and resources to accomplish state takeover at the lowest cost and minimal disruption.

2. Extreme tariffs on all products imported to or from non-aligned nations. Quotas on imports from friendly nations to protect local businesses.

3. Extensive long term programs for the relocation of urban people to rural areas for production and for defense.

4. Education for solidarity and revolutionary economics, society and consciousness. 5. (to be continued and updated)

5.

Part III.

3.1.  An Agrarian-Based Solidarity Economics

In The MER Solidarity Model there is a market economy but the government at all levels – directed by the people’s budget prioritizations – intervenes in the market to create sufficient basic goods and to satisfy basic needs within sustainability guidelines. ( LINKS…)

A Program for The Revolutionary Takeover of a Country

I. The Short Transition Period (First 3-5 Weeks of a Takeover) : Immediate Priorities (Go-Slow Option)

The development path for Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru is quite similar. The poor and their allies must seize most of the land and all valuable industries, assets and bank accounts.

3.2.  Phase II of Transition Period (First 3 months) :

Beginning the Orientation to Long-Run Priorities (The "Go-Slow" Option)

The primary requirements during the first months of a popular uprising are to further develop and secure the neighborhood and regional assembly operations, effectiveness and organization; to prioritize productive factors (money, skills, workers and material) for long run production of basic goods; and the planning for the inputs and related needs to secure the factors required to produce: Food, electricity, transport services, housing, health care, communications, environmental/sanitation and water.

ECONOMIC POLICIES: "Go Slow" Option

1. Credit and Currency Controls. All debts subject to cancellation.

2. Public Land given to organizations and sustainable farming coops.

3. Modest Credit programs for key sectors of the economy.

4. Increased property and income taxes on corporations, the rich and idle lands.

5. Partial decentralization of administration, armed forces and large state enterprises.

6. Increased minimum wages and health clinic access.

7. Regional Employment Programs in agriculture, land improvements, transportation and import substitution enterprises (public and private).

8. Import Substitution becomes the main industrial and cooperative sector focus, with attention to interconnections (linkages and input factors).

9. Modest re-nationalization of progressively smaller foreign and then domestic monopolies, oligarchies and concentrations of ownership.

10. Encourage South American Countries (or all countries) to abrogate the UN drug treaty and launch new legalization and crop substitution programs.

11. Direct the national and regional universities and trade schools to study and compliment research in organic farming, solidarity enterprises, import substitution and ways to assist other countries (Cuba, Bolivia etc... )

12. Limit News Media ownership and require more PSAs (public or educational) and programming by organizations representing poor people and minorities. Institute high fines for lies and media misinformation.

3.3.  Phase III - of The "Go Slow" Option

1. All of Phase II, but more and faster...

2. Subsidize linkages that support import substitution enterprises managed by workers collectively or through cooperatives. Extend these programs both locally, regionally and beyond the country with friendly regimes.

3. Military construction projects: schools, hospitals, sanitation, water, market places, environmental restoration and infrastructure. Creation of a civil militia and dual purpose roles for military units.

4. Links across borders and funding for a variety of rural development approaches. Eco and activista tourism, aid programs and fair trade networking (high valued crops and crafts).

5. Government purchases of lands and increased confiscations.

6. Increase taxes on medium size farms and some on small farms that are profitable.

7. Limits tightened on land ownership. Require divestment (break up) of business conglomerates.

8. Re-location projects to rural areas for urban people. Grant urban land titles and increase urban and near-urban land and business confiscations and purchases.

9. Education for Solidarity at all levels of society.

10. Establish regionally owned and locally operated retail food stores to sell basic goods at subsidized prices in poor neighborhoods and rural areas. Community cafeterias and Free Stores (for rationed clothing, toys, household products) established as possible.

11. TACTICS of Strategic Effect: High and progressively increased corporate Taxation can be used to Bankrupt FOREIGN OR ELITE factories and other business interests. Use the governmental powers of condemnation and the justification of the public's goods/benefits... Can also use buyouts with low fixed exchange rates (an low interest) payments - and then devalue the currency a lot. - Or just simply nationalize and promise to pay... or not.

3.4.  The Crisis Program : The Fast or Crisis Transitional Economic Program

In this scenario communities in all regions will be forced to hold clandestine or rushed meetings of Popular Assemblies to form political cadres and self defense arrangements. Hopefully, the majority of people in many nations by this time will have seen and embraced the connection of all struggles for sovereignty, autonomy, resistance, food security and radical restructuring of all aspects of all countries. This consciousness will empower people knowing that their struggle is one of many and an important part of a continental struggle whose success will sustain the re-construction of humane societies.

3.5.  Crisis Policies

Link: See sections 3.3 – 3.8 at:

3.9.  Consider your revolution an experiment in developing an alternative to corporate dominated globalization.

Implement the kinds of policies that :

1. show that poor people in the 3rd world can generate significant economic growth without international corporate investment;

2. create an economy with substantial resistance barriers to corporate domination: Generate jobs that are insulated from multinational corporate practices of moving into a region and then leaving to escape upward wage pressures;

3. make more efficient use of local raw materials than would a vertically integrated international corporate production process;

4. reinforce local democracy, participation, and empowerment of ordinary people. The goals of new projects include developing an economy that is egalitarian and a political structure that allows for the greatest possible democratic participation of workers and consumers in designing their own products.

5. provide an example to others of the power of cooperatives as engines of economic growth and development that simultaneously promote social justice and support communities.

6.

3.10. Development Guides and Ideas:

a.) Do inventories of natural resources, public resources (lands and schools etc ); Collect data on trade, fair trade inputs, forest resources and problem areas (pollution, erosion, corruption); Hydro potentials with a priority to the cheapest, least disruptive and the development needs of a place (social harmony, or small scale economic development priorities.)

Government and the research panels (drawn locally and regionally) draw up lists of resources: grazing lands, farm land (both in several categories of richness and eco impact), damaged lands, forests, special wildlands or habit zones, erosion zones, fishing zones and tourist areas.

b.) Inventory crafts outputs and investigate their expanded market potential. Analyze potentials for tourism and the risks associated with it.

c.) Natural resources - especially coal, oil, gas and forests (and the impacts of their development) - are set to the highest criteria for development and wise, long–run sustainable management. Sustainability and the future value of resources are carefully considered (long term yields and profits realized by slow development of the resource). Another factor is the future availability of improved techniques for mitigating ecological problems. Also, less public funding of infrastructure investments are needed in the short term under a "go-slow" regime (pipelines, ports and roads). Instead, national and regional governments can invest in schools, teachers and revolutionary criteria that will help people come up with more creative, practical and socially profitable goals and methods of resource and social development.

d.)  Reduce erosion, build smarter (infrastructure, industry, utilities) and focus skills and investments on import substitution (ISE ) products and techniques. The goals and the planning for the university system and most secondary school research is directed at how to improve and facilitate the alternative economic program of solidarity and social economy  For example: students would design or compare (dissect) foreign models of motors or engines and test them and see which were best and worst and then redesign them for local production - or a cheap method of remanufacturing used items (justified by overall ISE program).

e.)

3.11.  A NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY: ECOSOLIDARITY

Structures and Guides

Capitalism pretends that all needs are provided for by maximizing corporate profits. But despite huge expensive bureaucracies the rich countries still have serious social problems concerning health, education and crime. The MER Solidaristic Policies model maximizes food security; health and well-being; participation; a practical education; the values and benefits of cooperation; and a goal of many equalities. We are sure that such policies can produce enough (social) profits to satisfy basic needs for development: the people empowered.

What Kind of Economy Do We Want ?  What Kind of Economy Can We Have?

We observe that capitalist-oriented market systems are inefficient from moral, social, environmental and sustainability perspectives. Rather than maximize output and then support government bureaucracies and complex legal systems in order to compensate for all the externalities and problems of a growth oriented market system, we propose a new orientation called Agrarian Based Socialism, Solidarity Economics or the Social Economy of Christian Socialism. More profits stay inside the country when trade – or imports are reduced. Mercosur could help Bolivia and Peru – under new governments and new constitutions – by charging no tax on their agricultural exports to other countries. The alternative to the US – designed Western Hemisphere Free Trade plans (FTAA/ALCA/AFTA) is Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA ). These plans would have more power if they required the members not to belong to any individual trade or aid agreements not sanctioned by the group – MERCOSUR/ ALBA.

In the Solidarity Economics model the neoliberal fixation on growth and maximizing output are a low priority. Those capitalist goals are replaced with a priority to invent economic policies that provide for the sustainable production of the basics of life: food, housing, education, health and dignity. In the Solidarity model social equity, community self-reliance and sustainability are maximized first. This is accomplished through import substitution at the national then the regional and finally the community level. A nation gradually replaces its imports starting with the easiest first and through education and investment moves up to other goods and services. Simultaneously this program prepares for regional and community import substitution.

The goal of Solidarity Economics is to increase the availability of basic needs goods and to accomplish this with a declining impact on the environment. The real choice that people have is: Do they want a sustainable and just economy that is kind to people and neighbors or do they want the US to destroy the planet and debase humanity fighting ugly resource wars? An economic system is only as complex as a people allow it to be. People can have the sustainable economy that they want. It will be different and poorer in many ways than the late 20th Century US economic model. But it will be understandable because it is local, open (transparent) and decided by the people themselves.

The problem with markets is that corrupt governments write the laws to benefit the wealthy, the big companies and growth. These are corporate subsidies and state socialism for the rich.(30) The invisible hand of government policies shapes the production costs and the prices that consumers are willing to pay. If people want a country with many small farms producing organic products then they will be able to employ many people in a labor-intensive program. But people will pay more for food in the short run than they would if they continued to let rich people gobble up farmland and poison it with chemicals, pesticides, herbicides and GMOs. Prices are only lower in the corporate farm system because so many of the externalized costs are not paid by the corporation. These costs include slave labor, child labor, cheap loans, social suffering from the displacement of small farmers, repression of farm workers and impacts on the environment.

The safest way to improve the social benefits of markets is to keep all the market players of similar size, knowledge and security. Complex markets or complicated choices for a democracy make it likely that prudence is lost among poor information and the rush of events. Venezuela's development of Community Councils shows that people want to participate and direct their lives. The experiments with participatory budgeting in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (a state of 12 million people) suggest that average people can solve these problems simultaneously. The problems encountered in Brazil also show how difficult any program is when the government has to pay half its budget to foreign bankers for debts caused by previous corrupt governments.

Instead of a profit maximizing and export-based decision-making criteria Solidarity Economics would create a long-run soil conserving and biologically diverse system of farming where inputs - especially imported inputs - were not needed and expensive machinery would be replaced with labor, local resources and ingenuity.

3.13.  Agrarian-Based Localization: Directions of Priority

Prioritizing the basic needs of any society, results in an eventual transformation of a society. A new type of economic structure is then born along the lines of a green local-socialist decentralization program.

People should organize and reprioritize state and local policies for:

Women and Children; Education for a Solidarity Society of Pure Food, Dignity for Indigenous People and All Workers; and Health for All Including the environment.

Any country or region that seeks to provide these basic needs in a sustainable way will have little additional funds to waste on militaries and corporate subsidies. In parts of Latin American one can see a new world being born. It’s a world where people create the space and freedom to be themselves and care for themselves and their families. New economic structures can accomplish this in ways that build thriving, sustainable communities.

The sciences of Agro-Ecology and Watershed Management can guide localization planning with prioritization for sustainability and equity.

With common sense, lessons learned from the past and citizen empowerment through participation, all aspects of this world will evolve differently than the chaotic and cruel dictates experienced when international capital and the powerful elite force rapid change and modernization on every corner of the planet.

3.14.  A Structure for Solidarity, Local Power and Sustainable Economics

Solidarity Economics argues for a bias toward rural areas and a policy structure of localization where local resources are used sustainably to produce most of the basic needs goods and a surplus for trade with its nearest neighbors first.

This structure solves the problems of bureaucracies, political conflict and concentration of wealth. Markets are used locally, but trade is regulated beyond regions through toll roads and high fuel taxes. Toxic chemicals, genetically altered organisms (GMOs) and the weapons trade would be banned. Combined with ecological guidelines and additional restrictions on trade and land ownership, the market would create economic conditions that support small, medium and cooperative-based farms and rural enterprises. The importance of political democracy beyond a locality will eventually decline because most of the decisions over public policy are set in a well-biased (science-based) constitution or made locally.

3.15. Agrarian Reform: The Unfinished Revolution

Even poorly endowed places must take advantage of whatever will grow. Trees and riparian areas protect the water and biological resources. Some food, fish or export crops are necessary output from all places. Protecting renewable resources like the soils, forests, estuaries and fisheries is a duty and the basis of natural wealth.

The “Who owns the good farmlands” determines the wealth distribution of a region. The “What is farmed” determines the food dependency/food sovereignty of a place. The “Where” of farming determines the impacts on the ecology and the longrun productivity of the country. Overproduction near rivers or steep hills has a potentially large impact. Light grazing rotations and tree crops would be chosen by a community if it exercised control over the use of its resources. The “Why of farming” – or the Why Subsidize Small Farms and rural communities - determines the importance of culture, respect, sustainability and the connections of the people to the land and the ecology that they live in and depend on. The “How” of farming is connected to and grows out of all of these factors. Investments and trade polices accelerate or control trends in production and growth and thus affect all aspects of rural life and the well-being of the whole country. For decades investments in Latin America have been capital intensive (with an urban – industrial bias) thus creating greater unemployment and a rural exodus to mega-city slums.

Government commissions and scientific research panels (drawn from local and regional experts, students and faculty) will draw up detailed lists of each region’s resources: grazing lands, farmlands (in several categories of richness and environmental sensitivity), damaged lands, forests, special wildlands or habit zones, erosion zones, fishing zones and tourist or recreation areas.

After these studies are completed lands would be redistributed for free to competent farmers and ranchers.

Compensation for seized lands will not be possible in most places because of a lack of funds and the revolutionary perceptions that will accompany these drastic changes. Current owners of land could retain twice the standard limit that is set locally for a particular land type (typically 5 to 10 hectares for the highest quality lands and 20-40 hectares for marginal or grazing lands). Adults over 21 can only own the land that they live on and their vehicle license plate must be from that parcel’s address.(35)

All land would be redistributed for free to competent  farmers and ranchers. Initially land is redistributed to three sectors: small holders, coops and locally owned lands held for distribution to newcomers and population growth Current owners of land could retain twice the standard limit that is set locally for a particular land type. Adults over 21 can only own the land that they live on and their vehicle license plate must be from that locality too. People can lease land with trade restrictions outside their locality at twice the standard rental rate of the new locality. Land could not be divided or sold, except to the local cooperative land trust with the only profits being the increased value from improvements.

Next the government would analyze imports and exports at national and regional levels.

A plan or recommendation is drawn up that considers priority for basic needs goods and the national and regional production advantages: resources, skills, interests and existing complimentary infrastructure. From this point in the process the popular assemblies and research panels devise the final plans for land use, investments and subsidies.

Localization is a key guide for an evolving economic structure where the priorities are: import substitution, rural support and regional integration. As with the land reform program a structure of laws and subsidies would be enacted to establish and cultivate an alternative economics and then the ability to change the program negatively would require consensus or votes over several years in all regions affected. A key part of any new structure will be a new educational curriculum that emphasizes cooperation, participation and all the concepts of solidarity economics and ecological land use planning.

Localization is the economy of ecology. It is Solidarity Economics when the economics of social peace and ecological stewardship are balanced and complimentary. The bias toward the local creates a countervailing power to that of the corporations and the central government. Through import taxes to protect infant industries and industries that enhance localization (value adding, specialty and high quality PRODUCTS) a new structure can be phased in without extreme disruption. Taxes on luxury goods help to fund the program and transfer wealth from the rich to the poor.

3.16.  BANKS: OWNED AND MANAGED BY LOCAL COMMUNITIES

Popular perceptions of: Corruption; Disenfranchisement; poverty; lack of upward socio-economic mobility; and lack of personal security tend to limit the right – and ability – of a regime to conduct business of the state and to operate with moral legitimacy. It is time that we all strove to inject more ethical arguments (global and moral) into every kind of policy prescription or campaign. The whole world is watching and looking around for helpful ideas.

All pension funds, insurance policies, credit and banking would be done through public institutions and audited by an elected regional Board of Supervisors.(37) Only local lending would be allowed and it must meet community prioritization guidelines. Banks are to serve long-term needs and emergencies not to make money at the highest return. With currency controls in place that limit the amount of withdrawals and how much cash can be taken out of the country, the rich would be forced to invest or put their money in the local banks. Forcing businesses to apply for foreign currency use has been effective in Venezuela at identifying businesses and individuals that have not paid taxes which is a huge problem throughout Latin America and most poor countries.(38) Tax avoidance and illegal businesses would have a difficult time if banks were small, local, public and well-audited.

To combat inflation and avoid some corruption possibilities banks will maintain a 90 percent reserve requirement on most deposits. Audits will be open to the public and independent audits will be done every other year before the elections of the Board of Supervisors. When a crisis deepens or a new government comes to power, banks should be nationalized with strict currency controls. Reserves and deposit withdrawals are prioritized for key imports and the lower classes. Gradually the banks would be turned over to the communities.

3.17.  Ideas for Local Solidarity Projects and Import Substitution with Value Adding

Millions of people in Brazil have poor housing and tens of millions more throughout Latin America are without roofs – Sin Techos. In Buenos Aires, Argentina the piqueteros and asembleas have formed voluntary roofing collectives to repair old houses. They have also set up thrift stores to clothe the poor and the penniless; bakeries to feed the hungry and schools for children and adults where people can also learn about imperialism and the socialist solutions to capitalism’s crimes. Market gardens; sewer and water repair cooperatives; community-based TV and radio facilities; clothing manufacture and repairs; barter networks; and food processing are examples of local enterprises that governments and communities should subsidize. In remote areas or in nations lacking petroleum, a program for bio-diesel derived from African Palm plantations could be a beneficial enterprise for collectives and communities.

In a livestock industry keep as much as possible of the leather industry, the by-products (bonemeal, bloodmeal, manure, tallow), fencing material production, dairy, feedstocks, agricultural extension, veterinary services and training and livestock breeding in the community and certainly in the region. This builds local links to a variety of businesses, small and large, and guides education programs (University and Secondary) to create diverse skills in the region. Other examples are micro-credit small business development lending and advice for import substitution enterprises (Grameen Banks); soya farming with seed production, storage, experiments, exports, processing (tofu-feed-soy milk) or direct conversion to animal products (meat and egg industries). And all of these activities would be kept in the hands of local or regional businesses.

Ideas for Transport Regulation:

The key structure is to have vehicle licenses issued from each locality. Each time that you cross a border checkpoint your vehicle is weighed and you are required to fill your fuel tank. The border that you are crossing into receives the funds including a tax per pound of the vehicle. The tax per pound would be the same at all borders for all products. This encourages value adding to all trade products. The price of fuels would not be regulated. You must be over 21 to own a vehicle and over 25 to own a truck over a certain weight. All land would be redistributed for free to competent  farmers and ranchers. Current owners of land could retain twice the standard limit that is set locally for a particular land type. Adults over 21 can only own the land that they live on and their vehicle license plate must be from that locality too. People can lease land with trade restrictions outside their locality at twice the standard rental rate of the new locality

The border that you are crossing into receives the funds including a tax per pound of the vehicle. The tax per pound would be the same at all borders for all products. This encourages value adding to all trade products. The price of fuels would not be regulated. You must be over 21 to own a vehicle and over 25 to own a truck over a certain weight.

TRANSPORTATION ISSUES (52)

a. Phase out private car use; Provide small shopping markets and housing near to people’s jobs.

b. Put the Localization Alternative first; more local production, import substitution and support to infant industries and cooperatives.

c. Urban Transport Polices: no car zones and increased fees for vehicle registration.

d. Taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel (60-90% of price)

e. Free buses and trains; a clean moped exchange program..

f. Bicycle manufacture, repair and price subsidies.

g. Lower speed limits to save energy, lives and the costs of high-speed roads.

More Solidarity Economics Ideas;

Mission Mercal – Food Distribution

Mission Mercal is a network for distributing food throughout the country at slightly below market rates at government supported supermarkets. This program emerged as a result of the December 2002 employer sponsored general strike, which shut down food distribution. As of November 2003 there were 100 government markets around the country. The government is accelerating the building of these supermarkets, so that the number will double to 200 in December. The opposition criticizes this program saying that the Mercal markets undermine the private sector. Mercal markets primarily serve areas that are neglected by the private sector.

Venezuela’s government places emphasis on education: a strategy which takes time to bear fruit. May 2003 marked the beginning of a fourth phase of the Chavez Presidency when the country’s oil industry recovered and the rightwing opposition began to fall apart. The government had more resources to implement short-term anti-poverty measures and to refocus on its medium term strategies, placing particular emphasis on land reform and on the Bolivarian University. Conferences are often held in Caracas now as people from all over the world come to see this popular experiment called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Indigenous leaders and agrarian reform students have flocked here and there is planning for a hemisphere-wide school for teaching peasant agriculture and policy studies. Venezuela is well on its way to an Economics of Solidarity.(48)

The Last Step is a Whopper

Many economists and poverty activists endorse Solidarity Economics to one degree or another. Venezuela, the Zapatistas, the poor of Argentina, many people in Bolivia and the millions who support the MST landless workers movement in Brazil are moving in the direction of a new kind of society, politics and economy. But few people really understand what that will actually entail. Even if the US and the rich were not hostile, the road would be hard and full of speed bumps. The biggest hurdle that we all must face is to give up on economic growth, to give up on any kind of prosperity that is measured in the old ways. As many of the on-the-farm MST have decided in Brazil: “we want to be simple, to survive with dignity and perfect our subsistence technique and customs.” That is all: community, a healthy life for the children and enough to eat.(49)

There are gleanings of this perspective in the social economy project of the Chavez government. It is not "just" an anti-poverty measure, but constitutes a central element in Chavez’ Bolivarian project. It is designed to alleviate poverty and is also a central aspect for creating a more egalitarian, democratic, and solidaristic society. The government’s website defines the social economy as encompassing the following seven elements:(50)

1. The social economy is an alternative economy.

2. Where democratic and self-governing practices dominate.

3. It is driven by forms of work based on partnership and not on wage-earning.

4. Ownership over the means of production is collective (except in the case of micro-enterprises).

5. It is based on the equal distribution of surplus.

6. It is solidaristic with the environment in which it develops.

7. It holds on to its own autonomy in the face of monopolistic centers of economic or political power.

Extending Solidarity Economics

I. Global Issues:

a. Incentives for countries to turn in arms or reduce defense spending.

b. Deglobalization: radically reducing the powers and roles of the TNC-driven WTO and Bretton Woods institutions. The formation of new institutions helping to devolve the greater part of production, trade and economic decision-making to national and local levels (Walden Bello).

c. Sharing the Solidarity Economics Alternative to War and Global Collapse with all nations and people. Lower consumption world wide, especially of fossil fuels and high energy products like cars, steel and port facilities.

d. Abolish corporations outright or through the steps outlined by the International Forum on Globalization. (Utne Reader, May-June 2003, p. 55)

e. The WTO, FTAA, NAFTA, IMF and World Banks cease to exist.

f. Research biodiversity and threats to the Amazon Basin region and other key biodiversity zones.

g. GMOs are forbidden along with most toxic chemicals (at local, regional and global levels).

The US pays reparations for the damages done by these bio-terror weapons.

II. Polices for Transitional Periods, Austerity or Future Improvements

Severe penalties for bribery or fraud related to the following policies:

a. Phase-out private land ownership beyond subsistence needs and reduce the area required for subsistence with improved knowledge and techniques.

b. Restrict water use for non-essential uses

c. Identify economic bottlenecks, excess profits, pollution sources, corruption and beneficial economic activities (import substitution potential).

d. Watershed planning for ecological development with land reform (condemnation) to protect and to wisely share available resources

e. Research and experimentation on small development projects: State and regional micro credit for sustainability; Mini canteens locally or coop-owned to travel remote areas and sell things cheap (trade/barter) with some subsidies for important, health, education and sustainable farming items; Donations of Cattle, pig or chicken herds with the condition that in the second year the community turnover a part of the herd to neighboring communities (or farmers chosen by ballot or lot) A condition being that the operations are run collectively or as a cooperative.

g. Farming bottlenecks are common in transport, marketing, sales, value adding, packaging and promotion, so locally owned and operated cooperatives should be subsidized to provide abundant employment in these enterprises.

h. More equitable and democratic processes for economic planning that incorporate participatory budgeting, popular assemblies, planning from below and new mixtures of all of these.

i. Develop weighted criteria for participatory budgeting and new social accounting practices.

j. Enforced environmental regulation of all uses of petroleum products and other chemicals. Large taxes on all toxic products to pay for their regulation and disposal.

k. Improve the usefulness and facilitation skills of the rotating panels of scientists, planners and citizens (some from other regions) who review and investigate communities to see how their development plans operate, were arrived at, and how well they meet the IAPE/Earth Charter/ Regional guidelines (plans).

l. Mechanisms for appeal and precaution, avenues for citizen feedback.

m. Rural repatriation programs.

III. TRANSPORTATION ISSUES (52)

a. Phase out private car use; Provide small shopping markets and housing near to people’s jobs.

b. Put the Localization Alternative first; more local production, import substitution and support to infant industries and cooperatives.

c. Urban Transport Polices: no car zones and increased fees for vehicle registration.

d. Taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel (60-90% of price)

e. Free buses and trains; a clean moped exchange program..

f. Bicycle manufacture, repair and price subsidies.

g. Lower speed limits to save energy, lives and the costs of high-speed roads.

Rural Land Reform

Because Venezuela has high unemployment and imports much of its food, agriculture is a key import substitution target. Venezuela’s rural land reform was introduced in November 2001, as one of the package of 49 laws, which were passed at the same time concerning the state oil industry and other reforms. The law states that all adult Venezuelans have a right to apply for a piece of land for their family. This land is to be taken from state-owned land holdings, which are enormous and make up the largest part of Venezuela’s agriculturally viable land. The law opens up the possibility for the state to redistribute privately held land, if it is part of an estate of more than 100 hectares of high quality agricultural land or 5,000 hectares of low quality land. The land would be expropriated at market rates, making Venezuela’s land reform a relatively non-radical program.

The government distributed little land in 2002 due to the coup attempts. The next year it turned over 1.5 million hectares to about 130,000 families. This comes to an average of 11.5 hectares per family and a total beneficiary population of 650,000 (based on 5 persons per household). So far no land has been expropriated. There has been conflict over land which the government considers state land, but which large land owners claim to be theirs, even though they lack the documents to prove it.

The land reform is a comprehensive program that aims to avoid the typical problems by making sure that the new farmers have the skills, credit, technology, and marketing channels to actually make a living off of their newly acquired land. In addition to the national land institute (INTI), there is an institution that provides credit and skills training and an organization for marketing agricultural products that are produced by beneficiaries of the land reform. In the long-term, the reforms contribute to the diversification of the economy and to assure food sovereignty. In the medium term, the program is aimed at reducing rural poverty and also urban poverty, to the extent that people move out of urban slums and into the countryside. (40)

Urban Land Reform

Another important anti-poverty measure is the urban land reform, which will redistribute the land of the barrios (urban slums) to its inhabitants. Similar to the one Hernando de Soto has promoted in Peru, it incorporates elements that make this program an example for other countries. When people acquire title to their own self-built home in the barrio, they have security for the first time that they will not be expelled. They can use the home as collateral for a small loan, to improve their home, to buy a better home, or to invest in a small business. The process of acquiring urban land titles is a collective process, which brings the neighborhood together in the interest of improving the neighborhood’s infrastructure, such as roads, access to utilities, security, comfort, etc. (41)

The collective nature of the process is perhaps the most innovative aspect of the government’s urban land program. To acquire titles, 100 to 200 families in a neighborhood have to get together and form a land committee, which then acts as a liaison with the government on regularizing the land ownership of the families that the committee represents. A positive consequence in many cases is that the land committees have begun working on many more issues besides the negotiation and acquisition of land titles. They have also formed sub-committees that deal with public utility companies, such as the water and the electric company.

About a third of the barrio land is on government property (another third is on private property and one third on land where ownership is as yet undetermined). The process is slow because it involves many technical and legal steps. By November 2003, throughout Venezuela, about 45,000 families (befitting 225,000 individuals) had received titles to their homes, with another 65,000 families (or 330,000 individuals) to receive them soon.

In February, 2003 Agriculture and Lands (MAT) Minister Efren Andrades announced a series of food production projects for urban areas across the country. A pilot project for two slums in southern Caracas is supported by a UN FAO grant that will also finance near-urban poultry farms.

Micro-Finance and Social Economy

The social economy project of the Chavez government promotes cooperatives and micro-finance. The micro-finance program has several different institutional bases. Banco de la Mujer (Women’s Bank), Bandes (Bank for Economic and Social Development, Banfoandes (Bank for the Promotion of the Andean Region), and the Banco del Pueblo (People’s Bank) are involved in micro-finance as are institutions such as the Fund for the Development of Micro-Finance and the Ministry of Development of the Social Economy. A banking law requires all conventional banks to dedicate a certain percentage of their loans to micro-finance.

Between 2001 and 2003 about $50 million worth of micro-credits have been lent out by the banks named above. The Women’s Bank and the People’s Bank have given 70,000 micro-credits between them. In 2004, the government intends to expand the micro-credits program, according to the Minister for the Social Economy, Nelson Merentes.(43) Private and public banks also gave out micro-credits for a total of $75 million during the month of September 2003.(44)

Among the important beneficiaries of the micro-credit program are cooperatives. Venezuela had only 800 cooperatives when Chavez came to power, it is now estimated that there are over 40,000. The promotion of cooperatives boosts the small business sector, which is generally known to be the first place new jobs are created in an economy.

For a discourse on social economy and solidarity in Venezuela and cooperatives see the interview of Felipe Perez-Marti at http://venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php/articles.php?artno=1019

CONCLUSIONS

Solidarity Economics answers these questions convincingly: How much land and wealth redistribution; How to create new structures to restrain the State, guarantee local autonomy and individual freedoms; and What is the role of economic growth.(55) How much democratic choice is desired or possible is something that people will have to configure once they have explored Solidarity Economics in their everyday lives and conflicts. The final question -- and one that is difficult to predict -- is the one of agency: who will fight, who will lose?(56)

What do the working people want from Lula and the PT government in Brazil? The landless peasants want land where they can live and produce. The workers, victims of restructuring plans (IMF), want employment with all their rights. Everyone wants to improve social security keep it public and based on workers’ solidarity. The homeless want homes. The youth want a future, education and real jobs.(57)

Solidarity Economics is the platform for the Carnival, for everyone who wants a solidaristic life. In this sense it is also a potentially unifying force for the global anti-capitalist resistance movement to throw at the elite and the capitalist bankers. With an understanding of Solidarity all of the factions of the movement for change can find something for themselves and reasons to struggle together with everyone else.

The small and medium farmers and the landless workers can fly under the Solidarity banner for it offers them land in a thriving rural community with credit, marketing and technical assistance to reduce the dangers of chemicals, GMOs and bankruptcy from foreign competition. The poor urban dwellers will have more food, health care, education, opportunity and the choice to return to a rural renaissance or at least to not see their barrios further overcrowded with rising crime.

To the middle classes Solidarity offers peace of mind and a society working together that they can be proud of. In the medium term, there will be a niche economy for some of their skills as import substitution is established. The transition may not be easy for the middle classes, but it is hoped that their lowered (money) standard of living (poverty will be reduced but there eventually won’t be much of a middle class) will be compensated for by increased stability and normalcy – something that the middle classes all over the world will never have again under neoliberalism.

Women stand to gain the most from localization policies and a solidaristic society because women and children make up most of the poor and they have been the most neglected in the areas of health care, education and respect. Children will benefit from all aspects of Solidarity Economics, from a cleaner environment, and a real (revolutionary) education where their skills are needed for practical applications that increase the sustainability of solidarity and the new society. This usefulness will contribute to their personal growth as they contribute to important projects in their communities – communities that will be full of cultural activities, music and the excitement of hope.

For workers a solidaristic society means a great victory over capitalism and greed. Workers cooperatives will manage and operate most factories and businesses. With import substitution and wealth redistribution, the local and regional demand for products will remain high. For teachers and universities solidarity is a new page – as new discipline – one that renews their purpose and their value to local communities and the whole of society. Technicians, teachers, doctors and engineers will all be in great demand and many students will rise up quickly to fill positions of responsibility.

SOLIDARITY ECONOMICS:

THE ECOSOLIDARITY APPROACH

PART IV. The BOLIVIAN PROJECT: 

1. Energy Sector: Data, Comparisons, and Options; 

2. Resources – Natural,  Human and Industrial; 

3. Current uses of sections a and b;

4. Consumption by class;

5. The Transport Sector: a. Data: Compare and contrast; b. Transport options; 

6.

Objective:

To realize increased funds for the local government and the nation through better energy and transport policies. The criteria for success include ecological; equity; and self reliance goals.

Develop practical guidelines and methods to help policymakers (local and national) develop diagnostics to assess agricultural, transport and infrastructure needs and to ensure that strategies to address them are as cost effective as possible within the Ecosolidarity criteria for balanced development. Special emphasis is placed on data collection and explanations of some of the quantitative methodologies that can serve as inputs to the studies needed to ensure that the interests of the poor and other marginalized groups are accounted for.

BENEFITS OF A NEW ENERGY – TRANSPORT POLICY FOR BOLIVIA;

Things to Consider Economics and Policies for a New Bolivia

I. Macro factors:

1. Loans and Debt to International, National and Domestic lenders.

Solution: Cancel them.

2. Future Loans: From Venezuela, other neighbors, NGOs, generally not considered important when the government and its taxing authority are controlled by the people.

3. Foreign Ownership:

a. Large or Strategic Industries

b. Medium sized and importance industries/sectors.

Solution: Nationalize (expropriate) all large/important industries and negotiate taxes, management and investments with smaller industries, businesses and organizations... Use taxes to drive some bankrupt and huge performance or cleanup bonds on others. Restrict exports of any capital (machine) goods.

4. Currency: Given the reduced importance of trade (non-contract) and the sizeable currency reserves that should be available, currency issues are not as pressing as in older scenarios.  Either maintain strict currency controls or use non-convertible currency and severe penalties for cheaters.

5. Central Bank: Under direct control and supervision of the congress with full transparency and public access.

6. Taxation: Income: zero taxes for 80 percent of people; 40 to 80 percent taxation for top 5 to 15 percent of income earners. Steep fines for fraud.

7. Size and Functions of Government:  (Data to compare to other countries, Peruvian States, Venezuela and US states)

a.) National b.) Regional:  c.) Local:

8. Trade Partners and Agreements: Preferences given to neighbors, friends and price factored in only as a minor factor.

9. Trade Barriers: High taxes on luxuries and on many basic goods (if they need to be imported or are in competition).

Submitted by Jase Martinique; revolutionary@mail.com

 Updated version and final footnotes

I love Hugo Chavez and think he is one of the only decent leaders in the modern history of latin america - BUT... He needs to lead - he needs ot be honest about the costs of different programs -

here are a few of our footnotes (see end of article)




10.

b.) Venezuela's sales of gasoline at 12 cents a gallon is a tragic mistake. Venezuela's transport costs are high and rising because of bad planning and corruption (before Chavez); and the frequent torrential rains they receive (certain to increase with global warming) that cause mudslides and erosion. Specialists from the Civil Protection and Infrastructure Ministry consider the storm damage to the main bridge that connects Caracas with the coast to be very serious. Local authorities assert that the solution will be to build a new freeway, expected to be constructed in 2007, at a cost of US$ 1.1 billion to begin functioning after three years. Traffic is now routed through the restored old Caracas-La Guaira highway.

c.) For an amusing report from 1998 – see:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/caracas.html
“As they're taking me to the airport early next morning, I get a good look at Caracas in the rising sun. Passing through the squatter towns on the outskirts of the city, I see that the shanties are different from those in my dim thirty-five-year-old memories. The corrugated tin and cardboard has given way to crumbling red brick. Perhaps (I think) some progress does get made. Even as I'm pondering this, the van driver is telling us that in Venezuela a liter of petroleum is cheaper than a liter of mineral water. The oil boom goes on, and so does the regressive politics it feeds. There was a bloody coup attempt in 1994, and the prospect of what may happen after the upcoming elections worries a lot of people. Seen from outside, the odds are there will be some drama but no real change.”

d.)  http://www.latintrade.com/dynamic/index.php?pg=site_en/pastissues/Jul04/currents.html
“Until recently, Lervis Rolando drove a car bomb-but he's no terrorist. Rolando had modified his aging Ford Maverick to carry 215 liters of gasoline and drove it back and forth across the border, selling cheap Venezuelan gasoline in Colombia. Then the Venezuelan National Guard seized his car.A government crackdown has put a damper on a thriving smuggling industry, estimated at between 18,000 and 50,000 liters daily, that had people like Rolando carrying gasoline inside the trunks, back seats and even in the doors of their cars. More than one vehicle caught fire and exploded during the trip, earning them their name-carro bomba… the price of leaded gas to just over US$0.02 per liter at black-market exchange rates, compared to $0.46 in Colombia-if gas stations nearest Venezuela were bothering to open. In Venezuelan border towns like San Antonio, cars line up, many of them decades-old dinosaurs with huge gas tanks, to wait hours to gas up.

Economists estimate the public subsidy on the price of gasoline costs an already limping state oil company as much as $2.4 billion a year, money which could otherwise be invested in health, education or police… PDVSA's break-even selling price at more than $0.11 cents per liter-more than five times the current price. The oil company's accounts are not public… Naturally, many Venezuelan drivers, accustomed to paying pocket change to fill up their gas-guzzlers, have no complaints that the price of an egg buys three liters of gasoline. Extraordinarily cheap fuel produces daily damage by subsidizing gas guzzling sport utility vehicles and smog-belching, decades-old rolling wrecks which jam the nation's streets and suffocate its cities. Venezuela has no automobile emission controls; mechanics often simply remove catalytic converters on newer cars; and nearly free gasoline eliminates any incentive for keeping vehicles tuned…. A rich Venezuelan receives six times as much of the subsidy as does a poor one [and many other subsidies too!]. - Mike Ceaser, San Antonio, Venezuela.”

e.) http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.asp?Symbol=US:TM&Feed=AP&Date=20060112&ID=5414474

Venezuelans Snapping Up New Cars:  In Venezuela, where gasoline is cheaper than water, people are snapping up new cars in a sign of booming consumption in the oil-rich economy.New car sales hit a record of 228,378 units in 2005, up 70 percent from the previous year, the Venezuelan Automobile Chamber, or Cavenez, announced this week. The Venezuelan Automobile Chamber includes the local affiliates of companies like General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co., U.S.-German automaker DaimlerChrysler AG, Japan's Toyota Motor Corp. and Mitsubishi Motors Corp. that import and assemble cars in Venezuela.

f.) http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/international/13622908.htm

More dumb ideas from Hugo Chavez (who in many ways we see as the only decent leader in the history of Latin America!):  Sat, Jan. 14, 2006; Pipeline estimate soars to $20Billion; CARACAS - Venezuela has said a proposed South American natural gas pipeline to be built with Brazil and Argentina could cost $20 billion -- twice as much as previous estimates. The final details of the 5,000-mile pipeline that would run from Caracas, Venezuela, to Buenos Aires, Argentina ]destroying vast areas of rainforest and habitat], should be determined by mid-2006, Energy Minister Rafael Ramírez said in a statement late Thursday. Officials estimate the project will take as long as seven years to build and cost between $17 billion and $20 billion, Ramírez said, compared with earlier projections of about $10 billion.

g.) In one election Chavez promised to keep gasoline prices below 22 cents a gallon because he feared he would lose the lection otherwise. But even the highest estimates suggest that in 2006 Venezuela had only 110 cars per 1000 people – and since it has a large middle and upper class (20 percent of population or 200 of every 1000 people) they own most of the cars. If 80 percent of Venezuelans own very few cars (5 per 1000 people) then why would Chavez be worried? Psychology and fear are powerful motivators, one supposes… - based on data from: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/internet/inimr-ri.nsf/fr/gr121197f.html



BEGIN ARTICLE

Bolivia has about 25 cars per 1000 people. Many of them are older models and they are owned almost exclusively by the 10 percent of the population that is wealthy. The USA has 900 cars per 1000 – and that is not counting all of the trucks and government vehicles. If China were to reach half the level of car ownership in the USA, China would need to build or buy more than 600 million cars – more than twice the number in the USA today! But, before the Chinese or the Indians could enjoy driving them very far, the world’s climate would change terribly… and irreversibly!

Dear editors, there is a global energy war sweeping the planet at the same time that private vehicle ownership is booming. Something wrong with this picture – read on. President Bush says we are addicted to oil, but it is addiction to energy and waste that the USA is so grotesquely guilty of.

A longer version with additional footnotes is available at: http://www.xanga.com/revolutionarygreen

Eliminate Private Cars: New Democracy & Sustainable Economic Systems;

By Jase Martinique for Revolutionary Green;

(Word Count 2582 without notes; Main text 1999)

Part I. Capitalists are diabolically clever. They learn and invent. They have recently combined an older technology, motorized vehicles, with a newer social technology, mass private vehicle ownership. Now they export this nation-building model across the planet – especially to China.

There can be questions of the “Chicken and Egg” variety in economic or ecological analysis, but it is clear that the largest factor in development and in the ecological crisis of the earth is the same thing: cars – especially the widespread ownership of private vehicles. Mass transit as it is used in most countries is a false solution. The horrors of the automobile and its culture are well studied: a million killed outright and many millions injured, crippled or terrorized each year - and these are just the immediate human casualties! (1). The opportunity costs of allowing private vehicle ownership are fatal to any experiment in sustainability.

Trucks have a role in Basic Goods transport and busses or trains are important for long distance trade and travel, but private cars? Cars, roads and all of the parts and inputs required to maintain and repair them are too great a burden for any country to bear – that is, any country that wants to consume its fair share and learn to live sustainability. For the poor countries that lack energy resources, the costs of cars and energy imports often requires a large part of their export earnings to pay for them. The benefits accrue to the rich. (2.)

This study examines arguments against private cars and mass transit; data on per capita car ownership and costs around the world; and the policies for a revolutionary society of equitable and sustainable development. By awakening people to the severity of change necessary – the fact that they do not even understand how to move about without their own personal car –  we can move on to serious subjects: how sensible people must take over the world in the next 5 years or prepare for climate catastrophes and war. These issues are important to the revolutionary movements that are growing in Bolivia, Venezuela, Iraq and Nepal (In Iraq and Venezuela gasolina sells for 12 cents a gallon). Grassroots social movements want more than the politicians will deliver. The missing link between the potential of the poor masses and real change is an economic program that challenges the mentality and design of local or global capitalists. This study highlights the key proposals for a new program of Sustainable Economics and Real Democracy. (3.)

Part II. "Private Cars Are for Fascists: Mass Transit for Fools!"

“We are killing the future and the future choices that the people might have chosen if we refuse to discuss the alternatives to car ownership. Can anyone explain how a country with private car ownership could ever become sustainable? Can anyone explain how car ownership could expand significantly in Bolivia or Nepal without causing major economic problems?

The motor industry is a key indicator of the world economy. The nexus of related industries which depend for their continued expansion on the car point to its crucial position. The massive growth of cars has required a massive growth of roads. In Britain and the USA the underdevelopment of the railways means that the roads are the essential artery for the creation of virtually all commodities and the realization of their value in the market place. Given all this, how can cars and roads be neutral? They are forms of technology, and no technology is developed outside the class war. They represent a particular definition of progress; and all definitions depend on who has the power to decide what is good and what is needed.

Cars and the evils of middle classes must be addressed by any person, group or ideology that claims to be anti-fascist. Prisons, cell phones, private property, trade, corporations and single issue campaigns must also be addressed. Unless you think that everyone on the planet can have a car of their own then you must be against all private vehicles OR you are a fascist because you allow/enforce a system where some get things and others are excluded (know their roles). Unless you think that everyone on the planet has the right to be middle class consumers pursuing the American Dream then either you are against anyone being in the middle (or upper) class OR else you are a fascist because you allow/enforce a system where some get things and others are excluded (know their roles).

There could be 3 times as many people living in the USA and if they had no cars, no palaces, and less mental disease - it would be such a wonderful place of hope and humanness - instead of a psychedelic graveyard of failure. Few cars would mean less pollution, less expenses, and an end to war. Eventually, there might be cities that breathed and celebrated and shared - cities that loved and honored the rural areas that provide their food, water, building materials, energy and vacations.

If activities were less geographically dispersed they might be forced to become smaller in scale. People would be brought into daily contact with one another. Streets would not be deserted, so street crime would become virtually impossible, making trust between diverse individuals and communities a realistic goal rather than empty liberal rhetoric. All of which would make feasible the idea of municipal democracy, the idea of small local areas being directly governed by their inhabitants. Workers councils in a factory would not bring workers control over production, if the factory just made components to be assembled elsewhere into an unknown machine. Similarly, in the cities of today municipal democracy would not give people control over the conditions of their lives, when they are assembled elsewhere. The supersedence of transport would, at least, create a possibility of democracy.

Reform cannot challenge the political power of the Road as an institution, nor the power of Capital which it serves. Restrictions on the car only serve to reinforce and legitimate the machinery of motor power, rather like the way that abuse-spotting social workers can only legitimate the everyday barbarism of the Family, by picking out its most "dysfunctional" exemplars. We no more recognize the distinction between "green" cars and others, between "green" petrol and its rival products, than the macho distinction of performance between "good" and bad driving. We hate cars because we are sick of seeing our world around us torn apart, a world where we have no control over anything we do. We are sick of watching ourselves do the necessary. We could be participating in the enjoyable.

There is a growing movement against the car… then there is China. If we despise this system so much, if we hate everything that is part of it, if we despise single issue campaigns and favor only an assault on all fronts, then why pick on the car? Is it that the car is a symbol? Well symbol it definitely is but it is also a physical reality. Its ceaseless traffic in traffic is what stops us enjoying life. And maybe even what stops us communicating with you. That's why we want to smash your windscreen ; we want to break through to you and tell you that there's a world out here. We want to reach out to you and prise your hands from the sweaty steering wheel and gently lift you out of the car. Before we pour petrol on the seat and set light to the ugly thing. (http://newswire.indymedia.org/en/2005/11/827262.shtml) (4.)

Part III.  Mass Transit is Foolish – But Necessary for the Transition to Sustainability

Many of the successful mass transit programs in Latin America (Curritiba, Bogota, Quito) were designed primarily for the wealthy who own most of the cars. The goal was to reduce air pollution and congestion. Many transit programs were disasters, costing exorbitant amounts and serving few people. It’s nice for the rich though, they keep their cars and get to feel good and ride to the bank office quicker. And they probably got rich off of building the transit systems too! Mass transit compliments cars – get rid of the cars and you won’t need much transit since it will be easier to walk, bike or take a taxi once in a while. The real solution is to redesign cities so that jobs are closer to where people live – and to get people out of the cities! The redesigning of cities is easy and cheap. Seize the property of the rich and most of the middle class and relocate light industries into all areas. (5.)

Part IV.  Global Car Ownership; Let Them Eat Dust!

In most of the world only the middle class and the rich own cars. In the USA and much of Europe there are more cars than licensed drivers (as many as 900 cars per 1000 people). In Bolivia there are less than 30 cars per 1000 people and almost all of them are owned by the rich. Get rid of the private car? Who could complain except the rich? (6.)

Even by 2005, vehicle ownership was low in Latin America. Half of the countries report motorisation levels of under 100, i.e. less than 10 per cent of the population have access to a motor vehicle. Brazil has the highest motorisation level of the larger countries and has 8 times more vehicles per capita than does Venezuela. In Peru during 1995, 45% of road fatalities were pedestrians – about twice the average of other countries in the region. More than 200,000 people in Latin America are killed or severely injured each year by cars. (7.)

Part V. Automobile Cost Data:

Autos have many impacts on every aspect of life. They affect people’s health, environment, the imports, infrastructure, and research priorities of the country. The economic losses to injuries, wasted labor in the auto sector, repairs, pollution and the creation of consumer fantasies are staggering. (8.) If all of the waste related to private cars were put into agriculture and basic goods (health, education, water supplies…) then many countries could become pleasant and sustainable examples. To follow the individualist and consumerist approach that China and Mexico are following is to court local and global disaster.

An option for Bolivia (and for Paraguay and the parts of Peru and Brazil that are near Bolivia) is to outlaw private vehicles and then convert taxis, buses and collectivos to natural gas (NVGs). NGVs have gained worldwide recognition as one of the best alternative fuel options. For all practical purposes it is a “compulsory” fuel for Bolivia, given the abundance of the country’s gas reserves, and because of the positive impact that NGVs would have on the income and general quality of life of the country’s inhabitants.  With achievable goals, the study by Fernando Navarro of Transredes S.A., evaluates the economic benefits that NGVs offers Bolivia. (9.)

Instead of investing in NGV conversions (or an entire new regional industry based on NGVs), biodiesel (Palm Oil?) or an improved Bolivian refinery, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has offered to trade 150,000 barrels of diesel a week for a large portion of Bolivia’s food exports. (10.) Even if priced at $10 per barrel delivered, this would equal 6 million dollars each month of Bolivia's food.

Part VI. Conclusion: Cars Are Toxic to New Democracy and Sustainability

Cars kill everything: animals, people, pedestrian enjoyment/security, biking, forests, and eventually the planet. Worst of all is that cars are the scouts of the capitalists and the engineers of Yankee Imperialism. The people in the USA are hopelessly brainwashed by their own hype – plugged into their I-Pods and pulled along on a Fantasy Island Tour of car washes and drive-in fast food. So called radical leaders in the poor countries present the masses with few comprehensible programs and subtle promises of economic growth with socialist prosperity -  and so everyone tags along hitching a ride on the exhaust of the elite, on the road to oblivion. The only option that leads to sustainability (of the culture and the ecology – NOT! Economic growth as some groups would misconstrue things) is for people to seize control of their transport design, their lives… their future. (11.)

For a well-developed program that creates a structure where people can solve their problems as they move toward sustainability, see:

 http://bolivia.indymedia.org/es/2006/01/25916.shtml

Or read the excerpt below:

Criteria for Anti-Imperialist Governments:

A Minimum Framework for Sustainability:

ECOSOLIDARITY - The Non-Fascist Response to Capitalism and Climate Catastrophe

1. Cancel all foreign debt to US and European banks.

2. Nationalize and then turn over to regional control all important industries.

3. Restrict imports through tariffs and trade preferences for friendly countries.

4. Boycott the USA dollar, hold your reserve currencies in gold, silver, platinum or Euros until a revolutionary currency or a Liberated Block SDR is available.

5. Eliminate regressive labor, pension and minimum wage legislation.

 6. Deport the IMF, their agreements, and all USA government or commercial agents.

7. Impose austerity (severe taxes) on the rich. 

8. Abolition/prohibition of all genetically modified organisms (GMOs) (and high restrictions on research); abolition/prohibition on toxic chemicals and the overuse of agricultural chemicals. Support regional agriculture research and seed production.

9. End the Expansion of Mass Transit and utilize ration coupons for transit options.

10. No private cars in urban areas; motorized transport in urban areas primarily for business deliveries, the handicapped and elderly.

11. High fuel taxes (2-4 dollars per gallon) on private fuel sales. High vehicle registration/disposal fees on all private vehicles.

12. Abolition/prohibition on corporate business structures employing more than 100 people.

13. Beyond these restraints on transport, economic concentration and toxic materials we believe that a democratic and sustainable government will reduce imports, end dependency and invest in the localized production of basic needs goods (food, water, energy, building materials and all of the tools required to produce each of these necessities.). This will employ all of the people.

14. The sign that a sane government is operating will be seen when the workers are given the factories they work in and people the homes they live in – debt free. Once that is done and food is prioritized we won’t have to worry about economics.

What is novel and truthful about this program is that it would work for 8 billion people.

No other plan can make this claim.

The key to reducing waste and equalizing incomes is to utilize ration coupons and to charge for services (like water, power, garbage, schools and health care) according to a sliding scale. Everyone would receive monthly coupons for transport, basic foods, utilities and medicines. Home ownership would be very cheap as land trusts would capture increased speculative values and yearly community-issued coupons for basic building supplies would make improvements and maintenance cheap. The charges for basic levels of water, power, medicine, health care and garbage/sanitation would be about equal to the coupons received by households. Those wanting to consume more would pay steeply increasing rates. Those people who consume less than the basic levels could sell their coupons on the open market – though the coupons would be numbered to control excess graft.

The major expense of non-farm families would be food. Community councils could grant temporary emergency  rate relief in special circumstances – such as: a severe cold spell where energy consumption goes up, a widow with many children, or say a company that lost its bio-diesel generator and needs to buy extra electricity. Flexibility and a joy of learning will be important to the success of experiments in New Democracy and Sustainability:

We welcome comment and challenges to the Ecosolidarity Program from Marxists, Liberals, Libertarians and anyone interested in reducing economic impacts on the planet and surviving global warming.

NOTES (Word Count: 5644 6079 )

1. The Insanity of Cars and Capitalism:

a.) Though Eric Fromm squirmed about in his conclusions, his analysis fits well with the view that cars are the key reinforcing mechanism of capitalism. They are crucial to the creation of the structures (suburbia and travel) that shape our lives and dreams. But they create pathological relations. Fromm recognized the personality disorders associated with capitalism: the authoritarian personality; alienation; obsessive individualism and the "having" mode of life. For Fromm the way we live, work and organize together greatly influences how we develop our mental and physical health and our happiness. He questioned the sanity of a society which covets property over humanity: A society that values submission and domination more than self-determination and self-actualization. He stressed the need for a decentralized and libertarian form of socialism as a remedy for capitalism's disease. The car and capitalism are wholly about privilege and personal power over things: time, location, death...

b.) 1. CHINA:  December 2003 issue of Energy for Sustainable Development. "The transport sector currently accounts for only 7 per cent of China’s energy consumption with only one car for every 290 people (from 1975 to 1995, growing from around 0.2 cars per thousand people to just over 3 cars per thousand people). This contrasts with one car for every 12 people worldwide and one for every 2 persons in the US. Given a projected population of 1.5 billion by 2015, if only 10 per cent of the population of China achieves incomes and car ownership comparable to that of developed nations, the stock of cars could increase by some 40 to 60 million. Between the late 1970s and 2001, China’s overall fleet of motor vehicles other than two-wheelers increased 10-fold… In 2001 China identified auto manufacturing as one of seven “pillar industries” of the Chinese economy and announced a five-year plan to implement a primarily domestic industry that could offer a Chinese family car at a price that would encourage widespread ownership. Between 2000 and 2004, production of passenger cars in China jumped from 605,000 to 2.33 million. In October 2004, China’s Ministry of Communication announced that the nation’s freeways had reached 30,000 kilometers, placing it behind only the United States… a large portion of these roads had been toll roads."

According to Daniel Sperling, a professor of engineering and environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis (Director of  Institute of Transportation Studies), motorization is soaring everywhere, with the fastest growth occurring in Asia and Latin America. The number of motor vehicles other than two-wheelers in the world is expected to double in the next 15 years to 1.3 billion. All over China, municipal governments have begun to suppress or prohibit the use of bicycles in certain places… this is a big controversy. Emission levels of Chinese autos are similar to those of cars used in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s; these cars emit 10-20 times more pollution than cars currently used in Western countries. According to the foundation, 40% of autos and 70% of taxis in Beijing fail to meet basic Western emission standards.

c.) The World Watch Institute's annual "State of the World" (2006) report notes that China's economy has averaged a 9.5 percent growth rate. Last year, the country consumed 26 percent of the world's crude steel, 32 percent of the rice, 37 percent of the cotton and 47 percent of the cement. It says that soaring oil and other commodities prices show the strains on the world's resource base because of demands from India and China.

d.) EUROPE: Transport:  An efficient and flexible transport system is essential for our economy and our quality of life. But the current transport system poses significant and growing threats to the environment and human health, and even defeats its own objectives (‘too much traffic kills traffic’). The drastic growth in road transport and aviation is the main driver behind this development. The sector is the fastest growing consumer of energy and producer of greenhouse gases in the EU. Technology and fuel improvements have resulted in marked decreases of emissions of certain pollutants. Yet urban air quality in most European cities is still poor. Roads and railways are cutting natural and agricultural areas in ever-smaller pieces, threatening the existence of wild plants and animals. Traffic noise causes human health problems, and over 100 people die on the EU’s roads every day on average. Transport policies recognise the need to restrain transport growth and to improve the market shares of the various transport modes. Fair and efficient pricing, better targeted investments, and spatial planning are some of the policy tools that can help to achieve this. Road is the least safe transport mode (road accidents represent the main cause of death for persons under 45). Aviation and rail are the safest transport modes. For information on the growing problem of traffic-related fatalities, see “Vehicular Manslaughter: The Global Epidemic of Traffic Deaths,” EHP 112:A628-A631 (2004).

e. Love affair; http://www.economist.com/surveys/displayStory.cfm?story_id=163331&tranMode=none

As families become more prosperous, one of the first things they want is a car (see chart 1). The income elasticity of car ownership is roughly two: each 1% increase in average household income means a 2% increase in the number of cars. In Mexico, the number of private vehicles has risen by 30% since 1991, despite growing hardly at all in the depression year of 1995. In Seoul, streets where traffic flowed freely in 1990 were hopelessly tangled by 1996 as the number of cars more than doubled. “The love affair with the car and all the convenience it brings is the dominant mindset,” says Anwar Fazal, an official with the United Nations Development Programme in Malaysia. This is just as true in rich countries. Although populations in America and Europe are growing only slowly or not at all, the average household contains fewer and fewer people, so the number of households has been rising rapidly. Separate households generally make separate shopping trips and drive separately to social events, increasing the total number of journeys. Among families of working age, a growing proportion has two earners, generating yet more travel to work. This helps explain why there seems to be no limit to car saturation. In 1997, some 198m cars, motorcycles and light trucks were registered in America, well over one for every licensed driver. Italy has 600 private vehicles per 1,000 people.

Cars have made it possible to decentralise economic activity and to decouple residential choices from job, school and shopping choices…. Britain’s shift from local schooling to parental choice, which means that many young children attend schools a long way from their homes, relied on widespread car ownership—and because of that shift, in turn, nearly one-fifth of car journeys during the morning peak now involve taking kids to school. In America, the near-universal ownership of private cars has caused shoppers to abandon the neighbourhood store, first for the nearby shopping centre, then for the indoor mall, then, in the 1990s, for the “regional” mall with hundreds of stores serving residents within a 50km radius—almost all of whom arrive by car. In the EU in the 1990s, the number of passenger-kilometres traveled in private cars has been rising by over 2% a year, whereas other forms of ground transport have stagnated. In Britain, more than two-thirds of all journeys to work are now made by car, up from about half two decades ago (see chart 2). In America, 64% of workers commuted alone by car in 1980; ten years later, the figure had risen to 73%, and apart from a handful of big cities, public commuter transport had more or less vanished. Freight, too, has shifted to the road; Europe’s lorry loadings have trebled since 1970, whereas railway freight traffic has declined (see chart 3). On an average working day in 1996, the Netherlands had 50 motorway hold-ups at least 2km long…many people submit themselves to stalled traffic or jam-packed trains quite voluntarily, in return for a bigger house or a pleasant suburban garden. In Britain, for example, the average commuting distance has risen by a stunning 50% over the past two decades.

f.) BOSTON; USA: Car ownership is outstripping population growth nationally, regionally and locally. While the nation’s population has increased 80% since 1950, car ownership has increased by 383%.  The increase in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) due to rising automobile ownership rates and dispersed development patterns is ultimately unsustainable and constitutes an immediate environmental threat, as gasoline-fueled vehicles increase air and water pollution. It is estimated that for every gallon of gas burned by a vehicle, 25 pounds of C02 are released into the air. Annually, combustion-engine vehicles emit almost as many tons in pollutants as they weigh. At the time of the 1970 Census, 45% of Boston households owned one vehicle.  By 2000, that rate had increased to 65%, with a growing number of households owning two and three cars. In 2000, almost 85% of households in Metro Boston had at least one automobile

g.) INDIA: Geographically only a third the size of China, it too has more than 1 billion people, and it now has 8 million motor vehicles. A land-hungry country projected to add 515 million more people by 2050 cannot afford to cover valuable cropland with roads and parking lots. There simply is not enough land in China, India, and other densely populated countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, and Mexico to support auto-centered transportation systems and to feed their people. To reach USA levels of car ownership there would need to be 100 times as many cars in India as there were in 2001.

h.) GUATEMALA: - Waiting for the next car-free day  in Guatemala City.

http://www.itdp.org/STe/STe3/STe3_Latin_America.html

Car ownership has grown at a startling pace of 10% each year in Guatemala City, with most of the growth in auto use coming at the expense of collective transport. Private vehicles are now making more that 23% of all trips in the city.

i.) Latin American Megacities and Transport Problems 

http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu23me/uu23me0g.htm

j.) Increased motorization also includes an explosion in two-wheel motorized vehicles in many countries, pulling riders and revenue away from public-transit systems (clogging the streets in Asia the way cars and mini-buses do in Latin America). In nearly all cities worldwide, public transit is losing market share. The outcome in poor, densely populated cities with limited roadways for motor vehicles has been “far worse traffic congestion and pollution than exist in the United States, despite the fact that these cities have a fraction of the car ownership of the United States. The challenge of building roadways is more than just a question of economics and financing. Only a small minority of people in the developing world own cars and benefit from massive road-building budgets, In contrast, the vast majority suffer from increasing traffic congestion, noise, and pollution. Worse is that this large majority suffers from the separation of destinations available only to auto users--a general fragmentation of society and destination opportunities. -- Sperling and Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, Spring 2004 Access magazine.

k.) http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2849  Jakarta is one of the world’s fastest-growing cities. United Nations estimates put the city’s 1995 population at 11.5 million, a dramatic increase from only 530,000 in 1930. Mohammad Dannisworo of the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) says 8.5 million people live within the city’s boundaries at night and an additional 5.5 million migrate via 2.5 million private cars, 3.8 million motorcycles and 255,000 public transportation vehicles into the city during the day. This daily parade of combustion engines clogs the city streets and thickens the air, making Jakarta the world’s third-most-polluted city after Bangkok and Mexico City.

In addition to this, Mumbai is also one of the noisiest cities in the world, a key factor being the considerable number of vehicles on the city’s streets. There are more than 500,000 private automobiles on Mumbai streets. Despite a substantial public transit system, congestion in the metropolitan area continues. As Business Week reports, “After years of neglect, combined with helter-skelter growth, Bombay is falling apart. Its suburban train service carries six million passengers a day, which works out to 570 per train car, nearly three times their capacity.” “Public transport in Mumbai has reached a point of almost complete gridlock,” says Gordon Feller of the Urban Age Institute. “The emission standards of vehicles in the city are very bad and the local government is shy about talking about alternatives because it doesn’t know when it will implement them.”

l.)  The Pentagon Global Warming Study is a sobering document. The USA is preparing to police the world as global warming causes chaos. Oil exporting nations are particularly vulnerable to US imperialist designs.

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/world-bank-pentagon-warn-cli

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1153513,00.html

GLOBAL WARMING LINKS:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2005/ann/msu2005uw-pg.gif

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2005/ann/st-global-jan-dec-pg.gif

http://madison.indymedia.org/newswire/display_any/9154

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2005/ann/Reg110Dv00Elem02_01122005_pg.gif

http://www.mnforsustain.org/climate_snowmelt_dewpoints_minnesota_neuman_table_figure1.htm

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/face_011506.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/national/19enviro.htm

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0111_060111_plant_methane_2.html

world.  http://www.nature.com/nsu/030929/030929-8.html

http://www.iisd.ca/media/climate_atmosphere.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3200450.stm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1684378,00.html

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1120-03.htm

2. Costs for Poor Country Oil Importers:

a.) Natural Resources Forum, JNRF 25:2, May 2001 Lloyd Wright: Latin American busways and external costs in Santiago, Chile indicates that "transportation costs residents $5.7 billion, or approximately 27.5% of Gross Regional Product" (Zegras, 1997). Perhaps most affected by Latin America's spiraling car-ownership levels are the segments of society with the fewest options to protect themselves against the growing tide of pollution. Informal workers ply their trades and goods along Latin America's busiest streets in order to remain a small step ahead of absolute poverty (see Figure 2). Many work 12-16 hour days only a breath away from tailpipes emitting particulates, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides at levels well beyond the maximum recommended by the WHO. The World Bank recently calculated that the equivalent of 2% of Colombia’s GDP is spent moving people and goods chaotically within Bogota. The air quality and health problems are not limited to just mega-cities, such as Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. Cities perched upon the northern Andes, such as Bogota (Colombia), Quito (Ecuador), and La Paz (Bolivia) suffer contaminant levels well above standards set by the World Health Organization, especially with regard to carbon monoxide and particulate matter. Due to climatic factors and altitudes ranging from 2500 to 4000 meters above sea level, these cities are particularly susceptible to elevated pollution levels. Petrol and diesel fuels do not burn effectively at such altitudes and leave high levels of unburned contaminants. Thus, as residents must breathe in more air to receive an adequate oxygen supply, they are also absorbing more contaminants. This leads to increased rates of respiratory illness and medical costs.

In Mexico City, where breathing the air is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day, an estimated 6,400 premature deaths occur per year due to vehicle emissions (Bartone et al., 1994). An estimated 29% of children currently have recorded unhealthy levels of lead in their blood. Likewise, the extreme levels of air contaminants in Sao Paulo and Santiago have routinely forced closings of schools and outdoor activities. The added health costs from congestion and elevated contaminant levels are a price few cities in Latin America are capable of bearing without a significant economic penalty.

b.) Peru Energy and car imports: Net Oil Imports (2004E): 66,880 bbl/d; at 50 dollars a barrel this costs Peru about 1.3 billion dollars a year just for fuel in addition to the fuel produced domestically. The costs of importing cars, lubricants and their replacement parts (for refineries too) adds considerably to the expense of private vehicles. With high rates of extreme poverty spending money for the rich to have transport luxuries would appear murderously cruel to the poor indigenous people who are so often the victims of car accidents as they trek down Peru's roads looking for food or work.

c.) Estimates compiled by the Danish Road Directorate in a study financed by the IDB, at least 100,000 people are killed in traffic accidents and 1.2 million are injured each year in Latin America. The cost of these accidents, measured in lost productivity, hospital bills and other factors, is estimated at $30 billion. http://www.iadb.org/idbamerica/archive/stories/2000/eng/jan00e/e200i.htm

3. a.) zorpia.com/ecosolidarity;  Solidarityeconomics.blogspot.com;  mer130.tripod.com

b.) Only a few countries like Nepal and Bolivia still have this as an easy option… the world is waiting – If a government redistributes income, then demand for imported goods rises, inflation increases and the currency suffers. In Chile (1970-72) inflation and currency problems were acerbated by US and corporate sabotage of the economy, but it was also a problem in Nicaragua and Cuba. Venezuela has escaped this problem mainly because of rising oil prices and modest increases in taxation. Another policy would be to tax the rich much more (confiscatory levels?) and rather than distribute cash or large increases in wages, the government could plow most of the money into reducing the cost of living: free schools, health care, subsidized (or de-marketized) housing, less crime, cheap basic rates for electricity and other utilities, and labor laws requiring double time wages for working more than 30 hours a week. A nation aspiring to equality and sustainability has no choice but to get rid of the rich and prioritize spending on education for a solidarity economy.

4. Selected Notes from “Private Cars are for Fascists: Mass Transit for Fools:”

1. Road Safety: http://travel.state.gov/travel/tips/safety/safety_1179.html An estimated 1.17 million deaths occur each year worldwide due to road accidents. The majority of these deaths, about 70 percent, occur in developing countries. Sixty-five percent of deaths involve pedestrians and 35 percent of pedestrian deaths are children. Over 10 million people are crippled or injured each year.

2. Killed by Car Accidents : Highway fatalities account for more than 94% of all transportation deaths. There were an estimated 6,289,000 car accidents in the US in 1999. There were about 3.4 million injuries and 41,611 people killed in auto accidents in 1999. The total number of people killed in highway crashes in 2001 was 42,116, compared to 41,945 in 2000.

*** Final Notes (For Cars are for Fascists – Mass Transit is for Fools):

a. And now in the name of car/transport safety, we have surveillance cameras everywhere, with robots (computers) designed to issue traffic citations - or shoot kill orders. If this is not creeping fascism and Big Brother in the name of car safety... what is ? Considering that cars have killed more people than all wars combined (with WW II excluded ?) the whole concept of car safety is quite Orwellian.

b. As for the evils of single issue campaigns : There should be no denying that the private ownership of cars is at the base of most of the evils that we protest against. If you are protesting strip mining in Virginia or Venezuela, odds are that some of this ore goes to building cars and their world - either the materials required, the energy to build them or the electricity that could be produced with oil if all the cars were not so hungry. If you are protesting a timber sale, odds are that much of the wood cut is to be used for suburban sprawl, which is made possible by the car and by the wealth produced by the system of endless ( ?) economic growth that it supports. If you are protesting US imperialist wars - or the brutality and negligence of the Nigerian government - odds are that these are wars to fuel cars or wars of domination to perpetuate the Great powers that be (US - UK - EU - CHINA) and to keep making, loving and accommodating car culture and Motor Power ! There are many more examples if you just think. The car is by no means the only problem that we face. Apathy, selfish materialism, and hopelessness are serious issues. But if we could just slow things down a bit then reason might catch its breath and catch up to the showdown with our rush to oblivion... (http://colombia.indymedia.org/news/2006/01/36879.php)

c.) The Ecological Effects of Roads -- Oil and the Future (http://www.eco-action.org/dt/awaycars.html)

d.) The Ecological Effects of Roads;  By Reed Noss, PhD; http://www.eco-action.org/dt/roads.html

The following article previously appeared in "Killing Roads" under the name "Diamondback". It remains the definitive summary of the effects of roads on biological diversity. An extensive bibliography was prepared for the piece and is available from PAW NET, 117 Main St., Brattleboro, VT 05301, 802-257-4878 .

e.) The Importance of the Car to the Modern Economy; http://www.eco-action.org/dt/carecon.html

5.) Problems with Mass Transit :

a.) Problems with Mass Transit in Latin America; Natural Resources Forum, JNRF 25:2, May 2001; Latin American Busways: Moving People Rather than Cars; by Lloyd Wright,  Director, Latin America Institute for Transportation & Development Policy;  www.itdp.org

b.) USA and EUROPE: [Though we disagree with this article’s support for private cars, their critique of the waste and non-viability of mass transit is useful]

Table One -- Changes in USA Economy and Lifestyles, 1935-2000  % Change

                                                         1935      1960       2000           35-00

Average household size                     3.8       3.4              2.7          -29%

Workers per household                       .84      1.04            1.25         +48%

Miles of auto driving per capita       1,960     4,000        9,770       +399%

Miles of driving per household        7,500    13,600     26,300       +249%

Auto passenger miles per capita       4,290     7,940      15,830       +269%

Miles of transit riding per capita        380         210          170           -56%

Personal income per capita (2000$)  5,800    11,600     29,900      +414%

Income minus transport costs           5,200     10,000     24,200      +362%

Household sizes have declined, which led to a parallel decline in vehicle occupancies. The decline in carpooling has little to do with sprawl and everything to do with smaller families. Second, workers per household have increased by nearly 50 percent as more women have entered the workplace. Increased automobility means place of employment is no longer the most important criterion for locating one's residence… Households with more than one worker have a hard time locating their residence in a place convenient for both workers to walk or ride transit to work… Driving per household has increased by nearly 250 percent and passenger miles per capita have increased by nearly 270 percent.  Fourth, transit wasn't very important in 1935 and it is even less important today. Transit provided just 8 percent of motorized passenger miles of surface travel in 1935... It provides just 1 percent of motorized surface travel today. Transit doesn't do a whole lot better in European or Asian cities today. As shown in table three, the average resident of Stockholm and Tokyo ride transit about 3,500 miles per year, while residents of London, Munich, and Hong Kong go about 2,400 miles per year. But most other cities, including Paris, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam, are no better than U.S. cities were in 1920.

Table Three:  Miles Per Capita in 1990

Urban Area      Transit   Auto Driving

Amsterdam          663           3,977

Copenhagen       1,490          6,764

Frankfort            1,948          5,893

Hamburg           1,284           5,061

Hong Kong        2,365            493

London              2,361         3,892

New York            834          8,317

Paris                  1,325          3,459

Singapore          1,734          1,864

Stockholm         3,577          4,638

Tokyo                3,438          2,103

Vienna               1,519          8,361

Zurich                2,025          5,197

Source: Kenworthy & Laube, International Sourcebook of Auto dependency in Cities, U. Colorado Press, 1999

c.) In 2005, the Dominican Republic cancelled a high tech subway system under construction in Santo Domingo after people discovered that a bus system would cost only a fraction of the full costs of the subway.

6. a.) New Internationalist; "Poor and Rich - the Facts." March 1999.

b.) If the whole world consumed at Middle Class levels, prices would rise, destruction of the earth would rise and pollution levels would double or quadruple. War would be an eventual certainty.

c.) Per Capita Car Ownership: CAR DATA:  CARS Per 1000 People

c.1. EU:  varied from 230 to  430 in 1980, now many countries are above 600 cars per 1000 people.

c.2. In 2000, the Bolivian cites of La Paz and  Santa Cruz had 80 cars per 1000 people; COCHABAMBA had 10 per 1000, from: BOLIVIAN Instituto Nacional de Estadistica: INE 

c.3. In 1995, Chilean urban car ownership was 373 per 1000. The same source mentions 110 cars per 1000 people in 1995, but this did not include rural vehicles. They only represent 10 percent of total cars but the rural areas hold almost half the people. Correcting this omission would bring Peruvian car ownership down to 50 or 60 per 1000 people.

c.4. Ownership Rate for cars: Global Average is 12 per 1000 people (2000). In the period 1992-96: (car ownership per 1000 people) in the USA, 500; Indonesia, 44.8 ; Philippines, 16.9; India, 18.7; China, 4.5; Egypt, 34.0; South Africa, 45.6; Costa Rica, 44.5; Brazil, 45.8; Argentina, 71.3; Bolivia,  23.1; Paraguay, 60.0; Colombia,  63.0. Source: IADB, 1998

c.5. Private car ownership in Latin America has leapt ahead of supporting infrastructure. Latin America is now home to urbanization rates of up to 70% and vehicle ownership rates three times that of Asia (excluding Japan), averaging about 90 vehicles per 1000 people in 1990 (World Bank, 1997). With GDP levels in many Latin American countries now exceeding $3000 per capita, automobile purchases are taking off at an accelerated pace. From 1970 to 1990, the Latin American vehicle fleet grew by about 250%, reaching 37 million vehicles (World Bank, 1997). Much of this growth consists of imported, vehicles. Emissions from such older vehicles are several times greater than those of newer models.

c.6.  Rising oil prices and carbon taxes, if levied, will make it even more difficult in the future for poor or rural residents to buy cars. Rural residents will have to continue to meet their travel needs much as they do today, mainly by a combination of non-motorised modes, and for longer trips, bus and rail travel, if available. In the Ecosolidarity Program cooperative (worker or worker-community owned and operated) truck transport enterprises would be subsidized to make rural areas more profitable and liveable.

c.7.   http://www.scotiacapital.com/English/bns_econ/bns_auto.pdf; CHINA: In 2005, households accounted for more than 70% of overall car purchases, up from only 45% five years ago. Significant growth remains, as car ownership in China is still among the lowest in the world - 6 cars per 1,000 people, compared with a G7 average of 0.73 vehicles per capita. Volkswagen — the traditional market share leader in China — and its joint-venture partners, are the most negatively impacted by the shift to low-end models. SIAC VW — the manufacturer of the Passat, Santana and Polo — saw its sharedrop from 14% in 2004 to less than 10% through November 2005, and has been surpassed by SAIC GM — the maker of Cadillac, Buick and Sail. Hyundai and Chinese carmakers Chery and Gelly (who offer affordable small cars). Sales in India will accelerate. After advancing at 17% per annum between 2002 and 2004, sales in India moderated to 7% in 2005. Higher vehicle prices — linked to tighter emission standards — and higher fuel prices as well as rising interest rates restrained demand in 2005. Growth is set to pick up, with economic activity continuing to advance in excess of 7% and medium to longer-term auto demand drivers still firmly in place. India passenger car penetration is 7 cars for every 1,000 people, well below the Asian average (excluding Japan) of 19 cars per 1,000 people. Furthermore, the 20-64 year age group — the most active portion of the pop- pace and estimates suggest that 24 million households will be able to afford a new car by 2007. India’s car fleet was only 7.3 million at the end of 2004.

c.8. Accurate analysis of the transport and energy sectors is difficult in many poor countries because these are not considered a priority, the left governments horde and hide their data, and many corporations and universities choose not to fund such research.  Send us detailed data on Bolivian household expenditures (and expectations), imports, exports, and manufacturing (broken down by regions, states, gender, ethnicity, class and other relevant factors) then we can work up a complete localization (new Economics) program for Bolivia (or anywhere else). CONTACTS: Jase Martinique; revolutionary@mail.com

7. a.) Key indicators for the LAC region (mostly from 1996) 

Road fatalities- Deaths/100,000 pop.- Deaths/10,000car- Cars/1000- GNP per capita

(US$)

Brazil            26,903         16                     10                      162              $4,859

Colombia     7,874            21                    55                       38               $2,326

Argentina     6,473             18                    12                      155              $9,066

Venezuela    2,563             11                    58                        20               3,555

Peru             2,163              8                    25                        36               2,622

Chile            1,925            13                    11                      113               4,890

Cuba            1,424            12                    20                        64               -

Ecuador        1,112             9                     21                       45               1,606

Uruguay         693              21                    33                       65              6,255

Total: approximately 51,000 dead;  Source: IADB, 1998

b.) The preventable plague; 100,000 people die in traffic accidents in Latin America each year—a number that could easily be cut in half ; By Paul Constance;  http://www.iadb.org/idbamerica/archive/stories/2000/eng/jan00e/e200i.htm

A traffic accident has to be truly horrific to make headlines in Latin America. The danger of driving on most Latin American roads has become a macabre cliché—and a drain on the region’s societies and economies. According to estimates compiled by the Danish Road Directorate in a study financed by the IDB, at least 100,000 people are killed in traffic accidents and 1.2 million are injured each year in Latin America. The cost of these accidents, measured in lost productivity, hospital bills and other factors, is estimated at $30 billion. Traffic accidents occur far more frequently in Latin America than in most industrialized countries. For every 10,000 vehicles in circulation, the average Latin American country registers around 18 traffic fatalities per year. In the United States, Canada, Japan and several European countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED), the average is only 2.4 fatalities per 10,000 vehicles. But the most singular phenomenon on Latin America’s streets is the number of pedestrians who are hit and killed by vehicles. About half of all traffic accidents take place in the region’s cities, and between one-half and one-third of those killed are pedestrians—not vehicle drivers or passengers.

8. Costs: A comprehensive methodology for determining all of the costs of cars is found at:

http://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm66.htm#_Toc18284946

a.) A 1999 study in Quito showed that the health and loss of productivity costs alone resulted in a US$27 million economic loss to the city (Jurado and Southgate, 1999). Traffic congestion alone is estimated to cost Lima, Peru $210 million each year (Iterrugui, 1996). A broader study of total internal and external costs in Santiago, Chile indicates that "transportation costs residents $5.7 billion, or approximately 27.5% of Gross Regional Product" (Zegras, 1997).

b.) Often confined to informal settlements at the periphery, low-income urban dwellers are now

spending up to 40% of their income and a third of their long working day trying to access markets, services, or informal economic opportunities in the city centres. Paulo, the typical commuter from a poor area of the city spends more than two hours per day traveling (Thomson, 1994). [ Editor: the solution, obviously, being to establish jobs (factories, services and crafts) much nearer to the slums where poor people live.]

c.)  Thus, another lesson from the Latin American busways is that simple, ingenious, low-technology solutions are often of much greater value than more complex and costly alternatives. The rapidity of exclusive bus lanes has helped cities like Curitiba and Quito attract significant public ridership from even the car-owning sectors of the population. [ The wealthy]."

d.). "Subways, while clearly relevant to densely populated areas with little room for surface infrastructure, are probably not the definitive solution for most cities. At $90 million to $100 million/km constructed (Rabinovitch and Leitmann, 1993), underground systems can present unrealistic financial demands on cash-strapped cities in developing nations. Alternatively, the Latin American busways have been delivered at costs ranging from $1 to $3 million/km (TCRP, 1999). Thus, a busway network can cover as much as 100 times a city's area at the same cost as a subway (see Figure 9). The lower cost of busway systems may have significant ramifications for cities with populations under one million inhabitants. Such secondary cities have traditionally not been financially able to develop highly integrated systems that adequately cover their area. The busway, or at least many of its low-cost design features, are within reach even for smaller metropolitan areas, depending upon city densities and routing options. Only two underground systems in the world are reportedly recovering costs through fare-box collection, Sao Paulo and Hong Kong (TCRP, 1999). The Quito trolley-bus which charges a modest fare of $0.15 is able to fully cover all operating expenses. Some underground systems and above-ground rail systems, such as Bangkok's new Skytrain, have come under criticism for fares that exclude less advantaged segments of society. At $0.80 to $1.60 per trip, the Skytrain is not an option for much of Bangkok's poor. In turn, a sort of transit apartheid is created, where subsidized state-of-the-art technology whisks the wealthier segments of society about the city in comfort while the poor are relegated to the rigors of under-invested surface transport. By comparison, the relatively low-cost, one-fare system that applies to the entire urban area of Curitiba means that the average commuter only spends about 10% of personal income on transport (Birk and Zegras, 1993). [ONLY SPENDS 10 percent of income!!!].

e.)  Quito's first 11.2 km of the trolley-bus system cost a  modest $57 million, partially financed with loans from the Government of Spain and partially from local sources (Arias and Wright, 1999). Bogota is investing some  $280 million in an initial 41 km system; the costs include upgrading roadways as

exclusive bus lanes, stations, maintenance and parking facilities, and exchange areas to handle system integration with feeder routes (Rodriguez, 2000). The Quito cooperative is currently seeking nearly $9 million in funding for the 42 articulated buses required on the Eco-Via line (Nuñez, H., 2000).

f.)  Los Angeles has accumulated a $7 billion debt on its subway and other rail projects. Fare recovery is not nearly sufficient to cover the annual debt servicing costs of nearly $360 million per year (Economist, 2000).

g.)  Natural Resources Forum, JNRF 25:2, May 2001 Lloyd Wright: Latin American busways: "despite the installation of busway systems and complementary options, car ownership levels are still likely to continue rising, along with resulting air contaminant levels and associated health and  environmental costs. The goal of a clean and healthy urban living space for all is still far from being realized."

h.) A wide variety of markets and externality costs in USA;   http://afo.sandelman.ca/cc1.html#III;   http://www.distributiondrive.com/Article4.html