10 Essential Areas of Action

The New Economy Working Group has identified ten essential areas of action to advance the transformation to a New Economy:

1. The New Economy Story: Articulate a framing story of the possibility and potential of an living Earth economy that supports a healthy biosphere, a prosperous and meaningful life for all people, and vibrant, democratic communities of place. [See What's Your Story?]
     
2. Living Wealth Indicators: Replace GDP and other financial indicators with indicators of human, social, and natural systems health as the basis for evaluating economic performance. We get what we measure, so measure what we want: healthy children, families, communities, and natural systems. Beyond a given level of income, equality is the most important determinant of well-being. The human future depends on reducing aggregate human consumption to balance human consumption and the regenerative capacity of Earth's living systems.
     
3. Real Wealth Money System: Replace the current system of money creation and allocation designed to build private financial fortunes for the few with a new money system designed to support an equitable and sustainable allocation of real resources to meet the needs of all. Money created from nothing unrelated to the production of anything of real value is phantom wealth. When phantom wealth is created for exclusive private benefit, it is a form of theft. Wall Street institutions specialize in creating phantom wealth for the exclusive private benefit of Wall Street CEOs and financiers. In a real wealth money system, money creation will be decentralized and the financial system will be structured and operated as a regulated public utility devoted to meeting the financial needs of Main Street.
         
4. Shared Prosperity: Promote public values and policies that 1) encourage all persons to contribute to society through productive work whether paid or unpaid, and 2) support the equitable and inclusive distribution of income and ownership. Economic democracy (the equitable distribution of income and ownership) is an essential foundation of political democracy, the physical and mental health of people, and a sustainable human relationship with the environment.
        
5. Living Enterprises: Restructure existing rules and incentives to favor locally owned public benefit enterprises for which service to community is the primary business purpose and profit is a means not an end. Such enterprises will generally be organized as cooperative, worker or community owned enterprises. [See Marjorie Kelly, Keeping Wealth Local.]
           
6. Corporate Accountability: Change the rules relating to corporate charters and political participation to subordinate the  rights and powers of artificial legal entities to the rights and powers of real living persons. The only legitimate reason a public body to issue a corporate charter is to serve a public purpose. A corporation's public purpose is properly specified in it charter and subject to periodic public review. To maintain the integrity of the democratic political system in the face of aggregations of corporate power it is proper that corporations be prohibited from political participation. It is their role to honor the rules established by democratically elected bodies, not to make them.  
      
7. Global Rules for Regional Self-Reliance: Rewrite global and national market rules to support a planetary system of self-reliant, self-organizing bio-regional economies based on locally owned social enterprises. The rules and institutions of the global economy give free reign to elite financial interest to monopolize global finance, markets, resources, and intellectual profit for their exclusive private benefit. Action to optimize human, community, and natural systems health depends on localizing decision making within a system of global cooperation and sharing.  
       
8. Local Living Economies: Advance regional and local economic development and land use policies that favor locally owned social enterprises and household production, roll back sprawl, minimize auto dependence, strengthen community, and rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity to create local economies that function as living subsystems of their local ecosystems. All the many elements of the New Economy come together in place-based communities that are learning to manage their economies as living subsystems of their local ecosystems.   
       
9. Peace Economy: Convert from a war economy to a peace economy. People and planet can no longer afford war and the use of conventional military force against armed threats from terrorists who blend in with civilian populations is largely counterproductive. The national and global interest is best served by dismantling military establishments and reallocating resource to meet real needs. 
      
10. Popular Education and Media:  Translate the New Economy message of hope and possibility into the language of varied popular constituencies and through popular education and media campaigns build public awareness of the imperative and potential for economic transformation to secure a better life for all and secure the future of our children for generations to come.

These changes shift the economic system’s defining value from money to life, its locus of economic decision making from global to local institutions, its favored dynamic from competition to cooperation, and its primary purpose from growing the individual financial fortunes of the few to building living community wealth to secure the health and well-being of everyone. It involves an epic choice for humanity.