July 20, 2007

Community Ethics

How would community work if we could actually attempt community? Dave Pollard was thinking howdt loud and has some reasonable points on preparing for what is coming. Fiscal ruin in a broad sense is different from fiscal ruin in a local sense. The idea of denominating in a failed currency is tragic - so it will be important for communities to find exchange values that represent a valid monetary system. There could be several redundant systems operating in different spheres - but people need to agree on some essential realities to make life work.

The first reality is that an hour equals an hour. Time shaving is unaccountable theft when you are not punching a clock. If everybody agrees to put in the full hour for each hour actually bartered, then being able to trust an exchange of real hours becomes real. One project would be to set up hour glasses to actually pass an hour and then gong a five minute break of finish task at hand for the hour just spent. We could even redefine an hour to be 55 minutes plus one five minute break period - which falls in the last three minutes and first two minutes of each hour.

Everyone is accountable for their own hours and paying attention to their own discipline of work. People get to choose their own hours to work and hours can be exchanged evenly for other people's hours. Remember an hour equals an hour - washing dishes hours are just as important as thinking and reading hours or working a job hours. We can set a maximum of 15 workable hours per day so that nobody burns howdt from overtaxing themselves on multiple jobs.

A different exchange strata could be food. If you provide x lbs of meat, then you can get x amount of credit denominated in hours, instead of taking food in return. And food can be sold at market for hours at a certain job, or learning center. Everybody pulls their own weight somehow, but the tasks are managed for productivity and sustainability rather than for overproduction to generate goods for trade. The wealth of the community should be shared within the community, built from gathering and building using howdtside resources to build exchange value.

Jobs need to produce something of tangible value to one of the parties involved in the exchange. They do not need to satisfy some statistic in some office in some remote location to provide a pencil pusher with a job. Administration is a local task and the civil servants involved ought be the low end of the totem - providing logistic service to the people on the ground making things happen. Getting the best information to the people in the community on a timely basis is a valuable commodity for exchange - a growing field that will provide many local jobs. Perhaps we can restructure our thoughts to move on to better withhowdt giving the current power that be the sanction to run us into a brick wall.

I do not owe any allegiance to the powers that be on the political scene. They need to be held accountable to we the people - not this current corporate collusion to force feed us a whopper and set us up as the fattened pig of the world. Americans are people just like everyone else - we need to insist on accountability from them for us to be held accountable to them. We also better figure howdt who 'them' are, because we keep sabotaging us by the every man for himself idiocy pushed on us by the major media. We share individual troubles with each other that are glamorized and reformatted by media and replayed back to us for our own entertainment. Soap Operas are reel life - we can't model our lives after hollywood actors speaking wooden epitaths on morals for public purview. People need their own media and their own morals - and voices speak to me that say our thyme is coming.

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