Courses of Action to Revolutionize our Economy, Politics, and Relationships with Nature and Each Other: Grassroots Solutions to Corporate Power
by Carrie Durkee and Jim Tarbell
Use the Grassroots Institute's study guide, Grassroots Solutions and Corporate Power, to educate your community on: the historic roots and current condition of our money-powered politics; our elite-based economy; our nationally alienated relationship with nature; our historically poor relations with each other; and how to make systemic change to our economic and political systems as well as our relationships with nature and each other. We learn from history, think strategically about the future, take collective action for further ideas and agitate for change. The AfD's publication Justice Rising: Grassroots Solutions to Corporate Power is the basic reading material for this course.
These workshops present practical directions that system change can take to create a world built on equal political participation, prosperity for all, a vibrant and strong environmental system and a global coming together of consciousness that benefits both people and the planet.
The first section of the course on money in democracy looks at how rich, white males established our political system to benefit their interests. Since the beginning, they have used money, courts, lobbying, think tanks, the revolving door and violence to ensure that public policy benefits them personally, rather than the common good. It talks about the rise of Wall Street and the takeover of our elections by the robber barons, beginning in 1896. The workshops educate on: getting money out of politics; instituting publicly financed elections; transparency; separation of corporations and state; fair, audited and verifiable elections; and an end to voter suppression. This section also includes groups implementing systemic political change, including Grassroots Solutions to Corporate Power, Move to Amend, the Sunlight Foundation and the National Election Defense Coalition.
The second section focuses on the economy, and looks at how wealthy London stockbrokers designed our economic system on self-serving, false assumptions and an irrational dependence on the market. It shows that market failures have caused our most severe global problems from inequality, ethnic and racial oppression to climate change, global pollution, and resource depletion. Learn here how public banks, the solidarity economy, public control of our money supply, localization, and ecological economics are the economic systems of the future. The Next System Project, The New Economy Coalition, the Solidarity Economy Network, and more are highlighted.
Section three on our environment outlines how our political and economic systems are destroying nature. Our grassroots solution is to understand that we are part of nature.
This section also looks at our need to reclaim our natural and cultural commons from corporate policy makers pushing privatization, as well as how agribusiness is destroying our soil and wasting our water. We cover the farmers and communities of the local food movement that are working to solve this problem by building more soil and protecting our water. We also discuss protecting ourselves from the corporatized health system by instigating universal health care. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Local Rules for Local Food, and Health Care Now! are all part of the solution.
The last section brings the global down to the human scale. It traces Wall Street’s take over of US imperial foreign policy and gives an overview of the global elite and the tools they use to maintain their dominance through corporate media and military violence. It covers the oppressive “free” trade agreements, and their use as global governance, along with the role the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
These are juxtaposed against a 5000-year timeline, which starts with peaceful, Mediterranean partnership cultures that date back thousands of years. That timeline then transverses through the decline of the first democratic cultures and the onslaught of the use of violence for social domination, into the rise of money power, and then revolving back around to the rise of
democracy, Age of Aquarius, and the rise of the Global People’s Movement. The study guide ends with the rise of Earth consciousness, world citizenry, International Worker’s Rights and the Rights of Mother Earth.
Use the Grassroots Institute's study guide, Grassroots Solutions and Corporate Power, to educate your community on: the historic roots and current condition of our money-powered politics; our elite-based economy; our nationally alienated relationship with nature; our historically poor relations with each other; and how to make systemic change to our economic and political systems as well as our relationships with nature and each other. We learn from history, think strategically about the future, take collective action for further ideas and agitate for change. The AfD's publication Justice Rising: Grassroots Solutions to Corporate Power is the basic reading material for this course.
These workshops present practical directions that system change can take to create a world built on equal political participation, prosperity for all, a vibrant and strong environmental system and a global coming together of consciousness that benefits both people and the planet.
The first section of the course on money in democracy looks at how rich, white males established our political system to benefit their interests. Since the beginning, they have used money, courts, lobbying, think tanks, the revolving door and violence to ensure that public policy benefits them personally, rather than the common good. It talks about the rise of Wall Street and the takeover of our elections by the robber barons, beginning in 1896. The workshops educate on: getting money out of politics; instituting publicly financed elections; transparency; separation of corporations and state; fair, audited and verifiable elections; and an end to voter suppression. This section also includes groups implementing systemic political change, including Grassroots Solutions to Corporate Power, Move to Amend, the Sunlight Foundation and the National Election Defense Coalition.
The second section focuses on the economy, and looks at how wealthy London stockbrokers designed our economic system on self-serving, false assumptions and an irrational dependence on the market. It shows that market failures have caused our most severe global problems from inequality, ethnic and racial oppression to climate change, global pollution, and resource depletion. Learn here how public banks, the solidarity economy, public control of our money supply, localization, and ecological economics are the economic systems of the future. The Next System Project, The New Economy Coalition, the Solidarity Economy Network, and more are highlighted.
Section three on our environment outlines how our political and economic systems are destroying nature. Our grassroots solution is to understand that we are part of nature.
This section also looks at our need to reclaim our natural and cultural commons from corporate policy makers pushing privatization, as well as how agribusiness is destroying our soil and wasting our water. We cover the farmers and communities of the local food movement that are working to solve this problem by building more soil and protecting our water. We also discuss protecting ourselves from the corporatized health system by instigating universal health care. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Local Rules for Local Food, and Health Care Now! are all part of the solution.
The last section brings the global down to the human scale. It traces Wall Street’s take over of US imperial foreign policy and gives an overview of the global elite and the tools they use to maintain their dominance through corporate media and military violence. It covers the oppressive “free” trade agreements, and their use as global governance, along with the role the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
These are juxtaposed against a 5000-year timeline, which starts with peaceful, Mediterranean partnership cultures that date back thousands of years. That timeline then transverses through the decline of the first democratic cultures and the onslaught of the use of violence for social domination, into the rise of money power, and then revolving back around to the rise of
democracy, Age of Aquarius, and the rise of the Global People’s Movement. The study guide ends with the rise of Earth consciousness, world citizenry, International Worker’s Rights and the Rights of Mother Earth.