Green Party Platform:
Restructuring the Economy
Our current centralized monetary policy has evolved into a controlling and repressive force, rather than a system that serves the community as a medium of exchange and a store of value. People who have goods and services to provide have no outlet, except conventional commercial businesses.
To foster local economic diversity and to stimulate individual productivity, the Green Party advocates restructuring the economy:
- Encourage ecologically sound and employee-owned or profit sharing businesses of appropriate scale. Such businesses would primarily serve a regional market to keep money circulating within the community, rather than sending it to distant corporate headquarters. To further such enterprises, we advocate "incubator programs" and other forms of assistance, as well as "Buy Local, Buy green" campaigns. Establishing work place democracy must also be promoted.
- Encourage neighborhood non-profit development corporations that work to establish community-based economics, rather than the usual redevelopment fixation on huge projects in the downtown areas of cities.
- Support the creation of cooperative and collective businesses. One way to encourage this would be to free non-profit and locally-owned businesses from the overly complex tax and regulatory structures designed for profit-making corporations.
- Encourage the development of an informal economy, including volunteerism. The unemployed and underemployed could participate in the local economy through a credit barter system. In this system, the medium of exchange would be individual credit-debit accounts. People would extend credits and collect debits from one another for the purchase of each other's goods and services. These credits and debits could then be transferred among community members, circulating much like a currency. Since local members would redeem the currency with their goods and services, this medium of exchange would have a local value. Changes in banking regulations would be required to support such a program.
- Further develop the American "intentional community" movement--a residential community composed of people who have come together for a common purpose and live with some degree of economic sharing. In the United States, over 200,000 people now live in some type of intentional community.