What would a sustainable economy look like? Imagine: Tree lined streets full of small vendors selling locally produced items destined to serve human needs instead of compulsive consumption, production facilities organized on a human scale, with profits accruing to workers instead of transnational corporations, large areas of the natural world left undisturbed.

Many people have painted pictures of a sustainable society, but the harder question is how do get there from here? All over the world, people are trying to answer that question. In the US, local currencies are in circulation in over thirty cities. Local Exchange and Trading Systems (LETS - computer tracked barter systems) are in use in literally thousands of areas in Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries. In developing countries, many agencies are following the lead of the Grameen Bank in Bangledesh where loans of twenty, fifty, or hundreds of dollars are made to very small businesses to help them develop. The Corporations sense the wind and emphasize their "community service." Even President Clinton has advanced proposals of creating 'micro-loan' programs to support small businesses.

Don't be tempted to think that community economics are destined to remain at the periphery. The dollar in your pocket is a "Federal Reserve Note", yet the 'Fed' was not created until 1913. The nineteenth-century American economy was built on local currencies, most of them bank notes issued by small banks. In the Civil War era, there were over 7,000 local currencies in circulation. Shop keepers kept a phone-book sized registry listing bank notes and all known forgeries.

Tradelocal is a group in Charlottesville that started over a year ago to build community economy in our area. (Just for sport, we killed a Wal-Mart planned for south-side Charlottesville last year.) We have created a local business database that is available at http://tradelocal.org. The database can be used to find any product or service from a local provider. We also have a local business hotline that is available at (804) 760-8628 that people can call for information about local businesses.

Tradelocal has and will continue to promote local economy through events and the media. Building our local business database allows us to talk to each local business. We hope in doing so to create a collective identity among local businesses. Later this year we are planning to put a subscription credit or debit card system in place. People will only be able to use the card at local businesses, and will receive a small discount for doing so. A cut of the profits will be used to create local production that can displace transnational corporate businesses. Coke beware. Local currencies are a valuable resource, but they also require a great effort to establish legitimacy. We hope our card system will allow us to build wide involvement quickly.

Even as we focus on the building a local economy over which we have some control, we have to be aware of the large-scale implications of our actions. Nationally, our economy is managed by the Federal Reserve, and they have an intense focus on avoiding inflation. They regulate both the volume of money released into the economy and interest rates. By increasing the money supply and decreasing interest rates, they can stimulate the economy and promote growth. As growth increases, inflation increases. The 'Fed' cools inflation by decreasing the money supply and increasing interest rates. This slows activity in the entire economy.

The two causes of inflation are 'corporate pricing power' (the ability of powerful corporations to jack their prices at will) and the growth of wages among workers. Economists - hence the Fed - ignore the former entirely, and focus intently on the latter. So much so that they believe that a permanent underclass of unemployed and underemployed people is necessary to restrain inflation (and thus wages - can't ask for more pay when there are ten people outside the door begging for your job). They even have a name for it - the NonAccelerating Inflationary Rate of Unemployment, or NAIRU. When you go to New York or Washington DC., that is NAIRU lying on the sidewalk in ragged clothing, and it is no accident. It is the counterweight to corporate power that keeps the current economy in balance.

If you go to Wal-Mart to buy their shoddy goods, you send money up the vertical economy to rich people. They spend their billions freely, which generates inflationary pressure. The Fed's response to that pressure is to pull money out of the bottom of the economy, putting people out work, driving wages down, and thus limiting inflation at the expense of the entire working class. We are experiencing the longest sustained period of economic growth in American history. The Fed was happy to ignore the issue until wages started rising last year. Then they started hiking interest rates - four times since last summer and a few more predicted in the coming months. This is not irrelevant economics. It is an intentional method of economic management that purposefully maintains a structural underclass in our society.

By creating community economy, we can guerrilla-macro manage the economy from the ground up. Money spent in a local economy is spent 5-6 times before it leaves town. Each time that money is respent, it generates another dollar's worth of local employment while limiting the environmental impact of that money. If you buy Wander Bread made by Transnational OmniCorp Inc, you are buying a product made with machines and very few workers. A lot of energy and resources are required to run OmniCorps' machines. Their loaf of bread is environmentally costly. Bread from a local source is created with less energy, less resources, and more labor. Local bread is environmentally cheaper.

This isn't just about where you spend money, it is about who has control over our economy, our environment, and our future. Our cherished democratic powers are limited to government, and our government is increasingly bought and sold with corporate money. We should have democratic powers in our economy, and taking it back at the local level is the first step in that direction.

Tradelocal can be reached at www.tradelocal.org, tradelocal@flahsmail.com, (804)760-8628, or mail to 912 Woodfolk Drive, Charlottesville VA, 22902.