 My name is Gwendolyn Hauss Smith. I'm the Director of Global Community Initiatives, which is the host of this program. It's a non-profit organization based in Cabot, and we do work all over the world with communities who want to improve their democratic practices, their environmental practices, creating an environment where people are feeling safe and healthy, and showing respect and care for the whole community of life. Welcome, George. Come on in. Oh, yeah. We have a microphone. Testing. All right. Welcome. I thought we'd start just quickly by going around and saying hello. Welcoming everybody here. Identifying yourself. Welcome. Come on in. Have a seat. There are more chairs just over there if I could prevail on somebody to maybe set up a couple more. That would be great. So, deep breath. It's okay. Yeah. In case more people come. So, why don't we start with you, Steven? We just want your name, where you live, and one thing you hope to learn here tonight. I'm Steven MacArthur. I live in Monterey, Vermont, and I came wanting to learn a lot, one thing, more about the work that the Gwen is doing, for sure. So, thank you. My name is Meg Kenner. I live here in Monterey, and I'm also interested in this project. I'm an engineer. Okay, great. Thanks. I live in our field here, and I'm very interested in community building, for instance, economics, or anything like that. Thanks. I'm Nancy Wolf from Harry, and I heard Gwen give a talk about state banks at the Aldrich Library a few years ago, and the last thing I heard was the legislature was doing a study, and we know how that goes. So, what's the next step? I think. Thanks. Over here. My name's Kevin. I'm an educator from Hartwick, and I'm just curious about, in terms of how much company role this is. Of course. Yeah. I'm a bit at the end of my road from Suka. I'm Ron Merkin from Monterey, and I was interested in knowing exactly how you would implement an economy for everyone. Great, thanks. Back here. My name is Katie. I'm in Hyde Park. I'm interested in those things, and I'm also starting my own business, and I want to not be an asshole. Here tonight, I'm not to be an asshole. This looks great. Thank you very much. Michael. What? I'm Michael Tiles, and I live in Cabot, and what I went out of tonight is for all the technology to work. Yeah. He's our tech guy. We spent all day yesterday trying to figure this out. We're live streaming on YouTube and Facebook and Claudia's Facebook, and we're streaming it with Orca too, so you'll be able to watch this production in many ways afterwards. Again. Right. Margaret, do you want to go next? Speak up. Margaret Blanchard. I'm interested in seeing what I can find out about alternative grassroots economics. Great, thanks. And Steve? I'm Steve Loeb. I live here on Main Street in Montpelier and I video for Orca Media, and I'm very much interested in a better way to do banking. Okay, over here. Sylvia Smith. Strapford, Vermont. I'm interested in extending democracy to the economy. Great. So I'm Jeff Farber. I live in Montpelier. What do I want to learn? Well, I want to learn if we understand the sacrifices we're all going to probably have to make if we want to move this economy someplace. Okay, so sacrifices, so we all need to make things. Back here in your name. My name's Stuart Sander Smith. I'm from Strapford, and I'm interested in egalitarian ways of organizing society. All right. More egalitarian ways of organizing society. Come here. Hi, Jasmine from Faisten. I came this evening to be surrounded by people who are interested in new ideas. And I like the idea of learning how not to be an asshole more and more every day. So yeah, both of those things, just hear something new. Bad days to my mouth about money. So figured maybe this would give me a different perspective. Bad days to your mouth about money. Well, after you talk to me for a while, you're not even worth something. All right. That happens to be one of my favorite things to talk about. George? My name is George Lyrabian from Woodbury. And I'm interested in not so much in not being an asshole, but not being a blockhead. Who is oblivious to the advantages of things like which are equalitarian to the state bank. Which means the people of Vermont keep the money in the state and invest it in the state. What's so hard to understand about that? But the legislature doesn't get it. They're asshole and they're blockheads. They're on the same level as Trump when it comes to something like this. Okay, thanks. And they don't think they are, but they are. Ron? Yeah, well, I'm in a state of shock right now because I was just at the state house. It's filled with men wearing orange clothing. Very few people with the domestic violence ribbon. And they're talking, they're not talking to each other. They're, you know, the question of why do men give themselves permission when they're angry to resort to violence and guns? It just seems, anyway. So I'm hoping that somehow that can relate to, you know, this use of violence in our country, eradicating poverty. I think it's interlocked. So I'll be sitting here, eagerly listening. Great, thanks very much. Rick Barstow, I'm from Adam Ants and I'm interested in economic justice and particularly creating a economy that works for everyone, including the planet. And I think the concept of a state bank is, I think ever since I kind of learned about it and what the code has had for a hundred years, I think it's worked so well there that the banksters and the power to be don't want anyone else to have it. Now that might be, that's a good theory. Welcome, okay. Back here. Your name and where you live and one thing you want to learn. My name's Bill Berry, I live in Maine. I'm working here at the time, but I saw you in the paper. So I'm really interesting. I figure I might learn something. Great, welcome. All the way to Maine, cool. And over here. Hi, I'm Ned, I'm from Montpelier. I'm very interested in an economy that works to sustain the planet and sustain the people. All right, Audrey? Audrey Panette, I'm living in Montpelier and I'm interested in a state bank and a justice community. Great, thanks. Steven Emmerich, I'm living in Cabot. What was the question? What do I want to learn? Whatever you want to tell me. Okay, thank you. Thank you. I'm Joanne Brooking, I live in Plainfield and I'm not sure what I want to learn. I'm part of the people's, poor people's campaign and whatever economy just fits in. Great, welcome, Maureen. Hi, Maureen Hurley from Toppsum and I just want to know more about it. I'm all for it and I want to see what else we can do and to promote it. Now, I know Henry Harris was here earlier and he wanted to say a few words about the Poor People's Campaign which is one of the sponsors of tonight's event. There is a big press conference coming up on February 5th, that's next Monday. Does anybody know of the location? I don't know it off the end. Cedar Creek? Cedar Creek Room in the State House. So you're all invited to come to that on February 5th and on February 7th, we're having a Vermonters for New Economy Day at the State House will be located in the card room which is right off the cafeteria. We'd also invite you to come and ask your legislators what they think about some of the banks if you're so inclined. The Poor People's Campaign was begun originally by Martin Luther King 50 years ago, December 4th, 1968, 67. And four months later, he was assassinated. So even though they built an encampment on the Washington Mall and made a lot of progress in a very short time, it did not reach its goal of really putting Poor People's Issues on the national agenda the way that he wanted. So Reverend Dr. William Barber from North Carolina has revived the campaign 50 years later and they're calling for non-violent civil disobedience in states all across the country. If you want to get involved, please sign the sign up sheet over here and we will be sending your information on to that campaign. I've been working in Cabot. We had an information session there back in December and I know that there's a song meeting coming up, a musical tribute to the Poor People's Campaign in Plainfield sometime soon. Do you guys know the details of that? Tuesday? Okay, so February 5th is the kickoff. February 6th is the musical tribute. February 7th is card day at the state house for Vermonters for New Economy. So keep those dates on your calendars there right next week. And with that word of welcome, Michael and I have planned a musical begin to our evening to try and remember all of the people that have walked before us in this work because, oh, sorry, yes. Edgar and Chris are on the screen. Welcome, you guys. They're patching in from Washington. And right now I have them muted so that if they offer something, it won't go through, but they'll be talking in a few minutes as well. Washington DC. Edgar Kahn is the father of modern day time banking, if you've ever heard of time banking. And Chris Gray has been the director of TimeBanks USA for many years. We also have guests with us, Ricky Gard Diamond, the author of Screwnomics and editor of Vermonters newspaper for many years. You want to hold up your book. It is a fantastic book about to come out in April and she'll be talking about that. And Henry Jax is here from Vermonters for New Economy. Couple more people over here that haven't been introduced. You want to just say your name and where you're from and what you want to learn. No, no, no. No. Hi, I'm Tessa. Tessa, I'm quite good. Okay, completely. Welcome. Thanks, sorry to be late. All right, so this is a musical introduction where we'll have a couple of musical interludes. It's in a church without having some music to carry the evening forward with the good. You've said everything you're gonna say. I've said everything I'm gonna say. This is, Michael has been going to read the introduction to the song, which is a tribute to the people that walked in our path before us on its own. Good evening, everybody. Thanks for coming. It's a really great turnout. And I appreciate your spending your time with us. We're just gonna start with a song that was written by Utah Phillips. It was, he wrote it back in 2004. The last time we were unable to be the really poor Republican candidate and people were pretty depressed. And what was going on is they were starting a peace center in Nevada city where Bruce lived. And after that presidential election, the peace organizers came into a general meeting to discuss what went wrong and they were dragging their tails. They were really depressed. It was awful. Some people dissolved into tears. There was a lot of loose talk. I'm gonna go to Canada. I'm gonna go to New Zealand. Bruce just couldn't let that happen. He thought back on old Fred Thompson, the editor of The Industrial Worker, managed a hard time at San Quentin Federal Prison as a political prisoner for the IWW. Fred talked about the First World War and the Espeanite Act and the mass deportations without any due process and the 5,000 Union brothers and sisters in jails. The beatings, the lynchings, he said worse than anything we're going right through now, see. But we still came out of it with the structure of the eight hour day. Mind safety laws, child labor laws and then you roll into the Great Depression, grinding oppression, I mean right down on the bottom. But you have the birth of the CIO and the progressive movement. And what came out of that awful time? Social security, workman's compensation, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, things unheard of anywhere. You came right up through the war and into McCarthy Times, the Red Scare, Korea and the beginning of the Cold War when they tried to destroy the labor movement completely. And we came out of that, we didn't, we survived. We came out of that with the civil rights movement at work, the largest peace movement the country has ever seen. So knowing that, I know we're gonna get through it, we're going through now, we're going to come out of it better and stronger and you can count on it. And we've had a lot of help, we had a lot of help to do that, you know. When you look down back that road, we've got people like Sojourner Truth, Mother Jones. Remember Mother Jones and Miner's mother, she lived to be a hundred. Mother Jones in Philadelphia, speaking at the mill, they brought the little kids to her. The workers with parts of their hands missing, cut off by the machine, scout. Hair caught in the machines that pulled their scouts on. Well, she flew into her rage, went down to the Philadelphia Inquirer and said, we've got to expose this. And the editor said, we can't do it because of people that own the mill, own the paper. Well, it hasn't changed much, has it? Did she write a letter to her ex-conversement? Did she start a petition? No, she got a hundred those kids together in March with their parents and chaperones. They marched overland a hundred miles to New York City, they caught the ferry to Long Island and those kids camped on President Theodore Roosevelt's lawn to embarrass him into coming out in favor of child labor laws. Direct action gets the goods. And Eugene V. Debs, who founded the socialist part of the United States, Bruce loved that man. He said there was never a man more loved in this country than Eugene V. Debs. There in court telling the judge as he was on his way to jail for objecting to the First World War as a boss's war, he looked at the judge and said, well, there's a lower class I'm in it, while there's a criminal class I am of it, and while there's a soul in prison I am not free. And then on up to Maurice Sugar and the sit-down strikes of the 30s in Detroit and Flint, Michigan and on and on. These people, Bruce said, this introduction was written by Utah Phillips. I see them as building a boat. They were building a ship and none of them believed that they were ever sail on, but there was no excuse not to build it. When they got too old, too broken, too tired to build anymore on that ship, they passed the tools and the skills onto the younger ones and they kept building the boat. And now those tools are passed on to our times. They are in our hands and we keep building that boat. When our turn comes, we'll pass those tools along and someday that ship's gonna sail. Someday that ship's gonna sail to a world of economic justice and peace. You can count on that too. It's gonna sail some gene-deadical questions to bring it into reality. And I've done a lot of thinking about this. I've actually worked on a lot of projects around the world that have actually changed the local economy in some small way. There's a lot of work going on that's doing that. And I think it's really just a matter of understanding it and taking some small step that each of us can take. So I'm gonna go through just a very short talk. Each of us is gonna talk about 10 minutes. That's me and then Ricky and then Henry and then Edgar and Chris. And then we're gonna open it up for a general discussion. But the talk I've prepared really is to frame it because I think that most of us have a sense, and maybe correct me if I'm wrong, how many people here think that the economy is just really too complicated for most people to understand? You know, it feels overwhelming to a lot of people. I know when I try to talk to people about how to change it, often I see glazed eyes. Just a sense of, yeah, go ahead and write. What are we gonna do? The powers that are out there are just so large. There's nothing we can do to change it. But keep in mind that the economy has changed and is changing now over time. And it's changing because of decisions that we make. Now we right now, the collective we sitting in this room as people who I would guess are left of center in the northeast of the United States, a little state in Vermont, we're not in the majority in Washington. Our voices aren't being heard right now. But that doesn't change the fact that fundamentally, humans create the economy. And anything that humans create, humans can change. So I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail about all the problems that we're facing. I'm just gonna spend one slide on it. But human impoverishment is increasing at an army rate and the level of inequality in this country is greater than it's ever been. And that includes during the Gilded Age. Environmental degradation, these are just a few things. You know, species extinction, resource depletion, and climate chaos. They're happening, there's lots of evidence. If anybody in this room doesn't think any of these things are happening, talk to me after class. White male supremacy, patriarchy, systemic racism, and gender discrimination. These also are huge, ongoing problems in our society. The United States wasn't even able to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Let's remember that. And systemic racism is still baked into a lot of our laws, customs, and practices. And that also needs a lot of attention. Of course, increasing militarism and xenophobia is huge in the last several years. The whole anti-immigrant thing, the kind of craziness you're seeing at the State House of our guns, are part of that as well. And what we're seeing, along with all of these other things, is what I call social and cultural deterioration. You know, if you've ever heard of that book, Bowling Alone, you know, the deterioration of some of the social structures that used to keep us a little bit more contained in what we might think of as a human family. Now, I argue that all of these problems have the same roots. And they're very simple roots, actually, not so easy to overcome. But hyperindividualism, isolation, and separation is at the top of the list. And if you're interested in how that impacts the economy, I recommend this book to you, The Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein. He does a wonderful job talking about that and talking about how one of the antidotes to our economic woes is actually things like the gift economy and making more connections with each other instead of imagining ourselves as being separate from everything else. The culture of domination and competition, these two things go hand in hand. They really are part of the white male supremacy PRD spectrum. And Ricky's gonna talk a little more about that. In a group with Rianne Eisler as well, who is the director of the Center for Partnership Studies, and has written an enormous amount about this, she now contrasts two potential economies, being the domination economy, which is what we have now, and the partnership economy, which is the economy I think everybody in this room would like to move toward. One where cooperation is more the norm and this old idea of making it by subjugating others and hurting others is not the way we go anymore. And of course, on a spiritual level, I think it has to do with a fear of scarcity, a loss of trust, and a lack of faith. And I'm not talking about religious faith. I'm talking about our own faith in ourselves as human beings with our feet on the ground on this planet. I meet a lot of people today who are suffering from anxiety and fear. And this feeds a sense of scarcity. It feeds a sense of isolation and competition. And arguably, and this is a longer discussion than I'll be able to get into tonight, but arguably a lot of the economic structures that we have in place, especially money, feeds all of this phenomenon. The structures produce this, and this in turn produces the structures. So this is a quote by my dear husband, Michael Tao. If we really do imagine that we are all one on a spiritual level, that we are all one human family, that we're one with our sacred Mother Earth, then we only have essentially what we give. Think about that for a minute, that by giving we receive, because if we're all one, the only benefits we get are things that we give to others. And this also is something Charles talks a lot about in his book, Sacred Economics, in terms of the gift economy. I'm not saying that the gift economy is the answer, but I think the mindset that goes with that is a very important thing, because really what we're talking about, if these are the roots of our economic problems, we're talking about the need for a spiritual and a cultural shift more than we are little programmatic things that we can do in the state house from year to year. I think that the kinds of fixes that we're seeing, people advocate for are very important. We need a $15 an hour minimum wage. We need Medicare for all. We need to address systemic racism by looking at all the laws that promote it, but those are not enough to transform our culture and our economy. We need to rethink some of the building blocks of the economy that are perpetuating these problems. So I've identified basically five cornerstones or what I'm calling economic culture. These are the building blocks of any economy, not just ours, and looking at the economy through these lenses and understanding how if these things change, everything else can change is important. So the first one is ownership. Ownership is built into our legal structures, into our culture, into our understandings. It's very simple idea, two-year-olds understand the concept of mine, right? That's mine. But when you magnify that sense of ownership to larger economic institutions like corporations or in the early days of capitalism where one man owned massive amounts of productive capacity, that causes economic problems. And I think looking at that type of ownership in new ways, A is already happening. So this isn't a pipe dream. There's lots of examples of where ownership is changing. Land ownership is changing through community land trusts here in Vermont. Productive capacity ownership is changing through workers' cooperatives, worker-owned businesses, all of those sorts of things. So it is changing and it can change. And we can transform the ownership of the things that produce our own human well-being by looking at that more carefully. Now, as I said before, money is another one of the cornerstones of this economic culture. And it's something that most people really don't understand. And that's partly because they intentionally obfuscated the people that teach about money and the people that control the monetary system don't want you to understand it. Because I think as Henry Ford said, that if everybody understood the monetary system, there would be revolution tomorrow. It's really not that hard to understand. It's a privately-owned, debt-based positive interest system that is systematically impoverishing humanity and destroying the planet. Yeah, ownership is still first on the list because who owns the money is actually a critical question in that system. Then you have three more basic cultural building blocks, markets, which are the things where we trade with each other and there's many forms of those and many interventions and actual creations that we make as human beings to create those markets and to maintain them. Management refers to what most people study in microeconomics, how we manage our productive capacity, how we manage our business, so that things like social responsibility would fall in there in metrics. How do we measure economic progress? So I've thought of a cute little monomic to remember this by and it also speaks to the need for cultural and spiritual transformation. Oh, Margaret's mad at me. Now I've had this sort of graphic. I did not dream this up, but I think this was somebody else's slideshow of talking about the four principles of US economic system, private property, freedom of choice, profit and competition. So what I'm talking about here in terms of the culture of the economy and the fact that these five things really are the basic building blocks, I think you can see really clearly in that graphic. So my plan isn't to cover all of this tonight. I can't, there's 10 minutes, this is a lot of material, but I'm hoping that there's enough interest in all of these subjects so that we're gonna live stream five more workshops and the schedule for that is on the whole program that you got and it'll begin with ownership. If I was a teacher and you were a class, I'd recommend reading Marjorie Kelly's book, The Divine Right of Capital as the prerequisite for that class, which will happen on February 20th in Cabot, but also live streamed on this channel. Now ownership, you can look at the early capitalist structures of robber barons up through leveraged buyouts and now we've got this era of stock buyback that is all perpetuating and reinforcing the inequality in our system. Shareholder primacy is something that Marjorie Kelly talks a lot about. This is the law, basically, that companies have to make a profit for their shareholders first. When you hear about triple bottom line and multiple bottom line accounting systems, it's trying to offset this fundamental fact about most of our economic activities. Bondholder primacy is another like one unto it. Bondholder primacy actually was one of the very strongest principles in our early constitution. Most people don't know that the early constitutional debate here in the United States was between the bondholders that had funded the Revolutionary War and the states who had to pay the high debt and interest on those bonds that were being speculatively traded. Jane Adams was making more money trading bonds than she was on her farm. So bondholder primacy is another really important principle in this ownership spectrum. But then you get to the things that are problematic today. Public goods, who owns public goods and why are we privatizing these public goods as fast as we possibly can? In France, they're selling roads to the highest bidder. Water is already being privatized all over the world. Water has been privatized here in this country in several cities, including stock in California was one of the early and most horrific examples of how private companies take over the water supply and then they pay a lot of money for lower and lower service. And of course, externalities, who owns all the pollution that all of these enterprises produce? And they're explained away by most economists as an externality, that's not something anybody owns, it's something that the public just has to clean up. So as many of you know, we have sort of private profit and public cleanup costs from all of this stuff. Now money is another important subject. As I said, we have a privately owned debt-based positive interest bank money that both creates and maintains the one percent in this country and also produces the artificial sense of scarcity that feeds the sort of fear that we all experience, I think, on the economic level. Again, I'm already over my time probably, I'm not gonna talk about this a lot tonight but this will be the subject of one of the week's topics and this is a book I wrote with Bernard Liatar about both the problems with the money system and how local currencies are one of the ways in which those problems can be mitigated. So if I was a teacher and you were the class, I'd recommend reading this book. I have it electronically so you don't have to buy it anywhere, just write to me and I'll send it to you. Markets, another leader in this area is my dear friend, Hazel Henderson, who's both written this book called Ethical Markets and she runs a whole organization based on trying to get, oops, people to switch to new ways of, the Lojas market stands for lifestyles of health and sustainability. It's a trillion dollar market in the United States now of people that are genuinely trying to make products that better the health and welfare of people and planet. That's also the green economy and the discipline of ecological economics has been working to intervene in markets by pricing nature so that we have a value of ecological services like pollination, climate. Anyway, we'll talk about that in the market section and management, of course, is how we manage these enterprises, what goes on inside the enterprises. Whole systems accounting where the life cycle of products are taken into account in their pricing and their production. Full circle production where people are selling carpet services, if you're an interface, for example, instead of carpets that will then be thrown away. And this is also where you'll find a lot of the work that's been done on corporate responsibility for ecological and social impacts. My friend Hunter Lovens with some other people wrote a book about this many years ago called Natural Capitalism, which really captures the sort of move among the productive sector to try and be more environmentally sound. I'm not sure it's working. In fact, I really doubt that it's working and I'm not sure it goes far enough but it has moved the ball down the field a little bit and it's worth taking a look at those practices if we're really trying to change the economy. And as somebody over here said earlier, learning not to be such an asshole. And then metrics. Metrics are how we measure economic progress. There are two main schools of thought that are moving forward. They're not in competition with each other but they complement each other. One is the Gross National Happiness Movement which is based right here in Vermont. Gross National Happiness USA and the move to establish genuine progress indicators. These are both alternatives to GNP and GDP as ways of measuring our economy. Vermont has in fact adopted the genuine progress indicator as a measure of economic progress but it's now failed to fund it for three years in a row so we don't actually have the data that we need to look at the economy of Vermont through this lens. So the series of workshops is again, they're on your card, little program that was on your seat, February 20th at seven, March 6th, April 10th, April 24th and May 8th. I'm gonna ask people to register for them in advance so I know if we need to get a bigger space than the one we have at the Headwaters Garden and Learning Center which is where I live in Cabot, we're gonna be live streaming them so if Cabot's kind of far for you to come, tune in to the YouTube channel and you'll be able to watch it online. So that's the end of my quick comments. Are there, we're gonna save questions for after all the talks so I'm gonna turn it over to Ricky. I think I see a question. Oh, a question, a quick question. Yeah, you didn't mention labor. It seems to me you let labor rights. A labor, I didn't mention labor, I didn't mention production and consumption. There's a lot of things that we normally think of in terms of the economic world that I didn't talk about. You're absolutely right. What I talk about I think are the, what I see is the things that if they change, you know, labor is almost a constant. There needs to be ways that we change the treatment of labor but I'm certainly open to other categories, you know, because I don't have the final answer but I was looking at these five things because I think that if they change, the economy would change totally. Money and labor are also very closely related because labor is consistently robbed of their birthright because of our monetary system. So for example, if we change the monetary system to a public one as opposed to a private one, most people think it already is public. They look at all the dead presidents on the bill and they think that the United States government has something to do with the money when it actually really doesn't. And had a basic income for everybody. That would change our economy dramatically and change the way labor is in that economy dramatically. So I think even though it's very important and treating labor right as absolutely paramount to having a decent economy, I don't see it as one of the real leverage points. Okay, all right. Well, I have a chapter in scunomics called She's in Labor. And the subtitle is a sexier account of labor story embraces the value of we, the erotic pronoun larger than all of us. All of my books, scunomics as you might guess is really about that question of gender, which brings us to the subject of sex, which seems to be at the root of that word, I've been screwed. Which usually when I say my book is called scunomics, you're not smiling or laughing. You're being rather grim out there. But most people, when they hear the word scunomics, they kind of laugh and they say, well, I know what that's about right away. They recognize it. And so my curiosity about that language, because that's my field, I'm an amateur economist, which my husband worries about, because he says, you know, that's kind of downplaying your expertise. When really you know a lot about economics and he's right, I've learned the hard way. But I lost my place just then. I was so clever. What was I talking about? Yes, I'm an amateur economist. That's right. That's what I was saying. And so he says, he worries about my using that word. But then when I, because my own field of study is language, because I think language is so important, not only for what it tells us, but also for the way it shapes how we think about things, you know? So to be, does anybody here know what the root of that word amateur is? The Latin root, a ma, a mas, a mat. I love, I love, you know? And I think that's precisely what is missing from this language about economics and this way of thinking about economics as this competitive war were constantly waging, you know? I was part, I was thinking about, you talked to me about the title of eradicating poverty and I thought, yeah, that's pretty good. I like that. But when I think about it now, I think it sort of sounds like eradicating it, you know? Maybe we shouldn't begin to rethink poverty or redefine poverty because there's a certain amount of poverty of spirit right now that I think we shouldn't be talking about. You know, that's part of that. So, this, my whole book is really about, you know, why are we using this language to describe economics and how we feel about it? And so, I just told you the name of the chapter of She's in Labor, which is a sexier account. I'm trying to make economics sexier for a lot of different reasons. First of all, so your eyes won't blaze over. You actually may stay interested. But also because, you know, sex is like 570 million years old. If we didn't have sex, we'd all be self-dividing, you know, and we'd all be exactly alike and it would be really, really boring, okay? So, when sex started 570 million years ago, it brought together these genomes of chromosomes that we've shuffled every time mating took place, every time these two unlike creatures got together and figured out how to combine their chromosomes. And there are lots of ways that happens in the natural world. And it's everywhere. It's all around us. And I don't want us to take that for granted for a minute. So, the whole book, Stronomics, is really about sex. And it's also really about economics, which I have to tell you, has been mostly an all-male conversation for the last 5,000 years. Well, 2,500 years ago, Herodotus coined the word oikonomia, you know, economics. And he praised the queen bee of the, you know, agricultural world that he lived in and she made possible all the wealth that just naturally belonged to the property owner, to the patriarch. And pretty much since then, the conversation about economics has been among men and not just men, but men of a particular race, of a particular class, of a particular education, who, you know, they're talking together and they're coining all this language that to most of us, at least to me, sounds like Greek. And so, I put together a book that is full of definitions so that the language becomes a little clearer. Now, I have two glossaries in it and one is the straight definitions that everybody knows and then I have the box definitions that are written from a woman's point of view. The question of, you know, the definition of labor, for instance, it's a little bit different in the box definition than it might be in the back glossary. So, what else can I tell you? I love, first of all, I need to credit Gwen for being one of my sources in this book. She's been a really guiding light and I've read her books and loved her books and a lot of the books that she lists in her presentation are also sources from me and, you know, I got some nice blurbs from some of those people and the book is coming out April 4th, by the way. This is a dance reader copy. But I love her, she's immensely practical. I love your own, I think that is. So you'll remember that, you know, right? And when you described it to me, you said it was gonna be like a box. You picture it as a box. And I said, well, you know, I'm talking about all those things in my book. It's ownership, money, management, markets, and metrics, yeah, all of those are in here, but they're all, you know, they're not constructed in that way. And I think it's because I'm a storyteller, I've studied literature and stories and so those elements are kind of woven into the book here, but quite different. And I try to think about, well, why, what's different? And I think it's because when, what I'm trying to talk about, what I'm trying to name, are things that are now invisible. We have the economic box, but you know what, we're in the box. All that sex is in the box. All the world's glorious life is in that box and it's invisible now in this economy and we need to make it visible. So yeah, that's how I think it's connected. So I said that the conversation about economics has largely been a male one. And we sort of, Andrea Dworkin said something really great. She said, money talks, but it talks in a male voice. We kind of expect it to talk in a male voice. In fact, I think we feel more comfortable when a deep voice, not my little girly voice, but a deep voice is telling us how things are. We just sort of expect that to happen. Wall Street's doing great. That's right, that's right. And so I think there are really good reasons why most women sort of avoid this subject. I'm glad to see so many women here because I'm convinced and you've seen that things are already changing majorly. You know something is really cooking. And so women as a group is the audience that I have in mind for this book because I think most women really don't care about the difference between the Keynesian and a neoliberal, you know? And those just aren't words they talk about when they get together and have conversations. So what I'm encouraging with this book is to have what I'm calling economic girlfriend conversation groups. And in fact, experimenting with a couple of groups, we've got one started up in Chittenden County. I'm hoping to start another one here in Washington County. And if you wanna sign up for it or let me know that you're interested, there's a sign up sheet over there. And because these are advanced reader copies, I'm actually gonna give away 10 copies to the first group that formed just so that there's a little bonus, okay? And what I'm hoping is that we have some friends, my husband and I have some friends that we sent this book to. And I've written this for women, but I seem kind of interested in it also. And I certainly don't object to their reading it at all. And our friends told us that they have been reading it in bed together, which I think is so great, it's perfect. So we're gonna ask them to send us a picture so we can put it up on Facebook. So I think that all of us are really wanting a more humane, a more human kind of economy. Now, I'm going over time, but I really wanna read you a poem, can I do that now? Because economic language is abstract and theoretical. It is not emotional or at all sexy, except when in private emails. So I took some liberties with a poem that I love so much by my literary mother, whom I love so much, and you probably know her too, Grace Paley, you know her. And she's really the reason I moved to Vermont 35 years ago because she wrote stories about women like me, women who were single moms in poverty, women with ex-husbands and that kind of thing. And she made it literary, it was amazing. And I thought, if I moved to Vermont and I breathe the same air she does, maybe I'll be able to, you know. I think it did help me actually. So I went to an event where she read this poem and she was about this high, if you've never seen her, and she had at the time this white halo of hair. And it was at a Vermont college event where poets were gathering in protest of the invasion of Iraq. The place was packed. She was so great and she read this poem. And on a day when I was feeling really discouraged about being such an amateur economist and why in God's name, and I ever started this project, I thought I remembered this poem and it's called Responsibility. Grace would want me to be bold. She was bold in a time when poets weren't. She talked about politics, she talked about, she used in this poem the words economic justice and poets weren't doing that back then. And she also uses the word amateur in this. So I don't think she wouldn't mind because she's talking about economic justice and my throwing in a word here and there. So I'm gonna read you the first two lines of the poem as she wrote it. And then I'm gonna read the whole poem with my added words and you'll be able to tell what I've added. And I also wanna say for those who may have forgotten Homer's Iliad, at the end of the poem there's a mention of Cassandra and Cassandra was the high priestess of Troy who warned the city leaders, watch out for that Trojan horse, don't roll it through the gates, but they did and brought destruction. So all that is of this. So this is as Grace wrote it, responsibility. It is the responsibility of society to let the economist know to let the poet be a poet. It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman. Okay, now I'm gonna take some liberties. Responsibility, it is the responsibility of society to let the economist be a poet. It is the responsibility of the poet economist to be a woman. It is the responsibility of the poet economist to stand on street corners, giving out reports like poems and beautifully with the leaflets. Also leaflets you can hardly bear to look at because of the screaming rhetoric. It is the responsibility of the poetic economist to be a lazy amateur and to hang up and prophesy. It is the responsibility of the poetic amateur economist not to pay war taxes. It is the responsibility of the amateur economist poet to go in and out of ivory towers and two room apartments on Avenue C and buckwheat fields and army camps. It is the responsibility of the male poet economist to be a woman. It is the responsibility of female poet economist to be a woman. It is our responsibility to speak truth to power as the Quakers say. It is the poet's responsibility to learn the truth from the powerless amateur economist. It is the responsibility of the poetic amateur economist to say many times there is no freedom without justice and this means economic justice and love justice. It is the responsibility of the poetic amateur economist to sing this in all the original and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems. It is the responsibility of the amateur economist poet to listen, to gossip, to pass it on in the way storytellers decant the story of life. There is no freedom without fear and bravery. There is no freedom unless earth and air and water continue and children also continue. It is the responsibility of the poetic economist to be a woman, to keep an eye on this world and cry out like Cassandra when we listen to this time. Thank you, Ricky. Thank you very much. Beautiful. Okay, next we're gonna hear from Henry Jax who's gonna tell us something about what's going on in Vermont with Public Banks. Thank you, Gwen, and thank you, Ricky, for that poem. I'm not gonna share anything particularly creative or artistic, but those inspirations definitely make this work possible, and these two female economists, particularly Gwen, I owe for much of my learning in this realm of public banking. So that's what I'm gonna be talking about. Some of you may have heard about the initiative to establish a Vermont state bank or a state banking system, and I'm gonna try to draw as I talk to help visualize what's actually going on. So if we're going from the ownership, money, markets, metrics management section, we're talking right now about ownership and money. So like Gwen said, who owns the money and also who owns the ability to create more money? So first I'm gonna draw how our state collects taxes and then deposits them in a bank account. So this will be our state dome on the top. And then maybe these are some Vermont families. Who are paying taxes. So we as Vermonters pay taxes to our state government, and then our state deposits that money in a big Wall Street bank. So just like we have a bank account, our state has a bank account, and that's where the money sits until we spend it. So this is Wall Street and this is the capital. So right now we deposit our bank or our state funds in the bank and we get a small amount of interest back, but we lose any ability to lend that money out. And the bank actually does have that ability and it will lend out our deposits or leverage those deposits to make loans in all sorts of different industries, maybe the pharmaceutical industry or the fossil fuel industry or a weapons manufacturer. But that's all happening outside of our control. And we're getting some amount of interest back, it's actually a really small amount. Now at the same time when our state wants to build a bridge, we have to go and borrow money from the private sector that we use to fund that project. Now, because it's borrowed money and our money is coming on through a loan that bears interest over time, we're gonna end up actually paying more money back out than we borrow. So everyone knows how loans work. So at the same time we're borrowing money and then paying even more back. So on both sides we're sending money out of the state and then going and borrowing it. Now the alternative is a public bank. So a public bank would be a way for our state to, I'm gonna save my drawings time and this is a public bank. I'm not an artist by training. Amateur artist. So say that we brought our money into a public bank. Then what happens is that we have brought all of the taxes that we've raised from our businesses and from our local economy and we brought that money back into our state and put it in a public bank so that that bank can use the money to lend into our local economy. So all that additional investment in Vermont means that we can support our local businesses. We can support our students. We can support a town that might again want to renovate a school or fix the potholes in the road. Rather than any of those Vermonters having to go to the private sector to borrow, they can borrow from our state bank that is containing the funds from our taxes. So that's the really simple explanation and I'm just gonna jump to a couple of the values that are really behind the initiative. So one is just this idea of bringing our money home. This is money that could be circulating through our Vermon economy. So it's our money and it should be staying in Vermont. Another value is this idea of creating democratic direction with professional management. So the democratic direction is the idea that as we're bringing this money back into our state and investing it, how can we use that money to promote the things that we care about in our state, to promote education and health and our environmental resources that we wanna preserve. So all of those factors that our traditional economic system might consider externalities, we can consider with our public bank and we can say, hey, we wanna keep young people in our state, let's offer good student loans that will attract people to maybe pursue education or higher education in our state or we want to invest in renewable energy resources and we know that after 20 years these solar panels are gonna start paying for themselves by producing free energy and because we have this public bank we can consider all those different factors. We can clean up Lake Champlain because we know that the natural richness of that resource is worth the investment. So with the public bank we can direct our economy towards an economy that works for all of us. Again, another angle is that because our state bank would be getting the interest from the loans in our state, the state bank actually can become a revenue generator for our state treasury. So because banking is a profitable industry, all this economic activity that banks would normally be sending to their private shareholders the owners of the state bank are us, it's the people of Vermont and all the profits of the state bank could either be lent out again in larger loans or be paid back to the state and reduce our tax burden or increase the number of state programs that we can fund. So it's this boom to our government social spending and we know how important that is, especially with the Republican Congress in Washington DC that's very likely to cut social spending in the near future. So that extra revenue is a really important benefit as well. So another value that is important to remember is that if they can do it, so can we. So right now North Dakota has been running a state bank for over a hundred years, its capital base has grown and it's been paying approximately $50 million into the state every single year. So if they can do it in North Dakota, they have a similar economy, we can do it here. And also another value behind this project is the idea that big ideas are worth the work. So it is a big idea, but the benefits are really changing the fundamental structures of our economy. So I'm running out of time, so I just want to touch on another example of it happening right now, which is in Germany, 40% of the assets in Germany are being banked in a network of public bank called the Sparhausen Banking Network. And those banks are publicly owned, they've actually been around longer than the beginning of the country and they're controlled through a decision-making process that takes into account labor and unions and takes into account community needs and takes into account the local business environment. So these Sparhausen Banking Systems have been the foundation of Germany's strong, small and medium businesses and also their transition to renewable energies, which is something that we really want to replicate here in Vermont. So finally getting to the action element, we've had a really strong public banking movement in the United States since the financial crisis in 2008. And that includes the campaign here in Vermont that had a large win a couple of years ago when we established the 10% program that actually brought 10% of our deposits back through our state lending agencies that already existed. So that's an example of state lending agencies that already exist and right now are using borrowed money starting to use some of our own money and a banking license would let them and get the full amount of deposits and the ability to leverage them. So like I said, there's a public banking movement that's spreading like wildfire across the country. There's the fossil fuel divestment movement which has divested over $5.5 trillion of assets. So that movement is starting to bring to the surface of our public consciousness and the idea that if it's wrong to wreck the climate, then it's wrong to profit off wrecking the climate and understanding how banks fund the climate crisis has driven cities and religious institutions and educational institutions to divest from fossil fuel businesses. And in that process, many of those institutions particularly in the public sector like cities have come across the idea of a public bank where they can not only take their money out of the fossil fuel economy but actually use it to promote economic justice and environmental justice in their local communities. So if the movement right now has a couple of campaigns knocking on the door of a victory, we have seen a task force established in Santa Fe in this last November that's looking into the actual model that would suit their municipal banking needs. The cities of Oakland and Berkeley have put up $75,000 and $25,000 respectively to fund a study. So this is large chunks of money just to study it. Now in California and the governor of New Jersey who just won alongside democratic super majorities in New Jersey won on a campaign for a New Jersey public bank. And he's actually both a previous banker, he was a professional banker and also an ambassador to Germany. So I'm guessing that he might have gotten some ideas there that we can see implemented in New Jersey. And it's really exciting to see these other places pushing forward because as soon as one public bank is established in this new century, it could be a watershed. So what's next for Vermont? We're gonna continue our grassroots advocacy for bills in the state legislature that would create a commission. So establishing a public bank isn't something that you can just snap your fingers and do. We have lots of assets in this state that make it possible. We have state lending agencies. We have local banks and credit unions that we can partner with. So we have many of the ingredients to establish a public bank. We have awesome small businesses that we wanna invest in but designing a system, a model that is both, like I said, democratic. So it's serving our interests as Romaners and also professionally managed and secure and also insulated from political pressure. That all is gonna take some thinking. So our legislature needs to establish a commission to look into some of these questions. So we have two bills, one in the House H-208 and one in the Senate S-48 that would create a commission to look into a state bank. So we're gonna be lobbying the committee chairs to consider testimony on those bills, take those bills off the wall and also continue to contact other legislators and build support in the legislature but also across the state and really building a movement just like they did 100 years ago in North Dakota. So that was the fastest, I think we've covered it, but. Thank you, Henry. I'll be around after more questions. Okay. All right, now for our friends from Washington, Edgar, are you still there? We are. All right. So you're on the screen and you're on the microphone. Everybody can hear me? Because I'm welcome. I don't qualify for the account of real friends. I can't tell you that I have a twin sister so I started and she's about 15 minutes by over so I didn't start learning fairly early. Also I have a twin sister. I'm in politics. I'm a colleague who's my partner and made here in first grade who did a good doctorate on the journey to tribal sovereignty, the recognition of tribal sovereignty from our history in genocide and she will talk about community. I'll do what kind of thing. I'll start with the proposition, the action proposition, that we have what we need if we use what we have. And I'm gonna talk about this because people can't remember everything. I'm gonna talk about four Cs. I'm gonna talk about something called the core economy, currency, community weaver, the IT system and co-production. So those will be the four Cs. By core economy what we, what I'm referring to is an invisible economy that we all know. It's family, neighborhood, community, civil society. What it does is not necessarily a government and GDP. All it does is it is like raised children, take care of the elderly, build strong families, make safe and private neighborhoods, make democracy work and maybe mobilize immigrants to advance social justice. But this is the love and caring and coming together that we need all the time before the charter and we need more and more as every day for the next 10,000 books, in the seven years, 10,000 baby boomers will hit 65. And they are treated as if they're throwing white people up starpone cocks until we begin to create an economy that enlists them. Then we are going to be constantly promoting the fact that we don't have money to fund the programs. But the size of this core economy is not adequately official. Seven years back there was some computations just of the value of household work that was not for the GDP. And what was mentioned, it was equivalent to one quarter of the entire GDP, wishing measures of the unpaid chair by those from families to support seniors and the table that you put out of nursing homes was $500 billion for the Grand Foundation. Major economists estimate that the core economy was at least equivalent to 30% of GDP. So we're not talking about a minority in the economy, we're talking about a major economy. That I call the core economy. If you think of economics as a computer, we have all the programs that you see on the screen, but underline all of those programs, it's operating system. I mean, operating system for that whole computer, for that is in fact family-neighborhood to new civil society, that's the economy and that's the operating system we need to operate. It was based in a lot of part, in front of resources in line for it, based on labor objectives for the support nation of women and the exploitation from minorities. As we move to operate that operating system to one of the quality and one of our opportunity and one of respect and one of sustainability, we've got a revolution on our hands that brings me to the second piece, the second scene, which is currency. I decided years ago that there was never gonna be enough money to do what was needed to be done. And the money itself has operated on a characteristic that bothers me, a characteristic that's called price. So we value what's scarce, and if the thing is more abundant, if it's cheaper, if it's really abundant, it's very cheap or worthless. And I suddenly realized that man, we have devalued every universal that defines us as a human being, our ability to listen, to care for each other, to come to each other's rescue, to come to that one's home. So that I thought we needed a kind of money that puts supply and demand together and put untapped capacity together with unmet need. And in the core economy, there is vast untapped and unrecorded capacity. If you think of five food frames, two or three graves, if you think of seniors helping other seniors, if you think of all the homeless people, all the unemployed people, all the disabled people, all the returning veterans, and all of us who have some hours that we could give in some way, the vast untapped capacity is as great as the vast unmet needs. And so I decided that what we needed was a currency, and so I created a currency where all I'm gonna use as the unit of account of the hour. And all hours are equal, whether it's me as a lawyer writing a will or the fifth grade helping the third grade or learning the alphabet and learning how to read, or whether it's seniors helping other seniors. And so I created a currency that was now a digital currency that the IRS has moved as tax agent. And every hour you spend helping somebody, you get a credit, that person owes a credit. And we have in that bank, in order to be in the bank, you list all the things you're willing to do for others. So if you need somebody to translate into Spanish, if you need somebody to walk the door. And so I'm gonna turn now to my partner, Chris, to describe how IT has made that possible, how software has now made that possible, Chris. Okay, so hello. So time banking, as Edgar described, is a currency, an hour for an hour. So if you help somebody, you earn an hour, and if you want to get help, you pay an hour, and you can donate your hours to organizations. Organizations could be using a time bank credit. So this all requires actually software to manage all the information that a time bank generates because each person has a ton of different skills that they would like to offer through the time bank. And other people have needs that they would like to have met through the time bank. And the time bank in the software becomes a place where you can learn all of this information and make the exchanges. So local time banks are actually local organizations. They have leadership, those leaders are called coordinators and they actually manage or at least communicate with the members when they see that things are, members are not taking about action or they want to introduce members to each other. And they use Community Beaver to basically be like a customer management tool. They really are, in a way, bank managers. But they're bank managers of this weird money where you earn and spend time credits and it's always one hour for one hour in all this what you do. So, and you can go have a look at Community Beaver, it's called Community Beaver. If you go to democw3.timebanks.org, democw3.timebanks.org, and we call it CW3 that stands for Community Beaver 3 because this is the third iteration of our software. It's the nicest by far and it works very well on cell phones as well. So, if you go to democw3.timebanks.org, you'll find yourself a demonstration version of that software. And thousands of hours have been logged in. We're over 500 time vaccines countries and we're regenerating it. We know that it's 50,000 hours. We know too that in other countries where this is spreading, in the way that it's coming, the way else it's coming, that brings me to the fourth scene which is co-production. We started off trying to build small isolated community timebanks. But increasingly, what we're finding is that timebanks, timebanks, it means that any non-profit to use, any government agencies to use, any college to use, to begin to organize and to begin to mobilize the uncapped capacity to meet both general need or any specific need. So, we saw it used by the government and by community folks in New Zealand, Latin America, where all the government agencies went down. But because they created timebanks, it was the timebanks that told people where the roads are safe, where you can go for food, where you can park your kids, where there were mobilization efforts, you know. And the second one in New York City arch care, which is the Catholic healthcare system, it's a regular medical healthcare system. But it has a timebank with 1,600 members who are generating hours each and every day and who are providing the support and all the kind of 24-hour support that seniors need to keep them out of nursing homes to shorten their stay, to provide the support they need if their children are moved away and they're living this. So, the issue there is breaking down the isolation that we see and so we also see but it runs in Dane County, in Madison, it's used to work in the port where kids who get under trouble come before a jury of teenagers running time credits and they have the power to get them by the government to send themselves to community service. And that's rather good with each crime to see the use of Chicago to reduce special ed. I haven't heard from these health caregivers. So this is a car engine that can be used either in a special archway or to create community. And I think that if we begin to say that we have the tools right now, we don't have to wait on anything. And one hour, frankly, of course one hour because as I explained to people, didn't practice everything, I said my slice of internment is not worth more than your slice of internment. Ultimately, we're all people and we need a currency that honors our banks of the United. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Edgar. Of course, here in central Vermont, we have a time bank. You don't have to create one. That's the good news. It's called the Ununiverse Exchange and it's been in existence now since 2007, I think. 2008, so it's almost 10 years old. And Eric Bachman is one of the coordinators. He's also helped Edgar quite a lot with the new version of Community Weaver. So if you don't know about the Ununiverse Exchange, please look it up. It's O-R-E exchange.org or exchange.org. Thanks, Edgar and Chris. I know Chris is working on a new program too that will enable people, someone had mentioned earlier, how do you build community? And what they're finding is that people need to get together and talk about their needs and their assets and their desires. So Chris is organizing a little combination potluck workshop series that if you're interested in starting a time bank where you are, if you're not from central Vermont, get in touch with Chris and she can help you do that. Now, we'd like to open it up for questions and discussion. I know we all each took a little more than our 10 minutes and I apologize for that, but we're eager to hear your points. So Ann and then Robin. I have a question for Henry. First, I'd like to make a comment to Ricky. I was just hearing on the radio as I came here about Janet Yellen, a woman who has no problem with creating economics. And her first year was very difficult because she didn't give in to all of the philosophies of economics that some people were pushing on her, but she saw what really worked. And I think she was a wonderful example of a female economist. And also my question for Henry is, I understand that there was a big effort a few years back to start state banks. It sounds like a wonderful concept, it still is. I guess that was 2008 or so. And there were eight or nine states that actually did start state banks or really got into it. And the problem with them, I've heard, I don't know, non-economists, was that there was not sufficient capitalization in those states that wanted to do it. And I wondered if you would comment on that. So many states had individual legislators who broke bills to create commissions to look into public banking. No state has created public bank or even funded a formal study. And so that is still in the cards, that step in so Vermont is really as far as any state in terms of creating that commission to look into it. And then the question about capitalization is a good question. So the capital of a bank is like the foundation of a house where it's underneath everything and you're counting on it. So the capitalization of a state bank is gonna be some public asset. So as a state, we actually own lots and lots of assets, lots of buildings, lots of land, the ability to tax. So capitalization really isn't a problem for that reason. And additionally, because unlike a private bank, the Vermont state bank wouldn't pack up its doors and leave the state because it's serving people here, it's founded here and it's owned by the people. So that's another reason capitalization is different with a public bank. And even if we capitalize the bank at the Vermont state bank at a extremely secure rate, so that's like a 20% capitalization rate, we actually have the funds in our lending agencies. So these lending agencies are borrowing bonds and then re-loaning them out and getting interest back and through that process, they've grown their own capital basis and they actually each have unrestricted cash assets that are what they sound like, unrestricted cash assets. So our state lending agencies actually have upwards of $50 million in unrestricted cash assets. They could be the capital for a state bank. So all that being said, the commission would look into how we capitalize it, but it's a totally surmountable design question. Great, thanks, Ennis. Yeah, that data, the data on the amount of capital that we have in our state lending agencies was the product of a study that we did back in 2014 where we look comprehensively at the possibility of a state bank and the economic impact of a state bank. So Robin, you had a question. Yeah, just two questions, really. One is, could I hand this leaflet, this petition around what you could assign? Yeah, no problem. It's about the nuclear weapons ban treaty. Just to get it started. What I wanted to bring up is the good news that actually last night in Burlington, we won the right to put on the ballot in March a question to remove the F-35 airplanes from our airport. In other words, everyone thinks that's a done deal and it was really hard. We had to gather lots of signatures and convince the city council and the mayor. We all know that the mayor, Bernie and Leahy and Peter Wells all support this plane coming which is an abomination in contrast with the kind of economy you're talking about. The military spending drains money from human needs. So I wonder if any of you can comment on the impact. I mean, it would be wonderful if we could do a study of what the impact of these planes coming here if we don't win the ballot in March. And let me just say one thing for all of you who live outside of Burlington, that plane, as you know the F-16s, fly over your area is one of the reasons that they're here in Vermont is that there's lots of so-called unpopulated areas that these planes will be flying over and scaring the animals and scaring the children and scaring you. And the noise is staggering. I've heard it, I just can't imagine it being a regular part of our Vermont scenery. So commend you, I know Robin you're really behind that initiative to get rid of the F-35s. I don't know what the impact would be but I do think that you're absolutely right when you say that this type of deployment, this type of activity is part and parcel of this economic culture, this economic paradigm that has to change. And I mean, just in case you lost the thread in all of this, I hope you didn't but we're really talking about a cultural and spiritual shift in society, more than we are about specific programmatic things, yeah? The string is on, maybe you don't even have it, come on. I'm a filmmaker, so who are you, who are you filming this for? I've just since I know about it. Just live from my online audience. Your online audience, who is who? Who is on Facebook and YouTube. I have about 40,000 followers on YouTube. So you've been asking me if I'd like my image to be sent to those 40,000 people. Would you not? Well, I mean, it's a courtesy and it's, as a filmmaker, I'm pretty sensitive to that. There were times when, if I took an image of something. Can I just ask that you handle this outside of the conference? Sorry, sorry. I'm not standing because I want to give a speech but close the bar. So I think part of this conversation has to be looked at of whether we're in the forest and whether we're in the trees and not seeing the forest. So when we talk about economy, we're really talking about an industrialized economy. An industrialized economy, it really has only been in existence for about 300 years. And it changed the whole relationship of humans to the natural world when that happened in England. So here's an interesting thought. So the industrialization happened around cotton and cotton clothing, which was the factories were being built in England. They needed cotton. Where did they get the cotton? Slaves. Slaves. So in 1800, there were 500,000 slaves in America. In 1850, there were five million. So, only bringing this up is we're all product of that. And we don't know anything else but that because that's been our history. That's been our relationship to money, to everything else. So if we start this conversation, I think we have to look at our own relationship to what we know and what we don't know. So we don't know anything but an industrial economy, really. And what does that mean? And it means a lot of different things, but it means the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. And so, I mean, that's just, I've been thinking about this a lot and I've been thinking about how do we make that change? So it gets back to this, right? I think this is the latest technology, but it really is the trajectory of all that concentration of capital wealth. Now in the hands of the digital economy. And not, I didn't want to do this personally too, but it's just something that in this new world, we don't give people the right to say, no, I don't want my English to be broadcast to 40,000 people necessarily because I don't know anything. Anyway, so that's it, it's like, how do we start looking at our own personal relationships with this accumulation of wealth and our lifestyles, which have come about like that. And the lifestyles of which, if you look at footprints, ecological footprints, we are already living beyond what the earth can, the carrying capacity of the earth. And if everyone lived like a person in the United States, we'd have to have fibers. So that's really a lot of what I think this has to be. Yeah, that's very true. We're all part of this economy. And every piece of our life, every piece of our life's substance comes from it. And the economic box that allows all of that is what I was talking about earlier, because we live in that box. We don't even see the structures that perpetuate it. We don't understand that ownership is a structure, an economic structure. We don't understand that money is something that is an economic structure that perpetuates the type of problematic economic relationships that we have. And so that's part of what I was doing with this workshop is trying to bring those invisible box walls into our consciousness as a first step for trying to change them. Because we have to understand them and see them, I think, for what they are before we can change them. Did you have a question? Yes, thanks. I came for the one question. What is the next step? They did have a study committee. Did they not? No, no, no, no. Never happened? No, no. I'll tell you that it's okay. Yes, please. Okay, so we tried to get a study done before. We tried really hard and the banking lobby failed. It failed in the legislature. So I went out and raised the money to do the study privately. And that study was conducted in 2014 and it showed that if we had a public bank in Vermont, it was a very conservative study, by the way. But if we had a public bank in Vermont, it would create over 2,500 jobs. It would add over 340 million to the state's gross state product, whether we like that measurement or not. It's still a significant number. And over 192 million to the added value that is produced in Vermont. Now, normally when legislators and commissioners study that show that kind of economic impact, it would be a no-brainer to go forward and adopt that policy or whatever it was. But in this case because, again, the banking lobby was opposed to it and the state treasurer was opposed to it. And yeah, so they managed to stop and extracts. Even though 20 town meetings, 20 town meetings back in 2014 voted to direct the state legislature to set up a public bank. Now, right now we have a couple pieces of legislation as Henry described in the state House H208 Senate 48. 48? 48. Yeah, it's X. 40. They're all A's. And that goes with it. And they're going nowhere. I don't want to fool you on this. We want you to come to the cardinal on February 7th. We want you to be in the state legislature with us that day talking to your legislators. But I have zero comment, zero, that those bills are gonna get out of this by any. So what we're doing instead, more of is more of this, going out and doing grassroots meetings. We're happy to come to your neighborhood and do a little baking contest or a skit or educational activity that we have. But until we get new legislators in there, we're not gonna see any progress in the state. And a new treasurer. Wow. Yeah, I want to underscore what you just said. I've done a little personal research on this subject myself because of my own interest. I have the same kind of frustration that you do about it. Our state treasurer is a member of a national association of state treasurers. And her main position in that association is as the treasurer liaison with Wall Street banks. So who do you think she is listening to? About two years ago, when we had various state races, I asked a lot of different incumbents and some of the candidates about public banking and what they thought about it. I had three or four of them say, oh, I listened to Beth on this, okay? Well, all right, they listened to her. They're not gonna vote for or support a public bank. I talked to one particular candidate, Matt Dunn, when he was running for governor or thinking of running for governor. And I said, what do you think of a state bank? And he gave me the same answer. Oh, well, I'm with Beth on this. I listened to what she tells me. So if you wanna start with one of the real problems a shoe gets listened to on that hill up there, I think we could start with Beth. When is the next time she has to be a... That's my personal opinion. Everybody in our state runs every two years. Everybody in our state runs for office every two years. She's up for election in 2018. Before we go on, Audrey and Anne, I see you. I just wanna describe something that is called in the literature academically, regulatory capture, okay? That's when the private interests are so powerful that they basically end up owning the people that should be regulating them. And in this state, for example, the Department of Financial Regulation gets their money from taxes imposed on the banks that they are supposed to be regulating. So if you talk to the Department of Financial Regulation about a public bank, they don't wanna hear about it. They won't even talk to you about it. Because, again, their salaries are paid by the banks. The same goes for the federal housing finance agency, the office of the currency controller. Many of these agencies that we think are government organizations set up to regulate the private sector are actually owned. Locked stock and barrel are by that same private sector. So, Anne and then Audrey. And if you could come up, she was the mic, that'd be great. It's just a quick comment. I'm a retired state worker, and when I've gone to meetings, I've learned that we had not divested our funds from fossil fuels. And I've argued with Beth for two years, and I get on around. She doesn't wanna do that. Well, that's actually right. She runs both as a Democrat and a Republican, and has won over 80% of the vote. So she's very popular politician, and I think we deserve better. I think we deserve better. Audrey, do you have a comment? Do you wanna come up? Before we got away from the subject of the F-35, I had heard that parts for the F-35 were being produced in over 40 states, which is one of the reasons it continues, and it never gets voted down because of the jobs that are created in these four states. Well, that's true. Every piece of my hardware, isn't it? It's the military capture of our economy. If most people knew how much of our real economy went into military production, they'd be shocked. It's over 60%. It's huge. And the beauty of military spending, of course, is that unlike social spending, it can be raised and lowered a lot more easily because, oh, you cancel one plane order, that isn't gonna necessarily throw anybody out on the streets right away, but it will reduce the amount of government spending. So the government gets really enamored with military spending as an economic engine, and ignoring completely the fact that by spending all the money there, they're denying all of the people in their society most of their basic needs. So I see that people are getting ready to wrap up, and it is about time to wrap up. I'm sorry if we went a little over time, but we did have a, is there any last questions or comments people wanna make? We do have one final song we'd like to sing, and the words are on the back of your program, so we'd really like you to sing with us. It's not a terribly long song, but it does get to Robin's point and Audrey's point, and everybody's point about how the kind of domination culture we live in that breeds violence and exploitation and discrimination and environmental destruction is actually the problem, it is the problem. And in order to change that problem, it's not a matter of passing along. It's even though I'm a big fan of public banks, it's not even a matter of getting a public bank set up, although that's a very positive step in the right direction. It's actually a fairly substantial cultural shift. How do cultural shifts happen? How do spiritual awakenings happen on a mass scale? I think those are the kind of questions we need to start asking, and the poor people's movement to their credit have started asking those questions. It's not only the poor people's campaign, it's the poor people's campaign and a national call for moral revival. Because I think they recognize as well that there's this cultural problem that we have that needs to shift. So if you'd all join us, this is a song written by a Canadian, Ed McCurdy in 1950. It's one of Michael's favorites in 19, oh.