An Open Letter to Occupy Wall Street

The question has been raised, from both inside and outside the movement, on where Occupy Wall Street should go from here. The street actions are important as they are the most affective way of expressing the seriousness and scope of this movement; however these actions are only moderately sustainable. We now need to explore actions we can take individually, as well as collectively, as agents of change, to counter the Wall Street deception within a framework that is replicable and expandable on our Main Streets; in short, we need to foster an occupy Main Street movement.

In an effort to reinvent and reinvigorate Main Street, I want to offer a strategy for the occupy movement that involves harnessing the vast amount of human capital represented by the multitude of unemployed and underemployed professionals. I’m offering a website now under construction at www.vera-city.net, to serve as a base for an effort that calls out to like minded people to join together to achieve a grassroots revitalization of Main Street. Vera-City is only a seed of an idea, it presently contain links to numerous neighborhood development websites that offer working concepts on a wide range of community wealth building strategies, which include Coops, ESOPs and CSOPs, along with renewable energy stratagems and complementary currency models.

One benefit of participating in Vera City is a proprietary global digital complementary currency called the Vera, which will provide a barter device for the community. Though the Vera will have a global value, it can only be spent with local businesses owned by Vera City members. The Vera represents a private global complementary monetary system designed to assist communities to act locally-globally. The Vera is envisioned to be a hybrid currency that will provide for a share or stock component, which will supply a pool of risk capital for investing in energy conservation and renewable energy acquisition; affording a countervailing force to the economic power of the oil industry to control the energy market. The creation of the Vera will also produce a reserve of dollars that can be lent at a low cost to members for local business expansion.

Vera-City, along with the Vera, is an idea whose time has come and it’s time for this effort to be opened to others to move it forward quickly. The rapid expansion of the “Occupy” movement makes the need to move rapidly even more urgent, it also makes this strategy more viable. I’m seeking collaborators who have the skill sets to move this project into the mainstream, within a leaderless velvet revolution for liberating Main Street from the predation of Wall Street. We can no longer look to government or Wall Street to heed our demands; we need to move forward as a powerful multitude using collective or “neo corporate power” to change the trajectory of our social/economic condition.

We have a rare opportunity ahead of us to deconstruct the old institutions and create new robust institutions that respond more quickly to the changing times propelled by the new paradigms expressed through the exploding open source movement. What is needed right away are IT professionals, web designers and programmers, bankers, lawyers, angel investors, credit/debit card experts to build the business and legal superstructure, while at the same time a team of social network aficionados that will initiate a dialog with community organizers active on revitalizing their respective Main Streets around the globe, to lay the groundwork for implementation of the scheme. An immense amount of work needs to be done in a stealthy manner to build up a social network and fashion an alternative infrastructure, so when it is launched it can reach critical mass rapidly and be too big to stop. I know this is a bold proposal, but the grim times we live in demand we take great risk.

Copyright 2011