The document discusses how societies and communities are changing with new technologies and means of communication. It argues that local economies and governments need to empower citizens and generate real wealth rather than just serving corporate interests. It also criticizes the current global monetary system and argues for local currencies that are controlled by communities and based on local production. Finally, it discusses timebanking as an alternative that values all contributions equally and promotes community support systems.

1. By Armando-Jose Diaz │ PhD MBA MBM
Are we ready to be social?
Coincident with “new today”, our society is changing its behaviors, its way of life, and
adapting to new technologies, new social landscape, protocols, culture, and more so with its
means to communicate, purchasing habits, obtaining goods using mobile resources and on
demand availability inventories, and actively interact with others local and worldwide. In the
meantime other sectors of the social community, are far behind or barely reacting to adapt
into the new “global village”.
What about social empowerment for all?
We need to see our communities not only as places of residence, recreation and retail but
also as places that nurture active citizens who make the rules that govern their lives, and
who have the skills and productive capacity to generate real wealth. Local economies must
be more than branch plants of planetary corporations. Local government must be more than
simply a body that reacts to higher levels of government.
As an example, let’s talk about Metal Money. Today is identical in all essentials with the
money that exchanged products of antiquity. Gold money unearthed from the ruins of
Athens, Rome or Carthage is universally acceptable and circulates freely with the money of
modern Europe or America. Apart from possible differences in the fineness of the gold, a
kilogram of coins with the stamp of a Roman emperor equals a kilogram of coins with the
stamp of the German mint.
Our today’s money has all the characteristics of the money that Lycurgus banished from
Sparta. Money is perhaps the only State institution still unchanged from Greek antiquity.
Today’s global imbalances, deficits, bouncing currencies, poverty and debt crises require a
systemic redesign of that faulty economic source code. Worried finance ministers and
central bankers call vainly for a “new international financial architecture.”
They do little but fret about this behind closed doors, at meetings of the G-8, WTO, and in
Jackson Hole and Davos. Some clever libertarians try to beat the bankers at their own game
with global digital currencies backed by gold, including e-gold Ltd, Gold Money and Web
Money. Based in offshore havens, Nevis, Jersey, Moscow, and Panama, they have become
platforms for cyber-crooks. The rest of us are redesigning healthy homegrown sustainable
local economies – all over the world.
Before we fall into “either/or” errors, we should avoid doctrinaire “smallness,” ideological
localism, and knee-jerk libertarianism. None can protect local communities from the ravages
of market fundamentalist-driven globalization.
© 2014 Armando-Jose Diaz

2. Like it or not, we are all “glocal” (global-local) now. Communities, like cells in the body-politic
and the body, need boundaries or membranes to keep out elements destructive to the cell’s
integrity. But all cell membranes are semi-permeable to allow needed elements, information
and energy exchanges from the environment to pass through. In today’s information
saturated world, communities need to understand which elements to reject and which to
embrace.
Wholesale rejection can lead to rigidity, xenophobia, and misreading of history. Wholesale
acceptance of current unsustainable economic global trends will surely lead to loss of local
culture and biodiversity and to resource-depletion. We humans have been adept at creating
new scenarios and technologies that mirror our lack of systemic knowledge and foresight.
From such social changes and unanticipated consequences, we must then learn and evolve
– or suffer ecological collapse.
It is up to the advocates of appropriate technology and small-scale systems to become the
inventors of an appropriate technology for money. This task is vital to us, because all of the
other appropriate technologies with which we are involved, eventually depend upon a proper
and decent exchange system. When national currencies fail because of runaway inflation, or
for any other reason, we will survive in some fashion by using barter or labor exchange
systems.
If we are to expand and grow, and become more than a counter culture movement or a New
Age subset of the larger culture, then we must create a new money system to replace the
present system. Through this new system, the attributes we value -cooperation, self-reliance,
community- can become growing and dominant within the entire culture. This is direction our
work needs to go, not only survive the coming currency collapse, but also to develop what
Schumacher called an "economy of permanence."
To help us do this, we must create local currencies. A local (appropriately scaled) currency
should be:
1. Consistent with customary practices, such as cash, checking, and accounting
systems.
2. Redeemable by a universal measure of value in real goods and based on local
production.
3. Controlled by the community, perhaps through a nonprofit bank.
Among the alternatives, we will like to mention Timebanking, which is a practical tool that
enables co-production. Unlike the money economy, Timebanking values all hours equally:
1 hour of time = 1 time credit.
Timebanking values relationships that are forged through giving and receiving. Help give
people more control over their lives, prevent needs arising and grow what we call the ‘core
economy’ – our ability to care for and support each other and to engage in mutual and non-materialistic
exchanges and civic activity.
Much in the same way that the market economy – unless appropriately regulated – neglects
and erodes the ecosystem, so it can also undermine and weaken this core economy. In the
same way that the market fails to incorporate the environmental damage caused by
production into the cost of goods and services, it also fails to value the contribution of unpaid
labor.
© 2014 Armando-Jose Diaz

3. Currently core economy is taken for granted by the majority of public service interventions.
As globalization intensifies economic competition, however, people work harder and have
less time with families, friends and neighbors and the core economy is weakened. ‘Time
poverty’ leads to community breakdown, mental health problems and distrust. As market
economies across the world are threatening to implode, co-production in the form of
Timebanking suggests an alternative route by tapping in to abundant but neglected human
resources that can help to meet people’s needs and promote well-being for all.
For it is obvious that while on the one hand we are at a historical point when local and
democratic participation in the economy is essential to our economic survival and to our
humanity, it is also clear that we live in a world that is rapidly moving toward a one world
economy. This new, local and appropriate system would consist of thousands of small,
primarily self-reliant regions exchanging or trading directly with each other using a common
unit of exchange.
© 2014 Armando-Jose Diaz
Thus the foundation for a true world social economy
would emerge, increasing benefits for all.
Armando-Jose Diaz a marketing strategist, is currently an
independent business and strategies consultant, specialized in
providing strategic resources needed, to successfully develop
projects and consolidate long term institutional relationships
over the Iberoamerican, European and Asian markets.
“We poses the ability to think globally, and yet act locally”.
www.ardiz.com
ajdiaz@ardiz.com
Skype ardizusa