permaculture

[Nancy Elizabeth <nesutton@yahoo.com>]

(Love Scott's direction, btw, )  Posted far outside the main p.c. channels....
https://www.reddit.com/r/Permaculture/comments/4t8dps/end_of_nations_is_there_an_alternative_to/d5fxrgw?st=ireh5ndo&sh=aecf75ef

If you are interested in this stuff you might want to track down Bill 
Mollison's 1983 PDC. He breaks down a whole system of using the existing 
institutions of the nation state such as trust law to form non profit public 
interest trusts (the same legal form as churches and universities) that own 
profit seeking companies. The trust owns all of the land and capital 
equipment collectively and lends or leases it out to profit seeking companies 
owned by the trust. The profit seeking companies then donate all of their 
taxable profits to the trust and the trust pays what is effectively a minimum 
basic income to all of the beneficiaries of the trust (who are also the 
people in the companies and operating the land trust). Because all of the 
land, housing and capital can be provided by the trust holdings the basic 
income stipends can be below taxable rates but still provide a living wage. 
It's pretty much what Joel Salatin describes in this talk but with a more 
communitarian focus and a few sneakier institutional strategies. Effectively 
it means that a small group can get together, provide a livings for each 
other, pay no or almost no tax and be very legally defensible if state or 
corporate interests try to come after them (as they did with the original 
permaculture institute which was modelled this way).This land based form can 
then be networked into regional coops. Mollison largely models this on 
mondragon which the exception that there is a care of the earth, care of 
people etc charter in the coops (so they don't end up making consumer goods 
like standard washing machines). These coops can then be knitted into 
bioregional groups where the waste products of one coop become the inputs for 
another not unlike the Plant in Chicago. At this scale the groups would be 
large and coordinated enough to run local political candidates or have 
considerable sway in local politics which could remove regulatory barriers to 
regenerative and ecological activities.The whole thing is very interesting, 
especially since it's a roadmap that used existing institutions and legal 
forms which largely serve corporate interests but turns them to the service 
of regenerative social ecological systems. Rather than sitting on our thumbs 
waiting for nations to collapse it gives us an effective means of using the 
existing nation states to become incubators for permaculture federations 
which would have some measure of independence from centralized means of 
control. Even better than that it allows for a prefigurative politics and 
staging a social prototype in a context of use which allows us to identify 
'misfits' and sort out problems that would not be apparent in theoretical 
plan. What's more everything he talks about was able to be done in Australia 
or in larger cases in the Basque regions of Spain. It's not a bunch of pie in 
the sky postulates or theory.