Lesson to Learn from Katrina

While reading What To Take From Katrina today, I read an excellent comment posted by "Knitter" who appears to be a teacher by vocation.

"During college, in a teacher-training course, I learned to make a sociogram. The first step was to write all the names of the class on a large sheet of paper. Next, we added lines to connect friends. We tried to get a good sense of the interactions among the group. Some children had lines connecting to many people. A large part of the reason for doing this work, however, was to look for the children who had few or no lines connecting them to anyone else. These were children who were often overlooked. Kind, inviting words and a little extra attention helped these children to become part of the group.

It felt surprising to realize that in the busy hum of activity, there were some children who were barely taking part in it. By focusing only on the gregarious, active children, it would be easy to miss those who stood on the sidelines. Attention is required to find the silent ones, the needy ones.

Let’s adapt this tool to use it beyond a classroom. It could be used relatively easily to figure out how well connected a neighborhood is. Are there some people who are isolated from everyone else on the street? What might be done about it?"

I loved Knitter's classroom analogy, so I put it to work at once from an economic perspective. The classroom is the economy.

Our economy is our existence. It is the exchange of our labor that produces our roads, our bread, our milk, our houses, and our levies--everything we need to survive and thrive.

Money is at the heart of our economy. It is THE tool by which we exchange our labor. When people are forcelosed from access to this tool, they are effectively excluded from the economy. They have wealth--their labor--but they are excluded because they do not have the tool with which they can exchange their wealth for another's wealth, which they need to survive.

If we want to solve this problem of exclusion--if we want to include ALL people in an economy that is connected almost entirely by money--we MUST give them equal access to it according to their abilities and willingness to work.

We must not give certain people privileged access to money (central privatemonetary system), and then enable them to benefit from that privilege by allowing interest to be charged on every dollar that is circulated in our economy--an economy that is public--for the benefit of a few.

I have limited time. Money is supposed to be for public benefit, not private benefit. The most important issue of our time lies in this one truth.

Louisiana and Mississipi have suffered immeasurable misery all because they did not have access to the money with which they could have exchanged their abundant human capital to fix those levies. There was absolutely no reason for it except for the monopoly on our money system by private interests that charge interest on every single dollar that they circulate.

Learn about our governments' finance systems; they are all the same--all in debt--all based on interest.

Thanks, Knitter! You taught me something new today!

If you learned something new today, take a moment to teach someone else.

Learn and teach others about how money is supposed to work, and reclaim your freedom; your family's freedom, your friends' freedom, and our nation's freedom.