| Long-Range Plans |
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When Everyone in your town Accepts Metro Credits
we'll be able to use many more of them, to finance things that, today, are hard to afford.Here are examples of these benefits:
- Major funding for community organizations. Many local groups doing great work for your town (for women, youth, seniors, etc.) hardly have any money.
- Job creation center. An incubator for grass roots enterprises, for job training and apprenticeships.
- Large zero-interest loans for ecological businesses, like community cannery, solar hot water, experimental housing, greenhousing, organic farms. People with new ideas often have a tough time getting loans from conventional banks.
- Superinsulation of housing, to reduce dependence on their gas company and to reduce coal-burning and nuclear pollution. Technically, our town could be warmed with little fuel cost, were such a program funded here.
- Community-sponsored low-cost housing, built without depending on government grants or bureaucracy.
- Repair and recycling warehouse. Lots of our "garbage" is perfectly usable, and even the broken goods have component parts that should be separated and put back to work, rather than dumped.
- Trolley system. Our dependence on cars is our greatest waste of wealth (for car payments, insurance, gasoline, roadwork and Oil Wars) and contaminates our soil, water and air. Trolleys and bikes can gradually make travel easier, cheaper, and more fun.
- Land purchases for land trusts, to preserve local forests and farms. Speculators convert beauty and fertility of our land into suburbs. They buy up our neighborhoods for their development. A land trust will buy land and protect it from abuse, for the benefit of future generations.
you help this process expand.
Metro Progress:
Phase TWO- With enough Metros to allow larger purchases, Metros could become a larger portion of our income.
We can then foresee the following: Stores could reduce their dollar overhead by using local services and selling more locally made goods. More employees might accept Metros. Regular barter partners would decrease your dependence on dollars. An Ecological Loan Fund (ELF) could help start environmental businesses, and support local organic farms. Larger grants of Metro Credits could be made to community organizations. Local currencies might begin in many cities.
Phase THREE- After several years most locally-owned stores would accept Metros. Ten per cent of cash sales might use Metros. Many prices would be listed in Metro amounts. Metro bank accounts would be available in a Community Development Credit Union, and some local taxes might be paid with Metros. Many community organizations would be reliably funded with Metros. Exports of environmental goods Made in our town (such as cargo bicycles, insulation, farm tools, organic food, natural soap & lotions, solar equipment, natural fiber clothing, rail accessories) could be capitalized with Metros.
Phase FOUR- Many years later our bioregional economy would be far less dependent on distant corporations' resources. The region would become a nation of strong localities, linked by rapid rail. Bioregions would produce most of their own necessities ecologically, and trade emergency supplies. 25% of cash sales would use Metros.
Phase FIVE- Finally, the global economy thinks locally. Economies would be controlled at the grassroots level, proudly exporting cultural goods such as handcrafts, music, arts, dance and theater. Truly independent nations would have no need to fight for food, fuel, or metal. Wealth would be shifted from warfare to earthcare.
METRO World
In Metro world, thousands of cities, towns and neighborhoods, would each have their own money, issued within easy walking, bicycling and transit distances. The volume of creativity and enthusiasm brought into the marketplace by local currency will be new standards of economic. success.
Local money would be issued gradually and carefully, at the rate each community learns to use it.
Larger regions might then create joint currencies, or agree to accept one another's. But then, at the broadest levels of local currency trading, larger accrediting agencies would be needed to monitor the value and integrity of each currency. To keep things simple and manageable, (and to prevent replicating the abuses of national currency), we recommend that inter-trading of local currencies be formalized only between systems of comparable size, which operate nearby each other.