8 Ways to De-Corporatize Your Money

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1. Ditch the Cards
 
All electronic transactions siphon money out of your community to some extent, so try the human approach and bank in person. Pay in cash or, second best, write a check. If you have to use plastic, choose debit. Your local merchants lose some of their profit any time you use a card, but they pay up to seven times more in fees when it’s a credit card. And studies show people spend 12 to 18 percent more when they use cards instead of cash.

2. Move Your Debt
 
Already broke up with your mega-bank? From credit card balances to car loans to mortgages, mega-banks make far more money off your debt than your savings. Refinance your debt with a credit union or local bank and let your fees support your community. Be wary of “affinity credit cards,” which donate a certain amount per purchase to good-hearted organizations but often are connected with a mega-bank.

3. Spend Deliberately

Forget Internet deals; shop local and independent. Support second-hand markets by buying used, and barter and trade services when you can. Look for goods grown and made nearby.Research your purchases carefully: That organic Dagoba chocolate bar is owned by industry bad-boy Hershey. Want to give money to Coca-Cola? Buy Odwalla juice. Easy company screening at Green America’s Responsible Shopper website.

 4. Shorten Loan Lengths
 

To get as much interest from you as possible, banks offer to stretch out terms. Avoid the 30-year mortgage or the seven-year car loan. If you’re stuck with one, change it yourself: Decide the length of term that’s best for you and pay down your principal. Calculators at sites like ­mtgprofessor.com can be used for any loans, not just mortgages.

 5. Earn Feel-Good Interest
 
A community development bank will reinvest money from your CD back into your community and pay you interest. So will alternative savings tools offered by RSF Social Finance or the Community Investment Note from the nonprofit Calvert Foundation, which also lets you target by cause, such as public radio stations. Put money into kiva.org microloans and get no interest but big returns in social-economic justice. Closer to home, consider investing in family—a college loan for a nephew, for example.

6. Create a DIY Retirement Fund
 
Avoiding Wall Street’s ubiquitous 401k can be tricky. One way is via “Self-Directed” IRAs and Roth IRAs. These require the account owner—you—to make all investment decisions. You get to decide what projects to invest in—from local projects and businesses to real estate.

7. Invest In Home

Investing in your home strengthens your community and builds your wealth. Pay down your mortgage, then use that equity when it’s time to retire. Want more investment? Do it with a second property and be a local landlord, or invest in your children’s home. Beyond mortgages, invest in your home’s energy efficiency for a solid rate of return. Or become your own utility by tying your alternative energy system into the grid.

8. Don't Forget Your Community
 
Buy shares of a local co-op­—utility, food, store—or jump on a Direct Public Offering. Seek out, or better yet start, a community investment group to connect local businesses with local investors. Look for community Revolving Loan Funds that allow participation by individual investors, such as Cascadia (Pacific Northwest), “Invest Local Ohio” Economic and Community Development Notes, the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, and Mountain BizWorks (North Carolina).

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Give Karl Marx a Chance to Save the World Economy : Information Clearing House News

Give Karl Marx a Chance to Save the World Economy :  Information Clearing House News

By George Magnus
[REPRINT]

August 29, 2011 "Bloomberg" -- Policy makers struggling to understand the barrage of financial panics, protests and other ills afflicting the world would do well to study the works of a long-dead economist: Karl Marx. The sooner they recognize we’re facing a once-in-a-lifetime crisis of capitalism, the better equipped they will be to manage a way out of it.

The spirit of Marx, who is buried in a cemetery close to where I live in north London, has risen from the grave amid the financial crisis and subsequent economic slump. The wily philosopher’s analysis of capitalism had a lot of flaws, but today’s global economy bears some uncanny resemblances to the conditions he foresaw.

Consider, for example, Marx’s prediction of how the inherent conflict between capital and labor would manifest itself. As he wrote in “Das Kapital,” companies’ pursuit of profits and productivity would naturally lead them to need fewer and fewer workers, creating an “industrial reserve army” of the poor and unemployed: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery.”

The process he describes is visible throughout the developed world, particularly in the U.S. Companies’ efforts to cut costs and avoid hiring have boosted U.S. corporate profits as a share of total economic output to the highest level in more than six decades, while the unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent and real wages are stagnant.

U.S. income inequality, meanwhile, is by some measures close to its highest level since the 1920s. Before 2008, the income disparity was obscured by factors such as easy credit, which allowed poor households to enjoy a more affluent lifestyle. Now the problem is coming home to roost.

Over-Production Paradox

Marx also pointed out the paradox of over-production and under-consumption: The more people are relegated to poverty, the less they will be able to consume all the goods and services companies produce. When one company cuts costs to boost earnings, it’s smart, but when they all do, they undermine the income formation and effective demand on which they rely for revenues and profits.

This problem, too, is evident in today’s developed world. We have a substantial capacity to produce, but in the middle- and lower-income cohorts, we find widespread financial insecurity and low consumption rates. The result is visible in the U.S., where new housing construction and automobile sales remain about 75% and 30% below their 2006 peaks, respectively.

As Marx put it in Kapital: “The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses.”

Addressing the Crisis

So how do we address this crisis? To put Marx’s spirit back in the box, policy makers have to place jobs at the top of the economic agenda, and consider other unorthodox measures. The crisis isn’t temporary, and it certainly won’t be cured by the ideological passion for government austerity.

Here are five major planks of a strategy whose time, sadly, has not yet come.

First, we have to sustain aggregate demand and income growth, or else we could fall into a debt trap along with serious social consequences. Governments that don’t face an imminent debt crisis -- including the U.S., Germany and the U.K. -- must make employment creation the litmus test of policy. In the U.S., the employment-to-population ratio is now as low as in the 1980s. Measures of underemployment almost everywhere are at record highs. Cutting employer payroll taxes and creating fiscal incentives to encourage companies to hire people and invest would do for a start.

Lighten the Burden

Second, to lighten the household debt burden, new steps should allow eligible households to restructure mortgage debt, or swap some debt forgiveness for future payments to lenders out of any home price appreciation.

Third, to improve the functionality of the credit system, well-capitalized and well-structured banks should be allowed some temporary capital adequacy relief to try to get new credit flowing to small companies, especially. Governments and central banks could engage in direct spending on or indirect financing of national investment or infrastructure programs.

Fourth, to ease the sovereign debt burden in the euro zone, European creditors have to extend the lower interest rates and longer payment terms recently proposed for Greece. If jointly guaranteed euro bonds are a bridge too far, Germany has to champion an urgent recapitalization of banks to help absorb inevitable losses through a vastly enlarged European Financial Stability Facility -- a sine qua non to solve the bond market crisis at least.

Build Defenses

Fifth, to build defenses against the risk of falling into deflation and stagnation, central banks should look beyond bond- buying programs, and instead target a growth rate of nominal economic output. This would allow a temporary period of moderately higher inflation that could push inflation-adjusted interest rates well below zero and facilitate a lowering of debt burdens.

We can’t know how these proposals might work out, or what their unintended consequences might be. But the policy status quo isn’t acceptable, either. It could turn the U.S. into a more unstable version of Japan, and fracture the euro zone with unknowable political consequences. By 2013, the crisis of Western capitalism could easily spill over to China, but that’s another subject.

(George Magnus is senior economic adviser at UBS and author of “Uprising: Will Emerging Markets Shape or Shake the World Economy?” The opinions expressed are his own.)