The New League of Peace and Power

We seem to have been dreaming many of the same dreams.

I am writing to find out if you have any interest in hearing about a
vision that has been incubating in my head for the last 30 years.

I was jarred "asleep" by the statement of Akio Morita, the Founder of
Sony, that "Nations are a dying industry, corporations are the
structures of the future." And every day since, the truth of that
statement has become ever more clear. For many this is the "nightmare"
of our times, but for me I asked the simply question "what if a
corporation could be a people, instead of a person?" What if we could
have an economic "incorporation" of us -- a company "of the people, by
the people, and for the people." This simply shift of thinking has
allowed me to make, what at one time would have been unthinkable, the
statement that "I love corporations . . . it is kings that I can do
without."

Yes, there have been many incarnations of this same urge, ESOPs, worker
cooperatives, etc., but all the well intentioned ones seemed to share a
fatal flaw -- ironically the same fatal flaw as the occupy movement.
This flaw lies in simple mathematics -- what I call the "Movie Picking
Paradox". Anyone who has ever tried to pick a movie with more than a
handful of people has discovered the truth of the towering logarithmic
barrier of the paradox -- 10 people can't even pick a movie together.
So, in this modern world of complexity, how can people come together to
produce a well managed economic enterprise large enough to "compete"
with modern global multinational corporations? This quest has led me to
study a range of knowledge from the work of The Great Peacemaker, the
man who I believe invented "America", to the seminal work of the
diminutive academic and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics Elinor
Ostrom. The "Ostrom Parameters" are the distillation of thousands of
years of human creativity and she gives us the road map on how to govern
resources as a commons. Then I asked, "Can capital be a commons?"

The emphatically affirmative answer to this question is what lead me
conceive of the "New League of Peace and Power." The first global
indigenous tribe, an economic confederation. Taking the structure of a
multinational corporation but rooted in what I have for years termed
"Sacred Economics" and patterned after the model of confederation as
imagined by the Great Peacemaker in his formation of the historic
confederation that is still in existence today called the League of
Peace and Power, or the People of the Longhouse.

The Great Lakota Chief, Sitting Bull was asked, "do we use the White
Man's technology?". His answer was matter of fact -- "If the White Man
leaves something of value in the road, pick it up. Otherwise, let it
lie." We now have the ability to pick up the best of this new technical
world and blend it with the best of the long arc of human collaborative
evolution to help heal this wounded human society.

The time is now. We are the ones we have been waiting for.

--
m@sumpeople.org
www.sumpeople.org

"Little people can add up to big changes"

The Western Slope of the Sierra

I have learned about Summit from my friends Linda Vilatore and James "Woody" Woodruff.  I am writing to see if the vision of your enterprise might match my own.

I own 160 acres of land on the West Slope of the Sierra with a mile of South Yuba River frontage, surrounded by Tahoe National Forest and at the threshold of what I call the "Nisenan Wildness"*.   I have had a longterm vision of helping this land start a complete resource-secure human/nature interface transformation for the Tahoe Basin.  The vision includes the building of a "string of pearls" which are concentrated developments in the middle of wildness linked by mass transit, liberated from fossil fuel addiction, and organized around loving and deeply sustainable, nurturing incorporations of community and based on the principal of Sacred Capital. 

I imagine traveling from the Bay by high speed rail in my "mod" -- a personal tram like mobile room that can be docked on a train, a ferry, a semi truck, connected to a cable, or simply add square footage to my home when not in use.  I dream of being whisked over abundant nature to my ARC (awesomely resourceful community) while I sleep, work, or play.  I see myself looking down on the poor souls stuck in I-80 chain control, or watching a pack of wolves take down an antelope in Bear Valley.  I see my ARC being connected to an ARC on the top of Signal Peak with back country access into the Grouse Lakes Recreation Area, a hub of a series of guided recreation opportunities at the crest of the Sierra Nevada and home to an economically diverse community that is capable of surviving the vagaries of catastrophic climate disruption. 

Just as the current transportation and residential/commercial infrastructure of Tahoe was built with bonds, as a Commonteer, I see the construction of the new resource paradigm being built with funds from the Act of Common Bond, a government guaranteed bond measure that provides both a secure and evolutionary investment opportunity for the hard working middle class, but also a pool of money for every native born citizen over the age of 26 to invest in a democratically structured company with at least 300 other partners.

I have much more to share, but if I have not peaked your interest by now then I wish you well.  I have recently undergone a series of extreme challenges and am looking for what the future might hold for me.

*"In wildness is the preservation of the world" Thoreau

"I dwell in Possibility-- A fairer House than Prose-- More numerous of Windows-- Superior--for Doors-- Of Chambers as the Cedars-- Impregnable of Eye-- And for an Everlasting Roof The Gambrels of the Sky-- Of Visitors--the fairest-- For Occupation--This-- The spreading wide my narrow Hands To gather Paradise--" -- Emily Dickinson