Government Oligopolies

From the P2P Foundation:

“Individually, and separately, we can’t compete with the power of oligopolies. But together, working collaboratively as peers, we can have far more power over our own lives, our economy, our society, and the well-being of all-life-on-Earth, than oligopolies could ever dream of having. A century ago, to fight the corporatist oligopolies, we organized in labour unions. Peer Production and the Generosity Economy is the 21st century ‘labour union’, united this time not to negotiate with producers, but to render them obsolete, to replace them.”

Playing around with the previous quote:

“Individually, and separately, we can’t compete with the power of oligopolies governments. But together, working collaboratively as peers, we can have far more power over our own lives, our economy, our society, and the well-being of all-life-on-Earth, than oligopolies governments could ever dream of having. A century ago, to fight the corporatist oligopolies governments, we organized in labour unions experimented with socioeconomic alternatives. Peer Production and the Generosity Economy is the 21st century ‘socioeconomic alternative’, united this time not to negotiate with producers governments, but to render them obsolete, to replace them.”

Reminds me of a quote about governments I heard the other day – something like: Governments are not interested in outcomes they are interested in processes.

As far as the need for this check out this quote from TreeHugger:

I believe there is absolutely a direct relationship between living with too much and living with not enough… we have in every part of the world lost control of our food systems to agribusiness… [referring to Monsanto] a number of companies… have quite systematically removed seed banks, have contaminated [and] diminished the genetic material that all people in the world have with which to feed themselves, and it’s a terrifying problem. [T]he only way we can reclaim control over our food systems is to [first] step away, to any extent that we can, from the dismal presumption that it’s too late, because it’s not, it can’t be (we owe this to our kids to try) and to try whatever we can to reinvest in [and re-energize] our local [diversified and sustainable] food systems. If you can do that, you are helping the farmers in India because you’re walking away from agribusiness; you are forcing them to relinquish absolute control.