There has been a lot of talk about nationalization of the banks or at least a type of trustbusting, breaking these behemoths up into smaller entities to ensure competitiveness. This post at Tiny Revolution proposes a grassroots initiative to serve as a catalyst for this effort. In short, take your money out of Bank of America and Citigroup and put it into your local non-conglomerate bank. Sounds simple enough, but as I mentioned in my comment on the post, small efforts at change that attempt to alter the power balance of a system without actually changing its design are ultimately fruitless endeavors. In order to effect a change that would provide a more equitable system, you need to focus energy at the fundamentals of that system.
This is where local orientation comes in. Communities that are locally oriented are those that have achieved a high level of responsiveness to the needs of its members and the environment in which it is situated. That is to say, communities that produce their own food (not necessarily all of it, but a good deal), manage their own natural resources (e.g. water usage) and provide for their own economy (banking), are more apt and capable to provide equitable living standards and more capable of making environmentally responsible decisions. Most importantly this doesn't involve isolation from one community to another, but rather, with technology being what it is, communities can be interlinked and interrelated. The current corporate driven economic model is incapable of doing this as it is founded on principles of production that are completely at odds with our environmental reality (i.e. we don't have an unlimited amount of natural resources, See: Ecosocialism, many thanks to Bassem for sharing it).
The great thing is (in the United States at least) that many local communities have the necessary power to take back their communities and make them more self-sufficient. Regardless, this is a very big idea and small steps must be taken to advance us toward a more responsive government (which I shouldn't need to tell you is a MAJOR problem in present day America) and more equitable society. One such effort is called A New Way Forward, a rally movement that is calling for a break up of the big banks that are "too big to fail". Ralph Nader wrote recently of his encounter with a small-scale Indiana banker who said, "If these big companies are too big to fail, then they're too big!"
Here's to hoping we can transform that sentiment into a widely accepted belief.
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