While it may be tempting to divide the world into two separate camps, market and commons, some of the most interesting territory lies in the spaces in between – namely, in the non-capitalist, commons-based marketplace.  In France, they call it the “social economy” – the segment of commerce serviced by cooperatives and mutual enterprises.  Such companies meet their members’ commercial needs while also trying to address broader social, ecological and democratic concerns.

Over the last few years, a number of local currencies have launched in the UK, Totnes, Stroud, and Brixton being the most significant. The Brixton pound has now taken it one step further and next week, at its second birthday party, launches as an e-currency. Users will be able to pay by text, making it more versatile and opening up more opportunities for smaller traders that cannot currently accept credit cards, such as market stalls.

It’s the first local e-currency in the country, a pilot organised by the Transition Network, the New Economics Foundation and Dutch organisation QOIN. Brixton is a good place to run the experiment. It’s a distinctive part of London with its own identity and a thriving subculture. It’s young, diverse, and has a reputation for free thinking. It’s socially deprived, and has been for a long time. It’s also got a considerably larger catchment area than Totnes or Stroud, with lots of passing traffic through the Underground Station too – and yes, you can use Brixton pounds at the newsagents in the station.

In Britain, the 5th of November is Guy Fawkes Night, which commemorates the failure of a plot to blow up the House of Parliament in 1605. It’s traditionally celebrated with fireworks, bonfires, and the burning in effigy of the aforementioned and rather unfortunate Mr Fawkes. Fawke’s other legacy is the Guy Fawke’s Mask, as drawn by Alan Moore and popularised by the film V for Vendetta. The smiling papist’s face has become the unofficial mascot of  anti-bank protestors.

Given this new association, it’s fitting that November 5th has been chosen for Bank Transfer Day. It’s a day to send a message to the banking establishment by moving your account to an ethical bank.

Everyone from politicians to journalists and economists like to conflate words relating with finance with words relating to economy. You thought the were the same thing, right? That's OK, so did I. But they're not the same thing. I wish I could say this conflation occured from utter stupidity, but my suspicion is that it has been a long and relentless campaign by the corporatocracy (read John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman) to ensure that people can't even think of an economic model that isn't money based.

This is most apparent when I hear businesspeople and political leaders telling us something isn't economically viable, such as leaving the rainforest as a rainforest or giving a living wage to the people who make the stuff we use within an economic system we forced them into. An economic system is really only a method of managing all that we have been gifted as wisely as possible, not just for humans but for all the family of life. If we destroy our ecologies, there are no economies.

There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant.

Union leaders, who pull down salaries five times that of the rank and file as they bargain away rights and benefits, know the foundations are shaking. So do Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. So do the array of “liberal” groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked those who called for profound structural reform.

The ongoing exercise in democracy transpiring in and around the Occupy Wall Street site in Lower Manhattan imbues one's heart with resonances of the real. Many reasons factor into the phenomenon: Here, for example, one does not feel scammed and demeaned…gripped by the sense of futility, even embarrassment, experienced at even the thought of participating in the big money-skewed, sham elections staged in the corporate oligarchic state.

In our era, in which our mind’s are distracted and circumscribed by relentless, manic formations of instant information and evanescent imagery, we too often dwell in domains devoid of musk and fury, of the implications carried by mind meeting flesh; therefore, one is often nettled by an abiding hollowness resultant from voluntary exile in these weightless realms of electronic ghosts.

The events unfolding in this place bear little resemblance to contrived reality TV tawdriness or pro sports/corporate rock, empty spectacle. Although some of the event transpiring here have been broadcast, webcast and tweeted in “real time” -- in vivid contrast -- events are unfolding in time that is real.

We would like to bring more attention to a really well made animated short film, The American Dream.

At a time when so many people are waking up and taking to the streets in disgust of of the 1% are treating the 99%, its important to get educated to know the real causes of the economic problems we now face. Although the short film illustrates whats happening with the US, the rest of the world also suffer the consequences, so important to spread wide and far. Please watch. Get yourself and educated and spread the word to educate others.

A clear, consistent message that has underlain the Occupation of Wall Street over the past couple weeks says that the greed of the big banks is a far-reaching social problem. Standing in as representatives of an entire corporate system, an economy characterized by a mercenary avarice and a fundamental lack of justice and humanity, the banks have thus also been put forward as showing what’s wrong with the so-called free market.

There is a sense today that corporate malfeasance, though desperately underreported by the conventional news sources, is at all times all around us, endemic in the very culture prevailing in the world’s biggest companies. So when Wall Street’s critics, from student protestors to academic economists, talk about “moral hazard,” they’re identifying the problem of unaccountability.