Zohran Mamdani has now been sworn in as New York City’s mayor. He campaigned on affordability, a concept that has come to dominate the national conversation. He spelled out several goals to address that problem, and has proposed raising taxes on the rich to pay for them.

1. Transportation – free bus service in NY City.
2. Housing – a rent freeze rent for nearly 1 million New Yorkers and building 200,000 new homes over the next decade.
3. Child Care – free child care for children between six weeks and five years old.
4. Food – a city-owned grocery store in each borough.

However, the mayor and city council can only freeze the rent. The other goals will likely require support from the state legislature and the governor, who has expressed opposition to raising taxes. The legislature would need to pass a bill to raise billions of dollars in taxes on the wealthy to pay for those programs. And therein lies a huge problem.

Nearly every state and federal legislative body is predominantly controlled by politicians who have been elected thanks to significant campaign funding by the wealthy. And a large percentage of those wealthy people fight like hell to avoid paying taxes, even their fair share. And the latest efforts in Congress dictated by the wealthy (see the Big Beautiful Bill) shows that they are even willing to directly take from the rest of us so that they can pay even less tax.

So, although programs like those proposed by Mamdani would benefit millions, getting money out of the wealthy today makes Scrooge look downright generous. I guess that means there is nothing we can do about it.

Wrong. The reality is that we are not helpless! We can address our own needs, regardless of what the rich and powerful do. The only thing standing in our way is the lack of knowledge on how we can do that – and the will to act on it. 

In his inauguration speech, Mamdani noted that “A moment like this comes rarely. Seldom do we hold such an opportunity to transform and reinvent. Rarer still is it the people themselves whose hands are the ones upon the levers of change.”

As he said, we hold the levers of change. But what kind of change can we bring about? We start by recognizing that it doesn’t make sense to use the same mechanisms that produced the problems and expect a different outcome. We need think outside of the box.

For inspiration on how we the people can produce major change that benefits the “rest of us,” we can turn to the Futurist Buckminster Fuller who famously stated “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Thus, we need to develop something that does not start inside the current financial ecosystem.

How can we accomplish that? How can we produce an economy that works for the rest of us, not just the wealthy? In the hopes of finding a solution, we decided to look to history for examples of times and places where the people actually lifted up their local economy, by working outside the existing financial paradigm and without relying on the government or the wealthy to do it for them. We succeeded in finding such examples – which we then adopted.

That is what this website is all about. It describes how we the people can take control of our own financial destiny and change our future for the better, based on successful models from the past. It comes down to understanding the reality of money – who issues it and who controls it, and what the alternative to the current system might be.

The wealthy control our money supply and it’s distribution. This global financial ecosystem was designed several hundred years ago, by the rich, for the benefit of the rich. Most people don’t realize that almost all the money in circulation comes not from the government, but from private banks that are owned by guess who – the wealthy.

Those banks are granted a charter from the government to create new money with every loan they issue. (They don’t lend depositor’s money, the common misconception.) Thus, our government, along with all the other national governments, have privatized the creation of our national currencies.

But that is not all. When the banks create money out of thin air, they only create the principal with each loan, but not the interest. That interest gets pulled out of the existing money supply. Thus, the wealthy designed a system that, with each loan, takes a portion of the wealth from the rest of us and gives it to themselves. That is why the rich are getting richer and the rest of us are getting poorer. And that is also why governments throughout the world fail to ever permanently fix the problems that beset the rest of us, as they too borrow from the wealthy to pay for government programs. And then we pay for that borrowing with our taxes! The system is absolutely rigged to favor the wealthy.

And most importantly, that system continues to exist because we have been living with it for so long that we do not realize that it is not immutable and that we can choose another path. The first step is to make a decision that if the wealthy are allowed to create money in a system that only benefits them, then we the people should likewise be allowed to create money in a system that benefits all of us. And given the choice, who would choose the system that only benefits the rich?

See this section (and the below video) on how money is currently issued and controlled today, and then the alternative paradigm that we can control.

To apply that knowledge to creating an economy that serves the many and not the few, we need to escape the stranglehold of the current system. We do that by taking back the power to issue our own money – the “peoples’ money” as it were. This kind of money goes by various names, most commonly it is called a “complementary currency.” 

This is not as far-etched as one might assume. In reality, the idea of the people issuing their own money is not a new one. In fact, as this article from the Federal Reserve points out “The government isn’t the only entity allowed to issue money. Private citizens and businesses can too, and throughout U.S. history, they often have.”

It is already happening. Every time you hear about a new cryptocurrency offering (one form of a complementary currency), you see another example of money being issued by private parties. But cryptocurrencies are mostly a plaything of the wealthy. In contrast, thousands of communities have issued and are still issuing their own “local currencies” (not cryptocurrencies) to lift up their local economies.  

Historically, most of them have tended to produce only a marginal benefit to their community. But some have produced success far beyond what most of us could hope for. We discovered these successful examples from the past, and they provide us with the model for building a modern version that can truly bootstrap local economies everywhere, including New York City.

Thus, if we did issue our own currency, Mamdani would have all the money he needs to implement his programs and then some, without having to depend on Albany, the Governor, or the federal government.

Our organization, the Sustainable Communities Foundation (SCF), has built an entire financial ecosystem around this concept. Michael Sauvante, the founder of SCF, is the chief architect of this new ecosystem, including a complementary currency bank, an online marketplace and an information portal for learning about the system and enrolling in it. Take this visual Guided Tour to see how all the parts fit together.

In addition, Sauvante has written a comprehensive “free” eBook detailing all the elements that go into such a system, what can be done with it today and what more could be done with a small change in the US tax code. The book is titled “Money – It’s Not What You Think It Is.”