from the page: "..At the end of the summit's first day, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced that member countries had agreed to contribute 1% of their international reserves toward the bloc's main bank in order to create a reserve fund. The Bank of the Alba was established in 2008 with the intention of providing economic support to people-centred regional projects and to contribute to sustainable social and economic development across the region. The Bank is also cited as acting as a continental alternative to the International Monetary Fund... The heads of state also discussed the possibility of increasing the commercial use of the sucre, the bloc's virtual currency. The sucre is currently used for direct trading between the ALBA countries, allowing them to circumvent the U.S dollar and minimise the foreign-exchange risk.

from the page: ".. Through Argentines’ experiences in these “horizontal” projects, new forms of social relationships and new identities emerged based on values of mutual support and solidarity over individualism and exploitation... “Nestor Kirchner’s policy consisted of simultaneously enacting strategies to integrate, co-opt, and discipline the piquetero organizations,” writes Svampa... While not all piquetero groups could be co-opted, those that have chosen to ally with the government have been rewarded with economic and organizational resources... “We were neighbors. We didn’t have anything else in common other than our neighborhood, no kind of ideology,” says Eva Sinchecay of the Villa Puerrydon assembly. It was something that turned out to be both a strength and a weakness as assemblies were more independent but became susceptible to the agendas of left groups that used them as a means of recruitment. “It began to dissolve,”...

from the page: "...From a vacuum of political power and severe economic necessity, grew new political formations outside of traditional party politics. Hundreds of neighborhood assemblies came together to meet peoples’ most basic needs and create a space for local dialogue. Bartering clubs (with their own forms of currency) experimented in alternative economics, and workers of bankrupt businesses began to occupy and run enterprises on their own... Neighborhood assemblies referred to themselves as “autoconvocados” (self-convoked) and made decisions using a consensus model in which all had equal say and majority voting was often a last resource. There was also a renewed sense of solidarity between classes, as assemblies in middle-class neighborhoods directed many programs to the poor and unemployed... In a country where inequity often pits the poor against the middle class, this kind of solidarity was unique and critical..."

from the page: "...One alternative for these women could be finance co-operatives or credit unions. These member-owned institutions have, according to [Milford] Bateman [who wrote "Why doesn’t microfinance work? The destructive rise of local neoliberalism"], been far more effective at building local economies where they have been encouraged. Backed with a sympathetic government, which is also geared up to support indigenous small- and medium-sized enterprises, financial co-operatives could form the basis of a successful and more solidarity-based economy... Microfinance, on the other hand, fits all too easily with an Africa which is a source of raw materials and a market for multinationals who take their profits out of the continent, but not a robust economy in its own right. This neoliberal path has seen the growth of a middle class who benefit from the system, but a much bigger group who don’t and continue to struggle to make any kind of life for themselves."

from the page: "... North Dakota’s riches have been attributed to oil, but many states with oil are floundering. The sole truly distinguishing feature of North Dakota seems to be that it has managed to avoid the Wall Street credit freeze by owning and operating its own bank. According to the North Dakota Department of Commerce, the BND turned a profit in 2009 of $58.1 million; and this money goes into the state’s General Fund... North Dakota broke new ground nearly a century ago, but the true potential of publicly-owned banks remains to be explored. Nearly all of our money today is created by banks when they extend loans... We the people have given away our sovereign money-creating power to private, for-profit lending institutions, which have used it to siphon wealth from the productive economy. If we were to take that power back, we could generate the credit we need to underwrite a whole cornucopia of projects that we don’t even consider because we think we lack the "money."..."