Third Paradigm is an out-of-the-box thinktank on community sovereignty and regenerative economics.

We look at how to take back our cities, farmland and water; our money, production and trade; our media, education and culture, our religion and even our God.

We present a people's history of the Bible and a parent's view on how to raise giving kids in a taking world.

Radio Free Brighton
Tu 2:30 pm, Th 5:30 pm (UK)
Tu 6:30 am, Th 9:30 am (PST)

Free Radio Santa Cruz
Listen Live Sun 1:30 PST

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3rd Paradigm has been featured on these shows and stations:

Unwelcome Guests
by Lyn Gerry
on multiple stations

The Wringer
by Pete Bianco

WHCL Hamilton College

Global Notes
by Roger Barrett
CHLS Radio Lillooet

New World Notes
by Ken Dowst, WWUH
West Hartford, CT

Along with the pull towards independent media, there's also a marked divergence from the mainstream happening in publishing. Indie book clubs are springing up all over and the IndieBound bestseller list is more credible than the New York Times. But within this boundless group, there are networks sharing a common purpose. Right over in Oakland, the Anarchist Press has a remarkable array of writers, analysts, and researchers. I like my anarchy best in a clean, quiet space with a good cappuccino, but I never thought I'd find anarchy in a strip mall. Appearances can be deceiving, however. Capitola BookCafe, nestled between megastores, has gathered the most progressive line-up of speakers to be found south of the Bezerkley line.

Through them this past year, I've interviewed Nicolette Hahn Niman, author of Righteous Porkchop, Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City, and my virgin interview, which was with Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012: Return of Quetzelcoatl and founder of Reality Sandwich. I've also met authors there who I've written about – Jerry Mander in The Superferry Chronicles, Chris Cleeve in To Bee a British Pound, Tracy Kidder in Apropos of Everything, and Peter Richardson of Ramparts in Radio is Community-Forming. Next Wednesday, this trajectory will peak with Amy Goodman. It's been quite a ride.

Having a radio show has been a way to add my voice to the conversation. But by hearing good radio, I've discovered the art of active listening. I don't mean that maddening psychology exercise where you parrot back, "I think that I hear you saying..." I mean getting up off your tush and moving around while you're listening. Illiterate peasants in the first century were far more sophisticated listeners than we are today, I've learned from Biblical researchers. They had prodigious memories, vivid imaginations, and the capability of understanding deep abstract concepts. We've been dumbed down by spoon-fed, pre-digested pablum on TV. But at least it's funny! The educational system takes all the flavor out and it still doesn't have any nutrition. The purpose of education, as far as I can tell, is to gradually increase the amount of time we're capable of sitting down until we can endure it all day, which we call work. To relax, we move our sitting from the chair to the sofa.

On Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Philippe Diaz, Director of "The End of Poverty?" He gave the history of how poverty was created, by first taking the land. To continue his theme, there are two ways to make a slave – one is to take a person away from their land, and the other is to take the land away from a people. The latter is more lucrative because you don't have to pay traders or shipping costs, and impoverished people will compete against each other to be your slave. As a bonus, you get the resources.

Amy asks Philippe for the solution, and he gives three – agrarian reform, taxing property instead of consumption or labor, and de-growth. He describes the last as a mathematical problem of too many people for too few resources. I think, however, that one consumer sitting on their tush is an overpopulation by one. What we need is not de-growth but de-programming to undo our superiority to manual labor.

As Susan George points out in the film, the South is financing the North. They'd survive just fine without us, but we can't survive without them. Our access to slave labor is disappearing faster than easy crude oil.

We're already past the point of peak exploitation. To survive, we have to increase the time we spend really working – without a computer screen in sight. When we come back, we'll look at how all three of these concepts – media, press, and schooling – can work together to help us not only survive but thrive.

But first, let's hear some chimp poems. This is "Monkey Hill" by Stan Rice, and a Mary Oliver poem from a blog called "Touched by a Monkey."

Monkey Hill

We will sit all day on a bench in the sun watching the spider monkeys.
It will at moments resemble an internal Eden.
But we will not know this.
We will think that we are just taking pictures with our minds.
The male will stand upright and scratch his silvery-gold chest.
It will sound rough and shameless.
Over and over the egg of tenderness will break in our hearts
at the sight of the baby spider monkeys.
For nothing could be more guileless or curious.
The mother will stand on all fours and stare into space
and we will see by her eyes that all of this is beyond her,
though she is intelligent she is unable to fathom
this sweet injustice nature has made cling to her back.
And we will wait for those moments
when out of the concrete slabs piled to resemble a hill
a splendidly squealing chaos of monkeys
rushes, some trespass or crime in monkeydom,
causing us to cry aloud, Look at that one!
And then also there will be those moments we are embarrassed
and only through a deliberate effort
will we not look away as the monkey
reaches backwards to pull at the indescribable
pink something that dangles from its bottom,
and we will feel our humanity is endangered
and that our intimate moments might lap over into the animal world
and our privacies be beheld with such ghastly frankness.
But no monkey does any one thing for very long.
So soon the candor will pass.
And gradually the shadows of the trees will touch our bench
and it will get cool, then uncomfortably cool, and there will be fewer
and fewer monkeys, and no one will be on the opposite bench
with detached and absorbed expression, and even the thief gulls
will have left the moat, and we will say these words as we stand; no;
think them: Oh God, whatever else be true, though nothing is permanent,
may the myth of our lives be like this memory of monkeys; that real.

~ Stan Rice ~

From Singing Yet: New and Selected Poems

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~ Mary Oliver ~

From Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press

The poems were "Monkey Hill" by Stan Rice, a blog post from AmazingSuperPowers.com, and "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver. The Touched by a Monkey blog tells us that Joe Biden read Wild Geese on the anniversary of 9-11. I also heard the poet David Whyte read it in Santa Cruz, repeating every line in his deep Irish brogue. I think my poems could get famous too if I had a deep Irish brogue.

Our topic today is how to connect independent media, press, and schooling to enable a self-educated generation, without debt, who knows how to work with their hands. My suggestion is for those of us who value independent media to partner with Cabrillo College to start a radio station. Its charter would be to take the best news and analysis available for free worldwide and rebroadcast these programs. It seems untenable that the rest of the world has better information about US actions and motives than we have here at home.

But we might also take the best of the alternative press and the blogosphere and turn them into radio programs. David Rovics has a new feature on his website called This Month in History and Song. He links to articles that he's written about – I had no idea how prolific that guy is. It would make an excellent weekly half-hour to read excerpts and play the related songs about the events. He also has a practical booklet called Sing for Your Supper: a DIY Guide to Playing Music, Writing Songs, and Booking Your Own Gigs. Music is one of the best ways to tell the hard truths and have them be heard. It would be great to have a class learning about global events and rhyme patterns at the same time. My friend Robin has a recording studio and teaches a class called Be In Your Own Band. He'd love to support some fledgling political songwriters.

When my daughter and I went to the Cabrillo College Career Fair, the Student Senate practically leaped on her when they found she was a president of the high school environmental club. I was impressed by the Senate's anarchist fervor to break the spine of the textbook cartel. They have a program to help students beg, borrow, and steal to avoid new texts. I'd like to go them one further though – can we get rid of the textbooks altogether? Lectures by world-renowned speakers are available for free on-line. I buy books on the chemistry of dirt and the origin of Satan and Georgist land reform and a history of salt. But when was the last time you bought a textbook?

We design classes around students who really don't want to be there, so maybe they shouldn't be there. Maybe they should be riding a bike in Wilder Ranch while listening to Dennis Kucinich on Democracy Now, when he learned something from Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake. She asked him why the Democrats don't play hardball and withhold their votes as a block over critical issues. Kucinich took the point and heard her. An education takes two – both of whom are willing to listen and learn. That's my definition of a good teacher.

Let's break for Howie Day with a song called Collide, because sometimes the world does need just another love song.

That was Howie Day with Collide. We're talking about the need for a local communications group with a global focus, which we're calling CHIMPS: Cruzans Hosting Independent Media, Press, and Schooling. But it's not just any global focus we want. The mindset of sovereignty could be summed up as "Justice Before Charity." Philippe Diaz adds the question mark to the Jeffrey Sachs book, The End of Poverty. Philippe critiques the mosquito net and fertilizer approach taken by international charities, USAID, and multinational companies, who are in bed together in a high-stakes ménage àtrois.

On the other hand, Dennis Kucinich recognized State sovereignty in his approach to healthcare reform. Seeing no chance to get single-payer passed Federally, his rider would have protected States from insurance company lawsuits if they instituted their own public option or single-payer plan. This was rejected by the administration, aka Obama. How does he justify this? State-funded solutions wouldn't cost the Federal government any more. Allowing lawsuits for unfair competition only serves the interests of insurance companies who want to keep a monopoly. Kucinich is spot-on in the power of sovereignty – one State demonstrating a viable plan would create an avalanche for the good.

The same process is true globally. Charity is a capitalist concept in which those with advantages bear the white man's burden to help those without. In "The End of Poverty?" the economist Susan George demonstrates that this inverts reality. She says,

"Sub-Saharan Africa, which is the poorest part of the world, is paying $25,000 every minute to Northern creditors. Well, you could build a lot of schools and hospitals, create a lot of jobs, if you were using $25,000 a minute differently from debt repayment.

So there's this drain. And I think people don't understand that it is actually the South that is financing the North. If you look at the flows of money from North to South and then from South to North, what you find is that the South is financing the North to the tune of about $200 billion every year."

Susan George is talking about debt repayment for the predatory loans that John Perkins reveals as precisely-aimed bullets to kill sovereignty. This number doesn't include the resource theft, or the products made by their labor. 40% of Mexicans in Mexico, for instance, work for US corporations. It's said that money, when it pours into an area, is a tide that floats all boats. But that's counter to the principles of investment. You put money in to extract more than you invested. So money is a flood intended to create drought, wash away the topsoil, and enslave a population through thirst. On the other hand, sovereignty is a tide that floats all boats. When one country or one State is able to demonstrate their ability to take care of themselves, every one else fighting for their own right of self-determination is strengthened.

If you asked a population of high school seniors to define sovereignty, how many could? In a well-known videobyte, George W. doesn't have a clue. He keeps fumbling around, repeating the word. In a previous episode I show that Wikipedia gives a definition that's both academic and imperialist. There's a reason they're one and the same. Universities are a ruling class education. Without someone to rule over, another class who does the grunt work, our schooling is absolutely useless. The college system creates artificial entitlement through arbitrary competition. By the time a student has gone through 17 to 21 years of assimilating this skewed version of reality, if they're somehow able to see the truth, debt is still a lethal bullet to their ability to do anything about it.

The most likely time that students could perceive this 500-lb gorilla in the room is before students go into debt and while they're still living at home. This makes the community college perfect in theory. But in last week's episode, we talked about Maya Frost's New Global Student. She sees a developmental need for a rite of passage, a coming-of-age experience that demarcates a child from an adult. The university experience simulates this, but is the worst of both worlds. Financially dependent kids live with all the trappings of independence, and with unnamed servants to cook, clean, fix, garden, and maintain their lifestyle. When I first moved out of the dorms, I remember being chided for going a month without changing a burnt-out light bulb. In my feeble defense, it had never occurred to me. Someone had always done it for me.

Today, as never before, we can understand the real world and how it got that way through independent radio programs, videos, and small press publications. We can create local communities with a common ground through independent radio stations, community TV, and like-minded bookstores. But we also need to grow a generation that isn't dependent, either on us or on consumerism. Students need low-cost exploration – home-stays, community college exchanges, and focused research that they can bring back home. Like Totnes, England, the home of the local currency. Spain, who gets 45% of their electricity from wind. Canada, an easy target for healthcare, but also with trade policies that have protected their ability to make things. Denmark and South Korea, excellent for WWOOFing – World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. Let's send our students on a noble quest to all the corners of the world, which are surely more than four. Go forth and tame the dragon of sustainable knowledge and ride it back here.

For Third Paradigm, this has been Tereza Coraggio. Thanks to Skidmark Bob for sound production, and to Mike Scirocco for the website. As a last story on chimps, the website boingboing.net reports that NASA has plans to irradiate spider monkeys to determine the effects of radiation on astronauts. Visit the website for the close-up of big trusting spider monkey eyes.

This one's for you, little guy – we go out with David Bowie and Space Oddity.

Thank you for listening.

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Original writings by Tereza Coraggio available by permission of the author.
Ask and you shall receive!