Economic Conundrum and Making Our Own Currency 2017 #1

I love AYA.

One of my favorite courses is AYA's Economic Conundrum. These 9th-12th-grade students are on it. After digesting and dissecting the so-called economic collapse of 2008, and the white elite's manipulation of the greatest transfer of wealth from the Black to the white community since captivity, the students are now moving to what we can do to sure up our communities.

They've learned about CDOs, Federal Reserve history, bogus ratings by investment "rating agencies, lenders, servicers, and the infamous - Credit Default Swaps.

Why are they interested when they were 5-8 years old at the time of the Great Theft (2008)?

The answer is CARS! - Like Grand Theft Auto - but not he video game.

Wells Fargo - one of the banksters in the Great Theft, are continuing their illegal theft - this time with car loans, and loan contracts. While owning a home is quite a ways off for them, owning a car is not. Well's Fargo's forced placed insurance scamming nearly a million customers hit home. The students could see how the 25K car buyers were illegally forced into repossession provided a bridge to understanding how others were forced into foreclosure.

Ikeche, a student that lives in Jaimaca, said "wait a minute. I have an account with Wells Fargo." He sank lower when he discovered that his beloved bank had also created and charged people for unauthorized bank accounts. The 2008 stories of massive bank fraud, governmental and judicial collusion is still hard for many to believe. The August 2017 news accounts of Wells Fargo fraud helped make it more believable and relevant for our students.

I'm proud of them for digesting the first unit - one bite at a time.

Now, the fun begins. The real challenge is that they are taking up a project proposed by previous AYA students for us to make and use our own currency. They have 30 days to create an initial plan to present for community feedback.

Today they brainstormed:

• Vision
• Possibilities
• Obstacles

It wasn't easy. After all, they are "just" high school students who are they to create and implement a currency system by and for Afrikans.

They deliberated about how to peg their currency to an hour of work if they followed the Ithica, NY model. "But, is all work the same," questioned AJ. Should a person who is paid to move a bolder be paid the same as a person for watering flowers? This was his question that led to a powerful discussion of how payment for work is negotiated, about social values on certain work and certain people that we've caught.

This is gut and head deliberation. They are discovering that the "dollar" is both (1) a medium of exchange or payment (a currency), and (2) as the standard of value measurement. They are discovering how to decouple their currency (Garvey Dollars) from "the dollar," and how to create another standard of value for Afrikan work.

They were surprised to discover the average hourly wage in the US was $24.75 per hour. Few of them knew people who they thought were making that, so they researched in class the average hourly wage for Afrikans ($14.90). Khadira from Lexington, KY articulated that the minimum wage was $7.25. When I asked could anyone really make it on that, one student said, "yes." What a teachable moment!

That lead them to convert that to a yearly wage of just over $14,000. To a high school student, that may seem like a lot of money. So, I asked them to pretend they were on their own and asked that they look up costs for renting a one bedroom apartment in their area of the country. Even when they checked out living in "the projects" or living with a section 8 subsidy, it became clear to them that the elite maintaining a low minimum wage was part of the manipulation of the economy that we studied in the last section.

Income disparity began to become a bit more real for them today!

The students even considered what it would mean to have our system affirm us by pegging a Garvey Dollar to an hour of work valued at $20.00 per hour. I asked them to ponder that with these questions: 1. What if the basic unit of work for each other dwarfed the value measurement of this racist society? 2. What if working and exchanging with each other was inherently affirming based on the value assessment assigned to the currency?

They have many more issues to ponder, and questions to answer, and they are on it. I'm proud for these are nation-within-a-nation questions. Yes, they'll even research digital currency! We'll keep you posted.

Who knows you might want to join their effort to create an Afrikan people's currency movement