There's plenty of green energy locally for us to grow businesses without trying to increase profits with cheap labor. Most of the money is lost in marketing and shipping, not manufacture. When we make our consumer goods with local materials and sell to local customers we have plenty to go around and only the novelty and luxury items are bought from "out of town" markets. One widely useful and prolific resource is hemp. With it you can make paper, textiles, bio-plastic, rope, green building materials, paints, lubricants, highly nutritious food, a rare and powerful natural medicine, natural pesticide, soaps, cosmetics, and the most inexpensive ethanol that can be made right in the town where it is farmed. Hemp is an excellent rotation crop, because it enriches and restores soil to a more fertile state, rather than depleting it. Hemp crops kill weeds and are a natural pesticide, so all of the hemp products can be made totally non-toxic.

Hemp industries can jump-start the new green economy and send us soaring into the homegrown economy that the American pioneers dreamed of and misguided corporate robber barons worked so hard to prevent. You can't monopolize industries when "the people" have the ability to grow their own civilization. Freedom is homegrown and homemade. Prosperity is relative to the core values of the economy. When the vision is healthy, the economy is healthy.
www.nycamp.org/hip