So here we are in 2013, our world run by banking cartels, technocrats and oil companies, our own sense of community and looking out for one another sold down the lane for individualism and the right to consume the planets resources based on the fact that you work long hours and work damn hard, so we deserve it. And when ever there is an oil spill out at sea we shake angry fists at Politicians when we should be stopping using oil ourselves so as not to contribute towards its extraction and transportation and spillage.
I have always tried when ever possible to follow the line ‘start in your own backyard’ if something is destructive and unethical the easiest thing for us to do is to stop using it ourselves, or simply do not take part in any activities related to it. Yes, companies, politicians and all of the other self interested corporate flotsam are to blame for the continuity of the destruction of the planet. It is also our own consumption, and our buying into consumerist consumption that feeds these companies and organisational structures. We demand cheap meat, and an indigenous community loses its land to cattle ranchers. We demand masses of fresh salad, and someone loses some of their water table, there is violence, misery, and ecological destruction hiding inside most if not all of our purchases. 
Personal and community action and intervention v political processes
Our democratic systems are now dominated by the anti-human and destructive forces of neoliberalism across the board, and indeed across much of the world. It isn’t that Neoliberalism has won the argument about which economic/political model is best suited to humanities needs. It is in control because it controls money, wealth and labour. Democracy has now become something that is bought through lobbying groups and money markets. Companies effectively own our democracy, and every time we vote at election times we are putting our X marks the spot in support of this ideology. 
Take the power back and redefine it!
But we are taking back democracy in our own actions and interventions, when we try to live a better live without harming others and being part of the exploitative competitive mechanisms that keep us all apart. Globally there is a groundswell of people who are intervening in and reclaiming their lives back from the corporations that control them. Engaging in permaculture is a very effective way of re-localising, and reclaiming our lives from the cycles of debt and meaningless employment that is imposed on us externally. 
Permaculture will not only free us, but will also by design ensure that our systems correspond and add to the local ecology of the places where we live. At some point, our political system needs to be broken up and distributed back to the people on a local level. This is actually going on as we speak in community centres, permaculture projects, cooperatives, guilds and allotment projects up and down the land and all over the globe. But we need to act fast because the old paradigm is trying to reassert itself as the only viable option that humanity has to provide for our needs. So we need to link up with even more projects and groups and share that which we have collectively learned that works, and let our ideas and practices reach the communities that need them.
Steve