Re: [WDDM] Currency reform; Local currency

[Giorgio Menon <giorgio.menon(at)pd.infn.it>]

One of the main goals of our governors/diktators is to make the picture
blurred enough. There's been a long talk about top-down and bottom-up
policies recently. Unless we clearly define who's on top and who's not
this seems to be an academic discussion. I place money and people
holding it on top. Then politicians as referees. Police-military as
guardians of this game, hitting anyone who disregards the rules or
doesn't comply to them. Scientists and journalists thave the clear role
of entertaining people whith special effects while substantiating the
"goodness" of the game: Progress is "our" common goal, Civilization
"our" means. Below them the great majority of people who has to work
hard to keep the ball rolling and have minimal (if any) access to the
top (money).
Banks are therefore a keyword. Banks are overnational institutions: by
means of the applied interests they produce more money than the state
actually prints. After the Bretton Woods Agreements banks are no longer
required to hold an equivalent value of gold in their caveaux, thus
making speculations easier and money even more abstract. Now any
transaction is a flow of numbers between two computers (or even the same
one). Banks are trading numbers.
The parallel between numbers/maths and economy is impressive. Infinity
is "our" ultimate goal. Not differently from any religion, economy tends
to infinity. The excerpt you've copied testifies it. Bound to infinity
but stopped by the limits of the physical system, this is what the
Overshoot Day (Echofootprint) says.
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=overshoot
Alternative currencies can be tolerated as long as they don't represent
any real threat to the system. Certainly are a valuable countermeasure
for anyone who cares about DD which, in economy, might be translated
with Direct Access.

Regards

Giorgio


M. Kolar wrote:

> Hello everybody!
>
>   Food for thought:
>
>   We had in Nanaimo, BC, Canada recently a presentation on an
> alternative currency, Time Dollar (FCX), see
> http://www.fourthcornerexchange.com/ by its creator Francis Ayley (he
> would actually want to achieve something more than a local currency,
> his dream goal is a socially just replacement for the current money
> system). What made the biggest impression on me during his
> presentation was the claim that the nature of the money system has a
> big effect on our behaviour: the conventional money system (with
> interest collected on loans) forces people into competition, a local
> (i.e., interest-free, inflation/deflation-free) money system is
> conducive to cooperation between the market participants!
>   You can find a lot on interesting reading following the links on his
> site. E.g., to a special issue of the Yes! magazine on money matters,
> http://www.yesmagazine.org/default.asp?ID=93 , where my attention was
> caught especially by this article:
> http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=883, where one can find the
> sentence "The exponential growth of debt, in turn, puts pressure on
> the economy to also grow exponentially which, of course, in the long
> run is impossible." The message of the article being that our current
> money system makes no sense, that it only burdens most people with
> debt that they will never be able to pay off, and that it is the cause
> of our unsustainable use of natural resources.
>   So if all this is true, the logical conclusion seems to be that if
> we want to achieve a just society (democracy), we have no chance to do
> so within the current money system designed to benefit only a small
> segment of the society, isn't it so? Shouldn't we (the DD promoters,
> WDDM, ...) then pay also some (more, a lot of) attention to the reform
> of the money system???
>
>   Mirek
>
> P.S.: F. Ayley's FCX system is run as a private corporation (not even
> as a cooperative of all the members). He explained that this is
> necessary in USA if he wants to be on a firm basis to face
> successfully the onslaught of big banks if his systems starts to be
> successful and widely used (see the history of local currencies: how
> the banks killed first such very successful alternative system in
> Wörgl, Austria, 1932-33, and then many more in the USA during the
> Depression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency).
>   However, here in Canada people were not very enthusiastic about the
> idea of local currency being run as a private corporation, and experts
> claim that the reasons that led him to create a private corporation do
> not exist here, and so if we have a local currency system in Nanaimo,
> it will be the homegrown LETS/openmoney system:
>
> http://www.openmoney.org/
> http://www.openmoney.org/letsplay/   (this is a play demonstrating the
> system)
> http://openmoney.editme.com/letsplay   (this is another demo play)
> http://openmoney.info
> http://lets.net