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By Bruce R.
Here is a really fascinating video on money, and how those who control money, have the power to eventually control everything.
"The Secret of Oz" - http://www.truththeory.org/the-secret-of-oz/#com%20ment-67
A text summary of the main message in the video, can be found at: Lessons From The Wizard Of Oz - http://www.webofdebt.com/excerpts/chapter-1.php, but it doesn't span as much history as the video.
I never knew that the cycle of corporate vs. government control of money, went through six cycles in the US. Funny how schools only teach, it was "taxation without representation" as the main justification for the revolution. But the cause was even deeper. It was the lack of "controlled money" that caused the real hardship, which rippled through every transaction, and impoverishing the colonies. Way to controversial for a true education, were questioning, analysis, and differing opinions would be allowed, and shown.
So the cliche: "fiat money is evil, because any amount can be printed", is the wrong premise. It is "who controls the printing of the money" that matters.
Do we want to trust multi-national, profit motivated, banks? Their self interest only partially aligns with social interests.
"The Corporation" (DVD) documentary makes a very good case that corporations behave like sociopaths. They should never be trusted or thought that they could be kind. They are not human. Just because they are run by humans does not make them benign. If I move out of the accepted behavior in a typical dictatorship corporate hierarchy, I will be fired. Oh sure those doing the firing may feel pain, or remorse, but it means nothing to the corporate entity. I'll rip out an offensive hang nail that doesn't fit my body image. Sure it hurts, so what, those cells are not me--I am the structure, I am not the cells. Corporations are a tool, nothing more. And people are nothing more than patterns that keep the corporation going. Cause too much of a ripple in the pattern, and you will be gone. Corporations should not be loved, revered, given a wide influence, be given a long life, or allowed to be too big.
A typical response to the above, is to point out that capitalistic competitive profit motivated economy leads to more innovation and efficiencies, to reduce costs. That is a lot of concepts thrown together, as if they all are needed. My view (taken from 18'th century thinkers) profit centered capitalism should ONLY be use to serve the social good, with some profit rewards given to investors. When the social contract is done (for example build roads or bridges), the corporation is dissolved, or rechartered. Maybe rechartered into a non-profit? Profit and competition, are good motivators for people, because there is a direct self-interest. The danger is extending this to incorporated entities--their self-interest is alien to the human experience of living and feeling.
It's not all black and white. There are ways of incorporating that do not use the hierarchical model. See the book "The Democratic Corporation", by Russell L. Ackoff. It even has examples of successful, profitable, corporations that use this model. (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, in San Francisco, is one of the featured companies.) Another book "Capitalism 3.0", by Peter Barnes has a good solution for stopping the privatization of everything--create "trusts" to protect the "commons".
Enough rambling. Some solutions were presented to the money problem.
1. Get the Federal government to take control of printing money. No way in hell will that happen (not with out blood shed). People have been conditioned to distrust government. Well government is only a tool too, so caution is warranted. By the way, there is lot more rumbling of a world government, where the trigger could be a collapsed dollar, which would be replaced with a world-wide currency. There better be some alternatives in place before then.
2. State level governments could print money, or issue money through a state run bank. Still very unlikely, except for a small number of states. The video's solution stops here. Are they stupid or cowards? They offer no solutions that an individual can actually start. Let's continue down the political levels.
3. Next level, Regional or County. This is getting more likely, especially if a region starts to really hurt from the money squeeze. Still this is pretty hard to get going.
4. Lower still, City or Neighborhoods (or even local friends, clubs, or churches). This is really doable. Local script. Or "time bucks" can be used.
Google for "local currencies" and you will find a number of existing and planned currencies. For example:
"The E.F. Schumacher Society: Linking people, land, and community by building local economies." - http://smallisbeautiful.org/ See the "Local Currencies" and "SHARE Microcredit" sections.
The hard part for the lower levels: counterfeiting, and again, who has control? It would be good for the organization to be, at a minimum, a non-profit. Better if it was under the direct control of some local government organization, where there is some direct representative control.
One solution to counterfeiting, that is similar to the Tally Sticks, put RFID chips in the script. The unique id would be registered at a central web site. It need not be verified for every transaction. Still what would prevent others from using read/write chips to record valid ids? Cryptography, something like DigiCash - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash, could help, and it could even keep the script anonymous.
An even simpler idea: time-banks: track and trade time. For example: Timebanks - http://www.timebanks.org/ This group is selling software, but the concept can be easily implement with any software. Or for small groups (of less than 100 people) paper tracking can be use. I've experienced this with a Mother's Club, where babysitting hours were traded with at group of 50 families. Hours were tracked on 3x5 cards, by a secretary position that rotated once a month.
Using time as a "currency" is interesting, because a person spending an hour digging a ditch gets as much credit as a brain surgeon doing an hour operation. Oh sure the brain surgeon had to spend a lot of time with school, so they should be paid more. Really? Brain surgery is a whole lot more interesting than ditch digging. Maybe really dangerous, boring, or disgusting jobs should pay more. Also it's not like the person getting the operation would be paying for only one hour's worth of time. What about all of the people in the operating room, the people in post-op, the people tracking the charts? All their fractional amount of time spent "directly working for your operation" would be counted. What a mess; money is easier. But the time-bank concept could still be used for a gross leveled way of bartering simple services.
In the novel "The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted", by Harry Harrison (starting on page 182), a utopian world is run with the "wirr", an hour of work time. A unit of time is fixed, and tied to the population size. So long as efficiencies go up faster, than the population size, then the amount of time needed to work, to live, will go down. That is certainly not the vision for our culture--more efficiency most definitely does not mean less hours of work for everyone. Do you remember hearing this when you were growing up? (For those who are 45 and older.) "Increased productivity will lead to more leisure time for everyone, in the future." I was shocked to find out that most 20 year-olds have never heard this. They hear: "Work harder to, get ahead." How sad. It's every man/woman for themselves, and the utopian lie is not even offered anymore.
I just joined a new community based site.
The web site offers some basic social networking for neighborhoods to start building a "sharing community". A little naive, but even this decentralized, indirect, organizing approach is better than nothing. I hopefully slowed down a group that wanted to post neighborhood crimes. I said (more nicely): "yeah, instilling fear will build more trust and sharing--not. Nice idea, but wrong direction". A connected community will automatically reduce crime (and reporting will only be a part of that). I did point out one good example: "things that you can act on." A sheriff posted a notice that a 6 yr old boy was missing from an elementary school in our neighborhood. The best part was 40min later there was a follow-up: he was found and is OK. So often there is no follow-up, or it is days later, even when everything is OK, which leaves a lingering feeling of dis-ease.
Should I edit and cut the rambling? I seem to not have the ability (or desire?) to distill things to tight sound-bite prose. Maybe I can work on making it more interesting, but until then, are not some positive solutions rambling preferable to doom, what can you do, look how awful things will get, doom, it's so huge, there is nothing you can do to stop it. I guess it's a human reaction to focus on the awful things that could happen, so that they can be prevented. But when no solution can be seen, it just causes a primitive fear, anxiety, and anger reaction that is usually used to "divide" people--turn off the thinking part--react only. The subtle warm cuddly feeling of things going well, is just so boring, it does not hold our attention. It is clear though, that the Motley Men, and other people, know that feeling is important, and that it should be talked about.
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