Green Credit & Commonwealth
As long as currency is a commodity, everything will become a commodity as the quality of culture decreases and life grows ever cheaper. That process is the ultimate unsustainable con-game.
The wealth of Urban-Suburban Society is not simply the Wealth of Nations, but the poverty of billions. Poverty never existed before the invention of money and banking. In Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, a revisionary classic of honest anthropology, Nurit Bird-David writes:
"...Sahlins thinks that hunter-gatherers follow the 'Zen Way' to affluence, which presupposes that 'human material wants are few and finite, and technical means unchanging, but on the whole adequate.' This way contrasts, he argued, with the modern Western one (the 'Galbraithian way'), whose assumptions are appropriate to market economies—'that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improveable.' Hunter-gatherers with immediate-return systems in fact follow a third way—the 'sharing way'—to affluence. Their way is based on assumptions appropriate to their sharing economy—that material wants are linked with material means which are available for sharing...
"Finally, Sahlins wrote that otherwise curious heathen devices become understandable by the people's confidence and that hunter-gatherers behave as if they had it made."
They not only thought they had it made, they did have it made. First hand accounts of all the most reliable witnesses who lived with primitive people of the most ancient cultures—with the least contact with modern ways and technologies—report essentially the same native grace, robust health, and abundance, some with over 300 kinds of food and medicines.
Sahlins' mention of confidence may be easily passed over and the significance underestimated. Confidence, trust, is the only thing keeping the global Ponzi scam (the "economy") going now. So, we actually have much less reason for confidence than well trained primitive hunters.
Jim Bell is right. To wean the Consumer Society away from a more rapid descent into environmental disaster, we need true cost pricing. Products, processes, and projects that require ecocidal subsidies to seem affordable or that cause biological and social damage, health care disasters, and so on, should be priced accordingly. Given the real-world reality of systemic corruption and corporate manipulation, true cost pricing alone will never do. Even if it were allowed to get started on its own, developing a generally acceptable system might take too long to prevent an irreparable global catastrophe. Consumer Society's ecocidal socioeconomic paradigm, its disvalues, monetary madness, and corruption must be cured first or neutralized.
If the global derivatives bubble is a measure of the value of the Free Market economy then, surpassing 4800% of the world's annual GDP, it is inflating beyond $3,840,000,000,000,000 (3.840 quadrillion US dollars). Hard to believe? Yes or no, how many of those quadrillions are invested in making your world greener, healthier, more livable, eliminating poverty, ignorance, infant malnutrition and other causes of war? Right, close to zero ($0.00). Wiping out preventable misery and illness might cost about $80 billion or less per month or almost $1 trillion for a year. That is less than 0.003% of the global total invested in derivatives alone. It would be far less than 10% of the total cost of mid-east oil wars and medical benefits for injured veterans. Creating a bright Green future, globally, might cost $1 trillion over 5 years, about 10% of global defense spending per year. That will eliminate over 99% of the causes of war, but do the ultra-rich big winners invest in paradise? Are they becoming more intelligent, more noble, or more heroic than average greed crazed ego maniacs? Do they want Heaven on Earth? No, most are clearly devoted to maintaining all the infectious causes and symptoms of ecocide. Which master do they serve? Is it greed or good?
Before you decide, you may appreciate reading the refreshingly honest post by Jim Stanford on the Real-World Economics blogsite:
>> http://rwer.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/new-video-deconstructs-cge-trade-models/
In Greed, a comprehensive essay on the destructive rule of greed, Julian Edney offers another example from anthropology...
"Anthropologist Ruth Benedict summarized her overseas work saying the most obvious difference among societies was whether the living was cooperative or competitive. This was the 1930s. She used the term synergy. A high synergy society is socially cohesive, cooperative and unaggressive - one person's acts at the same time serve his own advantage and that of the group, his gain results in a gain for all. But cultures with low synergy are highly competitive and the individual gains advantage only at the expense of another, aggression is prized, indeed humor originates from one person's victory and another's demolition. Low synergy eventually threatens the social fabric. Her example was the Dobu of New Guinea, whose daily atmosphere of ill will and treachery among all made it a showcase of Hobbesean nastiness, and feared among its neighboring tribes. The Dobu have no chiefs, no government, no legalities and live very close to the "state of nature" philosophers propose. Danger is at its height within the tribe, not from without, and the attitude lives that it is prudent and right to inflict pain on losers to protect your win. Hierarchy is based on ruthlessness which is admired, and inequality and injustice are believed to be in the nature of things."
Edney goes on to point out that "clearly our own society has lower synergy than we boast" as it falls ever faster, ever more obviously in this post-Meltdown phase of the End Game.
It would be hard to find a better examination of sociopathic aberration than Edney's diagnosis of institutionalized greed and corruption in his online essays and blogs:
>> http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/review31/31Edney.htm
>> http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue32/Edney32.htm
In an article presented at the 1985 symposium on Economy and Church in Dialogue, former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) said...
"The economic inequality between the northern and southern hemispheres of the globe is becoming more and more an inner threat to the cohesion of the human family. The danger for our future from such a threat may be no less real than that proceeding from the weapons arsenals with which the East and the West oppose one another. New exertions must be made to overcome this tension, since all methods employed hitherto have proven themselves inadequate. In fact, the misery in the world has increased in shocking measure during the last thirty years. In order to find solutions that will truly lead us forward, new economic ideas will be necessary. But such measures do not seem conceivable or, above all, practicable without new moral impulses. It is at this point that a dialogue between Church and economy becomes both possible and necessary."
He went on to say that...
"These realms have come to appear mutually exclusive in the modern context of the separation of the subjective and objective realms. But the whole point is precisely that they should meet, preserving their own integrity and yet inseparable. It is becoming an increasingly obvious fact of economic history that the development of economic systems which concentrate on the common good depends on a determinate ethical system, which in turn can be born and sustained only by strong religious convictions. Conversely, it has also become obvious that the decline of such discipline can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse. An economic policy that is ordered not only to the good of the group — indeed, not only to the common good of a determinate state — but to the common good of the family of man demands a maximum of ethical discipline and thus a maximum of religious strength. The political formation of a will that employs the inherent economic laws towards this goal appears, in spite of all humanitarian protestations, almost impossible today. It can only be realized if new ethical powers are completely set free. A morality that believes itself able to dispense with the technical knowledge of economic laws is not morality but moralism. As such it is the antithesis of morality. A scientific approach that believes itself capable of managing without an ethos misunderstands the reality of man. Therefore it is not scientific. Today we need a maximum of specialized economic understanding, but also a maximum of ethos so that specialized economic understanding may enter the service of the right goals. Only in this way will its knowledge be both politically practicable and socially tolerable."
>> http://www.acton.org/global/article/market-economy-and-ethics
Such revolutionary, humanistic realism may seem beyond the scope of a Catholic bureaucrat, yet it reveals the truly human potential of religious inspiration and compassion. The Pope may be one of the most Buddhist of all Christians, but how do we turn ethics into effective policy?
"Buddhist Economics" is an essay by E. F. Schumacher, the humanitarian economist and author of Small is Beautiful: Economics As if People Mattered.
When asked by other economists what Buddhism has to do with economics, Schumacher told them, "Economics without Buddhism – without spiritual, human, and ecological values – is like sex without love."
To put it more plainly, heartless economics is like chronic, incestuous rape, torture and conspiracy to aid and abet mass murder. In The Human Revolution, a novelized history of Nichiren Buddhism in modern Japan, Dr. Daisaku Ikeda describes the awful conditions as World War 2 ended...
"Japan in those days writhed in the grip of a terrible economic crisis–runaway inflation."
"Nothing creates more misery than incompetent government... Day by day, the lives of the people took on the color of despair.
"The emergency measures temporarily protected monetary capital, but to the majority of the general public, they meant little more than enforced sacrifice...
"The crisis had not struck without warning. Its roots went deep; it had begun before the end of the war.
"Vast sums of money... were paid out in the name of war compensation."
"All this occurred at a time of national suffering and devastation. Big business... derived illicit profits from so-called war compensation. They laid off huge numbers of workers and destroyed their own products to protect their capital.
"Industrial sabotage of this kind created a drastic shortage of consumer goods, aggravating the rising cost of commodities. Just as one wave gives rise to another, social turmoil compounded the vicious circle.
"To make matters worse, no limits were placed on government spending... Big corporations avoided reopening production. It was far more profitable to let factories lie idle and hang on to their vast stores of hidden goods, waiting for prices to rise... while the value of money fell steadily..."
"The economic crisis rocked the foundation of people's lives, just like a massive earthquake..."
Ikeda witnessed Japan's atrocious misrule from before the war through 1945 and beyond. Though some of the secondary causes and details are different, the consequences are all too similar to our worsening crisis. Corrupt officials and corporations use chaos, despair, and confusion they create to abuse and exploit their already impoverished, desperate victims, the people. Who to blame is much less important than understanding how to remedy the economic plague afflicting us. Without understanding the cause, nature, and contributing factors, we stand no chance of curing our monetary disease. Without understanding, we have no way to create or measure real progress, nor to prevent failure. Now, almost everyone is more or less confused about money. The videos online (linked below) help make the basics visible and easy to understand, if hard to stomach:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FiaUpeJxcA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFb26u9g8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dmPchuXIXQ
The British colonists here had been using their own nonprofit currency from long before the revolution. So, in the early days of the new USA, the founding fathers put little detail into the constitution about Congress' responsibility for controlling the money, relative weights, and measures. In those days, the many forms of money, several foreign currencies, local scrip, wampum, beaver skins, tobacco, beer, salt, and other useful trade 'goods' in use provided pervasive education on the simple principles of value, money, credit, currency exchange, banking, and so on. Not knowing that most of us would be totally ignorant of the nature of money and credit, the authors of the Constitution failed to provide detailed instructions on what then seemed common knowledge, understood by all. Now, over 230 years later, the Fed dollar's floating value swirls in a bloody whirlpool of other unstable currencies and derivatives, both actual and virtual (local & digital scrip, securities & contracts). So, the time is ripe for an upgrade of our collective education on value, money, and credit.
An online synopsis of the virtually complete history of money, banking, credit, massive governmental fraud and the corruption of economics by Stephen Zarlenga, director of the Amercian Monetary Institute, is required reading for a comprehensive understanding of the problem and co-creating the solution. Zarlenga's draft of the American Monetary Reform Act, is brilliant, virtually perfect, and also online at the AMI website at:
>> http://monetary.org/
>> http://monetary.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/32pageexplanation.pdf
Zarlenga's analysis is not complete, and his strategy far from comprehensive, but it is the best so far for reforming the current money system. However, without a deep, thorough exposure of the roots of the problem there will be no sustainable cure. As with democracy, the only thing that will sustain a stable culture and its economy is a well informed populace. Once a vast majority understand the basics of karma, ethics, culture, wealth, value, and credit, then we can establish a hybrid economy with a pure credit system to keep the money system in check.
It is essential to realize that the Fed's debt-dollars have no monetary value, nor any intrinsic value, only notional value. That is true of all the other fiat currencies of the current world game. Their notional values are notional for two main reasons. First, the constant flux and volatility of the currency trade and official manipulation prevent knowing a fiat currency's exact [notional] value at any moment. Also, notional value lacks direct relation to a standard measure of physical material or quantity. The Constitution makes one legal US dollar one ounce of coin silver. So, a Fed dollar has no legal value either.
The Fed's debt dollars are Fiat Currency which, according to the US Constitution, cannot be legal tender (our money). "Fiat" means "decree" by whoever claims to have the right theory or the right to dictate values, rules and terms of servitude. In the USA, there was never a Constitutional amendment permitting Congress to give away its responsibility and our economy to the big Banksters of the early 20th century.
Our only legal US currency, coins (valued per weight of silver & gold), are pure money, an abstraction of barter for the sake of convenient exchange. So, our legal US money has both monetary and relative value, as long as the prices of metal remain fixed, with ample reserves and responsible control by Congress.
Since Fed dollars have no legal or real, fixed, intrinsic or natural value, they actually have no relative value to anything real or natural. It may seem they have real or relative value based on people's trust and use but, since trickery, lies, cheating, and crime are involved, that invalidates the basis of real value, making valid relative value legally impossible. The subversion of the Constitution and Congressional rules for effective management of the relative values, prices, and supply of silver and gold make our real money system totally impossible.
Credit or credit units may have notional or monetary or relative value but, for us, it is more important to realize that pure credit and debt are not locked in a natural pair bond. Credit is now usually associated with ever mounting debt and destructive exploitation, usury, via interest, profit taken for loans. Since national currencies are now all tied to ever escalating, insurmountable debt (to heartless banksters), we can say that credit or credit units (like Fed "dollars") tied to fiat currencies and the destructive Bubble Economy Game are not pure, not green, not sustainable, not healthy and not legal for use by US governments or agencies. Credit with only notional value has no intrinsic or real monetary value. Pure credit may have relative value related to intrinsic value.
In the USA, legally and generally, in principle, monetary value requires maintaining a fixed standard of exchange for general fairness and convenience. A pure, uncorrupted money system is nonprofit, by definition. There can be no making profit on money or manipulating the values and measures and rules for a special interest group, without voiding its fairness and convenience for all participants. Yet, a pure money system has never survived for long. Like the Fed's debt-dollars, credit based on a system of destructive exploitation and ever escalating debt is equally perverse. Pure credit, on the contrary, is a measure of what all people find intrinsically, naturally valuable.
Many ancient societies sustained a cultural economy based on intrinsic, positive values, and giving and sharing. The basic values of sustainable cultures are normally vibrant health, skill, happiness, virtue, wisdom, compassion, love, and generosity, sharing and gifting. Since the environment, Earth, was considered the source and repository of material abundance or wealth, the greatest honor and status was accorded those who gave and shared most, fostering greater joy and wellness for all. Selfishly taking most or causing general unhappiness and harm is considered sick, spiritually retarded or effects of harmful spirits. A typically overlooked essential of the gifting and sharing cultures, was that people did not take the methods or media of exchange very seriously. Wampum (cowry shells), hides, and trinkets were not considered more important than natural and spiritual resources, lives, health, and happiness. We may as well call such compassionate wisdom cultural sanity.
A pure, green, community credit system is not polluted by illegal schemes and harmful values. We already reward entertainers and experts in the arts, performing arts and sports more highly than anyone else. So, why not use a pure credit system that lets us directly reward everyone who makes positive contributions to our joy, health, and lively culture?
Only green credit, based on healthy cultural values, will deter activities that cause undue grief, illness, depression, and ruin. A healthy economy, whether local or global, is based on constructive cultural activity and exchange, not destructive exploitation, greed and terror. Normalized cheating and bogus theories build neither wealth nor cultural health. Neither wealth nor cultural liveliness depend on either winning or bloating, nor on wasting or squandering and hoarding. Saving is really investing and wealth is, among other things, the potential and capacity for sustaining a best case scenario. Without a best case scenario (the win-win scenario), the economy's snowballing End Game scenario will keep accelerating. If it does, the stealth depression will become an overt depression of the largest possible magnitude. Only green credit can stop it and cure it.
The Banksters cooked the Goose that laid the golden eggs, the US working class who drove 70% of the economy. There is nothing new or sophisticated or mysterious about this ancient syndrome. The fancy rationalizations and excuses are all hogwash and lies. A healthy economy, requires a stable, truly equitable economic system that serves all alike, fairly. We need fair trade, not bogus Free Trade. Yet, since we are not all 100% pure people, free of greed and perversity, having a pure system of one kind or another is out of the question.
We need a hybrid economy, with a nonprofit community based credit system balancing a reformed for-profit system. The US Constitution guarantees our right to any beneficial power or activity not specifically assigned to government. So, the establishment and legal recognition of community based credit systems is one of our natural rights. Congress had no right or legal power to give away its responsibility for our legal US money system, but they did. We clearly need and deserve an effective green alternative, now.
The Federal Reserve Bank system is constitutionally illegal and functionally defective, intentionally. It should be abolished or disempowered and disconnected from government. Yet, though it may seem best to prosecute it and its dark priesthood and co-conspirators, that can be put off and discussed by its victims, later. Until then, players obsessed with bogus Fed money, finance games and amoral investment can keep playing with their debt-dollars, Euros, stocks, bonds, futures, derivatives, etc.
Revision of the rules governing credit unions and interstate credit transactions must be discussed now. We need a viable hybrid system up and running, enabling lively cultural activity, healthy community development, and sane commerce. Since the necessities and related issues are too complex for this policy brief, this section deals only with the essential principles of nonprofit community credit, with a few simplified examples.
We first need to focus on what we need to remedy and replace first. Credit and debt are not synonyms. The Fed's bogus debt-money system creates and aggravates poverty for the vast majority by progressively inflating fake wealth for a tiny minority. Fake wealth is fake because it has nothing to do with real, positive potential, positive capacity, positive ability, positive creativity, positive empowerment, positive production, natural value, pure enjoyment, sharing, caring or healthy flow of real goods and services. Over 90% of fake wealth is invested directly or indirectly in destructive exploitation, negative control, tyranny, panic, oppression, suppression, recession, depression, and foreclosures, staged by corrupt elitists for centuries, at least.
We can play an infinite, nonprofit, win-win game for the sake of well-being and the love of life and debt free children, but credit and debt must be disentangled. Think of the Free Market as a finite, for-profit game, with finite rules, boundaries, scoring, winners and losers, a beginning and an end. The winners play for points (dollars, etc.) and deluded ego, creating ever more losers, plunging the world into disaster after disaster. Why? They are addicted to the rules, bad brain chemicals, and false notions about their options and karma. Money and banking without a stable standard of relative "values" has never sustained a healthy world game with a stable economy and never will.
The best way to prove that is with NeoMonopoly, the game called Monopoly played by new rules. Play it with the addition of loans and for-profit money with floating values set by the Banker, compound interest on the loans and all the money, and income tax paid every 4 rounds. One player is the Government, IRS, FBI, Supreme Court and the US Army. In NeoMonopoly, the Government and Banker have secret conferences and change the rules and definitions of economic terms whenever they want. So, good luck, but don't expect much fun.
Ironically, negative players of the for-profit game play mainly for quantity, despite excessive costs and unavoidable loss of both quality and quantity. Infinite players of nonprofit games play to enhance the enjoyment and quality of life, despite finite limits, status, quantity, and time.
That was the normal way of life on Earth, for millions of years, until about 5,000 years ago. Without money, economic values, banks, loans, interest, or taxes or tax lawyers and accountants, human beings thrived in natural harmony and basic joy in almost every environment on the planet. For hundreds of thousands of generations, without money, we suffered no debt or poverty. With few exceptions, Native American cultures were so successful they thrived in relatively stable populations for thousands of years, without polluting their environments or clear cutting the forests or depleting the soils or animal species. When they were too successful, they learned sustainable wisdom the hard way.
When Europeans arrived, ecological diversity and wild animals were numerous. Flocks of birds were so large that they darkened the sky when they rose up to fly. That was healthy, biologically positive normality. We can regain and sustain it, globally, but we need to see the naked truth. First, we need to recognize and respect the four basic modes of relationship and interaction...
1. Nondual:
creative, generative, infinite, primal, enlivening
2. Win-Win (give-give):
unitive, constructive, inclusive, mutually fulfilling
3. Win-Lose (give/take):
divisive, competitive, exclusive, limiting, disappointing
4. Lose-Lose (take-take):
destructive, negative, all consuming, depressing
The four modes apply to communities, cultures, civilizations, economies and all other social games as much as to individuals and families. The nondual mode of relationship is nature's way of creating, fostering, and supporting the relationship of all relationships we call the "universe" or life. We all participate to some extent as children or, sometimes, as parents and grandparents, lovers or heroes, but it can be hard to sustain while surviving in a corrupt society. The win-win mode is the one we all need to foster and support to sustain a successful civilization, and we can do it. Failing to use our best strategy and toolset would be insanely foolish.
The "winner takes all" insanity of modern Free Market capitalism is a perfect example of the Lose-Lose reality of the Win-Lose mode of relationship at the national and international levels. At the intercultural level, the Win-Lose game is a loser for all concerned, for we are all inseparably connected and affected.
The universe is the ultimate nondual mode of relatedness, and all karmas are instant karma, with ongoing chain reactions of consequences, for better or worse. What will it take to get back to the multi-millennial Win-Win game of life? Heartless exploiting, taking, hoarding, cheating, degrading, impoverishing, destroying and putting up with all that will never work.
We need true cost pricing or something similar with an even stronger corrective impact on destructive or toxic products, services, and projects. Yet, we first need to upgrade our definitions of karma, success, wealth, poverty, credit, value and benefit. The green definition of wealth measures success as the potential and flow of creativity, giving, sharing, cultivating, empowering, and the ability to increase and enhance the richness and joy of living.
Naturally, it will take more than notions and lip service to unsubvert and depervert the Consumer Society and its paradigm. We must recognize and sincerely celebrate all truly creative, positive, life enhancing activities by rewarding and empowering them and their creators or performers. When compassionate wisdom, productive creativity, abundant flow, giving and sharing are valued and gratefully credited as expressions of wealth, then we will see Earth as our treasury, manifesting sustainable success, ending debt and poverty.
Still, negative karmic momentum won't redirect itself, and that problem is the project of behavioral economics. For The Year in Science 2009 issue, a leader in the field, Professor of Economics and Psychology George Lowenstein (Carnegie Mellon University), revealed good news to Discover Magazine (Jan/Feb 2010, pg. 32 & 33). Lowenstein explained why smart people sometimes act in very stupid, self-destructive ways, as individuals and groups. Behavioral economists look for and study our actual passions and habits, especially our habitual passion "for persuading ourselves that what we want to believe is true" regardless of our lack of belief. The chronic failure to remember the simple dynamics of bubble markets is a prime example. Lowenstein also mentioned the problem of herd mentality and the sense of false security, safety in numbers.
Nothing new in that, but seeing how our instincts and brain functions for responding to danger, threats, and fear relate to economics is relatively new. People were not scared by wonderful Mr. Madoff's amazing performance because it didn't trigger their primate fear & threat response functions. Behavioral economics also works with the psychosocial dynamics of pessimism, optimism, risk aversion, risk tolerance, adrenaline addiction, and wacko bravado, irrational risk taking. Where's the good news?
What we can see and study is workable. The pathology of irresponsible credit card use is actually due to sick psychological elements of the industry. Brain scans show that credit cards have an anesthetic effecton the brain, literally suppressing rational consideration of scary issues and outcomes. What's worse? Since we can make "affordable" monthly payments, credit cards also trick the brain into not feeling like we're going into debt. We can now do something about the plague of plastic debt. Policy makers and corporate sustainability experts can now dovetail healthy marketing strategy with methods that help consumers make nondestructive choices. More on that later, but this means that producers can now protect the sustainability of their annual business cycle by protecting customers from themselves.
Elimination of excessive executive compensation can now be justified. We have hard numbers and proof that the psychosocial dynamics of real-world people and performance make previous notions "profit incentive" obsolete. For simple, routine tasks, increasing compensation works well, to a point. Beyond that point the curve goes flat. In complex, high risk endeavors, high stakes tend to make the brain narrow our focus, limiting or impairing performance. We can care more about winning or losing than the work or why we're doing it. High stakes and high pay are typically counter-productive when high performance requires creativity, expansive thinking, and innovative approaches to complex problems with unobvious odds for solution. So, directors and stockholders of corporations can stop rewarding heartless sociopaths with insanely excessive salaries, bonuses, and diamond studded platinum parachutes.
Behavioral economists see greed as desperation. Lowenstein says they call it hypermotivation. He sees greed as "the antithesis of self-interest" because it makes us so motivated get one thing at the expense of other things that can actually be more valuable or important, either immediately or in the long run. We now have scientific proof that the Devil's bargains are really bad deals. The mechanism that keeps us susceptible is called loss aversion. Socially induced envy and jealousy make the brain register a sense of loss, making us desperate to get out of the illusory hole. The ever more popular tendency to cheat is not just a sense of limited options, but a deep seated sense of deficiency, insecurity, and inadequacy that can be remedied with compassion and a little education or skillful psychology.
Behavioral economics shows us that our short-sightedness (subliminal stupidity) is caused by the brain's "present bias preference" (we want what we want now). Our tendency to laziness and haste, often employed to work against us, can be used for our best possible benefits. That enables us to devise clever methods for effective wellness programs for over-eaters, over-spenders, over-payers, and over-earners. The last two types are corporations and sociopathic executives.
Until the era of green wealth is globally established, leaders must develop sustainable policy, promote initiatives, and craft laws that separate money and debt, that deter, prohibit, and severely penalize ecocidal exploitation and other destructive activities and disvalues. Our other choice is ecocidal failure. Should we wait for the bankers and their political puppets to bail us out? That might happen when Hell freezes over or after they get religion, but both seem unlikely.
A nonprofit community credit system can be started by a cooperative association established for the purpose or a pre-existing organization, like a consumers co-op or a workers co-op company, a home owners association, a credit union, a for-profit corporation owned by decent folk, or even by friendly neighbors or noble individuals online, starting here and now. There are many good reasons to think that no organization nor any other person can or will determine the value of what you value better than you. The history of money, banking, and government proves these truths, but we can establish the system we need with an understanding of just the basics.
How could even a perfect alternative work well enough to survive the economics of Hell on Earth? The following brief examples offer a durable solution with variable options.
Of the many possible ways to set the relative values as the basis of a community credit system, using measures of time has some limited advantages, including familiarity. So, though the local currency system of Ithaca, New York, is not a pure nonprofit credit system, the Ithaca "Hours" certificates have worked very well since 1991, including approval for use at, by and for a local credit union. Visit the Ithaca Hours website and history page at...
http://www.ithacahours.com/archive/0001.html
Clearly, the disadvantages can be overcome, but only temporarily, even with a green upgrade. For instance, Ithaca's HOURS ("H") are valued at and exchangeable for $10.00 each, yet the buying power of the dollar has dropped by over 90% in the last 50 years and falls faster than ever. Real inflation soared like the price of metals over the last 10 years. So, if hours are the common basis of relative value, why not give the average worker a remedial raise? Instead of valuing the average hour at $100 though, $60 per hour seems less extreme and makes an equally effective example. So, a minute could equal $1 each, a 5 minute nickel = $5, a dime = $10, a quarter H = $15, a half H = $30, a full H credit = $60, and it would work almost like dollars did before 1975. Still, as long as a new alternative to cash is in any way connected to the Fed's Ponzi Casino system, debt-money and illusory values, the relative value of the alternative will rise or fall with the dollar.
Using time as the standard basis of relative value includes another bit of illogic unfit for a large scale credit system. One person's hour may seem unequal to one of another. With Ithaca HOURS and similar currencies, people negotiate various rates for services of varying perceived value.
Some alternative currency systems use a gold standard with cash equivalents fixed per ounces, fractions of an ounce or grams. Yet, gold is now tied to the unstable market economy, to mining, banking, finance, taxation, the same unsustainable manipulation, devaluation and gradual destabilization of the for-profit money system itself. Until metals are assigned fixed credit values, coins will remain far from being ideal tokens of pure credit.
The only way to sustain a stable credit system, balanced against the Fed's debt-dollar and its "floating value" and its manipulated "money" supply, is to stay free of direct monetary value and free of profit taking (via interest on debt). That may seem impossible or just crazy, but all official national currencies, including the dollar, have no set value, anyway. Their relative value changes with every microsecond of recalculated bets on the global currency trade and the latest central bankers' schemes. So, for exchange with currencies, the value of pure credit units could be figured as an average of all the major currencies and the current prices of all metals, oil, and national commodities index.
If that seems too complex, nonprofit community credit units can be valued at whatever the users agree on per each transaction or per tangible things commonly thought to have real or naturally intrinsic value, like certain luxuries, vehicles, animals, plants, commodities, materials, pleasing performances, whatever people value. However complex, super-cellphone computers, will have no problem handling the math for fair international exchange.
How are credits issued? A car manufacturer and its dealers often agree to give a car buyer a number of credit units equal to the number of dollars on the sticker. We call that a discount or premium. So, a cafe owner or soft drink manufacturer can accept credit units instead of dollars or offer them as premiums, like frequent flyer miles or coupons. A farmer might pay her workers with a combination of currency and credit units. A worker owned cooperative corporation may pay its employees entirely in credit units or just use them instead of a conventional profit sharing plan or benefits program. A doctor or clinic could use the credit system for a small scale HMO with superior quality services. The valuation of time, services, expertise, work or products is really decided by participants of an exchange through negotiation, however brief, subtle, or silent. So, especially with modern currencies, we are always affecting their value with each transaction manifesting the "market" for what we buy or sell.
Credit unions, community banks, and credit card vendors, like Visa, will have no trouble issuing GCCS (Green Community Credit System) cards and handling our accounts. Soon, they will do so as tax deductible nonprofit contributions to the community, the state, and the nations. Why would Visa and the World Bank cooperate with us? Because they depend on sustainable flow, and that takes participation, but their system suppresses both.
Only green credit can save the economy, by enabling 4 billion new participants to enter the game of culture with pure affluence, the capacity for flow and progress. It will cost the for-profit credit industry nothing, and dramatically increase the demand for conventional checking and savings account services. Then there will soon be hundreds of millions, then billions of new consumers and producers wanting new loans for products, services, and business projects that require official currencies. Each individual and each institutional participant will be an agent of the community, like its treasury and mint, minting new credit units as needed and deserved, in direct proportion to contributions to lively culture and flow. Will pure credit spin out of control like money always has?
Unlike the Fed's mysterious money machine, nonprofit credit lacks the structural elements and mechanics that create snowballing debt, interest (profit), and systemic cheating supported by bogus theory. Pure credit exists for our benefit, not for rapacious banksters and other predators who want the cream to themselves.
New and existing organizations and agencies can cooperate and use the Green Planning Standard to rate institutions, companies, etc., to determine their qualification (or disqualification) for issuing credits. Ungreen organizations and companies offering anti-green products and services must not be allowed to abuse the system for more toxic profit.
We can issue Green Credit units to each other via blog sites, Facebook, Twitter, private networks, and email. Where do the first pure, nonprofit credit units come from? They come from the same place the values come from. Did you get your first pay check in advance? Does an employee or another business take a check from a company that might be ruined before the check clears? Why does anyone take your personal checks? Where does the value of Fed dollars or Treasury bonds come from?
Well, the last example is hardly pure. The illusory, ever changing value of Fed dollars come from the illusory, ever changing value of T Bills and the imaginary value of the money put on banks' books with each new loan. The Fed's debt dollars are created by making entries in account ledgers and accounting databases controlled by it and the banks — debts for us, the people, and credits for the Fed, the banksters.
Still, like pure credit, even bad money depends on trust. Their is no other explanation for the continuing viability of the dollar. The USA has been functionally bankrupt for a very long time, insolvent, unable to pay its astronomical national debt. Yet, with the engine of the global economy, we get away with racking up even more toxic debt. For how long is anybody's guess, but the Fed dollar's value is a measure of trust. Once its TQ (trust quotient) drops below the level of terminal foolishness, the Fed and most US banks will be flat broke.
There is a real-world alternative that enables you to start issuing GCCS credit units today: Do you think this contribution to civilization and the well-being of all generations provides positive cultural value, causing positive change, greater wellness and more happiness? Great, use the new Green Credit Star system to award credits for the pages, posts, and comments you like. Rating a post you like gives it one Credit (like a vote of confidence in the value). That is multiplied by the number of stars you award. If you give this post (Green Credit & Commonwealth) 5 green stars, each worth 20 community Trust Units ("TU"), I will thank you for granting me 100 TUs.
The false viability of for-profit debt-money depends on suspending disbelief in the illusion of its relative value, while you ignore the negative effect of interest and manipulation by the banksters. Instead of instantly inflating the local economy by issuing credit with interest bearing debt (loans), like the Fed does, you and the credit unions, green employers, and community co-op associations can issue credit units directly, for real cultural benefit and commonwealth. Credit unions and cooperative banks can issue credit units as interest free loans.
As long as everyone is happy to be more affluent, with a healthy, thriving culture and a resurrected economy, the system will work better than Fed money. No more Bubble Economics, no depressing busts after manic booms, growth will level off to a healthy flow, like a mighty river. Towns, cities, counties, states, nations and tribes can use nonprofit credit units for trade and payment for services. Some international trade, import and export is handled with pure credit already and always has been. So, there can be no official argument against using it for smaller scale trade between jurisdictions regionally or in interstate commerce.
Long ago, the state of North Dakota initiated and sustained its own solution, its own banking system. However imperfect on its own, the Bank of North Dakota spared ND's citizens and businesses the Meltdown and End Game. We can do better than that over the next year or so. How? See the article linked below:
http://www.alternet.org/story/152285/north_dakota_fights_wall_street%27s_influence_with_a_state_bank_
Yes, we can rescue the USA. Though each state or locality may have its own unique set of subsystems, the Cooperative Community Credit System can be replicated nationally or internationally. If there is a monetary exchange value set at an average of global currencies and commodities, then official currency exchange transactions are as unnecessary as the related problems, inconveniences and costs. This alternative is being considered by the UN, China, and other leading nations that are tired of paying excessive dues to Club Fed and Wall Street Inc.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Wordpress, and many other businesses online will welcome another way to increase their volume of hits, goods, services, buzz and the flow of exchange. Without TUs, many banks and nations (other than Greece) will soon have little else to offer for keeping the world game going. Remember, Green Credit TUs are the perfect way to get about 4 billion new customers into the game to boost production and flow (affluence).
What should a unit of debtless, nonprofit credit be called? "Unit" and credit unit ("CU") seem too normal, sterile, boring. It's hard to imagine a nice symbol with a 'C' and a 'U' that looks right for convenient use. There is no love or sharing without trust. Since credit is a measure of trust, and we value sacred yet rational trust, 'T' makes a good symbol of it. The letter 'u' or 'U' superimposed over the T, might help. Written by hand, the Trust Unit symbol might look a like a cross with a big smile. If God wants us to love our neighbors and ourselves, using that symbol of our trust and community spirit should make Him very happy.
Jump start the global economy of the future. Whenever and wherever you can, use the Green Credit rating star system to award credits (community Trust Units) for valuable contributions to healthy culture and ecology. Please, also encourage your friends and local officials to subscribe to the Greenbook.blogspot.com and EcotectureNOW.wordpress.com
As long as currency is a commodity, everything will become a commodity as the quality of culture decreases and life grows ever cheaper. That process is the ultimate unsustainable con-game.
The wealth of Urban-Suburban Society is not simply the Wealth of Nations, but the poverty of billions. Poverty never existed before the invention of money and banking. In Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, a revisionary classic of honest anthropology, Nurit Bird-David writes:
"...Sahlins thinks that hunter-gatherers follow the 'Zen Way' to affluence, which presupposes that 'human material wants are few and finite, and technical means unchanging, but on the whole adequate.' This way contrasts, he argued, with the modern Western one (the 'Galbraithian way'), whose assumptions are appropriate to market economies—'that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improveable.' Hunter-gatherers with immediate-return systems in fact follow a third way—the 'sharing way'—to affluence. Their way is based on assumptions appropriate to their sharing economy—that material wants are linked with material means which are available for sharing...
"Finally, Sahlins wrote that otherwise curious heathen devices become understandable by the people's confidence and that hunter-gatherers behave as if they had it made."
They not only thought they had it made, they did have it made. First hand accounts of all the most reliable witnesses who lived with primitive people of the most ancient cultures—with the least contact with modern ways and technologies—report essentially the same native grace, robust health, and abundance, some with over 300 kinds of food and medicines.
Sahlins' mention of confidence may be easily passed over and the significance underestimated. Confidence, trust, is the only thing keeping the global Ponzi scam (the "economy") going now. So, we actually have much less reason for confidence than well trained primitive hunters.
Jim Bell is right. To wean the Consumer Society away from a more rapid descent into environmental disaster, we need true cost pricing. Products, processes, and projects that require ecocidal subsidies to seem affordable or that cause biological and social damage, health care disasters, and so on, should be priced accordingly. Given the real-world reality of systemic corruption and corporate manipulation, true cost pricing alone will never do. Even if it were allowed to get started on its own, developing a generally acceptable system might take too long to prevent an irreparable global catastrophe. Consumer Society's ecocidal socioeconomic paradigm, its disvalues, monetary madness, and corruption must be cured first or neutralized.
If the global derivatives bubble is a measure of the value of the Free Market economy then, surpassing 4800% of the world's annual GDP, it is inflating beyond $3,840,000,000,000,000 (3.840 quadrillion US dollars). Hard to believe? Yes or no, how many of those quadrillions are invested in making your world greener, healthier, more livable, eliminating poverty, ignorance, infant malnutrition and other causes of war? Right, close to zero ($0.00). Wiping out preventable misery and illness might cost about $80 billion or less per month or almost $1 trillion for a year. That is less than 0.003% of the global total invested in derivatives alone. It would be far less than 10% of the total cost of mid-east oil wars and medical benefits for injured veterans. Creating a bright Green future, globally, might cost $1 trillion over 5 years, about 10% of global defense spending per year. That will eliminate over 99% of the causes of war, but do the ultra-rich big winners invest in paradise? Are they becoming more intelligent, more noble, or more heroic than average greed crazed ego maniacs? Do they want Heaven on Earth? No, most are clearly devoted to maintaining all the infectious causes and symptoms of ecocide. Which master do they serve? Is it greed or good?
Before you decide, you may appreciate reading the refreshingly honest post by Jim Stanford on the Real-World Economics blogsite:
>> http://rwer.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/new-video-deconstructs-cge-trade-models/
In Greed, a comprehensive essay on the destructive rule of greed, Julian Edney offers another example from anthropology...
"Anthropologist Ruth Benedict summarized her overseas work saying the most obvious difference among societies was whether the living was cooperative or competitive. This was the 1930s. She used the term synergy. A high synergy society is socially cohesive, cooperative and unaggressive - one person's acts at the same time serve his own advantage and that of the group, his gain results in a gain for all. But cultures with low synergy are highly competitive and the individual gains advantage only at the expense of another, aggression is prized, indeed humor originates from one person's victory and another's demolition. Low synergy eventually threatens the social fabric. Her example was the Dobu of New Guinea, whose daily atmosphere of ill will and treachery among all made it a showcase of Hobbesean nastiness, and feared among its neighboring tribes. The Dobu have no chiefs, no government, no legalities and live very close to the "state of nature" philosophers propose. Danger is at its height within the tribe, not from without, and the attitude lives that it is prudent and right to inflict pain on losers to protect your win. Hierarchy is based on ruthlessness which is admired, and inequality and injustice are believed to be in the nature of things."
Edney goes on to point out that "clearly our own society has lower synergy than we boast" as it falls ever faster, ever more obviously in this post-Meltdown phase of the End Game.
It would be hard to find a better examination of sociopathic aberration than Edney's diagnosis of institutionalized greed and corruption in his online essays and blogs:
>> http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/review31/31Edney.htm
>> http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue32/Edney32.htm
In an article presented at the 1985 symposium on Economy and Church in Dialogue, former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) said...
"The economic inequality between the northern and southern hemispheres of the globe is becoming more and more an inner threat to the cohesion of the human family. The danger for our future from such a threat may be no less real than that proceeding from the weapons arsenals with which the East and the West oppose one another. New exertions must be made to overcome this tension, since all methods employed hitherto have proven themselves inadequate. In fact, the misery in the world has increased in shocking measure during the last thirty years. In order to find solutions that will truly lead us forward, new economic ideas will be necessary. But such measures do not seem conceivable or, above all, practicable without new moral impulses. It is at this point that a dialogue between Church and economy becomes both possible and necessary."
He went on to say that...
"These realms have come to appear mutually exclusive in the modern context of the separation of the subjective and objective realms. But the whole point is precisely that they should meet, preserving their own integrity and yet inseparable. It is becoming an increasingly obvious fact of economic history that the development of economic systems which concentrate on the common good depends on a determinate ethical system, which in turn can be born and sustained only by strong religious convictions. Conversely, it has also become obvious that the decline of such discipline can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse. An economic policy that is ordered not only to the good of the group — indeed, not only to the common good of a determinate state — but to the common good of the family of man demands a maximum of ethical discipline and thus a maximum of religious strength. The political formation of a will that employs the inherent economic laws towards this goal appears, in spite of all humanitarian protestations, almost impossible today. It can only be realized if new ethical powers are completely set free. A morality that believes itself able to dispense with the technical knowledge of economic laws is not morality but moralism. As such it is the antithesis of morality. A scientific approach that believes itself capable of managing without an ethos misunderstands the reality of man. Therefore it is not scientific. Today we need a maximum of specialized economic understanding, but also a maximum of ethos so that specialized economic understanding may enter the service of the right goals. Only in this way will its knowledge be both politically practicable and socially tolerable."
>> http://www.acton.org/global/article/market-economy-and-ethics
Such revolutionary, humanistic realism may seem beyond the scope of a Catholic bureaucrat, yet it reveals the truly human potential of religious inspiration and compassion. The Pope may be one of the most Buddhist of all Christians, but how do we turn ethics into effective policy?
"Buddhist Economics" is an essay by E. F. Schumacher, the humanitarian economist and author of Small is Beautiful: Economics As if People Mattered.
When asked by other economists what Buddhism has to do with economics, Schumacher told them, "Economics without Buddhism – without spiritual, human, and ecological values – is like sex without love."
To put it more plainly, heartless economics is like chronic, incestuous rape, torture and conspiracy to aid and abet mass murder. In The Human Revolution, a novelized history of Nichiren Buddhism in modern Japan, Dr. Daisaku Ikeda describes the awful conditions as World War 2 ended...
"Japan in those days writhed in the grip of a terrible economic crisis–runaway inflation."
"Nothing creates more misery than incompetent government... Day by day, the lives of the people took on the color of despair.
"The emergency measures temporarily protected monetary capital, but to the majority of the general public, they meant little more than enforced sacrifice...
"The crisis had not struck without warning. Its roots went deep; it had begun before the end of the war.
"Vast sums of money... were paid out in the name of war compensation."
"All this occurred at a time of national suffering and devastation. Big business... derived illicit profits from so-called war compensation. They laid off huge numbers of workers and destroyed their own products to protect their capital.
"Industrial sabotage of this kind created a drastic shortage of consumer goods, aggravating the rising cost of commodities. Just as one wave gives rise to another, social turmoil compounded the vicious circle.
"To make matters worse, no limits were placed on government spending... Big corporations avoided reopening production. It was far more profitable to let factories lie idle and hang on to their vast stores of hidden goods, waiting for prices to rise... while the value of money fell steadily..."
"The economic crisis rocked the foundation of people's lives, just like a massive earthquake..."
Ikeda witnessed Japan's atrocious misrule from before the war through 1945 and beyond. Though some of the secondary causes and details are different, the consequences are all too similar to our worsening crisis. Corrupt officials and corporations use chaos, despair, and confusion they create to abuse and exploit their already impoverished, desperate victims, the people. Who to blame is much less important than understanding how to remedy the economic plague afflicting us. Without understanding the cause, nature, and contributing factors, we stand no chance of curing our monetary disease. Without understanding, we have no way to create or measure real progress, nor to prevent failure. Now, almost everyone is more or less confused about money. The videos online (linked below) help make the basics visible and easy to understand, if hard to stomach:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FiaUpeJxcA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFb26u9g8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dmPchuXIXQ
The British colonists here had been using their own nonprofit currency from long before the revolution. So, in the early days of the new USA, the founding fathers put little detail into the constitution about Congress' responsibility for controlling the money, relative weights, and measures. In those days, the many forms of money, several foreign currencies, local scrip, wampum, beaver skins, tobacco, beer, salt, and other useful trade 'goods' in use provided pervasive education on the simple principles of value, money, credit, currency exchange, banking, and so on. Not knowing that most of us would be totally ignorant of the nature of money and credit, the authors of the Constitution failed to provide detailed instructions on what then seemed common knowledge, understood by all. Now, over 230 years later, the Fed dollar's floating value swirls in a bloody whirlpool of other unstable currencies and derivatives, both actual and virtual (local & digital scrip, securities & contracts). So, the time is ripe for an upgrade of our collective education on value, money, and credit.
An online synopsis of the virtually complete history of money, banking, credit, massive governmental fraud and the corruption of economics by Stephen Zarlenga, director of the Amercian Monetary Institute, is required reading for a comprehensive understanding of the problem and co-creating the solution. Zarlenga's draft of the American Monetary Reform Act, is brilliant, virtually perfect, and also online at the AMI website at:
>> http://monetary.org/
>> http://monetary.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/32pageexplanation.pdf
Zarlenga's analysis is not complete, and his strategy far from comprehensive, but it is the best so far for reforming the current money system. However, without a deep, thorough exposure of the roots of the problem there will be no sustainable cure. As with democracy, the only thing that will sustain a stable culture and its economy is a well informed populace. Once a vast majority understand the basics of karma, ethics, culture, wealth, value, and credit, then we can establish a hybrid economy with a pure credit system to keep the money system in check.
It is essential to realize that the Fed's debt-dollars have no monetary value, nor any intrinsic value, only notional value. That is true of all the other fiat currencies of the current world game. Their notional values are notional for two main reasons. First, the constant flux and volatility of the currency trade and official manipulation prevent knowing a fiat currency's exact [notional] value at any moment. Also, notional value lacks direct relation to a standard measure of physical material or quantity. The Constitution makes one legal US dollar one ounce of coin silver. So, a Fed dollar has no legal value either.
The Fed's debt dollars are Fiat Currency which, according to the US Constitution, cannot be legal tender (our money). "Fiat" means "decree" by whoever claims to have the right theory or the right to dictate values, rules and terms of servitude. In the USA, there was never a Constitutional amendment permitting Congress to give away its responsibility and our economy to the big Banksters of the early 20th century.
Our only legal US currency, coins (valued per weight of silver & gold), are pure money, an abstraction of barter for the sake of convenient exchange. So, our legal US money has both monetary and relative value, as long as the prices of metal remain fixed, with ample reserves and responsible control by Congress.
Since Fed dollars have no legal or real, fixed, intrinsic or natural value, they actually have no relative value to anything real or natural. It may seem they have real or relative value based on people's trust and use but, since trickery, lies, cheating, and crime are involved, that invalidates the basis of real value, making valid relative value legally impossible. The subversion of the Constitution and Congressional rules for effective management of the relative values, prices, and supply of silver and gold make our real money system totally impossible.
Credit or credit units may have notional or monetary or relative value but, for us, it is more important to realize that pure credit and debt are not locked in a natural pair bond. Credit is now usually associated with ever mounting debt and destructive exploitation, usury, via interest, profit taken for loans. Since national currencies are now all tied to ever escalating, insurmountable debt (to heartless banksters), we can say that credit or credit units (like Fed "dollars") tied to fiat currencies and the destructive Bubble Economy Game are not pure, not green, not sustainable, not healthy and not legal for use by US governments or agencies. Credit with only notional value has no intrinsic or real monetary value. Pure credit may have relative value related to intrinsic value.
In the USA, legally and generally, in principle, monetary value requires maintaining a fixed standard of exchange for general fairness and convenience. A pure, uncorrupted money system is nonprofit, by definition. There can be no making profit on money or manipulating the values and measures and rules for a special interest group, without voiding its fairness and convenience for all participants. Yet, a pure money system has never survived for long. Like the Fed's debt-dollars, credit based on a system of destructive exploitation and ever escalating debt is equally perverse. Pure credit, on the contrary, is a measure of what all people find intrinsically, naturally valuable.
Many ancient societies sustained a cultural economy based on intrinsic, positive values, and giving and sharing. The basic values of sustainable cultures are normally vibrant health, skill, happiness, virtue, wisdom, compassion, love, and generosity, sharing and gifting. Since the environment, Earth, was considered the source and repository of material abundance or wealth, the greatest honor and status was accorded those who gave and shared most, fostering greater joy and wellness for all. Selfishly taking most or causing general unhappiness and harm is considered sick, spiritually retarded or effects of harmful spirits. A typically overlooked essential of the gifting and sharing cultures, was that people did not take the methods or media of exchange very seriously. Wampum (cowry shells), hides, and trinkets were not considered more important than natural and spiritual resources, lives, health, and happiness. We may as well call such compassionate wisdom cultural sanity.
A pure, green, community credit system is not polluted by illegal schemes and harmful values. We already reward entertainers and experts in the arts, performing arts and sports more highly than anyone else. So, why not use a pure credit system that lets us directly reward everyone who makes positive contributions to our joy, health, and lively culture?
Only green credit, based on healthy cultural values, will deter activities that cause undue grief, illness, depression, and ruin. A healthy economy, whether local or global, is based on constructive cultural activity and exchange, not destructive exploitation, greed and terror. Normalized cheating and bogus theories build neither wealth nor cultural health. Neither wealth nor cultural liveliness depend on either winning or bloating, nor on wasting or squandering and hoarding. Saving is really investing and wealth is, among other things, the potential and capacity for sustaining a best case scenario. Without a best case scenario (the win-win scenario), the economy's snowballing End Game scenario will keep accelerating. If it does, the stealth depression will become an overt depression of the largest possible magnitude. Only green credit can stop it and cure it.
The Banksters cooked the Goose that laid the golden eggs, the US working class who drove 70% of the economy. There is nothing new or sophisticated or mysterious about this ancient syndrome. The fancy rationalizations and excuses are all hogwash and lies. A healthy economy, requires a stable, truly equitable economic system that serves all alike, fairly. We need fair trade, not bogus Free Trade. Yet, since we are not all 100% pure people, free of greed and perversity, having a pure system of one kind or another is out of the question.
We need a hybrid economy, with a nonprofit community based credit system balancing a reformed for-profit system. The US Constitution guarantees our right to any beneficial power or activity not specifically assigned to government. So, the establishment and legal recognition of community based credit systems is one of our natural rights. Congress had no right or legal power to give away its responsibility for our legal US money system, but they did. We clearly need and deserve an effective green alternative, now.
The Federal Reserve Bank system is constitutionally illegal and functionally defective, intentionally. It should be abolished or disempowered and disconnected from government. Yet, though it may seem best to prosecute it and its dark priesthood and co-conspirators, that can be put off and discussed by its victims, later. Until then, players obsessed with bogus Fed money, finance games and amoral investment can keep playing with their debt-dollars, Euros, stocks, bonds, futures, derivatives, etc.
Revision of the rules governing credit unions and interstate credit transactions must be discussed now. We need a viable hybrid system up and running, enabling lively cultural activity, healthy community development, and sane commerce. Since the necessities and related issues are too complex for this policy brief, this section deals only with the essential principles of nonprofit community credit, with a few simplified examples.
We first need to focus on what we need to remedy and replace first. Credit and debt are not synonyms. The Fed's bogus debt-money system creates and aggravates poverty for the vast majority by progressively inflating fake wealth for a tiny minority. Fake wealth is fake because it has nothing to do with real, positive potential, positive capacity, positive ability, positive creativity, positive empowerment, positive production, natural value, pure enjoyment, sharing, caring or healthy flow of real goods and services. Over 90% of fake wealth is invested directly or indirectly in destructive exploitation, negative control, tyranny, panic, oppression, suppression, recession, depression, and foreclosures, staged by corrupt elitists for centuries, at least.
We can play an infinite, nonprofit, win-win game for the sake of well-being and the love of life and debt free children, but credit and debt must be disentangled. Think of the Free Market as a finite, for-profit game, with finite rules, boundaries, scoring, winners and losers, a beginning and an end. The winners play for points (dollars, etc.) and deluded ego, creating ever more losers, plunging the world into disaster after disaster. Why? They are addicted to the rules, bad brain chemicals, and false notions about their options and karma. Money and banking without a stable standard of relative "values" has never sustained a healthy world game with a stable economy and never will.
The best way to prove that is with NeoMonopoly, the game called Monopoly played by new rules. Play it with the addition of loans and for-profit money with floating values set by the Banker, compound interest on the loans and all the money, and income tax paid every 4 rounds. One player is the Government, IRS, FBI, Supreme Court and the US Army. In NeoMonopoly, the Government and Banker have secret conferences and change the rules and definitions of economic terms whenever they want. So, good luck, but don't expect much fun.
Ironically, negative players of the for-profit game play mainly for quantity, despite excessive costs and unavoidable loss of both quality and quantity. Infinite players of nonprofit games play to enhance the enjoyment and quality of life, despite finite limits, status, quantity, and time.
That was the normal way of life on Earth, for millions of years, until about 5,000 years ago. Without money, economic values, banks, loans, interest, or taxes or tax lawyers and accountants, human beings thrived in natural harmony and basic joy in almost every environment on the planet. For hundreds of thousands of generations, without money, we suffered no debt or poverty. With few exceptions, Native American cultures were so successful they thrived in relatively stable populations for thousands of years, without polluting their environments or clear cutting the forests or depleting the soils or animal species. When they were too successful, they learned sustainable wisdom the hard way.
When Europeans arrived, ecological diversity and wild animals were numerous. Flocks of birds were so large that they darkened the sky when they rose up to fly. That was healthy, biologically positive normality. We can regain and sustain it, globally, but we need to see the naked truth. First, we need to recognize and respect the four basic modes of relationship and interaction...
1. Nondual:
creative, generative, infinite, primal, enlivening
2. Win-Win (give-give):
unitive, constructive, inclusive, mutually fulfilling
3. Win-Lose (give/take):
divisive, competitive, exclusive, limiting, disappointing
4. Lose-Lose (take-take):
destructive, negative, all consuming, depressing
The four modes apply to communities, cultures, civilizations, economies and all other social games as much as to individuals and families. The nondual mode of relationship is nature's way of creating, fostering, and supporting the relationship of all relationships we call the "universe" or life. We all participate to some extent as children or, sometimes, as parents and grandparents, lovers or heroes, but it can be hard to sustain while surviving in a corrupt society. The win-win mode is the one we all need to foster and support to sustain a successful civilization, and we can do it. Failing to use our best strategy and toolset would be insanely foolish.
The "winner takes all" insanity of modern Free Market capitalism is a perfect example of the Lose-Lose reality of the Win-Lose mode of relationship at the national and international levels. At the intercultural level, the Win-Lose game is a loser for all concerned, for we are all inseparably connected and affected.
The universe is the ultimate nondual mode of relatedness, and all karmas are instant karma, with ongoing chain reactions of consequences, for better or worse. What will it take to get back to the multi-millennial Win-Win game of life? Heartless exploiting, taking, hoarding, cheating, degrading, impoverishing, destroying and putting up with all that will never work.
We need true cost pricing or something similar with an even stronger corrective impact on destructive or toxic products, services, and projects. Yet, we first need to upgrade our definitions of karma, success, wealth, poverty, credit, value and benefit. The green definition of wealth measures success as the potential and flow of creativity, giving, sharing, cultivating, empowering, and the ability to increase and enhance the richness and joy of living.
Naturally, it will take more than notions and lip service to unsubvert and depervert the Consumer Society and its paradigm. We must recognize and sincerely celebrate all truly creative, positive, life enhancing activities by rewarding and empowering them and their creators or performers. When compassionate wisdom, productive creativity, abundant flow, giving and sharing are valued and gratefully credited as expressions of wealth, then we will see Earth as our treasury, manifesting sustainable success, ending debt and poverty.
Still, negative karmic momentum won't redirect itself, and that problem is the project of behavioral economics. For The Year in Science 2009 issue, a leader in the field, Professor of Economics and Psychology George Lowenstein (Carnegie Mellon University), revealed good news to Discover Magazine (Jan/Feb 2010, pg. 32 & 33). Lowenstein explained why smart people sometimes act in very stupid, self-destructive ways, as individuals and groups. Behavioral economists look for and study our actual passions and habits, especially our habitual passion "for persuading ourselves that what we want to believe is true" regardless of our lack of belief. The chronic failure to remember the simple dynamics of bubble markets is a prime example. Lowenstein also mentioned the problem of herd mentality and the sense of false security, safety in numbers.
Nothing new in that, but seeing how our instincts and brain functions for responding to danger, threats, and fear relate to economics is relatively new. People were not scared by wonderful Mr. Madoff's amazing performance because it didn't trigger their primate fear & threat response functions. Behavioral economics also works with the psychosocial dynamics of pessimism, optimism, risk aversion, risk tolerance, adrenaline addiction, and wacko bravado, irrational risk taking. Where's the good news?
What we can see and study is workable. The pathology of irresponsible credit card use is actually due to sick psychological elements of the industry. Brain scans show that credit cards have an anesthetic effecton the brain, literally suppressing rational consideration of scary issues and outcomes. What's worse? Since we can make "affordable" monthly payments, credit cards also trick the brain into not feeling like we're going into debt. We can now do something about the plague of plastic debt. Policy makers and corporate sustainability experts can now dovetail healthy marketing strategy with methods that help consumers make nondestructive choices. More on that later, but this means that producers can now protect the sustainability of their annual business cycle by protecting customers from themselves.
Elimination of excessive executive compensation can now be justified. We have hard numbers and proof that the psychosocial dynamics of real-world people and performance make previous notions "profit incentive" obsolete. For simple, routine tasks, increasing compensation works well, to a point. Beyond that point the curve goes flat. In complex, high risk endeavors, high stakes tend to make the brain narrow our focus, limiting or impairing performance. We can care more about winning or losing than the work or why we're doing it. High stakes and high pay are typically counter-productive when high performance requires creativity, expansive thinking, and innovative approaches to complex problems with unobvious odds for solution. So, directors and stockholders of corporations can stop rewarding heartless sociopaths with insanely excessive salaries, bonuses, and diamond studded platinum parachutes.
Behavioral economists see greed as desperation. Lowenstein says they call it hypermotivation. He sees greed as "the antithesis of self-interest" because it makes us so motivated get one thing at the expense of other things that can actually be more valuable or important, either immediately or in the long run. We now have scientific proof that the Devil's bargains are really bad deals. The mechanism that keeps us susceptible is called loss aversion. Socially induced envy and jealousy make the brain register a sense of loss, making us desperate to get out of the illusory hole. The ever more popular tendency to cheat is not just a sense of limited options, but a deep seated sense of deficiency, insecurity, and inadequacy that can be remedied with compassion and a little education or skillful psychology.
Behavioral economics shows us that our short-sightedness (subliminal stupidity) is caused by the brain's "present bias preference" (we want what we want now). Our tendency to laziness and haste, often employed to work against us, can be used for our best possible benefits. That enables us to devise clever methods for effective wellness programs for over-eaters, over-spenders, over-payers, and over-earners. The last two types are corporations and sociopathic executives.
Until the era of green wealth is globally established, leaders must develop sustainable policy, promote initiatives, and craft laws that separate money and debt, that deter, prohibit, and severely penalize ecocidal exploitation and other destructive activities and disvalues. Our other choice is ecocidal failure. Should we wait for the bankers and their political puppets to bail us out? That might happen when Hell freezes over or after they get religion, but both seem unlikely.
A nonprofit community credit system can be started by a cooperative association established for the purpose or a pre-existing organization, like a consumers co-op or a workers co-op company, a home owners association, a credit union, a for-profit corporation owned by decent folk, or even by friendly neighbors or noble individuals online, starting here and now. There are many good reasons to think that no organization nor any other person can or will determine the value of what you value better than you. The history of money, banking, and government proves these truths, but we can establish the system we need with an understanding of just the basics.
How could even a perfect alternative work well enough to survive the economics of Hell on Earth? The following brief examples offer a durable solution with variable options.
Of the many possible ways to set the relative values as the basis of a community credit system, using measures of time has some limited advantages, including familiarity. So, though the local currency system of Ithaca, New York, is not a pure nonprofit credit system, the Ithaca "Hours" certificates have worked very well since 1991, including approval for use at, by and for a local credit union. Visit the Ithaca Hours website and history page at...
http://www.ithacahours.com/archive/0001.html
Clearly, the disadvantages can be overcome, but only temporarily, even with a green upgrade. For instance, Ithaca's HOURS ("H") are valued at and exchangeable for $10.00 each, yet the buying power of the dollar has dropped by over 90% in the last 50 years and falls faster than ever. Real inflation soared like the price of metals over the last 10 years. So, if hours are the common basis of relative value, why not give the average worker a remedial raise? Instead of valuing the average hour at $100 though, $60 per hour seems less extreme and makes an equally effective example. So, a minute could equal $1 each, a 5 minute nickel = $5, a dime = $10, a quarter H = $15, a half H = $30, a full H credit = $60, and it would work almost like dollars did before 1975. Still, as long as a new alternative to cash is in any way connected to the Fed's Ponzi Casino system, debt-money and illusory values, the relative value of the alternative will rise or fall with the dollar.
Using time as the standard basis of relative value includes another bit of illogic unfit for a large scale credit system. One person's hour may seem unequal to one of another. With Ithaca HOURS and similar currencies, people negotiate various rates for services of varying perceived value.
Some alternative currency systems use a gold standard with cash equivalents fixed per ounces, fractions of an ounce or grams. Yet, gold is now tied to the unstable market economy, to mining, banking, finance, taxation, the same unsustainable manipulation, devaluation and gradual destabilization of the for-profit money system itself. Until metals are assigned fixed credit values, coins will remain far from being ideal tokens of pure credit.
The only way to sustain a stable credit system, balanced against the Fed's debt-dollar and its "floating value" and its manipulated "money" supply, is to stay free of direct monetary value and free of profit taking (via interest on debt). That may seem impossible or just crazy, but all official national currencies, including the dollar, have no set value, anyway. Their relative value changes with every microsecond of recalculated bets on the global currency trade and the latest central bankers' schemes. So, for exchange with currencies, the value of pure credit units could be figured as an average of all the major currencies and the current prices of all metals, oil, and national commodities index.
If that seems too complex, nonprofit community credit units can be valued at whatever the users agree on per each transaction or per tangible things commonly thought to have real or naturally intrinsic value, like certain luxuries, vehicles, animals, plants, commodities, materials, pleasing performances, whatever people value. However complex, super-cellphone computers, will have no problem handling the math for fair international exchange.
How are credits issued? A car manufacturer and its dealers often agree to give a car buyer a number of credit units equal to the number of dollars on the sticker. We call that a discount or premium. So, a cafe owner or soft drink manufacturer can accept credit units instead of dollars or offer them as premiums, like frequent flyer miles or coupons. A farmer might pay her workers with a combination of currency and credit units. A worker owned cooperative corporation may pay its employees entirely in credit units or just use them instead of a conventional profit sharing plan or benefits program. A doctor or clinic could use the credit system for a small scale HMO with superior quality services. The valuation of time, services, expertise, work or products is really decided by participants of an exchange through negotiation, however brief, subtle, or silent. So, especially with modern currencies, we are always affecting their value with each transaction manifesting the "market" for what we buy or sell.
Credit unions, community banks, and credit card vendors, like Visa, will have no trouble issuing GCCS (Green Community Credit System) cards and handling our accounts. Soon, they will do so as tax deductible nonprofit contributions to the community, the state, and the nations. Why would Visa and the World Bank cooperate with us? Because they depend on sustainable flow, and that takes participation, but their system suppresses both.
Only green credit can save the economy, by enabling 4 billion new participants to enter the game of culture with pure affluence, the capacity for flow and progress. It will cost the for-profit credit industry nothing, and dramatically increase the demand for conventional checking and savings account services. Then there will soon be hundreds of millions, then billions of new consumers and producers wanting new loans for products, services, and business projects that require official currencies. Each individual and each institutional participant will be an agent of the community, like its treasury and mint, minting new credit units as needed and deserved, in direct proportion to contributions to lively culture and flow. Will pure credit spin out of control like money always has?
Unlike the Fed's mysterious money machine, nonprofit credit lacks the structural elements and mechanics that create snowballing debt, interest (profit), and systemic cheating supported by bogus theory. Pure credit exists for our benefit, not for rapacious banksters and other predators who want the cream to themselves.
New and existing organizations and agencies can cooperate and use the Green Planning Standard to rate institutions, companies, etc., to determine their qualification (or disqualification) for issuing credits. Ungreen organizations and companies offering anti-green products and services must not be allowed to abuse the system for more toxic profit.
We can issue Green Credit units to each other via blog sites, Facebook, Twitter, private networks, and email. Where do the first pure, nonprofit credit units come from? They come from the same place the values come from. Did you get your first pay check in advance? Does an employee or another business take a check from a company that might be ruined before the check clears? Why does anyone take your personal checks? Where does the value of Fed dollars or Treasury bonds come from?
Well, the last example is hardly pure. The illusory, ever changing value of Fed dollars come from the illusory, ever changing value of T Bills and the imaginary value of the money put on banks' books with each new loan. The Fed's debt dollars are created by making entries in account ledgers and accounting databases controlled by it and the banks — debts for us, the people, and credits for the Fed, the banksters.
Still, like pure credit, even bad money depends on trust. Their is no other explanation for the continuing viability of the dollar. The USA has been functionally bankrupt for a very long time, insolvent, unable to pay its astronomical national debt. Yet, with the engine of the global economy, we get away with racking up even more toxic debt. For how long is anybody's guess, but the Fed dollar's value is a measure of trust. Once its TQ (trust quotient) drops below the level of terminal foolishness, the Fed and most US banks will be flat broke.
There is a real-world alternative that enables you to start issuing GCCS credit units today: Do you think this contribution to civilization and the well-being of all generations provides positive cultural value, causing positive change, greater wellness and more happiness? Great, use the new Green Credit Star system to award credits for the pages, posts, and comments you like. Rating a post you like gives it one Credit (like a vote of confidence in the value). That is multiplied by the number of stars you award. If you give this post (Green Credit & Commonwealth) 5 green stars, each worth 20 community Trust Units ("TU"), I will thank you for granting me 100 TUs.
The false viability of for-profit debt-money depends on suspending disbelief in the illusion of its relative value, while you ignore the negative effect of interest and manipulation by the banksters. Instead of instantly inflating the local economy by issuing credit with interest bearing debt (loans), like the Fed does, you and the credit unions, green employers, and community co-op associations can issue credit units directly, for real cultural benefit and commonwealth. Credit unions and cooperative banks can issue credit units as interest free loans.
As long as everyone is happy to be more affluent, with a healthy, thriving culture and a resurrected economy, the system will work better than Fed money. No more Bubble Economics, no depressing busts after manic booms, growth will level off to a healthy flow, like a mighty river. Towns, cities, counties, states, nations and tribes can use nonprofit credit units for trade and payment for services. Some international trade, import and export is handled with pure credit already and always has been. So, there can be no official argument against using it for smaller scale trade between jurisdictions regionally or in interstate commerce.
Long ago, the state of North Dakota initiated and sustained its own solution, its own banking system. However imperfect on its own, the Bank of North Dakota spared ND's citizens and businesses the Meltdown and End Game. We can do better than that over the next year or so. How? See the article linked below:
http://www.alternet.org/story/152285/north_dakota_fights_wall_street%27s_influence_with_a_state_bank_
Yes, we can rescue the USA. Though each state or locality may have its own unique set of subsystems, the Cooperative Community Credit System can be replicated nationally or internationally. If there is a monetary exchange value set at an average of global currencies and commodities, then official currency exchange transactions are as unnecessary as the related problems, inconveniences and costs. This alternative is being considered by the UN, China, and other leading nations that are tired of paying excessive dues to Club Fed and Wall Street Inc.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Wordpress, and many other businesses online will welcome another way to increase their volume of hits, goods, services, buzz and the flow of exchange. Without TUs, many banks and nations (other than Greece) will soon have little else to offer for keeping the world game going. Remember, Green Credit TUs are the perfect way to get about 4 billion new customers into the game to boost production and flow (affluence).
What should a unit of debtless, nonprofit credit be called? "Unit" and credit unit ("CU") seem too normal, sterile, boring. It's hard to imagine a nice symbol with a 'C' and a 'U' that looks right for convenient use. There is no love or sharing without trust. Since credit is a measure of trust, and we value sacred yet rational trust, 'T' makes a good symbol of it. The letter 'u' or 'U' superimposed over the T, might help. Written by hand, the Trust Unit symbol might look a like a cross with a big smile. If God wants us to love our neighbors and ourselves, using that symbol of our trust and community spirit should make Him very happy.
Jump start the global economy of the future. Whenever and wherever you can, use the Green Credit rating star system to award credits (community Trust Units) for valuable contributions to healthy culture and ecology. Please, also encourage your friends and local officials to subscribe to the Greenbook.blogspot.com and EcotectureNOW.wordpress.com
No comments:
Post a Comment
Technical comments, suggestions, and contributions are welcome, and may be included in the ebook and paperback editions (with full acknowledgment). Thanks. M
.