97% Owned investigates behind the scenes of the ever changing financial system, to uncover how the monetary system provides the foundations for international dominance and national control. Fresh thinking, new ideas and answers to simple questions are squeezed into this 2hr 10minute expose.
"Due for release May 1st it features frank interviews and comments from Positive Money, The New Economics Foundation, PRIME, Paul Moore HBOS Whistle Blower, Simon Dixon of Bank to the Future and Nick Dearden from Jubliee Debt Campaign."
Our governments give a trillion dollars in public handouts to the fossil fuel industry each year. A group of climate champions has emerged to end polluter payments at a vital UN summit this June.
"a group of visionary countries, led by New Zealand, Mexico, and Switzerland, are drawing a line in the sand against this madness."
"World leaders could make history by agreeing to cut the 1 trillion dollars they hand out in fossil fuel subsidies every year when they gather at a crucial environmental conference in Rio this June."
Question: "Do you look at Greece and wonder if they should be learning from the Icelandic model?"
"I have been very hesitant and reluctant to pass judgment on what other countries should do. I saw many misleading judgments made by people in other countries with respect to Iceland in recent years that I don’t think it is wise or fair for me to tell other countries what they should do."
"But I think it is our obligation in Iceland to give an open and honest description of our own experience, of the lessons we have leaned, and other people can draw their own conclusions. I have already mentioned that if you want to deal with this economic crisis, you must treat it not only as an economic challenge but also as a fundamental social, political, and even a judicial challenge."
"On the judicial side, we appointed a special commission headed by a Supreme Court judge that issued a report in 9 volumes, we appointed the office of special prosecutors, we have enacted various legislation and laws that relate to the judicial and legal system."
Actually, more than barter is it a local - city-wide - alternative currency they use, rather than direct exchange barter...
From the article:
"As Greece continues to search for solutions to its national economic crisis, the port town of Volos has adopted an old-school barter system to help its citizens muddle through."
"Five years into their recession with 21 percent unemployment, some Volos residents who were short on Euros but long on other resources created a local currency (called TEMs in Greek) that is traded based on non-monetary contributions into the online system."
"People sign up for a TEMs network account, see what services they might offer to other folks in their area who are in need, and start amassing credits that can be cashed in for things they themselves need. TEMs can be used for everything from bakers to babysitters, teachers to technicians."
Debt-free money may well be the solution to restoring a sane monetary system.
"Today, money creation has become a largely private affair. Not only is government money created through debt, but most money in circulation is also created through the leveraging of banks. Most of the money is lent into existence and thus essentially created by private banks in a system of generalised compound interest."
"Credit has become one of the primary means of reverse wealth distribution, a tax on the 99 per cent by the 1 per cent..."
"By their design, community currencies force people to spend locally, and usually quickly. They often stand as pillars of community-led attempts to rejuvenate depressed economies, such as Totnes and Brixton Pounds in the UK’s Transition Towns, and Argentina’s wide adoption of the Crédito during its 1999 economic crisis.
Most [of those currencies] are managed by nonprofit organizations, who sell them in exchange for legal tender (one Canadian dollar buys one Calgary Dollar, for instance).
The managing NPOs frequently have a surplus of funds (often from business participation fees or expired non-redeemed notes) that are funnelled into community projects or customer discounts. For example, 10 percent of all spent Toronto Dollars is donated to local charities, while the German chiemgauer, which started as a school project, has raised €100,000 for charities."
Stock would be issued at a discount – eg a Unit of £1.00 of Stock sold for 90p – and the rate of return depends on the period over which the Stock is returned to the Treasury in payment of taxes. The very word return alludes to this long forgotten practice of returning Stock to the issuer.
Stock revolutionises long term investment by transforming the risk. There is no longer a risk that debt and interest will not be paid. The stockholder may redeem Units against taxation, or may sell Units to other taxpayers/investors. Even if pure investors will not buy Stock, taxpayers will always buy Stock when the price is below £1.00.
The rate of return depends literally upon the date of return of the Stock to the Treasury or the date of sale: the former depends on the rate and basis of taxation, while the latter depends on liquidity – the ability to sell stock.
"Qualitative Easing will give a short/medium term breathing space for the transition of the UK economy to a sustainable long term fiscal basis."
Banco Palmas is an initiative of local currency and microcredit which has been practiced since 1998 at the Palmeira neighborhood in Fortaleza, Brazil.
Other poor districts of Brazil have been receiving training in order to start similar projects in their own communities. This evolved to the constitution of the already mentioned Brazilian Network of Community Banks. The banks register with the network and after a rigorous training process, they receive certification.
As of 2009, 47 similar local currency initiatives are found in Brazil, and there are some interests to implement similar systems in Argentina, Venezuela and France too.
"Money is just information, a way we measure what we trade, nothing of value in itself. And we can make it ourselves, to work as a complement to conventional money. It's just a matter of design."
My comment:
This is a feature length film - 1hour and 20 minutes.
Pay Pal has come to dominate online self-publishing, a rapidly expanding industry which allows authors sell ebooks directly to readers. Last week, without warning, the US firm wrote to every major self-publishing website, announcing that henceforth it will refuse to process payments for clients that sell books which contain certain types of what it regards as "obscene" content.
From now on, the firm said, it will begin aggressively prohibiting erotic literature which contains scenes of bestiality, rape, incest and under-age sex. Ebook websites that sell such works will have their PayPal accounts deactivated.
Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, one of the world's largest such sites, said the announcement has so far caused roughly 1,000 of the 100,000 novels that he stocks to be withdrawn from sale. "Regardless of whether you or I want to read these books, this is perfectly legal fiction and people have a right to publish it," he told The Independent on Sunday. "It surely isn't for some financial services company to control what is written by an author."
What is to be proposed here is a national and extremely efficient version of a LETS (Local Exchange Trading System), or a local currency system. These are basically barter schemes but strongly improved by using a local medium of exchange. Members gain points by supplying goods or services to other members. Such points gained are in the next round used to buy goods or services from other participants. The big advantage is that this enables economic activities locally which would else not have taken place due to lack of a regular medium of exchange (i.e. money).
My comment:
There is an updated and expanded version of this paper, "What if the Greeks, Irish, Baltics, Spaniards, Italians did this: high-tech parallel monetary systems for the underdogs?" available at http://tinyurl.com/8yjsn7c
Max Keiser and David Hales discuss Ripple, Bitcoin and the general move towards open source currencies as the trust in our current monetary authorities fades...
NANTES – This city in western French is getting ready to launch its own local currency as a complement to the euro.
Though Nantes is following the example of the WIR cooperative bank in Basel, Switzerland, where 60,000 small and medium-sized enterprises are already using a cashless payment system, this will be the first time a large-scale European city is willing to try the experiment with both businesses and individuals.
The measure addresses the increasing importance of non-monetary exchanges between firms, a tendency that is particularly visible in times of financial crisis.
The BRICS summit has wrapped up in India. Creating an alternative global lender and stepping away from the dollar as a reserve currency were among their main objectives...
my comment:
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - the emerging economic powers of a new multipolar world are talking about leaving both the US dollar and the IMF/World bank by the wayside as irrelevant to the future...
The CEO’s of the country’s three largest banks are among 200 who are facing criminal charges, and a special prosecutor expects up to 90 more indictments. The contrast with the United States could not be more obvious.
“The moral of the story is that a different approach to dealing with the banks is necessary, both to restore the U.S. economy but to prosecute financiers who broke the law. As it stands, bankers have gotten off scot-free while the country’s economic growth has been largely anemic...
"Canada's finance ministry announced the country would soon no longer be distributing the country's one-cent piece, effectively killing the penny. Now, in yet another sign that money is transitioning away from physical currency, the Royal Canadian Mint, the government-owned corporation that produces Canada's coinage, is set to launch MintChip, a digital form of currency that enables value transactions in the cloud."
"In other words, Canada has essentially just launched its own version of BitCoin. "MintChip brings all the benefits of cash into the digital age," according to MintChip's website. "Instant, private and secure, MintChip value can be stored and moved quickly and easily over email, software applications, or by physically tapping devices together."
The system is trying to come to grips with Bitcoin:
"Bitcoin poses a puzzle for regulators. It does not fit the UK Financial Services Authority's definition of e-money as it is not issued on the receipt of funds. A spokeswoman for the German Bundesbank told Reuters it was not classifying Bitcoins as e-currency. A French court was unable to determine whether Bitcoin is a virtual currency under French law and has referred the question to another court."
"Unlike conventional fiat money and other digital currencies, Bitcoin runs through a peer-to-peer network, independent of central control. Bitcoins are currently worth $4.88 (3.05 pounds) each on online currency exchanges, where they can be bought and sold for about 15 world currencies."
"Its popularity with financial professionals highlights an irony at the heart of the Bitcoin usership; suspicion of the banking system is written into the program's DNA."
"It was released in January 2009 by a developer using the probable pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Embedded in the code of its first block of transaction history are the words ‘The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks'. This was a way of time-stamping the first Bitcoin transaction, but also a clue to the developer's motivation."
Tems has been up and running for barely 18 months, said Maria Choupis, one of its founder members. Prompted by ever more swingeing salary cuts and tax increases, she reckons there are now around 15 such networks active around Greece, and more planned. “They are as much social structures as economic ones,” she said. “They foster intimacy and mutual support.”
What rules the system has are designed to ensure the tems continue “to circulate, and work hard as a currency”, said Christos Pappionannou, a mechanical engineer who runs the network’s website using open-source software.
No one may hold more than 1,200 tems in the account “so people don’t start hoarding; once you reach the top limit you have to start using them.”
And no one may owe more than 300, so people “can’t get into debt, and have to start offering something”.
Businesses that are part of the network are allowed to do transactions partly in tems, and partly in euros; most offer a 50/50 part-exchange.
Derivatives Market Bubble: Key news articles and top financial experts claim the $700 trillion derivatives market bubble is a time bomb.
According to many top financial analysts and the revealing news articles below, the $700 trillion financial derivatives market may be a time bomb waiting to explode with catastrophic consequences. $700 trillion is more than 10 times the GDP of the entire world and equivalent to $100,000 for each of the 7 billion inhabitants of our planet. These financial instruments have a legitimate place in hedging risk, yet the recent explosion of growth in the global derivatives market has created a huge potential for massive instability.
(My comment:) Some news on what the big banks are up to and how the economy is being sucked dry. Click on the headline to dig deeper.
There are a myriad of local exchange systems springing up, the reformers are busy. Yet, it is easy for all those efforts to be marginalized. For one, they are split into many small initiatives, none of them set to take on the juggernaut.
So I think something is missing: a universal standard for soft money that allows us to all work together seemlessly, regardless of distance, regardless of what we are putting our efforts into in our quest to bring about that new world, and that new economy.
A gift currency is a social symbol which can be used to encourage the flow of gifts between a group of people. These might take on many forms, but the most likely one is a simple promise to deliver a gift to the bearer. The promise can be issued on a piece of paper, e-mail, or perhaps even a tweet. Once issued, it should be able to circulate like money does. Rules might govern when it must be redeemed by, and who it can be transferred to – for example, the members of a particular group or scene.
Once issued, the promise of a gift can circulate much like the gift itself. An important feature is that gift currencies are not denominated in an abstract unit of account, like dollars or pounds. If that were so, the gift would inevitably become a mere means of payment.
Gift currencies are like money insofar as they act as a means of exchange and store of wealth, but they are deliberately not units of account.
There are a number non-interoperable solutions today; PayPal, Amazon Payments, Flattr, Google Checkout, Ven, Bitcoin, BankSimple, Square, and KickStarter are a few examples of these sorts of ground-breaking technologies. The Web Payments initiative at the W3C will live at the intersection of many of these emerging technologies and movements; mobile payments, alternative currencies, crowd-sourced investing, next-generation banking, and electronic commerce.
The purpose of the Web Payments Community Group is to create working technologies that enable universal payment for the Web. We will be integrating many of the technologies that exist today, some of which are listed above.
The goal is to create a safe, decentralized system and a set of open, patent and royalty-free specifications that allow people on the Web to send each other money as easily as they exchange instant messages and e-mail today. The group will focus on transforming the way we reward each other on the Web as well as how we organize financial resources to enhance our personal lives and pursue endeavors that improve upon the human condition...
Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme - but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.
Governments can create new credit electronically on their own computer keyboards as easily as commercial banks can. And unlike banks, their spending is expected to serve a broad social purpose, to be determined democratically.
Banking has moved so far away from funding industrial growth and economic development that it now benefits primarily at the economy’s expense in a predator and extractive way, not by making productive loans. This is now the great problem confronting our time. Banks now lend mainly to other financial institutions, hedge funds, corporate raiders, insurance companies and real estate, and engage in their own speculation in foreign currency, interest-rate arbitrage, and computer-driven trading programs.
Industrial firms bypass the banking system by financing new capital investment out of their own retained earnings, and meet their liquidity needs by issuing their own commercial paper directly. Yet to keep the bank casino winning, global bankers now want governments not only to bail them out but to enable them to renew their failed business plan – and to keep the present debts in place so that creditors will not have to take a loss.
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