1. Editorial: The
Transition To A New Decade
2. Money System Reform
2.1. The Purpose of the Money System
2.2. Various Aspects of the Money System
2.3. Monetary Reform: Creating the Public Money
Supply
(1) A Call for Volunteers
(2) The Coming General Election
(3) New Economics Foundation
3. Lessons From Copenhagen
3.1. "Developed" and "Developing" Nations
3.2. Seeing The Problem Whole
3.3. What Can Citizens Do?
4. Book Reviews
(1) Common Wealth: For A Free, Equal,
Mutual And Sustainable Society by Martin
Large
(2) Critical Social Theory And The End
Of Work by Edward
Granter
(3) A Renewable World: Energy, Ecology,
Equality by Herbert Girardet and Miguel
Mendonça
(4) The Case For Pluralism fromDag
Hammarskjold Foundation
5. Next Newsletter
1. EDITORIAL: THE TRANSITION TO A NEW DECADE
The 'Noughties' have shown that we in the "democratic
West", led by a global super-power in the USA, can
no longer claim a specially democratic and influential
position in world affairs.
The claim to be democratic has been disastrously
damaged by our self-imposed dependence
on profit-making commercial banks to provide our
public money supply, by our elected representatives'
money-grubbing, and by the way the US and Britain
invaded Iraq and destabilised the Middle East.
The claim to be influential has been shown
up at the recent Copenhagen conference
on climate change, when the newly powerful nations,
led by China and supported by many "less developed" peoples, insisted
that their future development prospects should
not suffer from the need to repair the global ecological
damage caused by Western development over
the past 200 years, and that we should bear the
main cost of repairing it.
In Britain we face a general election within the
next six months. There is a widespread sense that none
of our mainstream political parties is capable of
responding effectively to the range of national
and international challenges we now face. If their
election campaigns confirm this, the result could
be a temporary "hung Parliament".
We electors and our politicians might then recognise the
need for deeper-seated changes than mainstream
agendas now offer. A two-year transition
to the 'Teenies' decade could then see the start
of a deliberate shift to a new worldwide
path of co-operative development and
democratic participation. It would give
us a much better chance of securing the future
of our and other endangered species, than trying
to restore competitive Business-As-Usual.
2. MONEY SYSTEM REFORM
A major aspect of that new path of development
has to be a money system fit for its purpose.
2.1. The Purpose of the
Money System
The money system's purpose must
change from what it has been since its
origins in the distant past. It must no
longer be designed to provide
a stealthy way to transfer wealth from weaker and
poorer people to richer and more powerful ones. (If
you don't believe that this is a fair description,
take a look at my short History Of
Money - www.jamesrobertson.com/books.htm#history).
Its new public purpose now must
be to enable everyone to benefit from fair and efficient
exchanges of goods and services, reflecting what
we each contribute to and take from the common wealth.
It is a purpose for which governmental agencies
at local, national and international level must become
directly responsible.
To get the money system reconstructed for this
new purpose, we have to understand it as a
system of interacting money subsystems which
influences our behaviour at every level -
personal, household, local, national, and global.
We have to understand how it generates a calculus
of values, and how that operates as a
scoring system motivating us by rewarding
some things and penalising others. And we have to
understand how its present modes of operation motivate
us to behave in ways that hasten our species'
suicide.
The following four governmental decisions
primarily determine how the money system works -
in other words, what values it generates in terms
of the prices and costs of everything compared
with everything else, and so how it motivates us
to behave:
- how the public money supply is
created, by whom and in what form (as debt or
debt-free);
- how governments collect public revenue (for
example, what they tax and what
they don't tax);
- what public spending is spent on and what
it isn't spent on; and
- how governments regulate the
financial dealings of individual people and other
organisations.
Today, all of those urgently need systemic understanding
and reform.
2.2. Various Aspects of the Money System
I warmly recommend the December 2009/ January 2010
items in Charles Bazlinton's Blog The
Free Lunch.
They deal with many of the reforms needed in various
aspects of the money system, including changing the
way money is created, the need for land
value taxation and a Citizen's Income,
and how to get rid of the continually growing
maze of regulations intended as substitutes
for those necessary basic reforms.
I suggest you start with the "hilarious fun
and nonsense" lessons
of Wallace and Gromit in
the 6 January item on the 2010 UK general election,
and work backwards through the 16 December free
lunch for thousands of people in Trafalgar
Square, and end with the 28 November item on Professor
Richard Werner's latest interview on monetary matters.
2.3. Monetary Reform: Creating
the Public Money Supply
In Britain over the past few months public
anger has continued to rise against the bankers who
landed us in the present mess.
It is also widely perceived that, in the leading
political parties, virtually
nobody knows how to prevent the same thing happening
again.
That includes the Lib Dems, although
Vince Cable is judged to talk most common sense about
the issues as they continue to arise. It also
includes Labour, since Gordon Brown as Chancellor
was most clearly responsible for encouraging the
boom and bust debacle. And it obviously includes
the Conservatives - not mainly because they
didn't noticeably try to stop the boom and bust,
but because they are still known to represent the
interests of people, including themselves, who benefit
most from continuing high bank profits.
Moreover, the public servants responsible for
advising the present government, "such as Lord
Myners, Lady Vadera, Lord Turner and John Kingman,
were all past or present bankers, or friends of bankers.
When they leave public life they are likely to work
for a bank" - click
here. So what is to be done? Here are
some suggestions.
(1) A Call for Volunteers from Ben
Dyson - www.call4reform.org
"Join the Campaign for Monetary
Reform, and Help to Change the World
Our
self-imposed dependence on commercial
banks to create our public money supply has a disastrously
destructive impact on the economy and society in
every country in the world.
We need your help to change it.
Ten years ago Joseph Huber and James Robertson published a clear and effective
proposal for monetary reform, to transfer to a public agency the function of
creating the public money supply to serve the public interest.
Implementing this reform could prevent future
financial crises as well as allowing us to escape
from the debt trap that we are currently in. However,
one of the biggest problems is that very few people
know anything about this issue. The press and politicians
either do not understand the problem, or prefer
to ignore it.
It's Time To Change That
In early 2010, we’ll be launching the
most focused campaign for monetary reform
that has been seen to date.
Similar campaigns are needed in other countries. But this one will concentrate
on the UK. We will aim for 1 million people from the UK
to call
for reform of the monetary system over the next
year. This will show MPs and the government that they can no longer ignore
the issue that is at the root of the majority of social problems, and which
caused the worst crisis in the financial sector in 70 years.
We have already had meetings with some of the most senior politicians in
the UK, but they need to know that the public will support them in reforming
the system. This is why we need 1 million people to call for reform.
We Need The Help of Talented People
Educating 1 million people requires talented people with a wide range
of skills. We need people like you to join the campaign team. You
will be able to work from home or elsewhere in your own time but
you will be collaborating with a network of people all over the UK.
In addition, there will be full-time, paid opportunities arising
in the next 12 months.
Contact Me
If you want to make a major impact on the world and economy, and can offer
your skills and talent to make monetary reform a reality, contact
me now by sending an e-mail to 'ben at bendyson dot com'.
PS. Other major social issues are all important, but
the monetary system is at the root of most of them. By attacking the
root of the problem, we can solve social and economic problems that
have been unsolvable for decades.
Ben Dyson
www.call4reform.org"
(2) The coming general
election also provides an opportunity
to support independents who campaign
for monetary reform. They include:
Anne Belsey - www.moneyreformparty.org.uk
Dick Rodgers - www.thecommongood.info
For Independent candidates in
general, Terry
Waites' New Year message to Independent
parliamentary candidates has suggested to
me that
we should persuade as many of them as possible
to understand the need for monetary reform and
to include it in their manifestos.
(3) New Economics Foundation
Please take a look at the new page on Monetary
Reform on nef's website - www.neweconomics.org/projects/monetary-reform.
It will be interesting to see how it goes.
Likewise how nef develops specific practical proposals
from the findings in its recent
report "A
Bit Rich" - www.neweconomics.org/publications/bit-rich -
and its aspirations in "The
Great Transition" - www.neweconomics.org/publications/the-great-transition.
3. LESSONS FROM COPENHAGEN
Was the Copenhagen conference on climate change
last month a sheer waste of
carbon and other greenhouse gases, not to
mention money and valuable time? Does the
coldest weather ever experienced by many people in
many parts of the world now cast doubt on global
warming anyway? To both questions the answer must
be "No, not really, but ...".
The world community must learn from Copenhagen the
need to reconsider both the substance of
the key development challenges facing the world
in the 21st-century, and the
process of deciding how to tackle them.
3.1. "Developed" and "Developing" Nations
At Copenhagen, the formerly dominant "developed" nations
were woefully unprepared for the rest of the world's
insistence that its development prospects
should not be damaged by the payback costs of
the ecological damage caused by Western development over
the past 200 years. We need to understand that as
reasonable.
One of the many people who expressed that view
was Sudanese-born entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim in "Africa
must exploit all energy sources" (Financial
Times, 18 December 2009).
He said, among other
things:
"Carbon trading has been touted by many as
an important tool for cutting emissions. It may be
part of the solution. But we must admit an important
premise: Africans account for 13 per cent of the
world’s population and are responsible
for less than 4 per cent of carbon emissions. That
is our carbon credit. It is the
only basis for any carbon trading that makes sense."
Another was Thompson Ayodele,
director of the Initiative for Public Policy Analysis,
Lagos, Nigeria in "North
hides nefarious aims under green cloak" (Business
Day, South Africa, 17 December 2009).
More recently, on 5 January the President
of Bolivia, Evo Morales issued an invitation
to a new international conference on climate change:
"Making clear that those most affected by
climate change will be the poorest in the world
who will see their homes and their sources of survival
destroyed, and who will be forced to migrate
and seek refuge;
- Confirming that 75% of historical emissions of
greenhouse gases originated in the countries of the
North that followed a path of irrational industrialization;
- Regretting the failure of the Copenhagen Conference
caused by countries called “developed”,
that fail to recognize the climate debt they
have with developing countries, future generations
and Mother Earth."
It will be held from 20th to 22nd April 2010 in
Cochabamba, Bolivia. For the full text of the invitation,
go to http://cmpcc.org/2010/01/05/call/. (Thanks
to Roy Madron for this.)
3.2. Seeing The Problem Whole
In future it will surely make
sense for world development conferences to deal
with other global problems as well as energy, which
are inextricably linked with climate change.
They include:
- population growth,
- food production and distribution,
- availability of land and water,
- reforms of existing international (and national)
systems of government, politics and the law*,
and
- reforms of existing international (and national)
money systems.
* Fascinating background to one aspect is in Jonathon
Porritt's November 2009 report on "The
Standing of Sustainable Development in Government", reflecting
his nine years' experience as the first head of
the UK Government's Sustainable Development Commission.
For a summary of the present challenges of world
development by Lester Brown, click
here.
3.3. What Can Citizens Do?
In addition to all the "lifestyle" actions
we can take as individuals and households and local
communities, we can pressurise our governments to
bring in policies to change the present direction
of our societies' development - for example by persuading
parliamentary candidates to support them - see 2.3(2)
above.
In his thoughtful and interesting messages of 5
January and 6
January, John Bunzl draws the lesson from
Copenhagen that we should adopt an international "Simultaneous
Policy" approach to pressurising our
governments in that way.
Asking them to adopt the necessary policy
changes simultaneously would remove the excuse they
now constantly make under pressure from their businesses
and industries, that by adopting these policies
before other countries do, they will damage their
economic competitiveness.
There is more about Simpol at www.simpol.org.
4. BOOK REVIEWS
(1) Martin Large, COMMON
WEALTH: For a free, equal, mutual and sustainable
society, Hawthorn
Press, 2010, hardback, 285pp, £15.00.
The book is being launched in London at the Society
Guardian Future
of Housing Summit in London on 25
January.
I was very glad to endorse this book as follows.
"Only by sharing the value of our
common resources more fairly, is humanity
likely to be able to avoid the worldwide self-destruction
towards which our present path of development is
leading us.
In his masterly new book Martin
Large explores the changes this implies for the structures
of business, government and civil society and the
relationships between them. He identifies land value
taxation and a citizen's income as among the measures
that will help to bring the changes about.
Please read it if you care about
the future of our species."
The book's special importance is that, while it
concentrates on helping people who "want
to get on with building the social future where they
are, whether this means developing more
sustainable businesses, caring for the environment,
renewing democracy or community development",
it also recognises that, to facilitate that, "the
current captive corporate state can be replaced by
a government that works for the common good; the
economy can be freed from neo-liberal capitalism
by developing an associative, fair trade economy;
and public services such as education and health can
be liberated from both state dominance and from commercialisation".
It brings together practical grass-roots guidance
with wider understanding of the need for national
and global change.
(2) Edward Granter, CRITICAL
SOCIAL THEORY and the END of WORK,
Ashgate, 2009, hardback, 202pp, £55.00.
I have enjoyed this account of the development
of ideas about work and its future in the
industrial age. Having myself been one of
the British authors on this subject in the 1970s
and 1980s -
www.jamesrobertson.com/books.htm#futurework - I
was glad to be reminded of the work of others like
Krishan Kumar, Charles Handy, Clive Jenkins and Barry
Sherman. I even felt rather chuffed at
finding my name in the same company as academic post-Marxist
luminaries like Herbert Marcuse and André Gorz.
However, I am still as convinced as I was then
that "the end of work" misses the
point. We should be discussing the
liberation of work.
It is a basic error to assume,
as most people seem to do today, that working
for an employer is the only way to work,
and that that is actually the meaning of "work".
In fact, it is often much better to work, if you
can, for yourself and your family and your community,
doing things and providing goods and services which
you yourself value as worth providing.
I am sure that extending the freedom and
ability of people to practise that kind of "ownwork" will
now gather more support than it has done in the
past thirty or forty years. In the age
of "sustainable development" it
must become clear that to stifle that freedom,
by persuading or compelling as many people as possible
to increase the job statistics, is unacceptably
wasteful.
That is most clearly due to the mass duplication
of infrastructure and services between
home and workspace, and the mass daily
commute between them and back again, which
that policy requires. But it inevitably also limits
many people's sense of ethical commitment to good
work.
Granter's conclusion is that "by pointing
to the radical possibilities for transforming work,
end of work theories highlight the possibilities
for radical transformation of society as a whole".
I am sure his work will interest scholars of sociology,
history of ideas, and social and cultural theory.
I am not so sure how much it will help or inspire
people who are actively trying to bring the transformation
about.
(3) Herbert Girardet and Miguel Mendonça, A
RENEWABLE WORLD: Energy, Ecology, Equality, Green
Books, 2009, 256pp, £14.95/$27.95.
For a description of its contents please click
on the title (above) of this important Report for
the World
Future Council. Its last chapter is on "Going
Deeper, Looking Further". It recognises that,
although the book has placed a strong emphasis on
climate change, "even if climate change were
not happening, we would still need to change our
energy systems, restore the health of ecosystems,
create more livable cities, vibrant communities and
resilient localities, use less resources, spread
wealth, increase international peace and leave behind
a world fit for our children and grandchildren. So climate
change could be seen as the final wakeup call to
create an ethical, sustainable world...."
Although the Report recognises the need for various
separate changes involving money and finance, it
doesn't suggest a comprehensive and systematic
reconstruction of the money system that
influences how almost everyone in the world now behaves
- personally, locally, nationally and internationally.
So it's good to know that the World Future Council
recognises the need for a new financial system at
the core of the new economy that humanity now needs,
and that a coalition of social banks has provided
core funding for the Council's policy work on it
over the next three years - www.worldfuturecouncil.org/future_finance.html.
(4) Dag Hammarskjold
Foundation, THE
CASE FOR PLURALISM; "What
Next" Vol. II; Development Dialogue No 52,
August 2009, 199pp.
As a participant with the International
Foundation for Development Alternatives (IFDA) in
the 1970s and subsequently with the Dag Hammarskjöld
Foundation on "Another Development,
What Now", I was sad to learn of
the impending end of the
'What Next' project.
So it was a relief to know that a new "What
Next Initiative" - www.whatnext.org - will
carry forward the exploration of "alternative
paths that can take us to a decent and sustainable
future. That requires unconventional thinking,
and the consideration of a broad range of alternatives – a
strong case for pluralism. And that is what this
final What Next volume is all
about."
Contributors include Manfred Max-Neef, Vandana
Shiva and Wendy Harcourt. Niclas
Hallstrom's Introduction affirms that "all
actors - governments, business, academia, media
- have important roles to play, but little
will happen unless concerned and organised citizens
act, and act effectively and strategically,
thereby pushing and moving the other actors".
5. NEXT NEWSLETTER
During the
next few months I plan to complete a book
on money system reform, with a practical
core as summarised at 2.1. above. So my next
newsletter may not come out until after
Easter. But I know what happens to "the
best laid plans of mice and men ..... ".
