Money

Everybody (well almost everybody) wants more of it, there never seems to be enough money to go around and almost all governments spend more money it has. You spend an enormous amount of time working for, thinking about, spending and being frustrated about money but do you really know what it is, where it comes from, who controls it and how it is created? There was a point in time that I thought that I knew where money came from, I was misinformed. Misinformed by an education system that only tells part of the story and ignores many of the not so obvious and not so pleasant facts. Misinformed by a financial industry that has an agenda of profit, gluttonous profit.

Sometimes the misinformation is not intentional. The mass media will print or broadcast statements made by members of the Federal Reserve, Bankers and economic experts. These statements always steer scrutiny for the current economic situation away from the institutions they represent and toward the actions of other countries, foreign banks and even people like you and me. You may find it hard to believe today but in the history of banking there were periods of extreme opposition to banks.

There are several problems facing almost every country today, unemployment, inflation, and ecological destruction as well as a large and rapidly growing debt. Invariably the blame is cast on the politicians running the country, the workers in the country, maybe even the weather of the country but never on the currency systems of the country.

The Current Economic System

Sometimes we want to believe things that simply can't be supported by research or facts. One is that the current monetary system benefits the majority of the people and is environmentally responsible. War, environmental destruction, loss of bio-diversity, poverty are not isolated political or corporate problems. They are problems with one root cause that the financial system of the world is horribly out of whack.

The current financial system has diverged from its two main roles those being a standard of value and medium of exchange.

Today more money is traded as a commodity than it is used to move commodities and pay wages. Currency trading takes away control from people, corporations, governments (social good) and put it in the hands of a few traders whose interest is only in profits not stability. In fact instability generate more profits. The suffering that the instability causes generates profits. This will continue until an instability that is too large to control occurs.

Witness today the mantra of economic growth and free trade that are not leading us toward economic justice and environmental sustainability. Rather they are taking us in the direction of increasing economic injustice and environmental destruction.

When it cones to environmental concerns the debate always turns to jobs versus the environment. These arguments not only miss the point they are constructed to instill fear and sustain the status quo. The evidence is mounting that in a resource scarce world, neither is possible without the other.

The current economic system produces an irreconcilable conflict between the goal of creating economically just and environmentally sustainable societies and embracing sustained economic growth. The current policies are constructed to produce more millionaires and billionaires. They are not designed to achieving justice (social, economic or environmental) and sustainability.


Economic War

The economic war, and it is a war, for control of the worlds supply of money is being waged every day. It is a war for energy supplies and the currency used for exchange of the energy (petrodollars). Ruinous interest rates and onerous terms of trade are killing millions of people on a plundered planet. Hunger, sickness, homelessness, unemployment and criminality kill them. At the extreme some people receive millions a day in interest and children are sold into sexual slavery to pay off her parents debts.

Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control
whole continents; who controls money can control the world.
Henry A. Kissinger


Workers within countries are being forced into a war of wages and benefits with the current “free trade’ and Globalism movements. C. H. DOUGLAS predicted some of the current problems with trade and the protests against Globalism in 1924. His proposal of “Social Credit” does not receive a lot of course time in college economic courses if it is even brought up at all. When it is there is a certain amount of intellectual dishonesty in the discussion.

In all wars there are casualties, dead soldiers, homelessness, a damaged and polluted environment. You are involved in an economic war every month when you have to pay your home mortgage or your credit card bills. You have been drawn into an economic war with your neighbors and other people like you across the nation and across the globe and you probably didn’t even notice it.

Like all wars governments are involved. In the USA it is Congress that passes the laws and in the economic war this is where the battlefield is very heavily stacked against the individual consumer, citizen, voter, man or woman. In Congress the largest political contributions are credit cards companies and consumer financial service companies. Not big oil, not big pharmaceutical! A great big multibillion-dollar industry talking to Congress, whispering in their ear. Just like in a shooting war big money buys bigger and better guns. As in all wars, to the victor go the spoils, or in this case profits and not just good profits but extraordinary profits, unreasonable profits, unconscionable profits. This is a “feature” of government that is being copied all over the world from first world countries to third world countries. It is any wonder the third world countries are so heavily in debt?

Less than 1% of the population is now claiming ownership to almost 50% of the wealth and the trend is not in favor of the many but in favor of the few.


People control money (if they want to)

The Chinese parable of “The Monkey Master” is a story of what happens when a people wake up the their enslavement and take back control of their destiny. Money is a system designed by people, if it doesn’t serve us we can redesign it. Many people in the past have done exactly this. There are examples of alternative currencies functioning for the benefit of all the people. Where there has been too much success, Worgl for example, the central bank of the country had stepped in and outlawed the alternative currency plunging the community back into economic depression.


Alternative Currency, Alternative Economy

Changing the worlds economic system won’t be easy. There is an enormous amount of inertia to be overcome. There is also a huge body of myths about the current system of money. The money system is intentionally obfuscated to make it difficult for people to understand. Replacing the current currency system with an Alternative currency is not a popular idea especially with many of the governments in the world, the captains of industry and especially the financial industry.

History shows a better world is possible when committed people work hard enough for it. A small number of committed people ended slavery. Committed people helped workers win the right to organize and bargain collectively. The women’s suffrage movement won women the right to vote and regain control of their own bodies. Minorities won important civil rights.

Changing the world’s economy will be far more difficult than any of the proceeding changes in history. A change in the economy would shift control from a few powerful governments and a small group of people to majority of people. This type of change like overthrowing never comes easily. The current system is an economic dictatorship and history has shown that eventually all dictatorships fall under its own weight, greed and corruption. You can see some of this happening every day. By constructing and using an alternative currency now the transition from economic dictatorship to freedom will be possible.