>Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2001 04:14:33 -0700
>From: "Dick Eastman" <eastman@...>
>I understand how the current system worse than fails us, so how much
>of the Fed Reserve system can be replaced by LETS?

JCT: All of it. Find the Sovereignty Resolution where over 3000
American municipalities are begging the FED for interest-free loans of
newly-created currency to grasp that that we're not really replacing
the FED, we're reprogramming it to run right. Any casino cage can
handle any number of users. Run out of chips, print more. As long as
the collateral is there, they never run out of currency like the
present banking system does.

>1. Is LETS a create your own medium of exchange by picking your own
>non-loan-sourced backing for digital tokens?
JCT: Starting with the general collateral of time by a source of
humanpower, sure, all other material energy is acceptable too. My
Casino Turmel cashiers were empowered to issue chips in exchange for
both material collateral (cash) and non-material collateral (credit).
Everyone may borrow society's resources based on the the promise of
time and obtain even more based on the promise of material resource
too.

>2. Can LETS perform the function of a measure of value? Or would each
>LETS currency find its own gold price? Or what?
JCT: Use an Hour of manpower noting that Power times Time equals
Energy. Use a gallon of oil. Use gold. I don't care but whatever you
use, make sure there's enough and no interest.

>3. Of a store of value?
JCT: Money is not a store of value. That's just more economic
silliness. Money is a documentary claim on society's energy warehouse.
To an engineer, value has to a real asset. Money is not the asset, it
only represents it. It's a poker chip. Ask the best 12-year-old poker
player in grade school how they work.

>4. Can LETS money be banked and borrowed?
JCT: Can poker chips be banked or borrowed? Sure. But why bother
borrowing from someone else's account since your own markers are good
at the cage? I've never met one person who preferred asking his
neighbor for a loan over going to use a marker at the cage in private.

>5. Is there automatic market equilibrating "invisible hand" that
>would regulate the supply of LETS or the value of LETS currencies
>(e.g., the character of the LETS banker and his desire to stay solvent
>in the long run?)

JCT: Is there an invisible hand that regulates the supply of
poker chips at your Saturday night poker game? Yes. And it has
nothing to do with character. Remember, the value of a LETS token is
what's in the cashier's cage, not what you think it's worth like real
interest-bearing money. Remember that people who use money they think
is birthing baby new ones don't estimate in same way as people people
have accepted that money has no babies.
And whether the casino stays solvent has nothing do with how they
run the cage. It's an auxiliary function. Everybody runs their LETS
casino cages in the same way everywhere.

>There is a GIANT SPREAD between what people who deposit
>money in their banks get and even the lowest ("prime" rate) in the
>U.S. -- but when the Big Banks borrow internationally, the spread
>they enjoy between borrowing and lending is less that one point --
>genuine market efficiency for the elite -- contrived gouging for us
>the milking cows.

JCT: Spread is a complete red herring. Check the money flows
through the pipes in the engineering analysis to see why this is an
unimportant consideration.

>I don't know if LETS is the best way to go -- I only just now heard
>of it -- but if has advanced as far as you indicate and if it is
>indeed "interest free money," then as all the varieties of socialist
>became Leninists after the Russian Revolution, so all anti-FED
>monetary reformers will want to get behind the reform that has an
>actual foothold in the world, a real operating base from which to
>expand etc. (not created by a bank making a loan (creating a checking
>deposit) under a FED that hold our bonds and collects that interest
>(which large portion of the national debt would disappear if the
>Federal Reserve Act was repealed and "free banking" restored.

JCT: Yes, you got that right. Watch it go when the English Social
Crediters realize that France LETS have avowed they got the idea for
their interest-free social credits from Louis Even's Quebec Social
Credit movement. When they many thousands of Social Crediters in
Australia, New Zealand, UK, France, etc. realize LETS use social
credits and join, then the economic base will explode,
Sovereignty USA want interest-free financing from the FED but
never thought of using the LETS Timedollar software to do it
themselves with their 3000 municipalities in exactly the same way the
six Argentinian provinces used their interest-free provincial bonds.
When they realize they can do it themselves while waiting for the big
one, again, it will explode.
Early Libertarian-Anarchist literature promoted time-based
currency even if they have now been taken over by "economics majors"
who have been hynotized not to understand interest-free concepts.
Since I've referred you to the pipes I've used for the flows of
money, I particularly refer to my debates with Professor Flaherty who
could never keep where the pipes went straight in his mind. Those
Engineer (with a blueprint) VS Economist (without) debates still
fascinate me. In the same paragraph, one sentence would say that a
pipe is connected to the reservoir and in the next, it's connected to
the tap, then back to the reservoir, etc., never ever being to get it
straight that it had to be connected to or or the other but could
never be connected to both at the same time. Imagine. He could never
keep that straight in his brain that it had to be coming from one
place or the other while he kept insisting the one pipe was connected
to both.
Technocracy advocated Energy-based money.
I've heard recent reference to Kilowatt Dollars. Good unit.
And just like the City of Calgary now accepts LETS currency on
its buses, acceptability will again shoot to saturation.

But what's even more interesting is the synergy being created
between the Nazis and the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims, as
they realize that they have all been victims of the debt slavery
machine and all their excesses were a function of the death-gamble
nature of the usury rule, that we can all finally forgive and forget
and finish engineering Paradise on Earth.
Remember, my first resolution in the world-parliament once debt
slavery has been abolished is to change the planet's name from the
Earth to Eden. Hell to Heaven.
Christ's parables do say that the Kingdom of Heaven is just like
the Kingdom of Hell except that Hell has debts that grow and are never
paid off while Heaven has all payments going against the principle
with debts paid off the quickest. See
http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel/pombible.htm

>Can you tell us enough history of yourself so that we can know you
>are not a stooge of chase manhattan giving us a booby-trapped phony
>alternative to sour us on reform? I don't think you are, but who are
>you?

JCT: I think the Richest Pauper's Prayer has most of the relevant
links but essentially, I am a Grandson of Quebec Social Crediter,
Adelard Turmel, and I swore to my grand-dad that I would continue his
fight to abolish the demand that money make babies. Quebec Social
Credit's Louis Even preached the first LETS in comic book form. When I
then saw Michael Linton's first LETS model, I recognized its interest-
free Greendollar credits as the Social Credits preached to me by
grand-dad. So I sent Michael Linton $20,000 to develop the code in
Dbase for world-wide distribution. The result of my gamble is now
history. UNILETS is the banking system recommended in the Millennium
Declaration. I was invited to UN to make the presentation on it.
Steven Rockefeller's endorsement helped but what was he going to say
when I put him on the spot in public, especially when his cousin,
Richard, started the Maine Timedollar network? Kids from master
loanshark families don't necessarily have to be as bad as their
forebears, especially if they're helping liberate the debt slaves.

>Or if that is putting you on the spot, just answer this: How is
>your knowledge/invention of this system linked with your desire
>to reform the one we have?

JCT: It is my duty as a qualified banking systems engineer to
work to upgrade it's faulty and deadly positive feedback malfunction.

>(In a free banking system the character of the banker is
>very important, and of the banking system reformer.)

JCT: And in a LETS poker chip system, the character of the
cashier is absolutely immaterial. Crooks can run the chips and there's
just no way for them to steal when everything always balances.
Every positive has its own negative.
With interest, every dollar has a debt that grows even though the
dollar didn't. Go borrow $100 at a bank and walk around with it for a
year then go back. Your debt grew to $110 but the $100 in your wallet
didn't. So usury creates the imbalance that needs character
references. LETS has no imbalance and no one can cheat.

> Thanks in advance. Dick Eastman Yakima

JCT: Once in a while, I don't mind going into a little depth but
there are now too many people out there who see the big picture for it
to remain clouded by financial thinking much longer.
Just keep in mind that UNILETS is one big poker chip system where
your neighborhood's chips that you use on a daily basis (dollars, yen,
etc, ) are usable everywhere else too because all are based on the
interest-free Time Standard of Money. Just like in the old days when
you could use Ceasar's Palace chips at the Tropicana or the corner Las
Vegas store. An "1-Hour" note from Asia buys an hour's work in Africa
or America and vice versa.
The final ray of hope are all the monetary reform conferences
where LETS speakers steal the show even if they don't have the big
picture. Little ones that work are hit even if few of the speakers see
the big UNILETS that works best right on the horizon. Yet.

--
John C. "The Banking Systems Engineer" Turmel, Author of the UNILETS
interest-free time-based currency United Nations C6 recommendation to
Governments in the http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration.htm
Visit http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel