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James Robertson The full Newsletter can also be viewed at INTRODUCTION This newsletter touches on many aspects of money. I would like to emphasise two
important points concerning the need for realism about the exercise of power. The first is that our leaders will only be empowered to put through the necessary changes in the
present money system against the opposition of powerful
defenders of the status
quo, if
we compel our leaders to make the changes. See 4(1),
paragraph 3, below. The second is that, as so often, our
approach needs to be based on both/and, not either/or. It is not a
question whether to support decentralised monetary innovation against
mainstream monetary reform, or vice versa. Both are
essential. Decentralised innovation of money and finance will be an essential part of
the world's economic future, everywhere and at every level. Mainstream reform
will be an essential prerequisite to decentralised monetary and financial
innovation on any significant scale. See 4(3), 4(4) and 5 below. 1. CURRENT UK BACKGROUND 'Greedy Members
of Parliament' have temporarily pushed 'greedy bankers' out of the headlines.
After the elections last week for the European Parliament and local councils,
the media are still largely dominated by short-term political questions such
as the prospects for the Prime Minister and political parties, the next
general election, and whether we need politicians to be more independent of
the party line. The scandal about MPs' expenses has been seen as a possible opportunity to
deal with more 'fundamental constitutional questions'. But those tend to be the conventional
constitutional issues - voting systems, House of Lords
reform, citizen's juries, citizens' rights to 'recall' their MPs etc. See www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/03/political-reform-guardian-observer-survey. Inward-looking politicians and political commentators don't see that there are wider questions of
constitutional significance too, e.g. how to limit the financial
influence of big business and finance on public policy, or who creates the
public money supply and who decided that commercial banks should create it as
profit-making debt. Heather Brooke's successful use of the Freedom of Information Act to
expose the scandal of MPs' expenses sends a message of hope. Could the Act be used to expose
some of those other scandals too? See www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/articles/the-westminster-gravy-train. 2. ANOTHER BOOK NOW ON THE WEBSITE The History of
Money: From Its Origins to Our Time is the English text (www.jamesrobertson.com/books.htm#history)
of my Une Histoire de
L'Argent: Des origines à nos jours, Autrement, Paris 2007 - www.autrement.com/ouvrages.php?ouv=2746710306.
This short 'Junior Histoire' is about how money began, how it has evolved
to the present day, what it has enabled humans to achieve, why so many people
in the world today suffer from the way it works, how it may develop further,
and how young people today might want it to develop. I am grateful to
Autrement for permission to make it available here. 3. YES! MAGAZINE, SUMMER 2009, ISSUE 50 David Korten writes
an introduction to this 64-page issue on The New Economy Starts Here: Why This Crisis May be
Our Best Chance.
It follows up his book at 4(1) below. My article in this issue on Money
from Nothing: Supplying money should be a public service, not a cash cow for
banks is at www.yesmagazine.org/
article.asp?id=3498. For more about Yes!
magazine see www.yesmagazine.org. 4. FOUR BOOK REVIEWS (1) David Korten, AGENDA FOR A NEW ECONOMY:
From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, Berrett-Kohler,
San Francisco, 2009, paperback, 196pp. A splendid book.
Although written for American readers, it is very relevant to other
'developed' countries and the world as a whole. "We will need to change virtually
every aspect of how we structure and manage our economies.
Instead of maximising the rate at which we turn useful resources into toxic
trash, we will need to optimise the health and quantity of our stocks of real
wealth" (p116). At its core is a
12-point agenda for a real-wealth economy, including:
He notes the two following points as "arguably the most important":
The book emphasises President Obama's opportunity to preside over this
historic revolution. But the
inspiring final chapter, When
the people lead, the leaders will follow, has a message for us all.
It recognises that to enable Obama to succeed, he will have to "be
confronted with a popular demand from below too powerful to be ignored".
The fact is that, only if we find ways of compelling our leaders to lead,
will they be empowered against defenders of the status quo to tackle the fundamental
changes necessary for human survival and breakthrough to a new age in world
history. P.S. The next edition of this short, readable book should, in my view,
include proposals on the future of the international money system. If left
unreformed, it will frustrate the book's vision of the future. (2) Laszlo
Zsolnai (ed), ETHICAL
PROSPECTS: Economy, Society, and Environment,
Springer Science-Business Media BV, 2009, hardcover, 309pp. This book is
about ideas and initiatives that lead toward responsible business practices,
policies for the common good and ecological sustainability. I warmly
recommend it, especially to readers with access to academic or other
institutions that can afford to buy it. Contributions by 27 practitioners and scholars from Europe, America and
Asia "represent a diversity of fields including business ethics,
philosophy, organizational science, systems theory, finance, management,
economics, political science, and ecology". Its chapter headings include
The Good Company,
Value Creation as the
Foundation of Economics, Buddhist
Economics for Business, and Ethical
Banking. My contribution explains why business ethics cannot avoid the question:
"Can we resolve the present mismatch between money values and ethical
values by reforming the way the worldwide money system now works?"; and
answers "Yes, we can and must". (I will e-mail a copy as a pdf file
to anyone who asks me for "Robertson chapter in Ethical Prospects".) The Debate in Part 4 of the book corrects Bill Clinton's slogan "It's
the economy, stupid".
The economy is only a means to achieving a society's ends. We
need to get our politicians, business leaders, and other 'professionals' to
see that "it's NOT the economy, stupid, it's the society". I hope Laszlo
Zsolnai's collection of articles here will help to accelerate our
understanding of money not as things, but as a system of interconnected
systems; that it generates a practical calculus of value that
strongly motivates the behaviour and lives of almost everyone in the world;
and that our species survival will depend on our reforming it to reconcile
the values it imposes on us with the values
most of us hold. (3) Thomas Greco, THE
END OF MONEY and the FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION, Chelsea
Green, Vermont, 2009, paperback, 268 pp. Tom Greco has
been for many years an acknowledged champion of free, decentralised,
community currencies. I enthusiastically recommend the second
half of his book to anyone who wants to know more about the case for them and
the practicalities of setting them up. I also applaud the first hundred pages. They offer a devastating criticism
of the present "monopolistic control over credit, exercised through a
banking cartel armed with government-granted privilege" which
"allows wealth to be extracted from producer clients and, despite the
trappings of democracy, the control of governments to be maintained in the
hands of a few. Credit is allocated on a biased basis to favoured clients,
including central governments, which distorts both the system of economic
rewards and the exercise of political power". I agree wholeheartedly with that diagnosis of the problem. It is when we come to what we should do about it that I question Tom
Greco's realism. He dismisses as unrealistic the aim of transferring to public agencies the
function of issuing the public money supply debt-free in the public interest
under effective democratic control at national and international levels.
He assumes that national political power and global financial interests will
successfully combine to stop that happening. But it is surely
even more unrealistic to hope that that problem can be by-passed by
persuading people to drop out of the unreformed mainstream money system
and rely on "private initiative and the creative application of new
technologies and methods" instead. Can pioneers of the new local
community currencies develop them quickly and widely enough to liberate
millions, let alone billions, of us from our present dependence on the
unreformed big banks and big governments to provide for our money needs? If ever a sizeable number of people did look like succeeding in that, the
unreformed big banks and governments would surely combine to stamp them out,
as they stopped the growth of complementary currencies in the Great
Depression of the 1930s. A careful reading
of the book encourages me to hope that Greco may be shifting from his earlier
views on this point. In Chapter 19 on The Role of Governments in
Establishing Economic and Financial Stability he does, in fact,
set aside his selective pessimism about mainstream monetary reform. He
advocates legislation to achieve what are many of its aims. He also hopes not
to drive a divisive wedge between would-be allies, but to promote a deeper
understanding between 'reformers' and 'transformers' in pursuing a common
fundamental goal - 'empowerment of people' (p110). The 'both/and'
nature of what we need to do is clear: we need both to support
complementary currencies and economic decentralisation; and we need to
recognise that that won't happen without either mainstream monetary
reconstruction or the almost total collapse of human society in its present
form. P.S. Please also see Item 5 below. (4) David Boyle,
MONEY MATTERS: Putting the eco
into economics - global crisis and local solutions,
Alastair Sawday Publishing, Bristol, UK, paperback, 2009. This handy new book on money by David Boyle provides an excellent guided tour,
covering almost every aspect of the money system. It contains eight
Sections - on Metal Money, Information Money, Measuring
Money, Debt Money, Mad Money, Local Money, DIY Money and Spiritual Money.
Each Section contains between eight and fifteen two-page, bite-sized chunks,
eg on 'Gold: The barbarous relic', 'The lunacy of GDP: Why money isn't
everything', 'Great Crashes 5: the 2008 crash' and 'Greed therapy: The basis
of the problem'. As Charles Middleton of Triodos
Bank says in his Preface, it explains clearly, concisely and
entertainingly what Boyle thinks has gone wrong with our banking system and
financial institutions. I warmly recommend the book, but with a serious reservation similar to the one on the book
immediately above. Its fatalistic
conclusion - that the faults of today's dysfunctional money
system lie much deeper than it is possible for us to change - is very disappointing.
For more, see Item
5. 5. THE 'SANDBOX SYNDROME' This is relevant to the books by Tom Greco and David Boyle reviewed at
4(3) and 4(4) above. The 'Sandbox', as
Michael Marien described it in 1983, is "an enclosed area where children
safely play, while adults carry on undisturbed in their usual wicked ways.
Two complementary forces promote this condition: adults place children in the
sandbox to get rid of them, and children volunteer to play there because it
is fun". See the sixth paragraph at www.ghandchi.com/iranscope/Anthology/mm/sandbox.htm. In the context of the two books under review, the adults who carry on
undisturbed in their usual wicked ways are the leading people in big banks
and big governments. They are delighted to see their children
- fellow citizens - peacefully distracted and occupied in the sandbox, not
taking an interest in their wicked ways. They may even give the children's
leaders some pocket money from time to time to keep the other children busy
there, safely out of mischief! Of course it's true that the money values generated by the way the
mainstream money system now works are in conflict with our non-money,
ethical, emotional, aesthetic, spiritual and survival values. But that is a mismatch we must try to
put right - as noted under book (2) above. To ignore it, because
it's "a fundamental problem" and an "ancient mismatch between
money and value", is like accepting Mrs Thatcher's TINA
- "there is no alternative". The way the money system now works has
not been decreed by God or Nature. It
is a purely human construct, open to us to change - given the
necessary understanding and will. Many people are capable and intelligent enough to: ·
understand how the development of money has
been biased, as summarised for example at www.jamesrobertson.com/books.htm
#history; ·
realise that the calculus of money values we
have inherited from it has no foundation in objective reality; ·
understand, when its mechanics are explained
to us, how its present workings produce perverse outcomes; and ·
see, therefore, how it needs to be reformed -
systemically, as a system of systems, not with single 'catch-all solutions
that are supposed to solve everything'. That will enable more of us to recognise its reforms as the necessary and
only way to free ourselves and others from its domination, and allow us to
develop decentralised alternatives that it won't be able to stamp out - and
then get down to the task of reforming it. 6. SOME URL's WORTH VISITING Monetary Reform
Land Value Tax
and Banking Reform
Ethical and
Sustainable Banking
Local Currencies
Ethical Economics
End of Economic
Growth and Switch to Degrowth
James Robertson 8th June 2009 |
The Old Bakehouse
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