Friday 28 June 2013

Synergy

Introduction


From the P2P Foundation.

Timothy Wilken



“The market is unsustainable, inefficient, and enormously destructive to the biosphere. And, it is failing. There will be no solutions from Big government or from Big business. All attempts to work within or through these failing systems will be wasted effort.
There is no need to fight against these obsolete systems. They are failing on their own. Instead, we need to focus all our energy and efforts on creating synergic co-Operative alternatives. Giftegrity replaces market. Ortegrity replaces business. Synocracy replaces adversary-neutral government. My description of a such an alternative future is described here: Synergic Future and Synergic Future II.
Enlightenment, Genius, and Wisdom are possibilities build into the structure of the human brain. Any human can become enlightened. Any human can learn to think like a genius. Any human can learn to be wise. We humans CAN solve our problems, if we simply change our minds and work together. And, the time to do so is NOW!
Those humans that choose to become enlightened, genius and wise, have no problem converting to synergic co-Operative alternatives. Once they know these alternatives are available, they will choose and support them whole-heartedly, thus the need for Project Enlightenment. I know of no faster way to convert adversaries and neutralists to synergists.
I think it is also time to create a Synergic Co-Operative Wikipedia of Best Practices.
Success in the Adversary world requires coercive force. You make others help you by hurting them. Success in the Neutral world requires money, you pay others to help you. Success in the Synergic world requires love, you help others and trust that they will help you.”


Directory


Aspects of Tax....

or updates, see the specialized tag at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Taxation
Favorite project: see the Smart Taxes Network
Special P2P Foundation research project: see Free Tax Project

Contents

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Introductory Articles

  1. Chris Cook on P2P Taxation Reform
  2. Dale Carrico: Principles of Taxation
  3. Herman Daly: What Should We Tax?

Important entries:
  1. Commons-based Taxation
  2. Taxes as Commons

Citations

George Monbiot:
"There are two ways of cutting a deficit: raising taxes or reducing spending. Raising taxes means taking money from the rich. Cutting spending means taking money from the poor. Not in all cases of course: some taxation is regressive; some state spending takes money from ordinary citizens and gives it to banks, arms companies, oil barons and farmers. But in most cases the state transfers wealth from rich to poor, while tax cuts shift it from poor to rich." (http://www.monbiot.com/2011/08/01/how-the-billionaires-broke-the-system/)


Key Resources

Key Articles

Key Policy Proposals

  1. From Taxing Income to Taxing Inefficiency. Open Market Sustainability policy proposals by Patrick Doherty. [1]

Pages in category "Taxation"

The following 48 pages are in this category, out of 48 total.

B

C

D

F

G

G cont.

H

J

L

M

N

O

P

R

R cont.

S

T

U

V

W



How economic theory came to ignore the role of debt

Article: How economic theory came to ignore the role of debt. Michael Hudson (University of Missouri at Kansas City, USA). Paecon, 2011.
URL = http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue57/Hudson57.pdf comments
Amazing history of how the problem and issue of debt has been systematically ignored since Ricardo.


Description

"Starting from David Ricardo in 1817, the historian of economic thought searches in vain through the theorizing of financial-sector spokesmen for an acknowledgement of how debt charges (1) add a non-production cost to prices, (2) deflate markets of purchasing power that otherwise would be spent on goods and services, (3) discourage capital investment and employment to supply these markets, and hence (4) put downward pressure on wages.
What needs to be explained is why government, academia, industry and labor have not taken the lead in analyzing these problems. Why have the corrosive dynamics of debt been all but ignored?"


Source

Michael Hudson, “How economic theory came to ignore the role of debt”, real-world economics review, issue no. 57, 6 September 2011, pp. 2-24, http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue57/Hudson57.pdf
You may post and read comments on this paper at http://rwer.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/rwer-issue-57-michael-hudson/


The Great Disruption

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* Book: The Great Disruption. Paul Gilding. Bloomsbury Press, 2011
URL = http://paulgilding.com/the-great-disruption


Contents

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Description

"It’s time to stop just worrying about climate change, says Paul Gilding. We need instead to brace for impact because global crisis is no longer avoidable. This Great Disruption started in 2008, with spiking food and oil prices and dramatic ecological changes, such as the melting ice caps. It is not simply about fossil fuels and carbon footprints. We have come to the end of Economic Growth, Version 1.0, a world economy based on consumption and waste, where we lived beyond the means of our planet’s ecosystems and resources.
The Great Disruption offers a stark and unflinching look at the challenge humanity faces-yet also a deeply optimistic message. The coming decades will see loss, suffering, and conflict as our planetary overdraft is paid; however, they will also bring out the best humanity can offer: compassion, innovation, resilience, and adaptability. Gilding tells us how to fight-and win-what he calls The One Degree War to prevent catastrophic warming of the earth, and how to start today.
The crisis represents a rare chance to replace our addiction to growth with an ethic of sustainability, and it’s already happening. It’s also an unmatched business opportunity: Old industries will collapse while new companies will literally reshape our economy. In the aftermath of the Great Disruption, we will measure “growth” in a new way. It will mean not quantity of stuff but quality and happiness of life. Yes, there is life after shopping." (http://paulgilding.com/the-great-disruption)


Excerpts

Introduction

Paul Gilding:
"Why didn’t more of us see it coming? After all, the signals have been clear enough – signals that the ecological system that supports human society is hitting its limits, groaning under the strain of an economy simply too big for the planet. But we didn’t and, as a result, the time to act preventatively has past.
Now we must brace for impact. Now comes The Great Disruption.
It is true that the coming years won’t be pleasant, as our society and economy hits the wall and then realigns around what was always an obvious reality: You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. Not ‘should not’, or ‘better not’, but cannot.
We can, however, get through what’s ahead – if we prepare. I wrote my forthcoming book, The Great Disruption, to help us do that. My conclusion in writing it was this: not only can we make it through, we can come out the other side in better shape.
First, though, back to the present. There are countless analyses and metrics that clearly describe and record what is happening – our children will surely look back at what we can see now and ask, “What were you thinking?” One is oil prices, again on the way up, driven by surging demand in the developing world. Peak oil, long considered a fringe theory, is now widely acknowledged as inevitable, if not underway.
Leaked US diplomatic cables show evidence that oil reserves have been overstated, along with German military reports framing the connected security threat and comments by the UK energy secretary that the risk is real. No surprises here. Consumption has been outstripping the discovery of new reserves for a long time and, as production peaks, prices will rise – probably dramatically – with major economic consequences. Obvious to those who look.
An even more obvious concern is food. More than anything else, I believe food will come to define our entry into this period. Food prices, after hovering around long-term highs for several years, are now passing the extreme peaks of 2008 as climate chaos takes hold.
With our population growing and our diets moving to more energy- and grain-intensive meat production, supply was already tight. So, when record heat waves and drought hit Russia, crashing their wheat harvest and leading to an export ban, the global price response was rapid.
Next was Brazil. Did you hear about the so-called ‘one in one hundred-year’ drought in 2005 in the Amazon? Well there was another one in 2010, but this time worse. It appears that the Amazon, last year, was a dramatic net emitter of greenhouse gases rather than an absorber. Strange days indeed.
But actually not that strange, and certainly not surprising – you increase the thickness of the earth’s blanket and it gets warmer. Despite the wishful thinking of some, the global climate is behaving as the climate models forecast it would – a bit worse than expected but broadly in line. Indeed, 2010 tied with 2005 as the hottest year on record and, by year’s end, the sea temperature off Australia was the warmest ever recorded.
With warm oceans releasing more water vapour, we saw floods of biblical proportions hit the agricultural regions of Queensland, killing 22 people and impacting an area larger than France and Germany. The floods were quickly followed by one of the most intense cyclone ever to hit Queensland. Not good for food supplies, so expect prices to keep rising, especially considering that this was not a localised problem. Climate chaos is now worldwide, with an unprecedented 19 countries breaking temperature records in 2010.
Think that was just a bad year? Think again. Writing at Salon.com, Andrew Leonard argued recently that this may all come to a head in China. He quotes the UN, who’ve just warned that a severe drought is “threatening the wheat crop in China, the world’s largest wheat producer, and resulting in shortages of drinking water for people and livestock.” According to a Xinhua report, if serious rain doesn’t fall by the end of this month, the key grain producing region of Shandong will face its worst drought in 200 years. Of course, 200 years ago they didn’t have 1.3 billion mouths to feed. Imagine China facing a food shortage and, with plenty of money in the bank, going on a global shopping spree to feed itself. This, argues food expert Lester Brown, could be China in 2011. Enjoy your daily bread while you can still afford it.
Maybe it will rain there again soon – but next time? People are starting to understand that this type of thing is not a one off. Commenting on rising food prices, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times recently: “The evidence does, in fact, suggest that what we’re getting now is a first taste of the disruption, economic and political, that we’ll face in a warming world. And given our failure to act on greenhouse gases, there will be much more, and much worse, to come.”
But don’t panic. We will wake up soon. Not because the ecosystem is showing signs of major breakdown. Not because people are drowning. No, we will wake up because something much more important to us is now clearly threatened. When you try to create infinite growth on a finite planet, only two things can change: Either the planet gets bigger, which seems unlikely, or the economy stops growing. It’s the end of economic growth that will really get our attention.
There is surprisingly good news in all of this. We as humans have long been very good in a crisis. We ignore our health issues until the heart attack; our unwise lifestyle choices until the cancer diagnosis. We ignore our badly designed financial system until the economic crisis; or the threat of Hitler until the brink of war. Again and again, we respond to problems late, but dramatically – and, crucially, effectively. Slow, but not stupid.
This is a good attribute, given what’s coming. We’re going to have to transform our economy very rapidly, including our energy, transport and agricultural systems. This transition – to a zero net CO2 economy – will soon be underway and the business and economic opportunities for those who are ready (and risks to those who aren’t) are hard to overstate.
That’s why China is getting ready to win this race, with significantly more impressive programs to capture the opportunity than most Western countries. They understand that in the new world that is unfolding, being a ‘solar power’ will define geopolitical strength. Maybe the United States will start late, but strongly, surging out of Silicon Valley with a technology boom ready to disrupt and reinvigorate the world again. Time will tell – and probably sooner than you think.
There’s much more to this than technology, though, with some exciting cultural and political challenges ahead as well. In a growth-constrained world, our current central economic policy of ‘keep calm and carry on shopping’ is looking increasingly wrongheaded. It’s certainly insufficient for continued human development. (More good news there, however, because all the research suggests that shopping, or more specifically accruing more money and more stuff, is a very poor way to increase your happiness, once you’re out of absolute poverty.)
In response to the now inevitable crisis, we will demand our governments think more deeply. We will have to adopt policies known to improve quality of life, like encouraging community, social inclusion and – the most heretical idea of all – greater equality and a steady state economy. Interesting times indeed.
Taking all this together, we can now say with a high degree of certainty that change is going to start coming thick and fast. Change in our economy, in our politics, and in our lives. Change that will be challenging, but that will ultimately lead us to a better place.
So get ready for the ride. The Great Disruption is now underway." (http://paulgilding.com/cockatoo-chronicles/cc2011022thegreatdisruptionarrives.html)


Effective Global Default is only a matter of time

Paul Gilding:
" The legendary contrarian and fund manager Jeremy Grantham is co-founder of the Boston based firm GMO, with over $100 billion of assets under management. So this guy is a solid capitalist and market advocate, pursuing wealth for the wealthy. But he sees the data and is raising the alarm, calling this moment “one of the giant inflection points in economic history” – referring to the end of a 100-year steady decline in commodity prices. His views were echoed by Stephen King, group chief economist at HSBC, who wrote in the FT: “After the biggest meltdown since the Great Depression, economic theory tells us that world commodity prices should not be this high. But they are and the West quickly needs to wake up to this new economic reality. Commodity prices are now permanently higher.”
Grantham provides the detail, pointing out that the 100 year trend of falling prices in the 33 most important commodities, except for oil, were wiped out with a price surge from 2002 to 2010 – a surge even greater than experienced in WW2. We have now reached what Grantham calls the Great Paradigm shift; not a price spike but a new reality. Within this new reality, Grantham says: “if we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash.”
This is why hitting the wall is inevitable – because limits are not philosophies, they are limits. We can understand what to expect – and why the grenade will shatter the glasshouse of economic growth – by going back to how systems behave when they hit their limits. Our economic system first hit the wall in 2008 – that was when The Great Disruption began with food and oil prices hitting record highs and a credit crisis driven by reckless monetary policy pursuing growth at all costs. The resulting recession meant we backed away from those limits (bouncing off the wall), and then borrowed massive amounts of money from our children (think Greece) to try to get the economy moving again.
Now that the global economy is slowly entering a so-called “recovery”, the prices of commodities (representing our use of earth’s resources for food and materials) are on the way up, accelerated, in the case of food, by climate change. Of course if significant growth kicks in, the prices of oil, food and other commodities will surge, this time starting from near record highs. Then we will bounce back into recession and prices will back off again. Hit the wall, bounce off. Hit the wall, bounce off. Ouch.
By itself this would pose enough of a challenge to growth. But now we also have the debt we used to get the economy moving again. This debt can only be paid off with significant economic growth – but such significant growth is impossible as outlined above. So the debt itself becomes an enormous additional tension in the system, as argued by Richard Heinberg in his important forthcoming book The End of Growth. With the global economy and ecosystem now both burdened by unmanageable debt, effective global default is only a matter of time." (http://paulgilding.com/cockatoo-chronicles/cc20110629grenadeinglasshouse.html)




Case Study: China

"Economic growth is slowly but surely coming to an end, not for a few quarters or years, but to an end. It will still take some time given the mighty momentum behind it, as well as the power of our denial, but the signs are clear that both processes have begun.
Let me be clear that I’m not talking here about the long philosophical debate on the relative merits of growth – that rich countries getting richer does not improve their quality of life. What we face now is not a political choice – it’s too late for that. We have put in place the processes that will force the end of growth and nothing can now be done to change course.
China is perhaps the best example, exaggerating all that is good and bad about the growth model. We have seen spectacular rates of growth in recent decades and with it, many hundreds of millions of people being brought out of poverty. These people are now enjoying the fruits that global growth has delivered to many of us over the last century in technology, health and easy access to food. On the other hand China has paid an enormous price for this growth, in air pollution, degraded soil quality, spoiled waterways and longer term risks to food supply. It is now even taking from the USA the ignominious title of being the world’s largest current contributor to climate change (though we mustn’t forget China’s per capita emissions are still dwarfed by the pollution rate in the OECD countries).
So China sums up the paradox of the global economy, and provides an accelerated and exaggerated example of the problem. On the surface the growth model seems appealing, indeed powerful and invigorating. Everyone who has witnessed the growth machine at work in China in recent decades comes away in awe and wonder at the pace and scale of its achievements.
China has now, however, become the best example that demonstrates that the Great Disruption is underway – the state we have now entered, as I argued in my last column. In the same way China provides an exaggerated case of the good aspects of growth, they are now hitting the limits we are hitting globally, but doing so faster and harder, making it more noticeable and harder to deny. So unlike our political leaders, the Chinese leadership is slowly but surely facing reality. They observe their high growth rates, they observe the degradation in both their environment and limits to resource availability and they draw the obvious connection. Prime Minister Wen recently told parliament that “growing resource and environmental constraints are hindering growth.”
The Minister for the Environment gave deeper insights into their views when he recently said “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today…. The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to economic and social development.”
You got it Mr Zhou – grave impediments to growth. They haven’t yet come to the conclusion that these are in fact “impenetrable limits to growth”. But they will.
Their response gives us good insights into what we are all going to face and also to the considerable benefits our response will bring when it comes. As we hit the limits to growth we will desperately and aggressively pursue clean technology and other measures to reduce the impacts we are having on the global ecosystem and to respond to our limited resource supply. We will think this will be enough to keep growth going.
China is again a good example of what we can expect. They are doing all they can to slow down the cause of the problem with aggressive targets and action, and the economic benefits they will gain in doing so will be considerable. In renewable energy, electric cars, high speed trains and many other areas China is investing heavily and looking more and more like it’s going to lead the world in this, the next industrial revolution. They are even deliberately slowing down the rate of their economic growth, recognizing this is the primary cause of their problem, to give themselves more time to adapt.
As well as benefiting their economic competitiveness, their approach will bring considerable benefits to all of us, with new energy technologies being taken to scale and prices falling as a result. We can expect some sensational developments in this area with tomorrow’s Googles and Microsofts all positioning right now across China to be the global winners in this epic opportunity.
But in the end China will, like us, have to face the reality that economic growth has its limits. We can argue about what they are and when they will hit, but the idea of an infinite growth on a finite planet is quite delusional. Just do the math yourself and ask how big do you think the economy can get? Tim Jackson, author or Prosperity without Growth did this and concluded:
“The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100.”
The Global Footprint Network calculates that we need around 150% of the available land on planet earth to support our current economy, which means we’re burning up our capital every day to maintain the current state, let alone support any further growth. So you have to ask yourself, even allowing for sensational improvements in efficiency and technology, how big can the economy get before the physical limits are hit? Twice as big as the planet? Three times?
Despite the clear, rational logic, denial will be strong. People will argue oil price spikes are being caused by political unrest, not the underlying reality of peak oil. That food shortages are caused by market inefficiencies, not the underlying reality of climate change and the broken model of oil dependent, non renewable industrial agriculture. The worse the crisis gets, the more fanciful the excuses will become. That is the nature of denial. Given this is a serious addiction we have developed this denial will be strong.
But in the end, this is not philosophy – it’s physics and chemistry. Remember this: the core proposition our economic model is based on is a simple but impossible concept – infinite growth on a finite planet. So that means the end will come. The sooner we start getting ready, the better off we’ll be when it arrives." (http://paulgilding.com/cockatoo-chronicles/cc20110315chinaconfrontslimits.html)


Discussion

Nothing else will work than big government

Paul Gilding:
" views of Tea Party types in the US, who genuinely believe the climate threat is a conspiracy cooked up by people with a secret big government agenda, is not the dominant view of the corporate sector. However the general view – that government can’t be trusted, that markets should be left to do their thing and that imposing limits on behavior is inherently dangerous – is widespread and mainstream among those with their hands on the market levers.
Whatever the merits of this argument – and it is certainly true that the record of western governments in such areas is, at best, mixed and arguably poor – the effect of it being leverage to resist change is now clear: We will now move into an era of big, interventionist government that will last for decades and will impose tight controls on market behavior. The percentage of the economy controlled directly or indirectly by government will increase and the market will inevitably become less efficient in the process – it being true that interventionist government and central planning are generally economically inefficient but socially effective – war being the clearest example.
Why is the arrival of such an era now so clear?
We can see, after the Copenhagen and Cancun climate conferences, that the pace of response to the climate threat is not going to keep up with what the science says is needed. There is no dispute on the science – none of any consequence – that is holding back action. Both conferences saw governments universally agreeing that 20C was the maximum level of warming we can tolerate and the right scientific framing for policy. (Many scientists and an increasing number of countries argue it’s too high, but no one credible argues it’s too low.) So the science is clear but the action is slower than the science demands. We can lament this but that doesn’t change it.
How this will all unfold is not driven by politics but by science. The world is going to get ugly and there will be significant economic cost as a result. We are going to have rising sea levels and extreme weather causing widespread disruption, damage to infrastructure, geopolitical instability and large refugee flows. We’re going to have food crises and resulting social and economic upheavals. We will see ocean acidification and the collapse of fisheries.
While we won’t be able to prevent all that, we will, once it really takes hold, certainly then act to stop it getting worse. Guess what all this means? Big government.
What do you think is going to happen when large areas of expensive coastal real estate are damaged and even larger areas collapse in value as a result? An insurance crisis, a credit crisis and economic costs – all requiring big government intervention. Guess who steps in when there’s a food crisis and asserts new controls over trade and the market? Big government. What’s going to happen when major infrastructure is threatened by rising seas and extreme weather? Do you think the market will be left to run its course when power supplies, airports and freight transport facilities are threatened? No, government will step in and fix it. It will be messy, ugly and inefficient but it will certainly happen.
By that stage, there will also be a sense of crisis and associated political demand for dramatic emissions reductions. The nature of the lag between emissions reduction and impact means the required cuts will then, by necessity, require draconian measures – as I argued in the paper I co-authored on the One Degree War Plan. That too will require the heavy hand of big government." (http://paulgilding.com/cockatoo-chronicles/cc20101214biggovernment.html)


More Information

  1. Paul Gilding on the Great Disruption
  2. More videos and audios at http://paulgilding.com/discussion-papers/talks-video-and-audio


Financial Autonomous Zone

= the FAZ Currency Project
URL = http://faz.im/english/

Contents

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Description

"The FAZ, FINANCIAL AUTONOMOUS ZONE is an alternative economic system based on abundance rather than scarcity. The objective of the FAZ is to create communities among people who share values​​, economic and social relationships and productive activities, providing them a legal tool of exchange like a “complementary currency”. The FAZ is a concrete proposal for a structural economic change through an innovative and sustainable socio-productive model of aggregation, based on participation, which facilitates the creation of wealth and its social redistribution both, providing support, protection and development of the local economy, protection of economically weaker sections of the local population and funding increase of public utility services, without increasing the public debt.
Adhering to the FAZ, companies, associations and individuals will have the opportunity to manage their own economic and social relationships using the unique tools provided by the FAZ:
  • a currency, the Titan, to be spent within the FAZ
  • loans without interest in Titan
  • basic income in Titan, periodically distributed equally to all participants as a function of the wealth produced in the FAZ.
Those who adhere to the FAZ agrees to accept at least 50% on Titan in the exchange of products and services." (http://faz.im/english/)


Details

Who Are We

"The FAZ is an economic model created on 2003 by Domenico De Simone and developped during the years by other individuals. To develop his ideas was formed a research group called CENPEA, Centre for Economics of Abundance.
The group aims to carry out research and development in the monetary sphere, to build an economy based on abundance rather than scarcity.
Activities. It is proposed, such as research, to study the functioning of the existing monetary institutions, to propose a monetary reform and to develop complementary and alternative monetary systems based on abundance rather than scarcity. The development aims to identify the technical, legal and taxation issues for an alternative and complementary currency system building.
FAZ Feasibility studies. On our site is described an introductory possible circuit using a complementary local currency based on the principles of the FAZ. To have this circuit adequately realized you need to start a feasibility study of socio-econometric value compared to the intrinsic characteristics of the territory in which you wish to create. To this end, the Centre shall make available its expertise and his network of professionals to assess in detail the feasibility of an initiative in the area and to define an implementation model that includes the introduction of complementary currency possibly in different steps." (http://faz.im/who/)


How it works? FAZ Making

"The FAZ is a structure in which circulate negative rate bonds used legally “as is” money, with which you can create wealth through loans to companies and individuals, and with whom you can redistribute wealth through a basic income to all its participants. The FAZ consists of two subjects, one that issues the money in the form of negative rate bonds and one that accepts and redistributes them respectively which investment credits and life credits. (Note: the latin law legal entities are different from the common law legal entities, so these are to be further analyzed to understand if their features are effective and similar to latin law ones)


1. The FAZ Company. The Public Limited Company (PLC) is the entity which issues the not-money. It can be of two kinds, promoted by public entities (municipalities, provinces, regions, etc. ..), through public controlled companies, with which they can fund new public services and provide basic income to their citizens, without increasing their debt . Or promoted by private companies, through the establishment of a consortium company (syndacate), with which they can increase their business, fund new activities and deliver a social dividend to all members of the consortium, without increasing their debts.

2. The FAZ Association. The Association is the entity which accepts and redistributes the not-money. It consists of individuals, companies and associations. Receives investments’ funds, which distributes to natural and legal persons, and receives the basic income, which distributes to all members of the Association. Inside it there is a Scientific Committee that conducts research and development.

So the FAZ is of two kinds:
The Public FAZ, consisting of a public owned company (issuing entity) and the FAZ Association (entity of acceptance and redistribution). The relationship between the company and the Association is governed by a contract. The Public FAZ is carried out by the Public Entity by means of a public company which already exists and then it will enter into an agreement with the Association.

The Private FAZ, consisting of a private owned company (issuing entity), formed by member companies, and the FAZ Association. The relationship between the company and the Association is governed by a contract. The Private FAZ is performed by private companies through a consortium company – to be established by the member companies through the transfer of unredeemable credits (but not formally written off) to form the shares’ capital – which will enter into an agreement with the FAZ Association.

FAZ Operation
Issuance of negative rate bonds. To corporations is granted the right to issue bonds up to a maximum of twice the share capital, legal reserve and reserves resulting from the approved budget (in latin law). The company then emits negative rate bonds: a first issue for Investment Credit will be underwritten by the Association who will dispense shares to the associated companies and individuals to fund economic projects proposed by those, a second issue for Life Credit will be underwritten by the Association, who will dispense shares to associated individuals as universal and unconditional basic income.
The bonds will be issued to fund works, production of goods and services, and the rate will be determined by the company managers, upon the proposal of the Association Scientific Committee, taking into account the obsolescence average level of the goods and services produced, so that the life of the created money will be equal to the assets’ life created through investments. Bonds will be issued subsequently taking account of the consistency of production favoured by past emissions, otherwise they will have no justification. Automatic mechanisms for the money issuance and transparency in the accounts’ management will be fundamental FAZ principles, so that no one can have the power of decision in creation of money for investment. The goal is to avoid the possibility that arises a power on currency management. After the emission for investments, there will be an issuance to support demand through provision of basic income to all FAZ members. The circulation of not-money facilitates the creation and development of an economic circuit in which partners can find a market for their goods, as well as aiding the recovery of general well-being through the provision of basic income that stimulates demand.

At the end of the loan, if it is chosen to issue bond in the form of convertible bonds, is distributed by the issuer among the bonds’ holders a company’s share of a value equal to the rate of increase of wealth made from that investment, distribution which results in an individual credit capacity increase.

The negative rate bonds may be issued in two ways: (1) Materialized issuance. The issuance of bonds takes place in this way: on paper, in bearer form, with a fixed coupon, at par, with a negative rate of 5% annually, during twenty-year. The bonds are printed in paper form with free graphics, in units of 1, 5, 10, 50 units (i.e. Euros), and report the information required by law. (2) dematerialized issuance. The issuance of bonds takes place in this way: in electronic form, in bearer form, with a fixed coupon, at par, with a negative rate of 5% annually, during twenty-year. The electronic bonds are entered into a electronic bonds’ custody at a bank.


Accession clauses. The relationship between the FAZ members are governed by the Statute of the Association, by the Statute of the Company and by the contract between the Company and the Association. As the contracts are regulated by the law, can be foreseen in case of breach of contract (i.e. a member that get out the FAZ without authorization) financial penalties.
1) to accept, for the exchange of their goods, services and / or activities, to practice a reduction of the price in national currency (i.e. euro) of at least 50% and accept for the rest the negative rate bonds. Obviously, a firm may decide to allocate a part of their production activities within the association and to handle the rest in the national currency (i.e. Euros) as it is commonly done. The important thing is that the price is reduced by at least 50%, as well as the remuneration of the members’ activities will be reduced by 50% and the rest will be paid with the new money. This means that the Association will also become the occasion for meetings between labor supply and demand at conditions that will be supposedly better than the current ones.
2) to do not engage in price increases within the Faz and pricing its products in negative rate bonds;
3) to use for the transactions in negative rate bonds the electronic exchange system operated by the Association;
4) to accept that the bonds are burdened by a negative rate whose measurement is determined periodically by the Assembly of the Association within the range indicated by the Scientific Committee;
5) to accept that the company will emit and distribute negative rate bonds as Life Credit to all members according to criteria set by the Scientific Committee, which are generally commensurate with the total wealth of society (the so-called Social Capital);
6) to comply with the general operating rules and the decisions of the Association.

Tax aspects. For the fiscal aspects of the operation, the emissions can be considered as discounts of the list price of the goods and there is a precedent in this direction with decisions of the (italian) Tax Agency on the proper handling of receipts and invoices. Even the acceptance of a negative rate bond, which at the end will be near zero, can be considered as a discount on the total price, just because you take something in return, from the point of view of capital, is zero or close to it. In this respect, one can imagine that the Association is a structure in which it is practiced solidarity among the members who apply substantial discounts between them.

Costs. The costs for the FAZ creation are dependent on the amplitude of the circuit and the complexity of exchange that you want to implement.

In general, however, the cost to be taken into account are:
  • Administrative: Company and Association incorporation; printing costs for the issuance of paper bonds or holding securities custody for electronic issued bonds;
  • Technological: personalization and program management account maintenance and construction and maintenance of the website and the server;
  • Marketing: preparation and printing of publicity materials initiative and promotion activities;
  • Management control. To make the management control it must be operating a research center that monitors economic activities within the circuit and carries out the analysis and measurements necessary to propose the decisions of its competence;"
(http://faz.im/how/)


Discussion

Philosophy of FAZ

Post-scarcity economy. To facilitate change in our society it is necessary to change the economy, basing it on the abundance rather than scarcity. According to Richard Stallman (GNU Manifesto, 1985) and Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, 2003), an “economy of post-scarcity” is a system for the management and allocation of resources always sufficient to meet the needs perceived by individuals, where instead the economy as we know, or the ‘”economy of scarcity”, is a system in which there is an efficient allocation of scarce resources for definition, or always below the needs perceived by individuals.

Abundant resources. According to Frank Tipler (Physics of Immortality, 1988), resources are unlimited – so abundant but, of course, not endless – on the physical realm, in the sense that they are always sufficient for each living unit in the time of his life. Concrete example of unlimited abundance and yet finished is solar energy: mankind receives from the sun 3,850,000 exajoules of energy each year, while the total power consumption is less than 440 exajoules (Wikipedia). The fact that this abundance is not yet available shows that the problem of resources is an issue to be seen as not-objective but in perspective, that needs to be placed on the cultural level and not on a level of mere counting of them, given a certain capacity utilization. This, in fact, depends on the scientific knowledge, that has a capacity of growth at least equal to the growth of the expansion of the life in the universe.

The demonstration provided by Frank Tipler is based on considerations of Friedrik Von Hayek (Selected Writings, 1972) according to which the capital of a company is given by the revenue streams generated from the company itself. The corporate capital is not a sum of goods which have their own intrinsic value and it’s how the existing resources are used that determines how the income streams are generated. Income opportunities generated by how the company’s total assets are used is a function of information flows that can be managed by the company itself. It is possible, therefore, to define the resources in terms of opportunities and therefore of information flows, manageable by an organism. Tipler comes to the conclusion that the resources in the universe are always sufficient, since it is demonstrated that the amount of information that can be managed in the lifetime of an organism is necessarily less than the total available information, whatever the speed of management of such information. This organism could be an elemental life, a society, a galaxy or the entire universe and does not change the nature of the phenomenon.

Wealth as information. If resources are not infinite but abundant and their use is related to knowledge, must be redefined the concept of wealth. The wealth of a community is given by the ability to organize information flows that generate income opportunities and this ability of the organization depends on the creativity and the cultural level of the given society. If wealth is not material, it follows that it is no longer necessary to be accumulated. That’s change the idea of money, paving the way for the emergence of a not-money that’s a flow before a status, so – as in the case of gift – is possible to conceive a money that can be spended without causing an impoverishment.

The first and most revolutionary consequence of this assumption is that there is no need for any material accumulation of capital. The capital required for the development of a company is given by the knowledge of a society and their ability to organize it. Without this element, all the raw materials of the world would be useless and could not produce anything.

Social Capital. This body of knowledge is the “Social Capital”, the engine of development and growth of a society that should be considered a factor of production along with other commonly considered necessary for the production, such as raw materials, labor, financial capital. It is formed by the multiplication of the knowledge of all members of society and is a reciprocal function of the division and specialization of labor. In fact, the increase of the division of labor involves increase of collective knowledge, but also the increase of these involve an increase in the division of labor.

Life Credit. The remuneration of capital as a factor of production justifies a theoretical level the establishment of a basic income, defined “Life Credit”: all members of a society have the right to participate in the distribution of income resulting from the use of a factor of production in the formation of which everyone participates, regardless of any measure of participation, since the capital would serve no purpose without the contribution of all, without that knowledge it would not be possible any activity of production. The Life Credit is a basic income and as a redistribution of the Social Capital proceeds, generates an idea of ​​social equality that does not involve leveling of differences and individual merit, these differences do not translate into economic inequalities but tend to place themselves on the level of social recognition.

Investment Credit. Is well known that for the Kahn and Keynes multiplier, the investment of a sum involves a return into wealth, ranging from two to five times the investment done. The basic income must be commensurated with the scale of the investments being made in a society and must be derived from the effect of the multiplier that any investment produces in the society. A portion of each investment goes to remunerate the production factors and the risk of enterprise, but another part must remunerate the Social Capital. Currently, however, this part goes into the financial speculation in a downward spiral that can not come to an end because the interest on the monetary capital always tend to grow and to be repaid must generate more debt that will add to the interest component of the total capital. Life Credit does not replace income from work but it complements it and its determination must tend to an amount at least sufficient to subsistence, so that everyone can have the means and the time required to develop their talent and creativity. Only stimulating creativity and freeing at least for the part relating to the vital needs, the income from work, you can get an increase of the Social Capital.

The creation of money has to be carried out on investment on a strictly automatic basis. This prevents the management of the credit to be transformed into a discretionary power which is absolutely deleterious whether it is managed according to a political criterion, whether it is instead held by technicians who, through it, handle enormous power. The Social Capital may be expressed by a number which substantially coincides with the money supply as a whole or a portion of it. Of course, this coincidence will be much more precise in an economic environment that issues money on investment, but roughly even today we can say that in essence the non-speculative money supply (ie the set of financial instruments, which provide money excluding substantial part of the derivatives instruments) coincides with the Social Capital.
We can determine the individual credit capacity in the amount of money supply of each member of a society. A share on which each can have credit and must have at its request. We define it “Investment Credit”. This credit capacity can be transferred to a third party exactly as now you are buying shares of a company on the stock exchange or at the time of the enterprise constitution. From the individual point of view, when someone asks for a loan based on his credit capacity, this resets and reconstitutes itself as the person returns the credit obtained.
Briefly the FAZ after has a request to carry out an activity, creates the money by issuing a sum for investment, (Investment Credit), and consistent with the timing of the realization of this, it creates a corresponding sum to be distributed among all the participants (Life Credit). This issue is fully justified in the Fisher equation on investments, since an increase of the activity must need an increase in the money supply.
Not-Money. In the FAZ, money is issued in the form of negative rate bonds (TITAN). The money supply is made up of different monetary instruments and paper money is only one of them. Another tool is the bond. The proposal is to issue negative rate bonds expressed into the currency existing in a country (euro, dollar, yen, etc. ..).

This has two important consequences: the first is that the money does not create debt or interest and the second is that it disappears from the system as the assets that it has helped to create become obsolete. The level of negative rate depends on a function that is described by the average rate of obsolescence of the created assets. The negative rate also prevent the accumulation of financial capital and promotes maximum velocity of money circulation (demurrage). The loss of value, namely money supply, is crucial to create a not scarce money. Since the currency gradually expires and leaves the money supply which decreases, you can issue money in surplus, in fact operating a keynesian “deficit spending” without creating debt. The inability to accumulate the money will eliminate the problem of the liquidity trap that’s one of the problems underlying the current financial crisis and the inability to get out. At the same time, on the perspective view of the Fisher equation, the negative rate describes an economic environment that tend to be deflationary, since the money supply tends to decrease gradually and grows only for investments. If wealth creation is greater than the factor of two hypothesized, the prices should tend to decline and this could justify further issues of money as Life Credit. This environment makes reasonable the Say’s law, since each issue of money for investment is accompanied by a for monetary emission for consumption and therefore favoring their collocation.

While the ordinary positive rate bonds are issued as loans to fund the issuer and therefore must be redeemed at maturity, the negative rate bonds, since at the end have zero value and therefore the issuer does not have to repay the principal, may be given away for free. While remaining “official” circulating money in all respects, because bonds and banknotes are legal instrument of payment both.

In the current system there have been several negative emissions rate bonds, convertible bonds generally have a fixed date with a warrant negative in anticipation of a strong increase of the shares to be converted. One of these loans was issued long ago from the bottom of Warren Buffett and signed by more than a billion dollars in a few hours, another issue of bonds with negative rate was carried out in 2001 by the Société Générale in yen on the expectation of deflation in Japan that would reduced the prices of goods to a greater extent the negative rate applied.

Beyond the WIR. In the thirties, a group of Swiss entrepreneurs, in order to cope with the crisis of 1929 that can be compared with the current – with a 50% unemployment rate and a dramatic shortage of liquidity – decided to began to print money. They were 16 on 1934. They made a particular kind of money, that could not be accumulated because it was burdened with a negative rate – a “demurrage” as we say in technical terms – so after a certain period completely it lost its value. They called it WIR, abbreviation of “Wirtschaftsring”, which in german means “economic circuit” and also “we”. The association took the unredeemable debts of the members -, which are fractions of the Social Capital – and gave him in exchange for an equivalent in WIR currency, with which the member could make payments only within the circuit. In a few months the members and the association became thousands. WIR contributed to the recovery and stability of the Swiss economy during those difficult times. The experience is then continued in the post-war period, and the association at some point has turned into a bank. It had to give up negative rate due the diktat of the Swiss Central Bank, but the operations are still made at zero rate. Currently the WIR circuit counts 65,000 companies in 2011 and has made loans totaling more than 18 billion Swiss francs.

Our project aims to retrace the WIR road, excellent for small and medium-sized enterprises, with the necessary adjustments and corrections suggested by the past experiences, involving in the project not only businesses but also individuals and governments.

Conclusions
In conclusion, the FAZ is the most direct way to build a society based on the solidarity behavior without requiring sacrifices and relying rather, on selfish individual. It’s a tool that supports aggregate demand, resulting in recovery of the real local economy, do not create harm to the economic and financial system because it does not affect the debt and encourages the development / evolution of the network culture and society. The not-money is a measure that prevents the accumulation of money and drives people to spend the money to feed their skills and therefore their creativity. In the end, the main stimulus will be the individuals’ creativity and the achievement of ambitious personal and collective targets. Using the same logic that drives the open source world, people will be brought to work together to seek personal glory and not money which only became an unit of account. It will be a long and painful process to remove from the minds of the people the gods of money and its salvific function. But in the end, the not-money has essentially this function: if the value is no longer in things but in people, what is the point to look out for himself?" (http://faz.im/what/)


Digital Capitalism

          

From P2P Foundation


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Discussion

By John Naughton:
'Need a crash course in digital capitalism? Easy: you just need to understand four concepts – margins, volume, inequality and employment. And if you need more detail, just add the following adjectives: thin, vast, huge and poor.
First, margins. Once upon a time, there was a great company called Kodak. It dominated its industry, which happened to be chemistry-based photography. And in its dominance, it enjoyed very fat profit margins – up to 70% in some cases. But somewhere in the depths of Kodak's R&D labs, a few researchers invented digital photography. When they put it to their bosses, the conversation went something like this. Boss: "What are the margins likely to be on this stuff?" Engineers: "Well, it's digital technology so maybe 5% at best." Boss: "Thank you and goodbye."
Actually, it turned out to be goodbye Kodak: those fat margins on an obsolete technology blindsided the company's leaders. Kodak's engineers were right, of course. Anything that involves computers and mass production is destined to be commoditised. My first mobile phone (purchased in the 1980s) cost nearly £1,000. I've just seen a handset for sale in Tesco for £9.95. (And, yes, I know that Apple currently earns fat margins on its hardware, but that's because it's usually ahead of the competition and it won't last. What's happening in the much bigger Android market is a better guide.) And, if anything, the trend towards thin margins in non-hardware businesses is even more pronounced because online markets are relatively frictionless. Just ask anyone who's trying to compete with Amazon.
Then there's volume, which in the online world is astronomical. For example: 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute; more than 100bn photographs have been uploaded to Facebook; during the Christmas period, Amazon.co.uk dispatched a truck filled with parcels every three minutes; to date, more than 40bn apps have been downloaded from Apple's iTunes store. And so on. Margins may be thin, but when you multiply them by these kinds of numbers you get staggering amounts of revenue.
These vast revenues, however, are not being widely shared. Instead, they are mostly enriching the founders and shareholders of Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook et al. Of course, those who work at the heart of these organisations – the engineers, developers and the executives who manage them, for example – are richly rewarded in salaries, stock options and lavish perks. But these gilded employees constitute only a minority of the workforces of the big tech companies and most of their colleagues have decidedly more mundane terms of employment – and remuneration.
Take Apple, for example. It makes grandiose claims about the number of jobs that it "directly or indirectly" creates or supports. But about two-thirds of the company's 50,000 American employees work in the US Apple stores, where many of them were earning about $25,000 a year in 2012 – when the mean annual personal income in the US was $38,337 (2010 figure).
Then there's the question of employment, a topic on which the big technology companies seem exceedingly sensitive. Facebook, for example, is given to engaging fancy consultants to produce preposterous claims about the number of jobs it creates. One such "report" claimed that the company, which at the time had a global workforce of about 3,000, indirectly helped create 232,000 jobs in Europe in 2011 and enabled more than $32bn in revenues. And Apple, stung by criticism about all the work it has outsourced to Foxconn in China, is now driven to claiming it has "created or supported" nearly 600,000 jobs in the US.
The really tough question that none of these companies really wants to answer is: what kinds of jobs exactly? Anyone seeking an insight into this would do well to consult a terrific report by Sarah O'Connor, the Financial Times's economics correspondent. She visited Amazon's vast distribution centre at Rugeley in Staffordshire and her account of what she found there makes sobering reading.
She saw hundreds of people in orange vests pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle because "the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time". They walk between seven and 15 miles a day and everything they do is determined by Amazon's software. "You're sort of like a robot, but in human form," one manager told Ms O'Connor. "It's human automation, if you like."
Still, it's a job. Until it's replaced by a robot." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/feb/17/digital-capitalism-low-pay?)


20 Theses against green capitalism

from the P2P Foundation

 

 

 

URL = http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/11656
By: Tadzio Mueller and Alexis Passadakis:
1. The current world economic crisis marks the end of the neoliberal phase of capitalism. ‘Business as usual’ (financialisation, deregulation, privatisation…) is thus no longer an option: new spaces of accumulation and types of political regulation will need to be found by governments and corporations to keep capitalism going
2. Alongside the economic and political as well as energy crises, there is another crisis rocking the world: the biocrisis, the result of a suicidal mismatch between the ecological life support system that guarantees our collective human survival and capital’s need for constant growth
3. This biocrisis is an immense danger to our collective survival, but like all crises it also presents us, social movements, with a historic opportunity: to really go for capitalism's exposed jugular, its need for unceasing, destructive, insane growth
4. Of the proposals that have emerged from global elites, the only one that promises to address all these crises is the ‘Green New Deal’. This is not the cuddly green capitalism 1.0 of organic agriculture and D.I.Y. windmills, but a proposal for a new ’green’ phase of capitalism that seeks to generate profits from the piecemeal ecological modernisation of certain key areas of production (cars, energy, etc.)
5. Green capitalism 2.0 cannot solve the biocrisis (climate change and other ecological problems such as the dangerous reduction of biodiversity), but rather tries to profit from it. It therefore does not fundamentally alter the collision course on which any market-driven economy sets humanity with the biosphere.
6. This isn’t the 1930s. Then, under the pressure of powerful social movements, the old ‘New Deal’ redistributed power and wealth downwards. The ‘New New’ and ‘Green New Deal’ discussed by Obama, green parties all around the world, and even some multinationals is more about welfare for corporations than for people
7. Green Capitalism won't challenge the power of those who actually produce most greenhouse gases: the energy companies, airlines and carmakers, industrial agriculture, but will simply shower them with more money to help maintain their profit rates by making small ecological changes that will be too little, too late
8. Because globally, working people have lost their power to bargain and demand rights and decent wages, in a green capitalist setup, wages will probably stagnate or even decline to offset the rising costs of ‘ecological modernisation’
9. The 'green capitalist state' will be an authoritarian one. Justified by the threat of ecological crisis it will ‘manage’ the social unrest that will necessarily grow from the impoverishment that lies in the wake of rising cost of living (food, energy, etc.) and falling wages
10. In green capitalism, the poor will have to be excluded from consumption, pushed to the margins, while the wealthy will get to ‘offset’ their continued environmentally destructive behaviour, shopping and saving the planet at the same time
11. An authoritarian state, massive class inequalities, welfare given to corporations: from the point of view of social and ecological emancipation, green capitalism will be a disaster that we can never recover from. Today, we have a chance to get beyond the suicidal madness of constant growth. Tomorrow, by the time we’ve all gotten used to the new green regime, that chance may be gone
12. In green capitalism, there is a danger that established, mainstream environmental groups will come to play the role that trade unions played in the Fordist era: acting as safety valves to make sure that demands for social change, that our collective rage remain within the boundaries set by the needs of capital and governments
13. Albert Einstein defined ‘insanity’ as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” In the past decade, in spite of Kyoto, not only has the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increased – so, too, has the rate of increase. Do we simply want more of the same? Wouldn’t that be insane?
14. International climate agreements promote false solutions that are often more about energy security than climate change. Far from solving the crisis, emissions trading, CMD, joint implementation, offsets and so on, all provide a political shield for the continued production of greenhouse gases with impunity
15. For many communities in the global South, these false solutions (agrofuels, ‘green deserts’, CDM-projects) are by now often a greater threat than climate change itself
16. Real solutions to the climate crisis won't be dreamt up by governments or corporations. They can only emerge from below, from globally networked social movements for climate justice
17. Such solutions include: no to free trade, no to privatisation, no to flexible mechanisms. Yes to food sovereignty, yes to degrowth, yes to radical democracy and to leaving the resources in the ground
18. As an emerging global climate justice movement, we must fight two enemies: on one hand climate change and the fossilistic capitalism that causes it, and on the other, an emergent green capitalism that won’t stop it, but will limit our ability to do so
19. Of course, climate change and free trade aren’t the same thing, but: the Copenhagen-protocol will be a central regulatory instance of green capitalism just as the WTO was central to neoliberal capitalism. So how to relate to it? The Danish group KlimaX argues: A good deal is better than no deal - but no deal is way better than a bad one
20. The chance that governments will come up with a 'good deal' in Copenhagen is slim to none. Our aim must therefore be to demand agreement on real solutions. Failing that: to forget Kyoto, and shut down Copenhagen! (whatever the tactic)
(http://slash.autonomedia.org/node/11656)


More Information

Alexis is a member of attac Germany’s coordinating council, Tadzio a part of the Turbulence editorial collective (www.turbulence.org.uk). They are both active in the emerging climate justice movement, and can be reached at againstgreencapitalism (at) googlemail.com


Category: Money

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Blogger Ref Link  http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

                 
= free currencies embody this fundamental and universal claim that any citizen, any community, any organization has the right to create tools for wealth to flow. No individuals, no community should be dependent on monopolistic and private currencies, unless they have decided so. [1]
This section's theme are generally the monetary aspects of P2P trends, and more specifically, aspects of monetary reform, that aim to make the monetary system into a participatory resource that more broadly benefits larger sectors of the world population.
Human and social wealth is never reducible to its translation in money, see the Wealth Typology.
A very good summary of: What's Wrong with the Current Monetary System, by Mark Joob.
Recommended experts:


Contents

 [hide

Status

  1. Bitcoin is the first globally scaleable, socially sovereign, post-Westphalian currency. However, from an ethical and P2P point of view, it is a problematic currency.
  1. We therefore recommend to monitor the Universal Dividend Currency called Open UDC, which gives each individual an equal stake in monetary creation. Now in version 0.1, it will be operational from version 0.3 onwards.




The Way Forward, a P2P commentary

Michel Bauwens:
"My view is that we need to work on several levels at the same time.
First level is the creation of local (up to regional) complementary currencies, so that the local economy can compensate for the fluctuations in the global economy, especially in an era of structural crisis and lack of reform
The second level is national, where we need policy reform and an end to debt-driven money creation. So, a sufficient national currency created on the basis of need and real economic activity, not speculation, and not created 'with debt' by the banks. I'm starting to agree more and more with the neo-chartalist of the Modern Monetary Theory school on this. Central banks need to be made democratic again.
The third level is continental and global. Here the major reform is to make currencies independent of any nation-state, and made 'ecological'. The Terra approach of Bernard Lietaer, based on a basket of currencies representing energy usage and commodities, is the right direction to look into.
A fourth and special level are the virtual currencies, which can experiment with new rules and designs and fuel the emerging collaborative economy driven by online cooperation.
On the agenda should also be a transition income for socially beneficially and sustainable/ecololgical activities, and experiments with full basic income on local scales to see real-life effects.
Parallel with monetary and economic transformation, there is a lot we can do to demonetize the economy. One of my specific visions is the following: peer producers/commoners create their own production entities, i.e. mutualist Phyles, using the Peer Production License to create a counter-economy around the commons. These alternative enterpreneurial coalitions can make substantial progress to resource-based economics that do not need to involve money, for example by practicing radical open book management and production transparency, at least within the commons network. This and other steps would create larger areas of social life that are demonetized. What the exchange and sharing of rival material goods is concerned, which could deplete an entity is reciprocity was not assured, open accounting ledgers could be used, that do not involve the creation of classic 'money'."

Introduction

The P2P Foundation supports the direct social production of money, such as for example through Open Money and other P2P Exchange Infrastructure Projects systems. This marvellous presentation by Robin Upton explains how this can work.
Key distinctions: Currencies ; Free Currencies ; Wealth
For starters, read Eric Harris-Braun key argument: Why Monetary Design is Important
The following guide has all the essentials on Open Money and Complementary Currencies and is really recommended, for beginners and practitioners alike:
It explains the following basics: 1) The Function of Money; 2) the Purpose of Money; Cost Recovery Mechanisms for Complementary Currencies‎ ; Currency Issuing Procedures, and much more.
  • A comparative table of alternative currencies by SocialCompare [5]


Introductory Video


Introductory Articles
  1. The Co-Belongingness of Money and Community
  2. The Design of Money is not Neutral. By Bernard Lietaer, Gwendolyn Hallsmith.
  3. Read this excellent introduction to the negative role of interest-based money by Charles Eisenstein
  4. Best current report on the topic: Creating New Money: A monetary reform for the information age. By Joseph Huber & James Robertson. New Economics Foundation
  5. Arthur Brock: Differences between Open Source and Open Currencies
  6. Kevin Carson introduces the Peer Money debates
  7. Michel Bauwens on the Importance of Peer Money
  8. Alan Rosenblith: We need P2P Architectures for Money!!
  9. Jean-Francois Noubel: Economics of Flow vs Economics of Accumulation
  10. Ellen Brown on the Case for a Public Credit System: Money today is simply credit. When the credit is advanced by a bank, when the bank is owned by the community, and when the profits return to the community, the result can be a functional, efficient, and sustainable system of finance. See also: Money is Not a Thing, but a Relation
  11. Eric Blair: The Greenback vs Goldbug Debate
  12. Charles Eistenstein: Money, the Self, and Negative Interest Money. From Sacred Economics, Chapter 12.
  13. What Should Peer-to-Peer Money Be? By Eli Gothill.




Goals:
  1. Better redistribution of the existing money
  2. Transformation of the monetary system through the social production of money
  3. Alternatives to money: Peer Production ; Gift Economy ; Sharing; and other ways to assist in a transition to a more Resource Based Economy through Peer to Peer Exchanges and P2P Exchange Infrastructure Projects




Current Hot Projects to monitor

Key digital Open Money projects are: 1) Bitcoin ; Ripple ; 3) Open Coin; 4) Open-Universal Digital Currency Project‎; 5) Circular Multilateral Barter

See also:
  1. Banco Palmas, in Brazil, emits a local currency and supports the local economy. Video: The Story of Banco Palmas in Brazil
  2. The Common Good Bank initiative [7]
  3. The Metacurrency Project: the tci/ip platform for diverse currency creation: see the Flowspace project as first attempt to establish sucn an infrastructure for Free Currencies
  4. Open Coin: an actual published open specification for creating distributed digital currency
  5. The creation of the Open Source Hardware Reserve Bank. Details here
  6. Multiswap.net: A free platform for circular barter exchange
Longstanding historical experiments:
  1. WIR Economic Circle Cooperative: this 70-old Swiss mutual credit clearing system is getting traction as a model for the rest of Europe
  2. The historical experience of the Worgl Shillings
  3. The Swedish interest-free JAK Bank [8] [9]
Comparison chart of alternative currencies
  1. SocialCompare - overview chart of key characteristics of alternative currencies (editable)

Tools:
Tools to create People-Produced Money:
  1. Community Forge
  2. Community Exchange System
  3. Cyclos

Under development:
  1. Open-Universal Digital Currency Project: Open-UDC is based on TRM (Théorie Relative de la Monnaie,by Stéphane Laborde) and Universal Digital Currency project (UDC project), which aims to create a new digital currency based on individual members and the digital world. [10]
  2. OSCurrency,
  3. Cclite, [ GETS] (commercial),
  4. Ripple
  5. Regenerosity, Local Exchange
  6. Money 2.0

Also:
  1. Comparison page at http://www.communityforge.net/compare
  2. Software overview page: http://www.complementarycurrency.org/software.html

Our P2P Open Money Network

{{Person
|image1=Jean-Francois.jpg |name1=Jean-Francois Noubel |contact1= Twitter: @jfnoubel and @thetransitioner Blog: http://www.noubel.com
|image2=ThomasGreco.jpg |name2= Thomas Greco |contact2=thg at mindspring.com
|image3=FernandaIbarra.jpg |name3=Fernanda Ibarra |contact3= Twitter: @fer_ananda and @thetransitioner Profile at: http://people.thetransitioner.org/profile/FernandaIbarra
|image4=Michaellinton.jpg |name4= Michael Linton |contact4=michael dot linton@gmail.com
|image5=Georg Pleger.jpg |name5=Georg Pleger |contact5=georg at pleger dot at

Check out profiles of Open Money experts such as Alan Rosenblith ; Arthur Brock [11] ; Edgar Cahn [12]; Eric Harris-Braun [13]; Thomas Greco ; [[Jean-François Noubel [14]

}}

The open money software playing field: an overview

See also: Timebanking Software Platforms
Before getting to the issues, here is a synopsis of each of the main projects, in order of age. These projects are selected on the basis that they are open source, have multiple implementations, and support community exchange using an arbitrary measure of value.

Cyclos

Language/ platorm Full time developers Implementations Plug 'n' Play? Url
Java 4 Many No www.cyclos.org
Cyclos is the software implementation arm of the Social Trade Organisation. It is an open source, java, comprehensive accounting package used in increasingly large projects around the world. The German Tauschring network picked up Cyclos and now use it routinely, contributing back code. Many other 'one-off' projects also use it as a back end accounting package.


Community Exchange System (CES)

Language/ platorm ! Full time developers Implementations Plug 'n' Play? Url
MS asp 1 200 in one Yes www.ces.org.za
Arising from a grass-roots movement in Cape town, CES is a free web service that hosts 200 'Exchanges', each with its own currency and separate database. Some exchanges charge membership fees in the national currency, some in the currency of the exchange and some use the optional transactional levy feature. Trade is possible between exchanges.

ccLite

Language/ platorm Full time developers Implementations Plug 'n' Play? Url
PERL 1 No www.hughbarnard.org
Cclite is a Perl package for local exchange trading systems (LETS), banking and other alternative money systems. Multi-registry, multi-currency, web services based transactions and templated to give multi-lingual capabilities.


Fourth Corner

Language/ platorm Full time developers Implementations Plug 'n' Play? Url
Php <1 More or less www.fourthcornerexchange.com
Fourth Corner Exchange is a small family of LETS like groups. Their php/MySQL application was written for multiple implementations of that specific model. LETSlink UK has forked the software and done several implementations.


Drupal & Community Forge

Language/ platorm Full time developers Implementations Plug 'n' Play? Url
Drupal 1 + 1,000 35 No / Yes drupal.org/project/mutual_credit
www.communityforge.net
A Drupal module for web developers to implement a complementary currency with total flexibilty over usability, design, wireframing etc. Community Forge is a non-profit hosting Drupal implementations tailored for LETS.


oscurrency

Language/ platorm Full time developers Implementations Plug 'n' Play? Url
Inoshi 1 2 No www.opensourcecurrency.org
Developed by members of the Austin Time Exchange, this project is now under development for the Bay Area Community Exchange. While the platform, Insoshi is not well known, much attention has been given to openness, so that the system plugs in easily to the rest of the web.
Also worthy of mention is Time Banks whose membership includes a special license to use the proprietary 'Community Weaver' software.


Circular Multilateral Barter

Language/ platorm Full time developers Implementations Plug 'n' Play? Url
Python 1 No sourceforge.net/projects/cmb
www.multiswap.net
"Circular Multilateral Barter" (CMB) is aimed at supplying local enterprenours with a way to exchange goods within a p2p-network, without using money or any other currency, overcoming the "double coincidence of wants" problem, inherent to traditional barter.
One thing that distinguishes CMB from other credit commons is that all debts in CMB are person-to-person debts. There is no central political/administrative unit to decide who deserves to be trusted and who does not. Because of this, CMB should be able to scale-up very well, so that local communities can be seamlessly aggregated into larger ones.

Citations

To survive and thrive, human systems *need* a not just a network view, but a multi-dimensional, multi-scaled view and definition of systems. this will help us see how many, many people can operate and multiply many forms of wealth within systems that previously seemed easily depletable. Peer networks are vital to creating the multi-dimensional maps and models and views that will allow all of us to see the cornucopia of options that now exist, provided we can shift out focus from exploitation and control, to existential symbiosis with everything that is around us, on as many scales as possible.
- Sam Rose

I think its important to distinguish "currency" from a reputation measurement. Implicit in the term currency is the idea that it can be exchanged for something.A system for "recognition" is only a currency if that recognition is exchangable for something.
- Tom Salfied

“According to Margrit Kennedy, a German researcher who has studied this issue extensively, interest now composes 40% of the cost of everything we buy. We don’t see it on the sales slips, but interest is exacted at every stage of production.”
- Ellen Brown [15]


On Open Money

You treasure what you measure, and you measure what you treasure. Open money provides the tools to implement this maxim. What should we be treasuring in our culture and on our planet that we so far have no way to measure?
- Open Money [16]

Money is making a fundamental evolutionary step into community currencies. Conventional money as we know it has a built in architecture that leads to scarcity, centralization, concentration, secrecy, proprietarization. This conventional monetary system is not appropriate to dealing with today's global systemic challenges (harmonizing local and global needs, creating ecological sustainability, enabling the information economy, leveraging the open source paradigm, etc). Just as there are now millions of media outlets today, currencies will follow this same evolution by shifting from centralized authoritative models to distributed ones that allow better sustainability, distribution, transparency, and regulation mechanisms.
- Open Money [17]

How to best transcend the current economic mess? Put Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, Tim O’Reilly, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Nathan Myhrvold, and Danny Hillis in a room somewhere and don’t let them out until they have framed a new, massively-distributed financial system, founded on sound, open, peer-to-peer principles, from the start. And don’t call it a bank. Launch a new financial medium that is as open, scale-free, universally accessible, self-improving, and non-proprietary as the Internet, and leave the 13th century behind.”
- George Dyson [18]

Depression Economics

"During periods of so-called economic depression, societies suffer for want of all manner of essential goods, yet investigation almost invariably discloses that there are plenty of goods available. Plenty of coal in the ground, corn in the fields, wool on the sheep. What is missing is not materials but an abstract unit of measurement called ‘money.’
- Tom Robbins [19]


Leakages from the local economy

"Poor liquidity and leakage (money flowing from the local economy) are key causes for floundering and/or disappearing regional economies. To overcome these shortfalls local communities should be increasing local liquidity and plugging the leakage through the introduction of complementary community currencies thereby re-building their respective local communities in the coal mining area of Wales. When local residents within their respective communities changed the agreements they had about conventional money, by creating and spending complementary community currencies locally instead of spending only diminishing amounts of federal currency with giant corporations, it commenced re-birth in the local communities. Molly used the term local multiplier when she discussed how local liquidity increased proportionately to the amount of complementary community currency being circulated by those who were choosing to participate."
- (from a summary of) Molly Scott reporting on complementary currencies in Wales [20]


Aristotle on unnatural wealth

"There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural."
- Aristotle [21]


The Disintermediation of the Banks

"First, the distribution monopoly of the Postal Services was hit hard by the Net as people discovered they didn’t need to buy stamps. Then, the copyright industry’s distribution monopoly was flatly and unceremoniously run over. As a third and fairly recent victim, we find the old centralized journalism with its tightly controlled news distribution. As fourth and coming victim, there’s an information distribution few people have thought of in terms of information: the money in our society."
- Rick Falkvinge [22]


On the End of Banking

“There is no reason products and services could not be swapped directly by consumers and producers through a system of direct exchange – essentially a massive barter economy. All it requires is some commonly used unit of account and adequate computing power to make sure all transactions could be settled immediately. People would pay each other electronically, without the payment being routed through anything that we would currently recognize as a bank. Central banks in their present form would no longer exist – nor would money.”
– Mervyn King – Governor of the Bank of England [23]

Introductory Material

  1. Money is not the Only Value Measurement System . By Geoff Chesshire .
  2. Why Peer to Peer Currencies will Grow
  3. Bernard Lietaer: The Four-tiered Monetary System of the Future
  4. In his landmark essay, Valuing the Ethical Economy, Adam Arvidsson explains why we need Wealth Acknowledgment Systems for the Ethical Circuit of Value
  5. Must reading: Charles Eisenstein on Why Demurrage needs to replace interest (see the entry on Demurrage). Also: Money and the Crisis of Civilization on why the current crisis is also an endgame.
  6. The case for open money. See also: Open Money Manifesto]
  7. Ran Prieur: Fire vs. Water Economies, and the role of Demurrage in this tradition.
  8. Essential theoretical and historical introduction to the long term history of money and debt, as rooted in social violence, by David Graeber at http://www.metamute.org/en/content/debt_the_first_five_thousand_years
  9. Eric Harris-Braun on the necessary Difference between Multi-currency Platforms and Market Making Platforms
  10. Thomas Greco: Why Exchange Alternatives Fail to Thrive
  11. Robin Wood: Shifts in Value Exchange and Human Development: applying the spiral dynamics model to value exchange
  12. The three modalities of Production Sharing, i.e. working together for a common pool, without individual exchange or barter: 1) Labor Quota System‎; 2) Fair-Share Labor System‎; 3) Anti-Quota Labor System‎
  13. Why Matrifocal Societies Use Dual Currencies. Bernard Lietaer. [24]
  14. Steve Keen on Why We Need to Tackle Debt Pushing, not Money Creation
  15. Introduction to the Eight Forms of Capital‎





Also:


  1. Rationale for Monetary Reform by Greg Martin.
  2. Monetary Transformation, not Monetary Reform, is What is Needed. By Thomas Greco.
  3. Why the Growth Imperative is Linked to our Monetary Format
  4. Declaration Of The Universal Right Of Monetary Creation and the Open Money Manifesto
  5. Peter Koenig's summaries on the History and Future of money
  6. The Future of Money by Paul B. Hartzog
  7. Capital, Profits, and Interest. Benjamin Tucker.
  8. Chris Cook: a proposal for Open Capital

How-to:
  1. Process of Designing a Complementary Currency System. How-to recommendations by Stephen DeMeulenaere.

Discussions

Via: http://groups.google.com/group/metacurrency

Key Resources

Funding for Open Money and Complementary Currencies infrastructures via: the Fund for Complementary Currencies
  1. The Re-Inventing Money site, at http://reinventingmoney.com/
  2. The Book: "Money; A Mirror Image Of The Economy" by Dr. J.W. Smith - full text at http://IED.info/books/money Applying Henry George’s philosophy across the economic spectrum transposes monopoly rent values into equally-shared use-values. Quality of life increases as working hours drop by half.
  3. The consultancy: Value for People, helps local communities initiate complementary currencies

Key Articles

Key Blogs

Of key importance is the work by Eric Harris-Braun and friends on meta-currency platforms, see here
Also:
  1. New Currency Frontiers: very thoughtful new money blog with Eric Harris-Braun and others working on the Metacurrency Project
  2. Beyond Money: Thomas Greco's blog on monetary transformation and mutual credit
  3. Evolution of Money
  4. Open Source Currency
  5. Coverage of social money trends in Guillaume's blog
  6. Trust is the only currency: excellent analysis

Key Books

  • What Comes After Money? Essays from Reality Sandwich on Transforming Currency and Community, edited by Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan. EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books, 2011.


  • "Money and Sustainability: The Missing Link" by Bernard Lietaer, Christian Arnsperger, Sally Goerner and Stefan Brunnhuber. Triarchy Press, 2012 [25]. A report from the Club of Rome to Finance Watch and the World Business Academy
  • The trilogy by Bernard Lietaer:
  1. Bernard Lietaer, The Mystery of Money (Munich: Riemann Verlag, 2000).
  2. Bernard Lietaer, The Future of Money (London: Random House, 2001). Full text [26]
  3. Bernard Lietaer & Stephen M. Belgin, Of Human Wealth: Beyond Greed and Scarcity, Galley Edition Version 2.1. (Boulder, Colorado: Human Wealth Books and Talks, 2004.


From other authors:


  1. Thomas Greco. The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. Chelsea Green, 2009
  2. Money and Liberation. The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements. Peter North. University of Minnesota Press, 2008
  3. Interest and Inflation Free Money. Margrit Kennedy.
  4. Peter North: Money and Liberation: The Micropolitics of Alternative Currency Movements. [27]
  5. Creating New Money: A Monetary Reform for the Information Age, by Joseph Huber and James Robertson. New Economics Foundation (2001) [28]
  6. The Ecology of Money. By Richard Douthwait

Guidebooks:
  1. Community Currency Guide. Workbook by Bernard Lietaer

Also:
  1. Money and Magic
  2. Money in an Unequal World
  3. Monetary Theory
  4. 30 Lies about Money

Key Concept Pages to read

  1. Abundance vs. Scarcity and Monetary Scarcity vs. Monetary Sufficiency - Non-scarcity based monetary systems
  2. Monetary Reform, Demurrage and Seigneurage, the Credit Commons
  3. Four conditions for Open Money: Open Data Currencies ; Open Identity Currencies ; Open Rules Currencies ; Open Transport Currencies
  4. Wealth Typology,Because we need Wealth Acknowledgment Systems for the Ethical Circuit of Value

Key Conferences

Conference: Multiple moneys and development: making payments in diverse economies. 2nd International Conference on Complementary Currency Systems (CCS) ; 19 – 23 June 2013; Amsterdam


Key Delicious Tags

  1. Abundance, http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Abundance
  2. Complementary Currencies, http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Complementary-Currencies
  3. Monetary Reform, http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Monetary-Reform
  4. Open Money, http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Open-Money
  5. P2P Money, http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Money

Key Directories

  1. Online Database of Complementary Currencies Worldwide
  2. Global Resource Exchange Groups and Localized Exchange Communities
  3. Peer to Peer Exchanges and P2P Exchange Infrastructure Projects
  4. Electronic currencies in the Wikipedia

Key Documentaries

  1. The Money Fix: video by Alan Rosenblith shown at PBS stations in the U.S. in 2009/2010 [29]
  2. Money as Debt
  3. The Wealth of Neighbors
  4. The Money Masters
  5. In Debt We Trust, remarkable documentary about personal aspects of debt crisis

Key Essays

  1. Peer to Peer Lending, June 2007 overview report by Brad Slavin.
  2. Raoul Victor: Money and Peer Production, a marxist perspective


Bernard Lietaer

Two key essays/proposals by Bernard Lietaer et al:
  1. Is Our Monetary Structure a Systemic Cause for Financial Instability? Evidence and Remedies from Nature. By Bernard Lietaer, Robert E. Ulanowicz, Sally J. Goerner, and Nadia McLaren. Accepted for publication in Journal of Futures Studies Special Issue on the Financial Crisis (February-March 2010)
  2. Options for Managing a Systemic Bank Crisis. Bernard Lietaer, Dr. Robert Ulanowicz, and Dr. Sally Goerner. Sapiens-journal Volume 2, number 1, March 2009
"The sustainability of any complex flow system can be measured with a single metric as an emergent property of its structural diversity and interconnectivity; it requires a balance in emphasis between efficiency and resilience. The urgent message for economics from nature is that the monoculture of national currencies, justified on the basis of market efficiency, generates structural instability in our global financial system. Economic sustainability therefore requires diversification in types of currencies, specifically through complementary currencies."


Thomas Greco

  1. Thomas Greco: Why Exchange Alternatives Fail to Thrive: The State of the Alternative Exchange Movement, Excerpt from The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, Chapter 13,
  2. Thomas Greco: Towards A Complete Web-Based Trading Platform Excerpt, End of Money, Chapter 17,


See also

Key People

  1. Alan Rosenblith ;
  2. Arthur Brock [30] [31] ;
  3. Edgar Cahn [32];
  4. Eric Harris-Braun [33];
  5. Thomas Greco ;
  6. Fernanda Ibarra
  7. Margrit Kennedy
  8. Bernard Lietaer
  9. Michael Linton
  10. Jean-François Noubel [34]
  11. Elf Pavlik
  12. Jay Standish

Key Podcasts

See also:
  1. The Open Money Blogtalk Radio

Key Webcasts

Recommended:
  • The Money Fix, excellent documentary by Alan Rosenblith
  • 97 Percent Owned: probably the best documentary on how monetary creation works, though based on the situation in the UK

Documentaries:
  1. Money as Debt II: great explanation
  2. Introductory Animation to Complementary Currencies
Also:
  1. Alan Rosenblith on Open Money ; Alan Rosenblith on Open Money Protocols and Agreements
  2. Chris Cook on Peak Credit and Open Capital: excellent video presentation
  3. Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun's Introduction to The MetaCurrency Project ; Arthur Brock on Open Data Currencies
  4. Bernard Lietaer Interviewed on a New World Currency ; Bernard Lietaer on Complementary Currencies for Social Change ; Bernard Lietaer on Currencies for Cooperation ; Bernard Lietaer on Human Wealth
  5. Christian Nold on the Bijlmer Euro
  6. David Karsbol on Virtual Finance
  7. David Korten on Monetary Reform
  8. Douglas Rushkoff on Medieval Money
  9. Ellen Brown on the Web of Debt
  10. Giles Andrews on the Evolution of the Zopa Social Lending Project
  11. James Robertson on Monetary Reform for the Mainstream Economy
  12. Jean-François Noubel on Free Currencies
  13. Mohammad Yunus on Microfinance
  14. Peter Koenig on What is Money
  15. Philippe Van Parijs on the Basic Income
  16. Richard Douthwaite on Debt-based Money
  17. Sarah Hearn on the Berkshare Local Currency Program
  18. Thomas Greco on Monetary Transformation ; Thomas Greco on the End of Money ; Thomas Greco on the Importance of Mutual Credit Clearing ; Thomas Greco on the State of the Monetary Reform Movement m Thomas Greco on the History of Money and Debt
See also:

Deutschsprachige Ressourcen - German Ressources


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