Recent Articles

The betrayal of the Ukrainian people; you’re next!

I feel sorry for the Ukrainian people, not only have they been conscripted to fight a proxy war for the US against the Russians, a war in which despite massive financial and military support they are being slaughtered; they have now been selected to be a demonstration project for a US-created information system that gives the Kiev government all the information it needs to control every aspect of their people’s lives. Little by little, place by place, Big Brother is enslaving the masses.

I asked Bing Chat to give me a summary of the history, development and capabilities of the Diia phone app which is the heart of the system now being deployed. Here is what it gave me:

… Read the entire article here or on Medium. 
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Gloom and Doom, But There’s a New Dawn Arising

Give me the power to create the money and make it legal tender and I can become owner of the entire world. — T. H. Greco, Jr.

In 2009, while in the process of making the final edits to my book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, my editor took issue with my assertion that the declining value of the US dollar would continue indefinitely. He cited the increase in “value” of the dollar in the foreign exchange markets that was occurring at that time as evidence of my “error.”
… Read the entire article here or on Medium. 
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How to Solve the Money Problem, in a Nutshell

What You Need to Know About Money. Currency, Credit, and Exchange, a summary of my presentation to the RAMICS conference in October 2022.

… Rread the full article here.
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Private Currency Vouchers: an Answer to the Money Problem

I’ve long been arguing that the present centralized interest-based, debt-money system is fatally flawed and anti-democratic, and is the primary mechanism by which power and wealth are continually concentrated in the hands of global power elite. This article describes how private currency vouchers issued by trustworthy providers of real goods and services can provide sound means of payment that are superior to government and central bank fiat monies, and are a necessary step toward empowering people and communities and the emergence of a convivial and peaceful civilization.

Unlike, government and central bank fiat currencies which promise nothing but their acceptance as tax payments, private currency vouchers promise to be redeemed for real valuable goods and services. If the issuer is trustworthy and can be counted on to honor their pledge of redemption, their currency vouchers can provide traders with an exchange and payment medium that is superior to government and central bank fiat monies. Such honest currencies are neither novel nor odd, but have a long history and are an absolute necessity for the decentralization of economic and political power and the emergence of a peaceful and equitable social order.  
…Read the entire article here or on Medium
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Bitcoin, Blockchain, and the end of money as we’ve known it

This short article argues that, “The decentralized allocation and control of credit is the key to creating an honest, efficient, and sustainable system of exchange,” and outlines what needs to be done to achieve it.

Whether one likes it or not, the end of money as we’ve known it is at hand. From a more or less conventional perspective it may look something like what David G.W. Birch describes in his Forbes article, Payments In The Metaverse Will Be Huge, But They Won’t Be Based On Cryptocurrencies (Or People), but my view is rather different. Still, Birch highlights the three main issues that we both agree are crucial: trust, security and privacy.
… Read the entire article here or on Medium
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The Money Economy is not the Real Economy
This article describes the difference between the real economy of valuable goods and services and money that is supposed to represent real value but does not, and describes what is happening to bring them back into alignment.

The global system of money, banking, and finance is fatally flawed. The symptoms of that, which have long been present in the form of recurrent cycles of price inflation and economic depression, and increasing indebtedness, have now become painfully obvious and acute. By the application of various financial and political fixes the system has been propped up in stages to try to manage its ill effects and prevent the worst from happening. Central bankers and politicians while falsely blamed the problems on labor shortages and workers’ demands for higher wages, have tried to manage the adverse effects by means of interest rate manipulations, restriction or easing of credit, bank bailouts, and government spending on various programs, all of which tend to favor the corporations and wealthy class. The debt bubble of the early 2000s which culminated in the “bust” of 2007-08 came close to bringing down the entire global financial house of cards. The system has survived only by the application of unprecedented and extreme measures, and it continues to this day on life support.

… Read the entire article here or on Global Research
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The Usury Conjecture on the centralized, interest-based, debt-money system

The Usury Conjecture in a nutshell

The central banking, interest-based, debt money system that is dominant around the world today is neither stable, nor sustainable, nor fair. The creation of money based on bank lending with interest creates an imperative for debt to grow exponentially with the passage of time. That debt-growth imperative drives artificial economic growth as borrowers compete with one another to acquire enough money from the always insufficient pool of money to service their “loans.”
… Read the entire article here or on Medium
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Solar Dollars: A Complementary Currency that Incentivizes Renewable Energy

On July 12, 2021, I presented my Solar Dollar proposal as part of a two day virtual conference titled Pathways to Resilient Zero Carbon Cities, organized by Zero Carbon Lab, School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire (UK). Following that presentation, I was invited to submit a paper describing my proposal for publication in an academic journal. That paper titled, Solar Dollars: A Complementary Currency that Incentivizes Renewable Energy, has now been published and can be read or downloaded at https://doi.org/10.3389/fbuil.2021.785145.
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What’s coming and how to prepare?
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES FOR TROUBLED TIMES

For years I’ve been saying that we are being led, actually “driven,” toward a new global paradigm that is at once financial, economic, political and social, and I’ve been urging people to prepare for it. They naturally ask me what sorts of changes to expect and what they ought to do to be prepared. I first compiled a list of my ideas on that way back in the mid-1980s, a list that I’ve revised slightly from time to time and republished in various places. Since then the times have become increasingly “troubled” and I am convinced that the situation is quickly approaching a climax during which we-the-people who are not included in the super-class will be hard pressed to maintain any semblance of normality in our lives. We will be challenged as never before to adapt and to find ways to survive (and thrive) in the face of what I’ve been calling the global “mega-crisis” the dimensions of which include global warming, climate change, pandemics, terrorism, and financial and political malfeasance that are causing inflation, depressions, wars, loss of freedom, and that will ultimately enable the super class to engineer a “great reset” and usher in their New World Order.

Here is my latest revision of my Survival Strategies for Troubled Times.
— Read the full article here or on Medium.
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Community Currencies Can Enable Universal Basic Mobility (UBM)

It may not be a basic necessity for life, but mobility surely is a basic necessity for living in a modern economy and for having a decent quality of life. This fact is increasingly recognized, and in response, many cities have been subsidizing public transit, and now many are considering making public transit completely free to all riders.
–Read the full article here or on Medium.
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How to Fix Money, Banking, and the Economy, and Usher in a New Convivial Civilization
It is clear that governments and banking corporations have long colluded in creating the present system of money, banking and finance that dominates economies around the world, and that they have no interest in making the kinds of changes that would reduce their power or share the wealth more fairly. As I have described it before, the banking cartel has been given the privilege of creating money out of thin air as debt and charging interest for its use, while the central governments get to spend as much as they want for whatever they want without regard to their limited tax revenues or the popular will.
… Read the full article here or on Medium.
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Ivan Illich and the Coming Cultural Revolution
Do educational institutions make people stupid? Do medical institutions make people sick?

Such questions may at first glance seem preposterous, but they were raised in all seriousness a few decades ago by Ivan Illich, and strongly argued in his books, Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesis (1975). In both cases his arguments stem from his overarching belief that as institutions become too large and too centralized they end up doing the exact opposite of what they are intended to do. Over the subsequent decades, we’ve seen mounting evidence that Illich was correct in his assessments. In our attempts to improve efficiency, eliminate uncertainty, and get more done in less time, we have allowed everything to become too big, too rigid, too fast, and too centrally controlled. In the process the individual has become ever more helpless and alienated and more dependent on impersonal institutions that are being corrupted by their power and inherent conflicts of interest. As Illich argues, we have become slaves to our institutions and our myths about who we are and how the world works. George Bernard Shaw spoke similarly in declaring that all professions are “conspiracies against the laity.”
–Read the full article here or on Medium
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Go, set, get ready for your mark!
The dystopian world of George Orwell’s, 1984, and Aldus Huxley’s, Brave New World, has been creeping up on us for a very long time. Now it’s coming on at a gallop and seems bound to cross the finish line in just a few short strides. Its pounding hooves shake the earth as they grind into dust truth, privacy, human rights, and all that humans hold sacred. The heat and stench from the monsters fiery breath give fair warning that it means to consume whatever stands in its way. Like the temptation of Jesus by Satan, it promises us the world, but at the price of our very souls.
Read the full article here or on Medium.
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Money and Finance Have Now Been Completely Collectivized
Desperate efforts are being made by the central banks and central governments to keep the flawed global system of money, banking, and finance afloat, but they will ultimately prove futile. 
You can also read this article on Medium.
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The global money system: not the kind of normal we should get back to
This artice describes the urgency, and the opportunity, of ushering in a new, more equitable and sustainable economy based on the deployment of the innovative mechanisms of exchange and finance that I have long advocated. We need to ask ourselves what it is that keeps us on the treadmill. We try to get ahead but so often we end up simply standing still or falling farther behind. We are all chasing after that thing that everyone demands from us–money. The problem is that there is never enough money in the right places to fairly distribute the vast amount of wealth that the economy produces. What if we could all stop chasing after money? Money scarcity is an artifact of the interest-based, debt-money regime. Better means of exchange are available; we simply need to organize and use them.
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Riding the Populist Wave
This article points out that capitalists now admit that the system is “rigged” in their favor; it argues that Trump and Sanders represent two edges of the populist wave that is now dominating U.S. politics, that a Sanders win over Trump is entirely plausible, that the New Deal of FDR has been systematically dismantled and needs to be reestablished, and that in the long run people will need to work together in communities to build systems and structures that can circumvent the rigged system.
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Monetary alchemy: how to turn bad money into good
In this article, I describe how fiat money can be transmuted into a truly effective and scalable community currency, while at the same time providing a way to finance community improvement projects like affordable housing. Key features that distinguish my design from other “fiat backed” currencies that have been tried before are (1) the limitations placed on cash redemption, and (2) the requirement that the community currency be issued as loans to businesses based on the amount of needed and desired goods and services they have available for immediate sale. You can read the full article here.
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Liquidity and Monetization
This monograph defines key terms in the design and issuance of exchange media. The word “monetization” has lately come to be used to mean “generate revenue from,” but that is not what it means in monetary economics. Cut through the confusion by reading this article.
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Confronting the Power Elite
The world today is controlled by a small elite group that has been increasingly concentrating power and wealth in their own hands. How has that come about? How can power be decentralized and dispersed more broadly to enable people to live in peace and freedom?
Read the full article here. The PDF file can be downloaded here.
This article was also published in the web journal, Transformation. Another version of the article can be found on the Global Research website.
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Local Currencies—what works; what doesn’t?
The past thirty years have seen the emergence of a great many local and community currencies, which it was hoped would enhance community resilience and self-reliance. But the results have been less than spectacular. This article explains why, and argues that the key to a currencies success lies in its “basis of issue.” The PDF file can be downloaded here.
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How to Bring Liquidity Into an Economy, Free of Interest, Inflation, and Boom and Bust Cycles.
This article describes how the value of local production can be monetized in the form of circulating private currencies and trade credits created within associations of buyers and sellers.
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Solar Dollars – a way to promote renewable energy, while supporting the local economy and providing interest-free financing for utility companies.
This article describes how to issue and circulate of a sound private currency, in this case based on renewable energy, but the same model could be applied on the basis of any product or service that is in everyday demand.
A German language version can be found here.
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50 Ways to Leave the Euro: Greece and the Global Crisis.
In this article, published in Common Dreams on November 6, 2015, I provide my prescriptions for how Greece (and other countries) might relieve their impossible debt burden, and describe ways in which domestic liquidity can be created without inflation. The PDF file can be downloaded here.
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Money, debt and the end of the growth imperative, was published  March 3, 2014 in the online journal, Transformation. You can also read it here.
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People-Centered Adjustment: Transcending the Debt Crisis and Creating a Future of Abundance, Freedom, and Global Harmony, is an original essay published in the issue Anarchy & Nonprofit: An Emerging Affair of the Spanda Journal (Vol. 4, No. 1, 2013), an open-access journal which you can download for free here.
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Taking Moneyless Exchange to Scale: Measuring and Maintaining the Health of a Credit Clearing System.
The focus of this article is on credit clearing as a local moneyless exchange option, and deals specifically with the proper allocation of credit within credit clearing exchanges. It was published in the International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR) in April, 2013. Tiny url.
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Reclaiming the Credit Commons: Toward a Butterfly Society.
This is a chapter in the anthology, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, published by Levellers Press in 2012.
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Currencies of transition: Transforming money to unleash sustainability.
This is a chapter in the anthology, The Necessary Transition: The Journey towards the Sustainable Enterprise Economy, co-authored with Prof. Jem Bendell of Cumbria University, and published by Greenleaf Publishing Ltd. in June, 2013.
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The End of Money: Take Power Back From the Money and Banking Monopoly.
This article, published in Alternet on July 27, 2009, descries  decentralized free-market and community-based initiatives that enable people to transcend the money monopoly, and argues that “the Greenback solution” is a dead end.
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How Bad Will the Economy Get? Really, Really Bad.
Historically, every financial and economic crisis has been used to further centralize power and concentrate wealth. This one is no different. This article was published in Alternet, July 14, 2009.
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