Category Archives: Prescriptions

Riegel explains the foundations of economic democracy

Posted on February 27, 2011 | 9 comments

I have often referred to E. C. Riegel as a “master of monetary truth.” His insight is astounding, his logic impeccable, and his expression eloquent. In this essay on Economic Democracy, he shows the way out of our present predicament an into a new world of peace, justice and prosperity. I urge you to read the entire essay but I don’t want you to miss his bottom line:

“Once a monetary science develops, it will no more be localized or nationalized than mathematics is today. There opens before the mind, therefore, the prospect of a universal monetary unit and system that will operate without regard for political boundaries. It will have no nationality or politics. None will be coerced to participate. None will be barred. There will be but one monetary language for the world, and a democratic monetary system will unite people everywhere in the universal freedom of exchange.” [emphasis added]

ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY

The End of Monetary Nationalism

E.C. Riegel

Rising from tiny springs of rebellion in the consciousness of primitive men, democracy, like an ever expanding river, deepening and widening, has swept aside all the ancient forms of political government, and with them their pretenses of divine power and aristocratic preference. Its traditional service to humanity, however, has been only that of a negator of tyranny and presumption in the political sphere. In the future, it will be recognized and acclaimed for its more positive service in the economic sphere.

Under the constant challenge of democracy, the modern state has abandoned its former attitude of arrogance and now cloaks its undertakings in such flattering phrases as “democratic government,” “rule of the people,” “equality,” “welfare state,” and so on. These pretenses have been forced upon the state by the very failure of democracy as yet to assume a positive role in the affairs of mankind. The state is a positive organ and, as such, retains the initiative and leadership to which the people must turn for the “remedy” of this ill or that. Though the state is impotent to do more than change one economic ill for another, we cannot blame the demagogy of politicians for promising salvation from all the ills of mankind. This must continue, and the people must go on suffering under the delusion that they can resort to the political means of salvation, until an agency functioning through the economic means is supplied.

The ultimate accomplishment of democracy in the political sphere is the perfection of the rule of the majority. If this be all that democracy can deliver to society, the game is not worth the candle. It is little comfort to the individual, striving to express his personality, to know that democracy has wrested government from the hands of a few and placed it in the hands of a majority. Human aspirations for freedom can never be gratified as long as there is a veto power over self expression, whether imposed by a man on horseback or by means of the ballot box.

Yet the democratic state has no means of functioning other than by popular elections. That being so, the functions of the state must be limited to those public services which are desired by all. Consider the folly of undertaking to express the people’s will in all human affairs by an occasional election at which, in one confused shout, we sound our yeas and nays on a multitude of questions. At the same time, we select representatives to guess what it all means, and to divine from it how to execute our will on hundreds of issues that arise after we have given our confused “mandate.” Is not our boasted political equality but the equality of frustration? Can we have self-government, and at the same time delegate the power to govern? Are we indeed fit for self-government if we accept these delusive exercises as the processes of democracy? Can democracy offer nothing better?

Turn, now, from this sham democratic process offered by the state, with all its trappings of majesty, power, ritualism and futility, to a sphere in which real democratic expression obtains–so far as the state does not stultify it. This sphere of democracy has a true balloting system, whereunder every ballot is the clear and irrevocable mandate of the buyer through which he expresses his will, his aspirations, his freedom, and his personality. In this balloting system, elections are held every hour of ever day. Its voting booths are the market places of the world, its candidates, the goods and services offered by competing vendors. In this balloting system there is no tyranny by the majority. Every voter wins the elections. Whether he chooses the blue label, or the red, or the green, no one is denied his choice. Here every man is a king, and the economic constituency is made up of sovereigns in cooperation.

This voting system is the elective process over which the house of economic democracy must assert its exclusive sovereignty. It dispenses with the legislative process, for it is governed not by man-made laws but by a natural law that cannot be broken or biased by any man. This law, which provides absolute equity, is the natural law of competition, or, better, the law of cooperation, since it automatically rewards him who cooperates and withholds rewards from him who does not. The house of economic democracy requires no constitution and no executive or judicial mechanisms. These powers reside in the buyer, who exercises them by the simple criterion of self interest. As the whole consists of its parts, so the exercise of these powers by buyers in endless variety and circumstance compounds the social order in perfection.

Every power of the state must arise either by delegation from the citizen, or by usurpation. If we but give the matter a little independent thought, we can see that the money power can neither be delegated to the state as agent, nor exerted by it as principal. It can reside only in the same place where resides the productive power, and can be exerted only in association with the bargaining power. These powers belong not to the government, but to the individual; for he alone can produce wealth, and he alone can express selectivity and exercise the bargaining power in the market place. Professed money springing from any other source is pure counterfeit. It is a menace to the social order, which is utterly dependent upon the functioning of true money.

We all know that the rise in men’s living standards from primitive times to the present has come about through the specialization of labor, which is made possible by exchange, and that this in turn has been facilitated by the use of money. But do we realize that, without the guidance of the money-pricing system, we would lack all cue as to what products we should apply our specialized labors to? Production and exchange constitute a vast cooperative system wherein the cooperators are mostly strangers and usually remote from one another. Most of civilized man’s energies are devoted to the production of things for which he as an individual has no direct use. His only way of knowing that some other individuals have use for his product, is by the reaction of the market to his product in the form of a money price. The money-pricing system is the antenna of exchange, constantly keeping the cooperative mechanism responsive to demand and supply, by bringing together those buyers and sellers who at any given moment have mutual interests–and in the process regrouping and realigning those interests.

As we pass money from hand to hand, we give little thought to the delicate precision with which it preserves the equity of economic democracy and advances the social order. Every transfer of money registers an impulse on the market that changes the price of some commodity or commodities. These registered prices give the signal for more or less production of the commodities affected, thus keeping human energy, which is the generator of values, intelligently applied. This readjustment is in progress every moment of the day and night. This is the dynamics of social progress, constantly rewarding the efforts of those who conserve human energy and remain responsive to the buyer’s will, and punishing those who do not. If there can be omniscience on earth, here it abides, and it is this all-seeing eye that political planners would sacrifice for the blind directions of bureaucracies.

It is through the preservation and perfection of the monetary system that economic democracy will demonstrate its potential for human welfare. In this way it will avert the disaster that is now threatened by the attempt of the state to exercise a power it cannot command. The challenge is by no means difficult if we ignore the jumble of complexities that have been written about money. Let us forget the false premise of political money power. Let us endeavor neither to reconcile the irreconcilable, nor by some protective device to legitimize the illegitimate. The establishment of a nonpolitical monetary system is but an undertaking in accountancy.

In renouncing the political money idea, we abandon the idea of monetary nationalism. Trade is homogeneous; it knows no nationality, race, color, creed, or caste. Moreover, a truth is universal. Once a monetary science develops, it will no more be localized or nationalized than mathematics is today. There opens before the mind, therefore, the prospect of a universal monetary unit and system that will operate without regard for political boundaries. It will have no nationality or politics. None will be coerced to participate. None will be barred. There will be but one monetary language for the world, and a democratic monetary system will unite people everywhere in the universal freedom of exchange. [emphasis added]

Riegel’s books can be downloaded here. His Valun Mutual Money Plan can be found here on this site.–t.h.g.


9 Comments

Posted in Economics, Prescriptions, The Political Money System

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Money, “Free Trade” and “the China Problem”

Posted on February 22, 2011 | 5 comments

Professor Antal Fekete is an expert on the real bills doctrine and the gold standard. He is someone whose knowledge and insights I respect. This article, which appears on the SilverSeek.com website, draws important parallels between the opium wars of the 18th and 19th centuries and the current trade imbalance between the west (especially the US) and China. It’s the same game of looting but with somewhat different details.

While I don’t agree that a new gold standard is the solution, I recommend Prof, Fekete’s article because it provides the kind of historical perspective that is necessary for understanding what is really going on between China and the west. Rather than a gold standard, I think the world needs an objective, non-political standard of value based on a defined assortment of basic commodities. That is something I’ve written about in all of my books.–t.h.g.

Silver and Opium

By: Professor Antal E. Fekete

— Posted 16 February, 2011 Source: SilverSeek.com

The opium wars do not belong to the glorious episodes of Western history. Rather, they were instances of shameful behavior the West still has not lived down. Mercantilist governments resented the perpetual drain of silver from West to East in payment for Oriental goods (tea, silk, porcelain) that were in high demand in the Occident, facing low demand in the Orient for Occidental goods. From the mid-17th century more than 9 billion Troy ounces or 290 thousand metric tons of silver was absorbed by China from European countries in exchange for Chinese goods.

The British introduced opium along with tobacco as an export item to China in order to reduce their trade deficit. Under the disguise of free trade, the British, the Spanish and the French with the tacit approval of the Americans continued sending their contraband to China through legitimate as well as illegitimate trade channels even after the Chinese dynasty put an embargo on opium imports. Because of its strong appeal to the Chinese masses, and because of its highly addictive nature, opium appeared to be the ideal solution to the West’s trade problem. And, indeed, the flow of silver was first stopped, and then reversed. China was forced to pay silver for her addiction to opium smoking that was artificially induced by the pusher: the British.

Thus silver was replaced by opium as the mainstay of Western exports. In 1729 China, recognizing the growing problem of addiction and the debilitating and mind-corrupting nature of the drug, prohibited the sale and smoking of opium; allowing only a small quota of imports for medicinal purposes. The British defied the embargo and ban on opium trade, and encouraged smuggling. As a result, British exports of opium to China grew from an estimated 15 tons to 75 by 1773. This increased further to 900 tons by 1820; and to 1400 tons annually by 1838 — an almost 100-fold increase in 100 years.

Something had to be done. The Chinese government introduced death penalty for drug trafficking, and put British processing and distributing facilities on Chinese soil under siege. Chinese troops boarded British ships in international waters carrying opium to Chinese ports and destroyed their cargo, in addition to the destruction of opium found on Chinese territory. The British accused the Chinese of destroying British property, and sent a large British-Indian army to China in order to exact punishment.

British military superiority was clearly evident in the armed conflict. British warships wreaked havoc on coastal towns. After taking Canton the British sailed up the Yangtze River. They grabbed the tax barges, inflicting a devastating blow on the Chinese as imperial revenues were impossible to collect. In 1842 China sued for peace that was concluded in Nanking and ratified the following year. In the treaty China was forced to pay an indemnity to Britain, open four port cities where British subjects were given extraterritorial privileges, and cede Hong Kong to Britain. In 1844 the United States and France signed similar treaties with China.

These humiliating treaties were criticized in the House of Commons by William E. Gladstone, who later served as Prime Minister. He was wondering “whether there had ever been a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated to cover Britain with permanent disgrace.” The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston replied that nobody believed that the Chinese government’s motive was “the promotion of good moral habits”, or that the war was fought to stem China’s balance of trade deficit. The American president John Quincy Adams chimed in during the debate by suggesting that opium was a “mere incident”. According to him “the cause of the war was the arrogant and insupportable pretensions of China that she would hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of the relations between lord and vassal.” These words are echoed, 160 years later, by president Obama’s recent disdainful pronouncements to the effect that China’s exchange-rate policy is unacceptable to the rest of mankind as it pretends that China’s currency is that of the lord, and everybody else’s is that of the vassal.

The peace of Nanking did not last. The Chinese searched a suspicious ship, and the British answered by putting the port city of Canton under siege in 1856, occupying it in 1857. The French also entered the fray. British troops were approaching Beijing and set on to destroy the Summer Palace. China again was forced to sue for peace. In the peace treaty of Tianjin China yielded to the demand to create ten new port cities, and granted foreigners free passage throughout the country. It also agreed to pay an indemnity of five million ounces of silver: three million to Britain and two million to France.

This deliberate humiliation of China by the Western powers contributed greatly to the loosening and ultimate snapping of the internal coherence of the Qing Dynasty, leading to the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), the Boxer Uprising (1899-1901) and, ultimately, to the downfall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912.

The present trade dispute between the U.S. and China is reminiscent of the background to the two Opium Wars. Once more, the issue is the humiliation and plunder of China as a “thank you” for China’s favor of having provided consumer goods for which the West was unable to pay in terms of Western goods suitable for Chinese consumption. The only difference is the absence of opium in the dispute.

Oops, I take it back. The role of opium in the current dispute is played by paper. Paper dollars, to be precise. In 1971 an atrocity was made that I call the Nixon-Friedman conspiracy. To cover up the shame and disgrace of the default of the U.S. on its international gold obligations, Milton Friedman (following an earlier failed attempt of John M. Keynes) concocted a spurious and idiotic theory of floating exchange rates. It suggests that falling foreign exchange value of the domestic currency makes it stronger when in actual fact the opposite is true: it is made weaker as the terms of trade of the devaluing country deteriorates and that of its trading partners improves. Nixon was quick to embrace the false theory of Friedman. No public debate of the plan was permitted then, or ever after. Under the new dispensation the irredeemable dollar was to play the role of the ultimate extinguisher of debt, a preposterous idea. The scheme was imposed on the world under duress as part of the “new millennium”, shaking off the “tyranny of gold”, that “barbarous relic”, the last remnant of superstition, the only remaining “anachronism of the Modern Age”. The ploy was played up and celebrated as a great scientific breakthrough, making it possible for man to shape his own destiny rationally, free of superstition, for the first time ever. Yet all it was a cheap trick to elevate the dishonored paper of an insolvent banker (the U.S.) from scum to the holy of holies: international currency. The fact that fiat paper money has a history of 100 percent mortality was neatly side-stepped. Any questioning of the wisdom of experimenting with is in spite of logic and historical evidence was declared foggy-bottom reactionary thinking.

The amazing thing about this episode of the history of human folly was the ease with which it could be pushed down the throat of the rest of the world, including those nations that were directly hurt by it, such as the ones running a trade surplus with the U.S. Their savings went up in smoke. The explanation for this self-destructing behavior is the addictive, debilitating and mind-corrosive nature of paper money, in direct analogy with that of opium. The high caused by administering the opium pipe to the patient (read: administering QE) had to be repeated when the effect faded by a fresh administration of more opium (read: more QE2).

If the patient resists, like China did in 1840, then a holy opium war must be declared on it in the name of the right of others to free trade. 170 years later a New China once more demurred against the paper-torture treatment it was subjected to by the American debt-mongers and opium pushers.

But beware: if the West starts another Opium War, this time it is not China that will be on the losing side.

Reference: Opium Wars, Wikipedia, June 29, 2010.

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Posted in Geo-politics, Global Economy, Prescriptions, The Political Money System

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The World’s Ominous Reckoning

Posted on January 25, 2011 | 3 comments

My latest article, The World’s Ominous Reckoning, is featured on Reality Sandwich. It was also excerpted and posted on the P2P Foundation blog.

For your convenience, I also post it here.

The World’s Ominous Reckoning

By Thomas H. Greco

In a recent Washington Post article titled Europe’s ominous reckoning [1], economist Robert Samuelson correctly argued that “Ireland’s economic crisis is … not about Ireland.” What he seems to not recognize is that “Europe’s ominous reckoning” is not about Europe.

The reckoning will be global because the money and banking regime is global — and deeply flawed.

Discussions about possible solutions to the debt crisis tend to degenerate into ideological bickering because ideologies provides an inadequate framework in which to understand the nature of the problem and discover real effective solutions. Fiscal conservatives want to cut social spending so as to avoid raising taxes on the rich and privileged class. Political liberals have largely caved in to the same interests because they think that supporting the privileged class’s agenda is their only hope of gaining power. They will pay lip service to a social agenda and throw a few crumbs to the masses in an attempt to get elected, but they will ultimately advance the same elitist agenda, as have Presidents Clinton and Obama. Progressives argue that budgets can be balanced by cutting the military budget and raising taxes on the rich, but they remain impotent because political power has been so thoroughly centralized that popular progressive agendas have not a prayer of being implemented. Even if they were, they would simply make matters worse because under the present money and banking regime, a balanced government budget is not possible. How can the debate move beyond ideologies, and common ground be found?

Samuelson, like almost all conventionally trained economists, blames the woes of Ireland, and every other country, on failures in policy. He says, “Most European economies suffer from the ill effects of some combination of easy money, unsustainable social spending and big budget deficits,” but he fails to address the deeper questions of why? Why has money been easy? Why is social spending unsustainable? Why have budget deficits been too big?

It is not only a problem of European economies, it is a problem for virtually all national economies. As Samuelson points out, even the most prosperous countries have accumulated enormous debts. The governments of Germany and France, for example, have, respectively, gross debts of 76 percent and 86 percent of GDP (GDP is a measure of total economic output). The debt of the United States government is projected to exceed 100% of GDP within the next couple of years. And this picture does not even include the debts of lower levels of government — states, counties, and municipalities — or all of the private sector debt that burdens companies and individuals.

If the world has become so prosperous and productive, why all this debt, and why does it continue to grow ever more rapidly?

It is not a matter of policy, i.e., how we operate a flawed system. The problem is structural and systemic. The system is designed to create debt, and ever more of it. Like a pernicious cancer, debt is a parasite that is killing us, and in the end a parasite will die along with its host. How much of our well-being shall we sacrifice to keep feeding this cancer? Are we willing to starve ourselves and our children, to endure cuts in spending for education and public services, to sacrifice our hard-won freedoms, in order to sustain a system that despoils the earth, destroys the social fabric,  and creates ever greater economic inequities?

A few have been calling for “debt forgiveness,” a remedy analogous to cancer surgery. That may be a good start, but even that does no go far enough. We can excise the cancer, but if we do not recognize and eliminate its fundamental cause it will simply grow back. We can restart the game of Monopoly, but the outcome of the next round will be very much like that of the previous round unless we change the rules — or choose to play a different game.

The fact is, there is a debt imperative that is built into the global system of money and banking, and debt is eating us alive. As I wrote in my first book more than 20 years ago, our money system, based as it is on banks’ lending money into circulation at compound interest, requires debt to grow with the passage of time. Virtually all of the money today is created when banks make “loans.” The compounding of interest on these loans means that debt must grow as time goes on, not slowly, but at an accelerating rate. Ever greater amounts of money must be borrowed into circulation for this system to continue. When the private sector debt can no longer be expanded, government assumes the role of “borrower of last resort.” That is why government budget deficits have become chronic and continue to grow. In the latest cycle of Bubble and Bust, governments are rescuing the banks by taking “toxic” debt off their hands and giving them government bonds in return. In this way, the system can be sustained a little bit longer, but at costs that have yet to be tallied.

The current global predicament is the late-stage symptom of this fundamental flaw. Every political currency collectivizes credit. It is our credit that supports each national currency. We have allowed the banks to control our credit and we pay them interest for the “privilege” of accessing some of it as bank “loans.”

What must be done? The answer is simple, but few have been willing to hear it: interest must be eliminated from the money system to put an end to the growth imperative. To modern economists, such a proposition is heresy, foolish even, unthinkable! Interest to them is an essential inducement to save and invest and a necessary means of regulating credit and the economy. Nonsense, I say, a gross error and delusion fostered by incessant propaganda, media hype, and financial mumbo-jumbo. In an economy that is free from inflation, preservation of one’s capital is sufficient motivation for saving, and return on productive investments can be had in the form of ownership shares (so-called equity investment) instead of interest on debt. Such equity investments share both the rewards and the risks inherent in a productive enterprise, making the relationship between the user of funds and the provider of funds more harmonious and fair. As for regulating credit, we don’t need interest to do that; we can merely decide to withhold or offer credit, to whom, for what purpose, and in what amounts.

We need to learn to play a different game. We need to organize an entirely new structure of money, banking, and finance, one that is interest-free, decentralized, and controlled, not by banks or central governments, but by businesses and individuals that associate and organize themselves into cashless trading networks. This is a way to reclaim “the credit commons” from monopoly control and create healthy community economies.

In brief, any group of traders can organize to allocate their own collective credit amongst themselves, interest-free. This is merely an extension of the common business practice of selling on open account — “I’ll ship you the goods now and you can pay me later,” except it is organized, not on a bilateral basis, but within a community of many buyers and sellers. Done on a large enough scale that includes a sufficiently broad range of goods and services spanning all levels of the supply chain from retail, to wholesale, to manufacturing, to basic commodities, such systems can avoid the dysfunctions inherent in conventional money and banking and open the way to more harmonious and mutually beneficial trading relationships that enable the emergence of sustainable economies and promote the common good.

This approach is no pie-in-the-sky pipe dream, it is proven and well established. Known as mutual credit clearing, it is a process that is used by scores of commercial “barter” companies around the world to provide cashless trading for their business members. In this process, the things you sell pay for the things you buy without using money as an intermediate exchange medium. It’s as simple as that. According to the International Reciprocal Trade Association (IRTA), a major trade association for the industry, “IRTA Member companies using the “Modern Trade and Barter” process, made it possible for over 400,000 companies World Wide to utilize their excess business capacities and underperforming assets, to earn an estimated $12 billion dollars in previously lost and wasted revenues.”

Perhaps the best example of a credit clearing exchange that has been successful over a long period of time is the WIR Economic Circle Cooperative. Founded in Switzerland as a self-help organization in 1934 in the midst of the Great Depression, WIR provided a means for its business members to trade with one another despite the shortage of official money in circulation. Over three-quarters of a century, in good time and bad, WIR has continued to thrive. Its more than 60,000 members throughout Switzerland trade about $2 billion worth of goods and services annually.

Yes, it is possible to transcend the dysfunctional money and banking system and to take back our power from bankers and politicians who use it to abuse and exploit us. We do it, not by petitioning politicians who are already bought and paid for by an ever more powerful elite group, but by using the power that is already ours to use the resources we have to support each other’s productivity and to give credit where credit is due.

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Posted in Global Economy, Prescriptions, The Political Money System

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States beginning to assert their money power

Posted on January 16, 2011 | 12 comments

Bills have recently been introduced in several states to try to address the money problem. In an article that appeared in Financialsense.com, Robert Kientz describes actions that are occurring in several states. It is unclear how much support the various bills might have, or what their chances of passage might be, but Kientz implies that the state of Virginia has already taken official action to at least study the matter of using alternative payment media other than Federal Reserve currency. He says:

Virginia announced yesterday that the state would commission a study of alternative currencies including gold and silver in House Joint Resolution No. 557. A selected quote from Resolution 557:

WHEREAS, the Supreme Court of the United States in Lane County v. Oregon, 74 U.S. (7 Wallace) 71, 76-78 (1869), and Hagar v. Reclamation District No. 108, 111 U.S. 701, 706 (1884), has ruled that the States may adopt whatever currency they desire for the purposes of performing their sovereign governmental functions, even to the extent of adopting gold and silver coin for those purposes while refusing to employ a currency not redeemable in gold or silver coin that Congress has designated “legal tender”;

Such actions are a hopeful sign that the money power, and the political power that goes along with it, are devolving away from Wall Street and Washington and back to our states and communities. The states have a powerful weapon in the form of the United States Constitution, which declares that, no state shall make any thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.

Of the two metals, I much prefer silver as the value standard, for several reasons. My main objection to gold is that it is closely held by a few banks and governments that are able to manipulate its market price, and thus manipulate the economy if gold were to play a major monetary role. Silver is much more abundant and widely held, and while present market mechanisms enable a few entities to manipulate its market price, I think parallel  mechanisms can be put into place that would assure a freer market giving silver a more stable value. Ideally, however, trading entities will ultimately adopt an objective value measure using a composite commodity standard composed of a “market basket” of basic commodities.

Keynes was not wrong in calling gold “a barbarous relic,” but that’s not the whole story. We must also recognize that central banks, legal tender laws, and credit monopolies are relics even more barbarous than gold. The separation of money and state must ultimately be gained in order to have a truly free and harmonious society.

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Posted in Developing Alternatives, Prescriptions, The Political Money System

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States face serious budget challenges; no help from federal government

Posted on January 9, 2011 | 1 comment

In a speech delivered in Phoenix last Friday, David Stockman, budget chief under President Ronald Reagan, painted a gloomy picture for the economy.  According to the Arizona Republic, “Stockman told the assembled legislators, business and civic officials and others that the nation’s Capitol will offer no help and probably will complicate matters.”

“Washington will become a fountain of harm as you struggle with our own problems,” he said, but the article did not describe what might spew forth from that “fountain of harm.” It did mention that “His prescription for restoring balance to the federal budget calls for a mix of tax hikes, budget cuts and entitlement reforms, such as means-testing Social Security.” (read more here).

Why was there no mention of the bloated military and war budget, the maintenance of bases in countries around the world, or the enormous levels of wasteful pork barrel spending that Congress has become addicted to?

What is a state like Arizona to do?

The feds will do what they will do. The states will need to solve their own problems using their own resources, despite whatever destructive measures continue to emanate from Washington and New York.

In the coming weeks, we will be offering our own prescriptions for actions to be taken at the state level. These will outline basic measures that states need to implement in order to address their deepening financial woes and to make the inevitable transition to a steady-state economy. What we have in mid will be much more radical and salutary than anything being offered elsewhere. Stay tuned. –t.h.g.

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Posted in Finance and Economics, Prescriptions

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Plunder beyond belief, FED reluctantly shows the smoking gun.

Posted on December 12, 2010 | 4 comments

I have for decades been trying to explain the parasitic nature of the global financial regime and the political order that has become subservient to it. Now, the evidence has become so overwhelmingly obvious that even the most dubious and somnambulistic amongst us cannot ignore its meaning.

On December 5 I posted an item that included Senator Bernie Sanders’ courageous speech about the class war that is being waged against virtually everyone by the super-wealthy elite. In that speech, the Senator referenced the long awaited report from the FED that Congress has demanded. This report has started a firestorm involving even the mainstream financial media.

In this recent article, David DeGraw, lays it all out in detail (Wall Street’s Pentagon Papers: Biggest Financial Scam in World History) with numbers and quotes from various sources. Please read it.

Now it is up to us to do something about it.

What can be done? My book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, lays out prescriptions for communities, grassroots organizations, businesses, and governments. The time to act is now!

4 Comments

Posted in Finance and Economics, Prescriptions, The Debt Imperative, The Political Money System

Financial self-defense

Posted on October 10, 2010 | 1 comment

We’ve all been forced to play a game of real-life monopoly. The economy today is being milked, and we all are being parasitized by the banks and the government. Ever more people are beginning to understand the mechanics of how this is being done and looking for ways to protect themselves. The entire system of money and banking, with the help of top-level political leaders, has been structured to enable the few to exploit the many. The need is for a fundamental restructuring of money and the exchange process. In the meantime, there are some things that we can do to mitigate the effects of a corrupt system This article that appeared in AlterNet several months ago provides some advice.

10 Ways to Screw Over the Corporate Jackals Who’ve Been Screwing You

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Posted in Finance and Economics, Prescriptions, The Political Money System

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How to prepare for the new economic paradigm

Posted on September 6, 2010 | 3 comments

For years I’ve been saying that we are making a shift toward a new economic paradigm, and recommending that people prepare for it. About a year ago I posted a revised version of my Survival Strategies for Troubled Times on my other blog, Tom’s News and Views. Here is a pared down list from another related article that comes from a website called, The Economic Collapse.

10 Practical Steps That You Can Take To Insulate Yourself (At Least Somewhat) From The Coming Economic Collapse

1 – Get Out Of Debt

2 – Find New Sources Of Income

3 – Reduce Your Expenses

4 – Learn To Grow Your Own Food

5 – Make Sure You Have A Reliable Water Supply

6 – Buy Land

7 – Get Off The Grid

8 – Store Non-Perishable Supplies

9 – Develop Stronger Relationships

10 – Get Educated And Stay Flexible

You should read the full article here.

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Posted in Emerging paradigm, Finance and Economics, Prescriptions

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Investing in Uncertain Times

Posted on August 3, 2010 | 6 comments

A few weeks ago, after I commented on something she said in her monthly newsletter, author and alternative financial consultant, Susan Boskey (Susan@AlternativeFinancialNow.com), asked me to write something about investing for a subsequent issue. (You can find additional information on her website). Here is the article I wrote, which she has published. It expresses my idea about our current situation, and my advice about how to better use our resources in this time of transition.  – t.h.g.

Investing in Uncertain Times

Thomas H. Greco, Jr.

Many people today are in a quandary about their personal savings and investments. The conventional advice has it that every family should have three to six months’ living expenses squirreled away. But that begs another question which is, in what form should that ‘nest egg’ be held?

Is it safe and prudent to leave it in a bank? Should I buy bonds, or stocks, or real estate, or commodity futures? How can I balance risk with income and capital appreciation? These are questions that are difficult to answer even in “normal” times, but the present situation seems especially uncertain. The near financial meltdown of a couple of years ago coupled with the ongoing stream of bad economic news leads one to wonder, along with billionaire George Soros, is this the end of an era?

I think it is. My view on the matter is that the era of economic growth is over, kaput, finished. If you stop for a minute to think about it, you must admit that we live on a finite planet, that we are rapidly using up the available resources, that we are adding ever more pollution to our air, water and land, and that the distance (in time) between the end of the production line and regional dump is growing ever shorter. This cannot continue. Nature shows us that nothing grows forever. What would it be like if children never stopped growing? What happens as insect or animal populations grow? They either level off or experience a catastrophic collapse.

So, if we cannot expect the economy to return to what has been “normal” in our past, what can we expect? I believe that we must, and in fact are right now transitioning toward a steady-state economy, one in which overall quantitative growth is supplanted by qualitative development, i.e., an improvement in the conditions of life that really matter,

This is a transition that I compare to the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly. The caterpillar’s role is to eat and to grow, i.e., to accumulate the resources that will be used during the chrysalis stage by the emergent butterfly as it assembles itself into a new and different creature. The butterfly behavior contrasts sharply with that of the caterpillar. While the caterpillar can be very destructive as it devours plants, the butterfly helps to pollinate them as it sips nectar from their blossoms.

So, if this is an apt description of what is going on, we ought to withdraw our resources from Wall Street investments that perpetuate “the Caterpillar economy” of endless consumption and despoliation, and start investing in “the Butterfly economy,” which is more equitable, sustainable and restorative of the environment upon which our lives ultimately depend.

This can be achieved through

  • the Localization of Production,
  • on a Human Scale,
  • for Local Consumption,
  • using Locally Available Inputs.

As our communities become more self-reliant, we become more secure, providing for ourselves more of our food, energy, housing and other necessities of life.

Right now, the economy is in a depression because in the wake of the last bubble-bust cycle the private productive sector is being starved for credit while the wasteful government-military-industrial-financial sector is appropriating ever more resources to keep itself alive. There is not much we can do about that since the political power is mainly in the hands of those interests. But we can use our own resources in our own communities to secure a better future for ourselves and our descendants.

In a depression “cash is king” because many people don’t have enough of it to cover ordinary living expenses. At the same time, the money powers are inflating the currency at unheard of rates, so ultimately fixed-dollar securities, including bank deposits, will be eaten up by rising prices.

If savers and small investors can buy into local enterprises that provide returns as a share of their actual product, they can achieve some measure of security (in food and energy, for example) while transforming depreciating dollars into something (like food, or alcohol for fuel to replace gasoline) that will become increasingly valuable as time goes on. Use value is becoming more important than market value, and personal responsibility and local cooperation are becoming more important than reliance upon declining institutions and structures.

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Here are a few links to pertinent information:

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Demurrage: is it a good idea for a local currency or exchange system?

Posted on July 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

I’ve added a new monograph on the subject of demurrage to this site. You’ll find it in the sidebar to the right under Resources: Monographs: Demurrage: is it a good idea for a local currency or exchange system?

Or click here.

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Posted in Developing Alternatives, Exchange Design, Prescriptions

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