There are none so insightful and poetic as the Irish. This short speech by Terry McMahon sums up the rot that has overtaken Western countires as the people, by our misplaced trust, have allowed our so-called leaders to betray us and sell off our material and cultural heritage. No more! Listen, think, and act. Stand for truth, stand for reason, stand for freedom.
This is the latest chapter to be published of my new 2024 edition of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. It provides a comprehensive overview of the alternative exchange movement over the past several decades and its present state, along with important case studies, lessons learned, and prescriptions for significant performance improvements.
Here is a list of section headings with a few brief excerpts:
A currency, to be effective, must be SPENT into circulation. — Thomas H. Greco, Jr
Two Currents of Alternative Exchange
The Tucson Experience
More Recent Experiments in Mutual Credit Clearing In order for a mutual credit clearing exchange to be scalable and successful over the long run,
The allocation of credit lines cannot be arbitrary but must be based primarily on the value of the goods and services that each participant is prepared to sell within the exchange circle, and,
The project must be anchored in the local business community, especially the small- and medium-sized enterprises that form the backbone of every local economy and are the providers of people’s everyday needs.
Local Currencies
A Better Currency Model A sound, credible, effective, and scalable currency does not need to be redeemable for conventional money, the issuer needs only to provide credible assurance that its currency can be readily redeemed for some goods or services that are in general demand. Private or community currencies that are SPENT into circulation by trusted issuers, like utility companies, goods producers, or municipal governments, have much greater potential for promoting local community prosperity, resilience, and self-determination because they allow a community to monetize the value that is created and sold by local businesses and professionals. The internal “trade credits” provided to members of mutual credit clearing associations, like those being created by the scores of commercial “barter” exchanges that operate around the world, do the same. Such home-grown sources of liquidity enable a community to greatly reduce its dependence upon official money and bank borrowing, and to automatically favor local production and local sourcing of goods and services, thus reducing dependence upon imports and global corporate providers.
We are living in very turbulent and uncertain times in which division and confusion are being intentionally sown by competing forces in hopes of capturing hearts and minds to garner support for one agenda or another. But people are allowed to see only the facades of agendas that are largely hidden; that is why it is essential to pay attention to every voice and every perspective and measure each in relation to our values, attitudes, and beliefs, allowing dissonant evidence, when it is presented to us, some space for serious consideration.
There is much more I could say about this but my intention at the moment is to share a few bits that may be useful to you in your efforts to understand what’s happening in the world, what the near future may bring, and what you might need to know in prepare for it.
Firstly, I recommend to you the thoughts of Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics, who writes from the perspective of “The transcendent center,” which he describes as reconciling polarized issues by unearthing the unconscious assumptions both sides share and the questions neither side asks.” It does not seek compromise but “unifies them in a greater synthesis.”
Secondly, take a few minutes to watch and listen to this recent interview by Judge Andrew Napolitano of noted journalist Pepe Escobar in which the situations in Ukraine and the Middle-east were discussed. Pepe reports on an important conference that just took place in Istanbul in which various knowledgeable political figures and scholars discussed Israel, Iran, and other players in the ongoing conflict, and likely scenarios for future developments in the region and globally.
And thirdly, if that doesn’t get your attention and raise alarm bells, listen to this one:
Love or die; that’s a James Bond movie I’d really like to see. I wonder what Big Entertainment would do with that theme. The human condition is looking to be ever more tenuous amid increasing numbers and intensity of natural disasters, warnings about new microbes and diseases, economic crises, social and political unrest, and “wars and rumors of wars”—all of it hyped to the max by the mainstream legacy media with one evident intent, to persuade you to be fearful, trust “the system” to tell you the truth, and accept the solutions, cures, and dictates that come to you from the top of the entrenched human hierarchy.
Meanwhile, those same elite few are preparing for the worst, which they see as inevitable. That story is intelligently told in this recent post by Jamie Wheal on Substack, Doomsday Prep for the Rest of Us. This quote is a spoiler but I just can’t resist sharing it: “…a fractional minority of humanity has seized the wheel of our collective future. And your “redemption” means everyone else’s likely annihilation.” If that sounds to you like conspiracy theory, you really need to read the article.
And if you’re seeking a more promising means of surviving and a better future for everyone, pay attention to those who down through the ages have tried to show us what Richard Flyer is now calling “the Ancient Blueprint” which can lead us toward a “Symbiotic Culture.”
For a brief 10 minute introduction, see Richard’s video, Heart of the Matter is the Matter of the Heart.
John Mauldin’s recent article, Late Summer Sandpile, is one of his best–thought-provoking and very timely. As an investment advisor, his primary concern is with financial markets and systems, but the academic research findings in complexity and systems theory have a broader relevance. Thinking about systems as sand piles, academics can examine the dimensions of stability and instability as they occur in a wide variety of systems. After reading the article, I felt inclined to respond. Here below is what his article evoked in me.
Our civilization “sand pile” is comprised of many diverse but related fingers of instability, some small, some large, and many interconnected; that puts our entire civilization at risk. Among the most worrisome features are the astronomical growth of debt, religious, and cultural conflicts, competing political ideologies, and international intrigues and violence involving players that are now in command of unprecedented destructive power. If the conflict between Ukraine/NATO and Russia doesn’t trigger a nuclear war in the near term as Peter Koenig expects, the mountains of debt being built up will trigger a global financial collapse in the not-too-distant future. Markets are much more centralized than they used to be and are increasingly dominated by a few major players which tosses free market theories of market behavior out the window. Virtually all markets today are manipulated by huge corporations, investment funds, and asset management firms. But the biggest manipulators are the national governments of the major powers and their partners who run the global banking cartel. The top dog among them is the US government which has greatly abused the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It doles out privileges not only via legislation and executive orders, but increasingly by the preferential expenditure of massive amounts of legalized counterfeit money to favored clients and proxy governments in a desperate attempt to preserve and extend its “full spectrum dominance,” and replace democratic national governments with a One-World neo-feudal world order. The US and its allies are pushing the limits in the hope and expectation that there will not be a reaction big enough to upset their apple cart. But as Mauldin reminds us, one small grain of sand is often all it takes.
This short video about Sarvodaya describes with great clarity the pathway toward creating a decentralized, peaceful, convivial society that Gandhi and others have envisioned, and the Symbiotic Culture that Richard Flyer has for a long time been working on and writing about.
This is the latest chapter to be published of my new 2024 edition of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. It summarizes the dimensions of the money problem and the pathways toward solving it as we described them in the previous chapters, and elaborates upon the various functions of money and finance and how they can be handled in ways that are honest, fair, and empowering.
Here is a brief excerpt:
The political money system is the keystone in the arch of power. —Thomas H. Greco, Jr.
Having laid the necessary foundation in the first eleven chapters, we can now proceed to summarize the requirements for solving the money problem. We have shown how money has been politicized and how the control over its creation and allocation has become, what I call, “the keystone in the arch of power,” a power which is at once financial, economic, political, and social. Those who control money are able to control everything else. The inherent dysfunctions of the present monetary regime derive mainly from the following structural elements:
The monopolization of credit by the banking cartel in collusion with national governments
The creation of money by banks as interest-bearing “loans”
Legal tender status for official debt-money
The elimination of any operational concrete measure of value and unit of account
We have seen how that system:
Enables national governments to finance endless wars and other projects that are wasteful, destructive, and contrary both to the wishes of the citizenry and to the common welfare
Enables banks to reap inordinate profits while deciding to whom and for what purpose the money shall be distributed among “borrowers”
Gives a small, elite “super-class” the non-bona-fide money to acquire an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s real wealth and the ability to control political and economic affairs worldwide
Forces the exponential growth of debt, and destructive competition for an always-insufficient supply of money for all debts to be repaid
Emerging Exchange Alternatives
The most graceful and promising approach to empowering ourselves and our communities is through voluntary, entrepreneurial activities that can liberate the exchange process and reclaim “the credit commons.” So long as people have the freedom of association and the right to contract it will be difficult if not impossible for governments to prevent the creation of exchange media and mechanisms by private initiative. We can thereby, step-by-step, reduce our dependence upon bank borrowing and political currencies, taking control of our own credit and organizing independent means for allocating it directly to those individuals and businesses that we trust and wish to support. Riegel reminds us that, “there is no constitutional or statutory barrier to the inauguration of a private enterprise, non-debt, non-interest, mutual money system.” Only popular control of credit and competition in currencies can transcend the money problem. As Ulrich von Beckerath has observed, “Extension of exchange transactions without State money is in reality the beginning of a new system of settling accounts, indeed the beginning of a new economic order.” A new economic order is precisely what is needed at this point in history.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine intelligence officer and chief weapons inspector for the wapons treaty between the US and USSR. He has been working diligently to reduce the threat on nuclear war, a war which is becoming ever more likely given the aggressive stance of the recent US administrations that have not only refused to negotiate with presumed adversaries been but seem bent on extending at all costs US and western control of resources in counries around the world. Scott tells his story in his recent post titled, My Lost Summer, on Substack. I hope you will read it.
This is the latest chapter to be published of my new 2024 edition of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. It continues the story about “credit clearing” that was begun in the previous chapter and shows how it will revolutionize trade and payments and make money, as we have known it, obsolete.
Here is a brief excerpt:
If there were no money, any system of crediting sellers and debiting buyers would be fully competent to accomplish the work now performed by money. – Hugo Bilgram, 1914
In Chapter 10 we explained that the highest stage in the evolution of reciprocal exchange is “credit clearing,” and that banks have been using it for the past few hundred years to settle obligations amongst themselves. In this chapter we will further describe the history and applications of credit clearing, and we will show how clearing can be used to offset claims among not only groups of banks, but also among any persons or entities that have financial claims against one another. Most significantly, it is a process that may be applied among buyers and sellers of goods and services to directly offset their respective claims without involving banks as middle-men and without the need for conventional bank- or government-created currencies.
Direct Clearing Among Buyers and Sellers
Credit clearing is actually an ancient process. During the Middle Ages, credit played a major role in the various European “market towns” which hosted, at regular intervals, trading fairs in which merchants from widely scattered areas would gather to trade their goods. It is reasonable to conclude that the process of credit clearing would have been fundamental in their trading activities. This is evidenced by the fact that these market towns typically provided market courts for settling disputes under “merchant law” that was separate from common law and could be adjudicated in a matter of hours or days. James Davis points out that, “At the pettiest level of sales credit, many traders appear to have acted both as creditors and debtors, and there is evidence for running accounts, reciprocal dealings and a ‘complex of claims and counterclaims,’” and that, “Credit oiled the wheels of trade, and market courts dealt in small-scale sales debts that were integral to local retail and wholesale commerce. A market court ostensibly lowered transaction costs and thus attracted more traders by aiding a perception of the market as ‘fair, affordable, efficient’”.
The possibilities of direct credit clearing among buyers and sellers have long been recognized. In modern times, as early as 1914, Hugo Bilgram and L. E. Levy noted that, “If there were no money, any system of crediting sellers and debiting buyers would be fully competent to accomplish the work now performed by money.” They further suggested that:
“Were a number of businessmen to combine for the purpose of organizing a system of exchange, effective among themselves, they could clearly demonstrate how simple the money system can really be made. The greater the number of businessmen that would thus cooperate, the more complete would be their own emancipation from the obstruction to commerce and industry which existing currency laws impose.”
They then went on to propose such a system and describe how it might operate, which I summarized in one of my previous books and in a website post. I’ll not repeat that here because the context today is much different from what it was in 1914, but we will present a similar proposal based on what has since been learned and tailored to our current realities. I believe that it is no exaggeration to say that the creation and operation of such credit clearing systems is crucial to reversing the present trend toward economic ruin and global tyranny and changing the course toward realizing our human potential and the emergence of a peaceful, convivial civilization in which all can thrive.
You can read or listen to the entire chapter here.
Jem Bendell, former professor and founder of the Initiative for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) at the University of Cumbria (UK) has a highly credentialed background that is impressive by any measure. After a life changing experience, he embarked upon a different life path, delving deeply into diverse disciplines, including the latest climate science, that led to his writing, in 2023, his book, Breaking Together: A freedom-loving response to collapse, in which he summarized his startling conclusions:
“The collapse of modern societies has begun. That is the conclusion of two years of research by the interdisciplinary team behind Breaking Together. How did it come to this? Because monetary systems caused us to harm each other & nature to such an extent it broke the foundations of our societies. So what should we do? This book describes people allowing the full pain of our predicament to liberate them into living more courageously & creatively. They demonstrate we can be breaking together, not apart, in this era of collapse. Jem Bendell argues that reclaiming our freedoms is essential to soften the fall & regenerate the natural world. Escaping the efforts of panicking elites, we can advance an ecolibertarian agenda for both politics & practical action in a broken world.
Jem has since abandoned academia and his “illustrious career of delusion” in favor of a different path that embraces reality and includes practical decentralized actions of adaptation. Breaking Together is available as a free download, but if you would like to get a taste of it before plunging into his 500 page volume, I highly recommend that you listen to this two-part interview in which he quite articulately explains his main ideas, and how we can, by working together, adapt to the inevitable and ongoing collapse of our present version of civilization, and in the process build a better one. Interview Part 1; Part 2.
The work of Richard Flyer puts my own work, and that of Jem Bendell and others within a more comprehensive and foundational context.
In a recent message, Richard Flyer alerts readers to a short video that he posted a couple years ago on his YouTube channel to explain his work of empowerment and societal change. By his own description, “It not only provides solid content about building Symbiotic Cultures and Networks, but it really captures the Spirit, enthusiasm, and hope we need now more than ever—the possibility and reality of Fractal Community Empowerment. It was released more than a year before the book Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint for a New Creation came out on Substack as a weekly series. It shares many of the stories of on-the-ground grassroots movements I have been affiliated with, including San Diego, CA, and Reno, NV, as well as the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement of Sri Lanka – and their relevance today.”
This is the latest chapter to be published of my new 2024 edition of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. It continues the story begun in the previous chapter of how money has evolved and changed its character over time.
Here is a brief excerpt:
Money has become merely an accounting system, a way of “keeping score” in the economic “game” of give and take. —Thomas H. Greco, Jr.
Let us begin by summarizing the evolution of the various kinds of money that have been used to mediate reciprocal exchange:
The circulation of gold and silver coins gave way to paper banknotes that were redeemable for gold or silver coins, which made the notes essentially warehouse receipts for gold on deposit.
Then, banks began to lend bank notes into circulation based on the pledge of collateral assets (some valuable and others not) other than gold, some of which included government obligations (bonds, notes, etc.).
But ALL notes were redeemable in gold. This became known as the “fractional reserve banking” system.
Bank account balances (checkable bank “deposits”) increasingly took the place of paper bank notes, and bank customers began to write checks against their deposits instead of using bank notes to make payments.
As banks created ever greater amounts of non-bona-fide money based on national government debts and other illegitimate collateral assets, the fiction of gold-backing and redeemability could no longer be supported, and governments reneged on their promise to redeem their currency for gold. This broke the final link between political fiat money and the real economy of valuable goods and services.
But, despite that, the emergence of credit clearing to offset credit obligation against credit claims was a major leap forward in facilitating the reciprocal exchange of value.
You can now read or listen to the entire chapter at Future Brightly:
The first edition of my book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, was published by Chelsea Green Publishing in 2009. While it remains as relevant today as it was when first published the printed book has been out of print for several years. But, having had the rights reverted to me by my publisher, I am making the entire book available for free in PDF format. You can read it or download it HERE. If you would like a hard copy of the first edition used copies can still be found on Amazon.com, Abe books, Thrift books and elsewhere.
Better still, you can avail yourself of the new revised and expanded 2024 edition which I have been working on for almost two years and is almost complete. Eighteen chapters have already been posted and can be freely read or download HERE.
My previous books, as published, may be freely accessed in digital format by clicking the title below.
as relevant today as it was when first published the printed book has been out of print for several years. But, having had the rights reverted to me by my publisher, I am making the entire book available for free in PDF format. You can read it or download it HERE. If you would like a hard copy of the first edition used copies can still be found on Amazon.com, Abe books, Thrift books and elsewhere.
Better still, you can avail yourself of the new revised and expanded 2024 edition which I have been working on for almost two years and is almost complete. Eighteen chapters have already been posted and can be freely read or download HERE.
Beyond Money
Beyond Money 