photography by James Moloney
I performed outside the central bank in Dublin to raise awareness about the current monetary system, its flaws and the solutions to the challenges it poses. I wanted to see how I could inform people about these issues in an innovative and interesting manner.
Without preaching to the converted or patronising those affected by the economic crisis I just wanted to encourage dialogue on the matter. This experience at best could be transformative and the sentence I wrote highlighted the importance of empowering the individual through knowledge and understanding. I wrote in one cent coins “to understand is to transform what is”
This is the text presented in the golden envelope
Private corporations or banks create money which government and society then borrows with interest.
They are legally allowed to lend money they do not have using the fractional reserve system.
Fractional-reserve banking refers to the common banking practice of issuing more money than the bank holds as reserves. Banks in modern economies typically loan their customers many times the sum of the cash reserves that they hold.
By charging us interest the current money system can only function with perpetually accelerating growth within the economy. This leads to debt because perpetually accelerating growth is not sustainable.
The debt system employed by banks creates a social environment where only certain types of behaviour flourish and this tends to inhibit or destroy any tendency towards long term concerns and nourishment.
The government is now bailing out a dysfunctional system because there are few in power with the courage to reform it.
This is because the banking industry has become alarmingly powerful.
“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.” ~ Mayer Anselm Rothschild, banker.
A sustainable economy needs a monetary system which will allow for its resources to be mobilized towards a greater destiny than being used to pay off debt.
Political and business leaders could be motivated to put the planets welfare ahead of stock markets and profits if the current money system was changed. Technology could be used to create a sane, fairer and sustainable lifestyle for us all if we were not constantly indebt.
For more information please look at Chris Martenson’s “Crash Course” which is a forecast of the future economy and options. To find out more about where money comes from look on Youtube for Paul Grignons “Money as Debt”
“Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master of all industry and commerce…and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.” ~ James A. Garfield, assassinated President of the United States.
“The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity.” ~ Abraham Lincoln, assassinated President of the United States.
“The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough money to buy it back again…Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for then this world would be a better and happier place to live in. But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.” ~ Sir Josiah Stamp, Director, Bank of England 1928-1941 (reputed to be the 2nd richest man in England at the time).
“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal, there is no human relation between master and slave.” ~ Leo Tolstoy.
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National auto-determination practiced in past centuries.” ~ David Rockefeller in an address to Trilateral Commission meeting, 1991.
“Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity.” ~ Marshall McLuhan, media ‘guru’.
Bernard Lietaer is an economist who spent five years at the Central Bank in Belgium, where his first project was the design and implementation of the Euro. The following is his opinion on the current monetary system and possible solutions to the challenges that have arisen.
“Since 1971 when Nixon detached the dollar from the gold standard (when he stopped the dollars in circulation from being backed up in reserves by gold) we have been in a new monetary experiment where there is no historical precedent, bank debt currencies only relating to each other without any anchor to the real economy. That was the first step in a change to the monetary system. A crash in the system will be worse than the 1930’s because the 1930’s was limited, basically to the united states and Europe, the rest of the world was only marginally affected and in fact thrived well in certain places. We now have a global system that’s in trouble. I believe that different currency systems create different types of relationships. Traditional or conventional national currencies are competitive and create competition between people.
I have come to the conclusion that greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive.
For the first time in human history we have available the production technologies to create unprecedented abundance. Also there is enough food and shelter for everyone so scarcity needn’t be the guiding principle of our economic system even in a world of limited resources.
I believe that the economy of the future is going to be one of relationships, that’s the key and the choice of relationships will determine the type of currency we should be using. My forecast is that local currencies will be a major tool for social design in the 21st century, if for no other reasons than employment. I don’t claim that these local currencies will or should replace national currencies; that is why I call them “complementary” currencies. The national, competition-generating currencies will still have a role in the competitive global market. I believe, however, that complementary local currencies are a lot better suited to developing cooperative, local economies.
For example, in France, there are now 300 local exchange networks, called Grain de Sel, literally “Grain of Salt.” These systems – which arose exactly when and where the unemployment levels reached about 12 percent – facilitate exchanges of everything from rent to organic produce, but they do something else as well. Every fortnight in the Ariege, in south-western France, there is a big party. People come to trade not only cheeses, fruits, and cakes as in the normal market days, but also hours of plumbing, haircuts, sailing or English lessons. Only local currencies accepted!
We need to consciously design money to work for us, instead of us for it.
I propose that we choose to develop money systems that will enable us to attain sustainability and community healing on a local and global scale. These objectives are in our grasp within less than one generation’s time. Whether we materialize them or not will depend on our capacity to cooperate with each other to consciously reinvent our money.”
For more information please look up Beyond Greed and Scarcity by Bernard Lietaer at http://www.yesmagazine.org.
Herman E. Daly (1938-), is an American economist recognized as one of the founders of the field of ecological economics and as a critic of standard economic growth theory. Daly’s worked has centered on the relationship of the economy to the environment, and the relationship of the economy to ethics. At this critical juncture in our history he is providing solutions that will lead us away from ecological and economic crises.
“We cannot continue growing, and in fact so-called “economic” growth already has become uneconomic. The growth economy is failing. In other words, the quantity of expansion required by the current monetary system increases environmental and social costs faster than production benefits, making us poorer not richer, at least in high-consumption countries.
The current monetary system fails to take into account how economic processes consume resources and generate wastes. Continual growth means a quicker rate of resource extraction and ever more waste.
Mainstream economists are grudgingly coming to accept the fact that there are ecological limits to our growth after all.
In a world where we must make more modest demands on nature, Daly has focused on ensuring that we use those limited resources to produce real wealth that addresses real human needs”
Below are some examples of Daly’s crucial steps that are needed to attain an ecologically viable economic future.
-International capital mobility, coupled with free trade, allows corporations to escape from national regulation in the public interest, playing one nation off against another. Since there is no global government they are, in effect, uncontrolled. The nearest thing we have to a global government (IMF-WB-WTO) has shown no interest in regulating transnational capital for the common good. These processes need to be policed.
-Taxing what we want less of (depletion and pollution), and ceasing to tax what we want more of (income, value added) would seem reasonable – as the bumper sticker puts it, “tax bads, not goods.”
-Enclose the remaining commons of natural capital in public trusts, and price it, while freeing from private enclosure and prices the commonwealth of knowledge and information.
Sharing knowledge costs little, does not create unrepayable debts, and it increases the productivity of scarce factors in production. Existing knowledge is the most important input to the production of new knowledge, and keeping it artificially scarce and expensive is perverse. Patent monopolies (aka “intellectual property rights”) should be given for fewer “inventions,” and for fewer years.
Price what is truly scarce such as contributions from nature. Stop treating the scarce as if it were non-scarce, and the non-scarce as if it were scarce.
-Stabilize population – Work toward a balance in which births plus in-migrants equals deaths plus out-migrants.
-The rich should reduce the amount of resources they consume to free up resources and ecological space for use by the poor, while focusing their domestic efforts on development, technical and social improvements, that can be freely shared with poor countries.
-One hundred percent reserves would put our money supply back under the control of the government rather than the private banking sector.
Lending only money that has actually been saved by someone re- establishes the classical balance between abstinence and investment.
Move to 100 percent reserve requirements instead of fractional-reserve banking. Put control of money supply in the hands of the government rather than private banks.
For more information please go tohttp://www.adbusters.org
photography by James Moloney
