Stan's Next Tom Greco Steps
“Buckminster Fuller has argued that “All who are really dedicated to the earliest possible attainment of economic and physical success for all humanity—and thereby realistically to eliminate war—will have to shift their efforts from the political arena to participate in the design revolution.”126 The approaches advocated in this book are of that sort, and an important element of the “design revolution” is education. I agree with Riegel when he says that,
The greatest enemy of mankind is ignorance of the inherent money power in all of us. When the realization of this comes to man he will, like Sampson, push down the walls of his prison. . . . Finance which is the creature of the unholy wedlock between banker and state cannot be solved by either partner dominating or consuming the other. The only solution lies in the people denying the power of both over industry, and their assertion of their own money power.127
Thus we have called for the separation of money and state, but since the people do not control their government, we believe that separation can only be achieved as the people assert their money power. But, what is this “money power” that Riegel[…]”
Contents
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. While we may not be able to do much in the short-run to change the legal privilege of political currencies or bank-created credit money, we can reduce our dependence upon them. The way to do that is by 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.”128 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.
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Excerpt From Page 147
The End of Money and the Future of Civilization
Reference from Page 243
“the Swiss WIR Bank. WIR, the largest and most successful mutual credit clearing system to date, has for more than seventy years been providing credit clearing services to small- and medium-sized businesses throughout Switzerland. WIR requires that account balances be secured, typically by the pledge of real estate (usually in the form of a second mortgage on the member’s home). The value of such collateral should be used only to assure that a member lives up to his or her agreement and should not be the basis for setting debit limits on the account. Those limits, as we have said, should be based on the volume of sales made by that account.”
LETS Trading Systems
“The clearing process need not be restricted to banks; it can be applied directly to transactions between buyers and sellers of goods and services. The LETS137 systems that have proliferated in communities around the world use the credit clearing process, as do commercial trade exchanges. Credit clearing systems are, in essence, clearing houses—but their members are businesses and individuals instead of banks. There is, however, no absolute requirement for settlement. Balances, if they are not excessive, can simply be carried over from one period to the next in the expectation that in the long run each account balance will fluctuate not too widely around zero.
page 236
“A credit clearing association is based on an arrangement in which a group of traders, each of whom is both a buyer and a seller, agree to allocate to one another sufficient credit to facilitate their transactions among one another. The rest is merely bookkeeping.”
The Tucson Experience
Page 249
