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August 9, 2008
$$$$ Keep the "Funny Money" I Will Take the Value!!! $$$$
By Theresa Paulfranz
We May Need Two Kinds of Money
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Outline
A. Do We Need More Than One Kind of Money?
B. Is This Legal?
B. Monetary Empires Going Extinct:
An Historical and Current Perspective with Relation to Money
C. If Banks Can Pull Money Out of Thin Air Can We?
D. More on Ways to Diversify and Redefine Money
E. More Government Mr. Cook????
F. We CAN Create Our Own Money
G. Funny Money: Money Mistaken as a Commodity
H. Are Humans a Commodity?
I. Conclusion
$$$ Money $$$
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As I began to write this article I found that I had run into yet another duality ( I have in other writing described dual archetypal forms and functions as being a basic primal way the universe works and very integral to what it is ). All this began to pop out at me again as I tried to describe what I thought was wrong with money, and why money has been falling apart lately.
I came to feel that the current form of money is competitive, abstract, a mere quantitative commodity, non-local, and non-personal. And I came to feel that that was Ok as long as there was also a kind of "money" that had opposite characteristics. I think we need for some "money" to be cooperatively-created and cooperation- fostering, money that is less abstract, that is more quality-oriented, money that tends to stay local, and finally, money that has a personal aspect to it.
Our current kind of money is such a convenience. But although it has a near-infinite fluid exchangability, it is for the same reason prone to a near-infinite inflatability. And it can deflate as well. It's value is just too arbitrary and abstract. Barter is the opposite. It is cumbersome in the extreme. Barter is one kind of home-grown money one can use and it tends to stay local and not wander off.
Abstract paper money also has great gather-ability. Because of the top-heavy way our economic/political system is, this kind of money wings its way to the top waaaaay toooooo fast. The extreme fluidity of money lends wings to a lopsided system making it much more lopsided. Paper money and its fluidity creates a negative feedback system where the top-heavy system gives expression to top-heavy money which gives expression to a more top-heavy system and on and on. And the speed at which things are getting top-heavy and horribly out of balance seems to be increasing. This distortion within money is increasing so fast that the abstract representation that money is, is warping itself out of existence to some degree. The arbitrary abstract symbol for wealth, a bunch of paper, good only for the exchange of real wealth, can get so terribly abused it turns to nothing but an abstraction and not a real representation of wealth at all. If the abstraction called money gets too sick then there is not way to exchange the real wealth made by hardworking honest people.
Paper and digital money can fly around the planet very fast. It can fly out of "here" and over "there" with too much speed. Barter by its nature must be mostly local. Barter keeps our money "here". The local nature of barter keeps it grounded. As such it is much more dependable. Perhaps if we had two kinds of money that enabled us to more integrate the two sides of basic cosmic realities then we might have a chance to use money without being so burned by it.
Barter, itself a complement to money, has itself some complementary characteristics. Its local nature increases our personal interactions. And that has two sides. Some people are dishonest and getting to know a lot of local people can have its risks. But having a community that isn't really a community but only a group of strangers can be much more dangerous. When times get rough it is a good thing to know who you can trust. With some barter going on, over time you get to know and understand people you have dealt with that have proven themselves time after time. When the majority of the people realize, with this way of exchange, that acceptance into a local ring of interaction could be vital to their survival, there is little crime. Until recently the bigger money system worked so well we could get along without local barter/money and local trust making it possible. But times are changing.
Is This Legal?
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I believe that there are instances where barter is actually illegal. But as far as I can understand it, that seems to be an infringement on a person's innate and therefore inalienable freedoms. There was a time when legal and ethical were pretty much an overlap. They were close to the same thing. But every day now the two are moving to separate corners and are less and less synonymous all the time. Civil disobedience was once something practiced by radical intellectuals and ordinary people would never think of it. Pretty soon it may be a key part of every day survival.
A few hundred years ago Americans like you and I so hated paying any tax on English tea imports we dumped it in the harbor. I think they called that the Boston Tea Party. We might find ourselves dumping ( to some degree ) something that is far more vital..money. Money keeps us alive. For that very reason we need to learn how to better control it. Money has been going crazy for awhile now. It is fast becoming the case that instead of people using and controlling money, money uses and controls people.
They say that locks on doors keep honest people honest. There is a flip side to that, that is equally true. A community of people that have learned how to trust each other a bit can keep someone sane and calm that in a time of great uncertainty might have broken down and become an untrustworthy person. Keeping others at arms length with a lock is a good thing. But keeping people at arm's length and no further ( metaphorically speaking ) is a good thing as well. It is good to have some interaction with local people. Trust is something that has to be created and worked on. It does not just happen spontaneously. The money system is becoming very unstable. We need something more. And we have to create it ourselves. Trust is like money. It helps goods and favors to be exchanged and can keep people alive.
A couple years ago I read an article about a town somewhere that was in economic trouble. Someone started a system of computer credits. Since a computer credit is an abstract assigning of value it is close in nature to another kind of abstract symbolism i.e. paper money. But it is local and therefore too small to be prone to inflation or deflation. That local credit system might be called a thing that was partly money and partly barter. The system, according to the article I read, was effective and helped a lot of people. We could be seeing things like that starting up soon.
Monetary Empires Going Extinct:
An Historical and Current Perspective with Relation to Money
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A Mr. Richard C. Cook is saying interesting things about money.
Richard C. Cook is the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age. A retired federal analyst, his career included stints with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, and NASA, followed by twenty-one years with the U.S. Treasury Department. He is now a Washington, D.C.-based writer and consultant and will be speaking at the AMI annual conference in Chicago in September 2007. His website is at www.richardccook.com.
Richard C. Cook is a frequent contributor to Global Research. www.globalresearch.ca
Status Report on the Collapse of the U.S. Economy
by Richard C. Cook
"What is taking place is not just the collapse of the U.S. , but more than likely the final crash of Western civilization, since we are the last of the world empires to go down the drain. World War I saw the end of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires. World War II saw the disappearance of the French, British, Japanese, and Italian empires, along with Germany ( again ). The Soviet empire collapsed in 1991. The American is next."
All those places still exist. It is just that they are no longer empires. And that is why they are acting so sane while here at home in the U.S. things are still insane. Richard writes in another article about the nature of this empire that is crashing and what we can do about it ....
Monetary Reform and How a National Monetary System Should Work
by Richard C. Cook
www.richardccook.com.
"Note that all the banks of the Western world are ultimately private institutions owned by the world’s super-rich. The international banking structure is operated by and on behalf of the world’s monetary elite primarily for their own profit.
Just below the banking system are the giant corporations of the global economy which derive capital from and funnel profits into the financiers’ empire. Bringing up the rear are the populations and debt-serfs of the no-longer-sovereign nation states, including those of the United States, whose participation in the system as consumers is essential, but whose jobs continue to disappear as manufacturing is increasingly automated."
Because we here in America are still an empire, or an extremely vertical power-concentrating patriarchal organization, we still concentrate money at the top. And then the rich who are not wise enough to handle all that power ( most people at the bottom would not be wise enough either ) are mismanaging it. It is up to the people to take back the power they allowed to float to the top where it is being abused. You can only do that with a qualitative, home-grown, local, human-to-human, rich, monetary-plus level of interactions. And that ain't easy to achieve.
If Banks Can Pull Money Out of Thin Air Can We?
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Mr Cook tells us how money is created...
"It is done through the process of bank-created credit.....When a loan is made it is issued as a liability on the bank’s ledger. When it is repaid, the liability is canceled. With today’s computer systems, all transactions are digitized, of course. The bank keeps the interest on the loan as its combined administrative fee and profit. The money that is lent had no prior existence."
Let me repeat that one more time "The money that is lent had no prior existence."
If the financiers can pull credit and therefore money out of the clear blue sky we here at the bottom had better find a way to stablize this lopsidedness by creating our own money.
It is only as we at the bottom repay the loan that real value and real wealth is created. The "funny money" that was created to make a loan is not a thing of any value until the people at the bottom translate it into value. When a debt is repayed to a banker he then gets real value and real wealth from our hard work.
More on Ways to Diversify and Redefine Money
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This is a time of danger but it is also a time of opportunity. Things that were not possible before suddenly are possible. And this is more and more the case every day as the old system leaves a vacuum that needs filling.
Seems to me money is like a horse. We once needed horses to move things around. But if you had a horse that was often running down the road before getting hitched to the wagon, after awhile you would realize that having just one horse like this was insufficient. You would find more than one means of conveyance. Seems like we have a wild uncontrollable horse named "Money" and we need to find a tamer ride as well. If we had two horses, one a slow plodder that could do the job dependably, then we would know we would not be left high and dry. That second horse may be barter or something that weds barter to money to some degree.
It seems to me we could use money as collateral. It could represent a credit that would insure the person got something if a local deal fell through. Say you need a favor. You need it right away and can not return the favor immediately.You can not afford the favor very easily so you leave money with a third person with the understanding that as soon as you and the other party swapped favors successfully the money would be given back to you. There would have to be a trustworthy third party that had been doing this sort of thing for awhile for this kind of system to be reliable. Who says a lawyer or arbiter has to have umteen years of law school to be a good reliable third party? Anybody that is trustworthy could do it. But only a set number of people would be trusted to fill this function. As it is we depend on lawyers that are too expensive for ordinary transactions. And going to school half way to forever is the very thing that makes people like lawyers and doctors etc. often untrustworthy. Who says we need a bunch of legalistic chicanery? That very dependence is obscuring the real need, and that is for a build up on a community level of human trust.
The more a person proved himself honorable over time the less money he would need for collateral and the less a third party would be necessary. Levels of trust that would be impossible these days would slowly grow. And trustworthiness is the "commodity" that is most lacking in the world today. As the trustworthy persons attracted more monetary leverage they could initiate projects. Having trustworthy intelligent people initiate projects is just what we need to turn this money crisis around. Right now with everyone owing the bank and paying twice for their house ( at least) we are handing the reserve monetary value in our communities to strangers who do what is best for themselves and not the community. Is it any wonder our society is going downhill fast?
More Government Mr. Cook????
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Richard Cook says...
"Economic democracy may be defined as free access to the bounty of God’s earth, according to one’s need, character, ability, and work. The purpose of this access is for individuals to have the liberty to work out responsibly their own occupation, lifestyle, identity, and destiny without these being dictated by external authorities or the threat of economic ruin. These are the freedoms that are inherent in the ideals that created America and, though compromised so much, have been America’s gift to the rest of the world."
Mr. Cook goes on to say that if the government would take the power of money away from the exclusive control of the financiers that government would find a way to fairly distribute that money and credit to the citizens. He says we should all recieve a "National Dividend". I am saying that any gift of one's own innate personal individual bottom-up power given in excess to too much top-down representative power creates a lopsided situation. It seems to me that any arbitrary definition given to money by "someone else" will all too easily and quickly lead to an arbitrary redefinition. Just a little government bill here and a little bill there and soon poof there it goes.
We CAN Create Our Own Money
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If people think that a piece of green paper is not an abstract symbol for value but has value in and of itself then all hell breaks loose...which it has.
Mr. Cook goes on...
"..the underlying logic is that money is a commodity. A group of men have money. It is their money, we believe, rightfully earned. Therefore, because these individuals have money, they have a further right to lend it to others.
But under existing laws, the banking system then makes the leap of assuming that because they have money which can be lent, they have a right to lend much more than they actually possess. Somehow they have become fit practitioners of the fractional reserve banking system whereby, as described above, they can lend simply by creating debits in their computers, based on some ratio between their capital stock and their lending ceiling.
But if bankers can do this, why can’t you or I? If I have $1,000, why can’t I then lend $10,000 and collect the corresponding interest? The answer is that a bank has a government charter and supposedly can guarantee through various safeguards that the people to whom it lends can repay. But even this isn’t required of a bank any more if it can package its loans and sell them to some other business entity, such as an investment company.
But the fact is that banks can only be created by people who are already rich, can put up some initial capital, build a functioning business, and obtain the government charter mentioned above. Once they do this, they are the masters of the world."
"...the solution lies with the federal government taking back its constitutionally-authorized control of the credit of the nation from the financiers and managing it as previously stated—as a public utility. There is no need to eliminate capitalism, change the basis of property ownership, abolish corporations, etc., because the organization and administration of the production process is essentially irrelevant to the real problem."
"To those who are concerned that the concept of publicly-controlled credit postulates a monetary supply that can be turned on and off like tap water, this is a misconception. There is indeed a cornucopia of supply on the earth, but it is not of money. If is of what human beings are capable of producing with the skill of their hands and their heads and the knowledge of science and technology."
Yes and it is these very human beings themselves that will save the day for money. Not big government. We all know that at the moment the government is a puppet of big corporate money and the banking system and its financiers and that is not going to go away easily.
Mr. Cook says...
"This figure of $756,000 represents the amount of money an individual has had to borrow from financial institutions to make up what he should have received as his share of a National Dividend if Congress had not ceded the public prerogatives of credit-creation that exist in the Constitution to private financiers."
Government has done it once and they can do it again.
Mr. Cook explains that creating debt by loaning money that does not exist but as an abstract symbol with nothing behind it has eventually got our economy in a world of trouble. He explains that we found a way to dump this load on the world as a temporary measure that could only backfire in time which it now has.
I do agree with this quote..from Mr. Cook...
In the U. S. we are ....."continuing to resolve our domestic economic problems through overseas conquests. This is what the Western nations have been trying to do for centuries, and it appears that the rest of the world may finally have had enough. This is especially the case today when the main factor that is floating the U.S. economy is the huge U.S. trade imbalance where foreign nations must use the dollars they take in to their ultimate disadvantage by financing a federal budget deficit that is measured in dollars whose value is dropping."
As the ability to rip off other countries began to run out the financiers refocused at home with home mortgages.
Recently banks have been doing things with home mortgages all over the country that indicate they wanted things to go belly up so they could foreclose. There were rich rewards put in place for doing things unethically for those who worked for banks. And people fell into the traps. And all this chicanery and much more like it is now destablizing the world economy. We need to find a way to reward doing things ethically instead of rewarding the opposite behavior. A more local control of money would help with that. Careful personal interactions that slowly build trust need to be a part of this thing called "money".
And more recently we are seeing things like this..
The congress is seeing money matters get so wild and panicky that they are panicking. I just read that they passed a bill insuring that they have the right to spy on any and every credit card interaction. Or something to that effect. Well!! As far as I am concerned that is just like starting a run on a bank where the panic that started the run makes more panic and pretty soon the commonly agreed upon value of money is no longer commonly agreed upon. Then money can quickly become just a piece of paper. At such times the near-infinite inflatability/deflatability of paper money is too wild and unpredictable.
Especially right now, and possibly getting much worse soon, is money that seems to be going haywire. We need a means of allowing things to get exchanged that we can depend on. We need another kind of money as a counterbalance. Paper money as the only system of exchange is just too vulnerable to the influence of human greed and soon after human panic and then severe destabilization.
"Funny Money": Money Mistaken as a Commodity
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Mr. Cook...
"One of the things that is going on is that money is being mis-defined as a commodity. People who believe money is a commodity think it has value in-and-of-itself. But one of the hardest things to grasp about money is that not even gold or silver money, or paper money supposedly backed by gold or silver, has or could have intrinsic value."
and Cook goes on...
"Unfortunately, large amounts of credit are used mainly for speculation, not for any benefit to the producing economy. This includes securities bought on margin and borrowing by hedge funds where the fund may make a profit even if the value of its investments goes down. Bank-created credit in this case is little more than chips in a casino."
All this is "funny money" or fake money with no wealth or value attached at all. It is all just a bunch of casino chips. Most people who go to casinos lose. Or in this case there is often a way to make others lose.
We humans create an abstract monetary symbol for value and then fall in love with the symbol. Money is a means to an end not an end. We forget we are trying to create a world that is good for everybody.
Over time abstract symbols worshiped for themselves cause things to warp where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That process can and has now gone to an exponential explosion of monetary processes where we see rich and poor with an ever increasing divide. The species human could snap in two. As Abraham Lincoln said "A house divided against itself can not stand". If we lose our connectedness and ways to serve each other, exchange with each other and help each other, we could lose species integrity and go the way of the dinosaur.
Are Humans a Commodity?
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First we humans have made the mistake that a symbol for value is value. Then we go on to make things much worse by assigning nothing more than mere quantitative value to everything. When humans exchange things by a system that is strictly quantitatively-oriented and everything becomes a commodity then we ourselves become a commodity.
A car needs grease to make its parts run smoothly. But without a piston and some fire you ain't going nowhere! Money is only "exchangability grease"!!!!
Humans are beginning to catch on to the manipulations and games being perpetrated against them. But we have to see first that the games perpetrated on us were to a large extent things we willingly participated in.
We are all humans! The manipulations we are suffering from are only coming from other humans. And often the willingness to go along with a sick game means that that which we sent out has returned to us. As they say "What goes around comes around." Our inability to build slowly both with local home-grown relationships and with slow accumulation of wealth instead of going out and getting big loans, is undermining our chances to become economically independent/interdependent people.
We deserve better than how we have been treating ourselves. Much better. We do not want nor do we deserve to be herded with tasers or prodded and led about with dollars. We can refuse being pressured to take the programming others are trying to impose. We can create and determine for ourselves, each person his own unique way, how wealth and value and life should be defined.
Conclusion
______________________________________
So now I have come full circle. As I began so will I reiterate and so will I end. Let me say it again...
Our current form of money is competitive, abstract, a mere quantitative commodity, non-local, and non-personal. And I came to feel that that was Ok as long as there was also a kind of "money" that had opposite characteristics. I think we need as well for some "money" to be cooperatively-created and cooperation- fostering, money that is less abstract, that is more quality-oriented, money that tends to stay local, and finally, money that has a personal aspect to it.
The first kind of money, barter, has safety and stability and the second has fluidity. Somehow we must create different means of exchange that manage to serve both needs.
Most human interactions need to be more than mere quantitative interactions. Constant mere shuffling around of things with no personal quality of interaction is not enough to insure human happiness and human safety. Our present mere abstract representation of value devoid of any touch of human virtue could be seen as an inferior back up system. ( That inferior back up system I am referring to is what we now call "money" ). The quality of our lives could drastically improve if we mixed our money with rich human interactions and with a slow build up over time of human to human trust. As things are, abstractness is building on abstractness until we have exponential abstractness, and it is getting to where it all has little to no connection to, or support of, real live people.
The opportunity to be of service to the community with exchanges of all kinds should be seen as a privilege that is sacred. Instead we see a sick snatch and grab game going on in our world. We should be glad it is all falling apart? If it does not fall apart now it will get worse and then the correction would be worse as well. We should thank God we have a global crisis. Now we have a void that new healthy things can come into.
Mr. Cook goes on...
"Maybe the party is finally over. Maybe at the end of their 300-year reign, starting roughly with the creation of the Bank of England in 1694, the financiers have finally succeeded in doing enough damage to the world economy that the rest of us are willing to take action."
In our society we pay great attention to educating the human brain but we do not spend much time educating the human heart. As a result heart rending things are now happening. To educate the human heart we need human connections. The individual and the nuclear family need to be connected to the rest of society with some form of community. Most of us are not able, at this time, with our injured human hearts, to march right out and form new age communities connecting the stranded nuclear family to the rest of the world. ( the nuclear family used to be close to Mother Nature about 100 or so years ago as we were then mostly farmers. The nearby country village was a loose-knit but real community. Now we live physically very close to one another but have lost our tie to Nature and to each other )
We need to build slowly and create some sort of healthy communal interaction. ( At the moment only one out of ten attempts at new age community lasts for any significant length of time ). For now we need to try and form some sort of less ambitious communal interaction with our neighbors. The big system that has sustained humans for a long time is falling apart.
It seems to me that there should be two kinds of money. The first should be local, heavily associated with human relationships, and necessarily a bit cumbersome. The "cumbersomeness" could be seen as an opportunity to get to know people and create local safe rich human interactions. This should be the stable plodding kind of money. It should be tied most especially to local farmers growing food locally. That way mega-corporations could not be in the position they are in now to starve people out. The second kind of money should be the kind we are associated with now. It is totally abstract. That abstract arbitrary value is both a strength and a weakness. That kind of money needs the opposite kind of money with complementary strengths and weaknesses.
When a local farmer comes to market to sell his food he can not swap for other food in the city. Local farmers could originally get paper money for their goods. They could then exchange them for local computer-controlled credits. The restriction of money to a local credit system could be flexible with a slight penalty for exchanging back to more unrestricted paper money and a slight reward for leaving the money local.
THE END
P.S. There is a group of utube videos named "Zeitgeist". One tells the tale of how the stockmarket crash around 1930 was created from on high which is very interesting.
Another similar utube video told of an organization called the Illuminati started by a rich financier around the 16th or 17th centuries which later merged the Illuminati with the masons to some extent. The purpose of this joint organization was the mastery of the world. And the means was sometimes the use of satanism. This is supposed to be in a book by Nesta Webster named "World Revolution". I have not read this book.
Years ago I watched an Irishman talk on TV and he said that he changed careers because of a piece of information he ran into. He became a writer to tell the world what he had discovered. I do not remember his name. He said that the Vatican was in on the things going on with the second world war in Germany and the people of the fallen reich were kept safe in the Vatican for a time and then imported into the U.S. to become the top people in our government.
Further vicious crimes in high places are revealed in a book named "Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola, Nature, Accident, or Intentional?" by Leonard G.Horowitz, D.M.D, M.A., M.P.H. This book talks of an organization called The Knights of Malta, an organization within the Catholic Church that has had considerable power which has been viciously and purposely misused for centuries.
There seems to be something like an invisible vampire that is sucking the lifeblood out of this planet and its people. If we sit still for this we are crazy.