Date: Sun, 01 Mar 1998 11:41:54 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Bob Olsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: To FUTUREWORKS Please!
Dear Taxi Driver:
Please deliver the following "Shadow Money" to FUTUREWORKS.
Thank you.....!!!!!!
FORWARDED MESSAGE......
"...it is the abuse and prostitution of the role of money which
is the root cause of all economic evil and hence of most of the
social disorders..."
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 09:39:00 +1000
From: John Hermann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: ERA EMAIL NETWORK: Shadow Money
ERA Email Network
Welcome to the email network service of Economic Reform Australia (ERA).
The material you are receiving is part of the distribution of occasional
papers and articles produced by members of Economic Reform Australia
(ERA). This material is disseminated in the interests of informing the
community and stimulating discussion. Readers are permitted to copy and
distribute articles, providing that the source is acknowledged.
ERA is a non-party political organisation whose long-term goal is to
achieve a socially, environmentally and financially sustainable economic
system. Its short-term objectives include implementation of both the
economic sovereignty loan scheme and an Impex-style system of foreign
exchange management, together with financial transaction taxes (Tobin
taxes) and a reformed foreign investment review board. By these and other
means ERA seeks to return control of the economic and financial system to
the people.
-----------------------------------------
THE SHADOW AND THE SUBSTANCE
Peter Lock
The distinction between the shadow and the substance was never more
important than in today's financial system. Financial wealth is only the
shadow of real wealth, the real wealth of natural resources and human
brains and brawn. Before saying more about this distinction, it would be
useful to consider another imaginary situation of this sort in the
context of today's economic and social realities. We will refer to a
hypothetical city called Metropolis.
Commercial disaster had overtaken the public transport system of this
city of Metropolis. It could boast the finest trains, trams and buses
with their complement of technicians, drivers and other personnel. Its
roads and railways were in the best of repair. There was a whole
population ready, needing and willing to use this essential service. All
farm produce and the products of industry were piled up waiting to be
transported. Yet all movement had stopped because there were no tickets.
In the past, the Public Transport Authority had printed their own
tickets, but now another private printing company had obtained a legal
monopoly for all such printing and was demanding to be paid, not just
for their labour and materials, but also the face value of the tickets
themselves. That was not all. The tickets would always belong to the
printing company and those who used them would have to pay a further
percentage of their face value for the privilege of using them.
Such a debt system was commercially absurd and self-destructive. It
effectively meant that the ticket-printer virtually owned the whole
transport system for all of the latter's ticket sales' revenue was
forfeit to the former. It also meant that the Transport Authority would
always be operating at a huge loss since it would have no revenue of its
own to pay its running costs of wages, maintenance, depreciation and new
rolling stock. The shadow was dictating its terms to the substance and
was now the master of all who were totally and slavishly dependent on it.
Most of today's money supply, namely cheques and plastic credit cards,
is not real wealth but only a bank issued ticket or make-believe shadow
entitlement to real wealth. Banks, as creators of the community's
financial credit, have obtained a legal monopoly for the providing of
such tickets for the exchange and distribution of real wealth and behave
no differently from the above printer of the transport tickets.
The economic crises right throughout the world indicate that there is
something wrong at the core of our knowledge and understanding of how to
run the business side of humans' global and community house-keeping
activity.
We are confronted with a state of affairs which permits a surplus of
ordinary essential goods and services whilst millions are living at
poverty level, in need of most of the commodities that are, in reality
superabundant. To add to the paradox, it seems that the privation of
these have-nots, is due to the very existence of the surplus for the
haves. In the global marketplace all countries endeavour to consolidate
their position by disposing of or dumping their real wealth while trying
to avoid taking any other country's real wealth in return. More absurd
still is the growing of grains and their profitable feeding to animals to
eventually and inefficiently feed a relatively small number of affluent
humans. This accompanies also the wholesale destruction of foodstuffs for
market reasons whilst millions are dying of hunger.
It is completely inconceivable that these apparent contradictions can be
written off as being inevitable due to natural causes or to the defects
in general of human nature. No reasoning person can reconcile a state of
affairs in which the genius of men and women has succeeded in mastering
the very energy of the atomic nucleus and of transporting themselves to
the moon, and yet at the same time is incapable of solving the most basic
and elementary economic riddles of our age.
Professional economists and self-styled experts and authorities in
these matters express so many conflicting opinions and proffer such
contradictory advice that the world is more confused than ever. The
national debt of all countries to the banking system is increasing
exponentially and can never be paid because the interest burdened
principal must of necessity be increasingly greater than the amount of
actual money in circulation. For some already, and for many others soon,
the interest owing alone will exceed the total amount of their money in
circulation. We are on the verge of catastrophic global bankruptcy.
Academics realize such, but have no notion how to avoid it. It is time
that the scientific logic of self-functioning-feedback-systems,
unhampered by any preconceived theories and self-interest, be allowed to
pass judgment on the situation and to shed light on a marketplace
shrouded in the darkness of impending doom.
There can be no adequate understanding of the suicide or survival
alternative facing humanity without a proper perception of the financial
reality that it is the abuse and prostitution of the role of money which
is the root cause of all economic evil and hence of most of the social
disorders threatening the future of society.
............................................
Bob Olsen Toronto [EMAIL PROTECTED] (:-)
