[onlooker]

Well the problem with that Vts, is that many societies were ruled by how can you say Tyrants who chose for us ie. no democracy and even when we were allowed to chose the upper class/rich class/governing class found a way to insert their desired leadership.

[vtsnowedin]

Well the problem with that Vts, is that many societies were ruled by how can you say Tyrants who chose for us ie. no democracy and even when we were allowed to chose the upper class/rich class/governing class found a way to insert their desired leadership.

True way more often then it should be. Especially in those countries that claimed to be Socialist.

[americandream]

Well the problem with that Vts, is that many societies were ruled by how can you say Tyrants who chose for us ie. no democracy and even when we were allowed to chose the upper class/rich class/governing class found a way to insert their desired leadership.

True way more often then it should be. Especially in those countries that claimed to be Socialist.

Nonsense. The leaders in the former communist states lived modest lives. They had to establish draconian measures to keep the masses away from the idiots in the West. Communism is about making the new collectivised man, not the freedom to be some rich tossers halfwit. Of course, the highly subjectified morons in consumer societies equate freedom with committing planetary suicide and then wonder why it all went wrong. Of course, said cretins will blame everyone else but themselves. Keep consuming your way to your grandkids grave is all I say.

[onlooker]

please note the following:
All the wars engaged in throughout history. The lack of human equality and rights throughout history. The exploitation of the planet and of persons for economic profit. Have we been given a choice in these affairs, I think not. For example in this country we fought for women's rights, rights for blacks, rights for the poor, rights for the workers, rights for the consumers. We are still fighting for rights for Same sex couples. I do not even mention poorer countries whose masses of people have been denied their necessities much less any privileges or rights. Today, China is rapidly polluting their country. What do all these examples have in common? We were not consulted , we were not given rights to decide or even participate. To this day, legitimate protests are forcefully oppressed. Economic policy is done by and for the benefit of the elites and wealthy. Just Political elections are rare and decision making is exclusive to a few persons who coincidentally are either in power or possess a plethora of wealth. Corruption among the elite has always been a prominent feature of this group. So , tell me where do we fit in, in all of this. Now, as we are in dire straits and people are protesting because of a myriad of reasons are we being heard? Do not the great majority wish for wars to end, pollution to end, corruption to end. Are the powers that be really addressing these problems. NO. Business as usual continues and we are reduced to marching and hoping beyond hope to be heard by the elite. Finally, the elites can only say to us do not worry economic growth and technology will solve everything. HA

[americandream]

Onlooker

No one is willing to take responsibility that they are killing the future generations and then have the cheek to blame those they forced at gunpoint, to adopt their destructive lives. Are these people in the real world I ask. As for the elites, those buggers will shit and piss away this planet.

[kublikhan]

So , tell me where do we fit in, in all of this.

Well lets see:
1. Buying disposable crap at walmart because it's cheaper. Then throwing it in a landfill when we are done. All the while putting mom & pop shops out of business.
2. Filling up our gas guzzlers so we can take continue happy motoring. All the while spewing posions into the environment.
3. Refusing to pay the utility surchage for clean energy. Instead electing to pay the cheaper rate for good old dirty coal:

This report evaluates information gathered from 31 utility companies around the country who offer “opt-in” Green Pricing Programs to their customers. The goal is to determine to what extent utility consumers will voluntarily pay higher utility rates to increase the use of renewable energy by their utility providers. The utilities represent 24 different states, a mix of rural and urban customers, and employ various forms of power generation. The average level of participation in these “opt-in” Green Pricing Programs among the 31 utilities was less than 2.1% with two-thirds of all utilities recording participation rates of 1% or less.

This report hopes to examine whether consumer behavior matches the attitudes professed in polls related to adoption of, and payment for, increased usage of renewable energy by American consumers. By evaluating the conditions surrounding consumers and their resulting market behavior one can develop a better understanding of the American consumer and their real attitudes toward the value of clean energy.

The numbers gathered by various polls in individual states and nationwide show a large chasm between predicted consumer mentality and actual consumer behavior. In North Carolina, 42% of those asked said they would be willing to pay more for renewable energy from their utilities. This is on the lower end of public support, in fact: 70% of Floridians,] 89% of Michiganders,] and 67% of Americans overall have said they would support for Green Pricing Programs. 2.1% of surveyed customers actually choose to pay for such a program.

Conclusion
The data in this report clearly highlights the gap between stated values of consumers and the reality of their actions in the marketplace. The only conclusion to be drawn from this report is that consumers see Green Pricing Programs as an economic decision and that the direct economic consideration of higher utility bills takes precedence over the indirect ideal of greater renewable energy production in the future.

Green Pricing Programs

People are willing to profess all kinds of ideals in polls and online forums. But how many of those same people are willing to put their money were their mouth is? About 2.1%. I'm not saying elites are blameless here. But come on, we are not blameless either.

[onlooker]

Some good points Kublikhan, however I wonder when or where was a universal vote taken as to creating the global economy with it's cheap crap from China/Walmart. Who made the decision to adopt a fossil fuel economy. Who subsidizes still the fossil fuel industry. The decisions in so much as decisions were made were made by the government/elites. One can retort that it is simply the capitalist economy following the path of least resistance or higher profits yet throughout time we have lived in a world where I have perceived rarely have the masses been allowed to make important decisions as to the course or courses to take in affairs that concern them.

[americandream]

Some good points Kublikhan, however I wonder when or where was a universal vote taken as to creating the global economy with it's cheap crap from China/Walmart. Who made the decision to adopt a fossil fuel economy. Who subsidizes still the fossil fuel industry. The decisions in so much as decisions were made were made by the government/elites. One can retort that it is simply the capitalist economy following the path of least resistance or higher profits yet throughout time we have lived in a world where I have perceived rarely have the masses been allowed to make important decisions as to the course or courses to take in affairs that concern them.

A socialised economy existed till recently but the masses played an active role in its destruction, viz the USSR. The masses are not sufficiently conscious of their interests.

[dohboi]

"A socialised economy existed"

And it was also fossil fuel based and strove for unlimited growth.

Ulitmately, we have to get beyond 19th century ideologies as we get well into the 21st!

[Timo]

Some good points Kublikhan, however I wonder when or where was a universal vote taken as to creating the global economy with it's cheap crap from China/Walmart. Who made the decision to adopt a fossil fuel economy. Who subsidizes still the fossil fuel industry. The decisions in so much as decisions were made were made by the government/elites. One can retort that it is simply the capitalist economy following the path of least resistance or higher profits yet throughout time we have lived in a world where I have perceived rarely have the masses been allowed to make important decisions as to the course or courses to take in affairs that concern them.

Ford, Chrysler, GM, Exxon-Mobile, Koch Industries, Halliburton, et al., contribute hundreds of billions of dollars to the global economy. You? Maybe a few tens of thousands. In the global economic structure, size does matter. When you personally control the manufacturing of a product that the world requires, or control the means of extracting the resources used in that manufacturing, then you can have a personal meeting with the G-7 to express your points of view. If it makes you feel any better, i'm blocked out of that group, too.

[americandream]

"A socialised economy existed"

And it was also fossil fuel based and strove for unlimited growth.

Ulitmately, we have to get beyond 19th century ideologies as we get well into the 21st!

There are only two options with modernity (Reason).....socialised resource usage or capitalisation. Everything else are variations of this or pointless attempts at reviving reaction such as feudalism under the guise of anti modernity.

Until you recognise that, you will be chasing your shadow.

[jupiters_release]

"A socialised economy existed"

And it was also fossil fuel based and strove for unlimited growth.

Ulitmately, we have to get beyond 19th century ideologies as we get well into the 21st!

There are only two options with modernity (Reason).....socialised resource usage or capitalisation. Everything else are variations of this or pointless attempts at reviving reaction such as feudalism under the guise of anti modernity.

Until you recognise that, you will be chasing your shadow.

The only 'options' you know of!

A society's system of money is inseparable from other aspects of its relationship to the world and the relationships among its members. Money as we know it today both reflects and propels the objectification of the world, the paradigm of competition, and the depersonalization and atomization of society. We should therefore expect that any authentic change in these conditions would necessarily also involve a change in our system of money.

As a matter of fact, there are money systems that encourage sharing not competition, conservation not consumption, and community, not anonymity. Pilot versions of such systems have been around for at least a hundred years now, but because they are inimical to the larger patterns of our culture, they have been marginalized or even actively suppressed. Meanwhile, many creative proposals for new modes of industry such as Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce, and many green design technologies, are uneconomic under the current money system. The alternative money systems I describe below will naturally induce the economies described by visionaries such as Hawken, E.F. Schumacher, Herman Daly, and others. They will also reverse the progressive nationalization and globalization of every economic sector, revitalize communities, and contribute to the elimination of the "externalities" that put economic growth at odds with human happiness and planetary health.

Given the determining role of interest, the first alternative currency system to consider is one that structurally eliminates it. As the history of the Catholic Church demonstrates, laws and admonitions against interest are ineffective if its structural necessity is still present in the nature of the currency. A structural solution is needed, such as the system proposed by Silvio Gesell in The Natural Economic Order. Gesell's "free-money" (as he called it) bears a form of negative interest called demurrage. Periodically, a stamp costing a tiny fraction of the currency's denomination must be affixed to it, in effect a "user fee" or a "maintenance cost"; another way to look at it is that the currency "goes bad"—depreciates in value—as it ages.[3]

If this sounds like a radical proposal that could never work, it may surprise you to learn that no less an authority than John Maynard Keynes praised the theoretical soundness of Gesell's ideas. What's more, the system has actually been tried out with great success.

Although demurrage was applied as long ago as Ancient Egypt in the form of a storage cost for commodity-backed currency,[4] the best-known example was instituted in the town of Worgl, Austria, in 1932 by its famous mayor Uttenguggenberger. To remain valid, each piece of this locally-issued currency required a monthly stamp costing 1% of its face value. Instead of generating interest and growing, accumulation of wealth became a burden—much like possessions are a burden to the nomadic hunter-gatherer. People therefore spent their income quickly, generating intense economic activity in the town. The unemployment rate plummeted even as the rest of the country slipped into a deepening depression; public works were completed, and prosperity continued until the Worgl currency was outlawed in 1933 at the behest of a threatened central bank.

Demurrage produces a number of profound economic, social, and psychological effects. Conceptually, demurrage works by freeing material goods, which are subject to natural cyclic processes of renewal and decay, from their linkage with a money that only grows, exponentially, over time. As established in Chapter Four, this dynamic is what is driving us toward ruin in the utter exhaustion of all social, cultural, natural, and spiritual wealth. Demurrage currency merely subjects money to the same laws as natural commodities, whose continuing value requires maintenance. Gesell writes:

Gold does not harmonise with the character of our goods. Gold and straw, gold and petrol, gold and guano, gold and bricks, gold and iron, gold and hides! Only a wild fancy, a monstrous hallucination, only the doctrine of "value" can bridge the gulf. Commodities in general, straw, petrol, guano and the rest can be safely exchanged only when everyone is indifferent as to whether he possesses money or goods, and that is possible only if money is afflicted with all the defects inherent in our products. That is obvious. Our goods rot, decay, break, rust, so only if money has equally disagreeable, loss-involving properties can it effect exchange rapidly, securely and cheaply. For such money can never, on any account, be preferred by anyone to goods.

Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether, is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether. For such money is not preferred to goods either by the purchaser or the seller. We then part with our goods for money only because we need the money as a means of exchange, not because we expect an advantage from possession of the money.

In other words, money as a medium of exchange is decoupled from money as a store of value. No longer is money an exception to the universal tendency in nature toward rust, mold, rot and decay—that is, toward the recycling of resources. No longer does money perpetuate a human realm separate from nature.

Gesell's phrase, "... a monstrous hallucination, the doctrine of 'value'..." hints at an even more subtle and more potent effect of demurrage. What is he talking about? Value is the doctrine that assigns to each object in the world a number. It associates an abstraction, changeless and independent, with that which always changes and that exists in relationship to all else. Demurrage reverses this thinking and thus removes an important boundary between the human realm and the natural realm. When money is no longer preferred to goods, we will lose the habit of thinking in terms of how much something is "worth".

Whereas interest promotes the discounting of future cash flows, demurrage encourages long-term thinking. In present-day accounting, a rain forest generating one million dollars a year sustainably forever is more valuable if clearcut for an immediate profit of 50 million dollars. (In fact, the net present value of the sustainable forest calculated at a discount rate of a mere 5% is only $20 million.) This discounting of the future results in the infamously short-sighted behavior of corporations that sacrifice (even their own) long-term well-being for the short-term results of the fiscal quarter. Such behavior is perfectly rational in an interest-based economy, but in a demurrage system, pure self-interest would dictate that the forest be preserved. No longer would greed motivate the robbing of the future for the benefit of the present. As the exponential discounting of future cash flows implies the "cashing in" of the entire earth, as illustrated in Chapter Four, this feature of demurrage is highly attractive.

Whereas interest tends to concentrate wealth, demurrage promotes its distribution. In any economy with a specialization of labor beyond the family level, human beings need to perform exchanges in order to survive. Both interest and demurrage represent a fee for the use of money, but the key difference is that in the former system, the fee accrues to those who already have money, while in the latter system it is levied upon those who have money. Wealth comes with a high maintenance cost, thereby recreating the dynamics that governed hunter-gatherer attitudes toward accumulations of possessions.

Whereas security in an interest-based system comes from accumulating money, in a demurrage system it comes from having productive channels through which to direct it—that is, to become a nexus of the flow of wealth and not a point for its accumulation. In other words, it puts the focus on relationships, not on "having". Metaphorically, then, and perhaps more than metaphorically, the demurrage system accords with a different sense of self, affirmed not by defining more and more of the world within the confines of me and mine, but by developing and deepening relationships with others. In other words, it encourages reciprocation, sharing, and the rapid circulation of wealth. It is conceivable that wealth in a demurrage system would evolve into something akin to the model of the Pacific Northwest or Melanesia, in which a leader "acts as a shunting station for goods flowing reciprocally between his own and other like groups of society."[5] These "big man" societies were not fully egalitarian and bore some degree of centricity, as perhaps is necessary in any economy with more than a very basic division of labor; the key point is that leadership was not associated with the accumulation of money or possessions, but rather with a huge responsibility for generosity. Can you imagine a society where the greatest prestige, power, and leadership accorded to those with the greatest inclination and capacity for generosity?

[dohboi]

Nicely put, jr. Then there's also http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Democracy-J ... 089608745X

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

But back to the topic of the thread, in a musical mode:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntLsElbW9Xo

[Newfie]

Unbeknownst to me I've been operating in this " demurage" mode for quite a while now. You see I have little or no "trust" in our financial or monetary system. So while I do have some pretty good savings, I've also spent a lot on tangible things, things that are useful and have value in their own right. The boats (moveable bug out locations that can transport goods) and land.

My 401k however is structured to keep my savings locked up in the system, it is a teaser. I think I have a bunch of money that will provide for retirement, but not if the market crashes. So perhaps I should withdraw my bucks and buy a rental property? Take the tax hit and be done with it?

If enough people get thinking this way that in itself will crash the system.

[dohboi]

"it is a teaser. I think I have a bunch of money that will provide for retirement, but not if the market crashes. So perhaps I should withdraw my bucks and buy a rental property? Take the tax hit and be done with it?

If enough people get thinking this way that in itself will crash the system."

Methinks you may have a hold onto something there, good buddy.

[jupiters_release]

You're such a radical newfie.

[Newfie]

Aw, shucks!

[americandream]

Essentially, what appears to be proposed here is a form of capitalisation (as distinct from capitalism) with an ethical base. In other words, subjective dialectics which is to be expected in the long march to the onset of objective dialectic forces.

Having said that, exchange is a function of any civil order and money, whether as the basis of accumulation or socialised exchange will be with us. So I am not so sure why newfie is getting into a lather over its form.

edit: it would pay to retain some decorum dohboi. Name calling simply achieves nothing.

[dohboi]

When did I call any names, you f'ing slut whore pinko commie a$$fck sissy slut?

[Lore]

Reminds me of Roman Moronie's speech...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv8tVxk6Nj4