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The Money Fix
Duration:
1 hour, 19 minutes and 5 seconds
Country:
United States
Language:
English
Genre:
Documentary
Producer:
Alan Rosenblith
Director:
Alan Rosenblith
Views:
64,186
(52,936
embedded)
Posted by:
alanrosenblith on Aug 17, 2009
Feature length documentary exploring our society's relationship with the almighty dollar. Visit http://www.themoneyfix.org for more information. If embedding, please link back to http://www.themoneyfix.org.
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- When I was in college, I actually was a banker,
- and I'm not made to be a banker, so...
- well it was actually very depressing to me because I interacted with a lot of people,
- doing transactions for them, and it just really surprised me
- as to how much money ruled their lives.
- Well, I'm always worried about money.
- Well, that was after the divorce, but yeah, $60,000 in debt and I wasn't 30 yet.
- It's the whole seduction of money, and that lure of a chance to get more.
- The normal debt; homes, cars...
- We have contests to see who can spend the least amount of money,
- and I think one day I actually got down to about $1.50
- and that's the whole day's worth of food and everything.
- Didn't really have much money, and I was constantly struggling.
- The time I was most worried about money?
- Well right now. Right now I'm really worried about money.
- It was a domestic violence situation, and I was afraid that I wouldn't have the income.
- You wonder where your next meal is gonna come from.
- Pray that everything is going to work out alright.
- I always worry about money.
- Whether I have enough, whether I'm spending too much.
- You gotta make money. There's just no way around it.
- And you gotta do what you gotta do short of illegal things.
- I think that if money hadn't been an issue we would have totally been okay.
- Questions I have about money?
- If I had any questions about money, what would I like to know...
- What is the actually worth of a dollar these days?
- THE MONEY FIX
- Money; money is the source of much anxiety,
- much confusion, a great deal of suffering.
- Money makes the world go 'round. That's the one that everybody knows.
- Money is a tool to help people live a better quality of life,
- but somehow it's become the all in all. People think money is life in itself.
- The standard view is that if you get richer, you get better off and you're happier.
- Well, it turns out not to be true.
- People's absolute standard of living, once they're above poverty
- is pretty weakly related to happiness.
- I'm going to make a rough claim that about 95% of family feuds, problems, breakdowns,
- are about money. And I'm probably conservative.
- In America, to have a million dollars means that you're successful,
- but what does that really mean?
- Why is that? What's so special about money?
- Why do we feel about money as basically the breakdown in the family.
- Why is it so frequent?
- Our relationship with money is so troubled, and so upsetting,
- and it is not just for people who are trying to make ends meet or feel marginalized.
- But even our global billionaires are completely freaked out
- about money all the time. So having more money doesn't really resolve
- these problems we have around money.
- Understanding the dollar.
- That means more than knowing what a dollar bill looks like, or what a silver dollar is.
- For the first time, essentially the entire world, willing or not,
- subscribes to the same set of economic rules.
- The money system went global, and it began to disorder
- every local ecosystem and every local social system on the planet.
- At the bottom of all the rules, is the rule that making money
- is always more important than anything else.
- We've made money more important than human life,
- more important than the natural world, more important than God or spirit,
- and on that bed of lies, our relationship with money is resting.
- This is where we are today, is that the entire apparatus of assumptions
- underlying economics are simply wrong, so, you know,
- why do we allow societies to be run with this malfunctioning source code?
- Part of the difficulty is that very few people think about what money is,
- where it comes from, how it is created and how it is controlled.
- Well, remember there has been 150 years of very intense propaganda
- and indoctrination to drive to drive these ideas out of people's heads.
- If we could unpack all of this mystification, we'd probably find that
- economics was made so complicated in order to mystify people,
- so they could not really figure it all out.
- If everybody knew the full facts about how money is issued,
- how it's put into circulation, who was issuing it, how they have power
- and control over the economy, and over individual's lives,
- I think there'd be a lot of very unhappy people around.
- It's often been said that money moves the world, or money is the engine of the world,
- or money makes the world go 'round, but in more accuracy,
- money stops the world from going.
- I'm afraid that's more than I care to spend.
- Money doesn't facilitate in its current form, it inhibits transaction and trading.
- Money is the one thing that is required for economic exchange.
- It is the Khyber Pass if you will.
- It's the channel through which every transaction must go
- in order to be completed.
- We live today by exchanging goods and services with one another,
- and money is the medium that we use to do that,
- so money actually becomes the controlling element in economics.
- Those who control money control everything.
- Out of the simple barter of primitive people,
- spearheads became one of the first articles used as money.
- Shells have also served as money.
- Wampum was used by the American Indians,
- and hundreds of other articles have been money
- to various people and various times.
- Money is not a creature of the state.
- It didn't require any king or prince to invent money.
- Rather, money and monetary trade were products of spontaneous order.
- Well, put yourself in barter situation, where you come to market
- with some good and try to trade it directly for the good you want
- to go home and consume. So if you come to market with asparagus
- and you want to go home with plaid shirts, you have to find somebody
- who is not only selling plaid shirts, but wants to be paid in asparagus.
- But of course, the problem is you often can't find a trading partner
- who has the goods you want and wants the goods you have.
- An alternative is to think, "well, what does this guy selling plaid shirts want?"
- So, what people do is they consider trading not necessarily for
- what they ultimately desire, but for other intermediate goods
- that they think may be more readily traded for what they ultimately desire.
- And at first different people are experimenting
- with different indirect exchange strategies.
- So somebody may trade for salt, somebody else may be using nails,
- a third person may be using barley.
- But what happens is, the more certain goods get adopted
- in these individual efforts, the more attractive their use
- for the same purpose will seem to other people.
- Consequently, there can be a snowballing process where
- eventually a small set of goods or even just one commodity
- seems overwhelming more attractive, and becomes universally adopted.
- And when you reach a commonly accepted medium of exchange,
- that's when you've got money.
- So it's not defined by any physical characteristics,
- it's not defined by any legal sanction.
- It's defined by this social convention that people will accept it
- in order to trade it away later.
- In the course of human evolution, societies have used
- countless different things as money.
- Is it possible that what a society chooses as its money
- can affect the behavior of its people?
- The classical, the conventional way of thinking about money
- is that it's a passive medium of exchange that is being used
- as a convenience to make exchanges between people,
- and that it doesn't really affect either the kind of transactions that are being performed
- it just makes them easier, or the relationships between the people
- that are using that kind of money.
- Both these things happen to be proven wrong.
- Different kinds of money do have very different properties,
- and one of the key properties is the level of abundance or scarcity
- of the item that's being used as money.
- If it's abundant, you will get a proliferation of trade.
- People will be able to exchange their goods and services fairly freely.
- If money is scarce you create a very serious problem
- because you prevent people from actually
- being able to exchange goods and services.
- We have a number of studies now that actually demonstrate very clearly
- that depending on what one uses as a medium of exchange
- the relationships between the people are different.
- That's a huge huge implication right there.
- There are different kinds of monetary systems, and some promote
- very socially responsible behavior, and some promote
- very anti-social destructive behavior.
- My view of money in any society not just modern society,
- is a projection of the collective unconscious of that society.
- And the sign, the proof of that is that
- every society takes its own money system for granted.
- If you try and find out what people think money is,
- you will be mystified and amazed.
- It's a confusion, it's inaccurate, it's absurd, it's superstition,
- it's myth, it's religious, it's crazy.
- Most people haven't an idea, they just use it.
- Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it uses them.
- In fact it's impossible for the human mind to grasp the total amount of money
- that has been required to build the America we know today.
- Where then does all this money come from?
- Now we're getting to the point that is news.
- Most people have no idea where money comes from.
- A lot of people believe that it's the governments that create the money.
- I'm not sure of the exact authority under which more money is released.
- I know the executive has some power over it.
- You know, as long as when I cash my paycheck it's there,
- that's all I'm really worried about anymore.
- It comes from a big factory, where they make it.
- It's, I don't know, created by the government to control us.
- Well, it would have to be done by the government.
- I mean, that's what you would expect anyways.
- Whether or not it really is the government is a different story altogether.
- Conventional money is not created by the government as many people believe,
- and it's not even created by the central banks, although they do part of it.
- It is actually created by the banking system.
- People see these films about the US mint and the government printing office,
- and they see sheets of dollar bills being run off the printing presses.
- And so, they think it's the government that's printing money.
- But this is not the real source of money. The real source of money is banks.
- The banks have a complete monopoly on the money creation process,
- so the public are actually not involved in it at all directly or indirectly.
- The Federal Reserve is a private institution owned by commercial banks
- who are members of the Federal Reserve system, which includes
- all the nationally chartered banks.
- Most people don't realize that the Federal Reserve is a private corporation
- and is for profit. And in fact Federal Reserve,
- it's neither federal, and it's not a reserve.
- In 1910 a group of top American bankers met on Georgia's Jeckyll Island
- to discuss ways of stabilizing the country's banking system.
- Congress passed the Federal Reserve act in 1913 giving this private corporation
- a monopoly over issuing the nation's money supply.
- How then did the power to issue something
- as fundamental as money fall into private hands?
- Initially, you can think a bank was about storing people's gold,
- so you come in, you store your gold at the bank, and the banker gives you
- a gold certificate that says you have such and such amount of gold in my bank.
- Now, the basis of the paper money systems
- was when you could start trading those pieces of paper.
- Let's say you have some gold that you want to keep safe.
- You put it in a bank, and the bank gives you a paper receipt
- you can redeem later for your gold.
- You can now trade that piece of paper in place of the gold
- as long as others are also able to redeem it for your gold.
- The good name of the bank on the paper note assures people
- that behind the piece of paper is a piece of gold waiting to be redeemed.
- Soon, as people's confidence in the bank grows,
- rather than cashing in the receipt, the person receiving the paper simply trades it again.
- The paper may end up being traded many times
- before being redeemed for the original gold in the bank.
- And banks discovered that when people started paying each other
- with claims to the coins in the bank's vault rather than taking the coins out,
- that the bank didn't really need to keep all the coins in the vault
- in order to have enough to actually pay
- people who did come and want the coins.
- The banker realizes, nobody's coming to take the gold.
- The gold is just sitting there, so instead of just putting out one piece of paper
- that says there's such and such amount of gold, you can put out a lot of pieces of paper
- given the fact that nobody is coming and taking the gold, and you can lend money.
- And the basis of that loan is the trust that people have
- that if they want to come and get the gold, the gold will be there.
- Money in the bank is not actually wealth.
- The only thing that makes that system work is the fact that nobody actually does come
- to get the gold. Now if everybody says "You know what,
- I'm going to go get my gold at the bank." If everybody went and got it,
- there wouldn't be enough gold for everybody.
- You often had bank runs and bank panics.
- When people would have a lack of confidence in a particular bank,
- they would take those bank notes to the bank and demand their gold and silver.
- And with fractional reserves, that bank would quickly run out of the reserve metal
- and have to close its doors.
- So that's fractional reserve banking: the coins in the vault
- are a fraction of the claims that could be made for them.
- The reason the bank did it is because they were making money
- off of earning interest off of those loans
- that were promises that there was gold in the bank.
- As people's confidence in the bank and its receipts continues to grow,
- banks soon discover an unexpected way to earn profit.
- The bank can print a receipt for gold that does not even exist.
- They can then loan that receipt to someone on the condition
- that they pay it back with interest.
- While the bank takes a risk by having less gold than the outstanding receipts,
- there is an almost unlimited potential to make profit off charging interest
- on loaning gold that it does not even have.
- If people catch on that there isn't enough gold to redeem the receipts,
- they will all go to the bank at once to get their gold.
- If this happens there will be a bank run. The bank will fail
- because it is caught without enough gold to back up its receipts.
- In 1934, in an attempt to prevent further bank failures,
- a series of banking reforms slowly took away people's ability to trade
- their paper money in for gold or silver.
- In 1971, Richard Nixon removed the last vestiges of this convertibility.
- Today, our money can no longer be redeemed for gold or silver.
- Now we've gone beyond that to what I think of as an even more postmodern reality
- which is we don't even see the money anymore. We don't hold it in our hands.
- We take a piece of plastic to the supermarket,
- buy groceries and run it through a machine
- which registers it in our account book somewhere.
- The seller doesn't see it either, right?
- And at the end of the day, they balance accounts, and some numbers
- have been added to the supermarket's and taken out of our account.
- Most the assets that we call money are not printed dollar bills.
- In fact, the currency is a very small proportion of the total amount of money.
- Most of what we call money are bank accounts.
- In the same way that banks used to issue more paper money than they had gold,
- today banks issue more bank account money than they have cash reserves.
- It is these bank account balances that make up about 97% of what we think of as money.
- If a landlord wants to know how much money you have before you sign a lease,
- you would show them an account balance and not a suitcase full of cash.
- Most economic textbooks never say what money is. They just say what money does.
- They describe money by its functions. They talk about things like
- medium of exchange, standard of value, store of value;
- are the classical ones. These are all things that money does.
- Money lives in a different space, in fact. It's an agreement.
- A lot people think money is something that is tangible, real
- and that you can pick up and handle.
- That actually isn't so. Money is basically an idea. And it's an idea that
- you owe someone something, or someone owes something to you.
- And that idea can be symbolized by an account, where your account
- goes up and mine goes down or vice versa.
- Or it can be symbolized by an exchange of paper currency,
- or an exchange of coin whether it's gold, silver, or copper or whatever.
- But those are all symbols. It's not actually money.
- Another misconception that people have about money is that money is a thing,
- but in today's world, money is simply credit,
- which means it's an information system. And the question is:
- what kind of information does it convey? It's information about
- claims against the economic output.
- If you have a bank account that says you have a million dollars,
- it's nice to say I have a million dollars, but what really makes it nice
- is that you can buy a million dollars worth of things that you want to buy.
- So if money is nothing more than information about what we owe each other,
- how does the money we use everyday get created?
- Money is created through the process of bank loans.
- People, companies, governments
- go into the banking system and borrow money.
- So every dollar, every national currency you've ever seen is someone's debt.
- For every new dollar created in the monetary system,
- you have a corresponding debt.
- That works for both the federal reserve dollars themselves
- and for the bank deposit dollars that are based on them.
- Money is issued whenever someone takes out a loan from the bank.
- So if I walk into a bank, and I want to borrow half a million dollars to start a business,
- and I've got a good business plan, and I've got customers,
- then the bank, assuming they agree,
- will give me half a million dollars to start my business.
- There is your money, and this is your payment book.
- Thank you.
- Now most people, if you ask them, will say that that half a million dollars
- comes from somewhere else. It comes from someone else's savings;
- it comes from investments. That's actually not true.
- When I say money is issued as debt, I mean
- they don't get that money from anywhere.
- They actually create it out of thin air and create credit
- in my bank account, and puff there it is.
- John Kenneth Galbraith in his book "Money: whence is came, where it went,"
- says this. He says "The process by which money is created
- is so simple that the mind is repelled."
- And it's true. When I tell people how money is created by banks
- simply by making ledger entries, they just can't believe it.
- The private banking system literally creates our money out of nothing
- and loans it into the economy.
- The only way new money can get into the economy and ultimately your pocket,
- is via a bank loan. This means that every dollar you've ever seen
- is someone's debt to a bank.
- The simply fact is, and it's an uncomfortable fact for many people to realize,
- that if all the debts were repaid,
- then the whole money supply would simply disappear. There would be no money,
- and that would mean a complete and total collapse of the economy.
- If everybody were to reimburse their debts, if that were possible,
- that everybody does reimburse their debts, there wouldn't be any money left.
- In fact there's more debt than money available.
- And the reason is that interest is not created.
- The catch is that they want more repaid than what they've given me.
- When you go to a bank and borrow $100,000 to buy a house,
- they will check whether you have good credit. And then, they will decide
- to create the money, entering it electronically in your account,
- and say you have to bring back $200,000 in the next twenty years.
- The $100,000 of the first loan is created,
- the second one (the interest rate) is not created.
- So they send you into the world to compete with everybody else
- to bring in the second $100,000.
- That's how the money is kept scarce. It is through the competition
- between different players for interest that is not created.
- So there is always less money than is necessary. Okay? And it's systemic.
- If you to a bank and borrow money into circulation,
- if the bank decides to approve your loan application,
- they will make two entries on their books.
- One is they will take your note (let's say its a mortgage note)
- and that will be an asset on the books of the bank, and they will offset that
- with an equal deposit to your account which is a liability on the books of the bank.
- So the money creation process is as simple as that,
- but the bank does not create the interest that you're going to have to pay
- year by year by year until this mortgage loan matures.
- So where does that interest come from?
- Where does the interest come from? [laughs] I have to find that.
- Well, it has to come from some other loan that was made to someone else.
- So you have this inherent deficiency in the money supply.
- Not everyone can repay what they owe to the banks.
- At any given time there is more owed to the banks than exists in circulation.
- Which means inevitably, someone is going to lose the game.
- Someone is going to go bankrupt,
- and that has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the goods and services
- or the efficiency of the business. Nothing at all.
- Everybody in the economy is vying with everyone else to avoid defaulting
- on their loans to the banks. And the only way they can do that
- is by competing with one another for an inadequate supply.
- So, it's a like a game of musical chairs. It assures that there must be some losers,
- regardless of how competent they are in conducting their business.
- The money we get when we receive a loan is called principal.
- Our debt, however, is not discharged when we repay the principal.
- Bank loans are all made on the condition that people pay
- both the principal and the interest the bank charges.
- However, money can only be issued as principal;
- no one creates the interest. So the amount of debt owed is actually far greater
- than the amount of money there is to repay it.
- When a dollar is loaned into the economy it begins a loop.
- Joe the farmer gets a loan from the bank and pays Tom for fixing his tractor.
- Tom pays Jane for bread at the local bakery.
- And Jane in turn buys the wheat from Joe, who can now repay the loan.
- The problem is Joe owes the bank interest on top of the principal.
- In order to avoid losing his property to the bank,
- Joe must go find other money making its own loop in the economy.
- He can now repay his loan with the interest,
- but the people in that loop are left without their money.
- They still need money to facilitate their exchanges,
- and to repay the loan that issued the money they had been using.
- The only place they can get it is from other such debt loops.
- Since all money has an interest price tag attached,
- there will never be enough money to repay all the debt owed to banks.
- Therefore some people will always have to go bankrupt
- or have their property repossessed by the bank.
- It's crazy. Sometimes it worries me because, you know,
- what if there was like a collective understanding
- about how phony the money is, when it comes down to it?
- What would people do? Would they riot in the streets?
- Who's propagating the illusion behind the money?
- What... It just pisses me off actually.
- Whenever it rains, the trees direct a certain amount of the rainfall to the bark.
- And this bark is set up in these elaborate patterns
- to direct rain all the way around the tree.
- Wow really?
- Yeah, and in these crevices where bugs and ants and other critters live,
- you get a lot of exoskeletons that are shed in here.
- That then is dissolved by the rain water.
- It runs down and it carries the phosphate from the bugs
- and the manure of bugs down into this.
- All of this organic material at the base here is what feeds the tree,
- so it's like a constant recycling of the material of life back into life.
- Well, I don't think economics are related only to humans at all.
- It's very easy to see nature as an economy.
- Nature creates value constantly for the benefit of all its membership,
- and that's what I think economics are really all about.
- Here you have a kind of banking of resources
- that every element in this forest contributes to.
- So it's more like a community of contributors,
- and you take what you need as you need it.
- So there's like a bank at the bottom of that fir tree, there's this bank of resources,
- and it's available to the tree, it's available to fungi, to the earthworm, to termites.
- To whatever comes along and needs it,
- and each time someone takes something they generally contribute something.
- There isn't that kind of profit motive or interest or any of that in natural systems.
- It really isn't necessary to have more than you need,
- unless somehow you are acculturated to that belief system.
- So there's a kind of scarcity boogie bear in human culture
- that always has us feeling as if there isn't enough
- or there's not going to be enough, so we've got to, quick,
- gather as much as we can,
- and store it where no one can get to it and steal it from us or rob us or whatever.
- And then it doesn't really matter if we even use it.
- Most people's experience with money is that money is scarce.
- And in today's monetary system, it is scarce.
- These cultural lies on which our relationship with money rests and is rooted
- is really governed almost completely by the most insidious and tragic lie,
- which I believe is the lie of scarcity.
- Even the Federal Reserve publications claim
- that what gives money its value is its scarcity.
- And this is false. It's not the scarcity that gives money its value.
- When we're talking about credit money, what gives it value is its ability to requisition
- whatever you want or need from the marketplace.
- We actually swim in a set of unexamined unconscious beliefs.
- And we look out into the world, and we just fear that there's not enough to go around,
- without any evidence really. And then we make that true.
- The domination model artificially creates scarcity,
- and that scarcity is one of the ways the system actually maintains itself.
- Not only material scarcity, emotional and, yes, spiritual scarcity.
- I mean, what does it mean to have enough money?
- I guess you always want a little more.
- There's not enough time. There's not enough money. There's not enough sleep.
- So it's a constant battle with
- "There's not enough" "We don't have enough" "It's not enough" "I'm not enough."
- And that is a mindset. It's an unconscious unexamined mindset
- that creates distorted behaviors that are inconsistent with who we are.
- The same thing that keeps a rich person from giving
- is the same thing that keeps a poor person from making.
- It's that conditioned way of thinking and seeing we have to really begin to address.
- Those who consider themselves poor in this country are not poor.
- I think it's this scarcity mentality. I think it's a belief system that we all carry.
- And that "there's not enough" belief system has a second part to it.
- "There's not enough to go around, and someone somewhere is going to be left out."
- And that inevitable fear or certainty that
- there's not enough to go around and someone somewhere is going to be left out
- is actually at the base of our political understanding of the world,
- our systems of governance, our education system. It's even at the heart of religion.
- Of course there are scarcities that happen naturally.
- There's a disaster, there's a flood. All kinds of things can happen.
- But here you have a system that artificially creates scarcity
- so that then you get people who really are fighting for the spoils,
- and since there's so much control from up on top,
- it is a way of maintaining the disunity and the confusion of those on the bottom.
- What it is is emasculated men, and what do men do when they're emasculated?
- They compensate with hyper-masculinity.
- When you leave particularly men with no options,
- they get violent and they get destructive. I don't care where you are talking about.
- Go to Russia. What do you think the Russian gangs are?
- Go to Northern Ireland. Go anywhere in the world.
- These devastating dynamics are engineered.
- So our experience of money as being scarce is an artifact of the money system.
- In a properly run monetary system there will be no scarcity of money.
- This "there's not enough to go around and someone somewhere
- is always going to be left out" gives this very difficult and unfortunate permission
- to leave people out. 'Cause if someone's always going to be left out,
- then it's your job and my job to accumulate more
- than we possibly could ever use or need
- to distance ourselves from ever being one of those poor people who gets left out.
- At the point of view of the corporation, getting more,
- getting more and more and more, that is driven in part by greed,
- in part by the dynamic of trying to get profits, capitalism, but it's also driven by fear,
- because if you don't do it, if you can't expand faster than the next corporation
- they will get research money and they will get marketing money
- and they will beat you and may drive you out of the game.
- "You're not quick as efficient in this plant as you ought to be by our calculations"
- this is the banker speaking,
- "and so therefore we're going to either raise the cost of your credit
- and drive you to do bad things to your workers or to your community
- or to the environment in order to boost that return and boost your stock price.
- And we will lend to you under those terms only."
- The nice way of saying it is "nice guys finish last."
- If you're callous to the effects on others, you have a potential to rise.
- The odds are you can compete your way up. If you care
- and are socially concerned about others, you're at a tremendous disadvantage.
- So I think the competitive dynamic that we have
- does sort of weed out a set of people for success,
- but what I would say it weeds out for success is not competence,
- not creativity, not intelligence, but callousness far more often.
- Well, I think if you look at how economies actually function,
- they function with both competition and cooperation.
- So I think both can coexist. We have probably leaned more towards competition
- and I think we could use more cooperation,
- but I think either one in its extreme can be dysfunctional.
- Competition does have its place
- in urging us to our highest level of performance and fulfillment,
- but health is dependent on cooperation. We don't have the liver
- competing with the heart for blood and for nutrients.
- There is this inherent cooperation that leads to the health of the entire entity.
- The nature to which people are able to be social, civilized, sympathetic
- is quite amazing, and it's in contradiction to the nature of the money.
- It's interesting that anybody, whether you're a man or a woman,
- whether your aggressive naturally or very sweet and cooperative naturally,
- if you're going to have to make the money to live, I make you a prediction,
- you're going to have to fight for it. You're going to have to compete for it.
- Is that in nature out there? Is that the world that is that way?
- Or is it the money system that's between us and the world that is that way.
- I make the second claim.
- A lot of diversity here. We're starting to see a whole different array
- of plants come into being. So, there's some lupins here.
- There's strawberry. Small wild strawberry.
- This broom with the yellow blooms on it.
- This is a nitrogen fixer and is stabilizing these slopes.
- And, decomposers here. They're harvesting that broom.
- So what are these ants doing for the whole situation?
- Well basically, they're breaking carbon down.
- They're taking carbon, gathering it together, and breaking it down.
- You've got a great part of the umbelliferae family. This is yarrow.
- They're deep rooted so they bring a lot of minerals up
- from the parent material that goes bellow this sand and dig into
- more than silica to bring up things to the surface that will nourish these other plants.
- So you've got a lot of complexity here, a lot of plants cooperating with each other
- to try and create an ecosystem that stabilizes this shifting sand surface here.
- Ecosystems are based much more on cooperation than they are on competition.
- We tend to deify cutthroat competition,
- and there is some competition in nature, but there's much more cooperation.
- Species move from competition to cooperation because they discover
- the economic value of cooperating. It is cheaper, more efficient.
- All you have to do is look at our pentagon budget
- and see that a tiny fraction of it would really develop countries
- that we've been leveling instead. Very much more cost effective
- to make friends of them than it is to keep them as enemies.
- We have eight billion people on the planet.
- There's a billion of those that are happy to work but can't. There are no jobs for them.
- Some would argue that these people are unemployed
- because they lack skills, or because they don't want to work.
- And that may be true in a few cases, but in the vast majority
- that's not the reason why they're impoverished.
- The reason why they're impoverished is because you have this scarcity of money.
- The first question I ask is "Am I going to be stuck being a janitor forever?"
- And they were like, "Oh no, there's all kinds of chance for advancement.
- You could go to calling, we've got data entry.
- You've all got kinds of computer skills.." And then four months passed,
- and I addressed it again and got a different story. It was like I had no value.
- My self-esteem was going down because
- I can do more than just clean bingo tables and clean toilets.
- If you have an economy which is generating only a limited number of good jobs,
- are you surprised that parents feel it's really important
- to teach their kids how to compete on every level?
- They want their kids to get those jobs.
- You know, another kind of response would be to get together and say,
- "Hey wait a second. There's a problem with the structure here."
- But we have a very individualistic response to the problem.
- At the time of the civil war in the United States,
- which is a very interesting turning point, midway in the Industrial Revolution,
- the industrial rebuilding of the United States,
- slavery in the South was obviously condemned. But the counter argument
- was something they called "wage slavery." And what did that mean?
- It meant that you had no protection; you could be fired at will without a job.
- You could be thrown out on the street and you were a "wage slave" was the term.
- The Thirteenth Amendment which says you cannot treat a human being
- as a commodity for buying and selling.
- And the economics is, you can no longer buy or sell labor, but you can rent it.
- So the wage is... you're renting somebody.
- The word "job" was invented in the industrial age in England.
- It didn't exist before. And it describes a pile of things that one does for money.
- Work is a very very old concept. And work is something you do
- because you're passionate about it, or because you're good at it,
- or because that's what you love doing. A job is specifically
- something you do for pay. Pay in national money to be precise.
- Tell me, why are you interested in this job?
- I need a steady job, Mr. Wyaden with a chance to go places.
- People like Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln said that
- if America became that sort of society. A society in which everyone became,
- or the vast majority became wage laborers, or "wage slavery" as they used to call it,
- we would lose the freedoms that made America great.
- If you, say, were in such conditions of duress that you just couldn't survive
- except by being a slave, you might sign a contract that says "Okay, I'll be your slave."
- That's by your own free will. Are we going to take that seriously?
- Under some pathological assumptions I suppose.
- We live in an economy that takes eighty percent of each new generation,
- and educates that eighty percent to obey orders and to endure boredom,
- and stifles their creativity and stifles their capacities, and curtails them.
- They are systematically crushed by a system which does what?
- Which fills slots, and eighty percent of the slots need people who just do
- wrote tedious repetitive labor, at least at work,
- and therefore are acclimated to doing that.
- Most of my jobs, I've never really liked. I've never said, "This is great.
- I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this."
- There was a job I really really despised, but the money was really good.
- And it wasn't the job that I wanted. And my daily life
- and my work experience was just not making me happy.
- You could say, "You know what, this is a terrible job. I don't want to do it."
- It's a free market. You have total choice to not show up under these terrible conditions.
- At the same time, if you don't, little problem here,
- you're not going to eat and your family isn't going to eat. And that's why people do it.
- Yeah, I really hated that job.
- I think many of us feel nowadays feel the way Charlie Chaplin role modeled long ago.
- Like cogs and wheels, that we're stuck in the machinery of our economy.
- That we have very little choice. We have to work a nine to five job,
- and watch a little TV and go to bed, and do it all over again.
- I want to have a more rewarding experience I guess with life.
- And based not just to make money, and to say
- "Oh, this year I made 10,000 more than last year."
- I think this whole idea of a middle class in this country is ridiculous.
- There is no middle class. There's no such thing as that.
- They're the working poor too, because their whole lifestyle was financed to death.
- They have the big beautiful house, the two lovely cars,
- they're putting their kids through college,
- but if they fired from their job, all of that stuff is over.
- I've always been kind of a cynical person,
- so I guess to me doing jobs to just support yourself is just pretty much what life is about.
- It's that we do the work we do so often simply for the money.
- Now, since we're all chasing this money around, it utterly patterns our society.
- So hardly realizing it, they come into their purchasing stage,
- and are off on a wild non-stop ride.
- It's a happy-go-spending world reflected in the windows
- of the suburban shopping centers where they go to buy.
- I claim there's enough work in the world for everybody forever,
- but if you start to have to pay for it with a national money that's scarce,
- that's making the work into a job, that is going to be another question.
- Because someone is going to have to borrow that money in order to pay you.
- As we get rid of more and more and more jobs, we may have to get to a point where
- we redefine the meaning of work.
- And you're going to have to find other ways for people to support themselves.
- Work, there's an infinity of things we can do.
- We can make every city, every garden, every house a paradise.
- There's an infinite amount of things to be done to reach there.
- Don't expect to be paid for it in national money. Don't get that idea.
- So we have to find another way for what people can do in a post-industrial age.
- One of the things about local currency, I think that a lot of people are embracing it
- because they're starting to understand more about our federal economic system.
- Federal Reserve notes don't necessarily serve the best interest of local communities,
- and local currency can help tip the scales back into that mindset.
- For some people, if they have RiverHOURS, and they don't have federal money,
- we felt like, well, that's fine we will take them.
- And it works for us because we have employees here
- who are willing to be paid in RiverHOURS.
- My name is Mark England, and I'm a registered nurse,
- and I'm the director of clinical services here at La Clinica.
- We're not a free clinic, we expect payment, but we also work with people
- because we understand that people also need to buy food and shelter
- and other things to keep themselves alive as well.
- We don't seek to replace federal money in our communities at all.
- We are hoping to facilitate more exchange beyond what's possible with federal dollars.
- It's another kind of faith in another kind of currency.
- And it's faith in your neighbors, it's faith in local business, it's faith in your region
- and what it can offer you, and that there is true wealth there to be had.
- Not many of us remember that this country was built
- on decentralized issue of currency. By and large what it meant
- was that the various regions of the United States could develop in a decentralized way
- according to the resources and the skills that they had in that region.
- And that's what created the great diversity and economic wealth of this country.
- Complementary currency in my definition is an agreement in a community
- to use something, just about anything they can agree on,
- as a medium of exchange that's other than national conventional money.
- The first thing that one has to understand about complementary currencies
- is that there are as many different rules as you could want to invent.
- In national money, there's only one, and it's basically the same world-wide.
- In complementary currencies, different communities agree on different rules.
- It is complementary because they do not replace national money.
- A local currency is something that is issued at the time that it's backed
- by goods and services in our community.
- And when people advertise in the RiverHOURS trade directory,
- they actually sign a commitment that says that they are backing in whole or in part
- that currency with their goods or services that they're offering, and that they're
- also agreeing to accept in whole or in part some local currency.
- So when you get RiverHOURS,
- it's backed by people in your community and that's tangible.
- Local currency is a way of encouraging people, inducing people to spend locally.
- And it's also a way to help people to support one another in the local economy
- when they maybe do not have any money.
- It's been probably a third to half of my income.
- Whether it was just the advertising in the directory, and getting my name out
- or word of mouth has been huge.
- Their offerings, their inventory, the money often hits their cash register
- and then heads straight out of town to the central office in Ohio or wherever.
- RiverHOURS is hopelessly and happily bound to our community.
- That value always remains here, and I think people understand that.
- Alan Watts in the 50's wrote a critique of the depression where he said,
- "Look, the economy went flat because everybody found there was no money.
- There's plenty of work needed doing. Plenty of people wanted work.
- Plenty of goods in the stores, but nobody could afford them.
- Nobody could pay for them because we had no money."
- And he said this was like going to build a building, and you've got the materials,
- you've got the tools, you've got the skills, you've got the drawings,
- you've got the planning permission, you've got the weather, you've got the will.
- No inches. Damn!
- We had a bunch of inches, but then there was a big project on the other side of town;
- they're using all the inches. We don't have any inches,
- because all the inches went over there. I guess we're out of work.
- Well that's exactly what we do with money.
- That's my clearest realization is that there is plenty of work that needs to be done
- in this valley, and there are all kinds of people who need work.
- To make ends meet, they need work; they could contribute to the community.
- There's all kinds of things to do. So we have the work that needs to be done.
- We have the workers. What is it that's missing?
- Pieces of paper that say I'll do this in exchange for other goods.
- People are short of and hungry for a tangible way to just plug into a sense of community.
- And that feeling, that attitude, I believe is accomplished transactionally
- through using this currency system.
- Once they get the concept that we can spend the money here and it stays here
- and it helps our school system, our children, and our future and everything,
- people really get a hold of it again. And the RiverHOURS and all that,
- that's all stuff that we need to keep working hard at.
- I think it's exciting. I think RiverHOURS isn't going anywhere.
- I think it's only going to continue to bring people together and to get people talking.
- I'd like to say right now that it's a huge economic impact,
- but that's not the biggest impact of RiverHOURS at this point.
- The biggest impact is people starting to shift into recognizing and realizing
- that local communities can become more self-sufficient in every way.
- And the soil here is interesting because now, this is all dune stuff,
- but now we've this humus building up holding the sand together.
- You can still see the sand grains in there.
- So these dunes have been established for a while,
- so they're totally covered in vegetation.
- Everything has reached a certain amount of stability.
- All of the plants combined are sharing the rhizosphere with each other,
- their roots are intertwined, and they're contributing different things.
- These plants root associate with probably here it's a fungus
- that can actually take nitrogen out of the atmosphere and fix it on their roots.
- They actually fix it so the pine tree can get it. The pine tree in exchange,
- will through photosynthesis create sugars and send it down and feed that to the fungus.
- So there's this interaction going on all the time that is mutually beneficial.
- What we're doing is really reinventing the exchange process.
- We need to mediate exchanges in a different way than we've done before.
- The debt money system creates money on the basis of interest bearing debt.
- It's not debt itself that is at fault.
- It is the interest component that's attached to the debt.
- And the interest component does not get created
- when banks create money on the basis of collateral.
- Some people are really luddite about this and they think,
- "Well we should be back to gold and silver
- and that's a precious metal that doesn't change with time."
- That's all nonsense in my view. Just nonsense.
- And a lot of earnest good people devote their lives to trying to prove
- that somehow the world is going to hell because we have this symbolic money
- rather than the real thing.
- I would say don't waste your brain cells on that subject.
- It doesn't lead anywhere, and it's actually quite reactionary if you think about it.
- We have to start thinking about money as an information medium,
- not as a substantial thing.
- It has been merely an information medium
- for a couple hundred years in most respects, but nonetheless,
- we've stuck ourselves with the idea that there's only so much money.
- That's the core of its reality concept.
- That all there is is so many trillion dollars or euros or yen,
- and what we're doing is juggling them. Comes from you, goes to me,
- goes to him, goes to her. It's to and fro, and we're juggling with a real thing.
- Therefore we're always going to have shortages.
- How can we mediate our exchanges without creating a pervasive sense of scarcity?
- Are paper currencies like RiverHOURS really the best way
- to solve this problem, or are there other more effective approaches?
- RiverHOURS print their currency and as soon as you print a currency,
- you have, in fact, in my opinion, created a problem,
- because you've created a limited supply currency,
- which means there's only so much currency as there are notes in circulation.
- And then you end up with the same problem as you have if you have something
- like a currency backed by gold, which is there's only so much gold.
- In a mutual credit system there's unlimited currency available in potential,
- and that's one of its great strengths.
- In a mutual credit system each person has an account,
- and at sometimes your account may be positive
- at other times your account may be negative.
- Now, it's this allowance for a negative balance that is the fundamental feature
- of a credit-clearing system. This negative balance
- represents credit that's been extended to you by the rest of the community.
- My name is Francis Ayley. I'm the president of Fourth Corner Exchange.
- We are a mutual time-exchange, mutual credit exchange system.
- We have over, as of today, 650 members, and about 400 of those are in Bellingham.
- I'm Gene Breckon. I offer reading out loud, singing, playing the piano,
- word processing, writing, and office work.
- Hi, I'm Lynnette Allen, and I'm offering websites, design and development.
- One of my favorites is I have this great apple tree, so I have a lot of apples
- that I have sold for time dollars, and changed a four-year-old's concept
- of where apples come from. They don't come from the store, they come from a tree,
- and grandma was very happy that he learned that.
- In the case of mutual-credit systems, the rule of the game is I do something for you,
- I get a credit, you have a debit. The sum of the two is zero,
- so, in other words, net we owe nothing, but I have a credit and you have a debit.
- I as a seller may allocate to you some good or service that you need at the time.
- I get a credit to my account. You get a debit to your account.
- Your debit means you owe something to the community of traders
- in our credit clearing circle.
- My credit balance means that the circle owes something to me.
- I've really been enjoying a lot of things. Chicken soup from my friend Mary Stanton.
- I buy the chickens and she makes the soup. It's wonderful.
- When, with my credits, I can go and get the cookies of my neighbor,
- and you can work in her garden to pay for your debits,
- we've created a currency between the four of us. Try to do that with dollars.
- It doesn't work that way does it? I need to go and borrow it or I need to earn it,
- competing with everybody else to get it. In this game we create it ourselves.
- In a mutual credit system, everyone has an account.
- This account can go positive and it can go negative.
- When Bob repairs Andrew's hotel,
- Bob receives a credit, and Andrew receives a debit.
- Bob can then use that credit to buy catering from Christine.
- Andrew works off his debit by providing lodging for Daniel.
- When Daniel does dental work for Christine, the credit and debit are cleared.
- No hard cash was needed, and everyone gained something in the transaction.
- It's like this network. It provides more security for me just knowing
- that I'm part of Fourth Corner Exchange. And, for instance,
- during the winter part of my fence blew down in a storm,
- and I was able to find somebody, a carpenter
- who came up all the way from Mt. Vernon,
- and put that fence up for me within a few days.
- Over the long run, we expect that each person is going to put in
- as much as they take out, and take out as much as they put in,
- but we allow these temporary imbalances in order to facilitate this exchange process.
- This is the fundamental function of money.
- As more people join the mutual credit clearing circle,
- this process can become more dynamic. Ultimately, no matter how big the circle gets,
- the value people contribute should remain equal to the value they take out.
- This is money created not by a hierarchy. It is a medium of exchange
- that's created between us. We create the medium of exchange.
- Second, there's no interest. Third it's not scarce.
- When you start trading in Fourth Corner Exchange, many people talk about
- experiencing a shift in consciousness. There's not a scarcity of that currency,
- so there's much less competition.
- So you end up with a completely different experience.
- And people talk about how cooperative, supportive...
- people are really concerned about your well being.
- So the primary distinction between money that is tight, scarce, limited,
- comes from them, and money that is free available and sufficient
- and comes from us is that with one we are in fear, greed and competition,
- and with the other we behave like sensible human beings.
- We are more generous, we are more comfortable,
- we are more giving, we are more willing to receive.
- It's made me a lot more willing to share my home and open up my space.
- I'm not as afraid of people as I once was.
- I think that this organization has the potential of making things really livable
- as time gets harder in the future. Not only in terms of the goods and services
- but in terms of the connections and the community.
- Community needs to become our safety net, I believe, the way the economy is going.
- I only thought that everything I did, I would have to pay
- out of my pocket for in some way, and so now I realize
- I have these options, so I kind of see it as relationship-based consumption.
- There are literally thousands of grassroots person-to-person networks
- like Fourth Corner Exchange all over the world.
- However, the concept of mutual credit is not limited to the grass roots.
- Mutual credit has also been successfully applied in mainstream business.
- The commercial barter industry now oversees $30 billion a year in trade.
- 240,000 businesses in the US alone participate in a barter system.
- These networks use mutual credit to help businesses
- make better use of their capacity, while saving on their cash expenditures.
- My name is Dave Wallach, and I've been involved in the commercial barter business
- as a member since 1972. I started my own enterprise in 1979,
- a company called American Trade Association here in the Bay Area.
- Well, it's actually a process, it's a business process.
- Simply put it makes salable what is unsold wasted and ignored in our economy.
- My opinion, there's always an empty table in a restaurant,
- just like there's always an empty room in a hotel, so you need to fill it.
- And if you fill it by trade, I look at it just like it was cash,
- because you're going to order a nice dinner, a nice bottle of wine,
- and I'm going to spend that just as on an add somewhere or a taxi top, or whatever it was.
- John's Grill became famous when it was a setting in the novel by Daschle Hammett
- which was the Maltese Falcon, so John's Grill has been in business since 1908.
- My is Kaz, that's my nickname. My real name is Richard Kasmier.
- I've been in the wine business about 20 years. I was the first organic grower
- of grapes up here in Sonoma Valley, and we're in the town of Kenwood.
- And, I've been using barter for almost fifteen years.
- Excess capacity in business, simply put,
- is business that they could do but are not doing.
- One example would be like a printer, and his capacities are press time.
- So he's got these presses that he's paid a lot of money for,
- there're sitting on the floor, and they're running half the time.
- He's making a profit doing that, but they're only running half the time.
- That means he's got a 50% excess capacity.
- This is Club Sportiva. We're a luxury car share club,
- and as you can see behind me here we've got some really exciting cars.
- At Club Sportiva our members have access to drive the cars,
- so it's like a timeshare for sports cars.
- Mario Andretti, the famous formula one race car driver, is a member of Club Sportiva.
- Dick Gordon is an Apollo 12 astronaut, he's another member
- who's been on board since 2003 or 2004.
- So we joined BizExchange about roughly two years ago,
- and it was really quickly a good fit for the club.
- It was kind of an easy decision to join, and for our first year we were a very big client
- for them because a lot of their members found our services to be a good fit.
- And we did a lot of marketing and advertising through their company as well,
- some catering through their clients. So it was kind of a perfect match;
- that immediately, once the fire was stoked, it was going quickly.
- You could buy things that you're presently paying cash for.
- It could be legal services; it could be printing;
- it could be automotive repair; dental; medical.
- Thousands of different items are represented.
- So it makes sense that if they could exchange that excess capacity
- for goods and services they're paying cash for, that they would make a profit doing that.
- I'll sell my wine. And for that we've had a dentist, chiropractor, electrician, plumber,
- a roof repair guy, printing, brochures, business cards, silk-screening of shirts;
- we've used a pretty good gamet of services.
- For the small entry price to get into the network,
- which I think it was a hundred bucks, I don't know what it was; it was nominal.
- It was almost that shouldn't be even a consideration.
- It's really more, how would you spend your dollars, your BizEx dollars,
- once you start having dollars to spend. And if it's on things
- you either would spend otherwise anyway or on things you'd like to spend on
- but you haven't, it really should be a no-brainer.
- Through the use of bringing this efficiency into the economy,
- and utilizing what has been wasted and ignored,
- we bring tremendous efficiencies to the economy.
- So if we take wasted resources and are able to turn them into something productive,
- we now have reached a sociological goal also.
- So what we are, we're the ultimate business ecologists.
- You can't even begin to talk about how do we think like an ecosystem
- until you're aware of your place in your own culture, in your own society.
- That you aren't the only thing worth consideration.
- That everything around you is part of you, and that you have a responsibility
- for those around you. And in order to be aware of your place,
- you have to look at the place and understand the place, right?
- And it's earth, Planet Earth.
- There is without a doubt a mega-crisis that we're facing in the coming years.
- And, the big elephant in the living room is the money problem.
- And unfortunately, most people who are active in the sustainability movement
- and the environmental movement don't understand the nature of this problem.
- And we're not going to make any significant headway with sustainability
- or restoration of the environment until we solve the money problem.
- This is part of the hallmark of a pre-democratic society
- is that it functions by taboo.
- We have certain assumptions, we accept them, we do not question them.
- If you want to be part of the tribe, you will speak the language of the tribe,
- and you will follow the rules of the tribe.
- I think we will evolve to, number one, become aware of the blind-spots
- of what money does to us. That our money is actually like an iron ring
- that we put through our nose, and it's leading us in directions
- that may not be the ones that we want to go consciously.
- It is like playing cards. It is something that maybe we all kinda know
- in the back of our minds that it might be like that.
- It's just one of those things that you know, but you don't really want to know.
- Most people, most of us get up in the morning for things other than just money.
- We care about things like family, and, if you will, betterment;
- development as whole human beings.
- People are not fools forever, and I think we're going to see
- a very strong reaction to this as the pain grows and as the difficulties grow,
- and that's the time to begin building serious ideas about where we go for the future.
- I think we have the opportunity to bring forth an environmentally sustainable,
- spiritually fulfilling, and socially just human presence on this planet.
- And I think that is the power and possibility of our time.
- I think we can use money as a tool, as a servant to what we want to become
- rather than be victims.
- We don't need to have all this suffering around money.
- We can free ourselves from it.
- And the economy can be much healthier and much more of service to all of us.
- Time to become aware. Time to have a consciousness of our potential.
- And I would think our potential as humans is infinite.
- Let's not limit ourselves through the medium of exchange.
- Time to wake up.
- for more information on community currencies, visit www.themoneyfix.org


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