CAB - Communication Agents Blog

Banks Keep Accounts, They Don't Keep Money

Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 17:56:50 +0200
To: "Joel"
From: Josef Hasslberger
Subject: RE: Re: 'Energy as an anchor' reply : More on Money

Dear Sepp,

I've read somewhere: "Money is an idea backed up by confidence".

When the confidence is gone, the money is gone. This is the greatest, fundamental threat to the power of banks and all those who own "money". Banks exist because States have endowed them with the authority to maintain a vast bookkeeping system between payers and receivers. In fact, banks are the authorized relay stations for financial transactions. It is all about bookkeepers giving the false impression that they "own something".

Banks own nothing except their own capital.

All the banks' clients' savings are not the bank's capital. Lending, the giving and charging of interest, it is all about changing figures in today's electronic ledgers. The real value is in intellectual and material property and the capacity to produce. As long as someone will exchange something against an administrative deduction of a certain sum noted by the bank in the ledger it keeps in your name and an identical administrative change in the ledger the (another) bank keeps in the name of the supplier of something, all will be fine. Rockefellers, Rothschilds, ??, they're nothing but smart bookkeepers.

The word "bank account" explains it all. Account = a precise list or enumeration of monetary transactions. Banks keep accounts, they don't keep money.

Best regards,

Joel

Dear Joel,

I have read the same thing of money being an idea backed up by confidence, and it's one of the great truths. A concept that holds true no matter where you look. No amount of gold for instance can back money if there is no confidence.

The problem seems to be that banks, from simple bookkeepers and "money-movers" have evolved into something different. They have become the ultimate power behind the issue of money.

If you consider that only about 5 % of the total money supply in our typical western countries is physical (paper and coin), that leaves 95 % of it in the form of electrons. The interesting question is: how do these electrons come into being?

Well, believe it or not, the electrons are created by the banks, (the normal commercial banks, not even the "central banks") when they "give a loan". The justification is a "reserve requirement" of something like 10 %. So for every 10 of reserves (which would be bank capital plus deposits from clients), the bank can issue 100 of electrons.

Of course the bank claims that the money it loans out (actually pulls out of its hat) is its own property, and that the interest the lender must pay is the bank's to keep. This looks kind of strange on private loans, but we tend to accept. But look at governments who have to do the same thing: they have to borrow from the banks. They do it, issuing treasury bonds which are then "bought" by the banks and on which the banks get interest payments. Great scam!

And a great way to collect your interest - have the government tax the people!

Kind regards
Sepp

Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 20:19:55 +0200

To: "Joel"

From: Josef Hasslberger

Subject: Re: 'Energy as an anchor' reply : More on Money

"... But in reality that future survival is never dependent on money itself but on the availability of useful and valuable things to buy."

I could not agree with you more.

Unfortunately, money, by its very function, does assume value. In a sense money is nothing but value. Its physical attributes just describe the value we assign to it in order for it to function as a representative medium of exchange. That is the character of money : money is money and money is transferrable value -- you cant kill the value without killing the money; get rid of its value aspect and you sit with nothing but its soulless (and useless) remains. (Precious metals at least retain a minimum value -- a point for the metalists?)

My view is that money has no (and should not have any) value of and by itself. Its use lies in giving us a means to keep track of and account for the "exchange of valuables against other valuables" and in allowing delay as well as fractional values to be exchanged, which is a great advantage over barter, the direct exchange of goods. As soon as we use money as a "store of value", i.e. for savings, we distract from its primary function, which is the mediation of exchange. The "store of value" function could be admirably fulfilled by gold or other precious metals, but it is not compatible with the imperative that money used for exchange has to circulate as smoothly as possible (without hindrance) to fulfill that function to the fullest.

Gesell's proposal to devaluate money at 5 % pa is only allowing money to depreciate in a similar way as goods and services, which have the same tendency. In this way, money can more closely mimick the things it represents and that it is used for exchanging.

What is devaluing with the 5 % pa fee, is not the value of money itself, but only the value of each physical piece of money (paper) and each credit balance (current accounts). See it like a tax on money - you lost 5 % but you've just paid your taxes. The money units thus collected are then immediately re-distributed (to keep the correct amount of money to match goods and services on offer) so the value we give to money will NOT change. You can still buy one unit of energy for the same price you paid before.

All that happens is

1) we have provided an incentive to spend the money - make it circulate and

2) the money issuing authority gets ever fresh money units it can re-distribute, both to the people participating in the economy and towards expenditures of government which are today financed by taxing us more or less heavily.

Here is how I described my ideal economic system in a recent e-mail to a friend in Italy:

The question was: What Would Be Your Ideal Economic System?

And this was my answer:

It would be a system where resources were no longer diverted out of the "real economy" into the coffers of those who would use the resulting scarcity for purposes of control and oppression.

An ideal economic system would first of all guarantee the basic means of survival to all people in its area, encouraging creativity and personal initiative. It would favour co-operation while allowing for healthy competition. It would not allow concentration of economic resources in the hands of a few, nor would it require continuous economic growth for its own stability.

The way to do this would be to reform a few basic economic parameters, changing the economy from a debt base resulting in scarcity, to an economy of abundance. A few points:

-- Money "belongs" to all of those who participate in the economy - not to the banks nor to the state. Any money newly issued would therefore be distributed to the participants to spend as they see fit. Money would not be issued as loans by banks but would be accredited by a (central, regional or local) money issuing authority to every individual, with a small percentage going for government spending.

-- Currency would have to lose value with time. As money is a means of exchange for goods in commerce, it should - just like the goods or services - be time sensitive and lose some of its value if kept too long. This loss of value would be accredited to the money issuing authority for re-distribution. Funds would then go - in agreed proportions - towards personal spending capacity (credit to the participants) and government expenses - financing the services of government we believe necessary and useful.

-- Natural resources of all kinds, including land, shall pertain to the Community. The planet has a finite amount of natural resources. We all need them to live. They should not be open to ownership by a few. Use of the resources should of course be concessioned out to private interests - companies or individuals - subject to conditions which will aim at preserving these resources for the future, and at prices to be determined by public auction.

With these few and fairly straightforward changes of basic economic parameters, we could go a long way towards the ideal economy, where people would be free to be creative but also to have leisure if they wish, where we would have the necessities of life without having to feed a monster monopoly at the same time, where we would be free to engage in production and commerce without great obstacles and where the smartest and most active would do best - but not by taking scarce resources away from the less fortunate.

Taxes, as we know them today, could be abolished. Public expenditures would be financed by (a) fees received for the "farming out" of natural resource use, (b) rent received for public land use and (c) part of the monetary "back-flow" returning to the treasury/money-issuing-authority as a result of the periodic and largely automatic devaluation of money. Just think about never having to see a tax collector any more, while government yet has the money it needs to build roads and bridges.

We have two options with this money thing, this vehicle for value that we need so badly but hate even more: get rid of 'value' all together and just give whatever is to be given, or else live with it and do whatever is necessary to safeguard us from the evils of it.
The 'induced value' of money is the only value that is important and it depends entirely on the relation of goods and services on offer, on the one side and total amount of money in circulation multiplied by the velocity of turnover (that is, how many times in one year the money changes hands and thus fulfills its function of "means of exchange") on the other side.

In order to hold the 'value of money' stable, all you need to do is watch the price of energy or watch the price of a basket of basic goods including energy and at every tiny movement from your pre-determined value, either inject more or inject less money into the economy by issuing new money units. It works admirably well. Less units of money issued (decrease of total amount of money in circulation) price will tend lower. Conversely, more money issued (increasing the total amount of money in circulation) price will tend higher.

That is the ultimate tool to achieve stability of the value of money.

All you need is a dedicated money issue authority, a set of honest statistics, and a standard procedure for how to eliminate and how to inject the money units.

Kind regards

Sepp

Only For A Moment

In response to an email post inside the very high quality discussion group I-Sales I have suggested the following opportunity to view at proprietary content and intellectual assets also in a different way. This is how it went:

TOPIC: Stealing eBooks: Intellectual Property Theft? FROM: Keith Thirgood

Outside of knowing how to be offensive, Gavin Johnson doesn't know what he's talking about. He wrote:

>Radio and TV have been giving away audio and video gratis for decades. Public Libraries have provided access to all sorts of information for 130 years. Why are we now suddenly calling everyone thieves for doing what has been a common and accepted part of culture throughout recorded history?

Gavin, there's a difference between radio and TV "giving away" their content, which is their business model, and someone stealing content. And the content on radio and TV isn't being "given away" it's being served to the consumer. The consumer cannot record this "given away" content and re-sell it. You can't take the books from libraries and reprint them.

If you go onto my website and take my content, you're stealing. Plain and simple. This has nothing to do with corporate greed, or "daft old losers in power". It's my content. I worked hard to create it. It's mine to hoard. It's mine to sell. It's mine to give away. It's mine to destroy. Not yours. Mine.

Gavin, if you have the brains to innovate, go ahead and innovate, and give your results to the world for free. After all, you can always work for someone else to keep a roof over your head. (However, with your attitude, I wonder who'd hire you?)

Cheers,

Keith Thirgood
Capstone Communications Group
Free Marketing Tip of the Month

My reply:

I fully agree with Keith comments and upset feelings at Gaving for failing to recognize the major differences between the different business models being referred to here.

On the other hand I like to take the opportunity to suggest indeed, that if you wish to be humble and open-minded only for a moment, you may seem a number of interesting things when you decide to look at things from a comprehensive, holistic look at both us, inhabitants of this planet and the knowledge we create.

*Only for a moment:*

Though we are still separated in many nations competing with each other, and supporting an economic model that believes and maintains a credo of scarcity of resources and a fundamental axiom based on the laws of supply and demand, you can easily see that this does not have to be the only way to go about things. As a matter of fact it is an obsolete way to do so.

Buckminster Fuller in his masterpiece "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" (freely available online) clearly outlines the false assumptions of our Malthusian scarcity model, and it does not take Einstein to see that the information economy cannot be based on the principles of supply and demand as the supply of information is effectively infinite.

So, in this brief moment of mind openness and humbleness toward your fellow men, you may realize indeed that we would have great benefits if we were able not to place all of our knowledge under locks, patents and copyrights, but instead chose to let others edit, juxtapose, join together and reshuffle our own work for the sake of collectively increasing our understanding and of making our evolution on this planet a process deriving from our own needs and goals rather than from the key goals set out by the large multinational corporations that drive present day world business.

Imagine if we had the ability to all synergize, like in theory research scientists do around the world, and pass, exchange, refine and improve one upon the other in a perfect and infinite learning and ever-growing loop.

*Moment over*

Though I understand reality is a different story and I should stop dreaming about ideal worlds, I have taken small steps to make sure anyone else can pick up my content, reviews and essays and use it, edit it and refine it to her liking without even having to come and say "hello". It's called "Creative Commons" license (http://www.creativecommons.org) and it is a step forward in making your know how useful not only for you and your ability to survive but also for others, who outside your circle may leverage your idea to build better and bigger solutions or to facilitate the learning and education of others who do not have access to our same information.

In all instances we can see that the world we have built so far drives toward closure, restrictions and pay-to-pass signals everywhere. A possible harmonious, peaceful, intellectually rich and fast evolving human race may have to consider giving in some of its unnecessary greediness (based on false scarcity assumptions) in favour of a philosophy of open exchange, collaboration and co-operation, much in the spirit that the Open Source movement is showing today.

Last but not least, please note that I do survive by selling my own know-how, ebooks, and other fruits of my personal intellect and research. Still, I can do one without having to exclude the other. In truth, they nicely serve and complement each other.

All the best you all,

Robin Good
Ideas, Tool and Resources for Communication Agents
Stop surfing, Start Making WAVES !!
http://www.masternewmedia.org/

EVERYTHING Is Open To Question

illustration by: Lynette Cook - Original source

EVERYTHING is open to question, some things are more "reliable" than others and they are labelled accordingly. Evaluation and "linking up" of data is constantly going on in our mind. When we learn something new, sometimes we are days re-arranging knowledge both consciously and in dreamland.

In the end, it is this mechanism by which we form our convictions which will, when well understood, set us free to question "authority" and reach our own conclusions.

While thanking Sepp Hasslberger for this valuable and insightful contribution I like to take on the topic a bit further and assess the importance heretofore to design a new paradigm for human understanding which integrates in itself the acknowledgement and opportunity for increased and repeated amplification of our learning.

If it is through a mechanism of sincere questioning and investigation that new solutions and viewpoints can be formulated, our own paradigms supporting science and education must deeply embed this profound truth in the development and design of their curriculums and trades.

Our understanding of reality is gained through different stages of comprehension. At each one, our perception and computational apparati are able to take in and comprehend more of the reality surrounding us and to provide working explanations and principles that "check out" for most of us. Our interpretation of reality is an ongoing pursuit leading to an ever more refined understanding of the rules and immutable laws at work in this and other universes.

Overspecialization through Education seems to be one of the fundamental dumbing patterns enacted on humanity naive and short-sighted understanding of global evolution to limit its capacity to "see", "hear" and "understand" in much greater and more capable levels of intelligence the reality sHe lives in.

Through dedicated overspecialization main autoenslaves himself by self-negating the ability to maintain a broad and interconnected perspective on the nature of life and of living systems in the universe.

"'Jobs' represent a relatively recent pattern of work. From the fifteenth century to the twentieth century, there is a steady progress of fragmentation of the stages of work that constitute "mechanization" and "specialism".

These procedures cannot serve for survival or sanity in this new time."

(Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, 1967 Bantam Books).

"Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery - to probing and exploration ad to the recognition of the language of forms."
(ibid.)

"We now experience simultaneously the drop-out and the teach-in. The two forms are correlative. They belong together. The teach-in represents an attempt to shift education from instruction to discovery, from brainwashing students to brainwashing instructors. It is a big dramatic reversal."
(ibid.)

The mind is like a network of information. Pieces of data depend on other pieces for confirmation, for deciding about relative importance, or for being suspicious about. No single datum is ever completely discarded, nor is any single datum ever labelled as absolute truth. EVERYTHING is interrelated and always open to question; some things are more "reliable" than others and they are labelled accordingly. Evaluation and "linking up" of data is constantly going on in our mind just like the Google Dance. When we learn something new, sometimes we are days re-arranging knowledge both consciously and in dreamland.

In the end, it is this mechanism by which we form our convictions which will, when well understood, set us free to question "authority" and reach our own conclusions.

(Sepp Hasslberger)

Free Your Mind NOW

You can have complete and total freedom now.

All it requires is that you question everything you have ever been taught. You don't have to listen to political leaders, or religious leaders, or society. You don't have to be a slave to them. Of course, they will demonize open mindedness, but the bottom line is that you can have freedom now. You can control your own life. Two laws to follow are "Question authority, and think for yourselves".

Freedom is here.

I pose the following questions to you, dear reader.

Will you think for yourself?

Will you accept freedom?

Will you control your own life, your own brain?

Of course, the various socio-political and religious leaders will demonize anything that causes or creates open mindedness, free thinking. And why do they do that? It is all about control.

If even a small percent of our society became free, they would be out of power, there would be no way for
them to control them.

So, this message is addressed to those people who value freedom above all else. I am trying to impart this message onto them- You can be free now.

The most you can do is to free your own mind, by questioning what authority has told you, and others will follow. They will see your freedom, and start asking themselves questions. This is the dawn of the beginning of a new age, one that embraces personal freedom.

There are still many out there who are brainwashed, by socio-political leaders, and religious fundamentalists and their ignorant concepts. These people do not embrace freedom, because they are not ready for it. They are still brainwashed and conditioned by society and religious dogma. These people are not ready to leave the comfortable ignorance they now dwell in.

Their minds are not free.

It is these people who need to be awakened. It is these people who need to hear the truth. What these people don't realize, is that they are NOT happy.

They are not happy living a one-dimensional life, they are not happy being slaves. But, as the old saying goes, "Ignorance is bliss". But these people are not our enemies. They are our brothers and sisters, and they are trapped in a prison that society and religious have created for their minds. If we ever wish to be free, we are going to have to smash the bars of their prison, and free them with the truth.

True freedom is at hand. Are we going to embrace it, or let it slip between our fingers and lose it? We must stay free, so that others can become free as well.

Free Your Mind NOW
By Corey
An 18 Year Old American
7-30-3

The Golden Dream Of Islamic Currency

"Ants have no (or little) problems with food and shelter. Ditto with birds and nearly every other species. Humans are bogged down by anxieties over food and shelter. With minds, shouldn't humans be thousands of times ahead, not trailing fractions behind ants?"

This quote from Bala Pillai sparked an interesting train of thought. My reply to it argues that we may well be behind the ants and birds in caring for our own food and shelter, because of our particular brand of "economics", which really is geared to enrich a few at the expense of many.

Comes along another stimulus: Islamic gold dinars and silver dirhams are promoted as a solution to our economic woes in an article by Boudewijn Wegerif, a Swedish monetary economist. While the Islamic sect called Murabitun is spearheading the movement to bring the bimetallic dinar and dirham back into play as the "world currency for all free people", their reasoning does not go all the way.

Gold and silver are the very reason banks could introduce and develop their debt-economy scheme which is ruining our prospects for progress by chaining us to worries over basic needs - food and shelter.

Here is the discussion for those interested in economic matters...

At 13:28 +0100 11-08-2003, Robin Good wrote:

Dear Sepp, Chris,

"Ants have no (or little) problems with food and shelter. Ditto with birds and nearly every other species. Humans are bogged down by anxieties over food and shelter. With minds, shouldn't humans be thousands of times ahead, not trailing fractions behind ants?"

If your brain is working fine you should have immediate response and reference support facts and authors to shed some light and food for thought by those too easily inebriated by the apparent self-serving optimism of the above statement.

My response to Robin:

Thank you for a stimulating question. As Chris says we don't really take the viewpoint of other species, sometimes because of a conceited attitude - we think we are much better than them. I would add that we also don't care much for their problems, and thus are not good observers, although we probably could learn a few things if we only looked.

I believe it is correct to say that humans are bogged down by anxieties over food and shelter and indeed, having a mind that can identify problems and arrive at solutions, we should be doing much better than we are. But sometimes the mind works also in reverse. Someone smarter than us thinks up a solution that is good for that someone but leaves everyone else out in the cold.

In my view, we humans are anxious over food and shelter, not because there is a real physical problem but because we have chosen to adopt an economic system that caters to the enrichment and empowerment of a comparatively few, while the rest of us are living a life of artificial scarcity. Such a system is completely unknown in the animal kingdom and if introduced, it could well wipe out a species in short order.

Only because of our mind - our inventiveness - have we not yet succumbed to the economic constraints that we believe are an inevitable part of our daily lives. Apparently our type of economy has been inherited from ancient times. From the Sumerians up through history, the idea that "money" must have a value of its own, has been with us quite constantly, with only brief respites here and there.

Economy is the exchange of goods and services. Production and consumption are the end points that are brought to meet by that exchange. As long as the consumer can produce what he/she needs, there is little or no use for exchange, but life would be limited to an extremely primitive condition, not something we would want to even contemplate. So exchange, and therefore some kind of economic system are things we cannot do without.

What is needed for exchange to work is some kind of accounting system. No problem today with computers ready to take the drudgery out of counting, but historically, some physical means - beads, shells, iron bars, copper disks, all manner of "useless" little items have been used to serve the purpose of keeping track of who gave something and therefore should be having a "credit" to receive.

Trouble started when we were sold the idea that the counters must have an intrinsic value, such as silver, gold or other rare merchandise. By this conjuring trick, control over all economic activity and even over governments fell into the hands of those who retained the "valuable" currency in safekeeping. Gold and silver being relatively heavy to lug around, their place was soon taken by receipts of paper, the "bank notes".

The connection of money (bank notes) to precious metals perpetuated a mythical scarcity of the means of exchange. What's more, the banks issuing these "notes", convinced us we were expected to "pay them back", in other words we immediately entered a debt towards the banks every time we wanted to engage in economic activity. We also consented to pay for the privilege of using those notes. That fee we pay for our privilege is called interest. In its extreme form - usury - it was identified as an immoral and detrimental.

Unfortunately, prohibition of interest/usury could not be effective, although just about every major religion condemned the practice. The underlying condition - the intrinsic scarcity of the means of exchange - was never clearly identified and thus continued to be an effective control mechanism. The debt money system and accompanying interest has kept us chained to an insane belief: that we owe our money to someone and that whoever supplies it to us has every right to own us in return.

An efficient system of economic exchange which would not only allow us to catch up with the ants on food and shelter but bring unprecedented economic development and support great personal creativity, would have to work without scarsity and without a debt/interest mechanism.

Proposals in this direction have been made by Silvio Gesell in his work The Natural Economic Order and the principle of debt free money has found practical application in LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems). The officially sanctioned economic control system however has withstood such isolated attempts at challenging its basic premises and has continued to accumulate monetary value and political power in the hands of a few. Time for change?

In reply to this, Robin sent a mindecos newsgroup digest with the following recommendation:
I think it would be worthwhile that you bring in some light and clarification about this appaently alternative and ideal monetary/bank systems that are promoted as being interests- and usury-free.

Here is the more interesting part of that discussion, with an article on Islamic currency

Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003
From: "Kevin Russell"
Subject: finance globalism, debt slavery, and national bankruptcy that forfeits sovereignty to the creditors

I've just rediscovered this (2001) file by Swedish Monetary Economist Boudewijn Wegerif, which I was reminded of when Andrius mentioned he was looking for "Islamic finanicial institutions" practices etc... a few months ago, then reading Bloom's: Reinventing Capatialism and now again reminded with the post of re: Shoshana Zuboff And James Maxmin: the Support Economy.
------------------------------------------

MONEY MATTERS
Islamic "World Currency for Free People"
Boudewijn Wegerif
-- May 2001 --

----------------------------------------

I hope you find the .. following article interesting. A slightly abridged version has been translated into Swedish for the next issue of PENGAR (Money), the quarterly journal of monetary reform, of which I am consulting editor. PENGAR is sponsored by the members' owned, interest-free bank JAK, which you may be interested to learn more about, through the English section at www.jak.se.

Please feel free to post the article to others -- note though that I would appreciate knowing where the article has been placed and the lists to which it has been posted.

In friendship,

Boudewijn Wegerif
Monetary Studies Programme
Folkhogskola Vardingeby
150 21 Molnbo, Sweden.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

ISLAMIC DINARS AND DIRHAMS
"A World Currency for Free People"

Boudewijn Wegerif -- May 2001

"A time is certainly coming over mankind in which there will be nothing left that will be of use save a dinar and a dirham" - Ascribed to the prophet Mohammed, as reported by Abu Bakr ibn Abi Maryam and quoted at www.islamicmint.com.

From the beginning of Islam until 1924, with the break-up of the Near Eastern Ottoman Empire and fall of the Khalifate, the basic currency of the Muslims was the gold dinar and silver dirham. Islam was then made subject to western banking practice, with its different paper currencies. However, now Muslims around the world are being encouraged to convert their paper currencies into new 100 percent Islamic gold dinars and silver dirhams. They are also being encouraged to join the 100 percent gold backed e-dinar service, which is linked to e-gold.

The new Islamic dinar and dirham represent the renewal of coins that go back to the beginning of Islam. The weights of the coins (4.3 and 3 grams) and their role in the economy was set by the Shari'a - i.e. the Islamic Law.

A small Islamic sect called Murabitun is spearheading the movement to bring the bimetallic dinar and dirham back into play as the "world currency for all free people".

At www.murabitun.org one may read how in the 12th century the Murabitun were the most feared warriors of a flourishing Islamic Civilisation. They swept North into Southern Spain from West Africa in a devastating wave of conquest and destruction of the feeble and corrupt petty kingdoms of the day. An economically just and socially glorious period of Islam is said to have been engendered in the wake of the fighting.

Now Murabitun is alight again, say the authors of this history.

From his home in Scotland, the Murabitun leader, Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, travels the world with the basic Murabitun message that Allah and His Messenger have declared war on usury. The renewed Islamic order will come about "not through fighting in the streets against the world's guns" but through taking effective advantage of "the continuing collapse of the paper-money edifice now sinking under mathematical lunacy and inflation."

Perhaps the most telling point in favour of the new gold and silver currency is that it meets the Islamic zakat requirement by which Muslims must give at least 2 percent of their income to the poor in tangible merchandise or "honest money of actual substance", therefore not paper money.

"If the millions of Muslims who now make their payment of zakat in paper money would do it in newly minted dinars and dirhams, they will put in circulation millions of gold and silver coins into the mainstream of daily commercial activities of our communities," is written at www.islamicmint.com. "That single act will become the most important political act of the century, opening the path towards the establishment of our own halal (usury) free currency breaking away from the usurious financial system".

WORLD WITHOUT BANKS

The political leader of Murabitun, Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, has a vision of a world without banks. In a 3,000-word essay on the Islamic Banking Fallacy he dismisses the Islamic banking system as "profoundly contrary to Islam".

Three reasons are given why the Islamic bank is "a totally crypto-usurious institution", which "must be rejected and fought".

1. The use of credit to artificially expand the monetary resources is emphatically forbidden in the Shari'a (Islamic Law).

2. The Islamic principle of co-ownership, enshrined in the Shari'a, is usurped by the nature of the limited liability ownership of the banks and the enterprises they support.

3. In terms of the Islamic Law forbidding usury, a loan cannot be made of a commodity whose value is changeable, yet in banking everywhere fluctuation in value is generated and this affects the individual transactions the bank makes.

Umar Ibrahim Vadillo concludes: "There is no way of establishing an equitable market without going outside of the modem monetary and financial systems."

So long as the money supply is entrusted to a bank-supported government one must be ready to live with an artificial currency, which can be expanded and contracted at will, always according to the policies and economical suitability of the moment.

The Islamic bimetallic currency, on the other hand, is a natural currency that does not need rules or regulation, laws or official control.

FREEDOM AND STABILITY

According to a Murabitun "White Paper" document, a genuinely Islamic currency "only needs the individual freedom to possess and use gold and silver coins with an implicit elimination of all taxes imposed on their use. There is no doubt that the freedom to possess gold does not only mean the freedom to buy it and sell it for industrial purposes but also the freedom to use it as a medium of exchange."

Then, as commodities amongst other commodities, the value of gold and silver will naturally remain stable in relation to basic consumable goods. It seems that the value attached to gold and silver exchanges in a genuinely free market have a remarkable consistency over time.

Thus, according to a statement at www.islamicmint.com, "a chicken at the time of the Prophet, salla'llahu alaihi wa sallam, cost one dirham; today, 1,400 years later, a chicken costs approximately one dirham. In 1,400 years inflation is zero. Could we say the same about the dollar or any other paper currency in the last 25 years?"

The portability and anonymity of gold are also cited in the Murabitun literature as important, but their bottom line argument in favour of gold is that it is an asset that is no-one else's liability. "All forms of paper assets - bonds, shares, and even bank deposits - are promises to repay money borrowed. Their value is dependent upon the investor's belief that the promise will be fulfilled. A piece of gold is independent of the financial system, and its worth is underwritten by 5,000 years of human experience."

OPEN TRADE

With the adoption of a bimetallic gold and silver currency, Umar Ibrahim Vadillo anticipates the re-emergence of the once flourishing world of Islamic trading, which "does not involve any form of interest-debt, control of products by speculative future and stock markets, or the mediation of any bank".

The trading renewal will be founded on the restoration of two of Islam's most representative but lost institutions, "the marketplace, which will replace supermarkets, and, the caravans, which will replace monopolistic distribution." There is also a call for a return to the guilds of "independent, intelligent work teams, in which the relationship master/apprentice will replace employer/employee."

By tradition, the Islamic Market was once placed alongside the Mosque as a "space freely accessible to everybody, with no divisions (such as shops) and where no taxes, levies or rents could be paid". And, as in a Mosque, whoever got to a market place first had a right to it until he got up and went back to his house or finished selling.

The same flexibility/fluidity, for a free flow of trade, is associated with caravans. "The caravan brought more than merchandise from one market to another, they brought the whole city that they represented."

NO FIGURES GIVEN

There is no clear record of how effective Murabitun has been in introducing the gold dinar and linked trading model to Islam. In 1998 the gold market analyst Jay Taylor wrote that the Islamic dinar was being privately used in more than 22 countries and being minted in four countries, including South Africa.

According to the Murabitun's own undated "White Paper", "Dinars and dirhams have already been minted under the supervision and standards of the World Islamic Trading Organisation and are in circulation in Spain, Germany and South Africa, soon to be followed by Switzerland, England and other Muslim countries".

And at this site, 14 countries are listed as having Murabitun groups with their own websites, namely South Africa, North America, Malaysia, Germany, Nigeria, England, Turkey, Spain, Australia, France, Mexico, Switzerland, Bermuda and Denmark.

Although no figures are given, I suspect that the majority of the 4,000 or so new account holders at e-gold every week may be Muslims using the e-dinar service, which operates through e-gold. In 1999 there was a major promotion for the gold dinar in Dubai and at the e-gold website it is stated that more than half the gold backing for the e-gold payments service is in 400-ounce Dubai gold bars.

In the promotion of the e-dinar the point is well made that the greatest obstacle to gold and silver coinage, namely divisibility, is overcome by this system of payments: "Since ancient Babylonian times, paying for a pizza with gold coins has been impractical. All physical coins come in fixed sizes. There is a limit as to how small a coin can be. e-dinar, in contrast, is computerized; precise to 0.000001 oz (troy)".

There is irony in the thought that a return to traditional Islamic trading may be dependent on the Internet invention of 'infidels' - unbelievers. Perhaps too much irony.

This article provides interesting food for thought. My reply to Robin points out some important limitations of metal-based currency and suggests an alternative for achieving a stable currency available in any amount an economy could need:

Dear Robin,

Islamic banking, and especially the proposal of the Murabitun to base the economy on a gold and silver currency, together with an internet-based e-gold payment system, is providing many interesting pointers towards a better economy.

It seems that widespread agreement is already forming that our current economy based on debt is a profoundly unjust system of interaction between people. Money, the generally acceptable means of exchange, is furnished from the outside - it is generally "produced" by the banks and is released with the understanding that eventually, it has to be returned. In addition to returning all of the money that is provided, any debtor is also expected to "pay interest" for the privilege of using the needed means of exchange.

A real bonanza for the money masters, and an impossible task for the economy as a whole, because in order to pay the interest, NEW money will have to be borrowed, perpetuating the spiral and putting everyone in debt to the bankers - the makers of money. This forms a vicious circle that can never be broken, as long as we accept that the only "legal" means of exchange is furnished by a monopoly. The dilemma is perfectly described in a story by Louis Even (Money Myth exploded) of shipwrecks who find themselves isolated from the rest of the world and who put one of them - a banker - in charge of supplying them with money for their island economy.

Boudewijn Wegerif's article, Islamic "World Currency for Free People", gives us a good idea of how much this problem of banking and interest has been historically felt to be a grave problem. In fact, the political leader of the Murabitun, Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, who condemns any banking system, even the Islamic variety of "interest free" banking, is quoted as saying "There is no way of establishing an equitable market without going outside of the modem monetary and financial systems."

However, while the principles expressed by the Murabitun are sound - free trade and debt free money - I find that even the proponents of Islamic currency do not go far enough back in history when they advocate basing their economy on gold and silver.

EXCHANGE

Any economy needs an accounting system for the exchange of goods and services, valuable commodities that change hands. Money plays the mediator role, facilitating a system whereby we keep track of the value of economic exchanges between buyers and sellers. But when money itself becomes a valuable commodity, it ceases to function well as a medium of exchange. There may be fluctuations in the "price of money", and competition between the goods to be exchanged and the monetary medium leads to economic distortions.

Gold and silver not only are valuable commodities in their own right, they are also a finite resource. Spaceship Earth only has so much of these precious metals in its bowels, and the supply of "new money" depends entirely on the mining and minting of these precious metals or on their conversion from non-monetary to monetary use.

Much of the economic misery of "the dark ages" was due to the constraining factor of scarse availability of whatever metal was chosen as the monetary commodity. So when the Morabitun advocate to base the "World Currency for Free People" on gold and silver, they are, either unknowingly or by design, leading us into a blind alley.

STABLE CURRENCY

Money must be stable, the Murabitun are right about that. It should not change with time in relation to the goods it buys, but monitoring monetary stability is no problem. A "shopping basket" of typical goods and services will do an admirable job of showing whether money is worth more, less, or the same as last month.

Physically, the stability of money depends on extant supply multiplied by the velocity of circulation, let's call that M x V, where M is the total monetary Mass and V the velocity of curculation. When the product of M x V is greater than the total value of tradable goods and services, prices "inflate", we pay more money for the contents of the same shopping basket. Conversely, when M x V turns out to be insufficient to mediate the buying and selling of what's on offer, prices "deflate". In both cases, the economy is adversely affected.

It should be understood that out of the total of money in circulation in any given country, only about 3 to 5 per cent is actual "cash", that is, bank notes and coins. The rest is made up of freely floating electrons in the banks' computers. An interesting question is who owns the electrons, that is, who created them. In our current system of banking monopolies, the electrons are entirely created by dedicated commercial companies. Money in the form of electrons is created by banks when they "give credit". There is a certain turnover, as some of these electrons are retired when credit is paid back, but new money creation is always superior to credit retirement - interest on the debt must be paid in addition to paying back the principal. The money we use to pay interest has to have been borrowed by ourselves or someone else - it had to be brought into existence before we could "give it" to the bank. So our necessity for economic interaction always leaves us with the short end of the stick.

ECONOMIC VOODOO

In a just economic order, money would not be issued by the commercial banks. It would be created by and for the people, in other words, it would be property of the people who economically interact, not of banks or the state. It also would not be made of or backed by any valuable commodity such as precious metals. This last point is important because a linkage of money to any potentially scarce resource would reveal itself a bottleneck for future economic growth. This becomes obvious when we consider what Buckminster Fuller said in "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth:

At present there is about seventy billion dollars of mined gold known to exist on board our Spaceship Earth. A little more than half of it - about forty billion - is classified as being "monetary"; that is, it exists in the forms of various national coinages or in the form of officially banked gold bullion bars. The remaining thirty billion is in private metallic hordes, jewelry, gold teeth, etc.

Since banks have no money of their own and only our deposits on which they earn "interest," bank wealth or money consists only of accrued bank income. Income represents an average return of 5 per cent on capital invested. We may assume therefore from an estimate of the world’s annual gross product that the capital assets, in the form of industrial production, on board our Spaceship Earth are at present worth in excess of a quadrillion dollars. The world’s total of seventy billion dollars in gold represents only three one-thousandths of I per cent of the value of the world’s organized industrial production resources. The gold supply is so negligible as to make it pure voodoo to attempt to valve the world’s economic evolution traffic through the gold-sized needle’s "eye."

Even if we took into account that both gold and silver might be used for monetary purposes, as proposed by the Murabitun, extending the availability of our monetary resource, still the situation remains exactly the same. At one point in the future, we would run out of steam.

THE MECHANISM OF STABILITY

Now that we found out why we should not link money to gold or other precious metals, what would be a workable mechanism to keep our future currency stable as a rock?

We would have to assiduously use our "shopping basket" which we would strive to keep completely transparent, to make sure we get reliable early intelligence on any minute trend of price changes. Then we would increase or decrease the total monetary supply to counteract any trend for change. The result: A stable equilibrium for our currency, without the need for precious metals.

What we now need is an accelerator and break pedal. Accelerator to "inject" money, break to throttle down the flow.

Increasing the total amount of currency would be no problem. We simply "give out" more money. As we create the electrons or pieces of paper representing our money, we distribute them equally to all participants in the economy. One for one, kids, workers, the rich, the poor. It makes no difference, every person receives an equal amount. All of us are contributing to "the economy", some by producing and selling, all of us by consuming, some by working, some by keeping house. So it would only be just that everyone share in the benefits.

Retiring money from circulation will be a bit more tricky, but we can fall back on a mechanism proposed by Silvio Gesell in his "Natural Economic Order". Our money shall be configured to lose, with time, some of its value - about 5 per cent a year or less than half of one per cent a month. No problem for the electrons, software will take care of that. Circulating cash is a bit more tricky, but a variety of mechanisms for dating and correspondingly adjusting the value of the physical cash we use in daily transactions have been proposed. so this should not present unsurmountable hurdles.

With this time-devaluation mechanism, we now have a robust throttle that will allow us to decrease the available "money mass" in any measure we may need, to guarantee stability. But even more importantly, the fee of 5 per cent a year on all extant money will fill up the big common pot out of which we can spend for public works, infrastructure and government. In other words, this apparently modest fee could take the place of today's taxes - especially if we decided to save some big bucks on government and its related bueraucratic apparatus.

DREAMING, DREAMING

I know, I know, I must be dreaming, but before getting back into the real world, I wanted to outline this fairly complex question in some detail, not only because the golden-dream Islamic currency proposal is an interesting challenge to wrap our minds around - I actually think that unless anyone interested, woman, man or kid, can grasp these fundamental economic issues at least to some degree, we have no chance in hell to change anything. Leaving it to the so-called economic experts has already got us in a fine pickle and won't do any longer. The first step to bringing about change is to understand fully what we're dealing with.

Of course when we eventually do all wake up, we must figure out how to take personal and collective control of our destiny, before we can even think of saying good bye to the banking monopoly. We'll need to reform the political decision making process so the good ideas have a chance of making it against the competition of vested economic interests which control government today. It's roll-up-our-sleeves-and-do-it-ourselves time. No delegating someone else to "vote for us" for five years at a time. Got to participate personally in the decision making process - all of us.

Does that make any sense?

Sepp

p.s. the other article in the mindecos digest (regarding the support economy) is merely an attempt to overcome some of the more obvious symptoms of economic malady but does not touch on the basic mechanisms which I believe must be confronted and sorted out to make economic life bearable for all.

Personal Know-How Is The Only Real Wealth

There are are very few people, that nonetheless their valued social ideals have actually taken the steps to go and question deeply their assumptions and have invested solid time in researching the facts and reasons that hold our world in our apparent status. A great number of people from the US even believe like you that our state of affairs on this planet is even improving, so much is the pressure and the continuos media propaganda they expose themselves to without ever experimenting a true alternative modus of selecting and receiving information. According to what I see from this side of the planet things are not running as smooth as you describe them and all Areas for Change are deeply affected by it. *People incarcerated in US prisons in the last two years for moral crimes (that is not those ho have killed someone or robbed a bank). *Natural resources available to us and their social cost. *Environmental pollution. (from your own soldiers poisoned for life by your own Uranium-depleted weapons to the OGM and pesticides wars). *Health is completely in the hands of the pharma-cartel as it was never before. Business after AIDS-HIV and other pharma created diseases is still huge and able to control international relationships and treaties between first and third world countries. *Economy is run on the principle of usury and money is created by central banks against a worthless and meaningless gold reserve. Go and read a bit more of how things are being run on this front by our government leaders and understand what are the consequences on the world economy of this approach (pure economic slavery = you are always going to own money to others and the opportunity to create incentives to wide investment and sane spending are is non-existent. The opportunities are not in the hand of the individual but only in the hands of wealthy groups of interest.) *Science is unable to be transparent and to report events as they are for fear of creating panic and revealing the many hidden agendas hey have been working at. NASA is a prime example of this and we have been catching them covering up their tracks too many times now to still hang on to believe they can be of any trusted use or advice to us. Science is still based on principles and assumptions that have long been proven old and untrue. Still research and development in Science today is almost completely directed by multinational vested interests that will be patenting any apparent non natural solution to your problems including your ability to select and independently choose which foods and nutrients you will be able to ingest without buying into the pharma-cartel, OGM, pesticide, vaccine-rotten agendas. *Education is a control mechanism enforced to keep us completely dumb folded. Read my today's post on the CA Blog to see how I look at this situation. I could go on but I will restrain myself. Yes, I do believe that what others call a conspiracy for a new world order is indeed at play and I have collected enough hard facts to make me move in the direction I have taken. I myself used to scoff at those people who would seem to report such a paranoid state of things on this planet as pure buffs and overly analytical intellectuals. Unfortunately, I must humbly report, that once I have taken on me the personal task of going out to look and investigate the information I was given, I did find not only the facts to be true, but to represent indeed only a small portion of a very major grand-scheme in which, we have all so completely given in. The deceit played on us is very powerful and sophisticated, but it can be indeed revealed and exposed. It can be tracked back historically and you can actually come very close to be able to identify and name the actual people and world interests that have put this into motion. According to my view and the one of the other CAs already at work, there is no possibility whatsoever that "democracy" as you intend it can ever resolve or generate a solution to these issues. The fact is that "democracy" as you intend it is nothing else but another dialectic and social handle you have been given to feel you are in control of something indeed. Fact is that both left and right are working at sustaining the very "game" I am trying to take down. There is no more left or right wing that can save us. The direction is UP. There are some great resources online that do a great job of exposing and bringing forward the message that I am roughly painting here above. Please check out the following as appetizers for what you have been "consciously" or unconsciously missing: Jeff Rense John Rappoport What Really Happened What Are We Swallowing Natural Person Educate Yourself Also you can check out the over 100 independent and alternative sources of information available to you today and, assuming you want to have an independent voice reporting to you outside the vested interests of those who control CNN, Fox and AOL Time Warner. Do you know who in the end owns and controls all of those media moguls? Can you guess? Can you guess also how large is the pool of the interests controlling all of the other critical areas of human life? Very small indeed and made up by a handful of individuals. If you are serious about it and if you do invest the right time on it, you can label and put pictures on each one of them. They are on Google! In the end I can only say we are looking at reality with two different pair of glasses. I can empathize with you well on this, as I have been using your type of glasses for more than 40 years of my life. It is only recently, that I have been given the opportunity to try out new ones and to see what I would have never believed to be possible outside of a movie. Now I believe the movie (The Matrix) to be shallow and the reality I live in today to be a much more terrifying and scary nightmare than what one could ever conceive unaided by hard facts and information. That is what it all comes down to. If you do not have sufficient information to study, analyze and drawn your own conclusions, you are simply having a picnic with the devil, though it looks to you as carrying on normal life. Not only each one who does is slowly digging hir grave but is also actively helping the status quo and the overarching hidden agenda have an ever greater control of human life on this planet. This vicious circle can be stopped without wars and bloody revolutions. Information of what is going on is all that you need. Knowledge is power, or better: Personal Know-How Is The Only Real Wealth. Robin Bucky Fuller "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" is fully accessible online at no cost. Go and give a second look at it.

Ants Have No (or little) Problems With Food And Shelter

Bala Pillai is intensely promoting and actively bringing together a huge number of people tuned and open to the idea of effective shared-ethos mind ecosystems working at revolutionizing the way business is going to be run and organized in the next phase of our evolution on this planet.

Bala skilfully inspires and motivates those who have enough antennas to sense the deep change required for society and business to move to a higher evolutionary stage, where collaboration, cooperation and synergy replace competition, greed and secrecy.

Among the wonderful and fascinating memes Bala sends through the Internet some are particularly effective at grabbing people's unattended ideals, dreams and natural proclivities.

The main charge Bala sounds off when polling is networked "soldiers" for action rings:

"Ants have no (or little) problems with food and shelter. Ditto with birds and nearly every other species. Humans are bogged down by anxieties over food and shelter. With minds, shouldn't humans be thousands of times ahead, not trailing fractions behind ants?"

But outside the skilful motivation and insight one can glance though it, what is a challenging and valid answer to the above question?

I have chosen not to answer the question myself, as I myself have spent several years studying Edward Wilson Sociobiological research and have more than an evident clue of why we are so spectacularly unperforming when compared to ants. As the answer is charged with highly critical social, evolutionary and political elements, this is not an easy field to jump into without taking the risk of being misunderstood or altogether ostracized for appearing as a conspiracy paranoid.

I have so decided to interview and send Bala's meme to the three pioneering Communication Agents working at revolutinizing, from a different angle world and society as we know it now. Here is what Communication Agent Sepp Hasslberger of Health Supreme responded to my invitation of critically questioning the issue of ant's apparent inifinite success vs. our own very apparent evolutionary limits. Here is what he wrote:

"Dear Robin,

Thank you for a stimulating question. As Chris says we don't really take the viewpoint of other species, sometimes because of a conceited attitude - we think we are much better than them.

I would add that we also don't care much for their problems, and thus are not good observers, although we probably could learn a few things if we only looked.

I believe it is correct to say that humans are bogged down by anxieties over food and shelter and indeed, having a mind that can identify problems and arrive at solutions, we should be doing much better than we are. But sometimes the mind works also in reverse. Someone smarter than us thinks up a solution that is good for that someone but leaves everyone else out in the cold.

In my view, we humans are anxious over food and shelter, not because there is a real physical problem but because we have chosen to adopt an economic system that caters to the enrichment and empowerment of a comparatively few, while the rest of us are living a life of artificial scarcity. Such a system is completely unknown in the animal kingdom and if introduced, it could well wipe out a species in short order.

Only because of our mind - our inventiveness - have we not yet succumbed to the economic constraints that we believe are an inevitable part of our daily lives. Apparently our type of economy has been inherited from ancient times. From the Sumerians up through history, the idea that "money" must have a value of its own, has been with us quite constantly, with only brief respites here and there.

Economy is the exchange of goods and services. Production and consumption are the end points that are brought to meet by that exchange. As long as the consumer can produce what he/she needs, there is little or no use for exchange, but life would be limited to an extremely primitive condition, not something we would want to even contemplate. So exchange, and therefore some kind of economic system are things we cannot do without.

What is needed for exchange to work is some kind of accounting system. No problem today with computers ready to take the drudgery out of counting, but historically, some physical means - beads, shells, iron bars, copper disks, all manner of "useless" little items have been used to serve the purpose of keeping track of who gave something and therefore should be having a "credit" to receive.

Trouble started when we were sold the idea that the counters must have an intrinsic value, such as silver, gold or other rare merchandise. By this conjuring trick, control over all economic activity and even over governments fell into the hands of those who retained the "valuable" currency in safekeeping. Gold and silver being relatively heavy to lug around, their place was soon taken by receipts of paper, the "bank notes".

The connection of money (bank notes) to precious metals perpetuated a mythical scarcity of the means of exchange. What's more, the banks issuing these "notes", convinced us we were expected to "pay them
back", in other words we immediately entered a debt towards the banks every time we wanted to engage in economic activity. We also consented to pay for the privilege of using those notes. That fee we pay for our privilege is called interest. In its extreme form - usury - it was identified as an immoral and detrimental.

Unfortunately, prohibition of interest/usury could not be effective, although just about every major religion condemned the practice. The underlying condition - the intrinsic scarcity of the means of exchange - was never clearly identified and thus continued to be an effective control mechanism. The debt money system and accompanying interest has kept us chained to an insane belief: that we owe our money to someone and that whoever supplies it to us has every right to own us in return.

An efficient system of economic exchange which would not only allow us to catch up with the ants on food and shelter but bring unprecedented economic development and support great personal creativity, would have to work without assuming scarcity as a given premise and without a debt/interest mechanism.

Proposals in this direction have been made by Silvio Gesell in his work "The Natural Economic Order" and the principle of debt free money has found practical application in LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems).

The officially sanctioned economic control system however has withstood such isolated attempts at challenging its basic premises and has continued to accumulate monetary value and political power in the hands of a few.

Time for change?"

Sepp Hasslberger
Health Supreme
Communication Agents Initiative

Who Controls Knowledge?

It is difficult I realize, to expect or to find that the ideas I have put forward with the help of others in the Areas for Change, can be easily understood and embraced by those that come from different experiences, life journeys and who have yet not started investigating the issues at hand from a "general systems" perspective (that is you can't have my view on Education if you haven't looked at the other aspects of this rotten society. They are all interlinked and for a very specific reason).

[Systems theory or systems science argues that however complex or diverse the world that we experience, we will always find different types of organization in it, and such organization can be described by concepts and principles which are independent from the specific domain at which we are looking. Hence, if we would uncover those general laws, we would be able to analyse and solve problems in any domain, pertaining to any type of system.]
from "What Are Cybernetics And System Science?"

It is even more difficult to show to whoever is within a "system" how the system itself maybe at fault and perpetuating schemes that we have long lost track and meaning of.

My vision as a Communication Agent looks at society at large and at the critical issues that are shaping the way we live, interact, exchange, trade, cooperate, go about evolution and create wealth for us and for others.

All of the problems affecting society today, no matter at what field we look at, stem all from some two key factors:

a) control

b) knowledge

Who has knowledge or controls what knowledge, information and news is made available has complete power and control to determine the reality we end perceiving and buidling upon completely in hir (his+her) hands.

Though you may not like to believe what I say, or may rightly think that I am out of my mind and a paranoid buff, my stance is that in all major areas of social life, from the economy to health and energy we have been completely deceived and enslaved without us even realizing it.

Education is one of the means by which this is achieved.

The method is called Overspecialization. By having you focus and increase your knowledge in one specific area without being able to relate it to other far and diverse fields of interest, you only have a very limited and unworkable paradigm for how things really are and work in this world.

I know this sounds pretty out of reason, but I once again invite to check for qualified references that explain with extreme simplicity and comprehensiveness what I am so boldly claiming here (see Buckminster Fuller - Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1968). Here are some relevant passages from it:

"Looking at the total historical pattern of man around the Earth and observing that three quarters of the Earth is water, it seems obvious why men, unaware that they would some day contrive to fly and penetrate the ocean in submarines, thought of themselves exclusively as pedestrians‹as dry land specialists. Confined to the quarter of the Earth’s surface which is dry land it is easy to see how they came to specialize further as farmers or hunters-or, commanded by their leader, became specialized as soldiers. Less than half of the dry 25 per cent of the Earth’s surface was immediately favorable to the support of human life. Thus, throughout history 99.9 per cent of humanity has occupied only 10 per cent of the total Earth surface, dwelling only where life support was visibly obvious. The favorable land was not in one piece, but consisted of a myriad of relatively small parcels widely dispersed over the surface of the enormous Earth sphere. The small isolated groups of humanity were utterly unaware of one another’s existence. They were everywhere ignorant of the vast variety of very different environments and resource patterns occurring other than where they dwelt.

But there were a few human beings who gradually, through the process of invention and experiment, built and operated, first, local river and bay, next, along-shore, then off-shore rafts, dugouts, grass boats, and outrigger sailing canoes. Finally, they developed voluminous rib-bellied fishing vessels, and thereby ventured out to sea for progressively longer periods. Developing ever larger and more capable ships, the seafarers eventually were able to remain for months on the high seas. Thus, these venturers came to live normally at sea. This led them inevitably into world-around, swift, fortune-producing enterprise. Thus they became the first world men.

The men who were able to establish themselves on the oceans had also to be extraordinarily effective with the sword upon both land and sea. They had also to have great anticipatory vision, great ship designing capability, and original scientific conceptioning, mathematical skill in navigation and exploration techniques for coping in fog, night, and storm with the invisible hazards of rocks, shoals, and currents. The great sea venturers had to be able to command all the people in their dry land realm in order to commandeer the adequate metalworking, woodworking, weaving, and other skills necessary to produce their large, complex ships. They had to establish and maintain their authority in order that they themselves and the craftsmen preoccupied in producing the ship be adequately fed by the food-producing hunters and farmers of their realm. Here we see the specialization being greatly amplified under the supreme authority of the comprehensively visionary and brilliantly co-ordinated top swordsman, sea venturer. If his "ship came in" ‹that is, returned safely from its years’ long venturing‹all the people in his realm prospered and their leader’s power was vastly amplified.

There were very few of these top power men. But as they went on their sea ventures they gradually found that the waters interconnected all the world’s people and lands. They learned this unbeknownst to their illiterate sailors, who, often as not, having been hit over the head in a saloon and dragged aboard to wake up at sea, saw only a lot of water and, without navigational knowledge, had no idea where they had traveled.

The sea masters soon found that the people in each of the different places visited knew nothing of people in other places. The great venturers found the resources of Earth very unevenly distributed, and discovered that by bringing together various resources occurring remotely from one another one complemented the other in producing tools, services, and consumables of high advantage and value. Thus resources in one place which previously had seemed to be absolutely worthless suddenly became highly valued. Enormous wealth was generated by what the sea venturers could do in the way of integrating resources and distributing the products to the, everywhere around the world, amazed and eager customers. The ship owning captains found that they could carry fantastically large cargoes in their ships, due to nature’s floatability-cargoes so large they could not possibly be carried on the backs of animals or the backs of men. Furthermore, the ships could sail across a bay or sea, traveling shorter distances in much less time than it took to go around the shores and over the intervening mountains. So these very few masters of the water world became incalculably rich and powerful.

To understand the development of intellectual specialization, which is our first objective, we must study further the comprehensive intellectual capabilities of the sea leaders in contradistinction to the myriad of physical, muscle, and craft-skill specializations which their intellect and their skillful swordplay commanded. The great sea venturers thought always in terms of the world, because the world’s waters are continuous and cover three-quarters of the Earth planet. This meant that before the invention and use of cables and wireless 99.9 per cent of humanity thought only in the terms of their own local terrain. Despite our recently developed communications intimacy and popular awareness of total Earth we, too, in 1969 are as yet politically organized entirely in the terms of exclusive and utterly obsolete sovereign separateness.

This "sovereign--meaning top-weapons enforced‹"national" claim upon humans born in various lands leads to ever more severely specialized servitude and highly personalized identity classification. As a consequence of the slavish "categoryitis" the scientifically illogical, and as we shall see, often meaningless questions "Where do you live?" "What are you?" "What religion?" "What race?" ’"What nationality?" are all thought of today as logical questions. By the twenty-first century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth. If you don’t comprehend why that is so, listen to me closely."

The "control scheme" at work on this planet is so refined that to look and reveal its scope and workings provokes indignated reaction only by those very who have been so brainwashed to have lost any personal capacity for deep questioning and critical review of the establishment.

Education as it is generally intended on this planet today is not OK.

It does not help us in any way create individuals who understand and comprehend what is really going on in reality. Review the life of Leonardo and Michelangelo and see what kind of learning experiences and "education" they had to become the multidisciplinary masters of their times.

Each of the professionals we crate in Medicine, Education and Science is nothing but a specialized marketing manager for a world business plan you and I have never signed up for. The greatest beauty of this control scheme is that neither the doctor nor the scientist believe to have any conscious part in maintaining this as they can't even see it.

Unfortunately I am not here to pretend or convince anyone of my rightedness. There have now enough footprints in the ground to know that other animals like me are free in the wild and looking for each other.

I am simply working at identifying those like-minded people who resonate at once with what I say.
My mandate is to help them and provide them with skills, tools and means to achieve and realize the vision they have been longing for.

My goal is:
To provide communication skills and tools for uniquely talented communicators to effectively bring about deep and transformatory change in world society.

This may only happen through deep questioning of your own paradigm and value system, and through a generalist approach vs a specialist approach at resolving and understanding how things are.

Education, Economy, Justice, Energy are all intertwined fields of control that allow a few to keep the rest of us enslaved for the rest of our lives.

We are simply serving somebody's else purpose.

Robin

Communication Agents Goal

The most ambitious goal of this exclusive professional training program called the Communication Agents Initiative is to facilitate, support and guide qualifying social agents of change with already developed writing and communication skills to become effective Communication Agents.

An effective Communication Agent is able to gather, filter, select best information and to edit it, design it and enhance it before disseminating and distributing it.

Communication Agents strategy is one of sending out intelligence information designed and prepared to motivate critical questioning, to spur strategic analysis, to increase personal awareness and to instigate action supporting change and reform of our present institutions and modi operanda.

Communication Agents are talented communicators that are provided with the methods and tools to communicate, inform, network and attack in a highly advanced, self-coordinated and very efficient way.

Understanding must come from exploration.

The Raise Of Emergentism

Emergentism is a political ideology that has been making fast inroads into our culture by way of Joi Ito efforts on the Emergent Democracy front.

Mitch Ratcliffe is finalizing a book entitled Emergent Politics and writing on hos weblog about the key principles he is embedding inside it. Of much relevance to the mission and role of Communication Agents, Emergentism formalizes across a few, granitic statements the great transfroming foundations for a new emergent political and social paradigm of human interaction and self-governance.

Here a few key points from Mitch's own reflections about this

"Most importantly, with no monolithic state to guarantee their rights and enforce responsibilities, the individual will experience a profound change, one with all the risks and rewards of Pandora's Box.

Everything will be possible and permission will come through collaboration with others.

With the state fading, but national and local identity still an important component of human identity, a vacuum will open into which someone will step. My bet, the one I hope fervently will succeed, is that no one institution will emerge, but that an emergent community of communities will take pieces of the power of the state, and these communities will begin to interact together with the remaining institutions of the state, international non-governmental organizations, religions, private business and what will surely become a freelance, stateless security "industry" formerly known as the military. Handled deftly, this could turn out very well. If it is bungled, history will turn out very badly indeed.

"Having seen first-hand, many times, the power of networked groups, I hold out not hope, but a task, to organize and act, no matter who you are and no matter what it takes.

Because the lower cost of communications and the logistical infrastructures available around the world allows groups to address their own needs or the needs of others in more efficient and targeted ways, it is no longer necessary for majority rule to dominate all social, economic and political decisions. Instead, we are at the beginning of a collaboration of many minorities.

Power can be used for good or evil, regardless of the system that wields it, so emergentism strives to bring all perspectives and parties to every issue to the table in a world where the cost and complexity of making connections has fallen by orders of magnitude since the founding of the United Nations and, even, World Trade Organization. Every decision must be representative of the concerns of people impacted by the results."

Emergentism recognizes that modern institutions will continue to exist and shall not be violently overthrown but eroded by obsolescence as more efficient and fair alternatives emerge;

Emergentism seeks to create social decision-making environment where ad hoc and trans-national organizations can interact and coexist with existing institutions, with which it may share many values while simultaneously being in sharp conflict with those institutions.

Emergentism is politics for the people by the people that transcends national boundaries, cultural and ethnic differences, religious dogma and personal prejudice by identifying shared interests and facilitating collaboration using modern communications and transportation.

It is virtual community embedded in a physical world with its eyes wide open to the realities of emerging global and local identities that have less to do with people[base ']s locations and more to do with what they care about than the past.

Read more about Emergentism on Mitch Ratcliffe weblog.
via Ross Mayfield

Seeding Successful Epidemics

THE TIPPING POINT IS: That one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once. The moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point, a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. ...They (Epidemics) have clear examples of contagious behavior. They both have little changes that make big effects. It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic's equilibrium. What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus. Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push; just in the right place, it can be tipped. Passages excerpted from a wonderful summary of Malcom Gladwell Tipping Point