Firing Back - The case against money, and the case for a resource-based economic system

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rsBTGkdo08

Video of a talk given by Ben McLeish of the UK part of The Zeitgeist Movement. Unfortunately it can be a little difficult to hear some of what he says - the audio seems to have been captured somewhere in the auditorium rather than from the microphone Ben was speaking into, but it is still well worth listening to. As usual, Ben has new insights and new examples to refresh what for TZMers is now fairly familiar material. One example, albeit of a rather workaday matter, was the fact that individuals don't own their own shopping trolleys (shopping carts). They use one provided in/by the supermarket whilst they need it, and then pool it for others to use. There is a gradual move to towards this access or service model and away from the ownership model in which we retain a physical thing for our exclusive use, the most obvious example being the private car. Technology helps it become more and more possible to access what we need when we need it without outright ownership.

[I also saw separately  a montage of contributions by Jacque Fresco and George Carlin. In Jacque's 1974 Larry King interview, he observes how telephones were built to last so that the phone company didn't need to maintain or replace them too often. This was beneficial to the subscriber (as we used to call them) too - they don't want the phone to break. ]

I will try to get a link to the presentation material that Ben was talking to.


The explanation of fractional reserve banking isn't the clearest one I've come across, but the fact that money is created by banks out of thin air as debt is real, and doesn't need to be understood in detail to be shocking.