Monetary reform

From my limited knowledge of particular monetary reform proposals, I would say they are a stepping stone to an RBE. The reforms proposed by Positive Money are very inviting. The obvious one is its proposal to eradicate the fractional reserve system, and I'm going to agree and set that to one side.

One of my rerservations centres around the control of money supply. They propose to wrest this from the hands of bankers and politicians - yay - and give it to n independent body. OK, but how is this independent body going to decide by how much to increase money supply, and in whose interest will they do so? Their own, presumably. And will they be inccorruptible?

My other observatiion is that most ordinary people will still have to work to get hold of money, and therefore there will be pressure to create work so that people can do it, which leads us straight into the idea that problems (say  disease and disorder) are s good because they create work/jobs for people to solve them. This does seem to be a weakness of money that these reforms have not addressed, unless I'm mistaken.

Under Positive Money you would enter into a bond, actively allowing the bank to use your money for an agreed period during which you would not be able to take it back. You also get to decide which projects your capital will be spent on. Logically fine, and on the second point you can already choose ethical investments.

The problem as I see it, though, is that some people will still want the maximum return on their investment, so even if the projects invested in aren't sociilly constructive, and/or if they liquidate natural capital and call it income (to quote Natural Capitalism), they will still attract investement because they give a high return on the money put forward.

As I understand it, posiive money is itelf undecided on how it will quantify money supply.  And he point is that even if we willingly put a brake on money supply, the limiting factor is still real resources and not money.

Nevertheless, we cannot ignore this stepping stone. The looming finacial crisesmay be alleviated by a system which uses positive money.

Introduction to a resource based economy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mkRFCtl2MI

A good 18:50 presentation from Peter Joseph to introduce the idea of the RBE. Well worth sparing the time to understand.

Films, Music, Education, Food. Not war

http://culturesofresistance.org/

"Cultures of Resistance (CoR) is an activist network that encompasses a family of initiatives. These include an outreach web site, a feature documentary, a media production company, and a private foundation." I saw footage they supplied in John Pilger's film The war you don't see, broadcast on ITV earlier this week.

Pilger's film showed how media organisatios are at best complicit with war propaganda, and at best taken in by it. One point repeatedly made was that if a politician says something that is not true, and a media organisation reports what s/he said, the media organisation is being truthful, whilst managing to convey an untruth. The film featured several journalists expressing their regret that they'd been taken in and had passed on propaganda (lies) as news/truth.

Getting at the truth of war is hard. Journalists that report what the war machine wants them to report are given protection ("embedding") and access to sources. Journalists who try to live up to their high calling of objectivity and impartiality seem to be fewer. The film featured a memorial to journalists killed in war at St Bride's Church Fleet Street - 'the journalists' church'.

The idea that journalists should trade their objectivity for their lives / personal safety is particularly galling.