MODERATOR: If possible, delete the above. I needed to revise it.
Three questions:
1.Mike, are you asleep?
2.Where are our Credit Unions?
3.Are they asleep, too?
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The following story going around demonstrates the miracle of coincidences of needs:
In a small town on the South Coast of France, holiday season is in full
swing, but it is raining so there is not too much business happening.
Everyone is heavily in debt.
Luckily, a rich Russian tourist arrives in the foyer of the small local
hotel.
He asks for a room and puts a Euro100 note on the reception counter, takes a
key and goes to inspect the room located up the stairs on the third floor.
The hotel owner takes the banknote in a hurry and rushes to his meat supplier to whom he owes €100.
The butcher takes the money and races to his supplier to pay his debt.
The wholesaler rushes to the farmer to pay €100 for pigs he purchased some
time ago.
The farmer triumphantly gives the €100 note to a local prostitute who gave
him her services on credit.
The prostitute goes quickly to the hotel, as she was owing the hotel for her
hourly room use to entertain clients.
At that moment, the rich Russian is coming down to reception and informs the
hotel owner that the proposed room is unsatisfactory and takes his €100 back
and departs.
There was no profit or income. But everyone no longer has any debt and the
small townspeople look optimistically towards their future.
Could this be the solution to the Global Financial Crisis ? 
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BTW, by getting together in communities and using a community-created kind of money simply as counting sticks--BTW the Hudson's Bay Company used this system, with trappers in the north, for centuries--and without allowing any inflation-creating interest to be assessed, such a system could work this way, especially now that we have the personal computer to be the bank and help us.
PLAYING-CARD MONEY AND COLONIAL SCRIP
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I forgot to mention the prosperity of the American colonies--prior to 1776--which used colonial scrip. And the French colonies--prior to 1759--which used playing-card money.
For what happened in French Canada, Read page 403 and following, of THE WHITE AND THE GOLD--The French Regime in Canada, by Thomas B. Costain--a great Canadian born writer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Costain. The owners of the banks of England and France did not like the prosperity in the colonies, because the local kind of money system caused them to miss out on all those profits.
Now guess why the banks agreed to finance the civil servants and troops which kept the colonialists in their place--as is Quebec. Or, guess why they agreed to finance the wars against them when they rebelled--as in New England?
Not hard to figure, eh?
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Governments, are you asleep? Or are you in the thrall of, and in cahoots with, those to whom you have given, without our full consent, the monopoly of credit.
You allow banks to create and issue billions of fiat money--money NOT backed by any real goods (gold silver and the like) and services (skills of the people)--as a debt to us, and then treat as an asset to themselves. Then it is up to us members of the community to pay the rent, in the form of taxes, to them for something which really belongs to the community in the first place.
Now you know where the managers of banks, and other corporations, get all those big salaries and huge bonuses even when they do a lousy job for investors (large and small)--the real owners.
WAKEY! WAKEY, EVERYBODY!!!!!
