ABOUT THE POLITICS OF MONEY--Hazel Henderson
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http://www.hazelhenderson.com/editorials/politics_of_money.html===============================================================
THINGS I HAVE LEARNED FROM READING HAZEL HENDERSON1. I have learned that economics--about the way we manage ourselves and the homes we, as families live in, including our communities, cities, provinces, nations and so on--has always been politics in disguise.
2. We are political human beings, not just instinct-dependent animal beings. We must not forget that politics is about the raising--using the awesome power to tax self and others--and the spending of public money.
3. By now we know that some or our political leaders have failed us. For their own selfish reasons, they have given away too much of the power that ought to remain in the hands of voters who believe in democracy to certain professional economists, who "dominate public policy and trump so many other academic disciplines" (Henderson) and values in our daily lives.
4. Happily, all this focus on and awareness of the role of money is leading to a new and wide-spread awareness of what it is and, when used wisely is not the "root of all evil". Thomas Carlyle, who called economics the "dismal science", was wrong. Economics is neither a science, nor does it ever need to be a dismal topic.
5. Understanding the ways that money is designed, created and manipulated can help us design, create and manipulate it in ways that serve the public good and thus bring wealth, justice, peace and prosperity to all of us.
At last, this new awareness is helping more and more of us to really understand what money is and how best to use it.
6. Civic actions with local currencies--what I like to call complementary community currencies (CCC)--using barter, community credit and the more dubious rash of digital cybernetic-money all reveal that we must make the effort to understand the politics of money.
Henderson has written that, citizens all over the world--especially the Muslim world, I add--are rejecting malfunctioning economic source codes and operating systems: the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and imperious central banks.
Its hard-wired program: the now derided “Washington Consensus” recipe for hyping GNP-growth is challenged by the Human Development Index (HDI), Ecological Footprint Analysis, the Living Planet Index, the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, the Genuine Progress Index and Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness … not to mention scores of local city indices such as Jacksonville, Florida’s Quality Indicators for Progress, pioneered by the late Marian Chambers in 1983.
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IN THE BEGINNING, ALL MONEY WAS MADE OF THINGS--ANIMALS, SLAVES, HIDES, OILS, METALS AND THE LIKE ...
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As with politics, all real money was always, and is even now, local. It was created by people to facilitate exchange, transactions and based on trust.
The story of how this useful invention, money, grew into abstract national fiat currencies backed only by the promises of rulers and central bankers is now being told anew.
We witness how modern information technology and deregulation of banking and finance in the 1980s helped create today’s monstrous global casino, where $1.15 trillion worth--and growing--of fiat currencies slosh around the planet, daily, via mouse clicks on electronic exchanges. 90% of this is in purely speculative trading.
