Henrymakow: My name is Anthony Migchels and I am the initiator of the «Gelre,» the first Regional Currency in the Netherlands.
My organization is a foundation, not for profit, not a company, because I believe credit should be a public facility, serving the people that actually OWN the credit, instead of milking them dry with what is rightfully theirs. The Gelre foundation is run by a board of three.
We now have almost a hundred companies participating and the break even point should come at about 300, after that we can get an income out of it. But the real goal is, to hook up 66% of all companies in Gelderland, a province in the Netherlands with 1.2 million inhabitants and 60k companies. A GDP of about 40 billion Euro.
It is clear that interest bearing debt to a bank as money is a vicious hoax, but strangely enough, few have been developing a viable alternative.
Ellen Brown and the Money Master people, whom I both regard very highly, have reasonable
propositions, but they are still considering reform at the state-level and that is simply not going to happen. Not here in Europe and not before having survived WW3, anyway.
State Level real money implies the end of the New World Order Central Banking Vampires.
There is Bernard Lietaer, but his biggest point seems to be that ‘complementary currencies’ complement the ‘national’ (banking, really) currencies. He has correctly analyzed the negative aspects of interest, but is completely oblivious (or pretends to be) to the nefarious nature of the powers behind the printing press. It is clear that real alternative currencies have only one goal: to destroy the credibility of humanities greatest plague and its metal based successors. The goal is clearly NOT to play second fiddle.
I like Thomas Greco, who is very knowledgeable. He suggests mutual credit, facilitated by Market Players as a solution, but even he has not pinpointed what is to my mind the most crucial challenge for anybody wanting to create a viable currency, able to truly compete with Dollar or Euro
That challenge is as follows:
Barter units allow for interest free credit, but are not convertible to major currencies and convertible units don’t allow for non interest bearing credit.
Combining these two features, convertibility and interest free credit, is essential for non state/non bank monies to have a real impact.
It is the way of the not so distant future 🙂
Most barter schemes have prohibitive transactions costs. Also, and even more importantly, they are not convertible to Euro/Dollar. They usually are OK for swapping excess inventory or goods and services with low marginal cost, but not for high powered capital intensive industry.
The Euro/Dollar/Pound based Berkshares (http://berkshares.org/) , Lewes Pound
(http://www.thelewesPound.org/) and German Regional Currencies (www.regiogeldverein.de) are stronger, because they are based on national currencies: you give up a Dollar and in return you get a Berkshare, that can be spent within the network. In effect the Dollar remains in the network. Because there is a Dollar in the bank, companies can convert excess local currencies (units that they cannot usefully spend in the network) to Dollar/Euro The problem is, there can never be more of the local currency in circulation, than the supplying organization has Dollars/Euro in the bank. Therefore they cannot supply any credit.
This is also the basic architecture of the current Gelre. Another conceptual problem with this approach is that you are basing real, loving money on the most toxic commodity known to man: interest bearing bank debt as money.
There is also a legal problem here, in Europe, anyway:
Believe it or not, but De Nederlandsche Bank (Dutch central bank,) run by Nout Wellink who is on the board of BIS and a member of the Trilaterals) shut down my on-line telebank service. A clear sign I was on the right track :-). They did so because of a prohibition on collecting ‘reclaimable money’ (a direct translation of judicial lingo, I’m not sure an English speaking lawyer will know what this means).
You can, however, manage reclaimable money if you give a paper voucher in return. This is a loophole designed for book vouchers and the like.
Les mer henrymakow.com