Monthly Archive for December, 2011

An Occupy plan, money and free speech.

Published on December 7, 2011 in currency & DNA for social organisms. 1 Comment

I just read this interesting “plan” put forward by the Occupy “Working Group on the 99% Declaration.”

Notice that ten out of twenty-two of the suggested grievances are either directly or indirectly about money.  Hmmm.  Interesting indicator of where the problem is.  It’s fascinating to me how stuck we are with the idea that such grievances about money will be resolved politically.

For example: grievance 1 & 2 call for reversing the supreme court decision that spending money is an act of free speech, because this allows corporations and rich people to control government through the “protected speech” of campaign contributions.  That seems to make sense on the face of it.  But the problem is, I believe that money actually is an expressive capacity, a speech act.  So free speech does apply.  But not quite the way it might at first seems.  It’s not spending money that’s the speech act, it’s issuing it in the first place.  You see, issuing money is making a promise.  It’s make a declaration about value.  Spending money just is passing along that promise or declaration that some other party made, because it’s a token of the value you wish to transact.

If free speech really applies to issuance this has consequence for Occupy. A far better strategy, I believe, is to build on that Supreme Court decision, to take it further and make sure that we trumpet this truth. That real monetary speech comes from issuance, not spending.  But we don’t have to wait for the courts to recognize this truth before we start acting on it. Communities and individuals everywhere can start issuing thousands of new types of currencies as acts of free speech.  Currency issuance is already free because it is speech!

There may be one political fight that comes from this view.  Currently, legal tender laws force us to recognize Federal dollars for settling “all debts public and private”.  This amounts to something akin to the opposite of free speech, the forcing of speech.  I believe that you are free to speak as you please, to make any promises that you want.  But this freedom of also entails, I believe, that I not be required to believe your promises.  But this is what the legal tender laws amount to, citizens being required to believe the promises of government and the financial industry which together issue Federal currency.

So perhaps one political battle worth fighting for is the repeal of the legal tender laws (which can be done on the grounds of freedom of speech), but I think better strategy is just to make it obsolete.

Paul Krafel on Occupy and economic equality

Published on December 5, 2011 in currency & DNA for social organisms. 0 Comments

One of my heros is Paul Krafel, author of the book Seeing Nature, and short video, The Upward Spiral.  In his recent newsletter he has this to say about economic equality:

One of the main issues of the Occupy movement is economic inequality. Whenever I think about it, I keep coming back to my watershed work. For me, economic inequality is a vital but secondary issue. The more fundamental issue is how should money ideally flow within an economy? I believe it should be recycled often to fall again and again as rain upon the slopes. What we are seeing is a concentration of wealth low in the watershed and how unproductive it is down there. Trillions of dollars in credit default swaps. What kind of truly human aspiration is that serving? Trillions of dollars being leveraged for what? One can argue that more of that money should be shared more widely in the name of economic justice. But I think there is a more politically powerful perspective of economic effectiveness. How pathetically little is being truly created by all the money that has flowed too far downslope. A failure of imagination is draining our culture of economic vitality. It’s not an issue of rich vs. poor but an issue of how possibilities drain away when wealth accumulates downslope. All of us, rich and poor alike, would be uplifted by a flow that recycled and held the wealth of our species higher in the watershed. I believe it is spiritually important to see this as a long-term issue, not of taxing the rich and giving to the poor, but of adjusting thousands of the ongoing flows within an economy so that the money keeps getting recycled back up to flow over and over again.

– Paul Krafel

In case you don’t know, his “watershed work” is literally work on watersheds.  During rain storms he walks high up into the watershed with a trowel, and makes lots of small changes to redirect water flows from concentrating in gullies.  Paul has some fascinating photos of how this small work makes huge difference over time.