---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 07:29:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: John Turmel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: TURMEL: LETS: TOES97 David Boyle Speech Transcript
LETS: TOES 97: CREATING COMMUNITY CURRENCIES PANEL
TRANSCRIPT DRAFT BY JOHN TURMEL
JCT: xxxx represent undecipherable portions of the tape. I would
appreciate any information of necessary corrections before I post it
to the Usenet newsgroups later this week.
Enabling Sustainability and Re-embedding Money
1) David Boyle, New Economics Foundation, UK,
2) Jhym Phoenix, free-lance community activist,
3) Thomas Greco, Jr., Director, Community Information Resource Center,
4) Carol Brouillet, Panel-Moderator,
5) John C. Turmel, B. Eng. LETS Ottawa, Canada,
6) Michael Linton, LETS, Vancouver, Canada
Carol Brouillet, Panel-Moderator:
Welcome the panel on Local Currencies and the first speaker is
David Boyle, the Jhym Phoenix, Tom Greco, myself, John Turmel and
Michael Linton. David.
David Boyle, New Economics Foundation, UK:
Thank you Carol. I've got an apology to make because I've come
four thousands miles or so to do two meetings here and they're both
going on at the same time. So, I'm going to have to, which is really
annoying because I really wanted to hear what everybody got to say and
I'm hoping I can come back into the workshop stage and listen to what
people are saying there. But let me quickly just say what I have to
say.
The debate about money in Europe has a completely different
flavor than it does in England at the moment. And it's because we're
about to take what seems to me to be an extraordinary backward step
and abolish all our national currencies that is and hand it over and
have a Euro instead, a single European currency.
I mean we all know the problems of having one single dollar in
the States has, it means some places get poorer and some places get
very rich. And I think we can expect to find very similar things
happening in Europe.
But ironically, it's happening at at time when suddenly,
everybody is creating their own money. I don't mean the local
currencies we're talking about here but the kind of revolution in
corporate money that's going on simultaneously.
And "Reward Points" from your local supermarket, for instance, I
know in the States, you have, I don't know what you call them here,
but we call the Reward Points,
Audience member: Green Stamps,
Green stamps. You can even have a credit card with which you can
pay for purchases with "Reward" Points which you haven't yet already
earned in your supermarket. So this is a new kind of money. AMR's is a
new kind of money. Milquest Airlines, for instance, has a world-wide
public relations account for the British Public Relations Company
which is paid for entirely in Air Miles.
And there is a multi-currency world which is suddenly appearing.
And that, I think if we're going to talk about cyber-currencies. So, I
think it's very exciting a time to be involved in these kinds of
things and I think it's very exciting that at the same time as you've
all this sort of "raft" of corporate currencies appearing, there are
these local currencies that we've come to discuss today of various
different kinds.
And I've spent two months in the States last year meeting people
involved in lots of these kinds of things and I'm very excited by the
diversity of the kind of local currencies that are offered. They are
trying to do very different kinds of things. I don't know if you know
about Time Dollars. There it is. Trying to create sustainability but
it's a kind of sort of moral community sustainability there.
I think Hours are trying to create a sort of local economic
sustainability. Women's Share in New York, for instance, and that's a
sort of psychological sustainability they're doing.
What I'm trying to say by this is that we need all of these
experiments. They, all of them, have different things to teach us.
They all of them underpin different aspects of our lives.
I have a theory which I was just talking to Michael about which
is that there are two great money-innovative nations on Earth. One of
them is the Scots, and I don't know why that is but I'm open for
suggestions, and one of them is the Americans. And you can see why the
US is a great money-innovator. Because, when they arrived with the
Mayflower with a couple of chickens and some sheep, somehow, they had
to cozier up enough money to build this whole continent. And they did
that as we know partly by bartering the Indians $26 dollars for
Manhattan Island and partly by making money very available.
So, there is the other side of the American experience of money
which we haven 't really had in Europe which is every generation, a
massive series of bank crashes. And that's the other side of the coin
really. So you have a kind of debate and I think you see that debate
in every kind of local currency experiment there is between making
money very available, like Time Dollars, and making money real, like
the Birkshare people are doing in Massachusetts to make sure it's got
a definite standard of value which we can all rely upon.
Every new kind of currency, it seems to me, needs to have both of
those elements in it. They've got to be both available enough to be
useful and real enough and reliable enough for people to be able to
use it. If you give money away on the street, it loses it's value. You
need both sides of these same things it seems to me.
But what they've all taught is the psychological roots of the
whole international money system which we depend on. When the pound
dropped out of the European monetary system in 1992 very suddenly
which is not probably something which shook us a lot, the British
Chancellor of the Exchequer described himself as being overwhelmed by
a whirlwind. He didn't resign. He was sacked a year or so later.
But this week, they spent about a third of the British gold
reserve trying to prop up the pound and in the same way in the 1987
crash, American business was worth 25% less than it was worth the day
before the crash. Nothing had changed in that. They still had those
same buildings, they still all employed the same kind of people, they
still had the same assets. And yet, it is the belief in their value
had changed. Suddenly, the whole thing was different.
We have an international monetary system that depends on this
belief, it seems to me. That's why it depends on people's impressions
of weather patterns, their belief system, what they feel like, their
mood, or what the traders are that morning. And this great
interlocking group psychology is what provides us with the value for
our economic system at the moment.
And local currencies make that clear in a way that it wasn't
before. In England, we still believe that everything's based on the
gold standard even though it hasn't been for years and years. We don't
really understand this credit monster which hits us once in a
generation as it did on Black Wednesday.
And so we see it as a kind of weather system. Politicians talk
about it as if, you know, the recession is coming and it's like a cold
front coming in from the East, they're powerless to stop it.
And yet at the heart of this there is this kind of belief system.
If any of you have read Peter Pan or seen Peter Pan on stage, when
Tinkerbell comes in, she's dying, she's drunk the poison, you have to
clap your hands because, unless you believe in the fairies, they die.
And it's the same kind of thing. If you believe they're valuable,
they're valuable. And that's another insight that the local currency
system has given us.
Another one, and I think this is particularly and insight which
LETS had given us is that the money is created here by people simply
going into debt to their neighbors and they go into debt to their
neighbors because they need something. This is a kind of money, local
currencies and LETS in particular, is a kind of money which is created
simply because people need something in the same way that money, in
the mythical days when it was just shells picked up from a beach. It's
created by people's needs.
And I understand, I'm not a psychologist or anything, that when
babies suck at their mother's breasts, the milk is created simply by
the sucking. It's created simply by the baby needing it. And we're
creating with these local currencies a kind of system which is created
simply by the fact that people need it. And I think that's
tremendously exciting.
I think it has a problem which comes with it because, if we
provide enough money for us all to leave all of our every want, it
means that we then have to decide what really is the difference
between people's need and people's greed, which is a great slogan but
almost impossible to find out in practice what the difference between
the two is. And that's a problem which faces down the line.
It seems to me that we're not going to throw away the old money
system, the international money system, overnight, if ever. At the
moment, it's a system which has enormous power. I can build cities, it
builds roads if we want them, it looks after people with their health
or doesn't. But it doesn't build communities, it doesn't build
psychological health, it doesn't built families and local currencies I
think do so. And for that reason, no matter what the political
background, I'm romantic enough to think that they are inevitable and
will inevitably continue to grow. That's all I've got to say. Thanks
very much and I'm sorry I've got to go in a minute.
--
John C. "The Engineer" Turmel, Founder, Abolitionist Party of Canada
111-1505 Baseline Rd., Ottawa, K2C 3L4, Tel/Fax: 613-723-2739
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