permaculture

[Amir Redzic <redzic_amir@yahoo.com>]

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: James Robertson <james@jamesrobertson.com>
To: Amir Redzic <redzic_amir@yahoo.com> 
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2012 11:25 AM
Subject: James Robertson's Newsletter - July 2012
 

  James Robertson
Newsletter No. 37 - July 2012
The full Newsletter can also be viewed at 
www.jamesrobertson.com/newsletter.htm.
 
1. Money: Surely We Can't Avoid the Big Question Now 
2. Responses and Reviews for Future Money 
3. More on Money
4. Books Reviewed 
(1) Richard Murphy, The Courageous State 
>(2) Brian Davey (ed), Sharing for Survival 
>(3) Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty, The Resilience Imperative 
 
1. MONEY: SURELY WE CAN'T AVOID THE BIG QUESTION NOW 
Revelations ofdeep-seated corruption in the money system have been headline 
news in Britain in the past few weeks, linked with developments in the USA, 
Europe and the rest of the world. They emphasise the urgency to act on the 
proposals outlined in my bookFuture Money: Breakdown or Breakthrough? 
published in April - www.jamesrobertson.com/futuremoney.htm.
These recent revelations have led to public demands to:
        * stop rich people and businesses dodging their taxes with the help 
of highly paid bankers and accountants;
        * stop fraudulent cheating by bankers to profit themselves and their 
banks by falsifying the 'Libor' interest rates at which they lend money to 
one another; and
        * stop banks cheating small businesses by forcing conditions on their 
loans that the borrowers don't know about or understand.
All the big British banks appear to have been involved in these practices.
Meanwhile,
        * Barclays Bank has had to dismiss its Chief Executive Officer, Bob 
Diamond - at the insistence of Sir Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of 
England;
        * the Treasury is now open to "the possibility of introducing 
criminal sanctions for serious misconduct in the management of a bank" - See 
www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/consult_sanctions_directors_banks.htm;
        * a serious breakdown in the 'retail banking' services of the Royal 
Bank of Scotland affected hundreds of thousands of its customers, reflecting 
poor attention by banks to that side of their business;
        * HSBC (Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation), the biggest 
British bank, has just confessed to the US authorities that it has been 
guilty of money laundering the profits of the Mexican drugs trade and funding 
for terrorist activities in other countries, and may be fined more than $1 
billion; and
        * the uncertainfuture of eurozone banks remains unresolved.
So the banks are not oustandingly profitable to our economies, as they claim. 
They are "bloodsuckers" who feed on it at our expense, as John Weeks, a 
Professor Emeritus at SOAS (University of London), describes here - 
www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29329.htm.
All the evidence now available must surely force us toface up to the big 
question: 
Why on earth do we allow our political leaders to continue giving commercial 
banks the huge privilege of creating the publicmoney supply as profit-making 
debt at our expense? 
For a short discussion, see "A Good Question for Modern Democracies", "New 
European", Spring 2012, Vol 21, No 1, pages 2-6. Authors of other articles on 
aspects of Europe's financial problems in this issue include Tarek el Diwany 
and Julian Rose. Free pdf copies can be obtained from Luise Hemmer Pihl at 
skrodhoj[at]gmail.com. 
 
2. SOME RESPONSES and REVIEWS so far forFuture Money: Breakdown Or 
Breakthrough? 
[A reminder that subscribers to the newsletter can download a free pdf of 
Future Money by going to www.jamesrobertson.com/bookdownload.htm. Hard copies 
of the book can be ordered from 
www.greenbooks.co.uk/en/book/414/future-money.html.]
(1) Jehangir Pocha, chief editor of India's NewsX TV station, said
“I am really enjoying Future Money. It is an excellent book, with the simple 
language and structure of a 101 textbook but the underlying profundity of a 
treatise on philosophy.
>”It is also an important book, and so I wanted to ask if you know how I can 
>order some copies for India. I want to send the book to various ministers, 
>politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats, including our central bank 
>governors".
Green Books has sent copies to him, and I am very grateful to Barbara Panvel 
for the contact with him. An example of Pocha'sthinking  is at 
www.chs-sachetan.org/?p=1440 (from the Centre for Holistic Studies, Mumbai).
(2)James Bruges Letter in The Guardian, 15 June 2012 
-www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jun/15/businesses-banks-economy-growing
"Again and again, Threadneedle Street says that banks need help: the lady 
doth protest too much, methinks (Chancellor releases more than £80bn to 
protect banks from euro contagion, 15 June). It is the foolish or 
deliberately pernicious lending by banks since deregulation that has caused 
the debt storm, not Europe. Personal debt in the UK was £12bn in 1970; now 
it's £1,450bn. Debt will continue to rise if banks are allowed to continue 
creating the nation's money by sinking us into debt and charging us interest.
>It is people and small businesses – that buy and sell and keep the economy 
>moving – that need to be bailed out, not banks. In his new book, Future 
>Money, James Robertson suggests that the proverbial visitor from another 
>planet would stand aghast at the way we have given private institutions the 
>privilege of creating our money for their own benefit."
>James Bruges, Bristol
(3)Jeremy Williams, blog - 
http://makewealthhistory.org/2012/05/29/book-review-future-money-by-james-robertson/
(4)Martin Stott, in Town & Country Planning, June 2012 - 
www.jamesrobertson.com/martinstott.pdf
(5)Tony Vickers - www.landvaluescape.org/FUTURE MONEY review.pdf
(6) David Broman, Luxembourg - a pdf of his article can be seen here - 
www.jamesrobertson.com/davidbroman.pdf
The website version can be found here - 
www.lejeudi.lu/index.php/le-club/4331.html. Click here to read a Google 
Translate version of the article in English.
(7) Simon Thorpe, blog - 
http://simonthorpesideas.blogspot.fr/2012/06/james-robertson-future-money-breakdown.html
(8)Graham Barnes, Feasta, Ireland - 
www.feasta.org/2012/06/26/the-future-of-money-review/
(9)Richard Lemmer, Greenhouse blog - 
http://greenhousepr.co.uk/blog/show/future-money/
(10) School of Economic Science, Study Forum, April-May 2012 
-www.schooleconomicscience.org/phpBB2/ viewtopic.php?p=4552&sid=39423f5 
 
3. MORE ON MONEY 
(1)"Greece can have both the drachma and the euro", James Skinner & Tony 
Greenham - 
www.neweconomics.org/blog/2011/07/19/greece-can-have-both-the-drachma-and-the-euro
(2)"What I would tell Greece to do tomorrow if they asked", Simon Dixon - 
www.simondixon.org/3-simple-solutions-for-the-financial-crisis/2012/05/14/
(3)"Banking vs Democracy: how power shifted from parliament to the banking 
sector", Positive Money - 
www.positivemoney.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Banking_Vs_Democracy_Web.pdf
(4)Extract from 4th July Message, American Monetary Institute- 
www.monetary.org
"....... Jefferson fought the bank, helping to bring it down and Burr killed 
Hamilton over public insults; but privately issued money had gained a 
foothold in America. It's still here, in control of our monetary system. It's 
the root cause of most of our social and economic problems. Whenever it 
caused crises in the past, our government had to come to the rescue. Its 
latest atrocity is the current monetary, banking and economic crisis, 
threatening to take the entire world economy down into depression, and 
destroy the lives of billions of people in the process.
>
>It must end now! This crisis gives us our only opportunity to reform our 
>monetary system and eliminate the private creation of money; to eliminate 
>the privilege banks have to create our money supply when they extend loans; 
>to eliminate using debt for money!".
(5)Deirdre Kent (deirdre dot kent (at) gmail.com) in New Zealand has written 
a very important paper on "A land-backed currency issued by a local 
authority".
It can be downloaded from 
www.ethicalmarkets.com/2012/04/21/a-land-backed-currency-issued-by-a-local-authority.
It should be studied by anyone seriously interested in local currencies, 
local land value taxation, a local citizen's dividend, and local planning.
(6) For details of the new book by Margrit Kennedy, Bernard Lietaer and John 
Rogers on People Money: The Promise of Regional Currencies, see 
www.triarchypress.com/pages/Regional-Currencies-People-Money.htm.
 
4. BOOKS REVIEWED 
I can enthusiastically recommend these books to readers interested in their 
subject matter.
(1) Richard Murphy, THE COURAGEOUS STATE: RethinkingEconomics, Society and 
the Role of Government, Searching Finance Ltd, 8 Whitehall Road, London W7 
2JE, 2011, paperback, 317 pages, £14.99. For full details, including Contents 
and Reviews, see http://tinyurl.com/ctguu47.
In recent months Richard Murphy has prominently criticised how rich people 
and businesses avoid paying their due contribution to society through the tax 
system, and the shameless activities of bankers and accountants who get rich 
by specialising in tax avoidance. This important book deals with those and 
wider issues.
I support it wholeheartedly, although I have some differences with it. For 
example, I believe that historically the problems of our money system today 
go back much further than to what has followed Keynes and Beveridge since 
1945.
We have to recognise that, while it is essential for our political leaders to 
be more courageous, in the circumstances prevailing today that raises a huge 
question. How will the nature of democratic politics allow our politicians to 
be courageous when, in order to protect the survival and success of their 
political careers, they have to respect the conflicting demands and pressures 
of so many different groups of people, including electors, colleagues, 
opponents, and the press and broadcasting?
I hope Murphy's book will itself help to resolve that vital question by 
persuading active citizens to demand much more insight and courage from our 
politicians.
(2)Brian Davey (ed), SHARING for SURVIVAL: Restoring the Climate, The Commons 
and Society, published in memory of Richard Douthwaite by FEASTA (Foundation 
for the Economics of Sustainability) Dublin, 2012, and distributed in Britain 
by Green Books. Paperback, 188 pages, £14.99/€17.50.
Other authors include Nick Bardsley, James Bruges, John Jopling, Justin 
Kenrick, Laurence Matthews and Caroline Whyte. For details, including a full 
Contents list and information about all the authors, go to 
www.sharingforsurvival.org.
This book is a very welcome and understandable response to the dwindling 
momentum of attempts to deal with climate change at the global level - for 
example at recent U.N. conferences in Copenhagen, Durban and Rio.
I expressed doubts in Future Money about schemes for 'cap and trade' and 'cap 
and share' because, as things are at present, those schemes have tended to 
complicate the overall money system in ways that confuse how it should work. 
That has been one of the factors allowing those who manage the schemes to rip 
off their users.
However, in his opening chapter Brian Davey recognises that climate policy in 
general, and cap and share in particular, must be developed against the 
widespread inertia now existing. "The alternatives to the present log jam 
have to be constructed outside the political and economic mainstream". 
Davey goes on to say that "preparations are needed for a rapid transfer over 
to a new system that is running in embryo when things begin to break down, 
when an older generation flounder and prove quite unable to understand and 
quite incapable of coping". James Bruges, in his chapter on "Cap and Share in 
India" confirms that Indian culture offers opportunities to develop 
self-reliant 'cap and share' schemes from the bottom upwards.
STOP PRESS, JUST ARRIVED - brief details only 
(3) Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty, THE RESILIENCE IMPERATIVE: Cooperative 
Transitions to a Steady-State Economy, New Society Publishers, Canada, 2012, 
paperback, 389 pages, $26.95. Details at 
www.newsociety.com/Books/R/The-Resilience-Imperative include an excerpt from 
the book, a Contents List and Author Profiles.
 
James Robertson 
20 July 2012
 
james@jamesrobertson.com
www.jamesrobertson.com
 
  


 


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>From bob@bobwaldrop.net  Fri Jul 20 10:01:16 2012
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Subject: Re: [permaculture] Stop the War on Front Yard Vegetable Gardens
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I can't imagine that a prepainted metal roof is cheap enough for me to
afford.  I have a 1524 sq ft house, and I would love a metal roof but it
seems way out of my price range.  Whitewash on the other hand is pennies
a square foot, which is my kind of price.

rmw

On 7/19/2012 11:31 PM, venaurafarm wrote:
> On 7/20/2012 12:02 AM, Bob Waldrop wrote:
>> Hehehe, Lawrence, my point is "avoid monocultures" and use a "diversity
>> of social media approaches."  Probably there is a petition site
>> affiliated with this issue with a non-FB petition. If not, someone
>> should start one.  It's what I would do if I was managing this.  I'd
>> have a website with a place to sign, an email newsletter, a discussion
>> group, Twitter account, FB, google+,.
> Exactly. A working site with accessable petition. If they want media
> coverage, i.e. boing boing, they  will have to offer something that is
> easy to find and use.
>
> Frankly, with all the silly municipal ordinances and neighborhood
> covenants denying people the right to grow their own food in their yards
> we need a massive collaboration of folks across the nation to resist
> this nonsense.
>
> About whitewashing roofs - why not re-roof with prepainted metal which
> lasts a lifetime with no maintenance, comes in 3' widths with regular
> ridges (V's) and any length. Is not expensive.
>
>
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>