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  • From: Amir Redzic <redzic_amir@yahoo.com>
  • To: bhfront <bhfront2003@yahoogroups.com>, PermaBiH <permakultura-u-bih@googlegroups.com>, permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Fw: James Robertson's Newsletter - July 2012
  • Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2012 05:59:38 -0700 (PDT)




----- 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
 
 





The Old Bakehouse, Cholsey, Oxfordshire OX10 9NU, United Kingdom


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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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>
>





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