Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender - Softcover

Greco Jr., Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890132373 ISBN 13: 9781890132378

Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2001

Synopsis

Cash. Loot. Scratch. Lucre. Bread. Coin. Scrip. Moolah. Green. We all think we know intuitively what money is, and what it can do for us. Tom Greco, director of the Community Information Resource Center, understands and explains money on an eye-popping, fundamental level. Moreover, he provides a roadmap on how to make alternatives to the "legal tender" work for individuals, communities, and local economies.

Money will set your mental gears spinning with fantastic ideas. This book explains the mysteries and realities of money in clear and accessible prose, and reveals the true workings, and alarming fragility, of our existing financial system. It also describes concrete and realistic actions that individuals, businesses, social service agencies, and governments can take to enhance productivity and purchasing power, to protect local economies from the ravages of globalization, and to strengthen the bonds of community.

Money is a radical critique of our existing financial system, but also a practical and inspirational how-to manual for creating a vibrant and effective community currency system.
You'll learn:

• The truth about how money is created, and what it actually represents
• Why we're all in debt
• How the financial system is structured to inevitably transfer wealth from the poor to the rich
• How to start a financial revolution in your local community

A retired professor of business and economics, Tom Greco has spent twenty years studying community currency systems around the world, including historical models (such as during the Great Depression), and the scores of contemporary examples now operating in the United States, Canada, Europe, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. He helped establish the Tucson Traders currency in Arizona, and he has served as a consultant for many others. No pie-in-the-sky idealist, Greco offers a realistic vision of how healthy local economies can be supplemented with flourishing community currencies.

Anyone who works routinely with money needs this book--this means bankers, stockbrokers, merchants, community organizers, loan sharks, gamblers, investors, bank robbers, hedgefund operators, sports agents, and ordinary people.

 

About this title

About the Author

Thomas H. Greco, Jr. is the director of the Community Information Resource Center, which he founded in 1992. CIRC is a nonprofit consulting organization and networking hub dedicated to economic equity, social justice, and community improvement, specializing in community currency and mutual credit design, development, and implementation. He is a former engineer and professor of business administration. Tom's books include Money and Debt: A Solution to the Global Crisis, Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender, and The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. For more information on re-creating money systems, visit another webpage of Tom's, Reinventing Money (reinventingmoney.com).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

What This Book Contains and How to Use It (from the Introduction)

This volume focuses particularly on the creation and control of money, money substitutes, and alternative exchange mechanisms. It is actually four books in one, divided into four parts. While all the objectives are addressed in each and every part, the individual parts tend to emphasize the objectives in the order stated above. I advise you to read the book in its entirety, but depending on your main interests, you may want to read the various parts in a different order from that presented.

Part I is titled, "Monetary Realities and Official Illusions." It explains what money really is, how it is created and extinguished, how it malfunctions, and how it works against the interests of most individuals and communities. It continues with a description of how money has evolved, taking on different forms over time. It explains how these forms have enabled the further concentration of money's power in fewer hands and the erosion of social cohesion, community power, and democratic governance. This is background that I consider important to gaining a proper understanding of the money problem and how communities might cope with it. While I believe that this part should be read by everyone, it could be skipped temporarily by readers who already have some understanding of the nature of the problem and are anxious to get to "the solutions."

Part II, "Complementary Currencies, Past and Present," describes both historical and contemporary currency and exchange alternatives. These descriptions highlight the fundamental features, and the strengths and weaknesses, of each example. Parts I and II together show some of the processes by which individuals and communities have been disempowered, and some local responses that have been effective in restoring community control and economic vitality in the face of centralized power. They set the stage for the more prescriptive community exchange material contained in the remainder of the book. This part, too, might be passed over temporarily by those who already have some familiarity with these topics and wish to get right to the details of community currency design, improvement, and implementation.

Part III, "Monetary Transformation and Community Empowerment," is essentially a primer on community exchange, highlighting the basic design elements and describing various forms, features, procedures, and methodologies. It outlines gentle strategies by which communities can establish equitable, sustainable, and ecologically sound local economies using "home grown" exchange media and participatory methods for the allocation of credit and capital. It also provides in-depth coverage of the why, what, and how-to details. Community activists, organizers and social entrepreneurs will find in this section the meat of the book.

Part IV, "Currency Design, Improvement, and Innovation," continues to build on the material presented in Part III. It contains a number of innovative proposals for currencies, coupons, and scrip that address specific community problems while enhancing community power and strengthening the entire local economy. These models can be adapted to suit local conditions and needs. Social entrepreneurs and community organizers will find much here to stimulate their imaginations.

Throughout this book I will use the term community currency to mean any mechanism, that is under popular control, which provides a means of payment other than official currency.

In this context, the term community is used to describe any association of individuals, groups, or businesses that bind themselves together under an agreement to use an internal payment mechanism. Under this definition, it is clear that a community need not be defined by geographical proximity. It is possible to conceive of a community of traders who are widely dispersed geographically. Indeed, we are seeing the emergence of Internet-based communities in which the transactions take place in cyberspace and participants are scattered all over the world. It is not hard to imagine a payment system that is global in scope and beyond the control of any government or bank. There have already been some interesting experiments with so-called e-cash or cyber cash.

A community currency need not take the form of paper notes. It can be as simple as a set of account pages in a notebook in which the values of trades are recorded. Such a book is called a ledger, and the currency, in that case, consists of the numbers that comprise the members' account balances.

In essence, then, a community currency means that members of the group empower themselves to create their own "money," which they agree to use in paying for purchases made among themselves.

My hope is that readers will quickly grasp the enormous power inherent in these cooperative and democratic exchange arrangements, and that the information and ideas contained in this book will prove useful to others who share my dream of a world that works for everyone.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1890132373
• ISBN 13: 9781890132378
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Kerney Karen
• Number of pages: 320