We are missing something. We have bank accounts to keep track of money, but no account for everything else that we value — beyond money.
In fact, things that we find most valuable to us are not measured with money, so we set about to change that. Credyts is the account for everything else we value, and a new type of money too.
To create such a “new” account that reflects what society values, beyond money, we had to reimagine how money itself is created — and repatriate that important function back to the people. Now, private corporations (banks), not the people or government, create money. Private banks, having been gifted the extraordinary privilege of creating money and thus are in a position to dictate what society does, or does not, value. This strange reality is even more so when you consider private banks are not mandated to follow any criteria for favouring societal good, their only guiding mantra — corporate profits, not people, not society. We are proposing that People and Society need to control this fundamental function of who creates value and for who’s benefit, away from exclusively the control of private corporations (banks.)
While this may seem radical at 1st it actually more sensible approach that money (value) be created this way — to service the people that truly create “value” and “exchange” it, rather than middlemen (private banks) who have their own agenda that, as history has shown us, doesn’t always a align with what the rest of us want or need… Right now, money is created as debt, when a bank issues you a loan you get “money” in exchange for “debt” to the bank. Thus, money is a “promise to pay”. We are rethinking the creation of money as “promise to exchange” from the local community — where the Community is the issuer of (new) Community Credyts. Credyts is giving people the power to imagine, create and fund projects they want in their local community, thus allowing small society to decide what they value, rather than that being dictated by a middle-man.
This shift to a new model of money creation gets us out of being simply debtors to middle-men banks (negative money model), to a model where people are both the creators, and consumers, of money (value) within their own communities (positive money model). Shifting from the self-interest of middle-men bankers to the direct societal interests of the Local Community is, we believe, inherently more efficient creating both resilience and responsiveness to Local Needs. Community Currencies (Credyts) arise out of local value(s) rather than dictates from distant corporations who want to extract fees from us — for the privilege of using money we could instead simply create ourselves.
This is not without precedent or previous successes. In the midst of the Great Depression, the City of Wörgl in Austria issued its own Community Currency (in parallel to regular bank money) — and successfully avoided the ruin of unemployment which paralyzed the rest of the world. Based on the thinking of Silvio Gesell, an early 20th-century economist, “the miracle of Wörgl” [1]is a timely reminder that local communities can successfully issue “money” in an efficient and effective response to their local needs, especially when Central Bank policies fail[2]. Such resilience and independence are needed more and more as the centralized and globalized banking system (cartel) influences or dictates policies that benefit their wealth owners. Private Banks favour and serve those that are already rich at the expense of local prosperity.
Much of the direction of the Credyts System finds strong alignment with the work of Economist E.F. Schumacher[3] who’s book “Small is Beautiful. Economics, as if People Mattered” — the title just says everything about what is wrong with Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and Central Banking [4]Policies… and how we can counter the ugliness of “Big” with the beauty of “Small” and make economics about what matters to people, not to big banks[5]. It is clear that the current Centralised Bank System where private corporate interests guide the policies of the money system, and in turn, government policy that follows the money. A pathway out of inevitable debt bondage to the banks is to repatriate the creation of value — directly to the people and cut out the banks. Private Bank’s values are strictly tied to the interests of The 1%. However, we, The 99, actually hold all the power — if we simply decide to quietly and purposefully make decisions about what we value, in our local communities. Then, we control the balance of power and influence our own destinies. This is also, conveniently, a pathway to a true representative and direct democracy — of, by, and for the people — not the middlemen.
By enabling the creation of “Money” by the Community we can decide what we value — independent of what private banks “value” and be able to examine and act directly on questions such as: Does child-rearing and household management create value in the community and society? Does funding urban micro-farming create food security, reduce our energy footprint and facilitate community well-being? Does the creation of basic housing for everyone create a more stable social fabric and economy? Enabling creation at the Local Community Level creates the opportunity to re-examine what new robust models for societal well-being can be created at the edges — rather than through centralized models that are proving to be fragile and structured for the benefit of The 1% and not the rest of us…
Footnotes:
Worglwas a stunningly effective experiment, one that 170 neighbouring towns quickly wished to replicate. In his book, The Future of MoneyBernard Lietaer (Random House, 2001) he references several Free Economy projects including Complementary currencies are divided into work enabling currencies, such as the Worgl Stamp Scrip, Wära, and Ithaca Hour, and community enabling currencies, such as LETS, and also gives examples of corporate currencies, such as Frequent Flyer Miles.
[2] Former Wall Street insider, journalist and public speaker Naiomi Prins book: Collu$ion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World (2018)
[3] Schumacher Society Local Currencies models.
[4] Giants: The Global Power Elite, Peter Phillips “a look at the top 389 most powerful players in world capitalism”
[5] In the past 40 years consolidation (mergers and acquisitions) and private interests influencing deregulation of the banking & financial sectors have led to just a few dominant global banks.