STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Are 'Green' Reciprocal Exchange and Credit Systems Part of a Larger Elite Promotion?
By Staff News & Analysis - August 10, 2012

From "The High School Curriculum Every Urban Planner Wishes They'd Had" … "City Semester": Learning About Climate Change And Sustainability In The City … City Semester is an immersive, city-focused course that combines classwork and field studies for juniors at Fieldston. It's like other semester away programs run by the school, but instead of sending kids out to the Rocky Mountains or the Maine coast, students in the City Semester program turn their attention to their own neighborhood and city. … And if delving into city politics isn't enough to add a little more stress to high schoolers' lives, one of the sections of the course had students role-playing and problem-solving their way through some not-too-far-off disaster scenarios brought on as a result of climate change. Rising sea levels create a flood in lower Manhattan that causes a blackout, in this scenario. During the power outage, a rumored hostage situation at the United Nations causes the whole subway system to shut down. – Sustainable Cities

Dominant Social Theme: Alternative currency, credit and barter systems stand tall against the dialectical materialism of free-market economics.

Free-Market Analysis: In late July, SustainableCities reposted an article (excerpted above) about "sustainability" and how a progressive Bronx school educator was teaching young people to achieve it in their own communities.

OK! Step back … In our humble opinion, this has all the fingerprints of an elite promotion, one designed as usual to promote global governance. Not only are children being indoctrinated to support such notions as "climate change" but in this program we can see that young people are being encouraged to consult with New York City politicians to create "sustainable environments."

New York has probably one of the most corrupt political systems in the world so we don't know exactly how such consultations will prove of benefit, though that seems to be part of the program, nonetheless. If that were not bad enough, the students are then instructed to role-play about a climate disaster that includes United Nations hostage-taking.

Our response to this would be that so long as people are not hurt, the entire United Nations could be kidnapped in aggregate and moved to the Moon where its festering corruption and war-mongering could be conducted in an airless and sterile environment without earthly impact.

We would in a sense actually wish the same for blogs like this SustainableCities, which reprinted the article in question from ANOTHER Blog, "AtlanticCities."

Both of these blogs, along with many others in the so-called alternative space, are big on global warming and climate change. Yet there is little doubt now that global warming does not exist, or not at least as the massive and immediate problem that it is being promoted as.

It has been rejected not only by many of its own prominent backers, but also by the public at large. You can see our latest article on this elitist promotion here:

End of the Global Warming Debate as We Know It?

Now, it turns out, dear reader, that AtlanticCities is affiliated with that mouthpiece of elite globalism, the Atlantic Magazine. Like the Economist and the New Yorker, the Atlantic's editors never saw a problem that couldn't be fixed by enlightened government activism.

It's all part of a larger green psy-op, in our view, (what we call a power elite dominant social theme), one that is designed to frighten people into giving up power and wealth to specially prepared globalist solutions like the UN, IMF, etc.

Which brings us back to "SustainableCities.net" – an obvious elite psy-op.

SustainableCities is supported by the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL). VEIL in turn is supported by the Australian government that just forced through that country's horrible carbon tax to combat global warming (which probably does not exist).

OK, you've been patient. Here is the point of our article … SustainableCities is a big backer of "reciprocal exchange systems."

These are various kinds of alternative money systems and barter systems that would include what is commonly known as social credit, mutual credit and even variants of Georgism.

SustainableCities posted an article back in February on these sorts of systems entitled "More Than Money: Report On Reciprocal Exchange Systems." Here's a little bit:

It's increasingly clear that we live in collaborative times. Many of the most interesting innovations of recent years have at their heart ideas of sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, exchanging or swapping. These are age-old concepts being reinvented through network technologies and a cultural shift driven by the more civic minded millennial generation.

The [More Than Money] report, with the subtitle "Platforms for exchange and reciprocity in public services", was commissioned by NESTA and nef in an attempt to learn the lessons from the past and to provide a framework for understanding the many different approaches to complementary currencies and other platforms for reciprocal exchange.

The More Than Money report was funded by … guess who?

NESTA …

What's NESTA? Here, from Wikipedia:

The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) is an independent endowment in the United Kingdom established by an Act of Parliament in 1998.

The company acts through a combination of practical programmes, early stage investment, research and policy, and the formation of partnerships to foster innovation and deliver radical new ideas. Funded by a £250 million endowment from the UK National Lottery, NESTA uses the interest from that endowment to fund and support its projects.

NESTA is now a so-called "charitable body." But its roots are clear: it is supported by the British government, which also founded it.

NESTA's Policy and Research team publishes a wide range of research papers designed for policy makers. Most recently it contributed to James Dyson's Ingenious Britain report, and published a series of research papers – The Vital 6 Percent, Attacking the Recession, and Mass Localism – that influenced all of the three major party manifestos in the UK general election in 2010. The company also has a venture capital arm that invests in early-stage companies through direct investment.

So NESTA is big on various types of alternative money and also big on promoting various kinds of "green sustainability."

NESTA and SustainableCities are not the only outfits promoting "alternative money." So is a website called the "Green Business Network."

The Green Business Exchange recently carried an article entitled, "The Swiss WIR: Glimpse into the Future of GAEx." Here's the conclusion of that article:

Like the WIR, the Green America Exchange offers businesses the benefits of a complementary currency when cash is tight. Participants can use GAEx to weather economic downturns, forge new professional connections, receive services at a wholesale price, and discover new ways to be competitive—all within a system that caters exclusively to green businesses.

Okay … Let's summarize what we've learned.

SustainableCities, The Green Business Network and AtlanticCities are all part of an apparent green promotion of the power elite that uses fear of climate change to create globalist, authoritarian solutions.

These facilities are supported DIRECTLY by government "environmental" agencies in Australia and Britain that are evidently and obviously supported in turn by the power elite itself that seeks control worldwide through the use of these fear-based tactics.

Yet the promotions of "alternative money" and barter systems increasingly may be integral to the power elite agenda. Chief among these is the Greenbacker system that has recently been exposed along with Abraham Lincoln's presidency as an elitist promotion of sorts.

The charming and erudite Ellen Brown – a chief proponent of government monopoly money – has even set up her own non-profit to promote Greenbackerism. She also hopes to create an affiliation with the apparently Soros-controlled Occupy Wall Street movement. At least one of her board members has significant relationships with the UN.

It is certainly possible that the elites see alternative money systems and formal regional currencies as a way to re-establish control over their failing public/private monopoly central banking system of pure fiat.

Here at the Daily Bell staff reports we've been careful to promote competitive currencies and have no issues directly with WIR or numerous other currency systems – so long as they are not promoted by force. Our objection to such systems is that to function properly on the widest scale, they might have to be.

We also think that gold and silver are money historically and that if such money metals were freely promoted, they would overwhelm elitist control and become a great power for freedom. We have written articles regularly in defense of Austrian economics. You can see some recent ones here:

Austrian Business Cycle Analysis Explains the Misery of the World

Now Let Us Celebrate Tally Sticks … or Not

In Praise of Gentle Deflation Against Greenbackers and Other Paper Promoters

There are many troubling aspects to the emergence of the alternative money movement, not least of which is the antagonism to free-market thinking. So many websites springing up and seemingly promoting freedom and alternative currencies while attacking others for fairly similar sentiments …

After Thoughts

We have no doubt that all of the above shall come into focus as time goes on. We hope it is not what it sometimes appears to be.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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