Last week the New Labour MP Alistair Campbell wrote an article that appeared in the national press making the case for public funding of political parties. He made it well and there is a case to answer. Behind the scenes the New Labour SD Alistair Campbell was orchestrating a clever PR campaign that Max Clifford would have been proud of to demonise the private funding of political parties by business, unions and party supporters. SP stands for Spin Doctor.

This is the first of two weblogs about parallel currencies…followed by a discussion of energy currencies. These were first suggested by Buckminster Fuller in connection with his One World Island Global Electricity Grid but have taken on new life in recent years as the Global Commons Institute in London has seen the possibility of using Special Emission Rights (SERs) and Domestic Tradable Quotas (DTQs) to support their Contraction & Convergence agenda.

This primer on parallel currencies is based on The Ecology of Money...a Schumacher Briefing by Richard Douthwaite. The above diagram sums up his ideas. I will return to it tomorrow.

EM1 - people with earnings in a Wirtschaftsring-type system exchange them for the national exchange currency.
EM2 - members of a Local Exchange Trading System exchange LETS units for the national exchange currency.
EM3 - ensures that flows of money from imports and exports balance each other.
EM4 - allows people with exchange money to swap it for store-of-value savings money.
EM5 - balances capital flows in the store-of-value currency into and out of the country.
EM6 - composite of all the EM3-type exchanges operated by the rest of the world.
EM7 - balances the flow of money into and out of savings for the rest of the world.

The current Debt-Usury Financial System is seriously flawed. But it does what it was originally designed to do…it maldistributes money and finances wars. As a result those who benefit from the system have ensured that a network of international central banks and their handmaidens the commercial banks have taken over the world of money.

Double-entry bank book-keeping and the King and Country money system misruling the world started by ruling the waves when some old ideas, re-emerging in Amsterdam in the mid-17th century, were refined by Huguenot bankers into a coherent system. The Houblon Brothers brought the ideas to the Dutch and English Courts and in 1694 William of Orange incorporated them into English Law by giving a monopoly to the Bank of England Corporation.