Events are moving ever faster, toward the next world war or the total collapse of the World's 'economies' – or, at last, the spread of public understanding of at least the basic facts about modern money-and-debt creation, and its fundamental role in the development of the multitude of threats to the future, and present worldwide problems, to the point that the demand for reform becomes irresistible. The internet is invaluable for this, as the corporate media will not assist!
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) being debated in the US Congress as I write seriously threaten the freedom of the Internet worldwide, and appear to have almost full support of both houses, but the massive outcry outside these houses gives hope that they will be defeated, or vetoed by Obama. By the time you receive this, the outcome will be known – hopefully, this further move toward the fascist state in the US will have been roundly defeated.
Positive Money starts its first mailing of the New Year to its supporters with:
"Over the next few weeks we'll be releasing videos from our October conference, starting with this 20 minute extract from Ben Dyson's talk. This is the shortest and most succinct exposition of the problems with our current monetary system that we know of, so please spread it far and wide. For friends and family who may not have been willing to sit through our longer videos on money, 20 minutes should be just about tolerable!"
Can I add my plea to its one, to pass on the link to all you think may be prepared to watch it?
The ghost of Kropotkin would point to the existence of a thriving Australian car industry (an American subsidiary, admittedly) or to the Indian car industry (based on obsolescent British machine tools and die castings, but bringing the inestimable advantage of locally available spares), to illustrate his prediction of production for a local market. He might, with more relevance, point to the fact that the output of the car industry depends upon artificial stimulation of demand and on artificial obsolescence. Doubling the useful life of a vehicle would ruin the industry because it would cancel out the assumed advantages of widening the potential market. Henry Ford nearly bankrupted his firm by his insistence on continuing production of his Model T which `any hick up a dirt road could keep running'.
The motor industry, Britain's largest earner of foreign exchange through the export of manufactured goods, is the archetypical example of an industry depending on huge markets for the economies of scale. It is also a pre-eminent example of the kind of industry which it is difficult to imagine surviving into the twenty-first century :
Its demands on non-renewable resources are fantastic; vast quantities of energy and of water are absorbed in its manufacture; provision for it, in roads, in fossil fuels and human lives, is exorbitant; it is a major polluter. Sir Herbert Manzoni, the late City Engineer of Birmingham (in which capacity he carved up that city to keep the traffic flowing), remarked that 'it is probably the most wasteful and uneconomic contrivance which has yet appeared among our personal possessions. The average passenger-load of motor cars in our streets is certainly less than two persons, and in terms of transportable load some 400 cubic feet of vehicle weighing over 1 ton is used to convey 4 cubic feet of humanity weighing about 2 hundredweight, the ratio being about 10 to 1 in weight and 100 to 1 in bulk. The economic implication of this situation is ridiculous and I cannot believe it to be permanent.'° Kropotkin, who defined economics as `a science devoted to the study of the needs of men and of the means of satisfying them with the least possible waste of energy', would have been dumbfounded by the profligate waste of resources in our mass-market industries. His only question (and ours) would be : 'How long can it last?'