SCEC stands for Solidarietà che Cammina - Solidarity that walks. It is a complementary currency that is designed to start its life circulating in common with the official currency, the Euro.

It is adapted to the Italian situation, where alternative currencies are looked upon as competition to the official one. So SCEC defines itself as a complementary currency. It circulates together with the official currency.

SCEC is in the form of a discount chit denominated in Euro equivalents (in denominations of 0.50 Euro, 1, 2, 5, 10 and 50 Euro). It is distributed for free and acquires value only when used. Businesses and professionals agree to give a discount to buyers who pay (in part) with SCEC, usually around 20 %, but ranging mostly between 10 and 30 %.

A full description of the project in English - a bit lengthy but certainly of interest - is available here:

http://www.arcipelagoscec.org/doc/ArchipelagoSCECproject1.pdf

SCEC is putting first emphasis on actually supporting local production and commerce over imports from far away and world wide commerce by multinationals. The currency makes local exchanges more convenient for people who use the system, as they get a break by virtue of getting substantial discounts on the normal price.

The SCEC, once issued, stay in circulation and can be spent at any business or professional that adheres to the program and states how much discount they are willing to give. In this way, SCEC is tax neutral - no tax is to be paid on it as it is merely a discount.

Users of course, who are not subject to value added tax (VAT) when buying/selling second hand goods or exchanging favors and transactions in the social area can use SCEC to replace the official Euro currency in these direct exchanges.

SCEC is a discount as far as the government is concerned, but it is a fledgling alternative currency as far as the users are concerned.

It favors local commerce and as it gets more and more accepted, future uses might even include the payment of rates or (local) taxes.

An electronic system to run side by side with the currently available paper currency is in the planning stage. This would work like any bank account. You can make transfers to other users of the system, and you can convert paper into electronic or electronic into paper, if so desired.

Organizationally, SCEC is organized as a non profit "archipelago of several islands" which are the regional associations that are independent of each other, but agree to use the same kind of currency and to exchange information on who are the member businesses and professionals who accept SCEC as part payment for their goods or services.

SCEC are issued periodically and equally to all participants in the system, in exchange for a voluntary contribution intended to defray the costs of printing and administration.

Loans in SCEC to participating businesses are possible. They are given as an advance on future distribution of the currency. Once someone has received a loan they will not receive any future SCEC distributed to others, until they are "caught up" and are once again eligible to receive the normal distributions. Anyone entering the system gets 100 SCEC to start trading. To get more, they have to either wait for another periodic distribution or have to start giving some kind of service for which they accept SCEC in payment.

Continue reading "SCEC - Solidarity and Local Complementary Currency in Italy" »

Posted by Sepp at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The monetary system we know has run into serious trouble and it is very unlikely that more of the same policies that got us into the current bind will be sufficient to get us out of it again. Alternatives to the debt based system of bank-created-money have been discussed for decades, but reforms were put off because for certain people at the top of the pyramid, the system is extremely profitable. With the collapse of major banks and the need for taxpayers to step in to save the day, the calls for reform are getting louder and more articulated.

Umair Haque, in a recent article titled "Four Ways to Build a Better Economy" alludes to monetary reform as one of the changes we need to make to overcome the current crisis:

The Currency Fix. "The invisible hand doesn't mean that profiteers get to reach into your pocket with every trade. Yet, that's the economy we've built: one where you bear a collective responsibility for the decisions of bankers, beancounters, and other borrowers. Why? Because you have to invest, consume, and earn in a national currency, which can whipsaw up, down, or sideways, leaving you and your savings at the mercy of the state and the crony capitalists that control it.

It's time for this con game to end. Tomorrow's radical innovators will reconceive currency itself: they will design next-generation currencies that are globally accessible, ubiquitously liquid, and that are inherently, permanently hedged and insured -- so instead of getting inflated, deflated, disinflated, and eviscerated, currencies can do what, well, they were meant to do: serve as a durable store of authentic value."

I would add that an even more important function of currency than "durable store of authentic value" is to be an "abundantly available means of exchange and investment". Those two functions, mediating the exchange of goods and permitting investment for productive activities are perhaps the most immediately important functions of any monetary system and they should be programmed into a new currency right from the start.

A report by Joseph Huber and James Robertson of the New Economics Foundation lays out and discusses a direction of currency reform, to bring our monetary system into alignment with today's new realities:

The rules of the money system have shifted. The majority of money that now changes hands does so electronically. As a result, far more than ever before, new money is not issued by the state but by banks. Ninety seven pounds in every one hundred circulating in the economy will now have been issued by banks (in the form of sight deposits, printed into customers' accounts as interest-bearing debts). Only three pounds are cash, issued by the state (in the form of banknotes and coins, issued at no interest). The cost to the state of issuing new money is only the cost of producing banknotes and coins. The cost to the banks of issuing new money is virtually zero. The state receives public revenues from issuing cash, but banks make private profits. The benefits of the money system are therefore being captured by the financial services industry rather than shared democratically.

Continue reading "Seigniorage Reform: How to make a new monetary system" »

Posted by Sepp at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

As our dollar and debt based economy teeters on the brink of serious trouble - and as our lives teeter with the economy - it seems of great importance to at least understand why the economy has got into such a bind and how we could possibly get out of this. We won't have any change here unless we ourselves understand what's happening. Relying on the economic experts is what got us in trouble in the first place. So here comes an important book that brings some light to the matter.

Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System -- The Sleight of Hand That Has Trapped Us in Debt and How We Can Break Free

Find the book on Amazon

Our money system is not what we have been led to believe. The creation of money has been "privatized," or taken over by a private money cartel. Except for coins, all of our money is now created as loans advanced by private banking institutions -- including the private Federal Reserve. Banks create the principal but not the interest to service their loans. To find the interest, new loans must continually be taken out, expanding the money supply, inflating prices -- and robbing you of the value of your money. Web of Debt unravels the deception and presents a crystal clear picture of the financial abyss towards which we are heading. Then it explores a workable alternative, one that was tested in colonial America and is grounded in the best of American economic thought, including the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

About the Author
Ellen Brown, J.D., developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust." She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back.

Ellen Brown has applied her training as a litigating attorney, researcher and writer to the monetary field, unearthing facts that even the majority of banking and financial experts ignore: ranging from the privatization of money creation, to the Plunge Protection Team, to the Federal Reserve's "Helicopter Money." Read it; you'll get information you need in order to understand what is going on in our financial markets today. - Bernard Lietaer, former European central banker, author of "The Future of Money" and "Of Human Wealth"

Continue reading "Web of Debt: The Truth About Our Money System" »

Posted by Sepp at 4:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The story of how humans came to live in peace and plenty is a developing conversation. The initiator is David Braden, who proposes that we network, but with an additional dimension. Instead of only interacting on a flat, person-to-person basis, Braden says that we must also consider the larger system and our environment in what we do, and he calls it 3D Networking. You can get a good idea from his website 3DN Introduction, which explains three dimensional networking in its bite sized, linked pages.

David Braden, initiator of 3D Networking

One particularly interesting proposal is what Braden calls the Self-help Corporation. Today's economy does not have any place for people that aren't directly involved in making more and more profit for the corporate players. At first, these were only the people who did not have the right skills, but more and more people are being laid off because the corporation that employed them is cutting costs. It is nothing for a huge corporation to buy its competition and then start "slimming down", laying off thousands of people who thought they had secured stable employment. Thus, the ranks of those who don't fit keep swelling.

Braden's self-help corporation (this link is to an abbreviated description) is a way of balancing the needs of these individuals against the focus on profit which is a characteristic of the corporations and which does not allow giving someone a job simply because they need to make money to live.

"The self-help corporation is a simple, practical and economical way to alleviate the resulting poverty. It does not require public consensus, expensive government programs or massive charitable fundraising. One can be started now, by anyone, anywhere in the world.

Poor people are poor because they do not have skills that can be marketed in the "market economy" or their labor is valued by the market economy at a level that does not provide them adequate resources for a decent standard of living. They are not, however, without skills and resources. In particular, they possess the skills and available labor to produce basic necessities."

The question is whether such an idea has real transformative potential. Will people actually come together in solidarity and contribute their money or their skills to make it possible for a whole group to take care of basic necessities in a way that's much more economical than today's 'everyone for themselves' way of doing it.

The vision is growing and it's becoming more focused. A part of this process is documented in a discussion around The Story of How Humans Came to Live in Peace and Plenty on the "open money" Ning group.

Continue reading "The Story of How Humans Came to Live in Peace and Plenty" »

Posted by Sepp at 5:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

One of the alternatives to our current economic system, which is based on money created by banks as a debt and heavily laden with a cost called interest, is what has been termed the gift economy. Few would disagree that life could be much better if everything - or at least a good part of what we need for our daily survival - were freely available just for the taking.

Silver 20-SIMEC coins issued by Italian law professor Giacinto Auriti in a monetary experiment

But alas - the current economic reality is just the opposite - scarcity rules. Everything has a price, and the more scarce something is, the higher the price. To obtain anything we need to pay that price - in other words exchange something of ours for what we wish to receive.

At times - actually I would argue more often than not - scarcity is brought about artificially to manipulate the price and therefore the "exchange value" of goods. Making a profit and paying the piper requires it.

Oil probably is sa good an example as any. Far from there being a physical shortage of oil, the price for this black gold has been successfully manipulated to raise from 10 dollars a barrel only years ago to over a hundred dollars now. The corporations that exploit our dependence on oil for energy are doing the manipulating.

But we were talking about giving.

Nature gives to us abundantly, and we have no problem accepting what is offered. We do have some problems with stewardship, with giving of ourselves to Nature. Traditional cultures included taking care of the land and other creatures. They also practiced giving as a routine economic activity. How is it that we have turned away from giving as a delightful and satisfying pastime? Genevieve Vaughan, author of For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange analyzes the reasons from a feminist and largely psychosocial perspective in her article Introduction to the Gift Economy.

She sees giving as a distinctly feminine activity, and she may be right that women are culturally more apt to give, to nurture, than men. Our culture of male domination over the female, which creates a view of the sexes as opposed to and even in conflict with each other, seems to be at the bottom of this. This patriarchal bent of society, very much stressed in the Jewish and Christian tradition, seems to have made us men less inclined to consider nurturing or giving.

So what can we do to bring more balance, short of revolutionizing society and turning to matriarchy, which seems to have its own problems? Can we, in an economy that relies on scarcity and exchange as fundamental to its functioning, make a difference at all? Can we nudge the world towards more economic justice by what we ourselves are able to do?

I believe we can...

Continue reading "The Gift Economy - Receiving stimulates giving" »

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