How to start a whole system shift in the political economy

Posted on October 24, 2016 by Deirdre

If we don’t like predatory capitalism and we don’t like socialism, what do we want? This is what Gar Alperovitz of The Next System has asked. Many in the climate emergency movement have also called for ideas for a new economy. While some of the ideas are expanded elsewhere, here is a summary of what we believe is necessary:-

1. Leave the existing currency alone. It is what Bernard Lietaer calls a yang currency and needs to be balanced with a yin currency. So many things are wrong with the system it is quicker and better to start again. But the trick is to find how.

2. Elect a Community Board. Appoint hapu and/or iwi representatives. This board guides the process of decentralisation of energy and many other systems previously centralised and vulnerable to shock. They decide what is important for your area in the way of infrastructure for your local resilience – a functioning water system, a port, a roading system, a local radio station, a micro electricity grid, Local Area Networks for internet. They are responsible for planning and community development.

3. Elect a Currency Board, responsible for designing and issuing the currency and keeping it stable. It will eventually become a community bank. These people must be willing to communicate with and cooperate with all the other neighbouring Currency Boards. You can see how important the elections are! This Committee will create a new natural currency that decays by design. They will decide if it will be digital or notes. They will ensure the notes are secure and decide on the rate of decay of the currency and how much to issue in order to avoid inflation.

4. Elect a Land and Resources Board and appoint hapu and/or iwi representatives with knowledge of local land stories, Treaty settlements, sensitive land that is not back under iwi control. These people work with any existing land trusts and decide on what land to buy to put into the Community Land Trust. They first seek council cooperation to put council owned land into their trust. They also work with any local cooperative to ensure the land they use goes into the CLT. Then they make recommendations to the Monetary Committee for suitable properties to buy up with new money. They also monitor local resources – water, fish, forests, minerals and set rules for sustainable use of the commons.

A Lot of Elections are needed

It seems like a lot of elections, but they are important because you need plenty of elected people to act as checks and balances on the other boards. This is big stuff you are dealing with. Each small board has a range of vital functions we are not used to at this level, and it is critical to avoid corruption.

Decide that your Community Board will function as a self-governing local entity, possibly serving a population of 5000 – 25,000 people. Know that you can both make and enforce your local rules, especially rules relating to your currency and your rental gathering. Resist interference from national government in matters you believe are just local matters. Tell them to go away. You will help them later when your own currency and revenue schemes are scaled up. (See Declaration of Interdependence for rights and responsibilities of local communities)

Put it into action

The next phase is for the Currency Board to spend the new currency into existencein one of four ways:

a. to pay for labour and materials for adapting and maintaining infrastructure – the ones decided by the Community Board. Or you could spend it into existence to pay part of the salary of bank staff. Or a Citizens Dividend for a start? Or all three?

b. To pay part of the salary of staff in the new currency.

c. To distribute a small Citizens Dividend.

d. To buy land for the Community Land Trust.

If you can employ staff, get them to persuade your local businesses to accept the new currency for payment.

The Land and Resources Board will decide which land you want to put into community ownership first. Is it bare land or already built on? Will you insist on compulsory purchases? Is there a local factory or business in your district that has privatised part of your commons? (minerals, intellectual property, water, knowledge, public infrastructure). What powers do you want to purchase land of those who are polluting the biosphere?

5. Employ a valuer to set up a Land Rental Index. Accept only the new currency as payment.

6. Compile and maintain of directory of local citizens, including all children. Each will be eligible to share the rents from the use of the commons.

7. Have your Community Board communicate at the earliest possible juncture with neighbouring governance units. Ask yourself at what stage will you need to cooperate with other boards for roading, sewerage, water supply, transport, stormwater infrastructure. Be sympathetic to your local council when they have rating (local tax) arrears and use it as a bargaining tool, so your citizens can pay their rates in the new currency.

8. Employ participatory budgeting. The decision about whether to spend new revenue on infrastructure, administration or on Citizens Dividends will be done at a public meeting only. Establish the principle of community participation in budgeting right from the start. There will always be a tension between building essential infrastructure and giving out Citizens Dividends. Some get really attached to their dividends. Since Alaska doesn’t have participatory budgeting and people love their dividends so much, Alaska’s system isn’t funding enough infrastructure.

Adapting to Geophysical Reality

Posted on October 23, 2016 by Deirdre

No species survives unless it is good at adapting to its environment. And environments can change very fast. This article addresses the adaptations we must make to a rapidly warming world, to living with a low carbon economy and to major collapse of the global economy.

Getting to a low fossil fuel economy fast
Climate change has been humanity’s wake up call. Energy is at the heart of everything we do. For centuries we have used the energy of the sun in one form or another. It was only when we discovered oil, a form of stored sunlight compacted for millions of years, that economic growth really took off.

How dense is oil? Richard Heinberg explains that to push your car for 30 miles would take 6-8 weeks of hard labour, but you can put a gallon of petrol in your car and get there quickly for a few dollars .

We use fossil fuel energy not just to power our cars and tractors, but power our assembly lines, make our cement, plastic, pharmaceuticals and paints. As the low hanging fruit becomes exhausted, the cost of digging out fossil fuels rises and the unconventional oil, gas and coal is of not such high quality. Despite the financial challenges, oil companies continue to forecast increases in extraction.

When climate scientist Bill McKibben first wrote in 1989 on the coming climate challenge, he didn’t foresee the pace of change. He continues to be astonished at the rapidity of loss of Arctic ice, increasingly devastation cyclones and other extreme weather events. In a talk to the Oberlin College and Conservatory conference in Ohio, After Fossil Fuels: the Next Economy, he said we now have a very limited timeframe.

Founder of the Carbon Tracker, Mark Campanale, reminded listeners that economist Nicholas Stern had estimated that to get to two degrees of warming the world needed to spend $90 trillion in infrastructure for a low carbon economy. Campanale had calculated that there is only a 50% chance of getting there in the time estimated by major governments signing the Paris Agreement using their scenarios. There is so much unburnable carbon in the reserves of oil, gas and coal companies, that even if there was no further digging or mining activity than there is now, we would still overshoot the 2 degrees.

To put this $90 trillion in investment needed in perspective, the world GDP is $70 trillion and the total value of the stock of all the companies in the world is only $60 trillion. Campanale, a sustainable investment analyst, noted that some investors are saying it will all blow over and it is cyclical. So they keep their shares in fossil fuel companies until this happens. All the oil companies and OPEC forecast continual growth of fossil fuel extraction.

Two weeks before this conference Bill McKibben had post an article Recalculating the Climate Math, in which he wrote that scientists now think that 2 degrees is too much; moreover, the amount of fossil fuels in the currently operating plants worldwide would actually bring us above 2 degrees. So the amount of CO2 we can burn has to be reduced from 943 to 800 gigatons. And if we are going to get to 1.5 degrees, a goal set in Paris, we will need to close all the coal mines and some of the gas fields we’re currency operating long before they are exhausted. He finishes by saying ‘And if we don’t get it right, then all of us—along with our 10,000-year-old experiment in human civilization—will fail.’

And as for living with less oil, gas and coal, that is huge too. There are so many challenges, from how to power industrial machinery to how to transition from kerosene as aviation fuel, it hardly bears thinking about. There is no doubt however that we will have to grow our food more locally, to travel less and to have more localised economies. The permaculture movement can teach us how to build houses with less cement. There will be stranded assets like oil tankers and bankruptcies galore in the huge fossil fuel industry, let alone the huge losses on high-risk energy bonds in the fracking industry.

All the more reason why we have to think up the new economic system fast. Innovation to transition to a low carbon economy can only happen if investment is directed there and new companies have no deadweight taxes, only resource taxes.

We also need to adapt to an economy that will collapse.
Actuary Gail Tverberg, who through the years has predicted many changes that have come to pass, says the global economy can’t grow fast because the cheap-to-extract energy is depleting. She describes a situation where growth is slowing, global trade isn’t growing and central bankers can’t solve it even with historically low interest rates. More energy is needed now to extract energy, it takes energy to make and transport goods, and it takes an increasing amount of energy to create a growing amount of goods and services. Less cheap to extract energy produces less productivity growth and this translates into stagnant wages which no longer allow non elite workers to buy big ticket items like cars and houses. So the economy declines further.

She maintains this means commodity prices can’t hold up, so producing them eventually becomes uneconomical. And we are on a downward spiral. ‘This situation could lead to catastrophe because metals, agriculture and energy are all essential to the economy’. The rate of return on investment falls, new debt goes into buying assets and eventually, when commodity prices fall, asset prices fall. The price of agricultural land will fall. This leads to debt defaults and bank failures, affecting banks, insurance companies and pension plans. The lack of new loans will depress demand further. She predicts oil may fall below $20 a barrel.

Most investors and financial advisors are unaware that the price of commodities (in New Zealand it has largely been about the price of whole milk powder) is cyclical so it will turn around. But they haven’t factored in energy.

At the end of this long article in October, 2016 she concludes there is no way out of the problem over the long term. We will have reached our ‘Minsky Moment’.

Adapting to sudden financial collapse will be humanity’s biggest challenge.

Continuing War
While most societies have lived with war, we now have the added factor that there is a scramble for the last remaining fossil fuel reserves. Investigative journalist and international security scholar Nafeez Ahmed has explained the conflict in Syria in those terms, saying that there is competition for the offshore oil and natural gas reserves between the world’s biggest oil companies and that is why they court Assad. When civil war broke out the plans of Shell and oil majors were unexpectedly suspended. When it is resolved they will be able to continue. American firm, Genie Oil and Gas has been granted exploration rights in the Golan Heights. Among Genie’s board members are Rupert Murdoch, Larry Summers, Dick Cheney.

American Shale Oil, a subsidiary of Genie candidly admits on its website: ‘The peaking of world oil production presents the US and the world with an enormous challenge, Aggressive action must be taken to avoid unprecedented economic, social and political costs.’

In addition there are two proposed gas pipelines to get gas for Europe that are on hold. One is from Iran through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to Europe. This was signed by Assad and backed by Russia. The other is from Qatar’s North Field through Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey.

A Russian oil and gas company began oil prospecting operations in September 2015, the same area scoped by French firm CGGVeritas.

John Fullerton on the Regenerative Economy

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Deirdre

Occasionally you strike a book or long article that you really want to pay attention to. For me I have discovered John Fullerton’s white paper called Regenerative Capitalism How Universal Principles and Patterns will Shape our New Economy. It is 120 pages long and very dense, dated April 2015.

I found Fullerton through watching a large part of After Fossil Fuels The New Economy, a filmed seminar from Oberlin College, Ohio held in early October. (Try 1 hour 5 mins into this particular section, as it is long) I was excited because here was someone saying what we have been saying. I knew that people rarely are the sole inventors of new ideas. He wrote we need to design an economy according to nature’s principles. He knows that creativity and regenerative potential happens at the edges, a teaching from permaculture. He even quotes evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris.

He appeared with Juliet Schorr, a sociologist, former economist, who agreed with him yet reminded him that power and conflict must not be omitted and that one must not be attached too strongly to a metaphor.

When I looked at his acknowledgements I got quite excited. Here was a former JP Morgan banker listing Fritjof Capra, Janine Benyus, Hazel Henderson, David Korten, Thomas Berry, Buckminster Fuller, Jane Jacobs, Dana Meadows, EF Schumacher and Gar Alperovitz. Reading the text over the next few days I found he even knew a little of Bernard Lietaer and Elinor Ostrom and his scientific advisor is engineer Sally Goerner a student of flow and energy network sciences. She taught him about the optimum balance between efficiency and resilience. Goerner was a co-author with Bernard Lietaer in their Club of Rome book on Money and Sustainability.

Reading Charles Eisenstein’s book Sacred Economics was punctuated for me with long pauses while I digested one amazing sentence after another. Fullerton had this same effect on me in that he was articulating ideas only half formed in my mind, and doing so with such eloquent language. Then again, because he is qualified in finance and business, I learnt from his perspective. People who have voluntarily opted out of Wall Street to think and read and explore new ideas are very precious to the new economy movement and Fullerton is one of these.

John Fullerton has outlined eight principles for what he calls a Regenerative Economy and has expanded them in his white paper. He says his experiences with regenerative entrepreneurs as well as his exploration of systems theory, biomimicry, ecology and the physics of flow networks has led him to this list. Briefly, an economy must be or must demonstrate:

1. In Right Relationship – realising we are part of an interconnected web of life.
2. Views Wealth Holistically – realising there are multiple forms of capital.
3. Innovative, Adaptive, Responsive. This applies to individuals, businesses, society, governments and is the way for maximum fitness. It means the end of rigid hierarchical systems that control today’s centralised states.
4. Empowered participation. Everyone matters and the health of any human economy is dependent on everyone’s unique contribution to the health of the whole.
5. Honours Community and Place. Diversity and richness are essential to system vitality. Each human community embodies a mosaic of traditions, beliefs and potentialities, each uniquely shaped by long-term pressures of geography, history, culture, environment and changing human needs.
6. Edge Effect Abundance. The most innovation and abundance of life happens at the edges of systems e.g where rivers meet the ocean.
7. Robust Circulatory Flow. “Just as human health depends on robust circulation of oxygen, nutrients etc, so too economic health depends on robust circulatory flows of money, information, waste, resources, goods and services to support exchange, flush toxins, and nourish every participant at every level of our human networks.”
8. Seeks Balance. There is a delicate balance between resilience and efficiency. Small, diverse and flexible will lead to stagnation while big, efficient and focused will lead to collapse. There is a window of vitality half way.

He doesn’t really address tax reform in a big way, or the need to share the rents though he appears to have read Peter Barnes. He approves of progressive taxation, financial transaction tax and wants aggressive inheritance taxes. So there is more thinking to be done there. Like many others he probably conflates land with capital. Yes university teaching has been very successful in getting rid of land as a factor of production. Well done neoclassical economists – your strategy worked brilliantly.

I think he would love to read Silvio Gesell’s book The Natural Economic Order to learn about the design of naturally circulating money. That would set him thinking. And perhaps some of Lietaer’s books, particularly where he describes how Gesell’s ideas were put into practice in Dynastic Egypt, Central Middle Ages and in Great Depression towns in Europe.

Oh, and how he would love to read Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux!

Deirdre Kent

@deirdrekent

Lessons from Singapore’s political economy

Posted on October 17, 2016 by Deirdre

Marina Bay Financial Centre, Singapore

In his excellent TED talk, renowned inequality researcher Richard Wilkinson showed that of all OECD countries, Singapore had the worst inequality, ahead of Portugal, US, New Zealand, UK. Gini coefficients are the standard measure of income inequality. A score of 1 is the worst and 0 is the best. Because it is taken on the average not the median income, extremes of wealth will raise it.

I had always believed that Singapore was a model where there was little poverty and not much inequality. It is commonly cited as one of the more ‘georgist’ places in the world in terms of them shifting burdens on land, socialising its value and untaxing labour and capital.

But there are myths about the “Singaporean miracle”. In the absence of any constraint on the movement of global capital, any billionaire can set up residence and tap into the low tax regime. And they do. High net individuals and multinational corporations hide their wealth there. The tax benefits include a 20% top income tax, and a 17% top company tax. Even New Zealand has a billionaire living there – Richard Chandler.

We have insisted that both the land issue and money issue need to be addressed together, not separately, and Singapore is a clear example of what happens when you do one but not the other. The late Adrian Wrigley of the Systemic Fiscal Reform in Cambridge said, ‘If we just have resource taxes including land tax, where people pay for the privilege of monopolising their part of the commons, but have no monetary reform then money will concentrate with banks. Banks will row the economy between easy money and tight money causing booms and busts. They will put up interest rates for ‘riskier’ loans. They buy patents, radio spectrums, copyrights and trademarks.’ They bribe governments.

Whether Singapore, a country of 5.5 million, has done all this I don’t know, but it is a low tax regime and it certainly featured in the Panama Papers. It has even been labelled as a tax haven. For example, companies like TrustNet, now headquartered in Singapore, has branch offices in 16 other locations. It describes itself as a ‘one-stop shop,’ employing lawyers and accountants who help “high net worth” clients manage their money and business activities. The main product it sells is secrecy. It is easy to set up a company because only one shareholder and one director is needed. There is no need to disclose the beneficial owners of Singapore corporations to the authorities. Hopefully the international crackdown on tax sheltering will do something to change it, but given the nature of the tax regime in most countries, I can’t see much hope. They haven’t yet understood it is better to rely on land as a source of income, as land will not get up and walk away.

Big Australian mining companies have large workforces in Singapore. BHP has more staff there than its Melbourne headquarters. There are about 600 employees and 400 contractors in Singapore. Apart from being a marketing hub, it also has its business information systems based there. Rio Tinto employs more than 300 staff in Singapore. Companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto have all admitted in hearings as part of the Senate inquiry into corporate tax avoidance that they are under audit by the ATO for their use of Singapore ‘marketing’ and ‘service’ hubs, where they route hundreds of millions of dollars of income.

So I wonder about Singapore. Could it be a perfect example of what Adrian warned? While 90% of the land is now government owned, the banks have too much power.

Singapore is not just banking hub, it is shadow banking hub. There are about 125 commercial banks in Singapore, only five of which are local. Although banks lend a lot of money into existence in Singapore and their loans go towards construction of capital, rather than simply bidding up the price of land (as we see in Auckland, for example), that is not all that banks do. They sell derivative contracts over the counter – bets on interest rates or other securities. Derivatives leverage up money creation up to 100 or more times. Trading in derivatives contracts happens round the clock. Singapore is a leading global commodities hub with 14,000 people employed and annual turnover of some US $1 trillion in the commodities sector.

The majority of people who live there find Singapore is an extremely attractive place to live and operate from. It is safe, clean, and green with superb infrastructure. The unemployment rate in Singapore is just 1.9% (June 2016), down from 6% in 1986. Bear in mind though, the definition ‘employed’ includes those employed part time, probably as little as an hour a week.

Unlike New Zealand they don’t have a Universal Superannuation. Many of Singapore’s elderly didn’t save enough while working, but they live longer. Some were born when there was no access to education. What’s more, the Singapore language policy marginalised many of them only able to speak languages other than Mandarin and English. While the cultural norm of caring for the elderly seems to have almost vanished, the government still argues that children should take care of their parents. Many elderly are on the government allowance of $450 a month, reliant on charity for food and health care. Living in tiny apartments as small as 30 square metres, they clean tables at hawker centres, collect cardboard for money, scrub apartment blocks or slog in the hot sun as security guards. Security guards and cleaners are among the worst paid.

In response, there is now a plethora of government assistance, making for growing administrative costs of welfare, when it would have been so much better to have shared their land rents with all their citizens in the first place.

So Singapore can only stop its own rent from being stolen by the global elite; it can’t stop the global elite from setting up shop there and stealing the rent of other places. Local rent-sharing can only raise the local floor. But Singapore doesn’t do enough rent-sharing, hasn’t controlled its banking industry and doesn’t exist in isolation from the global capitalist economy. Hence its inequality.

So maybe we’ve seen only part of the equation. Taking land into public ownership stops private landowners from pocketing land rent, but it doesn’t restore the universal individual right to share the land value. The Singapore government has built great infrastructure and housed almost all its people, but it could easily share the remaining public money with its citizens. The Citizens Dividend enables everyone to collect rent, rather than just landowners. But without democratising the budgeting process, ordinary people are not receiving their fair share.

Singapore has the highest per capita of millionaires of any country. One in six households are millionaire households. The mobility of capital and people across borders means that the borders of the country are constantly being crossed. So it is no good just having one country in the world with land owned by the government while billions of dollars slosh around the globe every hour.

Billionaires can sit in Singapore and draw rent from land in the rest of the world. Aetas Global Markets provides funds for commodities projects. Many international firms are sited in Singapore. Global Capital firms like Knight Frank invest on behalf of what they call Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI) in property round the world. Genesis Global Capital appears to choose cities in the early stage of a property boom in Brazil and Germany. The Strait Times reports in March 2016 that the financial services sector is a key driver of Singapore’s growth.

Henry George defined poverty as the ‘fear of want’, the ‘relentless hell waiting beneath civilized society’. He believed that removing this fear would not only help the poor, but transform our culture and society.

Former Singapore resident Zbigniew Dumienski said, ‘The only group that I would consider as poor are the old people with no children. When they worked they didn’t have to contribute towards any retirement scheme (CPF) and might not have accumulated enough money to enjoy a peaceful retirement. This is why you often see old people selling tissues or cleaning tables in Singapore. They do receive some support from the state though, plus many of them own their apartments. In fact, I’ve met income-poor people who would choose to live in a tent/on the streets so that they can live off renting their apartment to other people.’

The situation of the 870,000 foreign workers (Feb 2016) in Singapore is contentious. Many immigrants like the safety and enjoy the food. While it is good if your employer is fair, it is not so good if you are exploited. There are construction workers from India, Bangladesh, China and Nepal and maids from the Philippines, Myanmar and Indonesia who earn much less than an average Singaporean. Some live in dormitory ghettos provided by the government. Migrant workers are not given basic protections such as a minimum wage, standardised working hours and a right to unionise, so this puts a downward pressure on wages, raising inequality. There are reports of maids being ripped off by recruiters, and sometimes being beaten or raped. Live-in nannies are often on 24/7 standby and earn $5 an hour. If they have their passports stolen by their employers they can’t go home. However many eventually earn enough to take back home and live a life with more choices. With 40% of Singapore’s inhabitants being foreigners by 2013, immigration is increasingly becoming a big political issue.

So despite the hope of eliminating poverty, the ugly side of global capitalism is becoming increasingly apparent.

Climate change do the math

Status

Portrait of Bill McKibben, author and activist. photo ©Nancie Battaglia

No species survives unless it is good at adapting to its environment. And environments can change very fast.

Climate change has been humanity’s wake up call. Energy is at the heart of everything we do. For centuries we have used the energy of the sun in one form or another. It was only when oil was discovered, a form of stored sunlight energy compacted for millions of years, economic growth really took off.

We use fossil fuel energy not just to power our cars and tractors, but power our assembly lines, make our cement, plastic, pharmaceuticals and paints. As the low hanging fruit becomes exhausted, the cost of digging out fossil fuels rises and the unconventional oil, gas and coal is of not such high quality. Despite massive financial challenges, oil companies continue to forecast increases in extraction.

Two weeks before this particular conference Bill McKibben had posted an article Recalculating the Climate Math, in which he wrote that scientists now think that 2 degrees is too much warming. Moreover burning the fossil fuels in the currently operating plants worldwide would actually bring us above 2 degrees. So the amount we can burn has to be reduced from 943 to 800 gigatons of CO2. And if we are going to get to 1.5 degrees, a goal set in Paris, we will need to close all the coal mines and some of the gas fields we’re currency operating long before they are exhausted. He finishes by saying ‘And if we don’t get it right, then all of us—along with our 10,000-year-old experiment in human civilization—will fail.’

The conference also had wonderful contributions from those involved with the divestment movement.

I have watched a considerable amount of this conference on youtube. While it is great as far as it goes, it would be even greater if this movement was linked to the very exciting currency design movement and the movement to reform the tax system so that taxes come from largely from ground rents. Imagine if they knew that dual currencies can lead to innovation and prosperity if the domestic currency is designed to decay naturally. Yes imagine them knowing that the design of the currency actually affects whether you think long term or short term. Imagine them realising that it is critical to neutralise those who oppose carbon taxes because they fear job losses and there is finally a way of getting a basic income through rent sharing and this gives them safety from redundancy. Imagine if they asked and really understood what caused the economic growth imperative and how to fix this. Imagine if they realised the political impossibility of centralised solutions to many issues. But insofar as it goes, it has contributed heaps. And it is very exciting that the critical topic is being discussed – how to design the next economy. This is what the New Economics Movement has been doing now for a considerable time.

Deirdre Kent
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Monthly Archives: October 2016