jueves, 31 de mayo de 2012

From Gangs to Gardens: How Community Agriculture Transformed Quesada Avenue by Katherine Gustafson — YES! Magazine

€urAustérité vue par le cartooniste Mark Fiore

Puisqu'il apparait de plus en plus clairement qu'engendrer la panique sur notre continent fait partie du plan ... voici un début de remède...

lunes, 28 de mayo de 2012

Et en parlant d'évasion fiscale....

Evasion fiscale : le livre qui accuse par Challenges

Dette Publique, Evasion Fiscale et Taxes et en Europe : des chiffres à vomir..

Comment peut on accuser les retraités et les chômeurs de ‘profiter du système’ et prétendre encore ignorer que nos fameuses dettes publiques sont, en premier lieu, la conséquence de réductions massives des taxes obtenues depuis plusieurs décennies par les plus riches et les multinationales. Alors que les même reviennent ensuite prêter les même sommes, aux même états à intérêts exorbitants.. gonflant encore davantage la dette publique ..

.. ou les ‘investir’ dans les caisses noires des partis politiques pour obtenir le camouflage généralisé par lequel d’autres sommes viennent à s’échapper vers les paradis fiscaux, pour être ‘réinvesties’ dans les fonds spéculatifs, d’ou ils reviennent pour un nouveau tour de gonflage de dette publique et de corruption politique ..

Et à ce sujet, Eurostat vient de publier son rapport annuel sur les Taxes en Europe, qui contient ce graphique à vomir sur les taxes des multinationales.

Voici le commentaire du bloggeur Wolf Richer sur son site ‘testoterone Pit’

[] what the heck happened in Europe? Eurostat has just published Taxation Trends in the European Union, and it leaves reasonable people gasping. The good news first—or the bad news, depending on the point of view....There has been a phenomenal race to the bottom in corporate income taxes across the 27-member European Union, as countries compete to attract businesses. While the debt crisis has slowed this trend, it has not stopped it.

Dans son rapport a l’Alliance Progressiste Des Socialistes & Démocrates au Parlement européen, Richard Murphy (Directeur, Tax Research UK) estime à 860 milliards d’euros par an le volume des pertes de revenus que représente l’évasion fiscale pour les états européens - plus que la totalité des budgets des soins de santé de l'UE. Il estime aussi que l’arrêt de cette évasion fiscale permettrait d’effacer la totalité des déficits publiques de l’UE en seulement 8,8 années.

Jeudi dernier, au Quebec

jueves, 24 de mayo de 2012

Stories about 2050 and how to go there

LOCALISATION OF ECONOMY

By 2050 the tendency to globalization has turned into a tendency to localization. This will have the principle of subsidiarity at its heart. In political terms, subsidiarity is widely accepted as meaning that everything is best decided and implemented closest to the people who will be affected. In economical terms it means that by 2050 the appropriate size for industries, resilience and permeability towards have reversed the economies of scale to make local much more efficient.

Conditions/drivers

By 2050 petrol has become extremely scarce and can only be used in special cases (Space Rockets, manufacturing of some materials); transport of heavy goods is very expensive. Sea transport is done by kite-vessels.
By 2050 ITER is still not operational for mass production, electricity is also very expensive, except electricity produced by local renewables or micro-renewables; long distance earth transport of heavy goods is very expensive even for Electric Vehicles (trains).
Some dramatic climate change disasters (Venice under the waters?) have finally made mandatory a tax on all products that includes all life-cycle costs, including waste and recycling. Recycling cannot be done in the third world.
Political demand for more equality pushes towards gains in local control.

What remains global

some industrial productions (chips, pharmaceutics, large solar air-globes) remain global or continental (EV motor-wheels, large kite sea transport vessels, electronic instrumentation)
information remains global: knowledge building, open science, digital libraries, engineering, design, social networking. Hyper-presence has reduced the need to travel.

Localizations

A.- Production

By 2050, minirobots, ultra-automation, 3D printing, self-growing materials make many local industries very efficient. DO IT YOURSELF has now a 30% of all production (your clothes, your furniture, your tableware, your configured Electric Vehicle)
By 2050, most population has returned from big Macro-cities to medium size agro-urban conglomerates. Vertical Automated Farming controlled by bio-ICT provide local food; taking also care of recycling of water.

B.- Distribution

By 2050, intermediaries about to disappear. Robotized EV of all sizes take the teleshopping home.

C.- Finances

By 2050, all money has become crypto money. Global crypto money is only used for mayor investments. All M1 money is regional, local and even by sector (Energy, Agriculture, etc). Payments done through the phone. Most loans are local, associated to local interests, and raised as P2P cloud-funding.

D.- Democracy

By 2050, most of the GDP is local, so that Gross Domestic Wealth discussions engage now everybody. eDemocracy has multiplied citizens participation in policy to 10% of their time; eDemocracy and Social Networking have become undistinguishable.

THE GREAT TRANSITION

The means for the Great Transition (the way the New Economics Foundation names it) will, at the end, be political. A party o parliamentary coalition will need to win elections at each country to make it become law with full democratic legitimacy.
In most countries, the Great Transition will require a constitutional change. A referendum will need to be formulated and won.

It will take some time for the current "Indignados", or OWS, or similar movements, to give birth for such a structured party or parliamentary representation and fuel it until parliamentarian victory.

The risk before

Desperation

Turns into fascism and xenophobia

and easily into war

COMMUNITY CURRENCIES

The monetary system after the Great Transition is a relatively uninteresting, almost technical, discussion. We have already very solid proposals for alternatives to the Fractional Reserve Banking system.

http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/towards-a-21st-century-banking-and-monetary-system

http://www.transaction.net/money/book/

http://beyondmoney.net/

http://www.monetary.org/

The only pending discussion is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) approach of the meta information of the electronic money, so that all wallets can manage all electronic currencies. Its a question of interoperability. Some proposals already exist, like the Ricardian contract and the INTERNET-DRAFT Ko Fujimura XML Voucher: Generic Voucher Language.

The relevant discussion is about the Community Currencies and the Monetary System model we need to pump solidarity to the poor before the transition.

More about it at

https://sites.google.com/site/desperadostheory/

Protesting the ECB - German Police March with protesters

From Occupy Frankfurt

lunes, 21 de mayo de 2012

Complementary Currency Software

The Foundation for P2P Alternatives

We study the impact of Peer to Peer technology and thought on society.
http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Foundation_for_P2P_Alternatives
Complementary Currency Software
http://p2pfoundation.net/Complementary_Currency_Software
Free Open Source Software

Cyclos

(Read more)

links: http://project.cyclos.org/ ; http://sourceforge.net/projects/cyclos/
for use in: complementary currency systems like LETS, Barter, Time bank, C3 (consumer commerce circuit) and micro finance systems like VLC (combination of micro finance with local currency). Cyclos is a transactional (on-line banking) system with several community functionalities and extended modules.
license : GPL (open source) license
used by : cyclos is used all over the world, some examples are http://www.circuitocompras.com.br, http://www.regiogeld.de or http://www.puntotransacciones.com (a more complete list can be found here).

Open Transactions

links: https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki ; https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions
Description: "It’s a solid, easy-to-use, FINANCIAL CRYPTO and DIGITAL CASH LIBRARY. Including an operational API, SERVER and CLIENT. Transaction processor featuring Untraceable Digital Cash, Anonymous Numbered Accounts, Triple-Signed Receipts, Basket Currencies, and Signed XML Contracts. Also supports cheques, invoices, payment plans, markets with trades, and other instruments... it's like PGP for Money.... Uses OpenSSL and Lucre blinded tokens. ---Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Android, Windows---Native APIs for Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, C, C++, Objective-C, C#, Tcl, and LISP"
license : GNU Affero General Public (open source) License

Bitcoin

link : http://www.bitcoin.org/ https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin
Description : "Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer digital currency. Peer-to-peer (P2P) means that there is no central authority to issue new money or keep track of transactions. Instead, these tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of the network."
used by : a large number of sites have started to accept Bitcoin and there is also a market for different Bitcoin demoninations
license : open source

Ripple

(Read more)

links: http://code.ripplepay.com/ ; http://ripple.sourceforge.net/ ; http://sourceforge.net/projects/ripple ; http://ripplep2p.com/wiki/
Description : a money system based on 'friendly obligations'.
license : The software that runs ripplepay.com is available under the GPL open-source license.
used by:
- Ripple Pay (https://ripplepay.com/) the original implementation by Ryan Fugger (see user's guide)
- Shire Hours - Ripplepay clone operated by John Bilyeu
- Multiswap
see also: Ripple Implementations
- the Circular Multilateral Barter code that powers Evgeni Pandurski's Multiswap site
- Rivulet John Paul Lewicke's Ripple server and AJAX front-end
- Rain Droplet - Open decentralized community credit service operated by Daniel Holt, based on Ripplepay
- Ripplexchange - Daniel Holt's Ripple marketplace
- Ripple Distributed Protocol - Designs for a system of distributed independent Ripple servers
- Ripplebase - Ryan Fugger's partially complete multi-client Ripple transaction server (see also documentation)

Open Coin

(Read more)

link: https://opencoin.org/
Description : "The opencoin project implements "digital cash". The system gives minting software, wallet software and everything that is necessary to have a system for anonymous electronic transactions. It can be used for vouchers, online payments, complementary currencies etc. opencoin defines standards and provides an implementation around the blind-signature system as invented by David Chaum, known as electronic cash / digicash.
license : The software and specs are opensource under a GPL License.

OsCurrency

(Read more)

link : http://www.opensourcecurrency.org/2008/11/oscurrency-demo-site-and-github.html
Description : "OSCurrency is complementary currency system derived from Insoshi, a Ruby on Rails open source social network project"
built over: http://portal.insoshi.com/
license: GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3
used by:
documentation: http://wiki.github.com/austintimeexchange/oscurrency

Drupal Mutual Credit Project

link : http://drupal.org/project/mutual_credit
built with : Drupal
Description : "An all-embracing and flexible package which includes a mutual credit engine, transaction forms and displays, including several views and blocks. It can be used as a digital back end for paper money projects, or to run an entire LETS or Timebank. With a little tweaking, it can manage currencies conforming to a wide range of designs."
used by :
- http://communityforge.net/ offer a hosted version "For community groups and social clubs with no IT budget, the basic package allows hundreds of users, full control over pages and menu items. Unlimited exchanges, membership expiry, offline member support. Export members and exchange history to csv format. Other community building features include calendar, image gallery, and news feed. "
- apparently Timebanks USA are using it for development of "Community Weaver II" (see hosted offering of existing version here)
- Community Exchange System working on migrating to it
- as of Mar 2nd 2011 a total of 57 sites currently report using this module
license :

Open Bank Project

link : http://www.openbankproject.com/
"We aim to create a RESTful API so that banks and their customers can securely and cost effectively adopt Web 2.0, Open Source and 3rd party tools, services and strategies. We want to promote greater openness to financial data."
license :

Time Bank

links : http://wadobo.com/trac/timebank/ (wiki and code) http://timebank.wadobo.com/ (demo)
Description : "Time Bank is a web service for managing a time bank, in which users offer their time doing service in exchange for services provided by others users for the same amount of time."
used by
- Ecolocal is an association in Seville, Spain
- R-ciclo is an association in Granada, Spain
- SUGUS GNU/Linux association - Linux user group of Seville University.
- Gelves is a an association in Gelves, Seville, Spain
license :

Mifos - Microfinance Open Source

link : http://sourceforge.net/projects/mifos/ http://mifos.org/
Description : "Mifos is an MIS purpose-built for the microfinance industry. It provides MFIs the key functionality to better serve the poor: client management, loans & savings portfolio tracking, reporting, & social performance measurement. mifos.org has more info"
used by :
- With 21 existing customers with another 19 in the pipeline (as of Mar 2nd 2011) Mifos will soon be servicing a total of over a million clients
license : Apache License V2.0

MyBanco - Open Source Core Banking

link : http://www.mybanco.org/
Description : "So you are paying thousands of dollars to do your Core Banking? Well, don't. MyBanco let's you do your core banking without paying one cent. Save on your bank's TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) by reducing the money you pay to companies offering proprietory systems, and start saving money, by using free and open source software"
license : GNU Affero General Public License

Local Exchange

link : http://sourceforge.net/projects/local-exchange/ Local Exchange UK ver 1.01
Description : "Local Exchange is a web-based local currency system. Local currency systems, such as LETS or Time Dollars, are designed to foster goods and service exchange on a community level"
used by :
- Fourth Corner Exchange is the original implementation
- www.Local Exchange.org.uk lists 18 (as of March 2nd 2011) LETS groups using the updated UK version
license : GNU General Public License (GPL)

Cclite

link : http://www.hughbarnard.org/content/alternative-currency-software http://sourceforge.net/projects/cclite/ http://groups.google.co.uk/group/cclite?hl=en
Description : "Cclite is a Perl package for local exchange trading systems (LETS), banking and other alternative money systems. Multi-registry, multi-currency, web services based (SOAP) and REST transactions and templated to give multi-lingual capabilitie" "Community currency accounting for local exchange trading systems (LETS)and other alternative money systems. Multi-registry (group), multi-currency, with inter-registry transactions using web services (SOAP), templated to give multi-lingual capablitie"
license : GNU General Public License (GPL)

PyLETS

link : http://copsewood.net/py_lets_cgi/index.html
Description : "PyLETS CGI is a simple, lightweight on-line mono-LETS accounting web application written in Python"
license : GNU Public License Version 3
see also : Multi Registry System (MRS) Links and Resources

Relevant Mailing Lists

Agile Banking Google Group "Lets change the world of banking and finance. This group is not for interesting theory, but about practical steps we can take to reinvent banking"
OSCurrency Google Group "OSCurrency is complementary currency system derived from Insoshi, a Ruby on Rails open source social network project"
Ripple Users Google Group "Discussions about the Ripple decentralized monetary system project at http://ripple-project.org" (lots of related discussion happens on the list too)
ECON-LETS "econ-lets is intended for discussion of the economic, social and telematics issues surrounding the development of LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems)"

Desobeissance Civile

PROTESTS around the world 2011- 2012

The song is a call to protests by Keny Arkana

....whose bio tells you her experience is entirely relevant to that song which perfectly encapsulate the feelings of those protests -

From wikipedia: Keny Arkana (born 1982 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France) is a French rap artist. She is active in the alter-globalization movement with "La Rage Du Peuple", a music collective created in 2004 in the neighborhood of Noailles in Marseilles.

97% Owned - Monetary reform

To join the campaign to democratise money see http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/97percent

When money drives almost all activity on the planet, it's essential that we understand it. Yet simple questions often get overlooked - questions like: where does money come from? Who creates it? Who decides how it gets used? And what does that mean for the millions of ordinary people who suffer when money and finance breaks down?

97% Owned is a new documentary that reveals how money is at the root of our current social and economic crisis. Featuring frank interviews and commentary from economists, campaigners and former bankers, it exposes the privatised, debt-based monetary system that gives banks the power to create money, shape the economy, cause crises and push house prices out of reach. Fact-based and clearly explained, in just 60 minutes it shows how the power to create money is the piece of the puzzle that economists were missing when they failed to predict the crisis.

Produced by Queuepolitely and featuring Ben Dyson of Positive Money, Josh Ryan-Collins of The New Economics Foundation, Ann Pettifor, the "HBOS Whistleblower" Paul Moore, Simon Dixon of Bank to the Future and Nick Dearden from the Jubliee Debt Campaign, this is the first documentary to tackle this issue from a UK-perspective, and can be watched online now.