Activists seek to promote resiliency with local currencies

Presenter: In October 1840, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: ‘We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a plan for a new community in his waistcoat pocket.’

Fast forward to 2025, and the plan in the waistcoat pocket often involves a new currency. Artist, tech entrepreneur, political systems thinker, Daví:

[00:00:24] Daví: Something we’re setting up is a digital currency. And essentially it can be transferred into any other version of currency as we develop the strength of the currency itself.

[00:00:36] But either way, in our currency, anybody who’s working with any business that we’re working on is going to be receiving an equal salary and that’s kind of the ideal that we offer people. And then the energy and the currency and the funding that we get along the way helps inform whether that currency will be able to transfer into any other currency.

[00:00:57] Presenter: Longtime Eugene peace activist Todd Boyle:

[00:01:00] Todd Boyle: You know, there’s been a lot of books written about this and the most promising model has been promoted by Tom Greco: A clearing system where the balances, first of all, the balances that people accumulate in their accounts from their buying and selling, there has to be a system similar to a bank where those can be cleared and settled.

[00:01:20] And his suggestion for many years has been that establishing a local currency, the best way to do this is to have a large sponsor who backs the currency with some sort of a commodity.

[00:01:32] And in Seattle, it was going to be a large regional baker. and they were going to say, you know, 10 Seattle Dollars will get you a loaf of bread from our bakery. And that’s something that is going to stand.

[00:01:43] And the way it was profitable for them was that they were going to pay their staff with the Seattle Dollars. They’re giving two-thirds dollar, you know, money, and one-third Seattle Dollars. Then they would go out in the community and buy and sell things, including the bakery from the bread.

[00:02:00] So then other businesses would chime in and they would participate with these new Seattle Dollars.

[00:02:06] But the best scenario is when a local government unit issues a alternative currency and starts to pay, let’s say, pay 10% of the salaries of the employees of the city of Eugene are going to get paid in Eugene Dollars, whether they like it or not. And they can use those to pay their city taxes. And so it’s no skin off their nose and no skin off anybody’s nose, doesn’t matter if you’re left-wing, right-wing.

[00:02:32] And so then there would emerge an exchange economy where people say, ‘You know, I don’t need these, these Eugene Dollars. I’ll just sell them over here on eBay or an exchange place where you could cash them in and it wouldn’t bother anybody.

[00:02:44] But it wouldn’t take very long before there was a huge quantity of these Eugene Dollars floating around and then people can buy and sell in Eugene Dollars and they’re not using the U.S. dollar anymore and they’re not subject to the inflation. We’re constantly being taxed by the inflation. And that doesn’t happen if you have a controlled fixed currency. So I agree with Tom Greco.

[00:03:06] Presenter: Author Thomas Greco Jr.:

[00:03:08] Thomas Greco Jr.: I think it’s become clear that we’re facing a multidimensional megacrisis. We have climate change, the end of cheap oil. We have resource depletion, pollution of land, air, and water. We’ve got the financial disintegration, banks failing, businesses going bankrupt, unemployment. And we have general institutional failure. Our schools fail to educate. Our health care system fails to deliver health. Our food system is increasingly suspect and unsafe. So the question is: How is this all going to play out?

[00:03:45] We can continue the current mode of operation with international competition for the world’s remaining resources and affluence for a few and serfdom for the many. or we can shift over to cooperative sharing and provide the basic necessities for everyone and a better life in our communities and around the world. 

[00:04:11] The political money regime—and we have right now around the world a political money regime that has developed over the last 300 years—it centralizes power and concentrates wealth. It undermines popular government. It forces artificial growth because the dominant monetary paradigm contains within it a debt imperative which results in a growth imperative.

[00:04:40] So money has become an instrument of power. It’s the primary lever for centralizing power and concentrating wealth, and I think that’s becoming ever more apparent.

[00:04:51] Presenter: Local time banker Thomas Price:

[00:04:53] Thomas Price (Lane Service Sharing Network Time Bank): The time banks are a phenomenon that has been around for a while. The core concept is, the one thing everyone has is time. We may not have a lot of money. We may not have a lot of other resources, but we usually have time.

[00:05:09] And if we can share our time with each other, which is really how most of the economy works, the grandmother that takes care of the grandkids is sharing her time, the mom doing the dishes or the kid doing chores is sharing their time.

[00:05:26] We share it collaboratively as a common place in our communities, but the time bank allows us to share it across families to other families, across your street to your neighbor, across town to the gal that has chickens that she’s raising and she’s got extra eggs. You know, it allows us to, for our own time and interest, do the things we love or want to invest our time in, and then gain credit for that in a way that we can exchange that with other people’s time that they’re investing in things they love.

[00:06:01] This time bank was birthed out of what was known as Cooperation Eugene. It was a nonprofit formed, and we studied what kind of cooperative things we could do in Eugene to deal with some of the many issues we were seeing.

[00:06:17] And early on in our studies, and we were studying Cooperation Jackson and Cooperation All-Kinds-Of-Other-Places, and seeing the different projects that they were putting together and doing, time banking kept coming up as a thread that people were using.

[00:06:33] The reason I like it is it actually allows us to value each other at the abundance of our own time. And actually, it changes the paradigm. Instead of paying as little as I can to get you to do work to make me profit, I’m going to give you the abundance of my time for the time that you want to give, any number of exchanges.

[00:06:54] We also had people that had been involved in working around disasters or after disasters.

[00:07:00] Presenter: Social reformers of our current era all seem to have the same plan in their waistcoat pockets: An inflation-proof local currency, which they say can support disaster preparedness, resiliency, and community self-determination.

[00:07:14] For more about Daví, see ByDaví.com. Thomas Greco Jr. talks about his books on Todd Boyle’s video, and you can learn more about time banks at TimeBanks.org and HourWorld.org.

Image: Daguerreotype of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1846, Albert Southworth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.