Rok Kranjc | Feb 6, 2018 | The Commons Post: Many of today’s proposals for and experiments with Universal Basic Income (UBI) in so-called developed countries seem to be congruent with, and indeed in some instances explicitly catered towards maintaining the dominant political economic architecture and status quo imaginary. Some of the more salient narratives regarding UBI present it as a silver bullet for all kinds of (neoliberally framed) social and economic woes and as a remedy for the pressing issue of automation which is assuredly having disruptive effects on the business-as-usual as practiced to-date. On the other hand, more radical proposals relevant to the UBI debate find themselves confined to academic and political ghettos, while those that do make it to experimental stage are watered down to versions of ‘basic income light’[i] through processes and barriers integral to incumbent political economic structures and forms of political deliberation.

While such experiments and proposals may be crucial stepping stones in fostering social salience and political legitimacy around alternatives to dominant welfare and wage labour models, it is important to recognize their limitations, particular application contexts, scales and time-horizons, with reference to wider integrative visions and potential mechanisms of socio-economic and political transformation. However the reality is that at this time such wider and integrative visions are lacking, while radical and systemic alternatives to welfare remain severely undertheorized in crucial areas. In the following I outline three critical areas that in my opinion can further the UBI debate, guided by the overarching question of what might an open ended, ecologically sound and socially just welfare system and pathway towards it look like.

1. Considering UBI as an interim model for citizen empowerment

Imagining potential futures of welfare from a ‘long now’[ii] perspective necessitates the recognition that some solutions should be designed to have intentionally short life-spans while others should be designed to change over long periods of time.[iii] The reality is that the forms of UBI thus far explored are likely not the be-all and end-all of alternatives. It is thus important to consider the view that UBI models based on fiat money pooled and distributed by means of more or less conventional market and state mechanisms (e.g. taxes, redistribution of state funds) may be an an overall important, yet perhaps best seen as consciously interim step in institutional re-design and citizen emancipation and empowerment. It is relevant to note however that UBI models, defined as unconditional payments of certain sums of money to individuals of a society, already today find rivals, for example in the concepts of Universal Basic Assets (UBA)[iv] and Universal Basic Services (UBS)[v], which importantly shift the debate from income to access to and participation in the commons. Using the ‘city as a commons’ framework and the critical concepts of UBA and UBS as starting points, it is possible to conceive of commons-based welfare models that operate on the principles of universal rights and effective access to basic and potentially expanding asset and service options (e.g. housing, food, energy, healthcare, mobility, internet, education, sport, recreation) and the care, co-creation of and democratic deliberation about them using novel collaborative, open-source, circular, sharing and regenerative economy approaches, among others.

2. Anchoring alternative welfare systems in alternative currencies

One issue that is very rarely addressed even within more radical UBI debates is that of the currencies and accounting frameworks on which such systems are (to be) based.[vi] Arguably, pursuing the interrelated goals of ecological sustainability and social justice calls for a reconsideration of ‘money-as-usual’. Many currency systems have been proposed that too range from local, complimentary and other currency types more or less congruent with or supplementary to the economic status quo, to radical alternatives.[vii] The envisioned ‘commonified’ basic assets and services model(s), indeed commons and commoning activity generally, may be anchored in a rich ecosystem of alternative currencies, indices and accounting frameworks operating at different scales and in different socioeconomic and socioecological contexts. Some of the more prominent proposed money anchors specifically include energy, time, CO2 emissions, single resources such as water or grain, or ‘baskets of resources’.[viii] Additional aspects to consider include:

• the ethics, scales and forms of cosmopolitan and translocal solidarity
• gift cultures and economies
• open data
• forms of transaction (e.g. ‘commoner smart cards’ for food, public transportation and skill-sharing)
• the potentials of blockchain technology

3. A deep rethinking of ‘work’

The currently ongoing and planned UBI experiments in the Netherlands, once presented as a beacon of hope in mainstream media, have recently been subject to a number of relevant critiques. It is important to outline that these experiments are not of universal income as they specifically target the unemployed and those already receiving some form of social benefit; nor are they unconditional, but configured with mind to supporting existing ‘labour market integration’ policies and mechanisms. Today, it is crucial to expand our definition of work and to rethink our engagement with it, a discussion that should go well beyond the reductionism of the automation narrative as presented in the mainstream. What is thus needed are systems complimentary to UBI/UBA/UBS that open up and encourage access to skills, (co-production of) knowledge, and discovering and trying oneself out at various (sometimes not at once apparent) forms of social and ecological ‘service’ and ‘life callings’ in transitional times; as well as civic media infrastructures that can support proactive public discourse around and experimentation with alternative institutional options, balancing the challenges of sustainability and social equity with resilient subsistence and social welfare contribution and provisioning. An interesting idea in this regard is the ‘balanced job complex’,[ix] proposed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel in their model for participatory economics; a deliberative democratic model that may be found useful in conceptualizing dynamic ways of societal self-configuration of equitable and contributory work loads depending on needs, capacities, preferences and challenges.

Conclusion

By imbuing the UBI debate with a more systems-oriented and commons perspective, I have argued that an important shift is made from income and work as such to deeper interrelated questions of 1.) rights, capabilities and effective access; 2.) forms of deliberation, governance, entrepreneurship, collective care and accounting; 3.) forms and scales of pooling resources and work, and; 4.) forms and scales of equitable distribution and sustainable and resilient provisioning of universal basic commons entitlements. The perspective illuminates the contingent relationship between the contextual and subjective ‘political viability‘ of the UBI, and the scopes and salience of articulated (critical, open-source, open-ended) alternative institutional possibilities; and the prospects of a polity that exploits a dialectical relationship between interim or hybrid institutional models on the one hand, and radical experimentation with other socio-economic configurations, emergent city-making/place-making cultures and political possibilities in the here-and-now on the other.

[i] Schouten, Socrates. 2018. Baby Steps on the Road to Basic Income. Green European Journal. Available at: https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/baby-steps-on-the-road-to-a-basic-income/

[ii] Brand, Stewart. 1999. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. New York: Basic Books.

[iii] Irwin et al. 2016. Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research. Design and Culture, 7(2), 229–246.

[iv] https://medium.com/institute-for-the-future/universal-basic-assets-abb08ca2f0fc.

[v] https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2017/10/universal-basic-services-or-universal-basic-income

[vi] Bauwens, Michel. 2006. Complementary Currencies and the Basic Income. Available at: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/complementary-currencies-and-the-basic-income/2006/02/14; Bauwens, M. & Niaros, V. (2017). Value in the Commons Economy: Developments in Open and Contributory Value  Accounting. Chiang Mai: Heinrich Böll Stiftung & P2P Foundation.

[vii] Dittmer, Kristofer. 2011. Local currencies for purposive degrowth? A quality check of some proposals for changing money-as-usual. Available at: http://degrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Dittmer_JCP_pre-pub-manuscript.pdf

[viii] New Economics Foundation. 2013. Energising Money: An introduction to energy currencies and accounting. Available at: http://neweconomics.org/2013/02/energising-money/

[ix] Albert, Michael. 2003. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. London: Verso

Photo by Mister Higgs

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Photo by haru__q

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For many currencies to coexist there needs to be an exchange rate between each currency and each other currency, which means either they are literally convertible into a different unit as miles are convertible to kilometers, or that there is a market enabling all currencies to be bought and sold for each other.

It always seemed to me that the whole point of a currency was that it was a shared reference point with a stable value in relation to goods and services, and that a personal currencies would be neither shared nor stable. Furthermore it would be very hard for the market to assess the value of each person’s promises.

There is plenty of monetary theory and historical experience around having multiple issuers of say, dollars. Many cryptocurrency advocates see themselves as implementing Hayek’s proposal for competing currencies. He believed that the most trusted currency provider would beat the competition and the least trustworthy would go out of business, and thus that the free market would give the users of money the highest quality money. I think a regime of personal currencies is an order of magnitude more complex than each bank issuing its own notes.

The Distributed ledger version of Ripple indicated how this might be done by granting every user the possibility to guarantee their friends’ IOUs. Everyone member’s promise was its own asset class or currency, and it provided an automated market for every possible pair of currencies. But the system would never work because any liquidity there might be for my promises of dollars would be spread thinly across many markets.

This was the problem the Bancor Protocol solved albeit with a token-based approach rather than using IOUs. Any user could issue any number of tokens and ‘connect’ them to other tokens in a pool with a common reserve token. The first currency could then be traded with, meaning exchanged for and priced against, the other tokens in the same pool, and therefore for tokens in other pools connected to that pool. Pools would be recursively connected until every token could be traded with every other across a tree structure just as I described in the credit commons white paper. The total number of markets was only the number of pools rather than one for each possible currency pair. Each pool could use its reserve to buy or sell tokens instead of needing a counterparty, meaning all the tokens could be liquid. This was an engineering achievement, and it forces us back to the question of why we thought everyone should issue their own token. It seems to work as a medium of exchange if you have an app connected to a blockchain, but what about other monetary functions? Its not standard of value because all token values are shifting with supply and demand, and its poor a store of value, having no intrinsic worth and only one guarantor.

So beyond those I have three major criticisms of massively multiplayer tokenomics.

The first is that doesn’t nothing to address the balance of trade problem which naturally occurs in any economy where different regions produce and consume different amounts. A money system needs to be explicit about how trade imbalances are handled. Receiving reserve tokens is like being given a interest-free credit which has to be repaid; it enables you to buy stuff from the wider markets, but you still have to sell stuff back to those markets. Economics has been contorting itself to get around the problem that some areas are more (economically) productive than others, and areas do not naturally import as much as they export. Rather what usually happens (see the Eurozone and the globalised dollar) is that the surplus countries start lending their surplus currency to the deficit countries at interest, and a trade imbalance eventually becomes an unmanageable debt leading to poverty and loss of sovereignty. If we are interested in social justice, we have to solve the problem of trade imbalances. There are basically 3 ways:

1. Political arrangements, investment from surplus areas to increase production in deficit areas, also maybe curbing or diverting consumption in surplus areas.
2. Debt forgiveness / grants from surplus areas to deficit areas
3. Block all trade when the trade becomes too imbalanced.

A multicurrency economy may have benefits regarding the issuance of currency and choice of which currency to use, but it obscures this balance of trade problem, especially when money is represented as variable value tokens. The Bancor approach uses a solid theory called the price-specie flow mechanism. The theory says that surplus areas’ currencies become stronger and deficit areas’ weaker, and therefore as trade becomes imbalances, prices change and surplus areas are encouraged to import and deficit areas export – essentially that with a free market in currencies, prices will automatically adjust to affect supply and demand to balance the trade. Unfortunately while the theory is solid, many economists say that in the real world there are many other factors affecting trade and this mechanism has little effect. Also it was never supposed to work for tokens but for a gold standard. So massively multiplayer tokenomics will be no more socially just than other money systems on this score.

My second criticism is that the distribution of risk/reward is very unclear. From time to time token issuers will go bust and the value of their tokens fall to nothing. Others will increase in value. Instead of holding money the purpose of which is to retain a known amount spending power, each user would hold a portfolio of assets whose value would be constantly changing. Every transaction would involve a choice and a negotiation of which tokens to transfer. This can be done automatically, or the user can use their own knowledge of the token issuers and their own assessment of what each token is worth or will be worth. In Bancor where demand is artificial, token values might not reflect any reality. The risk and reward is essentially randomly distributed except insofar as people know each others’ business and take the time to acquire and dump tokens they know about.This table shows who takes the risk in different monetary systems.

My third criticism is usability. I can’t imagine a massively multiplayer token system working with cash; an app would be needed to price everything. The total amount in your wallet would need to be re-calculated hour by hour, and if you wanted to decide for yourself which tokens to spend and which to save, you would either have to configure your wallet or fiddle a lot just as you would if your pocket was full of coins from different countries. What you gain in usability, you would lose in knowledge and control over what was really going on in your wallet.

I’m also concerned that massively multiplayer token systems might not behave as their designers suppose.

Imagine you issued some tokens, but the more you spend them, the lower their price/purchasing power. You would much rather hold other people’s tokens than spend your own. It is very like borrowing money at interest Without mortgage tax relief distorting the picture, anyone would spend their savings before borrowing money because it is cheaper.

That means the only currencies circulating will be those issued by players currently in deficit. Meaning half the players’ token issuances are unnecessary. I see a lot of parallels with the fiat money system:

• the medium of exchange will consist entirely of the credit of the deficit traders, and currencies belonging to surplus traders will be not be needed.
• surplus traders have more spending power than deficit traders, equivalent to interest earned on fiat savings
• deficit traders have less spending power than par, equivalent to interest paid on fiat debt
• a trader who spends all his tokens without earning them back, effectively defaults on his debt, to his guarantors – in this case his neighbours

But unlike the fiat money system

• Our credit is determined by agreement with our neighbours not by the bank but
• We now have many currencies in our wallets
• Currencies purchasing power is constantly changing – we need to consult and app every time we want to know the price of something

My final concern is about competition between currencies. Hayek was keen that different institutions like banks should compete to provide exchange media and store-of-value services to the market. But most complementary currencies are designed by communities for their own use. If they were to compete against each other they might make a more ‘efficient’ economy, if anyone cares to unpack that assertion, but at the expense of exacerbating trade imbalances, and eroding each other’s sovereignty.

Adding these few thoughts up, it seems to me that a system of personal currencies isn’t fundamentally different to what we have now, though it could be much worse since manipulation would be much easier and injustices would all be obscured by unreliable exchange rates. It would democratise credit but there are much simpler and more accountable ways to do this.

A balance needs to be struck somewhere between one world currency a global monetary policy and near-zero risk, and personal currencies which require artificial liquidity and have no fixed value at all. It is as if anyone had the right to crown themselves king, and be sovereign over themselves. Great but somebody still has to clean the toilet every week. More currencies doesn’t mean more sovereignty, more credit, or more wealth, but it does mean more complexity and less liquidity.

After all, isn’t the whole point of a medium of exchange, like a sovereign realm, that it is something shared and agreed and standardised by a community?

Photo by Thomas Hawk

The post Personal currencies: Hayek’s wet dream or Spaghettinomics? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

While such experiments and proposals may be crucial stepping stones in fostering social salience and political legitimacy around alternatives to dominant welfare and wage labour models, it is important to recognize their limitations, particular application contexts, scales and time-horizons, with reference to wider integrative visions and potential mechanisms of socio-economic and political transformation. However the reality is that at this time such wider and integrative visions are lacking, while radical and systemic alternatives to welfare remain severely undertheorized in crucial areas. In the following I outline three critical areas that in my opinion can further the UBI debate, guided by the overarching question of what might an open ended, ecologically sound and socially just welfare system and pathway towards it look like.

1: Considering UBI as an interim model for citizen empowerment

Imagining potential futures of welfare from a ‘long now’[ii] perspective necessitates the recognition that some solutions should be designed to have intentionally short life-spans while others should be designed to change over long periods of time.[iii] The reality is that the forms of UBI thus far explored are likely not the be-all and end-all of alternatives. It is thus important to consider the view that UBI models based on fiat money pooled and distributed by means of more or less conventional market and state mechanisms (e.g. taxes, redistribution of state funds) may be an an overall important, yet perhaps best seen as consciously interim step in institutional re-design and citizen emancipation and empowerment. It is relevant to note however that UBI models, defined as unconditional payments of certain sums of money to individuals of a society, already today find rivals, for example in the concepts of Universal Basic Assets (UBA)[iv] and Universal Basic Services (UBS)[v], which importantly shift the debate from income to access to and participation in the commons. Using the ‘city as a commons’ framework and the critical concepts of UBA and UBS as starting points, it is possible to conceive of commons-based welfare models that operate on the principles of universal rights and effective access to basic and potentially expanding asset and service options (e.g. housing, food, energy, healthcare, mobility, internet, education, sport, recreation) and the care, co-creation of and democratic deliberation about them using novel collaborative, open-source, circular, sharing and regenerative economy approaches, among others.

2: Anchoring alternative welfare systems in alternative currencies

One issue that is very rarely addressed even within more radical UBI debates is that of the currencies and accounting frameworks on which such systems are (to be) based.[vi] Arguably, pursuing the interrelated goals of ecological sustainability and social justice calls for a reconsideration of ‘money-as-usual’. Many currency systems have been proposed that too range from local, complimentary and other currency types more or less congruent with or supplementary to the economic status quo, to radical alternatives.[vii] The envisioned ‘commonified’ basic assets and services model(s), indeed commons and commoning activity generally, may be anchored in a rich ecosystem of alternative currencies, indices and accounting frameworks operating at different scales and in different socioeconomic and socioecological contexts. Some of the more prominent proposed money anchors specifically include energy, time, CO2 emissions, single resources such as water or grain, or ‘baskets of resources’.[viii] Additional aspects to consider include:

• the ethics, scales and forms of cosmopolitan and translocal solidarity
• gift cultures and economies
• open data
• forms of transaction (e.g. ‘commoner smart cards’ for food, public transportation and skill-sharing)
• the potentials of blockchain technology

3: A deep rethinking of ‘work’

The currently ongoing and planned UBI experiments in the Netherlands, once presented as a beacon of hope in mainstream media, have recently been subject to a number of relevant critiques. It is important to outline that these experiments are not of universal income as they specifically target the unemployed and those already receiving some form of social benefit; nor are they unconditional, but configured with mind to supporting existing ‘labour market integration’ policies and mechanisms. Today, it is crucial to expand our definition of work and to rethink our engagement with it, a discussion that should go well beyond the reductionism of the automation narrative as presented in the mainstream. What is thus needed are systems complimentary to UBI/UBA/UBS that open up and encourage access to skills, (co-production of) knowledge, and discovering and trying oneself out at various (sometimes not so at once apparent) forms of social and ecological service and ‘life callings’ in transitional times; as well as civic media infrastructures that can support proactive public discourse and balance the challenges of sustainability and equitable and resilient welfare provisioning with voluntary contributions to the collective resource and work/service pool, individual capabilities, personal and communal lifestyle preferences, and translocal solidarity agreements. An interesting idea in this regard is the ‘balanced job complex’,[ix] proposed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel in their model for participatory economics; a deliberative democratic model that may be found useful in conceptualizing dynamic ways of societal self-configuration of equitable and contributory work loads depending on needs and challenges.

Conclusion

By imbuing the UBI debate with a more systems-oriented and commons perspective, I have argued that an important shift is made from income and work as such to deeper interrelated questions of 1.) rights, capabilities and effective access; 2.) forms of deliberation, governance, entrepreneurship, collective care and accounting; 3.) forms and scales of pooling resources and work, and; 4.) forms and scales of equitable distribution and sustainable and resilient provisioning of universal basic commons entitlements. The perspective illuminates the contingent relationship between the contextual and subjective ‘political viability‘ of the UBI, and the scopes and salience of articulated (critical, open-source, open-ended) alternative institutional possibilities; and the prospects of a polity that exploits a dialectical relationship between interim or hybrid institutional models on the one hand, and radical experimentation with other socioeconomic configurations, emergent city-making/place-making cultures and political possibilities in the here-and-now on the other.

[i] Schouten, Socrates. 2018. Baby Steps on the Road to Basic Income. Green European Journal. Available at: https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/baby-steps-on-the-road-to-a-basic-income/

[ii] Brand, Stewart. 1999. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. New York: Basic Books.

[iii] Irwin et al. 2016. Transition Design: A Proposal for a New Area of Design Practice, Study, and Research. Design and Culture, 7(2), 229–246.

[iv] https://medium.com/institute-for-the-future/universal-basic-assets-abb08ca2f0fc.

[v] https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2017/10/universal-basic-services-or-universal-basic-income

[vi] Bauwens, Michel. 2006. Complementary Currencies and the Basic Income. Available at: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/complementary-currencies-and-the-basic-income/2006/02/14; Bauwens, M. & Niaros, V. (2017). Value in the Commons Economy: Developments in Open and Contributory Value Accounting. Chiang Mai: Heinrich Böll Stiftung & P2P Foundation.

[vii] Dittmer, Kristofer. 2011. Local currencies for purposive degrowth? A quality check of some proposals for changing money-as-usual. Available at: http://degrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Dittmer_JCP_pre-pub-manuscript.pdf

[viii] New Economics Foundation. 2013. Energising Money: An introduction to energy currencies and accounting. Available at: http://neweconomics.org/2013/02/energising-money/

[ix] Albert, Michael. 2003. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. London: Verso

Lead image:Graffiti work by Banksy, itself a reworking of the original “Begging for Change” by Australian street artist Meek.
Cross-posted from Labgov.it

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Stephanie Rearick and Leander Bindewald: If it wasn’t crystal clear just weeks ago, it is now: The economy as it stands is currently positioned in direct opposition to social and environmental objectives. For the sake of the wellbeing of our communities, our children, and our planet, it is imperative we change the voracious path of our consumption culture and consider how we might create opportunities for people to find meaningful work.

At the Mutual Aid Network, we have developed a new type of networked cooperative — one that, among other things, lets people find talented collaborators for personal, neighborhood-wide, or even city-wide projects. Here’s how we make it happen:

The first step is to bring people together around a common goal of any size and scope to form an individual “Mutual Aid Network.” The common goal can be anything — a group of friends aiming to redesign each person’s work life, a watershed restoration initiative, a city-wide energy efficiency and renewables program, a decentralized cooperatively-owned manufacturing initiative, a travel and culture exchange, or a meal program to ensure that everyone in a neighborhood has enough to eat. While each network is entirely autonomous, the underlying principles it follows are from drawn from commons governance and cooperative models.

To achieve the common goal, members pool and steward resources by combining any of the following tools — all tried and true in the patches of solidarity economy, big and small, over the course of generations:

• Shared resources or the commons: Participate in tool libraries, makerspaces, shared laundry facilities, and so forth.

• Timebanking and swapping: Exchange time credits — for example, an hour worth for a service, be it babysitting, cooking, cleaning, rides, light carpentry, gardening, art/music/language lessons, in exchange for a service. Contribute frequent flyer miles, meals, plots of land, buildings, equipment all to be acknowledged in community credits that are fair, transparent, and always mutually beneficial.

• Price-based mutual credit currencies, for business and highly professionalized service: Buy a $1,000 piece of equipment from a participating business for 1,000 points of interest-free credit, to be paid back by selling $1,000 worth of goods and services to the network. Taxed according to applicable laws.

• Savings pools and community investment: Contribute to a common pool of money to be allocated to collectively agreed causes or members with one-off financial needs, be they for a home, health care, or even burial expenses. Examples of this abound around the world and include the Mutual Aid Societies in the U.S., the original Building Societies in the U.K.

And then there is the “Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks,” formerly referred to as the Main Mutual Aid Network, which is one big global cooperative owned by all individual Mutual Aid Network sites. The members connect, share resources and best practices, and support new Mutual Aid Network sites all around the world by using the same approach and principles applied in the local sites.

Of course we don’t expect everyone to be solely working in the Mutual Aid Network context, but expect that more opportunities will build over time. Our strategy is to start with a number of pilot sites with different focus areas, strengths, and limitations, and have each one commit to supporting one another and help foster new sites. Eight pilot sites have signed up already, and at least eight more are in the works.

The economy of the 21st century is something we’ve been prototyping throughout human history. Now we can connect those ideas and practices that have proven to be sustainable over time and use technologies to connect, exchange, share, and learn collaboratively and effectively. Networks of networks can quickly connect to create a world where everyone has the opportunity to build the skills needed to make whole, happy communities. We are already doing it, across the world, independently and increasingly interdependently. Please join us. What you can do:

• Join an online orientation

• Join the Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks (formerly Main Mutual Aid Network) global co-op (U.S. based, global membership)

• Join the Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks work groups

• Explore creating a pilot site

• Participate in our Summit in Madison, Wisconsin, from Feb. 17-20

• Sign up for our e-mail list

All of those opportunities, plus more learning resources, can be found at: www.mutualaidnetwork.org

Here are some of our pilot projects:

Madison, Wisconsin

Allied Community Co-op is the first Mutual Aid Network pilot site. It’s where some of the organization’s fundamental ideas were born. Located in a food desert with little infrastructure (no school, grocery store, library, or neighborhood center), the Allied Co-op is working to bring a food buying club and a cooperatively-owned grocery store to the neighborhood.

The Social Justice Center, a multi-stakeholder nonprofit building in Madison’s affluent East Side, is a convening partner in exploring Madison’s second Mutual Aid Network pilot, which will be an inter-city partnership connecting Allied Co-op and many other local stakeholders in a network of resource-sharing and exchange initiative designed to create more equitable distribution of existing resources across the city.

Lansing, Michigan

The Mid-Michigan bioregion is home to a number of both for-profit and nonprofit cooperative enterprises, including the Mid-Michigan Time Bank, the Lansing Maker’s Network, and the Mid-Michigan Renewable Energy Cooperative. By leveraging time, tools, and talents, these groups will form the backbone of the Mid-Michigan Mutual Aid Network to help the region find new ways to build a sustainable new economy.

“Mutual Aid Networks provide a platform for communities to build from the ground up through identifying strengths and resources that are present globally which can be put into action through local location-specific projects,” says Marshall Clabueaux, a renewable energy activist and social entrepreneur.

Providence, Rhode Island

In the Providence Bay Area, the Fertile Underground Natural Cooperative is working to get a catering truck on the road. This truck will take food from farms and supermarkets and offer the raw, natural ingredients for free, while selling the prepared food. The goal of this project is to reach places that have limited access to fresh food and provide cooking demonstrations using seasonal produce.

Waterville, Kansas

Wellness Weaver, a timebank, has collaborated with partners around the US to connect people who want to create a FUNctional Health and Wellness Workers Cooperative — a wellness-oriented Mutual Aid Network.

“The value of the Mutual Aid Network is to bring the wisdom and expertise of those that have used time banking formally as a way to help develop and support the best functioning Wellness Oriented Mutual Aid Network,” says Helen Stucky Weaver, retired nurse and founder of Wellness Weavers.

St. Louis, Missouri

Solidarity Economy St. Louis is currently working to incubate African-American cooperative businesses, co-host a local conference around the theme of “Health, Wealth, and Disrupting Capitalism,” develop a time bank youth court program, engage in community organizing efforts to create a neighborhood food hub in the food desert of North St. Louis, and promote community development of vacant land.

“Being part of the Mutual Aid Network allows us to connect to and co-create a global movement of people who are working to build just and sustainable economies,” says Julia Ho, founder of Solidarity Economy St. Louis. “The only way for us to truly achieve mutual aid in our own communities is by extending mutual aid to others.”

Bergnek, South Africa

Bergnek Community Projects is a community development initiative that was started to empower and uplift women and youth through sustainable business ventures. The program provides access to food, clean water, and reproductive health care for women and girls in school. The long-term aim of the group is to build a community health care center.

Hull, United Kingdom

This Mutual Aid Network aims to create a chain reaction that goes back into communities. It meshes a thriving timebank with 600 members and the Hull Coin initiative, the City of Culture’s 2017 nomination, which is currently mobilizing 4,000 volunteers.

“When I started the TimeBank back in 2010, I saw it as the solution to everything,” says Kate Macdonald. “I realized in time that it is ‘one’ solution and that to have a viable parallel economy, we need different options which have strengths to use in different circumstances. When I heard Stephanie speak about Mutual Aid Networks a couple of years ago, I realized this had been what I had been looking for. What is often missed is a mechanism to join things up.”

Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania

The Mutual Aid Network of the Lehigh Valley addresses the social determinants of health of communities’ most vulnerable members, including formerly incarcerated people, juveniles aging out of the foster care system, homeless populations, individuals recovering from addiction, and newly settled refugees. This project address tackles these issues by tackling social isolation, one of the key factors that contributes to poor life and health outcomes.

These eight initiatives demonstrate that building a solidarity economy that serves every human being on the planet is possible.

A previous version of this article appeared in the July 2016 issue of STIR magazine

Header photo courtesy of the Mutual Aid Network.

The post The Mutual Aid Network Takes a Ground-Up Approach to Create a Collaborative Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

With the help of Will Ruddick, a community development specialist in Kenya since 2009, dozens of small business owners in Bangladesh agreed to accept a new currency, the Bangla-Pesa, in exchange for fresh produce, bicycle repairs, tutoring, taxi rides and other goods and services. The new commons-based currency has stimulated a big boost in the local economy while helping families that earn little in the formal economy (and thus have few Kenyan shillings) to earn another currency, Bangla-Pesa, which lets them meet their basic needs. Since its launch, over three million shillings of trade have been transacted using the currency. Its success has recently inspired the launch of a similar currency, Gatina-Pesa, for the neighborhood of Gatina, in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city.

We interviewed Ruddick, the founder of the Bangla-Pesa to learn more about his remarkable experiment in community-based money.

Will, what are the origins of the Bangla-Pesa?

The concept of the Bangla-Pesa is not new. It was first introduced in Kisumu Ndogo, Shauri Yako and Mnazi Mmoja slums in Kongowea. A number of us brought the idea to Bangladesh in March 2013 as a way to strengthen and stabilize the economy of the neighborhood. Bangla-Pesa is an accounting mechanism of reciprocal exchange or mutual-credit system. Members can accept only as much Bangla-Pesa as they can use in one day for local needs, like food and water. No one is allowed to have more than 400 Bangla-Pesa at any one time. In developing these programs, we incorporated a system of guarantors to the currency and a community fund to make the system more secure and sustainable.

How did you get people interested in using Bangla-Pesa?

The majority of people here live in poverty and are unable to meet their basic needs. Therefore, our goal was to use the currency to encourage economic activity, which in turn would help people who don’t earn much conventional money to be able to buy food and other necessities. People were only too happy to participate in such an experiment.

We saw the currency as a tool to let members of the network trade among themselves. The Bangla-Pesa is a business-to-business voucher system that only registered members can participate in. In this sense, the Bangla-Pesa is a complementary currency to official money. Technically it is a credit clearing system for multilateral reciprocal exchange. People outside the trading network like the Bangla-Pesa because it is used to support community activities like clean-ups; they also know that it can be used to buy goods and services at more than 100 shops.

What sort of system did you organize to launch Bangla-Pesa?

We organized more than 200 microenterprises into a community-based organization called the Bangladesh Business Network. Everyone formally registered as a member and agreed to accept the Bangla-Pesa in exchange for whatever they could offer – food products, services, transportation. Each business must agree to back 400 Bangla-Pesa with their goods and services. Each business must also have a group of four members that endorse their membership. Bangla-Pesa serve as vouchers or promissory notes for members’ goods and services.

What was the initial response to the new currency?

People in the neighborhood quickly saw the value of using it. It helped them meet their needs even though they don’t have much “real money.” But state authorities became quite agitated. They feared that the Bangla-Pesa might try to displace or challenge Kenya’s national currency, the shilling. Six of us who had started the currency were arrested by the Changamwe police and put in jail. The police were apparently worried because there are secessionist groups like the Mombasa Republican Council within the area. The government saw the Bangla-Pesa as a threat to it and the national currency.

The six of us were charged with possession of illegal currency papers in late May 2013. All of the businesses in the Bangladesh Business Network were told to stop using the currency. We found it all perplexing. Why should a simple mechanism that helps people self-organize themselves to make ends meet pose a threat to the country’s Central Bank?

So how did you persuade the government that the Bangla-Pesa is not a threat?

We pointed out that the Bangla-Pesa cannot be traded for shilling. They aren’t convertible into each other. We also emphasized that Bangla-Pesa are a trading voucher more than a currency in the strict sense, since its value is pegged to the Kenyan shilling. I think we also convinced the prosecutor that our goal was and is to uplift the living standards of the poorest. Three months after our arrest, in August 2013, the public prosecutor found we had broken no laws and dropped the charges.

What happened next?

The arrests stopped the economic stimulus that Bangla-Pesa had provoked because suddenly no one could use them. But then we re-launched the currency in November 2013 with the backing of the entire community, including local leaders and government officals. Since then, trading in Bangla-Pesa has resumed in a big way.

How does the Bangla-Pesa help people?

Take the case of Maciana Anyango, who is sixty-four. She is a widow and the sole breadwinner and takes care of her disabled seventeen-year-old daughter and a son who trained as a driver but has not secured a job yet. She says, “I used to be without food because we wouldn’t have enough Kenyan shillings. Now I can eat even when I don’t have the real money because I still have the Bangla-Pesa to use.”

Or consider a bicycle operator who has the capacity for twenty customers a day, but in general only has ten. Now he can give rides to those businesses in exchange for goods and services they have in excess, such as a woman who has extra tomatoes to sell. This helps the community weather poor economic periods. There are hundreds of millions of people around the world like this. They have goods and services to offer. So why can’t they create their own means of exchange, backed by what they have and can do?

Is the Bangla-Pesa mostly about business – or are there other reasons that people join?

People join because it’s good for the community. Fredrick Ochieng is an electronics repairman with a family of seven; such larger, extended families are not unusual in African societies. Ochieng says that he wanted to join to help provide for his family and for things for his children, like merry-go-rounds, and to help the community with things like the trash clean-up. And in fact, since starting to use Bangla-Pesa, it has helped him get to know people in the community as he got to know members of the network and they incidentially became new customers, when they have a problem with their phones.

What makes the currency itself different from the national currency, the Kenyan shilling?

Bangla-Pesa’s value is the same as the Kenyan shilling, but is not exchangeable for it. Bangla-Pesa is a voucher that circulates only among the community. And that means that the value generated within the community stays within the community, and does not flow to people outside of the neighborhood. As a result, the Bangla-Pesa, unlike other currencies, does not generate more poverty. Furthermore, unlike the Kenyan shilling, whose value fluctuates with inflation, the vouchers expire after one year. Bangla-Pesa can be renewed with a sticker upon payment in Bangla-Pesa to the community fund. This creates an annual renewal cycle for community service work.

How does the Bangla-Pesa system constitute a commons?

The Bangla-Pesa is managed by a nonprofit organization called KORU, which stands for “Kenyans Organizing Regional Unity,” which I cofounded with Jacky Kowa, a native Kenyan who works on women’s rights and health issues. The group’s members are elected, and it acts as a validator and steward of the currency. KORU addresses any disagreements that may come up among members.

The Bangla-Pesa is a symbol and instrument for community wealth because it is backed by the common pool of goods and services of the members of the network. The value of the currency is the sum total of the teaching of a teacher, the tomatoes raised by the farmers, the rides given on a motorcycle, and so on. Not more. Not less. So the vouchers represent that community wealth. The vouchers are also a way for people to improve the community. Once accepted into the Network, 200 Bangla-Pesa of the 400 allocated to a business are kept for community service work, such as trash pickup. Members vote on which types of community service work to fund.

Bangla-Pesa have helped created a commons by catalyzing new connections and cooperation among people. Rose Akiny runs a maize mill where she grinds maize to flour, a business that helps her care for her sister’s family after her sister passed away. She said, “I found friends who were doing business using Bangla-Pesa, and they backed me and then I backed them. Now I go to their businesses to buy maize, rice and beans, and they come to grind at my mill. I follow other members who have the Bangla-Pesa and learn where to purchase goods. It’s is also easy to find people because the members’ shops are marked.”

How have Bangla-Pesa improved the situations of families and the overall well-being of the Bangladesh community?

The community now trades the equivalent of roughly 100 euros daily using Bangla-Pesa in addition to its usage of Kenyan shillings. A survey on the impact of the program found that about 83 percent of participants saw an increase in their total sales as a result of the vouchers. Bangla-Pesa represent an average increase of 22 percent of total daily sales over a baseline level, compared to no increase in sales using Kenyan shillings. This implies that Bangla Pesa are responsible for that extra 22 percent in economic activity, which might not have materialized without the program.

Women especially benefit from Bangla-Pesa because 75 percent of the small businesses in Bangladesh have women owners. Bangla-Pesa have also made all of its users less dependent on the formal economy and the volatility of markets.

Among many commoners, the dominance of money and market mechanisms in mediating people’s relationships is usually seen as very controversial. Obviously there are many ways for people to meet their needs and help each other. How important do you think that a currency, or means of exchange, is for improving people’s livelihoods in the settlements that you work with?

It is really important to recognize how people fall into poverty when playing the game of capitalism and the reasons why poverty exists in the first place. Perhaps if we see poverty as manufactured through the control of resources by an elite minority, we can also see how the control of money might itself be a key tool of the elite.

Certainly the people in Bangladesh and Mombasa more generally are “poor” due to lack of education, corruption and lack of jobs. But this is not why poverty exists in the first place. There is a nearly unlimited demand for goods and services, including education, and there is a nearly unlimited supply of people who could provide them. What’s missing is a means of exchange between demand and supply. Sadly this needed means of exchange is usually only available as national currency, which is typically controlled by for-profit institutions, banks, whose goal is to benefit by increasing the debt of others.

If communities could instead control their own means of exchange, they could make exchange work for their own purposes. They could lower their dependency on Kenyan shilling by using Bangla-Pesa when possible. Bangla-Pesa creates a buffer for the community that helps it keep life going even during the worst economic periods.

Thank you.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.
Image: Yes Magazine

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Participants can view and comment on each other’s assignments in the forum, and can interact as they wish, with tutors commenting on assignments in the forum. Lessons Two and Four are followed by one hour webinars with the tutors, which occur on Saturday mornings at 10am. The first iteration begins February 2015, and the next will be in quarter three of 2015.

The following text is reposted from the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability:

A free online course at Masters-level will enable you to understand the past, present and future role of money in society. The 5th cohort starts 20th August 2017 and lasts 8 weeks (one lesson every two weeks). Enrol here.

The course is therefore highly interdisciplinary, drawing upon anthropology, sociology, history and heterodox economics. It is designed by Professor Jem Bendell PhD (IFLAS) and Matthew Slater BD (Community Forge), with additional tutoring by Leander Bindewald MA (IFLAS).

Typically 50 to 100 people complete the full 4 lessons, and many then continue to interact in the Alumni Forum. Over 20 have progressed to attend the full certificate course in London.

The next offering of the MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) starts online on August 20th 2017 and runs for over 2 months, with four lessons:

Lesson One: An introduction to money: functions, forms, and fallacies

Lesson Two: The history of money and its discontents

Lesson Three: The problems with mainstream monetary systems

Lesson Four: Alternatives

Each lesson begins on a Sunday, consisting of a audio-narrated slides of less than two hours (which you can listen to when you want within the following days), followed by two hours of personal reading and one hour to prepare a written assignment of around 500 words, which must be submitted by the following week.

Participants can view and comment on each other’s assignments in the forum, and can interact as they wish, with tutors commenting on assignments in the forum.

Lessons Two and Four are followed by one hour webinars with the tutors, which occur on Saturday mornings at 10am (UK time). You need access to a decent broadband connection but do not need any special software to engage in the course. If without a powerpoint viewer, participants can view lessons on youtube. Participants cannot start the MOOC late.

Sign up at http://mooc1.communityforge.net The next offering of the MOOC after August will be in February 2018.

At the end of this MOOC you will be able to:

• Critically assess views on the form and function of money and currency by drawing from monetary theories
• Explain theories on how social, economic and environmental problems arise from mainstream monetary systems
• Explain alternative forms of money and currency and the theories on how they can support better social, economic and environmental outcomes.

The full schedule follows below. On the MOOC you will be joined by participants on the Certificateof Achievement in Sustainable Exchange, which is a credit-bearing module offered by the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability at the University of Cumbria. Four days of classes in person at the Docklands Campus in London begin in April 2017, featuring Professor Bendell, Leander Bindewald and a range of guest lecturers. These classes explore the wider issues of currency innovation and the collaborative economy. There is a fee for the certificate, not the MOOC. You must have started the MOOC in order to enrol.

The Tutors 

Matthew Slater is a software engineer who specialises in open source software for community currencies. Co-founder of Community Forge, which produces software for and hosts over 100 local currencies, he is a regular commentator on grassroots initiatives for community control of currency and credit.

Leander Bindewald is the coordinator of the EU funded project Complementary Currencies in Action, and a regular commentator on currency innovation.

Photo by Sole Treadmill

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Outline

• What are the commons?
• Is there an example of a commons business model?
• In what areas are commons active?
• Is commons a new idea or are there examples from the past?
• How do privatization and enclosure affect the commons?
• What is the importance of digital commons?
• What role can commons play in the actual economic and institutional crisis?
• What are briefly the differences between commons and markets?
• Further reading

What are the commons?

Commons should be understood as a dynamic, living social system — any resource that can be used by many could inspire people to organize as a commons. The key questions are whether a particular community is motivated to manage a resource as a commons, and if it can come up with the rules, norms, and sanctions to make the system work.

Photo by 4nitsirk

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Kosmos is pleased to award a 2017 Seed Grant to Great Lakes Commons (GLC). The Great Lakes Commons cares for the protection of the second largest freshwater source in the world through education, interventions, and water protection.

GLC is a diverse network of people and organizations working to preserve the bioregional area of the Great Lakes and establish it as a commons—a resource that people collectively share, inherit, protect, and enjoy. With this grant, the GLC will explore an experimental econo-art intervention to rethink currency, value, and the impact money has on the world around us.

The pilot project will test people’s imagination and commitment for not only a new relationship with water, but with the money system that spoils it. The project asks: What if the value of currency was based on clean, available water—a commons-backed currency, rather than one based on our current measure of value? What would this money look like?  How would this money be used?

With the Seed Grant Award, GLC plans to produce 5,000 alternative currency notes for distribution to their Charter Supporters. One side of the currency will include information about water and special instructions. Receivers are encouraged to circulate the money, perhaps in gratitude to someone working in water protection, possibly to a teacher, or as a gift. The water commons-note will inspire receivers to imagine the possibilities associated with a new value system, and they’ll be directed to share their experiences and reactions online at GLC’s collective community website.

Statement from Great Lakes Commons:

The Great Lakes Commons initiative is a bioregional aspiration and invitation for protecting these waters as a sacred trust and shared commons. We express and advance our effort through a Commons Charter, collaborative storytelling map, and a set of tools and resources for ‘commoning’. At our core, we are a united community working on Great Lakes protection from different campaigns, locations, and cultural ties. We seek a deeper relationship with the waters and all those who live within this basin.

We are grateful to Kosmos Journal for funding our Great Lakes Commons Currency project. By sharing 5,000 new water-commons notes to our Charter supporters around the lakes, we can create new pathways for shared responsibility, reciprocity, and connection to the Great Lakes. The stories of how this currency circulates and what impact it makes will be shared on our collaborative map and with the Kosmos community.”

– Paul Baines, GLC’s Outreach and Education Coordinator

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Globalized capitalism has inflicted so many defeats upon the working class and people all over the world that it’s hard to give an account of them. Still, everything isn’t sad. In the middle of all this misery there are glimpses of light – if you know where to look for them. In fact, some of these bright spots come as a result of the misery, because they can be turned to our advantage.

Translated by Anne Merethe Erstad for the Norwegian original

The war on cash and the war on free speech

As previously shown through a number of examples, the international finance capitalism has specific plans to wind up cash as an option for payment. In India, this war on cash is led by the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, and his allies. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a leading participant in the “Better Than Cash Alliance” along with Ford Foundation, Clinton Foundation, Citi Foundation, Omidyar Network (eBay), Coca Cola, USAID and the UN – among others.

In Norway, the Norwegian bank DNB has taken the lead. And since politicians in general are trained to do as financial capitalism bids, we can say with almost total certainty that legislation banning cash will be passed. If cash payment is banned by law, we will no longer have money. Or rather: we will no longer have any control over our own money. Whether we’ll be able to use them or not, will be decided by the banks and the authorities. We can no longer withdraw money from the bank and hide them under the mattress, even if the banks should introduce a five percent negative interest rate. And if the authorities decide that a certain person should be blocked from their account, they cannot buy as much as a bus ticket or a piece of bread. The totalitarian society on steroids.

This neo-fascism, or this post-democratic society – or whatever we should name this nightmare – is matched by the draconic legislations against so-called “fake news” and the introduction of public-private censorship bodies. As noted before, a militarization of opinion formers worthy that of a dictatorship, is taking place. And it is happening without the slightest protest from those who supposedly support the freedom of the press and free speech.

Light in the darkness

And where do we find anything positive in all this, you may ask. A reasonable question, indeed. It appears dark as the night, like a dystopia by George Orwell or Albert Huxley. But watch closely, and you’ll find bright spots.

The cash ban will have extraordinary negative effects, but it will also force those of us in the resistance front to think anew. Our defensive struggle can no longer remain merely defensive. The enemy forces us to create our own currency. And they force us to organize collectively in new and interesting ways.

Alternative currencies are not as innovative as they may sound. There probably exist hundreds of them throughout the world, perhaps thousands. According to Wikipedia, Local Economy Trading Systems were particularly popular in the 20^th century and the web-based encyclopaedia also mentions a large number of community currencies in the USA.

Co-operative movements and closely knitted local communities are among those who have gained the most from community currencies. The European fiscal cliff has led to the establishment of several varieties of local currencies in a number of communities all over Europe. It’s not very hard to imagine how a co-operative movement or a network of co-operatives can benefit from this. Like money in general, these currencies will express a certain value, which makes it possible to change one value into another. As long as the co-operatives only trade amongst themselves, they have no need for dollars, Euro – or Norwegian kroners.

A few years ago I watched a news story on Italian RAI 3 from southern Italy about a small, poor village where many Albanians had settled several hundred years back. This village had established a community currency with two values; one Che (Guevara) and one Skanderbeg (the Albanian national hero). According to the news report, this worked well for the inter-trading among the village people. In the village where I am an inhabitant, in Tolfa near Rome, we could very well have had such a local currency. Barter-economy still exists and could be developed further. In addition there are many local craft businesses. I haven’t carried out any serious study of this, but I wouldn’t rule out that one Euro spent at the bakery passes five pairs of hands in Tolfa before it leaves the village. We could call the currency collinaro, as those of us living there are called collinari: the hill people.

The southern Italian che and skanderbeg were most likely paper based. But there is nothing stopping these currencies from being electronically based. In Norway, the one who has performed the most extensive work in this area is Trond Andresen at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology). He has demonstrated how this can be accomplished, all the way from the local to the national level. Andersen has argued that this system can work on a national level for countries in a time of crisis. However, with a cash ban coming up, it would be even more relevant as a tool of resistance, as means to control a part of one’s own added value without the bank interference and to keep a part of our co-operation and inter-trade outside the surveillance files.

This means that the banks’ and the states’ abuse more or less forces us to organise collectively and produce samples of a future collective society.

This applies to the censorship on social media as well. Increased censorship and harassment will make Facebook and similar systems irrelevant for publishing and discourse. This will enforce solutions on the outside, alternative social media and new platforms. This is more problematic, because the strength of the Internet is the fact that it is a global productive force. But I am absolutely sure it is possible to find a way around this as well. My personal contribution in the near future is to launch a web based medium which will bring the experiences from this blog several steps forward.

The 0.01 percent is extremely powerful, but obviously frightened

Those who benefit the most from the way global capitalism has developed, are the richest 0.01 percent. And among them, the ultra-rich “Masters of the Universe”. They are extremely powerful and some of them have personal assets exceeding entire countries’ gross national product. At the same time they are very few, and while they can buy whomever they want to defend them, the measures they are taking at the moment, above all the censorship, show that they are also very frightened. They know that if the 99 percent organise to fight them, they’re done for. When they cannot even tolerate competition from small blogs and alternative media lacking both money and power, they reveal their fear of rebellion and their fear of losing both power and capital. Their measures don’t reflect their strength, but their weakness, their panic.

These are very important lessons the ultra-rich have given us. A gift of which they are oblivious – they hardy understand what they have given away. And it is crucial to understand how this gift can be put to use.

Le Cri du peuple, Jacques Tardi (2001)
The Paris comune

The future society starts now

This points even further, to a central element in what I have called Communism 5.0. It is a collective society where the producers control the means of productions – jointly. And there’s no need to wait for a revolution fifty or hundred years ahead. In fact, it is possible to start the construction of this future society now. We can start tomorrow. Collective interaction and organizing around such projects will teach us to build a society and it will enhance people’s self confidence and trust in their own strengths. We’re not talking utopia. We’re talking about something we know can be done. And even more important: This has to be done, because the alternative is to be crushed beneath the weight of the ruling class’ power machinery. Some people dislike my calling it Communism 5.0, but that doesn’t matter. The Norwegian author Odd Eidem, once said: “Call me whatever you like. Call me the city tram!”

In this perspective, the 0.01 percent is not our worst enemy. They are few and they are frightened. We can handle them. Our worst enemy is our own feebleness, our own division and our own slave mentality. If we can liberate ourselves from this, we can save the world from the globalists and their gang.

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