This article is excerpted from my new book Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age, available in paperback June 1.

The U.S. federal debt has more than doubled since the 2008 financial crisis, shooting up from $9.4 trillion in mid-2008 to over $22 trillion in April 2019. The debt is never paid off. The government just keeps paying the interest on it, and interest rates are rising.

In 2018, the Fed announced plans to raise rates by 2020 to “normal” levels — a fed funds target of 3.375 percent — and to sell about $1.5 trillion in federal securities at the rate of $50 billion monthly, further growing the mountain of federal debt on the market. When the Fed holds government securities, it returns the interest to the government after deducting its costs; but the private buyers of these securities will be pocketing the interest, adding to the taxpayers’ bill.

In fact it is the interest, not the debt itself, that is the problem with a burgeoning federal debt. The principal just gets rolled over from year to year. But the interest must be paid to private bondholders annually by the taxpayers and constitutes one of the biggest items in the federal budget. Currently the Fed’s plans for “quantitative tightening” are on hold; but assuming it follows through with them, projections are that by 2027 U.S. taxpayers will owe $1 trillion annually just in interest on the federal debt. That is enough to fund President Donald Trump’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan every year, and it is a direct transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy investors holding most of the bonds.

Where will this money come from? Crippling taxes, wholesale privatization of public assets, and elimination of social services will not be sufficient to cover the bill.

Bondholder Debt Is Unnecessary

The irony is that the United States does not need to carry a debt to bondholders at all. It has been financially sovereign ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the dollar off the gold standard domestically in 1933. This was recognized by Beardsley Ruml, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in a 1945 presentation before the American Bar Association titled “Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete.”

“The necessity for government to tax in order to maintain both its independence and its solvency is true for state and local governments,” he said, “but it is not true for a national government.” The government was now at liberty to spend as needed to meet its budget, drawing on credit issued by its own central bank. It could do this until price inflation indicated a weakened purchasing power of the currency.

Then, and only then, would the government need to levy taxes — not to fund the budget but to counteract inflation by contracting the money supply. The principal purpose of taxes, said Ruml, was “the maintenance of a dollar which has stable purchasing power over the years. Sometimes this purpose is stated as ‘the avoidance of inflation.’”

The government could be funded without taxes by drawing on credit from its own central bank; and since there was no longer a need for gold to cover the loan, the central bank would not have to borrow. It could just create the money on its books. This insight is a basic tenet of Modern Monetary Theory: the government does not need to borrow or tax, at least until prices are driven up. It can just create the money it needs. The government could create money by issuing it directly; or by borrowing it directly from the central bank, which would create the money on its books; or by taking a perpetual overdraft on the Treasury’s account at the central bank, which would have the same effect.

The “Power Revolution” — Transferring the “Money Power” to the Banks

The Treasury could do that in theory, but some laws would need to be changed. Currently the federal government is not allowed to borrow directly from the Fed and is required to have the money in its account before spending it. After the dollar went off the gold standard in 1933, Congress could have had the Fed just print money and lend it to the government, cutting the banks out. But Wall Street lobbied for an amendment to the Federal Reserve Act, forbidding the Fed to buy bonds directly from the Treasury as it had done in the past.

The Treasury can borrow from itself by transferring money from “intragovernmental accounts” — Social Security and other trust funds that are under the auspices of the Treasury and have a surplus – but these funds do not include the Federal Reserve, which can lend to the government only by buying federal securities from bond dealers. The Fed is considered independent of the government. Its website states, “The Federal Reserve’s holdings of Treasury securities are categorized as ‘held by the public,’ because they are not in government accounts.”

According to Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, the prohibition against allowing the government to borrow directly from its own central bank was written into the Banking Act of 1935 at the behest of those bond dealers that have an exclusive right to purchase directly from the Fed. A historical review on the website of the New York Federal Reserve quotes Eccles as stating, “I think the real reasons for writing the prohibition into the [Banking Act] … can be traced to certain Government bond dealers who quite naturally had their eyes on business that might be lost to them if direct purchasing were permitted.”

The government was required to sell bonds through Wall Street middlemen, which the Fed could buy only through “open market operations” – purchases on the private bond market. Open market operations are conducted by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which meets behind closed doors and is dominated by private banker interests. The FOMC has no obligation to buy the government’s debt and generally does so only when it serves the purposes of the Fed and the banks.

Rep. Wright Patman, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency from 1963 to 1975, called the official sanctioning of the Federal Open Market Committee in the banking laws of 1933 and 1935 “the power revolution” — the transfer of the “money power” to the banks. Patman said, “The ‘open market’ is in reality a tightly closed market.” Only a selected few bond dealers were entitled to bid on the bonds the Treasury made available for auction each week. The practical effect, he said, was to take money from the taxpayer and give it to these dealers.

Feeding Off the Real Economy

That massive Wall Street subsidy was the subject of testimony by Eccles to the House Committee on Banking and Currency on March 3-5, 1947. Patman asked Eccles, “Now, since 1935, in order for the Federal Reserve banks to buy Government bonds, they had to go through a middleman, is that correct?” Eccles replied in the affirmative. Patman then launched into a prophetic warning, stating, “I am opposed to the United States Government, which possesses the sovereign and exclusive privilege of creating money, paying private bankers for the use of its own money. … I insist it is absolutely wrong for this committee to permit this condition to continue and saddle the taxpayers of this Nation with a burden of debt that they will not be able to liquidate in a hundred years or two hundred years.”

The truth of that statement is painfully evident today, when we have a $22 trillion debt that cannot possibly be repaid. The government just keeps rolling it over and paying the interest to banks and bondholders, feeding the “financialized” economy in which money makes money without producing new goods and services. The financialized economy has become a parasite feeding off the real economy, driving producers and workers further and further into debt.

In the 1960s, Patman attempted to have the Fed nationalized. The effort failed, but his committee did succeed in forcing the central bank to return its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs. The prohibition against direct lending by the central bank to the government, however, remains in force. The money power is still with the FOMC and the banks.

A Model We Can No Longer Afford

Today, the debt-growth model has reached its limits, as even the Bank for International Settlements, the “central bankers’ bank” in Switzerland, acknowledges. In its June 2016 annual report, the BIS said that debt levels were too high, productivity growth was too low, and the room for policy maneuver was too narrow. “The global economy cannot afford to rely any longer on the debt-fueled growth model that has brought it to the current juncture,” the BIS warned.

But the solutions it proposed would continue the austerity policies long imposed on countries that cannot pay their debts. It prescribed “prudential, fiscal and, above all, structural policies” — “structural readjustment.” That means privatizing public assets, slashing services, and raising taxes, choking off the very productivity needed to pay the nations’ debts. That approach has repeatedly been tried and has failed, as witnessed for example in the devastated economy of Greece.

Meanwhile, according to Minneapolis Fed president Neel Kashkari, financial regulation since 2008 has reduced the chances of another government bailout only modestly, from 84 percent to 67 percent. That means there is still a 67 percent chance of another major systemwide crisis, and this one could be worse than the last. The biggest banks are bigger, local banks are fewer, and global debt levels are higher. The economy has farther to fall. The regulators’ models are obsolete, aimed at a form of “old-fashioned banking” that has long since been abandoned.

We need a new model, one designed to serve the needs of the public and the economy rather than to maximize shareholder profits at public expense.

_____________________

An earlier version of this article was published in Truthout.org. Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution. Her latest book is Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age, published by the Democracy Collaborative. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

The post The Bankers’ “Power Revolution”: How the Government Got Shackled by Debt appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Within just three months, 42 councils have signed the pledge – representing over 17 million people between them in the UK  – and more than 34 million in the US, Australia, Canada and Switzerland.

Declaring a climate emergency creates an opportunity to:

1. Involve citizens through citizen’s assemblies and other processes of participation and consultation in setting priorities for ambitious carbon reduction and understanding and engaging with the difficult choices that implies.
2. Create healthier, more resilient and sustainable local communities powered by locally generated low carbon energy, served by affordable and sustainable transport, higher quality and more efficient housing stock and fed by sustainable food and land systems.
3. Un-do business as usual. In a time of cut-backs, reverse costly policies and investments in carbon-intensive infrastructures such as roads or airports and divest council pension funds from fossil fuels.

What does it mean to declare a climate emergency?

For a council to have called a ‘climate emergency’, commonly advanced guidelines say that they must have: used these specific words in a motion or executive decision; they must set a target date to reduce their local climate impacts consistent with the IPCC report; they must set up a working group to report within a short timescale; and they must engage with a cross section of the community.

When in ‘emergency mode’, councils must allocate discretionary funds towards climate action. That includes things such as: educating the community, advocating for action from higher level governments, mitigating and building resilience against the impacts of climate change, and funding or undertaking the planning and research needed to implement full state and national emergency mobilisation.

So far, councils’ pledges and aims have varied enormously. For example: Scarborough council has committed to a target of zero carbon emissions by 2030, and will seek up to £80,000 in funding over two years for a sustainability officer to help achieve their goals. Meanwhile, Liverpool City Council deleted all references to declaring a ‘Climate Emergency’ and many of the suggested actions to be taken. Its plan has no stated target, no timeline and no budget. In Lancaster and Oxford a Citizen’s Assembly is being set up as part of their process; this is a deliberative process in which a representative group of citizens selected at random from the population, learn about, discuss, and make recommendations in relation to a particular issue or set of issues.

Local governments are often in the front line of dealing with climate change impacts (such as flooding, fires, storm damage) and the on the receiving end of demands for mitigation action. A key issue is working out what local governments have exclusive control over (as opposed to national and regional authorities): and where the boundaries of responsibility lie, because with climate change they are often very complex and diffuse. Clearly councils also facing funding difficult constraints. Yet, across transport, energy, housing, waste, buildings, people are looking to councils for leadership.

So what can they do?

We are not short of concrete ideas about what to do. Reports such as Zero Carbon Britain show sector by sector analysis of what’s possible in the UK by 2030. Many cities have already taken the lead with emissions reduction pledges and zero carbon targets including commitments from Bristol and Manchester aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030 and 2038 respectively. Across the world, the cities organisation C40 has been calling for fossil free streets: commitments to procure only zero-emission buses from 2025; and ensuring a major area of the city is zero emission by 2030.

Planning is key and so is reducing demand. The services people want, such as heat and mobility, are often those they show the greatest indifference towards. We are often fearful of challenging people’s attachment to their cars, for example. But if safe, reliable and affordable alternatives are provided, people will use them. When affordable and accessible infrastructures are built for buses and bikes and pedestrians, people use them as numerous examples around the world have shown.

Around housing, councils can help to deliver on the government pledge to halve energy use from new build by 2030 and for all new homes to be heated by fossil free systems by 2025. They can promote energy efficiency schemes and exploit other grant funding, promote new carbon neutral housing schemes, either as authority owned projects or with partners and transform council’s own properties to maximise their own potential for energy production and saving.

Regarding transport, councils can promote energy efficiency in local transport, promote cycling and car sharing, consider car exclusion zones or access charges, promote the use of electric cars by providing charging points and invest in EV infrastructure, improve public transport integration (bikes, buses and trains) and consider how transport contracts can be used to promote green travel.

On energy, councils can promote low energy use- smart energy, energy efficiency and conservation. They can consider providing funding for solar energy installations on the basis of shared returns, review the authority’s own energy use and consider setting up ESCOs (energy service companies).

Others areas include waste and food. Councils can review waste and recycling policies- take pressure off land-fill and reduce methane and other emissions. Where possible they might target food consumption through procurement and menus in schools to include less meat and dairy.

In terms of business, they can promote support services for local businesses. Preferential business rates for local firms, for example, as part of much needed regional redevelopment, or creating Local Enterprise Partnerships to set up low carbon enterprise zones with tax breaks to nurture jobs, investment and innovation.

What can we stop doing?

As well as thinking creatively about how to deliver services in low carbon ways, we also need to accelerate the shift away from the fossil fuel economy.

Declaring an emergency permits a veto over actions which are incompatible with radical decarbonisation in line with the Paris agreement, and climate-proofing all areas of policy. This should mean divestment from fossil fuels. Local councils in the UK invest over £14 billion in the fossil fuel industry. Divestment from cities assets from fossil fuels though pension funds sends a powerful signal and makes a major contribution. Of the 1032 institutions that have divested from fossil fuels worldwide, just 15% are governments. But there are now more than 15 UK councils – from Sheffield to Stroud, Brighton to Birmingham –calling for divestment from their pension funds.

Beyond the local

Local council action doesn’t exist in a vacuum of course. Some of the measures described above require a supportive national regulatory environment. Financing could be delivered as part of a Green New Deal. Carbon budgets need to be set and enforced by independent national agencies such as the climate change committee. National government needs to give direction by laying down limits and reversing major decisions that produce carbon lock-in incompatible with 1.5 around airport expansion and fracking for example. Local government can make their voice heard to lobby government on this.

Declaring a climate emergency is just a starting point, and not without its challenges. But the good news is there are numerous policies that can be put in place as well as initiatives bubbling up from below that can be harnessed to scale up and accelerate the pace of change.

So what are we waiting for?

Reprinted from Rapid Transitions Alliance. You can find the original post here!

Featured image: Climate Emergency – PeoplesClimate-Melb-IMG_8280. By Takver. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).

The post What would a climate emergency plan look like? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Milica Begovic, Joost Beunderman, Indy Johar: The intent of putting the Next Generation Governance (#NextGenGov) agenda at the centre of the Istanbul Innovation Days 2018 was to start to explore the future of the world’s governance challenges, and to debate how a new set of models are needed to address a growing ‘relevance gap’ in governance and peacebuilding.

Any exploration into the Next Generation of Governance requires us to recognize that in an increasingly multi-polar world, a world where power is increasingly more directly used and the singular rule of law we had ‘hoped’ for is being challenged, the future of governance is not only about the technocratic capacity to make rules (even if they are machine readable rules), but also our ability to construct new social legitimacy for all and by all.

In a world where we are facing urgent calamities and deep-running risks like never before, organizations like UNDP are witnessing a growing gap between the incremental progress in practice and a rapidly accelerating set of challenges — whether rampant inequality and its impact on social cohesion, growing ranks of forcefully displaced people, the fragmentation of state agency, rapid depletion of the commons, or the seemingly intractable rise of new forms of violence. This gap — between the emerging reality (strategic risks) and existing practice — is set to exponentially grow unless there is a major rethink of development practice and how we remake governance fit for the 21st century.

Earlier, we hypothesized that across the world, our governance models are broken: we are holding on to 19th century models that deny the complexity of the ‘systemocracy’ we live in : a world of massive interdependencies. #NextGenGov therefore is an exploration — the first of many — of the type of experiments that chart a way towards a future in sync with the Sustainable Development Goals. It aims to explore the lessons, challenges and gaps emerging with governance not relegated to a single goal (SDG 16) but as the prerequisite of achieving the SDG agenda as a whole.

A very 21st century kind of failure

It could be argued governance is the central failure of the 21st century — sidelined as an inconvenient overhead, governance innovation has seen consistent underinvestment and a lack of attention. Our means of governance and regulation have become relics in an age of growing complexity. New capabilities and trends like rapid real-time data feedback loops, algorithmic decision making, new knowledge of the pathways of injustice and inequality, and the rise of new tools and domains of power are challenging established ways of decision making. Frequently hampered by simplistic notions about the levers of change, awed by networked power dynamics in the private sector and undermined by public sector austerity, many of us seem scared and disoriented in responding to the scale of failure and new needs we are witnessing. Worse still, we seem unable to make the case that ultimately, good governance should not be a means of state control but a means to unleash sustainably the full and fair capacity of all human beings.

In this context, the growing strategic risks of our age are making past governance protocols and processes increasingly incoherent and misaligned to the need of both member states and our broader global ecosystems; both real-world precedents and statistically derived probability are collapsing as viable decision-making tools. This incongruity is revealed at different scales and conditions:

1. The existing structures, governance and business models, skills, and institutional cultures are producing solutions that do not fit the new nature of problems they are supposed to be addressing (IPCC’s 1.5 C report and genetically engineered baby in China as most recent proxies of misalignment of current practice and emerging existential threats).

2. Business-as-usual as a method to address the entirely new scale and modality of problems is a recipe for decline and irrelevance (consider ongoing efforts to apply current regulatory paradigms to distributed technologies like blockchain).

3. Governments and investors too are experiencing the lack of coherence between existing solutions and emerging problems, and are therefore eager to restructure their relationship with UNDP and similar organisations.

Towards new Zones of Experiment

Searching for fresh perspectives, our approach was to hone in on a series of Zones of Experiment — a range of domains that could unlock some of the great transitions the world is facing. We looked at new ways to protect and restore the commons, to actualize the human rights of landless nations, and to prevent conflict and empower civic actors in revealing abuses. We also explored science fiction, arts and culture as seedbeds for imagining alternative economic systems, the role of new technologies in urban governance, and new practices in the way power is organized, manifested and influences decision making.

Across these zones of experiment, we are seeing how a new generation of edge practitioners is challenging the status quo, and how their experiments enable us to learn both context-specific and transferable lessons. Together, they point the way to the #NextGenGov agenda as a new approach to strategic innovation (and feedback coming in after the IID2018 indicates the need to explore additional Zones of Experiments with emerging new practices such as governance of digital financial markets and impact of systemic structural issues, such as decline of trust on single point sectors including attitudes towards vaccination).

Underlying all these is the double edged sword of rapid technological progress in a multi-polar world that is challenging established ethical certainties. The unexplainable AI is one such manifestation, where the advanced identification of correlation is argued to be sufficient to guide decision-making be judicial or even law enforcement, challenging — even perhaps regressing — us to a pre-scientific age and undermining the basic principles of governance — accountability and equality of treatment (as argued by Jacob Mchangama).

As Primavera de Filippi outlined in her keynote speech, new technological capabilities always carry the potential both to disrupt the status quo or conversely reify existing structures of power and inequality. If we want to put the new tools of power in the hands of the many not the few, we need to focus on the governance of the new infrastructures rather than rely on governance by those infrastructures. However, whether in blockchain applications (Primavera’s domain) or elsewhere, it is evident that often we simply don’t know yet what kind of detailed issues, unintended consequences or unexpected feedback loops we might face when applying new technological capabilities. This means experimentation can’t be seen as an add-on but should be at the core of exploring the future and rapid learning about implications of emerging trends.

This is not the place to summarize each zone of experiment discussed during the Istanbul Innovation Days. But we can outline a series of shared lessons and implications for the future of governance and peacebuilding.

1. Micro-massive Futures — A series of new micro-massive data, sensing, processing and influencing capabilities (as revealed in the work of Metasub, PulseLab Kampala and Decibel) is enabling state and non-state actors to transcend the tyranny of the statistically aggregated average, and instead focus on the micro, the unique and the predictive — early warnings on looming epidemics or weather-related crop failure, emerging signs of microbial antibiotic resistance, or the compound impacts of pollution on individuals, particularly in disadvantaged populations. The much more fine-grained understanding they enable (whether through big data, social media mining, or specific sampling and real-time blockchain-anchored measurement) creates radical new pathways to harboring and enhancing the public interest. Achieving decent average outcomes (of health, pollution, human development…) has more than ever become obsolete as a goal: the geographically, individually and temporally hyper specific data we can obtain, and the wicked nature of the issues at hand, require new ways of understanding ‘risk’ — and acting on it. This same micro-massive future on the other hand is also weaponizing the capacity to mine data in order to influence outcomes at the societal scale — opening up huge new questions about the meta governance of these new capacities in the first place. This implies a double set of responsibilities: if we can now govern and influence outcomes at the micro-level of the individual and molecular detail, and at the massive scale of societal bias, with at both scales growing capabilities to understand risk and predict possibilities — how do we govern in this new reality in order to use these powers for good? Or conversely how to ensure that the emerging capabilities of new governing realities are not resulting in human rights abuses, discrimination and violence?

2. From control to ennoblement — Where such distributed data generating and analysis capacity comes into its own is through new contracting agreements that change our capacity to manage shared assets. The multi-party contributory contracts, e.g. the blockchain-based agreements at the heart of the Regen Network, show us how the collective inertia around agricultural restoration could be overcome. Crucially, rather than disincentivizing ‘bad behaviours’ through control, such ennobling regulatory systems can now be imagined to incentivize, communicate and verify contributory systems. Equally, this capability is paving ways for entirely new class of governance mechanisms for the commons — including bestowing legal rights on rivers and the Amazon. How do we reimagine governance if such ennoblement and restoration would structurally be our objective?

3. Making the invisible visible — New ways of building the politics of change are continuously emerging. Using mapping, animation, arts and other visualization tools, practitioners like Forensic Architecture and Invisible Dust — and in different ways, Open Knowledge Germany — are empowering citizens and civic groups to reveal issues which for a wide range of reasons tend to remain hidden — whether in the case of state agents committing human rights abuses or pernicious, slow-moving killers like air pollution (which in many case of course equally implicates states in failing to uphold human rights). By involving distributed civic networks and creative professionals from right across traditional disciplines, and by connecting to the aspirations of populations in different ways, such emerging tactics act as a powerful complement to established tools to build the demand for change.

4. Hybrid participatory futures — Getting to a next level of citizen engagement in the transitions we face requires a next generation of platforms that enable engagement with complexity, new technology and alternative imaginings of the future. This is about new settings for deliberation, new ways of extending invitations to take part, and tapping into the creative resources of science fiction and the arts to reimagine social contract and alternative economic systems. Medialab Prado in Madrid, the Edgeryders community, the deliberative citizens’ assemblies in Ireland or, at local scale, RanLab’s deliberative polls across Africa, show in different ways that new settings for participation can engender new cultures of participation cutting across ‘online’ and ‘offline’. Their deep investment in the tactics of convening people enable the creation of new and highly constructive new communities of concern around difficult topics, as well as building legitimacy for bold experimental approaches. This in turn enables the prevention of potential policy failure or the addressing of topics hitherto thought untouchable by established political players. In an era that frequently bemoans the decline of trust in the abstract, such cultural infrastructure rebuilds avenues towards greater trustworthiness across different parties, and an ability to imagine futures unconstrained by current divisions and biases, as the mitigation of risk. As differing platforms have differing biases in terms of who they attract an what behaviors they foster, such participation will always needs to be hybrid — well curated online platforms, temporal gatherings and permanent physical spaces all play a role in building the shared legitimacy for civic innovation. Enabling the participatory co-creation of the future is a fundamental component of the governance architecture in a complex world: we must complement the nudging of people’s behavior (a crucial tactic which has been applied with considerable success) with nurturing human imagination and facilitating deliberation and engagement with evidence.

5. Public goods & rights beyond the state — In an era where about 68 million people are currently stateless and this number is expected to rise significantly in the coming years, we are seeing state players as unable, unwilling or simply absent in the anchoring of fundamental human rights like people’s individual and family identity, and unable to access public goods provided outside the national boundary. The Rohingya project and IRYO show powerful alternatives and lessons for the remaking of public services like healthcare for both refugee populations and other contexts where access to such services is patchy. These positive alternatives are equally matched by more challenges examples of the quasi privatization of justice — where large technology multinationals are already acting something like a judicial system — “one that is secretive, volatile, and often terrifying.’ They also reveal the need and possibility to reimagine not just service provision but also new architectures of governance beyond the nation state — consider the incoherence of applying national laws to growing numbers of stateless people, para-state futures around the world. The fundamental question arises whether the seemingly limitless rise in populations on the move and para state governance could compel us to imagine and construct at a more structural level new domains of service provision potentially disinter-mediated from the state — and whether that might be more than just dire necessity but also an opportunity to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

6. From Evidence based to Experimentation Driven Policy — In an age of increasing complexity, the danger of traditional evidence based policy leading us by the rear view mirror is evident. Instead, the zones of experiment — whether EcoLogic’s futuristic urban landscapes or the service design innovation shared by Pia Andrews from both New Zealand and New South Wales — show the possibility of a new arc of policy formation: experimentation is used to create new forms of situated intelligence and learning, consisting of both new evidence and new insights to underpin the ongoing and iterative development of policies and programmed. These pathways enable institutions to make sense of changes, (re)formulate intent and execution pathways, and thus co-evolve in an open and collaborative process. Fundamentally this is about recognizing 21st century governance will be structurally different: the new institutional capacity can clearly not be designed in vitro but has to grow in-situ, informed by strategic portfolios of experimental options in order to grow the evidence necessary for policy intervention.

7. Sovereignty 2.0. In an age where a vital commons governance can now also be advanced either by imbuing ecological entities — such as rivers in Columbia and elsewhere — with legal rights or by emerging new sets of capabilities like smart contracts and machine learning — as indicated by Regen Network — could this mean the massive scaling of strategies that imbue new types of bodies with ‘sovereign’ powers and capabilities for e.g. machine-based contracting and fining? If so, and heeding Primavera de Filippi’s warnings, the governance of these infrastructures will be a crucial field of innovation.

Whilst even individually these are important new trajectories, when taken together these emerging lessons show how we need to challenge our existing practices at a deeper level. Given the degrees of uncertainty and emergence we face, this implies a call for strategic investment in a broad portfolio of experiments can guide us to the future; fundamentally these are learning options that enable UNDP and its partners to seed and test new ways of governing across different domains. In parallel,#NextGenGov also pointed towards a further set of questions and challenges we face when staring into the future of Governance in a multi-polar tomorrow.

1. BEYOND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

In a world of sped-up complexity and change, the social contracts and legitimacy underlying our governance systems are constantly in question, not least because the relevance gaps affecting nearly all players (between needs and capabilities; between promise and delivery; between aspiration and capacity) means that not just trust, but actual trustworthiness is in decline. Across the world, we are seeing broadly two cultural-societal paradigms that underlie potential future social contracts: both of which could be argued as falling. Where individualism is the main tenet, we all too often fail to mainstream and anchor societal innovations that would reduce collective risk, whether vaccination rates or distributed flood prevention strategies. Where the collective is seen to take priority over the individual, the possible inability to accommodate divergence and diversity risks undermining the distributed creativity, energy and drive needed (and available!) to address wicked issues. The challenge we face is to move towards social contracts based on an explicit recognition of interdependence — reaffirming the need for the hybrid participation structures suggested above to provide the distributed fertile ground for this, as well as opening the space for discussions on system governance beyond the human governance. In future Innovation Days and Next Gen Gov experiments we need to transcend natural rights and embrace new sovereignty 2.0: such as sovereignty for rivers, trees and forests, opening the scope for dynamic interactions of such rights frameworks for a new social ecological contract.

2. MORE THAN ONE DEMOCRACY?

Irrespective of scale or context, it is clear that no sole actor — whether state, civic sector, corporate or start-up — has the ability to tackle the wicked issues of our time alone. This means that discourses on good governance and democracy fundamentally have to be about the distributed power to co-create society. Clearly this is conditioned both by the openness of institutional infrastructures and by the socio-economic fundamentals that enable or hinder people’s agency. Recognizing democracy as creating the positive freedom of ‘being able to care’ (whether about individual life choices, the craftsmanship of work, and about wider social and planetary interdependencies) implies not just a concern about the trends that reduce such capabilities (such as declining economic growth, growing job insecurity or the disasters that uproot people’s lives) but also a focus on the multitude of avenues that enable such care to be expressed and acted upon. The challenge we face is that in this reality, seeing multiparty parliamentary systems as the sole mechanism for delivering democracy seems increasingly hollow: citizen assemblies and participative, high-frequency accountability & feedback systems are examples of vital complementary mechanisms for the enhancement and preservation of public and shared goods. The examples we have seen are evidence of how they can unlock positive, inclusive new avenues to the future at any scale from the local to the global — in ways that ‘politics’ as usual cannot.

3. BUREAUCRATIC REVOLUTION.

In the non-pejorative sense of the word, bureaucracy is at the core of governance. Innovation and experimentation in the realm of our everyday bureaucracy can change the nature and people’s experience of governance and everyday life itself — look no further than Mariana Mazzucato’s work on the role of bureaucracy to create new markets. Just like the 19th century centralized bureaucracies shaped the notion of the modern state, the present ‘boring revolution’ in our capabilities (e.g. around data insight, zero overhead cost of micro transactions and transparent multi-actor contributory contracts) can drive a radical reinvention of the notion of governance and power. This is what is at stake. The challenge we face is evident in the many salutary lessons that IID2018 provided, on how positive outcomes of this process should not be taken for granted. Instead they can only result from clear intent, human-centered design and an approach to strategic innovation that is up to the magnitude of the issues at hand.

Beyond IID2018…to be continued

The IID2018 was an effort to manifest the strategic relevance gap between our rapidly growing needs and risks, and our all-too-slowly developing practice — in this case that of increasingly inadequate global governance models and implications across a range of interdisciplinary policy spaces. If revealing strategic risks and their interrelated nature is about building the demand side for ambitious change — Invisible Dust’s credo of “making the invisible visible” clearly struck a chord — then what comes next has to be a strategic innovation response that goes beyond organizational tweaks or individual responses. After all, in a show-of-hands poll on the first day of IID2018, only 5 people thought the world is on track in achieving Sustainable Development Goals — hardly surprising, given recent news on climate change or the accumulating impact of air pollution on health and learning. Addressing governance failures is at the heart of delivering the SDGs and it will require concerted belief, effort and strategic scale investment.

By virtue of its cross-sectoral strategic development role, UNDP has a natural and unique responsibility to focus on addressing the strategic, entangled and systemic governance risks facing us at a national, transnational and global level — and in doing so it needs to act as integrator on a country and transnational levels, whilst recognizing and respecting the necessity of a multipolar yet machine advanced interoperable future — where the notion, means and conceptions of governance are fully reimagined and socially co-created for a 21st century. Practically, this means NextGenGov was just the beginning of investing in and building a strategic portfolio of experiments that enable partners to learn, manage risk, and effect system change, in order to rebuild the (technical, political, informational, financial) capability of states and civic actors for agile, iterative governance that is premised less on building solutions and more about dealing with our new certainty — uncertainty.

*Special thanks in developing a part of this blog (strategic relevance gap) go to Luca Gatti of Axilo.

The post 7 Lessons & 3 Big Questions for the Next 10 Years of Governance appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Wed 21 November 2018, 18:15 – 20:30 GMT

Makespace Oxford: 1 Aristotle Lane, Oxford OX2 6TP, United Kingdom

REGISTER HERE

Building upon Shareable’s years of experience covering the ‘sharing ecosystem’ and the 137 model policies and case studies curated for the new book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons,” Tom Llewellyn, strategic partnerships director of Shareable, will show how the real sharing economy is already connecting people together, empowering community-led disaster recovery efforts, and working under the radar to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Tom Llewellyn is a lifelong sharer, commoner, and storyteller who travels the globe inspiring and empowering communities to share for a more resilient, equitable, and joyful world. He’s the Strategic Partnerships Director for Shareable.net, executive producer and host of the podcast documentary series The Response, and co-editor of the book “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons”.

Following the presentation, attendees will participate in an interactive ‘World Café’ style discussion, working together to evaluate Oxford by exploring the state of things, the available resources, the needs of residents, and what the steps might be to meet those needs together.

This workshop is for anyone interested in exploring how we might activate Oxford’s urban commons together to address some of our city’s most pressing needs. Please bring your enthusiasm, ideas, and any examples of projects you’re already aware of to share and connect with others.

This event is in partnership with the Solidarity Economy Association, an Oxford-based organisation supporting the growth of the UK’s solidarity economy through education, research, and awareness raising projects. The solidarity economy is made up of grassroots organisations, informal meetings, local community groups, co-operatives, associations and networks of organisations in every sector of our economy. They have been created to meet a need within their community, or broader society, that isn’t being met by our mainstream economy, or because those needs are being met in unethical or unsustainable ways. These initiatives all share a set of values that include equal decision-making, equity, sustainability, pluralism, and solidarity, and they are working towards a just and sustainable world, one that puts the real needs of people and our planet first.

The post Sharing Oxford – Activating our Urban Commons with Tom Llewellyn appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Ryan Conway:  The city of Ghent has a fairly long and developed tradition of citizen engagement. Advisory councils and public hearings, which were first introduced in the 1970s, evolved into more comprehensive approaches to community-based planning and led to the creation of a new city department, according to the city of Ghent. By 2003, that department began an “Area Operation” that proactively interacts with neighborhoods in the 25 districts of the city.

This increased focus also produced a new name, the Policy Participation Unit, and includes 20 “neighborhood managers” who engage one or two of the districts and act as brokers between the city and residents to ensure consistent interaction, according to a report titled “Good Practices” published by the European Cultural Foundation in 2016.

The Policy Participation Unit also facilitates a Resident’s Academy, grants for temporary-use projects in underutilized public spaces, neighborhood “Debatcafés” and focus groups, as well as a Neighborhood of the Month program that brings the mayor to each neighborhood for an entire month of interactive discussions.

View full policy here (in Dutch).

Learn more from:

• European Cultural Foundation’s publication on commons and culture

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Japan has found a way to write off nearly half its national debt without creating inflation. We could do that too.

Let’s face it. There is no way the US government is ever going to pay back a $20 trillion federal debt. The taxpayers will just continue to pay interest on it, year after year.

A lot of interest.

If the Federal Reserve raises the fed funds rate to 3.5% and sells its federal securities into the market, as it is proposing to do, by 2026 the projected tab will be $830 billion annually. That’s nearly $1 trillion owed by the taxpayers every year, just for interest.

Personal income taxes are at record highs, ringing in at $550 billion in the first four months of fiscal year 2017, or $1.6 trillion annually. But even at those high levels, handing over $830 billion to bondholders will wipe out over half the annual personal income tax take. Yet what is the alternative?

Japan seems to have found one. While the US government is busy driving up its “sovereign” debt and the interest owed on it, Japan has been canceling its debt at the rate of $720 billion (¥80tn) per year. How? By selling the debt to its own central bank, which returns the interest to the government. While most central banks have ended their quantitative easing programs and are planning to sell their federal securities, the Bank of Japan continues to aggressively buy its government’s debt. An interest-free debt owed to oneself that is rolled over from year to year is effectively void – a debt “jubilee.” As noted by fund manager Eric Lonergan in a February 2017 article:

The Bank of Japan is in the process of owning most of the outstanding government debt of Japan (it currently owns around 40%). BoJ holdings are part of the consolidated government balance sheet. So its holdings are in fact the accounting equivalent of a debt cancellation. If I buy back my own mortgage, I don’t have a mortgage.

If the Federal Reserve followed the same policy and bought 40% of the US national debt, the Fed would be holding $8 trillion in federal securities, three times its current holdings from its quantitative easing programs.

Eight trillion dollars in money created on a computer screen! Monetarists would be aghast. Surely that would trigger runaway hyperinflation!

But if Japan’s experience is any indication, it wouldn’t. Japan has a record low inflation rate of .02 percent. That’s not 2 percent, the Fed’s target inflation rate, but 1/100^th of 2 percent – almost zero. Japan also has an unemployment rate that is at a 22-year low of 2.8%, and the yen was up nearly 6% for the year against the dollar as of April 2017.

Selling the government’s debt to its own central bank has not succeeded in driving up Japanese prices, even though that was the BoJ’s expressed intent. Meanwhile, the economy is doing well. In a February 2017 article in Mother Jones titled “The Enduring Mystery of Japan’s Economy,” Kevin Drum notes that over the past two decades, Japan’s gross domestic product per capita has grown steadily and is up by 20 percent. He writes:

It’s true that Japan has suffered through two decades of low growth . . . . [But] despite its persistently low inflation, Japan’s economy is doing fine. Their GDP per working-age adult is actually higher than ours. So why are they growing so much more slowly than we are? It’s just simple demographics . . . Japan is aging fast. Its working-age population peaked in 1997 and has been declining ever since. Fewer workers means a lower GDP even if those workers are as productive as anyone in the world.

Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist for the World Bank, concurs. In a June 2013 article titled “Japan Is a Model, Not a Cautionary Tale,” he wrote:

Along many dimensions — greater income equality, longer life expectancy, lower unemployment, greater investments in children’s education and health, and even greater productivity relative to the size of the labor force — Japan has done better than the United States.

That is not to say that all is idyllic in Japan. Forty percent of Japanese workers lack secure full-time employment, adequate pensions and health insurance. But the point underscored here is that large-scale digital money-printing by the central bank used to buy back the government’s debt has not inflated prices, the alleged concern preventing other countries from doing it. Quantitative easing simply does not inflate the circulating money supply. In Japan, as in the US, QE is just an asset swap that occurs in the reserve accounts of banks. Government securities are swapped for reserves, which cannot be spent or lent into the consumer economy but can only be lent to other banks or used to buy more government securities.

The Bank of Japan is under heavy pressure to join the other central banks and start tightening the money supply, reversing the “accommodations” made after the 2008 banking crisis. But it is holding firm and is forging ahead with its bond-buying program. Reporting on the Bank of Japan’s policy meeting on June 15, 2017, The Financial Times stated that BoJ Governor Kuroda “refused to be drawn on an exit strategy from easy monetary policy, despite growing pressure from politicians, markets and the local media to set one out. He said the BoJ was still far from its 2 per cent inflation goal and the circumstances of a future exit were too uncertain.”

Rather than unwinding their securities purchases, the other central banks might do well to take a lesson from Japan and cancel their own governments’ debts. We have entered a new century and a new millennium. Ancient civilizations celebrated a changing of the guard with widespread debt cancellation. It is time for a twenty-first century jubilee from the crippling debts of governments, which could then work on generating some debt relief for their citizens.

Photo by portable_soul

The post Sovereign Debt Jubilee, Japanese-Style appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Sharing Cities have been generating a lot of attention recently thanks to the Sharing Cities Network and the announcement of Shareable’s upcoming book on commons-based urban solutions for municipal and civic leaders. Interest in Australia and New Zealand is growing too as evidenced by some recent events like the Melbourne Conversations panel on Smart City Leadership that I spoke at for the launch of Melbourne Knowledge Week last year.

In a recent interview with Wallace Chapman for RadioNZ Sunday, I talked about the rise of Sharing Cities,platform cooperativism and the shift from extractive to generative forms of ownership and value creation. This led to a series of invitations from Kiwis across the country keen for me to speak on sharing cities including a warm welcome by the Mayor of Christchurch, New Zealand, a city devastated by the 2011 earthquake and going through a period of experimental urban regeneration (see Gap Filler for inspiration).

The Commons in Christchurch is located on what used to be the site of the Crowne Plaza hotel which was demolished in 2012. The site is now a hub of transitional activity and home to a number of post-quake organisations.

Widespread interest in Sharing Cities makes perfect sense. In 1800 only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities. This figure has climbed to 50% today, and the global urban population is projected to reach around 70% by 2050. We are clearly living through the urban century and human civilization will either make it or break it in cities. The need to develop innovative thinking to address the climate crisis, resource constraints, inequality, and energy descent is greater now than ever.

That’s why Sharing Cities is a refreshing antidote to the top-down, technologically deterministic vision of the future we so often hear about in discussions of Smart Cities and the Internet of Things – a vision dominated by sensor networks, data mining and myriad opportunities for corporate and government surveillance.

Too many cities have been quick to embrace ‘smart technologies’ that attempt to overlay a city-wide digital operating system. Where integrated water, energy and transportation networks track and respond to the movement of people and objects. Who wins and who loses in this scenario?

It’s reminiscent of a scene from the 1969 Philip K. Dick novel Ubik where the protagonist gets into an argument with his “money gulping door” which demands payment every time he needs to enter or exit the building as his terms of service contract makes clear.

Chinese city opens ‘phone lane’ for texting pedestrians via The Guardian,

Sharing Cities on the other hand provide citizen-centric alternatives that focus on increasing the sharing capacity of existing infrastructure like public buildings and free wifi; provide access to idle or underutilised assets for ridesharing, coworking or urban agriculture; and strengthen the social fabric through deliberative decision-making like Citizen’s Juries, Participatory Budgeting and other forms of active citizenship.

Sharing Cities are an interesting hybrid between the public, private and community sectors and rely on a range of public goods and commonly owned resources to operate effectively. These include everything from the internet and road networks to open data and vacant public land. Cities are at the vanguard of the sharing movement as hubs of disruptive innovation, knowledge transfer and creative communities. Sharing Cities are about creating pathways for participation that recognise the City as Commons and give everyone in the community the opportunity to enjoy access to common goods and create new forms of shared value, knowledge, and prosperity.

The Agrocité urban commons project in the suburbs of Paris (via The Guardian).

The time has come for cities everywhere to emulate Sharing City trailblazers like Seoul and Amsterdam who recognise that sharing builds urban resilience, economic interdependence and social cooperation. City governments can help strike a fair balance by putting citizens first, supporting platform cooperatives and protecting the public realm. Cities can design the infrastructure, services and regulations that enable sharing in all its forms and strengthen the urban commons through policies for sharing cities that support food, jobs, housing and transportation initiatives to keep and grow wealth in local communities.

Sharing Cities give everyone who wants to participate in the sharing economy the opportunity to have a fair go. Government and business must work together with citizens to develop policy solutions that make sense for people, cities and sharing platforms. Sharing Cities provide a framework to make this vision for an inclusive sharing economy a reality.

This article originally appeared in Shareable. 

The post Sharing Cities: Why Ownership, Governance and The Commons Matter More Than Ever appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this article – penned by Cat Johnson and originally published in Shareable – our good friends at the Sustainable Economies Law Center take us for us ride in their fabulous community-supported time machine. Theirs is a constructive and inspiring vision of the future that is fully aligned with the ideals of the P2P Foundation and, as you will soon see, the good people at SELC are working hard to achieve it.  Watch out for some joint P2P Foundation/SELC projects and campaigns in the near future.

On Tuesday, the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) hosted its annual Fall Celebration and Showcase. Now in its fifth year, SELC is a driving force for the new economy, doing pioneering work around worker cooperatives, home-based food businesses, alternative currencies, legal guides for sharing, legal apprenticeships, accessible legal cafes, renewable energy, the commons, seed libraries and more.

At the celebration, the SELC team gave an overview of what they’ve accomplished this year, including removing many legal barriers to people growing and selling home-based food; legalizing alternative currencies in California; removing one of the biggest barriers to cooperative housing; and launching the Worker Coop Academy. As Executive Director Janelle Orsi put it, “This September, the governor was just signing our bills left and right.”

Shareable and SELC recently partnered up to support seed sharing and seed libraries. With a grant from the Clif Bar Family Foundation, SELC and Shareable are launching a nationwide campaign to educate legislators and the public about the essential need for and legality of seed libraries, and to clarify and protect the legal status of seed libraries, which have come under pressure from regulators recently. Shareable will be publishing articles on seed issues, including seed sharing, seed libraries, seed saving and more. We will also promote the campaign, activate grassroots networks, and advocate for a seed library exemption law in California.

On Tuesday, the SELC team also painted a picture of a very bright future; and they did so in true SELC form with lots of laughs, cartoons, smarts and silliness. With the help of a community-supported time machine, we traveled into a future complete with healthy, thriving, sustainable communities. Here’s how it plays out:

2015: The Year of the Seed

In 2015, there are seed libraries in almost every city in the country. From these libraries people can check out free seeds, grow them, harvest the food, eat it, and share seeds back to the library. People have free access to seeds, there are thriving local food systems, and we have a diverse seed commons. SELC contributed to this bright seed future by creating a seed law tool shed, launching a national seed law petition, and legalizing seed.

2016: The Year of Local Investing

In 2014, communities realized that they needed to move money out of Wall Street and divest from fossil fuels, but there weren’t many options to invest elsewhere, due in large part to legal barriers preventing investing in local businesses. In 2016, investment portfolios include cooperatives, credit unions and small businesses. SELC’s Sustainable Economies Securities Act enabled people to invest locally and became a model for other states throughout the country.

2017: The Year of Home-Based Food Business

In 2014, giant corporations with underpaid workers controlled much of the nations agriculture. People who wanted to start a small food business couldn’t because there were so many legal barriers. By 2017, SELC has made it possible for just about anyone to start their own farm or home-based food business by legalizing these entities, pioneering legal structures that help new farmers obtain access to land, and supporting the growth of worker owned farms.

2018: The Year of the Worker Cooperative

In 2014 there were only 300 to 400 worker cooperatives, and many barriers to creating them. Businesses and law schools didn’t educate their students how to advise or operate worker owned businesses, business incubators and development agencies didn’t provide resources to worker cooperatives, and, in fact, most people didn’t even know what a worker cooperative was.

In 2018 there are thousands of worker cooperatives because of SELC’s pioneering research, education and advocacy. SELC remains at the forefront of building an ecosystem of support services and laying the legal foundation for community ownership and democracy in the workplace. They partnered with the East Bay Community Law Center and Project Equity to create the first ever Worker Coop Academy in the Bay Area; there are now accredited worker cooperative courses in colleges across California and the country; and SELC’s model city policies, that prioritize worker coops, have been passed in cities across the country.

2019: The Year of the Transformed Legal Profession

In 2014, no one could afford an attorney because most attorneys were working for the very rich. The attorneys that came out of law school couldn’t find a job in 2014 and attorneys working for corporations were helping people build bigger and bigger corporations which was ruining the planet and widening the wealth gap. This was a failure of the legal system which is supposed to help people build a just and equitable society. By 2019, SELC’sResilient Communities Legal Cafes, which offer down to earth legal help for people doing real things in real communities, have caught on all across the country and there are legal cafes everywhere. SELC also supports individuals who are opening their own legal practices to build sustainable societies, and there’s a network of a million lawyers, all over the world, who are helping to build sustainable societies.

2020: The Year of Apprenticeships

In 2014, attorneys were graduating from law school $200,000 in debt—not a good position to be in if they wanted to serve society’s needs. By 2020, because of widespread legal apprenticeships however, a new generation of legal attorneys are able to roll up their sleeves and help cultivate sustainable societies. Legal apprenticeships have revolutionized the legal system and legal professionals now have a deep culture of teaching and learning. SELC created resources for legal apprentices to navigate their way through the legal apprenticeship, they blogged about their experiences, and they got the word out. They were even featured in the New York Times. They also introduced legal apprenticeships laws all over the US, so people everywhere can take the apprentice route to becoming an attorney.

2021: Year of the Awesome Nonprofit

In 2014, there were tons of big nonprofits where things happened very slowly. Funding sources diminished, organizations spent more on fundraising than they did on programs, staffers were overworked and always buried in paperwork, and highly paid executives and administrative staff were weighing nonprofits down. With all this, nonprofits weren’t changing our communities as fast as we needed them to. In 2021, the age of the agile nonprofit, tens of thousands of nonprofits have adopted SELC’s organizational model:

• Everyone gets paid the same living wage
• Every staff member is a leader and takes sense of own over the organization’s work
• Everyone has the flexibility to continue to build their skills and knowledge
• Everyone can bring proposals on ways to improve the impact of the organization
• Staff are encouraged to work 30 hour work weeks, to be creative, and, of course, to put on silly shows.

2022: The Year of Renewable Energy

In 2014, people were doing crazy stuff: injecting poisonous chemicals into the ground to extract gas, cutting mountaintops, burning everything and taking over land with industrial-scale solar farms. By 2022, communities have placed solar systems on every possible rooftop. People and communities now own and control their energy needs. SELC helped pass regulation to make sure people could actually invest in things that sustain these community solar, and other renewable energy, projects. SELC also developed legal structures to enable community solar projects and cooperatively owned solar projects that brought energy independence to every community across America.

2023: The Year of the Freelance Owned Cooperative

In 2014, freelancers were forced to bid on jobs and giant companies such as Task Rabbit and Uber were making millions off of freelancers. In 2023, there are freelancer-owned cooperatives, including Bay Area-based freelancer-owned cooperative Loconomics, everywhere. It’s because of the legal blueprint that Loconomics and SELC created that freelancers are allowed to share in profits, decision making power, tools and resources.

2024: The Year of the Commons

Before global capitalism, most land and water resources were managed by the people who used them. Communities everywhere managed their land and water resources as a commons. In 2014, these resources were highly concentrated in the hands of large corporations. But we learned from commoners and researchers including Elinor Ostrom, the principles to manage our commons. SELC created the first legal structure to collectively own and manage our farmland as a commons and has started creating more commons-based legal structures for land, water, housing, the Internet, banks and more—all things can be managed as a commons. In 2024, they’re stewarded forever in the commons legal structures.

The Wrap

As the SELC staff and the audience were all basking in the glow of the vibrant, thriving future of sustainable communities, Orsi offered a reminder.

“You guys could stay here in the future,” she says, “but if you don’t go back and do your work, then none of this will exist.”

Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter

The post SELC Celebrates Victories and Launches Seed Library Campaign appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Denis Jaromil Rojo of dyne.org

Following the sudden and bizarre announcement that popular encryption software Truecrypt ‘may contain unfixed security issues’ and the equally bizarre recommendation by the Truecrypt developers to use Microsoft’s Bitlocker program (source of much derision from security professionals who assume it must be backdoored by the NSA), there has been a great deal of speculation as to firstly, why this has happened, and secondly what to use as a replacement if Truecrypt is indeed compromised. The most common theory to explain the announcement seems to be that the TC devs were put in the same impossible situation as Lavabit had been – pressured to install a backdoor to the software, the leaders decided to close down the project rather than give in to the US government’s demands, and in the case of TC, the recommendation of software presumed to be insecure is a coded message of some sort.

However it could be that an ongoing audit of the TC code had found multiple vulnerabilities and faced with the exhausting prospect of fixing them, the developers decided to throw in the towel instead. However this does not explain the recommendation of Bitlocker.

As to the second question, it appears there is not too much out there in the way of trusted open source software which could replace Truecrypt – proprietary non-open software must be presumed to be insecure as the code cannot be audited. One option might be Tomb, written by Jaromil of the excellent dyne.org.

“Tomb aims to be an 100% free and open source system for easy encryption and backup of personal files, written in code that is easy to review and links commonly shared components.”

Tomb does not appear to be super-complicated to set up, however it is definitely less user-friendly than Truecrypt, and unlike TC it does not work on Windows machines, the advice from the website being:

“…we strongly encourage people in need of strong encryption to not use Winslows, or at least to not generate encrypted partitions with it, since it can contain backdoors in the random number generation…”

Meanwhile we await more details to fill in the background on the Truecrypt announcement…

The post Alternative to Truecrypt appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From our friends at The Extraenviromentalist Podcast, whom we’ll be featuring regularly on the P2P blog.

From the episode notes:

“The ideas we have about our government systems have been dramatically shaped by the energy sources that power them. If the physical characteristics of coal and oil have developed the expectations of our 20th century politics, how they also invent ‘the economy’? Will it be possible to sabotage a system that has an entirely different energy profile than the one that gave birth to organized labor?

In Extraenvironmentalist #69 we speak with Timothy Mitchell about our political systems and his book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. We discuss the ways coal and oil have transformed collective labor demands, revolutionized our money systems and contributed to our global conflicts. Then, Richard Heinberg updates us on the shale oil bubble and the implications of peak oil as we discuss Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future. Richard reflects on the timing of peak oil predictions and what the may indicate for the upcoming decade.”

Excerpts

The post Podcast of the day: The Extraenviromentalist: Carbon Democracy appeared first on P2P Foundation.