C.C.M.J. MISSION STATEMENT – draft at 30th January 2014

FACING A DAUNTING PROBLEM:  Society provides only the barest hint of acknowledgement that the present money system is an appendage to a culture of cheating that dominates western civilisation, which will not countenance intrusions that might threaten the privileges of the rent-seekers.

THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEM: When decent people raise the quality-of-life in a community, the net gains are capitalised into higher land prices, which undoes all the good – and keeps the predator culture on track… Any optimism that good-hearted people will prevail, alas, cannot overcome that remorseless process; the fiscal problem has to be corrected, if there is to be transformation on the scale that many of us dream about.

MISSION SEEMINGLY IMPOSSIBLE: Why? Because the people serving as agents of the rent-seeking culture would never negotiate the changes that would undermine the benefits which rent-seeking people receive. In the face of this dominating power, there are so many individual initiatives that were/are inspiring, but they do not translate into society-wide reforms. Why not?

It is important to distinguish between local experiments in the Good Life (which are to be encouraged) and structural reforms to a system that has been designed to fabricate the pathologies from which people wish to escape.

Many micro experiments (from local currencies to land trusts and employee-owned enterprises) enliven the imagination as to what could be achieved, if people were generally free to engage in alternative ways of living. But the rent-seeking character of our culture is such that it will not allow any experiments to threaten its vital interests. Ergo – the flaws in the structure of the social system need to be concurrently removed.

IN A NEW DIRECTION: We need to point to examples of possible alternative ways of living (to stimulate the imagination of those who are too stressed to think through these possibilities for themselves); but concurrent with such experiments, we need a full-frontal attack on the flaws within the structure of the existing system.

A penetrating book is The Traumatised Society (2012) born of Fred Harrison’s astute historical understanding and glaring contemporary evidence from around the world.  After three 2013 conferences relating to it, another book will be published in 2014. The foundations of this book are evolving as Ten Theses, carefully stated as abstracts of one paragraph, each accompanied by around eight pages of pithy, scholarly expansion with contemporary examples and applications – see www.sharetherents.org/.

IN PREPARATION FOR CHANGE: Meanwhile a small lead group is seeking to create a coalition of interests representing the various “takes” on change; to see if it is possible to amass a sufficiently intensive movement for change of the kind that leaves the agents of the current system in no doubt that the re-design of the current social structure will come, because enough people demand that it come.

But that won’t happen unless enough people are mobilised behind an agreed agenda for change, in terms of both (a) the priority reforms – meaning, to the present power structure – and (b) the demonstration of a physical presence of the kind that obliges the powers-that-be to take notice.

Early efforts at identifying prime principles to be introduced in a redesigned political economy – that is, a justice-based global house-keeping – isolate three societal or universal principles that inter-weave……… • Rent paid for the use of commonly created assets to be restored to common well-being, not to rent-seekers • New Money and credit to be created as a public utility free of exploitation under agreed rules • Means for a basic standard of living to be available for all citizens 

The core problem and the task before society is neatly stated in this poem….
THE WRONG MOUNTAIN
There was a man,
who could have been
any of us and probably is,
who after a long arduous ascent
full of grit and sacrifice,
glanced back across the horizon,
only to realise that he had
climbed the wrong mountain.
Nic Askew

See: http://www.sharetherents.org

Book Review Ellen Brown – by Tony Crawford: https://ellenbrown.com/author/