Time for a Change... of blogger

This is my first ever guest post, from none other than Mr. Lee Barnes!

Facebook. A place that you can choose to pass your free time whiling away the minutes chatting to old friends, new friends, people you can hardly remember meeting (if you’re that type of user). A place to play games with or against people around the globe. A place to let people know what you had for dinner with a photo to prove it.  A place to talk, frape, network and the like. Lolling and using swear words in abbreviated form (that’s alright then!) like we are computer geniuses because we use the computer 23 hours a day but in fact don’t do anything else other than maybe type a crappy word document for some crappy thing that is taking up valuable time from being a computer genius. I speak here for myself of course.

Facebook. I don’t actually like it that much but it is akin to Pringles. But I think it may have changed my life or at the very least opened my eyes wider than I think they have ever been. Considering matchsticks were as necessary for me at school as a pen and pencil, that’s saying something! For I often receive videos on my newsfeed of various interesting and banal things, not all of them I bother to watch as it takes some time to load due to the lightweight internet we have been provided. Seriously if this internet was a person, you could take it to a bar (obviously if this person wasn’t in Saudi Arabia) and order it a half a shandy and it would be on the floor retching its guts up on its first sip of the watered down beverage. So, I chose to download this video that appeared on my newsfeed, make dinner, wash up, drink a non-alcoholic beer and satisfy Rachel…..by way of washing up, and then finally I watched this video.

The video is a TV interview for Russia Today, for those who don’t know it’s a news channel that expresses views that the mainstream channels wouldn’t even consider. The interview starts with the news headline ‘No Money, No Problems’ underneath the newscaster. The newscaster begins by talking about the economy and relaying the view that many people consider it broken. She then continues to say that big problems need big ideas then she picks up a fistful 'o' dollars and says ‘Here’s one, money. Throw it away!’ and she throws the green stuff on the floor.  She simply follows this action by saying ‘Crazy right?!’ then she introduces Peter Joseph.

Now I won’t tell you blow for blow what he said, that’s the fun part because you can watch it for yourself just YouTube Peter Joseph: Moving Beyond Money  or  it's been handily added as a link above! But his main point is to change the economic system that we presently use into a resource based economy. Now this guy isn’t a Tree hugging Trevor or a Pothead Paul but a lot of what he talks about is the absolute wastefulness our current system and the pressure to perpetually consume and use and then of course the pressure to have the money to consume and use. With machines doing more and more of the work, jobs are becoming fewer. The monetary system is innately corrupt and only serves to keep us in the ‘rat race’.

For me, Peter tells some truths that I think are important to quote: ‘The current economic model is stuck in time and is not representing what meets human needs, we have to get back to what supports human life, what we’ve learned from nature...... We can easily feed everyone on this planet. And the more you step back and look at how technically you can provide for the population, eliminate war, eliminate famine and eliminate crime, which is 95% money related, it begins to become clear an entirely new approach can be taken….’

It’s interesting to note all the while when Peter is talking there is a scrolling news feed at the bottom of the screen that mentions public fury at cost of foreign military campaigns, austerity cuts, EU bailouts, radiation spike at a nuclear power plant, No fly zone over Libya because of airstrikes, clashes in Bahrain, police fire at demonstrators in Syria…..the list goes on.

The main point I guess is this, if we are to survive, we simply cannot continue in this way. When profit is more important than people, we cannot say that we live in a civilized society. When we reward greed and punish poverty, we cannot say that we live in a just world. When we continue to plunder the worlds finite resources instead of using the technology that we already have to harvest the clean, renewable resources, we cannot say that we live in a wise world. If we want to change that and I for one certainly do then we need to try something different and from the research I have done, getting rid of money is sounding less crazy and making more and more sense.

 



Fancy a game of chess?

 

If you're struggling to envisage a world where money is a thing of the past, then take a look at this link. The video is worth a watch. So take a look and see for  yourself. I challenge you to disagree with any of the 10 principles!  http://www.freeworldcharter.org/en