Category: Earth Intelligence

From Occupy to Climate Justice: Merging Economic Justice and Climate Activism

by Wen Stephenson

It’s an odd thing, really. in certain precincts of the left, especially across a broad spectrum of what could be called the economic left, our (by which I mean humanity’s) accelerating trajectory toward the climate cliff is little more popular as a topic than it is on the right. In fact, possibly less so. (Plenty of right-wingers love to talk about climate change, if only to deny its grim and urgent scientific reality. On the left, to say nothing of the center, denial takes different forms.)

Sometimes, though, the prospect of climate catastrophe shows up unexpectedly, awkwardly, as a kind of non sequitur—or the return of the repressed.

I was reminded of this not long ago when I came to a showstopping passage deep in the final chapter of anarchist anthropologist David Graeber’s The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, his interpretive account of the Occupy Wall Street uprising, in which he played a role not only as a core OWS organizer but as a kind of house intellectual (his magnum opus, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, happened to come out in the summer of 2011). Midway through a brief discourse on the nature of labor, he pauses to reflect, as though it has just occurred to him: “At the moment, probably the most pressing need is simply to slow down the engines of productivity.” Why? Because “if you consider the overall state of the world,” there are “two insoluble problems” we seem to face: “On the one hand, we have witnessed an endless series of global debt crises…to the point where the overall burden of debt…is obviously unsustainable. On the other we have an ecological crisis, a galloping process of climate change that is threatening to throw the entire planet into drought, floods, chaos, starvation, and war.”

Continue reading “Jean Lieven: From Occupy to Climate Justice – Merging Economic Justice and Climate Activism”

ECUADOR INITIATIVE: Transition Proposals Toward a Commons-Oriented Economy and Society

Sponsored by the National Institute of Advanced Studies of Ecuador, carried out by the Free/Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) Society.

Marc Gauvin is actively engaged in the Ecuador endeavor. Establlishing true value is as important as establishing true cost — the first is social value, the second ecological value.

B.I.B.O. is an acronym referring to “Bounded Input Bounded Output” The sine-qua-non requirement for stability in the types of systems that include any money system. Passivity refers to a particular case of BIBO where output never exceeds input or in the case of currency, debt is always less or equal to prices i.e. money is not a negotiable object as explained in this document).

BIBO precisely defines stability in Control Systems Engineering. Understanding BIBO as applied to money systems is crucial as it provides a powerful basis for logically dispelling the current false money paradigm. It explains why almost everything we have been conditioned to believe about money is logically and mathematically inconsistent and the exact opposite of what is scientiically required to bring stability to money.   The conclusion of having applied Control Systems and Stability theory to money can be best summarised by the following theorem:

Continue reading “Ecuador Initiative: Passive BIBO Currency – Stable Liquidity for the 21st Century”