Economic Fundamentals

The first selection for consideration involves a video on co-operative workplaces such as Mondragón in the Basque region of Spain. The co-operative workplace departs from many models of how to structure and operate a workplacee.

The second selection is an excerpt from a animated documentary entitled Money as Debt by Canadian artist Paul Grignon of Gabriola Island off British Columbia. The video excerpt constitutes less than half of the original documentary, and I urge viewers to go to Mr. Grignon's website and either purchase the DVD or donate something to support his work (and while there you can peruse some of his art work which is quite beautiful. His main web site is:

Paul Grignon

the DVDs can be purchased at:

Money As Debt DVDs

and one can make a donation to help support his work via:

Donations.

The documentary excerpt on 'Money As Debt' which appears below draws a very compelling and understandable set of pictures outlining the actual nature of money. And, one of the principles implicit in the video is that banks don't pay interest to depositors in exchange for the right to loan out that deposited money but, rather, bankers use deposits as a means of leveraging those deposits to earn huge profits via the arbitrary laws which have been passed that enable bankers to create money out of thin air ... a practice which might be labled as 'fradulent' if it were done by individual citizens. At the very least, banks do not provide depositors with a fair return on the use to which the deposits are put ... which is not in the form of loans, but rather, in the form of a financial leveraging machine that is used to churn out money that is not really backed by anything of value and from which banks earn considrable profits. Those profits really belong to the depositers who were the ones who made the creation of money possible, since without such deposits, there would be no fulcrum through which money could be leveraged to many times its original, underlying value. In effect, depositors have been snookered by the banks and kept in the dark about the precise nature of the relationship among: (a) the money that is deposited, (b) the generation of more money, and (c) the failure of the banks to provide depositers with a fair return to the depositors who are the ones (along with a variety of laws which serve the interests of bankers) which make the whole enterprise possible.