FORUM fOR STABLE CURRENCIES
Record of Meetings held in the Palace of Westminster
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CCMJ

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March 24th 2004: Room G - Blackrod's Entrance - 6pm until 9pm
LET'S JUST DO IT while WORKING on POLITICAL CHANGE
Citizens' Self-Help and Early Day Motions
INTEGRATING MONEY, FINANCE and BANKING
with Lawrence Bloom - Pat Conaty - Simon Ranger

Complementary community currencies, commercial barter money, credit unions, ethical investment - these are the tools that citizens have invented for themselves but they are only palliatives for interest-bearing national debts and debt-based banking and finance. At the same time, there is still hope that Parliamentarians will also tackle the issues of record profits by banks that coincide with record levels of personal, corporate and national indebtedness.

Early Day Motion 323, entitled PUBLIC CREDIT FOR PUBLIC PURPOSES, was tabled by Austin Mitchell MP on December 17th 2003 and set out with six signatures (now 20). Voters should bring the topic to the attention of their MP and invite Parliamentarians to appreciate the degree to which political life has become a financial issue. EDM 323 again invites the Treasury to investigate the benefits of increasing the money supply through 'publicly created money'.

Publicly created money is inherently interest-free whereas interest on National Debt constitutes some 5% of taxpayers' money - this year slightly less than the military budget.
Who benefits? And how does the exponential growth of compounding interest affect the country's economy when the Government's budget is equal to some 40% of the nation's money supply?
http://edm.ais.co.uk/weblink/html/motion.htrnl/ref=323



Following an innovative, highly respected and successful career in the property business Lawrence Bloom decided to take a prolonged sabbatical and in 1996 began to travel the world extensively, furthering his studies of business and spiritual philosophies and practice. Since then he has spent significant amounts of time with International Spiritual Leaders, and with personalities at the cutting edge of the transformation movement in business, focusing on connecting communities and monetary systems.
Pat Conaty was born in the USA, has lived in Britain since 1978. He was Senior manager at Birmingham Settlement, an inner city regeneration agency from 1985 -1999 and founded many innovative services including the National Money Advice Training Unit, National Debtline, Business Debtline and the Aston Reinvestment Trust - the first mutually owned, community reinvestment fund in the UK. He currently works as a consultant with the New Economics Foundation and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham. He has published many reports in the field of monetary advice, fuel poverty, ecological enterprise, the social economy and community reinvestment He is a Trustee of the Scarman Trust and a Director of Birmingham Credit Union Development Agency.
Simon Ranger entered the advertising industry in the mid-1970s. He was a Copywriter and later Creative Director in London, New York and Stockholm before forming his own advertising agency. It won International, European, American and Scandinavian Advertising Awards and distinguished itself for Export Achievement. In 1992 Simon founded Probono, a not-for-profit organisation for business and human development. Between 1998 and 2000 Simon was a director of Maxicrop International Ltd, the UK originator of liquid seaweed for horticulture. He is a board member of a small group of companies involved in the harvesting, manufacturing, distribution and retailing of wild seaweeds for nutrition and healthcare.