Robin Hood Tax to be launched on Wednesday at 0.05am

The Robin Hood Tax is the UK version of the Tobin Tax which was at the beginning of ATTAC in France ten years ago.

As an anti-poverty campaign, it is more pragmatic than the economic theories of Tobin Tax definitions or the political demands of the Attac network.

Supported by a coalition of 48 organisations, the Robin Hood Tax campaign spells out what the income should be spent on.

And in the spirit of our times, it uses Twitter and YouTube.

The video is set to private until the launch which is set to 0.05am in parallel with the 0.05% tax that Robin Hood wants to take.

However, Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, dismissed the idea of a Tobin Tax only recently, according to the FT.

Of course, this tax doesn’t get to the root of all evils, but at least it’s bound to capture people’s imagination!

Updates on this page.

Submissions to the Treasury Select Committee

“Learning by blogging” has been great fun ever since I dipped into the Blogosphere. Thus I discovered not only that WordPress is the best platform, but also its magic of tagging as a ‘behind the screens’ networking tool. Plus I marvel at the power of combining Pages and Posts, besides the different kinds of categories for links and posts.

And thus I started one blog after another and now create links across them. For who knows what you may click on, what takes your interest down the road of understanding who makes money, in whose interest and who benefits…

And thus I just produced a page summarizing our submissions. For Green Credit for Green Purposes was the first document I produced for the Treasury Select Committee.

This was followed by The Stick of Green Taxation v the Carrot of Green Funding.

A year later, our response to their Inquiry into the Banking Crisis.

Public Cash for the Real Economy

Our article Public Cash for the Real Economy – The ultimate request, by on-line petition has been published in the Accountancy Business Journal and the Public Interest.

It is about the historic background of legalised usury and how the financial economy has taken over the real economy.

Frightening? Yes! But there are other ways! Click here for ‘barter currencies’.

Public Credit Petition

Our response to the UNDP’s Call for Concepts on how to finance adaptation to climate change was called Green Credit for Green Growth. It was ignored. Too many people simply seem to be too blind to the money issue that underlies all public services, whether health, education or environment.

However, like a dog at a bone, I keep at it. Since the Treasury Select Committee sets its own agenda which ignores our issue, I published a petition. It requests to stage an inquiry into the money supply.

Do you know that ‘money’ (i.e. a nation’s currency) consists of two fundamentally different components:

1. Cash or ‘narrow money’ as the banks call it, issued by the State free of interest

2. Credit or ‘broad money’, issued by financial institutions.

Well, anybody who knows about usury knows that Cash is ‘good money’ and Credit is ‘bad money’. And there is Gresham’s law that says bad money drives good money out…

So the solution is to investigate how much Cash there is and how much Credit there is. That’s what we would like the Treasury Select Committee to make an inquiry into. That’s what the Public Credit Petition is asking.

Green Growth = Genuine Growth of the Real Economy

The distinction between the ‘real’ economy and ‘financial’ economy doesn’t seem to be necessary any more: everybody seems to believe that the central banks, banks and stock exchanges have the god given right to run our lives.

To examine and challenge that assumption, we have launched a Public Credit Petition that is targeted at the Treasury Select Committee.

Will you be tempted to use this on-line political tool and maybe put your name and comment down? When we have 100 signatures, our sponsor Austin Mitchell MP will take it further!

Gold & Silver Coins as Community Dollars

Read this message on http://www.solari.com

May 11, 2007

Want to start a community currency by “just doing it?” As more and more of us buy silver and gold coins, there are increasing opportunities to use our coins to transact.

Whenever I travel, I bring back coins from around the world to give to the children and young people in my life. I am hoping to interest them in far away places and the role of currency in networking us together. For Christmas and birthdays, I also give them gold and silver coins. Increasingly, I wanted a tool that would make translating between US dollars and precious metal coins effortless.

One day I was talking with Franklin Sanders about how to make this easy for me. He said that he thought there were many folks who would transact with gold and silver coins if they had a simple calculator.
So we decided to build a web site to provide one — http://www.silverandgoldaremoney.com. We called it that because, in fact, silver and gold are money. If we use our coins to transact in our daily lives, then the value of the currency in our pockets is going up rather than going down like the US dollar.

– Catherine Austin Fitts

http://radio.goldseek.com I will be interviewed with Franklin Sanders http://the-moneychanger.com on Monday, May 14 by Chris G.
Waltzek on the Goldseek Radio Show. The show will be archived here:
http://radio.goldseek.com. Franklin and I will be discussing our new calculator at http://www.silverandgoldaremoney.com and why we believe our calculator could help protect Main Street from Wall Street.

http://www.silverandgoldaremoney.com

Here it is — The Solari-Moneychanger precious metals exchange calculator that can be accessed online.
It features live silver / gold spot prices courtesy of goldmoney.com. The BETA version of this calculator can be viewed at silverandgoldaremoney.com. We’d love to hear your comments and ideas for improvement — just use the link at the top of the calculator.

http://www.solari.com/store/precious_metals_2.php

Haven’t started transacting in silver and gold coins yet? Check out this audio seminar featuring precious metals expert Franklin Sanders at the Solari Store. This seminar covers the political and economic landscape of precious metals as a backdrop for developing your own strategy for using silver and gold coins in transactions and investments. (This is the second audio seminar in the Solari Precious Metals Miniseries.)

http://www.solari.com/blog/

Top Picks at Catherine’s Blog:

• Dick Cheney’s Banker Sees World Bubble

• Bee Colony Collapse Disorder – Where is it Heading?

• Asia Will Start its Own Currency Pool so it Can Dump IMF

• Loan Derivatives Poised for Explosive Growth

© Solari, Inc. 2007

Disclaimer: Nothing in this Solari Update should be taken as individual investment advice. Anyone seeking investment advice for his or her personal financial situation is advised to seek out a qualified advisor or advisors and provide as much information as possible to the advisor in order that such advisor can take into account all relevant circumstances, objectives, and risks before rendering an opinion as to the appropriate investment strategy.

How do We Measure Growth and its Sustainability?

After having heard Jonathan Porritt at the Anglo-German Foundation, I studied their Creating Sustainable Growth in Europe research programme and applied for a small grant with this proposal:

A recent analysis of on-line statistics of the Bank of England has resulted in a submission to the Treasury Select Committee entitled Green Credit for Green Purposes. It was written in response to an inquiry into the Stern Review. Our key recommendation is the use of the Cash : Credit Ratio in the money supply as a new indicator and economic measure.

The report recommends ‘green credit’ as a mechanism for Government so that it can lead by ‘green governance’ and fuel the economy by funding environmentally beneficial activities.

By commissioning a similar study of data from the European Central Bank and the Bundesbank, new comparative insights would become available that would be applicable to both countries in terms of measuring sustainable growth.

The communication and dissemination of results is aimed at the City and Westminster in London and the German Government in Berlin. However, experience exists only in organising Forum meetings at the Palace of Westminster since 1998. Hence it is hoped that active collaboration with the Anglo German Foundation would contribute to the dissemination.

The proposed ‘matching analysis’ is also based on 10 years of independent research that resulted in an innovative framework for measuring new qualities called ‘3D Metrics’. In its deeply fundamental nature, it cuts across science, finance and economics through new mathematical methods embedded in proprietary software.

Description

As a first step towards further contributions to the Creating Sustainable Growth in Europe programme of the Anglo-German Foundation, the proposer it is suggested to analyse Euro data to compare the financial economics between the two countries.

In addition to her experience as a systems and data analyst, ‘3d metric’ software methods allow for

1. comparing data sets that are hitherto not comparable – by visualising ‘data layers’
2. forecasting data over short, medium and long time intervals – by using methods that have been tested and found well above average on financial market data.

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