Historical Irony That Should Burn
Hello, liberal readers! I'm curious if anyone is still reading, so I thought I'd throw in a post and see what happens!
In another LJ user's page, I read recently of Angela Merkel's recent comments to the government of Japan concerning its relations to the nations it attacked during what Japan called The Pacific War.
Ukeru Magosaki, who served as the ( Read more... )
In another LJ user's page, I read recently of Angela Merkel's recent comments to the government of Japan concerning its relations to the nations it attacked during what Japan called The Pacific War.
Ukeru Magosaki, who served as the ( Read more... )
China has made some monetary moves in that direction; hence the Beijing high-speed rail building and other infrastructure improvements the likes of which seem impossible in our home country's political climate.
Ms. Brown has a podcast as well (if you're into that sort of thing): It's Our Money With Ellen Brown. There, she is exploring a possible out for Greece. There is in the ECB regulations an allowance for public banking. The Germans have a system I don't pretend to understand called the "Sparkhausen" banks, public banks which well serve remote communities, giving these communities banking services which they otherwise might not have access. Because of the Sparkhausen system, the ECB allows public banks to finance themselves at zero interest directly from the ECB "vaults."
This would help Greece avoid immediate debt and the crushing interest which comes with it.
Africa has a program I would love to see in the US: M-Pesa. Essentially, when the Western powers moved into Africa and tried to establish the silly, silly, silly system of monthly service agreements far too many have accepted, Africans balked. They are far more savvy, demanding pay-as-you-go service. This meant that their phones had a known amount of cash pre-loaded. With this already in place, African phone services started a system where people could in essence text cash to the phones of friends and merchants.
Especially in tropical Africa, this caught on big time. Because of fraud and forgery problems, some of these countries only print small denomination bills; buying large items often meant traveling with a caravan of cash and the security to ensure its safe arrival. Worse, the damp weather meant bills didn't last long anyway.
Fun fact: the new smart credit cards, with the small chip that stores the transaction history, originally started in France; France's telecom system was socialized, meaning you paid by the minute. No matter how they tried, they could not make the US system of telephone-verified ATMs work there. Instead, in France they developed the smart cards, which held all the history on them. Merchants then cleared their transaction histories at the end of business day with one short call, not a continuous string of calls to clear each card.
These cards quickly caught on in tropical Africa, becoming the backbone of the purchase system.* That all changed slowly with M-Pesa; now people-who, after all, had phones anyway-didn't need to carry a separate card if they didn't want to.
(*Smart card background and history care of a chance encounter and conversation with a Microsoft specialist and international standards developer I spoke with on a cruise back when I was captaining small tour boats, boats quite often rented for Microsoft business and pleasure.)
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