Ralph spends the entire hour with the indefatigable, Hazel Henderson, the founder of the group, Ethical Markets, whose mission is to advocate for ways to measure prosperity and promoting economic models that emphasize not cut-throat competition and fear of scarcity but are based on principals of cooperation and sharing in our abundance.
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Hazel Henderson is an author, world-renowned futurist, evolutionary economist, worldwide syndicated columnist, and consultant on sustainable development. She is the founder of Ethical Markets Media and the creator and co-executive producer of the Ethical Markets TV series. She has edited and authored numerous books, including the award-winning Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy, Planetary Citizenship, and The Politics of the Solar Age.
She leads the Transforming Finance initiative, co-developed (with the Calvert Group) the GDP alternative known as the Ethical Markets Quality of Life Indicators (originally the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators), and co-organized the Beyond GDP conference for the European Commission. In 2013, she was inducted into the International Society of Sustainability Professionals Hall of Fame.
Markets and money are useful tools that humans have been using for thousands of years. And it was only about 300 years ago with the Industrial Revolution that it was the idea of weaponizing money and markets and making systems of accounting that were predatory on the golden rule societies. And they weaponized money and markets for accumulation and power.
Hazel Henderson, Ethical Markets
We all know that the price system is a function of human ignorance. Because we permit the falsity of “externalities” — allowing anything you don’t want to pay attention to — to fall off your balance sheet and be passed on to taxpayers or to future generations… We’ve come to the end of the line with that.
Hazel Henderson, Ethical Markets
Healthcare can never be a market because the buyers, in other words the patients, have almost no power, no information. And the sellers, i.e., the insurance companies and the providers, have all the power and all the information. And then we have the same market failure in the food system… And then you’ve got market failures in education, and in the safety nets that every society has to have in order to operate. I mean you can’t operate, eventually, without safety nets.
Hazel Henderson, Ethical Markets
If they purport— like Musk is saying he’s going to do with Twitter— if you purport to be the public square, then you must change the business model, no longer take advertising and only give public service spots and receive no funds from advertising of a commercial nature. And basically, that has to be their new business model. A nonprofit model.
Hazel Henderson, Ethical Markets
We not only own our own bodies but guess what we own our own minds and everything that comes out of our minds. So, we need to establish ownership and get paid for every bit or byte that we contribute to any of these social media platforms.
Hazel Henderson, Ethical Markets
A cryptocurrency is a digital noun. It has no meaning until somebody decides to wrap it up in a beautiful set of dreamy ideas that will be “all of these wonderful people who will manage this currency and make sure that it’s always held to the highest standard.” Come on. This is just marketing. It’s all marketing… Creating all these new assets out of thin air.
Hazel Henderson, Ethical Markets
Anthropologists call this the gift economy. Actually, on a day-to-day basis between billions of people in neighborhoods, communities, villages, farms, you name it, there are far more transactions completely outside the monetized market system. If they ever monetized it, that would be multi-trillions of dollars.
Ralph Nader
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’em Comin’!
“… there are far more transactions completely outside the monetized market system. If they ever monetized it, that would be multi-trillions of dollars.”
corporations get wind of this Idea
they’ll have their fingers in the pie
& bean counters on every corner.
Cheers to Hazel’s characterization of economists’ thinking as ‘Magical.’
The ‘financial’ view of money is based on the false assumption that the beginning step of the process is the creation of the unit of acCount by some magical mystical monetary unit creator as items of “value” the same as any other good or service that the people may manifest and that it is these units themselves that are moving along within the economic interactivity of the populace ‘providing the grease to the economic wheels.’ The assumption is that the acquisition of the units in one’s acCount are actually real things unto themselves and that it is these things that are themselves the things ‘of value’ within the economic interactivity as opposed to the real goods and services!
It is all completely bogus, as one can see the same transactional ledger in a TimeBank or Mutual Credit System wherein all of the activities occur and all of the right parties are given ‘credit’ for that which the community has valued, and not one of those giving credit to the service provider would have ever needed to have had a single unit “in their account.”
Former President of the FR Bank in Minnesota, Kocherlakota, proves the current definitions (and follow on assumptions about money) to be “vacuous” and asserts that the function of money is as a unit of measure/bookkeeping.
In Kocherlakota’s words:
“My argument demonstrates the vacuity of the three standard explanations of the role of fiat money in an economy: money acts as a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account….The traditional explanations for the presence of money in an economy are more descriptive of its functions than explanatory. The true explanation for money’s presence is that money is a record-keeping device.”
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/qr/qr2231.pdf (pages 2-3)
And if money is record keeping then the units themselves on the ledger sheets cannot themselves BE items of value. They are the abstract representation of the genuine goods and services of value in interactions between people.
And if money is a record keeping device whose units are used after the fact to do the recording then it clearly does not make sense that its units must pre-exist that which they will be used to record or that they must be pre-created by some magical mystical monetary unit creator, be that government or bank.
This whole ‘financial’ view of money narrative is part of the greater BS of pre-created monetary units that are supposed to embody “value” all by themselves and yet have some magical power to represent the value in all the other goods and services and to do so by moving along within the economy before they return to the source. Of course, the source was from a bank which ‘created’ the units as items of value that are claimed as the property of the banker. But how is it that some magical power belongs to banks to be able to create – Poof! – items of “value” though they are mere digits on a screen or numbers on a ledger sheet!? I guess it depends on whose screen or on whose piece of paper they are first written down!!
Terrific interview! Thank you for Ms Henderson on the show!
CALL CORPORATIONS WHAT THEY ARE, PARASITES; DO NOT CUTIFIE OR USE EUPHEMISMS.
END THE SHITSTEM OF GREED CENTRIC PARASITIC CANCER “CAPITALISM”.
WE DO NOT NEED “REPRESENTATION”, WE ARE COMPETENT ADULTS AND CAN DECIDE & VOTE FOR OURSELVES ON ANYTHING IN ALL WAYS ALWAYS; REFERENDUMS VIA INTERNET VOTING = TRUE DEMOCRACY.
END THE SHITSTEM, DO NOT PARTICIPATE OR CONDONE IT.