May 5 1996
JOHN TURMEL'S TRIP TO NEW ZEALAND
As I was the major financial backer of the development of
the Greendollar Local Employment Trading System (LETS) software
back in 1984, I was invited by Maureen Mallinson, the publisher
of the Greendollar Quarterly, to be a guest speaker at the New
Zealand Greendollar National Meeting near Thames on the
Coromandel peninsula on April 21 and April 23. My talk was to be
on the wisdom of all governments using Greendollars to create
large-scale national employment as successfully as local
organizations were creating local employment.
Greendollars are basically casino chips backed up with work
and as an electrical engineer and professional gambler, I derived
the equation for interest-free currency systems as Laplace
transform = 1/s with interest-bearing ones as 1/(s-i). I had been
politically promoting the use of interest-free monetary software
since 1979 and in 1981, I was the only candidate running with a
disk with a "Greenback" National Employment Trading System.
In 1984, I heard that Michael Linton had started up a
Greendollar Local Employment Trading System (LETS) in Courtenay,
B.C. and was looking for development funds. I checked that its
Laplace Transform was also 1/s (interest-free) and saw the
utility of a local level test model as a good way to help promote
the national and international model and granted him $22,000.
I wasn't sure I was going to be able to make the trip to New
Zealand as I was being sentenced on March 31 for operating the
largest private Poker and Blackjack casino in Canadian history
but having been acquitted of the same charge in 1989 before
expanding to 27 tables and 122 employees operating 24 hours a day
and seven days a week, I was facing a maximum of 12 years in
prison, two for keeping a gaming house and 10 for winning over a
million dollars. Fortunately, as the police had dubbed the raid
"Project Robin Hood" and I had spent most of it on more LETSystem
promotion and development, the judge sentenced me to probation
and community service and I was freed to make the trip.
In 1991, I had hosted Don Bethune, a monetary reformer and
member of the Democratic Party of New Zealand on his North
American speaking tour and he managed to get me a speaking
engagement at the Democratic National meeting which was being
held on the very same week-end.
My lady, Pauline, and I arrived on Friday morning. Ottawa to
Toronto (1 hour) to Honolulu (10 hours) to Auckland (8 hours).
We were struck by New Zealand's lush green mountainous landscape.
We were met by Adrienne Vale, the co-ordinator of the Auckland
LETS. She gave us a tour of Auckland and showed us their
Greendollar store based in the unemployed people's center. We
didn't get to meet Sue Bradford who originated the Auckland
Greendollar system but more on her later. Then we rented a car
and drove up to the conference site.
I would say that though New Zealanders drive on the wrong
side of the road, I only found myself driving on the right side
of the road twice during the whole trip with no jarring
consequences.
What amazed me were the very large herds of cattle and sheep
until I realized that their warm climate meant they didn't need
any barns. It probably accounts for the very green pastures.
At the Greendollar meeting were people from all over New
Zealand including the mayor of Thames, Alisdair Thompson who
happened to be a former Social Credit monetary reformer. In my
one hour talk, I not only read my poem "Ballad of the Mayor and
the LETS" showing how Greendollars could be used by local
municipalities but also pointed out the historical examples of
government use of interest-free currency systems to create
employment touching on British wooden "tallies" between 1100 and
1694, the use of Roman "Aes Grave" copper currency while they
were a great empire, the use of American colonial paper
"Continentals" before they were banned by the British king and
precipitated the revolution (don't believe it was over a tax on
tea), Lincoln's paper Treasury Greenback currency and Guernsey
Island's long-standing and current use of their own national
currency as successful examples of government-run Green currency
systems.
I then pointed out that the historical example of local
Wampum currency used by North American Indians which like
Greendollars, allowed each member to issue his own bead worth a
horse or a pelt operated more like the LETS which allows
individual members to issue their own Greendollar IOUs.
Then I spent time explaining how Jesus Christ had advocated
an interest-free monetary system and had condemned interest as
the yoke of oppression and debt slavery and had given his life in
the fight against this greatest crime against humanity, usury.
We spent that night at Roger and Maureen Kennerly's farm,
both staunch Greendollar members who ran the local natural
therapies clinic and also kept chickens, ducks and pigs. We went
to sleep that night with the windows open and I think a call must
have gone out to every mosquito in the county that there was
fresh imported blood in town. I woke up the next morning with
dozens and dozens of red welts on my face and arms though they
didn't itch. For the next several days, I had to remind everybody
I met that I didn't have leprosy, only mosquito bites.
On Saturday April 22, we drove down to the Epworth retreat
near Piarere south of Hamilton for the Democratic party meeting.
The Democrats belong to an "Alliance" of five smaller political
parties including the Greens, the Liberals, the New Labour and
the Maori Mano Motuhakes. I find this quite astonishing as most
leaders of small parties prefer to be the big fish in a small
pond rather than join a team in the larger pond. Though have
several members in the House, with proportional representation in
next year's elections and with over 20% of the popular vote, they
should be well represented in the next Parliament.
I spoke for an hour to the Democrats who had many members of
the former Social Credit monetary reform party and even though
the Greendollar social credits I was talking about was not the
form of Social Credit they had been talking about, they became
very enthused to find out that Government didn't have to give
away free "funny money" to balance the money supply to prices but
could lend interest-free Greendollars to eliminate the imbalance
in the first place.
I told them that Greendollar members were using social
credits that they had been preaching about for 70 years and it
was time they should start practicing what they were preaching
too. I installed the Greendollar software on their computer at
the meeting for them to practice with and nothing beats a working
system to convince people of its real potential. Party leader,
John Wright invited me down to speak in Christchurch on the South
Island on the following week.
On Sunday April 23, we were back at the Greendollar
conference where I spoke for 90 minutes on ways to improve the
operation of the systems. They were organizing inter-system
trading but there were troubles between systems as some systems
were buying more from other systems than was being bought back. I
pointed out that most the problems they had discussed could be
cured with one large national database accomplished by all
systems uploading their databases to one person who could append
them all together and download the whole national system back to
everyone.
As they had no way to knowing if a service members wanted
was available somewhere on another system without a complete
database, the only problem was accounting. But some of their
systems had done away with the computer credits altogether and
were using paper Greendollars which eliminated 99% of the
accounting overhead. They should all follow that example.
I also pointed out that third parties could accept the notes
without being members as long as they knew they could spend them
somewhere, like many Canadians accept Canadian Tire money from
Canada's largest hardware chain knowing where they can spend it,
and in this way, paper Greendollars would be invaluable
advertising to third parties.
Finally, I pointed out the importance of a store which could
act as a casino cashier's cage. The weakness of the standard
Greendollar system is that half the accounts have to be in the
negative so the other half can be positive and nobody likes to be
in the negative, a major impediment to trading. With a store
where people can drop off goods for sale, it allows the store to
hold the negative balance while more people may leave with
positives and be more willing to spend.
In the same vein of storing goods to back up Greendollars, I
pointed out that provision should be made for the elderly who own
a home or other assets to pledge it to the system and be given
open Greendollar credit lines with their commitments to be paid
from their estate after they die. Rather than borrowing money for
those services and losing the interest over time, they can get
the full value and enable more working Greendollar members to go
into the positive.
Of course, I emphasized the advantage of giving local
government a Greendollar account to facilitate larger municipal
employment creation and was told that the town of Nelson did have
a Greendollar account. I hope to check this out and urge the LETS
operators to immediately grant them a large credit limit with
which to undertake such local improvement projects. Once
government is accepting Greendollars in taxation to pay for those
projects, everybody in the whole community would accept them
since everybody needs the wherewithal to pay their taxes.
Monday April 24, we drove up to Hamilton and stayed with Don
Bethune, a former Hamilton city councillor, and his wife Mary.
That evening, we supped with Democrat organizer Doug Lever and
his wife Leslie and Cliff Tait and his wife Joyce. Cliff, a
former Democrat candidate and now a Hamilton city councillor, is
best know for his record-breaking solo flight "around the world
in 80 days" detailed in his book "Flight of the Kiwi." Cliff
invited me to participate in a musical evening where they had an
organ and a couple of accordions. I don't often play with others
but found out that New Zealand has a lot of accordionists.
Cliff invited me to address other Hamilton councilors at the
"Funding Local Government" seminar at Waikato University. There,
I met Bill Rogers, a computer science professor, who is going to
try to introduce study of the Greendollar software to his
classes.
Over the next few days, Cliff and Don managed to get me on
the "Coast to Coast" program on TV4 for a 6-minute interview by
Kay Gregory. There was a take-over battle going on between the
locally-owned power network and a large American company trying
to buy them out and I pointed out that North York Hydro in
Ontario was issuing Hydro Dollar gift certificates which could be
traded like Greendollars and are backed with electric power and
any smaller company could do the same though I doubted the large
bank-connected networks would be too enthusiastic about it. I
also had a 20 minute interview on News Radio SB with Mike Hight
who saw quite readily that like poker chips, there could be no
inflation if there was no interest. Of course, I plugged the
Hamilton Greendollar system every time I could.
Mary Bethune took us to visit "Kiwi House" where we got to
see some of those rare birds. I couldn't help but think that
these funny looking but plump birds would look good on the dinner
table. Then we went to the "Glow-worm caves." They're tiny thin
little worms that shine light. They hang to the cave ceilings and
drop strands of sticky webbing. Prey see the light, think it's
the end of the tunnel and fly up to get caught. The cave ceiling
looked just like a starry night. Quite a show.
On Friday April 28, we were invited to go stay at the home
of Ron and Yvonne Gilberd in Te Akau high up in the mountains
south of Hamilton. With no city lights, we had a great view of
the stars in the southern hemisphere and saw the immensity of the
Milky Way for the very first time. Ron had been a candidate for
the Social Credit party 5 times and was enthusiastic about
starting a Greendollar system in his area. They raised cattle and
sheep and had just received a load of 10-day- and 17-day-old
calves. They had these "calfeterias" which were large plastic
pails with nipples connected to straws and it was quite a show
watching the calves jostling each other for a nipple even though
there were enough for all. The younger calves came right up to us
but the older ones kept their distance.
On Monday May 1, I had to leave to drive to Auckland to fly
out to Christchurch and Pauline decided to stay behind. While I
was gone, she attended a moto-cross rally, went cross-mountain
riding on a three-wheeled motorbike, helped in the shearing shed,
visited the hot springs and even witnessed a "home-kill" of 3
steers which were butchered and stored in a cooler truck in less
than one hour. More and more people were invited to hear her
explain how Greendollars work. Kevin Roach came to the right
conclusion stating "Interest is the killer."
Before I left, Ron gave me a book about Bruce Beetham, the
first really influential Socred leader in Parliament. What really
broke my heart was when I found out that while he was mayor of
Hamilton, he had wanted to finance municipal projects with
interest-free "rates vouchers," tax-credits but couldn't even get
it on the agenda of the Hamilton city council who were too busy
passing a 20% tax increase. When he later got elected to
Parliament, he organized a large barter trade with Fiji island
but Prime Minister Muldoon scuttled the deal preferring to borrow
money and pay interest to international banks. Talk about having
the banker's interest at heart.
In Auckland, I stayed with Alan and Annette Efford. He is
another monetary reformer who immediately decided he was going to
join the Auckland Greendollar system. His daughter was also the
four-time New Zealand accordion champion who had competed
internationally. They had video-tape of her playing and I learned
the difference between a kid like me who practiced one hour a day
and her who practiced ten.
On Tuesday May 2, I flew off to Christchurch and was met by
John Wright and his wife Beverly. That night, we went out to the
first casino in New Zealand. The playing area was not much bigger
than my Topaz casino and had about as many tables though they
didn't have any real Poker. They had Blackjack, Roulette and some
Caribbean Stud Poker which is house-banked game. My usual habit
to disguise the fact I'm counting the cards at Blackjack is to
bet the minimum until a really positive shoe comes along, then
announce I'm leaving soon and betting it all until the end of the
shoe. It would look strange to go from $5 bets to $100 bets and
then back to $5 bets at the beginning of a new shoe, a sure clue
that it's a card counter. This way, I look like someone who's
just taking a shot before going home. I ended up losing $50 while
John Wright won $50.
He had arranged a 30-minute interview on Plains FM with Joe
Pounsford, another staunch old Socred who had run in 1960, 63,
66, 69, 72, 74, 84, 87, and 1990. What commitment. I again
pointed out the power of giving the municipality an account on
the Christchurch Greendollar system which is the largest in the
country with almost 400 members. That night, I spoke for 90
minutes to some Democrats and Gordon Hamblyn and his friend Dave
came from the Greendollar system. When one fellow asked Gordon what
LETS had actually done for him, he said "When I go to a LETS
market, I can afford anything. I bought a camera for G$200. I
could never have parted with 200 Kiwi dollars which I need for my
power, telephone, rates but I could pay 200 Greendollars because
all it meant was that I'd have to mow a few more lawns, sell a
little more honey." The fellow joined that night with several
others.
On Wednesday May 3, Joe Pounsford told me he was
participating in a demonstration in front of the New Zealand
Reserve Bank, the equivalent of the Bank of Canada. As Canada's
"interest-rate protester" having picketed the Bank of Canada
branches around the country weekly for five years, I couldn't
resist. I bought a paste-board, printed "Abolish Interest Rates"
and took part. I got a lot of thumbs up as I said "World's
shortest prayer, just add 'Amen'" and "Pleasant thought for the
day." I was also interviewed by Peter Matthias of the
Christchurch Press whose paper also came out and took pictures of
our demonstration. I don't think they did the story.
On Thursday May 4, back in Auckland, all sorts of monetary
protests were going on because the Asian Development Bank was
meeting there. Sue Bradford had organized massive protests which
made news around the world with clashes with the police over four
days. She was finally arrested.
Also in Auckland to speak against the Development Bank was
Leonor Briones of the Philippine "Freedom From Debt Coalition."
We attended her talk and broached the subject of Greendollars.
She had heard of it but in Britain. I hope she uses the software to
get her country working. She pointed out that they had 60
million people and owed 30 billion dollars. I pointed out Canada
had 30 million and owed 1,800 billion dollars. That took her
breath away.
On Friday May 5, Alan Efford and I went to court to see Sue
be released upon the condition she not picket until the bank
delegates had left. We both joined the Auckland Greendollar
system that day. I offered to sell my banking poetry in their
store. Then we went off to picket the Asian Development Bank
ourselves on their last day. Alan had printed up a sign which
read "Mort-gage = Death-gamble." We were the only protesters
there and we got within 20 meters of the front door as the
bankers were leaving. As they went by, I pointed to the LETS disk
I wear on my lapel and said "Interest-free money program
spreading on the internet." Most spoke English and looked
stunned. I guess they won't forget Sue and they won't forget me.
What's funny is that there was a show on Don Brash, the
Governor of the New Zealand Reserve Bank, where he said that as a
devout Presbyterian, he was trying to be a Christian economist.
What a contradiction. The country's head usurer thinking Christ
would approve of his money-lender activities.
Chris Leitch, another committed monetary reformer got me
interviewed on the Radio Pacific show with Mark Bennett but even
though I kept trying to talk about a National Employment Trading
System, all he wanted to talk about was how much money I had made
as a gambler. I complained that they were not offering Poker and
he pointed out that Harrah's was building a large casino right in
down-town Auckland and he thought they would certainly have
Poker. I hope so.
On Saturday May 6, Pauline joined me and we attended a
meeting of the Alliance where the leadership was passed on from
Sandra Lee to Jim Anderton. I spoke to a sub-group of about 70
people for an hour once again pointing out how LETS could work
for government. Later John Wright introduced me to the Alliance
council.
Besides John Wright of the Democrats who is pro-LETS, I got
a chance to speak to Jeannette Fitzsimons of the Greens who
already is a LETS member from Thames, Sandra Lee of Mano Motuhake
who mentioned that the Maoris already do a lot of barter, and
finally the new Alliance leader Jim Anderton of the New Labour
Party. With three of his five parties already in favour of
barter employment software, I hope the Alliance picks up the LETS
disk and runs with it as their national NETS monetary program.
That evening, we dined with Carey Wilson and his wife Mary
Tierney. Carey gave one beautiful example of how the debt problem
could be solved. "A salesman goes to a hotel in the morning and
pays $50 for his night's stay. The hotelier goes to the butcher
and pays his $50 bill for beef. The butcher goes to the baker and
pays his $50 bill for bread. The baker goes to the auto mechanic
who pays his $50 bill for a tune-up. The mechanic goes to the
hotel and pays his $50 tab. The salesman comes back and says that
he can't stay the night and asks if he can have his deposit back.
The hotelier gives him back his $50." It didn't have to be a $50
federal bill. It could have been a $50 Greendollar bill and the
debts would have all been repaid in the same way. Nice example.
On Monday May 8, Alan Efford brought us to the airport and
we started our journey home. Considering I went there with no
plans other than to attend the Greendollar meeting, I am still
amazed at the convergence of opportunities to talk monetary
reform.
But the best surprise was when I got home and checked my e-
mail to find that the Australian Parliament had just endorsed
LETS as a valuable employment creation system:
Date: Wed May 10 05:25:38 1995
From: bmlets@peg.apc.org (Martin Chadwick)
Subject: Parliament endorses LET scheme
To: econ-lets@mailbase.ac.uk
From Blue Mountains Gazette Apr 26 1994
PARLIAMENT ENDORSES LET SCHEME
Amendments to the Social Security Act have been passed by the
House of Representatives which confirm the role of Local Exchange
Trading Schemes (LETS) in the community.
These schemes allow people to exchange goods and services for
non-cash credit points, which are called 'ecos' in the Blue
Mountains and 'waratahs' in the Hawkesbury.
When Maggie Deahm was first elected to Parliament, the operation
of the LETS scheme in the Blue Mountains was threatened by the
Department of Social Security, which had ruled that 'ecos' should
count as if they were cash for the purpose of calculating income
which could reduce social security benefits. This effectively
discouraged the people who could get the greatest benefit from
LETS from participating in the scheme.
"LETS members came to me for help", Ms Deahm said. "I began
lobbying the Minister for a change to this ruling, arguing that
the advantages of staying active and keeping skills and contacts
up to date helped jobseekers and other disadvantaged people in
our community and the scheme deserved our support."
"I am pleased that the Minister has taken note of my submission
and proceeded to put this amendment through Parliament to protect
LETS schemes."
Speaking on the amendments in Parliament, Maggie Deahm said:
"LETS is a very important organization. It benefits unemployed
and under employed people... and keeps their skills going. People
are not going to lose their skills while waiting for a job to
come up. It was a community initiative."
"The great thing about the scheme is that it encompasses a wide
range of workers including builders, plumbers, accountants,
people doing tax returns, babysitters and lawn mowers. It is
extremely beneficial."
The Chair of the Caucus Community Services Committee, Garrie
Gibson, Member for Moreton, praised Maggie's work.
"There is one particular amendment that I am particularly pleased
about and it is as a result of some very good work on the part of
the Member for Macquarie (Ms Deahm), which is why we now call
this clause the Deahm amendment. She put in some outstanding
lobbying and presentation of the facts, figures and relevant
arguments as to why this should occur. She deserves personal
congratulation for the achievement of this amendment"
Thanks to all our new friends in New Zealand. We hope to
visit you again soon.
John and Pauline
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