Covid-19 Capitalism, Neoliberal Debt & the Need for Sovereign Money

This is a similar tale to the one experienced by British engineer Major C.H. Douglas just before the outbreak of World War I. Douglas was working on the London tube when his superiors announced that there was no more public money for any further construction. The budget had been reached and construction would have to halt. Douglas thought this strange since the materials, the know-how and the manpower were all present. The only thing lacking was money-but why? Then on the 28 th of July, 1914, the Great War began and suddenly there was money available for everything the war effort required. This set the engineer on a quest to discover more about the nature of money and capitalist accounting. WWI was Douglas’ ‘teaching moment’ just as COVID-19 is our teaching moment. It will teach us many things: about our friends, family, colleagues, neighbours and communities. It will have lessons to impart regarding the way we think about work, about our health, education and child care systems, and the very standards to which we hold our own governments to account. But it will also teach us about our money, who controls it and what we can do to promote healthy and prosperous communities in a time when our faith in our political leaders and financial systems is being urgently and critically tested.

taken from here

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