Regional Economic Communities

= paradigm for regional communities, linking together commercial, sustainable and social aspects. It describes a means for normal citizens to become joint owners of local, sustainably-run businesses.

URL = http://regional-economic-communities.info/

Description

Tim Reeves:

"Nowadays there are many initiatives to help make local communities economically more resilient and socially happier, and to support development of sustainable paradigms. To mention just a few: regional currencies, local exchange and trade systems, local barter rings, transition town initiative. Extending this movement by unifying many of these aspects, the concept of Regional Economic Communities (REC), with its local currency the Grok, has been designed to be a comprehensive paradigm for local communities, to promote both local ownership of businesses and local trade, while having the issue of sustainability (economical, ecological and social) as a core tenet.

Regional Economic Communities: This concept has been designed to be the appropriate next step on from the currently flawed systems at a local level. It allows a local community to take a large part of their destiny into their own hands, independent of developments at the national and international levels, and thus make them more resilient to the turbulences which we must shortly expect.

Here is a very brief resumee of the concept, whereby ReeComm is taken to mean a particular local community (cooperative) implementing the REC concept (in their own way):

1. A ReeComm cooperative offers local citizens various methods of collectively financing local, sustainably-run businesses. This allows the citizens, as members of the ReeComm, to become collective (part) owners of the businesses, which are thus freed of the need of financing themselves via bank loans, i.e. freeing them of the burden of debt and interest on the debt. Furthermore, sustainability is promoted and national fiat money, of uncertain future value, is converted into stakes in real tangible assets of an inherently important nature, i.e. those helping to meet our basic needs, now and in the future.

2. The ReeComm founds and operates a barter community which uses its own currency, the Grok, as its means of accounting. The Grok is not a fiat currency, it is a secured mutual credit system underpinned by the assets owned by the ReeComm. Its value is independent of other currencies, and, since the Grok is interest-free and employs a circulation safeguard fee, it is expected to be free of inflation. In all but one of the methods foreseen for creating Groks a corresponding value is, or has already been, used for long-term investment in sustainably run local assets.

Thus the Grok matches, on a personal and local business level, the Bancor proposed by Keynes for international use:

• Cannot be withdrawn from its native accounting system

• Cannot be converted to any national currency *

• Both are underpinned by tangible assets (Grok = local businesses, Bancor = gold)

• Both with demurrage (the Grok calls it a "circulation safeguard fee" to be understandable, Keynes called it "negative interest on positive balances" – which means exactly the same)." (http://regional-economic-communities.info/downloads/hidden/Money_So-where-do-we-go-from-here_2011-09-03.pdf)

More Information

• The Grok multipurpose local currency