Life after Dr. Yunus’ Visit to London

For the first time ever did I organise an event with a ‘blind date’ and someone who gets ‘mobbed’ for photos to be taken and dedications to be written when signing their book. But then I’ve never organised an event for a Nobel Peace Prize winner before!

Fortunately, his lecture at the LSE gave us an idea of what to expect.

YuNuSphere records what is taking place in the wake of his visit.

The Forum for Stable Currencies site has been revamped, and I am recording Forum related news here.

Participating in the Entrepreneurial (R)evolution

Thanks to most remarkable Chris Macrae I was not only given a copy of the new book by Dr. Yunus but also participated in one day of the World Entrepreneurship Summit.

Hence I am now more confident than ever that my long cherished project of a ‘Towards a Sustainable Investment Network‘ will come true.

What a relief!

Creating a World without Poverty

Chris Macrae is a remarkable ‘world entrepreneur‘ who also publishes the World Economist. His father Norman Macrae wrote most editorials for The Economist between 1949 and 1988 with astounding predictions.

With his strength in ‘brand marketing’, Chris has discovered that Dr. Muhammad Yunus is the best ‘collaboration brand’ for building a sustainable world and therefore sponsors and promotes him and his work extensively.

Creating a World without Poverty – Social Business and the Future of Capitalism is the latest book by Dr. Yunus who, as a professor of economics created the Grameen bank for microcredit with now over 20,000 employees in many countries and some two dozen other organizations in the Grameen Family.

I cannot but respond to this call for social and ethical action and have applied for some books to set up a ‘peer book club’. Do email me if you want to play along – together with ‘pioneers of change‘ and people who ‘turn up their courage‘.

The Bank of England – Ten Years On

On Thursday, June 14th, 2007, I heard Gordon Brown give evidence before the Treasury Select Committee. What a sad performance. It left me unusually depressed for a few days.

The Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England – Ten Years On is the topic of the current enquiry of the Committee – but he initiated the move as soon as Labour was in power.

And now he wallows in its ‘success’ which he measures by inflation and unemployment.

Why is inflation blindly accepted at face value?

Why do none of the Committee members question this short term measure? Instead they visit other Central Banks in the US and Canada. And Mr Brown also brags with being in line with the Fed and the European Central Banks.

As a professor of economics said to me: it’s a cartel of central banks that we’re up against

And Gordon Brown will get away with it in his self-gratifying and arrogant style.

In order NOT to get depressed, it is worth watching this video which says brilliantly in poetry what I’ve found in other ways: the author Paradox calls it The Matrix – which was most gratefully received from Russian / Cypriot friend and Multi Media Wizard David Edmond.

19.03. 07: No 10 Writing

The BBC program on Tony Blair’s life said he wanted to increase public spending when Labour came into power but Gordon Brown didn’t. The PM had also just invited some citizens to give them the feeling of participating in ‘policy’.

So I sent him copies of my submission and got a note from S. CAINE:

The Prime Minister has asked me to thank you for your recent letters and the enclosure.

He hopes that you will understand that, as the matter you rais is the responsibility of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, he has asked that your letter be forwarded to that Department so that they may reply to you direct on his behalf.

Technorati Profile

No need to apologise.

Sabine,

No need to apologise. We look forward to your supplementary memorandum.

Lis

Unfortunately, this supplementary memo was NOT published in the final report.

19.03.07 My sincere apologies

Dear Lis,

I am very sorry indeed to have caused bad feelings and a misunderstanding.

As I mentioned, I am taking your offer of a supplementary memorandum so seriously that I’m asking our lawyer for advice again. She recommended the Committee in the first place, which happened to coincide with the Stern inquiry.

Last week I attended not only the All Party Group for Climate Change but also the Climate for Change conference of Women in Science and Technology where grandmothers were appealed to as carers for future generations.

Forgive me for having let my German / Slavic passion (and pain) for our planet allowed me to explain my interest in the Committee’s work.

It was just background information.

Yours sincerely,

Sabine

Promoter, Is Green Growth Possible?

Publisher, Green Credit for Green Purposes

Organiser, Forum for Stable Currencies

Director
3D Metrics
21a Goldhurst Terrace
London NW6 3HB
T: +44 (0)20 7328 3701
M: +44 (0)7968 039 141

www.3dmetrics.co.uk – Measuring new Qualities in Finance, Science and Economics

TheyWorkForYou.com

This remarkable site allows you be ‘alerted’ by email when something relevant to you happens in Parlament:

— relating either to your MP
— or to keywords that you choose.

I am the 147th person who signed up to be emailed when Glenda Jackson MP speaks.

16.03.07 Nothing further to add

Dear Sabine,

Thank you for your email. The Committee does not respond to, or enter into discussions about individual memoranda. The Committee will express their views on this subject when they make their Report to the House.

I have nothing further to add.

Best wishes

Lis McCracken

16.03.07 Access to the Treasury Select Committee – because we have 10 years left according to NASA scientist James Hansen

Dear Lis

Many thanks indeed for your invitation to submit a supplementary memorandum!

While I am waiting for the advice of our lawyer, I thought I’d let you know more about my interest in the Committee’s inquiry into the Stern review:

I am old enough to have been rescued by my 85-year-old mother from the bombing of burning Dresden – on the way from her home which has become Polish to where we ended up as refugees. She moved over 40 times – the last time to the former DDR ‘left of Berlin’ where I could watch American style capitalism ‘roll in with a vengeance’.

I have had to explain to myself how Nazism had become possible in my country of music, philosophy and mathematics and I had to come to the realisation that people were only ‘doing their job’. With German thoroughness and dutifulness. People can only ‘do their job’ because they are paid to do so. Money is that tool and the fuel of the economy in the same way as blood is the fuel of our body. But that fuel has attained as bad a quality by now as air, water and soil around us.

James Gibb Stuart, the 84-year-old author of The Money Bomb who lives in Chairman McFall MP’s constituency says: the climate and the money problem are one and the same. But Isabel at the constituency office told me to get in touch with you regarding a meeting with the Chairman.

When I lived in Geneva and had an office next to the United Nations, I realised that my country was going to become the battlefield between the US and the USSR but thought that peace was politics and that politics was made by men.

I came to London thanks to Bernard Benson who in his youth had contributed to the invention of Trident. I had heard his lecture in Paris where he said that 1.7% of humanity are responsible for the arms race: the scientists (I had been working as a systems analyst at CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research), the military, arms producers, financiers and politicians.

As a mathematician and ‘computer woman’ I was involved in the first Internet Cafes in London and organised weekly ‘networking meetings’. One day Lord Sudeley came and told me his story about how his ancestor had been made bankrupt by Lloyds over 100 years ago. When I learned that the same ancestor had built the estate that became the model for the Palace of Westminster, I felt so ashamed for him. How can a country to this to its own history? I felt even worse when I met a person whose company was made bankrupt by Lloyds according to the same principles 100 years later. But I was to meet more and more such ‘bank victims’.

That’s why I organised the Forum for Stable Currencies at the House of Lords and learned more about our Western monetary system than I ever wanted to know. At our last meeting I had Aubrey Meyer as a speaker who demonstrated the dangers of our planet and the “Contraction and Convergence” framework of his Global Commons Institute. His 4-year-old daughter had asked him whether it’s really true that our planet is dying. I heard him play the music of Schindler’s List while showing pictures of our planet which cannot but make you cry.

When I attended a seminar of the Environmental Law Foundation on the legal and economic challenge of climate change, I spoke to a lawyer who began to advise me.

By that time, I had attended not only meetings of the Monetary Policy Committee before it became the Economics Affairs Committee at the House of Lords, but I had also made three submissions that became part of a report, a CD and in the third time were not published. Thus I discovered how not to be heard by writing.

I also had watched the establishment of the Debt Management Office, the Financial Services Authority and the reform of the House of Lords where Lord Sudeley lost his raison d’etre of party independent and long term thinking. Hansard reported Lord Oxon of Oxenford who had said that this country has never had a revolution because of that tradition!

When the Anglo-German Foundation compared the British and the German banking system, it came to the conclusion that the German system was superior in many ways. The Foundation is now heading a research programme into the creation of sustainable growth in Europe, and I have proposed to analyse the same kind of statistics of the European Central Bank as I have done for the Bank of England for my submission Green Credit for Green Purposes.

But I have also heard Monsieur Trichet give evidence before the Economic Affairs Committee where he was asked about the accountability of the ECB. He said that the finance ministers are invited twice a year but they tend not to come. I have also heard Sir Eddie George talk about interest rate setting as rather a poor economic control mechanism.

Meanwhile our planet is on a trend that that will reach a tipping point in ten years according to NASA scientist James Hansen – but Exxon uses money to discredit scientific information – even though The Limits to Growth report of the Club of Rome has been out since 1972.

NIMTO – not in my term of office – is the expression that I learned when I attended one of the Committee meetings and I understand that the Chairman is going to stand down. Who will do any long term thinking about what the Monetary and Financial Institutions (MFIs) are doing to this and other countries? How many banks have changed their light bulbs and changed over to using hybrid cars or are paying their employees to do so? Why have Private Non-Financial Institutions (PNFIs) and Other Financial Corporations (OFCs) been allowed to privilege of credit creation? Why does public funding go down while, in comparison, credit in the money supply goes up?

In 1944 when I was born, Labour MP Norman Smith said that there is always enough money for war, but never enough for health and education. Now there is not enough money for the environment either: my ‘Climate Monitoring Project’ has just been unsuccessful in a ‘bid for funding’ from DEFRA because they only had money for one project and that had to cover the study of ‘market mechanisms’. But at a conference of women in science and technology a speaker from the Forum for the Future showed a cartoon to illustrate how carbon trading is a mechanism for clearing a conscience of guilt. Alan Simpson MP calls it the Great Carbon Trading Swindle in the Daily Mail.

When I am asking for a meeting with Chairman McFall MP, I am asking for a human response to my submission. I want to know what the Chairman and the Committee members think about our issues and our concerns. I want to know whether they have read the document, whether they understand the issues or whether they need more information.

If they understand, I want to know what they intend to do about our recommendations. For it is possible to understand and feel completely helpless and powerless. But in the position of the Committee, it is possible to make a difference – on behalf of our planet!

Professor James Lovelock said in his address to the All Party Group on Climate Change that politicians should listen more to scientists.

Sir Nicholas Stern will look at my new software methods once he will be at the LSE where he said that people will be interested.

Professor Mark Maslin whose policy report “Are We on Target?” made the front page of the Guardian on March 6^th, has suggested to follow my ‘Green Credit’ submission with a report on ‘Is Green Growth Possible’ – which may be easier to understand.

Hence I consider submitting a preliminary analysis of ‘green growth’ as a supplementary memo. But what would happen to it? Will I again not know whether it has been read? Will I receive a response?

With ‘globally warm’ regards,

Yours sincerely,

Sabine

Organiser, Forum for Stable Currencies

Author, Green Credit for Green Purposes

Director
3D Metrics
21a Goldhurst Terrace
London NW6 3HB
T: +44 (0)20 7328 3701
M: +44 (0)7968 039 141
www.3dmetrics.co.uk – Measuring new Qualities in Finance, Science and Economics