97% Owned – Director’s Cut

By Shaun Chamberlin, originally published by Dark Optimism

May 23, 2012

Off the back of href=”http://www.darkoptimism.org/2012/05/17/transition-money-reflections-on-a-fascinating-theme-and-day/” target=”_blank”>my recent post on Transition Money, this excellent new short film, href=”http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/97percent” title=”97 Percent Owned” target=”_blank”>97% Owned, explains the privatised, debt-based money system we currently use. The one that allows UK banks to simply create around £200,000,000,000 (£200bn) a year and use it as they see fit – without any oversight – to shape the economy and control politics, causing crises, creating inflation and pushing house prices out of reach.

Most of us work for money, but these people are magicking it up and then using it to pay others to do whatever they please. How is this different from legalised slavery?

And we are the slaves. href=”http://sacred-economics.com/” title=”Sacred Economics” target=”_blank”>There are alternatives, and yet we continue accepting this datetime=”2012-05-19T22:36:20+00:00″>system scam, largely because we have been tricked to believe that economics is complicated and *yawn* href=”http://www.darkoptimism.org/2012/05/17/transition-money-reflections-on-a-fascinating-theme-and-day/” title=”Transition Money” target=”_blank”>boring! And yes, I have to admit, what could be more boring than being able to create money from thin air..?

( href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcGh1Dex4Yo&feature=relmfu” title=”Feature-length 97% Owned” target=”_blank”>a full feature-length version of 97% Owned is also available)

Shaun Chamberlin

“In 2005 I quit my job to devote myself full-time to exploring the dominant cultural stories and ‘myths’ that chart the course for our society and, in particular, how we might change direction before we end up where we are headed. My various efforts since have been covered across the UK press, including by the BBC, Guardian, Sunday Times, Independent and Daily Express, as well as internationally by Time magazine, Bloomberg News and the Financial Times.

Perhaps my proudest achievement is having shepherded the late David Fleming‘s extraordinary, award-winning Lean Logic and Surviving the Future to posthumous publication. In light of their ever-growing popularity, I taught the ‘Community, Place and Play: A Post-Market Economics‘ course at Schumacher College, was executive producer of 2020 film The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation?, and now partner with Vermont’s Sterling College, both as consulting scholar on their EcoGather project and leading the groundbreaking online programme ‘Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time’.

Meanwhile, putting the theory into practice, I am one of the six custodians of legendary free pub ‘The Happy Pig‘, and was involved with the Transition Network since its inception, leading to my co-founding Transition Town Kingston and authoring the movement’s second book, The Transition Timeline, back in 2009.

I was one of the earliest Extinction Rebellion arrestees, and have previously served as chair of the Ecological Land Co-operative, a director of the campaigning organisation Global Justice Now, Chelsea Green Publishing‘s commissioning editor for the UK/Europe and an advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, as well as co-authoring the All Party Parliamentary report into carbon rationing.

My writing roams across social, political and spiritual themes, including popular explorations of collapse, energy and ecological issues, and has found homes from online platforms openDemocracy, The Oil Drum and The Huffington Post to print magazines such as Tikkun, STIR, The Ecologist, The Land, Kosmos and Resurgence, along with academic publications such as the Solutions and Carbon Management peer-reviewed journals (including the most-read paper in the history of the latter).