Greece finds a way out of the frying pan
We are supposed to believe that the ferocious austerity measures imposed on Greece are working – but are they? Dimitri Papadimitriou, President of the Bard College Economics Institute, thinks not. Writing for the US site, Truth-out, he contends that two bailouts have spread ‘the economics of social disaster.’ The debt is not sustainable and Greece now looks, he says, ‘like a badly battered boxer.’ The unemployment rate stands at 28%; the education and health care systems have been decimated and one out of every three Greeks is living below the poverty line.
Papadimitriou says a ‘parallel financial system’ is the only way to re-establish employment and market liquidity. It’s already happening. People have for quite a time been using the TEM, an acronym of the Greek capitals that stand for ‘Local Alternative Unit’, exactly as our LETS stands for ‘Local Alternative Trading Scheme’. The city of Volos has gone further, setting up a TEM Internet mutual banking system, Internet-based and hosted on a cheap Dutch server to keep administration costs down. Its currency is TEM credits. On joining, members are granted a deficit-spend of up to 300 TEMs – effectively an interest-free loan from the community, much like our Credit Unions.
Membership has expanded eight-fold in the last year. Transactions are transfers from one user-account to another, and to ensure transparency, user balances are recorded on the open database, for all users to see. The system cannot lend money at interest, but that is not its purpose. It has provided a viable alternative to the Euro, enabling Greece to help its own recovery. The principle stands as an example of what any nation may do when pressed too hard by the international finance-jugglers.
