Hey Honey, they shrunk the money!

Looking at the bright new shiny, and shrunken, coins I wonder if any one else notices how much they have devalued? A friend pointed out to me the similarity between the bright new shiny copper 10c piece, and the 1c coin we used to have - the main noticeable difference is that the new one has a zero on it the old one didn't. Is that how much value the money has lost?

I hear the cry: "It's too complicated" How are we to understand these serious and complicated economic issues, and if we did what could we do about them? We easily pass on the responsibility to others who know better - and they work in our best interests, no? A paragraph by David C. Korten in his latest book "From Empire to Earth Community," clarified this very succinctly for me. Maybe it will help you.

These financial games [interest bearing loans, manipulated interest rates, financial speculation, and more] contribute nothing of value to the larger society. They do, however, significantly increase the buying power of the ruling elites and their claims on the real wealth of society relative to the claims of those persons who contribute to the creation of that wealth by producing real goods and providing real services. They are the most successful of financial cons because the mechanisms are invisible and the marks—the object of the con—rarely realise they have been conned. Even if they were to recognise they have been conned, there is nothing they can do about it because the con is both legal and culturally accepted. - David C. Korten

Those words stopped me in my tracks. Of course. Has anyone noticed that many of the productive people in our community, are living on the same or similar incomes they lived on 10 years ago when our money could buy more? We are working longer hours, or now we constitute part of a two income family, just to maintain the same level of purchases. And it goes on. While we look at local economics, we are not isolated from the economies of the world. And those economies are even harder to comprehend. However the secretive nature of those institutions who control the world economics is worth noting:

"Today the world is run by three of the most secretive institutions in the world: The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, all three of which, in turn, are dominated by the U.S. Their decisions are made in secret. The people who head them are appointed behind closed doors. Nobody really knows anything about them, their politics, their beliefs, their intentions. Nobody elected them. Nobody said they could make decisions on our behalf." – Arundhati Roy

And they are working in our best interests, right?