The State of the Campaign

We’re now six weeks into the Positive Money campaign, and we’ve made some great progress, the past two weeks marking several important milestones both for Positive Money and the Monetary Reform movement in general.

Since our launch we have:

• 2,000 supporters

• 5,000 hits a month on the website, including 3,500 unique visitors

• The largest Monetary Reform Facebook group

• Organised a sell out student conference for 130 participants

We’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to spreading awareness of the existence of this campaign and the need for it.

The growth of the movement, and our ultimate success relies on a proactive supporter base. If we all continue to make others aware of the need for change and the need for a unified voice to call for it, we can look forward to an even more exciting situation in six weeks time. We’ve collectively achieved all this without a coordinated movement to do so, and with the tools and groups we’ll be rolling out in weeks to come our capabilities will exponentially increase.

Following our first call for volunteers there has been a great response from a number of people willing to dedicate a few hours a week to making this happen. This week and next we’ll be working on organising these volunteers for a focused effort in raising awareness of our existence. Work is nearing completion on our social networking campaign platform, and with the help of our web team, when we’re ready to go this campaign will really start to take off in a big way.

Behind the scenes we’ve cultivated good relationships with key organisations, who have separate visions as to the ideal system to move over to, but that can both see the benefits in working with an organisation like ours that seeks to bring the debate into the public eye. We’ve also been in contact with several other key organisations not directly involved in the monetary reform movement, and we hope to develop these relationships with a view to working together in the future. We’ll be reporting more on these partnerships soon.

We’ve also been speaking about the recent protests in Iceland, where the UK equivalent of 2 million people protested against the government handling of the situation there, and will be working with a member of the Financial Fraud Unit in Iceland to advance the campaign over there. There is a need for Positive Money in all countries, and when we have this capability, an international presence will amplify our collective efforts.

Following the catastrophic systemic failure of the banking sector in the last few years, the development of social networks, and the internet in general, there is a real chance of success for our movement. The existence of a coordinated campaign to make this happen is vital.

There have been a series of interesting developments in the news.

A few moments ago the Federal Reserve announced another program of quantitative easing in the States, and will be pouring at least $75 billion a month into the economy until next June, in a last ditch effort to try to encourage the economy to recover by creating money to enable banks to further indebt the population. This really signifies the systemic failure of the banking system, and should this next round of quantitative easing fail to work, as the last has, there will be few options left other than a fundamental change in the way banking interacts with the wider economy.

Mervyn King has on a couple of occasions hinted at being in support of an end to fractional reserve banking. This is truly unprecedented for a currently serving Governor of the Bank of England, and signifies the growing view that fundamental reform is desirable and necessary.

The Independent Commission on Banking has been formed and has started it’s year long project, culminating in a recommendation for the government as to how to proceed, and whether to take a regulation or reform approach. Radical reforms of the banking system have been included on the agenda, and we’ll be applying pressure over the course of the next year to ensure that these ideas come under serious consideration.

Finally another historic landmark event occured on September 15th, when Douglas Carswell presented his Private Member’s bill to end fractional reserve banking. Although we expect that the bill will be blocked by government whips at it’s second reading on November 19th, this signifies an important strategic event, and the growing sentiment in Parliament that some bold changes must happen.

This week signifies the real start of the campaign for us, with the groundwork in place, and the coordinated involvement of our volunteers starting to shape up, we can really start to shake things up.

Let’s make this happen!

Ben Curtis & Ben Dyson