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Newsletter No 3 : March 2022

To Members and Friends of the Fractal Economy Cooperative,

The FEC team is very happy to inform you of a significant milestone in the Coop’s development. We now have in place the Web/App infrastructure to do the following:

  • Register members, through our website, as individuals, businesses, or not-for-profits (NFP).
  • Using our app, record sales between Coop members (recording done by sellers).
  • Levy a ‘community contributions’ (aka transaction tax) of 3% on the seller (recipient of money).
  • Utilise this revenue to support our NFP members with gift funding.
  • Individual members get to vote on how they would like to see the gift money used. The allocation of gift funding is totally dependent on how members vote.

 

You can now sign in to your account, view the NFPs registered with us as gift recipients and vote on how you wish to see the gift money allocated. Please see the section below on ‘How to vote on the FEC gift funding allocation’.

 

We anticipate that in about two weeks, we will be doing our first disbursement of funds. This means that you have time to encourage any NFP that you wish to receive financial support to be registered with us. This enables you (and any other persons who are also supporters of that NFP) to vote to allocate funding to the NFP. There are 3 NFP’s registered, waiting to receive your vote Chrysalis Steiner School, Community Radio 2BBB and Bellingen Shire Electricity Alliance. We anticipate that there will be quite a few more in the near future.

 

Over the next few months and years we would like to do the following: inform NFPs of the benefit of being FEC members, asking those NFP to then encourage their own members and supporters to sign up with the FEC, and then participate in trading within the FEC, in order to generate funding for the NFPs. We believe we can thus build a New Economy from the ground up – as described in our webpage https://fractaleconomy.coop/what-is-a-fractal-economy/.

Synergy and critical mass

You are receiving this newsletter either because you have signed up as a member of FEC or because you have expressed support for it in one way or another. You may also feel hesitant about entering actively into the activities of the Coop – that the likely benefit may not be worth the energy involved in ‘getting into it’. To wholly succeed the Coop needs to acquire a critical mass where enough active members will generate sales and community contributions revenue to get NFPs interested They in turn bring in more membership and more activity which will then create another cycle of expansion, and so on. Everything then works synergistically: more members = more sales = more community activity + more community revenue = more NFP members = more individual and business members.

One can wait for such a critical mass to develop before tagging along and getting involved; or one can participate in creating the critical mass. If you are one of the ‘hesitant’ members described above, we encourage you to be one of the proactive ones who create the critical mass. In part because we recognise that people are generally harried and time-stressed, we have taken every effort to ensure your ‘FEC experience’ is as straightforward and trouble free as possible. You should not find it costing too much of your time to get involved and that it is easy to register as a member (if you haven’t done so).  Also offer goods and services for sale to fellow members either online or through other methods we offer. Participate in buying and selling goods and services from/to members. Record such sales with the use of our app; vote to allocate gift funding to your favourite NFP. These processes, and more, are described in our Hands On Guide.

Our first post-Covid general meeting

As part of our celebrations of past and current achievements, and as a ‘kick-off’ for future activities, we plan to have our first physical meeting since the various lockdowns and restrictions on travel and meetings were put in place on account of Covid-19. The meeting will be held in Bellingen in The Stables [behind the ambulance station, Church St, Bellingen] starting at 4.30 pm on Friday 8th April. Zoom access will be made available to those who wish it. Gavin Tang will give a short (20 minutes) talk on why a huge global financial crash has to happen soon, and what must be done to prepare beforehand.

How to vote on the FEC gift funding allocation

After you sign in to your FEC account, select the Not-For-Profits’ directory on the top right. A few lines down from the top of the page there is a link that reads ‘How to allocate funds’. This link will explain to you how you can vote to allocate the gift funding to NFP’s.

To register as a new member or sign in: https://fractaleconomy.coop

The FEC team

PS If you no longer wish to receive this newsletter reply to this email.

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Most Popular Posts:

Transaction Tax

In the national economy, a transaction tax would be a flat rate tax on every monetary transaction with only a few minor exceptions such as transfers within a family unit. No costs or expense s by businesses will be tax deductible. Purchases of things like shares and currencies will also incur this tax (which pretty much wipes out the speculative transfers of capitalism). In the FEC economy we apply this tax to transfers between members so that we as a collective can do very good and powerful things with it. For marketing reasons, we have renamed this tax to ‘community contribution’.

Commons

We at the FEC do not think that the government is the appropriate collective institution to manage things like banking, taxation and land rental. These can all be taken out of the hands of government. Government should be restricted to policy making in the political realm. What we call the commons is an economic collective. This economic collective does not have the argy bargy of the political life. Outside of the capitalist context, it is the principle of cooperation and mutual aid that pervades the economic life, and it will have a very different structure to government. Because the term ‘public’ is often associated with government, we prefer the term ‘commons’ in reference to this economic collective.

Community Contribution

‘Community contribution’ is in fact the same as a transaction tax as described elsewhere [see Article 2 in ‘Further reading’]. The reason we have renamed the tax is for marketing reasons as people recoil from the notion of paying an extra tax. Tax payments is in fact how we as individuals contribute to the community in order to fund things like public transport, welfare and a functional judicial system. So people should be proud in saying that they pay their taxes. The reason that we have an aversion to the word tax is brought about by corporations who have the ability to make their expenses cost deductible. They load up all costs of dubious things into their income-expenditure calculations that they can get away with not paying a lot of the taxes that are their due. The whole scam trickles down to the rest of the economy and tax avoidance/evasion becomes an acceptable sport. In a true transaction tax, no expenses are tax deductible.

What is a fractal?

A fractal is by one definition ‘An object whose parts, at infinitely many levels of magnification, appear geometrically similar to the whole’. Take the fern leaf as shown in this image:

The first image above is a graphic picture of a whole fern leaf. If we take one of the ‘branches’ of the leaf – as depicted in the boxed section – and examine its structure, we find that the ‘branch replicates in full the pattern of the original fern leaf. The boxed section of the first image, rotated and appropriately magnified as in image 2, show an identical pattern to the whole leaf. If we take yet another ‘sub-branch’ out of the fern in image 2 as depicted in the boxed section of Image 2, we find the same leaf pattern replicated again. And so on.

The Fractal Economy Cooperative takes its name from this feature of fractals – that the part replicates the whole. We believe that what needs to be done in the global economy is the same as what needs to be done in the national economies; and that it is what we intend to do in the fractal economy. This means that we policies in a number of places that should also be practised in the national economy in order to make it a socially just and environmentally sustainable economy: direct democracy in the realm of policy making, direct individual participation in the allocation of public/commons spending; all the practices that make up for what we call commons banking, a new taxation system (which we call ‘community contribution’ for marketing reasons); support for cooperatives over share ownership of companies; a return to common ownership of land effected through the banking system.