Brian Davey has produced two more posters for the Occupy movement which can be downloaded from this site. They describe the Eurozone crisis and the “monetocracy”: the one percent who exercise power over the rest of us.

The Occupy movement needs some clear, simple ideas to champion. Debt cancellation is a clear, simple idea – but how can it be done in a way that is not chaotic and is fair to all, eg to the people who were never in debt anyway? And can it help us to start to work on our “ecological debts” too?

The EU’s collective austerity programme will do little or nothing to save the problem countries – Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Spain – from default and the rescue fund set up by the IMF and the ECB will only buy time before they do so. Richard Douthwaite argues that a limited, targeted injection of non-debt-based euros could provide a neat and swift solution to a debt problem the whole eurozone shares.

What would happen if, instead of the European Central Bank providing liquidity to private banks in order to ward off financial collapse, it provided funding to mobilise a green workforce to tackle urgent environmental challenges? The salaries would effectively transfuse local economies and the scheme has precedence in the Common Agricutural Policy which already pays farmers to protect the environment. This Irish adaptation of the Job Guarantee developed by Modern Monetary theorists in the US is proposed by Emer O’Siochru in an article on the Smart Taxes Network website.

Many discussions on sustainability rarely mention the world’s growing population and whether current or projected future levels are – or can be made – compatible with living within the limits set by the Earth’s regenerative capacity. David Knight’s paper shows that the growing population is not incompatible with lower levels of energy use, but that the rising levels of consumption in rich countries and “emerging” ones like Brazil, India and China certainly are.

Wikipedia and the Linux computer operating system were both created by unpaid volunteers using the internet, and both are out-competing their commercially-produced rivals, such as the Encyclopaedia Brtiannica and Microsoft. Are they examples of a new type of economy which has a lot further to go? Michel Bauwens, the founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation (P2P) believes so.