Читать книгу Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash - David Boyle - Страница 19

So the scene was set for stage three. Edgar was preparing himself for a new phase in his economy-building. The problem of services for old people was dealt with; time dollars were well-established for that, but maybe they could do other things as well. In Chicago schools, for example, where time dollars are being paid to children to tutor fellow-pupils two years below. They find that both tutors and tutored improve their grades. They even stop bullying each other: you don’t beat up your pupil after all, and you don’t let anybody else do so either.

‘These are kids who have already been told by the school system that they are “dumb”,’ said Edgar. ‘But they know the alphabet and they know that one plus two equals three, so if they’re dumb it is inconceivable that these younger kids won’t learn it. They don’t do the kids’ homework for them because they know the kids can do it, because they understand the problem – and all of a sudden they are starting to get As and Bs for the first time.’

But for all these things to be achieved, time dollars need to be under-pinned, and this is beginning to happen. In El Paso, you can now buy children’s clothes with time dollars. In Pittsburgh, a shop run by Aid to Families with Dependent Children provides toys, nappies and secondhand clothes in return for time dollars. An organization in New England provides a $40 bag of groceries for $14 plus two hours of time dollars. The point about pump-priming this social economy with children’s clothes or food is that you can get hold of surplus or waste – things that were actually going for nothing – and then make them available for time dollars.

Habitat for Humanity, the US low-cost homes charity, already lets people make their mortgage down-payment in 500 hours of time dollar work building homes for other people. By charging for their expertise in time dollars, or by letting people into their health centre for time dollars, lawyers and local councils can create this time dollar debt – a debt which has to be paid off by people improving their neighbourhood. If you charge in pounds or dollars, neighbourhoods would not be able to afford it, but by charging for services in time dollars, you can involve neighbourhoods in their own salvation.

Edgar Cahn calls this ‘co-production’: ‘Without co-production, nothing that professionals, organizations or programmes do can succeed,’ he says. ‘With co-production, the impossible comes within reach. As a lawyer, I get to make sure someone isn’t evicted from their home, but I can’t make that home somewhere I would want to live. For that I need that person’s involvement.’ Because the economy is half-blind, it takes no notice of these assets – people’s time, skills, energy and willingness to give back. It leaves them lying around while we all believe we are running out of money. Time dollars are a way of recycling the assets and getting them to work.

GMB general secretary John Edmonds – one of Britain’s top trade unionists – tells a story of the secretary of a big social club in north-west England who is actually employed by a big chemical company, ‘As the club secretary, he demonstrates considerable skills as a communicator, organizer and manager; the chemical company employs him as a semi-skilled packer,’ he said in a speech to the Royal Society of Arts. He went on: ‘The extent of John’s talent came to the attention of management when the company carried out a staff aptitude and experience survey. Showing me the results, the managing director delivered a bleak verdict: “We are wasting the ability of about half the people who work here”.’

Multiply this by every office, neighbourhood and street and you realize just how much hidden skill and human energy there is in society. And we thought we were running out of resources.

But there is something rather old-fashioned and moralistic about the time dollars idea, which I wasn’t sure would go down very well in cynical old Britain, where the slightest whiff of the ‘deserving poor’ gets a broadside from the people who watch out for these things. On the other hand, Edgar does some of this asset-recycling himself. He charges for his work in the legal advice centre in time dollars. He linked the major law firm Holland & Knight with a community group which wanted to clear out the drug-dealers and corrupt policemen from their neighbourhood in Washington and lobby to release funds for local improvement – in return for a retainer paid in time dollars. In 1996, the firm billed the equivalent of $234,979 to the community in time dollars, paid back in clearing up rubbish, planting flowers, school tutoring or taking down the car numbers of local drug-dealers.

Of course you can give this kind of stuff out for free, but shouldn’t it be paid for somehow? And if you are a law firm with the expertise and the local community has the energy, you need some kind of money system to bring the two together. ‘Lawyers have a lot of guilt,’ Edgar said later. ‘They know that the time they give is unleashing community development, but only if they charge in time dollars.’

Meanwhile, Edgar Cahn’s imagination was doing overtime. How about paying tax in time dollars? What about parking? What if city-centre parking spaces were reserved for people with time dollars? Imagine what an injection of credibility that would give to the idea of helping out in your neighbourhood. How about student loan payments in time dollars? ‘That’s next,’ he said as he took me to the front door the following evening, a little glint in his eye.

We were distributing ourselves into various cars, me with a video screen and a presentation stand on my lap. It was time for the time dollars bandwagon to descend on one of Washington’s more notorious estates. We were going to a housing block called Arthur M. Capper to discuss setting up a food bank with the residents. US cities are dotted with subsidized food banks, providing surplus food and groceries to poorer people at extremely low prices. Anyone with backing from a reputable organization can use these centres to supply their own local food banks.

Our job was to persuade the people who lived there to link this new food bank to time dollars, and use it to fuel a new kind of self-help. It was tricky: the residents had asked the Time Dollar Institute to be their official sponsors for the food bank. They might not take kindly to the morality bank which they were going to get. We drove past the Capitol, a kind of mental boundary between Washington’s safe and dangerous states of mind, past the trendy Irish pubs, underneath the urban motorways and down towards Anacostia. I hoped some of Edgar’s ‘smell of respect’ might rub off on me.

If you use the phrase ‘housing estate’ to Americans, they look at you blankly. To them, an estate is somewhere you grow cotton in the deep South. ‘Housing complex’ is equally bewildering: something your analyst might diagnose. Nor can you say ‘public housing’, because many of the apartment blocks where Washington’s poor live are actually private, though funded by subsidies from the city or one of the federal agencies.

The Arthur M. Capper block was one of these – a vast red-brick monstrosity, without character or redeeming features. Hundreds of dour little windows looked down on to a grassless, pitted, littered open space, wired off recreation areas and hundreds of bits of old cars. It was one of those strange modern wastelands whose appearance had been twisted somehow by the availability of grants. Clearly a great deal of money had been available at some point for floodlighting the recreation areas; obviously none had been forthcoming for landscaping. Poor old Arthur M. Capper, to have his name remembered in this way.

But there was no sense of menace or threat, and we were clearly expected. I heaved the screen through the front door, past the painted breeze-block walls and into what was evidently the ‘community room’. It was the kind of green-painted, fluorescent-lighted, orange-curtained, lino-covered hole you would expect in a block like this, with piles of elderly plastic chairs covered with specks of whitewash, some folded tables and a small framed copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper which looked as though it had come out of an old calendar. A notice informed us that ‘handwashing prevents infection’ and a small digital clock told us that the time was 3.52 – which it wasn’t.

Fourteen or so black women meandered into the room, with children attached and a faint air of having better things to do. Apart from the time dollar promoters and what seemed liked a whole coachload of housing rights activists, there was only one man. It wasn’t quite clear why he was there: he was in his seventies and evidently had not lived in Arthur M. Capper for some years.

‘Where’s the free food?’ said one child near me. His mother in an elderly T-shirt flapped a hand at him, but began looking quietly round the room herself.

‘It’s not actually free. Nothing in this life is free,’ said one of the housing activists glumly. ‘We know that.’

By the time Clarence rose to speak, explaining that time dollars were a ‘mechanism that brings people together’, the room was extremely noisy. Babies were banging the table, mothers were disciplining their charges, and the air of a 5 p.m. maths lesson pervaded the room. ‘You folks are in a state of dependency, dependent on the government to provide food stamps and shelter,’ he said. ‘But we don’t want to be in this business any more. We are trying to figure out how to get a little piece of money that you can save.’

As a method of introducing new kinds of money, it was curiously crablike. The mothers were shifting in their seats, eyeing the door for signs of the free supper. As one of only three whites in the room, I took on a studied air of absence. The meeting clearly wasn’t going terribly well. Then it was Edgar’s turn. I wondered how a white Jewish law professor would go down in a place like south-east Washington, especially in his habitual white polo-necked shirt. But I need not have worried. He spoke calmly and very simply, and he worked his audience like an old-fashioned politician.

‘My message is simply that we all need each other,’ he said. The women stilled for a second. His directness seemed to carry a little weight. ‘Everybody in this room knows what it’s like having to be in at least two places at one time. If you only had somebody you could turn to, it would be better – but you don’t want to ask for charity and you don’t want to be indebted.’ People had stopped shifting in their seats. Edgar’s approach was having some effect.

‘Some years ago I began to think: why can’t we create our own kind of money – a kind of money just between ourselves? A little bit like a blood bank. Why can’t we create some kind of time bank?’

And then a risk, but a calculated political one. ‘I was married to a black woman, and when we were first married, I knew what it meant for neighbours to help out neighbours. This is what neighbours have always done for neighbours. And you never had to declare that to the authorities. We can rebuild that sense of community we used to have.’

It was quietly spoken, mild and modest – but a bravura piece of politics for all that.

‘It is a kind of bank where you deposit care and giving,’ said Edgar, quoting Ralph Nader. ‘When you need care and giving you can withdraw it. In thirty-eight states where people have been doing this, nobody has been ripped off and nobody has been mugged. I can’t tell you that they are all angels, but I can tell you that people don’t mess with the people they have to live with.’

I wasn’t so sure about this, but the women carried on listening. Their range of dangling green, pink, blue and yellow earrings were uncharacteristically still. Even the children were a little quieter.

‘Nowadays all the rewards are for doing bad, and there are very few rewards for just being a decent neighbour,’ he said. ‘I know they say you can go to heaven, but I want you to get those rewards before that.’

It was convincing, inspiring even, but also perhaps a little confusing out of context.

‘What’s this got to do with setting up our food bank?’ asked one of the audience. Edgar had reckoned without ‘Miss Mary’, the tough-minded residents’ council chair, who had her own very clear political sense. She knew what she could sell, and she didn’t think she could sell her committee the idea of their new food bank being conditional on earning time dollars.

‘We wanted to be able to give the food away free,’ she said. Other voices followed, as they began to see the snag.

‘What happens if some people are dishonest?’ asked one.

‘Some of us got our food stamps five days late this month, and we need to be able to use the food bank.’

‘Yeah, I ain’t got mine yet!’ As in all public meetings about new ideas, all the questions were directly relevant, but jumbled up. So were the answers.

Clarence weighed in: ‘This time bank idea is something where people can begin to do things for each other in a very positive way. There are different activities which need doing which we can help do for each other – or get our friends to do it.’

‘I don’t have no friends,’ said one of the more obstreperous women. ‘I don’t need no friends.’

This was the signal for an enormous argument about something completely different. The woman with no friends stormed that her mother was in hospital and was losing her flat and nobody was helping. The rest of the audience ignored her. It was impossible to follow exactly what was happening. Mary braved her denunciations and said she would help tomorrow. The woman with no friends stalked out of the room in tears, knocking over a few of the plastic chairs as she went.

There was silence for a moment, but it was clear the meeting was over. Large boxes of chicken and coleslaw from the Roy Rogers chain had arrived and the children were queuing up. Here was the free food. Then in the corner of the room, as everybody else began to clear away, the real negotiations were beginning. Edgar, Clarence, Tina from Ohio and Mary huddled together looking serious. Mary’s big bunch of keys jangled at her wrist, while her small son Michael wandered about in an Old Navy T-shirt at her feet.

‘The question is, can people with time dollars get anything extra from the food bank in return for being good neighbours?’ said Edgar, setting out his case.

‘No,’ said Mary. It just wouldn’t work. It would be favouritism. She wouldn’t dare.

‘What do you think about the idea?’ said Tina sensibly, and immediately the atmosphere lightened.

‘I love it, but –’ said Mary. ‘But I wouldn’t dare.’

There was going to be no movement. Edgar signed the papers anyway, so that the Time Dollar Network would sponsor the food bank at Arthur M. Capper. He would return to the issue later.