Here's your link to the excerpted, e-book version (in PDF format), of MONEY: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender, by Thomas H. Greco, to be published by Chelsea Green in January, 2002 (Paper, 295 pp, $19.95):

Think of it as a trade: an exchange in idea currency much like you trade money for food and other life essentials. Because once you've read MONEY, you'll never think the same about what money is, what money does, how it is created, whom it benefits, and how the creation of parallel currencies outside of money as legal tender has the potential to transform community economic life. In effect you'll have traded confusion for understanding, an exchange I think you'll agree, is highly in your favor.

Vicki Robin, co-author of the best-selling YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE and writer of the book's Foreword, gives us the metaphor we need: Dorothy's little dog Toto pulling back the curtain to reveal the "wizard" for what he really is, a fraud and a deception. So it is with money. We are dazzled by the glittering Oz of money, banking, and finance, thinking it magical and beyond our comprehension. But wait a minute, like the little man at the controls trying desperately to pull the curtain closed, the financial cognoscenti are happy to keep us uninformed. Money is actually nothing more than a human idea, an agreement about how goods and services are exchanged.

And, guess what? The rules of the money game are made to favor particular groups. They're set and controlled by the banks, (not the government, not the people) where 95% of all money is created as interest-bearing debt. This inherently unstable system (the money supply is always lagging behind the growing amount of debt) creates and fuels the cancerous growth that now threatens to overwhelm the life support systems of the planet. Imagine playing a game of Monopoly in which all money must be borrowed at interest from the bank; who do you think would win?

But, there's hope. "The forgotten history of money is about how people can create their own." Greco shows us how the creation of parallel currency and credit systems can work to sustain and protect communities and their local economies, reinforcing the values of social justice, self-reliance, economic equity, and personal freedom. These alternative money systems have a long history, from depression-era scrip, to the Swiss WIR business group trading system (17% of Swiss businesses and 2.5 billion Swiss francs in annual trading), to the newer LETS (local employment and trading) systems, Toronto Dollars, YES (youth employment scrip), e-currency models, and more. The growth of alternative currency systems world-wide has been astonishing, from less than 100 in 1990 to over 2000 today.

In Argentina, currently perched on a mountain of debt and threatening to topple into default, the RGT (Global Trading Network) is a social money movement that sustains a half a million families and offers insulation and
protection from the adverse effects of economic globalization. Perhaps New York City should look to this model as it struggles to counter the severe economic effects of the World Trade Center attacks (ask to see our letter to Mayor-elect Bloomberg).

Need more reasons to read MONEY? Tom Greco's "Talking Points" explain why this book is even more relevant today, in the aftermath of 9/11 and with the growing threat of national recession, than the author even knew when he wrote it. E-mail me if you'd like to see these points and more.