John C. Turmel, B. Eng., Leader,
Abolitionist Party of Canada,
Email: turmel@ncf.ca

Thursday Oct 31 2002

Jean Serge Brisson, Leader,
Libertarian Party of Canada,
Email: jeanserge.brisson@3web.net

Dear Jean Serge and Ontario Libertarians:

I must say I am overwhelmed by your offer to step down and support me for the interim leadership of the Libertarian Party of Canada. Other than my own, I have only ever considered three parties to have quality programming: Libertarian, Social Credit, Green parties.

As I've told you, the Libertarians were the very first Federal Party I ever approved of and voted for. And I do fondly recall attending a Libertarian Party convention in the mid 1980s with George Dance and Roma Kelembet in Toronto. The only reason I never joined your fold was my insistence on the right to issue interest-free private currencies and the party wasn't there yet though they are now.

As you remember, in 1993, I formed the Abolitionist Party of Canada fielding with 80 candidates, 1 more than the Greens, in 3 weeks of telephone calls to private currency supporters in the old Populist Party, Social Credit Party, Parti du reforme monetaire, a few Greens. Our purpose was to promote a national LETS (Local Employment-Trading System) which has now evolved to also supporting the UNILETS proposed in resolution C6 of the United Nations Millennium Declaration.
http://yahoogroups.com/group/UNILETS

And of course, they had to accept my Libertarian values in our Abolitionist party program at
http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel/abprogs.htm

http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel/gambler.htm details my efforts to abolish gambling prohibition and create a casino industry in Canada;

http://www.medpot.net details my current efforts to abolish marijuana prohibition in Canada and then the world;

http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel details my efforts to abolish interest on community currency at the UN; (sure, sure, no need to abolish interest when everyone owns their own private bank and get the interest back to themselves anyway but it is good to admit the evil that is caused by the usurious demand for 11 when they only printed 10);

I noted and wrote an article about your party's support for private currencies which puts the Abolitionists and Libertarians in 100% agreement. I also pointed out in my recent article on the Libertarian party in Porto Alegre that now that the Libertarians have found private currencies, there were no more disagreement with Marxists! http://yahoogroups.com/group/turmel/message/1382

I found the same thing. In my 1997 Federal election race, candidates from the Greens, Natural Law, NDP and Marxist-
Leninist joined me in signing a petition for a National LETS. Imagine, an ultra-capitalist like me in agreement with the Marxist-Leninists on LETS. But the Porto Alegre report did note that it was at the Sustainable Development Seminar that featured the great 2.5 million-member Argentina LETS timecredits system where all their former rivalries and disagreements melted away.

So, yes, I think I would like to help rebuild up the Libertarian Party of Canada now that you have added private currencies to all my other favorites.

I know many people can't get their heads around my being in the Guinness Book of Records for most elections contested,
the Great Canadian Character Anthology and the U.N. Millennium Declaration as the engineer invited to make the keynote speech on restructuring the global financial architecture with an interest-free UNILETS time-based
currency. It just sounds too eccentric for politics. But it does generate media. And why should the Guinness Record not mention the Libertarian Party the next time one of my elections breaks a record?

As you also know, I haven't been able to work at my profession of gambling in a couple of years and, like most of us, am a pauper, even if the Arizona Republic called me the World's Richest Pauper. Only because I know how to make my bankroll last.

But the tax credit system does give us a way to reward party members for their attendance and support. Pay members to attend meetings? How? With party currency backed up by the goods contributed to the party for tax credits.

Let's say a movie theater owner wants to contribute the maximum in movie tickets on his dead Tuesday nights to the party for tax credits that the party will use to reward and pay our members.

Federal tax credits: 
His contribution of $1075 in tickets gets $500 tax credit.
His theater contribution of $1075 gets $500 too.
Ontario tax credits and deductions:
His contribute of $1700 gets $750 tax credit;
His theater contribution of $15,000 in tickets gets $3000
via a provincial income tax deduction at a 20% rate!

$1,075+1,075+1,700+15,000 = $18,850 in tickets gets him
$500+500+750+3000 = $ 4,750 in cash from government.

At $10 a ticket, that's 1885 tickets to the party and he collects only $4750 but he also sells popcorn and drinks on his dead Tuesday nights! It's like a discount of 75% but why would he care if his theater is empty on Tuesday nights and that's the night he designates "Libertarians-come-and-collect-the-contribution" night.

Any and all parties can accept theater tickets. Why don't they if it's all wonderful? They don't accept tickets because distribution is a problem? They don't have a LETS party currency to automate the process. All Liberals would have to come to HQ to pick up their tickets or they'd have to mail them out. We just have to add the theater to our LETS Directory and members use the currency already in their wallets. It's done. No costs. Of course, theaters have what I call "Use-it-or-lose-it" product so they should love to get 25% cash. And there are many more such businesses to provide all sorts of valuable backing for our party monopoly money.

So, as long as each members starts with some Party Monopoly money from our party bank, all the merchant has to do is
give us one gift certificate for the whole contribution, accept our party currency up to that amount and then buy back his gift certificate ready to do it again next year.

Once you've got movie tickets, baskets of golf balls at a driving range, whatever, members will gladly accept party currency for attending their meetings and taking on any extra chores.

We can create out own party private currency, practice what we preach, and issue it to the party organizers as fast as the contributions come in. So it works just like poker chips with contributions as the collateral.

Party Store
With tax credits as high as 75% on a $300 contribution to the provincial party, we can also bring in goods, shoes, clothes, (last year's line, perhaps) to kept in the party storehouse where members, upon receiving their party currency at the end of the night for attending a meeting, can then spend them in the party storehouse before going home. The party HQ and goodies store should be a real hub of economic, if not political, activity.

And you can get banquets and food!

There are other ways to maximize on a party currency which I have detailed at my medpot site when I suggested the Marijuana Party of Canada institute a party LETS. But it's obvious they aren't smoking very good stuff because they haven't made use of their tax-credit powers at all. Sad. See: http://www.medpot.net/txcrdts.htm

These kinds of contributions can only be distributed effectively with a LETS and with those contributions, you now have a currency to pay members with that will buy more and more as the LETS grows. Thus, by building a Libertarian LETS life-boat, almost everyone poor will want to join.

I would add that I bring a whole 23-year political career of connections to not only the National Party, we fielded 30 candidates in Quebec, but also to your Ontario party. With the upcoming provincial election just months away, I'd want to first start finding candidates and setting up LETS constituency associations in Ontario. As I also had 50 candidates in Ontario, I don't think it would be too hard to mobilize most of them into joining the party and getting involved again. I'd love to invite them to the Toronto meeting but few can afford the entry. Is there any way they can pay with their own private currency and work off our debt?

You know I'm the grand-daddy of guerrilla lawyers and no one's going to keep the Libertarians out of any debates without major court challenges. And as the father-engineer of the LETS interest-free community currency software, there's no reason the Libertarian Party should share the glory that a working system would bring to our program.

And I've been proud to proclaim my large "L" Libertarian values on the net despite no affiliation, especially in my contributions to http://yahoogroups.com/group/libertarian

I am happy to be accompanying you to Toronto for the Ontario Libertarian Party convention on Saturday. I've cc:ed this to
the email addresses of the Libertarian Party executives I found at your website. So yes, I'd like to take up the challenge of building the Libertarian Party of Canada by focusing on setting up riding associations in Ontario first. I therefore hope that the Ontario members who attend this will have time to hear how to get their hands on their tax-credit check-books and hit the road to start giving businesses with use-it-or-lose-it product the chance to save almost 5 grand in taxes by giving to party with a mechanism to deal it out. And we've only two another two months of the best time to be asking, end of year, because they tax time is just around the corner.

May the convention set aside some time hear how the Federal and the Provincial parties can use a LETS Libertarian currency to finance our preparations for the upcoming Provincial and Federal Elections? I have no doubt we can lure members from most of the other minor parties such as Canadian Action, Greens, Social Crediters, Marijuana Party who approve of LETS or our Libertarian values in general.

CC: Sam Apelbaum - leader@adlib.ca
Richard Darwin - darwins@total.net 
George Dance - Chair@adlib.ca
Wayne Chapeskie - waynec@spinnaker.com 
Nunzio Venuto - Rsec@adlib.ca
Jim McIntosh - Treasurer@adlib.ca
Peter Jaworski - MAL1@adlib.ca

John C. "The Banking Systems Engineer" Turmel, Author of the UNILETS usury-free time-based currency United Nations C6 recommendation to Governments in the http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration.htm
http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel / http://www.medpot.net 1.613.632.2334