Abstract: Building a social and ecological economy imbued with the aspirations of democratic governance and cultural renaissance that the degrowth movement aspires to, requires linguistic precision and rigorous observation of economic phenomenology, to expose and address pernicious monetary fallacies. Words like “growth”, “money” and “debt” need unambiguous requalification. Such elucidation exposes the root cause of socio-economic and ecological crisis, namely a dysfunctional banking system that colonises the political economy, through illegitimate privatisation and commodification of the credit commons, to generate exponential amounts of counterfeit credit, which enables a small group of bogus “investors” to co-opt the political process and embezzle the real wealth of nations. This reveals an alternative model of banking as a public service that is based on “social accounting”, which can provide territorial sovereignty in the allocation and multilateral clearing of non-commoditized and community-owned credit, for cooperative sustainable economic regeneration, on a democratic self-financing and usury-free basis.