We are living in very turbulent and uncertain times in which division and confusion are being intentionally sown by competing forces in hopes of capturing hearts and minds to garner support for one agenda or another. But people are allowed to see only the facades of agendas that are largely hidden; that is why it is essential to pay attention to every voice and every perspective and measure each in relation to our values, attitudes, and beliefs, allowing dissonant evidence, when it is presented to us, some space for serious consideration.
There is much more I could say about this but my intention at the moment is to share a few bits that may be useful to you in your efforts to understand what’s happening in the world, what the near future may bring, and what you might need to know in prepare for it.
Firstly, I recommend to you the thoughts of Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics, who writes from the perspective of “The transcendent center,” which he describes as reconciling polarized issues by unearthing the unconscious assumptions both sides share and the questions neither side asks.” It does not seek compromise but “unifies them in a greater synthesis.”
Secondly, take a few minutes to watch and listen to this recent interview by Judge Andrew Napolitano of noted journalist Pepe Escobar in which the situations in Ukraine and the Middle-east were discussed. Pepe reports on an important conference that just took place in Istanbul in which various knowledgeable political figures and scholars discussed Israel, Iran, and other players in the ongoing conflict, and likely scenarios for future developments in the region and globally.
And thirdly, if that doesn’t get your attention and raise alarm bells, listen to this one:
John Mauldin’s recent article, Late Summer Sandpile, is one of his best–thought-provoking and very timely. As an investment advisor, his primary concern is with financial markets and systems, but the academic research findings in complexity and systems theory have a broader relevance. Thinking about systems as sand piles, academics can examine the dimensions of stability and instability as they occur in a wide variety of systems. After reading the article, I felt inclined to respond. Here below is what his article evoked in me.
Our civilization “sand pile” is comprised of many diverse but related fingers of instability, some small, some large, and many interconnected; that puts our entire civilization at risk. Among the most worrisome features are the astronomical growth of debt, religious, and cultural conflicts, competing political ideologies, and international intrigues and violence involving players that are now in command of unprecedented destructive power. If the conflict between Ukraine/NATO and Russia doesn’t trigger a nuclear war in the near term as Peter Koenig expects, the mountains of debt being built up will trigger a global financial collapse in the not-too-distant future. Markets are much more centralized than they used to be and are increasingly dominated by a few major players which tosses free market theories of market behavior out the window. Virtually all markets today are manipulated by huge corporations, investment funds, and asset management firms. But the biggest manipulators are the national governments of the major powers and their partners who run the global banking cartel. The top dog among them is the US government which has greatly abused the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It doles out privileges not only via legislation and executive orders, but increasingly by the preferential expenditure of massive amounts of legalized counterfeit money to favored clients and proxy governments in a desperate attempt to preserve and extend its “full spectrum dominance,” and replace democratic national governments with a One-World neo-feudal world order. The US and its allies are pushing the limits in the hope and expectation that there will not be a reaction big enough to upset their apple cart. But as Mauldin reminds us, one small grain of sand is often all it takes.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine intelligence officer and chief weapons inspector for the wapons treaty between the US and USSR. He has been working diligently to reduce the threat on nuclear war, a war which is becoming ever more likely given the aggressive stance of the recent US administrations that have not only refused to negotiate with presumed adversaries been but seem bent on extending at all costs US and western control of resources in counries around the world. Scott tells his story in his recent post titled, My Lost Summer, on Substack. I hope you will read it.
I am pleased to present this guest editorial by my long-time friend and correspondent, Christopher Quigley. Christopher in an expert in market analysis, and a proponent of the Social Credit philosophy of C. H. Douglas. I think you will find it useful. — T.H.G.
Excerpt:
Social Credit and the End of Meta-Feudalism
The King is dead long live the King” so goes the feudal aristocratic mantra establishing power continuity. Death and birth are a part of reality and amidst the pain of death the love of life must prevail. Currently many say that American society is dying but in fact it is experiencing a transformation. — Major Clifford Douglas
The quote above, made in 1934, perhaps would have been more correct if Douglas had said that America was going through a “paradigm shift” rather than a transformation. This shift was in essence a revolution at the time, a revolution based on growing consciousness, labour unrest, social dysfunction and expanding poverty. Today this trend is still emerging with other forces driving the trend, forces such as the growth of internet learning networks and the diminished effectiveness of mass broadcasting. Thus, average Americans are finally starting to think as sovereigns again. Their enlightened thinking had stopped following the disaster of the civil war of 1861-1865. This national cessation of practical awareness allowed the then Federal micro-system to usurp the Union macro-system through credit power. As a result, today the Federal Government is now macro, and the Union of States micro, but this could change over the next 50 years.
The global elites want the real American economy to contract. They desire a constrained and hobbled society which is more dependent and demanding, more complex, more controlled, more diverse, more fractured, more locally ineffective— In a word, meta-feudal. To understand a world that is meta-feudal you should watch movies such as “Brazil,” “Rollerball,” and “Blade Runner.” These worlds are technologically advanced but disintegrated and astonishingly unequal.
The meta-powers work through fabricated “crises.” The elite set up the last economic “crisis” through the “originate to distribute” Basel banking agreement of 1998. From this model evolved the hyper property bubble of post-2000, the “credit” collapse of 2007-2008, and the market-fixing credit derivative system and asset laundering off-balance-sheet accounting protocols currently in place. The credit collapse eventually led to the new “improved” post-Covid, bailed-out banking oligarchy now in place. This club involves far fewer players than existed heretofore but the financial club that is in power is now manifestly more globally influential.
My webinar, Money, Power, Democracy, and War, that was aired on Humanity Rising last Tuesday, July 16, was recorded. In case you missed it, you can view it on YouTube. During the first 16 minutes or so, our host Jim Garrison expressed his thoughts on current national and world events; that was followed by his introduction, our presentation, and some further conversation. A few of the questions addressed were:
Why are nations continually at war when people want peace?
What do wars produce, and what do they destroy?
Who gains and who loses in war?
Where do governments get the money they need to finance war?
Is there a link between the monetary system and the political system?
In the process, I delved into some pertinent history and events that set the stage for our present deepening crisis, then began to describe the pathways towards re-empowerment of the people through decentralized initiatives involving independent means for measuring and exchanging value, beginning at the community level. Toward the end of the discussion, I offered my views on Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain technology. I’d be happy to have your comments. # # #
I will be appearing in a free webinar on Humanity Rising this Tuesday, July 16, at 8 AM Pacific time (11 AM Eastern time). You can get details and register to participate via Zoom by clicking here: Money, Power, Democracy, and War. You will receive the Zoom link a few hours prior to the event. I will be answering such questions as:
Why are nations continually at war when people want peace?
What do wars produce, and what do they destroy?
Who gains and who loses in war?
Where do governments get the money they need to finance war?
Is there a link between the monetary system and the political system?
The latest chapter in my new 2024 edition of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, has now been published. Here is an excerpt: The entirety of money, banking, and finance is comprised of claims and obligations. — Thomas H. Greco, Jr.
It was in a dusty old bookshop close to the British Museum in London that I discovered a slim volume that was to complete for me the picture of how money has evolved over time. I had been traveling in Europe and the United Kingdom in the summer of 2001 with my then partner, Donna, attending conferences, meeting with friends and cohorts, and enjoying the sights, sounds, and cultures of the Old World. It was actually Donna who discovered the book in the basement stacks and brought it to me, saying, “What about this one?” The book was The Meaning of Money by Hartley Withers. Although I had already been engaged in intensive research into the subjects of money and banking for more than twenty years and had written three books of my own on the subject, I had not previously heard of Withers, but it was evident that he must have been, in his day, a recognized authority on the subject, and that his book must have served for a long time as a leading text; I surmised that from the fact that the volume I held in my hands was the seventh edition, published in 1947, of a work first published in 1909, and that Withers had been the editor of The Economist magazine from 1916 to 1921. Reading Withers crystallized my understanding of the double transformation that money had undergone during the previous three hundred years, an understanding that afforded a clearer comprehension of the nature and significance of the changes that have taken place, an understanding that prepares the ground from which to launch the next great improvement in the exchange process.
My interview on the Pelle Neroth Taylor show on May 30, 2024 was recorded and is now available. My portion of the show can be heard here, and a transcript can be seen here. This was a wide-ranging conversation about the problems with the present political system of money and exchange, and the decentralized exchange mechanisms that have been developing in parallel with it, including both commercial and grassroots currencies and credit clearing exchanges. __________________________ Bank of Dave
I recently viewed the movie Bank of Dave. It was both entertaining and thought provoking and based on a true story. Here is a description from Imdb: Based on the true-life experiences of Dave Fishwick; ‘Bank of Dave’ tells the story of how a working class Burnley man and self-made millionaire fought to set up a community bank. While the movie is highly fictionalized to add entertainment value, the important elements are factual. Seeking to satisfy my curiosity about that, I found this news report from the Manchester Evening News: How much of Netflix’s Bank of Dave is based on a true story?___________________________ Tim Berners-Lee’s Internet lament
Tim Berners-Lee is widely credited with being the inventor of the world wide web. In his article, Original Hope, he laments the fact that what he hoped would develop into an infrastructure that would “allow for collaboration, foster compassion, and generate creativity,” has come to be “dominated by the self-interest of several corporations that have eroded the web’s values and led to breakdown and harm.” He has issued a call for action that will “reform the current system and create a new one that genuinely serves the best interests of humanity… [and] encourage collaboration, to create market conditions in which a diversity of options thrive to fuel creativity and shift away from polarising content to an environment shaped by a diversity of voices and perspectives that nurture empathy and understanding.” He concludes by citing a few emerging innovations that are beginning to do just that. You can read about it on Medium. ___________________________ 2024 A pivotal year.
This year,2024, is shaping up to be both frightening and climactic. Several of the geopolitical developments of the past year have been causing serious upheavals in the economic and political relationships among nations, and simmering conflicts have boiled over and are threatening to erupt into another catastrophic world war. These issues and concerns were discussed in the podcast, 2023 Geopolitical Marathon, which featured the views and opinions of respected experts including, Pepe Escobar, Jeffrey Sachs, Jackson Hinkle, Alastair Crooke and Alexander Dugin. If you want to better understand the facts of these matters and what may happen next, please give it your attention. ___________________________ While I remain optimistic about our prospects, I’m also convinced that we cannot afford to be complacent. We need to inform ourselves and listen to all points of view while remembering that we are all one human family responsible for our own future and our common home we call Earth. We sink or swim together.
Erecting the ‘wall of separation between church and state’… is absolutely essential in a free society. — Thomas Jefferson
The established beliefs about money in today’s world have become a sort of religion in which a fundamental tenet holds that government must, either directly or indirectly, have power over the system of money creation and circulation. This erroneous belief has taken the world to the brink of disaster which will surely ensue unless we take steps to depoliticize money by achieving the separation of money and state. It should be obvious by now that there will never be peace in the world so long as those who control our national governments are able to conjure up out of thin air the seemingly endless amounts of pseudo-money they need to pay for wars and whatever else might bolster their political and economic interests.
Read all about it in Chapter8—The Separation of Money and State, the latest chapter to be published in my new 2024 edition of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization.
Further chapters will continue to be posted as they are completed. Watch for Chapter Nine to be posted soon. As always, your comments and suggestions are welcomed, Thomas
The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes. —Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister under Queen Victoria
Chapter Five, the latest chapter in The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, new 2024 edition, is now available. It is being published first on Ken Richings; Substack channel, Future Brightly. Ken has greatly assisted my work in many ways, including editorial assistance and narration of each chapter. He has now posted all previous chapters, and starting now with Chapter 5, each new chapter will appear on his channel two weeks before being posted here on my website or elsewhere. I do not wish to place paywalls between me and my readers so all content will continue to remain freely available to read and download, either from Ken’s site or my own sites but I encourage you to reward Ken for his good work by opting to take a paid subscription to https://futurebrightly.substack.com/.
Chapter 4, Central Banking and the Rise of the Money Power is now available here on this website, complete with end notes, along with previously published chapters 1, 2, and 3. Click on the links below to access the text and the audio narration directly. Additional chapters will be posted as they are completed here. Watch for Chapter 5 to be posted in about two weeks.
As always, your comments and suggestions will be welcomed. Thomas
The first edition of my book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, was published by Chelsea Green Publishing in 2009. While it remains as relevant today as it was when first published the printed book has been out of print for several years. But, having had the rights reverted to me by my publisher, I am making the entire book available for free in PDF format. You can read it or download it HERE. If you would like a hard copy of the first edition used copies can still be found on Amazon.com, Abe books, Thrift books and elsewhere.
Better still, you can avail yourself of the new revised and expanded 2024 edition which I have been working on for almost two years and is almost complete. Eighteen chapters have already been posted and can be freely read or download HERE.
My previous books, as published, may be freely accessed in digital format by clicking the title below.
Redirecting our savings is an essential complement to creating independent local liquidity through private community currencies and credit clearing networks. If you want to use your savings in ways that align with your values, Community Investing 101 is a great … Continue reading →
Robert Pape, Professor of political scientist at the University of Chicago, understands international conflicts better than anyone I’ve yet encountered. In his recent post to his Substack, Why the Ceasefire Keeps Failing, he clearly describes that, in the present conflict … Continue reading →
The video included below is deficient in several respects and its short duration limits both the scope and debth of its coverage in explaining the main concepts and proposals that form the substance of my most important work. Despite that, … Continue reading →
Dear Dennis, I applaud your longstanding efforts on behalf of reason, peace, and monetary reform. But you must realize by now that reform is utterly impossible given the extreme centralization of monetary, financial, economic, and political power in the hands … Continue reading →
This video report from Alex Krainer harmonizes with what I’ve been arguing for mamy years. The fragility and faults of the centralized global debt-money regime, combined with the imperial overreach of the US and western allies are bringing the matter … Continue reading →
I recently viewed the video. Yanis Varoufakis: Iran War Collapses U.S. Neoliberal Economy, an interview by Glenn Diesen. Varoufakis does a very good job of exposing the fragility of the neoliberal economic model and its inability to withstand a major … Continue reading →
By Thomas H. Greco Jr. Professor Carroll Quigley was a historian and theorist who was renowned as a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he taught many famous and influential people including Nancy Pelosi and … Continue reading →
Virtually everyone senses that there is something drastically wrong with the state of our world. Many rail against the governments, institutions, and people that they hold responsible for the various aspects they recognize as unfair, unsustainable, destructive, and utterly inhuman. … Continue reading →
In 2013 I wrote an article that was published in the online academic journal, Internet Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR). That article, Taking Moneyless Exchange to Scale: Measuring and Maintaining the Health of a Credit Clearing System, was intended … Continue reading →
Upon the recent completion and publication of my new Chapter 20—Exchange, Finance, and the Store of Value, for the revised edition of my book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, I loaded it into NotebookLM and asked … Continue reading →
