In this short video by Katie Teague, David Korten describes the fundamental strategy that I have been advocating for a long time. Forget about petitioning Congress or appealing to the power structure. The old system cannot be reformed; it must be transcended. We need to reduce our dependence upon their systems, structures and institutions, and learn to share and cooperate in building new ones that serve the common good. That must begin with the greatest of all our dependencies–money.
The following is a message sent by Guy “Josh” Josserand, one of my friends and associates, to the Occupiers in Tucson. It is an eloquent expression of hope and power that I think should be widely shared.–t.h.g.
Dear Occupiers and Occupationists,
Thank you so much from my heart for the power of your presence.
This is a rising tide of public awareness and personal participation for which I have had decades of anticipation.
A tsunami of love and respect for life is forming that can wash clean some centuries of fear-based domination of the many by the few.
Government of the People, for the People, and by the People now faces its last best chance to escape corporate feudalism.
Are we serfs or are we sovereigns?
Toward this end I wish to encourage the Occupation to speak, not about what it needs but WHAT IT GIVES.
As much as the Occupation needs the 99%, we all, the 100%, need what the Occupation offers even more.
It offers us all power and voice.
Let us INVITE each one to take control of the power they have.
Let us encourage them to accept the power they are.
Let us remind them of Marianne Williamson’s message which Nelson Mandela repeated in his Inaugural Address.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Let us incorporate this perspective into every communication and act of Occupiers in every town and city of the world. Success of the Occupation will be measured by the degree to which we can eradicate fear from the hearts of both the 99% and the 1% as well, for the One Percent also suffers from bondage. Though they fortify themselves with wealth, it is only a wealth of power and dominance which is antithetical and incompatible with actual freedom, justice and happiness. Injustice for anyone breeds injustice for all, and as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us many years ago, “None of us is free until all of us are free.”
James Robertson and I have known each other for many years and I think there is a great deal mutual respect between us. James is quite insightful and his heart is in the right place, and that is reflected in his latest newsletter, part of which I’ve included below.Our main point of disagreement is about what changes are necessary to deal with civilizations current crisis and what might be fruitful approaches to making them.(1) He, like most Brits and Europeans I’ve encountered, still believes in statist solutions. They think they have a chance to influence, if not control, the political process using the existing structures.(2) James also believes that central government should be the provider of exchange media (money).On the first of those, I believe that the nation state has outlived its usefulness, that power has become over-centralized and therefore corrupting and corrupted, and that decentralization and human-scale must be the order of the day.On the second point, I believe in the need for government to relinquish the money power and to repeal legal tender laws that give one brand of money a monopoly and force its acceptance even though it is inevitably abused by improper issuance and misallocation. I address this in the chapter titled “The Separation of Money and State” in my latest book, The End of Money and The Future of Civilization. In 2002 I wrote an appraisal and critique of the proposal that he and Josef Huber published in 2001 under the title Creating New Money: A Monetary Reform for the Information Age. That critique can be found at http://reinventingmoney.com/monetary-reform-information-age/ . James’ review of my book, can be found at http://www.jamesrobertson.com/news-jun09.htm#greco. Subscriptions to his newsletter are free; you can sign up here. — t.h.g.James Robertson Newsletter No. 28 – January 2010 1. EDITORIAL: THE TRANSITION TO A NEW DECADE The ‘Noughties’ have shown that we in the “democratic West”, led by a global super-power in the USA, can no longer claim a specially democratic and influential position in world affairs.The claim to be democratic has been disastrously damaged by our self-imposed dependence on profit-making commercial banks to provide our public money supply, by our elected representatives’ money-grubbing, and by the way the US and Britain invaded Iraq and destabilised the Middle East. The claim to be influential has been shown up at the recent Copenhagen conference on climate change, when the newly powerful nations, led by China and supported by many “less developed” peoples, insisted that their future development prospects should not suffer from the need to repair the global ecological damage caused by Western development over the past 200 years, and that we should bear the main cost of repairing it. In Britain we face a general election within the next six months. There is a widespread sense that none of our mainstream political parties is capable of responding effectively to the range of national and international challenges we now face. If their election campaigns confirm this, the result could be a temporary “hung Parliament”. We electors and our politicians might then recognise the need for deeper-seated changes than mainstream agendas now offer. A two-year transition to the ‘Teenies’ decade could then see the start of a deliberate shift to a new worldwide path of co-operative development and democratic participation. It would give us a much better chance of securing the future of our and other endangered species, than trying to restore competitive Business-As-Usual. 2. MONEY SYSTEM REFORM A major aspect of that new path of development has to be a money system fit for its purpose. 2.1. The Purpose of the Money System The money system’s purpose must change from what it has been since its origins in the distant past. It must no longer be designed to provide a stealthy way to transfer wealth from weaker and poorer people to richer and more powerful ones. (If you don’t believe that this is a fair description, take a look at my short History Of Money –www.jamesrobertson.com/books.htm#history). Its new public purpose now must be to enable everyone to benefit from fair and efficient exchanges of goods and services, reflecting what we each contribute to and take from the common wealth. It is a purpose for which governmental agencies at local, national and international level must become directly responsible. To get the money system reconstructed for this new purpose, we have to understand it as a system of interacting money subsystems which influences our behaviour at every level – personal, household, local, national, and global. We have to understand how it generates a calculus of values, and how that operates as a scoring system motivating us by rewarding some things and penalising others. And we have to understand how its present modes of operation motivate us to behave in ways that hasten our species’ suicide. The following four governmental decisions primarily determine how the money system works – in other words, what values it generates in terms of the prices and costs of everything compared with everything else, and so how it motivates us to behave:
how the public money supply is created, by whom and in what form (as debt or debt-free);
how governments collect public revenue (for example, what they tax and what they don’t tax);
what public spending is spent on and what it isn’t spent on; and
how governments regulate the financial dealings of individual people and other organisations.
Today, all of those urgently need systemic understanding and reform. The full Newsletter can also be viewed here.
Congressman Ron Paul says it’s TIME magazine person-of-the-year, FED Chairman Ben Bernanke. While I agree that Bernanke is more powerful than the President, he’s only the front man and a hired hand for the real power — the banking elite and hidden oligarchy who’s agenda is to arrogate to themselves ever more power and control.
The level of fraud, theft, and expropriation being suffered by the American people today has reached such astounding proportions as to be almost laughable. The US is on the verge of financial ruin, civil unrest, and political despotism.
As that drama unfolds, it is crucial that people remain calm and behave in ways that express their highest ideals. It is time to cooperate and share and organize ourselves into mutual support associations to provide all of us with the things we need to thrive as we transition to “the Butterfly economy.” The following prayer from long-time friend and colleague, Rev. John Papworth, expresses very well the kind of sentiment that should inspire us. – t.h.g.
LORD make me an instrument of Thy war against evil;
Where there is vandalism against Thy creation,
Let me campaign to stop it.
Where there is sabotage of Thy genetic ordainings,
Let me fight like hell to prevent it and to safeguard Thy works.
Where there is conspiracy of boardroom greed to dominate and destroy Thy creation,
Let me join with others to wage an unremitting struggle to oppose it.
Where giant political and money forces combine to control local neighbourhood life,
Let me be quick to affirm the overriding need for strong community power so that Thy moral laws may prevail.
Where there is passivity, deference and conformism to the giant powers of darkness which are degrading society and its individual members,
Let me be a powerful witness to oppose them.
DIVINE MASTER, grant that I may not so much seek to live a quiet life as to be in the vanguard of those who would enhance life, not so much to grab as to give, not to evade my social obligations as to shoulder them, not to be afraid of power as to be imbued with courage to control it with others for worthy ends.
For it is in striving to act with love that we affirm love, and in devoting ourselves to noble causes we are redeemed, and in giving ourselves utterly to the service of truth, beauty and the well-being of our neighbours, we rise to the life immortal. AMEN.
(Based on an old, mush loved, prayer of St. Francis of Assisi).
What the world needs now is practical approaches to resolving the problem of power.
The key question is “who decides?” Right now, the process has been rigged so that a self-serving few decide for the many. How are they able to do that?
The key is MONEY.
Did George Bush and Tony Blair come begging to the people to donate money so they could attack Iraq?
Did they even ask us to pay higher taxes so they could fight this war?
Obviously, they did not. Bush even LOWERED taxes, especially for “his base,” the rich and well-connected.
How is it possible for expensive wars to be fought without raising taxes?
William Patterson and his cohorts figured that one out more than 300 years ago when the Bank of England was founded. They had no trouble selling the idea to King William III. The deal was this: The King got the money he needed to fight his war against France, while the financiers got the privilege of printing bank notes and lending them into circulation.
This perversion of the monetary system has since been “perfected” and spread almost universally to every country around the world. The power to control the creation and allocation of money (which is nothing more than credit) is the basis for all political power.
Until we do something about that, nothing much is going to change.
Fortunately, it is possible to restore “the credit commons” through voluntary, free market approaches. How? By establishing credit clearing associations that can be networked together worldwide.
LETS prototypes have given thousands of people some idea of how credit clearing works. Now we must take mutual credit clearing to the mainstream and build it to scale. E. C. Riegel had the vision but not the tools; we now have both the vision and the tools. Read my book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization, view my presentations and interviews on this site, https://beyondmoney.net/, read the works of E. C. Riegel (free downloads at https://reinventingmoney.com/library/. Start by reading his Private Enterprise Money) and explore the other important resources listed in the Library.
The original 2009 edition of my book, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization , is out of print but the Kindle edition and used copies can be ordered from Amazon.com. Chapters of the new 2024 edition will be posted as they are completed. You can find them here.
To order signed copies of my previous books, click on the title below:
Beyond Money 