Figure 1. Blue Dot Governance
The era of global tragedy of the commons ends.
The new paradigm begins when
Interdependent Regional Governments
unite to form a chaordic organization called,
The United Regions
Where coordinated expertise in Earth Science, Human-Nature and Economics,
Provide Regional Guidance to Maximize Real Wealth:
Real wealth is a measurement of a robust ecology
and of the general health and happiness of the people!
Money-Corporations-Politics (MCP)
"The few who understand the system will either be so interested from its profits or so dependent on its favors, that there will be no opposition from that class." ~ Rothschild Brothers of London, 1863
Note: This chapter is a rather brief overview. Readers not familiar with money/banking issues should read the more detailed MCP Appendix which contains many quotes by politicians, economists and journalists.
The AbReality (Abstract Reality) section of The Triad had a short quote by Zen philosopher Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, who spoke about the tyranny of the tools. It is especially true for the MCP (Money Corporations Politics) structures that rule our lives today. The human-created money tool is now the primary driver of humanity’s Ecological Footprint, now in significant deficit spending of Earth’s Gaian renewable resources. As any economist knows, continued deficit spending always leads to bankruptcy. Surely it is our human responsibility to re-design the money tool and use it as a dynamic regulator of human-activity. It’s a matter of survival.
Any society where individuals produce goods or services requires a currency - a monetary tool to enable trade. But just who is to control the money that operates society has been a struggle since biblical times. Apparently the only time Jesus used violence was when he cleansed the temple of the money changers who had turned it into a den of thieves. Not much has changed!
While all people are familiar with money at the consumer/earner level, the deeper issues of money creation and control form a specialty issue. As pointed out by the Carl Sagan quote in the Introduction, the vast majority of the public do not understand the basic details of more than a few specialty issues.
A large part of this discussion is about the US dollar because after WWII it became the default world standard that much of the world still follows to some degree. After a century of tussle in the US between the owners of banks and those elected to govern, on Christmas Eve, 1913, with only a few conservative-leaning congressmen in attendance, a surprise bill was introduced and passed. Thereafter the majority of control of the money system came into the hands of The Federal Reserve. As intended, this official government-sounding name leads the vast majority of people to believe that it is a branch of government. In fact, it is operated by a consortium of commercial banks with only limited control by the Federal government. As Professor Virginia Abernathy commented on this subject, The Federal Reserve is about as Federal as Federal Express, the courier company.
Banks were originally created to perform a public service. But after decades of hegemonic-driven evolution of the rules, while corporations still usually do perform a public service, now their primary purpose is make profit for their shareholders. For corporate banks, the largest part of the control and creation of money is motivated toward generating profit for banks and those who own them. Two US Presidents in the process of attempting to take the control of the money system back into government hands were assassinated. These were Lincoln and Kennedy. Written history is unclear on whether this was just coincidental.
The basic constitution of the USA gives the Federal Government the power to create the nation’s money. (Likewise, the constitutions of Canada and many other countries.) However, there is one primary means by which banks create vast profit for banks: Instead of the Federal Government creating money to operate both the government and society, the majority of money is created by commercial banks, money that is loaned into existence at interest. A loan is a debt. It is therefore called a debt-based money system. Not only do individuals and industry take out loans from banks, but your government gets much of its money from banks also! Both principal and interest are to be paid back to the banks and their private owners. (Note: The interest paid back is money that never existed before. This adds new money to the system and guarantees either growth or inflation.) This is one of the destabilizing features that make economic growth imperative, or the system will collapse, But like a monopoly game, the game will end when either one player has all the money, or there is no more property to buy. Just consider your country’s national debt, or the provincial/state debt, and the vast sums of interest that must be paid on that debt. If the constitution had not been bypassed years before, these loans could have been interest-free from money created by the Federal government.
NGOs (Non Government Organizations) in USA, in Canada and UK work vigorously to awaken the public to this issue and regularly petition their governments to take back the issuance of money. Unfortunately, it appears that a special version of the golden rule applies here - those with the gold get to rule. In the meantime the voting public, it seems, have too many other issues to deal with as they work and live within the familiar monetary world that has a large influence on their life choices. A time-tested truism describes this situation, You don’t know what you don’t know. Even though, in this case, it should be making you very angry.
The deceptive Federal Reserve name is not the only trick by monetary/economic leaders. Since 1901 the Nobel awards, as established by Nobel Foundation, have been given for great achievements in science, peace and other selected areas. To add credibility to economics, aptly named the dismal science, in ‘68 The Bank of Sweden began making an annual Nobel Prize for economics on the same fall date as the original Nobel awards. Details of this hoax are given in the ‘11 book, Economics Unmasked, Philip Smith (a physicist) and Manfred Max-Neef, a popular Chilean economist/writer.
A perfect storm is brewing at the junction of the drivers of unlimited growth, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and the issue of peak-oil which will eventually end growth. Here’s a sketch of what happens:
- Inflation, built-into economy by the money system, is now amplified by growing energy costs;
- The rich/poor divide grows wider;
- Tax base from the poor shrinks and the rich refuse to pay more taxes;
- Municipalities, states and countries cannot sustain their infrastructure that had been built in the days of cheap oil;
- Municipalities, states and countries start to default on their loans as infrastructure crumbles;
- The World Bank offers to save them with more loans. But now the conditions dramatically change. The nature of those changes are described in books with descriptive titles such as, David Korten’s 1995 book, When Corporations Rule the World, or John Pilger’s 2003 book, The New Rulers of The World.
Naomi Klein’s ’08 book, Disaster Capitalism, describes how the large corporations of the world take advantage of chaos after a natural disaster, or a disaster they have orchestrated. During the chaos of the immediate aftermath, they implement a ‘helping hand’ fix designed to enhance corporate control and profits. However, another dire element of the perfect storm is global warming and growing uncertainty of all that we once took for granted. MCP leaders will be unable to cope with the added chaos for very long.
This overview on MCP does not delve into many other weird activities in the commoditized-money world, and their imaginative creations such as fractional reserve banking, derivative trading, etc., etc. The money industry employs thousands of people who produce no goods and a relatively small real service for humanity. But those who work in the money control industry are among the most highly paid people on the planet.
We learned after the 2008 financial near-meltdown that the very large money institutions are now too big to fail. As Milton Friedman once wrote: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change.” The inevitable economic crash in our near-term future is poised to provide such a crisis. In order to prepare for paradigm change rather than waiting for chaos, we will need to have in place a shadow network of regionally administered system of Money, Corporations and Politics - an MCP system that is significantly outside the box of current thinking and capable of being a key regulator of human-activity in a world governed by Regions and guided by a science-based chaordic organization we shall call the United Regions, united under the Blue Planet Governance banner. Such a system is envisioned in Section 4, in the O50APC scenario.
Occasionally, a prominent economist will come forward and expose the underbelly of the MCP world. Herman Daly, once a senior official with the World Bank, has done a marvelous job of communicating the evil deeds of those who deal the money. He supports alternate possibilities such as the efforts of the Steady State Economics organization.
After an epiphany-like change of views, here is part of the text of James Galbraith’s written statement to members of the US Senate Judiciary Committee delivered May 10, 2010.
I write to you from a disgraced profession. Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably to understand the forces behind the financial crisis. Concepts including “rational expectations,” “market discipline,” and the “efficient markets hypothesis” led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices, that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur. Not all economists believed this – but most did. …. A link to the complete speech is in the MCP Appendix.
While energy flow is the lifeblood of Gaian nature, money flow is the lifeblood of civilization’s commerce and trade. Those who control this vital component of society and future life on Earth have lost their way. Our window of opportunity between today and civil breakdown will be short. Writer and journalist Naomi Klein has never been shy about attacking giants. She should be taken seriously when she writes an article in CommonDreams.org titled, If You Take Climate Change Seriously, You Have to Throw Out the Free-Market Playbook!
Amen to that!
Since we have a great deal of extremely important work to do, this chapter ends with a bit of humor:
Corporate deregulation leads to the headlines like this:
The Madoff investment scandal broke in December 2008, when former NASDAQ chairman Bernard Madoff admitted that the wealth management arm of his business was an elaborate Ponzi scheme.
... and when our system allows such things to happen and you wind up with this.........
…. on next page…
Leading to an angry bull at the (stock) market.......
The Bull reacts to The Bird
Troubleshooter in Birmingham England
Fall of 2008, at the peak of that monetary blip
End of MCP Overview
Back to Paradigm junction Index
Next to Paradigm Flaws
To Appendix MCP. If readers still have doubts about the need to change the MCP, the Appendix adds significantly more detail and dozens of relevant web references.
MORE INFORMATION (as of february 2015)
Most People Cannot Even Imagine That An Economic Collapse Is Coming, The Prophecy Project, Jim Rickards - Petrodollar, and his book, The Death of Money.
A 44 minute video at YouTube.
Where does money come from (Pedantry)
HSBC could yet be prosecuted over tax-dodging scheme, warns Loretta Lynch (The Guardian)
HSBC bank ‘helped clients dodge millions in tax’ (BBC)
Banking Giant HSBC Sheltered Murky Cash Linked to Dictators and Arms Dealers (ICIJ)
HSBC files show how Swiss bank helped clients dodge taxes and hide millions (The Guardian)
Tax-havens: Super-rich ‘hiding’ at least $21 trillion (BBC)
Illicit Financial Flows from Africa: track it, stop it, get it (Africa Renewal)
From Example Q to Mike C Rupert: If you were President for the day, what's the first thing you'd do?
MCR – Tough question. My first instinct would be that I would resign, because the American presidency is a prisoner of the banking system, housed in a government with three branches that are all controlled by banks, not to mention the administrative machinery. I think the first and easiest thing to do would be (assuming I had powers the presidency currently does not possess) would be to implement the terms of a constitutional amendment just offered by Florida Representative Ted Deutch called “Outlawing Corporate Cash Undermining Public Interest in our Elections and Democracy” or OCCUPIED. This is something I believe that every #Occupy in the U.S. should jump on immediately and that every #Occupy around the world should adapt for their own country.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Don Chisholm is a Director of the Gaia Preservation Coalition. He is a retired Engineering Technologist whose career path dealt with dynamic systems, maintenance, design, management and quality assurance auditing, generally related to the aviation industry. The past thirty years have been spent studying human behaviours, energy, and other areas related to the human predicament. For his complete biography and contact information, click here.
|
|Back to TITLE|
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6
Page 7
Page 8
Page 9
Supplement 1
Supplement 2
Supplement 3
Supplement 4
Supplement 5
Supplement 6
PelicanWeb Home Page
| 
![[groups_small]](groups_small.gif)