I just posted the following question on Organizing For America's Conversation With The President:
Mr. President, do you feel that the Washington federal government will ever allow the kinds of changes that are necessary to rebuild this nation economically while protecting us from the excesses of runaway capitalism, to put us on track for new cutting edge energy policies, to make our government more responsive to all of the people before economic interests, to work seriously on protecting the environment, to do away with the last vestiges of "legal" prejudicial distinctions and separations, to allow "we" the people, to provide proper and decent healthcare for all of "we" the people, to wrest the control of government away from the nonhuman corporate world, to reestablish the people’s faith in their own governmental institutions, and to move us into a future in which we work with the rest of the world as a high priority rather than continuing to deceive ourselves into believing that we are, by nature, inherently better than everyone else? Is there cause to believe that will ever happen?
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Time To Finally Abolish Slavery
[NOTE: These posts are an ongoing presentation, meant to be read beginning with the earliest and ending with the most recent. If not read in that order, there is a potential loss for the reader in an overall understanding of what is being presented. You have been warned.]
Now, if we live in a world where everyone is paid $1,000/year times their age, someone might say, “but that won’t work because nobody will want to work anymore and how will we get anything done.” Well, my first realization of the ridiculousness of that claim came about 35 years ago. It was back in my hippy trippy days. I was publisher of an underground/alternative monthly rag called The Razzberry Radicle. I had rented a large house from which to run our activities and in which to live. The house managed to have 7 bedrooms so we had as many as a dozen people living in the house (at one point we even had 3 people who claimed to be part of the Weathermen Underground living in our garage).
Two of the people who lived with us for a time were Frank and Valerie. To the best of my recollection, the only clothes that Frank ever wore was a pair of denim shorts. No shirt, no shoes, just shorts, 365 days a year, in Dayton, Ohio, where it gets cold in the winter. Well, one day we had a house crisis. The sewer had backed up into our basement and there was stuff floating everywhere. What were the poor hippies to do? Well, never fear. Without even being asked, Frank grabbed a shovel and a broom and got right to it. I’d say that he hiked up his pants, but when your pants are shorts, there’s not much to hike. And shoes? No time for such fluff. He just waded into it barefoot and cleaned it all up. And, my friends, I learned a very important lesson that day: no matter what happens, there will always be people who willingly will shovel shit.
You see, there is a difference between work and a job. There are people who work for the joy of working, and then there are those who work because they have to, because it’s expected of them, because they need to work in order to survive in this upsidedown economy that dominates every aspect of our lives. Some of my friends in Amway used to say that a job was short for Just Over Broke. How true that is for so many people. Bucky Fuller often referred to the “job obsession” of our economy as “justifying your existence.” Decades ago I left my “job” and began “working.” Now, I had originally started out working, but then one day I cut my hair and I got a job working for someone else and it wasn’t long before I found that the job began to stifle my work ethic.
Believe it or not, “job” is a relatively recent invention on the human scene. Prior to jobs most everybody worked. They grew stuff, they tended animals, they cut trees and cleared land, they built houses and small buildings. I’m sure you get the idea. And what did most of those endeavors have in common? Well, they didn’t usually have a “boss.” Each person was essentially their own boss, and people worked together, cooperated, and shared.
Now when it came to big work requiring lots of people to accomplish a large task, there needed to be a hierarchy of organization so that all of the work could be coordinated. As far as the manpower necessary to accomplish the project, in the distant past that was handled by people who were slaves, who were in servitude to a “boss,” the slave “owner.” This was one of the early reasons for war, to conquer others and turn them into slaves, into laborers for the victor. That’s how most of the palaces, mansions, and monuments of the past were built, with slave labor. Of course we don’t have that today. Or do we? Do we? Does slavery still exist?
Well, we know from United Nations stats that there is a huge sex slave trade in the world today. But, not in the United States. Right? Not since the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves almost 150 years ago. Right? Did you ever wonder, or did they ever teach you in school, who took the place of the slaves once they were freed? And what happened to the slaves once they were no longer bound to the “former” slave owners?
The answer is, of course, that many of the “former slaves” were able to secure employment working for their “former masters.” The master now had to “pay” them for their “services,” but out of that “pay” the former slaves had to figure out how to provide the necessities of food, clothing and shelters that were previously provided by the slave masters. It’s very clever when one thinks about it. The former “slave owners” were able to escape any responsibility for caring for their “former slaves” by “paying” the “former slaves” to take over responsibility for their own lives. And the work went on. So the work, in many cases in the short run, and most cases in the long run, was conducted by the same people who had done it before. But now they were free. They were free to spend and to consume and to get into debt. They were free to bear the responsibility for their lives even if the cards were stacked against them.
Driven by new technological methods of product production, the market for the manpower to drive this growing capitalist machine looked to the people who were “free” to work. A chicken in every pot. A job for everyone. Let’s hear it for America. Rah! Rah! Rah! Get a Job! Sha Na Na Nah! The Great American Dream! A job for everyone, working to keep the dream alive. And please, God, don’t let us wake up.
Now, what I’ve just gotten through trying to say in a kind way, I’m now going to say, in very blunt terminology. It has slowly come to my attention that the great Capitalist American way is one of massive slavery, but “Shhh! Don’t let the slaves know!” Bucky was right. The greatly touted “American work ethic” is part of a marketing strategy designed to “train” us, to “condition” us, through the capitalistic “public” educational training system without having to acknowledge that we are slaves. And we’ve been tricked into taking full responsibility for our own well-being. That’s why Bucky says that having a job is the way we “justify our existence.” And justified to whom? Why to the system that keeps us enslaved. Of course, the capitalist system is healthiest when there are more people looking for work than there are jobs available for them. And if you are a PhD, and the only job you can get is a job flipping burgers (even if you don’t take it) then there is no unemployment problem.
Now, as I’ve said, I have nothing against work. I, personally, am a hard worker. I mow lawns, I paint, I move furniture, I do handy man work. I teach. I write. I maintain a home. I do accounting. I perform weddings. I do computer trouble shooting. And I figure out the solutions to problems, from the very small to the extremely large. And in the midst of all of that, for the overwhelming majority of the last 45 years, I have had one or more “jobs” at any given point in time. I agree with Kahlil Gibran when he says, in “The Prophet” that “work is love made visible.” But I resent the major economic systems upon this planet, whether capitalist, socialist, communist, fascist, or whatever, that have taken that beautiful expression of love in humankind to work, and corrupted it into a commodity that is bought and sold in the marketplace, and the overall wellbeing of the “worker” be damned.
So I’m looking for ways to liberate that inborn work ethic from the limitations of selfish, corrupt, short-sighted economic systems. I have a tremendous faith in the practically unanimous desire of all of humanity to do the right thing and to live a good and personally fulfilling life. I want to break the chains of slavery that have been imposed by society’s economic systems. And then I want to work at designing and making available ways for people to rediscover who they are, the incredible creation that has been hidden under centuries of indentured servitude and to share that reality to the benefit of themselves and others.
And that brings us to education. Wherever I go, I always run into people who are “aware” of the fact that the Latin root of the word “education” is “educare” and that educare means “to draw forth.” In spite of that “knowledge,” however, our culture appears to continue upon a course wherein we continually attempt to try to “force knowledge” into, and upon, others under the guise of “education.” Of course if our culture is not really interested in facilitating individuals “discovering” who and what they are, and in doing what they enjoy doing best, as human beings’ innate curiosity, creativity, and native intelligence would imply that they were designed to do, but instead intends to train people, rather than to educate them, to fill the ever-burgeoning slots in the international corporate machine, then the future does not bode well for the existence of humanity.
Knowledge has long been used as a tool to exercise power over others. An example, shared with us by Bucky Fuller, concerns the “cipher.” Now, I’ll have to admit that when I first heard this story I didn’t really know what a cipher was. Maybe that’s because it’s really no big thing. It’s really a 0. It’s nothing. Zero. The lowly cipher. But there’s so much more to the story. And please note that as important as this story is, it’s principles are not taught in the educational system. So here’s how it goes down.
In the evolvement of humanity, people learned how to count. Don’t know about you, but my brain spends a great deal of time counting. I think that it must be something that it does when bored, sort of like playing solitaire. In order to count, we needed a “counting machine,” a calculator, to not only assist us in keeping track of our counting but as a way of agreeing with others upon the results of our counting. Of course the obvious first “universal calculator” would be our fingers and then our toes.
Well, fingers and toes are fine for small accounting, but what happens if one is dealing with quantities larger than 20? Well, the Arabs came up with a way to handle this, and their “secret” was brought back to the “west” by merchants who learned the secret while conducting business in their travels. That secret was the “cipher.” The cipher is a place holder that allows paper accounting. This is important, for it allows one to count beyond fingers and toes, to count beyond 20. If one can count past 20, one can get involved in larger business transactions without getting burned. And that means the possibility of greater wealth and greater power. It’s numeric literacy. And just as with alphabetic literacy, reading and writing, numeric/mathematic literacy is a gateway to greater opportunity.
Because of the possibilities offered through use of the knowledge of the cipher, its existence was kept secret in the West for centuries. There were, believe it or not, times when the mere knowledge of the cipher and its use was a crime punishable by death. I give this as an example of the importance of education and of the fact that access to educational opportunities can be subject to control and manipulation.
And that’s precisely what happened with the advent of the industrial revolution. As we’ve discussed earlier, work was originally an individual endeavor. People did what they did. They worked as a part of the survival equation. They worked for themselves and for their families. In many parts of the world, life is still like that. That’s the way it has been for thousands of years. But then the industrial equation reared its head and thousands of years of business as usual began to change.
Whether you are aware of it or not, and whether you believe it or not, that is one of the biggest reasons that Osama Bin Laden and many other terrorists hate America so much. It’s because we have a tendency to export our way of life to other countries, and that has a way of corrupting, and otherwise destroying, their way of life, a life that hasn’t changed much in thousands of years. That is until “we” came along with the capitalist promise in one hand and a flaming sword in the other.
It’s a fact that the overwhelming majority of the people on this planet have always worked. Humanity would not have survived otherwise. And the work that different people performed in various cultures became entwined in that culture and the ethic was passed on from generation to generation to generation. That’s a beneficial thing for the people, for the culture, and, unfortunately, for those who would dominate those people. And that’s the way it continued for thousands of years. And it would have gone on that way except for one small thing: humanity’s innate curiosity.
It’s a stone cold fact that every single human being is born naked, ignorant, and curious. Our nakedness makes us vulnerable and drives our curiosity to discover ways that we can survive and thrive. As we each explore this new environment into which we are thrust at birth, sometimes yanked, sometimes kicking, sometimes screaming, we discover that we must develop patterned responses to the stimuli around us or else go mad from a constant stream of the unknown and the unexpected. These gradually habitual pattern responses leave us free to explore new experiences and lifelong education begins, years before the artificial, manmade educational imitation called “school” and many months or even years before we first develop the ability to converse intelligently with the other human beings around us.
Our curiosity-driven, lifelong education is key to the success of our embracing the new economy. For that reason, education needs a thorough reexamination and the development of a whole new educational paradigm. So hang on, because what I’m about to share with you might shock you.
Now, if we live in a world where everyone is paid $1,000/year times their age, someone might say, “but that won’t work because nobody will want to work anymore and how will we get anything done.” Well, my first realization of the ridiculousness of that claim came about 35 years ago. It was back in my hippy trippy days. I was publisher of an underground/alternative monthly rag called The Razzberry Radicle. I had rented a large house from which to run our activities and in which to live. The house managed to have 7 bedrooms so we had as many as a dozen people living in the house (at one point we even had 3 people who claimed to be part of the Weathermen Underground living in our garage).
Two of the people who lived with us for a time were Frank and Valerie. To the best of my recollection, the only clothes that Frank ever wore was a pair of denim shorts. No shirt, no shoes, just shorts, 365 days a year, in Dayton, Ohio, where it gets cold in the winter. Well, one day we had a house crisis. The sewer had backed up into our basement and there was stuff floating everywhere. What were the poor hippies to do? Well, never fear. Without even being asked, Frank grabbed a shovel and a broom and got right to it. I’d say that he hiked up his pants, but when your pants are shorts, there’s not much to hike. And shoes? No time for such fluff. He just waded into it barefoot and cleaned it all up. And, my friends, I learned a very important lesson that day: no matter what happens, there will always be people who willingly will shovel shit.
You see, there is a difference between work and a job. There are people who work for the joy of working, and then there are those who work because they have to, because it’s expected of them, because they need to work in order to survive in this upsidedown economy that dominates every aspect of our lives. Some of my friends in Amway used to say that a job was short for Just Over Broke. How true that is for so many people. Bucky Fuller often referred to the “job obsession” of our economy as “justifying your existence.” Decades ago I left my “job” and began “working.” Now, I had originally started out working, but then one day I cut my hair and I got a job working for someone else and it wasn’t long before I found that the job began to stifle my work ethic.
Believe it or not, “job” is a relatively recent invention on the human scene. Prior to jobs most everybody worked. They grew stuff, they tended animals, they cut trees and cleared land, they built houses and small buildings. I’m sure you get the idea. And what did most of those endeavors have in common? Well, they didn’t usually have a “boss.” Each person was essentially their own boss, and people worked together, cooperated, and shared.
Now when it came to big work requiring lots of people to accomplish a large task, there needed to be a hierarchy of organization so that all of the work could be coordinated. As far as the manpower necessary to accomplish the project, in the distant past that was handled by people who were slaves, who were in servitude to a “boss,” the slave “owner.” This was one of the early reasons for war, to conquer others and turn them into slaves, into laborers for the victor. That’s how most of the palaces, mansions, and monuments of the past were built, with slave labor. Of course we don’t have that today. Or do we? Do we? Does slavery still exist?
Well, we know from United Nations stats that there is a huge sex slave trade in the world today. But, not in the United States. Right? Not since the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves almost 150 years ago. Right? Did you ever wonder, or did they ever teach you in school, who took the place of the slaves once they were freed? And what happened to the slaves once they were no longer bound to the “former” slave owners?
The answer is, of course, that many of the “former slaves” were able to secure employment working for their “former masters.” The master now had to “pay” them for their “services,” but out of that “pay” the former slaves had to figure out how to provide the necessities of food, clothing and shelters that were previously provided by the slave masters. It’s very clever when one thinks about it. The former “slave owners” were able to escape any responsibility for caring for their “former slaves” by “paying” the “former slaves” to take over responsibility for their own lives. And the work went on. So the work, in many cases in the short run, and most cases in the long run, was conducted by the same people who had done it before. But now they were free. They were free to spend and to consume and to get into debt. They were free to bear the responsibility for their lives even if the cards were stacked against them.
Driven by new technological methods of product production, the market for the manpower to drive this growing capitalist machine looked to the people who were “free” to work. A chicken in every pot. A job for everyone. Let’s hear it for America. Rah! Rah! Rah! Get a Job! Sha Na Na Nah! The Great American Dream! A job for everyone, working to keep the dream alive. And please, God, don’t let us wake up.
Now, what I’ve just gotten through trying to say in a kind way, I’m now going to say, in very blunt terminology. It has slowly come to my attention that the great Capitalist American way is one of massive slavery, but “Shhh! Don’t let the slaves know!” Bucky was right. The greatly touted “American work ethic” is part of a marketing strategy designed to “train” us, to “condition” us, through the capitalistic “public” educational training system without having to acknowledge that we are slaves. And we’ve been tricked into taking full responsibility for our own well-being. That’s why Bucky says that having a job is the way we “justify our existence.” And justified to whom? Why to the system that keeps us enslaved. Of course, the capitalist system is healthiest when there are more people looking for work than there are jobs available for them. And if you are a PhD, and the only job you can get is a job flipping burgers (even if you don’t take it) then there is no unemployment problem.
Now, as I’ve said, I have nothing against work. I, personally, am a hard worker. I mow lawns, I paint, I move furniture, I do handy man work. I teach. I write. I maintain a home. I do accounting. I perform weddings. I do computer trouble shooting. And I figure out the solutions to problems, from the very small to the extremely large. And in the midst of all of that, for the overwhelming majority of the last 45 years, I have had one or more “jobs” at any given point in time. I agree with Kahlil Gibran when he says, in “The Prophet” that “work is love made visible.” But I resent the major economic systems upon this planet, whether capitalist, socialist, communist, fascist, or whatever, that have taken that beautiful expression of love in humankind to work, and corrupted it into a commodity that is bought and sold in the marketplace, and the overall wellbeing of the “worker” be damned.
So I’m looking for ways to liberate that inborn work ethic from the limitations of selfish, corrupt, short-sighted economic systems. I have a tremendous faith in the practically unanimous desire of all of humanity to do the right thing and to live a good and personally fulfilling life. I want to break the chains of slavery that have been imposed by society’s economic systems. And then I want to work at designing and making available ways for people to rediscover who they are, the incredible creation that has been hidden under centuries of indentured servitude and to share that reality to the benefit of themselves and others.
And that brings us to education. Wherever I go, I always run into people who are “aware” of the fact that the Latin root of the word “education” is “educare” and that educare means “to draw forth.” In spite of that “knowledge,” however, our culture appears to continue upon a course wherein we continually attempt to try to “force knowledge” into, and upon, others under the guise of “education.” Of course if our culture is not really interested in facilitating individuals “discovering” who and what they are, and in doing what they enjoy doing best, as human beings’ innate curiosity, creativity, and native intelligence would imply that they were designed to do, but instead intends to train people, rather than to educate them, to fill the ever-burgeoning slots in the international corporate machine, then the future does not bode well for the existence of humanity.
Knowledge has long been used as a tool to exercise power over others. An example, shared with us by Bucky Fuller, concerns the “cipher.” Now, I’ll have to admit that when I first heard this story I didn’t really know what a cipher was. Maybe that’s because it’s really no big thing. It’s really a 0. It’s nothing. Zero. The lowly cipher. But there’s so much more to the story. And please note that as important as this story is, it’s principles are not taught in the educational system. So here’s how it goes down.
In the evolvement of humanity, people learned how to count. Don’t know about you, but my brain spends a great deal of time counting. I think that it must be something that it does when bored, sort of like playing solitaire. In order to count, we needed a “counting machine,” a calculator, to not only assist us in keeping track of our counting but as a way of agreeing with others upon the results of our counting. Of course the obvious first “universal calculator” would be our fingers and then our toes.
Well, fingers and toes are fine for small accounting, but what happens if one is dealing with quantities larger than 20? Well, the Arabs came up with a way to handle this, and their “secret” was brought back to the “west” by merchants who learned the secret while conducting business in their travels. That secret was the “cipher.” The cipher is a place holder that allows paper accounting. This is important, for it allows one to count beyond fingers and toes, to count beyond 20. If one can count past 20, one can get involved in larger business transactions without getting burned. And that means the possibility of greater wealth and greater power. It’s numeric literacy. And just as with alphabetic literacy, reading and writing, numeric/mathematic literacy is a gateway to greater opportunity.
Because of the possibilities offered through use of the knowledge of the cipher, its existence was kept secret in the West for centuries. There were, believe it or not, times when the mere knowledge of the cipher and its use was a crime punishable by death. I give this as an example of the importance of education and of the fact that access to educational opportunities can be subject to control and manipulation.
And that’s precisely what happened with the advent of the industrial revolution. As we’ve discussed earlier, work was originally an individual endeavor. People did what they did. They worked as a part of the survival equation. They worked for themselves and for their families. In many parts of the world, life is still like that. That’s the way it has been for thousands of years. But then the industrial equation reared its head and thousands of years of business as usual began to change.
Whether you are aware of it or not, and whether you believe it or not, that is one of the biggest reasons that Osama Bin Laden and many other terrorists hate America so much. It’s because we have a tendency to export our way of life to other countries, and that has a way of corrupting, and otherwise destroying, their way of life, a life that hasn’t changed much in thousands of years. That is until “we” came along with the capitalist promise in one hand and a flaming sword in the other.
It’s a fact that the overwhelming majority of the people on this planet have always worked. Humanity would not have survived otherwise. And the work that different people performed in various cultures became entwined in that culture and the ethic was passed on from generation to generation to generation. That’s a beneficial thing for the people, for the culture, and, unfortunately, for those who would dominate those people. And that’s the way it continued for thousands of years. And it would have gone on that way except for one small thing: humanity’s innate curiosity.
It’s a stone cold fact that every single human being is born naked, ignorant, and curious. Our nakedness makes us vulnerable and drives our curiosity to discover ways that we can survive and thrive. As we each explore this new environment into which we are thrust at birth, sometimes yanked, sometimes kicking, sometimes screaming, we discover that we must develop patterned responses to the stimuli around us or else go mad from a constant stream of the unknown and the unexpected. These gradually habitual pattern responses leave us free to explore new experiences and lifelong education begins, years before the artificial, manmade educational imitation called “school” and many months or even years before we first develop the ability to converse intelligently with the other human beings around us.
Our curiosity-driven, lifelong education is key to the success of our embracing the new economy. For that reason, education needs a thorough reexamination and the development of a whole new educational paradigm. So hang on, because what I’m about to share with you might shock you.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
A Golden Age
[NOTE: These posts are an ongoing presentation, meant to be read beginning with the earliest and ending with the most recent. If not read in that order, there is a potential loss for the reader in an overall understanding of what is being presented. You have been warned.]
Well, here’s what is going on. We have a new economy. It’s an economy based upon metaphysics, based upon ideas, based upon information. And we’ve got to figure out how it works. Now, long ago it occurred to me that it might be possible for anyone, even me, to figure out a framework for dealing with the new economy. And although there are those who will challenge what I am about to present as a fantasy, as a fiction, as a figment of imagination, as a bunch of crap, I feel that all of those phrases could be just as well applied to the old economy. After all, I have often wondered, can anybody name one principle in physics that backs up any economic principle? The principles of physical economics are nothing more than theory. So I’m going to share with you my theories. I feel that they are just as valid for consideration as the joke that is presently in process of unraveling.
I contend that economics, as it has been practiced, is nothing more than an overblown fantasy, a creation of fertile imaginations, but not based upon anything that could verify its validity or lend it the least smell of reality. So hey, if that fantasy was good enough to last all of these years, then maybe mine can make the grade. So here’s how I see it.
The wealth of our economy is based upon ideas coupled with their implementation. In other words, you take an idea and bring it into manifestation and it adds value to the world’s wealth. And since this is based upon metaphysics rather than upon physics, the wealth doesn’t disappear or dwindle away with time. The ideas remain valid. So who owns all of this new wealth. Well, to tell you the God’s truth, nobody knows. Oh, we have played games in the past to “protect” intellectual property, but that’s really like saying that it is possible to own a cloud. Don’t look now, but didn’t it just dissipate?
Well, try this on for size. I don’t think that anyone can claim ownership of an idea. I like the way Bucky Fuller used to put it when he said some of his best ideas seemed to have a sense of mustiness, as if they had been sitting on a shelf for a long time. And isn’t that the way ideas are? They’ve always been there. They are just waiting to be discovered. They are just waiting for someone to be open-minded enough to allow them to enter into the realm of our experience, our consciousness, and the opportunity to manifest themselves. The idea that someone can “own” that idea just because they opened their consciousness to receive it is nothing but pure crap. Often when someone “gets an idea,” if truth be known they are not the only one in the world to get that idea. We just saw that happen to me over the use of “metaphysical economy” by myself and Hakim Bey.
Intellectual property rights have nothing to do with ownership of an idea. They have to do with exploitation of an idea. In other words, whomever gets it to market first and has the sharpest lawyers wins the bragging rights. Of course that scenario could lead to large conglomerates taking over ideas as their own and screwing the “originator” of the idea. Hmmm. Sounds familiar. Reminds me of a friend, who had just been shafted by his company, but before he could leave he received a single check for an invention of his that his employer “owned.” He showed me the check and referred to it as whore money. That was all that we was going to get. Any future revenue generated by “his” idea would go straight into the coffers of the company that had just given him the boot.
My view is that ideas belong to everyone. Why? Because everyone can potentially be the channel for any idea to make its way off of the shelf and into our lives. But the value of that idea, the wealth generating potential of that idea belongs to everyone. And what is the value of that idea? Well, as I have already explained, it’s whatever people want to agree upon it to be. So here’s my proposal. Now I also believe that the individual(s) sharp enough to “recognize” the value of the idea that they “receive” should be rewarded. And just as we created elaborate, though distorted, patent and copywrite laws for the old economy, so, too, we can create new, and fairer , laws for handling this issue in the new economy. Hell, under such a system, I probably would qualify for sharing considerably in the new wealth merely because of what I am about to say.
I think that everyone in the world, that’s right, not any particular group, but everyone, should receive $1,000 per year. How is that for starters? Oops, I forgot something. I meant to say $1,000 per year times their age. Think about that for a moment. Think about what it would mean to you personally. Think about what it would mean to your family. Think about what it would mean for your parents. Think about what it would mean for all children, everywhere. Think about what it would mean for people who feel trapped financially in an abusive relationship. $1,000 a year times your age. For everyone in the entire world. How would your life change if right now you were to be given $1,000 times your age in years? And furthermore, you knew that you were going to receive the same thing next year plus an additional $1,000 because you would be a year older. And what do you have to do in exchange for that money? What are you talking about? This is a gift, a gift to you from the universe for being a human being. Consider it as a payment to encourage you to live up to your potential without having to sacrifice it on the altar of the old rat race.
Now there is something that you can do. And we’ll get into that after awhile, but the key here is to realize that I said “can do,” not “must do.” Don’t worry, like I say, we’ll flesh that all out shortly.
I shared this with a young 20-something about a half dozen years ago and she said, “well, I make more than that already.” To which I replied, “I didn’t say that you had to quit your job.” Wow, that adds a new perspective. I bet we could figure out a way to keep the old economic system and at the same time run this new one in parallel. In fact, that makes perfect sense, because that’s what essentially has been happening anyway.
One thing that I want to get very clear here, however, that nowhere am I talking about taking anything away from anyone else. Even if your gain is ill-gotten, you have nothing to fear from what I am talking about. This is not a redistribution of wealth. This is opening the floodgates to the true source of all wealth. And opening it so that all benefit equally.
So, obviously, what we will have to do is to figure out how much “money” we will have to extract from the “cosmic bank account” to pay everyone $1,000/year times their age. That figure will then be our starting benchmark for the total amount of wealth that is immediately available from the new economy. I know that my choice of $1K/year*age is arbitrary, but what the hell, it’s the best, and most equitable, that I have been able to come up with.
Now for a few tweaks. I think that ½ of that which is paid annually to minors should go into a special savings account to be held until their maturity. At 21, that would mean that every person achieving that age would have an immediate nest egg of $105,000 plus an income for that year of $21,000. If we “mature” them at 18, they will have an $85,500 nest egg and an income of $18,000 for the year.
I realize that there are some potential problems here. Will this encourage people to have many children so as to accrue extra free money? Example: a couple is driven to achieve high fertility and has 5 children, ages 2,4,6,8 and 10. That’s an extra $30k/year for their family, and that figure will climb at the rate of $2,500/year. Hey, honey, let’s have another one. Perhaps we could have a child tax on the parents for every child over X number. Harsh? If they are doing this for financial reasons, then they should be hit with a balancing of financial consequences. If they are doing it because they are just hot and don’t know any better, then they obviously need some behavioral counseling regarding personal control and personal responsibility. My God, there are a lot of potential possibilities for handling these situations. An additional possibility will make itself obvious when we talk about education (sometime in the future).
Another possible problem is inflation. Perhaps something will have to be done regarding certain price controls. Now, don’t get freaked. I’m not talking about across the board. It may evolve through creating a system whereby metaphysical income is valid for certain types of purchases, such as the basics of food, clothing, and shelter (and its accompanying support network of utilities, etc.), and those prices are protected against inflation.
Anyway, the bottom line is that we begin with a Metaphysical economy source fund of X trillion or quadrillion dollars that is paid annually to every human being on this spaceship called earth. In addition, people can make additional money through the old familiar system of “business as usual.”
Now, so far, unlike any other system that I have heard proposed for altering our economic outlook, I don’t think that I have offended anyone by threatening to take something away from them in order to give it to another. So let’s see how much further we might push the envelope.
I’m a firm believer in doing away with all taxes. I am amused by proposals such as the flat tax, but the fact of the matter is that every single scheme that comes along is trying to figure out how to switch the burden of “paying for all of this” without pissing off too many people. Let’s skip all of that elaborate sleight of hand and just scrap the entire tax system all together. Instead, let’s look to the same source that we have tapped for putting everyone on an annual payroll. Let’s determine what the needs of people as community are, from local to global, and tap the metaphysical source for the funds needed to bring everyone’s standard of living up to a successful par throughout the world. Now, for those of you “in business” don’t start complaining. Just think of all of the “business” that is going to come your way, if, that is, you are providing a product or service that is important.
Years ago, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Bucky Fuller had a thought assignment in one of his classes where they “created” a fictional company called Obnoxico that created useless “stuff,” the kind of things one might find in an airport gift shop. A peculiar thing happened, however, when several of his students took the idea and ran with it. They actually created a company called Obnoxico and began making money off of the crap that they were producing and selling If we began by setting up a system of what constitutes “essential” systems and artifacts and their value and cost and the metaphysical economic cost and then just issued those “metaphysical” funds, who would have a problem with that. Hmmm! I managed to throw taxes on the woodpile in just two paragraphs. What’s next?
How about this thing called “health insurance.” This strikes a particular chord with me because of an experience that I had about 20 years ago. I had a hernia and was fortunate to have a doctor who, through creative reporting to insurance, got me immediately into surgery by claiming the hernia to be incarcerated. Turns out that he was right and his move quite possibly saved my life, whereas if he had waited for the insurance company to make the call, I might have died. But something else happened while I was with him that I have never forgotten. He had been in medicine since World War II. He told me that he had tired of medicine and was going to do a semi-retirement thing where he would be a part-time doctor at a military hospital facility. “You see,” he said, “several years ago big business came in and said to the doctors, ‘boys, there’s money to be made here; step back and let us show you how it’s done.’” As far as he was concerned, the medical field had become too corrupted with its new “bottom line mentality.” So after over 40 years he was bailing to the security and comfort of a government position. Understand, he had decided to retreat to what could be called “socialism,” due to the corruptive influence of capitalism.
Everyone, every man, woman, and child, of whatever age, should receive top of the line professional healthcare at no cost. We do it for the military. We do it for top federal elected officials. Pay for it out of the cosmic account. And switch medicine from being reactive to being proactive towards health. If we help people to live healthy lives, the money saved in the long run is astronomical. This is not a theory. This is a fact. So what the hell are we waiting for, “boys?” I have a friend whose father and brother are both MD’s, and he says the role of American medicine is to cut it, burn it, freeze it. I prefer what the eminent doctor, Dr. Albert Schweitzer said; “It is the role of the physician to entertain the patient while the body heals itself.”
Now, as far as socialism is concerned, remember way back when I told you about labels? What did I say that they lead to? Evil, that’s right. Well, the conservative capitalists’ bandying about the term “socialism,” in order to instill fear in the hearts of the American people, need to cease their foolish and unfounded claims. There are times when socialism is the better answer to a situation than capitalism. There are times when capitalism is the wiser choice. The intelligent leaders are those who can tell the difference and who can explain their reasoning to the populace without resorting to labeling, name-calling, and fear mongering. When an industry is in the throes of developing, the competition of capitalism is a system that inspires competitive growth and development. However, once that industry has achieved a level of equilibrium, and is potentially available for everyone, it is better that it become socialized, thereby continuing to offer the achieved level of quality. Otherwise capitalism will move into a merger frenzy resulting in a money-guzzling monopoly while industry quality slides ever steadily downward.
A healthy economy is not a matter of either capitalism OR socialism. It is a matter of intelligent balance between the various systems available so as to insure the continued health of the economy and the availability of the economy’s output to the widest range of the world’s citizens.
Bottom line on improving the economy is that we must embrace the metaphysical aspects of our reality. Just because it is not physically measurable is no reason for the formally educated parts of our society to ignore it. Once we acknowledge and accept it and begin to incorporate it into our models of reality, humanity will begin to move into a golden age that is almost beyond our wildest dreams. And all of this without any individual disadvantaging any other individual, and the naysayers be damned.
I have more to say on this most important topic, and I want to talk about education, for it is a key aspect to what I am presenting here, but it’s getting late, I want to get this posted, and this is a good place to take a breath.
Well, here’s what is going on. We have a new economy. It’s an economy based upon metaphysics, based upon ideas, based upon information. And we’ve got to figure out how it works. Now, long ago it occurred to me that it might be possible for anyone, even me, to figure out a framework for dealing with the new economy. And although there are those who will challenge what I am about to present as a fantasy, as a fiction, as a figment of imagination, as a bunch of crap, I feel that all of those phrases could be just as well applied to the old economy. After all, I have often wondered, can anybody name one principle in physics that backs up any economic principle? The principles of physical economics are nothing more than theory. So I’m going to share with you my theories. I feel that they are just as valid for consideration as the joke that is presently in process of unraveling.
I contend that economics, as it has been practiced, is nothing more than an overblown fantasy, a creation of fertile imaginations, but not based upon anything that could verify its validity or lend it the least smell of reality. So hey, if that fantasy was good enough to last all of these years, then maybe mine can make the grade. So here’s how I see it.
The wealth of our economy is based upon ideas coupled with their implementation. In other words, you take an idea and bring it into manifestation and it adds value to the world’s wealth. And since this is based upon metaphysics rather than upon physics, the wealth doesn’t disappear or dwindle away with time. The ideas remain valid. So who owns all of this new wealth. Well, to tell you the God’s truth, nobody knows. Oh, we have played games in the past to “protect” intellectual property, but that’s really like saying that it is possible to own a cloud. Don’t look now, but didn’t it just dissipate?
Well, try this on for size. I don’t think that anyone can claim ownership of an idea. I like the way Bucky Fuller used to put it when he said some of his best ideas seemed to have a sense of mustiness, as if they had been sitting on a shelf for a long time. And isn’t that the way ideas are? They’ve always been there. They are just waiting to be discovered. They are just waiting for someone to be open-minded enough to allow them to enter into the realm of our experience, our consciousness, and the opportunity to manifest themselves. The idea that someone can “own” that idea just because they opened their consciousness to receive it is nothing but pure crap. Often when someone “gets an idea,” if truth be known they are not the only one in the world to get that idea. We just saw that happen to me over the use of “metaphysical economy” by myself and Hakim Bey.
Intellectual property rights have nothing to do with ownership of an idea. They have to do with exploitation of an idea. In other words, whomever gets it to market first and has the sharpest lawyers wins the bragging rights. Of course that scenario could lead to large conglomerates taking over ideas as their own and screwing the “originator” of the idea. Hmmm. Sounds familiar. Reminds me of a friend, who had just been shafted by his company, but before he could leave he received a single check for an invention of his that his employer “owned.” He showed me the check and referred to it as whore money. That was all that we was going to get. Any future revenue generated by “his” idea would go straight into the coffers of the company that had just given him the boot.
My view is that ideas belong to everyone. Why? Because everyone can potentially be the channel for any idea to make its way off of the shelf and into our lives. But the value of that idea, the wealth generating potential of that idea belongs to everyone. And what is the value of that idea? Well, as I have already explained, it’s whatever people want to agree upon it to be. So here’s my proposal. Now I also believe that the individual(s) sharp enough to “recognize” the value of the idea that they “receive” should be rewarded. And just as we created elaborate, though distorted, patent and copywrite laws for the old economy, so, too, we can create new, and fairer , laws for handling this issue in the new economy. Hell, under such a system, I probably would qualify for sharing considerably in the new wealth merely because of what I am about to say.
I think that everyone in the world, that’s right, not any particular group, but everyone, should receive $1,000 per year. How is that for starters? Oops, I forgot something. I meant to say $1,000 per year times their age. Think about that for a moment. Think about what it would mean to you personally. Think about what it would mean to your family. Think about what it would mean for your parents. Think about what it would mean for all children, everywhere. Think about what it would mean for people who feel trapped financially in an abusive relationship. $1,000 a year times your age. For everyone in the entire world. How would your life change if right now you were to be given $1,000 times your age in years? And furthermore, you knew that you were going to receive the same thing next year plus an additional $1,000 because you would be a year older. And what do you have to do in exchange for that money? What are you talking about? This is a gift, a gift to you from the universe for being a human being. Consider it as a payment to encourage you to live up to your potential without having to sacrifice it on the altar of the old rat race.
Now there is something that you can do. And we’ll get into that after awhile, but the key here is to realize that I said “can do,” not “must do.” Don’t worry, like I say, we’ll flesh that all out shortly.
I shared this with a young 20-something about a half dozen years ago and she said, “well, I make more than that already.” To which I replied, “I didn’t say that you had to quit your job.” Wow, that adds a new perspective. I bet we could figure out a way to keep the old economic system and at the same time run this new one in parallel. In fact, that makes perfect sense, because that’s what essentially has been happening anyway.
One thing that I want to get very clear here, however, that nowhere am I talking about taking anything away from anyone else. Even if your gain is ill-gotten, you have nothing to fear from what I am talking about. This is not a redistribution of wealth. This is opening the floodgates to the true source of all wealth. And opening it so that all benefit equally.
So, obviously, what we will have to do is to figure out how much “money” we will have to extract from the “cosmic bank account” to pay everyone $1,000/year times their age. That figure will then be our starting benchmark for the total amount of wealth that is immediately available from the new economy. I know that my choice of $1K/year*age is arbitrary, but what the hell, it’s the best, and most equitable, that I have been able to come up with.
Now for a few tweaks. I think that ½ of that which is paid annually to minors should go into a special savings account to be held until their maturity. At 21, that would mean that every person achieving that age would have an immediate nest egg of $105,000 plus an income for that year of $21,000. If we “mature” them at 18, they will have an $85,500 nest egg and an income of $18,000 for the year.
I realize that there are some potential problems here. Will this encourage people to have many children so as to accrue extra free money? Example: a couple is driven to achieve high fertility and has 5 children, ages 2,4,6,8 and 10. That’s an extra $30k/year for their family, and that figure will climb at the rate of $2,500/year. Hey, honey, let’s have another one. Perhaps we could have a child tax on the parents for every child over X number. Harsh? If they are doing this for financial reasons, then they should be hit with a balancing of financial consequences. If they are doing it because they are just hot and don’t know any better, then they obviously need some behavioral counseling regarding personal control and personal responsibility. My God, there are a lot of potential possibilities for handling these situations. An additional possibility will make itself obvious when we talk about education (sometime in the future).
Another possible problem is inflation. Perhaps something will have to be done regarding certain price controls. Now, don’t get freaked. I’m not talking about across the board. It may evolve through creating a system whereby metaphysical income is valid for certain types of purchases, such as the basics of food, clothing, and shelter (and its accompanying support network of utilities, etc.), and those prices are protected against inflation.
Anyway, the bottom line is that we begin with a Metaphysical economy source fund of X trillion or quadrillion dollars that is paid annually to every human being on this spaceship called earth. In addition, people can make additional money through the old familiar system of “business as usual.”
Now, so far, unlike any other system that I have heard proposed for altering our economic outlook, I don’t think that I have offended anyone by threatening to take something away from them in order to give it to another. So let’s see how much further we might push the envelope.
I’m a firm believer in doing away with all taxes. I am amused by proposals such as the flat tax, but the fact of the matter is that every single scheme that comes along is trying to figure out how to switch the burden of “paying for all of this” without pissing off too many people. Let’s skip all of that elaborate sleight of hand and just scrap the entire tax system all together. Instead, let’s look to the same source that we have tapped for putting everyone on an annual payroll. Let’s determine what the needs of people as community are, from local to global, and tap the metaphysical source for the funds needed to bring everyone’s standard of living up to a successful par throughout the world. Now, for those of you “in business” don’t start complaining. Just think of all of the “business” that is going to come your way, if, that is, you are providing a product or service that is important.
Years ago, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Bucky Fuller had a thought assignment in one of his classes where they “created” a fictional company called Obnoxico that created useless “stuff,” the kind of things one might find in an airport gift shop. A peculiar thing happened, however, when several of his students took the idea and ran with it. They actually created a company called Obnoxico and began making money off of the crap that they were producing and selling If we began by setting up a system of what constitutes “essential” systems and artifacts and their value and cost and the metaphysical economic cost and then just issued those “metaphysical” funds, who would have a problem with that. Hmmm! I managed to throw taxes on the woodpile in just two paragraphs. What’s next?
How about this thing called “health insurance.” This strikes a particular chord with me because of an experience that I had about 20 years ago. I had a hernia and was fortunate to have a doctor who, through creative reporting to insurance, got me immediately into surgery by claiming the hernia to be incarcerated. Turns out that he was right and his move quite possibly saved my life, whereas if he had waited for the insurance company to make the call, I might have died. But something else happened while I was with him that I have never forgotten. He had been in medicine since World War II. He told me that he had tired of medicine and was going to do a semi-retirement thing where he would be a part-time doctor at a military hospital facility. “You see,” he said, “several years ago big business came in and said to the doctors, ‘boys, there’s money to be made here; step back and let us show you how it’s done.’” As far as he was concerned, the medical field had become too corrupted with its new “bottom line mentality.” So after over 40 years he was bailing to the security and comfort of a government position. Understand, he had decided to retreat to what could be called “socialism,” due to the corruptive influence of capitalism.
Everyone, every man, woman, and child, of whatever age, should receive top of the line professional healthcare at no cost. We do it for the military. We do it for top federal elected officials. Pay for it out of the cosmic account. And switch medicine from being reactive to being proactive towards health. If we help people to live healthy lives, the money saved in the long run is astronomical. This is not a theory. This is a fact. So what the hell are we waiting for, “boys?” I have a friend whose father and brother are both MD’s, and he says the role of American medicine is to cut it, burn it, freeze it. I prefer what the eminent doctor, Dr. Albert Schweitzer said; “It is the role of the physician to entertain the patient while the body heals itself.”
Now, as far as socialism is concerned, remember way back when I told you about labels? What did I say that they lead to? Evil, that’s right. Well, the conservative capitalists’ bandying about the term “socialism,” in order to instill fear in the hearts of the American people, need to cease their foolish and unfounded claims. There are times when socialism is the better answer to a situation than capitalism. There are times when capitalism is the wiser choice. The intelligent leaders are those who can tell the difference and who can explain their reasoning to the populace without resorting to labeling, name-calling, and fear mongering. When an industry is in the throes of developing, the competition of capitalism is a system that inspires competitive growth and development. However, once that industry has achieved a level of equilibrium, and is potentially available for everyone, it is better that it become socialized, thereby continuing to offer the achieved level of quality. Otherwise capitalism will move into a merger frenzy resulting in a money-guzzling monopoly while industry quality slides ever steadily downward.
A healthy economy is not a matter of either capitalism OR socialism. It is a matter of intelligent balance between the various systems available so as to insure the continued health of the economy and the availability of the economy’s output to the widest range of the world’s citizens.
Bottom line on improving the economy is that we must embrace the metaphysical aspects of our reality. Just because it is not physically measurable is no reason for the formally educated parts of our society to ignore it. Once we acknowledge and accept it and begin to incorporate it into our models of reality, humanity will begin to move into a golden age that is almost beyond our wildest dreams. And all of this without any individual disadvantaging any other individual, and the naysayers be damned.
I have more to say on this most important topic, and I want to talk about education, for it is a key aspect to what I am presenting here, but it’s getting late, I want to get this posted, and this is a good place to take a breath.
Friday, October 3, 2008
A New Economy
[NOTE: These posts are an ongoing presentation, meant to be read beginning with the earliest and ending with the most recent. If not read in that order, there is a potential loss for the reader in an overall understanding of what is being presented. You have been warned.]
So the world economy goes bankrupt during World War I. And with that bankruptcy the Great Pirates lost their control over the world. BUT. And this is a big and important “But.” Nobody knew what had happened.
See, nobody knew that the Great Pirates had been running things for thousands of years. They always thought that it was the kings and queens and other figureheads, but those people were exactly that: nothing but figureheads, frontmen for the true powerbrokers. Now the figureheads weren’t going to admit that they were just figureheads. And the Great Pirates weren’t going to tell anybody, because the existence of the figureheads kept people from knowing who was really in charge. Therefore, when the Great Pirates lost control of what was going on, nobody knew. In other words, nobody was in charge any longer and nobody knew that nobody was in charge. Furthermore, when the world went belly up, nobody realized what had happened. If anyone did realize it, either they kept their mouth shut, somebody else shut their mouth, or nobody listened to them.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling. Sure it is. Just shut up and go back to your hole.
So no one was any longer in charge of what was going on and nobody knew it. Furthermore, nobody knew what was going on.
And therefore everybody continued to live as though things hadn’t changed. But they had.
Now I’m going to tell you what really happened.
As I’ve already stated, the old economy was based upon possession, production and movement of stuff (goods and resources) and services. Next I claim that the old economy was overwhelmed by the explosion of evolving science and technology. Think about what was happening. How did this expansion take place, what was the driving force behind all of this expanding creative output? Was it not ideas that spouted from the innate curiosity of humanity? Ideas. And when ideas come into expression, how are they related to one another? Through information. Through data. Now think about this for a minute. The old system of basing wealth upon physical possession was swamped by a rapidly emerging expansion of ideas and information which was generating a new wealth. And increasingly these ideas were concerning that which was beyond the normal scope of humanity’s physical senses.
So, the contention here is that the old economy was replaced by a new economy, an economy based upon ideas and information. Let’s pause for a moment and try to let that sink in. The old economy of physical accounting was replaced by a new accounting. But an accounting based upon what? Obviously something beyond the physical. The Greek for “beyond” is meta. Therefore, we could say that the basis for the new economy was meta-physical. Metaphysics.
Since the old economy was based upon physics and the new economy is based upon metaphysics, how does that change things, if at all? First, a basic principle in the world of physics is that of entropy. Entropy means that everything is running down and running out. This is why it was so easy for Malthus to decide that there must not be enough to go around. He was functioning in a world founded in entropy. Everything is running down and running out. That’s not the case with metaphysics, a reality that is beyond that which can be measured physically. In metaphysics, a basic principle is that everything is in a constant state of expansion. Funny, but isn’t that a goal of capitalism, to be constantly expanding the market? A constant state of expansion.
And we find that there is an inherent balance between these two realities. In a universe where everything is running down and running out, we observe that the universe is in a constant state of expansion. It’s like breath. We breath in, we breath out. Neither the “in” nor the “out” can survive for any length of time by themselves. They are co-existent. And so it is with the physical and the metaphysical. The physical springs from the metaphysical, yet the constantly recycling physical comprises all of the tools and building blocks necessary for the metaphysical to manifest itself. And together, they are constantly creating a universe that is truly beyond our wildest imaginations. Finally, in the past century, humanity had finally evolved in consciousness where it could begin to access this “other side of the coin” of economics, the creative source behind it all.
For those who are religiously oriented, this reality has been hidden in the Christian New Testament for almost 2,000 years. In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 1 he says “Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” Those are powerfully insightful words. Yet, that’s not all of the story, as Paul Harvey might say. If we look to the Lamsa translation of that line from the original Aramaic, we find a hidden phrase that adds a new dimension to this scripture and expands our understanding of “faith” to infinity. Here’s what Lamsa saw, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, as it was the substance of things that have come to pass; and it is the evidence of things not seen.” Then in the third verse, Paul says, “For it is through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen came to be from those which are not seen.”
What we find here is that the source of “all that is” is that which is not seen. And faith, or belief, is the portal through which it comes into expression. In our reality of experience, we are the agents of faith and therefore the creators of our reality through manifesting that which we believe. And that source for all of this faith and belief is infinite. And I would then contend that all things are possible.
Now, a very important part of what led us to our current economic woes had to do with credit. Some of my old friends in Amway used to spout about the evils of credit and how the appearance of the credit card, back in 1950 began humanity’s slide toward financial Armageddon. But they could only see the surface. It’s what was taking place behind the credit card that was most interesting. You see, credit is value extended to someone with the promise implied that the debtor will repay the creditor in the future. Well, we all know that things don’t always work out as we anticipate. And we also know that there are unscrupulous people who are always looking for ways to take advantage of others. So it is a given that anyone who gets into the business of crediting value to others is taking the risk of not being repaid for everything that they loan out. The coverage for those bad debts comes from the interest, and other charges, that one might get from other debtors. But the creditor must always stay alert to insure that they have enough value of their own to cover any potential losses from credit not being repaid.
So what would keep someone from loaning out far more than they could ever recoup? If you have been paying attention, the answer is regulation. We, the people, created laws concerning how much value one can loan out, or extend in credit to others, based upon one’s own value. And because lawyers and accountants were involved in all of this, every step of the way, upon every side imaginable, you can rest assured that the legislation that has been designed to protect us from the evildoers in finance is convoluted beyond the imagination of the common man. These laws decided who could loan and extend credit and how much they could loan or extend. I know that when I first got interested in this, banks could load out 9 times as much as they had in assets. I used to say, if you’ll only allow me the same latitude, I’ll loan 9 times my assets to myself, straighten out my finances, and then pay myself back. I mean, wouldn’t it be nice if you could pay all of that interest to yourself instead of having to pay it to someone else?
Originally, there were limitations as to who could and could not loan out money and extend credit. Over the years, however, those definitions expanded to include more and more financial entities and they spread out dramatically as to how much value could be loaned and extended in credit. And lots of this came through the form of deregulation, through removing the original regulations that were passed in order to protect us from financial entities getting too carried away with the game and thereby deep sixing the economy. With time, more and more people were able to jump into the money game of high finance. I mean today people can work and gamble from home 24/7. Gadzooks! Ah, the wonders of the modern age.
Around 1990, a friend turned me on to a book that has had quite an influence on my outlook on the realities around us. It was written by Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. The title of the book was “The Media Lab” and subtitled “Inventing The Future At M.I.T.” It was about the Media Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute Of Technology and how the students were working upon the merging of three fields of Broadcast and Motion Pictures, Print and Publishing, and Computers into one field. To this day, 20 years later, the book is still a fascinating read. But it’s not the Media Lab itself that I want to talk about. In the final third of the book in a section entitled “Media Lab Of The World,” Stewart interviewed a couple of world class economists, Peter Schwartz and Jay Ogilvy. In reference to the world’s economy they said, “no one is in charge and no one knows what’s going on.” Hmmm. Sort of fits into my scenario that the Great Pirates are no long in control, no one knows it, no one has taken their place, and the world economy has evolved into a new economy that no one yet comprehends.
Peter and Jay further pointed out that although no one was in charge and no one knew what was going on, nevertheless, the world’s economy was moving right along with billions of dollars flashing around the planet at the speed of light every second. They went on to say that a Nobel Prize awaits the person who can describe the economics of information.
Well, I do not begin to have the credentials to even qualify to be heard by those who move in the realm of Nobel ideas. But I’m going to give you my take on the matter, just the same. No one is in charge. True. That is why things are so out of hand right now. Oh, a few are making money off of the current situation, but they are not in charge. They are actually just lucky players or descendents of the Great Pirates. No one knows what is going on. True. Those who get an inkling of what is taking place are quickly discredited by those who are riding the wave. But nobody truly understands what is going on. Now how can I say that? Simple. No one that I know of has said what I’m about to say. (Oops, as I write this, researching as I go, I discover Hakim Bey aka Peter Lamborn Wilson making comments upon metaphysical economy. Credit where credit is due. Ideas whose time has come.) I happen to believe that what I am going to tell you is what is really going on and what can be done about it.
When the Metaphysical Economy came into being some 90 years ago, in the sense of taking precedence over the physical economy, it grew slowly, but deliberately. New ideas begat more new ideas, but the consequences of these new ideas were twisted and turned in an effort to make them fit into the equations of the old economics. The crash of ’29, which, as I told you, was the outpicturing of the actual crash a dozen years earlier, came about because the new economy was already generating new wealth and people didn’t know what to do with it, how to make it fit into the old economic molds. Hey, so what if it couldn’t be explained. Enjoy it. And enjoy it they did until it split the sides of the old mold and all hell broke loose as the house of cards collapsed. The Great Depression was a depression of the bankruptcy of the old system.
We were rescued from that depression by taking ideas and putting them into our physical reality through programs like the WPA. In other words, the government put people to work turning ideas into reality. (I’d love to see a list of everything that was built in this country by the WPA.) Yet, still we were seeing things through old outdated eyes. This new economy wasn’t just emerging in the United States. It was attempting to break out all over the world. Some slick marketers took advantage of people’s depression experience and playing upon fears that they manipulated into a self pride, vaulted themselves into positions of power where they fell back on the old, outdated power games of survival of the fittest and drove us into a second World War.
As with World War I, the atomically explosive growth of ideas put into action accelerated the new economy into a hyper drive. Yet the politicians and the economists and the financiers were able to continue fooling everyone by grabbing this new evolving wealth and finding ways to convert it into the old economic molds and extensively padding their pockets in the process. But they had to start getting more creative in their endeavors. So, in 1950, they created credit cards. This worked well because now they could funnel this new wealth into the fiction of credit. Remember when I told you that banks could loan out nine times more than their assets? This is what was backing that fantasy. The new wealth. But they funneled it to the coffers of the big players rather than to the people. And, after all, it is people who are the channel for all of this wealth, through the manifestation of their belief and creativity.
The Cold War tries to keep a lid on things, but it leads to the Space Race and more and more wealth is generated. Vietnam. More war ramp up of ideas. But wait folks, coming up on the outside is what many thought was a long shot. It’s computers expanding by leaps and bounds and in the process linking the entire world in one gigantic communications network. Truly nuclear expansion of wealth is now taking place. The Internet offers opportunities for creative outlet for billions of people on the planet. Egads! How do we keep a lid on it. How do we figure out how to account for it? Sub-prime mortgages. Derivatives. Risk insurance of packaged debt. Let everybody play. This is so much fun. This is so amazing. This is so unreal!
CRASH! The world market is in disarray. Millions have lost their savings. Millions have lost fortunes. Millions have lost their retirement. Millions have lost their homes. The ripples extend around the entire world. Yet, just as with the aftermath of 9/11, in many ways, for many people, things aren’t really that dire. Well, at least not yet. Now, a personal note here. Although I am posting this with a date of October 3, it is actually being written on election eve.
So, what happened, what crashed? Well, the economy, of course. Actually a facsimile thereof. Remember, it’s all just smoke and mirrors. The economy crashed almost a century ago and has not recovered. What we’ve been living in is just a movie loop that is played over and over while we desperately try to figure out what the hell is going on.
And just what is going on? That’s next.
So the world economy goes bankrupt during World War I. And with that bankruptcy the Great Pirates lost their control over the world. BUT. And this is a big and important “But.” Nobody knew what had happened.
See, nobody knew that the Great Pirates had been running things for thousands of years. They always thought that it was the kings and queens and other figureheads, but those people were exactly that: nothing but figureheads, frontmen for the true powerbrokers. Now the figureheads weren’t going to admit that they were just figureheads. And the Great Pirates weren’t going to tell anybody, because the existence of the figureheads kept people from knowing who was really in charge. Therefore, when the Great Pirates lost control of what was going on, nobody knew. In other words, nobody was in charge any longer and nobody knew that nobody was in charge. Furthermore, when the world went belly up, nobody realized what had happened. If anyone did realize it, either they kept their mouth shut, somebody else shut their mouth, or nobody listened to them.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling. Sure it is. Just shut up and go back to your hole.
So no one was any longer in charge of what was going on and nobody knew it. Furthermore, nobody knew what was going on.
And therefore everybody continued to live as though things hadn’t changed. But they had.
Now I’m going to tell you what really happened.
As I’ve already stated, the old economy was based upon possession, production and movement of stuff (goods and resources) and services. Next I claim that the old economy was overwhelmed by the explosion of evolving science and technology. Think about what was happening. How did this expansion take place, what was the driving force behind all of this expanding creative output? Was it not ideas that spouted from the innate curiosity of humanity? Ideas. And when ideas come into expression, how are they related to one another? Through information. Through data. Now think about this for a minute. The old system of basing wealth upon physical possession was swamped by a rapidly emerging expansion of ideas and information which was generating a new wealth. And increasingly these ideas were concerning that which was beyond the normal scope of humanity’s physical senses.
So, the contention here is that the old economy was replaced by a new economy, an economy based upon ideas and information. Let’s pause for a moment and try to let that sink in. The old economy of physical accounting was replaced by a new accounting. But an accounting based upon what? Obviously something beyond the physical. The Greek for “beyond” is meta. Therefore, we could say that the basis for the new economy was meta-physical. Metaphysics.
Since the old economy was based upon physics and the new economy is based upon metaphysics, how does that change things, if at all? First, a basic principle in the world of physics is that of entropy. Entropy means that everything is running down and running out. This is why it was so easy for Malthus to decide that there must not be enough to go around. He was functioning in a world founded in entropy. Everything is running down and running out. That’s not the case with metaphysics, a reality that is beyond that which can be measured physically. In metaphysics, a basic principle is that everything is in a constant state of expansion. Funny, but isn’t that a goal of capitalism, to be constantly expanding the market? A constant state of expansion.
And we find that there is an inherent balance between these two realities. In a universe where everything is running down and running out, we observe that the universe is in a constant state of expansion. It’s like breath. We breath in, we breath out. Neither the “in” nor the “out” can survive for any length of time by themselves. They are co-existent. And so it is with the physical and the metaphysical. The physical springs from the metaphysical, yet the constantly recycling physical comprises all of the tools and building blocks necessary for the metaphysical to manifest itself. And together, they are constantly creating a universe that is truly beyond our wildest imaginations. Finally, in the past century, humanity had finally evolved in consciousness where it could begin to access this “other side of the coin” of economics, the creative source behind it all.
For those who are religiously oriented, this reality has been hidden in the Christian New Testament for almost 2,000 years. In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 1 he says “Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” Those are powerfully insightful words. Yet, that’s not all of the story, as Paul Harvey might say. If we look to the Lamsa translation of that line from the original Aramaic, we find a hidden phrase that adds a new dimension to this scripture and expands our understanding of “faith” to infinity. Here’s what Lamsa saw, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, as it was the substance of things that have come to pass; and it is the evidence of things not seen.” Then in the third verse, Paul says, “For it is through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen came to be from those which are not seen.”
What we find here is that the source of “all that is” is that which is not seen. And faith, or belief, is the portal through which it comes into expression. In our reality of experience, we are the agents of faith and therefore the creators of our reality through manifesting that which we believe. And that source for all of this faith and belief is infinite. And I would then contend that all things are possible.
Now, a very important part of what led us to our current economic woes had to do with credit. Some of my old friends in Amway used to spout about the evils of credit and how the appearance of the credit card, back in 1950 began humanity’s slide toward financial Armageddon. But they could only see the surface. It’s what was taking place behind the credit card that was most interesting. You see, credit is value extended to someone with the promise implied that the debtor will repay the creditor in the future. Well, we all know that things don’t always work out as we anticipate. And we also know that there are unscrupulous people who are always looking for ways to take advantage of others. So it is a given that anyone who gets into the business of crediting value to others is taking the risk of not being repaid for everything that they loan out. The coverage for those bad debts comes from the interest, and other charges, that one might get from other debtors. But the creditor must always stay alert to insure that they have enough value of their own to cover any potential losses from credit not being repaid.
So what would keep someone from loaning out far more than they could ever recoup? If you have been paying attention, the answer is regulation. We, the people, created laws concerning how much value one can loan out, or extend in credit to others, based upon one’s own value. And because lawyers and accountants were involved in all of this, every step of the way, upon every side imaginable, you can rest assured that the legislation that has been designed to protect us from the evildoers in finance is convoluted beyond the imagination of the common man. These laws decided who could loan and extend credit and how much they could loan or extend. I know that when I first got interested in this, banks could load out 9 times as much as they had in assets. I used to say, if you’ll only allow me the same latitude, I’ll loan 9 times my assets to myself, straighten out my finances, and then pay myself back. I mean, wouldn’t it be nice if you could pay all of that interest to yourself instead of having to pay it to someone else?
Originally, there were limitations as to who could and could not loan out money and extend credit. Over the years, however, those definitions expanded to include more and more financial entities and they spread out dramatically as to how much value could be loaned and extended in credit. And lots of this came through the form of deregulation, through removing the original regulations that were passed in order to protect us from financial entities getting too carried away with the game and thereby deep sixing the economy. With time, more and more people were able to jump into the money game of high finance. I mean today people can work and gamble from home 24/7. Gadzooks! Ah, the wonders of the modern age.
Around 1990, a friend turned me on to a book that has had quite an influence on my outlook on the realities around us. It was written by Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. The title of the book was “The Media Lab” and subtitled “Inventing The Future At M.I.T.” It was about the Media Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute Of Technology and how the students were working upon the merging of three fields of Broadcast and Motion Pictures, Print and Publishing, and Computers into one field. To this day, 20 years later, the book is still a fascinating read. But it’s not the Media Lab itself that I want to talk about. In the final third of the book in a section entitled “Media Lab Of The World,” Stewart interviewed a couple of world class economists, Peter Schwartz and Jay Ogilvy. In reference to the world’s economy they said, “no one is in charge and no one knows what’s going on.” Hmmm. Sort of fits into my scenario that the Great Pirates are no long in control, no one knows it, no one has taken their place, and the world economy has evolved into a new economy that no one yet comprehends.
Peter and Jay further pointed out that although no one was in charge and no one knew what was going on, nevertheless, the world’s economy was moving right along with billions of dollars flashing around the planet at the speed of light every second. They went on to say that a Nobel Prize awaits the person who can describe the economics of information.
Well, I do not begin to have the credentials to even qualify to be heard by those who move in the realm of Nobel ideas. But I’m going to give you my take on the matter, just the same. No one is in charge. True. That is why things are so out of hand right now. Oh, a few are making money off of the current situation, but they are not in charge. They are actually just lucky players or descendents of the Great Pirates. No one knows what is going on. True. Those who get an inkling of what is taking place are quickly discredited by those who are riding the wave. But nobody truly understands what is going on. Now how can I say that? Simple. No one that I know of has said what I’m about to say. (Oops, as I write this, researching as I go, I discover Hakim Bey aka Peter Lamborn Wilson making comments upon metaphysical economy. Credit where credit is due. Ideas whose time has come.) I happen to believe that what I am going to tell you is what is really going on and what can be done about it.
When the Metaphysical Economy came into being some 90 years ago, in the sense of taking precedence over the physical economy, it grew slowly, but deliberately. New ideas begat more new ideas, but the consequences of these new ideas were twisted and turned in an effort to make them fit into the equations of the old economics. The crash of ’29, which, as I told you, was the outpicturing of the actual crash a dozen years earlier, came about because the new economy was already generating new wealth and people didn’t know what to do with it, how to make it fit into the old economic molds. Hey, so what if it couldn’t be explained. Enjoy it. And enjoy it they did until it split the sides of the old mold and all hell broke loose as the house of cards collapsed. The Great Depression was a depression of the bankruptcy of the old system.
We were rescued from that depression by taking ideas and putting them into our physical reality through programs like the WPA. In other words, the government put people to work turning ideas into reality. (I’d love to see a list of everything that was built in this country by the WPA.) Yet, still we were seeing things through old outdated eyes. This new economy wasn’t just emerging in the United States. It was attempting to break out all over the world. Some slick marketers took advantage of people’s depression experience and playing upon fears that they manipulated into a self pride, vaulted themselves into positions of power where they fell back on the old, outdated power games of survival of the fittest and drove us into a second World War.
As with World War I, the atomically explosive growth of ideas put into action accelerated the new economy into a hyper drive. Yet the politicians and the economists and the financiers were able to continue fooling everyone by grabbing this new evolving wealth and finding ways to convert it into the old economic molds and extensively padding their pockets in the process. But they had to start getting more creative in their endeavors. So, in 1950, they created credit cards. This worked well because now they could funnel this new wealth into the fiction of credit. Remember when I told you that banks could loan out nine times more than their assets? This is what was backing that fantasy. The new wealth. But they funneled it to the coffers of the big players rather than to the people. And, after all, it is people who are the channel for all of this wealth, through the manifestation of their belief and creativity.
The Cold War tries to keep a lid on things, but it leads to the Space Race and more and more wealth is generated. Vietnam. More war ramp up of ideas. But wait folks, coming up on the outside is what many thought was a long shot. It’s computers expanding by leaps and bounds and in the process linking the entire world in one gigantic communications network. Truly nuclear expansion of wealth is now taking place. The Internet offers opportunities for creative outlet for billions of people on the planet. Egads! How do we keep a lid on it. How do we figure out how to account for it? Sub-prime mortgages. Derivatives. Risk insurance of packaged debt. Let everybody play. This is so much fun. This is so amazing. This is so unreal!
CRASH! The world market is in disarray. Millions have lost their savings. Millions have lost fortunes. Millions have lost their retirement. Millions have lost their homes. The ripples extend around the entire world. Yet, just as with the aftermath of 9/11, in many ways, for many people, things aren’t really that dire. Well, at least not yet. Now, a personal note here. Although I am posting this with a date of October 3, it is actually being written on election eve.
So, what happened, what crashed? Well, the economy, of course. Actually a facsimile thereof. Remember, it’s all just smoke and mirrors. The economy crashed almost a century ago and has not recovered. What we’ve been living in is just a movie loop that is played over and over while we desperately try to figure out what the hell is going on.
And just what is going on? That’s next.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Unraveling The Economic Morass
[NOTE: These posts are an ongoing presentation, meant to be read beginning with the earliest and ending with the most recent. If not read in that order, there is a potential loss for the reader in an overall understanding of what is being presented. You have been warned.]
Well, we’ve taken a good look at energy. There are alternatives out there and they have been suppressed for a very long time. All of the misguided people who so quickly spout their skeptical reasons why these won’t work need to back off and give them a chance. Skeptics are a dime a dozen and always have been. They, along with other critics, never produce anything of value other than opinions. But opinions, on their own, without any constructive action, are empty. They are essentially worthless. If these new ideas won’t work, then why has government and big business gone to such efforts to stifle them? And when the government is working on these alternative energy systems themselves (Los Alamos & the Labs for almost 20 years that I’m aware of), why is it kept so secret.
Did you know that both HP and IBM have had the capability in their labs for 2 decades to store billions of characters of information holographically inside of a crystaline cubic centimeter using lasers? That’s gigabytes in a cubic centimeter, stored and retrieved at the speed of light. Why isn’t that technology on the market? One of the underlying reasons is that it might shake up the market as we know it. So screw everybody else. It’s kept secret until they can figure out how to turn it into a money-making machine, until they can figure out how to “control” it. And that’s the same way it has always been with new energy.
Anyway, it’s time now that we started talking about what we can do about the economy. I’ve deliberately saved this until later because aspects of what I am going to share with you are radically “out there.” But I’ve also been saving it because I wanted to give you a chance to see how absurd our present economic system is before I share with you my own economic perspective. What is happening presently in the world economy is so ridiculous that I’m hard pressed to understand why anybody believes it. And I’m also amazed at how few people are standing up and declaring how selfishly stupid all of this is.
I want to begin by letting you in on a little secret. Now, because it’s a secret, you might think that I’ll ask you not to share this knowledge with anyone else. But the fact of the matter is that if you do share this secret with someone else, the chances are that they won’t believe you. In fact, when I reveal this secret to you, you may very well not believe me. And that’s why this secret is such a success as a secret, because people don’t want to believe it because they don’t think that it’s possible, so it remains relatively unknown, which means it is good as an ongoing secret. So pay attention.
When we last left off, the world was under the control of the Great Pirates. A good place to get more detail on how this all came about can be found in Bucky Fuller’s books, “GRUNCH Of Giants” and “Critical Path.” GRUNCH is an acronym for “GRoss UNiversal Cash Heist” and is Fuller’s mapping out his warning that international corporations are taking over running the entire world. “Critical Path” describes what Bucky feels is necessary to save humanity from destroying itself (Warning: these aren’t easy reads). In the thoughts I’m about to share with you, I’m going to use Bucky’s ideas as a starting place and then add a few new perspectives of my own.
Things went relatively well for the Great Pirates for a long time. They had their battles with one another, but the conflicts were always executed by others whom they hired to do their fighting for them. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about here, we can look at Christopher Columbus. In America we grew up celebrating Columbus as the man who “discovered” America. But we overlook the fact that he died in debtor’s prison. How can that be? My God, the man is credited with discovering what was to become the greatest influence on the development of civilization on this planet. But, you see, he was just a pawn in the game. To his “bosses,” King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, he was just another employee to be discarded when he outlived his usefulness.
For centuries, the people of this planet struggled for survival with occasional outbreaks of combat. Please note that historically speaking, most people have attempted to live their lives without trying to kill other people. I know that that is hard to believe when one reads about how many people were killed by other people. When people did get involved in combat, the overwhelming majority of them were conscripted by unscrupulous people who felt driven to dominate others in an effort to expand their power and their wealth. These power mad manipulators used others to achieve those ends. So we’re back to the eternal conflict between the dominators (those who want to control the lives of others) and the liberators (those who desire to control their own lives).
Over the centuries those who desired to dominate have constantly been on the lookout for justifications for their bloodthirsty desire to have power over others. Well, as Bucky points out, when the British Empire expanded to encompass the entire world (the sun never set on the British Empire) the chief economist of their “company,” the British East India Company, was Thomas Malthus, and he was the world’s first recipient of an accounting of the world’s resources. Remember, the Great Pirates influence was extended through their merchant ships. The captains of those ships were not just sea captains. They also were knowledgeable in how to build forts, to communicate with indigenous cultures, to inventory resources in far flung parts of the world, and how to set up procedures for acquiring those resources they had discovered and transporting them back to their “bosses.”
Anyway, when Malthus examined all of this data, he said that it was obvious to him that humanity was multiplying (geometrically) faster than the necessary resources were being produced (arithmetically) to support humanity’s needs. Therefore he concluded that there was not enough to go around. Life thus would always be an ongoing battle for survival. Hey, the dude didn’t know about things like refrigeration and high speed transport and fertilizers and pesticides and ways of prolonging shelf life of products.
Next, enter Charles Darwin, a scientist commissioned to study the various life forms around the planet. Through his observations he concluded that life evolved over time through a process whereby those that were most adaptable, or most fit, to exist in their changing environment, were the ones who survived and created descendants who would also survive. They call this idea “evolution.”
Then we have Adam Smith who builds upon the foregoing conclusions that there is not enough to go around and that survival is the result of who is fittest, and he claims that it’s obvious that from an economic standpoint, those who are most likely the fittest for survival are those who are smart enough to master the collection and distribution of resources and services.
Not to be outdone, Karl Marx comes along and says that he agrees with these other two dudes that there is not enough to go around and that life is therefore a matter of survival of the fittest, but he disagrees with Smith and claims that the fittest is the worker who actually, through his own effort and sweat, produces the products which drive the economy.
Throughout all of this the Great Pirates continue to collect wealth through the domination of others. Meanwhile, the followers of Smith begin to gather under the flag of capitalism while the followers of Marx gather under the banner of communism, all the time eyeing one another warily. And the Great Pirates chuckle as they set up business deals with both sides.
And then something out of the ordinary begins to happen. Humanity begins going invisible. Here’s what I mean by that. Generally speaking, up until the twentieth century, life experience was composed of what was detectible by our physical senses: sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. In the 17th Century, through the use of optical lenses, Galileo had been able to expand his field of vision and see what no one else had seen when he looked out at the universe and discovered that we were not at the center of it. The Catholic Church condemned him for what amounted to the next 369 years for what he reported seeing. His discoveries were thereby effectively buried for centuries. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that we even knew that there were galaxies besides our own. And now we know that there are more galaxies than we can count. (For an expanded look at this topic, see the August 18, 2002 entry “In A Little Grain Of Sand” at my Weblog “Still…..After All These Years.”)
The same experience held true for the new world that optical lenses opened for us through microscopy. Early discoveries were denied and covered up. But it wasn’t just visually that our awareness was beginning to expand. It was also through discoveries of the vast possibilities of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Humans were not only discovering new possibilities but they were also turning those discoveries into useful artifacts, into products that began to feed the economic world machine.
An unexpected result of this move into increasingly non-sensorial realms was that the Great Pirates began to lose touch with what was really going on. They were very physically oriented, but we were quickly moving into more and more non-physical realities. This caused the Great Pirates to rely increasingly on others for information and data that they, themselves, didn’t fully understand.
Then along came World War I. Now I say that as though it just sort of happened. But that was not the case. Remember several days ago when I told you that until the mid-twentieth century that the greatest leaps in discovery, technology, and inventions came in conjunction with war? Well, if that’s the way things always have been, and new possibilities in research and development are begging for funding, then what do you do? Why you throw a big war and invite everyone to join in. And that’s exactly what they did. But they didn’t anticipate what would happen next.
The game of war had escalated from earlier times to new levels. The world moved into chemical and biological warfare. We developed refrigeration. Wired and wireless means of communication came into being. New medicines were developed to treat the war wounded. War began moving from the ground to the air. And through all of this, the Great Pirates began to lose control, even as their fortunes escalated.
If that wasn’t enough, however, another calamity of sorts occurred when the whole world’s economy went belly up. That’s right. In the middle of World War I the world’s economy went bankrupt. The crash of 1929 was nothing more than an acknowledgement of what had already transpired a dozen years earlier. And why do I claim that the world’s economy went bankrupt? It was because the output resulting from the incredible curiosity, creativity, and capability of humankind had gone into an overdrive mode that overwhelmed the world economic model. This is a very important concept to comprehend, for it lays the groundwork for what I am about to proclaim.
In order to finance the buildup to what became known as World War I, the German republic began printing more money to pay for their new war machine. Remember, the economy was based upon “stuff.” It was based upon what could be comprehended by the five physical senses. Although Adam Smith had declared that the “Wealth Of Nations” is in its people, he was only referring to the ability of the people to produce products that therein caused wealth to grow. Nowhere was, or has there ever been, an economic accounting of the part that thought, ideas, desire, drive, enthusiasm, commitment, or logical design play in the creation of wealth. In other words, the actual creativity itself has never been quantified. Therefore there is no way to fit it into the world’s economic models.
To give you an example of what we’re talking about here, between 1971 and 1972 the United States sent 3 Apollo missions (15, 16, & 17) to the moon, each including a 463 lb “lunar rover,” a vehicle which had been designed specifically to allow the astronauts to “drive” around on the surface of the moon. Including a 4th moon rover that was built for use as spare parts, the total price for those 4 vehicles was $38 million. That’s about $7.5 million each. The 3 that were sent to the moon were left behind. That’s $22.5 million worth of vehicle left on the moon. There was an outcry from many about the waste of such a move. Yeah, well, $22 million seemed like a lot of money in those days. However, the truth of the matter is that only a few hundred dollars worth of stuff was left behind on the moon after each mission, because that is what the material that comprised the moon rover cost. It was only the material, the stuff, that was left on the moon. The knowledge and the tools necessary to turn that “stuff” into a moon rover never once left this planet. The value stayed right here.
Now, how did they figure out that “value?” Well, through a lot of complicated calculations essentially having to do with measuring time, materials, and tools invested. When I say complicated, I’m only scratching the surface of what has transpired in the intervening 100 years since world economic bankruptcy. The economy is so complex, that no one truly understands it.
Example: in 1969, the head of the Internal Revenue Service was being interviewed on 60 Minutes and he admitted that no one person, including himself, understood all of the IRS’ Tax Code.
Anyway, the world economy was swamped by indescribable forces during World War I and it never recovered. The world economy went bankrupt. R.I.P.
Wait a minute. That’s a bunch of crap. We all know that the world’s economy has been functioning just fine for the last 90 years. Well, maybe not quite “just fine.” After all, there was the crash of 1929, and the Great Depression, and other economic challenges and boondoggles. And, too, there’s the current “meltdown.” But the world economy is still functioning, even if it is limping.
“So what do you have to say about that?”
Well, what I have to say is, “Fasten your seat belts!”
Well, we’ve taken a good look at energy. There are alternatives out there and they have been suppressed for a very long time. All of the misguided people who so quickly spout their skeptical reasons why these won’t work need to back off and give them a chance. Skeptics are a dime a dozen and always have been. They, along with other critics, never produce anything of value other than opinions. But opinions, on their own, without any constructive action, are empty. They are essentially worthless. If these new ideas won’t work, then why has government and big business gone to such efforts to stifle them? And when the government is working on these alternative energy systems themselves (Los Alamos & the Labs for almost 20 years that I’m aware of), why is it kept so secret.
Did you know that both HP and IBM have had the capability in their labs for 2 decades to store billions of characters of information holographically inside of a crystaline cubic centimeter using lasers? That’s gigabytes in a cubic centimeter, stored and retrieved at the speed of light. Why isn’t that technology on the market? One of the underlying reasons is that it might shake up the market as we know it. So screw everybody else. It’s kept secret until they can figure out how to turn it into a money-making machine, until they can figure out how to “control” it. And that’s the same way it has always been with new energy.
Anyway, it’s time now that we started talking about what we can do about the economy. I’ve deliberately saved this until later because aspects of what I am going to share with you are radically “out there.” But I’ve also been saving it because I wanted to give you a chance to see how absurd our present economic system is before I share with you my own economic perspective. What is happening presently in the world economy is so ridiculous that I’m hard pressed to understand why anybody believes it. And I’m also amazed at how few people are standing up and declaring how selfishly stupid all of this is.
I want to begin by letting you in on a little secret. Now, because it’s a secret, you might think that I’ll ask you not to share this knowledge with anyone else. But the fact of the matter is that if you do share this secret with someone else, the chances are that they won’t believe you. In fact, when I reveal this secret to you, you may very well not believe me. And that’s why this secret is such a success as a secret, because people don’t want to believe it because they don’t think that it’s possible, so it remains relatively unknown, which means it is good as an ongoing secret. So pay attention.
When we last left off, the world was under the control of the Great Pirates. A good place to get more detail on how this all came about can be found in Bucky Fuller’s books, “GRUNCH Of Giants” and “Critical Path.” GRUNCH is an acronym for “GRoss UNiversal Cash Heist” and is Fuller’s mapping out his warning that international corporations are taking over running the entire world. “Critical Path” describes what Bucky feels is necessary to save humanity from destroying itself (Warning: these aren’t easy reads). In the thoughts I’m about to share with you, I’m going to use Bucky’s ideas as a starting place and then add a few new perspectives of my own.
Things went relatively well for the Great Pirates for a long time. They had their battles with one another, but the conflicts were always executed by others whom they hired to do their fighting for them. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about here, we can look at Christopher Columbus. In America we grew up celebrating Columbus as the man who “discovered” America. But we overlook the fact that he died in debtor’s prison. How can that be? My God, the man is credited with discovering what was to become the greatest influence on the development of civilization on this planet. But, you see, he was just a pawn in the game. To his “bosses,” King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, he was just another employee to be discarded when he outlived his usefulness.
For centuries, the people of this planet struggled for survival with occasional outbreaks of combat. Please note that historically speaking, most people have attempted to live their lives without trying to kill other people. I know that that is hard to believe when one reads about how many people were killed by other people. When people did get involved in combat, the overwhelming majority of them were conscripted by unscrupulous people who felt driven to dominate others in an effort to expand their power and their wealth. These power mad manipulators used others to achieve those ends. So we’re back to the eternal conflict between the dominators (those who want to control the lives of others) and the liberators (those who desire to control their own lives).
Over the centuries those who desired to dominate have constantly been on the lookout for justifications for their bloodthirsty desire to have power over others. Well, as Bucky points out, when the British Empire expanded to encompass the entire world (the sun never set on the British Empire) the chief economist of their “company,” the British East India Company, was Thomas Malthus, and he was the world’s first recipient of an accounting of the world’s resources. Remember, the Great Pirates influence was extended through their merchant ships. The captains of those ships were not just sea captains. They also were knowledgeable in how to build forts, to communicate with indigenous cultures, to inventory resources in far flung parts of the world, and how to set up procedures for acquiring those resources they had discovered and transporting them back to their “bosses.”
Anyway, when Malthus examined all of this data, he said that it was obvious to him that humanity was multiplying (geometrically) faster than the necessary resources were being produced (arithmetically) to support humanity’s needs. Therefore he concluded that there was not enough to go around. Life thus would always be an ongoing battle for survival. Hey, the dude didn’t know about things like refrigeration and high speed transport and fertilizers and pesticides and ways of prolonging shelf life of products.
Next, enter Charles Darwin, a scientist commissioned to study the various life forms around the planet. Through his observations he concluded that life evolved over time through a process whereby those that were most adaptable, or most fit, to exist in their changing environment, were the ones who survived and created descendants who would also survive. They call this idea “evolution.”
Then we have Adam Smith who builds upon the foregoing conclusions that there is not enough to go around and that survival is the result of who is fittest, and he claims that it’s obvious that from an economic standpoint, those who are most likely the fittest for survival are those who are smart enough to master the collection and distribution of resources and services.
Not to be outdone, Karl Marx comes along and says that he agrees with these other two dudes that there is not enough to go around and that life is therefore a matter of survival of the fittest, but he disagrees with Smith and claims that the fittest is the worker who actually, through his own effort and sweat, produces the products which drive the economy.
Throughout all of this the Great Pirates continue to collect wealth through the domination of others. Meanwhile, the followers of Smith begin to gather under the flag of capitalism while the followers of Marx gather under the banner of communism, all the time eyeing one another warily. And the Great Pirates chuckle as they set up business deals with both sides.
And then something out of the ordinary begins to happen. Humanity begins going invisible. Here’s what I mean by that. Generally speaking, up until the twentieth century, life experience was composed of what was detectible by our physical senses: sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. In the 17th Century, through the use of optical lenses, Galileo had been able to expand his field of vision and see what no one else had seen when he looked out at the universe and discovered that we were not at the center of it. The Catholic Church condemned him for what amounted to the next 369 years for what he reported seeing. His discoveries were thereby effectively buried for centuries. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that we even knew that there were galaxies besides our own. And now we know that there are more galaxies than we can count. (For an expanded look at this topic, see the August 18, 2002 entry “In A Little Grain Of Sand” at my Weblog “Still…..After All These Years.”)
The same experience held true for the new world that optical lenses opened for us through microscopy. Early discoveries were denied and covered up. But it wasn’t just visually that our awareness was beginning to expand. It was also through discoveries of the vast possibilities of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Humans were not only discovering new possibilities but they were also turning those discoveries into useful artifacts, into products that began to feed the economic world machine.
An unexpected result of this move into increasingly non-sensorial realms was that the Great Pirates began to lose touch with what was really going on. They were very physically oriented, but we were quickly moving into more and more non-physical realities. This caused the Great Pirates to rely increasingly on others for information and data that they, themselves, didn’t fully understand.
Then along came World War I. Now I say that as though it just sort of happened. But that was not the case. Remember several days ago when I told you that until the mid-twentieth century that the greatest leaps in discovery, technology, and inventions came in conjunction with war? Well, if that’s the way things always have been, and new possibilities in research and development are begging for funding, then what do you do? Why you throw a big war and invite everyone to join in. And that’s exactly what they did. But they didn’t anticipate what would happen next.
The game of war had escalated from earlier times to new levels. The world moved into chemical and biological warfare. We developed refrigeration. Wired and wireless means of communication came into being. New medicines were developed to treat the war wounded. War began moving from the ground to the air. And through all of this, the Great Pirates began to lose control, even as their fortunes escalated.
If that wasn’t enough, however, another calamity of sorts occurred when the whole world’s economy went belly up. That’s right. In the middle of World War I the world’s economy went bankrupt. The crash of 1929 was nothing more than an acknowledgement of what had already transpired a dozen years earlier. And why do I claim that the world’s economy went bankrupt? It was because the output resulting from the incredible curiosity, creativity, and capability of humankind had gone into an overdrive mode that overwhelmed the world economic model. This is a very important concept to comprehend, for it lays the groundwork for what I am about to proclaim.
In order to finance the buildup to what became known as World War I, the German republic began printing more money to pay for their new war machine. Remember, the economy was based upon “stuff.” It was based upon what could be comprehended by the five physical senses. Although Adam Smith had declared that the “Wealth Of Nations” is in its people, he was only referring to the ability of the people to produce products that therein caused wealth to grow. Nowhere was, or has there ever been, an economic accounting of the part that thought, ideas, desire, drive, enthusiasm, commitment, or logical design play in the creation of wealth. In other words, the actual creativity itself has never been quantified. Therefore there is no way to fit it into the world’s economic models.
To give you an example of what we’re talking about here, between 1971 and 1972 the United States sent 3 Apollo missions (15, 16, & 17) to the moon, each including a 463 lb “lunar rover,” a vehicle which had been designed specifically to allow the astronauts to “drive” around on the surface of the moon. Including a 4th moon rover that was built for use as spare parts, the total price for those 4 vehicles was $38 million. That’s about $7.5 million each. The 3 that were sent to the moon were left behind. That’s $22.5 million worth of vehicle left on the moon. There was an outcry from many about the waste of such a move. Yeah, well, $22 million seemed like a lot of money in those days. However, the truth of the matter is that only a few hundred dollars worth of stuff was left behind on the moon after each mission, because that is what the material that comprised the moon rover cost. It was only the material, the stuff, that was left on the moon. The knowledge and the tools necessary to turn that “stuff” into a moon rover never once left this planet. The value stayed right here.
Now, how did they figure out that “value?” Well, through a lot of complicated calculations essentially having to do with measuring time, materials, and tools invested. When I say complicated, I’m only scratching the surface of what has transpired in the intervening 100 years since world economic bankruptcy. The economy is so complex, that no one truly understands it.
Example: in 1969, the head of the Internal Revenue Service was being interviewed on 60 Minutes and he admitted that no one person, including himself, understood all of the IRS’ Tax Code.
Anyway, the world economy was swamped by indescribable forces during World War I and it never recovered. The world economy went bankrupt. R.I.P.
Wait a minute. That’s a bunch of crap. We all know that the world’s economy has been functioning just fine for the last 90 years. Well, maybe not quite “just fine.” After all, there was the crash of 1929, and the Great Depression, and other economic challenges and boondoggles. And, too, there’s the current “meltdown.” But the world economy is still functioning, even if it is limping.
“So what do you have to say about that?”
Well, what I have to say is, “Fasten your seat belts!”
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Some Economic Background
[NOTE: These posts are an ongoing presentation, meant to be read beginning with the earliest and ending with the most recent. If not read in that order, there is a potential loss for the reader in an overall understanding of what is being presented. You have been warned.]
The only reason we refer to alternative sources of energy as alternatives is because we’ve put all of our eggs in one basket. Originally that basket was full of wood. Then it was coal. Then came oil. Then nuclear tried to gain a foothold, but the monopoly of oil continues to rule the day.
Throughout the history of the United States the people, as taxpayers, through the government have underwritten the building of the overwhelming majority of the infrastructure of our country and its developing lifestyle. Whenever I hear people whine about the evil waste of government, and how it rips off the taxpayer, and how it is an intrusion upon our lives, and how better off we would be without it, I shake my head over the abject ignorance of so many of my fellow citizens. We have bought and built large parts of the great American lifestyle through the money that we have paid to fuel the government to create the society that we desire.
90% of the 46,837 mile Federal Interstate Highway System (and 16,000 interchanges) was paid for with federal funds. Yet, those highways are owned by the states themselves. We, the people, through taxes we pay, build the highways while maintaining ownership of them through the individual states. Those roads are then maintained through funds from state fuel taxes. Even the speed limits are determined by the individual states. Further, the Federal government contributes about 60% of the money used to repair and maintain the country’s 600,000 bridges. Libraries. Education. Museums. Seaports. Regulatory organizations that are required to monitor business because there are so many people, businesses and organizations attempting to take advantage of America and its people. National parks and monuments. The list of what we, the people, through payment of taxes to grease the wheels of government create and support is largely what contributes to the high standard of living and opportunity in this country.
Before I move on, a brief word about earmarks. Earmarks are an invention designed to circumvent the problem created by the government being so big that Congress doesn’t have the time to even consider many of the things that need to be done. The term “earmark” is used in ways that imply that they are illegal, underhanded ways of congressional people sneaking funds that they shouldn’t. Although that sometimes happens, by and large the thousands of earmarks are for what could be considered valid needs. As far as validity is concerned, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Actually, earmarks also provide another important function, they allow for certain projects even if the political majority doesn’t always agree, and after all, the political majority is not always right. We’re all well aware of that fact whenever “the other party” is in power. If people want to talk about earmarks, why don’t they also talk about Executive Orders, the President’s way of circumventing having to run things through Congress and the judicial system.
If one reads the founding documents of this country, one finds the declaration that this is a country of the people, by the people, and for the people. All of the mavericks who yell about states’ rights, and who champion secession, and who promote doing things their own way “and all others be damned,” are far from being patriotic citizens. They have about as much of a knowledgeable understanding of what this country is about, and the history that has lead us to our current position of affluence and influence in the world, as a fly speck.
The government of the United States is the people. So when one vociferously condemns the government, they are actually condemning the people. As a part of “the people,” I take such criticism of the government personally and I resent it. How dare you condemn the people of this country. Adam Smith, whom so many capitalists admire, said the wealth of nations is in its people. The individuals who trash the government as though it were an enemy need to understand that just as they claim that capitalism is “self correcting,” so is the government of the United States of America self-correcting. Yet, those who condemn government demand punishment and dismantling of the government and then turn around and demand toleration and a free ticket for their treasured market.
The government of the United States has underwritten physical expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific, railroads, highways, state and local infrastructure, airplanes, shipping, the auto industry, computers, nuclear power, and on, and on, and on. The business of capitalism would never have made any real headway if it hadn’t been for the help and the support and the extremely laissez faire attitude of the U.S. government that often allowed business to run rampant over the people. Furthermore, if the federal government had not served to standardize many of the laws and pieces of infrastructure of the 50 different states, capitalism would have become a self-destructive free-for-all. And those facts, right there, are why we have government regulation of business. It’s not that government has sought to interfere in business, but rather that “our” government has had to take steps to protect “us” from the rampages of capitalism. My God, read your history. Government regulation is reactive, not proactive. It’s not that the government of the people desires to unfairly limit business. It’s that the government of the people, acts by the people through their elected and appointed representatives to insure for the people that they will not be unduly taken advantage of by business and by corporations.
If one but listens to the out-of-control rants and ravings of the extremely dysfunctional individuals known as radio talk show hosts, one realizes that their top priority is for rampant galloping capitalism. They disguise it with verbal fusillades about freedom for the individual to have access to unlimited opportunity, however the greatest opportunity that the system that they support offers to the overwhelming majority of people is the opportunity to be another cog in the wheel. Now, if you disagree with me, you might ask yourself whether you are a cog or you are the one who owns the machinery. If you are a cog, well, what can I say. You should know by now the reality of the great opportunity. If you are, on the other hand, the owner of the “machinery,” then how many cogs does it require for you to remain a successful owner? Bottom line is that it takes a hell of a lot of cogs to run the machinery of capitalism; therefore most people are going to live their lives as cogs, always on the edge of worrying about the next payment and wondering if their “retirement” will live up to their expectations. Every once in awhile someone will break free and rise above the rest, but it will just require more cogs to support them on their road to success.
A dozen or so years ago, a couple of hotshots came up with two new terms that turned out to be oxymorons. The first term was “compassionate conservatism.” The reason this is an oxymoron is because conservatism is not, by its very nature, compassionate. Nowhere in the doctrines of conservatism, or even more so in the pronouncements of contemporary conservatives themselves will one detect anything having to do with compassion. Compassion has to do with people, more specifically with the treatment of “other” people. The people most often concerned in conservatism are the people “me.” It’s “My” freedoms, and “my” rights and just “leave me alone” and it will all work out. As Lincoln said, conservatism is “adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried.”
The second oxymoron is “compassionate capitalism.” This was an awfully difficult realization for me to acknowledge. I grew up being taught the benefits of capitalism, and in the public school system, to boot. So having to become aware that capitalism cares very little about people was a shock. Capitalism and its principles sound great, at least on the surface. Ah, the freedom, the opportunity, the chance, and anyone can do it. Right. So true. True liberty. But wait a minute. What about the price?
Have you ever heard of cause and effect? You know, for every cause there is an effect. Well that’s only part of the story. There are also results. For instance two trains are on the same track, going in opposite directions and headed straight towards one another. Crash! The two trains on collision course = cause. The crash = effect. But when they crash, they raise up, briefly, as though trying to escape the pull of gravity. This is result. Those who were on the train, if they survive, have to live the rest of their lives with the results of that crash experience. Cause and effect can usually be narrowed down to a brief measurable time period, but results go on over time and quite often mutate into further results.
Well, it’s the same with capitalism. There are cause and effect events, but there are also results. However nobody wants to talk about the results. Yet the results linger far beyond the effects (think about global warming). It is true that in a capitalist system opportunity exists as a possibility for everyone. It’s like being an Amway distributor (I was one for 9 years). I honestly believe that anyone can become a successful Amway distributor. I believe that to be a fact. If one does what they are trained to do in that business and they do it consistently and they do not give up and quit, they will become successful. How long will it take? It doesn’t really matter if one is going to achieve comfortable success. But most people give up far too early. And although the more bitter ones claim that they are giving up on Amway, they are really giving up on themselves.
Another fact, however, is that 90% of the people who sign up as Amway distributors will not be successful. The reason is simple. They won’t do what they are told to do and do it consistently, and they will eventually quit trying to pretend that they are attempting to build a successful business. Nine out of every ten. But that’s why the one in ten can make it. If everybody “worked” the Amway business, they’d tap out the available pool of people in a month. The early ones would build a big business and the later ones would run out of available people to help them build their businesses. If everyone owned a McDonald’s franchise, who would flip the burgers. Who would want to eat there.
Capitalism is like that. In order for it to work, there needs to be an unlimited growing pool of consumers. That’s the result. That’s part of the price. Not everyone can be the boss that opportunity promises. Capitalism thrives on consumption and upon a growing pool of cheap labor. When either of those two factors waiver, the energetic capitalists create new ways to generate wealth. Unfortunately these new ways are not founded in the Capitalist ethic, but rather are invented around the false assumption that one can make money from money. Think about that for a minute.
Money is a symbol. It is not wealth itself. It’s only value is in the belief that it has value. I’ll show you what I mean. I have two bills here.
If I ask you to take the bill of your choice, which one will most people take? The $100 bill, of course. But how can that be? The other bill is $1,000,000. Why not take that one? Because we know that it is not “real,” that it has no real value. But what value does the $100 bill have? Well, years ago, the U.S. printed bills that were called Silver Certificates.
On those bills it said “This certifies that there is on deposit in the Treasury of the United States of America One Silver Dollar payable to the bearer on demand.” In other words, the money was backed by silver on deposit.
Those got replaced by United States Notes.
They said “The United States Will Pay To The Bearer On Demand One Dollar.” Unlike the Silver Certificate, it does not say what constitutes “One Dollar.” Since it is a United States note, the assumption is that it is backed by the United States Of America.
Next came the Federal Reserve Note.
This merely says that it is “legal tender for all debts public and private” and implies that it is backed by the Federal Reserve Bank. It doesn’t say that it has any value or that it is backed with anything of value. And that is the money that we use today.
The only value that money has anymore is that of belief. If it is believed to have value, then it has value for all of the believers. And the amount of value is directly attributable to the level of the belief of the believers.
The reason I went through all of this is to show you that money has no value of its own. So why would anyone think that they could wring additional value out of something that has no real intrinsic value to begin with. But isn’t that exactly what “interest” is all about. A loans B money and then expects to be repaid with that initial “value” of money plus more. B has to generate additional wealth so A can merely sit back and collect wealth without doing anything to generate it. Well, where the hell does the “more” come from?
Smoke and mirrors, my friend. It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. Our friend Dr. Fred Alan Wolf says that reality is nothing more than a whole lot of agreement. And that applies so astutely to the “value” of money. And that should be so obvious to everyone in our current economic system and our current economic condition.
An additional problem from all of this economic stuff arises from the fact that a major portion of the economy is nothing but a big crapshoot. And God, do we love to gamble. Always on the lookout for the next sure thing. I have lost track of all of the companies that I have worked for, and known of, whose founders were only in it long enough to go public so that they, the owners, could cash in by cashing out bigtime.
Recently, I was told by a knowledgeable friend that in the late 1990’s a bill was passed by Congress and signed into law wherein it was essentially made illegal to use the term “gaming” in reference to the stock market. But that’s exactly what the stock market is. And with the possibilities offered through today’s computer systems when linked to some of today’s deviously creative minds we now have a world economy seemingly in freefall.
Oh, woe is me; what to do.
This all goes back to the founding of this country. Let me ask you a question. What rights and freedoms does the Constitution of the United States offer or guarantee to you as a United States citizen? None! Read it for yourself. Oh, now you might say, “what about the amendments, the Bill of Rights.” Well, what about them? Why are they amendments instead of a part of the “original” document. The Constitution of the United States was adopted by the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787 and became the “law of the land” when ratified by New Hampshire (the 9th state to do so) on June 21, 1788. It took until May 29, 1790 for the last of the original 13 states (Rhode Island) to ratify the Constitution. The first 10 Amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, was introduced to Congress by James Madison on June 8, 1789 and ratified into the Constitution on December 15, 1791. As an aside, Connecticut, Georgia, and Massachusetts did not ratify the Bill of Rights until 1939 (that was not a typo, it was 1939, the 150th anniversary of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America). So it took 4 years after the adoption of the Constitution to guarantee the rights of the people, by the people, and for the people who had been the foundation of this entire enterprise in the first place.
The Federalists of the time believed that the Preamble to the Constitution guaranteed the people’s rights when it professed to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” That obviously didn’t cut it, for we never hear anyone complaining about not honoring the preamble, but instead of not honoring the Bill of Rights. One of the other reasons the freedoms were held up to be added later as amendments was because the major players in the founding of this country knew that, number one, they needed a Constitution as a foundation from which to function. Number two, they needed to have all of the states join in this effort so that they would truly be united. And number three, they knew that some of the colonies would argue over any number of individual rights ad infinitum, so they left that part out of the Constitution itself so as to better insure its rapid acceptance and ratification. Once the Constitution was ratified, they could then work on adding guaranteed freedoms to the already existing document. It took 4 years to get those freedoms into the guaranteed fabric of this country’s foundation; quite a remarkable feat, considering that this was done by Congress.
We haven’t talked here about the fact that the original Constitution supported slavery. That’s another story, and one that those who like to deify the founders of this country conveniently overlook.
Well, that was all before our time. Now it is the 21st Century, the world’s economy is in chaos. And the question is, “What are we going to do?”
The only reason we refer to alternative sources of energy as alternatives is because we’ve put all of our eggs in one basket. Originally that basket was full of wood. Then it was coal. Then came oil. Then nuclear tried to gain a foothold, but the monopoly of oil continues to rule the day.
Throughout the history of the United States the people, as taxpayers, through the government have underwritten the building of the overwhelming majority of the infrastructure of our country and its developing lifestyle. Whenever I hear people whine about the evil waste of government, and how it rips off the taxpayer, and how it is an intrusion upon our lives, and how better off we would be without it, I shake my head over the abject ignorance of so many of my fellow citizens. We have bought and built large parts of the great American lifestyle through the money that we have paid to fuel the government to create the society that we desire.
90% of the 46,837 mile Federal Interstate Highway System (and 16,000 interchanges) was paid for with federal funds. Yet, those highways are owned by the states themselves. We, the people, through taxes we pay, build the highways while maintaining ownership of them through the individual states. Those roads are then maintained through funds from state fuel taxes. Even the speed limits are determined by the individual states. Further, the Federal government contributes about 60% of the money used to repair and maintain the country’s 600,000 bridges. Libraries. Education. Museums. Seaports. Regulatory organizations that are required to monitor business because there are so many people, businesses and organizations attempting to take advantage of America and its people. National parks and monuments. The list of what we, the people, through payment of taxes to grease the wheels of government create and support is largely what contributes to the high standard of living and opportunity in this country.
Before I move on, a brief word about earmarks. Earmarks are an invention designed to circumvent the problem created by the government being so big that Congress doesn’t have the time to even consider many of the things that need to be done. The term “earmark” is used in ways that imply that they are illegal, underhanded ways of congressional people sneaking funds that they shouldn’t. Although that sometimes happens, by and large the thousands of earmarks are for what could be considered valid needs. As far as validity is concerned, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Actually, earmarks also provide another important function, they allow for certain projects even if the political majority doesn’t always agree, and after all, the political majority is not always right. We’re all well aware of that fact whenever “the other party” is in power. If people want to talk about earmarks, why don’t they also talk about Executive Orders, the President’s way of circumventing having to run things through Congress and the judicial system.
If one reads the founding documents of this country, one finds the declaration that this is a country of the people, by the people, and for the people. All of the mavericks who yell about states’ rights, and who champion secession, and who promote doing things their own way “and all others be damned,” are far from being patriotic citizens. They have about as much of a knowledgeable understanding of what this country is about, and the history that has lead us to our current position of affluence and influence in the world, as a fly speck.
The government of the United States is the people. So when one vociferously condemns the government, they are actually condemning the people. As a part of “the people,” I take such criticism of the government personally and I resent it. How dare you condemn the people of this country. Adam Smith, whom so many capitalists admire, said the wealth of nations is in its people. The individuals who trash the government as though it were an enemy need to understand that just as they claim that capitalism is “self correcting,” so is the government of the United States of America self-correcting. Yet, those who condemn government demand punishment and dismantling of the government and then turn around and demand toleration and a free ticket for their treasured market.
The government of the United States has underwritten physical expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific, railroads, highways, state and local infrastructure, airplanes, shipping, the auto industry, computers, nuclear power, and on, and on, and on. The business of capitalism would never have made any real headway if it hadn’t been for the help and the support and the extremely laissez faire attitude of the U.S. government that often allowed business to run rampant over the people. Furthermore, if the federal government had not served to standardize many of the laws and pieces of infrastructure of the 50 different states, capitalism would have become a self-destructive free-for-all. And those facts, right there, are why we have government regulation of business. It’s not that government has sought to interfere in business, but rather that “our” government has had to take steps to protect “us” from the rampages of capitalism. My God, read your history. Government regulation is reactive, not proactive. It’s not that the government of the people desires to unfairly limit business. It’s that the government of the people, acts by the people through their elected and appointed representatives to insure for the people that they will not be unduly taken advantage of by business and by corporations.
If one but listens to the out-of-control rants and ravings of the extremely dysfunctional individuals known as radio talk show hosts, one realizes that their top priority is for rampant galloping capitalism. They disguise it with verbal fusillades about freedom for the individual to have access to unlimited opportunity, however the greatest opportunity that the system that they support offers to the overwhelming majority of people is the opportunity to be another cog in the wheel. Now, if you disagree with me, you might ask yourself whether you are a cog or you are the one who owns the machinery. If you are a cog, well, what can I say. You should know by now the reality of the great opportunity. If you are, on the other hand, the owner of the “machinery,” then how many cogs does it require for you to remain a successful owner? Bottom line is that it takes a hell of a lot of cogs to run the machinery of capitalism; therefore most people are going to live their lives as cogs, always on the edge of worrying about the next payment and wondering if their “retirement” will live up to their expectations. Every once in awhile someone will break free and rise above the rest, but it will just require more cogs to support them on their road to success.
A dozen or so years ago, a couple of hotshots came up with two new terms that turned out to be oxymorons. The first term was “compassionate conservatism.” The reason this is an oxymoron is because conservatism is not, by its very nature, compassionate. Nowhere in the doctrines of conservatism, or even more so in the pronouncements of contemporary conservatives themselves will one detect anything having to do with compassion. Compassion has to do with people, more specifically with the treatment of “other” people. The people most often concerned in conservatism are the people “me.” It’s “My” freedoms, and “my” rights and just “leave me alone” and it will all work out. As Lincoln said, conservatism is “adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried.”
The second oxymoron is “compassionate capitalism.” This was an awfully difficult realization for me to acknowledge. I grew up being taught the benefits of capitalism, and in the public school system, to boot. So having to become aware that capitalism cares very little about people was a shock. Capitalism and its principles sound great, at least on the surface. Ah, the freedom, the opportunity, the chance, and anyone can do it. Right. So true. True liberty. But wait a minute. What about the price?
Have you ever heard of cause and effect? You know, for every cause there is an effect. Well that’s only part of the story. There are also results. For instance two trains are on the same track, going in opposite directions and headed straight towards one another. Crash! The two trains on collision course = cause. The crash = effect. But when they crash, they raise up, briefly, as though trying to escape the pull of gravity. This is result. Those who were on the train, if they survive, have to live the rest of their lives with the results of that crash experience. Cause and effect can usually be narrowed down to a brief measurable time period, but results go on over time and quite often mutate into further results.
Well, it’s the same with capitalism. There are cause and effect events, but there are also results. However nobody wants to talk about the results. Yet the results linger far beyond the effects (think about global warming). It is true that in a capitalist system opportunity exists as a possibility for everyone. It’s like being an Amway distributor (I was one for 9 years). I honestly believe that anyone can become a successful Amway distributor. I believe that to be a fact. If one does what they are trained to do in that business and they do it consistently and they do not give up and quit, they will become successful. How long will it take? It doesn’t really matter if one is going to achieve comfortable success. But most people give up far too early. And although the more bitter ones claim that they are giving up on Amway, they are really giving up on themselves.
Another fact, however, is that 90% of the people who sign up as Amway distributors will not be successful. The reason is simple. They won’t do what they are told to do and do it consistently, and they will eventually quit trying to pretend that they are attempting to build a successful business. Nine out of every ten. But that’s why the one in ten can make it. If everybody “worked” the Amway business, they’d tap out the available pool of people in a month. The early ones would build a big business and the later ones would run out of available people to help them build their businesses. If everyone owned a McDonald’s franchise, who would flip the burgers. Who would want to eat there.
Capitalism is like that. In order for it to work, there needs to be an unlimited growing pool of consumers. That’s the result. That’s part of the price. Not everyone can be the boss that opportunity promises. Capitalism thrives on consumption and upon a growing pool of cheap labor. When either of those two factors waiver, the energetic capitalists create new ways to generate wealth. Unfortunately these new ways are not founded in the Capitalist ethic, but rather are invented around the false assumption that one can make money from money. Think about that for a minute.
Money is a symbol. It is not wealth itself. It’s only value is in the belief that it has value. I’ll show you what I mean. I have two bills here.
If I ask you to take the bill of your choice, which one will most people take? The $100 bill, of course. But how can that be? The other bill is $1,000,000. Why not take that one? Because we know that it is not “real,” that it has no real value. But what value does the $100 bill have? Well, years ago, the U.S. printed bills that were called Silver Certificates.
On those bills it said “This certifies that there is on deposit in the Treasury of the United States of America One Silver Dollar payable to the bearer on demand.” In other words, the money was backed by silver on deposit.
Those got replaced by United States Notes.
They said “The United States Will Pay To The Bearer On Demand One Dollar.” Unlike the Silver Certificate, it does not say what constitutes “One Dollar.” Since it is a United States note, the assumption is that it is backed by the United States Of America.
Next came the Federal Reserve Note.
This merely says that it is “legal tender for all debts public and private” and implies that it is backed by the Federal Reserve Bank. It doesn’t say that it has any value or that it is backed with anything of value. And that is the money that we use today.
The only value that money has anymore is that of belief. If it is believed to have value, then it has value for all of the believers. And the amount of value is directly attributable to the level of the belief of the believers.
The reason I went through all of this is to show you that money has no value of its own. So why would anyone think that they could wring additional value out of something that has no real intrinsic value to begin with. But isn’t that exactly what “interest” is all about. A loans B money and then expects to be repaid with that initial “value” of money plus more. B has to generate additional wealth so A can merely sit back and collect wealth without doing anything to generate it. Well, where the hell does the “more” come from?
Smoke and mirrors, my friend. It’s a lot of smoke and mirrors. Our friend Dr. Fred Alan Wolf says that reality is nothing more than a whole lot of agreement. And that applies so astutely to the “value” of money. And that should be so obvious to everyone in our current economic system and our current economic condition.
An additional problem from all of this economic stuff arises from the fact that a major portion of the economy is nothing but a big crapshoot. And God, do we love to gamble. Always on the lookout for the next sure thing. I have lost track of all of the companies that I have worked for, and known of, whose founders were only in it long enough to go public so that they, the owners, could cash in by cashing out bigtime.
Recently, I was told by a knowledgeable friend that in the late 1990’s a bill was passed by Congress and signed into law wherein it was essentially made illegal to use the term “gaming” in reference to the stock market. But that’s exactly what the stock market is. And with the possibilities offered through today’s computer systems when linked to some of today’s deviously creative minds we now have a world economy seemingly in freefall.
Oh, woe is me; what to do.
This all goes back to the founding of this country. Let me ask you a question. What rights and freedoms does the Constitution of the United States offer or guarantee to you as a United States citizen? None! Read it for yourself. Oh, now you might say, “what about the amendments, the Bill of Rights.” Well, what about them? Why are they amendments instead of a part of the “original” document. The Constitution of the United States was adopted by the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787 and became the “law of the land” when ratified by New Hampshire (the 9th state to do so) on June 21, 1788. It took until May 29, 1790 for the last of the original 13 states (Rhode Island) to ratify the Constitution. The first 10 Amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, was introduced to Congress by James Madison on June 8, 1789 and ratified into the Constitution on December 15, 1791. As an aside, Connecticut, Georgia, and Massachusetts did not ratify the Bill of Rights until 1939 (that was not a typo, it was 1939, the 150th anniversary of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution of the United States of America). So it took 4 years after the adoption of the Constitution to guarantee the rights of the people, by the people, and for the people who had been the foundation of this entire enterprise in the first place.
The Federalists of the time believed that the Preamble to the Constitution guaranteed the people’s rights when it professed to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” That obviously didn’t cut it, for we never hear anyone complaining about not honoring the preamble, but instead of not honoring the Bill of Rights. One of the other reasons the freedoms were held up to be added later as amendments was because the major players in the founding of this country knew that, number one, they needed a Constitution as a foundation from which to function. Number two, they needed to have all of the states join in this effort so that they would truly be united. And number three, they knew that some of the colonies would argue over any number of individual rights ad infinitum, so they left that part out of the Constitution itself so as to better insure its rapid acceptance and ratification. Once the Constitution was ratified, they could then work on adding guaranteed freedoms to the already existing document. It took 4 years to get those freedoms into the guaranteed fabric of this country’s foundation; quite a remarkable feat, considering that this was done by Congress.
We haven’t talked here about the fact that the original Constitution supported slavery. That’s another story, and one that those who like to deify the founders of this country conveniently overlook.
Well, that was all before our time. Now it is the 21st Century, the world’s economy is in chaos. And the question is, “What are we going to do?”
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Finding New Energy
[NOTE: These posts are an ongoing presentation, meant to be read beginning with the earliest and ending with the most recent. If not read in that order, there is a potential loss for the A reader in an overall understanding of what is being presented. You have been warned.]
My first real introduction to the true energy possibilities that now exist came in 1990 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was at a Whole Life Expo and because I was a little flush at the time I had purchased a VIP ticket that allowed me to attend 5 seminars of my choice. I chose:
1) Chris Griscom, a resident of New Mexico from Galisteo. Chris had written some interesting books on energy and healing and was perhaps best known at the time as the person who had guided Shirley MacLaine in past-life regression. Although this seminar had the biggest turnout (SRO) of those I attended, I personally found it to be the least satisfying.
2) Dr. Timothy Leary, the 60’s drug guru was doing a multimedia presentation on the events of the 1960s. Tim, who was tragically misunderstood and mislabeled by the media and their sycophant surrogates, was a former Harvard professor and PhD whose goal in life was to study the human psyche and to discover techniques whereby people could psychoanalyze themselves, thus foregoing the necessity of a shrink while working out their own psychological problems or other anomalies. Tim was an accomplished showman and his presentation was enjoyable.
3) Richard Hoagland, perhaps best known for his study of the face on Mars and the mathematics that is associated with its geometrical location. I was somewhat skeptical, though part way through a slide show of an alleged 3 mile high glass dome on the moon, in the haze of the slides that were being projected, I began to detect geometric shapes that implied the possibility of deliberate conscious construction. Richard can be found at the Enterprise Mission and lives in Placitas, New Mexico where I also lived at one time. Of course when I lived there it was in a 700 sq ft cabin with no electricity. Did that for 2 and a half years. I’m sure Richard has electricity.
4) Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, quantum physicist, prolific writer, former professor, and the inspiration for Dr. Quantum in the movie “Down The Rabbit Hole,” which is an expanded sequel to “What The Bleep Do We Know?” Fred has written about quantum physics and shamanism (“The Eagle’s Quest”), parallel universes (“Parallel Universes”), the quantum physics of spirituality (“The Spiritual Universe”), an excellent introduction to the basics of quantum physics (“Taking The Quantum Leap”), and about the idea of the entire universe being a dream (“The Dreaming Universe”), which was his topic in 1990. I was first introduced to Fred through some tapes of him speaking at the annual Association of Unity Churches Conference at Unity School of Christianity. I admit that I originally refused to listen to the tapes (after all, my mother had given them to me and insisted that I would like it), but I finally gave in and was entranced by what he had to say. At that time, one of the things that caught my attention was his interest in the work of Carlo Suares, a French Cabalist, who had written a fascinating book entitled, “Cipher Of Genesis.”
5) Finally, but certainly not least, was Dr. Brian O’Leary, former astronaut, MIT professor and promoter of green science. He had actually brought attention to the face on Mars before Richard Hoagland got so involved with it. Brian and his wife, Meredith, have recently moved to Ecuador, South America and begun what is a retreat house of sorts. Anyway, in 1990 he was coordinator of a group of engineers, scientists, and inventors around the world who were working in a generalized area, though through a number of different approaches. Of all the talks I attended at the Expo, this one drew the fewest number of people. However, once the question/answer session began at the close of Brian’s talk it became quite obvious that those in attendance were almost all engineers and scientists from Los Alamos and Sandia Labs, and it became obvious from their questions what they were doing there. Our government was interested in, and working on, the same thing as the people that Brian was working with.
The group that Brian was fronting met once a year in Estes Park, Colorado. That meeting was followed by a public conference in Denver or Fort Collins. Oh, and what was the research that brought them together? Well, the physicist Richard Feynman, once made the claim that there was enough energy in a cup of water to boil all of the oceans on the planet. Energy in a cup of water? Well, of course, he was taking Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and expanding it to the maximum possibility. I’m sure that you are familiar with Einstein’s theory: E = mc2 In case you ever wondered, that translates into Energy equals matter expanding omnidirectionally at the speed of light.
It’s funny, but years ago (the 1930’s) Bucky Fuller wrote a book entitled, “Nine Chains To The Moon.” In the book was a chapter titled, “E = mc2 = Mrs. Murphy’s Horsepower.” Well, Bucky’s publisher said that they could not publish that chapter. It seems that there was a list of people who were qualified to comment upon Einstein’s theory and Bucky’s name was not on the list. Well, Dr. Fuller’s response was to suggest that the publisher ask Dr. Einstein what he thought of the chapter. Surprisingly, the publisher did just that and Einstein asked to meet Fuller. When the two of them came together, Einstein said, “Young man, I had no idea that my theory had any practical applications.” Even the great Einstein was not fully aware of all of the implications of what he had discovered.
So the equation is saying that if you take what we call matter and break the bonds that hold it together, that it will expand explosively in all directions at the speed of light as the energy that is trapped in the patterns that created that matter is released. So people realized that there might be some, as yet undiscovered, way to release the energy that is trapped in matter and to do it in such a way that it could be controlled and channeled to perform work. You may recall that earlier I mentioned what all is going on in the “emptiness that surrounds us.” Well, what would happen if one could figure out a way to extract the energy that comprises some of that floating matter that we can’t even see? It turns out that this wasn’t a totally new idea, because it is claimed that Tesla had figured out how to tap energy anywhere on the planet, but that J.P. Morgan wasn’t interested in backing it because there was no way he could make any money from it.
One of the first things that happens when an idea like this is floated is that many notable, knowledgeable scientists and engineers jump up and down and yell about the Laws of Thermodynamics, specifically the First Law that states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, therefore any energy that one might imagine accessing is going to cost the same amount of energy to access, therefore making the whole process a wash. “Ha, ha, ha,” they say, “there’s no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. You’re just wasting your time.”
That’s a viewpoint, with valid backup. But here’s another viewpoint: what if there were other laws of physics that we have yet to discover that apply to this new kind of energy transfer that can be valid while not negating the common laws of thermodynamics because they deal with matter in ways that we have yet to identify? That kind of thinking, that kind of inquiry is what drives scientific discovery. The previous “ha, ha” kind of thinking is what slows discovery and keeps us locked in outdated and outmoded systems.
So, in 1990, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a room largely populated by government scientists and engineers, I listened to Brian tell the stories of people that he was working with. And what were they working on? Free energy. And the reason you seldom hear anything about it is because just like in the days of J.P. Morgan and Nicola Tesla, there is no money to be made by the big powerbrokers, so there is no reason for anyone to give it a second thought. Free energy. Zero Point Field. Google “free energy” and you get over 80 million hits and yet you don’t hear a damn positive thing about it from the government or big business or the media.
Now, maybe you have a friend who’s an engineer and you go and ask him or her about “free energy” and after they pooh pooh it you decide that I’m nuts. I mean, I know how that is. I have a very good friend that I used to work for, a brilliant telecommunications engineer. And, although we talked about this regularly when we worked together, he doesn’t take any of this very seriously. But I don’t rely upon him for intelligent input where free energy is concerned. I mean, he’s a telecommunications engineer.
Here’s one of the people I look to for validation of this “new” energy source. Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Sadly, Dr. Clarke just passed on this year. He had stated that he was staying alive until “free energy” hits the streets. When it did, he said, all forms of pollution would be overcome, except one, and that was the heat generated by the use of this energy. Although, he went on to say that this might be a savior for humankind if the renowned historian Will Durant was right when he said that “civilization is an interval between ice ages."
If you’re not sure who I am talking about, then think about the Stanley Kubrick movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Dr. Clarke was the one who wrote that picture and it was based upon an earlier short story of his entitled, “The Sentinel.” Oh, “okay,” you say, “you are relying upon a science fiction writer.” Well, not quite, for you see, in addition to a prolific output of science fiction, Dr. Clarke was also a renowned scientist and hard science writer. Did you ever wonder how they figured out that you could put a satellite in orbit above the planet in such a way that as it orbited the planet it would actually stay in the same place in the sky. Think communications satellite. Dr. Clarke was the one who figured out how to do that, how to place satellites in geosynchronous orbit. He was the one who got the patent for the idea. No shabby accomplishment.
In 1976, Dr. Clarke published a book entitled “Imperial Earth.” The story was set 300 years in the future on the 500th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. As part of the publicity tour for the book, Dr. Clarke appeared on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow Show (it was on about the same time as Conan O’Brien but with more of a slant towards thought provoking guests and topics. So Snyder asks Clarke, “Well, Dr. Clarke, what is the earth going to be like in 300 years?” And Dr. Clarke says, “Well, Tom, as you might imagine I have a lot of friends who are scientists and also who are science fiction writers, and we talk about that all of the time, and the only thing that we can agree upon is that within the next 75 to 100 years we will have accomplished everything presently imaginable.” Now, my friends, that was 32 years ago. That would mean that we are now down to 43 – 68 years to go before accomplishing everything presently imaginable, or, to be fair, everything that was imaginable in 1976. Beyond that, he said, our imaginations have yet to develop.
With that introduction, let me share with you what Dr. Clarke had to say about “free energy.” In his 1997 book, “3001: The Final Odyssey,” he speaks of free energy. And in the notes under the Sources and Acknowledgements part of the book he says, “even as I write this, many competent engineers, in laboratories all over the world, claim to be tapping this new energy source.” Dr. Clarke made that claim over a decade ago. But we can’t do anything about it because we have to protect the markets, “The Market.” Well, “The Market” has imploded after raping us with exorbitant gasoline prices and the false belief that everyone should live in a McMansion. The world’s economic systems are on an unprecedented precipice and part of the reason is that we insist on clinging to outmoded ways. At the risk of you thinking that I am screaming, I assure you that I am not yelling, but a large part of our problem is that too damn many of us cling to OUTMODED WAYS.
But the story doesn’t end here. When I saw Brian O’Leary in 1990, one of the things that he said was, “I don’t fully understand what this means, but I’ve been told that when free energy hits the street, there will be a 3 trillion dollar shift in the world’s economy.” Afterwards I talked with him and explained that what that meant was that those countries whose economies were oil based would go belly up almost overnight as financial and power options shifted dramatically. We’re seeing a hint of that kind of thing right now.
Brian also shared with us that one of the people that he was working with at the time was a Canadian who was known as the modern day Tesla. This guy was concentrating on an interesting discovery made while tapping free energy. And here, I’d better give you an “in a nutshell” of my meager understanding of what is going on in tapping this energy. First, you need to understand that there are a lot of approaches to determining how to “tap” this new energy source. And it was obvious from the questions from Brian’s audience that the government engineers were using an approach that was different from that of many of the people with whom Brian was associated. However, here’s my meager understanding. It appears that when one rotates different magnetic fields at a high speed in close proximity to one another, that a dimension warp (for want of a better term) opens in space time and the energy just bleeds through. Now, if I am out to lunch, please don’t waste my time with making a big deal about it. I’m not an engineer. I’m just some guy running for President of the United States, so what the hell do I know.
However, by whatever means, when people are able to tap this energy source, to their surprise, that was not all that they tapped. There was something else there. Something that bled through into this dimension of experience. What was it? Anti-gravity. The aforementioned Canadian Tesla discovered that when he “zapped” objects with this new energy that sometimes they would take off (go up) and never come down. Whoops, another law bites the dust. What goes up apparently doesn’t always come down. This can also be verified in the notes of “3001.” So, what does anti-gravity mean? What’s the big deal? Well, that is what is going to take us to the stars. You’ve seen the warp drive on Star Trek? Welcome to the future, baby. As Dr. Clarke said, “To give you an idea what it would allow us to do, you could go from New York City to Los Angeles in the time it takes to snap your fingers and never feel a thing.”
Clarke wrote about this a decade ago. Tesla was experimenting with this a century ago. Why the hell don’t we know more about it and why the hell aren’t we doing something about it? Greed? Hunger for power and domination? Clinging to outmoded ways because they pad the pocket? If you’re interested in more information on what many of these engineers are working with, try the website Keeleynet.
If you’ve already clicked on the link that I gave you for Dr. O’Leary, then you might have discovered that he is pretty disgusted with the politicians in this country. He had written to Al Gore and others and they all have backed away from free energy. But Brian points out that all of the other “alternatives” that one hears about all come with a hidden energy cost that cancels their effectiveness. They just manage to perpetuate the same old crap under a different guise. Profit, profit, profit; keep the money machine on track, no matter the eventual price.
Do you realize how powerful the people are in this world who have power? Do you really? Do you know that they only have one God, and that God is world domination. Am AI over the top? Fine, prove me wrong!
Well, free energy may upset their apple cart. And one of the reasons that I am running for President is to use this as a platform to spread the word. I honestly believe that there is a critical point at which when enough people know about something, no one can keep it from coming to fruition.
My first real introduction to the true energy possibilities that now exist came in 1990 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was at a Whole Life Expo and because I was a little flush at the time I had purchased a VIP ticket that allowed me to attend 5 seminars of my choice. I chose:
1) Chris Griscom, a resident of New Mexico from Galisteo. Chris had written some interesting books on energy and healing and was perhaps best known at the time as the person who had guided Shirley MacLaine in past-life regression. Although this seminar had the biggest turnout (SRO) of those I attended, I personally found it to be the least satisfying.
2) Dr. Timothy Leary, the 60’s drug guru was doing a multimedia presentation on the events of the 1960s. Tim, who was tragically misunderstood and mislabeled by the media and their sycophant surrogates, was a former Harvard professor and PhD whose goal in life was to study the human psyche and to discover techniques whereby people could psychoanalyze themselves, thus foregoing the necessity of a shrink while working out their own psychological problems or other anomalies. Tim was an accomplished showman and his presentation was enjoyable.
3) Richard Hoagland, perhaps best known for his study of the face on Mars and the mathematics that is associated with its geometrical location. I was somewhat skeptical, though part way through a slide show of an alleged 3 mile high glass dome on the moon, in the haze of the slides that were being projected, I began to detect geometric shapes that implied the possibility of deliberate conscious construction. Richard can be found at the Enterprise Mission and lives in Placitas, New Mexico where I also lived at one time. Of course when I lived there it was in a 700 sq ft cabin with no electricity. Did that for 2 and a half years. I’m sure Richard has electricity.
4) Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, quantum physicist, prolific writer, former professor, and the inspiration for Dr. Quantum in the movie “Down The Rabbit Hole,” which is an expanded sequel to “What The Bleep Do We Know?” Fred has written about quantum physics and shamanism (“The Eagle’s Quest”), parallel universes (“Parallel Universes”), the quantum physics of spirituality (“The Spiritual Universe”), an excellent introduction to the basics of quantum physics (“Taking The Quantum Leap”), and about the idea of the entire universe being a dream (“The Dreaming Universe”), which was his topic in 1990. I was first introduced to Fred through some tapes of him speaking at the annual Association of Unity Churches Conference at Unity School of Christianity. I admit that I originally refused to listen to the tapes (after all, my mother had given them to me and insisted that I would like it), but I finally gave in and was entranced by what he had to say. At that time, one of the things that caught my attention was his interest in the work of Carlo Suares, a French Cabalist, who had written a fascinating book entitled, “Cipher Of Genesis.”
5) Finally, but certainly not least, was Dr. Brian O’Leary, former astronaut, MIT professor and promoter of green science. He had actually brought attention to the face on Mars before Richard Hoagland got so involved with it. Brian and his wife, Meredith, have recently moved to Ecuador, South America and begun what is a retreat house of sorts. Anyway, in 1990 he was coordinator of a group of engineers, scientists, and inventors around the world who were working in a generalized area, though through a number of different approaches. Of all the talks I attended at the Expo, this one drew the fewest number of people. However, once the question/answer session began at the close of Brian’s talk it became quite obvious that those in attendance were almost all engineers and scientists from Los Alamos and Sandia Labs, and it became obvious from their questions what they were doing there. Our government was interested in, and working on, the same thing as the people that Brian was working with.
The group that Brian was fronting met once a year in Estes Park, Colorado. That meeting was followed by a public conference in Denver or Fort Collins. Oh, and what was the research that brought them together? Well, the physicist Richard Feynman, once made the claim that there was enough energy in a cup of water to boil all of the oceans on the planet. Energy in a cup of water? Well, of course, he was taking Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and expanding it to the maximum possibility. I’m sure that you are familiar with Einstein’s theory: E = mc2 In case you ever wondered, that translates into Energy equals matter expanding omnidirectionally at the speed of light.
It’s funny, but years ago (the 1930’s) Bucky Fuller wrote a book entitled, “Nine Chains To The Moon.” In the book was a chapter titled, “E = mc2 = Mrs. Murphy’s Horsepower.” Well, Bucky’s publisher said that they could not publish that chapter. It seems that there was a list of people who were qualified to comment upon Einstein’s theory and Bucky’s name was not on the list. Well, Dr. Fuller’s response was to suggest that the publisher ask Dr. Einstein what he thought of the chapter. Surprisingly, the publisher did just that and Einstein asked to meet Fuller. When the two of them came together, Einstein said, “Young man, I had no idea that my theory had any practical applications.” Even the great Einstein was not fully aware of all of the implications of what he had discovered.
So the equation is saying that if you take what we call matter and break the bonds that hold it together, that it will expand explosively in all directions at the speed of light as the energy that is trapped in the patterns that created that matter is released. So people realized that there might be some, as yet undiscovered, way to release the energy that is trapped in matter and to do it in such a way that it could be controlled and channeled to perform work. You may recall that earlier I mentioned what all is going on in the “emptiness that surrounds us.” Well, what would happen if one could figure out a way to extract the energy that comprises some of that floating matter that we can’t even see? It turns out that this wasn’t a totally new idea, because it is claimed that Tesla had figured out how to tap energy anywhere on the planet, but that J.P. Morgan wasn’t interested in backing it because there was no way he could make any money from it.
One of the first things that happens when an idea like this is floated is that many notable, knowledgeable scientists and engineers jump up and down and yell about the Laws of Thermodynamics, specifically the First Law that states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, therefore any energy that one might imagine accessing is going to cost the same amount of energy to access, therefore making the whole process a wash. “Ha, ha, ha,” they say, “there’s no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. You’re just wasting your time.”
That’s a viewpoint, with valid backup. But here’s another viewpoint: what if there were other laws of physics that we have yet to discover that apply to this new kind of energy transfer that can be valid while not negating the common laws of thermodynamics because they deal with matter in ways that we have yet to identify? That kind of thinking, that kind of inquiry is what drives scientific discovery. The previous “ha, ha” kind of thinking is what slows discovery and keeps us locked in outdated and outmoded systems.
So, in 1990, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a room largely populated by government scientists and engineers, I listened to Brian tell the stories of people that he was working with. And what were they working on? Free energy. And the reason you seldom hear anything about it is because just like in the days of J.P. Morgan and Nicola Tesla, there is no money to be made by the big powerbrokers, so there is no reason for anyone to give it a second thought. Free energy. Zero Point Field. Google “free energy” and you get over 80 million hits and yet you don’t hear a damn positive thing about it from the government or big business or the media.
Now, maybe you have a friend who’s an engineer and you go and ask him or her about “free energy” and after they pooh pooh it you decide that I’m nuts. I mean, I know how that is. I have a very good friend that I used to work for, a brilliant telecommunications engineer. And, although we talked about this regularly when we worked together, he doesn’t take any of this very seriously. But I don’t rely upon him for intelligent input where free energy is concerned. I mean, he’s a telecommunications engineer.
Here’s one of the people I look to for validation of this “new” energy source. Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Sadly, Dr. Clarke just passed on this year. He had stated that he was staying alive until “free energy” hits the streets. When it did, he said, all forms of pollution would be overcome, except one, and that was the heat generated by the use of this energy. Although, he went on to say that this might be a savior for humankind if the renowned historian Will Durant was right when he said that “civilization is an interval between ice ages."
If you’re not sure who I am talking about, then think about the Stanley Kubrick movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Dr. Clarke was the one who wrote that picture and it was based upon an earlier short story of his entitled, “The Sentinel.” Oh, “okay,” you say, “you are relying upon a science fiction writer.” Well, not quite, for you see, in addition to a prolific output of science fiction, Dr. Clarke was also a renowned scientist and hard science writer. Did you ever wonder how they figured out that you could put a satellite in orbit above the planet in such a way that as it orbited the planet it would actually stay in the same place in the sky. Think communications satellite. Dr. Clarke was the one who figured out how to do that, how to place satellites in geosynchronous orbit. He was the one who got the patent for the idea. No shabby accomplishment.
In 1976, Dr. Clarke published a book entitled “Imperial Earth.” The story was set 300 years in the future on the 500th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. As part of the publicity tour for the book, Dr. Clarke appeared on Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow Show (it was on about the same time as Conan O’Brien but with more of a slant towards thought provoking guests and topics. So Snyder asks Clarke, “Well, Dr. Clarke, what is the earth going to be like in 300 years?” And Dr. Clarke says, “Well, Tom, as you might imagine I have a lot of friends who are scientists and also who are science fiction writers, and we talk about that all of the time, and the only thing that we can agree upon is that within the next 75 to 100 years we will have accomplished everything presently imaginable.” Now, my friends, that was 32 years ago. That would mean that we are now down to 43 – 68 years to go before accomplishing everything presently imaginable, or, to be fair, everything that was imaginable in 1976. Beyond that, he said, our imaginations have yet to develop.
With that introduction, let me share with you what Dr. Clarke had to say about “free energy.” In his 1997 book, “3001: The Final Odyssey,” he speaks of free energy. And in the notes under the Sources and Acknowledgements part of the book he says, “even as I write this, many competent engineers, in laboratories all over the world, claim to be tapping this new energy source.” Dr. Clarke made that claim over a decade ago. But we can’t do anything about it because we have to protect the markets, “The Market.” Well, “The Market” has imploded after raping us with exorbitant gasoline prices and the false belief that everyone should live in a McMansion. The world’s economic systems are on an unprecedented precipice and part of the reason is that we insist on clinging to outmoded ways. At the risk of you thinking that I am screaming, I assure you that I am not yelling, but a large part of our problem is that too damn many of us cling to OUTMODED WAYS.
But the story doesn’t end here. When I saw Brian O’Leary in 1990, one of the things that he said was, “I don’t fully understand what this means, but I’ve been told that when free energy hits the street, there will be a 3 trillion dollar shift in the world’s economy.” Afterwards I talked with him and explained that what that meant was that those countries whose economies were oil based would go belly up almost overnight as financial and power options shifted dramatically. We’re seeing a hint of that kind of thing right now.
Brian also shared with us that one of the people that he was working with at the time was a Canadian who was known as the modern day Tesla. This guy was concentrating on an interesting discovery made while tapping free energy. And here, I’d better give you an “in a nutshell” of my meager understanding of what is going on in tapping this energy. First, you need to understand that there are a lot of approaches to determining how to “tap” this new energy source. And it was obvious from the questions from Brian’s audience that the government engineers were using an approach that was different from that of many of the people with whom Brian was associated. However, here’s my meager understanding. It appears that when one rotates different magnetic fields at a high speed in close proximity to one another, that a dimension warp (for want of a better term) opens in space time and the energy just bleeds through. Now, if I am out to lunch, please don’t waste my time with making a big deal about it. I’m not an engineer. I’m just some guy running for President of the United States, so what the hell do I know.
However, by whatever means, when people are able to tap this energy source, to their surprise, that was not all that they tapped. There was something else there. Something that bled through into this dimension of experience. What was it? Anti-gravity. The aforementioned Canadian Tesla discovered that when he “zapped” objects with this new energy that sometimes they would take off (go up) and never come down. Whoops, another law bites the dust. What goes up apparently doesn’t always come down. This can also be verified in the notes of “3001.” So, what does anti-gravity mean? What’s the big deal? Well, that is what is going to take us to the stars. You’ve seen the warp drive on Star Trek? Welcome to the future, baby. As Dr. Clarke said, “To give you an idea what it would allow us to do, you could go from New York City to Los Angeles in the time it takes to snap your fingers and never feel a thing.”
Clarke wrote about this a decade ago. Tesla was experimenting with this a century ago. Why the hell don’t we know more about it and why the hell aren’t we doing something about it? Greed? Hunger for power and domination? Clinging to outmoded ways because they pad the pocket? If you’re interested in more information on what many of these engineers are working with, try the website Keeleynet.
If you’ve already clicked on the link that I gave you for Dr. O’Leary, then you might have discovered that he is pretty disgusted with the politicians in this country. He had written to Al Gore and others and they all have backed away from free energy. But Brian points out that all of the other “alternatives” that one hears about all come with a hidden energy cost that cancels their effectiveness. They just manage to perpetuate the same old crap under a different guise. Profit, profit, profit; keep the money machine on track, no matter the eventual price.
Do you realize how powerful the people are in this world who have power? Do you really? Do you know that they only have one God, and that God is world domination. Am AI over the top? Fine, prove me wrong!
Well, free energy may upset their apple cart. And one of the reasons that I am running for President is to use this as a platform to spread the word. I honestly believe that there is a critical point at which when enough people know about something, no one can keep it from coming to fruition.
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