Awareness & Value
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Green Economics and Natural Values
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by Michael Lucas Monterey, v4.72, 2-22-12
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©2012 Michael Lucas Monterey. All rights reserved. Please contact the author for permission to copy or reprint and for notification of nonprofit educational or scientific use.
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Email: <michael.monterey@gmail.com>
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CONTENTS
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Section 1 :: Introduction
Section 2 :: Essentials
Section 3 :: Sustainable Success
Section 4 :: Credit & Reality
Section 5 :: Valuable Consideration
Section 6 :: Lawful Money
Section 7 :: Beyond Plutonomy
Section 8 :: Community Credit
Section 9 :: Conclusions & Predictions
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Introduction
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“One cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it in the first place.” – Albert Einstein
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"If you don't know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere." – Henry Kissinger
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P = d^8 and W = g^7 • a^a
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The equations above are definitions. The “P” is for poverty, the “d^8” stands for debt, deficiency, deprivation, depreciation, disvalue, disrespect, dormancy, and destruction. “W” means wealth, the “g^7” stands for good, grace, generosity, giving, gratitude, gladness, and greatness; and the “a^a” represents appreciative awareness. It can be defined differently, but wealth without g^7•a^a is biologically, culturally, and spiritually worthless or worse. We will explore other ways to simplify the realities of an economy. Yet, the above definitions hold true, because economies are human games, systems.
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According to Einstein, anyone who can’t explain something to a six year old doesn’t understand it. The understanding of this theory can be distilled to that level of simplicity but, while generalizing the complexity with real world examples and natural analogies, we need valid definitions, congruent narratives and/or logical mathematical statements.
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For example: One who never leaves the ocean will never understand it, nor the water. Overcoming our structural ignorance and upgrading our socioeconomic conceptual matrix are interactive processes that happen intentionally or not at all.
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What is an orange worth, or an apple, a cherry or a mango? Is the intrinsic value of a metal or a stone variable? Why are modern economics, finance, and monetary policy so confusing? Why do children tend to trust adults, assuming that what they believe must be true? Why do we like theories and proof so much?
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This theory reveals the answers, underlying principles, and causes usually overlooked or ignored by well over 95% of observers within and beyond the field of conventional economics.
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Is this going to be difficult reading, filled with daunting prophecies of doom and gloom? No, but here it seems wise to quote Paul Ehrlich’s insight on modern positivism:
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“It seems to be part of American popular culture to consider optimism, in itself, to be good. In the face of disasters, our political and social leaders frequently castigate the ‘prophets of doom’ who fail to accentuate the positive and who want the lifeboats manned merely because the ship is sinking. Our entire society seems to suffer from a sort of mental block and many refuse to take action to correct its fatal course until it has passed the point of no return. This book is only ‘pessimistic’ in the sense that recognizing a severe problem and recommending action to solve it are ‘pessimistic.’” (from The End of Affluence, pg. 11)
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Fortunately, human genius, ingenuity, and responsiveness proved Ehrlich wrong on approximately 50% of his warnings, so far. However it turns out for modern society as a whole, attitudes toward our perverted economy have proved Ehrlich right. It is almost as if we are on the Titanic, ignoring the increasing angle and rate of descent while desperately trying not to hear the screaming of the lower class passengers locked into the lower decks.
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When I was growing up through the 1950s and ‘60s, a first class stamp cost a few pennies. My father was able to buy a nice, new 3-bedroom suburban home with large front and back yards for $14,000 at only about 4% interest while driving a bread truck. Mother could stay at home and raise me and my sisters. Soon we had two cars, without my mom working. Later, father and mother were self-employed. Like most successful business owners of that era, they made about 7 to 10 times more than their lowest paid employee. Five loaves of bread or five dozen eggs might cost a dollar, and gasoline was about $0.149 to $0.179 per gallon for regular. A nice new car cost from $2000 to $3000. In 1969, rent was only $70 per month for my first apartment, the entire first floor of an old Victorian home. That was fine, because at my first job with a large architectural firm, I earned $5.00 per hour.
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Back then, as a 21 year old single male, the buying power of my hourly wage was equal to about $65.00 of our inflated 2012 debt-dollars. I took home the equivalent of about $2000 (US 2012) per week. Most ambitious 21 year old citizens now feel lucky to work several part-time jobs and take home about $6.50 per hour to subsist without benefits in a world where prices are 10 to 15 times what I paid in 1969. So, under-class workers are over 100 times poorer, while upper upper-class elitists are well over 50 times richer. The numbers fail to fully reveal the negative effects suffered by over 150 million of us in the US alone.
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The not so new political faux solution? For unemployed single mothers and older, systemically unemployable talent, humiliate and degrade them, make pitiful little welfare handouts as hard to get as possible, then get them off the books or swept under the rug (and through the cracks) as soon as possible. For excess young people and the chronically under-employed there is now no political solution.
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The bad news is not reserved only for the under-class, the young, competent elders, families stuck in the chronic welfare syndrome, and the working poor. The New Year's day USA Today, 2012, reported that the Lender Processing Services corporation found over 6 million home owners late on their mortgage payments or in foreclosure. According to an earlier report, the National Association of Realtors and other industry watchers faked their statistics by about 20% over the last few years. Many underwater mortgage holders and home owners facing foreclosure are not luckless dupes of the toxic loan scams of 2005 to 2007.
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What happened to the American Dream? What happened to the huge blue collar middle-class that made America the greatest economic success story in the history of the modern world? Why did the USA fall from being the envy and hope of the world in the 1950s and ‘60s to being the world’s worst deadbeat, with over 50% of families stuck in poverty, needing food stamps to get by? Why are most in the midst of a virtual depression that the Federal Reserve system was established to prevent? Why has the Fed consistently failed us from its beginning? Why should anyone act as if they trust the Federal Reserve Banks' debt-dollar system? Why is conventional economics plagued by rancorous conflict, finger pointing, toxic schisms, and seemingly interminable debate over the definition of economics and its proper scope? Why have the best economists in the world rallied against economics-as-usual and sided with the 99% and the Occupy Wall Street movement?
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The above questions will be answered below, but first remember this: To most very young children, parents and other adults are like gods. Whatever they consider normal, children tend to assume is real, valid, and unquestionable. As we grow up, and everybody else always acts as if normal assumptions and behaviors are correct, natural, universal phenomena, we become unconsciously sure that normal assumptions, beliefs, and habits are natural and correct. Later, to avoid real and imaginary penalties, we tend to protect and defend our normal habits, beliefs, and assumptions, no matter how absurd, atrocious, damaging, or unsustainable.
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Of all possible answers to the question about our love of proof, our curiosity and love of satisfaction seem most compelling. We tend to learn that what we don't know we don't know usually hurts us, especially when money is involved. Thriving is so fulfilling and poverty so unpleasant, we like to know and understand what matters most in our lives and our world.
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In mathematics, the only theory or proof more satisfying than one that satisfies our curiosity with elegant, undeniable logic, is one that also has great explanatory power, that gives us answers for the hows and the why. The fields of physics and cosmology are built on theories offering answers or good guesses for the how questions. Yet, despite abundant physical proofs of parts of the whole, answers to the big “Why?” elude scientists devoted to the Standard Model theory. We tend to excuse physicists for being baffled by the essentials of universal being and exotic events at ultra-microscopic and ultra-vast scales, but events we normally associate with economics are no more exotic than politics, commerce, and accounting. Even the most exotic equations of complex derivatives fail to excuse the lack of a generally accepted fundamental theory or GUT (grand unifying theory) of economics.
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After over 5,000 years of commerce, despite the long history of the unified field of socioeconomic reality, economists and teachers of economics disagree about how to define it. They still suffer divisive conflict over basic theory and methodology, how to practice it, and why the economy does what it does. In fact, until now, there has never been a generally accepted theory covering the fundamentals of economics. The situation in economics is as if physics was divided into opposing camps arguing about the nature of the science and the reality of their tools.
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The dilemma is unnecessary, and satisfaction is at hand, but it requires a fresh perspective on the basics and governing dynamics.
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In the Barabara Weinstock Lecture of March 2011, former US Secretary of Labor and, now, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy Robert Reich (UC, Berkeley) told his audience some very important parts of the truth about economics and what happened to the economy. Professor Reich reminded his listeners that Wall Street is not the economy. He explained that economics was once a part of what was once called moral philosophy, a study of how we live together, our relations and interactions, causes and effects, the nature of our motivations and consequences. Reich's attack on the nature of the current problem revolved around the parallel of the extreme spike in income disparity between the wealthy and the poor in 1928 and the peak concentration of wealth in 2007, just before the crash of 2008 and so on. He revealed some of the identical mechanics (if not the architects) of the long-term stagnation of the Great Depression and of our Great Recession — rampant impoverishment of workers and the middle class, orchestrated with disastrous monetary policy.
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On the upbeat, Reich focused on the very important distinction between debt and public investment. Reich credited FDR, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson with fostering and sustaining public investment in infrastructure, education, modernization. That fostered a "bargain between employers and workers" blessed by an ethical spirit, shared prosperity, and shared sacrifice. Reich emphasized America's great pay off for investing in our post-WWII debt of over 100% of annual GDP. The huge progressive increase of productivity and wages drove proportional increase of consumption and spending by the majority. That drove the development of America as the leading superpower and the envy of the whole world. Reich’s approach makes it clear that our economy is failing because our understanding, our national ethics, policies, and responses are all deficient.
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A full review of Reich's work would be useful, yet incomplete without exploring the basics he leaves unexamined. This theory deals with core values, principles, governing dynamics, and basic relations, not secondary level theorems for promoting and maintaining the faux economics of plutocracy and corruption at the root of the problems Reich exposes.
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The heart of real economics flows with spirit, compassionate wisdom, positive values, ethics, and creative energy. For example, though using a formally understated style for his presentation at the 1985 symposium on Economy and Church in Dialogue, former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) said...
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"The economic inequality between the northern and southern hemispheres of the globe is becoming more and more an inner threat to the cohesion of the human family. The danger for our future from such a threat may be no less real than that proceeding from the weapons arsenals with which the East and the West oppose one another. New exertions must be made to overcome this tension, since all methods employed hitherto have proven themselves inadequate. In fact, the misery in the world has increased in shocking measure during the last thirty years. In order to find solutions that will truly lead us forward, new economic ideas will be necessary. But such measures do not seem conceivable or, above all, practicable without new moral impulses. It is at this point that a dialogue between Church and economy becomes both possible and necessary...
... "These realms have come to appear mutually exclusive in the modern context of the separation of the subjective and objective realms. But the whole point is precisely that they should meet, preserving their own integrity yet inseparable. It is becoming an increasingly obvious fact of economic history that the development of economic systems which concentrate on the common good depends on a determinate ethical system, which in turn can be born and sustained only by strong religious convictions. Conversely, it has also become obvious that the decline of such discipline can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse. An economic policy that is ordered not only to the good of the group — indeed, not only to the common good of a determinate state — but to the common good of the family of man demands a maximum of ethical discipline and thus a maximum of religious strength. The political formation of a will that employs the inherent economic laws towards this goal appears, in spite of all humanitarian protestations, almost impossible today. It can only be realized if new ethical powers are completely set free.
... “A morality that believes itself able to dispense with the technical knowledge of economic laws is not morality but moralism. As such it is the antithesis of morality. A scientific approach that believes itself capable of managing without an ethos misunderstands the reality of man. Therefore it is not scientific. Today we need a maximum of specialized economic understanding, but also a maximum of ethos so that specialized economic understanding may enter the service of the right goals. Only in this way will its knowledge be both politically practicable and socially tolerable."
<http://www.acton.org/global/article/market-economy-and-ethics>
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What are the economic laws and new ideas needed for a real, sustainable solution?
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To be valid, coherent, and ethical, economics must have effective education and dynamic reform embracing paradigm upgrades, free exchange, nonprofit credit, compassionate wisdom, kindness, fairness, generosity, and ecological sustainability. Though not really new, those imperatives encompass the laws and ideas we need now.
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In 1974, Paul Ehrlich's partly prophetic work, The End of Affluence, warned of the consequences of ongoing corruption and incompetence in government and economics, even mentioning "ecocide" and giving examples. Ehrlich went further than the future Pope, assigning much of the guilt to commercially sponsored economists (plutonomists, really) and the politicians and plutocrats who hired them to "legitimize" their sociopathic schemes. Now, 38 years later, we see that excessive tolerance for unethical, immoral, for-profit politics and ecocidal faux science proved Ehrlich’s and the Pope’s warnings valid.
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We now need economics in accord with the spiritual Golden Rule — treat others as you like to be treated. That is the basis of real equity and green (healthy) economics. Will it work — is it even possible? It guides the millennial "Suq" economy of the Middle East and much of Asia.
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"Buddhist Economics" is an essay by E. F. Schumacher, the humanitarian economist and author of Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.
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When asked by other economists what Buddhism has to do with economics, Schumacher told them, "Economics without Buddhism—without spiritual, human, and ecological values—is like sex without love."
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To be more precise, heartless pseudo-economics is like combining chronic, incestuous rape, torture and conspiracy to aid and abet mass murder and ecocide. Realistic economics must assess influences operating in the ecological, psychological, and ethical dimensions of culture, the non-rational and supra-rational functioning of real agents and groups, the good, the bad, and the ugly as is.
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Dr. Daisaku Ikeda's annual world peace proposal for 2010 brings the nature of our current dilemma into clear focus:
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"The sense of decline is characterized by a pessimism and a nihilism that differs from the experience of people during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when socialism was at least seen as offering an alternative to the prevailing system. Today's pessimism would seem on the surface to be the opposite of the frenetic energy of an inflationary bubble, but it is in fact simply a different aspect of the same underlying phenomenon.
... "The French political scientist Emmanuel Todd has offered the following analysis of what he calls 'the logical culmination' of finance-centered globalization: "While desiring to 'free the individual' from all the constraints of the collective, it has succeeded only in creating mediocritins who, trembling in terror, seek safety in the worship and hoarding of money.
... "The flip side of mammonism [rule by greed] is, in other words, nihilism. Aspects that would appear to be diametrically opposed are in fact the inevitable twins born of modern civilization. Both are the product of an era that might be termed an interregnum of values, in which no measure of worth other than the monetary is recognized. Even discussions of the negative aspects of globalization, such as poverty and income disparity, are cast solely in terms of monetary values, making them needlessly sterile and soulless."
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It would be hard to find a more accurate and succinct analysis of the heartless heart of the problem. Ikeda and Todd demonstrate the true nature of realistic economic thought. We can go further and classify attempted commodification of everything as a symptom of mental retardation and spiritual illness. We see more prophetically realistic economic analysis in the following quotes.
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"We need to develop the awareness that the standard of values that judges human worth solely on the basis of economic capacity is what Todd calls the value system of mediocrities; or rather, that it represents the effective absence of values. We need to ask ourselves why there is such pervasive pessimism and nihilism in advanced industrial societies where the standard of living, judged on a strictly material basis, surpasses that of the monarchs and aristocrats of the past."
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This work provides a truly scientific, ethical, and medical response to Ikeda's question, and for the modern process of systematizing maniacal greed, corruption, and the logistics of its terminal End Game scenario (global Plutonomy), which he identifies...
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"...modern civilization and especially the system of modern capitalism was, as Max Weber (1864-1920) saw it, characterized by a way of life in which some degree of stability was secured through the functioning of Protestant ethics acting to direct and rein in otherwise unhindered desire. In other words, value-based questions — 'What is the purpose of hard work, of effort, of accumulation?' — were an integral aspect of daily life. This lent a degree of balance to the human spirit and people's lives. When this steering wheel and brake cease to function, all that remains are the excesses of what Weber called ‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.’ It could be said that what is today condemned as super-capitalism — uncontrolled avarice [unbridled greed] — represents the terminal phase of this process in which desire and intellect have broken entirely free of any ethical framework.
... "The credit bubble that gave rise to the current financial crisis was rooted in the expansion of the highly speculative market in derivatives, which were developed using cutting-edge financial engineering. One can only wonder if any larger questions of purpose or impact ever impinged on the consciousness of those who were passionately focused on turning the world's financial markets into a giant casino."
<http://www.sgi.org/assets/pdf/peace2010(2).pdf>
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All our socioeconomic deficiencies, problems, and perversions are perpetuated and aggravated by the lack of an adequate theory. The relatively brief history of economics is graced with wonderful works of philosophical depth, practical insights, valuable models, mathematical invention, and useful protocols. It also includes a host of deficiencies, erroneous theorems, troubling notions, mystification, complication, contradictions, controversies, opposing factions, abject failures, rampant corruption, and cyclic disaster. Most economists seem to foster and serve plutocracy with plutonomics (pseudo-economics). A valid theory of economics may not cure evil, but will foster and support the psychosocial, cultural, and ethical cure of economics and the global economy.
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This theory supplies the missing basics, upgrading the socioeconomic paradigm that defines and determines the nature of the economy and its predominant values, disvalues, and rules, providing a new perspective on the realities of money, bubble markets, and systemic corruption. The prime objective here is not to improve plutonomics, nor to foster new conceptual or mathematical devices for more sophisticated massaging of numbers, statistics, and quantities for more sophisticated modeling of behavior, theoretical agents, and market forces. The main innovation of this theory is to redefine, rehabilitate and illuminate the essentials in order to disinfect, revitalize, and vaccinate the field. Curing the schisms, immoral afflictions, and malignancies will set economics on a healthy footing, relevant to the realities of human life and culture.
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Real economics must be proactive and protective as much as descriptive and analytical. To be of real value to humanity, the quality of economics must be as good as the ethics and integrity of economists and the teaching of economics. Economists and teachers of real economics serve the commonwealth of civilization and the well-being of humanity, the rest betray both economics and humanity.
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Human being and culture are essentially spiritual affairs—encompassing the whole of psychophysical presence—not simply rational monetary mechanics. Quantitative statistics and other technical methods are not adequate for cradle to cradle analysis of cultural activity, nor for establishing true cost pricing that can turn us away from the brink of ecological and economic collapse. Mastering economics requires qualitative and ethical metrics, requiring a basic understanding of the essentials of human life, culture, and ecology. This fundamental theory of economics and natural values identifies and explains the underlying principles, governing dynamics, basic concepts, and mechanics and how to use them for viable economics, equitable cultural exchange, and valid monetary policy.
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Plutonomics has won economics a bad name, "the dismal science," usually accepted as a dismal half joke. Yet, when the reality of life and the whole of human being are given due consideration, economics gives us a scope of study, discovery, and understanding as rich and vast as the infinite potentials of human life and culture.
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Basic logic, analogies, and real world examples are given to illustrate various elements and implications of this theory and its practical power. Some examples offer glimpses of a very healthy, very possible, post-plutonomic future. The feasibility is fostered by the reality of valid economics and its application in a sustainable, hybrid economic system based on an upgraded, expanded socioeconomic paradigm. That is the purpose of this work and its original motivation. With diligent study, research, collaboration, and creative application, the results — the economics of compassion — will be valuable and very rewarding.
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Essentials
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“Everything must be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein
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“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” – Henry Kissinger
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Equation 1: V = Bi • a(s + o)
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Economics, as in the equation above, starts with the principle of value (“V’), which is a result of the interaction of intrinsic benefit (“Bi”) and appreciation (“a”), realized as subject (“s”) united with object (“o”). In other words, value is a product of the enjoyment of awareness and presence, or being, experienced as life, the original benefit.
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What do we need? What do we really need most, which are most valuable? When necessary to get or sustain what we need, which of our wants and/or vices should we give up? How and why do we sometimes decide that wants or vices are more important then needs, even when it leads to ruin and misery? How and why do we value anything?
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Humanity requires spirituality, but animality as well. Nature determines our most basic needs and values but, so far, culture tends to generate a complex of wants, vices, customs, and status games that often trump wisdom. For us, status requires dualistic attention, monitoring, comparison, relative valuation, measure and, usually, scoring. Natural status among reptiles is relatively simple and, in mammalian species, progressively complex, leading to societies, economies, and economics. In our species, credit is a measure of value and/or score. Debt is a measure of disvalue or negative score.
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In normal accounting, a credit is a positive unit of value and benefit. A debit is a negative unit of expense, loss, or deficit. A debit is a negative unit of expense, loss, or deficit. A debit is not always a debt and, to a banker or loan shark a debt may be a credit, but a credit is always really a positive credit.
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Getting the realities confused prevents effective analysis of plans, proposed and past transactions, development, and progress. Confusing debt with credit makes tyranny and the corruption of money as easy as confusion about the nature of power.
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Simplify as you like but remember, credit, money systems, and economics are possible only because of value. Value is only possible because sentient human beings can appreciate phenomena—things—even insubstantial or infinite things, like beliefs, ideas, merit, credit, wealth, money, imaginary images, stories, whatever is fulfilling, satisfying. The viability of value is enforced as much by our natural emotional and sociocultural reactions to unfortunate events and potentials as by the good.
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Real economics deals with the complex cultural dimension of psychophysical reality, including ethics. Therefore, we must understand the fundamental principles, dynamics, and motivations that give rise to economic interactions. Effective communication is essential for mutual understanding and good results. To understand the principles and concepts that generate economies and economics, we need shared definitions of the terms essential to the field:
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1. Value: A principle of logic, ethics, psychology, and economics; or a subjective conception of whatever is appreciated or considered as being of benefit or virtue; a personal conception that is either 1) natural or 2) socially derived and arbitrary.
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2. Wealth: A great accumulation of value or goods, "material" abundance, potential or capability, great affluence (flow/currency, liquidity, solvency), great capacity for cultural interaction and beneficial exchange of goods, services, or assets (actual or symbolic benefits or objects of value). W = A(B + p)s :: Wealth = affluence X benefit + potential X sustainability
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3. Credit: A form of positive recognition and acknowledgment of trust, positive value, merit, benefit, potential and/or actual contributions to life, culture, and the future.
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4. Money: A socioeconomic system, a system of abstractions and symbolic media for 1) convenient exchange of goods or services, 2) measuring relative value, and 3) “storing” or accumulating value.
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5. Economy: The total "material" activity and interactions of a social group, a community, state, nation, or civilization, specifically either 1) non-monetary cultural interaction or 2) monetary commercial interaction and exchange.
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6. Commonwealth: Commonly shared cultural wealth; productive alliance; life enhancing activity of groups or communities that make up a state, nation, culture, or civilization.
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7. Poverty: A degrading state of deficiency and deprivation enforced by limited consciousness and retarded prosperity; insufficiency or inability, usually created, perpetuated, and exploited by a corrupt socioeconomic regime (a perverse consumer society, exploitive aristocracy, oligarchy, or plutocracy).
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8. Ethics: The principles of fair, equitable, mutually beneficial relationship, natural morality; the cultural codification of values and karmic relations (re: Karma, the universal Law of Interdependent Interaction).
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Money is a system, and a system can be seen as a game. The two most basic rules of a valid money game are that it be convenient for all and facilitate fair exchange for lively cultural activity and satisfactory experience. As children, when we play Monopoly, the board game, or any other game, do we play to win, for amassing huge score or devastating the losers? No, though we all love the thrill of victory, we play for fun. We love to play. For beloved children and most healthy adults, the joy of playing is more important than the final score.
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Some very enjoyable games are scoreless. James P. Carse, the author of Finite and Infinite Games, explores the nature, principles, rules, dynamics, and ethics of games played for fun, profit, power, and culture. Carse makes it easy to see that a society is a finite game, a product of definite rules, limits, winning and losing, beginning, ending, and so on.
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Culture evolves, it has no known or knowable beginning, no single set of definite rules, and no known ending. Culture can be complex, but simple, even primitive, and yet easy to enjoy. Society can become so complicated and dysfunctional, it becomes ever harder to enjoy and tolerate. The global Plutonomy game is clearly no fun for a rapidly increasing majority.
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In the beginning, economies are cultural, family affairs. We started playing socioeconomic culture games for the sake of convenience and the benefits for our loved ones, our families and friends. In primordial economies, scoring and winning and money or the equivalents were not important enough to consider them more important than living well. Now, too many of us consider scoring and winning more important than the quality of life and in some cases, life itself.
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Normative psychosis is a condition that causes us to engage in extremely harmful or severely dysfunctional behaviors accepted as typically normal. Some normal psychotics are so good at winning that they gained almost total control of the economy, just for the sake of winning, at any cost. They are a relatively small minority compared to those of us who cooperate with them as the quality of life deteriorates for all, whether we know it or not.
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Very few economists or fiscal policy makers talk about our worst problems. Why?
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Humanity increases by about 100 million people per year, while about the same number of jobs are eliminated by plutocracy or replaced by technology. Unless we accomplish a major overhaul of our socioeconomic system, its karmic momentum will keep driving us toward an economic wreck of global proportions. Still, plutonomists and teachers of plutonomics are paid to prevent a truly game changing solution. If selective inattention and perversity continue, the combination of aggravating factors and effects will cause results more terrible than we can imagine. Consider...
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Eq. 2: Hpg > N/t > 0/t • Iat > N/t = Hu^2/t
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Translation: Where human population growth (“Hpg”) is equal to or greater than “N/t” (actual number per year) greater than zero per year (“0/t”), multiplied by implementations of automation technology (“Iat”) equal or greater than N/t greater than “0/t”), that equals human unemployment squared per year (“Hu^2/t”), exponential job loss. With all other causes and factors left unchanged (status quo), that equation is the core of the Plutocratic Structural Formula for Geometric Decline: global socioeconomic disaster.
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Most “advanced” countries have an increasingly large majority of aging adults, ever less economic viability stability, and growth, declining quality of education and ever less opportunity for their adolescents and young adults. Less fortunate Third World societies are still plagued by rampant corruption fueled by foreign “aid” and graft funded by corporate rape of their natural resources, while some — like Brazil, among others — are rapidly surpassing the average US standard of living (SoL). The US SoL is falling rapidly as the impoverished majority grows more rapidly.
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Why? Despite the above, well over 30% of employed adults in the USA work for government or government contractors, supported by taxes and/or debt (government bonds). About 30% of US adults are elderly, retired, or too old to be employable in the current job market; and most of that group are receiving social security benefits or welfare and/or unemployment benefits. Real US unemployment numbers may be over 20% if we include those who have given up on filing or are part of the black or grey market. In some rural and inner city areas unemployment exceeds 30%. Most working age youth of the US are under- or unemployed, many living with parents receiving some degree of welfare assistance. Do we need an equation to see the unsustainability of the situation?
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Why do conventional economists avoid or ignore the crucial issues and hard evidence? Do they believe that there is simply no hope, no solution, no sense in dealing with the reality of modern civilization? Or, is it simply a lack of compassion and integrity and deficient imagination enforced by the deficient conceptual context of Plutonomy?
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When billions of lives are at stake, not dealing with the whole truth guarantees ineffective policy, bad planning, and worse. The subversion of economics is pervasively, indiscriminately destructive. For example, a pervasively typical example is the false notion that, in order to be effective, “money” and currency must be scarce enough to sustain ideal valuation. None of the prevailing theories of economics condemn that falsehood, nor do they include a logical reason for failing to acknowledge the principles that determine valuation or what is ideal or why. The currently fashionable schools of plutonomic thought all fail to define and explain the power and nature of value; and all fail to acknowledge and explain the real causes of inflation, systemic corruption, and pandemic disinformation.
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Economics is an applied science, a sub-discipline of holontology, the study of being as a whole, not isolated parts. The truth about economics is in the name. The linguistic and technical difference between ecology and economics is instructive. “Eco-” relates to home, habitat, environment or, more broadly, the reality in which we live. The suffix "-ics" places economics in the realm of the technical disciplines, like mechanics, combinatorics, and statistics. Yet, the qualifying component, "-nom-", tells us that economics is about nomenclature, nominal phenomena, the principles and expressions labeled for our use. We can be sure that economics is neither a pure nor hard science, nor a virtually open ended arena like mathematics. In principle, despite the differences, economics is more closely related to both ecology and anthropology than to mathematics or quantum mechanics. If it now seems alienated or estranged from its proper scope of endeavor (the study and development of practical knowledge and understanding useful for the benefit of humanity), the fault lies not in the essentials of economics, but in the collective habit of ignoring them.
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For example, you can not make money on money and have all participants of a culture enjoying fair exchange and sustainable equity. Paradigm repair, remedial education, and ethical reform are clearly prime duties of all real economists. We really must make the basics simple, easy to grasp by parents, teachers, and politicians.
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We might be tempted to think that concepts like value and merit or credit have no value themselves, but we would be wrong. Human beings have an inherent, inborn, irrepressible tendency to appreciate various phenomena and experiences. We can see appreciation and affection or affinity throughout the animal realms. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction are innate elements of experience. So, appreciation is clearly an intrinsic function of universal being, expressed and experienced wherever life manifests mentality and awareness. Thus, value is a generative structural principle of being, with dynamic potential intrinsic to sentient life forms, however primitive or limited their mentality. Why should we think that the principle of value and its potential are dynamic?
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Value is not simply a static concept existing in an abstract void. The realms of ideas and actions are inseparable, interdependent, and interactive. The universe and lives of sentient beings manifest fundamental principles of mentality and physicality, which are always simultaneously interrelated, even in the most minimal states of consciousness. In the most attenuated states, like coma, RNA molecules manifest intentionality, purposiveness and the most basic modes of intelligent activity. Epigenetic and sub-cellular activity directly affect the condition and functioning and quality of our DNA and life itself. Nature, life, the universe, and us are inseparable.
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Value and merit have power to inspire and/or motivate and affect psychological, verbal, physical and cultural interaction. A virus or an RNA molecule may not be sentient, but our activities, individually and collectively, are motivated to some extent by appreciation and desire for what we value. That is a dynamic relationship. Whether we possess what we value or simply appreciate it from afar, what we value has actual, intrinsic value or merit, even if it is only uniquely individual, relative value, it is real value or real merit. If something is of value to one person, that object of value has potential for related causes and actions, whether it would be actions of body, voice, or mind. Whatever causes action is also a cause of reaction, which occurs simultaneously, instantly.
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The universe and all life enhancing, life sustaining phenomena and life itself have absolute and relative value and both definite and infinite value. The essentials of universal reality may not be equally appreciated by all sentient beings, yet their infinite value remains infinitely, naturally valuable. Regardless of perceived value or relative value or conventional value — like monetary value — "things" like beauty, creativity, generosity, integrity, serenity, true nobility, kindness, compassion, great wisdom, humor, talent, art, pleasure, joy, satisfaction, freedom, health, breathing, air, eating, food, water, sex, babies, culture, and all the other essentials and imponderables of life are generally appreciated, considered priceless, infinitely valuable.
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Value and merit, and the psychophysical phenomena we appreciate as essentially beneficial, all have infinite value. Infinity may seem too remote or exotic for economics and practical applications of economic theory, but without an abiding realization of the infinity of value and what we value, we can be tricked into poverty or slavery — to greed and corruption or to the corrupt. To sustain healthy success, understanding the nature of value is absolutely essential. That requires a basic understanding of infinity, not just limitless vastness.
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We must overcome confusion about things that are infinite and relative and singular or seemingly tangible. Infinity is anything beyond definite description or comprehensive definition, beyond limited knowledge and conditioned consciousness.
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We can use mathematical abstraction to distill some if not all the infinities and essentials. The principles most important for understanding the basis of economics are value, equity, infinity, credit, affluence, benefit, trust, viability, manipulation, debt, and poverty. Let "V" stand for value, "E" for equity, "C" for credit, "D" for debt, "A" for affluence, "B" for benefit, "P" for poverty, "m" for manipulation, "c" for currency, "v" for viability, "t" for trust, "s" for sustainability, and "i" for infinity. We can now examine the interdependent relations, interactive potentials and dynamics:
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Eq. 3.a: C^i = V + ts where B + (cv)E and...
A + D – VB – C(cts) – E = P^i
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In plain language, infinite credit equals value plus sustainable trust, where benefit plus viable currency times equity equals affluence; and debt minus value times benefit minus credit, currency, trust, and sustainability, and minus equity, equals infinite poverty, i.e., total collapse of an economy and/or its monetary system. Therefore...
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Eq. 3.b: C, credit, does not equal D, debt; thus...
V(A + cm) – Es = P ...
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Value is not affluence and manipulated currency (corrupted “money”) minus sustainable equity for all (equitable sustainability); and so...
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Eq. 4.a: P^i = A + Dm – Ev(ts)VB
Eq. 4.b: –V + A – C(cm + D) – E = P
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Infinite poverty equals affluence and manipulated (mandatory) debt, minus viable equity, sustainable trust, and valuable benefit. Value and affluence are nullified as credit is subverted by manipulating the currency, using disvalue and debt to eliminate equity (fair shares & fair trade/exchange).
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The preceding equations are not intended to cover the whole field, but they can help us see the governing dynamics at work at the core of real world economies and why corrupted commercial economies always devolve into Casino Capitalism and its End Game phase, Plutonomy. The equations show the innate integrity of the principles of cultural economy as well as the disvalues and unsustainable disequity of manipulated commercial economies. The real value of a monetary system and all subsidiary notions are invalidated and perverted by systemic trickery, fraud, and cheating.
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For economics, sustainability, viability, validity, and integrity are virtually synonymous. We all know what imagination is — mental creativity — but what is integrity, really? Spiritual integrity is identity, autonomy, ethical honesty, biocentric value, wholeness sustaining psychophysical and cultural viability (sustainability). At the level of a culture's defining social context, its paradigm, integrity is its validity, coherence, and congruence. At the level of cultural interaction and industry, integrity is harmony, cohesive unity, and creative cooperation. At the level of socioeconomic functionality, integrity is equity, stability, reliability, and honesty.
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In his classic Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Matter, E.F. Schumacher left little out of his deep analysis of the decline, and fall of Rome and the perverse, expensive causes and the disastrous consequences. Schumacher's diagnosis and basically green prescription for realizing the positive potentials of 'Western' civilization were prophetic. For human beings with children, empathy, and compassion, the essentials of sustainable success are easy to choose. Choosing healthy sustainability is choosing sane, healthy relationships.
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The Four Modes of Relationship:
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1. Nondual (primal):
creative, generative, infinite, enlivening
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2. Win-Win (give-give):
unitive, constructive, inclusive, mutually fulfilling
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3. Win-Lose (give/take):
divisive, competitive, limiting, disappointing
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4. Lose-Lose (take-take):
negative, destructive, all consuming, depressing
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The four modes apply to communities, cultures, civilizations, economies and all other social games as much as to individuals and families. The ultimate nondual mode of relatedness, wherein all events are instant, simultaneous, interactive chain reactions of consequences that we experience as the universe. The nondual mode of relationship is nature's way of creating, fostering, and supporting the relationship of all relationships we call being. We all participate to some extent as children, but nonduality can be hard to sustain as an adult surviving in a corrupt society.
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We seem to have little effect or direct influence on the universal scale of relationship but, with 7 billion of us on our way to 9 billion, choosing the win-win way of life can make a huge difference. The win-win mode is the one we all need to foster and support to sustain a successful civilization, and we can do it.
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Failing to use our best strategy is insanely foolish. "Winner takes all" capitalism is a symptom of the lose-lose end game of the win-lose mode at the national and international levels. Getting something worthwhile for nothing is an illusion. Win-lose economic games are lose-lose for all, for we are all inseparably connected. For civilization as a whole, the nondual and win-win modes are the sustainably viable modes of relatedness.
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Sustainable Success
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“I must be willing to give up what I am to become what I will be.” – Albert Einstein
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"Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision." – Henry Kissinger
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Eq. 3.a: C^i = V + ts where B + (cv)E and...
A + D – VB – C(cts) – E = P^i
Eq. 3.b: C, credit, does not equal D, debt; thus...
V(A + cm) – Es = P ...
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To recap, credit equals value plus sustainable trust and substantial benefit, not debt. Therefore, value is not affluence plus manipulated currency (corrupted money) minus sustainable equity for all (equitable sustainability). Eliminating beneficial value and sustainable equity creates disvalue and infinite poverty, inevitably.
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Without addressing our compulsive desire for success (fulfillment, well being, security, happiness, pleasure, and affluence) and our obsessive aversion to failure (dissatisfaction, deficiency, fear, suffering, and poverty) there is no way to practice valid economics.
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When compassionate wisdom and economics are united, we will be able to enjoy the GDH, General Domestic Happiness. Until the GDH is established, we need to fully research, develop, and experience more of the ways and means of sustainable success. That requires realistic, humanistic economics. Until the economics of compassion and basic happiness are predominant, GDP may as well stand for Grotesque Demonic Perversion. As the Pope made clear, a positive alternative requires extraordinary devotion to ethical integrity and appropriate action fostering a society with a holistic socioeconomic paradigm. Until we manage that, the USA and all other nations putting up with financial tyranny and monetary fraud will continue to decline.
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Economics is a somewhat messy science of cultural activity, focusing mainly on the behaviors and transactions of individuals, cultures, and subgroups that make civilizations what they are. Successful cultures are composed of healthy, successful communities. Healthy, successful communities are composed of healthy relationships, primarily thriving families. Five of the basic factors affecting the fate of civilizations were revealed in Dr. Jared Diamond's best selling book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Those five critical factors are:
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1. environmental impact
2. climate change
3. neighboring allies and enemies
4. loss and gain of trading partners
5. society's responses to all the above
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The first two processes are interactive. Agriculture, construction, industry and wars have caused massive deforestation and radical climate change, aggravating and accelerating disaster. All the factors relate to use of our brains as much as anything.
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The failed empires of Europe, Asia, the Middle-East, Africa, Polynesia, and the ancient Americas had terminal defects in common: misconceptions, misunderstandings, misuse of inner and outer resources, and missed opportunities. Diamond covered several societies that faced severe crisis, responded effectively, adapted and succeeded. Two prerequisites foster the five other determinants of cultural health and longevity, giving us seven essentials of sustainable social success. The seven essentials are:
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1. A viable paradigm, a biocentric conceptual context supporting a sane worldview
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2. Loving respect for nature, sustaining commitment to the commonwealth, the joy and wellness of children, elders, enlightened spiritual leaders and wise guardians
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3. Biocentric awareness and empathy, compassionate sensitivity to environmental conditions, fostering and supporting optimal quality of life for all generations
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4. Consciousness of climate change with active commitment to eliminating or mitigating contributing factors and circumstances affecting its severity and rapidity
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5. Commitment to sustainably positive, peaceful relations with neighbors, allies and enemies alike, fostering constant improvement with Win-Win strategies and dialogue
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6. Thriving through ongoing development and maintenance of beneficial policies, strategies, and enterprises that foster and support lively cultural exchange with economic allies and competitors, while minimizing negativity, risk, damage, and losses
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7. Positive, creative cultural responses to whatever challenges sustainably healthy success
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With a valid paradigm and abiding commitment to a lively commonwealth and general well being, success can grow out of near disaster. Its members decide whether a society will succeed & rise or fail & fall. A society lacking a valid conceptual base, lacking adequate concern for the wellness of children, elders, nature and the general quality of life, lacks a viable basis for making consistently wise decisions and initiating life-sustaining responses.
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Is the global Consumer Society choosing to succeed? Do a majority of consumers consciously choose anything or are they stampeding toward Walmart like a herd of panicked cattle heading for a cliff? These issues are essential to modern economics and anyone who cares about the quality of life.
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As I pointed out in early 2005 and in January of 2008 (in part 1 of Global Emergency Medicine, a chapter of The Economics of Compassion), the Fed’s casino is crooked, rigged to give 'the house' the majority of the winnings, but who teaches that? Who factors the whole of corruption into their models and equations? Insatiable greed, malignant egoism, grandiose delusion, normalized disrespect and hostility, formerly minimized or covert, now openly rule the world with fear, corruption, numbness and arrogant nihilism. We see more rapid erosion and subversion of America's ethical and financial integrity, stability, and its ability to succeed in global competition with Asia and Latin America.
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As a society becomes more corrupt, its members become increasingly confused, forgetting or lacking most of the basic purposes, pleasures, motives, and principles of successful living and healthy relatedness. A social group that becomes increasingly perverse, becomes estranged from nature and humanity. Noble ethics and values are virtually then overtly suppressed, their presence becoming rarer as mediocrity, depravity, and stupidity flourish. Knowledge of merit and other virtues wanes and disappears. As corrupt elitists gain virtually total power, heartless ego and cowardice rule and, increasingly, determine the activity and consequences of what we may as well call demonocracy.
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The process of corruption expresses the inherently negative dynamics and weaknesses of the underlying conceptual matrix of a corrupted socioeconomic system and the associated presumptions, misconceptions, disvalues, and deceptions (like fractional reserve banking, fiat currencies with floating exchange rates, subversive financial "innovations" & toxic debt “securities”). As pervasive deception and confusion about values, ethics, merit, credit and money become more severe, negative, anti-natural activities become more prevalent. Then, instead of positive measures of real wealth, material abundance, capacity, and productivity, the monetary and relative values of currencies and accounts become measures of toxic debt, corruption, destructive exploitation, and social decay. Finally, the game is obviously more trouble than it was worth to the vast majority of players, and a new phase of cultural evolution then begins.
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Continued: see Awareness & Value part 4 - 6
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For more on the new nonprofit community credit system and related issues, visit "Green Community Credit System" group on Facebook and The Greenbook in progress at: <http://mm-greenbook.blogspot.com>
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Credit & Reality
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“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.” – Albert Einstein
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"The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." – Henry Kissinger
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Eq. 4.a: P^i = A + Dm – E(vts)VB
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Infinite poverty equals affluence plus mandatory debt, minus the following: viable equity charged with sustainable trust amplified by value empowered by benefit.
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Of all the infinities that give us the possibility of a cultural economy, none are more important than imagination, integrity, virtue, merit, and trust. When those essentials and their value are unrecognized or under-appreciated by most members of a society, a plutocracy gains virtually absolute control and easily turns the cultural economy into a destructive plutonomy. The cycle occurred throughout the history of money, from the relatively primitive cultures of ancient Africa and Asia, the early Aryan empires, the Maya realms and, among others, Easter Island, on up to global Consumer Society.
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Like community, a culture is a relationship of relationships, specifically, the actively dynamic expression of those relations. A cultural economy is an evolutionary result of cultural activity. The quality of the result is determined by the quality of the cause, the community and its culture. Anthropologists call the cultural economy of the most ancient native cultures a “Gifting Economy” or a sharing culture, because it is characterized mainly by sharing and giving for the good of all. The Gifting Economy fosters the best interests of the whole community, and in healthy cultures, it is common knowledge that all are united in the cooperative venture we call life.
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A commercial market economy is a socially generated overlay on the natural cultural economy of its host community. The quality of a commercial economy is determined by the community's socioeconomic paradigm and its level of integrity or corruption.
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Plutonomy is a psychosocial disease, like cancer, AIDS, gangrene, and ecocidal mania combined. The cause is spiritual retardation, a deficiency of integrity, a lack of ethics and compassionate wisdom. Plutonomy is a result of progressively stripping culture of its integrity, its humane qualities, virtues, merits, and values. As we lose our imagination and our appreciation of integrity, culture loses its value and starts to disintegrate; low, mean, negative attitudes (spirits) and perversely selfish egos rise to dominance.
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Ironically, negative players of the for-profit debt game play mainly for quantity, despite excessive costs and loss of both quality and, eventually, quantity. Players of infinite, nonprofit games play to enhance the quality of life, usually regardless of finite status, limits, quantity, and time. That was normal on Earth, for millions of years, until about 5,000 years ago. With no money, no banks, no loans, no interest, no taxes, no accountants, and no tax lawyers, human beings thrived in natural harmony and basic joy in almost every environment on the planet. For hundreds of thousands of generations, without money, we suffered no poverty.
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Though there may seem to be little to gain in comparing the most primitive cultures with our own, the development of commercial social programming, perverse notions of value and wealth, property, ownership, and the basis of economic theory can all be illuminated by highlighting the key elements and differences of primal culture and Consumer Society. Such comparisons can also help us see how democracies and republics with negative or deficient socioeconomic paradigms devolve into mobocracies and plutocracies and other forms of socioeconomic sickness.
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For example: The wealth of Urban-Suburban Society is not simply the Wealth of Nations, but the poverty of billions. Poverty could never exist before the invention of money and banking. In Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, a revisionary compilation of honest anthropology, we find this quote from Nurit Bird-David:
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"...Sahlins thinks that hunter-gatherers follow the 'Zen Way' to affluence, which presupposes that 'human material wants are few and finite, and technical means unchanging, but on the whole adequate.' This way contrasts, he argued, with the modern Western one (the 'Galbraithian way'), whose assumptions are appropriate to market economies—'that man's wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited, although improveable.' Hunter-gatherers with immediate-return systems in fact follow a third way—the 'sharing way'—to affluence. Their way is based on assumptions appropriate to their sharing economy—that material wants are linked with material means which are available for sharing...
... "Finally, Sahlins wrote that 'otherwise curious heathen devices become understandable by the people's confidence' and that hunter-gatherers behave 'as if they had it made.'"
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Regardless of Sahlins' curious economic notions, most primitive people not only thought they had it made, they did have it made. First hand accounts of all the most reliable witnesses who lived in very remote places with very primitive people of the most ancient cultures—with the least contact with modern ways and technologies—report essentially the same native grace, robust health, and abundance, some with over 300 kinds of very healthy foods and medicines. It is a well established fact that, even in seemingly harsh environments, hunter-gatherers spend about 4 to 6 hours daily on essential survival tasks. Sahlins' mention of primitive confidence may be easily passed over and the significance underestimated.
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Confidence is the only thing keeping the global Plutonomy game going. We should refrain from unrealistic romanticizing about all primitive cultures, but modern urbanites have much less reason for confidence than well trained primitive hunters in the wild. In Greed, a comprehensive essay on the destructive rule of greed, Julian Edney provides another example from anthropology...
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"Anthropologist Ruth Benedict summarized her overseas work saying the most obvious difference among societies was whether the living was cooperative or competitive. This was the 1930s. She used the term synergy. A high synergy society is socially cohesive, cooperative [and non-aggressive] — one person's acts at the same time serve his own advantage and that of the group, his gain results in a gain for all. But cultures with low synergy are highly competitive and the individual gains advantage only at the expense of another, aggression is prized, indeed humor originates from one person's victory and another's demolition. Low synergy eventually threatens the social fabric. Her example was the Dobu of New Guinea, whose daily atmosphere of ill will and treachery among all made it a showcase of Hobbesean nastiness, and feared among its neighboring tribes. The Dobu have no chiefs, no government, no legalities and live very close to the "state of nature" philosophers propose. Danger is at its height within the tribe, not from without, and the attitude lives that it is prudent and right to inflict pain on losers to protect your win. Hierarchy is based on ruthlessness which is admired, and inequality and injustice are believed to be in the nature of things."
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Edney goes on to point out that "clearly our own society has lower synergy than we boast" as it falls ever faster, ever more obviously through this phase of Plutonomy. It would be hard to find a better examination of sociopathic aberration than Edney's diagnosis of institutionalized greed and corruption in his online essays and blogs:
<http://www.btinternet.com/~pae_news/review31/31Edney.htm>
<http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue32/Edney32.htm>
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With few exceptions, Native American cultures were so successful they thrived in relatively stable populations for thousands of years, without polluting their environments or clear cutting the forests or depleting the soils or animal species. When they were too successful, they learned sustainable wisdom the hard way. When Europeans arrived here, ecological diversity and wild animals were numerous. Flocks of birds were so large that they darkened the sky when they rose up to fly. That was healthy, biologically positive normality. We can regain and sustain it, globally, but we need to see the naked truth.
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Consider the specific example of the big winners of global Plutonomy; we can assess their relative superiority, equality, or inferiority compared to native people...
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Wiping out preventable misery and illness might cost about $80 billion or less per month or almost $1 trillion per year. That is a tiny fraction of the global total invested in debt derivatives alone. It would be less than 10% of the final real cost of oil wars and medical benefits for injured combat veterans. Creating a bright Green future, globally, might cost $3 trillion over 5 years, or a fraction of global defense spending per year. Investing $7 trillion in creating a healthy, sustainable civilization will eliminate over 90% of the causes of war, but do the ultra-rich big winners invest in paradise? Are they becoming more intelligent, more noble or more heroic than average greed crazed ego maniacs?
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The top elitists seem determined to maintain all the infectious causes and symptoms of ecocide. Which master do they serve? Is it heartless greed or good? Are they superior or inferior to people of primitive cultures?
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With due respect to Adam Smith's enlightened ghost, we can see flaws and deficiencies in his views, economic theorems, and related notions. Consider one of Smith's core assumptions:
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"...consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident, that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it. But in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; as if production and not consumption were the end of all industry and commerce. No man could doubt the truth of this proposition."
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We can appreciate his pragmatic view of the historic tendency of ruthless Producers to shear Consumers as much as possible, but Smith's limited observations of his simpler world and his admissions contradict his primary axiom, that consumption is the sole aim and purpose of production. The axiom ignores the creation of art and other goods for pleasure and a sense of self-fulfillment. Production for the sake of exploiting or impoverishing others renders their consumption a secondary aim, subsidiary to the real purpose, personal gain. In the days of our earliest ancestors, production was performed for consumption only indirectly. Tools were first produced for use by the producer, not consumers, and the same could be said of shelter and clothing production, with the exception of items made for young children. Thinking that primitive art, tools, huts, loincloths, and footwear were made for consumers was as wrong in the 18th or 20th century as it is now.
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There is a large, basic difference between highly self-reliant generalists of primitive cultures and the codependent producers and consumers of an industrial culture where specialization and division of labor for mass exploitation is the norm. The ignorant opinions of modern, less self-reliant people do no invalidate the truth.
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People who were mostly self-sufficient had no need of producer or consumer or the abstracted principles, and we have ample evidence that there was generally little no notion of work. Generally, primitive endeavors tend to have the character of sacred art and play or, at the least, intensely engaging, inspiring, rewarding enterprise or exploration with a high degree of enjoyment and satisfaction. There are also the more miraculous and ecstatic interactions with children, lovers, friends, and prey animals. Most of those are considered sacred, deserving of reverent respect.
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We now know that, on average, most hunter-gatherer people spent no more than 4 to 6 hours daily on the necessities for thriving in a "rich" environment — like the Sonoran and Kalahari deserts or the Arctic Tundra. The rest of their time was spent in what producers and consumers call leisure or religious activities or recreation, play.
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As some cultures drifted into use of more sophisticated material technologies, the increasing specialization and division of labor caused increasing codependency. Desire for items produced by others increased in direct inverse proportion to the decreasing ability of each person to produce or acquire the necessities of life and culture on their own. With increasing division of labor came more division, social stratification, and increasing atomization of communal relations, families, roles, responsibilities, and positions of political power. Responsible anthropologists have found that extreme individuation and specialized role identification generally tend to accompany increasing social sophistication. Hence, most societies developed ever more abstracted, systematic ways and means, supporting progressive systemization of all aspects of culture and livelihood. Our basis and balance of power then shifted ever more from natural, biocentric essentials, to abstract stratagems and ideologies for exploitive social control.
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The principle of "use it or lose it" usually rules. As cultures become ever more urban, technical, ideological, systematic, and socially sophisticated, cultural knowledge and skills tend to decline and atrophy. As urbanism develops, sophisticated societies come to rely on symbolic abstractions, indirect knowledge access, and vicarious experience in almost all aspects of culture and life.
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In the primal ("P") and urban ("U") cases, in environments with adequate resources, certain factors are generally if not totally predominant:
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1-P: little or no specialization, thus not much need of product acquisition
1-U: specialization is dominant, almost everyone feels a need to acquire almost everything from somebody and/or somewhere else, leading inevitably to reactionary factionalism and sociopathic individualism as structurally inherent symptoms that propagate proportionally with increasing atomization, alienation, and disequity
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2-P: material industry of the culture is personal, communal, local, with little or no need for trade or imports & exports
2-U: systematic, externalized, automated industry becomes more pervasive, trade, import & export increase as production & consumption of necessities & luxuries become more pervasive and more entrenched as normative social essentials
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3-P: primal relatedness to nature, environment, and the communal group supports personal power, responsibility, resourcefulness, creativity, and wisdom
3-U: increasing urbanization, isolation & social stratification in sophisticated cultures leads to ever less general wellness, freedom, affluence, peace, and less personal empowerment, causing the cyclic rise and fall of succeeding tyrannies & plutonomies
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4-P: primal ability to create tools, shelter, clothing, art, music, culture, medicine, with mastery of hunting, communication, and visionary experience precludes the need for a system of abstracted values, money, and industrial enterprises for mass production
4-U: division of labor & automation emerged as a symptom of increasing codependency as individual capabilities decreased, complicating cultural complexification, increasing psycholinguistic sophistication; sociopolitical devolution accelerates as general empathy, compassion, ethics & values all decline
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5-P: primitive living in natural harmony, in direct relation to the environment with great mastery & self-reliance, tends to sustain healthy spirituality, appreciation, reverence & respect for life and nature
5-U: with decreasing self-reliance & mastery, respect for nature & life, spirituality & ethics all tend to devolve as materialism increases; cultural values decline as quality of life & appreciation decrease, destructive ecological impacts mount
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6-P: primal living, with appreciation of nature's infinite complexity, without cultural complication, tends to sustain great appreciation of children, elders, family, community, nature, and the importance of wellness, sanity, wisdom, compassion, responsibility & effective response
6-U: as the sophistication, abstraction, alienation, illness, inadequacy and addictive codependency of industrialized egos increase, the ability to understand the need for great appreciation and care for children, elders, family, community, and the environment decrease in direct proportion to the decline of general wellness, sanity, wisdom, compassion, responsibility & effective response
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Some of the above may seem to over-generalize, but study of non-chauvinistic anthropology will prove the essential points typically true. This is not more bad news about us moderns. The six aspects of cultural quality are useful for determining tendencies and likelihoods. Our hyper-adaptive resilience and tenacity has enabled us to survive multiple cycles of plagues, ice ages, global disaster due to volcanoes, meteor impacts, comet strikes and, more recently, our own insanity, re: nuclear power.
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We should quit pushing our luck. While we can agree that normalized insanity causes and/or supports atrocious suffering at a scale beyond all previous imagining, we can see it as a directly proportional result of gross inefficiency, pandemic immorality, sociopathic amorality, systemic stupidity, and inhumane socioeconomic policy. None of our global atrocity is necessary or permanent, nor is it sustainable. Efficient mass production of almost anything gives each of us a new opportunity for nearly unlimited development of our potential for personal evolution. While most of us may not become multidisciplinary artisans or jacks of all trades, we could become masters of several arts and/or sciences with one or more productive hobbies on the side. Hence, each of us can now be considered a missed investment opportunity.
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The behaviors, personalities, and tendencies of any human culture of any period are too complex to reduce to a few hard, inflexible axioms. Yet, deep insights and great generalizations can be expressed with amazingly helpful proverbs and pithy sayings that hold true after thousands of years. Most of the above may seem obvious to anyone who studied Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), the works of Kong Fu Zi (Confucius), the other great Sages, and some history of ancient Asia. If it seems that too many economists and students of economics are incapable of appreciating the above, then economics curricula clearly needs a major upgrade.
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“Not even God can help those who forfeit opportunity,” is as true today as it was in ancient China. We ignore our true potentials at the risk of much greater danger than we now face.
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Unlike natural values, socioeconomic "values" may have no relation to real phenomena that are beneficial and constructive, healthy and positive. Natural essentials of life have infinite, limitless, natural merit and characteristic benefits that are immeasurably valuable, despite limited perceptions, misconceptions, current trends, popular opinions, delusions and chronic cultural illness. Arbitrary, artificial values that are pathogenic products of toxic social programming typically conflict with beneficial natural values, fostering harmful or destructive, negative behavior. So, monetary values can be related not only to positive, natural values. Monetary values can be used to initiate, promote and maintain harmful, unhealthy, anti-natural attitudes, intentions, thoughts, propaganda, homicide, war, genocide, and ecocide.
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To fully examine the functional principles, we can use a real world example, like Federal Reserve notes, now erroneously called money or dollars. Fed "dollars" have no fixed, real, intrinsic or natural value. Nor do they have any relative value to anything tangible or natural. It might seem they have real or relative value based on people's belief, trust, and use, but trickery, lies, cheating, and crime are inherently involved in their issue and use. That invalidates the basis of real value, in principle, making valid relative value legally impossible. It also explains why Fed currency is an instrument of debt and a measure of the Fed's debt to the people of the USA.
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In a commercial economy with a valid money system, cash and various things are thought to have monetary value because they have relative value within the context of prevailing monetary policy, the rules (regulations) that arbitrarily determine the relative values that set the standard for equitable transactions. Equitable transactions are the actual affluence or flow of cultural interaction. In order to be of value and benefit to all the people participating in a culture and its economy, monetary transactions must be of mutual benefit per agreement and mutual understanding of the parties involved. Valid monetary exchange must be fair, valid, and viable for the sake of the commonwealth.
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Real benefit is not produced by a toxic commercial economy. A corrupted money system is really no good for anyone. Once its essential principles, rules, and operations are violated by the institutions or administrators managing a money system, it is no longer a valid money system, no longer equitable for one and all. Once perverted, money becomes systematic fraud. Our habitual tendency to confuse arbitrary and relative values of commodities with intrinsic and monetary values has always led to progressive abuse and subversion of money systems. Since corruption predates the use of money, the histories of money, financial exploitation, and official perversion of money and are inseparable.
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The Federal Reserve bank system's systematic perversion of money is causing ever mounting evidence, globally. How does the Fed create faux money and devalue it and cheat us out of the wealth of our culture? For those readers who may not be familiar with the mechanics of the essential fraud, the following description will help:
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The Federal Reserve system is a banking cartel. When we take out loans the banks give us nothing, deliver nothing, and risk nothing. In creating new loan accounts, the bank turns your good credit into debt, but not just your debt. Your local bank creates two accounts for each loan, with a positive balance for you and a negative balance for the bank's loan account, a bucket for the new money it takes to pay the principal. What new money? The Fed uses new loan account balances to inflate the amount of currency on their digital balance sheets, but without counting the interest as part of the "money" supply. Remember, in the Fed's fractional reserve system, they get to create new loans with over 90% of "your' money, but where does the bankers' interest come from? Off the top, like cream skimmed off the top of the milk of culture. So, with compound interest, the inevitable End Game scenario is built-in from the start. The Secret of Oz, an award winning documentary, makes most of the truth easily understandable:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swkq2E8mswI>
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Instead of keeping "your" money safe, the banks in a fractional reserve system (with currency based on debt) use it to drain the economy into their accounts, which is actually converting cultural capital and ever more of everything else into debt assets. That guarantees that the national debt will keep ballooning as long as the game lasts. In the End Game phase, the final scenario starts when a large majority of the players and victims realize that there is no way to escape ever worse poverty for all except an ever shrinking fraction of those who rigged the game. Even at the central banks, the "books" (digitized abstractions in cyberspace) and relations get ever more hopelessly out of balance.
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Investments in exotic abstractions to prolong liquidity and solvency become ever more vulnerable, straining ever more budgets to the breaking point. That is exactly what is happening now, most obviously in the "Eurozone" but the breakdown is global.
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Consider the following facts. According to the Constitution, legal US currency (gold and silver US coins) can have both monetary and relative value. That worked well as long as the prices of gold & silver remain fixed, with ample reserves and responsible control by Congress, permitting minting of currency only in direct proportion with actual production and services rendered. The US Constitution makes Congress responsible for direct management of the economy, the relative values, prices, supply, weights and measures of silver and gold for coinage, still our only legal tender. Without the requisite Constitutional amendment, the Federal Reserve system was initiated as an illegal, independent, private consortium allegedly serving the Treasury, but with absolute secrecy and no accountability to anyone. Congress had no right to default on its responsibility for the sake of bankers. So, legal validity of Federal Reserve debt notes is as impossible as the sustainability of a negative game designed to impoverish an ever greater percentage of players. Here, in the USA, legally, the purpose of government is protecting and serving our natural and spiritual rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the general welfare of the nation, all of us. The legally established purpose of the US government is NOT protecting and serving less than 5% of us to make them inconceivably richer than 95% of us by turning our economy into a crooked game. That is treason, not responsible governance. Yet, who demands justice or a remedy? How many of us consider a real solution for even a minute?
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Most of the 99% of us are clueless, with no idea how or why their defective socioeconomic paradigm keeps them enslaved and growing ever less rich or ever more poor. Without understanding or without intervention, the victims will not stop the process or replace it.
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The above explains why credit is now usually associated with ever mounting debt and destructive exploitation, usury, via interest, profit taken for loans, a hidden tax that grows via compound interest and devaluation of the currency. For what? The illusion of control and the thrill of winning, conquest, and devastation of the losers, us. Most currencies are now tied to ever escalating, insurmountable debt to the banking cartel, which ties US citizens to the negative pseudo-economy, the plutonomy.
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We can safely say that credit and debt instruments (like Fed "money" and CDO derivatives) tied to fiat currencies and other destructive Bubble Market games fuel Pump & Dump tactics, pure greed and corruption in action. Debt notes and their derivatives are not green, not sustainable, nor healthy, not fair, and therefore neither valid nor constitutionally legal.
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Pure credit is not the cause of debt. Credit is the basis of money and an expression of trust or confidence, of merit, reliability, and nobility (a high degree of personal ethical integrity, compassionate wisdom, empathy, kindness, courage, skill, and other valuable qualities).
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Letters of Credit, bank checks, promissory notes, and certificates of trust are ancient instruments of credit, not debt. Letters of Credit have been used in international commerce for millennia. The first certificates of deposit were essentially warehouse receipts, acknowledging the storage of material goods, precious metals, jewels, and other items that were too valuable or bulky to carry safely or conveniently. Those receipts were the precursors of all modern abstractions and tokens of material value, like currency, checks, etc. The first "bankers" were goldsmith's and other trusted artisans, inn keepers, and merchants with warehouses, vaults, and guards.
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Fraudulent debt-money systems (like the Fed) provide reliability and security only for those who control it as it creates and aggravates poverty for the vast majority by progressively inflating fake wealth for a tiny minority. Fake wealth is fake because it has nothing to do with real, positive potential, positive capacity, positive ability, positive creativity, positive empowerment, positive production, natural value, pure enjoyment, sharing, caring or healthy flow of real goods and services.
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Over 90% of fake wealth is invested directly or indirectly in destructive exploitation, negative control, bubble economics (pumping & dumping artificial assets), conflict and the causes of conflict, war, military support, oppression, suppression, recession, panic, and depression. Mass foreclosures have been engineered by corrupt elitists and sociopathic murderers for millennia.
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Consider an analogy of our global dilemma: Think of the modern Free Market Economy of Casino Capitalism as a finite, for-profit game, with finite rules, boundaries, scoring, winners and losers, a beginning and an end. We can call it NeoMonopoly. Deluded egos play for points (debt dollars, etc.), requiring ever more losers for cancerous growth, plunging the world into disaster after disaster. The goal? Winner takes all. Why? Addiction to rules, bad brain chemicals, and false notions about life, the basics, options, and karma, the universal Law of Interdependent Interaction. For most players the prime values are greed, ruthless exploitation, deception, cheating, and getting something for nothing. Naturally, such destructive disvalues ruin lives, communities, and civilizations.
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There is really only reason for an unstable, fractional reserve banking system based on fiat currency with floating exchange value: cheating the gullible, constantly, for as long as possible. Why is it so easy, popular, and persistent? Because it requires neither wisdom nor compassion, no love nor any responsibility.
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In a perverted society, before its karma ripens, corruption seems easy. Money and banking without a stable standard of relative "values" has never sustained a healthy world game with a stable economy and never will. The best way to prove that is with the board game called Monopoly played by new rules. NeoMonopoly is played with the addition of fractional reserve banking, loans, and debt-dollars with floating values set by the Banker, compound interest on all the money & loans, and income tax paid every 4 rounds. One player is the Government. In NeoMonopoly, the Government and Banker can have secret conferences and change the rules and definitions of economic terms whenever they want. Warning, the game will not be much fun while it lasts.
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Valuable Consideration
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“From the standpoint of daily life, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other — above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected... Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.” – Albert Einstein
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"If we do what is necessary, all the odds are in our favor." – Henry Kissinger
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Eq. 4.a: P^i = A + Dm – Ev(ts)VB and...
Eq. 4.b: –V + A – C(cm + D) – E = P
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Value and affluence are not sustainable when credit is subverted by manipulating the currency, using disvalue and debt to eliminate equity (fair shares & fair trade/exchange).
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Consideration is virtually synonymous with real compassion. In Christianity and, even in non-theistic Buddhism, no virtue is more highly valued than compassion. It is no accident that the words good and God are so similar. Divinity, the sacred, has clearly been regarded with reverence or awe from the origin of human culture. Long before the Neanderthal people were burying their dead with the spiritual benefit of blessings, the "Boskopf" people of ancient South Africa were burying their dead with reverence. The basic qualities, abilities, and awareness that make us human are inseparable from what most of us appreciate as essentially good, and essentially sacred.
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In the law of contracts, the term "valuable consideration" refers to compensation or "goods" exchanged. In business law, fairness is essential, a valid (true or real) legal agreement is said to be made "in good faith" for the sake of mutual benefit. In a suit, if there is no delivery of "consideration" or equitable exchange of valuable goods in good faith on the part of a plaintiff, there is no actionable loss, no basis of a judgment against the defendant. Fairness means mutual benefit, good results for both parties.
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It is wise to appreciate the principles and issues that make our highest values, our greatest qualities and benefits meaningful, making our communities viable and our lives worth living. Quality, value, and benefit are essential to the nature of compassion and miracles, and always at the heart of sacrifice. Sacrifice is not forfeiture, a loss, but a sacred offering, giving up a lesser for a greater good, essential for the best parenting, friendship, and great leadership. Sacrifice for the sake of building a relationship and for the good of a business or the community is at the heart of the ethics of the ancient Suq and Potlatch economies.
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Without sufficient scope and depth, how will economics and economists ever reach their full potential? Falling short of that, how could we then expect anything other than the failure of modern civilization?
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This world of 7 to 9 billion people is fundamentally different than one with only 1 or 2 billion people. The axioms and attitudes appropriate to 18th century social games are ecocidally irresponsible and monstrously inappropriate now. A few examples may help:
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> 90% of the fish are now gone and over 15% of the tiny things eaten near the bottom of their food chain are bits of decomposing plastic.
> acidification of the ocean (caused by pollution and excess carbon dioxide) is accelerating, killing coral reefs and reducing plankton populations (which reduces fish populations and oxygen production). 150 years ago, plankton were producing over 60% of Earth's atmospheric oxygen. Plankton mainly comes from coral reefs and the eggs of creatures that lived there.
> over 100,000 weird chemicals—most being endocrine disruptors, epigenetic mutagens—are flooding the biosphere, our life-support "system"
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We could relatively quickly generate a large catalog of problems impossible 100 years ago, or even 60 years ago. There was no way for Mr. Smith, Mr. Ricardo, or Lord Keynes to extrapolate or accurately model the dynamics of our current global crisis. Now, all the 12th to 20th century thinking that caused the crisis can only make it worse. The time is over ripe for proactive 21st century economics and a sustainable solution.
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Starting with a thorough rehab is essential. Credit and debt are not locked in a natural pair bond. Legally, in the USA, for validity and general fairness, monetary value requires maintaining a relatively fixed standard of exchange regulated by Congress. Negative credit (destructive debt)— designed to negate commonwealth and undermine stability for the fraudulent enrichment of an ever shrinking minority—lacks intrinsic cultural value, actively subverting positive value. Destructive debt and exploitation are neither healthy nor sustainable. Pure credit may have notional or monetary or relative value. Credit with only notional value has no intrinsic or real monetary value. Pure credit may have relative value related to intrinsic value, yet have no generally recognized value fixed relative to time and material value.
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A pure, uncorrupted money system is nonprofit, by definition. There can be no making profit on money or manipulating the values and measures and rules for a special interest group, without voiding its fairness and convenience for all participants. Yet, a pure money system has never survived for long. Like the Fed's bogus debt-money and credit based on a system of destructive exploitation and ever escalating debt is equally perverse. Pure credit, on the contrary, is a measure of what all people find intrinsically, naturally valuable.
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Trying to promote misunderstandings and limited perceptions of infinite phenomena of limitless value and infinite benefit is a symptom of sociopathic insanity or worse. Trying to achieve and maintain pervasive acceptance of false values to maintain destructive exploitation of an entire civilization is a monstrous evil. Sophisticated systems that assign "fixed" monetary values to things, "goods" or services that are not fixed or not good are inherently perverse. To the degree that their artificial conventions (rules & fundamental assumptions) and arbitrary values contradict natural values, socioeconomic systems' are perverse and subversive. When we no longer understand or even recognize what is pure, good, healthy or wise, then self-imposed, self-enforced slavery is guaranteed.
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Initially, a pure money system can exist and function without contradicting or conflicting with natural values. In a land of mostly disinformed people afflicted with corruption and cunning ego demons, pure systems are unsustainable. The least sustainable conventional systems are money systems. In a culture infected by a corrupted society run by corrupt exploiters, pure money systems inevitably turn into financial systems that lead to Plutonomy, an essentially negative World Game; a pervasive, parasitic devastation of the host culture by the least noble, least wise, least appreciative, most destructive egos.
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The longer and lower a culture falls into corruption, subversion of natural values, and financial exploitation, the more confusion grows into the generally accepted norm, the status quo. When general confusion about values, merit, credit and money is the basic condition of socialized mentality, vulnerability to further deception, delusion, corruption, abuse and exploitation increases proportionally, to a point. When ethical and moral confusion, corruption, and deception become pervasively dominant, the most perverted egos feel free to flaunt their anti-natural, anti-ethical disvalues and exploits. Their arrogance comes to seem unbeatable, beyond question or challenge, free to spawn unlimited corruption, greed, hostility and insanity. The extent and intensity of corruption and dysfunction then explode more rapidly than the general confusion, delusion, and corruption increase. That is characteristic of a plutonomy's End Game phase.
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As the essential, natural values, ethics, merit and morality of society decline, the tolerance of the losers, the victim-class, declines proportionally as their population increases. As the population of victims increases in inverse proportion to their decreasing quality of life and the big exploiters' percentage of the population decreases in inverse proportion to the exponential increase of their winnings. As in all previous End Game scenarios of essentially negative civilization, Plutonomy always becomes as unsustainable as a game of Monopoly with only one or two players remaining.
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Lawful Money
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“Nothing is more confusing than income tax.” – Albert Einstein
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"The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously." – Henry Kissinger
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Eq. 5: CV + c – (mD) = Wgs
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Credit (C) empowered by value (V), plus currency (c), minus mandated manipulation (m) of debt (D), provides sustainable growth of wealth (Wgs).
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So far, urban civilization has proved that we cannot handle money or power. Over the last five millennia, all forms of modern currency and “money” have proven vulnerable to exploitive manipulation and systemic abuse. Yap Islanders have no such trouble with their ancient stone ring tokens, some of which are so big and heavy they are left where they sit. In that case, it is ownership that circulates, not the currency. All existing forms of currency, on their own, are inadequate for establishing a sustainable monetary system. Money and corruption are too tightly interwoven to separate them without new theory and an economic paradigm supporting biocentric values. To use a money system without turning it into a tool of mass tyranny and financial destruction, we need a very different kind of currency.
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A generally overlooked or suppressed fact that made Julius Caesar so popular and so hated by his rivals among the Senate and the plutocrats behind them, was his introduction of bronze coins for the less than wealthy Romans. With smaller denominations than the gold, electrum, and silver coins in use as money, the wealth of the empire could flow more freely through more hands, enlivening culture, but weakening the plutocracy’s control of the rate and direction of flow. It was a brilliant (but deadly) stroke of monetary genius for gaining the enthusiastic support of the unwealthy majority (which was probably the main reason for Caesar's assassination. Naturally, the “new” monetary invention was very old in a more civilized Asian nation (we now call it ancient China).
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The “Founding Fathers” of the USA made two very grave errors in the crafting of the Constitution, or else were more severely compromised than usually thought possible. The US Constitution says that Congress must regulate the economy (by regulating the weights and measures of silver and gold); and it also makes silver and gold the only lawful money acceptable by government in the USA.
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In saying so little about our money system (and nothing about protecting our economy), and embodying such severe contradiction in what it does say, the Constitution was doomed to uneconomic misinterpretation, exploitation, and subversion by the ever clever, super-greedy, power hungry big bankers ever since. That doomed Congress to becoming increasingly corrupt and incompetent to sustain a valid money system. Silver and gold always were and are inadequate for use as currency in any society of imperfect people. Gold and silver are commodities, and their availability and relative value can be too easily manipulated for use as a sustainably valid medium of fair exchange. For example, geologists now agree that silver may be more rare than gold and, since it may always be more commonly used in industry, there may come a time when the relative monetary values fluctuates more than now.
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Information from the Federal Reserve Corporation says that money can be viable only if currency is somewhat scarce. That is absolutely false. Why? Scarce currency is only an advantage to the people who make it scarce by abusing, manipulating, and perverting it. Perverting (inflating, devaluing) a currency to manipulate and exploit other people is a game almost as old as money. Money cannot be a commodity traded for profit, nor “created” for compound interest, for profit, linking it to destructive debt.
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The other essential principles for keeping a currency’s value stable are 1) a commonly known basis of relative value and 2) issuing it in exact or very close proportion to the creation of real value, goods, services, etc. That seems difficult to achieve and sustain in a corrupt society, but not as difficult as ending and preventing parasitic abuse. QE, for example, “quantitative easing” is nothing other than printing more currency for bankers, financiers, currency traders, and hedge fund vultures who want more convenience and perpetual fleecing rights. Instead of scarcity, what makes money of value is convenience for trade, for the exchange of objects that are not easy to carry around.
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No matter how close to perfectly unfakeable we make material tokens of monetary value, the essential weakness remains. Most people tend to get confused about the difference between money (the system), currency, commodities, and values. When confusion rules, it makes no difference what laws or constitutional prescriptions say about the rules of money. As long as there are sociopathic exploiters and a way to propagate confusion and deception, sociopaths will exploit the confused. Additionally, as long as the refining and distribution of metals are subject to exploitable market forces, any metallic coinage may be subject to subversion by systematic manipulation and/or counterfeiting. That always subverts and inevitably degrades or destroys the host economy. Commodity based “money” is never sustainably equitable in a corrupt society. Still, we can consider the relative merits of a superior alloy for use in a culture in transition, one being cured of systemic corruption.
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We cannot have a pure money system until we have pure people. So, we now need a hybrid economy — negative for-profit debt-dollars counter-balanced by positive nonprofit green credit. Yet, even if a state of optimum understanding and acceptance comes to exist, it will not be a state of perfection. As long as humans think that a system of valuation using “hard” currency and win/lose exchange is necessary and preferable to non-monetary credit, there will be a high probability of systematic abuse and exploitation, cheating as a potential pandemic, yet irrational demand will persist as long as common confusion.
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So, we need a more practical currency, highly resistant to counterfeiting and not easily converted to use as a commodity. Gold and silver are clearly unsuitable materials for an ideal medium of exchange, not only because they are easily marketable commodities and somewhat easy to fake or dilute (by coring & refilling), but also because of their history with all the associated confusion, emotion, delusion, market fluctuation and manipulation. A useful and sustainable monetary system needs a more reliable form of hard currency and a new medium, a new coin metal alloy.
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To satisfy the relatively persistent desire for a substantial token of value and to discourage counterfeiting, the ideal alloy must be generally recognized as valuable, yet hard to fake. The ideal modern metal would also be very useful and durable. Small denominations, like pennies, nickles, dimes, quarters, and modern dollar coins might be improved by adding portions of iron for toughness, lower cost, and magnetic susceptibility. More valuable coins can contain gold and silver. The ideal alloy for higher values would be tough, not too heavy, and esthetically attractive. Ultimate usefulness and durability requires an alloy so complex and exotic that it would be very expensive and extremely difficult to fake or duplicate. In this modern world of easy international commerce and mass production technology, the ideal coin metal must not only be very hard to replace, but also easy to authenticate, easy to test with multiple methods, inexpensively.
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We can call the ideal monetary alloy, Monalloy. It could contain approximately 49% gold and silver, plus a significant percentage of iron, copper, and other base metals included for toughness, workability, low melting point, and efficient production. Various strategic and/or rare metals could be added to enhance resistance to easy counterfeiting, corrosion, and tarnishing. The use of iron would be good for toughness and magnetic testing.
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One device could quickly check a coin’s multiple properties: magnetism, electrical conductivity & resistivity, color, reflectivity, acoustics, physical appearance, and weight. Passing such a complex test would be very difficult, but not impossible. More sophisticated testing is possible using acid or microscopic inspection, and other methods of scientific analysis.
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Now, who really knows the value of a penny or a quarter or one of the Fed’s paper debt-dollars? The international debt valuation process is mysterious and changes from nanosecond to nanosecond.
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How would new Monalloy coins be valued and issued into circulation? The US Treasury already issues low value coins of copper, nickle alloy, and plated brass (bronze) based on theorems and policies invented by the Fed’s board of directors. As per the constitutional regulations for lawful money, gold and silver coins, the Treasury could issue Monalloy coinage into circulation in direct proportion to assets, goods, and services received. The US Constitution mentions that method for payment of members of the houses of Congress, but the same is required for payment of all debts for goods and services rendered. Constitutionally, the value of one US Dollar of legal tender is approximately one ounce of silver. The cultural usefulness and basic convenience and reliability were supplied by the use of weight as the means of denomination and relative value. So, an upgrade of the standard can be established. Weight is still best for valuation of modern, more useful and dependable coinage.
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For example, the smallest Monalloy token might weigh one half (0.5) gram. The largest medallion might weigh 50 grams, about 40% more than a one ounce gold coin. Naturally, unless the relative market values of the metals are fixed by law, as they should be in a well regulated nation using hard currency, spot values of Monalloy tokens and medallions would be determined by current market prices of the constituent metals. Now, that information can be easily and continuously monitored and posted, systematically, via websites, cell phones, POS terminals, cash registers, vending machines, and so on.
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What about an alternative to minting of Monalloy medallions by national government? Well, if the Fed has a right to issue debt-notes and call them legal tender, the states have a constitutional right to issue medallions and tokens that are not devalued by secret agreements of the Fed’s board members. Since the US government has defaulted on its Constitutional obligations and done away with our original metallic money standards, we may find it more expedient to let the States issue non-monetary tokens and medallions. If the State governments are too corrupt to provide good service and protect our rights to the pursuit of happiness, freedom from debt slavery, and a lively life, the Constitution guarantees our right to take care of ourselves. Monalloy medallions and tokens can be produced and issued by anyone, by any organization or any international alliance.
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How would a minter, official or private, cover the costs? New Monalloy coins could be sold or exchanged for raw metals with a fixed integral margin or, better yet, exchanged for Green Credit units. A private minter, contracting with a government, might receive a tax exemption or subsidy, but that still counts as a loss against the value of the coin/medallion. Non-monetary compensation with pure credit eliminates the need for monetary “loss” of value per coin/medallion to cover the cost of production, storage, security, management, and initial distribution.
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Equitable long-term use of even the best coinage can only be sustained in a fair, well governed economic system. Without a complementary nonprofit system to counter balance the dominant for-profit debt system, maintaining a sustainable and truly equitable monetary system will be impossible due to systemic corruption and abuse.
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Continued: see Awareness & Value part 7 - 9
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For more on the new nonprofit community credit system and related issues, visit "Green Community Credit System" group on Facebook and The Greenbook in progress at: <http://mm-greenbook.blogspot.com>
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Beyond Plutonomy
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“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” – Albert Einstein
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"Whoever controls the food supply can control the people. Those who control energy can control continents. Those who control money control the world." – Henry Kissinger
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Eq. 6.a: C^i = V + ts where B + (vc)E = A and...
Eq. 6.b: D – VB – C(cts) – E = P^i
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Infinite credit equals value plus sustainable trust, where benefit plus viable currency times equity equals affluence; and debt minus value times benefit minus credit times currency, trust, and sustainability, without equity, equals infinite poverty.
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When asked what he thought of the Federal Reserve system, President Harry Truman answered, “Well, I reckon it’s like having the foxes run the hen house because they have lots of experience inside.”
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Why would anyone want to invest any trust, time, or energy in establishing a sustainable alternative to Plutonomy? Who could believe an alternative is either possible or sustainable?
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For the last 5,000 years, plutocrats and their dupes have done nothing but become ever more addicted to playing their game the way it was always played: pump up the bubble, then dump stocks & other inflated “assets” to milk the cows, skim off the cream, suck up ever more of the milk, scoop up ever more property at rock bottom bargain prices, subvert and degrade the socioeconomic paradigm, destabilize, pervert, and replace healthy cultural economy with Plutonomy, impoverish the victims (us), and buy ever more politicians, judges, and thugs. Is their game sustainable? No.
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Plutonomy is NeoMonopoly, a perverse game played with an imaginary pie that makes the big bankers the winners every time. It starts by turning the cultural economy into a for-profit commercial economy then subverting and progressively perverting with faux money, for-profit debt-dollars. It ends whenever play is no longer sustainable, either economically or ecologically or both.
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After all that’s happened, how can anyone think they can afford to keep investing time, energy, and trust in the plutocrats’ End Game?
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Will the plutocrats and their minions give up their game without a fight or a total catastrophe? If they had any interest in preventing global catastrophe or enough knowledge and wisdom, the world would be a much healthier place to live now, the US economy would be fine, and there would be little or no poverty here or elsewhere. If plutocrats, plutonomists, and their dupes knew what they were doing, if they understood the principles of sustainable culture — of healthy living, of Karma, the universal law of interdependent interaction — if they knew that there is a superior alternative, then they would quit playing Plutonomy. If they have enough humanity and intelligence left to learn, consider, and embrace the complete paradigm of compassionate economics and sustainable culture, they will join the crusade to educate those of us suffering from plutonomic deception and poverty.
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Will it come to a fight? Not really, because nonprofit community credit will be a counter balancing complementary opposite of the for-profit debt-dollar game, both being subsystems of a hybrid economy. As long as the bankers and speculators get to keep playing their game and cooperative community credit stimulates cultural (economic) activity, which it will, the new dual subsystem economy will be better for everybody. Besides, there is nothing illegal about a nonprofit community credit system, so fighting it will be both impractical and counter-productive for the for-profit players.
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Will we do it and succeed? Do we want a sustainable, enlightened civilization? What do we really want? Do most of us, or even most of the Big Winners really want winning at the cost of global disaster? Will we choose wise use of natural resources, human talent, potential, and social success, or will we choose inevitable failure, collapse, the Fall of Civilization? Either way, the outcome will be guaranteed by how we deal with the faux money Box.
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"Economics" lacking acknowledgment and realistic assessment of corruption and its effects is definitely plutonomics, and plutocracy may as well be called demonocracy. Influences, attitudes, forces, and behaviors that degrade or destroy the quality of life might be due to neurosis or psychosis but, ethically, they can be considered demonic, evil. What can we do about it? It now seems that we need debt-dollars to start doing anything new or otherwise. Yet, as we can see now, there will be no positive result for billions of us if culture stays stuck in the End Game scenario of global NeoMonopoly (Plutonomy).
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The ruling international financial wizards and their political puppets are stuck in this dilemma of their making. The strings get ever more tangled and frayed. There is now no way to balance all their overcooked books and salvage what’s left of ethical society. The plutonomics paradigm allows no affordable solution for exponentially increasing unemployment, rapidly increasing poverty, increasing malnutrition & illness, and a real solution for Peak Oil, Peak Water, and international resource wars, with prosperity for all.
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Einstein realized that if the world is destroyed, it will not be because of the people who do evil, but because the rest of us do nothing about it. To some extent, humanity may always be afflicted by sociopathic illness, but if we want a healthy, enjoyable civilization and sustainable success, we must choose the best case win-win scenario and do what it takes to make it real, collectively. Plutocracy and Plutonomy will not cure themselves. They must be abandoned or by-passed by the majority of the people it takes to sustain a lively culture and a robust economy, while Plutonomy either peters out or collapses due to its own intrinsic illogic.
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Still, despite preposterous propaganda and partial faux solutions, the seven essentials of sustainable success and four fundamental modes of relationship are increasingly ignored as Consumer Society devolves through the cycle of malignant urbanism, boom, bust, and aftermath.
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Yes, Plutonomy can cause total collapse of an economy, its monetary system and, if it lasts long enough, it destroys the host civilization or empire. Plutonomy is not a game for living human beings, but for alienated, perverted, denatured egos. A society of alienated egos is a house divided against itself, innately self-defeating, fundamentally schizoid and unsustainable. We will make the best decisions and succeed only with the best possible understanding of the problem, the alternative, and our best options for sustainable success.
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In a for-profit socioeconomic system, ecocidal activities can be and are monetarily valued more than ecologically sane, healthy activities. In a for-profit culture with fractional reserve banking and unstable debt-currency, the national debt and plutonomy become increasingly unsustainable and unacceptable ever more rapidly. The "books" and balances get more hopelessly unbalanced as time goes by. There is ever less currency to go around for the losers, with ever fewer jobs as the bubble rapidly deflates. Plutonomy is clearly the inevitable End Game phase of Casino Capitalism.
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There is no good reason to believe that the economy of Star Trek's Federation is any less valid than the multinational banksters' Plutonomy game. Indeed, the fictional economics of Star Trek are really more valid than plutonomics. How is the economic system of a fictional federation of planets like real world economics?
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The Federation in Star Trek's vision of the future uses a modernized form of the Gifting Economy of the ancient primitive cultures. What may be the most remarkable similarity in the economics of Star Trek and primitive gifting economies is the general lack of obsession with competitive scoring and hoarding. In both models, life, people and biocentric values are considered of prime importance, and the economic functions are considered mere conveniences, no more exciting or desirable than a ubiquitous utility or household utensil.
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Star Trek's fictional model is presented as the economy of a relatively egalitarian meritocracy in a not too distant future, but the absence of a commercial economy was no problem here for hundreds of thousands of years. On the contrary, the non-biocentric economics of corporate commercialism caused and aggravated many of our worst problems from the start. Primitive cultures have had serious problems but, before the commercial systemization of money, no one turned disasters into highly automated industries.
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Nobel prize winning economist Dr. Amartya Sen appreciates the humane values of the ancient Suq system. From over 5,000 years ago — when knotted cords, skins, and clay tablets were used for invoices, receipts, and accounting records — what most modern Westerners call "losing" has been considered just as important, valuable, and useful as what many of us call "winning" in a transaction. In the Suq, the bazaar (a truly open market), not only are there no fixed, pre-set prices on goods and services, the object or goal of "doing business" is culture and personal fulfillment — as a member of the community. The very identity of each participant is integral to the quality of the relationships that make every individual's life worth living and that make their community and their culture what they are. In principle, each participant is intrinsically, infinitely valued and each interaction is a unique, intrinsically valuable expression of the life of the community and the culture. Ideally, each sane, spiritually healthy participant in the Suq economy is primarily focused on thriving as a member of a healthy family, enjoying life in a healthy community within a lively culture, with a sustainable future for countless generations.
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Are all participants and transactions perfect examples of the Suq's basic principles? No, but all are viable because the principles are biocentric, ethical, sustainable, understood and honored as such, like air, water, day and night. The prevailing values of the Suq foster and support healthy sustainability and humane identity.
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Like the Suq, a nonprofit community credit system is an infinite, win-win game played for the sake of well-being and the love of life. So, credit and debt must be disentangled.
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Credit is one of the most ancient measures of wealth, accomplishment, virtue, and power, the ability to create value and produce or generate greater benefit and commonwealth. Why were so many ancient spiritual cultures subverted and conquered by contact with people of corrupt cultures with newer technology and more sophisticated socioeconomic systems?
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The most ancient cultures that remained intact until our 20th century, retained a very sustainable, relatively healthy, biocentric sociocultural paradigm, sustaining a worldview and mind-set, fostering optimal use of resources we now call human capital and natural resources. The healthiest, most adaptive of the most remote ancient cultures—even in seemingly desolate environments—fostered an inherent understanding that the environment, Earth, and nature itself were the basic and ultimate store of wealth, freely accessible to every extended family group. That original grace was only sustained as long as exposure to new technology, tools, utensils, clothing, and alien social norms failed to belittle and demoralize the people of more primal cultures. The first "Fall" from the grace and innocence of primitive harmony was surely wrought by the seduction and temptation of the wonders of seemingly superior technology, of the unimaginably different, almost magical world of the arrogant devils who brought it with them.
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Why were so many civilizations of the past— and this one—seemingly doomed to repeat the same self-destructive cycle? Like it or not, we humans are the great imitators of the animal kingdom and creatures of habit. We can now jump back to modern times with more piercing insight. On subverting and usurping the money system to enslave sophisticated modern societies, John Maynard Keynes said:
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"The real difficulty in changing any enterprise lies not in developing new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones."
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"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. In the latter stages of the war all the belligerent governments practised, from necessity or incompetence, what a Bolshevist might have done from design. Even now, when the war is over, most of them continue out of weakness the same malpractices…
... "In this autumn of 1919 in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes. The reaction from the exertions, the fears, and the sufferings of the past five years is at its height. Our power of feeling or caring beyond the immediate questions of our own material well-being is temporarily eclipsed…. We have been moved already beyond endurance, and need rest. Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly. For these reasons the true voice of the new generation has not yet spoken, and silent opinion is not yet formed. To the formation of the general opinion of the future I dedicate this book…"
<rwer.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/the-supercommittee-of-the-one-percent-goes-down-in-flames>
<econ161.berkeley.edu/economists/keynes.html>
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In principle, Plutonomy really has nothing to do with money or economics. To understand the similarities and differences more easily, we can review the principles of Monopoly, the board game, and compare them to the basics of money and Plutonomy.
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Like Monopoly, Plutonomy has rules that make increasing disequity and imbalance a structural, functional necessity of the game. That is why there can be a winner or winners and losers, which is essential to the nature of the game. As in Monopoly, Plutonomy also incentivizes sociopathic exploitation, regardless of negative potentials and consequences for the community. The main differences in that aspect are mainly of scale and severity of consequences. The severity of a plutonomy's consequences is almost entirely due to the use of fractional reserve banking with inflatable, tradable (volatile), fiat currency, the mechanisms of compound interest, inflation, and fraud. In both games, "community" is irrelevant, but in Plutonomy and Casino Capitalism, it is an actual hindrance to winners take all at all cost. Another difference between Monopoly and the "real world" games is that a single winner of Monopoly may actually take all. Unless there is a real Devil, there is no one Big Winner of Plutonomy, and the top 1%ers can't really take all, but they can and do make the quality of life exponentially worse while the End Game scenario devolves toward ever more barbaric and ecocidal neoFascist neoFeudalism.
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Why should we think that ever more ecocidal neofascism is an inevitable result of the Plutonomy game? Because ethics, morality, sanity, compassion and responsible concern for future generations or other living beings are all equally irrelevant to the aim and rules of the game, and destructive debt is the enabling functional principle. Remember, the prime motive and supreme disvalues of Plutonomy are profit, score and winning, no matter what.
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Negative karmic momentum does not redirect itself, and that problem is the project of behavioral economists. A leader in the field, Professor of Economics and Psychology George Lowenstein, of Carnegie Mellon University, revealed good news to Discover Magazine (Jan/Feb 2010, pg. 32 & 33). Lowenstein explained why smart people sometimes act in very stupid, self-destructive ways, as individuals and groups.
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Why do large groups of humans, societies and civilizations, repeatedly fall prey to predators who corrupt and pervert their monetary systems and socioeconomic paradigms? The predators need no rational models or science to successfully plunder and ruin a culture. Like killer whales, plutocrats need only animal intelligence and ruthless instinct to herd schools of ignorant investors and voters into a whirling mass of confusion, then move in for the big feast. Experienced financial predators are no more sophisticated than a highly effective pack of wolves or primitive hunters who took advantage of seasonal migrations along ancient routes traveled for countless generations. In fact, modern financial predators may be less intelligent than primitive hunters who set grass fires to drive whole herds over cliffs. Financial predators are still practicing overkill after 5,000 years of atrociously destructive history. What's worse? Primitive hunters feel reverent respect for their prey and kill to eat and live, not for a perverse pleasure or greed or desire to conquer and enslave. Modern human predators are not so spiritually attuned to the reality of universal life and spirit.
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They may not have the whole solution, but behavioral economists look for and study our actual passions and obsessions, especially our habitual passion "for persuading ourselves that what we want to believe is true" regardless of our own disbelief. This pursuit is pricelessly valuable. Chronic failure to remember the simple dynamics of bubble markets is a prime example. Lowenstein cited herd mentality and its sense of false security, safety in numbers. Nothing new there, but scientifically studying how neurological responses to danger, threats, and fears relate to economics is. People were not scared by the amazing Mr. Madoff's improbable success because it didn't trigger their primate fear & threat response functions. Behavioral economics has studied the psychosocial dynamics of pessimism, optimism, risk aversion, risk tolerance, adrenaline addiction, and wacko bravado, irrational risk taking.
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The pathology of irresponsible credit card use is actually due to sick psychosocial elements of our addictive socioeconomic system. Brain scans show credit cards having an anesthetic effect on the brain, literally suppressing rational consideration of scary issues and outcomes.
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For example: Since we can make "affordable" monthly payments, credit cards also trick the brain into not feeling like we're going into debt. We can now do something about the plague of plastic debt. Theoretically, policy makers and corporate sustainability experts can integrate healthy strategy with methods that help consumers (and voters) make nondestructive choices. If this were a simpler, more perfect world, producers could protect the sustainability of their annual business cycles by protecting customers from themselves.
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We now have hard numbers and actual proof — showing the psychosocial dynamics determining real production and actual performance — making previous notions of "profit incentive" obsolete. For simple, routine tasks, increasing compensation works well, to a point. Beyond that point the curve goes flat. In complex, high risk endeavors, high stakes tend to make the brain narrow our focus, limiting or impairing performance. People can care more about winning or losing than their work or why their doing it. When high performance requires creativity, expansive thinking, and innovative approaches to complex problems with unobvious odds for solution, high stakes and high pay are typically counter-productive. Therefore, if they were perfectly impartial, ethical agents, directors and stockholders of corporations could stop rewarding heartless sociopaths with insanely excessive salaries, bonuses, and ultra-huge severance packages.
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We now have scientific proof that the Devil's bargains are really bad deals. Behavioral economists see greed as desperation, they call it hyper-motivation. Lowenstein sees greed as "the antithesis of self-interest." Greed makes us motivated to get one thing at the expense of other things that can be more valuable or important, either immediately or in the long run. The mechanism that keeps us susceptible is called loss aversion. Socially induced envy and jealousy make the brain register a sense of loss, making us desperate to get out of the illusory hole. The ever more popular tendency to cheat is not from a sense of limited options, but a deep seated sense of deficiency, insecurity, and inadequacy. That can be remedied with compassionate education and/or skillful therapy.
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Behavioral economics seeks to show how our individual and collective shortsightedness (subliminal stupidity) is caused by the brain's "present bias preference" (we want what we want now). Our tendency to laziness and haste, often employed to work against us, can be used for our best possible benefits, enabling our protectors to devise clever methods for effective wellness programs — for overeaters, over-spenders, over-payers, and over-earners. Since the last two types are heartless corporations and sociopathic executives, therapy will not produce globally transformative results until rational governance is pervasive, but healthier social programming can redirect our collective momentum, upward, possibly more rapidly than we can imagine.
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Cultures that survive an End Game scenario relatively intact have the option of restarting a pristine version of the conventional socioeconomic game or else starting or continuing an entirely new nonprofit game based on infinite values and ethical integrity. All either alternative requires for long-term viability is effective assessment of history, seeing how not to make the same mistakes again, and creating a win-win scenario.
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How can we make sense of the existing system and any new, transitional system? How can we understand the potentials of a completely new socioeconomic paradigm? Will a hybrid economy with a pure credit side spin out of control like an oblivious money game? Do we have enough time to accomplish a cure before total collapse unleashes more chaotic destruction?
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Paradigm upgrading and cultural evolution are required and take time but, in crisis, our cultural learning can go into an almost vertical peak mode. Fortunately, unlike the Federal Reserve system, green nonprofit credit lacks the structural elements and mechanics that create snowballing debt, interest (profit), and systemic cheating. Pure credit offers no positive recognition, measure, or reward for negativity and disvalue. All the popular notions that keep making the rich richer faster, as everybody else grows poorer faster, are simply notions, assumptions and beliefs that are all optional and as fictional as the value and legality of fraudulent debt currency.
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As a healthy, nonprofit sociocultural trend arises from the slimey ruins of global corruption, the awarding or giving of credit for what has infinite natural value will come easy. For example, why let a government agency, like the US Treasury, issue our national credit units (dollars)? Why make a business firm pay a professional athlete or actor several million dollars per year for a decade or so? Without the hypnotic illusion of debt-dollars, each of us can award credit directly to whoever we see deserving it, on the spot. Why keep believing that wealth is a measure of taking, winning, cheating, hoarding, heartless selfishness, and maniacal greed? Why assume that we will not use a superior alternative if it is available before the bitter end of a totally ruined civilization?
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A major advantage of a nonprofit socioeconomic paradigm is the irrelevancy of irrational, negative notions of wealth and success. As in many ancient gifting cultures, true wealth is a measure of giving, sharing, and the ability to give, share, and create value or benefit. Will formerly middle-class families and communities refuse a rapid return to affluence and a viable transition to sustainable wealth?
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The Plutonomy Game is unsustainable and unfixable primarily because most Big Winners (the plutocrats) and most losers now believe that scoring and hoarding are more important than natural, life-enhancing, life-sustaining values and healthy benefits. That is partly because most of the players have forgotten that they are not totally independent, separate beings, but communal beings dependent on all other forms of being.
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Even without realization of the whole truth about human being, everybody can See that the End Game enforces the ultimate worst case scenario for the losers, the 99% and the biosphere, the planetary life-support system of 100% of us. If the Big Winners let the game end but prevent starting over from scratch, there is no way to restore cultural equity and socioeconomic balance. As long as score and winning are more important than real value and pervasive well-being, there is no way to balance The Books with any strategy other than changing the rules of the game, radically. Yet, changing the rules would make it a different game. Unfortunately, most human animals fear and loathe even the thought of changing their favorite assumptions, habits, and games, no matter how negative and destructive they are. Fortunately, as conditions get radically worse, we get less resistant to radical change for the better.
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To resolve our chronic human dilemma, we must accomplish the greatest achievement in the history of humanity. We must discover and fully understand all the subconscious defensive mechanisms and systemic cultural delusions that keep us from abolishing destructive, negative socioeconomic games. No matter how big, finite games and systems have limits, beginnings, and ends. The destructive debt-dollar game, like all win/lose games, is finite and terminally limited. There is no reason to assume that modern Plutonomy essentially differs from the games of empire once played by the English, the Spanish, the ancient Romans, Mayans, and all the rest. We now have no good reason to doubt that a viable update of the ancient gifting/sharing economy will work well for another ten thousand years or more.
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Community Credit
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“The only sure way to avoid making mistakes is to have no new ideas.” – Albert Einstein
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"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it."
– Henry Kissinger
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GCCS Basics
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Eq. 7: VE + BC – (DP + mc) = A^i(vt + s)
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"V" stands for value of "E" for equity, plus "B" for benefit times "C" for credit, minus "D" for debt times "P" for poverty and "m" for manipulation of "c" for currency; and that equals "A^i" for infinite affluence, times "v" for viability, times "t" for trust plus "s" for sustainability. That equation is the core of the formula for socioeconomic recovery and success that lasts as long as we sustain equity, benefit, and nonprofit credit.
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Eq. 8: C ^c + (–E–V) – Bg = P^i
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C ^c, concentration of credit + the disequity of disvalue – Bg, general benefit, creates proportionally increasing poverty. When the unlimited spiritual poverty (and lack of ethical integrity) of a minority undermines fairness and intrinsic value to deprive the majority of benefit, a lose-lose result is assured. Nature guarantees the yin-yang relativity of spiritual poverty and “material” poverty. Letting evil rule society is a a bad bet on a no win scenario.
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If we want a lively culture with a lively economy and modest affluence for all, we need a new game that over 80% of us can play successfully. That means having our own pie back and not letting bankers, gamblers, and cheaters steal it or poison it. We need a cultural economy with a nonprofit credit system.
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Green Credit is a modern version of the Gifting Economy our ancient ancestors used before anyone thought of using symbolic tokens for exchange. Green Credit is also somewhat like the millennial “Suq” system used in town markets of the Middle East and Asia, combined with the economics of Star Trek: no fixed “prices” and no for-profit monetary currency, no destructive debt or financial manipulation.
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How can any kind of credit be green? Green means thriving in harmony while fostering the ability of all generations to do the same. Green economics is what we do with each other to enhance the quality of life. Plutonomics, the negative economics of plutocracy, is what sociopaths do to each other and us, with no compassion, regard or consideration of the consequences for all generations.
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Pure green credit and a global Green Community Credit System (GCCS) will do what no local currency or alternative monetary system can sustain.
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There is no way to make currency a debt-based commodity for speculative “trading” (betting) without destroying its value, validity, and sustainability. So, as long as local currencies are linked — directly or indirectly — to the corrupt socioeconomic paradigm of the bubble market Pump & Dump Game, communities will suffer consequences. As debt-based official currency systems go on faltering, inflating, deflating, and failing to serve as viable media of equitable exchange, local currencies become ever more vulnerable. Even local currencies denominated in units of time still depend on users’ notions of relative value based on the dominant national currency, binding them to it and its fate, via its corrupt conceptual matrix and the consequences.
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In this era of global financial insanity, the only way to sustain thriving, growing local economies is with a large community credit network with no link to the negative socioeconomic paradigm and the perverted monetary concepts of Plutonomy.
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Why trust Federal Reserve debt-dollars? The Fed may seem to run the only game in town, but a Fed “dollar” is really a micro-CDO (collateralized debt obligation), a toxic financial commodity, enabling exponential loss of positive cultural value, suppression of cultural and economic activity and growth, ever bigger score for the Big Winners and ever lower score (poverty) for the losers. Why use a nonprofit community credit system, instead of a local currency? Green Credit will give us back our sustainable pie of cultural wealth for all; and the Fed’s Plutonomy “money” is immoral, anti-ethical, and anti-green. Not being based on a parasitic debt-based system, nonprofit Green Credit will not be affected as the global financial game gets worse.
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Key advantages that make nonprofit community credit superior; it is...
. a non-taxable instrument of public benefit
. a not-for-profit (nontaxable) community service
. interest-free, thus free of constant systemic losses
. free of inflation, deflation & cyclic disaster
. stronger if the global financial system collapses
. a sustaining alternative to Plutonomy debt-dollars
. for lively culture, not scoring, hoarding & cheating
. not more important than life, health, children, etc.
. not a commodity, not material, not limited
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GCCS Startup Issues
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How does a nonprofit credit system work, and how do we start?
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1. In practice, a local alternative currency and a pure nonprofit credit system are not so different. Both systems use symbolic units enabling accounting and exchange of goods and services. Both are forms of credit, usable by credit unions or banks, but nonprofit community credit needs no link to national debt-based currencies. So, there is no retarding startup lag or ongoing limitation and suppression of flow due to mainstream financial decline, for-profit speculation, or exploitive monetary policy.
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. “Monetary” scarcity is an unnecessary, exploitive scam. Unlike alternative currency startups, instead of “buying” Green Credits with scarce Fed debt-dollars, credits are issued into circulation in exchange for goods or services — in direct proportion to real contributions to cultural activity and growth. Unlike the Fed’s exponential debt system, issuing Green Credits in proportion to the actual creation of value and flow of exchange eliminates inflation and deflation. Freeing credit and exchange from bondage to for-profit currency and compound interest frees local economies from cycles of inflation, depression, and boundless growth of poverty.
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3. The Green Community Credit System network starts with the Global Community Development Association network — growing organically from town & city, bioregional, tribal, and state, to national level CDAs. Checks, receipts, and smart cards can be used to exchange Green Credits for goods and services. Awards, gifts, grants, and investments can be given via email and GCCS enabled websites, networks, and systems like Paypal.
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4. Like some stable local currencies, Green Credits can be used by Credit Unions for loans to fund business development, construction, etc., and to keep them from failing.
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5. Local merchants, restaurants, service providers, and professionals can start using Green Credits like promo premiums or discount coupons; and, since Green Credits are better than debt-dollars, there is no loss in using them like coupons.
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6. Once Green Credits are commonly accepted, businesses, government agencies, schools, hospitals/clinics, etc., can use them for full or partial alternatives to Fed-dollar payroll and/or bonuses.
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7. Green Credits can be used as a tax-free, bond-free (debt-free) way to “fund” public works and community development projects.
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8. For converting the many virtual e-currencies online, Green Credits will serve as a stable medium of exchange for individuals, businesses — even banks — NGOs and governments.
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9. As ever more people ask Facebook, Youtube, eBay, and Amazon to adopt the GCCS Award Star system (instead of or in addition to the Like/Unlike thumbs), and ever more businesses use Green Credit, online and off, the major networks will start using it.
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10. Transactions with Green Credit units online will function much like exchanges with virtual Fed dollars in cyberspace, which now accounts for about 90% of all Fed “dollars” accounted as “existing” in the global Plutonomy game.
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11. Green Credit can be introduced and used by progressive co-ops, associations, online gamers, musicians, artists, and activist groups.
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12. Inevitably, Green Credits will be accepted as a complementary economic support system and issued by Visa, the World Bank, the UN, and governments.
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Conclusions & Predictions
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“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.” – Albert Einstein
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"For other nations, utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon." – Henry Kissinger
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Eq. 9: QoL^i = BV^i + A(Ev + s) = W
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Where QoL^i is pervasively optimal quality of life, the benefit of value is infinite and affluence is viable, equitable and sustainable, the optimal state of wealth (“W”).
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The intrinsic value of an orange equals the intrinsic value of an apple or a cherry or a mango, because the natural intrinsic value of fruit, of eating, and of enjoyment is pricelessly infinite for each. Personal and socially abstracted commercial comparisons and artificial monetary valuations do not change the nature or intrinsic value of an orange or an experience. True value and appreciation are interdependent and remain unaltered by our games, rules, socioeconomic delusions, monetary fictions, and illusions of time.
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Appreciation and depreciation are potentials and results of mentality and experience, not accounting terms or code words for speculators. If something comes to be appreciated more over time, its market value may increase, because perceptions and desires changed, not the thing. Yet, since the 1960s, the market value of under-class time has decreased by over 95% as the prices of typical consumer goods and services increased by up to 1500% or more. At the same time, the market value of elite-class expertise has increased by over 5000% as the quality of things affordable for under-class consumers has declined substantially. So, the market and relative values of the finer things have risen proportionally, further enriching those who can easily afford to pay the prices and reap the fatter resale profits and/or collateral benefits.
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The proportions of the transfer of affluence, prosperity, and liberty from the under-class to the elite-class and the related decline in the quality of life is staggering. Were the hyper-rich and the wanna-be rich unaware of the nature of the mass rape and looting of culture “enriching” them at everyone elses expense? Most of the elitists are thought to be very smart, but are they wise? Over a century of plutonomics and for-profit government proves the elitists, in general, insanely arrogant and cunning, but not wise.
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Do the hyper-rich really need more toys, land, and “money” than ten generations of their offspring and employees could use or lose? Do the hyper-rich and their corporate megademons really need to score thousands of times more dollars than the lowest employee or welfare recipient? Do they really need to totally suppress and suck the last erg of energy out of nature and culture? Do they need a catastrophic collapse of civilization before they give up their game?
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As we can see, the essentials of a healthy culture are not much more complex than the Golden Rule of all our great religious traditions. All it takes to create an affluent commonwealth with a viable economy is a paradigm upgrade, appreciation, clear intent, respect, goodwill, and cooperation.
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Technology is eliminating jobs at close to the same rate human population grows. As of Q4 2011, the USA’s socioeconomic illness forced 50% of its citizens into poverty, with the real estate market 20% worse than previously reported by industry analysts. The economic interactions of China and the other rapidly growing economies of the Third World have yet to be fully considered and discussed in academia. Yet, just four years from now, the USA will no longer be the dominant economic superpower, and the economies of India, Southeast Asia and South America combined will be larger, healthier, and stronger than China’s. Other analysts’ work now shows China’s economy reaching parity with the US economy by the year 2016, as they import ever more of our jobs and buy up more homes, farms, and businesses. The meteoric descent of the Eurozone and US economies may give the Chinese financial superiority even sooner.
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Global warming may permit oil drilling and international shipping across the Arctic before 2030, but radically changing climates and weather patterns are devastating whole regions and ruining hundreds of millions of lives. In China and rapidly developing Third World nations, doubling the amount of human habitat by 2030, using ungreen concrete and bricks, coal-fired power plants, and other sources of GHG (CO2 etc.) and soot emissions would make global symptoms much worse much earlier. Do we need exotic math to show us the most likely outcome of business as usual for over 80% of us in the next 20 years?
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Will the hyper-rich save the world from financial tyranny? No, they are the big bosses who distributed their corruption along with the loot — quadrillions of faux debt-dollars sheltered in derivatives and other negotiable “securities” — held directly or indirectly by corporations and their stockholders. If elitists wanted to improve the quality of civilization, to enhance the quality of life and commonwealth, then we would be living in Heaven on Earth already. As much as anyone else, sociopathic elitists are creatures and victims of their ecocidal socioeconomic paradigm.
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About 20% of us hope their pensions, mutual funds, and money market accounts will ensure them and their offspring a nice comfy, upper middle-class lifestyle or better. Will they save the world from the exponential debt game of the hyper-rich elite? No, like most big billionaire winners, they cower and quake at the thought of fixing or changing the game, which would mean admitting its evil nature and consequences.
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For sustainable success and a culture with a healthy future, a lively economy and a thriving middle-class, we need compassionate wisdom and our pie of infinite wealth back. For that, we all need to choose the wisest use of natural and personal resources. We need successful recovery from over 5,000 years of delusional arrogance, carelessness, waste, and disastrous mistakes.
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The commercial financial pie is divided into an ever smaller slice for an ever growing majority of us as an ever bigger slice is reserved for an ever smaller number of big winners. That pie of volatile debt-dollars is now split with about 10% for the non-elite 99% of us and about 90% for the elite 1%, their corporations, and the lucky dupes. Even if the elitists wanted to risk a complete restart and redistribution of the financial pie, or reversion to a cultural economy, how could they explain it and manage the transition?
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Commercial law and plutonomics now serve and protect corporate profit above and/or before protecting the environment, culture, and people — except when corporate raiders and killer CEOs are hired to rape and ruin companies, most of their stockholders, long-term employees, and taxpayers.
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The essence of any real human success is benefit and, since we are all part of a unified field of life, energy, relatedness, and socioeconomic interaction, to achieve a real solution, we must cultivate and protect the essentials of economic integrity: appreciation, respect, goodwill, and mutual benefit. Cultural or economic integrity are impossible without personal, spiritual integrity. Without integrity, what good are theorems and axioms of faux economics? Without goodwill, equity, and fairness, real economic validity and viability are impossible.
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Will this theory of fundamental economics and natural values pass all the tests of scientific verification, foster pervasive paradigm repair, and lead us to a new age of post-Plutonomy economics? Are the equations integrating the qualitative and quantitative essentials and dynamics of economics infallible?
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An essential of scientific validity as important as repeatability is falsifiability. If a theorem’s logic is impossible to falsify, it is typically a tautology, a circle of erroneous reasoning. Being based on the reality of our semi-rational culture and our imperfect psychology, you may easily falsify this theory; but it cannot be disproved with deficient notions, rationalizations, tautologies, or axioms of the various versions of plutonomics. On the other hand, the factional theorems of plutonomics can be disproved by exposing their lack of the basics of human psychology and culture, their lack of comprehensive logic, and their utter failure to account for 5,000 years of deliberate manipulation, systematic collusion, and systemic corruption.
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For some of us, including some economists, the need to believe that we know the truth about the world or reality becomes an obsessive passion, in some cases, fanatical neurosis or psychosis. The flip side is neurotic or psychotic denial of whatever seems to threaten our sense of knowing what is real, safe, pleasing, and/or profitable. Nothing threatens our favorite fictions much more than real or imagined threats to our illusion of economic reality and financial sustainability. That makes it easy for major Market Makers and swindlers to prey on our fear and greed, herding us into boom and bust, pump and dump cycles. The predators win on the way up the charts and on the way down (first buying, then selling out, then selling short).
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Since we may not become pure people suddenly, a “pure” socioeconomic system’s integrity, validity, and viability are not likely to last long. That is as true of a pure credit system as of a pure money system. So, we must establish a new, more rational, convenient, and equitable currency for national and/or international exchange.
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Pure money and credit are about voluntary cultural exchange, relationships, the effects, and optimizing the potentials of our cultural interactions. Plutonomy is about doing whatever it takes to achieve maximum exploitation of a culture and its socioeconomic paradigm with the least expenditure of currency and effort. A valid money system requires stable values, stable rules, and freedom from systematic abuse (systemic fraud). Plutonomy requires deception and fraud, changing socioeconomic rules and meanings to favor the top exploiters. That requires subverting and corrupting the host culture's sociocultural paradigm, its foundation of ethical values, morals, ideas, words, and customs.
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Nothing is much more aggravating for most conscious adults than witnessing systematic devastation of the economy and the quality of life (QoL). As we can clearly see, QoL and standards of living (SoL) are now far from identical.
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Rescuing the billions of us stuck in under-class poverty while restoring ecological sanity and abundance, is the best way to a sustainable solution for all of us. Yet, until we all sustain integrity, fairness, and goodwill, we need a hybrid game with a complementary, supplementary, nonprofit credit system that liberates our huge pool of pent up human resources and suppressed energy.
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Will economics lead us to a green utopia? No, but Utopia was a literary allegory that enabled people to see both sides of what was absurd, right and wrong with the world, permitting an opportunity for positive evolution. We need no unsustainable utopia, no one size fits all, engineered solution that fits no one well. We need a culture of compassion and an end of for-profit government and misrule by plutocrats. Consider...
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The rules, notions, and intentions of the predominant socioeconomic regime dictate rapidly rising SoL for a rapidly shrinking minority as real QoL declines more rapidly for an ever growing majority. We see it in the following...
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Eq. 10: SoL = BV + Amc +/–(Evt + s) ::
+/–QoL > +/–vt < P^i
...where SoL is some standard of living, and the benefit of value plus affluence may be mediated with manipulated currency with or without viable equity, trust, and sustainability; thus, variable QoL with variable viability and trust decreasing in a negative trend increases general poverty.
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Eq. 11: SoL^i = VE + BC – (DP + mc) ::
A^i • v(t + s) = QoL^i
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...where the general standard of living reaches optimal value of equity plus benefit times credit, minus debt times poverty and manipulation of currency, that sustains infinite affluence with viable trust and sustainability, equaling optimal quality of life for all. So...
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Eq. 12.a: SoL = W if and only if W = QoL^i thus...
Eq. 12.b: SoL^i = A(B + p)s = W
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Optimal standard of living for all = Affluence X Benefit + potential X sustainability = Wealth.
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Why and how? On this planet, our only unlimited natural resources are imagination, creativity, and ingenuity. Wise use of our human and natural resources will enable us to foster and sustain a post-Consumer Society of over 12 billion people. Including land, water, energy, and opportunity, we waste enough of everything to feed, clothe, house, and educate over 21 billion people. Nine billion of us living wisely and creatively could seem like Heaven on Earth compared to what we put up with now. Yet, for plutocrats and plutonomists, waste seems essential, sustainability seems unprofitable, pollution, war, propaganda, and cheating are their ideal scams.
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Mediocracies will never achieve a solution, real commonwealth, nor real recovery. Letting heartless financial predators divide, conquer, usurp, and subvert values, abuse of official authority degrades the economy, culture, nations, and our global ecology. By obscuring or burying the defining principles, governing dynamics, basic customs, and legal factors determining how the economy functions, the major financial predators, corporate and otherwise, degrade the quality of life on Earth for countless generations. We have massive evidence of this, from the core level of natural morality/immorality to the ecological impacts aggravating the financial symptoms of global economic illness. Solving the problem restores cultural integrity, the free flow of creativity, productivity, and general global prosperity like the USA enjoyed in the fifties and sixties.
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In the realms of science, considering part of the basics is insufficient. In the days of Smith, over 95% of people were farmers or primitive pastoralists or indigenous hunter-gatherers. The great thinkers and pioneers of economics, from Smith to John Maynard Keynes, could not predict or conceive of the massive complications and machinations of a global plutocracy with 7 billion victims addicted to technology. Keynes foresaw general possibilities and trends, but not today's realities nor the worst probabilities of tomorrow. None of the ideologues or pioneers fully explored the entire scope of economics or expressed all the fundamentals. That core deficiency enabled the cancerous growth of plutonomics and the rampant lack of ethics ruling the realms of commerce, politics, and academia.
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The worst case scenario is neither inevitable nor necessary, but Dr. Jared Diamond was right (see his book "Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed"), civilizations that failed and fell in the past chose devolutionary decline in collective wisdom, causing ever more bad decisions. Without a fundamental appreciation of natural values and viable ethics, there is no way to sustain social or economic validity, cultural integrity, healthy ecology, equity, and justice. Without appropriate appreciation of life and justice, realistic consideration and a culture worth sustaining are impossible. With a healthy cultural paradigm and a viable socioeconomic system, with appropriate policy and laws, we can have a best case scenario.
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The global economy is a unified field because human culture is a unified field of relationship, and because the universal law of interdependent interaction (Karma) is an inescapable reality. With so many of us living here, what some of us do in one part of the environment affects what happens elsewhere, with detectable, measurable effects.
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For a real solution, we need a 100% movement much more than we need a 99% movement to occupy Wall Street. However primitive or sophisticated, we all do what we do because we want to be fulfilled, healthy, safe, comfortable, happy, and free, self-determining. Elitists, like other animals, want to eat, drink, sleep, play, and sometimes mate, raise children, sometimes striving for the happiness and fulfillment of their children. Most of the time, most us try to live our lives by the Golden Rule of sacred ethics, treating others as we like to be treated. The basics of humanity are the basic principles that make economies and economics possible and viable.
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Economics must deal with all cultural activity, motivations, and the socioeconomic paradigm as is. Appreciation and value are the inseparable interdependent yin-yang of cultural activity and economic exchanges. Without understanding the nature and importance of appreciation and value and the other generative, functional principles of viable cultural interaction, we have no way to understand the governing dynamics of an economy. Nor could we practice valid economics or understand socioeconomic paradigms. Without clear recognition of all the positive and negative factors and dynamics, we lack the basis of effective analysis and understanding. Without the essentials, how can anyone perform effective study, assessment, or remedial action?
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Though modern economists seem to work with money, credit, and cultural activity on a vast global scale, the basics and the psychosocial infrastructure of economics are our ever present necessities. There is clearly no excuse for ignoring the basic realities of human weaknesses, vices, values, beliefs, attitudes, intentions, motivations, emotions, reactions, limitations, associations, habits, and the potentials of all the causes and contributing factors combined. Of all the factors that typically affect economic activity and trends, our values, beliefs, weaknesses, limitations, and habits are the most critical determinants. We are creatures of habit, with limitations and imperfections that make us highly susceptible to confusion, deception, corruption, systematic exploitation and indiscriminant destruction. In this thoroughly corrupted commercial economy (plutonomy), our confusion about money is the root of most other evils.
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As long as we consider ecocide, corruption, and other degrading, antisocial activities acceptable means for winning profit, for-profit government and destructive debt will rule. Then both economics and modern civilization would be doomed. Human culture is as much or more about attitudes, ideas, and beliefs that cause our behavior as it is about the effects, the results.
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Without considering the importance and effects of religion, spirituality, values, ethics and justice, we cannot study or practice economics. If it remained a self-contradictory excuse for plutocratic con games, economics could never be valid, of real benefit to humanity, nor could economists be responsible, responsive citizens, playing a positive role in sustaining healthy civilization.
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Without a healthy, biocentric socioeconomic paradigm there can be no healthy, sustainable alternative to negative exploitation as usual. Neither the socioeconomic paradigm of plutocracy nor its systemic corruption will ever turn into their opposites. Plutonomy and corruption are perpetuated by human beings, players convinced of the superiority of their favorite illusions, notions, obsessions, possessions, strategies, tactics, goals, and habits.
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Real economists are part of the solution, the others are all part of the problem. The applied science and practice of real economics cannot be used to rationalize perversity, corruption, and illogic. Corruption turns economics into plutonomics. Plutonomics is a symptom of Plutonomy, the End Game phase of an economy, a terminal cultural illness. In real economics, true wealth and real success are measures of healthy appreciation based on a stable, healthy culture, and debt-free money and positive credit. Subverting credit to manufacture ever more debt for ever more victims of systemic fraud, perverts the economy and human culture.
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No civilization has or will ever succeed or even survive as a house divided against itself. Any alternative that lacks complete ethical integrity and biocentric values is innately unsustainable and its duration proportional. The only sustainable alternative resembles the economy of Star Trek and the ancient gifting economies of the primal spiritual cultures. In ecologically sane cultures, value and quality of life are more important than taking, hoarding, competing, winning, scoring, and accounting. Corruption makes it very hard to understand that score (numbers & account balances) and winning are NOT more important than actual benefit, value, joy, wellness, a life sustaining biosphere, and a sane culture. Still, all relatively sane people naturally want happiness, satisfaction, freedom, self-determination, some security and comfort. The crux of the human dilemma is central to the duality that drives the Market Economy: greed and fear.
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A healthy economy, whether local or global, is based on constructive cultural activity and exchange, not on destructive exploitation, greed, hostility, and terror. Normalized cheating and bogus theories build neither wealth nor cultural health. Neither wealth nor cultural liveliness depend on winning or bloating, nor upon wasting or squandering.
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Saving is really deferred investing and wealth is, among other things, the potential and capacity for sustaining a best case scenario, but none of that makes sense in a plutonomy. Plutonomy requires endless cancerous growth, compound interest and ever accelerating destruction of commonwealth by the Big Winners. So, without a best case scenario, a win-win scenario, an economy's snowballing End Game scenario keeps accelerating.
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Systemic corruption always progresses to the point of maximum vulnerability and ecocidal abuse, because the means to prevent both have been eliminated or neutralized. Plutonomy really has nothing to do with money and economics.
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Humane observers have realized that, to be valid, economics must be holistic, including study of all causes, governing dynamics, effects, relations, and responses to dangerous crises, responses determining the success or failure of whole cultures or human civilization as a whole.
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Real world economics is a branch of holontology, more closely related to anthropology, psychology, bioethics, and history than to applied mathematics. Without effective grounding in a deep study of the whole of human life and culture, there can be no accurate analysis of our ways, means, results, reactions, responses, relations, and trends. Yet, how do we turn ethics and realistic economics into effective policy?
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The millennial Buddhist meaning of compassion includes effective response, appropriate action of mind, voice, and body. The most effective action will be establishing a sane, green alternative to Plutonomy and ongoing disaster. We need a nonprofit credit system for the new Gifting Culture of a millennial civilization. The increasingly horrific alternative would be aggravated by ever more of Earth's wealth being drained, wasted and/or destroyed by ever fewer winners. The end of our End Game scenario could be more atrocious than the fall of any of the civilizations that fell before ours. Hopefully, this work makes The Choice relatively easy for 100% of us.
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The predictions listed below offer an opportunity to test the validity and accuracy of the insights and understanding made possible by this theory of economics & natural values. The first three predictions are predicated on global failure to prevent disaster with a new hybrid system, a complementary, nonprofit, community credit system that counteracts the effects of Plutonomy.
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P.1 :: The Euro, the Eurozone housing market, and Europe’s banking system will collapse before the end of Q3 2012, possibly by midsummer.
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P2 :: The US real estate market and financial sector will plunge another 20% or more by the end of Q3 2012, possibly sooner.
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P3 :: By Q4 2012 or sooner, the interactive collapse of the Eurozone & US plutonomies will trigger collapse of the derivatives bubble, devastating the reinsurance industry and many weak governments, finishing off most of the financial sector (banks, etc.).
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P4 :: By Q1 2013, remedies for nations stuck in global depression will be initiated by a coalition of healthier cultures, led by Brazil, other strong South American and Southeast Asian nations; China and Europe will cooperate.
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P5 :: By Q1 2013, despite and/or because of all the above, a nonprofit, cooperative community credit system will be in use by an exponentially growing number of people, globally; and the new credit system will foster improved education, beneficial green activities, increasing commercial activity and industrial production.
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P6 :: By Q2 2013 or sooner, the Asian-African-South American alliance (or hegemony) will implement an equitable global currency with or without UN cooperation; and, with the US economy finally reduced to Third World status, most North Americans will want to adopt & use the new currency.
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P7 :: By Q3 2013 or sooner, extensive development of superior quality, biointensive agriculture (capable of feeding our growing population without increasing land area) will begin globally.
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P8 :: By Q2 2014 or sooner, the USA will foster next generation GreenTech R&D and production; and China will lead the switch to use of ultragreen concrete and unfired masonry products.
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P9 :: By Q4 2014 or sooner, without pervasive adoption of a complementary, nonprofit credit system, the combined strength of China and the other emerging economies will surpass that of the US economy; and US politicians will be forced to adopt policies that mimic the most effective policies of Germany and Brazil.
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P10 :: By Q2 2015 or sooner, a G-20 alliance or China, Japan, India, Brazil, and Germany, will start investing in design and construction of floating islands instead of building 200 more cities for 2 million people, each, and 400 more coal fired or nuclear power plants. Such mobile island cities will clean and de-acidify the ocean, restoring coral reefs and fish populations, as they generate power with solar PV panels, next generation wind generators, and hydrothermal convection loop systems.
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P11 :: By Q4 2015 or sooner, the causes of global hunger, malnutrition, and poverty will be essentially eliminated and the solution in progress; and, increasingly, people will be rewarded for learning new skills, “lost” arts and crafts or for providing real solutions to technical and social problems.
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P12 :: By Q2 2016 or sooner, the G-20 alliance will start constructing a fleet of giant dirigible sky resort-villages that circle the globe, providing transportation, advanced communications, cleaning the air, delivering shade and/or water and cargo to remote locations, etc.
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Mass negativity, insanity, and the destructive or retarding consequences, or a world ending global catastrophe, are the only things that might prevent actualization of predictions 4 through 12. An increase of mass stupidity is theoretically possible, but our love of happiness and freedom tilts the odds in favor of progressive evolution toward biospheric consciousness and sustainable success. Very few of us prefer great pain, disaster, excess suffering and chronic horror over great wellness, success, and joyous fulfillment. As the brilliant analyst, theorist, teacher, and planning policy advisor Donald Schon saw it, the faster everything gets worse, the faster everyone starts wanting and working for remedial change, and the faster everything gets better.
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“Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures, the whole of nature and it's beauty.” – Albert Einstein
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The introduction began with simple definitions of poverty and wealth, reflecting the basics, the qualitative, spiritual, cultural essentials and dynamics of economics. The great Tibetan translator and master teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche realized that enlightened consciouness is appreciative-discriminative awareness, intuitive, unitive awareness like we experience while appreciating the beauty of nature or a great work of art. For ongoing validity and integrity, economics must be based on open, appreciative perception, compassion, and creative intuition. To achieve and enjoy the sustainable success of an enlightened civilization instead of unnecessary resource wars and global disaster, each of us must choose and cultivate appreciation for what we have here, our vast opportunities, and our true potentials. In our best case scenario, economics will lead the way to an evolutionary, educational, and enlightening culture with a future. Anything less will perpetuate something less than a culture worth sustaining.
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For more on the new nonprofit community credit system and related issues, visit "Green Community Credit System" group on Facebook and The Greenbook in progress at: <http://mm-greenbook.blogspot.com>
