2014/03/19
2011/09/11
Greenbook Title & Contents
The Greenbook
Green Policy Directives
A Sustainability Solutions Resource
© 2011 Michael Lucas Monterey :: All Rights Reserved. This is an original work in progress, distributed only for review, comment, and nonprofit use. All rights of authorship under international and US copyright laws apply to this work and all parts of it. For queries, permissions, notifications, or delivery information you may email the author at michael.monterey@mdcinet.com or call 760.500.6171.
CONTENTS
Sections
A. Overview: Greening Reality
B. Seven Essentials of Sustainable Success
C. The Gandhi Mandates
D. Global Policy Necessities
E. Ecological Planning Standards
F. Green Credit & Commonwealth
G. Inner Ecology: Green Spirit & Ethics
H. Rehabbing the Law: Green Justice
I. Greening Government
J. Green Action Planning
K. Green Design Science - pending
L. Green Education - pending
M. Sources - pending
Green Policy Directives
A Sustainability Solutions Resource
© 2011 Michael Lucas Monterey :: All Rights Reserved. This is an original work in progress, distributed only for review, comment, and nonprofit use. All rights of authorship under international and US copyright laws apply to this work and all parts of it. For queries, permissions, notifications, or delivery information you may email the author at michael.monterey@mdcinet.com or call 760.500.6171.
CONTENTS
Sections
A. Overview: Greening Reality
B. Seven Essentials of Sustainable Success
C. The Gandhi Mandates
D. Global Policy Necessities
E. Ecological Planning Standards
F. Green Credit & Commonwealth
G. Inner Ecology: Green Spirit & Ethics
H. Rehabbing the Law: Green Justice
I. Greening Government
J. Green Action Planning
K. Green Design Science - pending
L. Green Education - pending
M. Sources - pending
GREENING REALITY
DISCLAIMER: As a visionary multidisciplinary scientist, artist, and designer of ultragreen dream homes and affordable ultragreen communities, on the leading edge since 1976, I learned to appreciate the value of winning hearts and minds with beautiful, compelling visions. I also discovered the real nature, scope, and depth of the ecological crisis and the roots of our main problem.
In his daily comic strip, while playing war with cartoon animal buddies, cute little Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Beautiful visions and green dreams will never be a future reality without a massive majority backing a major change of mind and paradigm. So, what follows may challenge or wipeout everything you believed about the world, wealth, value, money, and all the other things we need to take for granted, ignore, or deny in order to keep the ecocidal socioeconomic game going. Some of the passages deal with issues in a way that may seem unscholarly, too blunt or polarizing. However blunt, the purpose of this book is to reduce the polarization of people in the green and ungreen camps, by identifying the real causes and providing an effective prescription.
This is not about good and bad people, it is about good and bad habits, ideas, policies, laws, solutions and options. So, this is about the real nature, scope, depth, and mechanics of The Problem, and how to solve it. Nobody is perfect but, no matter how bad our ideas and habits, most of us love our children and would like to do our best for them and ourselves. By facing the challenge with courageous compassion for our children and grandchildren with adequate understanding, skill, and persistence, we can accomplish The Mission, on this planet or elsewhere.
Remember, if the Fed's banking system and its debt dollars can survive on trust and deception, a nonprofit, green credit system will thrive on trust and realism.
The totality of the content and most of the links provided below have never been assembled in a coherent, comprehensive way in one place before. This permits a realistic big picture view of the problem, but it can be daunting. So, please, read on with heroic courage. With the double edged sword of wisdom and compassion, we can win the race against time, while building invulnerable self-esteem and a healthy, sane, sustainable civilization.
Overview: Greening Reality
"Well, have you solved all the world's problems yet?"
Most people take that as a joke, for use as a cynical icebreaker at a bar or coffee shop. For green law makers, sustainability experts and educators the joke grows ever less funny. The more we see of the true scope and severity of our worst problems, the less we feel like laughing.
How do we solve the most complex problem in human history, stay happy and sane? Not by continuing the inadequate methods of the last 40 years. With enough time and skill, any complicated problem, however vast, can be solved by cutting through the complication, identifying the main components, and systematically resolving the dilemmas, either one at a time or all at once. When the problem is a whole world afflicted with a Consumer Society terminally addicted to oil, waste, profit, and deception (AKA advertising) the choice is clear. Some give up, get cynical, mean and clever, grabbing for as much of the loot as they can get, while it lasts. The rest of us get to be heroes or dupes, but this is a race against time.
How can anyone know that current efforts are inadequate to the challenge? Sustainability SMEs and educators are overlooking or ignoring the main causes of the human factors. How can we be sure of that?
The planetary environment can be thought of as a system, and its various processes that make the global climate can be seen as subsystems. The main driver of radical global climate change is the cumulative effect of multiple interacting feedback loops building up in earth's subsystems. A single system caught in a positive feedback loop can go into an exponential chain reaction of changes that can end in what we call disaster. When multiple interdependent systems all go into interactive feedback loops, the rapidity of change and increasing imbalance accelerate at a much greater rate. In early 2005 I started publishing warnings about the mounting symptoms of runaway climate imbalance and explaining the mechanisms. I accurately predicted that the process would accelerate progressively, calling for emergency preparations. A few months later, An Inconvenient Truth (the film) came out, but failed to tell the whole truth about the process snowballing beyond measure. Nor did it warn people of the true level of danger or the full consequences of being unprepared. Then came The Day After Tomorrow (the film), which speeded up the process by 5 to 10 years. I then pointed out the potentially horrific results of that scenario happening in 5 or 10 years instead of 10 days. Then corruption, unreasoning fear, denial, and business as usual continued as usual held real change to a snail's pace, blocked it, and keeps trying to block it.
Huge global disasters can cause very serious national security risks. With our fragile economy staggering through the aftermath of financial disaster, a colossal natural mega-disaster would be ruinous. During the last Bush administration, the FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) website featured reports that show over 70% of humans living in disaster zones of one kind or another, mainly coastal areas and floodplains. That majority is now about 4.9 billion of us. About 5 years ago both the UN and the Pentagon agreed that there may be well over 120 million climate change refugees by 2030, but that number is clearly far too low.
Real scientists now realize that effects of the process that they previously predicted for the year 2070 now look more likely for 2030. Eighteen years from now, the effects of the dual polar ice melt may be far more extreme than currently predicted, and much of the probable damage is not being mentioned. People in the tropics are moving inland, abandoning their islands now, or preparing to do so. Along the subarctic and arctic coasts, the shoreline is ever more rapidly washing away in summer waves, and the permafrost--with double the carbon in the sky--is starting to melt, rot, releasing CO2 and methane as well, which is over 22 times worse.
All these processes are aggravated by greed and addiction to energy, waste, money, denial, and illusions of wealth, luxury, status, progress, and convenience. Yet, no schools or green politicians are proposing any alternative to our ecocidal socioeconomic system or the retarded paradigm that enables it. In January of 2010 a mass media magazine (Discover) included feature articles on the huge, increasing loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic and on the brain science behind behavioral economics. Yet, the for-profit money system keeps rewarding sociopaths for destroying the economy and the environment, while cynical exploiters and faux patriots get prime time media coverage for ecocidal propaganda and insane nonsense.
As long as the root causes are unseen, unexamined, and left untreated, our symptoms will worsen. In this case, that means that the 7 becoming 9 billion of us would keep aggravating and accelerating the nonhuman processess at work in the environment.
We really should have started 40 years ago. In 1968, in Jimi Hendrix's first song on the second album, he mentioned climate change and the smell of a burnt world. By 1970, the best minds of the time saw this coming, and held conferences, gave interviews and lectures, wrote books, and articles trying to get us to change our ways, our minds, our attitudes, delusions and habits. But they failed and not entirely because we were too stupid and addicted to care.
Taoist psychologist and Zen philosopher Alan Watts attended one of those conferences on the environmental crisis and found himself and everyone else struggling with countless dilemmas. After all, they decided that they didn't know what to do about it.
See >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aufuwMiKmE
Also >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMheNLq97D4
Clearly, early proto-greens were hampered to some extent by wisdom deficiency and disinformation about the root causes, means, and defensive mechanisms of pandemic ecocidal mania. The problem is complicated, but initiating effective action requires no more than reducing the fog of complication and disinformation with a reasonable dose of ethics. To be fair, we must remember that the pandemic was not so obvious, blatant, and virulent in 1971, and most of us now fail to recognize and understand it and all the complications. That is why there is still no unified, comprehensive, global response, and why this book is necessary.
To survive and thrive, we need to solve all the essential dilemmas at once. How long we have for doing it is unknowable. How much skill it will take is unknown but, with enough time, that is knowable. Why have we failed so far? One of the worst parts of the problem is the coupling of faux security and apathetic shock that follow faux solutions and inadequate assessments of the problem. Greening the world requires a workable alternative to the ecocidal economy and the social meta-infrastructure that keeps it going. This one-stop resource for noble green heroes elected, appointed, or hired to solve the problem provides all the previously hidden or missing links, building blocks, and tools necessary to accomplish The Mission.
There is no time to waste. The interdependent, interactive components of the problem are as numerous and complex as the set of all diseases known to man. The solution is essentially a cure, and the result is wellness. Quick fixes at the drugstore or supermarket treat symptoms, not causes. The best doctors diagnose a whole patient, a whole life, looking for all causes of illness, and then prescribe the best possible protocol. Since the patient is the world, our emergency medical team needs enough interdisciplinary knowledge and skills for extraordinary teamwork.
Clearly, the most effective sustainability expert will be a master of several arts and sciences or else know enough of the essential principles and governing dynamics to be conversant with those who are. For the sake of discussion, at least, the arts of civilization include economics, politics, management, education, art, and religion; and science is seen to include medicine, psychology, ethics, philosophy, etc.
The Greenbook policy directives begin with seven decisive essentials for preventing cultural, socioeconomic, and ecological collapse, initially inspired by the work of Dr. Jared Diamond, author of the best selling books Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Gandhi's principles, strategies, and tactics inspired an update supporting the effective mandate needed for appropriate policy, law making, enforcement, and cultural empowerment. The section on global policy necessities, based on the UN's Earth Charter, serves as a master template for green laws that work. If the Seven Essentials are the heart of the Greenbook, effective planning standards and the Greenbook rating form are the arms and legs. The Greenbook form simplifies evaluation of policies, planning, development, projects, products—and much more—with realistic qualifications. The Greenbook rating form is based on the sophisticated yet simple standard developed by Malcom Wells, the godfather of ultragreen earth-sheltered architecture. The section on Green Credit features a practical nonprofit alternative to universal debt slavery and further ruin of the economy.
The section on Green Credit is rather long, because the economic dimensions of the problem and solution are complex and complicated; and because the impacts of financial tyranny and financial confusion are so severe. Systemic corruption rules and rigs the market economy for the sake of corporations and major stockholders whose current strategies are totally opposed to global wellness, affluence for all, and cultural sustainability. So, understanding green spirit and ethics is essential for a realistic response and for motivating billions of very religious people, voters, and tax payers.
Drawing from the accumulated wisdom of ancient sustainable cultures, from great leaders, policy analysts, bioneers, ecotects and scientists, great teachers, healers and culture heroes, the other sections of the Greenbook offer realistic options for remedial action and real recovery. Our socioeconomic paradigm needs a major overhaul and, without elemental wisdom and ethical pragmatism, the paradigm will remain beyond repair.
For now, we can all agree that, basically, "green" and "sustainability" and the Green Mission have always been about meeting the needs of the present in ways that do not diminish, impair, or limit the ability of future generations to meet theirs. Catering to modern desires without realistic consideration of the consequences may be destroying our ability to live healthy lives now or even to survive for more than a few decades or so.
The findings of cognitive science, psychoneuroimmunology, epigenetics, and ecopsychology all show that wellness of mind and body and environment are inseparable. Greening the world means greening our mind-bodies and the environment all at once. We are subject to illness as much from our own biochemistry, toxins produced with each negative decision or reaction, as from the tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals pervading the air, the waters, the soil, our food & mothers' milk. We cannot afford the pretense that making green shopping lists for corporations and governments will lead to healthy, peaceful sustainability.
Numerous scientific studies show that buildings are directly responsible for over 40% of energy use and over 50% of our pollution, but the total should also include transportation. Most cities and suburbs are now hastily designed for cars and trucks, for a total of more than 80% of energy use and pollution. Yet, most city planners and most architects still face seemingly insurmountable legal and fiscal constraints on their ability to create truly effective, positive change. If we could respond accordingly, the current socioeconomic paradigm and prevailing customs prevent a massive, rapid restructuring of cities and elimination of suburbs. As the top of the food chain, humanity now eats about 40% of what the plant realm produces. To adequately feed, clothe, house and educate the nine billion of us expected to be here in 2030, we may need over 250% more biological resources than we consume today. With less than 5% of humanity, the USA consumes nearly 30% of all resources. If all of us demand a typical American lifestyle in the next 20 years... The arithmetic is simple, 20 or 30 years from now 95% of us will not be able to consume 600% more of everything without radical, unimaginable changes.
Though a 600% upgrade of the global standard of living (GSL) may now be unimaginable, it may not be impossible. It seems likely that a more modest upgrade of our GSL may be more realistic and still improve our global quality of life (GQL) beyond measure. Yet, our antique, semi-barbaric, 17th century politics and economics deliberately oppose or discourage realistic analysis and planning for the next two decades. Most of the multinational corporations governing the realm of for profit politics are allergic to sustainability, efficiency, and wellness. If products last longer and work better, if people stay healthy and happy without constant consumption, buying, drugging, policing and war then how will industry and banking survive?
The time for wishful thinking and faux solutions is long gone. Ecologists look for what works 'as is' and what does not, their job is science, not solutions. Yet, we have much to learn from the best of ecologists, like Carl Safina, author and president of the Blue Ocean Institute. In his book, Hope at Low Tide, Safina gives us doses of inner ecology that may prove effective, for example:
"So, we're navigating a changing world with concepts that are not up to the task, concepts that lack—or prevent—modern comprehension of the world.
"Consequently, most of civilization remains uninformed about the two great realities of our existence: all life is family, and the world is finite. That is why we keep making choices that threaten our own monetary economy, the economy of nature, and the economy of time; otherwise known as the future of the world. What I'm saying, basically, is that in very consequential ways, our modes of conduct are so out of sync with reality that they are essentially irrational."
While we may debate how finite the world is, we can all agree that the time left for getting real may be more limited than we know. We should also be able to agree that irrationality so severe that it ruins our GQL, our wellness (and our odds of survival), is a psychopathic illness (ecocidal insanity). So far, it seems chronic.
To be truly effective, green law makers, sustainability policy advisors, consultants, managers, and directors need to foster much more effective innovation and systemic change, but how? Most green businesses are thriving and growing as the rest of the economy fails or falters. Yet, most builders and other businesses are still in the dark, trapped in the economic system's addiction to waste, inefficiency, cancerous growth, and rampant consumption regardless of the damage. Most of us are too busy watching TV, job hunting or struggling to stay employed to keep up with all the news and real science. Most of the opponents of sustainability are multinational corporations that limit or virtually suppress the best news and science. Thus, the solution requires pervasive and persistent education, by stealth if necessary, and almost constant coaching. That is why sustainability experts must master the art of education and the essence of psychology. We also need better information about realities and possibilities.
If we factor out the elements of the averages in the statistics of doom, we see that 5% of the 5% of us who are Americans are controlling over 90% of the US economy while using over 45% of the 30% of global resources "we" consume. Globally, the elite 5% of humans expect 95% of us to share less than 13% of the available stuff (including food, water, etc.). There may be more sustainable options than most of us have ever dreamed possible.
Yet, despite or because of the many books, articles, standards, programs, and advertising, what green really means, and what is really sustainable are still questionable. In the USA, at least, the roles of sustainability directors, managers, and consultants are usually subservient to institutionalized greed, the relentless hunt for maximum profit at all costs. To achieve the best possible results, even professionals committed to accomplishing the Mission now need a single, truly holistic standard and a unifying reference. We must rapidly educate a massive majority, effectively coordinate local initiatives, regional planning, and legislation appropriate to the national and global challenges threatening civilization as we know it. Otherwise, CEOs and corporate directors will not turn their firms into truly Earth friendly enterprises, nor let them go extinct.
So far, after nearly three years of trying, even mega-billionaire Warren Buffet has failed to arouse or instill a humanitarian ethic or humane conscience in the global elite. It may be that no single individual could do any better.
It seems most likely that the solution, the cure, if any, will come from the combined efforts of those of us devoted to the professions most concerned with sustainability. First, for a sane, healthy, sustainable culture and a greener future for all generations, we need a more realistic, positive definition of green and sustainability. The following seems most appropriate to the current challenge:
"Green" means sustainable success, thriving while enhancing the ability of all generations to do the same.
An ancient Chinese saying reminds us that good advice grates on the ear. Nobody likes to hear about needing an amputation or chemotherapy. When you feel fine, strong and healthy, hearing that you have stage four cancer is bad news. The current efforts to "green" the world would be fine if they were happening 30 or 40 years ago. This is now. This is a wake up call, a reality check, an honest diagnosis, and a prescription. Not all the news is good, nor all bad. Our disease may be curable. Our chance of recovery may be far better than 50%, if we start taking our medicine.
If we fail to accomplish the Mission, we will fail to create a future with a high quality of life for all people of all generations. Yet, no previous standard or set of official policy directives provides a workable basis for implementing the changes needed to change our destiny for the best. This little "Greenbook" offers the evolutionary solution.
If the severity of the crisis and the anti-green propaganda were not so extreme, some of the language, phrasing, and metaphors in the text might seem unusually harsh or extreme. In radical therapy for cancer and AIDS, medical analogies are often reinforced with metaphors from the realms of war and sports. Healthy immune system cells are seen as "good" warriors attacking and killing "evil" cancer cells and pathogens. Doctors and medical staff, family, friends, and the patient are like a team battling a deadly aggressor. Winning and losing are truly matters of life or death. That explains the Greenbook strategy.
You may wonder if any new policy directives can really enable more effective change than current programs and initiatives in progress. Fair enough, yet while previous efforts and texts work to remedy symptoms, this Greenbook reveals virus-like root causes that have long evaded full detection and treatment, preventing a cure. Here we also have detailed explanations of game changing principles, legal and organizational tools, cultural strategies, potent political tactics, logistical options, and funding alternatives for accelerated cultural healing. This comprehensive guide supports rapid development of action plans, potent legislation and effective initiatives for truly sustainable success.
How? The first section, on the determining factors of cultural success distills the mission, goals, strategic, tactical, and logistical issues down to just seven positive prerequisites, clearly sensible to anyone who appreciates life, wellness, sanity, children, and sustainable fulfillment. Dr. Diamond and his UCLA research team compiled a massive body of evidence showing that just five of the essentials have saved real-world nations from total disaster.
Gandhi's discovery, development, and use of his Satyagraha principles, strategy, and tactics led others to adopt and use them. Their first victory was in response to the first Apartheid laws, in the ruthlessly fascist nation of South Africa. The next victory was almost total, the end of British Colonial rule in India, a huge subcontinent at that time sustaining 300 different cultures. Their are only three basic aspects of Gandhi's mandates for a sane, healthy culture of free people. Their are just six related directives that flow from the three basics. The Gandhi mandates are not complicated, but they support the resolve necessary to choose social success and a sustainable green culture.
A wholly valid ecological planning paradigm and the new Green Rating Standard are essential for effectively evaluating what is green, what is deadly, and everything else in between. The new rating form has only 25 qualifying categories and a simple 4 degree scoring system. For well educated professionals, planners, teams of architects, ecologists, consultants, and elected officials or teachers, the new rating form will not be hard to use effectively. If the majority ignore it or refuse to use it, then the odds are they will not use any other method effectively either. In that case, we will fail to make the right choices, failing to sustain civilization through the mounting crisis.
The UN's Earth Charter is a valuable tool for green consciousness raising, with great guidelines, but it lacks the legal power and force appropriate to the state of ecocidal emergency. The new global policy imperatives provide effective provisions for enforcement for implementing the principles of the Earth Charter as viable law. The Earth Charter's form and content were developed before extensive research and reporting on the real scope and impact of antigreen corporations, pollution, and climate change. The Earth Charter is a wish list of great ideas, principles and values designed by hundreds of wonderful people who offered no positive or negative incentives or practical tactics for changing profitable ways and means that cause incalculable harm, illness, disability, death, massive destruction and other disastrous consequences. The Earth Charter could not prevent the worst ecological disasters in world history, the oil industry disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, constant oil pollution along the coasts of Africa, nuclear power plant disasters, and hundreds of other daily disasters.
Why? The Earth Charter politely suggests that nations and cities and towns beg heartless, chronically corrupt investors and corporate executives to embrace empathy, be wise, loving, noble, harmless heroes.
We need to recognize psychopathic evil for what it is and unplug the ecocidal money scam before it kills us all. The section on Green Credit & Commonwealth seems long but actually provides a compact diagnosis and prescription for the economic addiction, illness, and delusion that make ecological sanity and a beautiful, peaceful, healthy world seem unaffordable. The magnificent work of Stephen Zarlenga is referenced and linked to help us untangle the mysteries of monetary mechanics, but it stops short of the deeper issues, the defensive mechanisms and governing dynamics. The evolving discipline of behavioral economics is a helpful step in the right direction but, like the obsolete yet respectable modes of economics, it fails to tackle the realities of bogus monetary theories, bankrupt policies, and the underlying ethical and spiritual issues. Our money system rewards ecocidal mania. It needs emergency intervention, detox and rehab. Our best option is understanding the hidden mechanics of credit and banking, then establishing a new hybrid economy with an interest-free, inflation-proof credit system. That will rapidly stimulate real recovery, sustainable stability, and real equity. Otherwise, if all other nations give up on our bad debt dollars, 95% of us will soon be bankrupt Third World debtors. Without a viable alternative, we will only get more dysfunction and worse results. So, an appropriate effort is a small price to pay.
Why include a section on Green spirit in a work for professionals and officials? Anyone who thinks religion can be left out of the diagnosis and therapy needs therapy. Anyone who really wants sustainable personal, cultural, and ecological wellness can see the necessity of responding to the full scope of the problem, from the "hidden" roots on up. Principles, ethics, truth, justice, corruption, and ecological responsibility will never be effectively discussed without considering the primacy of attitude, intentionality, values, and the validity of the paradigm, the cultural conceptual framework, the social matrix of ideas and words. The spiritual dimension of the problem-solution space is at the core of sustainability. We will either deal with the influence and effects of religion, spirituality, and philosophy or we will keep choosing negligent insanity, irresponsibility, failure, and collapse.
The section on law provides legal depth charges and special power tools to sustainably disempower and dethrone corrupt judges, politicians, and corporations. Current laws for protecting us and the environment from ecocidal maniacs are too weak to work. The carbon Cap & Trade system created an illusion of progress that serves as a red herring and whipping boy for the professional loudmouths of Far Right TV and Talk Radio. Unless deterred by penalty of severe punishments and colossal fines, corrupt corporate officers, directors, and their politicians will prevent any costly inconvenience to the major stockholders. Real post-Meltdown inflation plus costs of cap & trade are increasingly passed through to residential rate payers, soon to double then triple monthly energy bills. That, on top of all the other financial burdens heaped on middle class backs, will add to the severely distressing, oppressive impact of the financial End Game scenario, a compelling diversion from ecocide. So, the Far Right attack dogs of the finance & energy cartels can whip their ignorant dupes into blaming their green rescuers instead of the corporate devils ruining the economy and exporting jobs to Asia.
We urgently need to educate the victims and enact and enforce green law protecting the QOL (quality of life) for all beings of all generations here and yet to come. All governments and executive officials need to enact emergency executive orders and laws with severe enforcement methods. Preparing for reality is sane responsibility, not green extremism.
The international legal activists' movement to make ecocide an international crime (similar to genocide) is a step in the right direction, but it lacks a conceptual and ethical foundation strong enough to support a sustainable popular movement, essential for global adoption and enforcement. Either we end ecocide and corporate rule or they will end any hope of a healthy civilization for Earth's children and grandchildren.
The section on green governance lays out the basis of a cure for disabled, toothless, faux-green policy and worm infested green apple agencies. A bright green paradise full of healthy, happy people is not the business of ecocidal politicians and greed crazed corporations. They think we need more war and damage, more prisons, more poisons, more expensive meds for pandemic depression, illness, and other profitable exploits. Their inner demons are obviously incapable of caring even that their children and them will suffer from an increasingly damaged environment. We, the people and the biosphere need policy mandates for effective legislation and regulations with sharp teeth — and consistent enforcement. The average person may be too dazed or busy to see the gradual destruction and poisoning of our planetary life-support system, but ignorance is no excuse.
The section on Green Action Planning offers the basics for appropriate emergency response and radical healing throughout all levels of government and society. To unlock the full potential available for timely recovery of our economy, sovereignty, and ecological wellness we need to use all the keys provided in this green policy and planning guide. To defeat well organized, well funded ecocidal mania, we need a massively popular, global alliance of healthy organizations and officials with a coherent master plan for orchestrating the cure. For leaders who do see the snowballing process accelerating, and who do understand the science, now really is the time for more radical action. We need much more than wish lists and voluntary compliance with inadequate standards. We need true nobility and heroic action guided by compassionate wisdom and great planning.
Is the Greenbook pragmatic enough for the complicated, 'real world' realms of law, politics, and bureaucracy? Are ecocidal "bad guys" or well meaning but disinformed officials being demonized here? No, ecocidal egos and spiritual illness are diagnosed and discussed in an honest way appropriate to the severity of the symptoms. Should we try to legislate morality? No, but if we keep pretending that ethics are optional or irrelevant to the solution, then we will have neither ethics nor a solution. Remember, karma is a simple, unbreakable, universal law. The basic issues seem complex because political and corporate corruption are confusingly complicated on purpose. Corporate devils and ego demons fear and hate anything simple enough to end delusional addictions to oil, greed, deception, illusion, and so on.
Is it too much to ask that policy makers and law makers think effectively about the whole of the problem? Is thinking about the basics on up, while making decisions determining the quality of life for all generations to much to ask? No, but old habits die hard, and replacing them with good ones has been an unpopular option for a very long time.
Over 5,000 years of history proves that without sustainable realism, healthy civilization is clearly unsustainable. We need to catch up with psychosocial reality. For professionals or officials entrusted with the fate of humanity, failing to get real is far worse than Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Real protection and prevention of harm sometimes take more than talk and lengthy political wrangling over what kind of actions might offer the best cost per benefit ratio. We need decisive yet compassionate action based on deep understanding of the essentials.
In protecting our mothers or grandmothers or children and grandchildren or our best friends--to prevent sudden murder, violent assault, torture, mutilation, maiming, poisoning, plagues or psychopathic atrocity--we rarely take time out to consider all the possibilities or wait for a fiscal feasibility study. If we think of this planet, Earth, as our mother, and love Nature as our grandmother or as the essence of our lives, then we see the need for action, not more wishful thinking and counter-productive debates. Our mother and grandmother, our natural life support system and our children are suffering attempted murder, torture, mutilation, disabling abuse, massive poisoning, biochemical warfare and pandemic ecocidal mania.
We need a real solution, effective action now, not later. When ecocidal maniacs agree to therapy will probably be too late. We need to make government effective now or as soon as possible. Consider the most likely consequences of unrealistic policy and inadequate response, then consider this the heart and start of an evolutionary master plan for a real solution. Why not stop the ecocidal assaults? Why not initiate effective therapy and truly sustainable recovery?
Each section of the Greenbook includes supportive commentary, but more extensive help is available through direct consultation, multimedia conferences, seminars or lectures. Though not mentioned in the text by name, some pioneering whole systems thinkers and problem solvers provided essential elements of this holistic approach. R Buckminster Fuller, Donald Schon, and many other brilliant visionaries, theorists, planners, and unsung heroes provided much of the knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration embodied and expressed in the Greenbook. The value of their truly amazing contributions to civilization and humanity is immeasurable. As time permits, all the pioneers, mentors, and champions of sane sustainability, their books and reference links will be included in the Appendix.
Thank you. MM
In his daily comic strip, while playing war with cartoon animal buddies, cute little Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
Beautiful visions and green dreams will never be a future reality without a massive majority backing a major change of mind and paradigm. So, what follows may challenge or wipeout everything you believed about the world, wealth, value, money, and all the other things we need to take for granted, ignore, or deny in order to keep the ecocidal socioeconomic game going. Some of the passages deal with issues in a way that may seem unscholarly, too blunt or polarizing. However blunt, the purpose of this book is to reduce the polarization of people in the green and ungreen camps, by identifying the real causes and providing an effective prescription.
This is not about good and bad people, it is about good and bad habits, ideas, policies, laws, solutions and options. So, this is about the real nature, scope, depth, and mechanics of The Problem, and how to solve it. Nobody is perfect but, no matter how bad our ideas and habits, most of us love our children and would like to do our best for them and ourselves. By facing the challenge with courageous compassion for our children and grandchildren with adequate understanding, skill, and persistence, we can accomplish The Mission, on this planet or elsewhere.
Remember, if the Fed's banking system and its debt dollars can survive on trust and deception, a nonprofit, green credit system will thrive on trust and realism.
The totality of the content and most of the links provided below have never been assembled in a coherent, comprehensive way in one place before. This permits a realistic big picture view of the problem, but it can be daunting. So, please, read on with heroic courage. With the double edged sword of wisdom and compassion, we can win the race against time, while building invulnerable self-esteem and a healthy, sane, sustainable civilization.
Overview: Greening Reality
"Well, have you solved all the world's problems yet?"
Most people take that as a joke, for use as a cynical icebreaker at a bar or coffee shop. For green law makers, sustainability experts and educators the joke grows ever less funny. The more we see of the true scope and severity of our worst problems, the less we feel like laughing.
How do we solve the most complex problem in human history, stay happy and sane? Not by continuing the inadequate methods of the last 40 years. With enough time and skill, any complicated problem, however vast, can be solved by cutting through the complication, identifying the main components, and systematically resolving the dilemmas, either one at a time or all at once. When the problem is a whole world afflicted with a Consumer Society terminally addicted to oil, waste, profit, and deception (AKA advertising) the choice is clear. Some give up, get cynical, mean and clever, grabbing for as much of the loot as they can get, while it lasts. The rest of us get to be heroes or dupes, but this is a race against time.
How can anyone know that current efforts are inadequate to the challenge? Sustainability SMEs and educators are overlooking or ignoring the main causes of the human factors. How can we be sure of that?
The planetary environment can be thought of as a system, and its various processes that make the global climate can be seen as subsystems. The main driver of radical global climate change is the cumulative effect of multiple interacting feedback loops building up in earth's subsystems. A single system caught in a positive feedback loop can go into an exponential chain reaction of changes that can end in what we call disaster. When multiple interdependent systems all go into interactive feedback loops, the rapidity of change and increasing imbalance accelerate at a much greater rate. In early 2005 I started publishing warnings about the mounting symptoms of runaway climate imbalance and explaining the mechanisms. I accurately predicted that the process would accelerate progressively, calling for emergency preparations. A few months later, An Inconvenient Truth (the film) came out, but failed to tell the whole truth about the process snowballing beyond measure. Nor did it warn people of the true level of danger or the full consequences of being unprepared. Then came The Day After Tomorrow (the film), which speeded up the process by 5 to 10 years. I then pointed out the potentially horrific results of that scenario happening in 5 or 10 years instead of 10 days. Then corruption, unreasoning fear, denial, and business as usual continued as usual held real change to a snail's pace, blocked it, and keeps trying to block it.
Huge global disasters can cause very serious national security risks. With our fragile economy staggering through the aftermath of financial disaster, a colossal natural mega-disaster would be ruinous. During the last Bush administration, the FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) website featured reports that show over 70% of humans living in disaster zones of one kind or another, mainly coastal areas and floodplains. That majority is now about 4.9 billion of us. About 5 years ago both the UN and the Pentagon agreed that there may be well over 120 million climate change refugees by 2030, but that number is clearly far too low.
Real scientists now realize that effects of the process that they previously predicted for the year 2070 now look more likely for 2030. Eighteen years from now, the effects of the dual polar ice melt may be far more extreme than currently predicted, and much of the probable damage is not being mentioned. People in the tropics are moving inland, abandoning their islands now, or preparing to do so. Along the subarctic and arctic coasts, the shoreline is ever more rapidly washing away in summer waves, and the permafrost--with double the carbon in the sky--is starting to melt, rot, releasing CO2 and methane as well, which is over 22 times worse.
All these processes are aggravated by greed and addiction to energy, waste, money, denial, and illusions of wealth, luxury, status, progress, and convenience. Yet, no schools or green politicians are proposing any alternative to our ecocidal socioeconomic system or the retarded paradigm that enables it. In January of 2010 a mass media magazine (Discover) included feature articles on the huge, increasing loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic and on the brain science behind behavioral economics. Yet, the for-profit money system keeps rewarding sociopaths for destroying the economy and the environment, while cynical exploiters and faux patriots get prime time media coverage for ecocidal propaganda and insane nonsense.
As long as the root causes are unseen, unexamined, and left untreated, our symptoms will worsen. In this case, that means that the 7 becoming 9 billion of us would keep aggravating and accelerating the nonhuman processess at work in the environment.
We really should have started 40 years ago. In 1968, in Jimi Hendrix's first song on the second album, he mentioned climate change and the smell of a burnt world. By 1970, the best minds of the time saw this coming, and held conferences, gave interviews and lectures, wrote books, and articles trying to get us to change our ways, our minds, our attitudes, delusions and habits. But they failed and not entirely because we were too stupid and addicted to care.
Taoist psychologist and Zen philosopher Alan Watts attended one of those conferences on the environmental crisis and found himself and everyone else struggling with countless dilemmas. After all, they decided that they didn't know what to do about it.
See >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aufuwMiKmE
Also >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMheNLq97D4
Clearly, early proto-greens were hampered to some extent by wisdom deficiency and disinformation about the root causes, means, and defensive mechanisms of pandemic ecocidal mania. The problem is complicated, but initiating effective action requires no more than reducing the fog of complication and disinformation with a reasonable dose of ethics. To be fair, we must remember that the pandemic was not so obvious, blatant, and virulent in 1971, and most of us now fail to recognize and understand it and all the complications. That is why there is still no unified, comprehensive, global response, and why this book is necessary.
To survive and thrive, we need to solve all the essential dilemmas at once. How long we have for doing it is unknowable. How much skill it will take is unknown but, with enough time, that is knowable. Why have we failed so far? One of the worst parts of the problem is the coupling of faux security and apathetic shock that follow faux solutions and inadequate assessments of the problem. Greening the world requires a workable alternative to the ecocidal economy and the social meta-infrastructure that keeps it going. This one-stop resource for noble green heroes elected, appointed, or hired to solve the problem provides all the previously hidden or missing links, building blocks, and tools necessary to accomplish The Mission.
There is no time to waste. The interdependent, interactive components of the problem are as numerous and complex as the set of all diseases known to man. The solution is essentially a cure, and the result is wellness. Quick fixes at the drugstore or supermarket treat symptoms, not causes. The best doctors diagnose a whole patient, a whole life, looking for all causes of illness, and then prescribe the best possible protocol. Since the patient is the world, our emergency medical team needs enough interdisciplinary knowledge and skills for extraordinary teamwork.
Clearly, the most effective sustainability expert will be a master of several arts and sciences or else know enough of the essential principles and governing dynamics to be conversant with those who are. For the sake of discussion, at least, the arts of civilization include economics, politics, management, education, art, and religion; and science is seen to include medicine, psychology, ethics, philosophy, etc.
The Greenbook policy directives begin with seven decisive essentials for preventing cultural, socioeconomic, and ecological collapse, initially inspired by the work of Dr. Jared Diamond, author of the best selling books Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Gandhi's principles, strategies, and tactics inspired an update supporting the effective mandate needed for appropriate policy, law making, enforcement, and cultural empowerment. The section on global policy necessities, based on the UN's Earth Charter, serves as a master template for green laws that work. If the Seven Essentials are the heart of the Greenbook, effective planning standards and the Greenbook rating form are the arms and legs. The Greenbook form simplifies evaluation of policies, planning, development, projects, products—and much more—with realistic qualifications. The Greenbook rating form is based on the sophisticated yet simple standard developed by Malcom Wells, the godfather of ultragreen earth-sheltered architecture. The section on Green Credit features a practical nonprofit alternative to universal debt slavery and further ruin of the economy.
The section on Green Credit is rather long, because the economic dimensions of the problem and solution are complex and complicated; and because the impacts of financial tyranny and financial confusion are so severe. Systemic corruption rules and rigs the market economy for the sake of corporations and major stockholders whose current strategies are totally opposed to global wellness, affluence for all, and cultural sustainability. So, understanding green spirit and ethics is essential for a realistic response and for motivating billions of very religious people, voters, and tax payers.
Drawing from the accumulated wisdom of ancient sustainable cultures, from great leaders, policy analysts, bioneers, ecotects and scientists, great teachers, healers and culture heroes, the other sections of the Greenbook offer realistic options for remedial action and real recovery. Our socioeconomic paradigm needs a major overhaul and, without elemental wisdom and ethical pragmatism, the paradigm will remain beyond repair.
For now, we can all agree that, basically, "green" and "sustainability" and the Green Mission have always been about meeting the needs of the present in ways that do not diminish, impair, or limit the ability of future generations to meet theirs. Catering to modern desires without realistic consideration of the consequences may be destroying our ability to live healthy lives now or even to survive for more than a few decades or so.
The findings of cognitive science, psychoneuroimmunology, epigenetics, and ecopsychology all show that wellness of mind and body and environment are inseparable. Greening the world means greening our mind-bodies and the environment all at once. We are subject to illness as much from our own biochemistry, toxins produced with each negative decision or reaction, as from the tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals pervading the air, the waters, the soil, our food & mothers' milk. We cannot afford the pretense that making green shopping lists for corporations and governments will lead to healthy, peaceful sustainability.
Numerous scientific studies show that buildings are directly responsible for over 40% of energy use and over 50% of our pollution, but the total should also include transportation. Most cities and suburbs are now hastily designed for cars and trucks, for a total of more than 80% of energy use and pollution. Yet, most city planners and most architects still face seemingly insurmountable legal and fiscal constraints on their ability to create truly effective, positive change. If we could respond accordingly, the current socioeconomic paradigm and prevailing customs prevent a massive, rapid restructuring of cities and elimination of suburbs. As the top of the food chain, humanity now eats about 40% of what the plant realm produces. To adequately feed, clothe, house and educate the nine billion of us expected to be here in 2030, we may need over 250% more biological resources than we consume today. With less than 5% of humanity, the USA consumes nearly 30% of all resources. If all of us demand a typical American lifestyle in the next 20 years... The arithmetic is simple, 20 or 30 years from now 95% of us will not be able to consume 600% more of everything without radical, unimaginable changes.
Though a 600% upgrade of the global standard of living (GSL) may now be unimaginable, it may not be impossible. It seems likely that a more modest upgrade of our GSL may be more realistic and still improve our global quality of life (GQL) beyond measure. Yet, our antique, semi-barbaric, 17th century politics and economics deliberately oppose or discourage realistic analysis and planning for the next two decades. Most of the multinational corporations governing the realm of for profit politics are allergic to sustainability, efficiency, and wellness. If products last longer and work better, if people stay healthy and happy without constant consumption, buying, drugging, policing and war then how will industry and banking survive?
The time for wishful thinking and faux solutions is long gone. Ecologists look for what works 'as is' and what does not, their job is science, not solutions. Yet, we have much to learn from the best of ecologists, like Carl Safina, author and president of the Blue Ocean Institute. In his book, Hope at Low Tide, Safina gives us doses of inner ecology that may prove effective, for example:
"So, we're navigating a changing world with concepts that are not up to the task, concepts that lack—or prevent—modern comprehension of the world.
"Consequently, most of civilization remains uninformed about the two great realities of our existence: all life is family, and the world is finite. That is why we keep making choices that threaten our own monetary economy, the economy of nature, and the economy of time; otherwise known as the future of the world. What I'm saying, basically, is that in very consequential ways, our modes of conduct are so out of sync with reality that they are essentially irrational."
While we may debate how finite the world is, we can all agree that the time left for getting real may be more limited than we know. We should also be able to agree that irrationality so severe that it ruins our GQL, our wellness (and our odds of survival), is a psychopathic illness (ecocidal insanity). So far, it seems chronic.
To be truly effective, green law makers, sustainability policy advisors, consultants, managers, and directors need to foster much more effective innovation and systemic change, but how? Most green businesses are thriving and growing as the rest of the economy fails or falters. Yet, most builders and other businesses are still in the dark, trapped in the economic system's addiction to waste, inefficiency, cancerous growth, and rampant consumption regardless of the damage. Most of us are too busy watching TV, job hunting or struggling to stay employed to keep up with all the news and real science. Most of the opponents of sustainability are multinational corporations that limit or virtually suppress the best news and science. Thus, the solution requires pervasive and persistent education, by stealth if necessary, and almost constant coaching. That is why sustainability experts must master the art of education and the essence of psychology. We also need better information about realities and possibilities.
If we factor out the elements of the averages in the statistics of doom, we see that 5% of the 5% of us who are Americans are controlling over 90% of the US economy while using over 45% of the 30% of global resources "we" consume. Globally, the elite 5% of humans expect 95% of us to share less than 13% of the available stuff (including food, water, etc.). There may be more sustainable options than most of us have ever dreamed possible.
Yet, despite or because of the many books, articles, standards, programs, and advertising, what green really means, and what is really sustainable are still questionable. In the USA, at least, the roles of sustainability directors, managers, and consultants are usually subservient to institutionalized greed, the relentless hunt for maximum profit at all costs. To achieve the best possible results, even professionals committed to accomplishing the Mission now need a single, truly holistic standard and a unifying reference. We must rapidly educate a massive majority, effectively coordinate local initiatives, regional planning, and legislation appropriate to the national and global challenges threatening civilization as we know it. Otherwise, CEOs and corporate directors will not turn their firms into truly Earth friendly enterprises, nor let them go extinct.
So far, after nearly three years of trying, even mega-billionaire Warren Buffet has failed to arouse or instill a humanitarian ethic or humane conscience in the global elite. It may be that no single individual could do any better.
It seems most likely that the solution, the cure, if any, will come from the combined efforts of those of us devoted to the professions most concerned with sustainability. First, for a sane, healthy, sustainable culture and a greener future for all generations, we need a more realistic, positive definition of green and sustainability. The following seems most appropriate to the current challenge:
"Green" means sustainable success, thriving while enhancing the ability of all generations to do the same.
An ancient Chinese saying reminds us that good advice grates on the ear. Nobody likes to hear about needing an amputation or chemotherapy. When you feel fine, strong and healthy, hearing that you have stage four cancer is bad news. The current efforts to "green" the world would be fine if they were happening 30 or 40 years ago. This is now. This is a wake up call, a reality check, an honest diagnosis, and a prescription. Not all the news is good, nor all bad. Our disease may be curable. Our chance of recovery may be far better than 50%, if we start taking our medicine.
If we fail to accomplish the Mission, we will fail to create a future with a high quality of life for all people of all generations. Yet, no previous standard or set of official policy directives provides a workable basis for implementing the changes needed to change our destiny for the best. This little "Greenbook" offers the evolutionary solution.
If the severity of the crisis and the anti-green propaganda were not so extreme, some of the language, phrasing, and metaphors in the text might seem unusually harsh or extreme. In radical therapy for cancer and AIDS, medical analogies are often reinforced with metaphors from the realms of war and sports. Healthy immune system cells are seen as "good" warriors attacking and killing "evil" cancer cells and pathogens. Doctors and medical staff, family, friends, and the patient are like a team battling a deadly aggressor. Winning and losing are truly matters of life or death. That explains the Greenbook strategy.
You may wonder if any new policy directives can really enable more effective change than current programs and initiatives in progress. Fair enough, yet while previous efforts and texts work to remedy symptoms, this Greenbook reveals virus-like root causes that have long evaded full detection and treatment, preventing a cure. Here we also have detailed explanations of game changing principles, legal and organizational tools, cultural strategies, potent political tactics, logistical options, and funding alternatives for accelerated cultural healing. This comprehensive guide supports rapid development of action plans, potent legislation and effective initiatives for truly sustainable success.
How? The first section, on the determining factors of cultural success distills the mission, goals, strategic, tactical, and logistical issues down to just seven positive prerequisites, clearly sensible to anyone who appreciates life, wellness, sanity, children, and sustainable fulfillment. Dr. Diamond and his UCLA research team compiled a massive body of evidence showing that just five of the essentials have saved real-world nations from total disaster.
Gandhi's discovery, development, and use of his Satyagraha principles, strategy, and tactics led others to adopt and use them. Their first victory was in response to the first Apartheid laws, in the ruthlessly fascist nation of South Africa. The next victory was almost total, the end of British Colonial rule in India, a huge subcontinent at that time sustaining 300 different cultures. Their are only three basic aspects of Gandhi's mandates for a sane, healthy culture of free people. Their are just six related directives that flow from the three basics. The Gandhi mandates are not complicated, but they support the resolve necessary to choose social success and a sustainable green culture.
A wholly valid ecological planning paradigm and the new Green Rating Standard are essential for effectively evaluating what is green, what is deadly, and everything else in between. The new rating form has only 25 qualifying categories and a simple 4 degree scoring system. For well educated professionals, planners, teams of architects, ecologists, consultants, and elected officials or teachers, the new rating form will not be hard to use effectively. If the majority ignore it or refuse to use it, then the odds are they will not use any other method effectively either. In that case, we will fail to make the right choices, failing to sustain civilization through the mounting crisis.
The UN's Earth Charter is a valuable tool for green consciousness raising, with great guidelines, but it lacks the legal power and force appropriate to the state of ecocidal emergency. The new global policy imperatives provide effective provisions for enforcement for implementing the principles of the Earth Charter as viable law. The Earth Charter's form and content were developed before extensive research and reporting on the real scope and impact of antigreen corporations, pollution, and climate change. The Earth Charter is a wish list of great ideas, principles and values designed by hundreds of wonderful people who offered no positive or negative incentives or practical tactics for changing profitable ways and means that cause incalculable harm, illness, disability, death, massive destruction and other disastrous consequences. The Earth Charter could not prevent the worst ecological disasters in world history, the oil industry disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, constant oil pollution along the coasts of Africa, nuclear power plant disasters, and hundreds of other daily disasters.
Why? The Earth Charter politely suggests that nations and cities and towns beg heartless, chronically corrupt investors and corporate executives to embrace empathy, be wise, loving, noble, harmless heroes.
We need to recognize psychopathic evil for what it is and unplug the ecocidal money scam before it kills us all. The section on Green Credit & Commonwealth seems long but actually provides a compact diagnosis and prescription for the economic addiction, illness, and delusion that make ecological sanity and a beautiful, peaceful, healthy world seem unaffordable. The magnificent work of Stephen Zarlenga is referenced and linked to help us untangle the mysteries of monetary mechanics, but it stops short of the deeper issues, the defensive mechanisms and governing dynamics. The evolving discipline of behavioral economics is a helpful step in the right direction but, like the obsolete yet respectable modes of economics, it fails to tackle the realities of bogus monetary theories, bankrupt policies, and the underlying ethical and spiritual issues. Our money system rewards ecocidal mania. It needs emergency intervention, detox and rehab. Our best option is understanding the hidden mechanics of credit and banking, then establishing a new hybrid economy with an interest-free, inflation-proof credit system. That will rapidly stimulate real recovery, sustainable stability, and real equity. Otherwise, if all other nations give up on our bad debt dollars, 95% of us will soon be bankrupt Third World debtors. Without a viable alternative, we will only get more dysfunction and worse results. So, an appropriate effort is a small price to pay.
Why include a section on Green spirit in a work for professionals and officials? Anyone who thinks religion can be left out of the diagnosis and therapy needs therapy. Anyone who really wants sustainable personal, cultural, and ecological wellness can see the necessity of responding to the full scope of the problem, from the "hidden" roots on up. Principles, ethics, truth, justice, corruption, and ecological responsibility will never be effectively discussed without considering the primacy of attitude, intentionality, values, and the validity of the paradigm, the cultural conceptual framework, the social matrix of ideas and words. The spiritual dimension of the problem-solution space is at the core of sustainability. We will either deal with the influence and effects of religion, spirituality, and philosophy or we will keep choosing negligent insanity, irresponsibility, failure, and collapse.
The section on law provides legal depth charges and special power tools to sustainably disempower and dethrone corrupt judges, politicians, and corporations. Current laws for protecting us and the environment from ecocidal maniacs are too weak to work. The carbon Cap & Trade system created an illusion of progress that serves as a red herring and whipping boy for the professional loudmouths of Far Right TV and Talk Radio. Unless deterred by penalty of severe punishments and colossal fines, corrupt corporate officers, directors, and their politicians will prevent any costly inconvenience to the major stockholders. Real post-Meltdown inflation plus costs of cap & trade are increasingly passed through to residential rate payers, soon to double then triple monthly energy bills. That, on top of all the other financial burdens heaped on middle class backs, will add to the severely distressing, oppressive impact of the financial End Game scenario, a compelling diversion from ecocide. So, the Far Right attack dogs of the finance & energy cartels can whip their ignorant dupes into blaming their green rescuers instead of the corporate devils ruining the economy and exporting jobs to Asia.
We urgently need to educate the victims and enact and enforce green law protecting the QOL (quality of life) for all beings of all generations here and yet to come. All governments and executive officials need to enact emergency executive orders and laws with severe enforcement methods. Preparing for reality is sane responsibility, not green extremism.
The international legal activists' movement to make ecocide an international crime (similar to genocide) is a step in the right direction, but it lacks a conceptual and ethical foundation strong enough to support a sustainable popular movement, essential for global adoption and enforcement. Either we end ecocide and corporate rule or they will end any hope of a healthy civilization for Earth's children and grandchildren.
The section on green governance lays out the basis of a cure for disabled, toothless, faux-green policy and worm infested green apple agencies. A bright green paradise full of healthy, happy people is not the business of ecocidal politicians and greed crazed corporations. They think we need more war and damage, more prisons, more poisons, more expensive meds for pandemic depression, illness, and other profitable exploits. Their inner demons are obviously incapable of caring even that their children and them will suffer from an increasingly damaged environment. We, the people and the biosphere need policy mandates for effective legislation and regulations with sharp teeth — and consistent enforcement. The average person may be too dazed or busy to see the gradual destruction and poisoning of our planetary life-support system, but ignorance is no excuse.
The section on Green Action Planning offers the basics for appropriate emergency response and radical healing throughout all levels of government and society. To unlock the full potential available for timely recovery of our economy, sovereignty, and ecological wellness we need to use all the keys provided in this green policy and planning guide. To defeat well organized, well funded ecocidal mania, we need a massively popular, global alliance of healthy organizations and officials with a coherent master plan for orchestrating the cure. For leaders who do see the snowballing process accelerating, and who do understand the science, now really is the time for more radical action. We need much more than wish lists and voluntary compliance with inadequate standards. We need true nobility and heroic action guided by compassionate wisdom and great planning.
Is the Greenbook pragmatic enough for the complicated, 'real world' realms of law, politics, and bureaucracy? Are ecocidal "bad guys" or well meaning but disinformed officials being demonized here? No, ecocidal egos and spiritual illness are diagnosed and discussed in an honest way appropriate to the severity of the symptoms. Should we try to legislate morality? No, but if we keep pretending that ethics are optional or irrelevant to the solution, then we will have neither ethics nor a solution. Remember, karma is a simple, unbreakable, universal law. The basic issues seem complex because political and corporate corruption are confusingly complicated on purpose. Corporate devils and ego demons fear and hate anything simple enough to end delusional addictions to oil, greed, deception, illusion, and so on.
Is it too much to ask that policy makers and law makers think effectively about the whole of the problem? Is thinking about the basics on up, while making decisions determining the quality of life for all generations to much to ask? No, but old habits die hard, and replacing them with good ones has been an unpopular option for a very long time.
Over 5,000 years of history proves that without sustainable realism, healthy civilization is clearly unsustainable. We need to catch up with psychosocial reality. For professionals or officials entrusted with the fate of humanity, failing to get real is far worse than Nero fiddling while Rome burned. Real protection and prevention of harm sometimes take more than talk and lengthy political wrangling over what kind of actions might offer the best cost per benefit ratio. We need decisive yet compassionate action based on deep understanding of the essentials.
In protecting our mothers or grandmothers or children and grandchildren or our best friends--to prevent sudden murder, violent assault, torture, mutilation, maiming, poisoning, plagues or psychopathic atrocity--we rarely take time out to consider all the possibilities or wait for a fiscal feasibility study. If we think of this planet, Earth, as our mother, and love Nature as our grandmother or as the essence of our lives, then we see the need for action, not more wishful thinking and counter-productive debates. Our mother and grandmother, our natural life support system and our children are suffering attempted murder, torture, mutilation, disabling abuse, massive poisoning, biochemical warfare and pandemic ecocidal mania.
We need a real solution, effective action now, not later. When ecocidal maniacs agree to therapy will probably be too late. We need to make government effective now or as soon as possible. Consider the most likely consequences of unrealistic policy and inadequate response, then consider this the heart and start of an evolutionary master plan for a real solution. Why not stop the ecocidal assaults? Why not initiate effective therapy and truly sustainable recovery?
Each section of the Greenbook includes supportive commentary, but more extensive help is available through direct consultation, multimedia conferences, seminars or lectures. Though not mentioned in the text by name, some pioneering whole systems thinkers and problem solvers provided essential elements of this holistic approach. R Buckminster Fuller, Donald Schon, and many other brilliant visionaries, theorists, planners, and unsung heroes provided much of the knowledge, wisdom, and inspiration embodied and expressed in the Greenbook. The value of their truly amazing contributions to civilization and humanity is immeasurable. As time permits, all the pioneers, mentors, and champions of sane sustainability, their books and reference links will be included in the Appendix.
Thank you. MM
SUSTAINABLE SUCCESS
Seven Essentials of Sustainable Success
The poor and semi-poor and nearly poor get much more poor as fast as the economy is either inflated or deflated, as the 'rich' get much richer much faster. Why?
For anyone lost in the financial swamp of severe recession or stealth depression, economic theories seem irrelevant. The world seems out of control and headed nowhere good for them or their families. Are they right?
Successful cultures are composed of healthy, successful communities. Healthy, successful communities are composed of healthy relationships, primarily thriving families. When 1% of the population get away with big scores, spiritual illness, global disaster, and ruining the lives of 99% of the families of the world, that smells of cultural decay, not success.
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. Here are those five determining factors:
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
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 our use of our brains as much as anything.
The failed empires of Europe, Asia, the Middle-East, Africa, Polynesia, and the ancient Americas had terminal defects, misconceptions, misunderstandings, misuse of inner and outer resources, and missed opportunities in common. Diamond also covered several societies that faced severe crisis, responded effectively, adapted and succeeded.
Though typically officially ignored, two prerequisites foster the five other determinants of cultural health and longevity, giving us seven essentials of sustainable social success. The seven essentials are:
1. A viable paradigm, a biocentric conceptual context supporting a sane worldview
2. Loving respect for nature, sustaining loving care and commitment to the commonwealth, joy, and wellness of children, elders, enlightened spiritual leaders and wise guardians
3. Biocentric awareness and empathy, compassionate sensitivity to environmental conditions, fostering and supporting optimal quality of life for all generations
4. Consciousness of climate change with active commitment to eliminating or mitigating contributing factors and circumstances affecting its severity and rapidity
5. Commitment to sustainably positive, peaceful relations with neighbors, allies and enemies alike, fostering constant improvement with Win-Win strategies and dialogue
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
7. Positive, creative cultural responses to whatever challenges sustainably healthy success
With a valid paradigm and abiding commitment to a lively commonwealth and general well being, success can grow out of near disaster. We, the people, decide to rise or fall. Sane, healthy people observe, investigate, and analyze the motives and dynamics governing their decisions, their lives, and their leaders. A society lacking a sane, valid conceptual base, lacking effective concern for the wellness of children, elders, nature and humanity as a whole, lacks a stable basis for making consistently wise decisions and life-sustaining responses.
Defective societies fail. Is the global Consumer Society choosing to succeed? Do a majority of consumers consciously choose anything or are they really just stampeding towards Walmart like a herd of panicked cattle heading for a cliff? These issues are extremely important for anyone who cares about their children and/or their own quality of life. These issues and the collective mix of decisions for or against cultural success and ecological sanity are determining our fate, our future, now.
Dr. Daisaku Ikeda's annual world peace proposal for 2010 brings our current dilemma into clear focus:
"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 mediocrities who, trembling in terror, seek safety in the worship and hoarding of money."
"The flipside 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."
Dr. Ikeda's grasp of the essentials, the governing dynamics, the scope and nature of the problem and causes makes the whole proposal well worth reading but, in the next two quotes, his assessment of the root of the problem seems fitting here:
"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."
"...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 supercapitalism--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."
For the whole text, see >> http://www.sgi.org/assets/pdf/peace2010(2).pdf
As I pointed out in early 2008, in part 1 of The Economics of Compassion, the casino is crooked, rigged to give 'the house' the majority of the winnings, but who teaches that? Who factors that into their economic equations? Insatiable greed, malignant egoism, grandiose delusion, normalized disrespect and hostility now openly rule the world with fear, corruption, numbness and arrogant nihilism. We see increasing decline of America's integrity, stability, and ability to succeed in global competition with Asia, Europe, and Latin America. 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 expensive, unsustainable causes and consequences. Schumacher's diagnosis and green prescription for realizing the positive potentials of 'Western' civilization were prophetic. Obviously, somewhere along the way, Free Market economists lost their empathy, integrity, and capacity for understanding the real world and humanity. Their credibility is declining almost as fast as the quality of life and our standard of living. As long as we choose to succeed, we can turn the table--with new rules and effective incentives.
The first two essentials are really easy. We choose healthy sustainability by choosing sanity and healthy relationships. Choosing the way with heart, compassion, appreciation, and a healthy respect for ancient wisdom and millennial sustainability is truly intelligent. Failing to choose wisely, without compassion, appreciation, or respect is terminally unwise. We can choose either heroic compassion and personal victory or cowardly delusion and horrific karma. In this there is no sustainable middle ground. There can be no valid doubt about this, nor any serious debate of the essential point. Just in case, consider the odds.
Choosing wisely, in favor of sustaining the first two essentials of sustainable success favors the best possible odds and our best potentials for the healthiest possible biosphere in a greener future. It also fosters and supports best case decisions for sustaining the other five essentials of global success.
Choosing unwisely, failing to sustain the first two essentials favors the worst possible odds and our greatest potentials for total disaster, economically, culturally, and ecologically. Choosing not to sustain a heart centered approach to life, lacking compassion and appreciation, with no respect for anything but greed and winning--at the expense of all living beings--fosters and supports worst case decisions about the other five essentials of global success.
The following sections provide ways and means for fostering and supporting our best possible odds, wise choices and effective policy making by officials and professionals with children and/or heart. If we act accordingly, clearly, we can accomplish the Mission.
The poor and semi-poor and nearly poor get much more poor as fast as the economy is either inflated or deflated, as the 'rich' get much richer much faster. Why?
For anyone lost in the financial swamp of severe recession or stealth depression, economic theories seem irrelevant. The world seems out of control and headed nowhere good for them or their families. Are they right?
Successful cultures are composed of healthy, successful communities. Healthy, successful communities are composed of healthy relationships, primarily thriving families. When 1% of the population get away with big scores, spiritual illness, global disaster, and ruining the lives of 99% of the families of the world, that smells of cultural decay, not success.
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. Here are those five determining factors:
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
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 our use of our brains as much as anything.
The failed empires of Europe, Asia, the Middle-East, Africa, Polynesia, and the ancient Americas had terminal defects, misconceptions, misunderstandings, misuse of inner and outer resources, and missed opportunities in common. Diamond also covered several societies that faced severe crisis, responded effectively, adapted and succeeded.
Though typically officially ignored, two prerequisites foster the five other determinants of cultural health and longevity, giving us seven essentials of sustainable social success. The seven essentials are:
1. A viable paradigm, a biocentric conceptual context supporting a sane worldview
2. Loving respect for nature, sustaining loving care and commitment to the commonwealth, joy, and wellness of children, elders, enlightened spiritual leaders and wise guardians
3. Biocentric awareness and empathy, compassionate sensitivity to environmental conditions, fostering and supporting optimal quality of life for all generations
4. Consciousness of climate change with active commitment to eliminating or mitigating contributing factors and circumstances affecting its severity and rapidity
5. Commitment to sustainably positive, peaceful relations with neighbors, allies and enemies alike, fostering constant improvement with Win-Win strategies and dialogue
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
7. Positive, creative cultural responses to whatever challenges sustainably healthy success
With a valid paradigm and abiding commitment to a lively commonwealth and general well being, success can grow out of near disaster. We, the people, decide to rise or fall. Sane, healthy people observe, investigate, and analyze the motives and dynamics governing their decisions, their lives, and their leaders. A society lacking a sane, valid conceptual base, lacking effective concern for the wellness of children, elders, nature and humanity as a whole, lacks a stable basis for making consistently wise decisions and life-sustaining responses.
Defective societies fail. Is the global Consumer Society choosing to succeed? Do a majority of consumers consciously choose anything or are they really just stampeding towards Walmart like a herd of panicked cattle heading for a cliff? These issues are extremely important for anyone who cares about their children and/or their own quality of life. These issues and the collective mix of decisions for or against cultural success and ecological sanity are determining our fate, our future, now.
Dr. Daisaku Ikeda's annual world peace proposal for 2010 brings our current dilemma into clear focus:
"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 mediocrities who, trembling in terror, seek safety in the worship and hoarding of money."
"The flipside 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."
Dr. Ikeda's grasp of the essentials, the governing dynamics, the scope and nature of the problem and causes makes the whole proposal well worth reading but, in the next two quotes, his assessment of the root of the problem seems fitting here:
"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."
"...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 supercapitalism--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."
For the whole text, see >> http://www.sgi.org/assets/pdf/peace2010(2).pdf
As I pointed out in early 2008, in part 1 of The Economics of Compassion, the casino is crooked, rigged to give 'the house' the majority of the winnings, but who teaches that? Who factors that into their economic equations? Insatiable greed, malignant egoism, grandiose delusion, normalized disrespect and hostility now openly rule the world with fear, corruption, numbness and arrogant nihilism. We see increasing decline of America's integrity, stability, and ability to succeed in global competition with Asia, Europe, and Latin America. 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 expensive, unsustainable causes and consequences. Schumacher's diagnosis and green prescription for realizing the positive potentials of 'Western' civilization were prophetic. Obviously, somewhere along the way, Free Market economists lost their empathy, integrity, and capacity for understanding the real world and humanity. Their credibility is declining almost as fast as the quality of life and our standard of living. As long as we choose to succeed, we can turn the table--with new rules and effective incentives.
The first two essentials are really easy. We choose healthy sustainability by choosing sanity and healthy relationships. Choosing the way with heart, compassion, appreciation, and a healthy respect for ancient wisdom and millennial sustainability is truly intelligent. Failing to choose wisely, without compassion, appreciation, or respect is terminally unwise. We can choose either heroic compassion and personal victory or cowardly delusion and horrific karma. In this there is no sustainable middle ground. There can be no valid doubt about this, nor any serious debate of the essential point. Just in case, consider the odds.
Choosing wisely, in favor of sustaining the first two essentials of sustainable success favors the best possible odds and our best potentials for the healthiest possible biosphere in a greener future. It also fosters and supports best case decisions for sustaining the other five essentials of global success.
Choosing unwisely, failing to sustain the first two essentials favors the worst possible odds and our greatest potentials for total disaster, economically, culturally, and ecologically. Choosing not to sustain a heart centered approach to life, lacking compassion and appreciation, with no respect for anything but greed and winning--at the expense of all living beings--fosters and supports worst case decisions about the other five essentials of global success.
The following sections provide ways and means for fostering and supporting our best possible odds, wise choices and effective policy making by officials and professionals with children and/or heart. If we act accordingly, clearly, we can accomplish the Mission.
GANDHI MANDATES
The Gandhi Mandates
On September 11, 1906, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Gandhi led 3,000 fellow Indians in a public vow to work against the forces of fascist racism and a new 'law' to require registration and fingerprinting of all 'nonwhite' people. Gandhi promised he would die rather than comply with the tyranny of Apartheid. That set the stage with strategy and successful tactics that led Nelson Mandela to prison, then to victory as his country's first black president.
For another 42 years after the birth of his Satyagraha campaign, Mahatma Gandhi lived on to refine his strategy and tactics with holistic thinking, deep spirituality, and compassionate action. Inspired by Gandhi, the common people used his methods to defeat the British Empire.
By 1948, Indians restored their freedom, civil rights, and political sovereignty. If they had followed all of Gandhi's advice and used his strategy from then on, India would have had the world's greenest culture and the most successful economy, and the world might be green today.
It helps to remember that Gandhi was inspired by Henry David Thoreau's example and his writing, On Civil Disobedience, in active protest against the Spanish American War and compulsory conscription of American youth into the military. We should also recall that both Thoreau and Gandhi were inspired by the examples and teachings of Jainism and Buddhism, especially the Lotus Sutra. Its humanistic ideals and pragmatic spirituality empower Gandhi's satyagraha, sarvodaya, and swadeshi with a well proven solution to our global crisis.
If we employ Gandhi's strategy and methods, they will work now, as well as ever. If we start using Gandhi's solution now, then we will free ourselves of the worst consequences of rule by ecocidal maniacs, tyrants, terrorists, and greedy fools.
The following updates of Gandhi's directives are called mandates because they must have enough force to defeat the empire of corporate greed. The movement to end corporate sponsored ecocide faces weapons far more powerful than guns, cannons, rockets and nuclear bombs. We must overcome big money and the legion of psychospiritual weapons within — deliberate ignorance, delusion, denial, apathy, depression, greed, ruthless ambition, hostility, resentment, hate, blind rage, vindictiveness, spiteful jealousy, selfish envy, vanity, arrogance, false pride, normalized hubris, cowardice, addictions, bad habits and negative tendencies. Since getting ourselves to give up even a single bad habit or stupid belief usually seems the hardest thing ever, ending the war against nature, life and the environment — like ending any war — requires total and constant commitment.
Success requires fearless action and the persistence of all green officials, good people, parents and children; also the right strategy, tactics, methods, and self-discipline. To keep the campaign on track, we need Gandhi's three prerequisites, the most basic elements of a healthy culture...
A. Satyagraha: Literally meaning "the power of truth," satyagraha is the heart of Gandhi's threefold initiative to establish cultural health and sustainable peace on Earth. Satyagraha means realizing, expressing and fulfilling our highest values and greatest potentials.
B. Sarvodaya: As important as the power of truth is sarvodaya, our commitment to seeing and serving all as equals, with sincere appreciation and respect.
C. Swadeshi: Economic self-determination and local self-reliance are necessary for freedom from exploitation, subversion and chronic corruption.
Pandemic corruption is unsustainable. A healthy democracy is impossible without those three pillars of sustainable success. Gandhi's understanding of the world, life, nature, and karma, the generative interdependence of all beings and things led to further refinement. The Mahatma would surely approve modern updates of his strategy for creating a healthy culture in a sustainably green, peaceful world:
1. People in positions of power, whether political, economic, religious, civic, or administrative power, must sustain a holistic view of life and peace. Act to ensure that life enhancing governance and peace and creative problem solving are appreciated, mandated and adopted, globally. Enable all citizens and officials to understand and support the essential necessity of sustainably healthy civilization.
2. We cannot expect government to change the world. We, the people, must change, inspiring and nurturing a unanimous sense of biospheric responsibility, by example. For a sustainable culture, create a climate of true respect, compassion, wisdom, love, caring, giving and sharing.
3. Foster an evolutionary culture for youth, sustaining respect, fairness, and nonviolence. Support renunciation of hate and rejection of injustice by consistently showing disapproval of corrupt celebrities, war toys, violent games, destructive behavior, and negative influences.
4. Sustain compassionate responsiveness and appreciation. Honor, promote, and support positive contributions to the community of life and, while learning to reduce our wants, plan for the needs of all generations present and yet to come.
5. Foster biospheric consciousness, a larger sense of identity, free of racism, ageism, sexism, gender bias, addictions and other negative social programs, for recovery from normative insanity and systemic violence. Begin really loving life, nature, our planet, all other species and people.
6. Respond to the needs of the community of life, laying the foundation of a sustainable society and a healthy environment. Meet your own needs while enhancing the ability of future generations to meet theirs. As opportunities for the young and needy are created or enhanced, eradicate rule by fear, greed, deliberate under-employment and aggressive impoverishment.
It seems fitting that 911 is now recognized as an emergency call for help in life threatening crises. Gandhi's Satyagraha was a major inspiration for Dr. Martin Luther King's ultimately successful mission. The Civil Rights movement, the peace movement, the movement to end testing and use of nuclear weapons, the campaign to save the oceans, and many successful missions to end tyranny and the abuse of power and of the environment are supporting examples.
Gandhi was probably asked more than once if he believed a sustainably peaceful nation is really possible. He said yes, using King Ashoka's 37 year reign of peaceful prosperity as an example. Gandhi knew that peace can now be more sustainable than it was in Ashoka's empire, 2400 years ago.
True nobility and heroic action foster sustainable self esteem, basic joy, and ultimate success for the best possible future. We need to do our best to ensure a beautiful future for our children and the following six generations, at least. To do that we need to act courageously, demand responsible action of elected officials, hold them accountable, and teach by example. Demanding less of ourselves, our governments, and our schools, while corruption and apathy destroy the biosphere, can only accelerate and intensify global disasters.
On September 11, 1906, in Johannesburg, South Africa, Gandhi led 3,000 fellow Indians in a public vow to work against the forces of fascist racism and a new 'law' to require registration and fingerprinting of all 'nonwhite' people. Gandhi promised he would die rather than comply with the tyranny of Apartheid. That set the stage with strategy and successful tactics that led Nelson Mandela to prison, then to victory as his country's first black president.
For another 42 years after the birth of his Satyagraha campaign, Mahatma Gandhi lived on to refine his strategy and tactics with holistic thinking, deep spirituality, and compassionate action. Inspired by Gandhi, the common people used his methods to defeat the British Empire.
By 1948, Indians restored their freedom, civil rights, and political sovereignty. If they had followed all of Gandhi's advice and used his strategy from then on, India would have had the world's greenest culture and the most successful economy, and the world might be green today.
It helps to remember that Gandhi was inspired by Henry David Thoreau's example and his writing, On Civil Disobedience, in active protest against the Spanish American War and compulsory conscription of American youth into the military. We should also recall that both Thoreau and Gandhi were inspired by the examples and teachings of Jainism and Buddhism, especially the Lotus Sutra. Its humanistic ideals and pragmatic spirituality empower Gandhi's satyagraha, sarvodaya, and swadeshi with a well proven solution to our global crisis.
If we employ Gandhi's strategy and methods, they will work now, as well as ever. If we start using Gandhi's solution now, then we will free ourselves of the worst consequences of rule by ecocidal maniacs, tyrants, terrorists, and greedy fools.
The following updates of Gandhi's directives are called mandates because they must have enough force to defeat the empire of corporate greed. The movement to end corporate sponsored ecocide faces weapons far more powerful than guns, cannons, rockets and nuclear bombs. We must overcome big money and the legion of psychospiritual weapons within — deliberate ignorance, delusion, denial, apathy, depression, greed, ruthless ambition, hostility, resentment, hate, blind rage, vindictiveness, spiteful jealousy, selfish envy, vanity, arrogance, false pride, normalized hubris, cowardice, addictions, bad habits and negative tendencies. Since getting ourselves to give up even a single bad habit or stupid belief usually seems the hardest thing ever, ending the war against nature, life and the environment — like ending any war — requires total and constant commitment.
Success requires fearless action and the persistence of all green officials, good people, parents and children; also the right strategy, tactics, methods, and self-discipline. To keep the campaign on track, we need Gandhi's three prerequisites, the most basic elements of a healthy culture...
A. Satyagraha: Literally meaning "the power of truth," satyagraha is the heart of Gandhi's threefold initiative to establish cultural health and sustainable peace on Earth. Satyagraha means realizing, expressing and fulfilling our highest values and greatest potentials.
B. Sarvodaya: As important as the power of truth is sarvodaya, our commitment to seeing and serving all as equals, with sincere appreciation and respect.
C. Swadeshi: Economic self-determination and local self-reliance are necessary for freedom from exploitation, subversion and chronic corruption.
Pandemic corruption is unsustainable. A healthy democracy is impossible without those three pillars of sustainable success. Gandhi's understanding of the world, life, nature, and karma, the generative interdependence of all beings and things led to further refinement. The Mahatma would surely approve modern updates of his strategy for creating a healthy culture in a sustainably green, peaceful world:
1. People in positions of power, whether political, economic, religious, civic, or administrative power, must sustain a holistic view of life and peace. Act to ensure that life enhancing governance and peace and creative problem solving are appreciated, mandated and adopted, globally. Enable all citizens and officials to understand and support the essential necessity of sustainably healthy civilization.
2. We cannot expect government to change the world. We, the people, must change, inspiring and nurturing a unanimous sense of biospheric responsibility, by example. For a sustainable culture, create a climate of true respect, compassion, wisdom, love, caring, giving and sharing.
3. Foster an evolutionary culture for youth, sustaining respect, fairness, and nonviolence. Support renunciation of hate and rejection of injustice by consistently showing disapproval of corrupt celebrities, war toys, violent games, destructive behavior, and negative influences.
4. Sustain compassionate responsiveness and appreciation. Honor, promote, and support positive contributions to the community of life and, while learning to reduce our wants, plan for the needs of all generations present and yet to come.
5. Foster biospheric consciousness, a larger sense of identity, free of racism, ageism, sexism, gender bias, addictions and other negative social programs, for recovery from normative insanity and systemic violence. Begin really loving life, nature, our planet, all other species and people.
6. Respond to the needs of the community of life, laying the foundation of a sustainable society and a healthy environment. Meet your own needs while enhancing the ability of future generations to meet theirs. As opportunities for the young and needy are created or enhanced, eradicate rule by fear, greed, deliberate under-employment and aggressive impoverishment.
It seems fitting that 911 is now recognized as an emergency call for help in life threatening crises. Gandhi's Satyagraha was a major inspiration for Dr. Martin Luther King's ultimately successful mission. The Civil Rights movement, the peace movement, the movement to end testing and use of nuclear weapons, the campaign to save the oceans, and many successful missions to end tyranny and the abuse of power and of the environment are supporting examples.
Gandhi was probably asked more than once if he believed a sustainably peaceful nation is really possible. He said yes, using King Ashoka's 37 year reign of peaceful prosperity as an example. Gandhi knew that peace can now be more sustainable than it was in Ashoka's empire, 2400 years ago.
True nobility and heroic action foster sustainable self esteem, basic joy, and ultimate success for the best possible future. We need to do our best to ensure a beautiful future for our children and the following six generations, at least. To do that we need to act courageously, demand responsible action of elected officials, hold them accountable, and teach by example. Demanding less of ourselves, our governments, and our schools, while corruption and apathy destroy the biosphere, can only accelerate and intensify global disasters.
GLOBAL NECESSITIES
Global Necessities
We need the most compelling, noble, yet realistic directives for crafting green law and governance policy to empower and sustain a popular movement that grows quickly enough to win our race against time.
The anarcho-facist corporatists are waging war against nature, spirit, and life. Is it real? Yes, it is. Is it sane? No, it is mass-insanity and mass-conspiracy, like the culture of human slavery, but the ecocidal corporatist culture is committed to enslaving and sickening all of us and our planetary life-support system, the biosphere.
Establishing a new paradigm and green laws for a sustainable green culture requires massive popular support and sustained political action against seemingly overwhelming odds. The following sustainability policy imperatives are not replacements for the principles embedded in the Earth Charter, but proactive updates mandating effective action to reinstate our most ancient natural values.
Global Sustainability Policy Requisites:
1. Respect nature and revere life in all its diversity.
2. See the Earth and all living beings as relatives worthy of loving respect.
3. Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion, and love.
4. Restore and protect the integrity of Earth's living web of relationships and environments.
5. Prevent imbalance, harm and pollution as the best method of environmental protection.
6. Nurture and protect the Earth's bounty and beauty for present and future generations.
7. Hate and war are harmful: sustain a peaceful, healthy, rational, just and egalitarian culture.
8. Advance the study of ecological sustainability, promote and support the open exchange and wide application of green knowledge and wisdom.
9. Sustain sane patterns of production, consumption, recreation and sexual procreation to safeguard Earth's regenerative capacities and individual rights and communal well-being.
10. Denounce and eliminate tyranny, greed and poverty by sustaining consistent political and fiscal support for this vital cultural, ethical, and ecological necessity.
11. To foster and enhance healthy human development and biospheric responsibility, support cultural activities, institutions, and organizations that express healthy values and green ethics.
12. Require positive responsiveness and enforce compliance with laws governing sustainable development, universal access to excellent educational experience, sustainable health care, gender equality, opportunities for appropriate work, and life enhancing cultural interaction.
13. Expand, foster and support mentor-apprenticeship programs, integrate formal education and cultural learning with the ecological wisdom, knowledge, values, and skills needed for a responsibly sustainable way of life.
14. Enact and enforce laws ensuring an unpolluted natural environment and a culture supportive of human dignity, bodily health, and spiritual well-being; with extra safeguards for the special needs, ways, means, and potentials of indigenous peoples, minorities, elders and children.
15. To remain healthy, cultural institutions at all levels must remain strong. Denounce, stigmatize, boycott, prosecute, legally and financially penalize, transform or terminate corrupt, destructive institutions and organizations.
16. Promote and cultivate sustainable peace and a culture of respect by honoring and rewarding true generosity, unbiased compassion, tolerance, nonviolence, creative problem solving, and biospheric consciousness.
17. Foster and sustain healthy cultures and green community development by seeking out heroes, productive geniuses, creative innovators, master artisans and truly green experts, honoring and rewarding them for the importance and merits of their work, regardless of academic credentials, official affiliations, or commercial sponsorship, regardless of age, gender, race, or religion.
18. While fostering and supporting green community development associations, cooperative community banks, local currencies and nonprofit credit systems, enhance and ensure cultural and ecological health by penalizing or stigmatizing destructive greed, psychopathic ambition, gross excess, waste and corruption.
The explicit intentions, especially in the 17th and 18th directives, are prerequisites for ensuring and expediting a greener future. Multinational corporations, executive ego demons, and greed crazy politicians have waged psychological, biological, chemical, and economic warfare against us and the Earth, aggressively and habitually. Brilliant creative problem solvers have invented great new technologies, far superior to what is typically recognized, publicized, and adopted, but systemic corruption sponsored by large corporations now forces most of our greatest innovators to suffer, scramble, and waste time trying to find investors. Unless we dethrone, defeat or heal and re-educate the psychopathic enemies of Earth and nature, they will keep disempowering and enslaving us until it is too late to prevent and/or minimize more catastrophic damage.
Some readers, noticing the great similarity of the 18 green policy imperatives and the 16 statements of the Earth Charter, may question the need for an update. For some, this new policy document may seem a product of impatience. If we knew how much time we have for a global solution, that might be a good guess. Unfortunately, the signs of ecological collapse are multiplying far faster than anyone can measure precisely. We may be beyond the tipping point of runaway climate catastrophe already. If that is so, then swift emergency action could minimize the consequences. Radical remedial action might slow down or prevent our descent into a worst-case disaster scenario. Not knowing where we are on the slippery slope of no return, the wisest strategy is to implement the toughest policy and laws as soon as possible.
Clearly, the plan and the team must both be coherent for a successful, well orchestrated effort. Global implementation requires the strongest, most comprehensive possible approach to broadcasting and teaching the principles of ecological, cultural, and economic responsibility.
Ecocidal business corporations exist only to shelter profit from whatever might reduce it, including penalties and costs of damages, injuries, and atrocities. The Global Policy Necessities are essential for minimum cultural health and sustainably ecological community development. With anything less, we will get more of the abuse and ecocidal atrocities we suffer already.
In Nigerian territory alone, Exxon Valdez scale oil leaks are a daily average. Corporate rule accelerates ever more giant dead zones in the oceans, more rapid acidification of the water, accelerating die off of coral reefs and plankton (that provide most of our oxygen), more plastic, toxins and hormonal disruptors in fish and everything else we eat or drink, more extreme weather, and so on. Potent green policy must initiate emergency reform of every government on the planet. To expect or promote anything less would be an irresponsible breach of personal integrity, causing incalculable harm and irrevocable suffering in your lifetime and others.
We need the most compelling, noble, yet realistic directives for crafting green law and governance policy to empower and sustain a popular movement that grows quickly enough to win our race against time.
The anarcho-facist corporatists are waging war against nature, spirit, and life. Is it real? Yes, it is. Is it sane? No, it is mass-insanity and mass-conspiracy, like the culture of human slavery, but the ecocidal corporatist culture is committed to enslaving and sickening all of us and our planetary life-support system, the biosphere.
Establishing a new paradigm and green laws for a sustainable green culture requires massive popular support and sustained political action against seemingly overwhelming odds. The following sustainability policy imperatives are not replacements for the principles embedded in the Earth Charter, but proactive updates mandating effective action to reinstate our most ancient natural values.
Global Sustainability Policy Requisites:
1. Respect nature and revere life in all its diversity.
2. See the Earth and all living beings as relatives worthy of loving respect.
3. Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion, and love.
4. Restore and protect the integrity of Earth's living web of relationships and environments.
5. Prevent imbalance, harm and pollution as the best method of environmental protection.
6. Nurture and protect the Earth's bounty and beauty for present and future generations.
7. Hate and war are harmful: sustain a peaceful, healthy, rational, just and egalitarian culture.
8. Advance the study of ecological sustainability, promote and support the open exchange and wide application of green knowledge and wisdom.
9. Sustain sane patterns of production, consumption, recreation and sexual procreation to safeguard Earth's regenerative capacities and individual rights and communal well-being.
10. Denounce and eliminate tyranny, greed and poverty by sustaining consistent political and fiscal support for this vital cultural, ethical, and ecological necessity.
11. To foster and enhance healthy human development and biospheric responsibility, support cultural activities, institutions, and organizations that express healthy values and green ethics.
12. Require positive responsiveness and enforce compliance with laws governing sustainable development, universal access to excellent educational experience, sustainable health care, gender equality, opportunities for appropriate work, and life enhancing cultural interaction.
13. Expand, foster and support mentor-apprenticeship programs, integrate formal education and cultural learning with the ecological wisdom, knowledge, values, and skills needed for a responsibly sustainable way of life.
14. Enact and enforce laws ensuring an unpolluted natural environment and a culture supportive of human dignity, bodily health, and spiritual well-being; with extra safeguards for the special needs, ways, means, and potentials of indigenous peoples, minorities, elders and children.
15. To remain healthy, cultural institutions at all levels must remain strong. Denounce, stigmatize, boycott, prosecute, legally and financially penalize, transform or terminate corrupt, destructive institutions and organizations.
16. Promote and cultivate sustainable peace and a culture of respect by honoring and rewarding true generosity, unbiased compassion, tolerance, nonviolence, creative problem solving, and biospheric consciousness.
17. Foster and sustain healthy cultures and green community development by seeking out heroes, productive geniuses, creative innovators, master artisans and truly green experts, honoring and rewarding them for the importance and merits of their work, regardless of academic credentials, official affiliations, or commercial sponsorship, regardless of age, gender, race, or religion.
18. While fostering and supporting green community development associations, cooperative community banks, local currencies and nonprofit credit systems, enhance and ensure cultural and ecological health by penalizing or stigmatizing destructive greed, psychopathic ambition, gross excess, waste and corruption.
The explicit intentions, especially in the 17th and 18th directives, are prerequisites for ensuring and expediting a greener future. Multinational corporations, executive ego demons, and greed crazy politicians have waged psychological, biological, chemical, and economic warfare against us and the Earth, aggressively and habitually. Brilliant creative problem solvers have invented great new technologies, far superior to what is typically recognized, publicized, and adopted, but systemic corruption sponsored by large corporations now forces most of our greatest innovators to suffer, scramble, and waste time trying to find investors. Unless we dethrone, defeat or heal and re-educate the psychopathic enemies of Earth and nature, they will keep disempowering and enslaving us until it is too late to prevent and/or minimize more catastrophic damage.
Some readers, noticing the great similarity of the 18 green policy imperatives and the 16 statements of the Earth Charter, may question the need for an update. For some, this new policy document may seem a product of impatience. If we knew how much time we have for a global solution, that might be a good guess. Unfortunately, the signs of ecological collapse are multiplying far faster than anyone can measure precisely. We may be beyond the tipping point of runaway climate catastrophe already. If that is so, then swift emergency action could minimize the consequences. Radical remedial action might slow down or prevent our descent into a worst-case disaster scenario. Not knowing where we are on the slippery slope of no return, the wisest strategy is to implement the toughest policy and laws as soon as possible.
Clearly, the plan and the team must both be coherent for a successful, well orchestrated effort. Global implementation requires the strongest, most comprehensive possible approach to broadcasting and teaching the principles of ecological, cultural, and economic responsibility.
Ecocidal business corporations exist only to shelter profit from whatever might reduce it, including penalties and costs of damages, injuries, and atrocities. The Global Policy Necessities are essential for minimum cultural health and sustainably ecological community development. With anything less, we will get more of the abuse and ecocidal atrocities we suffer already.
In Nigerian territory alone, Exxon Valdez scale oil leaks are a daily average. Corporate rule accelerates ever more giant dead zones in the oceans, more rapid acidification of the water, accelerating die off of coral reefs and plankton (that provide most of our oxygen), more plastic, toxins and hormonal disruptors in fish and everything else we eat or drink, more extreme weather, and so on. Potent green policy must initiate emergency reform of every government on the planet. To expect or promote anything less would be an irresponsible breach of personal integrity, causing incalculable harm and irrevocable suffering in your lifetime and others.
2011/09/10
ECOLOGICAL STANDARDS
Ecological Planning Standards
A beautiful green apple with an unseen worm hole, may be rotten to the core, not fit to eat. A building, a product or a plan may get a green label, yet be far less than ideally sustainable and cost effective.
True cost pricing for the whole life cycle is essential for sustainable success, but requires qualitative evaluation of factors and issues left out of standards in current use . Now we have a way to remedy that deficiency.
Malcolm Wells, an early bioneer of green architecture and responsible planning, began developing a green rating standard in the 1960s and, by 1969, published a practical form featuring four degrees of negative and positive scoring factors. Using the new form, you can evaluate the factors affecting any kind of project, product, process, activity or subjects.
Also in the 1960s, pioneering ecotect Paolo Soleri and his apprentices began developing designs and plans for cities that reverse ecocidal damage and waste, by eliminating secondary causes, irresponsible design, anti-green construction, and urban-suburban sprawl. Soleri's work opened the flood gates for bioethics and innovation for a sustainable civilization, but lacked a practical master plan for transition from our ungreen world to the ultragreen world of the future.
One main advantage of the Greenbook standard is that the line items cover all the basics of what makes a plan, project, process, product or thing either green or anti-green. Each of the qualifying categories covers a complex mix of basic and contributing causes, and effects. Rating the benefits and/or impacts may seem too difficult without expert consultants, but this standard requires only a reasonable effort to access the best available data and determine the most likely benefit or harm. We can use the new standard to define a sincerely green, reasonable effort. Your scoring of each category listed may be imperfect, yet produce an evaluation good enough for protection of all generations.
Wells used his form in an example featuring abandoned farmland. In that case (with negative impact numbers getting a minus sign), the rating variables were equivalent to:
1 = rarely/never, 2 = sometimes, 3 = often/usually, 4 = always/constantly
(See the link at the end of this section)
The Greenbook rating form can be used for establishing true cost pricing and assessing environmental impacts, penalties, fines, tax rates and incentives.
An inferior standard or code accepted as 'green enough' acts as a deadly institutional retro-virus in our cultural immune system, gradually destroying the society and the economy, the building industry, real estate markets and communities. The Greenbook standard can even be used to create a new LEED Diamond certification standard. It could also replace all the other standards and cure the codes.
The new Green Planning Standard—plus life affirming ethics, effective reason, compassionate inspiration and creative problem solving—enables progress to sustainable success in a greener future as rapidly as possible. If you think not, consider this, while most of the building industry suffered stagnation and worse, green building increased by nearly 50% per year. Why the huge disparity? The confusion, limitations, complications, and builders' attitudes are aggravated by standards, codes, and regulations inadequate to the real scope of the problem. Now, consider this: harmful, wasteful, ugly buildings usually stand and degrade the quality of life for decades or centuries. Designers, builders, developers, planners, and policy makers need this alternative to overly complicated, existing standards and codes. We all do.
The Greenbook toolkit and sustainability rating standard provide the essential qualifications for creating a green master plan for a successful future. Yet, some may fail to sustain denial and selective inattention. Real world examples may help them wake up and get sober. The few that follow may be sufficient for a wake up call and reality check combined...
The Chinese plan to double the area of their built environment by 2030. With population and economic growth rates of India close to China's and the rest of the Third World catching up fast, that means doubling the amount of human habitat built over the last 5,000 years in 18 years. That could double or triple the use of bricks, concrete, and pavement. That means doubling or tripling the amount of carbon released in the production and use of bricks and concrete. Bricks account for over 80 billion pounds of CO2 annually. Depending on whose numbers you use, the amount of extra carbon dioxide (CO2) released will equal from one to ten times the weight of the concrete itself. Though that means from over 1.6 billion to over 32 billion extra pounds of CO2 emissions yearly, until 2030 or beyond. The supply chain, production, and use of bricks releases over 80 billion pounds of CO2 annually. The CO2 emmissions accompany billions of tons of other greenhouse gases (GHG) generated by similar industrial processes, transportation, and construction support operations. Some of the other gases are poisonous, but total release of the methane frozen under the ocean floor and virtually locked in many millions of square miles of permafrost in the arctic tundra would cause the worst impact.
Methane is nearly 22 times more potent than CO2. Releasing much more methane would finish killing the ocean's coral reefs with increasing acidity and cause acid-rain strong enough to finish off most land animals and plants for a million years. The average temperature would also rise to over 140° F. Yet, superior formulas for green concrete and unfired masonry have existed for thousands of years, with only a tiny fraction of the embodied energy and GHG impact of ungreen concrete. New, high performance substitutes are even better, but virtually suppressed.
Another dire example is the environmental pollution and true cost of tar sand and oil shale mining and the conversion process for producing low grade fuel oil and gasoline. Far from being an affordable, green alternative to foreign oil, tar sand and oil shale are ecological nightmares worse than liquid oil and coal combined. They require excess use and pollution of groundwater and air and extended burning of fuel for transportation and power. The related propaganda helps to suppress the truth.
The best alternative to oil shale, oil, coal, nuclear power and wind energy is electric solar power. Using bogus science, bad statistics, and lies to maintain the illusion of necessity, the corporate energy cartel makes you think that solar electric technology is inadequate. With optimal building efficiency and vehicle upgrades, solar photo-voltaic panels (made mainly from sand and recycled metal), mounted on rooftops and over parking lots, will provide more than enough electricity for all of humanity's future needs.
Including energy efficiency upgrades of buildings, transportation, and industries in the calculations shows that the big power industry's projections of future demand are far above necessity and reality. For reference, as early as the 1960s, passive-solar design made buildings with 90% energy efficiency not only possible but more affordable than conventional buildings.
We should also remember that war is basically ecocidal. Armor piercing projectiles made of nuclear waste, depleted uranium and plutonium, are vaporized and pulverized (powdered) by super hot explosion on impact. That process, and all the other toxic compounds and metals released into the environment during battles, is as bad as pollution gets. Plutonium loses only half its radioactive killing power over 240,000 years; and one microgram can go on killing and harming for almost twice as long as it moves through the biosphere, carried as dust in the wind, or as snow, in the rain or in living bodies.
Long after battles and wars, the plague of land mines not only kills, cripples, mutilates and terrorizes innocent civilians, they make large areas of land unsafe for farming, organic or otherwise. The new Green Planning Standard gives us a way to effectively evaluate the anti-green elements of a weapon system, a tactic, a campaign strategy, a battle, a war, war crimes, and the true total costs of war and its "collateral" damage.
Radical climate change and its destructive potentials are no longer debatable. For designers, planners, policy makers, developers, district attorneys, judges, and politicians, the green rating standard is essential, not optional. Ignoring it is aiding and abetting ecocide and, possibly, negligent mass homicide. Death is the result of both accidental and deliberate mass murder; and public officials, lawyers, and professional policy makers have no legal excuse for either. The same holds true for designers and builders.
The Greenbook Rating Form in PDF 8.5" x 14" format:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B3Kw6mGNJYgANzJlMTg4NjgtZTNiMC00YmM4LWJmOGMtMDQ1ODBjZDcwOTBl&hl=en_US
A beautiful green apple with an unseen worm hole, may be rotten to the core, not fit to eat. A building, a product or a plan may get a green label, yet be far less than ideally sustainable and cost effective.
True cost pricing for the whole life cycle is essential for sustainable success, but requires qualitative evaluation of factors and issues left out of standards in current use . Now we have a way to remedy that deficiency.
Malcolm Wells, an early bioneer of green architecture and responsible planning, began developing a green rating standard in the 1960s and, by 1969, published a practical form featuring four degrees of negative and positive scoring factors. Using the new form, you can evaluate the factors affecting any kind of project, product, process, activity or subjects.
Also in the 1960s, pioneering ecotect Paolo Soleri and his apprentices began developing designs and plans for cities that reverse ecocidal damage and waste, by eliminating secondary causes, irresponsible design, anti-green construction, and urban-suburban sprawl. Soleri's work opened the flood gates for bioethics and innovation for a sustainable civilization, but lacked a practical master plan for transition from our ungreen world to the ultragreen world of the future.
One main advantage of the Greenbook standard is that the line items cover all the basics of what makes a plan, project, process, product or thing either green or anti-green. Each of the qualifying categories covers a complex mix of basic and contributing causes, and effects. Rating the benefits and/or impacts may seem too difficult without expert consultants, but this standard requires only a reasonable effort to access the best available data and determine the most likely benefit or harm. We can use the new standard to define a sincerely green, reasonable effort. Your scoring of each category listed may be imperfect, yet produce an evaluation good enough for protection of all generations.
Wells used his form in an example featuring abandoned farmland. In that case (with negative impact numbers getting a minus sign), the rating variables were equivalent to:
1 = rarely/never, 2 = sometimes, 3 = often/usually, 4 = always/constantly
(See the link at the end of this section)
The Greenbook rating form can be used for establishing true cost pricing and assessing environmental impacts, penalties, fines, tax rates and incentives.
An inferior standard or code accepted as 'green enough' acts as a deadly institutional retro-virus in our cultural immune system, gradually destroying the society and the economy, the building industry, real estate markets and communities. The Greenbook standard can even be used to create a new LEED Diamond certification standard. It could also replace all the other standards and cure the codes.
The new Green Planning Standard—plus life affirming ethics, effective reason, compassionate inspiration and creative problem solving—enables progress to sustainable success in a greener future as rapidly as possible. If you think not, consider this, while most of the building industry suffered stagnation and worse, green building increased by nearly 50% per year. Why the huge disparity? The confusion, limitations, complications, and builders' attitudes are aggravated by standards, codes, and regulations inadequate to the real scope of the problem. Now, consider this: harmful, wasteful, ugly buildings usually stand and degrade the quality of life for decades or centuries. Designers, builders, developers, planners, and policy makers need this alternative to overly complicated, existing standards and codes. We all do.
The Greenbook toolkit and sustainability rating standard provide the essential qualifications for creating a green master plan for a successful future. Yet, some may fail to sustain denial and selective inattention. Real world examples may help them wake up and get sober. The few that follow may be sufficient for a wake up call and reality check combined...
The Chinese plan to double the area of their built environment by 2030. With population and economic growth rates of India close to China's and the rest of the Third World catching up fast, that means doubling the amount of human habitat built over the last 5,000 years in 18 years. That could double or triple the use of bricks, concrete, and pavement. That means doubling or tripling the amount of carbon released in the production and use of bricks and concrete. Bricks account for over 80 billion pounds of CO2 annually. Depending on whose numbers you use, the amount of extra carbon dioxide (CO2) released will equal from one to ten times the weight of the concrete itself. Though that means from over 1.6 billion to over 32 billion extra pounds of CO2 emissions yearly, until 2030 or beyond. The supply chain, production, and use of bricks releases over 80 billion pounds of CO2 annually. The CO2 emmissions accompany billions of tons of other greenhouse gases (GHG) generated by similar industrial processes, transportation, and construction support operations. Some of the other gases are poisonous, but total release of the methane frozen under the ocean floor and virtually locked in many millions of square miles of permafrost in the arctic tundra would cause the worst impact.
Methane is nearly 22 times more potent than CO2. Releasing much more methane would finish killing the ocean's coral reefs with increasing acidity and cause acid-rain strong enough to finish off most land animals and plants for a million years. The average temperature would also rise to over 140° F. Yet, superior formulas for green concrete and unfired masonry have existed for thousands of years, with only a tiny fraction of the embodied energy and GHG impact of ungreen concrete. New, high performance substitutes are even better, but virtually suppressed.
Another dire example is the environmental pollution and true cost of tar sand and oil shale mining and the conversion process for producing low grade fuel oil and gasoline. Far from being an affordable, green alternative to foreign oil, tar sand and oil shale are ecological nightmares worse than liquid oil and coal combined. They require excess use and pollution of groundwater and air and extended burning of fuel for transportation and power. The related propaganda helps to suppress the truth.
The best alternative to oil shale, oil, coal, nuclear power and wind energy is electric solar power. Using bogus science, bad statistics, and lies to maintain the illusion of necessity, the corporate energy cartel makes you think that solar electric technology is inadequate. With optimal building efficiency and vehicle upgrades, solar photo-voltaic panels (made mainly from sand and recycled metal), mounted on rooftops and over parking lots, will provide more than enough electricity for all of humanity's future needs.
Including energy efficiency upgrades of buildings, transportation, and industries in the calculations shows that the big power industry's projections of future demand are far above necessity and reality. For reference, as early as the 1960s, passive-solar design made buildings with 90% energy efficiency not only possible but more affordable than conventional buildings.
We should also remember that war is basically ecocidal. Armor piercing projectiles made of nuclear waste, depleted uranium and plutonium, are vaporized and pulverized (powdered) by super hot explosion on impact. That process, and all the other toxic compounds and metals released into the environment during battles, is as bad as pollution gets. Plutonium loses only half its radioactive killing power over 240,000 years; and one microgram can go on killing and harming for almost twice as long as it moves through the biosphere, carried as dust in the wind, or as snow, in the rain or in living bodies.
Long after battles and wars, the plague of land mines not only kills, cripples, mutilates and terrorizes innocent civilians, they make large areas of land unsafe for farming, organic or otherwise. The new Green Planning Standard gives us a way to effectively evaluate the anti-green elements of a weapon system, a tactic, a campaign strategy, a battle, a war, war crimes, and the true total costs of war and its "collateral" damage.
Radical climate change and its destructive potentials are no longer debatable. For designers, planners, policy makers, developers, district attorneys, judges, and politicians, the green rating standard is essential, not optional. Ignoring it is aiding and abetting ecocide and, possibly, negligent mass homicide. Death is the result of both accidental and deliberate mass murder; and public officials, lawyers, and professional policy makers have no legal excuse for either. The same holds true for designers and builders.
The Greenbook Rating Form in PDF 8.5" x 14" format:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B3Kw6mGNJYgANzJlMTg4NjgtZTNiMC00YmM4LWJmOGMtMDQ1ODBjZDcwOTBl&hl=en_US
2011/09/08
GREEN CREDIT
Green Credit & Commonwealth
As long as currency is a commodity, everything will become a commodity as the quality of culture decreases and life grows ever cheaper. That process is the ultimate unsustainable con-game.
The wealth of Urban-Suburban Society is not simply the Wealth of Nations, but the poverty of billions. Poverty never existed before the invention of money and banking. In Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, a revisionary classic of honest anthropology, Nurit Bird-David writes:
"...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."
They not only thought they had it made, they did have it made. First hand accounts of all the most reliable witnesses who lived with 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 food and medicines.
Sahlins' mention of confidence may be easily passed over and the significance underestimated. Confidence, trust, is the only thing keeping the global Ponzi scam (the "economy") going now. So, we actually have much less reason for confidence than well trained primitive hunters.
Jim Bell is right. To wean the Consumer Society away from a more rapid descent into environmental disaster, we need true cost pricing. Products, processes, and projects that require ecocidal subsidies to seem affordable or that cause biological and social damage, health care disasters, and so on, should be priced accordingly. Given the real-world reality of systemic corruption and corporate manipulation, true cost pricing alone will never do. Even if it were allowed to get started on its own, developing a generally acceptable system might take too long to prevent an irreparable global catastrophe. Consumer Society's ecocidal socioeconomic paradigm, its disvalues, monetary madness, and corruption must be cured first or neutralized.
If the global derivatives bubble is a measure of the value of the Free Market economy then, surpassing 4800% of the world's annual GDP, it is inflating beyond $3,840,000,000,000,000 (3.840 quadrillion US dollars). Hard to believe? Yes or no, how many of those quadrillions are invested in making your world greener, healthier, more livable, eliminating poverty, ignorance, infant malnutrition and other causes of war? Right, close to zero ($0.00). Wiping out preventable misery and illness might cost about $80 billion or less per month or almost $1 trillion for a year. That is less than 0.003% of the global total invested in derivatives alone. It would be far less than 10% of the total cost of mid-east oil wars and medical benefits for injured veterans. Creating a bright Green future, globally, might cost $1 trillion over 5 years, about 10% of global defense spending per year. That will eliminate over 99% 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? Do they want Heaven on Earth? No, most are clearly devoted to maintaining all the infectious causes and symptoms of ecocide. Which master do they serve? Is it greed or good?
Before you decide, you may appreciate reading the refreshingly honest post by Jim Stanford on the Real-World Economics blogsite:
>> http://rwer.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/new-video-deconstructs-cge-trade-models/
In Greed, a comprehensive essay on the destructive rule of greed, Julian Edney offers another example from anthropology...
"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 unaggressive - 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."
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 in this post-Meltdown phase of the End Game.
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
In an article presented at the 1985 symposium on Economy and Church in Dialogue, former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) said...
"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."
He went on to say that...
"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 and 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
Such revolutionary, humanistic realism may seem beyond the scope of a Catholic bureaucrat, yet it reveals the truly human potential of religious inspiration and compassion. The Pope may be one of the most Buddhist of all Christians, but how do we turn ethics into effective policy?
"Buddhist Economics" is an essay by E. F. Schumacher, the humanitarian economist and author of Small is Beautiful: Economics As if People Mattered.
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."
To put it more plainly, heartless economics is like chronic, incestuous rape, torture and conspiracy to aid and abet mass murder. In The Human Revolution, a novelized history of Nichiren Buddhism in modern Japan, Dr. Daisaku Ikeda describes the awful conditions as World War 2 ended...
"Japan in those days writhed in the grip of a terrible economic crisis–runaway inflation."
"Nothing creates more misery than incompetent government... Day by day, the lives of the people took on the color of despair.
"The emergency measures temporarily protected monetary capital, but to the majority of the general public, they meant little more than enforced sacrifice...
"The crisis had not struck without warning. Its roots went deep; it had begun before the end of the war.
"Vast sums of money... were paid out in the name of war compensation."
"All this occurred at a time of national suffering and devastation. Big business... derived illicit profits from so-called war compensation. They laid off huge numbers of workers and destroyed their own products to protect their capital.
"Industrial sabotage of this kind created a drastic shortage of consumer goods, aggravating the rising cost of commodities. Just as one wave gives rise to another, social turmoil compounded the vicious circle.
"To make matters worse, no limits were placed on government spending... Big corporations avoided reopening production. It was far more profitable to let factories lie idle and hang on to their vast stores of hidden goods, waiting for prices to rise... while the value of money fell steadily..."
"The economic crisis rocked the foundation of people's lives, just like a massive earthquake..."
Ikeda witnessed Japan's atrocious misrule from before the war through 1945 and beyond. Though some of the secondary causes and details are different, the consequences are all too similar to our worsening crisis. Corrupt officials and corporations use chaos, despair, and confusion they create to abuse and exploit their already impoverished, desperate victims, the people. Who to blame is much less important than understanding how to remedy the economic plague afflicting us. Without understanding the cause, nature, and contributing factors, we stand no chance of curing our monetary disease. Without understanding, we have no way to create or measure real progress, nor to prevent failure. Now, almost everyone is more or less confused about money. The videos online (linked below) help make the basics visible and easy to understand, if hard to stomach:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FiaUpeJxcA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFb26u9g8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dmPchuXIXQ
The British colonists here had been using their own nonprofit currency from long before the revolution. So, in the early days of the new USA, the founding fathers put little detail into the constitution about Congress' responsibility for controlling the money, relative weights, and measures. In those days, the many forms of money, several foreign currencies, local scrip, wampum, beaver skins, tobacco, beer, salt, and other useful trade 'goods' in use provided pervasive education on the simple principles of value, money, credit, currency exchange, banking, and so on. Not knowing that most of us would be totally ignorant of the nature of money and credit, the authors of the Constitution failed to provide detailed instructions on what then seemed common knowledge, understood by all. Now, over 230 years later, the Fed dollar's floating value swirls in a bloody whirlpool of other unstable currencies and derivatives, both actual and virtual (local & digital scrip, securities & contracts). So, the time is ripe for an upgrade of our collective education on value, money, and credit.
An online synopsis of the virtually complete history of money, banking, credit, massive governmental fraud and the corruption of economics by Stephen Zarlenga, director of the Amercian Monetary Institute, is required reading for a comprehensive understanding of the problem and co-creating the solution. Zarlenga's draft of the American Monetary Reform Act, is brilliant, virtually perfect, and also online at the AMI website at:
>> http://monetary.org/
>> http://monetary.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/32pageexplanation.pdf
Zarlenga's analysis is not complete, and his strategy far from comprehensive, but it is the best so far for reforming the current money system. However, without a deep, thorough exposure of the roots of the problem there will be no sustainable cure. As with democracy, the only thing that will sustain a stable culture and its economy is a well informed populace. Once a vast majority understand the basics of karma, ethics, culture, wealth, value, and credit, then we can establish a hybrid economy with a pure credit system to keep the money system in check.
It is essential to realize that the Fed's debt-dollars have no monetary value, nor any intrinsic value, only notional value. That is true of all the other fiat currencies of the current world game. Their notional values are notional for two main reasons. First, the constant flux and volatility of the currency trade and official manipulation prevent knowing a fiat currency's exact [notional] value at any moment. Also, notional value lacks direct relation to a standard measure of physical material or quantity. The Constitution makes one legal US dollar one ounce of coin silver. So, a Fed dollar has no legal value either.
The Fed's debt dollars are Fiat Currency which, according to the US Constitution, cannot be legal tender (our money). "Fiat" means "decree" by whoever claims to have the right theory or the right to dictate values, rules and terms of servitude. In the USA, there was never a Constitutional amendment permitting Congress to give away its responsibility and our economy to the big Banksters of the early 20th century.
Our only legal US currency, coins (valued per weight of silver & gold), are pure money, an abstraction of barter for the sake of convenient exchange. So, our legal US money has both monetary and relative value, as long as the prices of metal remain fixed, with ample reserves and responsible control by Congress.
Since Fed dollars have no legal or real, fixed, intrinsic or natural value, they actually have no relative value to anything real or natural. It may seem they have real or relative value based on people's trust and use but, since trickery, lies, cheating, and crime are involved, that invalidates the basis of real value, making valid relative value legally impossible. The subversion of the Constitution and Congressional rules for effective management of the relative values, prices, and supply of silver and gold make our real money system totally impossible.
Credit or credit units may have notional or monetary or relative value but, for us, it is more important to realize that pure credit and debt are not locked in a natural pair bond. Credit is now usually associated with ever mounting debt and destructive exploitation, usury, via interest, profit taken for loans. Since national currencies are now all tied to ever escalating, insurmountable debt (to heartless banksters), we can say that credit or credit units (like Fed "dollars") tied to fiat currencies and the destructive Bubble Economy Game are not pure, not green, not sustainable, not healthy and not legal for use by US governments or agencies. Credit with only notional value has no intrinsic or real monetary value. Pure credit may have relative value related to intrinsic value.
In the USA, legally and generally, in principle, monetary value requires maintaining a fixed standard of exchange for general fairness and convenience. 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 debt-dollars, 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.
Many ancient societies sustained a cultural economy based on intrinsic, positive values, and giving and sharing. The basic values of sustainable cultures are normally vibrant health, skill, happiness, virtue, wisdom, compassion, love, and generosity, sharing and gifting. Since the environment, Earth, was considered the source and repository of material abundance or wealth, the greatest honor and status was accorded those who gave and shared most, fostering greater joy and wellness for all. Selfishly taking most or causing general unhappiness and harm is considered sick, spiritually retarded or effects of harmful spirits. A typically overlooked essential of the gifting and sharing cultures, was that people did not take the methods or media of exchange very seriously. Wampum (cowry shells), hides, and trinkets were not considered more important than natural and spiritual resources, lives, health, and happiness. We may as well call such compassionate wisdom cultural sanity.
A pure, green, community credit system is not polluted by illegal schemes and harmful values. We already reward entertainers and experts in the arts, performing arts and sports more highly than anyone else. So, why not use a pure credit system that lets us directly reward everyone who makes positive contributions to our joy, health, and lively culture?
Only green credit, based on healthy cultural values, will deter activities that cause undue grief, illness, depression, and ruin. A healthy economy, whether local or global, is based on constructive cultural activity and exchange, not destructive exploitation, greed and terror. Normalized cheating and bogus theories build neither wealth nor cultural health. Neither wealth nor cultural liveliness depend on either winning or bloating, nor on wasting or squandering and hoarding. Saving is really investing and wealth is, among other things, the potential and capacity for sustaining a best case scenario. Without a best case scenario (the win-win scenario), the economy's snowballing End Game scenario will keep accelerating. If it does, the stealth depression will become an overt depression of the largest possible magnitude. Only green credit can stop it and cure it.
The Banksters cooked the Goose that laid the golden eggs, the US working class who drove 70% of the economy. There is nothing new or sophisticated or mysterious about this ancient syndrome. The fancy rationalizations and excuses are all hogwash and lies. A healthy economy, requires a stable, truly equitable economic system that serves all alike, fairly. We need fair trade, not bogus Free Trade. Yet, since we are not all 100% pure people, free of greed and perversity, having a pure system of one kind or another is out of the question.
We need a hybrid economy, with a nonprofit community based credit system balancing a reformed for-profit system. The US Constitution guarantees our right to any beneficial power or activity not specifically assigned to government. So, the establishment and legal recognition of community based credit systems is one of our natural rights. Congress had no right or legal power to give away its responsibility for our legal US money system, but they did. We clearly need and deserve an effective green alternative, now.
The Federal Reserve Bank system is constitutionally illegal and functionally defective, intentionally. It should be abolished or disempowered and disconnected from government. Yet, though it may seem best to prosecute it and its dark priesthood and co-conspirators, that can be put off and discussed by its victims, later. Until then, players obsessed with bogus Fed money, finance games and amoral investment can keep playing with their debt-dollars, Euros, stocks, bonds, futures, derivatives, etc.
Revision of the rules governing credit unions and interstate credit transactions must be discussed now. We need a viable hybrid system up and running, enabling lively cultural activity, healthy community development, and sane commerce. Since the necessities and related issues are too complex for this policy brief, this section deals only with the essential principles of nonprofit community credit, with a few simplified examples.
We first need to focus on what we need to remedy and replace first. Credit and debt are not synonyms. The Fed's bogus debt-money system 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. Over 90% of fake wealth is invested directly or indirectly in destructive exploitation, negative control, tyranny, panic, oppression, suppression, recession, depression, and foreclosures, staged by corrupt elitists for centuries, at least.
We can play an infinite, nonprofit, win-win game for the sake of well-being and the love of life and debt free children, but credit and debt must be disentangled. Think of the Free Market as a finite, for-profit game, with finite rules, boundaries, scoring, winners and losers, a beginning and an end. The winners play for points (dollars, etc.) and deluded ego, creating ever more losers, plunging the world into disaster after disaster. Why? They are addicted to the rules, bad brain chemicals, and false notions about their options and karma. 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 NeoMonopoly, the game called Monopoly played by new rules. Play it with the addition of loans and for-profit money with floating values set by the Banker, compound interest on the loans and all the money, and income tax paid every 4 rounds. One player is the Government, IRS, FBI, Supreme Court and the US Army. In NeoMonopoly, the Government and Banker have secret conferences and change the rules and definitions of economic terms whenever they want. So, good luck, but don't expect much fun.
Ironically, negative players of the for-profit game play mainly for quantity, despite excessive costs and unavoidable loss of both quality and quantity. Infinite players of nonprofit games play to enhance the enjoyment and quality of life, despite finite limits, status, quantity, and time.
That was the normal way of life on Earth, for millions of years, until about 5,000 years ago. Without money, economic values, banks, loans, interest, or taxes or tax lawyers and accountants, 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 debt or poverty. 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, 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. First, we need to recognize and respect the four basic modes of relationship and interaction...
1. Nondual:
creative, generative, infinite, primal, enlivening
2. Win-Win (give-give):
unitive, constructive, inclusive, mutually fulfilling
3. Win-Lose (give/take):
divisive, competitive, exclusive, limiting, disappointing
4. Lose-Lose (take-take):
destructive, negative, all consuming, depressing
The four modes apply to communities, cultures, civilizations, economies and all other social games as much as to individuals and families. The nondual mode of relationship is nature's way of creating, fostering, and supporting the relationship of all relationships we call the "universe" or life. We all participate to some extent as children or, sometimes, as parents and grandparents, lovers or heroes, but it can be hard to sustain while surviving in a corrupt society. The win-win mode is the one we all need to foster and support to sustain a successful civilization, and we can do it. Failing to use our best strategy and toolset would be insanely foolish.
The "winner takes all" insanity of modern Free Market capitalism is a perfect example of the Lose-Lose reality of the Win-Lose mode of relationship at the national and international levels. At the intercultural level, the Win-Lose game is a loser for all concerned, for we are all inseparably connected and affected.
The universe is the ultimate nondual mode of relatedness, and all karmas are instant karma, with ongoing chain reactions of consequences, for better or worse. What will it take to get back to the multi-millennial Win-Win game of life? Heartless exploiting, taking, hoarding, cheating, degrading, impoverishing, destroying and putting up with all that will never work.
We need true cost pricing or something similar with an even stronger corrective impact on destructive or toxic products, services, and projects. Yet, we first need to upgrade our definitions of karma, success, wealth, poverty, credit, value and benefit. The green definition of wealth measures success as the potential and flow of creativity, giving, sharing, cultivating, empowering, and the ability to increase and enhance the richness and joy of living.
Naturally, it will take more than notions and lip service to unsubvert and depervert the Consumer Society and its paradigm. We must recognize and sincerely celebrate all truly creative, positive, life enhancing activities by rewarding and empowering them and their creators or performers. When compassionate wisdom, productive creativity, abundant flow, giving and sharing are valued and gratefully credited as expressions of wealth, then we will see Earth as our treasury, manifesting sustainable success, ending debt and poverty.
Still, negative karmic momentum won't redirect itself, and that problem is the project of behavioral economics. For The Year in Science 2009 issue, a leader in the field, Professor of Economics and Psychology George Lowenstein (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. Behavioral economists look for and study our actual passions and habits, especially our habitual passion "for persuading ourselves that what we want to believe is true" regardless of our lack of belief. The chronic failure to remember the simple dynamics of bubble markets is a prime example. Lowenstein also mentioned the problem of herd mentality and the sense of false security, safety in numbers.
Nothing new in that, but seeing how our instincts and brain functions for responding to danger, threats, and fear relate to economics is relatively new. People were not scared by wonderful Mr. Madoff's amazing performance because it didn't trigger their primate fear & threat response functions. Behavioral economics also works with the psychosocial dynamics of pessimism, optimism, risk aversion, risk tolerance, adrenaline addiction, and wacko bravado, irrational risk taking. Where's the good news?
What we can see and study is workable. The pathology of irresponsible credit card use is actually due to sick psychological elements of the industry. Brain scans show that credit cards have an anesthetic effecton the brain, literally suppressing rational consideration of scary issues and outcomes. What's worse? 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. Policy makers and corporate sustainability experts can now dovetail healthy marketing strategy with methods that help consumers make nondestructive choices. More on that later, but this means that producers can now protect the sustainability of their annual business cycle by protecting customers from themselves.
Elimination of excessive executive compensation can now be justified. We have hard numbers and proof that the psychosocial dynamics of real-world people and performance make previous notions "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. We can care more about winning or losing than the work or why we're doing it. High stakes and high pay are typically counter-productive when high performance requires creativity, expansive thinking, and innovative approaches to complex problems with unobvious odds for solution. So, directors and stockholders of corporations can stop rewarding heartless sociopaths with insanely excessive salaries, bonuses, and diamond studded platinum parachutes.
Behavioral economists see greed as desperation. Lowenstein says they call it hypermotivation. He sees greed as "the antithesis of self-interest" because it makes us so motivated get one thing at the expense of other things that can actually be more valuable or important, either immediately or in the long run. We now have scientific proof that the Devil's bargains are really bad deals. 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 just a sense of limited options, but a deep seated sense of deficiency, insecurity, and inadequacy that can be remedied with compassion and a little education or skillful psychology.
Behavioral economics shows us that our short-sightedness (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. That enables us to devise clever methods for effective wellness programs for over-eaters, over-spenders, over-payers, and over-earners. The last two types are corporations and sociopathic executives.
Until the era of green wealth is globally established, leaders must develop sustainable policy, promote initiatives, and craft laws that separate money and debt, that deter, prohibit, and severely penalize ecocidal exploitation and other destructive activities and disvalues. Our other choice is ecocidal failure. Should we wait for the bankers and their political puppets to bail us out? That might happen when Hell freezes over or after they get religion, but both seem unlikely.
A nonprofit community credit system can be started by a cooperative association established for the purpose or a pre-existing organization, like a consumers co-op or a workers co-op company, a home owners association, a credit union, a for-profit corporation owned by decent folk, or even by friendly neighbors or noble individuals online, starting here and now. There are many good reasons to think that no organization nor any other person can or will determine the value of what you value better than you. The history of money, banking, and government proves these truths, but we can establish the system we need with an understanding of just the basics.
How could even a perfect alternative work well enough to survive the economics of Hell on Earth? The following brief examples offer a durable solution with variable options.
Of the many possible ways to set the relative values as the basis of a community credit system, using measures of time has some limited advantages, including familiarity. So, though the local currency system of Ithaca, New York, is not a pure nonprofit credit system, the Ithaca "Hours" certificates have worked very well since 1991, including approval for use at, by and for a local credit union. Visit the Ithaca Hours website and history page at...
http://www.ithacahours.com/archive/0001.html
Clearly, the disadvantages can be overcome, but only temporarily, even with a green upgrade. For instance, Ithaca's HOURS ("H") are valued at and exchangeable for $10.00 each, yet the buying power of the dollar has dropped by over 90% in the last 50 years and falls faster than ever. Real inflation soared like the price of metals over the last 10 years. So, if hours are the common basis of relative value, why not give the average worker a remedial raise? Instead of valuing the average hour at $100 though, $60 per hour seems less extreme and makes an equally effective example. So, a minute could equal $1 each, a 5 minute nickel = $5, a dime = $10, a quarter H = $15, a half H = $30, a full H credit = $60, and it would work almost like dollars did before 1975. Still, as long as a new alternative to cash is in any way connected to the Fed's Ponzi Casino system, debt-money and illusory values, the relative value of the alternative will rise or fall with the dollar.
Using time as the standard basis of relative value includes another bit of illogic unfit for a large scale credit system. One person's hour may seem unequal to one of another. With Ithaca HOURS and similar currencies, people negotiate various rates for services of varying perceived value.
Some alternative currency systems use a gold standard with cash equivalents fixed per ounces, fractions of an ounce or grams. Yet, gold is now tied to the unstable market economy, to mining, banking, finance, taxation, the same unsustainable manipulation, devaluation and gradual destabilization of the for-profit money system itself. Until metals are assigned fixed credit values, coins will remain far from being ideal tokens of pure credit.
The only way to sustain a stable credit system, balanced against the Fed's debt-dollar and its "floating value" and its manipulated "money" supply, is to stay free of direct monetary value and free of profit taking (via interest on debt). That may seem impossible or just crazy, but all official national currencies, including the dollar, have no set value, anyway. Their relative value changes with every microsecond of recalculated bets on the global currency trade and the latest central bankers' schemes. So, for exchange with currencies, the value of pure credit units could be figured as an average of all the major currencies and the current prices of all metals, oil, and national commodities index.
If that seems too complex, nonprofit community credit units can be valued at whatever the users agree on per each transaction or per tangible things commonly thought to have real or naturally intrinsic value, like certain luxuries, vehicles, animals, plants, commodities, materials, pleasing performances, whatever people value. However complex, super-cellphone computers, will have no problem handling the math for fair international exchange.
How are credits issued? A car manufacturer and its dealers often agree to give a car buyer a number of credit units equal to the number of dollars on the sticker. We call that a discount or premium. So, a cafe owner or soft drink manufacturer can accept credit units instead of dollars or offer them as premiums, like frequent flyer miles or coupons. A farmer might pay her workers with a combination of currency and credit units. A worker owned cooperative corporation may pay its employees entirely in credit units or just use them instead of a conventional profit sharing plan or benefits program. A doctor or clinic could use the credit system for a small scale HMO with superior quality services. The valuation of time, services, expertise, work or products is really decided by participants of an exchange through negotiation, however brief, subtle, or silent. So, especially with modern currencies, we are always affecting their value with each transaction manifesting the "market" for what we buy or sell.
Credit unions, community banks, and credit card vendors, like Visa, will have no trouble issuing GCCS (Green Community Credit System) cards and handling our accounts. Soon, they will do so as tax deductible nonprofit contributions to the community, the state, and the nations. Why would Visa and the World Bank cooperate with us? Because they depend on sustainable flow, and that takes participation, but their system suppresses both.
Only green credit can save the economy, by enabling 4 billion new participants to enter the game of culture with pure affluence, the capacity for flow and progress. It will cost the for-profit credit industry nothing, and dramatically increase the demand for conventional checking and savings account services. Then there will soon be hundreds of millions, then billions of new consumers and producers wanting new loans for products, services, and business projects that require official currencies. Each individual and each institutional participant will be an agent of the community, like its treasury and mint, minting new credit units as needed and deserved, in direct proportion to contributions to lively culture and flow. Will pure credit spin out of control like money always has?
Unlike the Fed's mysterious money machine, nonprofit credit lacks the structural elements and mechanics that create snowballing debt, interest (profit), and systemic cheating supported by bogus theory. Pure credit exists for our benefit, not for rapacious banksters and other predators who want the cream to themselves.
New and existing organizations and agencies can cooperate and use the Green Planning Standard to rate institutions, companies, etc., to determine their qualification (or disqualification) for issuing credits. Ungreen organizations and companies offering anti-green products and services must not be allowed to abuse the system for more toxic profit.
We can issue Green Credit units to each other via blog sites, Facebook, Twitter, private networks, and email. Where do the first pure, nonprofit credit units come from? They come from the same place the values come from. Did you get your first pay check in advance? Does an employee or another business take a check from a company that might be ruined before the check clears? Why does anyone take your personal checks? Where does the value of Fed dollars or Treasury bonds come from?
Well, the last example is hardly pure. The illusory, ever changing value of Fed dollars come from the illusory, ever changing value of T Bills and the imaginary value of the money put on banks' books with each new loan. The Fed's debt dollars are created by making entries in account ledgers and accounting databases controlled by it and the banks — debts for us, the people, and credits for the Fed, the banksters.
Still, like pure credit, even bad money depends on trust. Their is no other explanation for the continuing viability of the dollar. The USA has been functionally bankrupt for a very long time, insolvent, unable to pay its astronomical national debt. Yet, with the engine of the global economy, we get away with racking up even more toxic debt. For how long is anybody's guess, but the Fed dollar's value is a measure of trust. Once its TQ (trust quotient) drops below the level of terminal foolishness, the Fed and most US banks will be flat broke.
There is a real-world alternative that enables you to start issuing GCCS credit units today: Do you think this contribution to civilization and the well-being of all generations provides positive cultural value, causing positive change, greater wellness and more happiness? Great, use the new Green Credit Star system to award credits for the pages, posts, and comments you like. Rating a post you like gives it one Credit (like a vote of confidence in the value). That is multiplied by the number of stars you award. If you give this post (Green Credit & Commonwealth) 5 green stars, each worth 20 community Trust Units ("TU"), I will thank you for granting me 100 TUs.
The false viability of for-profit debt-money depends on suspending disbelief in the illusion of its relative value, while you ignore the negative effect of interest and manipulation by the banksters. Instead of instantly inflating the local economy by issuing credit with interest bearing debt (loans), like the Fed does, you and the credit unions, green employers, and community co-op associations can issue credit units directly, for real cultural benefit and commonwealth. Credit unions and cooperative banks can issue credit units as interest free loans.
As long as everyone is happy to be more affluent, with a healthy, thriving culture and a resurrected economy, the system will work better than Fed money. No more Bubble Economics, no depressing busts after manic booms, growth will level off to a healthy flow, like a mighty river. Towns, cities, counties, states, nations and tribes can use nonprofit credit units for trade and payment for services. Some international trade, import and export is handled with pure credit already and always has been. So, there can be no official argument against using it for smaller scale trade between jurisdictions regionally or in interstate commerce.
Long ago, the state of North Dakota initiated and sustained its own solution, its own banking system. However imperfect on its own, the Bank of North Dakota spared ND's citizens and businesses the Meltdown and End Game. We can do better than that over the next year or so. How? See the article linked below:
http://www.alternet.org/story/152285/north_dakota_fights_wall_street%27s_influence_with_a_state_bank_
Yes, we can rescue the USA. Though each state or locality may have its own unique set of subsystems, the Cooperative Community Credit System can be replicated nationally or internationally. If there is a monetary exchange value set at an average of global currencies and commodities, then official currency exchange transactions are as unnecessary as the related problems, inconveniences and costs. This alternative is being considered by the UN, China, and other leading nations that are tired of paying excessive dues to Club Fed and Wall Street Inc.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Wordpress, and many other businesses online will welcome another way to increase their volume of hits, goods, services, buzz and the flow of exchange. Without TUs, many banks and nations (other than Greece) will soon have little else to offer for keeping the world game going. Remember, Green Credit TUs are the perfect way to get about 4 billion new customers into the game to boost production and flow (affluence).
What should a unit of debtless, nonprofit credit be called? "Unit" and credit unit ("CU") seem too normal, sterile, boring. It's hard to imagine a nice symbol with a 'C' and a 'U' that looks right for convenient use. There is no love or sharing without trust. Since credit is a measure of trust, and we value sacred yet rational trust, 'T' makes a good symbol of it. The letter 'u' or 'U' superimposed over the T, might help. Written by hand, the Trust Unit symbol might look a like a cross with a big smile. If God wants us to love our neighbors and ourselves, using that symbol of our trust and community spirit should make Him very happy.
Jump start the global economy of the future. Whenever and wherever you can, use the Green Credit rating star system to award credits (community Trust Units) for valuable contributions to healthy culture and ecology. Please, also encourage your friends and local officials to subscribe to the Greenbook.blogspot.com and EcotectureNOW.wordpress.com
As long as currency is a commodity, everything will become a commodity as the quality of culture decreases and life grows ever cheaper. That process is the ultimate unsustainable con-game.
The wealth of Urban-Suburban Society is not simply the Wealth of Nations, but the poverty of billions. Poverty never existed before the invention of money and banking. In Limited Wants, Unlimited Means, a revisionary classic of honest anthropology, Nurit Bird-David writes:
"...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."
They not only thought they had it made, they did have it made. First hand accounts of all the most reliable witnesses who lived with 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 food and medicines.
Sahlins' mention of confidence may be easily passed over and the significance underestimated. Confidence, trust, is the only thing keeping the global Ponzi scam (the "economy") going now. So, we actually have much less reason for confidence than well trained primitive hunters.
Jim Bell is right. To wean the Consumer Society away from a more rapid descent into environmental disaster, we need true cost pricing. Products, processes, and projects that require ecocidal subsidies to seem affordable or that cause biological and social damage, health care disasters, and so on, should be priced accordingly. Given the real-world reality of systemic corruption and corporate manipulation, true cost pricing alone will never do. Even if it were allowed to get started on its own, developing a generally acceptable system might take too long to prevent an irreparable global catastrophe. Consumer Society's ecocidal socioeconomic paradigm, its disvalues, monetary madness, and corruption must be cured first or neutralized.
If the global derivatives bubble is a measure of the value of the Free Market economy then, surpassing 4800% of the world's annual GDP, it is inflating beyond $3,840,000,000,000,000 (3.840 quadrillion US dollars). Hard to believe? Yes or no, how many of those quadrillions are invested in making your world greener, healthier, more livable, eliminating poverty, ignorance, infant malnutrition and other causes of war? Right, close to zero ($0.00). Wiping out preventable misery and illness might cost about $80 billion or less per month or almost $1 trillion for a year. That is less than 0.003% of the global total invested in derivatives alone. It would be far less than 10% of the total cost of mid-east oil wars and medical benefits for injured veterans. Creating a bright Green future, globally, might cost $1 trillion over 5 years, about 10% of global defense spending per year. That will eliminate over 99% 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? Do they want Heaven on Earth? No, most are clearly devoted to maintaining all the infectious causes and symptoms of ecocide. Which master do they serve? Is it greed or good?
Before you decide, you may appreciate reading the refreshingly honest post by Jim Stanford on the Real-World Economics blogsite:
>> http://rwer.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/new-video-deconstructs-cge-trade-models/
In Greed, a comprehensive essay on the destructive rule of greed, Julian Edney offers another example from anthropology...
"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 unaggressive - 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."
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 in this post-Meltdown phase of the End Game.
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
In an article presented at the 1985 symposium on Economy and Church in Dialogue, former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) said...
"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."
He went on to say that...
"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 and 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
Such revolutionary, humanistic realism may seem beyond the scope of a Catholic bureaucrat, yet it reveals the truly human potential of religious inspiration and compassion. The Pope may be one of the most Buddhist of all Christians, but how do we turn ethics into effective policy?
"Buddhist Economics" is an essay by E. F. Schumacher, the humanitarian economist and author of Small is Beautiful: Economics As if People Mattered.
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."
To put it more plainly, heartless economics is like chronic, incestuous rape, torture and conspiracy to aid and abet mass murder. In The Human Revolution, a novelized history of Nichiren Buddhism in modern Japan, Dr. Daisaku Ikeda describes the awful conditions as World War 2 ended...
"Japan in those days writhed in the grip of a terrible economic crisis–runaway inflation."
"Nothing creates more misery than incompetent government... Day by day, the lives of the people took on the color of despair.
"The emergency measures temporarily protected monetary capital, but to the majority of the general public, they meant little more than enforced sacrifice...
"The crisis had not struck without warning. Its roots went deep; it had begun before the end of the war.
"Vast sums of money... were paid out in the name of war compensation."
"All this occurred at a time of national suffering and devastation. Big business... derived illicit profits from so-called war compensation. They laid off huge numbers of workers and destroyed their own products to protect their capital.
"Industrial sabotage of this kind created a drastic shortage of consumer goods, aggravating the rising cost of commodities. Just as one wave gives rise to another, social turmoil compounded the vicious circle.
"To make matters worse, no limits were placed on government spending... Big corporations avoided reopening production. It was far more profitable to let factories lie idle and hang on to their vast stores of hidden goods, waiting for prices to rise... while the value of money fell steadily..."
"The economic crisis rocked the foundation of people's lives, just like a massive earthquake..."
Ikeda witnessed Japan's atrocious misrule from before the war through 1945 and beyond. Though some of the secondary causes and details are different, the consequences are all too similar to our worsening crisis. Corrupt officials and corporations use chaos, despair, and confusion they create to abuse and exploit their already impoverished, desperate victims, the people. Who to blame is much less important than understanding how to remedy the economic plague afflicting us. Without understanding the cause, nature, and contributing factors, we stand no chance of curing our monetary disease. Without understanding, we have no way to create or measure real progress, nor to prevent failure. Now, almost everyone is more or less confused about money. The videos online (linked below) help make the basics visible and easy to understand, if hard to stomach:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FiaUpeJxcA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkFb26u9g8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dmPchuXIXQ
The British colonists here had been using their own nonprofit currency from long before the revolution. So, in the early days of the new USA, the founding fathers put little detail into the constitution about Congress' responsibility for controlling the money, relative weights, and measures. In those days, the many forms of money, several foreign currencies, local scrip, wampum, beaver skins, tobacco, beer, salt, and other useful trade 'goods' in use provided pervasive education on the simple principles of value, money, credit, currency exchange, banking, and so on. Not knowing that most of us would be totally ignorant of the nature of money and credit, the authors of the Constitution failed to provide detailed instructions on what then seemed common knowledge, understood by all. Now, over 230 years later, the Fed dollar's floating value swirls in a bloody whirlpool of other unstable currencies and derivatives, both actual and virtual (local & digital scrip, securities & contracts). So, the time is ripe for an upgrade of our collective education on value, money, and credit.
An online synopsis of the virtually complete history of money, banking, credit, massive governmental fraud and the corruption of economics by Stephen Zarlenga, director of the Amercian Monetary Institute, is required reading for a comprehensive understanding of the problem and co-creating the solution. Zarlenga's draft of the American Monetary Reform Act, is brilliant, virtually perfect, and also online at the AMI website at:
>> http://monetary.org/
>> http://monetary.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/32pageexplanation.pdf
Zarlenga's analysis is not complete, and his strategy far from comprehensive, but it is the best so far for reforming the current money system. However, without a deep, thorough exposure of the roots of the problem there will be no sustainable cure. As with democracy, the only thing that will sustain a stable culture and its economy is a well informed populace. Once a vast majority understand the basics of karma, ethics, culture, wealth, value, and credit, then we can establish a hybrid economy with a pure credit system to keep the money system in check.
It is essential to realize that the Fed's debt-dollars have no monetary value, nor any intrinsic value, only notional value. That is true of all the other fiat currencies of the current world game. Their notional values are notional for two main reasons. First, the constant flux and volatility of the currency trade and official manipulation prevent knowing a fiat currency's exact [notional] value at any moment. Also, notional value lacks direct relation to a standard measure of physical material or quantity. The Constitution makes one legal US dollar one ounce of coin silver. So, a Fed dollar has no legal value either.
The Fed's debt dollars are Fiat Currency which, according to the US Constitution, cannot be legal tender (our money). "Fiat" means "decree" by whoever claims to have the right theory or the right to dictate values, rules and terms of servitude. In the USA, there was never a Constitutional amendment permitting Congress to give away its responsibility and our economy to the big Banksters of the early 20th century.
Our only legal US currency, coins (valued per weight of silver & gold), are pure money, an abstraction of barter for the sake of convenient exchange. So, our legal US money has both monetary and relative value, as long as the prices of metal remain fixed, with ample reserves and responsible control by Congress.
Since Fed dollars have no legal or real, fixed, intrinsic or natural value, they actually have no relative value to anything real or natural. It may seem they have real or relative value based on people's trust and use but, since trickery, lies, cheating, and crime are involved, that invalidates the basis of real value, making valid relative value legally impossible. The subversion of the Constitution and Congressional rules for effective management of the relative values, prices, and supply of silver and gold make our real money system totally impossible.
Credit or credit units may have notional or monetary or relative value but, for us, it is more important to realize that pure credit and debt are not locked in a natural pair bond. Credit is now usually associated with ever mounting debt and destructive exploitation, usury, via interest, profit taken for loans. Since national currencies are now all tied to ever escalating, insurmountable debt (to heartless banksters), we can say that credit or credit units (like Fed "dollars") tied to fiat currencies and the destructive Bubble Economy Game are not pure, not green, not sustainable, not healthy and not legal for use by US governments or agencies. Credit with only notional value has no intrinsic or real monetary value. Pure credit may have relative value related to intrinsic value.
In the USA, legally and generally, in principle, monetary value requires maintaining a fixed standard of exchange for general fairness and convenience. 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 debt-dollars, 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.
Many ancient societies sustained a cultural economy based on intrinsic, positive values, and giving and sharing. The basic values of sustainable cultures are normally vibrant health, skill, happiness, virtue, wisdom, compassion, love, and generosity, sharing and gifting. Since the environment, Earth, was considered the source and repository of material abundance or wealth, the greatest honor and status was accorded those who gave and shared most, fostering greater joy and wellness for all. Selfishly taking most or causing general unhappiness and harm is considered sick, spiritually retarded or effects of harmful spirits. A typically overlooked essential of the gifting and sharing cultures, was that people did not take the methods or media of exchange very seriously. Wampum (cowry shells), hides, and trinkets were not considered more important than natural and spiritual resources, lives, health, and happiness. We may as well call such compassionate wisdom cultural sanity.
A pure, green, community credit system is not polluted by illegal schemes and harmful values. We already reward entertainers and experts in the arts, performing arts and sports more highly than anyone else. So, why not use a pure credit system that lets us directly reward everyone who makes positive contributions to our joy, health, and lively culture?
Only green credit, based on healthy cultural values, will deter activities that cause undue grief, illness, depression, and ruin. A healthy economy, whether local or global, is based on constructive cultural activity and exchange, not destructive exploitation, greed and terror. Normalized cheating and bogus theories build neither wealth nor cultural health. Neither wealth nor cultural liveliness depend on either winning or bloating, nor on wasting or squandering and hoarding. Saving is really investing and wealth is, among other things, the potential and capacity for sustaining a best case scenario. Without a best case scenario (the win-win scenario), the economy's snowballing End Game scenario will keep accelerating. If it does, the stealth depression will become an overt depression of the largest possible magnitude. Only green credit can stop it and cure it.
The Banksters cooked the Goose that laid the golden eggs, the US working class who drove 70% of the economy. There is nothing new or sophisticated or mysterious about this ancient syndrome. The fancy rationalizations and excuses are all hogwash and lies. A healthy economy, requires a stable, truly equitable economic system that serves all alike, fairly. We need fair trade, not bogus Free Trade. Yet, since we are not all 100% pure people, free of greed and perversity, having a pure system of one kind or another is out of the question.
We need a hybrid economy, with a nonprofit community based credit system balancing a reformed for-profit system. The US Constitution guarantees our right to any beneficial power or activity not specifically assigned to government. So, the establishment and legal recognition of community based credit systems is one of our natural rights. Congress had no right or legal power to give away its responsibility for our legal US money system, but they did. We clearly need and deserve an effective green alternative, now.
The Federal Reserve Bank system is constitutionally illegal and functionally defective, intentionally. It should be abolished or disempowered and disconnected from government. Yet, though it may seem best to prosecute it and its dark priesthood and co-conspirators, that can be put off and discussed by its victims, later. Until then, players obsessed with bogus Fed money, finance games and amoral investment can keep playing with their debt-dollars, Euros, stocks, bonds, futures, derivatives, etc.
Revision of the rules governing credit unions and interstate credit transactions must be discussed now. We need a viable hybrid system up and running, enabling lively cultural activity, healthy community development, and sane commerce. Since the necessities and related issues are too complex for this policy brief, this section deals only with the essential principles of nonprofit community credit, with a few simplified examples.
We first need to focus on what we need to remedy and replace first. Credit and debt are not synonyms. The Fed's bogus debt-money system 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. Over 90% of fake wealth is invested directly or indirectly in destructive exploitation, negative control, tyranny, panic, oppression, suppression, recession, depression, and foreclosures, staged by corrupt elitists for centuries, at least.
We can play an infinite, nonprofit, win-win game for the sake of well-being and the love of life and debt free children, but credit and debt must be disentangled. Think of the Free Market as a finite, for-profit game, with finite rules, boundaries, scoring, winners and losers, a beginning and an end. The winners play for points (dollars, etc.) and deluded ego, creating ever more losers, plunging the world into disaster after disaster. Why? They are addicted to the rules, bad brain chemicals, and false notions about their options and karma. 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 NeoMonopoly, the game called Monopoly played by new rules. Play it with the addition of loans and for-profit money with floating values set by the Banker, compound interest on the loans and all the money, and income tax paid every 4 rounds. One player is the Government, IRS, FBI, Supreme Court and the US Army. In NeoMonopoly, the Government and Banker have secret conferences and change the rules and definitions of economic terms whenever they want. So, good luck, but don't expect much fun.
Ironically, negative players of the for-profit game play mainly for quantity, despite excessive costs and unavoidable loss of both quality and quantity. Infinite players of nonprofit games play to enhance the enjoyment and quality of life, despite finite limits, status, quantity, and time.
That was the normal way of life on Earth, for millions of years, until about 5,000 years ago. Without money, economic values, banks, loans, interest, or taxes or tax lawyers and accountants, 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 debt or poverty. 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, 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. First, we need to recognize and respect the four basic modes of relationship and interaction...
1. Nondual:
creative, generative, infinite, primal, enlivening
2. Win-Win (give-give):
unitive, constructive, inclusive, mutually fulfilling
3. Win-Lose (give/take):
divisive, competitive, exclusive, limiting, disappointing
4. Lose-Lose (take-take):
destructive, negative, all consuming, depressing
The four modes apply to communities, cultures, civilizations, economies and all other social games as much as to individuals and families. The nondual mode of relationship is nature's way of creating, fostering, and supporting the relationship of all relationships we call the "universe" or life. We all participate to some extent as children or, sometimes, as parents and grandparents, lovers or heroes, but it can be hard to sustain while surviving in a corrupt society. The win-win mode is the one we all need to foster and support to sustain a successful civilization, and we can do it. Failing to use our best strategy and toolset would be insanely foolish.
The "winner takes all" insanity of modern Free Market capitalism is a perfect example of the Lose-Lose reality of the Win-Lose mode of relationship at the national and international levels. At the intercultural level, the Win-Lose game is a loser for all concerned, for we are all inseparably connected and affected.
The universe is the ultimate nondual mode of relatedness, and all karmas are instant karma, with ongoing chain reactions of consequences, for better or worse. What will it take to get back to the multi-millennial Win-Win game of life? Heartless exploiting, taking, hoarding, cheating, degrading, impoverishing, destroying and putting up with all that will never work.
We need true cost pricing or something similar with an even stronger corrective impact on destructive or toxic products, services, and projects. Yet, we first need to upgrade our definitions of karma, success, wealth, poverty, credit, value and benefit. The green definition of wealth measures success as the potential and flow of creativity, giving, sharing, cultivating, empowering, and the ability to increase and enhance the richness and joy of living.
Naturally, it will take more than notions and lip service to unsubvert and depervert the Consumer Society and its paradigm. We must recognize and sincerely celebrate all truly creative, positive, life enhancing activities by rewarding and empowering them and their creators or performers. When compassionate wisdom, productive creativity, abundant flow, giving and sharing are valued and gratefully credited as expressions of wealth, then we will see Earth as our treasury, manifesting sustainable success, ending debt and poverty.
Still, negative karmic momentum won't redirect itself, and that problem is the project of behavioral economics. For The Year in Science 2009 issue, a leader in the field, Professor of Economics and Psychology George Lowenstein (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. Behavioral economists look for and study our actual passions and habits, especially our habitual passion "for persuading ourselves that what we want to believe is true" regardless of our lack of belief. The chronic failure to remember the simple dynamics of bubble markets is a prime example. Lowenstein also mentioned the problem of herd mentality and the sense of false security, safety in numbers.
Nothing new in that, but seeing how our instincts and brain functions for responding to danger, threats, and fear relate to economics is relatively new. People were not scared by wonderful Mr. Madoff's amazing performance because it didn't trigger their primate fear & threat response functions. Behavioral economics also works with the psychosocial dynamics of pessimism, optimism, risk aversion, risk tolerance, adrenaline addiction, and wacko bravado, irrational risk taking. Where's the good news?
What we can see and study is workable. The pathology of irresponsible credit card use is actually due to sick psychological elements of the industry. Brain scans show that credit cards have an anesthetic effecton the brain, literally suppressing rational consideration of scary issues and outcomes. What's worse? 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. Policy makers and corporate sustainability experts can now dovetail healthy marketing strategy with methods that help consumers make nondestructive choices. More on that later, but this means that producers can now protect the sustainability of their annual business cycle by protecting customers from themselves.
Elimination of excessive executive compensation can now be justified. We have hard numbers and proof that the psychosocial dynamics of real-world people and performance make previous notions "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. We can care more about winning or losing than the work or why we're doing it. High stakes and high pay are typically counter-productive when high performance requires creativity, expansive thinking, and innovative approaches to complex problems with unobvious odds for solution. So, directors and stockholders of corporations can stop rewarding heartless sociopaths with insanely excessive salaries, bonuses, and diamond studded platinum parachutes.
Behavioral economists see greed as desperation. Lowenstein says they call it hypermotivation. He sees greed as "the antithesis of self-interest" because it makes us so motivated get one thing at the expense of other things that can actually be more valuable or important, either immediately or in the long run. We now have scientific proof that the Devil's bargains are really bad deals. 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 just a sense of limited options, but a deep seated sense of deficiency, insecurity, and inadequacy that can be remedied with compassion and a little education or skillful psychology.
Behavioral economics shows us that our short-sightedness (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. That enables us to devise clever methods for effective wellness programs for over-eaters, over-spenders, over-payers, and over-earners. The last two types are corporations and sociopathic executives.
Until the era of green wealth is globally established, leaders must develop sustainable policy, promote initiatives, and craft laws that separate money and debt, that deter, prohibit, and severely penalize ecocidal exploitation and other destructive activities and disvalues. Our other choice is ecocidal failure. Should we wait for the bankers and their political puppets to bail us out? That might happen when Hell freezes over or after they get religion, but both seem unlikely.
A nonprofit community credit system can be started by a cooperative association established for the purpose or a pre-existing organization, like a consumers co-op or a workers co-op company, a home owners association, a credit union, a for-profit corporation owned by decent folk, or even by friendly neighbors or noble individuals online, starting here and now. There are many good reasons to think that no organization nor any other person can or will determine the value of what you value better than you. The history of money, banking, and government proves these truths, but we can establish the system we need with an understanding of just the basics.
How could even a perfect alternative work well enough to survive the economics of Hell on Earth? The following brief examples offer a durable solution with variable options.
Of the many possible ways to set the relative values as the basis of a community credit system, using measures of time has some limited advantages, including familiarity. So, though the local currency system of Ithaca, New York, is not a pure nonprofit credit system, the Ithaca "Hours" certificates have worked very well since 1991, including approval for use at, by and for a local credit union. Visit the Ithaca Hours website and history page at...
http://www.ithacahours.com/archive/0001.html
Clearly, the disadvantages can be overcome, but only temporarily, even with a green upgrade. For instance, Ithaca's HOURS ("H") are valued at and exchangeable for $10.00 each, yet the buying power of the dollar has dropped by over 90% in the last 50 years and falls faster than ever. Real inflation soared like the price of metals over the last 10 years. So, if hours are the common basis of relative value, why not give the average worker a remedial raise? Instead of valuing the average hour at $100 though, $60 per hour seems less extreme and makes an equally effective example. So, a minute could equal $1 each, a 5 minute nickel = $5, a dime = $10, a quarter H = $15, a half H = $30, a full H credit = $60, and it would work almost like dollars did before 1975. Still, as long as a new alternative to cash is in any way connected to the Fed's Ponzi Casino system, debt-money and illusory values, the relative value of the alternative will rise or fall with the dollar.
Using time as the standard basis of relative value includes another bit of illogic unfit for a large scale credit system. One person's hour may seem unequal to one of another. With Ithaca HOURS and similar currencies, people negotiate various rates for services of varying perceived value.
Some alternative currency systems use a gold standard with cash equivalents fixed per ounces, fractions of an ounce or grams. Yet, gold is now tied to the unstable market economy, to mining, banking, finance, taxation, the same unsustainable manipulation, devaluation and gradual destabilization of the for-profit money system itself. Until metals are assigned fixed credit values, coins will remain far from being ideal tokens of pure credit.
The only way to sustain a stable credit system, balanced against the Fed's debt-dollar and its "floating value" and its manipulated "money" supply, is to stay free of direct monetary value and free of profit taking (via interest on debt). That may seem impossible or just crazy, but all official national currencies, including the dollar, have no set value, anyway. Their relative value changes with every microsecond of recalculated bets on the global currency trade and the latest central bankers' schemes. So, for exchange with currencies, the value of pure credit units could be figured as an average of all the major currencies and the current prices of all metals, oil, and national commodities index.
If that seems too complex, nonprofit community credit units can be valued at whatever the users agree on per each transaction or per tangible things commonly thought to have real or naturally intrinsic value, like certain luxuries, vehicles, animals, plants, commodities, materials, pleasing performances, whatever people value. However complex, super-cellphone computers, will have no problem handling the math for fair international exchange.
How are credits issued? A car manufacturer and its dealers often agree to give a car buyer a number of credit units equal to the number of dollars on the sticker. We call that a discount or premium. So, a cafe owner or soft drink manufacturer can accept credit units instead of dollars or offer them as premiums, like frequent flyer miles or coupons. A farmer might pay her workers with a combination of currency and credit units. A worker owned cooperative corporation may pay its employees entirely in credit units or just use them instead of a conventional profit sharing plan or benefits program. A doctor or clinic could use the credit system for a small scale HMO with superior quality services. The valuation of time, services, expertise, work or products is really decided by participants of an exchange through negotiation, however brief, subtle, or silent. So, especially with modern currencies, we are always affecting their value with each transaction manifesting the "market" for what we buy or sell.
Credit unions, community banks, and credit card vendors, like Visa, will have no trouble issuing GCCS (Green Community Credit System) cards and handling our accounts. Soon, they will do so as tax deductible nonprofit contributions to the community, the state, and the nations. Why would Visa and the World Bank cooperate with us? Because they depend on sustainable flow, and that takes participation, but their system suppresses both.
Only green credit can save the economy, by enabling 4 billion new participants to enter the game of culture with pure affluence, the capacity for flow and progress. It will cost the for-profit credit industry nothing, and dramatically increase the demand for conventional checking and savings account services. Then there will soon be hundreds of millions, then billions of new consumers and producers wanting new loans for products, services, and business projects that require official currencies. Each individual and each institutional participant will be an agent of the community, like its treasury and mint, minting new credit units as needed and deserved, in direct proportion to contributions to lively culture and flow. Will pure credit spin out of control like money always has?
Unlike the Fed's mysterious money machine, nonprofit credit lacks the structural elements and mechanics that create snowballing debt, interest (profit), and systemic cheating supported by bogus theory. Pure credit exists for our benefit, not for rapacious banksters and other predators who want the cream to themselves.
New and existing organizations and agencies can cooperate and use the Green Planning Standard to rate institutions, companies, etc., to determine their qualification (or disqualification) for issuing credits. Ungreen organizations and companies offering anti-green products and services must not be allowed to abuse the system for more toxic profit.
We can issue Green Credit units to each other via blog sites, Facebook, Twitter, private networks, and email. Where do the first pure, nonprofit credit units come from? They come from the same place the values come from. Did you get your first pay check in advance? Does an employee or another business take a check from a company that might be ruined before the check clears? Why does anyone take your personal checks? Where does the value of Fed dollars or Treasury bonds come from?
Well, the last example is hardly pure. The illusory, ever changing value of Fed dollars come from the illusory, ever changing value of T Bills and the imaginary value of the money put on banks' books with each new loan. The Fed's debt dollars are created by making entries in account ledgers and accounting databases controlled by it and the banks — debts for us, the people, and credits for the Fed, the banksters.
Still, like pure credit, even bad money depends on trust. Their is no other explanation for the continuing viability of the dollar. The USA has been functionally bankrupt for a very long time, insolvent, unable to pay its astronomical national debt. Yet, with the engine of the global economy, we get away with racking up even more toxic debt. For how long is anybody's guess, but the Fed dollar's value is a measure of trust. Once its TQ (trust quotient) drops below the level of terminal foolishness, the Fed and most US banks will be flat broke.
There is a real-world alternative that enables you to start issuing GCCS credit units today: Do you think this contribution to civilization and the well-being of all generations provides positive cultural value, causing positive change, greater wellness and more happiness? Great, use the new Green Credit Star system to award credits for the pages, posts, and comments you like. Rating a post you like gives it one Credit (like a vote of confidence in the value). That is multiplied by the number of stars you award. If you give this post (Green Credit & Commonwealth) 5 green stars, each worth 20 community Trust Units ("TU"), I will thank you for granting me 100 TUs.
The false viability of for-profit debt-money depends on suspending disbelief in the illusion of its relative value, while you ignore the negative effect of interest and manipulation by the banksters. Instead of instantly inflating the local economy by issuing credit with interest bearing debt (loans), like the Fed does, you and the credit unions, green employers, and community co-op associations can issue credit units directly, for real cultural benefit and commonwealth. Credit unions and cooperative banks can issue credit units as interest free loans.
As long as everyone is happy to be more affluent, with a healthy, thriving culture and a resurrected economy, the system will work better than Fed money. No more Bubble Economics, no depressing busts after manic booms, growth will level off to a healthy flow, like a mighty river. Towns, cities, counties, states, nations and tribes can use nonprofit credit units for trade and payment for services. Some international trade, import and export is handled with pure credit already and always has been. So, there can be no official argument against using it for smaller scale trade between jurisdictions regionally or in interstate commerce.
Long ago, the state of North Dakota initiated and sustained its own solution, its own banking system. However imperfect on its own, the Bank of North Dakota spared ND's citizens and businesses the Meltdown and End Game. We can do better than that over the next year or so. How? See the article linked below:
http://www.alternet.org/story/152285/north_dakota_fights_wall_street%27s_influence_with_a_state_bank_
Yes, we can rescue the USA. Though each state or locality may have its own unique set of subsystems, the Cooperative Community Credit System can be replicated nationally or internationally. If there is a monetary exchange value set at an average of global currencies and commodities, then official currency exchange transactions are as unnecessary as the related problems, inconveniences and costs. This alternative is being considered by the UN, China, and other leading nations that are tired of paying excessive dues to Club Fed and Wall Street Inc.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Wordpress, and many other businesses online will welcome another way to increase their volume of hits, goods, services, buzz and the flow of exchange. Without TUs, many banks and nations (other than Greece) will soon have little else to offer for keeping the world game going. Remember, Green Credit TUs are the perfect way to get about 4 billion new customers into the game to boost production and flow (affluence).
What should a unit of debtless, nonprofit credit be called? "Unit" and credit unit ("CU") seem too normal, sterile, boring. It's hard to imagine a nice symbol with a 'C' and a 'U' that looks right for convenient use. There is no love or sharing without trust. Since credit is a measure of trust, and we value sacred yet rational trust, 'T' makes a good symbol of it. The letter 'u' or 'U' superimposed over the T, might help. Written by hand, the Trust Unit symbol might look a like a cross with a big smile. If God wants us to love our neighbors and ourselves, using that symbol of our trust and community spirit should make Him very happy.
Jump start the global economy of the future. Whenever and wherever you can, use the Green Credit rating star system to award credits (community Trust Units) for valuable contributions to healthy culture and ecology. Please, also encourage your friends and local officials to subscribe to the Greenbook.blogspot.com and EcotectureNOW.wordpress.com
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