Letter 1 - Page 1 - Protest and revolt.

Right now there are occupations against the financial corruption of politics all over the western world. This year saw uprisings and the overthrow of many brutal regimes in the Middle East with more to follow. 

2011 was one hell of a year wasn't it? What went on there?  How did powerful regimes that held their people in daily terror and religious control suddenly get flipped so quickly?  How did NATO engage in a war in North Africa?  Why are nations in the Middle East seeming so powerless to control their own populations and those populations of their neighbours?  How did 16 cities in the US witness simultaneous yet chaotic protests?  How Did the Tea party seize control of the Republican Party so efficiently?  What happened with the banks?  Why is there no money any more?  Why is the news do damned depressing all the time?

2011 - The Year our leaders took their eye off the ball and let it slip that people were effectively worthless to them.

The western protesters chant “We are the 99%”, implying that the remaining 1% hold all the power, and are content to watch their fellow humanity fall destitute. But that is an over simplification.  

Why do I say this?  Isn't this just me spouting Anarchist cant to make myself seem more important?  If only....

When the Egyptian secret police beat Khalid Said to death in Alexandria in June 2010 they could not have known that they had just tipped the balance in Egypt against the regime that employed them.  Khalid Said wasn't by any stretch the first death at the hands of the security forces nor would he be the last.  But his corpse's image inspired Wael Ghonim to set up the Facebook Group "We are all Khalid Said"  - His first post on the group set out their manifesto perfectly:

"Today they killed Khalid. If I don't act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me."

 This movement had a precedent and that precedent was two years earlier in Iran. In 2009 the election result reinstating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president under Supreme Leader the Islamic cleric Ayatollah Ali Khameini was disputed and  some student protested on the streets.  It was the usual suspects of radical idealists, modernisers and moderates and should have petered out but for the fact that the very next night Pro-Ahmadinejad paramilitaries raided the University of Tehran and injured many.  Result?  Millions of protesters and a real anti-government movement. 

Whatever my personal bias in this story, the Government of Iran handled this horribly badly, as most Middle Eastern governments tend to because of their authoritarian culture.  Exactly one week after the initial raid on Tehran University, a young woman was shot by the same paramilitaries and she bled to death in front of a camera-phone. Nothing could have been worse for the Authorities, the protest movement went from a political opposition to a revolutionary movement complete with its own martyr, which by the way, matters much more in the Islamic world than it does in the West.

The revolution rumbled on for months and the crackdown became more and more brutal with over 4000 detentions and even high ranking clerics, normally untouchable, being arrested to silence their objections. The green revolution in Iran is far from over and I expect that it will reignite this year.

Just after Syria comes to a resolution is my guesstimate.  It doesn't suit the US, Russia, China or any of the traditional superpowers to have two big powers in the Middle East destabilised at the same time.  It is telling that the normally aloof Saudi Government went on a desperate spending spree to stave off unrest in their Kingdom as the Arab Spring came to Bahrain which is linked to the mainland by a handy bridge.  If the House of Saudi lost its grip on power even slightly there was no predicting what would happen to the main source of  fossil fuel to the rest of the world.  

Irrespective of political leaning, idealogical aspiration or religious sectarianism - nobody wants chaos in the Middle East right now; not even Israel or the Palestinian Authority.  What's occurring is a crystallisation of the differences between the ruling class and the younger generations and the middle classes that demand more say over how they are ruled.  This wave of sentiment will continue to wash over every country where the citizens get a sniff of how worthless they now are to their rulers - this includes Western nations and the Russian Federation. 

I mentioned a tipping point earlier in this letter.  I said that our current system was designed around human slavery and it cannot adapt to even dirt poor humans no longer being helpless (asymmetric warfare) and the fact that technology does the work of humans better, cheaper and more reliably.  That means that we educated, pampered and indulged westerners are largely ineffective in the economic struggle to compete against less developed societies where aspiration is still an immense driving force.  Aspiration hasn't been seen In Europe and the US since 2002. Even in less developed nations, cheap labour is getting pricier because western markets are beginning to refuse products made using intimidation, cruelty or any other dehumanising method.    

The labour of human beings is no longer worth the price of their chains.

We should be at the dawn of a marvellous new age where mankind is finally able to enjoy en-masse the kind of leisure that we in the West largely enjoy but we're not because we haven't done the homework for that transition to  occur.  Instead we backed the nag that is financial services and financial services has collapsed like a house of cards under the strain. The philosophy, industry and religion of Free Market Economics is at turns devouring itself or paralysed with fear so ultimately it is shrinking.  All the while, those unemployed people in the developed world are still expected to locate employment in a diminishing economy or starve.  The current discomfort experienced in the West is the result of a deflation in their combined economies of less than 4%  - Imagine if a 10%+ deflation occurs, or more?   Is that even possible?  Can the economy of the entire west simply implode? 

The 1% is just as powerless as the 99%.

The most telling statistic regarding the US economy is the Federal Debt since 2007.  (The page I linked to has no liberal part in its DNA whatsoever and so I trust the numbers as they have not been massaged or skewed to make a case for social welfare or any expenditure that might be deemed liberal).  The part that I wish to highlight is  the 'Monetized Public Debt'  as opposed to the Gross Federal Debt (Government spending) and the Debt Held by the Public (Public includes foreign governments).  The box I want to show you is at the bottom of this page called "Gross Federal Debt Vs National Debt"  That blue section there from 1940 onwards.  What isn't it doing?  

It isn't fluctuating.  It's not rising, nor is it falling to any significant degree. Like an anchor or ballast it appears to be there simply to counterbalance other debt but in real terms its influence is shrinking year on year. 

Between the years of end 2007 to now the public debt has more than doubled.  The Federal Debt has risen nearly 70% but the Federal Reserve has not attempted to renationalise any of this new deficit to limit its impact upon the US economy.  I am sure there is a very intelligent and wise cause for this course of action; it's just....foreign governments outside of the European Continent owe the US very little and cannot be relied upon to be allies when push comes to shove. Add to that, a rival having such a control over the US government, say a nameless repressive monarchy that wants to control the oil market, a brutal theocracy that is friendly with an equally large financial power and looking to deplete uranium beyond the point of use for energy  or a one party totalitarian state that is buying up as many resources as it can and you can see the problem.  The Federal Reserve is in no position to help the US out of a calling down of that debt because its ballast is realistically negligible.  I can logically consider this standard percentage as the cost of running a skeleton government in the time of National Crisis. I would like to hear the evidence to the contrary, I really would, because this looks very much like the endgame I wrote about in the four part open letter. to the 100%.  

In fact, the only remaining market with some of the financial clout, the ethical integrity and sufficient positive disposition towards the US to take some of the strain remains the European Continent.  What a pity then that the Eurozone is currently under idealogical and speculative bombardment from the twin big guns of Wall Street and the City of London. 

This is how to lose friends and alienate people at the worst possible moment.

Money has been found out as nothing more than a measuring system for confidence.  In short, money is a confidence trick, a scam.  

Harsh words but true.

Given that any economy can be subject to stresses through the International Bond Market and given that the only remaining depository for wealth is banking, (Luxury goods and Property having overheated and popped in 2008) then everything you and I work for can be cancelled out by an oversight by a trader or an aggressive policy by rival nations and there's nothing we can do about that. 

Any wealth we give to the financial complex ceases to be our property at that moment.  If I take wealth, say my house and I sell it. I am paid by cheque by the buyer and I must pay that cheque into a bank to redeem it.  Now If I want access that wealth I can only be paid in bank notes.  My house is gone and I have the right to access a certain amount of paper notes.  Goody!  Loads of people want these paper notes, don't they?

What if the currency collapses?  Well then I realise that a house is better than a case full of paper.  But, until this inevitable collapse occurs (see the explosion of Debt Held by the Public above) I will play along with the make believe that money actually has a real world worth.

It doesn't   Money is a species of debt. the bank's entire function is to manage not wealth but debt.  Being a depository of  wealth is of very little value to banks but charging interest on loans is very profitable indeed.  Or was very profitable until large numbers of people discovered they couldn't pay the interest demanded.  Banks had no option but to foreclose and were left with a large portfolio of unsellable houses that deteriorate because of remaining empty over a long period of time.  

Clearly, allowing this situation continue that can lead only to a collapse is leading us nowhere.  Even those people that profit from the misery of others now recognise that this is a diminishing honey pot and they will ultimately end up looking for another income stream.  There is only so much vulture capitalism an economy can tolerate until the actual good stock, the part of the market that can potentially grow and thrive, gets raided and cut back.  How can business employ more people in a diminishing marketplace when they have to show a profit for their activity in order to be permitted to continue that activity, no matter how beneficial that activity is to the wider society?  

Economy is not Society.  

Society is what people build when they congregate together to live and thrive.  Economy is the measurement of a society's readiness to be harvested of wealth by outside organisations such as banks, insurance corporations and the marketers of financial products.

This is why I assert that money and the luxuries money can buy do NOT represent wealth.  Yachts don't actually create jobs and bring people together so they might thrive.  

I asserted that the Era of Debt is over.  This isn't a hope or a dream but a very real phenomenon.  Those that have debt in their lives are doing everything they can to  eradicate it.  Historically, the anti-capitalists have been on the fringes of society and have been largely a fairly unrealistic bunch, banging drums and rolling their hair into dreadlocks but this fringe has now been bolstered by a more mainstream population and they all get the whole "Debt = Debt" message.

The more you buy with banking products (credit cards, store cards, banknotes etc.) the less security you have in the deal.  More and more people are seeking out an alternative to credit purchases with hidden charges.  

   

The 100%: Letter 1 Page 1

"Monaterist Capitalism, the financial model we use in the west, is dying."  

If you click on the link you will see that I don't use the term Monetarist in a pejorative way but in the correct manner: pertaining to the supply and scarcity of paper money as a means to control inflation or the fluctuation of price of goods and services.

I assert that this system is now akin to adjusting the deck chairs on the Titanic.  Adjusting the supply or otherwise of paper money is not dealing with the central problem of consumerism not replenishing the environment it exists in. The reason I assert that  Monaterist Capitalism is dying is because it has nowhere else to go when money itself devalues or is attacked by outside Markets.  The Eurozone 'crisis' is just such an attack upon a currency representing a large market in highly developed countries with excellent educational standards and advanced infrastructures.

How can such a collection of prosperous and productive populations be 'in crisis'?

According to the IMF and the World Bank, these countries are in various stages of debt.  The debt has been generated by the governments of these countries selling bonds or promissory notes based on the prosperity of their national economies.  What is occurring now is that the Markets where national governments go to raise capital are demanding more and more interest on their loans.  Certain countries, adjudged by these experts not to be able to expand sufficiently quickly have to pay higher interest on their loans than others.

Why are governments selling their sovereignty to a privately run crap game in the first place?
Aren't taxes enough?  If not, why not?

The answer varies depending on to whom you put that question.  One school of thought is that governments are spending too much on their social infrastructure (Schools, hospitals, parks, etc.) and are expanding beyond their means.  Thus they are using the extra capital (and it is capital, not income) to bridge the divide between what they have and what they can afford to have.  Certainly this appears to have been the case in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger phase.  The other and opposite school of thought argues that tax has become a political issue with the electorate and the large middle class demand less and less taxation from their governments. So governments, in order to gain power, have effectively mortgaged off the existing social and economic infrastructure and gambled shamelessly on the open market hoping to make a killing, much like people in poverty spend more of their income on scratch cards and lottery tickets than people in financial comfort.

Oddly enough: Both seemingly divergent opinions are absolutely true and agree on the same thing.  The wealth and the potential work force of the population has been placed as security on a bet.  That's it.  It's a bet.

The criterion under which the International Bond Markets give capital to governments is exclusively their ability to expand economically.  Clearly, this is a nonsense as nations can only expand economically by either exploiting and depleting what resides within their borders or exploiting and depleting what resides without their borders.

There are a few ways they can achieve the latter:
Colonialism which is effectively enslaving less developed peoples so that  the governments can take the resources they need (19th Century solution), Warfare which is the more drastic measure of killing less developed peoples so that the governments can take the resources they need (20th Century Solution) or Globalization which is controlling the less developed peoples to manufacture at source so that only the finished product gets shipped (21st Century solution).

Now, Globalisation appears on the surface to be the least harmful of the three classic strategies but this ignores the violence done to the population back home.  Their work and their income has been shipped abroad.  Yes, it was work and income they should never have had in the first place. Ethically speaking, their raw materials came to them by slavery or genocide but that doesn't undo the fact that they have been taken out of meaningful life and dumped into a limbo they have no means of escaping.  Once proud people are now as helpless as medieval serfs.

The middle class, that traditional source of innovation and expansion ,are themselves feeling powerless and frustrated with a system that seems to punish their effort to generate capital rather than foster it. The standards required of a business in a boom time remain the standards expected in a bust.  So less people have to work harder to hit the target and they resent the hell out of this.

How will printing more Euros or Dollars or Yuan deal with this?  It won't.  Deck chairs.  Titanic.

This is the tipping point: even Yemen has an army.  We cannot exploit our neighbor anymore.  Whatever expansion we achieve from here on in cannot be exploitative and resource wasteful.  Sadly, our current science of economics is still working to a model that was first developed in 1915 when consumerism was devised. We are still expected to behave like good consumers in an unthinking and destructive manner for our economies to thrive.  Clearly this problem needs an immediate but long lasting solution

We have already come up with one half of our solution but that causes another, bigger problem.

We have built machines to do the most degrading part of the work necessary to produce goods and they have turned out to be ultra reliable, efficient, productive and better than people on all fronts.  The only problem is, it takes but one worker to supervise five machines where once it took a room full of workers to do the work of one machine.  Along with our jobs, we are also now exporting this level of automation to the developing economies and within the next twenty years, they will find themselves in the same quandary as we in the west find ourselves in now.

Ask any economist of any persuasion what solution he or she can offer to this reductive cul de sac and you will probably hear much jargon and citations but I doubt very much if you will hear a solution.  Our current standard of economics cannot adapt to this problem because economics in the general sense is inherently blind to this reality.  Economics doesn't factor in the finiteness of our resource pile. We will be counting on rare earths to power our mobile phones in ten years' time, even though they are called rare earths.

The hint is in the name: they will be depleted.  Phones need to seek the same functionality by other means.

Consumerism must end. Its time has passed we are now too many and too culturally advanced to settle for a mud-hut dwelling, self sufficient lifestyle en masse. The death of consumerism is happening right now.  This death is not being caused by the anti capitalist graffiti, nor is it the work of anarchists, nor is it the effect of the street protests of 2011; consumerism is being strangled by the twin hands of resource scarcity and mass unemployment.

In the past, people who were unemployed didn't expect a certain level of lifestyle. You had to work to eat, own your home and send your kids to school. If you lost your job, you went out and got another job as quickly as you could.  This no longer works because there are fewer jobs and even if you are in employment the cost of things is inevitably going to rise. You can start a business or work for cash if you like but unless you are offering a faddish range of products (see Apple Inc.) or have an effective monopoly (See Microsoft) the chances are you'll get eaten up by the bigger fish who are starving for any income stream they can source.

Part of this problem was the fact that there are big fish in this small pool in the first place.

The impetus for all this corporate giantism comes from the buying and selling of shares. In a bubble of their own making companies discovered, to their joy, that useless bits of paper that were promissory notes on their economic performance called 'shares' could grow in value the more traders believed in the company's potential for economic expansion. When these traders judge that the company cannot expand economically anymore the price of the share drops. None of this is real money it is just an estimate of of a company's earning potential but try telling that to the thousands of employees hired and fired just to play the market.

Shares and bonds rise and fall under the same criterion: Economic expansion.  They are the same product in two different markets.  Those markets, in a desperate attempt to derive more profit will inevitably blend with disastrous effect.  How do you fire a citizen?  With a bullet.

Corporate structures rely upon a supporting market to take their end product in exchange for cash, credit or kind.  If consumerism is not adjusted to factor in an understanding of our current physical reality (that resources are depleting and cannot be replaced) then I would not be very surprised to hear about the Burkina Faso / Rio Tinto War within about ten years. Scarier still would be the Rio Tinto / Mittal Steel War.  Nothing in our current model of civilisation (Monatarist Capitalism) can deal with this situation.  Nothing.

Does any of this sound familiar?  Aren't private corporations approaching the same situation countries found themselves in at the start of the 20th Century?  Isn't playing the market something that ultimately causes harm in both private industry and in nations?

It's not a pleasant thing to say but I believe that war is looming and if you cannot work to eat you may have to fight to eat.  Our civilisation will inevitably change, it is up to us to champion the change that doesn't kill us.

The 100%: Letter 1 Page 2

Q: How do you heal a dying system that demands the violent loss of human life and the destructive waste of vital resources to maintain its feeble pulse? 

A: You don’t.



By revealing the flaw that we humans are considered worthless units in a system not designed to serve our needs, Keynesian Economics has become so corrosive that it is choking the science of Economics as a whole.  Keynsean Economics is actually dying because its core assumption that "greed is good" has come up against the nasty truth that we live in a finite world that needs responsible stewarding. Physical truth trumps economic theory every time. Private economists and strategists are aware of this and they have diagnosed the crisis and are adjusting accordingly.

That’s a hugely dangerous situation to leave unsupervised.

Anyone who has studied Economics understands that it is a science without a control group. It exists purely in the realm of theory and there it must stay because it can destroy civilisations.

A geneticist can publish a theory about stem cells in a scientific paper and several other geneticists can then run to their labs and attempt to recreate the experiment to see if they get the same result. That’s a panel of peers who can then adjudge whether a theory is sound or unsound. In the science of Economics, our nations are the laboratory and we are the germs in the Petrie dish.  Once we understand that we understand Economists can only think in terms of markets and economies.

‘Society’ is beyond their ken.

Given that economic thought is a mental state that demands hardness against the plight of our fellow humans it is not surprising that Brett Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho” was set in the unforgiving world of cut-throat corporate finance.  It is a documented finding of extensive research within this world that people with diminished empathy and people with near maniac levels of self-esteem generally do very well in finance.  It is an industry that rewards the very same motives and instincts that result in imprisonment anywhere else.

Now tell these lizard brained ‘Masters of the Universe’ that their gilt edged playpen is about to go bye-bye and watch their response. Actually, 'aggressive sociopath' is a compliment to the top  As I said: a hugely dangerous situation.

We are living through a deliberate endgame that will most likely result in a genocide and not one of these nihilistic narcissists will even blink.  The mentality that gets you sports cars and yachts in the world of finance is aggressive sociopathy, a disorder that ensures that one is incapable of empathy for one’s fellows and actively seeks to dominate and terrorise. This is the same mentality that criminal gang culture seeks to engender through violent rituals, fundamentalist religions seek to develop using punishment and guilt and the military seeks to impose through intensive training.

This shared need for dehumanisation perfectly explains why at least one these four groups have risen to the top of every society in the world.  Frankly, my dears, they don’t give a damn.

We have had this miserable state of affairs for the last 2000 years. Imperial Rome was based on fascism or ‘might is right’. All empires obey this basic rule otherwise they cannot achieve success in warfare and become empires in the first place.  Western Civilisation is based solely on the science of conquest and without the strength to conquer other societies no other values can form. Even democracy is the seed that fell from the tree of oppression.  The Athenians that gave is the vote kept slaves without a second thought.

Rome, however, built aqueducts and great cities of stone.  It brought a higher specialisations of agriculture to their provinces so much so that French cuisine owes a very big debt of thanks to Julius Caesar, the invader from Rome. Rome was the product of a young and largely undiscovered world and so it expanded with the impunity of a civilising force.  No western power can lay claim to a crusade of civilisation any more. We have simply caused too much harm.

Rome gave us the word 'Terra' or 'Territory' to describe this amazing planet we live upon, an apt illustration of why the empire had to fail despite it controlling one third of the human population at its height. Rome thought the potential territory was never ending and, in such a universe, fascism is as good or as bad as any other system of human governance.  We know better, we see how our parents had no worries over fuel, food, water or even air quality.  We have all these problems and more besides.  There is a significant religious minority in the US that believes our world is coming to an end. Oddly enough they are joined in this belief by another significant religious minority in the realm of Islam.  No prizes for guessing who's who but accepting a genocide as 'pre-ordained' is a very handy conscience silencer, is it not?

Anyone who professes a belief in the "end of days' is a sociopath by the definition of they are looking forward to a genocide where only the people that fit their criteria may survive or be saved. Paradise for the sociopath is a garden of the senses, a paradise garden.  Hieronymous Bosch's Triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" deals with this mind set perfectly.  The narrow rectangular scene of Hell is painted with more loving care and salacious detail than the central  depiction paradise itself. This neatly translates to:  Paradise for the apocalyptic preacher is more about what other people lose than what he gains.  Envy and Pride, right there.

An open Letter to the 100%: Letter 1 page 1

“The current financial system in the west has a fatal flaw. It will never recover because that flaw has been exposed and those expected to pay for our losses WON’T.”

What evidence do I present to back up this claim?  How about 35 years of denial?

In his definitive book “Small is Beautiful”, E.F. Schumacher asserted that the science of economics treated capital goods (the irreplaceable bounty of our planet) as income goods (Stuff we make and can therefore replace). He illustrated how economic thought could not afford to consider the wider picture in the eternal quest to find the ultimate bargain.  “Small is Beautiful” was an international best seller.  E.F. Schumacher was one of the top three voices on economics and progressive entrepreneurialism right up to his death in 1977.
E.F. Schumacher first published “Small is Beautiful” back in 1974. That is over 35 years ago.  There is no point in repeating what has been said again and again over a 35 year period.

That message has been heard, absorbed, understood and ignored by those entrusted to protect our planet.

They continue to operate the brutal mincer that is Keynesian Economics despite repeated proofs of the damage and suffering this system is causing to mankind and life in general. I did not vote for a bloody endgame where the vast majority of my species is left to starve in a water parched scrub.  I did not contract for the species of humanity becoming so devalued that people that protesting against this biased system must face criminal charges, imprisonment and injury even to the point of innocent death.  In 2011, that is precisely what the governments of the world visited upon their citizens wherever protest happened.

We became worthless in 2011.  

That message has been heard, absorbed, understood and is anticipated by people who will spill out onto the streets in 2012 not in protest but in clever, passive resistance and extremely stupid insurrection.

The flaw in Keynesian Economic Theory has been exposed; the savings of nations have been wiped out, whole industries have been brought to a juddering halt but nothing is as fatal as Joe and Josie Public being shown just how worthless they appear to their ‘betters’. This rift in the social contract stems from governments being so obviously puppets of private or military interests.  What makes this a fatal flaw is that  government possesses no mechanism through which they can rebuild public trust once they have insulted the species as a whole - They are in denial of their own humanity by these actions. Their obvious error has been exposed and they cannot recover from that exposure. So, in a panic, their owners sent in the experts to take over and steady the Titanic, these experts are currently called 'Technocrats'.

The faceless advisors have finally taken command of the steering wheel. Technocrats are people who have no public mandate whatsoever yet they are imposing what they shamelessly call ‘austerity’ measures’ upon us all with no real world guide or example to go on. European Technocrats are maintaining the obscene protection racket that is the I.M.F.(International Monetary Fund) without once examining whether the I.M.F. is a contributing factor to the lengthening of the period of depression as was found to be the case in the Pacific Rim economies who repaid their outstanding debts to the I.M.F. and refused to take out further loans as they perceived the I.M.F. to be more politically than economically motivated. They were right.

Technocrats are nothing more than agents for the very vandals who tore apart our world in the first place. They are usurping our democracies for the benefit of an anti-democratic tyranny. Nothing they do or say can or will bring about economic recovery. They are so conditioned economically that they are compelled to strive for the ultimate bargain in every single transaction no matter what. The elderly generations are being starved of their savings, their homes and their families and future generations have been cheated of their birth right even before they draw their first breath; this represents the technocrat’s ultimate bargain.

For your information: the ultimate bargain is driving the cost of a good or service down to zero which is also called ‘theft’.

I didn't want this to be a rant, I just wanted to expand upon each opening statement but I am compelled to put the argument forward that Europe, the Middle East, India and Brazil need to stand back from this onrush to international crisis being programmed by the élites of the financial, military and energy world.  We either have democracy or we don't. Even the fascists engaged in some form of elections - our new masters just took over at boardroom level and that needs to be resisted.

Nobody has a mandate to enslave our unborn generations.

The expanded view of my open letter to the 100%

When I first posted these letters and asked for feedback I got some people telling me that I was writing something rather wordy and another group of people asking for more or wanting me to clarify things.

I cut the page count drastically to a total of 18 pages for the entire document to ensure that I didn't bore anyone. Now, however, I would like to reveal just how much thought and work went into each paragraph of my open letter.  The four letter may have seemed disjointed because of all the cutting I underwent to get them into a publishable size.

January is halfway through it's span and I see that there is so much more to be done before we have any chance of avoiding WWIII.  So here goes:  I will endeavour to write a page for each paragraph of the original letters to the best of my ability (this isn't trying to stretch the information out to a page, this is condensing the information down to a page) and hopefully you can see where I am coming from.

I perceive an unnecessary end game being played out, effectively a secret war that will spill over into an actual  war that we are not ready to fight and are being set  up to lose. This economic downturn is a deliberate sabotage and I hope you may see why too. 

An open letter to the 100% in four parts: Letter I

“The current financial system in the west has a fatal flaw. It will never recover because that flaw has been exposed and those expected to pay for our losses WON’T.”

Q: How do you heal a dying system that demands the violent loss of human life and the destructive waste of vital resources to maintain its feeble pulse?

A: You don’t.

Monetarist Capitalism, the financial model that we use in the west is dying. There are no new worlds left to conquer. We have reached the tipping point and we’re toppling over because the west’s economic paradigm must shift away from unrestrained expansion.

The tipping point is this: People are not as productive or as economical as technology.

No matter how they are abused, enslaved or harassed, people will never produce as much as machines. Yet employment is still the process by which most of us earn the right to eat, clothe ourselves and engage with the bounty of this world. This must soon change.

The reason our financial system is irreparable is the fact that it was created upon the back of human slavery and it cannot adapt away from that. The labour of human beings is no longer worth the price of their chains. Forget ethics and morality it’s all about money. People get hungry, tired, sick, depressed, and they tend to die. It is just bad business.

Right now there are occupations against the financial corruption of politics all over the western world. This year saw uprisings and the overthrow of many brutal regimes in the Middle East with more to follow. The western protesters chant “We are the 99%”, implying that the remaining 1% hold all the power, and are content to watch their fellow humanity fall destitute. But that is an over simplification. The 1% is just as powerless as the 99%.

Nobody can make money work again. Money has been found out as nothing more than a measuring system for confidence. In short: money is a confidence trick, a scam.

The note in your pocket is just a virtual concept, indicating how much the government estimates it can extract from you before you die. Money isn’t wealth; stocks and shares aren’t wealth; mansions, yachts and even football teams aren’t wealth.

Money is a form of debt and the era of debt is over. That’s right; debt is over as of now.

Here’s why:


A brief history of Western Financial Capitalism.

Coinage has been the basis of trade since the Bronze Age. The first coin is generally acknowledged to be the Lydian Lion from Asia Minor (Modern day Turkey) struck about 600BC. It is made of electrum (60% gold and 40% silver) and it was evaluated to be the equivalent of a month’s eating. Right about this time, international wars started too. This is the era of the Trojan horse, the establishment of the Greek city states, the founding of Rome etc. Capitalism, profit, or the concept of getting more out of a transaction than you put in, was born in this age although back then it was most likely called pillage.

Capitalism began with coins because wealth finally became portable and thus, easy to steal.

This portable wealth ensured that armies could be raised using people that didn’t belong to your tribe or were married to your daughters. (This was a feminist disaster, incidentally) Soldiers and slaves now poured in to city states drawn by the promise of gold and silver.

These are the first consultants although their traditional name was mercenaries.

Modern Capitalism or Debt (from the Latin, Debare – He owes) is the brainchild of the Renaissance. The two most important families of the Renaissance in Italy were the Borgia (Weaponry and Popes) and the Medici (Debt and Popes). Up until the Renaissance, Usury or the demanding of high interest on a loan was forbidden among Christian transactions by the Pope’s own command. The only lenders that could charge high interest were Jews by virtue of their being not subject to the Pope. Nobody but the very desperate ever borrowed from a Jew for this reason. (See the Merchant of Venice).

The Medici asserted the right to charge their debtors higher interest because, you recall, they also did Popes. This is the first example of a lobbyist but back then it was called Simony.

Wealth was portable and capable of growing thanks to usury being preached as acceptable, even respectable. The rich of the West could now afford to explore the world and trade in more and more goods, exchanging the wealth of the world with those nifty coins. Until, that is, Marco Polo visited Mongol occupied China and brought promissory notes back to Europe. It took a century but paper money was born.

This was the magic ingredient that turned a very useful system of measuring and trading in wealth to the most addictive drug ever invented by mankind. Now, stuff that was worthless and useless (paper notes) could buy even palazzos in Venice. What was perfectly acceptable in besieged China – promissory notes from a living god and inheritor of all the universe, ensuring that metal coins could be forged into arrowheads against the Golden Horde – were actually worthless beyond the reputation of the person issuing the notes in the first place.

Nothing has changed. Modern currency is FIAT, in other words, not tied to any particular source of wealth but the confidence of money traders. Money is STILL a confidence trick.

Normally, confidence comes and goes but when it has flat lined as now it is “Game Over”.

What is happening now is the inevitable result of money being confused with wealth when money actually has no connection to wealth. Money denotes no actual value other than how a volatile market feels about it. Gold has now become the acceptable wealth among those that trade in such things because that is all they know other than money and bonds.

Isn’t this undignified scuttle back to the golden calf just too familiar for comfort?

We are no longer lost in the desert. Gold, like money, glistens but is essentially useless. You can’t eat gold; it’s not the most reliable building material and it doesn’t keep you warm in winter. In a real world situation like, getting on the lifeboats before the Titanic sinks, holding an ingot of gold is NOT an advantage; it’s a liability.

Add to this a majority population that is both educated and used to certain comforts as their inheritance and you have a volatile situation that we have visited again and again. We are at the dawn of yet another war. Economically, this is considered good news as war pays a lot of bills and societies galvanise into great leaps of technological development and industrial production. But this time there’s a problem. We can no longer do war; our weapons are just too powerful. Remember, it was unjust ‘Austerity’ that provoked the Second World War.

This; the International Declaration of Human Rights; The United Nations and the emergence of electronic worldwide communications has rendered all the old solutions to financial crises null and void. We can’t actually bomb our way out of this problem. And the problem is this: money that is hoarded does not generate wealth. All power, including financial power, is fluid. It needs to flow to be of any use. There is no flow because those that are supposed to be managing the distribution money are all hoarding the money.

This is a fatal error. Water that is trapped goes stagnant. Money that is hoarded devalues.

Proof?

If you absolutely deny a junkie his or her drug they will wail and suffer but ultimately, they will recover from their addiction. I said that money is a drug so recovered junkies are just plain bad for the economy. People that cannot access credit, even small amounts of credit, do without. They find other ways to thrive; they develop other values; they place their trust in what is reliable. Societies that crawled out of the wreckage of WWII already know that.

Debt as a concept, as an addiction, as a means to compel people to obey is over because debt needs credit to exist. No credit = no interest = no debt. Monetarist Capitalism has served the West extremely well for hundreds of years but it was also a cruel, vile master because it was always going to fail. Money is based solely on confidence, nothing more.

There is a pre-existing alternative to war and that is slavery. Since 2010 people not even born yet will have to work over 10% of their time for free to pay for a stock market failure that happened in the last five years. This solution will fail because of one obvious truth:

The next generation simply WILL NOT PAY. They will find their own means to thrive.

Q: How do you heal a dying system that demands the violent loss of human life and the destructive waste of resources to maintain its feeble pulse?

A: You don’t. – You replace it with a superior system that works for everyone. The 100%

This is not a manifesto for Socialism nor is it a revolutionary document; I have addressed these letters to the 100%, to everyone everywhere. I have no intention of preaching an ideology to you. There are many smarter and wittier writers than me currently engaged in pointing fingers and laying blame. That’s not the point of this letter or the other three.

We can’t go to war over the planet’s remaining resources because we are too good at war and too bad at peace. We can’t enslave our children and our grandchildren because we will die first. And ‘Austerity’ as promoted by the World Bank, the IMF and every government that takes the bailout, won’t actually put Humpty Dumpty together again. Money is broken.

The brutal fact is: Our world is largely conquered but we were never supposed to conquer it. We were supposed to replenish it. We possess all the necessary technologies; we possess the required social cohesion and the population to recreate the conditions we enjoy on this world somewhere else. Sadly, somewhere else is a long, long way away. We just found it in 2011 and that distant planet, Keppler is the game changer. Our old rules are null and void.

The core problem for humanity is that we do not know how to replenish the Earth because of a false religion that we have all worshipped under for much too long. The more time we give over to Economics, which is essentially the science of predicting human confidence, the more we look like the lost civilisation of Easter Island.

What we require is a system that does all of what classic Capitalism did for us when we could expand without a care and could oppress when we needed new resources but this time our trade must be a virtuous circle which empowers and enriches everyone. We need a new token of wealth that even children can understand and appreciate and even generate.

We need to create an evolution as opposed to a revolution because the best way to minimise the pain of change is to allow the old and the new systems to exist side by side so people can rely on their familiar money system as their failsafe and play with the new wealth system until they come to trust in the new system more than paper money and credit because it offers more. When the motor car was invented horses weren’t shot en masse.

I believe I have the beginning of a superior, virtuous circle system that affords a win-win result for every transaction and puts to bed the spectre of poverty and want forever. This superior system I propose is the rolling out of a new kind of economy where money is no longer required and nor is the profit motive that money (as a synthetically scarce resource) has demanded from each transaction that we have made since the days of the Lydian Lion.

To recap: If we want to avoid a war between the generations, between blocs of nations, between the resource holders and the resource starved, I propose a new form of thinking as well as a new form of understanding our wealth. If you think that’s worth another ten minutes of your time, please, read the second letter for the 100%. It is called: e=MC²

℮=MC² - Letter II to the 100%

“We already possess something that does the job money was supposed to do even better, naturally occurring energy. I propose that we transform our broken financial economy into a genuinely 21^st Century ℮conomy.”

Trust: it’s what the entire system of wealth and industry in the west has been built upon since the days of men in short skirts fighting over Helen of Troy. So the worst thing to lose for any system designed to generate and manage wealth is trust.

Coinage, credit, bonds, financial products, the markets, all equal one thing: Bets.

Only gambling addicts believe there is a pattern and science to betting on the future. The rest of us are grateful we don’t have that illness. Yet there exists a minority that insists upon their right to manipulate all our savings, all of our acquired wealth, for their employers’ gain.

Every ten years or so a domino effect occurs; the culture within this financial élite becomes so competitive and so aggressive that safeguards get ignored and people literally start playing poker with the wealth of nations. This meltdown has happened three times in my living memory; I am under fifty! In the past, there were regulations that had to be adhered to; a limit on the way banks used our money existed and was enforced by law. That law was ‘deregulated’ in the late 90’s in both in the US and the UK.

Nobody is going to prison for this meltdown because nobody has broken the law.

Clearly, this is a betrayal of our trust. Equally clearly, our trust CANNOT be given again. By what convention is the deliberate undermining of a currency and a peoples’ access to wealth not warfare? By what measure is secretly monopolising public stocks not theft?

Our faith is broken. The market for currency trading is too decadent and too aloof not to cause another meltdown in five to ten years’ time. This market produces nothing; it doesn’t generate wealth; it serves no purpose but warfare. Nothing currently exists to counteract this insanely destructive cycle. The savings of the ordinary person in the high street remain unprotected. No insurer can compensate for a depression. Once a currency has been undermined, the value of savings is wiped out and all this actually happens with the signed permission of government. This is what the Tea Party and the Occupy movements are about.

Money, as a confidence trick, cannot recover. Money, as the only game in town, is over.

Debt is over. We will not pay the debts of those who deplete our savings as part of a game.

I propose a new vision for all of humanity, not just the West. I propose a means to peacefully move from a financial to a post-financial world. You read that right: A Post-Financial World.

I don’t have all the answers; nobody has all the answers but I do have some answers.

Here are my answers: “Money doesn’t actually represent wealth.” or “Profit doesn’t actually exist.” and “An economy that doesn’t serve the people is actually a tyranny.”

Let’s quickly go through each answer.

Money doesn’t actually represent wealth.

As anyone in Weimar Germany or present day Zimbabwe can tell you, money has no value other than the readiness of a seller to accept it in return for goods and services. Currency is scarce even at the best of times. Money, as something that can be used to access essentials (Food, Energy, Water, Clothing, Shelter) and luxuries, can only be generated by government.

This control of scarcity against abundance is a switch that is denied us as individuals. If we tried to print our own money we would be imprisoned. Either we get a job and thrive or we fail to get a job and rot. It doesn’t matter if we’re Mozart or Van Gogh or even Howard Hughes, we will starve or fatten depending on whether we can do as the market demands.

Where is the wealth? What is the wealth? What’s reliable? What’s real? What can we control and use to make other stuff happen? What can liberate us from our daily toil and dismiss our doubts for the future? That would be real power. That would be real wealth.

Profit doesn’t actually exist.

Take every single financial transaction in the world. Ask why these transactions are happening. What result do you get? Both parties are engaged in the transaction to enrich themselves. However it is a physical law that nothing comes from nothing so, in order for one party to make a profit, the other party must either make a loss or the remainder comes from a passive third party. That passive third party is everyone else; you and me.

Party ‘A’ has item ‘a’           A(a)       (b)B      Party ‘B’ has item ‘b’

‘A’ and ‘B’ agree to trade:     A(b)       (a)B      ‘a’ and ‘b’ exchange places.

Whether this is bartered chickens or an international electronic transaction the physics remains exactly the same. Nothing was created and nothing was destroyed. The gain or ‘profit’ exists purely in the minds of parties A and B. 

Profit doesn’t actually exist. Profit is a spectacular fantasy.

In the financial world profit is the raison d’être for everything. Nothing happens that doesn’t realise a profit at some stage. Even charity is now profit seeking. So what appears profitable to the trading parties is adjudged by the market to be good even if it is suicidal to us all.

What benefits both Parties ‘A’ and ‘B’ must harm Party ‘C’: This is simple physics.

An economy that does not serve the people is actually a tyranny.

In totalitarian societies, the state controls all the wealth and dispenses it (or not) based on the decision of the ruling élite. This system of government is abhorrent to people raised in the west. Yet our wealth is controlled by a group just as shadowy and exclusive as a cold war politburo. Our every action, movement and impulse is being controlled by people employed to manipulate us into making financial decisions and accepting contracts that do not benefit us at all. We are being subverted by actuaries, marketers, advertisers, cost appraisers and legions of other liars into doing precisely what doesn’t enrich us for their own profit. It is not a pretty sight. We live in an actual Dystopia. We are but one step away from George Orwell’s '1984'.

The truth is: neither leftist nor rightist ideology is truly going to break the vicious spiral of wealth and power centralising. Wealth and power are indeed centralising; 27 corporate logos now command control over 50% of the world’s wealth and resources. Our politicians are now being paid more by private interests than their government salaries. This process will continue to the point where we are the slaves to one super king and we are all building the Tower of Babel again.

Thanks to this vicious spiral, this planet will be uncomfortable within our children’s lifetime and uninhabitable for humans within generations. That’s really coming. Profit is a game of ‘let’s pretend’ that requires us to asset-strip our planet in order to for it to continue. But the truth is poking through the fantasy. We are Nero. Our world is Imperial Rome and Rome is burning. Our governments can’t or won’t deal with this problem.

But we can. We can decide that the financial world and its chain of debt is over. We can decide it is time for a post-financial world.

How can a Post Financial World Possibly work?

Money doesn’t actually represent wealth. Profit doesn’t actually exist. An economy that doesn’t serve the people is actually a tyranny. The common denominator here is the word ‘actually’ or reality in action. What is the reality currently in action upon our world?

We are slowly poisoning ourselves and all other life forms to serve a fantasy. To make a profit, we have in the last ten years meekly accepted the loss of our own security, any hope of security in our old age and the security of our children and people who haven’t even been born. This is the reality. We are actually enslaved to a fantasy. There is no physical profit.

There is abundance, however, and that abundance is us.

Where the financial experts see enormous problems I see golden opportunities. Where governments see overpopulation, I see an amazing mix of ideas and talents just waiting to be unleashed. Where economic commentators see the ‘Age of Austerity’ I see the ‘Golden Age of Innovation’. Where protesters demand revolution I propose ℮volution.

I do not propose shutting down of factories, production, services, confiscating personal wealth or other traditional revolutionary activities. I propose a means by which we can generate our own wealth and transmute that wealth into pre-existing goods and services as smoothly as if all we are doing is changing the design of our bank notes.

Clearly our existing production and service industries must be able to adapt. How we now do business must be able to continue for the foreseeable future so we need to co-ordinate tills to also count in an energy credit system. People will be able to transfer energy as easily as they now transfer credit. This is so easy to do.

What I propose is doable within five years. We already enjoy an infrastructure well inured to the transfer information. Our mobile phones already scan, receive and transmit data and we even know how to make a car park itself. We are good at engineering. The change to our surroundings is minimal. Cities can generate energy just by having us living in them.

The main challenges facing this transitional period aren’t to do with the fundamental principle but with the engineering required. Energy will never be scarce again. Energy is universal; kinetic power, light, gravity, matter are all universally physical realities so energy is limitless. There is no point to hoarding the limitless. Life itself is an open-ended, unending calculation. Life is Pi, it never ends. That’s an energy that never ends!

We are the abundance. We are reality expressed as an equation of energy to matter and light. We are ℮ = MC². Forget ‘Green’, energy is the new dollar.

Energy is indestructible and yet we can generate it with ease. People give off vast amounts of kinetic energy. We enjoy giving off energy and it is good for us to do so. We could harness each footstep, each jump, and each syllable, to create energy and enrich ourselves further. We already possess the technology to do this, why don’t we?

In an energy civilisation, an ℮conomy, everybody already possesses a certain wealth and can generate more wealth, independently of employment. This is a people centred model. The Medici are dead, they no longer matter. In the energy model wasting our resources for profit is nonsense. Even with the very great recycling efforts that happen in all the countries of the world we still dump the majority of our resources into landfill. All of this is wealth.

Nothing in an ℮conomy is disposable. Everything is designed specifically to be broken down to its core elements and redesigned for new uses. We could recharge our cars simply by driving them. The incessant pad of pedestrians’ feet could provide the energy required to light up our town centres. All this requires is the will and the imaginative engineering to derive the most efficient solutions to our energy challenges. We could power our urban centres through our own day to day activities. And we will because we are the source of the energy. Life is energy. Life is ‘℮’. We generate the energy, our cities store the energy and our technology is invested of the energy to do all the work.

And the MC² part?

In Einstein’s equation M stands for Matter or all that is physical. C stands for the speed of light. Therefore MC² represents the passage of events as far we can detect using the medium of light to discern changes in the matter that surrounds us. We call this ‘Time’. What we learn over time informs us of potential future events. What we record from times past serves as our guide to our present. What has this got to do a post-financial world? We’ve been here before and quite a few times. We now need to learn from the past.

The secret to success is not trying to reinvent the wheel or utterly destroying all that we have built within civilisation but to use that which aids us and reject that which hampers us. Our current financial system has built wonders as well as destroyed and we must embrace what is good about our financially controlled civilisation and reject what causes us harm.

Once our core value is energy and not amassing piles of coins it’s a no brainer that we’ll want to nurture our source of wealth and not let it starve in the desert. In an ℮conomy, we will want to maximize life and minimize our impact. It’s not about hugging trees it’s about rendering even more of our rather generous planet habitable by us and other species. That way we’ll be even richer.

If we are an ℮conomy, we are in the business of replenishing the Earth. There is no ‘the environment’ it is not separate to us, it’s not ‘somewhere else’. The environment is us and our home. We and our planet are connected and, until we can leave, we must replenish it.

If we’re smart enough and humble enough to pay attention, we may learn how our home solved the very same problems we now face over the billions of years of her existence. We have been gifted, with a range of elegant solutions for each problem. All the homework has already been done by our home.

We are the result of a very, very big and generous explosion. Whether by Divine will or random chemistry, the fact remains that we are energy (℮) contained within matter (M) learning over time (C²). We are the exquisite solution to our energy and financial crisis.

I have chosen to call this letter ℮ = MC² for a reason. We are the energy that results from the vast process that has happened since the first galactic explosion. We are not just physical but we enjoy insight and sentience. We think and feel. I am sure other animals do too but we are the only animal that has the means to undo the damage we have done. Now, the planet will ultimately repair that damage if we all die out but I’m proposing that we don’t actually have to die out. We just have to rethink our civilisation a bit and revolutionise how we get stuff done. I illustrate this in part III entitled ‘The Energy Revolution or the ℮volution.’