{a copy of the printed book may be obtained here, for $7:98  plus shipping}

Economic and Social Rebellion
in an Age of social political chaos

by Joel A. Wendt

a money debt owed bankers is merely a number ...
while what lives in the hearts of a People is a
spiritual currency of infinitely greater value

Warning: a text of this kind is in a way a work of art.  Not everyone is supposed to like it, and even the author is never satisfied.  At a certain point in time I just could not any more look at it and try to polish this or that phrase, or add another particular detail in order to fully explain what I hoped to write.  What is below is then flawed and I do not expect to satisfy most of my readers.  That said, I hope that in at least a few places the readers will find something useful.

Forward for the year 2020: aka, nine years later, and matters have apparently gotten worse, maybe ...

Acknowledgments: various titular spirits have influenced the writing of this, and need to be mentioned with gratitude: Socrates; St. Matthew; George Washington; and, Clara Barton. Like most of the world, I’ve been through a lot, for which the election of 2016 provided a great awakening. A lot of folks were not paying enough attention – myself included. After digesting this strange-fire, I ended up needing to write this essay for my blog:


The short of it is that a lot of folk in the heartland of America had no voice in politics, and were righteously conservative in their values. Trump being the only “not-a-politician” among the Republicans, he got many of these heartland votes. Factually, however, the reality is that through providential events, he won the electoral college. That is, not only was he “lucky”, but he was also himself surprised, and woefully unprepared for any of the results.

2 Now the Socrates~!~spirit laughs at our not seeing the obvious Justice being enacted. Being a pagan, he saw a world filled with the sometimes shameful influences/interferences of gods&goddesses in the lives of human beings, … Immortals whose agendas were – other worldly. They organized through - the actual rules of what we call, idiotically: chance – the dramas like this because folk needed to get just enough rope with which to hang themselves. The actual world is nowhere Random, although often Wild&Untamed. Western Civilization is dying into a new becoming, and that tsunami of future history will sweep us all to places of “surprise!”.

Including the discovery that – scientifically – the Planet on which we live is a superconscious cosmic Being, well known to all the ancient earth religions as: the Mother. Or not.

Everyone gets to have their own point of view, and destiny/fate. We are all: the right people, in the right place, at the right time. Even me, whose first words on my blog are: Welcome to the Aethereal Cave of a white-privileged, Christian, son of Montana, American citizen, shaman, and, professional heretic I have not revised the material below, although if someone wants to know my current views – thecollectiveimagination.com is all there is on that score.

table of contents

a preview, for readers that might not be interested in the whole text 3

author’s preface 5

introduction: the situation in America 6

the grandmother war 9

the army of the unemployed 11

manufactured consent - the secrets of the money changers 15

waking up and declaring victory 30

the market expects - unmasking economic religion 34

strategy and tactics - in general  37

strategy and tactics - in particular 40

a brief, and perhaps more poetic, summation 59 

notes 63
appendix: the Needed Future for the Occupy Wall Street Movement 64

a preview, for readers that might

not be interested in the whole text

I know, some people don’t like to read a lot of stuff, so in a few paragraphs I’ll try to  save those folks from having to read nearly 60 pages of possibly boring text.

First,... ordinary people just got screwed by a bunch of people, mostly bankers.  The bankers managed it kind of like the con we know as three pods and a pea game, where somehow you know the pea is never there under the pod, but you can never figure out how it gets there when it needs to be there - in banking we are involved with a very simple, yet highly significant,  analogous financial slight of hand.

Starting a few hundred years ago, bankers began loaning out more money than they had on deposit.  If they got caught, oh well, but otherwise they made a lot of money from the interest on these loans  Then they eventually figured out a way to do that in very large amounts of money and make it legal for them to do so.
 

The way they loan money today it doesn’t even have to be on deposit.  The “loan” itself creates the money, and as long as you are a Central Bank and corrupted your nations politicians so as to give you this power, there are no limits on the amount that can be created (regular banks have certain limits).  Here in America we call this private free-spending bank: The Federal Reserve.  All perfectly legal, sort of, and during the recent crisis the Fed “created” trillions of dollars out of nothing for the benefit of their financial friends.

The problem is that underneath, the hows and whys our central (federal) government came into existence in America, was something we have mostly forgotten, and which is called: the social contract.  The main element of this contract was our mutual consent to the rule of law, which was formally expressed in the creation of the U.S. Constitution. 

Bankers and other corporate officers have now routinely corrupted our national government, creating what has to be called: manufactured consent.  Our representatives don’t represent us anymore, they mostly  do what money wants them to do, with the result that (according to the Declaration) laws that are without our consent are unjust.  Justice, by the way, is not a legal concept, but the overriding shared moral concept which ought to inhabit our legal system, but hardly does any more at all.

These manufactured consent unjust laws in effect broke the social contract, particularly its core principle: the submission of all to the same rule of law.  What is now thought to be legal for corporations and banks is neither just or consented to.  If it was put to a clearly stated vote of We the People, many of these laws our so-called representatives have authored in the last 100 years would not receive our consent.

Since the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and begins We the People ... do ordain and establish ... while ending with the Bill of Rights, which in the 10th Amendment says: ... powers not granted ... are reserved to the people: We are free to unmake the Constitution and create a new one anytime we want.   This is far more than a simple amendment to the Constitution, and is a power We the People possess by natural right that does not have to be run through the amendment process, being part of those powers We reserved.

We do, however, have to assert it, and remind our public servants that they work for us.  If we don’t seize this power in the present, savage and terrible will be the consequences for us all.

What is basically required, while we assert our just powers of consent, is that we discuss with each other: 1) the social contract, 2) the rule of law, 3) the nature of money and banking, 4) what is the difference between the legal and the moral, and other related Ideas.  Justice, again, is a moral idea, not a legal concept.  Why do we need to discuss these matters?  Because the Lords of Finance screwed us royally and ruined our economy all for their own benefit, and before we can fix that - which we surely can, we need to understand our power to fix it.  Our so-called representatives, as we’ve already seen, are incapable of properly taking our side.

If we change the conversation down to these very basic questions all else in politics and social life will change.   Since the rules have been broken, we too are no longer bound to them, and there is much more we can do (see the strategies and tactics in the main text), to start the ball rolling toward a complete renewal of the social contract eliminating all kinds of insanity forced upon us by decades and decades of manufactured (unjust) consent (such as that Corporations can be seen legally as persons).

The details are important, otherwise I would not have offered them, but here at the beginning the above is the core element around which everything else revolves.  Although there is a final “point” which might help people understand better what is happening today:

Oh, and by the way, as an appetizer ... everybody in the world has a right to have a say in the elections of the next Presidents of the United States, because those elections effect them as well.  We have a lot of “rights” we can assert and seize, if we just have the will to no longer be passive.

author’s preface

The essential questions are individual moral questions, not society-wide legal questions.  The key element for me was to learn to trust the American People, and to learn to listen to what they do, not always just to what they say (which “sayings" are often warped by the media influence of the established powers).  Its what is the hearts of a People that has to learn to be heard.  Our minds are often polluted by the lies inherent in constantly repeated talking points and such as the propaganda emanating from Fox Noise.

The American Experiment (its Spirit, as it were) is not confined to the geographic America.  It is related to a slowly evolving universally human impulse for brotherhood, which at its highest moral/spiritual level includes individual and mutual sacrifice.   An excellent example of this all-human impulse was represented by an office worker standing in front of a tank in Tienanmen Square, in an effort to show solidarity with the protesters there, many of whom were soon to be killed.  This same moral-spiritual solidarity impulse arose in the recent social phenomena we are calling the Arab Spring.

The ordinary People of the world recognize that they are oppressed politically and economically and many seek to follow the inspiration (out of the nature of their own culture) something that first started to appear on the Stage of History over 230 years ago in the American and French revolutions.  In that first iteration of this universal human impulse, we understood it to be: Opposition to tyranny, and the seeking for individual political freedom.  At the same time it was as brothers and sisters that human beings commonly opposed the centuries of their subjugation by those who believed it was their right to dominate (might makes right).

While the forms of political tyranny vary over the whole world, there is one present form that now co-participates in the political domination present in all places - Economic Tyranny.  For a possible inside-America response to this tyranny, read a proposed Second Declaration of Independence on my website Shapes in the Fire [1].   This little booklet is about understanding the nature of the present day world-wide Economic Tyranny, how one of this tyranny’s central castles of power is in the geographic America, and what can be done about it in that America and at the same time perhaps world-wide.

As a basic hint, consider the fact that in reality the coming 2012 election in America is really the concern of all the citizens of the world, not just the so-called Americans, given that in today’s global economy all are effected by what happens politically and economically in America.  As this booklet develops, it will be explained just how everyone in the world, who wants to, can participate in the American electoral processes.

In a way, America is a central battlefield in the war the elites of wealth and political power wage on the ordinary people of the world.  America is not the only battlefield, but at the present it is a battlefield where in the next years a great victory can be had - one that benefits everyone everywhere.

*         *         *

introduction: the situation in America

Billionaire hedge fund manager Warren Buffett was quoted around 2008 saying that class warfare was in play, and his class was winning.  He did not say this as a brag, but with a certain kind of sadness.  Subsequently in 2011 he wrote that the rich, such as himself and others, did not deserve the tax breaks they were being constantly given by the ideological straight-jackets inhabiting the Republican Party.

In my book, Uncommon Sense: the degeneration, and the redemption, of political life in America [2], I wrote of a group that I called there the Lords of Finance.  I pointed out that historically the aristocracies of blood, which the American and French revolutions had thought to depose, had not actually been replaced by what we assume are modern democracies.  The truth was that a successor group - an aristocracy of wealth - had replaced that older aristocracy of blood in terms of the social domination of modern human beings, particularly in the so-called democratic West.

Some details as to causes and processes can be found in that work.  Here, in this introduction, we just need to notice that the present ruin of the American economy (and the world economy) can be laid at the fact that economic elites, having acquired over the centuries the ability to rule our economies for their own benefit, have in their rapacious greed (give me what I want now!) essentially destroyed from the inside that world-wide financial system we both seem to need.  I write “seem” because its the bankers and their friends that need this present system - not ordinary people.

These elites came to dominate our political life over centuries, gaining legislation through the corruption of our political processes that left them free to take risks with the livelihood of all, when the only real group that was to benefit was them.  That there is an us and them reality - what Buffett called class warfare - is due in large part to the mind set of the elites of wealth.  Ordinary people believed that what was required is to play by the rules, while the greedy and powerful choose to ignore those rules and then make their own, leaving the rest of us to live on the refuse leavings of their path to domination.

So the underlying moral question of my book above (Uncommon Sense) was this: Why play by the rules when the game is already fixed?

One of the wonders of the American Constitution is that it is framed in such a way that We the People have far more options than we currently suspect. These were won during the American Revolution, and similar rights and options are being sought and won elsewhere (such as the Arab Spring).  Macro changes in the social nature of the world unfold in different ways in different places, and at different times. Here are the critical bits of language from a former leading edge of these changes: the American Revolution, as laid into the U.S. Constitution:

“We the People ... do ordain and establish ...” (from the Preamble)... and ... “powers not delegated ... are reserved ... to the people” (from the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights).  These phrases, which are the bookends that hold up the whole Constitution, fully recognize that this document (a social contract whose heart was that all would submit to the same rule of law) was created by us, and that what We the People once created we can uncreate - or as a certain Justice of the Supreme Court once remarked: the Constitution is not a suicide pact.  The Constitution is not an agreement that binds us forever into any kind of insanity.  It is a temporary and limited grant of power to a central government by the People themselves.

Or, as is said in the original Declaration: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”

Legal scholarship recognizes that the law is not the moral.  The whole idea of civil disobedience recognizes this truism.  When I entered law school over four decades ago I was taught that the law tried to define and describe the least socially acceptable human behavior, while morality recognized the highest possible social behavior.  When I use the term moral or morality in this text, I mean to refer only to the individual human conscience and that individual’s sense of the good, or of the difference between right and wrong.  I am not referring to any rules, doctrine or dogma found in a book, such as the Hebrew and Christian Bible.

Right now, because of the collusion between wealthy elites and political powers, the economy in America and world-wide is collapsing.  Unemployment is raging out of control and rising.  Foreclosures of homes continues and large portions of those who once were thought of as the middle-class in the Western democracies are falling toward what seems to be the bottom levels of economic status.  In spite of the clear violations of many laws, corporate and government leaders have not been brought before the bar of justice, precisely because they control those very social processes.  While millions of poor and middle-class young people are constantly jailed for the possession of small amounts of euphoric drugs, the elites of wealth, and their servant politicians, can steal trillions, get drunk to their hearts content, and suffer no harm.

There has never before this moment been a better time, since the first Revolution, for the American People to stage another Rebellion, this time against the aristocracy of wealth and its allies.  It is the purpose of this booklet to outline how that can be carried out.  This writing is a document suggesting a path of economic and social civil disobedience, and no one should assume that many who choose this path  will be able to avoid personal harm.   Already the Patriot Act has asserted (against all logic and justice) that what it calls the crime of domestic terrorism can be found in what is to be proposed here.  Make no mistake, the powers of elite wealth and their servant politicians intend to make unlawful the moral acts we recognize as civil disobedience, by calling it domestic terrorism.

We are, in this Rebellion, on the horns of the same dilemma that faced those who signed the original Declaration, which ended with these words: "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”  Many of the signers of that Declaration, and some of their family members, did not survive the eight years of the original American Revolution.

Those who would participate in this coming necessary Economic and Social Rebellion need to be clear - if some essential few of us do not put our lives on the line, in many circumstances, it will not be enough.  We the People have many powers, and one of the main ones is sacrifice.  All the same, this struggle need not be insane, which is why I am calling this life and harm risking sacrificial aspect of the Rebellion:

the grandmother war

Revolutions of active aggression and blood, which our first Revolution was and had to be, needed the energies of the spent into death lives of the young and the extraordinary-ordinary [3].  It wasn’t just George Washington who was hanging out at Valley Forge.  The reality is that this modern Economic and Social Rebellion is of another order.  It is a moral war, and in a moral war one of the main ways to defeat our opponents is to shame them.  When a particular strategy or tactic is undertaken, that seems to run into the legal limits described by the Patriot Act and its progeny, at least some of the leaders of that action need to be our older female citizens.  It is one thing for out of control police forces and other hired bullies to beat and pepper spray unruly young people, and another thing entirely to physically attack and harm our women elders.   Remember this is a moral war, and the more risky the civil disobedience the more these need to be led by our female elders.

From a long term social-historical point of view, we are in fact (in terms of the ongoing metamorphosis of Western Civilization) moving from an old and tired Patriarchy toward a new and vibrant Matriarchy, such that the leadership of women is crucial - the change is from social dominion-over to social communion-with.  Top down pyramidal hierarchies are giving way to circles of shared conversation.  The Occupy Wall Street movement reveals that change clearly, but let me give another case in point, as a more direct example ...

One of the human needs that We the People must supply for ourselves, given that government and business have already  and will continue to fail to do this, is housing for those who no longer have homes and other kinds of shelter against the ravages of the elements.  There is no excuse in America for there to be any homeless at all, for homelessness certainly does not arise from a lack of actual buildings in which people can find shelter.  There are plenty of unused spaces that can be “liberated” and occupied by people needing to be out of the elements, and have available to them warmth and water.  What keeps us from using these spaces is the assertion of “legal ownership”, coupled with the unjust assertion that the law can be used to keep human beings from shelter which they need. 

The new rule [4] based on free individual morality would be one in which processes of “stewardship” would replace “ownership”.  Stewardship is the true conservative approach, because it holds and conserves the shared fruits of earth existence as and in a trust for all human needs.  Stewardship of the shared Earth resources for the satisfactions of life’s needs is common to all aboriginal Peoples.  What makes us moderns think we are more  “civilized”?  Civilization isn’t about how many things we possess, its about shared human values.

In an Economic and Social Rebellion we defy these rules of the older order of unrestrained and unjust “legal ownership” - we no longer Consent.   Private property “rights” no longer are to be permitted (Consented) to trump - without discussion - basic human need, particularly if the property claimed to be legally protected is not being otherwise used and is just sitting empty.

One of our Rights, retained by us via the Tenth (Reserve Clause) Amendment of the Bill of Rights, is the right to assert that different values dominate the Social Contract.  Remember the Constitution is a temporary grant of power and not a suicide pact.  The macro Social-Conscience is quite right to express itself against the abuses and corruption of governmental powers by monied elites.  That such expression may on occasion lead to conflict is simply the lesson that history teaches, for holders of power (especially powers gained in violation of the Social Contract) will be reluctant to surrender these powers; and, will in fact in the beginning of our Economic and Social Rebellion tighten their controls and dominance, just as did the English Aristocracy of Blood over 230 years ago.

In reality, our ostensible government could easily deal with this matter using already existing and established legal theories, had such government the will to do so.  There seems to be no legal precedent to prevent the use of eminent domain processes in order to take unused property in order to provide housing for those in need.  Yet, as we all know, given the alliances already existing between governments and private wealth (property), governments will not use this power in this way.  They have a choice to do otherwise, but in refusing to make that choice they will force others, in acting out of the Social Conscience, to choose those courses of action that liberate unused properties for the benefit of human shelter needs ...

the army of the unemployed

In the beginning this kind of action will involve many risks.  After some little time, however, we will become skilled at doing this.  When there are millions of unemployed, we have all kinds of people who can gather the needed information and otherwise organize themselves, enabling those who will “occupy” unused spaces in order to serve human needs to pick the best spaces.  In this age of social media, what was elsewhere an Arab Spring, can become in America an Economic and Social Spring.  We are not rebelling against the ostensible government per se, but rather against the economic and social rules that falsely dominate us and keep us from doing simple and sane things in order to house and feed those in need.  

The plain fact is that We the People are the core and essential government.  All powers not granted belong to us, and any power granted can be taken back.  The government, whether National, State or Local does not control us - we control it.  But that right and power has on this occasion to be re-asserted and seized, since it has effectively been forgotten.

There exists no moral justification for not filling these needs for shelter, food and water through what is unused.  The only excuse is ideas of law and private wealth (property), both of which need no longer be protected in a fashion that harms those in need.  On a moral level human needs trump so-called legal property rights without any question at all.

At the same time, make no mistake ... in the beginning the established holders of these powers will use violence, and the  only moral tool we have is the grandmother war - those sacrifices our elders are willing to make in order to set an example for all.  Notice that not all police forces will be led by conscienceless bullies.  The rule  (clear social fact) is that there are more of us than there are of them - far more.    Think of this war as a kind of social/moral rising tide.  At the start events will appear to be all in favor of (or won by) the established powers, but just as the Civil Rights Movement eventually led to vast social changes, so can a non-violent refusal to accept the primacy of property rights over human need.  This social/moral force cannot be stopped, unless we refuse to take the necessary risks.

Once the tide starts to turn, after the first rough patches, the response of the American People will be plain and sufficient.  Economic Injustice has woken us up, and while we may not yet get to put in jail the lawless and immoral bankers and others of the financial elites, we can certainly take back what they stole from us, and (for example) all empty foreclosed homes are now morally ours.   These are the first spaces that need be occupied during this Economic and Social Rebellion. 

The wiser banks will offer these homes to human need, and ask of those who live in them that proper care and maintenance be part of a reciprocal - new social contract - agreement.  The army of the non-employed can provide labor for these rational requirements for maintenance. Not all those connected to wealth will be unsympathetic to genuine human need.  We the People have the wisdom and the will to solve all these problems our no longer truly representative government has failed to fix.  We don’t need them as much as they need us.

Once again, from the original Declaration:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

We also need to feed those who can’t feed themselves.  Too long we have left to derivative (from us) government and charities this social and moral art.  Here is what we do:

From the creativity of the more and more self-organizing not otherwise employed, we ask all places where food traffics, to tithe to the whole.  No violence is used.  We simply ask, and we take what is given, whether it is waste or whatever (something we already do, but as the coming crisis escalates, this needs far greater self-organization).  If a place, whether a restaurant or a grocery store, gives food to the whole-in-need, that place is honored by notices acknowledge that they tithe.  This can be a simple picket with a single sign, or something placed in a window.  If some people want to give their patronage to places that don’t tithe food,  that is their individual free moral choice.

The principle of self-organization here is important.  We don’t want hierarchical structures organizing our actions from the top down.  Rather we want all politics to be local, and that such organization needs to proceed from the smallest local level.  For example, a church can organize all manner of effective actions, without bowing down to any assertion of right or power from above.  Again, the Occupy Wall Street is a good beginning experiment, while not being any ultimate solution.

We also ask families with higher standards of living to make food, perhaps one day a week from their own pantries and purchases.  If they give this tithe - even just making a few dozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches - an amount to be determined by them - we make sure they are honored for this gift.

Think, for example, of a suburban cul de sac - a couple dozen homes lining a street leading to a dead end circle.  On this street are a couple of foreclosed homes and several unemployed people.  They organize themselves - overcoming being mere strangers.  What they choose to do belongs to them to do,  and no one outside their circle of emerging friendship need tell them what to do. 

In addition, all unused arable land can be applied to growing food.  America, as a vast agrarian land trust, has something to give to the world in the form of agricultural riches, with the only legal limitation being the demand of elites to control human need driven access to food and water for personal and corporate gain [5].  Once more property rights (in the sense of old and tired legal - lowest acceptable social rules - constraints) are to be trumped by the moral sensibilities of the Social Conscience as we engage in this Economic and Social Rebellion on the path to redrafting the Social Contract - eventually making a new Constitution, which it is our right as We the People to do.  We assert that rules of stewardship begin to replace rules of private ownership, for the riches of the Earth belong to all.

Now latent in these concrete ideas are a couple of important distinctions.  The primary one is between property and persons.  We can occupy and commit acts of Economic and Social Rebellion against unused property, but not against the peopled roads upon which food traffics, for that would put us against persons.  We can’t just take from others what they need or hold, keeping in mind that the elites of wealth claim rights to excessive concentrations of wealth far far beyond any legitimate or actual moral need.  We don’t need to take from them, but can leave them to drown in the patent and inhuman excesses of their own hungers and desires.  The Social Conscience can see these individuals and their families - the holders of excessive concentrated wealth and their political and media servants - as moral children, and as such they are to be pitied.

Some people have noted that neither the Clinton or the Bush I or Bush II or the Obama administration asked Americans to sacrifice as was done during the Second Great War.  In our case, it is We the People asking this sacrifice of each other.  It is one of the ways we seize fundamental social and moral power, which as I have been trying to explain is superior to legal power.  You see, an essential aspect of this Economic and Social Rebellion is that we ourselves are the heart of it.  We are, in part, rebelling against our own passivity.  As Bob Marley sang: You got to lively up yourself, don’t be no drag.  What the central derivative government can no longer do, the now re-arising We the People citizen governance learns to do out of itself, using powers not delegated.

Now the fans of Ayn Rand - and similar philosophical views, will assert that the free individual need not conform to any social coercion to serve others.  This booklet does not disagree with that position.  What she refused to recognize, however, was that this same declaration of individual freedom allows other equally free individuals the right to choose to serve.  To serve or not serve is a choice, and while she was correct - in a sense, we need to keep in mind her Russian experiences - that social forces can appear to demand a moral-like conformance. We need to understand, however,  that she clearly misperceived the actual reality in the American experience (character) of the ongoing appearance of the free individual  - a social reality not at all like what she knew as a youth in Eastern Europe.  At that time she saw what she personally feared and rebelled against, which is something that hardly any longer exists as a social coercive force in America.   Americans cannot actually become communists or European-like socialists - the strength of our natural individuality is too well formed.

*

The above has been introductory, but not in any way complete.  Next we will take up fundamentals on a much more inclusive scale.

manufactured consent - the secrets of the money changers

The history of the American Experiment is, to a degree, complicated.  The broader strokes we all know.

Europeans came to the Americas, created colonies and claimed the lands as their own.   This was done by force of arms - the Native Peoples resisted once they understood that far too many of the Europeans were takers, not givers.  All real-property (land) rights (titles) to land in the Americas are rooted in theft by force of arms.  For example, what kind of social-political insanity led the French to think they had the moral right to sell to the American Government that vast already occupied space in the heart of America called the Louisiana Purchase?  As a means of avoiding a war between America and France over who was to dominate, this makes sense, although it does not make sense in a moral historical context - people already lived there.

At the same time this invasion was pushed by many of the social circumstances in Europe.  People were not just greed-driven adventurers, but were also fleeing religious and political persecution.  However, once established the colonists found themselves still governed in ways too confining.  Many of those coercive structures were economic. 

A quite significant one, which is almost forgotten, was that the English Crown (in its own battles to preserve their now decadent aristocracy of blood) made what amounted to peace agreements with the emerging class of merchants and bankers.  Competing groups, within the elites of blood and wealth in England, actually created the Bank of England as both an economic and a political ploy - the basic argument was over whether the basis of the English economy was to be land or currency - real-property (land) or money.

The aristocrats of blood wanted land, given that they claimed ownership of most of it, while the bankers and merchants wanted money, given that they knew how to manipulate that resource and as well very much wanted to overcome the older powers of blood.

The advocates for currency - money - won, somewhat acting out what later was recognized around 1790 by Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who was said to have stated: “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.”  This principle was understood all the way back when the Bank of England was created, and its problems were understood as well by our Founders.  One of the main causes of the Original Rebellion against England was the insistence of the Crown that only Bank of England currency could circulate in the Colonies, thus hamstringing the colonial economies.   Prompting Thomas Jefferson later to write, when Bankers had succeeded in maintaining their special position after the Revolution and the Original Constitution:

“The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling and riding over the plundered plowman and the beggar . . . I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country. I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.”

The first American Revolution got rid of the aristocracies of blood, but the aristocracies of wealth - the large banking and mercantile families - found that if they controlled the purse (the creation of money), the politicians, always needing money, would become tame and agreeable.  With the main exception being Lincoln (there were a few others), the history of the United States is the slow accretion of more and more political power in monied institutions, until today we have the completely insane idea that a corporation can be a person.  If directly asked, the Founders would have fallen into gales of laughter at such an impossible notion.  And then cried, for such would end up being the final nail in the coffin of the American Experiment in self-government - what Lincoln called: a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Let us look a little more closely at what the aristocracies of wealth have done to us, for with the unconscionable  thought that corporations can be treated the same as persons, we have stepped right up to the social-political precipice leading to a possible fascist state arising in the geographic America.  By the way and to be clear - a fascist state arises through the cooperation of business and government interests in an assertion of absolute power and dominance over a People.  The control the Koch brothers, and others of their view and level of wealth, seek to win over the lives of the American People leads inevitably to nothing less than the creation of a fascist state.

The U.S. Constitution grants (from the People, remember) to the Legislative Branch the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.  The central government can also borrow money, as well as make all the rules governing national Banking institutions.

Historically banks gained through practice the accepted usage of being able to loan out more money than they had on deposit (no law in the past or the present governed this carefully - they just did it, and few complained to the extent of applying effective legal restraint).  This is the main reason banks fail - their actual assets (money on deposit and other bank owned securities such as foreclosed properties) do not equal their obligations to depositors or others (such as the Fed) who have loaned the banks money.  This is why a “run” on a bank is so terrible - if the depositors and other creditors of the bank claim what is due them, the bank is so over-extended it cannot pay these apparently just demands, and then fails.   Since a great deal of modern banking assets are soon-to-be foreclosed properties (in the form of bundled mortgages), most banks are broke because of collapse of the value of these long recognized toxic assets.

Banks fail all the time.  Right now there is a world-wide escalation of bank failures because the whole world-wide financial system has over-extended itself.  Basically the international banking system is broke, in part because it also loaned money to Nation States, whose own mismanaged and ruined economies are also on the brink of failure (bankruptcy).

How this came to the present level of crisis has to do in large part with what is called debt-money.  The U.S. Constitution (unfortunately) did not actually appear to forbid banks from issuing bank-created currencies (called species at the time of the Founding), so that once again practices in banking got ahead of actual possible legal restraints.  So both the central and state governments and the banks could issue currencies (coin money).  Prior to the Constitution the colonies had vibrant economies because only local governments issued species (not banks), until the English Crown forced the colonies to only use currency issued by the Bank of England.  After the Revolution and the Constitution, seemingly pragmatic compromises allowed Banks to issue species as well, even though we got rid of Bank of England currency.  It was Hamilton and his ilk who created the first Central Bank in America, which while being called the Bank of the United States, was in effect a private bank (who owned the stock was the basic question).  Read the Wikipedia entry here for a first iteration of the three pods and a pea game.

Practical problems arose because not everyone would honor the currency of say a New York bank in another state - in Virginia, for example.  Circulating currencies need to be fundamentally backed by trust - we have to believe their value, otherwise we don’t accept them.  Eventually individual bank’s currencies (species) disappeared, and only the U.S. Dollar was in circulation (although foreign currencies also circulate, but generally only in very limited circles - such as the Canadian dollar).

Where does the currency come from - that is who prints it, and under what rules does it get to be circulated?

The historical details of this are convoluted and not particularly necessary, because we are essentially trying to grasp the actual situation true for today.  For this reason we need to understand the coming into being of the Federal Reserve and central banking; and as well understand the nature of modern commercial transactions such as credit and debit cards and their reality.

Keep in mind that bankers like to say that what they do is perfectly legal, forgetting that they corrupted our political life just to manufacture the consent to laws that only benefit them.  It may be “legal” but it is certainly not “moral or just” - we never Consented - only our so-called elected representatives did and they mostly have favored the Lords of Finance at every turn.  The American People - the real source of government powers - would not have voted for, or consented to, these endless wars, our economic ruin and the corruption of our electoral processes by concentrated money, were these questions actually put up for a vote.  Our so-called representatives stopped representing us a long time ago.

For example, following the economic debacle of the Great Depression, restraints were enacted on banks, such as the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932.  By the end of the Clinton administration in 1999, under the urging of Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan - powerful Fed and Bank advocates, this act was disemboweled, thus leaving the banks free of all sane restraint under which they had been placed  after their gross excesses of the 1920‘s (thus blurring all former distinctions between commercial and investment banks).  Such Legislative actions are not done with the People’s informed consent, but only by the corruption of our government by elites of wealth.  We the People were not asked, in a plain and obvious fashion, whether we wanted the banks to have this freedom from restraint.

Because of this same corruptive manufactured type of consent we were given around the time of the First Great War of the 20th Century the Federal Reserve.  This was the creation of a private banking association made to appear as if it was an arm of our government (by, for example, calling it Federal).  Even today talking heads on TV treat this private bank as if it was a part of the supposedly elected government.  It is not.

To this private bank our Congress granted unconstitutional powers over coinage and the regulation of its value - i.e. we gave a private bank complete control over when and how to issue currency (coinage), and when and how to control interest rates (regulation of its value).  During the recent crisis in finance, the Fed (as it is now called) gave trillions of dollars to not only major American financial institutions, but also to foreign banks - trillions of dollars for which the Fed basically refuses to give to anyone the actual details of this unregulated gift of American currency, thus debasing that very currency.  It is supposed to be ours - the People’s - currency, but a private bank controls its issue, and loaned it into existence for the sole benefit of elites of wealth.  Recall Rothschild’s dictum: “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws.”

How did they debase our currency (which the banks like to  act as if they own)?

Under current practices money enters the stream of the economy at the time it is loaned out by a bank.  It is created at the moment of the loan, and doesn’t exist before that time.  This is what happens when we use those credit cards that for decades were given to us in such an unrestrained and basically unregulated manner.  We are allowed and encouraged to believe the illusions that banks only loan what is on deposit, but that hasn’t been true for centuries.  This infusion over generations of what is essentially fake-money into the total economy has lead to all kinds of undesirable consequences for all of us.

Banks like for us to give them our paychecks and other income as deposits, because they can then loan out even more money (the amount they can loan - in most cases - is a multiple of the actual deposits, determined by a legal (not moral) principle called: fractional reserve).  The reason the Fed needed to control interest rates is because creating money in this way is automatically inflationary - i.e. with each “loan" there is then more currency in circulation, thus reducing its value (inflating the costs of what we can purchase because there is too much money out there in circulation).  The Fed by the way, like most Central Banks, has no such limit on its “loans”.

This is particularly true when banks loan money to the U.S. Government - that is when they (banks and hedge funds and other Nation State’s central banks) buy treasury bonds and other similar financial instruments.  Our government sells T-Bills in order to disguise what is essentially a loan transaction with the purchaser.  We borrow money because tax and other revenue do not equal what our corporation dominated Congress has already committed us to spending.  This is called deficit spending - or the negative difference on an annual basis between the tax revenue and the spending obligations.  Government spends more money than it has, which is why the seeming holy grail of government is a balanced (non-deficit) budget.

For example, in order to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, started by the Bush II administration, we had to borrow money in this fashion.  This was made more acute by the Bush II tax cuts, which decreased revenues at the same time government increased (war) spending.  Clinton appeared (lots of accounting tricks here as well) to have left a balanced budget, and a surplus (no deficit), and Bush II spent that on wars at the same time as increasing the deficit spending in order to finance the wars without disturbing already budgeted items (i.e. Congress at the same time kept spending high in order to placate other interests as well as not make trouble for American corporations and individuals dependent upon Defense Department paychecks, farm and other subsidies, as well as Social Security and Medicare).

Deficit spending increases what we call the National Debt, which is the total obligations out there in the form of T-Bills and related financial instruments.  Often to pay what are our government’s annual obligations, money must be borrowed via the issuing of treasury bills, thus producing a deficit.  Continuous deficit “spending" cannot do other wise than increase the National Debt. 

Keep in mind that the only reason this National Debt was recently a problem, was because legislators that don’t understand money and banking thought to gain a political advantage by placing a ceiling (upper limit) on the amount of the National Debt.  The National Debt limit  “issue” is mostly about politics and its games, and not about the underlying reality of debt-money banking and finance.

A lot of mouthing-off politicians don’t even understand the distinction (which is crucial) between the National Debt and deficit spending.  Many try to suggest that by cutting expenses we reduce the National Debt, but that is not true.  The only thing we do by lowering government spending is reduce the deficit (the part that would increase the National Debt).  Reducing the deficit does not decrease the National Debt, which is only decreased when we increase the spending part of the budget by retiring outstanding T-bills and other U.S. backed securities.  In fact, a goodly portion of our spending is merely payment on the interest obligation of these T-bills, which is why people buy them in the first place - as an interest bearing investment.

Once more, because this is crucial:  We owe money to others - that’s our National Debt.  Reducing the deficit (lowering spending and/or increasing tax revenues) does not decrease the National Debt - only the paying - spending - on the principle (not the interest) of these loans decreases the National Debt.  There is more here that needs to be appreciated.  In any given year our government often only pays the interest on these obligations, and while some T-bills are retired (some have term limits of a sort), every year of deficit spending just creates more loans. 

If we look at the proportion of National Debt due to deficit spending, Republican administrations going back to Reagan are responsible for over 80% of this Debt.  How did they do that?  They spent, on purpose, more money than they took in as tax revenues during those years.

Another (more essential to understand) main reason there is both a National Debt and considerable consumer debt is because when commercial and investment banks loan money they add an interest obligation.  If we think through those total transactions, it is apparent that this interest obligation can never be paid off.  This is only a little bit tricky, but bear with me.

The currency in circulation is created at the time of the loan, whether it is a credit card loan for consumer purchases, a loan to a corporation for capital investments, or a government loan in the form of the sale of treasury instruments.  The only money placed in circulation is for the amount of the loan, not for the additional amount of the interest that has to later be paid.  This means that there never is enough money in the system (in circulation) to retire the interest.  As a consequence, the National Debt and consumer debt can never ever be fully retired - they only grow in size, because there is never enough money in circulation to retire the interest aspect of the debt, which is constantly compounded (growing).

A great portion of the amounts of debt owed, which we call the totals of the National Debt and Consumer Debt, are in fact the blow back of the game of pods and peas, because these numbers can only grow larger given that the currency needed to pay off these manufactured debts has never been placed in circulation in the first place.

Yes, obviously in some circumstances debt is actually retired, such as when someone pays off  a mortgage or the whole balance of a credit card.  But the fact is that if we all (including our government) tried to pay off all these debts there is not enough money in circulation to do so.  In point of fact, the corrupted (and ignorant) ostensible government has in many instances created tax incentives for this debt (on home mortgages, for example) to be rolled over into the next home purchase/mortgage.   The same thing happens when your new credit card lets you pay off your old credit card as part of the original transaction.  The interest aspect of these loans never disappears, but remains present.  Such that if (for example) we default on a credit card debt, that debt becomes itself a financial instrument that is bought and sold, and continues to bear interest and penalties, which is why there are businesses specializing in credit-card debt collection.

Keep in mind that over the time of a mortgage or the period of a credit card debt, our payment is allocated only partially to the retirement of the principle, with often the major portion of our payment going to the endlessly growing (compounded) interest obligation.  The money in circulation is used to constantly pay on continuously accruing interest, letting the larger part of the principle remain.  A person paying out a mortgage over 30 years time will pay in both principle and interest several times over the actual amount of the original loan for the purchase of the house.  Of course, when the no longer overseen and restrained banking industry (commercial banks became able to operate like investment banks in 1999) became intoxicated with the short-term money potential of derivative (essentially fake - i.e. no real world value) financial instruments (such as bundled mortgages and credit default swaps), avoiding a crisis in banking became impossible (as many recognized years ago).

There never will be enough money in circulation to retire all this debt created interest - never.  It is a kind of reverse ponzi scheme in which banks create money out of nothing, loan it to us at no cost to them, accumulate vast amounts of this manufactured debt owned them by us, until inside our hearts and minds is the illusory idea that this debt is a moral obligation, not just a legal obligation, so as to create what is essentially a system of economic tyranny using the psychology of our conscience as a whip against us.  This is the reason our folk wisdom instinctively calls us “wage slaves”.  The whole of America is a system not unlike those towns in the past where the company owned the homes and the stores, and the workers all worked for the same owners at the local factory.  America just appears otherwise, but if we strip away these appearances, we will see America as one big Company Town (some call it the Corporatocracy).  There was a song, by Tennessee Ernie Ford, with this line: I owe my soul to the Company Store.

All the advantage and debt accrues to the Finance Corporations and we are made to believe we owe this money in a moral sense, while we only really owe it in a legal sense, with that legal sense having been created by Manufactured Consent (lies).  This is why what we are up to is both an Economic and a Social (moral) Rebellion.

We know something is not right, and that it is unjust (moral value is higher than mere legal value).  At the same time that the banks sold us mortgages we couldn’t pay (through seducing people who really didn’t understand what was being done), they did the same thing with credit cards.  During the last few decades just ask yourself how many people got letters from the bank issuing their credit cards raising the credit limit without actually being asked?  Banks also obtained less and less limitations on the amount of interest they could charge, becoming in effect legalized loan sharks through this tsunami of seemingly free consumer credit. When this ultimately resulted in waves of credit card failures (for which no one should be surprised), the banks went to Congress and rewrote all the rules regarding bankruptcies and the like, so that once more they win and we lose.  The banks didn’t just own the currency creation and debt and interest creation processes, they also owned the law creation processes (manufactured consent) as well.

Why is so much credit made available?  Because we are presently a consumer economy, being sold through psychologically coercive advertising to believe we need (must have) all kinds of products that wear out quickly, because many are so poorly made they soon fail.  It used to be we only bought products we truly needed and these were finely made so as to last a long long time.  If a watch or an iron or a pair of shoes wore out and needed fixing, there was always a skilled individual in our town that could repair it.  That is no longer true at all, unless you can purchase the kinds of products only available to the very rich.  Just think about the fashion industry and its influence on commercial purchases.  Nothing could be more ephemeral (fairy-like) than constantly changing fashion.

Such a society will (as is happening now) crash and burn because a consumer materialistic culture has no true inner strength.  It is essentially all vain show and surfaces.  Yet, we are going through the necessary phase of world-wide economic collapse as part of rediscovering that the American People (and other Peoples world-wide) have far more inner grit than the temporary vanity a consumer culture assumes.  We are not what we seem to be, or as is said: appearances (fashions) can be deceiving.

Just as we are undergoing a vast change of Climate, so are the fundamental structures of the consumer culture undergoing revolutionary change - the apparent collapse into economic ruin is actually a wisdom filled social/spiritual progress.  The masks are coming off, and what remains - the extraordinary ordinary human being - can create remarkable culture that has no need any longer for its members to own “things” in order to have human spiritual value.  Already we are socially in advance of the moral children that demand ownership of far more than they need.  We are, in a sense, their betters, not the other way around.  The psychological/spiritual shift that is underway involves people recognizing that a far different kind of example can and is being lived and taught to our children, other than the one which prizes competition, wealth and celebrity over cooperation, spiritual satisfaction, and individual meaning.

At the same time, we have to be careful not to look down on those who don’t get it, whether they are elites of wealth, media, celebrity, politics, spiritual life whatever.  Within their own biographies, the way they live life had to make sense.  No one, as an old acquaintance of mine put it, seeks to be bad or evil.  As another acquaintance put it: None of us are perfect.  As one of my spiritual teachers framed it: Best to sweep first your own doorstep before you insist another clean theirs.

Our politicians, not understanding advertising driven commerce, or finance and banking at all, scream and pout and posture, all for the purpose of obtaining and retaining power for themselves and their Party, but never appreciating the dominating  role of the Lords of Finance at all.  Who got blamed when the system finally collapsed under the weight of too much fake money and advertising manufactured consumer debt?  The borrower got blamed and is paying the price with the loss of homes and the loss of jobs, while the bankers go free, and continue to dominate using politicians whose ignorance and lack of wisdom seems only to be on the increase (witness the lame and vain candidates for President now being offered - at the time of this writing - for the 2012 election by the Republicans - not one of them has any real intellectual stature or character - wisdom - at all).  You can’t be a useful and effective President and not understand money, as Obama has so clearly demonstrated in a negative way.

This economic system and its vain social consequences (falsely called free market capitalism, when factually it is a complicated ponzie scheme benefiting the bankers and the wealthy) usually goes through cycles of collapse (recessions, depressions and whatever is going on now which the future will - I believe - simply call: the collapse, since the whole social order will be stressed to the breaking point).  In the past, the finance system (of collusive intercourse between banks, corporations, media sources and politicians) seemed always to rise from the dead, like a vampire, to begin the next cycle of sucking on our blood (our labor and our manufactured through psychologically coercive advertising willingness to consume, which seems to create all economic values). 

This total collapse may not result in complete anarchy, yet we still must fundamentally recognize that we are the prisoners of economic ideas that are illusory (what we have been taught to believe is going on), and our first need in the process of Economic and Social Rebellion is to throw off the chains of these unnecessary and untrue concepts.

To notice the scale of this scheme, follow what has happened recently in Greece, where the head of the International Monetary Fund demanded Greece institute austerity reforms before the IMF would give supporting money to that economy.  Then we discover that the IMF is itself  running out of money and needs the world’s Central Banks to create more currency to be used as a whip on the People of Greece and elsewhere (at the latest G-20 meetings, those Central Banks refused to give more money to the IMF - which means they too see the handwriting on the wall of financial world-wide collapse). 

Who are these People that they get to order Nation States, national governments and Peoples around?  Bankers - that’s who they are, and that’s all they are.  Plus, tragically, all their economic ideas (austerity reform etc.) are designed to preserve and advance their power.  None of it heals the underly social-political problems - austerity just takes more blood (spirit) from the People.

For certain details, read the book Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins - this has been going on for a very long time - officials at Central Banks world-wide, holding power over currencies, use that power to override the political wishes of the citizens of Nation States - ruling their governments from outside their borders in a criminal process of theft of those natural resources belonging to those Peoples.  John Perkins and his cohorts mostly did this to Third World countries, but as the 20th Century passed into the 21st, the same economic domination applied to  the Third World was instituted as regards the so-called First World.  Corporate and financial greed knows no national or patriotic pride.

Of course, the Bankers are in collusion with international corporations, for their symbiotic relationship is necessary.  In more ancient times, aristocracies of blood wove their claims of divine authority together through constant wars and marriages.  In our time the aristocracies of wealth weave their enterprises together through corporate take-overs. and mergers.  The underlying principles are the same, as are the goals.  Bigger is better, and corporations need cash (loans) in order to finance these take-overs and mergers - fake cash which is created (invented) at the moment of the loan, and is not on deposit in any bank.

During this current crisis, who did the falsely named United States Federal Reserve Banks give money to?  Other banks and through them corporations (but not to people losing their homes and going to bed hungry).  Trillions of dollars were created out of thin air in order to make it appear in their balance sheets that these institutions were economically viable (not broke).  Yet that reality of essential financial emptiness (being broke) cannot be avoided, and banks are failing all over the world, not just in America.  And, not only banks, but Nation States (such as Greece, Spain, Ireland and Iceland) are at risk because they cannot pay the full debt plus accrued interest (which can never be repaid remember, because only the currency reflecting the amount of the principle of the loan is placed in circulation). 

These debts, created by manufactured consent, have no moral value.  Their disappearance via a necessary but painful massive economic collapse would be a blessing, as each Nation State and People restructures mutually a non-central bank financial system.   The true wealth (as against the faked currency values) of the world belongs to the world’s Peoples, not the bankers, the corporations, or others who would seek to keep us all as serfs and peasants.

The battle lines are now drawn, between the claimed legal authority of the banking institutions (and their huge treaty-created international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and such as the World Trade Organization), and the ordinary People of the world.  These elite institutions and the related families need us as workers, consumers, and as warriors in their fights among each other, but for nothing else at all.  We only exist as modern serfs and peasants, and have in this scheme no authentic human or spiritual meaning.

The situation only seems dire because of the way major Media treats these matters.  Major Media too is corporate and elite-wealth dominated, thus being incapable of giving us a true picture of the nature of the situation.  In what follows next I’ll try to give a sense of the true nature of the current crisis, from a social point of view (see my other writings, such as: The Art of God: an actual Theory of Everything [6], for how matters look from a spiritual point of view).  The situation, while ripe to the point of smelling awful, is not beyond hope by any means.

Keep the following in mind.  This present social reality, which mimics the Company Town on a huge scale, is itself a product of human history and development.  Greed and thoughtlessness led to where we are today, just as other older habits led to the abuses ordinary people endured under the domination of the aristocracies of blood.  The domination today by the aristocracies of wealth are actually the result of a kind of historical progress, compelling human beings to choose (or not) to mature their social agreements.  We endure until we refuse any long to accept that domination.  Then we overcome that domination in a very naturally messy and human way.  It will not be exactly fun, but if we relax and give each other hot tea, company and comfort, we might just muddle through to a new Social Contract.

Let us do a brief summary before moving on ...

Private banks, and their related mercantile families, put in place starting around 1700 a system of banking and finance practices that gave them greater power than the various peoples and democratic Nation States, who ended up dominated by these Lords of Finance - Rothchild’s dictum about controlling the currency in action.  At the beginning many understood that problem, which was clear to America’s Founders.  By the 20th Century, however, the nature of the control of our currencies by the Lords of Finance became even more secret, and was in fact consciously hidden during the creation of the Federal Reserve.  Here is an interesting Wikipedia quote about Charles Lindberg’s father, Congressman Charles August Lindberg: 

In 1913, he wrote Banking, Currency, and the Money Trust, and in 1917 he wrote “Why is Your Country at War?”, attributing high finance as [a cause of] America’s involvement in World War I. According to Eustace Mullins, plates of this book were confiscated and destroyed by Government agents. Also in 1917 Lindbergh brought articles of impeachment against members of the Federal Reserve Board including Paul Warburg and William Proctor Gould Harding. Lindbergh charged that the Federal Reserve Board members were involved “...in a conspiracy to violate the Constitution and laws of the United States...”

Note the bit about the plates of the books being confiscated and destroyed. 

Following the creation of the Fed, excessive hungers for wealth and ever more related power led to the Great Depression, and even though laws came into being limiting this tendency to unnecessary risk taking with our money were enacted, by the end of the 20th Century even these laws were obliterated.  During the 20th Century, these same banking institutions and their partners in large corporations raped and pillaged the natural resources of the Third World (again, see Perkins: Confessions of an Economic Hitman).  As international corporations (including financial companies) became more and more independent of Nation States, even the Western Democracies including America, became the prey of the Lords of Finance.  Thus arose excessive use of credit cards and unsupported mortgages with all the consequences we now know.

Using manufactured consent through their ability to control our legislative houses, the Lords of Finance (an aristocracy of wealth that had replaced the no longer viable aristocracy of blood) put in place all manner of laws which enabled them to eventually control our industries, our farm lands, and our basic understanding of even the real nature of why our societies continued to fail to provide for our basic needs.  Like the aristocrats of blood, the aristocrats of wealth turn ordinary human beings into collections of manipulated serfs and peasants, and fodder for their wars over the world’s natural resources. 

Large corporations, aided by the banking industry, sell us drugs we do not need, and support in our centers of higher learning, points of view supportive of their hunger to dominate.  People should read Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, which not only warned about the military-industrial complex, but also warned against the excessive influence of concentrated wealth on our systems of higher education.

Keep in mind that the Federal Reserve, a private bank, had so corrupted our legislative branch that it obtained unconstitutional powers over the issuance of our currency, which they recently used to dole out trillions of dollars for the benefit of banking, finance and corporate interests - at our expense.

This lawlessness and immorality slowly shredded the social contract, whose heart was a shared agreement to submit to the same rule of law.  We are therefor no longer bound to this social contract and are completely free to unmake it and then remake it from the ground up.  At the same time remember that during this creative process all the old social rules and ideas are also in play and able to be reinvented - that is new culture can replace the old culture, a rather remarkable event already happening (see YouTube).

waking up and declaring victory

History reveals that human progress only proceeds via crisis.  There is no avoiding the pain of large social changes, which on the cusp of the beginning of an Economic and Social Rebellion, on the currently necessary scale, naturally includes and  means loss of jobs, and loss of housing for many Americans.  The American People have had their consumer life-style at the expense of the rest of the world, such that this life-style’s falling apart then becomes a kind of instant and deserved kind of karma.  Billions in so-called Third World countries already live in such extreme states of poverty, and now, as the financial system crashes, so soon will a lot of Americans suffer third-world like deprivations. 

This is the price our having been asleep is extracting, although the causes are wider and only partially include us.  At the same time these karma-like consequences are not generated against individuals, so much as it is generated against an immature society ruled by international outlaws.  This karma-like event is a gift from the Genius of History, enabling us to wake up to our “true grit" (American Character), and the pursuit and corralling of those same “outlaws".  Here next is the hierarchy of the social (non-spiritual) causes of the present financial and social debacle:

First, and lowest in terms of responsibility, is the ordinary citizen, worker and consumer.  We’ve been mostly busy raising the children (the future of any People) and creating the wealth (the entrepreneur only organizes this work-effort, for which share of the “work" he extracts far too often an entirely unreasonable portion).  

Second in terms of causal responsibility is the political class, which has promised much and delivered almost nothing.  They lie all the time - that is the one art they must master in order to get elected.  The important observation for us involves no longer listening to what politicians say, and instead concentrating only on what they do.  For example, for decades there have been questions about health-care, and not only has very little been done (the pharmaceutical and insurance industries get all that they need and want, while We the People have basically nothing - 50 million uninsured, with health insurance costs for the relatively insured rising faster than any other costs of living).  All this goes on while the politician provides for himself the best and most free medical insurance of all.  If politicians had to live like the least members of society, everything would quickly change.

Third in terms of causal responsibility is the wealthy and corporate classes, who have corrupted (the far too willing) political classes.  What is vainly called lobbying is just that place where what are essentially bribery transactions are carried out in full view, using coded language and winks of the eye.  Everyone knows Congress and the White House were bought and sold years ago (how else did the Fed come into existence?), although we all want to pretend otherwise.  But when regulated industries began to more and more write their own regulating legislation, the whole corrupt process became openly visible.

There is as well an open door between politicians and lobbying firms such that when you retire from one group it is very easy to move to the other.  Only business interests really get their needs met by our government anymore at all. For example, to work at the Pentagon, and retire with a government pension after 20 or 30 years, immediately leads to high paying jobs in the Defense Industry.

The fourth and final causal class of individuals, who bear the greatest responsibility of all, are the Media.  Living only in the moment, and fascinated with their own growing celebrity, as well as morally tethered to the corporate elite, they lost any sense of history and any consciousness of the significance of ideas.  They have no memory of recent historical events (compare major media news programs with the Daily Show) or any appreciation of the real nature of the American Experiment as an Idea.  Little or nothing of the reality of the nature of our government, or the nature of the real structure of banking and finance has been reported in the Media - those who were given the greatest of rights in the First Amendment, failed utterly: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

We are now left on our own, which is at it should be, for in the Citizenry of the American Experiment lies all the most amazing open political secrets of that creation - the U. S. Constitution - of the first iteration of the struggle for self-government. 

Media presents us with songs of great woe.  Elite financial and corporate institutions steal, lie, corrupt and plunder.  Politicians sow seeds of endless discord and display great ignorance - they are essentially useless except for selling us the no longer (if ever) true at all idea that they can fix our social problems.  All politicians see is their ambition, even the good ones, otherwise they would know clearly the emptiness of seeking elective power, for the greatest powers lie with the Citizenry.

And We?

Now we are awake and see that of all the failures of omission - of inaction, the one most potent, once no longer inactive, is our ability to fix and heal our own social, economic and public life.  We leave behind our habits of passivity and simply begin to assert the open truth of the Constitution: that which We created, We can uncreate.   Without our true Consent, the ostensible government has no real power (the Social Contract is an agreement to consent and to submit to the rule of law, and neither politicians or corporate officers - in banking especially - anymore submit).   That stepping outside this Social Contract, by bankers and other individuals, breaks it and leaves us free to do as we please.  As I wrote in Uncommon Sense: Why play by the rules when the game is already fixed?

The danger is to be so intoxicated with our freedom and our anger at the injustices that we drive ourselves in the direction of anarchy.  There is no real freedom without responsibility.  As I wrote in Song of the Grandfathers: "There is no true self government, in a political sense, if there is not an equal proportion of ‘self-governing’, by the individual of himself, in a moral sense"

What do we then do, once we realize that as Citizens we hold enormous real power, power born in the degree to which we create and Consent to a renewed Social Contract?

This is something that can only be worked out over time, and never from any kind of organized leadership.  Each citizen is the sole sovereign authority, otherwise freedom means nothing.  Next follows some simple rules and observations:

What appears to be chaotic always eventually delivers self-organization.  The Economic and Social Rebellion will lead to order, although in the beginning it will appear leaderless and confused.  The truth is that all politics is local, and it is what we do with our neighbors that is the most crucial.  Conversation with our neighbors is the key.  If we can’t talk to each other, we don’t deserve to think of ourselves as a People seeking true self-government.  For example, the manufactured conflict between liberals and conservatives, as if one or the other was a terrible person and the fault of all our problems, is just a kind of immoral political bigotry.

Yet, right in that act of talking to each other the whole chaotic seeming mess can be grasped and won.  Once ordinary citizens take hold of the political and social conversation, and add to it the questions of the nature of the social contract, of the shared (and equal) submission to the rule of law, and the distinctions between moral and legal behaviors, the politicians and the media and the corporations are unmasked.   Just in seizing the conversation in such an awake fashion, the war the rich have been making upon the poor is over. 

The rest that needs to happen follows naturally, although there are a lot of practical details that can and should be thought about.  We’ve traveled a long time down a particular road, and now we stop and turn in a direction that belongs to us, and not to the elites.  Where we then go they will eventually have to follow, for there are more of us - far more - than there are of them.  Nor do we have to stoop to their level, and coerce them or punish them.  We name them and describe their unjust deeds and leave to history their fall.  The pen (the word in conversation) is mightier than the sword.

Those looking for legislative answers to particular problems need to realize that the Legislative Branch is corrupted (a common failure throughout the world).  At the same time as we seize the conversation the ability of that corruption to remain viable begins to erode.  The truth brings light and that light drives away the dark (the truth shall make you free).  Better legislation will result as the ability to hide economic and social reality diminishes, and as we more and more assert that the essential aspect of government belongs to us.  No more three pods and a pea con job.  Details follow...

the market expects - unmasking economic religion

As this is a war of ideas (the changing of the content of the conversation), it will be helpful to recognize some of the illusions created by our current economic and social language.  For example, the frequent reference in  economic news and dialogs of something called: the market.  Just as a corporation can never be a person, no matter how hard some try to suggest that it is, so there is no reality to such a thing as: the market.

Now there are processes that occur in the ebb and flow of the creation of true economic values, but the human tendency to anthropomorphizing (seeing as human-like) non-human objects of thought leads economic thinkers to falsely conceive of this market-thing as an actor in economic processes.  In a way this market-thing is like an idol or a false god of the religious-like aspects of how many believers in so-called free-market capitalism relate to economic processes.  The reality is that there is no there there.

Take for example the Stock Markets.  Fundamentally these are casino-like businesses, where certain folks gamble, often with other peoples money (hedge funds and other retirement-fund investing institutions that “invest” in the “market”).  The reality is that a stock purchase is a “bet” that the “price” will rise or fall (the time this is mostly not true is when there is an IPO or initial public offering, which does in fact raise capital - most of the rest of stock “market” purchases are “bets”).  Given that the value of stock instruments tends to have no direct correlation with the health of the actual business as an economic enterprise, what we have then is a kind of club where psychologically and morally weak-minded individuals (managers of hedge funds etc.) play games with money that doesn’t belong to them.  The actual “market” consists of the psychological aspects of the individuals playing in this “game”.  This is why in recent months the stock markets have been so “volatile” - as it is not rationality that drives this buying and selling, but emotionally driven risk-taking.

If you listen over several days time to the explanations offered by the Evening News for the ups and downs of the stock market indexes, such as Standard and Poors, or the Dow Jones averages, what you hear on the News is simply the fake public-face “explanation” for what are essentially a huge variety of psychological factors that effect the Dow’s ups and downs.  No one actually knows why this gambling institution we call The New York Stock Exchange does what it does, except that its “average” behavior (ups and downs) can be made to appear as a “number”.   What makes the whole thing even worse is that computer software programs are often now free of human oversight and able to make “trades” (gamble) with huge bets and quickly changing strategies.  This is a recipe for disaster.  The fearsome “skynet” of the Terminator movies hasn’t taken over our military - its taken over our financial markets.

Many people know that the world’s financial institutions are failing, yet the hungers for wealth continue to bring about many risk-taking behaviors, causing the situation to be quite unpredictable (the need for predictable economic processes has been a driver for much of American foreign policy, but that is a whole other problem).  Holders of great wealth try to control something they can’t actually control, and given that wealth is often excessive (far more than the individual controlling that wealth actually needs), the game-playing with that wealth has few direct consequences for the “player” and a lot of consequences for the rest of us. 

It also is true that most of concentrated wealth is not real, but has arisen through financial transactions where no real exchange of goods and services occurs.  99% of the world’s so-called wealth is of this fake type, mostly having come into existence in markets in financial instruments.  Buying and selling financial instruments does not involve real existing items of value.  It is a game, and the instruments are the “counters”, while the world believes the fake economic religion that holders of vast amounts of these “counters” hold actual wealth.  The main thing this fake-wealth provides its holders (outside of toys and other excesses of unrestrained desire) is political and corporate power.

The current financial debacle is entirely rooted in this risk-taking involving fake-money by individuals who were already millionaires and billionaires, and who exist in a way of life that lives without a conscience, therefore caring not about what would happen to the rest of us if the whole system failed.  What does the Michael Douglas character say in the movie: “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”: its all about the game.

Like the aristocrats of blood, the aristocrats of wealth believe themselves to be our “betters”.  What the terms: the market refers to is this psychology of greed and conscienceless game-playing.  This “market” is then not something at all worthy of our sympathy or trust.  We could well do without it.

Even the basic economic theory of supply and demand fails in most instances, since supply is often controlled (for example, in the diamond-market supply is rigidly determined), and in such instances as farm subsidies there is no possibility of actually arriving at a true “market price” because the government is already interfering.   Demand as well is manufactured through psychological manipulation via advertising, such that the supposed real “value” of the goods in question is not determined by supply and demand, but by influencing our hungers for many products we don’t actually need.

In many other instances, such as oil prices (by the barrel, for example), supply and demand is again falsified because of the activity of speculators, as well as the creation of that really strange entity called “futures”.  Here, in agricultural futures for example, bets are placed on whether weather six months from now will mean more or less crops to be harvested.  Keep in mind that some of these bets only work if less food is available - that is the bet is made against our general interests, which is often what speculation is always about.  The speculator doesn’t care about the effects on others of his speculation - he only cares about his own earnings.  Recall if you can the tape recordings of the Enron energy speculators as they drove up energy prices in California through manufactured and faked-up lack of generating capacity (one of them said something on the order of - with others laughing: there goes another old lady’s retirement).  This speculation falsely and extremely raised home electricity costs for no other reason than selfish profit taking.

“Free market capitalism” is a horrible and tragic joke, since it mainly rests on giving as much “freedom” to speculators, cheats, and manipulators as it does to any effort to maintain and supply real human needs.  The whole current financial debacle is an example of this form of capitalism gone completely out of control, ruining the lives of many many people for no better reason than that some will have far more than they actually need at the expense of the basic needs of others.

To be clear: I am not arguing against “capitalism” per se, but only against the religious-like thinking that inhabits our present day economic conversation. 

strategy and tactics - in general

The primary goal is to seize the content of the political and economic conversation.  Right now the political class and the media class, supported by the financial class, form the conversation away from economic truth, so that the first and most important goal of the Economic and Social Rebellion is to bring the truth into the political conversation.  Ordinary citizens have to supply what the elites of our Society refuse to supply: plain and honest talk about economic and social realities.  Occupy Wall Street has begun this process of changing the conversation, but we have further to go if we want the whole truth involved.

To plain talk about these economic and social/political realities we also have to supply the profound political assertion that We the People are the true government, and that Federal, State and Local governments work for us.  Politicians and bureaucrats need to be reminded over and over again that we, the ordinary citizens, are their bosses and that they need to begin to act out the truth of that.  Bullying by police forces (and such as the TSA) is no longer tolerable.  The making things difficult fostered by nameless bureaucrats is no longer acceptable.  And, politicians telling us what to think and do is totally wrong.  What they really need to do is shut up and develop their listening skills.

Right now we all are addicted to our passivity and our acceptance that politicians have the right and power to tell  us what to do.  They (the ostensible government - we are the real government) need to be made to go the other way, and begin to act the way the servants of elite wealth act toward their masters: polite, humble, and in recognition that we can fire them anytime we wish.

The individual ordinary Citizen is the only aristocrat our Society ever need recognize.

Obviously getting from A to Z (from the present to the more healthy  conditions) will take time, but in this now we are right to assert that this become the case.  Anyone who wants to enter public service and truly be a servant of the people needs foremost to learn how to practice that relationship.

There is a paradox here, which is that a public servant is at the same time a citizen.  Yet we have apt models everywhere, where businesses operate in such a way that the primary rule is that the customer is always right.  When we serve another, we should act as their servant.  It is a blessing to serve and to be served.  There are great social arts latent in this common aspect of ordinary social intercourse.

Consider an example, which is everywhere today, and which when it first appeared was made to seem as something silly and perhaps even stupid.  People started saying to each other: “have a nice day”.  This most often occurs precisely in these moments of service.  We buy something at the local convenience store, and the person at the cash register “serves us”, as  they should.  That is one essential aspect of the social moment.  Then, when the service aspect the social interaction is ended, the final moment is closed with: “have a nice day”, to which many of us reply: “you too”, or something similar.

What is meant here?   What rose up out of the instinctive wisdom of the spiritual evolution of human consciousness and manifested in this social form?

What rose up is the recognition of true social equality, even though the primary interaction involved aspects of service.  Strangers, who needed to adopt servant/master type relations in certain social contexts, added to that process this final bit of contact.  We said to each other: I see you, as a person of equal meaning as I, even though this situation requires (for the moment) that you serve me. 

Now a lot of people don’t do this.  A lot of people feel entitled - that they have a right to be served and that others are meant to serve them, and that one can have a station in life that is socially superior to others.  This last still exists and will continue to exist for a long time into the future - this situation of a kind of elite entitled dominance.  Yet, at the same time, out of the instinctive social wisdom of ordinary people came this change in the course of many types of social interaction, whereby through words, and tone of voice and types of eye-contact, we noticed and honored our shared humanity.

People have been adding to this, by the way - this process of recognizing the natural divinity of the other individual is ongoing - it  is not finished.  People are starting to use names as well.  It is not enough, says this rising social wisdom, to just say have a nice day.  We must add to that the name of the other - of the Thou.  So people in positions of service (serving people in restaurants, cashiers at banks and grocery stores) often wear name tags, and we can read those name tags and use their name when we talk to them and to each other.

Many of us know the fleeting feeling of pleasure that comes when our name is recognized and spoken to us by someone who is otherwise a stranger.

What all this means is that the becoming of a nation of the people and by the people and for the people is not just a political process, but at a deeper level is a profoundly social process.  Consider, for example, those words or terms we call honorifics.  Senator so and so.  Mayor this and that.  If I am to call someone President Obama as a expected social honorific, he damn well should be calling me Citizen Wendt, because he works for me, not the other way around. 

This social evolution has in its past what lingered from the time of the aristocracies of the blood, where the aristocrat was seen as a superior person - his station in life was seen to be real - ordinary people were made to feel that others were their “betters”.  We have evolved socially beyond that condition, out of instinct mostly, but part of our Economic and Social Rebellion needs to be seizing as well this social element - we gain a great deal by not only changing and challenging the economic conversation, but the social conversation as well. 

Central to this, however, needs to be the recognition that these kinds of changes cannot be dictated by others.  We do them as individuals, because we feel their rightness as individuals.  If someone is criticizing us for improper social speech, they have not gotten (or understood) what is involved at all.  In this Ayn Rand had it right.  The Social  is not to dominate the Individual.  At the same time there will continue to be social-bullies - those who assert today what we have come to call: political correctness.  Our resistance to that kind of social dominance is just as crucial as our resistance to economic dominance

strategy and tactics - in particular

In a certain sense the following practical ideas are the heart and essence of this booklet.

Earlier I suggested we need to notice certain facts of our existence, one of which was that the world is a whole, and that the Idea of We the People belongs to all citizens of the world - all human beings, and perhaps all beings that are members of the living Earth community.  Economic reality is a whole as well.  There is, in truth and for example, no such thing as an American or a Chinese economy as separate entities.  There is only a World Economy (see Rudolf Steiner’s book of the same name).

What we call an American Economy or a State of California economy are only local conditions of the World Economy.  It is the same realty as Climate.  Climate is a world wide condition, and the weather processes in our particular area of the world are only local conditions in the total Climate of the world.  We were taught somewhat this idea with what was called: the butterfly effect.  A change in one local condition may seem to effect another far away local condition in an extreme way.  In the same way, the collapse (bankruptcy) of European State economies may effect the whole world’s economy.

Part of the problem of fully understanding this is our ideas of causality.  We tend to think of causal relations as linear in nature, although at the same time we are learning to see more accurately  that while parts appear to effect wholes, the reality is that wholes also effect parts.  We are learning this with the problem of Climate Change.  Complex systems like Climate and the World Economy do not follow linear causal rules.

Climate Change is real, although the causal problem of the human contribution to Climate Change is not clear.  A lot of debate here is confused, because they argue about what human activity contributes to Climate Change, without a lot of direct evidence for the assumed causal relation.  Arguments about that causal relation have nothing to do with the evidence of Climate Change (the shrinking of ice fields, the melting of permafrost, large movements of animals seeking to relocate in the total ecology, loss of species, unusual and more extreme local weather conditions and so forth).

We need to conceive of the World Economy in the same way.  Its collapse (in a linear causal sense) can appear to look like the failures in the American economy caused larger (European etc.) changes, but that is a false idea.  The real flaw, as it were, is the whole world’s economic ideas, which are immature and mostly oriented toward the self-interest of holders of wealth.  As we noted in the change from the aristocracy of blood to an aristocracy of wealth - this was accompanied by certain religious-like economic conceptions.

How individuals act in an economy is a function of how they think about what they are doing as actors in that economy.  What is happening to the World Economy is a vast change (like Climate Change) in our understanding - the confusing wool over our eyes of fake economic religions (such free market capitalism, socialism or communism) is being torn from these same eyes in a quite painful way.  At the same time, the World Economy is a natural extension of long term processes in human social and political history.  We didn’t create Climate, and we don’t (in an analogous way) really create the Economy (its real nature and rules as it were).  The World Economy is a reflection of the underlying nature of human beings - it exists as a consequence of our existence.  Its characteristics flow from our characteristics.  Where the World Economy reflects selfishness or altruism, those conditions derive from us.

Part of the coming Economic and Social Rebellion is about learning to appreciate the role of ideas in all this.  We change the ideas (do new thinking) and everything else (the economic, the social, the political, the cultural) changes.

Is there a focus point - a place where a kind of social-lever can be applied that moves the whole set of ideas (which need changing) in a favorable way?

Yes.

This place for the application of a social-lever - the application of our mutual wills - is the understanding, mentioned above, which now needs further practical elaboration: The election of Presidents of the United States of America is the rightful concern of all the Citizens of the World.  This is not the totality of world economic and political realities, but it is a place where a social lever can be applied in the present that will strongly effect the whole.  The political America and the economic America is a leading edge of social change, and by applying new and creative social forces to that dynamic, a great deal can be accomplished.

Let us take a small side trip here to better grasp this idea.

There is a movie called: Enemy at the Gates.  Whether or not it is historically accurate, it contains the idea that a small group of snipers, by attacking the officer corp of the advancing German Army, were able to save Stalingrad from being overrun in World War II.  We are in an analogous situation.  It will not take everyone in the world to act on these problems of Economic and Social Rebellion.  Small groups and individuals acting with the right understanding will provide the necessary “heroes” that are to inspire everyone else.  Instead of waiting for an America President to deliver on the promise of Hope and Change, we provide all the hope and change we need ourselves.  Remember Bob Marley: Got to lively up yourself, and be no drag.

One of the things the Arab Spring has taught us is how social media functions like a snowball rolling down a hill.  Without any additional effort, other than setting the snowball rolling, the effects grow larger and larger.  Already now in the United States the Occupy Wall Street movement is growing in the same way, becoming international in scope.  While this movement demonstrates the snowball effect, it does not contain fully yet the possibility to create real fundamental change because it lacks the right understanding/ideas.  It has the will, but not the needed and necessary insight or thought-content.  Without the right thought-content, as provided by such thinking as in this booklet, this will does not know how to direct itself effectively.  Its “feelings” are right - it knows the injustices.  Correcting and healing the defects takes a more intimate social and economic knowledge.

At the same time this refinement process of the related thought-content is ongoing already.  A few weeks ago Elizabeth Warren used the terms: the social contract.  Recently on CSNBC Chris Hedges used the terms: the rule of law.  On Alternet I just read an article about the occupation of foreclosed houses.  All the needed ideas are out there, and are now slowly coalescing into the necessary whole.

One of the assumptions of those leading protest activity (such as Occupy Wall Street), that has arisen in the 20th Century following the examples of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the anti-war movement in the 60‘s and 70‘s, is that we have to engage in mass actions.  So we organize mass actions to bring media attention to bear, as if this will wake people up, radicalize them and change their voting patterns.  This is no longer necessary, and in fact ought to be avoided because of its inherent weaknesses and dangers.

Mass protests open a door to mob violence, which arises when individuals let themselves be swept away by an instinctive psychology of passion at the expense of rational and individual moral responsibility.  A mob leads its members, they do not lead the mob.  Recent troubles in Greece are a good example of this.  Further, the established powers clearly use agent provocateurs to penetrate mass protests and turn them into violence, because that then becomes the narrative leading the Evening News.  The real purpose of the mass protest gets buried under the faked-up narrative of violence.

Our approach in the coming years will be quite different because we no longer need the official major media to spread the necessary thought-content.  What the Arab Spring revealed is that social-media itself is all we need.

Every individual possessing or capable of borrowing an electronic device can participate.  They don’t even need to leave their home, they just need to attend to the changing flow of the dialog as we seize the substance of the political and social and economic thought-content itself.  It doesn’t make a difference whether or not one used Twitter, or Face Book or YouTube - the whole needed effect is produced by the rising chorus of people speaking the truth - to each other - of economic, social and political reality.

This does not mean we don’t use celebration and theater as part of the dialog and processes of mutual support and interaction.  Instead of “protest”, we gather temporarily to celebrate and take joy in each others company.  That helps us form social coherence.  Keep in mind that certain needs (like shelter needs) will in the beginning (until government exercises its power of eminent domain for everyone’s benefit) involve “occupation”, which is a real “occupation” with real risks.  To confront properly the misuse of the no longer viable laws of private property, as a means to encourage stewardship of the shared resources of the Earth, will lead to conflict.

Social Media is the People’s Media and we no longer need major media at all.  If we unite our conversation, of the meaning of economic, political and social realities among each other, then from that everything else slowly and irrevocably changes.

For example, major media will have to take note of the change of conversation once it reaches a certain threshold.  Once major media takes note, politicians will have to speak to this change in the conversation.  This change in the conversation - the snowball effect of the People’s Media - itself gives hope, and at the same time it is not the only activity which lies in our capacities of Citizens of the World.

The second capacity (after and along side changing the conversation) is to run for office - that is take on the risks and the work of deep political participation.  Most of the time people run for office, believing they have to navigate all the “rules”, which will vary according to where in the world they are, and what is the nature of their particular type of government.  Even in a place where there is essentially some kind of overt despotism (such as China), individual world citizens can still “run for office”, because we don’t have to “follow the rules” nor are we limited by the “rules”.

Keep in mind that already established political parties, even such as the Greens, already are co-opted, because they assume that the broken legislative branches can presently be made to work.  Remember: this is an Economic and Social Rebellion, and one way to act out this Rebellion is to ignore the rules.  Ignoring the rules will have different consequences and risks in different places, and each individual choosing to ignore the rules will bear those particular risks and consequences.  Let me give a couple of examples to make this all a bit more concrete.

In America, if we really want to effect the 2012 elections, a million people should run for office.  Some should try to get on the ballot.  Some should seek to get others to vote for them as a write-in candidate (not needing to be on the ballot).  Some should just run on Twitter and Facebook and get their votes there (various individuals can tabulate the votes and publish these on the Internet).   People should run for all kinds of offices in this way - not just the higher ones.  Every election needs to have this “pressure" being applied from the People - pressure that ignores the rules and only seeks in this way to assert the fundamental conceptions of the Economic and Social Rebellion, such as our Right of Consent.  Some people can choose to only vote in these extra-legal (but perfectly moral) venues, but not in the official voting places.  It makes no difference.  Why?

Politics everywhere is dominated by what we call establishment powers.  In America there is essentially no present difference between the Democrats and the Republicans and the Libertarians as regards fundamental economic and social conceptions - all adhere to the conventional wisdom, believe in some fashion in the illusory market, and can’t find the courage to concretely assert that capitalism (in its present form) is not working.  This massive running for office in all kinds of venues  (ignoring whatever rules seem to limit us), does not need to succeed in the conventional way, because the Rebellion is all about the un-conventional.  As the Rebellion gains conceptual traction (more and more people begin to understand what is going on), this process of extra-legal (beyond the “rules”) voting will erode more and more the claimed legitimacy of the established way.  It is this gradual social/political erosion that we seek.

Like a Spring flood tide changes the course of rivers, so will this rising social tide also change the course of the social order, without ever having to resort to violence.  Those holding power at the top will find they can no longer claim that conventional voting grants them either the legal or moral power once assumed, and that the assertion of a “mandate” becomes more and more what it always was/is: A lie.

Manufactured Consent starts to fail, and with each election cycle (in America, and elsewhere where some form of democracy is claimed to exist) the capacity of Parties to assert they represent the People will slowly fall apart.  Already in America, all polling data shows that few inside government actually carry out the will of the people.  This process of massive running for office, in all possible moral ways, just more and more makes visible the disconnect between the claimed “serving the People” which politicians indulge in, and the clear fact is that they only serve the elites.

Keep in mind that this process of Rebellion accompanies a tragic change in economic and social circumstances for millions already, brought on by those very establishment powers themselves, who instead of being stewards of our shared social existence, chose instead to dominant it for their own benefit.

Consider the same activity in China, to do another example.  Official ballots only elect one Party.  That Party dominates everywhere often through coercion of one kind or another.  China in entering into the World Economy, however, had to allow electronic communication structures to come into existence.  China cannot back away from these transformations without sacrificing the very illusory economic domination to which it is now addicted.  Having created a middle-class, to uncreate it would destroy the country, and China’s rulers (the politburo [7]).

Social Rebellion is already in place in China.  Economic Rebellion is not far behind, once certain ideas about banking and similar matters regarding currency are understood there.  The use of made-up voting venues (on the Internet and elsewhere) will have a similar yet different effect in China.  Once more, the social flood of individual media will erode the existing “sides” or limits of the patterns (political rivers), because the conversation will itself change.  There already is a lively political conversation in China, one that is often repressed, but which cannot be eliminated.  The social control needed to eliminate this won’t work, for even today all manner of kinds of subversive speech exists in China. 

Even the Nine Men (the politburo) cannot stop conversation, or social evolution, especially given that the future of China depends on continuing its economic growth, and at the same time stabilizing it (economic growth always is on the verge of going out of control, and as the rest of the world spasms and teeters on the edge of an economic abyss, the fact that there is only really one World Economy ties China to the rest of us).  None of us are independent - economics is always interdependent.

Nation States and Corporations will all have to cooperate if they want economic stability, and during these adjustment phases, in which Economic and Social Rebellion will play a significant part, so will Nation States and Corporation have to come to terms with the emerging powers of individual World Citizens over the awake nature of the Conversation, with its core element rooted in the individually formated macro Social-Conscience.  When the one time consumers and workers (World Citizens) no longer are asleep to their “wage slavery” and the advertising driven psychological coercion to buy what we do not need, business and governments to remain viable will have to treat their former “wage slaves” in an entirely new way.

We the People have powers that those who try to rule have to take account of.  The old patterns of dominance will no longer work, and repression will on into the future always breed its opposition.  Eventually all must accommodate to all, unless we choose madness as a primary path into the future.  Some will do this, by the way - we don’t dare believe in a perfect future.  We just have to trust that more human beings will seek sanity, than there are those who will not.

Will war and corruption and terror and evil disappear?  No, of course not.  But at this particular historical cusp - what some call the beginning of the Third Millennium - there is emerging from the individual human being profound and wise social forces.  We trust ourselves and as much as possible trust each other - on this foundation a yet unimagined future will be built.

We have so far expressed two basic tactics: one) changing the conversation using social media; and two) millions (perhaps eventually billions) of us running for office - or otherwise engaging in deep political participation, even if there is not yet an “official” means or an office to run for.  Next let us focus more on the 2012 election for President in America.   Keep in mind that these processes become rivers of thought that erode old landscapes in the collective paradigms of the body social, according to the nature of the culture, people and language in which this activity arises.  We the People - the Citizens of the World - are asserting our right to choose, and this will create the new patterns, following the slow erosion of the old.

One of the curious things about American presidential elections is that when all is said and done, we are given only two choices: a Republican candidate or a Democrat candidate.  Prior to those choices emerging, we have a long season of primary elections, culminating in Party Conventions; and, even before that, an even longer season of various individuals “running” for their Party’s nomination.

In a certain sense it seems to make no difference which Party wins the Presidential Election in America - emphasis on “seems”.  In point of fact, the Republicans have more crazy people running than do the Democrats.  I mean by “crazy" the candidate’s own idea that they are actually, in terms of knowledge and character, qualified to hold this high office of trust.  None of the current candidates among the Republicans demonstrates anything but a complete lack of any appreciation of the nature of our form of government and the psychological realities of modern social existence. 

These candidates are, to borrow from a not too old movie, clueless about what it means to hold high office.  If major media was to ask them the right questions, their lacks would become obvious.  Hopefully one by-product of the more awake conversation will bring it about that major media will begin to ask questions of deeper meaning.

All the same and in spite of Obama’s inadequacies, the world needs not to change horses in mid-stream here.  Better the devil you know, than the one you don’t is the folk wisdom.

Using tactics one and two above, the prudent thing to do is at the same time urge the re-election of Obama.  Using social media World Citizens can assert that Obama should be re-elected (keep in mind we only will have two choices).  We (World Citizens) can also run for office in any country we want, and can from that “position” support any American Candidate that we want.  World support for Obama can include people coming to America to help his re-election.  Also, support for Obama does not have to take the passive form that we are wanting him to do anything he wants, but rather this support can (and should) assert as a main element that Obama (or the next several Presidents of America and officials elsewhere in the world) are the servants of the We the People World Citizens.  Simply by collectively claiming that right, we institute unstoppable change.

This “support” for Obama works as a kind of pressure on him and on his cohorts in American government.  The “stakes” as it were have been raised higher, and the demand on them for true public service made more plain.  It is one thing to lie and spin to an aspect of the American public, and another thing to try to scam the We the People world citizens.  None of this can happen however, unless social media is used by the world citizens to dominate the conversation away from what the politicians and financial people want.  We seize the conversation, and by holding together our shared sense of the need for true economic justice, slowly erode the ability of the American candidates for President to hide their biases and weakness.  What was said decades ago during the anti-war movement in America becomes even more true: The whole world is, literally, watching.

Again, keep in mind that Economic and Social Rebellion (we have many more tactics to discuss ... ) works as a kind of whole-process on multiple levels, and the 2012 elections in America are only one level toward which World Citizens, using social media, can apply their wills.  That’s why its a “tactic” not a “strategy”.  Lets pause a moment so as to better appreciate those two terms.

A “tactic” is a short term means by which a “strategic” goal is pursued.  Our strategic goal is the assertion of individual sovereignty among the Citizens of the World, as against the traditional and patriarchal domination of individuals over the last few thousand years.  The World belongs to (and is to be shared by) We the People, not to those who seek to dominate the rest of us and keep for themselves more than they need for their own use.

This strategic goal may never actually be fully reached.  Yet, in the pursuit of it we will achieve a great deal we otherwise would not achieve were we never to strive in the first place.  A human being’s reach always exceeds his grasp is that folk wisdom.

So, we have the “tactics" changing the conversation and everyone running for offices (increasing direct participation) of all kinds, whether or not in our particular nation/culture democracy is in any form active.  Next we have added the idea that all World Citizens can claim a moral right to participate (on some level) in the 2012 election for the American President.  This too is a social-river which will erode the past and create new social order as it gains its momentum and its self-understanding - that is, it is ultimately to be done not instinctively, but on purpose.

These are mostly social/political acts and tactics.  Now let us consider more closely the Economic element of the Rebellion in the form of tactics.  The two go together by the way.

As the flood tide of change of conversation etc. works its way deeper into the actual political (this will occur mostly in America first, somewhat later in the western democracies of Europe and then even more later elsewhere), it will become common knowledge that we no longer need private banks.  Private banks, via the adding of a loan obligation to the process by which currency is created, extract from the wealth creation-process (carried out through the labor of ordinary World Citizens) a legal obligation to pay interest on the debt (the loan).  This is a legal obligation, not a moral obligation.  Laws can be changed, and legal obligations can be forgiven.

People in America are already walking away from this loan-debt legal obligation in various ways, which everyone should now become aware of, and the more people that act out Economic Rebellion in this form, the more will the river of social change bring out the so very much needed new social-ways.  There are four main ways (tactics) already being applied in the present:

One) People who have the means to pay the mortgage, which mortgage under the influence of the housing bubble became actually not representative of the true value of the home, are abandoning that mortgage and that home.  Only now with the collapse of the housing bubble is the true value of the home emerging, although banks and other lenders assert that the grossly inflated value is legally owed.  Yet, instinctively people (rightly) feel cheated by this process, and are walking away from the home and the mortgage, even though they have the capacity to pay it.  This is the appearance of the social-conscience, which knows instinctively there is no justice in the legal obligation, as it arose from manipulated processes and manufactured consent, even though the individuals acting out this walk-away haven’t yet fully articulated why their personal aspect of conscience is not upset.

Two) People whose homes have been foreclosed are not moving out.  They refuse to be homeless, again because their individual instinctive social-conscience recognizes the underlying injustice. 

Three) In support of this (#2), although yet small in number, local sheriffs, who are needed to enforce an eviction, are refusing to evict people whose homes have been foreclosed.  Not being without a conscience themselves, these folks in “law” enforcement are choosing the higher moral value as it is obvious that the home once vacated will just sit empty, and in cities where a lot of this has gone on, an empty home then becomes a place of urban decay where other types social problems then fester and grow worse.

Four) More and more people are unable and unwilling to pay off the legal obligations for credit card debt.  Again, this debt can’t actually be paid on a macro-social scale, given that the loan currency creation process never placed in circulation enough money to pay off the interest-debt aspect of these loans in the first place.  Like the fake value of modern money (because of too much currency having been created), the interest-debt owed is also fake.  Just consider to whom that debt is owed.  As in the TV shows,  where we look for the criminal culprit: follow the money (or in this case, follow the claimed always compounding interest-debt).

With the loss of jobs, and the downsizing of pay (people losing health insurance and getting paid less for the same work - if they can find it), that has been increasing under the influence of the present coming crash of the finance bubble (the banks are broke), people don’t earn enough money to pay this bank-forced debt, rooted only in the profit motive, coerced by manufactured consent and manufactured desire (advertising). 

What we see here is an acting out by ordinary people, who instinctively realize that the social-contract has been broken by the elites of wealth, who co-opted our political process (manufactured consent) in order to enrich themselves at our expense.  This acting out of the social conscience is the placing of a higher moral value over and above a lower legal-only value.

For those unclear on the concept of the social conscience, in the past it took (at least) these following forms: the Vietnam anti-war movement, the Civil Rights movement, the Warren Court, the Labor-Union movement, the abolitionist movement etc.

As more and more ordinary people run for office, aware of these realities, the nature of the thinking of State legislatures will alter.  These legislatures will come to realize that one of the reasons North Dakota has such healthy local conditions in the World Economy is because that State (the only one of the fifty in the USA) has a State owned bank.   These kinds of banks need to multiply and replace the commercial/investment  banks (fostered everywhere by the Lords of Finance) who have been screwing us left and right for centuries.  Just think, for example, how in the old Western dramas on film and television, the bad guy was often the railroad or banker who then corrupted the mayor and then the sheriff.  That insight was rooted in the actual early Western experiences of Americans during their westward expansion, of such injustices caused by this alliance between railroads, bankers, law enforcement and politicians, that was not actually based on our Consent.

State owned banks have no need to provide their chief officers with huge salaries, nor do they need to add excessive interest at the moment of currency creation during the loan process.  They can also do micro-loans for people needing to start new businesses, because they no longer have the jobs once obtained through traditional means.  These banks also do not need to pay shareholders, because the reality is that We the People actually own these banks - since the government that authorizes their creation is our servant.

Another free capital process is found today on the Internet, where such new institutions as Kiva and Kickstarter allow individuals to combine their money energies in the service of other individuals with needs.

While there are some efforts in various places to create local currencies, that impulse is only short term in its potential, in particular because the exchange of goods and services for a currency depends upon trust.  A living economy needs new currency considerations, and while Steiner’s World Economy text provides some of the better ideals here,  for the moment keeping the dollar alive and well, through developing what are essentially We the People owned banks, is the best solution. 

Keep in mind, however, that establishment international banks and nation states are already trying to dethrone the dollar as the world’s default currency.  This does not mean we will fail if we use State Banks inside our own Country to issue interest-debt free currency in the form of the Dollar.  If fact, America can lead by example what other Nation States and Peoples could do to protect their own currency - the real point of a currency being the trust which follows its circulation.

In addition it will be useful to place into the conversation whether or not the National Debt of the various Nation States is a viable debt in a moral sense, or is instead an injustice forced upon the world by the Bankers via Central Banks and the creation of fake money on a world-wide scale among any number of currencies.  Recall that since the currency is created during the loan process, and only the amount of the currency thus created is tied to the loan, but not the interest, the resulting interest (that becomes this huge debt world-wide owed ultimately to banks) is the magic of the three pods and a pea.  We believe it exists, but since there is not enough money actually placed in circulation to pay off the accumulated bank-owed interest-debt, we are right to question whether this debt actually exists (other than on paper).

These more international problems will be helped by concentrating first on the situation in America.  What is done here can be an example to all.  The holders of America’s true (non-rolled over interest) debt can be encouraged by us to “forgive” aspects of this debt, in order to support a return in America to a more viable economy.  This has been done before with other Nations, and the only real holdout is the Central Banks themselves who still wish to use this debt in a coercive fashion against the Peoples of those Nations.  Taking the mask off of that con-job will be one of the crucial next phases of the economic and social rebellion on a world-wide scale.

For example, what is called balance of payment problems in international (among Nation States) economics is more three pods and a pea slight of hand.  The kinds of religious-like thinking common in modern economic thought is huge, and its slow devolution a necessity for social sanity to prevail.  Economic theory, dominated by number relations in a false imitation of physics, ruins the health of the shared social order at a very high level.   We need reality, not academic fantasy.

It is, by the way, not necessary to burn down the commercial/investment and central banks, even though as an emotional reaction that fantasy seems delightful.  First of all all kinds of ordinary people work for these banks.  When a bank crashes, like Bank of America seems on the verge of doing, thousands of people join the rolls of the under and unemployed.  What the Fed and the Treasury did in 2007-2008, in supporting these large financial institutions, was avoid what is essentially a basic process in economics: Non-viable businesses should be allowed to fail.  By believing these institutions were “to big to fail” the Fed and the Treasury kept the domination of the economy in the hands of the very people whose greed and other excesses have led to its ruin.

Given that commercial banks and investment banks are broke (their obligations greatly exceed their assets), the whole world will benefit if the seeming unthinkable (from the point of view of the elites) actually is allowed to happen.  Central Banks are not broke in the same sense, since there is presently no limit on the amount of fake currency they can create.  Not all these institutions will fail, nor will suffering truly get out of hand, unless a kind of madness takes hold of some people who possess the means to cause widespread damage via such items as: weapons of mass destruction and wars of aggression over old hates or for natural resources.  A world-wide restructuring of banking institutions, and the related “fallout” makes possible all manner of reform that is socially and economically needed. 

There will be no social problems, in the sense of the absence of shelter and food, that We the People cannot solve if the once dominating powers get out of the way, recognize and trust our wisdom, and leave us to pour our labor into unused resources to provide these food and shelter needs.  We do not all have to have “jobs” as wage slaves making commercial products no one needs, for there will be plenty of other real “work” that needs doing, and if we share instead of compete, most everyone can survive and play a role in the needed struggle.

“Jobs" are in fact a product of the Company Store phenomena, where workers are made to believe their labor can be owned and bought and sold (another religious-like belief of modern lame economic thinking).  A real understanding of the natural world reveals that nature is ruled by processes of vast cooperation and mutual sacrifice (as aboriginal peoples have long known), and not by the useless fantasy present in modern biology of survival of the fittest.  We do not need to compete for “jobs”, for there is plenty of viable “work”.  We just have to see that everyone is entitled to shelter and food and health care and other basic needs simply because they exist.  The fruits of the Earth belong to all, not to just a few.

To return to the situation in America, which needs to be won first, and become a model for the rest of the world: The end of private commercial and investment and central banks (serving concentrated wealth) and their replacement by  State (People) owned banks is not a form of communism or socialism, but rather a recognition that the banking industry, since its health is so crucial to the whole society, needs to be organized in a way such that vampire-like blood (wealth) sucking individuals do not take more than their fair share.  We actually seek to recreate (in a new way) the situation in the American Colonies before England forced upon us a single currency that had to be issued only by the Bank of England.

By the way, beware anyone who asserts an obvious immoral act is justification for the imagined “greater good”.  This never has been true, never will be true, although many who want to take advantage will or may assert or believe it is true, simply because they have lost the ability (if they ever had it) to think carefully and exactly the real nature and implications of such a vain and self-serving philosophy.

These processes of economic and social tactis will not be simple and will require a lot of discussion, but it is that very conversation and the waking up of the ordinary citizen to the reality of banking and money that is required.  Communism and socialism arose from social processes where the ordinary citizen was asleep and elites of power forced their ideology on all the rest.  Here, the meaning of banking and money will be made transparent to all, and then from that will arise real (non-concentrated) capitalism (again, see Steiner).

As long as We the People - the Citizens of the World - remain in contact with each other via social media, our contribution to this restructuring will be very helpful.  Already with the Wall Street Occupation (matters in America and as well the Arab Spring), it becomes clear that folks otherwise divided against each other, for no truly fundamentally crucial reasons, can work together for the needed restructuring possible in that culture and society.  In fact, these economic fallout processes will make us realize our shared brother and sisterhood on a much wider scale.

Please recall the harsh reality that many people in America and the Western Democracies, under the influence and domination of the Lords of Finance, have obtained positions of wealth (creature comforts - standards of living) far in excess of elsewhere in the so-called: Third World.   Americans consume something like 30% to 40% of the products created elsewhere in the world.  In sleeping through this stark social-reality, Americans earned a kind of instant karma (so to speak) now manifesting in the increasing unemployment and homelessness - conditions common to billions of other Citizens of the World.

Again, this karma-like aspect is not directed against individuals, but is a blow back from the acts of domination performed by the Lords of Finance.  They stole from the rest of the world, marketed their ill-gotten gains in America, and then through their greed drove the whole system into the ground, and our shared social life in the direction of anarchy and chaos.

We can use this change to fuel our social-conscience in a way that lets us lead the Economic and Social Rebellion in its world-wide manifestation.  We start the taming here, in America, of the Lords of Finance, and thus begin an effort to tame their excesses throughout the whole world.  Unfortunately this will not be accomplished without strife.

The Lords will try to turn the so-called middle-class against these changes, by making people fear the loss of the previous so-called standard of living.  A high standard of living has never been the real goal of the American People, whose grit and self-sacrifice capacities made them able to endure much and remain non-violent and sane.  We don’t need lots of “things” as much as we need social community and a sense of all being in the same ship at sea.

We do have a kind of generational conflict, in that younger people are not so attached to “things” as a rock upon which their self-identity rests, as are many of the baby boomers.  The loss of homes and jobs is a grave psychological stress-test for a lot of folks because of their age, which makes our work as part of the social rebellion so necessary in connection with the economic rebellion.  We need new social actions as much as we need new economic actions.

The Lords of Finance will resist, just as did the aristocracies of blood.  They will endeavor to beat us up with the law, claiming it is superior to injustice and moral considerations.  Property rights will be asserted to be higher than the rights of persons.  This is why at the beginning of this booklet I wrote of the grandmother war and the army of the unemployed, in conjunction with the need to take certain risks.  To remind the reader - these risks were two:

One involved the occupation of empty homes and buildings, on the basis that the social-conscience, which trumps during this Rebellion old laws based upon manufactured consent, can assert the fact that We the People actually own the government, not the other way around.  Since consent was manufactured, we have the reserved right to act outside legal restraints, and ensure that people who have a need for shelter, get to have that shelter.  The ostensible government should use eminent domain powers to provide housing, but in the beginning will remain corrupt and fail to act.

The underlying practical rule here is that: there are more of us than there are of them (see the movie Antz).  The Lords of Finance will use bullies to enforce their asserted legal rights as against the moral imperatives of the times.  As there are more of us than there are of them, we can (with some sacrifices) keep the bullies (which in reality are very few) from dominating.  As we do this we need to repeat over and over again, that we didn’t break the social contract, so the fact that we are no longer completely accepting the rule of law in all cases is justifiable, since clearly through manufactured consent the elites of wealth stepped outside the rule of law themselves.  Once more: “why play by the rules, when the game is already fixed.”

The second risk is less “illegal”, and involves asserting a right to tithe ourselves for food to feed everyone.  It is crucial that this tithe be voluntary.   This involves a kind of leadership by example (and is already happening in the Wall Street Occupation), and helps us avoid a descent into some form of socialism or communism (these are just different forms of domination using the State, based on elite ideologies).  The rule here again is: "There is no true self government, in a political sense, if there is not an equal proportion of ‘self-governing’, by the individual of himself, in a moral sense"

This includes, on the part of fear-driven and greed-driven speculators, that they stop messing with so-called financial markets.  They won’t of course, which means we have to change that part of the conversation that treats the market as a thing in itself instead of actually consisting of folks doing everything for themselves, and as little as possible for the rest of  us.

We do this “tactic” by as much as possible finding out who the big speculators are and naming them.  We bring the forces of social shame to bear on those who ruin things for the rest of us for their personal benefit.  Once elections in Western democracies, including America, began to produced legislators no long in thrall to monied powers, we can bring the justice system itself into play.  Right now legislatures will not hold accountable those who still control the political system, but as the flood of We the People Citizens of the World conversation takes hold, more and more officials seeking election or re-election will have to follow the new social contract as it emerges from ordinary hearts and minds.  Laws must apply equally - to all, and no longer will manufactured consent be tolerated by Citizens and voters.

Recall that we are applying the social-moral-lever first to the situation in America, as that then will spread its effects outward in more viable kinds of international change.  By the way, it is not so much that what happens in America models what should happen elsewhere, but rather that we inspire and help others believe that out of their own culture and language they can create “their Way” of economic and social rebellion.  All viable social change is local, and can only be “invented” by those who are there in that place and at that time.  There are no universally applicable “theories” of viable social change.  Bush II and company were totally in error to think they could export American style democracy to the middle-East. 

We only wage a war of ideas - updating the social contract and re-emphasizing that the government works for us.  That conversation cannot be resisted.  It just needs time and patience, like any true social transformation.

a brief, and perhaps more poetic, summation

Winds of change blow through and around the shared social-world of all of humanity.   Most everyone sees these winds as growing stronger.  Ancient Prophecies are thought by many to be coming true.  For some, old and terrible crimes are remembered, generating hate and ever new violence.  Even the Climate seems to be sundering itself from its old Ways, losing cohesion and patterns long remembered, and getting ready to forge something entirely old and new at the same time.  Humanity’s financial structures collapse in on themselves, perhaps bringing down governments, while weapons of mass destruction lurk in our darkest dreams, needing only a few madmen to be set them loose among us.  Water resources weaken, as do food resources.  Political strife and domination often makes impossible even the delivering of food and water to those in need.

It is possible to feel, as we watch these cascading and interrelated catastrophes escalate, that we are on the brink of some kind of spiritual and material abyss - the world may actually end.

Leaders - political, religious, business, military, cultural, whatever - seem not to know what to do other than frequently lie, or divide us against each other, or only offer sentimental platitudes, while what we really need is tea and company and the sharing of stories.  All the awfulness we see has been here before, and humanity always survives.  The totality of all this stress sings just one song: join together and help each other, or perish.

The core of what happens next is up to us.  We decide whether to make war on our neighbor.  We decide whether to dominate others.  We decide whether or not to spread hate and woe.  Make no mistake - if our thought is all the problems are caused by the other guy, and we ourselves are free of any responsibility, and the only ones with good intentions - that’s the famous well-paved road to destruction.

Whether we want to believe in God or Blind Chance Evolution, survival by individuals working alone is not in the cards.  We work together, or we fall - the house divided against itself cannot but fail.

Historically, in such phases of deep crisis, a choice can be made between Rebellion and temporarily increased Law and Order, for Rebellion always rides in on the horse of a kind of situational anarchy - it is inherently a level of dis-Order.  The holders of present power always make the same choice - sing the same song.  Give us more Order and we will protect you from the ravages of fearful Anarchy.  By more Order, they mean for us to have far less Freedom, which once lost is seldom if ever returned.  Thus was born the fascist State of Italy during World War II, Russian Communism following their “revolution” and all other dictatorships.

The Arab Spring in Egypt removed the dictator Mubarak (and his family and some of his cronies), while it further entrenched (for a time) in power  the Egyptian General officers of their military.  An Economic and Social Rebellion in America puts the structures of old and tired Order at risk, otherwise it could not work in the first place.  The holders of current Order will sing their siren song of just give up more of your freedoms and we will keep order and make the trains run on time.  They will try to deepen the divisions of Americans against Americans - for if we can be so divided we will be weaker, and easier prey.

This is a War, make no mistake.  The Money-lenders want their pound of flesh, but have no real right to it, since they violated the social-contract, stepped outside the rule of law and manufactured consent on all crucial matters.

Hating them and punishing them is of little use, as well.  The divisions amongst us are the first social aspects needing overcoming.  If we cannot talk to our neighbors (and even those who would be our enemies) in peaceful ways about money and banking and politics and the social contract, we do not deserve to continue the American Experiment seeking a nation of the people, by the people and for the people. 

The tendency for political action is to run down to Washington or New York or San Francisco and march in parades, when the real and most sound (and psychologically terrifying in a way) deed is to invite our neighbors over for tea and company.  That is where we make authentic common cause - all politics is local, and our next door neighbors are the most local of all.

How many of us are strangers to each other?  We live in apartments and neighborhoods right next to people we easily don’t like because they are different or loud and whatever.  The fact is, however, that the leaking social boat is one we all share, and if we don’t bail it out and fix its leaks together, we won’t keep it afloat.  Here is where women have a special and natural talent - social intercourse.  Men tend to want to posture and to strut, while women realize that what everyone actually needs company and sympathy.  Women (or the feminine inside men) will be the best organizers of local community.

Every single act of neighborly kindness, where we overcome our own resistance to those different than us, is the rock on which a strong society (social order) is built.  When the isolated computer geek finds a way to leave his basement cave to come out and carry groceries and shovel snow for his old lady widowed neighbor, regardless of her political views - that’s where the essential social rebellion is won - in difficult acts of kindness, where we lively up ourselves and be no drag.

No elite power in the world can dominate that.

On that basis then we learn together the nature of economic reality - what money is and how it effects our lives.  There lies the roots of the economic rebellion, - when we are no longer asleep to the secrets of the money changers, and understand how to serve and how to let ourselves be served.

Then we will all come to understand that the idea of the money interest-debt allegedly legally owed bankers is a manufactured illusion, while the moral kindness that lives in the hearts of a People is a real spiritual currency of infinitely greater value.

Think about it.  The Lords of Finance create finance systems that allowed them to control a nation’s currencies through Central Banks, all the while keeping hidden how this is a cheat against the People who don’t know this three pods and pea game.  These Central Banks vary somewhat all over the world, but the underlying con game remains the same.  How can accumulated debt based upon usurious loans, that never create the currency to pay off the interest element of the debt in the first place, be morally collectible?

Using this “power” the Lords of Finance stole from all Third World peoples the natural resources belonging to them, and as well financed the international corporations that abuse us all, making a commodity of our labor as if it can be bought and sold.  Slavery ought to have been abolished, but in America (and the Western democracies) everyone understands that having a job and being a member of the advertising coerced consumer culture means being a “wage slave”.

Its time to throw off the chains of economic domination held by the aristocracies of wealth.

How do we do this in a non-violent way?  By changing the whole world-wide conversation, and focusing in the present on the coming and next elections for President in America.

We learn to talk to each other about the real nature of money and banking, and be at the same time kind to our neighbors regardless of our differences.  The fact that it is not easy to be kind to those strangers that live nearest to us is the clearest sign it is morally important.  All true moral action is difficult.  We ask ourselves to do something more, something harder.  We go beyond ourselves in some way.  We pay a cost, we engage in sacrifice.  We spend something we otherwise hold dear or are afraid to risk.

That is the price of all true social evolution.  In this case, as in many similar cases, the most amazing thing is that we are not alone.  Gandhi wasn’t alone.  King wasn’t alone.  Buddha wasn’t alone.  Mohammad wasn’t alone.  We don’t have to wage this Economic and Social Rebellion alone.  Many are our companions, for it is together as We the People Citizens of the World that we strive to make a saner life for all, sharing the Earth for the benefit of everyone’s children unto the Seventh Generation.

 

notes:

[1] URL to a proposed Second Declaration of Independence: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/seconddeclaration.html

[2] URL to the book Uncommon Sense: the degeneration, and the redemption, of political life in America: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/degeneration.html

[3] YouTube videos on the “extraordinary ordinary”

#10 the extraordinary ordinary (part one) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MDWcCbDxZQ
#11 the extraordinary ordinary (part two) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsAPo5uvRRU
#12 the extraordinary ordinary (part three) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4thuClNkSdA
#13 the extraordinary ordinary (part four) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EScdHeJBUL4
#14 the extraordinary ordinary (part five) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUqTZl1-BC0
#15 the extraordinary ordinary (part six) http:///www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFJWPcNfwPo

[4] Tip of the hat to Bill Maher for “new rules”

[5] An early experiment in the “occupation” of unused property was People’s Park in Berkeley California in 1969: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Park

[6] URL for The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/artofgod.html

[7] the Chinese politburo, see Nine Men by David Wingrove: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/NineMen.html