Wake Up! Wake Up!

So many Americans are struggling to survive in the current money system. What most don’t realize is that it is not their own personal finances that need changing, but the economic system itself. In Running on Empty, Peter Peterson, former Secretary of Commerce and Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank, wrote that “America may well be headed for a financial meltdown. In Jan. 2004 … the IMF took direct aim at the U.S., warning the world that we are careening toward insolvency. They point to a huge and growing imbalance between what the federal government has promised to pay in future benefits and what it can reasonably expect to collect in future taxes. Its long-term deficit now exceeds 500% of GNP. Closing that gap, the IMF calculated, ‘would require an immediate and permanent 60% hike in the federal income tax or a 50% cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits.’” In his assessment, Paul Volcker, former chair of the Federal Reserve, warned that the U.S. faces a 75% chance of a crisis by 2009.
With the climate crisis also looming, these are interesting times indeed. What many of these experts don’t understand, however, is that the world long ago stopped working for the billions of people who live in abject poverty without even decent sanitation. Globalization, brought on by Western imperialism and the creation of banana republics, did those billions no favors, and we also don’t have the six planets worth of resources it would take for the world to live like “us”.
One thing that amuses me is that we award Nobel Prizes in economics to people for things like “Analyses of markets with asymmetric information.” Having stuffed themselves so deeply in the box, what all these experts don’t seem to get is that money is an illusion—you can’t really do anything tangible with it because it’s not real like baskets, sheep and bushels of corn were, or even the gold standard that money is supposed to represent. Currency was created to assist with trading and it is derived from current: that which helps the flow. It was not meant to be hoarded. To say we can’t do something—like provide healthcare, address world hunger, or stop destroying the planet because there isn’t enough money—is REALLY CRAZY. What we are actually saying is that we can’t provide what’s necessary because there is not enough cooperation.
In their 1863 letter to fellow financial power brokers, the Rothschild Brothers of London wrote that the few people who understand the financial system are either so caught up in its profits or so dependent on the lifestyle they enjoy from it that they won’t do anything to change it. Then they said that the rest of the people aren’t even aware of how the system works, so they’ll continue to labor as if this were the only option, “spending their lives in virtual enslavement to us while we reap the benefits”.
For so many reasons I feel like carrying around a sign that just says “WAKE UP, WAKE UP”. The power/money elite have, for thousands of years, concentrated control into their hands. This everyone-for-themselves (E-F-T) system has been their game, and it has largely gone unquestioned for thousands of years. But now the survival of our planet is threatened, and the game is playing out. However, if we had a cooperative society, 85% of the current jobs and all the resources associated with them would be unnecessary. Focusing on our individual survivals, we, indeed, became the unwitting slaves.
It’s just so easy to criticize what’s not working. Therefore, when I give my presentations, I simply say “the economic system is broken” and “the political system is broken”, because most of us already know what’s not working. What people don’t know is what to do about it. With the E-F-T no longer a viable option for the survival of the planet, we need to play a new game—one where everyone wins. People with consciousness can create a model that will work for everyone. A few years ago we formed the Community Planet Foundation and created such a model we call “For The Highest Good Of All”. With our belief that “the way we live together and relate together in Community is the basic building block needed to transform the planet”, we designed Communities of 500 people that will work on cooperation as the medium of exchange and redefine wealth as “use and access rather than possession.
From this model I wrote the book, THE NEXT EVOLUTION: a Blueprint for Transforming the Planet. In the book I describe how this new system would work:
“What if we thought of ourselves as one family where the needs of one, whether it be a person, a group or a country, are the concern of everyone? Granted that to do this we would have to rein in our egos and sacrifice our selfishness, but what could we gain? What do we really want more of in our lives? Some immediate thoughts are more leisure time, more play, quality time with good friends, opportunities for creative expression, beauty in nature, etc. We’d all probably also opt for less stress, more peace, less pollution, and more healthiness.
“Because most of the people in the world would have no idea what it would look like if we chose to live together for The Highest Good Of All, the first step would be to create a MODEL COMMUNITY, based on the concept of making life work for all of us, to show the world how life could be very, very different. While ‘intentional’ egalitarian communities are certainly not a new idea, with many small ones currently existing, none have been created with the intention and on the scale that is needed to arouse worldwide interest. We need to see an approach that not only could heal the planet but will also show a different way of living with a daily quality of life that would be more uplifting for almost anyone living on the planet.
“With the successful demonstration of this model, people from all over the world will be able to see and hear about a lifestyle that they too can enjoy and how we can start by setting up life to work for everyone, for The Highest Good Of All. There are enough resources and manpower for all of us, all life on the planet, to live together very abundantly. We just haven’t set it up that way yet because of the legacy of our everyone-for-themselves socio-economic-political approach. It is now time.”
—Jack Reed