Up-dated & upgraded Friday, April 11, 2025
Modern Money v. Real Wealth
“A thing is worth whatever somebody will pay for it.” – Anonymous
“Money makes 2 kinds of people: its masters and its slaves.” – Ancient Arabic saying
“It is hard to explain something to those paid to not understand it.” – George Orwell
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Economics of Corruption v. Justice & Wellness
Existing social reform & economic justice movements, sub-movements, normal political parties, politicians and intentional community groups are not succeeding. Why not? They lack the complete mix of all the necessary ingredients:
- appropriate intent & objectives
- effective strategy & infrastructure
- adequate funds, methods, logistics
- sufficient support, staff & recruits
- sufficient credibility & popularity
- inter-community cooperation
I may not be an academic economist, nor a professional practitioner, but I may be the first post-modern meta-economist. I came to it haphazardly, after several major setbacks and difficulties related to several phases of decline of the economy and culture of the USA. This work was also inspired by a rare, eccentric, farseeing and insightful mentor, QJ Workman. The Great Depression (and decades of aftermath) motivated QJ’s simply brilliant solution.
Why did The Solution fail to save us from our current socioeconomic insanity, getting worse daily? I excelled in architecture, art and entrepreneurial ventures requiring progressive technical expertise. Yet, the ongoing corruption and increasingly extreme dys-equity, disparity, and inequality called for a new, more modern kind of next-gen monetary credit system, for a next-gen parallel economy that “works” for all of us.
In the process, I realized that our problem has a deeper root cause. Some call it money, wrongly. We could call it ethical deficiency or cultural illness. Dr. David Suzuki called it ethicide. It fuels perpetual war, poverty, national debt, insane taxation, Drug War Inc., sickness-care for profit, politics for profit, ongoing toxic pollution, oblivious diversion, subversion and more anti-life perversion. It destabilizes and harms the whole world.
The root cause is systemic corruption. The ancient Chinese word for corruption also means rotting meat. Not curing it makes it worse. We can only cure it with bio-ethical axiology, the science of value. This work introduces the solution, but fully considering more of the symptoms helps put the necessity into perspective. The following are major examples:
The rate of species extinction may now rival the five Great Die-Off level extinctions of the past (Pearce 2015). AI-enhanced automation and the AI Arms Race evolve ever more rapidly. AI maximizes production, lethal efficiency and profits, minimizing costs and risks. That guarantees increasing job loss. That may soon exceed our global birth rate. In the poorest, most populated, least educated cultures, conversion to archaic religion exceeds the birth rates where more moderate religions prevail (Burke 2015). Populations in the most developed industrialized nations are aging. Our birth rates thus decline more rapidly. Accelerating climate change causes increasing migration, hundreds of millions more refugees in the next 12 years or so (Harvey 2018). Losing-class political power declines more rapidly as chaos, fear, plutonomy and desperation increase. Less than 0.01% of us now control and exploit nearly 90% of the world’s resources and assets, leaving little more than 10% for about 90% of us (RWER 2009).
Oceanographers, ecologists and other life-science experts know that–to avoid worse mass-extinction–we need a solution sooner rather than later. For a brief yet incisive critique of the role played by pseudo-scientific economics and economists, it would be hard to find one better than Michel Gueldry’s scathing 25 pages of historical fact and analysis (Gueldry 2015). Regardless, neither Gueldry nor any known economists propose a generally acceptable systemic solution.
Essentially, recent IPCC reports on extreme climate change equate the overall effect with ecocide.
“Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake” (one report declares) should the world warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, which it will do as soon as 2040, if current trends continue. Nearly all coral reefs would die out, wildfires and heat waves would sweep across the planet annually, and the interplay between drought and flooding and temperature would mean that the world’s food supply would become dramatically less secure. Avoiding that scale of suffering, the IPCC says, requires such a thorough transformation of the world’s economy, agriculture, and culture that “there is no…historical precedent.” (Wallace-Wells 2018)
The actuality is that civilization, nature, physics, and global thermodynamics are accelerating extreme climate destabilization faster than scientists can gather enough data to make useful predictions. That makes it likely that, if we keep aggravating the problem and not slowing or reversing the meltdown, all coastal nuclear power plants, industrial facilities, and cities will suffer catastrophic flooding by 2030. So, a 7-year global emergency project is essential to a best-case outcome.
A globally coordinated solution is possible. War is not the only good reason to initiate a massive upgrade of civilization’s ways and means. Yet, that requires facing the facts, and fully understanding the problem and causes, the anti-ethical nature and purpose of the national-debt-for-profit financial system.
Judeo-Christian scripture tells us that the love of money is the root of all evil, not money itself. Jewish and Islamic scripture both declare loaning of money for compound interest (profit) an evil, condemned by God (or, in Arabic, Allah). The Holy Bible says “you cannot serve both God and Mammon (the demon of greed)” and that there will always be poverty. Finally, the Book of Revelation says our worst problem is not a supernatural Devil, but “powers, principalities and corruption in high places.”
Scriptures may be questionable, yet they refer to real problems, including evil, ignorant negativity, injustice and tyranny.
Christians believe that Jesus said ‘“you shall know the truth, and it will make you free.”’ The truth is that poverty is impossible without money, greed, corruption and confusion. Unfortunately, as the late great scientist Carl Sagan realized, too many of us are too easily bamboozled, “and the longer and worse we’re bamboozled, the less we want to know about it.” Thus, the late great W.C. Fields clearly thought he should never give a sucker a break. P.T. Barnum thought that “a sucker is born every minute.” Now, we add nearly 259 more per minute.
Regardless of the birth-rate, if truth makes us free, not knowing it makes us slaves. That, and the devolution of education, makes wisdom essential to the solution, not the whole of it (Berkowitz, Illich, Gatto). David Suzuki saw modern money and economics as social diseases aggravating “ethicide” and political corruption, symptoms of AIDS-like cultural illness (Suzuki, Cahuc, Syll 2018). The solution also requires appropriate action, after taking the right medicine.
Beginning with the truth seems wise. Problems have causes and contributing factors. Dr. Abdelkader Chachi, PhD., found that the cause of our problem is ancient (Chachi 2005). Systematic exploitation, currency devaluation, inflation and destabilization both precedes and coincides with the fall of empires and civilizations. Legendary histories of most ancient cultures concur, telling of the world being destroyed because too many people got greedy and fell out of harmony with nature and spirit. The late great historian Chalmers Johnson saw it happening again, globally (Johnson 2004, etc.).
Why? Fully understanding money, love, and evil is no easy task, especially for economists. Adam Smith’s moral philosophy notwithstanding (Smith 1759-1790), ethics, good, evil and corruption were gradually deleted from Euro-American economics. Viral re-education seems essential for a cure, but full recovery requires wisdom in action. That must include the concerted energy and action of mind, voice and body, guided by truly healthy intention and ecocentric bio-ethics.
Thinking and acting as if ethicide and ecocide for profit are acceptable or integral costs of capitalism and free trade is simply insane. Remember, in the sandbox of childhood, per the Biblical golden rule, free trade is fair trade, equitable exchange of value for like value. Sustaining a stable standard of values for ethical society, reliable currency, debt-free exchange and fair trade requires an ethical cultural paradigm. For example, the economy of Star Trek sustained a fantasy world without money, taxes, debt and poverty. That is only possible without perpetual inflation (devaluation), chaotic instability and systemic evil.
The souq (or souk) system still works in Asia, the Middle-East and North Africa—after thousands of years—with ancient values and per transaction pricing. The prime value was and is quality of life (QOL), for the participants, their families and communities. The Potlatch system served America’s first Northwestern cultures very well, for countless centuries. Wealth was the potential and ability enabling high QOL—with abundant giving, sharing and enjoyment of nature’s abundance—no poverty, interest or taxes. We could now enjoy the best advantages of all three examples mentioned above.
How? The IRS wants tax for your “net income” (profit). Pure credit, giving, sharing and the “even trade” of fair exchange are free of profit and dys-equity (unequal “capital gains”). Real money is and always was a systemic abstraction of cultural credit, now complicated with rules and symbolism, easily subverted and perverted. Perverting money enabled usury, interest, national debt, corrosive taxation, and poverty.
Einstein saw that “the world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who do nothing about it,” yet income tax confused him.
Cyber-currencies, modernized barter systems, microfinance and existing local credit systems are equally vulnerable to dysfunctionality and offer no real solution. Why? The existing alternatives to perverse money are more or less tied to subverted beliefs about value, money and taxes; and they lack rules and principles redefining credit, wealth and success. Without revision of the rules and redefinition of the goals of the game, there will be no effective alternative, no real solution.
Still, anything we can understand and describe can be programmed and automated. Banks did it long ago. Cyber-coins depend on it. So, naturally, we can define a Win-Win system of best principles, policies and rules to create and sustain a new cultural economy that integrates:
- the best functions of the Star Trek Federation’s credit system
- the priceless souq paradigm and
- the ancient gifting and sharing ways
The alternative? More decline as the winners take all. For example, Warren Buffet recently told an interviewer, “there’s class warfare all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and it’s winning”(Stein 2006).
Despite Buffett’s agenda, Bankster debt-bucks and better tax policies will never buy a way out of our worst problems. The ethicidal trend also maintains the following ills:
- maniacal consumption
- toxic production
- planned obsolescence
- atrocious waste
- ecocide-for-profit, sanctified by law & the Fed
Usually, despite the many atrocious symptoms, nearly 99.9% of us seem unaware of the class war, the spiritual illness and the cause. The 0.01%ers seem to think winning higher scores—by keeping their casino capitalism scam going—is all that matters. For example, Buffett recently said that his class won their class-war (Kosik 2018). I agree. They won by bamboozling each generation of losers into believing that the GDP and “winner takes all” goal of their game is more important than cultural wellness and the QOL. So, while they eat ever more of our little slice of the pie, “the Fed” feeds us numbers that lie.
Consider this: Nobel laureate economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman called the Trump regime’s propaganda “nothing but lies”(Krugman 2018). Ending mass-confusion about money and taxes clearly matters (Martin 2014). However, mainstream economists will never save us.
Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz offers little or no comfort to the working poor and poorer (Stiglitz 2017). Celebrated humanitarian economist Manfred Max-Neef delivers heart wrenching descriptions and explanations of the problem, but no definite solution or action plan (Max-Neef 2012). E.F. Schumacher came close, seeing economics lacking ethical compassion as like sex without love. He championed Buddhist ethics, compassionate realism and local currencies, but no generally accepted strategy for a sustainable solution (Schumacher 1973). In his lecture on The Wisdom of Leopold Kohr, Ivan Illich cut to the root of the problem:
“Algorithms ‘purified’ value by filtering out appropriateness, thereby taking the good out of ethics.” (Illich 1994)
What could be more inappropriate than less appropriateness, less good and more evil? Trading goodness for valueless econometrics, preposterous postulates and amoral dogma totally perverted the future of economics. Lacking humanity, it ignored the reality of systemic evil. That made anti-ethical immorality the new normal of kleptocracy, funding dysethical economics for the sake of the hyper-rich winning-class. Their concern for QOL was made irrelevant long ago, if it ever existed at all. Therefore, both Kohr and Illich saw economics as an unfixable part of the problem, deserving replacement. They left what that might be unspecified.
The Economics of Ecocide v. Socioeconomic Sanity
Existing digital currencies provide no remedy. They perpetuate the game, serving as low-budget hedge funds, currency laundromats and bubble market gambles. What are they worth? They measure rankings of moods, fear, greed, volatile national currencies, momentary, ever-changing numbers in cyber-space—not actual values, goods, services or natural benefits. What could be worse? “Mining” (creating) conventional crypto-coins at the current rate could raise the average global temperature by another 2℃ in the next 10 years or so, submerging the coastal real estate where 70% of us live, as the rest of our habitat dies.
However, the “tragedy of the commons” is as unnecessary as it is unsustainable. Chris Hedges describes the destructive realities of the plutonomy game with passionate precision (Hedges 2018). Noam Chomsky explained our potential for omnicide and ecocidal mania (Chomsky 2018). Yet, a well-understood set of new rules, definitions and values, a new paradigm, could foster and support a civilization worth sustaining. That requires citizens who can afford that much QOL, and a way to sustain it.
The key issues are simple enough for children and, if we want cultural wellness, ethical AI can help us succeed where most human adults keep failing. After all, changing the rules of a game (or a system) changes it, makes it a new game, with new possibilities.
How? The way medical AI “expert systems” help doctors save lives makes a useful analogy for dicussing our options. Clearly though, only biocentric ethics will foster and support the knowledge and action we need to succeed. A truly Green paradigm can support an effective alliance of ethical evolutionaries and healthy communities. An AI-enhanced, bio-ethical meta-political party, an intelligent human party, can articulate and initiate appropriate policy, advocacy, legal-financial action and a 7-year global emergency rescue project. A global community development alliance (GCDA) will enable a stable AI-enhanced global community credit system (GCCS). That will sustain only positive credit and healthy commonwealth.
How? The GCCS advisory AI system auditor-manager will be trained and informed with a database of best practices, best ethics and best sources. As you will see fully explained in following content, the GCDA solution enables the right mix of all the ingredients of a lively global commonwealth.
For now, remember this, IBM’s Watson AI system beat the all-time human champion of Jeopardy by virtually reading 60 million pages of text per second. Of course, other AI systems and apps now enable much more effective uses. The GCDA’s AI-Advisor will monitor & audit cultural exchange better and quicker than all human economists, bankers, accountants and auditors combined. Fortunately, as you will also see, the GCCS AI quality management principles, policies and rules also make excessive cyber-coin “mining” unnecessary. The GCCS will be vastly more energy efficient, fast, and less costly than any existing cyber-currency and exchange system.
Also recall that systems are like games. New rules enable new results. If we want fair trade and a lively commonwealth for all, we can have it, but we need new rules and goals, and appropriate legal-financial organizational vehicles, the GCDA and GCCS. A global alliance of sane people, communities, cooperatives, Green businesses and a next-gen positive credit+currency system enable our best odds for Win-Win results.
Why? Because the GCDA+GCCS solution will foster and support all the projects, programs, initiatives, and global interaction, liberating the cultural wealth we need. For that, we also need emergency response and recovery of ethical society and restoration of our habitat, the biosphere that sustains us. The GCDA provides opportunities and benefits attractive enough to win the trust and participation of a majority of us, at least enough to initiate and support real change for the better.
Of course, you could wait for the winning-class power players to wake up and end their ecocidal kleptocracy game. Yet, who knows if we have enough time left for wating? If we want systemic change for the better, we can have it, if we choose effective action. Realities, politics and time make optimal quality of life and GDH (global domestic happiness) the right goals. Otherwise, what is anything else worth?
Preemptive Rebuttal
“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” – disgraced former Vice-president of the USA, Spiro Agnew
For those of you who still doubt the validity of the thesis, or misunderstood exactly what it is, what follows refutes counter-arguments based on mainstream beliefs, opinions, political propaganda and economic dogma. For those of you unfamiliar with the true history of money, credit, banking, financial crime and piracy, the facts may be shocking. However, I encourage you to read on with courage, trusting that proofs are provided.
First, objections and arguments based on misunderstanding are invalid. Partial understanding or addressing parts of an issue or ignoring essentials does not equal real understanding. Accepting failed hypotheses and conjectures of mainstream economics, while ignoring expert authorities with solid evidence, prevents understanding the essentials of history and reality. That prevents realistic economics and ethical politics.
Unfortunately, economics has no fundamental, definitive metatheory, no unitive basis of logical principle (as shown above and in following chapters). It has no ethics, no good and no ecocentric biophilic* values. Yet, the most likely objection and attempted refutation of the thesis is that modern civilization is neither essentially nor totally corrupt. Yet, that ignores the nature of corruption and the true scope of the problem. Hence, since ethics and holistic study of corruption and the effects of good and evil were long ago deleted from the paradigm of mainstream economics, a definitive reminder seems in order here.
Corruption: The original Chinese understanding is still valid. Their ancient word for corruption is a dual pictograph with symbols of rotting/rotten and meat. Corruption is like a psychospiritual, sociocultural form of necrotic, flesh-eating bacterial infection, like gangrene and pathogenic sepsis, the symptom commonly known as blood poisoning. Like rotting meat, unstopped corruption spreads through the mindbody of human culture. Unfortunately, this deadly infection started in the brain of society’s mindbody.
Fortunately, the body of human culture is a very complex ecosystem with several powerful modes of immune response and healing potentials. We call the main modes ethics, positive values, goodness, respect, empathy, compassion, wisdom, spirituality and constructive cooperation. Those are the essential elements of our cultural immune system attacked by corruption. Thus, corruption is also like a psychosocial form of AIDS and cancer combined. Thus, corrupt politicians and psychopathic executives are the cancer cells and deadly disease organisms of society’s mindbody.
Think, if we were diagnosing a single human being with blood poisoning, Ebola, AIDS and terminal cancer, would we say that a patient was well, ignoring the multiple catastrophic illness?
No, nor would good people blindly pretend that such a horrific fate is a socially acceptable norm, unworthy of medical attention. No compassionate doctor would say anyone with such an atrocious combination of illnesses should be denied the best help available. Yet, nearly all economists are clearly uncaring, silent and seemingly oblivious to the patient’s awful suffering. Most politicians and top executives of the world’s biggest corporations are uncaring, psychopathic vectors of infection.
Another argument against the systemic corruption theory excuses government and politics as usual because some politicians and voters seem moral and truly committed to ethical reform of government and society in general. Yet, despite their claims and passionate activities, those people use the Fed’s debt-for-profit currency fueling and funding the systemic corruption and decay of civilization. Choosing the lesser of two evils is failing to prevent more Hell on Earth.
For example, deficit spending and the Fed’s inflation (devaluation) of its “dollars” eroded their real buying power down to less than 3% of its original 1913 value. In fact, over the last 110 years, the USD’s “official” inflation has exceeded 2,500%. Yes, remember, when the Federal Reserve Act was illegally passed in 1913, a first-class US postage stamp was priced at $0.02 (2% of a dollar). The price has risen to $0.63 (63% of a dollar), a 3,150% inflation. That proves devaluation by nearly 28.64% per year, very close to the real rate of inflation suffered by ordinary voters. In 1912 the average income in the USA was $1,033.00 and most business owners enjoyed no more than 12 times the buying power of their lowest paid employee. That ratio is still mostly true in Japan and the Nordic nations. Here, teachers’ income in 2019 Fed bucks is more than 100 times the 1913 dollar value. Yet, most teachers now struggle to survive while suffering woefully mismanaged, under-performing, under-funded schools.
However we calculate and analyze the numbers, it should be obvious that just maintaining our buying power requires much more than 1% or 3% or even a 10% per year increase of wages or return on investment (ROI). For instance, those who lost half their assets in the high-tech crash of 2000-2001 and another 50% of their remaining assets in the Meltdown-Bailout scam of 2007-2009, would have had to make at least 100% ROI after each of those economic disasters to restore their prior affluence. Did they achieve such amazing ROI—in any number of years—while the real buying power of the Fed’s dollar was being devalued by nearly 29% per year? No, not unless the losers became top tier hedge fund managers and/or market makers.
Where did the great American Dream go? The Fed now shows median income in the USA as nearly $50,000.00 (give or take $20,000.00), but average CEO compensation rose 17% in 2017, to at least 312 times that of a “typical” employee, not the lowest paid worker. Somewhat earlier, if Mark Zuckerberg’s annual income had been included in the calculations, average CEO compensation would have been reported as nearly 3,000 times more than the lowest paid corporate employees. So, Mr. Z’s compensation was excluded. Meanwhile, Trumponomics and lower unemployment, more modern efficiencies and greater productivity provide little or no real long-term benefit to most workers, children, and 99% of elders. Clearly, quite the opposite is the truth. So, now, Trumponomics 2.0 is wrecking the global economy even faster, for the benefit of the hyper-rich power-brokers of the winning-class 0.001%ers.
Yes, as usual, the kleptopian winning-class and their kleptocrats keep getting richer while the rest of us get poorer, whether we admit it or not.
What do the moralists do about the real “hidden hand” in the national cookie jar? Right, nothing, but remember the cure. The Fed was allegedly created to prevent national economic disasters that cyclically devastated average families. Yet, now, as usual, the Fed’s Bankster owners help orchestrate every national financial disaster from before its beginning. Seemingly moral politicians (mostly lawyers) and brainwashed voters do nothing about it for the sake of themselves or their children. They either ignore the Fed’s disastrously toxic national-debt-for-profit con-game or else remain blithely bamboozled, or as paralyzed as a doomed deer in the headlights.
The Fed’s game demonstrates the successful corruption of kleptocratic society and civilization, nationally and globally. After all, standing by and doing, saying and caring nothing about systematic evil maintains corruption for “fun” and profit. Being a good consumer means being an accomplice by default, guilty of the sin of cowardly inaction at the least. At the worst, maintaining the systemic injustice of the Fed and the multinational banking cartel is a mass-sin of mass-fraud for the sake of maniacal greed.
Finally, some may say that no other socioeconomic system is workable or generally acceptable. That, essentially, is a tacit confirmation of the thesis, that the system and most if not all participants are fundamentally corrupt and/or oblivious. It also assumes that the vast majority of players, using Bankster debt-currencies deliberately support the inherently corrupt (and corrupting) dys-ethics of kleptopian society.
However, that not only assumes the incurability of corruption, it perpetuates it and tends to prevent the cure, at least individually. Yet, when hundreds of millions or billions of us fail to believe in and support ethical living and a better future for all generations, that tends to make a dystopian future a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whatever the result, even if the vast majority of participants are unaware of the nature of the game and the massively fraudulent injustice they help perpetuate, the “no better alternative” argument supports the bio-ethical thesis.
To fact-check the expert quotes included above, see the linked list of Real-World Economics Review’s most downloaded papers by world famous experts: RWER_most_read_papers
To put it more simply yet precisely, the thesis is this: The pandemic deficiencies of knowledge, understanding, wisdom and ethics foster and maintain the psychopathic kleptocracy ruling the world and ruining our habitat.
That assertion is supported by the ever-growing number of victims, and by the chronic failures of mainstream economics. It may seem hard to believe, but orthodox economics is not the only batch of pseudo-scientific rhetoric commonly unquestioned by under-informed, disinformed students, corrupt academics and unscientific members of the public. Yet, the sub-thesis is that modern civilization’s chronic ills are perpetuated by commercially sponsored systematic diseducation.
Speaking from experience, I can testify to the progressively insane corruption of education in the USA, without explaining its earliest subversion by the promoters of the Bavarian system. The late great educator, activist and author John Taylor Gatto gives the best history of the beginning of the end of life-enhancing education. For this brief report, we can look to the rapidly accelerating decline of community colleges, their falling enrollments, decreasing offerings and services, and the runaway escalation of university tuition in the USA. Compare that to the Nordic examples, among others. There, the people consider their educational institutions vehicles of cultural progress, worthy of national investment no debt-for-profit). For example, the universities and colleges of Norway are free, tuition-free, to anyone who can afford to live there. Norwegian students get debt-free help with living expenses, if they need it.
Global, Regional, and Local Examples
Other examples of cultural corruption are viewable via any media news source and archives of the historic record. The manic examples provided by the former and current POTUS and his cult are visible everywhere. Yet, the January 24, 2019, issue of the Eugene Weekly (EW) offers abundantly typical evidence to support my diagnosis. On the first page of content (p. 4) the Viewpoint column features a multiple-choice Pop Quiz! designed to publicize the commercial tsunamis of ecocidal greed threatening the Willamette River ecoregion. The candidate Perps are listed as:
- “Some local land-use attorneys representing homebuilders”
- “Out-of-state pave-and-run developers”
- “Lane County Housing Authority’s land acquisition and disposables policy”
- “All of the above”
The correct answer is D, but those are really not all the responsible Perps. The majority of the blame falls on us, citizens who do nothing to change the systemic corruption that makes toxic profit seem more important than optimal QOL (quality of life). In the Letters (to the EW editor) section, 8 of the 11 writers address problems that would not exist if our society valued QOL highly enough to change the rules and goals of the money game. Following feature articles all reported other severe symptoms of organized corruption, ecocidal insanity and toxic financial warfare commonly accepted as normal business-as-usual. Unfortunately, none of the authors, editors or letter writers understood the whole-system problem. A vast majority of the Banksters’ victims remain divided and diverted, focusing on single issue fragments of civilization’s illness and decline.
Several popular video series depend on the modern and not-so-modern reality of systemic corruption: Billions, Ozark and Justified depict the current phase of systemic crime and socioeconomic decline. The Deadwood series and many video documentaries on the conquest of this hemisphere confirm the trendy history of greed fueled systemic corruption. True, some invaders were not overtly corrupt, but the whole dynamic of conflict existed only because the world’s mainstream socioeconomic paradigm and its toxic financial system make corruption systemic, chronic and insidiously infectious. Those truths are verified by popular mainstream documentaries. For example, Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States, Fahrenheit 11/9 (and Michael Moore’s other films), and Lauren Greenfield’s Generation Wealth make the ongoing trend painfully apparent. Drugs Inc. and many other films & video documentaries detail the toxic economics fueling America’s ongoing Drug War, the profitable war against GDH (global domestic happiness), peace, nature and most of us. If we all remembered, really understood and acted on the realities exposed by Inside Job, The Big Short and Capitalism: A Love Story, later documentaries on the problem would have been unnecessary (click those weblinks for synopses and more content).
If only half the evidence shown in all the documentaries linked above was real, both my diagnosis and my thesis would still be valid. Consider the recent history of Portugal. It proves that deprohibition totally eliminates the obscenely high profits that keep all the criminal drug cartels, corrupt police, prosecutors, lawyers, judges and political parasites getting rich on our personal and financial damages. Portugal’s deprohibition of popular drugs also eliminated or minimized many other expensive cultural illnesses. Yet, in the USA, after nearly 12 years, who knows that, and who cares about a real solution here in the USA and elsewhere? Who sees mainstream news about Israel supporting R&D of cannabinoid (“marijuana”) compounds and therapies for the last few decades? There is still no effective mainstream initiative to end the destructive insanity of drug prohibition ruining the QOL here and everywhere else criminal empires and corruption infect nations, communities and families.
Does that still seem too harsh or pessimistic? Consider this, several years ago the CNN network sponsored the research and production of a 3-part documentary series, Weed, hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. The series brought the 80-year fraudulent conspiracy to light on mainstream TV, prime-time, for all the world to see. Yet, even now, who cares enough to end the illegal, treasonous atrocity and massively damaging injustices of the fraudulent misclassification and prohibition of cannabis? During the 80-year Drug War, the socioeconomic damages of seizure and forfeiture of private property amounted to trillions ($FSD), with countless more in actual collateral damages. Despite the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision limiting the use of forfeiture as excessive fines for extra revenue (for corrupt local, state and federal agencies), innocent people can still lose their homes, cars, etc., without being charged with a crime, without being able to afford the cost of recovery. That proves systemic corruption is the new normal.
The following excerpt from the PBS webpage about the Ken Burns series Prohibition is as true now, of cannabis and other recreational drugs, as it was of alcoholic beverages:
“…the enshrining of a faith-driven moral code in the Constitution paradoxically caused millions of Americans to rethink their definition of morality. Thugs became celebrities, responsible authority was rendered impotent. Social mores in place for a century were obliterated. Especially among the young, and most especially among young women, liquor consumption rocketed, propelling the rest of the culture with it: skirts shortened. Music heated up. America’s Sweetheart morphed into The Vamp.
“Prohibition turned law-abiding citizens into criminals, made a mockery of the justice system, caused illicit drinking to seem glamorous and fun, encouraged neighborhood gangs to become national crime syndicates, permitted government officials to bend and sometimes even break the law, and fostered cynicism and hypocrisy that corroded the social contract all across the country. With Prohibition in place, but ineffectively enforced, one observer noted, America had hardly freed itself from the scourge of alcohol abuse – instead, the “drys” had their law, while the “wets” had their liquor.”
Is that too hard to understand, or are the majority of us just too corrupt to do anything about it? Really, the DEA and its toxic laws keep profits sky high, while Drug Cartels and Big Pharma supply the drugs of choice that keep for-profit prisons in business. They over-flow with virtual slave labor and more dangerous graduates. Meanwhile, the USA’s plague of pandemic addictions keeps afflicting adults and children of every socioeconomic strata.
Yet, despite Ken Burns and a few other brave film-makers, who demands an end of insanely anti-ethical, unjust laws, and sociopolitical immorality—to end prohibition and the Drug War against justice, cultural wellness, and us, the People? What could be more immoral than a nation of people who allow ongoing fraud and perversion of law and the judicial system for the sake of corrupt police (the DEA, etc.), corrupt judges, corrupt prosecutors, corrupt politicians and their corrupt corporate puppet-masters?
The personal and cultural injury and financial damage done over the last 86 years are immeasurable and incalculable but, in more than half the states of the USA and most other nations, the damage and massive moral decay continues. For example, who knows or cares that—for nearly 40 years—the American Dental Association, all US colleges of dentistry and all public health officials of US governments ignored and virtually suppressed the ever-growing mountain of evidence that root canal jobs and oral bacteria in general cause a majority of deadly diseases? That is confirmed in the recent documentary The Root Cause and a huge number of verified research reports. More recently, medical scientists discovered that 96% of victims who died of Alzheimer’s dementia had brains infected by the bacteria that causes gingivitis, gum disease. Is that front page news, anywhere?
The evidence proves that deadly yet profitable fluoride poisoning continues. Yet, no federal law prohibits that dangerous substance? No, because fluoride feeds the for-proft medical industry.
We can also look to the atrocities of the toxic AgriBiz industries that keep poisoning, sickening, and ruining more lives, more terrestrial habitat, rivers, streams, estuaries and oceans. Instead of protecting us by prohibiting and eliminating commercially sponsored genocidal crimes against humanity and ecocidal crimes against nature—for the sake of profit, status, illusions of power and security—US government agencies protect the executives of the multinational coprorate perpetrators. Incredibly, despite the worsening damage and political insanity, the media and a vast majority of people do nothing effective to cure the disease, the terminal systemic corruption causing the catastrophic symptoms.
More importantly, a vast majority of us are either unaware of the fact that modern industry, including AgriBiz, wastes about 85% of everything it touches. The worst part? The most effective agricultural technology now in use produces more than 40 times more harvest, acre per acre, while using only 15% of the water required for traditional farming. General ignorance might be excusable if not for the fact that the USA is running out of water for crops and people.
As in the case of the fraudulent banning of cannabis products, politicians, mostly lawyers, have no excuse under the law. In fact, the use of cannabis instead of trees and cotton is a great example of systemic insanity, because cannabis requires a fraction of the water and nearly zero toxic chemicals while producing several times more harvests per year.
The systemic evil of the petrochemical industry should be equally well known but, to clinch the verdict, consider the latest financial evidence. For example, the MacArthur Foundation’s Weekly Climate Review reports more cumulative insult and injury:
“…[But] research just released by Influence Map, the London-based nonprofit that tracks corporate influence on climate policy, found that “the five largest publicly-traded oil and gas majors (ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, BP and Total) have invested over $1 billion of shareholder funds in the three years following the Paris Agreement on misleading climate-related branding and lobbying… designed to maintain the social and legal license to operate and expand fossil fuel operations.” While these companies spent $1 billion on climate PR, they invested a collective $110 billion in new fossil-fuel production, the HuffPost noted.”
We can also consider the global war industry, war, the Perps and the causes. Runaway cyber-war and bioterrorism can be another cause of sudden, catastrophic disaster terminating modern civilization. To dismiss them as marginal yet acceptable risks ignores the fact that the truly equitable cultural economy of an ethical society would lack systemic causes of violent retaliation. Religious causes can be considered at least partially due to corruption, lack of ethics and severely deficient bio-ethics.
From early in the history of modern civilization, the economics of dysequity involved systematic corruption, money, artificial scarcity, greed and irrational hostility. Whatever natural factors influenced people to commit theft, fraud and mass-murder in ancient times, the influence of hostility, greed, mass-foolishness and corruption now dominate civilization and its karmic trajectory, justified by fear.
Yes, there are bad guys, but why think that war is an unavoidable necessity? If the game of civilization was played by other rules, the money invested in the global war industry might be spent on making Earth a natural paradise, at least temporarily.
Fortunately, most of us wish the best possible future for our children. If the soldiers of the USA, Europe and the other mostly peaceful nations are trained to work for the good of all generations, habitat restoration and rapidly increasing affluence could ensure GDH. The happy beneficiaries would then have much less tolerance and no excuse for putting up with violent psychopaths and militant radicals. We might also see a reversal of the rampant over-population and unnecessary impoverishment in 3rd World cities and the horrific living conditions of millions of children, like those in Dhaka, Bangladesh (see Tales of Light, Lister 2018). Instead of the 3rd Worlds urban slums growing by millions per year for 20 years, the refugees of Monsanto’s biochemical warfare and the Bankster gang’s financial war (against 99% of us) could return to their rural villages, farms and bio-intensive organic gardening.
Now, you may call that an extremely unrealistic dream, but why? Is it because most of us want more Hell on Earth? No, the only obstacle is corruption, toxic hostility, greed, ignorant foolishness, fear and the psychosocial momentum of our obsession with maintaining the clearly disastrous status quo of business as usual: anti-ethical global kleptocracy.
The truths prove that the worst kind of corruption-for-profit is the not so new commercially sponsored, institutionally accepted, politically approved normal. In fact, the leading historians of money and banking all report the game beginning nearly 5,000 years ago. They show that the power of massively orchestrated fraud, dyseducation and propaganda (AKA for-profit news, funded by trillion-dollar industries) feeds ongoing fraud, corruption, mass-deception, confusion and suppression of truth.
Logical and scientific integrity require condemnation of the corruption ruling the toxic money game and mainstream economics. But, before ending this rebuttal, it seems wise to introduce a ray of hope, to counter the seemingly incurable illness of kleptonomics. In the near future, globally, total reforestation and habitat restoration is impossible, but rapid restoration of whole ecoregions has been and still is being accomplished. John D. Liu, film-maker and ecologist, documented the progress in his films and series. He also produced a brief documentary, Real Wealth (click the link to view it), making two of the main points of this work clearly visible.
The only real wealth comes from nature, from our habitat and our naturally healthy potentials and activities made possible by nature and our living habitat. Liu concurs that the real cause of poverty, pollution and the destruction of our habitat is corruption. Liu’s videos show that the solution to our worst problems is possible and practical. It is progressing everywhere people cooperate for the sake of goodness and cultural wellness. Liu’s Green Gold series proves that truth.
The rest of this work expands on the critique of the problem but, unlike economics, it reveals the possibilities and essential components of a whole-system solution. If this work generates viral social-media attention and discussion, the global emergency rescue project could succeed much more rapidly than we might expect. It may not save us from the worst long-term consequences of civilization, but it could save us from more Hell on Earth.
Note: As in Wikipedia articles, text in blue font, underlined, above & below, are weblinked to source material. Furthermore, the citations and notes feature weblinked text.
WORKS CITED:
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Relevant Sources
Fromchicago, John, Money-A brief history of the American Dollar, documentary, 2008
Jefferson, Thomas, Jefferson vs. Banksters, Yale University law library
Still, William, The Secrets of Oz & The Money Masters, film documentaries
Lietaer, Bernard, Money Diversity, Live presentation, PopTech 2011
Lanier, Jaron, Who Owns the Future?, The Agenda with S. Paikin, 2013
McKay, Adam, The Big Short, film, 2015
Greco, Thomas, Jr., Beyond Money, blog, books, etc.
Global, Anonymous, Elon Musk on AI, etc., documentary, 2018
Kasparov, Gary, on optimal AI & Humanity, etc., FICO interview, 2018
Michael Lucas Monterey: Creative Evolutionary 