WAKE UP

I made this video 10 years ago and it still is relevant...the way to liberty is to refuse to participate in the lie. 

PREPARING FOR THE GREAT RESET - SPIRO SKOURAs and DERRICK BROZE

(My take away from this interview is that now, more than ever before, we are needing to make some serious choices about what we value and what kind of lives we want to lead. I seriously see that a split will develop between those who heed the warning and those that choose to stay at home, wear a mask, and eventually accept the shot and all that comes with it. I am making the call to anyone in Costa Rica who is feeling the call for Family, Tribe, and Community, join the conversation HERE...)

SPIRO SKOURAS at Activist Post

DERRICK BROZE at Conscious Resistance

Resist the Crazy

By Michael Krieger

Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive – it’s that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.

– Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

As things felt like they were spiraling out of control last week, as Americans and people around the world were inundated with endless videos of street violence in addition to reactionary calls to deploy the U.S. military to cities across the country, the temptation to lose control of one’s mental faculties and basic humanity was heightened.

I saw evidence of this all around me. There was a dark and vicious energy in the air, and it felt contagious.

“I’m sensing a very dark and vicious energy out there which seems to be affecting all sorts of people who normally wouldn’t be sucked into it. 

I need to make a conscious effort to not have it influence me or my thoughts. If you’re feeling the same, try to retain sanity.”  

Michael Krieger on TWITTER

The responses to the tweet above were encouraging and demonstrated many others sensed the same thing and were likewise troubled by it. The overall madness of last week reminded me of the months following Donald Trump’s election. In both cases, the worldview of large numbers of people was shaken to its core. I think the root cause of the breakdown in both instances was that many people’s model of what is “normal” was suddenly shattered.

For example, the idea of Donald Trump being elected president was so incomprehensible and concerning to so many, they completely lost it when he won. Likewise, images of American cities burning amidst widespread looting caused another group to crack. Neither group had fully come to grips with how broken and corrupt the U.S. economy and society had become, and that these sorts of things happen when states begin to fail.

The reaction to Trump being elected from many of those traumatized by it was to try to remove him at all costs, even if this meant spreading an outlandish Russiagate theory for three years straight. Likewise, the knee-jerk reaction from many to the riots was to send in the military to crush them. In both cases, those who had their comfort zones shattered responded by trying to make the uncomfortable situation go away as soon as possible. Nobody wanted to ask why.

Why was Trump elected? People are angry. Why did cities erupt into civil disobedience? People are angry. Lots of people are angry, but why? We should probably try to honestly answer that question sooner rather than later. There are a lot of very good reasons to be angry.

That being said, unless your life is in immediate danger, the best response to an event that shocks you to your core is to step back and take a deep breath.  You don’t have to like what’s happening, but you should consider what a productive or creative response to the situation might look like, as opposed to immediately resorting to an instant-gratification, emotionally charged, reptilian response. The response to a crisis is often worse than the crisis itself.

Someone mentioned to me that he tells all his friends: “you must stand guard at the door of your mind.” Great advice in general, but particularly necessary during times like these. This is also partly what it means to be more conscious, a topic I’ve written about extensively in recent years (see my series on Spiral Dynamics)

It’s never been more important for those who are somewhat conscious to remain that way, because just as consciousness can evolve, it can also devolve. Characteristic of an evolved consciousness is being able to acknowledge one’s own flaws and vulnerabilities. It means being aware of your more base instincts as a human, which means admitting that just as you have the capacity for love, compassion and generosity, you also have the capacity for hate, apathy and selfishness.

Being honest about this and attempting to confront it is key to evolving one’s consciousness, but ego tends to get in the way. The ego has an image it needs to maintain and protect, which ends up acting as a severe roadblock on the path to sustainable self-improvement. It affects and stifles everyone to varying degrees.

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

(CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING) 

The Truth About the Dysfunctional System We Live Under and Why It Matters

Who Changed America from a Republic to a Financial Empire?

G. Edward Griffin

Money may not be the root of all evil, but debt-based money IS the root of the economic evil now descending on America. That’s the message from Damon Vrabel, a graduate of Harvard Business School and former Wall Street executive. This presentation shatters the myth that America is the home of the competitive free-market when, in fact, long ago it abandoned that economic model and replaced it with the monopoly-market model found in socialist, communist, and fascist systems. Americans who are not aware of this are prone to blame today’s economic woes on free-enterprise capitalism. They call for state intervention and control without realizing that is precisely what is causing the present economic crisis. How this came about and who engineered it – including their names and organizational affiliations – are included. We also get to see where the system is headed and why it cannot change its course – as long as it remains the system it is. They do not teach this at Harvard. [1 hr. 45 min. Original date: 2014-07-25.]

Inmates of The Hotel Eccles QE Rehab Facility

MILES FRANKLIN

Chairman Bernanke promised the Fed would unwind Fed purchases from the 2008 crisis. Now we know they can’t and won’t. The Fed balance sheet of created QE currency units will expand until a reset occurs.

When will increasing debt and the QE nonsense stop? Perhaps…

a) When a snowstorm devastates South Texas in August.

b) When the Fed begs forgiveness for its monumental sins.

c) When the US government balances its budget.

d) When global fiat Ponzi Schemes collapse.

e) When a huge financial reset occurs.

BOTTOM LINE:

Like the Eagles said in 1977:

“Welcome to the Hotel California… Relax, said the night man. We are programmed to receive. You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.”

The 2020 post COVID-19 pandemic version could be:

“Welcome to the Hotel Eccles… Relax, said the chairman. We are programmed to deceive. You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.” We have become inmates in the Hotel Eccles QE Rehab Facility because:

• National debt and money supply must grow. Inflate or Die!

• U.S. National Debt of $25 trillion can never be paid in today’s dollars. It must be defaulted or devalued. Expect a reset.

• Government and the banking cartel want dollar devaluation, consumer price inflation and more debt. They will sacrifice the dollar to support the bond and stock markets.

• The U.S. economy runs on debt and credit. Dollars are debts of the Federal Reserve. The U.S. government spends $ trillions over its revenues each year, so national debt must increase. In the absence of foreign and domestic buyers at artificially low interest rates, the Fed must monetize. QE4ever!

• Dishonest dollars created from nothing spend like existing dollars, but they make existing dollars worth less, until they become worthless. Countries who pursued similar policies are Zimbabwe, Argentina, and Venezuela, bad precedents.

• Oops! The consequences of monetizing $ trillions will be catastrophic, but we must not focus on those consequences in an election year.

From the Eagles: “This could be heaven, or this could be hell.”

Post COVID-19 Pandemic version: This will be heaven and hell. It will be (for a while) heaven for the political and financial elite and hell for the lower 90%. See below.

(CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING)

The Full Interview With Dr. Judy Mikovits That’s Been Deleted By Social Media Platforms

COLLECTIVE EVOLUTION

Dr. Andrew Kaufman: They Want To Genetically Modify Us...

There’s much about this stuff that is unknown to me within my own experience. Yet when more and more people are beginning to question the trend toward intrusive surveillance and mandatory, unsafe medical procedures performed whether we want them or not, then it is worth paying attention to. These are usually the people that are found suicided by two bullets to the head.

Waking up is hard to do....

ER Doctor Blows Up Fauci’s False Numbers

The Next News Network

Dr. Erickson, DO Accelerated Urgent Care, Bakersfield, CA full press conference

Premiered April 23, 2020

COVID: the Projection of a Mass Illusion

Jon Rappaport

Protests against the COVID imprisonment are spreading across America.

---Bright lights starting to dispel the darkness.

These protests are fracturing the illusion that we're in the grip of a virus that dictates economic suicide.

Here, from the US Library of Congress, is a sentence about the Great Depression of the 1930s:

"In a country with abundant resources, the largest force of skilled labor, and the most productive industry in the world, many found it hard to understand why the depression had occurred and why it could not be resolved."

Exactly.  The engineered 1929 crash of the stock market did not change the quantity or quality of national resources, labor, or industry one iota.
What had changed was the successful projection of a mass illusion: "THINGS ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT NOW.  TODAY IS COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM YESTERDAY."
In 1929, the official gibberish focused on unchecked speculation in the stock market.  Today, the official gibberish focuses on an unproven virus.

Official fatuous pronouncements about 1929 would have you believe that every American was, unfortunately, leveraged up to his neck in crashing stocks.  Pronouncements about 2020 would have you believe every American has suddenly become a transmitter of a deadly virus.  Both big lies.

When it comes to what is laughingly called medical science, the basic energy, drive, ambition, outlook, and inner vision of the individual is discounted.  His emotional force is discounted.  The resilience of his immune system is discounted.  The power of his spiritual beliefs is discounted.  His ability to overcome obstacles is discounted.  And of course, his natural right to make decisions about his own health is discounted.

Instead, he is viewed as a mechanical unit reacting to germs, with a high potential for failure.  This is pure insanity.  This is where all the purported sophistication of basic medical science winds up: in a dead end.  LIFE itself was eliminated from the equations and formulas.  Whose fault is that?  Not yours.  Not mine.

It turns out that, for many people, their belief in the power of the virus, and their belief in the officials who are spouting gobbledygook about it, outweigh their belief in whatever spiritual ultimates they profess.

Their own deepest beliefs are not strong enough.

Their religion is television.

Which is where the mass illusion is projected.
Epidemics are staged on television.

Images begin to flow:

An emergency medical vehicle on a street.  EMT personnel, in hazmat suits, load a man strapped down to a stretcher, into the van.  On another street, a man collapses on the sidewalk.  We see yet another quarantined man sitting inside a huge plastic bubble on a third street.  Cut to an airport lobby.  Soldiers are patrolling the space among the crowds.  Cut to a lab.  Close-up of vials of liquid.  Camera pulls back.  Techs in light green scrubs are placing the vials into slots of a table-top machine.  Auditorium---a man on a platform, wearing a doctor's white coat, is pointing a wand at a large screen, on which a chart is displayed, for the audience.  Back to the street.  People are wearing face masks.

These images wash over the television viewer.  Meanwhile, the anchor is imparting his prepared meaning: "The government today issued a ban on all travel into and out of the city...hundreds of plane flights have been cancelled.  Scientists are rushing to develop a vaccine..."

The television audience has an IMPRESSION of knowing something.  They're in the flow, the flow of the news...they're in the images...

Or: Example: we see angry crowds on the street of a foreign city. Many shots of young people on their cell phones sitting in outdoor cafés. Then the marble lobby of a government building where men in suits are walking, standing in groups talking to each other. Then at night, rockets exploding in the sky. Then armored vehicles moving through a gate into the city. Then clouds of smoke on another street and people running, chased by police.

A flow of consecutive images. The sequence, obviously, has been assembled by a news editor, but the viewing audience isn't aware of that. They're watching the "interconnected" images and listening to a news anchor tell a story that colors (infects) every image: "This is revolution for democracy, created by the technology of cell phones..."
Viewers thus believe something. Television has imparted a sensation to them.

In his 1976 film masterpiece, Network, Paddy Chayefsky's unhinged newsman, Howard Beale, broadcasts this message to his audience on national television---

"So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television's a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business... We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion."

Television, in the main, does not attempt to impart knowledge. It strives to give the viewer the impression that he knows something. There is a difference.
Knowledge, once established, is independent of the viewer. Whereas the impression of knowing is a feeling, a conviction, a belief the viewer holds, after he has watched moving images on a screen.  THIS is what the addicted viewer prefers.  He wants no part of knowledge.

Therefore: a short circuit occurs in his mind.
When you export this pattern out to a whole society, you are talking about a dominant method through which fake knowledge is groped and held close.

"Did you see that fantastic video about the Iraq War? It showed that Saddam actually had bioweapons."

"Really? How did they show that?"

"Well, I don't remember. But watch it. You'll see."

And that's another feature of the modern acquisition of "knowledge": amnesia about details.

The viewer can't recall key features of what he saw. Or if he can, he can't describe them, because he was inside them, busy building up his impression of knowing something.

Narrative-visual-television story strips out and discards conceptual analysis.

When a technology (television) turns into a method of perception, reality is turned inside out. People watch TV through TV eyes.

Mind control is no longer something only imposed from the outside. It is a matrix of a self-feeding, self-demanding loop.

Willing Devotees of the Image WANT images, food stamps of the programmed society.

The false pandemic I've been rejecting, in many articles, is delivered through video flow and narration.  Stacked and cut images.

There is no television challenge to the television flow, through the intrusion of actual knowledge, because that would shut down the parade of images and nullify the reasons for broadcasting them in the first place.

The old theater adage, "the show must go on," when adapted for television, becomes, "the flow must go on."  Once its course is set, there can be no turning back.

But individuals can shred the flow.

And groups of protestors can shred the flow.

And freedom breaks out.

Interview with Shiva Ayaadurai MIT Phd and Dr. Joseph Mercola concerning COVID-19

https://www.wakingtimes.com/2020/04/18/systems-biologist-speaks-out-about-covid-19-response/

Gabriel Ng - Why I Decided to Leave America

Why I Decided to Leave America (Covid-19 and 5G Implementation) By Gabriel Ng

The Four Horseman Documentary - A Must See!

If you are still in the dark about how the global system works, and why it seems to have become so dysfunctional, this documentary will open your eyes. Self knowledge, individually and collectively, is the way to transformation. As we shed light on those deceptions that have kept us from seeing the whole truth of our situation, we gain the capacity to shed our chains and embrace our natural freedom. Enjoy and share!

OPPT - The One People's Public Trust

What if the Godhead could reach down through the multi-verses and rewrite the script using the very laws once used to enslave humanity, thereby unequivocally declaring what was always true - that we are FREE in ALL WAYS in our collective Being and Doing! It might then just look like THIS:

WAKE UP WORLD

What is the One People’s Public Trust?

The One Peoples Public Trust itself consists of every person on the planet, the planet itself and the Creator.

The One People’s Trust trustees are a group of very skilled individuals including legal professionals who, in conjunction with a positive group inside the financial system, carried out extensive investigations into the massive fraud and theft taking place at the time.

They concluded that the financial and corporate government systems were committing treason against the people and after testing different approaches at correcting the injustices against humanity they saw being inflicted, they decided that that the only solution was to terminate the entire system through UCC filings.

The final report from the investigation is to be found here.

Resources

Press Releases

Disclosure Agreement – 25th December 2012
Announcement – 28th December 2012
Current State – 15th January 2013
OPPT Foreclosure on Major Corporations – 4th February 2013

Social Sites

Oppt-in – Facebook
Oppt-in – Twitter
Oppt-in – Flickr
OPPT Book – Facebook Alternative for the OPPT Community

Articles

One People’s Public Trust Lawfully Forecloses Corporations, Banks and Governments for Operating Slavery and Private Money Systems
Corporations Masquerading as Government in Australia & World Wide
Corporations Masquerading as Government (Part II): Which “Government” Can We Trust?
Further Wake Up World Articles on OPPT
Video: One People’s Public Trust Presentation
Video: 20 Reasons to OPPT in to One People’s Public Trust

Downloadable Documents

OPPT Courtesy Notice and Courtesy Notice Guidelines
UCC Filings
CVAC (CREATOR’S VALUE ASSET CENTER)
Updated OPPT UCC Financing Amendment
Network of Global Corporate Control
Operation Paradigm Final Bullet Report
SWQW Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars
Flash Mob Photo Kit

Radio Shows

Click here to listen to OPPT Radio Shows

Websites

One People’s Public Trust 1776 (Legal Documents)
oppt-in.com
Removing The Shackles
American Kubaki
Kauilapele
Lisa Harrison
Angel Lucci
FUQ: Frequently Unanswered Questions of the “Australian Government”
The OPPT Daily (Web ‘Newspaper’)
Extensive List of OPPT Websites from Around the World

For more CLICK HERE.

WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR! THE FIX THE WORLD PROJECT RESULTS.

From hopegirl2012

THIS IS BY FAR THE MOST POWERFUL THING ANY OF US HAS EVER EXPERIENCED.

So far not one of the 20 volunteers has been able to read through this without being brought to tears. It has this much heart. This much passion. And this much truth.

It is a book of solutions written by over 300 people from 37 countries. We have put thousands of combined man-hours into this over the last 3 months.

For all of you reading this now who have been waiting. THIS IS IT! THIS IS THE PARADIGM SHIFT!

WATCH! JUST WATCH WHAT THIS DOCUMENT DOES!

TRUST ME. THIS IS NOT A JOKE. WHEN YOU READ THIS, YOU WILL FEEL THIS ENERGY!!

SO LETS DO THIS! LETS BE THE CHANGE! LETS BE THE SHIFT! THE TIME IS NOW!!!

HOW TO FIX THE WORLD SUMMARY

Reference Library

APPENDIX

HOW TO FIX THE WORLD COMPLETE

Charles Eisenstein: Sacred Economics

Chapter 21

http://bit.ly/zgLqNx

The following is the twenty-second installment from
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

“Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of others.” -Albert Einstein

Trusting Gratitude

The question comes up again and again: How can I share my gifts in today’s money economy and still make a living? Some people who ask this question are artists, healers, or activists who despair of finding a way to “get paid for” what they do. Others have a successful business or profession but have begun to feel that something is amiss with the way they charge for their services.

Indeed, to charge a fee for service, or even for material goods, violates the spirit of the Gift. When we shift into gift mentality, we treat our creations as gifts to other people or to the world. It is contrary to the nature of a gift to specify, in advance, a return gift, for then it is no longer giving but rather bartering, selling. Furthermore, many people, particularly artists, healers, and musicians, see their work as sacred, inspired by a divine source and bearing infinite value. To assign it a price feels like a devaluation, a sacrilege. But surely the artist deserves to be compensated for his work, right?

The idea behind the word “compensation” is that you have, by working, made a sacrifice of your time. You have spent it doing work when you could have instead spent it on something you want to do. Another context in which we use the word is lawsuits, for example when someone seeks compensation for an injury, for pain and suffering.

In an economy that deserves the adjective “sacred,” work will no longer be an injury to one’s time or life; it will no longer be a matter of pain and suffering. A sacred economy recognizes that human beings desire to work: they desire to apply their life energy toward the expression of their gifts. There is no room in this conception for “compensation.” Work is a joy, a cause for gratitude. At its best, it is beyond price.

To keep reading, Click Here

Carl Herman - Open Proposal for U.S. Revolution

Though this is not the normal fare for this blog, I thought I would address the growing dissatisfaction pervading our global consciousness as certain well-known events unfold on the world stage. Exposing the lies we have believed and been subservient to, both inner and outer, is the task of all those who wish to awaken. Telling the Truth is the strongest tool we have in order to accomplish this. The Truth shall set you free.

“Constitutional governments and aristocracies are commonly overthrown owing to some deviation from justice…the rich, if the constitution gives them power, are apt to be insolent and avaricious… In all well-attempered governments there is nothing which should be more jealously maintained than the spirit of obedience to law, more especially in small matters; for transgression creeps in unperceived and at last ruins the state, just as the constant recurrence of small expenses in time eats up a fortune.” – Aristotle, Politics, Book V. 350 B.C.E.

Revolution is from the Latin, revolutio, a “turn around” of political power.

The US public would revolt and end unlawful US wars and banksters’ rigged-casino fraud if they understood and embraced the central facts of these issues. This four-part series of articles provides the central facts, invites passionate public response, and proposes specific revolutionary public action.

Please share the Revolution to end unlawful US wars and return trillions of our dollars to constructive work. With millions of lives at stake (perhaps billions), there is nothing more important for public participation.

Part 1: Open proposal for US revolution: end unlawful wars, parasitic/criminal economics

Part 2: Open proposal for US revolution: end unlawful wars, all begun with lies

Part 3: Open proposal for US revolution: end parasitic and criminal economics

Part 4: Open proposal for US revolution: expose corporate media as propaganda

These four articles are academic in language and documentation. My citizen advocacy paper, Government by dicts, has additional resources.

Click Here to read entire article.

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward

Awaken from your slumber, friends...
Open your eyes!

Path to A Peace Economy

David Korten presented the following speech on October 19, 2009 during a keynote lecture at the Economics of Peace Conference in Sonoma, California.

by David Korten

My subject tonight is the Path to a Peace Economy, based on ideas elaborated in my most recent book, Agenda for a New Economy, and the New Economy issue of YES! Magazine.

I start with a basic truth. A persistent pattern of violence against people, community, and nature is inherent in the institutional structure of our existing economy.

You don't treat a cancer with Band-Aids, and we can't resolve our current economic crisis with marginal regulatory adjustments. It is time to rethink and restructure.

Systemic Failure

Our economic institutions have been designed by Wall Street interests to secure personal economic and political power in the hands of members of a small ruling elite. They do it well. Unfortunately, it is the wrong purpose. We need a top to bottom redesign to put in place the institutions of a new economic system, a New Peace Economy, designed to share power and resources in a world that works for all.

So how bad is the failure of our current system? It is public knowledge. A brief review, however, is in order.

Economic Collapse

The Wall Street financial collapse has stripped tens of millions of previously middle class Americans of their jobs, homes, and retirement assets and plunged them into poverty and despair. The federal government and the Federal Reserve have responded by pouring trillions of dollars into the Wall Street financial institutions that created the crisis with minimal conditions and oversight, all in the hope that some of this money would trickle down as loans to the productive economy. The recipient financial institutions used the money instead to fund acquisitions that make "too big to fail" banks even bigger, pay dividends to shareholders who by market rules should have been wiped out in bankruptcy proceedings, award obscene bonuses to criminally culpable executives, and launch new predatory financial scams that create new systemic risks.

Wall Street says we have now weathered the crisis, which basically means the profits and bonuses of its most rapacious financial institutions have been restored. The jobs, homes, and retirement assets of ordinary Americans have not. To the contrary, job losses, bankruptcies, and housing foreclosures continue.

Social Collapse

This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. In the absence of progressive tax and public service policies, the institutions of the old economy create an ever-growing wealth gap between the profligate few and the desperate many. This obscene injustice is tearing apart the social fabric of family and community essential to a healthy society. The resulting fear, insecurity, and sense of injustice fuel the forces of violence as expressed in terrorism, genocide, political deadlock, and high rates of crime, incarceration, and suicide. All are both consequences and indicators of a failed economic system.

Environmental Collapse

Now we come to the system's ultimate failure: environmental collapse. The rules and institutions of the Old Economy drive endless growth in wasteful and destructive forms of material consumption that deplete soil and water, disrupt climate patterns, and convert Earth's natural capital into toxic garbage, thus reducing Earth's capacity to support life, creating massive human displacement, and intensifying a violent competition for Earth's remaining resources that finds expression in bloated military budgets and wars of occupation.

Start with virtually any dysfunction or injustice in our society and it traces back to a failed economic system. Follow the money, and it leads ultimately to Wall Street.

A Failed Experiment

For some thirty years, we have been engaged as a nation and as a species in a social engineering experiment to test the claims of an extremist economic ideology known as market fundamentalism.

Ideology of the Sociopath

You've heard the sermon preached by its most fanatic true believers:

There is no public interest—only an aggregation of private interests, which are best served when we each pursue our individual greed in a marketplace unfettered by rules and other forms of government interference. Public assets must be privatized to increase their productivity and efficiency by selling them to the highest bidder. The faster we consume, the faster the economy grows and the wealthier we become as a rising tide lifts all boats.

Inequality is essential to social order and prosperity. It provides us with wealthy investors able to bear the risks of investing in the creation of jobs and a working class motivated by economic insecurity to work hard at those jobs at a globally competitive wage. There is no alternative. If a few get rich, instead of condemning them out of envy—which is a mortal sin—celebrate their good fortune, because as the rich get richer, wealth trickles down and we all get richer. In America, anyone can succeed who applies himself. Failure is a sign of a flawed character.

Is this story familiar? It is no mystery why this economic theology leads to ruthless competition, obscene accumulation, and reckless consumption that destroys the environment and tears apart the social fabric. It embodies the moral philosophy of the sociopath.

It is now time to acknowledge the lessons of this disastrous experiment. Markets do have an essential role in a healthy economy, but market extremism does not. It turns out that markets do need rules, there is an essential role for government, we all have more when resources are shared, and Jesus and the other great religious teachers were right. We are members of a community and we all do better when we care for one another and act with mindful consideration of the needs of others.

Wall Street as Operating System

The institutions of the economy determine how, as a society, we allocate whatever resources are available to us. In an earlier time, we organized ourselves into clans and tribes in which we cared for one another and allocated resources to secure the well-being of all. Resource allocation decisions were local and relationships were mediated by bonds of mutual caring and security. Money in the earliest human societies was unknown. In our current society, most relationships on which we depend for the basics of survival, including food, water, shelter, and health care, are mediated by money. This gives enormous power to those who control the creation and allocation of money. In our country, that would be Wall Street.

To use a computer analogy, the Wall Street financial system has become the operating system of the economy and the society. The values and priorities of Wall Street thus become the defining values and priorities of the larger society. Wall Street has one value—money—and one goal: to maximize financial returns to those who control the money system. Social or environmental consequences find no place in Wall Street decision making.

A Choice-Making Species

In a few minutes, I will take up the question of how we can change this. In the meantime, I want to put our situation in its deeper historical, evolutionary, and spiritual context. For the past 5,000 years, we humans have been living in a cultural trance of our own making that alienates us from the land, our true nature, and our place in the cosmos.

So who are we humans? From where did we come? And for what purpose? Here is how I understand the big story based on the data of science, the wisdom of indigenous peoples, and the teachings of Jesus and other mystics.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the Great Integral Spirit that expresses itself through what we know as creation embarked on a bold and risky experiment in reflective consciousness: bringing forth a species able to step back and to reflect on creation in awe and wonder and to participate as a conscious co-creator in the continued creative unfolding. We humans are that species.

Our reflective consciousness gives us the capacity to choose our future with conscious collective intent. It was a risky experiment, however, because the capacity for self-awareness gives us an ego that can run out of control if it forgets it exists only as part of a larger whole.

In our earliest days, we humans raised our children collectively in the clan, tribe, or village, initiating them to the ways of life and the need to care for our Earth Mother as she in turn cares for us.

Over millennia, as our human consciousness was awakening and our capacities for self-direction grew, we learned to communicate through speech, master fire, domesticate plants and animals, and construct houses of skins, wood, stone, and dried mud. We developed the arts of pottery, painting, weaving, and carving. We undertook vast continental and transcontinental migrations to populate the planet and adapted to vastly different physical topographies and climates. We created complex languages and social codes that allowed for life in larger communities.

Then, some 5,000 years ago, something began to go terribly wrong. We turned from the ways of Earth Community and embraced the ways of Empire. It was a time of separation and forgetting. Community, partnership, and the celebration of life gave way to individualism, domination, and violence.

The few expropriated the wealth of the many. The masculine drove out the feminine. We continued to worship the Sky Father, but turned against our Earth Mother. We came to value the power to kill and destroy more highly than the ability to create and nurture life. Conquest became the measure of greatness. Economies came to be based on servitude and eventually money became the prime arbiter of human relationships.

Consider the dynamics inherent in a dominator system. With a few on the top and the many on the bottom, everyone is placed in competition with everyone else for the favored positions and the bonds of caring and sharing are broken. The creative energy of the species is redirected from securing the well-being of the tribe to advancing the technological instruments of war and the social instruments of domination.

The winners expropriate the available resources to maintain the system of domination. Positions of power are too often claimed by the most ruthless and psychologically damaged members of society. And so it has been for 5,000 years

If this discussion of Empire sounds familiar, it is for good reason. The kings and emperors have been replaced by corporate CEOs and hedge fund managers, but we are still living in the Era of Empire—and the basic dynamics still hold.

In the past 100 years, we humans have achieved technological mastery beyond the imagination of previous generations. Yet, lacking in the wisdom of place and community that is the heritage of indigenous peoples, the cultures we call mainstream have lost their way—forgetting what it means to be human and denying our connection to the web of planetary life. The time has come to rediscover our humanity and bring ourselves back into balance with our living Earth Mother. Creation has presented us with our final examination to determine whether we are a species worthy of survival. We must not, need not, fail.

When Money Rules

At its core, our current economic crisis is a spiritual crisis framed by this well-known scriptural verse from the Sermon on the Mount:

No one can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Matthew 6:24.

Mammon refers to wealth as an object of worship; the worship of a false god; a form of demonic possession; an evil force in opposition to Life.

Our worship of Mammon is the consequence of an illusion: the illusion that money is wealth and that making money is synonymous with producing wealth. The truth, as Wall Street has so dramatically demonstrated, is very different. Money isn't wealth, and it is quite easy to make lots of money without producing anything of value to the larger society. Money, the most mysterious of human inventions, a magical number of no meaning or existence outside the human mind, has displaced life as our object of sacred veneration and become the ultimate arbiter of human priorities. Money determines the fate of nations and shapes the boom and bust cycles of economic life. It allows some to live in grand opulence in the midst of scarcity, while confining others to death by starvation in the midst of plenty.

This is money as a system of power, a tyranny all the more complete because it is largely invisible to those it enslaves. To liberate ourselves from the tyranny, we must demystify money and recognize that it is a mere number created from nothing with a simple accounting entry when a bank issues a loan. As economist John Kenneth Galbraith once famously observed, the process by which money is created is "so simple it repels the mind."

When you take out a loan from a bank, the bank opens an account in your name and enters the amount of the loan in its ledger. That becomes a liability on the bank's accounts, offset by the corresponding asset of your promise to repay with interest. Two simple accounting entries, and money magically appears from nowhere. This simple fact makes banking a very profitable business and is the key to the ability of the institutions of Wall Street and its global counterparts to rule the world.

Mayer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty, once famously said, "Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its laws."

That pretty well sums it up. In our current system, this control is centralized in and monopolized by Wall Street institutions that value only money and seek only private accumulation. From a societal perspective it is a devastatingly unwise and destructive arrangement.

Money, particularly money that is created out of nothing without any contribution to the creation of anything of corresponding value, is phantom wealth—it has no substance or intrinsic utility. Creating phantom wealth is a Wall Street specialty. They call it financial innovation. I call it theft.

A Real Wealth Economy

So what is real wealth? We might say it is anything that has a real intrinsic value: land, labor, knowledge, food, education.

Most valuable of all are those forms of wealth that are beyond price: Love, a healthy, happy child, a job that provides a sense of self-worth and contribution, membership in a strong caring community, a healthy vibrant natural environment, peace—none of which find any place on Wall Street balance sheets or in our calculations of GDP.

Pull back the curtain, as the financial crash has done, and the truth is revealed that Wall Street acquires its power by destroying real living wealth to create phantom financial wealth. Wall Street is more than immoral, it is an institutional manifestation of evil.

So what will the New Economy look like, and how will we achieve it?

Living Earth

We begin with a recognition that the old economy is based not only on the illusion that money is wealth, but as well the illusion that we live in a world of open frontiers with endless abundant resources free for the taking. We are only now as a species awakening to the reality that we are passengers on a living spaceship and must learn to live in balanced relationship with our local ecosystems everywhere, working with nature to reuse and recycle everything and to eliminate the release of any substance that nature cannot readily absorb and detoxify.

Spaceship Earth, our Birth Mother, is endowed with a wondrous self-managing, self-regulating life support system that has nourished us as a species through the years of our growing up. As a loving parent, she has absorbed the insults and injuries of our reckless adolescent behavior. Our numbers and the power of our technology, however, now exceed her capacity to absorb.

Defining Principles

We must now restructure our economic institutions to align with three foundational principles: Ecological balance. Shared prosperity. And living democracy. Let's take them one by one.

1. Ecological Balance: It's spaceship management 101. We must bring ourselves into balance with Earth's life support system-the biosphere. This requires something you don't normally hear mentioned at economics conferences. We need to reduce aggregate human consumption, global GDP, starting with the most profligate nations. I'll say more about this later. Follow me closely here: We must simultaneously redesign our human economies to function everywhere as subsystems of the local ecosystems that comprise Earth's biosphere.

2. Shared Prosperity: As we act to reduce aggregate consumption, we need to recognize that Earth's bounty is the shared birthright of all living beings and learn to share it equitably to the benefit of all. The potential benefits of sharing prosperity go far beyond securing our mutual survival. According to a massive body of public health research, people in societies in which wealth and work are equitably shared enjoy greater physical and emotional health, stronger families and communities, less violence, and healthier natural environments than people in more unequal societies. Societies that are more equal are also more democratic and more resilient in the face of crisis.

   This has important implications for those of us who live in the United States. UK social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson observes that among the world's 30 richest countries we in the United States are number one in many things, including homicide rates, teenage pregnancy rates, rates of imprisonment, and numerous other social dysfunctions. We are also number one in the size of the income gap between our richest and poorest members. This is not a coincidence.

   The reason is simple. Greater inequality means greater psychological and emotional stress and insecurity for everyone, including for those at the top. Great sharing means less stress and insecurity.

3. Living Democracy means exactly what it says: living democracy as a daily practice of civic engagement. In a living democracy, popular sovereignty is integral to the fabric of community life. Living democracies celebrate and affirm diversity within a framework of individual rights, community responsibility, and mutual accountability. Their political and economic institutions support local decision making within a framework of cooperation and mutually agreed rules.

Ecological Balance, Shared Prosperity, and Living Democracy: three foundational principles of the new living peace economies on which the human future depends.

A Familiar Alternative

Those of us who came of age during the latter part of the twentieth century were taught that we are limited to a choice between two economic models: the model of Wall Street capitalism or the model of Soviet communism. We in the West chose Wall Street capitalism based on the false claim that capitalism is the natural champion of democracy and market choice. Now we see the reality that when Wall Street capitalism has its way, our political choices are limited to politicians who serve Wall Street interests and our market choices are limited to those that generate the greatest Wall Street profits.

Living Market Economies

We're not supposed to notice that both capitalism and communism, as we have known them, are simply alternative models of elite rule.

We have another option that is rarely mentioned, a planetary system of local living market economies that distribute and root decision-making power everywhere in inclusive, democratic, place-based living Earth communities, much in the manner of healthy ecosystems.

Many of the features of this New Economy option are more familiar than we might at first realize. They bear substantial resemblance to the Main Street economies many of us knew as we were growing up in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

The America We Once Knew

Although we had not yet dealt as a nation with crucial issues of race, gender, and the environment, the market rules of that day protected the public interest as we then understood it. Strong labor unions secured worker rights and assured a living wage. Our middle class was the envy of the world.

Banks were local and strictly regulated. Anti-trust protected the public from the abuse of corporate monopoly power. Cities and towns had vibrant lively Main Street economies served by local independent businesses that were accountable to the community and honored community values. And imagine this: Many insurance companies, hospitals, and financial institutions were organized as nonprofit cooperatives accountable to their members.

Most manufacturing was domestic, much of our food production was local, and we had a positive trade balance. Few families needed more than one car and per capita energy use was modest by current standards. There was substantial non-market household production and the typical wage for one employed working person was adequate to support a family.

Wall Street Take-Over

From the late 70s onward, Wall Street market fundamentalists mobilized to roll back the rules to unleash a consolidation of corporate power and de-link it from public accountability. Their right-wing social-engineering experiment allowed Wall Street to colonize the Main Street economy, decimated the middle class, undermined democracy and sense of community, reduced our national happiness index, and brought financial, social, and environmental devastation wherever it has reached.

Markets can and do support individual liberty and the public interest, but only when they operate within a framework of appropriate market rules and are complemented and supported by strong, democratically elected governments that enforce these rules and assure the provision of essential public services and infrastructure.

Appropriate rules support local ownership, bar private monopolies except within a strong regulatory framework, secure cost internalization and balanced trade among communities and nations, and prohibit monopoly pricing, market manipulation, and financial speculation.

We hear frequent reference these days to a distinction between the Wall Street economy and the Main Street economy. The difference is crucial.

Wall Street is in the business of using money to make money for people who have money without the burden of producing anything of value in return. Wall Street creates money out of nothing, engages in predatory lending at exorbitant interest rates, and uses its control of money to hold the public purse hostage to its demands. It is best understood as a criminal syndicate engaged in counterfeiting, usury, tax evasion, fraud, and extortion rackets—and should be treated accordingly.

Liberating Main Street

The Main Street economy is comprised of local businesses and working people engaged in producing real goods and services to meet real needs and providing meaningful, secure, family wage employment for the people of their communities. It is the logical foundation on which to build a new real wealth economy of green jobs, responsible community-oriented businesses, and sound environmental practices. Although devastated by the predatory intrusions of Wall Street corporations, it is now in revival as communities all across the nation rally to declare their independence from Wall Street and rebuild the community-serving economies they once knew.

No Wall Too Tall

Bringing down Wall Street may seem a daunting challenge to some of you. To get ourselves in the right spirit, I want to share an inspirational song by Raffi that he recorded to celebrate the launch of Agenda for a New Economy at the Trinity Wall Street Episcopal Church last January. It's called "No Wall Too Tall." Get up and dance with me as you listen to the words.

How many of you here grew up on Raffi's music or have children who did? Raffi is currently devoting his life to an initiative he calls Child Honoring based on the simple truth that a world that works for all the children will work for everyone.

A Three Part Strategy

So how can we bring down Wall Street's imperial tyranny?

We the people, as global civil society, are engaging this challenge on three strategic fronts:

1. We are changing the defining stories of the mainstream culture. It is a simple but rarely noted truth that every great transformational social movement begins with a conversation aimed at challenging a prevailing cultural story. The civil rights movement changed the story on race. The environmental movement changed the story about the human relationship to nature. The women's movement changed the story on gender. Our current task is to change the prevailing stories about the nature of wealth, the purpose of the economy, and our human nature. YES! Magazine and my most recent book Agenda for a New Economy are useful tools for organizing the necessary conversations.

2. We are creating a new economic reality from the bottom up as millions of people the world over are working to strengthen locally owned human-scale business and family farms, developing local financial institutions, reclaiming farm and forest lands, changing land use policies to concentrate population in compact communities that reduce automobile dependence, retrofitting their buildings for energy conservation, and otherwise moving toward local self reliance in food, energy, and other basic essentials. The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) is building a national support system for these initiatives.
3. We are changing the rules: Current law and public policy largely favor the Wall Street economy to the exclusion of Main Street economy. We must work together to promote and support political action at local, national, and global levels to change the balance in the favor of Main Street.

A New Economy Agenda

I'm currently focusing my energy on the New Economy Working Group, a partnership between Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, YES! Magazine, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, and the PCDForum. We are working to articulate a comprehensive New Economy agenda. Here are five essential elements:

1. Implement Living Wealth Indicators as the basis for evaluating economic performance: Because we get what we measure, we should measure what we want. We currently evaluate economic performance against GDP, which is an indicator of the rate at which the economy is extracting useful resources from nature, converting them to saleable products, and disposing of them as toxic waste into our air, water, and soils—all for the primary purpose of making rich people richer. And this is what we get.

Stock price indices, another favorite indicator, measure the rate at which people who own financial assets are increasing their economic advantage over everyone else.

Imagine how different things would be if we designed and managed the economy to maximize indicators of the health and vitality of our children, families, communities, and natural systems—while simultaneously reducing environmental burdens by redistributing available resources from destructive and non-essential uses to beneficial ones that improve the quality of life for everyone, create meaningful beneficial jobs, and heal the environment.

We can end war and convert to a peace economy; reorganize our infrastructure to eliminate automobile-dependence; curtail advertising and redirect those creative and media resources to education; end financial speculation and redirect investment to productive sustainable enterprises devoted to meeting community needs. This list is just a start. It is about setting sensible priorities.

2. Create a Real Wealth Money System: Last night Don Shaffer spoke of redirecting the flow of money from global to local financial markets and moving from complex, opaque, anonymous, short-term financial relationships to direct, transparent, personal, and long-term financial relationships. This defines our charge for redesigning and restructuring our systems of money creation and allocation.

Our existing Wall Street financial system centralizes the power to create and allocate money in an interlinked institutional system of mega-banks, hedge funds, private equity funds, the Federal Reserve, and captive regulatory bodies operating in secret beyond public oversight and accountability that I earlier described as a criminal syndicate.

The Bush and Obama administrations both pumped literally trillions of dollars of bailout money into the corrupt Wall Street financial institutions responsible for the current economic mess. Note here the essential difference between the bailout money and the Obama stimulus money. Bailout money goes to Wall Street financial institutions in the hope that some of it will trickle down to Main Street in the form of loans. Stimulus money bypasses Wall Street and directly funds the creation of productive jobs to create beneficial goods, services, and public infrastructure projects.

So imagine that instead of a bailout for the corrupt banks that caused the crash, the government had taken them over, broken them up, and spun off the pieces as individual community-based financial institutions—community banks, savings and loans, and credit unions. Some might be organized as private for-profits. Others as nonprofits or cooperatives. Some might be owned by state or local governments. All would function as properly regulated, community accountable public utilities.

Now imagine that the trillions of dollars that went to bailing out Wall Street banks had instead been added to the stimulus package to directly help homeowners facing foreclosure, create new jobs, and to fund education, health care, and public infrastructure. Further, imagine that the recipients of the stimulus money then deposited a portion of it as savings in these community financial institutions to be continuously recycled as low interest or no interest loans to grow local businesses, expand home ownership, and finance public investment. How different things might now be.

Here is a really radical idea: Let's federalize the Federal Reserve and make money supply management and banking oversight transparent and publicly accountable federal functions. Why should the federal government borrow and pay interest on money created with an accounting entry by private banks, thus condemning our children to perpetual debt slavery to private banks and foreign countries, when it is within the means of the government to make the accounting entry itself?

3. Share the Wealth: As noted earlier, we all do better when we share the wealth. So let's do it with:

• Income and employment policies that assure every person who needs employment access to employment that provides a living wage.
• Progressive taxation and public services policies that continuously recycle wealth from those at the top who have more than they need to those at the bottom who have less than they need.
• Land use and regional development policies that limit sprawl and support compact multi-strata development that prevents geographical division by class and race.

• Ownership policies that eliminate the class divide between owners and workers by encouraging every owning person to do productive work and every working person to be an owner.

4. Favor Businesses Organized as Living Enterprises for which the primary business purpose is to serve the community and profit is a means, not an end. Cooperative, worker, and local public ownership models sensibly and appropriately link business interests to community interests. We can and should make them our favored enterprise models.

5. Change the Global Rules to Support Local Control and Regional Self-Reliance: Current global economy rules and institutions that put the economic rights of global financiers and corporations ahead of the economic rights of ordinary people, place-based communities, and even nations. They have it backwards. The rules and institutions of living peace economies properly support democratic self-determination at local, regional, and national levels, keep trade fair and balanced, favor local over global businesses, and facilitate the sharing of information and beneficial technology.

The goal is to shift the economic system's defining value from money to life, its locus of economic decision making from global to local institutions, its favored dynamic from competition to cooperation, and its primary purpose from growing the individual financial fortunes of the few to building living community wealth to secure the health and well-being of everyone. It is ours to so choose and create.

How to Engage

You will find further information on everything I've covered here in Agenda for a New Economy. Buy a copy, download a discussion guide from davidkorten.org, and organize a discussion group to engage your friends, colleagues, and neighbors in an exploration of the new economy alternatives.

People are always asking, "What else can I do?" I recommend YES! Magazine as the place to start. Each issue is filled with stories of possibility and ideas for action. Visit the "Path to a New Economy" section of the YES! website.

*****

Part of growing up human is putting aside the ways of our childhood to embrace the more inclusive values and responsibilities of adulthood. Our time has come to grow up as a species coming of age on a small planet. This is the larger challenge before us. In a very real sense, it is about growing up spiritually to recognize and accept our place within the larger scheme of creation.

As we engage this challenging work in its many dimensions, we must constantly remind ourselves that we are privileged to live at the most dangerous—but also the most exciting—moment of creative opportunity in the whole of the human experience. We have the power to turn this world around for the sake of ourselves, our children for generations to come, and the continued creative unfolding of life on Earth. We are the ones we've been waiting for. Thank you.

David Korten is co-founder and board chair of YES! Magazine. His most recent book is Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. He presented this speech on October 19, 2009 during a keynote lecture at the Economics of Peace Conference in Sonoma, California.

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