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www.hopedance.org
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| <back | home "Wake Up, Wake Up!" by Jack Reed Many Americans are struggling to survive in the current money system. What most don’t realize is that it is not their own personal finances that need changing, but the economic system itself. In Running on Empty, Peter Peterson, former Secretary of Commerce and Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank, wrote, “America may well be headed for a financial meltdown. In Jan. 2004 … the IMF took direct aim at the U.S., warning the world that we are careening toward insolvency. They point to a huge and growing imbalance between what the federal government has promised to pay in future benefits and what it can reasonably expect to collect in future taxes. Its long-term deficit now exceeds 500% of GNP. Closing that gap, the IMF calculated, ‘would require an immediate and permanent 60% hike in the federal income tax or a 50% cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits.’ “ In his assessment, Paul Volcker, former chair of the Federal Reserve, warned that the U.S. faces a 75% chance of a financial crisis by 2009. With Peak Oil and environmental crises also looming, these are interesting times indeed. What many of these experts don’t understand, however, is that the world long ago stopped working for the billions of people who live in abject poverty without even decent sanitation. Globalization, brought on by Western imperialism, did those billions no favors, and we don’t have the six planets worth of resources it would take for the world to live like “us”. One thing that amuses me is that we award Nobel Prizes in economics to people for things like “analyses of markets with asymmetric information.” Having stuffed themselves so deeply into the box, what all these experts don’t seem to get is that money is an illusion—you can’t really do anything tangible with it because it’s not real like baskets, sheep and bushels of corn were, or even the gold standard that money is supposed to represent. Currency was created to assist with trading, and the term is derived from current: that which helps the flow. It was not meant to be hoarded. To say we can’t do something—like provide healthcare, address world hunger, or stop destroying the planet because there isn’t enough money—is REALLY CRAZY. What we are actually saying is that we can’t provide what’s necessary because there is not enough cooperation. In their 1863 letter to fellow financial power brokers, the Rothschild Brothers of London wrote that the few people who understand the financial system are either so caught up in its profits or so dependent upon the lifestyle they enjoy from it that they won’t do anything to change it. They further said that the rest of the people aren’t even aware of how the system works; so they’ll continue to labor as if this were the only option, spending their lives in virtual enslavement to those who reap the benefits. For so many reasons I feel like carrying around a sign that just says “WAKE UP, WAKE UP.” The power/money elite has, for thousands of years, concentrated control into their hands. This everyone-for-themselves (E-F-T) system has been their game, and it has largely gone unquestioned. But now the survival of our planet is threatened, and the game is playing out. However, if we had a cooperative society, 85% of the current jobs, and all the resources associated with them, would be unnecessary. Focusing on our individual survivals, we became the unwitting slaves of the current system. It is so easy to criticize what’s not working. Therefore, when I give my presentations, I simply say, “the economic system is broken” and “the political system is broken,” because most of us already know what’s not working. What people don’t know is what to do about it. With the E-F-T no longer a viable option for the survival of the planet, we need to play a new game—one where everyone wins. People with consciousness can create a model that will work for everyone. A few years ago we formed the Community Planet Foundation and created a model we call “For The Highest Good of All”. Following our belief that “the way we live together and relate together in community is the basic building block needed to transform the planet,” we designed communities of 500 people that will work on cooperation as the medium of exchange and redefine wealth as “use and access” rather than possession. From this model I wrote THE NEXT EVOLUTION: a Blueprint for Transforming the Planet. In the book I describe how this new system would work:
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