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This Changes Everything: How the 99% Woke Up

Introducing the movement that’s shifting our vision of what kind of world is possible—from the new book, “This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement.”

by Sarah van Gelder

posted Nov 18, 2011

“We fail to understand why we should have to pay the costs of the crisis, while its instigators continue to post record profits. We’re sick and tired of one injustice after another. We want human dignity back again.

This isn’t the kind of world we want to live in, and it’s we who have to decide what world we do want. We know we can change it, and we’re having a great time going about it.”

—From #HowToCamp by the Spanish indignados, whose occupations in cities throughout Spain helped inspire Occupy Wall Street

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Something happened in September 2011 so unexpected that no politician or pundit saw it coming.

Be part of the movement when you buy the book.
All royalties go to support the Occupy movement.

Inspired by the Arab Spring and uprisings in Europe, sparked by a challenge from Adbusters magazine to show up at Wall Street on September 17 and “bring a tent,” and encouraged by veteran New York activists, a few thousand people gathered in the financial district of New York City. At the end of the day, some of them set up camp in Zuccotti Park and started what became a national—and now international—movement.

The Occupy movement, as it has come to be called, named the source of the crises of our time: Wall Street banks, big corporations, and others among the 1% are claiming the world’s wealth for themselves at the expense of the 99% and having their way with our governments. This is a truth that political insiders and the media had avoided, even while the assets of the top 1% reached levels not seen since the 1920s. But now that this genie is out of the bottle, it can’t easily be put back in.

The shame many of us felt when we couldn’t find a job, pay down our debts, or keep our home is being replaced by a political awakening.

Without offices, paid staff, or a bank account, Occupy Wall Street quickly spread beyond New York. People gathered in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Atlanta, San Diego, and hundreds of other cities around the United States and claimed the right of we the people to create a world that works for the 99%. In a matter of weeks, the occupations and protests had spread worldwide, to over 1,500 cities, from Madrid to Cape Town and from Buenos Aires to Hong Kong, involving hundreds of thousands of people.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is not just demanding change. It is also transforming how we, the 99%, see ourselves. The shame many of us felt when we couldn’t find a job, pay down our debts, or keep our home is being replaced by a political awakening. Millions now recognize that we are not to blame for a weak economy, for a subprime mortgage meltdown, or for a tax system that favors the wealthy but bankrupts the government. The 99% are coming to see that we are collateral damage in an all-out effort by the super-rich to get even richer.

New York City, October 1, 2011.

Photo by Brett Casper.

Now that we see the issue clearly—and now that we see how many others are in the same boat—we can envision a new role for ourselves. We will no longer be isolated and powerless. We can hold vigils all night when necessary and nonviolently face down police. We are the vast majority of the population and, once we get active, we cannot be ignored. Our leaders will not fix things for us; we’ll have to do that ourselves. We’ll have to make the decisions, too. And we’ll have to take care of one another—provide the food, shelter, protection, and support needed to make it through long occupations, bad weather, and the hard work of finding consensus when we disagree.

By naming the issue, the movement has changed the political discourse. No longer can the interests of the 99% be ignored. The movement has unleashed the political power of millions and issued an open invitation to everyone to be part of creating a new world.

Historians may look back at September 2011 as the time when the 99% awoke, named our crisis, and faced the reality that none of our leaders are going to solve it. This is the moment when we realized we would have to act for ourselves.

The Truth is Out: The System is Rigged in Favor of the Wealthy

One of the signs at the Occupy Seattle protest reads: “Dear 1%. We were asleep. Now we’ve woken up. Signed, the 99%.”

This sign captures the feeling of many in the Occupy movement. We are seeing our ways of life, our aspirations, and our security slip away—not because we have been lazy or undisciplined, or lacked intelligence and motivation, but because the wealthiest among us have rigged the system to enhance their own power and wealth at the expense of everyone else.

Critics of the movement say they oppose the redistribution of wealth on principle. But redistribution is exactly what has been happening for decades. Today’s economy redistributes wealth from the poor and middle class to those at the top. The income of the top 1% grew 275 percent between 1979 and 2007, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For those in the bottom 20 percent, income grew just 18 percent during those twenty-eight years.

Occupy Wall Street. All around the country, protesters have embraced the theme of waking up.

Photo by Bluelaces.

The government actively facilitates this concentration of wealth through tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, and bailouts for giant banks and corporations. These entities also benefit from mining rights, logging rights, airwave rights, and countless other licenses to use common assets for private profit. Corporations shift the costs of environmental damage to the public and pocket the profits. Taxpayers bear the risk of global financial speculation while the payoffs go to those most effective at gaming the system. Instead of investing profits to provide jobs and produce needed goods and services, the 1% put their wealth into mergers, acquisitions, and more speculation.

The list of government interventions on behalf of the 1% goes on and on: Tax breaks favor the wealthy, global trade agreements encourage offshoring jobs, agricultural subsidies favor agribusiness over family farms, corporate media get sanctioned monopolies while independent media gets squeezed.

The people who go to work producing things we need—the middle class and working poor—pay the price for all this. Speculative profits act as a drain on the economy—like a hidden tax. This hidden tax is one of the many reasons the middle-class standard of living has been slipping.

This lopsided division of wealth corrupts government. Few among the 99% now believe government works for their benefit—and for good reason. With the 1% commanding an army of lobbyists and doling out money from multimillion-dollar campaign war chests, government has become a source of protection and subsidies for Wall Street. No wonder there isn’t enough money left over for education, repairing roads and bridges, taking care of veterans and retirees, much less for the critical transition we need to make to a clean energy future.

The system is broken in so many ways that it’s dizzying to try to name them all. This is part of the reason why the Occupy movement hasn’t created a list of demands. The problem is everywhere and looks different from every point of view. The one thing the protesters all seem to agree on is that the middle-class way of life is moving out of reach. Talk to people at any of the Occupy sites and you’ll hear stories of people who play by the rules, work long hours, study hard, and then find only low-wage jobs, often without health care coverage or prospects for a secure future.

And many can find no job at all. In the United States, twenty-five million people are unemployed, underemployed or have given up looking for work. Forty-five percent of those without jobs have been unemployed for more than twenty-seven weeks. Some employers won’t hire anyone who is currently unemployed. Meanwhile, the cost of health care, education, rent, food, and energy continues to rise; the only thing that’s falling is the value of homes and retirement funds.

The problem is everywhere and looks different from every point of view. The one thing the protesters all seem to agree on is that the middle-class way of life is moving out of reach.

Behind these statistics are real people. Since the Occupy movement began, some who identify themselves as part of the 99% have been posting their stories at wearethe99percent.tumblr.com. Here’s one: “I am a lucky one. I have enough money to eat three of four weeks of the month. I have been paying student loans for fifteen years and still no dent. My husband lost his job...Last year I took a 10 percent pay cut to ‘do my share’ and keep layoffs at bay. I lost my house. I went bankrupt. I still am paying over one thousand dollars in student loans for myself and my husband and that is just interest. We will not have children. How could we when we can’t even feed ourselves? I am the 99%.”

Another personal story, by a sixty-year-old, reads, “Got laid off. Moved two thousand miles for new job. Pays 40 percent less than old job. Sold home at a loss. Filed Chapter Eleven. Owe IRS fifty thousand dollars. Fifteen thousand dollar per year debt for son’s tuition at state university. Seventy-five percent of retirement funds shifted to the 1%! I am the 99%!”

The website contains thousands of stories like these.

Now that we know we are not alone, we are less likely to blame ourselves when things are hard. And now that we are seeing the ways the system is rigged against us, we can join with others to demand changes that will allow everyone to thrive.

10 Ways the Occupy Movement Changes Everything
Many question whether this movement can really make a difference. The truth is that it is already changing everything.
Here’s how.

We the People Now Know That We Have the Right, and the Power

The power of the Occupy Wall Street movement is rippling out far beyond the people camped at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, and even beyond the occupation sites springing up in cities around the world. This movement is reaching people who are carrying a protest sign for the first time, including some conservatives, along with union members who have been fighting a losing battle to maintain their standard of living.

Hundreds of thousands have participated in the protests and occupations, millions support the occupations, and tens of millions more support their key issues. Polls show that jobs continues to be the issue that most concerns us, yet the national dialogue has been dominated by obsession with debt. While just 27 percent of Americans responding to an October 2011 Time Magazine poll held a favorable view of the Tea Party, for example, 54 percent held a favorable view of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Of those familiar with the protests, large majorities share their concerns: 86 percent agreed that Wall Street and lobbyists have too much power in Washington, DC, 68 percent thought the rich should pay more taxes, and 79 percent believe the gap between rich and poor has grown too large.

The Occupy Wall Street movement does not treat power as something to request—something that others can either grant or withhold. We the people are the sovereigns under the Constitution.

The movement has been criticized for its diversity of people and grievances, but in that diversity lies its strength. Among the 99% are recent graduates and veterans who can’t find work, elderly who fear losing their pensions, the long-term unemployed, the homeless, peace activists, people with a day job in a corporate office who show up after work, members of the military, and off-duty police. Those involved cannot be pigeonholed. They are as diverse as the people of this country and this world.

The movement has also been criticized for its failure to issue a list of demands. In fact, it is easy to see what the movement is demanding: quite simply, a world that works for the 99%. The hand-lettered protest signs show the range of concerns: excessive student debt; banks that took taxpayer bailouts, then refused to help homeowners stay in their homes; cuts in government funding for essential services; Federal Reserve policies; the lack of jobs.

A list of specific demands would make it easier to manage, criticize, co-opt, and divide the movement. Instead, Occupy Wall Street is setting its own agenda on its own terms and developing consensus statements at its own pace. It’s doing this in spaces that it controls—some in parks and other public spaces, others in union halls, libraries, churches, and community centers. On the Internet, the movement issues statements and calls to action through Twitter, Facebook, and its own Web sites. From the start it was clear that the movement would not rely on a mainstream media corrupted by corporate interests.

The Occupy Wall Street movement does not treat power as something to request—something that others can either grant or withhold. We the people are the sovereigns under the Constitution. The Occupy Wall Street movement has become a space where a multitude of leaders are learning to work together, think independently, and define the world we want to live in.

Those leaders will be stirring things up for years to come.

This Is What Horizontal Power Looks Like

Photo by Kurt Christensen.

When political parties talk about building a base, they usually mean developing foot soldiers who will help candidates win election and then go home to let the elected officials make the decisions. The Occupy Wall Street movement turns that idea on its head. The ordinary people who have chosen to be part of this movement are the ones who debate the issues, determine strategies, and lead the work.

Working groups take care of practical matters like food, sanitation, media, meeting facilitation, and receiving packages from supporters. Other groups discuss the issues, create arts and culture, debate tactics, and consider whether to issue demands. In Zuccotti Park, the Consciousness Working Group set up a permanent sacred space for prayer and meditation; spiritual leaders from various faiths show up to lead observances.

The early weeks of the occupation coincided with Yom Kippur, and a thousand Jewish activists participated in services across from Zuccotti Park. They erected in the park a sukkah, a temporary hut built to represent the impromptu housing Israelites used in the desert when escaping Egypt. Because the building of structures at Zuccotti Park is forbidden, this was an act of civil disobedience.

At the center of this movement are general assemblies, where decisions are made by consensus. Facilitators are charged with managing the process so that all have a chance to be heard and everyone has a chance to express approval, disapproval, or to block consensus by means of hand signals.

Visitors report being surprised to see smiles instead of anger. This is a movement where you often hear the words, “I love you.”

The use of the people’s microphone is a central feature of the general assemblies. To use the people’s mic, a person first grabs the attention of the crowd by shouting, “Mic check!” Then, he or she begins to speak, saying a few words at a time, so that others can shout the words on to those behind them in the crowd.

Originally developed as a way to circumvent bans on amplification at many occupation sites, the people’s mic has developed into much more than that. It encourages deeper listening because audience members must actively repeat the language of the speaker. It encourages consensus because hearing oneself repeat a point of view one doesn’t agree with has a way of opening one’s mind. And it provides a great example of how community organizing works best when it’s people-powered and resilient. This technique allows crowds of thousands to communicate, and also allows groups involved in direct street action to make democratic decisions on the fly.

The occupation zones are not just places to talk about a new society. They are becoming twenty-four-hour-a-day experiments in egalitarian living. Without paid staff or hierarchies, everyone gets fed, laundry gets done by the truckload, disagreements get facilitated, and those arrested are greeted by crowds of cheering supporters when they get out of jail.

Cynics might question the importance of this deepening sense of community. But people who have lived in a competitive, isolating world are tasting a way of life built on support and inclusion, in some cases for the first time. They are sharing the risk of police beatings, arrests, and pepper spray, and the hardship of sleepless nights in a rainy or snowy park. The resulting bonds create strength, solidarity, and resolve. Visitors report being surprised to see smiles instead of anger. This is a movement where you often hear the words, “I love you.”

That experience of community is not easily forgotten, and it deepens the yearning for a new culture; one that is radically inclusive, respectful, supportive, and horizontal.

What Next?

Occupy Boston.

Photo by Scott Eisen.

The organizers of the September 17 occupation say they weren’t planning for an occupation that would go on week after week. It just hadn’t occurred to them. And no one can say where things will go from here. Harsh weather could drive people away. Other hazards could undercut the movement. Police violence could frighten away would-be protesters, or it could galvanize the movement, as did the pepper spraying of unarmed women in Manhattan and police violence against occupiers in Oakland.

Another threat to the movement is violence on the part of the occupiers themselves, which would be used to justify police action and likely turn press coverage against the occupations. With increasing tensions and exhausted protesters, the nonviolent discipline of this movement will be severely tested.

Violence could also come from provocateurs seeking to discredit the Occupy movement. Within a month of the movement’s launch there was a case of an admitted provocateur, an assistant editor at the right-wing magazine American Spectator, who tried, without success, to get Occupy and anti-war protesters to join him in pushing past security guards at the Smithsonian Museum of Air and Space in Washington, DC. Fortunately, the crowd refused to follow. Security guards responded by pepper spraying protesters, and the museum was closed for some hours. Most news reports attributed the scuffle to Occupy Wall Street protesters.

“A group of people started camping out in Zuccotti Park, and all of a sudden the conversation started being about the right things.” —Paul Krugman

But the movement has important strengths that add to its resilience. It is radically decentralized, so a disaster at any one occupation will not bring down the others; in fact, the others can take action in support. There is no single leader who could be co-opted or assassinated. Instead, leadership is broadly shared, and leadership skills are being taught and learned constantly.

What’s more, the autonomous groups within the movement that plan and carry out direct actions of all sorts are extremely difficult to contain. By choosing the targets of their actions wisely, they can further draw attention to institutions whose behavior calls into question their right to exist. When the legitimacy of large institutions crumbles, it is often just a matter of time before the support of government, stockholders, customers, and employees goes away, too. There is no institution that is “too big to fail.” This is one way that nonviolent revolution happens.

New support is flowing in, some from unexpected sources. A group of Marine veterans has formed OccupyMARINES, which will work to recruit police and members of other branches of the military to support the occupations, and to nonviolently protect protesters from police assaults. The Marines also plan to help the occupations sustain themselves through cold weather. The group was inspired by a viral video showing Marine Sergeant Shamar Thomas dressing down the police for brutalizing protesters. “There is no honor in this,” he shouted at the police. The wounding of Marine veteran Scott Olsen, who at twenty-four years old had already served two tours in Iraq, has further fired up fellow Marines. Olsen was critically injured by a police-fired projectile in an Oakland police action against occupiers.

Police, though often shown cracking down on occupations, have also expressed sympathy with the movement. In Albany, New York, state and city police declined to follow orders from the mayor to arrest and remove peaceful protesters. “We don’t have those resources, and these people were not causing trouble,” an official with the state patrol told the Times Union newspaper.

10 Everyday Acts of Resistance That Changed the World
How regular people, from Denmark to Liberia, have stood up to power—and won.

Will there come a time when there is no one willing to enforce orders to evict members of the 99% from occupation encampments—or from their homes, for that matter? And if popular support grows, will elected officials look to ally themselves with the movement, rather than suppress it? The fact that these are even questions shows how radically things have changed since a few hundred people occupied Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011.

Whatever happens next, Occupy Wall Street has already accomplished something that changes everything. It has fundamentally altered the national conversation.

“A group of people started camping out in Zuccotti Park, and all of a sudden the conversation started being about the right things,” says The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “It’s kind of a miracle.”

Now that millions recognize the injustice resulting from the power of Wall Street and giant corporations, that issue will not go away. The central question now is this: Will we build a society to benefit everyone? Or just the 1%?

The world becomes a very different place when members of the 99% stand up. The revolts in Egypt, elsewhere in the Middle East, and in Europe belie the story that popular uprisings are futile. The people occupying Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan and in cities across the country have showed that Americans, too, can take a stand.

People who’ve experienced the power of having a voice will not easily go back to silence. People who’ve found self-respect will work hard to avoid a return to isolation and powerlessness; the Occupy Wall Street movement gives us reason to believe that we the people can take charge of our destinies. The 99% are no longer sitting on the sidelines of history—we are making history.

Click here for more from This Changes Everything.

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Sarah van Gelder is co-founder and executive editor of YES! Magazine.

This Introduction is excerpted from the book This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement edited by Sarah van Gelder and the staff of YES! Magazine and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. The Introduction is available for free copying and reproduction under a Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivs (CC BY-ND) license, which allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to its original publication in the book, This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011.

Interested?

• Follow our ongoing coverage of Occupy Wall Street
• 10 Ways to Support the Occupy Movement
  There are many things you can do to be part of this growing movement—and only some of them involve sleeping outside.
• How to Build a People's Movement
  Now’s the time to challenge economic orthodoxy—but only a massive social movement can turn things around.

Four Principles to Fix Our Broken Economy

Topic

Supercommittee

Friday, Nov 18, 2011 5:49 PM Eastern Standard Time

Austerity will sink the economy

Budget cuts aren't the answer. Here are the four principles that should be guiding the supercommittee

By Robert Reich

(Credit: Courtesy of Robert Reich)

Topics:Supercommittee, Taxes, Great Recession

This originally appeared on Robert Reich's blog.

The biggest question right now on Planet Washington is whether the congressional supercommittee will reach an agreement.

That’s the wrong question. Agreement or not, Washington is on the road to making budget cuts that will slow the economy, increase unemployment and impose additional hardship on millions of Americans.

The real question is how to stop this austerity train wreck, and substitute the following:

FIRST: No cuts before jobs are back – until unemployment is down to 5 percent. Until then, the economy needs a boost, not a cut. Consumers – whose spending is 70 percent of the economy – don’t have the money to boost the economy on their own. Their pay is dropping and they’re losing jobs.

SECOND: Make the boost big enough. 14 million Americans are out of work, and 10 million are working part time who need full-time jobs. The President’s proposed jobs program is a start but it’s tiny relative to what needs to be done. It would create fewer than 2 million jobs. We need a big jobs program – rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure, and including a WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps.

THIRD: To pay for this, raise taxes on the super-rich. It’s only fair. Never before has so much income and wealth been concentrated at the very top, and taxes on the top so low. Go back to the 70 percent marginal tax we had before 1980. And include more tax brackets at the top. It doesn’t make sense that any income over $375,000 is taxed at the same 35 percent, even if it’s a billion dollars. And tax all sources of income at the same rate, including capital gains.

FOURTH: Cut the budget where the real bloat is. Military spending and corporate welfare. End weapons systems that don’t work and stop wars we shouldn’t be fighting to begin with, and we save over $300 billion a year. Cut corporate welfare – subsidies and special tax breaks going to big agribusiness, big oil, big pharma, and big insurance – and we save another $100 billion.

Do you hear me, Washington? Do these four things and restore jobs and prosperity. Fail to do these, and you’ll make things much, much worse.

Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration. He is also a blogger and the author of "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." More Robert Reich

Revolution is the Solution: Time for an Economic Bill of Rights

Time for an Economic Bill of Rights

by Ellen Hodgson Brown / November 12th, 2011

Henry Ford said, “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

We are beginning to understand, and Occupy Wall Street looks like the beginning of the revolution.

We are beginning to understand that our money is created, not by the government, but by banks. Many authorities have confirmed this, including the Federal Reserve itself. The only money the government creates today are coins, which compose less than one ten-thousandth of the money supply. Federal Reserve Notes, or dollar bills, are issued by Federal Reserve Banks, all twelve of which are owned by the private banks in their district. Most of our money comes into circulation as bank loans, and it comes with an interest charge attached.

According to Margrit Kennedy, a German researcher who has studied this issue extensively, interest now composes 40% of the cost of everything we buy. We don’t see it on the sales slips, but interest is exacted at every stage of production. Suppliers need to take out loans to pay for labor and materials, before they have a product to sell.

For government projects, Kennedy found that the average cost of interest is 50%. If the government owned the banks, it could keep the interest and get these projects at half price. That means governments—state and federal—could double the number of projects they could afford, without costing the taxpayers a single penny more than we are paying now.

This opens up exciting possibilities. Federal and state governments could fund all sorts of things we think we can’t afford now, simply by owning their own banks. They could fund something Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King dreamt of—an Economic Bill of Rights.

A Vision for Tomorrow

In his first inaugural address in 1933, Roosevelt criticized the sort of near-sighted Wall Street greed that precipitated the Great Depression. He said, “They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and where there is no vision the people perish.”

Roosevelt’s own vision reached its sharpest focus in 1944, when he called for a Second Bill of Rights. He said:

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights . . . . They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

He then enumerated the economic rights he thought needed to be added to the Bill of Rights. They included:

The right to a job;

The right to earn enough to pay for food and clothing;

The right of businessmen to be free of unfair competition and domination by monopolies;

The right to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; and,

The right to a good education.

Times have changed since the first Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution in 1791. When the country was founded, people could stake out some land, build a house on it, farm it, and be self-sufficient. The Great Depression saw people turned out of their homes and living in the streets—a phenomenon we are seeing again today. Few people now own their own homes. Even if you have signed a mortgage, you will be in debt peonage to the bank for 30 years or so before you can claim the home as your own.

Health needs have changed too. In 1791, foods were natural and nutrient-rich, and outdoor exercise was built into the lifestyle. Degenerative diseases such as cancer and heart disease were rare. Today, health insurance for some people can cost as much as rent.

Then there are college loans, which collectively now exceed a trillion dollars, more even than credit card debt. Students are coming out of universities not just without jobs but carrying a debt of $20,000 or so on their backs. For medical students and other post-graduate students, it can be $100,000 or more. Again, that’s as much as a mortgage, with no house to show for it. The justification for incurring these debts was supposed to be that the students would get better jobs when they graduated, but now jobs are scarce.

After World War II, the G.I. Bill provided returning servicemen with free college tuition, as well as cheap home loans and business loans. It was called “the G.I. Bill of Rights.” Studies have shown that the G.I. Bill paid for itself seven times over and is one of the most lucrative investments the government ever made.

The government could do that again—without increasing taxes or the federal debt. It could do it by recovering the power to create money from Wall Street and the financial services industry, which now claim a whopping 40% of everything we buy.

An Updated Constitution for a New Millennium

Banks acquired the power to create money by default, when Congress declined to claim it at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The Constitution says only that “Congress shall have the power to coin money [and] regulate the power thereof.” The Founders left out not just paper money but checkbook money, credit card money, money market funds, and other forms of exchange that make up the money supply today. All of them are created by private financial institutions, and they all come into the economy as loans with interest attached.

Governments—state and federal—could bypass the interest tab by setting up their own publicly-owned banks. Banking would become a public utility, a tool for promoting productivity and trade rather than for extracting wealth from the debtor class.

Congress could go further: it could reclaim the power to issue money from the banks and fund its budget directly. It could do this, in fact, without changing any laws. Congress is empowered to “coin money,” and the Constitution sets no limit on the face amount of the coins. Congress could issue a few one-trillion dollar coins, deposit them in an account, and start writing checks.

The Fed’s own figures show that the money supply has shrunk by $3 trillion since 2008. That sum could be spent into the economy without inflating prices. Three trillion dollars could go a long way toward providing the jobs and social services necessary to fulfill an Economic Bill of Rights. Guaranteeing employment to anyone willing and able to work would increase GDP, allowing the money supply to expand even further without inflating prices, since supply and demand would increase together.

Modernizing the Bill of Rights

As Bob Dylan said, “The times they are a’changin’.” Revolutionary times call for revolutionary solutions and an updated social contract. Apple and Microsoft update their programs every year. We are trying to fit a highly complex modern monetary scheme into a constitutional framework that is 200 years old.

After President Roosevelt died in 1945, his vision for an Economic Bill of Rights was kept alive by Martin Luther King. “True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

MLK too has now passed away, but his vision has been carried on by a variety of money reform groups. The government as “employer of last resort,” guaranteeing a living wage to anyone who wants to work, is a basic platform of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). An MMT website declares that by “[e]nding the enormous unearned profits acquired by the means of the privatization of our sovereign currency. . . [i]t is possible to have truly full employment without causing inflation.”

What was sufficient for a simple agrarian economy does not provide an adequate framework for freedom and democracy today. We need an Economic Bill of Rights, and we need to end the privatization of the national currency. Only when the privilege of creating the national money supply is returned to the people can we have a government that is truly of the people, by the people and for the people.

Ellen Brown is an attorney in Los Angeles and the author of 11 books. In Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free, she shows how a private banking cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Read other articles by Ellen, or visit Ellen's website.

This article was posted on Saturday, November 12th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Banks/Banking.

Election Results: Progressivism Is on the Rise

By Matthew Rothschild, November 9, 2011

It’s nice to wake up to election results you really like.

It’s been a while.

But progressives have lots of reasons to cheer today.

First and foremost, because voters in Ohio so decisively rejected Kasich’s anti-union law, repealing it by a whopping 61 to 39 margin.

But also decisively, and by a surprising 59 to 42 margin, voters in Mississippi rejected the referendum that would have declared that “personhood” begins at the moment of fertilization. I was worried about that one.

In Maine, voters turned back another misguided Republican missile, one that had destroyed same-day voter registration. The good people of Maine restored it, 60-40.

And then in Arizona, one of the most bigoted legislators ever to serve as the president of the state senate there, Russell Pearce, the architect of the hideous anti-immigration law SB 1070, got his comeuppance, losing in a historic recall election 53-45.

I’m happy today not only because some bad guys lost, but because voters around the country strongly affirmed key values of our more perfect union: Those values are labor rights, women’s rights, the right to the ballot, and the right to be welcomed here as an immigrant in this country of immigrants.

Rightwing Republicanism is on the decline, and progressivism is on the rise.

If you liked this story by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, check out his story "Why I Got Arrested in Madison."

Follow Matthew Rothschild @mattrothschild on Twitter

How to Fix 30 Years of Redistribution: Tax the Rich

Published on Thursday, November 10, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

How to Fix 30 Years of Redistribution: Tax the Rich

by Paul Buchheit

Redistribution of income has been taking place since 1980, when the top 1% already had a large piece of the pie (7%).

Then they took a second piece (7% more).

Then they took a third piece (7% more).

That's over a trillion dollars a year of after-tax income that would be going to the other 99% if it weren't for 30 years of tax cuts and deregulation.

If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.

How do wealthy Americans respond to this? They argue that the top earners pay most of the income tax. But federal income tax is only a small part of the burden on the middle class. Based on data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the total of all state and local taxes, social security taxes, and excise taxes (gasoline, alcohol, tobacco) consumes 21% of the annual incomes of the poorest half of America. For the richest 1% of Americans, the same taxes consume 7% of their incomes. Furthermore, the richest people pay most of the federal income taxes because they've made ALMOST ALL the new income over the past 30 years. As productivity has risen 80%, average overall wages have remained flat.

Wealthy people also claim that opportunity exists for everyone, if only they work hard. But an American born in 1970 in the bottom economic quintile had only a 17% chance of making it into the top two quintiles. Data shows that much of Europe has more economic mobility than the United States.

Wealthy people also claim that they've earned whatever they have. But they've made their fortunes with considerable help from society. Government-funded research, infrastructure growth, national security, and property laws have largely benefited rich individuals and corporations. DARPA (the Internet), NIH (medicine), and NSF and NASA (science) have laid a half-century foundation for profit-seeking corporations.

At the time of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine noted that everything "beyond what a man's own hands produce" came to him from society, and therefore "he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came."

Over a hundred years ago, Teddy Roosevelt, facing a plague of inequality not unlike today, stressed that "Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by [democratic] institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions."

Elizabeth Warren recently said "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody."

Even GE's Jeffrey Immelt concurred, saying that "government spending...prepares the way for new industries that thrive for generations."

The 1% need to take responsibility for their 30 years of good fortune. A progressive federal income tax is a good start.

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

The Five Fundamentals of Dealing with Change

The Five Fundamentals of Dealing with Change

by Joe Flower

International Copyright 1996 Joe Flower All Rights Reserved
Please see our free downloading policy.

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Some people, and some organizations, deal well with change. In fact, they seem to thrive on it.

They take its challenges as sources of enormous energy to drive them forward -- yet they cut their own path. Like a surfer riding the face of a thundering comber, they use the power of the wave to create their own kind of beauty.

Some people, and some organizations, fall apart in the face of change. They seemed well organized -- nice office building, confident CEO, vigorous growth (or nice spouse, good family, positive outlook) -- until something changes in their environment. Maybe a major employer pulls out of town, a "golden agers" retirement development goes in, and the customer base changes suddenly. Or maybe it's a family change: the last kid has left home, and your spouse decides to open a business.

And it's Yeats all over again: "Things fall apart, The center cannot hold."

And it's Yeats all over again: "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold."

Things go from bad to worse in a spiral: a problem with getting the right mix of customers problem cuts income, margins fall. The banks see you're in trouble, and the short-term lending dries up. Your profit margin falls, you try to make it up on volume, and the service levels fall. Customer satisfaction falls, and those who can afford it go to some other shop -- and the customer mix problem gets worse.

What's the real difference between those who thrive on change and those who fall apart, clawing and scrabbling their way down a slippery slope?

Is it just luck? Could be, if it happened once. But look carefully: people and organizations seem to have a pattern over their lifetimes. We all know some people that seem to shoot themselves in the foot every chance they get. Study companies that know how to survive, and you'll find corporations as much as 700 years old that have survived under monarchies, dictatorships, and revolutionary councils, through war and depression, plague and natural disaster. That takes far more than luck.

People and organizations that thrive on change share some fundamental attributes. And change is fractal: its basic nature looks the same at different scales. So the attributes that make an organization powerfully adaptive also make a relationship flexible and fruitful, a community livable, and an individual creative, adaptive, and secure in the midst of turbulence.

Five fundamentals

Organisms that thrive in a changing environment share these five necessary attributes:

• Husbanded Resources: Like an army that does not get too far ahead of its supply train, like a family that stays out of short-term debt and builds up savings, like a man who reaches his seventies with a body he has never abused, an organism that does not waste its capital has more options when it is threatened.

This can mean an array of things, depending on the context. In individuals, families and corporations, it means financial conservativism. It means not over-extending yourself. Search as you might among the oldest corporations, and you won't find any that practice creative financing. They tend to the fundamentals.

It doesn't mean you have to be rich. A little observation will show that rich people and organizations over-extend themselves as easily as anyone else. In many ways, in fact, they have more opportunity, since it is easier for people and organizations with assets to borrow money. It means, at whatever financial level you currently exist, keeping debt down and savings up, so that you have resources on which to draw when you need them.

In individuals, this means staying in good mental and physical health. In couples and families, it means working to keep the relationships vital and strong long before any crisis comes.

• Abundant Relationships: In an organization, we typically constrain relationships. We form our bonds with our immediate superiors and subordinates, and peers with whom we work closely. We don't form strong bonds with people in the next work unit over, or several levels above or below us in the hierarchy. Yet organizations in which people have multiple bonds and a lot of history together do better in times of difficulty.

In the early 1980s, John Kotter, in his groundbreaking study The General Manager, looked intensely at the management styles of CEOs and division directors who were generally acknowledged as excellent organizational leaders. One of the attributes these leaders had in common was that they seemed to know everyone -- not only their peers, subordinates, and superiors, but people in other divisions, clergy in the town, the union leaders, their counterparts at other organizations, the janitor who vacuumed their offices. And when the time came, each of these relationship was useful, often in unpredictable ways.

In organizations, we typically constrain relationships

One of the many difficulties of the Vietnam War was organizational: officers and fighting units were not trained and deployed together, as in most earlier wars. Rather, individual soldiers and officers were rotated in and out of units. The official rationale was that it was not good for fighting men to get "too attached" to their comrades and leaders. In practice, it meant less trust, with veteran fighters trying to survive their last weeks "in country" often going out into the jungle led by newly-arrived greenhorns that they barely knew.

In normal times, the depth and multiplicity of relationships within an organization seems merely pleasant, and preferable to a culture that is deeply divided between labor and management, the "suits" and the technicians, operations and marketing, along the thousand fissures that develop in the everyday world of work. In times of turbulence, abundant relationships become critical to the life of the organization.

In families, this means a richness and depth of relationships, not only within the nuclear family, but beyond the family walls into the extended family, and the surrounding community.

In an individual, this translates to full participation of all parts of the personality. Researchers into cases of "multiple personalities" tell us that these cases are only extreme versions of ourselves. In "multiples" the relationships between the parts of the personality have broken down, but we all have multiple parts. Often one part -- a controlling aspect, say, or a victimized aspect -- comes to dominate the personality, while other parts are ignored. This kind of personality is brittle and inflexible. Strong and flexible personalities bring all parts to the table, from the "inner child," full of wonder, delight, and sadness, to the controller, arbiter of order and purpose.

• Abundant Information: In our families, we keep secrets. We keep secrets even within ourselves: "Just call me Cleopatra, I'm the Queen of Denial." In organizations, we restrict information, holding onto it as a source of power.

In each of these situations, the individual parts of the organism have enough information to do their ordinary jobs, but not enough to help the organization through a crisis. If you have been through a natural disaster, you have seen how the need for information widens dramatically: suddenly you may need to know where the gas shut-off valve is, how to do CPR, or the best way to set sandbags.

In an organization, the difference between an open environment and a secretive one can be dramatic. I have seen an organization re-organize and downsize itself, eliminating half of all mid-level positions, in a single four-hour meeting, with almost all of those who left taking the decision voluntarily -- when they were given adequate information, and plenty of time before the meeting to think it over.

"Just call me Cleopatra, I'm the Queen of Denial."

Certain types of information that organizations have, such as personnel information and some securities information, are legally restricted. Others, such as Coke's secret formula and the design of Intel's next chip, are truly trade secrets, and must be guarded. But typically we restrict information far beyond those narrow boundaries. The ideal to which we should aspire, for the good of the organization, is a free flow of information.

For instance, many organizations have improved their labor relations by cleanly opening their books to the union. The power lost is the power to manipulate and obfuscate. The power gained is the power to find common ground.

Sometimes revealing facts about yourself or your organization leaves you truly more vulnerable -- if, for instance, your strategy was based on tricking or manipulating the competition, your own workers, your spouse, or yourself. But such strategies are themselves questionable, since they damage the very relationships on which your survival depends

• Distributed Power: Each decision made as far from the center as possible -- that's a mark of an adaptable organism. In an individual, this looks like "trusting your gut," rather than ignoring your gut to follow a rigid plan. In a family, it means considerable autonomy for each individual, within the broad sense of the family's spirit and purpose. In an organization, it means that each decision is taken as low down in the organization as possible. The CEO deciding what kind of postage meter to buy is a sign of a flawed, brittle organization.

The reason is simple: a centralized, hierarchical organization fully uses only one brain: Mr. Big's. Every other brain is only used to execute his orders, with all the creative, inventive, entrepreneurial parts shut off, all the excitement and energy put on hold.

In order to harness all the brain power in your organization, you must give them tasks to work out -- which means giving them the decision-making power they need to try different solutions. They must have the ability to fail.

To many people, this seems an inversion of the norm in the powerful organizations they see around them. Yet some of the largest, most successful organizations on the planet are extreme examples of distributed power. The global headquarters of Royal Dutch Shell has little power over its various national companies, who work together through an internal commodities exchange. Visa International is designed on just such a model. It is owned by its member banks, all decisions are reached by consensus, and members are free to market the Visa products any way they like -- yet decisions are made rapidly, and consistency is enforced across the system, by mutual agreement.

• A Common Story: Healthy, flexible individuals have a clear sense of purpose, and all parts of the personality are lined up behind that purpose. In healthy, flexible families, communities, and organizations, everyone has a sense of what their common endeavour is. The history of the organism is held in common, and its future vision is developed in common.

I have travelled many thousands of miles on Amtrak, and I have overheard many conversations among its employees. Not one concerned passenger comfort, safety, or efficiency -- what the employees might be giving to the life of the organism. Every single one concerned grievances, vacations, and pay negotiations -- what the employees are getting. At Budweiser, in contrast, any janitor or electrician will happily talk about the flavor and consistency of the beer, how it is attained, and how their job relates to it. At Sony's TV plants, the people on the manufacturing lines will gladly talk about the flatness of their tubes, the consistency of the image, and the brightness of the screen, and show off the new bracket they devised to decrease vibration in shipping.

It is this common story that allows an organization to function as a unit despite its distributed decision-making power. When Sony's TV unit in San Diego decided to design and market a cheap tele-conferencing monitor-top box, they knew what made a product a Sony, they knew Sony's product line, market position, and vision of the future. They didn't ask anyone's permission, but the venture fit right in. It was a true Sony product.

Test yourself

How well are you organization prepared to survive increasing turbulence? Look over these five attributes:

• husbanded resources
  
• abundant relationships
  
• abundant information
  
• distributed power
  
• a common story

How well do they describe you or your organization? What could you do differently to put yourself or your organization on a firmer, more conservative financial footing? To strengthen and multiply relationships? To increase the free flow of information? To distribute decision-making power? To nurture a common sense of the past, of your present daily purpose, and your vision of the future?

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How change works | Change happens| What is your goal? | Core concepts | Skills| Skill-building resources | Touching what is, touching what might be | Paradox | Heading for the open space | Habits of mind | Scenario spinning | Coming out | Breaking the trance | Finding a new path | Why it's important | Four quadrants | Psychological roots | Change Processes | Main Page

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Change Happens

Change Happens

by Joe Flower

International Copyright 1996 Joe Flower All Rights Reserved
Please see our free downloading policy.

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Most of us live - and think - as if the world were static, or as if it should be.

As individuals, as professionals, and as members or leaders of organizations, too often the way we act, plan, and react betrays the assumption that tomorrow will be much like today, that we'll slide by all right if we just get a little better, a little smarter, at doing what we are already doing.

The reality is quite different: Of the multiple separate elements that make up what you think of as your "self," many are likely to change over the next five to ten years -- what you do for a living, how you carry out that career, what you call yourself professionally, the shape of the organization within which you work, whom you claim as spouse or mate, the flavor of that relationship, your financial situation, where you live, your relationships with your parents, children, and friends, your health, even your beliefs and assumptions about yourself and the world around you. Some will change drastically, some subtly. Some will change incrementally, some cataclysmically. Some will be changed by outside forces, some from within.

Nothing suggests that this is going to get easier. In fact, every indication is that the ride will get a lot wilder

When we look at the trends underlying the rate of change - trends within society, demographic forces, technological shifts - nothing suggests that this is going to get easier. In fact, as we look forward into the new century, every indication is that the ride will get much wilder.

Both for individuals and for organizations, the skills that we most need to learn in order to survive and thrive are the skills of dealing with change.

Prediction: Faced with uncertainty, the most natural thing to do is to try to cut down on the uncertainty. We try to predict the future. Should I take an umbrella? Is the stock market going to fall? How much do I expect to earn this year? How will the department's budget end up?

This is classic trend analysis. It works over the relatively short term, when things are relatively stable, when one major variable changes at a time: the budget will rise by three to five percent, there's a sixty percent chance of showers by nightfall.

But there are problems with trend analysis. Consider the race car driver, given to plunging down a narrow, crowded track at heart-stopping speeds. At 220 miles per hour, he is betting his life on an exacting analysis of the short-term future. What if an accident occurs, a collision, a fireball in the middle of the track ahead of him? Which way should he steer to avoid the flaming wreckage? There is, in fact, a rule of thumb for this situation, and it might surprise you. The rule is: steer directly toward the spot where the accident began. The spot where the accident happened is the least likely spot for the wreckage to be when he gets there.

Surprisingly, this rule of thumb maps onto our personal, professional, and organizational lives. Today's trends have some predictive power over the short term, when other variables are not changing at the same time. Over any longer term, when other variables come into play, the target the trends seem to be headed for today is actually the least likely place for them to end up.

Chaos theory: There is a mathematical reality at the core of chaos theory: when one or two variables change over time, the result is a linear equation, a plot on a graph: We can actually plot the trend of their interactions. Cost of materials fall by a certain percentage, customer turnover rises by a certain percent, labor costs rise by a different percent, and in a year we are here on the graph, in two years we are here.

Its output becomes not a line but a hairball, steel wool, a snowstorm.

But when a larger number of different variables change over time, and the changing value of each one becomes the input for another, the resulting equation is non-linear. Its output becomes not a line but a hairball, steel wool, a snowstorm. The trend becomes not just very difficult to predict, but fundamentally impossible.

The more variables there are that are changing and interacting, the more turbulent our future, and the less we can predict it. So we have to prepare for it in a different way. In San Francisco, because of the interaction of ocean currents and winds, the inland heat, and the city's famous hills, the summer weather can vary wildly from one neighborhood to the next, from wind-blown fog to balmy sunshine to drizzle. So the experienced San Franciscan makes little attempt to predict the summer weather, but instead dresses in layers - shirt, sweater, jacket, with a windbreaker folded into the attache. He becomes adaptable, moment to moment.

How do I prepare for an unpredictable future?

Six practices will help us prepare for a future that is far less predictable than what we have enountered in the past:

• Deeper analysis: Look beyond surface trends to the underlying changes. Take one trend as an example: suppose there is a rise in pregnancy among unmarried teens in your area. The first impulse is to provide the teens with condoms, or simply tell them to knock it off. Will that work? I don't think so. We have to go deeper: What is the underlying change? Are there more teens? More teen unemployment? A lack of recreation facilities? A different cultural group moving into the area? A lack of family planning and abortion services? A drop in sex education? Loosening influence of churches and families? These can tell you more about the future -- and the possible solutions -- than the surface trend can.
• Wider scanning: Search regularly far beyond your accustomed bounds for the "seventh wave" that could change everything. U.S. healthcare organizations traditionally concerned themselves with attracting doctors and community donors, and dealing with federal and state regulation. They were blindsided by coalitions of employers, which are now the fundamental drivers of change in the industry. Disney fought home videocassette recorders tooth and nail, taking manufacturers to court, claiming that home video would destroy their theatrical movie business. They lost the suit, VCRs became popular -- and now Disney is the single largest seller of home videos.
• Constant scanning: Don't rely on a one-time analysis by an outside consultant, a therapist, or a personal change seminar. Build future scanning into your regular practice. Build your life as a learning experience, build your organization around its ability to learn. If your learning is only a product of something special, something extra (a retreat, a class, a period of re-engineering), it will be rare, it will be meager, and it will not integrate well into everyday life. If learning arises out of the everyday way that you or your organization goes about your business, learning will be constant, rich, and easily assimilable.
• Scenarios: As opposed to trend analysis, working with scenarios is a way to build a number of alternative futures. It helps us prepare for many possible futures, and spot the scenarios that could particularly lethal - or particularly attractive.
• Vision: The most potent factor in the creation of your future is you. Victory does not always go to the largest armies, the best deployment, and the most firepower. It goes as often to the smaller force with the greatest imagination, flexibility, and boldness, with the vision to make something happen. Every vision of the future sets off its own feedback loop. One prepares for what one believes will happen. At the same time, that preparation makes it more likely that this particular future will happen. Ask yourself what future you would prefer. Ask yourself what you are preparing for. For most organizations and individuals, the two are drastically different. If the point of future scanning is to have a more desirable future, rather than a less desirable one, then it is not enough simply to do your best at figuring out what is likely to happen and react to it. The best way to get to a more desirable future is to go out and create it, to envision that future and plan for it.
• Learning the skills of change: Surviving and thriving in a turbulent environment calls for a particular skill set, one that is not taught in university courses. These skills are more than a certain philosophical bent, or a quirk of personality. They are actual methods, tools, ways of seeing that work in turbulent environments. They are the skills of the surfer and the martial artist, the skills of jazz rather than chamber music, soccer rather than baseball. Some are obvious without long thought -- a certain flexibility, for instance. Others require a deeper study: for instance, the ability to turn the force of what is coming at you to your own advantage. Other skills may be completely counter-intuitive: the skill, for instance, of "anamnesis," the ancient mystic's ability in the middle of the shifting, swirling present to reach back and touch what is deep and constant.

In this web site we will explore these skills in detail, working through a number of propositions, observations, and rules of thumb that I call the "Change Codes." We will talk about change in our personal lives, our professional careers, and in the organizations that we help shepherd. One of my fundamental beliefs about change is that it is fractal in nature: that is, its form remains similar at different scales. There are things we can learn about it from studying intra-psychic phenomena that can inform our study of organizations, insights gained from family dynamics that can apply to communities or corporations.

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How change works | The five fundamentals of change| What is your goal? | Core concepts | Skills| Skill-building resources | Touching what is, touching what might be | Paradox | Heading for the open space | Habits of mind | Scenario spinning | Coming out | Breaking the trance | Finding a new path | Why it's important | Four quadrants | Psychological roots | Change Processes | Main Page

November 3, 2011 at 12:27:52

Occupy The Treasury! Reclaim The Monetary System With The Need Act - HR 2990

By Nikki Alexander (about the author)

HR 2990 - The National Emergency Employment Defense Act of 2011 could be the catalyst for a global renaissance. The NEED Act eliminates private control of the monetary system and restores the government's Constitutional authority to create money without creating debt and spend it into circulation to rebuild the productive economy.

With all the hysteria about government debt and deficit spending, ostensible pretexts for annihilating the public sector, why is no one scrutinizing the source of the problem ~ the monetary system?

Our economy has been running on credit since 1913 when Congress forfeited its sovereign authority to create the nation's money supply and gave that privilege away to a cartel of private banking corporations ~ the Federal Reserve System. What passes for money (Federal Reserve notes) is actually bank credit that enters circulation through private bank loans as interest bearing debt. Credit is not money. Credit is debt.

Not only did Congress forfeit its Constitutional authority to create money without incurring debt, it simultaneously gave private bankers the power to control the whole economy by dictating where credit flows ~ to Wall Street or Main Street. The bankers who control the credit supply, control both realities. They can arbitrarily expand credit exponentially to create a housing bubble or $600 trillion mortgage derivatives casino, and they can also starve the PRODUCTIVE economy by contracting the credit supply - at will. Wall Street corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash reserves and executive bonuses are soaring while millions of Americans are losing their jobs and homes through no fault of their own.

Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, admitted that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression, known to bankers as the Great Contraction. The same credit contraction of the productive economy is happening again today. This is why hospitals and schools are closing, businesses are collapsing, the job sector is shrinking, and municipalities have insufficient revenue ... why every part of the productive economy is contracting. The domino effect of contraction increases as people have less to spend and can't support local business that in turn must lay off workers. Unemployed workers have no income to pay taxes. Decreased tax revenue starves federal, state and local governments, which in turn lay off more workers and cut spending. Spending cuts and layoffs further contract the economy. Is the productive economy being deliberately destroyed or are these people really stupid?

(See this stunning graphic ~ the geography of recession.)

Why is no one publicly questioning the power banks have to contract the economy with their monopoly control over credit? Why don't we reinstate sovereign money instead that is issued by the federal government, per US Constitution Article 1, Section 8? We wouldn't have a national debt because the government wouldn't have to borrow. We wouldn't be at the mercy of banks that withhold credit and contract the economy because our government could inject liquidity directly into the PRODUCTIVE economy. This basic truth is so obvious, there must be an unspoken agreement that explains why governments everywhere continue to borrow credit instead of originating the national money supply without incurring public debt.

Who benefits?

Large corporations and ultra wealthy individuals theoretically pay 35% in taxes, but in reality from 17% to zero, compared to 50% and 91% respectively, in 1960. Today, the federal government borrows from these two extremely affluent groups instead of taxing excessive wealth. The public pays them back, plus interest ~ an arrangement that fosters income inequality, concentration of wealth, federal debt and deficits. Why not reform the tax code? Concentrated wealth buys political influence to dictate tax policy.

Who else benefits? The military siphons off 58% of the visible federal discretionary budget. The invisible Pentagon budget, in excess of one trillion annually is unknown to Congress because the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Pentagon contractors, DHS and the "security" industry have sucked up $7.5 trillion since 9/11. The corporate war and national "security" industries are financed with borrowed credit that goes on the taxpayer tab for future generations. If this government spending had to be financed through direct taxation do you think Americans would refuse to pay $6 trillion for illegal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya and $7.5 trillion for so-called "offensive security"? The cost of this antisocial spending is so excessive it would consume the entire annual income of most workers. Rebellion would surely derail the corporate war and national "security" gravy train.

Here are some other big beneficiaries of government debt ... Wall Street financial institutions, transnational investment banks and members of the Federal Reserve System that derive billions of dollars in interest payments provided by American taxpayers. Government debt is a lucrative commodity. (Student debt soared from $200 billion in Y2000 to a whopping $830 billion in Y2010, surpassing the nation's total credit card debt of $800 billion.) Just to give you a sense of how cavalier the transnational bankers are that gamble with our lives, ICE US Trust LLC, a Federal Reserve member, is a multi-trillion dollar credit default swaps casino that accepts only two forms of collateral to place a bet ~ cash and G-7 government debt.

Where did sixteen trillion dollars in taxpayer loans come from to bail out corporations and domestic and foreign banks that crashed the global economy with their mortgage derivatives casino? That credit was generated by the Federal Reserve to save the banks that created the crisis from well-deserved bankruptcy. Their liabilities were transferred to taxpayers and bailout funds were used to expand their monopolies. The US Treasury is their ATM and we, the taxpayers, supply the cash.

Another major beneficiary is the World Bank-IMF syndicate of predators that engineer government debt as a weapon of mass destruction. The "sovereign debt crisis" being used in Europe as a pretext for "austerity" is classic IMF "structural adjustment" (economic train wreck) and has its counterpart in the US, masquerading as government deficit reduction. Neoliberal privateers follow a predictable blueprint: deregulate to clear a path for criminals, drive a nation into debt to confiscate state assets, privatize the public sector, loot the treasury, slash wages, destroy unions, steal pensions, cut social spending, raise taxes on workers and cut taxes on the wealthy. Sound familiar? The IMF has been using this blueprint since WWII to loot the world.

The Occupy Movement has a stunning opportunity to halt and defeat this global attack on the public by restoring sovereign monetary systems worldwide.

Occupy the Treasury ~ Transform the monetary system

In the United States, Congressman Dennis Kucinich has introduced a bill that could be replicated in other countries -- HR 2990 The National Emergency Employment Defense Act of 2011. The NEED Act restores the constitutional prerogative of the federal government to create the national money supply -- without incurring debt - and ends "fractional reserve' lending, the accounting device that banks use to arbitrarily create credit with a computer keystroke. Henceforth, ONLY the US Treasury's Monetary Authority would have the legal authority to create US money. Banks would only be able to lend US money they actually have on deposit or borrow from the Monetary Authority. Implementation of The NEED Act would pay off federal debt with US Money as it comes due until it is permanently retired.

Money would initially enter circulation by federal spending to promote the general welfare, for example on public infrastructure ($2.2 trillion needed, creating 7 million jobs); underwriting the public education system from kindergarten through college; stabilizing social security and state pensions; funding federal mandates; making grants and interest-free loans to states for public infrastructure, education, health care and rehabilitation. In addition, the Monetary Authority would give 25% of money created to the states, and a tax-free dividend to all US citizens to inject liquidity into the economy. All without incurring one penny of debt.

Passing this legislation would give the PUBLIC control over creating the money supply and the MEANS to expand the PRODUCTIVE economy. People who are employed have money to spend which increases the number of customers for small (and large) businesses which can then hire more workers. Greater employment and increased productivity creates more state and local tax revenue which can then be spent on funding public services. In other words, the NEED Act reverses the cycle of economic contraction engineered by private banks withholding credit -- permanently.

The NEED Act nationalizes the monetary system ~ not the banking system. Serious financial regulations, Wall Street reforms and prosecutions for fraud are still in order. Immediate withdrawal from the World Trade Organization 1999 Financial Services Agreement is a critical prerequisite for reinstating regulations that protect the public. The 1999 WTO FSA mandated massive deregulation of the financial sector in 105 countries and forbids sovereign governments to EVER roll back these destructive mandates. By what authority? Add the unaccountable, unelected WTO tribunal to the list of transnational predators sabotaging financial integrity and monetary sovereignty.

Who wouldn't want a public monetary system that serves the whole society? The beneficiaries of a debt scheme that siphons off our nation's resources to finance antisocial pursuits and concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. Their lobbyists will descend on Congress. This bill will die a quiet death in the House Committee on Financial Services and never be brought to the floor for a vote unless we -- the 99% - make it visible and demand its passage.

The Occupy Movement has enormous potential to transform the structural inequality built into our monetary, economic and political system. Superficial "reforms" are meaningless. Please devote yourself to building public momentum to demand passage of this bill. If we reach critical mass, we just might "form a more perfect union, establish ECONOMIC justice, ensure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.'

Restoring sovereign monetary systems worldwide could spark a Global Renaissance .

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Video: A message from Dennis Kucinich to Occupy Wall Street protesters

Audio: Hear Dennis Kucinich explain the bill (15:29 -- 28:55)

Dennis Kucinich and Chris Hedges praise the Wall Street Occupation

NEED Act Fact Sheet

Read the NEED Act

Sign Petition to support HR 2990

Article: "Dennis Kucinich beats President Obama to the punch with a jobs plan"

http://nikkialexander.wordpress.com

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and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.