By Paul Smith
Author: Ross Jackson
Publish Date: January 2012
ISBN-10: 1603583882
ISBN-13: 9781603583886
Website: http://www.occupyworldstreet.org/ows-the-book
Blockbuster Book: Read about everything you ever wanted to know about
the economy and the wealthy 1%, including fundamental issues that are
at the core of the Occupy Movements list of grievances, all neatly
outlined in one book “Occupy World Street” by Ross Jackson, it’s aims
and purpose and the underlying practices of how the e lite 1% are
enriching themselves at the expense of the 99% majority and why
democracy has failed in the US, certainly a ‘Must Read’ for every
person in the US, how we all have been doped and exploited by the rich
and powerful and how wealthy people control corporations, congress,
government and the media and how we continue to damage the planet, all
in the name of greed and profits.
As demonstrators worldwide demand reform of a corrupt global economy
that concentrates wealth in the top 1% of income earners, Occupy World
Street offers a long awaited plan of action for ‘the 99 percent’. Ross
Jackson delivers one of the most lucid descriptions of how global
financial practices are driving economies to the brink of collapse,
and making it impossible to deal effectively with climate change,
ecosystem damage and peak oil.
He outlines a compelling plan that will allow countries to regain
control of their economies, reorganize global trade alliances on a
more human scale, and gradually replace WTO/IMF/World Bank with new
institutions that support sustainable economies and uphold human
rights. Rather than force a direct confrontation with the crumbling
‘Empire’, Jackson’s innovative strategy would be led by a handful of
small nations that are already starting to break away from the
contemporary global order, and supported by ordinary citizens around
the world.
Jackson has done what few others have dared to do: constructed a
specific, implementable plan to reorganize the way economies work.
It’s a plan, says sustainable economics pioneer Hazel Henderson,
that “has the potential to unite hundreds of NGOs and millions of
ordinary citizens behind a simple proposal that could change the
current dysfunctional game.”
Ross Jackson explains that the current system is no longer serving the
majority of the people in the US but rather the wealthy 1% elite and
corporate America. This system is based on exploiting the poor and
developing countries in the interest of economic gain for the elite 1%
only. These threats include economical, ecological, and social
collapse which can widely be attributed to the current reigning
financial ideology called Neoliberalism, which is the main force
driving society toward this potentially disastrous future.
Even though it addresses these issues, this book does not exude a tone
of doom and gloom nor is it chalked up with radical left-wing
conspiracies or propaganda, rather, the author backs up all his claims
with strong evidence and offers a road map to economic recovery and
sustainability and a concrete vision for a new society, which favors
not mere economic growth and greed but rather serving all of humanity
rather than only the wealthy elite and “the corporatocracy”. The
author, Ross Jackson, is at the forefront of this transformation-
spearheading Eco-villages and offering new models for almost all
aspects of civilization It is crucial that we as activists,
individuals and citizens rise above passivity and understand the
threats human civilization face today so that we can start taking
action locally and work towards a solution that will be more
sustainable.
This book is neutral and not politically aligned to any party or
corporation, the author states facts as they are and reveals many
hidden facts that most of us in the US are not aware of, the author is
wealthy and has no ulterior motives, this book is set
to become a best seller. This book is no urban legend or conspiracy
theory, it’s all hard facts that is not available to the general
public.
*** Note that this book will not be promoted in the US by the
mainstream media, because of the tight control that the Wealthy 1%,
Corporations, and the Government have on the Press, the wealthy would
not want facts that are exposed in this book to me made available to
the public.
Excerpts from the book:
The period from 1945 to 1980 was, in retrospect a period characterized
by relative peace, rapid economic growth, no major financial crisis, a
general sense of social cohesiveness in most nations, with the coming
to power of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the ascendency of
the neoliberals, everything changed. The subsequent period from 1980
to the present has been characterized by a deterioration of social
cohesiveness, environmental destruction, increasing stress, increasing
criminality, a shift from solidarity to individualism, a ‘greed is
good” mentality, a dramatic widening of the gap between rich and poor,
and not least, a series of major financial crisis resulting from the
‘financialization’ of the world economy, recall, that 1980 was also
the point at which the marginal costs of growth began to exceed the
marginal benefits, the point at which a global collapse may well have
begun. It is as if the dominant culture entered a final stage of
frenzy, denial, absurdity and fantasy to stave off the reality that
its way of life was coming to an end. Nowhere was this truer than in
the field of finance, which removed itself further and further from
any contact with the real world. In reality basic financial and
accounting principles were ignored.
______
Deregulation – The basic problem with removing government regulations
from markets was pointed out in the 1700s by Adam Smith, who did not
trust the morality of a merchant class that had no concept of
restraint or social responsibility. Since human ingenuity is
limitless, any relaxation of rules will inevitably lead to unintended
and unforeseen exploitation by profit-seeking businessmen, typically
at the expense of the non-profit seeking parts of society – local
communities, working people and the environment. History has shown
that repeatedly that markets are not self-regulating as the neoliberal
ideology has shown, on the contrary, unregulated markets tend to go to
extremes until they eventually crash. The deregulation and removing of
safeguards caused an entirely predictable result as it allowed new
profit driven unscrupulous investors to get their hands on the
enormous assets built up over several decades from local community
savings and engage in an unregulated and irresponsible speculative
frenzy as they invested in all kinds of dubious get-rich-quick schemes
characterized by conflicts of interests, incompetence, highly
speculative investments and criminal activities using other people’s
money. The ruling concept was: head we win, tails the taxpayers pay.
______
Unrestricted capital Flows – Free capital flow (including free flow of
goods across borders) is both the source of strength and the Achilles
heel of neoliberal politics. Unrestricted capital flows systemically
cause financial crises in two ways, firstly, they allow investor of
one country to create a financial crisis in another that would
otherwise not have occurred and secondly, they act like a virus that
allows a crisis in one country to spread to other countries and
example is the US subprime loan crisis. These unrestricted capital
flows are also the reason for systemic recurrence of financial crisis,
because the foreign markets in which the “players” invest, even though
large enough and liquid enough in normal markets are extremely
illiquid in a crisis.
______
The Financial Crisis of 2007-8 – This most recent crisis had elements
of all three “culprits”, deregulation, over-gearing of naked
derivatives at the national level in the United States and
unrestricted capital movements, which spread like a virus to the rest
of the world. A major deregulation event that paved the way for the
crisis was the repeal of the American Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 under
pressure from the financial elite who wanted more freedom to operate,
this act was passed originally back in 1933 to prevent the kind of
irresponsible and unregulated speculation that was identified at that
time as a major cause of the 1929 stock market crash. The
administartion of George W. Bush went even further cutting market
oversight to almost nothing. The subprime housing market is often
cited as the major cause of the crisis, but this is misleading because
the problem is systemic. With Glass-Seagall out of the way, the
post-1999 financial world became even more of a casino, unrelated to
the underlying economy. Money was not being used productively but for
naked speculation. the current global financial system is systemically
unstable and flawed and continues to be an accident waiting to happen.
The only unknowns are when and how the next accident will be
precipitated.
______
The Kennan Doctrine – The guiding doctrine followed by the American
political leadership over the past half century and the reasoning
behind it, was formulated in a remarkably clear statement by George F
Kennan (in 1948) ” We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only
6.3% of its population, This disparity is particularly great between
the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the
object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is
to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain
this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national
security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality
and daydreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated
everywhere on our immediate national objectives…….” we see here a
classic attitude of the worldview of separation. there is no sense of
global solidarity or sharing. Kennan’s doctrine is a blueprint for
Empire. There is only one wish to control 50% of the world’s resources
at the expense of everyone else. Other countries might as well be
enemies from outer space. But a dilemma is created by this doctrine,
because the proclaimed values of the United States for which it has
been widely admired the past 200 years are precisely those values that
must be sacrificed, and that in practice have been sacrificed, “human
rights, the raising of living standards [of developing countries] and
democratization”, therefore the doctrine must not be announced openly
to the American people, who would never accept it if they had choice
in the matter. It is the doctrine of the ruling elite (1%).
Thus the US leadership has been forced to be hypocritical, cynical,
even schizophrenic, saying one thing while doing another.
In the subsequent 200-plus years, the power struggle between the
“opulent minority” and the great majority has continued unabated.
Though the trend has been towards democracy in the past, the coming of
neoliberalism in the 1980′s, the trend has been reversed, evolving
into the situation, as we know today, with the minority owners of
great private wealth enjoying unprecedented influence while a
frustrated majority experiences disempowerment and a constant
deterioration in their freedoms and quality of life. Most observers
would agree that merely having elections every four years is not
sufficient evidence that a nation is democratic. Do voters have real
choice or are we looking at a one-party system? There are serious
questions about the degree of true democracy present in
twenty-first-century United States.
______
On 1 % – Inequalities – Increasing inequality is not just a moral
issue, there is a causal link between capitalism and inequality on the
one hand, and between inequality and social problems on the other that
is critical to our understanding of the role of the economic system in
social breakdown. The single most important cause of inequalities is
the ‘private ownership of income-generating property’. Unemployment is
identified as the second important factor, and has been linked to
increased rates of mental illness, suicide, homicide, divorce, heart
attack deaths, stroke deaths, aggression etc.
______
Assault on Nature – Today, crisis is all around us. We are living
right on the edge of breakdown, our well being, if not our survival,
is threatened by climate change, resource depletion, toxic pollution,
social breakdown, genetically modified foods, hunger, environmental
degradation and a rate of species extinction not seen in 65 million
years. Powerful forces are driving our civilization to a deep abyss,
behind all of them is a simple reality; ecosystem overload. Too many
people with too-powerful technologies are undermining the basis of our
existence. As a global population, we are living beyond our means,
living off our natural capital, consuming more than Nature can
replenish.
________
Energy Descent – the peak in global oil production and the subsequent
decline in oil supplies is not a threat to our survival as such, but
is going to cause a more immediate crisis that is a threat to our
whole way of life, we are consuming more oil than we are discovering,
it is just a matter of time before demand exceeds supply, when this
happens, the consequences will overshadow everything else on the
political agenda.
________
The Collapse of Civilizations – why is our civilization threatened? an
example is where the tendency of civilizations to destroy the
ecological foundation of life by cutting down forests and destroying
topsoil which results in short-term gains but inevitably leads to
long-term disasters. Another example is the human failure to adjust
populations to match the level that is sustainable, an example is
Ethiopia, which has one of the world’s highest death rates and a
devastated environment yet population continues to rise, driven by
each family’s attempt to survive. In he’s book “Collapse” Jared
Diamond states that from our lessons of history, environmental
degradation is a prime cause of collapse. Historian Joseph Tainter on
the other hand states that the overriding reason for collapse is
economic, more specifically, collapse is an example of the law of
diminishing returns i.e. declining benefits to the population. Another
reason is the role of energy, it is only energy that can sustain a
civilization, every time a civilization increases complexity, more
energy is required to maintain the same level of benefits, we are
reaching that stage of post cheap-oil era, with substantially higher
costs and correspondingly diminishing returns.
________
The evidence strongly suggests that our global civilization is
undergoing a collapse that will continue to play out over several
decades. There can be little doubt that we are on a journey toward a
different world for the simple reason that this one is on an
unsustainable path.
________
So what is driving our civilization toward ruin? Ecosystem overload,
over-population, unsustainable growth, species extinction, growing
inequality, global injustice, global warming, peak oil – we are so
familiar with all these things that it does not occur to us to ask
ourselves if there is a common thread linking them. The so-called
Cartesian/Newtonian worldview came to dominate the way Western
civilization looked at the world from roughly the seventeenth century
to the present, and not without good reason. The reductionist,
mechanical approach to problem solving inspired by Newton and others,
combined with Descarte’s concept of the separation of humankind and
nature, proved to be a powerful tool in the development of the
Industrial Revolution and modern science. It is generally considered
to have been a resounding success as on of the key factors in
increasing the general standard of living, particularly in
industrialized countries. However, it successes have not come without
costs. Often these costs appear elsewhere in the global system than we
might intuitively expect, for example, in damage to the environment
and human settlements from, and outside the field of vision of, the
centers of the industrialized world of the west. In this regard, it is
important to realize that, until recently, the vast majority of people
in the world were far less influenced by this worldview e.g. China,
India, Africa, the Middle East and South America. Many of these
peoples experienced only the negative effects of this paradigm through
colonialism, environmental degradation and commercial explanation. Our
civilization has held the Cartesian/Newtonian worldview for too long.
The strategies of this paradigm, which work so well in a “new
frontier” society, work no longer in a “spaceship
Earth” society. In a world where man is considered to be separate not
only from nature but also separate from other humans, it is no wonder
that a civilization has evolved that is based on the exploitation of
nature and the weaker parts of human society.
________
The Role of Economics – Central to this evolution is the role of
economics. Indeed, if the objective of someone was to drive our
civilization to ruin, then nothing could do it more effectively than
the invention of the currently dominant economic system -
neoliberalism. Since roughly the end of the Second World War, the
primary goal of almost nations has been to maximize economic growth,
without the least regard for either ecological overload or peak oil.
There are two fundamental flaws in the reigning version of economics.
The first one is the treatment of the environment as a subset of
economics. rather than the reverse, treating economics as a mechanism
of resource allocation that operates within the physical restrictions
of ecological space. In other words, economists perceive the
environment as a collection of
resources for humanity’s use rather than seeing humanity as an
integral part of, and inseparable from, a living and complex organism
we call Nature. The consequences of this error are enormous, a direct
conflict with one of the most fundamental and irrefutable laws of
physics, the second law of thermodynamics This law states a
fundamental fact about the irreversibility of nature. The nonrenewable
resources of our world, once used up (oil) then they are no longer
available to do any work.
This flaw allows economist to ignore problems of limited resources ,
ecosystem overload and energy descent. Economists can literally not
see these problems because they are not included in their differential
equations. It is as if or civilization is sailing down the Niagara
River, and our economic guides, who are servants of the political
leadership, have neither compass nor map. They will not see the
problems unti w go over the waterfall. The second major flaw is he way
in which economist model growth. This is especially dangerous because
the ruling elite tends to pay more attention to economists than to
physicists. The political power of the business community has been
increasing steadily for two hundred years to the point tht today, we
can no longer separate politics from business, particularly in the
world’s dominant economy, the United States. The combination of
powerful business interests, political allies and popular support
makes it almost impossible to stop the growth bubble from bursting
either when the ecosystem can no longer take the pressure, or more
likely, when the reality of the coming period of energy descent hits
the
financial markets.
________
International Monetary Fund – IMF – how does it exploit and put a
stranglehold on developing countries ? – IMF loans to developing
countries were made conditional upon acceptance of policies of
neoliberal ideology (no wonder poor, developing countries, remain in
an endless spiral of debt and under-development) For the typical
developing-country client, this meant they had to (1) reduce their
tariffs on western industrial products without compensating tariff
cuts by the industrialized countries; (2) devalue their currency and
expose it to short-term speculation by gigantic Wall street hedge
funds far larger than their central banks; (3) sell off key public
facilities to western corporations at ridiculously low prices; (4)
raise interest rates, throwing hundreds of companies into bankruptcy;
(5) remove food
subsidies to their poor while being forced to accept the right of the
West to dump subsidized food products on their market, destroying
their small farmers in the process (6). charge fees for school,
resulting in massive school-dropout rates. (7). cut social welfare
programs in order to force an unnecessary balanced budget and pay
interest on their debt to the IMF (8). switch from import substitution
to production of export-oriented materials of value to the West
(North). What we see here is a conscious attempt by the IMF to impose
on client states an ideology that was by no means universally
accepted, and in most cases not even appropriate. The result was
nothing less than a crude transfer of sovereignty from member states
to the IMF, and hence to the United States, not de jura, but de
facto.
________
World Bank – supported by associated donor countries and elite
organizations like the Paris Club imposed on developing countries by
granting them loans that were not really needed by making alliances
with wealthy elites and corrupt political leaders in developing
countries, who were allowed to pocket a sizable chunk of funds for
personal use and for their companies, which were awarded lucrative
contracts for unnecessary prestige projects. Most of the money
actually returned to the West in the form of contracts with American
and European engineering consultancies (Middle Eastern countries are
prime examples of this). US Treasury officials openly admitted that
two dollars came back for every one dollar contributed to the World
Bank in the form of procurement contracts for US exporters. The prime
goal of the World Bank and G7 countries is to use developing countries
as a cheap source of labor and raw materials and to keep them in an
endless spiral of debt.
________
World Trade Organization – WTO – The WTO has a Charter written by
corporations for corporations, a charter that puts commercial
interests above all, a charter to allow the strong to exploit the
weak. Constitutions of countries are generally based on the
sovereignty of people and countries, every constitution has protected
life above profits, but the WTO protects profits above the right to
human life and other species. The WTO “free trade” regime is in
reality a “forced trade” regime, because developing countries are
forced to accept exploitative conditions that put high tariffs on
their otherwise competitive exports, while allowing subsidized Western
products to undercut local production, this gives the country with the
strongest capital base and smallest social and environmental costs a
competitive advantage, in this case the United States. The WTO does
not support any environmentally friendly practices, example taxes on
CO2 emissions, in reality, the WTO system encourages destruction of
natural capital, the vey basis of human existence. (profits at all
costs).
________
Growth is good, not really, only ecologically sustainable growth is
good, but an economic system that treats ecology as a subordinate
rather than the other way around can never be sustainable. Thus,
neoliberal economics confuses capital depletion and return of capital,
treating depletion of natural resources as part if it were part of the
economic return, an elementary error in basic investment theory.
________
“Free markets benefit all, including the poor” – nothing is further
from the truth, the last thing that neoliberals want (Western
countries) is competitive developing countries, they want cheap labor
and cheap raw materials for their industrialized countries and a
market for their finished industrial products. The current system is
rapidly creating greater inequalities in the world, more poverty among
the poorest and more wealth among the wealthiest.
________
On Colonialism – as US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles claims to
have said “There are two ways of taking a society’s economy, one is by
armed force, the other is by financial means.
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