I watched The Ascent of Money BBC series last night. It was well worth the 4 hours of my life that it took to take it all in.  

The information prompted me to journey on an endless flow of related internet searches, and research. Last night I also had vivid dreams, a sign of reorganization in the associative networks of the brain. I'm not surprised because I was actually enthralled. To communicate the historical perspective of his book "The Ascent of Money" Niall Ferguson's miniseries takes up the mantle of James Burke's "BBC Connections" series. I was a huge fan of James Burke's uncanny ability to relate modern day entities, to seemingly unrelated events in history by illuminating the connections implied by history. "The Ascent of Money" delivers the history of money in clear connections between events, painting complete pictures of the historical relationships that shape the present day financial world. To do this, Niall Ferguson copied the Connections format exactly. All the way down to the conclusions that tag each section. While the series attempts to be impartial, I caught the author implying more than once, that we are without an alternative to this financial system. It also lacks coverage of the Fractional Reserve Lending Privilege that our government grants to the banks. I believe the author is genuinely trying to help, but lacks the imagination required to be impartial to the financial system. You have to be able to imagine all the other magnificent ways we could solve the problems that financial systems "solve" for us in order to see the current financial system for what it is. 

While the series fails to show alternatives are possible, it does do a very good job of relating every war ever fought by any nation to the decisions made by powerful banking families. I am no peddler of hate, and do not have a problem with the choices made by those in power, from Medici all the way to Rothschild and Rockefeller etc, I have no issue with the few families that maintain control of the financial systems, I am concerned that the people of the world continually choose to enable and facilitate wealth systems that don't maintain harmony with nature or neighbor. 

As the population of docile, compliant citizens of the western nations increased, the scale of violence and cultural separation between rich and poor increased in step. The correlation is so close that a metaphor of a man and woman locked into a passionate argentine tango describes the relationship between the 1% and 99% quite accurately. The people just keep coming back to dance, and the nature of the dance is inescapable: it does take two to tango. The people just kept coming back for more. For centuries.

After grokking The Ascent of Money and comparing notes with the counterculture, I am convinced that we have only three issues driving the global finance problem: 

1. The "Securitization" of Entitlements. Be they deeds, patents or copyrights, rolling them up into "Funds", "Record Labels" and "Patent Portfolios" and selling shares literally kills the commons. So we need to make every entitlement non-transferrable (period). Artists own their own music, Inventors own their own inventions and yes, Banks own their own loans. There is no other way for humankind to rediscover it self as the amazing talented builder of this wild and diverse world. Problem 

2. The Fractional Reserve Lending System grants banks the right to invent money. That's just too much to "entitle" any node in any network of relationships. It kills the "fit node" relationships discovered by Albert Laszlo Barabassi in 2002. The repeating waveform oscillation of boom/bust is based solely upon the inflation generated by the Fractional reserve system and the idea that the Bank is foreclosing on real property because you cant pay the interest on money they invented is enough to make soccer moms go "tent city" on wall street. 

3. Meaningfully Representative Government. Today, the lobby groups are the government. No way to deny it. Every bill in the Senate and House. Not one from the people. All from for-profit corporations that, by design, must maximize returns any way they can. The solution is to expand The Senate by 512 seats and the house by 1024. Allocated by population. With 1536 more people required to "win over" somehow, the Washington lobby is simply a priced out market. It becomes more difficult to go to war and more people and communities would be represented. Easing the feeling that the 99% have no say in what happens on the planet. 

I don't like war. Competition outside of a context of cooperation is savage. If you read between the lines of intrigue presented in "The Ascent of Money" you can see the trends underlying and know that The World Bank will be coming to take Iran's billions of dollars worth of gold that they removed from the bank earlier this year. If you know the history of injustice. If you understand that Iran has been brutalized internally and internationally by us, if you can see how wrong it is for us to starve their children in their own countries because of our fear of them, then you will be able to see the trap laid by nature. The true life force, which maintains all competition for survival in a context of cooperation and all consumption in a context of creation. If we go to war with Iran, because The Bank wants their Gold. We will lose.

The planet will be run by people who choose to take on the responsibility of maintaining humankind in the context of cooperation and creativity that is responsible for all of it's accomplishments. This is written in the hunger of humankind. We want to be freely connecting points, creating the patterns we invent in the diversity of potentiality extant here. There is no purpose for any entity with the discretion to restrict this, to do so now. No purpose but fear, and fear has only lead the US into the dark. If we are to derive just power to rule, we cannot commit atrocity for oil or gold. We must courageously choose to view every person on this planet as one with us, including those we perceive as mortal enemies, we must look past the fear and be an agent in support of the greater context of cooperation that sustains all life in the universe.

Gosh, this year is intense. Anyhoo. Enjoy the 4 hours of insightful financial history, amazingly free of conspiracy theory vibrations.

Posted via email from The Sid Gabriel Post