Conclusion: Regeneration Nation

In the last decade, while I was writing this book, climate change was the crisis du jour. Global warming was assumed to be predicated on atmospheric carbon caused by burning fossil fuels. The annual COP conferences, to the frustration of activists in every country, protected the oil industry. In that sense, as something that united people around the world in a common cause, it was a beautiful thing.

And that was just how they planned it. Climate change was too big for individual countries to fight alone, even if they could get their own governments on their side. A One World Problem required One World Government. We were facing extinction so drastic measures were needed—nothing was off the table.

I wrote the book and particularly this chapter within that paradigm. I now see climate change as being, at the very least weaponized, and most likely, entirely fabricated for the purpose of getting people to demand global control. Instead of climate change, geoengineering creates ‘natural’ catastrophes. The narrative serves as a cover.

What my chapter shows is that, if you prioritize principles over issues, you can’t be manipulated even if you are fooled.

There will always be another psyop. Some of them you’ll fall for, even if only for a time. As Heather B. says, you need to be unpsyopable. That doesn’t mean you can’t be fooled, it means that being fooled can’t stop your progress towards the goal. The goal is community sovereignty, where we control our labor and the property within our borders, and write rules that don’t take anything away from anyone else.

All things are possible through people coming together in voluntary networks. Nothing has been possible any other way. That’s why they need to fool us in order to rule us. If our rules come first, we can’t be divided over issues. We can’t be conquered from within. That’s being unpsyopable.

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After a while I began to understand what lay behind this plea for “solutions.” They were clamoring desperately for rescue remedies that would allow them to continue living exactly the way they were used to living, with all the accustomed comforts ranging from endless driving to universal air-conditioning, cheap fast food, reliable electric service, NASCAR, Disney World, Walmart, and good jobs with a guaranteed comfortable retirement. They didn’t want to hear anything that suggested we might have to make other arrangements for everyday life in this country.

—JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

If the master’s house caught on fire, 
the house Negro would fight harder to 
put the blaze out than the master would. 
If the master got sick, the house Negro 
would say, “What’s the matter, boss, 
we sick?” We sick!
He identified himself with his master more 
than his master identified with himself. And 
if you came to the house Negro and said,
“Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate,”
the house Negro would look at you and say,
“Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate?
Where is there a better house than this?
Where can I wear better clothes than this?
Where can I eat better food than this?”
That was that house Negro.

—MALCOLM X

Socialism never took root in America 
because the poor see themselves not 
as an exploited proletariat but as 
temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

—JOHN STEINBECK

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conclusion: regeneration nation

Capitalism and climate change work by the same mechanism, where something vital to life when stable is put into volatile circulation where it wreaks havoc around the world. With climate change, it’s carbon that’s been unearthed in fossil fuels or uprooted from forests and then vaporized, where it blankets the earth and turns up the heat in the ecosphere. With capitalism, it’s ownership that’s been uprooted from communities and put into the free market where it flashes across oceans, turning up the heat in the economy. Like carbon, airborne capital sweeps across plains, stealing the topsoil and fertility from whole continents. It causes floods of credit that wash away social services and replace them with debt and austerity. It can neither be contained nor kept out.

The word chattel, which is associated with slavery, simply means movable property. Before money’s invention, only people, livestock, and products could be traded. Once money was imposed, however, it made the slave labor that backed the currency invisible, enabling a cycle of conquest that turned land, houses, forests, water, and mineral rights into movable—and therefore tradable—property. It expanded slavery in a way that wouldn’t have been possible without a concentrated form in which lives could be turned into crumbs of gold, to be owned and controlled remotely.

Over the last 250 years, the slave trade has been formally abolished and is viewed as the worst of crimes when still practiced. Yet during the same quarter millennium, the labor of all people has been monetized. Homes are real estate investments. Childhood, education, sickness, and aging became lucrative industries rather than phases of family life. Community services, processes of nature, and even knowledge and ideas have been sucked into the capital cloud as property. It even takes seeds and turns them into patents. Rather than trade in people as chattel, all the things that life depends on have been turned into chattel, thereby enslaving the people in place. It forces us, in the first world, to be servants and collaborators in the exploitation of the field or factory slaves of the third world.

Capitalism is a system that favors the accumulation of capital wealth. Capital should be the opposite of chattel. It’s a heavy, stable, immovable rock that anchors the family, household, or community. Capital isn’t money but is the natural resources, physical infrastructure, or human skills and creativity of people, on which a price can never be put. If capitalism were a system that helped communities protect and enhance their own capital wealth, it would be a beautiful thing. But instead it’s built on the assumption that money and capital are the same, and both should flow freely on the global market.

The releasing of capital into the “free market” is like the unleashing of carbon into the atmosphere: both have had the harshest impact on those who derive no benefit, each has a momentum of its own that can’t be averted by personal actions, and neither can be merely slowed down—they can only be stopped through a complete paradigm shift. To understand this parallel, let’s look at carbon and the “taming of the spew” through intensive rotational grazing.

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grass farmers & carbon cowboys

Regenerative agriculture mimics the way in which ancient herds moved across the fields, tightly bunched against predators. Their hooves broke up the ground, embedding seeds and manure in the dirt, and creating indentations for puddles. They took one bite out of every plant in their path and then moved on, not returning to the same spot until the reverse migration in the spring.

Modern ranchers imitate nature by setting up electric fences and moving their cattle twice a day to a new salad bar, as Joel Salatin terms it. Mob-grazing a patch of ground creates humus—up to four inches per year in soil-building competitions. The humus pulls carbon out of the atmosphere and puts it back into the ground where it retains moisture and becomes food for the plants. Carbon is the building block of life and essential to growth. By banking the carbon in the dirt, it’s transformed into a magnet that produces lush growth that attracts more loose carbon and stabilizes more of it in the soil.

This is a self-proliferating cycle that, once set in motion, can clean up the damage done by fossil fuels, environmental destruction, and desertification. As with all permaculture, nature does the heavy lifting if humans know how to leverage it. As a result, holistic ranchers are increasingly seeing themselves as grass farmers with livestock as a byproduct. It’s the only organic way to reverse climate change and heal the damage.

A recent conference termed these ranchers “Artisans of the Grasslands” because they’re crafting a restorative system that builds back the earth’s natural defenses and immune system. One speaker compared the goal of mere sustainability to a doctor putting a 350-lb man on a diet in order to not gain more weight, making the point that to stay at a perilous and unhealthy tipping point isn’t enough. Instead, our goal needs to be regenerating our natural metabolism as a planet and sinking the carbon where it becomes a nutrient for life.

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lassoing capital

Free market capital, like atmospheric carbon, could be a stabilizing force if captured and sequestered locally; it could be the soil from which community grows. From a small amount of capital buried in public banks, credit could issue forth that would pull high finance speculation out of the global market and funnel real wealth back into the ground of community. Once reclaimed, this growing reserve of land and property would back a healthy cycle that supported life and diversity in its own economic ecosphere. It would replace credit conjured out of thin air with grassroots credit representing honest labor. It would dismantle smokestack capitalism—a top-down hierarchy that burns up assets to release them as anonymous commodities—with grassroots capitalism, which grows a unique culture particular to a community from the bottom up.

The United Nations distinguishes between money and wealth, and divides the latter into the categories of natural, physical, and human capital. Natural capital is the land and everything that flows over, under, and through it. Physical capital includes the buildings and infrastructure, such as communication, water, and electricity grids. Human capital encompasses the skills, education, and creativity of the people. All of these forms of capital belong by rights to the community, yet they’ve been usurped by a legal fiction called money. Fictions, however, can be rewritten to tell a new story.

It’s not enough to make an immoral and exploitative system tolerable for the few who live in developed countries. Our industrial world has been built on stolen land, stolen resources, stolen labor, and stolen lives. Capital, like atmospheric carbon, becomes a poison instead of a nutrient when allowed to fly away. Capital must be reined in from its upward rampage and brought to ground where it will do good instead of harm. Community capital has been cultivated by our ancestors and is the hope of all the world’s children. It holds the weight of the future and should never be carried off in a free market tradewind.

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giving credit its due

Grounded capital and grassroots credit can return the right of self-determination to all communities, no matter how rich or how poor. Like the symbiosis between soil and plants, they form a healthy cycle of nutrient renewal that allows for diversity rather than dictating the choices that are best everywhere. In contrast stand the solid, liquid, and gaseous states—capital, currency, and credit—of the smokestack economy, which power the machine that extracts wealth from communities, vaporizes it into money, and pumps it into the open sky of the free market. Here’s how it works:

Credit is the bodiless form of money that exists only in the ether, which comprises over 90% of what we exchange as money. Commercial banks, privately owned by wealthy individuals, create credit out of thin air, which gives them free default ownership of the houses, to be bought with thirty to sixty years (in dual incomes) of the borrowers’ labor. The borrowers’ labor monetizes the bank credit by backing it with human services, so that when it returns to the bank owners as interest, it represents a unit of trade. These bank-generated dollars are free to jump borders and float anywhere, mining cheap labor from around the world and pumping out an array of ready products. Dependence on stolen labor, like fossil fuels, makes consumers unable to resist the lures of capitalism because the things that sustain them, to bring comfort and pleasure, would be the first to go.

Instead of a consumer society, the community should be the guardians of their own commonwealth: the natural, physical, and human capital. They’re the stewards of the soil, the caretakers of the home, the protectors of the next generation. True wealth should never leave the community, trade should be only in the products of human labor. By issuing a credit rooted to stable wealth, the people who put in the work would own the product of their own labor, and the wealth would be preserved for generations to come.

As the default owner of the homes, commonwealth banks could issue mortgage credit that would free labor to serve the society’s needs. Housing costs range from 25-40% of pre-tax income, which means that 10-16 hours a week are spent in serving the banks. The same 10-16 hours per week could be spent in serving the community by providing education, healthcare, sanitation, child or eldercare, food, disaster preparedness, emergency services, or any other activity the residents wanted to enable.

In addition to the grassroots mortgage credit, a native currency could be established with a local terroir. While the dollar represents foreign extraction, a native currency could be a tradable thank you for donors to international charity. The gift would keep on giving both at home and abroad, building self-reliance in both places.

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grazing the cash cow

Capital sequestered in commonwealth banks could function like the buried carbon in the soil to start transferring ownership of wealth back into the ground of community. The Social Security Trust Fund could provide the seed capital. Peaking in the year 2020 at $2.9 trillion, it represents the accumulated retirement savings of all the generations of workers since the Great Depression. The people’s pension, as it was called, is a brilliantly designed system that has run at a surplus since its inception despite dramatic increases in the cost of living. Politicians are now worried that, as baby-boomers retire and the workforce dwindles, they may have to give this slush fund back.

However, among the public there’s a concern that the money’s no longer even there, as admitted by ex-President George W. Bush. To complicate matters, the money couldn’t be replaced without collecting it again in taxes or borrowing from the banks. For the last hundred years the Federal Government has allowed banks to usurp the right to create money. While the Constitution gives the Federal Government the sole right to coin money, banks and the bank-owned Federal Reserve have argued for a literal interpretation, keeping for themselves the right to print money or issue credit. In recent years, in response to the default crisis, a loophole has been suggested of High Value Platinum Coin Seigniorage, deemed legal by the former director of the US mint.

Using this mechanism, the Federal government could replace the fund by creating three one-trillion-dollar coins that would not be borrowed at interest from the Federal Reserve. Credit issued against the trillion dollar coins could be distributed to county-owned banks and invested into county mortgages. Through public banks, the interest would be recirculated into local jobs and subsidies. As mortgages were transferred to public banks, they would become debts to the community, to be repaid with local services and products.

Public banks are the cash cows of the economy. The capital of the Social Security Trust Fund could create a patch of fertile ground in the credit desert of local government. Public banks would ingest this credit to issue community mortgages. Ownership of the physical capital, the houses, is the manure that fertilizes the soil. This fosters the growth of lush, tender blades of new community credit, which the cash cow munches on to deposit more ownership of education and public services into the soil. As the rich underground network spreads, more capital equals more credit equals more capital. The digestive process of eminent domain can even break down false corporate claims and give ownership of the land back into the commonwealth.

According to the Rodale Institute:

Regenerative organic agriculture is marked by tendencies towards closed nutrient loops, greater diversity in the biological community, fewer annuals and more perennials, and greater reliance on internal rather than external resources. Regenerative organic agriculture is aligned with forms of agroecology practiced by farmers concerned with food sovereignty the world over.

Regenerative economics, like regenerative agriculture, is marked by closed credit loops, where what’s borrowed stays in close proximity and is repaid directly to the source. It promotes cultural diversity in the community but discourages speculators. It attracts long-term citizens seeking profits that are measured in the health of generations. Likewise, it fosters greater reliance on internal resources and reduces the dependence on externalities. Regenerative economics is aligned with people and movements the world over who are concerned with local sovereignty.

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out of thin air

The Commonwealth Council is like the holistic farmer whose public banking cash cows bring back the grasslands and biomass—the credit and capital of the economic cycle. Instead of city planners fighting for every dollar in their slim budgets, they can be visionaries; in a closed credit loop, what goes around comes around with interest. Like the farmer, the community can choose what to plant or cultivate and what to leave to its own wild devices.

With the cash cow of Commonwealth Reserve Banks, the seed capital of the Social Security Trust Fund, and the grasslands of the Commonwealth Caret, councils at the smallest level—even the neighborhood—can control their own labor, economy, and property. Libertarian policies would develop from the grassroots up with equally distributed dividends. What they plant is their choice, but the grounded capital and grassroots credit would provide the fertile soil for robust growth and organic diversity everywhere.

This book provides the foundation on which to build a revolution. The architects of the next system will need to see with open eyes what money is, who started it, why it functions so effectively, and how it became the organizing force of labor in the world today. They’ll need to understand the mechanism by which sovereignty has been stolen from communities and how it could be restored. This long-term planning calls for tough decisions and trade-offs, and quantifiable measures of success.

To go from a consumer society to a nation of producers is not a popular cause. No one is protesting that we need to work harder and have less stuff, much of it old and repaired a few times. But to sustain ourselves without exploitation—within our own borders or anywhere else—requires redefining our quality of life from the superficial to the deep and enduring. Like regenerative agriculture, it focuses on rebuilding the soil rather than producing more, bigger, faster. Capital, like carbon, is destructive in the global atmosphere but the source of life when sequestered in the ground. We need to bury the capital back where it belongs, deep in the soil of community.

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cloud capitalism

According to capitalism, no one whose labor is “marketable” should squander their time producing the food and goods that their families consume, raising their children, improving their home, or cultivating the relationships that enrich a neighborhood and community. And, in fact, few can afford it. The cost of living will rise to whatever the market will bear ... although the burden seems to fall on real people while “the market” doesn’t bear anything.

To serve the market is to return profits to investors who have put nothing into the enterprise. This money is a legal fiction of ownership over the land and its resources, over the infrastructure, businesses, and homes and over the labor, education, and invention of the people. It’s backed by a myriad of legal documents such as stock options, financial derivatives, mortgages, student loans, and intellectual property claims, designed to deprive those who do the work from the product of their labor.

A wider distribution of dollars through taxation only spreads the products of stolen labor around rather than enabling consumers to produce and producers to consume.

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rule by caret

Dollars generated by mortgages are the engine that extracts labor from first-world consumers, making them dependent on third-world production. On the other hand, commonwealth carets backed by mortgages become tradable units of stored labor that pay for goods produced and services rendered within neighborhoods and communities.

A commonwealth’s carets keep trade fair and favor neighbors over foreign nations. They provide constructive ways to save and invest, with active participation in productive enterprises that prioritize the food, goods, health, shelter, transportation, fuel, and even fun that people want and need.

Choices for how to use commonwealth carets can be pushed to the lowest level possible so that neighborhoods can build their own community centers and families can design their own school curriculum. Commonwealth carets focus resources on projects that enhance the health and well-being of the inhabitants and the beauty and biodiversity of the environment. Elders, immigrants, and indigenous populations can be recognized for the skills and knowledge they bring.

Unlike anonymous, impersonal money, commonwealth carets are impervious to theft, inflation, scams, and counterfeiting. They are a renewable resource tied to their source, not a free-floating asset.

The caret system converts the debts owed to private bankers into debts to society, a debt that we all owe. A previous generation cultivated the land, paved the roads, built the houses, taught in the schools, cared for the sick, and raised the young. The community of our forebearers includes the indigenous people from whom the land was taken, the slaves stolen from their lands to toil in this one, and the immigrants driven from their lands by military or economic occupation. The journey back to a just economy will need to partner with those who live close to the ground and learn from them how to partner with nature.

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a labor of love

A labor of love is a euphemism for unpaid work. But why should love and money be either/or? Fair payment acknowledges a job well-done and shows that a person is valued and appreciated. It provides the recipient with the capacity to be generous and pass their good fortune on to others. Money combines reciprocity with flexibility—it’s earned through doing something for someone else and spent as an expression of individual taste and choice. Money provides well-being and contentment: the serenity of having enough and the security of being free from fear. Despite the saying to the contrary, money can buy happiness or at least peace of mind.

But money in the form of bank credits replaces the relationships of community with a blank check of entitlement. When a person has money, they don’t need people who care about them. They’ll always be well-fed, housed in comfort and luxury, with every whim attended by all the servants their money can buy. Instead of “storing our meat in our neighbor’s belly,” as David Graeber quotes from Inuit tribes, money stores up the stolen labor of others. To turn our labors of love into a means of sustaining our lives, we need more than one kind of money and the ability to choose which master we’ll serve.

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love’s labor found

Judith Schwartz ends her book, Cows Save the Planet, with the question, “What is money?” Money, she concludes, is a metaphor. She continues,

... money and wealth have often been described in terms of soil. In An Agricultural Testament, Sir Albert Howard talks of industrial fertilizer as ‘transfer of the soil’s capital to the current account.’ ... And here’s a quote from Carlos Petrini, founder of Slow Food International ... ‘At the base of the economy is soil fertility. If we use money like synthetic fertilizer, we will get artificial growth, which can only last for awhile, but which lacks sustaining relationships with the earth.’

Synthetic fertilizer, like money created by banks, is a way of getting something out without putting anything in of real value. The real work of raising families and supporting neighborhoods is being done with the crumbs of time that fall from the corporate table. The true table should be the commons; the soil is the true wealth.

Community capital is the sum of our soil fertility, our skills and education, our capacity for manual labor, our infrastructure, our tools and buildings, our land, our water, and our resources. Each of these is like putting slow carbon deep into a soil bank where it regenerates life rather than burning up the atmosphere like fast carbon.

While hope may be the thing with feathers, vision is the thing with feet. It’s grounded in details and maps out the journey, with pitfalls, detours, and rest stops to enable the walker to keep putting one foot in front of the other. A map is a collective vision, the sum of all perspectives into a multifaceted symbol.

We can hope for a slow, yet steady, journey, perhaps over a generation, but it’s hard to tell what will precipitate the crisis that provides the opportunity or the lightning bolt that illuminates the vision. In the end, we can only feel our way forward in the certainty of uncertainty, as in Theodore Roetke’s poem “The Waking”:

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. 
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go. ...

Great Nature has another thing to do 
To you and me, so take the lively air, 
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

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In Russell Brand’s interview, Yuval looks at nations as spells cast by legal shaman. I answer that we need economic witches to take back the commons. I look at how nations prevent people from feeding themselves in India and profit from climate change at the COPs. Yuval states that nations make us care about the stranger but I find Israel negates that point. I imagine California breaking into 4 Swedens or 100 Icelands to be a manageable size for matrix government. Nuclear disaster, climate change, and runaway technology can all have small solutions more effective than the patriarchal pyramid of power.

In the town of Cherán in Michoacan, Mexico, the grandmothers and young people stood up to the drug cartels and government. Fourteen years later, they’re still thriving. With bonus synchronicities, here’s what they have to teach us about courage and anarchy.

Douglas Jack has spent 60 years working with elders in indigenous communities. He explains the longhouse economy, the 50-country Axis alliance for peace in WWII, scriptures that enslave, council process, and participatory empowerment. Going to the roots of words, he exposes new meaning. I respond from the perspective of my home-centered economic model of small scale sovereignty.