What are the ends and means of The Great Reset? I define them as dispossession through economics and monopoly, depopulation through military and medical, and psychological manipulation through education and media. I look at what our purpose is as societies, communities and families, and how we can measure whether their agenda or our purpose is succeeding. I explain why our existing system is the worst of both worlds because banks create the money but leave governments to care for the people. To reverse the extraction caused by predatory capital, three co-existing economies are proposed: a subsistence economy for self-reliance, a trade economy for reciprocity, and a gift economy for creativity and pure joy.
The three agendas of the Great Reset—dispossession, depopulation and psychological manipulation—aren’t in order because the latter obviously needs to precede the first two. However dispossession and depopulation can be easily measured while the hallmark of psychological manipulation is that it can’t be proven to those who don’t already see it. So we need to focus on statistics for the first two in order to raise the question of the third.
Now let’s look at the means and measures of each of those goals. Dispossession is done through economics and monopolization, particularly of energy whether that’s food or fuel. Dispossession comes in two forms: home ownership and small local businesses. So the measures of dispossession are what percentage of your population own their own homes or an independent means of making a living. How have these percentages changed in the last ten years?
Depopulation is done through military and medical means. On the military front, it doesn’t matter which side the deaths are on, or whether they’re from sanctions, direct action or weaponization—a critical caveat since, according to CNBC, NATO may be running out of weapons to give Ukraine. On the medical front, the measures are the rise or fall of all-cause mortality and the birth rate over the last ten years.
The prime mover, psychological manipulation, is perpetrated through education and media. A recent UnHerd article by David Rosado is called Where Did the Great Awokening Come From? It examines the use of terms that presume prejudice like racist, sexist, homophobe, white supremacist, misogynist, transphobe, Islamophobe, and anti-Semitic. It tracks their proliferation in academic literature in waves over the last century, each time setting a new normal threshold and their explosion in news media after 2010. If labels and politically charged name-calling is part of the strategy to divide and distract us, it’s been wildly successful.
What is our agenda? The function of any society is to support its communities, as the building block of society. The function of a community is to support families because they’re the smallest unit of community. Any system that works at one level should be able to scale up or down. The goal is the same—to enable members to take responsibility for themselves and others.
What is the inverse of The Reset Agenda on each of these points? The opposite of dispossession is self-reliance. No one can be self-reliant without the security of a place to which you belong, a community of which you’re part, and a way you can provide for your own and your family’s needs.
The opposite of depopulation isn’t population for its own sake because quantity isn’t quality. It is a system of reciprocity that enhances the ability of each to provide for the wellbeing of others. And the opposite of manipulation is the ability to think for yourself and to bring new meaning to light, which I’ll call creativity.
The system that we’re living under now—in the US or any country in the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Economic Forum (WEF)—is the worst of both worlds because bankers create the money through mortgages, claiming free ownership of the houses with the exclusive right to issue credit against them. The interest paid gets swapped to their other hand as venture capitalists on the boards of for-profit corporations. The proactive organization of labor, using housing as the reward, goes entirely to make them rich AND be seen as heroes, job-creators and philanthropists.
Government can’t organize labor proactively, using housing (or the money generated from it) as the reward. It taxes the earnings of people after their labor has served for-profit interests. Rather than being money-givers, with ample cash to spread around, they’re seen as leeches. The so-called ‘Federal’ government takes the lion’s share of taxes to give it back to corporations, the State takes a wolf’s share, and local government is the mouse nibbling at the edges.
If the full cost of a 30-yr mortgage and interest comes to 150% of the price, a 1% property tax will add 20% a year. That means that bankers, with no mission other than self-enrichment, bring in 2-3X what local governments do without lifting a finger or passing a school bond.
What local government is charged with is fixing the mess made by the corporations: all the destruction, sickness, homelessness, mental illness, addiction, poverty and hunger. Along with this they provide education and garbage collection—garbage in, garbage out. These two systems of corporatocracy and social welfare are intertwined like DNA. Without government propping up the profit-extracting machine, it would collapse under its own weight.
In the parallel system to reverse this, there are three types of economies. The first is a subsistence economy enabling people to be as self-reliant as possible, particularly in necessities like food.
The second is an economy of reciprocity that encourages the self-reliance of communities through internal trade in goods and services. This is accomplished through a digital community currency I call the caret system backed by local mortgages in commonwealth banks.
The third is an economy of creativity and cultural exchange that would be so fun it could operate as a gift economy. This is why we subsist, to bring out the best in everyone and let that light shine!
I’ve been talking with Doctor Hammer, who writes Doc Hammer’s Anvil, featuring an excellent Fishcalibur Sword and Ouroboros Snek. I met him on The Gutter, a very fun blog written by the sneakily erudite Guttermouth. In our conversation, I’ve been trying to distinguish why our money system isn’t about trade.
To illustrate, imagine teaching a kindergarten class how money works. Everyone makes things that others can buy but you give one kid all the trade tokens. What will happen? Now imagine that you distribute the tokens equally but give one kid all the desks that others need to rent in order to sit. As sociology texts explain, put 100 men on an island and make one person owner of all the people or all the land and the result will be the same.
So how do we make the transition from an economy where issuance of the money and ownership of the properties have both been monopolized? As explained in previous posts, you first need to make it illegal for any entity but government to create the money. That seems like a no-brainer and it is. As long as banks are the default owners of all properties with the ability to create the money through mortgages, we are all slaves to them.
Once that’s accomplished, however, you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Here are the incentives you can give:
a 3% fixed rate 30-year mortgage to refinance an existing mortgage in full or up to 80% of a new home.
a 3% interest rate on savings for retirement or a down payment, up to a specified maximum by age.
as shareholders in the commonwealth bank, all residents get monthly dividends in targeted areas of locally produced food, wellcare, education and home improvement.
a 2:1 advantage over non-residents in buying or renting property with carets worth twice the imperial currency.
a 2:1 advantage over outside corporations in selling products or services, or renting out property, once money that leaves the commonwealth is taxed.
the ability to exchange the imperial currency for carets at a 1:1 ratio up to a maximum per month and pay no income or sales tax for local goods or services.
the ability to earn dividends by providing food, wellcare, any form of education or home improvements, and pay no income or sales tax on your earnings.
participation in a social security pension that’s funded to last forever.
The only downside is that expenses in the imperial currency, above the maximum or outside the commonwealth, are taxed to keep money at home. Not a bad trade!
There’s a big difference between ‘we can’t change the system’ and ‘if you can’t explain how to change the system in 15 minutes, it can’t be done!’ So if you’d like to do more research, here’s Reversing the Reset:
With the consequences of the Great Reset becoming evident, but even those affected not wanting to see it, what's the most helpful thing we can do? I give the perspective of A Course in Miracles, having just finished the 670 pp manual once again. I look at The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow for an anthropology of anarchy. Vladimir Putin's June 17th address at St. Petersburg was an astute analysis of Europe and the US, with economic policies for Russia that support small business and home ownership. I apply his principles to the micro-communities we may need to start when economies in the West come crashing down, and show why it could be better than we'd dared to hope.
and here is Build a New Model:
Buckminster Fuller said that to change things, you can’t fight the existing reality. You have to build a new model that makes the old model obsolete. This episode outlines ten universal principles of a new model, including the purpose of government, how to measure its success or failure, what community wealth really is, how to protect and proliferate it, the intergenerational transfer of wealth, and paying your debt to society backwards and forwards. I begin by talking about the spiritual and metaphysical obstacles that keep us from imagining a new model and how to remove them in your own psyche. Based on my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, I end with the three powers that communities require in order to control their own labor: debt, tax & cash.
You know how much I love what you're doing; we need more people like you if we're going to survive. That said, from my humble perspective, it appears that "they" are winning, and the only consolation we will be left with is reorganizing at the local community level, if we can. That will not be easy, but it will be essential for those few of us who survive the great reset.
For the community bank, you should contact Ellen Brown, a public bank expert. If you don't have her email, I can send it.