Glossary of Terms

Corporatocracy A dictatorial socio-politico-economic system or structure in which vast corporations, under control of a few ultra-wealthy individuals, control a country via a combination of propaganda (marketing, advertising and control of media), divide-and-conquer tactics and economic disempowerment of the vast majority of the population, and domination or subsumption of the government and its personnel through economic and other forms of manipulation, intimidation and influence.

Neo-Feudal Lords Under classic feudalism, a very few people (Kings, Queens, Emperors, Kaisers, Tzars, etc.) own and control all of the land and resources, including the people who live in the realm. Their control is enforced by an upper class of nobles and soldiers (knights) who are subservient to the rulers. These are given dominion over portions of the realm in exchange for enforcing the will of the rulers. All other residents are serfs, peasants, or a very few craftspeople who have no rights other than try to survive on what is left over of the fruits of their labor after the rulers and their agents have taken what they want, and to unquestioningly submit to their whims and decrees. The lower classes, the vast majority, have no property or rights except at the whim of the rulers and their agents. Capitalism is functionally indistinguishable from Feudalism, even though the titles, legal definitions, and trappings are different. Under Capitalism, increasingly over the passage of time, a handful of ultra-wealthy people control nearly all of the land and the resources on it, often through gargantuan corporations that they run. The people living in those lands have no rights in practice except to pay the owners whatever they decide to ask, for all goods and services from a place to live to medical services to education, out of whatever that same ruling sector decides to pay them for their work. It goes without saying that for the vast majority of modern-day serfs, artisans and peasants, what they are paid by the owners is less than or barely enough to cover the cost of living. Therefore the elite members of this tiny controlling segment of the population are referred to as Neo-Feudal Lords.

Parasitic Industries Industries, businesses and enterprises that forcibly charge money in exchange for no true value. In most cases, parasitic industries prey upon need brought about and imposed through the draconian dynamics of Capitalist societies. In any paradigm, value-producing industries provide needed or desired goods and services, such as food, electricity, consumer goods, communication, healthcare, maintenance, or repairs, whether for pay or organically and freely flowing. Parasitic industries, on the other hand, arise out of the artificial shortages and obstacles to access imposed on all persons under Capitalism. Insurance companies are a prime example. When the cost of healthcare, home and vehicle maintenance and repair, disaster recovery, or liability is far beyond the reach of nearly everybody, insurance companies arise who charge a monthly fee in exchange for covering the cost of such expenses should they arise. Such businesses do detailed statistical analyses of the likelihood of various covered events, and structure their plans so that they take in a steady profit while paying out the least possible amount on claims. Such businesses pay adjusters and attorneys to find any and every possible legally enforceable way to avoid or minimize paying claims. When not legally prevented from doing so, such companies withhold coverage for pre-existing conditions, such that anybody with a chronic or recurring health condition either cannot get coverage or must pay prohibitive amounts. Thus the insurance industry takes advantage of the inaccessibility of vital services imposed by Capitalism and parasitizes clients, making themselves the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being the possibility of encountering a catastrophic event without coverage. However, insured individuals often find themselves fighting long, expensive legal battles to get the coverage for which they have paid. To make matters worse, these extremely powerful and lucrative industries lobby and otherwise influence legislators in many cases to legally force people to buy insurance, as is seen most prominently in the auto insurance industry. Other legal parasitic industries include stockbrokerages, real estate agencies, all financial services industries, pawn shops, advertising and marketing agencies, collection and repossession agencies, corporate attorneys, telemarketers and more. Illegal parasitic industries also flourish in Capitalist environments, such as identity theft, illegal pyramid schemes, scams of every kind, Ponzi schemes and more. A well-known example of an illegal parasitic industry is the “protection racket” in which citizens or small business owners are threatened with harm to person or property if they don’t pay “protection money” to prevent threatened vandalism or bodily harm.

Reverse Strike A strategy for implementing a complete change of socio-economic paradigm in which, with specific exceptions, all persons continue to perform their jobs and functions in the community while ceasing, abstaining from participating in, and blocking all financial activity. Producers, providers, and distributors of goods and services continue their normal activities. The stoppage is in the economic end of things. Cashiers ring merchandise out for inventory purposes but price-modify everything to zero. Billing departments mark all accounts current and paid in full, and cease all billing activities. All persons cease paying for anything, from groceries to rent or mortgage to medical care. All financial institutions including banks, credit unions, the Stock Exchange, collections and repossession agencies, credit card companies, insurance companies, etc. will be shut down, cut off from power and communications, and rendered inert, preferably by will of those who work in them, but by external agency if necessary (i.e. blocking entrances with vehicles, dumpsters and other obstacles; cutting power and communications lines; jamming cellular reception, etc.). Chains of command will be ignored and forcibly resisted if necessary as employees take democratic control of all operations. Any attempts to use police, military or mercenaries to re-assert control of the chain of command will also be met with resistance and non-compliance. This is in contrast to a traditional strike, where production and distribution are disrupted by employees in order to gain concessions from employers. In the reverse strike, the goal is not concessions but a complete change in paradigm. Employers have nothing that we want or need. The ones bringing the change are the ones keeping goods and services flowing, which forces those trying to suppress it into the role of the terrorists trying to shut vital services down. With millions of cell phones and other devices streaming and recording the events, the country and the world will quickly see the real situation. The majority of people will sympathize with and support the change-bringers. The wealthy and powerful around the world will oppose. But in the long run they cannot prevail if we are resolute, united and committed to bringing the Transition.’’

The self-devouring cycle The economic pattern of forced overproduction and overconsumption necessary to keep Capitalist paradigms functioning optimally according to Capitalist metrics. This cycle is characterized by the overproduction of inferior products that are deliberately manufactured to have a short lifespan, to be non-reparable and non-upgradeable. Since products break, expire or wear out quickly, consumers must frequently replace them. This guarantees constant profits for manufacturers and vendors, at the expense of artificially and unnecessarily stressful demands on employees and constant unnecessary economic drain on consumers, who are the same employees who work in production. This cycle also entails unnecessary depletion of natural resources, pollution, and waste. It is an economic pattern which forces employees to work under constant debilitating stress, devouring their time and life-enerty in order to produce throwaway goods in order to be able to pay to endlessly replace these same goods. The only participants in the cycle who benefit are the neo-Feudal Lords at the very top of the economic Pyramid who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the paradigm.

Transition The forceful but non-violent process of shutting down a dysfunctional, destructive hierarchical paradigm such as Capitalism, undisguised or disguised dictatorship, oligarchy, monarchy, or theocracy and implementing a peer-based, synergistic paradigm in its place that is based on co-operation, symbiosis, democratic or consensus-based decision-making, and what thousands of years of experience and recent advances in psycho-social science have taught us about human behaviors, responses, and motivations and what influences them. The Transition is usually to be brought out through implementation of the reverse strike strategy in most countries. Transition is distinguished from Revolution since the latter has historically become associated with violent, often bloody overthrows of governments, often leading to atrocities committed by all sides. In contrast, Transition, while involving the overthrow of one paradigm and replacing it with a different one, emphasizes the use of non-violent force, an ethic of compassion and humanity precluding vengeance or purging of deposed former persons in power, and decentralized control and responsibility. Transition is not the overthrow of government, but of the economic power structure.

Analysis and Graphic Representations of Important Data, Principles, and Concepts

Note how clearly the economic income disparity shows in this graph. The income of the bottom 99% of the population is so dwarfed by that of the top 1% and even the top 0.01%, that it appears as a horizontal line near zero. In reality that horizontal line covers the range from $0 yearly income to roughly $301,000 for individuals and $450,000 for households. In most graphical representations of data with such an extreme range, a logarithmic scale is used in order to visualize greater detail. Here, however, the data is presented unaltered, in order to show the true degree of disparity currently existing in the United States, a strong representation of the real-life example of an end-stage Capitalist society.

For those who are not math-minded, percentile means that if you are in the X’th Percentile, than your income is the same or greater than X% of the population. Thus the 50th percentile represents what is called the median income, which means that half the population (50%) has income greater than this amount and half has income less than this amount. At the time of this writing, the median annual income for individuals is approximately $36,310 and $57,028 for households.

As will become clear in Figure 2, a living wage for an individual is approximately $25,100 and for households between $40,581 - $53,061 depending on the number of people in the household up to 2 adults and 2 children. The data shows that approximately 34% of individuals and 37% - 48% of households in the United States are living at sub or just barely living level.

Below is a logarithmic representation of the same data as above. Note that even with the scale condensed by using orders of magnitude, the disparity is unmistakably dramatic. Even in this representation, the income of those very few at the top of the pyramid dwarfs that of all of the rest of the people.

Note that for those capitalist feudal lords in the top 0.001 percentile, the reality is vastly different than that of the overwhelming majority of the population. If a billionaire or corporation is in danger of going out of business, then the government takes money from the rest of the population (in the form of tax money) and gives it to the lord or corporation to keep them in business. If a CEO is fired for unethical behavior or mismanagement, they are given a bonus of millions of dollars. If a serf, meaning anybody not at the top of the pyramid, experiences financial hardships, then banks charge them recurring and escalating fees, thus ensuring their demise. If such a person is found guilty of unethical behavior or incompetence, then they are fired and possibly jailed. This is a snapshot of a truly Feudal society as prevailed in Europe in the Middle Ages, not of a free and democratic society of, by, and for The People.

As seen below, leaving out the top 1% allows a more detailed view of the disparity among 99% of us, though it is still quite a steep level of disparity. The colored horizontal and vertical lines on the graph show at what percentiles these metrics fall. Note that approximately 17% of individuals and 14% - 22% of households live below the Federally defined poverty line, which itself is $12,960 less than a living wage for individuals and $24,121 - $29,188 less than a living wage for households, which shows how unrealistic the U.S. government is in evaluating the well-being of its inhabitants. The reason for this degree of unrealism is twofold: One reason is that those elected to work in the executive, legislative and judiciary Federal Government are generally either from or closely tied to those at the top of the economic pyramid and so are truly out of touch with the reality for the overwhelming majority of people. The other reason is because of the disproportionate degree of influence that lobbyists for mega-corporations and the ultra-wealthy exert upon those in government.

It is worth noting that minimum wage in the United States, a kind of “safety net” originally intended to guarantee employees a living wage, falls woefully short. The Federal annual Minimum Wage is $15,080. Calculating a weighted average of State minimum wages shows a slightly better picture of $17,784. Thus the federal minimum wage is $10,020 less than a living wage for an individual, while the state minimum wage weighted average is $7,316 short. Keep in mind that a living wage means that one’s income just pays living expenses when nothing unexpected comes up. The reason for this disconnect from reality is that the pressure exerted by mega-corporations and the ultra-wealthy upon lawmakers is much stronger than that of the People. Working people put pressure on the government to guarantee a living wage; the new-feudal lords pressure to limit such protections. The result is anemic protections that fall far short of their intended purpose. This is where the pressures on government from the People and from the feudal lords and corporations find equilibrium. This is one more practical example of the fact that capitalism cannot, by its very nature, be modified or regulated into a form that works for the People.

In order to get a detailed picture of these data, we must look at only the bottom 50% of the population. Here we see clearly that hundreds of millions of people in the United States are subsisting on sub or barely living income. Keep in mind that “living wage” means that one’s income just covers living expenses with nothing left over. If any added expense occurs, such as car repair, inflation, deductibles and copays for medical procedures, attorney fees, or even parking or traffic tickets, for example, then such income does not suffice. It also does not cover entertainment, vacations, etc. It covers a life of work and bare subsistence. In order to be able to absorb typical unexpected expenses, one must be making considerably more than a living wage. Thus, the proportion of the U.S. population that lives in constant economic stress is considerably more than half.

The disparity between the bottom 99% and the uppermost 1% in the economic pyramid is replicated very closely within the upper 1%.

While it is very difficult to access detailed information about the very top one percent of the pyramid, data can be found. Sadly this data is not nearly as complete or high resolution as that pertaining to the lower 99%. One reason for this is that most studies do not go beyond resolution of percents. There are not many studies breaking the data down within a percentile. Many studies content themselves with “quintiles,” each quintile representing 20% of the income distribution. Another reason is that the people in the upper one percent prefer not to be subject to much public scrutiny, instinctively realizing that such scrutiny could expose them to danger from hundreds of millions of angry fellow citizens. In fact, these people are knowingly and deliberately protected in statistical reporting. The “Current Population Survey” in the United States is one of the most reliable sources of up-to-date information on changes in salary. Yet they employ what is called “top-coding” of all people whose salaries are more than $2,884.61 per week (about $150,000 per year). All persons with salaries above that figure are reported as $2,884.61 per week, representing the 95th percentile. This has continued unchanged for the past twenty years. Of course, those at the very top of the pyramid cannot completely avoid public exposure, due to their prominence in influencing economic policy. These neo-Feudal lords can afford to be in public view because their wealth buys them security that rivals that of heads of state. Observe how similar Figure 4, breaking down within the upper 1%, is to Figure 1, breaking down the entire population. (Figure 1 representing the chart for the entire population is inset for comparison.)

The Forbes Magazine list of the 400 wealthiest Americans represents approximately .0000012 (0.00012%) of the population, or about 1.2 out of every million people. Consider that Federal minimum wage is $15,080 per year. In contrast, as of 2018 these wealthiest 400 U.S. citizens controlled combined known wealth of approximately $2,900,000,000,000, or nearly three trillion dollars. This wealth is equivalent to the combined annual earnings of 192,397,692 people working at minimum wage, 115,537,848 individuals living at barely living wages, or 71,462,014 – 54,654,077 families of 2 to 4 people at barely living wages. These 400 people control more wealth than the bottom sixty percent of Americans – about 196,060,000 people.

The highest-earning individual in the United States in 2017 made $78,500,000,000. This one person’s income is roughly equivalent to the combined yearly earnings of 5,203,844 people working at minimum wage. That is more people than the population of any of 29 out of the 50 states. Translated into the equivalent in hourly wages for a 40-hour week, this would represent $37,740,384 per hour.

A recent article by Noah Kirsch in Forbes Magazine, a mainstream U.S. economic publication whose audience is those in the upper reaches of the economic Pyramid, states unapologetically that the richest three individuals in the United States control more wealth among them than the entire bottom 50% of the U.S. population combined. This is indistinguishable from the distribution in most feudal societies.

The only way to see any degree of detail within the top one percent is to view only 99.0% through 99.7%. Including even the 99.8th percentile squashes the bottom ¾ of the top 1% into a nearly flat line.

The disparity is so extreme that the human mind struggles to process it and encompass its implications and reality. Disparities within a given corporation are typically quite staggering as well:

Company Name CEO Salary Median Salary Disparity Ratio

Marathon Petroleum $19,799,220 $27,730 714 Whirlpool $11,840,330 $20,485 578 Tesla $228,403,884 $56,163 40,668 Kroger $12,032,496 $24,912 483 Walmart $23,620,352 $21,952 1,076 Gap $17,863,632 $5,831 3,566 Walt Disney Co. $65,662,896 $46,127 1,424 McDonalds $15,872,652 $7,473 2,124 CVS $21,956,922 $35,529 618 Target $17,210,713 $22,439 767

Another way to quantify the relative financial realities of the population is in terms of “net worth.” This represents the resources and assets that a person owns or controls, after their debts and expenses are subtracted. This may include currency, real estate, investments (stocks, bonds, etc), possessions, precious metals and gemstones, profitable businesses, income over and above expenses, and more. When all percentiles are taken into account, this chart very closely resembles those showing income, though the gradient is a little bit steeper at the upper end. Note, as well, the existence of negative net worth values in the graph.

In order to see any level of detail, once again we must leave out the uppermost reaches of the Pyramid, which otherwise dwarfs the other 99% and more to a straight, horizontal line by comparison. That horizontal-appearing line spans a range from less than -$81,000 at the low end to around $10,000,000 at the high end.

In order to see more detail, we can include no more than the bottom 90% of U.S. “net worth,” which allows us to explore those negative numbers. The worst-off people in the first percentile (the bottom 1%) on average have a net worth of approximately -$81,088. This means that when all of their debts and expenses are added to their assets and resources, they are left owing $81,088. In their economic situation, this bottom first percentile has virtually no chance of ever being able to recover. Many employers will not offer them a job, no lenders will loan to them, and their creditors will steadily increase the interest, finance fees, late fees, insufficient funds fees and other burdens upon those unfortunate enough to be in that demographic. Creditors eventually send delinquent accounts to collection agencies that relentlessly harass and terrorize debtors and eventually obtain court orders garnishing these unfortunate souls’ already meager salaries, driving them even deeper into the proverbial hole, leaving them no viable recourse. Even filing bankruptcy is beyond their means. The normal functioning of the capitalist paradigm works to deepen the plight of people in this situation, which also leads to losses on the parts of creditors.

Here we see Capitalism not just functioning as a win-loose-loose-loose-loose-loose paradigm, but as a no-win-for-anybody paradigm. All that is accomplished is to punish the people at the very bottom of the pyramid and grind them into the ground for no constructive purpose. It is important to note that the bottom 10% of the working population have negative net worth. In a population of approximately 329,000,000 people, that means that about 32,900,000 people are in that situation; actually more, when one considers that a good portion of these people are members of family units with children and in reality represent more people who are affected.

There is no real point in attempting to graph the very upper reaches of the net worth pyramid. It resembles the income pyramid but is even steeper. The upper reaches of the 99.9th percentile show net worth in the vicinity of $43,000,000 while the highest of the 99.999th percentile shows net worth of over $160,000,000,000. Here again we see, even within the upper one percent, a sharp stratification mimicking that between the uppermost percentile and the lower 99% of the population in terms of net worth.

Needless to say, nobody below the 33rd percentile has even the theoretical possibility of being able to “use money to make money.” Even those at the 50th percentile, who are actually able to save some after living expenses are paid, are barely able to absorb any unexpected expenses, such as uncovered medical or dental bills, legal costs, replacing or repairing a car, roof replacement, fumigation, electrical rewiring, major plumbing work, or college tuition. Just one such event can wipe out their resources or even leave them in debt. Even if they have some investments, most likely they will need to cash them in to cover such an event.

The most basic right is the right to life, which implies the right to occupy space. If you do not have that right, your right to exist is effectively nullified. As discussed in the body of this book, owning a home is preferable to renting in Capitalist societies, for obvious reasons. Statistics show that as of 2017, approximately 64% of the U.S. population “own” their residences and approximately 36% rent. On the surface, this looks not too dire; yet this statistic is misleading. Of the 64% who are counted as “owning” their homes in 2017, approximately 64% have are paying off a mortgage. Only 36% own their homes outright. The picture is a lot less rosy than it would appear. Keep in mind that as long as you have a mortgage, the bank or other lender owns the home until it’s paid off. Persons with mortgages are generally counted as “homeowners. This creates a misleading impression. When one combines renters and homeowners with mortgages together in the category of those who don’t in reality own their home, one arrives at a more accurate picture.

Thus we see that 76.34% of people living in the U.S. (248,639,380 people) are paying every month for their residence, and only 23.7% (77,190,900) own their homes outright. This roughly translates into a reality in which anybody below the 76’th income and net worth percentile is probably having to ransom their life every month. In other words, if a family in 2017 was bringing in less than $109,033 a year with a net worth of less than $394,356, then they were most likely hostage to a landlord or lender and could lose their place to live if their livelihood were lost or catastrophic expenses occurred. Even the majority of those who do own their homes outright are still not part of the microscopic sector of the population who control and own almost everything. They no longer must pay protection money every month to live in their home; but one has to be far, far beyond the 76th percentile to be among the ruling elite. These non-ruling-elite true homeowners correspond roughly to those who, in the Middle Ages, were granted a higher level of privileges than peasants and serfs but still wielded little power. Both groups could fairly easily lose what they have.

Of course the correlation of full home ownership to altitude on the economic pyramid is not as clear-cut as that of income and overall wealth, since paying off a mortgage transforms a person from a de-facto renter with bank as landlord to actual owner, as does inheriting a house from a parent or other relative who passes away. Many mortgages are either 15 or 30 years. Those who complete those years without missing payments do become true homeowners, regardless of where they are on the economic pyramid. In the dynamics of contemporary American society, however, it is increasingly difficult for a family to remain in the same home for the whole course of a mortgage. Job loss, job-related and other relocations, breakups of families, unforeseen catastrophic expenses, inflation that outpaces wages, and many other factors quite often intervene. In such a case, the house is sold, a home equity line of credit, second mortgage, or reverse mortgage is taken out, or the bank forecloses on the home, depending on the circumstances. The fact remains that only 23.7 percent of U.S. residents do not have to pay rent or mortgage every month to keep their home.

There are an estimated 554,000 people homeless in the United States, while approximately 12.7% of living units – about 17,298,000 units – are unoccupied. In other words, there are dramatically more than enough living units available to accommodate both the entire homeless population and a large number of refugees and/or future residents. This illustrates the inescapable fact that the primary products of Capitalism are shortage and inaccessibility. There is demonstrably no actual housing shortage. Yet over half a million people have no place to live because one has access to precisely nothing under Capitalist paradigms unless one comes up with money to pay for it. Many of the homeless are veterans who risked their lives to protect the country. This situation also clearly spotlights the destructive forced overproduction/overconsumption characteristic of Capitalist paradigms. New home construction continues at an undiminished pace, even though there are already more than enough living units to house all residents. In 2017, 1,280,000 new living units (of all kinds) were built. That alone is more than double what is needed to accommodate the entire homeless population with a lot to spare. This is clearly unsustainable long-term, wasteful and destructive, and does not serve the well-being of any but the very wealthy neo-Feudal lords who own and control a rapidly growing, vast share of all resources including land and dwellings.

Looking in four dimensions, we see that the disparity has been steadily growing over time in home ownership along with income and overall wealth. In 1945, about 55% of homeowners were mortgage-free. In 1960, approximately 42% of U.S. homeowners owned their houses outright, which dropped to 39% by 1970. By 1980, 35% were mortgage-free. Then that figure stayed relatively stable until recently. In 2019, it has dropped to 29.3%. The trend is unmistakable. (Data from the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, statista.com, National Multifamily Housing Council among others. Data is consistent across sources.)

The following table summarizes the data on housing in the United States, specifically in 2017:

Number of Housing Units Percent of total of Units Number of People Percent of population Rented 44,644,511 31.7% 111,611,278 34.27% Owned with mortgage 50,324,347 35.6% 137,016,701 42.07% Total Paying Monthly 94,968,858 67.3% 248,627,979 76.34% Owned Outright 28,296,402 20.1% 77,071,895 23.7% Vacant 17,737,369 12.6% 0 0 Homeless 0 0 554,000 .15% Total 141,673,953 100% 325,700,000 100%

While it is difficult to determine the precise amount of income and savings that a person or family in a Capitalist society such as the United States needs in order to more than barely survive paycheck to paycheck, there is a plethora of material written by “financial experts” advising those lower in the Pyramid on how to achieve “financial freedom.” General intentions and goals include preparedness for unexpected emergencies, job/income loss, and retirement. At living-wage, however, any emergency or job-loss translates into pretty much instant homelessness. Any major expense is impossible to surmount. Retirement is a myth as remote as unicorns and the ancient Greek gods.

A number of experts advise struggling wage earners to try to earn enough to save 20% - 30% of their take-home pay. Similar advice suggests to save enough money to cover 3 – 6 months of living expenses in case of job loss, plus an additional 3 – 6 months’ worth of money to cover unexpected emergencies. Finally, for retirement, many financial advisors recommend saving up a nest-egg of 22 times one’s accustomed annual living expenses.

Let’s see what this looks like for an individual or family living paycheck-to-paycheck. For an individual, a living wage is $25,106. At that income level, living expenses consume income with nothing owed and none left over. To make 20% - 30% more that can be saved, such an individual must make $30,127 – $32,638, which would put them in the 39th – 43rd percentile instead of the 33rd. A family living on just-living wages would have to attain and sustain an income of $48,697 - $70,574 in order to save 20% - 30%. This would require them to go from the 36th – 47th percentiles to the 42nd – 58th percentiles. All if this is assuming that one can jump 6 – 9 percentiles as a matter of course, which is obviously far from certain. Given the core structure and functioning of the Capitalist paradigm, while it is occasionally possible individually, it is literally impossible on a large scale. No matter how hard we work, only a very few occupants of these lower percentiles will ever be able to follow this financial advice.

Using the above advice, in order to save 3 – 6 months’ worth for emergencies plus another 3 – 6 months’ worth to live on in case of job loss, it will take all of these individuals and families 2 ½ years to save 6 months’ worth of living and emergency funds by saving 20%. It will take 5 years to save up 12 months’ combined living and emergency funds by saving 20%. If they are fortunate enough to be able to save 30%, then it will take 1 2/3 years to save up a 6-month buffer or 3 1/3 years to save up 12 months worth of combined buffer funds.

As for the goal of saving 22 times their annual living expenses for retirement, that comes out to a target of $552,362 for an individual (the 81st percentile of “net worth”), and $892,782 - $1,194,336 (the 87th – 90th percentiles of “net worth” respectively) for a family (ranging from two adults at the low end, to two adults plus two children at the high end). For all of these people, if they are saving 20% above living wage, it will take them 110 years to attain the goal. If they are fortunate enough to be able to save 30%, then they might just have time to reach the goal in only 73 years and 4 months. That would start counting after the 6 – 12 months’ emergency and living expense money are saved, so add another 1.66 to 5 years. This is assuming that no costly emergencies occur along the way and that there are no job losses that would consume the savings.

Clearly, there are some serious obstacles to reaching these goals. Given the vicissitudes of life under Capitalist paradigms, it is likely to take longer than the theoretical time just to attain the smaller goal of saving 6 – 12 months’ buffer, since more often than not there will be expensive car repairs, plumbing issues, uncovered medical expenses, attorney fees, home repairs, traffic tickets, and other unforeseeable expenses that will prolong the process. For most of us, the only way to attain such a goal in this paradigm is to work 1 ½ - 2 jobs per person for many years.

These figures and estimates are based on the assumption that people will only work, attend to errands, chores, bills and other living expenses, sleep, and save. These calculations do not figure in additional expenses such as minimal entertainment, trade school or higher education for the wage-earners or their children, vacations, hobbies, supporting children in extracurricular activities (sports, arts, and social organizations), and other “discretionary” expenses. These are not extravagances. They are activities that are common in a given culture. It is the rare individual or family that only works, does chores and errands, pays bills, and sleeps and whose children only go to school, come home and do homework, eat, and go to sleep. Thus, the figure of earning enough to save 20% - 30% of one’s salary is unrealistically low.

Obviously the goal of saving 22 years’ worth of living expenses for retirement is, to say the least, tenuous to completely unattainable. It is also unrealistically optimistic, since in the course of one’s working life and retirement, there will be inflation in any Capitalist culture. This is enforced by the very pyramidal structure of the economic paradigm. There will never be enough room high enough on the pyramid for more than a few. Since one’s rights, options, freedom, quality of life, respect afforded and access to resources are almost entirely determined by one’s economic status, we see once again that Capitalism is inherently incompatible with government of, by, and for an empowered, fulfilled, fully actualized people. That is inherent in the paradigm. Such a paradigm cannot be fixed by regulating or tweaking. The only solution is to scrap this nonviable paradigm and replace it with one that works.

Let us now examine another, little-spoken-of perspective: our time is our life.

If one is working for a sub-living wage, one’s most likely options are to live on the street, do without things like electricity or food, or work two or more jobs. In the industrialized world, a 40-hour work week has been an unofficial (and in some cases official) standard that is considered reasonable to work in order to pay off those who would deny us the right to continue existing.

There are 168 hours in a week. If one works 40 hours a week, then one has 128 hours left for other activities. Doctors agree pretty widely that in order to maintain optimum health, we need to sleep about 8 hours per day, which translates to 56 hours a week sleeping. If you work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and sleep 8 hours a day every day, that leaves you with 72 hours a week for other activities. This translates to about 8 hours a day on workdays and 16 hours a day on weekend days.

That sounds like a lot; but it takes time to cook, eat, do laundry, do grocery and other shopping, do household chores, bathe, pay bills, take care of medical and other necessities and more. If one has children, then one needs to spend time with them, likewise with spouses, friends, other family and so forth. Time-use statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor and other sources show that a typical work commute is about half an hour each way or one hour a day, or about 5 hours a week. Estimates on how much time a typical person spends a week on household chores and maintenance range from 2 hours a day, translating to 14 hours a week, to 20 hours a week. Families with children spend an average of 2 hours per day in childcare, or about 14 hours a week. Grocery shopping, counting commute to and from, at 1.5 times a week, comes to 1.5 hours a week. This does not count other errands such as trips to the hardware store, government agencies, doctors, dentists, and more. Estimates and surveys show that the average American spends about 70 minutes a day eating or about 8.20 hours a week. When one figures in these unavoidable, necessary activities, one is left with approximately 41.3 or about 41 hours and 20 minutes per week of free time. This averages out to around 5.9 hours a day. This figure is generous. If one spends 20 hours a week in household chores and maintenance instead of 14, then one has 35 hours and 20 minutes a week free, or just over 5 hours a day. Note that time spent on grooming, bathing, miscellaneous errands such as doctor’s appointments, trips to mechanics, talking on the phone paying, clarifying or contesting bills, working out at the gym for health, and more is not figured in.

If one is working 60 hours, equivalent to one and a half jobs, as many must, especially at the lowermost reaches of the pyramid, then one’s free time per week is decreased to 41.3 – 20 = 21.3 hours a week, averaging out to just 3 hours free per day. At 80 hours a week, two jobs, one is reduced to about one hour and 20 minutes of free time a week. And let’s not forget the commute time to the second job.

Some Capitalist apologists argue that typical CEO’s may work 60 hours or more a week. This is a specious and meaningless assertion, even if it were accurate. A person in the lower 18th – 35th percentiles of the pyramid who works 60 hours a week has no other options. Such a person is doing so from a disadvantaged position of constant attrition in a losing struggle for survival. He or she most likely cannot take or even afford a vacation, and is typically enduring demeaning treatment most of the time. The CEO who works 60 hours a week does not actually need to work. He or she could retire at any time and live very comfortably for the rest of their life and then pass on a similar legacy to their descendants. The CEO does not need to concern him or herself with home maintenance, errands, chores and such things; they under-pay a staff of people to do all of that. Most of them don’t even deal with traffic on their commute. They under-pay a chauffeur to drive, so they are free to conduct business or relax during their commute. The CEO is treated with deference and respect, and is able to take a vacation any time they choose, in any form or location that they choose. Any attempt to justify the disparity is uninformed at best and heartlessly inhumane at worst, and in either case is utterly untenable.

The chart below shows, for those living at or below a living wage, how many hours one has to work in order to afford to pay for the privilege of being permitted to continue existing.

Most readers will know all too well the impact of having to work 50 – 80 hours a week just to buy the privilege of being allowed to continue existing. The chronic stress, sleep deprivation, and mental, emotional and physical depletion are severely injurious to every aspect of life. It translates into less time and energy to spend with spouse and/or children, which takes a heavy toll on relationships. This has a destructive impact on growing children that is propagated, perpetuated, and magnified from generation to generation across long swaths of time. There is truly little difference between the life of a modern-day wage slave and that of a medieval serf. Only the distractions and technology are different.

From Figure 8, it is clear that for individuals below about the 18th percentile (Approximately 19,890,000 individuals supporting approximately 962,559 children) and households below about the 25th percentile (Assuming two adults per household, this includes approximately 67,801,225 adults who are supporting approximately 18,425,000 children), even working two jobs, 80 hours, per week still cannot meet living expenses. One can easily see the causal relationship between this reality and the negative “net worth” experienced by those lowest on the pyramid.

The data for weighted average minimum wage among states shows how many hours per week are necessary sustain the family unit at that wage for one adult, a couple, a single parent with one child, and two parents with two children respectively.

When we look at the trends over time, we can see that the economic bottom half of the population in the United States has never gained true freedom from this form of bondage. Figure 9 only goes through the 50th Percentile – the Median – in order to show the lower reaches in finer detail. When we add percentiles through the 95th, we see how the upper reaches dwarf the rest (Figure 9a). Were we to include the 99th percentile, much less the 99.999th percentile, the growth in their income over time would tower over the rest, which would be scrunched into a line barely distinguishable from the graphs of income distribution in the present time. In other words, the highest rarified reaches of the pyramid are not just accumulating and controlling a vastly disproportionate portion of wealth and resources, but the trend has been accelerating over time. This clearly illustrates the inevitable outcome of all Capitalist paradigms – a complete reversion to a Feudal society. If we extend and project these trends over time, we can see that at some point in the not distant future, the top 1/1000th of a percent will control virtually everything, leaving the rest literally with nothing.

Note above, that the Federal Minimum Wage in the U.S. has consistently fallen below even the living wage for a single individual. That gap clearly has widened dramatically since 1980. Observe that the bottom 20 percent of the population of single individuals generally find their income a bit below a living wage. A childless couple (living wage: 2 adults in graph) can manage a living wage only if they are near the 40th percentile. A family including 1 – 2 adults and 1 – 2 children must be near the 50th percentile to achieve a living wage. Note that these trends have remained consistent for over three quarters of a century.

In Figure 9a, we clearly see that the third quintile (40th through 60th percentiles) has outpaced the lower 40 percent of the population by a modest margin. The 60th through 80th percentile has outpaced those below them by nearly double. The upper 95th percentile has increased their income at a dramatically accelerating rate, even dwarfing the growth of the 80th percentile, as seen over time. The rate of acceleration is itself accelerating.

The table below, created with data from the Washington Post, shows the relative rates of change in income between 1980 and 2014 of different income percentiles. Remember that 1980 was when the U.S. government instituted the first implementation of “trickle-down economics,” granting massive tax breaks for primarily the wealthiest Americans and corporations, justified with the claimed assumption that the gains will “trickle down” the pyramid to the benefit of all.

Percentile Group Post-Tax Income Growth from 1980 - 2014 Bottom 20% 4% Next 30% 26% Middle 40% 49% Top 10 % 113% Top 1% 194% Top 0.1% 298% Top 0.01% 423% Top 0.001% 616%

Visually, this dramatically shows that the top .001% gained more income than the bottom 99% and almost as much as the entire top 99.9% put together. The disparity in wealth is even more extreme. Note that this does not include Corporate income gains. See Figure 9a1.

“Trickle-down economics” is another example of the dynamics of Capitalist paradigms, in which the influence and pressure that the neo-Feudal Lords can exert upon legislators and other government officials is, and always will be, far greater than the pressure that the rest of the people can exert. This effect is magnified and exacerbated when the lower reaches of the Pyramid are divided and fighting among ethnic, religious, political, age, and other groups blaming one another for their shared disempowerment and enslavement. Those who generate Capitalist propaganda have become profoundly adept at dividing us against each other, turning the diversity that could be the source of our greatest strength into a set of fracture lines to exploit in order to weaken and keep us striving against one another. This is not because the neo-Feudal Lords are necessarily evil in and of themselves. They are responding effectively and successfully to the reinforcers driving Capitalist systems and paradigms. The paradigm itself is the problem. The human behaviors and dynamics under this paradigm are completely predictable as a result.

Many U.S. economists have bemoaned the fact that, as a subculture, the generation nicknamed “Millennials” are spending less than previous generations. They are shopping less, consuming less. As discussed in the main text of this book, Capitalism as a paradigm can only function optimally if there is steady and constantly accelerating artificially-driven overproduction and overconsumption. A Capitalist economy in which all people have all that they need of easily fixed and upgraded products that will last a long time, is a mythical beast akin to the tooth fairy. If such a society were to exist, as a Capitalist economy it would crash and burn. Thus, from a Capitalist-centric frame of reference, everybody needs to produce and consume the maximum possible amount. It is seen as almost a kind of duty. If there is a generation or sub-population that doesn’t maintain those levels of consumption, they are viewed as a problem, as a kind of “slacker” population. Some have said that the Millennials are either lazy or have poor money management skills, when in reality they are simply reacting to the economic cards that they have been dealt.

Objective facts, however, reveal the truth. A current exhaustive and thorough study finds, after careful analysis of the data, that the reason why Millenials (loosely meaning people born between 1980 – 2000) aren’t consuming as much as previous generations is that they have less to spend for their hours of work than previous generations. The study finds that Millennials are bringing in 12% - 18% less for the same amount of work than people of “Generation X” (people born in the 1960’s and 1970’s), and 24% - 27% less than people of the “Baby Boomer” generation (People born between the end of World War II and 1960 or so). This is after compensating for variables such as inflation, changes in technology and other factors.

Another way to look at the trends over time is to examine the percent change in inflation versus the change in income across the economic spectrum over time. In Figure 9b below, we see that inflation has consistently outpaced wage and salary growth for the bottom 40 percent of the population (bottom 2 quintiles) over the past 95 years or so. For legibility’s sake, the median is not included as it would render the data too difficult to read. But it is clear that the 60th percentile (third quintile) and above are the only quintiles in which income has consistently outpaced inflation during these same 95 years in the United States. The median approximately just keeps pace with inflation. This means that at least half of the population of the United States has been losing economic ground as surely and predictably as the sun rises in the East.

The inflation rate has been calculated for 2018 compared to the following years:

- 1925, which represents the U.S. economy during the highly-stratified “Gilded Age” before the Great Depression - 1935 which represents the U.S. economy during the conditions of the Depression - 1945 which represents the U.S. economy during the boom at the end of World War II and just after, and - 1965 which represents the height of the Civil Rights movement when there was massive sustained popular activism that temporarily put pressure on elected officials to protect employees’ and consumers’ rights, which resulted in a temporary respite to the inexorable neo-Feudalistic concentration of wealth and power into the hands of those at the top of the economic Pyramid.

Starting with the “Reaganomics” of the 1980’s, the inexorable pressure of the neo-Feudal lords and their corporations began to overwhelm the will and influence of the People and undo the hard-won protections gained in the late 1950’s through the 1970’s. Since the 1980’s, labor unions have been disempowered, and there has been a steady erosion of all protections for employees and consumers as opposed to reinforcements for the power of the ultra-wealthy and their corporations.

Keep in mind that this chart only represents inflation versus income through wages or salary. It does not take into account income from investments of any kind. As discussed elsewhere, investment income is only a viable and significantly productive option for those who are living far enough above a living wage to be able to invest large enough amounts to massively increase their wealth. In other words, only those in the 60th percentile and above can realistically expect to create major improvements in their financial situation through investments. Only those in the 80th percentile and above can achieve sufficient income through investment to be able to survive a prolonged loss of income due to unemployment.

You will note that the bottom twenty percent have fared slightly better than the next higher 20 percent. This is almost completely the result of those programs that exist to assist those lowest on the pyramid, due to sustained public pressure. The 20th – 40th percentiles roughly represent the “working poor” who earn too much to qualify for any kind of assistance, but not enough to constitute a living wage.

Growth in both inflation and income was highest when measured from 1935 to 2018. The reason for this is that during the Great Depression, there was negative inflation and wage growth for a number of years. This results in the larger change from 1935 to 2018 as opposed to 1925 and 2018. In viewing this chart, one must keep in mind that the smaller growth of both inflation and wages in successive measured time periods is because as the elapsed time becomes shorter, the change is smaller. With this in mind, we can see that the top five percent consistently far outpaces inflation. The top one percent and above are not included because as in the other charts, it would so far dwarf the changes in the other economic percentiles as to make it impossible to make out details in this chart.

Interestingly, if one were to add change in minimum wage to this chart, one will see that it has actually outpaced inflation at some points and fallen behind at others. Yet even when minimum wage most solidly outpaced inflation, it still was so low as to be precipitously below a living wage. Since 1965, the minimum wage has grown less than two thirds as much as inflation, due to the stagnation introduced in the 1980’s and beyond. During the 1920’s through the 1950’s, labor movements experienced a resurgence that temporarily pressured legislators to enact protections for employees, which continued through the Civil Rights Movement years. Yet in the long run, the influence of the neo-Feudal Lords always out-creates the influence of the people upon government, as surely as a winning streak in a casino does not change the fundamental economics for those who choose to play. In the Capitalist paradigm, however, “playing” is not a choice as it is in a casino; it is compulsory.

The trend is clear. If we do not carry out a Transition to the new synergistic, currency-free, non-hierarchical paradigms and bring a complete end to capitalism soon, things will only get worse. We could find ourselves under the crushing weight of a feudal paradigm more extreme than that of the Middle Ages, made the more insidious and long-lived by the degree of control and enforcement made possible by sophisticated technology that will ultimately be available only to those at the highest reaches of the Pyramid.

Throughout this writing, the assertion has been maintained and supported that Capitalist paradigms are pyramid schemes which persistently and systematically draw resources of every kind, from money to land to respect to rights to influence on government, from the vast majority of people lower down to the microscopically few at the very top of the pyramid. This is how they function according to their design. To disrupt or end this siphoning will utterly shatter the pyramidal Capitalist economic power structure and cause it to cease functioning, to the benefit of all.

The truth, however, is much more extreme than a pyramid scheme. If you look at Figure 10 below, you see the comparison between a classical pyramid, the income distribution (and even more so, the wealth distribution) curves with and without the top one percent included. Here we easily see that the existing economic stratification is far more severe, the slope far steeper, than that of a classical pyramid. There is even less room high enough in the economic hierarchy to truly be able to exercise one’s Constitutional rights than there would be in a true pyramid scheme. Advance to the 50th or even the 80th percentile, and you barely gain in altitude. To ascend into the spike in this structure, you must advance high within the top one percent in income.

The data for wealth distribution in the United States in 2017 illustrates the extreme and escalating economic disparity in the aggressive flagship and promoter of Capitalist paradigms in the world. These data are available from multiple sources in government, academia and within the financial sector itself. As described in recent studies, the distribution of wealth (meaning permanent durable assets, including investments, real estate, savings and other resources that include but go beyond job income) is as follows:

Population Percentile Percent of U.S. Wealth they Control Approximate Number of People

Top 1% 40% 3,288,358 95% - 99% 27% 13,153,431 90% - 94% 12% 16,441,788 80% - 89% 11% 32,883,576 60% - 79% 8% 65,767,715 40% - 59% 2% 65,767,715 20% - 39% 0% 65,767,715 Bottom 0%-19% -1% 65,767,715

Note that the bottom 20 percentiles (Nearly 66 million people) control -1% of U.S. wealth, meaning that their expenses exceed their income. They are constantly losing ground. Adding up the numbers, we see that approximately the lowest economic 60% or 197,301,458 of U.S. citizens and residents control 2 + 0 + -1 = 1% of the wealth in the U.S. and 80% or 263,069,173 members of the national community control just 8 + 2 + 0 + -1 = 9% of U.S. wealth among them. The bottom 90% of the population among them control just 32% of U.S. wealth, as compared to 40% controlled by the top one percent. Bear in mind that the situation is even more extreme when we recall the wealth distribution data that shows that the top one percent is as drastically stratified as is the population as a whole.

To translate this data into understandable terms, imagine a ship that has a certain amount of space for passengers. For this illustration, we’ll use the Titanic. If we represent the 100 percentiles of the population as 100 people, and the total wealth in the United States as the total passenger capacity of the Titanic, then this wealth distribution translates into the picture below. Note that the top 1’st percentile (top 1%) has nearly half of the space to themselves. The 40th to 60th percentiles – the middle of the economic spectrum encompassing the median 50th percentile – control among them just 2% of the wealth. They are jammed into a tiny section in the bottom in the stern – the lower left compartment in the illustration. The 20th to 40th percentiles, the second lowest fifth of the population, control 0% of the wealth. In this illustration, there is no place for them in the ship at all. They are literally treading water in the stormy sea. The bottom 0th to 20th percentiles, the lowest on the Pyramid, are literally drowning underwater in this illustration.

Keep in mind that in a Capitalist paradigm, one’s degree of wealth translates directly into one’s access to all resources, including living space, food, medical care, lawyers, tools, goods and services of all kinds. It also translates directly into the degree of respect, freedom, and scope of options that one experiences.

The Titanic is an especially appropriate metaphorical illustration in that it was promoted as the finest ship of its day and being unsinkable, in a time of extreme and escalating wealth disparity. Its design was flawed. It also had insufficient lifeboats to accommodate more than a third of its passengers and crew.

Reviewing the graphs of income and wealth distribution in the United States, especially Figure 4, you can easily imagine that if we were to create another representation of the Titanic in which the top 1% of the economic Pyramid is broken down into hundredths, the picture would be similar, except that the lowest percentiles of the 1% would not be in the ocean or under it. They would be crammed into infinitesimally small spaces in the 1% boat, which would be impractical to represent visually.

The disparity of wealth is even more telling than the disparity of income. For those of us not in the uppermost percentiles of the pyramid, income is our primary or only resource. Our degree of freedom, access to all resources, options, quality of life and the respect we are afforded are determined and sustained or lost according to our income. Any change in income directly impacts every aspect of our lives. For those in the upper reaches of the pyramid, the role of income is secondary to the role of wealth, which becomes more and more invulnerable the higher up the pyramid one is. For those at the very top of the pyramid, wealth generates more additional wealth at an ever-accelerating rate. Income from wages or salary are insignificant and irrelevant by comparison, though still gargantuan in proportion to wages and salary of those in the mid to lower ranges of the pyramid.

As an analogy, imagine that all but those in the highest heights of the Pyramid are getting their electricity from bicycle generators that they must keep peddling constantly in order to keep the lights and refrigerator running, the water flowing, and the heat or air conditioning blowing. Any interruption of peddling shuts off the lights, fridge and the whole infrastructure. Those at the top of the pyramid power their houses from state-of-the-art power plants, and are equipped with backup generators as well as high-capacity storage batteries such that even if both power plant and backup generator were to fail, the backup batteries could sustain power for many generations to come. Yet all the while, in physical fact, there is more than enough energy for all persons to thrive.

If we aspire to live in an enlightened, free, democratic community, which is truly governed of, by and for the people, in which every one of us is empowered to thrive and make our greatest contribution, then we cannot perpetuate or even allow this paradigm to continue. The Capitalist paradigm is like a cancer or a parasite that draws its sustenance from its host and slowly weakens and kills it in the process. Its continuing existence depends on the willing (if misinformed and misguided) participation of all of us sustaining it as it engorges itself with the energy of our blood, sweat, and struggles as we slowly decline into oblivion by working and playing according to the rules of its paradigm. It is our right and duty to change our paradigm, our ways of functioning at every level at the front lines of development, production, distribution and daily life among us who are not at the top of the pyramid. We will change the ways we do things so that we support one another rather than the weight of the Pyramid. When we do this, the Pyramid itself will writhe and thrash about in its death throes then quickly crumble into nothing. Those who “fall” from the top of the Pyramid, the wealth and power addicts who had been enabled by the Pyramid, will experience withdrawal and will fear the “fall,” but their landing will not be devastating. It will not harm them. Unlike the reality under the Capitalist paradigms, the post-Transitional paradigm will support and find a niche for every individual.

Under Capitalist paradigms, the rate of accumulation of wealth, power and control of resources into the hands of those at the highest heights of the pyramid will always accelerate over time, despite any economic or legislative ups and downs. This expanding rate of acceleration comes at the price of a proportionally accelerating depletion of resources for those not at the top of the pyramid. Unless the entire paradigm is scrapped and replaced with one designed to support and sustain the symbiotic thriving of all, it will inevitably lead to a neo-Feudal society that exceeds the most extreme forms of Medieval totalitarianism. Such a society could last much longer than the Medieval one did, due to the high level of technology, including surveillance and weapons technology and the highly sophisticated level that propaganda has attained.

The flow chart below, based on data for per-capita productivity versus wages, illustrates the data on productivity and growth of different economic sectors of the U.S. and what it means in terms of the flow of wealth in this typical purely Capitalist paradigm. (See chapter 10: Metrics.) Keep in mind that in such a society, wealth, or the lack of it, is the biggest factor that defines and determines one’s quality of life, access to resources, the respect and deference one is given, and even one’s ability to survive at all.

It would be most instructive for a team of economists, physicists and mathematicians to do a study of the changes in the distribution of wealth, resources and control over time under Capitalist paradigms. In astrophysics, we know that in the primordial Universe, after things had cooled down enough for atoms to form out of quarks, there were vast clouds of hydrogen. Over very long periods of time, areas of these clouds that were denser than surrounding areas condensed further due to gravitation. The more densely packed regions had higher gravitational pull than the surrounding areas, which pulled even more hydrogen into the dense areas. As the mass of the densely-packed regions grew, their gravitational pull grew and extended farther, pulling more hydrogen in and increasing their mass. Eventually these regions became massive enough that their internal gravitational pull was strong enough to initiate nuclear fusion, and the first stars were born. When sufficient mass is concentrated in one place, a black hole forms whose escape velocity is the speed of light, meaning that matter and energy are pulled in but little or nothing can escape. It would not be surprising if observation and mathematical analysis of shifts in distribution and control of wealth and resources in Capitalist paradigms is found to follow identical or very similar patterns. Perhaps the same set of equations describes both.

In fact, some groundwork has already been done in this direction, comparing the distribution and movement of wealth in Capitalist paradigms to the distribution and kinetic energy of molecules in a gas, which directly ties in with the formation of stars and black holes. Pareto Distribution describes both phenomena very accurately in unsurprisingly parallel ways. The research and mathematical prediction also show that the more people save, the smaller the disparity; and the less people save, the greater the disparity. In the current stage of Capitalist dynamics in the U.S. and similar countries, the majority of people are unable to save, however much they would like to. In addition, the combination built-in obsolescence (necessitating more frequent replacement of items than is really necessary) and consumeristic conditioning from birth exploited by sophisticated advertising which drives compulsive purchasing, we see that the disparity escalates uncontrollably, as is predicted by the equations.

If we are honest with ourselves and examine the evidence mathematically, historically, sociologically, psychologically, anthropologically, empirically and more, we cannot escape the conclusion that Capitalism inevitably leads to a particularly pernicious form of Feudalism. If we do not wish to experience a millennia-long dark age of iron-fisted techno-feudal thralldom ending only when the earth has been so plundered and polluted that it becomes uninhabitable or when a desperate population arises in a bloodbath fueled by desperation, we have no viable choice but to shut down this destructive paradigm and replace it with one that is consciously, deliberately designed to sustainably generate a thriving society of thriving, empowered individuals in symbiotic synergy.

Dramatizations of Key Concepts

The Story of Sam

A Brief Dramatization of a Core Principle of the Transition: Allegory: Capitalism Comes To The Human Body

The Strange Case of Samuel – a Medical Socio-Economic Parable

Samuel was born a robust child. Early on, he had to struggle against some major obstacles; but he had a good head on his shoulders, a good heart, and better health than most of his peers.

Samuel had his growing pains. He made some poor choices in his adolescence but learned from both his successes and his failures and gained in wisdom faster than most. He became a leader among his fellows and was often a positive role model. He had a side of him that was kind of a bully but he also had a conscience and compassion, which prevailed in his speech and actions most of the time.

Like any human being, dog, cat, tree or other organism, Samuel – we’ll call him Sam – was made up of a community of trillions of cells. These cells in turn formed rich and varied communities within Sam’s body. There were the great metropolises of Heart, Brain, Liver, Lungs, Muscles. There were the smaller communities of specialized cells: Pituitary, the Islets of Langerhans, Adrenals, and many small towns such as Hair Follicles, Inner Ear, Retina and many more.

Each cell lived a fulfilling life doing what it was created to do: lung cells found their fulfillment grabbing oxygen molecules from the air and giving them to the Red Blood Cell Truckers while offloading carbon dioxide from them and releasing it into the air. Heart cells were drummers, laborers and dancers, pumping in a powerful dance that set the rhythm to which all the cells in the body pulsed. Liver cells were very detail-oriented characters who were adept at sorting through all the chemicals in the blood, separating and selecting some for disposal, others for storage or metabolism, and still others to be used in complex enzymatic processes that kept Sam healthy and robust.

Every cell did what was its nature to do and was fulfilled in doing it. The communities of cells, the organs, reflected the nature of the cells of which they were made, contributing in turn to the community as was their nature. And all together in their diversity, they were Sam, a conscious, growing, evolving, healthy human being.

Then one day something happened that would come to mystify doctors for quite a while.

One day the Lung Cells had their regular town hall meeting to discuss issues to do with their jobs in the world of Sam. Somehow a new idea came up, which got talked around and became a topic for official discussion. Nobody knew how this idea started, but most believe it was innocent in the beginning though somehow little by little it nearly became the undoing of Sam and the multitude of cells and communities keeping him whole.

A decision was made in Lungs. The next day a Notice went out to all the cells and communities in Sam: Henceforth the lungs will require two atoms of gold for every molecule of oxygen that they pass on to the Blood Truckers, and two atoms of gold for every molecule of carbon dioxide that they offload and return to the air. “This will henceforth be called our Price. If our Price is not met, then we will withhold oxygen and will not offload any carbon dioxide.”

The reaction was immediate and strong. The rest of the organs and the cells in them thought at first that it was a joke. When Lungs got word of this, they withheld oxygen and declined to offload carbon dioxide for about a minute and a half. Brain struggled to maintain consciousness and began to shut down. Heart found it increasingly difficult to continue pumping. All of the community of organs and their cells became desperate and realized they had only seconds to act.

“Ok, we accept your terms. We will give you gold for oxygen and for carbon dioxide disposal. But give us a few days to figure out how to get it.”

Lungs agreed to give the rest of the cells and organs two days to start bringing the gold, adding that in the meantime all cells and organs will be owing gold for oxygen delivered and carbon dioxide offloaded, and that interest will be charged. Lungs assured all organs and cells that they were keeping track of how many oxygen molecules they were delivering and how many carbon dioxide molecules they were removing. “All accounts will be paid in full within a week of this notice. Any cell or organ who fails to do so will not receive oxygen nor have their carbon dioxide removed until they do. In addition, they will have to pay an extra 3 gold atoms as a late fee plus another 5 gold atoms for reactivation of service.”

All the organs and cells scrambled frantically to find a way to come up with gold. Gold was not a normal or natural part of Samuel’s biological processes. It had no function or purpose. While it was not toxic in and of itself, there was no mechanism for digesting and distributing gold atoms within Sam’s body. The cells and organs urgently put their thoughts together to come up with a solution. Brain was as stumped as the rest of the organ communities, but among them they figured out a way.

Another major change began to ripple through Sam’s body. One by one, organs and cells began to give each other notice that from now on they well require gold atoms for their services. How else would they be able to gather the gold needed to satisfy Lungs’ price?

Very soon, inflation set in. “From now on, we will require ten gold atoms for every oxygen molecule delivered and every carbon dioxide molecule offloaded. Any who fail to meet the price will be excluded from service. Please see your in-boxes for a list of prices for other services including police and military defense (immune system) services, enzyme, hormone and other substance distribution and delivery, and all other Blood Corporation goods and services.” When asked why they got so expensive so quickly, Lungs replied with a press release saying: “We need to charge this price to meet our overhead operating costs. We have to pay the Blood Truckers their gold, pay Kidneys, Heart and Liver for their services, and of course make a profit. It’s not our fault that everybody else is so greedy.”

Pretty soon no cell or organ would perform any function without receiving gold atoms in return.

This was when Sam’s behavior began to change.

Normally good-natured most of the time and blessed with a strong work ethic, devotion to family and community, Sam’s behavior began to change. He became withdrawn, moody and distracted. His whole life and priorities changed. Every waking moment was devoted to gathering and consuming gold. He came up with an ingenious method of mixing a gold suspension that he could drink in order to allow Stomach, Intestines, Bowel and Gall Bladder to process the gold in an ionic state.

Sam had no idea why this was happening. He only knew that suddenly he had an insatiable craving for gold. Nothing else seemed to matter. He just couldn’t get enough gold to swallow. When he was preparing and drinking his gold suspension, he felt a sense of anticipation. As soon as he finished gulping it down, however, he felt a brief moment of well-being followed immediately by an ever greater craving for the metal. Pretty soon he only knew that he had to have more. As he consumed another glass, he was already thinking of how to get more. When he missed a dose of gold suspension, he felt sick, anxious, nervous, insecure, paranoid, grouchy.

As this process progressed, two things happened pretty much simultaneously:

One change was in Sam’s complexion. With the constant ingestion of gold, Sam’s skin took on a kind of golden glow. Everybody commented on how healthy and vibrant he looked, asked him what his secret was. He told them it was the gold suspension. And while his weight began to climb steadily due to gold weight, he looked thinner and thinner. For a while, he gave the impression of being in extraordinarily good health with his golden skin, thinning waistline, and apparently constant tireless energy.

The other change was that he became increasingly distant, moody, unpredictable, manic, and erratic. Valuable items began to go missing among his friends and family. At first nobody realized it was him doing it. His wedding ring disappeared, which he claimed was due to it slipping off and falling down the drain. He drained all of his resources and nobody knew where they went. He became jumpy, secretive, and devious. He began to run little cons on strangers. His stealing got out of control. He gradually became a stranger to his closest friends and family. This once highly principled, trustworthy friend and devoted family man transformed into the first one suspected whenever something went missing, phony charges appeared on someone’s account, or strange scary people knocked on the door in the wee hours of the morning.

His wife Liberty summed it up one day when, after he had verbally berated her for no apparent reason, she told him she believed that Sam had another love besides her, but she just couldn’t figure out who or what it was. He denied it angrily as he prepared his latest brew of gold suspension and drank it. When she cried in anguish and tried to take the glass of golden brew out of his hand, he lashed out and threw her across the room, gulped down the liquid, then dropped to the floor where Liberty watched bewildered as he began licking up all of the liquid that had spilled.

“What’s wrong?” she asked him as she checked herself for broken bones and rose from the kitchen floor, holding a paper towel over the gash in her forehead to stop the bleeding.

“I don’t know! I don’t know! I just know I have to have gold to drink! I can’t be without it, and I don’t know why! Just leave me alone will you?!?!? Just leave me be!”

Meanwhile inside Sam’s body, the situation was steadily escalating. At the time of the incident in the kitchen, Lungs had raised their price to 70 atoms of gold for every oxygen molecule delivered and for every molecule of carbon dioxide eliminated. They claimed that the reason was because they now needed more gold to pay for the goods and services of Heart, Brain, Kidney, Liver, Blood and other Corporations while still remaining profitable. The word “inflation” began to be heard. Lungs blamed labor costs – Blood Truckers, Muscles, and other Unions demanded higher pay. Every organ and cell took every opportunity to raise its prices to keep up with the prices imposed by other organs and cells. The escalation was self-perpetuating.

Sam’s biological processes became increasingly sluggish and fraught with breakages, slowdowns and breakdowns. What had once been a seamless choreography among all of the organs and cells, now had to stop at every exchange of energy or chemistry for cells and organs to process transactions. Before this new protocol, respiration had been a graceful dance of Blood Truckers pulling up to the Alveoli stations in Lungs, gracefully tossing their carbon dioxide out to the loading docks in the same motion as oxygen was tossed into the truck, with a Hi-Five and off to make the rounds. Now, a Blood Trucker would pull up to the station, pay the loading/offloading fees, pay the Alveoli Dock Workers, pay the Lung Offloading Fee, then wait for transaction confirmation, offload the carbon dioxide, then pay the Oxygen Fee, wait for transaction confirmation, then load the Oxygen under careful supervision lest any oxygen be stolen unpaid for. The whole process that used to take a few thousandths of a second now took nearly two seconds. It was this way throughout all of the complex interactions among organs, systems and cells in Sam’s body.

In addition, tumors formed in Sam’s body, structures whose only purpose was to process and keep track of the gold transactions and to shut off services for delinquent accounts. Still other tumors formed which took gold from cells and organs in exchange for covering their payments in the event that they fell behind, though charging high interest in the event of an actual claim. These structures took up space, crowding Sam’s real organs and consuming resources, leaving less for all of the other organs. This caused anemia and chronic fatigue, among other issues.

Whenever an uninsured cell or organ couldn’t make full payment for something, that good or service was withheld until payment was received. This became a more and more common occurrence as a few organs and cells managed to control more and more of the gold while more and more organs and cells were in debt to them. Cells began to die faster than they could reproduce. Necrosis set in at multiple sites throughout Sam’s body as whole neighborhoods of cells died for lack of oxygen, glucose, or more complex enzymes, hormones and processes.

In addition, since gold had no real function in Sam’s body and was not part of any metabolic or other processes, there was the question of where to put all of the gold steadily accumulating. While harmless in and of itself, there was just too much of it. Lungs, Kidneys, Intestines, Liver and Anus accumulated enormous quantities of gold and had no place to put it.

Why not Heart and Brain, you may ask? Well, cells in the city of Heart were working way too hard nonstop to be able to devote themselves to accumulating gold. Brain was too vulnerable to any fluctuation in oxygen, glucose and many other chemicals. It was too easy to threaten Brain with denial of service in so many ways. Brain was pretty easy for most organs to manipulate just by withholding oxygen, refusing to remove carbon dioxide, or crashing glucose, insulin or blood pressure. In the end, even though under protest, Brain acceded to the demands of the wealthy organs, for the greater good of the Body, its cells tried to tell themselves.

Why were Lungs, Kidneys, Intestines, Liver and Anus the ones ultimately calling the shots? Many doctors have written theses and papers on the subject. Ultimately, the consensus is that there was no particular reason. They just happened to be the ones who managed to leverage themselves and their functions in Sam’s body to greatest advantage for the new overarching goal of acquiring and accumulating gold atoms. In someone else’s body, it might have been different organs. But all researchers agree that the results would ultimately have been the same. Ultimately it was Anus who wielded the most power, since when it shut down, all organs and cells quickly began to drown and wallow in waste.

One more problem became increasingly painful for Sam. We mentioned that the constant influx of gold really did pose a storage problem. Wealthy cells and organs began to store the gold wherever they could find space: in the spaces between cells, in the joints, in the fluid of the eyes and inner ear, in the bone marrow, in the sweat glands, tear ducts and more. In a fit of opulence, Lungs and Kidneys decided to line all the blood vessels with gold. Of course this caused blood vessels to constrict and restricted blood flow while raising blood pressure to dangerous levels. Tissues and blood vessels become stiff. Sam’s blood turned a metallic red-gold that was actually quite pretty until it dried when he was cut.

He began to get infections since his white blood cells couldn’t get to the site of a viral or microbial breach in time to fight off the invaders. Gold was everywhere, blocking just about everything. Yet more kept coming in. In the intricate pathways and communication networks of Brain, gold began to interfere with normal functioning. Since gold is such a good conductor, its increasing presence precipitated numerous short circuits and even seizures. The cells of Brain found it increasingly difficult to maintain normal bodily functions and perform mental or cognitive activity. The neurons tried to find ways to use gold’s conductive properties in some beneficial way, but there was just too much of it. It became increasingly hard for new synapses to form, which meant that memory and cognitive functions were more and more compromised.

In the macro world, Sam began to show signs of delirium, dementia, inflammation, fever, anemia, hypoxia, and a whole long list of autoimmune maladies.

By now, few cells or organs in Sam’s body remembered how to function without the ingestion and exchange of gold atoms. None of them questioned it any more. The generations of cells that had lived before the Guilded Age had mostly died out and been replaced by generations who had known nothing else. All the organs and cells blamed each other for the high prices and steadily diminishing vitality and quality of life. Even Lungs, Liver, Anus and the other wealthy organs experienced a malaise that they mistakenly assumed was due to gold deficiency, spurring them to seek ever greater quantities of the metal.

As you can easily imagine, Sam began to experience pain, at first in his joints, muscles, and other places. His muscles got increasingly stiff and slow to respond. He felt constantly stuffy in his nose and sinuses. His reflexes began to slow and became erratic. He experienced fatigue, seizures, tremors, loss of coordination, and disorientation. He continued to gain weight but became emaciated to the point where he resembled a gold statue of a Holocaust survivor. His vision became blurry and clouded. His hearing became muffled and everything sounded distant. He was constantly tired, swollen but gaunt, distracted, confused, and in increasing pain in more and more places in his body. He gave off a faint smell of rotting flesh.

All of Sam’s friends and family urged him to see his doctor. In spite of his golden complexion, it was painfully clear that his health and sanity were in a downward spiral. His gold addiction utterly consumed him. It drove him to prey on family and friends as well as strangers. The cellular communities and organs of Sam’s body became so clogged with gold that vital systems began to shut down, even as the wealthy cells and organs proclaimed that Sam was in the peak of health, based on the volume of gold in Sam’s body, almost all of which was in their control.

When Sam went in for his physical at his wife Liberty’s urging, after protesting that he was in excellent health, his doctor was stumped at the changes. At first she thought it was a form of cancer, then came up with a diagnosis of “idiopathic meta-static atypical auto-immune-mediated solid malignancies of unknown origin.” That’s medical speak for “This poor guy is fossilizing to gold more with every breath! Pretty soon there’ll be no room for anything else! I have no idea what’s going on!”

Sam began to give off a smell like gangrene, as more and more cells and cell communities began to slowly die due to lack of basic needs because of insufficient gold to pay for their life needs. There was more than enough gold in Sam’s body to go around. All but a very small trickle of it was controlled by the wealthy organs.

One day a collection of cells from Heart, Brain, and various Endocrine cities traced the flow of gold in the body of Sam. They discovered that even within the wealthy organs of Lungs, Liver, Anus and the others, only a handful of cells, whom they dubbed King Cells, actually controlled and had access to the gold. The other cells in those communities – recast as Corporations - were paid by the King Cells. They in turn had to pay for the vital goods and services that kept them alive. These cells even had to pay the King Cells of their own organ communities for the privilege of residence in the community.

This loose coalition of cells from various organs gathered more data. Eventually they learned that out of the trillions of cells in Sam’s body, a few hundred thousands of them controlled all but a few hundredths of a percent of the gold in Sam’s Body. The Gold system was set up so that each time the King Cells paid out a gold molecule to an average cell for their contribution, they received between 5 and 20 gold atoms back from that same cell over time. At the rate things were going, it was only a matter of time before all the gold in Sam’s body would be controlled by those few hundred thousand cells, at which point trillions of cells would have no gold to pay, and the wealthy organs would withhold services. In this deadlocked state, all of the organ communities and cells would quickly die. The King Cells in the wealthy organs would, of course, be the last to die. But they would most surely die a lonely, horrible death encased in gold in a lifeless wasteland of dead cells beyond the horizon decomposing around them.

The Gold System, or the Gold Sickness as it came to be remembered in popular lore, was indeed a fatal autoimmune condition. It resulted in the cells in Sam’s body preying upon one another while bonding to gold ions rather than to the biological molecules that they needed to live. There had to be a cure.

The intrepid handful of cells, armed with this vital information, sounded the alarm and called for all of the cells in Sam’s body to recognize the emergency and give highest priority to finding a cure. These cells simply referred to themselves as “Symbiotic Cells of Sam.”

The King Cells immediately responded by mobilizing the military and police - the white blood cells - telling them that Symbiotic Cells of Sam were an invading virus-mutated cancer that they should attack and neutralize before they completely destroyed Sam. They also put out chemical messages for all cells to read, praising the value and indispensability of gold, calling for all cells to stand up for the Gold System without which Sam and all cells would perish, giving a clear message that the Symbiotic Cells of Sam were out to wreak havoc in the body.

Many Symbiotic Cells were destroyed by the misdirected white cells, while many more got smart really quickly and found ways to hide. The Symbiotic Cells put out chemical messages of their own from constantly-changing places in Sam’s body, exposing the truth about the role of Gold and the dynamics of the King Cells. At first a few here and a few there realized that these messages were true. As the message spread, it no longer depended on the Symbiotic Cells to keep the message and the information alive. Cells in every organ community began to copy the chemical message and pass it around, tucking it in Blood Trucks where all cells of Sam’s Body would encounter them.

At first the Blood Truckers were largely skeptical but gradually more and more of them made copies and distributed them wherever they traveled in Sam’s body.

Eventually a day and time were agreed upon. All but the King Cells and their bodyguards agreed – Heart will pump out a certain rhythm that will be the signal. And then it was in motion.

The Blood Truckers pulled into the Alveoli Stations directly, crashing through the payment barriers to offload their carbon dioxide to Lung cells which quickly released them to the air and tossed in the oxygen. Hi-Five and off to make the rounds. Like in the old days before the Gold Sickness. The same game-change was replicated in all interactions in Sam’s body. Payment officer cells were nowhere to be seen. Manager cells ordered the truckers to stop and pay, and were ignored

When the King Cells realized what was happening, they sent their bodyguards and enforcers to assert their control. They called upon the White Blood Cell soldiers to defend them. Some did come to their side, but even more soldiers had read the truth in the ubiquitous chemical messages and realized that as defenders of Sam’s body, their duty lay in ending the Gold Sickness. King Cells and those loyal to them were corralled and contained in out-of-the-way places where they could not block the normal functioning of biological processes in Sam’s body.

There was still the question of what to do with all of the gold that was blocking just about everything. In an unprecedented coordinated effort of all of the cells in Sam’s body, the gold was eliminated via every safe channel. For several weeks, Sam’s sweat and tears were gold-laced and iridescent. He had golden sleep crusts under his eyes in the morning. He peed pretty much the same gold suspension that he had consumed. He literally pooped little gold bricks. His breath on the bathroom mirror left a golden sheen behind.

Within a few weeks, the level of gold in Sam’s body was barely over normal. The parasitic tumors had been dismantled and their cells re-integrated into life-sustaining roles in his body that they were born to fulfill. Sam was mostly pain-free and full of energy. His sight was clear again, his hearing was keen, his limber muscles and joints became those of a professional dancer.

He continued to have a craving for gold, which plagued him still. He checked into a rehab facility for rare addictions and was able to overcome the cravings and the mental patterns that had formed around the addiction through cognitive and behavioral therapy.

Within Sam’s body, all of the cells and organ communities began to experience life uncluttered by gold and the quest for it. Some of the cells and organs wanted to punish the King Cells and especially Lungs for starting the whole catastrophe, but wiser cells prevailed. “We still need Lungs, and they need all of us. We have been given a second chance. Let’s not waste it fighting among ourselves. After all, we all share the same genes. We are all Sam, as are the King Cells. We cannot allow them to create sickness but they do have a valid contribution to make.”

King Cells and the wealthy organs pouted and moped for a while, but more and more Lung cells rediscovered the fulfilling dance of offloading carbon dioxide from the Blood Trucks and dutifully but playfully tossing in the oxygen. Most of the cells and organs of the body were immediately relieved to be able to be themselves and do what they were meant to do, to fulfill their purpose. Cells and organs, which had for a while been blaming each other for the Gold Sickness as it came to be called, became once again friends and comrades in performing the cellular dance of Life in the body of a human being. And Sam was renewed as though coming home from a war. Fortunately, he was saved in time to prevent Liberty from becoming a bereaved widow or worse, be pimped out to support her husband’s addiction.

Cells who had grown up believing that “Gold keeps the body whole” discovered to their surprise that Gold had actually been a burden, that things functioned infinitely better in its absence. The Gold Sickness was cured.

There is yet one more outcome that must be shared. Remember that when Sam was sporting a shrinking waistline and golden complexion, he recommended his gold suspension supplement to his friends and family?

Once Sam was free of the Gold Sickness and was his true self again, he looked around him and was horrified to see that many of his friends and family were deep into the Gold Sickness that he had unwittingly lured them into. His wife Liberty knew what to do. She advised him well.

Sam’s cells brought to his consciousness a way to propagate the cure. The original chemical message that precipitated Sam’s recovery was replicated in a form that would be compatible with any human organism. One by one Sam visited those who had contracted the Gold Sickness, told them of his discovery, and slipped a tiny droplet of water infused with the chemical message into their gold infusion which they were sure to drink. One by one, all of those in the fatal grip of the Gold Sickness were cured and restored.

What could have been an extinction-level pandemic was narrowly averted, and it has been noted that the generations since then have enjoyed an ever-increasing level of health and well-being.

A Tale of Two Towns

The Flow of Life With and Without Currency

As a mental exercise, imagine two communities: one which is hierarchical and revolves around currency and one which does not. Let’s call them Stuckton and Brightville.

Stuckton was once a town of small farmers and craftspeople who lived in a dynamic balance. The farmers, ranchers, hunters, and fishermen raised enough food for the townspeople to eat well, with enough to spare for trade with other towns. There were enough doctors, blacksmiths, mechanics, engineers, and so forth for everybody’s needs to be met. Each family owned the buildings and land they lived and worked on. The flour, paper, and steel mills produced enough for the town’s needs and also traded with other towns. There were carpenters, potters, electricians, doctors, software coders, truck drivers, welders and pretty much every profession and trade involved in the life of a town.

There was an elected Mayor and Town Council, who were people from the community who chose to run for office. For the most part, they were elected based on their perceived wisdom, fairness, and community-mindedness. Anybody in the town could express their concerns to them, and they largely strove to respond to the needs and wishes of the people who elected them.

Like in any capitalist community, they used currency in their exchanges of goods and services. At one time, people set their prices so that they could make a living. For a while it worked. Most were self-employed. People pretty much interacted as equals.

Then one year, the Thompson family farm had a calamity. Half the family members came down with something that made them sick for months. When planting time came, there were not enough hands to plant enough crops. Come harvest time, most of the sick had recovered, but there was less than half of the harvest that they needed; and the family owed the doctors quite a bit that they couldn’t pay. To make matters worse, a fungus had infected part of the crop. That part had to be burned to save the rest.

Going into winter, the Thompsons found they couldn’t afford firewood, meat, milk, warm shoes to replace the ones that had worn out, or even electricity. They had sold all of their harvest to cover their medical bills and had no bumper crop to plant in the spring. As the first frost sparkled the ground, they realized they probably wouldn’t survive the winter.

The Jensons, their neighbors, had had a particularly good year. Their fields became more fertile than their neighbors’ due to runoff of topsoil from up in the hills, which settled in the Jensons’ fields and gave them a boost. They had currency to spare from the sale of their bountiful crop.

The Jensons offered to buy the Thompsons’ farm from them, so that the Thompsons could buy supplies to survive the winter. The Thompsons saw no choice but to accept. From then on, the Thompsons worked for the Jensons, were paid by them for their work, and in turn paid rent to the Jensons. The Jensons sold the crops from both farms, paid the Thompsons the wages they had offered them, and kept the rest of the proceeds.

The same thing began to happen among residents of the town itself. The blacksmith, Evans, was injured, kicked by a horse she was shoeing and couldn’t work for a while. The mechanic, Rogin, who was making lots of money with the proliferation of machinery in the town, offered to buy Evans’ business in a similar arrangement. After the blacksmith recovered, she worked for Rogin, who owned both businesses and paid her a wage, out of which she paid rent to Rogin for her residence which was also her workshop. Clients for both the mechanics shop and the smithy paid Rogin directly.

Then there was the fisherman, Bellows, who saw what happened with the Jensons and Rogin and got an idea. He sneaked to the dock in the dead of night during a storm and sabotaged the boats of all the other fishermen, taking care to make it look like storm damage. During the next ten days, which was the peak of the tuna season, Bellows was the only boat in operation. By the end of the season, Bellows had bought out all but a couple of the other fishermen, and they worked for Bellows who now owned all of the boats and the houses of the other fishermen. That year the fish supply was quite short and prices extravagantly high. Bellows had an exceptionally good year. He was the only one who did.

Within a generation or so, Stuckton had changed dramatically. All of the farmland was owned and controlled by Jenson Agricultural Corporation. All of the farmers worked for Jenson Inc. The Jensons changed over the years. They were no longer the good-natured neighbors they had once been. They no longer worked the land, and the generation coming of age knew nothing of agriculture. They paid the other farmers to do the work, and always made sure to pay them just enough less than they would need to live, to ensure their continuing indebtedness to Jenson Inc. While Jenson Inc expanded to acquire farms in neighboring towns, the farmers in their employ, the descendants of the original owner-operator farmers, worked even longer hours than their grandparents had worked, yet were hungry most of the time, cold in the winter and sweltering in the summer, and turning grey at a younger age. The generation of farm workers coming of age began to work at a very young age, knowing that they would always be in debt to Jenson Corporation and would most likely never be able to leave.

In the town center, all skilled crafts including carpenters, smiths, mechanics, engineers, electricians, plumbers, and more were all under the control of, worked for, and paid rent to Rogin Enterprises, who owned almost all of the houses and workspaces in the town. Bellows Holdings controlled all fishing, fish processing, hunting, milling, and all of the homes and facilities involved.

Five families controlled everything in and around the town. They lived in unabashed opulence yet had long forgotten the skills and crafts over which they now ruled. Their lives were centered around gaining as much money and power as possible.

The quality of life of most of the residents declined in other ways as well. A couple of generations ago, craftspeople took pride in making the best products possible, built to last. But in the current generation, the manufacturers in the town realized they could make more money doing otherwise. Why make a pair of shoes that lasts a lifetime and sell one or two pairs to everybody, when you can make shoes that fall apart in a few months and keep selling everybody new ones?

A new business appeared in the center of town - a bank. With currency suddenly in short supply and many people desperate, the bank offered, for a small fee, to keep people’s money safe and give them a little extra every so often. You see, the bankers had discovered that the material used for their currency would, when piled up in massively huge amounts and compressed, replicate itself out of elements in the air. It took gigantic amounts for this to work; but once everybody brought their money to the bank, the bank had more than enough to vastly multiply it. The bankers became the wealthiest controlling interests in the town, more wealthy and having even greater control than the Five Families. The bank would give people half a percent of interest on the money they left in the bank, meanwhile quadrupling the money through the replication process. They produced nothing of value or benefit to the community or its residents, yet they vastly increased their own power and influence.

The mayor and town council were still officially elected by popular vote, but they knew the dynamics very well. When a member of one of the Five Families or bankers wanted something, they nearly always got it, one way or another. Anybody who went against the interests of the Bank or one of the Families was given reasons why their requests and concerns couldn’t and wouldn’t be considered, if they could get an appointment to speak to their representatives at all. Usually they were told to call or come back later and make an appointment. This was the case again and again.

While there was still enough food, wood, water, and other materials and skills for everybody to live well, most people did not. The Five Families lived like fabled royalty of long-vanished generations while everybody else eked out a bare existence, regardless of their high productivity, constantly in a state of stress and depletion physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. No longer was there balance. No longer did a person’s labor or expertise result in a good living or quality of life. The only ones who thrived were the ones who controlled currency, land, resources, and the lives of those who provided the brains, skills and muscle power involved in producing goods and services.

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Now let’s turn our attention to the town of Brightville, which took a different turn early on.

In Brightville, currency was never conceived of or used. Even barter was never formalized as a medium of exchange.

There was specialization, to be sure. There were skilled hunters, fishers, farmers, weavers, potters, electricians, carpenters, engineers, welders, plumbers, doctors, software and hardware engineers, herbalists, boatmakers, barbers, and all the others who worked at all of the crafts and skills that it took to maintain the town and the lives of its inhabitants.

There was no city council and no mayor. Whenever decisions affecting the community needed to be made, the residents would meet, discuss, argue, research, and ultimately come to a consensus. On the unusual occasions when consensus could not be reached, a vote was held. As the town grew, the logistics of the dialogue creatively adapted to accommodate the larger population. There was a lot of lively discussion, debate and argument; but there was no such thing as political corruption. There were no career politicians.

There was a powerful sense of cohesion among the diverse inhabitants of Brightville. Through a distributed database updated by everyone as necessary, the farmers knew how much wheat, potatoes, corn, squash and tomatoes were needed for everybody to get through the year with plenty to eat. Of course, a surplus was raised for both bumper crop and to cover possible unexpected shortages.

The hunters and ranchers knew how much meat was needed and made sure to provide enough for everybody plus some surplus to be smoked, dried, jerked, canned and otherwise preserved against hard winters or natural disasters.

The millers knew how much flour was needed for the bakers, who knew how much bread and pastries were needed and in turn kept the town supplied with fresh bread.

The carpenters, electricians, plumbers and other skilled construction professionals would check the database online every day. “Oh, Farmer Smith’s barn burned down. Let’s get out there and build them a new one.” The loggers always kept an adequate supply of wood at the materials depot on the edge of town. “Ah, a new family is moving into town next month. There’s a nice piece of land over by the Farnsworths’ place. Let’s put together a plan, meet with Sally the architect and get it done before they get here.”

The doctors’ offices were always open during normal hours for anybody who needed them. Patients came in, were seen, treated, and sent home or to hospital as necessary. The apothecaries, herbalists and other healthcare professionals of the town made sure that medicine was always available. The doctors were, of course, always reachable round the clock in case of emergency.

When the cell phone tower went down, the electricians and electronic engineers scrambled to get it back up and running.

The fishers knew how much fish was needed and made sure to keep enough available at all times.

In times of increased need, such as harvest time, every able person turned out to help with the harvest until it was done. Then after everybody rested up, there’d be a big celebration.

There was a farm supplies depot, a fishing supplies depot, a construction supplies depot, food depots and more. Whenever anybody needed anything, they went to the depot and picked it up. The items were duly scanned, logged and updated in the database.

Nobody kept track of who did or provided how much of what to whom. Everybody knew what was needed and did what was necessary to make sure it was provided. There was no concept of owing somebody something, unless a bet was placed or a favor was done.

True, there were lean years and calamities, times of shortage or adversity. There were the 3 years in a row when early, harsh, long winters cut the growing season short and there wasn’t enough food. During those times there were long, difficult town meetings; but solutions were found. Unusual food sources were tapped, which helped everybody get through the lean time. Food was rationed in the depots, and everybody managed to have enough to survive. A couple of recipes from those years even stayed in the town’s culinary lore as delicacies after the crisis passed.

Then there was the time that a flood destroyed the homes of a third of the community. The construction professionals and architects worked long hours for months, aided by anybody and everybody who could carry a hammer or use a saw. The people displaced by the disaster, were put up in the homes of friends and family in the meantime. As people’s homes were completed and people moved back into them, they replenished their furniture, appliances, decorations and more from the depots. While photos and mementoes couldn’t be replaced, most other things were no problem to replenish.

One year, the same scenario that impacted the Thompsons and the Jensons in Stuckton happened to the Quaigs and the Diaz family. The Quaigs all came down with the same sickness that hit the Thompsons. They were in no way going to be able to plant or harvest enough to supply even their own needs, much less keep a bumper crop and add some to the community food depot. Meanwhile the same topsoil runoff that blessed the Jensons in Stuckton, also graced the Diaz family in Brightville. When planting time came, there was no problem for the Quaigs because everybody turned out to help them plant, irrigate, fertilize, and harvest. All of the Quaigs pulled through the sickness. Every day, Diaz family members were over at the Quaigs, helping out, cooking chicken soup, doing laundry and other tasks and making sure the Quags were comfortable. With no need for currency, at least one doctor visited the Quaigs daily and maintained their care.

When Sallie the blacksmith was injured, Allie the welder took over Sallie’s duties until she recovered, and one or two of the town engineers helped out too.

It was almost inevitable that representatives from the business empires of Stuckton came to Brightville looking for expansion opportunities. They asked to speak to the Mayor and City Council about potentially “lucrative business opportunities that will benefit both our towns.” These representatives were thoroughly confused when they were told that there was no mayor or city council, but they were invited to speak to the townspeople at the next meeting. At the meeting, the businesspeople from Stuckton began by expressing “sympathy and dismay to see the level of poverty here in Brightville. Nobody here has any money. Frankly, we can’t see how you even manage to live. But we can change that! We can make some of you very rich, and bring you democracy, teach you how to elect proper representatives to govern you.”

That statement was met with uncomprehending silence. Nobody in Brightville had any idea what they were talking about. The concepts were completely foreign. They might as well have been speaking a foreign language.

Finally someone in the front row asked the Stucktonian emissaries to explain what they meant by “money,” “poverty,” “rich,” “democracy,” and “representatives.” “We have no idea what you’re talking about. None of us has ever heard these words before,” said a Brightvillian carpenter.

“Well, money is what makes the world go round. It’s what facilitates the flow of goods and services. Without money, how are you going to buy or rent a house, food, a car, appliances and other stuff? Poverty is what y’all have, because none of you seem to have any money. Rich means having a lot of money, having more than anybody else. Democracy means you elect politicians to act as representatives who decide what laws you will live under and how much taxes you pay. That’s called freedom.”

After the laughter died down, one of the doctors spoke up.

“Are you sure we’re speaking the same dialect? That really didn’t help much. I guess by money you mean the angular momentum of the earth that keeps it spinning, though how that facilitates stuff getting done is beyond me. You say we don’t have any, but we have as much of it as anybody. And how can somebody have more of the earth’s angular momentum than anybody else? And for that matter, what are “politicians,” “pay,” “rent,” “buy” and “taxes?” And what do you mean by “freedom?” In Brightville it means you can go about your life as you please as long as you aren’t interfering with somebody else’s doing so. Sounds like it means the opposite in Stuckton, since it involves asking someone else to tell you how to live.”

At this point the Stucktonians were totally confused, frustrated and fit to be tied. “Well, how do you get food? How do you get a house? How do you get a car?”

“You are seriously asking that? Really?”

“Yes. Seriously.”

“Well, for food we go to the depot next to the orange orchard by the river and stock up. Everybody here has a place to live in; but if someone new comes to town, they send word ahead. Then when they get here, they pick a spot that’s not in use, sit down with an architect, and the construction crew builds the house to their specifications. Unless, of course, they bring their own crew. As for a car, ya just go down to the lot across the street from the electronics depot and pick yourself out one. Why do you want to know something as simple as that? How do you do it in Stuckton? How do you get food, a house, or a car there?”

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute! How do you pay for these things? Whom do you pay? How do you get the currency?”

“What, for Pete’s sake, is ‘pay?’ Really! And what’s so important about it? And what does this have to do with the earth’s angular momentum?,” said a weaver.

“You gotta pay for everything! That’s what the Five Families and the Bank are for. They pay you to work, then you pay them for stuff like a place to live, a car, food and so forth.”

“I don’t mean any disrespect, but we’re truly not understanding what you’re trying to say. Have you found a way to harness the earth’s spin for some purpose?,” asked an engineer.

Jack Jenson, CEO of Jenson Corp, reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and handed some shiny pieces of currency to the engineer. “This is money.”

The engineer took the pieces and passed them around. They bore the image of some unknown person on one side, a number on the other side, and writing in a dead language.

The blacksmith examined one and spoke up matter-of-factly, saying “Oh yeah, this is somnambulum. It’s a pretty good conductor. We use it for a lot of things, though coronium or zerbium hold up better to heat and wear. Somnambulum’s one of the best conductors though, and stands up to more cold. But are you seriously saying that this is what you mean by ‘money?’ Really? Seriously?”

“Of course.”

Laughter rocked the auditorium for a good 10 minutes.

“Friend, no disrespect, but that’s gotta be the most cockamamie thing I’ve heard all year! Do you mean, you folks carry these little somnambulum trinkets around in your pockets instead of using the metal for what it’s good for, and you have to give them to these Five Families or Banuks or whatever you call them, to get things you need? That just plain don’t make no sense. And what a waste of good somnambulum! How do you folks manage to live? Sounds like you’ve got yourselves all turned around to where you don’t know your hands from your feet…”

After more laughter, a baker chimed in: “So what is supposed to be the benefit to us for doing whatever it is you’re suggesting we do?”

“You’ll all have money. And some of you will be rich. And you’ll work harder and produce more, because frankly I get the impression there’s a serious lack of work ethic around here. Here it is a Tuesday night, and the whole town is here as though nobody has a job to go to in the morning!”

A blacksmith spoke up: “We do what we have to do, when it needs to be done. Why would we need to do more? Everybody has what they need and there are reserves in stock. What possible need would there be to make more than we need?”

“So you can sell them for a profit, and pay for stuff.”

“Another word we don’t understand. What is ‘profit?’ Another metal that you carry around?”

“You people really are savages, aren’t you! You don’t get it, do you? You have to have money to live. You can’t just live wherever you want, take whatever you want, have whatever you want without paying for it. That’s… Well, it’s theft. It’s Communism! It’s dictatorship! It’s against the natural order of things!”

More laughter.

“Wow! Talk about culture shock!” said a high school teacher. “Why on earth would you say that? Why shouldn’t a person live wherever they want, as long as it’s not unsafe or someone else isn’t living there? Why shouldn’t we take what we want, have what we want and need? That’s why we make stuff – for people to use. And whatever you mean by ‘pay,’ I don’t have any idea what it means; but if it means you trade those somnambulum trinkets, which are useless in your pockets, then it just sounds to me like you’re making things a lot more complicated than they need to be. Either that, or you’ve been eating those magic mushrooms.”

“Are you saying, if I wanted to live here, I could just pick a plot of land, build a house on it, and go into your store, or your store, or your store and take what I want?,” asked a Stucktonian representative.

A doctor replied: “I don’t see why not. Pretty basic. Of course, you’d want to send word ahead so we could put together a welcoming crew, pick out a few locations we think you might like, find out what your skills and passions are so we can help you integrate into the community, and of course have the architects and building teams geared up and ready to build your place. I don’t know what a ‘store’ is, but if you mean a supply depot, they’re always open and we all take what we need when we need it, and make what’s needed when it’s needed.”

“That can’t possibly work! Nobody could live like that! It’s against human nature!,” exclaimed the Jenson Senior Vice-President of Marketing.

Uproarious laughter.

A carpenter responded: “Well, now, I do think you might have a touch of heat stroke or something, because that’s exactly how we’ve always lived. To tell the truth, it’s you who seem to be making up silly things that have no reason, purpose, rhyme or sense.”

A computer programmer spoke up, “Mister, I don’t mean any disrespect, but your delegation does give me cause for concern. Of course y’all’d be welcome to move in here if you want, but I don’t think you’d feel very at home here if you’re attached to living however it is you folks live in Stuckton. Y’all seem to be set on bending us to your ways, and I can’t see any good in it for us, so that won’t be happening. If y’all have a problem with that, then best you let us know now.”

“I’m sure we have products and services that you might want. You’d have to have money to buy them from us. And like my colleague said, some of you would become rich.”

A mechanic spoke next: “I also don’t mean any disrespect, but I took the liberty of looking over that car you drove up in. And I can’t help notice your shoes and clothes. No offense, but the workmanship isn’t up to snuff compared with stuff around here, and the materials are weak and won’t hold up long. Here, let me see your phone.”

One of the Stuckton corporate representatives handed him her phone.

“Hey Lee, take a look at this,” the mechanic said, tossing the phone to one of the electronics designers. “Whaddaya think?”

Lee fiddled with it for a couple of minutes, tossed it back to the Stucktonian saying “You folks really don’t know how to build stuff, do you? This phone won’t last more than a year or two. We’d be happy to send some folks over to Stuckton to teach you better techniques, if you like.”

Insulted, the representative from Rogin Enterprises stood and declared defensively, “You don’t have to teach us anything! We know how to build better phones, cars, and clothes! Do you think we’re stupid? We don’t build them as well as we could because if we did, if they never broke down or wore out or just lasted too long, there’d be no market, the economy would tank, businesses would close, jobs would be lost, and nobody would have to buy new ones!”

Uproarious laughter, again lasting nearly ten minutes.

“I know what y’all are! Yup, for sure I got it figured out. Y’all are some kind of theater troupe! You’re here to entertain us! I haven’t laughed this much since I don’t know when! Thank you!” said a fisherwoman, rising and coming to the stage to shake their hands, clapping on the way. “This is some of the best improv I’ve ever seen! Y’all’re welcome to come entertain us anytime! Hey, maybe we can send one of our theater groups to Stuckton just to be neighborly!”

Everybody clapped, laughing, having realized the true nature of the Stucktonian’s presentation.

Except for the Stucktonians. In a fit of indignation and scalded egos, they rose from the stage, stalked down the aisle, piled into their vehicle, and drove off.

A few months later, another Stucktonian delegation arrived with a platoon of soldiers. They repeated the original business offer of the first delegation, adding that if the Brightvillians continued to be unreceptive, Stuckton would intervene and “civilize” them, “for your own good.”

This delegation was greeted with fanfare and joviality as a repeat performance. After the Stucktonian soliloquy ended, there was thunderous laughter and applause. At a word from the Jenson delegate, a couple of the soldiers fired off a few shots in the air. “We’re not kidding! We will civilize you and open up this market! Nothing must stand in the way of Business!”

That was the first moment when the citizens of Brightville realized that this was a serious threat, not satirical theatre, and responded accordingly. The delegation was sent back to Stuckton on foot naked, barefoot, and shaken but otherwise unharmed to deliver one simple message from the people of Brightville: “Grow up and leave us alone!”

When the Stucktonian military arrived in Brightville, they discovered that the Brightvillians, while good-natured and easygoing, were quite fierce guerilla warriors when attacked. While the Stucktonian soldiers were better armed, the Brightvillians were creative, focused, co-ordinated and fearless. Within less than a day, the Stucktonians hightailed it out of Brightville, again naked, barefoot, missing their technology and weaponry, and on foot. Wounded Stucktonian soldiers were treated and nursed back to health, then sent home the same way as soon as they were well enough. Stucktonian soldiers who were captured after committing war crimes upon Brightvillians, were tried and treated according to Brightvillian law.

Unbeknownst to all, however, a seed had been planted. A shift in awareness had been set in motion. Among the Stucktonian soldiers who ended up spending some time in Brightville, new ideas began to sprout. They had been terrified that they would be beaten, brutalized, tortured, even killed. That is what they would have done to Brightvillian fighters had they won the conflict. As well, they had been told by their rulers that the Brightvillians were savage, primitive, vicious people. But instead, they found that, while restrained from access to anything resembling a weapon, they were treated with dignity, humanity and respect by the Brightvillians. There was anger expressed, but also compassion and camaraderie.

They had a chance to experience life in Brightville, with no need for money, with goods and services freely flowing, with abundance and respect for everybody, even for captured enemies.

By the time the captured and wounded soldiers were ready to go home, some of them asked if they could stay in Brightville and were happily accepted. Those who went back to Stuckton were nevertheless quite impressed with their Brightville experience. The once-familiar and seemingly natural and unassailable ways of Stuckton began more and more to feel burdensome, capricious, oppressive, and unnecessary to them.

The returning wounded and captives shared their experiences of the inner workings of life in Brightville with their friends and family, who scoffed at first but gradually came to question the order of things that was all they’d known. Within a decade or more, growing numbers of Stucktonians began to question the inevitability or even the validity of currency, the 5 Families, Banks and the dual existence of privileged and disenfranchised in the same community.

A trickle of Stucktonians started to trek to Brightville and were integrated into the community. Another swelling percentage of Stucktonians were deciding that rather than move to Brightville, they would bring Brightville’s way of life to Stuckton.

When the 5 Families and the Bank learned of this, they went to the media to spread propaganda to the effect that there was a nefarious dictatorial evil Communist conspiracy in Brightville to corrupt the youth of Stuckton, destroy the economy and make everybody poor, hungry and downtrodden. Of course, most of the people in Stuckton were already poor, hungry and downtrodden, but they had been brought up to believe that Stuckton was the Best Damn Place On Earth. Some of them believed the propaganda and aligned themselves with the ruling elite.

Eventually there came a day when things abruptly changed. Throughout Stuckton, everybody showed up for work and performed their jobs but stopped asking payment for goods and services, and stopped paying for anything even when some of the Old Guard tried to demand it. In the stores nobody asked for payment and nobody offered it. Craftspeople performed their jobs and did not ask for payment. The bank was barricaded, cut off from power and communications, and peacefully shut down. The Somnambulum was removed from the bank and put into a public place for use by whoever needed it. Nobody paid for anything, but they all kept working.

The 5 Families and the Bankers tried to send in the military to force the townspeople to return to the use of currency and resume payment. They discovered that many soldiers, a growing number, were committed to support and protect the strikers. Landlords knocked on doors demanding payment and were sternly told, “You don’t live here. You have no business here. You don’t need money any more. You have a home. Go there.”

When the power elite tried to enforce their dominance, they were defended against efficiently, disarmed, restrained, and placed out of the way. Within a month, Stuckton changed fundamentally. Representatives went to Brightville asking to learn how to function without currency and hierarchy. Brightvillians came to Stuckton and shared their common sense knowledge and experience. Within a generation, Stuckton shared the vibrant well-being and good-natured thriving lifestyle of Brightville, but with their own culture, slang, recipes, musical styles and culture. The two communities then enjoyed a long era of friendship and cultural exchange.

Conclusion

We now have a clear diagnosis and understanding of our true situation and of the cliff towards which we are hurtling headlong if we continue on our current trajectory. Fortunately, we now have a clear treatment plan, a course of action which will bring us away from the edge of a bleak and hellish abyss and into a condition of robust health and well-being that will most likely be able to endure indefinitely, barring pandemics, extinction-level asteroid impacts and other natural calamities possibly beyond our control. But to the extent that we control our destiny and the conditions that we live in, we will enjoy an ever-expanding, unprecedented new Renaissance and age of thriving and fulfillment individually and collectively that will redefine much of the very concepts of the nature of the human condition. Time is short, however. The sooner we act, the better our chances of success. The time is now. It is entirely up to us, the people of all of the countries of the world. From these pages, let us arise and act boldly, unified in our glorious diversity, fearlessly, honestly, uncompromisingly and compassionately to carry these principles from conception to actuality. Let the Transition begin!

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