OccupyWorldStreet from Occupy World Street.pdf · Learning from Nature | 184. ELEVEN. Gaian...

OccupyWorldStreetA Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform

RossJackson,PhD

Foreword by Hazel Henderson

Extracted from Occupy World Street - A Global Roadmap for Radical Economic and Political Reform by Ross Jackson

For more information visit www.greenbooks.co.uk/ows

First published in the UK in 2012 by

Green Books

Dartington Space, Dartington Hall,

Totnes, Devon TQ9 6EN

www.greenbooks.co.uk

Copyright © 2012 Ross Jackson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in

any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Designed by Peter Holm, Sterling Hill Productions, USA

ISBN 978 0 85784 058 5

Printed on paper sourced from responsibly

managed forests, using vegetable inks

Printed and bound by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall, UK



PRAISE FOR OCCUPY WORLD STREET

“Many writers have inventoried the unfolding disasters that threaten the human future. Ross Jackson is one of the very few who go on to spell out a visionary, yet practical, program of sufficient ambition to achieve a positive future. Best of all, he draws on his distinctive experience and credentials as a global currency trader to outline sound proposals for redesigning the badly flawed systems of global trade and finance that currently drive the world toward economic, social, and environmental collapse. This is a truly important book.”

—David Korten, cofounder of YES! magazine, author of Agenda for a New Economy

“Occupy World Street is a masterpiece that deserves to get wide circulation and commitment by world leaders. Never has the kind of ‘breakaway’ Ross Jackson envisages been more necessary to our prospects for survival.”

—Maurice Strong, Secretary-General of the UN Earth Summit, Rio 1992

“Ross Jackson’s proposal for post-collapse strategy is the first plausible, constructive scenario I have seen; an excellent text, even amazing. It is comprehensive, original, and very well written.”

—Dennis Meadows, coauthor, The Limits to Growth

“Occupy World Street breaks through the barriers that have shackled us. It is a monumental and inspirational call to action—and a long-awaited blue-print for how the actions should be implemented. Ross Jackson’s insights empower us to dream a new dream and give it the energy required to mate-rialize a truly Gaian world order.”

—John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

“Occupy World Street has the potential to unite hundreds of NGOs and millions of ordinary citizens in the streets behind a single simple proposal that could change the current dysfunctional game.”

—Hazel Henderson, author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy



“In Occupy World Street Ross Jackson tenderly brings us to understand how capitalism, patriarchy, and empire are three suicidal paradigms. These chapters are obligatory. But the last third of Occupy World Street is absolutely mind blowing—pure creative genius. Jackson was struck by lightning and disci-plined enough to transform the brilliance into a practical action plan. He has cleared the mists and his trumpets announce we do not have to go the way of the dinosaurs if we choose not to. Occupy World Street is the Aha! moment launching heartbroken activists into an immediate global collaboration which we could not implement without his ideas. Here they are. Let’s go.”

—Clinton Callahan, author of Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings

“Occupy World Street is a profound and urgently needed roadmap for the future of human civilization. Unlike most books emerging today on the global crisis, Occupy World Street challenges fundamental social and cultural assumptions that are driving the crisis, and stretches beyond painful symp-toms to practical solutions. Integrating forty years of leadership in business, science, ecology, philanthropy, and social activism, author Ross Jackson is a true servant of humanity who has engaged in high finance and business without ever losing touch with his concern and compassion for the entire human family. Few analysts have the requisite depth of insight, radical honesty, systemic expertise, and sheer courage to propose such far-reaching reforms of today’s world order. Occupy World Street is a breakthrough. Read it, find your unique role to play in its sweeping vision forward, and then if you haven’t already, breakaway!”

—Will Keepin, author of Divine Duality

“Occupy World Street is a breakthrough book! Ross Jackson is one of the world’s wise elders, and he sees clearly the collapse of the world system that is already underway. More importantly, he looks beyond breakdown to describe a new world with ‘Gaian institutions’ far better suited to the reality of an integrated world system. Occupy World Street offers creative leverage points and new approaches for moving beyond the obstacles of collapsing institutions and then, with deep insight, Jackson describes a range of new global institutions that can give birth to a world of sustainable prosperity.”

—Duane Elgin, author of The Living Universe



“Ross Jackson has written the definitive analysis of why the current system cannot reform itself and why a completely new system must be born. The corruption of the global financial system, combined with the magnitude of the escalating crisis of climate change, warrants no less than a complete human rebirth. Occupy World Street points the way.” —Jim Garrison, chairman and president, State of the World Forum

“A brilliantly detailed template for how to materialize enlightened global society. Radical shifts include natural phases of instability and unpredictabil-ity. Instead of becoming lost in the gaps that are forming between the death of the old and the birth of the new, Ross Jackson shows us how we can direct our energy toward positive change. Occupy World Street helps us understand the anatomy and developmental stages of our contemporary crises. Most importantly, it shows us how we can transform and move beyond them.”

—Llyn Roberts, author of Shapeshifting into Higher Consciousness

“Occupy World Street is a welcome addition to the growing chorus calling on us humans to grow up and start acting like adults and live together in a finite world more maturely. The longer we wait to change our ways the more difficult and challenging it will be for our descendants. Ross Jackson offers practical solutions to the course correction so sorely needed today.” —John Renesch, author of Getting to the Better Future

“Occupy World Street provides both a brilliant analysis of the immi-nent dangers that threaten to lead to a collapse of our global civiliza-tion and a bold and visionary design of global governance that embraces local sovereignty within an international framework for stewardship.” —Peter M. Pruzan, coauthor of Leading with Wisdom

“Occupy World Street is an important, timely, and courageous piece of work.”—Thomas H. Greco Jr., author of The End of Money

and the Future of Civilization

“Ross Jackson has been both a successful financier and an inspirational grass-roots innovator. This new book brings his wealth of experience to bear in a powerful and pragmatic response to our social, ecological, and economic malaise.”

—Helena Norberg-Hodge, author of Ancient Futures



“Economic disasters, climate change, species extinctions, social and politi-cal collapses—What next? Realistic solutions would help. And here they are, large enough in conception and sensitive enough in detail, courageous in facing the defining challenges, even exterminating angels of our times, and realistic enough to have a fighting chance.

“That’s what you get in Ross Jackson’s Occupy World Street. We need to break away from the infinite-growth economics that threaten practically everything. Says he, we need to reshape economics and create new institu-tions, admit that nature has its rules for people, too, and we need to acknowl-edge that the politics of genuine democracy and sustainability must rule business and economics, not the other way around.”

—Richard Register, author of Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature

“We are as skaters out on thin ice, humming a waltz in our heads. When suddenly we break through, it shocks us to the bone, and in that instant changes everything. If you have seen the Occupy Wall Streeters but can’t quite fathom either what they are trying to say or how they might actually succeed, Ross Jackson has something to tell you. Here is a book that lays the Occupy world out in a clear and complete way, from drug-resistant super-bugs to Wikileaks, from neoliberal capitalism to the Tunisian Spring. Put your Keynesian monetary theory back in its box. Jackson weaves a story of a world separated too long from nature but now returning by fits and starts to the real world.”

—Albert Bates, author of The Biochar Solution

“Brilliantly informative, timely and prescriptive, this book has global solu-tions for the Occupy movement. Simply the best strategy I have seen, and because Jackson himself started with grassroots community seeding, his strategy is well grounded. The Occupy movement will grow and blossom; it will inevitably require a global strategy and here it is! All levels of the global economy must be healthy if we are to have a reasonable human life on this planet, and as Jackson says, the longer it takes for people to wake up and act the more painful it will be. So spread this book and get going!”

—Elisabet Sahtouris, author of EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution



Publication date:

22nd March 2012

Media enquiries & extracts:

Gudrun Freese (Ms)[email protected]

Tel: 0782 5600 487

Referencing the book:

In your coverage, please include the book’s weblink, e.g.: Occupy World Street (£14.95) by Ross Jackson is published by Green Books (2012). For more information and to get involved,

visit www.greenbooks.co.uk/ows

Author interviews & lectures:

Ross Jackson will be in the UK during March 2012. Dates TBC. Please get in touch with Gudrun Freese if you would like to

speak with him in person during his UK visits, or book him for a lecture or panel. He is also available for phone interviews ahead

of publication, and may make earlier / later trips to the UK.

Bibliographic details:

Occupy World Street by Ross Jackson is published by Green Books in the UK and Europe.

£14.95 paperback

ISBN 978-0-85784-058-5

230 mm x 153 mm

336 pp



INTRODUCTION

“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the

world, are the ones who do.”

—Steve Jobs

The spontaneous emergence of Occupy Wall Street in New York in September of 2011 struck a chord that resonated around the world. Like a bolt of light-ning out of the blue, the demonstrators in Zuccotti Park—chanting “We are the 99 percent!”—expressed in words and action the suppressed anger and frustration with the status quo felt by millions of ordinary citizens around the world. By October 15, Occupy Wall Street went viral over the social networks, morphing into Occupy World Street when the citizens of 1,500 cities across the planet took to the streets in one of the biggest demonstra-tions in history to express their dissatisfaction—and with good reason. It is the ordinary citizens of the world who have been paying the price of an economic/political corporatocracy that has used financial speculation, which has no redeeming social value and only serves the interests of the 1 percent, to exploit the rest of society. The result has been an enormous transfer of real wealth from the middle class and the nonprofit sectors of society—the environment, communities, and social structures—to the already wealthy. Susan George, honorary president of ATTAC, calls the phenomenon “one of the greatest hold-ups of ours or any generation.” It is a process that has been accelerating for over thirty years and has reached the point where an explosive reaction to colossal social failure had to happen.

The demonstrators were quickly criticized by some observers for the wide range of issues they bring to the table and for their lack of any coherent alternative. This should not surprise anyone because the issues are indeed complex, interrelated, and actually quite a bit broader than most of the demonstrators and their critics even realize. Nor is an alternative a simple thing to formulate, as it involves—as this book will illustrate—a radical revamping of our global economic and political structures if we are to go to the root of the problem and propose real, workable solutions that can respond to the real needs of the demonstrating citizens. The corporatocracy is not only the cause of an inequitable wealth distribution. It is also a threat



xx INTRODUCTION

to democracy, to human rights, and to the rights of sovereign states to self-determination, as I will show. But most important, the reigning economic/political establishment is a major threat to the very survival of our civiliza-tion.

The failure of the 2009 and 2010 UN Climate Conferences to deal decisively with the looming danger of climate change raises a worrisome thought—it may not be politically possible to deal with the many global crises that our civilization faces. While this thought will strike many as absurd, it is unfor-tunately a very real possibility. And it is not just about climate change. The problem goes much deeper. We are facing a multitude of serious threats to life as we know it at this time, threats that were not relevant for previous generations—overload of the ecosystem, overpopulation, unsustainable growth, species extinction, growing inequality, global injustice, and more recently, global warming and peak oil.

There has been no lack of hard evidence and good analyses from numer-ous sources, no lack of worthy initiatives from thousands of NGOs and others to raise awareness and to suggest solutions, but to what avail? Things seem to be getting worse rather than better. For example, in May 2011 the International Energy Agency reported that energy-related CO

2 emissions are

now higher than ever before, in spite of the Kyoto Protocol and other initia-tives.

Many people have tried to respond to the rising threats, and in many differ-ent ways. In my own case, I have focused on helping the ecovillage move-ment grow and on increasing the quality of, and access to, education about sustainability. Others have focused on other important issues, like raising awareness, or changing consciousness, or global warming, or social justice, or sustainable agriculture, or saving the rainforests, and so on. Then why is so little being done about these obviously critical issues by the ruling powers that sometimes seem to be living on a different planet? Why the constant resistance? Why is it so difficult?

Parallel with the evolution of this untenable situation, economics has evolved into an irrelevant and abstract tool of the ruling elite, based on the dubious assumption that natural resources are without limit and are there to be used for the sole benefit of those who control them. While modern economists like to consider their field to be a branch of science, value-free and independent of politics, a more realistic view, critical to understanding the crux of the problem, is that put forward by American economist Hazel Henderson, who characterizes economics as “politics in disguise.” Economics has always served its political masters.



INTRODUCTION xxI

The current global structure is dysfunctional, undemocratic, corrupt, and exploitative of the environment, the developing countries, and even the citi-zens of the wealthiest nations. The ruling elites are apparently quite satisfied with the status quo and have no interest in finding global solutions, which can only weaken their relative position in the hierarchy. The current politi-cal leadership’s inflexible focus on economic growth makes it impossible to deal effectively with global issues like climate change, ecosystem damage, peak oil, and rationing of resources. Meanwhile, thousands of NGOs and millions, if not billions of ordinary citizens are dissatisfied with the status quo and are crying out for change. The dilemma seems to be: those who can, will not; those who will, cannot.

My purpose in this book is threefold: to analyze the root causes of the current political/economic logjam and the barriers that are preventing real solutions from being implemented; to propose global solutions, including new institutions that deal specifically with the identified problems and that work for everyone; and to put forward a strategy to get us there.

We have been far too slow in realizing the true nature of the threats facing us. It is vital that we deal with these global issues on an urgent basis. It is probably too late to avoid a collapse of civilization as we know it due to an obsession with economic growth on a finite planet that cannot tolerate much more without collapsing. I do not believe we can survive in the longer term as a global civilization without major reforms of the type proposed in the latter part of this book.

Personally, I have been straddling two very different worlds for the last thirty or so years. On the one hand, I have been at the very center of the evolving world of financial derivatives, hedge funds, and foreign-exchange fluctuations, both as adviser and manager. On the other hand, I have been an active reformer in the NGO world, very much aware of the unsustainability of our current path and the need for a major shift in lifestyle. This book is thus my attempt to draw upon my experience in these apparently incompat-ible areas of interest to show a possible way forward toward a more sustain-able and just global civilization, with a major focus on economics, since misguided assumptions about unlimited economic growth are central to the crises facing us. Thus, Occupy World Street is about collapse and renewal of our human civilization, about danger and opportunity, suffering and vision.

Part 1—“Planet Under Siege”—presents evidence that our civilization is already in the middle of a global collapse that will continue for several decades. It is a collapse that was inevitable, and should not be seen as entirely negative, although it is, and will continue to be, very painful. Collapse has



xxII INTRODUCTION

happened many times in the past for regional civilizations, but happens only once for the entire planetary civilization—the time at which the limits to physical growth begin to have serious global consequences. There is hard evidence that we are heading for a major discontinuity brought about by an overloading of the ecosystem as we hit the wall that limits further growth.

For our planet, the climax will be unique in one significant respect. In a dramatic coincidence, the driver that explains 75% of the enormous economic growth of the past 100 years—oil and gas—is about to peak and go into permanent decline during this period of ecological stress. The result of these two phenomena—ecological overload and peak oil—happening at almost the same time is going to result in the bursting of what I call the “growth bubble” and lead into a period of severe energy descent. When that happens, economic growth is going to turn negative rather suddenly for an indefinite period and with wide-ranging and painful consequences for everyone.

In part 2—“Drivers of Destruction”—I will explain why the collapse is happening, with particular emphasis on understanding the dominant world-view that produced both unprecedented growth and an economic/political system that made a collapse inevitable.

In part 3—“The Empire”—we will look at what has been happening in the United States over the past 60 years, acknowledging that the United States is no longer a true democracy, but has mutated into something else, where a “corporatocracy” controls, with a firm hand, all the vital sectors, including Congress, the financial institutions, the military, industry, and the media in what has become a global empire, but one on shaky ground.

Part 4—“New Values, New Beliefs”—describes the shift in values that is already happening and will eventually form the foundation of a new civiliza-tion. The impetus for radical change will be the realization that we have been living a lie, dominated by the cruel illusion of unending growth that simply cannot continue. It is time to reinvent ourselves as a sustainable and far more desirable civilization based on a new worldview and universal human values. Such a vision has been gradually emerging for several decades all across the world beneath the radar of the dominant culture—in NGOs, in the business world, in governments, in academia, and in the minds of people everywhere who dream of a better world. A deeper understanding of the coming crisis can give us the opportunity to make that vision a reality. To do so requires that we learn from the errors of the past in order to design a new kind of economics and a new kind of politics that will revolutionize every aspect of our lives.



INTRODUCTION xxIII

In part 5—“Toward a Gaian World Order”—I outline the new interna-tional institutions that are a logical necessity if we are to realize the vision of a sustainable and just future that works for everyone. I call the result of this restructuring effort the Gaian World Order to reflect the focus on the oneness of all planetary life in the emerging holistic worldview. A key component of the required restructuring lies in a revolutionary reform of the economic, monetary, trade, and financial system, as well as the political structure under which the international community operates. If we allow the vision to manifest, then future generations will function under a far more appropriate form of global governances and within the framework of an economic system that is protective of the environment and the social needs of all world citizens, without sacrificing the democratic institutions and personal freedoms that are two of the most positive characteristics of our time. But it will not happen by itself. Resistance from the dying culture will be formidable.

It is not enough to put forward a vision without a plan to achieve it. Therefore, in part 6—“Getting There”—I will describe a strategy to bring about the desired end result based on a peaceful cooperation between bottom-up grassroots supporters of the vision from across the world and a handful of small nations that are prepared to take on a leadership role at this critical time. The coauthor of an earlier draft of this work, Helena Norberg-Hodge, and I call it the Breakaway Strategy. It’s about breaking away from a dysfunctional and dying political/economic system that is hold-ing us in bondage. The task of the initiators is to found a prototype of the Gaian World Order in a Gaian League that offers an invitation to all nations to join the project as equal partners when they feel they are ready to partake in an exciting new adventure into a future of great promise that will work for everyone.



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