The 8 Forms of Capital – a whole system of economic understanding

April 12, 2016

In 2008 and 2009, I was part of the organizing & facilitation team for the Financial Permaculture Course in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Convened by the Center for Holistic Ecology, Gaia University, and Solari, Inc, the course brought together permaculture designers, financial planners, entrepreneurs, community activists, complementary currency advocates, farmers and government officials from around the country.

Financial Permaculture goes beyond the traditional permaculture approach to economics and asks the question, “What would it look like if we re-designed the global financial system using permaculture principles?” and “What if our financial system looked more like an ecosystem?”

In 2009, Catherine Austin Fitts presented “Mapping Financial Ecosystems”. We mapped all the ‘capital pools’ in the local community. We explored the flows of money between entities, and discussed how vibrant local economies are more defined by the flows of money rather than by the pools. Something wasn’t sitting right with me. We kept talking about money as if it was the only form of capital, even though there was a growing awareness that acres of land, board feet of timber, and tons of carbon might also be part of an ecosystemic economy.

At one of the open space sessions I began to realize a more complete map of “capital.”

EIGHT FORMS OF CAPITAL

The Oxford American Dictionary states that capital is, “wealth in the form of money or other assets” and a “valuable resource of a particular kind.” What are these ‘other assets’? I’ve never seen a whole map of all the different types of ‘valuable resources’. In the Permaculture Designers’ Manual, Bill Mollison offers and expands on a categorization of assets based on their potential: Degenerative, Generative, Procreative, Informational, Conservative (1). These always seem like a good way to think about things, but I don’t use them in any tangible way.

I wanted something that would be more helpful for understanding the complex transactions and exchanges swirling around me as a human being and us as a global community. As I considered the ‘mapping financial ecosystems’ exercise, a bigger picture began to emerge as I thought about the capital pools and flows of the Mayor of a hypothetical small town.

The Mayor might have some money (financial capital). A good Mayor would probably also have many friends in the town and some influence (social capital). The Mayor, who has a degree in economics, knows the stock market extremely well. S/he uses that intellectual capital to generate more money (financial capital) to run a re-election campaign, in which s/he works to transform financial capital into more social capital in the town.

I tried to enumerate all of the different ‘valuable resources’ which an individual or entity could gather or exchange. “Eight Forms of Capital” emerged:

SOCIAL CAPITAL

Influence and connections are social capital. A person or entity who has ‘good social capital’ can ask favors, influence decisions, and communicate efficiently. Social capital is of primary importance in politics, business, and community organizing.

Jason Eaton of Social Thread LLC explained to me that Capital can be in the form of equity or debt. In social capital, a person can ‘owe’ favors or decision-making influence to another person or entity.

MATERIAL CAPITAL

Non-living physical objects form material capital. Raw and processed resources like stone, metal, timber, and fossil fuels are ‘complexed’ with each other to create more sophisticated materials or structures. Modern buildings, bridges, and other pieces of infrastructure along with tools, computers, and other technologies are complexed forms of material capital.

FINANCIAL CAPITAL

We are most familiar with financial capital: Money, currencies, securities and other instruments of the global financial system. The current global society focuses enormous amounts of attention on financial capital. It is our primary tool for exchanging goods and services with other humans. It can be a powerful tool for oppression, or, (potentially) liberation.

LIVING CAPITAL

A precious metal dealer who attended both Financial Permaculture courses advises, “Rather than U.S. Dollars, measure your wealth in ounces [of gold and silver]!” Recognizing that “precious” metals are just another form of financial capital, Catherine Austin Fitts recommends that we diversify and, “Measure your wealth in ounces, acres, and hooves.” Living capital is made up of the animals, plants, water and soil of our land— the true basis for life on our planet.

Permaculture design teaches us the principles and practices for rapid creation of living capital. Permaculture encourages us to share the abundance of living capital rather than the intangible “wealth” of financial capital.

(Note: “Natural Capital” could be a synonym for Living Capital, but the 1999 book “Natural Capitalism” by Hawkens et al. focuses more on a slightly updated system of capitalism than on the true wealth of living systems. The current Slow Money movement is also making strides in a similar direction, seeking to transfer financial capital into the living forms of soil, animals, and agriculture.)

INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL

Intellectual capital is best described as a ‘knowledge’ asset. The majority of the current global education system is focused on imparting intellectual capital — whether or not it is the most useful form of capital for creating resilient and thriving communities. Having intellectual capital is touted as the surest way to ‘be successful’.Science and research can focus on obtaining intellectual capital or ‘truth’, though it is often motivated by the desire for financial or social capital. For example, “going to university” is primarily an exchange of financial capital for intellectual capital. It is supposed to prepare people for the rest of their lives in the world.

EXPERIENTIAL (OR HUMAN) CAPITAL

We accumulate experiential capital through actually organizing a project in our community, or building a strawbale house, or completing a permaculture design. The most effective way to learn anything comes through a blended gathering of intellectual and experiential capital. My personal experience getting a Master’s degree at Gaia University showed me that experiential learning is essential for my effective functioning in the world: I was able to do projects instead of take classes, and I’m now collaboratively organizing the local permaculture guild and co-running a successful permaculture design firm (2).

I can see that ‘Human Capital’ is a combination of social, intellectual and experiential capital, all facets of a person that can be gathered and carried in essentially limitless amounts. But there’s one more form of capital that a person can gather and carry inside themselves.

SPIRITUAL CAPITAL

As one practices their religion, spirituality, or other means of connection to self and universe, one may accumulate spiritual capital. It contains aspects of intellectual and experiential capital, but is deeper, more personal and less quantifiable. Most of the world’s religions include a concept of ‘the great chain of being’, a holarchic understanding of existence where spiritual attainment (in this context, the accumulation of spiritual capital) leads to different levels of being (3).

Buddhism even contains an explicit spiritual currency: Karma! This form of spiritual capital is tallied and accounted for not only in one’s current life, but (taking re-incarnation into consideration) also in all of the past and future lives of one’s soul. In spiritual capital again enters the concept that capital can be in the form of equity (gathering positive spiritual experience/understanding/attainment) OR in the form of debt. In some Mayan cultures (like the Tzutujil of Lago Atitlan), a basic understanding of existence is that humans owe a ‘spiritual debt’ to the magnificent beauty and complexity of existence. According to this worldview, the goal of one’s life in the world is to create works of unspeakable beauty and gratitude, thereby repaying the spiritual debt to existence (4). The Tzutujil also recognize that single human beings can never really be effective at gathering and flowing capital if they are separated from their community.

CULTURAL CAPITAL

All the other forms of capital may be held and owed by individuals, but cultural capital can only be gathered by a community of people. Cultural capital describes the shared internal and external processes of a community – the works of art and theater, the songs that every child learns, the ability to come together in celebration of the harvest or for a religious holiday. Cultural capital cannot be gathered by individuals alone. It could be viewed as an emergent property of the complex system of inter-capital exchanges that takes place in a village, a city, a bioregion, or nation.

PROPERTIES OF THE SYSTEM

These eight forms of capital help us map our understanding of the world. The map clarifies that money is not the only form of capital flowing around and through us. This map expands the concepts of wealth (and poverty) to include the ‘valuable resources’ of personal connections, natural resources, land, knowledge, experience, and more. It provides a language for permaculture designers to communicate the value of healthy soil and healthy communities to people immersed in the current mindset of global capitalism, where financial capital is the only reality.

There are two types of flow between pools capital:

1) Intra-capital flows, between the same type of capital. For example, using US dollars to purchase a stock or bond, or exchanging heirloom tomato seeds for a carton of eggs.

2) Inter-capital flows, between different types of capital. For example, paying for a 2-year apprenticeship with a master builder would be an exchange of financial capital for experiential, intellectual, and even social capital.

These properties of capital flow point to another interesting question and feature of this map: What are the mediums of exchange used for each form of capital?

EIGHT FORMS OF CURRENCY

Although most definitions of currency focus on financial capital, the Oxford American Dictionary and the Princeton Wordnet (5) both include the definition of “the fact or quality of being generally accepted or in use”. For this map, I define a currency as the generally accepted (or in use) medium of exchange between pools of capital. In many cases, the currency is the capital itself — for example, items of ‘Material Capital’ like copper or steel, can be the medium of exchange. Currencies can also be “complexed” into more interconnected and functional forms, and still used as a medium of exchange.

Here are the eight forms of currency associated with each form of capital:

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

Earlier this year, as my partner and I designed a four-weekend series of Forest Garden courses, we were having a lot of trouble with the budget. The costs of renting space and paying teachers combined with our desire to keep fees affordable for the local community made the numbers look unfeasible. No matter how we changed things around, we couldn’t figure out how to make a reasonable financial return. Then we realized that our thinking was too narrow — we were only looking at financial capital! When we considered the experiential capital we’d gain by running a course, the social capital gathered by planting forest gardens at a new education center, and the living capital of hundreds of useful plants going into the ground… it became clear that financial remuneration was only one facet of the system. Nonetheless, we still needed to balance our inflow and outflow of this one form of capital.

The eight forms of capital provide a clear path towards a small point of great leverage: Eco-social Investing. We can encourage individuals, businesses, organizations, and governments to mimic nature’s practices of investing: Locally, intimately, diversely, and primarily in living capital. The Financial Permaculture community, Gaia University, and a host of connected businesses and organizations are investing diverse baskets of capital, offering events like the Carbon Farming Course in Tennessee and the thriving eco-social chocolate business BooyaCacao.

I’ve outlined a set of principles for Eco-Social and Ecosystem Investing, which you can find on my blog at www.appleseedpermaculture.com/blog One of the most useful applications of this map is for growing and shifting our own understanding of the world and the transactions we engage in. When I volunteer time working on my friend’s organic permaculture farm, more than just ‘free labor’ is taking place:

-I’m gaining experiential and intellectual capital about the farm’s soil, crops, and management,

-We’re supporting the growth of healthy living capital in the soil,

-My friend gets help producing products to exchange for financial capital (her right livelihood)

-We both build social capital through positive interaction and connection with each other.

This amount of clarity can lead to a whole new level of transparency in our work as eco-social-cultural-economic designers. It can guide us towards an ever-deepening practice of the third ethic of permaculture.

THE THIRD ETHIC

Although Bill Mollison originally stated the third ethic of permaculture as “Setting limits to population and consumption,”(6) many of us (especially in the more recent waves of permaculture) have been taught different forms of the third ethic. Some learn “Fair Share,” a toned-down and friendlier version of “Limits”. Others learn “Resource Share,” which directs attention away from scarcity and towards re-investment of abundance. And more recently I’ve seen Starhawk refer to the third ethic as “Future Care,” which synthesizes the call for “Fair Share” and “Resource Share” into a focus on creating thriving inheritances for future generations. The eight forms of capital can and should be considered in terms of each version of the third ethic.

FAIR SHARE

When people and the businesses, organizations, and governments understand the eight forms of capital, they may find that financial capital is not the whole system. This can lead to decreased consumption of non-essential goods and services that fuel our infinite-growth-based financial system.

A truly just society requires fair and equitable distribution of all forms of capital. While financial capital is important, non-financial capitals offer pathways to empowerment for the oppressed communities of our planet. In communities I’ve visited (Kazakhstan, Chile, and Latin America), the abundance of cultural capital often outweighs the financial capital, regenerating into a wealth of experiential and living capital that I’ve never seen in my northeastern-USA home. Any of us in the over-developed world can follow this modeling, working to end oppression caused by our current financial-capital-centric systems.

RESOURCE SHARE

We can use the eight forms of capital to include resource sharing in our projects. AppleSeed Permaculture has set a new Carbon Policy, whereby 5% of our revenues will be dedicated to offsetting our carbon footprint through carbon-farming projects (living capital). The Permaculture Activist’s tree tax functions in much the same way, transforming financial capital into living capital for the good of the planet.

AppleSeed Permaculture is also inspired by our friends Shabazz and Josephine of Greenway Environmental Services, who explicitly donate 10% of every work week back to the community through education and consulting. They share their intellectual and experiential with urban youth groups and rural permaculturists alike, generating social capital for themselves at the same time. As an upper-middle class white male from the northeastern United States, I am seeking ways to transparently and joyfully use my multi-layered privilege to effectively share resources with those who have less power and freedom than I do. This article is one manifestation of my sharing of intellectual capital. I will also approach this goal through my work with eco-social investing. After seeking out leadership from people and communities who have been targeted by the oppressive effects of sexism, racism, and classism, their projects can be empowered through flows of multi-capital investment.

FUTURE CARE

To care for future generations, we need to move beyond finance into living and cultural capital. Of all eight forms, these two have the greatest potential for positive systemic change. Mollison writes, “We should develop or create wealth just as we develop landscapes, by conserving energy and natural resources [and] by developing procreative assets (proliferating forests, prairies, and life systems)”(7). Only through the songs, stories, and shared ethics of cultural capital can a focus on living capital can be sustained for the seventh generation to come.

Some pieces are missing from the map: where does “labor” fit into the picture? What form of capital is “time”? There may be some dangerous implications: this map could commodify ecosystem services, spirituality, and culture. To care for the future, we must think more holistically about our current capital system.

Let this map be a first draft. We don’t know what will happen in the future, but if a complex set of changes and capital flows appear along the way, I offer the eight forms of capital as a new map for the journey.

Source: http://www.appleseedpermaculture.com/8-forms-of-capital

Stunning Revelations In This Year's Most Censored Medical Film

April 08, 2016

(NaturalNews) When film-goers walked out of the Angelika Film Center in New York City last weekend, they were visibly moved, many of them with tears in their eyes. It wasn't one of the latest big box office dramas that inspired such emotion; it was a 91-minute documentary called Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe.

The film looks at the corruption, fraud and collusion that takes place in the CDC, which is supposed to be looking out for public health. It looks into the story of William Thompson, PhD, the CDC senior scientist who blew the whistle on CDC deception in studies on the links between the MMR vaccine and autism. There are interviews with politicians and doctors, but it is the stories shared by the parents of children who have been injured by MMR vaccines that are stirring up the most emotions.

Bring tissues and have support ready

Contributing Editor Tim Welsh of AgeofAutism.com was one of the first people to see the movie. He described it as a "riveting roller coaster" and identifies it as a standout even among other documentaries about autism.

He said the movie moved him to tears and suggested that viewers come equipped with tissues, although he was quick to point out that it gets its message across without going too far.

He said: "Questions raised over and over in the public domain about Fraud, Deception and Malfeasance at the CDC are detailed in such a way I personally believe it will be impossible for the crimes to go ignored."

He even goes so far as to suggest that viewers bring a friend for support because he found himself shaking and crying at the end and in need of a hug. A commenter who attended the Saturday night screening said she felt she was in the presence of heroes at the film, thanking all of those involved in its production. Another commenter said the film had been getting good numbers at the box office all weekend.

Meanwhile, a post by "Professor" on ThinkingMomsRevolution.com said: "Practically from the opening scene, the film Vaxxed grabs our attention and doesn't let go until it has elicited every ounce of empathy and outrage the human heart is capable of."

Several commenters were quick to echo their agreement and call out reviewers in the mainstream media who claimed that the turnout for the film was low.

The soft premiere was well attended considering that it took place on a Friday morning at 11am, but the 8pm showing that night was fully packed. When the makers of the film came out afterward, they were greeted with a standing ovation.

As pointed out by Celia Farber and Stephen Ericson of TruthBarrier.com, the film grossed more than $28,000 in three days on its opening weekend. This not only equates to at least a handful of sold-out shows but also exceeds the per-theater average for the controversial documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 on its opening weekend.

Film no stranger to controversy

The film was initially accepted by the Tribeca Film Festival before being suddenly and inexplicably rejected. Robert De Niro, who has an autistic child, said he had thought the film would be a good conversation-starter, but he was somehow convinced to change his mind.

In a statement he said, "But after reviewing it over the past few days with the Tribeca Film Festival team and others from the scientific community, we do not believe it contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for."

VAXXED: the ABC News interview that Big Pharma didn't want you to see

Sources include:

AgeOfAutism.com

NaturalNews.com

ThinkingMomsRevolution.com

TruthBarrier.com

VaxxedTheMovie.com

TruthWiki.org

Science.NaturalNews.com

History of the Solar System and Secret Space Program

Mar 2, 2016

David Wilcock and Corey Goode: History of the Solar System and Secret Space Program - Notes from Consciousness Life Expo 2016

Source: http://sitsshow.blogspot.com/2016/02/...

By Justin Deschamps

Please consider joining ... https://www.facebook.com/thefulldiscl...

and play your part to demand _FULL DISCLOSURE_ by bringing Awareness to help awaken Humanity!!!

The following is a series of detailed notes from David Wilcock and Corey Goode's talk from Friday the 19th of February 2016, History of the Secret Space Program.

Much of the data contained here is a summary of past disclosures, presented by Corey and David via their media outlets. But there are also hitherto unrevealed nuggets of information for those who have been following this unfolding story, several of which I think are of key importance.

This is the most well-rounded presentation of the Secret Space Program and history of the solar system that either of them has ever produced. It is an excellent place to start learning about what has apparently been happening under the cover of secrecy for eons.

Capitalism will eat democracy - unless we speak up

APRIL 6, 2016

“Have you wondered why politicians aren’t what they used to be, why governments seem unable to solve real problems?

Economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Minister of Finance for Greece, says that it’s because you can be in politics today but not be in power — because real power now belongs to those who control the economy. He believes that the mega-rich and corporations are cannibalizing the political sphere, causing financial crisis. In this talk, hear his dream for a world in which capital and labor no longer struggle against each other, “one that is simultaneously libertarian, Marxist and Keynesian.””

https://www.ted.com/talks/yanis_varoufakis_capitalism_will_eat_democracy_unless_we_speak_up?language=en#t-88411

Transcript of “Capitalism will eat democracy — unless we speak up”

Yanis Varoufakis

00:12 Democracy. In the West, we make a colossal mistake taking it for granted. We see democracy not as the most fragile of flowers that it really is, but we see it as part of our society’s furniture. We tend to think of it as an intransigent given. We mistakenly believe that capitalism begets inevitably democracy. It doesn’t.

00:40 Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and his great imitators in Beijing have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it is perfectly possible to have a flourishing capitalism, spectacular growth, while politics remains democracy-free. Indeed, democracy is receding in our neck of the woods, here in Europe.

01:03 Earlier this year, while I was representing Greece — the newly elected Greek government — in the Eurogroup as its Finance Minister, I was told in no uncertain terms that our nation’s democratic process — our elections — could not be allowed to interfere with economic policies that were being implemented in Greece. At that moment, I felt that there could be no greater vindication of Lee Kuan Yew, or the Chinese Communist Party, indeed of some recalcitrant friends of mine who kept telling me that democracy would be banned if it ever threatened to change anything.

01:40 Tonight, here, I want to present to you an economic case for an authentic democracy. I want to ask you to join me in believing again that Lee Kuan Yew, the Chinese Communist Party and indeed the Eurogroup are wrong in believing that we can dispense with democracy — that we need an authentic, boisterous democracy. And without democracy, our societies will be nastier, our future bleak and our great, new technologies wasted.

02:17 Speaking of waste, allow me to point out an interesting paradox that is threatening our economies as we speak. I call it the twin peaks paradox. One peak you understand — you know it, you recognize it — is the mountain of debts that has been casting a long shadow over the United States, Europe, the whole world. We all recognize the mountain of debts. But few people discern its twin. A mountain of idle cash belonging to rich savers and to corporations, too terrified to invest it into the productive activities that can generate the incomes from which you can extinguish the mountain of debts and which can produce all those things that humanity desperately needs, like green energy.

03:06 Now let me give you two numbers. Over the last three months, in the United States, in Britain and in the Eurozone, we have invested, collectively, 3.4 trillion dollars on all the wealth-producing goods — things like industrial plants, machinery, office blocks, schools, roads, railways, machinery, and so on and so forth. $3.4 trillion sounds like a lot of money until you compare it to the $5.1 trillion that has been slushing around in the same countries, in our financial institutions, doing absolutely nothing during the same period except inflating stock exchanges and bidding up house prices.

03:49 So a mountain of debt and a mountain of idle cash form twin peaks, failing to cancel each other out through the normal operation of the markets.

04:01 The result is stagnant wages, more than a quarter of 25- to 54-year-olds in America, in Japan and in Europe out of work. And consequently, low aggregate demand, which in a never-ending cycle, reinforces the pessimism of the investors, who, fearing low demand, reproduce it by not investing — exactly like Oedipus’ father, who, terrified by the prophecy of the oracle that his son would grow up to kill him, unwittingly engineered the conditions that ensured that Oedipus, his son, would kill him.

04:37 This is my quarrel with capitalism. Its gross wastefulness, all this idle cash, should be energized to improve lives, to develop human talents, and indeed to finance all these technologies, green technologies, which are absolutely essential for saving planet Earth.

04:57 Am I right in believing that democracy might be the answer? I believe so, but before we move on, what do we mean by democracy? Aristotle defined democracy as the constitution in which the free and the poor, being in the majority, control government.

05:16 Now, of course Athenian democracy excluded too many. Women, migrants and, of course, the slaves. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of ancient Athenian democracy on the basis of whom it excluded.

05:30 What was more pertinent, and continues to be so about ancient Athenian democracy, was the inclusion of the working poor, who not only acquired the right to free speech, but more importantly, crucially, they acquired the rights to political judgments that were afforded equal weight in the decision-making concerning matters of state. Now, of course, Athenian democracy didn’t last long. Like a candle that burns brightly, it burned out quickly. And indeed, our liberal democracies today do not have their roots in ancient Athens. They have their roots in the Magna Carta, in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, indeed in the American constitution. Whereas Athenian democracy was focusing on the masterless citizen and empowering the working poor, our liberal democracies are founded on the Magna Carta tradition, which was, after all, a charter for masters. And indeed, liberal democracy only surfaced when it was possible to separate fully the political sphere from the economic sphere, so as to confine the democratic process fully in the political sphere, leaving the economic sphere — the corporate world, if you want — as a democracy-free zone.

06:52 Now, in our democracies today, this separation of the economic from the political sphere, the moment it started happening, it gave rise to an inexorable, epic struggle between the two, with the economic sphere colonizing the political sphere, eating into its power.

07:11 Have you wondered why politicians are not what they used to be? It’s not because their DNA has degenerated.

07:18 (Laughter)

07:19 It is rather because one can be in government today and not in power, because power has migrated from the political to the economic sphere, which is separate.

07:30 Indeed, I spoke about my quarrel with capitalism. If you think about it, it is a little bit like a population of predators, that are so successful in decimating the prey that they must feed on, that in the end they starve.

07:47 Similarly, the economic sphere has been colonizing and cannibalizing the political sphere to such an extent that it is undermining itself, causing economic crisis. Corporate power is increasing, political goods are devaluing, inequality is rising, aggregate demand is falling and CEOs of corporations are too scared to invest the cash of their corporations.

08:12 So the more capitalism succeeds in taking the demos out of democracy, the taller the twin peaks and the greater the waste of human resources and humanity’s wealth.

08:26 Clearly, if this is right, we must reunite the political and economic spheres and better do it with a demos being in control, like in ancient Athens except without the slaves or the exclusion of women and migrants.

08:43 Now, this is not an original idea. The Marxist left had that idea 100 years ago and it didn’t go very well, did it?

08:49 The lesson that we learned from the Soviet debacle is that only by a miracle will the working poor be reempowered, as they were in ancient Athens, without creating new forms of brutality and waste.

09:05 But there is a solution: eliminate the working poor. Capitalism’s doing it by replacing low-wage workers with automata, androids, robots. The problem is that as long as the economic and the political spheres are separate, automation makes the twin peaks taller, the waste loftier and the social conflicts deeper, including — soon, I believe — in places like China.

09:37 So we need to reconfigure, we need to reunite the economic and the political spheres, but we’d better do it by democratizing the reunified sphere, lest we end up with a surveillance-mad hyperautocracy that makes The Matrix, the movie, look like a documentary.

09:59 (Laughter)

10:00 So the question is not whether capitalism will survive the technological innovations it is spawning. The more interesting question is whether capitalism will be succeeded by something resembling a Matrix dystopia or something much closer to a Star Trek-like society, where machines serve the humans and the humans expend their energies exploring the universe and indulging in long debates about the meaning of life in some ancient, Athenian-like, high tech agora.

10:35 I think we can afford to be optimistic. But what would it take, what would it look like to have this Star Trek-like utopia, instead of the Matrix-like dystopia?

10:49 In practical terms, allow me to share just briefly, a couple of examples.

10:54 At the level of the enterprise, imagine a capital market, where you earn capital as you work, and where your capital follows you from one job to another, from one company to another, and the company — whichever one you happen to work at at that time — is solely owned by those who happen to work in it at that moment. Then all income stems from capital, from profits, and the very concept of wage labor becomes obsolete. No more separation between those who own but do not work in the company and those who work but do not own the company; no more tug-of-war between capital and labor; no great gap between investment and saving; indeed, no towering twin peaks.

11:49 At the level of the global political economy, imagine for a moment that our national currencies have a free-floating exchange rate, with a universal, global, digital currency, one that is issued by the International Monetary Fund, the G-20, on behalf of all humanity. And imagine further that all international trade is denominated in this currency — let’s call it “the cosmos,” in units of cosmos — with every government agreeing to be paying into a common fund a sum of cosmos units proportional to the country’s trade deficit, or indeed to a country’s trade surplus. And imagine that that fund is utilized to invest in green technologies, especially in parts of the world where investment funding is scarce.

12:45 This is not a new idea. It’s what, effectively, John Maynard Keynes proposed in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference. The problem is that back then, they didn’t have the technology to implement it. Now we do, especially in the context of a reunified political-economic sphere.

13:07 The world that I am describing to you is simultaneously libertarian, in that it prioritizes empowered individuals, Marxist, since it will have confined to the dustbin of history the division between capital and labor, and Keynesian, global Keynesian. But above all else, it is a world in which we will be able to imagine an authentic democracy.

13:36 Will such a world dawn? Or shall we descend into a Matrix-like dystopia? The answer lies in the political choice that we shall be making collectively. It is our choice, and we’d better make it democratically.

13:53 Thank you.

13:54 (Applause)

14:00 Bruno Giussani: Yanis … It was you who described yourself in your bios as a libertarian Marxist. What is the relevance of Marx’s analysis today?

14:13 Yanis Varoufakis: Well, if there was any relevance in what I just said, then Marx is relevant. Because the whole point of reunifying the political and economic is — if we don’t do it, then technological innovation is going to create such a massive fall in aggregate demand,

14:26 what Larry Summers refers to as secular stagnation. With this crisis migrating from one part of the world, as it is now, it will destabilize not only our democracies, but even the emerging world that is not that keen on liberal democracy. So if this analysis holds water, then Marx is absolutely relevant. But so is Hayek, that’s why I’m a libertarian Marxist, and so is Keynes, so that’s why I’m totally confused.

14:53 (Laughter)

14:55 BG: Indeed, and possibly we are too, now.

14:57 (Laughter)

14:58 (Applause)

15:00 YV: If you are not confused, you are not thinking, OK?

15:03 BG: That’s a very, very Greek philosopher kind of thing to say —

15:06 YV: That was Einstein, actually —

15:08 BG: During your talk you mentioned Singapore and China, and last night at the speaker dinner, you expressed a pretty strong opinion about how the West looks at China. Would you like to share that?

15:19 YV: Well, there’s a great degree of hypocrisy. In our liberal democracies, we have a semblance of democracy. It’s because we have confined, as I was saying in my talk, democracy to the political sphere, while leaving the one sphere where all the action is — the economic sphere — a completely democracy-free zone.

15:38 In a sense, if I am allowed to be provocative, China today is closer to Britain in the 19th century. Because remember, we tend to associate liberalism with democracy — that’s a mistake, historically. Liberalism, liberal, it’s like John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill was particularly skeptical about the democratic process. So what you are seeing now in China is a very similar process to the one that we had in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, especially the transition from the first to the second. And to be castigating China for doing that which the West did in the 19th century, smacks of hypocrisy.

16:20 BG: I am sure that many people here are wondering about your experience as the Finance Minister of Greece earlier this year.

16:26 YV: I knew this was coming.

16:28 BG: Yes.

16:29 BG: Six months after, how do you look back at the first half of the year?

16:34 YV: Extremely exciting, from a personal point of view, and very disappointing, because we had an opportunity to reboot the Eurozone. Not just Greece, the Eurozone. To move away from the complacency and the constant denial that there was a massive — and there is a massive architectural fault line going through the Eurozone, which is threatening, massively, the whole of the European Union process.

16:59 We had an opportunity on the basis of the Greek program — which by the way, was the first program to manifest that denial — to put it right. And, unfortunately, the powers in the Eurozone, in the Eurogroup, chose to maintain denial.

17:17 But you know what happens. This is the experience of the Soviet Union. When you try to keep alive an economic system that architecturally cannot survive, through political will and through authoritarianism, you may succeed in prolonging it, but when change happens it happens very abruptly and catastrophically.

17:36 BG: What kind of change are you foreseeing?

17:38 YV: Well, there’s no doubt that if we don’t change the architecture of the Eurozone, the Eurozone has no future.

17:43 BG: Did you make any mistakes when you were Finance Minister?

17:46 YV: Every day.

17:48 BG: For example? YV: Anybody who looks back —

17:50 (Applause)

17:55 No, but seriously. If there’s any Minister of Finance, or of anything else for that matter, who tells you after six months in a job, especially in such a stressful situation, that they have made no mistake, they’re dangerous people. Of course I made mistakes.

18:10 The greatest mistake was to sign the application for the extension of a loan agreement in the end of February. I was imagining that there was a genuine interest on the side of the creditors to find common ground. And there wasn’t. They were simply interested in crushing our government, just because they did not want to have to deal with the architectural fault lines that were running through the Eurozone. And because they didn’t want to admit that for five years they were implementing a catastrophic program in Greece. We lost one-third of our nominal GDP. This is worse than the Great Depression. And no one has come clean from the troika of lenders that have been imposing this policy to say, “This was a colossal mistake.”

18:50 BG: Despite all this, and despite the aggressiveness of the discussion, you seem to be remaining quite pro-European.

18:56 YV: Absolutely. Look, my criticism of the European Union and the Eurozone comes from a person who lives and breathes Europe. My greatest fear is that the Eurozone will not survive. Because if it doesn’t, the centrifugal forces that will be unleashed will be demonic, and they will destroy the European Union. And that will be catastrophic not just for Europe but for the whole global economy.

19:22 We are probably the largest economy in the world. And if we allow ourselves to fall into a route of the postmodern 1930’s, which seems to me to be what we are doing, then that will be detrimental to the future of Europeans and non-Europeans alike.

19:39 BG: We definitely hope you are wrong on that point. Yanis, thank you for coming to TED.

19:43 YV: Thank you.

19:44 (Applause)

https://www.ted.com/talks/yanis_varoufakis_capitalism_will_eat_democracy_unless_we_speak_up/transcript?language=en

Mossack Fonseca: The Nazi, CIA And Nevada Connections... And Why It's Now Rothschild's Turn

04/03/2016

The Panama Papers, which relied heavily on the leaked information from Mossack Fonseca law firm, may not just be about State actors and corporate players’ secret offshore shell companies, physical assets and bank accounts, but more about getting back at people who have turned their backs on the New World Order totalitarian regime which took decades of planning, mass murder, regime changes, false flags, and sustained environmental destruction, to construct.

The Panama Papers look more like a Rothchild dynasty’s exercising the Samson Option. But, it’s still good to know that they are now after each other’s throat.

It turns out that the Mossack Fonseca law firm is a handy work of the Khazarian Mafia to draw in State leaders and companies purposely to create a bargaining chip on all of them for later use. Blackmailing is a tried and tested method of controlling leaderships everywhere.

From Heavy.com:

Jurgen Mossack, left, and Ramon Fonseca Mora are the founders of the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca.

The firm was founded more than 30 years ago by German-born Jurgen Mossack and Panamanian Ramon Fonseca Mora.

Here’s what you need to know about Mossack, Fonseca and their firm:

The German-Born Mossack Is the Son of a Waffen-SS Officer & Grew Up in Panama

Jurgen Mossack, second left, and Ramon Fonseca Mora, fifth from left, with other Mossack Fonseca leaders in 2011. (GIS/ Reynold Corum).

Jurgen Mossack, one of the founders of the Mossack Fonseca law firm, was born in Fürth, in Bavaria, in 1949, according to a 2015 article in the German business newspaper Handelsblatt.

He moved with his family to Panama and grew up there, the newspaper says.

Mossack’s father served in Hitler’s Waffen-SS during World War II, according to the Panama Papers investigation. The elder Mossack also offered to spy for the U.S. government on “former Nazis turned Communist or unconverted Nazis cloaking themselves as Communists,” after the war, according to U.S. intelligence files obtained by the ICIJ.. He also offered to spy on Communist activity in Cuba, the files show.

Jurgen Mossack studied at the Santa Maria La Antigua University School of Law in Panama, graduating in 1973, according to his biography on the firm’s website. He also studied law in London.

Fonseca Is a Political Leader & an Award-Winning Novelist

Fonseca, a 63-year-old native of Panama, studied law and political science at the University of Panama and then went on to the School of Economcis and Political Science London. He worked at the United Nations headquarters in Switzerland before starting his law firm.

Fonseca is also involved in politics, as a leader of the Panamenista party. He has taken a leave of absence from politics because of the investigation, according to the ICIJ.

In addition to his work with Mossack Fonseca and his political activity, Fonseca is an award-winning novelist. He has written four novels, along with plays and short stories, according to his website. He won the Ricardo Miró Prize, the national literary award in Panama, twice.

Mossack & Fonseca Merged Their Firms in 1986

Mossack founded his firm in 1977, and in 1983, merged firms with Fonseca in 1983. The firm expanded quickly, according to its website:

With over 500 staff members across every continent, the Mossack Fonseca Group provides excellent services based on more than 35 years of experience. … Our service and research-oriented professionals specialize in trust services, wealth management, international business structures, and commercial law, among other areas.

Our product and service portfolio is constantly updated and renewed, enabling the Group to find the appropriate solution for your business. We offer research, advice and services for the following jurisdictions: Belize, The Netherlands, Costa Rica, United Kingdom, Malta, Hong Kong, Cyprus, British Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Panama, British Anguilla, Seychelles, Samoa, Nevada, and Wyoming (USA).

Its attorneys have expertise in “all areas of law,” including “shipping, immigration, contracts and intellectual property, as well as commercial law in general.”

The firm says it also helps clients “physically” relocate to Panama and provides support on immigration matters and buying or renting property in Panama.

The ‘Panama Papers’ Leak Includes 11.5 Million Documents Dating Back to the Firm’s Founding

According to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Panama Papers leak includes 11.5 million documents that date back to the founding of the firm in 1977.

The result of the leak is an investigation the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has dubbed the “Panama Papers,” that “exposes a system that enables crime, corruption and wrongdoing, hidden by secretive offshore companies.”

The files from Mossack Fonesca, “include the offshore holdings of drug dealers, Mafia members, corrupt politicians and tax evaders – and wrongdoing galore,” according to the ICIJ.

http://heavy.com/news/2016/04/jurgen-mossack-ramon-fonseca-mora-panama-papers-leaks-partners-documents-photos-firm-tax-haven-lawyers/

From ZeroHedge:

‘For all the media excitement about the disclosed names in the “Panama Papers” leak, in this case represented by the extensive list of Mossack Fonseca clients, this is not a story about which super wealthy individuals did everything in their power, both legal and illegal, to avoid taxes, preserve their financial anonymity, and generally preserve their wealth. After all, that’s what they do, and it should not come as a surprise that they will always do that, especially following last year’s disclosure by the same ICIJ which revealed a list of 100,000 HSBC clients who had been dutifully avoiding the payment of taxes.

What the story is about is the nebulous world of offshore tax evasion and tax havens, which based on data from the World Bank, IMF, UN, and central banks, hide between $21 and $32 trillion,where registered incorporation agents and law firms in small Caribbean countries (and not so small US states) make the laundering of money and the “disappearance” of the super wealthy, into untracable numbers hidden behind shell companies, possible.

So, in order to learn some more about the real star of this story, the Panamanian lawfirm of Mossack Fonseca, we went to Fusion which has compiled a fascinating story of the company’s history, founders, and key milestone events in its life.

These include the Nazis, the CIA, Mexican drug lords, and of course, the U.S.

First, here is the Nazi and CIA connection:

Jurgen Mossack’s family landed here in the 1960s. During World War II, his father had served in the Nazi Party’s Waffen-SS, according to U.S. Army intelligence files obtained by the ICIJ. Once in Panama, the elder Mossack offered to spy on communists in Cuba for the CIA. (Mossack Fonseca said the firm “will not answer any questions related to private information regarding our company founding partners.”)

Here is the connection to Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, and perhaps to the DEA:

Many times Mossack Fonseca has had no clue which nefarious characters were doing what with the companies the firm created – as when Jurgen discovered in 2005, according to internal emails, that he was the registered agent and listed as the director for a company controlled by the Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero.The co-founder of the Guadalajara Cartel was convicted in Mexico in 1985 for the brutal murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. (Today, Quintero is again considered a fugitive by the US after walking out of prison in 2013 on a technicality).

Mossack Fonseca’s senior partners instructed an employee to carry out their resignation from the company upon the discovery. “Pablo Escobar was like a newborn compared to R. Caro Quintero!” Jurgen wrote in reaction to the news. “I wouldn’t want to be among those he visits after he leaves prison!”

And then there is the state of Nevada:

In 2013, an Argentine prosecutor’s report linked Nevada-incorporated shell companies involved in a major corruption scandal to Mossack Fonseca. When those shell companies became the subject of a federal court battle in Nevada, the leaked files show, Mossack Fonseca employees took steps to remove paper records and to wipe computer files and phone logs at its Las Vegas office. One employee even traveled from Central America to Nevada to bring back files. “When Andrés came to Nevada he cleaned up everything and brought all documents to Panama,” according to an email dated Sept. 24, 2014.

Mossack Fonseca said it “categorically” denies hiding or destroying documents in its statement to the ICIJ: “Let us be clear that it is not our policy to hide or destroy documentation that may be of use in any ongoing investigation or proceeding.”

The leaked records also contradict sworn testimony by Jurgen Mossack, who told the federal district court that his firm was separate from “MF Nevada,” its office in Las Vegas, and had no control over it. Mossack Fonseca “has never maintained an office, establishment or principal place of business in Nevada,” Mossack testified in July 2015. But, according to the ICIJ investigation, internal documents show the opposite, indicating that the firm’s Panama City headquarters controlled MF Nevada’s bank account, and that the firm’s co-founders and one other official with the company owned 100 percent of MF Nevada.

Why is Nevada important? Because recall that according to a recent investigation by Bloomberg, “The World’s Favorite New Tax Haven Is the United States” …

… and specifically several US states such as Nevada, Wyoming and South Dakota.

After years of lambasting other countries for helping rich Americans hide their money offshore, the U.S. is emerging as a leading tax and secrecy haven for rich foreigners. By resisting new global disclosure standards, the U.S. is creating a hot new market, becoming the go-to place to stash foreign wealth. Everyone from London lawyers to Swiss trust companies is getting in on the act, helping the world’s rich move accounts from places like the Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands to Nevada, Wyoming, and South Dakota.

“How ironic—no, how perverse—that the USA, which has been so sanctimonious in its condemnation of Swiss banks, has become the banking secrecy jurisdiction du jour,” wrote Peter A. Cotorceanu, a lawyer at Anaford AG, a Zurich law firm, in a recent legal journal. “That ‘giant sucking sound’ you hear? It is the sound of money rushing to the USA.”

That money is rushing for one simple reason: dirty foreign – and local – money is welcome in the U.S., no questions asked, to be shielded by the most impenetrable tax secrecy available anywhere on the planet.

One may even say that nowadays, US-based tax havens are the new Switzerland, or Bahamas or, for that matter, Panama. Indeed, for most Americans, offshore tax haven are now meaningless with the passage of the FATCA law, which makes the parking of dirty US money abroad practically impossible. So where does that money go instead – it stays in the US:

Others are also jumping in: Geneva-based Cisa Trust Co. SA, which advises wealthy Latin Americans, is applying to open in Pierre, S.D., to “serve the needs of our foreign clients,” said John J. Ryan Jr., Cisa’s president.

Trident Trust Co., one of the world’s biggest providers of offshore trusts, moved dozens of accounts out of Switzerland, Grand Cayman, and other locales and into Sioux Falls, S.D., in December, ahead of a Jan. 1 disclosure deadline.

“Cayman was slammed in December, closing things that people were withdrawing,” said Alice Rokahr, the president of Trident in South Dakota, one of several states promoting low taxes and confidentiality in their trust laws. “I was surprised at how many were coming across that were formerly Swiss bank accounts, but they want out of Switzerland.”

And, to top it off, there is one specific firm which is spearheading the conversion of the U.S. into Panama: Rothschild.

Rothschild, the centuries-old European financial institution, has opened a trust company in Reno, Nev., a few blocks from the Harrah’s and Eldorado casinos. It is now moving the fortunes of wealthy foreign clients out of offshore havens such as Bermuda, subject to the new international disclosure requirements, and into Rothschild-run trusts in Nevada, which are exempt.

* * *

For financial advisers, the current state of play is simply a good business opportunity. In a draft of his San Francisco presentation,Rothschild’s Penney wrote that the U.S. “is effectively the biggest tax haven in the world.” The U.S., he added in language later excised from his prepared remarks, lacks “the resources to enforce foreign tax laws and has little appetite to do so.”

Yes, Mossack Fonseca may now be history, and its countless uberwealthy clients exposed, but none other than Rothschild is now delighted to be able to fill its rather large shoes. In fact, someone with a conspiratorial bent may decide that today’s dramatic takedown of the Panama “offshoring” industry was nothing more than a hit designed to crush the competition of domestic “tax haven” providers… such as Rothschild.’

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-03/mossack-fonseca-nazi-cia-and-nevada-connections-and-why-its-now-rothschilds-turn

As the battle between good and evil rages on, we can only expect more of these revelations, or conspiracy confirmations, in the coming days and months.

SOURCE