On Facebook, Jared Paquette is trying to introduce me to the Venus Project.

The Venus Project is an organization that proposes a feasible plan of action for social change, one that works towards a peaceful and sustainable global civilization. It outlines an alternative to strive toward where human rights are no longer paper proclamations but a way of life.

I have been resistant to looking into it, for reasons I won’t prejudice you with. Finally, Jared introduced a video Jacque Fresco’s Self Search on Human Behavior -… that convinced me not to be so hasty in my judgment. He introduced this video to help me overcome the idea that Jacque Fresco of The Venus Project was too naive about human nature.

Jared has finally cast enough doubt in my mind about my preconceived notions about this project, that I now think it is worth learning more about. That’s why I have posted these links on my blog. When I have the time to do further reading, I’ll have the links handy right here.

One of my contentions to Jared had been that Jacque is focusing on the monetary system as a key problem,, unnecessarily. Here is an excerpt from The Venus Project about page that might confirm my concern.

Throughout history, change has been slow. Successive groups of incompetent leaders have replaced those that preceded them, but the underlying social and economic problems remain because the basic value systems have gone unaltered. The problems we are faced with today cannot be solved politically or financially because they are highly technical in nature. There may not even be enough money available to pay for the required changes, but there are more than enough resources. This is why The Venus Project advocates the transition from a monetary-based society to the eventual realization of a resource-based global economy.

We realize to make the transition from our present culture, which is politically incompetent, scarcity-oriented and obsolete, to this new, more humane society will require a quantum leap in both thought and action.

The issue is whether our monetary system has enough money to finance this effort even though there may be enough resources. If you understand how, at least for the USA, our “money” is created by the Federal Reserve System, then this may not be such an issue after all. The FED creates more money by saying an entity’s account with the Federal Reserve has more money in it, and they use a few computer key strokes to credit that account with more money. That’s all it takes. So there is no shortage of money that could be created. In fact, the only limit on money creation should be what actual resources are available, and not being productively used because of a momentary shortage of “money”. If enough people understood this, then the monetary system we have (not the Euro used by a bunch of countries not sovereign in their own currency) may not be the problem.

We may have to adopt our system for the entire world, though. Of course that may be, sort of what the invention of the Euro was intended to do, but how it was done was very ill conceived. They didn’t seem to understand how important the sovereignty issue was. While the sovereignty issue may be devilishly complex to figure out how to fix, it is no harder than what The Venus Project proposes.

At this point, I don’t really know enough about The Venus Project to know all that they have said and all that they understand. It could be hogwash, or it could be the real deal. It will take much more investigation to know, but it is intriguing enough to warrant some time on my part on that investigation.

Yes, I have already thought of the idea killing things that can be said about the above video, but I will resist the temptation to spout them until I become more educated on all that the Venus Project has done and said already.

I think the best I can say about The Venus Project, not having learned too much more about it, is that it goes off in a direction that I don’t find worthwhile for me to pursue. I much prefer the actions of the speaker in my previous post of the video of Andrew Mcafee’s TED talk What will future jobs look like?.

The Nation of Change has the story Greece – What You are not Being Told by the Media.

According to mainstream media, the current economic crisis in Greece is due to the government spending too much money on its people that it went broke. This claim however, is a lie. It was the banks that wrecked the country so oligarchs and international corporations could benefit.

The value of this article is the description of how austerity is class warfare.

Every single mainstream media has the following narrative for the economic crisis in Greece: the government spent too much money and went broke; the generous banks gave them money, but Greece still can’t pay the bills because it mismanaged the money that was given. It sounds quite reasonable, right?

Except that it is a big fat lie … not only about Greece, but about other European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland who are all experiencing various degrees of austerity. It was also the same big, fat lie that was used by banks and corporations to exploit many Latin American, Asian and African countries for many decades.

Greece did not fail on its own. It was made to fail.

In summary, the banks wrecked the Greek government and deliberately pushed it into unsustainable debt so that oligarchs and international corporations can profit from the ensuing chaos and misery.

If you are a fan of mafia movies, you know how the mafia would take over a popular restaurant. First, they would do something to disrupt the business – stage a murder at the restaurant or start a fire. When the business starts to suffer, the Godfather would generously offer some money as a token of friendship. In return, Greasy Thumb takes over the restaurant’s accounting, Big Joey is put in charge of procurement, and so on. Needless to say, it’s a journey down a spiral of misery for the owner who will soon be broke and, if lucky, alive.

Now, let’s map the mafia story to international finance in four stages.

Stage 1: The first and foremost reason that Greece got into trouble was the “Great Financial Crisis” of 2008 that was the brainchild of Wall Street and international bankers.
.
.
.
Stage 2 is when the financial time bombs exploded. Commercial and investment banks around the world started collapsing in a matter of weeks. Governments at local and regional level saw their investments and assets evaporate. Chaos everywhere!
.
.
.
Stage 3 is when the banks force the government to accept massive debts.
.
.
.
Stage 4: Now, the rape and humiliation of a nation begin under the name of “austerity” or “structural reforms.”
.
.
.

Earlier today, The New York Times had the story Greeks Reject Bailout Terms in Rebuff to European Leaders.

Who is going to be hurt more by this turn of events, the debtor nation that supposedly owes the money or the creditor nations who insist on getting the last ounce of blood from the victim?

Politicus USA has the article President Obama Kills Scott Walker’s White House Dream By Exposing His Record Of Failure. Here is an Obama quote they featured from the video below.

But understand, I’m saying this — Wisconsin is this extraordinary state filled with extraordinary people. But if you end up having policies that cut education, help folks at the top, aren’t expanding opportunity, then it’s not going to work. We need better policies — because the bottom line is top-down economics doesn’t work. Middle-class economics works. It works. It works.

President Obama went to La Crosse WIsconsin, touted the economic successes of his administration even as he detailed the failed policies of Scott Walker and trickle down economics. He used adjacent state Minnesota as comparison.

There are a few flies in the beautiful ointment that Obama describes. They just serve to prove his point, though. These flies were put their by Republican behavior.

The stock market has doubled

While it may seem good for people’s 401Ks and other retirement plans, this market level is probably indicative of a bubble. The bubble which could burst is a result of the FED trying massive liquidity injection into the economy to keep it afloat, when the federal government should have been spending more to stimulate the economy. There was no second stimulus because the Republicans wouldn’t allow it. Fiscal stimulus is a powerful tool to get the economy running, whereas monetary stimulus is a weak to totally ineffective tool under the current circumstances.

Unemployment is down

The President even alluded to this fly in the ointment. The jobs that people are getting aren’t at the high wage level where they should be. Some of the factors keeping wages down are the war against unions, very badly designed trade agreements, and the rigging of the system to keep all the benefits of automation in the hands of the very few.

More people are going to college than ever before

The exceedingly high debt level that people are forced to take on to get this education will hamper their economic achievement for a lifetime. This wet blanket on the economy keeps its growth well below where it would cause wages to increase back toward equality.

16 million more people now have health insurance

There are still in the neighborhood of 30 million or more people who still don’t have health care coverage. For something that was supposed to bring on universal coverage, this seems to be a fairly big fly. With the Republican intransigence when the law was being written and continuing intransigence during the implementation phase, I suppose such a gap in achievement was unavoidable.

We cut the deficit by two-thirds

This cut in the deficit is one of the main reasons why the economy didn’t grow even faster. It is the main reason why the FED thought that it had to inflate the money supply, even though all that did was to create a stock market bubble. This inflated stock market makes it look like the economy is growing faster than it is as far as anything that the middle-class can benefit from. If the economy comes roaring back despite Republican efforts to prevent it, there will be hell to pay for all that excess liquidity that the FED pumped in to the economy.

And finally, there is the fly that President Obama insists in putting into the ointment. If middle-class economics works so much better than trickle-down economics, why is the President so adamant about pushing the ultimate trickle-down economic ideas embodied in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “trade” agreement? Why is he so sure he is right about this secret deal, and the Democrats who oppose it are all wrong? Doesn’t he get just a little suspicious that his strongest supporters for this deal are almost all Republicans? How he can go to Wisconsin and make these remarks, and then go back to Washinton to foist this TPP on us is still a mystery to me. I can only guess at what his motives could be.