THE COALESCENCE Corp.

How Powerful Evolutionary Forces are Transforming Seven Billion Individual Humans Into a Single Harmonious Social Organism

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — R. Buckminster Fuller   ()>)(      
“Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do; nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace.” – John Lennon ()>)(
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead   ()>)(
“Now there is one outstanding important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction booklet came with it.” – R. Buckminster Fuller   ()>)(
“The finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most completely impressive way to the normal run of minds.” — William James    ()>)(
“The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating a problem in a way that will allow a solution.” – Bertrand Russell          ()>)(           
“The desire to question and change things comes from the healthiest part of you.” – Gene Tashoff           ()>)(
“The essence of The Coalescence is connectivity.” — Walter Szykitka                ()>)(
“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” – Bob Dylan                ()>)(
“This ain’t no foolin’ around.” – David Byrne                ()>)(
“Money is the root of all evil.” – Jesus                ()>)(
“Love conquers all.” – Virgil                ()>)(
“All you need is love.” – The Beatles            ()>)(
“Music will be thefinal uniter.” — Walter Szykitka

BLOG POSTS

MONEYISM – THE CANCER RAVAGING EARTH
Choose Your Language
MONEYISM The Cancer Ravaging Earth And How to Defeat It     MONEY. MONEY. MONEY.            That’s right. It’s all about . . . money.            And why not? Money is as pervasive as the air we breathe. And almost as important, because it affects every aspect of our lives: where we work, where we live, how we live, and even how long we live. So money consumes our thoughts and controls our lives. It drives our ambitionscolors ...
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DISENTANGLING ECONOMICS FROM FINANCE
The economic system, that is, the actual production and distribution of goods and services, is one thing; the financial system that controls it is quite another. Unfortunately, the two concepts have become conflated under the single rubric of “economics.” Contributing to the conflation is the practice of economists to pontificate about finance rather than economics.They don’t talk much about agricultural challenges or construction methods or manufacturing practices or distribution networks beyond their possible impact on the financial system.It would be ...
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MONEY IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO OUR PROBLEMS; MONEY IS THE PROBLEM
Money is as pervasive as the air we breathe. It governs every aspect of our lives: where we work, where we live, how we live, how long we live. It consumes our thoughts, focuses our ambitions, colors our dreams, sparks our disputes, and stokes our anxieties. It’s here, there, and everywhere. No wonder it is viewed with the same degree of inevitability and blind acceptance as a force of nature. Such as gravity. Money, however, is not a force of ...
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THE BEATLES AND THE MISSING (R)EVOLUTIONARY PLAN
Fifty years ago, I believed we were going to change the world. One of the popular aphorisms in those days was, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." There were many of us who believed we knew the solution – "All You Need Is Love" – and that we were part of it. But as it turned out, something was missing. And just when I saw the (r)evolutionary fervor of the counterculture beginning to slip ...
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HOW BAD DO THINGS HAVE TO GET?
. . . before people start thinking about a Plan B? What happens when the house of cards that is the world’s financial system finally collapses in a tangled heap of broken promises, worthless institutions, and clueless leaders? Where is Plan B? The objective of the Whole Earth Design Project is to produce Plan B. The strategy will be to authoritatively demonstrate that, with an abundance of natural and human resources combined with our scientific and technological expertise, there is ...
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AH, THE RICH! THEY ARE DIFFERENT FROM YOU AND ME
Oh, joy! Forbes’ annual billionaires issue just arrived, and it does not disappoint. You have certainly heard about the financial crisis. But let’s review: The cracks in the system began to appear in 2007, right about the time the stock market reached an all-time high in October of that year. By September of 2008, less than a year later, the world financial system was on the brink of total collapse and the entire international financial community was in a panic ...
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WHY THE WHOLE EARTH DESIGN PROJECT?
The objective of the Whole Earth Design Project is to design an ecologically and environmentally sustainable economic system capable of providing every individual on the planet with all of life’s essentials. Why? Here are two excellent reasons: Because we must. And because we can. Why must we? Because the present arrangement is not sustainable. If we don’t come up with a Plan B, the situation will continue to deteriorate, and eventually, sooner than you expect, it will have a dire ...
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INTRODUCING THE WHOLE EARTH DESIGN PROJECT
The WHOLE EARTH DESIGN PROJECT "You say you got a real solution. Well, you know, we'd all love to see the plan." --The Beatles, 1968 The ultimate objective of this project is to design an ecologically and environmentally sustainable economic system that will provide every individual on the planet with all of life's essentials, and to do so in a way so convincingly that it will lead to its universal adoption. The plan is to pursue this objective in the ...
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RALPH NADER AND ME
"What was that? A serious prediction of things to come, or an outburst of wishful thinking? Was it a thoughtful proposal of a realistic plan of action, or a misguided fantasy that defies common sense?" - The Coming Global Coalescence, Afterword "This book is not a novel. Nor is it nonfiction. In the literary world, it might be described as 'a practical utopia.' I call it a fictional vision that could become a new reality. Some known and not-well-known people ...
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THE FINANCCIAL TIMES EXAMINES CAPITALISM’S CRISIS – PART TWO
"Imagine a violent solar flare that washes over our planet with a powerful electromagnetic cloud and, in a nanosecond, wipes clean all computer records: checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, tax bills, loans, mortgages, pension funds, contracts, investments, insurance polices. All gone. Wiped out in the blink of an eye. Because of the financial meltdown, we are fast approaching just such a moment, when all those numbers in all those computers will be as meaningless as a Statement of Account ...
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THE FINANCIAL TIMES EXAMINES CAPITALISM’S CRISIS – PART ONE
"Money is not a force of nature. It is a concept, an idea, a figment of the human imagination. And it is real only to the extent that we allow it to rule our lives and our relationships with one another." -- The Coming Global Coalescence, page 4, print edition Inasmuch as the global financial system is dependent upon the universal acceptance of the concept of money and the rules by which it is utilized to control the real economy, ...
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GINGRICH TAKES SOUTH CAROLINA
"Presently, the overwhelming majority of the earth's population is too consumed with their everyday struggles to give much thought to the political and economic forces that are the primary determinants of the quality of their daily existence. It is not surprising, therefore, that they are, by and large, grossly and tragically uninformed and misinformed. Most of what is widely and publicly communicated -- such as advertising campaigns, political discourse, financial advice, and religious doctrine -- is deliberately manipulative and misleading ...
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THE (R)EVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL OF THE INTERNET
"While the planet's nervous system pulsates with waves of information, including reports of wars, scientific discoveries, political conflicts, economic dislocations, and environmental disasters, its organizing capacity (with 5 billion mobile phones and 2 billion Internet connections) sits quietly on standby, waiting to spring into action, to spread the word and to coordinate a unified response upon the inevitable arrival of that long-awaited 'idea whose time has come.'" -- The Coming Global Coalescence, page 43, print edition. This week we got ...
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THE INTERNET IS NOW BEYOND CONTROL
"The unintended consequence of making [the Internet] available to the masses is that it grants to individuals the unprecedented ability to organize themselves. The dilemma for the authorities is that the roots and branches of the Internet have become so intertwined into every aspect of the social infrastructure that, unlike a newspaper or television station, it is now impossible to limit the Internet's empowerment of the masses without at the same time diminishing the communication system they themselves can no ...
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HOW GOES THE WAR ON MARIJUANA?
In the last 15 years there were more than 10 million arrests in the United States for marijuana possession, with an additional million for trafficking. In 1995, the total for possession was 503,000; in 2010, the number had grown to 750,000. In New York City alone, the annual rate has been approximately 50,000, although a softening of the policy has resulted in a 15% decrease over the past year. What do those increasing arrest statistics say about the success or ...
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PITY THE POOR DOCTORS
I recently received an email from a friend who forwarded the following rant from a doctor: "Dear Mr. President: During my shift in the Emergency Room last night, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient whose smile revealed an expensive shiny gold tooth, whose body was adorned with a wide assortment of elaborate and costly tattoos, who wore a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and who chatted on a new cellular telephone equipped with a popular R&B ring ...
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REMEMBERING MARTIN LUTHER KING
On this day when we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King and mourn his death, it is at once encouraging that so much progress has been made in terms of racial discrimination and disheartening to realize that so much more remains to be done. 1968 was a traumatic year in many respects, but for those of us who were alive at the time, it's a bit disorienting to realize that more than half of the present US population were ...
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CHALLENGING THE RULES OF WAR
I keep reading and hearing about "rules of war." Talk about an oxymoron. Call me naive, but I believe there should be only one rule of war: Don't do it! Sure, people have been doing it since time immemorial­, but that doesn't mean they should. One rule of war that makes no sense is that the bodies of the fallen should not be desecrated­. That body has already been desecrated­. It's dead! ...
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TO REFORM OR TO REPLACE: THAT IS THE QUESTION
To reform, or to replace--that is the question:Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous greed and political control, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. The worldwide movement toward the social coalescence of the human family was recently struck by a lighting bolt of positive energy with the spectacular appearance of the Occupy Wall Street movement which in a matter of weeks spread around the world ...
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WHICH WAY FOR THE “OCCUPY” MOVEMENT?
John Heilemann, writing in the December 5 issue of NEW YORK magazine, offers an excellent account of the differences among the leaders of the 'leaderless' movement called Occupy Wall Street, or OWS, which occupied Manhattan's Zuccotti Park for several weeks before being forcefully removed by the New York City Police Department. Heilemann observes that the core group was split between the reformists who were aiming to improve the present system and the radicals who were out to remove it. Now ...
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A PANICKED MOVE BY DESPERATE CENTRAL BANKS
"Money is not a force of nature. It is a concept, an idea, a figment of the human imagination. And it is real only to the extent that we allow it to rule our lives and our relationships with one another." -- TCGC Right now, money -- the most lethal concept every coughed up by the human imagination -- has become the central cause of the world's dysfunctional economic system. While money is supposed to act as a facilitator of ...
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LIVING IN A MATERIAL WORLD
Black Friday has exceeded all expectations! On what has become the most important shopping weekend of the year, at a time when the world financial system is on the verge of collapse and the US economy is suffering from malnutrition, there were 6 percent more shoppers than last year and each shopper spent an average of $400, which was an increase of 9 percent. What is the meaning of this? I see the long lines, the crowds, the pushing and ...
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CORPORATIONS INCREASE THEIR PROFIT SKIM
If the US economy is in a recovery, where is it being felt? By the 1 percent occupying the corporate boardrooms. At the depth of the Great Recession, corporate profits never declined below 5 percent of gross domestic product. And since then, have hit historic highs. According to figures released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, in the second quarter of this year corporate profits were at an annual rate of 10.1 percent. And what happened in the third quarter? ...
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THE ACCELERATING PACE OF CHANGE
By the time I finished writing TCGC, at the beginning of this year, I had only three examples to offer of what I believed to be the game-changing power of modern communication technology: the use of mobile phones to foment and organize unrest in Iran (population 75 million) and Moldova (population 4 million), and the use of the Internet to elect Barack Obama to the most powerful political office on the planet. Since then ...
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HERE COMES THE AMERICAN AUTUMN
Finally, on the 14th day of the Occupy Wall Street demonstration and rally, the NY Times has acknowledged its existence on its front page this morning. What must eventually become clear is that this is a global movement that cannot be stopped, and the fact that it has now landed on the doorstep of the center of world finance signals that this is the beginning of the end of capitalism. So far, the one missing piece is an alternative. This ...
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NO ONE KNOWS WHAT TO DO
Last week, reporting on the latest meeting of the US Federal Reserve Bank, NY Times reporter, Catherine Rampell, opened her story with this line: "No one knows what to do to fix the economy." How frightening is that? The US and the rest of the world are being sucked into a vortex of political, economic and social chaos and no one knows what to do! In his NY Times column this morning, the liberal Nobel economist, Paul Krugman, noted that ...
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MASTERS OF WAR
Dick Cheney, the warmonger, has now written his version of events, IN MY TIME, in which he proudly recounts his role in some of the more egregious activities of the Bush administration. For conservatives, who are quick to call for law and order when people begin to get a little restless over injustices, it is quite astonishing that they are then more than willing to overlook crimes when justified in the name of national security. Torture, for one. Eaves-dropping on ...
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HOW CAPITALISM IS LIKE A PONZI SCHEME
In the Ponzi and Madoff schemes, participants were promised a generous monetary return on their monetary investments. In the capitalist version, the investment is not money, but labor. As individuals invest their labor in the production and distribution of goods and services, they are paid wages that enable them to purchase and consume the goods and services they themselves produce. Fair enough. This sounds like the standard description of the bedrock elements of an economic system. And it is the ...
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WHAT IS MONEY?
The concept of money is as pervasive as the air we breathe. It governs every aspect of our lives: where we work, where we live, how we live, how long we live. It consumes our thoughts, focuses our ambitions, colors our dreams, sparks our disputes, and stokes our anxieties. It’s here, there and everywhere. No wonder it is viewed with the same degree of inevitability and blind acceptance as a force of nature. Such as gravity. Money, however, is not ...
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IT’S CAPITALISM, STUPID
The cause of the debt crisis is to be found in the essence of capitalism itself: competition, which - surprise! - produces losers as well as winners. The primary mechanism through which this contest is engaged is the corporation, which the US Supreme Court recently declared to be the legal equivalent of a person. Here is how it works: corporations hire workers to produce widgets for which they are paid $8.75 each. Later, when the workers become consumers and buy ...
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DANCING IN THE DARK
From yesterday's New York Times: "The mood in the markets has taken a sharp turn for the worse. Headwinds are becoming stronger by the day." -- Mervyn A. King, governor of the Bank of England. "What we have been dealing with in recent weeks is a crisis of confidence among investors globally in the economic leadership in both the European Union and the United States. "-- Douglas Porter, economist. "The Fed came out and said we are staring recession in ...
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THE CURTAIN RISES ON ACT TWO
The houselights dim. The audience scurries to their seats, now with heightened anticipation. A new political force has gained ascendancy, with an anti-government, anti-regulation, anti-tax, anti-entitlement, pro-corporate, free market agenda. What will the future hold? The curtain rises and . . . . On Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged over 500 points, dropping a total of 1,350 points, or 10%, over 10 trading days. This drop in stock prices represented a loss in value of $1.5 trillion. During ...
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THE CURTAIN RISES ON ACT ONE
Phew! That was exciting. It had me on the edge of my seat. But what a setup for Act Two. Given the plot so far, this is going to be a bumpy ride. This is a situation in which everyone is behaving badly. Consider John Boehner, chief Republican negotiator. During the entire drama, he regularly complained that the president wasn't giving enough. Then when the deal was done, he boasted that he got 98 percent of what he wanted. When ...
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ECONOMISTS AND FINANCIALIST
Economics: "A social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services." Finance: "The science or study of the management of funds." Since every step in the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services involves the management of funds, the two sciences have become inseparably intertwined. This is unfortunate because the conflation of economics and finance only serves to obscure the ways in which the management of funds has taken precedence ...
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BEWARE OF 4-PAGE AGREEMENTS
This past Tuesday, President Obama got all excited about the possibility of ending the budget/debt deadlock in Washington as the result of a four-page "Bipartisan Plan to Reduce Our Nation's Deficit" prepared by a bipartisan gang of six senators. That same day the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 202 points or 1.6 percent. Yesterday the leadership of the European Union announced in a four-page memorandum that an agreement had been reached on how to avoid a EU-threatening default by Greece ...
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OH, THE DRAMA!
Could it possibly get any more exciting? The world's two largest economic powers, the United States and the European Union, both on the brink of disaster. At the same time. And for the same underlying reasons. At the center of the drama is a concept called 'default,' generally defined as a failure to meet a financial obligation. In Europe, Greece is in imminent danger of defaulting on its debts, an event, if allowed to take place, is predicted to bring ...
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TICK-TOCK
Yes, time is running out. So says Timothy Geitner, US Treasury Secretary. Time is running out for efforts to save this country's credit rating. Time is also running out for Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and now Italy. Time is running out for the European Union, and the entire global financial system. Question: Have you heard of any efforts to prepare for the time when and if time actually does run out? If so, please forward details. Meanwhile, may I be ...
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BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
What's going on behind those closed White House doors when the President meets with Congressional leaders in an attempt to negotiate an agreement on the national budget and the debt ceiling? Obama says they will be meeting every day until they finish their job, but so far the reports emanating from those meetings indicate that no progress is being made. Today they met for two hours and reported "no progress." So what did these people say to one another during ...
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GOOD NEWS ON GOOD FRIDAY
Here are some excerpts from this morning's New York Times: "The chip maker Advance Micro Devices topped earnings expectations for the quarter." "GE posts earnings that exceed forecasts." "McDonald's profit is up." "DuPont tops forecasts; profit up 27%." "Blackrock earnings increase 34%." "Real estate helps profit increase 58% at Blackstone." "Xerox reports rise in profit and revenue." And the NY stock market hit a 33-month high! What does all this good news mean? ...
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THE SCANDALOUS TAX CODE
Well, the taxman made his annual visit to collect his due, and while we made it through another year, we're also another couple of trillion dollars deeper in debt. As we are forever reminded, there are but two remedies for excessive debt: cut spending or raise taxes, one or the other, or a combination of both. Managing the national budget, therefore, is a matter of establishing a sustainable balance between those two efforts. Unfortunately, looking at the "raising taxes" part, ...
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HOW DEBT SAVED CAPITALISM – TEMPORARILY
All this bad-mouthing of debt is downright ungrateful. The criticism of individuals and governments who can't seem to live within their means ignores the fact that if they had not gone into debt the economy would have ground to a halt a long time ago. It's debt that keeps the capitalist Ponzi scheme going. As long as the Federal Reserve continues to pump money (and debt) into the economy, collapse will be avoided until ...
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