Based on a Speech to the International Reciprocal Trade Association, Puerto Aventuras, Quintana Roo,  Mexico, September 20, 2011

© 2011 by Richard C. Cook. This article may be reproduced in print or on the internet only in its entirety and with appropriate attribution including the following biographical information.

First I want to thank you for inviting my wife Karen and me to join you in this beautiful land of ocean, sunshine, history, and mystery. Second, I want to offer the organized barter movement—and by this I mean the barter associations that have placed their work on a sound professional business level—my heartfelt congratulations. I congratulate you not only for acting in the face of the global monetary crisis but also for taking active and practical measures for putting something real in its place.

It proves you don’t have to fight something directly to change it. “Resist not evil,” says the wisdom of the ages. Rather see it as a business opportunity!

And while the word “barter” conjures up images of primitive people exchanging bushels of corn for hogs and chickens, in today’s computerized business environment, the barter movement has become a highly sophisticated component of global trading. Reflecting on this fact in the background will help us work together today to see through the illusion of money as the world’s Money Power defines it.

Our journey will start with an analysis of the crisis, followed by recognition of how the barter networks and the rest of the complementary currency movement monetize value through trade credits and scrip. We’ll tour history through the medieval trade fairs and the creation of bills of credit in colonial America. We’ll conclude with my advocacy for a worldwide Basic Income Guarantee that I am calling the Gaia Plan and introducing for the first time today by that name.

We’ll be making this journey as nation after nation becomes insolvent due to their unsustainable sovereign debt, giving the Money Power an excuse to enforce crushing austerity measures. In Spain, for instance, proposals to eliminate laws that protect workers from summary firings are called “labor reforms.” In nation after nation, including the U.S., workers’ wages and job security, as well as health care and pensions, have been slashed.

But the people of the world are starting to wake up and say, “Enough is enough,” though their anxiety and demands are often vague and contradictory, as are statements by those in the press and politics who attempt to define and respond to them.

Progressives in the U.S. demand a restoration of high taxes on the wealthy like those prior to the Reagan years. In contrast, those involved in movements like the Tea Party argue for dramatic reductions in government spending.

But you will see as we proceed that I take a different tack by advocating instead a new understanding of the meaning of money, the purposes of economics, and the methods of balancing an industrial economy between the value of production and the availability of consumer purchasing power. While control of the world’s economies by the Money Power makes reaching such a balance difficult, it is yet possible.

The Money Power—centered in the U.S. in the Federal Reserve, the largest banks, and Wall Street—gains its apparent legitimacy by enacting a simple clerical operation—pluses and minuses in a multitude of checkbooks and ledgers. Yet it tries to control everything, profit from everything, and determine which human activities survive and which do not.

My question is who gave it the right to do these things?  Is it a power of nature or is it manmade? If the latter, it can be changed.

Central to the problem is the fact that our monetary system is the reason it is so difficult for anyone to start a new independent small business. Actually, the Wall Street war against small business has been raging for over 30 years, starting with the Federal Reserve-induced recession of 1979, when the Fed raised interest rates to over 20 percent.

This amounted to a 20 percent tax on the circulating medium of exchange levied by the central bankers—officials elected by no one. From the carnage inflicted on the small business sector came the 1980s merger-acquisition bubble, as well as all the bubbles that came afterwards, including the housing bubble of recent catastrophic memory.

The bubble economy from the 1980s until the 2008 collapse was Wall Street’s calling card—its bread and butter. It was the Money Power’s takeover.

Yet it’s small business—what we call Main Street—that should be the employment engine in a free enterprise economy. It’s a flourishing small business sector that should give an economy resilience and recoverability in the face of shocks.

We have lost that resiliency and recoverability. And it’s not just Federal Reserve policy. It’s also Wall Street-supported mega-business like the big box stores that suck money out of Main Street communities, money that should be circulating locally. And it’s tax and regulatory policy as well.

Cumulatively, the attack by the Money Power and its government enablers on small business in America, including family farming and small to medium-sized manufacturing concerns, has been an economic and cultural disaster. The greed of the Money Power has so severely damaged the U.S. economy that our nation is on the verge of implosion.

The same is happening elsewhere around the world. The tension is palpable.

Supposedly in an eleventh-hour attempt to avert calamity, the Federal Reserve recently stated its intent to keep interest rates at a level approaching zero into 2013. But even this measure is likely to damage small business further, as pointed out by Camden R. Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America.

Mr. Fine wrote in the Washington Post on August 25, 2011, that:

“…the Fed has taken away community bankers’ ability to compete in the free market. In the midst of a depressed economy with low loan demand, the central bank is exacerbating the financial crisis….Why? In my view, the Fed’s policy is nothing more than a backdoor bailout for the Wall Street mega-banks and investment houses. It amounts to the back of the hand for the community banks of this country… The Wall Street money houses are basically getting free money that they can hedge and arbitrage worldwide to make baskets of money, while local banks are stuck with deposits costing more than the federal funds rate….For the extended future… capital will be difficult if not impossible to raise, stifling growth on America’s Main Streets.”

Meanwhile, other nations and blocs of nations have learned to play the money game as well as we. However, they do not all seem so content to live on monetary manipulations as opposed to production as America has been, particularly once we outsourced our manufacturing to them, intending to live on financial profits alone. This in turn is tied in with our aggressive international currency policy.

In decades past it was the British pound that acted as the global trade and reserve currency and kept the British leisure class in control of world commerce. But by the 1930s Britain was bankrupt.

The U.S. stepped in. Since the end of World War II, it has been the U.S. dollar in the forefront, with the U.S. leisure class soaring into the stratosphere with income and wealth. With the outsourcing of U.S. manufacturing as a means of shipping dollars overseas, the middle and working classes have been sacrificed on the altar of dollar domination.

The jobs were sent abroad so U.S. dollars would become the world’s trading currency and be used by other nations to finance our government’s debt and to deposit in U.S. banks in order to extend their global leverage.

The American government has tried to keep the dollar supreme. The centerpiece of dollar domination, since President Richard Nixon removed the gold peg in 1971, has been the use of U.S. currency for the international oil trade—the petrodollar. Also in the 1970s, figures within the U.S. government induced OPEC to double the cost of oil, which ignited the inflation leading to the 1979-83 recession. 

But the dollar is increasingly threatened by the currencies of other nations and blocs, including the euro, which are maturing to the point when a time may be foreseen where currency multilateralism could become a reality. The threat of such a sea-change is the underlying reason the U.S. military is so intent on controlling the Middle East as did Great Britain until its decline. 

Meanwhile, regardless of whatever currency is under discussion, the objective of the Money Power is to assure that money can only be entered into circulation by being borrowed on credit from the privately-owned banking system.

Thus the crisis is not simply one of availability of credit. Yes, that availability has been reduced, which is why the Federal Reserve has supposedly taken such radical action. But even though interest rates are and will remain low and Wall Street and the big corporations are awash in cash, large numbers of people and businesses are excluded by the banks from borrowing because they are not viewed as credit-worthy.

All this reflects the persistence of the recession that now threatens to turn into the feared double-dipper. In fact there is a worldwide monetary deflation going on that no one talks about, caused by the withdrawal of money from circulation when loans are repaid, combined with the loss of equity through collapse of the housing market, and excessive “savings” through tying up of money in non-productive fixed assets like gold.

I’ll talk more about this later.  For now, we must simply realize that since the crash of 2008, absolutely nothing of substance has been done to reform the conditions that led to it.

Household debt is still off the charts, and unemployment remains high. What has happened is that tightening of credit, even with low rates, has made it harder for either the banks, government, or consumers to create another bubble.

But that is not reform. It’s simply the ongoing recession moving in the direction of a permanent condition. Without bubbles, both the Money Power and the U.S. government have lost the ability to generate real economic growth. Take away their bubbles and they have little remaining. The decline in the Dow-Jones average reflects such an awareness by investors.  

But let’s rise above the level of political finger-pointing and realize what few commentators do, which is that central to the problem is that all Western governments remain in collusion with the banks in calling only their debt-derived currencies “legal tender.” Ladies and gentlemen, the legal tender laws, are, in my opinion, a fraud upon the people.

The origin of these laws lies solely with the Money Power, and their purpose is to create and sustain the monopoly whereby the Money Power seeks to control the economic affairs of every nation. This understanding moves us powerfully in the direction of seeing the real causes of the crisis, not just their effects.

All the Money Power knows how to do is lend at a profit, remove money from circulation when loans are repaid, seize assets when loans are not repaid, and assist corporate predators by financing their gobbling up of any small fry that may threaten their own monopolies. The Money Power does not know how to invest in real production, and it does not know how to generate sustained consumer purchasing power. You simply cannot do these things by policy based on the money banks create from thin air.

Another underlying issue that no one focuses on is the fact that one of the most important responsibilities of any government is, or should be, to assure the presence of a sufficient quantity and quality of money to be used as a medium of exchange.

Without a medium of exchange, no commerce takes place. It is a fact that the U.S. government, as have most governments, has delegated the creation of a medium of exchange to the private banking system. But this system does not work in the long run. 

As any businessman knows, while borrowing money from a bank via a line of credit makes sense for operating liquidity, it is the worst possible means of investment because of the interest attached and the fact that lenders assume none of the risk of business failure. Much better means are gifts or grants, savings, retained earnings, or raising money in the capital markets. 

But these means have dried up under the financial crisis, except for some hi-tech start-ups or for the largest global businesses, and even then primarily for acquisitions where costs are cut, operations consolidated, and employees fired to pay off the loans used to finance the purchase. For individuals or small business, a satisfactory method of generating consumer purchasing power to allow their businesses to survive or grow simply no longer exists. This in a nutshell is why so many businesses and even state and local governments are exploring the creation of complementary currencies.

But the banks rule, so almost everyone else, including governments, are increasingly broke. The recent charade carried out by the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration, whereby the Republicans threatened to shut down government unless massive cuts were made to the federal budget was but play-acting by everyone involved.

We all knew the debt ceiling would be raised, because the government cannot live for one day without borrowing. The ceiling was raised, after massive handwringing, with deficit reduction targets that had social programs and entitlements facing cutbacks to pay for them.

No wonder Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post was candid in stating that the only challenge in the years to come will be how to “share the pain” from the collective sin of having lived beyond our means.

Next, the Money Power, acting through Standard and Poor’s, downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating. The same thing has been done to Japan by Moody’s, with the International Monetary Fund even recommending that Japan’s sales tax be raised to 15 percent to reduce the deficit there.

The Federal Reserve will be maintaining low interest rates supposedly to kick-start the private sector back into prosperity. Now we also have President Obama’s $477 billion job-creation proposal, if, of course, it can pass Congress. But unless a new economic engine is identified that is not simply another bubble like the housing one, these policies too will fail.

So will someone please tell me what the economic engine of the future is going to be? If it is to be more exports, won’t every other nation be trying to do the same? There can be no winners where a global economy tries to get over currency wars by creating trade wars. All there can be is more wars.

Or if the engine is to be infrastructure spending, including military construction to make up for cuts to the defense budget, what will happen when the loans to the federal government from the Federal Reserve used to finance it have to be paid back? 

Going back to the start of my speech, it won’t surprise you to hear that in my opinion the economic engine for a revived economy must be local and regional economic activity based on a resurgence of small business and the generation of individual and family purchasing power. And there must be adequate availability of currency as a means of exchange unencumbered by debt.

The Money Power is unable to do this through bank lending, even at low rates, because it has created a global economy which for decades has been based on price bubbles, concentration of wealth in global corporate cartels, speculation in resources, destruction of the manufacturing base as a means of sustaining a middle class, and enrichment of the financial elite at the expense of everyone else. 

Almost every solution that anyone has proposed to the crisis, including the progressives who habitually call for more federal government action, is a top-down approach, as though some macroeconomic quick-fix can change the lives of nations. But it’s all just trickle-down economics.

The right-wing advocates trickle-down from the rich. The left-wing advocates trickle-down from the government. This includes the Obama jobs-creation proposal.

But what we need is actually trickle-up. From the people. From the producers. From small business.

Token federal programs cannot cure the problem because fundamentally we are starved of a workable medium of exchange. There is today a vast shortage of money, including funding of day-to-day business operations through credit liquidity, at the grassroots level to meet the legitimate needs of the people who actually work for a living.

And this in turn is because of the illusion of money that the Money Power fosters. This illusion is that money is so sacred and scarce a commodity that only the wealthy, comfortable, and secure lenders and investors of Wall Street, along with their enablers like the chairman of the Fed, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the committee chairmen of both houses of Congress, can make the decisions the life and death of the community depend upon.

I can tell you that a person who buys into the illusion of money will be poorly equipped to understand the things I am talking about today. But it’s a different story for those in the complementary currency movement.

You do have the background and experience. Because you know what money is—you have proven it for yourselves. You know it is nothing sacred or mythical—it is merely trade credits or tokens created to move goods in trade. You know who really should have the right under the laws of nature to create those trade credits and tokens—the people who produce or have legitimate title to the goods that are available for trading.

The concept is simple. Yet most of the so-called progressives completely fail to grasp it. So do the conservatives who actually are the Money Power’s greatest apologists, because they confuse the money monopoly with “free enterprise” which it most emphatically is not.

I am now going to tell you everything you should need to know about economics. Economics is barter. Period.

Let’s be clear about that, in spite of the endless obfuscations of the so-called economics profession. I repeat: economics is barter.

Barter is the exchange of objects of worth, which includes the value of labor, ingenuity, and resources. Even when exchange is facilitated through what we call “money,” the principle is the same.

The unit of value of ancient civilizations was the cow. While gold, silver, or other metals had value, they were denominated in the number of healthy mature cows they could purchase.

This is a fact of history. A unit of gold meant, simply, “one cow’s worth.”

An economy of barter, including the barter those here today engage in, is not an emergency measure, not something to fall back on only when the system fails. I say this despite the fact that every financial crisis in history has had as one of its results an uptick in barter.

When you add to barter a system of tokens, or money, with or without its own intrinsic value, and add to that the ability quickly to create, store, and transport trading records, you have a full-fledged economic system. Credit may have a part to play in facilitating exchange within this system, but it is not primary. Production is primary. Credit and a satisfactory means of exchange should be tools. 

Trade in objects of real value is the way things are supposed to work. The separation of money from production that has developed today is destructive, dysfunctional, dishonest, and delusional.

The world’s largest market is in the trading of currencies to gain a profit from temporary fluctuations in relative value. For the producers of the world, it’s a disaster, because every industry and nation is subject to manipulated currency values that make long-term planning and financial security impossible.

Unless, of course, you happen to control the world’s reserve currency. But even there, as we have seen, control can only be maintained by having the world’s strongest military.

How then should the system work?

Let me take you back a few centuries to a simpler time—the medieval trading fairs. If you study medieval history, or read a good book on economic history, you see that the medieval trading fairs were one of the most remarkable economic and cultural phenomena ever seen. 

Merchants from all over Europe would transport the products of their localities and meet several times a year at central locations. Sometimes municipalities would build large warehouses for the fairs, some of which still stand.

At the fairs there would be agricultural products of all kinds—animals and produce—mainly from local sources. From farther away there would be articles of clothing, textiles, or the raw materials for making them. There would be manufactured objects from the various lines of artisan work. What there would not be was sufficient money to trade all the commodities that were brought to the fair.

Instead, each merchant, upon arrival, would deal in paper bills of exchange authorized by the managers of the fair. Often these bills would be dated to expire at the end of the fair, so were not viewed as having intrinsic value or serving as a repository of wealth. So a medium of exchange was created as needed on the spot.

And the method worked. Its spiritual descendant is the Swiss WIR system, a hugely successful non-official trading system with its own self-generated trade credits and system of record-keeping. Something similar is working today through the on-line trading networks such as yours.

Another type of self-generated complementary currency is scrip. The most famous scrip currency of the last 30 years has been Ithaca Hours in Ithaca, New York, which began during the 1991 recession.

Scrip has gotten a bad name because often coal miners were paid in scrip that could supposedly be redeemed only at the company store. But there is an element of bankers’ propaganda in this depiction.

For much of the 19^th century scrip as a means of exchange was a cornerstone of local economies in the U.S. Thousands of businesses issued scrip; for instance, drug stores and lumberyards. The scrip had value because it would be redeemed by the issuing merchant; such as, so many board feet of lumber. It had the added advantage of not having bank interest added to it.

In some areas, as in Appalachia where Karen and I now live, this system continued well into the 20^th century. I have spoken to people whose grandparents survived with it.

So it should be no surprise to hear that this is the way the people in hundreds of municipalities in the U.S. traded during the Great Depression. It’s the way the people of Argentina saved their nation during the currency collapse of the early 2000s. They met at central warehouses and traded goods through scrip created by the trading clubs that were set up.

It’s happening in America and Europe today. A couple of weeks ago CNBC ran a clip on the town of Filettino, Italy, minting its own money. Even residents of Washington, D.C., are printing local currency—the Potomac.

Pure barter has also reemerged. It’s the way Russia survived when the currency of the Soviet Union disappeared in the 1990s due to a full-front monetary attack by the West.

It’s said that by the mid-1990s up to 50 percent of Russia’s economic activity took place through barter, including goods accepted by the government as taxes. One author describes how he was able to travel through Russia at the time doing research for a book on the crisis with a trunk full of vodka his only spending money. Many large corporations and even nations deal directly in barter transactions today.

But back to scrip. Scrip was and is “money” in its natural form. Scrip does not require a government to issue a decree as they do when calling only bank-issued interest-bearing notes legal tender. But scrip can be driven out of circulation by such a decree.  

Use of scrip was the way the British colonies in America functioned in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. Apart from barter and trading in such currencies as Spanish dollars and Indian wampum, the colonies had begun to issue scrip currency by the year 1700.

Sometimes the currency consisted of receipts of goods deposited in public warehouses, as was done with tobacco in Virginia. Sometimes the currency originated with a land bank, as was done in Pennsylvania, where landowners used their land as collateral. Sometimes the colonial governments spent scrip into circulation through bills of credit, as with the colony of Massachusetts.

It was this variety of scrip used as a means of exchange that helped create the economic prosperity of the colonies. But here’s the key. Scrip received its value not only from its convenience and convertibility but also from the fact that governments accepted it in payment of taxes.

Remember this principle. It shows one way we can unlock the power of barter and complementary currencies today. 

But, as we know, the bankers launched a long campaign to take over the U.S. economy, whose milestones were the First and Second Banks of the United States and the National Banking Acts of 1863-64, culminating in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The 20^th century saw two parallel phenomena: 1) the ever-growing power of big finance with its control over nations and their economies and 2) the worst wars ever fought among human beings on the planet, with the half-century of warfare carried out by the U.S. and its allies from Vietnam to Iraq to Serbia, with Afghanistan, Iraq again, and now Libya just a continuation.

But the global crisis is not just economic. The world stands at a crossroads today in every category of human life. There are two completely different visions competing for humanity’s future. These two visions are the materialistic vs. the spiritual.

The materialistic vision is based on the presumption that the world consists entirely of what we perceive with the physical senses and that human beings are essentially thinking animals living in a world of limited material sustenance and subject to constant threat of privation due to lack, limitation, disease, and ultimately death.

According to this view, a human being is only a physical body, controllable by conditioning based on the pleasure-pain principle. 

People might yet enjoy a few fleeting moments of pleasure, of personal and family enjoyment, of hope in a better material future, or even of getting to heaven if they are good. But life on earth, believes the materialist, is a struggle for survival, a struggle that the social classes, nations, and races which are the most clever and energetic in beating out the others not only will win but deserve to win.

Materialism is a function of what may be called biogenetic consciousness. But taken to an extreme, it’s Social Darwinism elevated to theology. Add to it the power of modern technology, and it becomes extremely dangerous.

Given this view, politics and planning are best left to an elite functioning across international lines to control and dominate the world as they see fit, even if vast and increasing numbers of human beings are left out to the point of having their futures and lives sacrificed if there is not enough to go around of the crumbs that fall from their masters’ tables. It’s a trickle-down world.

Big dog eats little dog—that’s the materialistic philosophy. It’s the big dogs who think they have the right to rule the world.

This is obviously the vision of the Money Power that strives to run things by putting everyone, even the technicians and militarists who support and extend its power, into endless cycles of debt. It is this debt above all that defines the global crisis.

Nations and individuals are mired in debt they can never get rid of. For debt on this scale is never repaid and no one is ever out of debt. It is simply rolled over to the next cycle of debt while the Money Power acquires title to everything it can get its hands on.

As I said earlier, the obvious answer for those foreclosed upon is austerity. Stop living beyond your means. If the banks so dictate, or if you can’t get a job and the public entitlements have run out, then starve and die and even blame yourself in the process.

Governments and businesses try to cope by raising taxes and prices and so generate inflation. But debt catches up with that too. It’s a treadmill that gets faster all the time.

The police and military are there to step in if anyone gets out of line and tries to defy the established order. The same goes for the educational system, whose objective is to train the drones of the world to passively accept their fate, strive to stay out of trouble, and feel lucky if they can get a job or a low interest rate on a mortgage or a loan. Meanwhile, the corporate owned-press and entertainment industry is there to provide a little distraction.

Is this the world you want to live in? Obviously the result of materialism is massive and growing levels of psychological and physical stress.

A dark cloud of fear hangs over the world where people subsist amid nagging anxiety over losing what little they have if something should go wrong. Bankruptcy and loss of one’s home threaten if a person should lose his or her job or a family member become ill.

While this is going on, the rich become richer by the day, the earnings of CEOs and Wall Street tycoons set new records, universities which hand out tickets to prosperity by monopolizing the job credentialing process raise tuitions ever higher, and the giant corporations and too-big-to-fail banks wallow in more money than they know what to do with.

These are all the results of the materialistic perspective, or the belief that man “lives by bread alone.”

The spiritual vision starts with the realization that man is a spiritual being living in a spiritual universe. What does this mean?

Let us consider the following statement that has beckoned to man for 2,000 years: “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Does this statement establish a gulf between the material and spiritual worlds? Or is it of a higher vision, where the everyday world of getting and spending may also be seen as suffused with an inner light of meaning?

May the statement then signify, at least in part, that our daily bread also comes from the world of goodness and abundance which the words “the mouth of God” point to? The words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” would signify as much.

This is certainly what the Catholic Workers Movement believes or the old Distributist movement that favored maximum property ownership by householders and families. It is also what the ancient Hebrew religion believed through its periodic debt-forgiveness jubilees and what the Islamic religion maintains with its prohibition of usury. It was what Jesus Christ manifested by overturning the tables of the money lenders at the temple in Jerusalem, an incident which the scribes and Pharisees down through the ages have never been able to explain away.

The spiritual dimension was reflected in comments by Pope Benedict XVI in Spain only a month ago. Responding to the crisis where unemployment in Spain has climbed to over 20 percent he said:

“The economy doesn’t function with market self-regulation but needs an ethical reason to work for mankind. Man must be at the center of the economy, and the economy cannot be measured only by maximization of profit but rather according to the common good.”

He added that the crisis shows that a moral dimension isn’t “exterior” to economic problems but rather “interior and fundamental.”

We all know that spiritual vision means that we must not judge by appearances. It means we do not judge people by their nationality, the color of their skin, how prestigious a job they have, what university they attended, how many possessions they have piled up, whether or not their education conforms to our approval, and a host of other external factors.

The spiritual perspective means that we view every human being as worthy of respect, entitled to live on the earth with dignity, being equal not only before the law but in the sight of God. It means everyone should have a chance and should be treated decently and fairly.

Where does this vision come from? It comes from every religion, every spiritual teaching, every humanistic vision that has ever appeared on the planet. In the U.S. it also comes from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, and the 14^th Amendment providing for equal protection under the law.

The spiritual vision also comes from deep down inside each of us in the common understanding and divine spark of conscience that truly civilized and cultured people know in their hearts make us all members of the human family.

I worked for NASA at one time, and I can tell you that the space program gave tremendous impetus to the vision of earth and humanity as one of unity and togetherness. The images sent back from space of the beautiful but fragile blue marble we inhabit and of the incredible vastness and beauty of the other worlds and galaxies with which we share a place in the universe—all this changed our perspective forever and opened doors that will never close again.

But there is more even than that. Spiritual vision shows that the earth is not limited in its resources as most people believe and fear. Remember, this is a spiritual universe. Spiritual consciousness points to awareness of the infinite, of goodness without end.

Physics has started to understand that what we see of materiality is really only the outward manifestation of vast processes from the universal core of being that every millisecond give birth to energy vibrations on a scale too vast to contemplate but which crystallize to form the measurable worlds of matter.

In the 1890s the newspapers were reporting on the economic crisis that would destroy the birth of the industrial age because we were going to run out of horses. Today we fear we will run out of food or oil.

It has been figures representing the Money Power who, more than anyone else, have bemoaned the population explosion. Obviously a very effective means for stopping it is genocide in its many forms, and if war can’t always be counted on, then raising food and gas prices, allowing poverty to run amuck, tolerating high unemployment, or cutting pensions and government services will do a pretty good job as well.

I would even go as far as to say that the elite’s tolerance of un- and underemployment in our complex society is a crime against humanity, one responsible for many of the other crimes that plague us.

So that is where matters stand today. This is what in my opinion the Money Power believes and is up to. And it all goes back to the materialistic vision. I can’t have more, or even enough, if you have some too. Gimme. It’s mine.

The ideology of the Money Power comes from greed and destroys all that makes us human. The spiritual vision, by contrast, is one of moderation. It sees that if you have what you need, and thereby become a happier, more productive person, then I will benefit also.

Because there is truly no limitation on what an expansive universe can potentially produce if its resources are used wisely. We have scarcely even begun to tap the energy resources available when you think of wind energy or geothermal energy, or, of course, solar energy.

Then there’s zero-point energy, based on the theories of scientists such as Nikola Tesla, who said that seemingly empty space is in fact the repository of an unlimited source of energy in its potential state. Many independent researchers have been working to make Tesla’s ideas a reality in ways that would advance human freedom beyond anything dreamt of in the past. The computer revolution, where virtually unlimited computing power can be packed into microchips of infinitesimal size, hints at these possibilities.

In the field of economics, the spiritual vision means that everyone on earth should have fair access to purchasing power without having to go to a bank to beg for a loan at interest or a government handout if hardship can be proven to a bureaucrat.

In monetary affairs, the materialistic vision says money is a commodity to be tightly controlled by a financial oligarchy that will use it as they see fit to enrich themselves while everyone else struggles. This in spite of the fact that much of the money they lend they have created out of thin air under a license from government whose politicians they buy and sell at will. Government benefits because it can run up trillions of dollars in debt by borrowing this fictitious money from domestic and foreign banks through an arrangement presided over by the Federal Reserve and the central banks of other nations.

A twist on the materialistic idea is that the money supply should be tightened because only precious metals like gold and silver have real value. The gold bugs and the bankers represent two sides of the same coin so to speak. Both would throttle commerce for the sake of a materialistic ideology.

So what would a spiritual economics look like? What would spiritual money consist of? These have been questions I have been writing about since I retired from the federal government in 2007.

First of all, a spiritually-oriented currency would be available to everyone in sufficient quantity to satisfy the needs of life and provide for free and fair exchange of goods and services.

Obviously employment should be a chief means of acquiring the means of exchange. But it is not necessarily the only means. Earlier we mentioned grants, savings, and capital markets. But in addition, associations of producers, as well as states and municipalities, should be able to create complementary currencies, as you do and as many others are exploring.

But there is more. We know for a fact that not everyone needs to work to provide the necessities of life for society. The productivity of modern industry is phenomenal.

Too many workers on the job are inefficient, as any factory manager knows. Also, as we discussed earlier, business centralization and the decimation of the small business sector have sharply decreased the number of jobs available.

Structural unemployment resulting from changing conditions in the workplace is also a fact of life, and the types of jobs that can potentially be eliminated by computers and robots increase daily.

The result is, of course, that machines can produce far more than there is consumer income available to purchase it. While this is obvious to anyone with commonsense, economists seem not to have noticed. Henry Ford realized this when he decided to pay his workers enough to purchase the automobiles they constructed on the assembly line.

So what many of us believe is that there should be a public stipend for people who are not needed to work, who cannot work, for university-level students, for those who do volunteer work, for those trying to get a new business or career off the ground, for those whose work is not highly paid like teachers or eldercare providers, or for mothers or fathers who want to remain at home and raise their children while the spouse works.

I am speaking of a Basic Income Guarantee. There is a vitally important and growing worldwide movement for a Basic Income Guarantee, and I am proud to be part of it. A Basic Income Guarantee is the only practical way to create the leisure dividend the industrial age promised but has never delivered.

Some oppose the Basic Income Guarantee because they claim it is a socialistic measure. I emphatically disagree with this viewpoint.

Rather its roots may be found deeply implanted in the three historic religions of the Western world—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All three share a common ancestry and have a powerful social welfare component. Eastern religions contain the same idea in their concepts of compassion and the oneness of creation. A Basic Income Guarantee also makes economic sense.

The first modern figure to advocate a Basic Income Guarantee was Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and the famous saying, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Paine wrote, following the American Revolution, that U.S. citizens should receive a regular stipend as compensation for “loss of his or her natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property.” (Agrarian Justice, 1795).

Within the U.S. many famous economists have spoken in favor of a Basic Income Guarantee, including James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Milton Friedman. Another strong supporter was Friedrich Hayek, a major figure in the Austrian school of economics.

In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote:

“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”

In 1973, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published The Politics of a Guaranteed Income that became the basis of a proposal by President Richard Nixon that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1973 but was defeated by a coalition of Southern senators in a vote with strong racial overtones. What did emerge from that era was the earned-income tax credit as a limited guaranteed income that expanded to become a major anti-poverty measure under President Bill Clinton and remains a chief means of support for many low-income families.

In Western Europe an extensive social safety net became a cornerstone of post-World War II society that is increasingly threatened by societal debt. Other nations such as Brazil have begun to consider enacting a Basic Income Guarantee through statute.

The purest form of a Basic Income Guarantee in existence is the Alaska Permanent Fund, where all residents receive an annual payment of around $1,200 from the state’s resource revenues. Such a system would be replicable anywhere in the world.

The logic of the Basic Income Guarantee may be seen through the game of Monopoly where players collect $200 each time they pass “GO.” What would happen if, instead of receiving the free $200, it was a loan from the bank at 10 percent interest? What if you had to pay back $220 when you arrived at “GO” before receiving your next loan?

Clearly what would happen would be that every player on the board would soon be bankrupt, with the bank owning everything. And what would happen in real life if unemployment compensation or Social Security consisted of loans, not payments?

As automation continues to grow and eliminate jobs, more and more nations must begin to realize that to maintain a functioning economy people must simply be granted a subsistence income. Of course there is less chance of this happening every day under the global financial crisis.

Which raises the question of how a Basic Income Guarantee anywhere in the world can be paid for? By taxing everyone to the max who still has a job? No. For the interesting thing is that such grants of public funds do not always have to be balanced by taxation or government debt.

This is what the Money Power and their politically conservative allies want us to believe. That money is scarce and the resulting pain inevitable. Or even that money should be kept scarce because that is how its value is maintained for those fortunate enough to possess it. Of course the pain envisioned is always someone else’s, never one’s own.

But what I have been arguing since I entered the field of discussion after leaving the Treasury Department is that money creation for programs like a Basic Income Guarantee can be balanced by increased economic efficiencies, by the augmented production its availability would call forth, and by enhancing the velocity of money—the rate at which it is turned over by an active economy.

These are concepts many experts within and outside the government have known for decades. It’s what gave Keynesian economics its force for so long.

The fact is that money can simply be created by any sovereign authority or delegated by that sovereign authority to any organized entity within society. Conservatives deride this power as simply one of “printing money.”

But so what? It’s how the private banks—which, again, the conservatives never criticize—lend today under the fractional reserve system. They create a debit in a ledger and transfer it as a credit to the borrower’s bank account.

When the loan is repaid, the credit is cancelled from the books. After the banks tally up the interest charges, of course.

This cancellation actually subtracts from the money supply, as does locking up money in the creation of fixed assets like yachts or mansions that sit and rot while producing nothing of value. This type of conspicuous consumption is actually a type of hoarding.

Are the conservatives really so naive they don’t understand any of this? Or are they just terminally addicted to crying crocodile tears over whatever threatens to upset their self-absorbed world view?

Don’t they understand that credit should be treated as a public utility and used in the same way that bankers now use it except for the benefit of society rather than just the already-rich?

Yes, money can and should be created and distributed sufficient to society’s need, and in the industrial age the need is massive. In fact a Basic Income Guarantee could and should be “printed.”

And it need not be inflationary if it is balanced by what really gives money value—production. This balance is the key to maintaining the value of money—not artificial scarcities created by the Money Power when it wants to crash the economy.

The Social Credit theorists of the British Commonwealth nations tackled this problem under the leadership of British engineer C.H. Douglas almost a century ago. They advocated the distribution of money as a National Dividend in order to bring into balance cumulative consumer prices with available national income, noting that income always lagged due to the enormously important factor of retained earnings which any business must engage in to prepare for the future. Distribution of a National Dividend, they said, can be safely and readily done so long as it is balanced by an equivalent level of economic appreciation in terms of future productive capacity.

Those engaged in barter should understand this, because you know quite well that credit does call forth increased production. But lending by the banks is not necessary for this. Simply distributing the money against a national credit ledger would be far better, because the money remains in circulation and so sustains economic growth without the overhead of interest charges.

The math has been done. You can read about it in my writings and many other places. Similarly, barterers know that even if you have huge amounts of valuable goods and services ready for use, unless a medium of exchange is created they sit stagnant. But once that medium is created, trade begins to move again.

Indeed, anyone with objects of value to trade, including their own labor, should have a right to monetize them as you are doing. Another method in widespread use is computerized labor exchanges.

All such systems have a close intellectual and spiritual affinity to the concept of a Basic Income Guarantee. All such systems would transfer the privilege now allocated only to banks to individuals and associations under a similar public license now monopolized unfairly by the banks.

And all such systems can readily be created in the computer age. Think what the world would be like if eBay or Craigslist traded not just in dollars but in trade credits as well. There might really be an economic recovery, and—heaven forbid—without any bank-generated debt-based currency.

And what if people were given a certain amount of trade credits free and clear just to set the trading in motion? This would also be a Basic Income Guarantee.

What stands in the way of all this? Obviously a major factor is the tax system, which is another monopoly run by collusion between the Money Power and governments.

We saw earlier the economic advantages in colonial America of accepting scrip in payment of taxes. The same could and should be done today.

There is a great injustice, of which those in the barter movement are well aware, in the government having no compunction in taxing the trade of your clients to the full extent of its equivalent in U.S. dollars. Of course organizations like the International Reciprocal Trade Association are to be commended for keeping the barter associations legal with IRS and other national taxing authorities by helping you work with your clients to include in their accounting systems the payment of such taxes.

But you know it is unjust. And why is it unjust? Well, obviously because if the government considers your trade units as real money that can be taxed they should accept trade units in payment of taxes as well.

Yes, your barter trade credits should also become a legitimate currency with which to pay taxes. In fact, any association of producers that comes together with a functional system of trading, and this should include the hundreds of complementary currency systems cropping up around the world, should be able to pay taxes in that complementary currency if the government chooses to tax it as being real money. Then we would see whether the legal tender laws have any meaning or not, because then complementary currencies would be accepted in trade everywhere in the world.

In fact the government would benefit by realizing a large increase in revenue simply by converting these taxed trade credits to dollars in its accounting systems. I can tell you from my own experience that the Treasury Department could implement this policy in a matter of months and retire much of the national debt in so doing.

It could even be argued that doing otherwise should be considered unconstitutional by denying traders in complementary currencies the equal protection of the law.  Am I saying then that the declaration by the government that only Federal Reserve Notes may be legal tender could be found unconstitutional?

Yes, I am. I would urge the complementary currency movement to create test cases and undertake litigation to argue this issue in court.

It’s a simple matter of justice and equity. Confirming the full legal status of complementary currencies, combined with a Basic Income Guarantee, would break the money monopoly held by the Money Power that is destroying the economies of the world.

True, there are many other proposals out there for various types of monetary reform, including public banking, allowing the government to spend money into existence as was done with the Greenbacks of over a century ago, and so on. But unless individual citizens and associations of producers can obtain sufficient quantities of the medium of exchange needed to survive and to monetize their production, we will just be trading one type of money monopoly for another, and the same deadly crisis of poverty in the midst of plenty will remain.

Now, I am, for the first time, going to introduce another proposal that could help solve the global financial crisis. You will hear it today for the first time. 

Let’s start with what I have called the Cook Plan. I first presented the Cook Plan at the 8^th Congress of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network in New York on February 27, 2009. The plan was part of a paper entitled: “A Bailout for the People: Dividend Economics and the Basic Income Guarantee.”

My suggestion was to place a substantial amount of credit directly into the hands of the U.S. population through a Basic Income Guarantee consisting of a sufficient amount to supply every adult a subsistence living in the form of vouchers for such necessities as food and housing, then having the vouchers deposited in a national network of community savings banks that invest in locally productive enterprises.

The system would require no government means test to prove a person really needed the vouchers and no bureaucracy to administer them. They would be treated as a human right. 

The Cook Plan is based on the principle mentioned previously that full-employment is not at all necessary or even desirable in a modern economy. Rather there should be any number of options for work of a volunteer or low-income nature that, when undertaken, do not threaten a person’s survival.

But I now propose to take the idea of the Cook Plan a step further. I am calling it the Gaia Plan, which I am today unveiling for the very first time.

The Gaia Plan would be a Basic Income Guarantee issued by the International Monetary Fund to every adult on the planet under an accord administered by the United Nations.

The Gaia would be a worldwide currency named for the Greek designation for Mother Earth. The name would signify the care of Mother Earth for her human children.

Of course one of today’s concerns is that the Money Power obviously wants a global currency they can use to control humanity by abolishing the sovereignty of nations. The IMF, already having vast experience in impoverishing the people of many nations through austerity regimes, would be one of the agencies they would use for their purposes. 

The Gaia would also be a global currency, but not the kind the Money Power has in mind. Instead it would be a means of exchange for all the people, a means of exchange unencumbered by debt.

And wouldn’t it be a just turn of fate if the IMF were used to administer it? After all, the IMF employs a large number of highly-paid economists and accountants. Why not give them something to do that would benefit instead of destroy humanity?

Under the plan, there would be no means test for receipt of the Gaia. Every adult human being would receive it every month. I would suggest around $800 per payment.

The value of the Gaia could be based on a basket of currencies including the dollar, the euro, the ruble, the Chinese yuan, and the Japanese yen. The plan thereby has some affinities with the proposal by Belgian author Bernard Lietaer for a worldwide complementary currency he called the Terra. However, the Gaia Plan is far more comprehensive in calling for a global Basic Income Guarantee.

Like the Terra, however, the Gaia would help stabilize world currencies. The Gaia would also allow economies to be rebuilt from the bottom up, through entrepreneurship and small business growth.

As with the Cook Plan, the system could also include creation of a worldwide network of savings and development banks. The integrity of the Gaia could be maintained by a pledge nations signing the Gaia treaty would make for competent administration and prohibitions on profiteering through price gouging and other anti-competitive measures.

But let there be no doubt about it. To induce the UN, the IMF, and the governments of the world to reverse the present course of events and replace the oppression of the Money Power and its agents with a humanitarian program to benefit all mankind would constitute one of the great revolutions in history.

It is not a revolution that can be brought about by force. Yet it can happen through the ongoing planetary awakening of consciousness we see all around us.

In conclusion, let me say without reservation that it is impossible to believe that the world really does belong to a delusionary monetary system based on greed. It’s time for that mythology to end.

The world’s consciousness is indeed changing. Globalism is in fact here. Narrow nationalistic policies and national rivalries should be a thing of the past. But human freedom and dignity now call out for answers that benefit everyone, not just the elite and their repressive structures in their race to the bottom in destroying worker livelihoods.

The Golden Rule that all religions affirm requires us now, immediately, to alter our actions to reflect love of neighbor s of self. The Gaia plan would be a tangible expression of the highest ethical ideals of conscience recognized by the entire world over thousands of years.

Meanwhile, organizations like the International Reciprocal Trade Association are providing day-in-and-day-out many of the answers we need so urgently, including having the word “international” in its name. Let’s now take further steps. A functioning world economy would have a multitude of features with units used to pay taxes a prominent one.

So I say: Move forward with boldness and confidence into the future. Do what you are doing now as efficiently and fairly as possible, and be prepared for a future where you will help lead the way by teaching society what human freedom means in the marketplace and how crucially important monetary freedom is today.

Of course we really don’t know what the future holds. But no matter what happens, seeing through the illusion of money is a place to start.

There is a new earth and a new humanity in the making. Let us be part of bringing them to fruition.

Richard C. Cook was born in Missoula, Montana, later moved with his family to Virginia, and graduated with honors from the College of William and Mary, the alma mater of Thomas Jefferson, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. For the next 37 years he served with several federal agencies, including the Carter White House, taught history, and, for a time, operated organic farms in West Virginia and Virginia.

In 1986, while working for NASA, Richard became one of the foremost whistleblowers of modern times as the first NASA official to testify on the causes of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. He left NASA but in 1990 received the Cavallo Foundation Award for Moral Courage in Business and Government for his forthrightness.

Richard completed his government career in 2007 after 21 years as an analyst with the U.S. Treasury Department. On retirement in January, 2007, he published “Challenger Revealed,” his memoirs of the 1986 NASA tragedy.

He then published his book on the causes and cures of the global financial crisis entitled “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He has also written dozens of articles on both a host of public policy issues, as well as contemporary spirituality, and speaks regularly on these topics. His articles may be found on his website at www.richardccook.com

After a search through southwest Virginia, Richard and his wife Karen moved to Roanoke, Virginia, over a year ago from their previous home in Maryland. Their goal was to seek the “high places,” both in the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains and within their own hearts and spirits.

They have established a small business rehabbing old houses, and in January 2011, they decided to formalize their teaching activities through founding the Peace Spiritual Center, where they teach meditation and offer spiritual counseling. The center’s website is www.peace-spiritual-center.org.

To ask about Richard’s  speaking schedule, please contact monetaryreform@gmail.com

2011 is the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

The most misused word in the English language may be the one spelled G-O-D. It is a word used freely and frequently by hundreds of millions of English-speaking people who belong to the Christian churches, and even as a curse word by many people.

But how many really understand the meaning behind that word? How many have truly attained the state of consciousness known as God-realization? How many instead use the word to justify various forms of bigotry against those they perceive as non-believers? Can it be that misuse of the word has even given the being or reality the word may represent a bad name?

Christians profess belief in the Bible. Yet the word “God” never appears in the original language of the Bible. Instead, such words as Yahweh, Elohim, Ho Theos, or Ho Kurios are used.

According to the Reader’s Digest Family Word Finder, page 351, “Our word ‘god’ goes back via Germanic to Indo-European, in which a corresponding ancestor form meant ‘invoked one.’  The word’s only surviving non-Germanic relative is Sanskrit hu.” This form “appears in the Rig Veda, most ancient of Hindu scriptures [as]  puru-hutas,  ‘much invoked,’ epithet of the rain-and-thunder god Indra.”

The word “God” found its way into English-language Christianity through such translations as the King James Bible of 1611. But its origins are decidedly both racial and “pagan.” So in the most important word of their lexicon, Christians use a term that may be far-removed from the scriptures they profess to believe and often cite in looking down their noses at others.

What has probably done the most damage to the idea of “God” has been the use of religion by its adherents for the justification of war. Throughout history, more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion or its ideological derivatives than for any other cause. In this way, organized religion has often made itself repulsive to sensitive souls.  

The charge has often been led by Christians of the West. Immense damage was done to religion by World War I, when Christian nations murdered each other by the millions. The damage continues in what is obviously a latter-day crusade being carried out today by the U.S. military, and whatever allies it can muster, against the Islamic world. This crusade has been cheered on by many Christians, even to the point of burning the Koran in public.

The churches have also had little to say in criticism of the predatory system of Western-based capitalism that has increasingly polarized the world. The rich live in ever-increasing luxury, while increasing numbers are consigned to low standards of living or a growing hell of unemployment, poverty, and even starvation. While the churches rail against homosexuality and abortion, they say little or nothing about the corporate greed that places profits over people or destroys the natural environment.    

The hypocrisy of the Christian churches has led many to flee the usual denominations for alternative types of worship. This has included the formation of independent Christian congregations, reliance on the ethical standards inherent in secular humanism, or conversion to other religions such as Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism.

Striking have been the emergence of movements such as the Nation of Islam among African-Americans, the spread of yoga as both a spiritual practice and way of life, and the widespread adoption of Buddhist forms of practice among the Western intelligentsia. Also notable are the growth of the Sufi movement, the revival of indigenous forms of spirituality, especially among Native Americans of the Western hemisphere, and the search among Christians for their authentic roots by study of the Essenes, the Gnostics, and early Jewish Christian teachings.  

One development dating from the 1960s is the Madonna House apostolate within the Roman Catholic Church that brings the Orthodox Russian practices of the prayer of the heart and poustinia into a Western context. Another important source of teachings is the Spiritis movement, deriving, it says, from direct appearances of Jesus Christ himself to its adherents, resulting not only in new and vibrant explanations of Christian scripture but also integration of spirituality with scientific discoveries in unified field theory.

Spiritualism too has played a role through such figures as Edgar Cayce, the appearance of channeled teachings like A Course in Miracles, and even the search among accounts of extraterrestrial contacts for the spiritual messages therein.

Notable among the new forms of spirituality is the rejection of archaic definitions of sin and guilt. Instead, errant behavior is viewed as an error to be corrected through greater awareness and understanding rather than a permanent stain leading to hellfire and damnation. The new forms also seem much more open to concepts of human equality and freedom and far less beholden to rigid social, economic, political, and ecclesiastical structures. 

Faced with this plethora of new avenues of profound soul-searching, the standard Christian denominations often have little to say, except to retreat more deeply into doctrinaire interpretations of scriptures they do not really seem to understand. No wonder Gandhi said: “I like your Christ. But I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.”

But what all these movements point to is that in spite of the rejection by many of the forms of religion historically practiced in the West, the search for spiritual meaning and experience has never been stronger. So the likelihood remains that whatever the truth may be that hides behind the word “God,” it is a truth that continually calls to humanity for its exploration, understanding, and expression. For many, this search for truth has become a living fire. 

Copyright 2011 by Richard C. Cook

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Synposis

Part One of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“Our Early Political Leaders Warned Us Against the Banking Interests”

Early U.S. statesmen, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson worked to free the nation from control by the bankers who had been behind the establishment of the First and Second Banks of the United States. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln implemented a true democratic currency by spending Greenbacks directly into circulation without borrowing from the banks. These measures allowed the U.S. to develop for much of the 19th century largely free from bankers’ control. By the end of the century, this had changed, and the bankers were taking over.

Part Two of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Federal Reserve System: The Bankers Take Over”

President Lincoln’s Greenback system worked but was undermined and replaced by the financiers who got Congress to pass the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, then the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. The United States now became a nation dominated by the financial elite, the banks, and a debt-based monetary system. Consequently, the 20th Century was one of constant cycles of inflation and deflation resulting in the economic chaos we see today.

Part Three of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Collapse of the Financial System”

The collapse we are seeing today began in the financial system, not the producing economy. The crisis started with the housing bubble which the Federal Reserve created by cutting interest rates and then brought own by raising them. The trigger of the 2008 bank meltdown was refusal by European banks to purchase any more “toxic” U.S. debt based on mortgages and sold as securities. Now, with the decline in equity values, the burden of debt in our economy has grown even larger. Thus a renewal of bank lending will not solve the problem, while the economic stimulus program of the Obama administration is likewise insufficient to restore economic health.

Part Four of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“What is Credit and Who Should Control It?”

Fractional reserve banking is the process by which banks create credit out of thin air. But despite abuses of the system, credit is still a crucial part of modern economics. An enlightened concept of governance would view credit as a public utility. This means that government must take back the control of credit from the private financiers.

Part Five of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Gap Between Prices and Income”

One of the most important and least understood concepts in modern economics is the existence of a gap between prices and purchasing power. This gap results when a portion of prices must be set aside as business and private savings. The money is then used by the financial system for lending and speculation. Keynesian economics takes control of some of the savings through government deficit spending but is still a compromise with control of the economy by the financiers. In fact Keynesian economics has helped cause the collapsing debt pyramid. A better system would be to provide consumers with a National Dividend as a way to monetize the continuous appreciation of the producing economy.

 Part Six of Six Parts: Credit As A Public Utility: The Solution to the Economic Crisis

“The Greenback and National Dividend Solutions”

The U.S. should convert to a system where the money supply is created by the federal government by being spent into circulation without government borrowing or taxation as was done with the Greenbacks. The Federal Reserve should no longer be a bank of issue. Additionally, a National Dividend should be paid directly to the people. The “Cook Plan” calls for the initial distribution of vouchers in the amount of $1,000 a month plus a new system of community savings banks. Greenbacks combined with a National Dividend will create a non-inflationary democratic currency and transform the economy of the United States.

http://blogs.roanoke.com/arts/2011/03/nasa-analyst-richard-c-cook-the-complete-interview/

On February 25 & 26, 2011, Richard C. Cook gave Power Point presentations on “50 Years of Human Space Flight” at the Gainsboro and Williamson Road branch libraries in Roanoke, Virginia.

Coming next: “From Challenger to Extraterrestrials: Answering the Call of Space” at the main library Tuesday, March 29, 6-8 p.m.

In 1986 Richard C. Cook made history when he became the first NASA official to testify on the space agency’s prior knowledge of flaws in the solid rocket booster O-ring joints that destroyed space shuttle Challenger. Following his January 24, 2011, speech at Chapman University in Orange, California, to commemorate the 25^th anniversary of the tragedy, Cook now explores the links between how the seven Challenger astronauts answered the “call of space” with our growing awareness of the likelihood of an extraterrestrial presence affecting planet earth. He is the author of several books and dozens of articles on public policy issues published in print magazines and on the internet. His website is www.richardccook.com.

The space shuttle Challenger disaster took place 25 years ago on Jan. 28, 1986. I was working for NASA, sitting in the auditorium at Washington, D.C., headquarters, watching the launch when Challenger blew up. Teacher-in-Space Christa McAuliffe was aboard. It was the most-watched manned space launch since Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969.

Sen. John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, came on TV just afterward and said, “First light seemed to come from a solid rocket booster.” Actually, as a NASA resource analyst, I had been studying this problem for months as a potentially catastrophic problem.

I had written a detailed memo and other reports documenting engineers’ warnings of such an event. NASA knew the shuttle was unsafe due to this and several other hardware issues, had designed a fix, but now was “flying as is.”

Though NASA’s management knew almost immediately what had happened, they began to cover it up. But the O-ring papers came out in the press, including my July 1985 memo, and I was called to testify before a presidential commission headed by former Secretary of State William Rogers.

But there was more to the story of the Challenger mishap. Soon after I spoke up, the contractor engineers from Morton Thiokol who had opposed the launch came forward, and the story emerged of how they had warned the previous night that the cold air that had moved into the area could cause the O-ring joints to freeze. Other engineers were concerned about the ice on the launch tower and also testified. They had said the launch pad had looked like “something out of Dr. Zhivago.”

I was the first NASA official to speak publicly about the longstanding dangers of the solid rocket booster O-rings, but left NASA and spent the rest of my government career elsewhere. Though my stay at NASA was finished, in 1990 I received the Cavallo Award for Moral Courage in Business and Government for my testimony.

Challenger was a preventable disaster which I described in detail in my book Challenger Revealed, published in 2007, after I retired. What the commission did not report was the schedule pressures coming from the use of the space shuttle as a test platform for President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative—“Star Wars”—program and from the desire by the White House and NASA to get the Teacher in Space into orbit in time for President Reagan’s state of the union address that night. Pressure may also have come from NASA’s desire for delivery of the planned lesson from space on Friday which was Day Four of the mission. A delay would have pushed Christa McAuliffe’s televised presentation to the weekend.

The Challenger astronauts died because of all-too human failings but were true heroes of our time. Since NASA was created in 1958, America had been answering the call to space, and the Challenger astronauts were part of that historic mission.

We recognize today that exploration of space over the past half-century has been a quest that every person on the planet has been affected by one way or the other, even though many have good reason to question whether it has been worth the money or if it is just another way for us to attain national prestige or military superiority. Indeed, there is today a race to the moon involving not just the U.S., but also Russia, China, India, Japan, and the European Union. Some say it’s a race to gain a military advantage through the militarization of space and the creation of armed lunar bases.

Another major concern with the manned space program is that every human being who has flown has had to ride on the most dangerous transportation system known to man—extremely high-powered explosive rockets. The space shuttle has had two catastrophes—the loss of Columbia followed on Challenger’s heels in 2003—and is scheduled to cease operating in 2011.

 But the next phase of the manned space program—Constellation—which may yet be cancelled by the Obama administration, uses the same type of primitive rocketry. Indeed, the program was called by one NASA administrator “Apollo on steroids.”

 Manned space flight began with the suborbital mission of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961, followed by American Alan Shepard later that year. Through the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, the U.S. flew its manned space missions in stubby one-use capsules.

The space shuttle, first launched in 1981, was the world’s first reusable manned spacecraft. Though other countries have sent human beings to space, including a diverse group of crew members for the International Space Station, it’s only been the U.S. and Russia that have actually launched a manned space rocket.

Of course the U.S., Russia, and other nations working with them, have explored space in many other ways. This has been done both from the ground, through telescopes and gigantic radio dishes, such as the Very Large Array near Socorro, New Mexico, and from unmanned space probes that have created the amazing new science of comparative planetology.

Probes have been launched to travel within and outside our solar system. The Hubble Space Telescope has extended our vision to deep space, approaching the far reaches of the universe. Plus there are the numerous weather, communication, and surveillance satellites, along with many other instruments to study the earth, its atmosphere, magnetic fields, solar radiation, and the solar wind.

Unmanned probes are cheaper and obviously far less dangerous than manned spacecraft. In the future, we could even use robots to explore space. And there has been constant tension within NASA and Congress between manned and unmanned spaceflight for funding, publicity, and organizational priority.

So what are we looking for in space? The simplest answer to that question is to say we are seeking knowledge of the universe in which we live.

Another answer is that we are looking for ways to use space as a laboratory, a manufacturing environment, keep track from space of threats to the earth’s environment from pollution, or, someday perhaps, as a source of different types of energy. Some have even viewed space as a potential location for human colonization, which is the justification given for NASA’s perennial desire to send men and women to visit Mars. A voyage to Mars has been the ultimate goal of NASA’s manned space program since the 1960s.

But the question of what are we seeking goes beyond that, for the larger question of whether life exists beyond earth has occupied the space program since its inception. And in looking for life out there we also seek to know ourselves—who we are and where we have come from.

Certainly there can be no doubt that the universe is alive in ways we do not fully understand and on an incredibly large scale. There are amazing phenomena out there, from supernovas to black holes to quasars to neutrinos. We know very little about these things. We know even less about the matter of whether there is life out there “like us.”

“Are we alone?” is the question constantly asked when some new discovery is made, especially when we consider the growing evidence that the universe may contain millions of planets with enough similarity to earth that it is possible for them also to support life in some form.

When I came to Washington in 1970, I met a man who worked in NASA’s office that was then seeking extraterrestrial life. The main thing they had in mind was establishing radio contact. This led to SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Life, the program advanced so famously by Carl Sagan and represented in Jodi Foster’s movie Contact.

But how about actual UFOs and ETs? Well, we know, for instance, that UFOs have been reported throughout recorded history. We have records of reports from the days of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages that sound exactly modern UFO sightings.

There are the famous Roswell legends from 1947 of one or more UFO crashes in the deserts of New Mexico. I have studied these incidents in detail, mainly through the definitively-researched books of scientist Stanton Friedman, and believe that the evidence is decidedly in his favor.

The Air Force’s Project Blue Book that was in place from 1948 to 1969, documented many cases of UFO sightings, some found merely to be images of familiar objects like weather balloons, but some impossible to explain. Some say the government’s knowledge of UFOs was overseen by a super-secret group called Majestic and that through this group the government made a decision to deny the existence of UFO and ET phenomena altogether. Some even allege the U.S. government has made a formal treaty with ETs and that the contact scene from Steven Spielberg’s 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind was a depiction of an actual event.

So the UFO reports have persisted, as do claims of what are called alien abductions, where people have gone under hypnosis to describe visits to alien spacecraft and their being examined for undisclosed medical or scientific research. There is Dr. Steven Greer’s Disclosure Project, headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia, which has presented reports of UFO phenomena by former military, government, and scientific personnel and called on the government to let us know what it knows.

There have been allegations of technology transfers taking place due to UFO contact, including the sudden and unexplained appearance of transistors in the technological marketplace. The existence of a race of ETs called the “Greys” has been alleged, along with the idea that the government treaty I just spoke of was formed with this particular group of beings.

Do UFOs really exist? The published reports keep coming that say they do. I have personally talked to many intelligent people, including three different perfectly level-headed residents of Roanoke, Virginia, where I live, who have described UFOs, and I may have seen one myself as it zipped across the sky when I worked in Washington, D.C. Recently, a military veteran from North Carolina in his 80s said he had actually once seen a living ET, a survivor of one of the alleged 1947 New Mexico crashes, being held in custody at Camp Perry near Williamsburg, VA.

Former military officers have gone on record as having seen UFOs near military sites in the U.S. and Great Britain, including several who spoke at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in September 2010. As reported by CNN:

“Retired Col. Charles Halt recalled seeing UFOs over the woods near Royal Air Force Stations Bentwaters and Woodbridge in eastern England in December 1980. He and security personnel were investigating reports of strange lights just outside one of the bases.

“‘All through the forest was a bright glowing object,’ he said Monday. ‘The best way I can describe it, it looked like an eye – with bright red, with a dark center. It appeared to be winking. It was shedding something like molten metal, was dripping off it.

“’It silently moved through the trees, avoiding any contact, it bobbed up and down, and at one point it actually approached us. We tried to get closer. It receded out into the field, beyond the forest, and silently exploded into five white objects – gone. So we went out into the field looking for any evidence, because something had been apparently falling off it – and we find nothing,’ he said.

“He recalled subsequently seeing other objects in the sky, including one that stopped about 3,000 feet overhead and “’sent down a concentrated beam at our feet.’ No one was harmed.

“’The best way I can equate it is sort of a laser beam. We stood there in awe. Was this a warning? Was this an attempt to communicate? Was this a weapon? Or just a probe?’ he said.

“At about the same time, he was hearing radio reports from base personnel that beams from some of the objects were ‘falling into or near the weapons storage area.’”

I have also been informed by people formerly connected with the NASA manned space program who speak of ET contacts in the Apollo and space shuttle programs, though, if official reports on these incidents exist, they are obviously well-guarded secrets. One space program veteran, Clark McLelland, has presented a description of what he claimed was an eight-to-nine-foot-tall ET in the space shuttle’s payload bay he observed while working at video monitors at the Kennedy Space Center during an orbital mission.

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences after his spaceflight career, also has spoken out. According to a Fox News report from July 25, 2008:

“He says extraterrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions — but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.

“Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview in Birmingham, England, that sources in the federal government who had had contact with aliens described the beings as ‘little people who look strange to us.’

Mitchell, now 80 years old, holds the record for the longest moon walk in history—over nine hours. He has stated that Roswell actually happened, that the U.S. government has utilized UFO technology for its own purposes, and told the press that he was briefed on ET contacts while at NASA. He said:

 “I’ve been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes, we have been visited.”

 UFOs are often described as having the capability to fly in all directions, make rapid stops, turns, and starts, and accelerate at inconceivable speeds. Obviously the rockets used in manned spaceflight cannot do anything like this, not even the shuttle.

 But other types of propulsion have been under study by NASA and other R&D institutions for years, including nuclear power, what is called anti-gravity, and electromagnetism. An example is the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket developed by Costa Rican scientist and former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz through the Ad Astra Rocket Company and scheduled to be tested on the International Space Station over the next several years.

 This type of research points to much more advanced and benign technology than explosive rockets that some believe may already be known elsewhere in the universe, and it is through the investigation of such technology that the manned space program meets the world of ETs and UFOs, if indeed such things exist.

 So how could UFOs defy the laws of inertia and gravity? As early as the 1950s and 60s, what was called the Space Valve principle was identified that would allow for silent, frictionless travel, even in earth’s atmosphere. Today we have the phenomena whereby a superconductor cooled to an extremely low temperature is repelled by a magnetic field and made to levitate, the Meisner Effect.

 This is the principle behind the mag-lev train, whereby an extremely heavy train filled with cargo and passengers can travel at speeds over 100 mph on a track it never even touches. The same could be done with an automobile on a magnetized highway.

 The mag-lev train actually floats a centimeter above the track in seeming defiance of the law of gravity. Animals such as frogs have been levitated in the laboratory. A Japanese sumo wrestler was reportedly levitated on a disc containing a superconductor.

 Then there are the experiments with constructing a space elevator, where objects would ride to space on an extremely lightweight conveyor. My son at Virginia Tech worked on the space elevator project for a time.   

 UFOs and ETs are also a huge part of modern consciousness as reflected in the mass media. Space has been one of the predominant themes in movies, TV, and literature for the past half-century, including, most famously, Star Trek. The life of beings in space is an archetypal vision of reality that will not go away.

 Depiction of space phenomena in the media has ranged from the benign, as in Steven Spielberg’s ET, to the comical, as in Third Rock from the Sun, to a gigantic battleground between good and evil, as in Star Wars, to the cynical and horrifying, as in X-Files and Men in Black. While some reports are unsettling, like those of alien abduction, there is no evidence of any immediate menace to the existence of humanity.

 Indeed, it is often noted in the literature that beings capable of reaching the earth from distant regions could well be not only more advanced technologically, but also more ethically than we are. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell has said, again according to Fox News:

 “Real-life ET’s were similar to the traditional image of a ‘small Gray”‘ — short, slight frame, large eyes and large head. Mitchell also claimed human technology is ‘not nearly as sophisticated’ as the aliens’ and ‘had they been hostile,’ he warned ‘we would be been gone by now.’”

Interest in space also touches the spiritual realm, as with out-of-body travel and remote viewing. These have been the objects of serious study by the Monroe Institute near Charlottesville, Virginia. Thousands of intelligent, capable people have attended its programs, including many military and intelligence analysts. Experiences reported by the Monroe Institute have included out-of-body travel to what is described as worlds parallel to but quite distinct from our own. 

Though attempts have been made to debunk them, crop circles are another example of potential extraterrestrial involvement, where incredibly complex and mathematically-precise designs have been seen to be created by beams of light from the sky completing their work within minutes. These designs have included such figures as the Mandelbrot Set and the Julia Set which only in recent years have been created experimentally by high-powered computers.

 We may also have historical evidence of space visitors. The Egyptian Ennead of nine overarching deities was reputed to have extraterrestrial origins. Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Daniken is a famous book on the subject of ET visitation.

Indeed there are many legends from ancient civilizations of space visitors, including from ancient Sumeria and the Dogon culture of West Africa, which traces its origins to beings from Sirius. Even episodes of the Bible have been interpreted as referring to outer space visitation, including Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, as described in Exodus, in a roped-off area on Mt. Sinai.

The ancient Gnostics believed in the Aeons, spiritual beings or principles from afar who sometimes visited earth. Hinduism has the concept of lokas, extraterrestrial realms to which people can travel in deep meditation or after death.

The concept of other-wordly beings has actually been very common in history and is present today in the form of angels. Virtually all Christians believe in angels, including a guardian angel assigned to each of us, though they are viewed as spiritual, not physical, beings, if indeed the distinction means much scientifically. Why couldn’t angelic bodies simply be composed of a finer form of matter than we are accustomed to?

Many Christians pray to the archangel Michael. Prayers are also offered to departed saints who obviously reside somewhere other than right here on earth. Muslims believe the archangel Gabriel gave the Koran to Mohammed. Hindus may pray to the elephant-headed deity Ganesh or to the Lord Shiva or to forms of the divine mother such as Durga, Kali, or Saraswati.

Clearly none of these divine or semi-divine beings resides in the visible earthly realm, so might also be called “extraterrestrials” of a kind. There have also been rumors that both the Vatican and the United Nations have designated individuals as liaisons with ETs if and when they appear.

Actually, the U.N. has an Office for Outer Space Affairs, and while its head, Dr. Mazlan Othman of Malaysia, is not an official ambassador to the ET realm, she has spoken at such events as the British Royal Society’s conference on “The Detection of Extra-terrestrial Life and the Consequences for Science and Society.”

This 2010 conference in London was hosted by Lord Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen, who said that ETs “could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognise them. The problem is that we’re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology.”

He added: “I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”

Regarding the Vatican, while the Roman Catholic Church has not taken an official position, Monsignor Corrado Balducci, a member of the Vatican Curia, has gone on Italian national television a number of times to state his belief that extraterrestrial contact is a real phenomenon. Balducci provides an analysis of extraterrestrials that he feels is consistent with the Catholic Church’s understanding of theology, emphasizing that extraterrestrial encounters “are not demonic, they are not due to psychological impairment, they are not a case of entity attachment, but these encounters deserve to be studied carefully.”

Balducci has said that the Vatican is closely following ET phenomena and cites such Catholic thinkers of the past as 19^th century Jesuit astronomer Angelo Secchi (1818-66), who said, “It’s absurd to consider the worlds around us as uninhabited deserts.” There has even been discussion in some circles of whether, if ETs make themselves known, they should be offered the sacrament of Christian baptism.

Indeed, from a spiritual perspective, and according to some of the major religions in some description or another, we all may be viewed as “extraterrestrials,” if by that we mean souls incarnated here on earth to have a human experience. Otherwise, where did we come from in the first place?

 Of course it’s also easy to get lost in fantasy. There are whole imaginary mythologies and some bizarre cults that have been created, some focused on the possible significance of the supposed ending of the Mayan calendar in the year 2012. No one knows the exact future, but it is surely better to look ahead with faith and hope than to get wrapped up in gloom and doom prophecies. 

 At the same time, there are some definitely credible accounts of extraterrestrial contact through psychic means, if we can accept the possibility of mental or telepathic communication between different levels of being or among entities in different parts of the universe.

 I’ll mention two of these that I find particularly interesting and credible. One is the “Ra Material” from L/L Research in Louisville, KY, and the second is material on what is called “The Nine” from a group led by the late U.S. psychic researcher Andrija Puharich.

 Research on The Nine covered a fairly large group, including Eugene Rodenberry, the creator of Star Trek. The Association for Research and Enlightenment founded by Edgar Cayce in Virginia Beach, VA, also regularly conducts conferences and workshops on UFO research, as do many other organizations around the world.

 Let me close by saying simply that these are some of the avenues I’ve explored over the 25 years since I was personally involved in what was without a doubt the greatest tragedy of the space age. Yet in a sense it was not entirely a tragedy. Rather it was a demonstration by seven brave people of what it may be worth to explore the highest frontier, one we really know very little about.  

 And as we move forward from here, I would urge each of you to have an open mind about what space is and what the role of the human race may be in space exploration in both the immediate and distant future. Remember too that it has been through the manned space program and its many related endeavors that two infinities have met: that of the vast unending universe around us and that of the equally vast inner world of man’s  thought, his emotions of awe and wonder, and his undying and eternal striving of consciousness and spirit.  

 Copyright 2011 by Richard C. Cook

The shuttle was to be a “space truck” that would be used for every conceivable scientific, commercial and military purpose. By the time of the Reagan administration, the lines were confused even further by decisions to use the shuttle as a test platform for weapons testing under the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” program.

The investigations of the Challenger disaster exposed an organizational culture at NASA so influenced by politics, schedule exigencies and managerial careerism that it could never exert itself to the utmost to protect the human lives at stake. When Columbia disintegrated on re-entry in 2003, the investigative report was eerily similar.

By then, however, the public had largely lost interest in the manned space program, even as the private sector and the Russian space agency were dabbling in space tourism, where curious millionaires would be treated to a joy ride for astronomical fares.

After 2011 there will be no more space shuttle. In a stunning reversal, the massive Constellation return-to-the-moon program embarked on by the George W. Bush presidency was excluded from President Obama’s 2011 budget and is likely slated for oblivion.

There are few champions to defend Constellation other than the military-industrial complex and their congressional allies, partly because the ultimate goal of a manned journey to Mars has never seemed realistic or worth the price. Constellation also bound NASA’s future to perpetuation of the primitive launch technology of explosive rocketry vs. major investments in more exotic but benign systems like antigravity or electromagnetism.

Constellation — which former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin unfortunately referred to as “Apollo on steroids” — was also viewed by some critics as a thinly-disguised attempt to establish lunar military bases as part of a latter-day space arms race.

Is America lost in space? So it would seem. The heady days of the U.S. manned space program may be history, as veterans of the U.S. astronaut corps have gone public to point out. From a long-term historical perspective, the Challenger disaster may someday be viewed as the beginning of that decline.

Has America forgotten its aspiration to become a space-faring nation? Can those days be brought back by a country that has given away its manufacturing prowess to foreign competitors like China, and that has been devastated by two decades of economic turmoil?

Only time will tell. One thing is certain: A new vision of the place of mankind in the immensity of space is sorely needed.
 

Richard C. Cook is a former NASA budget analyst who, in 1985, warned the agency that problems with the O-ring seals in solid rocket boosters could cause a “catastrophic” failure during launch. After the Challenger disaster, he leaked those documents to The New York Times, which became a turning point in the accident investigation. Cook is an author and consultant living in Roanoke, Va. His book “Challenger Revealed” was published in 2007.

 January 28, 2011, is the 25^th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. A little more than a minute after Challenger was launched at the Kennedy Space Center that cold winter morning, the shuttle broke to pieces when an O-ring joint in one of the solid rocket boosters failed due to a burnthrough. The seven Challenger astronauts died, with some possibly having survived until the crew cabin struck the ocean surface after plummeting 60,000 feet.

It was arguably the greatest tragedy of the space age. NASA and the booster contractor, Morton Thiokol, knew the O-ring joint was flawed. A redesign had been decided on, though flights were to continue while the repair was being implemented.

The night before the launch, engineers from Morton Thiokol argued vociferously that liftoff should be postponed, because they feared the unusually cold temperatures moving in that night would subject the O-rings to hardening and possible failure. Personnel from Rockwell, the shuttle orbiter contractor, had their own fears with respect to formation of ice on the launch tower that could crash down on the orbiter when the main engines ignited.

The Thiokol engineers who predicted a rocket failure were overruled by their own management, acting under pressure from NASA. Even though NASA knew the day of the mishap what had caused it, a cover-up began to be implemented.

But the whistleblowers spoke up. In my own case, I had been working in the NASA Comptroller’s office as the lead resource analyst for the solid rocket boosters. When a Presidential Commission was formed to investigate the disaster, I testified on NASA’s past knowledge of O-ring problems after leaking some of the O-ring papers to the New York Times.

With support from some Commission members, the Thiokol witnesses, most notably Al McDonald and Roger Boisjoly, also made known their opposition to the launch. In June 1986, the Commission duly reported on the technical cause of the launch failure.

But presidential commissions are also created to deflect political repercussions. What they did not report was the likely pressure coming from the White House to get the shuttle into orbit so that the Teacher in Space, Christa McAuliffe, would be aloft when President Ronald Reagan gave his state of the union speech that night.

When I wrote my book Challenger Revealed I proved, at least to my own satisfaction and to that of many readers, and using information from an interview I conducted of a key eyewitness, that President Reagan himself was likely involved in the faulty launch decision. But I am not a conspiracy theorist, and, even though the White House knew that NASA was concerned about the possible effects of the cold weather, there was no evidence they knew the Thiokol engineers opposed the launch for booster rocket problems that had never been mentioned outside NASA or the Defense Department at the higher political levels.  

But there was more to it than that. Also in my book, I explained how the shuttle design had been compromised by decisions to make the vehicle an orbital platform for military missions. I also showed how much of the schedule pressure driving launch decisions in 1985-1986 came from use of the shuttle for space weapons research under the Reagan administration’s Star Wars program. All this activity was, to my mind, illegal in terms of NASA’s 1958 charter for the peaceful exploration of space.

The Challenger disaster was truly a preventable accident. But the time to point the finger and find fault is long past. Today in 2011 the shuttle program itself is history.

And by the time I finished my book in 2006, after working on it on and off for 20 years, I was personally ready to forgive, allow the healing process to take over, and move on, and I remain in that frame of mind today. To all who still may carry guilt from their own involvement or that of family members in those terrible events a quarter century ago, I say accept and forgive yourselves my brothers and sisters, for all did the best they could with the information they had available and the pressures that were brought to bear. I include the memory of President Reagan in this, my prayer.

So now I want to focus on some more far-reaching reflections we can derive from the deaths of the seven Challenger crew members—Commander Dick Scobee, Pilot Michael Smith, Mission Specialists Judy Resnick, Scott McNair, and Ellison Onizuka, and Payload Specialists Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe.

These seven were truly heroes of our time, as everyone has been who has been connected in any way, even as spectators, with the space program since its inception.

The space program did not come from nowhere. Though cynics may deride it as just a way to further national supremacy, carry weapons of war to the heavens, or a humongous waste of money, I believe there is much more to it than that.

In some respects the space program has been kids playing with some big, expensive, and dangerous toys. But I really don’t mind that at all.

It was fun for me too working for NASA.  Because along with it came the search for knowledge and understanding of the world beyond the earth’s surface and beyond the earth-bound mentality that has dominated mankind’s collective history for such a very long time.

Going to space was new. It was as though space was calling to us. Now, in the latter half of the 20^th century, we, along with Russia and other nations, were answering that call.

For what is space, after all? Space is not simply nothing. It is the home and womb of all life. The ancients spoke of the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water. But space was a fifth element—they called it the “ether.”

The ether was viewed as the source of everything and the place of origin of infinite power and energy. Physicists today are making similar discoveries through quantum mechanics and through learning about zero point energy, where a single indefinable locus of space contains not simply a vacuum, but an immense reservoir of unmanifested potentiality. Nicola Tesla tried to tap into this so-called free energy source, and some say he succeeded.

But sending human beings to space proved to be enormously complex and expensive. The human body is not made to survive in space.

Most of the cost of manned space travel goes to creating an earth-like environment in the extreme and hostile space environment. NASA’s space scientists long have argued that much more scientific knowledge can be gained from unmanned space probes, and they are right.

Plus there’s the fact that our methods of getting to space are shockingly primitive. We can’t even come close to imagining the explosive force of a Saturn 5 or a space shuttle main engine.

Of course these gigantic rockets can blow up—they’re supposed to. Except their force is designed to exit from the tail end in a controlled fashion, which obviously does not always happen. The investigation of more benign propulsion mechanisms such as anti-gravity, atomic energy, or electromagnetism, has been underfunded but still goes on.

Yet in spite of the dangers, we still long to travel to space. I had my own fantasy of becoming the first budget analyst in space—I am not making this up. And those more sensitive souls involved in the space program have long known that we are not alone in the universe and have chuckled any time a newspaper reporter suggests it is even an open question.

When I arrived in Washington to work for the federal government in 1970, I met a man who worked in the NASA office charged with investigating extraterrestrial life. After I published Challenger Revealed, I was contacted by people who had been involved in the space program and who gave me detailed information about NASA’s extraterrestrial observations and contacts, including those made during the lunar voyages and the shuttle program. These included reports of videos of nine-foot-tall space beings hanging with the astronauts in the shuttle’s payload bay.

Most recently I have begun a major research project on UFO phenomena. You have to sift your way through a massive quantity of information, and get past many idiotic media productions about the creatures of space who want to eat us for dinner, but when you do the work, it becomes very clear that UFOs have in fact come to earth and are probably present today.

Enough former military men, scientists, and ordinary observers have reported on UFO phenomena to establish their credibility. Despite efforts by some parties to debunk such phenomena, things like crop circles provide further evidence.

Crop circles are not a hoax. Their formation by beams of light have been witnessed, videoed, and documented. Crop circles depicting mathematical phenomena such as the Mandelbrot Set or the Julia Set have only recently been constructed by high-powered computers, yet they have been formed in perfect precision in crop fields in Great Britain and elsewhere.

I have also investigated the literature on the two supposed flying saucer crashes in New Mexico in 1947. Eye-witnesses to these events have been found and interviewed. It’s obvious to me that they really did happen.

And yes, I support those who argue there has been a massive U.S. government cover-up of these and related events, possibly so the government can reverse-engineer and monopolize UFO technology. A leader in making this case is Dr. Steven Greer, head of the Disclosure Project. I have myself talked to many people with nothing to prove whose eye-witness accounts of UFO sightings are clearly genuine.

I also agree with those who say UFOs and extraterrestrials have been around for millennia, as Erich von Daniken has explored in Chariots of the Gods and other books. It’s a plausible explanation of how such advanced ancient civilizations as the Sumerian suddenly appeared with complete systems of writing, astrology, architecture, and religion.  

There is another phenomenon related to extraterrestrial contact that I will not dwell on, but which you can look into if you are so inclined. These are the channeling contacts that have been documented over the past half-century.    

I spoke of the fragility of the human body and how it is unsuited to the space environment. But perhaps through the mind and the spirit we have better ways to contact or even travel through space.

There is a large body of literature on out-of-body travel that the U.S. military and intelligence communities have tried to tap into through development of remote viewing capabilities. I have carried out such experiments myself and have been able to simply get up and walk out of my physical body as it lay in a relaxed state.

People who have practiced such techniques have reported visits to parallel worlds similar to ours but existing in different dimensions of reality. There is also a group of people connected with the Monroe Institute in Virginia whose mission is to travel out-of-body in order to contact and provide assistance to the spirits of people who have died in traumatic events such as airplane crashes.

On the subject of channeling, there are two groups that have provided detailed and credible reports of extraterrestrial contacts. One of these is L/L Research of Louisville, Kentucky, publishers of The Ra Material, as well as a series of books by Carla Rueckert based on their exploration of the Law of One. This relates to the same principle of the underlying unity of the Universe as physicists are learning about, though from a more spiritual perspective.

Another channeling source is based on the work carried out by U.S. scientist Andrija Puharich, psychic Phyllis Schlemmer, and others, and is documented in several books including British author Stuart Holroyd’s, The Nine: Briefing from Deep Space.

And before you dismiss channeling as a legitimate source of knowledge, reflect on the likelihood that much of the Bible and other world religious literature also may be channeled material. For instance, Rudolf Steiner, the famous Austrian spiritual adept, said that the four Gospels of the New Testament were channeled.

So, these are some of the reflections that flood my mind as I review the meaning of the Challenger disaster 25 years ago. The lives of seven highly accomplished and courageous human beings were lost due to some extremely short-sighted and mundane human failings. They risked their lives and lost them, though I have no doubt they live on and are already engaged in or contemplating their next adventures.

Their achievements and what they risked for their values have been a major part of my own adult life and education. Thus for me, recollections of the Challenger disaster have not been something to shrink from.

There is much to learn from both triumph and tragedy and many transformative ways to view their meaning. I wish such an open-minded attitude of learning and exploration upon each of you, my companions in both outer and inner space.