Home > Author > Peter Joseph
1 " Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency. "
― Peter Joseph
2 " I spent the beginning of my focus on activism by doing what most everyone else was doing; blaming other people and institutions. Don’t like the war? Let’s blame the president, congress, or lobbyists. Don’t like ecological disregard? Let’s blame this or that corrupt corporation or some regulatory body for poor performance. Don’t like being poor and socially immobile? Let’s blame government coercion and interference in this free market utopia everyone keeps talking about.The sobering truth of the matter is that the only thing to blame is the dynamic, causal unfolding of system expression itself on the cultural level. In other words, none of us create or do anything in isolation – it’s impossible. We are system-bound both physically and psychologically; a continuum. Therefore our view of causality with respect to societal change can only be truly productive if we seek and source the most relevant sociological influences we can and begin to alter those effects from the root causes. "
3 " Make no mistake. The greatest destroyer of ecology. The greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution. The greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, animal abuse and inhumanity. The greatest generator of personal and social neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety. Not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for personal health, global sustainability and progress on this planet, is not some corrupt government or legislation.Not some rogue corporation or banking cartel.Not some flaw of human nature and not some secret cabal that controls the world.It is the socioeconomic system itself at its very foundation. "
4 " Everyone is so locked into the current way of doing things, they never see the larger picture or other, more responsible and efficient possibilities. A REAL economy is always wanting to limit consumption/manufacturing as much as possible by assuring the strategically "best" and "adaptable" productions at all times, while keeping balance with human needs and public health.It is a total shift in intent than what we have today. "
5 " Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work."A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok.People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact.Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety.So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars.And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality.And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent.The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course. "
6 " A ilusão de uma democracia é um insulto à nossa inteligência. Em um sistema monetário não existe esse negócio de "democracia verdadeira", nunca teve. "
7 " It is in this line of thinking that Dr. King’s “poverty of the spirit” really hits home. That a person can have a billion dollars in the bank and walk around as though that excess is OK in the midst of the vast suffering around him is an exceptional state of ethical and empathic impoverishment. But instead of looking at billionaires as a manifestation of both our problematic social system and disturbed human psychology, the public is lured into cultural violence, idolizing billionaires as heroes and beacons of success. "
― Peter Joseph , The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression
8 " The US government allocates roughly 2 percent of its annual budget to education. This is in stark contrast to the 20 percent allocated to the military, suggesting war is more beneficial to the nation’s leaders than an educated population.4 "
9 " if the goal of charity is to help those in need, you certainly wouldn’t know it based on the degree of waste and decadence present. There is something fundamentally wrong when people are eating extravagant meals, wearing $5,000 suits, and drinking $800 bottles of champagne while a guy on stage preaches about global starvation and poverty. This is particularly troubling in New York City, a place with about 60,000 homeless on the street each night. "
10 " Rather than forage and follow animal migrations, people of the post-Neolithic world became tied to the land in a more direct way, critically dependent on factors such as regional suitability for crops and availability of food for domestic animals. This adaptation then led to inevitable borders between settlements that also didn’t exist in nomadic life. As such, emerging settlements were vulnerable, requiring protection of their location and economic productions. This then meant the need for increased organization through new social institutions. To translate into terms of modern political economy, you thus have the basis for property (ownership); capital (means of production); labor specialization (jobs); regulation (government); and protection (law/police/military). In other words, you have grounds for what is now the ultimate mechanism of survival once again: the market system of economics. "
11 " if all money comes into existence through loans, with the returning of those loans removing the money from the money supply, where does the money to pay the interest come from? To better understand the question, consider a small island with 100 inhabitants. They have a bank that creates and loans money. Let’s assume each person gets a $100 loan. This means $10,000 has been created as the island’s total money supply. Everyone then buys goods and services, exchanging this money with each other, generating economic activity. This $10,000 in loans could then technically be returned to the bank, fulfilling the society’s loan obligations, removing all money from existence. However, if interest is charged, more money needs to be returned than actually exists. If each of those $100 loans required has a 10 percent interest fee, then while the total money supply is still $10,000, the actual value owed back to the bank is actually $11,000. So where does that extra $1,000 come from? "
12 " the precondition of unemployment has actually been shown to correlate to a wide array of problems. In the United States, between 1991 and 2000 the annual unemployment rate went from 6.8 percent to 4.8 percent. According to a study by the Uniform Crime Report (UCR), that same period produced a 42.9 percent reduction in murder, a 33.6 percent decline in violent crime, and a 28.8 percent reduction in property crime. "
13 " Gilligan makes it very clear what the most powerful generator of shame and humiliation is in human culture, according to his extensive study. As corroborated by others in epidemiological research, socioeconomic inequality appears to be the greatest driver of behavioral violence in general. Gilligan states, “Worldwide, the most powerful predictor of the murder rate is the size of the gap in income and wealth between the rich and the poor. The most powerful predictor of the rate of national or collective violence—war, civil insurrection, and terrorism—is the size of the gap between income and wealth between the rich and poor nations.”46 This is a troubling finding as wealth inequity is a textbook characteristic of capitalism, effectively making capitalism itself a precondition for war and violence. "
14 " let’s step back and consider the idea of economically driven structural violence in abstract principle. Imagine an island with 100 inhabitants. One person has managed to acquire, through customary trade methods, 99 percent of the resources of the island. The other ninety-nine are poor, sharing only 1 percent of the resources, and they are consequently suffering physically and psychologically. They are getting sick, fighting among themselves, and dying off prematurely for lack of economic means. The one wealthy person has more than enough to provide for everyone on the island without suffering any real loss of well-being, but chooses not to help. While intending no harm to anyone, the wealthy person simply thinks “everyone gets what they deserve” however unfortunate their plight. "
15 " as of 2015, almost 7 million people have lost homes to foreclosure in the US alone.97 As an aside, the ratio of empty homes to homeless people is troubling to think about. In Europe there are about 11 million empty homes and 4 million homeless—a ratio of just under three homes for every one homeless person—while in the US the ratio is six empty houses to one homeless person.98 In the UK alone, there are ten empty houses for every homeless family.99 This is no doubt a clear indication of serious structural inefficiencies in the economic system. "
16 " There are about 1,800 billionaires in the world as of 2015, with more than $7 trillion between them.58 The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) calculated that it would take roughly $30 billion a year to solve world hunger through mostly agricultural development in poor regions. These billionaires could provide this direct aid for 200 years and still have about $550 million each, on average. "
17 " A notable modern example was the 1999 financial deregulation of US banks through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. This act was introduced after the Great Depression in 1933 to help ensure commercial banks would no longer get involved with investment banks, pursuing risky speculation with their customers’ assets. However, once repealed after about $300 million in lobbying efforts, commercial banks turned around and engaged in credit-default swaps and other high-risk derivatives, paving the way for the 2008 global financial crisis. "
18 " communism, as historically practiced, required large-scale social control with heavy propaganda and legitimizing myths to maintain a controlling elite, just as capitalism does. Communism (as practiced) was a form of authoritarianism that simply approached social dominance in a different way. "
19 " capitalism is and has always been vastly inefficient in its allocation of resources across populations, with now virtually half of the world’s wealth owned by 1 percent of the population. To put these figures into perspective, it is estimated that the annual income of the richest 100 people is enough to end extreme global poverty four times over.97 Given this characteristic of the market to create inequality and relative poverty, researchers in the 1970s found that roughly 18 million people die every year due to these uneven distributions.98 Extrapolated for the twentieth century, that is 1,800 million deaths due to perhaps the most fundamental social characteristic of capitalism: inequality. "
20 " virtually all money is created out of debt by banks “extending credit” or giving loans. If all the debts of the world were paid off, there would be no money in circulation. How does this occur? Allow me to oversimplify, starting with government. When a government needs money, it creates bonds. These bonds represent debt. It then exchanges these bonds with its central bank, an institution granted the ability to create money. Of course, governments can also sell the bonds to the general public and even foreign nations to raise money, but that doesn’t actually create money—only banks can do that. Though considered investments, these bonds are really interest-bearing loans. If I buy a government bond for $1,000, I have actually loaned that amount to the government with the expectation that it will pay me back with interest accrued. Likewise, when the government sells bonds to its central bank, the central bank is technically loaning the newly created money, expecting interest payments. Bear in mind, both the government and the central bank are exchanging things invented out of thin air by essentially the transaction itself. "