Richard Lloyd Jones: It's not the first time we've seen big money bailouts in our economic history, of course. Financial crises have been with us since the stock market was created. But let's not forget, every time the stock market struggles, there's a ton of money pumped in to shore it up. Public money. But this time there's a lot of resistance. Could it be we're finally waking up?
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, the first in a series of what's going on behind the economic crisis. First of all, hearty apologies for not posting here for a while. I was very busy preparing for our first World Conference of Analytical Trilogy. Which wrapped up last weekend in San Diego. It was a great event, actually. That a number of loyal, thinking-with-somebody-else's-head listeners attended.
And I was very gratified to see that Mike McVeigh joined us from Houston. Mark Carlson and Jane Redding were in from Sedona. Roseanne Wellman and her mother flew in from Utah. And my fellow Canadians were there in some force, including Dennis Hilton from Vancouver, Will Lajeunesse and his father came in from Edmonton, and Jason Coombs, originally from Windsor, but who now lives here with us in São Paulo, was also there.
We had three and a half days of pretty fascinating lectures and workshops that really highlighted the expansiveness and depth of Dr. Norberto Keppe's comprehensive science of Analytical Trilogy. We also had a chance to feature the revolutionary Keppe Motor at the event and at a couple of press conferences in Los Angeles and San Diego. And now awareness of this revolutionary technological achievement has spread significantly all over the world.
Our Keppe Motor site at kepimotor.com gives some information. That's Keppe, K-E-P-P-E, kepimotor.com. And I've opened a new blog to explore new developments as well at kepimotor.wordpress.com. If you're really interested, set your Google alerts to Keppe Motor and Analytical Trilogy to stay up to speed. We were, of course, in the U.S. During the historic Senate and Congressional discussions of the $700 billion bailout package proposed by Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson.
That was wild stuff to watch, let me tell you. Coincidentally, perhaps, we were leaving the U.S. During the dramatic no vote to the package last Monday. This was not the first time Keppe's work had been introduced to the U.S. Keppe and Dr. Cláudia Pacheco were invited there personally back in the early 80s to spread their innovative and solution-based work there. After years of admiring the American society, Keppe was shocked at the decay he discovered in the United States.
He wrote a series of books aimed at conscientizing Americans of the wrong path they were heading down, particularly with the poorly conceived Reaganomic policies of the time. Liberation of the People, decay of the American people and the U.S., work and capital laid it all out clearly. The decay, the pathology of power, the inversion of placing capital above work, and the destruction of the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, as well as solutions that Keppe's work proposed in new business and living structures.
Although the American people loved his work, and still do, the power structures didn't, and it all culminated in Keppe and Pacheco fleeing the persecution in 1988. They lost everything, but re-established in Europe and finally found it safe enough to head back to Brazil, where they are now and working today. Their work flourishes here, and our World Conference of Analytical Trilogy was another attempt to have Keppe's work sprout in the country of the United States that's so lost and so in need of real solutions.
We're going to explore the problems behind this current crisis and some solutions in the next few podcasts, and it's a deep area, so we'll just touch on a little bit today and get to some more ideas in future podcasts. First of all, this is not a new crisis at all. As Keppe noticed, in the 80s, the economic orientation towards speculation was creating a disastrous situation in the country.
Money policy should be linked to production, to work, Keppe said, not to encouraging us to make money with money, as Reaganomics was doing. All the production of virtually everything has been moved offshore to China and Mexico and India, Taiwan, and this is a disaster for the United States. If there's no production anymore, what generates the cash? Speculation and complex and abstract investment instruments called derivatives and hedge funds that generate huge profits or losses based on small movements in prices of commodities or assets.
Nothing tangible produced, just numbers in a computer somewhere. So the crisis today is the result of decades of problems that were never addressed. A decay in all areas of American society, in ethics, in manufacturing, in education, in farming, and that is all imploding now. But the problem's been around for a long time before. That's important to see. Keppe tried to alert the U.S.
Society about this, but it fell on deaf ears. Now we're trying again. I just want to say a little more here because it's important to see that the economy has been in trouble for a while now. It's been made to appear that this is an unprecedented thing, but the signs have been around for a long time. Just recent analysis of the situation reveals that huge amounts of dough have been poured in to shore up jittery markets.
In the International Herald Tribune, they reported back in August of 2007 that the Fed pumped in 43 billion to maintain interest rates. At the same time, the other two parts of the trilateral commission, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan, were also injecting billions into the system. 250 billion pounds were injected by the Bank of England and the European Central Bank as well along the way.
Then, of course, there's our current scenario $70 billion to protect Lehman Brothers $85 billion for AIG $180 billion on September 18th by the U.S. Fed along with the European Central Bank the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the Swiss National Bank to shore up the financial system and now $700 billion more Am I missing something? Where's all this money gone?
And where's it going? Combine that with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's admission way back in 2001 that they couldn't account for $2.3 trillion in transactions they'd made. We've got no idea where it is, he said. Something's a little fishy here, don't you think? Something's also wrong when a homeowner can't pay his mortgage and gets thrown out on the street, but a banking system that's overextended in mortgages gets bailed out with billions.
Let's start the process of analyzing this disaster and proposing some solutions. Dr. Cláudia Pacheco was working very closely with Norberto Keppe back in the 80s in New York. Cláudia, I've been studying this situation a little bit. It's all over the news, of course. A flood of information, typical, but precious little real context or analysis. Michael Moore has made suggestions. Everyone's trying to make political hay out of it in this election year, but no one seems to be pointing to the root of the problem.
And I thought we could start probing that through Keppe's work today. Bring us up to speed on what he's seen in this issue.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: For seven years, Keppe was studying and focusing only on the effects of the sociopathology in human beings, neuroses, psychoses, and organic illnesses. When he was in Brazil, studying here and researching here and applying his science to his clients, He focused more in inner aspects, aspects that were coming from the inner life of individuals.
So when we moved to New York and we started to work in America, we started to perceive or kept him mostly focused on a huge problem, which he started to study and called sociopathology. He started to perceive that if the social or the socioeconomic structure is too sick, it can create not only socioeconomic problems, but severe illnesses like psychosis, neurosis, and that's what we see in America nowadays.
Richard: What happened there then in Dr. Keppe's view? What was it he was seeing that was causing all this corruption, all these problems?
Cláudia: Well, it happened, Richard, that because America followed very much some philosophers, some thinkers, some economists like Adam Smith, William of Oaken, and also this very practical attitude that Americans have, seeing in action, in doing things, the essence of life, and doing anything, like freedom to do whatever they wanted to do.
This kind of schools of thought made a huge disaster in North America. And what Keppe realized is that the structure in American society developed so much sickness and so much inversion that individuals that are born there have very little chance to be balanced and to have a reasonable health. So he was very much concerned. And
Richard: you guys started way back, didn't you?
1984? Or, when you were there, you started a whole campaign around the country, right, to fight this American decay you were seeing.
Cláudia: Nationwide campaign. And right after this campaign, to try to stop the effects of this decay, right after this, Keppe wrote a book about the pathology of powerful. Because we were dealing with powerful people trying to advise, to conscientize politicians that if they didn't follow the true foundations of a healthy society of what America used to be, that if they shift their orientation much more to speculation than before, much more to consumerism than before, and using the freedom in the inverted direction.
And
Richard: we really need to become conscious of this inversion, don't we? That we use our freedom completely wrong.
Cláudia: Yes. So when CAPI started to advise people there, we made a nationwide campaign. We sent books to all politicians in America, all governors, all House representatives, all senators, all people in charge of the government. We sent books to all of them. But with no response, they didn't react.
So what we realized in that time of the Reaganomics was that they were really believing that that philosophy, the Reaganomics philosophy, would help America to become a powerful nation and that they would have the freedom to do economically what they wanted to do and they would always succeed. So it was a time of enormous delusions of grandiosity delusions that that casino wall street money making money so we were very much worried we we witnessed many many farms bankrupt many farmers going bankrupt many small and medium industries going bankrupt we saw industry in America finishing.
So all the industries went to other countries. So we noticed that the orientation in America was that money was the value and not work. American people stopped working. They were even forced, many of them, to diminish their intensity of work. And not only that, but many of them had to stop.
Richard: Well, Cláudia, this is one of the real root problems of the situation we're seeing now
Cláudia: isn't it.
Capi understands that richness comes from work. Work of quality. Work of necessity and good work. Statical truthful and good work. And not any work. So richness comes from this and not money doesn't make any more money. It made it artificially made. So it was all a kind of delusional attitude of all those economists and which now is we are we're perceiving the consequences.
Then Keppe tried to avoid this and we did everything to halt this before and he said if we don't change this philosophy. If we don't go back to the values of work and good work that americans used to have in the past that built this nation. All the structure infrastructure of these nations and everything that America had of beautiful was built with hard work of Americans and also immigrants that went there to work in quality.
And a lot of ethical work was being done in that country.
Richard: You know, Dr. Keppe has talked about this a lot, that we've put money above everything. You know, we want to make money with money and not base it on any production. He says in his book, Work and Capital, that the economy is not just a game for human beings to play like Monopoly with exciting peaks and troughs, and we live in a fantasy world in that way.
He says the economy is part of reality and can only be developed correctly if it returns to its true origin.
Cláudia: Because, Richard, I think that we are in a first phase of conscientization. Americans now are starting to conscientize that this economic policy, the freedom of market, is not the true freedom Because we are free in economy to work, to do what is good, beautiful and truthful, the good for society, for humanity.
And not to feed the envy, the megalomania, the theomania of a few individuals or crazy groups or powerful people. There are some time, really are psychotic. And so when we are under this impression that a country is in decay only in economy, this is just the first step. Because decay in economy is also a consequence of a decay, a previous decay, psychological decay, in ethics, in education, in attitudes, in costumes, in values, in spirituality, in arts.
So a society that enters in a decay, it enters in a decay before the economic decay, they are in a psychological decay. So the economic decay is just a consequence where people refuse to work, where people think that if they gamble, if they take drugs, if they just have fun in life, if they don't care about the fellow man, if they don't care about ethical principles and spiritual principles.
So all this inversion took over America. And this was an enormous sadness for us because we expected that American people would take this new science and bring the benefits not only for themselves, but for all the world, like the Roman Empire did in the past with Christianity. But what we noticed is that they were not able anymore to understand what was going on.
So we tried to advise, and we suffered the consequences that many people know already. We suffered the consequences of this campaign, persecution, imprisonment, and persecution. And now Keppe said, okay, so if you don't wake up until 89, it will be too late. Because after 1989, it will be impossible to resurrect this kind of economic, financial disease and psychological disease that those upside down economists and thinkers brought to American people.
Richard: Dr. Keppe was talking about it this way in work in Capital Club. He was describing an example that he read from Time magazine back in 1987. At the time, the stock market was sort of going up rather vigorously at the time. And he said, one giddy stockholder in Time magazine said, it's like picking money off trees. So Dr. Keppe was saying that this shareholder's phrase shows two things.
Shows this agitation amounting to a sickness in the buying and selling of shares and the atmosphere of euphoria and immorality among people who play this market. And I love this about Keppe's work because he's going to the psychological, even philosophical root causes of all this rather than just slapping a band-aid on the thing, right?
Cláudia: And when people talk to Keppe, and Keppe is a specialist about American psychopathology and psychosocial pathology, for sure, because he's the one of the persons that love the most that country.
This is for sure. He loved enormously American people in American countries. But when we asked him, okay, Keppe, now what do you think? What is going to happen about this disaster? What is the solution? So he says, go back to work. Now people will have to go back to work and do good and truthful work and work for humanity. And this will not be easy presently anymore as it would be because making everybody go back to work now, it will be much more complicated because industries are destroyed.
Farms are in the hands of a few. All small, medium businesses that were the tissue, the economic tissue of the nation, now this is almost destroyed. Everybody dependent on a few companies and corporations. So, when these corporations go down, everybody goes down. It will be a time of huge conscientization. It's not a matter of having no solution. There is a solution, and people should not enter in a panic, but they have to understand that the problem is this.
Richard: Maybe here we could also, Cláudia, talk about the difference between the real economy and the inflated fantasy economy, because it's this latter one that's actually collapsing now.
Cláudia: Yes, because the real economy is what it is. And the financial breakdown will not affect what is really there being produced. And this is what is being produced, must continue, should continue, and should be more fed by investment or even workforce.
And believe, go back to the belief that doing, working and doing a good job is what brings wealth to a nation as it did in the past for United Nations. So there is hope. There are trilogical enterprises to be organized where all the workers are the owners or they are the shareholders of a company. And this is an economy that is only possible when the people understand this inversion.
So they realize how much they can produce and very fast with trilogical kind of economy and enterprises. And from what I see, all those people that are homeless, living in their cars now because they lost their homes, trilogical residences should be organized where people get together and have like one large house being shared with other people. And with this trilogical philosophy, conscientizing their pathologies, having like conscientization groups.
So there is a huge work now to be done to save American people from this crisis. It's not a band-aid, as you said, and no package is going to resolve. It's a fundamental, the pathology went to the bases, drug problems, all this must be addressed and trilogical science that Keppe brought is, I hope they will understand, it will be the solution. So people can confront not only the crisis, but imagine, Richard, how much nervous these people will become.
They are going to project among each other, no, you are the problem. They are going to fight, they are going to try to attack and to kill and to be frustrated. They will have no money anymore for the drugs that are used to have, so their comfort, their fun. So it will be mostly a psychological problem to be addressed presently. And there is hope and there is a hard work to be done but the solutions will come and the new beautiful future is ahead of us.
Richard: Like all of Keppe's work, there's a psychological and philosophical aspect to all that we see externally and this gets us close to the root of the problems. For sure, Keppe's perspective is essential if we want to understand and solve this economic situation. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. We'll continue next time.
