The Community Wizard of Sebastopol – Part 3

How knowledge behaves as an economic resource, we do not yet fully understand…We need an economic theory that puts knowledge into the center of the wealth-producing process. —Peter F. Drucker

IMAGE: Map Of Sebastopol

( Click Here for Part One
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0303/S00231.htm)

In Part One, we met the Community Wizard of Sebastopol, a community banker who is a quiet leader within his hometown of Sebastopol, California. Like thousands of Community Wizards throughout America, he loves people and organizes his life around people and relationships. He is a worthy steward of the resources in his place. Community Wizards have earned what the Chinese call t'ien ming ---“the mandate of heaven. [22]” A place has a soul and an intelligence that is independent of any person or organization. Community Wizards know this and delight in cultivating the soul and intelligence of the place they call home.

( Click Here for Part Two
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0303/S00242.htm)

In Part Two, we learned about the potential of Community Wizards to turn around our culture and economy, including the five financial drains that are draining every community in America: centralized government, central and centralized banking, currency and debt, centralized savings and investment, centralized purchases, and centralized narcotics trafficking and organized crime.

Diamonds in Our Own Backyard

Before you can drain off a person’s resources, it pays to do some brainwashing. The most powerful brainwashing in America is to persuade everyone to think that someone is only important or prestigious if they are affirmed or honored by the corporate media or the powers that be in academia, business or government.

As I had the opportunity to speak with visionary activist and radio talk show star Caroline W. Casey on the Reuniting Magic & Money tour, I was amazed to find that each audience was dotted with Community Wizards who were not supported locally because they had not been promoted on CBS or Fox News, written up by Time or Newsweek or received an award or grant from Harvard University or the Rockefeller Foundation.

Community Wizards who keep the powers that be from getting our resources away from us --- or force them to pay full price by insisting on the spirit and the letter of the law [23]--- are generally not acknowledged by corporate media or given awards and grants from large universities or foundations. The exception is when the central powers are trying to buy them away. Get the right Wizards out of town, and that privatization will be sweeter or buying up the local banking and consumer market will come at a cheaper price.

Sebastopol lies in a region populated by of some of the smartest experts on the planet in new agriculture and environmental science, alternative health care, digital technology and legal reengineering. This is the knowledge that will help unleash a powerful new economy.

As these experts find and build trustworthy relationships with the Community Wizards, we will begin to see new tools and technology integrate into the infrastructure of our places and the flow of every day life in much more human and practical ways. Doing so is served by the financial reengineering we need to ensure that local and global stakeholders alike can benefit from falling debt burdens and a rising Popsicle Index. [24]

The Community Wizard of Sebastopol is a patient man. Until recently, he was out politicked by the hunger of his neighbors and customers for “TV anointment” and by their failure to connect the dots between “how the money works” globally and locally. Time, however, is on his side. He is about to retire and has no desire to serve as a line manager again. But he knows whom to trust and he understands risk ---all the things that can go wrong.

The Community Wizard of Sebastopol has the ability to advise or help oversee the people and the plans and the budgets that collectively have the power to mine the diamonds in his Sebastopol backyard. He knows how to help real people go back to doing concrete things that generate economic productivity. He can be trusted with the real deal. Last but not least he knows his own limitations. He understands how many people have to work together well to make anything work at all. He understands how easy it is for things to go wrong. He understands that one bad apple can tear down the work of many over much time.

If we were to make a movie about the Community Wizards, a modern day Jimmy Stewart would play the lead. Like in the Jimmy Stewart movies, “It’s a Great Life” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” honesty, hard work and decency are about to become fashionable again. This is not about a change of human behavior. It is about how the money works. Community Wizards can oversee and lead “the real deal” in the trenches and sooner or later, as the financial system and our debt bubble continue to stall or worse, the rest of us are going to figure out that “perpetual war” is not the optimal strategy for subsidizing the Dow Jones Index. Indeed, perpetual war represents a failure of faith and of leadership and leads down a road to a new high tech Dark Ages.

Community Wizards are the diamonds in our own backyard. The time has come to help them sparkle and lead our planetary transformation at the root.

IMAGE: Another View Of Sebastopol

A Federal Credit Storm Warning

In 1989, when I became Assistant Secretary of Housing in the first Bush Administration, I discovered that the federal agencies and government sponsored enterprises in Washington owned as much as 70% of the mortgages in one town – because that is how many were in default. A decade of mortgage debt bubble, tax schemes and S&L/Iran Contra fraud had resulted in a situation where the only way to address working out the defaulted debt in many places was to reinvent the skills, small businesses and economy in that place. When that did not happen, the human toll was much higher than necessary.

Many more years of cleaning up significant financial fraud lead to one conclusion. We needed to finance local economies with private equity instead of federal credit. My proposals --- now the solari model [25]--- would allow small business and community banks to compete based on performance. It started with promoting place based transparency on “how the money works” with a suite of software tools, including one called Community Wizard. [26]

While my proposals promoting rising incomes and lower debt proved successful economically and in the marketplace, they were not politically feasible. [27][28] They would have reversed a process of centralization that enjoyed strong bi-partisan support in Washington. Indeed, Washington is financially dependent on centralization.

Instead, US Treasury, Federal Reserve, White House and Congressional policymakers intentionally increased the volume of outstanding mortgage, small business and other federal credit, while encouraging policies that would cause our economic ability to service this debt to diminish. [29] My experience in Washington documents that we have supported our federal government in becoming the worst predatory lender in our midst and in mismanaging, if not stealing, significant amounts of our retirement savings and reserves. [30] Selected private investors have profited enormously. [31]

Every community in America now has a resident population that has too much debt and contingent liabilities and no strategy to retire or manage them prudently. The most economic strategies include privatizing the servicing and/or ownership of some or all of these federal assets and liabilities with equity financial vehicles under the governance and management of Community Wizards who live and work in the place. Using locally controlled equity vehicles to do so will also permit communities to convert private credit card, auto and small business debt that have been financed by our pension funds and retirement saving through asset backed securities. These same locally controlled equity vehicles are ideal to circulate local and pension fund equity to small business and to manage any local privatizations – thus avoiding the continual transfer of assets like water and prisons to corporate control at prices and in structures that are not optimal strategically or economically.

Unless we write off and/or convert our current debt and liabilities overhang to equity vehicles that cede local control to Community Wizard’s and unleash new productivity under their leadership [32], we will have a perfect financial storm from which no constitutional form of government can survive. The end of myth of the rule of law will bring a withdrawal of liquidity and equity values from the central powers for which no amount of military and enforcement power can compensate.

When the “mandate of heaven” is gone, it is gone forever.

Support Your Community Wizards Today

Whatever your political issue is – whether you want to stop the War on Drugs and Prison, Inc, whether you are opposed to war in Iraq, whether you are upset about $3.3 trillion missing from the federal government [33], whether you are worried about the degradation of our food supply and our environment, whether you think Lockheed Martin is not the company you want managing the information sovereignty of our federal government and military satellite systems [34] or you are just mad about Enron and stock market fraud [35]--- the most powerful way to be against who and what is not working is to be for someone and something that is working.

Whatever your economic issue is – whether you need a job, or you or your small business are struggling to pay your rent and your debt service, or you are trying to make it without health care or retirement savings or you do not know where to invest your hard earned savings --- the time has come to stop trying to solve our financial problems alone and organize with other family, friends and neighbors who we trust to start helping and investing in each other.

An essential step to transform our world is to re-assert control over all the information and resources in our place and, as we do, collaborate between places. We start by organizing with the family and neighbors we trust to help each other with our short-term financial problems and by then networking to support the Community Wizards in our neighborhood.

If you live in the beautiful town of Sebastopol, California you are particularly lucky. You are home to the Community Wizard of Sebastopol. I suspect you may know who he is. If you do, you might want to pick up the phone and give him a call and say thanks. You might also ask one simple question:

“What can I do to give you and the people you trust energy?”

If you and the people you trust give the Community Wizard of Sebastopol and the people he trusts steady appreciation and support, together the people of Sebastopol will figure out how to build a better world.

My money is on the citizens of Sebastopol enjoying a profitable and rising Popsicle Index.

ENDNOTES:
[22] Eventually this concept would gain a wider application in ancient China. By Confucius' time, the t'ien ming applied to everyone and their obligations to see to the welfare of the people they are related to. The Mandate of Heaven, through which Heaven worked out its efforts to guarantee the well being of humanity, applied to each and every obligation and action one took and so represented what might be called the moral order of the universe. Allied with this idea was the concept Ming, or destiny. Heaven also ruled the physical world: earthquakes, sickness, wealth, rain, etc, but it ruled the physical world directly. All things that happen in the physical world are the direct result of Heaven's actions and are completely out of human control. The proper venue for human action, then, is in the realm of t'ien ming . These two concepts, t'ien ming, or the moral order of the universe, and ming, or the physical order of the universe, combined make the Tao, or "Way" of Heaven.
----Richard Hooker
[23] At What Price Privatization?, Interview of Greg Palast, http://www.solari.com/gideon/privatization030402.html
[24] “Solari & the Rise of the Rule of Law” by Catherine Austin Fitts, SRA Quarterly, September 2002, http://www.sandersresearch.com/html/MappingtheRealDeal/CAFAugust02/CAF080802.htm
[25] “Solari & the Rise of the Rule of Law” by Catherine Austin Fitts, SRA Quarterly, September 2002, http://www.sandersresearch.com/html/MappingtheRealDeal/CAFAugust02/CAF080802.htm
[26] “On the Money Trail: the Dangerous World of Catherine Austin Fitts” by Mari Kane http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/09.05.02/fitts -0236.html ; 'AntiTrust': Redefining the Killer App” by Uri Dowbenko, http://www.steamshovelpress.com/altmedia6.html
[27] See “The Myth of the Rule of Law,” Catherine Austin Fitts, SRA Quarterly, November 2001, http://www.solari.com/gideon/q301.pdf
[28] “The Story of Edgewood Technology Services,” by Catherine Austin Fitts, From the Wilderness, 1999, republished, Scoop Media, http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0207/S00101.htm
[29] “The Story of Edgewood Technology Services,” by Catherine Austin Fitts, From the Wilderness, 1999, republished, Scoop Media, http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0207/S00101.htm
[30] See “The Myth of the Rule of Law,” Catherine Austin Fitts, SRA Quarterly, November 2001, http://www.solari.com/gideon/q301.pdf
[31] “Smug Pug – Stealing Enron” by Catherine Austin Fitts, Scoop Media, http://www.scoop.co.nz/archive/scoop/stories/2d/cc/200206050039.c309ccd4.html
[32] “Solari & the Rise of the Rule of Law” by Catherine Austin Fitts, SRA Quarterly, September 2002, http://www.sandersresearch.com/html/MappingtheRealDeal/CAFAugust02/CAF080802.htm
[33] “The Missing Money: Why the Citizens of Tennessee Are Working Harder & Getting Less” by
Catherine Austin Fitts, Scoop Media, http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0207/S00031.htm#a
[34] “Software That Steals: Mortgage Market Unanswered Questions - Hitting On HUD” by Catherine Austin Fitts, Scoop Media, August 2002,
http://www.scoop.co.nz/archive/scoop/stories/17/3a/200208121132.47a0a862.html
[35] See “Mapping the Real Deal: The Real Deal About Enron – an Interview with Catherine Austin Fitts” by Daniel Armstrong, SRA Quarterly, February 2003, http://www.sandersresearch.com/html/MappingtheRealDeal/2003/CAF1033/CAF012003.htm

Catherine Austin Fitts is the President of Solari, Inc. ( http://solari.com) and a former Assistant Secretary of Housing – Federal Housing Commissioner in Bush I. She is currently litigating with Ervin and Associates (acting on behalf of the government ) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. If you would like to support her litigation efforts, you can through Affero/ Venture Collective: http://www.solari.com/vote.php
If this “Mapping the Real Deal” was useful for you, you can leave comments and send a gift to Catherine Austin Fitts and Scoop Media through Affero: http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?skid=smc
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Anti©opyright Catherine Austin Fitts, March 2003

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