

image from Fill at Pixabay CC0

Dear Powers That Be Consortium:

This is to inform you that the services your organizations have been providing to us, as our agents, no longer meet our needs, and we are terminating our agreement (the Industrial Civilization Management Agreement) with you and will in future provide the needed services directly ourselves.

Following is a partial listing of some of the ways in which your consortium member organizations have abrogated the spirit and substance of our long-standing agreement with you, leaving us no alternative but to take this step:

Representative Democracy LLC: Your “representatives” have not represented us at all. They have lied to us. They have taken bribes, and in return lavished gifts, from money we entrusted to them, on rich and powerful interests, to our overwhelming detriment. They have not upheld the laws designed to protect us or our environment, and have instituted laws that do the opposite. They have incompetently managed our services and our resources. They are all herewith fired; we will henceforth manage our common resources and public services locally and directly. The experiment with their service delivery model of “representative democracy” has been an abject failure. We will try an “uncivilized” approach — community-based direct democracy — instead.

Industrial Growth Economics LLC: The “executive officers” you assigned to our account are utterly incompetent, narcissistic, and hopelessly corrupted. They seem utterly incapable of taking any action in the public interest. The model you instituted on our behalf ironically called the “free market economy” is the precise opposite: it is an oligarchy of obscenely rich and powerful overlords sucking up the commons — our resources — for their own personal enrichment, impoverishing us in the process. Their gargantuan fees for worthless and destructive “services” are unwarranted and must be returned to us. They too are all fired, and ordered to immediately return everything they have taken from us, including all assets they have purchased with the proceeds of their unconscionable “salaries”, bonuses, dividends and capital gains, and we ask that they leave our premises immediately. Their ruinous economy will be dismantled and replaced, gradually, with a non-hierarchical, egalitarian, locally-based gift economy.

Neo-Liberal Education Services LLC: The officers and “ministers” of this organization have created a massive and dysfunctional centralized system that has neglected our young people and forced many of them into indentured servitude to your other member organizations. We are abolishing the entire system. Some of the prison-like buildings they have constructed for so-called education will be converted into housing for those they have impoverished and for entrepreneurial offices to support the new gift economy. Over the coming years a system of locally-mentored, self-directed learning (deschooling and unschooling) will be introduced to teach our young people, finally, how to learn and how to discover what they are meant to do with their precious lives.

Public Private Health Services LLC: The “privatization” of public health by the czars of this organization is terminated immediately. Health services will hereinafter be a right of all people, and will be offered free of charge. The patients they have made dependent on the medical and pharmaceutical “industry” with its exorbitantly-priced products and specialist services catering mainly to elites with diseases of affluence, will soon learn how to self-manage their health through sound nutrition and exercise, simple self-diagnosis and holistic self-treatment, guided by local medical generalists. Our research indicates that this will increase the healthy life-span of our citizens by several years, at a fraction the cost the “industry”, and its parasitic insurance companies and lawyers, have been charging.

Monoculture Industrial Foods LLC: The titans in charge of this organization have perpetrated cruelty and caused illness far beyond anything in the history of our planet. They have addicted us to overpriced junk, monopolized and privatized on a massive scale a resource that truly belongs to all of us. They have confined and tortured billions of living creatures. They have poisoned our food, our water, and our land. They have replaced the nutritious staples of millennia of human adaptation and cultivation with over-packaged, over-processed, unhealthy, toxic foods that are responsible for the soaring rates of chronic diseases afflicting nearly all of us. They have ruined our soil, desolated our forests and exhausted and befouled our seas. We are taking it all back, and beginning the long road back to healthy, organic, diverse, locally-produced food using permaculture principles.

Centralized Utilities LLC: Along with good food, good health and a safe and healthy planet, our birthright includes the rights to light, warmth, clean water, and accurate information. The executives of this organization have stolen that birthright, charging us for modest use of what should be free, and using those charges to subsidize destructive and monopolistic corporations that have fouled the planet and its atmosphere with hydrocarbon wastes, production by-products and pollution, and exhausted these precious resources to the point our dependence on them now imperils our very existence. We are halting all utilities’ and other energy extraction activities that produce greenhouse gases immediately, and phasing out all non-essential and centralize utility operations as quickly as the shift to renewable, community-owned utilities can be put in place. We are immediately halting the production of bottled water, incandescent lightbulbs, and other inexcusably wasteful products using our precious resources. And we are dismantling the oligopolies of mainstream media, social media, and telecommunications.

Defence & Security Partners LLC: Your generals and chiefs and head wardens, and their business friends who manufacture weapons, have made our planet and people much less safe —unsafe in fact, squandered trillions of dollars needlessly, encouraged and armed wars between our people, militarized law enforcement, and made imprisonment into a cruel, profiteering enterprise. This is the opposite of what they were hired to do for us. With them gone, we will begin the hard, generations-long task of re-enabling local communities to look after their own security with minimal incarceration, and working with fellow citizens everywhere to demilitarize our world and destroy the massive arsenals of weaponry they created. We will do this work with the understanding that the best way to avoid conflict is through eliminating inequality and hardship.

You, the Powers That Be, have worked complicitly with each other and with the aforementioned consortium members to steal from, betray, defraud and intimidate us. You have clearly been counting on our unwillingness to terminate this agreement because of its centuries-long history and the massive task that will be entailed in untangling it and restoring the horrific damage you have done to us, our social fabric and our planet. We have finally come to realize just how much damage has been done, and that it must no longer continue.

What surprises us most is that we believe that your consortium and its members were, at least initially, doing what they thought was in all our best interests. As tempting as it is for many of us to find you to blame for your actions and the damage they have done, we have concluded that you were actually doing your best, based on what you have been taught, and in some cases brainwashed, to believe. So we don’t want punishment, just a return to us of the resources we mistakenly entrusted to you, so that we can begin to undo the damage. And for you to get out of the way so that we can do that work.

Respectfully,

The People of Earth