Drawing Lessons from Experience;
The Agricultural Crises in North Korea
and Cuba -- Part 1

Why Changing the Way Money Works is the Key
to Resolving Peak Oil Challenges

by Dale Allen Pfeiffer
FTW Contributing Editor for Energy

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Part I – SUMMARY

One problem: two approaches. A sudden end to fossil fuel energy and imminent starvation and economic collapse.

For many years now, FTW has been saying clearly to people that until we change the way money works, we will remain perpetual victims at the hands of elites who have no incentive to change. In every lecture since 9/11, I have made it clear that until we "flip the model", no amount of regime change in the US will make the slightest bit of difference in the US.

One of the most frightening statements I have ever heard was the quote given in Paris last May by Dutch economist Maarten Van Mourik of the Netherlands Economic Institute, who observed regarding Peak Oil, "It may not be profitable to slow [oil and gas] decline." For North Korea and for the US, controlled by elites at the top, the proof of this is in the pudding.

As long as the world economy operates the way it does, based upon debt-financed growth, fractional reserve banking, $600 billion a year of drug money laundered through Wall Street, with equity and control held only at the very top, the results are easy to predict. And we find, as Dale Pfeiffer observes:

The painful experiences of DPRK point out that dealing with an energy crisis is not just a matter of finding an alternative mode of transportation, an alternative energy source, or a return to organic agriculture. We are talking about the collapse of a complex system, in this case, a social system that evolved gradually from a labor-intensive agrarian society to a fossil fuel- supported industrial, technological society. It simply is not possible to step back to an agrarian society all at once, or to take a leap forward into some unknown high-tech society. Complex systems change gradually, bit by bit. Faced with immediate change, a complex system tends to collapse.

Yet Cuba has survived these traps. Why? Because it has achieved a degree of financial and economic flexibility unheard of in either North Korea or the US. How? By transferring equity and control back to local communities and making the standard of living of the people the first priority. Forget labels that Cuba is a Communist country. What has been implemented there is one of the purest forms of capitalism ever conceived -- a form of capitalism that empowers people rather than weakens them. It is the form of capitalism by which our grandparents and great grandparents survived the Great Depression in the US. And it is a form of capitalism that has been systematically wiped out in the US through corporate fraud, pension fund raids, mergers, acquisitions and the race towards a doomed-to-fail globalization in the name of corporate profit.

Cuba, almost a living model of the economic reforms envisioned by former Assistant Housing Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts' Solari Model, teaches us some powerful lessons, and what has been accomplished there will give you hope for the future. It will also make it clear that no efforts to survive the effects of Peak Oil and Gas in the industrialized world will succeed until the people find the will to change the way that money works, and to take responsibility for how it works in their own neighborhood. That is the only way to change the way power works in their government, or at large in a world of infinite war, infinite lies and infinite political dishonesty.

The stark detail and amazing numbers in this series will make the point as clear to you as an empty plate or a full belly.