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A Reasonables' New-Vision Project

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Creating Community 

Continued:

Protecting Retirement Funds 

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Editor's Note:   The project outlined below is based on information from the prior pages:    Page 6a  ---  Creating Community°    and  Page 6b  ---  Money and Financial Trusts°   Some study time will be required in order to fully grasp the simplicity and the profundity of what is being proposed.   

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Page Content

   What Are Trusts`   --  and How Does One Use Them?

   Retirement Funding -- What Not to Do`  

   Cooperation Versus Competition`  

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   Some Basic Economics`  

   A Fresh Look `     at the Four Traditional Sources of Income

   An Alternative`    to the Traditional Four Income Sources   

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   The Recommended Trust Structure`  

   Overcoming the Drawbacks to Creating and Using Trusts`  

   A Recap of the Project's Intentions` 

   Gone` 

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What Are Trusts?
How Does One Use Them

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A trust is a non-living, legal  entity set up to control wealth.   It's a tool commonly used by wealthy families to keep assets together, to manage those assets, to avoid taxes, and to pass assets along to the next generation.   Studying the lives of the heirs to very wealthy men of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century reveals two distinct patterns.   Where the original monies were divided among the children, the family fortunes commonly disappeared within about two generations.  Where the moneies were held in trusts and made available to the family members as the trust's beneficiaries, the original fortunes are, in most cases, still there.   

Trusts, as financial control and asset protection tools, are readily available today.   In order to create a legal shell (the basic trust structure, itself), one has but to enlist a competent person or company to create it.°   Each trust can be custom-designed  for its own specific purpose.   A suggested structure is described as part of this project.

The next aspects to consider are where the trust assets are to come from  and how the money is to be used.  This brings the discussion to the original concept that was supposed to become a fully-funded and fully-functional United Sates government program called Social Security.   

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Retirement Funding  -- What Not to Do

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As a tool to see what can be done, an examination of what NOT to do can be a big eye opener.   To this end, an examination of  The United States Social Security system is in order.

The U.S. government's Social Security program is the classic example of what not to do.   The original, publicly stated intent was to collect money from the citizens and then to invest that money so that the investment would produce profits for the citizens .   Those who reached  retirement age would receive their share of the profits in the form of monthly payments.   

The principal (the money paid in) was to be used 
    for investments only.   

That money was to remain in the Social Security investment portfolio and to continue earning profits even after the death of the individual who had put the money into the investment fund.   In this way the principal would constantly grow, as would the profits generated from the investments.   In a relatively short time the principal (the amount of invested money)  would be so  large that the profits from the investments  shared by the retirees would be substantial.   The long-term, intended result was that everybody's retirement would be financially secure.

Millions of U.S. citizens entrusted the government with their retirement money.   And what did the government bureaucrats do with the money?   Did they invest it?   NO!   Did they keep it safe?   NO!   They spent it, and now that particular branch of the government is in debt to the tune of nearly forty trillion dollars ($40,000,000,000,000).

Was the Social Security system intentionally destroyed?   

When one asks this question,  two answers come back, the public answer and the real answer.    The public answer is " no,"  it was a question of need and mismanagement.   Politicians  needed the money for this or that purpose , and besides,  they didn't steal the money, they just borrowed it.   

The real answer revolves around power and control.    Imagine for a moment what the size of that  investment portfolio would be today if all the money which had ever been paid into the U.S. Social Security System was still there and had been invested instead of having been "borrowed" (stolen)  and spent.   The profits today would be enormous.   Its economic power would dwarf its closest rivals, and it would dominate and  control financial investments worldwide.   

What Could It Have Done?   

That investment portfolio would eventually have owned just about everything, including controlling  the major corporations that are presently raping the Earth for a few dollars more.   The profits that now go to the super-wealthy, would, instead, have belonged collectively, to all the people in the country.  Private ownership of the natural resources which are now controlled and raped by special interests would have been purchased and returned to their rightful owners --  all the people.  The retirement age could have been steadily lowered, instead of raised.     In time, it could have completely transformed the monetary system.   It could have significantly reduced and then eliminated the need for taxes.   Wealth would be distributed much more fairly and equally.   There would no longer be a need to steal to survive.    Crime would have been significantly lowered.   The con artists and manipulators such as those who presently own all the structures that control the government  would be out of business.    The super wealthy saw the future potential of Social Security.   They falsely considered it a threat to their power and control,  and so they intentionally destroyed it.

Imagine for a moment that that investment fund 
    actually existed today.   

Imagine that Social Security had a forty-trillion-dollar investment portfolio instead of a forty-trillion-dollar debt.   Imagine that  investment making only a meager two and one-half percent annual interest.  Even at that ridiculously low rate of return, the return on investment would be a trillion dollars a year in free and clear money that would be available for retired Americans.   That's about double what is currently (2005)  being paid to Social Security recipients.   There are about 48 million benefit recipients.   Even at that extremely low, two-and-one-half percent rate of return, payments from profits would average over $20,000 per year per person.   And, unlike today, not one nickel of that money would be coming from taxes.    

Another Comparison  

As another comparison, note that as of March 2005, according to Investment Company Institute, there was a total of about eight trillion dollars invested in mutual funds.  That total  (those investment dollars as much as they are)  is only twenty percent as big as Social Security would have been if the money had not been stolen and spent.   

In  addition, imagine that the five-hundred million dollars ($500,000,000) in Social Security taxes which are now being put into the system each year were  being used to increase the size of the investment portfolio and not ( as is presently being done) spend/used to pay retirees.    

If you had five-hundred million dollars each and every year to buy companies and tangible assets, how long would it take before you owned just about everything?   As you can see, the potential of collective investments  is awesome.   

Building a Replacement -- One Step at a Time

This concept, on a smaller scale, can be re-instituted by anyone and used for any purpose that requires funding.   Anyone who wants to can create his (her) own trust and determine who the beneficiaries shall be and when and how the benefits shall be distributed.   The N.V.P. Team is spearheading a movement in which individuals, families,  groups, clubs, churches, labor unions, social service organizations, and other similar groups create Tangible-asset, Retirement-funding Trusts for members of their particular  group who are interested in participating.    The goal is to have the beneficiaries in control of their own retirement monies and to base the investments on tangible assets such as real estate and not value-losing dollars or on promises to pay such as stocks and bonds.  The retirement trusts can be a privately controlled, mini-version of what the Social Security investment program was supposed to be.   When several of those privately controlled trusts  direct their assets toward a common goal, their collective financial clout will grow and become a power to be reckoned with.   And because the trusts assets are never spent or otherwise disposed of, the trust and its financial power will steadily grow.

Now that you have a grasp of the potential, the next step is to modify the concept and apply it to you and to me and to all the participants in The Reasonables' New-Vision Project.  

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Cooperation Versus Competition

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The Cooperation Structure   

In order for this project to work, it's critically important that all participants play using the cooperation structure.    Please review the section titled:    Cooperation Versus Competition.°   The "us against them" mode of functioning has to be given a one-way ticket to the trash bin.   

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Some Basic Economics

The Four Traditional Sources of Income:   

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In order to better understand how the  Tangible-asset, Retirement-funding Trust project  works, a review of some basics of economics is in order.   Traditional economics taught that there were four sources of income:  land, coordination, labor, and capital.   As human kind slowly developed social structures, these four parts evolved into a hierarchical structure.   

Land represented the king, the ruler, the land owner.  He controlled everything.   Second in command was coordination.   These were the men who followed the king's orders and did the hands-on controlling.   They told the laborers what to do.    The third aspect was labor.  These people were at the bottom on the pecking order.  In many cases they were slaves or indentured servants.   The fourth aspect was capital -- the use of someone else's assets (money, tools, land, servants, etc) to fund, finance and/or to assist  the land owner and to enhance his chances of success.   The asset lenders expected to be paid for the use of their capital.  

Individuals who were laborers  were considered expendable.   What happened to them and  how they and their families lived (or died) was of little or no concern to the land owner.   The coordinators, although more valuable than the laborers, were also expendable.   This evolved into a huge divide between labor ( the people - the public -  workers - employees)  on one side and the combined power of land, capital, and the highest end of coordination on the other.   This combined force is what today is referred to as "the super wealthy."  

That battle continues to this day.   The super wealthy have influenced government laws to the extent that they now own the structures that control the United States government.   One has but to examine the activities of "Resident" Bush and the people he works for to see that the super wealthy are intentionally and systematically destroying the middle class and replacing it with the antiquated feudal, two class system consisting of  the super wealthy and the super poor.   

The Reasonables' New-Vision Project Team is proposing a way to reverse this trend.   The N.V.P Team's solution is a one-bite-at-a-time, slow  take over  of the money faction of business by labor.   The Tangible-asset,  Retirement-funding Project , outlined below, is the recommended starting point.   Individually, most people lack financial power, but the collective effort of many people working together, can do what the United States Social Security System°   was originally designed to do.    

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A Fresh Look

At the Four Traditional Sources of Income:   

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This section will examine the long-term results of creating  tangible-asset-based, trusts  (and/or other similar ways to control money)  and how these money- controlling structures relate to the four sources of income described above -- labor, coordination, land, and capital.

Labor:   If you are one of the vast majority of humans, your source of money comes from or has come from your labor.   If and when you stop working, your income ceases.   Because the old ways of caring for the elderly are seriously flawed, this leaves the vast majority of elderly people  in serious economic deprivation.   Why?   

1)   Because Social Security is a tiny fraction of what it could have been;  (See the above description:   Retirement Funding -- What Not to Do`)

2)   The money in a large number of corporate pension funds have been swindled away from the employees by the corporation's controllers using government-endorsed, Enron-style accounting.   (At the behest of major corporations such as American Airlines, congress passed laws that allowed corporations to default on their obligations to retirees.  Once it became obvious that American Airlines successfully walked away from its obligations,  hoards of other jumped onto the screw-the-retirees bandwagon and as a result, multiple billions of dollars have been "legally-stolen" from pension funds.)   

3)   For those who do have retirement funds in the stock markets, money managers end up putting a significant portion of that money and/or its earnings in their own pockets; 

4)   The scariest part is that most retirement money is held in extremely vulnerable assets such as stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and bank accounts.  These investments are in the form of value-losing dollars or promises to pay.   When the promise goes away, so does your retirement money.   Where is one's retirement money if and when there's a major economic downturn in the stock market?   

Why Labor Should Store Its Retirement Benefits in the Form of Tangible Assets:   In theory here's retirement for a laborer in summary:  One works a life time to buy needed goods and services, and stores some goods and service for one's old age.   Those stored goods and services must be still both valuable and usable years after they are earned.   One can store those goods and services in the form of gold, silver, income-producing  real estate, and/or other durable assets.   During retirement, one transforms those stored goods and services  into in-the-moment usable goods and services such as food, clothing, and shelter.    

One can also store his/her future goods and services in the form of value-losing dollars and/or in the form of promises to pay such as stocks, bonds, mutual funds, corporate retirement promises, and bank accounts.   Often people have their entire retirement based on a promise on the part of management of the corporation they spent years working for.

What happens if a company goes bankrupt or  goes out of business and/or defaults on its retirement fund promises?   In the traditional format, the employees lose their retirement money.   BUT:  If the employees of that company had, collectively, taken money instead of retirement promises, and then held that money in an  independent, professionally-managed, tangible-asset-based  retirement trust, then what the company did or didn't do becomes irrelevant (unless the trust is heavily invested in the bankrupt company).   The  company can't default on its retirement promises because it has no promises;  its retirement obligation has already been paid.   Even if it goes out of business the retirement money is safe.   Why?   Because the business, itself, had no control over the retirement trust.   The employees, collectively, control the trust.

When retirees control their own retirement assets in the form of independently controlled, professionally-managed, tangible-assets trusts, they are not at the effect of anybody's promises.   

Coordination:   Unless you are one of a tiny minority who is at the very top of the coordinators, such as corporate CEO's, you are in the same boat with the laborers.   For example, the shop foreman may be paid a fixed salary instead of an hourly wage, but he still  has little or no real control over the company and, from the perspective of the CEO, he  is just one more expendable employee.

Land:   The term "land" has been altered from its old, traditional meaning.   Today this category includes assets  such as a business' land, business buildings, and the other physical property used in a business.   It includes commercial real estate, residential real estate, mineral rights, and the like.   If the physical assets are owned free and clear (with no outstanding debts attached to them), and if the business assets are not part of a dying business,  the assets are  safe no matter what the money manipulators do.   This type of property  is a major, dependable storage of wealth and usually is also a significant source of income.   It's a  secure investment because it has an intrinsic value within it -- a value within  that cannot be stolen.   Even in a financial  crash, the basic value is still there.   

Capital:  Capital has replaced the king.   It now dominates everything, and for many people, it has even replaced their traditional beliefs in God.  As you are well aware, money interests control and/or dominate almost everything on the entire planet today.   The N.V.P Team refers to phenomenon as the worship  of the Great God Money.°  

The Great God Money is not the slightest bit interested in your well-being or the environmental well-being of planet Earth.   Money is all that matters.   Even when his agents have more money than they could spend in a hundred life times, they are still working for their boss, the Great God Money.   "A Few Dollars More" is their call to arms, and they have their own "Golden Rule:"   "He who owns the gold, rules."   

Those who use underhanded, unethical (often illegal or secretly manipulative)  money-acquiring practices are the adult version of the schoolyard bully who, out of fear and out of a destroyed self-image, has to stand on everyone else just to get himself out of the sewer.   That's not to say that these people are inherently bad.   They have been seriously mis-educated.   Their fear, their training, and conditioning dominate and control their behavior.°   

Dethroning this False God:  The job of the N.V.P Team is two-fold.  First to assure the wealthy, that they have nothing to fear from others becoming wealthy.°    And second to teach and demonstrate how laborers and coordinators can also become beneficiaries  (recipients) of  the income from land and capital.   

Although it's obvious to those who look, it's rare to hear anyone speaks publicly about the fact that assets held in trusts, foundations, and similar legal structures are where wealthy families  get the majority of their money.   The wealthy people who control these asset-holding organizations manipulate conditions, laws, and circumstances to provide themselves with an abundance of money which they use to live  lavish lifestyles.   They play-down this fact or simply ignore it because they don't want others to get into the game and have equally profitable cash cows.   They fear that if others have money, their money and lifestyles will be threatened.   And what you won't hear anywhere, except from the N.V.P Team, is how you can re-adjust your approach to money and move step by step closer to the way the wealthy control and use money.

Why Create Mutual-Support Teams:

   Because this is an orderly, safe, legal, step-by-step process of making major changes in the lives of those who choose to improve their own lives and the lives of their present families and their descendents.   

   Because it's a long-term solution to the present day's gross  financial inequities.  

    Because it's  a reversal of the present trend toward a two-class society made up of the super wealthy and the super poor.    

    Because it also honors spiritual truths and the divine nature of all beings on planet Earth.   

    Because if present trends continue, life on Earth, as we know it, will cease to exist.   Some humans will almost certainly survive, but the conditions under which they live will be almost unrecognizable by today's standards.  For example, imagine and earth with no icecaps and the ocean fouty feet deeper.

The project offers a major shift away from funding  retirement programs  with false promises.   It's a shift into putting the employees' retirement money directly into a trust  fund at the same time that an employee is paid.    Why?  Because it's the employees' money, not the corporation's money.   It's really about freedom of choice and about letting the employees control their own retirement destiny.    It's about letting those whose money it is control how and  where their money is invested.

For a summary of the major intentions of the Reasonables' New-Vision project, see the section below titled:  A Recap of the Project's Intentions. 

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An Alternative

to the Traditions Four Income Sources:   

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 As one of the starting points,  the N.V.P Team is suggesting a major shift in the way corporate retirement funds are handled:   

1)  Instead of corporate executives (the agents of the super wealthy) making promises to pay retirees,  the N.V.P Team is suggesting at every pay period,  the retirement monies  actually be paid immediately and paid directly into an employee-controlled, retirement trust. 

2)    That employees set up a trust to manage and to control their retirement funds -- funds that the corporation, itself, cannot steal or, in any way, control, or use without employee permission.

3)  That  the retirement trust, which is under the control and direction of the employees, has complete control of how and where the  employees' retirement funds are invested.  

Why this Change?   Because as you probably already know, a significant portion of present-day corporate retirement funds have been "legally stolen" from employees using Bush-administration-endorsed,  Enron-style, sleazy, secret, underhanded accounting practices.   This has to stop, NOW!   

The paragraphs below offer a functional set-up regarding how to manage and control the retirement trust funds to insure their safety and their proper use.   The N.V.P. Team recommends that the trusts be set up in either of two, basic ways.   The first format gives relatively easy access to a  retirement-focused, tangible-asset, investment trust by those  who start with a relatively small amount of money.   It involves working in conjunction with others who are in similar financial positions.   With this type of initial format, the trusts  can be set up and managed in the traditional ways with the stipulation that when the assets put into the trusts  reach a predetermined level, the control shifts to the system described below.   For larger initial investments, the trust can start directly with the system described below.  

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The Trust Structure Format

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Safeguards:   

The intention of the N.V.P. Team is to prevent any single individual or group of individuals from having unbridled power.   Why?   Because time and time again, history has proven that humans do not have the capacity to deal with having unrestricted power.    In the world today, money and power are  intimately interconnected.  

Money is a very potent tool that can be used for the benefit of people or as a tool for repression and enslavement as it in now being done in all too many places and ways.   To countermand this problem, the N.V.P. Team recommends some major safeguards be installed in the trust structures.  

The goal is to prohibit anyone from stealing, destroying, or in any way damaging  the original capital, or from lining their pockets with the fund's money, or from playing favorites with the trust's assets in exchange for personal benefits.     Readers might note that the N.V.P. team is designing its  program to avoid behavior such as that which is now the all too common practice of our federal congressmen and senators.  Special interest groups use money to buy and to control those who are supposed to represent the public's interests.   

This unethical and highly-destructive behavior is usually hidden in secrecy or is buried under one or more degrees of separation,° and as a result, the general public does not see and does not understand that a government of the people, by the people and for the people has been transformed into a feeding troth for the wealth and powerful.

Recommended Structure        ...

The Recommended Structure:   

Because of the immense power that a trust with very large assets has, the N.V.P. Team recommends that the trusts with assets over a particular sum, perhaps $500,000 in value, (using 2005-value for the dollar)  be controlled using a structure based on that which was originally set up as the American Republic by our founding fathers.   Each trust that controls substantial assets has a checks-and-balances control system.   One branch (the Rule-makers)  determines the what, why, and how of the trust.   A second branch (the Managers) administers the trust,  and a third branch (the Arbitrators)   oversees the trust and resolves any disputes.   

To this basic structure, the N.V.P. Team suggests adding a fourth branch, (the Reality-Checkers).   The Reality-Checkers,  using   common sense and what the unbiased evidence indicates is the long-term best interests of everyone,  including Mother Nature.    This faction examines and weighs the indirect and usually hidden costs of the activities supported by the trust's investment funds.   

The goal is to gain enough financial power to redirect the priorities of the present, corporate, hierarchical structures that are,  all too commonly,  blindly raping Mother Nature and sacrificing the health and well-being of employees on the altar of corporate profits.   The goal is to, step-by-step, shift the manner in which businesses are run --  to shift corporate priorities from profits to people.

All members of all four branches are elected annually by the trust's beneficiaries.  The beneficiaries  are similar to the "owners" of the assets in the sense  that they receive the benefits.   (There aren't any owners in a trust; the people for whom the trusts were set up are called beneficiaries -- they get the benefits)    The beneficiaries, in their annual meetings and  by majority vote, have the power to adjust, alter, or change the overall purpose of the trust.  

The trust's Rule-Makes and the Arbitrators, and the Reality-Checkers  collectively, have the power to veto actions of the Managers and, if necessar, remove and replace any management people who are not operating in the best interest of all concerned.   By a vote called for by any member of any of the other three branches, ( Rule-Makes,  Arbitrators, and  Reality-Checkers ) management decisions may be vetoed, and/or members of Management can be removed and replaced.  

The bottom-line intention is that those for whom the trust was set up (the beneficiaries) be able to protect their assets and to indirectly (by annually electing the member of the four trust branches) oversee how the trusts are run.   In terms of who may participate in a particular trust, entry into the trust may be open or restricted in any way that the trust's beneficiaries choose by majority vote at their annual meetings.   

Letter and Intent:   

All rules and policies of the trust shall have  two equally powerful parts  --  the letter of those rules and the stated intention behind the written rules.   Whenever a rule (a statement of prescribed behavior)  is written, its intention shall also be written with it.   A violation of the rule's stated intention shall be equal to a violation of the letter of the rule.   

Here's  an example of the type of unethical practices the N.V.P. Team's program intends to avoid and  prohibit:   The auto insurance industry in California is legally prohibited from discriminating against a driver and charging insurance premiums based upon where the driver lives.   The industry honors the letter of the law but grossly and blatantly violates its intent.  The industry discriminates by charging premiums based upon the address where the car is garaged/parked.  

Rules and Policies:   

As an aid to healthy and flexible, trust management, a clear distinction needs to be made between a rule  and a policy.   A rule is a directive -- ("This is the way such-and-such shall be handled.")   A policy is a guideline giving latitude and leeway for the administers to adapt and adjust the suggested behavior and respond appropriately to fit each particular situation.

Consensus Versus Domination:   

The trust shall be run by consensus and not simply be domination by the majority.   Consensus  brings people together and minimizes differences by making harmony more important than getting one's way.   Where opinions differ, decisions are often outside the will of either side.   For a detailed description,   see the page titled:  consensus.°   There you'll find answers to common questions such as:  How does consensus differ from majority rule?   What to do if there is no consensus.

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