Application for Debt Ceiling Removal Job
July 28, 2011
President Barack Obama
The White House
Dear President Obama:
I have a solution for the debt ceiling crisis, plus the debt crisis underlying it, and the debt underlying that, and actually a number of related societal crises, and I’m writing to offer my help. I made much the same offer to President Clinton and President George. H.W. Bush, although not at the point of a debt ceiling crisis. The solution remains the same, and in this debt ceiling crisis it provides a clear way to go, and a very happy result. I wrote President George W. Bush about different things, and didn’t really suggest my economic solution because it seemed he was already having trouble keeping it all together. Through all you US Presidents, however, I haven’t stopped thinking about the US and the world’s economic problem and the solution, and I haven’t withheld the solution from anyone or any country but kept it available for anyone interested.
Lawrence Wright, writing in The New Yorker in its February 14, 2011 Anniversary Issue about, of all things, “Paul Haggis vs. Scientology,” related a conversation he had with one Tommy Davis concerning my economic solution.
Davis passed around a photograph of Armstrong, which, he said, showed Armstrong “sitting naked” with a giant globe in his lap. “This was a photo that was in a newspaper article he did where he said that all people should give up money,” Davis said. “He’s not a very sane person.”
Armstrong told me that, in the photo, he is actually wearing running shorts under the globe. The article is about his attempt to create a movement for people to “abandon the use of currency.”
The article Wright mentions was from the Marin Independent Journal in November 1992. I really was wearing a pair of running shorts, which I still possess, and are seen in these 1995 and 1996 photos. A Scientologist public relations person, who is also the son of a Hollywood actress, pronouncing some common, average Homo sapiens not very sane, is not only defamation, but a reason to read what that citizen had to say.
The movement or idea I envision is not for people to abandon the use of currency, which is both a ridiculous and virtually impossible concept. The idea is for people to end the use of money as currency, or to move society off the money standard, which is eminently prudent and doable. Any currency functions as a means of exchange, and a means of exchange will still be needed, even if money is no longer needed, after its replacement, as society’s dominating means of exchange, or currency.
In your early days as President, and earlier as candidate, you gave some of us hope because it sounded like you were going to think outside the box. I believe you even said in some speech I caught, perhaps in connection with the banking crisis or one or another meltdown crisis, that you were looking for people who think outside the box. The box, of course, is the money system and the money standard. The US box, as everyone knows, is the biggest box on earth.
As you can imagine, I’ve known for many years that thinking outside the box was strangely rare, and that communicating what I thought often encountered seemingly utter inability. Outside the box thinkers, as you also can imagine, and see, sometimes still communicate despite all their bad encounters. The seeming inability to think outside the box appeared rooted in a fear of going there to think, even for a second. This is a conundrum because thinking outside the box has been touted by almost everyone, including you, as a valuable and desirable ability.
I’ve experienced some psychically violent reactions when the idea of thinking outside the box was presented, but I’m just an average and common guy, as I said. As President of the country that thinks inside the biggest box, however, if you were to think for a moment outside it, and report what you found, you could do a world of good. You could prove there’s nothing to fear actually thinking outside the box, or at least less to fear than inside the box, and you could lead a lot of people to think outside it with you. The solution to the problems of the money system is outside it, and recognizing that idea and initiating that solution would be an excellent legacy from your Presidency.
Very early in your administration, when you were setting up an economic advisory group, at the point of one financial catastrophe or another, I recall you signaled that there would be no thinking outside the box on your team, and that everyone was devoted to the box and in agreement on the need to think within it. I do understand that you have said and done a great deal to get the box to work. You borrowed incredible sums to bail out or energize the box and stop it from recessing, depressing, collapsing, melting down, blowing up or any of the myriad other terrifying consequences and futures the box can have for us. Now your citizens and children in future generations, everyone thinking inside the box agrees, are locked even tighter and longer in the box.
What can peacefully, safely, sanely and humanely replace money as currency, whether everyone becomes able to think outside the box or not, is reason and the computer. Reason has been available at times and in places for almost ever, and always could have replaced money as currency if there had been enough of it. In all those years, however, there never was the computer, or the computerized society we now blessedly live in, which makes this shift off the money standard possible just with the reason we currently possess. The computer is already performing many of the functions that money did in the pre-computer era, so money’s complete replacement with the computer is not all that difficult. I wrote about the computer as currency in 1992, and developments in the computer world since then have all supported the conclusion that the computer and reason can replace the money system. Developments in the financial world, the economic world, the social world, the political world, the war world and other worlds have all supported the co-conclusion that the money system and standard — the box – has to be replaced.
The box is inefficient, oppressive, threatening, and clearly drives people to homelessness, desperation, to crime and to all sorts of other antisocial and destructive behaviors. The box has become even more oppressive to your citizens, and to Homo sapiens everywhere, now that its viable replacement is available, and a way can be seen out from under that oppression. The box causes wars and makes all but a few box operators losers and victims in its wars. It wastes lives, ruins others, denies education to the educable, and educates everyone in the inevitability and inescapability of the box that oppresses them. Its senseless drive to keep itself working not only harms its human workers but the planet and its wonders that actually sustain them.
The money age can end, and its human box can be thanked for outlasting its usefulness, and be peacefully retired. Government and societal transparency becomes real, operations can be streamlined, communications can flow a bit faster, universal health care becomes instantly available, and free, and people become a bit more honest. The brilliant minds now occupied with basic survival in the box, or consumed with finding in it an advantage or angle, can freely turn that brilliance to the real problems in the real world that will remain when the unreal box folds up.
The immediate debt ceiling crisis is extremely easy to resolve. Just raise it, and borrow whatever is needed, or print as much money as needed, to give the Government and citizens the time and peace of mind they need to work out the details for moving the country off the money standard and onto the reason standard. Moving society off the money standard also accomplishes the elimination of the national debt, and in fact every monetary debt. It is not hard to see that if the debt can be eliminated by moving society off the money standard, it doesn’t matter how huge the debt is to be eliminated. Therefore, borrow or print as much as you need to pay the bills and move society off the money standard as soon as humanly possible.
The Marin IJ observed in 1992 that I hadn’t been tapped for an economic advisory post, and this is still true today. It is also true that this remains a pretty good suggestion, and I’m making it to you now, Mr. President. I would probably be the only outside the box thinker on any of your teams, so my ideas could easily be overruled by everyone, my thinking wouldn’t have to be scary to anyone, and all the thinking inside the box could still get done almost as usual. Hiring me, however, would signal, that although you were hedging your bet, you were granting outside the box thinking some credence.
Obviously when people use the term “thinking outside the box,” they often mean thinking inside the box somehow differently from someone else thinking inside the box. I wouldn’t do this, and not because I’d want to be the only outside the box thinker in your Government or anywhere. I would welcome people who think outside the box, and would welcome being replaced by better outside the box thinkers. You could hire me for a year, say until next year’s federal election, and if you did I could even help you win it. I’m a Canadian, but that’s no problem. I don’t cost much even now, and I’d be thinking and working at all times toward doing whatever I do for free.
The debt ceiling deal shouldn’t take you and Congress more than an hour or two. Please take care of it, buy a little time, and at least start thinking about thinking outside the box that’s got you all thinking inside it.
Yours hopefully,
Gerry Armstrong
#2-46298 Yale Road
Chilliwack, BC V2P 2P6
Canada
gerry@gerryarmstrong.org
604-703-1373
