Several years ago, I went to California to do a speaking tour and to raise money to help me through the most difficult part of eleven years of litigation resulting from my efforts to prevent corruption in the federal finances. The speaking tour was successful. However, after spending many lunches and dinners entertaining numerous wealthy people, I came back empty handed. As one honest San Francisco Bay Area heiress said, “I would never give you money. I don’t want to piss off the CIA.”
Concerned, the group that sponsored the trip decided to put together a letter of socially responsible leaders in support of my efforts to be posted on the Solari website. One of the signatories was Judy Wicks, head of the White Dog Café in Philadelphia. Judy and I had worked together in a restaurant next to the University of Pennsylvania campus when I was a student in the 1970s. Judy was a founder of a group named BALLE — Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. David Korten is a BALLE board member.
During the same period, David Kubiak, then head of 911Truth.org made an effort to bring together various leaders interested in economics and business reform. In the process, he sent my article The Myth of the Rule of Law: or How the Money Works — the Destruction of Hamilton Securities Group to David Korten. Korten read it and sent me a long e-mail that expressed shock, saying something to the effect, “I did not know you could write about these things and stay alive.”
Impressed that he had taken the time to read the piece and by the intelligence of his comments, I composed a long detailed e-mail reply, explaining that yes, it was possible to tell the truth and stay alive. I then encouraged him to read a subsequent piece Solari & the Rise of the Rule of Law that gave an overview of the importance of small business and communities having transparency regarding government resources by place and access to equity capital based on performance.
I never heard from Korten again. A day or two later, I received a call from the person in San Francisco who had organized the letter in support of my fundraising efforts. David Korten, he said, had called Judy Wicks and insisted she drop from the group of socially responsible leaders who had signed the letter. She had called my friend to request that the letter be taken down from my website, and now he had to recirculate the letter and persuade everyone else to stay in. I was lead to believe that Korten was quite angry and Judy was quite upset. There was much embarrassment and much work to clean up the fallout. It was, however, to no avail. The momentum was lost.
My infrastructure imploded shortly thereafter as months of time and expenses invested in a fruitless fundraising effort exhausted my last resources. That was the moment in which I realized the productive way of sustaining myself through the litigation was to return to the world of investments in which my traditional experience and success was enriched with the invaluable knowledge I had gained about how to protect person, family and assets. Asking others to help me was backwards. It appeared that just about anyone with money or position was deeply afraid and operating inside of ever shrinking boundaries. I needed to help them navigate a world and financial markets where the most dangerous predators were hard to understand and see.
I tell this story because I want to discuss the concept of “material omission.” Under US securities law, when a company or enterprise issues stocks, bonds or other securities, they and their investment bankers are subject to disclosure requirements to ensure that a potential purchaser has adequate information to understand the true nature and value of the potential investment. Critical to these standards is the notion of a “material omission.” It is a potentially a criminal felony to intentionally omit information that is material to understanding and pricing the investment in question.
Let’s take this notion beyond the securities world. Let’s talk about comments on current events. If I write an article or book that intentionally misleads or omits critical information, then I am encouraging you to adopt a map of the world that is false. By encouraging you to believe a false or incomplete map, I increase the odds that you will use your time and money in ways that may not be optimal for you. It is like AAA selling you a map of North America and leaving some states off because they were having regulatory problems in those states. The problem is that if you are driving from New York to California, you may get lost because the map is not accurate.
I had not read Korten’ books when he told me that he did not think one could write about the “real deal” and stay alive. I have recently skimmed his latest book, The Great Turning: from Empire to Earth Community. Like most books of this genre, it is twisted into the pretzels that result when an author tries to provide a comprehensive picture in which problems and solutions are defined in terms of the overt economy, while truths that are not socially acceptable are exorcised. Which is to say that Korten is asking his readers to pay money and invest time reading a book which is rife with material omissions.
Amidst the pretzel talk, Korten promotes the official orthodoxy that Osama Bin Laden is responsible for 911. Korten is far from alone in doing so and this as well as his legitimate fears of talking about the “real deal” are what I want to talk about in Part II.