anne
Well-known member
I need some advice, friends.
I wrote something for my blog about my stance on politics/finances, but I wanted to post it here first with people who I trust before sending it off to the general public. I also have a video that I'm working on editing for it. It's just bits of a final project from a speech class my partner and I took last summer, which is mostly summarizing Zeitgeist: Addendum, Money as Debt, and The Best That Money Can't Buy with ideas from the story of stuff, technocracy, the venus project but without talking about religion or a resource based economy. So here it is and please let me know if you think there is anything that is difficult to understand or that might offend people. I figured that since many of you consider yourselves to be anarchists, this would be a good place to start for constructive comments without being attacked by people who are new to this way of thinking.
(Background info for those of you not familiar with my situation: I’m moving into a box truck in a few months, going through an intentional foreclosure and have 50k in credit card debt plus student loans, not able to pay for any of it. This is in response to several angry readers about the moral issues behind not honoring agreements with credit companies and the effects that has on individuals, communities and society as a whole.)
________________________________________________________________________
We have received several comments and emails regarding the subject of money, credit, and the financing of our project. Reading back, I see that we haven't explained this adequately. I realize that our choices may seem outrageous when they are out of context and we apologize for the lack of clarity. We are not looking to live off of society or some other "easy-living" welfare scheme. Nothing about the life we have chosen is going to be (or has been) easy. One of the statements in our introduction may have played a large role in this misconception. I said that we intend to “spend our life doing whatever makes us happy” and to many, that might sound like we mean kicking back, eating freedom fries, and watching American Idol. What would make us happy is to spend nearly every waking moment thinking about, planning, and conducting independent research that is not corrupted by the vested interest of an employer or driven by our own financial inadequacies.
In the spirit of full disclosure, our annual income is around $70,000. If you feel upset by our use of retail credit, know that your concern should be directed toward things like our exorbitantly overpriced blankets rather than our new home. The majority of our mobile condo project has been and will continue to be funded with earned income. We have spent a great deal of time without internet access at home, air conditioning, entertainment, etc. so we could afford to pay cash for the truck, mopeds and so on.
Modern society is founded on several institutions; namely religious, political and banking/economic systems. In turn, our cultural values and ethics are based on beliefs that tend to perpetuate these systems. This is why when someone voices a viewpoint contrary to accepted social norms, it is generally met with hostility and aggression.
If you want peace, no war, no poverty, no recessions, you can't have profit motives, governments, banks and competition. These things cannot and will never co-exist. I hate to sound cliché but one saying that is applicable in this situation is that the first step to recovery is realizing there is a problem.
Before I explain it further, I would first like to say that I know many people reading this have already decided to feel negatively about this topic and our choices in general with no real interest in understanding. If you think you may fall into this group, this explanation is not for you. Understanding our viewpoint will take the intention of ridding yourself of preconceptions that are based essentially on misinformation. If you choose to be threatened by information that may contradict your personal religious or political views, it would be a better use of your time to stop reading now.
Fundamental to all of this is the global monetary system. It is beyond the scope of this post to explain the system in every detail; however, this video presentation, which is comprised of the main points from two short speeches put together for a communications course, should act as a summary of the concepts. If you are interested (and I hope you are) the documentaries cited at the end explain this much more completely. Please watch them.
(insert video)
Parts of speeches to be used in video:
As you can see, the bank that owns the mortgage on our house did not pay for it. It created the $130k out of thin air, demanded that we then "pay them back" over 30 years (plus interest = multiply by 3.5) and now has possession of REAL property. If we're talking about ethics or fraud, don't look at us. Banks have been robbing people with this scam for generations. Similarly, all of our other credit lines are unsecured loans with the funds created the same way. It is impossible for me to feel remorse simply because I didn't fall for a long con.
So ask yourself: What real service or product do bankers, investors or financial institutions provide? Each new loan, "investment" or "funding" distorts our economic fiasco that much more. In earlier times, making money off of money was considered a spiritual sin (usury) and was condemned by religious leaders. One could argue that whoever produced the goods we purchased with defaulted credit lines deserve to be paid for their real labor (retail and industrial) so it is important to recognize that they actually did get paid by the bank that issued our credit at the time of purchase. No one who deserves payment is being hurt here.
Our job as human beings, in the simplest sense, is to survive. Money isn't real; the things we need to survive are. Non-living entities like banks and corporations (active manifestations of the monetary system) adulterate society and hinder our chances of survival and the survival of future generations. The logical response as a species is to protect ourselves from this threat and work towards eliminating it. This means not participating in the financial institutions that govern our society, and therefore not perpetuating them.
This won't be easy. If you need money, a job, a mortgage, you are participating. However, standing passively on the sidelines of this whole mess is not the answer either. It’s not enough to alter anything. So this is the reason for our radical lifestyle changes. If we are to rise above the pitfalls of the "wage slave nightmare" we must be completely self-reliant. We don't pretend to have all the answers. We also don't delude ourselves into thinking that society is necessarily fixable at this time, but the point of life is doing the best you can with the materials available to you, and we will continue to search for the most practical solutions to these problems for the rest of our lives.
I know that some of you are thinking, “What about the people who work in the banks? They’re not intentionally bad people just because the company who employs them unethically makes money simply by having more than the rest of us.” My answer is: What about them? As a former bank employee, I can understand how this is a hard pill to swallow. I cared about my customers and many of them had more interest in me than even my biological family. They’d bring back treats and trinkets with my name on them from their vacations and buy birthday/holiday/wedding gifts for me. Some would stop into the bank even if they didn’t need anything just because they’d think of something they couldn’t wait to tell me. The sincere relationships we have with one another are truly valid, but the context in which we experience them is inexcusable.
One example of this is that in 1945 there were 8.5 million members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis)—all of which either directly or indirectly participated in the murder of six million Jews on the quest for what they considered to be racial purity. Does that mean that these 8.5 million Nazis were evil people? No. Most of them were just doing the jobs that were available to them within the context of their lives and in the political environment of the time. Isn’t that what we’re still doing?
I’d rather not.
I wrote something for my blog about my stance on politics/finances, but I wanted to post it here first with people who I trust before sending it off to the general public. I also have a video that I'm working on editing for it. It's just bits of a final project from a speech class my partner and I took last summer, which is mostly summarizing Zeitgeist: Addendum, Money as Debt, and The Best That Money Can't Buy with ideas from the story of stuff, technocracy, the venus project but without talking about religion or a resource based economy. So here it is and please let me know if you think there is anything that is difficult to understand or that might offend people. I figured that since many of you consider yourselves to be anarchists, this would be a good place to start for constructive comments without being attacked by people who are new to this way of thinking.
(Background info for those of you not familiar with my situation: I’m moving into a box truck in a few months, going through an intentional foreclosure and have 50k in credit card debt plus student loans, not able to pay for any of it. This is in response to several angry readers about the moral issues behind not honoring agreements with credit companies and the effects that has on individuals, communities and society as a whole.)
________________________________________________________________________
We have received several comments and emails regarding the subject of money, credit, and the financing of our project. Reading back, I see that we haven't explained this adequately. I realize that our choices may seem outrageous when they are out of context and we apologize for the lack of clarity. We are not looking to live off of society or some other "easy-living" welfare scheme. Nothing about the life we have chosen is going to be (or has been) easy. One of the statements in our introduction may have played a large role in this misconception. I said that we intend to “spend our life doing whatever makes us happy” and to many, that might sound like we mean kicking back, eating freedom fries, and watching American Idol. What would make us happy is to spend nearly every waking moment thinking about, planning, and conducting independent research that is not corrupted by the vested interest of an employer or driven by our own financial inadequacies.
In the spirit of full disclosure, our annual income is around $70,000. If you feel upset by our use of retail credit, know that your concern should be directed toward things like our exorbitantly overpriced blankets rather than our new home. The majority of our mobile condo project has been and will continue to be funded with earned income. We have spent a great deal of time without internet access at home, air conditioning, entertainment, etc. so we could afford to pay cash for the truck, mopeds and so on.
Modern society is founded on several institutions; namely religious, political and banking/economic systems. In turn, our cultural values and ethics are based on beliefs that tend to perpetuate these systems. This is why when someone voices a viewpoint contrary to accepted social norms, it is generally met with hostility and aggression.
If you want peace, no war, no poverty, no recessions, you can't have profit motives, governments, banks and competition. These things cannot and will never co-exist. I hate to sound cliché but one saying that is applicable in this situation is that the first step to recovery is realizing there is a problem.
Before I explain it further, I would first like to say that I know many people reading this have already decided to feel negatively about this topic and our choices in general with no real interest in understanding. If you think you may fall into this group, this explanation is not for you. Understanding our viewpoint will take the intention of ridding yourself of preconceptions that are based essentially on misinformation. If you choose to be threatened by information that may contradict your personal religious or political views, it would be a better use of your time to stop reading now.
Fundamental to all of this is the global monetary system. It is beyond the scope of this post to explain the system in every detail; however, this video presentation, which is comprised of the main points from two short speeches put together for a communications course, should act as a summary of the concepts. If you are interested (and I hope you are) the documentaries cited at the end explain this much more completely. Please watch them.
(insert video)
Parts of speeches to be used in video:
Clips from my speech:
Despite all of our differences, there is one thing that we all have in common. SLIDE
Topic: Money. It is something that plays a role in every single day of our lives, yet not many of us know much about it.
We learn how to count it when we’re kids, how to spend it, how to save it, and if we’re lucky we learn how to invest it, but that is usually the extent of our education on money.
Summary: So today I’d like to talk about how the monetary system has changed from the past to the present, and discuss the dynamics of this system from an American perspective.
I. NEXT SLIDE
a. In the past, money was used as a means of trading scarce resources through various kinds of tokens, such as silver or gold that were agreed to represent a certain value.
b. Banking came about when people started needing a safe place to store their gold and would rent space in a shared vault. They were issued paper claim checks for the amount they left in the vault, so they could later return with those checks to collect their gold. NEXT SLIDE
c. This practice became so popular that in time, merchants started accepting claim checks as if they were the gold itself. Even when the bankers, the owners of the shared vaults, loaned out their personal money, as they often did, most people wanted their loans in paper claim checks since they were easier to carry and more convenient that the actual gold.
d. Since people rarely came for their actual gold, bankers started loaning out checks against the other depositor’s gold as well, to make more money. As long as the loans were repaid, the depositors would never know, and the bankers could make much larger profits.
e. When the depositors did find out, instead of removing their gold altogether, they asked for a share of the interest being made off the loans, thus starting the common banking concept of today.
II. And although many people imagine it to still be something similar, this is nothing like what actually goes on. NEXT SLIDE
a. One of the biggest differences is that we no longer use the gold standard. But if our money has no gold to back it up, how does it work? The transition to this new system can be explained by using our previous example of the bankers. Once the people who stored gold in the vaults were satisfied with simply collecting interest, the bankers looked for more ways to make money. They realized that they could give loans for not only the gold in the vault, but they could write claim checks and earn interest on gold that did not even exist. When the people and the government found out about this, they realized the negative impact that outlawing this practice would have, since much of the new economic progress was due to the availability of these extra loans. So instead of making it illegal, the government decided to regulate the amount of fake money that could be created. For example, for each original $1 in gold held in the vault, $10 in loans could be created out of nothing. But in the 1930’s, the gold standard ceased to exist in the United States and paper money could no longer be exchanged for gold. This is when the fiat currency system took over. Fiat, in Latin, means let it be done. And to us, this means that the government says this money must be accepted and that it has value, so it does. SLIDE
b. We now have one central bank that controls the monetary system in the United States. This is the Federal Reserve, and despite what many people assume, this is a privately owned company, not part of the government. In fact, when the government needs money for things such as war funding or bailouts for economic melt downs, it doesn’t create the money on its own—Instead, it borrows it from the Federal Reserve, much like we as consumers borrow money from our own banks and pay it back over time with interest.
c. The Federal Reserve dictates the money accounting system for the whole economy using “the fractional reserve system,” meaning that a bank can create new money given that they have a specific fraction of that amount already in deposits. NEXT SLIDE
d. If you go to google.com and search for Modern Money Mechanics, the first result you’ll get is a pdf version of the booklet created by the Federal Reserve explaining the entire process of new money creation. First money is deposited in a bank. The bank can then loan out up to 90% of the deposited money. But this money is usually re-deposited in another bank, which then loans out up to 90% of that deposit, and the process goes on and on. So wouldn’t this mean that a large portion of our deposits are loaned out to other people, and no longer available for withdrawal from our bank accounts? The answer is no.
e. This is prevented because the money being loaned isn’t actually coming out of the existing deposits. It is created on top of the deposited amounts. The deposits only act as the limiter of how much can be created. This usually turns out to be a ratio of 9 new dollars to every original dollar.
(It might seem crazy, but this form of corruption is nothing new.) NEXT SLIDE
III. The United States has a long history of fighting for freedom from manipulative banking interests.
a. Benjamin Franklin, one of our founding fathers, described a similar problem between the colonies and Great Britain as possibly the main reason for the revolution. NEXT SLIDE
b. Unfortunately, we went through a few rounds of similar tyranny in the US in the form of central banks even after we gained our freedom. Andrew Jackson had some strong views about the second national bank and his actions against it are worth remembering. He put a great deal of effort into ending the Second National Bank, and was successful. But after the Panic of 1907, despite Jackson’s warnings, the country was desperate for change and once again fell into the hands of a central bank. NEXT SLIDE
c. In 1913 President Woodrow Wilson allowed the Federal Reserve to become our third national bank in an attempt to bring about a much needed change in the troubled economy. Shortly after, once he realized what he had done, he expressed deep regrets for approving the Federal Reserve Act. He said, "I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit... We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world, no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."
IV. (These historical figures spoke passionately in opposition because the fractional reserve system creates many inherent problems.) NEXT SLIDE
a. This exponentially increasing money supply gains value only by taking it from the money that is already in existence, which devalues our currency. This is what we know as inflation. NEXT SLIDE
b. Also, all of the money being created is in the form of loans, with interest attached. So where is the money to cover the interest, even for the government? In this system, only the principle is created in the form of the loans themselves, but there is no extra money created to cover the interest, so new money in the form of new loans must regularly be created in order for this system to work. It can never stop or the system will collapse. NEXT.
c. But even with this constant growth, the amount of money needed to cover interest will constantly grow as well, so there will never be enough money for everyone. NEXT. This is why poverty, foreclosures and bankruptcies are guaranteed. For example, according to the national coalition for the homeless, there are about 3.5 million homeless people in the United States, but I read an article in USA Today at the beginning of this year that said one in every nine housing units is vacant. So there is no scarcity of homes, or people who want to live in them, only a scarcity of money.
(Dependency and helplessness of the masses is the result of our monetary system.) NEXT SLIDE
In summary, money started out as a representation of value but is now a representation of debt, and it promotes artificial scarcity and societal problems. I hope this presentation will act as encouragement for you to seek out more information about the true nature of the monetary system.
Clips from his speech:
If we take an honest look at our society, it is clear there are many problems. If we step back and look at the world as a whole, we see these same problems permeate all communities, all countries, all peoples. It stands to reason that the cause of these universal problems must be something we all have in common, something so fundamental that despite vast differences in region, culture, opportunities, religion, this inherent flaw shines through unobstructed. The only solution then, is to remove this element from our society and discard it as non-functional. This element is the monetary system, and society no longer requires its service.
(First though, I think an explanation of how money causes these problems is needed.
I. In any society, there are motivations and rewards for actions. The monetary system offers us one reward for participation: more money (profit). All entities have one common motivation: self-preservation (applies to humans, as well as all plants/animals, but also to other entities like businesses, governments).
A. For living creatures this motivation can mean we desire “necessities of life,” but non-living entities (businesses) can only be sustained through profit. Makes sense because businesses are instruments of the monetary system; they were designed to complement each other.
B. Where the problem arises: living beings have finite needs (only so much food an animal can eat before it doesn’t need any more). Businesses have infinite need; no matter how much profit a company makes, more is always better.
C. Created an environment where corporations can flourish, but living beings are not well-adapted for survival. Means that our needs have become secondary to the needs of the dominant species, a species that was supposed to make our lives easier, this is simply not the case anymore.
(Additionally, we live on a planet that has finite resources, which could sustain all of us, but will never satisfy the infinite need of business.)
What is important to remember is that who we truly are, our “human nature,” is not the manipulative, competitive beings our environment compels us to be. But we are responsible for perpetuating this society, if we are aware of a solution to these defects and do nothing to change. I hope this information has sparked an interest in reconsidering the habits and customs we have gathered around ourselves. Maybe we can discard those that are no longer relevant; leaving them in the past where they belong, so that we may have a brighter future for everyone together.
As you can see, the bank that owns the mortgage on our house did not pay for it. It created the $130k out of thin air, demanded that we then "pay them back" over 30 years (plus interest = multiply by 3.5) and now has possession of REAL property. If we're talking about ethics or fraud, don't look at us. Banks have been robbing people with this scam for generations. Similarly, all of our other credit lines are unsecured loans with the funds created the same way. It is impossible for me to feel remorse simply because I didn't fall for a long con.
So ask yourself: What real service or product do bankers, investors or financial institutions provide? Each new loan, "investment" or "funding" distorts our economic fiasco that much more. In earlier times, making money off of money was considered a spiritual sin (usury) and was condemned by religious leaders. One could argue that whoever produced the goods we purchased with defaulted credit lines deserve to be paid for their real labor (retail and industrial) so it is important to recognize that they actually did get paid by the bank that issued our credit at the time of purchase. No one who deserves payment is being hurt here.
Our job as human beings, in the simplest sense, is to survive. Money isn't real; the things we need to survive are. Non-living entities like banks and corporations (active manifestations of the monetary system) adulterate society and hinder our chances of survival and the survival of future generations. The logical response as a species is to protect ourselves from this threat and work towards eliminating it. This means not participating in the financial institutions that govern our society, and therefore not perpetuating them.
This won't be easy. If you need money, a job, a mortgage, you are participating. However, standing passively on the sidelines of this whole mess is not the answer either. It’s not enough to alter anything. So this is the reason for our radical lifestyle changes. If we are to rise above the pitfalls of the "wage slave nightmare" we must be completely self-reliant. We don't pretend to have all the answers. We also don't delude ourselves into thinking that society is necessarily fixable at this time, but the point of life is doing the best you can with the materials available to you, and we will continue to search for the most practical solutions to these problems for the rest of our lives.
I know that some of you are thinking, “What about the people who work in the banks? They’re not intentionally bad people just because the company who employs them unethically makes money simply by having more than the rest of us.” My answer is: What about them? As a former bank employee, I can understand how this is a hard pill to swallow. I cared about my customers and many of them had more interest in me than even my biological family. They’d bring back treats and trinkets with my name on them from their vacations and buy birthday/holiday/wedding gifts for me. Some would stop into the bank even if they didn’t need anything just because they’d think of something they couldn’t wait to tell me. The sincere relationships we have with one another are truly valid, but the context in which we experience them is inexcusable.
One example of this is that in 1945 there were 8.5 million members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis)—all of which either directly or indirectly participated in the murder of six million Jews on the quest for what they considered to be racial purity. Does that mean that these 8.5 million Nazis were evil people? No. Most of them were just doing the jobs that were available to them within the context of their lives and in the political environment of the time. Isn’t that what we’re still doing?
I’d rather not.