Money
Money
Money
Money requires specific understanding. A trap lies waiting by assuming that a common sense understanding of money represents reality.
“There is no evidence of a society or economy that relied primarily on barter.” Marcel Mauss in ‘The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies’
Instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economics.
“When barter did occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or potential enemies.” David Graeber in ‘Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value’
Commodities were likely used as the first form of money, such as gold, silver, copper, rice, salt, peppercorns, large stones, decorated belts, shells, alcohol, cigarettes, cannabis and candy. It seems that money emerged to facilitate exchanges between “complete strangers or potential enemies.”
Commodity Money
is similar to barter in use and commodity money provides a simple and automatic unit of account for the commodity being used as money. A unit of account is a standardized measurement of market value.
A unit of account is a necessary prerequisite for agreements that involve commercial debt. To function as a unit of account, whatever is being used as money must be:
- Divisible into smaller units without loss of value, for example, precious metals can be coined from bars, or melted down into bars again.
- Fungible: one unit or piece must be perceived as equivalent to any other, which is why diamonds, works of art and real estate do not work as money.
- Verifiable as to specific amounts. For example, coins are often made with ridges around the edges, so that any removal of material from the coin (lowering its commodity value) will be easy to detect.
Representative Money
stands in direct and fixed relation to a backing commodity, while not being composed of that commodity itself. Representative money consists of token coins or certificates that can be reliably exchanged for a fixed quantity of a commodity.
Paper representative money or banknotes were first used in China during the Song Dynasty. Banknotes were first issued in Europe by Stockholms Banco in 1661.
Under the gold standard, the value of money derived from gold in bank vaults, not government credit. If, for example, the United States of America government defaulted on its debt under the gold standard, the value of the dollar and much of the financial system would remain intact.
The United States Department of the Treasury seized physical control of the nation’s gold reserves in 1934, with the Gold Reserve Act. All of the United States’ monetary wealth was secretly transferred to vaults under the control of the United States Department of the Treasury.
United States Department of the Treasury is the nation’s largest debtor. The 1934 Gold Reserve Act put the United States Department of the Treasury in control of money.
That is like putting a pedophile in control of childcare when we are the children.
The government benefits three ways from using money debasement to create inflation:
- Inflation erodes the real value of government debt. The government repays with dollars worth less than the dollars they borrowed, which immediately transfers wealth from investors in government debt directly to the government.
- Inflation swells federal tax receipts due to “tax bracket creep” as incomes are pushed into higher tax brackets with no increase in purchasing power. Inflationary appreciation of business inventories is taxed as profit.
- Most importantly, money debasement itself levies a hidden “tax” on holders of money, such as people who keep savings accounts.
The 1934 Gold Reserve Act revalued gold (= debased the dollar) from $20.67 to $35.00 per ounce and accomplished all of the above along with much, much more. The United States Department of the Treasury took the control of the nation’s gold and spent it, leaving nothing but United States Department of the Treasury IOU’s backing the dollar.
“To act as a store of value, a money must be able to be reliably saved, stored, and retrieved – and be predictably usable as a medium of exchange when it is retrieved. The value of the money must also remain stable over time. In that sense, inflation by reducing the value of money, diminishes the ability of the money to function as a store of value.” N. Gregory Mankiw (2007) in “2″ Macroeconomics (6th ed.)
The role of money as a store of value that requires holding it without spending conflicts with its role as a medium of exchange that requires it to circulate. Apparently, the United States government encourages money circulation by continuously practicing money debasement.
The pain of taxes – increases - even as Congress declares tax cuts. As long as politicians maintain central control of the money supply, we are all impoverished.
In this environment one must either make investments that return a higher yield than the rate of government money debasement or immediately purchase hard goods known to be valued widely by other people. Any other strategy will, over time, devalue what you were paid for your work to make you, for any practical accounting purposes, a slave.
An example of making a high yield investment would be investing in your own on line business that generates an on going cash flow. Examples of widely valued hard goods include quality tools and firearms.
Fiat Money
or fiat currency is money whose value is not derived from any intrinsic value or guarantee that it can be converted into a commodity. It has no value except by government order or fiat.
The government declares the fiat currency (contemporary notes from the Federal Reserve System) to be legal tender, making it unlawful to not accept the fiat currency as a means of repayment for all debts, public and private.
Commercial Bank Money
is created through fractional-reserve banking, the banking practice where banks keep only a fraction of their deposits in reserve and invest the remainder. Commercial bank money differs from commodity money and fiat money in two ways
- it is non-physical, its existence is only reflected in the account ledgers of banks and other financial institutions
- risk that the deposit cannot be reclaimed upon demand if, for example, the financial institution becomes insolvent because demands upon deposits exceeds both the reserve and the value of the investments
The worthless home mortgages now held at fictional values make all the major banks, along with most of the smaller banks, technically insolvent and the FDIC does not have enough to cover the difference. This was all perpetrated with government oversight, aided and abetted by legislating away regulations.
A few insiders (at Goldman Sachs it seems) well understood the inevitable consequences, transferred their risk to unregulated financial instruments and then sold them to mutual funds and sovereign governments around the world including Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain and the United States of America. This was all perpetrated with government oversight, aided and abetted by refusing to legislate regulations.
Banksters will be blamed but make no mistake, this was a government operation from illicit beginning to the revolting end. The banks, by themselves, never could have pulled this off while governments have proved capable of debasing money without banks throughout history.
from the
United States Department of Labor
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Productivity and Costs, First Quarter 2010, Revised
“Nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased at a 2.8 percent annual rate during the first quarter of 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, with output rising 4.0 percent and hours rising 1.1 percent.”
Good for corporations and what about workers?
“Unit labor costs in nonfarm businesses fell 1.3 percent in the first quarter of 2010, as the 2.8 percent increase in productivity outpaced a 1.5 percent gain in hourly compensation. Unit labor costs fell 4.2 percent over the last four quarters, as the 6.1 percent increase in output per hour over that period outpaced a 1.6 percent rise in hourly compensation.”
Work harder, get paid less.
The pay you receive is what you spend, that is the economy. If you are paid less, then you are able to buy less with your wages, that is fundamental.
This makes short term corporate profits look good, but with less income you cannot buy what others produce and in the long term this results in corporations either having to
- cut prices (deflation) which damages profitability or
- end up with unsold inventory (priced above the cost of production) or
- fail.
The government monetary policy is not sustainable. In fact, the government monetary policy appears to have hit its limits.
The only thing now keeping the government monetary policy going is the still (apparently) wide spread belief that other people will continue to accept the United States dollar in trade for goods and services. In reality, the last person to accept it, loses.
Get your money working or get it into durable hard goods. A thoughtful balance between the two would appear a wise decision.
The Next Civil War
The conditions for the next United States Civil War were created by the victors of the first United States Civil War, the corporate elite and their political agents. At issue are rights established with The Declaration Of Independence.
The Declaration Of Independence is truly a magnificent document much superior to the United States Constitution, a severely flawed compromise in comparison that ultimately legalized the corporate take-over of the United States Of America. The key phrase of The Declaration Of Independence is
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,
and to institute new Government”
“These ends,” being, of course, “to secure these rights,” which are “endowed by their Creator,” making them “certain unalienable Rights, among these being Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It was specifically stated
“That, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The government established with respect to The Declaration Of Independence was terminated in 1861 when 11 states exercised their rights, declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America, also known as “the Confederacy“. Both Buchanan’s outgoing administration and Lincoln’s incoming administration rejected the legality of secession, considering it rebellion.
Rebellion is only possible in the face of the arbitrary will of another person.
Slavery consists of being “subject to the incessant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man.”
~ John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government
The rejection of the legality of secession was also the rejection of the legality of The Declaration Of Independence. The first Civil War was foremost a war to unite the states under a single government controlled by the corporate elite with the ending of slavery a political weapon used more to keep Great Britain out of it than any high and mighty purpose.
The African-American slaves were “freed” to live under the corporate controlled government instituted in defiance of The Declaration Of Independence. Previously, the United States government had existed De jure and since then it has existed De facto.
Without the freedom to exercise the Right to alter government or abolish it and institute a new one, everyone finds themselves to be “subject to the incessant, uncertain, arbitrary will of another man.” Without the freedom to exercise the Right to alter government or abolish it and institute a new one, everyone finds themselves to be a De facto slave.
The De facto government of The United States Of America passed laws legitimizing itself. The De facto government of The United States Of America has been on a global rampage ever since.
1867
Midway annexed
1890
United States Census Bureau announced the disappearance of a contiguous frontier line for the first time in United States history
1893
The Kingdom of Hawaii was under the rule of a sugar plantation cartel, which in 1887, with the full support of the United States Of America, instituted a constitution that eliminated the possibility of native Hawaiian self-government.
This constitution became known as the “Bayonet Constitution” because it was backed with the overt threat of military action, “gave all Americans and Europeans, even non-citizens, the right to vote” while denying it to the majority population.
The author of the Bayonet Constitution was attorney Lorrin Thurston, an agent of the sugar cartel. Thurston imposed himself on the Hawaiian government as its interior minister then used that position to plot the overthrow of the kingdom, which was consummated in January 1893.
1898
Hawaii annexed
1899
After smashing the forces of Spain the United States of America annexed Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. This meant fighting the Republic of the Philippines, a conflict that became a three-year-long counter-insurgency war.
1900
American Samoa annexed
1903
“Big Stick” diplomacy begins
U.S. instigated “uprising” separates Panama from Columbia and then Panama leases canal zone to U.S.
1917
U.S. declares war against Germany
Virgin Islands annexed
1941
U.S. declares war against Japan
1947
Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, captured from Japan, administered by U.S.
1948
NATO formed, the Cold War begins and the Bill of Rights severely compromised to combat the “Communist Menace”
1950
Korean War divides country and installs U.S. puppet government in power to this day
1954-1962
Congress terminates more than 60 Native American tribes as political units
1955-1975
Vietnam War divides country and installs U.S. puppet government
1959
Hawaii admitted as a state to escape international pressure to restore Hawaiian autonomy
1980
“War on Drugs” begins, erodes Bill of Rights, jails 1/5 of young African-American men and continues to this day
1991
Gulf War is first U.S. reduction of a regional power
2001
“War on Terror” begins, negates the Bill of Rights and continues to this day
2003
2008
Global financial crisis and recession as working people (producers) are forced to bail out corrupt bankers and their government enablers (expropriators)
There are many other examples and I invite you to list yours in the comments. The key elements remain the same in example after example as resources are stolen, key individuals deceived and entire peoples are first economically debased and then killed off by introduced diseases, malnutrition, starvation and finally military action as a coup de grace.
“What’s happening in my country is also happening in your country…. You don’t even know it, but you’re the Indians of the 21st Century, and that’s very sad.”
~ Russell Means, Indian Activist and Facilitator of the newly created Independent Republic of Lakota
The pattern set by the post-1861 De facto United States government regarding its treatment of indigenous North American people was
- repeated around the world by the United States government and continues to this day
- studied and admired by Adolf Hitler who repeated the pattern in his treatment of Gypsies, Jews and intellectuals
- repeated by Zionist Israelis in their treatment of the Palestinians
and is now being repeated upon the domestic population of the United States Of America.
So what is to be done?
You could quit. Quit being complicit to everything wrong that is going on.
Quit going along with it all. Simply stop helping it all happen, wherever you can.
Object to what is going on. Stop funding the system.
Stop working for psychopaths. Quit your jobs and go do something else to keep yourself alive.
Go do anything else. Just do not keep supporting the system.
Your life will become more challenging when you face up to your true responsibilities in life. Your life will also become immensely more satisfying.
“Each gesture of this sort, taken individually, seems as evanescent as a snowflake. But an avalanche begins as nothing more than a particularly large gathering of individual snowflakes that somehow found their way to the high ground.”
- William Norman Grigg February 26, 2010
The Next Civil War will be between producers, those who work to earn their own way and prosper through their own efforts, and expropriators, those who survive by taking from others with governments as their agents.
You do not want to be in the middle of this!
Already many United States citizens view government administrations that enrich their business cronies at citizen expense not as opponents but as enemies. The escalation of entitlements is not sustainable and when it inevitably ends so will any remaining public support.
Until that time, productive people who take responsibility for their own lives and well-being are seeing the fruits of their labor taken from them along with their independence, freedom and rights, endowed by their Creator, certain unalienable Rights, among these being Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Being enmeshed in the system increases your risk of becoming a victim. Do not be a victim.
Run Faster Than The Slowest Camper
The bear is out of the woods and the bull is running for cover. Forget about out running the bear, that is never going to happen. I will tell you why in a second.
All you really need to do is run faster than the slowest camper.
96 years ago, December 23, Woodrow Wilson used four gold pens to sign the Federal Reserve Act into law. This act is arguably the most destructive and harmful law enacted by a United States President up to that time.
The Federal Reserve Act allowed the inflationary bubbles that created the snowball of debt that currently engulfs us today. Nothing is at all mysterious about inflation;
inflation is government intervention pure and simple.
This proves the lie of the myth that regulators actually regulate rather than serve the interests of corporate beneficiaries. Debasing money is an old trick of governments going back at least as far as Biblical times.
15And when money failed in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came unto Joseph, and said, Give us bread: for why should we die in thy presence? for the money faileth.
16And Joseph said, Give your cattle; and I will give you for your cattle, if money fail.
17And they brought their cattle unto Joseph: and Joseph gave them bread in exchange for horses, and for the flocks, and for the cattle of the herds, and for the asses: and he fed them with bread for all their cattle for that year.
18When that year was ended, they came unto him the second year, and said unto him, We will not hide it from my lord, how that our money is spent; my lord also hath our herds of cattle; there is not ought left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies, and our lands:
19Wherefore shall we die before thine eyes, both we and our land? buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants unto Pharaoh: and give us seed, that we may live, and not die, that the land be not desolate.
20And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine prevailed over them: so the land became Pharaoh’s.
21And as for the people, he removed them to cities from one end of the borders of Egypt even to the other end thereof.
Genesis 47
What happened in Egypt is that the grain harvest was deposited into the secure government storage facility. The government then issued script (money) against the grain reserves.
When the government wanted to spend more than they could back up with grain reserves, they just went ahead and printed up more script anyway betting on ever increasing harvests to make the script good. Of course, with crop failures not only was the inflated script no good, in that it never had backing, but the original script could not be redeemed for grain either because there was none.
Fiscal policy cannot stimulate the economy.
The government has no money of its own.
It has only the power to tax and spend the money of others.
Financial collapse and food collapse have proven to be the consistent downfall of empires throughout human history. I write about the food collapse a little bit further down but first I want to touch upon the evidence of the advanced fear the government exhibits toward the governed.
Of course, since war has been declared upon United States citizens with the War On Drugs that allows the United States government to set new international records in the both the percentage of the population and total numbers of citizens that have been sent to prison by their own government.
The few shreds of the Bill of Rights remaining after the War On Drugs have now been completely obliterated by the subsequent War On Terrorism. The government appears so on edge that any excuse seems provocation enough to justify A Visit And Subpoena From Homeland Security.
The U.S. government fears and wages war upon the U.S. governed for reasons similar to why the Israeli government fears and wages war upon the Palestinians. Neither government would expect anyone to sit still for the wholesale fraud and abuse they dish out for very long.
They wish to avoid judgment and the consequences of their actions, also spelled out in the Bible.
1Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
2Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth eaten.
3Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.
4Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbath.
5Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.
6Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.
James 5
When the wealthy cheat farmers out of what the farmer is due the financial system tanks regardless of the unjust wars the wealthy wage.
This truth from Biblical times held up as a key point concerning the Fall of the Roman Empire and still holds true today. Truth seems to endure even if empires do not.
Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’:
the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US
Despite appearances, we are not merely revisiting old mistakes. Our very way of life has been transformed into dependency upon an unsustainable system now running out of resources.
Die-off is a bottom-up phenomena affecting the lowest rungs of the human socioeconomic ladder first. This is already happening at a scale that is increasingly impossible to ignore.
Spiritual Leaders, scientists, climatologists, anthropologists and leading researchers unsuccessfully try to convince humanity that our self-destructive path is the true root cause of the collapse.
Prepare now.
Prepare now by becoming productive in your own name. Prepare now by connecting with people who appreciate your products.
Those who cannot connect with a personal fan base will be without the opportunity to sell their products directly. Lacking that opportunity, the only recourse will be self-reliance and self-sufficiency.
A lonely path at best.
No More Pretending
Delusional hope produces nothing of value. Throughout my life I have sought to see things as they are. The past few months have provided me the opportunity to ponder current events against the tapestry of history.
“We have destroyed the Holocene biosphere, and it can never be rebuilt. We have inadvertently terraformed Earth into a different planet. This act cannot be undone; it is thermodynamically irreversible.” Desdemona
I leave it to climate change deniers to explain the recent wholesale collapse of fisheries with the increase in both reef and oceanic dead zones, the desertification of the world’s most productive land and the rapid transition from forest to desert by mega-fires.
The once frozen “methane bomb” has already gone off. The Arctic permafrost is already melting.
Large areas of Earth are becoming uninhabitable to mammals and their food plants. Most charismatic megafauna, such as elephants, rhinos and whales, will become extinct in a few decades. It is entirely likely that humans will follow them into oblivion.
For sure, this will be a bumpy road to total collapse and a few will manage to arrive in luxury SUVs. The rest of us, the vast majority, will see family and friends fall as we circle the drain together.
There are still resources that could be directed towards easing the necessary scaling back of empire and civilization as we know it. Scaling back in and of itself would help a great deal, perhaps forestalling human extinction as we adapt to an Earth that every day becomes more like Mars.
While President Obama takes on the ‘fat cat’ bankers the underlying collapse of the United State financial industry has yet to be addressed. The root problem is an excessive level of debt in the system at all levels, a level of debt that exceeds capacity to pay.
The problem in a nutshell – the banks are still hiding losses – big losses. Very little of the debt securitized by the housing bubble has been written off or yet foreclosed upon.
Loans are not being made to small business people because they have no collateral to pledge. Being asked to pledge personal assets as collateral for a small business loan is standard operating procedure.
With most homes underwater, most small businesspeople have no assets to pledge as collateral. Debt problems go beyond the largest banks.
China bought zero U.S. Treasury debt in October. Now foreigners have become net sellers of U.S. Treasury debt instruments.
The problems began when raw materials producers stopped receiving parity pricing and needed to borrow in able to start a new round of production. A principle method of under-paying, paying less than parity, appears in the form of paying in debased money.
Meanwhile, here we are, nearly a year under a new administration. For feds, more get 6-figure salaries, in an attempt to keep up with debasement of U.S. money.
Seduced And Abandoned
Both Democrats and Republicans demonstrate a history of saying whatever seems required to become elected, seduce the electorate, and upon election conveniently explaining away or otherwise abandoning their earlier promises.
Everyone seems to condemn this behavior between individuals. The victims often appear unable to disengage on their own initiative. If fortunate, their family and/or friends provide counseling and intervention to help end these cycles of abuse.
Yet society as a whole suffers serial victimizations by these two mainstream political parties. Ever since the Reagan Administration identified government as the problem the resulting orgy of deregulation and bureaucratic bloating continues unabated from one election to the next.
Some wish to call them incompetent idiots. Others wish to call them lying frauds. I suggest we make peace and call them incompetent lying idiot frauds.
The system they destroy also provides all the wealth and power expended in the destruction. Literally self-destruction. It seems an entire spectrum of pathologies plague our financialized government.
Narcissism
Borderline Personality Disorder
Characteropathy
Sociopathy
Psychopathy
Witness the unnecessary pain, suffering and death. Unnecessary because it results from a financial services industry that compounds debt exponentially inevitably demands more wealth than the total sum of raw materials entering the economy.
Unnecessary because the government fails to enforce the Prompt Corrective Action Law and administers regulation in the interest of the financial services industry contrary to the interests of citizens.
This occurs simultaneously with a prison industry growing faster than it can expand, militarization of local police forces, the historic first ever active deployment of U.S. Armed Forces within the United States of America, de facto nullification of the Bill of Rights and an overall heightening of domestic security.
I hope you are debt free and likewise free from any form of wage slavery. At least that can give you a running start.
Timing The Collapse
FNORD
For anyone without income, a home or even hope, the collapse has already happened. The number of those people on the ropes certainly seems to be increasing daily.
On the other hand, in this personal sense, you may not experience collapse during your lifetime. Of course that is not what the doom and gloomers say.
I used to be a doom and gloomer, an authentic doomsday freak pointing out the failures of our system and its imminent collapse. I’ve learned to temper my fears simply by living long enough.
However, in a larger more empirical sense, we may ask what exactly constitutes a societal collapse. Here we are asking about the nature of the collapse of the Euro-American Empire indicated by the ongoing disintegration of its global hegemony.
If you are someone who does not want to read social criticism, stop now.
If you are worried about you head exploding when you are presented with new information, stop now.
OK, now that I know you are willing to deal with this, I will continue.
As a first step, we have to acknowledge certain conclusions by Karl Marx. I know he is widely disparaged in the mainstream media, at community colleges nationwide and in state universities structured to provide occupational training in technical fields.
Rest assured, at elite institutions training the nest generation of leaders Karl Marx is read and discussed. The children of the hegemonic elite destined to inherit the reigns of power over 99.5% of the rest us know and study his work.
Well, they do if they actually did the work and didn’t just have their families purchase their degrees with another endowment. But that is another issue.
Sure, Karl Marx gets a bad name because of the abuses of the word ‘communist‘ by authoritarian megalomaniacs. To be honest, the world has never seen an authentic communist system in operation.
Part of the problem is that in the day and age of Karl Marx communication was a problem for those living in rural areas. Most people living today cannot imagine the isolation experienced by those living outside of city limits.
Karl Marx proposed an urban workers’ vanguard party to represent those in the hinter lands. This idea of a vanguard party has been much abused by totalitarian regimes around the world that bear little resemblance to his proposed communal life.
He was spot on in exposing the fatal flaw in capitalism. Bear in mind that Karl Marx thought capitalism was a good thing at the time and a step in the right direction away from the manorial serfdom that was the previous norm.
Anyway, capitalism depends upon continuous growth.
The capitalistic system just does not function as a steady state model.
Growth is required to pay off the interest charged on the debt incurred during the capitalization of industry and business. Without growth, only enough profit is made to pay off the principle.
Karl Marx realized that the earth is finite and possesses limited non-renewable resources. Once capitalism went world-wide it was destined to collapse.
In the time of Karl Marx, world-wide pretty much meant Europe in the predominant narrow ethnocentric view. And there were those of his (and later) generations who just couldn’t wait.
Just like the early Christians who grew impatient with God’s promise to destroy the world and started setting fires to help God out, early adopters of the Communist Manifesto perceived revolution as the fast track to post-capitalism.
That turned out badly for all concerned, both Christians and communists.
Karl Marx merely pointed out that given the requirements of capitalism regarding growth, eventually it would hit the limits of growth. With this realization he predicted the certain collapse of capitalism and projected forward from there, betting on human intelligence to come up with something better.
Of course, he thought he was as smart as anyone and perhaps he was. Anyway, communism was merely his projection into the unknowable future and the actual shape of things to come is totally up for grabs.
It is understandable that capitalists the world over took offense. This became the primary driver for political acrimony and national conflict ever since, at least as far as the general public was concerned.
Anyway, capitalism did hit the wall in the early 1970s. China, the last big holdout market, joined in capitalist expansion and left capitalism with no place else to grow.
A whole slew of events indicate the truth in this. Not only did we see the abandonment of the gold standard in the U.S. and the free floating of the U.S. dollar but we also saw the beginning of the first giant debt bubbles.
I first ran away to the mountains in the 1970s believing the collapse was in motion. I was right about that but wrong about the timing regarding my personal situation in the U.S.
The capitalistic hegemons turned to their own populations and began capitalistically monetizing every aspect of personal life, expanding into spheres of influence long felt to be intrinsically off limits. They did this with the full support of governments indebted to their central banks.
The FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector of the economy merged to form the financial services industry once government regulations that previously prevented this were abandoned. We now live in the era when all biopolitical production falls under capitalist control through the monetization of the once common property of social networks.
Without real growth, growth that is only possible through capitalist expansion into new markets, debt accumulates with no possibility of ever being paid off. The ballooning consumer debt, commercial debt and government debt are merely symptoms of the current crisis of capitalism.
The global debt crisis is a symptom of capitalism reaching the limits of growth.
This largely financial crisis will predictably cause a great deal of needless pain, suffering and death but all by itself is something that the human race as a whole can overcome. History is full of examples of empires falling in part due to the debasement of their currency by corrupt politicians and their financial handlers yet people survived to prosper again.
However, in the effort to extract greater profits by depressing the price of labor through population overshoot to produce a surplus supply of labor, other limits have been quickly approached. Paid labor, after all, originated after the population collapsed during the Great Plague and is part of the foundation of capitalism itself.
History indicates that the loss of productive farm land through extractive agricultural methods and the resulting decrease in productivity, coupled with erosion, also contributed to the collapse of empires. Despite so-called advances in food production, decreasing food value and exploding populations drive us towards a Malthusian Catastrophe of global proportions.
The so-called advances in food production have literally been fueled by the extravagant use of non-renewable hydrocarbons. Not only that, but civilization itself, especially as we have experienced it, has been literally fueled by the extravagant use of non-renewable hydrocarbons.
The remaining hydrocarbon reserves are being used by the global hegemonic elite to maintain their positions of privilege and power rather than used to enable a transition to another form of civilization. The U.S. armed forces is the largest user of non-renewable hydrocarbons and it is a safe bet that they will use the last of the extractable reserves maintaining the privilege and power of the global hegemonic elite.
This greatly complicates things.
Empires have fallen due to financial collapse and agricultural collapse but none have faced the exhaustion of non-renewable hydrocarbons. This evokes the specter of peak oil.
All the statistics surrounding peak oil originate from within the oil industry itself. We simply cannot know if peak oil is real or simply a clever ploy to increase profits.
In any event, either actual or engineered scarcity will drive huge profits even higher until it is no longer economically viable to extract hydrocarbons from the earth. People just are not prepared for that and, in fact, the global hegemonic elite works against even the possibility of energy independence.
Then there is the issue of climate change as it seems no longer politically correct to refer to global warming. In the end it does not matter if it was caused by people or not because it is happening and the hegemonic elite refuse to risk their privilege and power to enable meaningful change.
Population overshoot, financial collapse, agricultural collapse, exhaustion of non-renewable hydrocarbons, climate change and the machinations of the global power structure to stay in power creates an environment ripe for rampant deadly new diseases. The next Great Plague is now overdue and the ability to globally respond to it with adequate measures simply degrades by the hour.
Plastic pollution, acidification of the oceans and the collapse of one fishery after another are all further symptoms of an impending global collapse of Biblical proportions. This situation is real and very few are even thinking about preparing for it.
Think about preparing for collapse now.
Do you really want to be dependent on society as it is currently structured?
It seems to me that in order to prepare, concerned people need to be reducing dependence upon the status quo. This is becoming increasingly difficult to do because every effort to disengage from the system will be perceived by the system as an act of rebellion, criminal and terroristic.
I believe some people will survive and a few will continue to live relatively well. But to be able to do so will involve becoming responsible for all aspects of your own life.
It may well be that it will be only the minority who actually does the work to prepare will become the few who survive. And eventually, as the facts of the case become irrefutable and obvious to many more people, the remaining carrying capacity of the planet will not support those who start too late.
As long as the system prevails, you will have access to the Internet. The Internet offers more possibilities for creating income independent of mainstream employment than any brick and mortar opportunity in the world.
Perhaps you should be thinking about creating your own Internet business sooner rather that later. Then you will have a measure of control over timing the collapse, at least as far as your personal life is concerned.
What do you think?
