Debt, bondage, liberation
Financial historian Michael Hudson, author of Super Imperialism, makes a claim that the main contradiction in our society today is not between owner and worker, as the old left claimed, but between creditors and borrowers. I don’t know about “main” anything, contradictions or otherwise, but there is something critical in what he says. Critical because we need to understand if it’s true, and if so, why it’s true, and once we know why it’s true, figure out how to relate that understanding to the kinds of decisions we can and can’t make in our lives.
Very few people, by the way, disagree with Brother Hudson’s basic claim that we are now immersed in something called a debt crisis, even though that claim before last year’s collapse was controversial. But this relation between debtor and creditor – if it indeed qualifies for the status Contradiction, and I suspect it does – is what may hold the key to understanding how to recognize and make helpful decisions about what we can do about it.
I can tell my own experience, which I doubt is terribly exceptional.
We had jobs that delimited where and how we could live. We had kids that required a massive amount of household support to get through their school years; and when the jobs couldn’t keep up, we used credit – knowing full well that it was dangerous, but removing the alligator before we figured out how to drain the swamp. As the debt increased, the reliance on the jobs’ incomes increased until we were in the finger-trap (I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.)
There you go. Readers’ Digest version. I’ll bet it’s not only not exceptional, but that this story could describe – broad as it is – the experience of millions of households. Some people took more than others in lifestyle and credit, and some took less; so you could have the discussion about what was or was not necessary. But here I am concerned only with the shared, subjective experience. Work. Credit. Trap. Work.
And a sense of bondage.
It’s an appropriate response, this sense of bondage, because it is modern bondage, every bit as functional in the preservation of power as chattel slavery (one could argue mathematically that it is more functional in the preservation of more power). Trace the lines of dependency. I depended on the job to qualify for the debt that would make me further dependent on the job… no matter how good or bad that job might be. (Secret. Most jobs are not enjoyable.)
Taking a step back, now, let’s look at the individual in this debt-trap. The debtor has too little money (to use for consumption… and taxes) compared to the cost of total consumption. The compound interest takes this starting point to wend the debtor’s way into ever more abject dependency, as credit is then sought to serve existing debt. Bigger debt in the future to allay debt in the present. What are the two options for the debtor?
Increase the money inflow, or decrease the money outflow.
Since the question of making more money depends mostly on factors outside one’s control (very few people turn down bigger money for smaller money), then the aspect most within our control is reducing consumption.
A parallel strategy – for those households and individuals who want out of this trap, where it is even possible – is to pay down the principle on one’s debt.
These kinds of strategies take time and planning. We are executing such a strategy at our house right now (without sharing other people’s private details); and it required us to sell the house… which we are doing. In our own case, we have a small parachute called a military pension. It’s not enough to live high on the hog, or even at susbsistence level in the more expensive metropoles. But if we reduce our consumption to a level below that modest amount, then we have effectively broken out of the trap. Closing hasn’t happened yet, but once that chicken’s hatched, we pop off the grid and resettle. We could not have done this when the kids were here without tremendous drama, so I won’t put that out as some categorical imperative. People do what they can with what they got now.
A thousand people may have the same ONE problem, but that implies a thousand solutions, not one.
Today, Mike Whitney posted the following at Counterpunch:
The Fed’s extraordinary intervention into the financial markets makes another Lehman-type meltdown extremely unlikely. But while the financial system has been stabilized with a government blank check and rivers of liquidity, the real economy continues to languish.
On its current trajectory, GDP will fluctuate erratically for a decade or more while the economy seesaws between positive and negative growth. That means persistent high unemployment, flagging demand, and falling living standards. Where the economy finally lands, will depend more on government policies than on market dynamics. Political changes, like the upcoming midterm elections and Blue-dog resistance to additional stimulus, only add to the uncertainty. That’s bad news for anyone who’s looking for job security or who wants to see speedy end to the two year-long crisis.
There’s little chance that the financial system will suddenly implode or that the country will be overtaken by Zimbabwe-type hyperinflation. But the economy will undergo a low-grade depression, a period of sluggishness and retrenchment that drags on for, what seems like, an eternity. This is what typically happens when crises are extended by keeping terminally-ill banks on life-support instead of putting them out of their misery. Capital that could…
Be curious to know how other people who have tried, have escaped the debt trap, and how their experience might help others. The main moral in my story is that we were not in a position to “stay put and cut consumption,” what I believe is the ideal. The only asset we could liquidate was the house. But other folks are in other situations, and they need to hear all the options about how to excape bondage… er, debt.
Stan Moore:
I thought that ecological economist Herman Daly had a very interesting reference in the appendix to his seminal work “The Limits to Growth”. He referred to the Old Testament concept of the “Jubilee Year”, which according to the scriptures, was to occur every fiftieth year, after seven periods of seven years, with every seventh year being a Sabbath Year or year of rest, and the fiftieth year being the Jubilee Year, or year of wealth redistribution for the entire Nation of Israel. Imagine if such a redistribution were to occur every fifty years (or some other interval) in US society…
One thing Michael Hudson has pointed out is that the system of debt bondage did not just happen. It was engineered to happen. It was designed to happen. And it is antithetical to democracy and freedom.
If democracy was real, we would not have Congress debating how to best reward and enhance the profits of the private health insurance industry under the guise of health “reform”.
And I say that Christianity has failed in this respect as evidenced by what I heard when Barbara Ehrenreich was interviewed on the radio this week. She mentioned the mega-church gospel of prosperity that runs opposite what Jesus taught: pray for the necessities, the “daily bread” and not wealth, which is a pitfall and a snare. Joel Osteen says God wants us all to be prosperous and even wealthy, but Jesus did not say that; and warned how difficult it would be for a person of means to enter the kingdom of heaven.
From this angle, it appears that the US society has only just begun to reap what it has sown. We still cannot seem to grasp that debt does not equal wealth and our national and personal accounting systems have utterly miscalculated our real status. But the accounting must eventually occur, and the accounts must be balanced and settled. And it will not be pretty and it will not be comfortable.
Back to Scripture: Those who were first will be last, and those who were last will be first. Or as Richard Heinberg said: “The Party’s Over”.
Stan Moore
11 November 2009, 10:24 pmRichard:
Yeah, this sense of bondage is very real. We’re fortunate enough to be in a situation where we can liquidate our house (where we have a house that can be liquidated, with a decent enough mortgage that the sale will not only not destroy us itself, as it would for all too many, but will leave us with some leftover). In a little over a month we can be completely debt-free. But we have a 15-month old baby, so I can’t just quit my job, which takes four hours of commuting…. but maybe someday soon, if we can save enough…
12 November 2009, 2:13 amStan:
Sabbath, every seven days, everyone rests, including servants and draft animals. In other words, no exceptions by the owner. Every seven years, all debt is forgiven. Every seven times seven years (49 years) there is a general Jubilee in which land that has been lost (through debt) is returned to the original families. This was clearly a leveling, and the Jesus movement was critical of how far their people had strayed from it. It was first and foremost a Jubilary movement; and the introduction of the Cosmic Christ – separated from the secular – was a way to get around this core principle by reinterpretation and by fusion of the (hierarchicalized) church with the state. The message keeps getting through the clutter though. In the Lord’s Prayer, it says “give us this day our daily bread” (a call to simplicity and against undue accumulation, with ref in the Hebrew Bible)… “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” (“tresspasses” was introduced in translation, hmmm… but the words debt and sin are the same in the original).
Richard, I wish you luck, amigo.
Stan M, I want to quibble again over words even as I validate your point about debt and intention. “Christianity” is a historical phenomenon that contains too many contradictions to be useful in sentences that say Christianity has done this or hasn’t done that. The prosperity gospel is an perverse outgrowth of the dispensationalist heresy, further simplified to suit the dumbed-down consumerist consciousness of a desperate age, and part of a vast confidence game. You rightly point out that there are some problems with this once you consult the record, as it were.
Whitney, who has revised his own estimates of the future (never a safe practice), now believes that the liquidity-flood unleashed by the government will contain the problem (in macro-terms) in the short run, while making the bottom fall further away in the future. But this is what Mark Jones predicted on Crashlist ten years ago, too. It’s like predicting the next big San Fransisco earthquake. May can confidently say that the physical preconditions exist, but they don’t know when the fault will slip.
They are reflating the bubble, and doing so now in the housing market (which is the particular wave Sherry and I are riding to get us over the reefs, so to speak). They really don’t understand anything except rentier capitalism at this point, so ossified has that discredited economic orthodoxy become. The fall of the dollar that many have predicted and secretly hoped for is still not on the horizon, because the rest of the world is still trapped inside the system of dollar hegemony… a point the Euro-replacing-dollar folks haven’t understood. No one is interested in selling down the dollar, even if they could.
This actually buys some time, I suspect, since an abrupt fall of the dollar would not liberate the world from dollar hegemony, but create untold havoc among the most vulnerable. It is in this period that people need to seek ways off-grid, off the debt grid first, then off the physical grid (food and land) where and how possible.
12 November 2009, 6:06 amStan Moore:
There is a night club in Berkeley, CA called Ashkenaz, on San Pablo Avenue — sort of a dive where jazz and cross-cultural music is played and listened to. There used to be a big, hand-painted sign on the front exterior wall of the building that said “Tax the rich until there are no more rich”.
Which leads me to think about philantrophy and the “giving” by entities such as the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation, Warren Buffet, and others. I have not studied such philanthrophy closely, but I get the feeling when I am exposed to some of the details that it is not exactly what I wish it was. I see elements of self-serving, tax advantages, creation of further markets by which the giver can benefit, etc. The goals of the giving are usually defined by the giver rather than by a pool of potential receivers. It is better than nothing, but..
I have commented in wildlife circles about similar concepts of contributions to wildlife conservation by corporations. I happen to feel that much of such giving is still a net loss for wildlife when you do a cost/benefit comparison of the economic activity of the corporations and its impact on the natural world versus the direct giving from the profits of the enterprises. Some researchers have demonstrated that economic growth itself is the single leading limiting factor for wildlife in the aggregate, so the better solution to giving from the profits to habitat enhancement, would be to scale back the enterprises themselves and limit the damage, rather than trying to heal it.
The same is true of “trickle down economics”. People like Ronald Reagan and those with his mindset have/had no limits to their greed in terms of economic madness and manipulations, but there were always limits to the trickling down that went on. It was/is an imbalanced equation designed to preserve and enhance wealth and power of the few against the interests of the many.
Power is what is really at stake, because once you or your corporate entity get a billion or two, you have all the operating capital and wealth you need, but you crave the power to do as you please, to exploit your advantages, and to continue to accumulate more.
It is fascinating how the use of debt has exacerbated all of this, and the wealthy have learned how to manipulate debt to their own advantage. Micheal Hudson has spoken of the massive power of compound interest. The bankers are able to borrow at low interest from the government and the Federal Researve, to create demand and desire for material things by consumers, requiring debt in the absence of fair wages, and then to fund that debt at compound interest at much higher rates than they paid for it. This is usury. It has become obscene.
The wealthy use debt as a tool and they apply the golden rule by making the rules due to their accumulation of gold.
The whole system is corrupt. It scale is enormous, but what is new now is that the planet itself is hugely affected. We are at Peak Everything, minerals, fuels, even Peak Peace. I came up with the term Peak Peace to recognize that the Bush Administration obviously made a calculation that war would be the solution to Peak Oil, and Obama is following suit. There will be more warmaking and more severe warmaking in resource wars as the planet’s endowment of raw materials further diminishes. These will be “hot wars”, cold wars, trade wars, but they will be wars. The losers will experience worse bondage than before.
And the best we can do as individuals, I believe, is to take our own survival, and that of our families, our close friends, clans, tribes, communities seriously and make the necessary arrangements to survive in small numbers with the best skills we can assemble with local resources and assets. I think Michael Ruppert is fundamentally correct, and James Howard Kunstler, too that the mega-system of governance will break down and fail.
This winter will be very interesting to watch. because the system is running on fumes and corroding, imploding, and exploding here and their within its massive, aging infrastructure.
Best to stay under the radar screen of authorities that can harm you and to practice living free.
Stan Moore
12 November 2009, 9:12 amaskod:
If I remember correctly, the transition from the roman empire to medieval times included (among much else) and increased indebtness and increased taxation of the free peasants. This led to peasants moving to the untaxed rich peoples properties to work for them instead. Loosing the tax base, the empire answered with banning the peasants from moving (making them serfs).
Still being unable to pay their taxes and debts they had to sell their land (and themselves being bound to it) to the rich, who became richer (and still was not taxed). Eventually the empire could not even perform the basic tasks of a state, like providing military and order. So the rich fortified their roman mansions and hired private security. And then we have a medieval society.
12 November 2009, 10:39 amLouis Proyect:
Stan, I don’t have an email address for you but if you haven’t seen “The Good Soldier”, I can send you my copy.
12 November 2009, 11:49 amStan:
Bit off topic, but not really. In this transition that Sherry and I are doing, we have begun the process of giving away pretty much everything that won’t fit into four suitcases. It’s actually pretty hard work, giving everything away; but what I really want to note is that with everything that goes now, I feel the weight of it has been taken off me. I recommend giving everything away to anybody… who can.
12 November 2009, 2:27 pmCurt Kastens:
I recommend that you do not give away your recliner. You will really miss it. I did.
12 November 2009, 3:43 pmI was very glad when we got another one.
gdenby:
Just to add a few comments about the reference of Hudson “makes a claim that the main contradiction in our society today is not between owner and worker, as the old left claimed, but between creditors and borrowers.”
If I recall correctly the terminology he uses, he sees that Financial Capital has taken control of Industrial Capital. Thus, the contradiction between the old owner, “Industrial Capital,” and the worker has dropped to a lesser status compared to the contradiction between creditor (finance) and debtor (all others.) He notes that Marx only mentions Financial Capital as a footnote, believing that no society would be foolish enough to turn over control of real productive capacity to finance, which would inevitably ruin that capacity.
He offers quite a bit historical background at:
michael-hudson.com/articles/debt/
As an aside, when I was younger, I limited myself to owning what I could fit in the back of a car. I’ve tried to get my kids to do something similar, but they do have a strong tendency to collect things. At least, they seem to have learned to live within their means, altho those means are getting mighty thin just now. With the passage of time, I find myself wanting a few more things. I doubt I could fit what I now consider necessities in 4 suitcases. Dang, I need that warm blanket at night, and the pillows to prop up the aching joints.
12 November 2009, 4:00 pmWaldow:
Have posted this idea around here before… last year before it was a going concern for A. and I.
Lease land to farm right now.
It is cheap.
Because the landed gentry and the Kulaks still dream of parleying their chunk of earth into loveable dollar bills and are loath to sell given what they see as depressed prices (FALSE!!! See linked story from MCR http://newobservations.net/2009/11/08/conservative-property-index-predicts-we-are-less-than-half-way-through-fall/).
Because Mod Amis are usually conditioned against hard ass work, and are convinced that small scale farming is just a waste of time or a hobby.
I am a bankrupt shit, and We (A. mostly) Craigslisted 7 acres. Terms are: Yearly lease in exchange for three days a year of my carpentry skills. (The going rate for a good carpentry contractor is 400$/Day, so one could have suggested $1200/year, but people tend to get more enjoyment out of a trade, and like I said, we’s broke jokes.)
About $200 an acre/a year for good land in the Willamette Valley. Get a $2 lease form from a office supply store. Formality and ceremony are right. Find good hearted people to work with (A. and I left out ideology purity in finding a landowner).
We went with goats and pigs because our backyard gets us enough vegetables, and we love meat and milk from weeds and kitchen scraps.
Fencing cost 500 bucks and a whole lott’a work. Thankfully there was a neglected Christmas Tree plot overgrown which our land owner needed thinned badly.
Fall, bark, char, and slather with used motor oil. Pound them into the ground. The most costly part of a sturdy fence for nothing but blisters. Fir doesn’t last as forever, but what does?
Thankfully my A. is proof that a girly girl can work as hard as an ass like me. She does the daily caretaking and helps with the big work days too (So long as it isn’t in the Poison Oak). Most of the goat families you come across have a Woman in charge who seems to wear the pants in relation to her hippish hubby.
Stock can be gotten cheap or free, but we got fancy feral Keikos and Alpines. It is easier to start out with good genes.
It is at this part of my speil where people are yawning and going back to their philosophical discussions or back to trading anti-authoritarian gossip. Oh well. On occasion I get friends or activist accountancies to help me on the farm, and then I get to learn who has good character. Bonus.
It took us 1.5 years to get here, and we’ll be kidding in a month.
In a few years, when prices are really low, we hope to buy so we can have privacy… and scary ceremonies!
Good luck…. and thanks for the tact lessons over the years. I enjoy talking about this stuff and helping people, but nobody ever takes me up on it.
-Broke Joke Waldow
12 November 2009, 4:55 pmGuy Montag:
Stan,
Glad to see that you’re getting off the debt-grid and food-grid. Once you get some land of your own, you can garden, etc (I recall you having some trouble with the “Condo Nazi’s” about your edible front lawn a few years ago).
I’ve been slowly making process toward getting “off-grid” the past few years. But, my wife’s been very busy the last couple of years and I’ve got a couple of small children to look after as well.
Fortunately, we’re in the position to pay off our mortgage (certified check goes in the mail tomorrow)and I’ve got 10 acres, and a couple of barns and farmhouse to work with. Been heating my MI farmhouse with wood the past couple of years. Decent size garden. Biking into town 17 miles on my fancy recumbent bike to work at my firestation.
Unlike yourself, I don’t have a military pension to fall back onto (I was only in the MI ARNG for eight years with a LRRP company). At age 44, I’ve got at least 11 more years on the fire dept before I can retire. We’re being hit with layoffs and paycuts now, but I should have enough seniority to weather the economic storm. We can live well under our means if we have to and still have a bit of savings in reserve. We’re fortunate to be in better shape than most folks in MI.
Best of luck on your continuing escape from bondage.
P.S. In a previous post, you mentioned your “muckraking” experience with the Pat Tillman case. If you’re curious, I’ve posted three documents at feralfirefighter.blogspot.com (now where would I have gotten the inspiration for that blog name?) which detail the roles that Senator James Webb, Thom Shanker (NYT Pentagon Reporter), and Andrew Exum (Center for a New American Security thinktank pushing for the Afghan “surge”) played in whitewashing the role of General McChrystal in the cover-up of the Tillman fratricide.
12 November 2009, 10:35 pmMichael Anderson:
Good for you, Stan—now I understand your reference to “chicks hatching”—took it literally instead of figuratively. I think that giving away (or selling) what you don’t need is a good thing, and I have been through several iterations of this, and probably another to come soon.
What we have lost is the ability to see that, whatever our focus in life is, it always invloves giving something up, in fact, giving most things up. We have different things we do to make meaning in our lives…speaking for myself, I like, and am attached to and use the THINGS I need to make sound (and I happen to like my recliner, too)—but even this premise is flexible.
I also realize that what’s being discussed here can be over and above, and yet delicately intertwined with, that opinion.
Too bad I missed you in Fayetteville, but you be busy! I did get to Quaker House and had a leisurely conversation with Chuck Fager, about Quaker meetings, what Quakers are and aren’t, our respective origins, and picked up some of their literature on military alternatives (for future use on certain family members). It was refreshing and informative…and right peaceable. Recommended.
13 November 2009, 1:31 pmSean:
@ Stan Moore, 12 November 2009, 9:12 am –
Excellent post. Thanks.
13 November 2009, 2:56 pmKim Sky:
Wow. I really appreciate this thread. I was kind of shocked to read your post. Such simple and honest conversation about ones very own “financial problems”. To me, to speak openly to the whole world about this, is to break a cultural taboo?
Or perhaps it is because I am so overwhelmed myself with the current situation. I have a few male friends that are either already retired, or retiring at the end of this year, they own their own houses, and are looking to live for the rest of their lives on some 50,000 a year. AND, wondering if this will be enough! Wow. I’ve been living off of 10,000 a year or less, for the last ten years. This was when I was a single parent supporting a child, and spending in ways to provide my daughter with a decent childhood. The best thing I did was live in Costa Rica with her for a year, where her best friend lived in a tin shack, where her mother recounted how many times she passed out in school because of hunger, how she would painfully bite her fingers in her enthusiasm to get to eat, when she finally did get a bit of food, etc … so during her teans, my daughter insisted on getting clothes at the good-will, and understood what real poverty was.
And now. Ugh.
My sister is on the verge of accepting bankruptcy, my brother lost his house, etc. A close friend, who three years ago was making huge amounts of money cannot get a job and just signed up for food-stamps. I could sign up for food stamps too, but don’t want to. Many women are doubling, trippling up. This friend is renting a room from a single mother, who just now has added a renter who is paying for the use of the couch! To be able to provide decent housing and rent rooms seems like an amazing service and survival tactic.
Anyway at this point, I need look no further than myself and friends to identify a cause to “fight” for. As you point out, the debt thing is distinctly confusing. How to wrap ones brain around that, how to find a J.O.B.?
Some examples, two different friends bought a piece of land (one in Utah and the other on the big island-Hawaii) and built their houses, buying piece by piece with cash. Impressive. And actually easy to do, anyway here in the west where building supplies can be easily scavanged. These houses are beautiful. They have a simplicity and beauty that is very striking. It is with deep emotion one encounters such a home. None of the plastic, modern, magical or incomprehensible scientific home stuff. They are real. My friend in Hawaii has been able to construct a series of small “buildings” scattered over three acres, each with a roof and two walls, that’s all that is necessary there. A bedroom, an art studio, a guest room, a kitchen/living-room with catch-water system, windmill for electricity, composting toilet, and now engaging in farming, which is quite a feat as the land is all radical lava. And — the first year of her project, they lived under a tiny tree, constructed a tarp, walked in everything, water etc. No electricity for two years.
I absolutely love what Waldow is orchestrating, what courage and imagination! Hats off to you! Hopefully you’ll keep us updated on this important experiment of yours.
Personally, I have always been able to load what I own into my car. I live super simply — I just borrowed money to pay off my credit card, and now have an ultra hyper drive to work when I have work. It feels like clinging to the very edges of survival. The company where I work may fail. No savings. I had a nightmare last night where I realized that I may never, ever again be able to afford to leave this country! Which has been my way of sustaining self-life — how my sanity has been maintained. Quite the nightmare!
Hopefully we all can discover methods for jumping off that grid. Where we are actually leaving behind the humiliation and self-depredation one suffers in this system! Move towards forging a beautifully sane form of existence.
I’ve always been able to load what I own into my car. I live super simply — as my father always says — it does not matter what you make — you must spend less than you earn. Well, I can hardly earn less.
13 November 2009, 3:06 pmmark:
There is a video I saw recently on FSTV called “Capitalism Hits The Fan.” It consists of a lecture given by the economist Dr. Michael Wolff. You can watch it on YouTube if you don’t have dish/cable. This presentation is about the best I’ve seen thus far in explaining where we are and how as a society we got here. The economic forces that we are dealing with are systemic. They will not be “fixed” by “stimulus packages” however fanciful and sincere.
I don’t have any advice for anybody on how to proceed financially exept to say be thankful for what you have. I’ve read and seen Michael Hudson interviewed often. He’s a breath of fresh air. But if what Hudson has to say rings a bell with you, you definitely should check out “Capitalism Hits The Fan.”
13 November 2009, 5:29 pmStan:
It is taboo, Kim, far moreso than talking about one’s sex life (which I will not do here). That should tell us something.
I think it was Stienbeck who was writing about two drifters who showed up at the same hobo camp during the Depression. One said to the other, “I lost my farm.” Then the other replied, “I lost my farm, too.” Stienbeck called this a first cell-division in the gestation of a social revolution.
We gotta talk, and we gotta talk personal. Feminists told us that way back in the day. The personal is the political.
13 November 2009, 7:03 pmaskod:
If you buy the capitalistic paradigm, your income and wealth reflects your worth in society. Of course it is taboo to disclose your exact position. The taboo also makes sure that you do not relax your attempts to advance or get a clear picture of how poor you are in contrast to the 1% or so that owns most of everything.
The alternative is not buying the paradigm, but that is easier said then done. Breaking the taboo might be a step towards breaking the paradigm.
14 November 2009, 5:12 pmjuannie:
It is with a true sense of empathy that I begin my writing of this post and with a little trepidation that my words may sound arrogant. I hope they don’t come across to as such because it is in my heart to be helpful and not preachy. A little personal history may help in this regard.
I handed in my written resignation to my employer, Fisher Controls Co., a wholly owned subsidary of Monsanto, in October 1977 after returning from my first ever encounter workshop entitled “Self Esteem and the Art of Being”. My discovery was that the one thing that stood in the way of a higher self esteem was that I was holding on to a job that I neither enjoyed nor respected what I was doing. My lady friend, I discovered on our return trip from Chicago to central IA, had come up with the very same discovery so on the trip back we decided that if this really meant anything we would so move to quit our jobs and move on. Beginning in January 1978 I was unemployed and started using my wits and working at under-the-radar jobs while divesting myself of both debt and assets until in 1982, when I married my present wife we owned exactly what we could fit into my VW Bus and her large Ford sedan.
In 1990 when our daughter was five years old, I flew back above the radar and signed on with a private research scientist as his associate and have been processing his Meterological data ever since. That job is slated to end sometime in 2010 and I will be back to my wits, my meager SS and a modest IRA which I wisely moved from a mutual fund to CD’s before the crash, for my existence. My only long term debt in that interval was my home mortgage which I paid off before term by forgoing most of the niceties of modern living and adding a dedicated extra principle to the monthly payment. We now own a three and one half acre mortgage free property with a small but comfortable home which we heat with a highly efficient passive wood stove, a small barn and a 10′ by 18′ out building or as my wife calls it, a cottage. We garden and harvest a large portion of our winter supplies as well as a higher portion of summer vegetables for our table. We hope to add an attached greenhouse and maybe eventually get off the grid.
I’m approaching my 70′th year with my wife a few years behind and we are still in good health for our age but I don’t see how we will be able to continue as the years continue to accumulate. I will stop eating before I enter the senior care options I see available.
Now comes my suggestions that I believe would be as pertinent for everyone else as ourselves if we can realize our objectives. Civilization is clearly in the process of self destruction. I needn’t elaborate all the obvious warning signs as all here I believe know but maybe still with some degree of denial. Civilization exists, in Stanley Diamond’s words, as conquest abroad and repression at home. The system and culture is designed to benefit only the wealthiest but even they must eventually come down as the process of host consumption and despoliation continues unabated. I believe as Derrick Jensen does that the sooner the crash comes the less painful and the better for all of the planet’s inhabitants, not just we humans. It is cruel and not a picture easy to accept in full clarity but it is essential that we do. If some survive, the question is how do we move on in ways that don’t continue the destructive practices of industrial civilization and the dog eat dog, self centered and serving capitalistic mentality.
The answer is in the anthesis of the present system’s premise. We must first free ourselves from the attachments that still bind us to the disintegrating system whether they be debt or niceties or just programmed acceptance. We must realize our connectiveness in lieu of our stubborn individuality. We must come together as small human sized groups that can effect self governance, self sustainability and work toward our mutual not individual benefits. We must grow our own food, gather our own energy needs from the energy freely bestowed upon us from our generous father the sun, accept the responsibility for the health and well being of the land bases upon which we depend and understand the source of our sustenance and develop and express heart felt gratitude for each other and all that we depend upon. In very practical and immediate action we must seek out others of like mind and begin the process of fusing into small groups where we share our individual resources to glean the synergistic strengths that will see us through the period of cataclysm.
Easy for me to say, I know. I’m not there yet although I have been for some time, so far unsuccessfully, seeking local others of like mind to invest with in this venture. It’s not just a difficult decision to make but difficult to implement as there are few of us who are truly ready to abandon ship and start the swim toward that distant island we can’t even clearly see yet. But we must, I believe with all my heart and mind. Good luck to all and may you successfully navigate around all the sharks between here and there.
15 November 2009, 7:21 amWaldow:
Is it possible for a blog to be *so good* at dialectics, as Feral Scholar is, and still be a platform for finding ways to take action in the world?
Please! Post more experiences and practical ideas on the topic of Debt, Bondage, and Liberation. Sometimes this amounts to a status exchange, which is not fun for the listener, but if it identifies more ways we can #$^#^& act, then I’d love to read somebody’s brag (and of course some of us brag with lamentations! Who doesn’t enjoy some salty tears in a way…)
Kim made some beautiful candles last year for Christmas gifts. Theres a good example of getting off the #^#%^#%^ Cartesian consumer plain(and timely too).
Big or small, I’d like to hear it. What do you all got?
24 November 2009, 8:11 pmMichael Anderson:
Just in case you thought the Islamic system was immune from failure—looks like they’re as creative as Goldman Sachs with financial instruments:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/western-investors-watch-nervously-as-worth-of-islamic-bond-is-tested-to-limit/story-e6frg90o-1225804452440?referrer=email&source=AusBus_Lunch_email_nl
Western investors watch nervously as worth of Islamic bonds is tested to limit
A DEFAULT by Dubai will put the world of Islamic finance to the test at a time when hard questions are being asked by bankers and lawyers about the protection afforded by financial instruments that are Shariah compliant.
The bond that lies at the heart of the threat of default and financial ignominy for Dubai is a sukuk, an instrument invented by bankers and Islamic scholars to comply with a Shariah (Islamic law) prohibition against the payment of interest on money.
26 November 2009, 9:40 pmJonathan:
One idea that might help bring down debt is that if you are a home owner or someone who pays for utilities, consider insulating and weatherizing your house. There can be a bit more to it than just putting plastic on your windows. Bruce Harley’s book Insulate and Weatherize (Tauton) is an excellent resource. Also http://www.builditsolar.com – especially his section on the “Half Plan”. Most are modest DIY projects.
With a modest amount of DIY work, id guess that most households could expect 1/3 to 1/2 reduction in utilities, which would be a significant monthly savings for most people. Most of the simple techniques will pay for themselves in just a few months, and even some of the more heavy duty projects will give about a 20% yearly return on investment. This is tax and inflation proof – and will only save more money as energy prices go up. See here for ideas: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Renewable-Energy/2008-02-01/Easy-Projects-for-Instant-Energy-Savings.aspx
This could give someone a little breathing room in their monthly budgets to start paying down debt.
Also insulating and weatherizing are just as important in warmer climes if you use air conditioning.
2 December 2009, 9:29 pm