I don’t think life fears anything. Bacteria and fungi and grasses and small creatures have staying power well past nuclear wars and rapid climate change and super volcanos. People…may well be a failed experiment of life. By any metric: biomass, number, niche utilization …bacteria are the most successful life forms.

The most dangerous myth is to believe that the United States, in its foreign policies, means well.

I think you start with a return to traditional lending models, and the natural interest rate will reappear.

1. Encourage lending for productive purposes instead of just on real estate

2. No loans that cannot follow you after bankruptcy

3. No debtor prisons

4. Remove the belief that repayment is virtuous

5. Hold banks accountable for loans they make

6. Let banks fail if they make bad loans

7. Hold executive boards responsible for targeted lending

8. Reenact anti-usury laws

9. Don’t have a money system that inflates perpetually

With these things in place, good loans will be repaid, and bad loans will now. Banks who act antisocially will suffer for it. Asset classes that people need (houses) will return to more accessible pricing.

All I know is a plutocracy that feigns being a democracy, but that is democratic in name only. There is no public participation with political decisions, though the people have “the vote.” There is no meaningful conversation about social issues beyond distractor issues that have no bearing on the ability of the rulers to extract. The virtues of capitalism are common sense among the masses, but socialism exists for the rich. Freedom is glorified and overflowing, but only so long as you choose to pursue activities that don’t impede the ruling class.

I’d like to hear more about your experience

And then, read Sheldon Wolin’s “Democracy Incorporated.” I’ll even buy it for you if you’re unable.

I’m going to post this again because I think it’s important. If you’re going to absorb some information today, absorb something of great value.

https://youtu.be/LGc8DMHMyi8

https://youtu.be/LGc8DMHMyi8

As if I needed another reason to sit in delicious conversation with Professor Chomsky today.

“Cheap borrowing advantages the borrower.”

Not really. The fact that money is cheap means that everybody has already borrowed on the real assets that you desire. Prices are inflated on houses not as a virtue of their productiveness, but because of available money. Paying 6% interest to borrow on a house that was worth 2 years of your income in 1950, has now transitioned into borrowing at 3% on a house that is worth 12 years of income. You’re paying far far more in interest because you’re playing with an asset class that is massively inflated because of those aggressive loans, because of the myth of necessary home ownership, because of the impossibility of bank default due to bailouts, and because of the belief that prices will always rise.

Most important is the success that the finance industry has had in convincing the populous that prompt debt repayment is next to Godliness. Never before was virtue tied up with debt repayment. But now, people are expected to impoverish themselves, eat twinkies, live in boxes, and sell kidneys to repay debts. A debt that can’t be repaid, historically won’t. And it shouldn’t. Excessive interest is usury, and excessive charges from monopolies that corner people into participating with a one-sided loan, are unjust.

If you default on a loan, perhaps you’re a creep. But perhaps you can’t repay it. And if you can’t repay it, it was a bad loan and a bad business move by the bank.

If you have to play your master’s game, by all means play to the best of your ability. If you need to borrow, go for cheaper money.

The structure of debt has been altered from its of original form, to the advantage of the finance industry. The natural state of things is for a lender to make a loan based on his understanding of the likelihood that a borrow will pay it back. If they made a loan to someone who couldn’t make the payments, it was a bad loan. Default ensued and it was the bank’s loss. There was a risk to both sides of the contract. The natural rate of interest that covered such default risk was around 6%.

But now, loans are a one-sided risk. 1. Because 90% of loans are made on real assets (property) and are no longer made for business ventures, there is always an asset for the bank to redeem.

2. Debtors prisons are a real thing, and the possibility of imprisonment alters the mathematics of a potential debtor who cannot pay a loan—perhaps he’ll sell his child into slavery instead of defaulting on a bad loan.

3. Banks have written their own laws to make default impossible for some loans. If a graduate cannot pay 7% on her student loans, too bad. A 200k loan for a cooking degree would have been considered a bad loan in any other generation. The banks know it cannot be paid back. But now default is impossible.

4. Large default is no longer absorbed by the banks who are responsible for their poor business decision. Obama made it clear in ‘08 that losses would be passed on to taxpayers.

Even low interest rates are far higher than are needed to cover a loan that has no counterparty risk. 3% seems like a deal only because 18% credit card loans exist. A reversion to fair lending practices must happen, but will never happen so long as the banks write their own anti-default laws.

Yea. That’s up there with the absurdity of being asked to remember one’s home address or social security number.

https://youtu.be/LGc8DMHMyi8

Let us not forget what the Federal Reserve is. It is a collection of 12 private banks…each structured as a corporation, enacted and controlled by a collection of private bankers, to loan money to the government at interest. Government debts…your public debts…are debts to the banking class.

The goal of the FIAT industries is to shift an ever larger percentage of the peoples’ income into rents: home insurance, mortgage interest, realtor fees, construction costs, inspection fees, etc. As long as the people believe that real estate “always go up,” it’s easy to encourage them to drink from the well of ever-indebtedness. The virtue of home ownership is key, and an ever-explaining money supply is key. There was a time that a man could buy a house for 2-year’s labor, and still eat. Now he’s on the hook for 30-40 years and is buying his house 2-3 times. This is debt peonage, and Karl Marx, Adam Smith, JS Mill, Bertrand Russell, Noam Chomsky, and Sheldon Wolin all said (in different ways) that debt peonage is slavery. The difference is, that the masses are aware of slavery and so they fight it.

They’re not borrowing that money to buy you that house. Most money is loaned into existence by private institutions. It isn’t printed. You’re paying them 3%/year…say $9,000 of your work energy… which is real value. They’re adding a $9,000 credit to their balance sheet entitled “SquirrelMaster’s real work energy”, which can be redeemed…for your house. On the debit side, they loan you money out of thin air. A loan in fiat currency is a trade: one man’s labor for one institution’s…promise. They make loans off of depositors’ holdings, but they’re allowed to leverage those deposits and lend out almost 100x of their real assets. The myth of an IOU is that it is always good…but debts that cannot be paid, won’t. It’s musical chairs over and over again. It works as long as the music is playing, but the cyclical nature of finance capitalism that has replaced industrial capitalism, will devastate common people every 8-12 years…as long as it exists. People will default, lose their assets. Banks will demand bailouts…which is tax payers’ future purchasing power. People will lose their work energy which the FIAT (finance, insurance, real estate) sectors encouraged them to leverage because “buying a house is the American dream.”

My dream is not to be enslaved by a system of musical chairs, and to not trade my time for a promise that by design, can either impoverish me or my fellow man

That puts every “homeowner” on the hook for 5% mortgage interest for the next 30 years. It shifts an immense amount of wealth from the masses into the financial and real estate sectors. It isn’t that the government wants homeownership. The financial industry pushes the government to incentivize purchases to secure “their” interest, rents, and an ever-inflated asset class that promises greater rents in the future. The financial and real estate sectors are also the ones pushing to lower taxes on real estate, which makes more income available for mortgage interest at the expense of social programs depending on that tax basis.

There was a time when civic participation meant picketing, rioting, striking, writing, and marching. A hundred years of aggressive, bloody, and militarized responses to suppress insurrection, and a campaign by our rulers to convince the public that proper participation should be limited to voting and accepting the outcome, have left us with a citizenry who are in large part left out of any meaningful participation, and without any understanding of what civic participation really is.

A disinterested public that accepts that any civic participation is futile, is the goal of an oligarchy that advocates for democracy in name only. The shift from real representation in the Articles of Confederation to a more centralized and representative structure peddled by the Constitution, was designed to bypass the intrusive meddling by a decentralized populous.

The remaining voters are convinced by a complicit media that the salient issue in elections is “values,” not the endless wars, a faltering economy, or widening class differences.