Bailout
 
 
 
   So, lately I read that the U.S. Congress has approved 700 billion
dollars in treasury savings bonds to be given away to some big scale
creditors that are on the verge of default with their depositors. My
understanding is that these bond notes are to be traded with the Federal
Reserve Bank for new (counterfeit) Federal Reserve notes, in a familiar
arrangement in which the government pays it's bills with new counterfeit
money that looks legitimate from such a source, and the Federal Reserve Bank
sells the bonds, likewise looking like a credible source. In this case
though, the numbers are a bit extreme, leaving me to wonder if anyone will
buy the bonds.
   According to the Federal Reserve website, the total Federal Reserve
Notes in world circulation stands at about 750 billion dollars worth. I
presume that means that the new event will nearly double that amount. The
total quantity of Federal Reserve Notes has been on an exponentially rising
curve since 1960, but the new jump is still shocking to look at.
   I, and most everyone I know, are a bit confused by the terms that
economists use, and naturally a little dubious of the ethics involved. But
President Obama apparently approved the bailout idea so I took another
analytic look at the matter, and now I can see giving the go ahead myself.
   I don't perceive the bailout as an ideal answer, but as a best answer to
an American culture in which an overwhelming majority is either
irresponsible with borrowed capital or outright seeking something for
nothing at anyone else's expense. I don't perceive the bailout as a scam by
the wealthier people, partly because I presume they hold most of the loose
Federal Reserve Notes that stand to take a precipitous drop in value, and
also that I presume they don't have especially large deposit accounts at the
credit companies that will get the new money. I think they are owed large
amounts of the Notes.
   Reading about the great economic crash of 1873 in the United States,
with no central bank to blame for it, no New Deal programs to ease the
catastrophic unemployment and people going hungry, and huge profitable
deals for Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, I am struck by the moderate
impact of the present crisis. The corporate elite who presumably always
have their way in such matters are apparently deliberately promoting a
better life for everyone, through a more stable employment situation and
moderate predictable inflation in spite of a mass of humanity who refuse to
be deliberate about the management of the resources that they directly
depend on.
   I grew up in a subculture in America that gave no hint of looking for
something for nothing or being heedless with their own basic resources. I
passed my teenage years in two middle class suburbs of two little college
towns, in a family too poor to make nonessential purchases and too focused
on nobility of expression to obtain used items or seek assistance from
friends. To request a purchase from my parents never occurred to me; it
would have been unthinkable, a gross indignity to myself and a rude
disrepect of their generosity. We took food from government programs, but
only what was freely offerred.
   All the adults I met as a child maintained the same dignity as my
parents. I was thirty years old before I met any adult who lived hand to
mouth with their resources. At the age of 51, I know almost no-one who isn't
grossly mismanaging their resources and most people are quite desperate alot
of the time. Looking back, I notice that even my parents avoid capitalizing
their own life support systems as much as possible while still maintaining
an appearance of dignity. Many people now openly seek opportunities to be
exploitive of me or others and perceive a similiar heartlessness in me or in
the large scale social leadership. Many of them overtly mock my concern
about it.
   The idea of a loan default completely appauled me as a child. I imagined
it to be extremely rare and as tragic and regretable as a house fire. I
never witnessed either one. Nowadays I often hear people discuss defaulting
on a loan as casually as a game of chess. Sentimentality about property and
offering an honest consideration for something acquired never enter a
conversation about a loan, as if those matters are never a factor.
   I took a job as a used car salesman on commission for one week many
years ago, and I'm still taking in the implications of what I saw. I did not
make any sales at all. The fellow who hired me told me good-naturedly that
I was a jinx, when he sent me away. He said all his customers bought their
cars through high interest car loans and that most of them were unreliable
with payments, often resulting in him having to find them and repossess the
car when they weren't looking.
   I spoke with many of his prospective customers and went with several for
test drives, talking amiably about many things. I unknowingly convinced all
of them that they could not afford the car and would regret the purchase
one way or another. Whether due to a fit of compassion or not, none of them
wanted to risk putting me in a predicament of having to find them and take
the car back. What I realize now is that the other salesman would encourage
them to try to scam him or to overstretch their future earnings in a grim
way; and also, that the bailout is the culmination of thousands of
television and real estate purchases with a similiar inauspicious beginning,
a customer too inclined to self-pity and a salesman trying to make a
commission, arranging a likely to be tragic future for a short term insecure
payoff.
   The bailout then is a way to cope with the consequence of a prolific
amount of inaspicious salemanship that must be tolerated in order to
motivate economic growth and activity in spite of the innate lethargy and
lack of initiative of most people. If, instead, all American adults followed
my example, the U.S. economy would be less impressive and less efficient
than Mexico. President Obama and most of America want no part in that sort
of feebleness.
   Motivating people to accomplish productive work through getting them to
acquire or accept a debt looks insane to me, but I recognize the issue as
real. Almost everyone I relate to nowadays will not even take out the trash
unless they can be defined as owing it to someone or they are being paid to
do it.
   Practical production as an expression of divine feeling appears to be
limited almost entirely to a person's own area of dominance. Expression that
I observe around me between people is virtually always inquisitive, artistic
or beligerent.
   For gregarious people, a useful technical result from their expression
is an embarrassment, a sign of weakness or lack of dignity, which their
associates are often inspired to respond to with overt mocking or belittling
remarks. For example, mowing my front yard with a quiet electric mower is
likely to inspire passersby or neighbors who say something like "getting
some chores done, eh?" or "the old lady cracked the whip this morning?".
People who know me better will even throw in requests for submissive
additional work, such as litter control, or complain bitterly about some
side effects of the mowing, such as loss of a particular clump of
interesting plants. That I can tell, the inspiration is entirely friendly,
but damaging to everyone's initiative all the same.
   Even more insidious though is the similiar talk many people have
described to me that they say to themselves, with I presume similiar
emotional effect, similiar sabotage of generosity on their part.
   Having a legitimate debt is an adequate comeback to handle most of the
mockery, but nearly everyone seems to lean instead towards settling of a
need for technical result in their own life, such as a meal, through magic
or theft or enslaving someone else, so as to completely escape the mocking
remarks. Somehow this oppression of someone else, particularly if they are
being paid, has evolved into being generally admired or at least
legitimized, instead of being looked at as criminal or heartless as it was
by most of my associates in my youth, when the Boy Scout ethics of a "good
turn daily", and leaving a shared space in better condition than when
entered, were in widespread evidence.
   I still view enslaving or robbing of others as criminal, so my self-talk
promotes productive activity, at least enough to avoid the grossest forms
of leeching other people. I observe also, that most of the people I've been
personal with keep a significant level of productive maintenance going
within the personal area that they avoid sharing with anyone else,
suggesting to me that all is not lost, that generosity has mostly died but
initiative remains to some degree.
   The fairly intense rise in real estate values over the last few decades
has apparently resulted in a lot of poorly secured refinancing of houses
using the illusory high values, that recently returned to a more moderate
level. Many people, having maintained little or no equity in their house,
found a default on a devalued house to be a net gain at the expense of the
creditor, and jumped right into the legalized robbery.
   Recent decades have also included a huge number of junk mail
"pre-approved" credit card offers that encouraged people with little
income, and little self control about buying with a card, to incur a huge
unsecured debt for commodity and service purchases. Poorly secured school
loans have somehow become far more prolific also. The result has been
countless people that I know running up between ten and fifty thousand
dollars worth of debt that they are completely hopeless or cynical about.
Many just accept a trashed credit rating and let the interest run the total
up even higher.
   None have ever expressed appreciation for the amazing generosity of the
loaning agencies. I am impressed that they offer no interest charge for
credit card accounts paid within a month and no interest while a student is
still in school. To the contrary, the discussion is always towards accusing
the loaning agencies of seduction into disaster and deserving of a default.
   The cummlative effect of all these legal swindles is a massive currency
devaluation through a sudden buyout of the disintegrating credit companies
with new counterfeit government money, to prevent bankruptsy and
re-organization of the entire economy. I'm hoping that this disaster will
lead to a prohibition on unsecured loans, but the resulting shrinking of
economic activity that that would cause may be too much for the wealthy
controllers to accept.
   Unfortunately the world economy may be forced by market forces to shrink
and regroup. The future has already been spent to a massive degree, both by
individuals and by major world governments. In the sense that I view
economics, the world economy as a whole is bankrupt, with a huge unpaid
ecological cleanup bill as well as recognized paper promises to pay to
people who have already done the labor of building houses and appliances, or
who have rendered services. Further promises to pay are going to sound
hollow, in the face of so much heartless deliberate swindling of credit
companies.
   The people who presented the Zeitgeist movies suggest that this flushing
out of the sentiment of corruption in the basic social fabric will inspire
a widespread abandonment of commercial exchange as an economic form, into a
new social structure of spontaneous barn raising style commercial sharing
only, and no-one avoiding intimacy and mutual responsibility for anyone
else, through establishment of sovereign resources.
   Having struggled for years to coalesce unrelated adults into even a
simple tribe, without commercial guardedness, I can say with confidence
that nothing technically prevents it happening on any scale, with or
without the participation of those nearby. The only examples I've even
heard of were choreographed by a spiritual leader, and thus were only
possible for people open to being a disciple. I am not one of those people.
Neither are any of the Zeitgeist movie people. I only know of a few people
who are.
   But more the point, nothing prevents my current careful relation to
regular resources. I lack for nothing of significance, my environmental
impact is moderate, I work for cash about 4 hours a week, my current
resource stockpile and my current skill level could handle a six month
disaster without important tragedy; and this has all been made possible
through kindergarten level managerial deliberateness with what I have right
at hand, not through some major social and economic upheaval.
   I'm actually highly dubious of coping with resource management in a
collective way. My experience with collectives of regular people has been a
very disheartening tendency to rationalize gross excess of waste production
and gross overuse of effort for little of value to me. The Zeitgeist people
present the Venus Project, of Jacque Fresco and his friend Roxanne Meadows,
showing them to be advocates of the kind of gross industrial sterility and
excess that I feel as a kind of poverty, a suppression of my childish
friendliness.
   Mr. Joseph and Mr. Fresco both suggest that the practices of planning
obsolescence and having people do menial labor are both bad things and both
a result of management of resources using money. I've observed both
practices being major factors in nearly all my non-financial relationships
and see clear evidence advocating both in Mr. Fresco's presention of his own
lifestyle.
   Mr. Fresco overtly recommends that every current building, in the entire
world, be scrapped. I presume he means all the asbestos tile, all the
lumber and roofing, all the decorative brickwork, everything. He is selling
the Venus Project, and all his pictures and DVDs, describing them in his ads
as desirable consumptive products rather than as sacred results of a
heartsong. Nearly everyone I know lives that way, in an environment that
they don't hold sacred, full of stuff that they don't hold sacred, with
overt plans to upgrade.
   My eighty year old home and the stuff I've made are non-commercial for
me, not relatable to a cash value, and some is preserved well past any
physical usefulness. I have no plans to scrap anything for an upgrade, and
have little or no draw to obtaining possession of more stuff. I delight in
new stuff, but just to hold it and look at it.
   That I have seen, menial labor pays poorly because so many people are
drawn to do it as a meditation, often doing it even without pay or useful
result. I'm that way. Big scale management pays so well because it's so
stressful and lonely, like being a doctor.
   I am much more hopeful about a moral re-emergence of the Boy Scout
ethics of establishing security by being an honorable generous guest even in
my own place, of handling poverty by better management of the resources
already at hand, of avoiding financial trouble by being fair, and of finding
political sanity by being reverent. I think President Obama was embraced at
least partly for offering to lead through setting that example.




                  



   A great advisory article by Philip Brewer:

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