No Money, Know Peace

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

"No Money, Know Peace"

an editorial about our modern "capitalist" economy.

by: Jon Gee, Tallahassee, Florida, US, November 10, 2014.

This photo originally appeared in 2010 and was debated about on snopes dot com for a while before it was eventually accepted as substantiated by subsequent articles. In 2010, Huff-Post reported on homeless statistics gathered by the Urban Institute and housing statistics gathered by Fox Business that indicated there were 3.5 million homeless in America and 18.9 million vacant homes. In 2011, Amnesty International confirmed these figures exactly. On Feb 3, 2012, the Daily Kos reported that 1 in 402 Americans is homeless, while 1 in 7 American houses is empty; thus, "24 empty houses are available for each homeless American." On March 10, 2012, Disinformation confirmed this statistic exactly. So on June 28, 2012, Business Insider addressed the issue, reporting the statistic as "five vacant properties for every homeless person in the US." Since this wave of interest in 2012 there has not been as much sensationalism attached to this issue, and as the fire of public outrage has dwindled, so has the flow of new reports with more current and up-to-date statistics on this, uniquely "American," issue. In other words, this problem has not yet been solved.

Introduction: Low Wages, Hyper-Inflation and You, the Consumer.

In our modern, so-called "capitalist" economy, people are not different from rats. They rush around in their routines like lab rats through some experimental maze, and even listen to music on the radio to and from work that reminds them of this fact, lyrically advocating "get cheddar" meaning "get money." They watch the movie "the Matrix" and, sleepily, only vaguely, as if in a half dream, comprehend it is about them.

The value of money in a fiat economy is illusory. In reality, a one dollar bill and a ten dollar bill are different ONLY in the content of the symbols written in ink on them. In electronic fiat systems, the "real value" of "wealth" becomes even more abstract and absurd, replacing nearly identical forms of worthless paper currency with nearly identical computer-content ones and zeros. You can at least BURN paper money. Good luck eating your bit-coins if the internet is scrambled and electronic communication ever breaks down.

In fiat-capitalist society, MONEY is the sole motivating factor, yet MONEY is increasingly valueless as well. It is like trying to chase a balloon that is rising up into the sky. You will not catch it, and you look like a fool as you try. That money just "hyper-inflated" away from you.

What IS "hyper-inflation"? I gripe about it, some others do too, in the modern form of "QE," comparing this to the period of the Weimar Republic era during the interim between world wars in Germany. But when a central bank over-"inflates" the "money-supply" what does this mean? Well, immediately it means prices will go up. If the economy is full of X amount of liquid currency and capital, prices will be Y. If X becomes "inflated" the immediate result is that Y goes up as well. This is because corporate CEOs are actually sitting around, in the SAME ROOM with executives representing the central banking institution (the FDIC), and they are literally deciding HOW best to screw you. This is NOT A JOKE. This is a true fact. They are sitting there, daily, discussing HOW to make the MOST money OFF you.

To do this, the bank increases the money supply of liquid capital available in the economy over-all. Then corporate CEOs increase prices because they figure, "if there's more money available for people to spend, then we can adjust prices to them having more money over-all." Then, ALL prices go up across the board, and everyone goes bankrupt. Why? Because the same ass-slime CEOs that increase prices conveniently FORGET (or frequently REFUSE) to also increase wages. When prices go up and wages do not, people lose their savings, and eventually end up living hand-to-mouth as wage-slaves, serfs serving the corporations for just enough money to survive on, just enough to buy food, and not enough to save any for their own personal investments.

But "things are getting better now!" some say. The "global economic recession" was staved off by the US Fed's "QE" programs of "hyper-inflation," they claim. This is false. The "global economic recession" was, in fact, CAUSED by the US Fed's "QE" and even earlier low interest-rate and laxly screened lending programs, particularly the so-called "real estate bubble" in 2008. If "things are getting better now" it is only for the few, while the many have become voiceless, hated and homeless.

Main Thesis: The Social Stigma Against Poverty and Homelessness

It is seen as a "stigma" - a social "shame" - to live "at home" (with one's own parents); to receive a fixed income for a mental disability or for unemployment. It is seen as "lazy" NOT to "work." But surviving on a fixed income IS work in itself. It is a difficult, daily effort to make do with too little to afford to buy food, whether this is because of too little pay or because of too many bills, or both.

If one is homeless, one finds their life in America, the so-called "first world," to be as difficult and unpleasant, if not even more so, than that of a starving farmer during a drought in sub-Saharan Africa. Life "below the poverty line" ANYWHERE is less worth living.

If you don't work, you're broke, and if you're not broke, you don't need fixing. If you ARE broke, as in, you have no income, or no savings, or not enough money for food, etc., then there MUST BE "something wrong with YOU." There are whole schools of sociology on this subject; millions of American teens get drunk at colleges across the nation to graduate with a degree in "social work" where they can basically sit at a desk, get fat themselves, and get paid telling "broke" people how they should change their life, and how they are supposed to live, so that they, too, can become "successful" like these fat, "well-paid" social-workers are supposed to symbolize as wage-slaves of the State.

Thus, to be "different" and to "think outside the box" is dangerous; it means one, whether they desire to or not, is going to get singled out and used as an example of why everyone else is supposed to obey without question. If you step back and say, "we could be living in a society where nobody needs to do the type of 'job' most people nowadays do; we could even live in a society where having a job at all would be purely optional," then someone will shine the spot-light through a microscope on you and audit your own character and past. If you have any skeletons in your closet, "how dare you question the great and mighty dollar?" If you are happy with how you live, "you should be ashamed of yourself for not needing more money!"

It is a terrible plight to be an idealist in a capitalist economy. The MORE "fiat" and bereft of "real value" the currency becomes, the MORE people blame artists, poets, philosophers and free-thinkers for BEING poor, the more the average person, pinched in the "middle-class" by hyper-inflation, HATES the POOR. Eventually, gangs tend to form of bourgeois or neuvua-riche young men, who simply go around exterminating the newly homeless. While this happens, other rich people just ignore it going on. But look at history. That is exactly what happened in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, when "insulae" (wooden, low-rent housing-complexes) were repeatedly burned to the ground by Praetorians who blamed the Plebian poor for the "watering down" of their currency; it is also exactly what happened as the National Socialist Party came to power in Germany during the period leading up to WW2 and ended then in the Holocaust.

So, yes, for the average wage-slave, you could say, "things are getting better," because, to a rat in a maze, each corner one goes around is an improvement to being trapped down the dead-end where one just was. But to one who questions the value of serving others AS a wage-slave - making only enough to live on, never enough to "get ahead," dreaming of vacations while wasting their youth at a desk-job, entering data, or answering customer complaint phone-calls, or standing behind a goddamned cash register at some gas station - to one who would question the value in this whole system, they are virtually asking to die. The "herd mentality" defends itself. The "pack" sticks together. "Tamed" citizens HATE individualist human beings. They HATE them. And when they hunt, they hunt as one.

But if you are "getting rich quick" in a fiat-capitalist society, it is ONLY because you are proving YOUR OWN value and worth AS a wage-slave. If you are GOOD at sitting behind a desk, getting fat entering data and answering phone-calls, you will ultimately be rewarded for it. However, as I have said and will say again and again, if you QUESTION the VALUE in this SYSTEM itself, you are instantly anathema to it. It will attack you like white-blood cells attacking an invading foreign object, poking into the flesh of their host; and those who advocate the value of the capitalist economy and who value the force of the state will kill you. They will kill you like, supposedly, they did the last guy to stick his neck out for poor people: Jesus Christ; and that was 2,000 years ago. Oh there have been a couple since, like Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr. But you can see how well their efforts at bringing "peace" to the "masses" worked out for them as well as for "Our Lord and Savior."

No, the only people who "get rich quick" in a fiat-capitalist economy undergoing hyper-inflationary conditions are fucking fascists. People who prove their worth to those in power by being aggressors against the enemies of those in power: e.g. by abusing the poor. The poor are, in truth, nobody's enemy. They have never been, and probably will never become, organized into a single cohesive armed force. If they were, however, they would pose a greater threat to the rich than the media-concocted bullocks of "terrorist cells" in far off foreign lands. Because, thus, of this merely POTENTIAL for posing a real threat to the power-basis of the fiat-rich fascists, the rich hate the poor more than even Cain hated Abel. Such is the curse of money: that when those who have not had it suddenly have an unlimited supply of it, they turn savagely against all those they once depended on for their survival and whom they claimed they would always love and trust and need. Even those who attempt to "bring their posse up with them" end up merely alienated from all their oldest friends along the way due to money.

Conclusion: Money Can Fuck Off!

The idea it is "necessary" to work for survival is an illusion, and therefore the notion we require "money" and a capitalist economy for our survival is doubly so. People speculate all sorts of nonsense. "If you don't like it move." Where can we go to escape what money has made humanity into? This monstrous "urban sprawl" of our polluting population-centers has poked its electronic eyes into every last corner of the habitable globe and stuck a permanent probe up earth's deepest holes where the sun itself won't even shine. There is no longer any escaping the watchful "all-seeing eye" on the back of the 1 dollar bill. We are trapped here. It is a "prison planet."

But people cannot refute this fact logically: We do not NEED to be living in a fiat-capitalist economy. We COULD change this whole system. Almost ANYTHING ANYONE can imagine would probably work just as well, if not even better. Most people, even capitalists, agree, "the world would be better off if people didn't need money." But does anyone break out of the herd to do something about this? Never.

Whether you want to use as the excuse for such "laziness" that appreciates "free time" and solitary mental reverie, rather than loving labor and the effort of working in the service of others, either the relative technological progress we have made recently under post-atomic industrialism, or the relatively luxurious, opulent and even hedonic life-style that fiat-capitalism provides the illusion of being able to afford for only the briefest of moments, the fact is undeniable among modern western civilization's citizens that we do NOT NEED to work to "get money." There ARE alternatives, however socially shameful they may be, when it gets down to the wire of "a penny saved is a penny earned." One can cut costs and live a "shut-in" life-style while still remaining relatively creative and social simply because of the modern internet, and this cannot have been said in earlier periods.

Some desire travel, adventure, warfare or, at the LEAST, "extreme" sports. They are young, and this desire will burn out in them. The lust for bloodshed will fade, though their inculcation into a society wherein such is "normalized" behavior will not. People who grow up loving war toys end up either becoming soldiers or else benefitting from the stocks and bonds of the military-industrial sector private-corporations with no-bid federal-government security-contracts for themselves; or rarely both, and then, usually as public politicians or private lobbyists. In my opinion, were it not for such people as who once loved to attend the gladiatorial games, who thrived solely on "panem et circenta" and who, nowadays, are obsessed primarily with "football" on television and beer, the world would be greatly better off than it is.

So, if we can WORK only if we WISH to do so, then what use is money to us anymore? If "getting more money" is no longer the incentive required to MAKE us "work," to incite and induce us to serve others, then what other use does money have? When all work is truly voluntary, money is no longer relevant. Food might be. I could imagine being paid in food as being a simple enough transaction to remain useful in such a drastically different societal structure from our own modern capitalist economy. But "money?" What Fool would ever NEED that?