The purpose of money is to steal our time. The bankers usurp ownership of the properties and issue debt against them, for which we pay with our lives. It's not interest that's usury, it's usurping the right to issue the money. Debt isn’t the problem, taxation isn’t the problem—the problem is who issues the money. Banks and corporations are seen as heroes because they give us money, government as a parasite because they take it—however, it's actually the opposite.
We've been subjected to a geistheist, the stealing of our spirit, our soul, our purpose. That's what we have to change.
[thanks to Conspi-Rat, longtailed king of memes!]
of cabbages and anti-imperialist kings
I am inundated with flowers in honor of a visit by Mary Poindexter McLaughlin of The Art of Freedom. And yet I chose to spotlight the cabbage—so humble, so flamboyant!
And I want to thank Fadi Lama. Through some magic of his, today I’ve gotten 60 new subs, another 60 followers, bringing me past 5000. I’ve also gotten 3 more followers tomorrow. I don’t know how that works, but that’s the kind of zeitheist I can get behind!
Fadi is the author of Why the West Can’t Win, a geoeconomics primer. His invention of that phrase gave me a category for my book, How to Dismantle an Empire. We’re both delving into history to figure out how we got where we are, and how we can get out.
Fadi just had dinner with Pepe Escobar, the world’s wittiest geopolitical analyst, and Mohammad Marandi after the funeral of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon, which also honored those who’ve been killed in the onslaught and infiltration by Israel. Pepe wrote The Funeral That Sealed Hezbollah’s Unbreakable Covenant. I’ll be writing more about that soon, focusing on Vanessa’s article and the grief of women for this anti-imperialist hero, who has no parallel in the Western world:
the usurpers
What is the purpose of money? Many people think that the oligarchs’ goal is profit, to get as much money as possible. But that isn’t logical. They create the money—money is a means, not an end. An end to what?
Money steals our time, which is the purpose for which it was designed.
I’ve been interviewed by Doc Malik, to be released at a future date and, to my delight, he did an in-depth 90-min tutorial on the first section of my book, called Pieces of Slave. We talked about what David Graeber terms the coinage-taxation-slavery complex.
Coinage turned conquest into a self-perpetuating machine by paying the soldiers in the same fiat coin in which the peasants were taxed. To get the coins, they needed to feed, shelter and equip the army. The coins returned to the lord so he could pay the soldiers who survived while keeping the looted treasure to make more coins. Both citizens of the empire and subjects of colonies were enslaved by the coins, with the type of labor a critical difference.
I think this was the beginning of cognitive dissonance. The coins earned paid the ‘slave price’ for you and your loved ones. Yet they were earned by, in some way, contributing to the enslavement of your neighbors. Your labor might be nine steps removed but—since the initial distribution of coins was to the lord’s servants and military—all labor to earn coins rewarded someone whose work supported the lord in enslaving others.
The wage-earner’s belief that he was a good person for supporting his own family had to be kept separate from the knowledge that his labor enslaved other families. This prevented anyone from thinking ethically about their participation in the conquest machine.
two things are certain, debt and taxes
What is money? Money organizes labor in the interests of whoever issues it. If the community issues the money—particularly backed by the houses, as in Ben Franklin’s system and mine—it organizes labor for the benefit of the community. Money isn’t a bad thing.
Debt isn’t a bad thing either, or debt with interest. Let’s say I wanted to sell my house to you but a hedge fund was offering cash in full. You can give me a downpayment and pay over time. Without interest, I can only lose in that deal. But if you pay 5% a year on the remaining payment, that’s fair to you and me. And if you miss a payment or two, I don’t need to repossess because I know you’ll pay a little more in interest.
A debt owed to the community, as the default creditor when a house changes owner, is also fair. If the annual repayment was 1/30th of the debt plus 5% interest, it would cut the price of a house in half immediately and diminish each year until the final year was half of the first. Here’s why. We bid against each other for the maximum we can pay over a steady 30 years. The first ten years barely makes a dent in the principal. It wasn’t always that way and, if we’re the bank, it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Taxation isn’t a bad thing if the commonwealth issues the money and collects it back. That creates a self-perpetuating machine for projects that benefit the people, at their choice. It’s constructive, not destructive.
the heroes are villains, the villains heroes
When the bankers usurp the exclusive privilege of government to issue money, the interest they collect passes to their other hand as venture capitalists. They pay us based on our ability to fetch them multiples back of our cost. So this scoops up any of the money left after the mortgages and rents have been paid.
We see banks and corporations as heroes because they give us money. We protect our credit rating so we can get loans. We build up our resumes so we can land a ‘good job’ and spend all our time working for them. They’re our benefactors.
We see government as the parasites because they take our money. But this is really backwards. Government should be the one dispensing the money for public projects. This has been usurped by the bankers for their own gain. The banks and venture capitalists are the parasites and why our governments are scraping by on crumbs.
the geistheist
That’s why I think this is also the geistheist because it steals our spirit, our purpose, our meaning. Our souls have been sucked out to serve the usurpers. We no longer own our time, we means we don’t own our lives. The need to work isn’t the problem, it’s who and what we’re working for. That’s what we need to change.
And I’ll add this meme just for fun:
As world events spin out of control, I suggest we slow down. The faster we run, the further the goal moves away. I tell a story about nick-of-time miracles and permaculture spirituality. I look at empire vs. sovereignty and means vs. ends. I compare time to a hamster wheel. As things spin into control, I suggest we bide our time while spirit does the heavy lifting.
While we dance on the brink of nuclear war, NeoCons and ZioCons argue who we should provoke into annihilating the world. I look at geopolitics from Pepe Escobar, Fadi Lama, Chuck Baldwin, Cynthia Chung, Mike Renz and Oliver Boyd-Barrett.
This is a very early video when I still called my channel ‘Yes and … Russell Brand.’ It responds to Russell's podcast #24, "Inequality is Killing Us" with economic anthropologist Jason Hickel. I say inequality is killing them, but is a dementor that sucks out our souls and leaves us to work another day. I discuss global money migration, "name that coup", an African girl who wants to be a British pound, how Libya was swept away by the currency, and the dark side of spiritual oneness.
Nice reframing: they’re stealing our time. Looked at it through that lens, it’s so much easier to say no to unappealing work. Which I find myself doing lots of these days. Nice cabbage! Glad you and Mary got to hang!
Sorry Tereza, let me add that I'm not familiar with your work in this field, but I will remedy that! Certainly agree that community banking is a very good step forward.