The Slacker's Guide to the Great Remission, Preface: The Economic Crisis Returns
Preface
The world has recently undergone one of the most devastating economic crises in history. Mankind around the world suffered greatly; forced to work long hours for meager pay, coerced into debts he could never repay while overbearing governments cracked the authoritarian whip across his back as the natural environment fell to an encroaching army of manufactured trash. Consumers, like little Pac-Man heads, chomped away at the substrate that supports all life, creating great rifts in the forests and oceans and atmosphere, killing off species unable to compete with the hairless apes.
The economic crisis peaked in the late summer of 2008 as gasoline approached $5/gallon. An engineered shortage of rice, the staple food for much of the world, created scarcity and impoverished the already poor. Lettuce was almost $2/head. Rents were in the stratosphere and the cost of concrete was at an all-time high.
Forget about buying a house. The payments on an average house in the US represented over 50 percent of an average family’s income, and that’s with both partners working full-time jobs. Building permits and all the regulations enacted by an obese government bloated with tax revenues made homeownership nearly impossible for the majority.
The more you worked, the further behind you got. Saving money was futile. Many lived on credit, increasing their stress and ruining their health as it increased their financial burden.
Wage slavery was at an apex. A pall of dust rose over China and circled the globe as the Chinese fell into indenture and churned their environment for pennies manufacturing junk to export to the decadent West.
![hitch hiker.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/https://steemitimages.com/DQmY3EhXDciZhEN8drSXVpSFtoFWjuH2ak1mncpe1tPKH4z/hitch%20hiker.jpg)
And then a miracle. Americans said “enough” and began to default on their mortgages. The financial crisis began to ease.
In September of that year, the greed of financial institutions began what appeared to be their demise. The Ponzi schemes of banks and investment houses began to topple like stacked dominoes. Speculators stampeded the exits. Those that still had assets quit lending.
Without credit, people began to cut back on their spending. Instead of buying that $600 barbeque, they cooked on the stove in their house. Instead of going out, they stayed home. Instead of driving around all weekend looking for something to do to ease the pain of their slavery, they visited their neighbors.
Freeway gridlock eased. Malls emptied. Many rats realized that they could never win the race and abandoned the futility of their spinning wheel to nowhere.
Manufacturers cut their output. Demand for oil dropped. Crude fell from over $150/barrel to less than $30. By the winter of 2008, gasoline fell to less than half of what it had been. Because oil prices crashed so did everything else. Food prices dropped. Instead of $1.69, lettuce was 69 cents/head. Down from $8, a whole chicken was under $4; instead of $1.99, tomatoes were 25 cents per pound.
With lower prices, people started saving again. With a slowing economy, people quit using their credit card for purchases they couldn’t afford. Along with the speculative profits, people abandoned their overpriced homes or settled for what they already had and stayed put. As their credit scores fell, many also defaulted on their credit cards, throwing off their chains of indebtedness.
Stores bloated with inventory, slashed prices. Many offered a 10 percent discount for the asking. The cost of building materials plummeted. Housing prices fell by half, and in a few places, you could purchase a house for under $10,000… and in Detroit, for a single dollar.
The environment benefited too. As the demand for lumber dwindled, deforestation of the boreal forests nearly stopped. The scream of the chainsaw was replaced by the bugle-call of the elk. As manufacturing slowed world wide, pollution decreased. Pristine tropical beaches slated for despoilment by yet another resort hotel remained idyllic. Farmland was spared as the encroachment of suburbia abruptly stopped. New roads into hinterlands dead-ended. Graded lots healed over with a green mantle of weeds. Like a cancer grown too big to sustain itself, the economy of destruction went into remission.
Meanwhile, 90 percent of all workers still had jobs. Tax revenues from speculative profits dried up forcing the government to cut back on its profligate spending.
Enforcement of unnecessary laws fell off. In prisons overcrowded with victimless criminals, non-violent offenders received early release. Instead of demanding overtime from already overworked employees, bloated government bureaucracies gave them every other Friday off, free time to do whatever they wanted.
Family members got more time to spend with each other. Instead of incarceration in daycare, more kids stayed home with their parents.
More people than ever before started vegetable gardens, many feeling the pulse of Earth for the first time.
The muted bell of freedom began to ring out once again in America. What had become the American nightmare was becoming a dream again. It was blessed deflation in an economic remission, something unseen in over 70 years.
To be continued...
well said @citizenzero. you describe the disintegration of empire, its debt-based currency leading the way, and people inevitably helping themselves in smaller communities, as they have done historically in such situations. [there is always an economy however dire the circumstances. most folks will try and survive and they will do better at this by co-operating with others. a few though will lay down and die or at least vanish into an opiate-oblivion.] crypto offers the possibility of networks of networks of local economies which could have considerable resiliance and potential to produce peaceful prosperity. of course, the global information infrastructure would have to persist for something like that to happen, but if that goes down, everything goes down and we'll be hunting rats for dinner and living in a mad max movie. a good outcome of this imperial collapse cannot happen without struggle on many fronts. a key front is that of information, which includes money. hence the struggle for the internet, and the panicy grumbling from the establishment about crypto. hence the willful destabilisation of the conceptual underpinnings of useful and meaningful discourse through technologically intensified propoganda by those whose power and wealth is most challenged. hence the increase in sabre-rattling - war is often the last gamble of a dying empire ...
Yes, this is how we'll survive. Steemit, however, is perhaps the largest of all possible communities. Working in this type of forum we can develop a false idea that there are many of us and that we are gaining power. But just spend an hour standing next to the greeter at Wal-Mart and you'll soon realize that we are just a handful of people worldwide. The vast majority don't care a whit about any of this... not until they can't buy food.
Our power comes from being able to awaken those around us. Steemit is just a way of creating nodes of knowledge all over the world. We have to be active locally, in the flesh, with the people who occupy our immediate terrain. That is the only community that will enable us to survive. Then, if communication collapses, we are well prepared. Steemit is a way forward, but it's just a phase.
It's going to get a lot uglier before it gets better.
I'm from Israel, Israeli banks, allowing people to be minuses in their bank account, you only live in debt to the banks.
It's something very common in Israel
Debt is how money is created in fractional reserve banking. Debt piling up to the degree it was unable to be paid is what happened in 2008, and what is about to happen again.
This is why the solution undertaken by Bush, and then Obama, was to simply print money and throw it at the rentiers. Not the renters, but those whose income depended on debts being repaid to them - debts of money that never even existed until they created it by lending it out.
This is a system that cannot persist. The 500% increase in the global supply of dollars Obama undertook is about to completely crash the system. All of those dollars were lent when they were introduced into circulation, and there are no increases in production, in wages of the debtors, to pay the interest.
It's a mathematical impossibility.
I remember when I first found out about debt based money. I thought is was a conspiracy theory. Hah! It's no theory; simply conspiracy. They say that waking up is hard to do, now I know, I know that it's true...
That sure sounds like a lyric from a song I should know =)
It is and I tried to put emoji notes around it but the markdown formatting didn't work. :notes:
Common anywhere there is a central bank. It's a big scam.
There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.
- Mahatma Gandhi
I love it, so true and sad
So true!
I'm still working on the first one. lol
if people just stopped paying their student loan debts and credit card debt that would be enough
if everyone did what i was doing, it already would have happened :)
So true. 2007 was my year.
There was a Steemian I almost followed who posted a poem about being a radical with eyes wide open. And then at the end of his post he stated that he was trying to crowd source enough to pay off his $60,000+ student loans that he was ashamed and foolish enough to borrow. I commented that if he really understood fiat money he would know that everyone had already been paid. That only the central bank that issued the funds (backed by thin air) wouldn't get paid and that if he'd paid one single dollar of interest they had actually profited. The banks would simply charge off that bad loan, sell the debt to some fool debt collection agency and that money would disappear from the money supply. All he was protecting by having other people, people who work hard for their money, pay off his fool debt was his credit rating. He was actually serving the monster he claimed to hate. He never replied to my comment. So many talk the talk but won't walk the walk. Good for you!
One of the first rules of warfare is dont feed your enemy, I know the banks won't be feeding me.
If someone's going to try eat me, at the very least I won't be going down smoothly :)
Non repayment, and boycott is the biggest weapon we have and the only way we can use it is by uniting through independant media, which we are :)
How we spend and what we spend our money on is the only votes that actually have power. Checking a box next to the name of a puppet in the voting booth has no effect.
Steemit claims it is just a game, and a game it is. It, however, creates value; elucidation in the information age. When we vote on Steemit, we create value.
Politics is also a game; a game that enforces illusion and slavery.
Fiat money claims to be real, but it is also a game; a game that can either tighten the chains that bind us or break them.
Use your votes wisely and they will count.
This is why I don't have a bank account =p
I saw that comment, and completely agreed with you.
Hard to be a rebel against a system you are demanding support from, and he exemplified that reality.
Good call!
Let's see how the cryptos will play out in the game... We left most of the stage in 2007 - and much of it already earlier... step be step - and walking the talk / talking the walk eversince ;-) Hopefully more and more will come to this point! Thanks for this great post and ... Cheers from the Seven Mountains in Germany :-)
Good for you. I knew you were more than just a talker.
I think cryptos are a way forward, though I have to admit, I don't understand where the value comes from. Like the value placed in fiat money, cryptos exist only in the human imagination, a field of very fertile ground indeed.
Cryptos have allure. Steem is a lure: a way to pull people into a world of ideas.
Long ago I realized that having money was controlling only potential and potential is something only imagined and as yet unrealized. Tools give you real power, the power to change reality.
Cryptos are a better cruch it seems than fiat - at the time being... tools and knowledge are the legs we're standing on :-) you should try the #steemstem and #steemeducation tags on your posts :-)
Thank you. I'll look into that, especially since today's post (part 2) didn't go to the "New" feed at all but just plopped onto my blog page. So far after 3 hours: 2 votes, $0.00 SBD. Worst response yet. Frustrating!
then it is about time I put it into my feed ;-)
Where are the seven mountains ?
In Germany @johano ;-) Rhineriver-Valley, close to Bonn
Ah, bei den sieben Zwergen, hinter den sieben Bergen ! Have never been there, not even in the former capital.
Ja, genau da :-) Aber nicht weitersagen, dass wir hier bis heute auf Schneewittchen aufpassen - die böse Stiefmutter ist immer noch hinter ihr her ;-)
I had a nice dream once too, but then I also woke up...
Helicopter Ben, had he actually pushed pallets of $100 bills out of helicopters into the hands of debtors, might have actually helped. Instead, those pallets of cash were pushed into the vaults of the rentier class, those that mattered to the rentier class in power, such as Bush, Obama, Clinton, etc., where they merely allowed the zeroes to balance, and did nothing to help the victims of the rentier class.
I reckon it's about to happen again, only now BTC is providing a source of wealth they don't control, and so do all other cryptos. I wish cryptos were able to be secured from control, but what they do not control, they can destroy. Cryptos are trivially easy to destroy, if not to control.
At least physical metals are less easy to destroy.
Yeah. Americans didn't revolt over that because only a few got hungry.
If you make a bet and lose and then are overcompensated for your loss, then you've actually won. "Wow, that worked out really well. Think I'll do that again!" And that's exactly what they're doing, taking fiat money and buying real assets while juggling the numbers.
I'd love to believe that cryptos are some sort of solution, but I fear that they are just another distraction, another tar pit to get stuck in.
Television was going to be the epitome of expressive art. It morphed into titillation, indoctrination and consume-ation. The Internet was to be the information super highway. Yes, the information is out there, but we're surveilled and tracked wherever we go.
What role is cryptocurrency playing in this hyper-controlled culture? I doubt the big boys saw this technology coming, but they aren't just going to let it knock them from the cat-bird seat, not without a big fight. So far we're like a mosquito that has just landed. We're just a tickle. If we do start to drill our proboscis into their thick skin, we'll get slapped. 1984 was the wake-up call. We're way past that now. Unfortunately, the book ended badly. We'll just have to see how this plays out.
Very, very true.
I remember watching the internet become the premier pr0n delivery system the world had ever known, and wrestling with trying to maintain respect for humanity.
The Gutenburg Project, PLoS, all the amazing, wonderful history, science, and information at our fingertips, and Brazzers conquers the world....
I think that says more about people themselves than the Internet. Why eat an avocado salad when you can have cotton candy?
More likely crypto will be a part of the big players like cooperations, banks and governments. It will be kind of regulated at the end.
Predictions of a cashless society long predate both crypto, and the internet. I have more than a sneaking suspicion Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonym for the CIA.
I'm sure silver and gold are not.