© iStockFinancial Freedom
Ours is a neofeudal economy of financial serfs in servitude to a Financial Aristocracy. The Financial Nobility / Aristocracy own all the debt and the serfs owe the debt to the Aristocracy. The serfs own assets that don't generate much income, the Aristocracy owns assets that generate trillions of dollars in income. The serfs pay high tax rates if they make above-poverty wages, the Financial Nobility pay low taxes thanks to tax-avoidance scams arranged by the Aristocracy's toadies and lackeys in the Central State. The serfs create value, the Financial Nobility is parasitic.
That we are powerless is one of the key social control myths constantly promoted by the Status Quo. What better way to keep the serfs passive than to reinforce a belief in their powerlessness against Financial Feudalism?
But we are not powerless. Our complicity gives the Financial Aristocracy its power. Remove our complicity and the Aristocracy implodes.
The pathway of liberation is to opt out of financial feudalism. Here are twelve paths any adult can legally pursue in the course of their daily lives:
1. Support the decentralized, non-market economy. The core ideology of consumerism and financialization is that non-market assets and experiences have no status or financial value. This includes social capital, meals with friends, projects done cooperatively with friends, home gardens and dozens of other decentralized activities that cannot be financialized into centralized market transactions. Identity and social status are established in the non-market economy by collaboration, sharing, reciprocity, conviviality and generosity.
Decentralized means localized; farmers markets are examples of local market economies where the transactions are in cash (so banks can't skim transactions fees) and the money stays in the local economy rather than flowing to some distant concentration of capital.Top-down centralized "solutions" imposed by the Central State are the problem, not the solution, as they further the concentration of wealth and power into unstable monocultures. Stop looking to overly complex fake-reforms and centralized solutions to unsustainable systems and start exploring decentralized, localized solutions that bypass both the Central State and the Financial Aristocracy.
If you start valuing non-market assets and experiences as the most important markers of status, you are resisting both financialization and consumerism.
2. Stop participating in financialization. Financialization is the insidious imperative of the Financial Aristocracy that seeks to turn every human interaction into a financial transaction that can be charged a fee, and transform all assets into financialized instruments that can be commoditized and sold for immensely profitable fees.
As the finances of local governments implode under the weight of their protected fiefdoms, many are heeding the siren song of financialization as a temporary (and inevitably disastrous) "fix" to their structural insolvency. For example, the revenue stream from parking meters is financialized into an asset that is sold to a private corporation. When parking fees double, the residents of the city have no recourse via democracy or petition, as the meters in their city are now "owned" by a distant concentration of capital that can double late fees, charge outrageous transaction costs, etc., at will.This is how financialization inevitably transitions into financial tyranny.
The erosion of America's middle class security has several structural causes, but chief among them was the financialization of the housing market. This has led to serial bubbles of housing valuations and the widespread extraction of equity for consumption--the classic "windfall" that financialization always produces in its first toxic blush.
3. Redefine self-interest to exclude debt-servitude and dependence on consumerism and the Central State. Unless you are long retired and have no other option, minimize reliance on the State. Reliance on the State weakens the correlation between sustained effort and gain, so the work ethic and entrepreneurism both atrophy as they no longer offer competitive advantages in a system where bread and circuses are guaranteed by the State.
4. Act on your awareness that the nature of prosperity and financial security is changing. Dependence on centralized concentrations of power (Wall Street and the Central State) is now an extremely risky wager that what is demonstrably unsustainable will magically become sustainable via pixie dust or more Federal Reserve trickery. Security flows from resilience, self-reliance, decentralized, diversified sources of income and abundant social capital, not speculation fueled by Fed policies and Wall Street.
5. Stop supporting distant concentrations of capital that subvert democracy by using their gargantuan profits to buy the machinery of State governance and regulation. For example, stop watching broadcast programming owned by the six global media corporations that control the vast majority of the media/marketing complex.
Stop eroding your health and sending your money to corporate headquarters by no longer frequenting fast-food restaurants and by no longer buying unhealthy packaged foods from corporate agribusiness.Close your accounts with Wall Street investment firms and the "too big to fail" banks that dominate the mortgage, credit and debt markets in the U.S. If you need such an account to transact your business, maintain low balances so the banks cannot sweep your capital for their own use every day.
6. Stop supporting the debt-and-leverage based Financial Aristocracy. Liquidate all debt as soon as possible, take on no new debt except for short periods of time, explore localized or crowd-sourced private-capital loans that exclude the banks and limit the number of financial transactions that enrich the banks and Wall Street.
7. Transfer your assets out of Wall Street and into local enterprises or assets that do not enrich and empower Wall Street. Buy assets you control 100%, without the mediation of Wall Street.
8. Refuse to participate in consumerist status identifiers and the social defeat they create. Stop admiring and respecting those displaying status signifiers (supercars, $300 million yachts, etc.); start thinking of them as pathetic prisoners of a pathological mindset. Stop judging people based on their lack of status signifiers. Free your own mind from the toxic sociopathology of consumerism and social defeat. Stop watching commercial television and streaming corporate distractions and minimize your exposure to marketing and consumerist propaganda.
9. Vote in every election with an eye on rewarding honesty and truth and punishing empty promises. Unless the incumbent has renounced corporate contributions, unsustainable debt, financial tyranny and Central State encroachment of civil liberties, then vote against the incumbent, for they are just another lackey of the State-Plutocracy partnership. Avoid voting for either the Demopublican or Republicrat branches of the plutocracy; vote for an independent or third party candidate.
Remember that resistance isn't just about refusing to participate in pathological neofeudalism; it's about establishing a sustainable alternative to the unsustainable State-Aristocracy partnership. When people say that voting for a third-party candidate is "wasting your vote," reply that voting for either of the plutocrat parties is the real waste of a vote because their "leadership" is dooming the nation to destabilization and insolvency. As independents pick up more and more "wasted" votes, they shift from being "marginalized" to becoming powerful voices of integrity and transparency.10. Stop supporting inflationary policies such as money creation - QE by the Federal Reserve and Federal deficit spending. Act on your knowledge that inflation is theft and that the Federal Reserve is a private consortium of banks that is the enabler and protector of the parasitic Financial Aristocracy.
11. Become healthy, active and fit. Refuse to consume unhealthy junk food and packaged food, refuse to squander much of your time in sedentary "consumption" of corporate "entertainment" and digital distraction, and devote your energy and time to mastery, new skills, developing social capital and friendships, projects you own and enterprises that benefit your true self-interest. Refuse to follow the marketing/media siren song into chronic ill-health, social-media addiction and social defeat.
12. Embrace self-directed plans and construct a resilient, community-based, localized life of identity and meaning. Build a social ecology of positive, productive, collaborative, non-pathological people of like minds and spirits. Be powerful via Self-Reliance, not powerless via apathy, passivity and complicity.
For more on these ways to break free of serfdom, check out my books Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change, An Unconventional Guide to Investing in Troubled Times and Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.
Here is Neofeudal Financial Serfdom in three charts: just because nobody talks about neofeudalism doesn't mean it's not real:
Reader Comments
I think the way to extricate ourselves from this is to get out of the PUBLIC domain and into the PRIVATE. The system can not deal/offer franchises to a private person.
As a private person there is no interaction with any corporation and their benefits. Only interactions of equals whereby the private person can dictate the rules of the game and allowing us control of the situation.
But first and foremost... have no debt.
An interesting site with a huge library is at sedm.org
another interesting write up is.. Challenging "Net Zero" with Science, Richard Lindzen & William Happer, CO2 Coalition.. available in PDF
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Looks like a great paper! 'Challenging "Net Zero" with Science, Richard Lindzen & William Happer, CO2 Coalition' [Link]
If you don't mind I'll share the link here with all, and the executive summary:
"Governments around the globe are taking actions to implement fossil fuel-free or “Net Zero” energy systems without a thorough examination of the scientific basis for doing so. This paper undertakes that examination by reviewing the scientific support (or lack thereof) that has been used to justify this transition to Net Zero. No attempt is made to address the significant economic, societal or environmental consequences of a near-total reliance on renewable energy and the required battery-backup that is necessary to transition to a fossil fuel free future.
Two of the paper’s authors – Drs. William Happer and Richard Lindzen, professors emeritus at Princeton University and Massachussets Institute of Technology, respectively – have spent decades studying and writing about the physics of Earth’s atmosphere. The third, Gregory Wrightstone, a geologist of more than 40 years, has spent much of the last decade writing and speaking about the interplay of geology, history and climate.
The authors find that Net Zero – the global movement to eliminate fossil fuels and its emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases – to be scientifically invalid and a threat to the lives of billions of people..."
Secondly, I will stipulate to much that has been said about the managerial class and the Boomers. A great many of the 'money managers' can be zealous, petty tyrants. The caveat is that such people, like the poor, are always with us, so it remains to be explained why they broke into political ascendency just now, with the politics of Covid. The Boomers are a generation raised by Hollywood to be World War II LARPers, so their response was also very predictable. The problem here is the absence of any countervailing force to put them in their place. Why was there no one to tell us old fogeys to sit down and shut up?
I answer these questions by insisting that the politics of the Covid era was essentiially a monetary phenomenon. I am not talking about simple greed. I am talking about a much deeper ambiguity that lies at the heart of modern notions of money itself.
If you want to find the true, paradigmatic origin of Covid politics, you must look back to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and the bizarre phenomenon of negative interest rates. A negative rate of interest seems like a violation of the ordinary laws of 'economic physics.' It's a piece of financial antimatter that seems like it cannot/should not exist in normal space and time. When sovereign governments and central banks colluded to drive the interest rate below zero, they effectively declared the zombification of the economy to be their official policy. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this. It was the first modern example of the oxymoronic idea of "sacrificing the system to save the system" which was to become the Platonic form underlying all t'y the market rate of interest, is the end-all and be-all of the material side of life, an irrational rate of interest forces every business, every individual, and every transaction to begin to behave in irrational ways. Society and its institutions become literally 'demonic perversions' of their normal selves. This was the birth of Covidianism.
The idea of printing money to save a financial system already drowning in bad debt is the very height of idiocy, yet this was the policy adopted because it became necessary to "save the system," because too many people were already beholden to it. Once that step was taken, we no longer answered to reality but only to the system and its internal logic. Anyone trying to admit reality to the thought process became a threat to the system and was summarily punished. When moral hazard was eliminated, certain people, namely banks and Wall Street, figured that they could do no wrong and acted accordingly. They engendered a massive 'K-wave' of phony prosperity that everyone came to depend on, so society as a whole began to reflect this false ethos.
This fact became obvious in the early days of the lockdown when the call went out to empty the hospitals in order to "protect the healthcare system." It should have been insisted upon at that time that the purpose of the healthcare system is to protect us, it is not our purpose to protect the healthcare system. This is kind of like saying that we cannot deploy the army when the enemy is invading, because they might get shot (haven't you heard there's a war on?). This transvaluation of values represents an inversion of means and ends in precisely the same manner as the Great Financial Crisis: Sacrificing ourselves to save a system which has repudiated its duty to us and no longer serves us anyway.
From a distant perspective, Covid Politics was the reaction of an overly complex and failing regime trying to save itself, as it had formerly saved its solvency with negative interest rates. In both instances, it signifies only that the regime could not be saved by legitimate means and therefore should have been allowed to die. In order to kill the zombie regime, it is necessary to stop subsidizing failure. But everyone who is in debt is beholden to the zombie's script, and thus becomes a failure subsidizer, wittingly or not. This is why the regime lasts. The dollar is literally nothing more than a corpuscle that transfers lifeblood from the productive to the parasitical.
The best strategy for defeating the regime, I feel, is to get out of debt and get your money out of the financial system. For independent men, Covid politics would have held no sway. It had power only due to our debt.