Voodoo Economics

I am all for the various Occupy groups drawing attention to greed and corruption, etc - but I am still waiting to hear what solutions would satisfy them.

OK, taxing the rich, capping the maximum salaries, doing something about unearned bonuses, etc. Fair enough.

Unfortunately, as far as I can see, people have also maxed out their own credit, and seem to prefer the model of 'living well' - resisting the idea of frugality, tightening yer belt, rationing - sounds like 'socialism', maybe.

However, I still have confidence in Bucky Fuller's calculations that we already have enough resources for everyone to live comfortably and well, but the resources need redistribution.

 Bill Hicks put it clearly:

I had a vision of a way we could have no enemies ever again, if you're interested in this. Anybody interested in hearing this? It's kind of an interesting theory, and all we have to do is make one decisive act and we can rid the world of all our enemies at once. Here's what we do. You know all that money we spend on nuclear weapons and defense every year? Trillions of dollars. Instead, if we spent that money feeding and clothing the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded ... not one ... we could as one race explore inner and outer space together in peace, forever.

So I guess we need to tackle more than the money men. When I was a kid in the UK I thought it would have seemed like a great and bold move for the UK to unilaterally disarm, and join the small nations who do not spend huge sums on nuclear weapons that no-one was ever going to use. It took a couple of decades for the USSR to collapse. We spent unmentionable amounts of money making arms that would never ever get used - meanwhile dismantling the National Health Service and other great supports for all citizens.

The stupidity of all that still appals me.

I think we need something drastic. If we really did consist of 99% of the people, then the Permanent Universal Rent Strike would work. We all just stop paying mortgages and rent. What can do 'They' do, evict us all?

Then we have the Permanent Universal Tax Strike, until governments begin spending what they collect on the stuff we actually want.

Alternative currencies and LETS schemes, etc - trading skills and materials without them passing through money channels.

We might consider forgiving ourselves our debts, just as we write off Third World Debt. We just all declare ourselves bankrupt, and the debts unreclaimable.

Just riffing, you understand.   I don't really expect 99% of the people to act together, sadly.

'They', the 1%, after all, carry on playing the 'print more money' model (in electronic versions) knowing full well that devalues what remains in circulation. They play at Voodoo Economics and convince us that money 'is' finite, resources are too limited, and all that.

[Update]    Here's food for thought (thanks to Vincent for the alert): Revealed, the capitalist network that runs the world, from the New Scientist.

Staggering through the early stages

If you wonder at lessening blog posts here and there, I have once again joined the fray to write 50,000 words of fiction in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Apparently even more people started this year, it was trending on Twitter (whatever that means), etc.

Family visits, travelling, gigs and various other incidents mean that I have barely kept up the pace as yet, but I have gritted my teeth and staggered on (surely I should feel this way at the end of a marathon?) And although I don't update my word count every day, you can see here that I am making an effort. Some of the shortfall is scribbled in pencil in a notebook, and awaiting typing up...

Spooking the Herd

A lot of people still seem to believe in money – and therefore seem to think that something dreadful has 'happened to it' recently – as though it resembles the weather, or something outside our control - rather than the behaviour of human herds.

A million pound note sold for a mere £78,000. (This evokes the Mark Twain story)

Our Maybe editor Kent did say “get into gold” in his “Will You Survive the Coming Financial Crash?” and he appears to have been right in predicting that, although (ironically, given that he got the economics right) he didn’t survive it for medical reasons. (sigh)

And hyperinflation wipes everything away (if you think a million pound note improbable).

I still don’t really understand why gold works for people when paper doesn’t, however.

With a very little brain like mine, I find it easier to use a metaphor to understand what people think of as ‘money’.

The casino movie

where rich people gamble, and then run out of ‘cash’ so they put their shirt, their family inheritance, whatever – on the turn of the next card – and end up in debt.

As often as not, to get that IOU back they have to do something for the casino owners that goes against their normal behaviour - or just accept the 'pearl-handled revolver on the terrace'.

Now that’s just debt from bad judgement (selling the family jewels).

You get more of a plot if the casino needs some leverage over someone, so raises their hopes, encourages their gambles, and over-extends their credit (knowing full well that the odds favour them – eventually – winning it all, and ending up with power over the unfortunate gambler). And in such a plot, if luck started to favour the gambler, it seems safe to think that the casino would cheat to make him lose.

Lending money to sub-prime users could just be bad judgment, but it seems far more likely (to me) that it had a hidden agenda. Would you lend your own money to someone unlikely to pay it back? No, neither would I. Of course, if you lend money (at interest) to lots of people, perhaps you thought only a small minority would fall down…covered by the profits from the others. Um. It does seem a good way to scare and enslave people, however.

The only way (back in the movie) for the trapped person to escape the obligation usually involves borrowing from someone else (only temporarily solving the urgency of the problem of meeting a deadline), stealing, or selling something valuable (if you have anything at all left).

As money doesn’t really exist, this is not the same as just a bad crop, or shortage of apples for the year.

The government gives the banks the right to print money, and then the banks lend that ‘magic money’ back to the government at a rate of interest. There’s nothing there but IOUs! Check out my previous entry, or go straight to the excellent video of Money As Debt for a lucid explanation. It'll only take 30-40 minutes of your time, and worth every second!

So long as people 'believe in money', or trust others to eventually ‘pay back’ with something tangible, this imaginary system works. Once you have lost confidence it is hard to get it back.

Writing another, bigger, IOU doesn’t really cut it…I am the casino boss now, and I want my pound of flesh – no more promises, pleadings and bits of paper.

Any house of cards has always seemed a fairly unstable model (although here’s Bryan Berg the world champion card stacker) – except for the magicians’ special-effect version which instantly erects itself for a big finish appearance. And magicians (ever topical) can now produce a card castle made from credit cards! heh heh


So, returning to our unfortunate gambler – now enslaved to whoever owns that IOU (and they do get bought and sold and passed around) – does he know he’s been manipulated? Can he just shrug? Perhaps he can get the obligation written off or forgiven? Not usually out of the kindness of anyone’s heart – more likely for some great favour done (think Pulp Fiction).

After a period of apparent democratisation, and sharing of wealth with the workers, and self-sufficiency (“own your own home!”) – the real wealth (stuff) seems destined to fall back into the hands of the very rich individuals, and the institutions (banks, governments, etc). They don’t really care if the ‘value’ of the property has gone down, as those figures were only as imaginary as the bait of lottery wins anyway. But they do end up with you wage slaves paying them rent again. Lovely!

At this point, my own bets (that I wouldn’t receive a pension, so why invest? That savings would get wiped out, so why save? That borrowing would end up enslaving me, so why borrow against an uncertain future?) seem quite good.

I am rarely more than a couple of hundred pounds away from ZERO – sometimes up, sometimes down, but never very far each way. I have been considered poor by most people’s standards, of course (no credit). Right now I am little better or worse off than during the rest of my life (Freedom, as Janis so rightly pointed out, is just another word for nothing left to lose).

Hyperinflation - in simple terms

Heading for 62 times around the sun

I get a 'birthday' next week (and I'll probably be at the 'day job') but what keeps me going (and pretty healthy and happy) are Julie, Dandy the dog, my children: Keili Olsen (Pentaphobe), Yolande Philpott and Matilda (my daughter and grand-daughter 'Tilda'), my daughter Finlay Pearl, my fellow conspirator in creativity Bobby Campbell, my fellow juggling madman Mr Jules, all the NoFit State crew (past and present), all the other Illuminauts, any fellow jugglers and magicians, the Cardiff Library crew (you know who you are), my sisters Julia (and all her children, and new grandchild) and Judith (& her son Luke), and all the people who gave me fun, hope, cheerfulness and optimism over the last few years...

Much thanks to my parents (long gone) and to anyone who touched my life and encouraged me to keep going...you know who you are...



For amusement - in reverse order (what else?)

The Mighty Boosh, Shameless, Skins, Spaced, Black Books, George Carlin, Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, W.C.Fields, Buster Keaton, and so on and so on, back through all the fools in history....

And all the contemporary manifestations of such, from Crissie Trigger and the Raree Show to Franki Anderson and her Fool projects, Robert Anton Wilson and all the Maybe Logicians, from DJ Fly Agaric to Borsky the 'pataphysician, to anyone who doubts the simple realities they got offered in childhood...

Let's keep going with the 'blessings' of Bucky Fuller, and Bob Wilson, R.D.Laing and Maslow, Korzybski and all the weird Quantum Physicists - the passivist anarchists, the revolutionary pacifists of non-violence and non-resistance... all the crazy optimists and dreamers and futurists...

Peace.

Cheering Myself Up, Cheering Myself On

A Home Ower

Well, I just got a call to say that I 'am' (apparently) a 'home owner' (or what I call a 'home ower' - i.e. the bank owns a house, and if I promise to pay three times what it's currently 'worth' over the next 25 years without ever defaulting then I get to live there, or rent it to other people). Otherwise, they'll take it back.

You can see I don't get the concept, really. Wrong generation, perhaps, although even the people from my generation who built a house of cards would understand, and call it 'owning' something.

Money Magic

It's too much like magick for me. One day I have no money, no resources, no credit, no future, and then I sign a piece of paper (an IOU) and suddenly I join the propertied classes. NOT. In the movies, various mobs and mafias buy and sell debts, and then bully luckless and reckless gamblers into doing their dirty work, as the interest ticks higher and higher, and time gets shorter and shorter, and the IOU gets waved under their nose.

Check out Vulture Funds - for such people's approach to Third World Debt (buy the debt cheap, before it gets written off, and then sue for the total amount plus interest).

Somewhere to Write

Anyway, I mustn't rant on. Julie asked me to co-sign, and she's over the moon about owning a cottage in the hills. Shame she's partnered by such a miserable old buffoon. She assures me that Big Eric won't come around to kneecap me if I default, or fall into negative equity. I guess it could give me a place to write (finally) and walk the dog, and dream away. I just haven't even seen it yet!

Not yer typical Guardian Reader

I get a similar sort of sensation when I read The Guardian (which I do). I like intelligence, I like the total lack of language censorship, I like a loosely 'liberal' agenda - but I just guffaw when I read about the price people are willing to spend on clothes (this jacket's a snip at £349), wine (a cheeky little wine, and very reasonable at 14.99 per bottle, or £150 for a crate) or holidays (for only £3500 you and a loved one can spend 2 weeks on a luxury cruise - or, in The Guardian, perhaps exploring the ruins of Ancient China). Anything with more than one zero at the end makes me anxious, anything with more than two zeroes on the end make me panic, so numbers with 3 or 4 zeroes on the end (let alone 6-digit numbers) just throw me into denial.

Still, perhaps, to you, I sound like that paradoxical person - the homeless, scruffy bloke sitting on the floor, with a hat in front of him, outside Starbucks, reading The Guardian, and saying "Spare £2.50 for a cup of coffee, guv?"

Anyway.

Writing Online

I amuse myself when I write, at least - as I have no social life to speak of, and hardly ever sit around with people having a laugh these days. Most of my idea of funny just sounds grumpy and ungrateful to people, I guess. My heroes still include Diogenes the Cynic (you can read my take on that wonderful old anarchic and bohemian 'world citizen' in a piece I wrote for MQ called "Giving Cynicism A Bad Name"). You can find all my Maybe Writing in the Imperfect Index under BogusMagic. Or I have started listing my attempts on the website...under Writing.

Still obsessed with the money rant

Amusing Stats:

Remarkably, statistics from Creditaction suggest that only 51% of the British population know the balance on their credit cards and 46% have no idea what interest rates they pay on debts and accounts or what they receive on savings.

Such a cavalier attitude to fiscal planning may explain why personal debt as a proportion of income has risen from 105% in 1997 to 164% in 2006; this is the highest level ever recorded in the UK and the highest in the developed world. By mid 2007 total UK personal debt was £1,345 billion and total mortgages/secured lending reached £1,131 billion.

Things people bad at numbers do not know:

For example, a £1,000 balance at an APR of 14.9% would take 19 years 7 months to clear and cost £1,116 in interest if paid back at a monthly minimum 2% level. Paying back at 3% each month brings the time down to 11 years 7 months and the interest paid to £545.

If you're so clever, why aren't you rich?

The classic snide line said to me, as the 60s kicked in, with the slogan Live Now, Pay Later to describe Hire Purchase (as they called shopping on credit then). In fact, (well, until today), as I didn't owe anybody anything I felt (looked at through my lens) richer than virtually everyone else in the country. They owed a fortune, and I hovered around zero (plus or minus £100). So how come I remain in the poverty group, and they all take holidays in The Bahamas?

A Rigged Game

No, I still don't get it. I may measure 'smart' on IQ quizzes, but I have no street smarts at all. I feel queasy at the mere thought of usury, and have always known that money is a rigged game where the 'bank' or 'casino' always wins by creaming off a chunk of the turnover, and then share out the rest among 'winning' and 'losing' punters. But gamblers don't expect to lose. I expect to lose. I don't have the fantasy that I win the lottery. If I buy a lottery ticket I just think of it as throwing money into someone else's hat.

Good Luck, mate!

I posted some of Tony Allen's material on the forum, which people whooped and yelled about...he delivered it in the 90s, but it seems just as topical now as it did then. I heard his act frequently, and it always made me laugh, and feel like someone sane had finally turned up on this god-forsaken planet (to get to hear the act a few times, without paying, I worked on the door for him a few times).

Money As Debt

Moving on from the Credit Crunch post I made the other day, I'd like to post in this video called Money As Debt by Paul Grignon. I can never get people interested in Monetary Reform, but perhaps if you spend 47 minutes with this we could start a conversation?



More Resources on the Money As Debt page.

Credit Crunch

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

The overspend of the last few years, the enormous debt of the West living way beyond its means, has finally started to come unravelled in the UK.

Of course, as money is entirely a confidence game (in both meanings of the word) 'they' will continue to talk up the situation (to try to avoid further panic) but it sounds less and less convincing all the time.

I don’t write this merely as a hippie anarchist anti-capitalist (whatever that might mean) but as someone who doesn’t even believe in money (or what Robert Anton Wilson calls bio-survival tickets). That doesn’t mean I can survive long without them, of course, but I don’t have to believe in them. Bucky described wealth in terms of the number of future days it would 'buy' you.

"Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives."

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - Chapter VI Bucky Fuller

Just before Bob died we invented a currency for him - called 'Patatows, for various obscure reasons to do with Irishness and Joycean puns - RAW patatows, in fact. The most excellent Bobby designed them, and we put some into circulation. They have any value that his fans might give them. [see the RAW Deal blog posting - for other cash whimsy, from Duchamp to Boggs, from Warhol to Emperor Norton]

Ultimately, the bill is not a dollar at all, at most a representation of it. The bill is real, but the dollar itself is an abstraction… just like God. Indeed, it is remarkable how fundamentally modern monetary systems are grafted onto religion. According to Boggs the invention of both money and God date from the same era, and the traces are still visible in our own days. Just think of the double meaning of words like "redeem," or the root of the word "credit"--it is a direct derivative of the Latin word for believing. The side of Dutch coins reads "God Is With Us," while "In God We Trust" is printed on American bills.

BoB (as treasurer) even signed a few rare notes, and auctioned them on eBay (to help pay his rent and medical bills). It doesn’t seem that bizarre to me. I sign photos and trade them for small profit. However, most people seem to believe (even in this day and age when cash hardly comes into most transactions) that money exists in some sense. You might as well try to disillusion them as tell the Judeo-Christian-Muslim lot that not only do they all worship the same book /story, but that God is a concept, by which we measure - pain. My philosophical/religious education (say the word ‘spiritual’ and I reach for my metaphorical revolver) came entirely from teaching tales, folk tales, parables, myths, legends, and all the tools of the storyteller’s trade.

Somewhere in a cave, Ug borrows three rocks…and promises to bring them back later. As Ig has a lot of rocks (and therefore a lot of friends) Ug scratches three slashes in a soft piece of clay, for Ig to keep as a reminder.

Later on, Ig is playing knucklestone with OOg and as he didn’t bring all his rocks with him, trades the little clay tablet for his bet.

And so off it wanders, this little clay promissory note, wandering down the years and across the plains. In the desert it seems high value (no rocks around here, I’ll give you a camel for it!) Eventually, an Eskimo, who needs some rocks to hold down the edge of his tent, tries to cash it in for rocks. No rocks on an iceflow! Ug is long dead, and the rocks have all ground to sand.

So this morning, we see the first ‘run on the bank’ at Northern Rock. People queuing around the block, to be handed yet another piece of paper! It would seem laughable if it didn’t seem so serious…not quite hyperinflation yet...(when burning banknotes to keep warm is easier than trying to buy fuel). Bizarrely, you can see pictures of the queues of desperate people on the front of every daily paper in the UK, but their website stays up calmly offering to lend you vast sums of money, that you can pay back over the next 25 years. heh. Magic, or indeed magick. Those 'economists' and market players (a voodoo 'science' at best) continue to try to shore up the levees, or hold the card castle together, but it sounds more and more vacuous to me.

Of course, most people don’t think pension schemes spend all their money on skyscrapers with smoked glass walls, and then go bankrupt. Most people don’t think Insurance firms could just turn around and refuse to pay (Act of God! Oh, you smoke, that invalidates your claim…) or that banks (having lent out over ten times what they actually ‘own’) could go broke.

And then the good news. When we find ourselves up to our knees in flood water (water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink) some guy has invented a portable bottle with an incredibly fine filter, that even stops viruses passing through. I guess you end up with pure water, with no chemicals like chlorine or iodine. They go on sale next week, (Thanks to Keili for that story). LifeSaver Systems.

A Word In Your Ear

I will spend a little more time back here in the blog, soon. I have decided to allocate the time I have spent in online study (for the last three years) in compiling my book. The website, of course, forms a kind of autobiography without much detail or inner thought, and my opinions get scattered throughout blogs, articles, emails, etc - but I like the idea of generating some sort of hard copy, probably using Lulu or some such 'on-demand' publishing scheme.

As usual, I may have an overspill of material, and may well use this space to ‘flex the writing muscles’ and warm up.

I don’t think I ever explained why I use the title I do, for this blog. If you know Burroughs’ work you may not need an explanation, but for me it relates to the fact that we use language to program our psyche-soma, and those hypnotic patterns literally confuse, bemuse or amuse us… The Neuro-Linguistic Programming guys analysed this years ago - although they have since developed a slightly cult feeling around NLP. The original linguistic analysis still holds true however, even if the magical claims - fast therapy, accelerated learning, etc - aspect may give you pause.

From today’s papers: “...for those who deny climate change: believe us, it’s a reality”.

You could spend the day dismantling that worthy thought. The implicit idea that climate has never changed before, the idea that you can either deny or ‘believe’ in such processes, rather than measure them. The sloppy use of the word ‘reality’, etc.

We as humans don’t intend to ‘save the planet’ (I don’t think cockroaches, rats, pigeons and micro-organisms will much care what we do to it, and feel sure Gaia doesn't mind) but we do want to save the planet as an inhabitable environment for humans. Not the same thing.

And if we really wanted to, or accepted that we have some responsibility for the way things have changed we wouldn’t just switch to washing our clothes at 30 degrees! Kit Pedler spelled all this stuff out years ago in The Quest for Gaia (1979) (and yes folks, the hippie generation saw it coming, too – remember Doomwatch in 1970?) – as well as washing at low temperature, you should quit ironing those clothes, quit shaving, quit driving, quit flying, quit eating meat, quit using deodorants, etc, etc. Of course, when Kit turned up at the Houses of Parliament, bearded, homemade woolly jumper, on his bike, no-one took him seriously. Hey ho. So it goes.

Rather similar language gets used for our bodily health as individuals. Giving up smoking doesn’t ‘save lives every year’. It may extend them, or decrease the discomfort of old age. It may also leave you lingering healthily and unhappily (and expensively for your children) when you could have gone out with a bang. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the point intended, I just wish the language would accurately reflect what they want, rather than try to manipulate me with emotion and half-truth.

And finally, in spite of Terrorism creating a certain amount of havoc, this ‘climate change’ seems to cause far more damage and expense, and if humans do take the blame then I guess compensation also seems reasonable. Until recently these kind of events counted as ‘Acts of God’ in insurance terms. Who causes more damage, fear, disruption and expense:- Terrorists or God? All together now….

Of course, if the concept of God drives you to distraction (language illusions again – and Dawkins specifically thinks of God as a word virus) you might enjoy Billy Connolly’s movie ‘The Man Who Sued God’ which plays with the idea of insurance firms (and churches) getting away with that.

Try Disaster maps on World Mapper

And if we do decide to hold humans responsible, after all, then we might look at figures like 984,000 people killed by cars (worldwide) in 2001.

That same year (and don’t forget that includes 9/11) the figures for terrorism

Total Persons Killed: 6318

You can see why I seem so wary of car-drivers, compared to Terrorists. They seem 200 times more likely to kill me!