James Howard Kunstler: Racketeering Is Ruining Us

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Of course you are right Christopher H. Building codes and other laws incentivize and even force people to get their houses built by teams of professionals who use (and even waste) lots of non-local, manufactured products.
In The Hand-Sculpted House (Chelsea Green, 2002), the authors discuss ways to get around the building codes, the foremost being to avoid local officials if you can, while getting your neighbors in on some of your decision-making processes - that way the important people won't have any objection.

 

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… or it might be that the pharmacist decided to bbe neighborly and do you a double good turn, giving it to you for almost free, and disclaiming the cost to make you not feel beholden, thus freeing you to be a friend, not a debtor-of-favors.
If I were you, I'd reciprocate the friendship. More dog walks.  (and chew leathers, too, plea^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

 

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In fact, considering that his symptoms including internal hemhorrage, and celiac/wheat intolerance are indistinguishable from glyphosphate poisoning, and they occurred after he overate bread and nothing else, and considering that grains are washed of glyphosphate, which washing does nothing to get rid of it…
…  I'd say that he considers that glyphosphate may BE the plague. 

So, I'd say more and more that as this happens, people are going to stop buying the wheat.  Eventually, this problem is going to overwhelm SOMETHING.

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It is a crime that Roundup can be sprayed on wheat right before harvest, being used as a dessicant to ensure easier and faster harvesting.  If you buy your bread at the store more than likely it has residual Roundup in it.  This may be one reason many people now can't stomach wheat products. 

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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but glyphosate is also sprayed on oats.  See http://www.realfoodhouston.com/wp-files/2015/06/10/glyphosate-monsantos-roundup-is-applied-to-oats-not-just-wheat/
So all those warm-fuzzies I was getting buying Cheerios (whole grain, low sugar), and Old Fashioned Oatmeal for my son turned into alarm as I discovered I was feeding him products that were likely tainted with glyphosate.  BTW, I did find an alternative: Nature's Path Organic Oats.  See http://www.naturalnews.com/053721_glyphosate_Quaker_Instant_Oats_Silk_soymilk.html

But please be forewarned that some Organic grains are still contaminated with glyphosate.  Per the first article referenced above:

"Tropical Traditions, a supplier of organic foods and pastured meats, decided to test its grains and found that all of its commercial wheat samples were contaminated with glyphosate.  Glyphosate was also found in samples of organic grains, including barley, oats, spelt, and einkorn.  No glyphosate was found in its organic rye and millet.  Samples of organic wheat from small farms in Wisconsin were also free of glyphosate.  (source)"
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Does anyone have any relatively non biased research on how toxic glyphosate really is to the human body? A decade ago we were told it's harmless and you can drink it. If you listen to some people today, just looking at it will give you cancer. I use it on occasion to control invasives.

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Yes I was being a little facetious. I understand that people don't want to store gold coins in their houses and use them for transactions.

In my perfect world banks would exist only to be a repository for physical money, whatever form that is, NOT issued by the banks but by some other entity. And banks would be involved in administering the electronic representations of that physical money (equivalent to today's debit cards), whatever form that is, and transferring said money between people and countries. Providing an arena for simple, non-securitized commodity markets to operate.

I see no beneficial role for banks in society much beyond that.

Institutionalized interest returns on parking money somewhere would be illegal, not only because it's usurious, but because it is unsustainable in a finite world. No more fractional reserve money creation, no more debt-money at all other than unofficially through acquaintances.

Anyone who wants to invest their money in a real world venture and make a profit, hey no problem, but that isn't making money simply by sitting on money in the bank, that is pooling your money with other similar like-minded people and directly funding something.

Very explicitly write in the constitution that central banks shall not be formed and impose very strict rules on what private banks can do in order to limit their power and keep them limited to a very small sector of the economy, and prevent collusion to instigate market bubbles. Write everything we can in the constitution to avoid loopholes like which allowed the current tragedy to develop over the last century.

That's my perfect world which I know will ever happen, so we are forever banished to enslavement by the financiers until society breaks down so far that a coherent financial system can't be maintained.

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Mark-
Ok, that's kind of what I thought you meant, but I wasn't sure.  :slight_smile:

In this thought experiment, banks just store money, and provide a place that converts between digital money and physical money - services I find particularly useful, so I'm glad you didn't make them illegal.

I also heard you say that you give someone "other than banks" the power to create the banknotes.  Who would you give that power to?  And, related, what limits would there be on banknote creation?

Regarding borrowing & lending: free market has pretty clearly revealed that people don't want to all become lenders & loan collectors, any more than they want to guard their own pile of loot.  Enforcement of contracts is distasteful - when people don't pay, you want collection of your loan outsourced, especially if all you have to lend are small sums.  Plus, you really want someone else to validate the borrower.  At least, I do.  Collective lending just makes sense, just as collective money-security makes sense too.

I further claim that lending at interest is perfectly sustainable in a finite world if the loans are self-liquidating.  If I buy a computer that will help me to make $500/month, and I borrow $1000 dollars to do this - and without the computer, I can make nothing - that loan is self-liquidating.  Same thing with taxi drivers borrowing money to buy cars, and so on.  Eliminate borrowing, you have a lot fewer taxi drivers.

Likewise, there is the issue of credit.  I get the sense you don't like credit.  What about business credit, such as "30 day payment terms" for products that my (b2b) company produces?  Or credit for a farmer to buy seed from the seed company, payable when the crop comes in?  This sort of credit seems pretty important, as it reduces the capital required to start a business.  Otherwise, everyone has to save 100% of the capital required to start any business.  Presumably, the macro-effect of requiring all that capital for every startup venture to be saved means that the economy takes a whole lot longer to react to scarcity in a particular area.

Last point: if the world is a collection of economies, an economy where credit is illegal will most likely lose out to the others where it is not, because it will react as a whole much more slowly to any gaps in goods or services production.  People will see opportunity, but they will not have the savings piled up to take advantage of them.

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Mark-
One last point:

That's my perfect world which I know will [n]ever happen, so we are forever banished to enslavement by the financiers until society breaks down so far that a coherent financial system can't be maintained.
I reject the premise that we cannot work towards imagining the world we'd like to see.  First we must imagine, and only then we can create.

Wasn't Nelson Mandela able to imagine the world he would help to create while he was in prison?  If he hadn't imagined it first, he certainly never could have created it later on.  These things just don't happen by accident.

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There are now many new start-ups created by and for millenialls as an alternative to standard banking.Venture capital is flowing fast into these areas,Two that are off to a great start are simple and chime.Problem-Solution youth…Gotta love it…

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That's a good plan if and only if you live in an enlightened area with minimal, flexible zoning.  But even if you do, there's still the federal government weighing in.

The entire system is 100% geared towards assuring that you cannot escape the clutches of a predatory and serf-addicted system of banking.

Government regulations are responsible for adding $84,671 to the final price of a new single-family home, according to a report from the National Association of Home Builders.

According to the report, regulations implemented during the lot’s development are responsible for 14.6 percent of the total, while 9.7 percent is due to costs that accrue after the builder has purchased a finished lot.

“Regulations come in many forms and can be imposed by different levels of government,” explains the report. “At the local level, jurisdictions may charge permit, hook-up, and impact fees and establish development and construction standards that either directly increase costs to builders and developers, or cause delays that translate to higher costs.”

“The federal government can also impact the price of a home—for example, by requiring permits for stormwater discharge on construction site, which may lead to delays in addition to the hard cost of filing for a permit.”

The association applied the percentage increase due to regulation to home prices from Census data and found that regulatory costs in a home went from $65,224 in April of 2011 to $84,671 in March 2016—a 29.8 percent increase.

(Source)

First we can note that the minimum average cost of a new home cannot be less than $84,600...and that just gets you a bunch of permits and adherence to construction standards.  Actual building costs are extra, of course.

Second, that the nearly 30% increase in said cost over the five years between 2011 and 2016 alone is waaaAaay above the government imputed housing inflation for that period of time.

At any rate, may we get back to a time when people could build what makes sense to them, within reason, applying common sense and weighted trade-offs rather than whatever the heavily lobbied regulators can dream up.

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Racketeering has been going on for centuries. Anytime you get a select group, who wishes to control the supply or access to a supply of a given commodity to the masses, you have a racket. Call it a guild, cartel, union, regulator, what-have-you, it ends up the same; supply management. Most of the social ills of our human history are the result of this behavior. 
CM and JHK have touched on the downside, but we fail to acknowledge the upside behaviors that can lift us out of this collective mess. Western Christian history has demonstrated the typical response of small groups banding together with a benevolent philosophy to reject the exploitive/extractive system. Unfortunately, most human reactions have been violent and only replaced one tyranny for another. The successful ones have been agriculturally based, self reliant and locally based. JHK's, World Made By Hand, highlights this option and suggests a realistic solution. Getting back in touch with the land is essential in this quest. More "Featured Voices" on these topics would be welcomed

I applaud PP's efforts as a small contribution to these efforts and urge more of us to spread the word of this time tested response. Whether it be the Christian movements of the past and present(Amish, Anabaptist, Brethren, etc.) or Gandi's efforts or peasant movements, in general, it should be noted that there are realistic solutions to the racketeering proclivity endemic in our species. 

I'm out to the garden to dig some more spuds and onions that will be stored in a root cellar I built myself(without a permit).

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Pyranablade and Chris' discussion above reminded me of a clever and very patient young man, Johnny Sanphilippo, who build his own home on the Big Island of Hawaii without a loan.  He worked as a housekeeper never earning over $20,000/yr.

...[F]or $3000 cash he bought himself an empty lot in a failed subdivision on the Big Island.

… the permitting office wasn’t as enthusiastic about allowing him to build small. So he had plans drawn up for a conventionally-sized home, plus a 400 square foot garage.  Then he just built the garage.

Once the inspectors signed off on his fully-equipped garage (which included a bathroom, utility sink, electricity, septic system and rainwater capture), he let them know he wasn’t planning on building the house. Then he set about swapping the garage door for sliding glass and the utility sink for a regular kitchen.

Instead of relying on a loan to buy a house up-front, he had to do it the slow way, in stops and starts as he worked to pay off he step of the process. First, he saved up for a foundation, then the shell, then septic, etcetera and today, 13 years later, the home is complete.  [He camped on the land in a tent during the early years, then after the foundation, frame and roof were completed, he "camped" inside the shell as he worked.]

Since no contractor wanted to take on a tiny house project, and because he couldn’t afford doing the project all at once, he hired people on an individual basis (construction worker, plumber, electrician, etc).

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I don't think that debt-based money is itself inherently evil or anything… I just think that history has proven over and over again that it will be used by elites in the system to profit at the expense of the many.  If banks are well restrained, and you had truly free, market-based interest rates… then we wouldn't have half the problems we face today.  One also needs a free market money that everyone can participate in to keep the debt-based money system honest… i.e. you need freeGold.  I am not an advocate for a return to the Gold standard… just let Gold compete as a free market currency as the no counter party (risk) money that it is. 
In the US most of us are under the illusion that our debt-based money has lasting value… it has pretty much worked for the last 45 years.  But when you look at the contemporary (since 1971) history of the US dollar as told by the interest rate chart, you see the story writ large of our money becoming worthless.  What do I mean by worthless?  I mean that it has no yield… that you get paid nothing to, "lend" or deposit it in a bank.  Not only is it worthless - given our debt load in the US, and all Western nations… there is no way the money masters could make money yield again given the box they (we?) have painted themselves into.  Money with counter party risk should never yield zero, nor less than zero (if the return on money in a savings account is 0.1%, and inflation is 1.5%, your real return is negative 1.4%). 

The story told by the chart below will not be told again with the money we have today.  It can't happen.  The writing is already on the wall - the money is worthless.  There is enough residual confidence in the system left among our PokemonGo playing population that it may yet be a while until the velocity (of money) starts increasing again, and dollars ultimately become the hot potatoes that they deserve to be… but that day will come.  

The money system had a crisis not a decade after being taken off the Gold standard… and Volcker made a stick save by making money yield… and making it yield a lot!  People who conservatively invested their life savings in long term bonds in the late 1970's were very well rewarded.  The party has gone on ever since, driven by lower and lower ave. interest rates.  Now the party has ended… there is no way to make money yield again, there is no way to make bonds yield principle gains through further rate reductions.  No amount of rear view mirror modeling can explain what is happening now… it has to be viewed more philosophically.  Our money system is screwed.  One can only appreciate the usefulness of Gold as a means to save your stored labor when you understand the dynamics, and the past and present status of our debt-based fiat money.       

      

United States Fed Funds Rate
United States Fed Funds Rate730×340 6.24 KB
 

 

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" I fear the day when technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will just have a generation of idiots."    -  Albert Einstein
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You might be interested to know SP that Ambien is the sleeper that the Seal who shot Ben Laden used on the helicopters to sleep between actions. According to the book he " wrote" which I don't believe anyhow. I use it myself on suburban missions ( which are no less taxing to my over-driven fears!) 
Also Joseph P Farrell has a book out next month about the Twin Towers puzzle. He has expressed the opinion somewhere that we might be " property".

 

 

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Jim, my take on debt is the following:
If debt is not fraudulent, then it impinges on the freedom of the borrower.  It is a version of slavery :  limited, in many cases, but still slavery. 

Therefore, it usually empower the lender, and disempowers the borrower.  That then places the borrower in a worse position. 

Is that evil?  Well, if we had a true jubilee every 50 years, then no:  lending would be reserved to be a form of charity… but not exactly justice.  Other than that, I think the slavery is the reason that debt tends towards "evil" inclinations. 

I don't have a fix.  Just an awareness.

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Great new book on positive thinking during the long emergency. Check out ‘Surviving the Future’, by David Fleming. He is a deep thinker and rubbed shoulders with the Transition Town folks.
Chris and Adam, see if you can get his editor Shaun Chamberlin lined up for an interview.:smiling_face:

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JimH-
I really have to agree with everything you said.

I think the issue was not "going off the gold standard", it was the conduct of the politicians that led directly to actually having to go off the gold standard.  Leaving the gold standard was simply the necessary consequence that followed the actions already taken.

I forget who made the observation, but humans love a windfall.

  • Buying something you can't afford, to make yourself feel better, using debt: a possession windfall.
  • Taking a drug to make you feel briefly happy: emotional windfall.
  • Eating something sweet because it tastes good: calorie windfall.
  • Hoping to make a quick buck flipping a house using ponzi debt: a monetary windfall.
  • Hoping to make a quick buck through playing lotto - same thing - another monetary windfall.
For a con to work, there must first be a greedy mark.  I don't see a lot of difference between bankers who engage in predatory lending, drug dealers, casino operators, or soda manufacturers.  They all focus on exploiting the weakness in people's desire to receive a windfall of some sort.  And the best way to find a greedy mark is if you could somehow manufacture a whole lot of them - to set out to make people weak in just the right way.

Make them feel unsuccessful, not good enough, sick, and so on.

So do we blame moral decay for all this, or is it something else?  Advertising flips all the right switches in human psychology, and it becomes "mind control meets human weakness."   Its hard to forego the windfalls, its even harder when you hear about them incessantly.

https://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html

The average child sees 20,000 30-second commercials per year.

Evolutionary biology teaches us that children are more or less in a "programmable mode" when they are very young - so they can learn rapidly how to survive.  That's why they can learn 3 languages simultaneously.  Brain changes as they age.  So, hitting them with 20,000 commercials per year - well, that's mind control.

How far do we go to protect society from itself?

If we removed the mind control, would people still choose debt, and drugs, and massive amounts of sugary, fatty foods?

Maybe we're looking in the wrong place for the problem.  It might not be about "sound money", it might instead be about "clear thinking" - which would end up yielding a sound money system as a side effect of the way people made their decisions.

Imagine for a moment: a society without advertising.  People would have to buy things based on their own feelings about the product.

Imagine that.

 

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My words have been misinterpreted by Dave.  I said that debt-based money is not inherently evil, and I said that if banks were restrained, and the interest rate was freely determined by the market (and not by central banks, either directly as in short term rates, or through manipulations (like QE when it comes to long term rates) then we would only have half the problems we face today.
I did not say that bankers are not evil… I think that they are for the most part.  Dave turned his, "agreement" with my post into a blame-the-victim (of banking) screed.  While on some level, it does take two to tango (a borrower, and a lender) the lender has all the power.  When my wife's father's second wife, then his widow, was given a loan for a house in Florida by a banker who completely made up a number on the application for her income, which in reality was near zero at the time… a transaction that ended up putting her in the poor house…  that was evil.  Does anyone not have a story within two degrees of Kevin Bacon about the evils of modern banking?  Was it not evil to influence our lawmakers to change the laws such that student loan debt is not subject to bankruptcy, right on the eve of a huge expansion of student loan debt?  The evil could fill a few books.        

Honest people in banking end up outside of banking pretty quickly;

  http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-18/why-deutsche-bank-whistleblower-turned-down-825-million-award-his-own-words
My second point was that we would only have half our problems were fractional reserve banking, and debt-based fiat money reformed but still left in place -  I should have been more explicit about what the other half of the problems are;  expandable debt-based fiat money always favors spending our future today.. and hence is inherently extractive towards the earth.  The other half of the problems in my analogy are the third E problems we face.  For this I don't really blame the bankers, because it's up to all of us whether we act as good shepherds of the earth, although bankers in league with corporations are probably a beast that requires further analysis in this regard.  We need to wake up to the fact that, "growth" most often means accelerated extraction, and spending our finite (and even our renewable) resources more and more quickly and un-sustainably.