“Debt is a
relationship of power and inequality between the loan institution and the
borrower.”
Want some health care? Need a place to live? Are you hungry?
Need a gun? A politician? A drone missile? All those and more, much much more,
are available all day and all night at the marketplace and you don’t even have
to leave your home to go downtown or to the mall to do your shopping. It’s all
there for your consuming convenience on your computer, iPod, smart phone, dumb
phone or other products that can be used to charge purchases to your plastic
for anything and everything, anytime all the time. Nice?
Until your credit runs out. Or you lose your job. Or you didn’t
have a job or credit in the first place. In which case, none of those things
will be available to you.
It might not be too painful going without a weapon or a
missile or a rented if not fully owned politician but lacking food, clothing,
shelter and health care make it really tough to survive. In fact, science,
religion and numerous polls paid for by market researchers make it clear:
It’s impossible.
We are currently being told by some that the private
insurance profit program called Obamacare has created a wonderful health care
marketplace and is the greatest thing we’ve ever had, and by others that it
will kill people, destroy the economy and bring attack from outer space or
worse. Both arguments avoid the major question:
How come we have to go to a marketplace and purchase health
care and everything else we need in life? And who, or what, decides how much
money we need to have in order to get whatever it is we need and how deeply we
go into debt once we no longer have that money? Where and when did that process
start? At the Garden of Eden? During the American Revolution? At a Christmas
sale? Who started it? God? The Iroquois? Morgan Guaranty No-Trust? More
important, how can we control that process before it produces not only greater
inequality than already exists, but worse, an end to the process of life
itself?
Consumers – at one time called citizens but that was long
ago – have run up personal debts in this marketplace that add up to hundreds of
billions if not trillions of dollars. And the nations and societies where they
once were called citizens have debts equaling many trillions more. Does this
mean everybody is leading a wonderful life with all the stuff we’ve purchased
even if we don’t need it and don’t have the money to buy it?
Does a snake have wings?
If we’re so happy and content how come we have to spend
hundreds of billions to protect ourselves from nazis, commies, terrorists,
anti-Semites, Jews, burglars, street criminals, suite criminals, invaders from
outer and inner space, vampires, sitcoms, the landlord, our in-laws, finance
companies and so much else that has us constantly at our wits end, worried sick
and living in fear?
Reminder for the arithmetically challenged among us: we are
talking very very big numbers that have moved from millions to billions to
trillions in a very short period of historic time. For example:
A trillion has
twelve zeros and is equal to a thousand billions, each of them having nine
zeros. Got that? A billion seconds equal 32 years. In current media-speech,
that’s more than three decades. Wow? But a trillion seconds are equal to 320
centuries. That’s 32,000 years. Huh? Again to put it into a form that might
make it clear to those who can no longer say “ten years” but are compelled by
custom, habit and/or language and logic disability to only use the word “decade”,
those trillion seconds would take 3,200 “decades” to pass. However we say it,
that is a very very very long time. And remember, we are speaking about very
very very large dollar numbers, in most cases equally beyond our ability to
comprehend except as abstractions with seemingly little meaning in everyday
life.
Now back to our personal and collective-as-a-nation debts. Think
of those numbers for a second or a minute or all day or, if you’re really slow
and hung up on current media mind mash, a decade, and in the words of Ricky
Ricardo, “‘splain to me Lucy how we gonna pay that money?” Or more
realistically, whether we should even try, and when we should start canceling
it, and whether to begin that cancellation at a personal, state, national or
global level.
We should all know about our unfortunately massive global
marketplace for garbage. We are burying our planet in layers of our economic
species feces. How about seeing much if not all of debt for the garbage that it
is, a putrid life threatening smelly dump for those of us who don’t have enough
political power (guns, drones, etc.) to force its payment to us, but under the
guns and drones of those with the political power to force our payments of it
to them. Hmmm.
What would happen if a whole lot of us, not just one
community but many in unity with many others, told “them”; we are cancelling
the debt? If we did it in great enough numbers, like maybe close to the
seemingly incalculable figures called national and accumulated personal debt,
what would happen? Of course democracy would have to play a major role in
getting us to take that step. Some think we are a democratic society already.
Hmmm. Bring this subject up with your democratically elected representative and
see what reaction you get. Disregard that reaction and begin working with your
fellow citizens to stop consuming for just a while and begin planning to bring
about a happier environment by first cancelling the debt and then seeing what
it is we really need and where we should go to get it. We could save hundreds
of trillions of dollars and our race as well. Who would be against such a
sensible plan for humanity?
Guess?
Guess?
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