Money and What Should be Done with It

Money comes from nothing, and when it’s created, creates debt. This happens through the Fractional Reseve System. The Federal Reserve creates money out of the debt that the government claims. Only a small portion of the money needs to be held in ‘reserve’ after it’s ‘deposited’ into banks. For every deposit, the bank can potentially play with nine times the amount of money deposited. The bank loans that to individuals and other entities who deposit it into other accounts, perpetuating a cycle. All this money is debt (and almost all electronic), and all debt gets charged interest. Interest owed on existing debt exceeds the amount of existing debt and can only increase. Currency in circulation will never come close to matching the amount of money existing in the form of debt.

If the banks can access and manipulate money that doesn’t exist, then why can’t I as an individual do the same thing on a much smaller scale? That’s what I call my ‘credit card game’. I try to use the system’s debt-money to sustain my spending of debt-money. As long as I avoid intrest as much as possible, then as long as the Fractional Reserve System continues to operate, I should be able to continue increasing my debt without compromising my assets. Playing this ‘game’ also requires the attitude that even currency is not truly a tangible asset that can be depended on for survival needs.

Occasional losses are inevitable because I have to use my currency supply to rebalance my debt activity whenever my spending results in a cycle of intrest. To avoid participation in global slavery (dependance on money for the basic necessities of human life) I must balance these debt activities with a material lifestyle that does not rely on money (or labour hours in exchange for money) to guarantee sustainable resources necessary for survival such as food, shelter, entertainment, excercise, and health care.

But the ‘credit card game’ is just a risk to take for fun with a dysfunctional system as it spirals out of control. Playing the game involves the inherent threat of being swept into the spiral oneself. In effect, playing the game actually IS succumbing to the spiral, but it’s a desperate attempt to leap from the top of one loop to another while avoiding at all possible costs getting caught in the downcurve. It’s a huge risk to take in a very unstable uncontrollable arena. The rewards can very easily be surpassed by the price on has to pay if one so much as makes a single mistake in the course of the whole game. And the Fractional Reserve System is designed in such a way as to make those mistakes inevitable. The only way to win the ‘credit card game’ is to successfully extricate oneself from it somehow once one has started playing without without a significant loss of resources.

The only way to actually be free of the relationship between money and resources is to be free of the Fractional Reserve System.

The most implementable method of obtaining freedom from the Fractional Reserve System is to secure individual personal control of sustainable resources. For example, if you can eat from your own garden, then you don’t need to spend as many hours participating in the system that ultimately supports globalised corporate slave labour. Why take time out of the day to perpetuate a system of debt when you could be spending it enriching your own life?

Food is the most basic resource to begin with when establishing individual control of reources. Shelter is important to survival, but it is already structurally guaranteed by our status quo. Food is a daily consumable resource that must constantly (immeditately) be replenished as it is consumed. Food is one of the prime resources significantly employed by the corporate powers of globalisation to keep the slave-labour force in a state of poverty and dependance. If you can liberate yourself from monetary dependance for access to this resource, already you are substantially decreasing your participation in the system of debt and economic subjugation.

(On a side note, the corporate powers go so far as to manipulate the content of the food available at the lowest prices so that the slave-labour masses can only afford a diet of high protein and insufficient vitamins and minerals so that they can work hard but do not live long or have the energy and attention span to revolt against their situation.)

Growing one’s own food is possible even with minimal resources. Even starting small lightens the grip of debt. Window boxes and potted plants are an option for those in virtually any living situation. On a grand scale, coordinated projects of planting vegetables and so on in public greenspace could easily become a sweeping popular movement if enough motivated individuals or collectives were to muster the energy and inspiration. In my personal opinion, small groups of individuals communally occupying houses in urban settings and turning the lawns into gardens is the most sustainable method to realistically strive for personal control of the food resource.

Ultimately, the most important thing to think about is this whole system. Realise that there’s something very wrong with the Fractional Reserve System and it only inherently gets worse. We need to start somewhere, somehow, to change the status quo. It’s not so important WHAT you do right now – the system is so big and the crisis is accellerating at a continually increasing pace – but the important thing is to start to do SOMEthing, to TAKE ACTION, because if enough people start doing small things and achieving independence in small ways, a snowball effect could produce a large push towards the beginning of the collapse of the Fractional Reserve System, opening up possibilities and revealling options for the next step towards this necessary liberation.