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In the end, isn't it always they who decide what is best for us?
And in the real end, it is never best for us, but best for them.
We down here are seeing that the price of houses is going down. Naturally, we expected that, We've had bubbles before, we knew that after the bubble bursts real estate prices go down. Does that mean that "value" is a fluctuating something? In the old days (in my life time) a house was a home. It had a value that did not change much, and if it changed it slowly might even gain value. Not like a car, for instance. "Everybody knew" that a new car loses 30% of its value the moment you drive it from the dealer. That is why on a car loan you pay the interest up front. But a house is an investment; a car a necessity.
Now, all that seems to have changed. I do not understand this new world. There is no ground under the new world. It is all up in the air, an imaginary, illusionary economy that plays with figures on computers, apparently all based on imaginary money borrowed at shifting rates. That, to me, is frightening, and it makes it difficult to believe the big words they use to scare me. After all for eight years we have been told things that were not, and are not, true at all. So why should we believe them now?
This is a two hours plus movie. The first hour, The Venus Project people explain in great detail, but mostly comprehensible, to me at least, how money has morphed into an imaginary commodity. Why the seven hundred billion we were coaxed into creating "to prevent something worse from happening," is probably money thrown away. Today, money is just something you play with on computers, value does not count. It gives me a creepy feeling that we shall have to pay for it, and not the money wizards who make bubbles to get unconscionably rich.
(I did not spend much time with the second half of the movie, in which an old man and a not-as-old woman explain what the Venus Project is all about: "to redesign a culture." I know that cultures are not designed, they grow. They lost me when they said that there is no human nature, only human behavior and that human behavior had sunk to an unsustainable level, but that they will design better, sustainable, human behavior. Armies "design" human behavior, but at what cost! Twenty or more percent of returning veterans are so behaviorally destroyed that they may never fit into a civil society any more. Designing culture is even scarier than the hoopla with borrowed non-existent money that made billions for those who know how to move imaginary money around the world.)
But back to the real world down here, where money is paper dollars that we can exchange for food and other necessities. These days we also pay for things that may or may not be necessary. Is a computer necessary? For the money jugglers, yes; for us perhaps not. We did fine without computers for thousands of years. As we did without refrigerators, washing machines, three or four different kinds of telephones, automobiles in all shapes, zippers, plastic, antibiotics (do you realize that means "against living entities"), etc. We call that "progress." We were sold things and ideas that then became so much part of our lives that we can no longer imagine doing without. But it is the energy needed to make those things, and more energy to run and maintain them, that spews tons and tons of carbon into the atmosphere which not only makes smog, but is heating up the planet we live on. We are destroying the earth by burning oil and coal to run these now "necessary" items.
People, what we call progress is destroying the planet as we knew it, and we are totally unprepared to live on (or in) the planet we are making. And, what is worse, we are too busy having to worry about the airy fairy financial system of the world to pay attention to our planet and the atmosphere around it: the air we breathe. Maybe It is finally getting to us that the fearsome as well as the soothing words coming from Washington these last eight years were just a thin veil hiding what was really happening, while entertainment 24/7 kept us domesticated. Our wars are not going well at all, it turns out now. So why are we still there? Don't we make things worse by hanging around bombing with our superior weaponry and superior smirks?
Let's just get everybody back here, and take stock.
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What there is is all there is.
True for me, for every person, for a country, and yes, even for a financial system however stratospheric it may have imagined itself to be.
What there is is all there is.
Money can only be a convenient substitute for real value. Spend what I actually can spend. Make the best of things as they are. And I am not alone: share.
What there is is all there is.
How about revamping the financial system so that it only deals with what there is, and not with what they wished there were. Borrowing is really gambling on the future, isn't it? They say this crisis will get worse unless we, the government, do something -- other experts say this is a crisis, but the seven hundred billion government money is not going to deal with what is really wrong. Who can we believe?
