Fear and Self-loathing

We faced a substantial, unexpected expense this week, related to our one vehicle, and it conjured up all manner of emotions, some based in reality, and some emanating from the deeper wells of my paranoia. I do not believe I am alone in such reactions, so I am sharing them here.

First, we are fortunate. We can absorb the cost of repairs and new tires with our savings. There are countless citizens who are not that advantaged, who would be charging it on a credit card, or forced to abandon personal transportation completely. Racking up debt seems to be as much of an American pastime as baseball and apple pie.

Every time we dip into savings, though, means less money for the future. It is snipping another thread in the safety net. Everything monetary seems extremely tenuous now, and that is where fear starts to creep in. I believe that anxiety is a legitimate concern. Everyone who is not a billionaire should behave cautiously.

The self-loathing comes from not having traditional employment, or at least some kind of reasonably dependable income. I abandoned that lifestyle well before the pandemic. I am simply dysfunctional in the average workplace. Subjecting others, and myself, to that is not in anyone’s best interests. I do thrive when I get to choose who I want to work with, but I am in a rural location now where that is almost impossible to do in person.

I am nearing retirement, I think, but the age at which you can claim full benefits from Social Security keeps going up. Neither political party seems to have a problem with this because the people we elect to public office are so wealthy they don’t need Social Security themselves. They also get a government pension, and their own premium healthcare package.

Personally, we have investments, even a “wealth manager,” but they certainly have bigger fish as clients. Obviously, everything tethered to the stock market is precarious now, thanks to tariffs and other destabilizing actions that our President and congress have been taking. Consequently, I don’t think of our financial state as “real,” let alone something we can count on over the next twenty or thirty years.

This is all a predicament I think many of us share, and it has enormous ramifications. One horrifically distressing aspect is that as perceived personal risk goes up, we are a lot less likely to make donations to nonprofits that, ironically, help people in even worse circumstances. There are also many environmental organizations and civil rights advocates that I would like to support with my dollars, but what if we have another personal emergency?

I begin to rage when I think about how government has defunded many of those agencies and non-governmental organizations doing positive work, and instead grossly inflated the budgets of the “War Department,” and I.C.E. Emphasis on “gross.” We should have the exact opposite scenario.

If money itself is not the problem, it is the weaponization of it that enables cruelty, and compounds existing misery. We have to make money irrelevant, somehow, to rob it of its power. We stand to lose control of it entirely should cryptocurrency become the new standard. Almost nobody understands blockchain, myself included, and crypto represents, essentially, the privatization of currency. Its value will be determined entirely by powerful individuals, and we will be at their mercy.

My greatest act of fiscal resistance has been to enroll in a credit union. I did that decades ago when I lived in another city, and I have been delighted by the results. Spreading assets across different types of financial institutions seems like a good strategy, at least for now.

Today, our car is safer now, with new brakes, and rides a little smoother thanks to new tires, but where will the proverbial road take us? The GPS navigation device/department of our governments seems to be malfunctioning, and we are being taken for a ride, instead of being in the driver’s seat and determining our own destination. Fasten your seatbelt.

The Impossibility of Money

It should be clear by now that our current monetary systems are failing us, or at least the vast majority of us. It has reached the point for me, personally, where I am questioning the very existence of currency, let alone how it behaves. As long as we accept the contemporary and historical paradigm, we are unlikely to generate positive change (and I’m not talking about coins).

I can’t get over the irony that money is called “currency,” evoking the word “current,” as in something that flows. That is not what happens in our economies. Currency gets backed up behind the dam(n) of capitalism, hoarded by a tiny minority.

Cryptocurrency was, to me, an off-putting concept from the beginning, but I only recently figured out why. While the idea of alternative forms of transactions is attractive, this is not the answer, for many reasons.

The currency of my livelihood is words, so I am disappointed in myself for not immediately recognizing the obvious. “Crypto” is Greek for “hidden,” as in cryptozoology, the study of sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, and related legends. Fascinating, but there is not widespread subscription to the idea, kind of like cryptocurrency. The last thing we need for our economy is more hidden currency. We already have offshore bank accounts and other tax havens. We need total transparency in matters of money.

The energy demands for running blockchain are another reason for concern. The server farms consume massive amounts of electricity for their operation. The same can be said for generative AI (Artificial Intelligence), and data mining, too. Such large server farms are also incredibly loud, running twenty-four hours, seven days a week, generating noise complaints along with Bitcoin.

Beyond the energy-intensive aspect, cryptocurrency has other shortcomings. It has yet to be widely accepted by retail businesses. It requires technology that is still inaccessible to many, by choice or by reliability of internet service providers. Don’t get me started on NFTs (Non-fungible Tokens). Lastly, there is understandable consumer skepticism over crypto’s validity, valuation, and sustainability.

The most attractive attribute of cryptocurrency might be the perception that it is somehow subversive, a way of undermining conventional capitalist models. It’s complex nature and dependence on technology ensure that it will likely remain the domain of a different, tech-savvy minority. Perhaps it is the “snob appeal” I am mistaking for subversion.

A truly viable alternative currency will have to come from the bottom up, designed for communities of all levels, from local to global. As it stands now, we have currency of an arbitrary value, determined by a select minority, and that is demonstrably unsustainable, at least in the environmental sense. There exists a different model that might serve as a template.

The currency of the natural world is energy. It has an absolute, invariable value. Can energy be hoarded? Not permanently, and certainly not generationally. Various organisms are able to store energy to use during hibernation, metamorphosis, and other stressful processes and circumstances. Otherwise, energy cycles freely, allowing the proper functioning of ecosystem transactions.

The challenge of emulating a natural model is to do so without the attendant predatory and parasitic forms of energy exchange. We have that in spades in the capitalist model, and the trend is toward exacerbating that pattern rather than nullifying it.

The true revolution in currency will have to be organic. The leadership for it will probably come from Indigenous peoples, provided we allow that, and can forge alliances with labor and consumer unions. Existing models for localized currencies might help inform such a movement. Promoting interest in, and subscription to, credit unions and cooperative businesses will only enhance the effort.

The incentives for promoting blockchain tech are still profit-driven, as opposed to even trying to balance the common good. I think I have more faith in the imagination of artists to take us in a positive direction here. Pair that brand of creativity with economic and social justice disciplines, and we might be able to get something truly equitable. Finally.

Chasing Money

At this particular moment in time, I am secure enough in the fiscal sense that I do not need to chase projects for the money. That has not always been the case, and it will surely be a fleeting sense of relief. The welcome respite gives me pause in another way, more restless and disturbing than gratifying. It calls into question the idea that money should be a motivator, that everything be framed in the sense of income and expenditures.

© BayAreaDigitalSolutions.com

The constant implication in our lives is that we have a responsibility to earn an income, a responsibility to spend it and invest it to keep the economy going, and that taxation is the villain that keeps us from fully realizing our financial potential. Those directives come from those already wealthy, who attained their power by hoarding money. We think that money is the matrix that holds our lives together, and we need to free our minds of that foolish belief.

We think that money is the matrix that holds our lives together, and we need to free our minds of that foolish belief.

The only currency of any relevance and importance is energy. Some may equate energy with love, or some other emotion or notion, but what I am talking about is metabolic energy. That is the currency of living ecosystems, and it flows freely among all organisms. There is minimal banking of metabolic energy. Plant tubers might be one example. Bears putting on fat for the winter is another. These situations are the minority, though. Energy usually passes quickly through the food web.

Economies can be viewed as redundant and inefficient ecosystems in which every niche is filled by only one species: Homo sapiens. Energy flow is disrupted as some individuals hoard money instead of releasing it to continue flowing to other niches. Nature is strict in its demand that energy flow.

Perhaps the worst aspect of money is that it has allowed us to assign arbitrary value to everything. "Precious" metals and stones are precious only because we say they are. There is a fine line between priceless and worthless. Arguably, they are two sides of the same coin. The lives of other species are priceless until we decide that the monetary value of the land they occupy can be increased by developing a shopping center....and we arbitrarily decided what the land was worth to begin with.

Money limits our creativity because we think only in terms of how we will benefit financially. We dismiss important endeavors before they get off the ground because [whining] "that's too costly," or "we can't make any money doing that." A cost-benefit analysis too often destroys potentially great achievements.

Money also actively encourages the invention of unnecessary products and services. The marketplace is full of disposable goods, mass-produced decorative objects, and all manner of substances passing themselves off as food and drink that are destructive to our individual and collective health. We are all children in the face of advertising, so easily convinced that we cannot live without a given item. Money fuels the conflict that filmmaker Ken Burns describes as the "I want versus we need."

Money allows us to judge one another not by the content of our character, but by the sum of our bank accounts, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Wealthism should be as repulsive as racism, but instead we collectively aspire to be financially excessive. More importantly, we want to exclude others from our sense of entitlement and privilege. We want a very tangible expression of our success, but ironically define success by tangible expression. We never arrive in this scenario. It is the treadmill of status, nothing more. It is a process that erodes society instead of elevating it.

We can no longer afford (and I use that word deliberately) to allow ourselves to be conditioned to believe that money is a limiting or freeing element of our society. What is priceless? Empathy. Respect. Honesty. Patience. Persistence. Volunteerism. Be examples of those things. Add to that list, because it will get you thinking about what is truly value-able. Meanwhile, I challenge you to imagine a world without money. What would it look like? Could we operate more justly and more efficiently without it?

Budgets

© SSAE16professionals.com

Most talk of budgets is centered on government appropriations, program cuts, and other headline-making, multi-million dollar decisions made by elected officials. How much thought goes into our own personal budgeting? Are we guilty of saying to ourselves that if deficits and debt are ok for government, then overspending should be acceptable on a personal level? I find my own situation the opposite of that. I do not have a spending problem, I have an earning problem.

There is simply very little I am capable of doing, or interested in doing, that could generate a consistent income. More to the point, I no longer have tolerance for most employers, workplace politics, and being a cog that generates wealth for executives and company shareholders instead of a more equitable division of profits. Oh, I am guilty of instigating workplace drama myself. There may even be former coworkers and supervisors reading this who can attest to my being temperamental, seeking romantic relationships with coworkers, and not always completing tasks in my job description.

At least my contempt for most businesses is matched by my lack of enthusiasm for spending. There is simply very little I am interested in purchasing in the way of material goods. Not that I don't have my weaknesses. My spouse can vouch for the fact that tasty-but-not-always-healthy food and beverages are near the top of my priority list when it comes to disposable income. Good thing alcohol is so expensive, or I'd be drinking daily. Maybe hourly. On a really bad day it might be all I would do. The older I get, though, the less "things" I find I need or want. In fact, I would love to liquidate most of my possessions in favor of more money to travel.

One of my greatest disappointments is that virtually none of my belongings has any appeal to anyone else. My parents got me the Matchbox® toy cars as a kid, not the Hot Wheels™, for example. I have a few autographs, but they are from the era when sports stars and Hollywood celebrities would personalize them instead of offering a generic signature. That's apparently a bad thing that diminishes their value considerably. I put a few of my old natural history books up for sale on a Facebook group and got exactly zero responses. I don't mind donating things, but that usually isn't even enough to warrant itemizing my federal tax return. If charity begins at home, then we could use a little help here, IRS.

Collectively, we like to create the illusion that we are doing better financially than we really are. I've written about this before, the metamorphosis of the Middle Class into the Debt Class. We are taught that we need to "keep up with the Joneses," and not to complain, or have envy or jealousy over the success of others. Back in the day, that might have been true, and we could advance ourselves at least incrementally up the ladder of affluence. Today, corporations and Congress are simply removing the rungs, right out from under where we are currently perched. They are also cutting holes in the safety net beneath the ladder while telling us it is all for our own good, that we will somehow be better off. Baloney.

Back to your budget. The first thing to do is stop judging yourself by your material assets. Friends judging you that way? Get new friends. You can start with me. You know what is important, and the overwhelming majority of it you cannot find in a store or online. It is the fabric of family, community, and the other organisms we share the land, water, and atmosphere with. All else is icing, and arguably even unnecessary. There. Doesn't that make the cable or satellite service a little easier to part with? Maybe it even makes the decision to strike out on your own business venture a more plausible possibility. Go for it.

Why You Should Leave Your Bank...Now

© Makeyourmoneymatter.org

There may be nothing better you can do to empower yourself in today's economy and political structure (for lack of a better term) than to choose where your hard-earned dollars go. No, you don't have much of a choice in taxation, but you have a marketplace full of financial institutions. Some of those are better than others. Some of them have demonstrated time and again an absolute contempt for conventional middle-class consumers. Here are some reasons why you should choose wisely, and maybe opt for a credit union instead of a bank.

Fees. Many traditional banks nickel and dime your accounts to death. You need a minimum balance or you get a "maintenance fee." You bounce a check, you get a fee. Ok, you might deserve a fee if you are fiscally irresponsible, but too often you do not have to do anything to incur a fee.

Maximums and minimums. We already mentioned minimum balance requirements for traditional banks. They usually have a maximum withdrawal amount, and/or number of withdrawals, too, which means you are being punished for emergency situations in which you may need more than the usual amount. The most you should suffer is an interest penalty for a low balance.

Socially and environmentally irresponsible investments. This may be the overriding reason you should leave a commercial bank. Are you opposed to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)? It may interest you to know that Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley have all extended credit to Energy Transfer Partners, the company constructing the DAPL. Don't believe me? Check out the Snopes.com article. We can collectively make a statement by taking our own personal business elsewhere.

Lack of interest. Literally! Can you remember the last time your bank account earned interest? Neither can I. Savings accounts are essentially worthless. Certificates of deposit (CDs) lock your money away for at least several months or more at a time and still pay next to no interest. Banks have no interest in paying you to save, or creating products that reflect the need of the average person to keep assets liquid for emergencies yet still earn a little interest in the meantime. Sure, the Federal Reserve chairman is responsible for setting interest rates, but banks still have more flexibility they choose not to exercise.

Lack of interest in you. Unless you are wealthy enough for private banking services, you are probably of little interest as a customer to the average bank. Priorities at least appear to be: Shareholders, CEO, customer and/or employee. Banks are profit-driven institutions that profit off of customers, not for them. They push loan and credit services like....I'll resist comparisons to nefarious enterprises. We are encouraged to live beyond our means, and to think first of ourselves instead of our communities. It's what banks do.

I have been with a credit union for the communicating arts for decades, and finally divorced myself from conventional banks....at least five years ago. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Customer service is outstanding, no matter how much is in my account, or how many products I have. This excellence has persisted even after a merger with another credit union. When was the last time an event like turned out for the better?

Because credit unions are not publicly traded, the customer is the priority. Because credit unions are usually local, or at least regional, and/or tied to a particular profession or military service, responsiveness to members vastly exceeds that of a traditional bank. Further, they are often sponsors of local charities and charitable events, from which we all prosper as a more healthy community.

I no longer live in the same city (not even the same state) as my credit union, but no worries. Many credit unions do what is called "shared branch" transactions. I can go to a totally different credit union to do my banking. How cool is that?

I urge my readers to give serious consideration to switching from a big bank to a credit union, for all of the reasons mentioned above. At least take stock of your current bank and make sure it is doing right by you, and right for our world at large. This is how you become empowered. You deserve it, and so do the rest of us.