Even if no one speak about financial serfdom doesn’t imply it’s not real.
Ours is a neofeudal economy of financial serfs in servitude to a Monetary Aristocracy. The Financial Nobility/ Upper Class own all the financial obligation and the serfs owe the financial obligation to the Aristocracy. The serfs own possessions that don’t create much income, the Aristocracy owns assets that generate trillions of dollars in earnings. The serfs pay high tax rates if they make above-poverty salaries, the Financial Nobility pay low taxes thanks to tax-avoidance scams organized by the Upper class’s toadies and lackeys in the Central State. The serfs develop value, the Financial Nobility is parasitic.
That we are powerless is one of the crucial social control misconceptions continuously promoted by the Status Quo. What much better method to keep the serfs passive than to enhance a belief in their powerlessness against Financial Feudalism?
However we are not powerless. Our complicity offers the Financial Aristocracy its power. Remove our complicity and the Aristocracy implodes.
The path of freedom is to pull out of monetary feudalism. Here are twelve courses any adult can legally pursue in the course of their every day lives:
1. Assistance the decentralized, non-market economy. The core ideology of consumerism and financialization is that non-market properties and experiences have no status or monetary worth. This consists of social capital, meals with good friends, projects done cooperatively with pals, house gardens and lots of other decentralized activities that can not be financialized into central market transactions. Identity and social status are developed in the non-market economy by collaboration, sharing, reciprocity, conviviality and kindness.
Decentralized methods localized; farmers markets are examples of local market economies where the transactions are in cash (so banks can’t skim transactions charges) and the money stays in the local economy instead of flowing to some remote concentration of capital.
If you begin valuing non-market assets and experiences as the most essential markers of status, you are resisting both financialization and consumerism.
Top-down centralized “services” imposed by the Central State are the issue, not the option, as they even more the concentration of wealth and power into unsteady monocultures. Stop seeking to extremely complicated fake-reforms and centralized solutions to unsustainable systems and begin exploring decentralized, localized options that bypass both the Central State and the Financial Upper class.
2. Stop participating in financialization. Financialization is the insidious imperative of the Financial Upper class that seeks to turn every human interaction into a financial deal that can be charged a fee, and change all assets into financialized instruments that can be commoditized and sold for exceptionally lucrative costs.
As the financial resources of city governments implode under the weight of their secured fiefdoms, many are following the siren tune of financialization as a momentary (and inevitably devastating) “fix” to their structural insolvency. For instance, the income stream from parking meters is financialized into a possession that is offered to a personal corporation. When parking costs double, the residents of the city have no option by means of democracy or petition, as the meters in their city are now “owned” by a remote concentration of capital that can double late charges, charge outrageous deal costs, etc, at will.
This is how financialization undoubtedly shifts into monetary tyranny.
The erosion of America’s middle class security has numerous structural causes, but chief amongst them was the financialization of the housing market. This has actually led to serial bubbles of housing valuations and the extensive extraction of equity for intake– the classic “windfall” that financialization always produces in its first toxic blush.
3. Redefine self-interest to leave out debt-servitude and reliance on consumerism and the Central State. Unless you are long retired and have no other option, reduce dependence on the State. Dependence on the State deteriorates the correlation between continual effort and gain, so the work ethic and entrepreneurism both atrophy as they no longer use competitive benefits in a system where bread and circuses are ensured by the State.
4. Act upon your awareness that the nature of success and monetary security is altering. Reliance on centralized concentrations of power (Wall Street and the Central State) is now an extremely risky wager that what is demonstrably unsustainable will amazingly become sustainable through pixie dust or more Federal Reserve trickery. Security flows from durability, self-reliance, decentralized, varied income sources and abundant social capital, not speculation fueled by Fed policies and Wall Street.
5. Stop supporting distant concentrations of capital that subvert democracy by using their enormous earnings to buy the machinery of State governance and policy. For instance, stop watching broadcast programming owned by the six global media corporations that manage the huge majority of the media/marketing complex.
Stop eroding your health and sending your cash to home offices by no longer frequenting lunch counter and by no longer purchasing unhealthy packaged foods from corporate agribusiness.
Close your accounts with Wall Street financial investment firms and the “too big to stop working” banks that control the home mortgage, credit and debt markets in the U.S. If you require such an account to negotiate your business, keep low balances so the banks can not sweep your capital for their own use every day.
6. Stop supporting the debt-and-leverage based Financial Aristocracy. Liquidate all debt as soon as possible, handle no new financial obligation except for brief time periods, explore localized or crowd-sourced private-capital loans that leave out the banks and restrict the number of monetary transactions that enrich the banks and Wall Street.
7. Transfer your properties out of Wall Street and into regional business or assets that do not enhance and empower Wall Street. Buy properties you control 100%, without the mediation of Wall Street.
8. Refuse to take part in consumerist status identifiers and the social defeat they produce. Stop admiring and respecting those showing status signifiers (supercars, $300 million private yachts, and so on); begin considering them as useless prisoners of a pathological mindset. Stop evaluating people based upon their lack of status signifiers. Free your own mind from the toxic sociopathology of consumerism and social defeat. Stop enjoying commercial tv and streaming business distractions and reduce your exposure to marketing and consumerist propaganda.
9. Vote in every election with an eye on satisfying honesty and reality and punishing empty promises. Unless the incumbent has actually renounced business contributions, unsustainable financial obligation, financial tyranny and Central State advancement of civil liberties, then vote against the incumbent, for they are just another lackey of the State-Plutocracy collaboration. Avoid electing either the Demopublican or Republicrat branches of the plutocracy; elect an independent or third party prospect.
Remember that resistance isn’t just about refusing to participate in pathological neofeudalism; it has to do with developing a sustainable option to the unsustainable State-Aristocracy collaboration. When individuals state that electing a third-party prospect is “squandering your vote,” respond that voting for either of the plutocrat parties is the real waste of a vote because their “leadership” is dooming the country to destabilization and insolvency. As independents get a growing number of “squandered” votes, they move from being “marginalized” to becoming effective voices of stability and transparency.
10. Stop supporting inflationary policies such as money development – QE by the Federal Reserve and Federal deficit spending. Act on your knowledge that inflation is theft which the Federal Reserve is a personal consortium of banks that is the enabler and protector of the parasitic Financial Upper class.
11. Become healthy, active and fit. Decline to take in unhealthy food and packaged food, refuse to misuse much of your time in sedentary “usage” of business “entertainment” and digital distraction, and commit your energy and time to proficiency, new abilities, developing social capital and relationships, tasks you own and enterprises that benefit your real self-interest. Decline to follow the marketing/media siren song into chronic ill-health, social-media dependency and social defeat.
12. Embrace self-directed strategies and construct a durable, community-based, localized life of identity and significance. Construct a social ecology of favorable, productive, collective, non-pathological people of like minds and spirits. Be effective via Self-Reliance, not powerless through lethargy, passivity and complicity.
For more on these ways to break free of serfdom, check out my books Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Modification, A Non-traditional Guide to Buying Troubled Times and Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.
Here is Neofeudal Financial Serfdom in 3 charts: just because nobody talks about neofeudalism doesn’t indicate it’s not real:
New Podcast:
Charles Hugh Smith on Preparing Yourself for a Genuine Recession(38 min)( 38 min) My new book is now available at a 10 % discount rate($8.95 ebook,$ 18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century. Check out the very first chapterfor free(PDF)Check out excerpts of all 3 chapters Podcast with Richard Bonugli: Self Dependence in the 21st Century (43 min)My
recent books: The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me(Unique)
print$10.95, Kindle$ 6.95 Check out an excerpt free of charge (PDF)
When You Can’t Go On: Burnout
, Reckoning and Renewal$ 18 print,$ 8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Check out the first area totally free(PDF)Worldwide Crisis, National Renewal: A(Revolutionary )Grand Method for the United States(Kindle$9.95, print$24, audiobook)Read Chapter One free of charge (PDF ). A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking World(Kindle$ 8.95, print$20, audiobook$17.46)Check out the first area free of charge(PDF). Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Revenue, Power, and AI in a Shocked World
(Kindle $5, print$10, audiobook) Check out the very first section free of charge(PDF). The Experiences of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake
(Novel)$4.95 Kindle,$ 10.95 print); checked out the very first chapters totally free (PDF)Cash and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle,$15 print)Check out the very first area free of charge Become a$1/month client of my work by means of patreon.com. Register for my Substack
for free KEEP IN MIND: Contributions/subscriptions are acknowledged in the order received.
Your name and e-mail stay personal and will not be offered to any other specific, business or agency. Thank you, David E.($60), for your monumentally generous contributionto