Banks are not well understood. To many they appear to be some neutral factor that ‘only’ provides an essential service to the ‘economy’, that of credit creation. The banks themselves like to restrict your thinking to how much money who has, and what you could spend it on. Ideally you should believe that as long as you have money, you can get anything you want.
All money is credit that was once created by a bank
Why is this ideal? Because it means you bought their business model with hook, line and sinker. Because they create the money, you say you want it. You will do whatever they want. Also, and this is important, you have restricted the view of your world to whatever is for sale. That excludes whatever is no longer for sale, so any time stuff runs out, you won’t be interested. Cocolate will get more expensive because climate change is making it harder to grow, and you will think “i will buy that other stuff, that fake chocolate” its cheaper.
Money is a product that has value to banks as long as we believe in its purchasing power
We are so familiar with this way of thinking inside the constraints of money and the ‘economy’ that we forget it is a creation of bankers. It is usually the most attractive of such creations, because bankers don’t want us to try to escape it, but it is artificial, a system we are asked to accept. Only the people that do not know how to represent themselves (or that are on purpose misrepresented) will suffer more than the average inhabitant. The old and the poor. Society is a carefull matrix of people all depending on banks, and banks primary purpose is to keep it that way.
There will always be to little money for most people, because otherwise there would be no need for new credit. That will always be the case because money is sucked out of the ‘economy’ by the purchasing of fossil fuels.
But what is ‘credit creation’ exactly. It is the allocation of resources. Resources are the things you buy with money. Money itself is never of real value to you, you can’t eat it, you can’t drink it, it doesn’t grow. So if a central bank issues more credit at a lower rate (and the banks actually create loans) this means resources, all kinds, will be accessible to the owners of the money. They can grab them from the market. Just think how wierd this is : Just because some banker said so and created a number in your account, you are now allowed to take stuff from someone. The deal the bank makes with you is that you return money to them, but that never brings back the resources. You ate the apples, you burned the oil, you put the wood into your house, worn out the shoes.
Credit gives us access to all things traded, primarliy because it gives us acces to one specific thing traded : Fossil fuels. That is not a coincidence
You can’t unspend money you use to buy gasoline, because you can not make gasoline and return it to the pump owner. This is the most profound mystery of credit, and people seldomly notice it. It is mysterious because almost any manufacturing process uses fossil fuels, and always the fuels are destroyed. So what does it mean for a producer of say running shoes to pay back the credit they used to make shoes? Selling the shoes extracts credit from the hands of the buyers, but giving this money back to the bank does not unconsume the fossil fuels used. Clearly the use of fossil fuels in the economy is at the same time a fundamental force, and one that is given to those that have credit, for free.
Banks give fossil fuels away, and thus give everything away, and the competition for the fossil fuels makes that this leads to the creation of wealth efficiently (in relative terms)
There is no contradiction in the last sentence because the credit mentioned was created freely. The fuels consumed to buy products you buy with your credit are never recreated, never payed back to anyone. They are a gif, and they are because they make this system work. Banks could not operate if they could not depend on fossil fuels being burned and never returned. That is why we call this the carboncredit system, also known as ‘the economy’.
If some resources are never expected to be returned or regenerated, then what is the purpose of the ‘economy’? It is to get the maximum wealth out of the available resources. This is why we compete in the market, why we try to make ‘cheaper’ shoes. It is the distribution and use of fossil fuels that the economy optimizes. Even if it also optimizes the income of said bankers and intermediaries. Economists will say “fossil fuels are a commodity just like any other”. Of course, they do not want to reveal the magic trick behind our ‘capitalist’ economy.
To answer those economist one can say “Ok, take fossil fuels out, see what happens”. You can remove all wheat from the market, all iron, all soy, all silver. Things will get bad, but not as bad as removing all oil, coal and gas. Not as fast. Fossil fuels are a condition to the functioning of our economy and banks regulate how much fossil fuel is being consumed by controlling credit.
Banks are throwing coal under the bus because there is a much more attractive alternative : Gas
Yesterday the head of the Dutch Central Bank said it would be wise to invest less in coal, fossil fuels in general. He can say that because coal is being replaced by renewables as a source of electricity, because phasing out coal buys time for other fossil fuels and because perhaps he wants to create visible improvement also to buy more time. The core of his motivation is however that banks need fossil fuel use to continue or they will seize to be relevant.
Banks can survive divestment from coal, but not from all fossil fuels. Money would lose its value
Step for a moment into a world running on renewables. We have build wind turbines and solar panels and batteries and other storage systems to power the world, we find that we have much more power than we enjoy today. We find that we have lived on a ration with only negative consequences only to keep banks in existence. Why? Because renewables, storage of clean energy are not owned by one institution or group of institutions. Everyone can own a solar farm and run a factory off it. Everyone can own a biodigester and make plastic from the methane. Every owner of a renewable energy souce can actually create their own credit to trade away their energy. Every organic farmer can eat, doesn’t need a bank to get credit to buy fertilizer, pesticides, but can draw credit from the foodmarket.
A renewable energy economy has no such thing as unallocated credit (at least in the beginning). The economic principles simply dont work.
Imagine all renewable energy produces is consumed in one way or another to produce a society like we have today. If there are no fossil fuels, how would a bank be able to create credit of $1 million? It could. But what could it buy? Because all the local renewable energy sources and consumers would not be for sale. Also : Why would a solar farm owner in Greece hand over his solar electricity for dollars printed in the US? What could he buy in the US with those dollars if every solar farm and wind farm there had their own credits, which would already be in use locally? This is why banks and the financial system (no matter what they try) are going to be a thing of the past.
What banks try to stay relevant is :
- Create an energy market, support the grid so renewable energy sources will be build in the wrong places (like in the ocean or desert far away from where they are needed).
- Keep in tight contact with the fossil energy sector. Banks and fossil energy producers are one operation, even if they consist of multiple companies. It is the #carboncredit system.
- Try to be involved in the building of renewable energy sources to ensure they have to tie into the market, and to sustain the lie that our economy can transition to renewables without disappearing.
- Keep the focus on money as a magic powder that will always create whatever you want, by causing outrage about bonusses, showing oppulence.
- Divide society into good consumers, the haves and a lot of have nots, it is important for the masses to believe they hold a lottery ticket if they try hard enough, even though only a fraction of the people actually wins it and all have to wrestle over a meager fossil energy budget.
- Hunt cash, hidden money, make sure all virtual currencies keep tying into the major currencies. All independent funds can do things the banks can’t control.
- Keep the world in economic distress, so people want loans, want credit, and can’t do what is best for them on the scale it would have to be done.
The long and short of all the above is that if we allow banks to operate our ‘economy’ we will not transition to renewables fast enough. Fast enough can mean ‘while maintaining order’. Instead we will see a stratification between rich and poor, we will see replacement of coal by oil and oil by gas, We will see rampant fracking and other destructive types of fossil exploration. We will see resource depletion as the ‘economy’ doesn’t see anything that is not on the market nor ensures it will be available in the future.
In Holland Shell, when told it had to cut back on gas production, responded that it would then also not pay into the insurance fund for earthquakes. That seems bold and odd, but it makes perfect (carboncredit) sense : If the energy is not made available in Holland, then how can you power the activities involved in reconstruction, so why would you make credit available. This is what politicians need to learn : Fossil is money unless you grab both fossil and money creation and force it to create renewable sources of credit. (one dutch politician was not amused)
The action to take is simple, but not so politically. We need to bring both banks and fossil fuel companies under one rule, blocking out any legal interference. You see banks work this way themselves all the time : block out legal noise, also in the TTIP agreement big companies try to neutralize legal challenges by arbitration in their own supranational courts. This is because banks know they are powerfull because the people working for them are all conditioned to want money. It is a horse with a carrot on a stick tied to its back, grazing our planet until it is burned and bare.
The essence of what we need to do is to grab both banks and fossil reserves at the same time and write new rules for them.
So what to do? Create a global authority. Bring all fossil resources under one controlling body, it will regulate the sale and use of fossil fuels.
- Make global rules on investment so that fossil fuel goes into renewables are the maximum rate. More factories. Simply build them for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries.
- Make money heavy, meaning make it so that it is taxed more the farther it tries to move. This is to make money more like renewable energy credit.
- Make all financial transactions transparent, apply Hypertransparency.
- Depower the financial system by normalizing land cost, rebasing them in terms of their organic farming yield, not their real estate potential.
- Create credit based on renewable sources, take a part of the credit as tax, hand the rest to the owner of the energy source.
It is not possible to trow everyone a bone in the creation of this kind of system, which would exist for a while until all energy would be renewable and our potential to generate wealth would have increased about 100 times (where it could increase to about 2500 times!).
If you are not a carbon credit ‘capitalist’, you are never a communist. Communism is DEAD
Because every economist will pull out the big smear gun the moment you suggest doing anything else than following their lead, namely their accusation of plying communism, here a rebuttal : It would not be communism because it would have nothing to do with the teachings of Lenin. It would increase capitalim because credit would more match the realy productive resources the longer the policies would be in place (while today ‘capital’ means fossil fuel credit, which is decidedly NOT capital).
Perhaps a new global government should be formed by the people of all countries, with the sole purpose of organizing the movement to defeat the carboncredit self determination. We need to take the helm of spaceship Earth.
How to do this? It could be realized by a global, publicly funded (funded by the crowd) lobby campaign. Your political flavour can only be two things : protecting the fossil fuel credit economy or trying to move away from it. The latter option will bring more health, wealth and prosperity to more people. It would create more local autonomy, so that unnecessary fossil fuel intensive logistics and trade would not happen. It would remove much incentives for wars, it would remove a reason for countries to threaten each other over resources, because resource consumption would be more often matched by resource replenishment (as the use of fossil fuel in any activity would not be the aim, enabling renewabe powered resource creation). Etc. Etc.