Reply #17: This is probably old hat, but ... [View All]

[Newest Reality]

The increase of use and availability of credit cards coincides with the flatness of wages over the period since them became more widely available. In other words, they provided a compensation for lost spending power. How nice to have that extra money to be a good consumer, not based on your wages, but from a tentacle of the machine earning astronomical interest on your consumer subsidy.

Oh sure, we can beat ourselves collectively on the heads by thinking the collective we have abused credit cards based on our greedy little lack of merit and discipline, but should we not take the influence of bankers, media, culture, etc., and their motivations into consideration regarding the shifts in personal, financial perspective?

I have gathered from the posts that some of the good old sound advice being professed here is based on practical and sensible advice based in a reasonable reality where sensible budgeting and a fair system are both considered.

What I would like to point out is that money, credit, interest, value, debt, and other financial ideas are not actually real in the concrete sense, (like a stubbed toe, a whack in the head, or an empty stomach). Yet, they have become so ingrained in the minds of people utilizing these instruments day-to day that they are referred to "as if". When we forget that we have tied our sense of fair play and responsibility to what amounts to nothing more than a highly abstract social contract and terms of agreement that is represented by various social instruments to act in the stead of those social contracts, (cash, coin, papers, bonds, titles, etc.) we fall into a terribly distorted perspective that tends to favor the cabals and institutions that control, direct, and profit from the symbolic means of exchange.

You don't have to do much research to see this. The Wiemar Republic, Argentina, and the various other countries and situations where the abstract construct of symbolic exchanged changed rapidly and even failed. To me, the problem is that we find ourselves so invested, (mentally, physically, and often spiritually) in the pragmatism of the ingrained facade that we are unable to pull back when the fiction of it fails for various reasons, (usually heavy manipulation and malfeasance by the heavy-handed, top players of the game). We could, collectively call the game at any point and declare a Jubilee. That's an option in other situations where something has failed or broken down so much that scrapping it and starting over is the most viable solution.

Too many people have too much invested in the fiction to call the game and level the playing field. However, I am not saying that the people now find themselves used and abused and less enamored and captivated by the facade of representational, by-proxy value would not be open and interested in scrapping the mess that has been made. Yet, even if they did realize how little left they had to lose and started to become more agnostic about the value of symbolic wealth in its many forms and formats, they would quickly come up against those who have much to lose in the process of resetting a totally failing system of make believe.

So, I cannot blame those who have had to function as "consumers", (what a bovine-like replacement for the term citizen) students, and workers who tried to play along with the scorecard presented by those pretending to be anything other than exploitative and manipulative under the guise of being so-called respected members of the leadership/business community, (read corporate cannibals or Syndicate/Mafioso waxing as legit) politicians, bankers, elite, wealthy, etc. We have tried to adapt and do things right, and at every turn, we find a placard that says, bold letters, "You are screwed!"

Whoever is taking liberal arts classes on a student loan may or may not know that both the education they get and the money they will owe my be totally worthless, but they are spending valuable time doing something, at least, for now ... which is where many of us are. We won't worry about the game being played, but we will be taking it seriously less and less and declaring our own Jubilee's to various degrees, one by one, because we know that's where it has to go, one way or another.