“When the rivers are devoid of salmon and full of pollutants, when the invasion of our forests and oceans is complete, when our topsoil is fully depleted and we’ve laid desert to much of the Earth, all that will be left is cold, dead money, as forewarned by the myth of King Midas so many centuries ago. We will all  be dead – but very, very rich.” Mark Boyle The Moneyless World.

The great financier George Soros said, “don’t follow trends, follow fashion”.

Optimism is of course fashionable in bad times and many thinkers are optimistic about global trends – although still going on, there has been  a reduction in homicides, less violence against women and children, more Democracy, less genocidal behavior and fewer large-scale wars.

So what is behind these trends? I think it may be humanity coming to its senses. As South African University of KwaZulu Natal’s Professor Keyan Tomaselli held in an interview for the local Islamic TV channel last year, “the poorer the community, the more good you find. In the face of mutual difficulties, there is more sharing of human values. It is not poverty that breeds crime, poverty breeds a common humanity”.

War is just the shooting part of economic warfare which, since the Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear weapon use will bring (MAD), economic warfare has reached the point where almost every nation in the world is up against a wall of debt owned by an international, privately-owned, for-profit central banking system. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) are run by a small group of lenders holding the world to ransom through endemic usury. Most of Europe and the United States are sitting on a debt-to-Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio of over 100%.

That’s the same as having to pay ALL of your income toward the interest on your credit card. Beyond Maxed Out, you can’t pay your electricity or water bills. Can’t buy food or pay your staff.​

And if governments are using all their GDP to pay interest on their National debt, infrastructure maintenance and service delivery simply stop – electricity and water, roads and bridges fall into disrepair and the civil servant staff are sent home.

So the ‘Nanny State” is obsolete and we have to look after ourselves with planet’s free Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

How did that happen?

Monopolists began at the time of the Man whose birthday we recently celebrated, the Lord who famously ‘threw the money lenders out of the Temple”., but they did not disappear.

It was actually Tiberius Caesar who threw them out of Rome when “… a powerful host of accusers fell with sudden fury on the class which systematically increased its wealth by usury in defiance of a law passed by Caesar … defining the terms of lending money and of holding estates in Italy, a law long obsolete because the public good is sacrificed to private interest – Tacitus, The Annals of Rome, 29 Anno Domini.

Henry the First threw them ot of the United Kingdom 75 years after the signing of the Magna Carta following some two hundred years of dispute ‘over usury’.​

They came back into Amsterdam with the opening of the first stock exchange in 1560 and in 1630 demonstrated an overwhelmingly convincing fact to Europe’s ruling classes: that greed among the middle classes could be controlled through specific forms of financial market manipulation over and above predatory lending and other practices lenders had perfected over centuries.- a commodities ‘pump and dump’ manipulation on stock exchanges using a relatively valueless commodity, tulip bulbs.

It was called Tulip Mania and transferred a great deal of middle class wealth to the Dutch rulers who had in my opinion now decided to accept the lenders’ practices. And because they were not about to throw out the baby with the bathwater, loan sharking was finally ‘accepted into polite society.

The first massive transfer of middle class wealth from most of the civilized world was brought about in 1720 with the collapse of the South Sea Bubble, marking the beginning of the Capitalist Boom-Bust paradigm: one generation pushed into a credit-driven Boom followed by a Bust, a Depression and huge losses of wealth in the next. The last one was the Great Depression, followed by the ‘go now pay later’ swinging fifties, sixties and seventies. This one is variously called the Greater Depression or the Great Recession.

Bottom line? There are sixteen empty homes in the USA for every homeless person, fifty million of whom are out of work and on the food stamp dole; there is blood in the streets of Europe…

If you lose your estate to lenders, you cannot pay taxes and Tiberius 2000 years ago found that Rome had lost its tax base.

Today’s response on the ground is less violence and more understanding as communities of people face extreme difficulties together.

One of those difficulties on the ground is unemployment due to Globalization which fundamentally means that mechanization replaces manual labour.

So you fight with the resources you have and if you’re being forced over a cliff, you make a parachute.

The best parachute we can make today is an aspect of self-sufficiency called Community Food Security.

Against the remote possibility of lights and water delivery failing and food distribution stops through petrol outage (no electricity to run the pumps for vehicles and generators) I believe for starters, It is wise to take out a cheap insurance policy guaranteeing off-grid electricity: a tap off the electircal grid through a battery charger, two batteries in series holding 24 volts and an inverter that converts 24 voltd de into 110 ac.

As you get off the electircal grid with with and solar power, water   harvesting is next, with the aim of setting up community fruit and vegetable gardens using a small percentage of the arable land now under beautiful but inedible green desert (grass).

Harvest rain water instead of letting it flow into the rivers and out to sea. Create a public works program employing homeless people – they will more than likely accept food as payment in a new world based on the gift of giving in a more joyful, connected way of living

The old world is not so much falling apart, but making way for the new one that is rising on Mother Earth’s wonderful bounty; the passing away of the illusion that we can achieve independence though paper money with its concomitant states of  scarcity, anxiety, grasping greed and competition. Thinkers today are seeking ways to transform money so that it is no longer the enemy of ecology, sustainability, justice and abundance.

All we can do with money is transfer our dependence from one place to another: from the people and places around us, to money and the distant institutions it associates us with instead of using it as a medium of exchange.

We are in fact connected beings, utterly dependent on the rest of life to sustain us. Civilized (Monopolistic) humanity has denied that dependency for a long time, seeking lordship over Nature, transcendence of Nature. Money has been part of that illusion of mastery.

“But today we are moving into an ecological age, seeking to rejoin the circle of life in all its dimensions – ecological and social” – Charles Eisenstein in his foreward to ”A Moneyless World” by Mark Boyle.

When questioned about the extremity of his decision to live moneylessly, Daniel Suelo, who has been living for over twelve years in the US without a dime, once said:

… to say that I live without money isn’t saying anything, really. That’s like saying I live without belief in Santa Claus. Now, if we lived in a world where everyone believed in Santa Claus, you might think I am stepping out on a limb to live without Santa…

GOODBYE, PEASANTS…