Tag: Wealth

Life revolves around a money, wealth and material-based values set. It is destroying us; We think we are in control, but like any drug addict, the freedoms we cherish don’t exist anymore

If you believe you are free to think, free to be, free to say and free to do as you please today; it is time to understand and to accept that you are not. You are not free to do any of those things, no matter how free to you, they might feel or seem to be.

Yes, you may have what appears to be the freedom to choose and do whatever you want.

But life as we know it has been created, is framed, dictated and even regulated according to someone else’s rules.

You may now be asking yourself how that could possibly be. After all, you don’t have to ask permission from anyone before you do whatever it is you want to do, say whatever it is you want to say or do whatever it is that you want to do.

So, ask yourself: ‘What is the value set that really governs every part of my life?’ ‘What is the basis of the framework that guides the system of life that I am living by?’ ‘Where do the rules come from that tell me how I must live, think and do all the things that I do, so that everything I know does what it’s supposed to and everything that should do, gets done?’

Think very hard. Because the answer is unlikely to be whatever you might immediately think it to be.

What most people do not realise, is every part of life is ruled by the relationship that we have with money.

Everyone who has an influence on your life in some way – beyond the people you love and interact with regularly, has a relationship with you based on monetary or material value of some kind or in some way.

For an increasing number of us, a rather large penny drops to the floor at this point. But it also continues to be very hard to believe, or rather to accept, that just about every part of life and the lives that we have is measured against a financial or material value in some way.

It doesn’t matter if it’s our job, our background, our education. The list goes on and on.

Every facet or aspect of life – apart from the real, human relationships we have with other people – are ruled by what it pays, what it could pay, what it will give us, how it will look, or most importantly, what it will cost.

We fail to see the role that we all play in The System, because we all give and take at some level or to some extent in exactly the same way.

Much in the same way that alcohol does damage to the health of the individual on different timelines and in different ways, the influence that the money drug has on wider society is classed as being non-existent. Because it serves someone else’s purpose for us all to think about and see the impact of it that way.

But just as our reaction would be to all non-legalised or partially non legalised drugs would be if they were legalised, the cultural embrace and legitimisation of money and the way the disease it champions insidiously works, we overlook or make allowances for all of the damage that the role of money in life has done and is doing.

The way that drugs and money destroy lives is the same. The only difference is the way they are managed and used, deciding whether they corrupt us individually or collectively. But the impact on the very basis of the human value system is just the same.

We do not and will not reject poison when offered to us, if we do not recognise it as poison and we neither understand nor see what the damage to anyone already is, or what it will do or what it will be to us if we take or embrace it.

When society tells us something is good, the damage has to reach its extreme. The majority of people have to be damaged by that poison before the tipping point of sense can override the control of the drug, and the people who are pushing that drug.

On a micro level, the money or wealth obsessed culture could easily continue to run in cycles, where some people would thrive, and other people would be destroyed with the control that the addiction has always had upon all those addicted writing the rules. This is what has been happening across many generations in time.

But on a macro level, the rot and decay of our system of morality and ethics that the prioritisation of money has had, would only ever be able to continue until money became the only thing that matters at the highest levels and those at the top have become blind to the consequences of what obsessive behaviour of this kind really does.

The process of disease and rot that the obsession with money causes has been slowly but surely underway for centuries. But its destructiveness reached its zenith and the points of implosion when those fully under its spell and in control of the system, simply went too far and over the top with their response to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and what followed, their response to The European Referendum & Brexit Vote in 2016, their response to the arrival and spread of the Covid Virus in 2020 and beyond, and their response to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The implosion of the money, wealth and material-based values system is where we are and the world as we know it is right now.

It feels like everything is beginning to go wrong or is already going wrong, because it is.

Inter-generational addiction may not visit its consequences upon those who first created the addiction or upon those it has been imposed. It may be proven that in terms of what society deems acceptable at any given time, the illness could take many generations being passed from father to son before the real impact and damage has been disclosed. It is, however, the same all encompassing, all controlling disease all the same.

For as long as those addicted continue to see the reward as far outweighing any semblance of cost, they will do all that they can both to maintain and to increase their supply.

That is why, even in the final moments and the death throes of this terrible system, those who have abused the role and responsibilities of leadership and government level control that they were given on trust will do all they can to ensure that The System which supplies their own fix will continue to exist. No matter what happens or how that feels to you.

If you can see it, understand it and accept it, you will know that there has to be an alternative and with it, a choice.

The alternative is a completely different people first, humanity orientated and community focused value set, that can only come into being by making the conscious decision to change the way that we think.

That choice is now yours.

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The Money Based Order – The part we currently play

Sadly, we are or were all in on the con.

The very clever thing about the Money Based Order, is that its addictive nature thrives because it plays to one of the darker and most self-destructive parts of human nature, which is to put ourselves first.

When we indulge selfishness of the Money-focused kind, it simply doesn’t matter how big or how small the gain or advancement we perceive the accumulation of ‘wealth’ or ‘power’ in our lives to be. We are meeting the needs of that addiction, and somehow have the perverse message playing like a soundtrack that tells us all that we are on our way to the top.

As this is the way that every part of life now works, we have reached a point where pretty much everything we do, we look at or even the interactions we have, are all based on the bottom line of what value will come out of that interaction for us.

The strange thing is that by playing along with the workings of the Money Based Order in even the smallest of ways, we have dedicated ourselves to a pathway of addiction. An addiction that has the ability to change our lives and destroy our integrity at a personal level immediately, whilst at a community, cultural or national level, the whole process can and has taken decades or centuries to reach the outcome of its various plays.

The Great Reset | Reasons we are here | The motivation behind the Global Economy

The Global Economy and Global Supply Chain have been based on this idea, aim or motivation:

That those who have the power and influence to do so, should take each and every step possible to maximise profit and the accumulation of wealth for all those who are intimately involved. And that the accumulation of wealth and power should be used to motivate those who work within and lead in support of the system.

Yet the calculations used in this equation were only ever based on the profit and the accumulation of wealth for the few who really benefited being involved.

There was never any factoring in for the loss of jobs, the loss of skills, the loss of communities or indeed any of the human costs that running a system based solely on greed and money have inevitably imposed.

The people responsible for all of this have quite literally had to create a monetary system that finds more and more innovative ways of funnelling money that doesn’t exist to the people who can’t earn enough – all through lending and often unpayable debt, so that the broken system they have built keeps running, and the flaws in the whole thing would not become exposed.

Be under no illusion. This is not a conspiracy. Its what happens when people without values or good moral fibre find themselves in possession of a lot of money, power and influence, and then do all that they can without care, to increase and keep increasing all that they have.

This is the Story [metaphor] of The Ring [money/power] and the influence it has on Gollum [Politicians/Big Business/The Elites] in its most real-world and hideous form. And all those corrupted by this system and what they believe it gives them, are completely blind to the true cost of their actions to us all.

Power, position, wealth & influence are no insulation against complete stupidity

Anyone can be as clever or as intelligent as they like or as the world considers them to be. But if they don’t care about anyone but themselves at the end of the day, the outcome of their actions will always end with consequences that we might expect if we were to knowingly place the worlds greatest fools in the very same roles and handed them the same power, influence and ability to control.

These people at the top, across governments, business and the financial worlds today, cannot and will not be able to continue to ‘reign’ over the world or any country, IF we all stop believing that running the world and our country is only something that these people – who we don’t even know – can do.

When, Where & How did all the economic problems we have today really begin?

Okay, so we have to wind back the clock. Not just a little. But a very long way, before we can begin to start a whistle-stop tour of the key events and motivators that have contributed to or rather their impact on everything else have accumulated to create the situation that we are facing now.

Firstly, its important to understand that this is a story about human nature before anything else.

It’s a story about what happens when people obtain power, influence, wealth or a mixture of them all, and either don’t have the moral fibre, ethics or principles to always do the right thing for everyone at the start, or they end up that way because they have been corrupted by what they have experienced or gained along their life path.

Oddly enough, morality and values seem to become increasingly absent across society, the further from general hardship or real hardship that effects everybody within it becomes.

Without the experience of hardship, or ‘making do’, even the poorest members of society can quickly become mesmerised and emotionally tied to an obsession for what they could have, rather than really appreciating all that they have already got.

More wants more. And in 1971, with promises of benefits that could only be unleashed by so-called ‘market freedoms’, deregulation of financial systems and services, and the proposition that an economy unhindered by government will always look out for us all, Neoliberalism was unleashed upon the western world when US President Richard Nixon did away with The Gold Standard, and a world based on FIAT or rather created money was born.

Commercialism had been picking up great speed before 1971, particularly in the United States. The emotional fix of material possessions and the social benchmarking that became definable by ‘showy wealth’ for the masses played perfectly into the hands of those economists with an agenda. False prophets who were able to whisper their intoxicating poison into the ears of politicians and influencers who didn’t have the scruples to know or even suspect any better.

So, with the launch of the FIAT system – that the western world has all but since adopted – a cultural shift from values to ‘money is god’, through a process based on the success of media manipulation and brainwashing was well and truly unleashed.

For some to be rich, it does not follow that everyone else must be poor

Only accelerated by the arrival of the Internet and the media age, the dehumanisation of the relationships between each of us and any of the people we do not know has become destructively profound.

Greed has always been a problem, particularly for those who are insulated by the privilege of their positions, conditioning or upbringing.

But the impact from the lack of care or the consideration of the impact or consequences of actions that are increasingly profitable for the self-serving who have power, have never done so much damage to the lives of others as they are doing right now.

As the unscrupulous have increasingly taken more influence and control, they have changed the rules and frameworks that govern our system to push balance and fairness further and further away from us. Meanwhile, they have continued to consolidate the grip that they have, enriching themselves and those they identify as being of their kind, in a process that works purely on the basis that so they can win, it follows that many others must be the ones to lose.

There is nothing natural about the way that any of this works. The system is based on the accumulation of wealth and of money. Money, that has power only because of the belief that we have all foolishly placed in it. Money that doesn’t actually exist.

Money makes money, when it should only be effort and the contribution that any of us make, that defines any of us beyond a Basic Living Standard or benchmark that should exist and be maintained at the same level, so that there are the very same opportunities as a basis for all.

Until we reach the point when we all realise and accept that it is our values and our integrity in our relationship with others and the world around us that makes us ridiculously rich, rather than the money we have or the things that we own, no matter what we have, we will all remain very poor.

The true cost of Globalisation

The true driver of Globalisation was always the increase in profits for every company that played or that plays a role in the supply chains that are involved.

But the true cost of Globalisation has been the loss of jobs, the loss of skills, the loss of training opportunities, the loss of businesses, the loss of communities, the loss of national self-sufficiency, the impact on the environment, the impact on quality of life. And yes, the list goes on extensively to cover all of the impacts and consequences related to every part of that list which have changed life for everyone – enriching the few, whilst making life poorer in every way conceivable for everyone else.

Everything is relative

Whilst we were told that the cost of everything would be lowered by Globalisation and the economies of scale that centralisation of the kind that naturally follows then presents, the reality of building a global economy was that it hasn’t been helpful to the UK or to any of us in any way.

Purchase prices have never really fallen. But the prices of production have. And it was this very small truth hidden within what has been a very big lie, that has created difference in the views of the benefits and disadvantages of globalisation, and what has made the perpetual myth work

The move to globalisation was never based on the reasoning that it was supposed to be. It was and still is only about profit and nothing more.

Taxing wealth rather than productivity

Taxation is one of those things that everyone hates but accepts under what is perhaps the most ridiculous use of the shibboleth ‘its just how it is’.

In a response to one of my blogs I wrote a few years ago, a student suggested that taxation was a ‘voluntary’ process. I replied that the reason people paid their taxes without any apparent friction, was because it is the law for them to pay tax and to do so – not because it’s a voluntarily act.

At a deeper level, the student was arguably right. Because the fact that we don’t question the ridiculously extensive nature of the UK Tax Codes does indeed mean that in a counterintuitive way, we have voluntarily accepted the complexity and therefore the unfairness of the system that we have got.

Of course, it is the complexity, and the sheer volume of the UK Tax Code which stands at over seventeen thousand pages (17,000) and over a million words in length, demonstrates perhaps uniquely well how the more detail you have in legislation, the more holes you create for an entire industry of highly paid accountants to get their wealthy clients through.

The fairest way to pay tax, is for everyone to be treated exactly the same, and that means that everyone pays in the same way – which will always be the simplest way.

We occasionally hear talk of a ‘flat tax’, that is known to be a topic that our politicians avoid like the plague. They avoid it because of the upset it would cause the people who currently have so much influence over them and do so well from finding their way through those complexities that we have just discussed.

But a flat tax – which would mean everyone, and everything is taxed at the same rate, will not in itself go anywhere near enough to achieve the outcome of Levelling Level itself.

For reasons – which yes, once again, only benefit the rich and those with considerable wealth – the whole direction of Taxation in the UK today, is skewed towards productivity and output, rather than what anyone owns, manages or has sat idle in some form that is stashed away.

Taxing work and effort is a foolish thing to do, that contributes greatly to the difficulties and challenges that those on lower levels of pay face. It also works against social mobility, as it restricts the money available for people to ‘better themselves’ – perhaps by investing or starting a business – that would allow them to achieve and realise the aims they have – which should then be the focus of a much fairer and balanced system of tax.

Because the UK doesn’t currently tax land and resources that are held in private hands but provide the raw materials that are essential to daily life, those few that ‘own’ them suffer no discouragement from charging exactly what they like – and making no proportional payment back into the community pot as they do.

Equally, as public investment in infrastructure such as roads, railways, airports bring business to new areas and adds value to premises those private interests own, there is currently no system in place to tax the benefit to the company or the individual that they have gained for no reason other than it being the right time and the right place.

The argument that taxes are too complicated to overhaul holds no water. Like everything else, the only reason for arguing against change or for our politicians refusing to do so when they understand, is because there are powerful vested interests that benefit from not being taxed on capital and land, and an entire industry or profession exists that was created and developed to make the tax burden less and less painful, depending proportionately upon how much you are able to pay.

This must change.

Neoliberalism: The intoxicating lies of the powerful

Regrettably, our Politicians are too stupid to understand what the ideas underpinning neoliberalism are really all about.

Neoliberalism and free markets are all about bringing more wealth to those who are wealthy already and nothing more.

Neoliberalism when adopted at state level is a tool to sanitise and legitimise selfishness at the highest level.

Neoliberalist thinking has helped make it ok to do anything that is legal, even when that legality exists because it has been created only by and for those who benefit from it.

The end result is that others suffer at incalculable number of levels or degrees of separation. Because ethics have been replaced by the idea that you should do things because you can and not because you should.

Neoliberalism is basically a philosophy of creating misery and exploiting others so that those who are able, can benefit from that choice.

Neoliberalism is the modern form of mass slavery, where oppression and suppression has been sold to everyone as freedom and choice.

Money is no longer god. Oil is just the start.

If you had spoken to an economist just a year ago, they are likely to have told you that a situation could never exist where oil could not be sold. Yet that is exactly what has happened around the World in the past 48 hours.

Oil has long been known as black gold for good reason.

In its refined form it fuels and lubricates our cars, lorries, buses, trains and aeroplanes and is used in the manufacturing process for a seemingly endless number of different things.

Its sale, trading and transportation has become such a key part of the World economy at large, economists and industrialists watch both the price and the quantities being sold at any time very closely. Downward fluctuations in price are often a good indicator of the economy slowing down – simply because less production and use of oil means that demand for everything else has dropped.

Oil production has been used as an economic weapon for a long time. One of the most unsettling realities of the interest that the West has had in the Middle East and Arab States since the Second World War has been maintaining dominance of the control of the Worlds oil supply – as the taps being turned off would normally mean that everything else can be brought to a halt – or supply restricted to the point where the prices of everything go through the roof because of the key role that oil plays in the production of almost everything today.

Oil has always been about money. Those who own the oilfields or have monopoly over the supply have until now been guaranteed to be able to write what seems like an endless cheque.

Not any more.

Suddenly, the vulnerability of their bomb=proof industry can be seen for what it as and the role that it plays within our lives.

Despite the fear that COVID-19 has created, and the damage that is being done as a result of the very poor choices and decisions that our Politicians have made, there are good reasons to be positive about what the future and the post-COVID-19 world will hold for us all.

The stranglehold that big business, the banks and the finance sector has on us all because of the way that money is generated, manipulated and given false value by the trade in commodities like oil is being broken.

Right now their grip is being destroyed by a tiny little Virus that neither we, the Government nor they can control.

A great door has been opened and we are literally entering a different World to the one that we have all previously known.

Money is nothing. It is an idea. A construct and nothing more. Money only works because we consent to it being a means of exchange. Yet it has become so important in our lives, we have culturally come to the belief that the possession of money and the other trappings of material wealth are the only things of value and the only way that we can truly assess what someone is actually worth.

Having our lives shutdown by the Lockdown has began to show us all what money and wealth is really worth. We have a choice between attaining and attempting to keep a false material wealth that always sits outside of us, or recognising the true value within us all that is never in transition and remains and intrinsic part of us all.

No, I am not making light of the pain and anguish that many people are already or are likely to go through in the coming weeks and months simply because the Chancellor and the Johnson Government haven’t got the financial support for everyone who has lost their income right.

In fact, one of the most telling reasons that the Government has got this all so very wrong, is the inherent belief within the establishment that Money is the god that underpins all things and that it must continue to flow at all costs or everything will go wrong.

It won’t.

The lesson that the Johnson Government will soon learn if it has not done so already is that they should have used the responsibility and the power they have to bring the economy to a halt whilst they dealt with the COVID-19 emergency, instead of continuing under the ridiculous assumption that bailing out people and small businesses because they suddenly have no income was the right and only thing to do.

This Government has simply turned an emergency into a crisis and made things considerably worse for us all.

Because of what our Politicians have done, as individuals, as communities and together as a Country, we are now set on a pathway which is going to cause us all a considerable amount of pain.

The flip side is that we are already and will continue to look, feel and think differently about the World around us and the way that things are being done.

Our values are already changing and are going to change further still. Whether it’s as simple as being because we can now see how working from home can introduce a much higher quality of life, or that we don’t need the regular visits to restaurants, coffee shops and out-of-town shopping villages – simply to be happy as we once thought we did, we are collectively going to see life and everything around us through a very different lens.

We will no longer see celebrity and status as the be-all and end-all. Instead we will see the value in conversation and relationships with others around us in ways that we can already appreciate today, that before the Lockdown we never even realised we had.

The march of globalisation is now over no matter what any banker, economist or business leader thinks. Jobs once lost from the UK will ultimately return.

We are going to want to shop locally with local traders and local producers who we can trust to be there in ways that big business cannot. As we do so, we will help our local producers to produce more efficiently and more cheaply and we will see the value in consciously considering and supporting the use of shorter and more considerate supply chains for the provision of everything that we use in our everyday lives.

The political system in this Country will not survive what our current politicians have done.

The Political Parties we have are part of an establishment that is out of touch with the realities of life for those who are governed.

Those who govern us in the future will have to understand everything that they are working with around them in the sense of a genuine and empathetic three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees world view.

Governance is going to be about the consideration of consequences in all that a Government or Authority will do and no longer about what a politician can gain from getting a job, rather than what they are there to give and do on behalf of us all.

We are going to work together and see community and collaboration as a way to do things for the benefit of everyone, rather than just a way to further our own cause. The power that is there to be harnessed by working together will be beneficial for everyone, because it will no longer be about money and its imaginary value, but about caring and consideration for all.

Much too much credence and power has been given to people who call themselves specialists and experts in one or other field and they have played a significant role in bringing us to where we now are. They are usually highly intelligent people with qualifications as long as your arm. But intelligence given by anyone without care, consideration and thought for others is wasted. It will never account for anything of real value in whatever they do.

The real opportunity that has come from COVID-19 will be the fall of money as a god, the reevaluation of what real wealth really is, and with it the return to a way of being and seeing the world where everyone has value, no matter what it is they do.

2020 is going to be a big year for us all.