Money Is A Form Of Social Control And Most Americans Are Debt Slaves

Money Is A Form Of Social Control And Most Americans Are Debt Slaves - Photo by Serge Melki from Indianapolis, USAIs America really “the land of the free”?  Most people think of money as simply a medium of exchange that makes economic transactions more convenient, but the truth is that it is much more than that.  Money is also a form of social control.  Just think about it.  What did you do this morning?  Well, if you are like most Americans, you either got up and went to work (to make money) or to school (to learn the skills that you will need to make money).  We spend a great deal of our lives pursuing the almighty dollar, and there are literally millions of laws, rules and regulations about how we earn our money, about how we spend our money and about how much of our money the government gets to take from us.  Not that money is a bad thing in itself.  Without money, it would be really hard to have a modern society.  Unfortunately, our money is based on debt, and debt levels in the United States have exploded to absolutely unprecedented levels in recent years.  The borrower is the servant of the lender, and if you are like most Americans, nearly every major purchase that you make in your life is going to involve debt.  Do you want to get a college education so that you can get a “good job”?  You are told to get a student loan.  Do you want a car?  You are encouraged to get an auto loan and to stretch out the payments for as long as possible.  Do you want a home?  You are probably going to end up with a big fat mortgage.  And of course I could go on and on and on.  The cold, hard truth of the matter is that most Americans are debt slaves.  Most of us spend our entire lives trapped in an endless cycle of debt that we never escape until we die, and meanwhile our years of hard labor are greatly enriching those that own our debts.

Have you ever found yourself wondering why you can never seem to get ahead financially no matter how hard you work?

Well, it is probably because you have gotten yourself enslaved to debt.

Just consider the following example about credit card debt from a former Goldman Sachs banker



The answer, including the cost of monthly compounding, is $44,235, or about 9 times what it appears to cost you at face value.

But a large percentage of Americans never pay off their credit cards at all.  They make small payments each month, but then they just keep on adding to their balances.

In the end, that is financial suicide.

If you carry an “average balance” on your credit cards each month, and those credit cards have an “average” interest rate, you could end up paying millions of dollars to the credit card companies by the end of your life…




Answer: $2,629,618.64

Sadly, approximately 46% of all Americans carry a credit card balance from month to month.

How stupid can we be as a nation?

When you become enslaved to the credit card companies, your toil and sweat makes them much wealthier.  It is a form of slavery that does not require anyone pointing a gun at you.

But we never seem to learn.  Incredibly, 43 percent of all American families spend more than they earn each year.

As the chart below demonstrates, consumer credit actually declined for a short while during the last recession, but now it has turned around and the growth of consumer credit is on the same trajectory as it was before the last economic crisis…

Consumer Debt

Today, the total amount of consumer credit in the United States is 15 times larger than it was 40 years ago.

And every major “milestone” in our lives typically involves even more debt.

-The total amount of student loan debt in the United States recently passed a trillion dollars, and approximately two-thirds of all college students graduate with student loan debt at this point.

-Total home mortgage debt in the United States is now about 5 times larger than it was just 20 years ago, and mortgage debt as a percentage of GDP has more than tripled since 1955.


-Want to get married?  That average cost of a wedding is now $26,989 which is probably going to mean even more debt unless you have wealthy parents.

-Do you have a serious medical problem?  According to a report published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of the personal bankruptcies in the United States.


And I have not even begun to talk about our collective debts yet.

Government debt is a collective form of debt.  You may not have voted for any of the politicians that have been racking up debt in your name, but part of it still belongs to you.

Since the year 2000, state and local government debt has more than doubled.  These are collective debts for which we are all responsible…

State And Local Government Debt

And of course the biggest collective debt of all is the U.S. national debt.

In a previous article, I discussed how the national debt has exploded out of control in recent years.  If you can believe it, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio has increased from 66.6 percent to 103 percent since 2007, and the U.S. government accumulated more new debt during Barack Obama’s first term than it did under the first 42 U.S. presidents combined.

When you break things down by household, the numbers look even more frightening.

During Barack Obama’s first four years in the White House, the amount of new debt accumulated by the federal government breaks down to approximately $50,521 for every single household in the United States.

And as I have mentioned previously, if you started paying off just the new debt that the federal government has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.

Well, you might argue, none of that debt will ever be paid off in our lifetimes.

And you would be right.

But what we are doing is consigning our children, our grandchildren and all future generations of Americans to a lifetime of debt slavery.

How nice of us, eh?


How do we expect to continue doing this?

Fortunately, more Americans are starting to wake up to how foolish all of this is.

For example, the following is what Home Depot Founder Kenneth Langone told CNBC on Tuesday…

“The fundamentals haven’t changed … And we don’t know when the storm is going to hit,” he predicted. “It has to happen.If you look at our debt to GDP, eventually you reach a point where there’s no turning back.”

He used an analogy to make his point. “If you had one meal left, and you had your grandchild with you, would you eat if or give it to your grandchild?”

He said all people would say “give it to my grandchild.”

But pursuing the president’s vision, he argued, “[Is] eating the grandchildren’s breakfast, lunch and dinner right now. And the [grandchildren] haven’t been born yet.”

What we are doing to our children and our grandchildren is beyond criminal.  We are selling away their futures in order to make our lives more pleasant.


So where is the outrage over this theft?

Sadly, most Americans don’t even realize that all of this is by design.  When the Federal Reserve system was created back in 1913, it was designed to get the U.S. government trapped in an endless spiral of debt.

And it worked.  Today, the U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created.

Our society has become addicted to debt, and that means that we have become addicted to slavery.

We are not the “land of the free”.  The truth is that we are now the “land of the servants”.

Over the past 40 years, the total amount of debt owed in the United States (government, business, consumer, etc.) has grown from less than 2 trillion dollars to more than 55 trillion dollars

Total Credit Market Debt Owed

So who benefits from all of this?

I talked about this in a previous article.  The ultra-wealthy and the international bankers make enormous profits by lending money to all the rest of us.

According to a stunning report that was released last summer, the global elite have up to 32 trillion dollars stashed away in offshore tax havens around the globe.

How did they get so much money?

The borrower is the servant of the lender.  They have gotten rich at our expense.

But most people live their entire lives without ever understanding how the game is being played.

Today, most Americans see that the Dow is back above 14,000 and they hear the mainstream media telling them that happy days are here again and so they just believe that things are going to turn out okay somehow.

And it certainly does not help that most people seem to let others do their thinking for them.  In fact, about 23% of all Americans can’t even read at this point.

So is there any hope for us?

Please feel free to post a comment with your opinion below…

Money - Photo by selbstfotografiert

Americans Are Literally Being Worked To Death














































The Sobering Reality Of What Life Is Like In Reno, Nevada

What do you do when the city where you live is dying?  All over the United States formerly great cities are crumbling, but some are definitely in worse shape than others.  One reader recently wrote to me about what she sees happening all around her in Reno, Nevada.  The unemployment rate in Reno is now up to 11.7 percent, which is well above the national average of 8.3 percent.  But that doesn’t tell the whole story.  The recent recession hit Nevada particularly hard and people have been moving out of the state in waves.  In fact, the labor force in Nevada has shrunk by close to 20 percent over the past year as workers have moved elsewhere in search of work.  But even though the labor force is now nearly 20 percent smaller, the unemployment rate is still well above 11 percent.  There simply are not enough jobs in large Nevada cities such as Reno and Las Vegas.  Unfortunately for Reno, it does not have the same kind of big corporate money pouring into it that Las Vegas does.  The good news is that you can buy a house very, very cheaply in Reno because homes were foreclosed on in droves during the housing crash.  Even today, some housing developments that were put up near the end of the boom times look like virtual ghost towns.  The main industry in Reno is “entertainment”, but many of Reno’s strip clubs and gambling establishments have aged so badly at this point that they just look kind of depressing.  I guess that is kind of fitting, because Nevada has the fifth highest suicide rate in the nation, and Reno has been ranked as one of the top 10 depressed cities in the entire country.  As the city has declined, gangs have moved in and the drug trade is flourishing.  Reno has been called the meth capital of America, and crime is on the rise.  Despite being surrounded by tremendous natural beauty, Reno has become a very unpleasant place in which to live.  But what is happening in Reno is also happening in hundreds of other communities across the United States.  Our economy is collapsing and our cities are crumbling right in front of our eyes, and it is only going to get worse from here.





Unfortunately it turns out that the opposite is true.

Reno is actually a very sad place.

In fact, last year Men’s Health ranked Reno as the ninth saddest city in the United States.

In response to this ranking, one resident of Reno wrote the following….







One article that I found attempted to find humor in the raging meth epidemic that is happening in Reno….







What in the world has happened to us?



Talk about depressing.

But instead of having us focus on how bad the economic numbers are, the Federal Reserve wants to start measuring how “happy” everyone is.  The following is from a recent ABC News article….

Ben Bernanke wants to know if you are happy.

The Federal Reserve chairman said Monday that gauging happiness can be as important for measuring economic progress as determining whether inflation is low or unemployment high. Economics isn’t just about money and material benefits, Bernanke said. It is also about understanding and promoting “the enhancement of well-being.”



The Declining Value Of Work

One of the great joys that men in free societies have long enjoyed is the ability to earn an honest wage for an honest day of work.  In particular, the amazing capitalist engine that powered the U.S. economy for decade after decade greatly rewarded the incredible hard work and industriousness of the American people.  America was known as the land of opportunity, and we built the largest middle class in the history of the world by working incredibly hard.  But today, all of that is fundamentally changing.  Thanks to rapid advances in technology, and thanks to the globalization of the work force, the labor of American workers is rapidly losing value.  Automation, robotics and computers have made many jobs obsolete.  Today one man can do the work that a hundred men used to do.  Not only that, but today American workers literally have to compete against workers from all over the globe.  Global corporations often find themselves having to choose whether to build a factory in the United States or in the third world.  But in the third world workers often earn less than 10% of what American workers earn, corporations are often not required to provide any benefits to workers, and there are usually hardly any oppressive government regulations.  How can American workers compete against that?

The truth is that labor is now a global commodity.  How can an American worker compete against a desperate, half-starving worker in the third world that will work like mad for a dollar an hour?

But this is what we get for letting the politicians push “free trade” down our throats.

Most American workers had no idea that free trade would mean that they would suddenly be competing for jobs against workers in the Philippines and Malaysia.

But that is the cold, hard reality of globalism.

All of this free trade has been very hard on American workers as factory after factory has closed, but it has allowed the big corporations to get exceedingly wealthy.

The top executives at the big global corporations are certainly enjoying all of this free trade.  Their salaries have soared.

In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1.  Since the year 2000, that ratio has ranged between 300 to 500 to one.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

That is what globalism is all about.

The elite make out like bandits as they exploit third world labor pools, while the American middle class finds itself slowly being crushed out of existence.

According to the United Nations Gini Coefficient (which measures distribution of income), the United States has the highest level of inequality of all of the highly industrialized nations.

Increasingly, all of the rewards are going to those at the top, while the vast majority of Americans are left wondering why things just don’t seem to work out for them.

According to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two-thirds of income increases between 2002 and 2007 went to the wealthiest 1% of Americans.

Life is good if you are in the top one percent.

Unfortunately, that does not include any of us.

Instead, the American middle class is gradually being pushed into lower paying service jobs.  But it is really hard to feed a family by cutting hair or by greeting the folks who come walking into the local Wal-Mart.

If you talk to many Americans, they just can’t seem to figure out why they can’t make things work out even though they are working as hard as they can.  Millions of Americans have found themselves taking on second (and in many cases third) jobs in an attempt to provide for their families.

But what they don’t understand is that the global elite have turned labor into a globalized commodity.

American workers are not faced with a level playing field.  Just check out some of the pay levels around the world that American workers must compete against….

In Bangladesh, a garment worker makes 22 cents an hour. The wage in Cambodia is 33 cents an hour; in Pakistan, 37 cents an hour; in Vietnam, 38 cents; in Sri Lanka, 43 cents; Indonesia, 44 cents; India, 55 cents; China, 86 cents; the Philippines, $1.07; and Malaysia, $1.18.

Do any of you want to work for $1.18 an hour with no benefits?

But that is your competition.

Wages are being driven down and big global corporations are loving it.

This isn’t capitalism.

This is the global elite pushing us into a cruel system of economic slavery where they control all of the wealth and the rest of us struggle to survive as we work our tails off for them.

Already we are seeing large numbers of Americans becoming absolutely desperate to get even a low paying job.

For example, over one three day period, approximately 10,000 people showed up to apply for 90 jobs making washing machines in Kentucky for $27,000 a year.

Can your family live on $27,000 a year?

But that is considered a good wage now.

Actually, the folks who are making really good wages now are those who work for the U.S. government.

Yes, life is good if you are a servant of the system.

Today, the average federal worker now earns about twice as much as the average worker in the private sector.

Of course government employees basically produce next to nothing except red tape.

The U.S. government doesn’t seem to care if they are productive or not.  They just keep borrowing more money and getting us into even more financial trouble.

But at least there is somewhere for middle class families to get decent jobs.

In fact, it is getting really hard to live a middle class lifestyle in America without relying on the government in some way.

The truth is that good jobs are becoming increasingly scarce.

That is why it is absolutely imperative for all of us to try to become as independent as possible.

That means getting out of debt.

That means starting our own businesses.

That means learning how to grow a garden.

Many of those who continue to blindly rely on the system to provide them with a “job” (“just over broke”) will end up bitterly disappointed in the end.

Millions of Americans have already lost their jobs and millions more Americans will lose their jobs as we move along through the next few years.

In fact, with all of the amazing advances in technology that we have seen over the past couple of decades, the global elite are starting to realize that they really don’t need 6 billion workers after all.

Instead, those among the global elite are increasingly viewing all of us as a burden.  They openly ask why they should have to take care of so many “useless eaters”.  After all, if the system does not need all of us to keep functioning, then what good are we to them?

So these days you are starting to hear a lot about the dangers of “overpopulation” and the need to control population growth.

In fact, just over one year ago Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and other very wealthy power brokers held a clandestine meeting in New York.

So what was the topic?

Population control.

One anonymous attendee of the meeting was quoted in a U.K. newspaper as saying that overpopulation “is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers.”

Are you starting to get the idea?

Instead of being viewed as valuable workers, now we are being viewed by the elite as pests that have multiplied to the point where we are now out of control.

What a strange world we live in now.

We need to get back to the America where good workers are valued and where hard work is rewarded.

We need to get back to the America where having a large middle class is an important national goal.

We need to get back to the America where we build American businesses, where we hire American workers and where we buy American products.

But unless the American people wake up, American workers are going to continue to be devalued.

Are we actually going to sit back and let American living standards decline to third world standards?

It is up to this generation to reject globalism and to reclaim the great free enterprise principles that this nation was founded on.

If someday our children and grandchildren exist in a world where they are considered just another part of the third world labor pool they will know who to blame.
