By Robert Singer

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October 21, 2008

Postponed, but Not Avoided

On both environmental and financial fronts, the end of our consumer society can be postponed, but not avoided.

We live, after all, in a society that is consumed with unrelenting consumption.

Even the most conscientious consumers are leaving us in a world in which the air and water are polluted, the world’s precious rainforests are depleted and the planet continues its downward spiral into the grip of global warming.

Agrarian economies, even economies ruled under the limited excesses of Communism, are consumption oriented. With hungry capitalistic societies thrown into the mix, it’s estimated that the most of the world’s resources will be gone before the year 2023. The outlook isn’t bright.

Maybe President Bush wasn’t joking when, after rejecting the global climate change targets of the July 2008 G8 summit, he said, "Goodbye, from the world's biggest polluter."

Rampant consumerism and the resulting environmental degradation will undermine the ability of mankind to survive.

Let’s also take a look at the unabated consumption of dollars and cents.

Understanding the current economic crisis will be easier if we look at the events since 2001. Because the American economy appeared headed into a recession at the end of the dot-com bubble and following the subsequent attacks of Sept. 11, the Federal Reserve began slashing short term interest rates until they reached a historically low 1 percent. The move re-inflated the economy by allowing homeowners to extract $750 billion in equity from their homes—up from $106 billion in 1996—and apply the dollars toward a multitude of consumer items and other credit card debt.

As interest rates plummeted and home equity soared, buyers were able to afford first and second homes and investment properties, and they did it by taking out risky mortgages with “teaser rates” similar to those offered by the credit card industry. Even as interest rates adjusted upward, the sponsoring banks used complicated financial derivatives to resell the risky mortgages as “asset-backed paper.”

As housing prices began pointing downward and mortgage rates inched upward, the recession was put on hold with the help of an astonishing 10 to 12 credit card offers per month being delivered to some consumer mailboxes. The credit card companies issued 1.5 billion cards to 158 million cardholders and promised an improbable zero percent interest—some deals for up to 18 months. (Similar to mortgage debt, the credit card debt is put into pools also known as derivatives that are then resold to investment houses, other banks and institutional investors.)

But with $1 trillion in unpaid credit card balances at stake—coincidentally, almost the same amount as in the subprime market—the economy began to unravel. Pres. Bush's "stimulus checks” only delayed the inevitable.

Behind every consumer society is a fiat currency and behind every fiat currency is a Federal Reserve or a Central Bank controlled by the same men: Rothschild, Rockefeller, Kuhn, Loeb and Morgan. The financial puppet masters postponed the crisis by manipulating the money supply.

The Federal Reserve puppet masters orchestrated the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970’s and the dot-com and the housing market bubbles. But one of the more absurd notions that found its way into the history books and the writings of economic experts is that somehow these men were made wealthier from the Monopoly money they printed, the same money that enabled consumers to buy houses, cars, furniture and electronics, i.e. the cheap “stuff” we use on a daily basis. Let’s not forget the fact that in 1910 these men already controlled one-sixth of the world’s entire wealth. And that was real wealth: gold, silver and raw materials, not the fiat currency we call money.

Adding or subtracting billions of dollars to the money supply by the Federal Reserve and Central Banks around the world isn’t necessarily “the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” but rather a strategy to postpone the inevitable recession and depression, even chaos and anarchy, that is headed our way between now and 2023.

We have consumed the resources of our planet; we are living on borrowed financial time and it’s time for a change. The solution to our problems is a transition to a sustainable, non-consumer society. If the inevitable can’t be avoided, at least it can be postponed.

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Authors Bio: Robert Singer is a retired information technology professional and an environmental activist living in southern California. In 1995 he and his cousin Adam D. Singer founded IPC The Hospitalist Company, Inc., where he served as chief technology officer. Today the company manages more than 130 practice groups, providing care in some 300 medical facilities in 18 states. Prior to that he was president of Useful Software, a developer and publisher of business and consumer software for the personal computing Industry.