This report was originally published by Michael Snyder at The Economic Collapse
Throughout human history, those in the ruling class have found various ways to force those under them to work for their economic benefit. But in our day and age, we are willingly enslaving ourselves. The borrower is the servant of the lender, and there has never been more debt in our world than there is right now. According to the Institute of International Finance, global debt has hit the 217 trillion dollar mark, although other estimates would put this number far higher. Of course everyone knows that our planet is drowning in debt, but most people never stop to consider who owns all of this debt. This unprecedented debt bubble represents that greatest transfer of wealth in human history, and those that are being enriched are the extremely wealthy elitists at the very, very top of the food chain.
Did you know that 8 men now have as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people living on the planet combined?
Every year, the gap between the planet’s ultra-wealthy and the poor just becomes greater and greater. This is something that I have written about frequently, and the “financialization” of the global economy is playing a major role in this trend.
The entire global financial system is based on debt, and this debt-based system endlessly funnels the wealth of the world to the very, very top of the pyramid.
It has been said that Albert Einstein once made the following statement…
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.”
Whether he actually made that statement or not, the reality of the matter is that it is quite true. By getting all of the rest of us deep into debt, the elite can just sit back and slowly but surely become even wealthier over time. Meanwhile, as the rest of us work endless hours to “pay our bills”, the truth is that we are spending our best years working to enrich someone else.
Much has been written about the men and women that control the world. Whether you wish to call them “the elite”, “the establishment” or “the globalists”, the truth is that most of us understand who they are. And how they control all of us is not some sort of giant conspiracy. Ultimately, it is actually very simple. Money is a form of social control, and by getting the rest of us into as much debt as possible they are able to get all of us to work for their economic benefit.
It starts at a very early age. We greatly encourage our young people to go to college, and we tell them to not even worry about what it will cost. We assure them that there will be great jobs available for them once they finish school and that they will have no problem paying off the student loans that they will accumulate.
Well, over the past 10 years student loan debt in the United States “has grown 250 percent” and is now sitting at an absolutely staggering grand total of 1.4 trillion dollars. Millions of our young people are already entering the “real world” financially crippled, and many of them will literally spend decades paying off those debts.
But that is just the beginning.
In order to get around in our society, virtually all of us need at least one vehicle, and auto loans are very easy to get these days. I remember when auto loans were only made for four or five years at the most, but in 2017 it is quite common to find loans on new vehicles that stretch out for six or seven years.
The total amount of auto loan debt in the United States has now surpassed a trillion dollars, and this very dangerous bubble just continues to grow.
If you want to own a home, that is going to mean even more debt. In the old days, mortgages were commonly 10 years in length, but now 30 years is the standard.
By the way, do you know where the term “mortgage” originally comes from?
If you go all the way back to the Latin, it actually means “death pledge”.
And now that most mortgages are for 30 years, many will continue making payments until they literally drop dead.
Sadly, most Americans don’t even realize how much they are enriching those that are holding their mortgages. For example, if you have a 30 year mortgage on a $300,000 home at 3.92 percent, you will end up making total payments of $510,640.
Credit card debt is even more insidious. Interest rates on credit card debt are often in the high double digits, and some consumers actually end up paying back several times as much as they originally borrowed.
According to the Federal Reserve, total credit card debt in the United States has also now surpassed the trillion dollar mark, and we are about to enter the time of year when Americans use their credit cards the most frequently.
Overall, U.S. consumers are now nearly 13 trillion dollars in debt.
As borrowers, we are servants of the lenders, and most of us don’t even consciously understand what has been done to us.
In Part I, I have focused on individual debt obligations, but tomorrow in Part II I am going to talk about how the elite use government debt to corporately enslave us. All over the planet, national governments are drowning in debt, and this didn’t happen by accident. The elite love to get governments into debt because it is a way to systematically transfer tremendous amounts of wealth from our pockets to their pockets. This year alone, the U.S. government will pay somewhere around half a trillion dollars just in interest on the national debt. That represents a whole lot of tax dollars that we aren’t getting any benefit from, and those on the receiving end are just becoming wealthier and wealthier.
In Part II we will also talk about how our debt-based system is literally designed to create a government debt spiral. Once you understand this, the way that you view potential solutions completely changes. If we ever want to get government debt “under control”, we have got to do away with this current system that was intended to enslave us by those that created it.
We spend so much time on the symptoms, but if we ever want permanent solutions we need to start addressing the root causes of our problems. Debt is a tool of enslavement, and the fact that humanity is now more than 200 trillion dollars in debt should deeply alarm all of us.
Michael T. Snyder is a graduate of the University of Florida law school and he worked as an attorney in the heart of Washington D.C. for a number of years.Today, Michael is best known for his work as the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog and The American Dream.
If you want to know what is coming and what you can do to prepare, read his latest book [amazon text=Get Prepared Now!: Why A Great Crisis Is Coming & How You Can Survive It&asin=150522599X].
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If one had to draw on name from history that is as close to synonymous as a name could be to describe this its Rothschild.
Kevin2, eliminate the Rothschilds and let’s see what kind of changes take place. They are definitely a cancer upon this earth.
Its not them at this point but the system that they designed. If they dropped dead one day the position they fill will have someone in it before they hit the floor.
Brave – Agreed, but it’s all of them, the elitists, collectively, not just the Rothschilds. Although getting rid of that family would be a good start.
But why the zookeeper remains untouchable is the problem we must face.
1. Rothschild
2. Windsors
3. Soros
4. Bush Sr.
5. Dick Cheney
6. Obama
7. Clintons
Millions without any debt are struggling to get by just for the basic necessities of living. The debt burdened are fubar, work until you drop. How could you kill the Fed with a political system made up of warmongering millionaires who are paid handsomely to defend it? The light at the end of the tunnel flickered out, yet the people are long suffering without any effective response worthy of mention.
How do you kill the Fed (and the millionaire warmongers that defend it?). Like so many things, the answer to that is already part of the question. I suppose it is time to go to war. Honestly? We need to choose the ground first. Then… no mercy. After all, our enemies certainly have shown that they’ve none for us.
Unbelievable. Corporate America is robbing you blind, and you blame the Fed? What is it with Republicans, that they can’t tell the truth about what’s going on with our economy? The wealthiest one percent is robbing the country blind, sending our jobs overseas, refusing to pay taxes, doing everything in their power to buy Congress and rig the system to their advantage, the country and it’s people be damned, and you guys blame the Fed? Are you kidding me? Free your mind, your ass will follow…
Yes, but who runs Bartertown? The creatures from Jekyll Island is who. Free thinking understands that they got their foothold in 1913 and that WW1 in 1914 was no coincidence. We must identify the power that transcends the relative short term greed during ones lifetime. You blame the enabled. Your wrath should be directed at the enabler. Kevin2 is right, the enabler hides behind a red shield. It is red and for good reason.
Exactly! Rothschilds own the Fed, all MSM fake news, NATO, and our congress (both parties). They also own most of the corporations. MSM forgot to tell the poster above you so
he does not know.
The wealthy and the corporations have never actually paid taxes. Any “taxes” charged to them are written off as a cost of doing business, and the consumers pay for it. That’s how it works. If you sell something, you have to charge enough to pay all your expenses, including taxes and your own salary. All taxes do nowadays is attempt to push the wealthy and corporations in certain directions. Control is what taxes are about, not revenue.
The problem with jobs is that we want to pay 10 cents an hour for products, yet get paid $20 or more an hour to produce. The only source of our high standard of living is the low wages in other countries where a lot of our things are produced. If most people would accept that they are middle class or lower, and live that way, things would even out quicker so that foreign wages would be closer to American wages. Also, there are a lot of cheap things in stores that people used to make for themselves for nearly nothing. I saw a small crocheted doily in Wal-Mart one time that was selling for 75 cents. The person overseas who actually made the doily might have gotten 5 cents. Now who in the US would hand crochet a doily for even the 75 cents?
The Fed is what put the country as a whole in debt. Look at a piece of paper “money.” It says “Federal Reserve Note.” That means it’s a debt instrument, and it’s the Fed we owe it to. And then we owe interest on top of that.
You need to get educated on what the real problems are.
Good grief, you’ve got to stop reading that right wing stuff. Read “The Price of Inequality” by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winning economist. Free your mind…you know the rest…
The American way of life has become the least healthy on the planet. The problem is this: in order to maintain the illusion of American supremacy the standard of living must be propped up with debt. More and more needs to be borrowed to sustain a lifestyle of driving cars, living in too-large houses, eating junk food, consuming vast quantities of entertainment.
If Americans just lived like a European, they would be healthier and not need so much debt. They would enjoy better looking and healthier women: no more ‘land whales’. The obese and greedy are sucking up more and more resources. The normalizing of sick lifestyles is keeping the population in a mind-lock and preventing them from being freed.
My middle class childhood in the 1960s had us in a 1400 sq/ft home, one car, two TV sets (one with problematic reception). We wore Bo-Bo sneakers from the thrift store, salvaged bicycles from others trash which a few want to be Jessy James types turned into mini bikes. We learned how to actually fix things. Mowed lawns and shoved our neighbors snow for money because we didn’t get an allowance, no work, no money. A close friend bought (his father actually purchased) an Ithaca side by side by picking night crawlers getting 1 cent per.
In retrospect our standard of living would have been scoffed at by the featherbedded snow flakes today. We had everything we needed and worked for what we wanted. Its that simple.
I remember (having grown up in the 50s/60s) searching for pop bottles to turn in for the penny deposit or a nickel for the really large bottles. It took me a while but I saved up for a 98-cent board game (think it was Monopoly of all things). Then I was disappointed when I couldn’t afford the 3-cent sales tax. Mom and Dad were so proud that they gladly chipped in for the game. That lesson about tax has stayed with me to this day.
I did other odd jobs for money as a youngster. I recall painting a small rowboat my father had brought home. It was for a friend at his workplace. I think I made 10 dollars on that. What I most recall was the lemon yellow paint inside and out because the friend wanted to be able to easily spot his children on the small pond they would use.
My parents were thrifty though. We had hand-me-down clothes that were supplemented by new as needed. New was always purchased on sale. We also sewed many items with fabric ordered from the Sears catalog. We kids did not have a lot but had all we needed. There was always enough to eat because my parents and all the grandparents had large gardens. We had to help dig them up in the spring for planting and then pick the produce as it ripened.
My parents had gone through the depression and did not believe in taking on debt. They purchased what they could afford or save up for. When we kids were college age, we went to the local junior college (what we call community college these days) before going away to earn the bachelors degree. That did incur some debt but we were expected to pay as much as we could along the way with part time jobs.
The best thing was that Mom was a homemaker not a career woman. While she occasionally took a job for extra money, they were of short duration. My parents believed in rearing their children themselves not in babysitters doing it. They showed us how to do so many things from sewing to painting walls to gardening to fixing whatever was broken to how to tell the weather by natural signs. We were not allowed to rot before the TV after school or all weekend. We also took family trips in the car; once even to Niagara Falls. Dad built a boat every winter so I learned how to steam wood because he made boats with lapped planks over bent ribs. We’d use it all summer but people liked his work so it was always sold by fall.
I realize this sounds quite the idyllic childhood. They did not believe it was worth ruining our childhood with adult problems. It wasn’t until JFK was assassinated that I understood how the rest of the world could affect us. Our current culture seems to inflict itself as much as possible on people of all ages (no time for the innocence of youth) beginning at only a few days/weeks old when they are thrust into day care.
Maybe the snowflakes should be pitied. They don’t have anyone at home waiting for them after school. They have harried parents (or parent) arriving home at dinner time that are exhausted from work and traffic and only want to get food on the table quickly and keep the kids busy so they can rest.
Long post but when I contrast my upbringing with what is essentially factory-raised children of today…well, we see what we are getting.
I would like to know why adding 50 million people to the USA population since the year 2000 was the right thing to do. A good portion of the added national debt and the bottom lines of wall street came from all this fiat money created to give these welfare zombies that don’t speak-eenie-anglish a totally free ride.
I don’t have any debt whatsoever because I don’t use credit for anything. No credit card bill, no car payment, etc. I sold an my old Honda to a co-worker last month and am saving up money for a truck. I always go to a private owner and pay cash for a vehicle. I don’t make enough money to go play with financing. Most of my personal transactions are with cash. I piss off cashiers a lot using cash, LOL. My prepping is top priority to me and I won’t let credit interfere with that. I can manage with a $3000-$4000 vehicle. I need a high-dollar vehicle like I need a hole in my head.
Smart man. That is how it is done…..
Way to go. When I made my first loan, it was against my own savings and I paid myself back with interest. You don’t have to pay capital gains tax being an elitist over yourself, and if you skip a payment, you won’t repossess your own car. I pay high interest rates and make better than the banks.
I didn’t notice at first that SNYDER wrote this article. He came up with a good one for a change.
brave… that’s why you didn’t notice…it was a good one
WHATMEWORRY? The DOW has hit an all time high today.
Mr. Snyder is obviously very young, as he doesn’t remember that car loans used to be for only three years. That’s the longest I ever had, except for my last vehicle. But I paid off that one in three years anyway.
He’s also not keeping up. The local state credit union is now offering car loans for up to eight years. I can remember when you only got seven years to pay for a house trailer.
Archivist, I’ve always been told my income level was too low for any type of loan. So my only option for getting a car is Craigslist. I’ve heard some of the stories about Craigslist but it’s still my only option. Loans and even credit cards are impossible to get in my case. So be it.
Has anyone asked the racist players why they are not protesting against the 8 trillionaires?
Or is it not these 8 whom own all of our congress and
MSM that are really behind the protesting and it’s obvious
divide and conquer agenda?
“The good ole USA. Home of free enterprise, competition, innovation…”
Whoops…wrong…old pamphlet. Here’s the updated edition:
“The good ole USA. Home of imperialism, while pretending to the stupid she is a force for good. Corrupt politicians, corrupt financiers, fractured society, racial divisions, corporate fraud, rampant graft, Ponzi schemes disguised as retirement programs and the shiniest bad ass boots to stomp you with.”
I don’t have penis envy of the rich. It is the bottom 50% that is destroying the middle class and American culture. It is taxation of working citizens to pay those that refuse to work is what makes this all unfair. Along with adding 50 million people to the US population since 2000, nearly all via invasion and the invaders having children here. Hey dummy, do you really want to know where your jobs are? No one else here sees this. If corporations alone had to pay all the taxes in order to balance the budget each year, the cost of things wouldn’t rise as these corporations would still have to compete against each other. No one else here sees this. Since mega corporations through their lobbyists basically write all the laws anyway, why not make them pay for the entire show? I don’t expect any changes to make things fair for the working taxpayer. Things are only going to get worse as more and more people are going to get more and more freebies from the working taxpayer. And the dirty little secret is that women of all races here in the USA abuse the system the most, having children out of wedlock, no jobs, and the fathers are common street trash! Why bust your ass to feed these ‘animals’? You deserve to keep ALL the fruits of your merits, not send them to local, state and federal taxation to give a free ride to those that deserve nothing. A totally irresponsible vagina in the USA is worth $1 million dollars of free stuff throughout her lifetime from the working taxpayer. Welfare… What was once shameful is now a vag of honor. I do all my own shopping, I am fully aware of what’s going on. What really gets my goat are people younger than myself, weighing 200+, riding around the stores in those motorized carts… and the asshole had the nerve to demand that I pick some shit off the high shelf for her. You picked the wrong knight in shining armor. I bet she didn’t have a crew of people to help get her fat ass out of her car and sit her in the motorized cart! SOB!! I told her to find an employee.
@Bert
One bone to pick….
Corporations are tax collectors, not taxpayers. Any taxes laid on Corporations are paid in the following manner:
1.) Customers of the Corps’ Goods and/or Services may have some/all of the Taxes embedded in the Price they pay.
2.) Shareholders may see it as reduced earnings on their Stock
3.) Employees may see it as reduction/lower increases in their wages.
4.) The Taxes may result in Ex-employees 🙁
Corporations do not pay taxes.
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