The Road to Ruin is Paved With Credit

A finance company app service sends a girl onto my second monitor. A clip filmed on a camera phone in an apartment hallway with absolute zero production quality. “Like absolutely everyone else, I’ve wracked up debts and credits to pay”, she defensively claims as if credit card debt is the only proper way to live through your 20’s and 30’s. “This service has absolutely saved my private economy”, she laughs nervously, “and helped me save thousands of kroner (hundreds of dollars) each month!”

A second segment comes on, right on the heels of the first. Sometimes featuring a jogger. Sometimes happy vacation travelers. Sometimes even Tormund Giantsbane. Braving jungles and mountaintops for tacky souvenirs, or exploring temples in his completely inadequate VR-rig. Either way, he fucks up. He breaks shit at home. And the zinger is that he should use his credit card to pay for the damages.

Both of these adverts roll on loop on Twitch. A gaming streaming service primarily aimed at 30-somethings and younger.

And I find something very disturbing about the picture that these predatory credit companies paint.

The first message insinuates that an “ordinary” life is supposed to contain an unmanageable mountain of debt, and if yours is not you’re doing it wrong. And if you’re doing it right, you’ve wracked up so much debt that you absolutely need an app service (I’m not naming it, because I don’t want to give it free press) to keep track of it all. The second message tells us that if you klutz something up, just pay for it with your credit card! Preferably, THIS credit card (anonymous for the same reason as the one above). Because you probably can’t afford to fix it out of pocket. So why not just pay even more money that you don’t have, but at some later^[tm] stage! Preferably when the bill is bigger than the initial cost by orders of magnitude. Ka-ching…

Credit card interest rates are traditionally way higher than simple bank loans. But the principle is the same. Get money to pay for what you want now, pay us back later with the wig. Though with credit card companies, that wig tends to be bigger. A lot bigger. From a cursory glance, credit card interest rates soar into the vicinity of 20%. That’s 20% on top of money that the spender already can’t afford to spend, because if they could they wouldn’t use a credit card and tack on an accumulative 20% extra charge.

Private debt is on the rise. And furthermore an indicator of a looming economic crisis. Yes, another one. The years prior to the financial crisis of 2008, US private debt development skyrocketed in comparison to the US federal debt increase. The same relationship can be observed from Japan in the early 90’s. In China, in the years around 2010, private debt began to soar away from the public debt. Suggesting the inevitability of an imminent finance collapse there too.

So ballooning private debt isn’t news. It’s in the anthropological fossil record by now. And yet people can’t get enough of living beyond their means. And, apparently, companies and banks can’t get enough of incentivising it. Despite the indicators that uncontrollable private debt is a surefire way to break an economy.

Look… people are morons. Absolute fucking melons. It’s big entertainment to watch people make dumb financial decisions. Like what the Swedish television show Lyxfällan that doesn’t shy away from shaming fiscally irresponsible people, to Ashton Kutcher’s Going From Broke (which I haven’t watched). But aside from a entertainment-value, we are actively being pushed and prodded to live beyond our means. A “responsible” adult is supposed to get into debt. Like student debt, which is universal in the western world, but particularly predatory in the US as I’ve read. Or mortgages, because we’ve let ourselves be convinced that a home is not a home but an investment. Even medical debt in some fundamentalist regimes that can’t stand even a sprinkling of socialism in their democracies. And eventually, debt just because you want to buy expensive shoes, go on glamorous trips, or drink fancy drinks. We are being taught to be dumb with our money. By societal living standards, social media dreams, unrealistic family expectations, boomer precedents, and now even Twitch commercials that normalize an unsustainable private fiscal situation by getting into even more debt and paying others to manage it for you.

Instead of getting a credit card to fix your shit. Instead of signing up for a financial subscription to manage your subscriptions and loans. Instead of living beyond your means. Have you ever thought about… not? Not getting into more debt than you can handle? And be comfortable with the fact that sometimes you just can’t afford all the meaningless shit that you really, really want? If you can’t afford a house; don’t buy one. If you can’t afford a five ton truck, don’t get one. If you can’t afford a child; don’t have one. And if you can’t afford the latest Playstation or Prada, don’t expose yourself to compound interest just to scratch that itch. Not playing the game is the only way that you can influence our engorged cost of living, and stick it to the pricks that profit off of your need for a life you don’t possess the means to live.

And if you can’t stay away from living beyond your means, well… get a sugar momma and/or daddy. Because either way, you’re going to get fucked by someone rich.

/Sebastian Lindberg 14/9-2021

An Unsustainable Intimidation Tactic

“Let the quarry continue to destroy natural reserves and ground water reservoirs, or we may have to lay off your electorate.”

That’s the tune with which the northern Swedish iron ore giant LKAB threatens the rest of Sweden. That if the country doesn’t turn a blind eye to the environmental destruction caused by the lime quarry industry on the southeastern island Gotland, they may have to shutter production. Two environmentally destructive industry Goliaths holding hands to protect their bottom lines, holding jobs, politicians, and the whole country hostage to be allowed to carry on with their unsustainable practises.

This is a long running environmental conflict, with its focal point on the Swedish island of Gotland. The lime quarry has long been a divisive issue on the island, with natural resources gutted to support an industry that has been economically vital to the island since the 17^th century. Locally, the quarry generational workforce create a Venn diagram with the political leadership. Nationally, the Social Democrats have bent the boundaries of natural preserve areas to permit the devastating industry new space to expand, to feed the rest of Sweden’s mining juggernauts.

And most recently, an environmental court has denied one of the lime quarry, concrete manufacturers new room to expand. Which is when the mining industry up in the north of Sweden piped up in national media, demanding in front of the general public that the ruling be overturned upon the heads of their employees.

It’s no secret that I find environmental values non-negotiable. In a modern society that has raised subjective values to pedestals, environmental conservation and protectionism are absolute issues. You cannot weigh them against economic or cultural benefits. If there’s an ecological collapse, that won’t be mitigated by relative economic well being. Death is death. When you fall ill and die because you sold your liver, it doesn’t matter how much you enjoyed your windfall. You’re still dead.

At the same time, I don’t really begrudge people a job. I don’t begrudge civilization the utilization of natural resources. I don’t expect human civilization to fall back into some kind of hunter-gatherer hybrid again.

But if you can’t run your industry within the absolute framework of the preservation of the natural environment, then you’re not a fundament of society. You’re a poison. If the lime quarry industry on Gotland can’t extract lime in such a way that they preserve unique biotopes and drinking water for the inhabitants, then they shouldn’t be in business. If the northern mining industry can’t extract iron ore et. al. without relying on other industries that systematically commit the above mentioned atrocities, then they’re also a toxin. And every single person that has become reliant on such industries, wage-slave away as part of the problem; not the solution.

And if the system in which these industries function demands that they operate in such a manner that they leave an environmental wasteland in their wake, then that system needs to change. Immediately.

It is not a human right to continue a professional legacy that goes back over 300 years, if that legacy destroys the habitat. We don’t have any more time to pussyfoot around the issue of habitational preservation, regardless of how much you need the job at the mine or quarry. One family’s economical viability isn’t more important than the preservation of the environment. Nor a hundred or a thousand families. Nor even the survival of the nation or western society. This is a matter of perspective. If it is as you claim, that you need to poison groundwater and devastate the natural environment to protect your way of life, than your way of life is a sickness that society can no longer afford.

/Sebastian Lindberg 3/8-2021

A Smoke Screen Face Mask

Face masks. The fresh new fashion trend coming out of a new world order of germ spread prevention. A little piece of gauze over your mouth (and sometimes even nose). Putting people back on the streets and keeping tailors in business since the spring of 2020. An aegis for the public to hide behind as the angel of respiratory distress passes along them. A sign of caution, respect, and consideration for your fellow man. At least, that’s the sales pitch.

It’s a curious fad, one born out of fear and paranoia. And sadly, maybe it’s a fad that’s about as useful for public health as nipples on body armour.

You see, the medical community is split on the practical relevance of public face masks. Despite the fact that many countries (such as France, Germany, Turkey, Austria, etc.) have made the masks mandatory in public areas, the World Health Organization has been… luke warm on the use of masks (which, granted, they may be pushed to change in the near future (note that The Guardian is not a trusted source of news)). Sometimes arguing that effective face masks should be reserved for health care professionals who are more exposed than the random pedestrian, and at other times arguing that the public just don’t know how to use a mask properly. But still, countries are coming out in favour of the public covering their noses and mouths, regardless of whether the individual is sick or not. To make matters even muddier, studies and criticism have come out on both sides. Some mean that masks are better than nothing, others that they only supply an ignorant population with a false sense of safety, which may turn out worse for them than them cowering in fright in their homes.

So… why exactly is this such a big thing? What’s the huff in the midst of the global economy tanking and death tolls rising? Why would governments push for the public to engage with a dwindling supply of safety equipment best left to professionals? Or why would our leaders try to convince the public that this particular brand of tin foil hat will save them? Well, I believe I just gave a credible answer in a sentence above. The economy is failing… and governments around the world are desperate to salvage it. Or at least prolong its suffering for a few more months.

But who are they kidding. The economy has been failing for quite a while. Years. Decades. Perpetually kept on life support so that it can truck on for a little longer. Make the powers that be a little more money. Before it finally passes violently into that good night. Exponential growth, speculative investments, housing bubbles, trade wars, resource shortages… even if you don’t want to admit that the economy has been terminally ill for a very long time, you should at least be able to agree that it has been a very sickly beast, beaten to within an inch of its life by a fever pitch of greed.

Its death throes have been a long time coming…

Wait, hold on a second, what the fuck does the inherent unsustainability of the global market have to do with Wuhan Virus face mask usage?! Well… nation states tend to want to keep turning. They want to squeeze the last toothpaste out of the tube. That would be a sure-fire way to explain why countries, from Germany to the US and China, are eager to get people back out onto the streets. Out to spend. Out to generate taxes and profits. Why else would they jump onto face mask obligations without solid scientific support for it? Why would your government want you to become infatuated with a protective measure that might not actually protect you very well? Why would they push out scavenged mouth-curtains when they damned well know that the general population neither has the discipline or the education to use these masks with any amount of efficiency?

Look, face masks have their uses. They have the potential to save plenty of front line lives. But efficient ones aren’t made from your last-year-collection of sun-flower tops. Your old shirts were never woven to be able to keep micro-particles out. And even if they were, such masks, able to withstand the onslaught of germs, only stay good for a little while. And both you and I know damned well that you’re not going to keep cannibalising your wardrobe every damned time you intend to go out. The WHO, the absolute human authority on pathological prevention, make it clear that face masks are only a truly effective foil in the hands of trained professionals. And lets face it; most of you out there are neither trained or professionals.

True, we don’t rightly know exactly how Covid19 works. It seems like a weird bug, supposedly leaving millions unaffected, demolishing our ability to smell for some stupid reason, and it’s even under debate whether or not surviving the infection actually makes us immune to it, like what any damned other viral malady does. Even the actual lethality of the contagion is still up for debate. But that’s no damned reason to start praying to Asclepius or any other such superstitious nonsense. And yes, putting your faith, you health, in the hands of a flimsy piece of bargain-bin fabric is tantamount to making a sacrifice Dhanvantari. Because these face masks that are supposed to save us all? They’re at best a fickle rampart, useless on their own, and at worst not much better than a fire-extinguisher as protection when cliff-diving into a volcano.

Look, I get it. I want to get back to the way things were too. I want to go out, have a pint with the mates at the pub, sit in a park, go to the cinema… Shit, I had a line on Yusuf Islam playing live this summer! I haven’t seen my special someone in four weeks due to quarantine! But no matter how much I want to get back to the way things were, I don’t want to put my neighbours’ lives at risk to do so (a priority that our governments just don’t share).

So; face masks. Sure… use them all you like. If you use them right, they might even do you some good. But they’re a compliment. Not a compensation that would let you go on as if nothing’s changed. Remember that obliging you to wear one is just a government gambit to get you back to generating taxes; a gambit that makes you and your loves ones’ health play second fiddle to the bottom line. If you’re not sick, the face mask alone probably won’t save you. And if you’ve got symptoms, you should stay the fuck home anyway, which means you’re not gonna need your massacred summer dress covering your face. Because if the flu was as easy to stop as just to stick your nose into your shirt, I’m thinking we wouldn’t be in this position to begin with…

/Sebastian Lindberg 18/5-2020

The Wuhan Effect

When a cataclysmic eco-disaster looms, threatening the long-term survival of every living thing on the planet, world leaders and industry titans don’t give too much of a shit. But when a virus comes a-knocking, threatening the elderly and the infirm, the world turns on a dime.

As the world is hunkering down to weather the onslaught of the Wuhan Virus, aka. Covid-19, aka. Corona Virus, the social distancing and quarantine programs have produced not-totally unexpected fruits. Clear skies over industrial China. Starlit nights in urban areas. And pristine water in the channels of Venice (even if the claims of returning dolphins were an untrue exaggeration).

Turns out that a near-complete shutdown of the global economy is good for the environment. Whodathunk.

Well, everyone with a sliver of sense in their thick heads could have said so. And have said so. Repeatedly. From experts in pretty much every scientific field, to environmentalists and displeased children, plenty of voices have sounded and pleaded with the world industry to slow the fuck down before we crash into a wall. But any such pleads have fallen on disinterested ears, proving that the future of our children is an acceptable sacrifice for a black bottom line. Even when the next generation shames us in tears at a world summit, nothing changes. But the second that those fossilized fucks at the top of the economic food chain get assaulted by a virus that’s really only dangerous to them and not the wide majority of the population, they sing a different tune.

The politicians and the moguls always told us that a reset was impossible. That making the kind of zero-emission u-turn that the climate activists called necessary was in fact impossible. Unfeasible. Disastrously irresponsible. A fairytale fiction. That no matter what global crisis threatened the very existence of the human race, the factories wouldn’t, couldn’t, shut down. They told us this, laughed at us for our naiveté, and went on with their wanton profiteering.

But the Wuhan Virus has proven that they lied. Undeniable proof that the factories can in fact be shut down. That the ships can be stranded. That the trucks can be stopped. It’s just a matter of the right incentive. And global ecological collapse, rising sea levels, hellraising storms, famine and drought, turned out to be the incorrect incentives for the avaricious and the corrupt. The right incentive wasn’t a mass extinction. It turned out to be a little cough. A little cough from mainland China that rocked the world into compliance.

Because the lives and futures of all those that come after us weren’t as important as the withering lives of those precious few that make all the decisions.

But no matter how hard the markets fall, no matter how many companies shutter their doors and lay off their employees, a pandemic passes. Eventually. No matter what measures we take, what failures we commit, eventually the plague passes. A day will come when the Wuhan Virus is about as irrelevant to global society as the common cold. The question isn’t how we get there, but rather what happens then?

Do we go back to an exponential growth economy that keeps hollowing out the planet we live on? Do we go back to stock markets, carbon and sulphur emissions? Back to commercialism, greed and want? Do we go back to spending the worlds renewable resources at double the rate they replenish at? Because that’s what all the economists, politicians and industry giants  contemplate. On how to go back to the twisted, distorted, dysfunctional way things were.

Or do we count ourselves lucky, and keep our production down enough to satisfy our needs without going back to inflating our wants?

It’d be nice, wouldn’t it? If people living in urban China could keep looking up and seeing the sky? Wouldn’t it be nice to see fabled wildlife return to our ports and channels? Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to wear an oxygen supply just to go get groceries? Wouldn’t it be nice if all those parasitic fucks at the top would die off from a little cough, and finally relinquish the reigns of the world to those that prefer to live on our planet rather than profiteer from of it?

/Sebastian Lindberg 23/3-2020

The Fear of Financial Vampires

Queue news reel!: Top banking executive, and his little government planted munchkin, warn that U.S. Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders will “ruin” the U.S. economy, if he wins the presidency! ‘Lo, the tower of Babel will fall, and the world will descend into darkness and affordable living conditions!

Last week, the British-based, Canada-owned news outlet Reuters, published a gem insert into the ongoing Democratic Primary pageantry currently steam-rolling through the Unites States. Reuters had gotten in touch with ex-Goldman Sachs executive Lloyd Blankfein, asking him for his thoughts on the progressive wave sweeping across the U.S. landscape. And surprising absolutely fuck all, the banking exec expressed… concern, stating that the U.S. economy would get absolutely wrecked if Bernie Sanders ended up in the White House.

Context time: You might remember Goldman Sachs, the second largest investment bank in the world, and one of the key figures behind the mortgage collapse of 2007-2008, also known as the Great Recession (at least until the next plummet comes around). A bank, back then run by (among others) Mr. Lloyd Blankfein, which made some 4 billion dollars U.S. by “betting” on the 2008 market collapse. The same Mr. Lloyd Blankfein that exhibited his knowing culpability in the “Great Recession” as he, at the ass end of 2008 when the collapse was a fact, publicly refused his yearly bonus, while some 3´200 Goldman Sachs employees had been let go (about 10% of its global work force). The Mr. Lloyd Blankfein that is estimated to have approximately 1 billion dollars U.S. stashed away in personal assets, liquid and otherwise.

This guy; this phat cat of Wall Street, this High King of investment banking, this culpable bastard of the 2008-2012 financial crisis that sent whole countries bankrupt, that influenced a great wave of isolationism, bigotry, and nationalism around the globe, thinks that Bernie Sanders will “ruin” the U.S. economy. Well… he would know, wouldn’t he?

And you know what? Why wouldn’t that be a good thing? The U.S. economy is a monster. An absolute fucking monster. An institution of stone hearted speculative free market economics that is the manufacturer of one of the greatest income-divides in the western world. According to a 2018 U.S. government survey, nearly 12% of the country’s population live in poverty. A survey touting that that’s the lowest it has been since before the “Great Recession”. And knowing that the survey came out of the Trump administration, you can be damned sure that those numbers aren’t in actuality any lower.

So, why should anyone try to sustain this sickly economy? An economy designed to impoverish and disenfranchise the general population while putting more and more into the pockets of the likes of Blankfein? According to the World Bank (another corrupt institution), half of Blankfein’s personal net worth (500 million dollars U.S.) could be used to lift some 18 million people out of poverty. But he’s no Jeff Bezos. And it is not the job of private citizens, even if they’re a High King of investment banking, to personally provide for all the poor in the country. No, that’s the government’s job. And as far as I understand the founding tenets of capitalism, the banks should exist to provide service to the government. Not that the government should exist to provide service to the banks.

So yeah. According to what Bernie Sanders has been espousing for his whole career, odds are good that our dubious High King Blankfein is correct. Bernie will most likely “ruin” the U.S. economy. Ruin it in such a way that the likes of Blankfein will no longer be able to drain so much from so many. Bernie Sanders will, if he’s not full of shit, in all likelihood, break down the current financial paradigms and put an end to such financial vampires as Blankfein. And I cannot for the life of me fathom why that would be a bad thing.

/Sebastian Lindberg 17/2-2020

A Wakandan Dream

What even is a border? A line on a map. A checkpoint with armed guards and passport checks. Maybe a river or the crest of a mountain chain. Or just a stretch of scrublands or desert. Maybe even a village that’s been there since before someone decided that the barbershop is part of country A, and the market is part of country B.

Nigeria gone did an interesting thing this autumn. They closed their land borders. Completely. Not like what western countries sometime espouse doing. No, Nigeria went all in. A land border of some 3700 kilometres (or 2300 miles for the imperials out there) at that! Just close that shit right down, with no uncontrolled passage or trade permitted.

Why? Well, it’s a bid from Nigerian president Buhari in a bid to stem the “illegal” trade and barter that, according to him, had been draining Nigerias resources for decades. Any country aiming to become great, according to Buhari, needs to be able to see to its own needs first. China closed its borders for a decade or so back in the mid 19-hundreds. It worked out great for them. Why wouldn’t it work out great for Nigeria?

African borders are a mess. Most of them look all neat and straight when you see them on a map, so it’s easy to assume that they have their shit covered border-ways. But they don’t. You see, life isn’t a straight line. Nor is geography. Ethnic groups usually form around valleys, rivers, hinterlands, fertile flood plains, nothing of which forms along straight symmetrical lines. Thus, borders that have developed organically, along with the people living in the area, are very rarely straight and neat. No, Africa’s borders where carved up, not by the indigenous peoples, but by rich aristocrats and businessmen of 1880’s Europe. And if you don’t care about the people living there, or by lay of the land, if you care only about imperialistic pursuits and gains, then straight lines seem ever so easy.

It’s just a shame that societies don’t form along straight lines.

The idea to retain the old imperialistic demarcations of Africa back in the 60’s, when the continent slowly started to become “independent”, was to avoid all the bloodshed and conflict that had sculpted the European nations before them. It worked… unwell. And a large part of the work of the African Union, a joint congregation not dissimilar to the European Union, was to validate and naturalize the very unnatural borders that their predecessors had left them with.

Which is why I said that Buhari’s effort to close the borders is interesting. Not just stupid, reckless, crazy, or genius. But interesting. It seems impossible at first. 370 metric miles of scrublands, forests, deserts, fields, and sometimes villages, closed to any and all traffic. The prospect of allotting resources to such a momentous task appears plain stupid. But the Nigerian border patrol seems to have done it. Reports are coming in of economic tragedies along the Nigerian border, in neighbouring Benin and Niger. So clearly the shut-down has an effect.

Which brings us to why this decision is not just callous and reckless, but, as previously noted, interesting too. A large part behind the continuous failure of African nations to become self sufficient has been a linger colonialist agenda embedded in the international effort of leading the new nations into the modern future. With ever shifting development goals, with resource-extraction clauses hidden away within foreign aid agreements, with unwritten ultimatums with regards to foreign investment, and with western sponsored corruption on the highest state levels. Even though African nations are (with one weird exception) independent nations, they never quite got out from under the colonial yoke.

Because nearly all sub-Saharan countries are rich in resources. In one way or another. Perhaps richer than European, American, or Asian counterparts by ways of magnitude.

So why can’t they just shrug off western and eastern dependencies, if they’re so rich? Because much like a veteran vampire victim, they’re drained. Drained, but angry. Distrustful. And African isolationists have long pondered the idea of collectively shutting themselves off from the rest of the world. To build themselves up, without foreign intervention. Without colonialist interests guiding their evolution.

Which is why Buhari’s decision to close the borders are interesting. Even though, according to reports, he’s missing the point by not closing himself off to global business interests, but just to neighbouring countries. To cut down on the informal (untaxed) trade conducted daily in most sub-Saharan countries. There has been no talk of shutting down Biafran oil fields or foreign development projects. His aim is instead to shut down trade with his neighbouring compatriots. To enforce the rule of some 130 years-since-dead gents in a Berlin conference hall, and to punish people that just want to live their lives according to cultural and ethnic association rather than nationalistic ones.

Buhari’s move to centralize trade through Nigeria’s ports may seem like a mad move that you might expect from the likes of the Orange Hydra. Surely the policy will be devastating, maybe even murderously so, to thousands, if not millions of people, both within Nigeria and without. But there is a kernel of an interesting prospect somewhere inside. Like a little nugget of something shiny baked into a turd of ill-advised nationalism.

Because what do you think would happen if all sub-Saharan countries, young nations and post-colonial territories all, would come together and close off their resources from the economic vampires surrounding them? What would happen if they decided to stop exporting most of the world’s rare earth minerals, most of the world’s oil reserves, and most of the world’s precious metals?

It’d probably make for a rough few years for the world’s largest continent. But it would probably hammer out a new, constructive status quo within itself. It has the resources, and now also the knowledge, to make the best of it.

Can the rest of the world really say the same?

/Sebastian Lindberg 18/11-2019