Health Update & A Medical Scandal: Rampant Underdiagnosis And Misdiagnosis Of Hypothyroidism

I’ve written previously about my struggles with hypothyroidism and how I’ve been seeking treatment for it. My doctor prescribed me Armour Thyroid, which is about as close to a “natural” drug as you can get — it’s desiccated pig thyroid, and I’m essentially doing thyroid hormone replacement therapy although I don’t think it’s officially called that. In any case, it turns out the process of ramping up dosage to find the right level is a very long, slow process. Each time my dosage increases, I need to wait two weeks for the effects to level off before I know whether I can increase again. I started at 30 mg per day, and am up to 180 mg per day. That’s a big jump, but it’s taken months to get this far and in the meantime I’m still so freakin’ wiped out I’m useless a lot of the time. So, I am slowly but surely feeling better, but it’s taking way, way longer than I ever imagined it would.

I’ve learned some pretty interesting things along the way. Apparently, misdiagnosis and underdiagnosis of hypothyroidism is utterly rampant. Prior to the 1960s, it was really common to use porcine thyroid extract to treat hypothyroidism. Diagnosis was made primarily on the basis of obvious physical symptoms; treatment success was judged by the reduction of symptoms and whether or not the patient feels better.

In the 1960s, pharmaceutical companies started coming out with synthetic thyroid hormone and developed a blood test to determine whether a person is hypothyroid or not. These became the standard and are still the standard today. The blood test measures for something called TSH, or thyroid stimulating hormone. TSH then gets turned into two separate hormones, T3 and T4, by the thyroid gland. If TSH levels are in the “normal range,” the doctor proclaims “no hypothyroidism” and sends you on your way.

Big problems with this. First, “normal range” just means an average of people who’ve been tested. I don’t know if it’s possible to find out who the tested people were, how many there were, or if they were even a representative sample of the population. Back in the 60s, a lot of medical standardization happened on the basis of testing white men only, and never mind if women or nonwhite people did not fit the standardization.

Second, any given person’s metabolism is going to be different — I’m sure everyone knows someone who’s basal body temperature is something other than 98.6° F. If a person’s normal body temperature is 98.9° F, forcing their body temperature down would make them hypothermic, and vice versa. The same holds true with thyroid hormone levels, which makes perfect sense, since both body temperature and thyroid hormones are related to metabolism.

Third, and IMO most important, TSH levels do not even indicate whether a person’s thyroid is functioning or not. TSH levels could be absolutely perfect, but if your thyroid isn’t converting this properly you’re going to be hypothyroid. TSH blood tests determine whether synthetic thyroid can be used to elevate TSH levels, not whether you are hypothyroid. Clearly these are entirely different things but for 50 years now they’ve been treated as one and the same, while millions of people spend their entire lives feeling run down, shitty, exhausted to the point of being nonfunctional, or even suicidal.

I personally have been battling what I now know are hypothyroid symptoms since I was a child. I have always been tired, overweight, and foggy-headed. As was my mother, and my grandmother. I’ve spent my whole life thinking I am a lazy piece of shit, wondering how in the fuck other people can possibly take on as much as they do without crashing and burning. I’ve had thyroid blood tests done three times before now, and every single time the doctor told me I was normal, that what I needed was to get more exercise and eat more vegetables. And every single time I attempted to get more exercise and eat more vegetables I ended up feeling way worse and gave up. Now I know why.

Hypothyroidism symptom: puffy face

Click to embiggen.

The image on the right shows a woman suffering from myxedema, an accumulation of a mucousy fluid beneath the skin. It is not water retention, it is not obesity, it is not due to insufficient exercise or vegetables. It is one of the most common and obvious signs of hypothyroidism and yet it is completely ignored by the vast majority of doctors, and by the medical establishment as a whole. Anyone who’s met me in real life can attest that I do indeed have the same puffy-faced appearance, although it has only recently become so pronounced. Thankfully the massive bags under my eyes are slowly but surely returning to mere circles.

In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, I am really angry about all this. I’ve been struggling to wake up (and fall asleep) for at least 25 years. Millions of people have been unnecessarily ill for decades because the medical establishment decided to just simply ignore really fucking obvious physical symptoms in favor of a blood test that doesn’t even measure the correct thing.

And why? Could it be because, as quoted here from the British Thyroid Association Executive Committee: “…Armour Thyroid is not eligible to be claimed on the prescription exemption certificate (FP10)”? In other words, the pharmaceutical lobby got itself a government subsidy for synthetic thyroid, while DTH has no equivalent subsidy. Do British doctors get pharmaceutical company perks to the same degree that American doctors do?

The page linked above, by the way, is standard medical establishment ranting against something that actually works. No matter what anyone says, the fact of the matter is that the medical establishment has a massive financial interest in keeping as many people as sick as possible. If people actually got well the industry would shrivel and die. It’s beyond me how anyone can trust any standard doctor for any reason… I really don’t, and at this point, even if I had the greatest insurance in the world, I would probably still opt for physicians that refuse to accept medical insurance of any kind.

Ornament

On Canceling Collapse

Some while back Ran caused a stir when he announced that he no longer believes in collapse. Had this been anyone but Ran I would’ve dismissed it as asshattery, but he’s a smart guy and generally has good reasons for thinking what he does. At the time,  he’d written that he “just doesn’t see it,” though I can’t find this statement now in his archives to link.

So now a little time has worn on, Ran has focused his attention on other things, the world has continued to collapse in some places while ramping up its apocalypse torque in others. It’s been interesting to watch this dichotomy from afar. How can someone who’s done the research think industrial civilization is here to stay when all signs indicate imminent disaster?

I’ve developed a theory about this. I think what’s happening is that Ran has successfully collapse-proofed his life, at least to the degree that anyone can, and so has been able to escape a lot of what the rest of us can’t. Therefore collapse has become invisible to him; he literally does not see it.

The whole point of extricating from the monetary system, from debt, from car dependency, from global food supply chains, from electricity dependency, etc., as Ran has done, is so that your own life won’t go down the shitter as conditions deteriorate. I keep hammering on the notion that peak oil, climate change, and all the rest will be — are being — experienced as financial issues first and foremost. Because Ran built his life to exclude money wherever possible, and to build “wealth” in non-monetary and more fulfilling areas of his life, he’s not subject to the primary, financial effects of collapse the same way most other people are. And I suspect even the secondary effects of collapse, still some years off hopefully — i.e., electrical grid malfunction, true food shortages in North America, possibly civil unrest — will be inconveniences to Ran’s lifestyle, not life-threatening catastrophes.

In short, Ran is there. I think a lot of people might see him as kind of an oddball inspiration; but what all of us, perhaps including Ran himself, are missing is that he’s the first in what will undoubtedly show up, eventually, as a pattern of people who are not experiencing collapse as it happens, because they’ve been smart about their pre-collapse money and time.

However — big however — just because some people can adapt so successfully that they do not experience collapse, does not mean there is no collapse. Ran’s experience underscores what Dmitry Orlov has written: when collapse happens, everybody thinks it is theirs alone, a personal failing, not a systemic one. If this is true, the inverse is also going to be true: if someone does not experience collapse as it is happening, he/she will attribute this to systemic stability, not to a personally successful adaptation.

Millions of people around the world experienced the financial collapse of 2008 as the apocalypse and continue to muddle through as best they can in what is, for them, a hell on Earth. The economic situation of the past several years is a Very Big Deal and it is not going to get fixed to the point that a future technodystopia is possible — the numbers just don’t add up. They really don’t. The amount of occult toxicity leftover from the housing boom is enough to crash civilization many times over all on its own, without factoring in peak oil and climate change. We are, without a doubt, in for a severe societal de-complexification if not a total reset.

Nevertheless, it evidently is the case that one can extricate so successfully that collapse becomes invisible. How awesome is that? Ran’s lifestyle is not so freakish that it is unattainable — and he’s done everyone the great favor of carefully documenting the steps he’s taken to get where he is. Though momentarily confusing for some and mathematically impossible, Ran’s about-face is ultimately good news for anyone paying attention.

Ornament

Addressing Solari Issues

I’m planning to make this my last post in this series discussing Catherine Austin Fitts’ Solari concept. Though it’s an issue I care very much about, it is a bit far afield from where I prefer to keep Mythodrome as a general rule.

That’s not to say I consider it off-topic. Economic and finance issues tie directly in to the Fall mythology. I care about it as much as I do because I think any understanding of how to realign ourselves with Elohim is incomplete without it. I’ll start with this to see if I can’t pull it all together.

Some Theoretical Context

I’ve written previously that I think the Genesis concept of Elohim is more akin to Native American’s wakan tanka than to the Greeks’ Zeus; and in fact, the Judeo-Christian god, as widely understood, is in fact Zeus rebranded as capital-G “God.” Dispensing with Zeus preconceptions and reading Genesis on its own terms reveals that Elohim is more properly understood as the underlying force that animates everything in the universe; and moreover, this force is not something abstract, like gravity, but rather is something that expresses itself as consciousness and that humans can engage directly. Eastern spiritual traditions would articulate this as: consciousness is the ground of being.

Here on our planet, Elohim manifests as a riot of life and life-driven processes. Millions of species together contribute to the carbon cycle, the water cycle, various oceanic cycles, weather patterns, and everything else that comprises the single, living organism Earth. From vanishingly small bacteria to trees as tall as small mountains, everything is one.

This is the context in which humans evolved. Our cultural ancestors back in the Paleolithic had no concept of “other” as we do. Everything was one big life process. And that process, at its most fundamental, consisted of what ecologists today call energy flow: the sun causes plants to grow; these are consumed by herbivores, which concentrate the sun’s energy in their muscles and organs; the herbivores are consumed by carnivores, which further concentrate the sun’s energy; carnivores sit atop any given food web until they die, at which point they become food for scavengers, who consume what’s left of the sun’s energy superconcentrated in carnivores’ bodies; and when the remainder of the sun’s concentrated energy is picked clean, the rest returns to the soil, providing nutrients for the plants that the sun causes to grow. This cycle goes around again and again, forever. Humans, like all species, are physiologically hard-wired to exist in this context. It is literally in our DNA.

The Fall mythology describes our cultural forebears’ experience of first perceiving that they had been cut out of the big giant Everything. Of course this is not actually possible, but to their thinking, they no longer had access to the sun-based energy flow. And so they set about trying to create their own “one” and their own energy flow simply because nothing else is possible for humans. I believe this effort was and is largely unconscious, stemming from our biology. It’s completely genetic. Their efforts to recreate a separate “one” was the city; their efforts to recreate a separate energy flow was economy.

All ancient cultures of which I am aware venerated gold as either a representation of the sun or as pieces of the sun itself (and to a lesser extent silver, as a representation of the moon). Gold became the separated, substitute sun in their separated, substitute energy flow. Within the context of the city, gold came to function in economies just as the sun functions in an ecosystem: workers mine gold from the ground and make it available to goldsmiths; goldsmiths concentrate the gold among themselves, fashioning it into jewelry, coins, or what-have-you; and the ruling elites super-concentrate the gold as apex predators of the city economy. This is of course terribly oversimplified, but hopefully it illustrates my point.

Gold-based economies were inherently limited, because there is only ever so much gold to be had. A gold-based economy cannot grow beyond a certain point. Psychopathic conquest could only be carried out so far until there just wasn’t enough money to pay for it anymore.

Debt-based fiat currencies are an insidious break from the gold-as-sun economies of the past, while still obeying our genetic requirement for an energy flow type system. In this case, a central bank makes currency available to workers and small business (among other entities) through loans; these are consumed by distributors, mid-sized banks the like, which concentrate the currency into a middle tier; and the psychopaths at the top feed off these, superconcentrating the currency into their own hands. The ultimate apex predator in this system is the central bank, which owns all the money in circulation plus the interest. Nowhere in this equation is any recognition of hard physical limits, as there was with gold economies and ecological energy flow before them. This means two things: first, a currency system that has no physical limit built-in can, theoretically, spread to encompass the whole universe; second, the psychopaths at the central bank can essentially buy everything that exists in the universe. The entire “one” of the Paleolithic can thereby be usurped by the separated, substitute “one,” and Elohim can be usurped by those who feed the separated, substitute energy flow. In other words: they would make themselves God.

The way things are set up economically right now, it is impossible to opt out; impossible to move backwards to a gold standard and then to the real ecological energy flow; and any forward movement within the current system can only hasten the planet’s demise, and ours along with it.

The solari concept offers an absolutely ingenious alternative. Fiat currencies were dissociated from natural resources and attached to debt in order to make profit — a thoroughly extractive process — more efficient at concentrating wealth-energy-gold into the hands of the psychopathic would-be apex predator gods. But that dissociation-and-debt scheme also means there’s nothing to stop ordinary people extracting profit from those at the top. That is what a solari does. And moreover, the profit it extracts from the top gets reinvested in increasing natural resources and quality of life, and it counts these as wealth and value on par with, or even surpassing, the wealth and value of hoarding currency notes.

An ordinary corporation turns living systems into profits, thereby causing widespread death. A solari turns profits into living systems, thereby healing death neighborhood by neighborhood.

For me, solari represents a step toward realigning economics with Elohim. It gives life and life systems, and people who value these, a tool to out-compete death systems within the context of civilization. Followed to its ultimate conclusion, capitalism in its current form can only lead to death. Solari’s ultimate conclusion would be so much life we’d find ourselves reintegrated with nature, with Elohim, just by default.

Q&A, As Best I Can

Trust. Vera brought up the question of trust: how do people know their money is safe if they lend to and/or invest in their neighbors locally, without a bank intermediary to protect their investments?

Catherine used to refer to this issue as “building financial intimacy.” Her groundwork for this assumed a greater level of starting wealth than I certainly have, and probably most people reading this blog have, so I think for us it would mean starting at a lower level. Personally, I envision a group of people sharing their whole financial picture with each other, absolutely everything, and working together to not only figure out ways to help each other out of debt, but to hold each other accountable for not diverting income into things that will be detrimental.

The example I used in my previous post was that of savers getting .5% interest on their CDs reinvesting some of that money to help credit card debtors pay down their debts faster. The debtors pay the savers 10% interest, or half what the bank charges; and in that way the debtors get out of debt faster while the savers earn massively greater interest on their savings investment. In this particular instance, it would be entirely appropriate for the debtors to demonstrate a solid history of repayment, while the saver-investors need to demonstrate ways they are moving out of participating in tapeworm economics — for example by banking and shopping locally, boycotting egregious corporations, or what-have-you.

Over time as people work together they will build trust, and as more people join the ranks more trust will be created among community members. It’s an ongoing process that may start small, but has really powerful potential for real change.

Money availability and local alternatives. Shawn wrote in with the comment:

Given the weakness of the economy as a whole and the direction it is going in I don’t believe there are enough funds to get the pattern really rolling… I much prefer the LETSystem which requires only record keeping and communication. I’ve been building a model that will work within a local food growing operation but have yet to come close to perfecting it.

For the time being there is still plenty of money in the system. The Fed has been printing money at a ghastly, frightening pace the last couple of years, so much so that many people more knowledgeable than I fully expect hyperinflation and/or massive asset bubbles (like the housing bubble) in the not-too-distant future. My own view is that there is still time to make solari principles happen. Catherine’s view was that local investment offers one of the safest places to park one’s money in light of changing economic conditions, because the less dependent a community is on the global economy, the better it will be able to weather economic storms.

A LETSystem is certainly compatible with solari. I personally think it’s an awesome idea, particularly because it manages to almost totally divorce whole chunks of its local economy from the sinking globalization ship. But I think it doesn’t go far enough, because people still need money to pay taxes and to conduct trade with other communities. The same holds true for any kind of local scrip — as long as it does not pin its value to that of the national currency.

On a side note, I know a lot of people are gung-ho about Berkshares, but I think its a poorly designed system. It is pinned directly to the dollar, which means it ultimately serves to concentrate the dollar’s problems in the community; and, it is designed to be worth 10% less than the dollar, which means anyone using Berkshares is automatically operating at a 10% loss over currency notes. From a financial and business standpoint Berkshares do more harm than good.

How The Stock Structure Works. Vera asks another pertinent question:

“The solari raises money for its various projects by selling stock against the value of its database”… What does it mean? Does facebook sell its info, and would a solari sell the data gathered?

First, stocks work by making whoever buys them partial owner of whatever they represent. That’s why they’re also called “shares” — a stockholder shares ownership of whatever asset the stocks are issued against. So, the purchase of one solari stock would give the stockholder one share of ownership over the database. When someone gets a dividend check, that is his/her share of the profit generated by the asset.

Facebook does indeed sell its information, and that is one of the major ways it makes money. It sells the information to marketers, the CIA, whoever has use for it. But the solari’s database would be completely transparent, so there wouldn’t be any way of making money on the sale of information directly. Instead, the solari would have to package the information in a way that people would be willing to buy. So for example, it could put together a case study of some particular investment scheme that analyzes its success and weaknesses; it could write an annual forecast detailing areas of investment opportunity; it could write another annual report detailing various spending habits of the community that would be of interest to retailers and local farmers (e.g., “our community’s love of heirloom tomatoes leveled off last year, but interest in goat cheeses continued to grow”); it could charge for preparing specific subsets of data (e.g., only the information pertaining to schools or to black market activities). Those are just examples, but the information could be packaged up in any way that’s useful.

Those kinds of reports, by the way, sell for hundreds if not thousands of dollars each. It is not at all unusual for a business or an investor to drop $500 on a market report.

Private investors’ trust of public investment. Laurent from France comments:

a) the “private money” is always reluctant to link a potential profit to “public” decisions, espacially if they have no right to vote.
b) this type of “solari” exist in France. They are called ” Societe d’economie mixte” . Some of them work well and have contributed to rebuilding communities after wars or crises. But most of them don’t work well because private investors have run away from “public managers” who are not honest or not efficient…

The main thing to remember is that even though a solari may be investing in projects that benefit the community, it is in no way linked to any government agency or initiative. So therefore investment money comes in on the strength of the solari’s ability to generate profits — it just happens that the solari’s profits come from doing things that help, not harm.

I didn’t know the French already had corporations like this up and running in France. I will definitely research this thank you so much for the tip!

Conclusion

Okay that’s a hella lot of writing for one day, but hopefully I’ve been able to illuminate the solari concept, at least as far as I understand it, somewhat better.

I have to say I’m a little bit surprised by the level of interest. I’ve been slowly but surely trying to get my own wee biz back up and running, after having the opportunity to hear some feedback I plan to continue blogging about this stuff more directly over there. Hopefully I’ll have that site live in the next couple of weeks — for sure, I will post about it when it’s up.

Finally, thanks everyone for a great conversation!

Ornament

Sophie Scholl Beheading: 70th Anniversary

(I’m taking a brief detour from solari economics to commemorate a little-remembered but vitally important historical event. More solari in coming days.)

This past Friday, February 22, 2013, marked the 70th anniversary of Sophie Scholl’s beheading. She was 21 years old on the day of her execution.

Sophie Scholl was a student at der Universität München in 1943 during the height of Nazism’s blood-and-iron grip on German civil society. She was part of a nonviolent, philosophically-oriented student resistance movement called the White Rose. Beginning in June 1942, the White Rose embarked on a resistance campaign that consisted of writing anti-Hitler and anti-Nazi graffiti on buildings, distributing a series of six leaflets via bulk mailing and, on February 18, 1943, anonymous leaflet distribution on campus grounds.

It was this final attempt at campus leafletting for which Sophie and her brother Hans, also a White Rose member, were arrested. She was taken to jail and interrogated (questioned, not tortured) over the course of four days. Sophie, Hans, and another White Rose member, Christoph Probst, were tried, sentenced, and executed by guillotine all on the same day: February 22, 1943.

You can read the leaflets in their original German here, and in English here.

The video clip is from the extraordinary and stunning film Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. The scene depicts her trial and was, remarkably, taken from actual court transcripts. (The judge character in this scene, official title of President, is supposedly rather accurate.) The entire film is available on YouTube here. I highly recommend everyone see this film and take note of the similarities between the Nazi rhetoric, and the rhetoric of political discourse in contemporary America.

What is so striking to me are the crimes for which Sophie, Hans, and Christoph were executed, based on their leaflets: treason, “aiding the enemy” and “demoralizing the troops.”  I assume it is not necessary to point out how similar this is to the language of recent United States legislation such as the Patriot Act and most recently the 2012 NDAA, which would grant the Executive branch power to use the military for detention of American citizens on American soil, indefinitely, for “aiding” an extremely ill-defined terrorist enemy. The Obama administration is currently fighting legal challenges to this unprecedented curtailment of domestic civil liberties.

The White Rose leaflets themselves are salient in their insistence on truth, as measured in facts and conscience; their condemnation of apathy; and their calls to passive resistance — what we would call civil disobedience — based on the facts at hand and on what acquiescent Germans knew in their hearts.

From Leaflet II:

It is impossible to come to terms with National Socialism on an intellectual basis, because it is simply not intellectual. You cannot speak of a National Socialist ideology. If such a thing existed, you would be forced to try to defend or engage it on an intellectual basis. Reality offers us a completely different image. When the movement was still in embryonic form, it relied on deception of its fellow man. Even then, it was rotten to the core and could preserve itself only on the basis of constant lies. Hitler himself wrote in an early edition of “his” book – a book that is written in the most awful German I have ever read, despite which the nation of poets and thinkers have elevated it to the status of the Bible: “You would not believe how one must deceive a nation in order to rule it.” If this cancerous growth in the German nation was not too noticeable in the early phases, then that is because there were enough forces for good at work to try to slow its growth. But as it grew larger and larger and finally ascended to power by means of one last vulgar corruption, the abscess erupted and defiled the whole body.

From Leaflet V:

The war is coming to its certain end. Just as in 1918, the German government is trying to draw attention to the growing submarine danger, while in the East the armies endlessly retreat and an invasion is expected in the West. America’s mobilization has not even reached its zenith, yet even now it surpasses anything that has gone before in history. With mathe­mati­cal certainty, Hitler is leading the German nation to disaster. Hitler cannot win the war, he can only prolong it! His guilt and the guilt of his assistants have infinitely exceeded all measure. A just punishment grows ever closer!

And what is the German nation doing? It sees nothing, it hears nothing. It is blindly following its seducers to destruction. Victory at any price, that is what they have written on their flags. I will fight to the last man, says Hitler, but yet the war is already lost.

Germans! Do you and your children wish to suffer the same fate as the Jews? Do you wish to be measured with the same measure as your seducers? Shall we forever be the most hated and rejected nation in all the world? No! Therefore, separate yourselves from the Na­tional Socialist subhumanity! Prove with your deeds that you think differently! A new War of Independence is beginning. The better part of the nation is fighting with us. Rend the cloak of apathy that you have wrapped around your hearts! Make up your minds, before it is too late!

Do not believe the National Socialist propaganda that has driven the fear of Bolshevism into your very being! Do not believe that Germany’s salvation is wed to a victory of National Socialism for better or for worse! A band of criminals cannot attain a German victory. Separate yourselves from everything connected to National Socialism while you still have time! Later, all those who hid themselves cowardly and undecided will have to stand before a terrible and just court of law.

From Leaflet VI:

Freedom and honor! For ten long years, Hitler and his associates have abused, stomped, and twisted these two glorious German words till they are loathsome. Only posers* are capable of doing this, posers who cast the highest values of a nation before swine. Over the last ten years, they have more than shown us what freedom and honor means to them – they have destroyed all material and intellectual freedom and all moral substance in the German people. The terrible blood bath that they have caused in all of Europe in the name of the freedom and honor of the German people – a blood bath that they cause anew every day – has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German.

*Posers = “Dilettanten” in the original German. The insinuation here is that Hitler and his associates are inauthentic and not true Germans, a grave insult. The word is normally translated as “dilettante.”

Is it even possible to read this stuff without feeling like Sophie Scholl, et al., were reaching forward through time to bitch-slap us here in 21st century America? It is simply astonishing how relevant the White Rose leaflets are in light of the crackdown on civil liberties we have experienced since September, 2001. Meditating on this stuff the past few days has made me realize just how far gone the United States really is. Everything — and I mean everything — required for a full fascist military crackdown on the populace is in place. The only thing lacking is a brand name to pull it all together, and it seems that argument rages currently among the various factions of the American right.

Oh, pardon a tangent here for a moment, but I just have to set the record straight: fascism has always been, is now, and will always be a phenomenon of the political right. Fascism is not the equivalent of tyranny or authoritarianism; it is a right-wing manifestation of such, in the same way communism turned out to be a left-wing manifestation. Authoritarianism is not limited to any given political context. It can appear pretty much anywhere; fascism is the word that describes authoritarianism when it appears from the right.

Likewise, socialism is not the equivalent of fascism. Hitler called his party “National Socialism” in an effort to rob the left of its claim to the word “socialism,” which in the early 20th century had very positive political connotations. In his own words:

“Why,” I asked Hitler, “do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?”

“Socialism,” he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, “is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.

“Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.

“We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one.”

In case it slipped past you: what Hitler is saying here would be like saying, oh say for example, that the United States was founded to be a Christian nation. It’s a complete distortion of historical fact — a lie — to bolster an illegitimate claim to absolute power.

Political discussion in the United States has become so confused that it is impossible to use the words “fascism” and “socialism” at all, because the ignoramuses on Fox News use them to mean whatever the hell they want, everything except what they actually mean. They have to do this of course — any intellectually honest assessment of fascism would reveal their own behavior to be fascistic; any intellectually honest assessment of socialism would reveal that the happiest and most prosperous nations on Earth are in fact social democracies. And that would compromise Rupert Murdoch’s personal wealth.

In any event, re-exposing myself to this material, and to the film linked above, after many years has brought a level of sobriety to my thinking that I have been avoiding for a long time for very personal reasons which I won’t get into here. But I do find myself asking the same question that’s been haunting me since I left Christian fundamentalism — the most overt form of homegrown American fascism — behind for good: what is the critical mass required for a full-blown fascist-fundamentalist takeover? We are perched right at the gates of Hell. What can be the final straw?

 

Ornament

Revisiting Catherine Austin Fitts’ “Solari”

Introducing The Venerable Ms. Fitts

One of the people whose post-9/11 work I most admire is Catherine Austin Fitts. Vocationally she’s an investment banker which, in a lot of peoples’ minds, should automatically make her positively evyle; however, her approach to money and finance is very different from the vampire squid with which we all contend.

I got to meet her at the 2006 Local Solutions conference, and at one point while chatting informally about various ways local communities could finance their own needs without the help of the vampire squid, she exclaimed with a big smile, “I love money!”

Up until that point I would have been horrified at such a blatant declaration of greed. I mean, if nothing else it’s just in really poor taste. But for whatever reason it clicked in my head differently at that moment and I saw that there was not anything like standard bankster greed in her statement. For Fitts, money was not something to hoard out of fear. For her, money was a creative medium. Not a destructive or extractive one. It was a tool to be used for creating beauty and social justice, for healing the Earth, for bringing corruption to heel, for building a door out of our crumbling economic edifice and into the real world of fresh air and living souls. She spoke with the vocabulary of banksters but the words had a different meaning. Fitts was an artist and her medium was money: infinitely useful, infinitely malleable, limited only by our own failure of imagination.

Like all wage-slave types, money for me had always been bondage. And indeed that is how our monetary system is set up, a system of slavery whereby only a few ever gain freedom and everyone else is doomed to flush their lives down the time-card toilet with only two weeks per year to enjoy life, plus another 10 years at the end before death. But after my brief conversation with Fitts I began looking at money and finance differently. Money is indeed useful and malleable; it can be made to behave on any scale, and no special lobbying or social movements or legislation is required. It is the master’s tool that can dismantle the master’s house.

One of the most important things I gleaned from Fitts’ work, though I don’t believe she ever addressed this directly, is that the illusory nature of money is both its great weakness — of which most of us are aware at this point, I’m sure — and its great strength. It is a shape-shifter that can be formed into anything, and can appear or disappear in an instant. It has no shape of its own and it has no allegiances. Indeed, money is so slippery that even under a monetary regime designed for slavery and death it can be turned into life in the hands of an adept practitioner.

Money As Magick

I choose the phrase “adept practitioner” quite deliberately. Money doesn’t really exist — even if it is in the form of gold or other concrete object, its value as money exists only in one’s mind. Money is, ultimately, intention. Harnessing and directing the power of intention is the definition of magick.

While Fitts herself probably wouldn’t like that analogy, I’m going to use it here because I suspect anyone reading this will have dabbled more in magick than in finance.

Like any magick, the key to using money is in learning how to direct intent. In magick, this is done by first identifying your intent; next, gather various objects and/or substances that correspond to your intent; and finally, assemble these into a ritual that sharply focuses your intent and gets it out of your head and into the universe. The ritual process creates a morphic resonance within your morphic field that brings about synchronicities in line with your intent. There are two basic types of intent: sending stuff away from you (yang), and pulling stuff toward you (yin).

The monetary system functions like a morphic field; what you do with your money is akin to a ritual, and the consequences of your financial decisions are like synchronicities within the morphic field. Money obeys the basic intent types: you can send it away from you (yang), or pull it towards you (yin).

For the sake of comparison, let’s say there’s something in your life you want to send away from you… a nosy neighbor perhaps. So what you want to do is a mild banishing spell (you don’t want to kill anybody). For your ritual you collect a black candle and some sage oil, both of which correspond to banishing intent. For the ritual itself you rub the sage oil downward on the candle to symbolize “away from me,” light it, and while it’s burning visualize your neighbor ignoring you. When the candle burns out you collect up the wax scraps, wrap them in a blue cloth to symbolize “peace,” and place these in your freezer to symbolize “chill out.”

Now let’s say you have some money stream coming in that you want to banish. Because money is intent already out in the universe, you do not have to go to the trouble of putting it there; you can work with it directly. Your banishing ritual will involve shutting down whatever is the source of that money. On the flip side, if you want to pull money toward you, your ritual will involve opening up a channel through which it can flow.

In magick, it is crucially important to be very clear about your intent, because if you identify it wrong you’re going to get results you don’t want. In the nosy neighbor example, what you want to banish is not the neighbor but her unwarranted attention; if you get it wrong, you may end up banishing her from her house through fire or foreclosure or whatever. The same is true with money, and I think this is where people start getting tripped up — certainly this is something I have trouble with. Since money is already intention out in the universe & within your morphic field, its results are immediate — resonance need not be established, it is established already. And that means there is no behind-the-scenes, mysterious, invisible process working to manifest your intention; this part you have to do yourself. You may never know what circumstances motivate your nosy neighbor to leave you alone, but if you want to open a channel through which money can flow to you, you have to map out that process from beginning to end and spend the money accordingly on each individual step in order to make that step manifest.

Now all of that might seem like a silly detour, but I’m laying all this out to try to get Fitts’ solari idea into a context that might be more easily understandable than finance-speak.

Money As Magick Applied

Right now our monetary system is set up so that money flows from the less-wealthy masses into the coffers of corporations and billionaires. It does this through various codifications of the principle like attracts like. The most obvious example of this is usury, otherwise known as interest. If you have money, usury causes it to attract more money. If you do not have money, usury depletes whatever money does happen to come your way.

Another example would be that of the P/E ratio, or price-to-earnings ratio. On the stock market, the price of a company’s stock is determined (in part) by dividing the company’s earnings by the total number of its existing shares — and then multiplying — multiplying! — that number again and again. That multiple is the ratio. The multiple is determined by stock traders in the process of buying and selling the company’s stock: if they think the company is awesome they will drive up the price of the stock, and therefore its multiple, by trying to outbid each other to buy those shares. Higher earnings makes people want to buy, thereby increasing the multiple and the value of the company; lower earnings makes people want to sell, thereby driving down the multiple and the value of the company. Like attracts like.

The most pernicious example would be simply this: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Like attracts like.

Fitts’ genius is in her ability to align positive intention with money’s properties of immediacy and like-attracts-like. Like any adept practitioner, she isn’t constrained by notions of fixed space, fixed time, fixed matter; or as in the case with money, notions of fixed value or fixed availability. Her basic idea, as I understand it, boils down to this: money’s like-attracts-like positive feedback loop can be attached to anything, so let’s attach it to the good and the just. Once that attachment is made the upward spiral will take care of itself.

And this is the point where she lost everyone. Because figuring out how to do that attaching requires entrepreneurship — dirty, filthy capitalism. Overcoming the capitalism heebie-jeebies and actually learning to become an adept money practitioner is too much for most self-respecting people of moral principles, but it’s across that chasm that the fun really begins.

For example: in any given community, there are going to be a bunch of people earning .5% on their CD savings accounts, and a bunch of other people paying 20.5% on their credit cards. The bank has the like-attracts-like thing set up in its own favor, ripping off its customers at a 20% spread. Getting the feedback loop working in the peoples’ favor is, in this instance, really obvious: the people with savings lend their money to the people with credit card debt at 10% interest. Bang zoom, problem solved. The savers are earning back an un-fucking-believable rate on their investment, the debtors are paying off their debts at half the standard usury rate and twice as fast as before, and everybody’s extricated from the bank’s feedback loop.

The peoples’ feedback loop fires up when their neighbors find out what’s going on and want to get in on the action. Now more people are extricated from the bank, more savers are earning higher interest and more debtors are getting out of debt faster. Then maybe someone else duplicates the idea somewhere else; then it happens again somewhere else, then somewhere else still. The bank’s feedback loop is shriveling and the peoples’ feedback loop is blossoming. Like attracts like.

Here’s a somewhat bigger example. Say there are a half-dozen independent businesses on Main Street that are struggling in the bad economy. Normally these businesses would go to the bank and establish lines of credit at 15% interest in order to pad the slow times so that they can meet their monthly bills, payrolls and such. Those businesses don’t have the ability to issue stock to raise money like big publicly-traded companies do. What they could do, though, is band together to form a special kind of umbrella business called a Limited Liability Company (LLC) and sell “memberships” — which, for all intents and purposes, function just like stock shares with dividends and the like, but can’t be traded. Now suddenly everyone who’s bought memberships in the LLC has a vested interest in making sure those Main Street businesses do well. The LLC members shop at the stores and encourage others to do the same, because they’ll get bigger dividends, and now suddenly Main Street is prospering again like it hasn’t in years. Then soon enough other businesses want in on the LLC because that’s a fucking awesome setup. Then eventually someone duplicates the idea on some other Main Street; then another and another; and thus the Main Street feedback loop fires up too.

(Aside: the LLC is a really interesting kind of business organization. It’s like a hybrid public-private company with all the advantages of both and none of the disadvantages of either. It can be organized just about however you want. See Chris Cook’s article on the UK’s version of the LLC, called an LLP, and some ingenius ways it has been used for sustainable development. Chris Cook was main architect of the Iranian oil bourse and another of my filthy-capitalist collapse heroes.)

Solari

But Fitts’ crowning achievement, in my opinion, was her blueprint for the solari, a for-profit community financial corporation.

In order to really get how a solari would work, it’s important to understand one thing: information is worth money, and information about money is worth more than money. When Facebook went public, it was valued at something like $100 billion — and that is definitely not because of the money it makes on advertising. It’s because Facebook owns what is arguably the largest database on individual people in the world. That kind of detailed knowledge is phenomenally powerful.

A solari works on the same principle, only its database is filled not with ducky-face photos and cyberbullying, but with detailed information about money flows within its given community. The information is collected from public records, voluntary surveys, various public entities’ budgets and the like. Crucially, it would also include all the black- and gray-market information it could track down. Like Facebook, the solari’s database would grow over time, revealing an ever more detailed picture of the community’s wealth.

Based on this information the solari then identifies areas in the community where cash flow can be optimized in the community’s favor. So for example, say the city hires a big national firm to handle garbage collection; meanwhile, a bunch of people in need of jobs are sitting around fretting about how they’re going to pay rent. The solari would negotiate with the city for its community to opt out of the garbage collection contract, and would rechannel those funds toward hiring some of the unemployed locals instead. So now, the community has saved money and decreased its unemployment rate and, potentially, provided some health insurance for people who otherwise wouldn’t have any. The solari has optimized the community’s cash flow and everybody wins.

And of course, these types of actions go into the database, increasing the database’s value. It is not in the solari’s interest to do things that hurt the community, because a database full of financial failure is worth just about jack shit. The solari’s database is valuable only to the extent that it is successful at contributing to improving the community — in whatever way, shape or form that may take. Thus the solari profits not by extracting wealth from its community, but rather by increasing wealth in the community. This is precisely the opposite of how the economy currently functions.

Once per quarter, the solari publishes a report on the financial health of the community and the projects it is working on. Feedback from people on the ground would be crucial — these folks are the solari’s eyes and ears on the street, and if they are not benefitting, the value of the database is compromised.

The solari raises money for its various projects by selling stock against the value of its database, just like Facebook does. There are two stock tiers: tier A stocks can only be sold to people who live in the community, are very limited in number, they confer voting rights, but do not pay dividends. There is no direct financial gain with A-stocks; any gain to A-stock holders is indirect, by improving the community. Tier B stocks can be purchased by anyone, do pay dividends, but do not confer voting rights. Financial gain is direct in the form of the dividend checks, but because they confer no voting rights, there isn’t any way for B-stock holders to manipulate the solari’s projects for their own advantage over the community.

With this tiered stock system, the solari is able to pull in money from potentially all over the globe to build up the community, while the community itself spends that money wherever it determines some improvement project will benefit the community as a whole. The money can be used for quite literally anything: to bolster failing schools, to clean up an abandoned lot and plant a public orchard, to invest in cottage industry and mom-and-pop businesses, maybe build a local solar-powered electrical grid, set up a low-cost health care clinic, fix up or tear down blighted properties. Anything that improves the community also increases the value of the database, making further B-stock sales more attractive, and bringing in more money.

Because the solari is a standard, run-of-the-mill financial corporation, there’s no reason its stocks can’t trade on a secondary market. In this scenario, the whole community is able to benefit from the P/E ratio madness described above. So, say the earnings of the community as a whole is $10 million, and the secondary market determines the stock to be worth 10 times earnings. Now suddenly the solari — and by extension, the community — is worth $100 million. $100 million! Just like that! A valuation like that makes all kinds of outside investment in the community very attractive indeed, thereby bringing in even more outside money.

In this way, the solari completely reverses the financial drain in a community. Instead of money flowing out of the community and into the coffers of supranational corporations, money flows in, causing more money to flow in, and then more and more. The like-attracts-like positive feedback loop is attached to the community as a whole and everybody benefits.

Solari And Preparations

It is plainly obvious to me that in terms of collapse preparations, a solari is almost infinitely more useful than a Transition initiative. Anything at all that can be done at the community level to slow the descent — that is, to extricate the community from the sinking globalization ship — will contribute to the feedback loop. How about a neighborhood-based solar-electric grid that is not tied to the main grid? How about buying a half-circle of vacant property around the perimeter of the community to establish a public permaculture space? How about a distributed gray- and black-water bioprocessing system that is not tied to the public sewage system? How about a jubilee in which the solari flat-out pays off the consumer debt of its community members?

Even more important is the ability to adapt, and quickly, to whatever black swan event might strike. The solari makes enormous sums of money available at any given time, providing the opportunity for immediate adaptation when required.

None of these things are even remotely possible under the Transition banner. They’re just too expensive, and even if the money were available, would require so much “consensus” on every little detail that nothing would ever get done.

You know, it makes me angry and very sad to survey the level of opportunity lost since Fitts first began circulating her solari ideas. That was long before the economic crash and so much could have been done to cushion the blow. All that was lost, was lost because people did not want to relinquish their notion that money is evil and bad, and they didn’t want to corrupt themselves by even learning about it, much less putting it to use. Solari is the ultimate relocalization; when relocalization got usurped by Transition is right about the time Fitts withdrew behind her paywall. I wonder now if she didn’t simply see the writing on the wall. Transition is just not flexible enough in its ideology to accommodate something so blatantly capitalist as a community financial corporation; there really isn’t any room there to discuss such things, let alone take action on them. The anti-capitalist bent of those with the collapse megaphones has succeeded in cutting off preparations’ nose to spite its face.

Conclusion

Solari represents not just a buffer against collapse, but a complete reconfiguration of how money works. It cannot stop climate change or peak oil; however, what it can do is fund a real and meaningful transition — small “t” — to a way of life that is adapted to the new realities and can thrive more-or-less happily within these. Should the idea catch on at a large scale — unlikely, but not out of the realm of possibility — it could form the basis of a fully adapted, and adaptable, economy. Resilience would become a moot point, because it would simply be built right in.

Maybe it’s not too late for Fitts’ solari ideas to take root. Maybe enough people understand now that “collapse” means financial collapse first and foremost. But given what I have seen, I’m not holding my breath. Old habits of mind are too hard to break.

Ornament