The problem with money

Part 1: What is the problem?

There may have been a time when money was a relatively harmless or neutral inanimate object, void of any intrinsic character (good or evil), but now—in this time like no other before it—things have changed. The problem with money—in our current dire dilemma, as the Earth and all who dwell therein are facing the likelihood of the worst catastrophe in human history—is the power that money has been given to perpetuate the engines of the monstrous machine that has actually created the imminent catastrophe.¹ The economic systems that most humans in the world today live under are dependent upon the continued production and consumption of things that are actually toxic to our personal and environmental health. The personal human health issues brought to us by junk foods, junk pharmaceuticals, and toxic petro-chemical agriculture are better-known and more widely acknowledged than the environmental and climate destruction issues, even though the threat from climate disaster is more dire. That monstrous machine, the money-driven, toxic industrial production and consumption system, brings us phenomena like the disappearance of glaciers, Arctic ice, and permafrost; the accelerating releases of methane; the increased frequency of droughts and other extreme, abnormal, unpredictable weather patterns; the daily mass extinctions of species of animals and plants; rising seas engulfing small islands; new migrations of people and other species as "climate refugees"; and many other evidences of climate destruction that continue to accelerate beyond the rates that scientists predicted just a few years ago. The prevailing systems are dependent upon keeping us enslaved through financial debt and cultural brainwashing, which includes convincing people that there is no possible better system, and that the best we can hope for is to mildly tweak the system we have, working through the "proper channels." But those channels are corrupt governments that are also enslaved by the multinational industrial corporate elites. These systems are designed, structured, and intentionally maintained to perpetuate themselves and continually bring the imagined "benefits" of disproportionate material rewards and political power to a very small percentage of the people of this planet. Under these conditions, our continued entrapment in currency-based artificial economies continues to push us further away from any possibility of resolution to this crisis.