While holding my industrial-strength nose

Part 1

I am a thinker and philosopher.

Every little nuance I catch I analyze. I’ve been doing this all my life since a little girl. I live great experiences in my imagination. Einstein said that imagination is all important, even moreso than knowledge, which is a huge recommendation.

Our culture though, stymies imagination. Something took hold of society and turned its mind to ugly things. Yet this world we live on could very well have been meant for our enjoyment. We still argue about whether it’s spherical or flat and there are theories for and against on both sides. The rub is, we really don’t know too much about ourselves or the land we live on.

I was always an easy-going person. For a while I studied the stock market. I read all the financial papers and I had all my finances under control. I was going to try my hand at investing. But I wanted to study it first while dabbling and putting a little money in it. After seeing what a whacko world finance was, I began to see so many holes in our system. I worked in commercial real estate in Boston and could see commercial property prices soaring for no good reason. Properties were being bought and sold left and right. Even after one year, the property my company managed appreciated 30M more than one year prior. No new revenues, it was all perception and trying to get in and make that quick buck. It was madness. I could see it. I recall reading in the Wall Street Journal at the time about Michael Burry, the founder of Scion Capital, the hedge fund manager who shorted the sub prime bond market and who was depicted in the movie “The Big Short”.

At the start of 2008 I used to argue with contractors at my workplace in Boston about how bad things were financially. They were doing great guns at the time and wouldn’t have any of it – they said I was paranoid, and that it’s nowhere near as bad as I was thinking. If it wasn’t for the fact that I remember having tense conversations about it at work with my (woman) boss looking at me askance, it may have slipped my memory that I saw the financial crisis coming and warned of a collapse. And since then everything has skittled out of control. I knew it would be big too because the valuations were going nuts, plus, terms were coming due for the new hip way of buying in housing finance, with balloon interest – low interest up front with a big spike at the end of the initial term.

When it all went belly up in September 2008 I remember those days so well. I used to meet a young stockbroker on the train who worked for State Street Bank. We would discuss the craziness of the stock market. He was half my age and we would talk about how rare honesty and trust were in this business. I remember saying to him trust will be the most valuable commodity soon.

When the market crashed, the next day I rode the train to Boston as usual and the passengers were in a trance. They of course were now fully aware of the seriousness of the markets. Nobody was talking. Everyone looked serious and glum. I recall sitting at my seat and welling with emotion. With anger. With frustration. It was like something was going to erupt. The night before and all through the financial papers, Hank Paulson was saying the banks were going to be bailed out at the tune of $700B.

No! I wanted to say. The markets must crash or it will have huge implications and distortions I predicted. The banks must not be let to get away with it. They needed to learn their lesson. As I sat on the train that day, the day after the stock market crash, I felt I had to say something to those commuters sitting there in shock on their way to work the day after the collapse. But what could I say? I answered myself by imagining walking through the carriages saying something to give the people a message. I didn’t want the banks to be bailed out – I thought that would be disastrous, but at the same time, I wasn’t sure either, because the chairman of the Fed, Paulson, was frightening everyone by saying it would be economic catastrophe if the banks were allowed to fail. The government was going to put the bill through immediately. I only had a matter of seconds to get something out of my mouth and into the minds of the commuters that morning. The message had to be crystal clear. What to say?

After tossing ideas over and over with haste, “Call your congressman” was what I settled upon. Because I really didn’t know what else we could do in such a situation. That was in the days when I believed in congressmen.

Before any more thought was put into it I stood up and put my brown quilted backpack on my shoulders, the one I took to work with me daily and had all my affairs nicely compartmentalized inside. And in my usual corporate clothing, I began walking the isles of the train. I didn’t give myself any time to consider how ridiculous I might have seemed or what responses I might garner. I just got up and did it.

As I walked through, passengers would look up from their newspapers and above their eyeglasses, and I looked them right in the eye and said “Call your congressman” as I walked steadfastly through all the carriages. I looked at the left aisle seats and the right isle seats and repeated the mantra. I kept on walking through, not waiting for any chance for them to respond. I kept that pace further through the train repeating it over and over as I traversed the aisles through the carriages. The stares on their faces remain with me to this day. They were stunned, not just by me, they were speechless. They didn’t understand what was going on. Nobody was smiling.

I couldn’t believe I did something like that. What the hell drove me? I was a total quivering ball of emotion once I was done. I got to work and I asked my boss if she had seen the news, and she took one look at me and said, “Go home Denise, just go home”. She could see I was in such a mess. I wasn’t crying but very intensed (sic)

I wasn’t going to go home – no fucking way! I had so much energy in me I had Mount Vesuvius in me. I just had to do more. What to do though? It was a fine day in Boston and I was dressed like a typical corporate clone – long black trench coat, tied at the waist, dark slacks with white blouse and black jacket. I always liked to dress well. With corporate clothes on I knew I didn’t look very threatening. I thought I would buy a board and a marker and walk around Boston with a message on the board, and ask people I encountered about the bank bailout.

This was the very day after Hank Paulson’s announcement asking for a 700B dollar bailout for the banks – the very banks that had actually caused the crash! Stunning effrontery. We didn’t know what would happen if the banks failed, they made it seem like catastrophe but really the catastrophe was that we didn’t let them fail.

Elizabeth Warren was on the panel that awarded the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) to the banks. Don’t you just love the way they word their snafu’s - “troubled assets”. Liberals who pretend to care about “the common man” have no idea how the common man lives. I nearly took a double take when I found that Paul Krugman was a sitting member on the Committee of 300, a powerful global council that makes decisions about commerce, banking, media, and the military “for centralized global efforts”. He sits alongside notables such as the Rothschilds, several monarchs, and world billionaires including Warren Buffett. So much for his grass roots liberal spoutaramas. He wrote the book, “Proud to be a Liberal”. I had it. I used to think Krugman was for real. I used to admire him. That was before I knew he was on the Committee of 300 and many other undisclosed factoids.

Though I looked approachable as I’m short and totally non-threatening, I needed something to keep the image lighthearted, everyone was tense about it enough as it was. I thought I needed a hat to make myself look totally approachable. I thought some kind of baseball hat - that usually greets people well in Boston. I stopped at South Station at one of those ubiquitous and irritating stores that sell only baseball hats. For someone who cares about the planet and wastage, to see what is being manufactured for such petty whims makes my heart do a nosedive. I wanted a green hat because I was so into greening the world and they had one that looked acceptable, mainly white with green patterns on it. I also bought a matchstick size US flag to quell any idea of terrorism – after 911 that was the new ethos of city society. I stuck the flag in the center of the hat. Then went off to buy a board and marker.

Once I had all my equipment, I had to decide what to put on the sign. Hmm.

I planned to walk around Boston during the day and at peak hour I planned to go stand in front of South Station where squillions of commuters would be able to see my sign. The wording had to be brief, it had to convey something important that could be interpreted easily and unambiguously. But what? I didn’t know whether the bailouts should be given or not. We had very little time to think about it. Paulson pounded out the panic - quick, quick, the sky is falling, the world will collapse if the banks go down.

This state of urgency made me suspicious. It sounded like one of those greasy sales gimmicks - “buy it now before they’re sold out”. I didn’t want people to fall into making a hasty decision. I was beginning to see what these slimes were about. So I ended up making the sign say something like wait two days before deciding. Something like that, I’m not quite sure now as it’s been a while. I walked around Boston that day with a stupid hat on and that sign almost as big as my body, and talked to people that I bumped into. At the end of the day I went to South Station as planned and stood outside. A nice woman in about her 70’s stood and talked to me. I might have looked silly but I knew my stuff then, (though I’ve forgotten the details now in 2025) and could talk about it as well as any expert. Well into our conversation, a Bloomberg reporter came by and talked with us. He was very charming and wanted to check out if I really knew what I was talking about. He asked me what LIBOR stands for which of course was elementary.

That was the way I spent the day after the announcement of the 2008 crash. Funnily enough, one of the contractors at my workplace who was singing Dixie before the crash, ended up losing his house and embroiled in a tough foreclosure battle, his demeanor very much changed. I felt sad for him.

The rest of it is history. A few years after the crash, I joined a group of “casual economists” one might call them, scholars and visionaries about money and politics. It took a while to see through the circuitousness of what money is really all about and in those days we were all learning from each other. There I learned about the Federal Reserve and interest and principle, in depth, about the way money is created into the money supply. We would discuss for hours and we enjoyed each other’s company immensely. We met monthly for over three years, sometimes going to the host’s family summerhouse at an island in Maine. We would sometimes jest that these meetings were similar to the meetings at Jekyll Island in North Carolina, the meeting of the bankers who created the Federal Reserve, but only because we were on an island too and talking about money. We felt we were putting together a template for a better society. JR had started an alternative digital currency which had been met with slow but steady success in Greenfield MA. For about a year I would spend one day of the week staffing his office in Main Street and talking to people who came in, about using this local currency. They have since changed the name of it but the currency is still being used and kudos to them for keeping it going. It’s a wonderful thing to use an alternative currency. I wish many, many more locations would offer this benefit and withdraw from the wicked banking system. It’s been a few years since I have been involved with them but they are a really wonderful group of people who care deeply about society and building a world we all know is possible. All of us in the group were like that. It was a powerful group to be a part of.

Most in the group were scholars or authors except myself and another member. He had a farmhouse close to Boston which needed some work. I would go over and help him make some cosmetic improvements to his house. He had a substantial greenhouse all made with glass, though the whole property was modest. We used the local currency as the exchange medium for my work on his property. It was so much fun to be using those credits and not Federal Reserve notes. The local currency offered a bonus of 10% at that time, it was a reward for using the currency and giving it life. This makes a whole lot of sense. We need to move towards systems that make sense and that reward the users for using it. We need to get off the bankster’s economy.

Having delved into this territory of money and stocks, and being a person who constantly sees patterns, I barely could believe how insane it all was, how it made absolutely no sense at all. Except it did make sense if you wanted to siphon the money from “the unwashed masses (which is what they call us) to banksters. Yes in that case the whole tangled ball of snot did make sense. I began to be sickened by money and what money does to the human heart and mind. I began to notice how it removes all morality. If you have money you can buy anyone and anything almost without accountability or responsibility. You can decimate the earth. To top it off, the monied classes are revered by the poorer classes and indeed, many aspire to being just as rich as the very ones they condemn. So it feels like we’re in a continuous loop of insanity.

A few years ago I started doing something without too much forethought. I am so glad I did but it hasn’t been easy. Sometimes too much forethought prevents action. I stopped paying banks and government charges. I closed my bank accounts, I lived on the cash and barter economy. I also used the alternative money system JR started and which is now more commonly used in the particular area it began, and which I’m happy about because any time bankster’s money is avoided, is a good thing in my book. However the currency is still dependent on the US dollar and therefore not as independent of it as another currency I preferred, (NumeroSet) But no matter what local currency is used - always - getting off Federal Reserve notes is better than staying on them, so whatever local currency floats one’s boat...as long as we start using a currency that is off the banking system - it’s moving in the right direction. I think Bitcoin has banking behind it however even if it doesn’t, it’s not going to get us out of the mousetrap because it is a currency that appreciates and depreciates so really we’re still in the same excrement.

Ideally it would be good to stick to about 3 to 5 various currency platforms otherwise we will be too fragmented and won’t get enough people to trade with. If we are too sprinkled over many platforms, we’d have to log in and out of various platforms to trade our skills. That would be ok if it’s kept to a minimum. We can have hundreds of currencies but we need ideally 2 to 3 main ones that we can all be on. It’s a bit like social media – you can try to get away from facebook but the other ones just don’t have the number of people. Facebook is really a most incredible public utility and should be made into such. It is crazy the way facebook purports to be so syrupy good with their “community standards” yet blaspheme the First Amendment rampantly and brazenly. One has to wonder with facebook what community they are talking about – sounds very much like a community of fascists. Facebook needs a good schlapping from the public. Best would be for it to be made into a public utility owned by the members themselves. This is how the internet could be a really awesome place for everyone.