Time to END ALL Interest Rate Charges on EXISTING consumer credit card debt and reduce ALL home mortgage interest rate charges to four percent.

A couple of decades ago when I was just starting out in the film industry I worked for a film company that was in merger talks with two other film companies. Our company was 10-15 million dollars in debt and it appeared the only way to save ourselves was by merging with two stable companies so that the overall debt percentage would be minimized. Our company had already made a name for itself so combining with a financially stable company (aka too big to fail) would result in better times.

But then reality hits. It turns out that all three companies were hiding their own 10-15 million dollars of debt. Each company assumed the other two merging companies were debt free. After the merger the three companies realized they all had brought their own debt into the merger. The new and improved too big to fail company actually had 30-45 million dollars of debt and went out of business less than a year later. 

I bring this story up now because I see my microcosmic job experience is actually recreating itself on a much grander scale.

Most of world is in debt, and nobody really has a solution other than to try and hide their own debt from others.

I have a solution to the hide the debt game that is being played and since I am a nobody, I may be correct when I say "nobody" has a solution.

Gargantuan consumer debt and the destructively high interest rate charges that accompany the consumer debt has destroyed a critical component of a sustainable worldwide economy. Consumers all over the world have less money to spend because more and more of their income is going towards repetitive, revolving interest rate charges that are so onerous they have become unreduceable.

While the actual amount of worldwide consumer debt may not seem like a substantial amount of the overall worldwide debt, it is having a profound affect in many insidious ways. The bottom line is the amount of disposable income that each and every consumer is able to create is dramatically shrinking, and in the process, disposable income no longer first travels between consumers and local small businesses within local economies, disposable income now goes directly to pay a bank debt or some type of tax, and this is a huge problem.

We have reached an economic tipping point where the absolutely profoundly rich are now draining the worlds resources by expecting to get the best return on obscene amounts of savings. Money that should no longer be receiving interest payments is actually siphoning more and more capital away from the everyday person who is just trying to make ends meet.

Banksters worldwide keep stalling the inevitable. The longer the banksters wait to severly reduce interest rate charges on existing consumer debt and decrease home mortgage interest rates to an across the board 4%, the worse things will be for the worldwide economy for an ever expanding period of time.

Too much emphasis is being placed on maintaining interest rate profit margins even when those interest rate profit margins are actually spiraling every country into deepening debt that is devaluing real estate values everywhere.

Countries need to transition to alternative forms of energy that they can generate on their own land, for their own needs, or wars will increase. The key stumbling block to global energy self sufficiency is it needs to happen within the cost parameters of existing oil supplies and prices, and there in lies the parallel problem.

It takes petroleum to create alternative energy infrastructure, but petroleum is being used in a "one time and its gone" methodology.

The longer we wait to deputize oil for the primary purpose of ramping up other forms of energy as quickly as possible, the less likely we will be able to make a successful alternative energy transition while also being able to concurrently service the energy requirements of 6 billion people worldwide (and growing).

What does the world's inability to harvest new sources of energy have to do with interest rate charges? Interest rate charges enslave people to work longer and harder just to maintain their same level of debt. As consumers work longer and harder at their jobs they consume more and more petroleum and energy sources at a time when that petro should be used to create alternative forms of energy.

One example of the reallocation of petroleum to create alternative forms of energy is the idea of completely redoing the electrical grid infrastructure. Actually re laying every bit of electrical wire in the entire United States with the most efficient forms of conductive wiring could significantly reduce the amount of power that needs to be generated, but the petroleum to drive such a project is being diverted to simply driving our gas guzzling cars.

Unfortunately, there is no mechanism in place to create a public works program to make the revamping of the energy grid a likelihood. Instead, the interest rate trap is contributing to consumers working extra hours (assuming they can find work) at jobs that drain our energy resources, which in turn requires our government to fund military installations all over the world, which in turn provides all that extra petroleum which we should be weaning ourselves off of.

Consumer Interest rate charges on EXISTING credit card debt is creating an indebted, enslaved society that will do anything to be able to pay their bills. Most of the work that is being done simply perpetually repays repeating revolving consumer credit card debt and those nasty interest rate charges that prevent the debt from ever being paid down, which further removes us from the urgent energy goal of replacing petroleum as the dominant energy supply source on the planet.

What the world needs to do is DECREASE the amount of hours the worlds workers need to work to maintain their present lifestyle. Each work hour reduction creates more flexibility and more time for actually improving the energy infrastructure of our planet while also reducing energy consumption as well.

Any banker or politician that thinks it is a good thing to create more work hours so consumers can keep repaying repetitive interest rate charges on existing consumer debt is actually helping to accelerate the global population towards a possibly preventable economic and ecological global catastrophe.

Why it Really is Later Than We Think When it Comes to Petroleum and the Worlds Addiction to Oil.

Imagine that ethanol had been invented before gasoline. The advantages of Ethanol would be pretty apparent, one can grow their own fuel while remaining independent of all other countries and entities. Seed, water, soil, and sun and one can grow corn to make ethanol, wow.

Now imagine the ethanol pioneers wanting to resell excess ethanol. To meet this goal, and to increase efficiency and profits, a huge ethanol plant is built. At first glance the ethanol plant is doing spectacularly well as all the local growers bring their corn in for processing. Sooner rather than later, the nearby seasonal supply of corn is depleted.

To keep the ethanol plant busy, and profitable, corn is pipelined in. Oh wait a minute, corn cannot be pipelined in, because it's corn. The lightweight, volume enhanced corn has to be trucked in. It soon becomes apparent that as the distance the corn has to travel before it is ethanolized increases, the potential profits are consumed simply supplying ethanol fuel to the truck that is carrying the load of corn in for processing.

The corn to ethanol ratio works best when the corn is nearby, and almost doesn't work at all as that distance grows. To make matters worse, not only does the truck have to go and get the corn from the farm and then bring it back, all the while burning ethanol, another truck has to then be used to transport the flammable fluid to it's final destinations. Ethanol also is used to harvest the corn, and sadly, the fertllizer used to help grow the corn uses petroleum products as well. The result is way too much ethanol being used, to produce ethanol.

Petroleum has always been able to mask the wrongness of using itself, to make more of itself, until now. The wrongness with petroleum comes into play when petroleum energy is used to make more products, that also are petroleum dependent. If petroleum was only used to create products that in turn run off of non-petroleum based fuel, the world and its future would look a lot better.

I happened to catch Tammy Bruce (June 22, 2008) on the radio last Sunday afternoon, and it was appalling to hear her try and claim that the United States' over consumption of petroleum is something the rest of the world should bow down to in gratitude because the United States fuels the world's economy. This is nonsense.

The worst thing the United States could be doing is encouraging every other country to follow our "petroleum addicted" lead. Sadly, we seem to be doing a great job of addicting the rest of the world to petroleum.

When we use petroleum to make products that rely on the burning of petroleum to function, we are no different than the farmer driving their load of corn a far enough distance to basically burn up all the product that was to be made from selling the corn for ethanol in the first place.

How does this relate to Wall Street?

Wall Street does not want to acknowledge the super simple rule that using petroleum to make other products that rely on petroleum will be the quickest road to a worldwide economic meltdown. If Wall Street continues down the path of rewarding petroleum based products that create more petroleum based addiction with higher stock value, the surface of the planet and the industrialized nations that enhabit part of it will just be wiped out at a faster than expected rate.

Those less addicted to petroleum will probably survive at a better rate than the industrialized nations.

The Price of Gasoline Doesn't Matter.

The Price of Gasoline Doesn't Matter. Well, actually, the price of gasoline shouldn't matter. If you drive a car that gets 20 miles per gallon, and pay 2.00 dollars per gallon, your cost per gallon of gasoline is no different than if you drive a car that gets 50 miles per gallon and you are paying 5 dollars per gallon.

The problem has been in the lethargy with which our own economy, marketing, and personal preferences cause the increase in miles per gallon technology to barely increase over the past 20-30 years. New potential gas saving advancements are instead put into faster acceleration or more internal comfort for the passengers such as more 12 volt outputs to power television screens, improve air conditioning, add a better speaker system, keep the car more plush, or just larger and heavier than is necessary.

Just what is happening to the gasoline profits? Think about that for a moment. In a free market universe it's none of our business what the petroleum profiteer does. But what if the oil profiteer decided to make millions of hummers, sell them at a discount, and even offer 3 dollars off on a gallon of gas to every buyer of a hummer? While the odds are that won't happen, there are signs of it with these gas for only 2.99 guarantee offers if you basically buy a new gas guzzling car.

Could the argument be made that we no longer have a "free market society" if the amount of petroleum required for the planet's economy to run is more than can be supplied? Under those conditions, aren't urgent maneuvers the order of the day?

Not if you believe in let the market decide. At some point, the price of gas will become so high that other technologies will be developed. so just let the market decide. But there is a problem with that line of thinking.

If the oil profiteers choose to ignore the development of alternative energy technologies, they actually obstruct it's development. The obstruction comes in the form of purchasing existing, inefficient products that actually increase oil consumption! Anything short of investing ALL of the excess petroleum profits in alternative renewable energy products generated in one form or another by the sun, may be too little too late.

I believe we are in an "either you support alternative energy technologies, or you are against alternative energy technologies" mode, there is no in between. Fighting in Iraq to ensure stability so oil flows becomes a moot point if we don't accelerate our own fight for alternative energy development at a fater rate, especially when the amount of oil the military is using just to stay in Iraq is factored in.