My daughter has returned to Llangolman after several weeks in Sweden sandwiched between meditation retreats at Gaia House in Totnes. I spent the afternoon cleaning the house, packing away my computer and moving out of her bedroom. All my Welsh wordly goods are now in two travelling bags, one rucksack and the Dell shoulder case that once contained a fully functioning laptop computer...until the key board converted itself into a random symbol generator at a repair cost of £120.
Today the Guardian's Environment editor John Vidal had a breathless article on Sweden's plans to be the world's first oil-free economy. The story is certainly a good one and Sweden's population of nine million may indeed be 'taking the biggest energy step of any advance western country by trying to wean itself off oil completely within 15 years without building a new generation of nuclear power stations'.
But...and there is always a but where the nuclear industry is involved...Sweden voted in various referendums to get rid of nuclear energy by the year 2000. The Government has been dragging its feet for 20 years. The latest, absolute final, watch my lips deadline expired seven years ago. So the subtext of the announcement is that the Swedish Government has given the Swedish Nuclear Industry another 15 year lease of death. Am I being too cynical?
The nuclear industry is at the hub of a global axis of evil and like Carthage it must be destroyed...completely and utterly...razed to the ground...no ifs and buts. I pray that Sweden sticks to its Bofors guns. But I fear Brussels will find ways and means to meddle.
I place more hope in the rapid expansion of interest-free banking in Sweden. JAK....Jord Arbete Kapital...has seen another year of steady growth. Yet still only one third of one percent of the Swedish population are members. More significantly the Debt Usury Fractional Banking Industry is making inroads into JAK's customer base. JAK monthly payments look higher because they have a policy of 'eftersparandet'...after saving.
Eftersparandet means that you build up a new fund at the same time as you are paying off the old interest-free loan. The end result is that instead of being loan-free and penniless after making your final loan repayment you can be footloose and fancy-free because you have your very own personal capital base. The lie peddlers from the usury banks are deceitfully fooling some JAK customers by persuading them to switch to 'cheaper' loans. I have no doubt that JAK will figure out a way to respond...a legal challenge of mis-selling perhaps?
In my JAK loan application last month I explained that I needed seventy five thousand kronor to set myself up in Lund. I see it more as a cash flow loan since rents and deposits are needed up-front and it always take a month or two to get into the system and find ways to sing for your supper when moving to a strange country.
Unless I can find a continuous stream of benefactors I have to pay rent or moor my boat somewhere...and that is no longer free. Apartment rents in Lund are half the price of Cambridge. In England the Housing Benefit regulations keep rents artificially high...to the benefit of the rich. Placing a floor on rents distorts the supply and demand mechanism...and is one of the causes of the rapidly rising inequality that has been accelerating under New Labour. The middle classes then pay into the general tax pool...rich people and big corporations pay lobbyists and tax lawyers to make sure they never pay a penny...and this passes up the credit food chain from the poor to the super rich.
Anyway the way I figure it is that once I have a half-price apartment in Lund I will be back on the Scholars Network and able to swap my place for a working desk in Cambridge whenever I feel so inclined. If the gods are in their heaven then there is no reason why my Arizona accommodation should not come the same way.
Why Sweden? I am just twenty credits away from my Filosofie Kandidat Examen (filkand). One term will do it. In 1999 I brought myself within striking distance by picking up twenty credits in Economic History and another five credits from a course in Sustainable Development in the Baltic. This pushed me over the hundred credit mark. When my mother died in September 1999 I decided to abandon Stockholm and return to England. But then Connie's road accident and subsequent death kept me there...even though I was part of the way through some research into Swedish IT Firms and Large Organisations at Stockholm University's School of Business.
In my JAK loan application I stated that my 20 credits would come from the Department of Economic History at Lund University. My research interest was the banking and financial arrangements of the Hanseatic towns in the Middle Ages. This is part of a broader interest into the real history of european banking and the relationship between banking and innovation. I have a hunch that the introduction of double-entry book-keeping into what became known as central banking was a sufficient condition to explain the accelerated expansion of trading and manufacturing that modern day historians label as the industrial revolution. There will be articles and perhaps a book coming out of my research at Lund.
Disbursement of my SEK 75 000 JAK interest-free loan is scheduled for April. Regular monthly payments via my tax credit of £ 250 per month will take me from £ 7 000 in debt to a few thousand pounds in credit over the next three years. If I put up some collateral I can have the money in two weeks. Any offers of collateral by way of sponsorship? I might need it in a hurry if I find the boat has disappeared when I return to Rye at the weekend.
