The Spiritual Opportunity Of Our Money Pain I really like this guy , Matt Taibbi, who writes for the Rolling Stone magazine. He again has a great article this month on the continued betrayal of the American people. The article is called “Wall Street Strikes Back” and the table of contents description on Page 5 tells a lot of the story: “Congress looked serious about financial reform until the country’s biggest banks unleashed an army of 2000 paid lobbyists”. In the body of the article, Matt talks about the watering down of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act and ends with a few points that In feel are important to mention here. On the positive side, the bill will curb some of the predatory lending I have spoken a lot about. But the more important issues the bill was supposed to address, like breaking up large risky banks, requiring financial giants to set up a fund to pay for their own bailouts, and probably most importantly, forcing the derivatives market to be more transparent, won’t happen in any meaningful way. So the $600 trillion derivatives market will continue to work without the light of day, and that in my mind is criminal. Matt’s conclusion foretells the continuing impact on the American people- “a war the once looked winnable will continue to drag on for years, creating more havoc and destroying more lives before it is over”. So the results of the financial fiasco keep getting put back onto the shoulders of [...]
Credit Card Debt
Concentric Circles of Recession
We Are Not Out of the Falling Bubble Woods Yet. I heard a joke the other day, that might have been funny if it weren’t so close to the truth. “The last will and testament of the Icelandic financial sector requested their ashes be spread over Europe”. I loved what my husband’s friend said in response to hearing that: There was a special bequest to England who replied “We said cash not ash”. But this is what is happening not just around Iceland debt, but debt in general all over the world. The debtors are being blamed, and the creditors have been given cash. The US government bailed out the banks- who were responsible for making bad loans, but gave nothing to the debtors. In effect, the bankers have been paid for their bad loans. As our economy is shrinking, these same creditors are grabbing as much as they can and in the process making the debtors feel guilty. The creditors are more guilty. They supported predatory lending- lending knowing that the debts could never be paid. It is another chapter in the wealth grab. The 10,000,000 Americans who are probably going to lose their homes didn’t cause the problems, but they and the American people whose taxes funded the bailouts are going to be left holding the bag. The economist Michael Hudson has likened the American democracy at the moment to an Oligarchy. He said that 25 years ago, 1% of the American public owned 27% of equity income, [...]
The Wall Street Hustle
Opting Out of the Big Bank Fiasco and Moving Toward Self Sufficiency The Rolling Stone March 2009 issue had an article by Matt Taibbi called Wall Street’s Bailout Hustle in which he likens the financial crisis bailout to a street con and makes a very good case of it, taking us step by step through the con game led by Goldman Sachs. In the article he makes a case that the big banks aren’t just pocketing the trillions that were given them to rescue the economy, but that they are engineering another crash so that they can continue to feed at the trough. There is one paragraph that is such a concise summary, it is worth quoting: “Take massive sums of money from the government, sit on it until the government starts printing trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to restart the economy, buy even more toxic assets to sell back to the government at even more inflated prices,- and then, when all else fails, start driving toward the cliff again with a frank and open endorsement of bubble economies”. He goes on to say, that” con artists have a word for the inability of victims to accept that they have been scammed. The call it the “true believer” syndrome.” It is time to quit believing that someone else- the government, the banks- are going to take care of you and will have your best interests at heart. It is time to wake up, smell the coffee and take [...]
The Future is Now
Are Being Spiritual and Not Debting for the Future Contradictory? I received this email last week: “In an excellent post last April on credit card debt, you stated bluntly, ‘Debt steals from the future.’ I’m in full agreement, but I fear this line of reasoning falls on deaf ears to many debt-laden people who’ve imbibed spiritual literature over the years that emphasizes “present-moment awareness.” They don’t want to hear about the future, don’t want to think about it. For them, that 60s song by The Grass Roots, ‘Let’s Live for Today’ has been a lifelong mantra. Do you have any thoughts on how to overcome this resistance to the notion of focusing on the future? You hint at this when you write, ‘You will become more present, and not living in the bondage of your future’ by avoiding debt… but what exactly should someone tell himself or herself while climbing out of debt to ‘become more present’?” This is an excellent question, but not a simple one to answer. There are many levels on which to answer this question. I am going to approach it for the purposes of this post from two perspectives. Firstly from the perspective of Right Action. We are where spirit has materialized, so you cannot separate yourself from that which is physical or material. So being in the moment, in the now of our experience, does not negate the laws of relative reality, of physical manifestation. And there are patterns that manifest regarding money just [...]
The Answer To Our Credit Crisis
The Antidote to Greed in the Economic Downturn In my last post I talked about leaving the chase for more is better and a sense of deprivation which fueled that chase and start living in a sense of sufficiency. I also said this would take a shift in consciousness. In the November 10 Newsweek, in the Article, A Darker Future For Us, by Robert Samuelson, he talked about how Americans have been “progress junkies”. That is part of what I believe allowed us to be asleep at the wheel around the greed, miscalculation and the subsequent economic ruin of many Americans, and maybe America itself. The recession will end, but it won’t be a recovery to previous rates of growth. People are going to feel poorer, because their “sluggish income gains (will) get siphoned off into higher taxes, energy costs, and health spending.He says the we are about to begin a time of what he calls “affluent deprivation” which he says is a state of mind. I believe that we can, and need to move from a sense that without growth we will be in deprivation. It’s costly to consume out of a sense of deprivation. We get caught up in wanting more-bigger-faster stuff and then have to go back to earn the money to pay for it. And we are not really satisfied. What we really want is rest, time., money and connection. Jacob Needleman talks about how our capitalist society creates ever new desires. And the ease of [...]
Opting Out of Serfdom
Day to Day Living in the New Paradigm In my last two blogs I talked at length about predatory lending and the debt economy getting us into trouble as a nation and as individuals. We need to step out of the culture of easy money and magical thinking that allowed Ponzi schemes like Bernie Madoff- but not just him. If you look at the whole bubble created by the debt system, you could say the whole of the state of Florida was a Ponzi scheme (look at the details of their real estate bubble). You could say all hedgefunds and therefore the fund managers were a Ponzi scheme. You could say the whole country (supported by Greenspan and the Bush Administration) has been living a national Ponzi scheme. Maybe ( and I believe) the whole world economy has been a Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff was just the starting bell in this horserace. I have an acquaintance here in Marin County who thought he was a multimillionaire. He had a thriving tax preparation business. Then he got into the investment business so his tax clients could invest in pension plans. And then he invested his own earnings in Florida real estate. The whole thing (except his tax practice- as taxes, like death, are inevitable) has fallen like a deck of cards. Now he is deeply suffering from his delusion and is having great difficulty in accepting that. There are many people who are in the same boat and they are [...]
Debt is the New Bondage
Staying Out of Credit Card Debt As stated in the New Yorker in its April 13, 2009 issue, in the article I.O.U. by Jill Lepore ,”Consumer debt has been the engine of the American economy since the 1970′s and arguably longer”. I would argue not just the American economy, but the whole world consumer driven bubble economy that has just crashed because it is simply not sustainable. Many are now recognizing that the predatory lending practices of the banks and credit card companies, with the tacit approval of the government through it’s interest rate manipulation and, as Jill Lepore, says its pitching to the American people that credit is a civic responsibility , have created a such a giant hole in the economy that we wonder if it can actually be fixed. We have no appreciation for history, or geography, in this country. It was never something that was valued in our education. If we did appreciate history, we would know that the downfall of every civilization was presaged by a wider and wider split between the haves and the have -nots. Think the Fall of the Roman Empire and now perhaps what we are experiencing, the Fall of the American Empire. We don’t have to go back that far if we were interested in what happened to us with respect to debt. And if we look we will see, that we have had many rises and falls of the economy, and in all cases debt was seen as necessary [...]