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 [...]
Marin
Chaos and The Economy
A Spiritual View of the Economic Crises I was at a mediation and guidance session the other night that was led by my friend, Pratima Freeman, who has been receiving guidance higher consciousness during meditation for many years. Not any particular being, but a transmission from a source of wisdom. See her website, Gifts of Guidance. She told me on the way to the evening she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to teach on. Apparently during the meditation, she got the message that she was supposed to teach on joy, but had a lot of resistance to that. With all that was going on in the world, why joy? But that’s what we did, and it led to a very interesting evening about women and their role in the ending of the patriarchy. What I understood, is that we all need to stay connected to our joy. I am not talking about happiness here. Joy is experiencing everything without judgment or concern. It is a state of beingness. Whereas happiness requires that “this” happen and “not this”. There is a vast difference between them. Joy is inclusive, while happiness is exclusive. Another example (mine) is that when we say abundance, we don’t mean the being state of feeling gratitude for the beneficence of existence, of consciousness and experience that flows through our lives, but rather we mean money. So it is joy that is needed is for there to be a grounding in being while the world enters into [...]
Sustainable World
The Great Turning Laast Sunday, January 3rd, in Mill Valley, CA I spent the afternoon at Awakening The Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium which was created by The Pachamam Alliance. Apparently this symposium has 2000 trainers that share it around the world in more than 40 countries on six continents. This alliance was created out of a call for partnership from one of the world’s remote indigenous dream cultures, The Achuar of the Amazon rainforest that was anwered by a small group if people, that included Lynn Twist. Lynn wrote the book, The Soul of Money, which I love and supports the movement as I do from the chase from “more is better” to sufficiency. This is how she says the Achuar put it: “We need to change the dream of the North, the dream of the modern world, a dream rooted in consumption and acquisition, without any regard to the consequences of the natural world or even our own future.” The mission of the Pachamama Alliance is to bring forth as environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just human presence on earth. The symposium was organized around four questions: Where are we? How did we get here? What is possible for the future? Where do we go from here? They have a book called the Sustainable World Sourcebook which we should all have which gives detailed answers to all of these questions, which I can’t go into in detail here, but I would like to address. If we really look [...]
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 [...]