I believe that the internet is the new ‘global brain’. Every single time we connect in this new way, we create neuron connections and dendrites that are setting up an alternate neural network.
So many of our old paradigm systems are breaking down.
I compare our clogged, overly complex financial, social and governmental systems with clogged arteries. After my dad had open heart surgery, he walked an hour a day and, over time, an alternate set of arteries arose that helped his limited circulation, keeping him alive for years beyond doctor expectations.
I believe that the rise of the internet and its easy inter-connectedness is our best hope for a global family of man that can work together to move beyond our stagnation.
So when a successful blogger reaches out to create a progressive ‘visiting subscriber’ group, to help small blogs take the next step, I applaud his thoughtfulness and hope for the best, a new way to naturally interact and bond.
The US government has been jerry-rigging statistics like the CPI for a decade, effectively lying to us about the financial instability of our money system. According to the government’s abandoned formula, we’ve been in a recession since at least 2007, but have been stumbling for years. So a governmental admission like the one on Huffington Post today is insulting to the middle class who work hard, pay taxes and struggle to get by, because they’ve been ‘hurtling’ for years.
In his book, BAD MONEY, Kevin Phillips says: ‘The debt the United States has been piling on in the last few years has provided only 30-40 percent as much stimulus per dollar to the national economy as did the debt added twenty-five or forty years ago. Why? Because money borrowed in 1970 or 1984 to be spent on factories, new jet fighter aircraft, teachers, or interstate highways had a lot more grassroots impact than money borrowed by ten thousand hedge funds to double the leverage of their various self-serving speculations.”
My read from this book is that Phillips says that the CPI is now made up of a strange mix of things to avoid showing that regular Americans have been suffering the ravages of inflation for years: Instead of counting in your mortgage payment, property tax, home insurance and declining property values, the CPI includes a formula for ‘what you could rent your home for’. It does not count things like increased cost of travel, food and living expenses but does give itself a deduction for the money we’d spend if banks charged us more fees. Its ridiculous.
We need a simple message from some politician that will tell the truth: “Hey, America? This is how it is. We’ve overspent. We have no money. We know you have very little money and that we’ve wasted your tax dollars. But we’re in a recession, have been for a few years. The way out is going to involve a bit of sacrifice from you and us. You hold your belt tight but also take care of your neighbor. We’ll stop spending on crazy things and we’ll make sure basic services are kept up and that we put all our weight behind what will get us out of this and so many other messes, GREEN JOBS. We’ll bail out parts of the auto industry, but only those who make and sell GREEN CARS. No more tax deductions for anything but GREEN. No more throwing good money after bad. That way, you can feed yourself and your family. The economy will have a boom. Global warming will arrest. We’ll slow our dependence on foreign oil. And money will flow into the pockets of workers. Where it will be spent back in the economy.
This morning I parent-volunteered at my kid’s high school, walking students a few blocks away to a free dining hall that serves three meals a day to homeless and low income people. Our job was making 120 sandwiches that would be handed out after the hot lunch, so that someone has food for later. We opened bags and bags of donated days old loaves of bread, swiped a big gob of mayo/mustard mix onto each slice and put two pieces of meat on one side, made the sandwich and then bagged it. We made two boxes of 60 sandwiches each.
As we opened loaf after loaf, I noticed that some loaves give you 8 sandwiches, some give you seven and some give you ten.
We’re in a recession. I’m pretty blessed. I’ve never had to figure out if the loaf I have has enough to make sandwiches for my whole family.
US Corporations go around the world and take the most valuable assets from many foreign countries, then sell the products and pocket the profit. The US does not acknowledge that other countries own their water, diamonds, gold, oil, seeds, rainforest land, etc. We go in, set up huge private security perimeters, milk the asset and are SHOCKED when brought to the table for negotiations about how to share the wealth we’re taking from the indigenous peoples.
Here’s Sarah Palin, explaining that ‘each Alaskan owns’ her state’s oil reserves and should be paid when oil companies suck it out of the ground.
Hey, wait a minute! Alaskans are Americans. I’m an American. She’s taking my tax dollars for the Bridge to Nowhere, Why don’t I get some of that money?
And wouldn’t America be a better global citizen if our businesses and government paid citizens of other countries when we appropriated their most valuable assets?
Treasure Secretary Henry Paulson is handing out $160 billion to banks in the hopes that they will stabilize and the financial markets will calm. But he won’t tell you which banks are in trouble. Instead, he’s giving cash to a range of banks, so that NO ONE CAN POINT A FINGER AT THE WEAKENED BANK.
Its like the lice patrol at my kids’ school: they notify parents that lice is present but don’t name kids, so the innocent kid doesn’t get stigmatized. Problem is, banks aren’t elementry school kids. Banks intentionally lent out lots and lots of money on the fractional reserve system, and bought and sold dangerously valued subprime mortgage and credit derivative products.
I think more banks should fail. The weak or badly damaged banks should close. The banks that do get government support (purchased by the government in the biggest Socialist grab ever in the US) should not lend out the money they’re given. The stronger banks should recapitalize, but not MERGE into bigger, more dangerous weapons of money destruction.
Someone needs to explain to the American people that the bank bailout does not mean money will be immediately be lent out again. Because its the excess lending that got us in this mess.
Then we should get on with it. There are other dominos falling.
The world is becoming more and more connected, while some Americans are trying to create false divisions between us. Elizabeth Dole’s new ad made me laugh! GODLESS!!! GODLESS!!! If you say it enough times, its like yelling FIRE in a crowded North Carolina theater.
Its not her opponent’s voice yelling GODLESS at the end, its an unidentified disembodied voice.
I imagine that North Carolina, with its tobacco farms growing for an addicted worldwide audience (http://www.agr.state.nc.us/markets/commodit/horticul/tobacco/) and North Carolina’s tobacco economic impact at over $7.0 billion, is as concerned with the economy, loss of water due to global warming and the global financial crisis as with the GODLESS!
This is what happens when previously vital and creative leaders, like Elizabeth Dole, leave all their values stashed in a locker somewhere in the hopes that they can scare the voting public into re-electing them. They forget to lead and instead stand in the dark yelling FIRE!
If you take a knife and cut a B into your cheek, you’ll start with an up and down stroke and then make the two circles heading towards your ear. If someone else, say a MUGGER, takes a knife and cuts a B into your cheek, he/she is going to start near your ear with the up and down stroke and then make two circles near your nose.
Think it thru, people, before you maim yourself and blame others.
Across the US, average Americans believe we’re a manufacturing powerhouse and that the world buys our goods. We believe that other countries are jealous of our high lifestyle. We also believe that other countries are stealing our jobs.
None of this is true. Only 10% of all corporate profits come from US manufacturing. 44% of corporate profits come from Finance, moving money around. Around and around and around, it turns out. Fractional reserves allow banks, investment banks and the US government to lend out money that does not even exist, not backed by actual cash in the bank.
Yes, jobs have left the US, but the US put its eggs into the ‘finance’ basket, and we have to now buy things from other countries, at interest. We’ve decided we want to make money off of money, not work. We want the Vegas high roller income and we throw our money at the real estate bubble, the stock bubble, the financial services bubble. All bubbles burst and now we’re flabbergasted – ‘What the hell happened?” Some say its un-American to question the government, but I don’t. I think its un-American to let the river flow so far out of its bed that we die without water. Its time to rein things in. To sacrifice, to take the power away from the people who’ve skimmed profits off the top, the middle and the bottom of every aspect of our lives. The same guys who bankrupted our economy are now in charge of the trillions of dollars they talked us out of, and Americans honestly think they will do the right thing.
Our monetary system, as we know it, doesn’t exist. I was wondering, with Paulson shoving $125 billion down the throats of banks, where the hell is that $125 billion coming from? Why can’t it be diverted to pay down part of our ungodly trillion dollar deficit? How can we keep printing fake dollars? I can’t do that for my family, why should the government do it, enslaving my family for decades?
My favorite tshirt says ‘My account can’t be overdrawn, I still have checks”. That’s an immature, ignorant joke but the funny thing is our government is still writing checks, even though we’re waaaaaaaay overdrawn.
Homeowners are being blamed for tapping into their major asset, their home values. But 99% of Americans don’t OWN their own home. They pay interest to a bank. They owe a HUGE portion of fluctuating home values. The government coddles them by saying ‘you get a great tax deduction for the loan interest you pay on your home loan’. But guess what? Your interest and principal adds up to 2 or 3 TIMES the price you purchased your house for. Tax deductions? Count those against bank profits. You don’t own your own home. You’re part of a big money ’story’. Money lent to you so you can raise your family in a home. Money you pay interest on. Money you write on your tax return, thinking you get a ‘benefit’. Money swept away from you by the greed of the money movers, as the entire real estate market has dropped 10-40% across the US and has not yet reached bottom.
Time to sweep away the old money systems and recalibrate to our values:
