My whole proposal also depends upon wholesale reform of the banking system. We can get everything socialists want, though Capitalism, but only if we deal with the banks.
I have a plan. It is a simple plan that depend on realizing only two things: 1) money is not real; and 2) the only reason that ANY modern nation has financial problems is that money creation, i.e. inflation, takes money out of the pockets of ordinary citizens.
Greece presumably has a central bank. That bank needs to print up enough drachma to declare their debts settled. They then need to revalue the drachma such that it is tied to the dollar or gold.
If there are any adults in Greece, they then need to reform the system such that they work the same hours and number of years as everyone else, because no one will any longer be willing to fund their lifestyle, but they will have been given a second chance.
Cry not for the German bankers: they make money out of nothing too. This just flips the currentcy (sic) direction.
I deal with this idea at some length in my treatise, here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html
I don’t have any shortage of ideas. At this moment, I have a backlog of probably 30-40 posts, some of which in all honesty I may never get to. Still, from time to time I do like to pass things along that strike my fancy. Here is an email I got today.
1) Only in America could politicians talk about the greed of the rich at a
$35,000 a plate campaign fund raising event.2) Only in America could
people claim that the government still
discriminates against black Americans
when we have a black President, a black Attorney General, and roughly 18% of the
federal workforce is black. 12% of the population is black.3) Only in
America could we have had the two people most responsible for our tax code,
Timothy Geithner, the head of the Treasury Department and Charles Rangel who
once ran the Ways and Means Committee, BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in
favor of higher taxes.4) Only in America can we have terrorists kill
people in the name of
Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting
that Muslims
might be harmed by the backlash.5) Only in America would
we make people who want to legally become American citizens wait for years in
their home countries and pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege
while we discuss letting anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just
become American citizens.6) Only in America could the people who believe
in balancing the
budget and sticking by the country’s Constitution be thought
of as
“extremists.”7) Only in America could you need to present a
driver’s license to
cash a check or buy alcohol, but not to vote.8)
Only in America could people demand the government investigate
whether oil
companies are gouging the public because the price of gas went up when the
return on equity invested in a major U.S. oil company (Marathon Oil) is less
than half of a company making tennis shoes (Nike).9) Only in America
could the government collect more tax dollars from the people than any nation in
recorded history, still spend a trillion dollars more than it has per year for
total spending of $7 million PER MINUTE, and complain that it doesn’t have
nearly enough money.10) Only in America could the rich people who pay
86% of all income
taxes be accused of not paying their “fair share” by people
who don’t
pay any income taxes at all.
Complain about the present and blame it on the past
I’d like to find your inner child and kick it’s little ass
Now, what’s interesting about this is that when they did their Hell Freezes Over tour, they literally, in my understanding, had to pay someone to pass notes and messages between them, as they refused to speak face to face to one another, their terrific harmonies on stage notwithstanding. (note to self: needed a few, more, commas, in that sentence).
As I grow older though, and I think get more perspective on my own emotions, it seems to me that this concept of the inner child has some merit. On occasion, I get deep enough within my own self that I feel as though I am lying underneath my emotional self, separate from it, and that I can feel it, see it, process it, as it is. And frankly in most respects I am not the sort of person I would want to be. There is ugliness in me that I hate to see, but must admit.
It is truly astonishing how deep and pervasive and long lived illusions about your self can be. We think we are one sort of person, and can live out a life, easily, without ever grasping who and how we really are.
The value of the “inner child” idea is this: it is a place holder for the notion that at some point in our lives we stop–or never begin–processing emotion honestly, directly, spontaneously. We equate our selves with how the world sees us, or how we feel we must be seen by the world. We equate ourselves with goals and accomplishments that are compulsive, the energy for accomplishing which does not arise from our selves, but from other people, from persuasion, from illusion.
To win is not the best end to strive for. To accomplish, or to experience quantitatively (I saw 42 world landmarks last year, and visited 27 countries) is not the best end. Checking off lists is not the best end.
What to me seems worthwhile is the learned capacity to feel deeply, and in particular to feel spontaneous positive feelings deeply, and in response to normal, routine stimuli, like cool days, warm days, cloudy days, clear days, rainy days, sunny days, around pleasant people, and around challenging people. It is far easier to make your world interesting than to seek out an interesting world. You have far less competition, too.
Most people stop feeling at some point. I don’t know why this is, if it is a peculiarly modern thing, or if it dates back to the earliest moments of culture. As I have often remarked, it is interesting how many songs talk about losing the ability to feel. As one example, Lady Antebellum’s “Need you now”: “Yes Id rather hurt than feel nothing at all.”
One can accurately, I think, look at all the death metal, speed metal, Marilyn Manson, punk rock, etc. as expressions of a need to feel something while in the throes of an emotional apocalypse. It is so hard to see what is not there, which in this case is the capacity for the expression of innocent, constructive, meaningful, satisfying emotions.
You cannot blame your childhood for adult dysfunction. You must force yourself to do your job. At the same time, I think a life lived without down time, without leisure, lounging time, is almost necessarily going to be wasted. That is when you re-create yourself.
Thus, this idea of the inner child is not an excuse, but it is rather an opportunity to look back, to realize that you lost something useful, something valuable along the way. The concept is not a regression into helplessness and irresponsibility, but rather what for most people will be an advancement into the ADULT expression of primary, honest emotions.
Hopefully that makes sense to someone.
According to the Financial Times, their net profit (note this is profit, not revenue, which was some 27 billion) for the first three MONTHS on 2012 was some $5.4 billion. That means they were tracking to net some $22 billion on the year. Why was there so much press over a “loss” of a mere $2 billion?
That this was a story is itself a story. That the media ran with it the way they did indicates to me that they were more or less given direction to run with the story. For its part, JP Morgan clearly did not suffer from this revelation. My best guess is that they continue to want to get burdensome regulations put on smaller banks that will reduce effective competition, and enable them to corral yet more of the market. They needed some lead-in to give the usual suspects, the paid politicians, some reason to shout about regulating the banking industry.
Truly, the stupidity of the press on this and nearly every other topic is quite breathtaking. I am not willing to believe they are all complicit; their complicity is simply not needed, their buy in is not needed, when all you have to is spin them three times then set them off in whatever direction you choose.
A herd of cattle would at least not do us the disservice of pretending to inform us. Silence is preferable to misdirection, most of the time.
An interesting example is Michael Moore’s call for the rich–him–to pay more in taxes, without himself volunteering to do so. From his perspective, it is not “moral” until compelled.
This is a subtle point, and the point of congruence between what I have termed Sybaritic Leftism and Cultural Sadeism.
People who translate this “God is great” miss the point that for Muslims God only has one name, and it is Allah, and Arabic is His language.
It will soon be broken.
Who put it in? Was he thinking of
Rosa’s, a plate of parillada, fresh tortillas from
a real mother,
big titted waitresses who move just a bit
slower
than their enormous heels and miniskirts
require?
Or was it “fuck, fuck, fuck this heat.”
It’s not so bad before lunch, but work must be done after,
too.
The cool is for those who made other decisions.
Whatever:
he has left his mark.
Yesterday I watched two and a half movies. I watched Iron Man 2, the Avengers, and half of a French film entitled “Sarah’s Key”. That last was a sad but somewhat redemptive movie about one of ten million tragic stories from the Holocaust. No doubt all of this affected my dreams.
When I woke up this morning, I realized that Voldemort is me, too. This is in some respects a pretty basic psychological insight, in that people that assume the brain and mind are synonymous would postulate that any psychic conflict in dreams necessarily involves split psychic “parts”.
Indeed. As I look at this, I see that no process of psychological integration can fail to involve the understanding that we all have evil in us. There is no point any free person can reach in which the capacity for resentment, self pity, bitterness, malice, anger, hatred, viciousness, spitefulness, grandiosity and all the other negative emotions drops away. Their potential, their possibility, will always be there, even in the most advanced people.
You cannot not hate. You cannot make it go away. What you can do is recognize that you are NOT a saint, will never BE a saint, and that if you think you are all sunshine and love, you are probably a superficial person, who has simply split off the venom. You see this in “Christians” who hate in the name of God. You see this in “peacenik” left wingers, who hate in the name of peace and love. What good was accomplished by losing the Vietnam War? None: horrific, stomach turning violence was the outcome.
All of us need to own our violence. We need to see it.
I have often quoted a line I love from the Tao Te Ching: “Renounce sainthood. It will be 1,000 times better for everyone.” There are many meanings which can be teased out of this, but I think this is the primary one.
I should probably end there, but hell, I have more to add, even if it affects the flow.
What people call sainthood is likely quite often simply compulsive behavior–psychological aberration–taken to an extreme in the external FORM of predetermined religiously desirable behaviors, within which of course I include the churches of political radicalism.
An obvious example is the Mahdi of the Sudan, who lived in a cave for some time, and did the sorts of things Sufi saints did (fasting, recitation, renunciation). Given troops, he turned out to be a vicious, sadistic, sexually voracious pig. But his status as a saint never disappeared, and he is idolized to this very day by some Islamists.
More generally, though, I agree with Moshe Feldenkrais that almost all forms of what is called “greatness” is to some greater or lesser extent psychological dysfunction. Who is driven to “lead”? People who are driven to lead. Again, it is for this reason that the Tao Te Ching teaches that only those who do not want to be king are fit to be king.
Few thoughts on a rainy “Sun’s Day”.
A people will sometimes step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we were meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.
Sheenagh Pugh