Crime of the Century - Reprise

Despite the fact that the so-called experts and high-ranking politicians are acting surprised by the recent events regarding the economy, there really is no mystery as to how we arrived at this station. There are investigative journalists who have been telling us what is going on for decades. The real question is: why did they go unheeded? We all knew the football scores, we all knew the latest celebrity faux pas’, but we did not know one thing about the economy. In fact, before the patsy called the sub-prime mortgage meltdown arrived on the scene, you couldn’t find anybody who was even remotely interested in the topic. Now you can’t escape the opinions of every pundit and armchair economist in the world.
Below is a list of brilliantly researched books that I highly recommend if you are at all interested in following the marriage of politics and economics in the past century.

Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
Rogue Economics by Loretta Napoletani
The Rise of the Fourth Reich by Jim Marrs
And the Truth Shall Set You Free by David Icke

Watch the movie Zeitgeist



...and Zeitgeist Addendum

Black Elk

Centuries ago a Native Indian leader told his people of his vision: that a threat so huge was going to come from the outside and that the only way they were going to keep from being overtaken was to unite against it. His people laughed, for they had enjoyed dominion over the land for a very long time. What could possibly come now, and where would it come from?
The Europeans did come not long after this vision, but the Natives had paid no heed to the warning and had not united. Everywhere there were warring tribes. They were a divided group, and as such were the more easily conquered. For sure there were people who saw this threat and worked together to keep it at bay, but there were also people who saw opportunity in aligning themselves with these newcomers, and this alliance did not bode well for the Native American population. The rest, as they say, is history.
I believe that we are now perched on the promontory of a similar situation, one in which we are only going to succeed in overcoming if we become one united force in every sense of the term. I alone am not going to single-handedly change the path humanity is currently on, nor are you, but that shouldn’t stop us from acting in alignment with our integrity for one moment. The human race stands at a precipice where it must put forth a Herculean effort to get itself out of a mess that it has become deeply entrenched in. It is also at a time of incredible opportunity, for how better to learn a lesson than out of the sheer necessity to survive. The outcome of our future is not guaranteed, and there is much work to be done on each individual’s part. But it is far from impossible for us to learn the lesson from the Native American elder whose vision need not go unheeded.

Questions to ponder:

Are you open to hearing what you need to hear, as opposed to what you want to hear?
What are you doing to strengthen your community, as opposed to separating yourself from it?
If the global, or even national economies, totally collapse, which they very well could, what contribution can you make to your community for remuneration? If you don’t have any skills to contribute, when will you begin work on learning or acquiring these?

Crime of the Century

There is a lot of finger pointing going on right now over the state of the economy. Governments blame the financial industry, banks blame the defaulted citizenry, and the citizens blame both. But the actual truth is that we all participated in this mess that we are now finding ourselves in. While it is true that investment banks never could have gone this far astray without government deregulation, it is also true that Wall Street could never have propagated these highly leveraged instruments without the money coming in from Main Street. That’s you, and that’s me.

When you deposit your money with one of the big banks, you are financing everything that they then do with that money. When you buy a stock on Wall Street, you are personally financing that company. If you have a pension or a mutual fund, even if you do not know what it is invested in, you are financing all of those companies with your energy.

The bottom line is that we, the folks on Main Street have been financing Wall Street, its brokers and investment banks, all along. And we need to take responsibility for that. We also need to help our leaders make the changes that they need to make if we expect them to withdraw power from Wall Street. If we are to make a difference in these times and do our part, we must begin to align our actions with our beliefs, and we must reengineer how the money works so that the criminal enterprises don’t get the vote of the people with their hard-earned dollars.

Things you can do:

-Take your money out of the big banks and put it into a credit union or a small local bank.
-Invest in your own community.
-Do not buy stock in a company whose agenda is not in alignment with your beliefs.