This month’s email newsletter didn’t get sent on time and I haven’t written here in my blog recently either. That’s not to say that nothing has been written. But all the thoughts of this spiritual counselor and healer have been currently focused on political activism and, because I always try to be positive and uplifting, I was starting to feel like members of our list might not want to hear about it. There’s a mistake made in the New Age community that says “Thou shalt not have a single negative thought!” And, to be honest, living one’s life within a negative mindset isn’t the healthiest way to be.
However, without our “negative” thoughts how would we ever identify the things that need to change. “Ow! That fire is hot! That hurts! I feel really negative right now! I think I better turn this stovetop off before I or somebody else gets hurt again.” That’s very very different than reacting to the same life situation and saying “Ow, ow, ow. Life is so hard, there are hot evil things around every corner. Life is horrible, I’ve been hurt and now I’m going to cower in fear before anything red forever more!” We don’t advocate living like that but we do need our temporary negative reactions to help us chart a course. A more positive one, we hope, and that’s the point.
If we don’t dare to acknowledge what causes us pain we don’t tend to do anything to improve our lives. There are many of us who prefer to self-medicate with drinking or drugs, excessive TV, social distractions or even by attempting to use meditation to release our stress so we can go back to doing the same old thing. That doesn’t tend to work very well. People come to us and say they need help to learn to meditate better. Then we find out that their lives are a mess. They don’t need us to teach them meditation. That can help a person get into a more centered place so better decisions can be made, but meditation alone is not enough.
In the world today we are facing an economic crisis the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression. Supposedly, not as great as that—but we are also facing protracted war in the Middle East, global warming, a healthcare crisis that has already reached critical proportions for large segments of our population, and a myriad of other interconnecting problems from food production to housing and everything a typical family needs to survive. These are not single answer problems and they all line up to point to an even greater issue: how have we been making these decisions in the past few decades? Who has been pulling the strings and why have we let them?
Why are alternative healthcare services maligned and subject to misinformation campaigns in the mainstream media? (Just read a typical article about homeopathy if you don’t agree.) Why have herbs that have been used effectively and inexpensively with only rare side effects been removed from the market (ephedra and sassafras, for example) while pharmaceutical related deaths and illness have reached epidemic proportions? Why do some of the most prosperous nations in the Western world provide free healthcare for their citizens while we’re letting insurance companies run the show in our country? Why are we forcing families to go bankrupt when they are refused insurance payments even after having paid into the system for many years if not decades?
I could go on and on: I used to work in eldercare services. Paul and I have been trying to help people in a field the mainstream has been taught to mistrust, fear or even hate. My credit card company just upped my monthly payments by 150% without even stating a reason for the increase. Barack Obama signed legislation that makes bait and switch tactics in regards to interest rates illegal; but my credit card company got around that by more than doubling the minimum payment instead.
Ow!!! This fire is hot!! I’ve been meditating. I’ve been doing energy healing. I’ve been using my own flower essence aromatherapy perfume. And yes, I actually do feel a little more cheerful. But not just because those stress reduction techniques have been working. I’m writing about it. I’ve written a book. (I’ve written two.) And I’m letting people know about it.
Empowering spiritually-inspired action for the highest benefit of all concerned is as spiritual as it gets.
Think about it.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Community for the Common Good
In my email yesterday I received a letter from my good friend Linda who wrote about the immense joy of living and working in community she and her husband Roger share in upstate Vermont. It included two articles by David Goodman, author of Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times
. He wrote about the hard-working conglomeration of food co-ops, family farms, and local businesses pooling their resources to transform Linda’s poverty stricken rural town of Hardwick into a thriving food-lover’s “destination.”
One local business, a gourmet restaurant named Claire’s, was actually funded by 100 residents of the community who collectively bought 50 shares of her company at $1000 each. The community owns the restaurant and the restaurant exclusively buys vegetables, artisan cheeses and other farm products from the community it serves. It’s a winning formula. New businesses have moved to the area, at least 100 new jobs have been created, and a local nonprofit, the Center for an Agricultural Economy, was at the start of it.
Helping each other has been a Hardwick tradition and, oddly, it is not unlike how the multinational oil companies and mega-banks do business. The principals take each other out for coffee, lend each other money, swap expertise to help each other’s businesses, and brainstorm as to how to help their increasingly interrelated conglomeration of little businesses further. The significant difference is that their brainchild is about creating a healthy local economy that can’t be easily pillaged and raped by multinationals attempting to use their power and influence to dominate and control the world’s financial markets as a whole. It’s about small town community, sustainability and love.
So far, it’s working! Last spring researchers from MIT and Columbia University visited to learn more about the project. They and other large organizations are studying the feasibility of replicating Hardwick’s efforts in other communities across the globe.
. He wrote about the hard-working conglomeration of food co-ops, family farms, and local businesses pooling their resources to transform Linda’s poverty stricken rural town of Hardwick into a thriving food-lover’s “destination.”One local business, a gourmet restaurant named Claire’s, was actually funded by 100 residents of the community who collectively bought 50 shares of her company at $1000 each. The community owns the restaurant and the restaurant exclusively buys vegetables, artisan cheeses and other farm products from the community it serves. It’s a winning formula. New businesses have moved to the area, at least 100 new jobs have been created, and a local nonprofit, the Center for an Agricultural Economy, was at the start of it.
Helping each other has been a Hardwick tradition and, oddly, it is not unlike how the multinational oil companies and mega-banks do business. The principals take each other out for coffee, lend each other money, swap expertise to help each other’s businesses, and brainstorm as to how to help their increasingly interrelated conglomeration of little businesses further. The significant difference is that their brainchild is about creating a healthy local economy that can’t be easily pillaged and raped by multinationals attempting to use their power and influence to dominate and control the world’s financial markets as a whole. It’s about small town community, sustainability and love.
So far, it’s working! Last spring researchers from MIT and Columbia University visited to learn more about the project. They and other large organizations are studying the feasibility of replicating Hardwick’s efforts in other communities across the globe.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Hard Times Demand Other Kinds of Actions
Followers to my blog know that I used to use this venue as a place to talk about things related to spiritual counseling and healing, the use of flowers for emotional and spiritual healing, art and photography. It dissolved into more of a selling place when our financial situation dissolved, especially after we moved to the desert. Then we got hit hard by our relationship with one of our selling venues, Cafepress, and then came the hardest blow of all— a 150% increase in minimum payment by the company that funded our businesses, JPMorgan Chase.
I put a flurry of work into researching who this company is, posted that, and now rarely have the desire to post anything at all. I'm too busy trying to plug the holes of our barely viable bank account, writing a book about our experiences, and trying to regroup. But I have been wanting to address some of what I most recently have posted about—the connection between mega-oil, mega-banking, the wars in the Middle East, and the economic crisis we all find ourselves in now.
It's a bit much and what I wrote before on this blog comes across a little like a hysterical rant so I've had to do a little healing work on myself to come back to a more centered place. I haven't had the heart to write about it for awhile but it's in my book now—my book that was supposed to be a more or less light-hearted account of the journey of two New Age metaphysical counselors in the Mormon desert.
Art can illuminate an aspect of living life on the planet we might not ordinarily encounter, it can open the heart, the mind and/or spirit to something new and different, something we might miss or not see if we walked by it. Georgia O’Keefe once said “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”
That’s part of what I want to do with my work, to show people the worlds within the worlds we inhabit. We get so busy in our rush, rush, busy, busy lives. It’s almost impossible to see a flower, never mind explore the significance and healing nature of every living thing. That’s what my work with Paul is sometimes about, it’s usually what our art is all about, and it’s the main reason I started to write about my work with flower essences. It’s also part and parcel of the reason I’m currently writing a new book.
What I NEVER wanted to do was to fight injustice, lead press release and letter writing campaigns, research multinational corporations and figure out just how convoluted and evil some of these twisted financiers can be.
I’ve never wanted to buy into conspiracy theories! In my research online I tried to eliminate any website that came across as a conspiracy theory site. I looked for evidence of connections, documented proof. It took almost three days of work and it still isn’t easy to put all the pieces together but the connections that can be discovered are pretty much in plain sight!
The Rockefellers founded Standard Oil Company, the world’s first and largest multinational corporation until it was broken up the U.S. Supreme Court in 1911. It began as a partnership between John Rockefeller, his brother William, and four others, one of whom was related to the Rockefellers through marriage. Partnerships and convoluted agreements between entities are still how the Rockefeller companies operate to this day. That’s why it is often difficult to point a finger squarely at the head of any one person. You’d have to trace all the interrelationships going back before various mergers happened to figure it out.
One of the younger Rockefellers recently was interviewed about her own holdings in Exxon Mobil, the company her relatives started as Standard Oil many years back. She said she didn’t know but the reporter’s own research indicated it might be as little as 1%. That doesn’t seem like much. But if you add up how many companies the same family owns or invests in that also have stock in the various Standard Oil spin-offs and how many of those supposedly independent oil companies are now merging to form larger corporations—Exxon /Mobil, Chevron/Texaco—it’s pretty obvious that the break-up of John Rockefeller’s oil monopoly in 1911 is being rectified by the principals involved step by step and that Rockefeller’s bank, JPMorgan Chase, has dealings or direct connections with them all.
I realize that Chase recorded over $500 million in losses in their credit card division in the past year but it was the actions of their own mega-conglomerate oil machine that brought the country’s economy to its knees. Exxon Mobil alone posted record profits based on oil prices because of the Iraq war while consumers were saddled with enormous costs at the gas pumps, heating bills, grocery store and everywhere else. That made it impossible for millions of Americans to pay their rent, never mind the credit cards they got from Chase at usury rates before the subprime lending fiasco even happened. Poor JPMorgan Chase? Pity them not!
And what about the subprime lending currently being blamed for the crash? According to a report by the Washington watchdog Center for Public Integrity, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merril Lynch and Citigroup “both owned and financed subprime lenders.” And who has benefited from the resulting and inevitable crash? Anyone with the ability to buy the smaller lending institutions up at bargain basement prices and JPMorgan Chase is one of the biggest ones. That’s how they used the $25 billion “bail-out” they received from the Federal government. They bought Washington Mutual and several others. They are one of the largest mega-banks in the world and that's not a coincidence.
I put a flurry of work into researching who this company is, posted that, and now rarely have the desire to post anything at all. I'm too busy trying to plug the holes of our barely viable bank account, writing a book about our experiences, and trying to regroup. But I have been wanting to address some of what I most recently have posted about—the connection between mega-oil, mega-banking, the wars in the Middle East, and the economic crisis we all find ourselves in now.
It's a bit much and what I wrote before on this blog comes across a little like a hysterical rant so I've had to do a little healing work on myself to come back to a more centered place. I haven't had the heart to write about it for awhile but it's in my book now—my book that was supposed to be a more or less light-hearted account of the journey of two New Age metaphysical counselors in the Mormon desert.
Art can illuminate an aspect of living life on the planet we might not ordinarily encounter, it can open the heart, the mind and/or spirit to something new and different, something we might miss or not see if we walked by it. Georgia O’Keefe once said “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”
That’s part of what I want to do with my work, to show people the worlds within the worlds we inhabit. We get so busy in our rush, rush, busy, busy lives. It’s almost impossible to see a flower, never mind explore the significance and healing nature of every living thing. That’s what my work with Paul is sometimes about, it’s usually what our art is all about, and it’s the main reason I started to write about my work with flower essences. It’s also part and parcel of the reason I’m currently writing a new book.
What I NEVER wanted to do was to fight injustice, lead press release and letter writing campaigns, research multinational corporations and figure out just how convoluted and evil some of these twisted financiers can be.
I’ve never wanted to buy into conspiracy theories! In my research online I tried to eliminate any website that came across as a conspiracy theory site. I looked for evidence of connections, documented proof. It took almost three days of work and it still isn’t easy to put all the pieces together but the connections that can be discovered are pretty much in plain sight!
The Rockefellers founded Standard Oil Company, the world’s first and largest multinational corporation until it was broken up the U.S. Supreme Court in 1911. It began as a partnership between John Rockefeller, his brother William, and four others, one of whom was related to the Rockefellers through marriage. Partnerships and convoluted agreements between entities are still how the Rockefeller companies operate to this day. That’s why it is often difficult to point a finger squarely at the head of any one person. You’d have to trace all the interrelationships going back before various mergers happened to figure it out.
One of the younger Rockefellers recently was interviewed about her own holdings in Exxon Mobil, the company her relatives started as Standard Oil many years back. She said she didn’t know but the reporter’s own research indicated it might be as little as 1%. That doesn’t seem like much. But if you add up how many companies the same family owns or invests in that also have stock in the various Standard Oil spin-offs and how many of those supposedly independent oil companies are now merging to form larger corporations—Exxon /Mobil, Chevron/Texaco—it’s pretty obvious that the break-up of John Rockefeller’s oil monopoly in 1911 is being rectified by the principals involved step by step and that Rockefeller’s bank, JPMorgan Chase, has dealings or direct connections with them all.
I realize that Chase recorded over $500 million in losses in their credit card division in the past year but it was the actions of their own mega-conglomerate oil machine that brought the country’s economy to its knees. Exxon Mobil alone posted record profits based on oil prices because of the Iraq war while consumers were saddled with enormous costs at the gas pumps, heating bills, grocery store and everywhere else. That made it impossible for millions of Americans to pay their rent, never mind the credit cards they got from Chase at usury rates before the subprime lending fiasco even happened. Poor JPMorgan Chase? Pity them not!
And what about the subprime lending currently being blamed for the crash? According to a report by the Washington watchdog Center for Public Integrity, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Merril Lynch and Citigroup “both owned and financed subprime lenders.” And who has benefited from the resulting and inevitable crash? Anyone with the ability to buy the smaller lending institutions up at bargain basement prices and JPMorgan Chase is one of the biggest ones. That’s how they used the $25 billion “bail-out” they received from the Federal government. They bought Washington Mutual and several others. They are one of the largest mega-banks in the world and that's not a coincidence.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Thanks, Dennis!
Another Cafepress shopkeeper saw my press release about Cafepress and asked permission to help distribute it. Now I'm getting computer generated confirmation emails from newspapers across the country thanking me for my submission! Wow! Thanks, again! I really wanted help in getting the word out to the news media but was getting overwhelmed by the thought of it. My own financial situation needs to take precedence but I have to admit to feeling better when I write and share what's going on. I currently have more than 250 pages of my book finished. It's almost complete and Chase, along with Cafepress, just gave me a new chapter. It's called "Con Men, Swindlers and Thieves."
Thursday, June 25, 2009
More About the Chase Credit Card Bait and Switch
Consumer Affairs.com has an article about JPMorgan Chase raising the minimum payment on their low interest rate credit cards from 2% to 5% at http://www.consumeraffairs.com/credit_cards/chase_credit_cards.html . That's a 150% increase in monthly payment. People are being forced to default and/or declare bankruptcy in droves.
I read the letters on this website and felt way better! Not because this is happening to so many people but because people are speaking up. I was just devastated by this experience, feeling ashamed and horrified at the idea of bankruptcy but mad as hell that anyone could do this to me. Sure, I said yes to the low interest rate checks I got from them (see my previous blog) but I did it thinking how else would I EVER get such a low interest rate for a business loan? How could I even get a business loan at all for the type of businesses we have? I was going to figure out how to pay it back, I WAS paying it back. Now, there's no way and I'm FAR from the only one.
According to one letter I read the Obama Administration is trying to put through legislation to prevent this kind of abuse but it won't be law right away. Is this Chase's retaliation?
Chase, by the way is owned by the Rockefellers, the same lovely people who founded Exxon Mobil, the multinational corporation who brought us the Iraq War. I've been researching who this company is all day and what I've been reading is unbelievable. The links are no longer as direct as they once were but Exxon Mobil and JPMorgan Chase executives and retired executives sit on each other's boards, invest in each other's companies, and both attend meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations, along with BP, Chevron, Shell, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, and a number of other corporations who are not exactly impartial players in global economics and politics especially as it relates to oil-rich countries like Iraq and Iran. Dick Cheney and many other high ranking officials in the Bush administration continue to sit on this council.
JPMorgan Chase was one of the big banks who received $25 billion in federal bailout money. When Obama insisted on measures to regulate how they used this money and wanted to scrutinize their activities JPMorgan Chase said, uh-uh, no way. They paid the money back recently and that's when all these letters were sent raising the rates.
By the way, when a reporter for CNN asked how they were going to raise the money to repay these funds the CEO of the company said: "I don't see why a company with our kind of capital would need to raise capital." Yeah, they're a multinational corporation worth at least 2.1 trillion dollars. They brag about that on their own homepage. Why the hell were they getting a bailout in the first place?
Oh yeah, I remember, because the record $163 billion in profits they and their community of interdependent companies made while jacking fuel oil prices up and benefiting from large oil contracts with the Pentagon during the 5 years of the Iraq war (so far) wasn't enough? You all do remember the high prices at the gas pumps, the cost of heating fuel and jacked up prices for food and everything that got shipped across country in the final years of the Bush administration, don't you? Remember— that was going on at the same time as the predatory lending practices that are currently being blamed for tanking the economy. If JPMorgan Chase—the company that is owned by the people that still own controlling interests in many of the biggest privately owned oil companies in the world—wasn't doing their crap we wouldn't be in this mess.
This is the kind of predatory behavior bringing the world's economy to its knees. And, from where I sit, they look like the perpetrators.
I read the letters on this website and felt way better! Not because this is happening to so many people but because people are speaking up. I was just devastated by this experience, feeling ashamed and horrified at the idea of bankruptcy but mad as hell that anyone could do this to me. Sure, I said yes to the low interest rate checks I got from them (see my previous blog) but I did it thinking how else would I EVER get such a low interest rate for a business loan? How could I even get a business loan at all for the type of businesses we have? I was going to figure out how to pay it back, I WAS paying it back. Now, there's no way and I'm FAR from the only one.
According to one letter I read the Obama Administration is trying to put through legislation to prevent this kind of abuse but it won't be law right away. Is this Chase's retaliation?
Chase, by the way is owned by the Rockefellers, the same lovely people who founded Exxon Mobil, the multinational corporation who brought us the Iraq War. I've been researching who this company is all day and what I've been reading is unbelievable. The links are no longer as direct as they once were but Exxon Mobil and JPMorgan Chase executives and retired executives sit on each other's boards, invest in each other's companies, and both attend meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations, along with BP, Chevron, Shell, Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, and a number of other corporations who are not exactly impartial players in global economics and politics especially as it relates to oil-rich countries like Iraq and Iran. Dick Cheney and many other high ranking officials in the Bush administration continue to sit on this council.
JPMorgan Chase was one of the big banks who received $25 billion in federal bailout money. When Obama insisted on measures to regulate how they used this money and wanted to scrutinize their activities JPMorgan Chase said, uh-uh, no way. They paid the money back recently and that's when all these letters were sent raising the rates.
By the way, when a reporter for CNN asked how they were going to raise the money to repay these funds the CEO of the company said: "I don't see why a company with our kind of capital would need to raise capital." Yeah, they're a multinational corporation worth at least 2.1 trillion dollars. They brag about that on their own homepage. Why the hell were they getting a bailout in the first place?
Oh yeah, I remember, because the record $163 billion in profits they and their community of interdependent companies made while jacking fuel oil prices up and benefiting from large oil contracts with the Pentagon during the 5 years of the Iraq war (so far) wasn't enough? You all do remember the high prices at the gas pumps, the cost of heating fuel and jacked up prices for food and everything that got shipped across country in the final years of the Bush administration, don't you? Remember— that was going on at the same time as the predatory lending practices that are currently being blamed for tanking the economy. If JPMorgan Chase—the company that is owned by the people that still own controlling interests in many of the biggest privately owned oil companies in the world—wasn't doing their crap we wouldn't be in this mess.
This is the kind of predatory behavior bringing the world's economy to its knees. And, from where I sit, they look like the perpetrators.
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