Govern Point - Critical Thinking: Politics and Culture

The United States & Barack Obama

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:45:00 +0000

First and foremost, I would like to extend heartfelt congratulations to America and to President-Elect Obama for this monumental victory. The hope and optimism for the future is apparent across the globe now despite the perilous issues the entire world is facing. In light of his historic and inspiring victory, I have decided to take a closer look at the relationship between the United States and Barrack Obama.

Barack Obama has an amazing number of tight conjunctions with the astrology chart for the United States (see footer). Obama’s Neptune falls so precisely on our nation’s rising sign that it is nothing short of amazing. The United States Ascendant is 08°35′ in Scorpio and Barack Obama’s Neptune lines up almost exactly at 08°36′ in Scorpio. Neptune symbolizes our need for spiritual transcendence and our highest ideals. This is an especially noteworthy aspect because it shows that Barack Obama’s highest ideals concerning America are perfectly in synch with the principles held dearest by the American people.

In addition, Obama’s Neptune forms 3 harmonious trines (these indicate ease, warmth, and cooperation) to the Sun, Venus, and Jupiter of the United States. This indicates that Obama has an effortless flair to inspire the nation to live up to its highest potentials. This also shows that he has the ability to do so by reminding us of our larger spiritual role as human beings who are citizens of planet Earth as opposed to simply being American citizens. This is in direct contrast to George W. Bush’s narrow ideology of “it’s us against them” and “you’re either with us or against us” mentality. Instead, Obama’s entire philosophy is one based on the forward advancement of humanity as a whole.

It is of particular interest that Obama’s Neptune does tightly square (this creates tension) the nation’s midheaven and north node (this is the ultimate direction the country needs to be headed in a spiritual sense). This indicates that Barack Obama will have an uphill battle to climb at certain points during his administration because the public may feel that his ideas are either too idealistic or simply unpractical. Thus, he will have to demonstrate the kind of charismatic confidence and relentlessness that he has displayed in his 2008 Presidential campaign in order to truly get America behind all of his plans.

The Neptune of the United States is tightly conjunct Obama’s Mars. Mars in an astrology chart represents what we feel passionate about and are willing to fight for. Thus, in this configuration, we see Barack Obama willing to passionately fight for the American Dream for himself and for that of others. Ultimately, it seems that Obama’s greatest dream is taking this nation forward in a very progressive and determined manner.

Another interesting fact is that Obama’s Midheaven (career and social status) falls within the first house (the general viewpoint and attitude toward life) of the chart of the United States. This is a strong indicator that Obama’s career goals are perfectly in synch with the viewpoints of the citizens of the United States. This is symbolic of a handshake done in the spirit of goodwill. Obama pushes America’s highest vision of itself forward and, in return, the United States helps Obama accomplish his most cherished ideals for the American people.

Barack Obama’s Sun in Leo is in a tight conjunction (marriage or union type energy) with the midheaven (the way the U.S. goes about its business and the way the world see the U.S.) of the United States. This symbolizes that the United States sees Barack Obama as a perfect example of the American Dream and its highest ideals.

Think about that for a moment.

His parents were biracial. After they divorced, he was raised by a single mother and his grandparents. He went on to be a standout graduate from Harvard Law School and a youthful senator for the state of Illinois. Now, despite all of the hardships that he has faced, he is the very first African American President this nation has ever witnessed. The message of Obama’s life is classic Americana and gives all of us, regardless of our race, the hope of achieving our highest potential no matter how difficult our past might have been.

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There are 3 charts that exist for the United States and Astrologers have fiercely debated which one is the most accurate. Of course, the birth of our country is July 4, 1776. The exact time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is the issue widely disagreed upon. There is the 5:10 PM chart with a Sagittarius Ascendant, the most popular chart at 02:13:32 AM chart with a Gemini Ascendant, and the last one is the 2:21 PM chart for the United States that I personally prefer. This gives our country a Scorpio Rising Ascendant and it just so happens that our country’s national symbol is the eagle. The eagle is also one of the symbols that represents Scorpio. The eagle symbolizes the highest and most spiritually aware form of Scorpio’s power.

Eric Hughes is an Astrological Consultant who compassionately enables people to understand themselves on a deep spiritual level. He helps people to enthusiastically embrace their life with renewed passion as they learn how to consciously honor their own unique inner-flame. He is also the author of the popular TinyFeet Astrology Children’s Report. Eric may be contacted at (404) 402-3179, http://www.inner-flame-astrology.com, or [http://www.tinyfeetastrology.com]

Author: Eric Hughes
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

President Obama, Race & Rage

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:46:35 +0000

There’s a growing craze that suggest that President Obama should openly express outrage, most recently over the Gulf Oil Spill. According to a recent News Week article, this demand for a show of presidential fury is not coming from a few people:

“…New York Times columnists want to see Obama angry; the filmmaker Spike Lee is demanding that the president “go off”; Democratic strategist James Carville wants “rage.” Whole cable shows have been devoted to the question…the Today show’s Matt Lauer informed the president that his critics were saying, “This is not the time to meet with experts and advisers, this is the time to…kick some butt.”

The Gulf Oil Spill is referenced as the worse environmental disaster in American history. Compared with the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, the George H.W. Bush administration specifically denied that the federal government bore any responsibility for the cleanup, and Transportation Secretary Samuel Skinner declared that government involvement would be “counterproductive.”

The Gulf Oil Spill is not the first suggestion that the president is “not touch enough to lead.” A 2008 Huffington headline reads: Enough! Why Obama should Release his Righteous Rage:

“…Obama has waited long enough to show us this side of himself. Besides, we need to know that he can be a mean motherfucker if he wants this job… the last seven-plus years demand more than a detached analysis-and certainly more than a beaming smile. They demand indignation. Outrage. Fury.”

Really? And where, exactly, has the previous seven-plus years of kick-ass, cowboy leadership gotten us? The catastrophic inheritance from the past administration, multiple wars including the Republican war on the President, and Mother Nature’s rage, would be mission impossible for anyone, yet it does not seem to sway our obsession that President Obama should be angry, immediate and flawless.

I don’t claim to comprehend the complexity of the challenges we face as a nation, nor do I know the appropriate response, if there is such a think. I can only imagine what it’s like to live in President Obama’s skin, to hold the weight of the world on your shoulders. It’s not a job I’d want. But I am curious: Why are so many of us enraged that President Obama is not publicly outraged? For the 4 decades I’ve been voting, I don’t recall any president being “expected” or “pressured” to display outraged. What are we really after in this collective longing for the President to “go off?” What would President Obama’s rage prove to us? How would it relieve us? And more importantly: What would President Obama’s rage reinforce that would affirm our notion of Blackness?

Imagine for a moment the dilemma: If President Obama “goes off”, he is viewed as threatening and just another out of control Black man. If he rages righteously, he proves his Blackness and shows the world how tough he is. If President Obama does not rage, he is weak, lacking what it takes to be a strong leader. Our story about why he does or does not express rage is just that-our story, not to be confused with who he is.

Here’s my story (at least today): We have a history of tying black and rage together, and when this doesn’t happen, we don’t know what to do with ourselves. I’ll continue knowing my story is only a sliver of the truth.

Consider this: Our need for President Obama to explode in rage is our unconscious need to maintain our comfort with and definition of Blackness: Black folks look like this…, act like this…, and ends up like this… Fill in the blanks.

It is my observation that people of color, and especially Black people, disproportionately embody and express the denied rage of other races and cultures. I see this as a global as well as national issue. John McEnroe, for example, had an “anger management” problem where as Serena Williams’ behavior was “Roid Rage”, “not that of a champion.” As angry as McEnroe became, he was not characterized as violent. When we combine woman (women should not get angry) and Black (Blacks are always angry), it places a particular spin on our perception. This distortion does not happen consciously. It comes from generations of programming and social conditioning. It is what we have grown to expect, and therefore what is reinforced as “truth.”

In Berkeley, California, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run to pay the parking meter only to be met by a Black woman having just placed a ticket on my windshield. My impulse was to scream: “I was only 30 seconds late.” But upon seeing the “I’m not paid enough to take your shit” frown on her face, I would instead snatch the ticket and mumble under my breath as I crawled back into my illegally parked car. Was she given the job because she could ward off potential irate citizens like me? Would she have bitten my head off had I screamed at her? Perhaps she was simply doing her job. Perhaps all of the above and none of the above.

Another example. When I worked in corporate America, I felt it was my job to express the anger in the group. This was not an explicit agreement. It was a subconscious understanding that we all colluded with and benefited from. Other team members held different roles-peacekeeper, cynic, observer, humorist, etc., but my role was “the rager.” When someone did something that required confrontation, all eyes rolled in my direction. Being reliable to the team, intolerable of the anxiety I was experiencing, and unconsciously loyal to a lineage of ragers, I played my role with righteous pride.

While my ego was frequently stroked outside the meetings, when teammates would share how relieved they felt that I had spoken, I was unaware of how my race and ignorance was being exploited as I lived true to the stigma of the “Strong Black Woman.” As I splattered their denied disgust, others could point to my lack of control while their own pressure cooker was temporarily relieved at my expense. My belligerence was consistent with my thoughts but not reflective of my needs. Being out of control did not provide me with strength nor did it offer the peace and authentic connections I was unaware of needing and unable to articulate. Instead, I was reacting more from a notion of who I felt I should be and, at this point, what I had mastered-rage. In my “dead righteousness,” I destroyed relationships with people and causes I deeply cared about.

As I began to heal my rage and shift my behavior, others began to experience their rage more directly. In my relief, I noticed that many team members became upset because I was no longer doing their work. With practice, I learned how to sit with my discomfort long enough to clarify a more authentic destination. Without blame or shame, I began to acknowledge to myself that I not only wanted to speak my truth, I wanted to make a difference that brought us together.

There is a difference between feeling rage and acting on those feelings. What we do today with our intense inner fuel is deeply rooted in our history, our direct experiences, and the insights we glean from self-reflection. Unexamined, our expression of rage can cause life-changing and long-lasting damage. Wars, politics, and Mother Nature herself, are currently manifesting the unresolved rage of generations. This is true in our families, relationships, and within ourselves.

Pick any race, ethnicity, gender or class: the majority of us have been harmed by someone’s fury, often a loved one. And too many of us struggle with the regret of having harmed others. When you understand this human proclivity and its resulting impact, you are less likely to express rage indiscriminately or hold the rage of others personally. The more you understanding and dignify the roots of your own rage, the wiser and more spacious your choices. You understand how emotionally delicate we all are as humans and your actions reveal an intention beyond the emotionality of the moment.

So, consider this story among stories: What if President Obama is simply being President Obama? What if, because of his race, heritage, experience, wisdom, and his power as the President, he is aware of the harm the display of rage can re-stimulate and impart? What if he is using his own personal rage to ripen his understanding of the complex problems we face as a nation and world? What if we acknowledged that the unprecedented challenges of our time requires an unprecedented leadership? What if it takes more time to heal a problem than to fix one? What if we understood that input is not the same as having things your way? What would it mean for each of us to consider President Obama’s humanity over our righteous desire to make him in our own image? And as we consider the impossible challenge of making him in our own image (something we’ve not perfected with our children, our parents, our partners and pets), is raging, blaming and shaming a wise approach?

Ruth King, MA, is a respected voice on emotional wisdom and individual and team development. She is the author of Healing Rage-Women Making Inner Peace Possible, an O Magazine Nugget. As a coach and consultant, King weaves Eastern philosophy, Western psychology, leadership development, metaphysics, and teachings from wisdom traditions to lecture, coach, and facilitate workshops that transform the emotional body and mind. To learn more about how to transform negative emotions into positive fuel, visit http://ruthking.net

Author: Ruth King
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

How Public Safety Professionals Are Shooting Themselves in the Foot

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 01:45:47 +0000

When the Long Beach Press-Telegram reported recently that Long Beach’s Chief of Police had vowed that the police would “get the job done” regardless of what they were tasked with doing in the face of drastically reduced resources, I had two immediate and contradictory reactions. As a Long Beach resident and business owner, I felt relieved to hear that the police still plan to provide “…the best possible service for the people who are accustomed to that service.” As an expert in resource allocation, however, I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding!” By publicly promising to maintain the normal level of safety no matter what, the Chief essentially gave the City Council the green light to take resources away from the Police Department and give them to other agencies. In short, he metaphorically shot his department in the foot – unless the Police department has been greatly over-funded, and recent budget cuts merely reduced its budget to an appropriate level. Somehow I doubt this is the case.

I’m not picking on the Long Beach Police Chief; he just happened to be a local example of what I’m hearing and seeing in law enforcement and fire service agencies. In both these professions, members tend to downplay the significance of their roles in keeping people safe while routinely putting themselves in danger. “It’s just my job,” they often protest when grateful recipients of their services try to express their thanks. As a result, over time the public began to believe them, and subsequently was lulled into a false sense of security because these public servants make what they do seem almost easy. Few people stop to think about what is required to keep our law enforcement and fire service protectors at the top of their respective games so they can perform at high levels at a moment’s notice.

Thus when City Council members or other decision-makers adopt deeply flawed policies like proportional sharing instead of stepping up to the plate and making the tough decisions they were elected or hired to make, there is relatively little resistance from the public about whether the resources are being prioritized appropriately. As a result, we witness scenarios like the one in which a Los Angeles City Council member vowed to save the jobs of the City’s calligraphers (employees whose job is to produce the pretty certificates that Council members like to hand out to constituents) at all costs – even though “essential” jobs such as those of teacher, police officer, and fire fighter were on the chopping block.

The fact is that when law enforcement and fire service leaders continue to assure the public that all is, and will remain, well despite fewer and fewer resources each year, they are doing a serious disservice to the public and to their own employees. While service levels may be maintained in the short-term, they are not sustainable over time: employees get burned out due to overwhelming work loads, and critical, life and death decisions are made by people who are tired and stressed out. When equipment malfunctions, when (or even if) it can be repaired will depend on factors such as when overworked mechanics can get to it, and/or how long it takes for the parts to arrive after someone realizes that no one ordered them since the clerical personnel who handled the ordering were laid off, and/or whether the money to pay for the parts can be found somehow.

In short, the “things will continue to be normal” mantra is a charade that must stop. Decision-makers and the public need to be educated about the trade-offs that result from allocating fewer resources than required to maintain service levels.

Here’s my advice to leaders in law enforcement and the fire service, and to public sector decision-makers: stop it! More specifically:

1. Leaders in the fire service and law enforcement: I’m sure you believe you’re doing the right thing by assuring the public that you will keep us safe. And I think you are sincere when you say you will do everything possible to make sure that happens. But the truth is that you can’t, at least not beyond the very short term. And in your heart of hearts, you know it too. So please: stop sending the message that everything is fine, and begin to educate the public about what the trade-offs will be when you have fewer resources with which to work.

2. Public sector decision-makers: stop hiding behind the appearance of doing your jobs (e.g., by implementing ineffective policies like proportional sharing), and start making the tough decisions required to deal with current and future conditions. A good place to start, for example, is by setting priorities and allocating resources based on what is needed to achieve the relevant government entity’s “big picture” (e.g., a city’s vision or mission) rather than on what groups have complained the loudest most recently.

Public sector entities are having a tough time right now, and everyone is suffering as a result. Let’s not compound the existing challenges by setting unrealistic expectations about public safety, and then burning out good people trying to achieve them.

Pat Lynch, Ph.D., is President of Business Alignment Strategies, Inc., a consulting firm that helps clients optimize business results by aligning people, programs, and processes with organizational goals. For additional articles please visit our web site at http://www.BusinessAlignmentStrategies.com. You may contact Pat at Pat@BusinessAlignmentStrategies.com or at (562) 985-0333. Copyright 2010 Pat Lynch. All rights reserved.

Author: Pat Lynch
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

Obama: The Things We Don’t Know About Him

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:45:49 +0000

He was born in Honolulu but there is great controversy over the authenticity of his birth certificate. He went to school at Occidental, Columbia University and Harvard but hardly anyone has stepped forward with any memories of him. There is a claim that Barack Obama, Sr. is his father but many speculate that perhaps this isn’t so, a justification for not revealing his actual birth certificate. Barack took the name of his step-father and was known as Barry Soetoro for a period of time. He attended Besuki Public School and St. Francis of Assisi School in Jakarta but no former teachers or former classmates have come forward to brag about chumming with the President of the United States during their childhood.

Facebook is a modern marvel. I grew up in Meadville, a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania but I’ve lived most of my adult life in Columbus, Georgia. I attended Neason Hill Elementary School in Meadville 45 years ago. I remember all of my teacher’s names from first through sixth grade and most of my classmates. Recently, I logged into the ‘Meadville’ Facebook page and reconnected with many grade school friends. I wrote to one in particular and began my notification like this, “I know you probably don’t remember me but…” He wrote back and said, “Oh yes, of course I remember you…” We both had a clear remembrance of each other from 45 years ago.

Why hasn’t anyone from Besuki or St. Francis of Assisi School stepped forward to tell tales of their relationship with Barry Soetoro? Barack attended Punahou School, a college preparatory school in 1971. No one seems to have remembered him. Obama openly admits that he used tobacco, alcohol and cocaine to “push questions of who I was out of my mind.” (Boston Globe, Nov. 2007) If Obama took drugs to forget who he was, did all of his friends take drugs to forget who he was also? No one, no one remembers him.

We know so much about our presidents. We collect facts and trivia about them. We are fascinated when we find common facts about extraordinary men. We know that Abraham Lincoln was 6’4″. We know James Madison was only 5’4″. We know that George Washington wore dentures made of animal teeth. We know a 332 pound Howard Taft got stuck in the White House bath tub the first time he used it. Very few people even know the 21st president named Chester A. Arthur. He once declared, “I may be President of the United States, but my private life is my own d_____ business.” This seems to be the ongoing motto of Barack Obama. We know so little about him that it ceases to be simply unusual, it borders on being just plain weird.

If you look hard enough you will find a picture of Michelle and Barack’s wedding. But you won’t find any male friends accompanying the groom. His best man was Malik Obama, a half-brother from Kenya. Why are there no pictures or recollections of male buddies at his wedding? Did he have any friends?

Having attended Occidental, Columbia University and Harvard, why are there no professors stepping forward to reminisce about having Barack in class? The Wall Street Journal reported that “Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him.” (WSJ, Obama’s Lost Years, Sept. 11, 2008) Matt Welch, of Reason.com, interviewed Wayne Allyn Root, a former ‘classmate’ of Obama at Columbia University back in the 1980′s;

Matt Welch: “So tell us what we should know about Barack Obama that we don’t?”

Wayne Allyn Root: “I think the most dangerous thing you should know about Barack Obama is that I don’t know a single person at Columbia that knows him, and they all know me. I don’t have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. Ever!”

Obama has spent nearly $2 million to cover up records from his past. We have no birth certificate, no grades from colleges and universities attended, no papers written, no speeches given. What is he trying so hard to cover up? Did his papers indicate his true colors? Was he aligned with Black Panther-like radicals? Would his papers reveal ananti-Americanism or a radicalism that would categorize him more in line with a die-hard communist rather than simply a socialist? Is he hiding these things because he is an extremely private person and doesn’t care for the limelight (I can’t even keep a straight face while writing those words) or does Barack Obama have a background that must be hidden from the American people in order to fulfill the necessary deception to get him elected and maybe reelected?

There is mystery surrounding the law licenses of both Barack and Michelle Obama. Were they revoked? Did they voluntarily submit for the suspension of their licenses? Does a lawyer volunteer their license shortly before they are about to be accused of wrong doing? Is it like a coach resigning from his team just hours before he knows he is about to be fired? Did they request their licenses be made inactive only to be activated at a later date or did they surrender their licenses permanently?

Jack Caskill writes for Worldnetdaily. He has written a book entitled “Deconstructing Obama.” Caskill was flummoxed by the reports of a bogus social security number used by Barack Obama between 1977 and 1979. (Another Look at Obama’s Social Security Number, WND, March 17, 2011) The number was issued in Connecticut. Obama has never lived there nor has any family member. Why would he get a social security card from Connecticut?

Caskill contacted Susan Daniels, a licensed investigator from Ohio who is very well qualified to research assets for law firms. She lives in the world of data basis and has access to many records that public commoners have no access to. Daniels began her own investigation of Barack Obama in 2009 and discovered the dilemma regarding his social security number. “All I can say,” says Daniels of 042-68-4425, “is that it’s phony and [Obama] has been using it, with it first appearing on his selective service document in 1980.” Daniels discovered that the applicant for 042-68-4424,Thomas Wood, died at age 19 and lived in Connecticut. Barack Obama applied for 042-68-4425 when he was sixteen years of age living in Hawaii. Why won’t Barack Obama step forward and explain this mystery?

Alan Keyes expressed his concern about this issue: “”Is it incompetence? Is it cowardice?” he asks rhetorically. “Is it just indifference and nonchalance of this elite in the courts and in politics, in the Congress and elsewhere?” (Obama Social Security Number to become issue in 2012 race?, Joe Kovacs, WND, 8/11/2011)

Politicians are vulnerable when it comes to the women they have dated or even had casual contact with over the years, just ask Bill Clinton, Herman Cain or Anthony Weiner. But where are the girlfriends of Barack Obama? Is there not one single female in his past who would step forward and claim to have dated him or at least known him in even a superficially intimate way? None. Not a single female claims to have known him in that way. Barack was 31 years old when he married. He attended several colleges and universities. He lived in many different parts of the country. Not a single female has stepped forward saying, “Oh yes, I knew Barack. We dated for awhile.”

Herman Cain said that the American people are “sick and tired of the deception coming from this president and this administration.” Paul told the Corinthians, “Don’t let anyone deceive you.” (1 Corinthians 15:33) Thomas Gray wrote in his poem, Ode to a Distant Prospect of Eton College, “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.” Are Americans tired of being deceived or are they satisfied in their ignorance? We will find out on November 6, 2012.

Kevin Probst lives in Columbus, Georgia. He is a teacher of History and Apologetics at a private high school. He submits articles pertaining to theology, apologetics, Christian living and American culture. If you have an interest in those ideas please visit his website at: http://www.kpprobst.blogspot.com and offer your opinions or join the conversation.

Author: Kevin Probst
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

President Obama, Race & Rage

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:47:33 +0000

The Gulf Oil Spill is not the first suggestion that the president is “not touch enough to lead.” A 2008 Huffington headline reads: Enough! Why Obama should Release his Righteous Rage:

Author: Ruth King
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

Prospective 2008 Presidential Candidate: John Edwards

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 02:42:03 +0000

Former North Carolina Senator John Edwards will face an uphill climb for the Democratic nomination. He only served one term in the U.S. Senate, as he didn’t seek re-election in 2004, the year he was the Democratic vice presidential nominee. He would appear on the surface to be excellent candidate. He is young, good looking, intelligent, and could take large numbers of female primary votes away from Hillary Clinton.

However, his biggest obstacle will be his status as a failed vice presidential nominee. Candidates in both parties who lose in their bid for vice president, without having first won, have great difficulty getting a presidential nomination. For example, Joe Lieberman’s primary campaign crashed and burned after the New Hampshire Primary in January 2004. Before that, Sargent Shriver (in 1976) and Edmund Muskie (in 1972) were the last failed vice presidential nominees to seek the Democratic presidential nomination and they were both rejected. On the Republican side, Bob Dole was finally able to capture his party’s nomination in 1996 after a failed bid for vice president in 1976. However, even he was turned away in his first two attempts (1980 and 1988).

On the positive side for Edwards, he will have more time to campaign than most of his potential opponents. Only former Virginia Governor Mark Warner might have a similar amount of free time to campaign.

Terry Mitchell is a software engineer, freelance writer, and blogger from Hopewell, VA. On his blog – http://commenterry.blogs.com – he posts commentaries on various subjects such as politics, technology, religion, health and well-being, personal finance, and sports. His commentaries offer a unique point of view that is not often found in mainstream media.

Author: Terry Mitchell
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

Solutions to the Global Financial Crisis

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:42:42 +0000

As the debate continues in Congress about lowering the budget deficit, the debt ceiling is about to be raised again. Because the dollar is still one of the world’s most important reserve currencies, US budget deficits and the integrity of the Fed’s balance sheet contribute enormously to the world’s debt load.
Here are a few do-able suggestions to lower the US deficit.

1) Audit the Federal Reserve.
Banks within the Federal Reserve system must undergo yearly audits, but the Fed itself has never had an independent auditor examine its books. As the Fed expands its balance sheet, it pours more dollars into the world’s financial system, which is already overloaded with dollar-denominated securities and other debt instruments.

A Congressional interview of the Fed’s Inspector General by Congressman Alan Grayson in 2010 showed that the Federal Reserve had no idea where $9 TRILLION of it’s created money had gone to. This is, clearly, financial irresponsibility on a massive scale. The Federal Reserve needs yearly audits to ensure its financial integrity.

2) Consolidate Federal Regulatory Agencies
The recently passed reforms of the United States’ financial and banking regulatory agencies created a hodge-podge of new regulatory agencies with no clear distinction as to who is doing what! We need to streamline the Federal regulatory process and create a few powerful, clearly defined agencies and expand their powers. Lax regulation created the sub-prime mortgage crisis, allowing banks to create bogus mortgages and lend to unqualified people, thus sticking the taxpayers with the bill for banks’ irresponsible lending.

3) Eliminate Securitization
Securitization is the process of slicing and dicing assets until the source of funds is no longer recognizable. This is, in fact, criminal activity, because an investor cannot locate the actual performing assets that underlie a security, thus preventing an investor from doing his or her due diligence in determining whether a security is even worth the paper it is printed on. The confusing zoo of securities products, including CDOs and Credit Default Swaps, led directly to the world’s financial crisis, form which we still have not recovered.

4) Separate Commercial Banking from Investment Banking
As long as securitization is allowed, we must re-institute Glass-Steagal, passed in the 1930′s after the great Depression, and firmly separate commercial (traditional loan and savings) banks from securities banks (like Goldman Sachs). The world financial crisis stems directly from abuses in investment (securities) banking, and the allowance of traditional banks to create their own securities products.

We must repeal the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, passed in 1999, and the so-called Securities “reform” legislation passed at the beginning of the new millennium. which are mainly responsible for the excesses of the banks.

As citizens, we must demand financial and regulatory accountability from our representatives in Congress, and those who enforce banking regulations, or things will get a lot worse!

Kenneth James Michael MacLean has written 8 inspiring books, over 100 content-rich articles, and produced four movies.

Ken is a professional book and manuscript editor. See his site at http://www.macleanediting.com/

Also visit Ken at his personal website, The Big Picture, at http://www.kjmaclean.com

Author: Kenneth MacLean
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

What We Once Entrusted to God – We Now Demand From Politics

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:44:10 +0000

Politics is a repository where we dump everything ominous and uncomfortable that we don’t want to know about, don’t want to be responsible for, and don’t know what to do with. We elevate certain persons to power far greater than we give to ourselves, expecting in return for them to handle what frightens and confuses us. As such politicians are small derivatives of what God once was worldwide. For most of human history what happened was God’s will and doing. Politics thus has a great deal in common with religion in that it presumes to be in charge of everything, when actually it is in charge of far less … mostly the military and spending our money.

Like heaven, politics promises everything while delivering very little, mostly an assurance of better times to come-the pretend-form of hope. We need to put the things that we can’t handle somewhere so we can pretend they’re being taken care of, in a lofty-far removed from us-place, managed by special people who are bigger and wiser than the rest of us. To consider that these elevated people know nothing more than we do about what’s wrong, or what to do about it, or that most of the protection we’re expecting to be in place, isn’t really happening-is very frightening. These miserable results aren’t anybody’s fault, though we’re fond of blaming specific politicians. Debates over which candidate is good and who is bad fuels our elections with some reason to be involved with what spends most of our resources, and accomplishes very little of real value to each one of us.

That is, unless we choose to regard the nation’s defense-a powerful military-as saving our skin, when it wouldn’t be necessary in the first place if politics did what it promises constantly to be doing-bringing peace and safety. Over time politics has been defined in various ways, as living god-ness, kingly rule, priestly powers, and presently as majority-mob- rule. By definition, politics is designed to assert power, not to bring peace. If it ever succeeded-which it can’t-it would put itself out of business. And who in power wants, or knows how to do that? And yet we entrust most of our basic needs to this venerable institution. Let’s examine where we’ve deposited the family jewels. The political arm of the public realm is a non-personal place where we hire people-actors-to stand in as representatives of our most vital needs. Politics decides how much personal opportunity and support society encourages and facilitates for each one of us in the course of our lives. There is no question that the quality of democratic opportunity has increased over hundreds of years. It’s a question of how far it still must still go-which is very far.

Politicians pretend to solve problems by investing money in them, though the problems remain largely intact, revealing how little of what’s dear to us can be obtained by spending money. Politicians are actors simply because no one can “represent” another person except by pretending what they’re doing is “for your own good”, is the usual way authority-figures put it. When like the rest of us, they only know how to represent themselves. They do this very effectively behind closed doors and between the lines, skimming off the extras that a public life offers/requires, which is what they, and most of us believe is necessary or we wouldn’t so vigorously celebrate the fame of political figures. Our adoration, expressed either as love or hate, gives them special privileges.

Though it’s almost never mentioned, politics is based upon the notion that people can say anything they want as long as they don’t do very much about it. This is mostly what politics is made of-rhetoric-pretending to solve the world’s problems by talking about them. The unwritten, unacknowledged purpose of politics is to prevent anything new from happening. This repressive attitude is called “patriotism,” “loyalty” and “law and order.” This view posits that the past is holier than the present. Something new that changes the way the system works is considered “un-American”, and perhaps even treasonable. Politics sets up bureaucracy to administer its pseudo-decisions. These superstructures that govern key parts of our lives are designed to be moderately oppressive so we don’t notice how ineffective they are in responding to our needs. The strategy is based on the notion that if someone is being annoyed and threatened, they’ll be too busy defending themselves to notice how much we have failed to respond to what they’ve requested or complained about. We all have had this experience when we’ve called a bureaucracy.

They blame us for the problem. Most recently, phone systems have been employed in order to turn up the volume of our annoyance, making it Herculean to impossible to reach a live person, amplifying our resentment commensurate with the increase in public un-safety, and giving us something small to notice and complain about-telephone tag-instead of straight talk about terrorism and torture … and why we’re not all directly voting on how to spend our community property. Most of us would describe this awful experience as the perfidy of bad people doing bad things. The simple truth is that politicians are acting like this for our sake. We should feel sorry for them. In spite of how much money and opportunity they have access to-if they possess sufficient self-centered opportunism-they’re our whipping boys that we regularly abuse. They’re in public life to be complained about, so that we don’t notice the lousy structure of our government, even in our wonderful-in-many-ways democracy.

Governments are structured to make sure nothing changes. If we keep pointing our fingers at a few people for being bad guys, we won’t notice how much the whole bloody system needs to be overhauled. Thomas Jefferson strongly recommended that the structure of the government be changed every twenty-five years if need be. Though actually doing it would be very frightening to us. This was undoubtedly why we originally voted down his idea of a constitutional convention convening every generation (25 years). Instead, we venerate the Constitution as a holy relic, as if tradition was more important than people. Even if we admit that politics is too powerful, we still believe it’s just another king who is now accountable to us. When it’s actually much worse than the king was. Power is now centered in not one, but thousands of people who collaborate with each other far better than they do with us. How do you hold so many people accountable? Anybody who believes voting or the news media create accountability is seriously delusional. Not that they don’t make excellent contributions. Both voting and the news used to be powerful, but like everything, they became a sham because they haven’t changed.

News advertises one point of view. We all know that; which is why so many of us don’t read much of it, don’t vote, and don’t watch the news. This only adds to our sense of helplessness and despair. The news should present to us all points of view in the same news program, so we would no longer pretend there’s only one way of looking at anything. This would help us make up our own minds about what’s happening in the world. It would most likely also frighten us to see regularly that there are no easy answers. It’s safe to conclude that politics is where we pretend the most. Specifically, we pretend that people are inspired and enlightened by their vocation to look after the welfare of us all. But what is this pretence? It’s primarily a passionate belief in the personality of the candidate. It’s no different than believing a Hollywood actor is someone of note beyond the heroic, villainous or non-descript parts that they play in the movies. They begin to believe what their fans say about them, and act like big shots. Increasingly politics is personality worship. But what does personality have to do with the issues and problems besetting us? Personality is our public identity-persona-while character is everything we are, parts of which others see much easier than we do. Public appearance reduces who we are to caricatures exaggerating whatever aspects of us that particular public scene amplifies. They don’t demonstrate who someone is.

We need to be alone with our politicians and challenge them in similar ways to how we test potential love partners, that is, if we test our lovers instead of perpetually trying to arrange the pretense of romance-our current wished-for relationship with politicians. Maybe then we would have some idea of who they are. In the meantime, “the show must go on” with its dodges and pretense. We all know that politicians and actors are like us, frail, unknowing in many ways, struggling to understand life, and subject to the same temptations of anyone who is confused and frightened. Politicians are vulnerable to the corruption that exists in any false-front society. They pretend to be “in charge” when they don’t have any idea of what to do. In desperation, government has turned over the reigns of power to money, making bargains with big business in Machiavellian amoral ways, while spewing moral political rhetoric. Probably 90 percent of income available to politicians has been acquired dishonestly if one defines honesty rigorously. Knowing this we feel despairing. But we don’t know what else to do.

Representative government liberated us from the King and his nobles, and partially from the Church and its presumptive holy pontifications, when we finally realized that nobody has a direct line to God. But we still ask ourselves, “Isn’t representation what democracy is about? Isn’t voting the only way the average citizen can participate in government?” The answer to both questions is no. But where do we go then when we feel that our political system isn’t working? We usually blame the bad guys, as if only some of us created the problems. When we all are responsible for them. Any other assumption is patently undemocratic! In the true nature of democracy, we’re all responsible for everything. So why have we been blaming politicians when they don’t know anymore than we do about how to fix things? The problem isn’t bad people. It’s bad structure. Once again habit comes back to reveal its power. Social structure is just institutional habit. Every good idea eventually becomes a bad one.

It’s called change. That’s what happened to representative government. It was a profound and liberating solution. It’s now become an oppressive and dehumanizing obstacle to the continued progress of democracy. We’re not as naïve as we used to be. In fact, in the social realm the talents of the majority are grossly underused, in effect utterly ignored! We’re far more capable of forming opinions than any of us imagine -and expressing them-in effect being in charge of our own lives. We’re not so easily duped by misinformation, which is what politics has been giving us for centuries. We just never noticed this evolving truth about ourselves. In fact, we believed what we were told. Look at old movies and see how people relate to authority. Thank somebody that we are no longer so naïve. We can thank the Internet for giving us relatively free access to all information.

So what’s wrong with the system? To begin with, money dominates modern life throughout the system with its amoral anti-philosophy-”it’s just doing business”-that makes the world one huge criminal state. As evidence on the news, international crime is increasingly being reported. The anti-moral, anti-spiritual perspective of money has come to dominate the world. It’s called “capitalism” and “modernization.” The business of making money has become the underground world government. What’s the crisis? It’s a crisis of credibility. There is nothing in the world in which we believe passionately except for money, which has no credibility whatsoever, and openly brags about it. Business regards “profit” as superior to credibility, pretending there’s something moral about making money at the expense of other people. One of our biggest pretenses is that profit doesn’t hurt or deprive anyone. There’s another whopper possessing enormous pretend-credibility hanging about-that certain people need to be very rich in order to keep the economy going. That’s not true.

Projects need huge capital, but that does not require individual people having it. Perhaps we ought to consider putting consumers on the board of directors with equal voting power or limiting the wealth that any one person can possess and see how much good we can accomplish with all the extra resources. Call it “communism” if you like. What difference does it make what we call it? Lots of Karl Marx’s ideas were bunk. Maybe this one wasn’t. Capitalism has won, so why don’t we try to assimilate some of our former opposition’s best ideas? Nobody, even our enemy, is all-wrong. Though Marx was wrong about redistributing wealth. The real solution is to eliminate the possibility of great individual wealth. The limitation of wealth would actually accomplish something else far more important. It would take gambling-the big kill-out of the mainstream of life, rendering it more of a pastime than the core of our big dream to strike it rich.

On an emotional level, the legitimacy of this craving is the dream of having safe security. Unfortunately it’s based on the cynical belief that money can buy anything. It’s not that we entirely believed this in our conscious mind. But in experience we function as if we did. Once more, we are of two minds, and the truthful one is most easily discarded. We want to buy comfort, most of all, and as much safety as we can. If we provided everyone in the world the basics of life-food, clothing, a shelter of their own, protected aloneness, and warmth-there would be far less crime than there is and the cost to society would be much less than it is. That affluent Western civilization hasn’t already done this, at least for its own people, is an utter disgrace! If we do this, dread will be removed from everyone’s life, which derives from never knowing whether we will have enough to survive. The disgraceful term “poverty” defines all of us who aren’t upper-middle class, meaning all those who worry about not having enough all their lives. We continue to inflict on ourselves the cruel, demeaning, and frightening belief that comfort and security must be worked for, must be earned monetarily, or we don’t deserve it except as charity that insults the recipient. The humiliating bullet of that perfidious moral assertion is what we try to dodge by getting rich.

If we got used to the idea money isn’t so terribly important except as a unit of measurement-in fact it’s downright boring-we might consider the unthinkable: to relinquish ownership, that primitive relationship we have with parts of nature, and with each other, that spawns so much violence and abuse. We might replace ownership with choosing the right lifetime occupation, which is what we need far more. We would no longer say, “I can do what I want” and begin to say, “I am the steward of this place, and of my life, as long as I need to be.” The idea horrifies us because we have invested so much of our comfort and security in the concept of ownership. Our firm conviction in the necessity of it prevails even though we know how much damage this belief has done to the environment and each other, both of which we have owned for thousands of years, most of human history. Perhaps we don’t need to give it up entirely. But we should reexamine it. In change, nothing is sacred. We can either join the process of evolution or we can continue to fight it and probably lose in the end.

But what is most paramount to the well-being of humanity is the elimination of violence, which will only happen if we are far more resolute than we are now. It requires preventing any one human from ever being violent more than once. We’d like to entirely eliminate violence. But we can’t restrain someone just because we think they might hurt someone, only after they’ve actually done it. Like everything else repetitive in human nature, violence is habituated. It is not a matter of personal choice. If someone is violent once, they’ll be violent again. We must make sure that doesn’t happen. Though most likely it will take fifty or a hundred years for us to move toward this solution, giving us time to figure out how best to do it, and people plenty of time to adapt to it before it becomes law. Instead of such visionary reaching, what are we doing? In this technological age we are highly over-identified with our machines because they seem so much more powerful than we are. We want to be a machine! We call these “bionic” wonders “superheroes.” We give them magical superpowers-what most movies are about now.

A recent remake of the movie Manchurian Candidate appears to be a story about the evil uses of genetic engineering, when it’s most fundamentally a story about bad mothers and fathers. Many parents still perceive their children as instruments of their own power instead of someone entrusted to them in order to assist them in releasing their (the children’s) natural powers as independent agents. The movie also expresses what it’s like to be dominated by others who pretend to be serving us. This exposes the ways in which family, society, and culture control our lives by keeping the vast majority of us anxious, insecure, about not having enough resources and by insisting we fill standardized identities and jobs. In other words, we’ve always been dominated by the machine we call “royalty,” “the church,” “society,” the “majority,” “the economy,” or “the marketplace.” Only recently have a great many of us begun to venture into “entrepreneurship,” creating the shape and form of our own work. And yet, what still dominates this effort, what we must do in conformance to society’s cultural capitalistic command, is to make money simply to survive. This gross necessity distorts the process of being what and who we are because of money’s cynical amorality. The result is that we make money at the expense of others.

The care of service has become an advertiser’s joke. Some would insist that we have to cooperate with each other, to which I would agree. But that cooperation is democratic only when individuals arrange to collaborate with others individuals because they want to. It’s happening more and more all the time. But that mode of governance has barely begun to take over the human experience. Of course we don’t know how to collaborate well because we’ve never seriously tried. These provocative ideas violate many sacred cows of democratic rights in their present form and are thus very unlikely. They’re presented herein as illustrations of what we should consider and how much determination will be required for us to reach our goals. It will require the willing cooperation of the vast majority of people in the world, which will probably take fifty or a hundred years to achieve. But nothing will ever happen unless we get started in earnest. We believe politics requires politicians. It doesn’t, only administrators of our common will.

It terrifies us to imagine ourselves as individuals taking over the world and being responsible for what happens in it … perhaps by voting on the Internet. Undoubtedly the ideas presented herein are crazy and unworkable. Most certainly that will be the response of many. But they’re not meant to be workable solutions. They are challenges that are meant to help us imagine that individuated forms of governance are possible, that is if we have the will and courage to make ourselves ready and available to such drastic change. By keeping ourselves safe in the status quo, we vote for the belief that everything’s fine and force our children to solve the problems we have chosen to ignore. We needed the Internet in order to imagine such political heresy. We needed a way of communicating directly with each other that isn’t controlled or policed by anyone. Let’s look honestly at our nature, the good and bad of it. It’s all displayed on the Internet. But please let’s stop turning our security over to someone else. That’s how tyranny was, and still is, built.

In its best form, politics is how we set things up in the large picture of human society in order to do only one thing: facilitate the education and the opportunity of individual people. Nothing should be more important than that. This includes money, economy, and defense. If we make anything else more important than the safe passage of individual effort, we will eventually produce a tyranny. In order to achieve these ends we must define human nature psychologically. We must come to see ourselves as we really are, with as little pretense as possible. We must learn to be unafraid of fear, so that we can learn how to keep it in bounds without killing or attacking each other.

Only individual humans can agree, and then instantaneously be committed to actualizing their agreement with the ruthlessness with which violence deserves to be treated. It isn’t people toward whom we have to become determined in a vigorous way. It’s violence that we must oppress-suppress, by preventing violent people from ever being violent again toward those who have successfully committed to nonviolence…whatever that comes to mean. However, in spite of the oppression that emanates from political decisions and from public bureaucratic practice, the primary obstacle to change in our times exists inside each one of us where personal habits and their institutional practices obstruct our capacity to think, feel, and imagine big!

Like the poor farmers of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, who cringe in terror at the prospect of raising up to face their tormentors, we too have been cowed by our childhood experiences to believe that to be supremely individual, rebellious in thought, word, and deed is a consummately selfish act of treason and a betrayal of the social group, most particularly our family. We were raised to believe such acts deserve the worst kind of punishment-banishment and death.

The family, as its presently structured, is as much an instrument of culture and society as it’s an instrument of individual growth and development. It will always condemn rebellion-particularly from itself-before it will encourage individual creativity that might threaten the solidarity of family connections and traditions. This is the hardest lesson, perhaps, that we will ever learn. The prohibitive fears and inhibitions that family, in its present form traumatizes our habit structure will continue to prevent us from imagining ourselves capable of managing the world. For instance, all institutions, including the family do not allow for the arrangement of leadership always to be functional and project driven, which is the only social arrangement that will ever be fully democratic.

Project-leadership emerges spontaneously-the best person for the job-or by vote, but only after the project has been chosen and designed by all of us. Such leadership lasts only as long as the project does, and exists only to focus the efforts of the group of people who implement it. This will not happen unless we vigorously fathom the depths of our own potentially very powerful psyche-spirit, learn to cope with an ethereal, intangible identity, and free the extraordinary talents that lie almost completely unfulfilled.

Without such open transformation such change will never happen today…or tomorrow. For centuries the human spirit has been in bondage. That’s where we put it for safekeeping. Unable to occupy it ourselves, we gave it first to every tiny aspect of nature, and then to the gods, and finally to God. We must learn to repossess it. It’s who we are. What we do with it is our destiny. It’s time to bring it out of cold storage from the next world, so that it can fully occupy, and educate this one.

My additional works can be seen at this website: http://donfenn.com

Author: Don Fenn
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

The United States & Barack Obama

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:44:05 +0000

Think about that for a moment.

Author: Eric Hughes
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

President Obama, Race & Rage

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:42:00 +0000

The Gulf Oil Spill is not the first suggestion that the president is “not touch enough to lead.” A 2008 Huffington headline reads: Enough! Why Obama should Release his Righteous Rage:

Author: Ruth King
Article Source: EzineArticles.com