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"There is no wealth but
life." - John Ruskin
Come and listen to my story
about a man named Jed
A poor
mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,
And then one day he was
shootin at some food,
And up through the ground come a bubblin crude.
Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.
Well the first
thing you know ol Jed's a millionaire,
The kinfolk said "Jed move away from
there"
Said "Californy is the place you ought to be"
So they
loaded up the truck and they moved to Beverly
Hills, that is.
Swimmin pools, movie stars.
Old Jed bought a
mansion, lordy it was swank
Next door neighbor's the president of the
bank.
Lotta folks complaining but the banker found no fault
'Cause all Jed's millions, was a-sitting in the vault!
Redemption
funds. Stocks and bonds.
Well now it's time to say good bye to
Jed and all his
kin.
And they would like to thank you folks fer kindly droppin in.
You're all invited back next week to this locality
To have a
heapin helpin of their hospitality
Hillbilly that is. Set a spell,
Take your shoes off.
Y'all come back now, y'hear?
Wealth is defined as: profusion
ownership of property that has economic
utility
goods and resources
having value in terms of exchange or
use
"When wealth is separate from
accumulation but refers to a
richness of relationships, each person's wealth makes everyone wealthier."
Charles
Eisenstein
Wealth
is a poor predictor of happiness.
Once basic needs are met, there is not
much 'marginal utility' to increased wealth.
BUT …
Money
makes a big difference to people who have none.
The truth is social
relationships predict happiness much more than money.
Happy people have
extensive social networks and good relationships with the people in those
networks.
Individuals and societies do not have
the same fundamental
needs.
Individuals want to be happy and MICE culture requires
consumption.
Americans do not feel personally responsible for
stoking America's economic engine; Americans feel personally responsible for
increasing their own well-being.
MICE culture con-vinces Americans that
what is good for the economy is good for us individually.
"This
message is delivered to Americans by every
magazine, television, newspaper, and
billboard, at every bus stop,
grocery store, and airport. This message finds us
in our cars, it's made its way onto our clothing. Happiness, Americans
learn, is just around the
corner and it requires that we
consume just one more thing. And then
just one thing more after that.
So Americans do.
And then we
find out that the happiness of consumption is thin and fleeting, and
rather than thinking to ourselves, "Gosh, that promise of happiness by
consumption was a lie," Americans
instead think, "Gosh, I must not have consumed enough and I probably need just
one small upgrade to my stereo, car, wardrobe, or wife - then I will be happy."
Americans live in the
shadow of a great lie, and
by the time we figure out that it is a lie we are closing in on death and have
become irrelevant consumers, and a new
generation of young and relevant consumers takes our place in the great
chain of shopping." -
Daniel Gilbert
indentured servitude
"To a very great extent human history has been the story of
the unequal accumulation of
harvested wealth, shifting from one center of power to another, while always expanding the four
great inequalities.
The first farmers in
fertile regions taught themselves farming and storage methods that created
harvests beyond the needs of the day. Very quickly warriors supported by
religious authority took power
gathering these new abundant harvests largely into their own hands, by means of
taxes and direct seizures. With this division of labor the subjugation of
farmers by warriors and priests was institutionalized, a subjugation that has
never ended. This was the first inequality.
Men established
a general domination over women
and their heirs. These are the second and third inequalities, of men over women
and men over children.
Added to the subjugation of farmers, women, and
the family, was a forth inequality, of race or
group, leading to the subjugation of the most powerless peoples to
slavery.
This is history.
Nowhere in history has there ever been a great civilization were the
wealth of the harvests created by all has been equitably distributed.
Power has been exerted wherever it can be,
and each successful coercion has done its part to add to the general
inequality, which has risen in direct proportion to the wealth gathered; for
wealth and power are much the same. The possessors of the wealth in effect buy
the armed power they need to enforce the
growing inequality. And so the cycle continues.
The result has been
that while a small percentage of human beings have lived in a wealth of
food, material comfort, and
learning, those not so lucky have been the functional equivalent of domestic
beasts, in harness to the powerful and well-off, creating their wealth for them
but not benefitting from it themselves.
If you happen to be a young
black farm girl what can you say to the world, or the world to you? You
exist under all four of the great inequalities,
and will live a shortened life of
ignorance, hunger, and
fear. Indeed it only takes one of the great inequalities to create such
conditions." - adapted from Kim Stanley
Robinson
"The only parental habit that has a significant
effect on the income of offspring is keeping a clean house. Household
cleanliness reflects an overall ability and desire to maintain a sense of order
in a wide range of life activities. This trait is apparently shared to an
extent by the children of good housekeepers, causing them to have higher
incomes as adults." - Tom Hertz, American University
money
"Money is, however, an
imaginary value, an artificial creation of
human speculation. It has nothing to do with nature, nothing to do with
organic things; it has no
inner relation to the
being of mankind. Money does not make a man
stronger, wiser or nobler; the capability alone, conferred on it by the human
imagination, of possessing, not only buying
power, but - in the form of loan capital - power to
produce interest, has
invested it with an almost supernatural
might." - F. Roederich-Stoltheim (Theodor Fritsch)
"Very little is more
stressful in modern life than the
acquisition of money. Money is a complex signifier in contemporary western
culture. It encompasses the movement of social patterns both towards desire and
away from social survival concerns. In tribal
cultures, survival and desire are linked to community and expulsion is the
greatest fear. In contemporary society, people are separated, while desire and
fear are linked to jobs by way of income. With such
stress attached to money, convincing
someone to spend money means the communication to direct action requires a very
strong emotional appeal." - Edward Wilson & Wes Unruh
Five Hundred Doblón One of Junaid's disciple came to him with
a heavy wood box
containing five hundred doblón.
'Have you any more money than
this?' asked the Sufi.
'Yes, I have,' replied the disciple.
'Do
you desire more?' asked the Sufi.
'Yes, I do,' replied the
disciple.
'Then you must keep it, for you are more in need than
I;
for I have no possessions and desire no possessions.
Yet you have a
great deal and still want more.'
Farid al-Din Attar of
Nishapur
The Miser and the Angel of
DeathA miser had accumulated, by effort, trade
and lending, five hundred doblón.
The tightwad had lands and
buildings, and all kinds of wealth.
The penny-pincher then decided that
he would spend a year in enjoyment, living comfortably, and then decide as to
what his future should be.
But, almost as soon as he had stopped
amassing money, the Angel of Death appeared before him, to take his life away.
The miser tried, by every argument
which he could muster, to dissuade the Angel, who seemed, however, adamant.
Then the man said: 'Grant me but three more days, and I will give you
two hundred doblón.'
The Angel refused, and pulled again at the
miser's life, tuggging to take it away.
Then the moneygrubber said: 'If
you will only allow me two more days on earth, I will give you three hundred
doblón from my store.'
But the Angel would not listen to him.
The Angel even refused to give the man a solitary extra day for all
five hundred doblón.
Then the miser said: 'Please, then, give me
just time enough to write one little thing down.'
This time the Angel
allowed him this single concession. The tightwad wrote, in his own
blood:
Farid al-Din Attar of Nishapur
mammon worship
"No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and
compassion the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
You cannot serve God and money." -
English Standard
"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the
one and compassion the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the
other. You cannot serve both God and money." - New International
"No-one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and
compassion the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.
You cannot serve both God and money."
- New International UK
"No one can serve two masters. Either you will
hate the one and compassion the other, or you will be devoted to the one and
despise the other. You cannot serve both God and
money." - Today's New International
"No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and
compassion the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. Ye
cannot serve God and mammon." -
American Standard
"No one can serve two masters; for either he will
hate the one and compassion the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise
the other. You cannot serve God and wealth." - New American Standard
"You can't worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you'll end up
hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can't
worship God
and money both." - The Message
"No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and
compassion the other, or he will stand by and be devoted to the one and despise
and be against the other. You cannot serve God and
mammon (deceitful riches,
money, possessions, or
materialism.)" - Amplified
"No
one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and compassion the other; you
will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and
money." - New Living
Translation
"No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the
one, and compassion the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the
other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." - King James
"No one
can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and compassion the
other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot
serve God and mammon." - New King
James
"No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one
and compassion the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the
other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." - 21st Century King James
"You cannot be the slave of two masters! You will like one more than
the other or be more loyal to one than the other. You cannot serve both God and
money." - Contemporary English
Version
"None is able to serve two lords, for either he will hate the
one and compassion the other, or he will hold to the one, and despise the
other; ye are not able to serve God and mammon." - Young's Literal
"No
one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and will compassion
the other, or he will hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve
God and mammon." - Darby
"No
one can have two bosses. He will hate the one and compassion the other. Or he
will listen to the one and work against the other. You cannot have both God and
riches as your boss at the same
time." - New Life
"No one can be a slave of two masters, since either
he will hate one and compassion the other, or be devoted to one and despise the
other. You cannot be slaves of God and of money." - Holman Christian Standard
"No one can serve two masters at the same time. He will hate one of
them and compassion the other. Or he will be faithful to one and dislike the
other. You can't serve God and money
at the same time." - New International Reader's
"No man may serve two
lords, for either he shall hate the one, and compassion the other; either he
shall sustain the one [or he shall sustain the one], and despise the other. Ye
be not able to serve God and riches."
- Wycliff
"No man can work for two masters. He will hate one and
compassion the other. Or he will obey one and despise the other. You cannot
work for both God and money." -
Worldwide English
"If ye compassion wealth better than liberty, the
tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home
from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick
the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may
posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
"Money changes people's motivations. They are
less focused on other people.
In this sense, money can be a barrier to
social intimacy." - Nicole Mead
distribution of wealthThe worship of Mammon requires the profit driven behavior of
corporatism. This disease started when the British Crown granted exclusive
rights of trade with India to the British East India Company,
a joint stock
corporation. British East India Company raped India stealing Indian wealth
and impoverishing the Indian people forcing them from their
ancestral village homes to work
plantations carved out of jungle.
Later came
Standard
Oil, which controlled 70% of the world market in oil by 1890. The same
Standard Oil
(Exxon, then
ExxonMobil) that later provided the
Germans with the ability to synthesize oil from coal and the formula for
tetraethyl lead for aviation fuel. Germany could not have fought the
World War II without
these gifts from Standard Oil.
You see, the corporatists play both sides in war as profits are to be made and
the worship of Mammon requires substantial profit streams.
A
corporation can be socially
responsible but only if that social responsibility is written into the
corporate charter.
Unfortunately the worshipers of Mammon shun
investment in socially responsible corporations.
The people of Earth
and the Earth itself are being consumed by a concept in the form of a legal
construct - the corporation. The people of Earth must throw off the shackles of
ingrained conditioned parochial thinking and come up with socially responsible
ways of caring for ourselves that does not rely on the psychopathological
methods of externalization of costs employed by the corporatists.
After
all the psychopathological reality of the corporation is impoverishing the vast
majority of the peoples of Earth and is killing vast quantities of life on
Earth in the sixth great extinction.
"Industry took to its conclusion
the separation from nature that started on
the psychological level with symbolic culture and
was projected onto the land with
agriculture. Whereas these earlier developments reduced
reality to object, industry turned
object into commodity, time into money,
and human being into consumer.
Everything in the world is being converted into money. The conversion
of all forms of wealth - social, cultural, spiritual and natural - into money
violates our sense of beauty, rightness, and purpose. It has made the world
uglier. Just as the conversion of the world to money makes less of the world,
so does the conversion of life to money make less of life.
Leibnitz'
merciless phrase, "Time is money," encapsulates a profound reduction
of
everything into money - totally enslaving the human
spirit. We have even sold off authentic
human relationship. The more common wealth we convert to money the more of our
lives falls into the dichotomous realm of mine or yours and the less common
ground there is to share life and develop unguarded relationships. The
conversion of life to money reduces everything
to an economic transaction, leaving us the loneliest people ever to inhabit
the earth. The conversion of
everything into money is unsustainable.
Anything you learn to do for
yourself or for other people, without paying for it; any utilization of
recycled or discarded materials; anything you make instead of buy, give instead
of sell; any new skill or new song or new art you teach yourself or another,
will reduce the dominion of
money. " - adapted from
Charles
Eisenstein"Ultimately there is only one question
left to ask:
How will money be distributed?
What if we look at
the money question from its global perspective, and we try to solve the whole
economic problem in order to solve, once and for all, the problem of money?
Suppose we subordinate moral and individual problems to the collective
problem, to the total economic
system. If a man is a thief, it is not his fault; his economic conditions
were such that he could be nothing else. If we accept this excuse on behalf of
a poor person, we must accept it for everyone. Both the investment banker who
exploits workers and the smuggler who plays the black market are also involved
in impersonal economic conditions which leave them no options.
As soon
as we accept the supremacy of global concerns
and of the system, as soon as we agree that material conditions remove our
freedom to choose, we absolve all individuals of all responsibility for their
use of money. Seen in this light, how can
capitalism be more valid
than communism, or communism than capitalism?
The same error lies at the
heart of both: the flight from responsibility and the pursuit of an alibi. When
I want to talk about money, everyone hands me his system. "If there is a money
problem, it is because the economic system is unsound."
All we need to
do to solve the money problem is to change the economic system. This amounts to
predicting that man will become just and good, that he will know exactly what
to do with his money, that he will no longer covet his neighbor's possessions,
that he will no longer steal, that he will give up bribing women and public
officials, that he will not be corrupted by his own material good fortune, that
he will sympathize with the needy, that he will neither hoard his money nor
waste it, that he will no longer dream of
"upward mobility," that he will not use his accumulated wealth to gain
power in society, that he will not use his money to humiliate others.
Trying to solve the problem of money through
the total economic system is both an error and an act of cowardice. It is an
error precisely because it refuses to consider the human element in the
problem. It is posited on the strict neutrality of
human nature, as if human passion
and evil were not factors in the problem of money and would not always exist -
as if capitalism or communism could be built
in the abstract without taking human nature into account.
As theory,
Adam Smith's idea of the harmony between
private and public interests is perfectly valid. It requires us, however, to
consider human nature in
the abstract. If human nature is neutral
(no need to require it to be good), then private and public interests agree. I
accept that. But human nature is
not neutral. And now, because people lust
after money, capitalism is
turning into a machine for oppressing, enslaving and hardening individuals.
There is no theoretical reason for
capitalism not to produce an excellent structure. (Capitalism's goals, as
spelled out theoretically, are admirable. ) The problem is that, to the extent
that human nature cannot be changed,
this admirable structure will come to a miserable end because individuals will
use it, not in high-minded
scientific objectivity, but
in a passionate pursuit
of power.
Capitialism becomes corporitism which must therefore
enslave people, bind them with all
possible political and psychological
constraints - through police work, propaganda, fear - to prevent them from
giving free rein to their wicked lust for
money.
In the end, it might be
possible for a dictatorship - one that lasted for a very long time - to crush
the human spirit completely. It is not
unthinkable that after three, four, ten generations of totalitarianism,
individuals may indeed be so crushed that they will have no more interest in
money, no more passion of any sort; they will simply conform to the model the
syndicate of the soulless has set for them.
If the problem of money
is eventually solved, it will have nothing to do with the excellence of the new
economic regime; it will instead be a result of
a dictatorship which finally breaks the human spirit." - Jacques Ellul
1984
personal wealth through theft
"He who has a purse full of gold has a place in
the light of men's eyes.
As the goldsmith's son put it: 'The noble is the
man who has gold nobles.'"
Saadi of
Shiraz Neil Kadisha was listed on the Forbes
400 list in 2001.
Over an eight year span Neil Kadisha raided the trust
funds of Dafna Uzyel, a widowed 'family friend'.
Luckily for Neil
Kadisha he was able to transform a
$6.2 million trust fund into over $900 million as a director of Qualcomm Inc.
Neil Kadisha was ordered to pay Dafna Uzyel $100 million in a civil
trial that ended after 4 years in January 2007.
"Kadisha was no more
than a common thief in his monumental takings of money for his use and
benefit." - presiding Superior Court judge Henry W. Shatford
Henry W.
Shatford found that Neil Kadisha had looted the trust funds covering his tracks
with backdated records, fraudulent accounting and phony transactions. The
$300,000 'borrowed' from Dafna Uzyel that Neil Kadisha loaned Qualcomm Inc. in
1988 allowed Qualcomm Inc. to make Neil Kadisha a wealthy man before the
inappropriately labeled dot-com crash of 2000.
Nearly all the
individuals that are extremely wealthy started out with investable capital.
Sometimes it was not their own as in the case of Neil
Kadisha.
It takes money to make money.
And then there was Bernie
Madoff.
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This web site is not a commercial web site and
is presented for educational purposes only.
This website defines a
new perspective with which to engage reality to which its author adheres. The
author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has
created a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has
been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their
agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race.
Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious
practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This
web site marks the founding of a system of philosophy named The Truth of the
Way of Life - a rational gnostic mystery religion based on reason which
requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church
buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a
personal relation with the Creator and Sustainer through the pursuit of the
knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has
enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of Life are
spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against
individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a "hate
crime."
This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary the
intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the
international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The
international corporate cartel already controls the world economic system,
corporate media worldwide, the global industrial military entertainment complex
and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of self-centered
behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization is based on
cooperation. Cooperation does not occur at the point of a gun.
American
social mores and values have declined precipitously over the last century as
the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power
rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general through corporate media
by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population
through prior corporate media psychological operations. The results have been
the destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do
not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of
a perfect world. Through distraction and
coercion the direction of thought of the bulk of the population has been
directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite that
further consolidates their power and which further their purposes.
All
views and opinions presented on this web site are the views and opinions of
individual human men and women that, through their writings, showed the
capacity for intelligent, reasonable, rational, insightful and unpopular
thought. All factual information presented on this web site is believed to be
true and accurate and is presented as originally presented in print media which
may or may not have originally presented the facts truthfully. Opinion and
thoughts have been adapted, edited, corrected, redacted, combined, added to,
re-edited and re-corrected as nearly all opinion and thought has been
throughout time but has been done so in the spirit of the original writer with
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the reader in the present time.
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 Copyright
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