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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
"I know of no country in which there is so little
independence
of mind and real freedom of discussion as in
America."
Alexis de
Tocqueville
"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 forged 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 forged 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 shared to an extent by the children of
good housekeepers, allowing them to have higher incomes as adults." -
Tom
Hertz
"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 incorporation.
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.
A
corporation can be socially
responsible but only if that social responsibility is written into the
corporate charter.
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
sustenance that does not rely on the
psychopathological methods of externalization of costs employed by the
corporatists.
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.
The Wetiko revolution reduced reality to object.
The resulting
separation from nature allowed the
land to be seen as an object to be manipulated.
Over time human beings
also became objects to be manipulated.
"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 relationships.
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." -
Charles
Eisenstein
"Ultimately there is only
one question left to ask:
How will resources be
distributed?
What if we look at the resource 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 access to resources?
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 other 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 resources.
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 resource problem, it is because the economic system is
unsound."
All we need to do to solve the resource 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 resouces, 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 resources nor waste them, 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 resources to humiliate others.
Trying to solve the problem of resource distribution
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 resource distribution 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.
As 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 set for them.
If the problem of resource
distribution 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 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
forged a populace unable to discern propaganda
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reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs
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system of philosophy named The Truth of the Way of the Lumière Infinie -
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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
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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
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global industrial military entertainment complex and is responsible for the
collapse of morals, the elevation of self-centered behavior and the destruction of
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corporate media psychological operations. The results have been the destruction
of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not adhere to
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the bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the
corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which
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