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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
"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
“Only government can take perfectly good
paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination
worthless.” - Milton Friedman
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 love 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 love 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 love 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 love 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
love 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 love 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 love 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 love 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 love 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 love 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 love
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 love 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 love 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 love 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 love 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 love 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 love
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 love the other.
Or he will obey one and despise the other. You cannot work for both God and
money." - Worldwide English
"If ye adore 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
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