Archive for the ‘Economy’ Category

GOLD POST IT WEEKLY INSPIRATIONAL MESSAGE for 10/13

What happens if you try to play Scrabble with the rule book from Monopoly? Not so much luck, huh?

Well, the game has changed and so have the rules but so many of us are

still trying to play by the old rules…and the results are stagnation and frustration.

You can’t shirk personal responsibility, or force outcomes, or intend to manipulate the facts or the truth for personal gain. You can’t even “work” the way you used to because nothing “works” the same in this new world in which we find ourselves.

Yes. It looks the same, but trust me, it doesn’t operate the same.

Different game board. Different rules. So what are they?

To move around this new board…you need to follow three simple rules.

1, Allow what is brought into your life (and stop trying to make something else happen).

2. Joyfully experience and express gratitude for all that is right in your life.

3. Hold Love in your heart for everyone and everything.

Allowing. Joy. Love. Get those down and watch how effortlessly you zip about this board.

Sign up here for my FREE Gold Post It Weekly Inspirational Message here.

 

I have long lived by the certainty that everything is energy. This includes money which, by logical extension of thought, includes the economy. The evolution and advancement of humanity has always been tied to its understanding, harnessing and application of energy. Since human nature, in its lower form, contains elements of both selfishness and greed, there are those who throughout time have sought to understand, harness and apply to their sole benefit, the production and distribution of money for the purpose of concentrating power among the few.

The concentration of power among the few can only be achieved at the expense of the many. Which brings me to the invaluable lesson we in the United States and elsewhere can learn from Hamas.

What we witness Hamas inflicting in Gaza, and what occurs throughout the radical Islamic controlled regions of the world, is a combination of physical and psychological enslavement. Through terror, brute force and total disregard for quality of life (or life itself) such “leadership” profits and prospers while sacrificing the very people it claims to be representing.

We in the West should not be quick to judge how the Palestinian population could allow and participate in such a diabolical arrangement as we in the United States are living in an “economic glass house.” Instead of physical and psychological enslavement we in the West have been blindly cooperating in our own financial and psychological enslavement.

By way of understanding and controlling the means of production, distribution and regulation of the energy of money, and the mind-altering control of the means of dissemination of information by media…elites and power brokers in this country have enslaved us as surely as those in countries we condemn for lacking humanitarian policies. The only difference is the subtlety and masking of true intent as executed in the West. While Islamists use kidnapping and torture as their weapons of choice, the U.S. government and global power brokers use the Federal Reserve, the World Bank and social engineering as theirs.

What humanity must do, and do in a hurry before escape (freedom) is no longer a viable option, is to plunge the stake of truth into the heart of the beast of enslavement that has been sucking our life’s blood from us for at least the last 100 years. We can do this by awakening to the truth of what’s happening and taking a lesson from the ancient Israelites who were economically and psychologically enslaved to Pharaoh: they opted out in a hurry.

We too, must now hurry to opt out of a corrupt and diabolical system that manipulates us through the illusions of “lack and fear” and which have caused us to become indebted and addicted to a fiction that “more and faster” is better.

You must opt out of the lie that you are only one person who has no ability to know what is happening to you and lack a voice to articulate that knowing.You must opt out of fear and all its progeny…victimization, depression, frustration, impotence, rage, violence, and hate.

Step into who you are. Step into your connection with all that is good and true. Step into the memory of what freedom feels like and reclaim your birthright.

Slow down. Self-source. Have courage. You have the answer and you know the way out.

It’s certainly easy to become frustrated, angered, even enraged at national and global events. Terrorists are summarily released from Guantanamo to inevitably return to their pursuit of our destruction; original IRS files under investigation, allegedly lacking any archived copies, suddenly disappear and the hard drive that housed them is destroyed; literally thousands of illegal immigrants pour across our southern border daily while the Federal government, charged with our protection, stands by idle and silent; the most radical of radical Islamic terrorists murderously and savagely tear their way through Iraq seizing cities and imposing Sharia Law as they go, negating the efforts we made and the lives we sacrificed to bring that nation a chance for freedom; food and energy prices soar upward while we are told there is no inflation and one hundred million, one third of our population, are unemployed.

Yes, it is definitely easy to be overwhelmed and enraged…easy and terribly wrong.

Overwhelmed people feel victimized and are susceptible to manipulation by anyone promising an end to their frustrations. Enraged people are reactive, fail to reason and consequently, think before they act. Neither false prophets nor indiscriminate actions can serve us now.

What’s needed is very simple, if not necessarily easy:

1. Pull back to your most basic and immediate needs and environment.

2. Ask yourself, “How will gratuitous anger serve me?

3. Ask yourself,” What can I do to simplify my life and reduce stress?”

4. Reach out to neighbors, friends or colleagues to establish a community of support for one another.

5. Commit to not allowing yourself to be seduced into blame, violence or hatred of others.

6. Identify and stand firm in your core beliefs regardless of their political correctness…so long as those beliefs are not at the expense of another.

7. Hold fast to faith in humankind’s awakening to the realization that united we stand and divided we fall as All are One.

8. Allow truth to emerge from within you rather than allow an agenda to be imposed upon you.

Every historical period has its challenges. This one is no exception. What causes pain and suffering is not change. It’s our resistance to change. The world is changing in rapid and profound ways. Old patterns of behavior and correction will not work. When we switched from horse and buggy to the combustion engine, you could not fuel that engine with oats…although those oats worked just fine under the old system.

Rather than judge who did what and how we got here, let’s use our intellects, our hearts, and our individual uniqueness to co-create solutions. The dawn of a new day brings the opportunity to either repeat yesterday or live today anew.

Free Will. You get to choose.

 

The “greenest” faction of the Nazi war machine was the SS.  Heinrich Himmler who headed the unit was an animal lover, a vegetarian and organic farming enthusiast. In fact, at Treblinka, the SS had beautiful picnic grounds and a zoo, while the last sight the Jews saw before entering the gas chambers was an exquisite flower garden. The SS advocated an ideology of “blood and soil” that rolled into one policy evolutionary racism, peasant agrarianism and environmentalism.

So, it is possible to be politically correct while simultaneously being inhumanely insane. Which brings me to Cliven Bundy and the Obama Administration.

Mr. Bundy is a fourth generation rancher in Nevada. He has been grazing his 500 cattle on Clark County, Nevada public lands as did his father and grandfather before him. He has paid his grazing fees to the County and the State. He has not, however, paid fees demanded by the federal government as it is his position, supported by the Governor of Nevada, that the U.S. Government and Bureau of Land Management have no authority to collect them.

The response to his refusal to pay those fees is now the theft of his private property by the Federal Government (200 cattle thus far captured and removed), armed marshals surrounding the remainder as well as he and his family, his son tasered and a dangerously escalating situation. Memories of Waco and the Branch Davidian Sect standoff come to mind. The prospects for this ending poorly increase exponentially by the day.

The regulation and legal basis by which the Federal Government is asserting its authority and claim was enacted 20 years ago protecting the desert tortoise of the region from extinction.

As an animal lover I would never want to see any animal harmed, let alone extinct. But when we reach the point where the survival of the tortoise is grounds for abrogating the U.S. Constitution and basic human rights, we are dangerously close to…if not over…the same line the SS crossed. That story ended poorly as well.

We need to understand our connectedness to one another,to all living things, and to the environment within a well-thought through balanced approach. No one aspect of that triad should prevail at the expense of the others. Every American should be appalled and vocal about what is taking place in Nevada. As German Lutheran Pastor and vocal Nazi opponent Erik Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “Not to speak is to speak. Not to stand is to stand.”

I’m not often compelled to write a post that leaves my readers feeling anything but optimistic or at least hopeful.  Its not that I shy away from difficult stories.  Its just that my style is to always seek the high ground, and so, when writing about the most negative or fear-based events I seek, and generally find, the inspirational take-away.

Hopefully, this post will stay true to that intention; although as I write I am momentarily at a loss to see how.

We have a President who has serially lied to the Nation and who disregards the rule of law. He’s lied so many times that I am astonished at his hubris, given the existence of video recording. His repeated contradictions and outright untruths are both stunning and deeply disturbing to anyone with an understanding of how the U.S. Constitution has kept this great experiment in governance from going the way of so many failed efforts that came before it that tried to create a free society.

The President has gone so far in overstepping the Constitutional bounds of his office, and done so without any opposition from Congress or clamor for accountability by the populace, that he now feels safe in saying such things as “I’ve got a pen and a phone…and I can use that pen to sign Executive Orders (referring to Congress’ reluctance to support his agenda) and “The good thing about being President is that I can do whatever I want” (while touring, of all places, Jefferson’s Monticello).

I have witten before on this blog about the imperial nature of this First Couple and I am not alone. Others have expressed similar observations…just not enough others. So now I feel compelled to say that if you, reading this post, stand by while this bastion of liberty is highjacked by an arrogant, self-annointed, dictatorial President who YOU elected, then there will be nowhere to go and no one to see when all of his actions converge to reach critical mass and result in the economic and societal collapse of this Nation. Its show time, folks. Use your voice or lose your voice for a very, long, dark period of time to come.

Yet it pains me to end on other than hope. So here it is.

If you refuse to be silent or complicit or in denial any longer, and there are enough of you, then you will yet be able to tell your grandchildren that in a critical hour of American history, when much of what this country was founded upon to abolish was in jeopardy of being destroyed. you found your voice… and stood… to speak truth to power.

I am not in favor of anyone who is ill being unable to get medical care. I can’t imagine any rational, compassionate person who would be. But perfection is hard to come by, even in healthcare, and so for quite some time now we in the United States have been the beneficiaries of an imperfect healthcare system…albeit the best in the world.

So, in full disclosure, I was never in favor of Obamacare.  From Obamacare’s inception until today, I believe the free market to be the best arena in which good ideas can be born and maintained within a free society. Government runs very little, if anything, efficiently. The prospect of it successfully overseeing the creation and “enforcement” of healthcare for 317,000,000 citizens seemed almost laughable.

However, I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t in favor of Obamacare to solve our healthcare shortcomings. Neither was President Obama.

As far back as 2003 during his days as a U.S. Senator, President Obama was an advocate of a “single-payer” system whereby the private insurance industry would be eliminated and replaced by the federal government. Single-payer is what is also referred to as nationalized or socialized medicine. The government that would run Obama’s single-payer system is the same government that cannot seem to efficiently run the U.S. Postal Service or effectively manage immigration.

Now, with the fiasco that has become known as Obamacare, President Obama may be on the road to getting his wish.  The progressive state of Vermont is attempting to implement single-payer healthcare to circumvent the seemingly endless challenges and foibles that are Obamacare.

It’s been a long, circuitous, and deceptive route getting to where we are but it may yet payoff for those who, like New Yorkers with the recent election of Bill de Blasio as Mayor, think that Socialism and Communism are inherently more efficient and just systems than the Constitutional Republic under which we in the United States have lived since our inception. This, of course, will come as a shock to the hundreds of millions of people slaughtered by tyrannical or fascistic leaders in countries that have tried both alternative systems.

Economic equality is not equal opportunity. Economic equality among a populace is sought, but never achieved, by way of redistribution of wealth…which always ends with a few having achieved their wealth, literally, upon the bodies of those who bought the fiction that a government can and will give you all things for nothing. There is, in such cases, always a price paid in blood.  On the other hand, equal opportunity is the right of every individual living in a free society to pursue their dreams unobstructed by specifically targeted governmental restraints .

Obamacare was the wrong solution. Vermont is on the wrong track.  Free market  health care, with purchase rights across state lines and accountability for insurers and providers alike, with provisions for preexisting conditions and those truly unable to secure health insurance is the answer.

But the slope from freedom to bondage is a slippery one. Vermont’s efforts are the latest indication that we are on the down slope.

 

It didn’t work in Detroit when the progressive “Model City” plan was implemented. It didn’t work when U.S. banks stopped requiring credit thresholds before issuing new mortgages. It didn’t work when Congress rammed through the Affordable Care Act (a/k/a Obamacare) and it will not work as The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) now tries to cure diversity “shortfalls” in our neighborhoods by imposing mandatory diversity regulations.

Social engineering and redistribution simply do not work.

The “Model City” plan in Detroit bankrupted the city and brought the 4^th largest city in the United States in 1970 to its knees by 2013. By turning on the spigots of home loans absent verified credit, banks brought the housing market to its knees and precipitated the stock market crash of 2008. Obamacare, promised not to be a tax then upheld by the Supreme Court as a tax now seems to be underfunded, impossible to implement and creating more problems across the economy that it could ever have solved. It may bring the economy of the nation to its knees. HUD will, if it has its way, be a significant nail in the coffin of Liberty by regulating who gets to live where based upon subjective and arbitrary rules and regulations rather than effort and achievement.

Social engineering and redistribution of wealth and services are the cornerstones of this Administration. They are the tools of transformation by which Progressives in both political parties seek to ever-enlarge a centralized government while simultaneously diminishing the individual.

If you think you can do nothing you are wrong. Find like-minded people and join together to voice, in whatever ways are peaceful and law abiding, your refusal to go quietly into the night.

Robert F. Kennedy said: “Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, (s)he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Few words in the English language make me as uncomfortable as the word “appeasement.” That’s because it conjures images of Neville Chamberlain, train tracks and ovens. So, when tonight I heard talk radio host Glenn Beck use the word appeasement in the context of the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, I sat up and took notice. I reacted as I did because that one word instantly brought into focus all that is occurring around us.

Energy, finances and Wahhabism are the 21st century trinity. You probably know about the U.S.- Saudi oil dependent relationship. You may even know that Saudi investment and ownership in U.S. companies and enterprises includes such holdings as 60% of Citibank and $20 million gifts each to Georgetown and Harvard Universities to buy Departmental Chairs and influence curriculum. The list is endless and the sums of money (read “influence”) are staggering.

But did you know that Saudi Arabia is the largest source of funding for terrorism in the world? Or that Wahhabism is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia? Or that it’s “a religious movement among fundamentalist Islamic believers that seeks to return to the earliest fundamental sources of the Quran”? It teaches the worst kind of hatred and spawns terror against all non-Muslim people and beliefs. It has schools in the United States teaching, for example, that Muslims should not only “always oppose” infidels “in every way”, but “hate them for their religion … for Allah’s sake”, that “democracy” is responsible for all the horrible wars of the 20th century”, and that Shia and certain Sunni Muslims were infidels.”

We have turned a blind eye towards the destructive relationship that has evolved with Saudi Arabia. While this Administration is not the first to be complicit in this, it is the one history will charge with being most like the despised Neville Chamberlain who appeased the enemy.

Today we are not witness to the final destination of train tracks but rather to beheading and suicide bombers. And as with the most recent attack in Boston, we again hear voices from those in power who deny the truth (“there’s no such thing as Islamic terrorism”) and conspire with the enemy to conceal it (Janet Napolitano lying to Congress about the immanent “voluntary” deportation of Boston terror attack likely co-conspirator Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi).

Appeasement.

Whether the Nazis or the Saudis, selling your soul to Evil in exchange for anything is but an illusion. Evil make no deals from which it does not emerge the victor having consumed the vanquished.

Our only hope is to courageously stand for what is right and true albeit it difficult.  My prayer is that there are enough of us willing to do just that before we find ourselves out of options.

Is there anyone out there who is still unconscious enough to believe anything our politicians say or do?  I suppose the incredulous answer is “Yes” because they’re still “saying  and doing” and, as in the President’s staged statement made just moments ago concerning the pending fiscal cliff… they’re still allowing themselves to be used as useful idiots positioned for the camera behind the President with smiles on their faces. Amazing. Truly!

These corrupt, disingenuous and self-serving public servants have just been given a pay raise by our President to be paid for with your tax dollars while they vacationed for Christmas at their respective homes (in the President’s case Hawaii) while we were left twisting in the wind over the potential price of milk and our tax burdens for 2013 and beyond. Then, they did us a favor and returned from holiday to perhaps cut a totally inadequate and piecemeal deal at the 11^th hour when they should have, and could have, worked this out months ago.

This is but the latest example of why you have to disengage from “The Game.”

The purpose of The Game is to keep you twisting in the wind and therefore, frightened. Frightened people are infinitely more manageable and easily manipulated (read: “enslaved”) than are independent, internally directed, personally responsible people. Hence, why they perpetuate all the uncertainty and fear.

I love board games but I don’t play chess. The reason I don’t play is because no matter how many times it’s been explained to me, I don’t get it. Besides, there are a multitude of other games to play with rules I do understand. Now, maybe it’s not the best analogy. After all, the rules of chess don’t change mid-game as do the rules of elite power brokers. Power brokers, and those sycophants who hang by their sides, play by rules and change them at will while the rest of us are forever playing catch up.

But where the analogy is GREAT is that we don’t have to play this game. We can get off this board and choose another game.

The one I like is “The Game of Oneness.”

It has many dimensions but the rules are constant no matter which one you’re in:

1. Be personally responsible. 2. Have unfaltering integrity. 3. Think for yourself. 4. Buy only what you like regardless of what is marketed. 5. Back off technology. 6. Exhibit compassion for yourself and others. 7. Spend time in Nature and realign with its rhythms. 8. Cultivate joy in your heart and spread it outward. 9. Do no harm.

When you get to the end of that board, having played by the rules, the win is so much more than dying with the most toys.

The win is Eternal Life.

Qu’ils mangent de la brioche, commonly translated as “Let them eat cake,” was not actually spoken by either French Queen Marie Antoinette or First Lady Michelle Obama although it could have been uttered by either.  Like Marie, Michelle continues to display her propensity for excess and luxury while espousing, through word only, her compassion and understanding for the economic plight of the Nation and its citizens.

She is a perfect representation of her husband’s Administration. Self-indulgence and hubris sum it all up.

We need look no further than Christmas. You know, that time of year when we step outside our own wants and egos to fulfill the needs and wants of others.  In theory, it’s a season of compassion, charitable giving and unity. Even when we fall far short of the theory and the ideal, finding ourselves caught up in the materialism of it all, we none-the-less stretch our minds, and our pocketbooks, to give what we hope others will delight in receiving. During tough economic times such as we presently find ourselves in, the stretching is all the more challenging and therefore, perhaps more heartfelt. We make do with less in order to give more.

Except for the Obamas.

A $4M taxpayer funded vacation to Hawaii in the face of looming economic crisis and 54 (yes I said 54!) Christmas trees throughout the White House is the First Couples way of saying not “Merry Christmas” but rather Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.

I do not begrudge a sitting President a Christmas break. Nor do I think the First Family should deny themselves a Christmas tree or two. After all, it’s a big house. And besides, there is nothing inspiring about your leader living like a peanut farmer in the most respected residence in the world. However, it’s a long way from peanut-farmer-austerity to the excesses of French nobility…or, in the instant case, those of the current inhabitants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Don’t even get me started on the President’s “my way or the highway” proposal to Congress to resolve the fiscal crisis that was delivered this week by an arrogant, self-impressed and unapologetic Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner. That’s the earlier hubris reference.

We have serious and mounting challenges to face. You and I are living the reality of those stresses every minute of every day. Yet those in whom we have placed both our confidence and the power to solve, or at least try to solve, these challenges are going about their lives arrogantly, uncompromisingly, and extravagantly.

Lately, I hear people attempting to compare President Obama to Abraham Lincoln. I will admit that both faced a fractured Nation. They are also both thin. Beyond that, I find the comparison laughable. If there is a leader with which to compare our current President I would suggest not Lincoln but Louis…as in Queen Marie’s husband, Louis XVI.

Louis started his reign as a popular monarch, but his indecisiveness led to the populace eventually perceiving him as part of the tyranny they sought to shake off.  It was also the people’s belief that Louis was seeking foreign invasion as a means of political salvation. His credibility eventually undermined, his reign foreshadowed the end of the monarchy and likely birth of the Republic.

At the recent Soul Train Music Awards, actor Jamie Foxx referred to “…Our Lord and Savior Barack Obama.” I think that was a bit extreme. King Barack, and Queen Michelle, would have been just fine.

Perhaps with prayer and an awakened populace this too will end with (a return to) the Republic.