Last Days of Empire

Money as Energy

2011-03-22T09:20:00.000-07:00

There are lots of different ways you can think about money, one of those ways is to think of money as energy. This is not a comprehensive view, but might be considered one facet of the diamond.

As you may be aware, most of the money in the world is created out of nothing by banks when they make a loan. The bank simply makes two entries on a balance sheet – a liability for the debtor and a credit for themselves and voila, money comes into circulation. The money actually gets its value from the work people do to earn it, but that comes later in the cycle – often just before it is returned to the bank as a loan payment.

During the movement of money around the country, or around the world in the case of the US Dollar, it picks up various kinds of energy. Sometimes this is negative energy as when money is used to pay for criminal activity, or it is stolen or changes hands as a result of cheating. This is symbolized by the fact that nearly every US Dollar in circulation has some tiny amount of cocaine on its surface, and is indicated in the terms blood-money, filthy lucre and so on.

When you convert national currency into a local currency, like the B-note (Baltimore MD), not only do you succeed in purging this accumulated negative energy from your transactions, but you also get a boost in positive energy. This is because the B-note does not accrue interest, and because its purpose is to improve the overall economic well-being of the community. When you spend a US Dollar, almost every transaction results in part of that dollar leaving the community. This can be for the purchase of services or supplies which originate elsewhere, for the payment of shareholders or the repayment of loans to outside entities. The B-note, however, has no value outside the community, so it does not leave. This has the effect of ring-fencing the B-note energy, causing it to circulate within the community each transaction adding to the positive energy replacing the entropic and often negative energy of US Dollars.

www.BaltimoreGreenCurrency.org

Are you self-medicating?

2010-08-16T16:26:00.000-07:00

Some people say
that all cannabis use
is medicinal.

Is that going too far?

What do you think?

Here are some
things to consider.

It has always been the case, for all species, and for all time, that
the earth
provides everything
an individual needs to prosper.

Whether that be abundant game for
African carnivores, daily
sunlight for trillions of plants, or fruit bearing trees, seeds and
vegetables for our selves.

Why would the earth not provide an ideal medicine
for many conditions which are common for humans? It would be illogical to
assume that such a thing is unlikely.

Cannabis
is effective in many ways. As a pain reliever,
and
an
appetite
stimulant, to
be sure. But it’s also a
bronchodilator
(as in it opens up the air passages in the lungs making
it easier to breathe) and
cannabinoids
have frequently been
demonstrated
to
have
a curative
effect
on several

different

forms

of
cancer.

This much is widely
known,
and is
the
main
impetus
behind
recent attempts to
make
this
herb

available
to
patients
in many

more studies
all
the
time
and
the known efficacy of
this
plant

continues
to
expand.

It
is demonstratively

effective

in
slowing
the progression of several
degenerative

conditions,
such
as

Alzheimer’s,

ALS,

and MS
to
name
only
a few.

It
kills the

MRSA
superbug.

For

thousands
of
years, cannabis has also been used
as
a mood elevator,

and as
a way of

relieving the
effects of stress.

Almost
any other substance used for this purpose, whether it be alcohol or prescription drugs or the recreational

variety, is
ultimately, toxic
in sufficient quantities.

Cannabis is the
safer alternative to all of these
things.

It is absolutely wrong
to continue the prohibition of cannabis.

It flys in the face of logic.
It runs counter
to the recommendations of just about every study of cannabis
prohibition that has ever been undertaken.

And it denies suffering people
access to something hugely beneficial to their well being.

In its present form, cannabis prohibition manifests itself
as a

racially

biased

war
on the poor.

Its effect
on poor communities, and minority
populations is
absolutely dire.
It
achieves no worthwhile
results. The number
of problem drug users in
the United States
continues to increase
despite
decades of
this expensive
and ugly war on freedom.

It is time to stand up and shout down any politician who continues to
support the present
arrangement, which works to the benefit of a very few at the expense of the
great many. It is
immoral,
and corrupted from
top to bottom.

Rise up. It
is time to end the
war.

Stop arresting
medical cannabis users.

Reschedule
cannabis so that researchers and scientists get a really good look at this
plant.

Good policy stems
from understanding. Willful ignorance is no foundation for anything.

Its time to end this fkn war.

2010-07-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

What are we doing to ourselves? We send young men, and old men, and even some women, to a desert country where they learn how to drag people into the street and shoot them. And then we bring them home, and give them jobs as police officers.

We have been continually at war in some place or another for decades. And this current war, the “war on Terror” is an endless war.

And mostly this war is being waged on us.

Some mad fiend blows up the World Trade Center, and now we, the American people, are the enemy. We must be subject to frequent searches, preposterous indignities like the shoeless shuffle at the gate, where we all pretend to believe in the story of the shoe bomber, cos whatever schmuck made up the story wants constant reassurance that the proles haven’t figured it out yet, and a demonstration of consequences for any that do speak out. Gotta keep the loonies on the path.

The liquid products in a one quart ziplock bag pay homage to the “death and destruction on an unprecedented scale” the description of the farcical liquid bomb airplane plot offered by the British Home secretary at the first press conference.

We honor the myth of the underwear bomber with full body scans. Everyone else is doing it. It makes it seem real.

The whole airport thing has become a ritual where the slaves demonstrate their fealty to the fantasy world of scary boogiemen, by enacting a pantomime. We label this nonsense “security’ but it is a ritual learning – and it is one of the pillars of the disinformation matrix -- the media enhanced false reality. Frequent travelers are being deeply brainwashed by this process.

Ugh. We now live in a completely made up world. What used to be routinely described as torture, has achieved a linguistic makeover in the US media that is newspeak and doublethink manifest. “Ignorance is Strength” would be a far more appropriate slogan for Faux Noise than the laughably improper ‘Fair and Balanced”. Thank heavens for Wikileaks, and the independent bloggers. I don’t know how easy it is to discern the truth from all these sources, but its gotta be healthier for the mind, than the meaningless pablum served up by the corporate stooges on the TeeVee.

It appears that the emotional basis which was the core rationale for the mass slaughter of Afghans and Iraqis has dissipated in the mass consciousness. Nobody really understands why “we” are there anymore. And the drugs and the oil and the money and corruption and the mayhem and slaughter are starting to penetrate.

Democracy is coming.

We need to assert ourselves.

Its time to stop this fkn war.

Is it a Snowstorm or an Exercise?

2010-02-11T09:28:00.000-08:00

Friday, February 5, 2010

Snowpocalypse DC dot com has the single word Panic flashing on and off in screen sized red letters.

Fox noise informs us that the guys in army uniforms driving around in the SUVs are doing important work like taking sick people to the hospital – in case you were wondering who those guys were. It is currently illegal to drive in Baltimore without snow chains on your tires, so almost everyone is immobilized. Damn that weather is effective crowd control. Friday night lock-down.

In the place I am staying there is a big screen TV, tuned in to Fox Noise. I don’t usually watch TV, and I have never been exposed to Fox News before except in YouTube clips, so the snowstorm hype was quite novel. It was absurd, ridiculous overkill – but then I guess that is what is required to make people conform to the new emergency regime. Most of the TV heads were sufficiently aroused to go and buy extra stuff (TV heads are used to being encouraged to buy extra stuff) in readiness for two or three days stuck inside (One of those days being Superbowl Sunday no less). The crowds at the grocery store on Thursday night (it started snowing about noon on Friday) were orderly, but you would expect that in a nice Jewish suburb. Some places in DC looked very crowded indeed. I get the impression that it wouldn’t take much more than a three day snowstorm to start causing really serious problems.

And the authorities get to have a practice. Commentators such as Gerald Celente, James Howard Kunstler and others are predicting significant social unrest in the United States in the near future, and it would be unrealistic to expect that the authorities do not plan and train for such events. Though I am sure a lot of the activity on the roads over the next couple of days will be for the purpose of exercise, some of it will be real. I expect Fox Noise will serve up some suitable vignettes properly weighted to convey the right message.

Stay calm, the authorities have everything under control, resistance is futile, buy some more stuff.

One day in 1988

2009-12-30T09:09:00.000-08:00

I have been a hunger activist since 1980. From street level volunteer work to the highest levels, where policy is determined in Washington DC.

I have also lived and worked among the homeless in various places in England and Australia, and in Los Angeles, CA and Washington DC in the United States.

For the period 1987- 1989 I was Legislative Director of RESULTS. In this capacity I was responsible for the creation of a microcredit program at the US Agency for International Development, and for establishing a relationship between RESULTS and microcredit that continues to expand, to the benefit of the poor and disadvantaged all over the world.

My boss at the time, and the other full-time staff member, was Sam Daley Harris, founder and Executive Director of RESULTS. Currently, Sam is Director of the Microcredit Summit in Washington DC.

During the early part of the campaign to get the Congress to earmark funds for microcredit, (then called micro-enterprise), I was ably assisted by RESULTS group leader and intern from Cornell University, Alexander M. Counts, currently President of the Grameen Foundation.

Congressman Ed Feighan of Ohio agreed to introduce the legislation. The staff person, serving as Legislative Director, and Chief of Staff for Rep. Feighan, was the very capable Mr.George Stephanopoulos, currently anchor of ABC's Good Morning America.

The two senior technical advisers were Dr. John Hatch, founder and managing director of FINCA (now retired). FINCA is one of the largest and most successful microcredit institutions in the world, with lending operations all over central and south America, as well as eastern Europe and Africa.

And Dr. Muhammad Yunus, founder and managing director of the Grameen Bank, Bangladesh, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2006, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.

It is my view that the Grameen Bank, Bangladesh is the most successful human endeavor in existence. This was my view in 1985 when I first came across micro enterprise, and lobbied in the RESULTS management committee for the inclusion of Grameen Bank as an institution RESULTS should specifically support.

It was view in 1987 when, at my insistence, micro enterprise became the sole focus for the first RESULTS legislation, which it was to be my job, as Legislative Director, to shepherd through the congressional maze.

It remains my view.

This is now supported by the fact of more than100 million of the world's poorest families who currently enjoy a sustainable escape from poverty through the workings of micro-credit.

And the sustained drop in birth-rates that microcredit is certainly a factor in creating in Bangladesh is very significant -- demonstrating conclusively that the most efficient path to a stable population is to focus on improving the conditions of the poorest women.

There are many other profound, and significant external benefits to microcredit, but I have written of this elsewhere and that is not my purpose in this journal.

This story of two days in 1988 is singular, and of interest principally to the millions who were facing starvation at the time. But for those few million people it is a very significant story, and I place it here for the public record.

As best as I can remember, this is what happened over the course of two days in 1988.

In January or February of that year, Sam Harris and I had a meeting with Mr. Kelly Kammerer, who was the most senior AID official at that time in Washington, DC.

Mr. Kammerer had requested the meeting to discuss the possibility of a search for common ground. The Agency had found itself on the opposite side of many of our recent campaigns, most particularly microcredit, and wanted to see if there were some issues on which we could work together.

This meeting had been scheduled six weeks earlier, at about the time the passage of the continuing resolution sealed our victory in the initial microcredit campaign.

The day before the meeting Sam handed me a letter as I arrived at the office at about 9:30 in the morning. The letter was from a RESULTS volunteer in Leeds, England. On the first page, the word famine had been underlined in red.

In the UK there was a rumor of an impending famine in Ethiopia.

Less than three years earlier one million Ethiopians died as a result of famine, although aid efforts had prevented starvation for some seven million others before it was over. This event, which some remember as the "Live Aid" famine because of the concert organized by Irish musicians Bob Geldorf and Midge Ure, which resulted in a massive, though belated, aid effort.

Sam asked me to call the aid organizations and see if I could find out what was happening.

I called CARE, Save the Children, and Catholic Relief Services and the USAID Ethiopia Desk. I was told that there might be isolated pockets of famine, but nothing like three years ago, nothing like that.

I kept gathering information, because nobody I talked to actually seemed really sure what was happening. Eventually I was referred to Mr. Pierre-Michel Fontaine whom, I think, was responsible for the UNHCR program in that part of Africa.

I called UN Headquarters in New York, and I identified myself to the secretary as Michael Rigby, calling from RESULTS in Washington DC. I was surprised to be put through immediately, although I think it is fair to say that due to previous and successful campaigns on behalf of UNICEF and IFAD, RESULTS had a good reputation at the UN.

Pierre-Michel explained the situation, and I report the content of our conversation as accurately as I can recall.

MJR -- I am hearing rumors of an impending famine situation in Ethiopia, and I am told that you are the most knowledgeable person on that matter.

PM -- There are three harvests every year in Ethiopia, the first two failed completely, the third is now lying dead on the ground. Even if it rains tomorrow there is no food for millions of people. We are looking at a situation every bit as bad as 1985. We need to ship a million tons of food, and we cannot do ANYTHING (emphasis in original) because we have not had an official request for aid from the Mengistu government in Ethiopia.

MJR -- I will see what we can do.

Mengistu was deliberately starving millions of Eritreans and Tigreans, and would not request aid, even though these people were Ethiopians, according to Mengistu. This was not the first time famine had been used as a weapon, and it probably wasn't the last, but it has been my experience that the real world is often nastier than most people believe possible. Mengistu was holding the capitol of the colonial territory that had been shaped by the Europeans for the specific purpose of corralling long time adversaries in the divide and conquer strategy favored by colonial powers since the time of Alexander.

Mengistu, from the minority tribe, held sway over the other two with the secret police, combined with massive brutality formula, much favored by cold war client states. Mengistu stands out though, even in that crowd, for his diversion of aid funds to military equipment, purchased to enforce his reign of terror. For his use of aid convoys as cover for moving his troops, during a massive and life threatening famine. And just for sheer brutality.

Ethiopia switched sides during the cold war, and in 1988, it was a US client state.

I reported the results of my survey to Sam Harris and he said I should call Joan Mower at Reuters and Andy Holmes at Cox Newspapers. I gave both of these reporters the relevant phone numbers and the situation as described above. Then I went back to doing my usual work for about forty-five minutes, at which point Sam suggested I call Andy and Joan again.

I reached Joan first. I asked if she thought she might be able to use the story I had given her and she said "its already on the wire" and "thanks, good story", and then I had an almost identical conversation with Andy.

Sam suggested I call the aid agencies back again. They all reported that they were gearing up for a major effort. Amazing what the attention of a couple of reporters can do.

So I called Pierre-Michel at the United Nations, and asked him how much grain he wanted from the United States. He said it didn't work like that, because it was a donation, the donor countries decided how much they want to give. So I said "in previous famine situations, what proportion of the total has come from the United States", and he said "about a third" and I said "three hundred and fifty thousand tons," and he said "about that, yes".

I reported this conversation to Sam Harris. And later I went home to my wife and baby.

That night Sam called all of the regional co-ordinators, who called all the group leaders, who called all the partners, and the next day more than two hundred and fifty people spread across thirty-five cities and twenty six states scoured the newspapers looking for reports on a famine in Ethiopia. If they found one, they cut it out, and photocopied then faxed (with the masthead and the date) to the RESULTS office. Faxes poured in all morning, and when we left for our 11:30 am meeting with Kelley Kammerer I was carrying nine.

RESULTS was well named.

In addition to Kelly, and Sam, and myself, at the meeting there were three gentlemen from "The White House" who thought that it would be in our interests to get a hands-on understanding of the Agency for International Development, and they were prepared to fly us to any project we wanted to see, and as many projects as we wanted to see, anywhere in the world, at their expense, for twelve months.

Sam said we didn't need to fly anywhere, and we were quite prepared to cover our own expenses for research, if they would only point out to us which of their programs benefited the very poorest people, we would be happy to make them famous. They replied that there were no programs which benefited the very poorest, they preferred to target assistance a few rungs up, so that the benefits trickle down to those at the bottom. "In that case", said Sam, "we have nothing further to talk about".

At that point the White House contingent left, and into the somewhat embarrassed silence that followed their departure I interjected, "Kelly, have you heard anything about a possible famine situation in Ethiopia?" He said, "I think there was something in this morning's clippings" and undoubtedly glad to have something to move on to, he checked his whole file while I laid my nine on the coffee table in front of me.

It wasn't a big table and so the photocopied newspaper clippings completely covered it, and were falling off the edges. Kelly pulled out two sheets from his file of about twenty five photocopies.

And then I looked right in his eyes and I said. "Kelly, how long will it take to ship three hundred and fifty thousand tons of grain to Addis Ababa?". He said that the Agency's emergency allocation was good for something like thirty-nine thousand tons, and three hundred and fifty thousand also exceeded some other threshold, so that it would require primary legislation, for which you would have to arrange a special session of this committee and that committee and a whole bunch of other committees and then you get the President to sign it and then you can get three hundred thousand tons.

As he spoke, and named the committees we'd have to bring together, I ran through a best case scenario in my mind. If we really pushed, we could make a big enough deal out of this situation that the various committees would rapidly find a quorum, and still it was going to take months. So when he had finished speaking I responded "So, August" , this being a date several months from when this conversation was taking place.

He seemed a little surprised, 'cos I think he knew that if we really pushed it we could make all that happen by August. I certainly believed we could have done so, and I am also sure we would have done so had that proved necessary. Kelly said, "Yes, that might be possible by August."

"Kelly", I said, with some considerable feeling, "Tens of thousands of people will be dead by then."

He said that he would bring the matter up at the daily briefing of the Agency Director, Mr. Alan Bond, a recent appointment.

Now I reckon Kelly is looking at me, like I'm someone who has just turned down the bribe (free travel, anywhere for a year all-expenses paid) and I am offering him peace and quiet in return for a few hundred million dollars worth of food aid.

And he knows that on day one of this campaign, at eleven thirty in the morning, we have press in eleven (my nine and Kelly's two) newspapers. This situation is as new for Kelly today, as it had been for me the day before. He knows that we are only just getting started, and that we overcame the administration's opposition in the microcredit, IFAD and UNICEF campaigns.

I think that the swift response of the volunteers had helped make it clear to Mr. Kammerer that we were very serious about this matter. As for the amazing coincidence of this meeting having been scheduled six weeks earlier - who can say? A cubic centimeter of chance.

I don't know what Kelly Kammerer said to Alan Bond but I think its likely he recommended a significant response.

If you want to succeed in a campaign you have to go full tilt until they actually sign the necessary document -- no matter how much they protest that you are pushing too hard. The steamroller method is the only appropriate strategy in an emergency situation.

Over the course of the next few days we sent out at least twenty six newspaper clippings in daily mailings to a whole bunch of Congressmen - all the members of the relevant committees , all the members whose districts were covered by whatever particular newspaper printed the item (and once you got on our list you got all of them, whether they were in your district or not). A whole bunch of AID people, committee staff, aid agencies, and people at the UN.

To make all this happen, in Washington at that time we had a couple of cheap IBM clone computers (and sufficient expertise on hand to make them productive) and we had Sharon Mason - our secret weapon of a secretary, originally a volunteer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. And we had me & Sam.

And across the US we had Dorsey Lawson - a little old lady from Pasadena, and a couple of hundred really serious volunteers.

We were the kind of organization where the Executive Director, and the Legislative Director regularly spent Friday evenings standing at the counter in the photocopy store, folding letters and stuffing them into envelopes.

Within a few days Alan Bond was in Addis Abbaba where he announced an immediate shipment of one hundred and ninety thousand tons.

The rest of the world, (prodded by [among others], RESULTS partners in England, and Canada, and Germany and Australia as well as the larger United States organization.), quickly emulated the United States, (whose subsequent further contributions brought them close to three hundred thousand tons by the time it was all over) and almost all one million tons were committed in about two months.

Not all of the aid got to where it was most needed, and probably ten thousand people did die as a result of famine that year, but that's a lot less than a million. And that's got to be a good thing.

Dreadful conditions, and frequent outbreaks of violence continue to make parts of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia very difficult places to live. But for a few months, many of the people who do the right thing were calling the shots, and so it allowed some of humanity's brighter lights to shine for a while. And that's a good thing too.

I offer the above story which can be checked by interviewing the people named above, should there be any doubt about my character.

Tour de Fours

2009-08-13T00:54:00.000-07:00

Dr. Muhammad Yunus (Nobel Laureate, Author, Mentor) was broadcast on C-span for a couple of hours today. And he got the Medal of Freedom from President Barak H. Obama. A flicker of hope, perhaps.

A massive expansion of microcredit in the USA is poised for take off.

Yunus has 1,000 borrowers in Jackson Heights, NY, and a 100% repayment rate. Start ups are underway in Omaha, NB, and other places, including Baltimore, MD.

Grameen Bank is completely unaffected by the recession, and that is true in whatever country it is operating. Including the United States.

The talk today (I'll add a link as soon as it is available), has moments of pure genius. Watch for the clever pun on the word “fours” - pretty classy for a native Bengali speaker.

The day President Barak H. Obama was graced with a visit from Yunus.

I am in awe of this man, and have been since 1985. It is the pride of my life that I was able to work alongside him for a while.

One day every single person in the world will know his name.

And you can take that to the bank.

Biowarfare & the War on Drugs

2009-05-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Is the war on drugs gonna end?

Some people think it should.

If the drugs are no longer criminal, the cops lose their training exercise, and some of their incentive for doing thorough searches, such as that which turned up the test-tubes, containing stuff (supposedly, non-lethal) from a biowarfare lab in Canada.

Lose the drug war and you lose some effectiveness in interdiction. Biowarfare agents are fortunately rare, but safeguards have to be 100% effective. In the event of state sponsored terrorism a la 911, no conceivable defense can be 100% effective. So how much do we need the current regime of border control, local police surveillance and swat teams?

Due to new legislation in Maryland, next year it will be possible to determine, for example, what 600+ annual swat team deployments are being used for in Prince George's County. How many “drug busts” as opposed to actual crimes. Data for the whole state of Maryland will be published next year.

How many swat team drug busts are carried out annually by the DEA, and is this broken down by city, state, region?

If you put these guys to work on another non-existent crime, like bio-warfare, you also create a large well heeled, well equipped & trained organization with known ties to organized crime, politics, legitimate intelligence & black ops and now with a vested interest in bio-terrorism (cos if there is no bio-terrorism event, the whole enterprise has no justification for existing).

If no actual terrorist threat occurred, then these forces would certainly be sufficient to manufacture hysteria by some other means. The death toll will, no doubt, be reflected in the huge sums of public money subsequently devoted to the care and well being of our friends in the fancy uniforms. (The deplorable state of the health-care available to the survivors of past uniformed excesses will, no doubt, disappear from the public dialog.)

One thing you can see from the drug war is that various interests congeal around the utilization of all that kit, and the fancy black uniforms, and the vast swathes of uncounted cash, and all of the corruption that goes along with that. The last thing you need is a similar infrastructure focused on some other 'crime'. There have to be better ways of dealing with this threat that are both commensurate with the extent of the potential damage, and consistent with basic human decency.

The war on drugs is, among other things, the current attempt by capitalist extremists to disable the source of any coherent resistance to their dominant role in national policy. It is, at its heart a war on the poor, and it is no longer possible to conceal this fact.

Can we hope for change?

Dying Mall

2009-04-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

I went out to my local shopping mall. While I was taking pictures of the empty buildings and acres of vacant parking lots I was conscious of the fact that my behaviour was sufficient to cause any right-thinking red-blooded American to report me to the authorities.

I Mean that even says TARGET right there in front of your face.

Look away

And that is what this essay is about.

Tilting at Windmills

2009-04-18T20:48:00.000-07:00

According to Greenpeace, in what must be considered a wildly optimistic scenario, China could supply close to 10% of her electricity from wind power. That is, assuming no growth in China's electricity demand for the next decade. (Even if her economic growth slows to 6% for the next decade, Chinas electricity demand will close to double in that time.)

This is clearly not sufficient to deal with the problems of pollution.

One must also consider whether the full exploitation of wind “resources” in China would not also raise some other additional problems – species extinctions, for example. Other, unanticipated effects are almost inevitable.

We must seek another path.

I think the answer must be some form of micro power generation, with a panoply of possibilities tailored to individual situations. For example, a typical home would benefit from insulation, solar, wind, geothermal, micro-hydro, and/or cold fusion. While industrial plant would utilize wave, geothermal, solar collector, and/or cold fusion.

Such a system would be able to quickly adapt to new inventions and innovations would be rapid, because so many individuals would be engaged in the effort.

I don't think we can expect to utilize a great deal of our existing infrastructure in this activity.

We must create new ways of meeting our needs without the excesses of our energy intensive lifestyle. Local production and consumption must replace the five thousand mile ceasar salad.

It will be necessary to provide financing and capital to millions of homeowners and microentrepreneurs to carry out the refurbishing of homes and businesses.

It would be a disaster to attempt to carry out this effort with the failed capitalist banking system.

The best way to organize the effort would be through micro-finance, and social businesses.

But I would say that.

Ideas that take a long time to die

2009-03-26T19:13:00.000-07:00

Even if the media pundits saw the econopocalypse coming they were unable to report it. Libel laws in the UK, and self-interest and commercial pressure in the USA are sufficient to ensure that certain stories NEVER get published, and in addition, a particular tone of boosterism is rigorously enforced.

Consider, if there are forty routes from here to where I am going, but my vehicle is only capable of negotiating 30 of those routes, then I am limited by the tool I am using. Software works the same way. There are always more options available to the imagination than the software can accommodate. Where this becomes a problem, is when force of habit leads to a failure of the imagination. The externally imposed restrictions become internalized. And this is basic to the way humans learn, so it is not possible to transcend these limitations.

Only the birth death cycle allows the shedding of certain kinds of ideas. Our current situation has come about, in part, because an increase in life expectancy has provided us with an elderly leadership cadre with an irrational attachment to outdated and inaccurate ideas. This dislocation in turn is further compounded by the exponential increase in the rate of change (See Toffler, Alvin "Future Shock"). Hence we careen towards unprecedented crisis.

Still.

What is with the President? He has polled the country on four occasions since his election, and on every occasion legalization of marijuana has been the most strongly supported issue. And yet the President continues to dismiss the idea out of hand. Is this stupid? What would it cost? Legalization would gain the fierce loyalty of an otherwise marginalized, and very vocal minority, as well as meet with the approval of the vast majority of the American public. So why not do it?

As with anything in Washington, various interests combine to support the status quo. Overcoming these interests seems to be beyond the capacity of three quarters of the population. This is true for health care, where the vast majority support the single payer model, yet this option is barely discussed in the media, and it is true for marijuana. Why is that, and what interests are we talking about, that are so powerful, they can blithely ignore, and even ridicule, the vast majority with impunity?

Obviously the drug cartels. All the other big players in illegal drugs - banks, intelligence agencies, police and other law enforcement, prison guards, prison owners and investors, supporters of police state apparatus and SWAT team deployments, alcohol and tobacco companies, religious extremists, big pharma, the American Medical Association, the stock markets, weapons and surveillance equipment manufacturers, tinpot dictators with a desire for US supplied weapons. The Skull and Bones secret society. The Clinton and Bush crime families.

No surprise that this is proving a bit difficult.

Still, anyone who is sticking up for that lot deserves no quarter. Once more into the breach..

Sow Flowers

2009-03-05T11:33:00.000-08:00

Sow flowers to make a garden bloom around you,
The thorns you sow will prick your own feet.

Arrows shot at others
Will return to hit you as they fall.

You yourself will come to teeter on the lip
Of a well dug to undermine another.

Though you look at others with contempt,
It's you whose body will be reduced to dust.

Humanity is all one body;
To torture another is simply to wound yourself.

When you don't look for faults in others,
They will conceal your weaknesses in return.

Make your path straight now, by the bright light of day;
For pitch darkness will come without warning.

Consider no wickedness insignificant, however slight;
For the little deeds of darkness soon pile up.

If another does you harm, return them good;
Or evil will devour you too.

The heart that is safe in the storm
Is the one which carries
Others' burdens
Like a
Boat.

-- from The Poetry of Rahman Baba: Poet of the Pashtuns, translated by Robert Sampson and Momin Khan

According to the BBC, Taleban vandals destroyed the ancient shrine to Sufi poet Rahman Baba because women continued to visit the shrine. And, no, I don't think that such actions justify the ongoing slaughter of Afghans by invading corporate armies, if anything, the military action provides a cover for, as well as a means whereby, such atrocities are achieved. There are proven ways to deal with the profound errors of thinking that this desecration represents, but they do not involve violence in any way shape or form.

Toss your balls in the air!

2009-02-25T11:13:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEZB4taSEoA

Rick Santelli - calls for Chicago tea party to dump derivative securities into Lake Michigan.

New incarnation as a revolutionary leader.

Says Washington and Jefferson (both potheads) are rolling in their graves.

The split widens.

What Mr. Santelli and his ilk fail to realize, is that their honest labor, and enlightened capitalist philosophy have brought this planet close to a dangerous precipice. The world is no longer split between the haves and have-nots, the savers and the borrowers, nor the worthy and the profane. We are all dependent on the biosphere.

An inchoate coalition continues to coalesce.

One group is uniting across international boundaries. Language and cultural values, rather than obstacles to understanding become opportunities for expansion and growth for these people. This group values peace, love, respect, health and well-being. They care about not only their own food (these people do not eat at MacDonalds), but also that there be food for everyone else.

Most of them are very poor, about two billion of them live on less than two dollars a day. Close to a billion of them have access to credit through micro-finance programs. Millions of them are local environmental activists, thousands of them travel the world and lend strength to the whole movement through the cohesion and communication they provide.

They work in trade unions and credit unions, hospitals and clinics. Some of them work at Starbucks at the moment, but as the econopocalypse continues they will find other ways to contribute. You see what this group understands, and what Mr Santelli has yet to realize, is that the jobs thing is over. There. Are. No. Fucking. Jobs.

So that raises the question – what shall we do? Hmmm. Tough one that. Let's see. The earth currently losing approximately two hundred species a day. Earth's population expected to reach nine and a half billion by 2050. Global agriculture absolutely dependent on chemicals and fuel currently obtained from a source which must be replaced for many reasons, not least of which are the stench, the noise, the asphyxiating fumes, the destruction of fragile ecosystems, the oppression of tribal peoples, the upholding of nasty little fascist torturers as legal heads of state, not to mention a significant portion of the global trade in weapons, many of which are also heavily dependent on this fuel source.

OK so there's plenty to do. Now how shall we organize ourselves to accomplish these things that need doing?

The best thing would be to set up companies. We could call them Social Business companies. Social business is a non-loss, non-dividend company with a social purpose. (Cleaning up a toxic dump, for example, or restoring a damaged wetlands, restoring fish stock to traditional fishing areas, sifting thousands of tons of plastic debris from the Pacific Ocean gyre, that sort of thing).

I wish I could claim this idea as my own, but it came from Dr. Muhammad Yunus, whose accomplishments in the field of improving the opportunities for tens of millions of the world's poorest people are ample testament to the quality of that mind.

The future is ours. We are one, Mr. Santelli, and you are welcome to join us -- I've even thought of a “job” for you.

We need to set up a social stock-market where investors can stash their gains from the destruction of our living space. A way for the capitalist classes to pay us back for the mess made by corporations acting in the interests of the shareholders (as they are legally obliged to do).

We pay no interest, and offer no dividend. Under specified circumstances the investment can be returned to the investor, but no more than that. The success of the business is determined by how much it contributes to the general well being. All ventures are essentially co-ops, although some recognition of seniority is afforded on the basis of experience and accomplishment, the wild disparities in incomes between the “workers” and the “executives” are to be confined to the dustbin of history.

That is the future we are already creating, even before the pile of debris from the capitalist expansion has completed its fall. The pinnacle of global dominance so briefly achieved, must necessarily be followed by a collapse. To argue otherwise is to completely misunderstand the force of Change in the universe. (A Chinese mind would never make such an error). The seeds are already planted.

So, by all means, toss you derivatives in the lake, Mr. Santelli. The losers are about to become winners – do you know which group you are in?

The Obamasiah has been anointed, and the econopocalypse has continued unabated.

2009-01-25T13:58:00.001-08:00

The Obamasiah can apparently raise the dead. Not only has the corpse of Osama bin Laden been re-animated for the purpose of mixing some new terro-politica tapes (a sure-fire hit on CNN and YouTube), but the long dead John Maynard Keynes has arisen in the form of untold amounts of money being used to stimulate the economy.

Pardon my skepticism, but isn't this simply a matter of shoveling piles of depreciating paper currency in the general direction of campaign contributors and other constituencies. In addition the Federal Reserve (which isn't Federal and has no reserves) has accepted as collateral, worthless derivatives contracts (the famed troubled assets), and so far pumped between three and eight (nobody knows for sure) Trillion dollars into the collapsed banking system with no end in sight. The credit crisis continues, despite these unthinkably huge amounts of "money" being added to the debts of our grandchildren. Iconoclast Webster Tarpley is predicting "Hyper-stagflation" as the upcoming final stage in the death of the dollar.

I can see no possibility of reviving this dead monster. Even the Obamasiah can't breathe a spark of life into the rapidly decomposing carcass - to paraphrase Monty Python, "This economy wouldn't voom if you put 4 million volts through it." Official figures put unemployment in America at just above 7%. A true measure of the number of working age adults currently unemployed would put that figure closer to fourteen percent, and if the underemployed were included, then the number would likely be between twenty and twenty-five percent.

I have been unemployed since December 2006. A few very small short term contracts have allowed me to earn less than three thousand dollars since then, however the constant stream of stimulus packages from the Congress have several times refilled the unemployment benefits bowl on my behalf, and this, combined with my ability to live very inexpensively, and the fact that the allowance I receive is inflated by the almost unlimited overtime in my last job, means that I have a viable income at present, and it seems that this may continue for as much as another year. Enough time, I hope, for me to realize my ambition of developing sufficient income from my exploits on the internet. Of course I shall continue to send out applications for the real or imagined vacancies that are retrieved from the various employment databases patrolled by web-bots on my behalf, but with half a million jobs disappearing every month at the moment, I do not really expect any action from that quarter. The massive number being added to the rolls makes it likely that the checks will keep on coming. The danger of riots and massive increases in property crime will scare the politicians into appropriating unemployment benefits extensions over and over again. The sinking economy, therefore, works to my benefit for the time being.

Everyone else is fucked. I went to visit my local Circuit City yesterday. It's a five minute bike ride, and I pass it on the way home from the metro station, but this was my first visit. The store was crowded with bargain hunters, although most were fondling rather than buying the merchandise. The store-wide 10% discount might accurately reflect the thin profit margins in consumer electronic sales, but it is not a steep enough discount to stimulate the feeding frenzy necessary to empty the shelves, nor reduce the stacks of cardboard boxed big screens. I was hoping to pick up a camera, and some phone accessories, but I can get better bargains on the net, so I left carrying my empty backpack. I wonder how long my local mall will remain open. The theater closed a couple of weeks ago. The loss of Circuit City is another nail in the coffin of the unlamented consumer lifestyle. I wonder what we will all do for fun when the shopping craze has ended. Gardening, I expect, will be big.

Linux

2009-01-04T09:44:00.000-08:00

I started using windows in 1992. So I expected to have some problems getting used to an entirely new operating system. Linux Ubuntu installed easily enough – it took a lot less time than a windows XP installation, and asked fewer questions. It came with Sun microsystems open office as well and a few other programs – such as Firefox, Rhythm music player, Totem movie player and a bunch of games and accessories. There were no problems with installation, and a problem I had been having for months with my wireless network card cleared up after the system automatically downloaded a couple of hundred updates shortly after I logged on the first time.

There was no firewall included, but apparently you don't really need one because Linux doesn't have all the vulnerabilities that come with Windows. I downloaded one anyway because I have been hacked three times recently and I am making this switch in order to improve my security.

Software downloads couldn't be much easier, with hundreds of applications available from the applications menu, you just click on the ones you want and they are downloaded and installed with no trouble at all. Some programs, such as the Cinelerra movie editing software require a bit more fiddling about with terminal commands, but as a fairly expert Windows user I had little difficulty figuring out how that all worked.

Within about four hours from completing the backup of my windows drive I was up and running, seamlessly using documents from my NTFS backup drive. The Cinelerra software is vastly more capable than the commercial software I had been using for movies, and remains the only program I have installed so far that may take some time to learn.

My only regret, now that I have been a Linux user for more than a week, is that I didn't do this years ago.

On the hacker's trail...

2008-12-23T11:35:00.000-08:00

On the hacker’s trail.

My new site got hacked last week. Almost all of the links were broken, and since the site is, in essence, a collection of links, it took a lot of work to fix.

The hacker left me a message, so that I would recognize him/her/them(?) the next time.

The next time was today.

Same MO, but this time the message said I was so wide open he/she/they could hit me anywhere, anytime.

So I shut everything down, and thought about it.

My site gets launched in a few days. I have been hacked twice. It looks personal – ie I don’t think I have been trailed over by some bot, someone is coming specifically after me. So I have to upgrade security. Funny I already did that this week, and now I need to accelerate.

Well, whoever it is did me a favor. So I am grateful, actually. Thank you Mr. Hacker. Keep the kids off the highway. Peace.

The Drug War

2008-11-21T14:54:00.000-08:00

The War on (some) Drugs

Lets start with reality. People use drugs. Always have. Always will.

Whoever controls the drugs, controls a huge amount of cash. At the moment criminal drug cartels aligned with corrupt law enforcement and corrupt intelligence, appointed and elected officials, secret societies (notably Skull & Bones), and corrupt banking, software and finance companies. Huge amounts of drug money gets invested in “legitimate” stocks, and funds secret quasi-governmental operations such as Iran-Contra. Central Intelligence and other secret agencies have actively participated in large scale heroin operations in the Golden Triangle (Air America) during the Vietnam war, in Central American Cocaine (Iran-Contra, Mena Arkansas) and currently in Afghanistan with the huge poppy crop which emerged shortly after the CIA organized Afghanistan Campaign (Operation Enduring Freedom). George Orwell would have recognized the genius of that name.

Less affluent neighborhoods in the United States are plagued with Heroin and Crack Cocaine. The thugs who rise to the top of the illegal street trade are self selected – the more violent and ruthless rise to the top. Instead of sales tax revenue and legitimate trade boosting the local economy there are violent street battles and heavy handed police crackdowns. Or lawlessness and breakdown, leaving the children with no chance of a decent future.

That’s what happens when you declare war on drugs. You send a massive chunk of the economy underground, and contribute to all kinds of corruption. Sure, you might have a lot of people in prison, but is that something to celebrate? It seems that the current policy creates far more problems than it “solves”. In fact it doesn’t “solve” the problem, or even move the situation forward in any way whatsoever.

Less affluent communities in the United States, and in many other parts of the world, will remain in a desperate condition for so long as this misguided drug war continues.

There are political forces in this country and elsewhere that see an advantage to themselves in flooding potentially dissident communities with addictive and destructive drugs. Stops the people from organizing effectively to protect their legitimate economic interests. Allows the imprisonment of any potentially disruptive element (eg. young men). There are some twisted people in this world, and some of them have very important jobs.

Drugs are dangerous. But the drug war is far more dangerous. It is time for some clear headed thinking that starts with knowledge and understanding. Enough of this politically induced ignorance. Military based responses to the production and distribution of Cocaine in Columbia have not diminished the flow of product, but they have created an outsized and over-equipped military force. Maybe that was the point. Someone’s idea of a political compromise – I’ll support your drug war if you’ll help me arm this regime that is friendly to certain “American Interests”.

Drug money exists as a tapeworm eating away the inside of our economic structures. Catherine Austin Fitts coined the term “tapeworm economy” and her point of view is very informative on this matter. And Terrence McKenna is another voice representing a legitimate interest. Drugs are dangerous, but waging war doesn’t diminish the danger. In fact the danger of drugs is significantly increased by the fact of their illegality. Decriminalization can lead to more sensible control. There is no control in an illegal system by definition – that’s what makes it illegal, the lack of control.

Drugs are dangerous, but fear is a poor foundation upon which to build a policy. Take a good long look, and then, in the context of a complete reversal in the long term policy of prohibition, decriminalize marijuana, and step back and notice that the world doesn’t fall apart as a result. Notice you might be selling a lot less Prozac and Zanex, but people are happier, and there is a bit more green money being passed around the neighborhood. The more this money circulates, the more prosperity accrues to the neighborhood, and this shows up in the form of more small traders and shops, locally owned and operated businesses. More jobs, better schools, more focused law enforcement, safer neighborhoods, less corruption. Less alcohol consumption – especially among the young.

And having braved the unknown with that one simple step, and having learned what there is to be learned, tackle the problem of addictive drugs with enlightened dispatch. It is impossible to imagine that a policy could be crafted which would produce a more negative result that the current dismal situation.

New Bike

2008-07-29T09:50:00.000-07:00

I always name my bicycles. The last one was called “gravel” which I took from the Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

“The Wheelchair” is from a Chinese Factory. She, for she is the most assuredly feminine of all the machines I have owned, can go places most wheelchairs cannot = up and down kerbs for example, which is necessary if the bike is to be viable transportation.

I haven’t begun to explore her slinky strength. I am barely able to walk at the moment, due to circulation problems in my leg(s). This condition will only get worse unless I take steps to reverse the deterioration. So I need the advice of an expert in healing and herbs.

And I need the bike to get to his house. Cos If I were to go by metro, going by recent experience, I’d expect it to hurt. The pressure bandage helped some, The daily aspirin, and the daily lemon juice and baking soda may be having some positive effect, who knows how bad this would be without that? I can manage the ride all the way there and back, but I might take the train there and bike back. Depending. Get some Stevia anyway.

Twenty four speeds, front shocks, spring mounted comfort saddle, disks front and rear. I added a monster back-rack with custom cage, carved out of a black plastic File Tray from Target. Extra reflectors, lights. I have the front shocks screwed down pretty tight, and the tires at the high end of the range, but I cannot make “wheelchair” perform like “Gravel”. The twist-grip gear changes are a step backwards from the crisp and slick triggers, and the pointer moves across the numbers, instead of the numbers moving past the fixed point, so they take some getting used to.

I am traveling mostly on the sidewalk (where I was comfortable with Gravel on the road) and I am in lower gear due to my physical limitations. I am out of shape, because it is ten months since Gravel got nicked. And the wheelchair has really substandard pedals. So I cannot claim to have mastered the skills needed to test wheelchair against my own limitations, let alone her innate potential. She makes it possible for me to have a life outside of this room. And for that I am truly grateful. I hope we have a long and close relationship.

Microcredit News

2008-07-14T20:32:00.000-07:00

Yunus voted second leading intellectual in the world. (Why is Arhundati Roy not on this list?)

Economist Article. Is this microcredit? Or shameless exploitation of impoverished people?

Book Review - Small Loans, Big Dreams

I met Alex Counts when he entered microcredit circles in 1987. We worked together for a while. Alex was very competent. I recommended that he pursue a career
in microcredit. So you can’t expect an unbiased review of Alex’s book Small Loans, Big Dreams.

Twenty years of work informs this book. The one thing that really stands out is just how difficult it is to succeed at micro-credit. How hard the women have to work. The range of obstacles they have to overcome. Inspirational and daunting. How do microfinance institutions manage 112 million people willing to undertake such an arduous path? How dire does the alternative have to be before this is a viable option?

112 million families receiving microfinance services in 2007. This is a growth of 12% from the previous year. At 12% annual growth the current target of 175 million poor families by 2015 will be exceeded by more than 100 million.

The average annual growth rate over the past 11 years is just a hair below 32%. If it were possible to continue that rate of growth, the number of families receiving microfinance services would be 1.03 Billion by 2015 – about half of all the families in the world.

Yunus also published a book recently. Here is Yunus talking about Social Business from 2007.

What about the conceptual failure. And one conceptual failure that I would like to share with you because you are coming up with lots of conceptual framework in your mind.

It’s very clear how it fails in addressing the issue of human abilities. It is the concept of business. We all know what is business, but the existing concept of business, I feel very strongly doesn’t do justice to human beings. It limits human beings ability.

The present concept of business is to make money. Business means business to make money. There is no other business definition. Profit maximization is the mission of business.

That’s fine.

But is that what human being is all about?

What about the other urges people have inside their heart? Same human being who wants to make money at the same time wants to do other things, do good to other people, to make an impact on this planet. How come I can not accommodate it in my business.

So I am saying there is a failure to limiting human being in only one role. Single dimensional human beings. But human beings are multi-dimensional. Human being want to make money, but human beings are also caring human beings. So in order to accommodate the other urges why cant we create another type of business. Maybe we call them social business. Social business is a business to do good to other people. Social business is to solve a social problem. Not for making money, or personal gain out of it. It’s a non-loss, non-dividend company. With a social objective.

And some people say,” Ah people are not crazy to do such things”. And I say you will be amazed how crazy people are, they give away their money in philanthropy. If they can give away money for philanthropy, they can put their money to do good to other people too, as a business. Philanthropy is a wonderful idea, you help people But philanthropy money has a capacity of one type, but social business money, social business dollar has a multiple of that capacity, because it recycles, it goes on. It can solve the problem.

As Alex points out in Small Loans, Big Dreams microfinance institutions modeled on Grameen are one example of a social business. There are many others. Yunus is working to establish a social stock exchange whereby people can invest in social business. This has enormous growth potential -- the available market is huge. About six and a half billion people could benefit directly from not for profit businesses capitalized to take care of environmental and social problems. Because these organizations are bubbled up from the bottom, rather than managed from the top, they remain closer to local realities and priorities. This is a vastly more efficient process than relying on government programs, and of far greater utility than business capitalized for the purpose of making money.

What kind of world do you want?

Diebold to the rescue?

2008-03-02T12:03:00.000-08:00

What’s the betting there’s a big Diebold win for Clinton in Texas and Ohio? The recount in New Hampshire was cancelled due to lack of money even though serious discrepancies had been exposed. Remember the massive outcry?

I don’t think the Clinton/Bush cabal are going to give up their dreams of global domination just because a few million ignorant voters decide they want something else. The American presidency has been “won” by fraud for all of the past eight years, few people objected, and those that did were largely ignored by the corporate media. There have been no changes in media ownership which suggest a more reliable and impartial coverage this time around. If anything, the criminals have strengthened their grip.

The gap between reality and the fiction presented by the world’s media barons has been a gaping chasm since September 2001, and the gap grows wider and deeper with each passing day.

Change

2008-02-07T10:52:00.000-08:00

Doctor Shortage Change Obama We Are One

Maryland is running short of doctors. In part this is due to the outsourcing of medical training costs by accepting immigrant doctors and depriving young Americans of the opportunity to train for a lucrative and worthwhile career. This is the cost of legal immigration. By focusing the discussion on illegal immigration, the true costs and advantages of the present immigration system are concealed. What happens to a society which develops along this path? It may be financially expedient for a while, but ultimately the community must provide for the training of its own doctors (engineers, lawyers, scientists etc). The bills are coming due, just at the point we can least afford to pay them.

A more efficient health care system would take much greater advantage of greater numbers of less expensive nurses and primary health care workers, and provide a great many worthwhile jobs for the community. This is what government funded health care programs do. They provide lots of good worthwhile jobs. Why are we importing people from other countries to do these professional jobs, when we have such a great need for decent jobs in less well off communities all over the country.

Just because it is manifestly easier for the politicians to contain the great American tradition of accepting people from all over the world in search of a better life for themselves, by allocating slots to people based on their having achieved advanced education overseas, at someone else’s expense. WE demonize as illegal, the undocumented workers who arrive penniless and desperate, as so many of our forefathers did before us. And we forget, in this dispute of who has a “right” to be here, that many arrived in chains, and their descendants still face an almost impossible struggle in many cities and farm communities all over this land of the free.

It is in the nature of all things to change. It is the only constant of which we can be confident. Unceasing change and transformation is fundamental to our existence on this mortal plane. The genetic make up, and the conscious historical traditions of our people are expanding at an ever increasing rate. This is inevitable, and therefore, if you want to be able to understand this change, you need to accept its benefits and its other consequences, and grow your understanding in alignment with it. Senator Obama’s candidacy for the nomination of the Democratic Party is one of the manifestations of this change. The multi cultural lives of our teenagers and young adults in urban and suburban areas of the United States are another indication. Change is speeding up. This is partly because of our abilities to communicate with vast numbers of people very quickly, but this again is neither cause nor effect, but manifestation of a far deeper and more permanent change.

Old barriers of race are breaking down in the United States. Oh we still find lots of ways to separate ourselves from each other. Our suburban lifestyles and car culture have cut and sliced the arrangement of our lives - we don’t get out enough, and when we do go out, casual conversations with the neighbors, once a feature of ordinary life everywhere for hundreds of thousands of years, has been replaced with chatting to the clerk at your local McDonalds. People now meet each other on the internet. In response to a god-awful loneliness (hmm…reminds me of some days as a teenager) people connect with each other over vast distances, and over their local neighborhood sitting in front of small screens.

Pretty soon our situation is going to be dramatically changed in response to the decline in the use of oil to power our lifestyle.

There are all sorts of reasons why we must, and inevitably will, decrease our reliance on fossil fuels. This will entail some very serious re-tooling, and a big rethink in architecture and the design of community living spaces. We simply will not be traveling anything like the distances our current generation, and the previous couple, have always taken for granted. This is another big change that America is racing to embrace, while at the same time squeezing the maximum economic benefits from the existing arrangement. The old structure must fall, and it seems the owners of all that capital investment are preparing (however grudgingly and slowly) to switch to the green economy. The advent of Green products from the makers of Clorox Bleach is a welcome sign. Recent restructuring of the conditionality of loans to energy generation companies requiring investment in cleanup and in renewable sources, is another.

One thing of which you can be certain, the number of energy units consumed is going to go way down for a lot of us. The pollution and noise of the internal combustion engine is about to undergo a dramatic decline. The air will be a lot cleaner.

Managing this change will require very flexible leadership in Washington DC. Does Obama have the capacity to manage, to lead through the minefield of competing interests? Well, maybe, maybe not, but somehow or other we must, if we are to continue to be successful as a nation, develop a way of living in harmony with each other, and with the natural world of which we are a very important part.

In other words, our selves must unite and integrate at higher and more inclusive ways until we can form policy from the core idea that what is good for the world, and for the people of the world, most of all, is necessarily good for America. We must flow with the change to be successful, to resist, to try and delay the change will exhaust the power of all who try it.

We are One.

We are becoming one world people in a very meaningful and transcendent manner. Nothing can interfere with this change. It runs far deeper than the superficial reality of nation states, and water shortages, and resource wars, and whatever else dances in the pixels of broadcast reality.

We are One. It is manifest.

Corporate Rule

2008-02-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

The issue that only Ron Paul will discuss in the Presidential campaign is the use of the United States military to protect the profits of trans-national corporations all over the world. It is time we understood that our role in the world, as American workers and American taxpayers is to provide for the needs of international finance. We are slaves to a homegrown power that has no loyalty to our country.

It is corporate power and profit that dictates our foreign and domestic policy. WE have been overthrown. Government of, by and for the people has perished from the earth.

If we are to take back that which is rightfully ours, our freedom, then we must remove from government all those corporate lackeys who have been complicit in this counter-revolution, and shut down the institutions of global dominance. And the really sad truth is that this may no longer be possible within the lifetime of anyone now living.

How is an individual to face up to this reality and begin to turn the tide? First we must, by our individual choices and actions, refuse to support the corporate monsters. Don’t work for them, don’t buy their products, don’t vote for their lackeys. Transitioning to this role is difficult because we have been asleep for many decades. Each of us must evaluate our lifestyle and replace those activities in which we engage that result in gains for our corporate masters.

Do not work for trans-national corporations.

Do not buy their products.

Do not use their banks

Use barter, lets and home produced food to withdraw from the corporate economy

Invest in alternative non-corporate energy, food, housing and transportation.

Keep your taxable income as low as humanly possible to starve the military industrial complex.

Turn off the corporate propaganda feeds – no television, no corporate owned radio and newspapers.

Organize alternative political parties

Get to know your neighbors and develop local solutions to meeting the needs of the community.

Or suicide. A concerted international suicide campaign would demonstrate absolute opposition to corporate slavery. Live free or die.

How many suicides would it take before the sleeping power of the majority is awoken to the reality of their situation? Hundreds of millions probably. (Tough sell, eh?) How to organize this?

If each suicide were published on YouTube then the powers would shut down the channel. It would be necessary to organize mass-suicides that could not be suppressed by the media. If, for example, a hundred million Americans were to suicide on one day, that might be enough. But the masters of international finance would love to see the world population dramatically reduced, and would simply replace that many without batting an eye. In fact, preventable disease and poverty already kill millions every year, and there is no end to the supply.

What if we stopped reproducing? Again, that is already happening – fertility rates are below replacement levels in much of the industrialized world, and only immigration keeps our numbers rising.

Is there no way out? What if we just stopped working and spent our days sitting on the sidelines and refusing to participate. This is what I do now, but it would only be effective if there were a huge increase in the number of people living this way. A sort or permanent national strike.

Do what you can, sabotage the corporate monster at every opportunity. Fill the jails and prisons. Again, this strategy is already employed by some, but the corporate monster adapts to the situation by building more prisons, and for a profit.

The situation is impossible. There is no way out.

So go back to work. Relax in front of the TV. Invest your passion in the spectacle of professional sports. Ignore the ongoing slaughter and pretend to believe in the righteousness of the cause of global capitalism. Suppress your anxiety and awareness with prescription drugs and alcohol. Spend your life accumulating the toys and distractions provided to submissive servants of the monster. Leave the problem for your kids.

Eventually the corporate monsters will eat the whole world, and then each other.

And the survivors will start the whole process all over again.

The Economic Pyramid

2008-01-23T13:04:00.000-08:00

The impending recession continues to expose structural defects in the global economy.

The fundamental problem is that far too many people are simply left out.

In order to include them, global rates of consumption must be in balance with the productivity of the biosphere. We cannot provide a reasonable standard of living for nine or ten billion people (which is the likely peak in world population if present trends continue) if that standard of living requires rates of consumption similar to those imposed by the structures of our civilization. In other words we have to change the way we live, to create a viable example that the rest of the world can emulate.

We have, in the past, regarded ourselves as the “Shining City on the Hill” that all the peoples of the world aspire to re-create for themselves. Had we been successful in having the rest of the world copy the way we behave, then our high consuming lifestyle would have perhaps destroyed the ability of this planet to support life. Even with the minimal participation in economic activity now enjoyed by one fifth of the world’s population, habitat destruction and pollution result in two hundred species becoming extinct every single day. The world cannot remain the way it is.

The economic pyramid (you have seen it on the back of the dollar bill, yes?)

We live in a global economy where the economic pyramid is wildly out of kilter.

While optimists use the image of a ladder, distribution of economic benefits are more usefully envisioned as a pyramid. When this pyramid is in balance, wealth is generated at the very bottom, and moves up the pyramid. Because there is virtually no trickle down of wealth, unless the inputs are made at the bottom, the lower layers simply atrophy and drop off the pyramid.

People, on the other hand, fall down the pyramid more readily than they climb up.

Also, when resources are inserted at a higher level then they circulate all the faster, having a shorter distance to travel.

Economic activity circulates faster at the top.

Over the last few decades more and more resources have been injected into higher layers, where they circulate very fast, giving the illusion of wealth creation, and more and more people fall out of the bottom, and wind up in homeless shelters, or in barrios, shanty towns and other informal constructions, with no health care, and no prospect of improving their situation.

The pyramid no longer looks like the one on the dollar. Right now the pyramid has an enormously wide, and very flat base rising very gradually until it suddenly curves upwards coming to a tower, with almost sheer sides and a pinnacle in the way far distance. More like a thumbtack than a pyramid. If this particular pyramid is to avoid falling over, is it essential to inject resources at the base, and to do this by way of a structural (i.e. permanent) change.

Microcredit is a very good tool to achieve this result on a global scale. IN the picture above microcredit is represented by the pool underneath the pyramid. People fall out of the economic activity represented by the pyramid, and into the broader wider microcredit economy.

In the United States there are many other options, partly because so many people here do have access to real resources which can be invested in a way that promotes real change. And also because the condition of the very poorest is desperate in widely varying ways from the poverty which more uniformly afflicts the rural poor in less industrialized countries.

Today’s News Wednesday, January 23, 2008

2008-01-23T10:54:00.001-08:00

The Center for Public Integrity today released a report, and a publicly accessible database of 935 false statements issued by eight senior officials of the Bush administration in the lead up to the Iraq war. The study claims that this was “part of an orchestrated campaign” on the part of the Bush administration.

The White House claims in its defense that their position on Iraq, WMD’s and Al Quaida, were based on the consensus of intelligence agencies all over the world. But at the time, George Bush repeatedly cited British sources for his wild and extravagant claims, and yet there was so much controversy in British Intelligence that two ministers (Claire Short and Robin Cook) resigned and one intelligence analyst (Dr. David Kelly) was executed, with the government and virtually all news sources claiming an improbable suicide.

In Australia, a senior intelligence analyst resigned and spoke out frequently about the distortions that were been imposed on the public mind through an orchestrated government and media campaign in support of a war that could not be justified.

And yet the war happened, and all of these lies and distortions go virtually unmentioned in the current election campaign. Hundreds of billions of dollars in profitable war related contracts continue to provide a feast for cronies of Bush and Cheney. And thousands of people in Iraq live in mortal jeopardy.

Also today, thousands of hungry people escaped from the Israeli prison camp most of us know as the Gaza strip. The people blew a hole in the wall (built by Israel) and poured across the border into Egypt. These people have been subjected to a vicious campaign of oppression and deprivation in retaliation for them having elected a government which does not meet with the approval of Washington and Tel Aviv.

Also today Vice President Dick Cheney made a presentation to the Heritage Foundation on the subject of FISA legislation. He based the rationale for this legislation on an entirely fabricated reality in which Al Queda terrorists, (who had attacked America on September 11, 2001), were plotting equally dastardly acts with equal likelihood of success, were it not for the fearless work of dedicated American patriots torturing suspects and monitoring all communications in the United States with the active participation of telephone and communications companies. There was no Q & A broadcast on Cspan – just the raw propaganda. Most sinister and duplicitous President of Vice ever.

Meanwhile back in the Congress the Democrats are promoting Schip as a stimulus measure. It would inject resources into the hands of poor people, allowing them to free –up funds currently dedicated to health care, but the Republicans are resisting because they want whatever changes they make to be temporary (and they want the goodies for their rich friends, as usual).

The impending recession continues to expose structural defects in the global economy.

The fundamental problem is that far too many people are simply left out. In order to include them, global rates of consumption must be in balance with the productivity of the biosphere. We cannot provide a reasonable standard of living for nine or ten billion people (which is the likely peak in world population if present trends continue) if that standard of living requires rates of consumption similar to those imposed by the structures of our civilization. In other words we have to change the way we live, to create a viable example that the rest of the world can emulate.

Even with the minimal participation in economic activity now enjoyed by one fifth of the world’s population, habitat destruction and pollution result in two hundred species becoming extinct every single day.

The world cannot remain the way it is.

A Stimulus Package

2008-01-17T19:32:00.000-08:00

Well. Fed Chairman Mr. Bernanke, was on Capitol Hill this morning, discussing the options for a “stimulus package.” It seems everyone is already agreed that $100 billion is shortly going to come streaming off the printing presses, all that remains is to divvy up the spoils. Tax cuts, tax rebates, food stamp increase, and extended unemployment insurance coverage are all on the table.

Mr. Bernanke seems nervous, and stresses the need for speed. This is $100 billion to boost consumption. Obviously the best place to put it is in the hands of people who will spend it immediately. Generally speaking the poorer the recipient, the faster the stimulation flows into the system. But I would say that.

If it works, then perhaps Mr. Bernanke will consider a more permanent “stimulus” in the form of universal health care and a sharp increase in the minimum wage.

Instead of diverting hundreds of billions of dollars into unnecessary wars of choice, and hundreds of millions into incarcerating the poor, a more enlightened administration might consider an extensive program of infrastructure re-design to accommodate our new healthy lifestyles. More walking, more bicycles, more local production and consumption, significantly less use of fossil fuels.

The redesign of the suburbs to encompass more viable communities with work, food, water and power all locally available. The construction of efficient rail and canal transportation. And some decent schools. There is an almost unending list. Many of these projects have been waiting for years for funding to be available, everything else is already in place.

If this situation leads to a rethink of the whole stimulus game, then we might restore something meaningful to the term “civilization”.

Yunus on Tour

2008-01-12T08:14:00.000-08:00

Microcredit pioneer Dr. Yunus is traveling around the United States.

Tour dates.

He is promoting his new book which I hope to review later. In this audio Dr Yunus describes his work.

Microcredit, for which Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, is a brilliant achievement, and one for which Yunus has already attained an enduring legacy.

If present growth rates are maintained, this development will have a very significant effect, altering the whole story of humanity. Whether this, in itself will be sufficient to realign our species with the global biosphere upon which all life depends, remains to be seen. But if we do make it to a point of population stasis, and then commence an orderly and voluntary decline in numbers, microcredit will have been one of the main innovations that made that possible. It is hard to conceive of a future in which Yunus’s achievement will not be revered by hundreds of millions, and with good reason. The eradication of poverty remains within reach, and many of us will live long enough to see it happen.

Audacious and Excellent. Strongly recommended.

Bipartisanship

2008-01-08T11:40:00.000-08:00

After decades of strong arming the Democratic party, going back at least as far as President Reagan in 1980, some Republicans, looking at a the potential of a severe reversal, are now calling for a bi-partisan cabinet, or a government of national unity.

With fewer and fewer people aligning themselves with either party, and the extent of the Republican betrayal of the American worker now becoming apparent to all This can only be seen as a last gasp attempt by the right wing to hold the country to the far right course that has served them so well for decades.

We already have two parties who slavishly follow a corporate agenda at the expense of the common people. Under the guise of “free trade” millions of good union manufacturing jobs have been transferred overseas. Both parties, taking much of their income from defense and pharmaceutical industries, have defended and extended the war machine, and fiercely defend the massive profits taken from the most expensive health care system in the world.

For decades, both parties have exploited the “Cold War” to unite the country in the face of an imaginary enemy. Now that the evil empire has been dismantled, both parties cling to the boogeyman bin Laden, and the myth of international terrorism in the hope of scaring people silly enough to support their massive theft and exploitation, and oppression of much of the rest of the world.

The fact is that more people die in traffic accidents in one day, than succumb to terrorist attacks in a year. More people die every year falling down stairs than as a result of terrorist attacks. SO terrorism is clearly not a big enough problem for people to check their common sense at the door. And there remains the problem of 911. What actually happened that day? No thinking person can continue to believe the official government conspiracy theory. There has still been no explanation for the total destruction of a 42 story building that day. It seems that there is no fabrication that will fit this event into the tale of 19 knife-wielding supermen, which has already been stretched beyond the fantastic in the story told by the bi-partisan 911 Commission.

The problems now faced by the Republicans and the Democrats, is that it is too easy for people to access alternative views to those expressed on the corporate media. The propaganda matrix is crumbling at the edges. The extent of environmental damage is too great to hide from all but the completely brain dead. The real crisis we face has nothing to do with Muslim extremists.

Features of Microcredit

2007-10-25T14:24:00.000-07:00

Some of the features of the microcredit system that lead me to believe that it may be possible, using this technology, to create sufficiency for all of the people on planet earth, to do this in a manner that is in harmony with the ecology of our planet,

Decentralized control and true freedom

In our system, everything that is built requires the permission of a bank. The bank evaluates each loan request, and approves or denies the loan based on its primary focus – which is – “will this loan be profitable for the bank?” The bank also requires collateral.

The effect of these criteria are (a) Only those with assets are able to get credit, thus resources are always easier to get for the wealthy, and (b) If there is no profit for the bank, the project will not go forward.

In a microcredit system there is no collateral, thus the poor are not excluded. Also, all transactions are public. This is one of the implications of a program designed to work the opposite way to commercial banking – commercial banking transactions are private, therefore microcredit transactions are public.

Loan approvals are carried out by the borrowers peer group, who also assume liability for the loan. This means that while each project is evaluated very carefully by the peer group, it is their decision that determines whether the sister gets the loan. The bank is not the decision maker, and thus central control of the economic process devolves from the bank to the loan recipients peer group.

And the loan application is made in public, and announced to all of the other groups in that center prior to the disbursement of funds. This process ensures that the owners of the institution – i.e. the borrowers, are kept completely informed about how its capital is being utilized. Central control of the decision making process is avoided, and a community-based process is created in it’s place.

Entry into the microcredit circle is restricted always to the poorest people in the community. This ensures that no group can be exploited by another group in microcredit, because the poorest always receive first priority.

In practice an exploited group is immediately absorbed into the microfinance community. As their economic priorities are funded, their status changes and the exploitation is thereby escaped. Cohesive groups of formerly very poor people are enormously resilient, and they rapidly become strong enough to avoid or resist all manner of previously experienced discrimination and abuse.

This is real freedom.

Local production and consumption

In all cases initial economic activities funded by microcredit loans are for the local production of goods and services, which are consumed locally. In more developed microcredit institutions some producers, e.g., handloom weavers in Bangladesh, combine to create cooperative ventures which include trade relationships with other communities, but this is a later development.

These early microentrepeneurs often involve themselves in small scale food production. From vegetable gardens to keeping a few chickens, to growing tea, or husking rice, keeping a dairy cow, or goat. These activities are very susceptible to environmental change, and thus ecological awareness, and the harmony of the natural cycle are much more developed in those whose living is so delicately balanced upon the earth. Huge monoculture agriculture, widespread use of chemicals and oil powered machinery are not part of this equation. The food produced is mostly organic, raised by the people who eat it and trade the surplus. It is easy to see how contemporary knowledge of permaculture and local ecosystems will combine with these activities in a very harmonious and organic fashion.

This new economy must necessarily emulate some of the features of the old one, such as producing enough food for everyone (Oh. Well, let’s say trying to produce enough food for everyone). But this resurgence of village based agriculture and self sufficiency is not a regression to an early feudal age. The internet makes possible a much better informed population. Global communications systems are enthusiastically adopted by micro entrepreneurs. Widespread ignorance is no longer a necessary evil.

The poor are closest to the land

As has been pointed out by Peter Kareiva of the Nature Conservancy, the poorest are the closest to the earth. Does this translate to a lasting sensitivity to environmental concerns as the microentrepreneur gains access to more choices, gains more wealth, and begins to have a greater impact on her environment? These are important questions when you consider the potential impact of billions of people, newly escaped from poverty, all beginning to have a greater say in the decisions which affect their lives. This movement could have either a positive or negative impact.

I believe that the current trends go in both directions, but that microcredit, truly focused on providing services to the very poorest as the continuing and ongoing priority, has a largely beneficial effect on the environment, and that there is every reason to believe that this environmental sensitivity could be enhanced to the great benefit of huge numbers of people, and other living things. (Yunus is clearly aware of the dangers of global warming, and one can expect that this sensitivity will rapidly gain credence among the staff and the borrowers at Grameen institutions.)

A new ethic

Microcredit replaces competition with cooperation as the guiding ethic. This is achieved in the formation of borrower peer groups. Peer groups are an essential element in microcredit, as essential as the avoidance of collateral. In fact, peer groups can be understood as the replacement for collateral in a number of important ways, but collateral replacement is not their primary function.

A peer group works as follows:

The five member borrower group is important for a number of reasons, but the role of the other group members in supporting and developing the income-generating activities of each of their peers is possibly the most significant. The group is formed when a single borrower approaches the project for her first loan. She learns that she must find four friends , who also wish to take out a loan, as the first condition for membership. This gathering of four others turns out to be a difficult project for some. It requires a level of enthusiasm and determination which quickly separates out the truly motivated. And this highly motivated person becomes the group chairwoman in its first year. This sets a standard, and as each group member takes on the role of chairperson, as they all must do, this standard becomes the base, each successive chairperson tries to do the job better than her predecessor, until the job once again roles around to the original chairperson five years later. This spiral of continuous improvement is only one of many such spirals within the microcredit system.

Every member of the group accepts responsibility for all of the loans of each member of the group. If one member fails to repay, the other four must club together and repay her loan before they can qualify for a further loan themselves. In practice this results in a situation in which all five eagerly assist one another. The success of each is important to all, thus repayment rates are extremely high, and yet entirely voluntary. There is no collateral, and no legal instrument between the borrower and the lending institution. Borrowers are trusted to repay, and they almost invariably repay that trust. One could argue that their situation is such that microcredit represents their only viable path to self sufficiency, and that the prospect of loosing this chance by non-repayment of loans is sufficiently negative as to virtually compel repayment. And, having to face four of your closest friends who have been obliged to cover your outstanding debt in order to keep their own hopes alive is a sufficiently daunting prospect that virtually no one defaults, ever.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the peer group. It is the foundation upon which the entire edifice is built. At weekly meetings, the entire center, (consisting of as many as eight peer groups or forty people) comes together to make their weekly payments, apply for new loans, and meet with their sisters to exchange goods, services, information and assistance. At these weekly meetings the community decides on the investment priorities for that community. Group projects, such as the creation of an elementary school, or the provision of a new well, are decided upon and funded at these meetings. They are the heartbeat of the organization.

It is hard to imagine a microcredit project which functions well without these peer groups. But many organizations who make loans to individuals, some of which even require collateral, describe themselves as microcredit. Don’t accept this description. Microcredit loans are for the poorest people, if collateral is required the poorest are necessarily excluded. For a project to be microcredit there must be no collateral, and the borrowers must be destitute women. Anything that does not meet this basic criteria is not microcredit as described in this publication, no matter what it calls itself.

And the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

Any microcredit project worthy of the name restricts its new membership by requiring that an individual be demonstrably among the poorest people in the neighborhood - bottom 20% of income. In some communities this equates to an income negligibly greater than zero. Because of this requirement, microcredit organizations have identifiable characteristics, allowing an observer to distinguish between microcredit and other programs of small loans for microbusiness ventures.

Were microcredit loans to be extended to a higher echelon, it would become impossible ever to reach the poorer group. Thus microcredit would fail in its primary goal – poverty eradication.

Yunus is most insistent on this point, and with good reason. It is essential to work with the poorest group because to do otherwise would result in designed in inefficiency. Program overheads would become too great, loan repayments would become erratic, all manner of collateral type schemes would be blended in, and the whole project would become another short-term cash cow for the development elite. This is not an alternative to current economic practice, this is an extension of current practice, and because it excludes the poorest it can never be sustainable.

With this understanding one can see that microcredit programs can run easily alongside the mainstream economy of the global financial empire. It presents no threat, and no purpose would be served by framing microcredit in opposition to the collapsing empire. The empire will collapse under its own weight. Microcredit just takes care of the people deemed “uneconomic” by the system of greed and growth. The faster the old structure contracts, the larger the available pool of impoverished people. The faster microcredit grows.

Each person enters the microcredit system having directly experienced poverty. The poverty that results from the inequalities hard coded in to the economic empire that now encircles the globe. Thus they are disinclined to participate in creating a new set of restrictions and exclusions that condemn many to lifelong poverty simply by virtue of their birth. This ethic informs the foundation of microcredit, it is not something that can be expunged or replaced. Hierarchical structures of exploitation do not function easily in this environment.

The door into microcredit is the eye of the needle.

On the other side, everything spins the opposite way.

It works.

One of the developments microcredit has begun to encounter in Bangladesh, is the phenomena of children from very poor families who have achieved advanced college degrees. This is a new phenomena. Young mothers of course invest in their children’s well being, and this has resulted in large numbers of boys and girls from families who have been illiterate for generations, suddenly becoming highly educated in one generation. A very rapidly growing cohort of educated young people who have skills and opportunities never before available in those families. People who also understand what it is like to be poor. There is no data available as yet, to be able to see what will happen as a result, but I cannot resist a little speculation.

There is no doubt that one of the tasks facing the human population of the earth, is the task of cleaning up the mess, the pollution, the unexploded ordinance, the ravaged landscape, the denuded forest, the disappearing natural habitat for many of the species which share the planet with us. We cannot continue to lose two hundred species each day and expect to survive ourselves. This is madness.

The clean-up job is likely to be expensive, highly technical, and will require the dedicated effort of millions of people. And that’s where the children of microcredit come in. These educated young people could become the backbone of a worldwide movement of social business. Non-profit concerns whose success is determined by achievement of some goal deemed of value to the community by its shareholders. And many of these new social businesses will dedicate themselves to achieving environmental goals.

Oh, and one last thing.

Over the past thirty years, birth rates in Bangladesh have halved. Microcredit has been a significant factor in this change, because microcredit directly addresses the twin problems that lead to rapid population growth – grinding poverty, and the exploitation of women. By putting resources in the hands of the woman, power in the family is rebalanced in her favor. The improvement in her personal situation allows her to adequately care for the children she has, reducing the incidence of child mortality. As a business owner she is motivated to have a smaller family. On a wide enough scale, this could easily be sufficient to stabilize the world population.

In many respects, all of this is happening already, but there are improvements that could be made, and likely will be made, in order to responsibly take advantage of the fact that very soon, most of the world’s people will be taking care of all of their basic needs through microcredit. Widespread poverty will be history.

Exponential Growth

2007-10-24T10:26:00.000-07:00

First a primer on exponential growth arithmetic. This is a twenty-two minute video from 1995.

Well, you can watch the other parts if you wish, but I think the professor has adequately made his point.

Present population growth rates are unsustainable. Present growth rates in the stock market are unsustainable, present trends in many areas, especially resource use, are unsustainable, and the problem is arriving very much faster than anyone is talking about on the news, in the political debates, or even in the conversation about global warming. In all regards, the future for our economic system, an economic system predicated on endless growth, is very bleak indeed.

However.

Microcredit programs (which serve the poorest families in the world, with a sustainable escape from poverty), are growing, currently, averaged over the past ten years, at 34.17% per annum.

This gives a doubling time of just over two years.

100 million families in 2006, at five persons per family equals half a billion people. This doubles to one billion in two years, two billion in four years, and four billion in six years.

This chart (double click to enlarge) shows microcredit growth from 1997 , with the same growth rate extended to 2015. As you can see, the numbers are getting very big, very quickly.

It is important to understand that microcredit is NOT a part of the economic system which is racing to extinction. It is, in fact an entirely different economic system, one that works the opposite way. This is because its foundation was designed by endeavoring to do the precise opposite of a commercial bank.

I could waffle on endlessly on the differences between microcredit and conventional economics, and no doubt will in future posts. However, this recent speech by Dr. Muhammad Yunus hits a lot of good points, and the gist of the matter becomes apparent.

Audio Podcast of Dr. Muhammad Yunus’ Senior Day Address

More later.