'What Is The New Way?'

Recent items in the news:

* 'Research links big bonuses to risky takeovers' - The (Glasgow) Herald, 19/5. ("Bankers who are paid big bonuses for completing acquisitions are more likely to engage their banks in risky behaviour, according to a new study...")

* 'Anxiety keeps the super-rich safe from middle-class rage' - op-ed by Peter Wilby, the Guardian, same date. ("The pay gap at the top should change the terms of political trade. But the squeezed middle must first learn to look up...")

* 'They caused the crash and now they strangle recovery' - op-ed by Polly Toynbee, the Guardian, 28/5. ("Instead of lending to small businesses, bankers are lining their own pockets. And yet we look the other way...")

* 'Slow death of the dollar' - article in the Business section of the London Times by Iain Dey, 29/5. ("The greenback remains reserve currency of the world but China's renminbi is starting to draw followers...Big investors around the world don't want to stuff all their savings into an asset that everyone expects to fall in value. It is those same big investors that have been funding America's colossal budget deficit - which increases by about $4 billion a day...")

* 'Options and futures: the speculators playing with our daily bread' - article in the Guardian, 3/6. ("In the final part of our series, Felicity Lawrence looks at the link between rising food prices and poorly regulated commodities markets.")

As to this issue of poor regulation, consider this, from an article by Russell Targ carried on realitysandwich.com & posted on 31/5:

"Traditionally, banks lend money to homeowners for their mortgages and retain the risk of default, called credit risk. However, due to twenty-first centurey financial innovations, banks can now sell rights to the mortgage payments and pass on related credit risk to other banks and securities dealers through a process called securitization. Until 2000, the Roosevelt era Glass-Steagall Act prohibited banks from offering investment, commercial banking, or insurance services. But the Republican driven Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 allows commercial and investment banks to consolidate and create securities out of their junk mortgages. That is, your local bank can now wrap up hundreds of worthless home loans in tinfoil, tie them with a ribbon, and call them securities. A bank no longer cares whether or not the boorrower will ever pay back the loan, because it wil soon be bundled and sold to someone else. These are called 'ninja' loans - no income, no job, no assets. This new 'originate to distribute' banking model means credit risk has been distributed broadly to investors around the world, with a series of consequential impacts. Economist have criticized Texas senator Phil Gramm's deregulation Act as a principal contribution to the on-going subprime mortgage financal crisis, arguing that the 'bail out' amounts to corporate welfare for financial institutions and a moral hazard that will make taxpayers pay dearly - $700 billion so far..."

Shades of the Savings & Loan scam and scandal of a couple of decades ago. These people are nothing if not insistent. And predictable...

Enough background. Sufficient background, to my concluding comment on this blog.

From a Comments thread on an article, entitled 'Global Revolution by Winter', by business critic Gerald Celente, appearing on the 3/6 e-newsletter Before It's News, originally appearing (on 27/5) at business insider.com:

Led on May 28 [spelling & punctuation as original]

"we need a new way. the Spanish are right. so are the greeks and arabs. The left and the right each have their flaws and people can finally see them. We are all unhappy. we are all getting screwed no matter what party gets in. the middle class is forgotten. we need a new way. this old way hasn't worked for a long time. The middle class reached it's peak in the 60s and 70s and its been downhill ever since.

what is the new way?"


kibitzer - June 8 [me]

"The new way, Led, is to stop looking linearly - Left or Right - and look up. To a new paradigm of life on Earth. Characterized in particular by a lack of money as a motivator; and getting to fundamental basics about life.

Consider. Either there is a 'God' - something more than Man; a reason for life, beyond just in and for itself only - or there is not. If there is not, then nothing really matters anyway, and one might as well live one's life exclusively for oneself - independent of the effect of that pursuit on others - as not; for the end of the closed system of life can, then, as easily be seen as that as anything else, a presumed evolutionary advantage in cooperating with others, or whatever. (Dinosaurs don't care about the future.) If there is, however, then certain things follow.

It follows for one thing that there is Plan in and Purpose to life; that life has meaning, beyond just in and for itself. And there you have your answer to your question: the new way is to recognize this reality - really. And when we do, people will exchange goods and services between themselves, and give of their best to one another, out of the highest motive there is: out of gratitude to their Creator for life with meaning. And if they do, then 'all things will be added unto them'.

Including the creation of a level of civilization operating on a higher level of consciousness than now.

Just waiting for us to look up. See it. And get there.

And I'm not talking about 'religions'. I'm talking about spirituality. About the recognition of the whole of the life experience. Which involves higher dimensions than just the material level. Which is all that is recognized by atheists. Also known as Flatlanders.

Ignorance may be bliss. But it's a drag. Especially on human social evolution."


And them's my thoughts on the subject for tonight.