Posts under ‘economy’

What is money?

Money is imaginary to begin with. It consists of something (credit, paper, gold, a number in a computer, etc.) chosen by a society to represent measured units of value for people to exchange goods & services. It is not only a straight replacement for goods & services, but money itself is a commodity. The particulars of how money works makes for good reading.

Money is in one sense, the confidence we have in this society of ours; in our ability to work together, exist together, live together for the betterment of us as individuals and as a group.

Money is trust. Money is a membership in society. Money is a varying measurement on how we feel we are doing as a group. How this plan of working together is going. Money is a report card and an assertion that we all believe in ourselves as a society.

Money makes it possible for people outside our daily transactions, consumptions and interactions with each other – to contribute to each of those parts of our lives. Money makes it possible for someone to make a shoe in one town for us to buy in another without ever seeing or even knowing that shoemaker or town. It’s not just shoes – it’s everything.

BURBANK: Information is beginning to emerge from the inside the The Walt Disney Company, that the entertainment and media giant is preparing to announce a national health plan for everyone in the U.S.

CEO Robert “Bob” Iger has scheduled a press conference for this Thursday,two hours before President Barack Obama‘s address to the joint chambers of Congress. With rumors swirling of The White House taking up a draft of its own health care plan, this move is clearly designed to beat the President to the punch and gain the initiative.

My ‘day job’ has me traveling today. I am in rural MA, but I could be anywhere. Looking at this hotel and the surrounding…um…civilisation, I am actually nowhere. That has nothing to do with the city, though. It has everything to do with the effect this economy is having on the people.

I am an alcoholic.

I got sober almost 20 years ago. Before that, I abused alcohol, drugs, sex and money in order to ignore the damage I had done to my life, deluding myself . I crawled through life in a cycle of being drunk or not yet drunk, making more mistakes that would need more drinking to erase. I am nobody special. Absolutely nobody. Everyone on this planet has problems and I have mine. I chose to deal with them by ‘feeling better’, one glass at a time. All day. Each and every day…week…month and year – until I turned to someone for help.

She helped me by asking me two questions.

N'en déplaise à ces fous nommés sages de Grèce,
En ce monde il n'est point de parfaite sagesse;
Tous les hommes sont fous, et malgré tous leurs soîns
Ne diffèrent entre eux que du plus ou du moins.
- BOILEAU

Whatever these crazy appointed sages of Greece,
In this world there is no perfect wisdom;
All men are mad, and despite all their care
Differ among themselves as more or less.

So reads the somewhat cynical inscription to Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written in 1841 by Charles Mackay. It was a book about bubbles. The first two chapters are about financial bubbles.

There have been a lot of conversations regarding the investigation and prosecution of Bush / Cheney & Co. for their criminal destruction of lives and property in pursuit of wealth for themselves and their friends.  There are also a lot of questions regarding the TARP money like where is it going and why?  Both lines of questioning are vital to our country.  Guaranteed that I myself will be sounding the charge on both of these as well as every progressive blog in the country.

(Image courtesy of indiesocial.com)

I walked onto the train platform in downtown Chicago today.  A woman had just finished shopping at Macy’s and had several red shopping bags.  She was trying to put everything into one bag.  The wind picked up and blew some of the empty bags down the platform.  I took off running and stopped them from blowing out onto the street. 

Then, she yells to me that: "It’s OK!  They’re empty."  Then she sits down and waits for the train with her two bags full of stuff.  The 5 empty big red bags are just out there on the platform and she makes no effort to pick them up.  I told her that I didn’t want litter for a Christmas present, picked them all up and threw them in the trash (no recycling on CTA platforms…dammit!).

Image courtesy of cesr.org

This post begins a series to recognize people that speak about the world in terms of what they observe and what they can prove.  Their voices stand out in the crowd.  In their words, they speak not of fantasy, delusion and rationalization.  Instead, they utilize the gifts of human cognition, awareness to observe what is here in the world around us.  They are not dogmatic, but analytic and take in the world ‘warts & all’ for what it is and what it is not.  They do not separate humankind from nature in any form of grandeur.  In short, they look at things the way they really are and not what we would have them be.

Hi everybody! 

Did you know that today is International Anti-Corruption Day?  I sure as hell did not (but I do now).  Just in case you forgot, corruption occurs when people pay money in a secret deal, in order to break the law…so they can make a lot more money.

Why don’t we look at how the world celebrated this wonderful new holiday.  Maybe we can even see some real corruption in action.  Wow!  This is so much fun.

I condemn murder in all of its forms. This is a conversation about terrorists and attacks on civilian populations.

Last week’s brutal attacks of unarmed civilians in Mumbai got me to thinking about the nature of attacks on civilians. For many years, I accepted the given definition of ‘terrorists’ as people that are so filled with evil that they want to frighten and kill us all. There are always sociopaths out there to fit into this mold. I think that for the sheer numbers of civilians killed in targeted violence, sociopaths are not the only explanation. The large role of religious / dogmatic programming in targeted violence against civilians eliminates sociopathology as a cause because the sociopath has no conscience or care for his/her impact on society. For the most part, the religious killer is convinced that his/her morality is calling for the murder of civilians.