DeB— My mother says the same thing, too. I like to know the mega-patterns worse and the best to recognize where things are shifting and how I can benefit. I think it’s a ‘metis’ thing in the ancient Greek sense. Looking at the entire landscape and pulling out what can work for you….I try to be connected but also off the grid if that makes sense. Love this new book on how social networks are changing the world. ‘Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom” here’s the vid on it. The book will be out Jan 19th. It’s more ‘user friendly’ than ‘Wikinomics” although loved that too. The author lives in France and is in my Facebook friends: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubo1asE4l-o

Mugsy Great Post “it IS regulated, constantly, 24-7” That is the truth. The pressure of “world mind” always infiltrating our lives is sometimes too much to repel. I believe since the campaign started, the financial meltdown, and the election there has been an ever increasing pressure for the world to change. The world is changing, but individual people change slowly.

Brilliant, my dahling. As always, a wealth of information. Why don’t you create a column for women, my dear, and share your insights into the complexities of the financial world? With your educational and experiential pedigree, dear, I’m sure you could make a name for yourself, perhaps like that woman who called the 1987 crash.

another depression may be averted????? i don’t know where you live, but where i live, the economy didn’t just start to fail in the year 2000. michigan started getting nailed back in 1993 when NAFTA was signed. immediately jobs started disappearing — going to mexico, going to china, going to india — anywhere but michigan. who signed NAFTA? it wasn’t george w. it was signed by Clinton. this economic situation didn’t happen overnight. putting NAFTA in place may have been a good thing for other countries, but it was as if someone poked a huge hole in the bottom of a bucket full of water — the water rushes out. well, jobs have been rushing out. i remember clinton saying that only the low paying jobs would leave the country and high tech jobs would continue to grow. i guess engineering isn’t a high tech job, because those are the jobs that disappeared in michigan. Add insult to injury, michigan’s senator abraham claimed the u.s. didn’t produce enough engineers or scientists, so he pushed a bill through which permitted another 100,000 immigrants a year to enter the u.s. provided they had scientific or engineering degrees. what did u of m produce from its engineering school? chopped liver???? when people lose jobs, they can’t buy products or services and they can’t take care of their families or themselves. in the 1990s, michigan had as many as 650,000 people registered with MESC — the unemployment service for the state. open jobs? sometimes as many as 45,000. and many of those were agencies all trying to fill the same 10-15 positions. my friends — engineers like me — many have had to move to other countries or other states to find work, some are working at Home Depot. Silver lining? i don’t think losing one’s home to foreclosure because one no longer has a job and has gone through one’s life savings trying to keep body and soul together comes with a silver lining when the results are living on the street or bouncing from one friend’s home to another. george w. tried. that’s more than clinton did. and while obama may have the best intentions in the world, i don’t think he can turn this thing around by himself — he has to have the cooperation of congress as well as the cooperation of business leaders. what you are seeing around the country now started in michigan. some of our towns can’t afford police or fire and have to rent them. in some areas of northern michigan, school districts have literally shut down. life isn’t always fair, but it sure doesn’t have to be this wretched. i was an engineer. i DID save my money. i DID lose my home to foreclosure back in 2005. i DID live on the street. i DID go without medical help and without food. if this could happen to someone like me, it could happen to anyone.

THE CASH NEXUS-Niall Ferguson-August 9-01 Central conclusion: “Money does not make the world go round.” Rather, it has been political events-above all, wars that have shaped the institutions of modern economic life. Sex, violence, and power are “individually or together capable of over-riding money.” Ferguson is one of the most technically accomplished historians writing today. Millions of Americans today are liable to taxation without representation; unlike their colonial forebears, however their disenfranchisement is largely voluntary. (in 1990 just over 61 million Americans voted. 114 million paid taxes.) From my notes years ago. Liked what you had to say Emcye.

I read Naomi Wolfe’s book. By however one wishes to characterize it, Doctrine of Chaos, Disaster Capitalism, Major General Smedley Butler WWI era book “War is a Racket” (and his revelations before Congress in 1933 of the “Business Plot” which was also documented by the BBC) the NeoCons/Leo Strassians uberized the agenda to keep 80% of people broke, struggling and impoverished while they steal everything and create a 20% elite. They took the blueprint they used in South America in the 70s and 80s in earlier administrations and around the world (Burma, South America, Indonesia, in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion,Iran-Contra, etc). Arundhati Roy described it in her World Social Forum speech in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on 27th January, 2003, when many of us were fighting the impending invasion of Iraq, predicting how disasterous it would be for America and the world, 1/2 the U.S. cheerlead for it. It’s a Wizard of Oz shell game. Always diverting attention over here, while they clean out everything over there, whereever ‘there’ is. Of course the bailout is another rout. When people are struggling to pay for food, health care, child care, gasoline they aren’t paying attention to riders on legislation passed on Friday nights in Congress that alter the fundamentals and will devastate lives. Especially when Fox News will cover with 24/7 broadcasts of something inane. Brent Bozell, George Norquist and other key GOP strategists met last weekend to redefine their ‘brand.’ It will be the same pattern with a new face/buzzwords and 1/2 the people will buy it because they don’t pay any attention to underlying historical patterns and draw the link of cause and effect in their own lives or global life. Arundhati Roy: “Corporate Globalization - or shall we call it by its name? - Imperialism - needs a press that pretends to be free. It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice. Meanwhile, the countries of the North harden their borders and stockpile weapons of mass destruction. After all they have to make sure that it’s only money, goods, patents and services that are globalized. Not the free movement of people. Not a respect for human rights. Not international treaties on racial discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons or greenhouse gas emissions or climate change, or god forbid justice. So this - all this - is “empire.” This loyal confederation, this obscene accumulation of power, this greatly increased distance between those who make the decisions and those who have to suffer them. Our fight, our goal, our vision of Another World must be to eliminate that distance. “The good news is that we’re not doing too badly. There have been major victories. Here in Latin America you have had so many - in Bolivia, you have Cochabamba. In Peru, there was the uprising in Arequipa, In Venezuela, and the world’s gaze is on the people of Argentina, who are trying to refashion a country from the ashes of the havoc wrought by the IMF. In India the movement against corporate globalization is gathering momentum and is poised to become the, only real political force to counter religious fascism. ‘Many of us have dark moments of hopelessness and despair. We know that under the spreading canopy of the War Against Terrorism, the men in suits are hard at work. While bombs rain down on us, and cruise missiles skid across the skies, we know that contracts are being signed, patents are being registered, oil pipelines are being laid, natural resources are being plundered, water is being privatized, and George Bush is planning to go to war against Iraq. If we look at this conflict as a, straightforward eye-ball to eye-ball confrontation, between “Empire” and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing. But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to “Empire.” We may not have stopped it in its tracks yet but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands. before us on the world’s stage in all its brutish, iniquitous nakedness. Empire may well go to war, but it’s out in the open now - too ugly to behold its own reflection. “Before September 11th 2001 America had a secret history. Secret especially from its own people. But now America’s secrets are history, and its history is public knowledge. It’s street talk. Today, we know that every argument that is being used to escalate the war against Iraq is a lie. The most ludicrous of them being the U.S. Government’s deep commitment to bring democracy to Iraq. Killing people to save them from dictatorship or ideological corruption is, of course, an old U.S. government sport. Here in Latin America, you know that better than most. Nobody doubts that Saddam Hussein is a ruthless dictator, a murderer (whose worst excesses were supported by the governments of the United States and Great Britain). There’s no doubt that Iraqis would be better off without him. But, then, the whole world would be better off without a certain Mr. Bush. In fact, he is far more dangerous than Saddam Hussein. So, should we bomb Bush out of the White House? It’s more than clear that Bush is determined to go to war against Iraq, regardless of the facts and regardless of international public opinion. “What can we do? We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history. We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar. … Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. “The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. “Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” So how do we resist “Empire”?