The Illusion of Wall Street & Washington Money

I have to say I was furious over Bush’s paying off his supporters with the initial $700 Billion bailout.

The whole scheme was fabricated on gambles being the basis of our economy, and Bush and his money friends ran with it for eight years, making billions.

You see, much of the trouble of our global financial situation is due to debt. And the process of taking debt, both mortgages, gambles on commodities and the like, and pretending that debt is actually a commodity that can be traded and exchanged, created the real estate bubbles around the world. The more we traded debts like mortgages, the more money seemed to be ‘growing on trees’, and greed took over–as it always does in speculative situations.

Now, the debt has crumbled, as it also always does. An economy based on debt and the growing of the ability to pay off debt is totally dependent on a growing economy, and the peoples’ ability to pay off that growing debt on a regular basis. But when this house of cards slowed down, as all economies do periodically, the greed-based debt pyramid had nowhere to go, but down. And down it has come.

This pyramid scheme propped up prices for everything that we’ve been paying for for a couple decades now: houses, cars, appliances, even wages and those immensely obscene bonuses to corporate managers, even as their companies crumbled around them. The pyramid has led to us having to scramble excessively in our lives, to keep up with the ‘things’ that we all have been duped into thinking we need.

So it has all fallen apart. And what is left when a house of cards falls down? Two things: The players, and the stack of cards on the table. The players are you and me. And the stack of cards are our own resources and talents, connections and skills. In other words, the actual true value of our relationships within our own local economies.

So what does one do when one is furious, but wants to change that anger into something productive?

Bless President Obama. He’s stepped into a nearly impossible situation to win. But he’s focused on the same thing as I’m saying here: Our wealth doesn’t lie on Wall Street, or in Washington. Our wealth comes from that other ‘W’ word: We. We are our wealth, our best source of freedom, of liberty, of economical well-being. We are the source of the cure for this horrible situation we’ve found ourselves in. And We can do it, We the People.

You have to take your financial consciousness into your own hands. And We have to do so as communities, and stop relying on the bloated policies and ideas of this ill-begotten and sickness of greed perpetrated by Bush and his people.  We have to do it, and We have to start now.

Here are three steps you can do, right now, today, that will help turn your life and the financial life of your community around. I’m doing these things, and it’s working. Here they are:

    1) Return to a cooperative way of living within your means, and within your neighborhood and community. Start co-ops for food, energy, transportation, handyman services, babysitting, energy sustainability. Any product, service, need or desire can be brought into a cooperative of teams within your community. Get five people together to start it, and get moving.

    2) Live within your means. Stop believing ads on tv that tell you how you should look, live, eat, behave. In fact, stop watching tv altogether, it’s nothing but a wasteland of horrible values, people hurting and killing each other, and ads for junk that you don’t need. For instance, have you noticed that all laugh-tracks on so-called comedy shows now are laughing at the ridicule and sarcasm one character perpetrates on another? Why watch such junk? Turn it off, start a garden, read with your kids, make love with your spouse, and have coffee with your friends and neighbors. Live locally.

    3) And that leads to the third idea you can start today: Buy locally. Support your neighbor’s businesses, stop going to the big-box stores, stop shopping for junk and junk-food you don’t need, and eat at locally owned restaurants, shop at locally-owned stores, and contribute your money right back into the community, instead of sending it through these huge corporations into this ridiculous maze of financial mishandling we’re now suffering from. Gandhi only bought locally made products, and started a revolution based on not buying clothing made in England. You can start such a revolution, too.

Start being the "We the People’ our fore-fathers and mothers imagined, worked for, fought and died for. Keep their legacy alive in your own life. We owe it to them, and to our children and grandchildren.

If you do these three things, they will lead to other steps you can take.  Be open to community. Let it pull you forward into a life filled with connection, love, and financial abundance, within your means, through this Way of We!