John O'Donohue: For a New Beginning

For a New Beginning

In out of the way places of the heart
Where your thoughts never think to wander
This beginning has been quietly forming
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

 

For a long time it has watched your desire
Feeling the emptiness grow inside you
Noticing how you willed yourself on
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

 

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent
Wondered would you always live like this.

 

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream
A path of plenitude opening before you.

 

Though your destination is not clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.

 

Awaken your spirit to adventure
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

- John O'Donohue

Paul Loeb: Those Who Make Us Believe That Anything Is Possible

 

Those who make us believe that anything’s possible and fire our imagination over the long haul, are often the ones who have survived the bleakest of circumstances. The men and women who have every reason to despair, but don’t, may have the most to teach us, not only about how to hold true to our beliefs, but about how such a life can bring about seemingly impossible social change. 

― Paul Rogat Loeb, The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear

 

C. JoyBell C.: The Only Way That We Can Live

The only way that we can live, is if we grow. 

The only way that we can grow is if we change. 

The only way that we can change is if we learn. 

The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. 

And the only way that we can become exposed is if we 

throw ourselves out into the open. 

Do it. 

Throw yourself.

― C. JoyBell C.
 

 

Jack Kornfield: To Bow To Life's Sorrows

To bow to the fact of our life's sorrows and 

betrayals is to accept them; and from 

this deep gesture we discover that all life is workable. 

As we learn to bow, we discover that the heart holds more 

freedom and compassion than we could imagine.

― Jack Kornfield

 

Mary Oliver: To Pay Attention

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

-- Mary Oliver

 

Photo by my friend
Julie Zenterra

The Dalai Lama: The Preciousness of Life

 

Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not die, so do other creatures.

- Dalai Lama XIV

Nomi Prins: All the Presidents' Bankers

All the Presidents' Bankers

Who rules America?

All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power is a groundbreaking narrative of how an elite group of men transformed the American economy and government, dictated foreign and domestic policy, and shaped world history. Culled from original presidential archival documents, All the Presidents’ Bankers delivers an explosive account of the hundred-year interdependence between the White House and Wall Street that transcends a simple analysis of money driving politics, or greed driving bankers, or bankers controlling governments. It presents the shocking genealogy of American power.

Prins ushers us into the intimate world of exclusive clubs, vacation spots, and Ivy League universities that binds presidents and financiers. She unravels the multi-generational family, blood, intermarriage, and mentor-protégé relationships that have confined national influence to a privileged cluster of the same people who recycle their power through elected office and private channels in Washington, D.C.

All the Presidents’ Bankers sheds new light on pivotal historic events—such as why, after the Panic of 1907, America’s dominant bankers convened to fashion the Federal Reserve System; how J. P. Morgan’s ambitions motivated President Wilson during World War I; how Chase and National City Bank chairmen worked secretly with President Roosevelt to rescue capitalism during the Great Depression while J.P. Morgan Jr. invited Roosevelt’s son yachting; and how American financiers collaborated with President Truman to construct the World Bank and IMF after World War II.

Prins divulges how, through the Cold War and Vietnam era, presidents and bankers pushed America’s superpower status and expansion abroad, while promoting the broadly democratic values and social welfare at home. But from the 1970s, Wall Street’s rush to secure Middle East oil profits altered the nature of political-financial alliances. Bankers’ profit motive trumped heritage and allegiance to public service, while presidents lost control over the economy, as was dramatically evident in the financial crisis of 2008.

This unprecedented history of American power illuminates how the same financiers retained their authoritative position through history, swaying presidents regardless of party affiliation. All the Presidents’ Bankers explores the alarming global repercussions of a system lacking barriers between public office and private power. Prins leaves us with an ominous choice: either we break the alliances, or they will break us.

Please go here for this review:  http://www.nomiprins.com/presidents-bankers/.

Please go here for more: http://www.amazon.com/All-Presidents-Bankers-Alliances-American/dp/156858749X.

The Miracle Is In the Unfolding

I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and alas begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you're going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you.

― C. JoyBell C.

 

Paulo Freire: Education and the Transformation of the World

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. 
 

― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

 

Martin Luther King, Jr.: A True Revolution of Values

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere... A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. 

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Prophecy Delivered! Martin Luther King Jr. and the Death of Democracy

Saturday, 26 April 2014 10:03
By Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, Truthout | Op-Ed

Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking against the Vietnam War at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul Campus, April 27, 1967. (Photo: Minnesota Historical Society / Flickr)

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“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Democracy is dead. It has always been an afflicted creature - hobbling about - wounded at its very being. An enslaving disposition corrupted the United States before it matured. Its spiritual death was foretold, but the nation refused to hear the black voices crying out in the wilderness. At the Riverside Church, the Holy See of liberal Protestantism, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - born in the bosom of the black Baptist church - prophesied: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." And he was martyred a year later on April 4, 1968.

A year before the racist, materialist and militaristic ax cut King down, he warned the nation of its demise. The now infamous "A Time to Break the Silence" speech at the Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, was a stern warning against the maladies of the American spirit - materialism, racism and militarism. The year between the Riverside speech and his assassination proved to be a radical one. As though he was racing against death's chariot, King accelerated his critique of the United States and took up more radical tactics...

With keen economic analysis in one hand and the Bible in the other, King preached that the federal government should devote billions of dollars to ending poverty in the richest nation in the world. Economic justice was essential to the democratic experiment. While King held anti-capitalist beliefs since his childhood, his heart was strummed by the Watts riots and tuned during his time in Chicago in 1966...

Renting an overpriced flat surrounded by abject poverty, King moved his wife and children to the West Side of Chicago. He made the connection between the situation of blacks in the north and the south. "We are tired of being lynched physically in the Mississippi and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and psychologically in the Chicago," he told the several thousand gathered in a Chicago stadium. The experience of living in a dilapidated apartment in a major Northern city cemented King's disdain for the right to vote without economic justice. In Chicago he lived with and worked among gang members - the hardened and hard-core poor. King met regularly with black gang members in his Chicago apartment. He provided them with training in nonviolence. He carried their message to the Riverside Church. A major reason for his opposition to the war grew out of the time spent in Northern ghettos:

"As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action. But, they asked, what about Vietnam? ... Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government."

In addition to seeing the war in Vietnam as immoral, King saw the war as a direct threat to Johnson's War on Poverty. Like "a demonic suction tube," resources were being drained from the poor in the US to kill the poor of Vietnam. His experience in Northern ghettos and the quagmire in Vietnam needed a tactical response. Having refused to believe that the bank of justice was bankrupt, King issued a notice to the the republic – the Poor People's Campaign. On behalf of the abused poor, the Poor People's Campaign was a direct confrontation with the federal government over spending in Vietnam and the lack of economic redress in the United States...

King was slain standing in solidarity with poor black janitors in Memphis and the Poor People's Campaign did not achieve its stated goals. And King's prophetic warning concerning spiritual death has come to pass. In the past decade, the triplets of evil are embodied in correlating events: Hurricane Katrina (racism), the Iraq War (militarism), and the fiscal crash of 2008 (materialism). To make matters worse,Citizens United and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down limits to campaign contributions may be the last gasp of the American empire, signaling the trump of materialism over democracy. The onslaught of reproductive rights restrictions and anti-queer legislation combined with aggressive voter rights violations has taken the body politic off life support.

The United States may have a black president, but the black poor still do not belong.

The United States may have a black president, but the black poor still do not belong. In some urban centers, upwards of 50 percent of black and brown men are unemployed. It seems every other week there is a Trayvon Martin, CeCe McDonald, Renisha McBride or Jordan Davis - victims of state-sanctioned violence against black bodies. The UN recently issued a reportcondemning the United States for a racist prison industrial complex and racist policing (racism); illegal drone strikes, extrajudicial assassinations, indefinite detention, torture, and NSA surveillance (militarism) and criminalization of homeless (materialism). In the "Kids Count" Report, the Annie E. Casey Foundationindicated that African American, Latino, and Native American children lag in every early childhood indicator.

King warned the US of democracy's pending doom here. King's mission was to "redeem the soul of America." The black freedom struggle, in part, accentuated redemptive possibilities - but the United States may prove beyond redemption. The triplets render the Statue of Liberty blind and mute. Like its greatest son, the body politic lays it head on its cooling board and the flag is its winding cloth. In the wake of King's death, his beloved Coretta mourned: "He gave his life for the poor of the world, the garbage workers of Memphis and the peasants of Vietnam. The day that Negro people and others in bondage are truly free, on the day want is abolished, on the day wars are no more, on that day I know my husband will rest in a long-deserved peace." To be sure, King is turning over in his grave.

 The above are excerpts - please go here for the full Truthout article: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23253-prophecy-delivered-martin-luther-king-jr-and-the-death-of-democracy.

The Voice of Everything

There is nothing in the world that does not speak to us. 

Everything and everybody reveals its own nature, 

character and secrets continuously. 

The more open our inner senses, 

the more we understand the voice of everything.
 

 - Hazrat Inayat Khan
 

from Deva Premal and Miten 

photo by Manose

Dan Goldberg: We Are All Connected

We are all connected. 

That is reality. 

Our energy is in constant flow...

through and between all of us 

and everything else in the universe. 
 

- Dan Goldberg
 

Lawrence Lessig Has a “Moonshot” Plan to Halt Our Slide Toward Plutocracy

April 25, 2014

by Joshua Holland

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The launch of Apollo 11, the first lunar landing mission, on July 16, 1969. (Image: Nasa)

Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig, the crusader for campaign finance reform, feels that his fellow reformers don’t think big or boldly enough to inspire the kind of grassroots campaign that might break elite donors’ stranglehold on America’s political system.

In a recent piece in The Atlantic, Lessig argues that public cynicism about the prospect of deep reform actually working is the only thing keeping widespread outrage at our slide toward plutocracy in check. And he thinks that only a “moonshot” campaign — an ambitious, collective, national effort “unlike anything they’ve seen before” — can “crack this cynicism” and usher in a more democratic system.

BillMoyers.com asked Lessig to lay out his vision of change. Below is a transcript of our discussion that’s been lightly edited for clarity.

Joshua Holland: There’s a cyclical dynamic at work. People are complacent about the issue of money and politics because they think they can’t change it — and that reforms are always designed to protect incumbents — so they don’t put pressure on politicians and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Is that your view?

Lawrence Lessig. (Photo: Dale Robbins)

Lawrence Lessig: Yes, it is. I think what’s striking is that the overwhelming majority of Americans see a problem with the way money influences politics and want it fixed. Our polls show that more than 90 percent of Americans believe it’s important to reduce the influence of money in politics. And that’s true for Republicans as much as Democrats and Independents. This is just a universal view.

Yet we don’t do anything about it, because most of us think the system is so entrenched. There was a poll a couple of years ago by the Clarus Group which found that 80 percent of Americans believe that every reform has been for the purpose of entrenching the incumbents, as opposed to actually reforming the system.

Most of us wish we could fly like Superman, but we don’t leap off of tall buildings because we recognize we can’t. And it’s the same thing here. We just have this politics of resignation — a belief that there’s nothing you can do about it, that the rich and powerful will control our politics and that’s the way it will always be.

Holland: But are they wrong? Are they wrong to believe that money is, as they say, “like water” — that it will always find the cracks in the system?

Lessig: I certainly think they’re wrong, to the extent that a different system would produce radically different results.

We got Citizens United and then the entrenchment of super PACs because of something the DC circuit court did in a case called SpeechNow. After that happened, there was an explosion of money into the system that wasn’t there before. Now, if money always finds its way in, regardless of the rules, we wouldn’t have seen that. That money would’ve already been there. The rules changed and the amount of money and the size of the influence of large contributors went up dramatically. So the rules matter dramatically.

We’ve got to begin to recognize this will take a moonshot, and we need to start strategizing around the idea of building a movement that people look at and say, “Yeah, this could really work.”

But I think we need to recognize that Americans are realistic, and they’re not going to rally around a change they don’t believe has any hope of being achieved. So you could either say, “Let’s give up,” or you can say, “What is the kind of change — the kind of strategy — that could actually have an effect?” And how do you convince America of that strategy? That’s ultimately the challenge here.

We’ve got to begin to recognize this will take a moonshot, and we need to start strategizing around the idea of building a movement that people look at and say, “Yeah, this could really work.”

Please go here to continue this interview: http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/25/lawrence-lessig-has-a-moonshot-plan-to-halt-our-slide-toward-plutocracy/.

Matt Taibbi rips into America's growing income gap in 'The Divide'

Matt Taibbi starkly details how far U.S. ideals have fallen in 'The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.'

The cover of "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap" and author Matt Taibbi.(Robin Holland / Spiegel & Grau)

By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic

March 27, 2014, 11:40 a.m.

Matt Taibbi begins his sixth book, "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap," with a simple formulation: "Poverty goes up; Crime goes down; Prison population doubles." It's a snapshot, a way to represent what Taibbi sees as the through-the-looking-glass reality of contemporary America, where rule of law has been subverted by, on the one hand, corporate greed and, on the other, a kind of institutionalized abuse of the poor.

Such a landscape, he suggests, brings to mind the last days of the Soviet Union, which operated out of a similar sort of mass hypocrisy until, in 1990 and '91, "people were permitted to think about all this and question the unwritten rules out loud, [and] it was like the whole country woke up from a dream, and the system fell apart in a matter of months."

Not that Taibbi is particularly optimistic about such a revolution (of either justice or perception) happening here. Rather, he feels "like I'm living that process in reverse, watching my own country fall into a delusion in the same way the Soviets once woke up from one."

"The Divide," then, is — like other recent books, including George Packer's "The Unwinding" and Thomas Pikkety's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" — an attempt to map the slippage, to identify, through reporting and analysis, just what has happened to America and how it operates. Taibbi is well suited for such an endeavor; a longtime contributor for Rolling Stone — he left this year to start an online magazine for First Look Media — he's been writing about American political and economic life for better than a decade, especially the 2008 financial meltdown and its aftermath.

In that regard, "The Divide" can be read as a sequel of sorts to his last book, 2011's "Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History" or even to "The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion," which came out in 2009. What all three share is a sense (to borrow a phrase from Leonard Cohen) "that the deal is rotten," that we as a nation have turned our backs on our ideals.

"For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth," Taibbi writes, "we've developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. And the one condition, it turns out, is money. If you have a lot of it, the legal road you get to travel is well lit and beautifully maintained. If you don't, it's a dark alley and most Americans would be shocked to find out what's at the end of it."

Please continue this review here:  http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-matt-taibbi-20140330,0,4516236.story.