JOURNEYS OF THE SPIRIT

In the morning there are trees everywhere, as though they crept up on my consciousness during the night. They shine green in the window, welcome me into the day. Warblers warble in them. Sunlight twinkles through them. Out in the morning, the farmers are at work early, readying their paddies.

Yesterday the farmer who owns the paddy across the road spent most of the day fortifying the paddy wall, using the long hoe made for the purpose, in a rhythmic dance with the earth. All the paddies in their eachness fit together like perfect facets on the vast green gem they make of the mountainside. The farmer's work is thus a matter of beauty, as compared to the manufactured concrete or metal paddy wall units more modern farmers use to achieve the same purpose.

The traditional mud wall has to be tended more often, like any work of art, but the rice no doubt appreciates the attention in some vegetably emotional way we know nothing of, is more contented rice, and so offers more content to the consumer. The farmer as well is no doubt the better for it in body and mind, lives better, sleeps better, has better generations, and is less out of pocket.

I can imagine the rationalizing arguments for the new ways: how they save time, even though they cost way more than mud and must at some point be discarded and replaced. Commerce, as a science, knows nothing of the spirit or its journey through time, a journey that is impossible when time is money.

BRADY DECIDES TO GIVE HIMSELF A BONUS

Cracking me up at the moment is the the sight of the American public and its elected officials - who in accordance with the new trickle-up theory have been giving away their descendants' economy - getting rabid over the fact that on the way out of the public bank with their arms full of billions of taxpayer dollars, one of the thieves bent down and picked up a penny off the floor as a bonus. What an outrage! ($165 million / $1.1 trillion = .015%)

So after a long spell of reading all the mind-numbing economic news from the USA, and following deep and responsible consideration - one doesn't approach such issues lightly - I've decided to give myself a bonus, like the guys at the Big Trough in Washington.

I haven't decided yet how big my bonus will be; it's tricky in my case because, unlike the Wall Streeters, I deserve a bonus more than they do, since I'm not rewarding myself for losing other people's money and haven't committed possible malfeasance, plus I care about appearing too greedy. Integrity can hold you back in this kind of situation.

On the other hand, I don't want my bonus to be too small, because once the job withers and after the foreclosure my pension dries up just as medical care blows away in the economic duststorm that's coming - thanks to the unceasing hand-over-fist work of all those folks at the top of the pyramid - I'm gonna need some long-term partytime backup, so I figure a modest 10 million rapidly shrinking dollars should cover the tab till the next bubble.

First, though, I have to incorporate myself as a failing but needy financial entity that has avoided paying taxes for decades. How does CitiBrady, Morgan, Lynch, Gold, Merrill and Sachsman sound? Mind you, this is not a bailout, it's just humble greed. But at least I'm being honest.

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The Real AIG Scandal

AIG ... and the Politics of Deflection

The Big Takeover

"People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — 'our partners in the government,' as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers."

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One Small Problem...

"When a bank says an asset is worth 60 cents and the market says it's worth 30 cents, someone has to cover that spread. The genius of Geithner's plan is that it pawns most of the cost (and most of the risk) off on the taxpayer without the taxpayer noticing.

But unless the taxpayer gets stuck with the entire spread, which is probably what Geithner is hoping, banks that sell assets will have to take massive writedowns. This will start the whole cycle of violence again."

TRUST

TRUST - you remember that word - used to be part of all those inscriptions carved over institutional doorways now falling into economoral decline everywhere-- archaeologists dig one up every now and then from another older and forgotten society that made earlier versions of the same mistakes.

One of the first places they used the word TRUST was on the money, especially when it was no longer gold and became the matter of faith it's now lapsing from.

TRUST was also commonly used in the names of the biggest banks and most reputable finance companies, First Trust this and National Trust that, the word had that much heft; politicians even used it now and then in high-sounding speeches of once upon a time, before microphones and tape recording exposed the de facto conversations. The word was embroidered on old flags as well, then later printed on t-shirts manufactured abroad. Ironically, in the present day it's still stamped on the US dollar! The lost cachet is needed now more than ever.

TRUST was the word, back in the day. You could find it in all the holy books-- and look what they've done with it. Things have changed so much since the word itself could be "trusted" - in the original, uncorrupted sense - to mean what it originally conveyed. We should maybe find a new word for what TRUST used to be, when it didn't cause a chuckle - you'd see it in those big bronze angular Roman letters engraved for the ages and gilded, when it still had dignity and semantic power, when it was a word you could... whatever that new word will be.

As for ourselves, there is still Truth in us-- Here's hoping that when next we put the new TRUST over doorways, we've reclaimed the old meaning and lived up to it for at least 1000 years...

MAYBE WE COULD RUN THE WORLD ON HOT AIR?

An interesting perspective on fuel (and other) price rises...

"The system and its apologists are desperate to keep this obvious truth hidden from the public, or at least to keep the public confused about it. For example, last week, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said that 'a weaker dollar cannot be blamed for soaring oil prices.' This is on par with saying that 'heavy rain cannot be blamed for flooding in the Midwest.'

Proof – and this is where that pesky 'reality' thing really gets in the way of a good lie – is that gasoline prices have hardly changed in terms of real money. A gallon of gasoline today costs about $4.10 in American fiat money, but can still be had for less than a quarter-ounce of silver. [Currently 18.37 per ounce and rising]. A silver quarter from 1964 or earlier contains nearly a quarter-ounce of silver, and, despite fluctuations in the price of the two commodities, will usually buy roughly a gallon of gas. This situation has changed little in decades."

--Glen Allport

MY CENTRAL BANK

I go to an American ATM for the first time and all the instructions are in plain English, so helpful and direct for the newbie, no overload of boilerplate politeness, just the familiar minimalism of step A, step B etc.

I put in my card, zip through the procedure and to my strange surprise real, old-fashioned money comes out, that the core of me reflexively realizes it can buy stuff with, the bills looking just the way real money still looks in the central bank of my mind even after all these years, with pictures on it of people I learned about long ago in school-- iconic revolutionaries and generals, presidents and other members of that permanent psychopantheon, with historic buildings on the back, every denomination impractically pale green and uniform in size, the ones and hundreds differentiated only by the zeros and the portraits of George and Ben, each bill mythically charged by particulars deeply interwoven with my own history, unlike multicolored and varisized Japanese money, which, though artier, more practical and (at the moment) economically stronger, is nevertheless not fully accepted by my central bank, where it has no historic heft and does not viscerally impress me; only my intellect knows I can actually buy stuff with those pretty pieces of paper.

Ever surprising, all the insitutional minutiae the traveler never leaves behind...

REAL MONEY

The Kyoto plant nursery that has property down the road brings to it all the wood cuttings and trimmings from their landscaping business, to turn the smaller limbs and branches into wood chip mulch, kindly piling up the bigger stuff at the edge for me to take away as firewood, and when I go down there a couple days after the last time there is new wood here and there, and if you have a wood burning stove and heat your house with wood alone as we do, it's like seeing piles of money lying there for you to just pick up, but this is real money-- not just pieces of paper with deceased males' pictures on them that governments say they won't exchange for gold-- this is cherry money, oak money, ironwood money, locust money, stacks of it, money you can turn right into lots of heat and light to cook on and dance to. I went down there this morning and got a whole vanload of sweet-grained money, mostly cherry (there is no better firewood) and ironwood, and bucked and split and stacked it all in front of the house, next to the big piles of other money minted for winter. There is pride of a new sort that resides in the riches of one's growing stack of firewood, one's work, the fruit of muscle, the grainy cumulus of effort, the quality and tone and visual heft of immanent heat, the craft of its hewing, the anticipation of its warmth, the sense it affords of the larger security that extends from far within a lifetime to far beyond its edges, teaching the mind to learn of itself thus, through body and spirit, and so to live and grow in accord with the true grain of being.