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The Fall of a Free Market Prophet
The statements were made by Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006.
Ah, Alan Greenspan .... The Maestro, the Wizard. Just one year ago when CNBC did a TV special about him, its title was Judging a Giant!
"By the dawn of the new millennium, it was nearly impossible to find anyone in America who wasn't gaga over Greenspan. Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street, and Main Street, dogs and cats -- all were high on the Fed chairman."
Justin Martin, Greenspan: The Man Behind Money
Now it's 2008. The NY Times ran a piece called "The Reckoning: Taking a Hard New Look at the Greenspan Legacy," and Alan's in the Bubble Hall of Shame.
Alan Greenspan was an Objectivist.
It's hard to know if he's still one or, if he's not, when and why he stopped.
Even the Objectivists don't know. Their official website says: Although he is not famous as an Objectivist (nor is it clear that he still considers himself an Objectivist), arguably the most famous person associated with Objectivism is Alan Greenspan.
What, you may ask, is an Objectivist?
An Objectivist is a follower of Ayn Rand. She was a writer. Her most famous book is a novel, Atlas Shrugged. In it, the capitalist entrepreneurs go on strike against the collectivist shlubs -- government, the unions, and the working class in general -- all of whom leach off of the great men, and the world collapses.
The capitalist leaders go off to the wilderness to form their own little utopia, where they build railroads that run on time and airlines that never crash, and have hot, gorgeous, young, college educated heiresses desperate to bed them. They are also very fit and hunky -- the entrepreneurs, that is, -- who are all male.
It's sort of a post-Nietzsche vision of supermensches. In it the only route to virtue is "a full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism -- with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church."
She established a group. She was the leader, was surrounded by acolytes and devotees. Alan was among them.
Objectivists like to walk around with gold jewelry, a broach or a tie pin, in the shape of a dollar sign.
Ayn Rand's real name was Alissa Rosenbaum.
She was a Russian Jew. Suddenly, I had a whole new vision. I understood.
There's this thing about Jews. Pardon me, as I plunge into ethnic stereotyping here. But as one, via Latvia and Belarus, I claim a certain latitude.
Even after saying that, please, if you are without a sense of humor, if you find yourself watching the Daily Show or Bill Maher, and don't laugh, please stop now. If you are an actual anti-Semite or feel inclined to assault Christians, Muslims, Communists, nuclear physicists, or encourage others to so, please stop now, and don't quote me. If you are under 18, that's completely irrelevant.
Here's the thing about Jews.
They like to think. Nudge one, and a philosopher begins to spout. They have a theory, about the world, God, food, love, human relations, politics. It's happy, it's sad. It is, especially, utopian. Jews always have these theories about how the world could be made perfect.
They're good at it. They make up great theories. Partly because they're just theories, and partly because Jews are normally the underdog, there's almost always a humanistic heart beating beneath the ideologies they invent.
But then, from time to time, a gentile gets hold of one of those theories, and, boy oh boy, there's trouble.
For example, you have Jesus. Nice ideas, very friendly, be good to the poor, "he who is without sin, cast the first stone," like that.
The goys take it over, and next thing you know, you have the Spanish Inquisition.
The Arabs pick it up, turn it into Islam, and what's the first thing they do? They make the Jews and Christians second class citizens. Which is nothing to what they do to polytheists.
Karl Marx, Fredrich Engels, they're saying "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." Saintly sentiments. They write a couple of books, a movement starts, you turn around and you're looking at Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung and a few million peasants are uprooted and slaughtered.
Albert Einstein figures out that mass can be turn into energy. The gentiles find out, and it's bye-bye Hiroshima, syanora Nagasaki.
So I figure she meant what she said, and she wanted to be taken seriously, and she wanted people to believe her. But in her heart of hearts, she didn't ever really think that people would live that way. Or in her head of heads, she never understood what happens when they try in the real world.
Anyway, that's where Alan Greenspan came from.
His mind was full of Objectivist ideas. A belief that humans were rational. That self-interest would guide unregulated capitalists to do only sane and sensible things. Not every capitalist all the time, but enough of them often enough, that a capitalist system would be inherently beneficent and operate for the good of all.
Free market capitalism -- as a faith -- really is an inverse of Marxism. It is a theology that believes their system will bring paradise on earth and moral perfection. When their system is in power in the real world, their true believers claim that any problem only happened because their ideology has not been applied with sufficient purity.
Alan did very well for himself. He ran a consulting company that made tons of money. He was on the board of directors for Alcoa, Capital Cities/ABC, Inc., General Foods, Inc., J.P. Morgan & Co., Inc., and more. He dated Barbara Walters.
In 1987, Ronald Reagan appointed him as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
He stayed on through Bush I and Bill Clinton.
Then along came George W. Bush.
He was one of those gentiles. The kind who would take a Jewish idea, whether it was Christianity or free market economics, and ride its ideology as far as circumstances would allow, unaware that he'd left its humanistic heart behind.
With nobody to restrain him, Greenspan put his full faith in the markets. He kept interest rates low. Which pumped money into the credit markets. He resisted regulations. When he was warned that real estate was blowing a big, big bubble, he refused to act.
Why?
Because he believed in the inherent virtue of markets.
So there he was, being quizzed by one of the heroes of the House of Representatives, Henry Waxman.
First, Greenspan said, in a prepared statement, "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief."
Well, yes. One of the fundamentals of conservative, free market, laissez-faire, Objectivist economics is that business people will act sanely and sensibly, thereby protecting people who trust in them. That's a theological belief. Now, watching the bubble burst, Greenspan was doing a remarkable thing, and he does deserve some credit for it. He was acknowledging reality!
Then he said, "I made a mistake in presuming they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders." Which means they need to be regulated. By someone else. By government.
"In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working," Waxman said. Meaning this notion that individual greed would, as if "guided by an invisible hand," lead to the greatest social good.
"Absolutely, precisely," Greenspan replied.
The acolyte of Alissa Rosenbaum, the apostle of Adam Smith, the enabler of George W. Bush, had acknowledged that their god -- the free market -- had failed.
- Posted in
89 Comments so far
Show Allin college, a young Jewish lad informed me that "jesus was a nice Jewish boy who went into his father's business." we know what happened with that. Greenspan and Obama's economic advisers are ready for their close-ups, Mr. Beinhart. The part of Ayn Rand is hilarious. I see Sara Palin in a blonde wig saying "A is A" triumphantly to a frenzied crowd? "While America Shlepped?"
Hello
One question i can't find an answer to, why did Milton Friedman praise the federal reserve and Alan Greenspan if he believes in the free market? That is very contradictory.
Why? well because of the simple fact that manipulating the interest rate for the whole economy isn't the choice of free market?
So how can Milton advocate free market economics if he praises the federal reserve that is manipulating the free market interest rate which resulted in the credit crises.
I mean if the interest rate wouldn't have been so low in the 2001 people wouldn't had borrowed all the money they did.
And why the heck is Milton defending the Federal reserve which in itself is proping up the fractional reserv banking sistem that is creating money out of thin air? How the hell does Milton stand for freedom and fairness if the institution he praises allows private banks to get rich by fraud and destroying our purshasing power by inflation?
What the hell happend to the free market economist Milton Friedman in his elderly ages?
Same thing with Alan, huge free market economist before he became part of the banking industry, then suddenly turned to a non free market champion by embracing the fraudulent banking industry.
What gives? Common sense people go kuku when they get older or what?
Thanks!
Who really questions authority, a la the bumper sticker: "Question Authority!"? Certainly not the authorities themselves who are often astonished and seduced by the power of their own influence. The herd remains the herd, trampling the fallen leaders in search of the new ones. But as we near the precipice will an existential angst suddenly induce an individual lucidity sufficient to keep us all from tumbling into the void?
Stay tuned.
Sioux Rose
Nice existential lyricism, Crux, you got a bumper sticker there (albeit a long one)!
S I O U X R O S E,
Perhaps as in _ L U C I D _ D R E A M I N G _, we the more evolved in consciousness within the heard -- can broadcast the message :
__ Awaken to the possibility of BEING a dream dreaming
__ caught tightly in the midst of onerous propaganda and illusions of reality
__ -- -- S T O P __ N O W -- -- __
__ to mark the deaths and mourn the mindf⊃@ked who consume themselves
__ whilst asleep
Namaste
Sioux Rose
NSPIRE: All thought provoking. The one (rhetorical question, really) I posited in my astrological analysis of this time frame, "The Final Phase of the Piscean Age" is "How does the dreamer come to recognize THE AWAKENED state"? All those who CONSUME Fox "news" with their faux filler (a/k/a food) are CLUELESS to how "under the influence" they really are. My daughter had on Barbara Walter's "special" on the ten most intriguing people (I think that was the title), and Rush Limbaugh was cast as one. That bloated JABBA THE HUT (was that the name of that disgusting THING in the Star Wars trilogy?) just got some mega-million dollar contract for stroking his listeners in the art of HATING others. This society is so sick! I guess that's the intellectual equivalent of sadomasochism. WHY people can listen to that shit head is an alien notion to me. I think it's that misery likes company, and the worse people feel about themselves, their lives and future prospects, the more necessary it is to hate someone and find another to feel superior to. Rush Limbaugh is the spiritual equivalent of a maggot... and it really upsets me that rather than give microphone time to Cindy Sheehan who has to ask donors for funds, or Harvey Wasserman, or so many of the INFORMED writers who we read regularly on this site, the MAGGOT gets the fiscal rewards and unbridled access to the air waves, the PUBLIC'S air waves! Polluted by such as he.
Yes, Jabba The Hut was his name, and you do him a great disservice by comparing him to Rush Limbaugh! : )
SIOUXROSE,
Twas "Most Fascinating" ( which I know through Steven Colbert's show interview w/ Babs ), although Rush is better categorized as most disgusting.
Hate is the essence of the mindf⊃@king manipulation, of small minds by elitist bottom scum suckers.
Although I adhere to the belief that both maggots and scum serve mankind significantly better than neoCONers like Rush.
A survival trained buddy has clarified that maggots are both useful to clean infected wounds and to eat as food, when times are really tough.
Perhaps Rush is better likened to a parasitic soul-eater, as perhaps was 'Jack the Ripper', who ( in Babel V -- sci fi ) feasted upon the savage pains and suffering of his victims ? Like a reverse of the empath in the original Star Trek, that gave her life to heal another ( via spiritual vibrations ).
Namaste
Ayn Rand and her acolytes have always failed to account for the pernicious influence of unearned wealth and that greed, hubris, and stupidity affects all of mankind; her management uber-class included.
www.wunderman-comics.com
Thank you. This has been my thought lately when I hear the term "wealth creation" used so much. Capitalism is supposed to be the production and selling of goods. Yet these people want to create wealth out of thin air. Hell, give me access to the paper, ink and a printing press and I'll show you "wealth creation".
Thanks to the digital age those resources aren't required anymore. If I knew what I was doing all these keyboard strokes I made writing this response could have netted me big bucks and transferred it to a numbered account somewhere. Somehow the first (counterfeiting) is illegal and the second one isn't. It's really just the same thing.
I, too, am a Russian Jew but my parents, my father especially, made sure I understood very early that there are such things in this world as Greed and Stupidity. Also, it is emphatically NOT true that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Nietzsche reminds me in some ways of George Wanker Bush. Ask all the people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their dreams but are still walking around above ground if the experience has made them stronger. And finally, Ayn Rand was shtupping Milton Friedman and she gave birth to Alan Greenspan. I think that should put to rest the slander that all Jews are intelligent.
LOL!!
Interestingly, Adam Smith never wrote about the "invisible hand" of the free market. (http://tinyurl.com/6bra4t) And now, it appears as if even Ayn Rand believed in it more as a dreamy ideal than reality. Then we learn that acolytes of Smith and Rand, such as Greenspan and Milton Friedman, fell hook, line, and stinker for this myth, and have helped promulgate it around the world at the muzzle of a gun in the wake of many shocks. And why is the world so messed up?
The more I learn about myths, the more I realize that much of what we "know"...is myth.
"All Nature's difference keeps all Nature's peace." Alexander Pope
Just remember that the Jews did keep slaves in ancient times and were fiercely ethnocentric. They did a great job mucking things up without any help from gentiles(who had their own flaws).
We would have been better off I think if we ditched the desert and looked to the Far east mystical religions. Not perfect either, but way more benign than what hunting/herder societies came up with.
Objectivism is great though.
Its raw human supremacy myth and so fun to debunk. Rand said dont be a racist! Discriminate against non humans!
Animal lovers: the new man haters.
She also had very specific ideas on humor. Never laugh at yourself.
lol
I love those childish clowns.
Although most know of the Good Samaritan story, few realize that it is more significant in the relevant details :
It was a rich Jew who was dying at roadside
Many similar rich Jews ignored the destitute man, leaving him to die
It was that times most despised and abused minority -- A Samaritan -- whose common humanity was kindled
The message appears to have been COMPLETELY lost to the state of Israel and it's relationship to soon to be majority Palestinians
Namaste
Be careful there with these stereotypes -- what is said about Greenspan can be extended by way of Milton Friedman to Rubin and Summers, and on other side, to Krugman and Stiglitz, all Jewish economists which have had enormous influence on economic thinking from right to left. You would almost begin believing in Hilter's conspiracy theories about Jewish capitalists and communists ganging up together against the Volk.
Also this part is chronologically erroneous (or reads poorly):
"For example, you have Jesus. Nice ideas, very friendly, be good to the poor, "he who is without sin, cast the first stone," like that.
The goys take it over, and next thing you know, you have the Spanish Inquisition.
The Arabs pick it up, turn it into Islam, and what's the first thing they do? They make the Jews and Christians second class citizens. Which is nothing to what they do to polytheists."
The Arabs didn't pick up anything from the Spanish Inquistion -- in fact they were the main enemy to be liquidated (unless you mean picking up things from Jesus). And Jews and Christians were people of the book, and enjoyed far greater rights than what European Christians did with their minorities at the time. Polytheists were persecuted in any case by all these crazy theists.
C E T I,
Perhaps your "ITS" are misapplied ?
I read it as :
"The Arabs pick [ Christian & Jewish ideology ] up, turn it into Islam, and what's the first thing they do? They make the Jews and Christians second class citizens. Which is nothing to what they do to polytheists."
The implied subject of Arabs makes no sense to be the Spanish Inquistion -- at least we agree about that !
On the other hand, recent genetic research proves that many Jews and Arabs did convert to Christian belief ( that or die or leave Spain ) during those pain-filled days, as their DNA component is increased in Spaniards overall.
Namaste
Good points, but methinks you're being a bit too serious. And you missed part of his very obviously tongue-in-cheek thing about "Jews come up with a great idea, the goys pick it up, distort it's true meaning and all hell breaks loose". Not meant to be taken seriously!
With the Jesus example, he claims the goys picked up Jesus's ideas and twisted them badly which led to the Spanish I. (Huge leap of course...HE'S BEING FUNNY!!) And here's the part you mistakenly ascribed to the wrong thing: "The Arabs pick it up..." does not refer to the Spanish Inquisition, but to the original notion of that passage, the ideas that Jesus popularized...picked up and distorted first by the 'goys' and then by the 'Arabs'.
Obviously real estate wasn't the only thing operating in a bubble. I wonder if these guys ever got outside, bought a loaf of bread, rode the bus.
Inside the park homer.
Only thing keeping this piece from going over the right (left?) field wall was the unfortunate reference to Adam Smith at the conclusion.
He's gotten a bum rap for a century.
I've read and studied his writings, and his name is almost always lumped in where it does not belong. This practice has become a habit when discussing "free markets," and it is an anachronistic canard at the very least.
Good comment. Maybe left-center field...???
I agree about the quality of the article, and about the almost total distortion of Smith's theory--certainly his intent.
The article makes important points, and makes me laugh. If it's not over the fence, then it's as you say, an inside-the-park...more exciting, gritty, and dramatic in a way.
You simply have to know the context, the situation against which Smith was railing to understand his point. Royal monopolies were the 'market' modus operendi at the time. You received the King's permission (monopoly) to make stawberry jam (or whatever), and nobody else could legally make that product in your market area. Smith simply said: "laissez-faire" (French for 'allow') everybody who wants to make strawberry jam and sell it at the market. Now the 'invisible hand' of competition will push everybody to produce a better product to compete, and it will give consumers choices which obviously will have the tendency to bring down prices as producers compete for consumers. Not exactly nasty or radical!
But...right-wingers like Friedman have always grossly distorted Smith and bleated at us that he insisted that entrepreneurs should be given total freedom to greedily pursue their profit without government regulations. Not true at all.
Smith specifically warned that capitalists are constantly trying to distort the market by fixing prices. He was most definitely calling for government regulations.
I suspect that the vast majority of us who like to think of ourselves as "progressives" would have followed Smith around and wolfed down his writings. He was brilliant, weird, colorful, and an extremely good analyst.
Not at all the cheerleader for profiteers he's been made out to be by the right-wing cabal.
You're not a fucking progressive - you're a correct line ideologue who thinks that they have the right to kneecap anybody who disagrees.
There is more progressivity in my foreskin (which I don't even have anymore) than you have in your entire mind.
You would permit - no, FORCE - the whole world to fall under the thrall of the Cheneys, the Sarkozys, the Browns, and the Howards, and go slowly but inexorably to Hell. That, rather than permit people to interact without the force and fraud of the State.
If you have a State, you have a BIG pile of money just lying there waiting to be stolen and diverted. Why on earth do you think that would attract right-thinking gentlemen rather than parasitic scum,bags with an eye on self-enrichment? What does history teach us, but that the pot of money attracts the most vile of men?
You think like a 30-something female schoolteacher.
That is the third-worst insult I can muster, and one that I seldom use because it contains within it my combined hatred of, contempt for and disgust regarding
(1) the State;
(2) the bureaucracy;
(3) the under-achievers that become teachers; and
(4) the susceptibility of women to believe the most atrocious rubbish once they start getting old ["Buy this face goop - it will make you look like Claudia Schiffer" or "let government help everyone - we can make everyone equal"].
Cheerio
GT
GT's Market Rant
It my opinion that one Alan Greenspan was NOT taken aback by where his policies led. They were predictable outcomes.
Greed is at the heart and core of Capitalism and to pretend one did not allow for greed as a defense of those stupid policies only shows how stupid he thinks the people are.
Jews who AREN'T ethnocentric AREN'T JEWS !!! You have to buy into the mythology to be classified as a 'Jew' - and you can't join unless you can prove your geneology. So let's be clear here: there are people who DO NOT IDENTIFY THEMSELVES AS 'JEWISH' - and then there's all the rest of us. So by definition, ANY SELF-PROCLAIMED JEW is a racist!!! Otherwise, they wouldn't claim to be Jewish !!! Why is this so difficult to understand? And by the way, what racist isn't a supremacist? (Like what American doesn't think the US is the greatest and best country in the world?) This is the kind of thinking that brought us the Nazis - and the Zionists - and all the hell of fascism!!!
You can't claim to be a Jew and not admit you belong to a selective 'elite' club that looks down on not just other people, but other animals as well. (Yeah, so do Christians and Moslems, but they are derived from Judaism, remember.) At least Buddhists don't claim exclusive superiority - there is a better world, but it going to take atheists to create it.
Twisted, but funny and with a lot of truth.
Define "Failed" the CEO of GM has enough stashed away to work for a$ 1.00 a year and l am sure the super rich have squirreled enough in gold and off shore accounts to keep their heirs happy for many generations, for the rest of us" let them eat cake ! " someone once said.
The heads of the Big Three auto companies will probably have contracts similar to those tendered to aging baseball players, i.e., "incentives". For example, though the contact clearly states your salary is $1.00 per year, if you show up to work wearing a tie you will be paid $1,000,000 each day you wear a tie. Another $1,000,000 for wearing socks, etc. This will all be in the last page of a multi-page contract and in type so small it can only be read under a microscope. These guys are not going to work for $1.00 a year. That's a mortal insult and they'd rather choke to death on their own vomit than work for basically nothing, no matter how much they have hidden away offshore in gold and Euros.
steve jobs has been doing a buck a yr for many yrs..he needs some cash he sells some stock..what he is skipping out on is the 15 percent that you and i pay or paid into social security..a buck a yr. is a good deal for him and his company..
ken
LOL (again!) Good one, as usual.
Webber said... "We would have been better off I think if we ditched the desert and looked to the Far east mystical religions. Not perfect either, but way more benign than what hunting/herder societies came up with."
It is important to distinguish the Jewish race from the Jewish religion, as not all those who have Jewish heritage believe in their religion, and not all those who find value in Judaism are of Jewish descent.
If you go back three thousand years in the near east (which wasnt always desert, but became that way through desertification by cutting down most of the Cedars of Lebanon), the Jews were slaves in Assyria and Egypt (at different times), and their religious beliefs were heavily influenced by the dominant culture they were in... They were rubbing shoulders with religious men from cultures from all over who came to Alexandria, and much of this record was lost when the Library of Alexandria was burned
If you go back two thousand years ago, you will find folks from the far east (India) and middle east (Persia) also living amongst the locals. These Buddhists
and Zoroastrians influenced the ideas of the mystery schools, Essenes, and Thereputeae... the Gnostics... who were using the written Greek language to share their ideas with each other... They were frustrated by the cruelty of the Roman Empire and the corruption of the Jewish Ruling Elite (Sadduccees) who were taxing the Jewish Temple goers, among other heinous crimes...
So the Gnostics created the Jesus myth at that time for two reasons...
first to call Bullshit on the Empire and the Sadduccees by saying that their Messiah already came and went, making the Sadduccees irrelevant at best...
And also to encode the initiation rites of the mystery schools into a language of symbolism so initiates could understand the path to enlightenment in a universal story...
Drawing on the characteristics of the Sun/Son gods of Egypt (Horus), Persia (Mithra), India (Krishna), and Judea (Moses), the writers of the Jesus myth recreated a character that was already known in most traditions, and given (at that time) a contemporary setting to retell the story that was stripped of the various cultural differences, and distilled the story to the true essence/meaning that wove like a common thread through each culture...
Unfortunately, this symbolic story became bastardized by the Literalists, who mistook the map for the territory, and perceived the new testament to be the literal word of God... at the same time the first Literalist Christian cult churches were gaining in popularity, the Roman Empire was weakening... So The Roman Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity as the new State Religion to tighten his control... He held the Council of Nicea to determine which books in the old testament and which versions of the Jesus story to include in the new testament... and decreed that Jesus and only Jesus was the Son of God, the rest of us are born sinners, and any literature saying otherwise was Heresy... Thus providing the theological justification for the Holy wars, Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, torture, and genocide over the last 1600 years... that is the true Hallmark of any Empire.
G O L D E N _ M E A N,
You've said in most excellent proportion many truths and subtleties that are usually overlooked ( elemental but unseen ). Thank you 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 … fold.
Every moment of each day of every-year humankindness has flourished to instill each NOW's moment with ever further reaching truths and visions of possibility. We should ask ourselves 'how can we box and label this infinity of reality, either now or as history revealed' ?
It's our hubris to believe that we alone share this moment of inspiration and connection to all that is revered.
Namaste
Sioux Rose
GOLDEN MEAN: Luminous posting. My hat's off to you. Gracias.
Thank you Nspire and Siouxrose,
And the feeling is mutual for your thought-invoking posts...
I have read commondreams comments for the last two years, wanting to see and research the many different perspectives here before I chose to begin posting a month or so ago, and I have found a few strong voices amongst the chatter that pleasantly remind my what is truly meaningful in life, you two are amongst those who have inspired me share my thoughts here...
All too often I find my political and spiritual beliefs to be difficult to be understood let alone digested by friends and family... (I once made a friend at a potluck cry by informing her of Clinton's war record, so I try to keep my ideological dish to myself as best as I can)...
This forum is a safe way to share ideas, no matter how difficult or far-out they may be, without the trappings of interpersonal issues to cloud things...
Sioux Rose
GOLDEN: I am flattered as your intellect certainly owns its own radiance and you are an asset to this forum. (I believe Nspire would agree if I might speak for him.) Please continue to share your responses & ideas where you feel thus inspired! And welcome to the forum.
By the way, as something of an oracle, I can't count the number of times people began to cry, sometimes from something as brief as reading the meaning of 3 tarot cards they chose in response to a question I asked them to make to "their higher self" or any "guides" that might be present. Truth is a powerful thing, and the undying truths have been left to us, encoded into a great many things like the rings of trees and the oracle systems devised by our spiritually astute ancestors precisely so that the heavy cloak of matter/materialism would not inhibit the higher understanding necessary for navigating on the earth plane and retaining one's sense of perspective... a key asset to living a life of conscious integrity. I would LOVE to see this premise taught to children at least as a counterbalance to the general teaching of rabid consumerism and the mundane skills necessary for GETTING all those things the mass media merchandising machine makes them believe they want and need.
S I O U X R O S E,
Yes, we are agreed -- there is always a huge opening for courageous thinkers whose insight can "break through" and ring the bell of being aware of our awareness, and being present to true experience of that reverent presence / consciousness of the ALL that IS
( formlessness, hidden from "our" lackluster rationalized Western thinking requiring "things" = form based thoughts ).
If we cannot label it, grasp its defined meaning -- can it even exist { says the left brain hemisphere } ? Of course, it is our right hemisphere must become the focus of that "spiritual" perception, which has little need for definitiveness being the paradoxical expression of infinity.
Of the many links that I've recommended, this is by far the very most powerful yet :
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness -- of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.
Jill comes back from near death to INSPIRATIONALLY inform us of what the right hemisphere imagines of this world, w/o the buzzing bothersome noise of the left hemisphere ( temporarily silenced by blood clot ). This blessed experience is the proof positive of what so many of us have longed to grasp -- here we have the left-brain dominated scientist entirely blown off every aspect of form and thingness -- in order to bring us back the "concrete" experience of formless and thinglessness.
It is no wonder that she screams in joyous tears of momentous breakthrough, as she provides her most profound experience on this video -- it bring tears to me to even recall her emotion and depth of reverence …
Namaste
P. S. My sincere thanks for the gracious gift of this video, from our beloved ( and dearly missed on CD ):
___ S T A R _ O F _ T H E _ S E A ___
Sioux Rose
NPWR: GREAT posting, thanks for sharing it!
You're a loooong way from the article...but great info. Thanks
My lengthy rant was in response to Webber and other posters who have used this article as a springboard for advocating that the Jews and/or Judaism are inferior or ethnocentric or worse... I was attempting to give an historical context for this discussion that seemed to be degenerating into another anti-Israel gangpile of comments by a few reactionaries... while simultaneously challenging some of the premises of the Article's author... brevity and staying on topic are not my strong suits... thanks
Karl Marx said he "didn't have time to write small books".
Points well taken and your perspective was great. I would advise not to worry about staying on topic when you have something interesting and pertinent to say...which you do.
But you're right, so many people drift away from the intent of an article to plunge into their favorite racist rant (or whatever).
I find it a bit frightening that so many people can miss the obvious tongue-in-cheek character of such an article and twist it into any personal direction they want to.
Fascinating and enjoyable post. Thanks for submitting it. As a lifelong agnostic, I am predisposed to give such accounts some credence. However, I was wondering why you omitted any mention of the importance and influence of the period of the Babylonian captivity.
One website which offers somewhat similar historical explanations is http://www.jesusneverexisted.com
In a just world, misguided fanatics like Greenspan and Ayn Rand would deserve to be held up to ridicule in exact proportion to the damage their fanaticism had done. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, Ayn Rand, and Greenspan deserve to be a terms of derision for many years to come among the rest of us.
Poet
THIS is misguided - comparing Greenspan to murderous dictators? How absurd. When his theories were proven wrong he admitted it, without killing millions upon millions of people.
Marco you are right--a better comparison could be made with Richelieu and Rasputin, noth of whom were royal toadies mystically or religiously obsessed who started out with the earnest conviction that they were doing good and in the end only ended up doing well for themselves.
Both Greenspan and Rand still deserve to become terms of derision for a long time to come for what their life's work has done to the overwhelming majority of the rest of us.
Poet
Dammit Poet - don't you back down: you're absolutely right.
Greenspan's manipulation of the short-term price of credit DIRECTLY helped the US continue its program of slaughter of brown-skinned children; a slaughter that has increased in scope and pace since the Fed was shat into existence by corrupt bankers and their whores in Congress.
Without the Fed, the US would not be able to inflate away the costs of their debt - the people would feel an additional tax burden and would question what the money was being used for.
Those who enable the implementation of a policy are as culpable as those who carry it out. (Those who formulate anti-human policy are by far the worst, of course).
Cheney is worse than the subhuman scumbags who torture on America's behalf, because without his direction the torture and extra-judicial killing would not take place. (More correctly, the torture is on America's POLITICIANS' behalf... it is not the PEOPLE that do this or cause it to be done, it is the parasitic scum that live off them).
Greenspan and his ilk furnish the means by which the financial cost of this rape of the world (which costs a mind-boggling amount) can be hidden from the taxpayers.
The game is to transfer tax revenue to favoured cronies, and enrich oneself in the process... so how much it actually costs is not relevant to politicians so long as the public can be fooled (or cowed by stories of boogie men) for as long as it tkes to fleece them.
Hitler's toll is being revised downwards all the time (witness the changing of the plaque at Auschwitz... form 4 million to 1 million). I have said before - even ONE death for no reason, is too many.
If Hitler's toll has fallen (to, say, 3.5 million) then it is LOWER than the US's toll in VietNam/Laos/Cambodia, and on a par with the toll in Iraq (counting back to include all deaths from the destruction of sanitation equipment and civilian infrastructure in the 1990s by US Air Force 'heroes').
So yeah - Greenspan and his ilk should be on a par with Pol Pot, Eichmann, Stalin and his cronies.
Rand is a historical non-entity - even those who claim to be Randians seldom have any clue what a deluded bitch she was. She had as much interest in genuine liberty as Paul Wolfowitz or any of the other Straussians.
What Would JEfferson Do? He would be leading a revolt.
Cheers
GT
GT's Market Rant
You sound like a pretentious frat-brat who reads way beyond what you can understand, and who has a fairly severe case of Tourette Syndrome.
"There you go again..."
What an absolute load of crap that article is.
For a start - in what way is Greenspan a capitalist?
His consulting company - Townsend Greenspan - FAILED (yes- FAILED). He was wrong at every major turning point between 1964 and 1974. Then, as a result of cronyism he was hired into the bureaucracy (the only place that untalented dickheads can make a career).
"Free markets"? Greenspan spent his entire career as a Central Planner of Interest Rates, for fuck's sake. Government and bureaucratic setting of the price of money... the ULTIMATE in central planning: as Mises pointed out, that ALWAYS leads to disaster because politicians think that it gives them a license to print money when they screw up.
Greenspan even had to rely on cronyism to get his PhD - he got it sub honoris, 22 years after he enrolled.
I have been pointing out since 1997 that Greenspan was an idiot who would have died of starvation if he had not managed to affix his lips to the public teat.
Rand was a fraud (as was Marx): Rand babbled about liberty and free markets, but idolised the US government - the biggest crony-ocracy and corrupter of market principles since the French monarchy. She was a 'correct line' ideologue who regularly held kangaroo courts and excommunicated acolytes who were not sufficiently adoring (like Rothbard).
Yeah, yeah - Jooze are smart. Yeah, yeah, they all mean well. Wolfowtiz, Perle, Feith, Abrams, Ariel Sharon, Rahm Emmanuel's terrorist dad... all well-meaning philosophers. Give me a fucking break.
But it's not because they're Jooze... it's because they're fucking parasitic scum. Bush isn't a Joo; nor is Cheney, nor is Rice, nor is Rumsfeld, nor is John 'screw my wife and let me watch' Bolton. They're just parasitic scum.
Sarkozy, Brown, Blair... all non-kikes (if you believe Sarko, his big hook nose is from the Greek side of a family).
Belonging to some bunch of morons that believes in an invisible sky wizard who likes eating foreskin is not the criterion on which to judge these scumbags. The criterion is whether or not they participate in a system that deliberately slaughters other people's children, just so that they and their cronies can live in palaces.
Cheers
GT
GT's Market Rant
You are so simplistic it's hilarious. You didn't understand the article at all (as you didn't a few weeks ago with one by Monbiot).
Read it again, unfinished PhD. (Interesting that you would pick up Greenspan's PhD shenanigans... you who bragged about your PhD in the comments to Monbiot's article but it turns out it's "unfinished"...!??? Hey, bright boy, we all have an unfinished PhD, all 6 million of us...)
It's a great article with a hilarious tongue-in-cheek thing about Jewish utopianism adopted by Gentiles without the humanism. Soooo, but sooo obviously meant to be satirical and humorous...
Sure enough, there Mr "almost preternatural numeracy without being Rain Man"...you missed it. You completely missed the point of the article.
You curse and swear, drop names with wild abandon, and puke out the most confused, incoherent crap imaginable.
But I truly am curious about how you know so much about how "...untalented dickheads can make a career..."?????
Comparing Rand to Marx (in their lack of authenticity and seriousness) is like...let's see... well... like comparing you to someone who can actually think. You no more understand Marx than you understood this article.
But this article is so much easier than Marx, so I think you can understand it if you really try. Read the article again...slowly... No, no!! Put away that keyboard. Unplug it. Come on, just do it.
Come on there getreal. Who the F*K are you anyway? The only comments I have read from you are your "takes" on whether the author is being funny or not (which is by the wqay a COMPLETELY subjective matter). All you've done is dish out the ad hominems yourself there getreal. In fact, why don't you "getreal"?
Another person who doesn't get it!! Christ, what is wrong with you people...spaghetti-monster...!!???
What the fuck business is it of yours "who I am"?? The whole thing about a blog is that we discuss according to what we say...never mind color of skin, name, address, university education, etc. You write something and that's all we need.
What difference would it make if you knew my name was Joe Phuckyu from Smelee Krotch Indiana? And I don't give a fuck who you are or where you come from. Can you imagine just how insignificant that can be?????
The article is intelligent because it explains something deep by making an idiot (Gr$$nspan) look like the pathetic old fool that he is by describing his humiliating appearance in front of the committee.
And it sets it all up with reference to utopian visions etc. My point is not at all that you or anybody else should find it funny. Who cares. Maybe you don't have any sense of humor.
Here's my point. Try to get it. Beinhart was not being serious... not being literal. He did not mean to say that Jews are more humane than anybody else. He was being tongue-in-cheek when he said that. Got it. Yes, finding something funny is subjective. Understanding the author's intent is not. You didn't get it.