…how the ‘federal reserve’ scam works…

Wonderfully illustrated by Dylan Ratigan on MSNBC’s Morning Meeting on Friday, July 24, 2009…

Eliot Spitzer, the ex-New York City Governor who was disgraced out of office over a ‘call-girl’ scandal, is a guest on this show – and helps put things in perspective. It is interesting to note that Spitzer, before becoming Governor, was New York’s Attorney General who fearlessly and feverishly prosecuted corporate crime in that capacity and had made many ‘rich’ and ‘influential’ enemies before he left the Attorney General’s office to assume the Governorship of New York (important to note that AIG was one of the corporate crooks nailed by Spitzer – yes, the same AIG that has in the recent past been showered with tons of tax-payer money with no questions asked about what is going to happen with all that cash) – which is why it’s no surprise that his faux-pas with the very expensive call-girl was played out in detail for the entire world to see – payback, I guess, for messing with the rich and powerful – needless to say, the revelations about his call-girl and the amount she charged him per visit manifested themselves in or around the time he started beating the drums about how the actions of the Federal Reserve, Corporate America, and the Political Leaders of the great US of A need to be examined carefully as there was a ’scam’ in progress…

“…The Federal Reserve — the quasi-autonomous body that controls the US’s money supply — is a Ponzi scheme that created bubble after bubble in the US economy and needs to be held accountable for its actions…The Federal Reserve has benefited for decades from the notion that it is quasi-autonomous, its supposed to be independent. Let me tell you a dirty secret: The Fed has done an absolutely disastrous job since [former Fed Chairman] Paul Volcker left…You look at the governing structure of the New York [Federal Reserve], it was run by the very banks that got the money. This is a Ponzi scheme, an inside job. It is outrageous, it is time for Congress to say enough of this. And to give them more power now is crazy…” – Eliot Spitzer

- The Ranting Dream

…more wisdom of the ages…

Following the overwhelming response to the earlier ‘dogma‘ rant, I’d like to share more of Kabir and Bulleh Shah with you…

Listen carefully – there is a story being told – a beautiful story…

What is seen is not the Truth
What is, cannot be said
Trust comes not without seeing
Nor understanding without words
The wise comprehends with knowledge
To the ignorant it is but a wonder
Some worship the formless God
Some worship His various forms
In what way He is beyond these attributes
Only the Knower knows
That music cannot be written
How can then be the notes
Says Kabir, awareness alone will overcome illusion

- Kabir

If the divine is found through ablutions,
Surely frogs and fish would find him first
If the divine is hidden in jungles,
The cattle would have discovered him by now
O Bulleh, the divine is found by those
with pure and true heart

- Bulleh Shah

The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:
The moon is within me, and so is the sun.
The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.
So long as man clamors for the I and the Mine, his works are as naught:
When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.
For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge:
When that comes, then work is put away.
The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers.
The musk is in the deer, but it seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.

- Kabir

The soil is in ferment, O friend
Behold the diversity.
The soil is the horse, so is the rider
The soil chases the soil, and we hear the clanging of soil
The soil kills the soil, with weapons of the soil.
That soil with more on it, is arrogance
The soil is the garden so is its beauty
The soil admires the soil in all its wondrous forms
After the circle of life is done it returns to the soil
Answer the riddle O Bulleh, and take this burden off my head.

- Bulleh Shah

Oh Companion That Abode Is Unmatched,
Where My Complete Beloved Is.
In that Place There Is No Happiness or Unhappiness,
No Truth or Untruth
Neither Sin Nor Virtue.
There Is No Day or Night, No Moon or Sun,
There Is Radiance Without Light.
There Is No Knowledge or Meditation
No Repetition of Mantra or Austerities,
Neither Speech Coming From Vedas or Books.
Doing, Not-Doing, Holding, Leaving
All These Are All Lost Too In This Place.
No Home, No Homeless, Neither Outside or Inside,
Micro and Macrocosm Are Non-Existent.
Five Elemental Constituents and the Trinity Are Both Not There
Witnessing Un-struck Shabad Sound is Also Not There.
No Root or Flower, Neither Branch or Seed,
Without a Tree Fruits are Adorning,
Primordial Om Sound, Breath-Synchronized Soham,
This and That – All Are Absent, The Breath Too Unknown
Where the Beloved Is There is Utterly Nothing
Says Kabir I Have Come To Realize.
Whoever Sees My Indicative Sign
Will Accomplish the Goal of Liberation.

- Kabir

He said, “Let there be,” and it happened.
He made the latent turn into the manifest,
Out of the formless He created the form.
What a wondrous game He played!
What a carefree game He plays!
When He disclosed the hidden secret,
He lifted the veil from over His face.
Why does He now hide from me?
The Real permeates everyone.
What a carefree game He plays!
He said, “We have honored mankind;
None has been created like you;
You are the crown of all creation.”
What a proclamation with the beat of drum!
What a carefree game He plays!
He himself indulges in these carefree acts;
He himself feels frightened of himself;
He has taken abode in every house;
And the people keep wandering in delusion.
What a carefree game He plays!
He himself aroused longing to become mad in love.
He himself became Laila to steal Majnun’s heart.
Himself He wept, himself consoled himself.
O, what a game of love He plays!
What a carefree game He plays!
Himself the lover, He himself is the Beloved.
Here logic and reason have no part to play.
Bullah rejoices in his union with the Beloved.
Why does He create separation now?
What a carefree game He plays!

- Bulleh Shah

The Swan Will Fly Away All Alone,
Spectacle of the World Will Be a Mere Fair
As the Leaf Falls from the Tree
Is Difficult to Find
Who Knows Where it Will Fall
Once it is Struck with a Gust Of Wind
When Life Span is Complete
Then Listening to Orders, Following Others, Will Be Over
The Messengers of Yama are Very Strong
It’s an Entanglement with the Yama
Servant Kabir Praises the Attributes of the Lord
He Finds the Lord Soon
Guru Will Go According to His Doings
The Disciple According to His

- Kabir

…now step away from those mundane and meaningless rituals and traditions for a bit…cast off the burden of those hereditary prejudices you carry for just a few moments…then read through this beautiful story one more time…

…is that laughter I hear???

“When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky” — Buddha

The Ranting Dream

Rwanda’s Romeo…

I have a burning desire to tell a story today…and I’m a fan of tragedies (especially those written by Shakespeare) - so I’m going to tell you a story about Romeo…Rwanda’s Romeo…

Many have long forgotten the genocide in Rwanda circa 1993-1994. Depending on where you shop for your daily dose of facts, those who still remember know that this catastrophe saw the systematic termination and massacare of anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million innocent human beings while the world watched, doing absolutely nothing about it…

On the ground, in Rwanda, Major-General Romeo Dallaire of Canada led a very tiny UN peacekeeping force…and kept begging UN Headquarters for reinforcements.

He had warned of impending catastrophe long before there was severe tension - and actually faxed a document on January 11, 1994 to his bosses informing that a mass-killing campaign was brewing and being planned…

The response from his bosses in New York: do NOT intervene…

The UN Security Council – specifically the greatest defender of the defenseless, the supreme protector of global peace, the epitome of freedom and justice, the uber-greatest US of A and France – pulled every string to ensure that no one in the entire global community as much as lifted a finger against anyone or anything committing atrocities in Rwanda…before, during, and after the genocide…it helped greatly that this ‘global community‘ consists (yes: CONSISTS – to this moment) of nothing more than a bunch of scared, spineless, greedy, crooked, stupid, ignorant fools who are incapable of thinking for themselves…

Needless to say, Romeo not only did not get any additional troops, but was now forbidden to continue his on-going ‘weapons raids‘ on the ground – and on three different occassions, the crooks back at the UN attempted to force the peacekeepers to pull out of Rwanda – with Romeo resisting and avoiding orders to pullout all three times…in the hope that ‘ANY‘ peacekeeper presence was better than none – and he hoped that by staying his ground despite being greatly outnumbered, they may have a chance at ‘slowing down‘ the momentum of the bad guys – giving the rest of the lazy world enough time to react and intervene, thereby saving the innocent citizens of that god-forsaken cursed land…

Sadly, the managers of world affairs – the crooks, the politicians…oh wait, that’s the same thing…let’s just call them ‘crooks‘ for the sake of simplicity…sadly, the crooks wasted precious time using crafty delay tactics…diverting international political will and dialog towards the ‘feasibility‘ of committing troops for a not so ‘fashionable‘, relatively insignificant, and a not-that-profitably-’exploitable‘ country in the middle of nowhere than actually being concerned about the safety and security of innocent human beings…

Eight months after his original request for troops, Romeo got about 2,500 people…much less than what he needed on the ground – most of these reinforcements showed up to the battle zone with NO EQUIPMENT or TRAINING (…Bangladesh sent their troops without any equipment or weapons and sent a rookie phantom battalion of kids with no experience whatsoever…) – and Romeo had to send them back for their own safety…

By April of that year, Romeo was left with but 450 people in blue berets…and by then, as we all know, the genocide had long matured – many were already hacked and many more were being hunted down and ripped apart by the minute…Romeo lost 10 of his own troops (the brave Belgian peacekeepers) in that genocide along with 500,000 to 1 million innocent Rwandan’s that looked up to the UN peacekeeping force to save their souls…and many millions more who have been forever scarred, displaced, and raped by the world that watched and did nothing…

That was the end of the Rwanda story…in a few days after the tragedy, the crooks were back at their full time engagement – fleecing every glittery (and oily) nook and cranny of the planet and everyone was out and about pretending nothing ever happened…

Romeo’s boss was promoted – to the position of ‘Secretary-General‘ of the United Nations…and all his superiors got new and improved status and positions within the political domain. Romeo himself was gifted a comfortable office position that would have guaranteed a very luxurious retirement in the most exotic of lands he could ever imagine…

The ethical burden of the catastrophe overcame Romeo though…and he assumed the burden of this tragedy on his own shoulders reasoning with himself that he was unable to convince his superiors to appreciate the reality that he saw on the ground in Rwanda – and had he done a better job at convincing his bosses, he might just have saved a million innocent lives…

He attempted suicide twice in his despair…and then realized that he would do better service to this planet by coming out and talking about his experience so that the rest of us complacent, ignorant fools are able to learn something from it – and hopefully not allow another Rwanda to slip away under the watch of another Romeo…

Sadly, to this day, he has refused to challenge his bosses and continues to assume the burden of the tragedy on his own shoulders – and while I admire and respect that, I wish that once – just once – he challenged and questioned the unwillingness of those responsible at the time to take ownership and to do the right thing…I wish just once that these crooks were clearly identified and asked to answer some tough questions about their motives and behavior…I wish, just once, that Romeo named names…

“[T]here were more people killed, wounded, or made refugees in less than four months in Rwanda than in the long Yugoslavian war. We poured tens of thousands of troops into Yugoslavia…And so I came to the conclusion that the world’s response is fundamentally racist.”

“I cannot, as many people urge, just put it behind me, get a new life. I can’t wash my hands, like Pontius Pilate, of 800,000 dead. I can’t forget…the people with all the hope they had, and then watching them as displaced people, seeing them after they had been chopped up – and when the survivors saw the blue beret, there was just bewilderment. What had happened? And seeing the terror, the horror in the eyes of the children…You don’t, you don’t just say…damn, I did what I could, and it’s too bad. Not this stuff. I don’t think I’m allowed to do that, morally.”

- Major-General Romeo Dallaire

And that, folks, is the tragic story of Romeo – Rwanda’s Romeo…

“Nothing has a more divisive and alienating effect upon society than…moral complacency and lack of responsibility” – Carl Jung

Congratulations to ALL of us – citizens of this planet – who sat complacently on the sidelines through Romeo’s tragedy, popcorn in hand, and enjoyed the show…kudos for a job very well done!!!…

- The Ranting Dream

…the age of incompetence revisited…

Observe the leadership (or lack thereof) around you…incompetent (an understatement), attention-hungry folks who push, shove, cheat, bribe, coax, and threaten their way up to the top…in complete denial of the many underlying insecurities and complexes haunting their existence…and dangerously overconfident of the skills, knowledge, experience, wisdom, and character that they don’t possess (and have no intention, capacity, or desire of ever acquiring)…

Look closely and you’ll easily spot the incompetent ‘martyr‘ – like Sarah Palin – pretending to have ‘dedicated‘ her entire career to the ‘service‘ of Alaska (while the rest of her immediate family and good friends were busy accumulating a lot of wealth courtesy of some very lucrative government contracts) – a career in which, she believes (or wants others to believe), she has served her people better than anyone else before her in that office…and who now claims to be resigning from office out of her undying ‘love‘ for, and ‘loyalty‘ to, the people of Alaska, her family, and the party she represents…sacrificing her golden-egg producing position in politics for the ‘greater‘ good…and blaming everything around her for all the ‘bad‘ things that happened (or supposedly did not ‘really‘ happen) on her watch…

Speculation is rife with stories about a potential presidential or senate run…but very little is being said about an intense investigation underway – a massive corruption scandal – maybe, just maybe, that is a good enough reason to ‘sacrifice‘ that profitable political seat – a fair trade for a ‘get-out-of-jail-free‘ card…then again, with the amount of stupidity prevalent on our planet, a presidential run may not be such a bad idea after all…there are enough idiots out there that will help her get the majority vote she needs to give her the opportunity to destroy an entire country – or even the entire planet…always aim high – even when being stupid…

Do you see that incompetent martyr around you?…the one who works tirelessly at being less than productive – clocking in a cool 12.25 non-stop hours even on New Year’s Day on meaningless tasks – and making sure everyone in the hierarchy knows that she/he was in the office that day…the one who shows up to work after picking up her/his cholera medication from the neighborhood pharmacy…the one who made it to the last board meeting in cast and crutches driven to the office by the paramedics who picked her/him up right from the crash scene…I’m sure you know these folks…they’re everywhere…

Then there is the incompetent ‘bully‘- and you guessed it…the ole’ bushyman-cowboy-type and her/his dick-headed ‘condi’ment of mass deception – there are too many of them around nowadays to list in one rant…enough said, I think.

Let’s see if you can spot this character around you…old-school mentality, fanatically religious (obviously – since it is the business of religion that helps her/him divide and conquer…duh!), resistant to change, superbly deceptive, and a downright scoundrel. The most unapproachable of them all…where she/he is today is (more than likely) courtesy of an influential connection who expects her/him to quietly and subserviently obey and fulfill the underlying agenda of that influential entity…unable and unwilling to make decisions and quick to question the credibility, loyalty, and integrity of those around her/him when challenged and/or as a tactic of distraction and/or deflection…

Closely allied with the incompetent bully and the incompetent martyr is the incompetent ‘non-stick-clown‘…remember Tony Blair? – or ‘Teflon Tony‘ for those who knew him well…an entire highly evolved species contained within an individual character with the gifted ability to smoothly cruise-by in stealth-mode while crap is flying all around him emerging at the other end looking (and smelling) squeaky-clean…

Gee…I wonder if there is such character around me…never provides a straight answer, quick to produce proof that she/he was in Timbuktu when that bad decision was made even though the document authorizing the poorly articulated plan (or lack thereof) contains her/his signature and there is taped evidence of her/him sealing that very decision…this master of spin is highly skilled at pulling wool over everyone’s eyes and gets away with it every single time…I’m going to take a five minute break here because for some odd-reason, my brain is screaming Stephen Harper…Stephen Harper…Stephen Harper…and I just don’t understand why…maybe that break will help…

…okay I’m back – the screaming has stopped, thankfully…but now I’m getting these visions…I see a non-stick frying pan with the image of Canada’s Prime Minister etched on its inner surface…sigh!…I wonder what’s happening in that little brain of mine…

…on with the rant…

Then there is the incompetent ‘who-what-dude(tte)‘- the Canadian senate (and that of the great US of A) is full of this brand of incompetence…some of these dudes and dudettes are known to have been away from their duties for years…collecting a hefty pay-cheque courtesy of the ignorant tax-payer while vacationing indefinitely in the beautiful tropical paradises of the south, with the rest of their colleagues asking questions like: “…I‘ve heard that name, but who is that? what does he look like?? is he even alive???…”

I’m sure you’ll easily be able to list many of these characters around you – here’s a hint to get you off the ground: start with your most beloved senate and work your way down to the mighty unions (or should I say ‘UP‘ to the mighty unions?) and you’ll be busy writing names for the rest of this year…

Who doesn’t know the incompetent ‘bragster‘? – the one who stops people on the street and points to her/his gold-plated name badge – making sure everyone knows, over and over again, who she/he is…from India’s beloved, Laloo Prasad Yadav – current day politician and elected leader, convicted and jailed in the 70’s on a ‘national security‘ charge (ironic, eh?) – to the frog at work because of whom the sun dutifully rises everyday, and with whose permission it sets; the bragster is alive, well, and forging ahead will full gusto…

Know this character? Work with her/him? Live with her/him? Grew up with her/him? – I’m sure you have (and probably still do)…

…I will end this rant here…but know that there are too many incompetent leaders out there – in politics, in business, in friendship, in family, in faith, in education – everywhere – just observe your surroundings and you’ll see it clearly…

It’s time to weed this incompetence out folks…the status-quo is unacceptable…the ‘reptilian-brains‘ out there need to move over and make room for more competent leadership…stand up…be counted…don’t accept mediocrity anywhere – start with yourselves and set a higher standard in everything you do and touch, and keep raising that bar every day…change is a slow and tedious process…you and I may not be able to usher in the era of competence during our lifetime…but if we start now, there may be hope for our future generations…

“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thoughts in clear form.” – Albert Einstein

The opposition will be very violent…both from our individual ‘internal‘ incompetence and from the incompetence around us…but thoughtlessly submitting to the sickly status-quo is not an option…stand up…be counted…don’t accept mediocrity…start with yourself…

Stay Well!

- The Ranting Dream