Word Cloud for Iguanajournal

A Wordle word cloud for this blog!

People is the most mentioned word in this blog, and money is in second place. Hmmm, well, money needs to be talked about! Prosperity is third so that makes up for it. Enjoy!

We Lost Our Garbage

Our mayor has done some really outlandish things, but the craziest idea he ever had was to take away all public garbage cans and residential garbage collectors and trucks. The city dump had begun to overflow and the incinerator had burned out so instead of making new places for all of the garbage, he shut them all down!

You can imagine what happened around here. People didn't know what to do with all of their junk so they started throwing it in the street and there were protests pretty much all over. Some of us were afraid that diseases would break out because rats multiplied and the stench was absolutely unbearable everywhere you went.

The mayor just ignored the protests and went about his business as usual.

After about three weeks, though, some amazing things started happening. When businesses realized that people stopped buying stuff that had lots of packaging they scrambled to offer their goods and services with less wrapping. Everybody started returning their junk mail and the post office became totally inundated with it until the post office decided not to deliver it anymore.

Also, people started figuring out ways to recycle almost everything and things slowly started cleaning up. Recycling companies offered their services door to door, compost classes became popular and whole neighborhoods began organizing themselves as garbage free zones. Even large international companies began competing among themselves for consumer attention by offering to receive and in some cases buy back their products once they were no longer useful. They would recycle them, refurbish them, reuse them, anything to avoid creating garbage. Small second hand stores sprang up all over and people started renting things they really didn't need to buy. Fix-it guys became the most important job around here and they were actually able to make a living wage!

The mayor sent all of the garbage collectors and trucks to work for recycling companies, which gave them quite a boost. With a glut of recyclable material, it became cheaper than virgin material in most cases so business picked up even further.

Now that some time has passed, people see garbage in a totally new light. In fact, the idea is almost completely absurd and it seems that is what the mayor wanted to get across. People lose sight of the fact that we are part of the earth's natural cycles once we see ourselves as something separate from all other living and inert things. That line of thought progresses to the point that we feel we can throw something where we no longer have to deal with it. This becomes a blind spot that bothers our intuition in the best of cases and just becomes a non reality for everybody else.

Our mayor hit us over the head with our blind spot and helped us become more integrated with the Earth's natural cycles. The concept of garbage no longer exists here to the extent that we can reject wasteful products from other cities. Industries haven't changed as much as we would like because they depend on distant markets and can't really treat our town as a special case. Recently the mayor has contracted companies to turn organic and body waste into bio-fuels for all government vehicles, so we are pretty excited about that. We are hopeful, though, that our culture of integration and garbage-less waste will be contagious to nearby towns and cities so our region can be greener and more beautiful.

Carbon Credit Offset Project in Ecuador

My wife made this video for Piqqo, a European company that provides exposure for emissions trading projects that need funding. End-users of Piqqo buy carbon credits to offset emissions from their business or lifestyle.

She really enjoyed producing this video and we learned a lot about certificates awarded by the U.N. for important environmentally friendly projects.

We don't buy sugar, though. We only consume sugar-cane in the house because it is a lot healthier. So, this sugar production plant may be energetically self-sufficient, but it would provide even more benefit to the community if it stopped processing sugar-cane into sugar.

Enjoy the video!

Is the Revolution Green or Spiritual?

No serious survey of our economic reality can challenge the fact that the current crisis has laid to rest the myth that our financial institutions are sound. In a recent article, David Korten explains that “The financial meltdown pulled away the curtain to reveal a corrupt system that runs on speculation, the stripping of corporate assets, predatory lending, and asset bubbles like the real estate and dot-com ‘booms.’” When articles of real value are created as by-products of the quest for speculative gain, you know the system is poorly designed.

Two of my favorite proponents of change, Thomas Friedman and David Korten, are leading advocates for a green revolution that will align our economy with human needs and the natural environment. Of course, I agree with this perspective. And although many of the critical problems we currently face will be resolved by setting in motion the changes they suggest, we cannot overlook the fact that their proposal leaves the most entrenched and damaging element of the story told by the gurus of economic witchcraft unquestioned: the framework remains within a world view that can be accurately described as dogmatic materialism. This framework wants us to believe on the one hand that a process of trial and error aimed at social re-engineering will eventually lead humanity to material prosperity and on the other hand that any mention of spirituality (or worse religion) in this process will only deviate the search and postpone the desired outcome.

Rejecting the consumer culture,"today's inheritor by default of materialism's gospel of human betterment", and attracted by the spiritual terminology and principles that tout harmony and unity as fundamental to human prosperity, the green revolution has attracted many of our leading minds to its cause. An increasing number of people turn their efforts towards it and set hopes on it as a panacea that will somehow bring both material and spiritual prosperity.

Far from being a signal of a maturing humanity, this trend rather clearly shows how people have failed to learn the fundamental lesson that the global effort towards social and economic development has taught us: "The fate of what the world has learned to call social and economic development has left no doubt that not even the most idealistic motives can correct materialism's fundamental flaws. ... Fifty years later, while acknowledging the impressive benefits development has brought, the enterprise must be adjudged, by its own standards, a disheartening failure. Far from narrowing the gap between the well-being of the small segment of the human family who enjoy the benefits of modernity and the condition of the vast populations mired in hopeless want, the collective effort that began with such high hopes has seen the gap widen into an abyss."

Harmony and unity are, of course, spiritual principles, and although they are beautifully exemplified in the earth's natural processes, their source lies beyond the earth. Establishing an intimate connection with the source inspires people to exemplify these same principles by transcending their current condition for one which is inherently spiritual in nature. This spiritual condition is found in every human being in a state of potentiality that awaits development as a seed yearns for the nutritious soil, sun and water in just the right proportion.

Material development is a fundamental aspect of true prosperity, and thus should be vigorously pursued. Dogmatic materialism, however, by defining this search in purely material terms and imposing a fear of sounding naive upon any challenger, has succeeded in alienating or at least confusing the great majority of the human population for whom religion is still the main guiding force in their lives.

As many traditional religions ever less clearly reflect the noble truths in their original writings, the frustration for those who want to pattern their lives by these traditions grows daily. On the one hand, little truth can be found in social and economic development as it is currently conceived because it does not allow people to incorporate spiritual truths, while at the same time the social and moral guidance people relentlessly search for in traditional faiths are mired in dogmas and, well, traditions and thus the little guidance offered has become increasingly irrelevant. Growing numbers of the world's people find themselves alone rowing in a sea of religious confusion.

Proponents of the green revolution point to this situation and rightly name it for what it is: a deviation in our search for prosperity, a veil that motivates some to search beyond religion for meaning and others to sink into the dogmas and traditions in hopes of finding some acceptance and tranquility.

Critical to this exploration, as explained in the following paragraph, is the fact that religion when properly conceived can offer and has done so throughout history, what a green revolution can never provide:

Throughout history, the primary agents of spiritual development have been the great religions. For the majority of the earth's people, the scriptures of each of these systems of belief have served, in Bahá’u’lláh's words, as 'the City of God', a source of a knowledge that totally embraces consciousness, one so compelling as to endow the sincere with 'a new eye, a new ear, a new heart, and a new mind'. A vast literature, to which all religious cultures have contributed, records the experience of transcendence reported by generations of seekers. Down the millennia, the lives of those who responded to intimations of the Divine have inspired breathtaking achievements in music, architecture, and the other arts, endlessly replicating the soul's experience for millions of their fellow believers. No other force in existence has been able to elicit from people comparable qualities of heroism, self-sacrifice and self-discipline. At the social level, the resulting moral principles have repeatedly translated themselves into universal codes of law, regulating and elevating human relationships. Viewed in perspective, the major religions emerge as the primary driving forces of the civilizing process. To argue otherwise is surely to ignore the evidence of history.

---------

All quotes taken from "One Common Faith", written by the Baha'i World Centre and published in 2005.
---------

In a future post, I will attempt to explore the question that naturally comes to mind upon reading this last paragraph:

"Why, then, does this immensely rich heritage not serve as the central stage for today's
reawakening of spiritual quest?"

Financial Meltdown

The current financial crisis is not what it seems. However, because it seems like, well just about any number of things, most of us don't feel that we have much choice but to trust that the people that got us into this mess in the first place will somehow get us out. Even more frustrating is that this is exactly the attitude that those people need for us to have in order for the show to continue as scripted.

These gurus of economic witchcraft feed us a story that goes something like this:

A doctoral degree in economics or any related field, from Yale or Princeton or some similar institution qualifies certain people to understand the intricate and extremely complex inner-workings of the economic and financial instruments that have evolved over approximately 250 years to their nearly perfect current status. The prevailing crisis has occurred because many of our vital institutions have had the poor fortune of being controlled by unscrupulous and selfish individuals. The common citizen should feel assured that our leaders have learned from this crisis and will make the necessary adjustments to the system so that consumer confidence grows, private investments become more financially stable and most importantly the Gross Domestic Product and the Dow Jones Industrial Average begin rising again, so that life can go back to normal.

This sounds so plausible, neutral and reassuring that it almost makes sense. Although it may sound reassuring to some, it is neither plausible nor neutral. In fact, a carefully crafted ideology provides the underlying assumptions that have become so ubiquitous that they gain a status that sets them beyond critical examination for fear of sounding un-American. Bearing such a risk in mind, this crisis provides us with a perfect opportunity to do just that: critically examine such assumptions and look at alternative views so that we can direct our efforts towards supporting initiatives that will truly build prosperity.

With a nearly infinite number of topics at our disposal for exploration, we will look at just two. We will first turn our gaze towards a specific aspect our financial institutions, currency issuance, and subsequently explore the dizzying possibilities of breaking free from the dogmatic materialistic framework in which the above story is set.

I. Debt-Free Money

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are aspects of our financial structure that are portrayed as having survived the ordeal of natural selection not unlike Darwin’s turtles on the Galapagos Islands, rendering them the gospel truth. However, as several elements of the current paradigm have been dethroned lately, we should take the opportunity afforded to dig deep into some others.

An element that we would be wise to pry into is the way we create money. Put in the simplest terms, “One key to Wall Street’s power and to the inherent instability of the financial system is the current practice of private banks creating money with a simple bookkeeping entry each time they make a loan. Because the bookkeeping entry creates only the principal, but not the interest, unless the economy grows fast enough to generate sufficient demand for loans to create the new money required to make the interest payments on the previous loans, debts go into default and the financial system and the economy collapse. The demand for repayment with interest of nearly every dollar in circulation virtually assures the economy will fail unless GDP and inequality are constantly growing.” (David Korten)

This growth imperative puts us in a bind by making us decide to either use natural resources unsustainably or default on our debt. So, the question arises, does money need to be issued as interest-earning debt? Common sense tells us that we can, and indeed must, use our natural resources sustainably, and that this principle seems much more important than servicing man-made debt. As we haven't been inventive or courageous enough to permit this common sense to see reality, we have given the power of issuing money over to private banks, which charge us for this service in the form of interest on every loan.

However, are banks really providing a service worth charging interest for? First, banks don’t really provide society with any notable service because they create money out of nothing while making it appear to be created by government. As Ellen Brown so clearly explains, “This devious scheme was revealed by Sir Josiah Stamp, director of the Bank of England and the second richest man in Britain in the 1920s. Speaking at the University of Texas in 1927, he dropped this bombshell:

The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin . . . . Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again. . . . Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. . . . But, if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.

“Professor Henry C. K. Liu is an economist who graduated from Harvard and chaired a graduate department at UCLA before becoming an investment adviser for developing countries. He calls the current monetary scheme a 'cruel hoax.' When we wake up to that fact, he says, our entire economic world view will need to be reordered, "just as physics was subject to reordering when man's world view changed with the realization that the earth is not stationary nor is it the center of the universe." The hoax is that there is virtually no 'real' money in the system, only debts. Except for coins, which are issued by the government and make up only about one one-thousandth of the money supply, the entire U.S. money supply now consists of debt to private banks, for money they created with accounting entries on their books. It is all done by sleight of hand; and like a magician's trick, we have to see it many times before we realize what is going on. But when we do, it changes everything.”

Second, even though interest has come to be regarded as a natural and fair element of a healthy economy, it creates the growth imperative mentioned above. As David Korten puts it, “Privately issued debt-money … bears major responsibility for environmental destruction because it requires infinite growth, extreme inequality because it assures an upward flow of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street, and economic instability because issuing loans to fuel reckless speculation generates handsome short-term bank profits” at the expense of failing small businesses and home foreclosures. For this reason, Mr. Korten suggests that one of the most important elements of an agenda for a new economy is converting to debt-free money.

The story woven by the gurus of economic witchcraft suddenly becomes vulnerable. These are things we can all understand. Surely any product of evolution would not cause environmental destruction and widen the gulf between rich and poor as our current banking institutions do. Self-indulgent individuals at the helm of these institutions are the product and not the cause of a larger crisis in which private institutions are allowed to create money out of nothing by sleight of hand. Has measuring human prosperity and the health of our earth through the GDP and the Dow Jones index set us on a path towards anything resembling prosperity or health?

Lastly, and most importantly, these and similar insights have empowered ordinary people to stand up and have a say in how our money is issued. We now have evidence that our banking institutions are much more vulnerable than we previously imagined.

Further exploring this necessary paradigm shift, as I will do in subsequent posts, is crucial if we want to shake our current boom-bust mentality and if we want to see how material prosperity can match its spiritual counterpart.

Give W His Due

The utter joy exhibited by such large numbers of Americans with the election of Barak Obama to the office of President was truly inspirational.

Internationally there may have been just as much joy that evening for the possibilities people see in having at least a symbolic representative of themselves in the White House.

"For Obama to overcome what people consider to be synonymous with America -- race -- it's unimaginable,'' said Eric Shepherd, a professor at City University in London. "It's given the world a lot more faith in America. America has become a place that does deliver on its promises. People can achieve anything.''

"Martin Luther King's dream has been realized by Barack Obama.''

Thomas Friedman even called this the end of the Civil War after 147 years.

He goes on to quote Michael Sandel thus, “This is the deepest chord Obama’s campaign evoked. The biggest applause line in his stump speech was the one that said every American will have a chance to go to college provided he or she performs a period of national service — in the military, in the Peace Corps or in the community. Obama’s campaign tapped a dormant civic idealism, a hunger among Americans to serve a cause greater than themselves, a yearning to be citizens again.”

We must, however great the current enthusiasm, recognize the critical role W played in these accomplishments, even if he didn't mean to. The W years can be seen as necessary to provoke such a sea change in American politics.

• We have learned, for example, that turning our collective backs on a city destroyed by a hurricane tears the whole nation apart and exposes institutionalized racism.
  
• We have learned that fabricating tales of nation-building in the Middle East sets several nations up for failure, including our own.
  
• We have learned that "making torture and domestic spying legal, fooling Americans by cooking up warped evidence for war and scheming how to further enrich their buddies in the oil and gas industry", as Maureed Dowd so aptly puts it, provides evidence of how such an evolved democracy can be corrupted by misuse.
  
• We have learned that completely deregulating and letting "wild law" reign over the market causes financial crises possibly beyond our capacity for reparation.
  
• We have learned that pitting a conventional army against a network of underground guerrillas in the vast Middle East is like eliminating malaria one mosquito at a time.
  
• We have learned that not building a coalition of nations to fight against rebel states destroys legitimacy of the mission and undermines moral authority.
  
• We have learned that responding to a terrorist attack on innocent civilians by asking people to go shopping belies deep ignorance and callousness.
  
• We have learned that putting all of our proverbial eggs into economic growth irregardless of the web of life that such growth ultimately depends on, only raises within us a greater yearning to reconnect with this web of life even if this means reconsidering the growth imperative.

Perhaps the greatest lesson we have learned through the W years, at least from my perspective, stems from the fact that America's collective lifestyle choices and the policies designed to uphold that lifestyle have offended large numbers of people because they are largely materialistic, selfish and conflictive. America is not always right, and whether you interpret 9-11 as a manifestation of this sentiment or not, insisting that it is has made America much more the aggressor than the victim. The lesson is that America, as any other nation, has its strengths and weaknesses and will only be able to establish its ideals at home to the extent that it supports other nations in doing the same.

Why was it necessary to endure eight years of selfish mediocrity to arrive at this point? Well, why do many people need to suffer a heart attack in order to realize that their lifestyle is killing them? Why do we need to miss someone in order to realize how much we lover him/her?

On an individual scale these questions don't seem so transcendental, but collectively they take on greater significance because learning is more unwieldy, messy and painfully slow. However, W's legacy is that he sped up our collective learning process to hitherto unknown heights. To see an inversely proportional relationship between W's blunders and greater consciousness gained by the American public about the founding ideals, about the necessity to take care of people and not turn our backs on extreme wealth disparities is testimony to the resilience and vision this nation's people have.

This does not happen here in Ecuador. Even if the depths of suffering are greater in general here, it is translated into learning over what seems like generations, not over a presidential term or two. For this reason among others the world looks to America for leadership, and the time has come for that role to be properly fulfilled.

The wave of global goodwill that poured from all corners of the earth with the news that Barak Obama was elected to the American presidency is extremely encouraging. My hope is that this wave will grow as America applies a leadership style characterized by innovation and example that empowers other nations and peoples as partners, far from the bullying practiced during this past administration.

Siddhartha - Gautama - Buddha

The other day I heard an interview with Deepak Chopra about his recent book Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment. In the end he piqued my curiosity enough for me to read the book, but maybe not for the right reason. Describing Buddhism, he said that it is a secular spirituality, not a religion in the Judeo-Christian sense. While it is true that Buddhism stands apart from the Westernized faith traditions in several fundamental ways, it horrified me to qualify it as secular spirituality. Now that I have read Mr. Chopra's book, and now that I have reread Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and looked into the matter at least enough to understand what that statement could mean, I'd like to share my conclusions in hopes that this exercise will help those thoughts to continue evolving.

Both books repeatedly mention the "gods" in a way that we today speak of luck as that which helps you do something surprisingly effective. Both books make it clear that at the time it was common belief that people could become gods through an ascetic and holy life. In the same way, both speak of demons as the opposite force, and Mr. Chopra's book personifies a demon as one of the main characters who eventually provokes the final battle that leads Gautama to enlightenment. If this understanding of gods and demons is historically accurate, then Buddha would logically avoid confusing people further by centering his teachings on an Absolute, or God as we understand the concept. His focus on right view, aim, speech, action, living, effort, mindfulness and contemplation were surely the proper medicine that provoked the spiritual and material transformation necessary at that moment in time.

"The following is the Buddha's description of [the Absolute] in the famous Udana passage in the Khuddaka Nikaya: 'There is, O monks, an Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed. Were there not, O monks, this Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed, there would be no escape from the world of the born, originated, created, formed. Since, O monks, there is an Unborn, Unoriginated, Uncreated, Unformed, therefore is there an escape from the born, originated, created, formed. What is dependent, that also moves; what is independent does not move' (Udana 8:3). Nagarjuna, the founder of the Madhyamika school of Buddhism, argues from this passage that without the acceptance of an Ultimate Reality (Paramartha) there can be no deliverance (nirvana) (Madhyamika Karikas, cited in Murti 235)."

If you think about it, no Founder of any religion has ever encouraged his followers to dwell on the concept of God beyond basic concepts of uniqueness and certain qualities that God embodies. "Baha'u'llah similarly speaks of an entity, an Unknowable Essence, of which nothing can be predicated: 'To every discerning and illumined heart it is evident that God, the unknowable Essence, the divine Being, is immensely exalted beyond every human attribute, such as corporeal existence, ascent and descent, egress and regress . . . He standeth exalted beyond and above all separation and union, all proximity and remoteness. No sign can indicate His presence or His absence' (KI 98). It is simply not spiritually profitable to spend too much time trying to gain further comprehension of God's essence.

If we qualified Islam, Christianity or the Baha'i Faith as secular spirituality, we would surely rob each of them of their essence. So, why should Buddhism be any different? It is saddening that Buddhism seems to have gained much popularity over the past few decades because of this fundamental misunderstanding of Buddha's message.

Another key concept in both books, although more implicit than explicit, is that of reincarnation. Contemplating this has led me to conclude that reincarnation exists in the story of the Buddha, which especially as presented by Mr. Chopra, is the story of each and every human being. He grows up as Siddhartha and upon maturing beyond that role, transforms into Gautama in search of true meaning. This search leads him to again transform, this time into the Buddha when he discovers the reality behind suffering, time and all of creation. This enlightened state provides an unimaginably powerful vehicle for him to generate the same transformational process in others.

In a very real sense, Siddhartha died in order for Gautama to be born and Buddha was born from Gautama's ashes. Thus the same fundamental person was reincarnated twice in order to escape the wheel of suffering. All true change of the order presented in the movement from Siddhartha to Buddha implies death as well as birth. Embracing both as a single forward flowing journey opens us to constant evolution, a maturation process that can eventually induce enlightenment.

Moving beyond the illusion of duality is the single most important concept explored in both books, and they both do it brilliantly. In Mr. Chopra's rendition, Buddha becomes the elements around him, perceives the innermost sensations of others and is able to touch and heal them. In Mr. Hesse's rendition, this vision is personified in the river by which Siddhartha makes his final home. "He saw that the water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new. Who could understand, conceive this? He did not understand it; he was only aware of a dim suspicion, a faint memory, divine voices."

Visudeva, Siddhartha's greatest teacher explains that "the river knows everything; one can learn everything from it." On this occasion, Siddhartha learned "that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek depths." He also grows to learn that the present only exists for the river, "not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future." Thus, "Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man, were only separated by shadows, not through reality." Which also clearly implies that all sorrow, self-torment, fear, difficulties and evil happen in time and are thus conquered as soon as time is dispelled.

The river has many voices, in fact the voice of all living creatures are in its voice, as all living creatures come to the river for both physical and spiritual nourishment. This nourishment becomes those creatures, and their voice and their life and death.

"Siddhartha saw the river hasten, made up of himself and his relatives and all the people he had ever seen. All the waves and water hastened, suffering, towards goals, many goals, to the waterfall, to the sea, to the current, to the ocean and all goals were reached and each one was succeeded by another. The water changed to vapor and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed anew, flowed anew."

"Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything. ... He had often heard all of this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. He could no longer distinguish the different voices - the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other: the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and the groan of the dying. They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life. When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great sound of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om - perfection."

This poetic description of the river, and the transformation into enlightenment resonates deep within me. I have felt this flow not in a river as the rivers near here don't flow too well, but in compost, of all places! The life-decay-life process that eventually becomes the source of nourishment as healthy, teeming, fertile soil attracts me like a magnet. All of our mineral, plant, animal and human ancestors are there, present, becoming nourishment. I have always felt that it is a terrible injustice to throw away kitchen waste because it interrupts this life-giving process. I tend to this process in my house, and I sit and listen to it, and watch it and work with it just to learn its lessons in my effort to become spiritual nourishment for others. Just as the river, humus carries a wisdom far beyond my current grasp.

So, beyond highly recommending both of the books under review, I hope that reading them leads the reader to such contemplation of our potential as spiritual beings as I have been provoked to undertake.

Cognitive Surplus

<

a screen that ships without a mouse, ships broken...

Watch this video. It is really worth it. It provides an extremely insightful analysis of social evolution and the power of Web 2.0 applications in reconceptualizing mass media to provide opportunities for everybody not only to consume but also produce and share.

Spending four formative years in countries like Taiwan, South Korea and Egypt, where tv was mostly just plain bad and more often than not spoken in a language I could not understand, got me away from tv and into activities like sports and games and just enjoying simpler things. Of course upon returning to the US I watched my fair share of MASH reruns, but I escaped getting hooked to the boobtube like most of my schoolmates.

What puzzles me now is how we feel that we need to turn our brain off in order to shed and get over financial stress or other types of stress caused from having to work too long or too hard in a job that is more often than not quite meaningless. If you want to escape from something too meaningless to bear, then why do something even more meaningless? In this sense tv serves the same purpose as alcohol and other recreative drugs. True, sometimes we identify with Giligan or Samantha or the guy on CSI and we like to feel that we can be like them. However, more often than not, as Mr. Shirky says in the video, we just aren't sure what else to do with our time. This is partly because before Web 2.0 applications like blogs and social networking and podcasting, watching tv (and of course listening to the radio) was basically our only opportunity to be part of popular culture through mass media. For decades this reinforced the messages from tv adds encouraging us to become net consumers.

The cognitive surplus created from becoming such consumers needs to be looked upon as an opportunity. Having enough time to watch trillions of hours of tv while our social and spiritual fabric comes undone at the seems provides us with one of the greatest opportunities available to humanity at present. Mr. Shirky would have us believe that it is better to do something, anything, as long as it implies being an active participant and not a passive consumer. As insightful as this talk is, I just can't agree that we need to set the bar of expectation so low because doing just anything won't get us very far from our tv set.

This concept elevated to principle in the video arises from a misunderstanding of the potentiality of human capacity.

"Man is called today to the attainment of that station to which he was destined from the 'Beginning which has no beginning.' This, then, is why 'Abdu'l-Bahá so exalted the station of Servitude. This is why He intimated that man accepting any station lower than this, any putting of self before service to others, qualifies himself as of the animal, the bestial nature, and places himself outside the pale of real manhood. It is because the definition of Man is altered. That which has been hinted in the past as a possible goal is now a requisite. Man's dreams, his highest dreams, must now be realized. And the path to that realization is the path of Service; its Goal the attainment to the station of pure Servitude.

"'The sweetness of servitude is the food of my spirit.' These words of the Master indicate the source of His power. His was a vastly higher quality of service than even that of my fanciful imagination... It went far deeper; it rose to far greater heights. It was a quality inherent in His deepest being, and manifested itself in every look, gesture, deed, ... in every breath He drew." (Howard Colby Ives)

If our essential humanity means attaining to an exalted station of servitude to others, then building the capacity necessary to make that service an efficient and effective contribution to helping our society reflect spiritual values held in common by all of humanity becomes top priority. Building and applying such capacities is the true source of power, of a nurtured spirit, the means by which our highest dreams will be realized, the sweetness that cannot be equalled. Further, it provides our life with the meaning that can dissipate stress on a magnitude that tv will never hope to attain.

If this weren't the case, then doing just about anything that implies participation would be a healthy social goal. However, in light of our essential nature, and the source of our true joy, it would be foolish to not push ourselved to greater heights. Of couse, Web 2.0 applications will play an important role in deploying the current massive cognitive surplus in the right direction, but there are such a variety of avenues leading to the station of servitute that we should be constantly exploring as many as we can find.

Double-Edged Prices

'There is nothing in the pot. We have no food for a meal. Often a pot is put on the fire so children think a meal is being prepared. It gives them hope. If we told them there was no food they would start crying and there would be nothing we could do. This way they just go to sleep quietly.' – Aliou, a mother from a rural village in Mauritania

Not that the current financial meltdown isn't important - it is mostly for the failed mentality that it represents - but let's not let it distract us from what is urgent. This is admittedly difficult when anti-interventionist governments move astronomical sums to prop up their banking systems while ignoring their own commitments to curb world hunger. "...in stark contrast with the response to the current financial crisis, where huge financial resources have been mobilised by the international community in a matter of days... countries suffering from the food crisis received promises of just $12.3bn at the Rome FAO conference in June 2008, well short of UN estimates of the $25bn–$40bn needed (and five months on, little more than $1bn has been disbursed)."

Oxfam International just published a briefing paper aimed at bringing us back to this reality. It is called "Double-Edged Prices, Lessons from the food price crisis: 10 actions developing countries should take". Basic staple prices have recently risen and this should have been wonderful news for countries with economies focused on agriculture, and for the small farmers themselves. However, as the report states, "decades of misguided policies by developing country governments on agriculture, trade, and domestic markets – often promoted by international financial institutions and supported by donor countries – have prevented poor farmers and rural workers from reaping the benefits of higher commodity prices. As a result, the crisis is hurting poor producers and consumers alike, threatening to reverse recent progress on poverty reduction in many countries. To help farmers get out of poverty while protecting poor consumers, developing country governments, with the support of donors, should invest now into smallholder agriculture and social protection."

During the last year, the price in staple foods around the world have risen from 30 to 150%. Even before the current food crisis, over 850 million people lived in hunger and approximately 30,000 children died daily from related causes. The title of the Oxfam report refers to the false dilemma created when donor institutions ask themselves whether they should support consumers by lowering prices or producers by raising them. This leads to food donations from rich countries on one hand, and on the other, structural adjustments to economic policies aimed at directing the agricultural sector of a nation towards producing what can be sold on the international market, even if it can't be eaten by local communities. For example, cacao prices have increased dramatically since this crisis began (people eat more chocolate in times of anxiety), so Ecuador is expanding cacao production as well as other similar products like flowers, bananas and shrimp and seeking to open new export markets. Meanwhile staple food prices in Ecuadorian markets have risen 8% over the past year. In these cases, people buy cheaper foods, that usually have less nutritional value, rather than buying less food.

Higher fuel prices have led to increases in critical agricultural inputs like nitrogen-based fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides and seeds. In fact, Monsanto, the world's largest seed (genetically modified) and agrochemical company has seen a 26% increase in revenue during the past year. Vanity Fair recently carried a major feature article on the mafia-like tactics of Monsanto in its pursuit of total domination of various facets of agribusiness aimed at consolidating corporate power even in the face of increasing food shortages.

The report concludes that in general, "those countries that have invested in smallholder agriculture and social protection policies have proved to be more resilient to the crisis. Conversely, where countries have opened their markets too widely or too rapidly to food imports and have failed to invest robustly in their agricultural sectors, they have fared far worse." Mexico is a perfect case in point.

"In the 1980s, Mexico was reeling under massive foreign debt. In 1988, interest payments made up 57 per cent of federal expenditure and, following World Bank and IMF recommendations, the country set about reducing public spending and dismantling a system under which the State subsidised agricultural inputs, provided loans and technical assistance, regulated imports, set guaranteed prices for producers, and subsidised the price of tortilla.

"State marketing committees and the National Company for Popular Subsistence (CONASUPO, a body which retained 15–20 per cent of production for distribution to remote areas) were also eliminated. Control of the market was usurped by a handful of agribusinesses and intermediary companies. Currently, Cargill, Maseca, ADM, Minsa, Arancia Corn Products, and Agroinsa among them control 70 per cent of Mexico’s corn imports and exports.

"A further blow to domestic agriculture came with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, under which Mexico agreed to liberalise its corn sector. Subsidised US corn began to flood the market and the price of corn in Mexico fell by more than 70 per cent in real terms, pushing thousands of corn farmers out of production and reducing overall output. After more than 4,000 years, Mexico became a net importer of corn."

The report provides a general action guide in the form of 10 recommendations. They are well thought out from the perspective of the more vulnerable countries. However, it gives too much importance to the IMF and the World Bank, which simply need to cease to exist or be completely transformed into institutions that are democratically accountable and which move resources to mitigate the effects of and ultimately eliminate poverty and wealth extremes.

This report succeeds at providing a timely and clear analysis of the current food crisis that it hopes will make a "difference to the millions of poor people hit by the current crisis, and build resilience to future shocks."

Currency, Debt and Poverty (for Blog Action Day)

This week one of my favorite blogs, Dot Earth, posted a fabulous and timely reflection called "Growth Economics on a Finite Planet". The post quotes an article written my Dr. Herman Daly, specialist in "ecological economics". The article speaks about something that many of us have been thinking for years, that speculative finance is not economy at all but a sophisticated way of gambling that only distracts our attention from the real economy of producing for real needs. "To Dr. Daly, the implosion after the burst of trading and investment in high-concept paper offerings was inevitable, and simply a reorientation of the market toward the only real economy — the one grounded in actual assets. In the end, the only economy that can’t be gamed is one that is grounded in the way the Earth works. That is where 'real wealth,' and real limits, lie, he says."

"High-concept paper offerings" (reminds me of "edible foodlike substances...") really represent the tip of the iceberg. The larger, submerged base is made of money, the principle instrument that financial institutions and corporations use in their effort to create a consumer culture. Later in the above-mentioned article Dr. Daly lists the factors that allowed financial assets to become so disconnected from real assets, and the first point in this list is especially interesting: "...the fact that we have fiat money, not commodity money". Currency systems created by fiat work when the authority issuing the currency (government) guarantees the value of the currency although it's value is not referenced by any commodity. The idea is to ground the value of money to what is produced in that country, but this connection has deteriorated over time. So, paradoxically the connection between the value of money and real assets has weakened and at the same time high-concept paper offerings and money itself have became confused with real economy and real wealth. To understand this confusion, it is necessary to briefly explore the nature of money.

Over the past century the purpose, use, issuance and meaning of money have undergone a profound transformation that has allowed it to be used towards the construction and maintenance of the globalization process. Without delving too deep into the evolution of the concept of money, let it suffice to state that money served humanity principally as a means of exchange until the globalizing, and especially the speculative, process gave it new roles to play.

For many years money was generally issued by local banks at rates necessary to facilitate exchange. However, "…with problems caused by over-issuance and speculation, governments stepped in to regulate the issuing of money, creating the first central banks and issuing money … by printing it, selling government bonds to commercial banks and the public, [and] by borrowing it from the bank at interest. Thus, in order to ensure an expanding money supply, money is issued as interest-bearing debt."

As time passed, governments discovered that a particular difficulty with this system existed because "at any given moment in time, the total amount of debt in a conventional money system always exceeds the total amount of money available in the system. The money needed to pay the interest over these loans can only come from some other similar circuits, i.e. money issued by some other borrower. If that happens, the second borrower will not be able to earn back enough money to pay his debt. In order to prevent economic stagnation, the money supply must be continuously expanded: there is need of a perpetual borrower that can never go bankrupt despite the fact that he never pays his debt. Since the 1950s, governments have assumed this role. In order to stay above this debt, economic growth must exceed the growth of debt. However, in reality the global economy is not catching up with the exponential growth of interest bearing debt."

Scarcity is then a central component of the current economic system. This brings up several issues each of which merits attention. Scarcity of money has a double effect. First, it motivates people to work harder to earn money out of fear of falling into poverty. This is a key source of society’s deterioration as people are driven towards a profit motive and are frequently forced to work for unsatisfying and often socially and ecologically destructive jobs. Second, since money is put into circulation by creating principal, but not the interest owed on the principal, people and corporations must compete to obtain the scarce money to pay the interest. If the total money supply does not increase at least by the amount owed on interest, some necessarily go further into debt and even bankrupt. However, because interest is calculated to expand exponentially, it is at odds with the impossibility of producing and consuming goods or services at an exponentially growing rate.

Both commodity backed and fiat currencies are used as a store of value. "Using currency as a store of value, to generate interest or for expected profits at a later time" encourages hoarding and therefore competition. While money is stored "others cannot use it as a medium of exchange, which works against the interests of the economy" as fewer transactions can take place causing a downturn in the economy. Of course, when signs of recession appear, more money is issued or interest rates are lowered, enabling more transactions to take place. This give and take of the money supply keeps people fluctuating with the system, a perpetual scarcity-abundance, boom-bust uncertainty. "Providing incentives to ensure that the medium of exchange does not also incorporate the store of value function would therefore automatically dampen this boom-bust tendency of the current system."

Giving money the function of a store of value also motivates people to search for short-term profits at the expense of long-term growth, creating conflicting moral and economic incentives. "Consider as metaphor, for example, the life of a tree (or any other living resource). Because of interest, the net present value of any income far away in the future is negligible. So, it literally pays to cut down a tree and put the proceeds in a savings account instead of letting it grow for another decade or century. Similarly, the only types of trees worth planting commercially are the fastest-growing varieties such as pine. (Nobody plants redwoods for commercial reasons.) So even when we plant trees, we are systematically losing biodiversity."

As we have recently been reminded, another detrimental use of money is speculation. Over the last five or six decades money increasingly developed into a tool for speculative profit until it became the dominant use for money. "Today more than 95% of all currency transactions are motivated by speculation; less than 5% are for trades of goods and services." Able to generate spectacular profits within increasingly short periods of time, money acquired a new purpose: to merely reproduce itself. Investors search for schemes that will offer the largest profits within the shortest amount of time, essentially blind to real human needs and ecological concerns.

In the meantime, money has become confused with wealth. "Wealth is something that has real value in meeting our needs and fulfilling our wants. Modern money is only a number on a piece of paper or an electronic trace in a computer that by social convention gives its holder a claim on real wealth. In our confusion we concentrate on the money to the neglect of those things that actually sustain a good life." Even those who understand the difference between money and wealth are often forced to participate in unsatisfying or damaging means of acquiring money in order to maintain a dignified style of life.

For these reasons, and I am sure there are many more, we have put ourselves in the particularly malevolent quandary of needing to produce and consume as fast as our debt multiplies or invent "high-concept paper offerings" that dupe people into believing that real wealth is being produced. It all adds up to a negative sum game that as more people and businesses lose we slowly conclude that this system is making losers of all of us.

To round out this post on a more positive note, many people are realizing that national currencies "have been designed for specific purposes only, and cannot fulfill certain social objectives (such as fostering trade and cooperation, or ecological sustainability). Some currencies already operational today or being proposed for the future are designed to fulfill such objectives, and operate best when they are used in tandem with the national currencies." Because these complimentary currencies do not bear interest, they

• "promote longer-term planning by encouraging participants to invest in productive assets rather than hoarding currency; and

• encourage trade and cooperation, because the money is in sufficient supply."

These new currencies open exciting possibilities for a healthy economy in which poverty is no longer seen as an inevitable and is rather viewed as the anomaly it really is.