글로벌 금융 양아치들의 위상

지난 6월 13일, 미국 상원 은행위원회에서 JP Morgan Chase Bank의 CEO인 Jamie Dimon을 대상으로 청문회가 있었습니다.

JP Morgan Chase Bank는 청문회 몇 주전 파생상품 투기로 약 US$ 3 Bil. 이상의 손실을 낸것으로 알려졌습니다. 30억 달러.... 우리돈으로 3조원이 넘는 규모입니다. 

JP Morgan Chase Bank는 가장 큰 정치자금 후원자이니 그 청문회 분위기가 어떠했을까는 불을 보듯 뻔한 일입니다. 그런데 이 청문회에서 아주 의미심장한 장면이 포착됩니다. 바로 이 장면!

미국 대통령 문장이 새겨진 커프링크스 (cufflinks)!

Mother Jones의 Kevin Drum은 이를 다음과 같이 해석합니다.

• Don't fuck with me. The president has my back. 
• Give it up, GOP. I still support Obama no matter how much you suck up to me. 
• Hey Obama. See these? Don't take them for granted.

이 커프링크스를 보니, 갑자기 '만년필' 하나가 떠오릅니다.

1999년 빌 클린턴 대통령은 Glass-Steagall 법안 폐지를 통과시킨 의회의 결정에 최종 서명을 합니다. 글로벌 금융 양아치들에게 있어 이는 매우 역사적인 순간이었습니다.

서명시 사용했던 만년필은 당시 Citigroup회장이었던 Sandford Weill에게 "증정"되었다고 합니다. 

The Open Source Everything Manifesto

Recently I've encountered another Great Book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, & Trust by Robert David Steele.
The following is the Chapter 3.  Manifesto of the book which is copied and pasted from Reality Sandwich without their permission. If I am asked to endorse it in return, I will surely do it.

The circumstances underlying this manifesto are stark and compelling: We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making. Power was centralized in the hands of increasingly specialized "elites" and "experts" who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted.

In the beginning, there was the commons. Over vast stretches of prehistoric time, tribal cultures evolved in tandem with the natural environment. They did this without creating private property or hierarchical relationships of control and dominance that led to consumption of nature as a resource. Open-source culture provided for community sharing and community development. With the rise of patriarchy, empire, and systems of egoic control and empowerment, this open-source approach to community was destroyed. Over the course of the last centuries, the commons was fenced, and everything from agriculture to water was commoditized without regard to the true cost in non-renewable resources. Human beings, who had spent centuries evolving away from slavery, were re-commoditized by the Industrial Era.

The corruption of the commons led to the loss of integrity between and among individuals, organizations, and community. Artificial paradises made up of objects and possessions were substituted for true community based on authentic heart-to-heart relationships. Secular corruption is made possible by information asymmetries between those in power and the public. In the absence of transparency, truth, and trust, wealth is concentrated and waste is rampant.

We, Homo sapiens, are defined by what we know in the context of the Cosmos and the Earth -- larger Whole Systems.

We, Homo sapiens, were in harmony with the Cosmos and the Earth during earlier centuries when indigenous wisdom prevailed. The evolution of social forms and technology toward ever-greater levels of complexity is part of our human development toward deeper consciousness and self-awareness. The technosphere, as José Argüelles and others have realized, is the necessary detour that takes us from the pristine biosphere to the psychically collectivized state of the noosphere.

We live in a constellation of complex systems. It is impossible for any single person or even any single organization or nation in isolation to understand complex systems.

Collective intelligence -- multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making -- is the only means of obtaining near-real time understanding of complex systems sufficient to achieve resilience in the face of changes. Many of these changes, including biospheric ones such as climate change and depletion of planetary resources, are the result of human activity and industry in the last three centuries.

As our technological capacities continue to increase and our environment becomes ever more fragile and endangered, we find that changes to the Earth that used to take ten thousand years now take a fraction of that. We must rediscover and reintegrate indigenous wisdom in order to come back into harmony with larger whole systems, and do so in a manner that allows for application of appropriate technologies and science, open-source intelligence gathering, and real-time self-governance.This means that we cannot afford to address our complex world with industrial-era hierarchies in which information travels laboriously up the chain to the top, some elites deliberate -- lacking much of the information they need, and often lacking ethics as well -- and then micro-management instructions go back down. All this takes time, and the instructions are invariably wrong. Instead, we harness the intelligence at the edge of the network -- at the point of impact -- and the individual who is face to face with a problem in a microcosm is the tip of the human spear, able both to reach back to all other humans for assistance, and to act on behalf of all humans in the moment.

It is in this light that we must recognize that only a restoration of open-source culture, and all that enables across the full spectrum of open-source possibilities, can allow humanity to harness the distributed intelligence of the collective and create the equivalent of heaven on Earth -- in other words, a world that works for all.

History is a narrative we construct and a tool we can shape. Our model of history has been corrupted by "information pathologies" that include weapons of distortion and deception; suppression of alternatives and repression of inconvenient knowledge; and manufactured consent, propaganda, secrecy, and outright ideologically justified lies that go unchallenged by most journalists and scholars.

Knowledge has fragmented due to academic specialization, which supports an elite culture of secrecy and allows for control of populations by the wealthy few, who maintain surveillance and information-gathering operations. The sciences are divorced from the humanities and from religions; disciplines are divorced from one another; within disciplines the sub-disciplines have become tiny cultures in isolation from all other knowledge clusters.

We find ourselves at the end of centuries of isolation and alienation. We are at the beginning of the Great Awakening. The evolution of social technologies and communications media appears to align with prophecies of indigenous cultures like the classic Maya, who looked toward our epoch as the end of one great cycle and the beginning of another. It's a window of opportunity for us, potentially the threshold of transformation of humanity into a new psychic collectivity, a new global civilization that can attain galactic citizenship. We have the potential to achieve a radical evolution and expansion of our consciousness as a species, once we put aside all lesser goals.

Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we realize such a lofty destiny as well as create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of knowledge, revolutionary wealth -- all can create a nonzero win-win Earth that works for one hundred percent of humanity. This is the "utopia" that Buckminster Fuller foresaw, now within our reach.

Context matters. Context creates coherence and restores the missing connections that the fragmentation of knowledge into academic specializations has caused. Economy needs to be reimagined in terms of a whole systems approach-the "true costs" of human action need to be measured holistically, in terms of effects on the regenerative capacity of the biosphere as a whole. If we as Homo sapiens fail to connect the dots and make decisions on the basis of truthful, true-cost information, we will self-destruct.

Clarity (transparency) is the means by which we nurture the recognition and sharing of truth.

Diversity is how our human species will achieve ongoing abundance by liberating human innovation.

Integrity is how we enter into a "state of grace" and become "one with God," however you choose to define and understand these broad terms. This manifesto defines "God" as an experience of collective solidarity that extends from the human realm to the universe as a whole.

Sustainability can only be achieved through mass collaboration and the achievement of panarchy -- a constellation of co-equal hybrid systems of self-governance in which all individuals freely choose where they wish to be heard, and have full access to all relevant information.

Culture is the soul of the community, the "glue" that keeps the lessons of history alive, that demands clarity, that unifies diversity, that nurtures and demands integrity, and thus sustains the community.

A model for public intelligence is proffered in this book, ideally providing a means for every citizen to be a collector, producer, and consumer of public intelligence (decision-support).

A model for informed democracy also is proffered here -- it provides a means for achieving panarchy, enabling every citizen to have access to all relevant information and to participate constructively in an infinite number of self-selected communities of interest.

Organized people will defeat organized money every time. We must all come together to begin a new era that restores the sovereignty of the public in the aggregate over all other forms of organization and influence.

Panarchy is the end-state, Radical Man is the soul, Reflexive Practice is the process, and Web 4.0 -- all people connected to one another and all information in all languages all the time -- is the means whereby we create and actualize a World Brain and Global Game, a noosphere, and achieve evolutionary collective consciousness.

The goal is to reject money and concentrated illicitly aggregated and largely phantom wealth in favor of community wealth defined by community knowledge, community sharing of information, and community definition of truth derived in transparency and authenticity, the latter being the ultimate arbiter of shared wealth.

When we relate and share knowledge authentically, this places us in a state of grace, a state of "win-win" harmony with all others, and establishes trust among all.

Copyright © 2012 by Robert David Steele.  Reprinted by permission of the publisher. 

Real Reason for the War in Syria

Bassma Kdmani, the head of Syrian National Transitional Council, was invited at the 2012 Bilderberg Conference. Paul Joseph Watson, the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com, cast a suspicious glance on it:

The presence of Syrian National Transitional Council head Bassma Kodmani at the 2012 Bilderberg conference clearly indicates that power brokers at the elite confab will be discussing the effort to topple President Bashar Al-Assad and install a NATO-friendly administration in the violence-stricken country.

Whether the above statement is a kind of 'conspiracy' or not, a simple question should be asked. "What is the real reason to intervene in Syria?"
Prof. Michel Chossudovsky helps us to get the timely answer in his latest article in Global Research.

What is the real reason for America's war on Syria?

This question is addressed in a lead article by James P. Rubin, a Bloomberg executive editor and former State department official under the Clinton administration. The article appears in this month's Foreign Policy Magazine under the clear-cut title: "The Real Reason to Intervene in Syria"

In an unusual twist, "the answer to the question", namely "the real reason" is provided in the article's subtitle: "Cutting Iran's link to the Mediterranean Sea is a strategic prize worth the risk.".

The subtitle should dispel --in the eyes of the reader-- the illusion that US foreign policy has an underlying "humanitarian  mandate".  Pentagon and US State department documents as well as independent reports confirm that military action against Syria has been contemplated by Washington and Tel Aviv for more than 20 years. 

According to James P. Rubin, the war plans directed against Syria are intimately related to those pertaining to Iran. They are part of the same US-Israeli military agenda which consists in weakening Iran with a view to "protecting Israel". The latter objective is to be carried out through a pre-emptive attack against Iran:  "We're not done with the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran" says James P. Rubin. (emphasis added)

As it has become clearer that the Houla massacre was not undertaken by the pro-government militia as claimed in chorus and without evidence by the Western media (actually it was committed by units of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), an armed entity directly supported by the US-NATO-Israel military alliance), the next questions should be asked:

What is the precise nature of the relationship between the FSA and the Western military alliance?  
What is the command structure? 
What is the nature of this diabolical covert operation? 
Who ordered these atrocities against the Syrian people?  

Houla Massacre

"When war is planned, it's used to create fear, demonize enemies, dehumanize them, falsely accuse them of atrocities and other crimes, and enlist public support for intervention for alleged humanitarian reasons."  - Stephen Lendman

Who can say it is not true?
It should be revisited that what was really going on before Libya's Gaddafi was murdered by the US-NATO led militant under the name of UN's Responsibility to Protect (R2P).

In Syria, no doubt that the same kind of 'media disinformation' or 'manufacturing consent' has been in the pipe line.

Please refer to the following links:

• BBC Deceitfully Posts Images from Iraq in Syria Massacre Report!
• MEDIA DISINFORMATION: West Desperately Attempts to Spin Syrian Crisis
• THE HOULA MASSACRE: Opposition Terrorists "Killed Families Loyal to the Government"

Have you ever wondered why ...

깜찍한 어린 소녀의 뜨끔한 질문...

현대 금융시스템의 주술에 걸려 '부채의 덫 (Web of Debt)'에 무기력하게 매달려 있는 우리 어른들에게 Victoria Grant라는 12살 짜리 소녀가 백만불짜리 질문을 던집니다.

왜 캐나다는 빚더미에 빠져있는지 혹시 의구심을 던져보신적 있으신가요?

왜 정부가 시민들에게 이러저러한 세금들을 강요하는지 생각해보신적 있으신가요?

대형 사설 은행들의 은행가들은 갈수록 부자가 되어가는데, 우리는 그렇지 못한 이유에 대해 의문을 던져보신적 있으신가요?

국가 총부채규모가 어찌하여 8천억 달러 이상 되는지, 그에 대한 이자를 왜 매일 1억6천만 달러씩 지불해야하는지 의문을 제기해보신적 있으신가요? 1년이면 6백억 달러입니다!!! 이 6백억 달러는 도대체 누구한테 가는것 일까요?

그리고는 천만불짜리 답을 제시합니다.

제가 알게된 사실은 다름아닌 은행들이 가져간다는 것입니다. 그리고 정부가 이들과  결탁하여 시민들을 빚의 수렁에 빠뜨리고 있다는 것이고요.

정부가 채권을 발행하면 사설 은행들이 이를 매입하고, 사설 은행들은 이 채권(빚)을 담보로 시중에 대출이라는 형태로 돈을 공급합니다. 물론 복리의 이자 지급 조건으로. 이때 공급되는 돈은 은행이 기존에 보유하고 있던 돈이 아니라 마우스 클릭으로 새롭게 창조된 돈입니다.

연설 말미에 소녀가 인용한 말을 들으며, '여성과 어린아이들이 새 시대를 열어갈 주인공'이라는 개벽 사상가들의 예언을 떠올립니다.

“Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” 

현대 금융시스템의 주술이 어떤 형태로 풀리게 될지 궁금합니다.