Contrary to what is commonly believed, you do not “own” your money. Money is a government created and regulated commodity. While it is illegal for you to print your own currency, everyday people create “money,” when they create profit. The government recognizes the difference between currency and profit, and it taxes your profits rather than arresting you. You do not need to be in a business to generate a profit. When a laborer works for somebody else, his labor generates a profit called “income.” Different terms have been created to describe profit, based on how it is created. All money originates from profit, and the government constantly regulates it.

It is important to recognize that the government and the people both behave similarly in regard to the creation and regulation of money. Even when the government spends money it does not have, it is not behaving differently than individuals who regularly go into debt to purchase homes, automobiles, etc. Every organization has the same infrastructure needs as the individual. Personal finance, business overhead and government regulations are intimately linked.

The government is like a balloon. Any pressure at one point will divert the pressure to another point. The government passes laws to regulate the economy, with the hopeful desire that everyone and every organization will thrive, but most laws are primarily written to adjust the effect of previous laws. The government is in a perpetual state of crisis management, trying to regulate the currency that it created.

Democracy gives everyone an opportunity to petition the government for relief of burdens created by the currency, but it is important to note that the currency system under democracy is the same as it has been for thousands of years. The American Revolution was part of a wave of political change, but the underlying economic philosophy was unchanged. New faces adorned the money, but money remained a government created and regulated commodity. Communist and Islamic revolutions made similar political changes regarding who and how decisions would be made, but the underlying concept of money also remained unchanged.

There are two powerful abstract ideas at work in the world. One is the belief in the existence of God, the other is the belief in the existence of money. Almost everyone believes in the existence of money and that they “own” it, but money is just a form of barter. Money has no value unless other people accept it. Money is an intellectual agreement. It is real because we believe it exists.

The purpose of money is to serve as barter. Trade is necessary for everyone to survive. Money allegedly makes the distribution of goods and services easier. If the distribution of goods and services is difficult or unfair, then we should see that as a symptom of a mis-regulated currency. While the political process can give everyone a chance to vent their grievances, the more difficult issue is what has caused the problems. Problems are easily observed; they present themselves. Solutions, however, require a certain amount of dilligence. Treating the symptoms will never lead to a cure for the underlying disease. That is why it is important to recognize that we do not “own” money.

At its simplest form, the economy is a distribution system. We work to produce what others consume, others work to consume what we produce. While everything originates from the Earth for free, man must add his labor to fashion the natural resources into something useful. Distribution within the economy should not be measured primarily by money or production, but in terms of labor.

Because the Earth is large, certain resources are found are various places. Trade is in everyone’s best interest, but what we are trading primarily is labor, not goods. Governments exist to facilitate trade both within and outside of a country. Money was created to make the trade easier. If trade is not working well, people tend to both blame the government and look to the government for relief, but what we really need to know is how does the economy work. We cannot fix a system without properly understanding how it works.

The primary failures of a mis-regulated economy are war and poverty. When the labor of one nation is spent on destroying the productivity of another nation, this should be seen as a catastrophic failure of trade. Sanctions precede war because a trade war is an act of war with money as the weapons. Both sides in a conflict believe in money and war and that God favors themselves.

Likewise, poverty should be seen as a failure to regulate labor within a country wisely. As we know, poverty and war have been a part of every nation’s history. Money has always been mis-regulated and misunderstood, and therefore the history of men is about the use, misuse and abuse of labor and money. History is a crime scene where everyone is a victim, not just for slaves, but for the slave-masters, too.

The mis-regulation of the currency makes everyone miserable, high and low. The rich live in fear, the poor live in poverty. The same forces that make men rich also conspire to make them poor. Fortunes that can be made overnight can fade just as quickly. The cycles of boom and bust are not random events, they have an underlying mathematical formula.

I was thinking today that the primary contradiction between freedom
and government revolves around the concept of a contract.

A contract is something that is freely agreed upon by two parties.
No government need be involved. But if someone feels that the
contract has been broken, then he goes running to the government.
Pretty quickly, the government is spending all its time enforcing
contracts that private citizens agreed to.

The original agreement between the two citizens had an element of
risk involved, for both sides. They have to trust each other, and
the vast majority of contracts work on a gentlemen's agreement.
But, once a dispute arises, all the risk is transferred to the
government to decide, and thus all the people bear the weight of
honoring that contract, even though they were not a party to the
agreement. It would be far better for the government to refuse to
judge any contract, than for it to be judge of all of them.

Of course, many would complain that they want the "protection" of the
government, but it is that very act of transferring risk and creating
a government "of protection" that has destroyed our freedom and
create Big Brother. Taxes become a reflection of the costs of all
contracts, since even the government is "under contract" to its own
employees. And, most businesses are selling to the government,
either directly or indirectly.

Libertarian is more than just a political idea, it is also the idea
of economic liberty. For there to be liberty, there must also be
risk. Most Libertarians, I suspect, want the rule of law (ie, the
force of law) on their side. (They tend to be self-employed.) If
they are willing to pay for that "service," then they need to admit
to themselves that the rest of the apparatus must come along with it.

If the courts limited themselves to criminal cases of violence, then
we would be far better off. Nothing can be stolen twice, but by
getting the government involved, the loss can be many times greater.
Insurance is a state-regulated pyramid scheme, and making the
government the enforcer of contracts turns the government into a
taxing pyramid scheme. (Of course, no insurance should be
mandatory. That is forcing people into a contract.)

More people are swindled because they think the government is
regulating the contract. People would be wiser with less government,
but there would also be less need to commit fraud. Even in the act
of trying to protect people the government is destroying the value of
the currency, because all contracts revolve around "the right to
profit." Since capitalism, by definition, is an imbalanced trade,
where one person loses and another person gains, the right to profit
is inherently at risk when entering into the contract. The
government is now insuring people's expectations; this need not
involve the state.

Take copyright protection, for example. If I buy a CD I am under
contract to the artist and the record company. It's totally nuts how
far this concept of contract has grown. While people are no longer
considered property (slavery,) the concept of private contracts is
still seriously out of whack, along with the government's role in
enforcing them. Liberals, Libertarians and Conservatives all go
running to the government for protection of their contracts, when the
better strategy would be to limit the government's power to decide
certain issues, and all contracts would be strictly voluntary. (How
many soldiers would be in Iraq now if their heads were not full of
the foolishness that they are "under contract?")

We are all making ourselves a victim of our own government, but more
specifically, it is our understanding of contract that is at fault.
Even the covenant with God is voluntary, He may judge at the end,
but in the meantime you can keep or break the contract at will. Why
would contracts between man be less flexible? The more we enforce
our expectations, the less they come to be. Without trust, we have
nothing. The government becomes an instrument of revenge, and
nothing will correct the past, but the attempt to "right wrongs" can
destroy the present and the future.

peace,
steve consilvio
www.behappyandfree.com

From: Robert Crane
Date: December 25, 2006 1:37:06 PM PST
To: KELSO_BINARY_ECONOMICS@LISTSERV.KENT.EDU
Subject: Fw: freedom, liberty: A good Christian summary of the dynamics between duties and rights in the Islamic shari'ah
Reply-To: "Capital Ownership Group: Louis Kelso's Binary Economics Discussion Group"

Nasir,

This article on the dynamics of human responsibilities and rights by a modern Christian scholar is the best summary I have seen of what has always been taken for granted by the classical Islamic scholars. I have been frustrated all my life by the way human rights have become a false god among most liberals in the West, as best typified by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which implies that human rights are created by humans rather than by God. Every human right is merely the product of a higher responsibility, as designed by God and developed over the centuries by the world's greatest Muslim scholars in the maqasid al shari'ah. This code of human responsibilities has never been matched in any other civilization.

The tragedy is that it has been dead for six hundred years in most of the Muslim world. This is why the most that modern Muslims seem to be capable of doing when challenged about human rights is to say, "Me too." The major problem facing Muslims is not their marginalization by superior physical powers but their ignorance of their own religion and of its reliance on the spiritual origins of all ultimate values, including compassionate justice.

Ecumenical understanding and cooperation on any other basis is like a human being tilting at windmills or like a wolf baying at the moon. The author of the article below, Stefano Montana, explains that without God there cannot be any human rights. Norm Kurland then follows this up with a definition of the principles of economic justice that form the core of the Islamic maqsud known as haqq al mal. The specifics of implementation are important, but principle is more important than praxis because praxis without principle results in the slavery of humans to their own false god, namely, themselves. This is why we live in the most polytheistic period in human history and why we will be bringing on our own end times unless we recover the best of the past to build a better future.

Peace through compassionate justice, Faruq


-----Original Message-----
From: chrisdorf@HOTMAIL.COM
To: KELSO_BINARY_ECONOMICS@LISTSERV.KENT.EDU
Sent: Mon, 25 Dec 2006 10:12 AM
Subject: Re: Freedom, liberty ... and license - Duty Before Rights?

Duties Before Rights http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=100010
Duties Before Rights?
Interview With Director of Van Thuan Observatory
VERONA, Italy, DEC. 15, 2006 (Zenit.org).- By promoting a culture of rights without first promoting a culture of duties, society creates a "babel" of rights in which the strong prevail over the weak, says the director the Van Thuan Observatory.

Stefano Fontana, who heads the institute that promotes the social doctrine of the Church, is also the author of "Per una politica dei doveri dopo il fallimento della stagione dei diritti" (For a Politics of Duties After the Failure of the Season of Rights), published in Italian by Cantagalli of Siena.

In this interview, which also appears on the Web page of the observatory, the author explains why it is necessary for a society to not only promote duties, but to make them a priority.

Q: Two questions immediately come to mind when reading the title of your book. The first is: Has the season of rights failed already? Are we still far from the complete fulfillment of human rights?

Fontanta: It is true that many people in the world do not enjoy even the most basic human rights. But I wonder: Isn't this because other people in the world have sped up the race for the state of the art rights to the point that they have transformed all their desires into rights?

Q: But the Church, and especially Pope John Paul II, has been a leading advocate for human rights for a very long time.

Fontana: The question is not to deny rights, in fact the opposite is true. The point is that we have to understand that without duties rights spiral upon themselves, they annul each other. In the end, the babel of rights leads to the triumph of the right of the strongest. The rights themselves, in order to be truly such, must accept the priority of duty over them. This is the right way to protect rights and the Church has always done that.

Q: Why talk about the priority of duty? Isn't it enough to reaffirm the complementarity between duties and rights?

Fontana: Any right has a corresponding duty and vice versa, this is absolutely true but it is not sufficient. It is easy, in fact, to artificially fabricate a duty that can be used as a justification for a new right. In Italy, the right to abortion is recognized by a law that starts from the duty to nurture life. The right to euthanasia is based on the duty to relieve suffering. The complementarity between rights and duties is true but is susceptible to ideological manipulation. We really have to go back to the priority of duty.

Q: And this priority of duties would be grounded on what?

Fontana: On the priority of receiving and accepting over producing. We do not produce ourselves but we receive and accept ourselves. We do not produce nature but we receive and accept it, we do not produce culture but we receive and accept it. Of course, we also do produce, but on the basis of an original receiving and accepting.

Q: Receiving and accepting implies a duty?

Fontana: Duty is "being available" while a right is "to have the availability of" something. This is why duty does not come from within us but from the outside. Now we have to decide if we are our own masters and the masters of our own being or if we, ourselves, and our own being are entrusted to us as a task. Modern thought holds the first belief and therefore absolutizes rights, I hold the second belief and thus I start from the duties, i.e., from a call, from a task that has been entrusted to us.

Q: It seems to me that the "I" is a rather risky concept: Isn't the "I," i.e., the subject, the place of free creativity? After all, we are who we want to be. We are the architects of our lives.

Fontana: According to the modern notion of consciousness, this is true: the "I" is a pure consciousness that shapes itself as it wishes. However, according to Christian philosophy, from Augustine to Wojtyla, the "I" is not pure consciousness, but is consciousness of being, i.e., it is a subject that becomes aware that it is something that is given to itself. I am first and foremost also a task for myself, I am a duty to myself, I cannot even dispose of myself, as well as of others, as I wish.

Q: In other words, the priority of duty over rights is the response to a call that comes from outside, from transcendence that is?

Fontana: Rights refer to the right to do something. Thus, they refer to having the availability of something. Instead, duty is to be available. Thus, it refers to a dimension that is unavailable to me, which I cannot use but which I must serve. Since it refers to the unavailable, duty always refers to the transcendent. As Dostoevsky said, without God there is nothing a man is bound not do; i.e., there are only rights and not duties.

Q: In the title we see the word "politics." What does politics have to do with duties?

Fontana: Our society is dying from rights. The right to produce man in laboratories and, in general, the right of doing any action is absolutizing technology, and technology alone is deadly. Rights will never put a limit on themselves. Rights are the right to do something; there will always be new things to do and therefore new rights, without any limits. Limits stem from duties. A politics of duties is a politics of sense and of limit.

Q: A politics of duties, where do we start?

Fontana: A politics of duties concerns all social spheres. However, if I were to suggest a starting point, I would say it is the theme of life. It is the first duty we are entrusted with, the first duty that is placed in our hands. When life is denied, all the subsequent duties are weakened and at the end only the rights prevail.

Q: Could you suggest other realms where a politics of duties might be urgent?

Fontana: I think about the fact that we have many universal declarations of rights but none of duties. I think about the fact that no community identity can be created without duties and therefore the dialogue between cultures is extremely difficult. I think about the crisis of citizenship if it does not become an ethical citizenship, i.e., one that is grounded on sharing duties. I think about the many subjects of civil society that would be ready to take on new responsibilities, i.e., duties.

Be There When I Need you
By Ariangilee Foley
©March 2, 2006 (Published with permission)

When I’m asleep in my bed,
The days worth of thoughts leave my head.
Like silhouettes dancing in mid air,
Prances through canyons,
Carved by the flowing river of worry.

Be there playing when I need you.

In the sun,
In the grass,
Over the moon
And through waters as clear as glass.

Be there to rejoice with me when I need you.

Over miles of hills,
Through angry seas,
And raging storms,
To calm and to lighten one’s battered soul.

Be there to hold my lantern when I need you.

To breathe and to see,
To touch and to feel,
To live and to renew life.

Be there to guard me when I need you.

But when the journey comes to an end,
The sights seen,
Breath turns to gasp,
Life has been lived,
And I am lying there in my head.

Be there beside me, to cool my heating head when I need you.

When day rolls into hour
Hour breaks to minute,
Minute crumbles to second.

Remember, I’ll always be beside you, to watch over you when you need me.

Dan's wonderful work in Edmonton and the work he's done in the global justice movement including design and maintenance of the beautiful website http://www.globaljusticemovement.org/ proves you can't lose with justice.

Like we've all observed, even evil people like to be treated fairly... Heck –– even my dog likes to be treated humanely, and our family functions better when we look out for her interests.

In my work, I've witnessed a true hunger for justice. It's like the last 40 years or so (I date it back to the Sixties) humanity's taken this wild excursion off the road less travelled. And somehow, our social institutions got swept up in this swerve, and now we're way off beam.

People know this. And they're looking for ways to get back, to get re-centered.

And that's why the work of the global justice movement, I believe, will have a profound impact on not just getting back on track but taking a monumental leap forward in new ways that humans will live and work on this spinning playground.

Similar to many in my generation, I always enjoyed the Star Trek television and movie series. But I remember one rare episode where money was discussed. How did people obtain incomes so the civilization could "boldly go where no man has gone before." Well, Gene Roddenberry blew the whole thing off. There was maybe one line of weak dialogue that went something like, "Well, we don't have money anymore. Everybody now has enough to live on..."

Gee, if only it were that easy. Probably THE most important thing in life next to Tao is money. Economy. How do I earn a living? Where does the money come from to pay the bills? How do I have an income when I'm old and can't work or get around anymore?

And as far as I can tell, this critical subject has NEVER been structured around justice. Historically, it's been organized around screwing people over, and the favoring of the few in power, both politically and religiously, by the many slaving away, doing the real work of keeping life functioning.

Bob Crane's most recent article "Federalism: The Missing Arrow in the American Quiver" is dead on. We can't believe or accept injustice as a prerequisite to keeping the peace or garnering some type of fleeting security. The fact is life works exactly the other way around. And the diversity of all human cultures enjoying the freedom to live and work together? It's organic. The only "barriers" are ones erected by deluded humans that unfortunately (that's life, sometimes) rise to power.

Justice can surmount any obstacle. It has this unbelievable power and mass like love. Once you've been exposed to it –– and get INTO it –– your life will never be the same again~~Nemo

(snipped)
From 9/11 until recently, many of our community spokespersons would insist that these crimes were the work of a tiny minority that had no significant support or sympathy among Muslims, and that this terrorism had nothing to do with Islam. But one could argue that, to the contrary, the willingness to takfir Muslims and then murder them and then justify the murder of whoever (be they Muslim or non-Muslim) does not agree with whatever utopian vision one is ready to kill for, has afflicted Islam since its earliest years. I refer, of course, to the Kharijites, who murdered the caliph Imam Ali and put women and children, as well as non-combatant men, to the sword because of a utopian doctrine. This, the first and most grievous heresy in Islam, was suppressed and universally repudiated by the ulema in the earliest centuries, but was revived as an operational arm for radical Islamist revolutionary ideology in the mid-1960s and at a time when it had little or no reference to Palestine, Iraq, or Chechnya.

That is why we must reject the insistence, that echoes within all of us, on finding only those “roots and causes” of terrorism that are exclusively outside of a particular way in which some, perhaps even many, Muslims understand Islam. Is the “cause” colonialism? Amir Abd al-Qader al-Jaziri warred for years in the mid-nineteenth century against one of the cruelest strains of European colonialism – the French conquest of Algeria – without committing one atrocious act. On the contrary, he punished his own troops if they committed atrocities in retaliation for those committed by French troops, atrocities that are now par for the course among Muslim terrorists. And this same Amir Abd al-Qader, exiled by the French to Damascus, intervened with his own corps of armed bodyguards to save the lives of Syrian Christians threatened by a murderous Muslim and Druze mob in 1860, a mob responding – no doubt, to legitimate economic grievances – as some sort of moral open season for mass murder.

Perhaps the answer, I would suggest, and particularly to Muslim young people, is that Amir Abd al-Qader, who was unquestionably a great warrior, was above all a noble warrior who considered Islam above all as a personal path to a spiritual reality and not as a religion emptied of spiritual content and then turned into a modern revolutionary ideology in which utopian ends justify any means. Indeed, the duties – sources or imperatives of social justice – toward one’s family, neighbors, and, by analogy, one’s nation all stem from that personal struggle on that personal path to God that characterizes the greater jihad.

Traditional Islam, be it in the Indian subcontinent or the Arab world, was once perfumed by an inner spirituality. In the United Kingdom, far more than is the case in the United States, Muslim young people have two options: to either hold onto a traditional Islam that was entirely enveloped in an immigrant ethnic idiom, particularly language, dress, and ethnic insularity, that was inconceivable for most of them for they are precisely that – British young people of Muslim faith, and the language, dress, and cultural insularity are foreign and, when imposed, embarrassing. The alternative was to assimilate into the prevailing mass youth culture that, in the United Kingdom, tends to be particularly mindless, promiscuous, drug and alcohol afflicted, and often criminal. Now this narrow prism has been increasingly radicalized by grievance-obsession . We must recognize that a grievance, however real, in fact particularly if it is real , can become self-defeatingly obsessive. Every successful immigrant group or successful sector of an immigrant group that has come to America and Europe, both Muslim or non-Muslim, seems to understand this intuitively.

So, radical versions of Islam offered an alternative, one that combined the fashionable left-wing identity politics of the past few decades with a Muslim identity that claimed a false universality … a false universality in its denial that all living and worthwhile human culture, Muslim or not, beyond the most basic religious rites and law, is invariably local. The alternative that was not particularly available was traditional Islam, with its core of spiritual priorities, enshrined and expressed in our Anglo-American English language and in those strands of Anglo-American culture – one thinks of Shakespeare, the Lake poets, and the school of politeness and good manners that is massively endangered, but still alive and easily assimilated into an Anglo-American Islam – a process that has occurred on a limited individual middle-class basis in Britain and even more so in the more educated, more middle-class second-generation as well as the convert Muslim communities in the United States.

And in a world of overreaching materialism and militant secularism that could be described as fundamentalist, this evolving British traditional Islam and its American equivalent must find true allies. I suggest that those true allies are to be found among those faith communities – Christian and Jewish – ready to acknowledge our common Abrahamic origins.

Excerpt from speech by S. Abdallah Schleifer, professor emeritus of journalism and mass communication at the American University in Cairo, Egypt at Temple University, Philadelphia, PA on Oct. 2nd of last year...

The nexus of problems we face as re-designers of human institutional systems that have atrophied naturally over time due to lack of justice-based maintenance, fundamentally have to do with how a lot of people –– perhaps most –– think and interact with the world.

This has been documented and commented upon by a host of people, extending from the ancient prophets of all the great religions, to recent writers such as Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, J. Krishnamurti, Richard Bach and Shunryu Suzuki.

I've felt for a long time that us warriors in The Just Third Way must not become trapped in these ages-old dungeons of ego-mind-think –– because it will doom this movement like many attempts in the past at "changing the world" –– which, of course, is impossible. Life is perfect. One of the many challenges of living is: Can we SEE, FEEL and BE this FACT?

It can be observed that what most people consider evil in conventional terms can be traced to the divided mind. To a mind that stands apart. To a mind that screens. To a mind that connives. To a mind that cleaves the skull, stands on the table, blinking and staring back. Like some ugly alien life force truly bewitching humankind.

The reality of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind.

Most people associate freedom not in what can be observed in nature, but in humans' supposedly independent free will and the power of free choice.

But if I separate my mind from myself and my experiences, freedom seems to be how much I can barge around the world; yet the world somehow always seems to resist and throws a lot of rocks back.

But to the undivided mind there is no distinction between "I" and the world. There is just one giant endless Streaming that engulfs everything. This Power provides the foamy crest in an ocean wave, the pulse felt through a human wrist or the thrust of magna out a volcano's throat. Life is not a matter of "me" pushing the world around or it sometimes pushing back.

Having a choice is not freedom. Choices are decisions usually motivated by pleasure or pain, and the divided mind constantly schemes about getting "I' into pleasure and as far away from pain as possible.

But the sweetest pleasures are spontaneous, and pain at its worst is an anticipation before it's even slated to arrive.

The often false sense of being "free" wanes when trying to do impossible or meaningless things. We are not free to jump across a canyon, march safely across a busy freeway of speeding traffic, or prevent blood from being pumped back from our toes.

Freedom, like everything else in Life, is conditional. There is no such thing as freedom when it contradicts how Life works. If I split my mind apart from the Streaming, and allow it to command this or command that based on what pleases me, the more I will be incapable of enjoying anything at all.

Because all pleasure exist in the present. Unless I am aware and acknowledge that fact, future happiness can never be guaranteed. That sense of "losing ones self" in the moment and resisting any urge for the mind to play games with time reveals the only true freedom.

This may explain why there are precious few people who support the wisdom of what we're trying to do. We must spend ample time teaching people how to think, and the traps that lie in wait all around us. I believe this is contained in Justice Based Management, but perhaps needs to be elevated in this important education.

If we can't interact normally with the Everyday World, which some name God or Tao, we're not going to counterbalance good and evil.

What we name the Streaming is not important; perhaps it may even trigger this disease of human minds splitting apart from what they constantly experience. Just trying to write about this delicate matter may trigger a backlash, but as humans, we have precious few tools to effectively communicate.

We must daily try to immerse ourselves in this solar-like wind, which exists in our own atmosphere. It's not easy, because our civilization constantly builds a culture that glorifies Man over Tao.

This wrestling match exists in a circular orbit of time. It just keeps coming back again and again and again. Can we break this dog-chasing-tail syndrome so that we can truly strike out in new directions like Capital Homesteading that holds so much promise?

Saint money. How can humans have the energy or time to connect with the Streaming Metaphysic when we're all slaves to countless hours spent balancing on an economic teeter totter that has grown dangerously unstable for people sitting on either end?

These are challenging flaws that require judicious redesign. Nothing but the future of mankind depends upon it.

Just some thoughts from a struggler of One Mind~~Nemo

Greetings and Salutations to You All,

One of the subject matters that has engrossed me my whole life has been –– for want of a better word –– the Metaphysic. Or, Study of Reality. Or any other way you want to use English words to describe how people respond, react or deal with Life (probably would be easier and more productive if we just drew pictures or told parables, which a lot of the ancients did with myths handed down from various cultures...)

I'm always on the lookout for authors and speakers who can "describe what can't be described" about how Life "is." Two of my favorite are Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley.

I've found another author, Barry Goss, and his Ebook "The Manifesting Mindset" which you can locate on www.ourunion.org/. It's about 52 pages with double-spaced lines. A bit long, parts of it kind of corny (YOU try and take a stab at writing about how the Intelligence of Life works...I have, and it's hard...), but overall I highly recommend it. Print it out on some old recycled paper you have lying around, take it with you and when you have time, slowly go through it. I don't know anything about Mr. Goss, but my hat's off to anyone trying to help illuminate "The True Path."

Whether or not happiness and success finds you in your life (and you thought you were trying to find it?) depends so much on your mind. How do you think? with it? If you daily "reboot" your mind and refreshed head out into the morning –– compare this method to continually grinding day-in-and-day-out thinking old thoughts or memories from yesterday, last week, last year. Or thoughts of the future, events of which you couldn't possibly know unless you had a knack for reading crystal balls or traveling through linear time.

Probably the best and most reoccurring symbol that many mystics, shamans and aesthetics have used and continue to use to describe this invisible but very feel-able Force –– is a watercourse way, or a river. This symbol and the overall Force is being more scientifically proven by burgeoning studies and discoveries of quantum physics.

When you begin to walk across a river, it has been said that you can never step in the same place twice. That is also true about everyday Life. It flows around us constantly like a river. We can't physically see it, but one can feel it. It is power always on the move. It doesn't stop for anyone or any thing. Yet it is infinitely loving and supportive. You can lean on it, let it caress you, let it empower you. The Force's power is Infinite. We are all children of the stars that birthed our world.

What we "think" might be permanent really isn't. It's a trick (how fun would Life be if it was all predictable?) Because it doesn't appear Life was designed for someone to take a perch off to the side unnoticed. Life is about motion –– doing things, playing and getting involved in what's going on. Living your life in the Moment will take practice, because for now we live in a culture obsessed with the past and future. You can better measure things that have already happened, an obsession with many humans.

Unfortunately, most of us don't use the power of our minds appropriately to match the Force. We use it instead to retreat, withdraw and shrivel our lives away with past memories of what has happened to us so far. The mind can summon up these regurgitated thoughts over and over again, like a spell put on us by an evil, clever witch.

The Ultimate Reality is the Present Moment. Because that's where it's all happenin'! Like stepping with bare feet into a gurgling creek on a hot day, don't try and anticipate or predict what may happen NOW by the use of past or futuristic thoughts. If you take this approach (and one can certainly choose to if arrogant enough), you will miss out.

On what? Things like true storybook adventures such as meeting interesting people, finding fascinating types of work, discovering things or encouraging actions to aid the Common Good, traveling to all parts of the globe and amassing both monetary and spiritual riches beyond even your grinding mind's wildest conjuring.

In this new millennium, some say humankind is poised above a trampoline of a leap in Consciousness that will far surpass humans' recent technological wonders. The Internet's unprecedented capabilities of linking people together with words, pictures, movies and real-time video cams will probably be one of the biggest innovations responsible for ushering in a new Age of humans interconnecting together.

Only time and people's participation (or not) will tell.

So take a read and report back to the group about what you've learned. Enjoy the adventure. I certainly have, thanks to all of you in my immediate and extended families who continually lift me up~~Steve

This deliberate perversion of Islam into an alleged totalitarian ideology like Communism has been bought hook, line, and sinker by many academics in universities, who are responsible for the preparation of policy paradigms, by most of the think-tanks, who rely on the expertise of academia to set the agenda for policy in Washington, and by all of Bush's close Neo-Con associates, who make and implement policy in pursuit of a totalitarian utopia with total disregard for either Congress or the American people.

Over the decades, I have collected dozens of the best books by and about utopian thinkers, all of whom produced in the end nothing but abominations in human life. The worst and most dangerous of the bunch may be the Neo-Cons, if they can survive their own arrogance.

These are the people against whom America's Founders warned as the maximum threat to the traditionalist thought of Edmund Burke. As leader of the minority party in the English parliament, he was the Founders' principal mentor in the years leading up to the Revolution, even though he taught that reform was better than revolution and subsequently rejected what he considered to be the Americans' inopportune misreading of his message.

A forerunner of the Neo-Cons and an idol of some of them in their early years was Lenin, who translated the writings of the theoretician, Karl Marx, into operational policy. The utopia of Lenin differed from the Neo-Cons' only in that he was not motivated primarily by fear. They both agree on a single approach to capitalism: "take it or leave it," and "my way or the highway." Paradigmatic and structural reform simply are out of the question, which is why all such totalitarian utopias must fail in the end.

There is a third way. One perspicacious but provocative Muslim intellectual, Moin Ansari, says this third way is Islam. Muslims should know this, but it has taken Christians and Jews to flesh this out with programmatic solutions, because too many Muslims buy into the Qutb/Neo-Con obsession about a zero-sum clash of civilizations.

This third way has been spelled out over the last few decades by, among others, the Center for Economic and Social Justice, which I co-founded with Norman Kurland in 1985 to establish President Reagan's Presidential Task Force on Economic Justice. A number of web-sites have developed this approach in recent years, some of the most useful documents of which include the following:

www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us/partyplatform.htm
www.globaljusticemovement.org/mission_shared_vision.htm
www.cesj.org/thirdway/comparison3rdway.htm
www.cesj.org/thirdway/paradigmpapers/iraq-nationbuilding.htm
www.cesj.org/thirdway/paradigmpapers/csid-040528.htm
www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/regional-global/katrinaplan050907.html

As I have taught for more than a quarter century, there is a near identity between classical American thought, encapsuled in the Preamble to the American Constitution, which lists justice first and freedom last as the purpose for forming the American union, and classical Islamic thought, encapsuled in the maqasid al shari'ah or universal principles of human rights, which form the governing paradigm of classical, but now almost extinct, Islamic jurisprudence.

Radical utopians now are trying to hijack our jointly held traditional wisdom, which we may call "the just third way." The radical Muslims want to impose what they call an "Islamic state" or even "a global Islamic caliphate," and the radical Neo-Con globalists want to impose what they call "democratic capitalism." These radical utopian terms are absurd oxymorons designed to hide the common goal to impose stability as the only ultimate goal under the guise, respectively, of "the Will of God" and "freedom and democracy."

The Neo-Cons have now embarked on a desperate public relations campaign to sell America without changing any American policies. Not once during the past five years has President Bush mentioned the word "justice," except in the sense of revenge and twice in a throwaway line inserted by his speechwriters without any follow-up. Freedom and democracy without a paradigm of justice to give them meaning is incomprehensible to 90% of the people in the world. For them the Neo-Cons are "speaking Greek" because they live in a world of their own cut off from reality.

The Neo-Con use of oxymorons to associate the religion Islam with the evils of radical terrorists is known as "mimetic warfare," which is the use of symbols (words) to influence the thinking of the target audience subliminally, that is, to capture their minds without them being aware that they have been victimized.

The sophistication of this threat to the traditional teachings of all the world religions is shown by the fact that these oxymorons are accepted even by some of those who oppose the Neo-Cons and try to be objective about Islam as a religion. Even otherwise intelligent Muslims have fallen for this trap in order to gain acceptance as "moderate," "liberal," or "progressive" Muslims, whom the Neo-Cons hope then to co-opt.

The sophistication of this strategy is shown by the campaign to get both Muslims and non-Muslims to adopt a litmus test for what constitutes "militant Islam." Daniel Pipes systematized this new technique by attempting to identify professors in American universities who in relation to Muslims were the equivalent of what "Commie-symps" were during the Cold War against Communist totalitarianism. As Sheila Musaji points out in her most recent article, "Through the Looking Glass," this demonization matrix has been further developed and publicized by the militantly Zionist magazine Frontpage, which lists anywhere from seven to nine danger signs of "militant Islam." She suggests that, "given a little time this list will grow."

This new game of testing Muslims for how well they accept the mimetic warriers' perversion of Islam reminds one of the CIA's word-count game a generation ago when authors were graded by how frequently they used the phrase "social justice." A high count indicated the degree to which one was disloyal and thus a threat to the Free World. The very use of the word "justice" flagged a security risk, because the only acceptable word was "freedom." In this mind-game the word "freedom" was used to flag those who agreed with American foreign policies.

Perhaps the most subtly misleading terms in modern mimetic warfare are "Islamic country" and "Islamic world," which in mimetic warfare are designed to group majority Muslim countries together as a single, systemic threat. Even Muslims use this terminology, although they know perfectly well that there is not a single Islamic country in the world. As Jeremy Henzell-Thomas points out in his article, there are indeed few countries that one should even categorize as "Muslim".

The word Islamic refers to the submission of a person or community to God. One can define this socially as one's commitment to human rights or to the pursuit of peace through justice and justice through peace. Or, more basically one can define "Islamic" as practical commitment to the interdependent goals of order, justice, and freedom, which provided the normative paradigm for all the Founders of America and forms the core belief in the perennial wisdom of every traditionalist religion.

It is ironic that America is by far the best example of what should be meant by the term Islamic world, because the ecumenical wisdom of America's founders has survived and is practiced in the United States better than anywhere else on earth. This is true despite the fact that the American media and the White House often reflect and grossly portray the very opposite of everything Islamic.

Why do both Muslims and non-Muslims go along with this game of mental perversion, like sheep to a slaughter. The innocent and naive argument for "going along with the flow" is that everyone is using these terms, so we must accept them in order to participate in public policy debates. This is nothing more than acceptance and practice of what the novel, 1984, termed double-speak, which is at the heart of every totalitarian strategy to enslave the world in pursuit of unlimited economic, political, and military power~~Bob Crane

Howdy All,

If you look at page two of this pdf from IRRC (page "196") you'll see a short article published on shareholder activism at the AAG.

The Investor Responsibility Research Center is one of two big outfits that service needs (like proxy voting) of large institutional investors who mainly invest pension money (the other big one is ISS--Institutional Shareholder Services.) Remember that around 95% of AAG stock is owned by institutional investors.

IRRC, ISS and the companies that invest pension monies are anxious to communicate with the strategic stakeholder groups of workers and customers at the AAG and other companies they invest in. I have long advocated that our unions communicate in an organized and frequent way with our owners.

Remember--management are not the owners. They are agents hired by the board whose members are elected by the owners--the stockholders. True, management owns stock, but mostly through grants and stock options that they in effect "give" to themselves. Workers, on the other hand, buy all their stock shares through cash contributions they make to their 401(k) accounts (which is matched by ALK stock up to certain limits) and through cash outlays to buy through the AAG's Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

Making a corporation work deals with bringing together the various groups that make up a corporation. You've heard the corporate tripartite group mentioned often by management--workers, customers and stockholders. But when you carefully watch the actions of those in power whether they be in management or union--you see just the opposite. They RESIST efforts to bring the constituents together. What you get then is what we have now--CONFLICT!

Staying competitive in a free market is very challenging--tough! When you throw in the mix that we are all fighting INTERNALLY--that's when the obituaries start to get written, which some are doing now.

I advocate more OWNERSHIP for the strategic stakeholders of workers and customers (we share about only 5% of the stock now).

You can't vote greenbacks. As a worker, if you get a dollar more an hour--that does not equate to one more vote to determine who is in power over you (plus it just raised our fixed costs, money which has to come from somewhere). If you become an owner of one more share--it represents capital that is VOTEABLE. It guarantees your participation in how our companies are managed--plus, if done right, share distribution REDUCES our fixed costs so we can compete with the Southwests and JetBlues of the world, and truly move toward job security.

Never stop! approaching our agents--management and challenging them why they don't promote more ownership as a viable solution to what ails us in this crazy airline marketplace. Also, never stop! approaching union leadership and challenging them why they don't promote that their members become bigger owners of securities in our companies that transcends a mere hourly wage! If dues to fund the union are taken only from hourly wages, doesn't that ensure unions will ALWAYS be seeking ways to raise our fixed costs! dooming us?! How about hooking some of that dues' stream from worker profit sharing to relieve some of that pressure? Plus, it makes the union a legitimate stakeholder, and not some independent agent hypocritically isolated from an everyday reality--RISK!

Until we get the players on the same page and pulling in the same direction, we are in for nothing but trouble as we have witnessed in this 2005 Summer of Hell at Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air, these houses we all call home!~~Steve

Hello Jock and All,

I liked you bar analogy. It fits very well.

I look at it something like this--we are not saints; we are all members of this weird species that we have all sort of agreed to call humans (in Kings English, anyway). We are not Gods, for god's sake. If we were Gods--well, we wouldn't be experiencing this bizarre, crazy ecstasy we again have all sort of agreed to call *Life.*

I don't know about ya'll, but being a God like most humans seem to imagine Him (I like Her myself), sure would seem b-o-r-i-n-g to me...

I like this rough-and-tumble existence of being human through-and-through. It's outrageous at times, dispiriting and bitingly sad, but then those episodes are balanced by ones of sheer joy, awe and inspiration of what can happen in this gift of life that we somehow have all been given...

I had this pilot friend of mine one time sit me down and explain that getting to heaven was the only thing that really mattered (the Christian heaven, of course; and heaven being a place, I guess, where you sit on a cloud, swinging one leg hanging over the side, strumming a harp). He was totally shocked when I told him that that was the last thing I would ever want to do, and that Jesus Christ, Muhammad and the Buddha never taught any such thing.

If I understand just a wee bit what these amazing prophets tried to teach us, it's we create heaven or hell on EARTH. It's up to us. We all make our own little realities that add up to a joint or social BIG reality. We don't have to travel anywhere. And now, you can create your own little hell or heaven with the pushing of the *send* button on a computer...

Right now, worldwide human affairs appears to be more on the HELL side of the duality *equation.* But you know what? Life takes that right in stride with what you can observe in Nature and all around us of a stabilizing, neutralizing and counter balancing force. It's the darnedest thing. Sometimes it takes a human life span or two to kick in--but who are we to dictate time?

Discussion groups at COG, of course, don't float on some island separate from all of this.

With all the ranting and raving, and words flying around like rocket arrows--I still have learned a ton about money, banks, corporations, securities--and possible ways we could all share more in ownership. And I thank you all. Owning sure beats working for ever-lowering wages!! In many ways I've changed the way I currently live! based on the contributed wisdom I have read here!

I think we can get past this. We just gotta get past ourselves, and realize Life is one really BIG place~~Steve

p.s. For my birthday, my middle son gave me a license plate holder OWN OR BE OWNED, which I have proudly mounted on my bucket of bolts 1978 Chevy van that I call Toots. Soon I will paste on a bumper sticker that says: Consume New Production!!

Dear Steve:

As far as I can see, the only thing that's going to work is to convince workers that ownership — real ownership, with the full rights of property — is far more secure than any wage system job. You can fire a worker at virtually no cost (assuming you do it "right," i.e., toss enough dust in people's eyes to obscure what you're doing), but you have to buy out an owner. To get the point across means educating people primarily on what, exactly, property is (and, almost as importantly, what it is not), and why the vote — control — is an integral part of what Belloc called "the restoration of property."

The way I see it (and watch out that I don't poke your eye out with my stone tablets as I come down from the mountain), people don't trust ownership via corporate shares for two reasons. One, the only way to make money with corporate shares is to engage in speculation. Most shares, as Kelso pointed out almost half a century ago in The Capitalist Manifesto, don't pay enough in the way of dividends to buy a cheap suit. Speculation is not the foundation of an "ownership society" because the only way to receive an income is to divest yourself of ownership by selling your shares.

Two (and much more important), people don't trust corporate shares, per se. They don't trust corporate shares because they don't trust corporations. They don't trust corporations because they don't trust the people hired to run the corporations for the owners. They don't trust them because they don't trust the board of directors who hired them. They don't trust the BoD because they don't trust the people who elected them — the annonymous owners ... who usually don't trust the workers, and the circle begins all over again.

So everything has to start all over again at ground level. People aren't ever going to understand property until they own some — we can't wait for people to understand property in order to want it (Chesterton said something about people in former days having respect for property probably because they owned some). Thus, although it was clearly not ideal, framing the ESOP as an employee benefit was probably the most politically feasible way to get the first ESOP legislation through. ("Ownership? Feh. More and higher benefits? .... let's talk.") Unfortunately, the next step has been slowed almost to a standstill — that is, going from the "beneficial ownership" of the ESOP, which allows things like voting as "prudential matter," to direct ownership (through capital homesteading) in which things like voting are inalienable rights.

We have a chance to get something done with the social security crisis in concert with Mr. Bush's vague desire for an ownership society (give Norm fifteen minutes with Mr. Bush, though, and I think you'd see some clarity, not to mention action) — not because people think that a direct private property stake is what they want or need, but because it seems like the only thing that will work. Capital homesteading implies a reform of the corporation — a demand for which will grow, particularly with respect to voting and governance in accordance with Justice-Based Management (necessarily ownership-based) as soon as people have specific and definable direct ownership interests in corporations. If they don't get what they want individually, they will organize with others who want the same things — and with a lot of owners, there will be a lot of people interested in corporate reform. If those people are the workers, customers and suppliers of a corporation, they will have a double interest in cleaning things up. None of them will realize until much later that they were carrying out acts of social justice. All they will want is to fix the corporation so they get their rights.

In conclusion (as if you didn't already know all of this), any time someone starts grousing about the evil corporation, you can either zing them with a quote from Edmund Burke (one of the few members of the British Parliament who tried to defend the American Revolution) that the only thing necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing (or something like that), or take a page from Norm's book and demand to know what they have that's any better than an ownership union to acquire and protect the rights to and of property.
==============
Steve Nieman wrote:
Hi Mike,

Fascinating, trying to get at how the hourly-wage mindset began.

Obviously, the American Puritan work ethic predated stock corporations and other "securities" ways that people can earn income from common stock ownership.

Do you think that earning money off of owning and being involved in securities trading (pension investors gotta find someplace to put their trillions) is considered not working "hard"?

It appears from what you've uncovered below is the waning of the Puritan work-hard ethic. Can anyone conceive of a leisurely way of living as truly meaningful?

What workers have to realize as hourly wages jobs are eliminated or farmed overseas--there will be no income to form the basis for living and enjoying life.

The road leads to and through voteable securities, which is what Capital Homesteading is...

But I continue to talk to workers who continue to demand ever-escalating hourly wages--damn the securities, because they don't trust anything corporate. Plus, management won't offer anything dealing with securities, because, I guess, they want all of it...

I talked to the CEO of Alaska at the stockholders meeting after the company axed 500 ramp jobs, querying why they didn't offer a formula of lower wages (to compete with the contractor who eventually took over those 500 jobs) combined with income from capital wages. The CEO knew exactly what I was talking about--but he said the union (IAM) would not allow capital wages into the negotiations. So bye, bye American pie.

Moving a human mindset is a BIG ordeal. It will take time--so enjoy your life NOW. Grinding away on something that may take a generation or two more of time--you may feel like you never lived...~~Steve
________________
On Jul 11, 2005, at 10:05 AM, Michael Greaney wrote:

Dear Steve:

I thought you might be interested in the following quote from The Proletariat by a Georgetown University professor with the tongue-twisting name of Goetz Briefs. Dr. Briefs (1889 - 1974) was a member of a discussion group in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s with the even more unpronounceable name of Königswinterkreis ("King's Winter Circle"), which included Fr. Oswald von Nel Breuning, Franz Müller, Heinrich Rommen, and some others, all students of Fr. Heinrich Pesch, S.J., who died in 1926. After escaping from the Nazis, most of the group ended up in the U.S., teaching at Chicago, St. Louis, or Georgetown. The chapter from which it is taken traces the development of the wage slave mindset in Americans. Anyway,


The New American Philosophy of Life

A new philosophy of life apparently is in the ascendancy, represented by the job-dependent and security-seeking groups, and most of all by the youth. Labor for them has ceased to be a means of probation hallowed by traditional religious convictions, neither a means toward economic progress nor a chance to rise, but just the basis of living and of enjoying life. This indicates that two roots of American individualistic dynamism are dying off — the metaphysical incentive to work as a means of salvation, and the dynamic materialism of getting rich by hard work or, occasionally, by gambling. Traditional American values like freedom and equality, independence, and economic progress are interpreted and re-evaluated in a new way by the rising social group and by the American youth of today.

Goetz Briefs, "The Proletarian Potential of American Labor" The Proletariat (1937), p. 225.

Yours,
Michael D. Greaney
Director of Research
Center for Economic and Social Justice
www.cesj.org

6-22-05
Well written! Norm,

Hit the bulls-eye.

Much of humanity have lost their way and now do worship man-made creations, particularly the nation-state and money, which not only distorts but puts completely off track humans connection to the Infinite. When that connection to the Ground of Being is severed, there's Hell to pay on Earth with social institutions that men build. Fortunately, individuals do not have to rely on other humans to stay connected to this Link; this power has been bestowed upon us all, and it probably ultimately defines what being human is. We can also stay linked or link back up as a social group through servant leadership dedicated to this Ultimate Reality as you have pointed out before.

Keep aiming those arrows at the heart of the matter. Thanks for helping describe a feeling--what is nearly impossible to communicate in our word-symbols language~~Nemo
___________________
On Jun 22, 2005, at 7:11 PM, Norman G. Kurland wrote:

Dear Moin,

You point out a fatal flaw that is inherent in the modern nation-state system, a system where the nation-state has acquired a higher level of sovereignty that that of the Creator or that of any of the human beings governed by the nation-state. Another way of saying the same thing, is that humanity now worships man-made creations, like the nation-state and money, thus subverting the natural hierarchy of the Source of all Creation and the Creator's relationship to each human person and as the ultimate source of universal principles of justice and fundamental human rights.

The evolving nation-state system, having subordinated the Creator and human beings to the unnatural sovereignty of the "collective", left humanity in a constant struggle with one another, as reflected by wars, revolutions, terrorism, rising crime rates and other manifestations of some trying to dominate others. Thus, when most people talk about new models of nation-building, even when they use the cover of "Abraham" as the "father of all nations," their "federation" models remain within the zero-sum framework of the traditional nation-state system, setting group against group, each trying to dominate others in the federation.

None of these federation models put God or Allah on top, the individual human person next, and the nation-state and all other human artifacts (including laws, institutions and money systems) subordinate to the Creator and the inherent sovereignty of each human person. With the chaos so prevalent in today's world, we now have an opportunity to restore the natural hierarchy sovereignty that can bring peace through justice to the world.

The Abraham Federation I have proposed for Iraq and other troubled global territories is described at

http://www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/regional-global/abrahamfederation-iraq.html

The system would be structured on a form of sovereignty envisioned by America's founders, but never fully realized and eventually perverted by scholars ignorant of their original intent and commitment to natural law principles.

This original intent can be found through a careful reading of the American Constitution and Bill of Rights, especially the long-ignored Ninth Amendment that reads: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights [accruing to the States and the three branches of the Federal Government], shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." This provision recognized natural law rights (i.e., rights created by God or Allah) that preceded the invention of any form of governance by human beings. Such God-given rights were in the words of John Locke "Life, Liberty and Property." The Declaration of Independence clearly stated that "unalienable rights" were endowed to humans by "their Creator", not rights that man gave to man or any government gave to humans, each of whom were "created equal."

George Mason, the father of the American Bill of Rights, wrote (before Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence) in the Virginia Declaration of Rights that "all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity, namely the enjoyment of life, liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

If these are expressions of natural law, then it should be clear that the sovereignty of every human person should rest at a higher level than the sovereignty of any form of government, that only the Creator of all human beings has a higher sovereignty than any individual, and that government must exist only with the consent of the governed and should serve only as a human artifact or social prop to enable each person to enjoy his or her God-given rights and to have a direct personal relationship to the Creator independent of any human or institutional intermediary or other social props.

The paper above rejects the artificial two-state solutions and offers an architecture that can unite highly diverse people and groups because it is based on a post-scarcity growth vision in which every man, woman and child (especially women) are afforded equal rights to acquire and possess modern wealth-producing assets to meet their materials needs and to liberate them from the cancer of the global wage slave system.

There's nothing utopic about the Abraham Federation model. It can be applied anywhere, even in the United States, or for that matter globally. All it takes are leaders who are committed to justice for the least of the least and have the courage to do what's right.

In Peace through Justice,
Norm

Moinansari@aol.com wrote:
TWO STATE SOLUTION, BI-NATIONAL STATE vs. TWO 2 NATION THEORY (snipped)

This is the status of government "corporations" in our current monopolistic capitalistic system--

Yesterday, I went to my local U.S. post office (USPS) and tried to mail a package that I had accidentally put in an old USPS Priority Mail box (reusing--one of the best ways to recycle).

"That'll have to go priority mail," she snapped.

"But I don't want it to go priority mail," I said. "All I need is ground delivery."

"Well, that's impossible with the box you've used." She glanced at the address. "Oh, I see it's going to Canada. We don't do priority mail to Canada, so I can't accept your package."

I appealed with a compelling look, but she just waved me away from her counter.

So here I am, a customer, willing to pay real money for a service, and I was being turned away.

I drove down the street to a locally-owned postal annex (Copy Express in Orchards, WA) and presented my package. "Could I get this shipped via ground to Canada?" I asked.

"No problem," the cute girl said. I explained my earlier experience with the USPS. "I'll just wrap your package in brown paper--it won't be a problem," she said smiling.

So not ten minutes later Copy Express had my $10 and my package was headed off to our neighbors to the North.

Obviously--a foil to government "corporations" like the USPS are public corporations. With a private incentive motivated by profit, they're going to be much more efficient--and not rely on us taxpayers to fund inefficient operations.

But corporations got their own scam going. Through state securities laws that were written eons ago, corporate power is slanted heavily to the original people who created the company, which somehow gets extended to non-owner "professional management" who take over when the company is sold.

So all the efficiencies of corporate entities are heavily degraded because management steers most of the wealth workers and customers create into their own pockets through various legal stock maneuverings, i.e. stock grants, options, pension stock tie-ins, etc.

One way to reform how corporate power is organized and wielded is for new state legislation to be enacted allowing for corporations to be formed as CICs--Community Investment Corporations. Another concept to address unchecked corporate power is Capital Homesteading.

Want to get some education on CICs and C