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Hello Everyone,
With everything that’s happening these days, from ecological, ecclesiastical, financial, to political, the mind can boggle more than ever remembering we humans are just a species hanging around on a planet that’s rotating and revolving in space, and we’ve rightly categorized ourselves for the animal kingdom.
We homo sapiens are small animals compared to elephants, giraffes, and fin whales; we are big animals compared to aardvarks, felines, and marmots. Humans are walking stalks of flesh and bile and bone, and our brains developed larger than other species.’ Perhaps we are too busy with family and enterprise to practice pondering ourselves as physically vulnerable as any other animals. Not to the exclusion of homo sapiens, all biotic forms are infinitesimal things compared to the enormities of Planet Earth, our Sun, and the Milky Way galaxy.
Considering Surrealities
I hope the above paragraph has evoked a surreal moment for you. Remembering some people’s sensibilities often allow observations and feelings more deeply and readily, a capacity for interpreting apparent sensations serving surrealities becomes effortlessly available for acknowledgement. I’ve made up a definition of surrealities that hopefully resonate with ideas presented in this ezine:
Observing physical things or imagining mental images suggesting incongruous juxtapositions the result of which can become an unexpected feeling of mild disorientation followed by expressions such as, “I can’t believe that happened,” or “What a stunning moment.”
My experience of a surreal moment is liken to an unexpected interruption of whatever I was imagining or thinking, as if being cloaked for a few seconds inside a serene, disorienting wonderment that can be attractive or repulsive. I’m guessing until a person becomes comfortable with surrealities, one surreal, dazed moment after another can sometimes be annoying or not. Some moments are longer than others, and one might not be experienced for weeks.
A certificate of merit for understanding and describing surrealities is not pinned to my wall, but, from recent personal experience, I’ve gained an appreciation for them by staying awake to observations and feelings during these exceptional moments. Listening to the intuitive when considering surrealities, imagine sensitive people feeling mildly disoriented when
— holding for the first time a newborn baby; as the mother of a newborn, your doctor says it is stillborn;
— taking for granted the functions of memory as a full-time, primary care giver for someone who is experiencing dementing disorders;
— reading information that deepens the already darkened consequences of manipulative financial markets affecting your portfolio, which could significantly dwindle over the long-term international transitions.
The Warning
The Golden Rule, by which I was explicitly reared, highlights goodwill and trust for all, but my sense of goodwill becomes incongruous when juxtaposed with some USA bankers’ habitual fraud and usury abuse, resulting in continued financial debacles, and losses of USA citizens’ homes and monetary resources.
I felt a surreal moment while viewing for the first time The Warning, a PBS FRONTLINE report that rightly revises information noted in a program called House of Cards televised by CNBC. The Warning reveals a seeming contradiction with regard to accountability of subprime mortgages. The following paragraph is a paraphrased extraction from House of Cards, and the extraction appears as part of a footnote in a previous Staying Awake.
…No one—not the Federal Reserve, nor the Securities Exchange Commission, nor rating agencies, nor banks, nor congressional members—blew the whistle;… accountability was silenced.
However, featured in The Warning, Brooksley Born, had indeed blown the whistle: her reputation as a lawyer is stellar, and she has more than twenty years practiced law in derivatives markets. Born was not allowed to observe, yet later suspected, the lucrative twenty-seven trillion dollar secretive and fraudulent sales, which had occurred via over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, were threatening to collapse the entire financial system.
When the stock market was booming in 1998, she stood toe to toe with men refusing to blow the whistle while Long Term Capital Management (LTCM hedge funds) and later, Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO’s), both examples of derivatives, were traded willy-nilly and neither monitored nor regulated.
During presidential terms of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, greedy and negligent bankers thumbed their noses at fraud, hoping their secret gambles were monetary insurance in defense of the potential probability of palpable fraudulent practices.
Hover Here for video reference.PBS FRONTLINE documentary, The Warning, was inspiration for writing ideas gleaned from the program in video format presented at the bottom of this ezine.
Honesty Was Silenced
In 2007, the systemic risk of derivatives had grown to 595 trillion dollars. In 2008, financial destinies began prophetically unfolding into collapses. The honesty of Brooksley Born was silenced along with her research in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to protect from fraud the money of the American public, which was and still is at risk in derivatives.
“It’ll happen again if we don’t take the appropriate steps,” Born warns. “There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience.” Refer here.
Two of the numerous men who did not stop the merciless bullying and final shut down of Born, Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, both accepted key positions in the proposed Obama administration.
No One Conspires Alone
The men secretly manipulating official governmental matters do not conspire alone: they symbiotically collude with financial lobbyists, with corporacratic media, and other hierarchies including the prevailing prerogatives of the Federal Reserve.
It’s reasonable to assume that any possible feelings in a surreal moment must give way to rethinking that it is neither humorous nor acceptable to perceive Brooksley’s style unto itself as “irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable” when for years the daring hierarchy dominated by men saying such things were highly likely to have been men who were irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable if not also vicious while concealing tendencies for greed and negligence revealed in investigative results by Brooksley Born. ¹
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