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Tired of “too big to fail”? Tired of the US government’s eagerness to spend billions of public dollars to bail out the very institutions that brought the global economy to the brink of ruin? Tired of record profits (Goldman Sachs) and massive CEO bonuses (just about every big money bank) in the midst of the Great Recession? Tired of letting the big boys use your money to get themselves rich through speculative shenanigans and investment in globalized enterprises that destroy both the biosphere and human communities? Tired of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer?

Then STOP GIVING THEM YOUR MONEY!

Stop willingly handing over your cash to the big corporations and financial institutions that are hell-bent on squeezing every last drop of blood out of the fragile earth and its fragile people in order to realize short term financial gains regardless of the long term consequences. Every penny you deposit in a bank or invest in a stock or mutual fund is being used to do something. What kind of activity are you financing? That lusty extra percentage point is the bait in a Faustian bargain. Don’t sell your soul for pennies. Don’t sell out the planet, its life, and its people in order to buy more shit to shove in your closet. Find out what your money is doing, and if it ain’t doing good, MOVE YOUR MONEY!

Banking
Close your accounts at Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, Wachovia, US Bank, etc and open an account at a community-oriented local financial institution, such as an FDIC insured local bank or NCUA insured local credit union.

You can find a local bank by entering your zip code here:

You can find a local credit union at findacreditunion.com

Check out moveyourmoney.info for more information about local banking and credit unions. You can also find them on facebook.

Investments
First of all, think about the word “investment”. What exactly are you investing in? Are you playing a numbers game, betting on odds for a high return with almost no consideration for the kind of real world activity that is being financed by your hard earned cash? Or are you investing in a better world for you and your children? What exactly constitutes a successful return on your investment? A higher number on your statement, or a viable, livable, vibrant, clean, just, and beautiful world? Forget about numbers. Imagine the kind of world you want your children to live in and then put your money into businesses and funds that promote the kind of activity you really care about. The good news is that you can earn reasonable returns while simultaneously taking some responsibility for what your money is actually doing and helping to fund a better world.

Look into Socially Responsible Investing (SRI). If your current financial adviser says you should steer clear, find a different adviser. Invest in a just and green future (which in the end is the only lucrative investment going).

Check out the Social Investment Forum, SocialFunds.com, and The Community Investment Center for much more information about SRIs as well fund comparison tools.

Do you know what your money is doing? Find out! Then MOVE YOUR MONEY!

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Watch the trailer and then go get the movie. This may be the easiest, most potent and visceral way to have a peak behind the veil of the corporate food production machine that rules over us, ravishes our environment, makes us sick, squeezes out our last pennies, systematizes cruelty to animals, exploits the dispossessed (the immigrant, the minority), pollutes our land and water, co-opts our government, secures intellectual property rights to the genetic codes of  life, squashes out all competition (the family farmer, the tradesman) through massive legal and financial resources, homogenizes culture, destroys the diversity and abundance of species of flora and fauna, burns ungodly amounts of fossil fuels released as carbon into the atmosphere, creates a nation of addicts strung out on empty calories… all so that you can get “cheap”  “food” at your local supermarket.

Find out why this system actually ends up creating the least healthy, least flavorful, least satisfying food at the highest possible cost to this planet. Realize that you have been caught in the Matrix, the real one, and that it is time to wake up. Realize that you have been taken in by a sophisticated and extremely powerful education system sponsored by the corporate media that is specifically designed to hide the dark side of this matrix and to cause you to live in a virtualized cultural dream world, sanitizing and irradiating the sick truth, wrapping it up in plastic, and serving it to you with a smile.

This may be as inconvenient a truth as that of global warming, and equally as important. It must be faced. Can you really, now that you know, remain a passive participant in global systems of cruelty and environmental devastation? Can you explain that to your children?

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Here are some resources I’ve found helpful in trying to understand the critical mess we’re in and how to get out of it.

The Economic Crisis and the Bailout

Rolling Stone

• The Big Takeover. The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution. By Matt Taibbi. Probably the best single article I’ve seen explaining the debacle.
• The New Trough. The Wall Street bailout looks a lot like Iraq — a “free-fraud zone” where private contractors cash in on the mess they helped create. By Naomi Klein. How the current economic crisis is just the latest manifestation of Disaster Capitalism.

New York Times

• Obama’s Ersatz Capitalism: “What the Obama administration is doing is far worse than nationalization: it is ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses.” by Joseph Stiglitz

Bill Moyer’s Journal

• William Greider lays out the case for a fundamental restructuring of America’s economy and society.

Democracy Now!

• David Korten talks about his book: Agenda for a New Economy. Highly recommended!
• James Galbraith talks about Geithner’s plan to overhaul the nation’s financial regulatory system

This American Life

• Bad Bank. The collapse of the banking system explained, in just 59 minutes.
• Another Frightening Show About the Economy
• The Giant Pool of Money. How sub-prime mortgages took the system down.

Fresh Air: Terry Gross’s interviews with Michael Greenberg

• Was ‘Adult Supervision’ Needed On Wall Street? Our confusing economy explained.

The Brutal Legacy of Neoliberalism, Capitalist Corporatism, Free-Market Fundamentalism

• The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, as well as Klein’s writings, debates, appearances, and interviews. Klein is a brilliant and fearless journalist, calling power to account with a deft command of language, a keen intellect, and meticulous research.www.naomiklein.com
• Adbusters magazine

The Fundamental Problem: The Limits to Growth. Steps toward a Viable Solution.

Adbusters

• The Crisis: Groundbreaking economist, Herman Daly, zeroes in on the root cause of our financial meltdown.
• Big Idea: A Steady-State Economy. An alternative to our world-eating economy predicated on growth.
• Back Away from the Tipping Point: Ten crucial steps to attain an ecologically viable economic future

Books and Magazines

• Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. Why Wall Street can’t be fixed and how to replace it. By David Korten. See the interview on Democracy Now!
• Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy. By Peter G. Brown and Geoffrey Garver
• For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future by Herman E Daly and John B Cobb Jr
• Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming by Paul Hawken.
• The writings of Bill McKibben. www.billmckibben.com
• Yes! Magazine. The Journal of Positive Futures
• Adbusters magazine. Journal of the Mental Environment.

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We are reaping what we have sown. The current economic implosion is not merely the consequence of foolish or unscrupulous practices in the world of big corporations and high finance, nor is it simply the fallout of the policies of a particular administration (i.e. Bush), nor the result of the reign of a particular economic ideology (i.e. neoliberalism). We are bewildered, frightened, and angry, and we want to know who to blame, but we need look no further than our own backyards. The present disaster is ultimately the result of the way we have chosen to structure our political and economic relationships to the earth and to each other, both in our personal lives and collectively as human beings.

This is not just an economic crisis, it is an ecological crisis, it is a political crisis, and, at its root, it is a spiritual crisis. This crisis didn’t begin with the sub-prime mortgage debacle, not with Bush, not with the dawn of free-market corporate capitalism. We have been in the midst of the current crisis for a very long time.

So why now? If the problematic nature of our political and economic relations to the earth and each other stretches way back (maybe all the way back) then why is everything going all haywire right now? The answer is globalization. This is a new era in the history of humanity. The expansion of the scale of human activity, power, and presence within the finite context of the planet earth has crossed a critical threshold. The earth can no longer absorb the consequences of our actions. The impact of our presence on earth has outstripped the capacity of evolution to adapt in a way that can sustain life. The reduction of friction* and increasing interconnectedness of human political/economic relations, the consolidation of power in geographically abstracted mega-corporations, the creation of a globally integrated and instantaneous communication and information network, the fast movement of huge amounts of money, all driven by the power of computers, has changed us. We as human beings now exist in a categorically different relation to the natural systems of the earth that sustain us. We have become too powerful, too fast, too effective. Because of the integrated nature of our globalized world, the consequences of our actions become immediate and far-reaching. There is less and less delay in both space and time between the moment of action and its global effects. But our wisdom has not kept pace with our power. Lacking wisdom, we have become the monster, the economic Frankenstein, of our own creation.

But what is the essence of wisdom? (more…)

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If you follow the news, you know that the Bush administration is finally coming close to achieving its objective in Iraq. Thousands of US soldiers are dead. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead. Millions are displaced. The whole region is a volatile quagmire. But it was worth it, because Operation Iraqi Freedom has succeeded: we are finally going to get the oil. Just in time too, what with gas at $4 per gallon and all.

No-bid contracts are about to be handed over to Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total, BP, Chevron and a number of smaller companies so that they can help “rebuild the decrepit Iraqi oil industry.” In exchange, they will receive premium access to one of the largest remaining oil deposits in the world. These foreign firms are positioned to keep 75 percent of the value of the contracts granted under the control of the Iraqi National Oil Company. As other global sources dwindle, this is going to lead to a cash-flow for the chosen few that will make last year’s record-setting profits laughable. Mission accomplished, he said.

Here’s how it went down. We went in for the oil. We destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, raided its coffers, despoiled priceless and ancient national treasures, illegally held and tortured detainees, killed people, decimated the economy, spawned a civil/religious war, alienated most of the world, and reduced the place to chaos. Then we handed out no-bid contracts (see a theme emerging?) to companies such as Haliburton and Bechtel with direct connections to the highest reaches of our government, funneling billions of US citizens’ dollars into a grossly negligent privatized reconstruction of Iraq. Now we want Iraq to pay for this “reconstruction” by handing over the oil.

Iraq is nearly destroyed, the American people were first lied to and then robbed blind, and a handful of multinational corporations are getting rich beyond their wildest dreams. You want to know what Iraq was really about? Take the advice Deep Throat gave during the Watergate scandal: follow the money.

That’s Iraq, but what I really want to talk about is Naomi Klein.

The mess in Iraq is just one the most recent and egregious examples of the consequences of what Naomi Klein calls “Disaster Capitalism”. Klein’s latest book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (a New York Times best seller) is now being released in paperback. It is the story of “how America’s free market policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.” Klein systematically takes us through a modern history of human catastrophe, war, and natural disaster and shows how multinational corporations in bed with political and economic free-market ideologues have seized advantage of crises to impose draconian economic policies on wounded populations, handing over to private companies the riches of the public sphere, and creating conditions advantageous to only the biggest global players, often with brutal repression of dissent. Russia, China, Central and South America, the South-East Asia crisis, South Africa, the tsunami, New Orleans, Guantanamo, Iraq… She covers it all. Disaster profiteering has become one of the most lucrative ventures available for those who are positioned to exploit a shocked and beaten populace. We, as Americans, need to understand how powerful interests play on our fears to garner support for international interventions in the name of national defense (i.e. the “war on terror”) that do little to secure us from harm, but do a lot to secure vast amounts of wealth for an elite few.

This, in my opinion, is one of the most important stories of our time. It’s scary as hell. Buy the book. Read it.

Visit The Shock Doctrine website to find out more.

Check out Audio and Video footage of Naomi speaking on top news and talk shows.
Watch her debate Alan Greenspan.

Read Naomi Klein’s latest (short) article in The Nation, in which she talks about the connections between disaster capitalism and the current food and fuel crises.

Update - A conversation between Naomi Klein and Amy Goodman concerning all of the above, and Obama’s true economic colors.

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Minneapolis, MN – I just spent the weekend at the National Conference for Media Reform that was held here in Minneapolis. If I ever had any doubt about the corporate media’s stranglehold on truth and it’s abuse of power for the sake of profit- all in the name of “journalism”- it was dispelled this weekend. And the most eloquent spokesperson revealing this sad reality was not one of the many intelligent, impassioned, and courageous people who addressed or attended the conference- it was none other than Bill O’Reilly. “Reporting” about the conference on his Fox “news” show, O’Reilly characterized the attendees as lunatics, crazies, and fascists. Fascists??!! The whole point of the conference was to reclaim democratic access to and ownership of the means of public communication, information, and debate- television, radio, cable/satellite, print, and especially the Internet- almost ALL of which is now owned and controlled by a grand total of 6 companies. If you believe you are receiving any semblance of objective journalism in the corporate media, you ought to take a closer look.

It matters. This is how we got into Iraq. This is how we allowed Bush to steal an election. This is why we care more about the next American Idol than we do about Darfur, Tibet, Afghanistan, the environment, our next-door neighbors…

Among the lunatics and fascists at the conference were Bill Moyers, Dan Rather, Amy Goodman, Phil Donahue, Representative Mike Doyle, Senator Byron Dorgan, two current FCC commissioners, and many other incredibly thoughtful and motivated people who care deeply about this country and recognize that truly free speech is the foundation of any democracy worth the name. O’Reilly is either blatantly pursuing his own agenda at the expense of any pretense to truthfulness or he is truly one of the most ignorant people I have ever heard. It would be laughable, except that people believe him.

And that is the point.

This is serious folks. I think the most critical issues of our time are 1) the corporate/capitalist version of economic “growth” that is leading to the decimation of this planet’s ability to sustain life, 2) corporate control of the media, 3) the complicity of government with each. These are the foundational issues. Whatever other problems, injustices, causes that you are (rightly) concerned about, they can likely be traced back to one of these larger issues. In any case, your particular area of concern will never be sustainably resolved until we figure out first things first. Until we get the truth out about what is happening to our world, nothing will change. The truth is that the current system is designed to generate massive profits and power for an elite few at the expense of the earth and the majority of its inhabitants, and to keep the rest of the people either enslaved to poverty or anesthetized.

Who controls what gets said? Who has the power to determine the message? How are we to communicate with each other as free people without truly democratic, decentralized, truthful, locally-connected media? This is how we live together. The political economy and the media are the conduits through which our material and mental/emotional/spiritual lives flow. Who controls them controls our lives.

It’s time for change. And I ain’t talkin’ about Obama (although I hope he wins by the biggest landslide in American history this November). Wake up, folks (myself included). Stakes is high.

Head on over to freepress.net to listen to Moyer’s plenary address at the conference, to view video from other speakers such as Dan Rather and Amy Goodman, and to find out more about the critical need for media reform in this country.

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Do yourself the favor of reading this excerpt from Bill Moyer’s latest book “Moyers on Democracy.” Truth telling at it’s bravest and best. While you are there, get yourself hooked up with an RSS or email feed from Alternet.org

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