While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.
The companies aren't hiring, because consumers don't have enough money to buy the goods and services.
We go forward with our heads held high, but look back and remember where we come from.
What do the 5%, or the 1% actually use their money for? They lend it back to the economy at large, they load it down with debt. They make their money by lending to the bottom 95%, or the bottom 99%. When you give them more after-tax income, it enables them to buy even more control of government, even more control of election campaigns. They're not going to spend this money back into the goods-and-services economy.
The one sure mark of a con, though, is the promise of free money.
So we are in for years of debt deflation. That means that people have to pay so much debt service for mortgages, credit cards, student loans, bank loans and other obligations that they have less to spend on goods and services. So markets shrink. New investment and employment fall off, and the economy is falls into a downward spiral.
The most serious problems lie in the financial sphere, where the economy's debt overhead has grown more rapidly than the 'real' economy's ability to carry this debt. [. . . ] The essence of the global financial bubble is that savings are diverted to inflate the stock market, bond market and real estate prices rather than to build new factories and employ more labor.
Haven't you ever heard of the saying, "If you want to shoot the general, first shoot the horse!"?' --Lin If you wanna shoot the general, then you should just SHOOT THE GENERAL!' --Ed
What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.
Rick Bass is one of a dwindling handful of American fiction writers still celebrating the importance of place, the natural world, and the struggle of a few brave souls to live and work respectfully in what's left of our western wilderness. . . The Lives of Rocks is his most lyrical and powerful book to date. . . a masterwork.
Music is either sacred or secular. The sacred agrees with its dignity, and here has its greatest effect on life, an effect that remains the same through all ages and epochs. Secular music should be cheerful throughout.