Positive Think Your Way to Abundance

Abundance. It's a nice word, isn’t it? It's a great concept, the idea that abundance of everything is there for everybody, it doesn’t matter who you are. And if you haven’t got enough of it apparently you can just think your way into it. Or you can be lucky and win the lottery. Just kidding.

Abundance of money, abundance of opportunities, abundance of dreams, abundance of dreams fulfilled, abundance of self-esteem, abundance of love and respect. We all want that. Especially love. Everybody wants a happy relationship, where they’re treated with respect and there’s real connection.

All of it always seems so miraculously possible, so utterly achievable - and real – when you’ve just read the latest motivational book, or seen the latest “spiritual” film. The big Aha moment. They make it so clear, don't they? Your thinking brain comes alive with all the possibilities it didn't see before. Often they tell you that just seeing those possibilities is all it takes. Just getting your head around the bigger idea. Manipulate your brain. Just think! And now that you see and think, you know. And because you know, you can act differently. So your life will be different from this point on. Better. Fulfilled. Successful. Filled with abundance. To know is to change, isn’t it? 

It's a fabulous idea. How hard can it be – you watch a film, read a book, intellectually embrace an idea, and miraculously your life turns around. All the things that don’t work in your life just melt away. The men who haven’t treated you well? They’re gone, and they’re somehow magically replaced by different men, who treat you with incredible respect, make you feel deserving and loved and important. And all you had to do was think differently. Be positive.

Sounds logical, right? Actually it’s bollocks. 

The Brazilian Revolution - Quality of Life Trumps Football

In an era of mass communication it’s surprisingly easy to know very little about a country’s people. My assumption about Brazil was that everybody was crazy about football and up until protests erupted recently I presumed everybody was excited about the Confederations Cup and the Olympics. Clearly I was wrong. What started out as a righteous objection to the price hike of transport was just the tinder catching fire. That something so sacred as football is being sacrificed to a greater need says a lot about how far Brazilians have been pushed.  

Now it’s practically a full-blown revolution as the middle class riots against corruption, poor services and government mis-spending, which includes the inordinate cost of hosting the World Cup and the Olympics. More than a million people demonstrated on Thursday in 80 cities around the country. Compare this to 100 people protesting lasting year about the hike in bus prices.  

It’s starting to look a bit like Egypt. With one major difference; President Dilma Rousseff paid attention and praised Brazilians for their courage in speaking out peacefully. As the protests got violent she didn’t support the violence, but she hasn’t used it as an excuse to shut the door.  

Perhaps that’s because she was radical student herself and can identify with the protestors – many of whom are young and demonstrating for the first time in their lives. Or maybe it’s because she’s taken note of history, and power hasn’t intoxicated and blinded her as it has many activists who led revolutions only to become harsh dictators. Whatever the reasons, partly at Rousseff’s command, bus prices were restored to what they were in quite a few cities, and on Friday she called an emergency meeting with various relevant ministers.  

Some of the demonstrators’ placards have read “Halt evictions”, “Come to the street. It’s the only place we don’t pay taxes”, “Stop corruption. Change Brazil”, "We don't need money for World Cup, we need money for hospitals" and “Government failure to understand education will lead to revolution”. The message is clear. The middle class is awake, alive, articulate and courageous. Not willing any more to take abuse. 

It’s happening all round the world. Call me a radical but I think it’s a good thing. It signals the coming to an end of an era that’s been great for a few but miserable for millions. The world has gone from having two classes, upper and lower with no hope of the lower rising, to three where the middle class enjoyed prosperity. And if you were born with nothing you could make a fortune.  

But the dynamics have been slipping back dangerously close to a 2 class world as the middle class has lost its footing. I guess in a way that's because it still had the mentality of boss and servant. It was a thing of pride to give all your loyalty to a company. Until giving your loyalty was abused and became sacrificing your life and your lifestyle. That’s when the middle class started splitting into two. Bosses and entrepreneurs rose, and workers sank. Bosses became greedier, workers became demoralized until the boundary between the two began solidifying again. In today’s world if you’re born with nothing or you lose what you had and you land in the gutter it’s incredibly difficult to get back up again.  

But all the time the middle class has looked to be losing its power it’s been gathering a different kind of momentum: awareness that it has rights, that people can protest and make a difference. That the masses actually have the power. 

This is always how consciousness grows. When you don't know your worth you get kicked around, you give yourself away to people who abuse your trust. You get angry. You protest. You realise you can drop the boss/servant mentality. You can take your power back. It usually happens when you have nothing left to lose.

The beauty about today's world is that some leaders understand this dynamic and are either actively promoting the middle class or at least recognizing that they have to work with it. I think that’s a beautiful thing. So I'm all in favor of protest and demonstration. I hate violence but I can understand how a person can get to the point of being so constantly dismissed, disrespected and made to pay for others’ inhumanity, corruption and lousy management that they blow a fuse. 

May Brazil have as peaceful revolution as possible; may Rousseff find a way to help the people succeed in their quest for a better run government and a better quality of life. They deserve it.

The Outrage Over NSA Surveillance - Should American Pay for their Own Security?

The haves in Western society have gotten used to being able to have their cake and eat it, and to not have to pay for the consequences of their actions, and even for their freedom. Somebody else pays, but that doesn’t trouble us too much.

In times of recession the have-less slip down the ladder dangerously close to the have-nots, but in boom times so far enough have recovered enough to keep the system going, despite that they’re paying too high a price. Working for wages that don’t reflect their contribution so that corporations and their shareholders can profit. Spending beyond their means so that banks can make a profit.

And then everybody kind of becomes unaccountable. The have-nots of course pay for everything and over time that group gets bigger and bigger. But a lot of people look the other way. It won’t happen to me. Even if it did happen once, it won’t happen again. It seems to be human nature. Until you’re down and you just can’t get up again. Then you realize, I have the power to change this. And then the whole world changes for you.

But those people are in the minority. Just as it happens at an individual level, it does with societies. The majority believe that what they do in their lives from moment to moment and the choices they make have nothing to do with the trouble that their country gets into. Of course they’re right in some ways. Leaders fabricate wars to oust inconvenient rulers or parties or squander budgets. Politicians steal the money and/or do what the wealthy and powerful want them to do. Bankers bankrupt entire economies and get away with it: correction, are rewarded for it.

But none of it could happen if every citizen actively participated in elections, which means finding out everything there is to find about candidates before they’re elected. Then communicating with them on everything they do. Protesting every single time they step out of line.

Some do it more than others, but the majority of us wait until something really disastrous happens then we wait for the next election and we vote differently, unless we allow ourselves to get seduced by bland election promises or we’re blinded by our prejudices. We’d rather hold onto them than properly inform ourselves.

And when an unjust war is started on the pretext of protecting our freedom, we accept it and look away from the fact that somebody else is paying for that real or imagined freedom. The soldiers, for one. Innocent civilians for another, just wanting to live their lives in peace, learn their own lessons in their own way, being smashed to pieces. Maybe dying, maybe surviving to live the rest of their lives in hell, their family, town and country destroyed.

Americans are being given the choice of actually paying the price themselves for their own security now, with the Obama Administration’s intelligence gathering. Isn’t it better than making others pay? Creating a fake war on a false pretext and bombing the hell out of a country? Conning US soldiers who get physically and mentally maimed or destroyed into believing they did something noble? Conning parents into believing they're sacrificing their children for something great, so that they'll  encourage the rest of the children to give themselves up like so much fodder? Illegally holding 'suspects' and illegally torturing them, treating them like animals?

For the war in Iraq the US military sent its missionaries into poor urban areas and targeted young men who had no jobs, no resources, no opportunities. Congressmen and Senators didn't send their own sons to fight. In fact they made sure their sons didn't fight. That’s not the worst kind of intrusion into privacy?

With this latest intelligence gathering story, the real intrusion on privacy would be if content were being mined which it isn't. And a much greater threat to individuals is when violent response, most of it inappropriate, fosters more hatred and more terrorism. When the superwealthy and giant corporations get away with not contributing adequately to society. When wages are too low so profits can be high and shareholders and CEOs can make a fortune. When a Republican governor squanders $24 million to further his personal agenda and says he didn't know what it cost and he didn't care. Shortly after he had cut $10 million from after-care programs in poor schools, $12 million from hospital charity, and refused to spend $25 million on early voting.

In comparison to the alternatives, intelligence gathering is a peaceful and non-violent method of dealing with the terrorist threat. It would be great if there was no threat. But there is one and something has to be done. The question is simply, who’s going to pay for the security? The people who receive it, or those who don't?

What Price Freedom? President Obama Defends NSA Surveillance

There’s been a riot of protest about the Obama Administration’s invasion of privacy lately, with the media milking it for all it’s worth. Protestors see it as the end of America and American freedom, the confirmation that the US is a police state, proof that President Obama is a thug, illustration that all your emails and your internet activity are being read and filed, andyou’re your telephone calls listened to and saved.
  
One wonders if anybody has thought about how many employees it would take to do all of that,  how long it would take, and how physically impossible it actually is, considering that we’re talking about all the phone and email activity of 313 900 000 people. 

Some research cited that on average Americans spend 7 hours a month talking on the phone. That’s 2 197 300 000 hours a month that would have to be listened to. Which would take one person 91 554 166 days to cover, listening 24 hours a day. So the Obama Administration must be employing millions of people just to listen into phone calls. 

What about emails? The figures are too astronomic to even contemplate, and the whole scenario is unutterably absurd.

The truth is that the content of phone calls isn’t being listened to, just who’s making them and who to. Which still doesn’t mean that every single call is being scrutinized. The information is mined for alerts. To catch terrorists. And the internet data of Americans isn’t being scrutinized at all. Plus, the reality of intelligence gathering is probably nowhere near as glamorous or sinister as many seem to fear, and as Hollywood has projected. It’s hard to separate fiction from fact most of the time, which I think is partly why so many people are going ballistic.

President Obama is keeping his head, however. He pointed out that surveillance is nothing new and that society sometimes has to make compromise if it wants ultimate protection. It makes sense to me. 

There seem to be two options to counter terror: intelligence or military invasion. The latter makes other people pay for your freedom. It maims or destroys - mentally and physically - huge numbers of US soldiers and innocent civilians, and enables illegal kidnap and torture. It’s conveniently far from home – except for the soldiers and their families, of course – and everybody can get on pretty much with their lives, adapting to paranoia, hoping a bomb doesn't blow up in their back yard. 

Not letting themselves really consider what this option is doing to innocent people. Not really thinking that their freedom comes at a horrible price, paid by somebody else.

But it creates more enemies, generates incendiary hatred and fosters more terrorist attacks. The  military industrial complex continues to make a profit, becomes more powerful, more controlling of politicians. That option will never free America from terrorism. Violence begets more violence. 

Intelligence, on the other hand, doesn’t maim or destroy anybody so integrity is preserved as well as lives and sanity. It doesn't make more enemies, and it has a chance of succeeding. That's a no-brainer.

In 2009 US intelligence analysts were alerted by an email which they traced to a young man, Najibullah Zazi, who asked an Al Qaeda operative how to make a flour-based bomb. Later, he sent another email saying the marriage was ready. He was traced and later confessed to having plotted to bomb New York subways. I find that both sobering and encouraging. 

One of the critics of this invasion of privacy said that the failures to catch terrorists far outnumber the successes and concluded that the intelligence gathering was a waste of time.  But that's the nature of success, that's how it happens in reality. You keep trying even when you fail, and you always fail more times than you succeed. But you do eventually succeed and your successes are noteworthy.
And I guess to the New York inhabitants who took the subway and were saved from losing body parts and/or their lives, the surveillance wasn’t a waste of time at all. 

I know that if I'd been one of those who would have been dismembered by a terrorist bomb if it hadn't been intercepted by intelligence I'd be grateful, not critical.

In World War II, people sacrificed their lives for freedom from fascism. Now all people are being asked to sacrifice is a tiny bit of freedom, so their lives and integrity can be preserved. It doesn’t seem like a very big price to ask, to me.

Honor Amongst Thieves? Bloomberg News Reporters Cross the Line

 

It’s not often that something happens on Wall Street that should and could make news but gets mentioned casually in passing instead of being thoroughly investigated. But that seems to have happened in the reporting about the latest accusations leveled at Bloomberg financial data and news by public relation chiefs Jake Siewert of Goldman Sachs and Joe Evangelista of JP Morgan Chase.

The accusations are that Bloomberg reporters have been crossing the line drawn in the contract that states they may not use information gleaned from the terminals for reporting. Accusations surfaced when a Bloomberg reporter noticed that a Goldman executive hadn’t logged in for a few days. He called the Hong Kong office to ask what had happened to the executive. When news of it got to Siewert he called Evangelista, who said the same thing had been happening to JP Morgan’s execs.

Bloomberg investigated, admitted that reporters were crossing the line and breaching the terminals contract and agreed to put a stop to it. One would imagine lawsuits and huge press would have ensued but nothing seems to have really happened. It’s a bit of a damp squib, news-wise.

What hasn’t been explained is that the contract allowed reporters a limited period during which they could access help desks and log ins. If they couldn’t use that information why were they allowed to access it?

Much more interesting, though, is that this isn’t the first time executives have complained about reporters crossing the line. So when Siewert took the latest complaint seriously, some executives – reported on by the New York Times on condition of anonymity – admitted to having tried to use the breach to bargain down the price of the terminals! It’s blackmail. Soft blackmail, maybe, no threats, no bad guys, no anonymous notes, but blackmail nevertheless. In a country where people sue for the most tenuous reasons and even win, that nothing came of this is pretty extraordinary. Honor amongst thieves, I guess.

That anybody in Wall Street would be accusing anybody else of crossing the line is amusing. That execs would even openly admit to indulging in blackmail is testament to how much Wall Street believes itself to be above the law. That’s still amusing but in a rather sinister kind of way. 

What’s puzzling is that these two aspects of the same company exist as bedfellows. There are many complaints that Bloomberg News reports destructively on Wall Street goings on, yet Bloomberg financial data terminals are everywhere. And this despite that they’re by far the most expensive at $20,000 apiece. 

Maybe it’s explained by the fact that Bloomberg News is part of Bloomberg L.P., a multinational mass media limited partnership that’s based in the city of New York. Revenue in 2011 was $7.6 billion. Global revenue for the financial data market was $16 billion. No wonder nobody really challenges Bloomberg. And with all those connections, why would they have to bother reducing the price of their terminals? For once Wall Street is on the receiving end. Of a corporation that  probably controls Wall Street. Which pretty much boils down to one man. Michael Bloomberg, the 7th wealthiest man in the US, owns 88% of Bloomberg L.P.