“Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter The Kingdom.”

The “eye of the needle” was a term used for the narrow after-hours gate to the inner city of Jerusalem. All baggage needed to be removed in order to pass through.

In order for people to see the truth, they need to pass through this narrow opening, shedding the baggage of bad ideas about capital, state, and the human person.

The ends do not justify the means.

Riteous indignation over exploitative capitalism does not make one a Marxist. By the same token, indignation toward Satism (as defined by Mark Levin in Liberty and Tyranny) does not make one a self-riteous, greedy capitalist. As the late Pope John Paul II had said, any economic system that ignores the dignity of the human person is bound to fail.

Who is being served in our economic system: private capital, the State, or the human person? The answer lies how in the weakest among us are regarded and served – the poor, the unborn, and the handicapped.

Meantime… I’m daring to post a delicious language treat below – because we reformers do hard work for humanity’s good and carry the burden of knowing what all should know, and our lives deserve to be brightened by great delights (especially ones that inspire us to persevere) – or we have missed the whole point of living.

Please don’t try to understand this excerpt – much better to just let it wash over you. Read it slowly, out loud to yourself is good if you like. (there are no typos. This is from James Joyce’s immensely important masterpiece Finnegans Wake – and JJ will forgive me the license I have taken in editing it… because me n JJ are having a language and lifelove affair)

Awareness is on the rise, Friends. Truth is getting her boots on, climbing out of her dungeon. The human tribe…the Finnegans…are waking…so, enjoy, Monetary Reformers:

“You mean to see we have been hadding a sound night’s sleep? You may so. It is just, it is just about to, it is just about to rolywholyover. Of all the stranger things that ever not even in the hundrund and badst pageans of unthowsent and wonst nice…to be have happened! The untireties of livesliving being the one substrance of a streamsbecoming. Totalled in toldteld and telltold in tittletell tattle. Why? Because, graced be Gad and all giddy gadgets, in whose words were the beginnings, there are two signs to turn to, the yest and the ist, the wright side and the wronged side, feeling aslip and wauking up, so an, so farth. Why? It is a sot of a swigswag, systomy dystomy, which everabody you ever anywhere at all doze. Why? Such me. Where did thots come from? It is infinitesimally fevers, resty fever, risy fever, a coranto of aria, sleeper awakening, in the smalls of one’s back presentiment …a flash from a future of maybe mahamayability through the windr of a wondr in a wildr is a weltr as a wirbl of a warbl is a world.

Tom.
It is perfect degrees excelsius.
Anemone activescent the torporature is returning to mornal. Humid nature is feeling itself freely at ease with the all fresco.”

Lots of fun at Finnegans wake!
Love soft fun at Finnegans Wake?

Perhaps we should all take note of Edison’s approach when explaining to our friends and neighbors.

Every financier cloaks his or her speculative activity behind this same pious self-justification. Former Lehman Brothers bond trader, Lawrence McDonald, becomes rhapsodic when describing the historical social role of Lehman ( “A Colossal Failure of Common Sense”). The role of financial middle man is “holy”, he believes.

If you were being paid millions per year, you might find it easy to sell yourself to the rubes in just this way. The key word is “sell”. The truth is Wall Street is to the market economy what insurance companies are to health care. They conceal their profit motive behind a sacred social purpose. They sell it to the public and to themselves, as well. A guy like Lawrence McDonald believes his own bullshit.

And so does the US Congress and the President. They believe it because it makes them rich. It must be true.

So put a tax on their “trading”. Tax the usurious middleman, those people who take their cut in the name of all that is holy.

That won’t be easy because it so happens that a majority of American investors will see their money-for-nothing returns on investment reduced to compensate the lords of finance for their losses.

It so happens that the American investment community, the great middle class and above, has bought the financier’s sales pitch. They believe in bullshit just like they believe in making a profit from disease and misfortune.

It’s capitalism and it really sucks. When you accept the idea that your self-interest is the same thing as the public interest, you are a card carrying American capitalist, the most self-deluded idiot in the known world.

Having said that, we seem to do better as territorial peoples, as compared to nomadic tribes. Territories need to be guarded, governed and defended, lest the young and weak are not provided for.

In Illinois, as well as many other places, much of the farmland is owned by the insurance companies. Right now we are loosing control of our food supply, and could be headed for disaster on that front.

First thing you hijack is the language the people use.

You re-name what is actually the commons, the common heritage, the earthly gifts given to all equally by whatever it is you think created us, the work done for everybody in common by mother nature – the commons – you rename this “natural resources” and get everybody to use that terminology.

you do this because the commons obviously cannot be owned

but resources can.

bingo. now you can own the earth and all the works of man upon it.

brilliant?

Land monopoly (plus private inheritance) is the very back bone of rule by the rich.

Winston Churchill: “Land Monopoly is not the only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies – it is perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly.”

Here is (part of) “Archimedes” by Mark Twain:

“It is evident that he was an over-rated man. He was in the habit of making a lot of fuss about his screws and levers, but his knowledge of mechanics was in reality of a very limited character. I have never set up for a genius myself, but I know of a mechanical force more powerful than anything the vaunting engineer of Syracuse ever dreamed of. It is the force of land monopoly; it is a screw and lever all in one; it will screw the last penny out of a man’s pocket, and bend everything on earth to its own despotic will.

Give me the private ownership of all the land, and will I move the earth? No; but I will do more. I will undertake to make slaves of all the human beings on the face of it. Not chattel slaves exactly, but slaves nevertheless. What an idiot I would be to make chattel slaves of them. I would have to find them salts and senna when they were sick, and whip them to work when they were lazy.

No, it is not good enough. Under the system I propose the fools would imagine they were all free. I would get a maximum of results, and have no responsibility whatever. They would cultivate the soil; they would dive into the bowels of the earth for its hidden treasures; they would build cities and construct railways and telegraphs; their ships would navigate the ocean; they would work and work, and invent and contrive; their warehouses would be full, their markets glutted, and:

The beauty of the whole concern would be
That everything they made would belong to me.

It would be this way, you see: As I owned all the land, they would of course, have to pay me rent. They could not reasonably expect me to allow them the use of the land for nothing. I am not a hard man, and in fixing the rent I would be very liberal with them. I would allow them, in fact, to fix it themselves. What could be fairer? Here is a piece of land, let us say, it might be a farm, it might be a building site, or it might be something else – if there was only one man who wanted it, of course he would not offer me much, but if the land be really worth anything such a circumstance is not likely to happen.

On the contrary, there would be a number who would want it, and they would go on bidding and bidding one against the other, in order to get it. I should accept the highest offer – what could be fairer? Every increase of population, extension of trade, every advance in the arts and sciences would, as we all know, increase the value of land, and the competition that would naturally arise would continue to force rents upward, so much so, that in many cases the tenants would have little or nothing left for themselves.

In this case a number of those who were hard pushed would seek to borrow, and as for those who were not so hard pushed, they would, as a matter of course, get the idea into their heads that if they only had more capital they could extend their operations, and thereby make their business more profitable. Here I am again. The very man they stand in need of; a regular benefactor of my species, and always ready to oblige them. With such an enormous rent-roll I could furnish them with funds up to the full extent of the available security; they would not expect me to do more, and in the matter of interest I would be equally generous.

I would allow them to fix the rate of it themselves in precisely the same manner as they had fixed the rent. I should then have them by the wool, and if they failed in their payments it would be the easiest thing in the world to sell them out. They might bewail their lot, but business is business. They should have worked harder and been more provident. Whatever inconvenience they might suffer, it would be their concern, and not mine.

What a glorious time I would have of it! Rent and interest, interest and rent, and no limit to either, excepting the ability of the workers to pay. Rents would go up and up, and they would continue to pledge and mortgage, and as they went bung, bung, one after another, it would be the finest sport ever seen. thus, from the simple leverage of land monopoly, not only the great globe itself, but everything on the face of it would eventually belong to me. I would be king and lord of all, and the rest of mankind would be my most willing slaves…

read the rest of Mark Twain’s “Archimedes” here – at a site that is one of the world’s greatest hidden treasures:

http://www.envisioneer.net/RainForest/