HOLA! The Magic Has Started!

Well the recession has recessed me right out of living in California, so I am driving down Mexico way to stay with friends who offered to put me up for a spell. Goal? document the ongoing effort to save endangered species, and the social changes in modern middle class Guadalajara. In the turtle spawning grounds the locals earn $1 an endangered egg for soup. The last time I visited we were threatened by men on horseback with rifles. They bullied me into not photographing them; this time I will shoot them (so to speak!).

When the economy comes ROARING BACK! I'll take that job, and complete my masters degree.

Hey lets face it nearly $0% interest loans? A rocking great new president of the US? Americans don't like depressions. Americans don't believe in failure. People of the US don't like second place, won't stand for dead rats in the peanut butter, bankers with their hands in the public till, an old man freezing to death in his own home as he donates a 1/2 million to a hospital, a widow shooting herself in despair of loosing her home - these are the kinds of things Americans can not abide.

If we don't have people robbing grocery stories with shotguns, and riots in the streets we will have peace in two years and an expanding economy.

Things are going to change and they will change swiftly - but not fast enough for me to remain in San Mateo... My friend Ariel said I should bring another gringo to ride shotgun meanwhile.

Is anyone that smart?

Is anyone smart enough to have recognized problems with the economy before it got this bad, and is anyone smart enough to fix them? Well, such people did exist and do exist but that doesn't mean anyone is willing to listen.

An example are those analysts and investors who realized that Madoff's split-strike conversion strategy could not produce such stable profits, and reviewed Madoff's records and then concluded it was fraud. Many people fell for Madoff's "it's proprietary information" and "don't tell anyone you are invested with me."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122956314669716617.html
"In 1999, trader Harry Markopolos wrote that "Madoff Securities is the world's largest Ponzi Scheme," in a letter to the SEC."

"The fact is that the only people who seem to have taken concrete action to protect investors from Mr. Madoff are private research shops like Aksia LLC. Its analysts did the real work of figuring out that Mr. Madoff's claimed investment strategy couldn't be happening at the volumes he claimed to be trading. Likewise, it was the short sellers who first blew the whistle on Enron, while the SEC was clueless and the firm's auditors were asleep."

Who is really going to listen to the boy crying wolf when the party is so much fun?

Why do I care aside from being out of a high paying job recently myself in UI Design and Business Analysis? I am no big time investor but for 10 years at least I'd been commenting to my best friend "I don't understand how economics works." and "Where is all the money coming from?" and "How come I don't think it is funny that banks 'accidently' grant a credit card to a dog?"

Looking at US economics from a larger patterns view, (the best of my skills), I saw a pattern that didn't match, it made no sense, there was too much money focused in all the same places. The problem with my simple observation was the ground I was standing on - the assumption I made - that is if you are an honest person, expecting the numbers to match, not expecting that it is possible they won't add up.

It was that one thing that I could not understand, how could an entire country try and fool itself? I did not expect that so many would be asleep at the wheel or that there were so many wolves driving those vehicles. It was the piece of the analysis pie that I presumed as innocent when it just wasn't.

My friend remarked to me recently "The reason you couldn't see how the economy works is because it didn't work. The economic machine you were looking at -- it wasn't working, we just didn't see it break down until now."

As an outsider some of the things I noticed where advertising programs that probably cost more than they could bring in. Even accounting for companies wanting market share, it still did not seem to be economically feasible.

Sometimes I have overcome this fault such as by judging a polititan by his face; Nixon and Geo W Bush. However I was conned when traveling recently, and after reading about this kind of person I realized he displayed several of the "tells" of his behavior such as changing his tone and volume of his voice in odd ways which con artists use to sound more convincing or commanding and confuse their prey.

This technique is just exactly like television advertising does. Its a very simple, effective - obey - "buy this now!" technique.

It is important that individuals learn to recognize such behavior in others whether it is on an individual or national level - it always comes down to if something doesn't feel right or the money is too easy -- it isn't right.

Even if I had seen more clearly how the economics in N. America weren't working, I'd still be out of a job now, because we would still have to wait until the economy broke down for everyone to see we need to change.

The Cassandra Effect is knowing something (good or bad) will happen in advance, but even after communicating nobody listens or can act on the information. Even if you know, it does not mean anyone will or can listen and understand you or change anything.

Sometimes its like knowing you should loose weight or other self-improvement - you know it, but you can't or don't act and when the consequences hit they may be worse than expected.

I am much less concerned about the Gross National Product and more concerned with Gross National Happiness. We have to all be smart together. And that is either socialist (which we are doing with the banks and car companies) or - communism.

Universal Responsibility in a Matrixed Economic World

I am concerned that Obama and his staff are not aware enough of the danger and that his planned policies do not go far enough. Reading up on America's depression era New Deal of the 1930's and the times leading up to it are remarkably like the times we are going though, except no one bailed out the fat cats then (as you know). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

Agreed bailing out the rich will help prevent some suicides like Adolf Merckle, the German billionaire who slipped from #44 most wealthy person on the planet to number #77 or Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet, a fund manager who invested with Bernie Madoff and apparently committed suicide at his office - to me these people's deaths are no laughing matter - not any different than those overleveraged investors who committed suicide on Black Thursday in 1929 or thereabouts by jumping from the buildings they were in. And what is it that Merckle could see that was so scary?

Some people actually laughed in 1929 to see or hear of the suicides, as if those folks deserved it or were somehow different than they were - a few months later, out of a job -- they stopped laughing.

My feeling is that we may be lucky by the end of Obama's first term in office to see any real strides. The only capital that he can really bank on is who he IS, and that the government at least is out of the hands of incompetents (from our standpoint) and warmongering profiteers. Ugh! the sick thing is industrial war complex oldsters really don't get that the world has changed - we ARE in this together just as HH the Dalai Lamas and HH the Popes as well as other religious and secular leaders have long preached. We communicate on an entirely different level, more frequently and around the world. Arguably there is universal responsibility and we are just getting a clue.


For just one example every night that I post a new image on Flickr - I know, no, no, I expect people from around the world will comment on it by the next morning - in one day - all around the world. And the comments in foreign languages I will translate to read and my reply I will translate and respond with - nearly instantly in their language. Even my requests are posted by Flickr in the native language of the person I am requesting their photo from - all with a drop down menu - no effort on my part.

Another example is that of the late Mr. Oscar Grant III, an unarmed African-American man shot in the back and killed in Oakland by the police (by accident or purposely) is instantly seen over the Web from every recording cell phone present - police authorities - placed in their roles to "serve and protect" absolutely can not hide any more behind some story when everyone anywhere can see what occured. And by the way - happy, satisfied people don't protest.

Franklin Roosevelt tried a lot of things to stabilize the economy. The stuff FDR did which was recently dismantled appears to be the root cause of the suffering in the country now, as the rich continue to amass profits while the lower classes lose a place to live. Political leaders can't hide any more either and the results of their efforts for good or bad will be known sooner and in more detail than ever before.

There is also an issue more complex than it first appears, of the average age of baby boomers, as they retire and there are not enough educated people coming into the working social system who can earn enough because education was gutted --- either to make sure that there was no opposition to the will of the wealthy greedy or because self-serving politicos were also too short sighted to see what the results of not funding education would be.

Not everyone is like us, not everyone takes joy in educating themselves, and some education, like primary research is beyond the costs of a single individual to bear, or one person to complete.

Poorer middle-classed housing such as San Francisco's Daly City has inexplicably one of the highest forced foreclosure rates in the country. Economists are researching why but *hey* that is way, way past a dollar short and a day late.

When I asked a religious leader about the causes of being out of work he said "stabilize your mind" and I think that to a large extent - that is the basic root cause of the US current troubles. The fears we have are based on tainted emotions. "The only fear we have is fear itself" another realization by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt that sounds like a call to arms once again with deeper meaning.

We really have to get rid of tainted emotions such as greed and the desire by even those with education and money to willingly inflict pain and suffering on others - such as by torture or slavery - where we can not root it out of ourselves we need to legislate it and make it clear that it is a common goal, a community of the world standard to commit to rid ourselves of afflictive emotions; we need to root out fear itself, greed, and ignorance.

We can’t stand aside and look any more; stabilizing our own minds, taking universal individual responsibility - that is where the future is really at; only then we will have something we can rely on, ourselves as well as each other.


"We'll forward in this generation
Triumphantly ...
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds"

Redemption Song
-Bob Marley