Daily Archives: March 17, 2008

$200 Billion Bail Out and Spitzer

For my dear readers, every now and then there is some financial info posted. When this article came my way, I considered it worth sharing..

istock_coins_000002762799small.jpgEliot’s Mess
The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked

by Greg Palast


While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure. (article continues here)

Weekly Reflection #3

istock_meditating.jpg

Meditation has been laid stress upon by all religions. The meditative state of mind is declared by the yogis to be the highest state in which the mind exists. When the mind is studying the external object, it gets identified with it, loses itself. To use the simile of the old Indian philosopher: the soul of man is like a piece of crystal, but it takes the color of whatever is near it. Whatever the soul touches…it has to take its color. That is the difficulty. That constitutes the bondage. The color is so strong, the crystal forgets itself and identifies itself with the color. Suppose a red flower is near the crystal: the crystal takes the color and forgets itself, thinks it is red. We have taken the color of the body and have forgotten what we are. All the difficulties that follow come from that one dead body. All our fears, all worries, anxieties, troubles, mistakes, weakness, evil, are from that one blunder-that we are bodies. This is the ordinary person. It is the person taking the color of the flower near to it. We are no more bodies than the crystal is the red flower. – Vivekananda