Burning Man Aug 25 - Sept 1

Lecture Friday afternoon at Entheon Village, 5-6 pm http://www.entheonvillage.com/content/blogcategory/43/123/

Sept 10: Howl Festival literature panel at St Marks Church

Sept 20 - 21: Horizons Conference, NYC http://www.horizonsnyc.org/

 

Sept 23 - 25: SNAP Conference, Boulder CO http://www.snapgathering.com/

 

Sept 26 - 28: Omega 2012 Conference,Rhinebeck NY http://www.eomega.org/omega/workshops/0d05fb87f0430ca563b4ceac7b5203e3/

Oct 3 - 4: Coalescence Festival, Eureka Springs, ARK http://www.coalessencefest.com/

Oct 2: Unveiling 2012 Conference, Tallahassee, FLA http://www.unveiling2012.org/

 

Nov 1 - 2: 2012 Conference, San Francisco CA http://2012conference.org/

Nov 14 - 15: Greenfest SF, San Francisco CA http://www.greenfestivals.org/

EVOLVER: WAKE UP AND DREAM 

Saturday, February 2nd, 8pm - 4 am

www.realitysandwich.com

What happens when America’s most visionary city starts building a new world by living out its dreams? 

Take an overnight journey into a realm of new possibilities with otherworldly music, performance, ideas, art and alchemy. Drift through a labyrinth of rooms full of enchanted activities, glowing and pulsing artwork, exotic performers, magical chill caves, futuristic playgrounds, and endless spontaneity. 

Featuring: Globesonic’s (Fabian Alsultany & Derek Beres) electrifying melting pot of Afro-beat, tabla, drum ‘n bass, global trance, dub, hip-hop, and house. Haj (Resident DJ of Sub Swara & Freek Factory) and his “low-end monkey business that’s more about journey than genre.” Hercules’ (Safetycan) Hobo Tech, Freshstep and Deep Electrofunk. 

Glass Bead Collective’s “paceship Inflatable,” Peripheral Media Projects’{E}volutionary {E}volver Printing, Scott Draves’ “Electric Sheep,” Blinky Art by Fort-Da/Image Node, Dr. Brainwave’s “Mind Machine,” Face Painting by Kostume Kult & Friends, “Gastronome Cache-Cache: The Masked Meal,” Bill Kennedy’s gaggle of dream geese, Future Unincorporated’s “Poll of the Future” by Cassie Thornton, “Entheogenic Plants of the World” with Nat Bletter, chakra balancing with Lisa Paul Streitfeld, “Restoring the Revelation Dream” with Rodger Kamenetz, C. Eule Dance: “Flight of Fantasy” with video by Yuliya Lanina, ecstatic drumming with Jay Michaelson, hula-hoop instruction with Stephanie Radia, “INFINITY” mannequin installation with Kundalini Couture/Wearable Art by Selma Karaca and video by John Knowles., “Chakracise” with Kiana Love, interactive light installation by Seej, Michael Robinson’s “Universus” project, video art by Love Intelligence Group and The Housewives’ Guide to Anatom! yD… And, of course, that bold beautiful dreamer – YOU!  Evolvitorium, 8:30p: “Asanas and Ayahuasca”In this talk Sharon Gannon (co-founder of Jivamukti Yoga) and Reality Sandwich’s Daniel Pinchbeck (author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl) compare and contrast yoga and shamanism and how these ancient techniques might just save our world today. Opening “Body Prayer” by Jivamukti co-founder David Life. 

Communion Square Cafe: Courtney Weber - MC and Astro Hour with musical accompaniment by Eric Holloway, sitar and Sufi poetry with Dawoud Kringle and Asad Khan, Divine Drum & Bass Hip Hop with Naada, fantastical storytelling by Martin Dockery, David Life live, Jessica Star’s Burner-Country music, Michael Brownstein’s “Must Not Sleep,” and Bill Kennedy on the mike. Yummy vegan food, sumptuous smoothies, & fair trade coffee. Dreamy Costumes Highly Encouraged! 18+ with ID or all ages with a parent. No alcohol will be served. You’ll need to take off your shoes when entering the dream so don your funkiest socks or slippers. This is the first in a series of freakishly fun experiments from Reality Sandwich. Their goal is to spread ideas, connect people and reinvigorate life with creativity and spirit. As the seasons change, expect more invitations to participate in reality-changing events. If we can build it here, we can build it anywhere. So, let’s get together, New York, and start dreaming. 

Saturday, Feb 2, 8p (doors) to 4a841 Broadway, 2nd Floor (between 13th & 14th St. at Union Square) $15 advance tickets, $20 doorTickets: http://www.jivamuktiyoga.com/fms/event_fm.htmlwww.realitysandwich.com / www.jivamuktiyoga.com 

Recently, I have been putting myself through a crash refresher course on political philosophy and social theory, reviewing Macchiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Murray Bookchin, and others. The most satisfying analysis of the contemporary situation that I have found is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude (Penguin, 2005), which was a follow-up to their best-selling Empire (Princeton, 2000). Hardt is a political philosopher at

Duke

University, while Negri is Italian, and spent four years in prison for conspiring with the Red Brigade, an Italian revolutionary group (though the charges were highly dubious). Negri and Hardt aspire to be the Marx and Engels of our time; like Marx and Engels, their collaboration meshes the theoretical depth of Continental philosophy and the pragmatic tendencies of the Anglo tradition.  Today, the entire stream of radical Communist and revolutionary thought has been marginalized and forgotten in the US, outside of abstruse academic circles where it is employed in a distanced and theoretical fashion, and in shrill coteries that produce newspapers and protests but lack any meaningful influence on mainstream debate. Communism is associated with the grey, bureaucratic, murderous totalitarianisms that developed under that name in the 20th Century. What is forgotten is why Communist and socialist ideology once posed such a dangerous threat to capitalism as an alternative to the oppression of oligarchic rule. Because of this history, the very notion of ideology or social theory continues to be shunned in mainstream progressive circles, which focus on reformist initiatives. In Empire and Multitude, Negri and Hardt do a heroic job of revisiting and revising Marxist philosophy in the light of recent developments. Negri and Hardt argue that the main or “hegemonic” form of production in our world is no longer material production, as it was in Marx’s time, but “immaterial production,” the production of concepts, images, communications systems, and affective relationships. If industrial capitalism created “surplus value” by hoarding the excess productive capacity of labor, our post-industrial capitalism creates value in a different way, by “expropriating” the “commons,” in other words, putting tolls and privatized barriers around areas that could be freely available to humanity, such as intellectual property, the electromagnetic spectrum, or genetic material. The authors of Multitude see tremendous potential for human emancipation in the new collaborative networks of late-stage capitalism. They point out that the development of collaborative networks, such as those that produce open-source software, reveals there is no longer a need for a boss, or for any hierarchical form of organization. As an alternative, they present the possibility (though without providing any tangible models) of an emergent direct democracy that would function on a global level. Negri and Hardt barely mention the ecological crisis in their work, and do not address the psychic and shamanic elements involved in transforming human consciousness. However, their work addresses one very real question that must now be explored, as we face the accelerating cataclysms of species extinction, resource depletion, militarism, and climate change: Whether the current political system — with its compromises, corruptions, and multi-year cycles — can be reformed, and transformed, to deal with these challenges to the continued survival of the human species. If not, then an alternative must be found — and quickly. 

As I learned while writing my books, certain areas and discourses are subject to extreme taboo and repression – repression not only of the ideas themselves, but even of the original intent behind the repression. In these arenas, the repressed material, when it is brought up to consciousness again, is greeted with ridicule, resistance, contempt, or utter blankness. I found this to be the case with psychedelics and psychic phenomena, along with other subjects. This knee-jerk dismissal is currently our attitude toward a straightforward reevaluation of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, and so on. On the other hand, items of “revolutionary chic” – such as Che Guevara t-shirts – are mass-produced as commodities, made ironic, and in this way emptied of significance or threat. The extreme blankness produced by repression can be a positive thing, as it opens the possibility for a quite sudden and powerful “return of the repressed,” and a reassessment without preconceptions. The prospect that an egalitarian planetary culture - where, instead of being free to own private property, we are free from private property, as Marx once quipped — would be preferable to this one now seems so impossible that it might catch on.  The absence of social theory from mainstream discourse is underscored by the lack of class consciousness in the US today. Recently, labor conflicts are becoming more visible and virulent again – the writer’s guild strike in

Hollywood and the stage hands strike on Broadway are just two of the most publicized examples. Yet these particular disputes are not analyzed – as far as I know – in a larger framework that looks at the development of class relationships as a whole. This is the case even though the disparity between average workers’ income and the income of CEOs has grown to grotesque proportions, becoming a form of economic apartheid.  There are good reasons to propose that, in the very near future, a post-Marxist analysis of current class relations and social consciousness could become extremely relevant. Right now, we appear to be approaching a severe breakdown of the US financial system, with deep repercussions for the global economy. The ongoing meltdown of the subprime mortgage market is, according to this hypothesis, stage one of this process, and a crisis in personal debt will be the second stage - the dropping of the other shoe. Below, I have enclosed a summary of the economist David Martin’s recent speech to The Arlington Institute, a futurist think tank in

Virginia. Two years ago, Martin made a speech at Arlington where he foresaw the subprime mortgage market meltdown with impressive acuity (a transcript is available on the

Arlington’s website). His analysis of the credit landscape suggests that mass defaults on personal debt, starting in December, are going to overwhelm the capacity of banks and insurers, who will not be able to find bailouts. Bank insolvencies would lead to the failure of the privately held Federal Reserve. Currently, OPEC and China are shifting their holdings out of

US currency, and the Euro is becoming the reserve currency around the world. Martin proposes that by March we will be entering an entirely transfigured economic landscape. The logic of his argument seems compelling to me. As bank failures and mass defaults begin to mount up, people are going to need interpretive tools to understand their new situation, in order to react to it practically and deal with it psychologically. During a crisis, there is the potential for a major opening of awareness and compassionate understanding, or for a large-scale retraction into fear-based belief systems and Fundamentalisms. Sometimes you have both at the same time. The imminent economic plunge, if it happens, cannot help but act as a multi-generational wake up call. These days, when I talk to people – especially people in their twenties – I often find myself stunned by their ignorance of the economic and social situation that surrounds them. And yet, I grew up with the same attitude of jaded indifference and the senseless assurance that nothing about politics, economics, or the environment had any real meaning, or would ever affect me in any tangible way. 

This jaded indifference is the result of intensive conditioning by the media – the phenomenon of the “flattered self” brilliantly described in Thomas De Zengotita’s book Mediated – and an alienated education system which “produces subjectivities” that fit the status quo. These manufactured subjectivities are cut off from any sense of responsibility for the social reality or the life-world that sustains them, and they are carefully conditioned to identify with this alienation as a mark of pride — celebrities like Mick Jagger and Jack Nicholson, or their younger iterations, are patron saints of cynical hipness and smug narcissism. The concept of the “production of subjectivity” is a major one for Negri and Hardt, who see it as the most important form of production in post-industrial civilization. I will discuss this in greater detail in a future piece.  In our contemporary context, Negri and Hardt posit a global “multitude” of working people, rather than the Marxist proletariat of the past. Class distinctions do not hold in the same way — as Negri notes in an interview, it is the total organization of society that is the “enemy,” not a particular class. They argue that the dynamics of capitalist development have been shaped, primarily, by the desires of the laboring multitude, and the antagonism between the working many and the ruling few. The New Deal, for instance, arose out of the worker’s movements here and abroad, above all the Russian Revolution, which sent shock waves through the Capitalist system. Over the last decades, the US system has been increasingly based on debt. Where the media encouraged comatose consumerism, politicians succeeded by offering happy-faced visions of a world without sacrifice while they supported policies leading to increasing economic apartheid. In an atmosphere of extraordinary plenty and overt overproduction of comforts and goods, where huge fortunes are controlled by the elite few, where enormous waste is built into the system and encouraged by it, it seems only natural to be profligate, to assume that the hard limits defined by the shrinking realities of income are actually the delusion, and the media displays of endless bounty are the reality. The delusional and self-destructive profligacy of the populace is, possibly, also an act of subliminal aggression against the system’s false promises and betrayals (the deepest betrayal being the delusion that material success leads to sustained happiness). The profligate spending of the masses is also a natural – almost biological – reaction to the corruptions of Empire. When the populace sees CEOs, politicians, and millionaires routinely escaping from their crimes, fleecings, and defraudings, they subliminally identify with them, accepting that this is proper behavior within the society, and will be rewarded rather than punished. Of course, the assumption of massive personal debt was not a conscious and calculated strategy of the populace to dismantle the capitalist system, but it could be seen as an unconscious strategy of sabotage. This could be the case, even though the financial system developed predatory, invasive, and deceptive tactics to reach the consumer base with constant inducements to accept more credit cards, loans, and mortgage refinancings. Psychosis and hypnosis work together to reinforce consensus trance. In his book The Politics of Subversion, Negri argues that the ultimate discovery of the 20th Century was that “Capitalism is impossible,” and this was proved by the failure of the two major attempts to reform the capitalist system, the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s. This failure of reformist efforts was ultimately linked to the integration of the world market, which defined a limit of capitalist expansion. These limits were reinforced by the many forms of resistance that developed in response to the extensions of capital, from guerrilla wars to Green Parties. According to political philosophers of the past, capitalism cannot exist without new markets to exploit, in order to create surplus value. Marx wrote that Capitalism “is the first mode of economy which is unable to exist on itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and support.” Without a new outside to absorb and digest, capitalism confronts “devaluation resulting from overproduction.” 

Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine, analyzes how contemporary neo-conservative practice is based on utilizing natural or manmade disaster as a tool for leveraging increased privatization. Internal landscapes of the Empire can in this way be re-colonized by capital, after a catastrophe, and transformed. This is another symptom of the evaporation of any outside realm for capitalism to penetrate and absorb. The mass psychology of capitalism centers on this continual aggression, this need to grasp hold of the Other and make use of it, to convert difference to sameness. When the entire planet has been converted to sameness, as is now the case, this aggressive psychology goes into regression, seeking to defend itself at all costs. This entrenched psychology — given iconic form by football games and right wing “shock jocks” — must be properly understood so it can be addressed and its violent tendencies defused.  After the 1960s, the main engine of the US financial system shifted from the production of finished goods to financial speculations and transactions. This shift was symbolized by the iconic construction of The World Trade Centers in the early 1970s, “tuning forks” for the new frequency of predatory finance capitalism that developed through the 1990s. Unlike factory production, financial speculation does not require a large working class. In the

United States over the last decades, we have witnessed an astonishing degradation. As Capital moved its factories overseas, the

US dismantled its productive infrastructure and converted a population of trained technicians to unskilled “surplus labor,” filling service jobs. In some ways, the US has reverse-engineered itself into a Third World country, with its nomadic elite no longer tied to nationalist obligations - the financial meltdown should make this clear. Today, our primary export to

China is soy beans, a raw material, while we receive electronic devices and finished goods from them.  During this process, the US rulers were confronted with the difficult question of what to do with the huge pool of nonspecialist surplus labor no longer required for the functioning of the system. One solution was to warehouse them in prisons (the

US is 5% of the world population with 25% of the world’s prison population), another was to put them in the military (but popular resistance to the draft has made this difficult); another option was to create new bureaucracies and expand unnecessary aspects of the service sector. Another idea – a short-term solution but one that created the temporary illusion of abundance – was to encourage the amassing of personal debt, and then to turn that debt into a financial product, through securities, and sell those bundled debts up the financial pyramid. With the end of any ideological effort to reform capitalism, the oligarchic elite began to shift increasing amounts of wealth to the top of the financial pyramid, crushing the middle class and the working class in the process. As Negri and Hardt point out, this shift was accompanied by a change in paradigm. Instead of classes with different interests, we now have a dualistic divide between the “included” and the “excluded”. Politicians incite and manipulate the fear of being part of the ever-expanding group of the excluded. For this reason, to take one recent example, Bush vetoed the child health care bill. To keep the fearful populace in line, the ruling regime offers “Neo-Malthusian” policies, and enforces a divide between respectability and misery. 

It is increasingly obvious that the short-term thinking behind these arrangements has created a fragile and unsustainable situation. Something, or, more likely, many things all at once are soon going to break. At that point, the US political system’s drift toward authoritarianism (as documented in Naomi Wolf’s The End of America) may be given another strong push. However, as we have seen in Iraq and

New Orleans, the control apparatus that is emerging is nothing at all like the efficient organization of European mid-century Fascism, driven by a mythological teleology and collective fantasies of racial purity. Instead, the postmodern form of authoritarian control involves a crude application of force and a general sloppiness, an almost uncaring attitude even toward its own intentions. For this reason, it is possible that a new level of authoritarianism and an intensified, nonviolent movement for positive change, orchestrated by civil society, could exist at the same time, at least for a while. But any significant change would require a serious raising of social awareness and consciousness of oppression among the populace, along with a deeper collaboration among progressive groups.  An imminent meltdown of the US financial system, if it is indeed on the way, should be welcomed, despite the hardship it may cause to many of us, our friends and relations. The system of globalized post-industrial capitalism is quickly destroying the planetary ecology, and if it is allowed to run unchecked for much longer, we will forfeit our future on this planet. Historically, crisis is the crucible for transformation. If the illusion of

US prosperity disappears, the world may be receptive to alternative development models. After all, China and

India are seeking to achieve the “American Dream” promised to them by decades of our pop culture propaganda. With the approaching economic collapse, the Left has one more opportunity to emerge from dormancy and build a social program and a transformative plan of action. Negri and Hardt suggest that a revolutionary shift might not emerge in successive stages over time, as in previous insurrections, but in one sudden unfolding: “It may be that insurrectional activity is no longer divided into … stages but develops simultaneously. As we will argue in the course of this book, resistance, exodus, the emptying out of the enemy’s power, and the multitude’s construction of a new society are one and the same process.” This possibility is based on Negri’s fascinating view of the nonlinear dynamics of historical transformation. He suggests, essentially, that events lie on a spiral, and an entire complex of concepts and organizations can reassemble itself all of a sudden, based on patterns of the past that are lost to conscious awareness. The long history of humanity’s struggle against oppression is available to all of us, encoded within us. Negri’s rhizomatic view of transformative processes calls to mind Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of “morphogenetic fields” as well as the Jungian archetypes, defined as clusters of psychic energy that can spontaneously appear within the psyche of the individual or society. It also fits the alternative model of time and development that some visionary scholars find encoded in the Mayan Calendar. According to this hypothesis, the entire complex and rich history of radical thought and praxis could suddenly emerge once again, in a new iteration, when conditions are prepared for it. 

The immediate need for the progressive community is to articulate a positive agenda, along with tactics and strategies for bringing this agenda to fruition in the shortest time possible. The main thrust of the “Left” in the last decades has been criticism and complaint. This has failed to create a powerful attractor or an organizational infrastructure for social transformation. As the Dalai Lama put it, everyone wants a better life. If you can show them how to get there, they will follow. The Left has failed to achieve this simple task. Regeneration of the movement requires a new visionary paradigm that integrates the spiritual shift made by the counterculture since the 1960s with a compassionate and egalitarian program that has tangible solutions to offer to a broad spectrum of the populace. Considering the preponderance of military force, there is no hope for violence as a tool of social transformation. Any radicalized program should focus on an absorptive strategy that neutralizes its potential opponents by engaging and transforming them - a Tantric approach, that sees no dualities nor enemies. If we are going to save the world situation from pitching over into the abyss, the media – especially the mass media – has to be intensively repurposed to beam out a new paradigm that integrates sustainable practices with inner transformation. The mass media could be used for the “production of subjectivities” focused not on the toxic “American Dream” of omnipotent ego, competitive greed, and endless material abundance, but on sustainability, interconnectivity, community, and psychic development. By my reckoning, this unlikely reversal has to happen in the next few years. 

http://www.m-cam.com/display_news?id=240 

Arlington Institute issues a Financial Alert based on M·CAM Analytics Kenneth Dabkowski, Executive Director — The Arlington Institute 

Berkeley Springs, West Virginia — November 19, 2007 — At a recent board meeting of The Arlington Institute, Dr. David Martin, CEO of M·CAM and one of the members of the board was asked for his assessment of the global financial situation in the coming months. Here are the notes from his response: 

I stand by my commentary in July of ‘06.     * The next shoe to fall is consumer credit 

Currently as reports came in on 3rd quarter, foreclosures were up 470% this quarter alone. They will be up over 500% this coming quarter (4th). A foreclosure in our terms is when the bank has officially declared an account insolvent and tries to regain the asset (if it exists). The person who is foreclosed upon can no longer secure any traditional consumer credit. This in turn goes straight to the banks as no one will be able to get the store issued charge cards. A minority of people pay off their consumer debt every month. When one considers the combination of consumer credit card debt and the compounded debt of “home equity” financing, we estimate that less than 20% of people actually carry no consumer credit from one month to the next. Many of the ones who don’t pay off their carried consumer debt have at least one credit card at its limit and therefore lack credit capacity. Most have their paycheck directly covering bills and servicing the minimum balance due. 

Therefore people who are foreclosed upon will not be able to obtain credit and since their paychecks will be maxed out, there will not be extra cash left over from the paycheck to service a new debt. Next, everybody buys things at Christmas. As much as 40% of retail sales are done in the 4th quarter of the year — i.e. the retail miracle. The purchase decline in retail goods this fourth quarter will occur because many credit-only consumers will lack the credit capacity mentioned above. Frequently, people overcharge their limit and the banks (albeit a profit center for subprime credit users) levy a penalty by increasing interest rates and charging additional fees. In the 4th quarter of 2007, the amount of people overcharging their limits will be too many for the banks to handle. We do not have a system in place to deal with overcharge on that scale. A substantial number of this December’s purchases will go into an overdraft on credit limits. 

CDO — Collateral Debt Obligation — Consumer Credit Consumer credit pooled debt investment instruments (a form of CDO) are originated and rated based on underlying historical credit behavior and a complex series of predictive models for repayment dynamics. CDOs have “strips” which are a combination of similar profile tranches within a larger investment product. Based on the market’s appetite for risk, investment performance guarantees (or credit enhancements) are packaged with the credits. These credit guarantees are issued by insurance companies, reinsurance companies, and other specialty finance companies — many operating with extra-territorial jurisdiction rendering fiscal oversight more complicated. 

These strips come in several categories:     * Investment grade    * Almost investment grade    * Junk and    * Why did we give them a credit card? 

All of these grades are priced on historical default rates. The credit insurance companies (AIG, MBIA, Ambac, Financial Security Assurance, Channel Re, XL, Zurich Re and other reinsurers) have, from time to time, issued credit guarantees to the securities. Banks sell debt in the form of a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO). Minor shifts in default actuarial activity (+/- 25 basis points) from normative behavior is absorbed within pricing of these financial guaranty contracts. However fundamental shifts (hundreds or thousands of basis points in one quarter) are not built into the model and result in credit enhancement insolvency on a major scale. When the insurer cannot pay based on its own liquidity impairment, the bank is left with catastrophic (an insurance term for excessive loss outside of expected) exposure. 

If in a single quarter we have an increased foreclosure rate of 400% (or 4000 basis points) the insurance contracts simply cannot handle that kind of drastic shift as evidenced by the write offs in the third quarter. When we will follow the drastic third quarter with a loss of 500% in the fourth quarter, the trajectory becomes clear. Neither the banking nor the insurance industry has a historical experience in dealing with this type of challenge and neither has the liquidity linked to these contracts to support system wide collapse. 

    * Where was the announcement of this? There was no announcement.  However Hank Greenberg is resurfacing in AIG leadership even during an SEC investigation because without him, no one else can remember where the counterparty risks are. In order to save the insurance industry, shareholders have looked past alleged SEC violations as there is no one with Mr. Greenberg’s awareness of the market and counterparty agreements who can hope to navigate the coming challenges. In the 4th quarter, the US will have another record foreclosure announcement. Once you’re over 25% (25 basis point) foreclosure, all models are broken. Under a consumer credit melt-down, Capital One and/or Wachovia are likely going to put a massive foreclosure liability to an insurance company and the insurance company will not have liquidity to cover the exposure.  This is the problem we got into when we issued credit card debt on top of secondary mortgages — (inflated the value of the home) and gave out credit based on faux equity that no one really had. 

The reason why this problem is the second shoe to fall (subprime mortgage collapse was the first shoe) is because consumer credit has a different foreclosure frequency than traditional mortgage credit. December is when the maturity of the giant buyout of the economy moves. 

By December, you’ll have a second round of charge offs based on consumer credit. The real big problem — when you foreclose on consumer credit, people stop buying things. When people stop buying things, we don’t have a tertiary way to pump liquidity into the market. People won’t have extra cash from their paychecks and won’t have capacity on their cards. Try this case study: 

Go to the mall and stand in front of counter at Victoria Secret. Watch what happens when someone wants to pay with cash. The clerk won’t know how to ring up cash. They will need a manager to come over to give change and unlock drawers. When you don’t have capacity on those cards, you don’t buy things. VISA credit cards actually denigrate using cash in their run-up-to-Christmas add campaign. Next, go to any savings bank data set. If you were going to spend $1000 in cash this Christmas, can you do it? For the most part, the answer would be “no” because we have had a net negative spending for the last 5 years. 

Therefore there will be depressed consumer spending this Christmas but what is spent, people will overcharge. This will take what used to be good investments in CDOs and will change the dynamic. If you used to be a person who paid their bills on time, you will now only pay half. If the credit companies are counting on the top two tranches to pay their card off in full and they don’t, they won’t have liquidity to cover the rest. The banks cannot afford the top tranch paying half. The estimates are out. There will be at least $400B in the first round of charge offs in the CDO market. 

We’re not going to be done with the subprime mortgage when the CDOs fall. Therefore we will have an insolvency problem with the banks that are mentioned above. This is the kiss of death of a privately held Federal Reserve. For the Federal Reserve to function, its stakeholder banks (like JP Morgan Chase) must remain viable and liquid. When one of them, or any major bank in the

U.S. (like Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York, Washington Mutual, etc.) is impaired or ceases to exist, the architecture of the Fed’s capacity to respond to systemic challenges is unsustainable.

  If the banks have no money, they can’t pump liquidity into the market. Taking half of a trillion dollars out of market in a single distressed write down becomes problematic. The US banking system does not have the liquidity to take the hit.  The actual solvency of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is relatively indecipherable due to the fact that their treasury management processes (and the risks of their own investment strategies) are not uniformly disclosed with sufficient transparency. The FDIC was set up for isolated problems with a few bad banks but is NOT prepared to “insure” the system in an industry-wide crisis. The actual liquidity reserve of the “insurance” that Americans view as their safety net is 1/100th the actual exposure of outstanding deposits. The actual coverage ratio for the Bank Insurance Fund (BIF) fell below 1.25% in 2002, the same year that less stable credit practices were adopted by America’s leading banks. The funny part is that the Federal Government will be on holiday when all of this happens. There will be no one to put freeze actions and moratoria on actions. The only way you stop the cataclysm is to put together civil actions on deposit withdrawals. 

As I discussed previously, the Chinese currency wild-card may become relevant far sooner than expected. An effort by China to convert its $1.4 trillion U.S. Treasury holdings into euros is not viable for many reasons — not the least of which is the European Central Bank’s inability to absorb such an event. As China continues its rush away from supporting U.S. Treasuries and as Middle Eastern investors are buying them up in more diversified holdings, a new “currency exchange” is unfolding. Realizing that they cannot liquidate their holdings, it appears that the Chinese are currently using their U.S. Treasury holdings as collateral for euro denominated purchases and long term infrastructure transactions. In other words, they may be “liquidating” their holdings as collateral and, in so doing, effectively migrating to non-dollar value without ever having to officially dump their current Treasury holdings. Therefore, collateralize the credit in dollars — especially if you’re long in dollars. The lender/financier won’t call the note because you have it structured in such a way to both allow it to perform and hold illiquid collateral that no one wants. This essentially inflates euros. Although you can’t sell dollars, the whole purpose of collateral is that it is a second source of payment — collateral is there to down rate the risk of the loan. Secondary becomes irrelevant.  When February comes, the Chinese are going to do something as they will have to decide what the exposure is going to be with the treasury. As I see it they have to just dump the treasury. They only keep it because they can use it — they have 43% direct/indirect of US treasuries so they’ll dump them on the market. 

The US Congressional pressures to decouple the RMB will work, but not in the way we want. Our plan includes helping them hold on to the treasuries, it does not involve them not holding the dollar anymore. The

US wanted the tether to be part of the float. This will cause disenfranchisement of the

US electorate (during primary season). February is also when public (media) will realize we won’t pull out of this. Side note: Mayor Bloomberg could enter the race at this point, being the savior candidate (at least economically), but has $1B dollars in non-liquid money so he may not be able to enter.      * March is when we realize that the dollar doesn’t come back. 

OPEC price with the whole fluctuation of oil futures presages the event. They are going to run the price of oil as high as they can get it on the dollar, while buying US treasuries from China with the money. When the dollar does collapse, they’ll flip denominations. The wild card is long about March when the OPEC cuts spot oil off the dollar to the euro. One can look at the current oil price at close to $100/barrel and fail to see that, as this premium price is currently turning around and investing in a weakening dollar, the effective price (less the dollar investment hedge) is probably closer to $50/barrel than the spot price reflects. Currency problems will change the game — they are financially structuring themselves to take the hit.  When we can’t afford to buy oil commodities on a spot market — it compounds the problem however the consumer that Saudi Arabia ships to is liquid (China). In the

US it is a big problem. There is still a market for oil; it just changes. When you come out of Straits of Hormuz, turn left. 

by Daniel Pinchbeck This article originally appeared in Conscious Choice magazine. 

These days I feel lost in the immense suffering and madness of our world.Something has snapped in the spirit of the time; events have gone beyond human capacity to control, predict or even conceptualize. Those who insist they know what is happening are merely pretending, or dissembling. When novelty arises, when old structures disintegrate before new patterns reveal themselves, there are no experts. 

Perhaps the best oracles we can consult are systems analysts like Erwin Laszlo. Laszlo studies chaos theory and believes global civilization is a few years away from what he calls “the chaos point.” According to Laszlo, we are at a “crucial decision-window” of instability. “When we reach the point of chaos,” Laszlo tells us, “the stable ‘point’ and ‘periodic’ attractors of our systems will be joined by ‘chaotic’ or ‘strange’ attractors.” These “strange attractors” will propel us, like booster rockets, to evolutionary development or entropic debauch. In other words, we should prepare ourselves for the unknown and inexplicable. 

The current economic crisis provides an intriguing case in point. For those of us with an interest in spirituality and a background in the arts, the conceptual concoctions of modern finance ­ derivatives, futures, quants, margin calls and whatnot ­ can seem as occult as sorcerers’ spells. All of these entities are inextricably intertwined in the subprime mortgage market fiasco, which continues to unfold. 

Apparently, after stocks dropped in the wake of 9/11, the government stimulated the sluggish U.S. economy by pumping up the housing market. In earlier and more reticent eras, banks and mortgage brokers required collateral before making loans. After 2001, these restrictions were relaxed, bringing the “American Dream” of home ownership ­ or mortgage debt refinancing ­ to a wider populace. Loans that began at low interest (only to balloon to high interest later), got handed out to all and sundry. Based on Pollyanna-ish projections that these high-interest loans disconnected from any tangible assets would be paid back, the sub-prime mortgages were packaged into “securities” and traded up the financial markets. Several million holders of sub-prime mortgages are now defaulting on their payments, with more to follow.  Stepping back for a moment, we might see larger historical dynamics at work.Over the last decades, much of U.S. industry was relocated and outsourced to the developing world, leaving a large populace that had little to produce but was still committed to a credit-based, cushy and consumptive lifestyle. Our financial sector ­ following the old adage, “if you got lemons, make lemonade” ­ cunningly repackaged the increasing burden of

U.S. personal debt, turning it into a shiny product for the financial markets. Over the last years, these questionable loans, bundled into securities, became one of our major exports to the world. With nothing tangible left to sell, the

U.S. turned individual debt into its chief export.  It seems inconceivable that the financial institutions and speculators didn’t anticipate large-scale defaults. Perhaps they were counting on the Federal Reserve to bail them out. During the last months, in fact, the Fed, along with its European counterpart, has poured hundreds of billions of newly invented dollars into the financial markets, temporarily stabilizing the system and rewarding the speculators while doing nothing for the masses of people facing eviction from their homes and creating the prospect of hyperinflation. 

The Fed, a private institution, “injects liquidity,” quips the New York Times, without needle or syringe. As a Lehman Brothers economist notes, “All they do is write down a number and credit that amount of cash to the bank.It’s a bookkeeping entry.” The Fed’s miraculous capacity to create instant cash brings up deeper questions about the nature of money today ­ what is it? De-linked from the gold standard, money is based on little more than our collective belief in it. 

In Third World countries, currency crises ­ often brought about by predatory speculation - frequently lead to frozen bank accounts and long breadlines, followed by a change of currency that creates immense profit for the banks and the government. Of course, many believe that such a thing could never happen here. Recently, there have been rumors of a plan to form an American version of the European Federation, uniting Mexico, the U.S. and

Canada under a new currency, the “Amero,” and a new constitution, devised by the bankers. In his essay in the new anthology, The Mystery of 2012 (Sounds True Press), Peter Russell notes that transformations of human culture are built upon each other, with each new revolution requiring exponentially less time to manifest. The Agricultural Age developed over thousands of years, the Industrial Age required a few hundred years, and the Information Age ­ built upon the manufacturing technologies developed by industrialization - only took twenty years. Russell suggests that the next revolution would be from the Information Age to what he calls “the Wisdom Age.” In just a few years, we could shift from a system based on data analysis rewarding corporate and individual greed to one that utilized human knowledge and foresight to institute a compassionate and equitable planetary culture. The overt irrationality revealed by the current financial crisis might act as a necessary awakening, leading to a large-scale shift in values.

I receive many queries from readers via email, and seek to answer most of them (though not the writers who want my help in finding psychedelics). I find that sometimes the questions stimulate me to develop my own thinking, such as this recent one from a reader in Portland, on the relation of the ideas in “2012″ to contemporary literature and art. I have put his original email and then my response below.

Question from a reader: 

Daniel– 

I recently caught your reading here in Portland, OR, and I have read both of your books twice. Not only have I enjoyed your books, but they have really spoken to me powerfully in a personal way.   

I am a poet, and I understand your frustration and disappointment with most Western intellectuals. I have always felt that myself, and I feel it now more acutely than ever. I see the value in your critique of Modernism (in Breaking Open the Head), and I too feel that poets and artists need to move into a new real realm beyond alienation and pessimism.   

However, I also have some questions about your position. I read somewhere your criticism of Cormac McCarthy’s novel THE ROAD. I just read this novel, and I think it is amazing. I think that you criticized it because you feel that he is imagining a bleak, ruined future, and that he might be in some way contributing to the manifestation of that future by imagining it. Okay, I see your point, just as I see your point in your “fight” with Whitley Streiber.    

Here’s the problem I have: what is an artist supposed to do? You can only write the visions that come to you. You can’t consciously “steer” the material into positive attitudes unless you want your poem or novel to be some sort of propaganda piece, or some sort of fake smile on the face of a suffering man. I do think that an artist is also a person, a spirit, so he or she should be doing inner work to release that pain or hopelessness–to break down the walls that cause alienation. But in the mean time should artists censor their “negative” thoughts?   

Also, I have been to Burning Man, and I must say that I was not as impressed as you were. I saw no one there who was anything like the artist that Cormac McCarthy is. I am open to the possibility that I missed something, that there is something unique to be found there. However, I don’t know how you can hold that festival up as some sort of ideal and knock down an artist like McCarthy. Granted, I hope a new Henry Miller better than Henry Miller will emerge. I hope epic poems of joy and celebration can be born out of the shadow of Allen Ginsberg, but I guess I wonder what your thoughts are on this subject. And I wonder if you have reservations about your criticisms of Artaud and Michaux and other brave pioneers. I offer these thoughts with all due respect to the important work you have done and are doing.    

My Response: 

This is a great question, and one that I think about all the time. 

I believe that literature and art are crucial in evolving/intensifying consciousness, creating new forms of complex awareness and adding subtle dimensions to human experience. The struggle for women’s liberation for instance was voiced in hundreds of years of fiction - Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights, etc - which laid the groundwork for a social transformation in the status of women. Etc for Dickens and Blake and the awareness of industrialism as a destructive force. I agree that artists can be “the antennae of the race” and the conscience of the species.

However, it is in the nature of art to keep changing, as human consciousness changes. “What is art” is different for each generation - if you reduplicate the style or form of past art, it is not really art in my view but more like craft or self-expression, which is not bad but not transformational in the same way art is. 

So we are now responding to radically different conditions than people were before, and the nature and potential for transformative work has also changed. We seem to be in a transition between the bourgeois culture of the last few hundred years - with the novel and lyric poem as its expressive forms - and some other form of social existence that would naturally create different expressive forms. 

When I look at the function of contemporary lit and art, mostly it seems to be having a regressive effect, reinforcing the old forms of bourgeois identity with sentimental identifications with the ego. I am very concerned, right now, with the seeming incapacity of most people in our culture to awaken to the dire urgency of our present situation, and to move from passive contemplation to active engagement. I feel that not just individual works but the entire construct of the contemporary art and literary worlds are functioning as another pacifying and distracting mechanism - someone may read a novel about war and cry, but that doesn’t translate into organizing to stop the wars we are now waging. It is as many forces have conspired to depolitize culture and make it socially irrelevant. 

As for “The Road”, I agree that McCarthy is a terrific writer - I loved “Blood Meridian” - who is literally “spellbinding” and “entrancing”. But what kind of spell does he cast?                

I don’t know that I agree with you that you can “only write the visions that come to you. You can’t consciously “steer” the material into positive attitudes…” I would just propose to you that this perspective needs to be questioned and examined. There may be a kind of romanticizing of inspiration implicit here. This idea might apply to that romantic/lyrical mode of bourgeois consciousness, less than to whatever new form of consciousness and attitude is now emerging. 

I think we can retain the richness and complexity of the Western psyche and sensibility while integrating not only the nondual, non-egoic Eastern perspective but also a sense of creative participation in reality-making that leads to art that illuminates, and helps create a foundation for, the most visionary possibilities of what a human future can be, on the Earth and in the wider cosmos.   

At the same time, in this immediate period, I personally would like to see some artists sacrifice their desire for expressing themselves to utilize their gifts for the purpose of planetary (r)evolution. I myself would love to go back to a novel that would take me 3 - 6 months to revise, then would come out a year after that, at the earliest. Unfortunately I cannot spare the time as from my perspective there needs to be an alternative infrastructure in place ASAP, including media and network, that allows for an alternative exchange system, resource sharing,  and community organization. Studying works like “The End of America” (on parallels btw our time and early Nazi Germany), “With Speed and Violence” (on abrupt climate change), and Chris Hedges’ book on the Fundamentalist ambition to instate a fascist theocracy, I think we have no time to waste to get our shit together. 

Anyway, this is my short answer!

A few days ago I picked up Who Cares?!, a book by Ramesh S. Balsekar, an Indian sage known for his blunt, cutting, almost nasty approach to the quest for enlightenment. Ramesh’s perspective is that the individual self is an illusion and “doing” is an illusion - we find ourselves in a reality-movie where God is playing all the parts. The actions of our individual “body-mind organism” are determined by the source, the universal consciousness that creates and occasionally dissolves our egos in order to continue lila, the divine play. For Ramesh, enlightenment is the extinction of personality, the annihilation of the illusion of self and doer-ship. Read more »

While people from the mainstream literary and media culture often find my ideas weird, “too much,” or somehow “out there,” for me, my entire project has been fundamentally and quite strictly logical. When I had my spiritual crisis in my late twenties, I confronted something that I had always felt lurking in the background of my consciousness: The nihilism of contemporary culture, which values material gain while denying any possibility of the existence of the soul. This denial is based on the very recent development of science in the last few centuries. We can see its contemporary expression in writers like Richard Dawkins and David Dennett. It is almost as if secular, scientific materialists take a cold comfort in their certainty that there can be no such thing as God or an afterlife, that human existence is the result of random conditions and genetic mutations over time. Just because a few centuries of science appear to support this claim does not make it true. Many concepts and theories have been accepted by people for hundreds or thousands of years that eventually turned out to be false. The question we might want to ask ourselves is how can we demonstrate the validity or invalidity of this claim of materialist meaninglessness for ourselves? Read more »

This year I attended my eighth straight Burning Man festival in the Black Rock desert of Nevada. It was an awesome event, featuring a lunar eclipse, an early act of arson perpetrated on the festival’s iconic stick figure, a more-than-double rainbow, and some of the greatest works of art I have ever seen, touched, jumped on, and danced around. I stayed at Entheon Village, one of the largest camps on the Playa, bringing together 400 people from around the US and the world. Entheon featured several domes and stages, a nightly environmental film program, a cardboard zendo for meditation, a goddess temple, and a full kitchen serving delicious Vegan food to the entire camp. Entheon brought together and synergized different groups that I have known and camped with before, including ‘tribes’ from Salt Lake City (rabble-rousing former Mormons turned shaman-artists), North Carolina, and the North West (visionary vibesters responsible for a giant ‘art car’ in the form of a fire-breathing, copper-skinned dragon), scientists from MIT (my friend Ryan Wartena’s nanotechnology projects have been featured on the cover of science magazines his website is growingarchitecture.com), and Djs, jam bands, visual artists, and performing artists from the Bay Area. Read more »