jimrigby.org

Rachel Maddow has won a well deserved award for standing up for those with no voice. To read article,

Click here

Bill McKibben is still crying in the wilderness on behalf of the planet to a species which holds its artificial values over the roots of it’s own survival. Balancing the artificial needs of business with the real needs of the planet is suicide. Why? Because nature is the balance. To read McKibben’s article,
click here

When we are young, hope comes easy. As searchers, we believe that we will someday discover some unalloyed truth. As artists, we trust that we will someday taste a fully blossomed beauty. As doers, we expect that we will be able to find some unalloyed good, or at least reach some place of lasting happiness. After drinking from the bitter cup of experience, it is natural to question the maturity of our earlier hopes- to question hope itself.

Hope is not some wispy dream that may or may not be realized. Hope is our sense of the energy of life itself. Hope is the soul’s orientation into the future. It is our trust in the creative unfolding of the universe.

Hope cannot be defeated by any roll of fortune’s dice because it is not directed toward any object in life, it is aimed at life itself. Hope beats silently behind the ebb and flow of events. Buried beneath a sea of ashes the soul cannot but dream of beauty. Chained to the withered tree of sorrow, the soul still envisions some future happiness. Lost in a hopeless fog of lies, the soul cannot but squint for a beacon of truth.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery believed that no one has the right to despair. He said that all of us are messengers of a thing greater than ourselves. From this point of view, despair is the rejection of the larger life of which our little lives are but an expression. Hope is not deceived by the puppet figures dancing before us in the shape of success or failure. Hope is not some desired outcome, but the energy that drives the heart, and the stars as well.

The company that produced “agent orange” which killed or maimed more than a million Vietnamese, now wants to bring to that country another product it has used to undo the economies of many other nations. Mansanto wants to profit off the misery of a new generation of Vietnamese. To read the story,
click hereMansanto

If you’ve been hoping that America can become the same kind of God fearing nation as Iran, or as Spain was during the inquisition, I have good news! Rick Santorum won three states yesterday! He may not win the actual nomination, but it’s good to know that there are still three states unblinded by science or compassion for people who are different from them. Once the wall of separation between church and state comes down, the cleansing can begin. I’m burning my Village People records today just to be safe.
click here

People often ask why teachers like Jesus or Buddha didn’t just come out and say what they meant. Why did they teach in parables and riddles? Some believe such teachings are nothing more than escapist nonsense.

If the truth we need to live our lives were only historical or scientific facts, we would not need religion at all. If we were empty buckets to be filled with water or nails, life could be described in our ordinary language. But we are not looking for a meaningful description of life, we are looking for meaningful lives!

As Einstein said, our situation here upon earth is very strange. Picture the following image: Pretend that we all live in little cabins built over a great cavern. The cavern is filled with unbelievable beauty and each cabin has an entrance to the cave, but few of us even suspect that we are connected to each other, much less that we are connected to such a staggering majesty.

Our situation is actually stranger than that. We are like waves who see our isolated birth and death, but may not realize we are all expressions of a deeper ocean. Paul Tillich seems to have explored this strange land when he writes, “The most intimate motions within the depths of our souls are not completely our own. For they belong also to our friends, to humankind, to the universe and to the ground of being, the aim of our life.”

What we perceive as our own isolated self is the tip of the iceberg. Jesus has been painted standing on the outside of our door knocking to come in. In fact, we are the ones locked out of our own larger house and we do not even remember that we have the keys to get back in. We sometimes speak of spiritual masters. We do not need a master over us, but we may need help from someone who has mastered the mysteries of the vast cavern that connects us all. What a paradox, we need a guide into the deeper regions of our own mysterious souls!

If you have any doubt why the wall of separation between religion and state is vital to democracy, consider the following story. To read,click here

This is what a constitution is for, to override a popular prejudice and offer equal rights to all citizens. It they pay all their taxes, they get all their rights, period. To read story,
click here

Not long ago, the Wall Street Journal had an article by a Rabbi claiming that the Bible teaches capitalism. Coincidentally, I ran across an article I wrote for our church newsletter on Wall Street in 2008 before the election. The article was a warning of what many of us saw coming.

Wall Street Secrets

     “And if you lend money to my people, to the poor among you, you are not to act as a creditor to them, you shall not charge them interest.”  Exodus 24:25

The fancy “Wall Street” section of New York is named after a wall built by the Dutch using slave labor.  In 1991, it was discovered that the wall and much of Manhattan was built over the graves of Africans kidnapped from their homelands and erased from history when their graves were dug over to build offices for the wealthy.  As P. Sainath of India puts it, “The first stock traded on Wall Street was human stock.”

The purpose of the original stock exchange was to limit stock traders to New York’s elite.  Women were not allowed to join.  Insider trading is not an anomaly, it was the purpose of the organization to begin with.

We might consider what the wall hides from us in our day.  Certainly slave labor is still the mainstay of our economy, though most of it has been moved off shore.  Our willingness in the United   States to turn our heads from the suffering corporations have inflicted upon the third world, may now deliver us to the same preditors.

Newspapers write of the need to bail out U.S. Banks.  But there are no U.S.banks of any real size.  Banks, like major corporations, are international now.  They cannot afford to be patriotic, though they know the prudence of appearing so.  Flag lapels are just an inexpensive way of getting the camel in the tent.

The proposed “bail out” will be headed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former chief executive officer of one of the offending banks.  He is a perfect fox to guard the henhouse.  The recommended recover plan, like everything else in the Bush administration, is laced with secrecy, and permits almost no congressional oversight.  Take a gander at one line from section 8:

     “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” 

If you are waiting for the election to make everything better, think again.  Remember that McCain was seriously implicated in the Savings and Loan scandal.  Notice also that Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin under Clinton called for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act enacted in 1929 to curb the kind of speculative lending that contributed to the great depression and has led us back to the abyss.  Rubin is now advising Barak Obama.

The reason I am talking about Wall Street in a church newsletter is that America cannot solve its economic or political problems until it solves its spiritual problem.  As long as people in the U.S.believe the American dream is about money, we will be a brutal stupid people.  The American dream was about freedom not amassing material goods.  The purpose of government was as much about the common welfare as the common defense.  The money we are spending on this recovery package, could have been universal health care.  It could have been affordable housing, it could have been so many things if America did not worship at the altar of capitalism.

The Bible directly and specifically forbids impoverishing others by charging them interest.  If America wants to be a Christian nation it can do so not by forcing Christian dogma on others, but by having the same bottom line as Jesus, human rights not property rights.  As it stands, we are much closer disciples of Ayn Rand than Jesus, or Moses, or any spiritual person for that matter.

The “wall” of Wall Street has always hidden things that the rich did not want the American people to see.  Now that the Berlinwall has been torn down, I think it is time to tear down the wall that separates the people from the common ownership of the land beneath their own feet.

Bank of America using Private Intel Firms to Attack Wikileaks

2011-02-02

In a document titled “The WikiLeaks Threat” three data intelligence companies, Plantir Technologies, HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies, outline a plan to attack Wikileaks. They are acting upon request from Hunton and Williams, a law firm working for Bank of America. The Department of Justice recommended the law firm to Bank of America according to an article in The Tech Herald. The prosed attacks on WikiLeaks according to the slides include these actions:

Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions of sabotage or discredit the opposing organizations. Submit fake documents and then call out the error. Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed not to be secure they are done. Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward. Media campaign to push the radial and reckless nature of WikiLeaks activities. Sustain pressure. Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates concern and doubt among moderates. Search for leaks. Use social media to profile and identify risky behavior of employees.

for more, go to wikileaks.org