Uncategorized | Lucinda Marshall

Archive for Uncategorized

The Economy Of Empire Fail

October 12, 2009 / Lucinda / Comments Off

The unaffordable cost of our reality. I’ll leave it to you to add it up:

Too small to save:

A year after Washington rescued the banks considered too big to fail, the ones deemed too small to save are approaching a grim milestone: the 100th bank failure of 2009.

Burdened by worsening commercial real estate loans, many small banks’ troubles are just beginning. Many analysts say that the now-toxic loans could sink hundreds of small lenders over the next few years and place a significant drag on the economy.

Already, the bank failures are placing enormous strain on the F.D.I.C. and its fund, which keeps depositors whole. Flush with more than $50 billion only two years ago, the fund recently fell into the red.

So our federally insured deposits are insured with what, exactly?

One ringy dingy, two ringy dingy… speed dial tells all:

Geithner’s calendars, obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the extraordinary influence of three companies. More than any other company or any of their rival banks, Goldman, Citi and JPMorgan can get Geithner on the phone several times a day if necessary, giving them an unmatched opportunity to influence policy.

You’re gonna be asked, but don’t tell:

Neil Barofsky, the independent watchdog of the TARP program, recently said that while the Wall Street bailout did avert full-scale financial collapse, it plainly failed in its principal stated goal of increasing lending (because banks used the money to buy other institutions, create capital cushions, pay out bonsues, etc.). He detailed how the Treasury Department actually tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to coach the banks into refusing to provide Barofsky with information about how they used the TARP money they received. Worse, he said that the U.S. economy is more dependent than ever on these same “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions, which have grown in size, and the U.S. economy is thus more vulnerable than it was even a year ago to an actual collapse.

Contributing to rape:

The thirty GOP Senators who voted against the Franken amendment, which protects women who were raped or sexually abused while working for private defense contractors, received generous contributions from those same private contractors.

Suck on this–Insurance company denies coverage to “obese” breastfeeding baby:

Alex Lange is a chubby, dimpled, healthy and happy 4-month-old.

But in the cold, calculating numbered charts of insurance companies, he is fat. That’s why he is being turned down for health insurance.

By the numbers, Alex is in the 99th percentile for height and weight for babies his age. Insurers don’t take babies above the 95th percentile, no matter how healthy they are otherwise.

“I could understand if we could control what he’s eating. But he’s 4 months old. He’s breast-feeding. We can’t put him on the Atkins diet or on a treadmill,” joked his frustrated father.

While the media was busy quoting old white guys, the woman we should have listened to because she got it exactly right:

Hey, Wanna Go To The Movies, Eat Popcorn And Then Commit Some Civil Disobedience?

Going to the movies just isn’t what it used to be. In the olden days, you bought a ticket, plunked yourself into a seat, ate the popcorn and escaped from reality for a couple of hours. No more. It truly is a sign of the times that within the space of a week, two different movies opened that are not only hugely entertaining, but also offer biting analysis of our current economic crisis, globalization and climate change and implore viewers to not only watch but to also take action.

If Econ 101 made no sense to you and guys like Greenspan and Geithner sound like they are speaking in tongues, go see Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, all will be illuminated. The movie is funny and informative, but much more importantly, Moore intends it as a call to action,

As far as I’m concerned, Tea Bag Nation ends today — at noon to be precise. For that’s when I set loose, on a thousand screens across this great land, a movie I’ve made that’s so relentless, so dangerous, so damning in its humor, that it will — I can only hope — do what no movie has done before: Take them down, take them all down, once and for all.

On his website he has a “Do Something” page with links to organizations working on such issues as health care reform, the foreclosure crisis, subprime lending and information about the much and erroneously maligned ACORN.

While Moore leaves the choice of action up to you, the Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, ask for something that I don’t think has ever been asked in a major movie rollout–they are asking viewers to hit the streets and maybe even participate in a global civil disobedience action. Really. The Yes Men Fix The World, for lack of a better term, vivisects globalization and corporate greed and exposes it for what it is, and somehow manages to deliver its message despite the fact that the audience is laughing so hard they are gasping for air.

And then as the lights go on, they ask you to join them in protesting the truths they’ve just exposed. During the opening nights, thus far, the audience has marched out of the theater and gone to Whole Foods, JP Morgan Chase and an ICE detention center along with megaphones, musical instruments and Survival Balls.

Prior to the movie opening they also used the Survival Balls in a protest at the U.N. where Bichlbaum was arrested. One thing learned–apparently it is quite difficult to handcuff someone in a Survival Ball.

Which leads us to what the Yes Men are really leading us to–civil disobedience:

Our film is a small part of a movement to help make that happen. Another part is BeyondTalk.net – a website we recently launched in collaboration with a dozen direct-action activists. The idea is to get 10,000 folks to sign the “Climate Pledge of Resistance” and risk arrest to demand sane climate-change policy. On November 30, the tenth anniversary of the Seattle protests, and a week before the Copenhagen climate talks, those 10,000 activists will form the largest civil disobedience action in recent protest history.

Will this hilarious call to get off our butts work? I don’t know but consider the following collection of headlines from the last week alone:

In Louisville Kentucky where the jobless rate is more than 10%, 10,000 people lined up to apply for 90 jobs.

You would have to go back at least 15 million years to find carbon dioxide levels on Earth as high as they are today.

Within 15 years, public systems on average will have less half the money they need to pay pension benefits, according to an analysis by Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Other analysts say funding levels could hit that low within a decade.

After losing about $1 trillion in the markets, state and local governments are facing a devil’s choice: Either slash retirement benefits or pursue high-return investments that come with high risk.

Eighteen months ago, no one dared imagine humanity pushing the climate beyond an additional two degrees C of heating, but rising carbon emissions and inability to agree on cuts has meant science must now consider the previously unthinkable.
“Two degrees C is already gone as a target,” said Chris West of the University of Oxford’s UK Climate Impacts Programme. “Four degrees C is definitely possible.”

Thousands of people swarmed Cobo Hall in chaos this morning trying to get applications for housing and utility payment assistance from the city of Detroit.

The City of Detroit Planning & Development Department was to pass out 5,000 applications to those standing in line. But a line of people snaking back and forth inside Cobo, down Washington Boulevard and around the corner to the circular parking deck far outnumbered the applications available.

“Today, one-third of mortgages are underwater, and if housing prices continue to drop, some experts estimate that one half of all mortgages will exceed the value of the homes they secure,”

Meanwhile, in a bizarre parallel universe, the DJIA keeps going back up and every week or 2 someone proclaims the recession over. Well maybe (for now) on Wall Street but it sure the heck is not on Main Street.

When I was growing up we learned that it was good for companies to grow and produce more goods because then people had jobs and things to purchase with the money they earned making said things. But in a jobless “recovery” which is what appears to be happening now, that relationship is suddenly exposed for the fraud that it is, and we are now being confronted with the small print at the bottom of the contract that says there will also be an environmental price to pay for all the stuff we’ve been producing and long story short, instead of taking us along for the ride, what is going up on Wall Street is going down on Main Street. (For an additional reality check about what has and hasn’t happened economically during the last year, see this compendium of ups and downs.)

If, like me, you’ve had enough, go to Beyond Talk and sign up. If you can’t commit civil disobedience, you can sign up for legal acts of protest. We may not be able to fix the world, but we can damn well stop trashing it. The only way that is going to happen, however, is if we are willing to stand up for ourselves. Yes, I mean you. Just do it.

Matridynamics

October 8, 2009 / Lucinda / 3 comments

She changes everything she touches

And everything she touches changes.

When I was a child, I had a book about a little girl whose grandmother gave her a word, I don’t recall the name of the book, but just the point that the gifting of words was enormously powerful.

Last week I asked for suggestions for “a word to describe the rising up of a matri- (meaning honoring both women and Mother Earth) energy force for peace.” I received numerous suggestions, all quite inspiring. The two that resonate with me are matridynamic which was offered by Loretta Kemsley and gaia-archy which was shared by Susan Hawthorne. They are both very potent words. Gaia-archy feels like a good descriptor of a framework, but matridynamic at least to me sounds more like an organic, growing, changing process that reflects what is needed.

There is little doubt that we have reached the time where there must be not only a turning away as Phil Ochs once put it, but also a very major change in paradigm. In this country it is now painfully obvious that every aspect of our well-being has been sold to the highest bidder and that those we have chosen to run our nation are, with few exceptions, corrupted to the core. Globally, the climate change that our plunder of the earth has wrought is making itself painfully apparent time and time again, with floods, droughts, water and food shortages, melting glaciers and disappearing species. There is no turning back now, only a question of how we go forward.

For this we need a changed way of being with ourselves and with the earth, a new way of going forward, a visionary shift that is well described by the word matridynamic.

Many thanks to all that participated in this dialog and especially to Loretta for such a magnificent word.

Looking For…A Word

September 30, 2009 / Lucinda / Comments Off

I am trying to find a word to describe the rising up of a matri- (meaning honoring both women and Mother Earth) energy force for peace. It is a powerful word, but it is escaping me. Suggestions?

Mirage

September 24, 2009 / Lucinda / Comments Off

I grew up in the Arizona desert and it has always been one of the places where I can re-center with the mystery. The spirit of the Grandmothers seems palpably alive when you listen to the stillness in the desert sun.

For many years now, the desert has been under stress from over-development but on a recent trip home I found the Phoenix valley blanketed with foreclosure signs that tell the sorry tale and on the plane home this is what came to me:

Desert heartbeat
Throbbing faintly below the
Glass and concrete
Jutting up,
Unnatural, fatal wounding.

Endstage foreclosed wilderness upon
The wildness that once was.
Transplantation finally rejected,
Unwelcome parasite defeated by itself.

Desert mirage rising up from
Heated sand.
Clarity returns beneath the
Azur sky.

Autumnal Meditations

September 19, 2009 / Lucinda / 2 comments

The other evening I sat on my patio and listened to the stillness of the approaching night. I wanted to meditate about balance, or more to the point I suppose, the lack thereof that seems to challenge us on a daily basis.

There were 2 crickets, one would chirp and then the other, taking turns, it seemed that they were quite courteous, each waiting until the other had finished. It seemed a fitting chorus for my meditation. Slowly my ears detected the sound of children playing down the block, their laughter made me smile. And then I began to hear the noise of the nearby streets although I hadn’t heard that at first. Not such a fitting chorus as the crickets, but certainly symbolic of the problem.

The equinox marks a point of equality between the day and night, a moment of celestial balance and in many parts of the world, the beginning of the harvest season and a period of gratitude. Here in the Northern Hemisphere it marks the beginning of longer nights that envelope us with a physical darkness that seems to ask us to look within for our own strength. It is a time to re-center.

Below are a few quotes that resonate for me. Please feel free to share your own thoughts about balance and gratitude in the comments.

Carol P. Christ:

We do not give so that we will receive, we give in gratitude because we have already received–from our mothers, from others, and from the earth—in a circle that goes back to the beginning of time.

As the wheel turns from summer to fall, it is time to give thanks for all that Beautiful and Bountiful Earth has given to us. And to think of what we can give back to the earth and to those who have generously shared its abundance with us.

Susan Hawthorne:

(W)hat we face is not unique. We are not the first generation to have to deal with “the dark hurlings of nature” although we may be the first to have brought it upon ourselves.

It is no accident that time and again earth is compared to the human body. Our planet like us is a living system – its ecosystems like our circulatory and endocrinal systems rise and fall responding to the events taking place on its surface and in its interior spaces. This is not a romantic idea of mine, it is metaphoric, but no less real for being so.

Our human experience suggests such metaphors to us as we grapple with ways of understanding our selves and our relationship to the world whether it be earth as body, wind as breath, the great flows of rivers, oceans and lava as tears and blood, grass and trees as hair and limbs.

Riding The Economic Roller-Coaster–The Big Plunge Is Just Up Ahead

September 13, 2009 / Lucinda / 7 comments

In what at times has sounded like a script from Sesame Street, pundits and economists have endlessly engaged in speculating about whether the recession looks like the warm and fuzzy Letter U, the nasty Letter V, the even nastier Letter W, the crazy Letter X, or the dreaded Letter L. It’s enough to make you swear off Alphabet Soup forever.

Call me illiterate, but I think we’re barking up the wrong analogy, what we’ve got looks more like a roller coaster from where I sit. Think about it: the most terrifying ride in the park–you go up a little and then down, your heart lands in your stomach and you’re afraid you’re going to upchuck all over your date but then you realize that you survived and it isn’t so bad and hey you’re going up again. And then you get to the top of the next rise and see the very long and steep decline that lies ahead…

I’m no economist, but while the Cash for Clunkers program certainly helped lower car inventories and upped the average mpg of the cars on the road a tad, only 41% of the cars bought under the program were American and hey did you know that the payments are taxable? (Note–after a comment from an alert reader, see the clarification of what this means below.) Much more importantly, none of this does jack to reform our transportation policy. So now that the program is over, how long does the economic honeymoon continue? And when does an understanding of peak oil temper our Detroit at any cost mantra?

Then there is the money laundering bailout of the banks and insurance companies. Stockholders got stuck in the hot water spin cycle where their money shrank the big one leading a panicked Congress to shovel enormous amounts of money at these companies with shockingly little oversight or regulation. We don’t even know how the money was used or where it all went. And funny story, those companies that were about to plunge into the abyss and take us with them–stock prices are back up, and the CEO’s are doing quite nicely, thank you. And what exactly has been done to insure that it doesn’t happen again?

As for the foreclosure crisis–that nasty little house of cards seems to have eased. Or not. Seems there are some mortgages called Option ARMs about 70% of which will reset before 2011, some by as much as 63% leaving a whole lot more people with not much of an option but to go into foreclosure, so that one isn’t over yet either.

Those factors, and throw in the health care debacle and unemployment while we’re at it, are enough to say we’ve still got a problem but our current economic woes are only the tip of the not so proverbial iceberg. Which happens to be melting. And quickly at that.

Our national self-centered myopia when it comes to climate change and environmental peril is blinding us to the inevitable, drastic changes ahead. In the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, we believe there is such a thing as clean coal and safe nuclear energy, we blithely use pesticides and herbicides on our land and then drink them from our rivers. We poison our air and imperil our food supply by genetically modifying it and then go back to watching Mad Men or American Idol without a minute of my bad or wondering about the consequences and cost of this folly.

And costly it will be. As the healthcare ‘reform’ debate has made all too clear, we have incorporated our democracy to the point where the welfare of huge corporations is considered at least if not more important than the welfare and health of the people they supposedly serve. The same is even more true of the energy and global warming debate, witness the recent effort by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to hold a “Scopes”-like trial on global warming for the simple reason that the corporations they represent will do just about anything to keep making a buck for as long as they can, no matter the cost and heaven forbid they should be held accountable for the damage that is staring us in the face.

This head-in-the-sand state of national denial is not sustainable, it’s not even survivable and it most definitely is not profitable. Richard Power puts it quite eloquently,

(T)he climate change debate (by that I mean what to do about it, not whether it is real), is not… simply one of dire national importance, it is one of dire planetary importance, and the nature of opposition to meaningful action on climate change is not simply self-abusive, it is suicidal.

Or in the even more dire words of Johann Hari, we are at “five minutes to ecological midnight.”

Whether or not the recession is ending is irrelevant and not even the correct question. At best, we are in a bit of economic remission, but do not be deluded, the ride has only just begun, and the big fall is still ahead.

I’ll leave you with this…

Reclaiming Medusa (Again)

September 10, 2009 / Lucinda / One comment

Reclaiming Medusa was born in 2005 as one of my early attempts at blogging. I regretfully gave it up when I started the Feminist Peace Network (FPN) blog, because it was one project too many. It was a necessary choice, but at the time I promised myself I would eventually get back to it. And eventually is now.

The following is an updated version of the introductory essay I wrote for the original blog, along with a postscript. What I wrote in 2005, and the necessity of the spirit of Medusa, is even more true today than it was then:

I first crossed paths with Medusa at an Audrey Flack exhibit. It was of course the hair that caught my attention, I knew immediately that this was one Goddess who refused to be defined by revisionist mythology. Medusa means sovereign female wisdom and according to Alicia Le Van’s The Gorgon Medusa, her

“mask was used to guard and protect women and the secret knowledge of the Divine Feminine. It literally warned men to “Keep Away! Female Mysteries.” It was erected in stone,(corresponding to her look of stone), on caves and gateways at sacred sites dedicated to the Goddess.”

But of course Medusa’s power was incompatible with the myths of male power that were necessary to explain the rise of patriarchy and she had to be destroyed. La Van explains,

“The mythological beheading of Medusa symbolizes the ultimate silencing of female wisdom and expression. It is the act which stops her growth, limits her potential, movement and cultural contributions. She is obliterated and her severed head is flaunted on the Acropolis and other works of art in pride of her and all women’s subjugation by violent men. She is broken and her body enslaved. Her spirit, her mind, her spiritual powers are killed. Her once honored forces of female creativity and destruction are halted. Her role as dynamic mediatrix degraded. Her life-giving, death-wielding powers and wild forces of nature are controlled, tamed, and mastered by the male order. The cycles of life and nature are made to conform to his linear perspective.”

Not so metaphorically, in both global and very personal terms, we are living the fate of Medusa. Women in particular face a relentless struggle for economic empowerment. Violence, particularly against women and children is an escalating epidemic. The right of women to control their own bodies is under siege and the degradation of this planet with all manner of chemical and nuclear poison endangers our future. We are in danger when we question the patriarchal system from which dominating power and identity are derived and when we honor the wisdom, rights and lives of women. In the face of these threats to our existence, we need to continue to relentlessly tell our stories, name our needs and speak our truths. We need to reclaim the discussion.

Postscript: In recent months I have wanted to write about a number of topics that are somewhat outside the focus of the Feminist Peace Network blog. I believe passionately that the FPN blog should continue to focus primarily on misogyny and the intersection between violence and women’s human rights, so I intend Reclaiming Medusa to be a place to explore other topics that are not a good fit for FPN.

Before undertaking this project, I gave a lot of thought to simply posting to blogs on other sites, but if there is one thing I’ve learned over the last few years, it is that it is urgently necessary for women to have their own spaces in the ever-evolving media universe and I chose to be a part of that effort.

I’m not sure yet what the rhythm of this blog will be, probably less posts than FPN and some combination of quick hits to provide links to other things that should be read and lengthier pieces when I find the time, so be patient as I find the path and feel free to offer your thoughts, they are always welcome.

Go here to learn more about me, including contact info and check the links in the sidebar for copyright and comment policies. Be sure to join the Fan page I set up on Facebook for the blog, I’ll be posting some links there to things that I think might be of interest but that I’m not going to address on the blog.

**********

Feed your soul: Click here to learn more about Goddess symbolism.

Lucinda Marshall