To what extent is the Mystical Paradigm strictly metaphysics and theory, or can pragmatic applications be derived?  The Mystical Paradigm permits a more meaningful interpretation of this evidence in useful ways.  To repeat an earlier assertion, no intellectual solution to any of the following problems can be found without a viable Spiritual Consciousness as a dominant condition in our society.  This a technical chapter written strictly in academic style to profile a summary of the evidence illustrating the effects of Spiritual anemia and corruption in the major social mechanisms that operate this country. The critiques have largely been compiled by others and documented here as selected social criticism. It may be found in reputable books, reports and other documents and media that have been well received by those competent to criticize them, and/or which have appealed to a wide public through the end of 1993.

To what extent are our values as expressed in our manner of doing business, in our "laws," both civil and economic?  Our values are defined by these activities.  Further and more important, the products of these values are an accurate  mirror in which we can America's relationship with THE LAW?  In that context what is the prognosis for our quality of life?  And to what extent do the present social, economic and political circumstances mirror the True level of our Spiritual health?  Where are we with respect to the possibilities of Transfiguration, or the doom of oblivion?  By THE LAW, Life is RAW [Reality Always Wins], and the LAW must be reflected in "the law"  for  those civil and criminal laws to be Spiritually valid. Who among us know these things?  More importantly, who cares?

To be forewarned is to be forearmed, but that presumes that subtle warnings are perceived, understood, and responded to. This Chapter [now an archive] is created because the nature of our society and our values are such that the references to follow have appealed to specialists and have not been widely read at all by the so called general public.  They have mostly been read only by that narrow segment of our population that has a "professional" interest in them.   Business people focus on business, economists on economics, and educators on education and so on.   A few activists read more widely but they are usually  disconnected to the institutions that ought move and shake with change and are often connected to institutions that have a near term vested interest in ignoring this criticism.   But the typical voter (or should be voter,) the person at the local hangout, or church meeting, will not have heard of let alone understood and debated the implications of most of them.  They may view the headlines each day with an incipient nervousness, but they have no paradigm to justify their becoming  any further involved.  The violence has not encroached close enough to make the evidence before their eyes sufficiently relevant or personal. Most are unaware, nor would they believe, that they should somehow care about them.

But these dissonant references are the early warnings of our society's twilight before darkness and death. Like the shrill of sirens through our night time windows, we know that suffering and heartache are abroad in the land, but they are owned by some disconnected, depersonalized other.  We go back to sleep.

Because of our compromised  HIP (Human Information Processing competence, Dialogue 4) we can only hear the strident siren songs of the simples (e.g., ala Ross Perot, Rush Limbaugh.) We mindlessly shop for and yearn to turn to the most promising Messiah, one that we can tune into because they must be on our wavelength.  But the only one they can pick up on their ultra narrow band emotional receiver speaks in the deceptive sounds of the simples.  "Turn back to God."  "Elect me!"  "Back to basics."  "Praise to the three R's."  "Get rid of government!"  As our social problems inexorably deteriorate into certain social catastrophe, one must be reminded of Hitler's being appointed as Chancellor, then elected (under coercive circumstances he created) to take over the internationally abused democratic Weimar Republic in the Germany of the 1930s which,. Then after being duly elected. he promptly overthrew it.  Thus did he become dictator for his Nazi cause to advance the ultimate agenda for his motherland, "Deutschland Uber Alles."  Having promised the economically abused (perpetrated by the allies as vengeful punishment for World War I)  elements of a bitterly frustrated German population in Germany cheered him on for their own vengeance' sake, thereby creating the horror of World War II.  This revolving horror is the classic signature of Spiritual emptiness.

This Chapter will draw the relationship between the Spiritual Consciousness of the Mystical Paradigm and the social conditions that have produced and justified the professional criticism that is summarized below.  I intend to create an intellectual link between the critical writings that are referenced, and the Spiritual health of our social order.  What is written here gives substance to the evolution of the current state of Spiritual lack, which are the indicators for understanding how our nation has gotten in this fix, and clues for what to do about it.  I could not include more references in the space allotted, and that by choosing those I have, I have both knowingly and unknowingly neglected others that may be more legitimate or effective for you.  But I believe that the references selected are those necessary and sufficient to state and defend my thesis. Perhaps the nature of what follows will further illuminate the claims for what is required for Spiritual Transfiguration as is recommended in the Integrative Epilog.
 

 The Mystical Paradigm is concerned about the moral-ethical nature of the balance between the free expression of personal power (our vaunted freedoms) and its relationship to equity of empowerment among all people (re the clearly evident disparity between haves and have-nots.) There is no real personal freedom (as validated, betrayed, and repressed by economic realities) without genuine Spiritual enlightenment and commitment.  The evidence will show how seriously we are out of balance in the last decades of the 20th Century.  This examination is applied in the context of our nation at our current fading stage of Twilight as we confront the onrushing darkness of our night.  I define our status in relationship to the documented evidence in the areas of "The Law", economics and banking, business and commerce, education, journalism and the media.  I hope to underscore the nature and presence of their adverse impact upon you and me as individuals, our families and support groups, our community life, and our nation.

 In this discussion, a reminder:  Money is not a medium of exchange. Money is power.  The rules of money are created by the power brokers and power mongers to defend and expand their personal power.  They set and selectively enforce the rules of law affecting business, economics and governance.  They act to hide the roots of their power from you and me.  But all institutional power deeply affects the power (freedoms) of average individuals and families who are totally vulnerable to the activities that are always churning in a grid of impersonal power.  Social commentary about business, economics, education, communities and politics should be read as wholly concerned with the personal power of those who benefit from the power amplifiers they use to direct their fortunes, and ours.  They use abstract economic or political theory as an intellectual smoke screen. They ought be revealed for the sham behind the scam.

As you now know from the preceding [dialogues] the issue is not only to derive an accurate and complete intellectual grasp of our problems and their root nature,  but to awaken our Spiritual Consciousness of the context for those problems, or to reveal the lack of Spiritual Consciousness which creates problems in the first place.   The presence of Spiritual Consciousness is required to separate superficial symptoms from their causal problems that are their True destructive factors, then to heal and promote recovery.   As such, when I speak of principles in any of the following areas, I am not talking about economic or social theory as natural law, as in the laws of physics.  I am speaking of principles defined from the arbitrarily contrived human laws of powerful people. These are congealed, contrived, implemented and enforced by and for the benefit of those corporate and political decision makers who derive significant personal benefits from the personal power networks they have arranged for themselves.

 The following quote written at the beginning of our current economic decline which, while directed at economists, also applies to any apologist for the destructive excesses of predatory capitalism.  We have forged our national polices in a Spiritually and philosophically impoverished vacuum.

 "Economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions.  Some go so far as to claim that economic laws are as free from 'metaphysics' or 'values' as the law of gravitation."  in- Schumacher, E.F., 1975, "Buddhist Economics," in Rosin, Summer, (Ed), Economic Power Failure: The Current American Crisis, NY: McGraw Hill Co p-258

The economic laws of power, far from being natural, or neutral, are almost solely contrived by and for the benefit of the community of power brokers. Power and empowerment are the principal determines of both economic and emotional well being of our people and their groups, organizations and institutions, which we collectively define as our American society.  Or they are equally effective indicators of pathology and dysfunction in our human system at any level such as may be afflicted.

There are a variety of myths that undergird all of the activities of our society.  Their foundation lies in the current social meaning of "the law"  which acquired its first expression in the English Middle ages.  We are its heirs.  But in America, this  "law" is built on its own foundation which is presumed to be the Constitution of the United States. The law, for better or worse, is our social gyroscope which becomes defective when there is an impoverishment of Spiritual Consciousness.  Our Constitution, asserts that each citizen is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. How this is to be implemented is mostly specified in the Bill of Rights, the first amendments to the Constitution. But there is no direct reference to economics in the Constitution which was unnecessary in a simple rural agrarian society. There, each responsible adult can intimately know all aspects of the system.   Alas, not true today. The analysis begins with "the law."

1. The Law & Justice as Advocate for, and Protector of Personal Power:

  "Woe unto ye scribes and Pharisees [lawyers], hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in." (Matt 23:27, KJV)

If you were ever a devoted viewer of Perry Mason (staring Raymond Burr) series, or Paper Chase  (staring John Housman) or the skill and dedication of Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, or the more current violent and action laden versions called 21 Jump Street, or the more intellectual, The Lawyers, or any other programs of that genre, you most likely have succumbed to the most cherished myths that proclaim the happy nature and certain operation of certain equal and perfect justice in the United States.  While your mind assures you that these representations are of course fiction, your consciousness is subtly seduced to accept these representations as truth.  The underlying principles of fairness and end-justice they exploit in dramatizing their issues are accepted as being true, because we yearn for them to be true.   While we may desperately need to believe these are true, in fact, they are not.

Even before one asks of each of these dramatized scenarios, "Who paid for all that justice, and the opulent life styles of the lawyers?" these images of justice triumphing are at the opposite end of the true reality.  The RAW of it finds "The Law" is  routinely flawed, exploited and manipulated to serve the powerful. This body law and its practice are random and capricious for the economically short changed, and callous and indiscriminately brutal to all but its owners.  This is the real "justice" that now tortures the soul of America.  It survives and thrives in the shadows of public selfishness, apathy, confusion and distraction.

 "The Law" includes the entire body of state, federal and local statutes, the judges who decide cases based on their personal interpretation of these statues, the lawyers who twist, slight and manipulate these laws solely to produce a win for their clients.  Unless convenient to the cause, these activities are  mostly without regard to the truth or actual moral status of the issues or their clients.  This indictment also applies to the various hangers-on of the court whop feed in the trough of the law.  Such creatures include the bail bondsmen, court reporters, private investigators (detectives), evaluators, and the array of "expert" forensic witnesses who often routinely give the same testimony over and over again before the same judges as if the judge immediately forgets the relevance of the redundant and costly (to the client victim) testimony.  As just one example, the data from research that sheds light on "the best interests of a child" is repeatedly paid for by each frantic contestant pleading for a share of their own child's life. They are forced to enter again and again into the same court , to provide before the same judges the same technical or legal points.

The machinations of United States corporations, conglomerates and banks thrive in accordance with standards set for them in the laws of our nation.  These laws are in constant flux as they are intentionally designed by corporate lawyers to be vague and weak in order that they may be safely tweaked or manipulated.  In this first section I address expert commentary on the ethical integrity of this legal structure and practice on which our social stability and economic fairness depend. I note the comparison of "the law", that is, the tangible and institutional rules and standards of American society, with THE LAW.  The latter is the eternal verities or Cosmic expression of TRUTH and the unfoldment of GOD. I assert that even with the small number of references that space permits be included, the indictment is clear that there is no more pervasive, overwhelming and unchallenged evil in American society than that which is the daily work, substance and alas, pleasure of lawyering. The law is designed by and for those who have embraced it, exploit it, suck up to and suck its bitter teat, and relentlessly act to ensure that it feeds only them.

From the first perceptions of the real status of earthly law, as stated by Jesus, quoted above, to the insight of Shakespeare who said: "The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers." [In- King Henry The Third, Part IV, ii, 86.]  and continues to Charles Dickens.  The latter's sentiment is found in his book, Bleak House, a story about the anguished process by which an estate is entered into litigation over a small dispute regarding the will. The over the course of intervening years, the entire estate is squandered to the services of barristers (British for lawyer,) the murder of a relative is committed and the family is destroyed.  It was Dickens who first observed that in effect, lawyers first feed the law in order that the law can feed them.   Then there is the following blunt assessment:

"No one can have been for twenty years in active and varied legal practice without becoming convinced that the profession to which he belongs harbors within itself examples of as base, deliberate, and ingenious depravity as any that, less favored by fortune or cunning, have gravitated into the penitentiary... Theodore Bacon-  1882." [In- Lieberman, Jethro K., 1978, Crisis at the Bar: The Unethical Ethics of Lawyers (and What to Do About It), NY: W.W. Norton & CO, Inc,  p-8]

 Family Law:  the Licensed Practice of Cruelty  and the Legalized Abuse and Corruption of Children.  This practice of "milking" the victim to due process has been the heart and soul of divorce and child custody litigation. In this depraved arena, a parent's frantic love for their child, or their fulminating hatred and malicious willingness to use their own child as an instrument to wreck their hate and vengeance on the other parent, eternally fuels the litigation process.  In matters of child custody disputes this process is extraordinarily brutal because traditional lawyers are prepared to actually exploit and foment incipient parental conflict, to use the children as pawns in a socially condoned and institutionally contrived massive exploitation of that parent most capable of malevolent hate.  It only takes one such parent to fight when they have access to a lawyer.  These "Family Lawyers" who, like the portrait of Dorian Grey, are scrupulously neat in their tidy three piece suits (men and women alike) thereby masking the rotting soul within.  They are without Consciousness and incapable of moral and ethical outrage at the manner in which they routinely function.  Thus do they feed and indulge their own children on the destroyed children of their clients.  Those readers not made victim to this process will have difficulty accepting these claims.

 Documentation of attorney legitimized malpractice includes aiding, abetting and obfuscating to insure the success of parentally abducted children. The cases presented on TV represent an amazing contrast to the array of emotionally sterile protocols used to separate distraught children from a loved parent. The scene is an anguished and emotional cauldron. Janet Kosid-Uthe, an exception to those lawyers who exploit children of divorce, has said,

 "The substance of these reports suggests a pattern of negligent indifference to the real plight of victim children and parents.  In the face of their findings as to the extent personal stress such actions induce, the depressing direction of concern for this reader appear to prioritized protecting the vested interests of the legal system rather a clear and concise overriding of contradictory, obstructive, non relevant state and local statutes."

 Woe unto ye lawyers!  How does this legalized scam work? The gaining of any court order, seldom produces automatically enforceable justice without any further victim commitment. Any such costly legal document, once acquired, is simply the right to pay an attorney yet again to go back to the bar to then plead for enforcement which when it is refused, diluted or compromised, creates only the right to again pay more money for an appeal, and yet another until, and another until, years latter, the highest court (if funds and determination can carry one that far) may choose to discard it.

Grieving families who simply want to probate a modest will, given any opposition by a malicious relative or other interested party can, like the fictional parties of Dickens  Bleak House, tie up the resolution of the will for years at ongoing expense to all concerned.  Small disputes among business partners can terminate in mutual bankruptcy with the divestiture of remaining wealth shared by the attorneys involved.  Small accidents, trivial negligence, small damages to a real victim galvanize the legal grinder and all parties to any dispute become victim to feeding "the law."

Victims of a major felony crime may be forced to appear in court and watch over months and months of appeals, delays and legal subterfuge, and finally never see justice resolved.  Prosecuting lawyers are willing to withhold, falsify or distort evidence and thus convict and murder (by obtaining a death sentence) a helpless scapegoat in order to produce a conviction for their personal score card of prosecutorial effectiveness.  This system is not simply bad, or problematic, it is brutally evil.  What do lawyers say about this way of life they have embraced?  The "good" lawyer is an oxymoron, except for a tiny handful of attorneys who hate what they represent and oppose it, thereby taking large personal risks.  Some have been censured for so doing, or for suing other attorneys. But most lawyers are fervent apologists for and defenders of their sordid practices.

The True nature of their profession and their role in it is not in their Consciousness, therefore, as asserted by the Mystical Paradigm, this reality is denied to their intellect's capacity to process it.  That is why you cannot embarrass or humiliate a lawyer.   Defending their way of life is the principal mission of the paid functionaries of the American Bar Association and its local bar affiliates.

Here some accounts of some ethical lawyers' own moral outrage at finding themselves a part of "the law".  I begin with comments on the manner in which lawyers are created in the first place.   Scott Turow, while a first year law student, has written in one place as follows:

 "By custom the law world has been rigidly patriarchal.  Many of the psychological articles I read about law school accounted for the harshness of relations between professors and students by relating them to the stereotypical Freudian struggle between fathers and sons.  a powerful figure parades before a group that always before has been made up of primarily young men.  The older male flexes his muscles, assails the young ones, demonstrates his control over them, while they grow up both eager to imitate him and increasingly resentful.  In a way, those patterns of envy and subjugation are repeated throughout the legal world, with the old men always standing on the shoulders of the young ones.  ...It all continues until one day you suddenly are a professor, a judge, or a partner--doing what was done to you."
[In- Turow, Scott, 1977, One Law: An Inside Account of the First Year at Harvard Law School, NY: G.P. Putnam & Sons pp- 245-246]

 "We are now doing a section on what Guy [Professor Guy Sternlieb] calls 'political analysis'.  We dissect political environments and evaluate options for actors within them.  Sternlieb will often issues challenges to the class.  'Damn it, there's a reason I teach this course.  You people are going to be congressmen and mayors and State Department officials in 20 years. What will you do in these situations?...'   ... I am still a little discomfited by a place that is so cheerfully assumed to be the training ground for the power elite.  That particular pride represents an incredible, if tacit, stake in the status quo, and also amounts to a quiet message to students that their place in the legal world should always be among the mighty.  It produces the kind of advocate who is uncommitted to ultimate personal values and who will represent anyone--ITT, Hitler, Atilla the Hun--as long as the case seems important."  [Turow, op cit, p-261.]

These root corruptions are of course created by lawyers.  And what is the fate of lawyers who are professionally reared by such means.  Indeed for those  who successfully gravitated to the centers of corporate and legal power, journalist Joseph Goulden has, on the basis of hundreds of detailed interviews with a wide variety of lawyers, judges and law faculty, compiled a compelling indictment exploiting their own rules:

 "By any objective measure, including that made by the bar itself, attorney discipline is a farce--'a scandalous situation.'  in the words of a study committee commissioned by the American Bar Association and chaired by no less a legal establishmentarian than Tom C. Clark, the former Supreme Court Justice.  The report of the Clark Committee, issued in 1970, found lawyers' attitudes toward discipline ranged from `apathy to outright hostility.'  It cited enough sins by lawyers to discourage anyone who read the report from ever crossing the threshold of a law office.  It listed a congeries of disgraces found almost everywhere it looked around the country...  Bar groups refusing to move against members convicted of bribery, income tax evasion, theft of clients' funds and other crimes.  Failure of lawyers to report ethical and criminal wrongdoing by other attorneys.  Prominent firms and individuals with de facto immunity from discipline, especially in smaller towns where they dominated the local bar association.  Indeed, one wonders after skimming the Clark Committee's report whether any problem should be entrusted to a lawyer, for the tales of wrong doing are numerous, and they are varied." [In-  Goulden, Joseph C., 1977, 1978, The Million Dollar Lawyers: a Behind-the Scenes Look at America's Big Money Attorneys and How They Operate,  NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, . pp- 264-265]

 "a basic tenant of the lawyer's creed is that it is ethical to aid those bent on acting unethically.  Summing up the bar's attitude, Sharswood wrote that the lawyer 'is not morally responsible for the act of the party in maintaining an unjust cause.   Lawyers may legitimately take on corrupt clients and often do.  Lawyers help the guilty go free.  They cover up their client's misdeeds. They prepare legal instruments that are disadvantageous to the weak and the poor.  They help industrialists pollute the air and water.  They aid many in blunting the force of bills pending in Congress and the statehouses that would protect the public against these and other evils.  And the bar is in trouble collectively because collectively it appears to help a few injure the many; people perceive individual lawyers as agents for malefactors." [Lieberman, op cit, p- 136.]

In his scathing assessment of the intellectual and ethical consciousness of Vice President Dan Quayle, with regard to the relationship between corporate power and the law, author Joe Queenan says:

 "...I would like to see all 700,000 of the nation's lawyers disemboweled, enabling roving jackals and birds of prey to feast on their entrails, even if I had to shell out $9.95 on Pay-Per View to see it.  Nevertheless, when viewed from the cold, impersonal, economic perspective, the tort reform clique betrays an astonishing ignorance of the way this society operates, which is thusly: Corporations steal from the public by overcharging for crappy products that aren't going to last very long, and usually aren't safe.  The public steals back by lodging ridiculous product liability lawsuits that have absolutely no merit, but that often result in hefty awards, because juries are made up of people who hate corporations.  Lawyers steal from everybody by defending either side.  Since everyone is stealing from everyone else, liability suits are not really sucking $29 billion, or $80 billion, or $300 billion a year out of the American economy. In reality, the money that frivolous plaintiffs are awarded by vindictive, irresponsible juries helps feed their children, who will one day grow up to be lawyers who will then defend major corporations against frivolous lawsuits.  And so the great Mandala of life spins and spins again." [In-Queenan, Joe, 1992, Imperial Caddie: The Rise of Dan Quayle in America and the Decline and Fall of Practically Everything Else, (NY: Hyperion  p-138]

Regardless of the personal damage you may have suffered, efforts to sue lawyers for malpractice are highly problematic as I have learned from my own loss and as validated by HALT:

 "The ABA [American Bar Association] officials predict that claims for lawyer misconduct will continue to increase as much as 20 percent a year.  ...Clients end up paying the bill whenever costs, including insurance premiums for their lawyers.  Plus at least one legal scholar suggests that lawyers who are afraid of malpractice claims may begin overlawering to protect themselves from suit.  This could increase competent service only marginally while greatly increasing legal costs to clients. ...If the lawyer has left town or filed bankruptcy, this may mean the client has no way to recover losses."
[In- Directory of Lawyers Who Sue Lawyers, 1993, HALT- An Organization of Americans for Legal Reform; 1319 F Street NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC, 20004.  p- 25] Comment: Appears to be out of print. replacement

In this resounding chorus of substantial and documented criticism, there are voices that speak of lawyering with the unconcerned detachment of being among the unconscious.  Such is Charles Rembar, who wrote The Law of the Land, a book that the National Observer found to be "a fat fine book that teaches as it delights and entertains us, a book about the law that honors the law."   This book does consider the topic of ethics in the law such that it is worthy of mention even in the Index.   However, in a short section on consumer criticism, he states:

 "'Consumer' attacks on the profession have lately come into vogue.  To some extent they are warranted.  To some extent they are misguided for reasons explained in a moment.  To some extent they are disingenuous, postures assumed for political purposes or simply for personal prominence."  [In- Rembar, Charles, 1980. The Law of the Land: The Evolution of Our Legal System,."  NY: Simon Schuster, pp-263-264]

He opposes a second unwarranted attack on the fees attorneys charge saying,  "Working time for most lawyers is interchangeable with money." (P-265, emphasis added).   Interesting enough, Rembar has advocated for litigation being a government and not a private expense in order to insure a level playing field for both criminal and civil matters (P-262), a proposal he notes was met with "widespread silence."  Such a proposal is intended to insure equal empowerment, and as such, is highly consistent with the implications of the Mystical Paradigm as noted in the Integrating Epilog.  But then he states:

 "There is implicit in the agitation--either as a conscious belief on the part of those who attack or as a necessary implication of the proposal made--the premise that lawyers are more reprehensible than other people who work for a living.  The premise is wrong.  Lawyers in general are slightly better than most occupational groups."  [Rembar, op cit, p-266]

"In the 20 years since it formed a political action committee (PAC) and undertook a sophisticated lobbying operation, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) has achieved an unparalleled track record on Capitol Hill.  While other special interests regularly sacrifice losses on one front in order to win on another, and occasionally leave Capitol Hill licking their wounds, ATLA has never compromised and never lost.  Ever.  'No other lobbying group can make that claim,' says Lester Brickman, a professor a Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of law who specializes in legal ethics." [source lost, related source]

Thanks to the above profession of "the law" we have a jungle of rules and regulations which define how our banking and commerce industries must function.  This industry pretends that these rules are "of science" and I remind your throughout the following decision that "the law" of economics is not of science but of lawyers.  The Spiritual impoverishment of "the law" is context for all that relates to it, including the laws of banking in its various manifestations, loans, stocks and bonds, and the manipulations of various forms of mutual funds.  Regardless of the instruments used, where any form of money is involved, the entire exercise is one which indulges the participants in the direct exercise and competition in the use of raw personal power, power over others.

 "Money confers social and political power, naturally.  Those who have more of it than others use their wealth to dominate or control other human beings who have little or none.  But money also gives power to the secret self, enabling it to pursue its own self-gratification in a singular fashion.  Money's most obvious expression of power is the ability to acquire things that satisfy the imagination--consuming goods that are utterly unrelated to necessity or even usefulness.  The things, instead, fulfill elaborate fantasies of selfhood, a visible statement of who-I-am, like the primitive tribesman who used feathers and facial paints to explain their status and inner character."
[Greider, William, 1987, The Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, NY: Simeon & Schuster., P- 235.]

And for the "suits," those three piece, high tech, educated denizens of urban corporate America who appear (by their deeds) to live out their lives oblivious to and far from Spiritual Consciousness, we find them dwelling at the more primitive end of the needs hierarchy.   For many, there is no more self gratifying experience that the raw exercising of power over others for no other justification than their having the license and will to do so.  Thus banks are institutional power amplifiers of considerable potential for self-indulgence in the exercise of power.  But the meaning of "Bank" as the traditional bastion of social power is being transformed so that other social institutions, e.g., insurance companies, mutual companies and specially created financial management institutions are steadily encroaching and  replacing the traditional functions of banks as controllers of our economic system.   On this complex elliptical playing field the power brokers play their games of corporate survival and dominance.  As has been said, when elephant's fight, the ants suffer and die. Following is a snapshot of how the process works.

Power Amplification:
Consider the table below.  Suppose I get a check in the mail for $1,000,000 from a mysterious benefactor.  With trembling hands I go to the bank who validates its legitimacy.  Not having had time to make other plans for the money, I deposit it in the "First Wealthy Bank." Presumably now both the bank and I have a million dollars, which the bank can now lend out at higher interest than being returned to me, and we both benefit. However, there is a conditional requirement that the bank must follow.  Otherwise the banks would not have any money at hand to return my million to me if, a week later, I write a million dollar check to a realty company to buy a building.   The bank must retain about one fifth of my deposit, or $200,000.  But now they can grant an $800,000
loan to the President of Expansive Manufacturing to invest in her plant who deposits it in her company's bank, the Second Wealthy Bank."  Now three entities have shared my million dollars, not to mention to Original Wealthy Bank who held the million until it transferred to First Wealthy Bank to honor my deposit.

Here is how the progression continues through 20 cycles of lending at 20% margin:

 TABLE: NAME OF BANK LOAN DEPOSIT 80 PERCENT RE-LOADABLE

                                              APPARENT VALUE                      VALUE LOANED
First Wealthy Bank (Actual)$1,000,000.00                800,000.00
Second Wealthy                800,000.00                640,000.00
Third Wealthy                 640,000.00                512,000.00
Fourth Wealthy                512,000.00                409,600.00
Fifth Wealthy                 409,600.00                327,680.00
Sixth Wealthy                 327,680.00                262,144.00
Seventh Wealthy               262,144.00                209,715.20
Eighth Wealthy                209,715.20                167,772.16
Ninth Wealthy                 167,772.16                134,217.73
Tenth Wealthy                 134,217.73                107,374.18
Eleventh Wealthy              107,374.18                 85,899.34
Twelfth Wealthy                85,899.34                 68,719.47
Thirteenth Wealthy             68,719.47                 54,975.58
Fourteenth Wealthy             54,975.58                 43,980.46
Fifteenth Wealthy              43,980.46                 35,184.37
(etc to 20th Wealthy Bank)

TOTAL EXPANSION OF MONEY SUPPLY From $1,000,000 to $4,824,078.12

Since there are many other depositors, even though they have loaned out $800,000 of the million dollars plus interest they owe me, not  every depositor is going to want all their funds out at once. Therefore, there will be ample reserves to accommodate normal patterns of withdrawal in any given period of time.  This is why a "run" of anxious depositors wanting to pull their money from a bank is feared, and banks about to go into receivership suddenly close their doors without warning after the bank examiners come in to audit their suspicious bank accounts under cover of darkness.

However all banks can collectively achieve what individual banks can not.  All of the transactions descending from the original bank will most likely be entered into some other bank, who on the average is unlikely in any short period of time to be returning the same amount of money to First Wealthy Bank.  But the Federal Reserve Banking System (the Fed) covers the entire chain reaction in which any given deposit begins a cycle of loans, each cycle of which diminishes the actual funds being retained by 20 percent at each exchange.  Even so, the entire wealth of the banking system has been increased by a factor of five, i.e., by transforming my one million into a total of five million.   The Fed then controls the amount of money (power) available to the players by determining the amount of reserves available for the game.   It does this by changing the amount of allowable reserves available to the member banks, and by the interest it charges for member banks to cover their own loans from the Fed.

When the money supply contracts by order of the Fed reducing the 20% margin, the immediate response is a corresponding rise in interest rates which dampens the borrower's desire for money, but also enhances the profit of the banks for each loan made at the higher interest rates.  The Fed can also alter its open-market policies and adjust its discount rate to loans made to member banks which affects their ability to charge interest.  All of the above are human decisions, not nature's decisions.  If you truly follow this logic, you can understand why the whole game of the national debt is a terrible fraud.  The game exists as an abstraction (a deadly serious one) solely  to protect the value of the money (power) of the owners of this power game, the bankers and the members of their interlocking directorates and stockholders. [See Grider, op cit, 1987]

We have no further interest in the technical details of the management of the money supply, but in the potential of the use and abuse of its power by the power brokers and power mongers and their manipulation of the rules.  Money has been deemed to be the measure of personal power of those who own its symbolic power markers, which are currency, legal papers and other binding contracts, certificates and promissory notes of various kinds.
..
.
Federal Reserve Board:
the "Fed" is made up of member banks appointed in such a way as to make certain that the decisions are only made by those having vested their  own power in the process of banking and commerce.  There are 12 Districts made up of member banks with each district headed by a Federal Reserve Bank.  Each Fed bank is a corporation owned by the member banks associated with the reserve bank.

The President of the United States appoints a seven man Board of Governors for the Fed from the presidents of the member banks, each of whom serves for a 14 year term.  Such long terms insure stability of the policies and practices from congressional interference, thus freeing the Board's incumbents to collectively ignore the protestations of elected officials.  But there are other mechanism by which the power (money) supply is controlled, and that is the means by which the decision making is controlled.  Each member Federal Reserve Bank is managed by a Board of Directors that is made of the Presidents of local banks in major metropolitan areas. Six of the nine Directors of each of the 12 regional banks must be selected by other Federal Reserve regional banks with the remainder coming from significant commercial banks and occasionally local industry, legal and commercial leaders.  As somebody once said, "Incest is OK so long as you keep it in the family."

One need not be systems practitioner to recognize the tidy incestuous relationship that the power brokers have arranged to unsure that control will remain with them.  Further, the history of the Feds behavior suggests that when it wants to be a governmental entity, it claims the privilege until it is more convenient to function as a private entity, at which point it proclaims its authority to do so.  Countless law suits over the years have failed to de-stabilize this self serving characteristic.

The real power of the bank rises from its control over the money supply:
This in affects all aspects of American society.  The controlling mechanism is the 12 man Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC.) FOMC is made up of participants from the Boards of the member banks who have five votes. These votes rotate annually among the 12 Federal Reserve Districts. Then there are seven votes from the members of the Fed.'s Board of Governors.  FOMC meets from 10 to 12 times a year.    FOMC's decisions are approved by the Director of the Federal Reserve who controls the supply of the Fed.'s money.  The power of this one individual is enormous, and is not subject to overriding control by the electorate.

The Mystical Paradigm holds that money equals power.  In that context, note that there is no legislative control over the enormous power of this institution and the handful of men or manage it. However, notice how our societal myths are nurtured in our universities per the example of the highly regarded (by American business) Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Paul Samuelson in his widely marketed basic textbook:

  "[The Fed as a public agency] ...is directly responsible to Congress; and whenever conflict arises between
  its making a profit and the public interest, it acts according to the public interest without question.  Its
  member banks receive fixed and nominal dividends from it; but so profitable is the Fed by virtue of its
  legal privilege, that its dollars of profit above a certain level go entirely to the United States government.
  The Reserve authorities, meaning by this the regional and Washington officials, never think of its
  stockholders, the member commercial banks, as dictators of its actions, but instead act as a public body.
  (So the men on the Federal Open market Committee are not private citizens even though their paychecks do
  not come from the government.) "
  In the basic economics textbook:  Samuelson, Paul, 1976. Economics,  10th Edition, NY: McGraw-Hill Co,   p-293]

The Mystical Paradigm suggests that a claim of "conspiracy" is a fair accusation.  Any claims to the contrary are a predictable smoke screen consistent with any conspiracy.  The FOMC deliberates and votes in secret.  In event a District Reserve bank should elect a member of their Board to be President, but who is out of favor with the masters at the Fed in Washington, the Chairman of the Fed.'s Board can veto that choice.   If there is no conspiracy, why is there this need for the "government's" business be done in this secret and controlling  manner?  Why the severe controls to insure this corporate owned incestuous control over the decision makers?

The bank's assertion that it is not conspiratorial has been seriously challenged by many individuals, most notably for more than 50 years by Wright Patman's the Texas Congressman and populist.  He kept up his attacks until his death in the mid 1970s.  Others have continued his cause without success.  In a general commentary on the interlocking networks of industry, commerce and banks, Summer Rosin has compiled and edited a series of monographs by established thinkers and practitioners from the above fiscal domains.   These domains combine to create the character and quality of our national life. The gist of these monographs suggest the need for a new paradigm as one discovers the actions of the various contributors to our national condition, a condition which gives title to his book:

Rosin, Sumner 1975, Economic Power Failure: The Current American Crisis, NY: McGraw Hill Co

Banks participate unexamined and unchallenged in these industrial and commercial activities, as in any criminal conspiracy, because the public remains unconscious of the relevance of these activities to their Spiritual health. They accept the myth that they are beholden to this power structures and must always remain  mindful that they provide us our employment and, selectively speaking, the finer dimensions of our material way of life.   But in those mid-seventies there were even more critical books being written, e.,g,

Clarke, Thurston and Tigue, John J. Jr, 1975. Dirty Money: Swiss Banks, the Mafia, Money Laundering and White Collar Crime, (NY: Simon and Schuster

Hoffman, Abbie, 1987, Steal this Urine Test: Fighting Drug Hysteria in America, NY: Penguin Books

Klein, Naomi, 2007, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, NY: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, LLC
Comment: Highly Recommended.  This book should be required reading for every politician and candidate for public office.  A reading of this book with even a crude understanding of its implications, will reveal the nature of the plans that have occupied the priorities of the corporate right wing since before President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1961 warning to the United States about the dangers of the recently recognized "Military Industrial Complex." That was required at the time to win WWII.   It makes punishingly clear just what the Bush-Cheney psychopathic agenda has been for the past eight years, and how it is now directing the corporate right wing's efforts to prevail in the 2008 presidential election.  Eisenhower's warning has been entirely ignored with the disastrous political consequences that are the ruination of our nation today.  If you want to read a REAL horror story, one that makes Stephen King look like an amateur, read this book because this horror is factually real, authoritive in its documentation, immanent, and as of now, largely unrecognized for what it actually is and what it portends.  Therefore, this condition is NOT being adequately responded to. For access to a number of professional reviews of this international best seller beginning with Juan-Santos, go here:
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/reviews/juan-santos

  "Moral contempt for bankers and their power over others would endure across the centuries and into the
  present time, but the process of capital accumulation established its own justification.  The morality was
  exalted in the Protestant ethic of John Calvin; the mechanics were elaborated by the classical economists
  who accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism.  Bankers were assured that by doing what they had once
  been forbidden, they were actually doing good for all."
  [In- Greider, William, 1987, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, NY: Simon and Schuster), (p-172]

  "The awkward little secret of the American System was that modern recessions did not flow ineluctably
  from mysterious natural forces in the business cycle.  Recessions were induced by the federal government.
  In seven recessions since World War I the same transaction had preceded each contraction [of the economy]:
  the Federal Reserve's decision to force up the interest rates to an abnormal level" [p- 393]

  "The orderly world described in economics textbooks was thus inverted.  Economics taught that finance
  existed to facilitate business and commerce, that the real economy was the core of capitalism and that
  finance merely served it like a veil.  When money's value was given paramount priority, the order was
  turned upside down.   The diverse energies of the real economy, the vast aspirations of Americans
  generally, would now be suppressed in order to protect the interests of money." [p- 620]

  "Certain principles of money were not subject to alteration by the modern technocratic managers.  They
  might be ignored or forgotten for a time, but they could not be repealed.  One of these principles was the
  ancient biblical injunction against usury,  The particular definitions of usury had changed over the
  centuries, but the moral meaning had not.  Usury was present when lenders insisted on terms that were sure
  to ruin the borrowers."  [Greider, op cit, p 707]

When interest rates go up, every marginal business that is dependent on loans to stay in business collapses, including marginal banks.  Then there is a feeding frenzy among the power broker/mongers who gobble up liquid assets, real estate, family farms and a variety of small, medium and even large size businesses.  During the Reagan administration the power broker/mongers indulged themselves in such a feeding frenzy. Deregulation was legislated for numerous industries.

When the airlines were deregulated with the promise that competition would reduce the cost of air travel, the following actually happened:

(1) Small airlines were gobbled up by large airlines or collapsed;
(2) Service declined or was eliminated among secondary and tertiary airports;
(3) Price wars reduced prices only across main routes and raised them among other routes;
(4) Many airlines sacrificed services and adequate maintenance in order to cut their costs to compete in price wars;
(5) Current (as of this writing in the fall of 1993) estimates predict that only for mega-carriers will survive into next year.
[In 2005, major airlines are forced into bankruptcy, or force their employees to accept draconian cuts in wages and benefits or be fired]

As businesses are threatened, to save costs and  in order to preserve what power they can, the owners respond by firing those who helped them develop their business.  The 1980's were marked by massive stock wars and takeovers in the corporate community as the knife edge of high interest pushed many over the brink.  In addition, there was rampant criminal actions among the banking community resulting in the successive failure of numerous banks, beginning with small savings and loans and escalating to progressively larger banks. There were national scandals in the manipulation of corporate bonds, insider training and especially junk bonds.  The result was a massive additional debt of billions of dollars from the government having to pay for these losses.

These losses were of course paid by loans, both directly from the largest bank and from a variety of government bonds.  The massive interest that daily accrued from these loans was added to the debt minute by minute.  Under the carefully contrived rules of banking, the debt had to be paid for by the average working person, because "the law" is deliberately contrived by the power brokers to protect the power brokers and especially the power mongers.  "Brokers" and "mongers" are indistinguishable by law, because the line dividing them is obscure and is a matter of both the art of disguise, deception, and the extent of excesses.  All of this excess was attributed to the behavior of economic "law," when in fact, power broker/mongers exploit the civil law created by and for the convenience of corporations.

Greider documented that the role of the principal regulatory valve of the US economic system, the Federal Reserve System, was entirely contrived to preserve money for its owners, i.e., that the Federal Reserve is contrived to serve the power broker/mongers of America first and last, with only enough in the middle to preserve the mythology of "equal rights to compete."  He showed how its then chairman, Paul Volker, deliberately kept interest rates well in excess of 15% for many months while the above mentioned businesses were ruthlessly swept under.  That this was permitted without challenge demonstrates how well middle America had learned and accepted their mythology,  "always play fair by the rules."  The victims could not imagine, nor could most Americans imagine, such an evil thing any more than a victim parent could imagine that the partner they loved would steal their child.  This example from economics is only one brief allusion to the power of unconscious paradigms to mask public awareness that they had been made victims by rules intended to permit their ongoing exploitation.

Far from being an "evil" as Greider pointed out, inflation is the only hedge against economic exploitation the small person or business system has.  During inflation, debtors pay their debts with devalued money, but they get this benefit at the end and not at the beginning of the loan.  That is they pay mostly interest at the beginning (95%), and pay back the principal only at the end of the loan period. By this contrived rule of exponential interest, the lender's profit portion is not being hurt that much by inflation. Thus slow inflation permits a "balance of fairness."   All of these machination unfortunately occurs far beyond the consciousness or caring of even well educated persons.  Their daily preoccupation put them well beyond coping as they are swept along by undetected myths, symbols and paradigms. In this, they are also oblivious to the corruption of the society's Spiritual integrity that the process creates.

The Mystical Paradigm asserts that Spiritual corruption is marked by slavish devotion to enhance personal power and not to serve humankind.  Money is a veil which protects the ruling power's control from direct observation, and whose significance is hidden from the public even as it promotes a deeper political conflict among diverse classes of citizens.  To see who has power, follow the money.  See who controls the money, how they live, with what are they surrounded, and the artifacts of their businesses.  Compare the success of their excesses with the impact on the exploited and disempowered poor, and those minimally educated middle class whom the new laws on the official books of the United States freely endorse.  And what is the justification for this outrage?

  "Lifeboat ethics have a long heritage. The rich habitually confuse their own acquisition programs with the
  common good and numb whatever residual feelings of empathy they may retain with stern judgments
  about the depravity of life's losers.  Poverty is a sign of God's disfavor, a badge of laziness, a consequence
  of incontinence, or a natural disaster beyond all human control.  The world is divided into a few engines
  and many wagons."  [In: Barnet, Richard J., 1980,. The Lean Years: Politics in the Age of Scarcity, NY:
  Simon and Schuster  p--303]

Life is RAW! REALITY  Always Wins!!  Spiritual LAW will eventually prevail.  The unraveling of the massive criminal activities of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCC I), owned by Pakistanis and other Middle Easterners, began in 1990.  When the bank was finally fully revealed and shut down by 1992, the fallout of this necessary act only came after sufficient corruption led to international bankruptcies of otherwise legal, ethical and competent companies and individuals. Those banks and other financial institutions entered a self protective free for all, each screwing each other and the innocents in an attempt to disengage, disassociate and protect their own fiscal interests.  These actions were not the fruits of Spiritual integrity.

But lets set aside the adverse impact on abstract out-of-consciousness entities such as large national and international business. We know that most employees of BCCI were entirely innocent of any knowledge of its practice. Most were minor functionaries dutifully doing their job.  Lets set aside the principal operators and their lackeys who could have but did not stand for moral principle.  What about the innocents of the corrupt enterprise who did at some point discover, or have high suspicion that clear fraud was being practiced?  Let look at those functionaries, who like you, toil daily for their livelihood.  BCCI, like any other institution could only function through the combined efforts of people like your self, a loyal and devoted staff.  Think of the Milgram's conclusions (in Dialogue 5 on Power and Control) about the human capacity to surrender our souls to what we perceive to be legitimate authority.  But as a reward for this ignorant devotion, the BCCI staff shared equally in the collapse with the exploited victims outside the bank:

  "Perhaps the saddest victims of BCCI's failure were the bank's loyal, law abiding employees who lost both
  their jobs and their savings when the bank was shut down.  They found themselves in the same boat as
  other depositors, hoping that Sheik Zayed would make good on at least some of the bank's debts, but their
  employment prospects were not good, not with time spent at I on their resumes.  It was guilt by
  association."
  [In Potts, Mark,  Kochan, Nicholas, and Whittington, Ronert, 1992,  Dirty Money-BCCI: The Inside
  Story of the World's Sleaziest Bank,  Washington: National Press Books  p-249]

In our own society, whose members are largely oblivious to the interlocking effects of complex systems, here we find gentle grandfathers and grandmothers serving in the workforce.  In the armaments industry, after a day's work at manufacturing the murderous instruments of war, which rent the bodies of the innocent women and children of Bosnia-Hercegovina and elsewhere in the world, and without a thought to the consequences of their evil work, they leave and go to their own tranquil homes to bounce their grandchildren on their knees.  They watch with eyes that do not see while the television displays the results of their work, the torn bodies of innocents.  In their Spiritual oblivion, they read to their own children and grandchildren the myths of America, stories of justice, love and innocence.   Yet the Spiritual links of Reality connect all with all. Their actions will reach back to them as certain Karma and eventually touch their Souls, if not in this life, then in the next life.   

They administration blows the sacred trumpet of national defense, with which nobody would argue against.  But this is an industry whose products and services are sold without bias to end up murdering those on all sides in almost any conflict, to Colombian drug traffickers, Manuel Noriga, and a variety of US criminal conspiracies who launder their own moneys through a variety of legitimate US banks. [See Hoffman, 1987; for overall corporate conspiracy theory, see Marrs, Jim, 2001]  But only those Americans especially trained to apply systems paradigms to the variety of economic and business systems could possibly untangle these linkages.  How many such persons are there?  Not nearly enough who are high enough in positions of decision making responsibility, and who are also capable of communicating effectively to all America's disconnected, disinterested couch potatoes.  

The new paradigm requires a different view of the world and the place of humankind as a specie, and then the various genera of exploiters and power brokers who struggle within and exploiters of and benefactors of the living ecology.  Following is an example of a Spiritually relevant concern:

  "I think within economics we have become unduly impressed with what technology can do, and this is in
  part because most economists today have lived during a generation, or roughly the period since 1940, in
  which technological advances have been most impressive... And we began to think we could do anything
  with technology if we set our minds to it... but what we are now beginning to discover is that there are
  some very important problems facing us for which there are no quick and easy technological fixes."
  [In- Brown, Lester, 1975, "Ecological Economics," in: Rosin, Summer, (Ed), Economic Power Failure: The Current
  American Crisis, NY: McGraw Hill Co. pp-  253-254]

[Return to Jump Point where digression began  in the Introductory Dialogue, Part 3 of 3]

[Use back button to return to "usury" jump point in glossary]

3.  Business & Commerce

  "American business overwhelmingly adopted the Jeffersonian creed, transmuting it into an ideology with a
  strong antigovernment animus, a hostility toward other organized groups (especially labor unions), and an
  emphasis on 'rugged individualism,' meaning rugged individualism of business executives, sometimes
  heading organizations with tens or hundreds of thousands of employees.  Top critics of the Jeffersonian
  business ideology, such principles came to seem utterly inappropriate in a society increasingly dominated by
  huge corporations, and a threat not only to efficient operation of the economic system, but the liberty of the
  individual in the new age of industrialism." In: Silk, Leonard, & Silk, Mark, 1980,

After Sinclair, a generation later, Edward R. Murrow's dramatic footage brought to America's living rooms the same indictment of migrant farm workers in the CBS Series during the 1960s, Harvest of Shame.   A  review almost another generation later shows continuing gross economic exploitation of these emigrants with negligible improvements for many.   One of the first consumer oriented books on the exploitation of the urban poor [Caplovitz, David,  1967, The Poor Pay More, NY: Free Press, Paperback] presented his study of migrants in the ghetto environs of New York City.  He asserts, for example, that the intrinsic problems of the poor are exacerbated by the societal pressures that bring them into intentionally exploitive credit arrangements.  Such persons, living on the edge, poorly educated, handicapped in some cases by adequate English comprehension, are fearful of going afoul of the law and through such vulnerabilities they are selectively exploited.

But exploitation has been documented at a more insidious and comprehensive level, one which strikes at the American mythology of intrinsic fairness, a foundation upon which our democratic legacy and future depends. In the mid 1970s Ovid Demaris wrote a scathing summary of the domination of corporate power structures as they inflict their control on the American Public, a control that is largely invisible.  He focuses on Howard Hughes, ITT,  Robert Vesco, General Electric, Richard Nixon, Bebe Rebozo, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, Mudge Rose, Russell Long, Wilber Mills, the Chase Manhattan Bank and a vast interlocking network of corporate power.  How many well educated persons understand the implications of these linkages?  How many less can they correctly interpret these linkages in Spiritual terms?

This invisible network serves those vested enterprises hidden from public consciousness where they appear officially isolated, standing stark and separable as affirmation of the carefully manufactured and massaged myth of fair and free competition with survival of the fittest on a level playing field in a stadium of uncorrupted competition. But in fact a carefully managed core of their interlocking control mechanisms are designed to weave an invisible and unchangeable strangle hold on all levels of Power Broker/Monger activity throughout the United States and across the world.   He shows how this phantom structure was assembled beginning with the Duponts at the turn of
the Century and their crafting of the Laws of Delaware to define the legal establishment of the Corporation as an "individual" or "person" with all the rights and privileges thereof, and with permissive and non-accountable rules and practices which serves as an impenetrable barrier to preserve corporate Boards of Directors from personal accountability or law suit for any damages or corruption their engines of power might commit.

Foundations:
Demaris documents how their charitable foundations are admired and naively accepted by the public who are grateful for any largess spilled over into American communities. But in truth foundations are vast tax shelters crafted to cheat those same communities out of many times the funds that could become available by fair and equitable tax accountability. What do these presumably beneficent and altruistic foundations do for the Power Brokers under current laws?

  "1.  Keep control of wealth.
   2.  Keep for the donor many attributes of wealth by many means:
     a.   Designating administrative management of the foundation.
     b.   Control over its investments.
     c.   Appointing relatives as directors of foundations.
     d.   Foundations assets can be used to borrow money to buy other property that does not jeopardize its
          purposes.  Thus foundation funds can be c=enhanced from the capitalization of tax exemption.
   3.  The foundation can keep income in the family.
   4.  Family foundations can aid employees of the donors business.
   5.  Foundations may be the method of insuring funds will be available for use in new ventures in
       business.
   6.  We can avoid income from property while it is slowly being given to a foundation...
   7.  We can b=get the 20 percent charity deducting in other ways:
     a.   By giving away appreciated property [escaping tax realization on the gain].
     b.   We can give funds to a foundation to get charitable deductions currently in our most favorable tax
          year.
     c.   Very often local personal and real property taxes can be avoided.
     d.   We can avoid speculative profits.
     e.   We can give away valuable "frozen assets,"  white elephant estates, residences, valuable works of
          art..."  [p-285]
    [In-Ovid Demaris, 1975, Dirty Business: The Corporate-Political Money-Power Game, Harper Magazine Press]

 "[wealth] has the one kind of power that really counts in America: the power to pass on to others (the workers) the costs that others are trying to shift to you.  Yet the myths survive: education is an income leveler, hard work will be rewarded and can even make you rich, the poor are poor because they are lazy, widespread stock ownership has created a true 'people's capitalism,' regulatory agencies protect the public, antitrust laws are a barrier to excessive concentration of wealth, tax breaks to industry create more jobs, and high corporate profits mean more prosperity for everybody.  [and in regard to the pernicious myth of growth being good] This fixation on growth is the curse of modern society." [P-405, brackets added]

  "In the 1950s, the United Fruit Company was the most powerful economic and political force in Central
  America.  On its millions of acres of farmland, United Fruit division managers ruled over a caste ridden
  hierarchy with the unquestioned prerogatives of Asian satraps.  Pouring millions of dollars into the
  company coffers, shipping its products across the oceans in the largest fleet of private ships in the world,
  `El Pulpo' (The Octopus) was accustomed to winning its way by force, bribery, and political subversion,
  often in cooperation with the U.S. State Department and the CIA.  United Fruit was instrumental in (among
  other dirty tricks) the overthrow of the government of Guatemala and the Bay of Pigs invasion."
  [In-   McCann, Thomas P., 1976,. An American Company: The Tragedy of United Fruit, Henry Scammel (Ed), NY:
  Crown Publishers  (From a flyleaf of the cover)]

  "The strength of the idea of private enterprise lies in its terrifying simplicity.  It suggests that the totality of
  life can be reduced to one aspect--profits.  The businessman, as a private individual, may still be interested
  in other aspects of life--perhaps goodness, truth and beauty--but as a business man he concerns himself
  only with profits.  In this respect, the idea of private enterprise fits exactly into the idea of The Market,
  which... I called `the institutionalism of individualism and non-responsibility'.  Equally, it fits perfectly into
  the modern trend towards total quantification at the expense of the appreciation of qualitative differences;
  for private enterprise is not concerned with what it produces, but only what it gains from production."
[In   Schumacher, E.F., 1973.  Small Is Beautiful; Economics as If People Mattered, NY: Harper Torch Books,
 p- 240]

  "Game theory stakes out its territory distinctly as the mutual interaction of two or more players in a game.
  The action is always an interaction, at the very least in the sense that each player in his decisions in a game
  takes account of the strategies of the other players.  In an economic game, the interaction is usually directed
  at creating and dividing wealth."
  [In- McDonald, John, 1975,  The Game of Business: Modern Game Theory and   the Interactions of People in
  Economic Life. The Rules, Choices, Strategies in Important Business Events,   Garden City, NY: Doubleday
  and Company, Inc  p-1,
  NOTE: McDonald had been an editor of Fortune magazine for three decades when he wrote this book]

  "The corporate myth is of a disciplined, energetic, dedicated but well rewarded body of men serving under
  a dynamic leader.  He reflects the interests of its owners at whose will he serves.  His subordinates carry
  out his orders or transmit them to the minions below.  This is the organization.  its purpose like that of all
  businesses large or small is to make money by making things--to do well by doing good.  It does best when
  it serves the public interest.  This is accomplished through the market to which the corporation is wholly
  subordinate.  What the consumer most wants, the market, it prices and sales, best rewards.  Since the
  corporation is wholly in the service of the consumer, it cannot be in service to itself; being subject to the
  power of the public, it can not have any significant power of its own."
  [In -Galbraith, John Kenneth, 1977, The   Age of Uncertainty: a History of Economic ideas and Their Consequences,
  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co p-257]

Galbraith then itemizes the real facts about corporate America.  They manage prices which are contrary to the consumer's ability to cope or respond, it shapes consumer taste, and there is the manipulation of government authority, both directly (by bribing political incumbents) and indirectly (by intimidation of their lobbies).  He is sensitive to the nuances of power in the face of public apathy and neglect:

"Were it part of our everyday education and comment that the corporation is an instrument for the exercise
of power, that it belongs to the process by which we are governed, there would then be debate on how that power
is used and how it might be made subordinate to the public will and need.  This debate is avoided by propagating
the myth that the power does not exist. ...By pretending that the power is not present, we greatly reduce our
need to worry about its exercise." [Galbraith, op cit p-259]

  "(a) our largest corporations have such harmful market and nonmarket impacts; (b) state chartering laws,
  downgraded by the Delaware syndrome, have failed to restrain corporate abuses; © the governing ethos of
  our giant firms more resembles an autocracy than a democracy; (d) the officers of these corporations lack
  individual accountability for their actions; (e) corporate secrecy has overwhelmed the need for corporate
  disclosure; (f) these firms routinely violate the rights of employees; (g) widespread market concentration
  insulates most of our largest companies from the rigors of competition; (h) there is occurring an outbreak
  of corporate payoffs and other crimes; and (I) our chronic economic conditions amply demonstrate that
  these corporations are not performing well even by their own standards..."
  [In: Nader, Ralph, Green, Mark and Seligman, Joel, 1977, Taming the Giant Corporation, NY: W.A., Norton and Company  p-252]...

  "The victim of corporate crime is often unaware that he has been victimized.  The method of operation is
  subtle.  When a corporation mugs you it does it with something soft.  Corporate thefts and violence are
  disguised in a complex variety of ways.  The stratagems include price fixing, shoddy products in fancy
  packages, hazardous designs, false weights and measurements, food adulteration, circumvention of
  antipollution laws, inferior and dangerous drugs,... lethal toys, secret rebates and kickbacks, usury hidden
  in service charges, bid rigging, illegal labor practices, unsafe working conditions, industrial and
  commercial espionage, monopolistic mergers, insider stock deals, fraudulent misrepresentations,
  sophisticated boiler-room stock promotions, bribery on government contracts, conflicts of interest in
  corporate deals... and in appointments to government services and vice versa, excessive campaign
  contributions, gifts and bribes, and, in gangster fashion, the use of aliases in the form of subsidiaries and
  dummy corporations.  They hire supermouthpieces and loophole artists, along with advertising hucksters
  and suave public relations counselors, captive bureaucrats and politicians, lobbyists--when does petitioning
  become graft?--and erudite Ivy League vice-presidents to give class to the front office."  [In Demaris, op
  cit, P- 9]

But the legacy of such Spiritually impoverished values is enshrined in our nation's schools, the schools that shape the values of American business. An what has been said about that preeminent symbol and custodian of the legacy of business wisdom and corporate power?

  "...they were not worried too much about habits of thinking and questioning anything, but content to accept
  that the maximization of long range profit is why God hath created earth. They were living the shortest of
  all possible short-range strategies, the only object of which was to survive.

It is surprising how long the Business School has bee able to continue on in this way, miraculously untouched (or only lightly touched) by dissent and demonstrations; amid mounting proof that this way, the American way, was leading the nation into a heap of trouble.  The American way, that outworn hilariously   twisted and disfigured ethic which urges people to compete for the sake of competing, achieve for the sake of achieving, win for the sake of winning, and which honors him who does all this without pause or letup--the fastest, the richest, the smartest, the nicest, the sportiest, the artiest; because things wouldn't be the way they are unless God meant them to be.

  "The school doesn't want to hear the tumult outside.  That the American way of death is about to poison,
  shoot, and burn America.  That something is going on out there--a second reformation which is preaching
  love and togetherness; which doesn't want anything to do with the idea that man is the enemy of man, and
  which is repudiating the ultimate American belief, that in all things the individual is supreme."
  [In Cohen, Peter, 1973, The Gospel According to the Harvard Business School: The Education of America's
  Managerial Elite- The Case of Section B, NY: Doubleday and Co. p-328]

4. Politics and Governance

In the above ferment of power obsessed machinations, oiled by corporate and legal incest, and the array of evils summarized by Demaris, Greider and others, what does the critical literature say about the impact of all this on the governance of our society? We are taught that control over our society is vested in the myth that our society is: "By the people, of the people, and for the people."

But what is being observed about the "Government of the people, by the people and for the people."  The one which states on its coin of the realm,  "In God we trust."  How much power do our people (you and I) have? One measure of that power is measurable in documenting simply what the government is doing with its total power (legislative options and money via taxes) that validates our sacrifices in providing it.  How alert are the American people as to exactly in what ways our corporate owned and managed government is serving us?  As just one example, how many otherwise well educated and socially responsible Americans knew the implications for them of the following incident:

  "In December 1982, President Reagan flew down to Brazil with a $1.2 billion Christmas present from the
  U.S. taxpayers.  Actually the present wasn't for the Brazilians but for Citibank, Chase Manhattan, and the
  like, since they could collect from the Brazilians only if the U.S. Treasury gave them the money.  The
  handout came on top of a $3.8 billion rescue of U.S. Banks in Mexico, and there was talk of another $2
  billion for Mexico's Christmas stocking.  The Treasury Department was also pressing Congress to increase
  the U.S. contribution to the IMF [International Monetary Fund] by $8.4 billion to enable it to expand its
  lending to these countries so that they could pay back the banks.  Unlike European and Japanese central
  bankers, who were telling their banks to tighten lending procedures because there was no lender of last
  resort to bail them out, the `New Right' administration of Ronald Reagan was putting U.S. taxpayers in
  hock for the follies of U.S. banks.  (This was a government that came to power with a promise to get the
  government off the backs of the American people.) "
  [In- Penny Lernoux, 1984, In Banks We Trust: Bankers and Their Close Associates: The CIA, the
  Mafia, Drug Traders, Dictators, Politicians and the Vatican,NY: Anchor Press Doubleday. p-246]

How many Americans know the implications now? The reason for this "courage" of U.S. banks lending to risky third world ventures was six lines of law added to the Depository Institutions and Regulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980, in effect creating a bank bailout to save U.S. banks from failing foreign loans.  These six lines permitted the Fed to buy securities directly from foreign governments.  By means of this ruse, U.S. taxpayers are to bail out U.S. banks who were suffering defaults in loan (reckless or considered) made by the banks to these governments. The bailouts had the effect of fueling world wide inflation that would again cost the U.S. economy by having all banks paid off by paying foreign debts with devalued dollars.  This complexity is so far beyond the consciousness of the average American, most do not even want to deal even with the little of it that can be noted here.  Yet our lives suffer from the very abuse that flourishes because of widespread public ignorance and indifference.

In spite of the scale of such government-corporate collusion as these activities and the rapidly ballooning debt, Reagan was reelected over Michael Dukakis, Governor of Massachusetts in 1986, even in the face of already massive collapses of both foreign loans especially in Brazil and Mexico, and our savings and loan companies. Here is just one example of the hidden abuses of power that is possible for establishment power broker/mongers under current rules and public consciousness.  They freely use the same government they publicly condemn as their own power amplifier to manipulate the power of money which they use for their purposes in ways that are contrary to the interests of the people. But they attack the government publicly for its regulatory capacity and power to level the economic playing field, the so called entitlement programs. Socialism? For the corporations, yes. For the poor and disenfranchised, no.  In accordance with the Mystical Paradigm, such actions are a tripled affront:

  (1) The use of power to subjugate the power of third world (Wilderness Peoples) and emergent national
  powers is evil by producing destructive byproducts;
  (2) The use of power solely which advance one's own political power by acts of deception is evil because it
  promotes and protects evil producing actions; and
  (3) a willful betrayal and misrepresentation of United States' workers who yield up their personal power
  (via taxes) in order to have it served the national interests, not the vested interests of groups of power broker/mongers.

5.  Our National Soul:
The prior sections offered some indication of the abuses rampant in banking and in Corporate and commercial America.  These are also other raw abuses of power at cost to the quality of life of the mass of the American public.  But the quality of our life is grounded in the moral ethical trust of our actions, not in accordance with contrived "law", but in accordance with THE LAW.  Thus we have much to fear that:

  "...there are now hundreds of millions of men, women and children without money, without hope of
  making money for themselves or anyone else.  Abandonment of this population is no longer a practical
  survival strategy for the rich, because the costs of such a monumental human sacrifice are prohibitive...
  degrades the political and psychological basis of all human existence.  This devaluation process is already
  advanced. In the industrial West we often note that 'life is cheap' in the Orient or other exotic places... But
  the two world wars that decimated Europe and brought catastrophe to Asia were planned in the industrial
  capitals.  The bullets and bombs that caused 25 million casualties in the generation since World War II
  were aimed at poor countries, but were made in rich countries. [and in citing the failure of even feeble
  attempts to control the carnage he notes]  ...the effort to curb the 'Saturday night specials' habitually used to
  dispatch husbands, wives, schoolboys, taxi drivers, liquor store owners and bridge partners has been
  blocked by a powerful lobby that thrives on a similar set of beliefs [i.e., uncontrolled absolute rights and
  freedom]   Child abuse, a bureaucratic euphemism for the murder and mutilation of children by parents, has
  shown a dramatic interest in recent years.  ...Mounting street crime testifies to the process of devaluation of
  human life that is underway everywhere." [In Barnet, 1980 op cit, pp 303-304]

The role of government has been usurped by the power broker/mongers in America.  We have returned in a cycle of total corporate dominance at the turn of the century through the era of the rise of labor unions, the crash of wall street, the two world ward which produced a rich middle class, and the expansion of government support of massive public programs and the rise of the entitlement programs.   Now the cycle has reversed under twelve years of a Republican administration, in which even the  excesses of the Nixon years and the raw criminality of his assault on the integrity of government did not inspire the electorate to rise up in ethical outrage and "drive the rascals out."   In assessing the status of this trend during the Reagan years Piven and Cloward have stated:

  "When its several parts are considered together, the success of the corporate campaign is impressive, at
  least at first glance.  The groups who launched it know what they want; they are going about getting what
  they want forcefully and shrewdly; and they have formidable resources for propaganda and political
  organization, as illustrated by the stunning advertising and telephoning blitz mounted by the administration
  and a number of big corporations on the eve of the congressional vote on tax-cut legislation... Can they
  revive nineteenth century doctrine that economic activities are regulated by the laws of the market rather
  than the laws of the state and thus persuade people that the state is not the proper arbiter from which to
  seek solutions to their economic troubles?  More to the point, can they alter the structure of the state so as
  to make such a doctrine credible?
  [In: Piven, Frances F. and Cloward, Richard a., 1982, The New Class War: Reagan's Attack on the Welfare
   State and Its Consequences, NY: Pantheon Books.  p-134]

Of course the answer has emerged in the repudiation of the Reagan Bush policies in the 1992 election that brought Bill Clinton and restored the Democrats to power.  However, the threat remains and is regrouping, when one actor is revealed for what he is, then the assault takes on a fresh face.  Now it is focus is on the national debt. But my argument here is that the public who changed administrations did so from rank self-interest and not because they fully understood the status of our nation from a larger Spiritual Paradigm.  [In 1993] the Clinton democratic administration is focusing on government as the cause of all problems.  There is nary a word as to what is happened in the corporate closet.  But government is owned by the corporations.  Barlett and Steel consider that the U.S. Government regulations and body of "the law" is in fact a manual that has been written by the corporations (through their captive and manipulated congressmen.  This "law" amounts to a set of guidelines on how to do predatory business by using the government as a corporate extension.

  "Think of it as the United States Government Rule Book.  It is a system of rewards and penalties that
  influences business behavior, which in turn has a wide ranging impact on your daily life.  From the price
  you pay for a gallon of gasoline or quart of milk to the closing of a manufacturing plant and the elimination
  of your job.  From the number of peanuts in your favorite brand of peanut butter to the amount of money
  you will collect in unemployment benefits if you are laid off.  From whether the shirt or dress you are
  wearing is made in Fleetwood, Pennsylvania or Seoul, Korea, to whether the company you work for
  expands its production facilities in the United States, thereby creating jobs, or open new plants in Puerto
  Rico or Mexico instead.  From whether the grapes you eat are grown in California or Chile, to the amount
  of money you will receive in your pension check when you retire--or whether you will even receive a
  pension check.  From the amount of interest you earn on your passbook savings account to whether your
  weekly paycheck is cut when your employer sells out to a competitor."
  [In-  Barlett, Donald, L., and Steele, James E., 1992, America: What Went Wrong?  Kansas City: Andrew & McMeel,  p-10]