You might know Carolyn who has been walking with us. Here is her message whereby she asks my advice regarding the coming visit of her first grandchild.
Hi Bruno,
One thing I would like to pick your brains one if you do not mind is this: We are retired and therefore spend all our days with Jack who is the best companion we could wish for. Although not the best behaved dog in the world we can visit friends and he is always welcome and he is content to sit quietly under tables when we have long leisurely meals - so basically he suits us fine. However I am very concious that he is the centre of our attention and as such I have to accept spoilt. We are expecting our first grandchild in December and I want to do everything I can to prepare him for the influx of a tiny visitor that is bound to take attention from him. We did this successfully 30 odd years ago when we had our first baby with a 5 year old Samoyed who accepted and soon became devoted to the baby. But our grandchild is only going to visit us and I think this might be more difficult for Jack to accept. I am as confident as you can be that he would never intentionally hurt a baby but he is a 35kilos bulldozer. I had thought of buying a doll and nursing it and playing with it on the floor to get him used to the idea of not walking all over it!! The floor has always been "his territory" - that is where we play with him and have lots of cuddles etc. You will be pleased to hear he does not climb on the settee or bed, but we do role around the floor with him and it is a nightly game before bedtime.
Sorry for the garbled message - I hope you understand it. I don't want to wait until the little one visits us, and then decide we have a problem. Any thoughts on the doll idea?
Thanks and hope to see you soon
Carolyn
Hello Carolyn,
This is my advice regarding the visit of your first grandchild and how to prepare your dog for it.
1. According to me spoiling a dog is cruel. His parents never do it. No animal is ever spoiling her/his children.
Spoiling a dog is in most cases caused by our feeling of lack. The solution is to work at your personal development, to start listening to your true self, to stop sailing down the river called Denial, in order to reach an ever higher level of awareness. Your dog is showing you the way. He does not need your love. You are needing his love, or so you think. It will be my pleasure to help you find the right behaviour.
2. Find some neighbours, family or friends who have (small) children and introduce them to your dog. If your dog is showing any signs of aggression with them you need professional help.
3. If your dog is sleeping in your bedroom, place his bed outside that room and if need be put him on a lead and restrict him to another area.
4. You are absolutely right with your excellent idea about the doll. Walk around with the doll and speak to it as if it is your grandchild. When changing the nappy of the doll, always put the dog in sitSTAY or downSTAY. Let him sniff and watch the doll and praise him for being good.
5. Now this is important: USE DIFFERENT WORDS AND A DIFFERENT TONE OF VOICE, for the dog and the baby.
6. Dogs must not be allowed on furniture. Certainly not on furniture near the grandchild. Now is the time to change your behaviour if your dog was allowed on furniture.
7. Move the dog's bed around from one place to another and from one room to another, in order to teach him to STAY wherever you want him to stay.
8. Teach your dog to be alone. For instance leave him in a room, close the door and go back after 10 seconds, then after a few minutes etc... until he can stay alone for half an hour.
9. Stop all wrestling games, tug-of-war games and all games involving chasing with your dog. The floor is your territory. Not his. You will allow your grandchild to walk on the floor. Not your dog. If that is not clear for him he might challenge the child.
10. If you have not done it yet, start practicing the Bruno Dog Feeding Ritual. A grandchild will have to be fed several times a day. In order to avoid what we call "jealousy" from your dog, feed him also not twice a day but each time your grandchild will be fed. Feed him after the grandchild has been fed.
11. If you have several dog toys scattered all over your home, then that is big trouble. One of my basic rules is to NEVER leave any toys on the floor for the dog. These objects are not toys for the dog but PREYS and he considers the toys/preys to be his property. Everyone having an unstable dog has bought lots of toys for the spoiled dog. Many people do this because of the feeling of guilt, especially when they do not spend quality time with their dog or when they have not taught him to stay alone for a while.
Take not only all dog toys away, but also everything else a dog can consider as his prey like shoes, slippers, socks, etc...
Use only one toy when playing with your dog and hide the toy after the playful session. If the dog picks up anything from the floor, take it away from him and shout at the THING. NOT at the dog.
12. Start pulling the ears and the tail of the dog and praise him for letting you do it. Invite other adults and children to do this too under your supervision.
13. If possible ask for some bedsheets or unwashed clothes from the grandchild to be send to you. Let the dog smell them and praise him for it. Leave the sheets and clothes in the area where the grandchild will be.
14. When the grandchild arrives, put your dog on a leash and let him smell the child while keeping the leash in your hands. Leave the trailing leash on the dog for several days in order to enable you to correct the dog quickly when the need arrives.
15. Dogs like the smell of used nappies. Keep them away from the dog. Otherwise you will be in for a surprise.
Always willing to help.
Love
Bruno
WALK SUNDAY 04.09.2011
What we did last week was great.
Having looked at the weather forecast (las previsiones del tiempo) on the U3A-Val del Pop website, I saw that it will be hot this coming Sunday 04.09.2011.
For that reason I will start again from the small square Las Ocas in Jalón. I will be there at 19.30 sitting in a comfortable chair of bar Lluna Llunera till 20.30 and then I will take you over a different track in Jalon.
Follow me.
Un abrazo de Bruno
Monday, August 29, 2011
Saturday, August 27, 2011
No voice and walking
Several times I have been writing about walking with our dogs without uttering a word. I have compared it with a walking meditation.
No chattering about the weather or about what we have seen in the telebasura.
Instead of filling the space around us with words,take the time to listen to our soul and observe our dogs and the way they communicate with nature.
Carolyn has had the opportunity to practice that kind of walking for a week because she lost her voice. This is what she writes:
A little snippet that I hope will make you smile - I lost my voice completely last week and I mean completely - it was very interesting to note that when I went walking with Jack (our brown Labrador) he took no more/less notice of me than when I spoke commands, .A clap of hands or click of fingers achieved the same results as "come here - now - etc etc" So point taken.
Looking forward to walking with you again.
Regards
Carolyn
No chattering about the weather or about what we have seen in the telebasura.
Instead of filling the space around us with words,take the time to listen to our soul and observe our dogs and the way they communicate with nature.
Carolyn has had the opportunity to practice that kind of walking for a week because she lost her voice. This is what she writes:
A little snippet that I hope will make you smile - I lost my voice completely last week and I mean completely - it was very interesting to note that when I went walking with Jack (our brown Labrador) he took no more/less notice of me than when I spoke commands, .A clap of hands or click of fingers achieved the same results as "come here - now - etc etc" So point taken.
Looking forward to walking with you again.
Regards
Carolyn
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Free Lessons for dog walkers
I am starting with free lessons for dog caring people walking with me on Sundays. As I have received already 1.235.678 applications I will have to make a selection. Those who can send me the correct answer to the following question will be allowed access to my free lessons and nobody else.
The one million euro question is......who wrote the following:
Walking is about much more than giving your dog exercise, although exercise is the first and most important element in my three-part fulfillment formula and a big part of why we walk our dogs. To me, however, walking side by side is also the activity that forges the deepest kind of bond between human and dog. It is the primal core of that relationship.
In order to make things not too difficult for you I offer you my well-known multiple choice system.
Is Groucho Marx the author? Or...Angela Merkel? Nicolas Sarkozy? Bruno Goffin? Charlie Chaplin? Douglas Fairbanks? José Luis Zapatero? Cesar Millan? Tony Blair? Tom Boonen? Mother Theresa? Jurgen Van den Broeck? Jeni Oliva? Carlos Lara? or....Muhamed al Hawarri el Khadafi?
The first 700 in sending me the correct answer will win a free lesson with me in my free dog carers lessons for free dog walkers.
LUV
Bruno
The one million euro question is......who wrote the following:
Walking is about much more than giving your dog exercise, although exercise is the first and most important element in my three-part fulfillment formula and a big part of why we walk our dogs. To me, however, walking side by side is also the activity that forges the deepest kind of bond between human and dog. It is the primal core of that relationship.
In order to make things not too difficult for you I offer you my well-known multiple choice system.
Is Groucho Marx the author? Or...Angela Merkel? Nicolas Sarkozy? Bruno Goffin? Charlie Chaplin? Douglas Fairbanks? José Luis Zapatero? Cesar Millan? Tony Blair? Tom Boonen? Mother Theresa? Jurgen Van den Broeck? Jeni Oliva? Carlos Lara? or....Muhamed al Hawarri el Khadafi?
The first 700 in sending me the correct answer will win a free lesson with me in my free dog carers lessons for free dog walkers.
LUV
Bruno
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Arthur Schopenhauer
In the revelation of any truth, there are three stages. In the first it is
ridiculed. In the second it is resisted and in the third it is considered
self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Lessons for dog carers
The little black dog
some of you have met during a walk has stayed with us for another week. His Spanish name "Sino" means, "Het Lot" in Flemish, "le Destin" in French, "Schicksal" in German and "Fate" in English.
For me his staying with us turned out to be a very nice week.
Our cat did not agree and kept her distance from Sino.
This 9 months old dog is an athlete filled with enough energy to keep on running, sniffing and jumping for a long time. Taking that into account I walked him three times a day, sometimes even at midday.
It was nice to see how my two dogs treated him in a different way. My male Labrador gave him no choice with clear communication: a loud bark and a show of teeth was enough to keep the young dog at bay. But my female Labrador was "nice" to him with the result that he kept on harassing her until I intervened. For that I used two things. Outside, for instance while breakfasting underneath our Algarroba tree, I would attach one end of a rope to his collar and the other end to the carob tree. Inside our home I would put him in his bench. Each time the result was immediate: he calmed down.
If he was rough I was rough with him too. Nevertheless he preferred to come and lie next to my feet when I was working on the computer.
Walking in the woods around our "chabola" was paradise for him after the life in an urbanization. I never waited for him and I never had to call him. He always paid attention to me.
Teaching him the Sit, Stay, Come during the feeding ritual was a piece of cake (so to speak).
However I can fully understand that such a young and energetic dog can pose a problem for elderly "nice" people.
If you are over seventy and thinking about adopting a young dog, it might be a good idea to ask me for advice first.
Free dog(carers)training sessions.
Soon the temperatures will drop and I will be able to accompany you once more during our walks/caminatas.
In addition to that I am offering my walking friends something else for free.
In september I will start with free dog CARERS training sessions for the members of my Sunday morning walking group. When I told Beatrice about my idea she threatened to call the Guardia Civil and have me imprisoned. When I told a few Spanish friends I could see it in their eyes: they really think that I am now definitely raving mad.
This is my proposal.
1. I invite friends who are willing to host the free weekly sessions in their garden to get in touch with me. If you know of any other place where we can meet, let me know.
2. I look forward to working with small groups of friends.
3. I look forward to working with friends who confirm they are willing to learn.
4. I look forward to working with friends who confirm they will attend my sessions for a minimum of six months, this being the equivalent of at least 24 consecutive sessions.
5. I look forward to working with friends who are willing to learn from their dogs.
6. I look forward to working with friends who are willing to have a close look at the River called "Denial".
7. I look forward to working with friends who will tell me I am making them feel stupid.
8. Do you remember what I wrote about serving and helping (in May 2011) on this blog? If you remember you will know I am looking forward to work with you because I know that I will learn from you.
Most of the time this blog is a one way street. This time I am really looking forward to your proposals, your ideas, your questions and your suggestions.
Looking at the weather forecast on the U3A website I see that temperatures will be lower during the weekend. What I am going to do this coming Sunday 28.08.2011 is this: At 19.30 I will go to the bar Lluna Llunera (on the placeta de Las Ocas) in Jalon, where I will wait till 20.30. Then I will leave for a short walk. If you want to come along for a chat only that is ok. If you want to accompany me during the short walk, bring along una linterna / a torch.
Un abrazo de Bruno, el encantador de perros y adiestrador de seres humanos
some of you have met during a walk has stayed with us for another week. His Spanish name "Sino" means, "Het Lot" in Flemish, "le Destin" in French, "Schicksal" in German and "Fate" in English.
For me his staying with us turned out to be a very nice week.
Our cat did not agree and kept her distance from Sino.
This 9 months old dog is an athlete filled with enough energy to keep on running, sniffing and jumping for a long time. Taking that into account I walked him three times a day, sometimes even at midday.
It was nice to see how my two dogs treated him in a different way. My male Labrador gave him no choice with clear communication: a loud bark and a show of teeth was enough to keep the young dog at bay. But my female Labrador was "nice" to him with the result that he kept on harassing her until I intervened. For that I used two things. Outside, for instance while breakfasting underneath our Algarroba tree, I would attach one end of a rope to his collar and the other end to the carob tree. Inside our home I would put him in his bench. Each time the result was immediate: he calmed down.
If he was rough I was rough with him too. Nevertheless he preferred to come and lie next to my feet when I was working on the computer.
Walking in the woods around our "chabola" was paradise for him after the life in an urbanization. I never waited for him and I never had to call him. He always paid attention to me.
Teaching him the Sit, Stay, Come during the feeding ritual was a piece of cake (so to speak).
However I can fully understand that such a young and energetic dog can pose a problem for elderly "nice" people.
If you are over seventy and thinking about adopting a young dog, it might be a good idea to ask me for advice first.
Free dog(carers)training sessions.
Soon the temperatures will drop and I will be able to accompany you once more during our walks/caminatas.
In addition to that I am offering my walking friends something else for free.
In september I will start with free dog CARERS training sessions for the members of my Sunday morning walking group. When I told Beatrice about my idea she threatened to call the Guardia Civil and have me imprisoned. When I told a few Spanish friends I could see it in their eyes: they really think that I am now definitely raving mad.
This is my proposal.
1. I invite friends who are willing to host the free weekly sessions in their garden to get in touch with me. If you know of any other place where we can meet, let me know.
2. I look forward to working with small groups of friends.
3. I look forward to working with friends who confirm they are willing to learn.
4. I look forward to working with friends who confirm they will attend my sessions for a minimum of six months, this being the equivalent of at least 24 consecutive sessions.
5. I look forward to working with friends who are willing to learn from their dogs.
6. I look forward to working with friends who are willing to have a close look at the River called "Denial".
7. I look forward to working with friends who will tell me I am making them feel stupid.
8. Do you remember what I wrote about serving and helping (in May 2011) on this blog? If you remember you will know I am looking forward to work with you because I know that I will learn from you.
Most of the time this blog is a one way street. This time I am really looking forward to your proposals, your ideas, your questions and your suggestions.
Looking at the weather forecast on the U3A website I see that temperatures will be lower during the weekend. What I am going to do this coming Sunday 28.08.2011 is this: At 19.30 I will go to the bar Lluna Llunera (on the placeta de Las Ocas) in Jalon, where I will wait till 20.30. Then I will leave for a short walk. If you want to come along for a chat only that is ok. If you want to accompany me during the short walk, bring along una linterna / a torch.
Un abrazo de Bruno, el encantador de perros y adiestrador de seres humanos
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Breaking the Spell of Money
Any objections?
Yes I know you might think it has nothing to do with dogs. I think it does.
Yes it is a long article. Switch off the mad box (la caja tonta) for once and read.
A brother from the MKP-UK community sent me the fhe link to the article "Breaking the Spell of Money", written by Scott Russell Sander and published on www.orionmagazine.org.
Take your time and read
Breaking the Spell of Money
ANYONE WHO PAYS ATTENTION to the state of the planet realizes that all natural systems on which human life depends are deteriorating, and they are doing so largely because of human actions. By natural systems I mean the topsoil, forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, oceans, atmosphere, the host of other species, and the cycles that bind them together into a living whole. By human life I mean not merely the survival of our species, but the quality of our existence, the prospects for adequate food, shelter, work, education, health care, conviviality, intellectual endeavor, and spiritual growth for our kind far into the future.
So the crucial question is, why? Why are those of us in the richest countries acting in such a way as to undermine the conditions on which our own lives, the lives of other species, and the lives of future generations depend? And why are we so intent on coaxing or coercing the poorer countries to follow our example? There are many possible answers, of course, from human shortsightedness to selfish genes to otherworldly religions to consumerism to global corporations. I would like to focus on a different one—our confusion of financial wealth with real wealth.
To grasp the impact of that confusion, think of someone you love. Then recall that if you were to reduce a human body to its elements—oxygen, carbon, phosphorus, copper, sulfur, potassium, magnesium, iodine, and so on—you would end up with a few dollars’ worth of raw materials. But even with inflation, and allowing for the obesity epidemic, this person you cherish still would not fetch as much as ten dollars on the commodities market. A child would fetch less, roughly in proportion to body weight.
Such calculations seem absurd, of course, because none of us would consider dismantling a human being for any amount of money, least of all someone we love. Nor would we entertain the milder suggestion of lopping off someone’s arm or leg and putting it up for sale, even if the limb belonged to our worst enemy. Our objection would not be overcome by the assurance that the person still has another arm, another leg, and seems to be getting along just fine. We’d be likely to say that it’s not acceptable under any circumstances to treat a person as a commodity, worth so much per pound.
And yet this is how our economy treats every portion of the natural world—as a commodity for sale, subject to damage or destruction if enough money can be made from the transaction. Nothing in nature has been spared—not forests, grasslands, wetlands, mountains, rivers, oceans, atmosphere, nor any of the creatures that dwell therein. Nor have human beings been spared. Through its routine practices, this economy subjects people to shoddy products, unsafe working conditions, medical scams, poisoned air and water, propaganda dressed up as journalism, and countless other assaults, all in pursuit of profits.
When tobacco or pharmaceutical companies suppress research that shows their products are killing people, they may not single out particular human beings for execution, yet they deliberately sentence a large number of strangers to premature death. Likewise, when banks launder drug money, when the insurance industry opposes public health care, when the auto industry lobbies against higher fuel-efficiency standards, when arms manufacturers fight any restraint on the trade in guns, when agribusiness opposes limits on the spraying of poisons, when electric utilities evade regulations that would clean up smoke from power plants, when chambers of commerce lobby against efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they are just as surely condemning vast numbers of people to illness, injury, and death.
THE ECONOMIST MILTON FRIEDMAN stated flatly that “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” The second half of Friedman’s sentence would place a curb on the first half only in a universe where enterprises motivated entirely by greed never engaged in deception or fraud. This may have seemed like a possibility in the rarefied atmosphere of the Chicago School of Economics, where Friedman held sway and helped to shape the free-market ideology that has dominated American society in recent decades. But in the world where the rest of us live, deception and fraud have been commonplace among corporate giants, from Enron to Exxon, from United Fruit to Union Carbide. Consider a short list of recent malefactors: Halliburton, Philip Morris, WorldCom, Wachovia, Arthur Andersen, Adelphia, Blackwater, Monsanto, Massey Energy, Tyco, HealthSouth, Wal-Mart, Global Crossing, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Countrywide Financial, AIG, and BP. These companies, and legions of others, have cooked the account books, misrepresented their financial condition with end-of-quarter window dressing, abused their employees, cheated their investors, sold lethal products, violated safety regulations, lied, bribed, swindled, or otherwise refused to stay within “the rules of the game.”
In our country, when the rules become a nuisance or do not sufficiently favor their interests, big companies purchase enough support in the White House or Congress or regulatory agencies to have the rules revised or abolished. Examples of this abuse could be cited from all industries, but none are more egregious than those in finance. Until the mid-1980s, the U.S. financial sector never accounted for more than 16 percent of all corporate profits, but over the past decade it has averaged more than 41 percent, and it has done so while contributing only modestly to social needs, chiefly through local banks and credit unions, and while doing a great deal of harm, chiefly through the creation and trade of financial paper. Most of the economic advisors for President Obama, as for President Bush, have come straight from Wall Street, and, not surprisingly, they have shaped government policy to benefit the biggest Wall Street firms and the richest investors. The global economic meltdown was largely a result of such rigging of the system, which freed commercial and investment banks, trading companies, and rating agencies to gamble recklessly with other people’s money.
In spite of the worldwide suffering caused by this casino capitalism, the financial reform bill passed by Congress in the summer of 2010 does little to rein it in. The managers of hedge funds, for example, have kept their operations essentially free of oversight, while preserving the loophole that treats their earnings as capital gains, taxed at 15 percent, rather than as regular income, which would be taxed in the top bracket at 35 percent. In 2009, when the CEOs of the twenty-five largest American hedge funds split over $26 billion, this cozy arrangement cost the Treasury, and therefore the rest of us, several billion dollars in lost tax revenue. When President Obama urged Congress to close this tax loophole, the billionaire chairman of one hedge fund responded by comparing such a move with the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Now, why would a billionaire want more money, and why have some billionaires sought to increase their fortunes by purchasing television networks and newspapers, funding think tanks, hiring armies of lobbyists and propagandists, and setting up phony front groups, all to spread the gospel of no-holds-barred capitalism? You might say that such behavior is natural, because everybody wants more money. But consider: Suppose you keep a billion dollars under your mattress, where it will earn no income, and you set out to spend it; in order to burn through it all within an adult lifetime of, say, fifty years, you would have to spend $1.7 million per month, or $55,000 per day. If you took your billion dollars out from under the mattress and invested it in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds at current rates, you could spend $40 million per year, or $110,000 per day, forever, without touching your capital. It so happens that $110,000 is a bit more than twice the median household income in the United States. If you do the math, you will find that the twenty-five hedge fund managers who pulled in $26 billion last year claimed an income equivalent to roughly 500,000 households, or some 2 million people.
What are Rupert Murdoch, David and Charles Koch, Adolph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, and other billionaire advocates of unbridled capitalism after? They certainly are not worrying about sending their kids to college or paying their medical bills. Then what are they seeking? A psychiatrist might be better qualified to answer the question, but let me offer an amateur’s hunch, which arises from six decades of watching our legislatures, regulatory agencies, judiciary, public lands, mass media, and schools come under the influence, and often under the total control, of the richest Americans. What the free-enterprise billionaires are greedy for is not money but power, and not merely the power to take care of themselves and their families, which would be reasonable, but the power to have anything they want and do anything they want without limit, which is decidedly unreasonable. Anyone who has shared a house with a two-year-old or a fifteen-year-old has witnessed such a craving to fulfill every desire and throw off every constraint. Most children grow beyond this hankering for omnipotence. Those who carry the craving into adulthood may become sociopaths—incapable of sensing or caring for the needs of other people, indifferent to the harm they cause, reacting aggressively toward anyone or anything that blocks their will.
I’m not saying that all billionaires, or megamillionaires, are sociopaths. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett clearly aren’t, for example, for they are using their fortunes to serve the public good, including funding programs for those who dwell at the other end of the money spectrum. In June of 2010, Gates and Buffett invited the richest individuals and families in America to sign a pledge to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. As of this writing, fifty-seven have accepted the invitation, including Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York; Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder of Facebook; Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft; and Ted Turner, founder of CNN. Perhaps they have signed the pledge out of pure altruism. But I would like to believe they also understand that they themselves did not create their financial wealth, however skillful and hardworking they may be; they amassed their money by drawing on the efforts of countless people, living and dead; by drawing on public resources, such as schools and courts; by reaping the benefits of madcap bidding on the stock market; and by drawing on the natural resources of the planet. I would like to believe that, having derived their riches from the commons, they feel obliged to return a substantial portion of those riches for the benefit of the commons.
Whatever their motives, the signers of the Giving Pledge are following the example of Andrew Carnegie. Although he acquired his fortune by methods as ruthless as any employed by buccaneer capitalists today, having made his money, Carnegie gave it all away, except for a modest amount left to his family. We associate his name especially with the more than twenty-five hundred libraries he endowed, but he also funded many other public goods, including a university, a museum, and a foundation for promoting not free enterprise, but education and world peace. In an essay published in 1889 called “The Gospel of Wealth,” he argued that the concentration of great fortunes in the hands of a few was an inevitable result of capitalism, but also a dangerous one, because the resulting disparity between the haves and have-nots would cause social unrest. And so, he insisted, these great fortunes should be restored to society, either through philanthropy or through taxation.
In view of the current efforts, backed by many of the richest Americans, to abolish the estate tax, it is striking to read Carnegie’s view of the matter:
The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion.… Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.
That is not a passage you are likely to find cited by the Cato Institute, Free Enterprise Fund, Heritage Foundation, Club for Growth, or any of the other strident opponents of the federal estate tax, a tax that under current regulations affects only the richest 1 percent of Americans—the very citizens, by coincidence, who fund the Cato Institute, etc., etc.
Now let us return to pondering the richest of our fellow citizens who show no inclination to share their wealth, but rather seem intent on growing richer by hook or crook, regardless of the consequences for our democracy, the environment, or future generations. Unlike Andrew Carnegie, unlike Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, these individuals use their wealth only to increase their power, and use their power only to guard and increase their wealth, and so on, in an upward spiral toward infinity. Their success in this endeavor can be measured by the fact that the top 1 percent of earners now receives 24 percent of all income in the United States, the highest proportion since the eve of the Great Depression in 1929.
Giant corporations operate in a similar way, using their wealth to increase their power over markets and governments, and using their power to increase their wealth. When I say giant, I am not referring to retailers, banks, factories, or other firms that operate on a modest scale and in one or a few locations. I am referring to the behemoths of business. Of the one hundred largest economies in the world, more than half are multinational corporations. Exxon alone surpasses in revenues the economies of 180 nations. These gigantic empires, spanning the globe, answer to no electorate, move jobs and money about at will, keep much of their operations secret, and oppose any regulation that might cut into their profits. Thus, over the past several decades, Exxon has used its enormous might to oppose higher fuel-efficiency standards, to resist safety regulations that might have prevented the catastrophic oil spill in Prince William Sound, to push for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and to thwart legislation aimed at controlling carbon emissions. In doing so, the managers of Exxon have simply obeyed the logic of capitalism, which is to maximize profIts regardless of social and environmental costs. Through trade organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute and numerous front groups, Exxon, Shell, BP, and other energy titans have spent millions of dollars trying to persuade the public that the climate isn’t shifting dangerously, or if it is shifting then humans play no part in the change, or if humans do play a part then nothing can be done about it without stifling the economy.
“Saving the economy” is the slogan used to defend every sort of injustice and negligence, from defeating health-care legislation to ignoring the Clean Water Act to shunning the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. But should we save an economy in which the finance industry claims over 40 percent of all corporate profits and a single hedge fund manager claims an income equivalent to that of twenty thousand households? Should we save an economy in which the top 1 percent of earners rake in a quarter of all income? Should we embrace an economy in which one in ten households faces foreclosure, 44 million people live in poverty, and 51 million lack health insurance, an economy in which the unemployment rate for African Americans is above 17 percent and for all workers is nearly 10 percent? Should we defend an economy that even in a recession generates a GDP over $14 trillion, a quarter of the world’s total, and yet is supposedly unable to afford to reduce its carbon emissions? Should we serve an economy that represents less than 5 percent of Earth’s population and yet accounts for nearly half of world military spending? A reasonable person might conclude that such an economy is fatally flawed, and that the flaws will not be repaired by those who profit from them the most.
THE ACCUMULATION OF MONEY gives the richest individuals and corporations godlike power over the rest of us. Yet money itself has no intrinsic value; it is a medium of exchange, a token that we have tacitly agreed to recognize and swap for things that do possess intrinsic value, such as potatoes or poetry, salmon or surgery. Money is a symbolic tool, wholly dependent for its usefulness on an underlying social compact. It is paradoxical, therefore, that those who have benefited the most financially from the existence of this compact have been most aggressive in seeking to undermine it, by attacking unions, cooperatives, public education, independent media, social welfare programs, nonprofits that serve the poor, land-use planning, and every aspect of government that doesn’t directly serve the rich. For the social compact to hold, ordinary people must feel that they are participating in a common enterprise that benefits everyone fairly, and not a pyramid scheme designed to benefit a few at the very top. While the superrich often pretend to oppose government as an imposition on their freedom, they are usually great fans of government contracts, crop subsidies, oil depletion allowances, and other forms of corporate welfare, and even greater fans of military spending.
Among those who have grasped the link between U.S. militarism and the cult of money was Martin Luther King Jr. In a speech entitled “A Time to Break Silence,” delivered a year to the day before he was assassinated, King went against the counsel of his friends and advisors by denouncing the Vietnam War. Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, indeed like every U.S. military operation from the 1950s onward, the war in Vietnam was justified as an effort to promote freedom and democracy and to protect American security. What our military was actually protecting, King argued, were “the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.” For saying so, he was denounced as a communist or socialist by newspapers and self-proclaimed patriots nationwide, just as President Obama has been denounced as a socialist for proposing national health care.
The slur is an old one, going back to the late nineteenth century when movements to organize unions or end child labor in factories or secure votes for women were decried as socialist by the robber barons and their henchmen in politics and journalism. Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the labels communist and socialist have been used interchangeably by the superrich to condemn any cooperative efforts by citizens to secure basic rights or to serve common needs. These twin labels have been used to vilify the income tax, the estate tax, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, every major piece of environmental legislation, American participation in the UN, disarmament treaties, aid to the poor, humanitarian aid to other nations—any endeavor by government, in short, that might reduce the coffers or curb the power of those who sit atop the greatest heaps of capital.
That power is steadily increasing, as witness the Supreme Court’s decision in early 2010, by a 5-4 vote, in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, which holds that corporate funding of political broadcasts during elections cannot be limited. The majority based their argument on the twin claims, never mentioned in the Constitution, that corporations are entitled to be treated as persons under the law and that money is a form of speech, and therefore any constraint on spending by corporations to influence elections would be a denial of their right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. The decision means that our electoral process, already corrupted by big money, will fall even more under the sway of corporations and their innocuous-sounding front groups, such as “Citizens United.” The nearly unanimous view among the nation’s leading First Amendment scholars, voiced at a meeting in March of 2010, was that the case was wrongly decided. But the only five opinions that count are those of the judges in the majority, who were appointed to the Supreme Court by administrations that have benefited most handsomely from corporate financing.
MONEY DERIVES ITS MEANING from society, not from those who own the largest piles of it. Recognizing this fact is the first move toward liberating ourselves from the thrall of concentrated capital. We need to desanctify money, reminding ourselves that it is not a god ordained to rule over us, nor is it a natural force like gravity, which operates beyond our control. It is a human invention, like baseball or Monopoly, governed by rules that are subject to change and viable only so long as we agree to play the game. We need to see and to declare that the money game as it is currently played in America produces a few big winners, who thereby acquire tyrannical power over the rest of us as great as that of any dictator or monarch; that they are using this power to skew the game more and more in their favor; and that the net result of this money game is to degrade the real sources of our well-being.
It is just as important that we shake off the spell of consumerism. In 1955, a retailing analyst named Victor Lebow bluntly described what an ever-expanding capitalism would require of us: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. The economy needs things consumed, burned, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.” And so it has come to pass. Americans, by and large, have made consumption a way of life, and a prime source, if not of spiritual satisfaction, then of compensation for whatever else might be missing from our lives, such as meaningful work, intact families, high-quality schools, honest government, safe streets, a healthy environment, a nation at peace, leisure time, neighborliness, community engagement, and other fast-disappearing or entirely vanished boons.
Advertisers maintain the consumerist illusion by appealing to our every impulse, from lust and envy to love of family and nature. The estimates for annual spending on advertising in the U.S. hover around $500 billion. This is roughly the amount we spend annually on public education. While taxpayers complain about the cost of schools, they do not protest the cost of advertising, which inflates the price of everything we purchase, and which aims at persuading us to view the buying of stuff as the pathway to happiness. A current ad for Coke, showing a frosty bottle, actually uses the slogan “Open Happiness.” The promise is false, and all of us know it, yet we keep falling for the illusion. We can begin to free ourselves from that illusion by reducing our exposure to those media, such as commercial television and radio, that are primarily devoted to merchandising. We can laugh at advertising. We can distinguish between our needs, which are finite, and our wants, which are limitless. Beyond meeting our basic needs, money cannot give us any of the things that actually bring happiness—family, community, good health, good work, experience of art and nature, service to others, a sense of purpose, spiritual insight.
When we do spend money, so far as possible we should put it in the hands of our neighbors—local merchants, professionals, growers, craft workers, artists, chefs, and makers of useful things—and we should put as little as possible in the coffers of distant corporations and plutocrats, who know and care nothing about our communities. We should encourage efforts to restore local economies through small-scale manufacturing, sustainable agriculture and forestry, distributed energy generation, credit unions, public-access television and radio, nonprofits, and cooperatives. We should experiment with local currencies, as a number of cities across the U.S. have done. When possible, we should barter goods and services, avoiding the use of money altogether.
As a nation, we need to quit using the flow of money as the chief measure of our well-being. The U.S. Gross Domestic Product is the dollar value of our nation’s economic output in a given period, without regard to the purpose of that output. So the cost of cleaning up an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico adds to the GDP, as does an epidemic of cancer, a recall of salmonella-laced eggs, a bombing campaign in Afghanistan, lawsuits against Ponzi schemers, prison construction, and every other sort of ill. The GDP does not reflect work done at home without pay, volunteer work in the community, or mutual aid exchanged between neighbors. It counts junk food you buy on the highway but not food you grow in your backyard. It counts the child care you purchase but not the care you provide. If you lead a healthy life, you contribute little to the GDP through medical expenditures, but if you smoke, become addicted to drugs or alcohol, become dangerously obese, neglect your health in any way at all, you’re sure to boost the GDP. War also swells the GDP, but peacemaking does not. We need to devise measures of well-being that take into account the actual quality of life in our society, from the rate of incarceration (currently the highest in the world) to the rate of infant mortality (currently thirty-third in the world), from the condition of our soils and rivers and air to the safety of our streets.
One need not be an economist—as I am not—to see that our economic system is profoundly unjust in its distribution of benefits and damage, that it relies on violence toward people and planet, and that it is eroding the foundations of democracy. What should we do? Not as any sort of expert, but as a citizen, I say we need to get big money out of politics by publicly financing elections and strictly regulating lobbyists. We need to preserve the estate tax, for its abolition would lead to rule by an aristocracy of inherited wealth, just the sort of tyranny we threw off in our revolt against Britain. We need to defend the natural and cultural goods we share, such as the oceans and the internet, from those who seek to exploit the common wealth for their sole profit. We need to stop private-sector companies from dictating research agendas in our public universities. We need legislation that strips corporations of the legal status of persons. We need to restore the original definition of a corporation as an association granted temporary privileges for the purpose of carrying out some socially useful task, with charters that must be reviewed and renewed periodically by state legislatures. We need to enforce the anti-trust laws, breaking up giant corporations into units small enough to be answerable to democratic control. We need to require that the public airwaves, now used mainly to sell the products of global corporations, serve public interests.
To recover our democracy, relieve human suffering, and protect our planet, we need to do a great many things that may seem unlikely or impossible. But they seem so only if we define ourselves as isolated consumers rather than citizens, if we surrender our will and imagination to the masters of money. Over the next few generations, we will either create a civilization that treats all of its members compassionately and treats Earth respectfully, or we will sink into barbarism. Whatever the odds, I say we should work toward that just and ecologically wise civilization, with all our powers.
Scott Russell Sander
www.orionmagazine.org
Yes I know you might think it has nothing to do with dogs. I think it does.
Yes it is a long article. Switch off the mad box (la caja tonta) for once and read.
A brother from the MKP-UK community sent me the fhe link to the article "Breaking the Spell of Money", written by Scott Russell Sander and published on www.orionmagazine.org.
Take your time and read
Breaking the Spell of Money
ANYONE WHO PAYS ATTENTION to the state of the planet realizes that all natural systems on which human life depends are deteriorating, and they are doing so largely because of human actions. By natural systems I mean the topsoil, forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, lakes, oceans, atmosphere, the host of other species, and the cycles that bind them together into a living whole. By human life I mean not merely the survival of our species, but the quality of our existence, the prospects for adequate food, shelter, work, education, health care, conviviality, intellectual endeavor, and spiritual growth for our kind far into the future.
So the crucial question is, why? Why are those of us in the richest countries acting in such a way as to undermine the conditions on which our own lives, the lives of other species, and the lives of future generations depend? And why are we so intent on coaxing or coercing the poorer countries to follow our example? There are many possible answers, of course, from human shortsightedness to selfish genes to otherworldly religions to consumerism to global corporations. I would like to focus on a different one—our confusion of financial wealth with real wealth.
To grasp the impact of that confusion, think of someone you love. Then recall that if you were to reduce a human body to its elements—oxygen, carbon, phosphorus, copper, sulfur, potassium, magnesium, iodine, and so on—you would end up with a few dollars’ worth of raw materials. But even with inflation, and allowing for the obesity epidemic, this person you cherish still would not fetch as much as ten dollars on the commodities market. A child would fetch less, roughly in proportion to body weight.
Such calculations seem absurd, of course, because none of us would consider dismantling a human being for any amount of money, least of all someone we love. Nor would we entertain the milder suggestion of lopping off someone’s arm or leg and putting it up for sale, even if the limb belonged to our worst enemy. Our objection would not be overcome by the assurance that the person still has another arm, another leg, and seems to be getting along just fine. We’d be likely to say that it’s not acceptable under any circumstances to treat a person as a commodity, worth so much per pound.
And yet this is how our economy treats every portion of the natural world—as a commodity for sale, subject to damage or destruction if enough money can be made from the transaction. Nothing in nature has been spared—not forests, grasslands, wetlands, mountains, rivers, oceans, atmosphere, nor any of the creatures that dwell therein. Nor have human beings been spared. Through its routine practices, this economy subjects people to shoddy products, unsafe working conditions, medical scams, poisoned air and water, propaganda dressed up as journalism, and countless other assaults, all in pursuit of profits.
When tobacco or pharmaceutical companies suppress research that shows their products are killing people, they may not single out particular human beings for execution, yet they deliberately sentence a large number of strangers to premature death. Likewise, when banks launder drug money, when the insurance industry opposes public health care, when the auto industry lobbies against higher fuel-efficiency standards, when arms manufacturers fight any restraint on the trade in guns, when agribusiness opposes limits on the spraying of poisons, when electric utilities evade regulations that would clean up smoke from power plants, when chambers of commerce lobby against efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they are just as surely condemning vast numbers of people to illness, injury, and death.
THE ECONOMIST MILTON FRIEDMAN stated flatly that “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” The second half of Friedman’s sentence would place a curb on the first half only in a universe where enterprises motivated entirely by greed never engaged in deception or fraud. This may have seemed like a possibility in the rarefied atmosphere of the Chicago School of Economics, where Friedman held sway and helped to shape the free-market ideology that has dominated American society in recent decades. But in the world where the rest of us live, deception and fraud have been commonplace among corporate giants, from Enron to Exxon, from United Fruit to Union Carbide. Consider a short list of recent malefactors: Halliburton, Philip Morris, WorldCom, Wachovia, Arthur Andersen, Adelphia, Blackwater, Monsanto, Massey Energy, Tyco, HealthSouth, Wal-Mart, Global Crossing, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Countrywide Financial, AIG, and BP. These companies, and legions of others, have cooked the account books, misrepresented their financial condition with end-of-quarter window dressing, abused their employees, cheated their investors, sold lethal products, violated safety regulations, lied, bribed, swindled, or otherwise refused to stay within “the rules of the game.”
In our country, when the rules become a nuisance or do not sufficiently favor their interests, big companies purchase enough support in the White House or Congress or regulatory agencies to have the rules revised or abolished. Examples of this abuse could be cited from all industries, but none are more egregious than those in finance. Until the mid-1980s, the U.S. financial sector never accounted for more than 16 percent of all corporate profits, but over the past decade it has averaged more than 41 percent, and it has done so while contributing only modestly to social needs, chiefly through local banks and credit unions, and while doing a great deal of harm, chiefly through the creation and trade of financial paper. Most of the economic advisors for President Obama, as for President Bush, have come straight from Wall Street, and, not surprisingly, they have shaped government policy to benefit the biggest Wall Street firms and the richest investors. The global economic meltdown was largely a result of such rigging of the system, which freed commercial and investment banks, trading companies, and rating agencies to gamble recklessly with other people’s money.
In spite of the worldwide suffering caused by this casino capitalism, the financial reform bill passed by Congress in the summer of 2010 does little to rein it in. The managers of hedge funds, for example, have kept their operations essentially free of oversight, while preserving the loophole that treats their earnings as capital gains, taxed at 15 percent, rather than as regular income, which would be taxed in the top bracket at 35 percent. In 2009, when the CEOs of the twenty-five largest American hedge funds split over $26 billion, this cozy arrangement cost the Treasury, and therefore the rest of us, several billion dollars in lost tax revenue. When President Obama urged Congress to close this tax loophole, the billionaire chairman of one hedge fund responded by comparing such a move with the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Now, why would a billionaire want more money, and why have some billionaires sought to increase their fortunes by purchasing television networks and newspapers, funding think tanks, hiring armies of lobbyists and propagandists, and setting up phony front groups, all to spread the gospel of no-holds-barred capitalism? You might say that such behavior is natural, because everybody wants more money. But consider: Suppose you keep a billion dollars under your mattress, where it will earn no income, and you set out to spend it; in order to burn through it all within an adult lifetime of, say, fifty years, you would have to spend $1.7 million per month, or $55,000 per day. If you took your billion dollars out from under the mattress and invested it in long-term U.S. Treasury bonds at current rates, you could spend $40 million per year, or $110,000 per day, forever, without touching your capital. It so happens that $110,000 is a bit more than twice the median household income in the United States. If you do the math, you will find that the twenty-five hedge fund managers who pulled in $26 billion last year claimed an income equivalent to roughly 500,000 households, or some 2 million people.
What are Rupert Murdoch, David and Charles Koch, Adolph Coors, Richard Mellon Scaife, and other billionaire advocates of unbridled capitalism after? They certainly are not worrying about sending their kids to college or paying their medical bills. Then what are they seeking? A psychiatrist might be better qualified to answer the question, but let me offer an amateur’s hunch, which arises from six decades of watching our legislatures, regulatory agencies, judiciary, public lands, mass media, and schools come under the influence, and often under the total control, of the richest Americans. What the free-enterprise billionaires are greedy for is not money but power, and not merely the power to take care of themselves and their families, which would be reasonable, but the power to have anything they want and do anything they want without limit, which is decidedly unreasonable. Anyone who has shared a house with a two-year-old or a fifteen-year-old has witnessed such a craving to fulfill every desire and throw off every constraint. Most children grow beyond this hankering for omnipotence. Those who carry the craving into adulthood may become sociopaths—incapable of sensing or caring for the needs of other people, indifferent to the harm they cause, reacting aggressively toward anyone or anything that blocks their will.
I’m not saying that all billionaires, or megamillionaires, are sociopaths. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett clearly aren’t, for example, for they are using their fortunes to serve the public good, including funding programs for those who dwell at the other end of the money spectrum. In June of 2010, Gates and Buffett invited the richest individuals and families in America to sign a pledge to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. As of this writing, fifty-seven have accepted the invitation, including Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York; Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder of Facebook; Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft; and Ted Turner, founder of CNN. Perhaps they have signed the pledge out of pure altruism. But I would like to believe they also understand that they themselves did not create their financial wealth, however skillful and hardworking they may be; they amassed their money by drawing on the efforts of countless people, living and dead; by drawing on public resources, such as schools and courts; by reaping the benefits of madcap bidding on the stock market; and by drawing on the natural resources of the planet. I would like to believe that, having derived their riches from the commons, they feel obliged to return a substantial portion of those riches for the benefit of the commons.
Whatever their motives, the signers of the Giving Pledge are following the example of Andrew Carnegie. Although he acquired his fortune by methods as ruthless as any employed by buccaneer capitalists today, having made his money, Carnegie gave it all away, except for a modest amount left to his family. We associate his name especially with the more than twenty-five hundred libraries he endowed, but he also funded many other public goods, including a university, a museum, and a foundation for promoting not free enterprise, but education and world peace. In an essay published in 1889 called “The Gospel of Wealth,” he argued that the concentration of great fortunes in the hands of a few was an inevitable result of capitalism, but also a dangerous one, because the resulting disparity between the haves and have-nots would cause social unrest. And so, he insisted, these great fortunes should be restored to society, either through philanthropy or through taxation.
In view of the current efforts, backed by many of the richest Americans, to abolish the estate tax, it is striking to read Carnegie’s view of the matter:
The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growth of a salutary change in public opinion.… Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.
That is not a passage you are likely to find cited by the Cato Institute, Free Enterprise Fund, Heritage Foundation, Club for Growth, or any of the other strident opponents of the federal estate tax, a tax that under current regulations affects only the richest 1 percent of Americans—the very citizens, by coincidence, who fund the Cato Institute, etc., etc.
Now let us return to pondering the richest of our fellow citizens who show no inclination to share their wealth, but rather seem intent on growing richer by hook or crook, regardless of the consequences for our democracy, the environment, or future generations. Unlike Andrew Carnegie, unlike Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, these individuals use their wealth only to increase their power, and use their power only to guard and increase their wealth, and so on, in an upward spiral toward infinity. Their success in this endeavor can be measured by the fact that the top 1 percent of earners now receives 24 percent of all income in the United States, the highest proportion since the eve of the Great Depression in 1929.
Giant corporations operate in a similar way, using their wealth to increase their power over markets and governments, and using their power to increase their wealth. When I say giant, I am not referring to retailers, banks, factories, or other firms that operate on a modest scale and in one or a few locations. I am referring to the behemoths of business. Of the one hundred largest economies in the world, more than half are multinational corporations. Exxon alone surpasses in revenues the economies of 180 nations. These gigantic empires, spanning the globe, answer to no electorate, move jobs and money about at will, keep much of their operations secret, and oppose any regulation that might cut into their profits. Thus, over the past several decades, Exxon has used its enormous might to oppose higher fuel-efficiency standards, to resist safety regulations that might have prevented the catastrophic oil spill in Prince William Sound, to push for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and to thwart legislation aimed at controlling carbon emissions. In doing so, the managers of Exxon have simply obeyed the logic of capitalism, which is to maximize profIts regardless of social and environmental costs. Through trade organizations such as the American Petroleum Institute and numerous front groups, Exxon, Shell, BP, and other energy titans have spent millions of dollars trying to persuade the public that the climate isn’t shifting dangerously, or if it is shifting then humans play no part in the change, or if humans do play a part then nothing can be done about it without stifling the economy.
“Saving the economy” is the slogan used to defend every sort of injustice and negligence, from defeating health-care legislation to ignoring the Clean Water Act to shunning the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. But should we save an economy in which the finance industry claims over 40 percent of all corporate profits and a single hedge fund manager claims an income equivalent to that of twenty thousand households? Should we save an economy in which the top 1 percent of earners rake in a quarter of all income? Should we embrace an economy in which one in ten households faces foreclosure, 44 million people live in poverty, and 51 million lack health insurance, an economy in which the unemployment rate for African Americans is above 17 percent and for all workers is nearly 10 percent? Should we defend an economy that even in a recession generates a GDP over $14 trillion, a quarter of the world’s total, and yet is supposedly unable to afford to reduce its carbon emissions? Should we serve an economy that represents less than 5 percent of Earth’s population and yet accounts for nearly half of world military spending? A reasonable person might conclude that such an economy is fatally flawed, and that the flaws will not be repaired by those who profit from them the most.
THE ACCUMULATION OF MONEY gives the richest individuals and corporations godlike power over the rest of us. Yet money itself has no intrinsic value; it is a medium of exchange, a token that we have tacitly agreed to recognize and swap for things that do possess intrinsic value, such as potatoes or poetry, salmon or surgery. Money is a symbolic tool, wholly dependent for its usefulness on an underlying social compact. It is paradoxical, therefore, that those who have benefited the most financially from the existence of this compact have been most aggressive in seeking to undermine it, by attacking unions, cooperatives, public education, independent media, social welfare programs, nonprofits that serve the poor, land-use planning, and every aspect of government that doesn’t directly serve the rich. For the social compact to hold, ordinary people must feel that they are participating in a common enterprise that benefits everyone fairly, and not a pyramid scheme designed to benefit a few at the very top. While the superrich often pretend to oppose government as an imposition on their freedom, they are usually great fans of government contracts, crop subsidies, oil depletion allowances, and other forms of corporate welfare, and even greater fans of military spending.
Among those who have grasped the link between U.S. militarism and the cult of money was Martin Luther King Jr. In a speech entitled “A Time to Break Silence,” delivered a year to the day before he was assassinated, King went against the counsel of his friends and advisors by denouncing the Vietnam War. Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, indeed like every U.S. military operation from the 1950s onward, the war in Vietnam was justified as an effort to promote freedom and democracy and to protect American security. What our military was actually protecting, King argued, were “the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.” For saying so, he was denounced as a communist or socialist by newspapers and self-proclaimed patriots nationwide, just as President Obama has been denounced as a socialist for proposing national health care.
The slur is an old one, going back to the late nineteenth century when movements to organize unions or end child labor in factories or secure votes for women were decried as socialist by the robber barons and their henchmen in politics and journalism. Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the labels communist and socialist have been used interchangeably by the superrich to condemn any cooperative efforts by citizens to secure basic rights or to serve common needs. These twin labels have been used to vilify the income tax, the estate tax, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, every major piece of environmental legislation, American participation in the UN, disarmament treaties, aid to the poor, humanitarian aid to other nations—any endeavor by government, in short, that might reduce the coffers or curb the power of those who sit atop the greatest heaps of capital.
That power is steadily increasing, as witness the Supreme Court’s decision in early 2010, by a 5-4 vote, in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, which holds that corporate funding of political broadcasts during elections cannot be limited. The majority based their argument on the twin claims, never mentioned in the Constitution, that corporations are entitled to be treated as persons under the law and that money is a form of speech, and therefore any constraint on spending by corporations to influence elections would be a denial of their right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. The decision means that our electoral process, already corrupted by big money, will fall even more under the sway of corporations and their innocuous-sounding front groups, such as “Citizens United.” The nearly unanimous view among the nation’s leading First Amendment scholars, voiced at a meeting in March of 2010, was that the case was wrongly decided. But the only five opinions that count are those of the judges in the majority, who were appointed to the Supreme Court by administrations that have benefited most handsomely from corporate financing.
MONEY DERIVES ITS MEANING from society, not from those who own the largest piles of it. Recognizing this fact is the first move toward liberating ourselves from the thrall of concentrated capital. We need to desanctify money, reminding ourselves that it is not a god ordained to rule over us, nor is it a natural force like gravity, which operates beyond our control. It is a human invention, like baseball or Monopoly, governed by rules that are subject to change and viable only so long as we agree to play the game. We need to see and to declare that the money game as it is currently played in America produces a few big winners, who thereby acquire tyrannical power over the rest of us as great as that of any dictator or monarch; that they are using this power to skew the game more and more in their favor; and that the net result of this money game is to degrade the real sources of our well-being.
It is just as important that we shake off the spell of consumerism. In 1955, a retailing analyst named Victor Lebow bluntly described what an ever-expanding capitalism would require of us: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. The economy needs things consumed, burned, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.” And so it has come to pass. Americans, by and large, have made consumption a way of life, and a prime source, if not of spiritual satisfaction, then of compensation for whatever else might be missing from our lives, such as meaningful work, intact families, high-quality schools, honest government, safe streets, a healthy environment, a nation at peace, leisure time, neighborliness, community engagement, and other fast-disappearing or entirely vanished boons.
Advertisers maintain the consumerist illusion by appealing to our every impulse, from lust and envy to love of family and nature. The estimates for annual spending on advertising in the U.S. hover around $500 billion. This is roughly the amount we spend annually on public education. While taxpayers complain about the cost of schools, they do not protest the cost of advertising, which inflates the price of everything we purchase, and which aims at persuading us to view the buying of stuff as the pathway to happiness. A current ad for Coke, showing a frosty bottle, actually uses the slogan “Open Happiness.” The promise is false, and all of us know it, yet we keep falling for the illusion. We can begin to free ourselves from that illusion by reducing our exposure to those media, such as commercial television and radio, that are primarily devoted to merchandising. We can laugh at advertising. We can distinguish between our needs, which are finite, and our wants, which are limitless. Beyond meeting our basic needs, money cannot give us any of the things that actually bring happiness—family, community, good health, good work, experience of art and nature, service to others, a sense of purpose, spiritual insight.
When we do spend money, so far as possible we should put it in the hands of our neighbors—local merchants, professionals, growers, craft workers, artists, chefs, and makers of useful things—and we should put as little as possible in the coffers of distant corporations and plutocrats, who know and care nothing about our communities. We should encourage efforts to restore local economies through small-scale manufacturing, sustainable agriculture and forestry, distributed energy generation, credit unions, public-access television and radio, nonprofits, and cooperatives. We should experiment with local currencies, as a number of cities across the U.S. have done. When possible, we should barter goods and services, avoiding the use of money altogether.
As a nation, we need to quit using the flow of money as the chief measure of our well-being. The U.S. Gross Domestic Product is the dollar value of our nation’s economic output in a given period, without regard to the purpose of that output. So the cost of cleaning up an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico adds to the GDP, as does an epidemic of cancer, a recall of salmonella-laced eggs, a bombing campaign in Afghanistan, lawsuits against Ponzi schemers, prison construction, and every other sort of ill. The GDP does not reflect work done at home without pay, volunteer work in the community, or mutual aid exchanged between neighbors. It counts junk food you buy on the highway but not food you grow in your backyard. It counts the child care you purchase but not the care you provide. If you lead a healthy life, you contribute little to the GDP through medical expenditures, but if you smoke, become addicted to drugs or alcohol, become dangerously obese, neglect your health in any way at all, you’re sure to boost the GDP. War also swells the GDP, but peacemaking does not. We need to devise measures of well-being that take into account the actual quality of life in our society, from the rate of incarceration (currently the highest in the world) to the rate of infant mortality (currently thirty-third in the world), from the condition of our soils and rivers and air to the safety of our streets.
One need not be an economist—as I am not—to see that our economic system is profoundly unjust in its distribution of benefits and damage, that it relies on violence toward people and planet, and that it is eroding the foundations of democracy. What should we do? Not as any sort of expert, but as a citizen, I say we need to get big money out of politics by publicly financing elections and strictly regulating lobbyists. We need to preserve the estate tax, for its abolition would lead to rule by an aristocracy of inherited wealth, just the sort of tyranny we threw off in our revolt against Britain. We need to defend the natural and cultural goods we share, such as the oceans and the internet, from those who seek to exploit the common wealth for their sole profit. We need to stop private-sector companies from dictating research agendas in our public universities. We need legislation that strips corporations of the legal status of persons. We need to restore the original definition of a corporation as an association granted temporary privileges for the purpose of carrying out some socially useful task, with charters that must be reviewed and renewed periodically by state legislatures. We need to enforce the anti-trust laws, breaking up giant corporations into units small enough to be answerable to democratic control. We need to require that the public airwaves, now used mainly to sell the products of global corporations, serve public interests.
To recover our democracy, relieve human suffering, and protect our planet, we need to do a great many things that may seem unlikely or impossible. But they seem so only if we define ourselves as isolated consumers rather than citizens, if we surrender our will and imagination to the masters of money. Over the next few generations, we will either create a civilization that treats all of its members compassionately and treats Earth respectfully, or we will sink into barbarism. Whatever the odds, I say we should work toward that just and ecologically wise civilization, with all our powers.
Scott Russell Sander
www.orionmagazine.org
Monday, August 15, 2011
UK RIOTS
Africa to send troops, food parcels to UK as riots spread
ETHIOPIA. The African Union today adopted a unilateral resolution to deploy army troops and care packages to England as looting and violence spread from London to other major cities. Spokesperson Charity Khumalo said “We can no longer stand by while these savages tear themselves apart.”
The AU, meeting today in an emergency session to discuss the ongoing rioting in the UK, has declared that they will do “everything in their power to help bring civilisation to England”.
“It’s just so sad, you know?” said Khumalo, speaking from the organisation’s HQ in Addis Ababa. “Sitting here and watching them on TV while their society implodes. We cannot in good conscience remain idle and let it happen.”
The AU has announced a range of initiatives that Africans can get involved with to help alleviate the misery of the English.
“For instance, we have launched an ‘Adopt an English child’ programme,” Khumalo explained, showing journalists brochures featuring the faces of English kids. “If you donate a mere R50 a month, you can see to it that sweet little Johnny from Peckham receives a basic education, a pack of condoms and a pair of pimpin’ Nikes.”
Khumalo also said that the AU would be parachuting in dentists along with army troops as part of a ‘Feel better about yourselves, Brits!’ initiative.
“You can understand why they’re turning on each other,” the spokesperson told journalists. “You look in the mirror and you see teeth untouched by modern dentistry. It’s heartbreaking enough to make anyone put a brick through a Starbucks.”
The organisation also plans to air-drop care packages on major UK cities.
“Vegetables, mainly,” Khumalo confirmed. “We’re sending them vegetables and toothpaste.”
The AU’s flagship event, however, will be a star-studded rock concert to be held in Johannesburg, with all proceeds going towards the establishment of mobile libraries around the UK. Artists ranging from Mafikizolo to Steve Hofmeyr have pledged to perform at the show.
“As a humanitarian, it’s the least I can do,” Hofmeyr said yesterday. “I look at those photos of the adorable little beasts knifing each other in fights over looted X-Boxes and I want to hug them and give them a nice hot cup of Milo.”
Meanwhile, the week’s events have seen terrified South Africans in London and Manchester packing their bags for home.
“This country is going to the dogs, dude,” said Werner du Preez, a gap-year student from Johannesburg. “I’ve been offered a nice little two-bedroom place in Hillbrow where I can feel safe again.
(Copied from the website www.hayibo.com)
ETHIOPIA. The African Union today adopted a unilateral resolution to deploy army troops and care packages to England as looting and violence spread from London to other major cities. Spokesperson Charity Khumalo said “We can no longer stand by while these savages tear themselves apart.”
The AU, meeting today in an emergency session to discuss the ongoing rioting in the UK, has declared that they will do “everything in their power to help bring civilisation to England”.
“It’s just so sad, you know?” said Khumalo, speaking from the organisation’s HQ in Addis Ababa. “Sitting here and watching them on TV while their society implodes. We cannot in good conscience remain idle and let it happen.”
The AU has announced a range of initiatives that Africans can get involved with to help alleviate the misery of the English.
“For instance, we have launched an ‘Adopt an English child’ programme,” Khumalo explained, showing journalists brochures featuring the faces of English kids. “If you donate a mere R50 a month, you can see to it that sweet little Johnny from Peckham receives a basic education, a pack of condoms and a pair of pimpin’ Nikes.”
Khumalo also said that the AU would be parachuting in dentists along with army troops as part of a ‘Feel better about yourselves, Brits!’ initiative.
“You can understand why they’re turning on each other,” the spokesperson told journalists. “You look in the mirror and you see teeth untouched by modern dentistry. It’s heartbreaking enough to make anyone put a brick through a Starbucks.”
The organisation also plans to air-drop care packages on major UK cities.
“Vegetables, mainly,” Khumalo confirmed. “We’re sending them vegetables and toothpaste.”
The AU’s flagship event, however, will be a star-studded rock concert to be held in Johannesburg, with all proceeds going towards the establishment of mobile libraries around the UK. Artists ranging from Mafikizolo to Steve Hofmeyr have pledged to perform at the show.
“As a humanitarian, it’s the least I can do,” Hofmeyr said yesterday. “I look at those photos of the adorable little beasts knifing each other in fights over looted X-Boxes and I want to hug them and give them a nice hot cup of Milo.”
Meanwhile, the week’s events have seen terrified South Africans in London and Manchester packing their bags for home.
“This country is going to the dogs, dude,” said Werner du Preez, a gap-year student from Johannesburg. “I’ve been offered a nice little two-bedroom place in Hillbrow where I can feel safe again.
(Copied from the website www.hayibo.com)
The Lion and The Hunter
Responding to my letter Do Not Feed My Dog, Muriel wrote me the following:
Hello Bruno, No, I don't like anyone else to feed my dog that is strangers. At the moment I am trying to make him slightly less attached to me so my daughter or son in law give him his proper food in the evening . I'm not perfect - he sometimes gets a bit of plain biscuit from me!l Muriel
Nobody is perfect Muriel, except the Universe.
According to me Mother Nature (the expression of the Universe on our planet) is always right, is always perfect, because she never makes mistakes.
Unspoiled children of Mother Nature, like for instance canines, are according to me also perfect. A dog is a dog. (S)he cannot be anything else but a dog. Which means (s)he cannot be right or wrong. (S)he simply IS.
Traumatized animals cannot be found living in the complete freedom offered to them by Mother Nature.
On the other hand, millions of unstable animals with traumas can be found while living with humans.
Strange you should say this about making your dog slightly less attached to you by inviting your daughter or son in law to give him food, while you are then giving him a biscuit.
Now and then.
What a beautiful human way of thinking this is. But, according to me, it has nothing to do with correctly understanding your dog.
Do you think a canine pack leader wants the members of his pack to be slightly less attached to him?
For what purpose?
Will the harmony in the pack become better?
Will the pack hunt more efficiently?
Will the pack members respect their leader more?
Will they pay more attention to him?
Will they feel more secure?
Will they trust him more?
Then there is the giving of the biscuit!!
Do you assume any canine pack leader will ever distribute biscuits in his life?
Do you think he will bribe members of his pack by offering them a biscuit?
Do you think his charisma, his presence, his calm assertive energy, his sense of leadership will increase if he does this?
Allow me to quote a magnificent African proverb for you. It was a present given to me by a wise black MKP brother from South Africa.
"Until the lion has his own storyteller, the hunter will always be the hero".
I see myself as a teacher of human beings and when teaching, I am translating what the dogs tell me. When I translate for clients, what their dogs are telling me it is usually the opposite of what the humans have assumed.
So I will now slightly adapt the African proverb in order to give it a canine "turn".
"Until the dog has an interpreter like me, the human will always assume (s)he is right and the dog is wrong."
The beauty of learning how to understand our dogs correctly is that they offer us the means to start understanding our own behaviour.
That is why I call dogs my teachers.
Dogs are showing us how we can live without lying, without blaming, without moaning, without criticising and without worrying.
I am not the only one to write about the fact that many people are not willing to think and feel like that. About the fact that they are sailing along the river called Denial. I fully understand and accept that, for I was sailing down the same river in the same boat until I learned how to listen to my feelings and how to work with my shadow.
I quote from the book titled "Be the pack leader" by Cesar Millan, page 210:
"Psychologists share an inside joke.
D.E.N.I.A.L, they say, stands for Don't Even Notice I Am Lying.
Human beings are the only animals who are happily lied to by our own minds about what is actually happening around us.....But we are also the only species with the access to consciously CHANGE our mental or emotional states."
More and more dog caring people are beginning to think and feel like that. By correctly understanding the behaviour of their dogs, they start understanding their own behaviour and the behaviour of their fellow human beings. This leads to more acceptance, to more solidarity and more empathy and honesty in our relationships.
Refering to what scientists working in the field of quantum physics have discovered, Cesar Millan writes:
"What does any of this have to do with dog psychology and becoming a better pack leader? It means that you, with your more powerful consciousness, can do something your dog cannot. You have the ability to control your reality - and with it, the energy you project - in ways that you probably do not even think possible......If you can positively project the intention you desire through real strength and honesty, your dog will instantly react to that calm-assertive energy."
Thank you Muriel for inspiring me. Your lovely message triggered something of in my brain, transmitted my interpretation of what you wrote to my fingers and look, here is the result.
Keep on writing.
LOVE
Bruno
Hello Bruno, No, I don't like anyone else to feed my dog that is strangers. At the moment I am trying to make him slightly less attached to me so my daughter or son in law give him his proper food in the evening . I'm not perfect - he sometimes gets a bit of plain biscuit from me!l Muriel
Nobody is perfect Muriel, except the Universe.
According to me Mother Nature (the expression of the Universe on our planet) is always right, is always perfect, because she never makes mistakes.
Unspoiled children of Mother Nature, like for instance canines, are according to me also perfect. A dog is a dog. (S)he cannot be anything else but a dog. Which means (s)he cannot be right or wrong. (S)he simply IS.
Traumatized animals cannot be found living in the complete freedom offered to them by Mother Nature.
On the other hand, millions of unstable animals with traumas can be found while living with humans.
Strange you should say this about making your dog slightly less attached to you by inviting your daughter or son in law to give him food, while you are then giving him a biscuit.
Now and then.
What a beautiful human way of thinking this is. But, according to me, it has nothing to do with correctly understanding your dog.
Do you think a canine pack leader wants the members of his pack to be slightly less attached to him?
For what purpose?
Will the harmony in the pack become better?
Will the pack hunt more efficiently?
Will the pack members respect their leader more?
Will they pay more attention to him?
Will they feel more secure?
Will they trust him more?
Then there is the giving of the biscuit!!
Do you assume any canine pack leader will ever distribute biscuits in his life?
Do you think he will bribe members of his pack by offering them a biscuit?
Do you think his charisma, his presence, his calm assertive energy, his sense of leadership will increase if he does this?
Allow me to quote a magnificent African proverb for you. It was a present given to me by a wise black MKP brother from South Africa.
"Until the lion has his own storyteller, the hunter will always be the hero".
I see myself as a teacher of human beings and when teaching, I am translating what the dogs tell me. When I translate for clients, what their dogs are telling me it is usually the opposite of what the humans have assumed.
So I will now slightly adapt the African proverb in order to give it a canine "turn".
"Until the dog has an interpreter like me, the human will always assume (s)he is right and the dog is wrong."
The beauty of learning how to understand our dogs correctly is that they offer us the means to start understanding our own behaviour.
That is why I call dogs my teachers.
Dogs are showing us how we can live without lying, without blaming, without moaning, without criticising and without worrying.
I am not the only one to write about the fact that many people are not willing to think and feel like that. About the fact that they are sailing along the river called Denial. I fully understand and accept that, for I was sailing down the same river in the same boat until I learned how to listen to my feelings and how to work with my shadow.
I quote from the book titled "Be the pack leader" by Cesar Millan, page 210:
"Psychologists share an inside joke.
D.E.N.I.A.L, they say, stands for Don't Even Notice I Am Lying.
Human beings are the only animals who are happily lied to by our own minds about what is actually happening around us.....But we are also the only species with the access to consciously CHANGE our mental or emotional states."
More and more dog caring people are beginning to think and feel like that. By correctly understanding the behaviour of their dogs, they start understanding their own behaviour and the behaviour of their fellow human beings. This leads to more acceptance, to more solidarity and more empathy and honesty in our relationships.
Refering to what scientists working in the field of quantum physics have discovered, Cesar Millan writes:
"What does any of this have to do with dog psychology and becoming a better pack leader? It means that you, with your more powerful consciousness, can do something your dog cannot. You have the ability to control your reality - and with it, the energy you project - in ways that you probably do not even think possible......If you can positively project the intention you desire through real strength and honesty, your dog will instantly react to that calm-assertive energy."
Thank you Muriel for inspiring me. Your lovely message triggered something of in my brain, transmitted my interpretation of what you wrote to my fingers and look, here is the result.
Keep on writing.
LOVE
Bruno
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Learning a big lesson
Hi Bruno,
Thanks a lot for your letters. All your letters are read very carefully by me. I am often tempted to reply, this time I can not resist.
I am a jolly person, always ready to laugh (also about myself) and full of ideas, how to solve problems. And I tell you, having helped so many persons I learned myself a big lesson: you do not help them by helping them, but by letting them find out, sooner or later, what they themselves have to change in their lives.
I learned: everybody is different, acts differently. I learned to say NO when I felt
obliged (by my education) to help, because I was again and again "used" by persons. At last I learned, this all had to happen to me in order that I learned, not to take the responsibility for all the problems in the world.
I have given up most of my voluntary work, this gives me more time for me and the family, including our animals and for my needs.
You will notice, that in the group I mostly walk alone, just enjoying the moments with all the dogs, that makes me happy.
Thank you for having me as a walking-member, I shall join you as soon as it is cooler
Ruth.
I love what Ruth has written about learning a big lesson.
She discovered why she was always willing to help others.
She is now aware of her hidden motives.
It of course does not mean that I am against helping others.
It means for me that it is very rewarding to discover why we are behaving like we are behaving.
Let me give you an example.
I believe what Ruediger Dahlke describes in one of his earlier books.
Many people who are "saving" animals like cats and dogs are doing it because (unconsciously) they want to be saved themselves.
The same people however will (unconsciously)roast another animal in the evening and not even think about "saving" it.
When I talk about this, most persons I am talking to, will be angry at me.
Are you?
Love.
Brunothedoglistener
Thanks a lot for your letters. All your letters are read very carefully by me. I am often tempted to reply, this time I can not resist.
I am a jolly person, always ready to laugh (also about myself) and full of ideas, how to solve problems. And I tell you, having helped so many persons I learned myself a big lesson: you do not help them by helping them, but by letting them find out, sooner or later, what they themselves have to change in their lives.
I learned: everybody is different, acts differently. I learned to say NO when I felt
obliged (by my education) to help, because I was again and again "used" by persons. At last I learned, this all had to happen to me in order that I learned, not to take the responsibility for all the problems in the world.
I have given up most of my voluntary work, this gives me more time for me and the family, including our animals and for my needs.
You will notice, that in the group I mostly walk alone, just enjoying the moments with all the dogs, that makes me happy.
Thank you for having me as a walking-member, I shall join you as soon as it is cooler
Ruth.
I love what Ruth has written about learning a big lesson.
She discovered why she was always willing to help others.
She is now aware of her hidden motives.
It of course does not mean that I am against helping others.
It means for me that it is very rewarding to discover why we are behaving like we are behaving.
Let me give you an example.
I believe what Ruediger Dahlke describes in one of his earlier books.
Many people who are "saving" animals like cats and dogs are doing it because (unconsciously) they want to be saved themselves.
The same people however will (unconsciously)roast another animal in the evening and not even think about "saving" it.
When I talk about this, most persons I am talking to, will be angry at me.
Are you?
Love.
Brunothedoglistener
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Jackie's dog is gone
jackiewillacy@hotmail.com> wrote:
What a sensible decision Bruno to stop walkies for the time being. The temperatures are terrible for us so imagine what it is like for your four-legged friends who are just as happy at the moment lying under a tree as going for a walk.!
My piece of devastating news this week is that I put my beloved Joshua to sleep on Monday and I have to say that was the worst day of my life and has been since because he was my constant shadow and I feel totally lost without him. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in about January and has managed very well but just recently his breathing was very laboured and he kept getting all sorts of infections for which I went to the vet last Friday. They thought it was a thyroid problem and that is why I was at the vets on Monday but driving there I made the decision to say goodbye because to keep him alive would have been for my benefit and he would have suffered. The vets did say they thought he would only have lasted possibly another 2 weeks with more medication. He was 15 years and 4 months old and I remember the day I collected him from the breeder as if it was yesterday. Not sure if Sabre has noticed he is not here any more - perhaps when he does not get half of Josh's meal to finish! I remember him, with a smile on my face, trying to get him to go round your agility course without a stone in his mouth. I hope he is happy and at peace now.
Jackie
Dear Jackie,
Thanks for your moving message.
Looking back I do remember how I felt each time when I lost a dog.
I imagine that I can feel your pain.
Allow me to suggest something.
Go into your pain and feel it as deep and as painful as you can.
Feel how it is hurting.
Then let go of your pain.
Think of Joshua and how he has had a long and fabulous life with you. His consciousness is now living in the eternal hunting fields where there is no pain and no suffering.
Life is about change.
Everything in the Universe is continuously changing. While I am writing this thousands of cells in my body are dying and are being replaced by new ones.
As we are all One in the Universe, as we are all energy, as we all have the same minerals in our bodies as there are present in all the planets, I have learned not to linger on in my personal pain caused by past events.
When I think of parents, friends, dogs and other dear ones that have passed away, I feel positive energy. The ones that have gone over feel that positive connectedness too.
Some authors are even saying that what we call "death" can be the most glorious moment of what we call "life".
I invite you to read once more "Closing Cycles" by Paulo Coelho on this blog.
I am also repeating the last sentence of my former letter:
However, if you want to meet for a drink, just call or drop me a line.
LOVE
Bruno
What a sensible decision Bruno to stop walkies for the time being. The temperatures are terrible for us so imagine what it is like for your four-legged friends who are just as happy at the moment lying under a tree as going for a walk.!
My piece of devastating news this week is that I put my beloved Joshua to sleep on Monday and I have to say that was the worst day of my life and has been since because he was my constant shadow and I feel totally lost without him. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in about January and has managed very well but just recently his breathing was very laboured and he kept getting all sorts of infections for which I went to the vet last Friday. They thought it was a thyroid problem and that is why I was at the vets on Monday but driving there I made the decision to say goodbye because to keep him alive would have been for my benefit and he would have suffered. The vets did say they thought he would only have lasted possibly another 2 weeks with more medication. He was 15 years and 4 months old and I remember the day I collected him from the breeder as if it was yesterday. Not sure if Sabre has noticed he is not here any more - perhaps when he does not get half of Josh's meal to finish! I remember him, with a smile on my face, trying to get him to go round your agility course without a stone in his mouth. I hope he is happy and at peace now.
Jackie
Dear Jackie,
Thanks for your moving message.
Looking back I do remember how I felt each time when I lost a dog.
I imagine that I can feel your pain.
Allow me to suggest something.
Go into your pain and feel it as deep and as painful as you can.
Feel how it is hurting.
Then let go of your pain.
Think of Joshua and how he has had a long and fabulous life with you. His consciousness is now living in the eternal hunting fields where there is no pain and no suffering.
Life is about change.
Everything in the Universe is continuously changing. While I am writing this thousands of cells in my body are dying and are being replaced by new ones.
As we are all One in the Universe, as we are all energy, as we all have the same minerals in our bodies as there are present in all the planets, I have learned not to linger on in my personal pain caused by past events.
When I think of parents, friends, dogs and other dear ones that have passed away, I feel positive energy. The ones that have gone over feel that positive connectedness too.
Some authors are even saying that what we call "death" can be the most glorious moment of what we call "life".
I invite you to read once more "Closing Cycles" by Paulo Coelho on this blog.
I am also repeating the last sentence of my former letter:
However, if you want to meet for a drink, just call or drop me a line.
LOVE
Bruno
Looking for a Labrador
From:
Hendric
h.schroeder@gmx.net
Hi Bruno
I would like to ask you for some help. Friends of mine would love to
give a home to a dog, preferably a male Labrador. They lost their dear
companion due to a serious health problem and are looking for an new
friend. Should you know somebody who has a Labrador dog that needs a
home,it would be nice if you could let me know.
Best regards
Hendric
Hendric
h.schroeder@gmx.net
Hi Bruno
I would like to ask you for some help. Friends of mine would love to
give a home to a dog, preferably a male Labrador. They lost their dear
companion due to a serious health problem and are looking for an new
friend. Should you know somebody who has a Labrador dog that needs a
home,it would be nice if you could let me know.
Best regards
Hendric
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Walking meditation
Dear friends walking with dogs.
A few times I had the courage to suggest to you a different kind of walking. As we all belong to the chattering classes, we think that most of the time we have to fill the space around us with chattering voices. Dogs (and lots of other animals)do not walk(=hunt) like that. What I suggested a few times was to walk for 10 minutes without saying anything. I do remember that some friends were not able to do it. But others could really keep their mouths shut for 10 minutes. After the 10 minutes of silence I stopped the group and asked if anyone had noticed anything.Two friends said that their dogs had paid more attention to them. They both had experienced, had seen and felt, the different connection with their pets. My interpretation was that they had been closer to their dogs and closer to nature.
That is what I experience many times when I walk silently with my dogs.
In another letter I have been writing about a Tibetan monk who does silent walks with thousands of followers all over the world. He calls these walks "Silent Meditations". I could understand what the monk means. Some 35 years ago I became a student of Transcendental Meditation and I started learning how to listen to my soul. When practicing TM I am supposed to sit down in quiet surroundings, close my eyes, etc... Since then I discovered that walking with my dogs offers me a different way of connecting with them, with myself and with the universe.
A while ago Jeni brought along a book for me to read. Immediately I was fascinated by "Conversations with God",(book number 3) by Neale Donald Walsch. Having finished the book, I gave it back to Jeni and bought a copy for myself. I have now read it a third time and I want to share with you what I found on page 162.
"In meditation you place yourself in a state of readyness to experience total awareness while your body is in a wakened state. This state of readiness is called TRUE WAKEFULNESS. You do not have to be sitting in meditation to experience this. Meditation is simply a device, a tool... Sitting meditation is not the only kind of meditation there is. There is also stopping meditation. Walking meditation. Doing meditation... When you walk in a state of true wakefulness, you breathe in every flower, you fly with every bird, you feel every crunch beneath your feet. You find beauty and wisdom. For wisdom is found wherever beauty is formed. And beauty is formed everywhere, out of all the stuff of life. You do not have to seek it. It will come to you."
Have you ever practised walking meditation? Or are you going to give it a try now that you have read this letter?
HIGH TEMPERATURES.
Last Sunday I drove to Benimeli without my dogs. At home we had 35 degrees in the shade and that is too much for my two oldies. But on the square in Benimeli I spent a nice evening with some friends who agreed that it was too hot for a walk.
Back home I looked at http://www.eltiempo.es/jalon.html and saw that the same high temperatures are being expected for this coming Sunday.
For that reason my suggestion is to interrupt our Sunday walks until temperatures come down. I suppose this is going to happen in September. Personally I will keep on walking my dogs at 07.00 a.m. and again after 10.00 p.m.
However, if you want to meet for a drink, just call or drop me a line.
Love.
Bruno
A few times I had the courage to suggest to you a different kind of walking. As we all belong to the chattering classes, we think that most of the time we have to fill the space around us with chattering voices. Dogs (and lots of other animals)do not walk(=hunt) like that. What I suggested a few times was to walk for 10 minutes without saying anything. I do remember that some friends were not able to do it. But others could really keep their mouths shut for 10 minutes. After the 10 minutes of silence I stopped the group and asked if anyone had noticed anything.Two friends said that their dogs had paid more attention to them. They both had experienced, had seen and felt, the different connection with their pets. My interpretation was that they had been closer to their dogs and closer to nature.
That is what I experience many times when I walk silently with my dogs.
In another letter I have been writing about a Tibetan monk who does silent walks with thousands of followers all over the world. He calls these walks "Silent Meditations". I could understand what the monk means. Some 35 years ago I became a student of Transcendental Meditation and I started learning how to listen to my soul. When practicing TM I am supposed to sit down in quiet surroundings, close my eyes, etc... Since then I discovered that walking with my dogs offers me a different way of connecting with them, with myself and with the universe.
A while ago Jeni brought along a book for me to read. Immediately I was fascinated by "Conversations with God",(book number 3) by Neale Donald Walsch. Having finished the book, I gave it back to Jeni and bought a copy for myself. I have now read it a third time and I want to share with you what I found on page 162.
"In meditation you place yourself in a state of readyness to experience total awareness while your body is in a wakened state. This state of readiness is called TRUE WAKEFULNESS. You do not have to be sitting in meditation to experience this. Meditation is simply a device, a tool... Sitting meditation is not the only kind of meditation there is. There is also stopping meditation. Walking meditation. Doing meditation... When you walk in a state of true wakefulness, you breathe in every flower, you fly with every bird, you feel every crunch beneath your feet. You find beauty and wisdom. For wisdom is found wherever beauty is formed. And beauty is formed everywhere, out of all the stuff of life. You do not have to seek it. It will come to you."
Have you ever practised walking meditation? Or are you going to give it a try now that you have read this letter?
HIGH TEMPERATURES.
Last Sunday I drove to Benimeli without my dogs. At home we had 35 degrees in the shade and that is too much for my two oldies. But on the square in Benimeli I spent a nice evening with some friends who agreed that it was too hot for a walk.
Back home I looked at http://www.eltiempo.es/jalon.html and saw that the same high temperatures are being expected for this coming Sunday.
For that reason my suggestion is to interrupt our Sunday walks until temperatures come down. I suppose this is going to happen in September. Personally I will keep on walking my dogs at 07.00 a.m. and again after 10.00 p.m.
However, if you want to meet for a drink, just call or drop me a line.
Love.
Bruno
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