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Friday, March 20, 2009

"*****Fed Planning 15-Fold Increase In US Monetary Base*****

by Eric deCarbonnel   Source Market Skeptics

"The fed is planning moves that would more than double its balance-sheet assets by September to $4.5 trillion from $1.9 trillion. Whether expressing approval or concern over the fed’s intentions, most commentators fail to understand the real magnitude of the projected expansion of the US monetary base because they don’t take into account the amount of dollars circulating abroad.

At least 70 percent of all US currency is held outside the country, and this means the US monetary base is considerably smaller than the fed’s overall balance sheet. Take, for example, the true US domestic money supply at the beginning of September 2008, before the fed started its quantitative easing. From the Federal Reserve’s website, we know that currency in circulation was 833 Billion. This translates as 583 Billion dollars circulating abroad (70 percent), and 250 Billion dollars circulating domestically (30 percent). Since the bank reserve balances held with Federal Reserve Banks were 12 billion, that gives us a 262 Billion domestic monetary base as of September 2008. Now compare that to the projected US domestic monetary base for September 2009 which is 3,818 billion (4,500 billion – 583 billion (dollars circulating abroad) – 99 billion (other fed liabilities not part of the money supply)). The fed’s planned balance sheet expansion results in a 15-fold increase in the base money supply.


262 Billion = US monetary base as of September 2008 (minus dollars held abroad)
3,818 Billion = projected US monetary base in September 2009 (minus dollars held abroad)

3,818 Billion / 262 Billion = 15-Fold Increase in US monetary base


This is a staggering devaluation of the US currency! It means that for every dollar in America in September 2008, the fed is going to create fourteen more of them! Below is a rough sketch of what this increase in US monetary base would look like:






This 15-Fold Increase will be impossible to reverse

Next September, when the fed realizes it has gone too far and tries to reverse its balance sheet expansion, it will be unable to do so. The realities which will hinder the fed’s control of the money supply are:

1) The toxic assets filling its balance sheet

Expanding the money supply is easy. All the fed has to do is print dollars and then use them to buy assets. There is no effective limit to how much the fed can print and spend.

Shrinking the money is much trickier. To shrink the base money supply, the fed sell assets and takes the dollars it receives for them out of circulation. The amount the fed can shrink the money supply is therefore effectively limited by the market value of assets on its balance sheets. Since the fed is in the process of loading up on toxic securities while trying to restore health to the financial sector, it is now sitting billions of unrealized losses. These unrealized losses means the fed has little ammunition available to bring the money supply under control.

Once September rolls around, If the fed wants to reverse the expansion of its balance sheet and shrink the monetary base back down from 3,818 billion to 262 billion, then it will need to sell 3,556 billion worth of assets. However, the market value of its assets will only be worth a fraction of that.

2) Political constrains on fed's actions

Even if the fed does try to shrink the money, it is likely to run into political constrains on its actions:

A) Selling toxic assets at a loss could become a crippling source of major embarrassment for the fed, undermining its authority. For example, last year when the fed took 29 billion toxic assets to help JPMorgan’s takeover of Bear Stearns, it assured Americans that by holding those securities till maturity, the cost to taxpayers would be minimal. If the fed sells those toxic Bearn Stearns assets at a catastrophic loss, it would cause fury and outrage from voters and lawmakers.

B) Selling assets at below book value will quickly cause the fed’s equity to turn negative. The Federal Reserve would then need to be recapitalized by new debt from the treasury, which would increase the national debt.

3) The benefits from of its balance sheet expansion would be lost if the fed starts selling assets

The fed is accumulating toxic mortgage backed securities, long term treasuries, and other assets to unfreeze the credit markets and spur economic growth. Turning around and selling those assets would result in the collapse of the credit markets and the financial system, which the fed has been desperately trying to prevent.

Upwards pressure on interest rates

On top of all the issues above, the fed’s woes are going to be compounded by upwards pressure on the yields of treasuries and other US debt. This upwards pressure will likely force the fed to monetize far more treasuries than the planned $300 billion purchases it has already announced, and will greatly complicate any efforts by the fed to control the money supply.

Below are the nine factors which will cause yields to move higher.


1) Massive supply of treasuries in the pipeline

The biggest force pressuring treasury yield upward is without a doubt the trillions of debt the treasury has to sell to finance the enormous 2009 budget deficit. There is nowhere near enough buyers to absorb this supply. The graph below demonstrates the challenge facing the treasury in funding this year’s budget.



2) As a reserve asset, treasury bonds will face enormous selling pressure in 2009

There is the mistaken belief that the role of treasuries as a safe haven is bullish for treasury bonds. It is not. This logic ignores the reality that reserve assets, such as treasuries, are accumulate in good times and sold in bad times:

Federal and state agencies will be selling treasury reserves. For example, the Deposit Insurance Fund (a.k.a. FDIC) will be selling treasuries to pay back depositors of failed banks, and the Unemployment Trust Fund will be selling treasuries to make payments to the unemployed.

State and local governments will be selling treasury reserves. As an example, states have already begun drawing down reserves as their budget troubles worsen. The bulk of those reserve remain, and they will be sold over the course of this year.

Banks and insurers will be selling off their treasury loan-loss reserves. Financial institutions have been building their treasury loan-loss reserve for the last year in anticipation of growing defaults. In 2009, this process will reverse as loans go bad and insurers make good on claims.

Foreign central banks will be selling off their treasury foreign reserves. Saudi Arabia, for example, is projecting a 2009 Budget Deficit, which it intends to finance by selling off its US holdings. Russia, meanwhile, has already sold over 20% of its $598.1 billion reserves, and India's central bank has been forced to sell off its US holdings to curb its currency's decline, and its total reserves have decreased by $62.2 billion. Japan, which is now running a record current account deficit, can also be expected to sell treasuries.

Even China could become a seller of treasuries as it mobilizes its dollar reserves. The Chinese government has sent clear signals that it is shifting from passive to active management of its reserve and is exploring more efficient ways to use its reserves to boost its domestic economy.


3) Retirement inflows into treasuries are over

The steady accumulation of treasuries by government retirement funds has helped absorb the supply of treasury bonds for over three decades. This accumulation of government debt to secure the retirement of baby boomers helped drive down treasury yields and fund deficit spending. As of September 2008, the four biggest of these funds held 3.3 trillion treasuries:

2150 billion (Federal old-age and survivors insurance trust fund)
615 billion (Federal employees retirement fund)
318 billion (federal hospital insurance trust fund)
217 billion (federal disability insurance trust fund) (for more on these four funds, see where social security tax amounts are deposited)

3300 billion total

Today, the accumulation of treasuries by government retirement funds is over. Baby boomers are beginning to retire, increasing outflows, and unemployment is rising, cutting inflows. More importantly, the 3.3 trillion already accumulated in these funds provides an enormous political incentive to prevent treasury prices from collapsing. Faced with a run on treasuries, politicians, rather than explaining to baby boomers that their retirement savings are gone, will instruct the fed to monetize treasury bonds. This alone will prevent the fed from reversing its current balance sheet expansion.


4) Deleveraging in credit-default swap market will drive up risk premiums

If you have been following the credit crisis in any detail, you might have heard that the 53 trillion credit-default swap market threatening the solvency of the financial system. What you might not have heard is the other dire threat posed by the CDS market: drastically higher risk premiums on all forms of debt.

These higher risk premiums are the result of reversing the process by which credit-default swaps were leveraged up and packaged into investment vehicles. Some examples of these horrors are:

Synthetic CDOs
As opposed to regular CDOs (which contain actual bonds), synthetic CDOs provide income to investors by selling credit-default swaps on hundreds bonds from companies and governments.
To juice returns, these synthetic CDOs disproportionally insured the riskiest AAA rated debt, such as Lehman’s bonds. Synthetic CDOs are estimated to have sold insurance on between $1.25 trillion to $6 trillion worth of bonds.

Constant-Proportion Debt Obligations
CPDOs are specialized funds which work exactly like synthetic CDOs but with one major difference: they used leverage to boost returns. These CPDO funds typically borrowed about $15 for every dollar invested with them. They also contain safety triggers that force the liquidation of their investments if losses reach a predetermined level, and most CPDO funds have begun to hit these triggers. For example, Three CPDO funds launched in 2006 by Dutch bank ABN Amro Holding NV have already been forced to liquidate as credit insurance costs spiked and their credit ratings were downgraded.

Credit Derivative Product Companies
CDPPs are another group of specialized funds which work exactly like synthetic CDOs and CPDO funds, except for one key difference: they used an insane amount of leverage, as much as $80 for every dollar invested. CDPP funds together with subprime CDOs squared are finalists for the title of “most idiotic financial instrument ever created”.


Since these leveraged investment vehicles sold an enormous amount of insurance, the premiums for CDS insurance dropped sharply, making corporate debt seem safer and lowering interest rates. In effect, the process of building up the 53 trillion CDS market created an era of artificially low risk premiums on all forms of debt. Unfortunately, the pendulum is now swinging in the other direction, and the pain has just begun.

As investors attempt to get out of synthetic CDOs and CPDO/CDPP funds try to deleverage, they push up the cost of default insurance. In turn, that raises the risk premium on all forms of debt since most investors use the cost of default insurance as a guide when deciding at what interest rate they will buy bonds. Many banks are also tying corporate loan rates to credit-default swaps, raising borrowing costs and exposing companies to an overleveraged derivative market which is largely responsible for crippling the financial system.

The graph below shows how the cost of insuring the debt of EU nations is being driven up.



The rising cost of insuring debt is impacting treasuries too. The cost to hedge against losses on $10 million of Treasuries is now about $100,000 annually for 10 years, up from $1,000 in the first half of 2007. These rising insurance costs have helped push up treasury yields in the last few months. Worse still, the rising costs of insuring against government defaults will undermine faith in dollar. After all, the CDS market is telling us that 10-year treasury notes have become 100 times riskier in the last two years.


5) Unwinding the Gold carry trade

The massive expansion in the US money supply will undoubtedly drive gold prices several times higher and force the unwinding of the gold carry trade. To see the threat which unwinding the gold carry trade poses, it is necessary to understand how US and UK financial institutions got themselves stuck in an enormous short position in gold from which they have no hope of ever escaping. For that purpose, I have outlined below the five steps Wall Street seems to repeat endlessly on its path to ruin.


Step 1: Wall Street embraces a false paradigm

“Housing prices never fall”

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“gold is a relic” or “gold is in a permanent downtrend”

Step 2: Wall Street makes billions embracing this false paradigm…

US/UK Financial institutions made billion in fees from making mortgage loans and securitizing them.

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US/UK Financial institutions made billions via gold carry trade. Here is an ultra quick explanation how it works from zealllc.com

So, if you can find a cheap enough cost of capital, a safe enough destination, and you have the credit to borrow large amounts of money, you too could make enormous profits in carry trades. The notorious gold carry trade is based on the exact same idea. Elite money-center bullion banks were given sweetheart opportunities to borrow central bank physical gold at 1%, sell it in the open market, and immediately invest the proceeds in higher yielding “safe” investments and reap vast profits.

As Moneyweek further explains:

It seemed like a no-brainer. The central banks got to squeeze a yield from their gold. The borrowers got to sell the gold on, and use the proceeds to fund more exciting investments like 10-year US Treasuries yielding 4% per year or so. Yes, these 'carry trade' returns were tiny. But the cost of borrowing gold was tinier still.

Step 3: …and creates a catastrophic mess in the process

Enormous housing bubble
Subprime CDOs squared
Off balance sheet SIVs
Etc…

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Commercial banks and speculators are left inescapably short gold. These ridiculous short positions are best captured by John Hathaway in his 1999 article, The Golden Pyramid.

The recipe for a shortage has been carefully followed. A few finishing touches may be required before a market epiphany. There is no known reconciliation between paper and physical positions, and none will be attempted until after the squeeze. The weakness of credit analysis and supervisory oversight, as well as the many ambiguities in the linkage between paper gold and physical can flourish only if there is supreme confidence in gold's permanent downtrend. The trust and confidence essential to balance the gold derivatives pyramid depends on three critical errors: that mine reserves = physical gold; that gold receivables = gold on hand; and that financial markets will enjoy smooth sailing indefinitely. Trust is nothing more than a state of mind. When this levitation is finally exposed and its illusions shattered, it is ludicrous to think the imbalances can be corrected by a small rise in the price and within a comfortable time frame. Expect the resolution to be swift, furious, and uncomfortable for those caught short.

Step 4: Something goes horribly wrong

Subprime borrowers start defaulting
Housing prices plummet

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Gold prices shoot up after the 1999 Washington Agreement on Gold (EU central banks agreed to limits on gold sales/leasing).

This gold bear trap is best described by Reginald H. Howe in his report about central banks at the abyss.

The first Washington Agreement on Gold, announced in September 1999 at the close of the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, D.C., placed limits for the next five years on the official gold sales of the signatories as well as on their gold lending and use of futures and options. Put together at the instigation of major Euro Area central banks in response to the decline in gold prices caused by the series of U.K. gold auctions announced in May of the same year,WAG I caused gold prices to shoot sharply higher.

Within days, as gold shorts rushed to cover, the price jumped from around $265 to almost $330/oz. and gold lease rates spiked to over 9%. The rally caught the major bullion banks completely wrong-footed, resulting in the panic later described by Edward A.J. George, then Governor of the Bank of England (Complaint, 55):

We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The U.S. Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K.

Despite managing to “get the gold price under control”, US/UK bullion banks (JPMorgan, HSBC, etc…) have been stuck on the short side of gold ever since.

Step 5: The US fed and UK do everything in their power to “save the financial system”

Royal Bank of Scotland bailout
Bear Stearns bailout
Freddie/Fannie bailout
AIG bailout
US/UK Quantitative easing
Etc…

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Leasing out all US/UK gold to bullion banks
Gold swaps with foreign central banks (then leasing out the gold)
Convincing allies to sell gold
Writing naked call options on gold
Britain’s 1999 gold sales
Pre-emptive gold sales
Allowing JPMorgan’s and HSBC’s manipulation of COMEX futures
Etc…


Make no mistake, gold prices have suppressed, but calling this process a “conspiracy” would be inaccurate. Gold suppression by the US and UK is better characterized as a desperate cover-up. Furthermore, while a side affect of the gold carry trade and gold suppression was to drive down interest rates, that was never their intended effect. A desire to hold interest rates would not have been enough to push the fed or the Bank of England to manipulate gold prices. It was only the threat of the total collapse of US/UK financial system which prompted the suppression of gold. The unwinding of the gold carry trade would have (and will) dragged down the some of the biggest US/UK banks under (JPMorgan, HSBC, etc…) and that was what had to be prevented at any cost.

Stay away from any form of paper gold: GLD (HSBC is custodian), gold pools and unallocated gold accounts, gold futures, etc… Paper gold investments are guaranteed to default before this crisis ends.


Besides leaving the financial system inescapably short gold, the gold carry trade also drove down yields on treasuries and other US debt, as commercial banks invested the proceeds from the sale of borrowed central bank gold and other naked short positions. Unwinding the gold carry trade involves the purchase of physical gold, but also the sale of the investments linked to the gold short positions. As the fed begins 15-fold expansion of the monetary base (which logically should eventually send gold prices up at least ten times where they are now), the unwinding and fallout of the gold carry trade seems imminent.


6) The return of the 580 billion dollars circulating abroad

Over the last thirty years, the steady outflow of 580 billion dollars has helped drive down interest rates. For example, If 10 billion dollars leaked out of the US and began circulating abroad, the fed would print 10 billion and buy treasuries in order to replenish the domestic money supply. So the 580 billion dollars held abroad resulted in the purchase of roughly 580 billion treasury bonds by the fed, thereby increasing demand for US debt.

While the accumulation of oversea dollars has been beneficial in the past, today the large pools of dollars circulating in foreign hands pose a threat. With many dollar alternatives becoming available, US oversea currency looks increasingly likely to start flowing back home. The main currencies with the potential to displace dollars are:

A) The Chinese yuan which is becoming an international currency
B) The Khaleeji, a new currency being launched by Gulf states which will be possibly backed by gold.
C) The Euro with its partial gold backing
D) Gold

Furthermore, now that the fed has begun creating money at an accelerating rate, the extensive foreign holdings of US currency might exacerbate the effects of inflation fears. As foreign dollar holders’ confidence in the dollar is eroded, they will trade their dollars for alternate stores of value (yuan, euro, gold, etc…), potentially sending a flood of currency back to the US. If the Fed failed to reduce the supply of currency to counteract dollars being unloaded from abroad, the inflationary consequences would be made worse as the mass reversal of currency flows from foreigners to the US becomes overwhelming.

7) Interest rate derivates nightmare

The threat posed by interest rate derivates is perhaps the greatest out of all the ones outlined so far. It is also the one hardest to understand. The first thing to note about interest rate swaps is the size of the market, as explained by the Wikipedia:

The Bank for International Settlements reports that interest rate swaps are the largest component of the global OTC derivative market. The notional amount outstanding as of December 2006 in OTC interest rate swaps was $229.8 trillion, up $60.7 trillion (35.9%) from December 2005. These contracts account for 55.4% of the entire $415 trillion OTC derivative market. As of Dec 2007 the number rose to 309,6 trillion according to the same source.

The growth in interest rate swaps creates demand for bonds because many of these interest derivatives require the purchase of bonds as a hedge. Rob Kirby on 321gold.com explains this in his article, the real ponzi scheme - "unreal interest rates".

Interest Rate Swaps create demand for bonds because bond trades are implicitly embedded in these transactions. Without end user demand for the product - trading for "trading sake" creates ARTIFICIAL demand for bonds. This manipulates rates lower than they otherwise would be.


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Interest rate swaps were originally developed to [1] allow parties to exchange streams of interest payments for another party's stream of cash flows; [2] manage fixed or floating assets and liabilities and [3] to speculate - replicating unfunded bond exposures to profit from changes in interest rates. Growth in the first two of these activities are dependent on their being increased end-user-demand for these products - graph 1 above indicated that this is not the case:

In the case of J.P. Morgan in particular[forgetting about the lesser obscenities at Citi and B of A]; their interest rate swap book is so big that there are not enough U.S. Government bonds being issued or in existence for them to adequately hedge their positions.

This means that the obscene, explosive growth in interest rate derivatives was all about overwhelming the long end of the interest rate complexto ensure that every and any U.S. Government bond ever issued had a buyer on attractive terms for the issuer. Concurrent with the neutering of usury, the price of gold was also "capped" largely through Fed appointed banks "shorting gold futures" as well as brokering gold leases [sales in drag] sourcing vaulted Sovereign Central Bank gold bullion. The gold price had to be rigged concurrently because historically, according to observations outlined in Gibson's Paradox - lowering interest rates leads to a higher gold price. Gold price strength is historically synonymous with U.S. Dollar weakness which leads to higher financing costs or the possibility of capital flight.

Same as with the gold carry trade, while the explosive growth in interest rate derivatives did reduce interest rates by creating demand for bonds, I am not sure about the conspiracy element. From everything I have seen and read during the credit crisis, the wizards of Wall Street (ie: the creators of the subprime CDO squared and other horrors) and the Federal Reserve seem more like children playing with dynamite rather than masterminds capable of pulling off vast conspiracies.

The greater threat posed by interest rate swaps

Besides creating artificial demand for bonds, the interest rate swap market poses a systematic risk exceeding that of the credit-default swap market because of its enormous size and the fact that each interest rate swap contract offers the potential for unlimited losses. The graph below should help show this danger.





In a currency collapse (which is where we are headed with Bernanke’s 15-fold increase in the money supply), interest rates follow inflation to astronomical heights. Loans for 24 hour periods and interest rates in the five or six digits are common in hyperinflation, and, should they occur here in the States, anyone “short the swap” (the floating-rate payers in interest rate swaps) will be crushed into oblivion. At least with credit default swaps, there is a limit to how much investors can lose.


8) The liquidation of the 8 Trillion dollar holdings of overleveraged European banks

European banks increased their dollar assets sharply in the last decade which helped drive down US interest rates and absorbed a large portion of America's growing debt. Their combined long dollar positions grew to more than $800 billion by mid-2007. This $800 billion was then leveraged into $8 trillion in US assets. The low capital ratios of these dollar positions were acceptable to regulators because European banks are allowed to apply a lot more leverage as long as they are buying exclusively AAA rated securities.

Unfortunately, as we have learned over the past 18 months, AAA is not always AAA. While much of the AAA rated securities bought by European banks were treasuries and agencies, some of these AAA rated securities were senior securitized loans that are still marked close to par on the balance sheet of European banks despite the fact they trade around 70 cents on the dollar in the markets. The enormous unrealized losses on their US holdings are only one of the problems facing European banks.

The other is the loss of their dollar funding. The enormous leverage employed by European banks to purchase toxic AAA rated assets was funded in great part by loans from US money market funds. After Lehman's default led to massive withdrawals from those money market funds, European banks lost access to billions in dollar funding.

If European banks are forced to sell their 8 trillion US assets, it will crash the credit markets, and they will have to recognize enormous losses. Since the fed is desperate to prevent the collapse of the US financial system, it lent those European banks 600 billion dollars so that they wouldn't be forced to sell. Meanwhile, European banks accepted this 600 billion because they don't want to recognize losses on their toxic US securities.


What is going to happen next with these overleveraged European banks?

Well, if history is any guide, the outlook isn’t good for the US financial system:

“When the American economy fell into depression, US banks recalled their loans, causing the German banking system to collapse”

The same thing will happen in 2009, except the roles will be reversed. It will be European banks that will recall their loans and sell off dollar assets, causing the US banking system to collapse.

What could convince European banks sell off their US assets at firesale prices?

The answer is simple: fear of a dollar collapse. With the fed increasing the monetary base 15-fold, the strategy of waiting for impaired assets to recover becomes meaningless: with the dollar likely to lose nine tenths of its value in the next year, waiting for assets trading 70 cents on the dollar to recover is a senseless venture.

9) Inflation expectations

The US’s experience during the Great Depression has left America dominated by Keynesian thinking and prone to deflation fears. As a result, inflation expectations are about nonexistent right now despite the current financial crisis. However, the fed’s latest plan to expand the monetary base 15-fold should give pause to even the most hardened deflationist. Indeed someone must be worried, because the fed’s Wednesday announcement has caused a dramatic collapse of the dollar:




The sheer size the fed’s monetary expansion and the dollar’s fall will soon increase both inflation and inflation expectations. This in turn will put upwards pressure on treasury yields.


Conclusion

During the last three decades, long-term interests rates have fallen steadily in US, as demonstrated by the chart below





Logically speaking, the chart above makes no sense. The fundamentals underlying the US economy have grown steadily worse over the last thirty years. For example, in 2006, the US’s current account deficit nearly hit 9 percent of our gdp, and economists usually consider 4 percent to be unsustainable. There are also the US’s chronic budget deficits and the massive projected social security shortfalls. Even more incomprehensible, over the last six months the yield on long-term treasuries has fallen in the face of a disintegrating economy and massive expansion in the supply of treasuries. This is NOT how the world works: as the financial health of borrowers decrease, their interest rates are supposed to go up. The only rational explanation is that some combination of forces has been unnaturally driving rates lower. These forces, (outlined above) which have been driving interest rates down, are today threats and issues which need to be resolved before the financial crisis can end:

The US budget deficit
The crisis in entitlement spending
The trade deficit and large holdings of treasury reserves
The credit-default swap market
The gold carry trade
The 580 billion dollar circulating overseas
The 8 trillion dollar assets accumulated by European banks
The interest rate swaps market
The Keynesian thinking dominating US economic and fiscal policy "

http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/03/fed-is-planning-15-fold-increase-in-us.html

"U.N. panel says world should ditch dollar | U.S. | Reuters

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE52H2CY20090318

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"China calls for new reserve currency
By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing

Source The Financial Times 

Published: March 23 2009 12:16 | Last updated: March 24 2009 00:06

"China’s central bank on Monday proposed replacing the US dollar as the international reserve currency with a new global system controlled by the International Monetary Fund.

In an essay posted on the People’s Bank of China’s website, Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank’s governor, said the goal would be to create a reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies”.

Analysts said the proposal was an indication of Beijing’s fears that actions being taken to save the domestic US economy would have a negative impact on China.

“This is a clear sign that China, as the largest holder of US dollar financial assets, is concerned about the potential inflationary risk of the US Federal Reserve printing money,” said Qu Hongbin, chief China economist for HSBC.

Although Mr Zhou did not mention the US dollar, the essay gave a pointed critique of the current dollar-dominated monetary system.

“The outbreak of the [current] crisis and its spillover to the entire world reflected the inherent vulnerabilities and systemic risks in the existing international monetary system,” Mr Zhou wrote.

China has little choice but to hold the bulk of its $2,000bn of foreign exchange reserves in US dollars, and this is unlikely to change in the near future.

To replace the current system, Mr Zhou suggested expanding the role of special drawing rights, which were introduced by the IMF in 1969 to support the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate regime but became less relevant once that collapsed in the 1970s.

Today, the value of SDRs is based on a basket of four currencies – the US dollar, yen, euro and sterling – and they are used largely as a unit of account by the IMF and some other international organisations.

China’s proposal would expand the basket of currencies forming the basis of SDR valuation to all major economies and set up a settlement system between SDRs and other currencies so they could be used in international trade and financial transactions.

Countries would entrust a portion of their SDR reserves to the IMF to manage collectively on their behalf and SDRs would gradually replace existing reserve currencies.

Mr Zhou said the proposal would require “extraordinary political vision and courage” and acknowledged a debt to John Maynard Keynes, who made a similar suggestion in the 1940s. 

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009 "

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7851925a-17a2-11de-8c9d-0000779fd2ac.html

"What You Pay Attention To Creates Your Life III

By Bill Harris November 24th, 2007 
Source Dream Manifesto

"Mastering your Internal Map of Reality This may all seem incredibly complex, and in a sense, it is. (In fact, we’ve just scratched the surface of your Internal Map of Reality, looking at just a few aspects of it.) You are fluent in your native language, however, and even the simplest language is complex. Mastering your Internal Map of Reality is like anything else - you start where you are, you practice, and you make progress.

Since this process is one of discovering yourself, and how you create your experience of life, it’s a fascinating undertaking, with profoundly positive rewards. Mastering your Internal Map of Reality is much the same process a jazz musician uses to learn to improvise. The musician practices chords, scales, and other pieces of musical vocabulary. He consciously thinks of these things and how to arrange them while he practices.

At some point, however, his ability to play no longer requires conscious thought. He relaxes his linear mind and turns his playing over to that part of his mind I mentioned a moment ago, a part that knows how to utilize the skills he has practiced. This other part of his mind can see all the possible choices for what to play in each next moment, evaluate them, choose the best one, and then play it - all in a fraction of a moment, and without conscious thought.

The musician must play this way. The music happens much too quickly to allow him to think his way through it with his linear mind. So, he plays with little or no linear thought, in the same way you talk to others without considering grammar, syntax, or even giving much thought to the content of what you say.

Okay, so you aren’t a jazz musician. But you probably do know how to drive a car.

When you first learned to drive you had to think your way through each move. “Time to stop. Where is the brake? When, exactly, do I step on it, and how hard - in order to stop at the right place and the right moment?” “Okay. Time to change lanes. I’ve got to look over my shoulder, judge how much room I need, decide how fast to go, and when to go, and then use the right amount of gas, breaking, and steering, all at the exact right time.”

It was a lot of work because you had to do it all with your conscious, linear mind. Now, though, you drive with little if any conscious thought. To be a little bit Zen about it, when you drive you’re one with the car. How did you get that way? By practicing, by driving until you developed the ability to evaluate all the possibilities in each moment, choose the right one, and then do it - all without consciously thinking about it. Just like the jazz musician, you began by being unconsciously incompetent (you didn’t know how, and you didn’t even know what you didn’t know).

Then, with a little bit of practice, you became consciously incompetent (you began to realize what you didn’t know, and what you needed to work on). Next, you became consciously competent (you could do it, but you had to think your way through it). Finally, you became unconsciously competent (you turned it over to a part of your unconscious mind that can evaluate an infinite number of variable, instantly, decide what to do, and then do it).

The ability to move through these various stages, by the way, is connected to the amount of neural real estate devoted to whatever it is you are learning. Once you have practiced enough, the part of your brain responsible for driving, or playing music - or consciously and intentionally operating your Internal Map of Reality - takes over and does its job.

So you can learn to take charge of your Internal Map of Reality. First, you learn the basics of how it works. Next, you notice how you’ve been using it and what results your way of using it has been creating. Then you play with each part and find out what it does, and notice all the other choices you haven’t been exercising. You play with those and find out what they do. Eventually, the same mechanism that allows you to drive a car while you eat, talk on the phone, change the radio station, put on your makeup, and talk to your passengers, will take over.

You’ll be just like the jazz musician who, after practicing for many years, effortlessly generates beautiful music. The fact that you may not know anyone with this kind of control over his or her mind shouldn’t keep you from believing that you can learn to do this.

It can be done (I’ve done it, and I have taught many others to do it). All that’s required is the desire to do so, and the persistence to practice. The process is fascinating, and the rewards are huge. What would you do if you really could be in charge of what you feel, how you behave, and what people and situations you attract into your life?

We each have a choice. We can continue to automatically create whatever our Internal Map of Reality has been pre-programmed to create, or we can develop the awareness, and the flexibility, to intentionally and fluidly change our Map of Reality, moment - by - moment, as needed, in order to create whatever we want.

You may not have realized, up to now, that this choice existed, but it’s a real choice. You can take the reins of your mind, and in mastering your mind, you can master your life."

http://www.dreammanifesto.com/part-3.html

"What You Pay Attention To Creates Your Life II

By Bill Harris November 22nd, 2007 
Source Dream Manifesto

"Metaprograms are content-free (unlike beliefs or values, each of which has content) in the sense that they can be applied to any content. Let’s look at a couple of the more important metaprograms.

The Direction Filter determines whether, when you look at a given situation, you move toward what you want, or away from what you don’t want. If someone asks you why having a good job is important to you (assuming that it is), you might say that having a good job creates a good living and allows you to exercise your creativity.

In this case, you’ve described what you want to move toward - a good living, and exercising your creativity. You might, though, use this filter in the opposite way and say that without a good job you would struggle to make ends meet, and you would feel bad spending forty hours a week doing something you find uninteresting. In this case, you’ve described what you want to move away from - not being able to make ends meet, and spending your time on something that does not interest you. In both cases, your intention might be the same, to have what you want. In the first case you want to get it by moving toward it, while in the second you want to get it by moving away from the opposite.

These two ways of focusing your mind, however, will create very different outcomes. To move toward what you want, you have to focus on it. In most cases this means picturing it internally or talking to yourself about it. As with all focusing, this will create certain feelings and behaviors, and it will cause you to attract or be attracted to the people or situations that will help you make what you’ve focused on happen in reality.

As always, your mind figures out how to create what you focus on. When you move away from what you don’t want, something very similar happens, but with an interesting twist. To move away from something you don’t want, you also have to focus on it. Unfortunately, your mind takes what you focus on very literally. It assumes that you want whatever you focus on. It doesn’t register the negative and, as before, it gets busy attracting or creating what you’ve focused on - even though you don’t want it.

If, for instance, you are afraid that people don’t like you, you will find ways to attract people who don’t like you. You might become attracted to people who don’t like anyone. You might act in such a way that people don’t like you. You might interpret what people say and do in a way that makes it seem that they don’t like you, even if they do. You can see that automatically focusing on what you don’t want is not resourceful, yet many people do it.

To be in charge of what you create, you need to use this filter consciously. You cannot allow it to operate unconsciously.

A second metaprogram filter, The Reason Filter, determines why you do whatever it is you are doing. Do you do it because it’s possible, or because you have to? Many people unconsciously and automatically follow a set of rules or “supposed-to’s” they learned while growing up. These rules create pre-programmed focusing and pre-programmed behavior.

There are certain benefits to this - rules act like shortcuts, allowing us to act in ways that have worked in the past). However, no set of rules can cover all possibilities, and what do you do when you can’t find a rule that works? And, many of the rules we carry with us from childhood are nothing more than hand-me-down limitation from our parents.

Rules and “have-to’s” filter out other possibilities, and if you filter out the possibilities, you don’t see them. If you don’t see them, they don’t exist. If you focus on the possibilities in any given situation, you may still end up with the same action the rules would have generated, but you’ll be doing it for a different reason, and you’ll have considered many possibilities that might generate a much more resourceful outcome.

But what about the shortcut advantage?

Won’t you need to consider all the possibilities - which could be infinite - in every situation? Relax. There is a part of you that can consider them all, evaluate them, and choose the most resourceful, and do it in an instant. It isn’t your linear mind, though, which does everything one step at a time, but rather another part of you that can handle an unlimited number of variables all at once. (More about that in a moment.) These (and about twenty more) metaprogram filters determine what you pay attention to.

You can either use them unconsciously, as you probably are now, or you can master them and use them consciously and intentionally. When these filters operate unconsciously and automatically, you will create your life in a certain pre-set way. If you operate them consciously and intentionally, you can create whatever you want. It’s that simple."

http://www.dreammanifesto.com/centerpointe-part-2.html

Awesome information, hope you enjoy!!

____

"What You Pay Attention To Creates Your Life  Part 1

By Bill Harris November 20th, 2007
Source Dream Manifesto

"Your Internal Map of Reality is really just a way of taking what comes in through your senses and turning it into what you feel, how you behave, and the people and situations you attract or become attracted to. There are several steps in this process. In the simplest sense, you begin by deciding what to pay attention to. Then, you decide how to pay attention to it, in other words, how to represent to yourself internally whatever you are paying attention to (i.e., how to think about it).

These two simple steps involve a number of rather complex sub-steps. Deciding what to pay attention to involves choosing what you allow in through your senses - a simple example being whether to watch television, read a book, or watch the sunset. Next, of all the millions of bits of information touching your senses in each moment, you have to decide which to notice and which to delete and therefore not notice. This is no minor decision (and, right now, if you’re like most people, you’re making it unconsciously and automatically). The amount of information coming in through your senses in each moment is enormous.

You can pay attention, in any moment, to only a tiny fraction of it, which means that you must delete most of it. And because this onslaught of sensory information keeps coming and coming and coming, you must make this decision over and over, in every moment. To make this easier, your internal map of reality consists of certain automatic, pre-set ways of deciding what to let in and what to delete.

This method, as handy as it is, has certain drawbacks. You decided how to decide what to pay attention to when you were very young, before you had any real criteria for deciding how to do it. To be truly effective as a human being, you’re going to have to take this process off of autopilot and learn to do it consciously and intentionally. In each moment, and depending on the outcome you have in mind, what is most resourceful to pay attention to changes.

Consciously deciding what to pay attention to and what to delete has huge advantages. One automatic method of deciding what to pay attention to is your beliefs. Beliefs are crystallized, pre-set ways of focusing attention, and as such become self-fulfilling prophecies, in the sense that we find ways to make whatever we believe come true in reality (or at least seem to be true, which usually amounts to the same thing). When you believe something, you delete whatever does not support the belief, and keep the rest.

Beliefs also strongly affect your ability to attract or become attracted to people and situations that help confirm that what you believe is, indeed, true. A wit once said, “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it.”  This bon mot actually describes how it works. For instance, if you believe that in relationships men will be untrustworthy and unreliable, you will notice, attract,and become attracted to men who are, indeed, unreliable.

In a crowded room, your attention will be automatically drawn to such men. At the same time, you’ll fail to notice, or fail to become attracted to, men who don’t fit this profile (another example of how we use unconscious cues to attract certain people and situations). If you do encounter men who are reliable in relationships, you won’t be attracted to them, or you’ll interpret what they do as evidence of unreliability, even if that isn’t really true.

If you believe it’s difficult to make money, you’ll focus your attention in such a way that you’ll attract or become attracted to situations where it is, indeed, difficult to make money. You’ll also fail to notice situations where it might be easier to make money. If you do notice a moneymaking opportunity, you’ll discount it, or act in a way that leads to failure anyway - again, confirming the “truth” of what you belief.

Different beliefs cause us to attract different people and situations, to behave in different ways, and to create different outcomes - outcomes that demonstrate the truth of what you already believe. Your goal, of course, is to operate your internal map of reality consciously and intentionally, adjusting how you use it on the fly to fit each situation and the outcome you want to create. This means choosing what to believe based on the outcome you want.

Since you will find a way to make anything you believe either come true or seem to be true, choosing what to believe becomes a method for creating what you want.

Most people choose what to believe because “it’s true.” In other words, they believe it because they have “evidence.” Once you have evidence and, based on that evidence, believe something to be true, you will find ways to create more evidence - which is why psychologists call it a self-fulfilling prophecy. This means that you shouldn’t decide what to believe based on past evidence. Instead, you should decide what to believe based on the outcome you have in mind.

Now how do you do that? Doesn’t that mean you have to disregard “the evidence” - to pretend that what the evidence tells you is true isn’t true? Yes, you do, in a sense. How, then, do you go against the evidence you currently have for what you believe now, assuming that you want to change what you believe? First, you understand that beliefs generate evidence, and evidence also generates beliefs. If you decide to believe something that is more resourceful, you will generate evidence that this new belief is true. In fact, ALL beliefs are “true,” in the sense that all beliefs generate their own evidence.

Next, you look around and realize that someone else, somewhere, believes what you would like to believe. If so, it is possible to believe it. So, borrow that other person’s evidence until you have your own. Believe “as if” the belief is true. If you do think “as if” the belief is true, and act as if it is true, you will generate the ideas, the motivation, the internal qualities, and the behavior, which will make it come true.

You can choose what to believe, based on what you want to create. When you change what you believe, you change what you pay attention to and what you delete, and in doing so, you change how you feel and behave, and what and whom you attract.

A second key aspect of your Internal Map of Reality is your values. Values are simply what you think is important. When you think something is important, you pay attention to it, and you spend time on it.

Values, then, are another filter that determines what you pay attention to (and, therefore, what results you create). Values also have an additional and more specialized role: they are the source of motivation.

If something is important to you, you pay attention to it, and you are motivated by it. As with beliefs, you can choose what is important to you. Most people make this choice when they are too small to have any criteria for choosing. How do they choose, then? They choose based on pressures applied by their parents. Parents have an agenda, sometimes positive and sometimes not, for what should be important, and this becomes another unconscious, automatic part of your Internal Map of Reality.

You can, however, choose what to value, and in doing so, take charge of your life. In addition to beliefs and values, there is another collection of filters we use to decide what to pay attention to and what to delete, called metaprograms....."

http://www.dreammanifesto.com/pay-attention-creates-life.html

My take ..... Washington's must be a sea of "white matter".

____________

"Radio Lab: Into the Brain of a Liar
by Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad

Jake Rofman for NPR

"Morning Edition, March 6, 2008 · We all lie — once a day or so, according to most studies. But usually we tell little lies, like "your new haircut looks great!" And most of us can control when we lie or what we lie about. But some people lie repeatedly and compulsively, about things both big and small.

In 2005, a study published in The British Journal of Psychiatry provided the first evidence of structural differences in the brains of people with a history of persistent lying. The study was led by Yaling Yang, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of Southern California, and Adrian Raine, an expert on antisocial disorders who is now at University of Pennsylvania.

They expected to see some kind of deficit in the brains of these liars, Yang says. But surprisingly, the liars in their study actually had a surplus — specifically, they had more connections in the part of their brains responsible for complex thinking.

Finding Liars

The label "pathological liar" gets used in a variety of ways, and there's no standard psychological definition or test to measure if someone is a pathological liar. So Yang and her team chose to focus their study on people who have a history of repeated lying and seem not to be able to control their lying (hereafter called simply, "liars"). The researchers began by gathering volunteers from temporary employment agencies in the Los Angeles area. The idea was that liars would be over-represented at these agencies; a history of repeated lying would likely make it hard to keep a steady job.

Then they ran 108 volunteers through extensive interviews and a battery of tests that measure patterns of deception. In the end, the team found 12 people who showed strong evidence of repeated and compulsive lying. For control groups, they identified 16 people who had antisocial tendencies but no history of lying and 21 people with no history of either lying or antisocial behavior.

Into the Scanner

Yang and her colleagues put all 49 people, both the liars and the non-liars, into a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and took pictures of their prefrontal cortex. They chose to focus on this area of the brain because previous studies had shown that the prefrontal cortex plays a role in both lying and in antisocial behaviors.

If you could look into this part of the brain, which sits right behind your forehead, you would see two kinds of matter: gray and white. Gray matter is the groups of brain cells that process information. Most neuroscience studies focus on gray matter. But nearly half the brain is composed of connective tissues that carry electrical signals from one group of neurons to another. This is white matter. Roughly, gray matter is where the processing happens, and white matter connects different parts of the brain, helping us to bring different ideas together.

The liars in Yang's study had on average 22 percent to 26 percent more white matter in their prefrontal cortex than both the normal and antisocial controls.

More Connections

Yang speculates that the increase in white matter means that people who lie repeatedly and compulsively are better at making connections between thoughts that aren't connected in reality — like, say, "me" and "fighter pilot." Consequently, while some of us struggle to come up with reasons why we were late for work, or can't go out with someone we don't really like, Yang's liars impulsively serve up a heaping helping of excuses and stories, and fast.

"By having more connections," Yang says, "you can jump from one idea to another and you can come up with more random stories and ideas."

Admittedly, this study is just a first step. It doesn't show that more white matter in the prefrontal cortex accounts for all lying or that it's the only part of the brain involved. And the study does not establish whether the brain differences lead to lying or whether repeated lying somehow "exercises" connections in the brain. While the study was carefully designed to exclude differences that could be due to age, ethnicity, IQ, brain injury or substance abuse, the small sample size means the results need to be replicated. More research is needed to define what behaviors count as pathological lying and to establish the mechanism behind those behaviors.

A Promising Beginning

Still, the study provides a promising starting point for exploring the relationship between lying and white matter in the brain. For example, brain scans of autistic people, who have difficulty telling lies, show the exact opposite profile of Yang's liars: They have less white matter than other people. In autistic children, white matter doesn't develop at a normal rate.

"For normal people, from age 2 to age 10 there is a big jump in their white matter," says Yang, "and actually that's the same age that they develop the skill to lie."

Yang has good reason to be thinking about the development of young brains: She's a new mom. She's on maternity leave keeping a close eye on her daughter, Zoe.

"Every step, every little noise she makes, it makes me wonder what's going on in her brain," Yang says. And because she's a scientist, as well as a mother, she does more than just wonder. "It's too early to scan her brain," Yang says, "but eventually I will do it."

Soren Wheeler contributed to this report."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87922568

Add a tea bag to the latest global elitist slush fund.  

________

 

$750 billion "green" investment could revive economy: U.N.
Thu Mar 19, 2009 4:24am EDT

Source Reuters

OSLO (Reuters) - Investments of $750 billion could create a "Green New Deal" to revive the world economy and protect the environment, perhaps aided by a tax on oil, the head of the U.N. environment agency said on Thursday.

Achim Steiner said spending should focus on five environmental sectors including improved energy efficiency for buildings and solar or wind power to create jobs, curb poverty and fight climate change.

"The opportunity must not be lost," Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), told Reuters of a UNEP study that will be put to world leaders meeting in London on April 2 to work out how to spur the ailing economy.

The UNEP report said investments of one percent of global gross domestic product, or about $750 billion, could bankroll a "Global Green New Deal" inspired by the "New Deal" of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt that helped end the depression of the 1930s.

Investments should be split between more energy efficient buildings, renewable energies, better transport, improved agriculture and measures to safeguard nature -- such as fresh water, forests or coral reefs, it said.

Thursday's study adds details of spending after UNEP called for a Green New Deal late last year.

Steiner also said that the world urgently needed funds to jump start a U.N. deal to fight global warming, due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December to succeed the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.

He floated the possibility of taxing oil in rich nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to help a new pact become the cornerstone of a greener economy.

"If, for argument's sake, you were to put a five-year levy in OECD countries of $5 a barrel, you would generate $100 billion per annum. It translates into roughly 3 cents per liter," he said.

UNNOTICED

"It would be almost, if not totally, unnoticed by the consumer," he said, especially since oil prices have fallen from more than $140 a barrel at mid-2008 peaks to about $40.

A barrel of oil contains 158 liters and OECD consumption is about 20 billion barrels a year, he said. "This is just one example, there may be many others," of funding, he said.

"I am concerned about the prospect of a meaningful deal in Copenhagen if there is not a significant financial package on the table," he said. Cash would encourage poor nations to step up actions to curb rising greenhouse gas emissions.

"The argument that we cannot afford this does not, on any serious analysis, hold much water -- especially given the cost to the global economy of failure to act on climate change," he said.

Carbon markets, which could also be a source of funds to help fight climate change, were unlikely to contribute enough cash in early years of a new climate deal, he said.

Steiner said there were promising signs that economic stimulus packages by many nations, ranging from the United States to China, were being tailored to help a shift toward greener growth and away from dependence on fossil fuels.

The U.N. Climate Panel says that greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are a prime cause of warming that will cause more heatwaves, droughts, rising sea levels and more powerful storms."

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE52I09T20090319?sp=true

Follow the money trail paying for control.

______

"Lose Your Property for Growing Food?

Big Brother legislation could mean prosecution, fines up to $1 million

March 16, 2009
By Chelsea Schilling
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

Source Steve Quayle Q Factor

"Some small farms and organic food growers could be placed under direct supervision of the federal government under new legislation making its way through Congress.

Food Safety Modernization Act

House Resolution 875, or the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, was introduced by Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., in February. DeLauro's husband, Stanley Greenburg, works for Monsanto – the world's leading producer of herbicides and genetically engineered seed.

DeLauro's act has 39 co-sponsors and was referred to the House Agriculture Committee on Feb. 4. It calls for the creation of a Food Safety Administration to allow the government to regulate food production at all levels – and even mandates property seizure, fines of up to $1 million per offense and criminal prosecution for producers, manufacturers and distributors who fail to comply with regulations.

Michael Olson, host of the Food Chain radio show and author of "Metro Farm," told WND the government should focus on regulating food production in countries such as China and Mexico rather than burdening small and organic farmers in the U.S. with overreaching regulations.

"We need somebody to watch over us when we're eating food that comes from thousands and thousands of miles away. We need some help there," he said. "But when food comes from our neighbors or from farmers who we know, we don't need all of those rules. If your neighbor sells you something that is bad and you get sick, you are going to get your hands on that farmer, and that will be the end of it. It regulates itself."

The legislation would establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services "to protect the public health by preventing food-borne illness, ensuring the safety of food, improving research on contaminants leading to food-borne illness, and improving security of food from intentional contamination, and for other purposes."

Federal regulators will be tasked with ensuring that food producers, processors and distributors – both large and small – prevent and minimize food safety hazards such as food-borne illnesses and contaminants such as bacteria, chemicals, natural toxins or manufactured toxicants, viruses, parasites, prions, physical hazards or other human pathogens.

Under the legislation's broad wording, slaughterhouses, seafood processing plants, establishments that process, store, hold or transport all categories of food products prior to delivery for retail sale, farms, ranches, orchards, vineyards, aquaculture facilities and confined animal-feeding operations would be subject to strict government regulation.

Government inspectors would be required to visit and examine food production facilities, including small farms, to ensure compliance. They would review food safety records and conduct surveillance of animals, plants, products or the environment.

"What the government will do is bring in industry experts to tell them how to manage all this stuff," Olson said. "It's industry that's telling government how to set these things up. What it always boils down to is who can afford to have the most influence over the government. It would be those companies that have sufficient economies of scale to be able to afford the influence – which is, of course, industrial agriculture."

Farms and food producers would be forced to submit copies of all records to federal inspectors upon request to determine whether food is contaminated, to ensure they are in compliance with food safety laws and to maintain government tracking records. Refusal to register, permit inspector access or testing of food or equipment would be prohibited.

"What is going to happen is that local agriculture will end up suffering through some onerous protocols designed for international agriculture that they simply don't need," Olson said. "Thus, it will be a way for industrial agriculture to manage local agriculture."

Under the act, every food producer must have a written food safety plan describing likely hazards and preventative controls they have implemented and must abide by "minimum standards related to fertilizer use, nutrients, hygiene, packaging, temperature controls, animal encroachment, and water."

"That opens a whole can of worms," Olson said. "I think that's where people are starting to freak out about losing organic agriculture. Who is going to decide what the minimum standards are for fertilization or anything else? The government is going to bring in big industry and say we are setting up these protocols, so what do you think we should do? Who is it going to bring in to ask? The government will bring in people who have economies of scale who have that kind of influence."

DeLauro's act calls for the Food Safety Administration to create a "national traceability system" to retrieve history, use and location of each food product through all stages of production, processing and distribution.

Olson believes the regulations could create unjustifiable financial hardships for small farmers and run them out of business.

"That is often the purpose of rules and regulations: to get rid of your competition," he said. "Only people who are very, very large can afford to comply. They can hire one person to do paperwork. There's a specialization of labor there, and when you are very small, you can't afford to do all of these things."

Olson said despite good intentions behind the legislation, this act could devastate small U.S. farms.

"Every time we pass a rule or a law or a regulation to make the world a better place, it seems like what we do is subsidize production offshore," he said. "We tell farmers they can no longer drive diesel tractors because they make bad smoke. Well, essentially what we're doing is giving China a subsidy to grow our crops for us, or Mexico or anyone else."

Section 304 of the Food Safety Modernization Act establishes a group of "experts and stakeholders from Federal, State, and local food safety and health agencies, the food industry, consumer organizations, and academia" to make recommendations for improving food-borne illness surveillance.

According to the act, "Any person that commits an act that violates the food safety law … may be assessed a civil penalty by the Administrator of not more than $1,000,000 for each such act."

Each violation and each separate day the producer is in defiance of the law would be considered a separate offense and an additional penalty. The act suggests federal administrators consider the gravity of the violation, the degree of responsibility and the size and type of business when determining penalties.

Criminal sanctions may be imposed if contaminated food causes serious illness or death, and offenders may face fines and imprisonment of up to 10 years.

"It's just frightening what can happen with good intentions," Olson said. "It's probably the most radical notions on the face of this Earth, but local agriculture doesn't need government because it takes care of itself."

Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act

Another "food safety" bill that has organic and small farmers worried is Senate Bill 425, or the Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act, sponsored by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.

Brown's bill is backed by lobbyists for Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland and Tyson. It was introduced in September and has been referred to the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee. Some say the legislation could also put small farmers out of business.

Like HR 875, the measure establishes a nationwide "traceability system" monitored by the Food and Drug Administration for all stages of manufacturing, processing, packaging and distribution of food. It would cost $40 million over three years.

"We must ensure that the federal government has the ability and authority to protect the public, given the global nature of the food supply," Brown said when he introduced the bill. He suggested the FDA and USDA have power to declare mandatory recalls.

The government would track food shipped in interstate commerce through a recordkeeping and audit system, a secure, online database
or registered identification. Each farmer or producer would be required to maintain records regarding the purchase, sale and identification of their products.

A 13-member advisory committee of food safety and tracking technology experts, representatives of the food industry, consumer advocates and government officials would assist in implementing the traceability system.

The bill calls for the committee to establish a national database or registry operated by the Food and Drug Administration. It also proposes an electronic records database to identify sales of food and its ingredients "establishing that the food and its ingredients were grown, prepared, handled, manufactured, processed, distributed, shipped, warehoused, imported, and conveyed under conditions that ensure the safety of the food."

It states, "The records should include an electronic statement with the date of, and the names and addresses of all parties to, each prior sale, purchase, or trade, and any other information as appropriate."

If government inspectors find that a food item is not in compliance, they may force producers to cease distribution, recall the item or confiscate it.

"If the postal service can track a package from my office in Washington to my office in Cincinnati, we should be able to do the same for food products," Sen. Brown said in a Sept. 4, 2008, statement. "Families that are struggling with the high cost of groceries should not also have to worry about the safety of their food. This legislation gives the government the resources it needs to protect the public."

Recalls of contaminated food are usually voluntary; however, in his weekly radio address on March 15, President Obama announced he's forming a Food Safety Working Group to propose new laws and stop corruption of the nation's food.

The group will review, update and enforce food safety laws, which Obama said "have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt."

The president said outbreaks from contaminated foods, such as a recent salmonella outbreak among consumers of peanut products, have occurred more frequently in recent years due to outdated regulations, fewer inspectors, scaled back inspections and a lack of information sharing between government agencies.

"In the end, food safety is something I take seriously, not just as your president but as a parent," Obama said. "No parent should have to worry that their child is going to get sick from their lunch just as no family should have to worry that the medicines they buy will cause them harm."

The blogosphere is buzzing with comments on the legislation, including the following: 

* Obama and his cronies or his puppetmasters are trying to take total control – nationalize everything, disarm the populace, control food, etc. We are seeing the formation of a total police state.

* Well ... that's not very " green " of Obama. What's his real agenda?

* This is getting way out of hand! Isn't it enough the FDA already allows poisons in our foods? 

* If you're starving, no number of guns will enable you to stay free. That's the whole idea behind this legislation. He who controls the food really makes the rules.

* The government is terrified of the tax loss. Imagine all the tax dollars lost if people actually grew their own vegetables! Imagine if people actually coordinated their efforts with family, friends and neighbors. People could be in no time eating for the price of their own effort. ... Oh the horror of it all! The last thing the government wants is for us to be self-sufficient.

* They want to make you dependent upon government. I say no way! already the government is giving away taxes from my great great grandchildren and now they want to take away my food, my semi-auto rifles, my right to alternative holistic medicine? We need a revolution, sheeple! Wake up! They want fascism ... can you not see that?

* The screening processes will make it very expensive for smaller farmers, where bigger agriculture corporations can foot the bill.

* If anything it just increases accountability, which is arguably a good thing. It pretty much says they'll only confiscate your property if there are questions of contamination and you don't comply with their inspections. I think the severity of this has been blown out of proportion by a lot of conjecture.

* Don't waste your time calling the criminals in D.C. and begging them to act like humans. This will end with a bloody revolt.

* The more I examine this (on the surface) seemingly innocuous bill the more I hate it. It is a coward's ploy to push out of business small farms and farmers markets without actually making them illegal because many will choose not to operate due to the compliance issue. "

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=92002

http://standeyo.com/NEWS/09_Food_Water/090318.lose.prop.grow.food.HR875.html

           

 

Another awesome article, read a similar suggestion of making a scrapbook or vision board of what you intend to achieve in order to impress your intent on your subconscious.  Good luck!!

____

"How to Create an Empowering Vision Book

By Jack Canfield March 16th, 2009
Source Dream Manifesto

"Tapping into the powers of the brain with visualization will begin to function as if your goals are already attained. Your brain will work tirelessly to achieve the statements you give your subconscious mind. And when those statements are the affirmation of your goals, you are certain to achieve them!

Because your mind responds strongly to visual stimulation - by representing your goals with pictures and images you will stimulate your emotions… and your emotions are the vibrational energy that activates the Law of Attraction.

Create a personal vision book that clearly depicts the future you wish to create
Find pictures that represent or symbolize the experiences, feelings, and possessions you want to attract into your life, and place them in your book. Have fun with the process! Use photographs, magazine cutouts, pictures from the Internet - whatever inspires you. Be creative. Include not only pictures, but anything that speaks to you.

Consider including a picture of yourself in your book. If you do, choose one that was taken in a happy moment. You will also want to post your affirmations, inspirational words, quotations, and thoughts here. Choose words and images that inspire you and make you feel good.

You can use your vision book to depict goals and dreams in all areas of your life, or in just one specific area that you are focusing on. Keep it neat, and be selective about what you place in your vision book. It’s a good idea to avoid creating a cluttered or chaotic book - you don’t want to attract chaos into your life.

Use only the words and images that best represent your purpose, your ideal future, and words that inspire positive emotions in you. There is beauty in simplicity and clarity.

If you are working on visualizing and creating changes in many areas of your life, then you may want to use more than one vision book. You might use one vision book for your personal goals and another for career and financial goals. You might even want to keep your career vision book at the office or on your desk as a means of inspiration and affirmation.

How to use your vision book
Try keeping your vision book on the nightstand next to your bed. Leave it standing in an open position as often as you are comfortable with, and spend time each morning and evening visualizing, affirming, believing, and internalizing your goals.

The time you spend visualizing in the evening just before bed is especially powerful. The thoughts and images that are present in your mind during the last forty-five minutes before going to sleep are the ones that will replay themselves repeatedly in your subconscious mind through­out the night, and the thoughts and images that you begin each day with will help you to create a vibrational match for the future you desire.

As some time goes by, and your dreams begin to manifest, look at those images that represent your achievements, and feel gratitude for how well the Law of Attraction is working in your life. Acknowledge that it is working.

Don’t remove the pictures or images that represent the goals you’ve already achieved.

Achievement of the goals in your vision book are powerful visual reminders of what you have already consciously and deliberately attracted into your life.

I recommend you write down the date you created your vision book. The universe loves speed, and you will be amazed at just how quickly the Law of Attraction responds to your energy, commitment, and desires.

Much like a time capsule, this book will document your personal journey, your dreams, and your achievements for that particular year. It will become a record of your growth, awareness, and expansion that you will want to keep and reflect back upon in years to come.

Final thoughts on using your completed vision book:

  * Look at your vision book often and feel the inspiration it provides.
  * Hold it in your hands and really internalize the future it represents.
  * Read your affirmations and inspirational words aloud.
  * See yourself living in that manner.
  * Feel yourself in the future you have designed.
  * Believe it is already yours.
  * Be grateful for the good that is already present in your life.
  * Acknowledge any goals you have already achieved.
  * Acknowledge the changes you have seen and felt.
  * Acknowledge the presence of God in your life.
  * Acknowledge the Law of Attraction at work in your life.
  * Look at it just before going to bed and first thing upon rising.

I hope I’ve inspired you to create your own vision book and start implementing what you learned from today’s message. See it. Feel it. Believe it!"

http://www.dreammanifesto.com/create-empowering-vision-book.html
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Abraham-Hicks Daily Quote

" In the same way that there is not an instant wanted thing manifesting in your experience, there is not instant unwanted thing happening in your experience. It takes some adapting to vibrations. If you've managed to hold anything, wanted or unwanted, for 17 seconds -- there is a coalescing of thought that takes you a little closer to the vibration of whatever you are turning your attention to. Those 17 second increments, are not discernable. And that's why, when you get into that place, it feels like instant manifestation. Just like when you get into that negative place, it feels like instant manifestation. It's like, "Where did that come from? Seemed like it just sort of snuck up on me," instead of snuck up over a long time."

   

Third and final installment of an awesome article. Hope you've enjoyed it as much as me.

"How to Neutralize Past Negative Experiences - Part III

By Tania Kotsos March 14th, 2009
Source Dream Manifesto

Step 3 - Give Every Experience its Rightful Place

"Scientific experiments have shown that the mind does not know the difference between that which is experienced and that which is imagined. This suggests that every time you re-live a negative experience in your mind, adding some extra sauce as you go along, your mind believes you are experiencing it again. So instead of living an experience just the one time, you live it a hundred, a thousand or even countless times.

You are a Time Traveler
The third and final step in neutralizing negative experiences from your life is to leave them where they belong - in the past. There is no need to travel faster than the speed of light or to break any laws of physics in order for you to travel back in time. All you need to do is access a world that is not subject to time. You have access to such a world at your fingertips – this world is your mind.

Know that time is an illusion of the physical world to which your mental world is not subjected. Just like in your dreams many years can elapse in the space of a few hours, so in the realm of your imagination you can travel anywhere you want, backwards and forwards in time, without any obstacle.

The Time Traveler Meditation
To leave a past negative experience in the past, try out the following meditation - part of Mind Your Reality’s Time Traveler Series - and have fun with it. In a relaxed state with your eyes closed, mentally create an image of a horizontal time line of your life where the furthest point to your right is your present moment.

Make sure your time line includes an exact point for your negative experience as well as a length of time before that experience stretching back into your childhood. With this time line in mind, mentally sense how you have carried the negative experience with you since its occurrence through to your present moment and how its shadow has somehow hovered at every point and colored every experience thereafter.

Freezing the Negative Experience
Now imagine yourself traveling backwards in time along your time-line until you come to your experience. With the new perception and strength you have gained through Step 1 and Step 2, mentally freeze the experience in its place and thank it for its lesson, knowing that it can not follow you back to your present moment in its frozen state. Now continue to travel back in time to a point when those negative beliefs or feelings that created that experience did not exist.

You may find that you have to travel back to your childhood years or it may be that the experience itself created new negative beliefs. In that case, just take a couple of steps back to the moment before the experience. Allow yourself to truly feel how light, happy, carefree and confident you felt without those negative beliefs and see yourself stepping into and embracing those feelings.

Returning to the Present Moment
Next, mentally make your way back along your time line to the current moment. See yourself effortlessly gliding past your once negative experience without any emotion and notice how it is and always will be frozen in time as just one of your many life experiences. Notice its absence from every point thereafter as you continue traveling forward to your present moment.

Sense how the present feels different to what it was prior to your time travel and how your expectations about the future have changed now that it is no longer under the influence of that event. Allow yourself to enjoy this sense of freedom and lightness and from this place of strength, start to mentally count upwards and slowly open your eyes. Repeat this exercise for any experience you wish to let go of.

Know that Your Reality is Yours to Create
Your past experiences have no power over you, other than the power you grant them. Resolve now to release yourself from the grip of the perceived negativity of your experiences and allow yourself to enjoy the glorious game that is life. Apply these three steps with consistency and you will enjoy positive transformation in all areas of your life.

In a very short period of time you will find that while the specific experience may still exist in your recollection, there is no emotion attached to it, you are stronger for it and you are free of its influence. Know that by Universal Law you can not attract the same negative experience into your life once you have positively changed the belief that originally attracted it. When the lesson is learned, the experience is neutralized.

In a nutshell, too many people create their life in the shadow of their past negative experiences and so fail to achieve the success for which they strive. Know that you can free yourself from the negative influence of a past experience by identifying and changing the beliefs that attracted it in the first instance, by changing your perception, and by placing your experience back in its place rather than carrying it with you indefinitely.

When you learn to see your negative experiences as an opportunity to learn and change something about yourself, you will find the pain you once felt will have been transformed into gratitude for a lesson well learned."

http://www.dreammanifesto.com/neutralize-negative-experiences-part-iii.html
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Abraham-Hicks Daily Quote

" It is of great value for you to give your conscious attention to what you specifically want, otherwise you can be swept up by the influence of that which surrounds you. You are bombarded by the stimulation of thought. And so, unless you are setting forth the thought that is important to you, you can be stimulated by another's thought that may or may not be important to you."
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" Whatever you're thinking about is literally like planning a future event. When you're worrying, you are planning. When you're appreciating you are planning...What are you planning? "

   

Second part of an awesome article .... and there's even more after this installment  To be continued…"

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"How to Neutralize Past Negative Experiences - Part II

By Tania Kotsos March 12th, 2009
Source Dream Manifesto

"Step 2 - Change Your Perception and the Experience Changes

You can easily change your perception when you recognize the fact that you made it up in the first instance based on your beliefs and past experiences. In a relaxed state with your eyes closed, create a mental image in your mind of a negative experience you wish to neutralize.

Neutrally observe yourself experiencing the specific event, how it started, how you felt, where it took place, why it was negative for you and how you reacted. As you continue to neutrally observe the scene unfolding through to its end, see how your beliefs about life and yourself made you perceive the experience as negative.

Having Fun with Your Mental Image
Have fun with the scene in your mind by changing your perception. Keep it light. Allow yourself to sense how differently you would have felt or reacted had your beliefs about yourself and life been different. For instance, had you had more self-love, self-esteem and self-confidence when an important relationship ended; or had you had no attachment to money and no fear of failure when your business was in trouble – how would your perception of that experience be different.

Whatever the negative belief you had at the time, see yourself believing its opposite. Sense how your experience changes from one of disempowerment to one of empowerment as your beliefs change. Feel how the experience doesn’t matter as much anymore or how in fact, you feel stronger for it. From this place of strength, take a deep breath and as you exhale release the experience, seeing the image gently float away. Enjoy the lightness you feel as you mentally count upwards and slowly open your eyes.

Changing Your Perception is Not Denial
To change your perception of an experience does not mean you deny its occurrence. When you change perception, you change your perspective which really means to “see” something from a different vantage point, through different eyes. It doesn’t mean the experience didn’t happen. It simply means that you attach a different meaning to an otherwise neutral event. It is you who attaches meaning to all your experiences in any case, so you might as well attach a meaning that serves you.

A Special Mention About Our Perception of Death
This article is aimed at those often repeated experiences that we attract to ourselves and that stand in the way of our success. It is not aimed at dealing with the death of a loved one, although its principles could generally be applied. Death can be an undeniably heart-wrenching experience.

Know though, that it is often our false perception about the finality of death which makes its pain so acute. If we could only see the truth that death is a new scene for those who have left the physical plane, rather than the final falling of a curtain, we would alleviate much of the pain that we carry with us as a result of it.

If You Are Going Through it Now
The first two steps (i.e. finding the negative belief and changing your perception) can effectively be applied to any negative experience you may currently be going through. When you remove the emotion, change the perception and recognize your negative underlying beliefs, you will be able to deal with the situation far more calmly and effectively with inspired rather than desperate action.

You will find solutions which were otherwise invisible to you. As Albert Einstein said, “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created”. In other words, you cannot expect to find a solution to a problem created by a negative belief if you are still operating at the level of that negative belief."

To be continued…"

http://www.dreammanifesto.com/neutralize-negative-experiences-part-ii.html
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Abraham-Hicks Daily Quote

" Who you are and what you know when you are born is everything that you need to know to thrive. You are born with a sense of self and a sense of wanting self to feel good, and the mechanisms to bring it about."

 

An outstanding article, will post part 2 when it becomes available.  Hope you enjoy!!

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"How to Neutralize Past Negative Experiences - Part I

By Tania Kotsos March 10th, 2009
Source Dream Manifesto

"Life is supposed to be a wonderful collection of always new experiences but we too often focus on the negative experiences of our past and so live our life in their presence and create our future in their shadow. Each of your experiences have taken place only once but you may have re-lived them a thousand times in your mind, thereby giving them a thousand times more power than they are due; a thousand more places in your life than they are due; and a thousand more strings to pull you with than they are due.

Ultimately, negative experiences can be transformed into positive lessons and so can become the ticket to your success rather than the excess baggage that prevents it.

The Deception of Perception
Know that every thing you experience in life is in itself neutral. It is your perception that labels your experiences as good or bad, positive or negative, happy or sad in accordance with your beliefs, which themselves are a product of your perception of your past experiences. Perception therefore can be very misleading because it colours your experiences and reinforces your beliefs irrespective of whether they serve you or not.

Re-Experiencing the Experienced
You can not experience any reality other than the one you perceive based on your beliefs. So you create something of a cycle, where your experiences validate your beliefs and your beliefs your experiences, with the cycle being virtuous or vicious depending on the nature of your beliefs. This is why most people tend to repeat their experiences whether it is in their relationships, their health, their finances or in any other area.

Ask yourself how many times you have drawn the same experience to yourself over and over again. The people or the setting may change but the fundamental experience, or how you felt as a result of it, is the same. This is not coincidence or the luck of the draw - you are always the only common denominator and your inner world the only cause.

Three Steps to Neutralize Negative Experiences
You may find that a specific experience from your past has negatively affected your general outlook on life or your belief in yourself. You may have even forgotten how you felt about life and yourself before it. The influence of a past negative experience may feel very real to you today but this is only because you have carried it with you beyond the one time that it occurred without learning its lesson and the longer you carry something, the heavier it becomes.

To easily free yourself from the grip of a negative experience follow these three steps:

1. learn its lesson by finding your belief; 2. change your perception; and 3. leave it in its rightful place on the imaginary time-line of your life. Each of the steps can be used independently or you may find that one step is more suited to specific experiences. However, using the three together is by far most effective and will yield the most permanent results.

Step 1 - To Learn the Lesson Find the Belief
Whenever you have a negative experience that causes you pain, it is telling you that something is “wrong” - not with your outer world but with your inner world. Just like physical pain alerts us to a physical problem and allows you to correct it, so mental pain alerts you to a mental problem that needs correcting.

Think about it - when you touched a hot flame or stove as a child and burnt yourself, the pain you felt taught you not to do it again. Were it not for the pain, you would have been severely burnt. In the same way, the pain in the mental world is trying to prevent you from getting severely burnt in your life. Learn to see each and every one of your so-called negative experiences as a dear friend coming to tell you what is wrong.

What is “Wrong”?
You can discover what is “wrong” in your inner world once you recognize that you create your reality. The truth is that you attracted the negative experience to yourself in accordance with your subconscious beliefs. The experience is doing nothing more than letting you see your negative beliefs so that you can change them and hence not repeat the experience – this is growth.

Mentally collect your similar experiences together and look for the common thread. You will usually find that one or a number of negative beliefs come up repeatedly, whether it is that you are not good enough, not clever enough, not attractive enough or perhaps that wealth is only for the lucky or that you are not cut out for success - the list is endless.

Finding the Culprit
If the underlying negative belief is not obvious to you, then look at how you felt or reacted during the experience and work backwards from there. Ask yourself why you felt and reacted that way. You can also examine your daily habits, your fears and those outcomes you desperately want to avoid at all costs or that you are otherwise desperately attached to seeing manifest in your life – it is your subconscious beliefs that drive them all.

Create a Belief List
Alternatively, make a written list of both your positive and negative beliefs about yourself and life. Examine all areas and write down everything that comes to you. Start with your “I ams”, e.g. “I am stupid”, “I am a failure”, “I am attractive” and then add more impersonal terms like “money is”, “relationships are”, “love is”, “life is” and so on. The words that come to you first are usually most accurate - be honest with yourself.

Make sure to look closely at your beliefs because the innocent may in fact be guilty. For instance, a belief like “I am competitive” may look innocent enough but its influence can be negative as it can make you compare yourself to others and to see life in terms of being a winner or a loser, both of which drain you of your authentic power. Once you have your list, it should be easy to match the negative belief to the negative experience. Keep your list in a private place, make notes next to your beliefs and add new ones as they come to you. Use it to assess any experience in your life.

Take Charge of Your Beliefs
By finding the belief behind a negative experience, you can easily understand how and why you perceived it to be negative. The experience is then positively transformed because you have learnt something about yourself that you can change. Even if you attract that experience again you will be able to immediately see the lesson without the associated pain and take steps to change the belief.

The most effective way to change your beliefs is by re-programming your subconscious mind using creative visualization, affirmations and prayer, knowing that you are one with the All-Powerful, All-Knowing Universal Mind for which nothing is impossible. Once you change the belief, the experience is not repeated again in your life.

To be continued… "

http://www.dreammanifesto.com/neutralize-negative-experiences-part.html
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Abraham-Hicks Daily Quote

" When you offer a vibration, the Universal forces are working in concert with each other in order to satisfy you. You really are the center of the Universe."

 

"Sell Your Cleverness And Purchase Bewilderment

By Wayne Dyer March 2nd, 2008 
Source Dream Manifesto 

"Having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing sounds easy until you think about how much conditioning has taken place in your life, and how many of your current thoughts were influenced by geography, the religious beliefs of your ancestors, the color of your skin, the shape of your eyes, the political orientation of your parents, your size, your gender, the schools that were selected for you, and the vocation of your great-grandparents, to list only some possibilities.

You showed up here as a tiny infant capable of an infinite number of potentialities. Many of your choices remain unexplored because of a hopefully well-intentioned conditioning program designed to make you fit the culture of your caretakers. You probably had next to no opportunity to disagree with the cultural and societal arrangements made for your life.

There may have been some adults who encouraged you to have an open mind, but if you’re honest with yourself, you know that your philosophy of life, your religious beliefs, your manner of dress, and your language are a function of what your tribe (and its heritage) determined was right for you. If you made any fuss about going against this preordained conditioning, you probably heard even stronger voices insisting that you get back in line and do things the way they have “always been done.” Fitting in superseded having a mind that was open to new ideas.

If your parents were Jewish, it’s unlikely that you were raised to honor and respect the Muslim religion, and vice versa. If both your parents were Republicans, it’s improbable that you heard the virtues of the Democratic Party extolled. Whatever the reasons our ancestors may have had for not having open minds, it’s true that they inhabited a much less populated world than we do. In today’s overpopulated world, we simply cannot continue to live with those old styles of closed-mindedness. I urge you to open your mind to all possibilities, to resist any efforts to be pigeonholed, and to refuse to allow pessimism into your consciousness. Having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing seems to me to be one of the most basic principles that you can adopt to contribute to individual and world peace.

No One Knows Enough to Be a Pessimist
Find an opportunity to observe a tiny little green sprout emerging from a seed. When you do, allow yourself to feel the awe of what you’re seeing. A famous poet named Rumi observed, “Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.” The scene of an emerging sprout represents the beginning of life. No one on this planet has even a tiny clue as to how all of this works. What is that creative spark that causes the life to sprout? What created the observer, the consciousness, the observation, and perception itself? The questions are endless.

A short while ago, Earthlings in the space program were moving a tiny vehicle on Mars via remote control. Invisible signals took ten minutes to travel through space and arrived to make right turns and instruct a scoop to pick up some Martian real estate to examine. We all marvel at such technological feats. But think about it for a moment. In an endless universe, Mars, our closest neighbor, is the equivalent of moving a billionth of an inch across the page you’re reading! We move a little vehicle on a neighbor next door and we’re so impressed with ourselves.

There are billions and billions of planets, objects, and stars in our galaxy alone, and there are uncountable billions of galaxies out there. We are a speck in an incomprehensibly vast universe that has no end to it. Think about this: If we found the end, would there be a wall at the edge of the universe? If so, who built it? Even more perplexing, what’s on the other side of the wall, and how thick is it?

How can anyone be a pessimist in a world where we know so little? A heart starts beating inside a mother’s womb a few weeks after conception, and it’s a total mystery to everyone on our planet. In comparison to what there is to know, we are only embryos. Keep this in mind whenever you encounter those who are absolutely certain that there’s only one way to do something.

Resist being a pessimist. Resist with all your might, because we hardly know anything at all in comparison with what there is to know. Can you imagine what a pessimist who lived only 200 years ago would think about the world we live in? Airplanes, electricity, automobiles, television, remote controls, the Internet, fax machines, telephones, cellular phones, and so on. All because of that spark of open-mindedness that allowed progress, growth, and creativity to flourish.

And what of the future and all of your tomorrows? Can you picture faxing yourself back to the 14th century, flying without machines, telepathically communicating, de-molecularizing yourself and rearranging yourself on another galaxy, or cloning a sheep from a photograph of a sheep? An open mind allows you to explore and create and grow. A closed mind seals off any such creative explanation. Remember that progress would be impossible if we always did things the way we always have. The ability to participate in miracles-true miracles in your life-happens when you open your mind to your limitless potential.

The Miracle Mind-Set
Refuse to allow yourself to have low expectations about what you’re capable of creating. As Michelangelo suggested, the greater danger is not that your hopes are too high and you fail to reach them; it’s that they’re too low and you do. Have within you an imaginary candle flame that burns brightly regardless of what goes before you. Let this inner flame represent for you the idea that you’re capable of manifesting miracles in your life.

In every single case of a person experiencing a spontaneous healing or overcoming something that was considered to be impossible, the individual went through a complete reversal of personality. They actually rewrote their own agreement with reality. To experience Godlike spontaneous miracles, you must have a sense of yourself as Godlike. The Scriptures say, “With God all things are possible.” Now tell me, what does that leave out? A mind that’s open to everything means being peaceful, radiating love, practicing forgiveness, being generous, respecting all life, and most important, visualizing yourself as capable of doing anything that you can conceive of in your mind and heart.

Whatever universal law that has ever been utilized to manifest a miracle any where, any time, and in any person is still on the books. It has never been repealed, and it never will be. You possess the same energy, the same God-consciousness, to be a miracle worker-but only if you truly believe and know it within yourself.

Understand that what you think about expands (”As a man thinketh, so is he”). If your thoughts are filled with doubt and you have a closed mind, you will of necessity act upon those closed-mind doubts, and you’ll see evidence of your thinking virtually everywhere you are. On the other hand, should you decide (make no mistake about this, it is a choice) to have a mind that’s open to everything, then you’ll act upon that inner energy, and you’ll be the creator as well as the recipient of miracles wherever you are. You will experience what Walt Whitman meant when he wrote, “To me, every cubic inch of space is a miracle.”

What Being Open to Everything Means
Everything means just what it says. No exceptions. When someone suggests something to you that conflicts with your conditioning, rather than responding with, “That’s ridiculous; we all know that’s impossible,” say, “I’ve never considered that before. I’ll think about it.” Open yourself up to the spiritual ideas of all people, and listen with an open mind to crazy schemes and ideas that seem at first to be outrageous. If someone suggests that crystals can cure hemorrhoids, that natural herbs can lower cholesterol, that people will eventually be able to breathe underwater, or that levitation is possible-listen, and be curious.

Let go of your attachments to what you’ve been trained to believe. Open your mind to all possibilities, because whether you believe something is possible or impossible, either way you’ll be right. How can that be true? Your agreement with reality and all that’s possible determines what you’ll become. If you’re convinced that you can’t become wealthy, famous, artistic, a professional athlete, a great singer, or whatever, you will act upon that inner conviction that prevents you from manifesting what you’d really like. All that you’ll get from your effort is being right. When you need to be right, you’re attached to your conditioned reflex of the way things are and always have been; and you assume they will always be.

Releasing Your Attachments
This first secret has two components: (1) a mind that is open to everything, and (2) a mind that is attached to nothing. Your attachments are the source of all your problems. The need to be right, to possess someone or something, to win at all costs, to be viewed by others as superior-these are all attachments. The open mind resists these attachments and consequently experiences inner peace and success.

To release attachments, you have to make a shift in how you view yourself. If your primary identification is with your body and your possessions, your ego is the dominant force in your life. If you can tame your ego sufficiently, you’ll call upon your spirit to be the guiding force in your life. As a spiritual being, you can observe your body and be a compassionate witness to your existence. Your spiritual aspect sees the folly of attachments because your spiritual self is an infinite soul. Nothing can make you happy or successful. These are inner constructs that you bring to your world, rather than what you receive from it.

If you think peaceful thoughts, you’ll feel peaceful emotions, and that’s what you’ll bring to every life situation. If you’re attached to being right or absolutely need something in order to be at peace or to be successful, you’ll live a life of striving yet never arriving.

It’s possible to have a burning desire yet not have attachments. You can have an inner vision of what you intend to manifest and still detach yourself from the outcome. How? Consider this observation in A Course in Miracles: “Infinite patience produces immediate results.” It sounds like a paradox, doesn’t it? Infinite patience implies an absolute certainty that what you’d like to manifest will indeed show up, in perfect order, and exactly on time. The immediate result you receive from this inner knowing is a sense of peace. When you detach from the outcome, you’re at peace, and you’ll ultimately see the fruits of your convictions.

Suppose you had a choice between two magic wands. With Wand A, you can have any physical thing you desire by simply waving it. With Wand B, you can have a sense of peace for the rest of your life regardless of what circumstances arise. Which would you pick? A guarantee of stuff, or inner peace for the remainder of your life? If you opt for peace, then you already have Wand B. Simply have a mind that is open to everything but attached to nothing. Let it all come and go as it will. Enjoy it all, but never make your happiness or success dependent on an attachment to any thing, any place, and particularly, any person.

In all of your relationships, if you can love someone enough to allow them to be exactly what they choose to be-without any expectations or attachments from you-you’ll know true peace in your lifetime. True love means you love a person for what they are, not for what you think they should be. This is an open mind-and an absence of attachment."

http://www.dreammanifesto.com/sell-cleverness-purchase-bewilderment.html
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Abraham-Hicks Daily Quote

" What about creating a very obvious positive current of financial abundance? What about getting so good at visualizing that the money flows through you easily? What about expending money? Giving more people work? Giving more people opportunity? The more you spend, the more people benefit, and the more people get in on the game and dovetail with you. Your role is to utilize the Energy. That's why you exist. You are an Energy-flowing being, a focuser, a perceiver. You are a Creator. There is not anything worse in all of the Universe to do than to come forth into the environment of great contrast where desire is born easily and not allow Energy to flow to your desire. That is a true squandering of life."
___

" In the same way that there is not an instant wanted thing manifesting in your experience, there is not instant unwanted thing happening in your experience. It takes some adapting to vibrations. If you've managed to hold anything, wanted or unwanted, for 17 seconds -- there is a coalescing of thought that takes you a little closer to the vibration of whatever you are turning your attention to. Those 17 second increments, are not discernable. And that's why, when you get into that place, it feels like instant manifestation. Just like when you get into that negative place, it feels like instant manifestation. It's like, "Where did that come from? Seemed like it just sort of snuck up on me," instead of snuck up over a long time."

 

"Fractal Time - The Secret of 2012 and a New World Age

By Gregg Braden March 8th, 2009
Source Dream Manifesto

"We're living the end of time. Not the end of the world, but the end of a world age - a 5,125-year cycle of time - and the way we've known the world throughout that time. The present world age began in 3114 b.c. and will end in a.d. 2012.

Because the end of anything also marks the beginning of what comes next, we're also living the start of what follows the end of time: the next world age, which ancient traditions called the great cycle.

From the epic poems of India's Mahabharata to the oral traditions of indigenous Americans and the biblical story of Revelation, those who have come before us knew that the end of time was coming. They knew, because it always does. Every 5,125 years, the earth and our solar system reach a place in their journey through the heavens that marks the end of precisely such a cycle. With that end, a new world age begins. Apparently it's always been this way.

For at least four such cycles (or five, according to the Mesoamerican traditions of the Aztec and the Maya peoples), our ancestors endured the changes in global magnetic fields, climate, diminishing resources, and rising sea levels that come with the end of time. They did so without satellites and the Internet or computer models to help them prepare for such a radical shift.

The fact that they lived to tell the story stands as a powerful testament to an undeniable truth: it tells us beyond any reasonable doubt that the inhabitants of our planet have survived the end of world ages in the past. Beyond simply surviving, our ancestors learned from the difficulties that can accompany the change. In the words of their day, they did their best to tell us what it means to live such a rare moment in history. It's a good thing they did, because such events are few and far between. Only five generations in the last 26,000 years have experienced the shift of world ages. We will be the sixth.

The present world age isn't something that will simply fade away into the sunset of a time that seems to perpetually linger somewhere "out there" in our future. Just the opposite: our world age has an expiration date. It ends at a specific time, with a specific event, on a day that was marked on a calendar more than 2,000 years ago. There is no secret about that date. The Maya who calculated it also inscribed it as a permanent record for future generations. The date is etched into stone monuments that were built to last until the end of time.

When the date is translated to our familiar system of time, the message becomes clear. It tells us that our present world cycle will conclude with the winter solstice that takes place on December 21 in the year 2012. It's on this date that the mysterious Maya identified the astonishing astronomical events that will mark the end of our age . . . and they did so more than two millennia ago.

The reason:
Physically, our solar system is moving through shortest part of an orbit that looks like a flattened circle, an ellipsis whose far end carries us to the most distant point from the core of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

The physical effect:
Both ancient traditions and modern science tell us that our location in this cyclic orbit determines how we experience the powerful sources of energy, such as the "massive magnetic fields," which radiate from our galaxy's core. Recent studies suggest that it is precisely such cycles that may explain the mysterious patterns of biodiversity - the rise and fall of life on Earth, such as the mass extinctions that happened 250 and 450 million years ago.

Additionally, modern discoveries confirm that Earth's position throughout the journey (orbit, tilt, and wobble) create the ever-changing cycles that influence everything from temperature and climate to polar ice and the magnetic fields of the earth. Details of these effects will be discussed throughout the book.

The emotional/spiritual effect:
As we travel farther from our galaxy's core, our distance from the energy located there was described by ancient traditions as the loss of a connection that we sense both spiritually and emotionally. Scientific links between the quality of Earth's magnetic fields, how they're affected by cosmic conditions, and our feeling of well-being seem to precisely support such ancient beliefs.

In the same way that Earth's rotation makes the darkest part of the night appear just before the dawn, our position in the heavens is such that the darkest part of our world age appears right before our heavenly orbit begins the return that brings us closer to our galaxy's core. With that return, we experience relief from the cataclysmic forces of the cycle's darkness. And just as the night must pass in order to get to the new day, the only way to arrive at the light of the next cycle is to finish the darkness of this one.

We all know that dark experiences definitely exist in our world, and we don't need to look far to find them; however, there's also more to life than the suffering that the ancients foresaw - much more. Even in our time of great darkness, the polarities of peace, healing, love, and compassion are alive, well, and abundant.

Our ancestors had an amazingly deep grasp of just what our experience of cosmic cycles means on multiple levels.

Somehow they knew that Earth's position in the heavens would affect the physical conditions in our world, as well as the emotional and spiritual experiences that we need to embrace them. Through myth, analogy, and metaphor, they reminded us that the farther we travel away from the source of such powerful energy, the deeper we are in darkness and the more out of sync we find ourselves with the fields that influence life here on Earth. From the traditions of the Hopi to the ancient Vedas, it's this experience of separateness that is credited with our sense of being lost as well.

Our ancestors cautioned that at the most distant point in our cycle, we would forget who we are - our connectedness to one another and the earth. They told us that we would forget our past. It's precisely this disconnected feeling that seems to be the consequence of the cyclic journey that carries us to the far end of our galactic orbit. It's also the fear that is spawned by such feelings that has led to the chaos, war, and destruction at the end of cycles past.

The key to 2012 and our time in history is to understand the language of nature's cycles and to use that language today to prepare for the future. Ultimately we may discover that our ability to understand and apply the "rules" of Fractal Time holds the key to our deepest healing, our greatest joy, and our survival as a species."

http://www.dreammanifesto.com/fractal-time-secret-2012-world-age.html
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Abraham-Hicks Daily Quote

" You've trained yourself to face reality. You've trained yourself to tell the truth. You've trained yourself to tell it like it is. So in the beginning, these fantasies feel a little inappropriate, because it's like you're fooling yourself. Sometimes people will say, "Well, isn't this just denial?" And we say, we hope so! We hope that you are denying the absence that you do not want. And we hope that you are embracing the presence of what you do. But somehow the idea of denial has become a dirty word to you; like it is virtuous to face the reality of the horror of your own lives. And we would be ignoring anything that did not please us. We would get our eyes on what feels good. "

Two different ones both from our local Atlanta metaphysical publications.

 

March 09 Astrology by Annie Hollis
Source Oracle20-20.com
http://oracle20-20.com/magazine/2009/0309/astrology.php

 

Astrology March 2009 by Ariel Rose
Source aquarius-atlanta.com
http://www.aquarius-atlanta.com/astrology.php