General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Hey Jon Stewart, Jokes About Wearing Masks Aren't Funny [View all]PatrickforB
(15,339 posts)So what IS our plan Whiskey? If the species of Sapiens does not learn to live in harmony with the Ain Soph, each other and our sacred earth, the earth itself will cast us off.
The Issues
This government is so corrupt it can no longer function, and the people in charge are giving away the treasury to the billionaire locusts. Wall Street is roaring but layoffs are about to begin. The same AI that is being crammed down our throats and up our rectums isn't that smart and it is creating a big market crashing bubble, just like the dot-com bust in 2001 and the housing derivative bubble in 2009.
Wall Street and the billionaires are out of control and squeezing all of us to death economically.
There are around 3,300 billionaires on this planet. The top 1% of the wealthy, including these billionaires, are emotionally diseased people who live in such fear they won't have enough that they now control over 40% of the world's wealth.
In the meantime, 3.5 BILLION people live in poverty, with around 900 million of those in extreme poverty. The worst? Over 17 people DIE OF HUNGER RELATED CAUSES EVERY MINUTE.
Spiritual Plan
My plan includes meditations and other spiritual practices that lift my own consciousness to the highest realms of consciousness. These states were identified using kinesiology in the 1991 book Power vs Force written by psychiatrist David Hawkins. These highest levels of human consciousness on Hawkins' log scale are love, joy, peace and enlightenment. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, we must hold our consciousness at 'love or above.'
In addition, I am striving to shed both fear and attachment.
Economic Plan
Materially, I'm still working at age 67, and in the process of downsizing so my post-work income will be enough. I am a caregiver to my spouse, as well, and her needs must be somehow met.
And, I am calling my two US senators - my rep is BoBo, so calling her office is futile - at least once a week. I speak to their staff members about these issues. I have in fact spoken to both of their policy teams about overturning the current legal doctrine of shareholder primacy and replacing it with a stakeholder approach that holds the needs of workers, consumers and the environment EQUAL to shareholder profits. This, as I said in my original post, would need to include the right of consumers to truth in news reporting from publicly traded media companies, not biased to generate higher profits through increased clicks and thus higher ad revenue. The reason this is important is we MUST get rid of Fox news and other right wing propaganda organs, and right now the fiduciary responsibility of the senior news producers on MSNow, CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC and CBS is ALWAYS to generate maximum profits for shareholders. Nothing really required in terms of truth in news reporting.
Lastly, as a reasonably well-respected economist, I have been working with economic developers throughout my state to advance agritech as a viable economic development strategy, because with vertical farming, we don't consume as much water, and can grow a greater variety of crops. The Netherlands has led the way in this - over the course of this century they have quietly increased their ag capacity to the point they are the SECOND largest exporter of produce in the world behind the US. My question is why we cannot achieve these results here, and several states have so far been adopting Dutch practices that has yielded measurable increases in like-to-like produce output per 1,000 people employed.
I am also involved in looking for ways to mitigate energy requirements, because data centers take up huge amounts of power. There is solar and wind, of course, as well as conservation. Hydrogen power remains blocked by greed-based economic interests, while at the same time promising advances have been made in fusion and it may be feasible by 2030 to create business parks around tiny fusion reactors tied to the power grid. This all has potential.
Microeconomics
I am also buying only what I need. Nothing frivolous. The current figures on retail sales show a 4.1% increase from 2024 in Black Friday gross sales, but inflation has outpaced that, suggesting the American consumer is being squeezed by Wall Street greed-flation - spending more for the same amount of goods or less.
What are you doing?