Transparency Matters

The world we are heading toward is one where transparency reigns supreme. This is the fruition of the realization that everything opens into everything else. Terrence McKenna talks about this phenomenon; he tells us that nothing is unannounced. He says, "This is like a weird quality of experience, you can't learn this from physics or economics. Maybe you can learn it from economics. Nothing is unannounced. Everything is preceded by the shock wave of its coming."

Most people respond to the mini shock waves and micro vibrational currents that are hidden in plain sight around them, but without knowing why. You might say that opaqueness is merely a mis-perception on some level. Empaths experiencing excessive transparency might want to check out this post. I promise my next post will be  on topic with information on grounding tips and healing touch. So what about the level of transparency in the financial markets?

Mirroring the sentiments of the Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, Brother Ali, the legally blind albino rapper from Wisconsin, asks us in his song The Puzzle:
"Whose to blame for the state I'm in?
I play my cards but somehow I can't win."

The specifics of the situation are, of course, no puzzle to the financial mongoose Max Keiser. He has an interesting response to the above lyric. In his Rigged Markets video he asks, "Are the so called free markets rigged? Check kiting, bear rating, front running, back dating, look back trading, pump and dumping, wash sales, match sales, blank check IPO's, parking stock, painting the tape, market timing, late trading, shearing, spring loading, bullet dodging, oh and my favorite naked short selling. These are just a few of the many many oh so many ways that brokers, bankers, and CEO's use to defraud other market participants." No wonder Brother Ali can't win -- by himself he doesn't have any market clout.

In a recent radio interview David Wilcock says, "What I'm proposing here is that if you as the individual taxpayer are standing there in front of the IRS and they're auditing your tax returns they demand that you have transparency -- meaning that you're going to show them everything to account for every dollar that you spent and where it goes. What I'm saying is that with the power of the Internet we now have and will create transparency for the world elite -- for the government and for the corporations. There won't be hidden balance sheets. There won't be Enron engineering of the books. It's gonna be websites that you log into and you can actively audit companies in terms of where the money is going; you can actively audit the government and see where the money is going and you won't be able to hide things anymore. Now that sounds ridiculously Pollyanna-ish, but you get enough people pissed off and that's exactly what's going to happen because nobody is going to want to put up with this anymore when it gets to the point that their basic quality of life is being infringed upon. And so what we're seeing right now is things moving to the point where that will be inspired in people." In the short article "Transparency is the essence of market economy" Keiser explains in more detail the workings of the current situation.

In the same vein as Wilcock and Keiser, blogger Hjálmar Gíslason tells us that, "Today we live in a very different world. Real time communication and crunching of terabytes of data is within the reach of pretty much anybody. 'Quarterly', let alone 'annually' is not something we settle for when it comes to news, communication or even entertainment. 'On-demand' and 'real time' is the name of the game. Why should we settle for anything less in our investments?" I would suggest that the traditional linear graph of stock prices is an artifact even in real time. We should be able to see real time capital flows on a global level. The fact that short interest data is released twice a month is, in my mind, a complete joke. Is there some special section of the nasdaq where people are living like they were in the 1890's with no computers? Finally, "Ask the Experts" guest Bud Burr and Ron Paul talk about the importance of transparency and central bank collusion.

So how do you, as an individual, increase transparency? Localization is one way you can directly participate. Supporting slow food and your local CSA is a great first step. From the individual investor's perspective there are many organizations out there. InsiderCow sounds like an interesting idea, although I have no personal experience with them. Shadowstats.com reports adjusted, accurate, government statistics rather than official "massaged" data. One book I just purchased that looks interesting is The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer; he talks about alternative currencies. One idea I had was to ask people, "What would happen if you linked the value of a currency to the level of species diversity?" Most people responded with, "Can you measure that?"

A great place to get information is iTulip -- check out their forums. As an aside, you can check out some of the exhibitors that were at the recent bioneers conference: RSF, Calvert, Griton Capital, and MicroPlace.

Additional people to check out that are speaking truth include:
Bob Chapman: http://theinternationalforecaster.com
Peter Schiff: http://www.europac.net and on YouTube
Marc Faber: http://www.gloomboomdoom.com and on YouTube
Jim Rogers: http://www.jimrogers.com and on YouTube

So how does this all tie into empathy? You only have to look at the people managing this ponzi scheme to answer that question. Keiser tells us: "That Wall Street Journal study that was done a year ago or so proved that people with slight brain damage make better money managers because they have no empathy. Empathy kills performance. So naturally the whole system is skewed toward brain damage. So you have brain damaged, non empathic, terrorists managing an 800 billion dollar slush fund." So it is no wonder why the whole system is set up to obfuscate information and narrow consciousness.

It seems surprising to me that more people are not interested in Empathy. You can use it to access full body altered states of consciousness at will without taking any drugs. It is even possible to use it to expand your awareness out of your body and into drugs themselves and experience drug states. Just be sure not to tell anyone that because it sounds so fucking nutty. So in essence the whole world is a potential cornucopia of psychedelic like trips when you are able to empath strongly. The black market drug industry would take a huge hit tomorrow if everyone could learn to move their awareness, or assemblage point, out of their bodies. Unsurprisingly, the illegal drugs that proliferate are the ones that are cause fixation and consciousness myopia -- for obvious economic and political reasons.

There is good work being done however. A MAPS project, under the auspices of Valerie Mojeiko, is doing important work using MDMA in therapy to increase self empathy levels for people suffering from PTSD. At the recent bioneers conference Ralph Metzner said, "That's what trauma means -- that you don't have empathy for yourself." MDMA is a perfect choice to work with trauma survivors because it increases empathy levels so significantly while leaving the ego in tact.