The end to trickery. Warning-not a funny post...sorry:)

Some things are just too radicle to even talk about it seems.

Top to bottom news coverage is of the Global financial crisis. The UK is bankrupt. The US is floundering with millions unemployed. China is stalling. The Indian step up into the global economic spotlight put on hold. Everywhere we are told that things are really bad.

Ok.

But what if things just aren't bad?

I mean, sure things are bad if we look at the millions of pieces of paper that other people created without asking us. With agreements that not one of us understood, or would even condone if we could follow the convoluted mathematical principles..

Millions of millions of tricks, hidden from people. Math tricks. Deceptions. A lack of forthrightness.

Too radical. 

Do we all have enough food? Do we produce enough globally? Yes.

Is there enough shelter? Are there enough places for most everyone to live? Yes.

Fuel? Presently and five years from now? Yes.

Uh Oh... 

But knowing that, what is about to happen?

Are people going to starve? Yes.

Are millions going to be homeless? Yes.

Will people go cold in the winter? You bet.

Will families be ripped apart? Violence and crime increase as a result of the feeling of helplessness? Count on it.

Why? Because we have all subscribed to the belief that personal greed must be absolute to motivate any type of production, innovation or growth in our economies.

This smacks of socialism. Well actually i want to address something even more base than the economic system. Socialism, Capitalism, neither will work until we fix something else.

Lets talk about compassion instead.

In the last one hundred years our neighbors have grown into an inconvenience. We don't get to know them. We are busy, in a rush, uninterested. We lost our senses of community. And as we let go our sense of community, we are a step closer to letting go our sense of humanity. 

We must remember our group is not just family, city, country, religion but species. 

Without knowing our neighbors, we tolerate the unjust. Without a sense of community we allow the latest and greatest form of economy to thrive all around us in these last fifty years.

I simply call it trickery.

We have always had some form of trickery, but for many reasons it has never ever been as prevalent as it is now.

Trickery is profit from nothing. 

Trickery is miles of fine print. Trickery is unfair contracts. Trickery is advertising that is an outright lie, that most know is a lie, but nothing is done to stop it. Trickery is the responsibility on the consumer to prove something is defective, unfair or wrong.

Trickery is vital in this new unfair economy.

Scientific and mathematic illiteracy has created an unfair quiet class system. Along with a paralyzingly inefficient and overpriced legal remedy to trickery, allowing all of us to be caught up in unfair, and unjust systems of exploitation. 

Things are to easy and basic to get into, but amazingly complex and perplexing to free ourselves from after we reach the learning curve to see we are being exploited. It reminds me of a Crab trap.

We are all victims of it. And it has destroyed the possibility of good capitalism.

Everywhere you turn is trickery at work; Stock price manipulation, Short selling, Sub prime mortgages, Cell phone contracts that have rates designed by algorithms to predict the highest yield in overruns, advertising designed to heighten insecurity, every single diet product, gym memberships, built in obsolescence in automobiles, the fact that gas prices rise the very day oil prices rise but take weeks to go down when it decreases, and i'm sure you have many many examples of being purposely misled. 

This happens by friends and strangers alike. As we have been convinced that any profit extracted from anyone is moral if the market bears the price.

But that only really works when we allow ourselves to be disconnected from one another. 

And that is what this century has put so much effort on doing to allow it to happen. We would never sell something defective to our mother. And we would not do such a thing to a neighbor who we see every day and interact with. So why do we allow ourselves to do it when working for a corporation, to another? 

Because they have convinced us that trickery is ok.

Because we have been purposefully distanced from our neighbors. 

We have had, in essence, our morals 'de-regulated'.

This global catastrophe does not need to be the painful harvesting of wealth from the poor that it is shaping up to be. 

We need to make a stand to no longer allow ourselves to be convinced that unlimited profiteering through dishonesty can be tolerated.

We can maintain a market if we respect our humanity, and in our humanity we must completely change the destructive moral blindness to the greed which is toxifying our development as a people and making the one financial system we subscribe to, self-destruct.

I've been thinking and a few things could change the world.

And it starts small. Just do this.

Be fair. Lets make fair the new greed. 

Respect those you know are fair and act with conscience, encourage others to do so.

Stop screwing over people whether you know them or not. E-bay, craigslist, at work, anywhere.

Make a profit, but one you wouldn't be ashamed to tell the person you made a profit off.

Don't allow yourself to be taken advantage of! And let companies, and people know when you feel you are being exploited.

Let others know about dishonest and inhumane corporations, businesses and people.

Support honest people, humane organizations and business.

Get to know your neighbors! Share with them! Care about their well being. 

Everyday expand the circle of your community to include more, until it resembles the equator.

Understand and accept that we seek wealth for security and pleasure, and a strong community of friends can offer those as well. So put time into developing both, and remember their are no shortcuts.

Thats all. 

I am gonna try it and see what happens. Maybe it'll just be me. But it would be nice if allot of other people pushed this agenda across political, religious and geographical boundaries. 

Maybe instead of leaving our kids a ravaged earth and trillions of debt to an anonymous faceless corporate/political organization, we could leave them a world that welcomes them into it's community, where it can grow up a little less jaded, and a lot more happy.