Back to the Garden

The old home page is here

"The Song of Songs is a poem about the sexual awakening of a young woman and her lover. In a series of subtly articulated scenes, the two meet in an idealized landscape of fertility and abundance... a kind of Eden ...where they discover the pleasures of love.

--- Ariel and Chana Bloch
The Song of Songs: A New Translation

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

--- Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock"

This website began as a way of sharing my music for the "Song of Songs"... an erotic love song that has been quoted and sung in Jewish and Christian wedding ceremonies for some 2000 years. Under the present circumstances, however... as the economy melts down and our leaders break promises right and left... it isn't enough to dream about an earthly paradise. It's up to us to make it happen, here and now.

Paradise Now

As the old economy crumbles, people across the country are building a new one. Based on new forms of money, democratic finance, and business, the new economy is about increasing the quality of life, improving health, and restoring the environment. The Summer 2009 issue of YES!, The New Economy, takes a look at the people and organizations who are creating this Earth-friendly and people-centered economy.

 

:: TOOLS & RESOURCES

:: A NEW ECONOMY LIBRARY

:: TOOLS & RESOURCES

Sustainable Economics:

Forget Wall Street. The new economy is all about creating real, sustainable wealth. These organizations can help you jump-start the new economy by promoting change in your workplace, at home, or in Washington.



Finance & Banks:

As larger financial institutions continue to fail in the aftermath of the mess they created, these organizations pass YES!'s stress test.

Alternative Currencies:

Forget the Fed—these alternative currencies help local economies instead.

Corporate Responsibility:

Corporate wrongs are hard to fight. Hold corporations accountable with help from these organizations.



:: A NEW ECONOMY LIBRARY

Reflections, ideas, and visions for a new economy can be found in these books and films—including some recent releases and some old classics.

:: BOOKS

Agenda for a New Economy, by David Korten, argues that our hope lies not with Wall Street, but with Main Street, which creates wealth from real resources to meet real needs. (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2009).

BUY THROUGH YES!: 20% off the cover price with the YES! discount..

Bringing the Food Economy Home, by Helena Norberg-Hodge, Todd Merrifield, and Steven Gorelick, argues that localizing our food economies is a “solution-multiplier” that will reduce the negative impacts of globalization. (Zed Books, 2002)

Capitalism 3.0, by Peter Barnes, urges readers to “upgrade” capitalism and preserve humanity's shared heritage by reclaiming the Commons – nature, community, and culture. (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006)

Cooperation Works! by E. G. Nadeau and David Thomson, discusses specific, cooperative approaches to business, development, and the equal treatment of society's forgotten members, using success stories from the U.S. (Lone Oak Press, 1996)

Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street, by Jeff Gates, discusses how to recreate our democracy by reshaping our economy and fighting economic inequality. (Perseus Books, 2001)

Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life by Frances Moore Lappé, encourages a departure from “thin democracy,” vested in private interest, to “living democracy” in the interest of all. (Jossey-Bass, 2005)

Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth, by Lester R. Brown, challenges us to consider the economy as part of the environment. (W.W. Norton & Company, 2001)

Economics as if the Earth Really Mattered: A Catalyst Guide to Socially Conscious Investing, by Susan Meeker-Lowry, provides case studies, contacts, resource lists, and an extensive bibliography to help those concerned with finding ways to use their money to create a more just and sustainable economy. (New Society Publishers, 1988)

From Mondragón to America: Experiments in Community Development, by Greg MacLeod, explores the success of the community-owned town of Mondragon, Spain, as well as how to replicate its business and social experiment in other communities. (University College of Cape Breton Press, 1997)

The Future of Money, by Bernard Lietaer, a former currency speculator who helped design Europe's currency, describes how we can create a sustainable money system. (See YES! interview) (Random House Group Ltd (UK), 2001)

Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age, by Michael H. Shuman, provides a thorough overview of many approaches to creating a local living economy. (Routledge, 2000)

Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, describes how business leaders are adopting a new models that account for the value and scarcity of natural ecosystems and life systems. (Little, Brown & Company, 1999)

The Nature of Economies, by Jane Jacobs, follows the conversation of five contemporary New Yorkers as they discuss whether economic life obeys the same rules as those that govern nature. (The Modern Library, 2000)

Parecon: Life After Capitalism, by Michael Albert, outlines a new economic model, “participatory economics,” a framework that is more democratic than capitalism or socialism. (Verso Books, 2003)

The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, by David C. Korten, documents the accelerating problems of unrestrained corporate power and creates a vision of a new living economy. (Berrett-Koehler Publishers with Kumarian Press Inc., 1999)

Putting Democracy to Work: A Practical Guide for Starting and Managing Worker-Owned Businesses, by Frank T. Adams and Gary B. Hansen, is a how-to guide for managing a worker cooperative. (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1993)

Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World, by Richard Douthwaite, proposes that communities should build independent local economies to avoid mainstream economic collapse, and also supplies ideas for action. (The Lilliput Press LTD, 1996)

Slow Money by Woody Tasch, brings money back down to Earth, explaining how business and local, sustainable, food production are intimately connected. (Chelsea Green, 2008)

The Small-Mart Revolution by Michael Shuman provides practical tips for consumers, investors, and policy-makers to help small, local businesses succeed over multinational corporations. (Barrett-Koehler, 2006)

The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin, offers a diagnosis of the disintegration of the relationship between individuals and companies and explores the cause of the crisis. (Viking Penguin, 2002)

Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, by E.F. Schumacher. This classic on human-scale, life-sustaining economics was re-issued in 1999, with an introduction by Paul Hawken. (Hartley & Marks, 1999)

What Comes Next: Proposals for a Different Society, by Thad Williamson, assesses proposed alternatives to the current political and economic system. (The National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives, 1998)

:: FILMS

Argentina's Occupied Factories is a documentary film based on the Argentine workers' movement to occupy failed or failing factories and transform them into worker cooperatives. Michael Albert interviews workers as he tours occupied factories. 55 minutes, DVD. Z Communications, 2006. www.zmag.org

Independent America is a documentary featuring small business owners struggling against corporate incursion. www.independentamerica.net

What's the Economy For, Anyway? is John de Graaf's latest film about embracing the real wealth of living in healthy communities and taking back time for ourselves, our families, and the things that matter most. De Graaf is the national coordinator for Take Back Your Time Day. Keep an eye out for the film's upcoming release, and read some of the theories behind it at
www.timeday.org

Of Poetry and Politics

"The Song of Songs is a poem about the sexual awakening of a young woman and her lover. In a series of subtly articulated scenes, the two meet in an idealized landscape of fertility and abundance... a kind of Eden ...where they discover the pleasures of love. The passage from innocence to experience is a subject of the Eden story, too, but there the loss of innocence is fraught with consequences. The Song looks at the same border-crossing and sees only the joy of discovery."

--- Ariel and Chana Bloch
The Song of Songs: A New Translation

Although deeply romantic and highly erotic, the "Song of Songs" also has a sociopolitical  dimension. Due to its roots in an ancient matriarchal tradition, there is no trace... in the relationship between the two lovers ...of the gender based inequality that pervades the rest of the Bible. Writing in a time when marriages were arranged by the male head of the household, the author of the Song argued poetically that love... not the desire for wealth, power, and prestige ...should be the foundation of marriage and the renewal of life. Men and women, should be free to choose their own partners according to the laws of the heart. The Song's central theme is that genuine friendship and true love are worth more than all the wealth of Solomon. The young man compares his lot with the king's and concludes that he is the more fortunate of the two. This is wisdom, to be sure, but even in the ordinary sense, he isn't really poor at all. Both he and his lover are blessed with youthful energy, and their love flourishes amid nature's abundance, in "a kind of Eden."

Of course, all lovers feel boundless generosity for the ones they love, and all parents want their families to be well-provided for; but the Song's sociopolitical dimension and its roots in matriarchal society place these impulses in a larger context.

[In his book, The Mystery of Money, Bernard Lietaer] traces the development of two competing monetary schemes, one based on shared abundance, the other based on scarcity, greed and debt. The former characterized the matriarchal societies of antiquity. The latter characterized the warlike patriarchal societies that forcibly displaced them.

--- Ellen Brown
Web of Debt © 2008, p. 55

As I write, much of the world is headed for a major economic depression. According to Dr. Michael Hudson, the Paulson/Geithner multi-trillion dollar bank bailouts will only succeed in creating a financial elite of "kleptocrats," while impoverishing the rest of us.

What’s happened here, by Mr. Paulson of Goldman Sachs, is almost a mirror image of what the other Goldman Sachs’ Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin did in Russia: he’s creating and endowing a class of kleptocrats by giving them liquid treasury securities in exchange for basically worthless junk.

In Russia’s case they gave State ownership of raw materials and fuels... oil, [and] other assets ...to individuals who then diversified their portfolios by selling as much as they could to the West and taking their money out and putting them into dollars and sterling and euros. What’s happening here is that the Wall Street beneficiaries are going to take the money and run, and put it in safe economies such as Russia, China and any other non-US economy they can find: the result will be a huge capital outflow, a capital flight that will put downward pressure on the dollar.

Psychologists and sociologists debate the role that money problems play in undermining marital relationships, but most people would probably agree that financial distress contributes greatly to the overall level of stress, unhappiness, and irratability. In the coming economic meltdown, marriages are likely to be sorely tested. The "American dream" of liberty, peace, and shared abundance has been steadily fading. Over the course of several decades, in the absence of campaign finance reform, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have undermined the material security of middle and lower class families.  To be sure, there have been major differences between the two parties' social agendas... abortion, gay marriage, etc. ...and these differences have been skillfully exploited to divide and conquer the "lower" classes; but the two parties' economic agendas have long been identical: the transfer of wealth upwards.

This is not likely to change under the new administration. When Mr. Obama talks about change, he is holding out the possibility of increasing social justice; however, genuine monetary reform is clearly out of the question. Make no mistake: the banksters, kleptocrats, and warmongers are still in charge.  Yet the coming cataclysm is entirely avoidable. If enough people were to awaken from their cultural trance, confront the root of the problem, and educate their friends and neighbors, economic sanity could spread at the speed of light in the present 21st century global village. There are some simple but powerful remedies for our present economic crisis, but they are not likely to be implemented unless people recognize the central problem, at the root of all others. The best laid plans for social justice and environmental repair are likely to remain seriously underfunded as long as we fail to address the artificial scarcity created by our fraudulent, sociopathic monetary system, which is little more than a form of organized crime.

Greed and competition are not a result of immutable human temperament... Greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being continuously created and amplified as a direct result of the kind of money we are using... We can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive.

--- Bernard Lietaer

In 1750, Benjamin Franklin described the salutary effect of a monetary system designed to promote the common good.

There was abundance in the Colonies, and peace was reigning on every border. It was difficult, and even impossible, to find a happier and more prosperous nation on all the surface of the globe. Comfort was prevailing in every home. The people, in general, kept the highest moral standards, and education was widely spread.

--- Benjamin Franklin

When Franklin went to London in 1764, he was astonished to find widespread unemployment and poverty among the British working classes.

When he asked why, he was told the country had too many workers. The rich were already overburdened with taxes and could not pay more to relieve the poverty of the working classes. Franklin was then asked how the American colonies managed to collect enough money to support their poor houses. He reportedly replied:

We have no poor houses in the Colonies; and if we had some, there would be nobody to put in them, since there is, in the Colonies, not a single unemployed person, neither beggars nor tramps.

His English listeners had trouble believing this, since when their poor houses and jails had become too cluttered, the English had actually shipped their poor to the Colonies. The directors of the Bank of England asked what was responsible for the booming economy of the young colonies. Franklin replied:

That is simple. In the colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Scrip. We issue it to pay the government's approved expenses and charities. We make sure it is issued in proper proportions to make the goods pass easily from the producers to the consumers... In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one. You see, legitimate government can both spend and lend money into circulation, while banks can only lend significant amounts of their promissory bank notes, for they can neither give away nor spend but a tiny fraction of the money the people need. Thus, when you bankers here in England place money in circulation, there is always a debt principal to be returned and usury to be paid. The result is that you have always too little credit in circulation to give the workers full employment. You do not have too many workers, you have too little money in circulation, and that which circulates, all bears the endless burden of unpayable debt and usury.

--- Ellen Brown
quoting Charles Binderup
The Web of Debt, © 2008, p.40

The potential for shared abundance is even greater now than it was in Franklin's time.

We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance ... we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.

--- Buckminister Fuller

The race between Utopia and Oblivion reflects two different visions of reality. One sees a world capable of providing for all. The other sees a world that is too small for its inhabitants, requiring the annihilation of large segments of the population if the rest are to survive. The prevailing scarcity mentality focuses on shortages of oil, water and food. But the real shortage, as Benjamin Franklin explained to his English listeners in the eighteenth century, is in the medium of exchange. If sufficient money could be made available to develop alternative sources of energy, alternative means of extracting water from the environment, and more efficient ways of growing food, there could be abundance for all. The notion that the government could simply print the money it needs is considered unrealistically utopian and inflationary; yet banks create money all the time. The chief reason the U.S. government can't do it is that a private banking cartel already has a monpoly on the practice.

--- Ellen H. Brown
The Web of Debt, © 2008, p.336

  This last quote is from Ellen Hodgson Brown, author of the profoundly important book, The Web of Debt. Her website is www.webofdebt.com. 

Wake up, America !

Unless a great many people wake up real fast, and understand the nature of the fraud that has been practiced on us by the financial elite and their corporate media, another Great Depression is almost inevitable. As you navigate these troubled times, beware of the corporate everything-is-under-control, let-us-handle-it, just-sit-back-and-watch illusion factory.

Buying Brand Obama

Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, our elected officials continue to have their palms greased by armies of corporate lobbyists, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, we are being duped into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.

--- Chris Hedges
truthdig.com

America's Nightmare: The Obama Dystopia

After 8 years of the Bush-Cheney nightmare during which we saw the wanton destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, the cynical  negation of centuries of Law designed to protect the most basic human rights and a foreign policy worthy of Genghis Khan, there came along the "Great Black Hope" in the persona of Barack Obama. The collective world consciousness turned uncritically to what was presented as a new era for peace, change and trust in Government.

Never before had one witnessed such an accomplished use of manipulation, propaganda, imagery and public relations wizardry to sell the public a man who was to take the baton from Bush and run with it in the race to destroy the economy, the rights of the people and help birth a nation totally controlled by those who have always lurked in the shadows of power. "Change" was promised and was delivered in the form of a deepening of the already Dystopic  nightmare.
[*] [*] [*]

Promises were broken with no apology, the same creative legalese that infested the Bush administration, in the form of John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez, was again used to deny justice to the inmates of Guantanamo, It was used to justify more torture, more destruction of the Constitution and more illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens.

The President that extended the hand of peace to the Muslim world has murdered hundreds of Pakistani men, women and children. The President who promised accountability in Government has filled his staff with lobbyists, banksters and warmongers. His Attorney General refuses to prosecute some of the worst war crimes committed in modern history and continues to give legal cover to criminals who tortured with impunity.

The country has been further bankrupted by the continuing theft of taxpayer money as the Wall St. campaign donors receive their quid pro quo. Obama has stood by idly as Bernancke states that the private Federal Reserve is not answerable to either Congress or the American public. The U.S. taxpayer is now on the hook for $14.3 Trillion and rising. Foreclosures and unemployment are rising with no meaningful efforts by the administration to alleviate the symptoms, never mind the cause. The new image of America is one of tent cities, lengthening soup kitchen lines, sherrifs evicting countless thousands of young and old from their homes, once prosperous towns descending in to an eerie stillness and an increasingly disillusioned populace.

The "War on terrorism" has mutated into a control grid for an increasingly aware population. The foundation for this had already been put in place by Bush with the Patriot Act, Patriot Act 2, Military commissions act and numerous executive orders that strangled what was left of Posse Comitatus and the Constitution.

Homeland Security now defines "Terrorists" as those who believe in the Constitution, the first, second and fourth amendments. Returning veterans are being targeted for a denial of their second amendment rights. A  "Terrorist Watchlist" of more than a million and rapidly growing, is being used as the basis for denying citizens the rights to travel and to work.

Obama is now mulling over the idea of indefinite detention without trial for U.S. citizens. This, from a teacher of the Constitution ! Bills are in congress to criminalize free speech on the Internet via the Cyberbullying Act which will make hurting somebody's feelings a felony. Just like the Patriot Act this will morph into a criminalization of political free speech and any criticism of the Government.

"Cyberterrorism" is being used as a pretext to bring government regulation to the the last stronghold of unbiased information. Washington has realized that it's getting harder to get away with their Fascist agenda and are moving to control the field. The populace have become more aware of just what kind of "Change" Obama intended to deliver.

There has been a growing resistance on a state level with several invoking their 9th and 10th Amendment rights in a valiant attempt to stop the Federal Vampire from draining the last drops of blood, the last vestiges of Freedom and Hope.

This is the Dystopic Nightmare that America finds itself in today and each day brings new assaults on Freedom and Sanity. The framework for total control of the citizenry, the economy and the media is being built upon in a relentless aggrandization of Govermental power. Obama sits atop his new Empire still smiling that sickeningly disingenuous smile surrounded by his seasoned courtiers who have worked for decades to bring America in to this new era of the New World Order.

--- Andrew Hughes
globalresearch.ca

  

And the banks... hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created ...are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.

--- Senator Dick Durban,
on "The Ed Show"

 

Obama’s new bank giveaway

Backed by Mr. Summers [current Director of The National Economic Council], Boris Yeltsin’s Harvard Boys transferred trillions of dollars of Russian mineral wealth and public enterprises into the hands of kleptocrats. That was an asset transfer, pure and simple. In 1997, to be sure, the IMF gave Russia a loan that immediately disappeared into the kleptocrats’ bank accounts, to be paid out of subsequent oil-export proceeds. But assets were the name of the game. Today’s U.S. giveaway has a new twist. It is analogous to the “watered stocks” and bonds that railroad magnates and Wall Street emperors of finance gave themselves and their political mouthpieces, simply adding the interest coupons and dividends onto the prices charged the public as if they were real “costs.” Today’s version – “watered Treasury bonds” – are being created on the public sector’s balance sheet. “Taxpayers” must bear the interest charges on $2 to $4 trillion of new Treasury bonds printed and swapped for “trash,” that is, bad loans. Paying interest on these new bonds will leave less for the infrastructure investment that Mr. Obama rightly says we need.

Michael Hudson
globalresearch.ca

Revealing quotes from, Fessing Up Has Lost Its Shock Value, by David Sirota:

We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system.

--- Timothy Geithner, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury

When it comes to the federal rescue plan, 

the government has all the downside and we have all the upside... meaning lowlife grave dancers like me will make a fortune.

--- J. Christopher Flowers, 
one of the finance industry’s richest speculators

 

Is There Truth in Obama's Advertising?

The point of the advertising is to delude people with the imagery and tales of a football player [or a] sexy actress, who drives to the moon in a car or something like that. But, that's certainly not to inform people. In fact, it's to keep people uninformed.

The goal of advertising is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. Those of you who suffered through an economics course know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. But industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to undermine markets and get uninformed consumers making irrational choices.

And when they turn to selling a candidate they do the same thing. They want uninformed consumers, you know, uninformed voters to make irrational choices based on the success of illusion, slander, and effective body language or whatever else is supposed to be significant. So you undermine democracy pretty much the same way you undermine markets. Well, that's the nature of an election when it's run by the business world, and you'd expect it to be like that. There should be no surprise there.

--- Noam Chomsky
openmediaboston.org

 

Read more about the Song of Solomon,
listen to music, tour the art gallery...

The Hidden Meaning of the Song of Solomon
The Song of Solomon as Erotic Poetry
Deep Ecology and the Song of Songs
Christian Mysticism / Bridal Mysticism
 Was Jesus Married?
Illustrations for the Song of Solomon
A New Traslation of the Song of Solomon
Music for the Song of Solomon
Christian Wedding Music
The Star of David and the Flower of Life
Squaring the Circle: Sacred Geometry and
the Marriage of Heaven and Earth

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.Copyright © Call 1998 - 2009