My mother was in the hospital for almost four months - till late March. It has been, mildly put, a trying time. For a week, after her third brain surgery, she did not come to or respond. All boundaries were transcended in that time. Emotions, time, body, work, self, other, all were a blurr. All that counted was that she came to. In that time most of all, but other times too, close friendships and giving surfaced so easily between the families waiting in the hospital,for good news. There were four families in particular that were tough cases, three tumors and one stroke. Ours was a tumor. And it was ours, we carried it with our mother, grandmother, wife, sister. The family came together, unsure and awkward at first, but poised in moments of action.
So who was there, a Vietnamese man of 78, a Jewish Swiss fellow of 55, and a Phillipino woman in her early 70's. Both the Vietnamese man and the Phillipino woman wore papery thin skin, gaunt, their faces pushing forward pronounced cheek bones and eyes smiling filled with tenderness and worry all at the same time. The Vietnamese man, gentle and watery with his frailty, exhibited too a profound spirituality and empathic experience. The Jewish Swiss fellow, round and jovial with red hair and a balding head, wore a yamukah (skull cap) in black, and spoke with his heart. His wife had previously been operated for the same condition, brain tumor and he was a veteran. He lit up when he learned I had worked in Geneva at the UN. And then painstakingly, he confirmed for me the positive signs of my mother's responses to the operation when there was no way to know. And even after his wife had been discharged, he came back to check on me and to see how my mother was doing. By then she was responding verbally, Thank God. The Phillipino woman, gripped by the most difficult situation, her husband's ambivalent responses to treatment for his stroke, left her at times defeated, but her nursing background gave her the experience to persevere. She had been through this before, when one of her sons similarly suffered from a stroke due to an aneurism early in his life, and she had to care for him ever since.
Amazed at the resilience of the human spirit as I looked around me, I could not fathom how these people had been through what they had, supporting their loved ones, family members and others, day after day in a life that met with so many challenges. Was there so much love in this world? If there was, how did it elude the others? Those who took the wrong path, a path of treachery, betrayal, abuse, and criminality. It was hard to put both together on the same planet - these people of ultimate maturity, and those others who like children steal from others, or trample on their hearts and souls without care or regard.
Like them, I too would be tested. In those days and weeks when my mother's fate rested in the hands of the intensive care medical team, there were days when only tears would stream down my face, and I could not eat or sleep. But these great souls looked after me at night and during the day. Brought me food and drink, told me to sleep, and more importantly told me to smile, so that things could get better. Staying in the hospital day and night... I grew close to them and let their silence and talk nourish my spirit to a height I did not think possible. I let them lead me to a place of belief, shelter, and light where anything was possible, including the miracle of healing and strength that it was incumbent on me to transmit to my mother. In addition, hundreds of clients and colleagues wrote their prayers of strength too... an amazing testament to the kind of community that can develop not only around crisis, but around the empathic resonance of human bonds and ties that we all understand - that of mother and child.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
The Commodification of Disaster
A tsunami in Indonesia, earthquake in the Himalayas, a sheet of rock splitting open the middle of Haiti, the BP oil spill, and yet another quake creating Tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan... the foundation to the risk that in legal doctrine is known as Force Majeure. It is either my imagination or force majeure is starting to hold a more coveted place in our risk management strategies when it comes to legal and asset management. Deal agreements of all kinds will and are being affected and should undergo some overhaul as we confront transactional disputes and cooperation alike moving forward. I am told the earth's axis is shifting, the planet rotates a bit faster, the day is growing, however infinitesimally, shorter. The plates on the earth's surface are growing somewhat closer together, adjusting to the changes set in motion, so to speak. Other plates are growing closer too... note the middle east uprisings. Political and social plates are sliding us to new terrain slipping tensions into new crevices and connection.
We humans are creators, mimicking the earth. Fictions unimaginable, sprout from our psyches onto a page, a structure, an institution, a piece of paper or metal printed upon, known to the world to represent a measure of worth that we all believe in, or at least, we are all suppose to believe in until that fateful moment we are overwhelmed by disaster. That fiction is money - currency - even gold, used to value a segmented series of actions, products, processes, services, commodities, resources. What happens to the value of oil when it is spilled? What happens to the value of micro-chips when the plant in which they are manufactured disappears? What happens to an entire industry, like the nuclear industry, when signs of its holocaust
are visible on the horizon? We have created markets which trace exactly what happens, which symbol -stock or other- representing that commodity rises and which one falls?
Humans need security and hence, covet stability and hate risk. Risk is not
rewarded unless of course you are able to predict it and can show such prediction by shorting the particular commodity or representation of the same. If the timeline of disasters continues, more and greater reward will bestowed on those who can predict. A new industry of seers will erupt as in the days of old. "Mad Money" is only the beginning. Religion - even newer kinds - may hold a stronger grasp on our hearts and minds. And what would become of the value of disaster itself within our current fictions? Think a little about Project Redd to undo decades of deforestation in the Amazon, or the staggered carbon pollution created by industrial revolution and its parade of development, and the new markets created in response. If India and China thought about it long enough, yet another carbon or development market specifically geared to their situation would sprout. We are valuing at least man-made disasters (even as we are making them) over a longer timeline quite highly... highly enough to form new markets of healing, kind of like the charitable markets of aids, cancer, malaria etc... in the pharmaceutical world that are double edged. The edges are helping a larger segment of humankind with the cure, and the nearer form of financial
commodification necessary to bring in the money close to the dichotomy between brand and generics. Disease is after all a form of disaster.
War is another form. Uprisings like those blanketing across the middle east present a case in point. These commodify the sale of consultancy in political arrangements, the support and identification of opposing parties, the formation of parliamentary and other democracies, the establishment of democratic constitutions. Political and violent upheaval, like the kind involved in the drug trade, assist us in commodifying arms and the black market of illegal substances, in some ways assuring the outlawed nature of both. South American and Mexican governments bandy about with American and Chinese supports, formal and informal of their politics, their illegal industries, and their corruption and illicit assets. The people in these countries cry out for stability in their currencies, government programs that might support their multitude of poor citizens. The instability created in these countries is in some cases temporary with a permanent structure that promises more freedom to the peoples being governed if not more prosperity. The prosperity for middle east people may in fact take longer as assets and resources are fought over on a higher political terrain between the strongest powers - the most useful and prized of these assets being oil not democracy. In other cases, the instability is more permanent as it sustains corruption in local governments while the stronger powers reign over the resources, distracting the locals with short term self- interest often at the expense of their own people.
In fact the commodification of disaster on the one hand belies an old tale, an old story in which disaster (in the guise of political upheaval) acts as just another distraction to enable the monopolizing of far away resources; and on the other infiltrates our risk adjustment analysis and increased need for in/reass/urance from sub-prime crisis to Japanese tsunami.
We humans are creators, mimicking the earth. Fictions unimaginable, sprout from our psyches onto a page, a structure, an institution, a piece of paper or metal printed upon, known to the world to represent a measure of worth that we all believe in, or at least, we are all suppose to believe in until that fateful moment we are overwhelmed by disaster. That fiction is money - currency - even gold, used to value a segmented series of actions, products, processes, services, commodities, resources. What happens to the value of oil when it is spilled? What happens to the value of micro-chips when the plant in which they are manufactured disappears? What happens to an entire industry, like the nuclear industry, when signs of its holocaust
are visible on the horizon? We have created markets which trace exactly what happens, which symbol -stock or other- representing that commodity rises and which one falls?
Humans need security and hence, covet stability and hate risk. Risk is not
rewarded unless of course you are able to predict it and can show such prediction by shorting the particular commodity or representation of the same. If the timeline of disasters continues, more and greater reward will bestowed on those who can predict. A new industry of seers will erupt as in the days of old. "Mad Money" is only the beginning. Religion - even newer kinds - may hold a stronger grasp on our hearts and minds. And what would become of the value of disaster itself within our current fictions? Think a little about Project Redd to undo decades of deforestation in the Amazon, or the staggered carbon pollution created by industrial revolution and its parade of development, and the new markets created in response. If India and China thought about it long enough, yet another carbon or development market specifically geared to their situation would sprout. We are valuing at least man-made disasters (even as we are making them) over a longer timeline quite highly... highly enough to form new markets of healing, kind of like the charitable markets of aids, cancer, malaria etc... in the pharmaceutical world that are double edged. The edges are helping a larger segment of humankind with the cure, and the nearer form of financial
commodification necessary to bring in the money close to the dichotomy between brand and generics. Disease is after all a form of disaster.
War is another form. Uprisings like those blanketing across the middle east present a case in point. These commodify the sale of consultancy in political arrangements, the support and identification of opposing parties, the formation of parliamentary and other democracies, the establishment of democratic constitutions. Political and violent upheaval, like the kind involved in the drug trade, assist us in commodifying arms and the black market of illegal substances, in some ways assuring the outlawed nature of both. South American and Mexican governments bandy about with American and Chinese supports, formal and informal of their politics, their illegal industries, and their corruption and illicit assets. The people in these countries cry out for stability in their currencies, government programs that might support their multitude of poor citizens. The instability created in these countries is in some cases temporary with a permanent structure that promises more freedom to the peoples being governed if not more prosperity. The prosperity for middle east people may in fact take longer as assets and resources are fought over on a higher political terrain between the strongest powers - the most useful and prized of these assets being oil not democracy. In other cases, the instability is more permanent as it sustains corruption in local governments while the stronger powers reign over the resources, distracting the locals with short term self- interest often at the expense of their own people.
In fact the commodification of disaster on the one hand belies an old tale, an old story in which disaster (in the guise of political upheaval) acts as just another distraction to enable the monopolizing of far away resources; and on the other infiltrates our risk adjustment analysis and increased need for in/reass/urance from sub-prime crisis to Japanese tsunami.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Conceptions of Belonging and Legal Relationships In a Changing World
I don't know where my home is... in my mother's womb, in my self-created house, within my family unit, my academic or professional community, city, town, state or country? It is increasingly up for grabs as I connect to others far away and disconnect from myself and my immediate present through my crack-berry, telephone, computer. Confusion is resulting not only in my own life, but in the lives of my clients and colleagues. Non-US investors into world-wide ponzi schemes are connected to others thousands of miles away and to ostensible U.S. protections, protections that dissipate as soon as fraud and loss are uncovered. One kind of loss has a way of resulting in other losses...strangely enough, aspects of belonging we thought we had can vanish with the wind. But loss engenders human connection too, at least on informal levels. Formality does not appear to befriend loss... requiring the insertion of litigators; requiring changing interpretations of existing legislation in view of changed circumstance.
To me, home is a conception of belonging, a form of acceptance of self as is, recognizing its fragility, strength, and the weaknesses attached to a specific spirit embodied uniquely in one human form. Where do I feel I really belong? Does anyone really care what I believe about my own sense of belonging... care in the sense of validating that belief with some formal power within the larger community so that obligations and rights can issue from my own sense of belonging? Or must I be done to? I am born into a family, into a town or city, into a country and told what I believe and indoctrinated into the program of a specific country, unless of course, I am a military brat or have otherwise been carted all over the world through any number of scenarios mongrelizing my programming. I am allowed to cast a vote if I happen to be a citizen of the country I also happen to live in (a privilege I have not owned for some 17 years now) so I can impact the rules made by legislators at the various levels of my belonging.
Other conceptions of belonging (literature on the "commons") address the widening meanings of community and arguably widening rights or possibility of impacting those rules and rights but not necessarily the shrinking and loss sustained in self. As my sense of belonging changes, I lose parts of my self as much if not more than I gain. Take the role of technology I touch upon above. For that matter, consider how much more I touch cold hard steel and keys on a board these days than fruit, skin, heat attached to another human or animal... does that change what/where I may sense my belonging. I belong in my head much more than in my skin? How do I connect now? In the same way or differently?
I chat/skype/call with others far away and sometimes I conduct whole transactions with people I have never met... investing thousands of dollars with them, even my entire life savings, often counting on other espoused experts (advisers) to counsel me and tell me that my money is insured, protected by government agencies. Perhaps the dollars are the real connective tool, formal in the sense of trust represented by the guaranteed exchange, often even connected to the spiritual or a higher power (note 'in God we Trust' or symbols of monarchs and inspirational figures). Money lost and won, connects us to others across borders. Professionals too can be positioned to create communities and transactions in a positive way. I find myself for instance at the center of community creation through value based and integrating litigation that assists in the processing of grief and loss toward a place of hope and eventual recovery validating the experience of belonging of clients around the world connected by fraud.
There are rules that allow for these fraudulent transactions to take place, agencies placed in positions of oversight, managers emboldened by government backing and support because they have attracted the funds necessary to be considered significant. Technological advances in place allow these connections to take place, but also allow innocents to fall prey to sociopathic predators. The Madoffs and Stanfords of the world are phantoms devoid of spirit and heart, leeching off families, elderly and innocents for the sole purpose of sustaining themselves and their unending appetite for material gain. The widening of a heart based commons (which includes legitimate rights and obligations of law-abiding individuals and entities), based on these same technological advances supports these financial vampires' cross border empires too. Clearly I have a problem seeing such predatory behavior as some attempt at regulatory arbitrage. Any support of such criminal behavior by countries denying protections to innocent cross-border investors condones and creates pariah models for upcoming generations (perhaps we should take note of the increasing number of vampire based TV shows).
Inevitably and from the rooted outset, home represents stability, familiarity, a certain exchange of power and comfort too... and involves one's heart. Formal and informal rules are integral to the exchanges of the home. Home does not need borders... just as one's family can extend to close friends, lovers, close colleagues, and even pets... home can extend to all the places where close and significant ties and contacts have been placed. The trust placed in the extension into such significant ties warrants a mutual recognition and assertion of one's rights in those other lands.
To me, home is a conception of belonging, a form of acceptance of self as is, recognizing its fragility, strength, and the weaknesses attached to a specific spirit embodied uniquely in one human form. Where do I feel I really belong? Does anyone really care what I believe about my own sense of belonging... care in the sense of validating that belief with some formal power within the larger community so that obligations and rights can issue from my own sense of belonging? Or must I be done to? I am born into a family, into a town or city, into a country and told what I believe and indoctrinated into the program of a specific country, unless of course, I am a military brat or have otherwise been carted all over the world through any number of scenarios mongrelizing my programming. I am allowed to cast a vote if I happen to be a citizen of the country I also happen to live in (a privilege I have not owned for some 17 years now) so I can impact the rules made by legislators at the various levels of my belonging.
Other conceptions of belonging (literature on the "commons") address the widening meanings of community and arguably widening rights or possibility of impacting those rules and rights but not necessarily the shrinking and loss sustained in self. As my sense of belonging changes, I lose parts of my self as much if not more than I gain. Take the role of technology I touch upon above. For that matter, consider how much more I touch cold hard steel and keys on a board these days than fruit, skin, heat attached to another human or animal... does that change what/where I may sense my belonging. I belong in my head much more than in my skin? How do I connect now? In the same way or differently?
I chat/skype/call with others far away and sometimes I conduct whole transactions with people I have never met... investing thousands of dollars with them, even my entire life savings, often counting on other espoused experts (advisers) to counsel me and tell me that my money is insured, protected by government agencies. Perhaps the dollars are the real connective tool, formal in the sense of trust represented by the guaranteed exchange, often even connected to the spiritual or a higher power (note 'in God we Trust' or symbols of monarchs and inspirational figures). Money lost and won, connects us to others across borders. Professionals too can be positioned to create communities and transactions in a positive way. I find myself for instance at the center of community creation through value based and integrating litigation that assists in the processing of grief and loss toward a place of hope and eventual recovery validating the experience of belonging of clients around the world connected by fraud.
There are rules that allow for these fraudulent transactions to take place, agencies placed in positions of oversight, managers emboldened by government backing and support because they have attracted the funds necessary to be considered significant. Technological advances in place allow these connections to take place, but also allow innocents to fall prey to sociopathic predators. The Madoffs and Stanfords of the world are phantoms devoid of spirit and heart, leeching off families, elderly and innocents for the sole purpose of sustaining themselves and their unending appetite for material gain. The widening of a heart based commons (which includes legitimate rights and obligations of law-abiding individuals and entities), based on these same technological advances supports these financial vampires' cross border empires too. Clearly I have a problem seeing such predatory behavior as some attempt at regulatory arbitrage. Any support of such criminal behavior by countries denying protections to innocent cross-border investors condones and creates pariah models for upcoming generations (perhaps we should take note of the increasing number of vampire based TV shows).
Inevitably and from the rooted outset, home represents stability, familiarity, a certain exchange of power and comfort too... and involves one's heart. Formal and informal rules are integral to the exchanges of the home. Home does not need borders... just as one's family can extend to close friends, lovers, close colleagues, and even pets... home can extend to all the places where close and significant ties and contacts have been placed. The trust placed in the extension into such significant ties warrants a mutual recognition and assertion of one's rights in those other lands.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Love and the Law - Celebrating Mothers!
As we near the holidays, wish each other well, think a little more about giving and sacrifice, and the passage that the new year will bring, it seems appropriate to think back to when and where it all began - our mothers. We were all formed in the womb of her care (along the spectrum that that special care can connote for each of us, of course). The significance of those nine months and the birthing process is immeasurable; the later bonds created and dependence established - unfathomably formative of all other relationships; the further un/reliability exponentially impressed into personality, into the sense of in/security each of us projects and lives and experiences in life, work, and play. Mothers then, at least in part, create for us a system of familiarity, care, love, bonding and relating, if not so much more. Systems by definition are premised on a set of rules and so mothering is our first brush with the law. If we are lucky, these laws of our origin are the laws of love and compassion and not hate.
I have been blessed with understanding the law of mothering to include inner fortitude, complete sacrifice, equality, acceptance, such compassion for the other as to accept brutal punishment, incisive brilliance of the kind that beckons the stars to appear all along the profound and strategic cut created by her thought, love and unquestioned devotion, and finally the innumerable mistakes she has made so I could not forget the humanity of which the rest was born. In my turn I have tried to correct some of those mistakes, making others as a consequence. Letting her push me to be no less than my brothers and accept nothing I could not give in return; to think more of the possibilities born of my own imagination and the love fed me than the limited reality born of possibilities created by those who went before me. And with each passing year, to know that I will speak to her almost every day (or not if we do not get along), the ability to yell and scream at each other and to love each other in a glance, to cook with each other, to speak about anything and everything that concerns the world, the men in our worlds, our children - what has changed and what remains the same, to learn still from her how to run my business(es) for she has always harbored the entrepreneurial spirit without the opportunity to express it, except through me. And her earnest and forceful righteousness and sense of fairness; or inherent compassion and pragmatism at which I still marvel for I have seen it in few other people, except maybe my daughter, who so takes after her grandmother.
I have had blessings bestowed on me in the past couple of weeks of being close to the birth of a baby girl of a close friend perilously and prematurely born this week, and simultaneously hearing of the reappearance of a brain tumor in my own mother. You can understand as a writer I have no choice but to write this out. Somehow this young and old life are related through me and I can sense that each has an incredibly strong spirit - old and courageous. Regardless of age, these lives must be strong in the face of life’s physical limitations, and overcome the challenge their bodies present, the imperfect understanding of medical technology, relying on more than just science, but in addition on the energy of care and love their doctors, friends and family provide and focus upon them.
I think too about the fragility with which love comes and goes…the care, the patience, impotence and courage it demands of us in all moments but especially in moments of need, in moments of fear, in moments that most test our equilibrium…and it makes me question its rules. How can so much be expected of us? How can such complexity be formed in one breath taken in and expelled? What is a feeling when it is weak and then when it is strong? Can it be called by the same name? Is language the limitation, or the intellect’s ability to fathom emotion? Is there a rule to capture and govern that feeling to do our bidding so the complex rush is more palatable? Where will the caregiving courage come from to overcome this emotional challenge bred by the interdependence characterized by the closest and strongest bonds of mother and child? We are of course calling up our earliest and most primal self-sacrificial impulses, learned from none other than our mothers.
And whereas we take good care of babies, newborns even premature ones, bestowing on them the law of maternal sacrifice (whether it comes from Mom, Dad, or Doctor), how do we rate on this law of reciprocal sacrifice for our mothers? When it comes to pregnant women, we allegedly fare poorly in the U.S. behind countries like Serbia and Kuwait, for instance. “Marsden Wagner, former director of Women's and Children's Health at the WHO, writes in his 2006 book Born in the U.S.A. that "in the United States, at least half of maternal deaths are not reported anywhere ... and that with adequate medical attention, close to half of these women need not have died." (from the article “No Country for Mothers”; http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=no_country_for_mothers). As for tumors and cancers, brain tumors are the tenth most common cause of cancer death in women in U.S.(http://www.cancer.net/patient/Cancer+Types/Brain+Tumor?sectionTitle=Statistics). That being said…statistics do not relate the exceptional character and spirit that forges forth from a deep survival instinct of which we may be intimately aware in our own families, in our mothers and daughters, nor do they express the spirit of our own loving energy to care and support recovery in those who require our sacrifice.
As we close this year then, perhaps we can all evolve in ourselves a deeper resolve to be governed by the law of sacrifice we have learned from that primal bond so we may celebrate and support all the mothers in our lives!
I have been blessed with understanding the law of mothering to include inner fortitude, complete sacrifice, equality, acceptance, such compassion for the other as to accept brutal punishment, incisive brilliance of the kind that beckons the stars to appear all along the profound and strategic cut created by her thought, love and unquestioned devotion, and finally the innumerable mistakes she has made so I could not forget the humanity of which the rest was born. In my turn I have tried to correct some of those mistakes, making others as a consequence. Letting her push me to be no less than my brothers and accept nothing I could not give in return; to think more of the possibilities born of my own imagination and the love fed me than the limited reality born of possibilities created by those who went before me. And with each passing year, to know that I will speak to her almost every day (or not if we do not get along), the ability to yell and scream at each other and to love each other in a glance, to cook with each other, to speak about anything and everything that concerns the world, the men in our worlds, our children - what has changed and what remains the same, to learn still from her how to run my business(es) for she has always harbored the entrepreneurial spirit without the opportunity to express it, except through me. And her earnest and forceful righteousness and sense of fairness; or inherent compassion and pragmatism at which I still marvel for I have seen it in few other people, except maybe my daughter, who so takes after her grandmother.
I have had blessings bestowed on me in the past couple of weeks of being close to the birth of a baby girl of a close friend perilously and prematurely born this week, and simultaneously hearing of the reappearance of a brain tumor in my own mother. You can understand as a writer I have no choice but to write this out. Somehow this young and old life are related through me and I can sense that each has an incredibly strong spirit - old and courageous. Regardless of age, these lives must be strong in the face of life’s physical limitations, and overcome the challenge their bodies present, the imperfect understanding of medical technology, relying on more than just science, but in addition on the energy of care and love their doctors, friends and family provide and focus upon them.
I think too about the fragility with which love comes and goes…the care, the patience, impotence and courage it demands of us in all moments but especially in moments of need, in moments of fear, in moments that most test our equilibrium…and it makes me question its rules. How can so much be expected of us? How can such complexity be formed in one breath taken in and expelled? What is a feeling when it is weak and then when it is strong? Can it be called by the same name? Is language the limitation, or the intellect’s ability to fathom emotion? Is there a rule to capture and govern that feeling to do our bidding so the complex rush is more palatable? Where will the caregiving courage come from to overcome this emotional challenge bred by the interdependence characterized by the closest and strongest bonds of mother and child? We are of course calling up our earliest and most primal self-sacrificial impulses, learned from none other than our mothers.
And whereas we take good care of babies, newborns even premature ones, bestowing on them the law of maternal sacrifice (whether it comes from Mom, Dad, or Doctor), how do we rate on this law of reciprocal sacrifice for our mothers? When it comes to pregnant women, we allegedly fare poorly in the U.S. behind countries like Serbia and Kuwait, for instance. “Marsden Wagner, former director of Women's and Children's Health at the WHO, writes in his 2006 book Born in the U.S.A. that "in the United States, at least half of maternal deaths are not reported anywhere ... and that with adequate medical attention, close to half of these women need not have died." (from the article “No Country for Mothers”; http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=no_country_for_mothers). As for tumors and cancers, brain tumors are the tenth most common cause of cancer death in women in U.S.(http://www.cancer.net/patient/Cancer+Types/Brain+Tumor?sectionTitle=Statistics). That being said…statistics do not relate the exceptional character and spirit that forges forth from a deep survival instinct of which we may be intimately aware in our own families, in our mothers and daughters, nor do they express the spirit of our own loving energy to care and support recovery in those who require our sacrifice.
As we close this year then, perhaps we can all evolve in ourselves a deeper resolve to be governed by the law of sacrifice we have learned from that primal bond so we may celebrate and support all the mothers in our lives!
Monday, December 6, 2010
From abuse... toward a law of compassion
Throughout his and herstory,in disparate ways we have witnessed through others and our own souls the abuse of power, a cycle perpetrated by those who govern, and sometimes simply by those who hold something over someone else - physical prowess, economic force, anger, innocence lost. That simple act of sadism (of which each of us is capable even as tears fall and there is recognition of the act exercised) in which one human being makes the decision, however conscious or unconscious, that it is appropriate to hurt someone else by misappropriating or injuring their wealth/property, their livelihood, their body, their emotions/heart or their mind requires in the perpetrator and victim, a multitude of formative actions and reactions. In cases of abuse of power by factions of a community against another, or even by entire communities against other communities, the multiplicity of such formation, requiring the sadistic leadership to prime and handle the conformist ripple to affect a community of aggression as we have seen in numerous genocides, slaughters, wars and conquests of varying types, is staggering.
All the more when these formative actions and reactions cause systemic ripples within our everyday institutions, sometimes institutions in which we seek most to place our trust, like police forces turned corrupt, or regulatory watchdogs like the SEC watching porn instead of acting in accordance with their mandate, or the media/press publicizing only opinions they support instead of required news unbiased and non-political. But where does all this start? How do we become part of some large conformist wave of abuse? What of our own agency in this? How many of us look around and really see what is going on and if it has gone awry? How many of us think before we act when we know we are acting not out of love, or business, or occupational mandates, but out of anger,or out of a sense of leverage over others out of some economic, occupational, regulatory, or other advantage.
The expressions of such abuse of power- the jailing of innocents/innocence, the ignorance of evil, the lack of accountability of governing institutions to their charges, corporate expansion that engenders illegal conduct victimizing the public at large including the government(s) chosen to represent it - speak volumes to the resonance of micro action at macro levels. There are examples at different locations on this spectrum between micro and macro...Only today I heard from a 70 year old taken for a good portion of her life savings by a financial advisor, who not only swindled her, but made her out to be the perpetrator so that she is in a battle with a large financial institution he told her he represented, and that institution has now bankrupted her... despite the knowledge the illegality was committed by the intermediary while the legal system inured to such tragedy processes what appears to be criminal behaviour. Another person related to me that a fund he knows is providing evidence in the investigation of yet another financial institution, and yet the media leak of this evidentiary cooperation has led it to lose customers who are confused about their lawful participation in catching culprits. We have all watched Madoff, Stanford and others commit their unfathomable frauds on the public. We have watched banks on which we relied shrivel up and die only to be picked up by others for nothing while the public continues to be serviced in the style to which it has become accustomed...and tidal waves of debt wash out the financial underpinnings of entire nations on the other side of the pond.
We also have been shaken not so long ago under the attack from above on the World Trade Center, running in the streets toward Times Square on that fateful day, not so unlike the uproar raised by another war in 1965...retreating into the bunker in the backyard...the bunkers transformed into ominously targeted skyscrapers in Times Square. The primitive anger, strategic economic upheaval, communal uprising, border crossings, human traffic/king, migrations, both organic and designed...the aesthetics of control, neat and efficient. Lest I forget corporate, personal, and national transgressions upon the only home we have, this earth. Where does it all take us? To a sadistic impulse driven by all that is taken from us; or towards the expansive impulse to reform, process, reflect, integrate, and move toward compassion not out of a political or punitive command, but from some place of foresight and reckoning? Do we seek instead to take care of ourselves, and others, perhaps? We judge ourselves after all when we judge another. What do we learn? What is the best law of compassion, perhaps compassionate accountability we can put in place to govern ourselves and our children?
All the more when these formative actions and reactions cause systemic ripples within our everyday institutions, sometimes institutions in which we seek most to place our trust, like police forces turned corrupt, or regulatory watchdogs like the SEC watching porn instead of acting in accordance with their mandate, or the media/press publicizing only opinions they support instead of required news unbiased and non-political. But where does all this start? How do we become part of some large conformist wave of abuse? What of our own agency in this? How many of us look around and really see what is going on and if it has gone awry? How many of us think before we act when we know we are acting not out of love, or business, or occupational mandates, but out of anger,or out of a sense of leverage over others out of some economic, occupational, regulatory, or other advantage.
The expressions of such abuse of power- the jailing of innocents/innocence, the ignorance of evil, the lack of accountability of governing institutions to their charges, corporate expansion that engenders illegal conduct victimizing the public at large including the government(s) chosen to represent it - speak volumes to the resonance of micro action at macro levels. There are examples at different locations on this spectrum between micro and macro...Only today I heard from a 70 year old taken for a good portion of her life savings by a financial advisor, who not only swindled her, but made her out to be the perpetrator so that she is in a battle with a large financial institution he told her he represented, and that institution has now bankrupted her... despite the knowledge the illegality was committed by the intermediary while the legal system inured to such tragedy processes what appears to be criminal behaviour. Another person related to me that a fund he knows is providing evidence in the investigation of yet another financial institution, and yet the media leak of this evidentiary cooperation has led it to lose customers who are confused about their lawful participation in catching culprits. We have all watched Madoff, Stanford and others commit their unfathomable frauds on the public. We have watched banks on which we relied shrivel up and die only to be picked up by others for nothing while the public continues to be serviced in the style to which it has become accustomed...and tidal waves of debt wash out the financial underpinnings of entire nations on the other side of the pond.
We also have been shaken not so long ago under the attack from above on the World Trade Center, running in the streets toward Times Square on that fateful day, not so unlike the uproar raised by another war in 1965...retreating into the bunker in the backyard...the bunkers transformed into ominously targeted skyscrapers in Times Square. The primitive anger, strategic economic upheaval, communal uprising, border crossings, human traffic/king, migrations, both organic and designed...the aesthetics of control, neat and efficient. Lest I forget corporate, personal, and national transgressions upon the only home we have, this earth. Where does it all take us? To a sadistic impulse driven by all that is taken from us; or towards the expansive impulse to reform, process, reflect, integrate, and move toward compassion not out of a political or punitive command, but from some place of foresight and reckoning? Do we seek instead to take care of ourselves, and others, perhaps? We judge ourselves after all when we judge another. What do we learn? What is the best law of compassion, perhaps compassionate accountability we can put in place to govern ourselves and our children?
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Whistling while you work and getting paid for it!
After a summer hiatus on my writing, I am itching to get back to the keyboard and blow! And just in time too... as you may have gathered from our KLS website, reform abounds. And the potential for successful communication of the messages rung at the bell of governmental ineptitude and incompetence, perhaps even distraction hangs in the air with the passing of the financial reform act. Chief among the sections of interest is one on Whistleblowers. Not only are rewards that will finally be paid underscored (so little has been previously paid out), for those assisting the SEC with its job in impugning those violations that lead to actions against their perpetrating institutions and individuals, the slate is drawn up with some of the process necessary to a successful resolution of such investigations in the interest of state and whistleblower alike. The rest is still to come in the form of rules to be drafted by the SEC. Whistleblowers whose assistance leads to an action against offenders stand to not only be respected and not ignored, but to gain 10-30% of the penalty meted as a reward. What is more, they are to gain special protections where they may experience retaliation if they are insiders within the offending institution.
What does this mean? The message has been transmitted that whistleblower tips and complaints are an efficient mechanism to trigger governmental action. Whistleblowers are deserving of special protections because they are inherently at risk from their employers and others for the courageous actions they shoulder in order to affect changes in individual and systemic offensive and illegal behavior. And it means much more than that too. Two parties that started out on opposite sides have been enmeshed in a dance that is finally provided the music to choreograph change that is real and tangible. Out of a cacaphonous display of disparagement and anger, and earnest structured critique from private and public quarters, now at least on paper, a possibility for transformation has emerged.
This movement toward joining what you cannot beat is the kind of awakening (modest for now until we see it in action and the reality sinks in) we push protagonists into experiencing if we are novelists - even more so when confronted by systematic public milestones of the lessons learned smacking us in both congressional reviews of the IG's reports, and in actions taken, however suspicious against larger institutions. The display is convincing indeed, but do we believe? Has the faith been restored? Only time will tell.
GDK.
What does this mean? The message has been transmitted that whistleblower tips and complaints are an efficient mechanism to trigger governmental action. Whistleblowers are deserving of special protections because they are inherently at risk from their employers and others for the courageous actions they shoulder in order to affect changes in individual and systemic offensive and illegal behavior. And it means much more than that too. Two parties that started out on opposite sides have been enmeshed in a dance that is finally provided the music to choreograph change that is real and tangible. Out of a cacaphonous display of disparagement and anger, and earnest structured critique from private and public quarters, now at least on paper, a possibility for transformation has emerged.
This movement toward joining what you cannot beat is the kind of awakening (modest for now until we see it in action and the reality sinks in) we push protagonists into experiencing if we are novelists - even more so when confronted by systematic public milestones of the lessons learned smacking us in both congressional reviews of the IG's reports, and in actions taken, however suspicious against larger institutions. The display is convincing indeed, but do we believe? Has the faith been restored? Only time will tell.
GDK.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
The polluting spill... tapping into the unnatural and its financial consequences
Just in case we were not fully steeped in the mire of human catastrophe with the undoing of our financial fictions, an oil company taps wrecklessly into a substrate that has been brewing a concoction burned to create heat, run our vehicles, factories etc and literally blows its top. In the process, the oil company may also have blown itself financially. It is small wonder that an exercise as unnatural, 'artificial', human-made as drilling thousands of feet to reach the muck that is also known as "black gold" causes the very human-made reactive phenomenon of lawsuits to arise. I am speaking of the BP oil spill, and referring now to the lawsuit filed by the New York Pension fund against BP for investment losses.(1.)
Tragedy is not profitable for almost anyone (I'm excluding those sent in to clean up), and a fiasco like this one is bound to rack up damages not only in favor of investors sustaining them, but nature, tourists, fisherfolk, millions of ordinary people who flock to the beauty of the Carribbean throughout the year. All of these are also investors, perhaps the more innocent ones since they did not necessarily seek to make money from the extraction that went awry.
Our planet has evolved over 4.6 billion years (according to various radiometric dating techniques) and its layers of evolution hold great mysteries stored like a library of information about what came before us and how it was assimilated into the mother from which it sprang. The BP oil spill is an interesting interchange of law and science/nature (not trying to conflate science with nature here, just suggesting that our study of nature these days veers to the scientific). On the scientific side, BP like other oil companies has been enabled by technology, also developed through scientific study, to extract part of the evolutionary core of our planet, part of the common patrimony of all humanity, I believe, for its own gain.
What is oil?
"In the leading theory, dead organic material accumulates on the bottom of oceans, riverbeds or swamps, mixing with mud and sand. Over time, more sediment piles on top and the resulting heat and pressure transforms the organic layer into a dark and waxy substance known as kerogen. Left alone, the kerogen molecules eventually crack, breaking up into shorter and lighter molecules composed almost solely of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Depending on how liquid or gaseous this mixture is, it will turn into either petroleum or natural gas. So how long does this process take? Scientists aren't really sure, but they figure it's probably on the order of hundreds of thousands." (www.livescience.com)
Much of what this earth has made, it has the power to unmake even while exploiting us as its instrument. Certainly, this substance and the layers that sit beneath us all, belong to all of us and have done so for thousands of years as the substance was percolating into its current state. What is more, the extraction subtracts a layer from under all of us. And when one of us messes up, it hurts all of us. It is for this reason, this universal impact caused by the reckless use of technology for financial profits that do their own kind of damage, such tragedy must exact steep financial and other penalties. Complete sanitation of the area impacted, specific performance restoring this area and space into its original magnificence, the people whose day to day lives and livelihoods are debilitated also made whole, perhaps even the fish and ocean life can be replanted to replace what has been lost.
For those of us not yet convinced that polar caps are melting and the need for green solutions to our burgeoning energy needs is urgent, we have found another reason to embark upon clean solutions. There is nothing like a dirty oil spill to help us understand that clean renewable resources like the wind and sun (even if initially expensive) are far more cost-effective in the long run. They ensure at least some possibility that our grand children will see an earth remotely resembling the one we have enjoyed. Cleaning up is necessary not only in the financial realm where a new ethic of clean hands must be regulated and sought, a clean earth fueled by clean energy must source our light!
1. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100624/us_nm/us_newyorkstate_bp
Tragedy is not profitable for almost anyone (I'm excluding those sent in to clean up), and a fiasco like this one is bound to rack up damages not only in favor of investors sustaining them, but nature, tourists, fisherfolk, millions of ordinary people who flock to the beauty of the Carribbean throughout the year. All of these are also investors, perhaps the more innocent ones since they did not necessarily seek to make money from the extraction that went awry.
Our planet has evolved over 4.6 billion years (according to various radiometric dating techniques) and its layers of evolution hold great mysteries stored like a library of information about what came before us and how it was assimilated into the mother from which it sprang. The BP oil spill is an interesting interchange of law and science/nature (not trying to conflate science with nature here, just suggesting that our study of nature these days veers to the scientific). On the scientific side, BP like other oil companies has been enabled by technology, also developed through scientific study, to extract part of the evolutionary core of our planet, part of the common patrimony of all humanity, I believe, for its own gain.
What is oil?
"In the leading theory, dead organic material accumulates on the bottom of oceans, riverbeds or swamps, mixing with mud and sand. Over time, more sediment piles on top and the resulting heat and pressure transforms the organic layer into a dark and waxy substance known as kerogen. Left alone, the kerogen molecules eventually crack, breaking up into shorter and lighter molecules composed almost solely of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Depending on how liquid or gaseous this mixture is, it will turn into either petroleum or natural gas. So how long does this process take? Scientists aren't really sure, but they figure it's probably on the order of hundreds of thousands." (www.livescience.com)
Much of what this earth has made, it has the power to unmake even while exploiting us as its instrument. Certainly, this substance and the layers that sit beneath us all, belong to all of us and have done so for thousands of years as the substance was percolating into its current state. What is more, the extraction subtracts a layer from under all of us. And when one of us messes up, it hurts all of us. It is for this reason, this universal impact caused by the reckless use of technology for financial profits that do their own kind of damage, such tragedy must exact steep financial and other penalties. Complete sanitation of the area impacted, specific performance restoring this area and space into its original magnificence, the people whose day to day lives and livelihoods are debilitated also made whole, perhaps even the fish and ocean life can be replanted to replace what has been lost.
For those of us not yet convinced that polar caps are melting and the need for green solutions to our burgeoning energy needs is urgent, we have found another reason to embark upon clean solutions. There is nothing like a dirty oil spill to help us understand that clean renewable resources like the wind and sun (even if initially expensive) are far more cost-effective in the long run. They ensure at least some possibility that our grand children will see an earth remotely resembling the one we have enjoyed. Cleaning up is necessary not only in the financial realm where a new ethic of clean hands must be regulated and sought, a clean earth fueled by clean energy must source our light!
1. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100624/us_nm/us_newyorkstate_bp
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