"THE SECRET": CREATING A CULTURE OF CHEERFULNESS AS ROME BURNS

March 28, 2007

By Carolyn Baker

A friend recently asked me what I knew about The Secret, and I had to confess, absolutely nothing. A couple of days later, another friend asked the same question, so I decided I’d better investigate this supposedly revolutionary new book and DVD that have taken the country by storm. As I did so, I discovered that nothing about The Secret is revolutionary or new but rather a glitzy, twenty-first century redux of what has come to be called in metaphysical circles “New Thought”.

While aspects of New Thought have their roots in ancient teachings, it is for the most part, uniquely American—its roots in this country stemming from the transcendentalist movement of the late-nineteenth century. Among those giving birth to New Thought in America were Mary Baker Eddy, founding mother of Christian Science, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Ernest Holmes, and Charles Fillmore. What was “new” about New Thought at the time of its inception was its departure from Calvinistic, shame-based Christianity which taught the inherent sinfulness of man, proclaiming instead man’s innate goodness and perfectibility through the use of the Divine Mind which the transcendentalists believed resided at his core.

The New Thought movement emphasizes the supremacy of the mind over the body and material existence. While most adherents of New Thought do not deny the reality of corporeal existence as did Mary Baker Eddy who insisted that “there is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter,” they overwhelmingly revere the spiritual over the material and believe that physical, corporeal reality is a manifestation of mind. In other words, that our thoughts and attitudes create our external reality.

Ancient and indigenous teachings also incorporate the latter but acknowledge that alongside the light, the good, the true, and the beautiful, exists the dark side of existence which is as authentically real as the light and not merely created by the mind. Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and most native religious teachings worldwide not only acknowledge the dark side, but insist that it is an inherent part of human existence that must be faced and worked with in order to fully experience the blessings of the light.

In a nation so thoroughly marinated historically in exceptionalism and superiority from the moment Europeans set foot on North American soil, for example, the Puritan attributions to the New World such as “a new Jerusalem”, “a city set on a hill” and “a light unto the world,” we would expect to ultimately witness the proliferation of belief systems that exempt Americans from the same kind of suffering endured by fellow humans in other parts of the world.

It’s All About Me

In Sibling Society (1996) Robert Bly astutely, in my opinion, describes American culture as one of children who have never matured into adulthood and where “adults cling to self-absorbed adolescent values, television talk shows have more clout than elders, children are spiritually abandoned to fend for themselves, and in the place of community we have built shopping malls.”

I can think of no more apt description of The Secret than this, for it is first and foremost all about me and what I want.

Only children and adolescents believe that they can, as The Secret insists, have anything they want. Rhonda Byrne of Prime Time Productions, one of the principal filmmakers and author of the book The Secret, says she was inspired by reading “The Science Of Getting Rich”, a 1910 book by Wallace D. Wattles, a New Thought transcendentalist, which proclaims that one’s wealth or lack thereof is a product of one’s thought and attitudes. Positive thinking attracts good things; negative thinking attracts lack.

When I hear these concepts, I can only return to: How uniquely American! Can you imagine telling twelve year-old girls in Chinese sweatshops—the ones who work sixteen hours a day for pennies, live in squalor, may get raped at any moment, and sometimes are found dead at the ripe old age of twenty at their sewing machines from working themselves to death—can you imagine telling them that their situation is the product of their thoughts? Examples of such ghastly human suffering are countless in a world where millions of human beings live on less than two dollars a day.

Although the documentary is highly endorsed and supported by Oprah, for whom I personally hold great respect, let’s not forget who Oprah is: none other than one of the wealthiest people on the planet. Clearly, she was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth, and she arrived where she is today through hard work, but no one disputes that she had an abundance of good fortune that poor black women rarely experience.

But how would Rhonda know about the teeming masses of earthlings living on two dollars a day? It appears that she isn’t looking. Perhaps she’s too busy attracting the next mansion, world cruise, fifty karat diamond, or documentary project. For Rhonda, like so many Americans and citizens of the developed world, and yes, like a typical two year-old, seems to have no sense of limits. It’s no “secret” (pun intended) that millions if not billions of human beings on earth hate America—for innumerable reasons, but for one in particular: We seem to have no sense of enough-ness. Enough is never enough, and since Christopher Columbus stepped off the ship onto Caribbean shores, European settlers and their descendents have almost never had a sense of limitation—from sea to shining sea and the philosophy of Manifest Destiny that justified genociding millions of Native Americans which this nation’s politicians and financiers took to the rest of the world. Nor do they reveal any signs of tempering their voracious appetite for the world’s resources beyond our shores. In fact, it has never been as out-of-control as in the present moment.

Acknowledging The Pain

Individuals in America’s sibling society are not bad human beings, nor are they inherently greedy, but they have been enculturated to grow up to be good consumers, which has now become synonymous with good citizenship. Sadly, The Secret only offers more of the same: buy this DVD, this book, so you can become wealthy enough to buy whatever you want in the future. Ignore what consumption is doing to yourself and the planet, just consume more!

During the Great Depression there were Ponzi schemes and dance marathons. In every era of economic hardship, some quick fix or magic bullet appears and proliferates. The Secret is classic pie in the sky—so very 1980s a la Louise Hay and Terry Cole Whittaker, wrapped in twenty-first century panache and special effects, guaranteed to lighten the heart of any middle or working class individual steamrollered by subprime meltdown, maxed out credit cards, overwhelming medical bills and child care expenses, ever-increasing gas prices, perhaps still paying off student loans, unable to save a dime, and finding any talk of pensions or retirement savings nothing less than laughable.

In my recent article “In Debt We Trust”, I referred to Danny Schecter’s DVD of the same title which opens with a congregation in an African American church who have created a program to rid themselves of all debt. They “created their own reality” not only by thinking positively, but by looking squarely in the face, the evil of debt in their world and constructing a program of “Coming Clean” in order to liberate themselves from it. Unfortunately, this is precisely what “The Secret” is unwilling to do, choosing instead to ignore human suffering and injustice locally and globally, with total disinterest in the economic warfare being perpetrated on individuals and communities worldwide.

Don’t Bother Me With Causes, I Want The Solution

Another characteristic of a sibling society is its unwillingness to explore causation. After all, a sick child doesn’t want to hear how they caught a cold because they didn’t put on their jacket; they just want mommy or daddy or the doctor to take the cold away. The Secret is perfect for siblings because they need not trouble themselves with anyone else’s suffering or how their own suffering was caused by forces outside their own minds. They don’t want to hear about how the United States government has been waging economic warfare on them for decades, how the military industrial complex is bankrupting their nation and will abjectly impoverish their children and grandchildren, how rather than spending more and acquiring more debt, they need to trim down, conserve, and oh that horrible adult word that siblings hate so much: sacrifice. They want a solution, and they want it now. Never mind the trillion-dollar deficit and the trillions missing from the coffers of the United States government that was stolen from them.

Understandably, no one prefers to explore the causes of middle and working class debt and economic drain. It’s an enormous can of ugly, smelly, and sometimes lethal worms that once examined, confirm that no matter how bad we think things are now, they are really much worse than we had imagined. The awareness that one is living in a decaying, rotting, collapsing empire, and that all the strategies for making it better that one has been taught such as voting, working harder, and marching in the streets aren’t working because they have essentially become meaningless, is enough to compel almost anyone to run right out and buy The Secret and meticulously follow its instructions.

This week Truth To Power published historian Chalmers Johnson’s article “Is The Empire About To Collapse?” in which he speaks of his latest book Nemesis, the name of the Greek goddess of hubris and retribution. Johnson believes as I do that 231 years of American hubris is coming to a tragic end. The tragedy, in my opinion, is not that the empire is collapsing, but that so many innocent, well-intentioned, hard working people will pay such a ghastly price for it, and not because they weren’t thinking pleasant thoughts. I’m reminded of the scene from Titanic in which a group of women, including Molly Brown, sat in a lifeboat and watched the ship split apart and crumble into the sea. One woman remarked that absolution was needed for what had happened, to which Molly replied, “There is no absolution for this.”

Another movie scene comes to mind, an all-time favorite of mine from the seventies, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” The scene is a dance marathon during the Great Depression where dozens of working class men and women have come to dance for several days in order to earn a pittance for their grueling efforts. As the couples dance without sleep, or rather, just keep moving endlessly around the clock on the dance floor, wealthy spectators sit comfortably in the grandstands taking bets on who will endure, occasionally tossing coins in the direction of the dancers. A bitter, cynical young woman (Gloria) played by Jane Fonda, partners with a guileless young man (Robert) played by Michael Sarrazin whereupon dialog between them ensues, becoming increasingly philosophical and continuing throughout the marathon. Gloria, has lost all hope, perhaps because she has refused to deny the darkness of a society engulfed in economic catastrophe. She also sees through and resents the master of ceremonies of the marathon who manipulates the dancers to increase their physical and emotional exhaustion in order to entertain the wealthy spectators. What is worse, at the end of the marathon, numerous expenses are deducted from the final prize, leaving the winners with nothing—a set-up from start to finish. Gloria’s anger has clearly energized her and allowed her to survive a difficult life. Unfortunately, she allows it to destroy her, and after she and Robert depart, she attempts to shoot herself but cannot do it. She then asks him to shoot her, and he does.

Although Gloria was filled with toxic bitterness, she saw through a system that was stacked against the working class by a ruling elite, aloof from but entertained by, the struggles of the lower classes. In that sense she never lost her humanity or her dignity. Tragically, she was a loner who had no support or validation for the truth she saw and therefore became overwhelmed by the darkness she refused to deny.

In my opinion, “They Shoot Horses Don’t They?” depicts not only the economic suffering of the Great Depression but also that of the economic tsunami that appears to be engulfing the United States. Those who have refused to face the truth of that deluge because they prefer to remain distracted by “American Idol” and the death of Anna Nicole Smith, are likely to face the same consequences as the gullible dance marathon participants who had no clue regarding the causes of the Great Depression and the set-up in which they were ensnared. Others, wallowing in narcissism and pretty thoughts, may opt to join the ruling elite in the grandstands, ignoring the human anguish of the ones beneath them dancing on the treadmill of the American debt industry. The third option is that the Gloria’s among us refuse to be destroyed by our own and others’ suffering and resist. The first step of resistance is thoroughly understanding what we are resisting, then gathering the necessary support to resist, and finally, building economic, emotional, and spiritual lifeboats to navigate the approaching storm.

Let me clarify: I have no problem with people becoming and remaining prosperous. I do not champion the “poor and proud” mentality. What I find offensive and inexcusable is the unwillingness of purveyors and devotees of The Secret to look at the other half of reality—the dark side—theirs and that of their government, move beyond their terminal narcissism, and resist the economic holocaust being perpetrated on them and the rest of the world by a fascist empire. Not to do so is to remain a sibling for one’s entire life, and if America’s middle and working classes need to do any one thing in this moment, it is to grow up and face adult reality. I know of no more shining example of this than Catherine Austin Fitts who is dedicating her time and energy to teaching people how to become prosperous, not by distracting themselves from injustice and economic warfare, but by teaching them to become intimately acquainted with it in order to wisely create options of prosperity for themselves and their loved ones.

Similarly, Michael Hudson, historian, professor, former Wall St. financial analyst, and author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire offers critical insights into the empire’s downward spiral toward economic meltdown and may be heard on KPFA’s “Guns And Butter” program speaking on the topic of “America: Host Or Parasite?”.

As for documentaries that address reality, a wiser and more mature approach, from my perspective, is that of Tim Bennett’s and Sally Erickson’s DVD “What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire” about which I wrote an extensive article earlier this month. Rather than offer a sibling soporific, this documentary addresses head-on the nightmare that humans have created on so many levels, especially on the level of making the planet uninhabitable, but rather than inviting the viewer to escape into isolated, self-absorbed consumerism on steroids, it presents the opportunity to join with others of like mind and heart to reverse the lethal trajectory on which the human race is spinning out of control. Just as the last thing we need at this moment in history in the face of fossil fuel depletion is a “solution” that involves consuming more oil, the last thing the human race needs in the face of the perfect economic storm is an indulgent “I can have anything I want” perspective that ignores the empire’s evils and perpetuates the very mega-consumerism that is annihilating the planet.

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Whose Mortgage Crisis?

Anya Kamenetz

March 15, 2007

Anya Kamenetz is a freelance writer, the author of Generation Debt and a journalistic fellow of the Freelancers Union. She can be reached at her website, anyakamenetz.blogspot.com.

“A Mortgage Crisis Begins to Spiral, and the Casualties Mount,” read the headline in The New York Times last week. I clicked on the link expecting to read about the growing numbers of victims of “exploding” subprime mortgages, suddenly stuck with unaffordable payments as interest rates tick up and housing prices fall. Instead, the “casualties” of the headline were the subprime mortgage bankers and brokers, multimillionaires who are losing their red Ferrari convertibles and private jets now that the housing bubble has officially burst.

Yes, this current stock slump looks to a lot of people like the tech bust 2.0, and it may very well affect the whole economy. The economic big picture is an important angle, also explored by the Times here, here and here.

But what about the angle involving real people who are actually going to lose their homes? "Subprime" lending is a creature of our recent unprecedented era of unrestricted credit. It is the business of providing mortgages at exceptionally high interest rates to people with poor or spotty credit histories, who in this economy, tend to be lower earners, less educated and disproportionately minority. It also often has an uglier name—predatory lending.

In the just-passed era of record-low interest rates, the lenders who are now in trouble dangled homeownership before millions of people who never dreamed of such a thing before, enticing people into barely affordable contracts with low introductory rates and zero percent down, helping drive housing prices up and inflating our homeownership rate to the highest in American history. Not to mention minting money for themselves.

And President Bush bragged about it, because it looked like progress. He repeatedly cut funding for Housing and Urban Development programs, even in the wake of the Katrina diaspora crisis. Yet, because of the proliferation of subprime loans, he was able to tell a black audience in 2005, “Today, nearly half of all African Americans own their own homes. And that's good for our country.” It was the ultimate in privatization.

Unfortunately, sometimes the risk gets so high that owning is not really owning. The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit that takes on all forms of predatory lending, estimates that predatory mortgage lending costs Americans more than $9.1 billion each year. And African Americans and Latinos are more likely to get subprime mortgages even when they have the same qualifications as whites. "Nontraditional loans in the subprime market are seriously eroding the traditional benefits of homeownership," Michael Calhoun, the Center’s president, has said. "By their very nature, they pose a high risk of losing valuable home equity or foreclosure."

Now the brokers are going to take some losses and switch to trading something else—fine for them. But what about the millions of marginally middle-class people stuck up to their neck with higher and unaffordable monthly payments? Their futures hold delinquency, defaults, foreclosures and bankruptcy.

According to Barron's , during the next two years homeowners can expect increased monthly payments on an estimated $600 billion of subprime mortgages. The last quarter of 2006 had a record rate of foreclosures. Senator Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.,, the chairman of the Banking Committee, told reporters that the next 18 months may bring as many as 2 million more.

America is at another Enron moment. Rather than shedding a tear for the traders who pumped up this market, we are now required as a country to reexamine the responsibility that creditors have to borrowers—to make a sane assessment of the ability to repay, not merely to make as much money as they can out of the risk. It is high time to block predatory lending of all kinds by reinstating usury laws, limiting interest rates, penalties and fees that creditors can charge.

Will our Democratic lawmakers accept this moral challenge? The jury’s still out. On the one hand, 14 Democratic senators voted for the credit-industry-authored bankruptcy bill in 2005. On the other hand, Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., recently held some pretty harrowing hearings on predatory credit card industry practices, in which he raked over the CEOs of the top three credit card issuers in the country.

Several lawmakers, including Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Hillary Clinton, D-NY, have introduced reforms of the extremely predatory practices of student lenders. And Senator Chris Dodd and Representative Barney Frank, D-Mass., are each discussing introducing legislation on subprime lending, Dodd to protect the borrowers already trapped and Frank to restrict these risky mortgages going forward.

I have high hopes that predatory lending could become the moral values issue of 2008. In the meantime, let’s keep in mind who the real casualties are.

Think the Nation's Debt Doesn't Affect You? Think Again

In addition to borrowing from the world's poorest countries, Bush & Co. are secretly confiscating your hard-earned dollars to support their out-of-control spending habits.

By John F. Ince, AlterNet
Posted on March 20, 2007

Sometime in the next year, Congress will start going through their periodic rituals and related public relations charades in an effort to absolve themselves of any blame for raising of the federal government's debt ceiling.

With Bush and cronies having added over $3 trillion dollars to the national debt, the country's credit card tab now stands at $8.8 trillion. This represents an astounding increase of over 45 percent since Bush came into office in January of 2001. And all this fiscal profligacy took place during the years when the CBO originally forecasted record surpluses of approximately $2.5 trillion. And there is no end in sight to the deficits.

More alarmingly we now rely on foreigners to finance over 40 percent of this debt with the lion's share coming from the Asian central banks. In FY 2006 the current account trade deficit is on track to set yet another record, on the order of $700 billion. To put this in perspective, billionaire investor Warren Buffet points out that, "15 years ago, the U.S. had no trade deficit with China. Now, it's 200 billion dollars." He says if the country does not change course, the rest of the world could end up owning 15 trillion-dollars worth of the United States. That's equal to the value of all American stock.

Is it a natural state of affairs for the world's richest nation to be borrowing from the world's poorest nations, to the tune of over 6 percent of its GDP? Harvard Economic Professor and former Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund, Kenneth Rogoff doesn't think so. Rogoff goes on camera in the recently released documentary film, TIME-BOMB: America's Debt Crises, Causes, Consequences and Solutions and says, "This is not a normal state of affairs. And it's certainly not something we expect to see from the world's richest country. Back when Britain was on top they were lending money to the world, but we're borrowing from the rest of the world. Our current account trade deficit is now more than our defense spending and incredibly we've been borrowing from the rest of the world like this for several years now. I think we're going to reach a point where the rest of the world decides that they don't want to lend to us. And that can be kind of traumatic."

America's high deficit strategy is due for a critical review, but the review won't be coming from Congress, the media or the American electorate, because these issues just don't rank high on a national agenda dominated by war, sports, celebrity worship, and scandal. But like it or not, Bush's deficit strategy will be getting critical review from the people who matter most: global investors.

There are renewed signs that global investors may be getting concerned about the level of U.S. borrowing. Recently the Chinese, holders of about $1 billion in U.S. Treasuries, recently set up a new agency of their central bank to take a hard look at their investments overseas, and their continued financing of U. S. deficits may come under close scrutiny. If global investors were to begin to balk at picking up the tab for American excesses, it would be a monumental embarrassment to the United States.

More palpably it would force the Fed to raise interest rates to make the T-bills marketable. That, of course, would have serious effects for the U. S. economy, the stock market and the real estate market. Could this be the beginning of the unraveling? Perhaps.

There are of course, countervailing forces that could enable the U.S. Treasury to continue its glut of borrowing. China and the Asian Central banks would hate to see the markets for their exports go soft and they know that only by continuing their financial largesse will the United States continue to be the "shopper of last resort" in the global marketplace. Oil producing nations are also awash in capital and, as long as the dollar remains the default currency for petrodollars, they view the dollar as a safe bet. But these conditions can't continue indefinitely and no investor wants to be the last to react to bad news.

If history is any guide, we need to be concerned. The last time there was a changing of the guard at the Fed, Alan Greenspan was greeted just about 90 days into his new tenure with the stock market crash of '87, which overnight wiped out over 20 percent of the amassed wealth of investors. The recent hiccup in the global financial markets has raised new concerns about market instability. With the softening of the real estate market, the subprime mortgage market has already sent shock waves through mortgage lending circles, with several notable bankruptcies. There is concern that it may move up the food chain jeopardizing the lending portfolio's major banks, most of whom have been quietly raising the loan loss reserves.

Nobody knows for sure how this will play itself out, but the big picture is not a rosy one for the American economy. In the past year the median sales price for a home in America actually declined and homeowners are starting to feel the hangover of over $1.5 trillion that Americans have extracted from the equity of their homes with interest-only loans and the easy money the banks are throwing at them. The derivatives market, despite having been racked with scandals, is still highly leveraged and due for a "correction". And the stock market has turned jittery on news from China and spiked oil prices.

True to form, the Bush administration's response is not to address any of the root causes of these potential instabilities, but rather to go into public relations high gear to accentuate the positive. When faced with bad news, Bush sent his advisors on a global marketing blitz last year to "Sell the Economy's Sizzle" with pitch saleman, aka Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, sputtering forth the administration's talking points out on the lecture circuit.

These are serious issues and their implications go well beyond the cold numbers that politicians and economists like to manipulate to their advantage. Here are four reasons why America's debt load is today the most serious issue facing this country:

First and most fundamentally, as America's borrows more from foreigners, we are jeopardizing our stature as a world leader. The lessons of history are clear. A nation's borrowing from abroad is generally a precurcursor to decline.

Harvard Economics Professor Benjamin Friedman, says in the TIME-BOMB documentary, "Historically whichever country has been the world's leading lender, deploying its capital for use around the world has always accrued a particular kind of influence in world affairs, whether it's the Dutch in the 17th century, or before that the Spanish in the 16th century, or more recently the British from the mid 19th century through the twentieth century or the United States in the great part of the 20th century after World War I.

"Again and again it has always been the world's leading lending country that has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic influence and cultural influence. It's no accident that we took over that role from the British at the same time that we took over from the the job of being world's leading lending country. Today we are no longer the world's leading lending country. In fact we are now the world's biggest debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of military prowess alone. As an American citizen, I hope that we can continue to do this but I have to observe that the tides of world history do not speak well for that strategy."

Second, the persistent deficits are ultimately destabilizing to financial markets. Peter G. Peterson, former Secretary of Commerce under President Nixon, and today Chairman of The Blackstone Group, says in TIME-BOMB, " I'm not smart enough to predict where or when, but there are very serious people that believe our current fiscal irresponsibility is heading this country towards a hard landing. A hard landing is one where the foreigners lose confidence in putting their money in this country. The scenario then is that the dollar drops very sharply; interest rates rise very sharply. It has serious effects obviously on the stock market and the economy, and it heads us towards this dreaded stagflation where you have both inflation and recession at the same time."

Third, America's standard of living will surely take a tumble. When the dollar takes a fall on the global exchange, as it must eventually, everything Americans buy from abroad will cost more. With America's manufacturing base all but evaporated, virtually every industry sector will start to feel inflationary pressures. Inflation would force the Fed to raise interest rates further which will have effects throughout the entire economy, forcing many businesses large and small to the brink of insolvency and raising unemployment.

Fourth, the high deficits are putting the assets of all American's at risk through inflation. Inflation is a poorly understood phenemenon, but its effects are both powerful and insidious. As even the modern day father of deficit spending, economist John Maynard Keynes acknowledged, "The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens."

In short America has been living beyond it's means for too long and the reckoning is looming. The consequences of delaying action to address the root causes of the problems are serious and long-lasting. The time for action is now. For further information on how to get involved visit: http://www.time-bomb.org/. To purchase the film, click here.

John Ince is a former reporter at Fortune Magazine and the producer/director of a new documentary about America's debt crisis. For more information, visit http://www.time-bomb.org/ or to purchase the film visit http://www.customflix.com/208246.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.