Earth Day – March 20th, 2010 - Integrity will set you free

At the stroke of a moment, the 40th Annual UN Peace Bell Ceremony will take place. This is the Real Earth Day, Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 1:32 p.m. EDT (Equinox). The mission and vision statement for the real Earth Day was not some sappy after school program, with tee-shirt, but a challenge to live our principles with lives framed with integrity. Peace, Justice, and Care of the Earth.

Those who planned it and participated were life long proponents for clean water, clean air and transparency. The issue was not political in 1970, both Republicans and Democrats were involved.

If you thought Earth Day was in April you swallowed a corporate lie perpetrated that 1970 with the blatant use of the same name by a group of corporate hires. Read the story here. All of us need to be more discerning. Lies are destroying everything we built. Read The Wrong Kind of Green, in The Nation, just yesterday.

Some few have known and tried to warn us. We did not listen until our own ox was gored.

Today is the direct result of that lie and all the lies, the manipulation, and the lack of conscience by a relatively few. Today you see the outcome of unbridled appetite and greed, a lack of conscience and integrity, by those same few. Most of us, the overwhelming majority, do the right thing most of the time.

Together we, the many, can change direction. Integrity and discernment is all we need. Uncounted people today are drawing on their own integrity as they fight for you, even when you do not know it.

Today an elderly man is sitting in solitary confinement in the Los Angeles Jail because his integrity makes it impossible for him to say the words which would immediately release him. In his mind is justice for all of us. He will die for his integrity, for you.

Prominent anti-trust attorney Richard I. Fine was sentenced to “coercive confinement” in the L.A. Central Men’s Jail for an indefinite period of time to silence him. He has now been sixty days in solitary confinement and has been in jail for over a year. Fine was handcuffed and shackled, lead away to jail from the court house, on March 4, 2009. Judge David P. Yaffe gave the order. The court wants him silenced on their ongoing schemes to use the court system for their own profit. They have been attempting to coerce Fine into submission, but failed. Richard Fine is determined to reform the justice system.

Don't expect the media to cover Fine's heroic challenge of corruption. Taking over the media, converting it into an extension of corporate PR, was an early strategy, now reaching its fruition. Journalists should have been the first to see this and take a stand. Their own standards mandate it.

They failed to exercise integrity.

If we want change we need to do it ourselves and begin by understanding the entirety of the problem we face.

Our world is melting around our ears, caused by this same lack of integrity, installed as the operational formula in our institutions. Integrity is the tool which helps us survive and prosper – if it is used. Integrity includes a refusal to accept lies as truth and so profit from lies. Integrity is an insistence on knowing, not accepting assurances without all the facts.

The awakening of our common humanity challenged generations past to see what was possible and never settle for less. Yet even as we have stretched, innovated and labored, reaching for the vision which is America, we have harbored a devil within. Today the full realization of psychopaths as individuals without conscience, incapable of integrity, is sinking in.

We reject gluttony, sexual deviancy, self-indulgence. These attributes along with the lies and manipulation which simulates emotion, characterize psychopaths. Yet who have we trusted to lead us?

Turn your eyes to those occupying positions of trust in government and corporations. These are occupied by all too many who will do anything to get what they want. Psychopaths are drawn to the nexus of power, they can be charismatic and will tell you whatever you want to hear to achieve their ends. They simulate emotions along with mouthing words of honor to deceive as a matter of routine.

Today experts believe many of our institutions are psychopathic in operation. Dr. Robert Hare, psychologist and world renowned expert in psychopathy, originated testing for psychopathy, common in criminals. Testing is now routinely used for applicants in various service professions such as firefighters, operators of nuclear power plants, police officers and teachers.

While lecturing to a convention of cops in Newfoundland, Hare posed another application for testing, as reported in Fast Company Magazine by Alan Deutschman , “Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?” The screen suddenly transitioned from faces of sex offenders and Mafia Hit Men to, “top executives from WorldCom, which had just declared bankruptcy, and Enron.” Hare continued, “Why wouldn't we want to screen them?

Dr. Robert Hare coined the word, “corporate psychopathic,” and has since written the book, “Snakes In Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work,” Paul Babiak, Ph.D. and Robert D. Hare, Ph.D.

Look at government. Is what you see any different? No.

Psychopaths have no emotions. Their brains lack these functions neurologically, according to research by Kent A. Kiehl, PhD at the Mind Institute whose work with criminals has been highly revealing. They see you as prey, not as people. Who but psychopaths would send your children off to war on claims they knew as lies?

While psychopaths continue to grab for power and money others struggle to do good.

In Nigeria a man, Francis Bosah, is looking for help with a problem which is confronting people around the world. This morning I received an email from Francis asking for my help. What he needs is tiny. Read the email and what is needed here.

In the wake of WWII chemical companies, now losing profits because overt war had ended, converted their factories from weapons of war to pesticides. Today the level of pesticides is poisoning the Earth as the residue of the war for profit shows up in toxic levels in autopsies from all parts of the world. People are dying, the unborn are not safe and neither are our elderly.

Francis wants to stop this in his country by replacing the use of pesticides with natural, non-impacting solutions. If he were starting this campaign alone it would be impossible. But Francis found an ally who had already produced alternatives to every pesticide now in use.

Steve Tvedten, a former exterminator, lost his uncle and baby son to the toxic effects of pesticides, nearly dying himself. Giving away his company, he committed himself to providing alternatives. His book, is available for free online. Read it for yourself and use it as have tens of thousands now living healthier lives.

Americans believe in the power of the individual. In these three men you see power exercised with integrity.

The vision which is still America conflicts with the business plan for engorging corporations with our stolen lives. Psychopaths are drawn to power. The point of conflict is integrity. Normal people have limits, things they will not do for power. From the member partners of the Federal Reserve, to Big Oil, and on to, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower put it on leaving the White House, the Industrial Military Complex, they are eating out our substance. See it now.

We did not see this clearly before. They always knew what they were doing.

Each Spring the real Earth Day brings with it the opportunity to remember the opposition will do anything to win. Lying and murder mean nothing to the kind of people who displaced the integrity of the real Earth Day. The death of your baby girl from an injection? Your uncle abandoned and starving on the street because of the nightmares which haunt him from Iraq? These are just corporate write offs.

It is all about money and power for them.

This Earth Day commit yourself to understanding what is confronting us. Stop settling for assurances. Notice what is happening around you. Listen as they mouth the rhetoric which once moved you and remember it when the reality emerges. Learn to see the greed lighting their eyes. Instead of following, live your integrity. Judge for yourself – and at the moment when the Earth turns towards renewal in the Northern Hemisphere, remember, we are human because we feel, we love, care, and hunger for the vision which moved generations to become Americans. The vision is still true.

Back to the Future of Commerce in Pennsylvania and Your Home Town.

One Woman's Quest for a free market.

Karen Emery bought her first 1 oz coin of silver in New Hampshire just last year. The token, which cost $16.00, made an enormous difference in the life of one woman, opening the way for people in the Delaware Valley area of Pennsylvania, to see what it is like to use money which will hold its value.

Karen was attending the Free State's Liberty Forum at the Crown Plaza in Nashua, NH, when she picked up a silver token at an after hours party. It was her birthday, March 5, 2009, and she had been thinking about how good it would be if, as once was the case, money had weight and substance.

While being interviewed for this article Karen mentioned how it felt as she held it, smooth, heavy, and gleaming. Along with the substance the token had, she thought, integrity. She still carries it with her as a reminder.

Karen had learned about Free State's Liberty Forum on Free Talk Live, for two years before she finally made it to the event. Free Talk Live, is Karen said, "The radio that you control." The non-structured radio station has become a voice for a growing on the air community. She listened to their program once and was hooked. There is, Karen says, nothing like the open mike with Ian Freeman and Mark Edge.

Karen's first token came from Bullion Direct. Within a few weeks she had signed up as a representative for American Open Currency Standard, or AOCS. Every so often over the ensuing weeks she would take out the coin and hold it in her hand again.

While a representative for American Open Currency Standard, Karen had time to think about what was important. Selling silver at so far over what it was worth as metal, she realized could never result in people using silver tokens for barter in their day to day lives. She wanted that experience, using metal coins, a thing which itself had value, when she bought her gas and groceries.

So Karen Emery decided to start DelValley Silver. Her new company would not offer many different tokens, just one to begin with. The token had to be inexpensive enough so people would use it. In her mind Karen saw people putting them on the counter and showing them to their children. In this way children could understand what money once was - and experience it again.

That decision make, it was all a matter of details. Karen found a mint to produce the rounds. Golden State Mint is in California. She then determined the image the token would carry, filed papers with the state, which reminded her again, why she wanted the integrity she felt in silver rounds.

The first token carried a map of Pennsylvania, including Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey for good measure. The second suggests the Amish traditions of her state.

Karen had begun talking to local merchants in May for AOCS. Now, in August, she was talking to them about a different proposition. Since there was no fee to sign up entry costs were low, an important consideration in an already struggling economy. Karen has seven merchants signed up. The merchants see barter in silver in various ways but among their motivations is the knowledge hard metal will come into their hands. Interest is building, she says, which is reflected from her merchants.

AmeriKick Martial Arts, Liberty Revolution Network, Twins Auto Repair Inc., Advise Laboratories, MetaSense Inc., Street Road Lukoil, and Vermilion Hills Chiropractic, a range of businesses, are now accepting the tokens and negotiations are going on with the local Amish community. To serve the Amish community Karen will be adding a $6.00 token to her inventory.

The tokens now offered include a one ounce round, showing the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware, for $18.64, purchased in lots, and a ½ ounce token, carrying the image of an Amish family in their carriage for $9.77.

At a time when America's dollar is teetering on the edge of disaster the solid value of silver is raising increasing interest across the country. Barter and script systems are springing up in places where they were previously unknown at unprecedented rates. A website, Move Your Money, is now urging Americans to move their money out of banks, such as Citibank, which are now placing severe limits on withdrawals from accounts. The Move Your Money site offers links so users can ascertain the rating of their own bank and find one which is higher.

All the money they move will still be Federal Reserve Notes. Karen would like ordinary people to have money with integrity.

To use silver rounds, tokens, for commerce the price of the silver must be near to that paid for the metal itself. The 'spot' price of the metal changes constantly, fluctuating against other ways to hold value, commodities, and against existing currencies.

In the Delaware Valley local people who carry the tokens are learning by doing. The DelValley site provides a short tutorial on reasons barter and hard metal have continued to have a place in the market, explaining clearly and simply how their system works.

For those in the Freedom Movement it is a leaflet sprung to life or a tutorial by Murray Rothbard made flesh. In the Delaware Valley of Pennsylvania you can touch theory.

This year Karen Emery will be attending the Free State Project's Freedom Forum, which will again take place in Nashua at the Crown Plaza. But this time she will not be just attending. She will be selling her own rounds and discussing with those interested how they can merge their activism with business, providing one of the essentials needed to bridge the meltdown from corporate greed to a new economy in their own communities.