With the Host of the Spiritual Politician
Melinda Pillsbury-Foster
Friday, July 27, 2007, 4 pm PST
This Week's Show
Guest: Dr. Arthur Ogawa
The economy and politics today continues the following disturbing trends. If Bush and those trends make you nervous you need to meet Art and find out about Kaweah Co-op.
Following the lead of Halliburton Hedge Funds and other questionable ventures are beginning to relocate off shore. This provides immunization for possible liability when the bottom falls out. Pensions, annuities, and other investments are at risk.
Never have Americans carried such a weight of debt. Never has it been more difficult for them to simply tread water.
Nearly all Americans with phones are receiving daily calls from mortgage refinance companies. Today I received 5 such calls. Two different offers for refinancing options appeared as ads today on the opening page for Yahoo.
Never has our future been less secure though we have never paid more for what was billed as 'security.'
What is government offering as safety?
Today states like New Hampshire are being threatened by Homeland Security for the offense of refusing to comply with the REAL ID.
George Bush has begin using Executive Orders to enact edicts that he can use to flout the law. The direction of his orders is fascism.
George Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was part of a plot to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a right-wing military coup in 1934.
That Bush Conspiracy was confirmed in Congressional Hearings. Strangely, no action was taken.
Nothing about us is as persistent as family culture. You drink it in with your mother's milk.
How secure are you and your family right now?
Today Americans have no savings; we live from pay check to pay check.
Your local grocery store has enough food for two days.
Much of that food comes from off shore or is transported long distances.
What would your community be like if the shelves of those grocery stores were empty?
Food the originates from off shore is more likely to carry diseases and have been impacted by toxic conditions.
Where is the food you will eat next week NOW?
Hurricane Katrina taught us that FEMA and the Federal government may take money in taxes but they will not deliver the services and security we thought we were buying.
The bottom may fall out at any moment. That is where you are today.
That said, what real action can you take to make your family, your neighborhood, and your community more secure, healthier, and less dependent on all things that are harmful or must come from a distance?
There are answers.. All challenges life offers come with unsuspected opportunities. Emergencies make us focus on what really matters in life. What really matters to you? That new cell phone that will be history in six months? Or the voice you hear on the other end when someone you love answers?
People across the U. S. are already adopting solutions that enrich their lives, allowing them to live healthier and know where and how what they will be eating is being raised; that those they love will be happy and cared for.
Families and communities are coming together to accomplish good things. So can you.
Arthur Ogawa is a resident of Three Rivers, Tulare County, California. With his family, he has lived there since 1993, immigrating from the San Francisco Bay area.
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Art had a career as an experimental physicist (PhD, Physics, UC Berkeley, 1978), working at facilities such as the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Fermi National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Commuting kept him from being the kind of active father he wanted to be to their two children.
So in 1986 he turned to technical consulting in order to work at home with his wife Marian Goldeen. He has worked as an electronic publishing consultant for some 20 years, serving clients such as Apple, HP, NASA, and Boeing. Their children became home schooled. Today their daughter and son develop Web comics, music, and painting as part of their continuing self-directed learning.
The family achieved a closeness they never believed possible but had always wanted. They also got out of debt entirely. They are part of a community that helps each other. Art is now working on making their home more energy efficient.
When Art and his family moved to Three Rivers Art became active in the Kaweah Food Co-op. Starting with the food they eat, now far more locally grown and so more dependable and healthy, they are working on more ways to make their community better.
The Kaweah Food Co-op of Three Rivers, Tulare County, California, is a group of some 30 families who work cooperatively each month to provide high-quality, cost-effective food for their families and the community. Meeting once every four weeks, the Co-op distributes food obtained from UNFIW and local sources on a non-profit basis. That has provided a basis that can now meet other needs that their community and other communities across the U. S. did not imagine would be necessary a decade ago.
Life is about values and quality for them. What is it for you?
Community activism is individual investment in the community where you live. Doing it yourself, after all, is where America came from. In the world of America's Founders government budgeting meant getting together once a year to go over that budget line by line. Everyone could see how the pennies would be spent and by whom. That is real American government; the people doing it themselves voluntarily. Today most fire departments are still run by local volunteers.
We think of the world as divided into 'for profit' and 'government.' But the history of America's people and communities is really the history of cooperation that yields profits not counted in fiat money but in far richer benefits. Community involvement builds deep bonds, enduring trust, and the kind of capital that lasts.
Across the country people are reconsidering how their needs might be better met and they are doing it themselves.
Co-ops are one way people do that. Kaweah in Three Rivers strives to find and develop local sources for food, also on the agenda are solutions for problems that revitalize the essence of American Community and leave families and neighbors better, not worse, off.
Art works to help local small farms keep going in a world of factory farms that would otherwise gobble them up. Small, family farms produce food you can trust and great community.
In small towns, big cities, and in the suburbs, people like Art and Kaweah Co-op are looking for solutions to looming problems. With back yard gardens, co-ops, and exchange they are changing how they eat and live. They use consensus, finding common ground, and caring. Working together works both to solve problems now and prevent problems in the future.
Knowing your neighbors is the best insurance you can buy today, a security that you probably don't yet have but that you can learn about from Art and Kaweah.
Their Co-op dates back 25 years, and some of the founding members are still active.
Communities across the country are assessing the present political reality and doing the same thing, working towards local independence in every way.
What the Show is about and being a Spiritual Politician
Bringing government into alignment with the Lessons of Jesus:
The focus of our show is how to bring government into alignment with truth of our spiritual nature. So America started with the idea we are all, inherently free. We are free to choose, free to live, to breath, and to live our lives as we see fit. Government does not own us; government is just a contractor, providing service.
That framework is in alignment with the spiritual truth that each of us connects to God directly, needing no agency as an intermediary. To be free is to be free in the spirit and so in the flesh that temporarily holds the spirit.
When Thomas Jefferson said we were all possessed of inherent rights, existing before government he was extending a spiritual truth into a civic form. It is that Mission Statement from the Declaration of Independence we need to keep in mind.
Because we are free and reject, as did Christ, the use of deceit, manipulation or violence we need to be conscious about our relationships with others and find ways to grow into the sense of connection and community that makes us One in Him.
This is especially true for Christians but it is true for everyone else as well.
Nearly every major spiritual viewpoint enunciates the idea that we are connected to each other and should be good to each other. Christians just have an even more exacting mission. Christians are to love every one, treating them as they would Jesus.
Jesus was very clear about how we were to treat others. He did not say that it was alright to be abusive, deceitful, and violent if we used government as our tool and agent. There was no exception, He wanted all of our hearts, minds and souls. Christ did not lay out any plan of government, but left it to the conscience of the individual, the same way He connects to each of us.
We are Americans but we are also members of a human family that connects us to something truly wonderful and immense.
So our job here at the Spiritual Politician is to look at Government as a human tool we use every day. We need to consider if government is working in a way that speaks that common understanding about our connections to each other and, if it is not, we need to change it.
Americans have had many successes over the last 231 years since our founding and, learning from both mistakes and successes we can consider that question. So here at the Spiritual Politician we look at the truth behind of rhetoric.
Given what is going on today in Government what we may decide to do it reboot the whole system.
To provide the examples of what has gone right and what has gone very wrong we here at the Spiritual Politician have put together several different kinds of segments you will hear on our show from time to time.
Founder and president of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation
Books by Melinda: Links to Melinda's sites:
How the NeoCons Stole Freedom
Shards of Verse Melinda's Poetry
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