Satya Center Early September 2007 Newsletter
September 5, 2007

by Curtis Lang and Jane Sherry		print version
		print version (graphics)

Warm greetings from your Editors, Curtis Lang and Jane Sherry.

This is a brief newsletter, because Jane and I are soon to leave for the Denver Gem and Mineral Show, on a week-long buying trip to secure some new treasures for our SatyaCenter store.

We will report back with another newsletter toward the end of the month, so stay tuned. . .

September is the month of the Barley Moon, also known as the Corn Moon. Here in the Hudson Valley, we are having an exceptional harvest season -- the corn stands taller than my head in the field next to our house, and as I drive around the area, my car is often overtopped by the surrounding corn tassels, especially when I dip into the hollows between the hills.

We also are enjoying an exceptional tomato harvest. The freezers in both our refrigerators are filling up with tomato sauce, tomato chutney, and other tomato products.

The only way to keep up with the steady flow of green beans, beets and cucumbers is to keep on canning them, and we are using every available zucchini recipe known to humanity since the flood of giant-sized zucchinis challenges our culinary creativity every week.

A cool, dry, weather pattern has settled into our river valley, but the forecast is for rain within a few days, so we continue to be blessed with a healthy balance of sun and precipitation.

The cosmic weather pattern has been a little more turbulent, as though of you who are sensitive to such things are well aware.

A total north node lunar eclipse with sun in Virgo and moon in Pisces occurred a few days ago on September 28, and a solar new moon eclipse in Virgo will take place on September 11^th.

Taken together, these two very powerful celestial events herald the onset of a period of dramatic changes in global, national and personal affairs.

An informal poll of several adept astrologers we know personally revealed a disturbing consensus. We are entering a period of time, a zone of energetic disturbance at least two or more years in length, which typically produces large-scale, bloody warfare between nations and powerful downturns in global economic affairs.

The most likely nations to be embroiled in war: Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. The most likely focus for the emerging global economic crisis – Wall Street.

On a more personal level, these two eclipses herald the admittedly somewhat difficult dawn of a much more hopeful and upbeat cosmic climate.

Saturn’s entry in Virgo is very positive for those born under every sign of the Zodiac, because for the last five years Saturn has been residing in Cancer and Leo – two signs that are never happy homes for the ringed giant – and the Cosmic Taskmaster has passed along the conflicted energy of these placements to each and every one of us, making it feel extremely unpleasant to fulfill our karmic and dharmic duties. Now Saturn has entered Virgo, a sign which is very compatible with Saturnine energies, so we will all enjoy a much moresupportive atmosphere in which we can productively fulfill our dreams -- within the bounds of Saturnine realism, of course.

The upcoming September 11 partial solar eclipse falls in the South Node in the same sign as Saturn, and this placement is said to stimulate deep levels of learning obtained through heightened co-operation among willing individuals. So enjoy this opportunity to get together with like-minded friends, neighbors, and co-workers. Showcase your talents in setting where the entire community can benefit and take the social opportunities presented to you to upgrade your own skills.

Jane and I will be doing just that at the Denver Gem & Mineral Show, where we will be meeting with Master Crystal Cutters, Energy Healers and Lightworkers from around the world who share our love for healing stones and who are part of the global community of crystal and gem merchants to which we belong.

This 9/11 Virgo Solar eclipse also provides a welcome release of the accumulated tensions and depression associated with the last couple of years, especially the difficult energies triggered by the Saturn-Neptune opposition that has proved so debilitating for so many of us.

We are fortunate to have two extremely insightful and experienced astrologers who contribute articles regularly to Satya Center. This newsletter Bill Herbst and Malvin Artley provide us with a very nuanced and detailed vision of the cosmic weather patterns likely to unfold in the near and medium-term future.

You will also find in this newsletter a selection of big-picture news articles exploring the hidden causes of the current mortgage meltdown in America, and the likely impact the sub-prime housing collapse will have on banks, Wall Street firms, Fed policy and the rest of the economy.

Jane and I wish you a most productive, sociable, and bountiful summer’s end. May you receive the grace and guidance you need to meet all your spiritual goals!

Top Satya Center Stories of the Week

Esoteric Astrologer Malvin Artley explicates the deep currents of meaning being revealed during the current “Virgo Solar Festival and Eclipses 2007”.

“So many relationships are under stress and at every level of living, not just at an intimate level,” Malvin explains. “Business relations, professional relations, international relations, intimate relations—none are escaping this influence. We all struggle to BE because we get hooked into everyone else’s ‘stuff’ and hence ignore what is true to us. The ‘body’ never lies. It is not really that difficult. Essentially, we will never live a happy life (I speak here of true happiness borne from a virtuous life) until we live as though we know we have to BE. And that means we have to make certain ‘adjustments’ in our relationships, if you know what I mean. Those adjustments are in the wind, as we will see.”

Mountain Astrologer Contributing Editor Bill Herbst provides a big picture perspective on long-term astrological trends in his new article, “The Importance of Plumbing”.

“The decade of the 2010s will unfold as another lightning-bolt chapter in the recently accelerated evolution of humanity toward substantive change in how we live, work, and play on this garden planet,” Bill predicts. Click on the link to his story, above, to read more about his specific predictions.

“There is no better way to enjoy cooked tomatoes during the harvest, than by slow roasting them to bring out the full rich sweetness of this favorite fruit of the Americas,” Jane contends.

In her new article “Flower Essence Therapy, Aromatherapy and Color Therapy – A Natural Synthesis”, flower Essence Society staffer Jann Garitty explores the work of Begoña Siegrist, a Flower Essence, Bach Remedy and Aura-Soma therapist who utilizes flower essence therapy in combination with aromatherapy and color therapy. Working in tandem, these three therapies augment each other, helping both the practitioner and the client.

It’s harvest time again and that means it’s time for canning! Nutrition therapist Betsy Cashen’s article, “Sauerkraut and Fermented Vegetables”, offers us a time tested recipe for natural lacto-fermentation of vegetables, the classic cabbage saurkraut, carrots & beets.

In “Like the Water”, one of his new poems for 2007, poet Jed Myers explores the mysterious intersection between the egoistic self and spirit realms which is the evanescent dwelling place of the human soul.

Visit the Crystal Gallery-- Lemurian Seed Crystals and Super Seven

Read our article on "The New Lemurians". Learn about the origins & uses of Lemurian Seed Crystals. Discover the New Lemurians. We’ve got pink lemurian wands, water-clear Lemurian Vogel wands, rutilated Lemurians, Lemurian spheres, Dream Lemurians and New Clear Lemurians in our section featuring Lemurian seed crystals.

Collectors, meditators and crystal healers will appreciate our collection of Melody's Super 7 pendants and rough points in our Super7 Gallery.

Top Spiritual Stories From Around the Web

Published on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
A New Order of The Ages
by Marianne Williamson

There is a principle in A Course in Miracles stating that it is not up to us what we learn, but only whether we learn through joy or through pain. In a universe that is, quite literally, the ongoing evolutionary impulse to love — the spiritual process through which Love extends itself throughout space and time - the individual’s only true assignment is to learn to actualize the love within.

Wherever in our thinking we are bound by fear, the universe is invested in teaching us the transformative and freeing power of love. Where we are judgmental, the universe is invested in teaching us the ways of forgiveness. Where we are harsh, the universe is invested in teaching us how to be gentle. Where we are competitive, the universe is invested in teaching us the value of co-operation. Where we are ambitious, the universe is invested in teaching us the ways of inspiration. Where we are irresponsible toward our material resources, the universe is invested in teaching us the art of stewardship. Where we are defensive, the universe is invested in teaching us the power of defenselessness. Where we would attack, the universe is invested in teaching us that we are one with all, and therefore can only attack ourselves.

Where we have lessons to learn, the universe conspires to teach us. At first, the lessons are easy enough, even pleasant to learn. We’re given the opportunity to learn, with joy, how to live our lives with more integrity and love.

Yet whatever lesson we refuse to learn, comes round again until we do — each time appearing in a more sobering form, with more serious implications should we refuse to learn it. We do have free will, but we do not have the freedom to slow down the universe. Our learning fuels the momentum of the universe, which will not be allowed to stop. One way or the other, we will learn what we need to learn … even if we have to learn it through suffering.

I think that is where Western Civilization — particularly American civilization — is today. There are lessons we keep refusing to learn, and we are bordering on having to learn them through pain. A nation is simply a collection of individuals, and must follow the same growth imperatives as do any of its members. Just as individuals are forced to grow, and to change where necessary, so is a country. There is ultimately no survival where there is no adaptation to change.

The Aquarius Papers
The Astrology of The Grand Irrationality - What Is It?
by Robert Wilkinson, mid 2006

Visitors to this site know I often refer to a phenomenon which I have termed "The Grand Irrationality." We all know it's happening, and many feel it acutely both within ourselves and with others we encounter. Some seem to be handling it okay, and seem able to function easily despite the obsessive-compulsive behaviors so prevalent in our world. Others are having a harder time with the generic weirdness. It seems as though reason alone is not enough to figure out what's happening, why, and what to do about it. Things are pretty irrational right now, and it seems to many I speak with as though Destiny itself is on the move in most if not all of our lives. Today we will explore what this is all about.

Important decisions are being made, relationships on every level are in dynamic shift, and many are searching for a new life, job, or profession (check out both articles!) Yet for all the forks in the road we confront, none of it makes much sense. From one point of view, the Earth is going into its shift, or Initiation into a new way of doing its being, and since we are part of the Earth organism, we also are going through our own shifts and changes, both individually and collectively. Nations, Economics, Politics, Environment, Health, and many other areas are changing into new transitional models for our transitional era.

Over the past few years, I have termed this collective atmosphere, or phenomenon, "The Grand Irrationality." This is because we are in the heart of a 22 year Neptune septile Pluto. All aspects in the septile series produce irrational points in our evolution, due to the inherent non-rationality of this series derived from dividing the circle by 7, yielding non-rational aspect values. This on-going tension is triggered by other planets aspecting Neptune and Pluto, and these are the points when things seem to be maximally crazy or weird.

Neptune and Pluto, the outmost invisible "spiritual" planets, have been and will be in the irrational, compulsive, "fork in the road" septile aspect for quite a few years. The last time we dealt with this was the 1930s, when Fascism and other authoritarian models, including the AMA and many draconian US governmental agencies, reared their ugly heads in America, Europe, Asia, and other parts of our world. We've been dealing with this since the mid-term elections of 1994, which marked the beginning of the rise of the present Neocon uber-nasty political movement along with the linking up of various terrorists and their organizations.

Perhaps this can explain the sense that we've all been dealing with irrational or compulsive people since the mid-'90s. It sure seems that things and people have gotten weirder these past 11 years and it doesn't seem there is any end in sight. When Jupiter went stationary direct in early Virgo biseptile Pluto and triseptile Neptune in Spring 2004 it primed the pump for more of this sort of extremism, and there are other planetary stations and conjunctions that have contributed to this process.

It's hard to be rational when confronted with irrational people, or those hung up on their particular obsessions or compulsions. That's why it's important to stay focused rather than scattered in extreme (and improbable) imaginings - Pluto in Sagittarius - and keep your eye on the ideal - Neptune in Aquarius - rather than get hardened in vague feelings or peculiar power struggles with friends or associates.

Since we'll be living within this for a while, please don't think these very weird times are only strange and difficult for you personally, since everyone's going through it. Some are more aware of it, some less, and some are totally clueless.

World of Wisdom
Cool Future
Adrian Ross Duncan, June 2007

Recorded history on Earth did not begin so long ago. Egyptian hieroglyphics appeared about 6000 years back and the first phonetic writing appeared shortly after. Theoretically this is a span of only 200 generations. In this period, at least until recently, people have huddled around fires both to keep warm and to cook food. Flames and glowing coals is what they had. Smoke continually darkened their living places and got in their eyes. They gathered around and told stories, watching the shifting shadows curiously. There was day and light, and there was night and dark. In this world of night and day, philosophies developed, and they were characterized by polarity, by good and evil, god and the devil. Reality was defined by opposites – light/dark, good/bad, true/false, matter/energy, body/mind, subject/object.

In our 24/7 neon wonderland, this reality is no longer existent; the philosophies or religions developed to map the realities of a previous age, fall short today. There is much talk about global warming, but the future is destined to be cool. Smokers today are nostalgics, who still need to see the dancing flame and ritually recreate the smoke that characterized a bygone age. Modern legislation forces them to gather around their miniature camp fires – outside buildings from Los Angeles to Stockholm. On a macro level dying industries mirror this micro pollution, burning huge quantities of oil and coal and belching smoke – and of course carbon dioxide – into the heavens.

Up until now, historically speaking, it has been supposed that matter must be burned to create energy, and huge quantities of matter burned to create huge quantities of energy. Industrialization has brought untold benefits but also created environmental imbalance, yet the factories and power stations of the last two centuries are a transitional phase – a dying breed, like smokers. Our children’s children will read about them in the history books and marvel.

Long-term history is mapped astrologically by precession, which is the term for the 25,870 year wobble of the Earth’s pole through each of the 12 signs of the Zodiac in what is called a Great Year. This leads to 12 Ages of 2,155 years the last of which is the Piscean Age which in the West has been associated with the Christian era. Christ and the Virgin Mary are seen to represent the Pisces/Virgo polarity. The transition from Pisces to the Aquarian Age is a slow process, which could possibly be seen to have started with the discovery and utilization of electricity at the end of the 19th century. It is electricity – an energy that no longer creates smoke – that has come to replace the burning flame. Light bulbs, electric fires, cookers are the early tools of the transformation to Aquarius. Electricity is the high-energy start to the digital low-energy future. Plastic is the next building block in that process.

This process has until now been extraordinary wasteful and polluting. Industrialization has brought a greed that has systematically stripped the Earth of its natural resources. Astrologically the industrial era is spanned by another major time cycle that is the conjunction cycle of Jupiter and Saturn. This cycle returns to the same position every 800 years and is divided into 4 sub-periods during which the conjunction falls in one of the four elements. The conjunction cycle in Earth started in 1842 and ends in the year 2020, when the conjunction falls in Aquarius (starting a 200-year cycle in Air). These years span the exploitation of the resources of Earth.

When the Air cycle begins, there will no longer be an exploitation of Earth – the new frontier will be air and electromagnetic radiation from all areas of the spectrum. This will put a stop to sources of pollution created by burning, not least because there will be very little coal and oil left to burn. New technology will make it uninteresting to burn coal; oil will be too valuable to burn and will be used to create plastic. In this transition phase there will be radical and dramatic developments that create the energy we need in news ways. Wherever there is a current technology that creates unnecessary heat, this will be eliminated. A case in point is the light bulb. This primitive object uses electricity to heat a metal filament to a white hot state in a vacuum. The bulb is fragile and 80% of the energy is lost as heat. New diode technology creates virtually no heat, and is long-lasting and robust. Many of the products we use today are energy intensive and inefficient – the digital future will bring economies of energy on a huge scale because of the harnessing of light.

Breaking News Headlines 24/7 at Satya Center 

Tune in to Satya Center’s 24/7 environmental news headlines and listen to environmental news radio from Environmental News Network at ENN EarthNews.

Top News Stories From Around the Web

[Ed. Note: These are excerpts from lengthy news stories that provide the analytical context, the intellectual framework, the historical analysis, that is so completely missing from most so-called news in the mainstream media. If you are interested in the topic, click on the link provided to read more. . .]’

Hot Money and the Impoverishing of the Baby Boomer Retiree: How the Current Financial Crisis Evolved

By Curtis Lang

The main thing is that there has been a wave of easy credit around the world which is being used to mask structural problems in the global economy — mainly overproduction and inadequate demand — the classic problems of capitalist countries, which often have led to war and boom and bust conditions in the past. Another big structural problem is the over-reliance in America especially on market based retirement solutions for an aging population. This over-reliance on the market to provide for baby boomer retirement virtually requires a massive speculative financial bubble to provide adequate income even for that small segment of the population which is embedded in the corporate system — say the top 30%.

Oh, by the way, Jim Jubak, my Editor at WORTH magazine is now at MSN Money Central and writes a daily investing column. He is smart, honest and onto the Wall Street con. He dissects the reasons that this speculative mania was encouraged by the key players in the global financial markets who are pension funds and their ilk and it’s simple — they needed very high returns fast to fund baby boomer retirement. Starting in the early Nineties the whole financial market was converted to a giant slot machine with big payoffs to meet that need. Of course you had to pay Wall Street Masters big bucks to play and the risk was, well, shall we say, higher than what a rational investor would have accepted?

In the housing market the flood of low-cost “hot money” has led to sub-prime problems. The subprime mortgage market is a “laissez-faire” Utopian capitalist creation designed to bring more and more folks into the housing market.

Rather than have government subsidized housing, just have banks offer cheap loans with readjustable rates to those whom banks had been redlining for years — people in poor or minority neighborhoods, for instance. Because the readjustable rates get to onerous levels fast, the underlying assumption is that the borrower will flip the property or refinance to more favorable terms before getting burned. This assumes the borrower is somehow either earning more money than before and/or that the housing market is still booming and that the house is worth more so that with a higher appraised value it can more easily be refinanced at a fixed rate or else the buyer can sell at a profit to a willing and eager sucker, er, buyer.

For young yuppies it means they can get into houses worth much more than they could really afford, once again on the assumption that they will be earning more in a couple years or else flip the property or refinance at more favorable terms. All this depends on a continued housing boom and strong economy — a rosy scenario. Many many people here in NYC bought second homes in upstate New York near where Jane and I live now that cost $400,000 and up which they couldn’t really afford, assuming all as above in the rosy scenario.

Now that the market is unwinding it is the poor and minorities who are being foreclosed and slammed and redlining is returning with a vengeance.

The young yuppies may be forced to walk away from their MacMansions and second homes, but hey, that’s just the magic of the marketplace. They were players and now they’ve been played. No hard feelings about the structures of capitalism for them, I’m sure. ;-)

This all takes place against a backdrop of the total financialization of the economy. FIRE industries (finance, insurance and real estate) are now the main drivers of the economy, along with war of course, as we outsource and downsize. This outsourcing and downsizing combines with easy money for a turbo-charged replay of the 1980s merger mania boom, and now that the sub-prime mortgage market is blowing up, this is a problem for the Wall Street Masters of the Universe who oversee the mergers and LBO markets, because they also are up to their necks in derivatives based upon subprimes.

Big banks are also into M&A and LBOs and subprimes in a less sophisticated fashion than their Wall Street cousins, and their risk is probably even higher.

Of course global bankers and traders from all the countries of the world have been playing similar games with hot money. The basic idea is use the cheap money you get on loan from easygoing central banks to make high risk investments and flip them continuously. Works fine until the music stops. Then everybody is left holding one or another bag of shit.

So now the stage is set for a generalized market downturn all over the world.

See the first article below.

That’s it in a nutshell.

The Fed has become a blower of financial bubbles rather than a pricker of bubbles. It makes you much more popular as a central banker. However Bernanke and Bush say they don’t want to bailout subprime borrowers. They do not fit the profile of good Republican campaign contributors. ;-) They are suckers upon whom good Republican campaign predators, I mean contributors, feast every day. So now the Fed may return to its old role of nasty pricker of bubbles, all at the expense of stupid overoptimistic young yuppies and minorities. If the Wall Street Masters and the bankers have too many problems, I am sure there will be selective bailouts as needed, for the good of the “global financial system” and soon the Vulture funds will appear, ready to feast upon the bones of the fallen Masters and bankers, to the general enjoyment of the media, their financial brethern and the general public, who will be conveniently presented with some handy scapegoats a la Enron.

Over and out.

Curtis

Microsoft Money Central
Jubak's Journal8/10/2007 12:01 ET
How Wall Street got into this mess
By Jim Jubak

An aging society needed safe investments with a reasonably high yield to pay years of pensions. Wall Street invented a solution that sounded too good to be true -- and it turns out it was.

How did some of the smartest minds on Wall Street and at banks, insurance companies, pension funds and hedge funds around the world get into the current financial-market mess?

And how is it that you and I will wind up paying the bill, ultimately?

To answer those questions, let's start with a quick rundown of recent bad news in the continuing meltdown in the credit market for assets based on mortgages and buyout loans.

    * Thursday's massive 387-point sell-off in the Dow Jones Industrial Average followed a meltdown in Europe after the French bank BNP Paribas said it was suspending trading in three hedge funds -- with an estimated $2.8 billion in assets as of July 31 -- because it couldn't value them due to huge losses in the subprime mortgage market.

    * Two mortgage insurers, Mortgage Guaranty and Radian (RDN, news, msgs), have said that a $1 billion investment in a subprime mortgage company could be worthless.

    * After seeing $14 billion to $20 billion in assets evaporate as two of its leveraged hedge funds went bust, Bear Stearns (BSC, news, msgs) announced that a third, unleveraged, hedge fund had run up big losses. It froze investor accounts.

    * Braddock Financial closed a $300-million hedge fund after subprime losses.

    * German bank KfW said it would bail out a German lender with subprime losses.

    * Australia's Macquarie Bank (MQBKY, news, msgs) said investors in one of its mutual funds would lose up to 25% of their money thanks to losses in the subprime sector.

    * And shares of American Home Mortgage (AHM, news, msgs) lost 97% of their value after the lender said it could no longer raise capital for new loans and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

    * Some 46 financing deals representing over $60 billion have been pulled from the market since June 22, according to an analysis by investment management firm Baring Asset Management.

How did all this happen? As any good con man will tell you, the success of a con depends on the mark wanting to believe. The victim, in essence, talks himself into getting fleeced.

In this case, the global investment community wanted to believe that Wall Street and other centers of financial engineering could manufacture investment-grade, long-term debt to meet the huge demand of insurance companies, pension funds and central governments for predictable, long-lived and safe interest-paying investments. Because the need for this paper was so great, these marks were willing to suspend belief. They knew in their heads that you can't manufacture investment-grade debt. But in their hearts they wanted to believe. They needed to believe. They had to believe.

Because, you see, it's the only way out for an aging world that's running a huge shortage of the real stuff. So investors were all too willing to buy fake investment-grade paper -- at prices commanded by the real investment-grade stuff -- until finally the con was revealed as assets were marked to market at 50% or less of their assumed value.

Counterpunch
In Richistan: Fantastic Wealth for a Few; Steady Decline for Many
The Return of the Robber Barons
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
August 3, 2007

The US economy continues its 21st century decline, even as the Bush Regime outfits B-2 stealth bombers with 30,000 pound monster “bunker buster” bombs for its coming attack on Iran. While profits soar for the armaments industry, the American people continue to take it on the chin.

The latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the real wages and salaries of US civilian workers are below those of 5 years ago. It could not be otherwise with US corporations offshoring good jobs in order to reduce labor costs and, thereby, to convert wages once paid to Americans into multi-million dollar bonuses paid to CEOs and other top management.

Good jobs that still remain in the US are increasingly filled with foreign workers brought in on work visas. Corporate public relations departments have successfully spread the lie that there is a shortage of qualified US workers, necessitating the importation into the US of foreigners. The truth is that the US corporations force their American employees to train the lower paid foreigners who take their jobs. Otherwise, the discharged American gets no severance pay.

Law firms, such as Cohen & Grigsby, compete in marketing their services to US corporations on how to evade the law and to replace their American employees with lower paid foreigners. As Lawrence Lebowitz, vice president at Cohen & Grisby, explained in the law firm’s marketing video, “our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested US worker.”

Meanwhile, US colleges and universities continue to graduate hundreds of thousands of qualified engineers, IT professionals, and other professionals who will never have the opportunity to work in the professions for which they have been trained. America today is like India of yesteryear, with engineers working as bartenders, taxi cab drivers, waitresses, and employed in menial work in dog kennels as the offshoring of US jobs dismantles the ladders of upward mobility for US citizens.

Over the last year (from June 2006 through June 2007) the US economy created 1.6 million net private sector jobs. As Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services reports each month, essentially all of the new jobs are in low-paid domestic services that do not require a college education.

truthout
Economy Goes From Bad to Worse
By Dean Baker
Monday 06 August 2007

    For most of this decade, progressive economists have said the economy was growing fine, but typical workers were not benefiting because income was being redistributed upward. We can no longer say this.

    The Commerce Department revised its growth data last month. It now shows the economy grew much slower over the last three years than we had previously thought. In particular, the new data implies productivity has been growing at just a 1.5 percent annual rate over the last three years. This is the same rate the economy experienced during the long productivity slowdown from 1973 to 1995. It is a full percentage point below the 2.5 percent growth rate from 1995 to 2004.

FORTUNE Magazine
The next energy crisis
More than a quarter of America's oil flows through southern Louisiana. Too bad the land is slowly sinking into the sea.
By Nicholas Varchaver, Fortune senior writer
August 9 2007: 9:20 AM EDT

Fortune Magazine -- Port Fourchon feels like the edge of the world. As you drive south on Louisiana Highway 1 through Bayou Lafourche, open marshes seem to stretch endlessly until you reach this spot, 60 miles below New Orleans. There, the marsh once known as trembling prairie meets the Gulf of Mexico.

This is an oil-services installation. And though its existence is unknown to most Americans, it is vital to them. Without Port Fourchon and its fleet of vessels bringing food, supplies, equipment, and reinforcements to platforms in the gulf, the U.S. would lose access to nearly a fifth of all the oil and gas it uses.

Port Fourchon is also home to pipelines, miles and miles of them. There are the feeders from the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which accommodates the massive tankers that deliver 11 percent of the nation's foreign oil. There are conduits that supply two of the nation's strategic petroleum-reserve facilities.

There are countless more for companies such as Shell (Charts), Chevron (Charts, Fortune 500), and BP (Charts). All told, the pipelines at Fourchon connect to half of the refining capacity in this country. And they're a key stem in a broader branching of pipelines in southern Louisiana, which combine to transport 27 percent of America's oil and 30 percent of its natural gas.

If the port seems like a mirage on the edge of the marsh, that may be because its permanence is anything but assured. The port sits in a region that, although it escaped the most cataclysmic destruction of Katrina and Rita, is being ravaged by two slow-moving but equally ruinous phenomena: erosion and the sinking of the land.

Some 25 square miles of Louisiana have been collapsing into the gulf each year for three-quarters of a century. A total of 1,900 square miles, roughly the area of Delaware, disappeared between the 1930s and 2005, and another 217 square miles were pulverized into liquid by Katrina and Rita. And that land loss, says Ted Falgout, who has run Port Fourchon for 28 years, poses a growing threat not only to the people who live here but also to the U.S. energy supply.

YES! Magazine Fall 2007: Stand Up to Corporate Power
Living Wealth: Better Than Money
by David Korten

If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced relationship with one another and the Earth. This requires building economies with heart.

If we are to slow and ultimately reverse the social and environmental disintegration we see around us, we must change the rules to curb the pervasive abuse of corporate power that contributes so much to those harms.

Taming corporate power will slow the damage. It will not be sufficient, however, to heal our relationships with one another and the Earth and bring our troubled world into social and environmental balance. Corporations are but instruments of a deeper social pathology revealed in a familiar story our society tells about the nature of prosperity.

Empire Prosperity Story

The prevailing prosperity narrative has many variations, but these are among its essential elements:

    * Economic growth fills our lives with material abundance, lifts the poor from their misery, and creates the wealth needed to protect the environment.

    * Money is the measure of wealth and the proper arbiter of every choice and relationship.

    * Prosperity depends on freeing wealthy investors from taxes and regulations that limit their incentive and capacity to invest in creating the new jobs that enrich us all.

    * Unregulated markets allocate resources to their most productive and highest value use.

    * The wealthy deserve their riches because we all get richer as the benefits of the investments of those on top trickle down to those on the bottom.

    * Poverty is caused by welfare programs that strip the poor of motivation to become productive members of society willing to work hard at the jobs the market offers.

This money-serving prosperity story is repeated endlessly by corporate media and taught in economics, business, and public policy courses in our colleges and universities almost as sacred writ. I call it the Empire prosperity story. 

Few notice the implications of its legitimation of the power and privilege of for-profit corporations and an economic system designed to maximize returns to money, that is, to make rich people richer. Furthermore, it praises extreme individualism that, in other circumstances would be condemned as sociopathic; values life only as a commodity; and diverts our attention from the basic reality that destroying life to make money is an act of collective insanity. In addition to destroying real wealth, it threatens our very survival as a species.

Earth Community Prosperity Story

Consider these elements of a contrasting life-serving prosperity story that looks to life, rather than money, as the true measure of wealth.

    * Healthy children, families, communities, and ecological systems are the true measure of real wealth.

    * Mutual caring and support are the primary currency of healthy families and communities, and community is the key to economic security.

    * Real wealth is created by investing in the human capital of productive people, the social capital of caring relationships, and the natural capital of healthy ecosystems.

    * The end of poverty and the healing of the environment will come from reallocating material resources from rich to poor and from life-destructive to life-nurturing uses.

    * Markets have a vital role, but democratically accountable governments must secure community interests by assuring that everyone plays by basic rules that internalize costs, maintain equity, and favor human-scale local businesses that honor community values and serve community needs.

    * Economies must serve and be accountable to people, not the reverse

Meditation Moment: The Way of Water

Esoteric Tao Teh Ching : Chapter 8

The wise one models one's life
following the example of flowing water.
Water benefits all things with no contention.
Water always stays in low places;
no one can look up to it.
Therefore, the way of water presents the example
of fulfilling spiritual virtue.

In governing your life,
Stay in the right place.
Have a deep mind.
Give kindly.
Keep your word.
Govern your affairs uprightly.
Accomplish things with good capability.
Move at the appropriate times.
Do not contend, thus, you will receive no blame.

The best way to govern one's life is
to stay in the correct, safe positon;
to give to others freely but prudently;
to make one's words trustworthy;
to be honest and open in all one's capability
to accomplish things;
to learn correct timing;
and to avoid contention with others.
By living this way,
one causes fewer problems for oneself and others.