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‘Walking Eagle’ Senator BARACK OBAMA was invited to address a major gathering of the American Indian Nation two weeks ago in upstate New York.  HE spoke for almost an hour on HIS future plans for increasing every Native American’s present standard of living, should HE one day become the President. HE referred to his career as a Senator, how he had signed ‘YES’ for every Indian issue that came to his desk for approval.

Although the Senator was vague on the details of his plan, he seemed most enthusiastic about his future ideas for helping his ‘red sisters and brothers’.

At the conclusion of his speech, the Tribes presented the Senator with a plaque inscribed with his new Indian name - Walking Eagle. The proud Senator then departed in his motorcade, waving to the crowds.

A news reporter later inquired to the group of chiefs of how they came to select the new name had given to the Senator. They explain ed that Walking Eagle is the name given to a bird so full of shit it can no longer fly.

I just hope the other American people are as smart as the Indians.

 Dear Reader,

The very worst use of time is to stay at a job for months and years for which you are completely unsuited.

There are a great number of people who spend their whole lives doing something they don’t enjoy during the week, always looking forward to the weekends. They refer to Monday as “Blue Monday” and to Wednesday as “Hump Day.” At the end of the week, they say “Thank God It’s Friday!”

These are men and women with very little in the way of a future. They look upon their jobs as a form of drudgery, a penance they have to pay in order to enjoy their free time. And because of this attitude, they will seldom advance or be promoted.

They will stay pretty much where they are, moving from job to job, and always wondering why other people seem to be living the good life while they feel like they are living a life of quiet desperation.

At my seminars, I am frequently asked by people what they can do to be more successful. In almost every case, they are working in jobs they don’t like, for bosses they don’t particularly respect, producing or selling products or services for customers they don’t care about. And many of them think that if they just hang in there long enough, the clouds will part and everything will get better for them.

But the fact is that you are where you are and what you are because that’s what you have chosen. You can do amazing things with your life, but nobody else can change your situation for you. It’s entirely up to you.

The economic function of your company is to hire people at the very lowest cost so that they can serve customers at the very lowest cost in a competitive market. For this reason, no one has any obligation to pay you any more than you are getting. If possible, they would like to pay you less.

One thing I tell people over and over again is that they must become very good at doing what they are doing if they want to move up in their company. And if they don’t have the inner desire to be very good at their job, it means they are probably in the wrong one.

Excellence is like a ladder, and excellent performance at your current job is like the rungs on the ladder. In order for you to progress, you must become extremely good at what you are doing right now. Once you have mastered your current job, you will automatically move up to more difficult, more interesting, and higher-paid jobs.

Too many people do their jobs in an average or mediocre fashion, with the idea that, when the right job comes along, then they will really do a good job. But for some reason, the right job never comes along. They are always passed over for promotions and advancement. They are always the last ones hired and the first ones laid off.

So be perfectly honest with yourself. Look deep inside and decide what it is you would like to do if you only had six months left to live. What would you choose to do if you won a million dollars in the lottery tomorrow? What sort of work would you do if you were absolutely guaranteed of success in any one field? If you had no limits on your abilities and opportunities - no debts, no problems, no commitments - what would be your ideal job or career?

Research shows that the things people liked to do best between the ages of 7 and 14 were a very good indicator of what they would be most successful at as adults.

A man at one of my seminars told me that when he was between the ages of 7 and 14 he loved to build model airplanes. He built more and more complicated planes, and then built them with engines and flew them in contests.

Today, he is 35 years old. He has a degree in aeronautical engineering. He designs small aircraft. In addition, he owns an aircraft maintenance company and an air charter firm. He is a multi-millionaire, and he feels like he has never worked a day in his life. He has always done what he loved to do and most enjoyed from the time he was a little boy.

If you’re not sure about your true calling, ask the people closest to you. Ask them, “What do you think I would be the very best at doing with my life?” It is amazing how people around you - including your spouse, your best friends, and your parents - can see clearly what you should be doing when often you cannot see it yourself.

Project yourself forward five years, and imagine that your entire life is perfect in every respect. Imagine that you are doing exactly the right job for you, in exactly the right place, with exactly the right people, and earning exactly the amount you want to earn.

What would that look like? Where would you be, and what would you be doing? Who would you be with, and how would you have changed?

When you have that picture in your head, think about the steps you would have to take to get from where you are today to where you want to be in five years. What skills would you have to develop? What information would you have to acquire? What obstacles would you have to overcome?

Success comes from being excellent at what you do. The market pays excellent rewards only for excellent performance. It pays average rewards for average performance, and below-average rewards for below-average performance.

But excellence is a journey, not a destination. You never quite get there. You can never relax. The market is always changing, so what constitutes excellence today will be different tomorrow and very different next year and every year thereafter.

All really successful and happy people know in their hearts that they are very good at what they do. And if you are doing what you really love and enjoy, if you are following your true calling, you will know it too.

By Brian Tracy

“The most splendid achievement of all is the constant striving to surpass yourself and to be worthy of your own approval.”

- Denis Waitley

To all of you wannabe Americans who still think caving and kissing ass is the answer:

Dear Reader,

Out in New Mexico, some little guys are fighting some big guys who happen to be government guys who also happen to be acting like bullies.

Do you tend to root for the underdog? Do you enjoy seeing bullies get their comeuppance?

Then I’ve got a good story for you…

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Dark shadow
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Let’s say there’s a government website that acknowledges evidence that milk thistle is “hepatoprotective” (that is, it protects the liver). And let’s say there’s another government website that offers this quote about milk thistle: “It has been used for thousands of years as a remedy for a variety of ailments, especially liver problems.”

Okay. As it happens, you manufacture and sell a milk thistle product, so on your website you post something like this: “The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (a division of the National Institutes of Health) states that milk thistle has been used for thousands of years as a remedy for a variety of ailments, especially liver problems.”

What are you doing? You’re stating the truth about an historical fact. Not only that, it’s a fact backed up by a direct quote from a government agency.

Guess what? You can’t do that.

Who says? The FTC. And they’re willing to take away your company and bankrupt you to prove their point.

So what do you do? Most companies roll over and comply when the FTC shadow darkens their door. But not you. You sue the bullies. And you just might make history.

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Way over the top
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For about 15 years, Mark and Marianne Hershiser have operated Native Essence Herb Company, just outside of Taos, New Mexico. They started their business with a single herbal tea, then slowly expanded to offer many individual herbs and herbal formulas.

This past spring they received a letter from the Western Region of the FTC, stating that they had violated the FTC Act by making deceptive claims. Acting like a “good cop,” the Western Region letter notes that the Hershisers could avoid litigation from the FTC “bad cop” by removing the claims from their website and signing a settlement agreement. Failure to respond would result in legal action that would include, “…appointment of a receiver to exercise control over the company…and an asset freeze…”

The letter states that the FTC also directed the Western Region office to seek from the company an amount equal to revenues from the sales of certain products – that is: ALL revenues accumulated over the years the products were sold.

In other words: Comply or we’ll take your business and bury you in debt.

Late last month the Hershisers responded in a way no one had ever responded to such a letter. They sued. Citing the First Amendment, the Hershisers claim they have the right to truthfully inform customers about the historical uses of individual herbs (as noted on government websites) and to share the conclusions of government-sponsored studies.

In a statement issued by the office of Richard A. Jaffe, the Hershisers’ attorney, Mr. Jaffe said, “This is a precedent-setting case. The issue has never been litigated; it not only affects the Hershisers, but all companies which sell herbal products.”

We can only hope that someone at the FTC is squirming uncomfortably. And hopefully that discomfort will steadily increase as the case goes on.

You can be sure I’ll closely follow the Hershisers’ progress, and I’ll keep you posted on how they fare in their fight with these government bullies. Meanwhile, you can read more about their case (and contribute to their legal fund, if you like) at this website: herbalinformation.com.

Real Americans face their problems - deal with them.  They don’t run and hide.

Enjoy…

Jim

Dear Reader,

There’s a particular moment known to all Baby Boomers when Wile E. Coyote, in a rapture of over-reaching, has run past the edge of the mesa and, still licking his chops and rubbing his front paws in anticipation of fricasseed roadrunner, discovers that he is suspended in thin air by nothing more than momentum. Grin becomes chagrin. He turns a nauseating shade of green, and drops, whistling, back to earth thousands of feet below, with a distant, dismal, barely audible thud at the end of his journey. We are Wile E. Coyote Nation.

Is there anyone in the known universe who thinks that the U.S. financial system is not fifty feet beyond the edge of the mesa of credibility?

Nothing will avail now. Not even if Sirhan Sirhan were paroled at noon today and transported directly to the West Wing with a .44 magnum in each hand (and a taxi driven by the Devil waiting outside to take him to the U.S. Treasury and the offices of the Federal Reserve).

It’s hard to imagine what kind of melodramas were unspooling on the Hamptons lawns this weekend, while everybody else in America was watching Nascar, or plying the aisles of BJs Discount Warehouse for next week’s supply of mesquite-and-guacamole flavored Doritos, or having flames and chains tattooed on their necks, or lost in a haze of valium and methedrine.

With the death of the IndyMac Bank last week, and the GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac laying side-by-side in the EMT van on IV drips, headed for the Federal Reserve’s ever more crowded intensive care unit, there was a sense of the American Dream having passed through the event horizon that denotes the opening of a black hole.

What would happen if the U.S. government acted to bail out these feckless enterprises (and what if they don’t)? Either way, it’s not a pretty picture. If Mr. Bernanke does start shoveling loans into the GSE black hole, he’ll further undermine the soundness of his own outfit and do nothing, really, to repair Fannie and Freddie’s structural problem of having securitized too many loans that will never be paid back. If instead Fannie and Freddie are flat-out taken over entirely by the U.S. government (and remember the Federal Reserve is not the government), then the national debt will roughly double overnight – which will pound the U.S. dollar down a rat-hole.

Meanwhile, the foreign holders of those decrepitating dollars might not rush to the redemption window, but they certainly would use them to buy up every oil futures contract on God’s not-so-green Earth as fast as possible – they’d be dumb not to – which would leave American Happy Motorists with gasoline prices north of $5 a gallon, and possibly north of $10. (In that case, say goodbye to the airlines. In fact, say goodbye to what passes for the rest of the US economy, including especially the vaunted retail sector that supposedly counts for 70 percent of the action.)

If Fannie and Freddie are left to die out on the desert floor, say goodbye to the housing market, the major investment banks, countless regional banks, the retirement accounts of virtually everyone in America, the viability of all fifty states’ governments, and the day-to-day operating ability of all their municipalities – and very likely the current incarnation of the world banking system.

This process is really out of control now. The bottom line is the comprehensive bankruptcy of the United States. The Republican Party under George Bush will be known as the party that wrecked America (release 2.0). Painful as it is, Americans had better get a new “Dream” and fast. It better be a dream based on the way the universe actually works, which is to say an operating procedure run on earnest effort and truthfulness rather than merely trying to get something for nothing and wishing on stars. We might begin symbolically by evacuating Las Vegas and calling in an air strike on the loathsome place – to register our new reality-based attitude adjustment.

After that, we’ve got to get to work re-tooling all the everyday activities of life, including the way we grow our food, the way we raise and deploy capital, the way we do trade and manufacturing, the way we go from point A to point B, the way we educate children, the way we stay healthy, and the way we occupy the landscape. I know, it sounds like a lot, maybe too much. But grok this: we don’t have any choice if we want a plausible future on this portion of the North American continent.

Of course, none of that is likely to happen. Instead, and under the worst imaginable economic conditions, we’ll probably embark on a campaign to prop up the un-prop-up-able and sustain the unsustainable – that is, defend every status quo habit and behavior that we’re used to, whether it can be salvaged or not. Of course, this would be a fatal squandering of our dwindling resources, but it tends, historically, to be the last act of the melodrama in any faltering empire.

The result, pretty soon into that process, will be social breakdown and political upheaval. Every tattoo freak out there who has been prepping for his own starring role in some kind of comic book Armageddon will finally get his chance to shine. Lots of people will get hurt and starve. Property will change hands in a disorderly way. And at the end of this process an American corn-pone Hitler may be waiting to set everything and everyone straight.

Regards,

James Howard Kunstler

Dear Reader,

Some time ago I did a show on Habits. They play an important role in your life. Like many aspects of your life, habits can be considered both a blessing and a curse. Robert Russell in his magnificent little book “You Try It” wrote that habit was God’s way of making good automatic in your life.

I had a wonderful friend in Atlanta, the late Dr. Jay Dishman, who wrote an excellent article about habit in his monthly newsletter dated February 1985. I have shared Dr. Dishman’s article with thousands of people around the world. Today I want to share it with you. Here goes!

“Recently I visited Alcatraz Prison. Once it housed the most hardened of criminals. Today it is open to tourists under the direction of the United States Parks Department. Many men have tried to escape Alcatraz; no one is known to have succeeded. As I listened to the tour guide explain the impossibility of escape, I thought of other prisons equally confining but where the doors are never locked, no guards walk the halls, and escape is encouraged and possible. That prison is Habit.”

Our habit is thinking about ourselves and our environment as a jail or a paradise. We need but to look around us to see people who are rich emotionally and materially because they think and feel rich. We also see people who are laden with emotional and material debt because they think lack. Some are inspired with vision, others are encumbered with doubt. Some are moved by ambition, others feel safer in monotony. Some reach for the mountain tops, others huddle in the pits. Some seek opportunity, others wait for it to knock. The sad fact is that more people are confined by their thoughts than are fed by them.

Negative thinking shuts us in a prison, but there is a way out. The apostle Paul said, “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Paul knew a lot about prisons, both physical and mental. You renew your life by renewing your mind. You renew your mind when you change your habit of thinking.

Dr. Jay Dishman helped thousands change their habit of thinking in his lifetime. Now hopefully he has helped you.

Bob Proctor

Dear Reader,

In detachment lies the wisdom of uncertainty… in the wisdom of uncertainty lies the freedom from our past, from the known, which is the prison of past conditioning.

And in our willingness to step into the unknown, the field of all possibilities, we surrender ourselves to the creative mind that orchestrates the dance of the universe. - The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra.

Or, put another way, what you’ve been doing doesn’t seem to be working. Don’t you think its time to try something new? Something different?  Something out of the ordinary?  Something creative?  Something that at least has the possibility of working?

Dear Reader,

Over the years as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned two things. One, in the Wonderful World of Republicans and Democrats, things usually aren’t as they appear. And two, because of lesson number one, you need to continually ask why, over and over again. If you do, you’ll eventually come close to the truth.

What does this have to do with debt consolidation companies?

First, let’s define what we mean by “debt consolidation company.”

When I hear the word “consolidate” I think of a company that takes all my debts, adds them up, and loans me the money to pay them all off. Then I just make one small payment to the consolidation company. They “consolidate” a bunch of small debts into one big, easy to manage debt.

These types of companies are few and far between.

Most of todays “debt consolidation companies” do nothing more than negotiate, on your behalf, with the banks. They get the banks to settle for a lesser amount at a lower rate of interest. Then, when you add up all your debts and all your payments, its an amount you can afford. And, to make sure things go according to plan, you make your payments to the consolidation company and they in turn pay the banks. The whole purpose is to get your debts paid off in 2 to 5 years.

Sounds like a deal, doesn’t it?

This is where things start to get confusing.

If you’ve ever read you credit card agreement it probably has a “default” or “universal default” clause.

With the “default” clause, if you’re late with a few payments over a certain period of time, with your credit card bank, they’ll raise your interest rate to a staggering 25 – 40%. With the “universal default” clause, if you miss any type to payment, to anyone, (that includes utilities, rent, or bouncing a check) during a certain period of time, they’ll raise your interest rate to the same staggering 25 – 40%.

Which brings us to several “why” questions.

You’re late on a few payments. The bank raises your interest rate to penalize you. Now, you can’t afford to make even the minimum payments. So, you go and pay some of your hard earned money to a consolidation/negotiation company to convince the bank to lower your interest rate and the balance due. According to these companies ads, the banks almost always agree.

Why? And why?

If the banks are raising your rates to penalize you, why would they agree to lower the rates for a third party consolidation/negotiation company?

And, why won’t they do this for you directly? Better yet, when you miss a few payments why doesn’t the bank send you a letter telling you not to worry, they’re going to lower your rates, forgive some of the debt, and reduce your payments until you get out of your financial pickle?

Could it be that there is something else the bank is trying to do when you get into a financial squeeze?

Are the banks raising the rates to force you into needing the services of one of these consolidation/negotiation companies? And, if so, what are they trying to get you to do?

Here’s where I really start to wonder.

The ads for these consolidation/negotiation companies brag that they can get your debt reduced up to 70%. Which means you will still owe 30¢ on the dollar. According to a recent article in the Boston Globe, collection companies are buying delinquent accounts for as little as 2.5¢ on the dollar. If these consolidation/negotiation companies are so good at what they do, why can’t they at least get the same deal? In fact, since they’re being paid to represent you, why can’t they get a better deal? Like $0.00?

Jim Bullock

“It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you get off on sometimes. What matters most is getting off. You cannot make progress without making decisions.”

- Jim Rohn

Dear Reader,

In celebration of the United States’ Independence, we bring you this true story of five men who broke through their terror barrier and made a commitment to something huge.

The thirteen colonies (what would become the United States) were being taxed unfairly under Great Britain’s rule. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert R. Livingston and Roger Sherman were the five men that stood up for the Colonist’s rights. They argued that Great Britain had no jurisdiction to tax the Colonies.

While all of the other Colonists felt that they were being treated unfairly, none of them were willing to say so, as their allegiance was still with the King of Great Britain. It was up to these five men to push for the rights of the Colonists. They met at the Virginia Convention and then again in Williamsburg to declare the Colonies independent. John Adams stood up for the resolution that: “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

When these five men met to draft the Declaration of Independence, there was no working process. They did not have someone to lead the meeting, take minutes or even guide them as to how the ideas should be presented. They were on their own to take control and put all of their thoughts into an organized form that could be presented to Congress. The committee decided on a general outline that the document needed to follow, and then appointed Thomas Jefferson to write the first draft. The weight of the 13 Colonies’ independence now rested on Jefferson’s shoulders. Jefferson only had 17 days to finish the first draft. He then got comments and revisions from the other committee members and wrote a second draft. The document titled “A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled” was presented to Congress on June 28, 1776.

These men knew that what was put on this paper could have cost them their lives, did they not receive backup from Congress and the other Colonists. If the King of Great Britain wanted to, he could have had these men executed for encouraging the Colonists to go against his rule. They put themselves on the line in order to gain freedom for the rest of the Colonies.

On July 2, 1776 Congress and 12 of the 13 colonies approved General Lee’s Resolution for Independence, severing ties between the Colonies and Great Britain for good. The next day, John Adams wrote a letter to his wife predicting that July 2nd would soon become a great American holiday. Congress then began to look at the Declaration of Independence. After several days of debating, word changing, and some content adjustment, Congress approved the document on July 4, 1776.

Today America celebrates 232 years of independence and freedom. Because these men did not let fear stand in their way, because they did not hesitate to make the right choice, American Citizens now have the right to vote, the right to free speech, the right to practice any religion, the right to a fair trial, just to name a few.

Paul Martinelli

Editor’s Note:  Are you ready to stand tall for your financial freedom?