The Corleone Family

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The Solari Report – 22 Jan 2009

 

Michael Corleone: “My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.”
Kay Adams: “Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don’t have men killed.”
Michael Corleone: “Oh. Who’s being naive, Kay?”
— The Godfather, Part I

A true family is a group of people who invest in each other’s skills and future. Within such a family, no person is expendable.

Throughout history, financial wealth has been organized around families.  Many of the powerful institutions in our society, in fact, represent intergenerational pools of capital -– for example, the Bechtel Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Glenmede Trust Company

If we are to build a strong economy, it will be made up of strong families. Either families in the traditional sense, or families that we create. Many of us are members of families that, like the Corleone family in The Godfather series, have been torn apart by the manipulation of our ambition, greed, and naivete by powerful financial and business interests. Husbands and wives are turned against one another. Children and parents disappoint each other and grow apart. Sibling rivalry threatens family interests.

Most of us assume that The Godfather films — Part I, Part II, Part III — are movies about an organized crime family.  The reality is that we all live inside The Godfather’s world. The Godfather series has much to teach us about navigating in our current environment:

  • The double-binds that families and businesses face in the real economy
  • The stresses that this places on marriages and children
  • How we can reduce the risk of being manipulated and turned against one another
  • The important role played by churches, foundations and tax-exempt organizations in controlling and managing intergenerational wealth
  • The interconnectedness of street crime to the board rooms of global corporations to the financial markets that trade their securities

In this week’s Solari Report our focus is on “Let’s Go to the Movies.” I have prepared a special report on how The Godfather series can help you understand the risks you and your family manage today and what this means to building real wealth in your household and business.

Note: Solari Report subscribers can now listen to Catherine’s discussion of this topic via MP3 recording. You can subscribe monthly or annually here.

Resources:

Narco-Dollars For Beginners

What Can A Woman Can Do to Help the Solari Index Rise

44 Comments

  1. Just saw “The Wrestler” (in Sydney)… if you want a movie to act as a metaphor for the decline of the US then look no further!

    — Emphasis on external validation at the expense of intimacy, connectedness and environmental health
    — Exhausted and disillusioned in the present after a glorious 1980s; you’re just not that special anymore
    — Final lunge into potential destruction to keep the illusion going

    Great movie though extremely sad.

  2. The bigger issue is also a spiritual one. Human beings have forgotten who they are. They are disconnected from their power. They are disconnected from Mother Earth. People routinely believe in false prophets who guide them down the paths of paradigms that have nothing to do with true personal power, or historical meaning. The controllers of the paradigms have created distractions designed to destroy the true power of other human beings.

    And perhaps this is a good thing. True power requires much wisdom, and one look at the work of the power families of the world quickly shows how little wisdom has been adopted. Imagine a world in which every person owns the inner secrets of life, of the siddha, of the spiritual adept, and many of those people not having the wisdom of a rodent, will use those powers to further the aims of their own limited ego. Mankind would have ended long ago, in such a scenario.

    With mass enlightenment comes a stage of mass fragility, which is where we are now. The archetype of Death approaches but has not decided what form it will take. Will it be the death of Truth, or the death of masses of individuals? On such a small planet, only a few can have access to Truth, or the human species will devour itself in its quest to climb out of its own shell.

  3. Leaders must make hard decisions. They must kill. To avoid killing avoids responsibility.

    The story of two men: One becomes a spiritual leader but refuses to make the hard life death decisions. He is whacked. The second man had to make the same choice. He goes into government and starts one the world’s great religions.

    We think of Mahatma Gandhi as a spiritual leader. He kept rising to the point where there was more and more pressure for him to go into the government. As any government minister he would need to make life or death decisions. He refused. If one were to put this in the Seth terms of “we create our own realities” then he had himself put down.

    The other man who did join real government is founder of a great religion. This other man was not Mohammad? He was ‘government’ from the get go. It was Confucius. He became a godfather.

    War on the planet is reducing. But to do so we must with greater and greater care use the military. We cannot avoid this. That just goes backward to more violence.

    Hard decisions must be made. This applies to economics. American cabotage is stupid and wasteful. Short-sea is used as an example. So many would be against short-sea that it would never fly. Yet it would end up helping all. Europe has had short-sea for decades. Do you see 18-wheelers blocking up all the highways in Europe? Hell no.

    We know that we cannot continue with growth economies. We got the bankers out the way with minimum violence. We simply paid them off. Short-sea means not only rebuilding railroads but building more. The tariff on anything coming into the US is 12 %. We cannot double that to 24. Laws would need to be changed. Many of the laws are international here anyway. Will many scream ‘fascism’? Of course. What we can’t counter with some PR we simply ignore. Courses are already appearing at colleges in Maine. The educator crowd are aghast as they have no control. Only internationally certified teachers can be used. They screamed, then cried, now go along.

    When spirituality is an avoidance it is not spiritual.
    Michael

  4. The movies of godfather are great epics but they don not tell whole truths

    I just called and left you folks a voicemail in order to convey my sincerity this is what i was talking about. FYI I posted the info here a long time ago

    http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/05/14/emperors-club-booker-pleads-guilty-to-counts-of-conspiracy/?mod=homeblogmod_lawblog

    http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Hearings.Detail&HearingID=102e41a1-f540-4ce5-a701-b6d09b7606b1

    http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?Fuseaction=Hearings.Detail&HearingID=90f8e691-9065-4f8c-a465-72722b47e7f2

    Anyway check it out and ask yourselves why the transcripts and webcasts of very imporatnt hearings in the US Senat Banking Committee from over five years ago are still missing

    FYI this is one of the missing transcipts of the US Senate Baning Commitee from five years ago.

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/5362918/Senate-hearing

    As far as me versus the mob goes check this out some folks may take an interest.

    http://davidamos.blogspot.com/2006/05/wiretap-tapes-impeach-bush.html

    http://actionlyme.org/FBI_WIRETAPE_TAPES.htm (link broken)

    FEDERAL EXPRESS February 7, 2006

    Senator Arlen Specter
    United States Senate
    Committee on the Judiciary
    224 Dirksen Senate Office Building
    Washington, DC 20510

    Dear Mr. Specter:

    I have been asked to forward the enclosed tapes to you from a man
    named, David Amos, a Canadian citizen, in connection with the matters
    raised in the attached letter. Mr. Amos has represented to me that
    these are illegal FBI wire tap tapes. I believe Mr. Amos has been in
    contact with you about this previously.

    Very truly yours,
    Barry A. Bachrach
    Direct telephone: (508) 926-3403
    Direct facsimile: (508) 929-3003
    Email: bbachrach@bowditch.com

    Veritas Vincit
    David Raymond Amos

  5. David:

    You are absolutely correct. The Godfather films do not provide a clear, comprehensive picture. Rather they provide a marvelous insight into several pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.

    Thanks for your post and these links. I will take a look.

    How do busy people gain an emotional understanding of what is going on around us? Watching a series of movies, each that provides one or two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle is a practical way. Reviewing all the material through books, articles and documentations is much more time consuming and often draining for many people.

    Part of the challenge is the role of intellectual knowledge vs emotional knowledge. To be effective at dealing effectively in this environment, we need to incorporate an understanding of our environment at an emotional level. This is where movies do such a good job — helping us feel something at a more intimate, personal level.

    This is why I have chosen to do a movie segment in the Solari Report — I believe it can help busy people integrate much more critical understanding faster. Then as they want to go deeper, I can point to articles, books, etc. I also cover the puzzle pieces that are left out and where to go to find them.

    When I was in litigation with the federal government in the 1990’s, a reporter wrote a
    story about my situation. It was picked up by search engine as a Top Pick and the web hits skyrocketed. Suddenly, I started to get calls from former associates who held influential positions. The head of real estate for one of the largest corporations in the
    world. The head of a very influential PR firm. A partner in a leading Washington law firm. Their private message for me? It was “Watch Godfather III.”

    It was the first time I watched Godfather III or thought about the relevance of these movies to the day to day legal, administrative, smears and physical harassment I was experiencing related to HUD’s role in engineering the housing bubble.

    I was stunned when I realized how much Godfather III had to teach about HUD corruption and the narcotics trafficking that is so intertwined with housing finance and mortgage fraud. For more, see my articles Narco Dollars for Beginners and the Myth of the Rule of Law.

    All my best,

    Catherine

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