Monday, October 17, 2011

Crony Communocapitalism and The Ponzi of Ideology

What we’ve got in the US specifically and the world generally right now is not democracy so much as plutarchy. It is not capitalism so much as cronyism. It’s an artificially planned, money printing, price printing machine which actually resembles species of Eastern Bloc communism in many ways. It is a centrally-planned fiat currency system in which a quiet cabal of central bankers in cooperation with trillionaire dynasties run their Gulag Planet of debt slaves, complete with their own “Ministry of truth” masquerading as the “news media” like CNN, for a dose of constructed reality in between stints of the Brave New World feelies like Jersey Shore and Call of Duty, helping us keep jacked into a Matrix of gossip, guns, and gadgets. The great “innovation” of 21st century finance on the “lie told 100,000 becomes truth” epithet is the even simpler “price spinning”, where financial propaganda divisions of the banksters like CNBC who weave reality around prices manufactured not through free market “price discovery”, but through fraudulent mark-to-modelling of assets, Weimar-style running of the printing presses, and leaning of JP Morgan’s 78 trillion derivatives black hole onto the price of gold and silver, or anything else they’d like to keep depreciated to keep the Wile E Coyote that is our Global Financial Ponzi Scheme from looking down.

Actual free market capitalism where competition actually occurs only really exists in small and narrowing bands of reality, perhaps 20% or less of the economy. Some of these small pockets of actual free market exist if you go out and become an independent contractor, or try your hand at a computer company startup in Silicon Valley. But even companies like Steve Jobs’ “rebel revolutionary” Apple has become the same-old competition-smothering trust that condones child labor, a 16 hour work day, supports genocidal Congolese warlords who supply cheap bloodstained minerals and -- antithetical to that Riddley Scott ad overused as a metaphor for Jobs by glorifying MSM mythmakers – Apple is helping 2014 look a LOT like 1984.

Even tech companies like Google share more in common with the KGB It’s like saying, “If people don’t like Coke, they can always drink Pepsi.” Don’t like eBay? You can always exert vast amounts of your personal time and energy hand-peddling your products to the 3 billion people on the internet for a fraction of the targeted eyeballs you’d get from eBay. Companies in the search business, like companies in the soft drink business, follow a Power Law distribution, that is, the vast majority of market share is inevitably controlled by a tiny minority of companies, and the barriers to entry of any new entrepreneurial venture into an existing mature industry, such as soft drinks or search, are so immense that the free market competition factor is so distorted it becomes essentially nil, ultimately resulting in a universal attractor state of near-monopoly. Oligopoly, if you like. This is why almost all small businesses ventures are in smaller, non-Power Law sectors (What Nassim Taleb calls “mediocristan”) like restaurants, or are inventing some new business niche who has not yet developed a monopolistic metastasis (as the venture capitalist who started Google once did).

This effect goes DOUBLY for internet companies later in life who, on top of the business Power Law, have the monstrous advantage of software lock-in and network lock-in. Software lock-in manifests as the substrata of established code, protocols and API upon which new programs are built become exponentially more difficult to dislodge and revamp as time passes. Network lock-in is best illustrated in the eBay example where the user utility of the service (internet auctions) increases dramatically with increase in user base, thus creating a winner-take-all feedback loop causing the company with the most users to become the Master Node for that particular market. The best utility for auctions (most eyeballs, cheapest prices) can be garnered via eBay, so users will naturally continue to flock there until either they shut down for whatever reason or people stop wanting to auction their stuff off (not likely). In the case of Facebook, since they've become the only SN game in town, "opting out" puts you at a crippling networking disadvantage in the business sector, and leaves you out of the conversations and connections between friends and family near and far. Ultimately this free market spiel "I can leave anytime" is an illusion of choice: for their particular service there is no competition and the opportunity costs are so great that many simply cannot [i]afford[/i] to choose abstinence. In the same way that nobody had to go around with a prod "forcing" people and businesses to get online: the internet simply became so ubiquitous you either got with the cyber-program or you got left in the dust(bins).

The Google of the pre-ubiquitous-internet era was of course Microsoft, who controlled 90% marketshare of OS and productivity software (90%… seeing a pattern here? ). So Google dominating the search and online ad market (and recommendation engine market and self-driving cars and libraries, and…) is not some unexpected Black Swan out of left field. Thing is, it gets scary when they start branching out into email, mobile phones, mobile OSes, and via the Google suite of online docs spreadsheets etc. they’re trying to SUBSUME all of Microsft’s necropolising empire. And they’re not stopping there.

Markets, socialism, these are nothing new. We've been doing mongongo nut commerce in Silk Roads and Trobriand circles millenia before capitalism was ever pulled out of the ass of a blowhard looking for a neologism vehicle to acquire tenure. They're natural occurances evolutionarily emerging from macro-level human psychology and social groups. Startups are all born capitalist then grow up communist. Really any of the “mature” sectors of the American economy are generally oligopolistic, essentially run by power-mongering bureaucrat cabals made up of crony capitalism in the private sector and crony communism in the public. We’ve got Coca-Cola, starving Indians and outright paying paramilitaries to murder union leaders in Colombia, subsidized by the government and competition-free with the other half of its oligopoly and price-fixer-in-crime Pepsi. It’s the same story in virtually every domain; pharmaceuticals, where politicians help price-warp the cost of healthcare by destroying competition to astronomical levels in exchange for a high-paid seat on the board of a drug company, agriculture with the Monsatan we all know is literally “destroying” the competition with help through GMO intellectual property laws, and then there’s the uber-communists “Too Big To Fail” banking where it’s not just corporate welfare but we’re being bloodlet for their MISTAKES through redistribution of wealth. In all these industries, a tiny aristocracy of companies dominate the market and buy the government into their back pocket. Communism and capitalism are not “Operating Systems” you choose and install into your country’s “machine”, they’re hodge-podges of mushy ideas that occur in a patchwork of different instances, they’re a gradient that emerges -- just as the two comp-sci grads Larry and Sergei’s startup starts out as free-market competition against other idealistic young entrepreneurial seeds fed by hope n change and LAN night pizza parties, but eventually slides towards crony-capitalism / communism as they take 60% control of the market, begin buying out the FCC and actively spying on the populace not unlike the Soviet Union’s wiretaps, their search-filtering auction like the KGB censors. Nassim “Black Swan” Taleb succinctly summarized it in his Bed of Procrustes aphorism. Economists like Marx/Smith and those of today who championed mean variants and the Gaussian are Procrustes, the mythical Greek blacksmith who had a single bed of a single length. Rather than adjust the bed to fit people’s height, he would stretch them or chop off their legs so they would fit the bed. Similarly, the “experts” we trust, rather than adjust their theories to people, rather attempt to force people to fit their theories, causing much pain and suffering, just as doctors killed more people than they saved – AKA iatrogenics -- for millennia with their blood letting and other “theories” till only very recently with the introduction of double-blind trials. These theories never ever work according to any Marx or Smith’s plan because they’re just the brain-ejaculate of pseudo-science academics that attempt to herd fundamentally people into their panglossian clockwork. And like Des Cartes’ mind/bodydualities and classical physics’ separation of space/time which muddled thought in neuroscience and astrophysics respectively, we’re forced to live in the sticky residue of the capito-communism dualities until Haley’s comet swerves out of orbit thanks to the Jupiter-sized gravity of Jamie Dimon’s two-Earth GDP derivatives and ends the Anthropocene period with a fiery crater the size of George Soro’s blood money stash.

What we have now is Stalin’s “planned economy” where bankers and government officials convene in imperial suites of Geneva penthouses to discuss “the plan”, then Bear Sterns, Lehman, the American People are premeditatedly destroyed via financial WMDs, then the subsequent “divvying up” of the spoils is fully orchestrated again behind the scenes of Obama’s North American Kremlin. Just as Steve Forbes and John Paulson who met yesterday in constitution square in Greece at the Bretagne Hotel to discuss how to divide up the Greek assets at pennies on the dollar like komodos circling a faltering water buffalo, dying from the bacteria-festering wound they inflicted earlier. “You buy when there’s blood in the streets,” said a certain Rothschild, who spread the false rumor that Napoleon had won at Waterloo, nosediving the price of his government’s assets to zero, then proceeded to buy the consorts up at pennies on the pound, giving unholy birth to the wealthiest family in England. Except now they don’t even need to spill blood on the streets, don’t need to start a hot war with tanks and bombs (although they do quite well peddling tanks and RPGs to dictator-to-be rebels). Now, they just take the “blood” spilled by the American people during the subprime, near-prime, prime Ponzi-Land heist, use those blood-stained toxic CDOs and derivatives, have their supercomputers dump those all over Greece’s streets (now literally full of potholes and hordes of heroin addicts thanks to the centrally-planned financial decimation) then rush in and buy up Greece’s infrastructure at – you guesses it – pennies on the dollar. This is a Kurzweilian Singularity except the asymptote is skyrocketing down instead of up; it’s tech-propelled exponential dystopia via wealth stripping. This is High-Frequency-Rape, using Goldman Sachs’ numerate-invented Real Doll machine dildos to fuck your pension fund and your kid’s future fund a trillion times every nanosecond, scraping off a little membrane of pennies each time till you’re hemorrhaging wages and 401k and literally bleeding to death from a workplace accident that isn’t covered by your Gulag-care.

The problem with Marx is not that capitalism will eventually eat itself like some globe-spanning self-destructing Ouroboros – which it surely will, even if the bankster-politician crony-capitocommunism believe they can paper over the yawning debt vortex forever by running the currency presses and “lending more” -- it’s Marx’ failure to recognize that this is not a feature unique to capitalism but rather to the Homo Sapiens species. It’s easy to forget we’ve been at each other’s throats since Cain picked up his dad’s femur and bashed his brother’s head in. We’ve been in feudal warring chaos for most of our career as cortically-bloated monkies, interspersed by brief periods of “civilization”. At the highest levels, economics and government, capitalism, communism, all the “isms”, the messianic faiths born out of the Enlightenment, these all dissolve back into the dissertation word salad from whence they came, and become simple primate feudalism at best or barbarism at worst. In the same way that energy and matter generally appear distinct, yet reveal themselves to be the same thing in extreme conditions, so does money and office melt away into naked Darwinian power struggle when the blue chips are down on the table. The paying off of regulators and Obama in the boardroom of Goldman Sachs is the same as the bullying and leg-breaking of the non-compliant journalists by Putin’s KGB retainers. The mass execution of Stalin’s political opponents is the same as cronycapito-communist China’s mass-dissapearance and re-education of dissidents through hard labor soldering iPad components for a bowl of rice soup a day. Even if you don’t have dollar capital there is always a currency exchange – and the ultimate commodity is power. Even in a peacenik greener non-profit NGO meeting, you can see the power dynamics play out as a “higher up” strong-arms funds to his idiot brother’s doomed solar leg-warmer idea or to his niece’s birthday party at the Sheraton. You see it when President Obama gets before a mic and says, “We can’t prosecute the bankers because… what they did was immoral, inappropriate, or reckless, but not illegal,” as he did today, outright lying to the American people and criminally failing to do his job of enforcing our nation’s laws, effectively making himself looter criminal-in-chief seeing he is the one person in the best position to stop this.

The naivete of Marx is not that capitalism – or any system – will collapse, but that what rises from the ashes will not simply be capitalism 2.0, or some cocktail mix slightly more socialistic than capitalistic. Rather than some socialist or communist wonderland in which people all hold hands, sing “Heal The World” and engage in harmonious “cooperative enterprise” and public ownership, magically satisfied with their single identical house, car, and government-issue gadget “dictated” by the economics central planners, who are magically as uncorruptible as Mother Theresa and wouldn’t think to disappear/kill off dissidents and send the population to The Gulag for “re-education”. It was just published in the Wall Street Journal the other day that brain-damage patients make the best bankers – because they lack empathy and the ability to care about the millions of people’s lives they holocaust when they blow up a society in a mass-short, then mop up the remains for “pennies on the dollar”. Essentially meaning that the largest, most powerful entities in the world come to be run by subhuman psychopaths who live merely for the safari-like thrill of adding zeroes to their accounts and notches to their belts each time they strangle a $300,000 slave-girl they beat in an auction against a Saudi prince. This is precisely the pattern of history of socialist and communist revolutions which have inevitably led to some heartless psychopath – be it a Stalin or a Pol Pot or a People’s Republic – snatching up the reigns while all the “pure communists” are sitting around singing kumbaya and holding Woodstock readings of Das Kapital. “Oh, please don’t desire status and prestige and wealth Mr. megalomaniacal ruthless power grabber, this is a stateless, classless society of egalitarianism, where we work 2 hours a day, read the classics and practice archery in the afternoon!” Then Mr. power-hungry tyrant who wasn’t breastfed or who never knew his dad or whatever comes down with his gang, the “Fuck Peace Party”, mows down all the lamb holding hippies with AKs, and goes on to assume power and become the next Jamie Dimon or Vladimir Putin or Voldemort or Dick Cheney or whoever. End of Utopia.

The truth is it’s these extremes, the belief in the savior-power of these old obsolete ideologies themselves; capitalism, communism, neoliberalism, libertarianism, these myths people bow down before in their echo-chamber cathedrals, their Harvard auditoriums, these “Too Big Too Fail” concepts that inevitably unravel and fail us like bricks toppling from the Berlin Wall, fail like every rigid glorified Gaussian Copula and Collateralized Debt Obligation sold as snake oil by financial conjurers, these cons that lure us into their “get happy quick” Ponzi Schemes, lull us into a false sense of solvency, and that ultimately blow up in our face and leave some psycho running the show.

The truth is, human society is like marriage; you don’t just go out to “ideology-match.com” type in your eye color and hobbies, find out if capitalism or communism is Mr. Right through some reality-TV competition, get swept off your feet, have a Jennifer Anniston movie wedding, and then live happily ever after, lounging in the fields, reading poetry and practicing archery as Marx would have you believe. Marriage is a never-ending challenge that you’ve got to work hard at every single day to make work. Before living together you have these two-dimensional ideals of each other, prince and princess first-date charming, which over time you come to realize were stupid stereotypes, and they’re just regular people, really capitalistic in some ways and socialistic in others, and the categories become empty and meaningless the more time you spend together, and it works as long as you keep communicating and renewing the relationship. If you stop communicating, let things slide, check out to watch American Idol, you’ll soon find tensions growing, building up like bubbles of debt, resentments piling up like red ink on the relationship balance sheet, lies weaving from lies spreading out into a fractal web like fraud. In passing guest-room meetings growing fewer they say the relationship is the most valuable thing but it’s really just toxic assets they can’t wait to dump. They start cheating on you with politicians, plotting against you in anonymous hotel rooms how to take your house, short your stock, and the pleasantry-masked chats devolve into outright blow-ups, economic meltdowns. Then one day you wake up and wonder, “who is this monster and how did they get here?” when it was you who put them there.

I believe in government by the people for the people. Because of this, in any society, whatever their ideological leaning be capitalistic or socialistic, if they check out of their process, fail to self-govern, then some crazy mean assholes will take over and do the governing for them. When that happens, the tree of liberty must be regularly watered with the blood of said tyrants. The capitalism-communism spectrum is a false binary which should be rotated to a choice between “cronyistic plutarchy” to “democratic, regulated, entrepreneurialism” which is determined only minimally by the ideologies and laws adopted by the government and overwhelmingly by the people’s ability and willingness to participate in regulating themselves and their leaders. Obama’s refusal to prosecute the bankster criminals who are commiting a pre-meditated class massacre upon the 99% only reinforces this point that we can’t sit around waiting for the existing government, who is in on the scam, to save us; we can’t wait for the commander in chief to order his Navy Seals to take out the REAL pirates robbing us because he’s getting a cut of the booty. No, we’ve got to save ourselves. Occupy Wall Street is people waking up, getting out in the street, taking aim at the pirates, governing themselves again, taking their future into their own hands.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

World Class War Powder Keg is LIT!

TENS OF THOUSANDS TAKE TIMES SQUARE!!!!

Tens of thousands more poured out across six continents in solidarity, from Madrid to London to Tokyo to Tahrir Square!

The World Class War Powder Keg is LIT baby!

22 Arrested for closing accounts at Citibank!

Ah, the Gulag leg breakers (police) are called in to stop the organized, legal destruction of the Citibank holcrux. We're past the point of even pretending this is a nation of laws anymore. Let's just issue all the looters stealing bottles of milk a banking license, so we can help "grow the economy", since that is our business model here in the US and Europe. Your Rome is burning, fucking weasel rapists!

[b]Pluto-speak to English glossary[/b]

Never turn on a TV or click a Google News link without it!


“We need to recapitalize banks” – we want to steal from you some more because we’ve already pissed away the money we stole from you playing casino and committing fraud, shuffling your TARP funds around in a shell game.

“These strict regulation will cause us to loose our competitive edge.” It’s really hard work, fucking you over. We deserve to be paid 1000 times your salary

“We need to shore up (country/econopolitical union)’s banks” – we want to steal from you

“Banks need to start lending more” – my Ponzi mobile is running low on gas

“Mistakes were made” – We knowingly raped your family, and made off with your house while we were at it, but let’s put the past behind us.

“We cannot allow this (financial institution) to fail” You all need to take a 20% pay cut or the head of Barclays will disinvite me to the next champagne toast at the Lanesborough.

“The Greeks have been spending beyond their means.” We took all our subprime nuclear waste and shit it out on Athens with the help of our bitch and your head of state Karolos Papoulias so we could make a killing when you keel over from radiation sickness.

“Slovakia is threatening the stability by refusing to cooperate with the bailout” Slovakia is telling the financial terrorists to shove the bailout h-bomb up their ass.

Obama on why the thousands of robber baron banksters have not been prosecuted:
"Banks did things which were immoral, frowned upon, that let us down, but were not illegal." - I'm a whore who sucks Jamie Dimon's cock for campaign contributions who is just as much a looter lawbreaking criminal for failing to prosecute, and I deserve to be impeached.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Occupy: Hoping While Considering All The Facts

It has the feeling of the rebel teens of wealthy white suburbs, inventing their own oppressors to resist.

That's the kind of bias I'm talking about. "Oh, it's just a bunch of rich white kids." "It's just a bunch of circus-performing jazz playing hippies whining." Cherry picking facts to spin a dismissive narrative. Obviously the front line is going to be the students who don't have families they need to be constantly working to support, they're the first ones out. But even these students are mostly unemployed buried in 100+k in debt who have a life working at McDonald’s while banks siphon off half their wages, so the "rich white kid" stereotype that JP Morgan-funded talking heads try to wedge the movement with doesn't really hold. They're not just out there to "party" despite continued misrepresentation and selective cinematography; they're fighting FOR all the working class who can't be there, for the poor who can't afford the plane ticket, all of whom have been equally raped by the bankster gangbang. We’re fighting for your future after you graduate with your heaping mounds of student loan debt and dismal job prospects, for The Kid’s future, for Minibot’s future. But we’re way past just the college students now, with people of all ages, backgrounds, income levels, the unions, teachers, stock traders, doctors, bus drivers, cops, the 99%, are all out there, demanding justice for a global criminal cabal. Of course it’s not exactly “The Arab Spring”: that’s what makes it an analogy. The similarities are there: the young educated graduates get out of school with no prospects at 25% youth unemployment, and started making noise about it. Here in the US we’re eerily at that same 25% threshold. In Greece it’s a similar story: government in cahoots with banks blowing up their future and dividing up the severed body parts of the country like cuts of cheap steak. The main difference is JP Morgan is not having NYPD kill people (he did just “donate” 4.6 million to the cops though…) Do we need to wait till people start getting gunned down in the streets before we think about getting out there and changing things? Shall we let the Frankenstein monster shadow banking system continue to rampage, create Global Financial/Economic Meltdown 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and send off our children into a nation who can only offer Wal-Mart, Burger King, people sloshing around on foodstamps looking for a hit of crack? It's like saying, "Well, you're not going into cardiac arrest in need of a quadruple bypass, so let's just let you keep eating those chicken fried steaks till it gets more serious." If anything, we are years, if not a decade *late* with Occupy Wall Street and similar movements, thanks in no small part to our anesthetizingly entertaining media. At what level of oppression does a people’s suffering stop being “rich white kids whining” and become real oppression?

The changes they're asking for are real, and valid, and are only going to happen the same way all changes happen in a democracy


Democracy? That’s funny. Text me when we have something other than a rent-a-government.

Since we seem adept at spawning influential political movements, just look at the vast changes, for better and worse, to our system over the past 5 years, that is a result that is unlikely for us.


Frankly, I'm seeing a lot of lack of change, or "worse".

Poverty rate 2008: 13.2% Poverty rate 2010: 14.3%

Unemployment rate: increased to 10% in 2009, stagnating between 9 and 10%, no light at the end of the tunnel in sight.

Average weeks unemployed 2009: 19.9 weeks. 2011: 40.3 weeks

Median income 2008: 52,029. 2010: 49,445

Average Family Heath Insurance plan 2008: 12,680. 2011: $15,073

Total jobs: Jan 2009: 142,201,000. Aug 2011: 139,627,000

Inflation rate Jan 2009: 0.03% Aug 2011: 3.77%

Food stamp usage Jan 2009: 31.9 mil May 2011: 45.2 mil

Price of gas Jan 2009: $1.82 Aug 2011: $3.66

National Debt Jan 2009: 10.6 Trillion Sep 2011: 14.7 trillion

Obama claimed hope, change, clean out Washington, campaign finance. Accepted the largest total campaign contributions from Wall Street in history.

Banksters: becoming even Too Bigger To Fail, still raping the US and world, President, congress, regulators continue to refuse to do their job. Continuing more of the same Bush policies.

Zero major financial criminals indicted and put behind bars. No effective reforms i.e. Glass Steagal, corporate compensation, HFT, mark-to-market, etc etc etc….

What is likely is that these movement will coalesce or be co-opted into an existing political structure that will attempt to elect memebers to office. Or it will simply subside back into a general unahppiness with the status quo.


I won’t say that utilizing the movement’s momentum to elect members to public office is a bad idea. Again, we need as many prongs on the attack as possible. But the specific trajectory on which it is coalesced (hopefully not co-opted, since we’ve seen how the “hope and change” and “tea party” turned out) is important. The strength of Occupy Wall Street is precisely that it does not end at simple myopic "demands" or buy into the fabricated soap opera “Left vs Right” thing, but rather is framed as “bottom versus top”; the 99% versus the 1%, as the reality is. Rather than some empty soundbyte, it is the non-thing, the societal Rorschach blot in which we recognize our own personal sufferings as voiced in the many 99% portraits, the mirror through which we can see ourselves, and the complex system to which we are connected, clearly. Which is why the puppet media is sincerely baffled by the movement. The original Tea Party leaders: Dylan Ratigan, Karl Denninger, Rick Santelli tried valiantly to keep the movement’s focus on the right target, but along the way, Sarah Palin and the Kochs manage to swing the train off track with their star power and billions, and now it’s essentially just another arm of the “There are droughts in Texas because Native Americans are cannibals” party. The 99% then becomes the intentionally jerrymandered “50%” against gay marriage, and thus the charade continues. More of the same. Whatever happens, OWS must attempt to maintain its independence and not be seduced by the golden hooks of big money “support” that might snare it, and make it another marionette as Obama has become. Perhaps a key cornerstone, an x-factor that makes this time different is the increasingly decentralized (and perhaps thus a little more democratic) methods via which people receive information provided by new, increasingly pervasive technology, namely the internet and social media. As the percentage of people who are limited to the blinders of CNN and Fox begins to migrate to the more varied universe of the digital, this will lower the barriers to entry for candidates who no longer need to pay millions for network TV airtime, as occurred with recorded music and other media when the price of production dropped. Because of this we may see a candidate who can actually take it all the way without having Goldman and JP Morgan shove their billion dollar fists up the OWS party’s ass.

Other recent positive developments that might turn the tables include things like crowdfunding which make it extremely easy for large groups to contribute small amounts. Perhaps even more potent than electing hens into the DC fox house are the allied hacktivist groups who can fight cyber-financial fire with cyber-financial fire, outing hidden risk and toxicity, then applying reverse-capitalism to blow up the fraudsters with their own weapon of choice: shorting. They've already taken down Chaoda, one of the Hong Kong Exchanges' largest and longest running frauds as a proof of concept, and are turning their sights. The "flow of capital" is a two-way stream, if we harness it right. An OWS activist hedge fund might go out and start a new viral tactic: instead of buying surplus pizzas, everyone buy gold and silver ounce by ounce, while simultaneously buying it up by the truckload with the billions they'll make from short selling corrupt vampire-squid banks and companies like JP Morgan, then suddenly the global financial dynamic shifts from being the Global Financial Ponzi Scheme to being the Global Financial Justice Scheme. The abused 99% flips the system on it's head and they become the rulers, who bring the hammer down on the People With Too Many Mansions doing the abusing.

There is a 'movement' mentality, a sense of being at an important place in history, that is common in these events. History is littered with pivotal moments that the participants were certain indicated paradigm change. Mostly they don't though. It is a flaw of youth to think that your time is unique.


Oh come on. Obviously this “might” not be the nodal point on which the world pivots. Since I know a little bit more than the average person about how the global child-raping machine actually works, how impossibly powerful it is, how deeply its tentacles are entwined in the fabric of our economy, society, politics, and culture, I am all the more sobered about the slimness of OWS' chances. Maybe it will have a massive effect, maybe it will help a little, maybe it will just go out not with a bang but a whimper and we’ll go back to the status quo, expressing our fits of mute rage by changing television channels and voting in loaded presidential elections. As I keep saying: we don’t know the moment of revolution, but that doesn’t mean we stop trying. Perhaps it’s naivete to believe this is possible. Perhaps this is just another exercise in futility and we should just start honing our obsequiousness, practicing our “can I take your order?”s, learn to set our own broken bones, and practice living twenty to a room. Build arks out of the decaying planks of underwater homes, for when the Great Flood of melting poles invades our cities overrun with looters both in hoodies and suit-and-ties. What matters is that we tried.

Revolution requires sacrifice? That's easy to say when you aren't paying for it.


We’re paying for it by NOT creating a revolution. I’m paying for it by working three fucking “kinda part-time” jobs which change hours or end every week without notice wondering how the hell am I going to pay for my family's skyrocketing food costs the next month. I'm paying for it as I'm paying off my equally wealth-stripping inflated student loans and criminally expensive housing and still not getting any health insurance for my daughter. You’ve got one of those, right?

Every person has these moments, mostly when they are young or when they are in the midst of a life changing period, where they are certain that what they are doing is the most important thing they will ever be a part of. In practice, unless you are walking on the moon or curing smallpox, that isn't the case


“Let’s not bother because we MIGHT not amount to anything.” Do you hear how defeatist and pathetic that sounds? “Hey you dumb hippy kids, this is just a flaw of your youth, a phase. Just pack up your loud guitars and tie dye and go home to part your hair, cause societal change and Civil Rights and all that jazz is probably never going to take off.” “Hey, you women with Mohawks and stripe suits, get back to the kitchen and massage your husband’s feet like a good pet, because your feminist movement will probably just fizzle out.” Come on.

That certainly makes a good excuse to tell your kids when they ask you why they have to work at McWal-Mart 16 hours a day so they can afford a thousand dollar first aid kit to tend their wounds they got from a mugging because the police department was disbanded due to “belt tightening” from Bajillion Dollar Bailout Episode IV. “Sorry, baby, but it’s not daddy’s fault. These movement things usually don’t amount to anything, so there was really no point in trying. It was just a bunch of rich white hippy kids going through a phase anyway.”

They say realism is hoping for the best, while having considering all the facts.

After being down at Occupy Oahu, amongst dozens growing to hundreds, the homeless, HPD cops who donated sandwiches, having sincere, positive discussions with both Ron Paul and Ralph Nader supporters, listening to single moms and their kids, bank employee couples and their kids, commiserating with laid off construction workers, philosophizing with college professors, and, yes, jamming with some bongo-bangin granola grinding neo-hippy college students, and seeing the movement across over a thousand cities on five continents growing stronger and faster than most anticipated, and witnessing hacktivists, financial gurus, and whistleblowers gearing up for cyber-fincial war, I believe I have considered the facts, and I continue to hope for the best. If that be naiveté, then call me a tie dyed-in-the-wool dreamer.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Occupy The Planet (Hack it too)

Occupy Movement is front page on CNN, spread nation-wide and growing.

Ah yes, looks like Occupy Wall Street is going asymptotic. I hate to say I called it but... I guess should go get some "I liked #Occupy Wall Street before it was cool" t-shirts and go apply for one of them new-fangled futurist jobs.


Well, at least someone's stripping the emperor.

Anonymous hit the CEO of JP Morgan Chase. Wouldn't want them to feel left out.

Oh hell, why not just start a whole arm dedicated to corporate securities fraud research hacktivism.

Digital warrior groups like Anonymous perhaps have the ability to hit the corporate world where it hurts the most: in their balance sheet. Also, they've got the highest leverage, return on investment: a small group of elite hackers surrounded by a miasma of spontaneously coalescing attackers from anywhere on the planet can with a few hours on their laptop strike serious blows at behemoth targets. Cyber-asymmetrical warfare waged by starfish-like decentralized cells, but rather than the violent suicide bombers of the radical Islamic groups who kamikaze physical planes into the physical epicenters of the global financial oligarchy, they're driving virtual connection requests by the billions into servers in distributed denial of service attacks, drilling trojans and worms into the cold machine heart of the largest banking megafauna. Eating them from the inside out using their own weapon of mass economic destruction; the computer network. The internet in particular and digital revolution in general is also a major differing factor between what's going on now and the Civil Rights movement. It's been acknowledged often enough as well that social media and other net-enabled communications tech were instrumental in at least enabling and accelerating the Arab Spring, lubricating the gears of revolution, and that phenomenon applies equally, if not more so to Occupy Wall Street, organized almost entirely, originally, online with Twitter et. al.. Half a century ago, those few hundred protesters laying around the park would likely have gotten perhaps a single odd mention after the obituary page in a major newspaper, and not even a nod from the 20th century TV news network empires whose cameras would've turned away, indifferently. Occupy Wall Street would've died before you could say, "dirty hippie." But the increasingly decentralized, multilateral, and "read-write" rather than just "read" nature of the internet has allowed a kind of trickle-up, democratic media saturation, via tweets, posts, livestream video footage of events (including voilence against the nonviolent), and is a knell of the change in the way we gain information about the world and how not merely the richest broadcasters but anyone with a phone (70% of the planet) can co-mediate reality. And after the digital grass-roots had spread the story wide enough, the mainstream was eventually forced to pay attention. We have perhaps what Baudrillard called hypermediation, but we also have co-mediation, and open-mediation from the entire population. It's a whole nother playing field, a whole new unmapped territory whose fog of war remains thick, and whether it tilts the odds in favor of the 99% or the richest 1 remains undecided.

Granted, these new uses for tech which the street has found are not going to bring about Shangrilah in and of itself, but we need as many prongs in the attack as possible, given that we're dealing with long-tentacled, evasive shadow-banking squid who reallocate funds, offices, and personnel at the speed of the internet. There needs to be an assault with similar post-geographical reach. Perhaps that is one of Occupy Wall Streets greatest contributions disguised as an incoherency weakness: the protest not just about negotiating a contract this month or ending this particular war or asking this particular CEO to resign or trying to kill the fed; none of these will actually affect the global ecology of mass underclass destruction. It's finally getting to the bottom of things. The movement's message is "The problem is endemic, global, at the very heart of our society, and every single one of you in the 99% are involved."

Bonus: Occupy K-Street

Bonus bonus AFL-CIO speaks out. Unions continue to step up. Let's do this.