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.
Reality checking The Future since 2027.
Monday, October 17, 2011
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.
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.
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.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Why We Should All Occupy Wall Street
Occupy Wall Street. Or occupy a city near you in solidarity, if you can't.
So some people have suggested that the Occupy Wall Street blackout doesn't exist, and that reporters and the media just don't care cause it's not like Egypt where people are being killed by a brutal dictator.
So if you wear a pretty charcoal Valentino suit that costs more than a Smarte Car and sip champagne from a Trump balcony while installing, funding, and arming the genocidal dictators, then it's ok. Not to mention the billions who aren't just unable to find a job and healthcare but are actively dying, moving to violence and/or scarcity-based wars in other countries thanks to food commodity speculation and other instances of serial bubbles. One Arab leader killing a citizen is a tragedy, a WASP eradicating 1/4 the planet and extinguishing the potential prosperity of its own country is a statistic better suited for the CNBC marquee. Maybe we should gather all those recently futureless college students, Iraq vets, laid off cops teachers and firemen, and people with stomach cancer who can't afford or have been denied the care to get even the pain-relief meds, ask them all to sit on The Charging Bull, one by one, douse themselves in gasoline, and set themselves on fire holding a copy of Audacity of Hope in one hand and Obama's campaign contribution pie chart in the other.
Apparently, they're just some people with signs sitting in a park, not stopping business, not doing anything at all.
Rosa Parks was also just some lady sitting in a bus, if we remove the blinders of hindsight. It may not be big enough to draw attention yet (although there is definitely a degree of censorship going on which is undisputable re: Yahoo Mail and Koch-funded internet "independent" sock puppets abound so I'd be wary of any info about these protests) but in the domesticated, hypermedia-anesthetized United States, you can't just out and run a marathon. You've got to start with just a couple leg lifts. But as any personal trainer will tell you, the hardest part is just getting off the couch and getting into the gym.
Perhaps in the case of the brutal dictator and the ruthless financial mogul, one of these evils just has the resources, money, and connections to hide his skeletons in distant closets, whereas the more mangy counterpart has to do all the wetwork himself, forced to shit in his own backyard.
At any rate, the Mubareks and Gaddafis are just symptoms, lone-wolf psychopaths, the bottom-rung straggling ends of a very deep, very complex, very fucked up web. The Occupy Wall Street protests, however idealistic, uncoordinated, and perhaps premature, are going after the deeper root. Wall Street is the financial center of the universe, and the epicenter of the global pain and suffering caused, the Death Star core. Even if it was only 200 protesting, the symbolic weight globally cannot be underestimated, and it may very well turn out to be a key galvanization point. And in the US, at least now we're aiming at the right spot, instead of getting off on the left-right artificial WWF politics, cheering on Keith Olberman or Bill O'Reily as they slug it out, forgetting that their meal tickets are coming from the same source.
Obfuscation, hiding heinous crimes by embedding them in complexity so people say, "Well, it's not like the bankers just took out a gun and shot some Ethiopians or mugged you for your wallet" is exactly one of the plutocracy's major strategies. The under-educated Bronx kid, who doesn't have the con-skills and robs $300 from the 711 gets life in prison. The red-tied banker who steals $30 billion from 401ks, police and fireman salaries gets coddled by the president, a bailout, and doubles his bonuses the next year. Probably get a seat at the SEC or in the oval office if he keeps up the "good work". Maybe, since he's so good at hiding the truth, he can get a job systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations for the SEC.
The protest was essentially a giant flashmob, a rainstorm coalescing from a rainbow of nascent and growing groups -- The initial grain was Ad Busters, but later snowballed to include Day of Rage, Anonymous, and even Christian and Vietnam Vet organizations. The diversity was truly heartening, and a harbinger. The fact that there was any American out on the street, sleeping for more than one night in tents, to protest anything other than cancellation of Jersey Shore or the election of a "nigger President" should be considered a major victory.
And, granted, this is just the beginning. The austerity and real depression hasn't even begun to kick in yet, and already we've got people complaining, civil unrest. And we, our political system, our president, and we the people still haven't even begun to face the multi-trillion ton gorilla in the room, that the financial h-bombs are still hidden deep in the Hal-sized HFT supercomputers of the numerati.
It's not a "If you break it, they will go" thing for sure. It's a web, woven of money, connections, and thanks to the world wide wonderful internetz the shadow cancer is more fluid and non-local than ever. A garden is never finished, justice is an eternal process, not the end-state of some equation. Wall Street just happens to be, at this point, the largest nodal point of money, the greatest of great attractors of excess, the Gomorrah of wanton greed -- and, thus, the largest source of power abuse and corruption, to the extent that that megacorporations, ubermegabanks, and the blue blood dynasties still put their foot down on any given geography. It is also thusly the largest reservoir of symbolic juju; the way the Civ Rights groups coalesced around King and Parks, the reason why Osama aimed the 747s at the twin towers and the White House. Even if the heads of AIG, Goldman Sachs, he rest of the financial-industrial cabal, Bernanke, Paulson, half Obama's cabinet, McDonald's, Exxon Mobil, and the Boogeyman were served up on a platter at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, for each that fell, two more would take their place, two more backstabbing sociopaths aiming for the corner office securing their megalomaniacal pissing match King-of-the-Hilldom.
If the country does actually wake up, descend pitchforks and shotguns in hand for the blood of the banksters and the billionaires start getting really burnt by the heat down in Hell's Kitchen, then they will of course be on the first Gulfstream out to London, Beijing, or wherever the "economic climate" is "friendly for business". Cue the pained brows of traders plastered aon CNBC and Time Magazine covers, mass handwringing whining about "brain drain" and "America losing its competitive edge". Politicians banging their shoes on podiums in pretend-outrage as they no longer get their thousand dollar lunches and revolving door opportunities on the boards of major banks. Mass exodus of toxicity, probably a drop in "productivity", which was all falsely inflated hot air consisting of the long skyrocketing price of homes, healthcare, and college which noone can afford anymore. A loss in Gross Domestic Product but a gain in General Happiness Quotient.
Whatever the case, the uber rich would just touch down else where, set up shop in Mumbai, somewhere. We can't stop people being greedy self-destructive assholes short of diving under the hood of our brains and rewiring our neurological reward-feedback pathways, or coming up with some cure for sociopathy and psychopathy. Either is superduper unlikely. But perhaps the thing that's really scaring them is the fact that the global unrest and active resistance is spreading now like wildfire, first from the Arab Spring, then to Greece and Spain, to the US. Already, viral co-protests are breaking out in California, even in Kansas. London heads of state and banks are getting wary of similar movements breaking out across the pond. Will the wildfire create utopia? Probably not. But if you're going after a hydra, it's best to hit all the heads at once, full-on scorched Earth.
And it's not like these people are idiotic glass-shattering anarchists. So far the only violence has been coming from the police,
Some have suggested that these are just a bunch of kids interested in partying, finding something fun to do for the weekend, hooking up and getting their faces on TV.
I'm not sure that's fair. Certainly they're not being shot in the street or lynched up by the dozen, but these people (not just kids but blue collar and middle class who have lost their jobs, homes, healthcare, despite what Fox and other mainstream media continue to spin them as) are out there with their tents and pizza prepared to squat the financial center of the universe for months according to Day of Rage, and the other key organizing sites. Many have even given up well-paying jobs -- those vanishing jewels in this economy -- to travel thousands of miles with almost no money to take part in this movement. They're out there for very specific, personal reasons in most cases, varying from chronic unemployment despite overeducation, absence of basic services, and connecting that with the complete failure of the political and business establishment to do anything about it or even *listen*. You'd discover this if you bother to go deeper than the co-opted US lamestream media. are generally better informed than the average American about the heinous crimes and issues involving Wall Street and the financial-political complex, and are protesting smart, not starting scuffles with police. Granted, not everyone will or can afford to be out there that whole time, but to say 'they're just out to have fun and get famous' when there are people being attacked, having their cameras and tents ripped away by police. And -- thanks to bailout-driven "austerity measures" -- these primarily overeducated yet underemployed aren't exactly 'loaded', and most probably aren't taking "paid vacation time" as that crown jewel of the labor movement is quickly becoming a myth as workers rights are continually eroded.
But beyond that, I think sci/speculative fiction writer William Gibson onced summed it up nicely when asked about his decision to leave the US for Canada during the draft:
"It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippy girls and have lots of hashish than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the North Vietnamese people under US imperialism. Much more, much more to do with hippy girls and hashish."
And I think that goes for most major, global movements. They're as chaotic, insane, and ultimately unpredictable as war, despite the way historians and academics like to tidy up all the black swans into a nice neat movie-script narrative full of protagonists, antagonists, arc and drama. Movements are not legislated into existence, they are not outlined in a boardroom by central planners or sprung fully formed from the dissertations of anthropology professors. They just happen. Sure, the Civil Rights Movement had a core of dedicated individuals in the NAACP, ACLU. But much of that movement, as a subset of the whirlwind that began in the 60's, was also fundamentally about young people doing something fun. Breaking away from the leash of Disneyfied parents still shellshocked from WWII trying to create suburban happy Stepford land. Country kids bored of shoveling hay and listening to uninspired sermons, seeing pictures on this new "Tee-Vee" thing of a place over the rainbow called "San Francisco" where everyone seemed to be having a really great time partying and doing this "mary-wanna" happy stick. And maybe somewhere, running through tear gas away from the cops in New York and a long hot night on the street with a black dancer-turned-demonstrator who’d spent her life under the boot of racism, maybe they found their new selves, came to understand and embody the “cause”. Came to discover the meaning of sacrifice.
I think it goes without saying that without the Beat forefathers of the 50’s and the preceding countercultural movements including the hippies and the whole JFK era awakening, the America we know today would be much worse off, and indeed, the Civil Rights movement would have had much less social traction and political will it needed to take off. As is illustrated most recently in “The Help” and virtually every story where the barriers of color, sex, and religion and other artificial divides between people have been broken, there is always a necessary courage on both sides, the minority (blacks in that case) and majority (whites). So maybe some people came out cause they really believed “the Capitalist Establishment” had to be abandoned for the communes. Maybe some people came out after reading way too much William Burroughs and wanting to blast their minds with every drug available into the Interzone. Maybe some people just followed the busload of hot young hippy chicks. Maybe some people were just bored. Probably for everyone it was a mix of all those, but I doubt even the people there can know their original intents. The important thing was they didn’t just sit around and pontificate to themselves from their armchairs, discuss in committees what “the perfect post-capitalist utopia will look like”, and hold readings of back issues of Das Kapital; no, they got out there and actually DID something. 90% of life is just showing up. I have to applaud the people who occupied, and continue to occupy Wall Street for that, even if they don't immediately accomplish their goals with the first of many legs of protest.
And then we have the complaints, snarking naysayers of the Occupy Wall Street movement along the lines of, "bunch of lazy hippy kids," "too disorganized, incoherent" "these kids have no way to engage at anything close to parity with those they are angry at."
Perhaps only those furthest afield in Marxian LSD land are deluded enough to believe that a few hundred regular occupiers spiking to a few thousand at peak traffic hours are going to topple Goldman "Officially Rules The World" Sachs and the fuckedopoly that metonym represents. Give them at least the benefit of that much self-awareness. Of course the unions will need to get involved; that’s the point. The unions, the watchdog groups, the closet-good investment bank employees, the journalists, the whistleblowers, the doctors, the nurses, the teachers, the parents who care at all about their children’s future, the children who can’t multiply thanks to gutted public school funding but know, somehow, that this is the right thing to do. The cops themselves, who arrested 80 protesters knowing they’re going to be losing their pensions,p possibly jobs, along with the firefighters, and the rest of the public sector. This is just the first verse in a very long song of the movement. These first couple weeks of protest on Wall Street and 35 other cities have been the call; now they’re awaiting the response from all of us.
"Man, those crazy deluded, childish brown skinned Punjabi flinging salt around, how can they expect to ever change anything?" "What's with this stupid negro lady refusing to give up her seat on the bus; what, she think she's going to tear out the crooked ugly veins of North American racism single handedly?"
An external movement is fundamentally a manifestation of the internal zeitgeist of a people, and though it must always start from some small event, if the fuel is there then all you need is the match; If you build it they will come. The political objective of the Ferdinand assassination might have been to peel away Austria-Hungary's south-Slav provinces that they might be combined into a Greater Serbia or a Yugoslavia, yet it wound up setting off the powder keg. WWI, from the spatiotemporal vantage point of the beginning of the 20th century, was a Black Swan event; there had been no major hot war for nearly a century, historians had been writing about “The End Of War”, “The Great Peace” (Not unlike our current Fed Chairman’s crown-jewel paper: “The Great Moderation” of the modern economy). Long before millions occupied the gears and cogs of Libya, chased Gaddafi to Algeria, there were the ninety five theses, long litanies of resentments the mounting piles of nascent jihads had been accumulating. The Libyan people retraced the steps of endless breadlines, the long walks of executed dissidents, trails of tears welling up like years of debt, left unpaid. And if debt goes unpaid long enough, as any honest mathematician will tell you, there will be meltdown; financial, social, or ecological.
Glenn Greenwald from Salon captures it poignantly:
Another case-in-point of the old koan about history rhyming rather than repeating can be vis'ed here:
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."
We may look back one day on this time period, go on actually *paid* vacations from our non-menial service industry, non-slave labor jobs. We'll buy plane tickets to New York with the savings we've accrued as the college-housing-car loan ponzi is finally extinguished and the fruits of our increasingly productive labor comes back to us rather than being stored as zeros and ones in Zurich mainframes, high-frequency-traded by Blue Gene/L-powered algorithms. We’ll stroll down through Zuccotti park with our kids who have health care and a future to look forward to, sweep the LCD screens of our Genius Pads that we can afford without turning our homes into ATM machines, and replay old Twitter bookmarks. Holding up the screen we’ll see geotagged locative installations; the translucent tulpa of Anonymous, bullfighting the Wall Street Bull. Spectral throngs of Occupy Wall Streeters, schooling past, 99%ers of all backgrounds and ages, chanting and pumping fists alongside leisurely patrolling NYPD. Eventually we’ll reach East 12th Street, the new Manhattan Ground Zero, of the World Class War detonation. The Ground Zero that was the World Trade Center and the swamp of financial-political malignancy they once stood for will have long faded like last month's #trending topic from the radars of our collective subconscious, "occupied" and overshadowed by the psycho-social gravitas of the revolution begun on Wall Street. The focal point of Gibson novels will shift from the long shadow of the two towers to the supernova of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The time will cease to be the post-911 world, instead the post-Global Awakening world. The Al Qaeda boogeyman and the War on Abstract Concepts it spawned will all seem like a bad dream, like the rest of the “Lost Decade”, the premise of some near-future sci-fi dystopia rather than anything that had ever been reality. There, at East 12th, we’ll see her ghost, the one people around the world read about in history e-books; the innocent female college student, bawling as she is shot in the face by a mad whiteshirt officer, and remember that shot, heard and seen around the world, as the Ferdinand Assassination moment, the Ghandian nodal point, the Rosa Parks of economics that finally became the Civil Rights Movement of the 21st Century. The world will still be fucked up, people will still be greedy, self-destructive, narcissistic assholes, but maybe things will be a little more like Sweden and less like a cross between a Shenzhen suicide factory and Wlliam Gibson’s hyper-Reaganomic Sprawl.
One thing is for certain: no one will remember those that complained, “They’re just lazy hippy kids” or “They don’t have a coherent set of demands” and then kept calm and carried on. If you don’t like the particular brand of activism you’re seeing, then by all means get down there with the people fighting on your behalf and engage in some proactivism, rather than reactivism. Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall.
Or maybe this will all pass, premature. No one knows the moment of revolution. Until then, we’ll just have to keep marching, occupying, tweeting, crowdsourcing pizza, and dialoging, as we are. Keeping as many flames alive as possible that the keg might be lit when it reaches threshold and blows up on the Banksters and their puppets on the left and right, that Empire of Champagne Toasts and Cooked Books, and the kindling of that Fahrenheit 451 might just be those brave people of the 99% down at Occupy Wall Street right now.
So some people have suggested that the Occupy Wall Street blackout doesn't exist, and that reporters and the media just don't care cause it's not like Egypt where people are being killed by a brutal dictator.
So if you wear a pretty charcoal Valentino suit that costs more than a Smarte Car and sip champagne from a Trump balcony while installing, funding, and arming the genocidal dictators, then it's ok. Not to mention the billions who aren't just unable to find a job and healthcare but are actively dying, moving to violence and/or scarcity-based wars in other countries thanks to food commodity speculation and other instances of serial bubbles. One Arab leader killing a citizen is a tragedy, a WASP eradicating 1/4 the planet and extinguishing the potential prosperity of its own country is a statistic better suited for the CNBC marquee. Maybe we should gather all those recently futureless college students, Iraq vets, laid off cops teachers and firemen, and people with stomach cancer who can't afford or have been denied the care to get even the pain-relief meds, ask them all to sit on The Charging Bull, one by one, douse themselves in gasoline, and set themselves on fire holding a copy of Audacity of Hope in one hand and Obama's campaign contribution pie chart in the other.
Apparently, they're just some people with signs sitting in a park, not stopping business, not doing anything at all.
Rosa Parks was also just some lady sitting in a bus, if we remove the blinders of hindsight. It may not be big enough to draw attention yet (although there is definitely a degree of censorship going on which is undisputable re: Yahoo Mail and Koch-funded internet "independent" sock puppets abound so I'd be wary of any info about these protests) but in the domesticated, hypermedia-anesthetized United States, you can't just out and run a marathon. You've got to start with just a couple leg lifts. But as any personal trainer will tell you, the hardest part is just getting off the couch and getting into the gym.
Perhaps in the case of the brutal dictator and the ruthless financial mogul, one of these evils just has the resources, money, and connections to hide his skeletons in distant closets, whereas the more mangy counterpart has to do all the wetwork himself, forced to shit in his own backyard.
At any rate, the Mubareks and Gaddafis are just symptoms, lone-wolf psychopaths, the bottom-rung straggling ends of a very deep, very complex, very fucked up web. The Occupy Wall Street protests, however idealistic, uncoordinated, and perhaps premature, are going after the deeper root. Wall Street is the financial center of the universe, and the epicenter of the global pain and suffering caused, the Death Star core. Even if it was only 200 protesting, the symbolic weight globally cannot be underestimated, and it may very well turn out to be a key galvanization point. And in the US, at least now we're aiming at the right spot, instead of getting off on the left-right artificial WWF politics, cheering on Keith Olberman or Bill O'Reily as they slug it out, forgetting that their meal tickets are coming from the same source.
Obfuscation, hiding heinous crimes by embedding them in complexity so people say, "Well, it's not like the bankers just took out a gun and shot some Ethiopians or mugged you for your wallet" is exactly one of the plutocracy's major strategies. The under-educated Bronx kid, who doesn't have the con-skills and robs $300 from the 711 gets life in prison. The red-tied banker who steals $30 billion from 401ks, police and fireman salaries gets coddled by the president, a bailout, and doubles his bonuses the next year. Probably get a seat at the SEC or in the oval office if he keeps up the "good work". Maybe, since he's so good at hiding the truth, he can get a job systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations for the SEC.
The protest was essentially a giant flashmob, a rainstorm coalescing from a rainbow of nascent and growing groups -- The initial grain was Ad Busters, but later snowballed to include Day of Rage, Anonymous, and even Christian and Vietnam Vet organizations. The diversity was truly heartening, and a harbinger. The fact that there was any American out on the street, sleeping for more than one night in tents, to protest anything other than cancellation of Jersey Shore or the election of a "nigger President" should be considered a major victory.
And, granted, this is just the beginning. The austerity and real depression hasn't even begun to kick in yet, and already we've got people complaining, civil unrest. And we, our political system, our president, and we the people still haven't even begun to face the multi-trillion ton gorilla in the room, that the financial h-bombs are still hidden deep in the Hal-sized HFT supercomputers of the numerati.
It's not a "If you break it, they will go" thing for sure. It's a web, woven of money, connections, and thanks to the world wide wonderful internetz the shadow cancer is more fluid and non-local than ever. A garden is never finished, justice is an eternal process, not the end-state of some equation. Wall Street just happens to be, at this point, the largest nodal point of money, the greatest of great attractors of excess, the Gomorrah of wanton greed -- and, thus, the largest source of power abuse and corruption, to the extent that that megacorporations, ubermegabanks, and the blue blood dynasties still put their foot down on any given geography. It is also thusly the largest reservoir of symbolic juju; the way the Civ Rights groups coalesced around King and Parks, the reason why Osama aimed the 747s at the twin towers and the White House. Even if the heads of AIG, Goldman Sachs, he rest of the financial-industrial cabal, Bernanke, Paulson, half Obama's cabinet, McDonald's, Exxon Mobil, and the Boogeyman were served up on a platter at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, for each that fell, two more would take their place, two more backstabbing sociopaths aiming for the corner office securing their megalomaniacal pissing match King-of-the-Hilldom.
If the country does actually wake up, descend pitchforks and shotguns in hand for the blood of the banksters and the billionaires start getting really burnt by the heat down in Hell's Kitchen, then they will of course be on the first Gulfstream out to London, Beijing, or wherever the "economic climate" is "friendly for business". Cue the pained brows of traders plastered aon CNBC and Time Magazine covers, mass handwringing whining about "brain drain" and "America losing its competitive edge". Politicians banging their shoes on podiums in pretend-outrage as they no longer get their thousand dollar lunches and revolving door opportunities on the boards of major banks. Mass exodus of toxicity, probably a drop in "productivity", which was all falsely inflated hot air consisting of the long skyrocketing price of homes, healthcare, and college which noone can afford anymore. A loss in Gross Domestic Product but a gain in General Happiness Quotient.
Whatever the case, the uber rich would just touch down else where, set up shop in Mumbai, somewhere. We can't stop people being greedy self-destructive assholes short of diving under the hood of our brains and rewiring our neurological reward-feedback pathways, or coming up with some cure for sociopathy and psychopathy. Either is superduper unlikely. But perhaps the thing that's really scaring them is the fact that the global unrest and active resistance is spreading now like wildfire, first from the Arab Spring, then to Greece and Spain, to the US. Already, viral co-protests are breaking out in California, even in Kansas. London heads of state and banks are getting wary of similar movements breaking out across the pond. Will the wildfire create utopia? Probably not. But if you're going after a hydra, it's best to hit all the heads at once, full-on scorched Earth.
And it's not like these people are idiotic glass-shattering anarchists. So far the only violence has been coming from the police,
Some have suggested that these are just a bunch of kids interested in partying, finding something fun to do for the weekend, hooking up and getting their faces on TV.
I'm not sure that's fair. Certainly they're not being shot in the street or lynched up by the dozen, but these people (not just kids but blue collar and middle class who have lost their jobs, homes, healthcare, despite what Fox and other mainstream media continue to spin them as) are out there with their tents and pizza prepared to squat the financial center of the universe for months according to Day of Rage, and the other key organizing sites. Many have even given up well-paying jobs -- those vanishing jewels in this economy -- to travel thousands of miles with almost no money to take part in this movement. They're out there for very specific, personal reasons in most cases, varying from chronic unemployment despite overeducation, absence of basic services, and connecting that with the complete failure of the political and business establishment to do anything about it or even *listen*. You'd discover this if you bother to go deeper than the co-opted US lamestream media. are generally better informed than the average American about the heinous crimes and issues involving Wall Street and the financial-political complex, and are protesting smart, not starting scuffles with police. Granted, not everyone will or can afford to be out there that whole time, but to say 'they're just out to have fun and get famous' when there are people being attacked, having their cameras and tents ripped away by police. And -- thanks to bailout-driven "austerity measures" -- these primarily overeducated yet underemployed aren't exactly 'loaded', and most probably aren't taking "paid vacation time" as that crown jewel of the labor movement is quickly becoming a myth as workers rights are continually eroded.
But beyond that, I think sci/speculative fiction writer William Gibson onced summed it up nicely when asked about his decision to leave the US for Canada during the draft:
"It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippy girls and have lots of hashish than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the North Vietnamese people under US imperialism. Much more, much more to do with hippy girls and hashish."
And I think that goes for most major, global movements. They're as chaotic, insane, and ultimately unpredictable as war, despite the way historians and academics like to tidy up all the black swans into a nice neat movie-script narrative full of protagonists, antagonists, arc and drama. Movements are not legislated into existence, they are not outlined in a boardroom by central planners or sprung fully formed from the dissertations of anthropology professors. They just happen. Sure, the Civil Rights Movement had a core of dedicated individuals in the NAACP, ACLU. But much of that movement, as a subset of the whirlwind that began in the 60's, was also fundamentally about young people doing something fun. Breaking away from the leash of Disneyfied parents still shellshocked from WWII trying to create suburban happy Stepford land. Country kids bored of shoveling hay and listening to uninspired sermons, seeing pictures on this new "Tee-Vee" thing of a place over the rainbow called "San Francisco" where everyone seemed to be having a really great time partying and doing this "mary-wanna" happy stick. And maybe somewhere, running through tear gas away from the cops in New York and a long hot night on the street with a black dancer-turned-demonstrator who’d spent her life under the boot of racism, maybe they found their new selves, came to understand and embody the “cause”. Came to discover the meaning of sacrifice.
I think it goes without saying that without the Beat forefathers of the 50’s and the preceding countercultural movements including the hippies and the whole JFK era awakening, the America we know today would be much worse off, and indeed, the Civil Rights movement would have had much less social traction and political will it needed to take off. As is illustrated most recently in “The Help” and virtually every story where the barriers of color, sex, and religion and other artificial divides between people have been broken, there is always a necessary courage on both sides, the minority (blacks in that case) and majority (whites). So maybe some people came out cause they really believed “the Capitalist Establishment” had to be abandoned for the communes. Maybe some people came out after reading way too much William Burroughs and wanting to blast their minds with every drug available into the Interzone. Maybe some people just followed the busload of hot young hippy chicks. Maybe some people were just bored. Probably for everyone it was a mix of all those, but I doubt even the people there can know their original intents. The important thing was they didn’t just sit around and pontificate to themselves from their armchairs, discuss in committees what “the perfect post-capitalist utopia will look like”, and hold readings of back issues of Das Kapital; no, they got out there and actually DID something. 90% of life is just showing up. I have to applaud the people who occupied, and continue to occupy Wall Street for that, even if they don't immediately accomplish their goals with the first of many legs of protest.
And then we have the complaints, snarking naysayers of the Occupy Wall Street movement along the lines of, "bunch of lazy hippy kids," "too disorganized, incoherent" "these kids have no way to engage at anything close to parity with those they are angry at."
Perhaps only those furthest afield in Marxian LSD land are deluded enough to believe that a few hundred regular occupiers spiking to a few thousand at peak traffic hours are going to topple Goldman "Officially Rules The World" Sachs and the fuckedopoly that metonym represents. Give them at least the benefit of that much self-awareness. Of course the unions will need to get involved; that’s the point. The unions, the watchdog groups, the closet-good investment bank employees, the journalists, the whistleblowers, the doctors, the nurses, the teachers, the parents who care at all about their children’s future, the children who can’t multiply thanks to gutted public school funding but know, somehow, that this is the right thing to do. The cops themselves, who arrested 80 protesters knowing they’re going to be losing their pensions,p possibly jobs, along with the firefighters, and the rest of the public sector. This is just the first verse in a very long song of the movement. These first couple weeks of protest on Wall Street and 35 other cities have been the call; now they’re awaiting the response from all of us.
"Man, those crazy deluded, childish brown skinned Punjabi flinging salt around, how can they expect to ever change anything?" "What's with this stupid negro lady refusing to give up her seat on the bus; what, she think she's going to tear out the crooked ugly veins of North American racism single handedly?"
An external movement is fundamentally a manifestation of the internal zeitgeist of a people, and though it must always start from some small event, if the fuel is there then all you need is the match; If you build it they will come. The political objective of the Ferdinand assassination might have been to peel away Austria-Hungary's south-Slav provinces that they might be combined into a Greater Serbia or a Yugoslavia, yet it wound up setting off the powder keg. WWI, from the spatiotemporal vantage point of the beginning of the 20th century, was a Black Swan event; there had been no major hot war for nearly a century, historians had been writing about “The End Of War”, “The Great Peace” (Not unlike our current Fed Chairman’s crown-jewel paper: “The Great Moderation” of the modern economy). Long before millions occupied the gears and cogs of Libya, chased Gaddafi to Algeria, there were the ninety five theses, long litanies of resentments the mounting piles of nascent jihads had been accumulating. The Libyan people retraced the steps of endless breadlines, the long walks of executed dissidents, trails of tears welling up like years of debt, left unpaid. And if debt goes unpaid long enough, as any honest mathematician will tell you, there will be meltdown; financial, social, or ecological.
Glenn Greenwald from Salon captures it poignantly:
Most importantly, very few protest movements enjoy perfect clarity about tactics or command widespread support when they begin; they're designed to spark conversation, raise awareness, attract others to the cause, and build those structural planks as they grow and develop. Dismissing these incipient protests because they lack fully developed, sophisticated professionalization is akin to pronouncing a three-year-old child worthless because he can't read Schopenhauer: those who are actually interested in helping it develop will work toward improving those deficiencies, not harp on them in order to belittle its worth.
Another case-in-point of the old koan about history rhyming rather than repeating can be vis'ed here:
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."
We may look back one day on this time period, go on actually *paid* vacations from our non-menial service industry, non-slave labor jobs. We'll buy plane tickets to New York with the savings we've accrued as the college-housing-car loan ponzi is finally extinguished and the fruits of our increasingly productive labor comes back to us rather than being stored as zeros and ones in Zurich mainframes, high-frequency-traded by Blue Gene/L-powered algorithms. We’ll stroll down through Zuccotti park with our kids who have health care and a future to look forward to, sweep the LCD screens of our Genius Pads that we can afford without turning our homes into ATM machines, and replay old Twitter bookmarks. Holding up the screen we’ll see geotagged locative installations; the translucent tulpa of Anonymous, bullfighting the Wall Street Bull. Spectral throngs of Occupy Wall Streeters, schooling past, 99%ers of all backgrounds and ages, chanting and pumping fists alongside leisurely patrolling NYPD. Eventually we’ll reach East 12th Street, the new Manhattan Ground Zero, of the World Class War detonation. The Ground Zero that was the World Trade Center and the swamp of financial-political malignancy they once stood for will have long faded like last month's #trending topic from the radars of our collective subconscious, "occupied" and overshadowed by the psycho-social gravitas of the revolution begun on Wall Street. The focal point of Gibson novels will shift from the long shadow of the two towers to the supernova of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The time will cease to be the post-911 world, instead the post-Global Awakening world. The Al Qaeda boogeyman and the War on Abstract Concepts it spawned will all seem like a bad dream, like the rest of the “Lost Decade”, the premise of some near-future sci-fi dystopia rather than anything that had ever been reality. There, at East 12th, we’ll see her ghost, the one people around the world read about in history e-books; the innocent female college student, bawling as she is shot in the face by a mad whiteshirt officer, and remember that shot, heard and seen around the world, as the Ferdinand Assassination moment, the Ghandian nodal point, the Rosa Parks of economics that finally became the Civil Rights Movement of the 21st Century. The world will still be fucked up, people will still be greedy, self-destructive, narcissistic assholes, but maybe things will be a little more like Sweden and less like a cross between a Shenzhen suicide factory and Wlliam Gibson’s hyper-Reaganomic Sprawl.
One thing is for certain: no one will remember those that complained, “They’re just lazy hippy kids” or “They don’t have a coherent set of demands” and then kept calm and carried on. If you don’t like the particular brand of activism you’re seeing, then by all means get down there with the people fighting on your behalf and engage in some proactivism, rather than reactivism. Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall.
Or maybe this will all pass, premature. No one knows the moment of revolution. Until then, we’ll just have to keep marching, occupying, tweeting, crowdsourcing pizza, and dialoging, as we are. Keeping as many flames alive as possible that the keg might be lit when it reaches threshold and blows up on the Banksters and their puppets on the left and right, that Empire of Champagne Toasts and Cooked Books, and the kindling of that Fahrenheit 451 might just be those brave people of the 99% down at Occupy Wall Street right now.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Of Movements and Hydras
So some people have suggested that the Occupy Wall Street blackout doesn't exist, and that reporters and the media just don't care cause it's not like Egypt where people are being killed by a brutal dictator.
So if you wear a pretty charcoal Valentino suit that costs more than a Smarte Car and sip champagne from a Trump balcony while installing, funding, and arming the genocidal dictators, then it's ok. Not to mention the billions who aren't just unable to find a job and healthcare but are actively dying, moving to violence and/or scarcity-based wars in other countries thanks to food commodity speculation and other instances of serial bubbles. One Arab leader killing a citizen is a tragedy, a WASP eradicating 1/4 the planet and extinguishing the potential prosperity of its own country is a statistic better suited for the CNBC marquee. Maybe we should gather all those recently futureless college students, Iraq vets, laid off cops teachers and firemen, and people with stomach cancer who can't afford or have been denied the care to get even the pain-relief meds, ask them all to sit on The Charging Bull, one by one, douse themselves in gasoline, and set themselves on fire holding a copy of Audacity of Hope in one hand and Obama's campaign contribution pie chart in the other.
Apparently, they're just some people with signs sitting in a park, not stopping business, not doing anything at all.
Rosa Parks was also just some lady sitting in a bus, if we remove the blinders of hindsight. It may not be big enough to draw attention yet (although there is definitely a degree of censorship going on which is undisputable re: Yahoo Mail and Koch-funded internet "independent" sock puppets abound so I'd be wary of any info about these protests) but in the domesticated, hypermedia-anesthetized United States, you can't just out and run a marathon. You've got to start with just a couple leg lifts. But as any personal trainer will tell you, the hardest part is just getting off the couch and getting into the gym.
Perhaps in the case of the brutal dictator and the ruthless financial mogul, one of these evils just has the resources, money, and connections to hide his skeletons in distant closets, whereas the more mangy counterpart has to do all the wetwork himself, forced to shit in his own backyard.
At any rate, the Mubareks and Gaddafis are just symptoms, lone-wolf psychopaths, the bottom-rung straggling ends of a very deep, very complex, very fucked up web. The Occupy Wall Street protests, however idealistic, uncoordinated, and perhaps premature, are going after the deeper root. Wall Street is the financial center of the universe, and the epicenter of the global pain and suffering caused, the Death Star core. Even if it was only 200 protesting, the symbolic weight globally cannot be underestimated, and it may very well turn out to be a key galvanization point. And in the US, at least now we're aiming at the right spot, instead of getting off on the left-right artificial WWF politics, cheering on Keith Olberman or Bill O'Reily as they slug it out, forgetting that their meal tickets are coming from the same source.
Obfuscation, hiding heinous crimes by embedding them in complexity so people say, "Well, it's not like the bankers just took out a gun and shot some Ethiopians or mugged you for your wallet" is exactly one of their major strategies. The under-educated Bronx kid, who doesn't have the con-skills and robs $300 from the 711 gets life in prison. The red-tied banker who steals $30 billion from 401ks, police and fireman salaries gets coddled by the president, a bailout, and doubles his bonuses the next year. Probably get a seat at the SEC or in the oval office if he keeps up the "good work". Maybe, since he's so good at hiding the truth, he can get a job systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations for the SEC.
The protest was essentially a giant flashmob, a rainstorm coalescing from a rainbow of nascent and growing groups -- The initial grain was Ad Busters, but later snowballed to include Day of Rage, Anonymous, and even Christian and Vietnam Vet organizations. The diversity was truly heartening, and a harbinger. The fact that there was any American out on the street, sleeping for more than one night in tents, to protest anything other than cancellation of Jersey Shore or the election of a "nigger President" should be considered a major victory.
And, granted, this is just the beginning. The austerity and real depression hasn't even begun to kick in yet, and already we've got people complaining, civil unrest. And we, our political system, our president, and we the people still haven't even begun to face the multi-trillion ton gorilla in the room, that the financial h-bombs are still hidden deep in the Hal-sized HFT supercomputers of the numerati.
It's not a "If you break it, they will go" thing for sure. It's a web, woven of money, connections, and thanks to the world wide wonderful internetz the shadow cancer is more fluid and non-local than ever. A garden is never finished, justice is an eternal process, not the end-state of some equation. Wall Street just happens to be, at this point, the largest nodal point of money, the greatest of great attractors of excess, the Gomorrah of wanton greed -- and, thus, the largest source of power abuse and corruption, to the extent that that megacorporations, ubermegabanks, and the blue blood dynasties still put their foot down on any given geography. It is also thusly the largest reservoir of symbolic juju; the way the Civ Rights groups coalesced around King and Parks, the reason why Osama aimed the 747s at the twin towers and the White House. Even if the heads of AIG, Goldman Sachs, he rest of the financial-industrial cabal, Bernanke, Paulson, half Obama's cabinet, McDonald's, Exxon Mobil, and the Boogeyman were served up on a platter at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, for each that fell, two more would take their place, two more backstabbing sociopaths aiming for the corner office securing their megalomaniacal pissing match King-of-the-Hilldom.
If the country does actually wake up, descend pitchforks and shotguns in hand for the blood of the banksters and the billionaires start getting really burnt by the heat down in Hell's Kitchen, then they will of course be on the first Gulfstream out to London, Beijing, or wherever the "economic climate" is "friendly for business". Cue the pained brows of traders plastered aon CNBC and Time Magazine covers, mass handwringing whining about "brain drain" and "America losing its competitive edge". Politicians banging their shoes on podiums in pretend-outrage as they no longer get their thousand dollar lunches and revolving door opportunities on the boards of major banks. Mass exodus of toxicity, probably a drop in "productivity", which was all falsely inflated hot air consisting of the long skyrocketing price of homes, healthcare, and college which noone can afford anymore. A loss in Gross Domestic Product but a gain in General Happiness Quotient.
Whatever the case, the uber rich would just touch down else where, set up shop in Mumbai, somewhere. We can't stop people being greedy self-destructive assholes short of diving under the hood of our brains and rewiring our neurological reward-feedback pathways, or coming up with some cure for sociopathy and psychopathy. Either is superduper unlikely. But perhaps the thing that's really scaring them is the fact that the global unrest and active resistance is spreading now like wildfire, first from the Arab Spring, then to Greece and Spain, to the US. Already, viral co-protests are breaking out in California, even in Kansas. London heads of state and banks are getting wary of similar movements breaking out across the pond. Will the wildfire create utopia? Probably not. But if you're going after a hydra, it's best to hit all the heads at once, full-on scorched Earth.
And it's not like these people are idiotic glass-shattering anarchists. So far the only violence has been coming from the police,
Some have suggested that these are just a bunch of kids interested in partying, finding something fun to do for the weekend, hooking up and getting their faces on TV.
I'm not sure that's fair. Certainly they're not being shot in the street or lynched up by the dozen, but these people (not just kids but blue collar and middle class who have lost their jobs, homes, healthcare, despite what Fox and other mainstream media continue to spin them as) are out there with their tents and pizza prepared to squat the financial center of the universe for months according to Day of Rage, and the other key organizing sites. Many have even given up well-paying jobs -- those vanishing jewels in this economy -- to travel thousands of miles with almost no money to take part in this movement. They're out there for very specific, personal reasons in most cases, varying from chronic unemployment despite overeducation, absence of basic services, and connecting that with the complete failure of the political and business establishment to do anything about it or even *listen*. You'd discover this if you bother to go deeper than the co-opted US lamestream media. are generally better informed than the average American about the heinous crimes and issues involving Wall Street and the financial-political complex, and are protesting smart, not starting scuffles with police. Granted, not everyone will or can afford to be out there that whole time, but to say 'they're just out to have fun and get famous' when there are people being attacked, having their cameras and tents ripped away by police. And -- thanks to bailout-driven "austerity measures" -- these primarily overeducated yet underemployed aren't exactly 'loaded', and most probably aren't taking "paid vacation time" as that crown jewel of the labor movement is quickly becoming a myth as workers rights are continually eroded.
But beyond that, I think sci/speculative fiction writer William Gibson onced summed it up nicely when asked about his decision to leave the US for Canada during the draft:
"It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippy girls and have lots of hashish than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the North Vietnamese people under US imperialism. Much more, much more to do with hippy girls and hashish."
And I think that goes for most major, global movements. They're as chaotic, insane, and ultimately unpredictable as war, despite the way historians and academics like to tidy up all the black swans into a nice neat movie-script narrative full of protagonists, antagonists, arc and drama. Movements are not legislated into existence, they are not outlined in a boardroom by central planners or sprung fully formed from the dissertations of anthropology professors. They just happen. Sure, the Civil Rights Movement had a core of dedicated individuals in the NAACP, ACLU. But much of that movement, as a subset of the whirlwind that began in the 60's, was also fundamentally about young people doing something fun. Breaking away from the leash of Disneyfied parents still shellshocked from WWII trying to create suburban happy Stepford land. Country kids bored of shoveling hay and listening to uninspired sermons, seeing pictures on this new "Tee-Vee" thing of a place over the rainbow called "San Francisco" where everyone seemed to be having a really great time partying and doing this "mary-wanna" happy stick. And maybe somewhere, running through tear gas away from the cops in New York and a long hot night on the street with a black dancer-turned-demonstrator who’d spent her life under the boot of racism, maybe they found their new selves, came to understand and embody the “cause”. Came to discover the meaning of sacrifice.
I think it goes without saying that without the Beat forefathers of the 50’s and the preceding countercultural movements including the hippies and the JFK era, the America we know today would be much worse off, and indeed, the Civil Rights movement would have had much less needed social traction and political will to take off. As is illustrated most recently in “The Help” and virtually every story where the barriers of color, sex, and religion and other artificial divides between people have been broken, there is always a necessary courage on both sides, the minority (blacks in that case) and majority (whites). So maybe some people came out cause they really believed “the Capitalist Establishment” had to be abandoned for the communes. Maybe some people came out after reading way too much William Burroughs and wanting to blast their minds with every drug available into the Interzone. Maybe some people just followed the busload of hot young hippy chicks. Maybe some people were just bored. Probably for everyone it was a mix of all those, but I doubt even the people there can know their original intents. The important thing was they didn’t just sit around and pontificate to themselves from their armchairs, discuss in committees what “the perfect post-capitalist utopia will look like”, and hold readings of back issues of Das Kapital; no, they got out there and actually DID something. 90% of life is just showing up. I have to applaud the people who occupied, and continue to occupy Wall Street for that, even if they don't immediately accomplish their goals with the first of many legs of protest.
So if you wear a pretty charcoal Valentino suit that costs more than a Smarte Car and sip champagne from a Trump balcony while installing, funding, and arming the genocidal dictators, then it's ok. Not to mention the billions who aren't just unable to find a job and healthcare but are actively dying, moving to violence and/or scarcity-based wars in other countries thanks to food commodity speculation and other instances of serial bubbles. One Arab leader killing a citizen is a tragedy, a WASP eradicating 1/4 the planet and extinguishing the potential prosperity of its own country is a statistic better suited for the CNBC marquee. Maybe we should gather all those recently futureless college students, Iraq vets, laid off cops teachers and firemen, and people with stomach cancer who can't afford or have been denied the care to get even the pain-relief meds, ask them all to sit on The Charging Bull, one by one, douse themselves in gasoline, and set themselves on fire holding a copy of Audacity of Hope in one hand and Obama's campaign contribution pie chart in the other.
Apparently, they're just some people with signs sitting in a park, not stopping business, not doing anything at all.
Rosa Parks was also just some lady sitting in a bus, if we remove the blinders of hindsight. It may not be big enough to draw attention yet (although there is definitely a degree of censorship going on which is undisputable re: Yahoo Mail and Koch-funded internet "independent" sock puppets abound so I'd be wary of any info about these protests) but in the domesticated, hypermedia-anesthetized United States, you can't just out and run a marathon. You've got to start with just a couple leg lifts. But as any personal trainer will tell you, the hardest part is just getting off the couch and getting into the gym.
Perhaps in the case of the brutal dictator and the ruthless financial mogul, one of these evils just has the resources, money, and connections to hide his skeletons in distant closets, whereas the more mangy counterpart has to do all the wetwork himself, forced to shit in his own backyard.
At any rate, the Mubareks and Gaddafis are just symptoms, lone-wolf psychopaths, the bottom-rung straggling ends of a very deep, very complex, very fucked up web. The Occupy Wall Street protests, however idealistic, uncoordinated, and perhaps premature, are going after the deeper root. Wall Street is the financial center of the universe, and the epicenter of the global pain and suffering caused, the Death Star core. Even if it was only 200 protesting, the symbolic weight globally cannot be underestimated, and it may very well turn out to be a key galvanization point. And in the US, at least now we're aiming at the right spot, instead of getting off on the left-right artificial WWF politics, cheering on Keith Olberman or Bill O'Reily as they slug it out, forgetting that their meal tickets are coming from the same source.
Obfuscation, hiding heinous crimes by embedding them in complexity so people say, "Well, it's not like the bankers just took out a gun and shot some Ethiopians or mugged you for your wallet" is exactly one of their major strategies. The under-educated Bronx kid, who doesn't have the con-skills and robs $300 from the 711 gets life in prison. The red-tied banker who steals $30 billion from 401ks, police and fireman salaries gets coddled by the president, a bailout, and doubles his bonuses the next year. Probably get a seat at the SEC or in the oval office if he keeps up the "good work". Maybe, since he's so good at hiding the truth, he can get a job systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations for the SEC.
The protest was essentially a giant flashmob, a rainstorm coalescing from a rainbow of nascent and growing groups -- The initial grain was Ad Busters, but later snowballed to include Day of Rage, Anonymous, and even Christian and Vietnam Vet organizations. The diversity was truly heartening, and a harbinger. The fact that there was any American out on the street, sleeping for more than one night in tents, to protest anything other than cancellation of Jersey Shore or the election of a "nigger President" should be considered a major victory.
And, granted, this is just the beginning. The austerity and real depression hasn't even begun to kick in yet, and already we've got people complaining, civil unrest. And we, our political system, our president, and we the people still haven't even begun to face the multi-trillion ton gorilla in the room, that the financial h-bombs are still hidden deep in the Hal-sized HFT supercomputers of the numerati.
It's not a "If you break it, they will go" thing for sure. It's a web, woven of money, connections, and thanks to the world wide wonderful internetz the shadow cancer is more fluid and non-local than ever. A garden is never finished, justice is an eternal process, not the end-state of some equation. Wall Street just happens to be, at this point, the largest nodal point of money, the greatest of great attractors of excess, the Gomorrah of wanton greed -- and, thus, the largest source of power abuse and corruption, to the extent that that megacorporations, ubermegabanks, and the blue blood dynasties still put their foot down on any given geography. It is also thusly the largest reservoir of symbolic juju; the way the Civ Rights groups coalesced around King and Parks, the reason why Osama aimed the 747s at the twin towers and the White House. Even if the heads of AIG, Goldman Sachs, he rest of the financial-industrial cabal, Bernanke, Paulson, half Obama's cabinet, McDonald's, Exxon Mobil, and the Boogeyman were served up on a platter at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, for each that fell, two more would take their place, two more backstabbing sociopaths aiming for the corner office securing their megalomaniacal pissing match King-of-the-Hilldom.
If the country does actually wake up, descend pitchforks and shotguns in hand for the blood of the banksters and the billionaires start getting really burnt by the heat down in Hell's Kitchen, then they will of course be on the first Gulfstream out to London, Beijing, or wherever the "economic climate" is "friendly for business". Cue the pained brows of traders plastered aon CNBC and Time Magazine covers, mass handwringing whining about "brain drain" and "America losing its competitive edge". Politicians banging their shoes on podiums in pretend-outrage as they no longer get their thousand dollar lunches and revolving door opportunities on the boards of major banks. Mass exodus of toxicity, probably a drop in "productivity", which was all falsely inflated hot air consisting of the long skyrocketing price of homes, healthcare, and college which noone can afford anymore. A loss in Gross Domestic Product but a gain in General Happiness Quotient.
Whatever the case, the uber rich would just touch down else where, set up shop in Mumbai, somewhere. We can't stop people being greedy self-destructive assholes short of diving under the hood of our brains and rewiring our neurological reward-feedback pathways, or coming up with some cure for sociopathy and psychopathy. Either is superduper unlikely. But perhaps the thing that's really scaring them is the fact that the global unrest and active resistance is spreading now like wildfire, first from the Arab Spring, then to Greece and Spain, to the US. Already, viral co-protests are breaking out in California, even in Kansas. London heads of state and banks are getting wary of similar movements breaking out across the pond. Will the wildfire create utopia? Probably not. But if you're going after a hydra, it's best to hit all the heads at once, full-on scorched Earth.
And it's not like these people are idiotic glass-shattering anarchists. So far the only violence has been coming from the police,
Some have suggested that these are just a bunch of kids interested in partying, finding something fun to do for the weekend, hooking up and getting their faces on TV.
I'm not sure that's fair. Certainly they're not being shot in the street or lynched up by the dozen, but these people (not just kids but blue collar and middle class who have lost their jobs, homes, healthcare, despite what Fox and other mainstream media continue to spin them as) are out there with their tents and pizza prepared to squat the financial center of the universe for months according to Day of Rage, and the other key organizing sites. Many have even given up well-paying jobs -- those vanishing jewels in this economy -- to travel thousands of miles with almost no money to take part in this movement. They're out there for very specific, personal reasons in most cases, varying from chronic unemployment despite overeducation, absence of basic services, and connecting that with the complete failure of the political and business establishment to do anything about it or even *listen*. You'd discover this if you bother to go deeper than the co-opted US lamestream media. are generally better informed than the average American about the heinous crimes and issues involving Wall Street and the financial-political complex, and are protesting smart, not starting scuffles with police. Granted, not everyone will or can afford to be out there that whole time, but to say 'they're just out to have fun and get famous' when there are people being attacked, having their cameras and tents ripped away by police. And -- thanks to bailout-driven "austerity measures" -- these primarily overeducated yet underemployed aren't exactly 'loaded', and most probably aren't taking "paid vacation time" as that crown jewel of the labor movement is quickly becoming a myth as workers rights are continually eroded.
But beyond that, I think sci/speculative fiction writer William Gibson onced summed it up nicely when asked about his decision to leave the US for Canada during the draft:
"It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippy girls and have lots of hashish than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the North Vietnamese people under US imperialism. Much more, much more to do with hippy girls and hashish."
And I think that goes for most major, global movements. They're as chaotic, insane, and ultimately unpredictable as war, despite the way historians and academics like to tidy up all the black swans into a nice neat movie-script narrative full of protagonists, antagonists, arc and drama. Movements are not legislated into existence, they are not outlined in a boardroom by central planners or sprung fully formed from the dissertations of anthropology professors. They just happen. Sure, the Civil Rights Movement had a core of dedicated individuals in the NAACP, ACLU. But much of that movement, as a subset of the whirlwind that began in the 60's, was also fundamentally about young people doing something fun. Breaking away from the leash of Disneyfied parents still shellshocked from WWII trying to create suburban happy Stepford land. Country kids bored of shoveling hay and listening to uninspired sermons, seeing pictures on this new "Tee-Vee" thing of a place over the rainbow called "San Francisco" where everyone seemed to be having a really great time partying and doing this "mary-wanna" happy stick. And maybe somewhere, running through tear gas away from the cops in New York and a long hot night on the street with a black dancer-turned-demonstrator who’d spent her life under the boot of racism, maybe they found their new selves, came to understand and embody the “cause”. Came to discover the meaning of sacrifice.
I think it goes without saying that without the Beat forefathers of the 50’s and the preceding countercultural movements including the hippies and the JFK era, the America we know today would be much worse off, and indeed, the Civil Rights movement would have had much less needed social traction and political will to take off. As is illustrated most recently in “The Help” and virtually every story where the barriers of color, sex, and religion and other artificial divides between people have been broken, there is always a necessary courage on both sides, the minority (blacks in that case) and majority (whites). So maybe some people came out cause they really believed “the Capitalist Establishment” had to be abandoned for the communes. Maybe some people came out after reading way too much William Burroughs and wanting to blast their minds with every drug available into the Interzone. Maybe some people just followed the busload of hot young hippy chicks. Maybe some people were just bored. Probably for everyone it was a mix of all those, but I doubt even the people there can know their original intents. The important thing was they didn’t just sit around and pontificate to themselves from their armchairs, discuss in committees what “the perfect post-capitalist utopia will look like”, and hold readings of back issues of Das Kapital; no, they got out there and actually DID something. 90% of life is just showing up. I have to applaud the people who occupied, and continue to occupy Wall Street for that, even if they don't immediately accomplish their goals with the first of many legs of protest.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Eat The Rich
Occupy Wall Street: the Civil Rights sit-in of the 21st century. https://occupywallst.org/
If you care about anything other than your portfolio and you're in the Manhattan area, get your ass to Wall Street and join the occupation!
This is America's Tahrir moment. This is the United People of The World waking up from their anesthetization, their exit from the Pluto's Cave, no longer buying blindly into the shadow-puppet show of left-and-right cast on the walls of their cage. This is them re-uniting and rising up in one collective middle finger to the Powerful Assholes of The World and letting them know that -- like the Gaddafis, the Mubareks, the King Georges and the Louis XVI before them -- their 15 minutes is up, that the Universe they believed they had Mastered is coming to a Big Crunch. And not even their global racket woven of near-light speed high-frequency-trades will be able to escape the horizon of this event. They will discover their golden parachutes turned to lead, and when they fall, like the millions of unemployed, underemployed, uninsured, homeless and pensionless, they will *not* have a safety net built from the blood sweat and taxes of the people to break their impact. They may pay their kowtowing media empire, the CNNs, Fox News, even the New York Times and the Time Magazines bend to their will, look the other way in fear or their meal tickets like 1940's Germans. Funny how the major news media are there in seconds, dodging RPGs to get the fullest coverage of public protests in Greece, Egypt, Libya, yet when their own sons and daughters, Americans descend on the financial capital of the US, those fair-weather organizations are silent, or dismiss the protests as "a little gathering of liberals and aging hippies".
The lamestream media blackout will not end at the geographical boundaries of either seaboard. The Money tentacles will extend to the webosphere, and the armchair "Twitter Revolution" touting Techvangelists will have their moment of truth when Goldman and AIG board members offer to buy consensus reality, pay to have unfavorable #trending topics redacted from the collective consciousness. We'll see if that "Don't Be Evil" t-shirt slogan is more than just a skin-deep hedge against antitrust lawsuits when Google and Facebook are threatened to kneel down and join the cocksucking ranks of the traditional media whores and quietly tweak their pagerank algorithms, "personalization filters" to silence the voice of the actual people of the US, as opposed to just the cheerleading Silicon Valley hoi-polloi circlejerking and tweeting the party hype for kudos and digital dimes. The "collective intelligence" will be thrown into cognitive dissonance. Out on The Street tonight are those 200 million chronically jobless 20-somethings who played by the rules, Stayed In School, to discover the American Dream is the American Sham; left with Physics/Marketing double PhDs and an Orange County mortgage-worth in student loans, fighting Micronesian immigrants for grease-pit jobs, blogging tweeting and "building their brand" in their underwear whilst trying to convince themself it's employment. "Fuck school. Fuck honesty, integrity, hard work, causes bigger than yourself. Win, win, win, that's what life is about. Lie, cheat, steal, fraud, and export your toxic waste onto the nearest sucker, and let the Devil take the rest. Better them than me." This is the culture, the legacy that we're handing on down as fertile visions of bright, green, sustainable futures wither, the seeds dying in infancy with every depression-crushed new business, with every passing month's unemployment, skill bases left to rot in parent's living rooms in front of the X-Box.
These jobless, overeducated generation of new-hobohemians will be tempted by the Kochs and Rothschilds with payment in actual dollar amounts to utilize their college-honed writing skills to join the left-right Obamacare vs Teabagger pundit slapfights, against their own interest. And even if the United Oligarchies of America fail to buy out Generation Fucked-Over, a billion sock-puppet powered robo-bloggers and propaganda forums and equally mindless onslaughts of Jersey Shore clones will do their darndest to take our eyes off the ball, pull the Wizard of Oz curtain back over the festering naked lunch while we're fishing for change out of our parents' couches to buy a greasy shrinkwrapped McHeart Attack burger causing a heart attack that isn't covered in our plan. But you know that for a healthy, balanced society, what we need to do is EAT THE RICH.
And if you can't eat'em - tax'em. http://lat.ms/oQaYCF
For some good dissection of the specific heinous financial atrocities that continue unfettered and unprosecuted, have a look at The Market Ticker site
If you care about anything other than your portfolio and you're in the Manhattan area, get your ass to Wall Street and join the occupation!
This is America's Tahrir moment. This is the United People of The World waking up from their anesthetization, their exit from the Pluto's Cave, no longer buying blindly into the shadow-puppet show of left-and-right cast on the walls of their cage. This is them re-uniting and rising up in one collective middle finger to the Powerful Assholes of The World and letting them know that -- like the Gaddafis, the Mubareks, the King Georges and the Louis XVI before them -- their 15 minutes is up, that the Universe they believed they had Mastered is coming to a Big Crunch. And not even their global racket woven of near-light speed high-frequency-trades will be able to escape the horizon of this event. They will discover their golden parachutes turned to lead, and when they fall, like the millions of unemployed, underemployed, uninsured, homeless and pensionless, they will *not* have a safety net built from the blood sweat and taxes of the people to break their impact. They may pay their kowtowing media empire, the CNNs, Fox News, even the New York Times and the Time Magazines bend to their will, look the other way in fear or their meal tickets like 1940's Germans. Funny how the major news media are there in seconds, dodging RPGs to get the fullest coverage of public protests in Greece, Egypt, Libya, yet when their own sons and daughters, Americans descend on the financial capital of the US, those fair-weather organizations are silent, or dismiss the protests as "a little gathering of liberals and aging hippies".
The lamestream media blackout will not end at the geographical boundaries of either seaboard. The Money tentacles will extend to the webosphere, and the armchair "Twitter Revolution" touting Techvangelists will have their moment of truth when Goldman and AIG board members offer to buy consensus reality, pay to have unfavorable #trending topics redacted from the collective consciousness. We'll see if that "Don't Be Evil" t-shirt slogan is more than just a skin-deep hedge against antitrust lawsuits when Google and Facebook are threatened to kneel down and join the cocksucking ranks of the traditional media whores and quietly tweak their pagerank algorithms, "personalization filters" to silence the voice of the actual people of the US, as opposed to just the cheerleading Silicon Valley hoi-polloi circlejerking and tweeting the party hype for kudos and digital dimes. The "collective intelligence" will be thrown into cognitive dissonance. Out on The Street tonight are those 200 million chronically jobless 20-somethings who played by the rules, Stayed In School, to discover the American Dream is the American Sham; left with Physics/Marketing double PhDs and an Orange County mortgage-worth in student loans, fighting Micronesian immigrants for grease-pit jobs, blogging tweeting and "building their brand" in their underwear whilst trying to convince themself it's employment. "Fuck school. Fuck honesty, integrity, hard work, causes bigger than yourself. Win, win, win, that's what life is about. Lie, cheat, steal, fraud, and export your toxic waste onto the nearest sucker, and let the Devil take the rest. Better them than me." This is the culture, the legacy that we're handing on down as fertile visions of bright, green, sustainable futures wither, the seeds dying in infancy with every depression-crushed new business, with every passing month's unemployment, skill bases left to rot in parent's living rooms in front of the X-Box.
These jobless, overeducated generation of new-hobohemians will be tempted by the Kochs and Rothschilds with payment in actual dollar amounts to utilize their college-honed writing skills to join the left-right Obamacare vs Teabagger pundit slapfights, against their own interest. And even if the United Oligarchies of America fail to buy out Generation Fucked-Over, a billion sock-puppet powered robo-bloggers and propaganda forums and equally mindless onslaughts of Jersey Shore clones will do their darndest to take our eyes off the ball, pull the Wizard of Oz curtain back over the festering naked lunch while we're fishing for change out of our parents' couches to buy a greasy shrinkwrapped McHeart Attack burger causing a heart attack that isn't covered in our plan. But you know that for a healthy, balanced society, what we need to do is EAT THE RICH.
And if you can't eat'em - tax'em. http://lat.ms/oQaYCF
For some good dissection of the specific heinous financial atrocities that continue unfettered and unprosecuted, have a look at The Market Ticker site
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