It’s impossible to know where to begin when paying tribute to an intellectual giant and truly Dangerous Mind like author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, who died today of metastized esophogeal cancer.
Far more elegant remembrances will pour in from far more skilled writers than I could ever hope to be. Here’s three hours of the guy speaking for himself on CSPAN’s Book TV show.
I was looking for an image of an old labor movement poster that had the fat cat asking the mouse “You going let that union guy steal your cookie?” which I’ve always thought was the ultimate stick in the eye to working class people who watch Fox News and believe billionaire “job creators” deserve tax cuts, whilst union members and their families—you, know, their actual neighbors and relatives!—should have to make greater sacrifices. Instead of a vintage image, I came across the above illustration, Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt’s “We’re All in This Together,” their contribution to the terrific looking Occupy Comics project (which Alan Moore has just signed on to as well).
Isn’t that just a thing of beauty? It deserves to be a poster/lithograph too. I bet a lot of people would buy them. I certainly would. It’s something that needs to get around. and be seen.
“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
That quote (and Google) in turn led me to stumble across The Punk Patriot, who has been making politically-themed YouTube videos for some time now—that are often quite good—with the aim to promote “life, liberty and the pursuit of a less fucked-up government.” Worthy goals, indeed!
In the clip below, The Punk Patriot takes on the Reichwing echo-chamber. This is a great video to send to that Archie Bunker-ish great uncle of yours who annoyed the shit out of you on Thanksgiving with his Fox News/Dittohead nonsense…
Late last month in Mexico City, Alejandro Jodorowsky organized the “March of the Skulls” to disperse negative energy caused by the death toll of the nation’s drug war. Nearly 40,000 Mexicans have died drug war related deaths in the past five years. The advance billing for the November 27th event described it as “the first act of collective psycho-magic in Mexico” and it attracted nearly 3000 people who donned skeleton masks, face-paint, tops hats. Some marchers carried black versions of the Mexican flag and shouted “Long live the dead!”
The “maestro” arrived at the palace steps about 1:30 p.m., causing brief havoc among the gathered calaveras as people jostled to get near him. The white-haired Jodorowsky, fit and agile at 82, wore a black sports coat, a bright purple scarf and a detailed skull mask.
Along with his family, Jodorowsky led the calaveras up the Eje Central avenue to Plaza Garibaldi in a mostly silent demonstration. In the late 1980s, he filmed some key scenes of “Santa Sangre” at this plaza, homebase for the city’s for-hire mariachi bands. On Sunday, it was easy to imagine another “Santa Sangre” scene being filmed during the march, but this time from a dark and unfamiliar future.
Someone decided the group should sing a song. It became “La Llorona,” the Weeping Woman.
Jodorowsky was displeased with the group’s initial interpretation, so he asked for another go at it. A mariachi band joined in as accompaniment.
“There are 50,000 dead beings,” Jodorowsky said through a bullhorn, before the sea of skulls. “They are sheep. They are not black sheep. We must have mercy for these souls that have disappeared. Let’s sing this song with lament, as if we were the mother of one of these persons. Understand?”
Then he asked that all those present cross and link their arms with those of the strangers around them. The group did. They chanted “Peace, peace, peace!” until Jodorowsky asked that everyone let out a big laugh. Laughter and applause followed.
You have to love that the wiley shaman did the old “c’mon you guys can do better” routine and made them sing it again!
After the jump, a news report about Alejandro Jodorowsky’s November 27, 2011 Psychomagic event in Mexico.
The 12-member congressional “Super Committee” failed, as we all knew it would, when Republicans stood firm in their craven, lickspittle fealty to the wealthiest Americans. Everyone knew, everyone paying even the slightest bit of attention to these clowns—and their Democrat “enablers”—that it was going to fail. No one was surprised. No one at all. Failure WAS the expectation from day one (Is there even a single dissenter to that opinion, on the right or left out there? Anyone? I didn’t think so).
The Occupy Movement has been criticized by small-minded types for “having no plans” etc, but what did they expect after merely a few weeks, anyway?
And then there is thisextraordinary document (below) in which the Occupy Washington, DC peeps throw down the gauntlet in style. Reproduced here in full. I encourage you to read them both carefully and then share these documents with everyone you know, on FB, on Twitter and everywhere else.
[Note, I am not putting this in block quotes, it would be 4ft. long if I did, but to make it clear in case it’s not: I did not write this. I agree with it wholeheartedly, and I very strongly endorse it, but I did not write it and I don’t want to confuse anyone that I did, okay?]
WHEREAS THE FIRST AMENDMENT TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION PROVIDES THAT: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
BE IT RESOLVED THAT:
WE, THE NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF THE PEOPLE of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in order to form a more perfect Union, by, for and of the PEOPLE, shall elect and convene a NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY the week of July 4, 2012 in the City Of Philadelphia to prepare and ratify a PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES on behalf of the Ninety-Nine Percent of United States citizens.
I. Election of Delegates:
In or about March 2012, the People, consisting of all United States citizens who have reached the age of 18, regardless of party affiliation and voter registration status, shall elect Two Delegates, one male and one female, by direct vote, from each of the existing 435 Congressional Districts to represent the People at the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY. The office of Delegate shall be open to all United States citizens who have reached the age of 18.
No candidate for Delegate to the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY will be permitted to run on a party line or use any party label while running for or serving as a Delegate. No candidate or Delegate may take private money from any source except to fund his or her trip to the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY. Election Committees in the 435 voting districts, consisting of volunteers, shall organize, coordinate and transparently fund this election. The voting process shall be free from the corrupting influence of corporate money and all funds raised by the Working Group on the 99% Declaration shall be used for the purpose of funding the election of Delegates and providing a venue for the Delegates to meet in Philadelphia.
II. Meeting of the National General Assembly and Approval of a Petition for a Redress of Grievances:
In addition to ensuring a free and fair election of the Delegates to the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY, the Working Group on the 99% Declaration shall be responsible for raising sufficient funds to secure a venue wherein the 876* Delegates may convene, deliberate and ratify a PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES. The ratified PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES will be signed by the Delegates and presented to all 535 members of Congress, the 9 members of the Supreme Court, the President of the United States and each of the political candidates seeking to be elected to federal public office in the November 2012 general election. Because the time in Philadelphia will be limited, between March 2012 and July 2012, the elected Delegates shall meet electronically, or in person if possible, to confer and write the PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES. Subject to the voting procedure regarding the final vote for ratification of the PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES as set forth in section III, the Delegates of the National General Assembly shall implement their own rules, procedures, agenda, code of conduct, internal elections or appointments of committee members to efficiently and expeditiously accomplish the People’s mandate to present a PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES to all three branches of the government of the United States of America and political candidates before the 2012 general election.
III. Content of the Petition for a Redress of Grievances:
The PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES ratified by the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY shall be non-partisan and specifically address the critical issues now confronting the People of the United States of America. The PETITION shall be a product of the 876 elected Delegates who will confer with the American People during its creation. While attending the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY in July 2012 the Delegates shall deliberate and vote upon grievances, proposals and solutions to be included in the PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES and, if necessary, adjourn for further consultation with the American People as our founding fathers did during the first two Continental Congresses. The final vote ratifying the PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES shall be by a simple majority vote of the 876 delegates. A duly elected chairperson of the National General Assembly shall determine the outcome of the final vote on ratification in the event of a tie. Upon ratification, all of the Delegates shall affix their signatures to the PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES so it may be served upon all candidates running for national political office in the 2012 general election and the seated members of the three branches of the United States Government.
IV. Suggested Content of the Petition for a Redress of Grievances.
In order to facilitate the timely election of the 876 Delegates to the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY by July 4, 2012 and submission of the PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES before the 2012 general election, the Working Group on the 99% Declaration, shall include with this Declaration a suggested list of grievances to be submitted to the Delegates of the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY no later than April 30, 2012. The final version of the PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES, to be written and ratified solely by the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY, may or may not include the following issues currently suggested by the Working Group on the 99% Declaration:
1. Elimination of the Corporate State. The merger of the American political system of republican democracy with the economic system of capitalism has resulted in the establishment of a corporate government of, by and for the benefit of domestic and multi-national corporations. Therefore, the 99% of the American People demand an immediate ban on all direct and indirect private contributions of any thing of value, to all politicians serving in or running for federal office in the United States. This ban shall extend to all individuals, corporations, “political action committees,” “super political action committees,” lobbyists, unions and all other private sources of money or things of value, including but not limited to, promises of employment. Private funding of political campaigns from concentrated sources of wealth have corrupted our political system. Therefore, all private funding of political campaigns shall be replaced by the fair, equal and TOTAL public financing of all federal political campaigns.
We, the 99% of the American People, categorically REJECT the concepts that corporations are persons and that money is equivalent to free speech because if that were so, then only the wealthiest people, corporations and entities possessing concentrated wealth would have a meaningful voice in our society. We demand the immediate and complete elimination of all private political contributions through the enactment of new campaign finance laws and Constitutional amendment if necessary. It has become clear that politicians in the United States cannot regulate themselves and have become the exclusive representatives of corporations, unions and the very wealthy who indirectly and directly spend vast sums of money on political campaigns to influence the candidates’ decisions when they attain office and ensure their reelection year after year despite historically low disapproval ratings by the American People. It has been estimated that 94% of all federal political campaigns are won by the candidate who spends the most money on the campaign. As a result, our elected representatives spend far too much time fundraising for the next election rather than doing the People’s business. This constant need for more and more money, causes our politicians to labor under obscene conflicts of interest that make it impossible for them to act in the best interests of the American People. Indeed, the current system’s propagation of legalized bribery and conflicts of interests has reduced our democracy to a greed driven corporatocracy run by oligarchs who represent .05 to 1% of the population but own 38% to 40% of the wealth. Through their exclusive control of politicians, the incomes of the top 1% have increased 275% since 1979 while most other salaries have remained virtually flat or declined.
2. Abrogation of the “Citizens United” Case. The immediate abrogation, even if it requires a Constitutional Amendment, of the outrageous and anti-democratic Supreme Court holding in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and its progeny. This heinous decision proclaimed by the United States Supreme Court in 2010 equates the direct and indirect payment of money to politicians by political action committees, corporations, wealthy individuals and unions with the exercise of protected free speech. We, the 99% of the American People, demand that this institutional bribery never again be deemed protected free speech and all direct and indirect private payments to politicians end immediately.
3. Elimination of All Private Benefits and “Perks” to Public Servants. The 99% of the American People demand the immediate prohibition of special benefits to all federal elected officials, public employees, officers, public servants, officials or their immediate family members including a corrupt “revolving door” in and out of our government. Elected and unelected public officials and their immediate families shall be banned from ever being employed by any corporation, lobbying firm, individual or business that the public official specifically regulated while in office. No public employee, officer, official or their immediate family members shall own or hold any stock or shares in any corporation or other entity that the elected or unelected public official specifically regulated while in office until a full 5 years after their term or employment is completed. There shall be a complete lifetime ban on the acceptance of all gifts, services, money or thing of value, directly or indirectly, by any elected or appointed public official or their immediate family members, from any person, corporation, union or any other entity that the public official was charged to specifically regulate while he or she was in office.
The term “specifically regulate” shall mean service or employment on a committee or sub-committee or service within any agency or department of the federal government responsible for the regulation of the person, union, corporation or entity in question. To root out corruption and restore integrity to our political system, all elected politicians and public employees must ONLY collect their salary, generous healthcare benefits and pension. To enforce these policies, Congress shall immediately pass new criminal laws banning the aforementioned private benefits to politicians and public officials. Any person, including individuals connected directly or indirectly to corporations, lobbyists, or unions who violate these new criminal laws shall be sentenced to a term of mandatory imprisonment of no less than two years and not more than ten years. Special benefits shall include the use of insider information by elected and unelected public officials to profit in financial markets or investments.
4. Term Limits. Members of the United States House of Representatives shall be limited to serving no more than four two-year terms in their lifetime. Members of the United States Senate shall be limited to serving no more than two six-year terms in their lifetime. The two-term limit for President shall remain unchanged. Serving as a member of Congress or as the President of the United States is one of the highest honors and privileges our culture can bestow. These positions of prominence in our society should be sought to serve one’s country and not provide a lifetime career designed to increase personal wealth and accumulate power for the sake of vanity and hubris. The lengths that today’s politicians will go to for the sake of clinging to power demonstrate the critical need for term limits and making career politicians the exception rather than the rule.
5. A Fair Tax Code. A complete reformation and simplification of the United States Tax Code to require ALL individuals and corporations to pay a fair share of a progressive, graduated income tax by eliminating loopholes, unfair tax breaks, exemptions and unfair deductions, subsidies and ending all other methods of evading taxes. The current system of taxation unjustly favors the wealthiest Americans, many of whom pay fewer taxes to the United States Treasury than citizens who earn much less and pay a much higher percentage of their incomes in taxes. Any corporation or entity that does business in the United States and generates income from that business in the United States shall be fully taxed on that income regardless of corporate domicile or they will be barred from earning their profits in the United States. This will allow honest companies and individuals who pay their fair share in taxes to take over those markets in the United States economy. Businesses that pay taxes in other countries will no longer be permitted to use that excuse to justify their failure to pay federal income tax in the United States.
6. Healthcare for All. Medicare for all or adoption of a universal single-payer healthcare system. The broken Medicaid program will be eliminated as redundant. Affordable healthcare shall be a human right.
7. Protection of the Planet. Human greed, exponentially magnified by corporations, is destroying the only habitable planet known to humanity. Multinational corporations have purchased so much influence in Congress (and other governments in the world) that they can secure the passage or blockage of regulations to maximize profits and minimize conservation of the environment. The evidence of climate change due to human activity can no longer be denied by rational people. New comprehensive laws and regulations must be immediately enacted to give the Environmental Protection Agency, and other environmental protection regulators, expanded powers and resources to shut down corporations, businesses or any entities that intentionally or recklessly damage the environment, and to criminally prosecute individuals who intentionally or recklessly damage the environment. No corporate veil should protect any employee, officer or director of a corporation who is directly or indirectly engaged in the intentional or reckless decimation of the planet for profit. The amount of profit a corporation can make must be balanced (by conflict-free regulators) with the inevitable damage that human activity inflicts on the environment. The 99% of the American People demand the immediate implementation of new and existing programs to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels to reusable or carbon neutral sources of energy and higher greenhouse gas emission standards so that something will be left for our children and grandchildren. The rights to clean air, water, and conservation of the planet for future generations shall no longer be infringed by greed-driven corporations and selfish individuals.
8. Debt Reduction. Adoption of an immediate plan to reduce the national debt to a sustainable percentage of GDP by 2020. Reduction of the $15 trillion national debt to be achieved by BOTH fair progressive taxation and cuts in spending that benefit corporations engaged in perpetual war for profit, inefficient healthcare, pharmaceutical exploitation, over-prescribing medications for profit, the communications industry, the prison and military industrial complexes, banking and finance, the oil and gas industry, and all other entities that have used the federal budget as a private income stream resulting in our $15 trillion debt. We agree that spending cuts are necessary but those cuts must be made to facilitate what is best for the People of the United States of America, not corporations who care for nothing except profit.
9. Jobs for All Americans. Passage of a comprehensive job and job-training act like the American Jobs Act to employ our citizens in jobs that are available with specialized training. The American People must be put to work now by repairing America’s crumbling infrastructure and building other needed public works projects. In conjunction with a new jobs act, reinstitution of the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps and similar emergency governmental agencies tasked with creating new projects to provide jobs to the 46 million People living in poverty, the 8.6% unemployed and 16.2% who are underemployed.
10. Student Loan Forgiveness. Our students are more than $1 trillion in debt from education loans and have fewer employment prospects due to the financial collapse directly caused by the unbridled and unregulated greed of Wall Street. Banks receive virtually interest free loans from the Federal Reserve Bank and then charge upwards of 6% interest to our students for profit. Because education is the only way to ensure our future success as a nation, interest on student debts must be immediately reduced to 2% or less and repayments deferred for periods of unemployment. Subject to the provisions of point five herein, the tax code will be amended so that employers will receive a student loan repayment tax deduction for paying off the loans of their employees. Moreover, to reduce the principal on all outstanding student loans, a financial transaction surcharge, similar to those fees charged by banks on consumers, will be introduced. This surcharge will serve as restitution and reparations for Wall Street’s intentional and reckless conduct leading to widespread unemployment after the economic collapse in 2007-2008. This economic crisis, the worst since the Great Depression, resulted in the $1.5 trillion dollar bail out of Wall Street, secret Federal Reserve loans, and unknown losses to the economy estimated to be in the trillions of dollars. Banks and the financial institutions they are permitted to own (see point 16 infra) have caused the current worldwide recession, debt crisis and ongoing turmoil in the international markets.
11. Immigration Reform and Improved Border Security. Immediate passage of the Dream Act and comprehensive immigration and border security reform including offering visas, lawful permanent resident status and citizenship to the world’s brightest and most highly skilled People to come, stay and work in our industries and schools after they obtain their education and training in the United States.
12. Ending of Perpetual War for Profit. Recalling all military personnel at all non-essential bases including but not limited to Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia and Cuba and refocusing national defense goals to address threats posed by the geopolitics of the 21st century, including terrorism and limiting the large scale deployment of military forces to those instances where Congressional approval has been granted. New laws must be enacted to counter the Military Industrial Complex’s mission of perpetual war for profit. The United States has engaged in war after war only to later to discover that the pretexts relied upon to enter these wars were false or exaggerated to generate profits for the Military Industrial Complex and other corporations and individuals. The annual savings created by updating our military posture and ending perpetual war will be applied to the social programs outlined herein to improve the quality of life for human beings rather than facilitating and assisting corporations engaged in mass-murder for profits distributed to the top 1% of wealth owners.
13. Emergency Reform of Public Education. The education system in the United States is a resounding failure. New educational goals to train the American public to perform jobs in a 21st century economy, particularly in the areas of technology, infrastructure repair, water and resource conservation and green energy must be mandated as national security issue. These reforms must be accomplished by taking into consideration the redundancy caused by technology and the inexpensive cost of labor in China, India and other developing countries. Tenure should be eliminated in primary public education in favor of merit performance and paying our teachers a competitive salary commensurate with the salaries in the private sector. These salaries must be based upon similar skills found in the private sector because without highly-skilled teachers, there will never be a highly-skilled workforce and the United States will fall further and further behind its competitors.
14. End Outsourcing. Subject to the elimination of corporate tax loopholes and exploited exemptions and deductions as stated in point five, limited tax incentives will be permitted to entice businesses to hire our citizens rather than outsource jobs. Conversely, an “outsourcing tax” should be introduced to discourage businesses from sending jobs overseas and tax incentives should be offered to companies that invest in reconstructing the manufacturing capacity of the United States. This country must again competitively produce everyday products in the United States rather than importing them from countries like China and India. To do business in the United States, corporations must make slightly less profit by hiring American workers and paying them a living wage rather than maximizing every penny of profit to the detriment of our society.
15. End Currency Manipulation. Implementing immediate legislation (see e.g. H.R. 639) to encourage China (which undervalues its currency by an estimated 25% to 40%) and our other trading partners to end currency manipulation, reduce the trade deficit and end clearly identified unfair trade practices.
16. Banking and Securities Reform. Immediate reenactment of the Glass-Steagall Act and increased regulation of Wall Street and the financial industry by the SEC, FINRA, CFTC, the Justice Department and the other financial regulators including the recently established Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. We further demand an immediate investigation by the Justice Department into the potential criminal practices of the Securities and Banking industry that directly led to the collapse of markets, bank bail-out and firm failures in 2007-2008. To facilitate the aforementioned student loan debt relief, banks and securities firms shall pay a small financial transaction fee, also known as the “Robin Hood Tax”, on each and every stock trade and other financial transactions without passing these costs onto consumers. Uniform regulations will be enacted to specifically limit what banks may charge consumers for ATM fees and/or the use of debit cards and other so-called miscellaneous fees. There will be an end to the $4 billion a year “hedge fund loophole” which permits certain individuals engaged in financial transactions to evade graduated income tax rates by treating their income as long-term capital gains which are taxed at a much lower rate (approximately 15%) than income tax.
17. Foreclosure Moratorium. Adoption of a plan similar to President Clinton’s proposal to end the mortgage crisis. The privately owned Federal Reserve Bank shall not continue to lower interest rates for loans to banks that are refusing to loan to small businesses and consumers. Instead, the federal government shall buy all mortgages in foreclosure and refinance these debts at an interest rate of 1% or less because that is the interest rate the Federal Reserve charges the banks who hoard the cash despite ample liquidity. These re-financed debts will be managed by the newly established Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and an independent foreclosure task force appointed and overseen by Congress and the Executive Branch to determine, on a case-by-case basis, whether foreclosure proceedings should continue based on the circumstances of each homeowner and the propriety of the financial institution’s conduct when originating the loan
18. Ending the Fed. The immediate formation of a non-partisan commission, overseen by Congress, to audit and investigate the short-term and long-term economic risks in eliminating the privately-owned Federal Reserve Bank and transferring all its functions to the United States Treasury Department.
19. Abolish the Electoral College and Enact Uniform Election Reforms. The 99% demand the abolishment of the Electoral College in favor of the Popular Vote in presidential elections to avoid situations where the Electoral College elects a candidate who does not receive a majority of the popular vote. Subject to the above-referenced ban on all private money and gifts in politics, Congress shall immediately enact additional campaign finance reform requiring the Federal Communications Commission to grant free air-time to all federal candidates; total public campaign financing to all candidates who obtain sufficient petition signatures and/or votes to get on the ballot and participate in the primaries and/or general election; implementation of nationwide uniform election rules applied to all voting districts requiring equal access to third parties to appear on ballots; abolition of “gerrymandering” by utilizing non-partisan public commissions so that third parties may fairly compete in elections, shortening the campaign season to three months; allowing voting on weekends and holidays; issuance of free voter registration cards to all citizens who are eligible to vote so that they cannot be turned away at a polling station because they do not have a driver’s license or other form of identification; a review of the exclusion of voters with non-violent criminal records, and expanding the option of mail-in ballots and verifiable internet voting.
20. Ending the War in Afghanistan and Care of Veterans. An immediate withdrawal of all combat troops from Afghanistan and a substantial increase in the amount of funding for veteran job training and placement. New programs dedicated to the treatment of the emotional and physical injuries sustained by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Our veterans are committing suicide at an unprecedented rate of one person every 80 minutes and we must help now.
21. Repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”). Immediate passage of Senate bill, S. 598, and House bill, H.R. 1116, to repeal the Defense Of Marriage Act because all human beings have the right to love and marry another human being regardless of gender or sexual orientation.
22. No Censorship of the Internet. The Internet and its related technologies foster free speech, innovation, and a global human consciousness. We believe that the Internet and its related technologies are the joint property of humanity, and as such, it must not be censored or regulated in any manner without the consent of the people who utilize and contribute to its vitality. We therefore demand the immediate withdrawal of the Stop Online Piracy Act or “SOPA” (H.R. 3261) and the Protect IP Act (S. 968). These bills, if enacted into law, would grant the government broad new powers to curtail speech on the internet, block domain names, track internet protocol (“IP”) addresses, dramatically increase the cost of using content on the internet, chill innovation and creativity of web entrepreneurs in favor of media corporations that already own or control most online content. Furthermore, any future action by the government to censor, dismantle or interfere with, any other future technology that promotes communication between human beings, will be deemed by the people as a violation of the First Amendment and the universal human right to free speech and assembly. We also call upon the United States government to vociferously condemn any country that represses the speech of its people including the censorship of the Internet and related technologies.
V. BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that IF the PETITION FOR A REDRESS OF GRIEVANCES approved by the 876 Delegates of the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY in consultation with the NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF THE PEOPLE, is not acted upon within a reasonable time and to the satisfaction of the Delegates of the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY, said Delegates shall reconvene to utilize the grassroots network established in the election of the NATIONAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY to organize a new INDEPENDENT POLITICAL PARTY to run candidates for every available Congressional seat in the mid-term election of 2014 and again in 2016 until all vestiges of the existing corrupt corporatocracy have been eradicated through the power of the ballot box.
In Growing Up In America, Morley Markson revisits his 1969 documentary on counter culture icons, Breathing Together:Revolution Of The Electric Family, with the original subjects of the film to get the perspective of age and hindsight.
Reflecting the past through the present, forming a kind of Möbius strip of history, we watch as they watch: Jerry Rubin’s transformation from firebrand radical to Capitalist cliche, the evolution and assassination of Fred Hampton (through the eyes of his mother) and the unwavering integrity and self-realization of Abbie Hoffman, William Kunstler, Timothy Leary, former Black Panther Field Marshall/expatriate Don Cox, Allen Ginsberg, and MC5 manager and White Panther founder John Sinclair. This is a fascinating glimpse at lives that mattered and still do.
It’s hard to believe that with the exception of John Sinclair and director Markson all of these men are dead. Are these the last of a dying breed?
While Growing Up In America is a vital and significant document, its failure to include some women in the mix is a glaring oversight. Bernardine Dohrn, Angela Davis, Shulamith Firestone and Diane di Prima are just a few of the women who were actively involved with cultural and political upheaval of the Sixties and any one of them would have provided a much needed woman’s point of view to the film. Once again, we’re confronted with the notion that the Sixties counter-culture was a boy’s club.
This fine documentary is out-of-print on video and has yet to be released on DVD.
I wonder what imagined slight led John Baxter to write such an insidious biography on J G Ballard? Does Baxter, a failed science fiction writer, who started his short-lived career around the same time as Ballard, have some deep-seated grudge against the guru of suburbia that his new biography The Inner Man - The Life of J G Ballard was aimed to settle? From its opening introduction, which begins with Baxter describing Ballard soliciting ‘automobile porn’ from his Danish translator, one wonders what exactly is Baxter’s intention, other than to diminish Ballard’s talent and originality.
If we are to believe Baxter then Ballard was an ad-man who got lucky, a psychopath scarred by childhood experiences as a prisoner of war, his whole life and career merely an exercise in skillful “image management”.
While in person Ballard had “the voice of a born advertiser, paradoxically preaching a jihad against commerce: the contradiction at the heart of Jim’s life”. Even his ambition to become a science-fiction writer could be seen as “an aspect of his psychopathology, for it echoes the hostility of someone trying to hide a physical or psychological dysfunction - epilepsy, dyslexia, illiteracy”.
Baxter continues:
In person, Jim presented a veneer of good-fellowship, slick as Formica and just as impermeable…
...This reflexive affability disguised a troubled personality that sometimes expressed itself in physical violence…
...Jim never denied that his psychology bordered on the psychopathic.
Really? But he never admitted it either. And as for the “physical violence” Baxter supplies no evidence, no eye-witnesseses, other than a now refuted quote from author Michael Moorcock. So what are we to make of Baxter’s book?
There is something interesting going on here, Baxter has created a fictional biography filled with factoids - things that look like facts, sound like facts, but are in truth fictions. It’s the kind of technique mastered by the likes of Adam Curtis or the Daily Mail, where unrelated facts are linked to support strange or spurious arguments. Sadly, The Inner Man is riddled with such factoids, with Baxter concluding:
Jim’s skill was to speculate and fantasize, evade and lie. ‘Truth’ was not a word he regarded with much respect, least of all in describing and explaining his life. In its stead, he deployed the psychopath’s reverence for the instant present, for frenzy, for the divine, and for those forces, natural and unnatural, that are forever slipping beyond our control.
The whole biography is like an ident-i-kit photograph constructed by a man suffering from the worst affects of a bad acid trip - the image may contain likenesses of eyes, nose and mouth, but the whole is disturbingly inhuman.
There is no warmth to his vision of Ballard, everything is seen as a cynical ploy by a man who is cast as an “intellectual thug”, and whose “paramount skill was his ad man’s ability to remarket himself.” There is no explanation as to how he coped with bringing up 3 children after his wife’s tragic death while on family holiday in Spain. How he buried her in a little Spanish cemetery, then drove home with the children, having to “pull over to weep uncontrollably.”
Not surprisingly, Ballard’s children, and his partner Claire Walsh, did not take part in Baxter’s cut and paste assemblage. Moreover, there are no quotes from any of Ballard’s books, only brief synopses, which only reminded me of Terry Johnson’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe from his play Insignificance, where the glamorous star can recite Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but hasn’t a clue what it means. Baxter can sub Ballard’s novels, but he has no real understanding of what they are about.
There are also some glaring mistakes - Eduardo Paolozzi was not a “burly Glaswegian” but was born in Leith, Edinburgh. It was Friedrich Nietzsche who said, “When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you,” and not H. G. Wells. If Baxter (and his editors) can’t get the verifiable facts correct, why should we believe him on any of his unsubstantiated assertions?
This is why Baxter’s biography fails.
He also fails to see Ballard and his work within a wider cultural perspective. Before Ballard and his family were imprisoned at the camp in the Lunghua, George Orwell predicted the world that Ballard was to write about and make his home for most of his life, in his 1941 essay “England Your England”:
The place to look for the germs of the future England is in the light-industry areas along the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes - everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns - the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums and mansions, or of the country, with its manor houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist. There are wide gradations of income but it is the same kind of life that is being lived at different levels, in labor-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads and in the naked democracy of the swimming-pools. It is a rather restless, cultureless life, centering round tinned food Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up with an intimate knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that civilization belong the people who are most at home in and most definitely of the modern world, the technicians and higher paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists. They are the indeterminate stratum at which the older class distinctions are beginning to break down.
Orwell could have been describing Ballard’s future vision of Shepperton - a world of swimming pools, airmen, film producers, industrial chemists, who live on the arterial roads, on the outskirts of a great town.
Jesse LaGreca, the articulate young man who effectively “schooled” Fox News creep Griff Jenkins in an amusing encounter that has become one of the defining “viral videos” of the Occupy Wall Street movement so far, has been with the encampment for two months. Speaking for himself, but on behalf of the movement, LeGrecca summarized what the movement is seeking, on his Ministry of Truth blog at Daily Kos.
I think this is a pretty good to-do list for the progressive movement in this country, and as LaGreca correctly points out: We know the Republicans are our enemies, but with friends like the Democrats… I mean, come the fuck on, it’s time to get real!. The Dems are in a rough spot: They have to decide which side they’re on and if they can’t decide, it will be decided for them.
Are millionaire Deomcrats in the House and Senate going to vote against their own interests and the people whose money got them elected in the first place? You’re dreaming if you think that.
I keep hearing from people that Occupy Wall Street protests don’t have a clear message, so here is a short rundown of the “message” as far as I have seen.
It is time to invest in infrastructure and education
It is time to STOP busting labor unions, whether private or public
It is time to defend Medicare and Social Security tooth and nail from phony reforms or baloney cuts
It is time to STOP the spending cuts and start investing in America, and if we have to raise taxes on the rich and corporations in order to force them to invest in America, then so be it.
It is time to STOP the racist and discriminatory practice of “Stop and Frisk” and other tactics of racial profiling
It is time for civil rights for ALL, and that means equal rights for LGBT Americans to serve our military and marry whom ever they will
It is time for ACCOUNTABILITY for the men who lied us into war and crashed our economy
It is time for immigration reform that does not punish workers, but provides a clear pathway to citizenship for everyone
It is time for investigations that lead to prosecutions on Wall Street in response to the crimes that have been committed in the last decade.
It is time for a serious discussion about the Federal Reserve and it’s role in this economic disaster
It is time for universal health care that everyone can afford. It is time to talk about Single Payer Health Care.
It is time for alternative green energy instead of Oil and Coal.
It is time to protect our civil liberties and our constitution.
It is time for a discussion about free trade and how it has undermined the working class while enriching only the wealthiest among us.
It is time to end corporate personhood.
There are sooooo many things that need to be fixed, reformed and addressed, and this short list does not do justice to the many grievances that the 99% have, but we must accept the fact that the GOP only serves the rich and the Dem Establishment only serves to cave to the GOP. They are NOT going to help us. We are going to have to do this ourselves.
It is time to have the BIG conversation about what kind of country we want America to be, and the lobbyists and corrupt career politicians and the corrupt corporate media are NOT going to hijack our conversation. Do we want America to be a nation where 1 out of 5 children live in poverty while the wealthiest among us get ever more wealthy and more powerful? Do we want to live in a nation with crumbling infrastructure that can only reward the rich with ever decreasing tax rates while our schools go unfunded? Do we want to live in a country that can always fund these never ending wars but must cut spending on everything else?
Hear, hear!
It’s time to forget about the park, that’s over and it’s probably a good thing that it is. There’s work to be done this winter. It was never about sleeping in a park in lower Manhattan in sub-zero weather in the first place.
After today, the movement needs to figure out what it’s going to do next. Phase one has been a rousing, inspiring success. Bring on Phase two!
Read the rest of Welcome to PHASE 2 of Occupy Wall Street, now here is a message (Daily Kos).
An incredible interview between Philip K. Dick and Charles Platt from 1979, where the legendary author discussed his life, his writing and the strange events that inspired his famed Exegesis. At nearly 2 hours long, this interview is essential listening for anyone with an interest in PKD.
Occupy TVNY’s Janine Saunders (who posted the video last week of Douglas Rushkoff’s teach-in at Occupy Wall Street) sent in this clip of “dangerous mind” Harry Belafonte addressing Occupy Wall Street, the labor movement, Rev. Martin Luther King, staying the non-violent course as activists and how the young people of today give him hope.
Occupy TVNY caught up with long time activist, singer and actor Harry Belafonte backstage at a screening of Sing Your Song—a new documentary about his life, organized for members of Occupy Wall Street and Local 1199.
Rumors are flying around that the Occupy London encampment outside of St Paul’s Cathedral will be evicted tomorrow. Describing what he calls the “greatest upsurge of student radicalism since the 1960s,” Owen Jones, author of the important new book Chavs: The Demonization of the Underclass (Verso), takes stock of what’s been achieved so far, and what’s still ahead for the Occupy and student movements in Great Britain in a thought-provoking essay posted on Dazed Digital:
Ever present in the minds of Occupiers and student radicals alike is the legacy of the anti-war movement. Up to 2 million marched against the Iraq war but – as is frequently raised at meetings of British radicals – the invasion happened anyway. It’s seen as an indictment of the strategy of the so-called ‘A to B march’ – turn up, demonstrate, go home. That’s partly what’s given the impetus to Occupy: the strategy is that protests have to be made impossible to ignore.
Occupy doesn’t offer a direct challenge to the power of the economic elite; but it has certainly transformed the debate. Questions that the media likes to ignore – like the nature of capitalism – are being discussed in newspaper comment pieces and radio phone-ins. The Tories have turned a banking crisis into a crisis of public spending; Occupy reminds us of the real villains. And it has broad public sympathy, too: one poll showed that, while 38% felt the protesters were “naïve” because “there is no practical alternative to capitalism”, a whopping 52% thought that “the protesters are right to want to call time on a system that puts profit before people.”
Both Occupy and the student radicals should be seen as different – but overlapping – wings of the same movement: indeed, on the latest student protest, held on 9th November, activists attempted to march on the City in solidarity. While there are Occupiers from a range of age groups, younger activists are particularly prominent outside St Paul’s.
It’s not surprising that young people have taken the lead in the protest movements that have sprung up under Coalition rule. There’s the obvious: one of the Government parties promised the abolition of fees, but instead the cost of a university education has been tripled. But students in particular are often the first to move because – frankly – they have more time on their hands than working people; they are not dependent on a full-time job for sustenance; and they do not have responsibilities like keeping a family fed. With less of a stake in the system, there are fewer consequences when it comes to take off their gloves and fighting back.
But it’s also a symptom of a perfect storm hammering British youth. Unemployment has now hit one in five among 18 to 24-year-olds; what work there is available is often in the form of low-paid, insecure, poorly regarded service sector jobs; there are 5 million people languishing on social housing waiting lists while private rents soar, leaving a generation without the prospect of an affordable home; cuts are hitting youth services; and, as well as the trebling of tuition fees, the Educational Maintenance Allowance has been abolished. For the first time since World War II, the promise that the next generation will be better off than the last has abruptly ended.
Occupy and the student radicals are just two symptoms of a generation without prospects. As an ideologically charged austerity programme reshapes British society, the ranks of this so-called “lost generation” will only grow. But so too will the protests, occupations and strikes. A new age of revolt is upon us.
Occupy London: A New Age of Rebellion (Dazed Digital)
“If you owe the bank $1000, you’re at the mercy of the bank, if you owe the bank $1,000,000,000 the bank is at your mercy.”
A few weeks back, I attended an extraordinary event in New York organized by my longtime friend Douglas Rushkoff called “Contact.” It was a fascinating symposium about fighting corporate influence online and how to affect societal change using social media tools (more or less). The object of the day was to tease out four projects from the participants (a mix of 300 activists, tech entrepreneurs, intellectuals and media types) which could be practically realized, not just “pie in the sky” stuff. Four finalists got $10,000 awards from Pepsi to assist in concretizing these ideas.
At first, the conference, which took place at a stunning former synagogue on the Lower East Side known as The Angel Orensanz Center, got off to a bumpy start. Whenever someone would raise their hand and say something too fuzzy like “I’d like to start an online forum for people to discuss social issues” this got back a politely, yet dismissive “Uh, what, specifically, do you mean by that?” response from Rushkoff, who led the sessions. His firm conceptual herding caused a rapid focusing of the group mind into projects that had not just viability—and utility, of course—but that could actually be manifested within days or weeks.
There were a lot of worthy, even brilliant, ideas kicked around that day, but the first one that really caused me to take notice was when one of the participants stood up and said he’d like to create an online tool to facilitate and organize a mass debt strike against the banks and the government. There was an immediate “x factor” that this notion tapped into (my guess is that Occupy Wall Street was supported by 100% of the room) and “Kick-Stopper,” as the project was dubbed, became one of the four finalists.
When the conference broke down into smaller discussion groups—I was one of the judges of who would get the Pepsi cash—I silently observed the debt strike enthusiasts’ conversation with interest. I was somewhat less enamored of the concept when Thomas Gokey, an adjunct professor at Syracuse University who proposed the idea, said that maybe the money owed to the banks could be held in escrow accounts, eventually getting paid to the banks, but only after they’d agreed to certain demands and reforms. To some of the people seated on pillows in the venue’s balcony, this seemed like a reasonable approach, but at least half the group groaned and expressed the more punk rock sentiment of “fuck the banks, they’ll get NONE of it” which seemed like a much better position to take, to my mind.
Stiffing the fuckers is something they’ll understand…
“I wanted to do this project because I kept having the same basic conversation with everyone at Zuccotti and everywhere else,” Gokey told me. “When I talk to people about what we could do that would really compel Congress and Wall Street to meet our demands or really alter the current system, we inevitably start discussing what non-cooperation with our own oppression would look like. What does it mean to stop cooperating with the banks? What we inevitably end up describing is some variation of a debt strike, simply ending our own participation in a system that exploits us.”
—snip—
“The problem is that a debt-strike will take a lot of coordination to make it work,” Thomas Gokey points out, “It can’t just be one person who is willing to risk their financial life, it only works when there are millions of people who are willing to take that risk together, and they are only going to take that risk if they can feel confident that everyone else has got their back.”
That in part is what Gokey hoped to solve by bringing the debt strike idea to ContactCon, but it’s not the only one. Lerner points out that the debt strike also needs targets, demands and an answer to the question, “Who pays?”
“There should be debt forgiveness, but these guys—the student loan profiteers—should eat it, not the government and taxpayers,” he points out. “The banks should pay because they destroyed the economy, they sucked 18-year-olds into predatory loans they are stuck with for life.”
Hear, hear! Imagine the indignity of graduating from college with $100,000 of student loan debt nipping at your heels and today’s nearly non-existent job prospects. It’s absurd.
I’m not an expert in this sort of thing, but apparently you can’t charge off student loans in bankruptcy, they’ll just attach your wages, so a collective action to withhold student loan payments (and credit card debt) at a time when half the country is skint could gather critical mass rather quickly, I’d imagine. Everyone else got a bail-out, why shouldn’t you?
My prediction: You’re going to be hearing the term “debt strike” used a lot in the coming months.
(For the record, I have not a single cent of student loan debt. I didn’t go to college and I have no skin in this game. Education should be free for anyone who wants to learn and better themselves.)
Debtor’s Revolution: Are Debt Strikes Another Possible Tactic in the Fight Against the Big Banks? (AlterNet)
The United States isn’t broke; we’re the richest country on the planet and a country in which the richest among us are doing exceptionally well. But the truth is, our economy is broken, producing more pollution, greenhouse gasses and garbage than any other country. In these and so many other ways, it just isn’t working. But rather than invest in something better, we continue to keep this ‘dinosaur economy’ on life support with hundreds of billions of dollars of our tax money. The Story of Broke calls for a shift in government spending toward investments in clean, green solutions—renewable energy, safer chemicals and materials, zero waste and more—that can deliver jobs AND a healthier environment. It’s time to rebuild the American Dream; but this time, let’s build it better.
A guest editorial from our super smart pal, Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from his essential Of Two Minds blog.
There are really only three ways to cripple Wall Street’s democracy-killing concentration of wealth and power: take our money out of Wall Street and the TBTF banks, eliminate private money from elections and abolish Wall Street’s dealer, the Federal Reserve.
There are only three things—and only these three—that will cripple Wall Street’s democracy-killing concentration of wealth and power:
1. Transfer the 99%‘s money out of Wall Street and the Too Big To Fail Banks
2. Remove campaign contributions from our democracy in a way that the corporate legalist lackeys in the Supreme Court cannot overturn, i.e. entirely publicly financed elections
3. Abolish Wall Street’s dealer, pusher and protector, the Federal Reserve.
My reasoning is very simple:
Everything else people want to see happen cannot happen if:
1) Wall Street and the SDI (systemically dangerous institutions) a.k.a. too big to fail banks, control most Americans’ financial assets and debts
2) The Federal Reserve exists to enable and protect the SDI’s wealth and power via Primary Dealers, the discount window and other pusher/dealer mechanisms
3) Wall Street and the other SDIs can use the billions of dollars they skim from our accounts, IRAs, 401Ks and pensions to buy political influence and protection from regulation and competition.
Therefore these are the necessary foundations of any real change.
As long as Wall Street and the other SDIs control much of the nation’s financial markets, assets and debts, and the Federal Reserve exists to protect and enable their predation and parasitic skimming, they will have the means to reap billions in profits which can then be funneled into our cash-corrupted political system of for-sale toadies and apparatchiks.
The only real leverage we have is our money and our compliance. Leaving our money in Wall Street and the Too Big to fail banks enables their dominance. Leaving our money in checking accounts, money market funds, savings accounts and brokerage accounts, and then using credit and debit cards issued by the SDIs, is to remain deeply complicit in their dominance.
This concept is now entering the cultural dialog, for example this recent entry on Zero Hedge: Want To Defeat The Banks? Stop Participating In The System!
Frequent Of Two Minds contributor Harun I. summed the argument up even more forcefully:
I applaud this movement only if people are coming to the recognition that, collectively, we as a nation have been wrong and now need to move in a different direction. We must now engage in discussing how best to do so.
However, I remain skeptical. Why are the TBTF banks still operating? From fraud to extortion to money laundering for drug cartels, the list of crimes against humanity is quite clear and long. Exactly what does it take before people will stop doing business with demonstrably corrupt entities?
And now there is a General Strike scheduled. I am all for it. But understand that our government will borrow the shortfall and nothing meaningful other than an increase in public debt will occur.
However, if you want to see an instantaneous and dramatic effect, every person close every account they have with all the TBTF banks and their subsidiaries on the same day.
Immediately or almost immediately they would have to be taken into receivership, their assets marked to market and sold off. The End.
Why destroy the TBTF banks? Most of them are Primary Dealers. The Fed then comes under pressure as it becomes the only lender of resort.
Then, once we have gotten their attention we tackle monetary reform, lobbying, and term limit in Congress and the Supreme Court.
It is time for government to “fear the people”. Rest assured that if government does not fear the people, nothing will change.
As for the Supreme Court’s legalist worship of the Corporate State: I believe this court will be remembered by history as the court which veered close enough to Corporate-State fascism to give it a big wet kiss. Corporate “rights” of personhood? No problem, you got it! The “right” to fund unlimited campaign contributions? No problem, you got it!
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Benito Mussolini
We might profitably ask how the Founding Fathers would have responded to calls that the U.S. Constitution should contain a clause granting the East India Company the same rights of personhood as U.S. citizens, and then further granting it the unlimited right to buy political favors as a function of “free speech.”
One wonders how any of the Revolutionary War veterans among the Founding Fathers might have responded to such toadying claptrap. Yet this is precisely what the corporate toadies in the flowing black robes claim is “defended” by the U.S. Constitution.
A close reading of the Constitution reveals no amendments or clauses granting private corporations personhood, or granting them the right to inject unlimited sums of money to sway elections. If we turn to the Federalist Papers, we find fear of a “tyranny of the minority”—and what is a private corporation but an extreme minority bent on purchasing a limited but oppressive, exploitative and parasitical tyranny?
The legalist lackeys on the Supreme Court have hidden far too long behind the reputation of the Court—a reputation punctured by history, we might note—as a forum of disinterested legal debate. Rather, the court is nothing but another collection of imperfect human beings who are easily swayed by the tenor of the times and the ideological agendas of the wealthy and powerful. (“These are not the campaign reforms you’re looking for. Move along.”)
Given that we have a court that worships Corporate-State fascism slicked over with a thin veneer of democracy for public relations purposes—every single attempt to limit corporate campaign contributions has been struck down by the court—then our only choice as a people is to ban all private money contributions and institute a system of 100% publicly financed elections. Yes, it’s imperfect, and yes, it’s messy and costly, but nowhere near as corrupting and costly to liberty as the Corporate-State fascism we now endure.
Libertarians may be aghast at this option, but we have been reduced by the legalist lackeys in the Supreme Court to this choice: either we continue to be ruled by the corrupting corporate-State nexis of unlimited corporate/private Elites funding of elections, or we go with public financing. Thanks to the Supreme Court, there is no other choice.
As a lagniappe thought: one of the primary concerns of many “OWS/we are the 99” supporters is rising income disparity. That is a legitimate concern in any nation claiming to be a democracy with a free-market economy. Yet a close examination of the roots of income disparity and rising poverty leads straight to the Federal Reserve.
What Mr. Gross and Mr. Frank and many others don’t see is that it is the creation of fiat money that destroys wealth and misdirects the investment of capital into less productive assets. That is, monetary inflation destroys capital (wealth). The reason why the production of goods and services do not bear higher yields than financial assets is that the production of goods and services suffers from a lack of real capital. Remember that real capital comes only from the saved profits of production and from the savings of workers from wages earned in production.
You obviously cannot print wealth, but if you try that fiat money distorts the entire economy by directing investment to things which appear to appreciate but what is really happening is that the dollar is depreciating. As a result, fiat money and real capital are invested in financial assets because they appear to have greater yields than returns from the production of goods. Prices rise (price inflation) and it creates the inevitable boom which always busts. The fall out is that we are stuck with things people don’t want (in the present re/depression it is housing). And we fall for it every time.
Allow me to simplify the argument:
1. The Federal Reserve has financialized the economy as an intrinsic expression of its reason for being.
2. Financialization necessarily creates systemically rising income disparity.
I think that’s all we need to understand to grasp the utmost importance of abolishing the Federal Reserve, a private banking monopoly created and protected by our Congress. Limiting Wall Street and the TBTF banks is structurally impossible as long as the Federal Reserve exists.
Written by Charles Hugh Smith, cross-posted from Of Two Minds.
Thanks to New York photographer Robert Chin for videotaping this and uploading it to Youtube.
Recorded November 3, 2011, 10.15am. The People vs. Goldman Sachs mock trial people’s hearing held at Liberty a/k/a Zuccotti Park with fiery commentary by Dr. Cornel West, eloquence by Chris Hedges, and testimonies from people directly affected by Goldman Sach policies.
You can keep up-to-date with the always compelling Cornel West at his website.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning human rights journalist who writes a weekly column for Truthdig .
This is the kind of street theater we need to see in cities all across America. In addition to marching and occupying public places, we need to explore creative and provocative ways to capture the attention of the media. In our ADD culture, we’ve got to keep things interesting. West and Hedges are taking a page from the Abbie Hoffman play book.
Hedges was arrested along with 15 other protesters following the “people’s trial” when they staged a sit-in outside the headquarters of Goldman Sachs.
Over a dozen Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested today outside Goldman Sachs, where they had marched with 300 others after holding a mock trial of CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Among those arrested were performance artist gadfly Reverend Billy and author and columnist Chris Hedges, who is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. Hedges and the Rev joined several others in a direct action protest outside the firm, sitting down on the sidewalk, linking arms, and refusing to leave. It seems clear the activists intended to be arrested; earlier today Reverend Billy tweeted, “I’ll spend the afternoon in a police van with Chris Hedges and come out ten times more READY for the miracle! Revolujah!”
Yeah, you wish… Me too! Sorry for the bait and switch, folks, but I’ll try to make it up to you with a new half-hour video of Žižek, below, as seen on Al Jazeera last week.
I do have a point, though, for leading you here under false pretenses: The fact that you are interested to see what Slavoj Žižek (or someone like him) would say about Occupy Wall Street, and especially hearing it said on Fox News, is why Roger Ailes needs to do a very quick revamp of his product if he doesn’t want Fox to seem like it’s yesterday’s news…
It’s been interesting to watch how Fox News keeps calling on the very same lame-brained group of talking heads they always call on, to discuss Occupy Wall Street. Like they can’t rotate in ANYONE new to shake things up even a little bit? OWS has upset the Fox News apple cart in a big way. They have no idea how to deal with it, understand it, or even process it intellectually, let alone report on it, and that is becoming more and more obvious every day.
How many variations on the themes of “dirty hippies,” “they don’t know what they want,” “they’re a bunch of violent socialists who are just jealous of rich people (like us and our masters)” and of course, “ACORN!” are there?
I’ve just counted four.
Predictable but hilarious. In less than two months Fox has nearly totally lost its once secure place in the national conversation. They’re floundering very, very badly. They’ve fumbled the ball.
Here’s how I see it: Fox News post-Occupy Wall Street is like The Spice Girls the day after Geri Haliwell left the group. Their entire shtick became anachronistic in a single day.
This is what Occupy Wall Street has done to Fox News, not to mention the rest of the far Reichwing opinion outlets. From talk radio to the various editorials written byTea party twits on WorldNetDaily, what’s been on evidence for the past few weeks is that there is almost zero capability on the part of people who think that way to absorb what is happening because it is happening so incredibly quickly. It’s taken them completely by surprise.
Indeed, the scales have rapidly tipped in the past few weeks and there are shifting sands beneath our feet as I type this. My feet and yours, not just Bill O’Reilly’s or Rupert Murdoch’s. I don’t think anyone, right of left, has a full picture of what’s going on, or exactly where it’s headed, but what should be crystal clear to every person in the world capable of critical thinking is that something big, something very major and something potentially fantastic has happened and it is going to continue to happen for some time to come. Like it or not, this is not a prediction, it is a statement of fact.
The genie is way out of the bottle, but you won’t hear about this from entities (like Fox News) who are threatened by what’s happening. Some of the most objective reporting on what’s occurring in America—and when I say “objective” I mean to impart, in this instance, not an anti-American bias but a NON-American point of view, there is huge difference—is coming from Russia Today and Al Jazeera. You want interesting news, considered opinions, intelligent reporting and something beyond the empty calories of the shrieking taking heads, then check both networks out.
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek was recently given nearly 30 minutes on Al Jazeera to speak about global revolutionary movements and what’s coming next. Can you imagine the sparks that would fly if Žižek was invited on to The O’Reilly Factor or Sean Hannity’s program?
Why not? If it’s good for ratings, it’s good for ratings. Isn’t that all Ailes really cares about? Well, if so, Fox News will need to update their modus operandi—and pronto, too—to keep up with such rapidly changing events. The thing is, I don’t think they can go on as they have in the past. Not because I think their audience has, or is going to, “wise up” all of a sudden because of what they see happening with OWS (although some of them will). No, my contention is very simply that Fox News is becoming too predictable, even for their admittedly not very intellectually demanding viewers. That’s saying a lot.
Ann Coulter? Hmmm, I mean, I wonder what her take is on Occupy Wall Street, don’t you?
Actually, no I fucking don’t and I never have. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass what Ann Coulter thinks about anything, but beyond that, she’s boring, and predictable, and so is Fox News. The past two months have seen the network foundering badly. Fox has become too rote, too boring. Ann Coulter? She’s not even any fun to mock anymore. Roger Ailes needs to euthanize Ann Coulter and push her off the gangplank just like he did with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. She’s the poster child for everything that’s wrong with Fox News right now. Put her and the rest of them out to pasture soon or Fox News will be just like the post-Geri Haliwell Spice Girls in 1998, becoming a glaring anachronism almost overnight.
In 1979, the acclaimed French director, Bertrand Tavernier arrived in Glasgow to shoot his latest project - a science fiction film called Death Watch. It was a move away from Tavernier’s best known work - historical drama (Que la fête commence…), crime (The Watchmaker of St. Paul’s), and his scripts which focussed on the complex psychological interactions between characters.
Based on the novel, The Unsleeping Eye by David G Compton, Death Watch centered on a young man, Roddy, who is hired by a TV organization to have a camera implanted in his eye, in order that he may follow and film the last days of a terminally ill woman, Katherine. Tavernier developed this into clever and layered film starring Romy Schneider as Katherine, Harvey Keitel as Roddy, with a supporting cast of Harry Dean Stanton and Max Von Sydow, and early appearances for Robbie Coltrane and Bill Nighy.
For the cast alone should have ensured Death Watch‘s cult status, but it opened to negative reviews, and was quickly damned to obscurity in the growing multiplex world of The Empire Strikes Back, Smokey and the Bandit, Airplane! and Any Which Way You Can.
Tavernier had proven himself to be too clever by half and had made an intelligent and polemical film, which raised issues of the ethics and morality involved in film-making. Tavernier was also presciently examining the affects of Reality TV and Ob Docs, and questioning the role of media intrusion in our lives. Big issues, big subjects, and worth far more than comic book mix parped out by Lucas and co.
Almost entirely filmed in Glasgow, Death Watch captured the city at its most bleak and desolate - its heart ripped-out by unthinking town planners, who wanted to create a container city that mimicked an idealized America of freeways and skyscrapers. Their actions were akin to hacking off the legs of a prize winning racehorse, then entering it in the Grand National. Communities were destroyed, rehoused in high-rise, shoe-box apartments on the outskirts of the city, or scattered further afield in New Towns. The city’s industries were in fatal decline, the docks abandoned, ship-building almost gone. Yet, for all this, there is an inherent beauty to Tavernier’s vision, where Glasgow looks like a martian out-post, while at the same time capturing the mahogany warmth of its mythical Victorian past as the “Second City of the Empire”.
Since it’s acknowledged by Noam Chomsky in the trailer that today he’s very nearly a forgotten figure, I don’t feel that ashamed over my admittedly near total lack of awareness of Paul Goodman. Having said that, I saw posters for Paul Goodman Changed My Life at Occupy Wall Street, dialed up the trailer online and now I can’t wait to see it:
Paul Goodman’s 1960 best-seller, Growing Up Absurd, became a cornerstone of countercultural thinking, alongside books like The Medium Is The Message, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and The Feminine Mystique. Goodman was a polymath: a poet, essayist, playwright, and psychotherapist. He was candid about his bisexuality while maintaining a marriage and raising two children. Jonathan Lee weaves together old and new footage of those who extol Goodman’s virtues, as well as his adamant detractors (often one and the same), including Grace Paley, Ned Rorem, Deborah Meier, William F. Buckley, Susan Sontag, and Judith Malina. An abrasive and contradictory figure, Goodman’s influence was nonetheless immense. Today, much of what passes as common knowledge in the fields of education, politics, psychology, urban planning, civil rights, and sexual politics was first posited by him nearly half a century ago.
This warms the cockles of my Trotskyite heart: Wednesday night in New York City, schools Chancellor Dennis Wallcott and the members of the Panel for Education Policy (or PEP, the body which enacts policy for the New York City DOE), got more than they bargained for when annoyed parents took a page from Occupy Wall Street and commandeered the meeting with the “people’s mic.” Unsurprisingly, rather than attempt to engage the parents and find out what they wanted, the panel just fucked off.
Nice work, folks, keep the pressure on these clowns.
There is a revolution going on that will touch every aspect of American life. Anyone who think this genie is going back in the bottle is dreaming.
