A Reminder

SUBHEAD: Given the situation of this world, there is always something to do. Right now!

By Mickey Z. on 24 April 2013 for World News Trust-
(http://worldnewstrust.com/reminder-theres-always-something-to-do-right-now-mickey-z)


Image above: A and written sign during the Occupy Wallstreet days, "We have so much to unlearn here". From original article.

“The old proletariat sold its labor power in order to subsist. The new proletarian sells his labor power in order to consume.”

-Raoul Vaneigem

Recently, while riding the Q101 bus during rush hour, I found it interesting and kinda' fun to watch the driver interact with his regular passengers -- but one exchange really stood out. A weary man, maybe in his mid-60s, labored his way up the steps and onto the bus.

The driver remarked with a chuckle: “Two more days.”

These simple words seemed to make the tired man -- along with a few other worn out commuters -- nod and smile with hope.

You see, it was Wednesday and these folks were essentially wishing away 48 hours of their meager time on earth so they could have permission to do what they really want to do on “the weekend.”

As for what they do with such “free” time, I’ll get to that in a moment. Let’s first consider how intensely and relentlessly we’re all conditioned.

“That’s life” and “You can’t win ‘em all” and “Take the good with the bad” and “Hey, it could always be worse”... we endlessly settle for less pain instead of demanding more pleasure.

“It’s always been like this,” I’m told, ad nauseam. “You can’t fight City Hall” and “Besides, it’s never gonna change.”

After a while, if you’re not vigilant, it all starts to sink in and far too many of us willingly embrace mediocrity -- even boredom -- while ignoring or endorsing avoidable atrocities. Our humanity and our capacity for critical thought are relentlessly pounded out of us.

No wonder it’s so damn easy to not only get us to buy into this culture... but also convince us to defend it with our very lives.

As the Situationists used to say: “The real state secret is the misery of everyday life.”

Which brings me back to the concept of “free time.”

Nothing else to do?
“Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.”

-Saul Bellow

I’ve worked in a variety of gyms and health clubs for much of my adult life and while exercise crazes and workout fashions may come and go, one disturbing trend endures:

Each and every day, I witness some of my fellow humans spend hour after hour wandering the premises. Sure, they do some semblance of a workout but mostly, they talk or people watch or yak on their cell phones or drink coffee or read the newspaper or, most commonly: stare at one of the dozens of televisions.

Whenever I point out such a person to a co-worker or client, the most common reaction I get is: “I guess they’ve got nothing better to do.”

Combine this familiar outlook with the “two more days” concept I mentioned above and it’s pretty damn depressing. How many of us toil at unfulfilling jobs, wishing away the “work week” so we can have “free time” only to discover that we’ve got “nothing better to do”?

As the Situationists used to say: “The real state secret is the misery of everyday life.”

Good and desperately important work
“One of the good things about everything being so fucked up -- about the culture being so ubiquitously destructive -- is that no matter where you look, no matter what your gifts, no matter where your heart lies, there’s good and desperately important work to be done.”

- Derrick Jensen

I’d like to remind those who regularly wish away “two more days,” that during those 48 hours:

• Roughly 400,000 acres of rainforest will be destroyed (mostly to create room for pastures and feed crops for doomed cattle).
• More than 5,000 American children will be born into poverty.
• About 26 million tons of toxic chemicals will be released across the globe.
• Somewhere between 300 and 400 plant and animal species will go extinct.
• Nearly 60,000 children under the age of five will die from preventable causes.
• About 250 million animals will be murdered for food (sic) by a global industry that consumes one-third of the planet’s land surface and is the No. 1 source of human-created greenhouse gases.

How do I know all this? Because this -- and so much more -- is what happens every 48 hours while too many of us are “bored” because we’ve got “nothing better to do” than sit at the gym and watch and re-watch Sportscenter highlights.

I’d say it’s time to reinvent everyday life -- steal it back from corporate propagandists and reintroduce the joy of living. We can provoke dramatic changes simply by refusing to submit to the societal formula we’re presented with. Sometimes, all it takes is thoughtful introspection to liberate oneself from the seductive, profit-motivated web and move into the realm of freethinking and individuality.

Breaking away from the omnipresent corporate message of “work, consume, and obey authority without question” can be our way of challenging -- and smashing -- the status quo to create a society in which industrial pirates, murderous politicians, and vacuous celebrities are no longer the ideal we strive for.

Did you ever notice how animated people get when you ask them what they'd do if they won the lottery? They can suddenly articulate dreams and wants and desires in a hopeful, confident way. It's as if someone has given them a shot of adrenaline… a new lease on life, if you will.

Wouldn't it be neat if we could all get so excited and optimistic about our lives and our future without the promise of some unattainable and unnecessary monetary prize?

We know how we feel… so no longer should we allow Hollywood, Madison Avenue, the government, or Corporate America to define our needs.

Imagine if the majority of us woke tomorrow morning and suddenly recognized that…

• Boredom is counterrevolutionary.
• The best time to start fighting back is now.
• The best place to start fighting back is here.

Imagine if the majority of us woke tomorrow morning and suddenly recognized all forms of life -- including ourselves -- as part of one collective soul. If so, how could we not defend that collective soul… by any means necessary?

With all due respect to the Situationists, I’ll let you in on the real secret: All our grievances and all our solutions are connected -- and we are the ones the planet has been waiting for.

#shifthappens

• Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook.
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Hurricane Sandy was Climate Change

SUBHEAD: The storm rode in as the Fourth Horseman of the Climate Apocalypse. Ignore that message at your peril.

By Rebecca Solnit on 6 November 2012 for TomDispatch -
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175613/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_the_name_of_the_hurricane_is_climate_change/)


Image above: A woman dresses as "Death", one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, during a Greenpeace demonstration in Parliament Square in Copenhagen, 14 December, 2009. Note large balloon representing the volume size of one ton of CO2 gas.  From (http://islamizationwatch.blogspot.com/2009/12/climate-debate-heats-up-in-copenhagen.html).

The first horseman was named al-Qaeda in Manhattan, and it came as a message on September 11, 2001: that our meddling in the Middle East had sown rage and funded madness. We had meddled because of imperial ambition and because of oil, the black gold that fueled most of our machines and our largest corporations and too many of our politicians. The second horseman came not quite four years later. It was named Katrina, and this one too delivered a warning.

Katrina’s message was that we needed to face the dangers we had turned our back on when the country became obsessed with terrorism: failing infrastructure, institutional rot, racial divides, and poverty. And larger than any of these was the climate -- the heating oceans breeding stronger storms, melting the ice and raising the sea level, breaking the patterns of the weather we had always had into sharp shards: burning and dying forests, floods, droughts, heat waves in January, freak blizzards, sudden oscillations, acidifying oceans.


The third horseman came in October of 2008: it was named Wall Street, and when that horseman stumbled and collapsed, we were reminded that it had always been a predator, and all that had changed was the scale -- of deregulation, of greed, of recklessness, of amorality about homes and lives being casually trashed to profit the already wealthy. And the fourth horseman has arrived on schedule.

We called it Sandy, and it came to tell us we should have listened harder when the first, second, and third disasters showed up. This storm’s name shouldn’t be Sandy -- though that means we’ve run through the alphabet all the way up to S this hurricane season, way past brutal Isaac in August -- it should be Climate Change.  If each catastrophe came with a message, then this one’s was that global warming’s here, that the old rules don’t apply, and that not doing anything about it for the past 30 years is going to prove far, far more expensive than doing something would have been.

That is, expensive for us, for human beings, for life on Earth, if not for the carbon profiteers, the ones who are, in a way, tied to all four of these apocalyptic visitors. A reasonable estimate I heard of the cost of this disaster was $30 billion, just a tiny bit more than Chevron’s profits last year (though it might go as high as $50 billion). Except that it’s coming out of the empty wallets of single mothers in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the pensions of the elderly, and the taxes of the rest of us. Disasters cost most of us terribly, in our hearts, in our hopes for the future, and in our ability to lead a decent life. They cost some corporations as well, while leading to ever-greater profits for others.

Disasters Are Born Political
It was in no small part for the benefit of the weapons-makers and oil producers that we propped up dictators and built military bases and earned the resentment of the Muslim world. It was for the benefit of oil and other carbon producers that we did nothing about climate change, and they actively toiled to prevent any such action.

If you wanted, you could even add a fifth horseman, a fifth disaster to our list, the blowout of the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico in the spring of 2010; cost-cutting on equipment ended 11 lives and contaminated a region dense with wildlife and fishing families and hundreds of thousands of others. It was as horrendous as the other four, but it took fewer lives directly and it should have but didn't produce political change.

Each of the other catastrophes has redirected American politics and policy in profound ways. 9/11 brought us close to dictatorship, until Katrina corrected course by discrediting the Bush administration and putting poverty and racism, if not climate change, back on the agenda. Wall Street's implosion was the 2008 October Surprise that made Americans leave Republican presidential candidate John McCain's no-change campaign in the dust -- and that, three years later, prompted the birth of Occupy Wall Street.

The Wall Street collapse did a lot for Barack Obama, too, and just in time another October surprise has made Romney look venal, clueless, and irrelevant. Disaster has been good to Obama -- Katrina’s reminder about race may have laid the groundwork for his presidential bid, and the financial implosion in the middle of the presidential campaign, as well as John McCain’s disastrous response to it, may have won him the last election.

The storm that broke the media narrative of an ascending Romney gave Obama the nonpartisan moment of solidarity he always longed for -- including the loving arms of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. But it’s not about the president; it’s about the other seven billion of us and the rest of the Earth’s creatures, from plankton to pikas.

Hope in the Storm
Sandy did what no activist could have done adequately: put climate change back on the agenda, made the argument for reasonably large government, and reminded us of the colossal failures of the Bush administration seven years ago. (Michael “heckuva job” Brown, FEMA's astonishingly incompetent director under George W. Bush, even popped up to underscore just how far we've come.)

Maybe Sandy will also remind us that terrorism was among the least common, if most dramatic, of the dangers we faced then and face now. Though rollercoasters in the surf and cities under water have their own drama -- and so does seawater rushing into the pit at Ground Zero.

Clearly, the game has changed. New York City’s billionaire mayor, when not endorsing police brutality against Wall Street’s Occupiers, has been a huge supporter of work on climate change.  He gave the Sierra Club $50 million to fight coal last year and late last week in Sandy’s wake came out with a tepid endorsement of Obama as the candidate who might do something on the climate. Last week as well, his magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, ran a cover that could’ve run anytime in the past few decades (but didn’t) with the headline: “It’s global warming, stupid.”

There are two things you can hope for after Sandy. The first is that every person stranded without power, running water, open grocery stores, access to transportation, an intact home, and maybe income (if work isn’t reachable or a job has been suspended) is able to return to normal as soon as possible. Or more than that in some cases, because the storm has also brought to light how many people were barely getting by before.  (After all, we also use the word “underwater” for people drowning in debt and houses worth less than what’s owed on their mortgages.) The second is that the fires and the water and the wind this time put climate change where it belongs, in the center of our most pressing issues.

We Have Power! How Disasters Unfold
A stranger sent me a widely circulated photograph of a front gate in Hoboken with a power strip and extension cord and a little note that reads, “We have power! Please feel free to charge your phone.” We have power, and volunteers are putting it to work in ways that count. In many disasters, government and big bureaucratic relief organizations take time to get it together or they allocate aid in less than ideal ways. The most crucial early work is often done by those on the ground, by the neighbors, by civil society -- and word, as last week ended, was that the government wasn’t always doing it adequately.

Hurricane Sandy seems to be typical in this regard. Occupy Wall Street and 350.org got together to create Occupy Sandy and are already doing splendid relief work, including for those in the flooded housing projects in Red Hook, Brooklyn. My friend Marina Sitrin, a scholar and Occupy organizer, wrote late last week:

“Amazing and inspiring work by community and Occupy folks! Hot nutritious meals for many hundreds. Supplies that people need, like diapers, baby wipes, flashlights etc., all organized. Also saw the first (meaning first set up in NYC -- only tonight) scary FEMA site a few blocks away. Militarized and policed entrance, to an area fenced in with 15-foot fences, where one gets a sort of military/astronaut ration with explanations of how to use in English that I did not understand. Plus Skittles?”

Occupy, declared dead by the mainstream media six weeks ago, is shining in this mess. Kindness, solidarity, mutual aid of this kind can ameliorate a catastrophe, but it can’t prevent one, and this isn’t the kind of power it takes to pump out drowned subway stations or rebuild railroad lines or get the lights back on. There is a role for government in disaster, and for mobilizing all available forces in forestalling our march toward a planet that could look like the New Jersey shore all the time.

When Occupy first began, all those tents, medical clinics, and community kitchens in the encampments reminded me of the aftermath of an earthquake.  The occupiers looked like disaster survivors -- and in a sense they were, though the disaster they had survived was called the economy and its impacts are usually remarkably invisible. Sandy is also an economic disaster: unlimited release of carbon into the atmosphere is very expensive and will get more so.

The increasingly turbulent, disaster-prone planet we’re on is our beautiful old Earth with the temperature raised almost one degree celsius. It’s going to get hotter than that, though we can still make a difference in how hot it gets. Right now, locally, in the soaked places, we need people to aid the stranded, the homeless, and the hungry. Globally we need to uncouple government from the Big Energy corporations, and ensure that most of the carbon energy left on the planet stays where it belongs: underground.

After the Status Quo
Disasters often unfold a little like revolutions. They create a tremendous rupture with the past. Today has nothing much in common with yesterday -- in how the system works or doesn’t, in what people have in common, in how they see their priorities and possibilities. The people in power are often most interested in returning to yesterday, because the status quo was working for them -- though Mayor Bloomberg is to be commended for taking the storm as a wake-up call to do more about climate change. For the rest of us, after such a disaster, sometimes the status quo doesn’t look so good.

Disasters often produce real political change, not always for the better (and not always for the worse). I called four of the last five big calamities in this country the four horsemen of the apocalypse because directly or otherwise they caused so much suffering, because they brought us closer to the brink, and because they changed our national direction. Disaster has now become our national policy: we invite it in and it directs us, for better and worse.

As the horsemen trample over all the things we love most, it becomes impossible to distinguish natural disaster from man-made calamity: maybe the point is that there is no difference anymore. But there’s another point: that we can prevent the worst of the impact in all sorts of ways, from evacuation plans to carbon emissions reductions to economic justice, and that it’s all tied up together.
I wish Sandy hadn’t happened. But it did, and there have been and will be more disasters like this. I hope that radical change arises from it. The climate has already changed. May we change to meet the challenges.

• Rebecca Solnit wrote about disasters and civil society in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster and in many reports for TomDispatch and other websites. 



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Rant on Deception

SUBHEAD: We must view everything they say or do from the standpoint of being DECEIVED.  

By Ashvin Pandurangi on 27 June 2012 for the Automatic Earth -  
(http://theautomaticearth.com/Finance/rant-on-deception.html)


 Image above: Advice on deception can be deceptive. From orignal article.
 
It's the middle of yet another week in which yet another round of European wealth extraction (bloody rape) is underway... and yet another gaggle of speculating geese prove that they have no idea what the hell they're talking about or what the hell is going on around them... so... I'm just gonna take this opportunity to rant a little bit.

When the politicians, media pundits, corporate analysts and others start squirting out their verbal diarrhea about the economy, the financial system, the environment, energy trends, the political climate, the geopolitical situation, social issues and everything else that makes its way onto their teleprompters and scripts and reports, there is one common element throughout all of the incessant blather - deception.

That's not just a descriptive noun or verb I'm talking about, either - it's a Theory of Conduct. We must view everything they say or do from the standpoint of being DECEIVED with a capital D-E-C-E-I-V-E and D. None of those scoundrels can be trusted, because they either have a nefarious agenda of their own or are themselves being deceived by someone else with a nefarious agenda - call it a global circle jerk of deceivers and deception.

What these sheisters do is convince you that everything you thought you knew to be true can be substituted with their own MYTHS conjured up in corporate board rooms and hotel suites, bought and paid for with YOUR money. That's right - just like Joe the Dumbass and Jane the Lazy TOOL pay 100 bucks a month to watch no-talent ass clowns on America's Got an Infinite Number of Degrading Reality TV Shows every evening, they pay thousands of bucks every year to be convinced that their collective torture and rape is JUST ACES.

• You thought that taking on debt was bad and should generally be avoided - THEY told you that accumulating debt is the ONLY way to become successful and respected in this world.
• You thought that it was wrong to punish the victims and reward the perpetrators of a Class A Felony - THEY told you that it's the ONLY way to prevent an economic apocalypse and save your pension or your job.
• You thought that austerity for the struggling masses and bailouts for the filthy rich bankers would destroy the local economy - THEY told you that local economies MUST be destroyed for the long-term greater good of humanity.
• You thought that it was important for people to have sovereignty over their bodies and their own communities through elected and accountable representatives - THEY told you that sovereignty and democracy are obsolete artifacts of a stagnant civilization; a naive remembrance of things past.

You see, anything that you think is true about this world and your life in it can be snatched up like a glop of silly putty, deformed and reshaped into something that is 100% untrue. The only pre-condition to these timeless acts of deception is that your BELIEFS have to be flexible and undefined like... a fucking glop of silly putty. Your worthless brain has to be so mushy and so atrophied that a couple of douche bags in Sweden can tell you that Barack Obama deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, and you believe them!

A couple of Eurotrash Ministers can tell you that they have come up with yet another bailout plan to avert financial meltdown and fill your life back up with rainbows and happy thoughts, while emptying out your pockets and your bank account, and you immediately go back into a culturally-induced coma. That is, of course, until your 9 to 5 Boss tells you to pack up your shit and go home for good, or your financial advisor tells you that your net worth just cratered by 25%, or your trusted bank sends you a polite letter saying you're in default on your mortgage and the roof over your kids' heads has already been scheduled for auction to the lowest scumbag.

Then you wake up and realize the better part of your life has just been one pack of deceptions after another, all setting you up to ultimately do whatever you are told by your Slave Masters and accept your miserable fate without so much as a peep. And it's not just you who will end up SUFFERING for your lack of even ONE freaking ounce of critical thinking and due diligence in that malignant brain of yours - it will be everyone around you, including your family and your closest friends.

So take a deep breath... and re-learn how to read, and to comprehend, and to think critically and to be motivated for the Truth. Tell your family and friends that there is more to life than being endlessly DECEIVED, and more to life than being used like square of toilet paper by the DECEIVERS who just finished taking a massive dump on their heads. Take a shower... use a lot of shampoo and soap... scrub yourself down... towel off... and THEN get your mind right. And get very comfortable too... because the Truth can only win out over the Deceptions over the long-haul, and WE - me, you... all of us - are only just getting started here.

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NATO protests in Chicago

SUBHEAD: Police van drives into protesters, web video reporters detained, held at gunpoint.  

By Xeni Jardin on 20 May 2012 for Boing Boing- 
(http://boingboing.net/2012/05/20/nato-protests-in-chicago-live.html#more-161878)
 

Image above: Cation Police State Ahead. . From original article. Photo by C.S. Muncy
 
"Occupy" movement participants and an array of protest groups are among those gathering in Chicago this weekend to demonstrate outside the NATO summit. Sunday, protesters are ramping up for the largest demonstration of the weekend. So are police and Homeland Security agents. Today, thousands of demonstrators are marching to the convention center where President Obama and other world leaders are meeting. Four men have been arrested on terror charges. Lawyers for the men now referred to by some protesters as the "NATO 4" claim undercover agents set up a bomb plot, and entrapped the suspects.

Image above: Mounted Chicago police ride into crowd. From original article. Photo by C.S. Muncy

Saturday night, at about 10:40PM local time, a Chicago Police van "drove into a crowd of demonstrators who were attempting to cross westbound over the Jackson Street bridge at the Chicago River," according to this video report and testimony from people who were present.


Video above: Police van runs into crowd of demonstrators. From (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yAMBN5CWxs).

Chicago Police van number 6751, accelerated as it passed through the crowd, striking several people and seriously injuring one victim who was later transported to the emergency room. The extent of the victim's injuries are not known. The driver of the van made no attempt to ascertain the condition of any of the people that were struck. Witnesses watched as the van passed through the phalanx of police surrounding the scene and drove away from the area. Had there been a civilian driving, they would certainly have been charged with a hit-and-run on a pedestrian in the roadway and taken into custody once they had been apprehended. No order to disperse had been given to the crowd.

Tim Pool @Timcast

WE HAVE BEEN RAIDED SOS

19 May 12

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Also last night, a group of independent web video journalists report having been been harassed, detained, and handcuffed by Chicago police. They claim their gear was damaged and video documenting police attacks on protesters destroyed. Below, from the WeAreChange YouTube feed (many videos there from the Chicago protests):

Luke Rudkowksi, Tim Pool, Jeoff Shively, Dustin & Jess were driving home after covering a NATO protest in Chicago only to have their car raided by police.

Tim Pool @Timcast

Calming down, still paranoid after being cuffed at gunpoint. #nato #nonato Live at timcast.tv

19 May 12

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Tim Pool @Timcast

We are told the police scanners are tracking us... #NATO #noNATO

19 May 12

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Geoffrey Giraffe @Jiraffa

Guns were drawn, car raided just after.we.called.nlg explained we may be about to be framed to come to house while we gathered belongings.

19 May 12

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Geoffrey Giraffe @Jiraffa

Car.got raided by 12 cars, cuffed, searched, interrogated.

19 May 12

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Luke Rudkowski @Lukewearechange

My friend that i saw earlier today said he was detained illegally for 6 hrs at a DHS center and questioned about me

19 May 12

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Luke Rudkowski @Lukewearechange

HD video of CPD raid on @Jiraffa @Timcast and myself guns drawn, ustream footage deleted, cameras were shut off by CPD & lot more craziness

19 May 12

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Luke Rudkowski @Lukewearechange

The CPD got all the info on me that DHS did not get from my friend that was detained and interrogated about me

20 May 12

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Luke Rudkowski @Lukewearechange

Homeland Security wanted to know what i was wearing who i was with and where i was staying this is freaky friend will make video update soon

20 May 12

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Luke Rudkowski @Lukewearechange

Just found out my friend who was detained by DHS 10min after seeing me was interrogated about me by name where i was staying who i was with

20 May 12

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Xeni Jardin @xeni 19 May 12

Luke is another #ows #nonato livestreamer. “@Lukewearechange: Had guns drawn on me searched and interrogated while handcuffed”

Geoffrey Giraffe @Jiraffa

@xeni Also CPD slammed hard drives against running boards 4 or 5 times each. Think they thought @Timcast alt batteries were drives too.

20 May 12

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Video above: Cops stopping video crew. From (http://youtu.be/yzouTMprfPA).

And in related news: At the time of this blog post, there are reports that the City of Chicago website has been DDOS'd. Over the weekend, there were reports of other such DDOSes.
Follow the Chicago protests today as they unfold, with the livestreamers the Chicago police and Homeland Security are following: Tim Pool's web video stream, Luke Rudkowski's web video stream. On Twitter: Geoffrey Giraffe (@jiraffa), Tim Pool (@timcast), Luke Rudkowski (@lukewearechange).

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US Anti-OWS legislation

SOURCE: Judie Hilke Lumborg (judie@aloha.net) SUBHEAD: US Congress passes authoritarian anti-protest law with felony charges for impeding government. By Tom Carter on 3 March 2012 for World Socialist Website - (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/mar2012/prot-m03.shtml) Image above: Demonstrators walk through the make-shift tent city as part of the Occupy D.C. demonstration at Freedom Plaza, in Washington on Oct. 11, 2011.From (http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-202_162-20119236.html).The United States is now in a full-blown crisis because its "corrupt foundation has been exposed to the American people. The US government may crack down on this movement but cannot uproot it. Ultimately, it will grow so that it will bring down the capitalist system and the West." - Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei 10/12/11. A bill passed Monday in the US House of Representatives and Thursday in the Senate would make it a felony—a serious criminal offense punishable by lengthy terms of incarceration—to participate in many forms of protest associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests of last year. Several commentators have dubbed it the “anti-Occupy” law, but its implications are far broader. The bill—H.R. 347, or the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011”—was passed by unanimous consent in the Senate, while only Ron Paul and two other Republicans voted against the bill in the House of Representatives (the bill passed 388-3). Not a single Democratic politician voted against the bill. The virtually unanimous passage of H.R. 347 starkly exposes the fact that, despite all the posturing, the Democrats and the Republicans stand shoulder to shoulder with the corporate and financial oligarchy, which regarded last year’s popular protests against social inequality with a mixture of fear and hostility. Among the central provisions of H.R. 347 is a section that would make it a criminal offense to “enter or remain in” an area designated as “restricted.” The bill defines the areas that qualify as “restricted” in extremely vague and broad terms. Restricted areas can include “a building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting” and “a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance.” The Secret Service provides bodyguards not just to the US president, but to a broad layer of top figures in the political establishment, including presidential candidates and foreign dignitaries. Even more sinister is the provision regarding events of “national significance.” What circumstances constitute events of “national significance” is left to the unbridled discretion of the Department of Homeland Security. The occasion for virtually any large protest could be designated by the Department of Homeland Security as an event of “national significance,” making any demonstrations in the vicinity illegal. For certain, included among such events would be the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, which have been classified as National Special Security Events (NSSE), a category created under the Clinton administration. These conventions have been the occasion for protests that have been subjected to ever increasing police restrictions and repression. Under H.R. 347, future protests at such events could be outright criminalized. The standard punishment under the new law is a fine and up to one year in prison. If a weapon or serious physical injury is involved, the penalty may be increased to up to ten years. Also criminalized by the bill is conduct “that impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions” and “obstructs or impedes ingress or egress to or from any restricted building or grounds.” These provisions, even more so than the provisions creating “restricted areas,” threaten to criminalize a broad range of protest activities that were previously perfectly legal. In order to appreciate the unprecedented sweep of H.R. 347, it is necessary to consider a few examples:

• A wide area around the next G-20 meeting or other global summit could be designated “restricted” by the Secret Service, such that any person who “enters” a that area can be subject to a fine and a year in jail under Section 1752(a)(1) (making it a felony to enter any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so).
• Senator Rick Santorum, the ultra-right Republican presidential candidate, enjoys the protection of the Secret Service. Accordingly, a person who shouts “boo!” during a speech by Santorum could be subject to arrest and a year of imprisonment under Section 1752(a)(2) (making it a felony to “engag[e] in disorderly or disruptive conduct in” a restricted area).
• Striking government workers who form a picket line near any event of “national significance” can be locked up under Section 1752(a)(3) (making it a crime to imped[e] ingress or egress to or from any restricted building or grounds).

Under the ancient regime in France, steps were taken to ensure that the “unwashed masses” were kept out of sight whenever a carriage containing an important aristocrat or church official was passing through. Similarly, H.R. 347 creates for the US president and other top officials a protest-free bubble or “no-free-speech zone” that follows them wherever they go, making sure the discontented multitude is kept out of the picture. The Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act is plainly in violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which was passed in 1791 in the aftermath of the American Revolution. The First Amendment provides: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . . or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” (The arrogance of the Democratic and Republican politicians is staggering—what part of “Congress shall make no law” do they not understand?) H.R. 347 comes on the heels of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was signed by President Obama into law on December 31, 2011. The NDAA gives the president the power to order the assassination and incarceration of any person—including a US citizen—anywhere in the world without charge or trial. The passage of H.R. 347 has been the subject of a virtual blackout in the media. In light of the unprecedented nature of the bill, which would effectively overturn the First Amendment, this blackout cannot be innocent. The media silence therefore represents a conscious effort to keep the American population in the dark as to the government’s efforts to eviscerate the Bill of Rights. The bill would vastly expand a previous law making it misdemeanor to trespass on the grounds of the White House. An earlier version of the bill would have made it a felony just to “conspire” to engage in any of the conduct described above. The bill now awaits President Obama’s signature before it becomes the law of the land. What lies behind the unprecedented attack underway on the US Constitution and Bill of Rights is a growing understanding in the ruling class that the protests that took place around the world against social inequality in 2011 will inevitably re-emerge in more and more powerful forms in 2012 and beyond, as austerity measures and the crashing economy make the conditions of life more and more impossible for the working class. The virtually unanimous support in Congress H.R. 347, among Democrats as well as Republicans, reflects overriding sentiment within the ruling establishment for scrapping all existing democratic rights in favor of dictatorial methods of rule. This sentiment was most directly expressed this week by Wyoming Republican legislator David Miller, who recently introduced a bill into the state legislature that would give the state the power, in an “emergency,” to create its own standing army through conscription, print its own currency, acquire military aircraft, suspend the legislature, and establish martial law. “Things happen quickly sometimes—look at Libya, look at Egypt, look at those situations,” Miller told the Star-Tribune in Casper, Wyoming. Repeating arguments employed by every military dictatorship over the past century, Miller declared, “We wouldn’t have time to meet as a Legislature or even in special session to do anything to respond.” Miller’s so-called “doomsday law” was defeated in the Wyoming legislature Tuesday by the narrow margin of 30-27. See also: Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act Lib of Cong: 112th Congress - House Res 347 Lib of Congs: 112th Congress - Senate Bill 1794 Ea O Ka Aina: Wyoming Doomsday Bill 2/24/12 .

Protesting Monsanto on Maui

SOURCE: Brad Parsons (mauibrad@hotmail.com) SUBHEAD: Maui group holds week of protest against GMOs crops near Monsanto office in Kihei. Police claim trespass. By Wendy Osher on 23 January 2012 for Maui Now - (http://mauinow.com/2012/01/23/monsanto-responds-as-maui-occupy-group-launches-demonstration) Image above: Maui activists demonstrate against Monsanto GMO products. Photos by Madeline Ziecker. For more see (http://mauinow.com/2011/10/17/photos-maui-activists-call-for-gmo-labeling)

A week of Occupy Wall Street Maui events kick off today with the establishment of an encampment near the Monsanto offices in Kihei.

A series of marches, rallies and vigils are planned throughout the week as the group expresses their concerns over herbicide use, production of GMO products, and arguments of impacts on small farmers.

An event flyer makes claims of food supply control, government manipulation and environmental poisons.

Monsanto Hawaii Community Affairs Director, Paul Koehler responded to the planned demonstrations saying that while the company respects everyone’s right to voice their opinion, he said, “It’s unfortunate that a number of misleading and factually incorrect statements about Monsanto and genetically engineered crops continue to circulate.”

He said the company recognizes that the topics can be complex and reiterated the company’s commitment to transparency and dialogue.

“We’re happy to have an open, respectful discussion with anyone genuinely interested in learning more about who we are and what we do,” he said.

The week of events planned by Occupy Wall Street Maui and posted on the occupymaui.com website include:

• Monday, January 23, 2012: a roundup-themed garden highlighting concerns over herbicide use.
• Tuesday, January 24, 2012: a march is planned past Monsanto crops along the Piilani Highway in South Maui.
• Wednesday, January 25, 2012: a rally in Kahului is planned to spread information on the effects of GMO products.
• Thursday, January 26, 2012: a march is planned in Wailuku to protest Monsanto and claims of the company’s influence in government.
• Friday, January 27, 2012: An Occupy with Aloha event is planned at the University of Hawaii Maui College.
• Saturday, January 28, 2012: Plans to Occupy local farmers markets and fruit stands, and gathering for a day of teach-ins, music, and organic food is planned.
• Sunday, January 29, 2012: A dusk vigil will be held for small farmers at the occupation site fronting Monsanto on Maui.

Koehler said Monsanto Hawaii is working with the Police Department to ensure safety of all during the planned Occupy events. “Our number one concern,” he said, “is for the safety of everyone involved, including that of drivers passing by on the highway, pedestrians, our employees and the demonstrators.”

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ACLU confronts Maui PD on free speech By Wendy Osher on 23 January 2012 for Maui Now - (http://mauinow.com/2012/01/27/aclu-confronts-county-regarding-occupy-maui-monsanto-protest) Image above: Maui activists demonstrate along Piilani Highway in Kihei under supervision of Maui PD.. Photos by Madeline Ziecker.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii filed a complaint letter with the County of Maui this week citing concerns over First Amendment rights of protesters demonstrating near the Monsanto facility along the Pi’ilani Highway in Kihei.

Members of the Occupy Wall Street Maui group began the week-long protest on Monday to expresses their concerns over herbicide use, production of GMO products, and impacts on small farmers.

When the protest started, Monsanto officials found fault with claims against the company, but acknowledged the right for individuals to express their opinion.

The ACLU letter, dated on Tuesday, January 24, 2012, alleges OWSM members were threatened with trespass and instructed to leave the site after sunset because of safety concerns.

In the ACLU letter, the foundation states, “there is evidence to suggest that the county is singling out the Occupy protesters for harassment based on the content of their speech.”

The ACLU letter states that “vague safety concerns” were used “in justifying statements that protesters must leave at night.” It further states that, “No government official has given any basis for the statement that the safety of the protesters, the drivers, or the general public is at risk.”

A response letter from Deputy Corporation Counsel Moana M. Lutey states, “It is my understanding that the protestors leave of their own volition and not as a result of any threats by the MPD. In fact, it would make sense to leave at nightfall because the two protest areas are not well lit at night.”

OWSM protester, Brady Townsend said members of the group spent months planning the event. He said, “We researched it thoroughly, and got permits for our marches, but were told after a long run-around we did not need one for the site itself as it is on public property.”

OWSM members say they had planned to maintain a visible presence on the site 24 hours a day for the week; however, when rented portable sanitary facilities arrived, they say Maui police officers “turned them away.”

Officials from the County Department of the Corporation Counsel said, “In terms of the portable toilet permit, this cannot be construed as an act of harassment by MPD. If a permit was denied, I do not know who would have denied it,” stated Lutey in the Jan. 25, 2012 response letter to the ACLU.

Lutey further stated, “There is no provision in the County Code for the issuance of a portable toilet permit. As a result, no county agency could have denied the permit.”

The group released two videos saying police actions contradict the county’s position. The videos are posted on the OWSM Facebook page at: http://tinyurl.com/MPD-Kihei1, and http://tinyurl.com/MPD-Kihei2.

Corporation Counsel states that none of the protesters have been arrested, cited, or threatened with arrest or citation for protesting at Monsanto. “Instead, the protesters have simply been asked to comply with the same rules that apply to sign wavers (i.e. maintaining a certain distance from intersections for traffic safety, do not stand in the middle of a divided highway, etc.),” Lutey stated.

A request for comment from Monsanto was granted with the following statement from the company’s Community Affairs Director, Paul Koehler, who said, “This is a legal and safety matter outside of our purview, so we respectfully defer to county and state authorities.”

The OWSM group has plans to continue the demonstration as planned through Sunday, January 29, 2012, concluding with a dusk vigil. It is unclear if the event will run into the evening.

.

Fincancial market is collapsing

SUBHEAD: The only roles being cast in the up-coming production is that of occupying your own space. By Ilargi on 25 January 2012 for Automatic Earth - (http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2012/01/january-25-2012-occupy-your-own-space.html) Image above: Detail of 1937 ohto of wife and child of tractor driver on Aldridge Plantation, Mississippi, by Dorthea Lange.From original article. For today’s global financial problems, there are no solutions that are favorable to either incumbent politicians or wannabe leaders (unless they’re extremists, perhaps), let alone to the people they claim to represent. All our herd of leaders can do is to postpone the inevitable outcome of inevitable processes as long as possible. That's why we see Obama presenting yet another housing plan that won't work, and Europe setting up the umptieth Save Greece concoction that is doomed to fail before it's signed - if that happens at all -. Obama knows it, and so do Europe's leaders. The disaster they're seeking to avert, it seems, is not so much economic depression as it is their being voted out of office. And this pattern is not going to change, not as long as they can keep up appearances by seizing ever more of our children's future wealth, not as long as we let them. Greece is negotiating a deal with investors to achieve a 70% haircut on existing bonds, up from 21% hardly more than half a year ago, and it still won't be enough. The 49% increase since last summer should be a huge red flag for everyone. Why that increase? Well, first of all of course because 21% was always ridiculously low. But something else is happening too: the biggest developing problem for Europe is that a Greek default can increasingly be enormously profitable for certain parties in the market. And why should they then work to "save" Greece? It has been clear for a long time now that Greek bonds have no value left at all. During that time, the smarter kids in the class have been able to position themselves according to that fact. Therefore the noose around the EU and ECB necks gets pulled in tighter as we go along. And as the ridiculous notion of the 70% haircut being labeled as "voluntary" keeps being touted. The IMF is pressuring the ECB to also take a haircut. Other central banks and sovereigns are next in line. Hello, Fed! Hey, China! The ECB wants to sell its Greek paper to one of the European emergency funds, which can then take the haircut. Musical chairs is making a come-back as a highly popular game these days. The smarter kids are laughing all the way to all the banks as they are paid all the money they want by all the bankrupt nations seeking to hide their insolvency from their own citizens, squandering those very citizens' scarce remaining wealth in the process. We can only keep our societies alive and running by telling a seemingly neverending series of lies. And if everyone had the same interests, this delusion could last quite a while; we’ve been doing it for 4-5 years already, after all (and arguably for much longer). But not everybody has the same interests, not anymore. This lying eyes mirage system is almost perfect, but, in the words of Leonard Cohen: "there's a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in". Still, people believe most of the lies, and add their own with impunity, because they don't want to see things for what they are. So we just keep talking about economic growth, and we'll make up the numbers we need to prove it as we go along. The plans discussed for Greece involve interest payments on new bonds of 4-5% or so. It doesn't matter one bit what percentage they come up with. Greece won’t be able to pay any interest, never mind principal, for many years to come. And everybody with a seat at the table knows it. These are your proverbial exercises in futility. They're all that's left us. Financially bankrupt, politically bankrupt, morally bankrupt. As every additional dollar issued as debt no longer adds to GDP, but instead subtracts from it, there's no doubt where this is going. But yes, it's true, we can still choose to look the other way and wait for it to hit us over the head. Matter of preference. If houses in countries like the US, Britain, Holland, Spain, China are ever to reach a level where they become affordable, we will find they no longer are, no matter how low prices become - receding horizons in reverse, sort of -. Because if they do reach that level, the entire contraption that is our economy will have crumbled. So governments choose to prop up home prices. Helped in arriving at that decision by the knowledge that homeowners are a formidable political force they don’t want to turn against them. But propping up home prices means supporting price levels that were established by hot air credit in combination with liar loans and other "criminal legalities" in the first decade of the millennium. The hot air credit is rapidly vanishing because it's put everyone and their pet hamster neck deep into debt. People can't afford to borrow anymore, a simple truth that is almost entirely ignored. Hence, to prop up today's prices at yesterday's levels, governments themselves need to step in. Can't have that ole market working its magic. What this does is it lets every single citizen pay for every single underwater homeowner's debt. And why should people who already have a hard time pay for someone else's home? Obama's State of the Union mortgage plan, provided it doesn't simmer down and die like all the preceding plans, is based on refinancing at lower interest rates. If nothing else, this will put potentially substantial ($100 billion? $300 billion?) additional pressure on Fannie and Freddie. Which already have negative capitalization rates. And sit on trillions of dollars "worth" of highly dubious paper, most of which has not been written down to anything like reasonable, realistic levels. Of course all the negative aspects of this were dealt with a few years back through the brilliant move to let everyone decide their own accounting standards. A move that is as dangerous as it is brilliant, however. Because nobody knows what anything is truly worth anymore. You can have lender A having a home loan on its books for $200,000, while bank B has issued securities for a strikingly similar home next door "worth" $400,000, and the just as similar home next to that one has been sold for $50,000 just last week. Now if the "owners" of either the first or the second home default, what happens to the value of those loans and/or securities written on them? At some point, someone will demand to know the truth. But neither the government, nor the lenders, nor the borrowers want that truth to be known. Small wonder that banks would rather let homes sit empty or let borrowers stay put for years without paying. Price discovery is a bitch, and never more so than after a long period of lying about that price. There's only one thing a government can reasonably do when faced with a conundrum such as this: nothing. Unfortunately, that's not what governments think they're for, doing nothing, and - luckily for them - neither does the majority of people they represent. In this particular case, all those homeowners want action. They demand that the government protect the value of - what they see as- their property. And so we have another plan. America likes to tout its status of a free market country. But that's just nuts. Delusional nuts. And no, it's not that all of a sudden we see socialism or communism, popular as those accusations may be; that just comes from people who don't understand what those words mean. What has happened is that America is electing a Liar-in-Chief every four years. His/her job is to keep the herd in the faith, to let them buy stuff all the time, preferably with borrowed money. To keep all noses pointing in the same direction, namely perpetual growth, especially when there isn't any. The Liar-in-Chief is far more a religious leader than a political one. You can't have the herd disperse and separate and all its members running off in different direction to go and do their own thing. Nothing to do with Obama specifically either, it's simply in the job description. Taking the job, though, is indeed his own responsibility. If Obama were a political instead of a faith-based leader, he would take his hands off the US real estate market, and let the market do what it does best: price discovery. Shut down Fannie and Freddie and their ilk, the biggest economic disaster in US history, and sell off their "assets" to the highest bidder. Write down all the losses, let holders of loans and securities take the haircuts they are entitled to, and go on with life. Look at the future instead of being stuck in the past. There is zero chance that US home prices will ever reach their recent peak again, unless some sort of huge inflation were to take place, and that is obviously not in the cards for many years (if it were, it would have been here already) . So before that happens, other factors will have made sure that home prices are driven down relentlessly. Like, for instance, most Americans, or the ones that have jobs at least, a select group, making the kinds of wages that are current today among burgerflippers in China or Vietnam. Fannie and Freddie are to a significant extent responsible for the fact that the financial sector has been able to take over and govern US society, including its political sphere. Whenever I say things like this, there are always people that point to all the good the GSEs have done: allowed ordinary people to afford a home etc. But in fact, from the get-go, they have driven up prices by "raising affordability", and that has allowed for the banking sector to get a stranglehold on the US population. Today this has culminated in a situation where personal debt levels and federal debt levels have reached ridiculous levels. Debts which will never ever be serviced. All that's left is trying to let people continue to believe that they will, until creditors bring down the guillotine. Which they will, simply because there's a profit to be made. Releasing Fannie and Freddie from their misery would amount to certain election defeat, or so goes the perceived wisdom. So that's not going to happen. We're going to have to wait for the markets to judge that the time has come when profits from wagers are more attractive than hand-outs and bail-outs. At that point, governments and central banks will be exposed as being absolutely powerless to influence anything at all, and least of all interest rates or home prices. And that is a sad reality. For all of us who don't have seats at the big casino tables in Washington and Brussels and Davos. It's not like I'm alone in my judgment of Fannie and Freddie, even if that's a small consolation in view of the enormity of the consequences of the decision to let an election victory prevail over the health of an economy. If you ever wonder what kind of person wants a job like POTUS anyway, keep that in mind. Mike Mish Shedlock is one of the few people I know who shares - some of - my views. He had this to say last week:

Time To Concede Home 'Ownership' Is A Fraud

I have long-stated the best thing to do is nothing. Indeed if nothing is done, home prices will drop low enough that investors will want to buy them. Delays in foreclosures only serve to delay the housing recovery.

Mish then quotes his friend BC, who provides a very astute observation:

The only long-term durable solution to the unreal estate mess is to cease further securitization by agencies and shut them down. It's time to concede that "homeownership" is a fraud. When there is $16 trillion in mortgage and consumer debt outstanding and an estimated $16 trillion in residential unreal estate value, with the risk of another 20% decline in prices, there is no "ownership". Rather, virtually everyone with a mortgage is renting debt-money from a lender and leasing the land from a local taxing authority. The mortgagees have a "dead pledge" in the value of the debt owed, not an "asset". The lenders and taxing authorities are the "owners" of a lien (a bond or constraint on the real property), which entitles them to income in the form of compounding interest and tax receipts in perpetuity.

Well, it’s not going to happen on a voluntary basis, this admission of fraud. We're going to see the financial markets having to tear the delusion of ownership and economic recovery from the cold dead hands of all those implicated in that fraud, from lenders to investors to borrowers and governments. And that will be a pleasant. sight to behold. George Soros is in his eighties. He seems to now feel free to speak out on what he sees coming, to hold his cards a little less close to his chest. Soros is dead on, and, if anything, holding back in this Daily Beast piece.

George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War

"We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system." Soros draws on his past to argue that the global economic crisis is as significant, and unpredictable, as the end of communism. "The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening." To Soros, the spectacular debunking of the credo of efficient markets—the notion that markets are rational and can regulate themselves to avert disaster—"is comparable to the collapse of Marxism as a political system. The prevailing interpretation has turned out to be very misleading. It assumes perfect knowledge, which is very far removed from reality. We need to move from the Age of Reason to the Age of Fallibility in order to have a proper understanding of the problems." Take Europe. He’s now convinced that "if you have a disorderly collapse of the euro, you have the danger of a revival of the political conflicts that have torn Europe apart over the centuries—an extreme form of nationalism, which manifests itself in xenophobia, the exclusion of foreigners and ethnic groups. In Hitler’s time, that was focused on the Jews. Today, you have that with the Gypsies, the Roma, which is a small minority, and also, of course, Muslim immigrants." As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. "Yes, yes, yes," he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. "It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States."

Ironically and unfortunately, the economic growth faith delusion is too strong to make people, even if they acknowledge that harder times lie ahead, understand that they need to focus some place other than how much their gold is worth today, or their pension. That things other than monetary items will be much more important to their survival and well-being. That land and community and practical skills will in the future trump all the things they've ever seen as valuable. And, to be honest, how can you be expected to change your myopic points of view when everyone around you holds on to them in the exact same way that you do? You look around, and everything seems alright, nothing a spoonful of austerity and hard work can't cure. But, just as the only good thing to do for Obama right now is to abolish Fannie and Freddie and Sallie Mae and the FHA and FHFA, to get out, which he won’t, there's an equivalent for Jill and Jack on Main Street. And that is also to get out. Get out and cut, to the extent possible, all dependence on the government that makes its decisions for all the wrong reasons, and on all other top-down systems that rely on it. Because those systems are going to crash, and there's no doubt that they will bring all the Jack and Jills that depend on them, down with them. Obama and Merkel won't get out of the way, and that increases the urgency for Jack and Jill to do so. There are people whose role in this unfolding tragedy will be to Occupy Wall Street or Tahrir Square. And there are people whose role it will be to find and occupy their own space. Those are the only main roles that will be available for this movie. The extras will all be cast as cannon fodder. .

Occupy - Embrace what you are!

SUBHEAD: The Occupy movement can light a fire of human beauty, and human love amidst the sterility of this world. By John Duffy on 21 December 2011 for Grow Food Raise Hell - (http://growfoodraisehell.tumblr.com/post/14572070695/occupy-embrace-what-you-are) Image above: Police arrest a protester on New York's Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2011, during a march by Occupy Wall Street. From (http://abcnews.go.com/US/occupy-wall-street-protesters-americans/story?id=14652698#.TvtzUEpfW2A). Since the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City and around the US and the globe, there has been a constancy of criticism coming from the entrenched establishment and its would-be supporters. It’s easy enough to ignore the banality and mindlessness of the critiques coming from this camp—critiques aimed at the supposèd lack of direction amongst Occupiers, or their supposed lack of employment, or their supposed lack of hygiene. What is frustrating is the sideline coaching from non-participants who think themselves far too clever to get involved, but who nonetheless feel they know the exact direction and focus that the movement must take. It surprises me that Occupy Wall Street’s original impetus somehow slides over, under, and around the attention of those who proclaim to know what would be best for it. It surprises me more when Occupy participants miss the obvious reality of what I believe their movement is, so I will say it plainly here: Occupy Wall Street and its sister protests around the world are a cultural resistance. It is forgivable to observe the name “Occupy Wall Street,” to see that the original protesters planted themselves as close to the heart of the financial death cult as the enforcement arm of the state would allow, and to arrive at the conclusion that all Occupy efforts are a reaction to monetary malfeasance, both public and private. However, it is clear with even a cursory study of the class demographics and ideological spectrum present that Occupy Movement groups are resisting a broader cultural meme—of which the recent fiduciary debauchery on Wall Street and in Washington is but one outgrowth. Occupy protests have targeted everything from Goldman Sachs and Bank of America’s recent abundance of criminality, to homelessness, the degradation of the environment, the corporate influence in politics, the toxicity of the food supply, foreign wars, domestic repression, foreclosures, Wal-Mart, big Pharma, etc, ad nauseam. This plethora of targets, this seemingly endless hit list, is not as the critics smugly proclaim: a lack of focus or meandering of thought. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of the greater cultural malaise. The challenge of focus for Occupy protests is not necessarily one of targets or tactics. Though strategic maneuvering of their members to the pinch points and bottle necks of the dominant culture is a conversation of constant necessity, more pressing is the discovery of the poisonous heart of the dominant culture. What is the common thread which grafts together the banks, the oil companies, the degradation of the planet’s ecosystems, the drugging of children, the indefinite detention of “terror suspects,” and the imprisonment of non-violent drug possessors? To me, it seems clear that the dominant culture is a culture of domination. The dominant culture, that is — the culture of industrial civilization, that is — our culture — is a culture that rests on a foundation of violence, exploitation, slavery, and brutality. In the privileged West, it is harder to see this than in, say, the Niger Delta, the Brazilian rain forests, or in the sweatshops of Asia. To be sure, the barbarity of our culture is present domestically, but as most modern, “civilized” people have lost connectivity with the natural world, they likely don’t see their city, suburb, or local shopping mall as an exploitation of the land. Further, they take little notice of the flowers, the salamanders, the moths, or any of the over two hundred species which go extinct every day on Earth, including those who forever exit their own communities. Somehow, the exported violence of the tar sands mining operations in Alberta Canada, the Pacific or Atlantic garbage “islands,” or the petroleum wastes of Azerbaijan or newly liberated Iraq remain invisible to those who benefit from these graveyards the most. Perhaps you don’t see the congruity between environmental destruction and the revolving door that exists between government and finance. Perhaps you don’t see ours as a culture of domination, of violence, of exploitation. Let’s look at it another way. This culture is one in which it is not only acceptable, but celebrated, to destroy life for profit. Indeed, the only way to profit, the only way to generate material “wealth,” is by killing. A tree doesn’t become lumber unless you cut it down. Cows don’t become McBurger filling until they have been executed (and of course, tortured). Even humans don’t become laborers until they have been enclosed into a capitalist marketplace, off of and separate from the land, where they must choose between labor and starvation. Thus there is a price tag hung around the neck of every living thing. Since the only laudable goal according to cultural dogma is the accumulation of excess capital, it is axiomatic that this culture will cut down more trees every year, drag more and bigger nets across the ocean floor every year, lay more concrete every year, burn more petroleum every year, in a never ending quest to convert the living planet into the abstract object of our insane festishizations: money. Though it may be a bit heavy for some, it must be stated; capitalism is reaching its endgame. The growth requirement which capitalism has built into itself is now colliding headlong with the limits of the natural world, which provides all of the raw stock required by industry. Like an organism undergoing ketosis, the system is beginning to devour itself for sustenance. Governments create imaginary capital to patch over privately created black holes of debt, while financial institutions feast on the accumulated “wealth” of the poorer strata of western society by mechanisms like foreclosure, stagnant wages, increasing tuitions, increasing interest payments, layoffs, and every other conceivable and now commonplace “austerity measure.” It is this amalgam of symptoms of collapse that the people of the “first” world are now experiencing. Of course, these first-worlders have lived on the backs of exploited peoples, animals, and land bases for generations, all too happy to consume to their heart’s content in a drunken orgy of self-righteous hedonism. (In their defense, the masters of capital did scar these people at birth with the brand of consumption, bombarding them day and night with self defeating advertisements and a ceaseless campaign of pro-authoritarian, anti-life propaganda.) This monstrous architecture has not only built into an impossible growth requirement, but also a series of premises concerning the validity of hierarchy. This is a culture of domination. Our culture regularly promotes and lauds the violence committed by armies and police against civilians. It regularly promotes and lauds violence committed by men against women and children. It regularly promotes and lauds the violence committed by humans against animals, against plants, against water, soil, and air. This culture reviles any violence in the reverse direction. Violence may not flow up the hierarchy without being met by immense over-pressures of force. Those at the top and their mercenary defenders will not allow their status to be questioned, let alone challenged. Hence, we witness the unfounded violence so far committed against Occupy protesters, despite their near uniform docile behavior. Now that the maw of imperial capitalism is fixing itself upon the white people of the first world, now that a future of more luxury and entitlement is not a guarantee, there is a revelation to the true nature of the culture appearing to those willing to see it. The chant “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” rings of this dawning truth. The system isn’t here for you—you are here for it. You are to turn your cog, move your little piece of the machine, keep it marching, keep it killing, and the moment you become a net drain on the architecture of this society, you find your place in the cast iron furnace next to the felled redwood, the poisoned aquifer, and the Bangladeshi slave. You will be chewed up and spit out like the expendable component that you are. It’s no longer just the exotic foreigners in some far away land who are getting in the way of profit, now it is you. Now it’s your family, your co-workers, your town that stands between a corporation and black ink on the bottom line. This is the intellectual hurdle before the Occupy Movement. Do they dare shine a light on the built-in flaws of capitalism? Do they dare indict long held “self evident truths,” and stand united behind the idea that another world truly is possible? Themselves organized in an egalitarian, horizontal fashion, making decisions by consensus and demanding respect for all participants—do Occupy Movements dare recognize their anarchism, and move forward with stolid conviction that it is not merely a handful of nasty players they are fighting, not merely a corrupt electoral process, but toxic imaginings of power and right in the minds of the masters, and indeed, in the minds of all men born into the belly of this twisted device? At the moment, many Occupy groups and members will hold up their hands and soften their voices to meekly proclaim, “Now, I’m not against capitalism or rich people,” instead hiding behind a desire for “financial fairness.” The problem is that one cannot, with full education on the topic, simultaneously believe in capitalism and financial fairness. Volumes on this issue have been written by men smarter and more articulate than myself, so I will spare the reader an extrapolation on this topic, hopefully sufficing to say that the logic of capitalism dictates that were one man capable of accumulating the capital to do so, he could buy all of the land in the world. Any logic that leads to that conclusion is not logic at all, and must be abandoned by all sane people. If the Occupy Movement, fearful of public opinion, fearful of poll numbers and the manufactured and implanted concerns of fence-sitters, decides not to move forward and proudly adopt that theirs is truly a rejection of the dominant culture, it will stagnate. As this culture has made a mess of all of its participants psychologically and emotionally, it is folly to fear the misguided notions of non-participating members of the culture, especially at such an early stage of our collective activism. On the other hand, if the Occupy Movement recognizes its true heart, embraces its foundational disdain for the culture at large, and follows through with whatever manifests from that heartbreak and that need, it has a chance to do something incredible: to inspire. To inspire true revolt in the hearts of all people. To inspire an outpouring of collective sympathy, a great sigh from a worldwide population subjugated for lifetimes upon lifetimes. The Occupy Protest Movement and all of its congruent revolutions around the world have in their hands, if they have the courage to use it, the ability to inspire one last flare up of human fire, human beauty, and human love a world of hastening emotional sterility. It is from this rage and awe burning in the guts of man, that freedom, peace, and communion are born. Yet at this moment, a brave new world dawns. The empires of the world are increasing the scale of their violence as they scrape and claw for dominion of the remaining global hydrocarbon reserves. Capitalist institutions, including nations themselves, cannibalize one and other for survival. A shadow of tyranny and fascism is creeping forth, extinguishing the last remnants of freedom people have, and in this dark hour, I implore the Occupy protesters, of which I am a dedicated one: bring light, in what is otherwise a truly blackened future without us. • John Duffy is an artist, activist, and voice of the Grow Food, Raise Hell podcast. He currently resides in Austin, Texas. .