History for Beginners

After the heady, arguably Revolutionary events of last January, this year's opening month and its absurdist and obsessive media spectacle of the Republican Campaign Clown Car, one cannot be blamed if one longs for... something better. Change the channel, mKay? This is boresome.

Well, I have not watched a single "debate" (they are not debates, they have not been debates for years, for generations, why are they calling them "debates" when they are nothing but sales pitches? I ask you.) in the Republican campaign, and I doubt I will even watch the Incumbent trade sound bites with the Challenger (whomever it may be -- even Romney who now has to overcome so many obstacles -- in the end). It's become a Gong Show with aspects of Survivor thrown in to make it seem up to date.

Entertainment for the masses and revenues (Oh, boy! Big Fucking Revenues!http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif) for the Entertainment conglomerates. Talk about revenue sharing and wealth transfers! Yeek!

I did watch Arcade Fire on Austin City Limitsthough. Anyone who was following the Wisconsin Uprising and Occupation last winter is aware of Arcade Fire because of the video below, even if, like me, they didn't know of them beforehand:

Wisconsin "Budget Repair Bill" Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Arcade Fire's "Revolution (Lies)" was hailed at the time as "the soundtrack of a Revolution."

Little did we know then that Wisconsin actually was the spark that would ignite revolutionary fervor throughout the land. Our friends in Egypt knew, though.

They knew that what they had done just days and weeks before and what their colleagues in Tunisia had done and what was igniting in Europe was unstoppable. Once the spark is lit... there you are. It's under way. Hold on, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

And so it has been. Thus the media focus on the Clown Car of the Perpetual Political Campaign is more than a little, erm, stupid. And maybe that's for the best. Our friends at dKos have been absolutely obsessed with Republicans and their maunderings and maneuverings to capture the Throne for months and months, so much so, there has been practically no acknowledgement that there even are "Democrats" in Washington DC and statehouses any more. Whether the honchos over there realize it or not, their almost exclusive focus on Republicans functions as one of those subliminal messages that we all used to understand the media was filling our little heads with: Republicans are the only politicians that matter, the only political party that matters, focus exclusively on the Republicans, no matter how clownish they may be, they are your Rulers and your Buddies... over and over again, repeated endlessly, a mantra, a trance-inducing formula. To my eye, intentional. Let us not forget, Markos, like many other luminaries in the internet's so-called "progressive" political field, is an ex-Republican who converted as it were.

He, like so many others who want to sit at the Big Table and be a Playah in the Palace, has never been much of a liberal/leftist/progressive in any recognizable political sense of those terms. I've said that he, like many others on the lefter side of the internet political dial, is essentially a libertarian entrepreneur. That's not quite the same thing as the "hard left partisan" that he and others have been accused of being.

But then, libertarians have long been angling to capture the leftish mantle. And who's to blame them? The Dems gave it up a long time ago. In fact, I would argue that the Dems have never been a leftist party at all, they are a conservative political party. They are the oldest political party in the country, and they take that status very seriously. They see themselves as the Responsible Party conserving what is best in American culture, society, and politics, in opposition to various radical reactionary parties (like the Republicans) who have arisen from time to time, while simultaneously standing in opposition to the "mob", the vox populi, We the People, whose ravenings and outcries must be kept suppressed at all times and by any means necessary.

Sometimes that means throwing bones to the masses, but for some time now, neither major political party has been the least bit inclined to throw bones (sometimes not even rhetorical ones) to their bases.

Hm. How did that happen? This is not normal American politics.

From what little I can figure out from my experience on the inside of the Federal government "what happened" was Waco and then Oklahoma City. And then the Clinton impeachment, the Bush seizure of the White House and the collapse of Congressional authority, followed in quick succession by the 9/11 attack and the wars of revenge and imperial aggression that followed upon that singular event. Thence the rigorous institutionalization of the National Security State and the New Model Mercenary Militarist that bids to rule the world -- on behalf, it would seem, of a rather small but very powerful cohort of global corporatists. The "People"? Pshaw. What of them?

What I witnessed was the government barricading itself against the People.

From the inside, these events were all of a piece, almost seamless; they altered government's relationship with the People, and they fundamentally altered politics in ways that I don't think more than a few people have fully come to recognize.

Politics has always been a spectacle and a show, that's it's nature. But now it is one that is completely meaningless at the federal level. Once in office, elected representatives do not serve you and me, they can't or they wouldn't be there, not for long anyway. They serve a ruling class, one that is rather more shadowy than we may think. This is not to go all CT, but the people who are actually pulling the strings in the DC Palaces, and more and more in the provinces as well, are people we've probably never heard of; at the top there is no separation between these people and their interests and the government. It's all the same.

We the People are simply irrelevant at that level. We exist to the extent we can be manipulated when need be to follow the commands and desires of a ruling elite. But as we've seen, there are "too many" of us, by many millions. Way too many. Must cull the herd one way or another. It seems that the preferred method is relatively simple: dismissal from society and neglect.

Though I have long railed about it, there is still very little general recognition of what has happened and is happening to tens of millions of Americans who have been jettisoned, not just from the so-called middle class but from any class at all. They've become essentially non-people, by the tens of millions. They have no jobs and they cannot get jobs because there aren't any openings and there won't ever be again. They have no homes because their homes have been seized and will be given to others at pennies on the dollar. There are few and diminishing social services available to them -- or anyone for that matter -- and so American poverty rates are skyrocketing, hunger stalks the land, people are suffering quite openly, and some are dying. Very little is done by our policy-makers to alleviate this suffering, because it's standard policy not to. And in America, it has always been standard policy to blame the victim.

But things are different this time. The cruelty that policy-makers are exhibiting is remarkable, for one thing. Nothing quite like this has been seen and known in this country for decades, not since the Hoover era, and even then, policy-makers were more circumspect about their contempt for the common herd. The current social/political/economic situation is being used by policy-makers as an opportunity -- yet another in a long string of them -- to take away customary rights, benefits, and privileges that Americans thought were guaranteed by contract or the Constitution.

Benefits are being cut, or they are not available at all. Access to basic services like health care and education is being denied. Rights that workers earned long ago are being withdrawn. Pension obligations are being refused. Contracts are abrogated. Homes are seized and sold to others for a tiny percentage of what had been demanded from the debtor. On and on.

This American model of cruelty is like something out of a 19th Century novel -- a nightmare of despair that we thought we overcame... but it turns out our policy makers never got the message.

I trace it back to Waco, one of the cruelest -- and most spectacular -- domestic policing actions our federal government has ever engaged in. Once under way, it seemed impossible to stop. Why that should be is still a matter of controversy, but the upshot was almost too horrible to contemplate, not just the miserable deaths of scores of innocents in the holocaust of Branch Davidian compound, but in the armed rebellion that commenced soon thereafter.

In fact, according to reports, the action at the Branch Davidian compound was intended to thwart armed rebellion by certain shadowy crypto-religious forces that were arming and aligning with one another in preparation for the coming Apocalypse (or something of the sort). The Davidians were among the many armed Apocalyptic Believers who were being tracked at the time, and the action itself was planned -- if you want to call what the incompetents in charge were doing "planning" -- during the latter days of the Bush (Senior) administration, apparently without the knowledge of headquarters. The action itself was put in motion under the authority of the Clinton Justice Department. The point of it was to neutralize this particular armed camp and to intimidate anyone else who might be contemplating armed insurrection in preparation for the Return of the Lord.

It didn't go well.

This all happened at a time when the domestic security state apparatus was relatively primitive though quite extensive, built as it was on a Drug War platform. That's a whole other topic in itself.

Waco was a catastrophic failure. And I cannot imagine we would be in such a horrible mess now if it weren't for that catastrophe. There are plenty of people who would disagree with my assessment, who would see the origins of our current pickle elsewhere. There is no single source, of course. But Waco was the catalyst for what was to come.

After the shock wore off, the response to the slaughter at Waco was an intensification not a diminution of the armed insurrectionist movements around the country, exactly the opposite of the intent of action itself.

This culminated in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. While directly related to Waco, that reaction seemed to come from an even deeper animosity against The Government due to what McVeigh witnessed and participated in during the First Gulf War. As awful as the slaughter in Waco was, it had eerie echoes of Iraq where hundreds of mostly women and children were burnt alive in a shelter in Baghdad, where surrendered prisoners were machine gunned down in the field because they were inconvenient, and where McVeigh himself was ordered to bury hundreds of Iraqi soldiers alive. On their retreat from Kuwait, tens of thousands of Iraqi troops -- conscripts almost all -- were ruthlessly slaughtered from above in an action that had no modern precedent.

The First Gulf War has been largely forgotten thanks to subsequent events in the region but at the time it was seen as one of the most barbaric campaigns the United States had ever conducted, of such surpassing brutality and cruelty that it was practically unimaginable.

The sight of Schwartzkopf, Cheney, Powell, et al, lying on teevee and celebrating this disgusting slaughter still turns my stomach, and I know people who were involved in it who were emotionally shattered by what they did or what they witnessed, and who were physically sickened as well and still suffer from complications.

Hundreds of thousands of American troops paid a heavy price for the momentary glory of the warrior-policy-makers who just kept right on strutting and puffing out their chests while the rest of us languished.

Here we are, two decades on, and the cruelty on display overseas that thence was made manifest domestically has borne extraordinarily foul fruit given the global economic collapse and further overseas war-making that has made it so gosh-darn hard to fund even the basic domestic social services Americans have already paid for like Social Security and Medicare and so forth.

The question, as always, is what do we do about it?

We see that the political/electoral system does not work on behalf of the People, and under the current circumstances, it cannot. The government itself is absent, barricaded away from you and me, and We the People do not have access to it. We are subjects -- when we are considered at all which is ever less often. The rituals of politics and elections still continue, of course, as they did in Rome for hundreds of years after the Republic was extinguished. Roman elections were part of panem et circenses that kept the lower orders entertained while their betters got on with the important matters of state and empire that simply didn't involve the plebeians -- except to the extent they could be a revenue source and be manipulated.

When there were too many, the herd was culled. When they rebelled...

The situation now, however, is far more complex -- and yet in some ways, simpler -- than historical parallels. We are facing a global onslaught against the People and the Earth by what is really a tiny fragment of hyper-wealthy and powerful individuals who are competing against one another to be King of the World. We largely don't know who these people are; even if we know some of their names, we have little or no idea what their political/social/moral points of view are, and those few we do know something of are so surpassingly benighted and cruel it's almost unimaginable.

The People rising up against this fragment of quasi-humanity should have overwhelmed them long ago, but it hasn't happened, not even close. Oh no, the struggle has barely begun.

Wither?

Yesterday, I posted a few movies, one of which was Frank Lopez's "END:CIV," which I think I've posted before. It's one of those "earth is dying/we are dying" manifesto movies you see from time to time. Typically, I don't much care for doomer-gloomer stuff, and I stay away from it on principle, but this is Frank Lopez, AKA, "The Stimulator" on Submedia.tv, who I became interested in when Global Revolution would run his "End of the World (As We Know It) and I feel fine" anarchist shit during the frequent outages of the Occupy Wall Street live feeds. I'm becoming more and more fond of him and his ideas and his work. "The Stimulator" is linked at right. Below is a link to a Q and A in Troy, NY, last April after a screening of "END:CIV". It gets pretty intense as some of the audience takes him to task over his views of non-violence, Gandhi, King, et al, and I think it is worth listening to the exchanges. As he says, we don't have a lot of time, and unless we have an honest and open discussion about tactics, we aren't going to get anywhere...

Q&A with activist media maker Frank Lopez

We may still be at the Beginning of the Beginning, but there is a lot of history behind it.

Lot of history....

Some Movies

I know, I've posted two of these before, but we can always see them again. Alien Planet is new to me.

Is there some reason our oligarchs and plutocrats are so mindless or insane?

Toward Critical Spirit

Via Yves Smith and Naked Capitalism:



I've been saying "Watch Europe and North Africa" -- and Spain in particular -- for some time because it is from Spain, Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and from North Africa that the bases of the American and Global Occupy Movement come.

This was understood in the Occupy Wall Street development process because so many of the M15 Movement participants were activists within or advising the OWS participants. And of course the precursor American Rebellion and Occupation in Wisconsin was openly and directly derived from the Egyptian and Tunisian models.

Little information was widely distributed about these aspects of the Movement in the United States, so it was easy enough for some Zeitgeisters and RonPauliacs to assert predominance early on in many of the Occupations around the country and not face a lot of opposition.

Because their political, social and moral ideas have long been excluded from the "mainstream," many people who participated early on in the Occupy Movement were simply unfamiliar with them; the more they learned, the more most rejected them.

Zeitgeist and RonPaulism, for example, function little differently than religious cults, and even though many people are drawn to religion and can be susceptible to cults, there is ultimately no "there there" for most people in either the Zeitgeist or the RonPauliac cults. These cults are focused on esoterica of monetary policy, for example, obsessed with the Fed and all its many perverse ways, but they fail to develop any kind of practical social/political or functional economic alternative. So, they get nowhere. But then, to my jaundiced eye, they aren't meant to get anywhere as political/social or economic alternatives. They are meant solely to perpetuate themselves and to keep their founders and leaders in the public eye and in comfort.

But ultimately, their interests are irrelevant to the Revolution, though, who knows, there may be some elements of Zeitgeistism or even RonPaulism that winds up in the programs and policies of the Better Future we're all so busy envisioning and some are so busy building.

The energy of the Movement and the Revolution is not in Zeitgeistism or RonPaulism. It looks to me like both sap energy at the local level, and they simply have no relevance at the national and international levels. Their relevance to the Movement as a whole remains to be seen.

In the video above, Miguel Yarza of Democracia Real Ya explains it all for you, what is really going on and what is really important in for the future of the Movement and the Revolution: Dignity, Justice, Community and Peace is the way I synthesize these values. Yarza describes what is actually going on in Spain and Europe and elsewhere as a result of the diffusion of M15 and Democracia Real Ya ideas and ideals throughout the Occupy Movement.

Democracial Real Ya is a Dignity and (social/economic) Justice movement, as were the uprisings and revolutions in North Africa, though in North Africa, legal justice became a focus of the movements after the state crackdowns on the demonstrations and protests.

In this country, we're still figuring out some of the Dignity and Justice aspects of the uprisings, but there has been a very gratifying focus at many Occupations on the plight of the homeless and homeless mentally ill in particular, and on the necessity to keep people in their homes if they have them. The fight against foreclosures in this county mirrors what's going on in Spain. Also, more and more American Occupations are taking cues from Europe and liberating vacant buildings, even if only briefly at this point. On Friday, for example, the former Jack Tarr/Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco that was closed and abandoned a few years ago was liberated for a few hours with the intention of making it into living quarters for some of the thousands of homeless in San Francisco and the Bay Area. This action was modeled on the Traveler's Aid building liberation in Oakland last November and that action in turn was modeled on the many abandoned building liberations in Spain and elsewhere in Europe that have been going on for many years. Squatting has a long history in Europe and is legally protected, whereas in the United States, it is strictly against the law and sometimes brutally suppressed if it occurs; thus, those who are doing it in this country -- and it is happening more widely than most of us realize -- are very courageous. While it is not unprecedented in this country, the current energy behind it, drawing mostly on the anarchist community, is new.

Real Democracy continues to be a goal through all the various aspects of the Movements, Uprisings, and Revolutions, most especially in Europe and North Africa where the betrayal of the People by their Rulers is so stark and profound. What they have been "given" is not at all what they thought they were getting. Bait and switch is too kind a word, and it goes back to the triumph of Neo-Liberal economic theory (another form of cultic belief) that essentially strip mines wealth from the public and hands it to oligarchs and plutocrats who, for whatever reason, have no sense of social responsibility whatsoever.

"Democracy" was supposed to prevent that outcome, but in its current form of representative/parliamentary/managed democracy, it is actually enabling it. Peoples in Europe and North Africa see that stark reality and they revolt. The notion is gaining traction in the United States as even the Rs understand that the Plutocrats who own our government have no sense of social responsibility at all, any more than their European counterparts do, and this is wrong.

One may disagree with the Gingrich response to the issue of social responsibility -- please do! -- but at least he has some idea what it is. Romney, for whatever reason, and Paul, for selfish reasons, do not.

As for the current White House and Congress, it's hard to say. If it were not for the social benefit programs currently in place, almost all of them dating back decades, it is doubtful that the current political class would be doing anything on behalf of the masses, for in general they seem to lack conscience or any ability to act on conscience if they have it.

Most institutions that proclaim a social conscience or responsibility have failed, in my view because they are more concerned with their organizational survival than they are with serving their clients. Why that's so is a whole other discussion.

It's therefore up to the People to voice their interests and to demonstrate how to act on those interests.

It's difficult -- especially under conditions of brutal repression -- but it is taking place just the same. And every time there is another fierce crack down by Authority (the UC Riverside confrontation the other day was certainly typical) the opposition to oppression grows. It takes time to figure out what to do about it. Notably, the Authorities are more flexible in their repressive tactics than I would have thought -- which gives us some idea of the extent of the training they have received in suppressing popular unrest. Obviously this factor of "law enforcement" has been emphasized heavily since 1999, even though they still make unforced errors routinely in dealing with the public.

Yarza is talking about building a "critical spirit," which we can think about as a critical mass, that will tip the balance away from the Neo-Liberal catastrophist cult that has captured governments everywhere. And you never know when the tipping point will come. Nor can you necessarily predict just how the cookie will crumble.

But the pressure must be maintained, and the image of the future must be prepared.

When we do our part, the critical spirit takes care of itself.

And there is no sign that the People are tiring.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif


[Occupy Oakland's Unstoppable Bus cruising San Francisco's Financial District.]

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John Spritzler and David Stratman, "Thinking about Revolution."

SOPA, PIPA and The Megaupload Thing

Well, whoever has been put in charge of riling up the online masses certainly managed a threepeat this week what with the shutdown and blackouts of various sections of the interwebs in protest against the online piracy bills sailing through Congress and the quite dramatic seizure and shutdown of Megaupload and the arrest of a number of its luminaries in New Zealand followed by Anonymous disrupting the web-presence of the DoJ, FBI, and various parasitical entertainment corporations.

All in a week's online fun, isn't it?

I haven't followed all the intricacies of the online piracy bills, so I won't address them directly, but it seems to me that if the DoJ can command foreign agents (not just in New Zealand, apparently) to round up whomever they designate, and can on its own and in collaboration with others seize whatever pelf they choose in whatever amounts they can find, on accusation alone, and, further, can destroy one of the most popular websites in the world, again on accusation alone, then the bills in Congress are simply redundant. The Government already has the power to do whatever they please, apparently at the command of certain entertainment conglomerates, and there's nothing you can do about it.

That seems to be the "message" being sent here to all and sundry, far and wide.

Your internet operation exists on sufferance alone.

I used Megaupload infrequently but occasionally, because I could sometimes find things there that I couldn't find anywhere else, not even from corporate sources. This is the value of this kind of file sharing. People have stuff that you may be looking for -- or related to what you are looking for -- and they are able and willing to share it through sites like Megaupload, much as a neighbor or library might have done prior to the advent of the Internet.

This is not "piracy" by any stretch of the imagination.

I'm so old, I remember a time before the Internet and all its filesharing sites and the controversies surrounding them. It wasn't as easy as it is now to do independent research or to find interesting diversions from research. But it was certainly possible, nonetheless, and copyright issues rarely arose.

Imagine, if you will, a newsstand in the Bygone Era. They still exist in a somewhat truncated form. There was one in San Francisco I visited frequently when I lived there in the 1970's; it had a vast array of periodicals and publications, from all over the world, and I would sometimes stay in there for hours browsing the racks, reading freely from whatever caught my eye or interested me. I would usually buy one or two periodicals if I wanted to keep particular articles at hand -- I still have some of them -- but most of them I just put back on the shelf, as did pretty much every other customer.

I'm looking at one of my bookshelves as I write this, and I'm remembering where some of these books came from. Some were purchased at that news stand in San Francisco back in those days, some were books given to me by relatives or friends well before or after that, some were purchased second hand for 50 cents, some were mail-order, some are college texts, and so on. In other words, they have been acquired over decades from all kinds of sources, and some of them are now fairly rare and difficult to come by.

Some were purchased at standard or discount retail, but many were not. Quite a few were not purchased by me at all. They were purchased by someone else and given to me. Or I bought them for a few pennies at a thrift store or from a discard bookrack on the street or at a library sale. In other words, the copyright holder was only paid once, if at all, for these books. And at a library or newsstand, I could read anything on the shelves without paying a fee to the copyright holder.

I could share any of the copyright material in my possession -- no matter how I acquired it -- with anyone at any time without running the risk of arrest or seizure for copyright violation, and the copyright holder had no right to payment when I did so.

What I couldn't and didn't do was claim someone else's literary or artistic work as my own, and I certainly never tried to profit from someone else's literary or artistic work. But I could if I wanted to -- without violating copyright.

I own a lot of paintings and books, some of which have a market value well beyond the price I may (or someone may) have paid for them originally. I may sell those items for whatever I can get for them in the market, and assuming a profit in the sale, that profit is mine, not the copyright holder's or the original artist's.

I may never have paid the copyright holder or artist for these books and paintings, but I can profit from them freely -- except that I cannot legally claim copyrighted literary or artistic work as having been created by me if it wasn't. And I wouldn't do that anyway.

In addition, anyone who wishes and who I give access to can view any goddamn thing on my shelves they want to, and if I let them, they can have it for whatever purpose they choose -- without payment to me or to the original copyright holder.

The same is true of my entire recorded music collection, all the 78's, 45s, the 33 1/3rds, all the CDs, all the DVDs. No matter how I acquired them, in other words, anyone I give access to can listen to them. They can watch any movie I have on tape or DVD. It's no violation of copyright, nor is it even remotely piracy, to do so.

What I can't do -- and wouldn't do -- is republish copyrighted works as if I owned rights to them. I can pass on and resell books and other copyrighted material I own, but I cannot print copies of copyrighted books and sell them or make new recordings of copyrighted music or videos without a license to do so.

Since the advent of the InterTubes, however, some copyright holders have decided that every view by every viewer on the Internet must be paid for. The informal or formal sharing such as has long been done in homes and libraries is somehow piracy when it is done on the Internet. Same with the selling of material: you can sell a copyrighted book or recording on the Internet through eBay or whathaveyou, but apparently you cannot charge to view or listen to a copyrighted book or recording on the Internet, nor apparently can you make it available to view or listen to over the internet for free, nor even link to it in some cases, unless you have a license without being accused of piracy.

This situation is absurd.

From what I know of Megaupload and other similar sites, the site provided a platform for people to share with others all sorts of copyrighted and other material that they had access to, for free or at a very small charge (for faster speed not content.) To me, this is exactly what I can do with printed and recorded material in my home, any time I want, and without having my property seized for doing so.

Somehow, back in the Old Days Before the Internet, copyright holders managed to get by without charging every viewer or reader or listener every time they looked, read or listened to a copyright work, or by so restricting access to copyrighted material that it couldn't even be referred to without a license (as has been the case with AP news stories from time to time). They managed to survive even though purchasers of their works could do anything they wanted with them -- including re-sell for a profit -- without owing the copyright holder a damn thing. They even survived the advent of public libraries, book fairs, reading circles and so on. How did they do it?

But now, provide a platform for people to easily share copyright material on the Internet and you'll be subjected to arbitrary arrest and seizure of all your property, goods, and chattel. Download some copyright material via this platform and you might be subject to criminal prosecution yourself.

This is copyright control gone crazy.

I realize that the argument is that filesharing through services like Megaupload is akin to unlicensed republishing, since the work can be distributed widely rather than passed on in individual copies (that someone purchased at some point) and that such distribution is thought to diminish the value copyright holders derive from their product. But many lines of evidence show that's not the case. The wider the distribution, the more familiar the creator/author's work becomes to a far wider audience, and that can easily lead to a much higher value than it otherwise might. Many creator/authors are actually in favor of Megaupload and other file sharing sites because they do allow works and their creators to become much more widely known than they otherwise might. The ease with which one can gain access to the work is the key.

It might be "unlicensed republishing" if someone is literally pirating and making money off the work, but for the most part, they're not. Filesharing is free or very low cost to users. The works being distributed are generally (though not always) attributed appropriately. Those who make money off filesharing make money off the service itself or off of advertising, not off "unlicensed republishing" of copyrighted work. They are not stealing anything from copyright holders, they are in many cases enhancing the ability of copyright holders to make even more money off their works. This is the newstand and lending library model in hyperdrive. Copyright holders should love it.

The gross authoritarianism of the SOPA/PIPA/Megaupload Thing is its most troubling aspect to date. What was done to Megaupload and its people I think was meant to terrorize those who engage in "unlicensed" anything. The implication being you're next. And there's nothing you can do about it. The US Government can go anywhere in the world and do anything they want to you, and they will.

They don't need SOPA and they don't need PIPA; they'll just do it, and you are powerless in the face of such determination. They can and will seize everything you own. They can and will shut down your websites and deprive you of a livelihood. You can do nothing about it. And they will do this on behalf of an increasingly mindless corporate sector that seeks not simply profit but endless revenues by coercion, compulsion -- and government enforcement.

And people wonder why there is a revolt under way...



[Note: I left out any discussion of the file storage aspects of Megaupload, and the loss of that storage seems to be the factor that is currently raising the most ire among users, since file sharing is still possible through other sites. A lot of large files that were being kept at Megaupload so as to free other space are now gone, and most of these stored files were never available for more than very limited and usually in-house sharing. In some cases, valuable proprietary files -- copyright material owned by the user -- is now inaccessible because of the disabling of Megaupload in its entirety. Depending on exactly what has been lost -- and by whom -- this situation could have extraordinary repercussions.]

Redemption and The Obama Problem

A big part of the initial enthusiasm for the candidacy of Barack Obama was due to the potential for Redemption that he represented. After 8 years of the monstrousness of Bush and Cheney and all their minions and lackeys in the White House and 8 years before that of sunny but compromised... erm... "vulgarity" of the Clinton White House (blow jobs on the job being so vulgar, dontchaknow), the need for the Redemption of the American government, indeed, the Redemption of America, was clear to anyone with eyes to see and brain to think.

And here was such a nice, well-spoken black man standing for the Presidency who wasn't out there blaming everybody and casting aspersions for his suffering and all. He merely pointed out that there was a Better Way Forward, that the Nation could heal and come together after a period of great difficulty. And he was the one to make it so.

There could hardly BE a more redemptive character given our history. And look at that smile and those big, floppy ears. Who could resist? Certainly, he was better and in better mental health than that crabby old grandpa and his harpie-like pseudo-sidekick. Boy howdy.

Besides, the economy had just gone into a tailspin, and the Busheviks in office, and the R side of the aisle in general, seemed indifferent to anything but the well-being of the top of the economic pyramid.

And so Obama was elected with enormous enthusiasm and Hope. Finally, our (real) long national nightmare would be over. Hurrah!

Well. It didn't work out so well.

The Redemption took place, to be sure, but it had nothing at all to do with America or the People; it had and has to do with the Highest of the Mighty who are doing better now than ever, and who are now more insulated and protected against the roaring of the mob than they have ever been. In Obama, whose election they funded with massive donations, they got someone who could not only do their bidding with bells on, they got someone who was almost magically able to manage the masses to go along with it. Though we were all told at the time his was a people-funded campaign, small-fry donations from the millions upon millions, it turns out that the banks and Wall Street were actually Obama's major donors, and soon enough, the People realized their small-fry contributions didn't mean a thing...

As I've pointed out many times, Candidate Obama was being auditioned for the role over a period of two years or more, his primary task being keeping the Rabble in line, and he passed with flying colors, something Gramps and Herself never came close to doing; they couldn't have pacified a mob if they tried. Obama did it with ease and a certain sort of grace that is still astonishing. He can spout perfect nonsense and the People will still respond as if they had been spoken to by God.

Throughout his tenancy in the White House, Mr. Obama has primarily served the interests of finance, the banks, and the rich. If the social service programs put forth in the (FD) Roosevelt and Johnson administrations had not existed, he would not have proposed them. From the outset, the Obama economic policy has been as close to Hooverism as it is possible for an American President to get at this time. Hoover's Redemption isn't complete, but it is getting closer thanks to Obama's adoption of his economic policies.

To this day, no matter how bad the unemployment situation is, Obama has not proposed a real jobs program for Americans; he won't even consider it. Nixon was on top of that problem when it came up during his administration. Not Obama. Nope. All he can come up with is the ditch metaphor, that it took a long time to get into this ditch and it will take a long time to get out of it.

Regardless of the falseness of the metaphor -- the crash was pretty damn fast to those who suffered, and the rich were rescued right away -- the fact is, the Rs have been making headway with the electorate by "talking about" jobs and job programs (of course they have no more intention of doing anything about it than Obama does). The fact that the Obama Administration has been stunningly indifferent to the plight of the unemployed should be the most serious mark against it, far and away more important to most people than the esoterica of "civil liberties," and even warmongering, but the Rs have proposed absolutely nothing of their own to do anything about it, so it's a wash.

In other words, nobody running for office intends to do a damn thing about the absence of employment for a large swath of the population. Not a damned thing.

The Rs will merely talk about it and do nothing; the Ds and Obama will wring their hands and do nothing.

Poverty is being imposed on millions upon millions more Americans year over year, and the Powers That Be like it like that. So that's the way it will be.

As of early this year, half of Americans were impoverished or officially "low income." This is why the R charge that "half of Americans don't pay income taxes!!" is so absurd. Yes? And? They're too fucking poor to pay income taxes, and they are getting poorer. "Lucky-duckies" indeed.

The impoverishment of the American People is not a matter of accidental Fate, it is a matter of policy from Washington. That policy is carried out by Obama with slightly less denunciation and demonization of those impoverished than it would be under an R administration. Optics!

The wars are winding down under the Obama reign, but they would have under Gramps as well. We can't "afford" them, you see, and there is no longer any value for the money spent, so... liquidate them.

Initially, the wars were a means of transferring boatloads of cash to favored friends of the Bush Regime, and for exterminating varied foe in dramatic fashion. The wars were spectacle for the masses, Big Money for friends. But then they got ugly.

And titanically expensive all around financed by borrowing from China, oops. Well, China's leaders are nobody's fools, and keeping the Americans Occupied as it were, occupying foreign lands, was a convenience for the Chinese and others who were able under the circumstances to foster their own societies and economic growth without the interference of Americans and their high-handed ways. They were busy elsewhere. The cost of keeping them at bay was worth it. But China is now balking at further payments along these lines.

As the funding for wars dries up, the wars themselves must be jettisoned, but many of the trappings of the wars have now been codified and institutionalized, trappings like the murder squads ("special forces"), the mercenaries, the drones, the camps for terror suspects, the torture policies, the ever greater limitations on civil liberties, the ever-expanding national security state and so on.

All of these trappings and more are now, it seems, permanent features of American law, lore, and practice. They were largely institutionalized under Obama.

Oh, well, Ron Paul has been talking about how bad they are, so that's good.

The fact is, there is no movement to upend most of what has been put in place as a consequence of the wars. Think back: much the same situation obtained after WWI and WWII as well. Many of the policies put in place as a consequence of those wars have stuck with us. They are useful to government and they perpetuate themselves because they are so useful.

I'll go so far as to suggest that it is the bloated military and the metastasized National Security State that are now the primary domestic economic engines. The war economy continued without let up -- it kept growing -- after WWII, the reason being that the war economy was seen as the primary means of staying out of another Depression. It worked after a fashion.

But here we are in another Depression anyway. In some sectors, that's blamed on the "Peace Dividend" in consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union; without a major foe, there was no rationale for the continued bloated military budget, thus... well, it's complicated.

This time, though, the bloated military and security budgets don't seem to be having any positive effect on the economic situation of most Americans. In fact, things have been getting worse. More ominously, practically every politician, including Obama, is endlessly yabbering about cutting budgets for such things as Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and any other kind of human assistance they can think of.

In other words, reducing further what little social services and income support most Americans have already paid for in order, it seems, to keep the wealthy as secure and comfortable as possible, and to keep the war machine and security state in tune forever.

Nothing else seems to matter to Our Rulers, nothing else at all.

And so the People rise, somewhat chaotically and ineffectively for the moment, but rise they do.

Redemption under Obama having failed, the Rs seek to put up a Gazillionaire with Issues as their nominee for the Throne. That will solve the problem! Right. Great plan. He could pull it off, of course, but at this point he is so close to implosion, it's hard to imagine just how he'd do it. It's early yet.

The pundits keep speculating that Romney's religion will keep him from being elected (Mormonism to me is more like a business with social service and secret society aspects rather than a religion), but this is pretty much the same narrative as was used by pundits to discuss the difficulty of electing JFK or Obama himself; some social "flaw" in other words, be it Catholicism or Mormonism or Colored-ism, interferes with the path to glory, and overcoming it is the test the candidate must pass.

What will hamstring Romney is his general snottiness. There would be no Redemption through him in any case. Back when Romney was endowed at the Temple, he took a vow to revenge the martyrdom of Prophet Joseph Smith in 1844. This is not quite the same as Redemption...

Obama, under the circumstances, has a much easier road than he otherwise would. He may be closer to re-confirmation on the Throne than anyone now realizes.

That means, if so, that Redemption, which this nation still so badly needs, is delayed yet again.

Psalm 94

3How long, O LORD?
How long will the wicked be allowed to gloat?
4Hear their arrogance!
How these evildoers boast!
5They oppress your people, LORD,
hurting those you love.

Envisioning That Better Future -- Seven: Liberty and Equality for All

Yes. Well. That's the crux of the struggle, still, isn't it?

What does it mean, this call for liberty and equality that most of us hearing all our lives? What are we talking about here?

I've written before about the contrasting liberationist and communitarian impulses of the rebellions of the 1960's -- both of them asserting liberty and equality as fundamental values, but each having a distinctive vision of what they meant and how they would be applied in the real world.

The Movement Liberationists were not on the whole inclined toward Community. The Movement Communitarians were not, on the whole, inclined toward rampant individualism.

"Liberty" means something different in a Communitarian context than it does in a Liberationist one.

"Equality" means something different to a Liberationist than it does to a Communitarian.

The underlying spark for the rebellions of the 1960's was the Civil Rights Movement that began in the 1950's (which in turn was an outgrowth of earlier civil rights and justice movements). The Civil Rights movement combined Liberationist and Communitarian impulses rather successfully, but in the translation to the mostly urban white campus environment of the 1960s, the two were disentwined and separated into distinct threads.

The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was a strongly Liberationist movement that utilized little or nothing of a Communitarian nature. Individuals did come together of course -- there were thousands of students involved -- and the "community" was the campus itself, already present.

The Free Speech Movement did not seek to create a community, in other words. It grew out of the pre-existing campus community. It sought to liberate individuals in the community from the egregious strictures of the authorities of that community against political speech and activity on campus.

In this it was partially successful -- after a good deal of struggle. There was no attempt to fundamentally transform the campus community. That would come later.

Commmunitarianism did not really arise among the 1960's rebels until the advent of the Hippies, something that was not a campus phenomenon at all. The Hippies, instead, were an intentional community of like-minded strangers brought together in San Francisco in the famous Haight-Ashbury District who chose to live partially communally in an urban setting. Numbers of early communitarians quickly split off into sub-communities who established more or less self-sustaining rural communes, some of which are still in existence (most failed, of course; yes, "of course." It's very difficult to do communes successfully over time in this country).

The liberation the communitarians sought was liberation from social conformity and from interference by outside authority. Equality was a value within the commune.

On the other hand, Liberationists sought the liberation of the individual from the arbitrary imposition of authority, and from that impulse, liberationism developed a "group liberation" vision somewhat akin to the Civil Rights Movement, focused almost entirely on liberating various groups from the strictures of law and authority, but often leaving the individuals to fend for themselves once "liberated."

Most of this liberation was won -- sometimes after intense struggle -- but always at a cost. We don't often discuss the costs involved in "liberation," and it is not my point to discuss it extensively in this post, but we should be aware that "liberation" has in many cases been an unfair trade off.

"Equality" among Liberationists tended to be -- and still is -- a matter of legal status. One is equal before the law, or is supposed to be, or is in theory. That's the extent of it.

If we truly want a successful vision of the future, we're going to have to find some way to fuse to two again, and that's been a big part of the process of the Occupy Movement, perhaps its most important aspect to date.

My own impression has been that the core of the Occupations is always found in the attempt at forming temporary intentional communities. Every one of them to my knowledge -- and I've followed several dozen of the hundreds and hundreds that have been started -- have had the same initial goals: to set up and operate temporary communities of like minded and dedicated people on behalf of "the 99%" -- in other words, on behalf of the community as a whole.

It hasn't been entirely successful, in that most Americans have no experience with and no conception of this kind of intentional community building based on anarchic and democratic principles. It's all new and very unfamiliar to most Americans. And this sort of community-building is what is most threatening to the powers that be. Destroying these spontaneous communities -- and preventing their re-emergence -- has been one of the primary objectives of the anti-Occupy crackdowns by police forces all over the country.

Many Americans cannot grasp and are quite frightened by the prospect of these communities, filled as they are with so many of the discards and rejects of America, a fear that our rulers like to encourage.

And yet I think it is through the continued development of these communities that we'll find our future -- if one is to be found at all.

Is it a future of Liberty and Equality? Honestly? Not in the sense most of us have become accustomed to over the last several generations, no.

That's part of the difficulty so many Occupations have encountered. "Liberty" and "equality" mean something different in the context of an Occupation camp than they do in the context of the every-day legal and social processes of our society.

"Liberty" carries with it the burden of responsibility; one is not simply free to do as one pleases, in other words, and one is not able to do or be what one wants without consideration of the interests of everyone else in the community. This is the essence of the process of community-building from the ground up. It is not easy to do this; for some people, it is not even possible.

I was discussing some of these concepts with a fellow who has been active in intentional community development field for twenty years or more, and his initial statement was, "You people are trying to do something that's almost impossible." Yes, that's so, I acknowledged, now how do we do it?

"You're going to make a lot of mistakes," he said, "but that's the way you're going to learn." And so it has been.

The principles of horizontal organization and democratic authority seem to be more and more solidly established within the Occupy Movement as time goes on; these are the fundamentals of the Movement, and as people become more familiar with them, and more at ease with them, they seem more and more natural. The problem initially was the absence of any easily accessible guidelines to work from. Unfamiliarity with the processes involved and real discomfort with the results of some of the attempts led to lots and lots of mistakes, but that's how you learn.

"Be not afraid" became the motto flashed on the Verizon Building in Manhattan. ("Do not be afraid.")

"We are winning."

That's becoming more and more true every day. At least it seems to me, even though I have stepped back from day-to-day active participation in the Movement.

"Liberty" is tied directly with responsibility; "equality" is tied with interest and ability.

And all of it, in my view, is wrapped within conceptions of Dignity and Justice, Community and Peace that have been percolating for many long years.

It is the zeitgeist of the era.

The current ruling class is shuddering and facing irrelevancy in the midst of an unfamiliar yet oddly compelling global populist (not so much "popular") movement that can neither be suppressed nor absorbed. This is the Future, there's no way around it.

We will see a new era of Liberty and Equality for All. It won't be quite what we had in mind back in the Old Days, but that's probably for the best.

MLK Day -- Redemption and Remembrance

Watch A Different Color Blue on PBS. See more from POV.

I spent a good deal of yesterday with an old friend, Charles Curtis Blackwell, a blind Black poet, painter, and playwright whose astonishing and powerful poetry-performance play "Is, the Color of Mississippi Mud" inaugurated our first season in our Downtown facility more than 20 years ago now.

It was a production like no other that had been attempted in this area; it's memory still reverberates among those who participated in it or saw it or heard about it, and it is still talked about in terms of awe and wonder.

Charles is not your everyday talent by any means -- as can be seen in the video above, as well as in the pages available to preview in the link to the script.
And there is so much more beyond these spare elements.

He's been through a kind of living hell more than once -- only to emerge stronger and more in tune with what I think he and I would call the Divine.

We discussed all kinds of things yesterday including how little the young, now the age our grandchildren might have been had we had any, seem to know or comprehend about the lives and the legacy of those like Dr. King who blazed such paths for the rest of us to follow in.

Charles is intimately familiar with the badder sides of the American experience -- he's lived it, not simply in the Jim Crow South (though he did) but through some of the most devastating emotional and psychological trials of modern living as well.

He is no stranger to the redemptive power of suffering, and part of why we got together yesterday was to remember some of our common experience as well as to celebrate what's coming.

He gave me a copy of his new script: "When Struggle Gave Improvisation the Blues." I'm reading it now. It's a vision of how the world was when time was, a very distinctive and characteristic Blackwell vision of the 1950's in America and the struggles of so many to build a better future. Their sacrifices, their gifts to the rest of us.

It's told in powerful poetry and jazz and dance and song and story, by a cast of eight or nine or twelve or however many are needed and want to be involved, the way Blackwell's "big pieces" always are, and it's fluid and open and deeply moving the way his works tend to be; but I don't know how it ends, as I haven't finished it yet. Something for the remainder of the day.

The idea of Redemption was always part of the mystique of Martin Luther King, Jr. The point being, of course, that the nation desperately needed redemption. So many false starts and dashed hopes, destroyed lives, absent futures due to America's Original Sin of chattel slavery and the ongoing efforts to suppress the liberties and human dignities of the slaves' descendants -- and so many others as well.

Art -- whether in performance or by some other means -- can be and often is a powerful redemptive force especially for individuals, but in the case of Martin Luther King the quest for redemption went far beyond the individual. His legacy is profound, but it is incomplete.

Over at Crooks and Liars, Richard EJ Eskow has written as extensive an examination of just how incomplete that legacy is as I've seen anywhere, and it is something I think we can all benefit from internalizing. We all have so very much farther to go to realize King's dream.

Even the worst among us seem to be moving toward the Light. I know, it seems impossible, but the signs are there. The armor of the Highest of the Mighty is cracking. They know they can't maintain the rest of creation in their thrall, for they are too frail and they know too little to pose as gods who walk among us much longer.

"Getting Past Self" (2006) by Charles Curtis Blackwell

Getting Past Self

Press Play

The Uselessness of Our Aristocrats

While the Obama regime has made incalculable unforced errors that have kept our many overseas wars of aggression going -- indeed, expanded some of them -- restricted our liberties, perpetuated our Endless Recession, and made more and more people's lives as miserable and controlled as possible, even though a handful of predators in banking and finance and vulture capital continue to prosper mightily, the prospect of putting up another Republican Aristo against Obama -- someone who is arguably a Man of the People (if somewhat of a traitor to his class nonetheless) -- is looking more and more like a bizarre spectacle. Yet it may have an upshot no one has adequately anticipated.

Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee presumptive has been under a surprising level of attack from fellow Rs for his "vulture capitalism" period at Bain Capital during which he amassed an enormous fortune, much of it on the backs of... lesser people... whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed. That's how people of his ilk make money. They do leveraged buyouts, then strip the assets of the acquisitions. It's been going on for decades, Mitt got into the game early, made a huge fortune through debt finance and asset stripping, destroying many people's lives along the way, and he -- like all the rest of his ilk -- seems to be utterly oblivious to the wreckage he left behind. It's not his problem, you see. Someone else can clean up the mess.

This is the general attitude of our entire Aristocratic Class, not just Mittens. They seem completely incapable -- as a class -- of recognizing, let alone addressing, the level of human misery they cause in pursuit of endless riches above all else.

It's pathological.

Of course we've seen it all before, not that long ago, either. It was present in both Bush reigns, and of course it was the consistent attitude during the Go-Go 80's; the Lesser People simply don't matter. They are on the whole an undifferentiated, dehumanized mass, resources to be exploited and discarded at will.

This is the general attitude of our Overclass to the rest of humanity. They simply do not have a human connection with anyone, nor do they have a care for anyone, outside their own class, and more and more it is clear (as in the case of Mitt), they have no knowledge of anyone outside their own class. Nor do they want any, nor are they able to empathize with anyone at all, let alone those "beneath" them.

Unfortunately, this pathology is like an infection. Much as craziness and insanity are communicable with enough exposure, so is the complete lack of empathy that characterizes so much of our Aristocracy. It can spread all too easily through a population at large, and when it does, we see the kind of violent, crabbed and misshapen societies the United States has largely become -- one that celebrates the misfortune of others and one that punishes those who can't abide or keep up with the course of selfishness and greed.

Ordinary people may tolerate this state of affairs for a while, may even become temporary advocates for it, if they believe they are somehow better off under the rule of cruelty (cf: Fascist/Nazi era in Europe as example). But inevitably they awaken to the fact that they have been under assault and have been robbed all this time.

And they rise up. It is inevitable. And as we saw so many times last year -- still going on this year, but not getting quite as much press -- the Rule of Aristocratic Cruelty reacts with more repression and cruelty, and more and more physical and psychological violence, trying to force the masses to accept their sorry fate. In other words, their only response to the outcry against their cruelty is more cruelty more widely applied.

A more responsible Aristocracy (or at least one that wants to survive) listens to the outcry of the masses and adjusts its behavior accordingly to accommodate the pleas for redress they receive.

But ours, somewhat bewilderingly, does not. Pleas aren't even heard, let alone accommodated -- or rejected for that matter. Theft and looting, exploitation and destruction by the Overclass is more and more brazen; control or punishment only applies to those "below" never to those on top, while just being "below" becomes a punishable offense.

Our putative Aristocrats -- the Overclass -- has no regard at all for the interests of those beneath them, and they have only a marginal concern over how far they can push the lesser people and how fast.

The Overclass only serves itself, but its members are also in fierce and unrelenting competition with one another for pre-eminence. They cheerfully steal from one another, in other words, as well as from those beneath them. They seem to be hard-wired for theft and looting and destruction and they can't help themselves. It is an identity thing for them.

And here we have Mittens as the perfect example. He displays no conscience, no empathy, no consideration -- at all -- for any of those he has brought misery to over his long years as a titan of finance. If they have "problems", oh well, they need to bootstrap themselves like he did, suck it up and go on. Or not. It's not his "problem." Someone else can deal with it -- or no one. It doesn't matter. Because those who don't make it under his scheme of cruelty... don't matter.

"It's Capitalist Free Enterprise, my friends."

Yes, it is.

The more he goes down this path, the more people will associate their misery with what he is attempting to get them to celebrate: Capitalist Free Enterprise. And the more they will ultimately reject it.

Under the circumstances, full on Socialism is looking more and more promising. Or something else. But not Plunder Capitalism and the Useless Aristocracy that goes with it -- such as Mittens believes in as his secular religion. No more of that, thankyouverymuch.

Obama does not get off scot free by any means. His role, though, has always been quite different: to serve the interests of the Overclass fully while managing the masses. I've mentioned this many times before: Obama spent years auditioning for his role as Manager of the Masses, and he demonstrated just how well he was able to do it in Berlin, where he attracted a crowd of hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, who listened to him speechify about... nothing. He held them in thrall, and what he said to them didn't matter at all. Later, at his inauguration, he was able to enthrall millions who attended in bitter cold, while telling them that they would have to sacrifice and suffer in order to get through the rough times ahead.

Little did they realize they were being told they must suffer and sacrifice for the benefit of those who had been robbing them and destroying their lives, but there you are. That's how our system works.

Obama has been on message ever since. His premise is that "things could be worse," and they will be worse, guaranteed, if those Other People are ever put back in charge.

In other words, there is No Better Future for You. You will drudge along till all your goods and chattel are used up or stolen, and you'll feel grateful that things didn't get any worse than they did. That is your lot and your fate. Rejoice!

And yet, more and more obviously, the Aristocrats of Cruelty who rule us are seen as the useless parasites they are, burdens the rest of us can no longer afford.

The test for Obama now is whether he can keep the masses under control. So far, he's done surprisingly well at it. His real test will be whether he can manage the coming rebellions.

Needless to say, people like Mitt are too busy plundering to be bothered...

Will "Vulture Capitalist" Have Legs?

I'm enjoying the spinning and skewering going on over Romney's Bain Capital Thing. It's a remarkable development so early in the political season. I can't help being a little cynical about it, though, because it feels like the entire Republican Establishment and their media handmaidens are trying like anything to defuse the issue for the general election by getting it out in the open now -- and then "pushing back".

This is a time-honored political tactic, and the Rs are sometimes brilliant at it. Say an R candidate has some sort of weakness -- they did it with Bush the Lesser all the time -- and have some other R point it out ("He cain't tawk that English so good..."). Or make a big deal out of his many failed businesses. Whatever. The point is to bring these perceived weaknesses into the discussion early and then transform them into strengths: "He's a Man of the People! He's someone I could have a beer with!" Yadda, yadda. And it works; well, it works well enough to snow some of the people some of the time (and of course all of the Haute Media all of the time) and that's good enough to gain enough votes to steal an election.

That's why I'm not at all convinced that Gingrich and Perry are really trying to stop or bring down Romney -- the Nominee Designate of the Republican Party and Our New Emperor In Waiting -- with all the "Vulture Capitalist" yabbering. No, not at all.

It's still very early in the political season, for example. The "Vulture Capitalist" charge is one that the Dems have made, but not until Romney was the nominee would it make any sense or have any impact. Romney won't be nominated for months and months. So the Rs -- being the marketeers that they are -- bring up candidate weaknesses now so as to counter them and defuse them early, before the Dems can use them.

Romney is said to be pushing back now, defending Capitalism and the Free Market and God and everything else, and also, too, defending Bain Capital, for no matter how bad some of their results were, "That's Free-Market Capitalism, my friends."

And so it is.

If the Dems were a Leftist party, which they are not, they would be hammering away at this kind of Truth Telling relentlessly -- "yes, this is what capitalism is, this is what it does, and this is why we're in this economic pickle now." But they won't do that, first because the Rs are doing it, so they don't have to. Then because the Dem Establishment is right there with Romney. Got his back they do.

The problem for the People brought on by Vulture Capitalism and leveraged buy outs and all the rest of the kit bag of tricks used by the financial cliques are very well known. They have been denounced and celebrated in song and story and endless reporting in the alternative media for decades.

Bush the Lesser was a Vulture, too, you know. We have been down this path before and we know where it leads.

But Dems go to Harvard Business School, too, you know; and they absorb the same predatory notions as the Rs; the Chicago School is no slouch in arguing on behalf of the wrecking crews, either. Putting controls on the activities of Bain or any of the other outfits set up to loot and plunder and wreak economic havoc is not in the policy cards no matter who you put in the Oval Office.

That Romney was/is one of the plunderers and looters may ultimately have no political legs at all; Obama's policies, after all, certainly won't control the likes of them.

But still, it's good to see this stuff out in the open, highlighted in the media, despite all the spin and lies that surround it (NPR).

People have a visceral revulsion to harm this sort of finance capitalism does to them. But it harms everyone. It is what causes the constant Crisis of Capitalism. We know that.

Maybe this time, we'll get furious enough to stop it.

Mark Morford Explains It All For You

Mark Morford has been tweaking, tantalizing and teasing readers of the San Francisco Chronicle for long years now. Not as long as Herb Caen, to be sure, but still...

His columns were among the very few 'mainstream' media effusions that showed any real insight into what was really going on back in the early days of my involvement in the internet, despite the author's, shall we say, unique vision of Things As They Are.

Many of those who found him back in those days were delighted, and then they weren't so delighted any more because Morford does have a schtick, and unless you're up for it, it can be a bit much after a while, and then you crave it, can't get enough of it, and you want to go to San Francisco and take Yoga from him, and then you don't, and then you're all confused and you run around screaming while he twists himself into yet another impossible yoga position and laughs a celestial laugh that makes you stop and wonder... is this all really a joke?

All of it?

No!

So it goes on like that.

And then he comes up with something like "The Rapture Is For Cowards (or is it Ninnies?)" and you know he is dead on, spot on tuned into the Universe in ways you can only imagine being if you could ever get through your current karmic debt, which you won't, so just get used to it, ease up, and learn to laugh or cry or anything besides whatever it is you're doing now.

Verily, from the Mayans to the Greeks, the pagans to the nutball evangelicals, New Age hippies to the witches of Burning Man, every tribe has their ache for transformation, for a final, orgasmic release into the Great Void. Right now it's freshly coupled to a feeling that 2012 is particularly pregnant and tangy, more potentially explosive than any other year to date. Indeed, the 2012 cataclysm is an idea that's been hovering around the collective consciousness for so long, there just might be something to it. You think?

Do you want signs? There are signs. Global warming has accelerated, unprecedented methane plumes are blasting out of the Arctic seabed to scare the horses, nature is in increasingly furious uproar, we are running out of maple syrup, frankincense, whooping cranes, Adderall and those exquisite nautilus seashells, which is just all kinds of depressing. Extinctions are happening faster than we can count, and we can count pretty fast.

Yes, well. It couldn't be truer. But so what?

It gets worse. Or maybe better. Did you know every animal species on earth is (at least partially) gay? That nearly every species we know enjoys homosexual sex for all sorts of reasons, many of which we don't even understand and most of which would make any evangelical shake with muddled rage? True. Don't tell the Tea Party. Or rather, do, and watch their faces explode.

Then there's dark matter, the stuff that, along with dark energy, makes up 96 percent of the entire universe. It's completely unknown. Inexplicable. Baffling. For all we know it's made of chocolate lubricant, tequila blanco and invisible alien spermatozoa and it's pouring down right now to impregnate all girls named Tiffany and Dakota and Caitlin. Apocalypse!

Oh my God, India and China! They're running out of water, for one thing. And when both dry up completely they will hop in their strange little cars and drive toward each other at breakneck speed, daring the other other to chicken out first so the other can race in and steal all their incense and/or iPods and sell them for Evian. I read that somewhere.

And?

Here's the wonderful thing: Peel back the uppermost layer of any apocalypse fantasy, 2012 prophecy or doomsday scenario, remove the lunk-headed shards related to zombies, aliens, gold bars, Ebola outbreaks and locust invasions, strip away the tremulous Christian pathos and evangelical illiteracy, and you're left with one stunning, increasingly intense desire for ecstatic awakening, writ large.

Put it this way: The real reason 2012 is so frontloaded? Because we've loaded it. Because there really has been mind-boggling technological advancement, environmental breakdown, change in the karmic weather. The tang in the air is a real tang. We are not the same planet, the same species, the same spiritual lugs we once were. At least, not all of us.

It is very possible and very true that the window of opportunity for some sort of great spiritual leapfrog is finally opening wider than a tiny sliver of a crack. The real question is: What are you going to do about it? Or the bigger question still: Are you even ready?

See, this is this catch. This is the one thing all tribes agree on when it comes to rapturous spiritual transformations and awakenings, be it Jesus coming to hoover up your quivering soul or (more elegantly) a simple stepping into the sheer bliss of consciousness itself and swimming there for the rest of forever.

It's this: You gotta be ready. You gotta be aligned to it, attuned, have done a bit of the work. Simply put, you need to be awake.

And when Morford gets into a state like this, he might be on to something, for he is often content to spin yarn and smirk and leave it at that. Not this time.

2012 is here.

Now.

And:

it's all just seven billion angels dancing on the head of a pin of Shiva.

Well sure. But you knew that...

Read the whole thing. Ponder.

Envisioning That Better Future -- Six: The End of Wars of Aggression

Apart from the fact that the notion that the United States does not engage in wars of aggression has always been a lie, the ease with which the US Government has become captivated by the current round of aggressive warfare since 2001 -- more than a decade now -- is truly shocking.

Wars of aggression have been refined to the point of nearly pinpoint liquidation of individuals at will (sorry about the continuing collateral damage, but we're working on it! Really!) -- by remote control, no less, operated by pimply faced boys and girls at video game terminals at Groom Lake, NV, for cripes sake -- but still, the notion that American Military Might can or should be "projected" willy-nilly, wherever and whenever Our Rulers and their owners and sponsors so determine without let or hindrance by even a whiff of International Law or Treaty or any barrier at all is still shocking to the conscience of anyone who still has a conscience after all these years of lies and propaganda about what is going on.

At first, it was obvious that the wars of choice and aggression that were being undertaken by Our Rulers, ostensibly in pursuit of so-called "enemy combatants" and rogue Terror States or what have you were actually no different than the Imperial Wars of Aggression practiced routinely during the colonial period of Western history when those who were weaker in the face of the aggressor colonialists were simply bulldozed into oblivion by the war machines assembled against them, their nations were demolished, and their things were stolen -- their wives and daughters right along with their cattle.

This was called "Spreading Civilization" back in the day, and propaganda mills churned out endless justifications for it, especially when the United States engaged in overseas empire building. Our Little Brown Brothers didn't stand a chance.

The war to subdue the Philippines that started in 1898 went on for more than a decade, with enormous slaughter of the Natives and destruction of much of the country's enduring social and political fabric, all to preserve a lie: that the United States was not building an Empire. The Natives deserved what they got for resisting the imposition of authority by their Betters.

The horror of what went on in the Philippines to establish the American Imperial presence shocked the consciences of many Americans at the time -- leading to many excuses from the Government, much "soul searching," periodic "investigations" and reports to Congress, and the simultaneous consolidation of American authority over the islands, its resources and its peoples. It was one of the most brutal colonial conquests of a very brutal colonial era, but "good works" (schools and hospitals!) were offered to the surviving Natives as modest compensation for what they had lost.

And of course there was a handy class of already "civilized" Natives (thanks to the Spanish former colonial masters) who were just as happy to transfer their loyalty from Spain to the US as long there was a benefit in doing so. In those days, American policy was to make sure there would be a benefit to being... loyal subjects.

But Independence could not be denied forever; the Japanese attack and invasion of 1941-42 put the lie to American invincibility in the Pacific even if Japan was ultimately defeated. An independent Philippines was one of the more immediate consequences of WWII in the Pacific, but of course there would always be strings attached... American military bases, for example, and American sponsored dictatorships running things from Manila on behalf of American interests.

That lasted as long as it could, but not forever. It can't last forever because the whole construct is based on a lie: The US doesn't seek Empire (it does); the US does not seek to rule overseas (it does; latterly through proxies); the US is beneficent and benign believing only in democracy and human rights(in your dreams!)

Even as they shook free of American Imperialism, the peoples of the Philippines found themselves more heavily indebted to American interests. It's not at all clear that even now they have achieved the level of independence the initial rebellion of 1898 sought.

And the Philippines was only one of America's numerous colonial/imperial expansions during the late 19th - early 20th Centuries. There were plenty of others, but the Imperial cause was temporarily derailed by the repeated World Wars, the economic Depressions, and the advent of the Soviet Union as chief rival of the United States on the world stage.

Nevertheless, the United States has been organized as a domestic Imperial State since the adoption of the Constitution. Once that domestic continental empire was consolidated through negotiations, subterfuge, strategy and many, many wars of aggression -- and of course a Civil War -- sights were set overseas almost immediately; Hawaii being the first victim. Taking over the remnants of the Spanish Empire was in some was a brilliant maneuver. In other ways, it was a moral catastrophe.

All of this had been worked out during the period of domestic expansion and expropriation. The ways and means to Empire through wars of aggression against a weaker opposition were integral to the American character.

But after World War II, the notion of any nation having the right to pursue wars of aggression for colonial or any other purpose was discredited and indeed made illegal under international law. Nazis were tried and hanged for such things.

The wars that the United States engaged in after the end of WWII -- principally in Korea and Vietnam -- were justified under the rubric of "defense" of allies who had been attacked by "aggressive" neighbors. But of course, this was fiction, too, as the "neighbors" were created by the very external forces that then engaged in the wars. It was a sophisticated means of continuing wars of aggression, and it failed dismally in the swamps of the Mekong Delta among other places.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, seems to have released the hounds of aggressive war once again. This time around, it seems that the United States and its allies are intent on going back to those parts of the former British Empire where the Lessons of Liberty didn't quite "take" -- Iraq, obviously, and Afghanistan; but a good deal of Eastern Africa and parts of the Persian Gulf and Middle East as well. Most of the places now under the aggressive gaze of American forces are ones that failed to become integrated under the British Imperial umbrella back in the day, and it seems that the main point of the current round of aggressive wars against them is to whip them into shape for proper rule and exploitation under some Native version of Anglo-American "law."

That it is being done on the same basis as colonial wars and imperial expansions of the past is grotesque; that's exactly what led to the world wars and other catastrophes of the 20th Century. Is this not understood?

Apparently not. And why not?

Apparently, Our Ruling Classes cannot see their own failures except through the prism of an arch-rival, such as the Soviet Union was back in the day, that held a constant critical mirror up to the failures of the West and pointed out what frauds the Western "democracies" were.

The collapse of the Soviet Union took that mirror away, and despite the efforts of the current rulers of the Russian Federation to hold their cracked and de-silvered mirror up to highlight the hypocrisy of the West, there is no real global rival to Anglo-American Imperial hegemony these days. Nations like China and India, that should be more than a little interested in using a cudgel against Anglo-American Imperial adventurism and their consequent wars of aggression are far more interested in their own domestic development (which is in hyperdrive at the moment) than they are in curbing Anglo-American excesses overseas.

In fact, I suspect they approve of much of the aggressive warfare against uppity Natives that the Anglo-American alliance has been engaged in, for in the case of China (to some extent, India as well) they are financing it. If they see a danger to their own interests from the aggression of the Neo-Imperialists, they aren't showing it.

Yet it is vital for the United States to pull out of its current aggressive international posture, just as it is vital for Britain to do the same. There is no sign whatever of its happening, no matter the calls from the People and wide swaths of the intellectual communities to do so.

The Ruling Class neither listens to nor cares what the People "think." They only care about what the People DO; and so far, they have seen nothing that they feel they need fear from the People anywhere.

Certainly nothing -- yet -- equivalent to the Global Communist Conspiracy they once trembled before and made some positive accommodations to.

Yet there is nevertheless a global rising against the unfettered continuation of Neo-Imperialism, against the arbitrary imposition of authority, against the indignities and exploitation that are inevitable in the dictatorships propped up by the Neo-Imperialists, and against Neo-Imperialist indignity and exploitation as well.

People everywhere are saying "No!" -- but they haven't figured out yet how to stop it.

That is going to take a good deal more thought, struggle, experiment and failure to discover, but it will be discovered. For Peoples everywhere know that the Better Future they seek can only come once the new round of imperial wars of aggression are ended.

Envisioning That Better Future -- Five: The End of Cruelty

The United States has become one of the most outrageously cruel societies thanks in part to a long tradition of physical cruelty and brutal excess -- going back at least to the earliest Colonial times -- but especially due to the determination of our Ruling Classes to develop and impose as cruel a regime as they believe they can get away with as a consequence of the 9/11 attacks. Not that there weren't many signs of what was to come well before those attacks.

Cruelty has become so ingrained in the American consciousness that the hundreds or thousands of domestic applications of cruelty by Authority every day in this country go practically unnoticed by the majority of people. Most don't know what's going on because they don't see it directly; those who do have some idea of what's going on may only have the vaguest idea of the scope of the problem, and many of them don't care about cruelty to others in any case.

Domestic cruelty is only part of the problem, however. Our international behavior, especially during our nation's now routine wars of aggression abroad, is less and less distinguishable from that of many aggressor nations of history, to the point where shocking the conscience (and lies) has become a widespread military tactic used by our allies as well.

It's shameful, deeply morally wrong, and it is ultimately unsustainable.

Any Better Future we envision will have deal with American cruelty and take the necessary steps to curb and then end it.

The immediate problem in dealing with the topic is that cruelty is pervasive in American society. Where do you start getting a handle on it and eventually getting rid of it?

So many Americans have been conditioned to accept the cruel treatment of The Other that in many cases, they don't even recognize it when they witness it. And I've been struck during the Occupy Movement at the general passivity of Occupy crowds in the face of often egregious brutality and cruelty by police forces all over the land.

The crowds may or may not make loud objections to the applications of force they witness, but most would never intervene. Few have any idea that they have the power to transform the cruelty or brutality they are witnessing or being subjected to, such as Marine Sgt. Shamar Thomas did in shaming the NYPD last October.

Our entire prison/industrial complex is suffused with cruelty; but so is much of law enforcement in general. The entire injustice system relies on its own cruel instincts to oppress, repress, and suppress those it deems threats -- by excesses of criminalization, disparate enforcement, discriminatory sentencing, and on and on and on and on.

The entire system is an abomination and must be abolished and started over. It's well past the point of effective reform.

But there is more. The current hot candidate for the Republican nomination for President (and already designated successor to Obama as far as the media is concerned) Mitt Romney has let loose any number of apparently unconsciously cruel statements, from the fact that he likes to fire people to the absurd statement that he's "unemployed" too, that I've decided he's probably dogwhistling very effectively to the heartless Republican base. All the other candidates on the Republican side ten to be very open about their cruel intentions, particularly Gingrich, but certainly not limited to him. Romney-the-Moderate (so he's characterized) must communicate more... subtly. Not an easy task for him, given his history.

But the entire political system operates on a premise of cruelly disregarding the needs and interests of the People in order to serve the needs and interests of the High and the Mighty. Republicans have no lock on that kind of cruelty. It is ever-present throughout the system, and Democrats have developed remarkably effective methods of cruelly dismissing and denouncing their own base of support.

Corporate cruelty is too well known by too many people.

We could go on.

The point is that any vision of a Better Future -- that's going to mean anything to the People -- must end the systematic cruelty and brutality that is a paramount feature of American society in almost all its aspects. It's not just physical cruelty, either.

How to do that is still an open question. But nothing can be done without more widespread recognition of what's going on. The thousands of highly public arrests and hundreds of injuries connected with the Occupy Movement, together with routinely cruel treatment in custody -- and the greater levels of testimony about it -- are having a cumulative effect on consciousness and consciences.

It's a start...