FAIR USE NOTICE

FAIR USE NOTICE

A BEAR MARKET ECONOMICS BLOG

OCCUPY THE REVOLUTION

OCCUPY THE REVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. we believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates
FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates

All Blogs licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Revolution is the Answer: Don't Look on the Bright Side: Pessimism, Not Magical Thinking, Is What Will Save Us

AlterNet.org


WORLD

It would take a miracle for our intractable problems to become tractable. Being in denial about that doesn't help anyone.

It gets worse. If you pay attention to the news, the prospects for the future look grim. The new normal of high unemployment and stagnant wages will likely not turn out to be just a phase. The next generations may indeed do worse than the ones before them. Thanks to the Supreme Court, big money will keep tightening its stranglehold on elections and lawmaking. Financial reform and consumer protection will never survive the onslaught of lobbyists. Reckless bankers will go on making out like bandits, and the public will always be forced to rescue them. The Internet, along with cable and wireless, will be controlled by fewer and more-powerful companies. The world will keep staggering from one economic crisis to another. We will not have the leadership and citizenship we need to kick our dependence on oil. We will not even keep up with the Kardashians.

Add your own items to the list. Whatever global threats scare you -- climate change, the Middle East, loose nukes, pandemics -- and whatever domestic issues haunt you -- failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, rising poverty, obesity -- the odds are that the honesty, discipline, resources and burden-sharing required for a happy ending will not, like Elijah, show up at our door.

Sure, there's some good news around, and there are advances ahead. Gay marriage is legal in New York, and perhaps one day the resistance to it will seem as unfathomable as the opposition to women's suffrage. Technology is growing exponentially, and today's iGizmos will doubtlessly seem like steam engines tomorrow. We will some day actually be gone from Afghanistan. Justices Scalia and Thomas will eventually retire. French fries or salami will turn out to be good for us, at least for a while. Some Wall Street slimeballs will be nailed, some good guys will win elections and some little girl will be rescued from a well.

But it would pretty much take a miracle for our intractable problems to become tractable. Without one, political polarization is not about to give way to kumbaya. Cultural coarsening is not going to reverse course. The middle class will not be resurgent; the gap between rich and poor will not start closing; the plutocrats calling the shots will not cede their power. No warning on its way to us -- no new BP, no next shooting, no future default -- will bring us to our senses about the environment, assault weapons or derivatives for any longer than it takes for the next Casey Anthony or Anthony Weiner comes along.

Politicians, of course, can never say something like this. They're selling progress, greatness, can-do. The only place for pessimism in the public sphere is as a handy foil. "There are those who say that we can't solve our problems, that our best days are behind us, that China is the future. But I say...." It's a surefire applause line. But it's also a straw man. There aren't "those who say" that. Americans hate pessimism. We get discouraged, our hope flags, but predicting defeat is inconceivable. The comeback kids, the triumphant underdogs, the resilient fighters rising to the challenge: that's who we see in the mirror.

We place fatalism beyond the pale. To give up on the possibility of change, to doubt that we're up to the task, is socially aberrant. You may fear that we are doomed to be a nation of big babies: we claim to want leaders who'll face tough choices, but we punish them for actually making them. You may despair that the rationality required to face up to reality will never overcome the fundamentalism, know-nothingism and magic thinking that has a hammerlock on our national psyche. You may believe that big money and big media have become so powerful that our sclerotic democratic institutions are inherently incapable of checking them.

But you can't admit any of that. In public, we never let such darkness prevail. Instead, we work to improve things. We organize, rally, blog, join movements, work phone banks, ring doorbells, write checks, sign petitions.

We are not a tragic nation. If a leader disappoints us, or breaks our hearts, we say it's just a setback, not a sign that the system itself manufactures impotence and capitulation. If a problem festers, we cling to the belief that money, know-how and perhaps some sobering wake-up call are all we need to solve it; we don't dare entertain the notion that there's something in human nature that's causing and protracting it. If social conflict splits us, we diagnose a communication problem, a semantic setback on the road to common ground, a gap that can be bridged by consensus on facts and deliberation on goals; it's just too painful to think that tribal values impervious to rationality and insusceptible to compromise are the ineluctable driver of our divisions.

I wish I could declare my confidence in our ability to solve our problems without sounding like some candidate who just wants my vote. But ironic optimism won't do. I'm desperate for evidence that we're prepared to pay for the services we demand, or to subordinate our desires in order to meet our obligations to one another, or to reform our governance so that special interest money, filibusters and the other Washington diseases didn't sicken the system. I just wish it didn't take drinking the can-do Kool Aid to see the glass as half full.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Save Yourself and Join the Revolution




History is calling you!

ForOurEconomy.org is a grass roots campaign to wrest control of our economy from the big banks, crony capitalists and financial elites.


Take Action! How We Can Save OUR Economy

By Tiffiny Cheng, David DeGraw and Kevin Zeese

The next few weeks will culminate into a defining moment in American history and lay the course for our economic future. After two years of being asleep at the switch, Congress is finally stepping up and taking action on financial reform. The resulting bill will be a clear indication and definitive proof as to who is actually running our country. Will it reinforce the dominance of the Wall Street elite, or will it mark a rebirth of the rule of law and economic prosperity for millions of Americans who have seen their standard of living decline?

The early indications are ominous, two of the most crucial aspects of true reform have already been dealt a severe blow. The amendment to break up the “too big to fail” banks has been voted down, and the bill to audit the Federal Reserve has been gutted of important provisions.

We cannot just sit back and let politicians, who are overly influenced by campaign funding and lobbying activities on the part of the big banks who have plunged us into this crisis, decide our future without us. Our passive unwillingness to stand up for our own rights is part of the reason we are in this crisis to begin with. Right now is the most pivotal time for us to make our voice heard.

This bill is where we draw the line and STAND UP.

Enough is enough! It’s time for Americans to take OUR economy back from the big banks and financial interests that have looted it. It’s time to restructure, decentralize and democratize OUR economy.

Wall Street has pillaged our country. It has been bailed out and saved from their casino gambling, Ponzi schemes and allowed to continue their plunder. They are the concentrated power that history has warned us about.

Trillions of our taxpayer dollars have been handed over from the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve to the Wall Street elite, handed over to benefit the very people who caused the crisis. The truth about how many trillions of our tax dollars have been “transferred,” and who exactly they have been given to, has been kept secret in the un-audited Federal Reserve. It is time to audit the Fed and either dismantle it or remake it so it reflects the interests of the people, not the big banks who have hijacked our economy.

How much do they have to steal before Americans say, ‘No more! It is OUR money, it is OUR economy’? How many more honest, law abiding, hardworking Americans have to lose their homes, jobs and struggle just to acquire basic necessities and make ends meet before these greedy bankers are held accountable?

Before laying out our 12-step program to take our economy back, let’s take a brief look at some of the devastating results of Wall Street’s greed:

* Over 50 million US citizens are living in poverty;

* The US now has the HIGHEST poverty rate in the industrialized world;

* 50% of American children will need to use a food stamp during their childhood;

* 30 million Americans are in need of employment, with 20% of Americans either unemployed, underemployed or without hope of finding work;

* Foreclosure rates continue to break record after record. More than five million families have already lost their homes. A record 2.8 million properties were in foreclosure in 2009. The first three months of 2010 had the highest foreclosure rates ever, and 13-25 million foreclosures are predicted by 2014.

* In the past two years, Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings. They have also lost $13 trillion in the value of their homes.

* Personal bankruptcies are rising. A record number of Americans filed for bankruptcy in March 2010. In fact, 6,900 Americans go bankrupt every day.

* Due to this economic crisis, American workers have bought more on credit cards than ever before. We now have over $850 billion in credit card debt, as banks charge usurious interest rates on this debt.

* The US now has the HIGHEST inequality of wealth in our nation’s history. The economic top 1% controls an all-time record 70% of all financial assets.

* The average CEO salary, including stock options and incentives, has skyrocketed and is now 500 times more than the average workers.

* While CEO salaries have been soaring and corporate profits are breaking all-time records, average worker pay is declining and incentives are being cut.

These are just some of the horrifying results of Wall Street’s rigging of the economy. The free-market is now a rigged-market ruled by corporate welfare and crony capitalists who are funneling wealth away from 99% of the American public and directly into their coffers on an unprecedented scale. Risk, losses and debts have been socialized, while profits have been privatized.

As a consequence of their continued looting, austerity measures are about to be implemented. In state after state across the country, and on a federal level, we are facing severe deficits. Mass school closings have already been scheduled for the end of this school year, as thousands of teachers have already been told that they will no longer have a job. Pension funds and medical programs are being slashed. Fire fighters, police and health care workers are being cut back . Six million Americans are on the verge of losing the unemployment benefits that they have been surviving off of and there are now a record six available workers for every one job opening. Unemployment insurance funds have already been depleted in 33 states, with more expected to go into the red within the next few months.

Draconian cuts in vital social programs and critical government functions are just beginning to be phased in, while our national wealth is still being transferred to the wealthiest. They are pulling out the social infrastructure from below us and are about to pile higher taxes on top of us.

While nearly 200 million, two out of three, Americans are struggling to make ends meet and currently living paycheck to paycheck, billionaires have increased their aggregate wealth by a stunning 50% during this economic crisis.

The Robber Barons of the Gilded Age have now been displaced as America’s greediest ruling class.

After trillions in bailouts – a cover for the greatest theft of wealth in history – we are seeing record-breaking profits and bonuses on Wall Street. We have the power to stop this looting, break up this concentrated power and take back the economy. We just have to stand up for ourselves – TOGETHER.

We can break the financial oppression, and here’s how we will do it.

The Mobilization for OUR Economy begins while the Obama Administration and Congress are debating reform of the financial industry. However, much more than what is being proposed is needed to give Americans control over their economic lives. To achieve these objectives, we are working to make the following common-sense reforms into reality:

#1) Break up the “Too Big To Fail” Banks. You can’t have free-market competition when a handful of big banks can rig the market and regulatory structure to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else. We will continue to push for reforms put forth in the Kaufman-Brown SAFE Banking Act.

#2) Put in place a transparent open exchange for over-the-counter derivatives and ban High Frequency Trading (HFT). Investigate all prior HFT and frontrunning activities, including the sudden 1000 point stock market plunge on May 6th. Create a team of experts to analyze/restructure/dissolve existing derivative contracts to reduce risk. We support Senator Blanche Lincoln’s Wall Street Transparency and Accountability Act.

#3) Require stricter accounting standards so the real value and debt/liabilities of banks are understood. With this, a more responsible executive pay structure must be implemented. Investigate firms and hold them liable for accounting scams. Clawbacks must be implemented on bonuses and executive compensation that was based on false profits. Investigate the Federal Reserve’s role in covering up, aiding and abetting firms in accounting fraud.

#4) Rein in corporate power. Stop corporate welfare – no more bailouts! End
corporate personhood and reverse the Citizens United court decision by a constitutional amendment. We must also make sure that all taxpayer funds and loans handed out in the bailout are returned with an interest rate that reflects current profit margins that were created as a result of our tax money.

#5) Audit the Federal Reserve. There should be zero secrecy in this private banking corporation that prints U.S. dollars and extends zero interest loans to a select few. The Fed should either be dismantled or re-made to represent the interests of the American people, not the banks, and include elected positions on their Board of Governors.

#6) Tax trading of stocks, bonds, derivatives and options. A small micro-tax applied to large firms would slow high-risk speculation and provide significant revenue, allowing reduction of income taxes, withholding taxes and adequately fund government operations.

#7) Corresponding to our second objective, close the casino by reinstating both a modernized version of the Glass–Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking, and a strict Net Capital rule that limits wild risk-taking and speculating.

#8) Shut the revolving door and put up a strict firewall between finance executives and government regulators and officials.

#9) End usurious credit card and pay day loans. Cap interest rates and get rid of hidden bank fees.

#10) Create an empowered and independent Consumer Protection Agency (CPA). Investigate predatory lending schemes, liar’s loans and put a moratorium on home foreclosures, as the first steps in what will be many investigations into abusive practices. Credit rating agencies should be regulated by the CPA and function independently of the firms producing the products being rated.

#11) Urgently hire 1,500+ white-collar crime investigators to enforce existing laws.

#12) Fire, investigate and prosecute government officials like Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers and John Dugan, and investigate Hank Paulson, Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, all of whom played a significant role in the financial collapse and the massive “transfer” of wealth to the finance industry. Also investigate and prosecute, under RICO statutes, top executives in financial firms who engaged in fraudulent activity. Appoint people like Elizabeth Warren, Simon Johnson, Joseph Stiglitz, William Black and Ron Paul to positions of authority over the economy.

These are our primary objectives and the necessary steps that must be taken to take OUR economy back. If the financial reform bill, that has been two years in the making, doesn’t live up to this 12-step program, we will know that our politicians have sold us short once again.

The Wall Street elite have controlled our political process for too long!

We must show them that we mean business this time, so STAND UP and fight for your future. Join us at sit-ins, protests and rallies across the United States. We can take back our country. We can regain control over our economic lives.

The time is now!

HISTORY IS CALLING YOU!

YOUR FUTURE IS CALLING YOU!

YOU ARE NEEDED!

SIGN UP NOW:

Comes the Revolution - We'll Want an Ally in Congress

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice


When the Public Rises, It’ll Want an Ally in Congress

For the majority of people in the United States — a majority does not vote, a majority believes the government is broken, a majority thinks our public policy is headed in the wrong direction — the fact that we call this place a democracy is apparently outweighed by the fact that our national government almost never does what a majority of us want done. Some of the things we don’t want done include the destruction of the planet’s environment, the mass slaughter of war, the spreading of violence, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny aristocracy while millions at home and billions abroad suffer horrifically for lack of readily available resources.

When the people of Egypt decided earlier this year to rise up and resist their government’s abuses, it would have been helpful for them to have more real allies already in positions of partial power within that government. The same applies to us, should we ever determine that we are not going to take it anymore. Perhaps that moment will come in October. Perhaps, as momentum builds around the country for real resistance, it will come ahead of schedule this summer. Perhaps it will come a few years down the road.

When such a moment comes, we will have to face violence without employing it. We will have to counter the crimes of war makers and robber barons with the impoliteness of uncompromising refusal to allow their operations to continue. We will have to make sacrifices and steadfastly advance the struggle while resisting innumerable temptations to compromise with the unconscionable. But we will also have to lead the way forward, negotiate, unite, and synthesize.

I’m not suggesting the rather silly critique that we know what we are against but not what we are for. Those questions answer themselves. We are against making war on the world. We are for making friendship with the world. We are against coal, oil, nuclear, and gas. We are for solar, wind, tides, and all renewables. We are against legalized bribery. We are for clean elections, free media time, verified vote counting, and automatic registration. We are against ignorance. We are for investment in education and journalism. We are against secrecy. We are for transparency. We are against corporate health coverage. We are for single payer. We are against plutocracy and corporate power. We are for taxing billionaires, imposing the law equally on all, and providing human rights to all and only humans.

If we make it impossible for the banksters to fund crimes in our name with impunity, we will also need to make it possible for working people to borrow money, diplomats to negotiate alliances and trade agreements, and criminals — including the biggest and most powerful of them — to be given fair trials. It will be helpful to us if we have some friends already in official positions of governance. But who will they be?

The very idea of aligning ourselves with allies in Congress has been given a bad name. And it damn well deserves it. Allies in Congress should align themselves with us, not the other way around. But even when they do so in large numbers, they are consistently out-numbered by their colleagues and by the power of the two parties to which they answer. We don’t seem capable of electing 218 principled House members, much less 60 uncorrupted Senators. And yet, we are better off with some minority in Congress speaking — even if, for now, it is only speaking — for the majority outside of Congress. I would even say we are better off with members in Congress who sometimes represent us and sometimes cave in to corrupting influences, as compared with those who never represent us at all.

Look at the people we idolize as whistle blowers. They are usually people who have been cooperative cogs in a machine of death and destruction, often for many years, who finally decided to expose a particular abuse. We don’t reject their good deeds on the grounds that they aren’t angels. I think Congress members’ actions should be treated the same way. They stand or fall on their own merits, not the personality of the member, much less the imagined holy or hellish nature of the member’s political party.

And yet, goddamn it, wouldn’t it be nice to really have one of us in Congress? Wouldn’t that be useful if the tide began to turn, whether slowly or in an immediate upheaval?

As I write this, Republicans in Ohio are working on eliminating Congressman Dennis Kucinich’s district. They’re not trying to vote him out, but to erase his district from the map so that he has nowhere to run for reelection, at least not in Ohio. Also, as I write this, Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, longtime chair of the Progressive Caucus and ally of the peace movement, is announcing her intention not to run for reelection.

Yet a possibility is opening up of replacing Woolsey with someone who clearly has the potential to be even better than Kucinich has been thus far.

No matter how Woolsey’s district is redrawn in California, it will remain a very progressive district. This means that nationally those who pay attention to, and work on, elections, as well as those who want their children to have a decent world to live in, ought to take some interest in replacing Woolsey with a real progressive leader, not just someone who will vote the right way most of the time, not just someone who will say the right things, not even just someone who will stick their neck out and take the lead on matters that are deemed controversial within the Beltway, but someone who will educate, encourage activism, and organize within the government.

Luckily, that candidate is available and running, and he’s running against one — possibly two — Obama followers. No Republican or independent is going to be elected to Congress from Marin County. The representative is either going to be a robotic Democratic drone who votes as the President instructs, thus inverting and perverting our system of checks and balances. Or the representative is going to be the person that progressives turn to for support from around the nation in the years to come: Norman Solomon.

If you don’t know who Norman is, read his Wikipedia page. Norman is one of the best activists I know, and one of the best book authors, possibly the very best columnist, and undoubtedly one of the easiest colleagues to work with whether we agree on something or not (we’re working together on RootsAction). Norman may not agree with everything in this column. But I’m not looking for someone identical to myself to elect to Congress. Norman Solomon would make a better Congress member than I would and than most of us would. He is ideally suited for it. I expect him to stay connected to the activist world, to make ideal use of independent and corporate media, and to build a caucus of Congress members that doesn’t just add members to its ranks but actually takes actions that impact our public policy. When I say I expect these things, I don’t mean that I am making these demands of Norman (though I am); I mean that we can safely predict that he will conduct himself in this manner if elected.

That’s always a big if. The forces of mediocrity are always gathering strength against the exceptional. Let’s nip in the bud the notion that California’s Sixth District should be “represented” by a run of the mill hack. We can do that by pumping thousands of small donations from ordinary people all over the country into Solomon’s campaign this week before the totals raised thus far are counted and announced at the end of June. Solomon has already raised over $100,000. If Rahm hadn’t left for Chicago, the national machine to stop Solomon would be in full gear already. But people who stand for nothing are easily intimidated. I’m doing my bit to help scare them off right now. Won’t you? Please give at least the price of a fancy coffee for the sake of having a people’s leader in Washington when we need one.

David Swanson is an anti-war activist. Read other articles by David.

This article was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2011 at 8:00am and is filed under Activism, Anti-war, Elections.

Comes the Revolution: The 99% Movement



Time for a Second American Revolution – The 99% Movement

Is It Time for Law Abiding American Citizens to Stop Paying Their Taxes and Start a New Government?The Economic Elite have seized our economy, tax system and government. These people are the most depraved terrorists on the planet and they have viciously attacked us and launched an all-out economic war on the American public. We have to get serious about defending ourselves and fighting back.

“This situation continues only because the mass of the people refuse to look facts in the face and prefer to feed on illusions produced and circulated by those in power with a profusion that contrasts with their withholding the necessities of life. The day that the mass of the American people awake to the realities of the situation, that day the restoration of democracy will commence, for power and rule will revert to the people.” — John Dewey

Which brings us back to my original question: Is It Time for Law Abiding American Citizens to Stop Paying Their Taxes and Start a New Government?

When it comes to the overwhelming evidence of unpunished theft, and the process of paying taxes into that organized system of theft, there comes a point when exploited people need to ask the question: Why should hardworking Americans continue to contribute to our own demise?

This is the same question that led to the first American Revolution when Thomas Jefferson wrote the following Declaration:

“Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”

And dare I say, with ample evidence to back up this claim, the level of “abuses and usurpations” inflicted upon the American people is much greater today than it was in 1776. Despite an omni-present propaganda (mainstream media) system — which is the greatest weapon of oppression humanity has ever known, which has also obscured, isolated and suppressed dissent and understanding of our present tyrannical forces — recent public opinion polls have produced stunning results:

* Only 21% of American voters believe the government has the consent of the governed.
* 82% want an aggressive crackdown on the criminal class that looted our economy.
* 86% feel the system of government is broken.
* 79% think the economy will collapse.

These are amazingly positive signs, because this means that the propaganda system is collapsing. These results show that only 15-20% of the population is still successfully propagandized, and this number will obviously keep falling as the economic attack continues to escalate.

The Economic Elite are hoping that our propagandized population will just sleepwalk to extinction and passively accept a slow death. Those of us who are aware need to sound the alarm! Where are the modern-day Paul Reveres? We need one on every street corner, at every shopping mall and coffee shop, on every online social network. In our nation’s history, the stakes have never been higher.

If you are reading this right now, and understand that what I’m saying is true, how can you continue to remain passive? I know that just ignoring this report is the easy thing to do, but ask yourself, look in the mirror and ask yourself: Will ignoring this today make my future any better? Or will it make things much worse? Paid-off politicians will not protect your future. Your house is on fire and no one is coming to put it out. Are you going to, or are you going to let it burn to the ground?

Only you can protect your future. Your inaction makes you complicit in your own demise.

As the late Howard Zinn once put it: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

And the train is moving at a quickened pace. Analyzing the devastation from the economic attack thus far, it has been equivalent to a 9/11 attack every single week. And these attacks continue without any significant measures taken to defend against it.

Our politicians won’t defend us and exercise the will of the people, so we must. It’s time to get moving, start organizing and to form a new government that is, as the Constitution states: of, by and for the people.

We will restore a rule of law. The second America Revolution has now begun!

We are US soldiers, policemen, firemen, teachers, students, business owners, postal workers, transit workers, construction workers, union members, artists, journalists, doctors, nurses, lawyers, social service workers, factory workers, farmers, we are 99% of the population and we will not stand by and let our country be destroyed like this!

We are launching a 99% Movement and all the propaganda and labels that are used to divide us will fall to the wayside. We are not just Republicans and Democrats, or Tea Party and Coffee Party people, we are Americans and we are uniting against our common enemy.

“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency is great and unendurable. And oppression and robbery are organized, I say; let us not have such a machine any longer. I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”
– Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

“The civilization may still seem brilliant because it possesses an outward front, the work of a long past, but is in reality an edifice crumbling to ruin and destined to fall in at the first storm.”
– Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

“All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.”
– Strobe Talbott

“First Ray of the New Rising Sun”
– Jimi Hendrix

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains
to earth like dew
Which in sleep
had fallen on you
Ye are many
they are few”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley

The illusion being thrust upon us, by the mainstream media and current politicians, that leaves us feeling powerless to create change, is crashing down. As millions of Americans begin to realize the power we have in numbers and opt-out of this unconstitutional government that is currently in place, we will restore a rule of law and secure our freedom, liberty and future.

Is It Time for Law Abiding American Citizens to Stop Paying Their Taxes and Start a New Government?We look forward to proving the criminal misconduct rampant throughout our government and economic system in court. We will prove that the Government has acted against our interests, in an unconstitutional manner on many fronts and has actively facilitated the theft of taxpayer funds. It is beyond any legal doubt, as will be proven in courtrooms across the country. In fact, we are requesting a six-hour block of national primetime television programming to present our evidence directly to the American public. We expect the major networks to comply with our request, as the national broadcast television stations are licensed by the FCC to use the Public airwaves and are required by law to inform and serve the Public interest.

XIII: How You Can Get Involved

“Are you brave enough to see?
Do you want to change it?”

Trent Reznor

Anyone with a general interest in taking part in this 99% movement, please sign up here.

If you are a lawyer who would like to participate in this effort, please email Law@AmpedStatus.com.

We are also assembling a production team for our television and film public awareness campaign. If you have skills in this area, or would like to help fund this project, please email Media@AmpedStatus.com.

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook Post to Reddit Post to Digg Post to StumbleUpon

Thursday, June 23, 2011

In the Age of WikiLeaks, the End of Secrecy?

In the Age of WikiLeaks, the End of Secrecy?

Micah L. Sifry

“In one direction we can reach out and touch the time when the leaders of the Soviet Union thought that the explosion at the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl could be kept secret from the rest of the world. In the other direction we can see a time—already upon us—when fourteen-year-old hackers in Australia or Newfoundland can make their way into the most sensitive areas of national security or international finance. The central concern of government in the future will not be information, but analysis. We need government agencies staffed with argumentative people who can live with ambiguity and look upon secrecy as a sign of insecurity.”
         ——Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
            
Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, 1997

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
         —Benjamin Franklin


For some time now, our leaders have been saying that they understand—nay, that they embrace—the disruptive potential of the Internet. Take President Obama, who used networked technology so adroitly in his 2008 election campaign. Here he is talking about the power of the Internet at a town hall meeting with students in Shanghai in 2009, where he memorably declared:

I am a big believer in technology, and I’m a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates new ideas. It encourages creativity.

Obama added, “The truth is that because in the United States information is free…I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me. I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger, and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”

Or take Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. No American official has been more eloquent in expressing support for the power of the Internet than Clinton, who gave a highly visible speech on “Internet freedom” on January 21, 2010, in Washington, where she waxed poetic about how “the spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet,” adding:

The Internet is a network that magnifies the power and potential of all others. And that’s why we believe it’s critical that its users are assured certain basic freedoms. Freedom of expression is first among them. This freedom is no longer defined solely by whether citizens can go into the town square and criticize their government without fear of retribution. Blogs, e-mails, social networks and text messages have opened up new forums for exchanging ideas, and created new targets for censorship….
   Now, ultimately, this issue isn’t just about information freedom; it is about what kind of world we want and what kind of world we will inhabit. It’s about whether we live on a planet with one Internet, one global community and a common body of knowledge that benefits and unites us all, or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where you live and the whims of censors.

The words are nice, but unfortunately theirs has been a kind of bloodless embrace, a rhetorical gesture to a changing culture without any real content and certainly no loss of control. Yes, as a candidate Obama allowed his supporters to use his online social network, my.BarackObama.com, to organize a 20,000-strong petition objecting to his flip-flopping on the issue of warrantless wiretapping. But after an e-mail response and a few hours of question-deflecting by his advisers on his blog, the issue was dropped. Most politicians, including Obama, have used the Internet to consolidate their power, not to empower others for any other purpose.

To be sure, they’ve been fascinated by the Internet’s potential to challenge the status quo elsewhere. President Obama deftly used YouTube to address the Iranian people directly at the beginning of his administration, posting a message of friendship at the time of the Nowruz (springtime) celebrations that, according to YouTube’s open tracking analytics, was indeed widely watched inside Iran. And administration officials like Clinton have spoken out often in defense of bloggers’ free speech rights, and condemned countries like China, Egypt, Iran, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Vietnam for clamping down on the Internet and cracking down on human rights activists using online social network platforms.

But the reason the recent confrontation between WikiLeaks and the US government is a pivotal event is that, unlike these other applications of technology to politics, this time the free flow of information is threatening the establishment with difficult questions. And not by embarrassing one politician or bureaucrat but by exposing systemic details of how America conducts its foreign and military policies. Or, as writer Bruce Sterling memorably put it, “Julian Assange has hacked a superpower.” The result is a series of deeply uncomfortable contradictions.

The idea that the wondrous “new nervous system” for the planet that Clinton saw being created by all this online freedom might want to turn its attention to the most powerful country on the planet shouldn’t be a shock to leaders like her. But when the State Department cables started to leak, she fell back on a much older way of seeing the world. “The United States strongly condemns the illegal disclosure of classified information,” she said in her prepared statement the day the news broke. “It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems.” She added later, “Disclosures like these tear at the fabric of the proper function of responsible government.” The notion that lying to the American public, or the world, about the conduct of foreign or military policy might be more damaging to the fabric of international relations or to the functioning of responsible government was not addressed.

‘You Can’t Handle the Truth’?

Here is Clinton’s problem: in the networked age, when the watched can also be the watchers, nothing less than the credibility of authority itself is at stake. Western governments presumably rest on the consent of the governed, but only if the governed trust the word of those who would govern them. In this changed environment, the people formerly known as the authorities can re-earn that trust only by being more transparent, and by eliminating the contradictions between what they say and what they do. Compounding this challenge, today when a crisis strikes, information moves faster than the “authorities” can know using their own, slower methods. WikiLeaks, and other channels for the unauthorized release and spread of information, are symptoms of this change, not its cause.

Unfortunately there is a large gap between what American officials have told the public about their actions and what they have actually done. Transparency may be the best medicine for a healthy democracy, but from the government’s perspective, the problem with the WikiLeaks revelations from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, plus the State Department cables, may well be that they expose too much. Not in the sense of giving away military secrets that endanger troops in the field or human rights workers; so far both the Pentagon and the State Department have explicitly admitted that no such harm has occurred (though the original release of the Afghanistan war records may have placed some civilian informants in danger from the Taliban).

Rather, the war logs and diplomatic cables show that the nine-year war in Afghanistan is doomed. And this is not something the governments fighting that war want to tell their public. As Javier Moreno, editor of El País, wrote in a long essay explaining why his paper decided to work with WikiLeaks in publishing the State Department cables,

Tens of thousands of soldiers are fighting a war in Afghanistan that their respective leaders know is not winnable. Tens of thousands of soldiers are shoring up a government known around the world to be corrupt, but which is tolerated by those who sent the soldiers there in the first place. The WikiLeaks cables show that none of the Western powers believes that Afghanistan can become a credible nation in the medium term, and much less become a viable democracy, despite the stated aims of those whose soldiers are fighting and dying there. Few people have been surprised to learn that the Afghan president has been salting away millions of dollars in overseas aid in foreign bank accounts with the full cognizance of his patrons.

He added, “We may have suspected our governments of underhand dealings, but we did not have the proof that WikiLeaks has provided. We now know that our governments were aware of the situations mentioned above, and, what is more, they have hidden the facts from us.”

Instead of an honest discussion about what the war logs and cables tell us in toto, we have been treated to a bizarre and contradictory set of responses. Sometimes, what Julian Assange has done is portrayed as worse than what Al Qaeda has done. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich: “He should be treated as an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.” And other times, we are told that the so-called revelations are actually pretty humdrum. Defense Secretary Robert Gates: “Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest.” Nothing to see here; move along please.

There is only one way to reconcile these seemingly contradictory messages coming from the government and its allies in Congress and the media. At some fundamental level, they probably understand that the conditions for maintaining their monopoly on critical information have been broken. But they apparently still hope that the next Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker, will be dissuaded from an act of conscience if he believes either that the personal cost will be too high or that his actions won’t make a difference. Of course, neither approach will work, as long as millions of other government employees have access to the information the government is trying to hide. The Age of Transparency is here not because of one transnational online network dedicated to open information and whistleblowing named WikiLeaks but because the knowledge of how to build and maintain such networks is widespread.

he End of Secrecy

Let’s posit that what Assange is doing is “radical transparency,” i.e., publishing everything he can get his hands on. He has not, in fact, been doing that, though he is obviously publishing a great deal of raw material. Given that the Internet is a realm of abundance—not scarcity, like the old ink- and airtime-based media—this is a feature, not a bug. Raw-data dumps of previously private or secret information are now part of the media landscape. As Max Frankel, former executive editor of the New York Times, recently put it, “The threat of massive leaks will persist so long as there are massive secrets.”

Security expert Bruce Schneier makes a similar point. “Secrets are only as secure as the least trusted person who knows them,” he wrote on his blog a few weeks after Cablegate erupted. “The more people who know a secret, the more likely it is to be made public.” Somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 military and diplomatic personnel had access to the SIPRNet system that Bradley Manning is alleged to have tapped. The government doesn’t know precisely how many people overall have security clearances to classified information. Based on reporting from the Government Accountability Office, Steven Aftergood, a secrecy expert, estimates that this number is 2.5 million.

In other words, since this kind of “radical transparency” is technologically feasible, like it or not, it is a given. Efforts to stop it will fail, just as efforts to stop file-sharing by killing Napster failed. As Schneier sagely points out, “Just as the music and movie industries are going to have to change their business models for the Internet era, governments are going to have to change their secrecy models. I don’t know what those new models will be, but they will be different.”

Fourteen years ago, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan led the bipartisan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. Its recommendations are worth revisiting in light of WikiLeaks. “It is time for a new way of thinking about secrecy,” the commission’s report began. “Secrecy is a form of government regulation. Americans are familiar with the tendency to over-regulate in other areas. What is different with secrecy is that the public cannot know the extent or the content of the regulation.” The Moynihan Commission was examining a condition not unlike that of the present day, where millions of people had security clearances and hundreds of thousands of new “top secret” documents, whose disclosure could presumably cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security,” were created each year. But the commission was convinced that the culture of secrecy was out of control and hurting the country:

Excessive secrecy has significant consequences for the national interest when, as a result, policymakers are not fully informed, government is not held accountable for its actions, and the public cannot engage in informed debate. This remains a dangerous world; some secrecy is vital to save lives, bring miscreants to justice, protect national security, and engage in effective diplomacy. Yet as Justice Potter Stewart noted in his opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, when everything is secret, nothing is secret. Even as billions of dollars are spent each year on government secrecy, the classification and personnel security systems have not always succeeded at their core task of protecting those secrets most critical to the national security. The classification system, for example, is used too often to deny the public an understanding of the policymaking process, rather than for the necessary protection of intelligence activities and other highly sensitive matters.

Well before Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and thumb-size memory sticks, Moynihan foresaw that the information age would make the culture of government secrecy untenable, even picturing a time “when fourteen-year-old hackers in Australia or Newfoundland” could penetrate the government’s most sensitive secrets. With his commission, mandated by an act of Congress, he tried to turn the paradigm on its head. “The great discovery of Western science, somewhere in the seventeenth century,” he wrote, “was the principle of openness. A scientist who judged he had discovered something, published it. Often to great controversy, leading to rejection, acceptance, modification, whatever. Which is to say, to knowledge. In this setting science advanced, as nowhere else and never before.”

It is long past time for governments to embrace this paradigm. “Where you’re open, things will not be WikiLeaked,” says Christopher Graham, Britain’s information minister. “Quite a lot of this is only exciting because we didn’t know it.” He adds, “The best form of defense is transparency—much more proactive publication of what organizations do. It’s an attitude of, ‘OK. You want to know? Here it is.’” Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the City University of New York Journalism School, argues that government should be transparent by default, and have to justify when it chooses to make something secret, not the reverse. And he, too, sees something positive in the impact of WikiLeaks. “Perhaps the lesson of WikiLeaks should be that the open air is less fearsome than we’d thought,” he blogged. “That should lead to less secrecy. After all, the only sure defense against leaks is transparency.”

People who think more transparency will lead only to the hiding of secrets deeper in the bureaucracy, or that it will prevent government officials from conducting any kind of meaningful business, and that as a result we will know less, not more, about the workings of government or the powerful should think again. By that logic, we should require less public disclosure, not more. Why ask campaign contributors or lobbyists to disclose any of their activities? In fact, when people think what they’re doing is subject to public view, their behavior generally changes for the better. Thus Cablegate—which exposed many sovereign powers to a new level of public scrutiny, warning them that more such scrutiny is always a possibility in the future—should, on balance, lead to better behavior. Why? Because the cost of maintaining the contradictions between what you say in public and what you do really has just gone up another notch.

Carne Ross is a British diplomat who resigned his post at the United Nations over the dissimulation that his government practiced during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. “From now on, it will be ever more difficult for governments to claim one thing and do another,” says Ross. “For in making such claims, they are making themselves vulnerable to WikiLeaks of their own.” If all it takes is one person with a USB drive, the “least trusted person” whose conscience may be pricked by a contradiction in his or her government’s behavior, that information can move into public view more easily than ever before. That is the reality of the twenty-first century. It would be far better for all of us if our governments and other powerful institutions got with the business of accepting that transparency will be a new fact of life, and take steps to align their words with their deeds. In that respect, Hillary Clinton should thank Julian Assange rather than apologize to world leaders for what he did.

Judging from another “Internet freedom” speech Clinton gave in the wake of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, a new era of openness and candor is not upon us. She declared America’s support for the “freedom to connect” online “to solve shared problems and expose public corruption,” and she insisted that “governments also have a duty to be transparent,” but insisted that WikiLeaks could somehow be walled off from these principles because it “began with an act of theft.” “Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase,” she declared, as if that meant the information in those documents was somehow unfit for public consumption or discussion simply because they weren’t leaked in the proper way, say to Bob Woodward. For someone who has tried to be an Internet progressive, it was a singularly ostrichlike move. And unfortunately for Clinton and all the other world leaders, burying your head in the sand doesn’t make bottom-up transparency disappear.

Two, Three, Many Leaks

That’s because the genie has escaped from the bottle. Whatever else you may say about Assange, his greatest contribution to global enlightenment is the idea of a viable “stateless news organization,” to use Jay Rosen’s phrase, beholden to no country’s laws and dedicated to bringing government information into public view. Even if Assange—who has just lost round one of his fight to avoid extradition to Sweden to face rape charges—goes to jail and WikiLeaks is somehow shut down, others are already following in his footsteps. Or as futurist Mark Pesce nicely put it, “The failures of WikiLeaks provide the blueprint for the systems which will follow it.”

Since Cablegate, several independent WikiLeaks-style projects have announced themselves, including: BrusselsLeaks.com (focused on the European Union); BalkanLeaks.eu (the Balkan countries); Indoleaks.org (Indonesia); Rospil.info (Russia); two competing environmental efforts, each claiming the name GreenLeaks; and the Al-Jazeera Transparency Unit, which in January began publishing (with the Guardian) a cache of documents from inside the Palestinian Authority that exposed the minutes of high-level PA negotiating sessions with Israel and the United States. Some recent graduates of the CUNY Journalism School launched a simple tool, Localeaks, for publishers interested in attracting whistleblowers. And even the New York Times announced it may create a special portal for would-be leakers.

Perhaps the most important of these fledgling efforts is OpenLeaks.org, which is being built by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Herbert Snorrason and other former WikiLeaks associates. Of all these efforts, OpenLeaks is most likely to have the technological and cryptographic skills needed to succeed in a world filled with shady actors opposed to transparency. And unlike WikiLeaks, it is designed to be decentralized.

In mid-December, Domscheit-Berg told me that OpenLeaks was trying to correct mistakes in the WikiLeaks approach. “I am not into being a leader, and I don’t trust the whole concept of leaders either,” he said, adding, “If you follow the debate around why we left the WL [WikiLeaks] project, you will find that a strikingly important detail.” He described OpenLeaks as more of a technological service provider to many media organizations, as well as others with an interest in opening up information, like NGOs and labor unions. Instead of acting as a central hub for leaks, it will provide a dedicated website for handling leaks to each entity. In his view, this approach has several advantages:

Firstly, the system will scale better with each new participant. Secondly, the source is the one that will have a say in who should exclusively be granted first access to material, while also ensuring that material will be distributed to others in the system after a period of exclusive access. Thirdly, we will make use of existing resources, experience, manpower etc [to] deal with submissions more efficiently. Fourthly, we will be able to deliver information more directly to where it matters and will be used, while remaining a neutral service ourselves. And last but not least, this approach will create a large union of shared interests in the defense of the rights to run an anonymous post-drop in the digital world.

Of course, we can’t take for granted that the powers that be will let this happen without a fight. In that respect, the battle over WikiLeaks has had another salutary effect: it has delivered a wake-up call to everyone who thought the free and open Internet was a settled fact. Freedom of the press is no longer the exclusive province of those who own one, but while the Internet has drastically lowered the barriers to entry into the public sphere, it has not eliminated them. Right now, unpopular or disruptive speech online will probably exist in a twilight zone, semi-free, sometimes capable of threatening powerful institutions and other times subject to their whims. What’s needed is much more robust discussion of how the Internet can become a genuinely free public arena, a global town square where anyone can speak. Or, to be more precise, an Internet whose underlying architecture is really free of government or corporate control, as decentralized and uncontrollable as life itself.

This essay is adapted from Micah Sifry’s new book, WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency.

Resistance Requires Action More Than Civil Disobedience


Saki Knafo

Giving A Face To 'Anonymous': A Meeting With A Member Of The Secret Society Of Hackers

Protest


Here's the thing about the secret international brotherhood of Internet bandits called Anonymous: It's kind of hard to get an interview with them. When you offer revolutionary groups a chance to say their piece to a mass audience, they generally get back to you within two to three hours, but Anonymous isn't a group.

Or that's what they'd say, anyway, if you could get them to talk. Most of the time they don't talk, except in 1980s robot voices. But more on that later.

There's been a lot of curiosity about Anonymous lately, and fortunately for the inquiring journalist, lots of non-anonymous people have been talking about them. The most recent flurry of chatter began on Friday, when police in Spain said they'd hunted down three members of the group (or the alliance, or whatever you want to call them). Anonymous had incurred Spain's wrath back in March by temporarily knocking out the website of the national government.

Then, on Monday, it was announced that the Turkish police had captured 32 additional suspected members. A few days before, Anonymous had taken over the website of the Turkish Telecommunications Authority and shut it down. In other words, if you went to the national telecommunications website that day to find out why your phone wasn’t working, you instead found that the website wasn't working, and you had a tantrum.

And then, on Monday and again Tuesday, came the reports that hit closest to home: Anonymous was going after the Federal Reserve. Even for a group that essentially set off a series of attacks that brought the multinational giant Sony to its knees in April, this seemed like awfully big prey. Yet if you doubt the group's ability to do damage to a powerful adversary, you probably don't realize that it's already landed big blows against some pretty sizable opponents – to begin with, Sony, and MasterCard, and Iran. Or that its members recently broke into the website of HBGary, an internet security firm whose CEO threatened to out Anonymous members, and published 50,000 internal emails and the CEO's social security number, humiliating him into resigning from the company.

As astute observers will point out, the news of Anonymous' declaration of war against the Federal Reserve actually arrived on Saturday, when the group posted a YouTube video that opened with a clip of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke reassuring a journalist that he had the problem of the growing gap between rich and poor "under control." This clip was followed by a voice-over manifesto against the bank, accompanied by a series of title cards and delivered in the voice of a robot as might be imagined by a director of 1980s B-movies.

But the story didn't really take off until Tuesday, when a series of articles in the tech press noted that the group planned go to battle that day -- both by hacking into the bank's website and by staging a series of old-fashioned protests at different banks around the country. And so, that day, an inquiring journalist set out to track down the shadowy syndicate. Or the secretive fraternity. Or whatever.

Calls were made to security researchers (hackers employed by the "good guys"). Tweets were cast out into the waves of the Internet. And then, at about 9:30 that night, after hours of silence, an answer arrived in the form of an email: Go to the Manhattan Municipal Building. There would be people there. Ask for "Gary in the White Hat."

First, a little history: Anonymous started about eight years ago on the imageboard of 4chan.org, a website where people posted random pictures of things they thought were shocking or worthy of "lulz," a.k.a. laughs. (Often these things were porn.) In 2008, a coterie of some of the more devoted pranksters who'd found one another on the site declared war against the Church of Scientology, accusing it of censorship for removing an unflattering video of Tom Cruise from YouTube.

Protests were organized: demonstrators showed up to the Church's headquarters wearing masks portraying the grinning visage of the 17th-century English icon of anarchy Guy Fawkes. But the group's main battlefield was always the Internet. In December, the group attacked the websites of MasterCard and PayPal, whose executives had provoked them by suspending payments to WikiLeaks. Anonymous members saw WikiLeaks as a comrade in the fight against censorship.

And in April, after Sony PlayStation antagonized the group by suing a hacker who'd found a way to run third-party applications on its gaming consoles, Anonymous struck again, essentially commanding an army of Internet drones to bombard the company's website with automated information requests until the site was knocked offline. The group also claimed responsibility for publishing more than 10,000 emails stolen from a website of the Iranian government, and it's been said that they helped the agitators in Tunisia circumvent the online barriers that that the government there had thrown up in the revolution's path.

Traditionally, hackers have divided themselves into two groups: the "black hats," who exploit the vulnerabilities of their marks for profit, and the "white hats," who hire themselves out to protect the vulnerable. Anonymous fits into neither category. Some people call them "gray hats," but that implies an level of cohesion they tend to deny. In their online communications they insist they have no leader, no chain of command. Anyone who claims to be acting under the banner of Anonymous is by virtue of that fact a member of Anonymous.

And yet, the hat worn by Gary in the White Hat was indeed white. It had a full brim and a band around it, and that was the extent of any similarities between the wearer and Jack Nicholson's character from "Chinatown." Gary, as he asked to be called, was built like Roman Polanski, with rectangular glasses and a beard that hadn't been trimmed in a month. He was locking up a bike outside the municipal building while a crowd of about 60 people, mostly kids in their teens and twenties, sat on the ground a little ways off, in a sprawl of backpacks and sleeping mats and congas. A teenage girl was overheard inquiring, "Does anyone know the words to 'This Land Is Your Land'?"

Most of these people were not with Anonymous, Gary said. He explained that he had initially intended to hold his protest in a park a few blocks away, closer to the Federal Reserve, but several factors had intervened, including what Gary described as a corporate barbecue. Ultimately, he'd decided to merge his contingent of about twenty Anonymous supporters with a slightly larger mass of protestors who had set up camp under the eaves of the municipal building that night for a "sleep-in" demonstration against the mayor's proposed budget cuts.

"Anonymous is a decentralized group," Gary said, lighting a cigarette. "They have all sorts of different motives. There are those who are hackers, those who are activists, those who are 16-year-old kids wanting to impress their girlfriends." In general, the members rally around the belief that "people who hoard information are the same people who hoard wealth."

You can forget that earlier claim about Anonymous' reluctance to talk: Gary talked so much that he kept having to dig into his pocket for his matches so he could relight his cigarette. He said that he'd gotten involved with Anonymous a couple of months ago, when he saw something on the Internet about how they were planning a campaign against the country's central banking system and the banking industry in general, and were demanding that Bernanke step down. He wanted to help them "knock the corporations out of the government."

A year before that, Gary was working in real estate. "I made a lot of money and I lost a lot of money," is how he summed it up. His employer, he said, was a company that invested half a billion dollars buying up slum buildings in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx: "A slumlord, basically. They were trying to turn lead into gold."

He came to believe that "the people who rise to the tops of these corporations are basically sociopaths – they have no concept of right or wrong, they just want to make the boss happy."

In any event, the corporation's adventure in slum alchemy didn't pan out very well, and Gary was laid off last May. After a stint on unemployment, things got to the point where he was facing homelessness, so he set off on a bike ride down to Florida, camping out on private land at the invitation of strangers.

When he learned about Anonymous' battle against the banks he began trying to contact the group over Twitter. Eventually someone sent a reply saying they could use his help answering emails. Gary agreed to pitch in, and suggested to his unknown interlocutor that they supplement their online actions with a public protest near Wall Street.

He started a Twitter account devoted to promoting this idea -- @NYCcamp –- and soon began receiving messages from people around the country who said they wanted to hold protests of their own to coincide with his.

Outside the Manhattan Municipal Building on Tuesday night, Gary said he wasn't sure how those other protests had fared, and he admitted that the turnout at his own rally wasn't quite what he'd hoped for, but he didn't seem too disappointed. It is an article of faith among Anonymous members that, as their motto goes, Anonymous is legion. And besides, Gary had learned on Twitter a little while earlier that at least one additional Anonymous member had now joined the gathering. He looked around at the crowd. "I have no idea who she is," he said.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Why Revolution Must Start in America.

Apocalyptic Boredom

Chris Hedges's Endgame Strategy

Why the revolution must start in America.

Tyler Hicks / Redux / The New York Times

Tyler Hicks / Redux / The New York Times

Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

The unrest in the Middle East, the convulsions in Ivory Coast, the hunger sweeping across failed states such as Somalia, the freak weather patterns and the systematic unraveling of the American empire do not signal a lurch toward freedom and democracy but the catastrophic breakdown of globalization. The world as we know it is coming to an end. And what will follow will not be pleasant or easy.

The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking. Dozens of members of Congress in the United States have announced that climate change does not exist and evolution is a hoax. They chant the mantra that the marketplace should determine human behavior, even as the unfettered and unregulated marketplace threw the global economy into a seizure and evaporated some $40 trillion in worldwide wealth. The corporate media retreats as swiftly from reality into endless mini-dramas revolving around celebrities or long discussions about the inane comments of a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin. The real world – the one imploding in our faces – is ignored.

The deadly convergence of environmental and economic catastrophe is not coincidental. Corporations turn everything, from human beings to the natural world, into commodities they ruthlessly exploit until exhaustion or death. The race of doom is now between environmental collapse and global economic collapse. Which will get us first? Or will they get us at the same time?

Carbon emissions continue to soar upward, polar ice sheets continue to melt at an alarming rate, hundreds of species are vanishing, fish stocks are being dramatically depleted, droughts and floods are destroying cropland and human habitat across the globe, water sources are being poisoned, and the great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. As temperatures continue to rise huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species. And accompanying the assault on the ecosystem that sustains human life is the cruelty and stupidity of unchecked corporate capitalism that is creating a global economy of masters and serfs and a world where millions will be unable to survive.

We continue to talk about personalities – Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama or Stephen Harper – although the heads of state and elected officials have become largely irrelevant. Corporate lobbyists write the bills. Lobbyists get them passed. Lobbyists make sure you get the money to be elected. And lobbyists employ you when you get out of office. Those who hold actual power are the tiny elite who manage the corporations. The share of national income of the top 0.1 percent of Americans since 1974 has grown from 2.7 to 12.3 percent. One in six American workers may be without a job. Some 40 million Americans may live in poverty, with tens of millions more living in a category called “near poverty.” Six million people may be forced from their homes in the United States because of foreclosures and bank repossessions. But while the masses suffer, Goldman Sachs, one of the financial firms most responsible for the evaporation of $17 trillion in wages, savings and wealth of small investors and shareholders in the United States, is giddily handing out $17.5 billion in compensation to its managers, including $12.6 million to its CEO, Lloyd Blankfein.

The massive redistribution of wealth happened because lawmakers and public officials were, in essence, hired to permit it to happen. It was not a conspiracy. The process was transparent. It did not require the formation of a new political party or movement. It was the result of inertia by our political and intellectual class, which in the face of expanding corporate power found it personally profitable to facilitate it or look the other way. The armies of lobbyists, who write the legislation, bankroll political campaigns and disseminate propaganda, have been able to short-circuit the electorate.

Our political vocabulary continues to sustain the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and the Liberal Party in Canada offer minor palliatives and a feel-your-pain language to mask the cruelty and goals of the corporate state. Neofeudalism will be cemented into place whether it is delivered by Democrats and the Liberals, who are pushing us there at 60 miles an hour, or by Republicans and the Conservatives, who are barreling toward it at 100 miles an hour.

“By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes that it can make their interests a priority,” Sheldon Wolin writes, “the Democratic Party pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in an inverted totalitarian system.” The Democrats and the Liberals are always able to offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate collectivism.

It is not that the public in the United States does not want a good healthcare system, programs that provide employment, quality public education or an end to Wall Street’s looting of the U.S. Treasury. Most polls suggest Americans do. But it has become impossible for most citizens in these corporate states to find out what is happening in the centers of power. Television news celebrities dutifully present two opposing sides to every issue, although each side is usually lying. The viewer can believe whatever he or she wants to believe. Nothing is actually elucidated or explained. The sound bites by Republicans or Democrats, the Liberals or the Conservatives, are accepted at face value. And once the television lights are turned off, the politicians go back to the business of serving business.

Human history, rather than being a chronicle of freedom and democracy, is characterized by ruthless domination. Our elites have done what all elites do. They have found sophisticated mechanisms to thwart popular aspirations, disenfranchise the working and increasingly the middle class, keep us passive and make us serve their interests. The brief democratic opening in our society in the early 20th century, made possible by radical movements, unions and a vigorous press, has again been shut tight. We were mesmerized by political charades, cheap consumerism, spectacle and magical thinking as we were ruthlessly stripped of power.

Adequate food, clean water and basic security are now beyond the reach of half the world’s population. Food prices have risen 61 percent globally since December 2008, according to the International Monetary Fund. The price of wheat has exploded, more than doubling in the last eight months to $8.56 a bushel. When half of your income is spent on food, as it is in countries such as Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Somalia and Ivory Coast, price increases of this magnitude bring with them widespread malnutrition and starvation. Food prices in the United States have risen over the past three months at an annualized rate of five percent. There are some 40 million poor in the United States who devote 35 percent of their after-tax incomes to pay for food. As the cost of fossil fuel climbs, as climate change continues to disrupt agricultural production and as populations and unemployment swell, we will find ourselves convulsed in more global and domestic unrest. Food riots and political protests will be frequent, as will malnutrition and starvation. Desperate people employ desperate measures to survive. And the elites will use the surveillance and security state to attempt to crush all forms of popular dissent.

The last people who should be in charge of our food supply or our social and political life, not to mention the welfare of sick children, are corporate capitalists and Wall Street speculators. But none of this is going to change until we turn our backs on the wider society, denounce the orthodoxies peddled in our universities and in the press by corporate apologists and construct our opposition to the corporate state from the ground up. It will not be easy. It will take time. And it will require us to accept the status of social and political pariahs, especially as the lunatic fringe of our political establishment steadily gains power as the crisis mounts. The corporate state has nothing to offer the left or the right but fear. It uses fear to turn the population into passive accomplices. And as long as we remain afraid, or believe that the formal mechanisms of power can actually bring us real reform, nothing will change.

It does not matter, as writers such as John Ralston Saul have pointed out, that every one of globalism’s promises has turned out to be a lie. It does not matter that economic inequality has gotten worse and that most of the world’s wealth has become concentrated in a few hands. It does not matter that the middle class – the beating heart of any democracy – is disappearing and that the rights and wages of the working class have fallen into precipitous decline as labor regulations, protection of our manufacturing base and labor unions have been demolished. It does not matter that corporations have used the destruction of trade barriers as a mechanism for massive tax evasion, a technique that allows conglomerates such as General Electric or Bank of America to avoid paying any taxes. It does not matter that corporations are exploiting and killing the ecosystem for profit. The steady barrage of illusions disseminated by corporate systems of propaganda, in which words are often replaced with music and images, are impervious to truth. Faith in the marketplace replaces for many faith in an omnipresent God. And those who dissent are banished as heretics.

The aim of the corporate state is not to feed, clothe or house the masses but to shift all economic, social and political power and wealth into the hands of the tiny corporate elite. It is to create a world where the heads of corporations make $900,000 an hour and four-job families struggle to survive. The corporate elite achieves its aims of greater and greater profit by weakening and dismantling government agencies and taking over or destroying public institutions. Charter schools, mercenary armies, a for-profit health insurance industry and outsourcing every facet of government work, from clerical tasks to intelligence, feed the corporate beast at our expense. The decimation of labor unions, the twisting of education into mindless vocational training and the slashing of social services leave us ever more enslaved to the whims of corporations. The intrusion of corporations into the public sphere destroys the concept of the common good. It erases the lines between public and private interests. It creates a world that is defined exclusively by naked self-interest.

Many of us are seduced by childish happy talk. Who wants to hear that we are advancing not toward a paradise of happy consumption and personal prosperity but toward disaster? Who wants to confront a future in which the rapacious and greedy appetites of our global elite, who have failed to protect the planet, threaten to produce widespread anarchy, famine, environmental catastrophe, nuclear terrorism and wars for diminishing resources? Who wants to shatter the myth that the human race is evolving morally, that it can continue its giddy plundering of nonrenewable resources and its hedonistic levels of consumption, that capitalist expansion is eternal and will never cease?

Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd.

The game is over. We lost. The corporate state will continue its inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation and the planet is locked into a desperate, permanent underclass. Most of us will struggle to make a living while the Blankfeins and our political elites wallow in the decadence and greed of the Forbidden City and Versailles. These elites do not have a vision. They know only one word: more. They will continue to exploit the nation, the global economy and the ecosystem. And they will use their money to hide in gated compounds when it all implodes. Do not expect them to take care of us when it starts to unravel. We will have to take care of ourselves. We will have to rapidly create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and former international correspondent for the New York Times. His latest book is The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.