Category Archives: Politics

Occupy Vancouver Day One

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Who IS that masked man?

Who IS that masked man?

Julian Assange: no wonder I love this man

Julian Assange: no wonder I love this man

Oh Julian, the Sexy Jedi look suits you.

Actually, you have to respect that; the man is under house arrest (still no charges laid, please note) and still he comes out in solidarity at the OccupyLondon protest, mask and all. And here’s me, staying up till 4am removing all my ID and sign-in apps from my iPod and thinking about taking off my nail polish to be less recognizable. Live and learn!

We are all Anonymous now. The institutions that we’ve built, paid for, worked in, with, and against, have become like those sentient robots in the old movies: we built them to help us, and instead they’ve enslaved us. They’ve taken away our very humanity, so that we really ARE anonymous, so much so that there’s a general push on the part of our organizations to force us to carry identification at all times, because the institutions control the access to indentification and thus to identity itself. They first depersonalized us and then told us we had to carry our serial numbers at all times. Without ID, you essentially don’t exist and you cannot claim any rights in our current climate. Not when things like the Patriot Act exist, when the governments of most Western nations collaborate with bloody dictators to circumvent the Geneva Conventions. Go on, carry your driver’s license, and realize that ICBC is collaborating with the Vancouver Police Department to provide face recognition software so you can be tracked, even while obeying the law. Just in case the government needs something on you. And don’t forget that the gap between the richest 1% and the rest is larger and growing faster in BC than it is in the US, and that Canada has more billionaires per capita than any other nation.

Long ago I wrote about the Manual of Afghani Jihad and the Japanese Kamikaze documents, and said that if our world had anything as spiritually compelling as those documents, we would solve most of the world’s problems. Alienation would be a thing of the past instead of the universal constant.

Well now alienation is a weapon.

Anonymous and similar groups have answered that call. Here is their manifesto, in video form, from that pinko muckraker Charlie Chaplin. Why not? We’ve heard from George Carlin and Fran Lebowitz on Occupy Wall Street. Why not Charlie Chaplin?

Dude has it going on.

While we’re at it, let’s hear from Oscar Wilde on Occupy Everywhere:

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

– Oscar Wilde

Occupy Comics!

Occupy Comics!

Here’s a slideshow of Occupy Vancouver shots from News1130 (and hey, if you’re done with your Nony mask, I could really use one! Hint! Hint! I’ll be the one walking around without a Nony mask!):

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Nice work.

There’s a fantastic roundup of shots on TheCrunchyBanjo, far better than I could ever do, so DO take a look through them all. Here’s just one:

Occupy Together at Occupy Vancouver by Max Hirst

Occupy Together at Occupy Vancouver by Max Hirst

And an aerial view of the protest:

Occupy Vancouver from the roof of the Rosewood

Occupy Vancouver from the roof of the Rosewood

and a rather poignant Anon:

Anonymous Janis Joplin at Occupy Vancouver

How IS Bobby McGee these days?

Let’s see what the Powers That Be have to say about this…hmmm, how about asking the head of the Bank of Canada, a former Goldman Sachs-er:

Demonstrations like the Occupy Wall Street protests, which will hit Canadian cities this weekend, are a “democratic expression of views’’ and “entirely constructive,’’ Mr. Carney said.

“It makes it more tangible, the challenges that that economy is facing, and it makes it more important to demonstrate success on issues such as financial reform,’’ he said.

The words that Mr. Carney applies to the civil disruption carry extra weight because the Harper government is pushing for him to become the next chairman of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), a group charged with co-ordinating the overhaul of international banking regulations. There is widespread fear that, the more time that passes, the tougher it will be to muster political enthusiasm for reforms, against which the financial industry is lobbying furiously.

Mr. Carney has been a fierce critic of the industry backlash and has vowed to counter it.

What is this? I can’t even…I think my brain just broke. Even the 1%ers are on our side.

Here are some cool, free-use logos for the 99%. If you see Conrad Black using them, well just take them away from him. He’s a stateless, convicted felon desperate enough to try anything, tho, so be prepared for ninja moves. Slooooow ninja moves.

I am the 99 percent

I am the 99 percent

The 99% has a significant sub-percentage of hipsters. Well, what else are you going to do but protest if you’re an over-educated, underemployed or unemployed person who cares about what the world is coming to and worries that if you don’t speak up NOW, you may miss your chance forever? You protest. And then you party.

http://twitter.com/#!/cameronreed/statuses/125372402166272002

Radically awesome.

and now, more from My Imaginary Boyfriend, Julian Assange.

Want to know what the future looks like, Vancouver? It looks like OccupySpain, that’s what it looks like. And this is what THAT looks like:

Spain looks pretty occupied to me

Spain looks pretty occupied to me

Fran Lebowitz on the OccupyEverywhere movement

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I'm all for the separation of Corp and State. You?

I'm all for the separation of Corp and State. You?

A hundred years ago, anything worth saying had already been said by Oscar Wilde and/or George Bernard Shaw. Today anything worth saying has already been said by George Carlin and/or Fran Lebowitz. We’ve already reviewed what George presciently said about Occupy Wall Street, so now let’s take a trip in the TARDIS back to the July, 1997 issue of Vanity Fair and see what the Sage of Manhattan had to say about Occupy Wall Street and its offspring.

Do you agree with Calvin Coolidge that “the chief business of the American people is business?”

I think that in the current climate Calvin Coolidge might be regarded as almost a Beatnik, since it seems widely accepted that the only business of the American people is business — and that the appropriate model for all human endeavor is the business model. People contstantly say things like “If I ran my business the way they run the public school system, I’d be out of business in three weeks.” People seem to have the idea that these things are similar in some way. If they ran the public school system the way you run your business, people would be even less educated than they are now, because the purpose of business is to earn a profit. This is not the purpose of education. Additionally, it is not hard to imagine down-sizing in this context — grades four through nine being regarded as middle management and hence eliminated. It is equally easy to envision at some imminent point in time that during the State of the Union address, when the camera pans above the head of the president, instead of the great seal of the United States of America we will see the Nike symbol. Direct corporate sponsorship of the federal government.

People accept this sort of thing in every way now. People accept a level of commercialization of every single aspect of life that is shocking to someone of my age. you pay nine dollars to go to the movies and they show you commericals for 20 minutes. Not ony commercials for other movies — which they get you to call trailers or previews, like, “How lucky for you. For your nine dollars we’re throwing in 75 previews”  — but also commercials for products like Coca-Cola. When they started showing these — which wasn’t that long ago, although everyone now seems unable to remember a time when this did not occur —  people in New York used to boo them, but now they don’t. They expect to pay to see commercials. It takes two seconds, it seems, to get people used to this kind of thing. I, on the other hand, still can’t get used to paying for television. A television bill. It’s astonishing. And even more astonishing is that other people regard this as a technological advance, whereas to me it seems this is technology going backward. I feel that if at first television had been cable TV — this enormous, clunky, cumbersome, labor-intensive, expensive system —  and then some genius figured out broadcast television, people would have said, “Can you imagine? They don’t have to dig up the streets anymore. They don’t need the big wires. You can move your tv around. It doesn’t have to be attached to your wall. And it’s free. It goes through the air. It’s a miracle of modern technology — of course, there’ll have to be commercials.

The 99%

The 99%

GPOY: OccupyEverywhere Edition

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Power to the People

Power to the People

Ever have one of those days where you’re all, I GAVE Peace a chance and ten years later we’re still in Afghanistan? No? Just me then?

OccupyVancouver

OccupyOttawa

OccupyToronto

OccupyVictoria

OccupyEverywhere

October 15.

Expect us.

George Carlin on OccupyWallStreet

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George Carlin on Politicians. Reminds me of the joke Second cousins twice removed, once forcibly

George Carlin on Politicians. Reminds me of the joke Second cousins twice removed, once forcibly

For those of you who are aural learners rather than visual, here it is in video:

And for those of you who are more cerebral and/or don’t have your glasses with you right now, here is the transcript:

There’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the REAL owners, now. The REAL owners, the BIG WEALTHY business interests that control things and make all the important decisions — forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. YOU DON’T. You have no choice. You have OWNERS. They OWN YOU. They own EVERYTHING. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations; they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State houses, the City Halls; they’ve got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They gotcha by the BALLS. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying — lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want — they want MORE for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They DON’T want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting FUCKED by system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passably accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they’re comin’ for your SOCIAL SECURITY MONEY. They want your fuckin’ retirement money. They want it BACK. So they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it ALL from you sooner or later — ‘cuz they OWN this fuckin’ place. It’s a big CLUB. And YOU AIN’T IN IT. You and I are NOT IN the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long, beating you over the in their media telling you what to believe — what to think — and what to buy. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-workin people — white collar, blue collar — doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-workin people CONTINUE — these are people of modest means — continue to elect these RICH COCKSUCKERS who don’t GIVE a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you, they don’t GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU. T HEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU — AT ALL. AT ALL. AT ALL. You know? And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care … that’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth — it’s called the American Dream … ‘cuz you have to be asleep to believe it.”
George Carlin’s Final Words To The World…

George Carlin on “The American Dream”. The greatest 3 minutes of his career, and the final 3 minutes of his career. The PTB are aggressively trying to keep this video off YouTube and Google, so I thought I’d upload it so it can’t get deleted as easily. Everyone needs to watch this! “It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Any questions?

Welcome to Wall Street

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Welcome to Wall Street

Welcome to Wall Street

For far too long Wall Street has been occupied by hostile forces.

For about 220 years, in fact.

In March, 1792, twenty-four of New York City’s leading merchants met secretly at Corre’s Hotel to discuss ways to bring order to the securities business and to wrest it from their competitors, the auctioneers. Two months later, on May 17, 1792, these merchants signed a document named the Buttonwood Agreement, named after their traditional meeting place, a buttonwood tree. The agreement called for the signers to trade securities only among themselves, to set trading fees, and not to participate in other auctions of securities. These twenty-four men had founded what was to become the New York Stock Exchange. The Exchange would later be located at 11 Wall Street.

Born and bred to exclusivity, raised in full view of the public, and propped up by a taxation system that relies on an affluent bourgeoisie that the system itself seeks to extinguish, it’s no wonder that when the American People exercised their Constitutionally protected freedom of assembly on sidewalks that they’d paid for and built, The System struck back.

Having its servants (I thought they were Public Servants? Silly me) net and then mace a group of peaceful women protestors:

Conducting eldritch legal seances to resurrect long-dead statutes for all the world as if their own identical suits and Goldman Sachs haircuts weren’t the ne plus ultra in depersonalization and the very basis for this:

Anonymous

Anonymous has no comment at this time

Sooner or later, New York City will run out of cops, or perhaps the budget burden will become so steep that Billionaire Bloomberg will petition the President to bring in Erik Prince and his Band of Bloodthirsty Bros.

Some are already writing the eulogy for #OccupyWallStreet, somewhat prematurely. But all voodoo devotees know you have to write it down before you draw the pentagram and cast the spell to make it come true.

Editors at Adbusters, a Vancouver-based magazine (mission: “topple existing power structures”) wanted to see if they could spark demonstrations just by posting the idea using social media. It created a Twitter topic with the hashtag #OccupyWallStreet, asking people to come to New York’s Financial District to join what they said would be tens of thousands in a “leaderless resistance movement” objecting to banks, capitalism and other perceived evils. Egypt’s Tahrir Square was cited as precedent.

The protests last week were a bust, but perhaps the young protesters learned a lesson: Just because it’s on social media doesn’t make it true.

The article goes on to say that the reports of violence were completely overstated. Scroll up on this post. Or, if you prefer, scroll down.

Yes, Noam Chomsky is a tiresome windbag, but every now and again he’s just…right. Like now (alternate G+ link in case Cusack’s retweet has still crashed the website):

Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street — financial institutions generally — has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world). And should also know that it has been doing so increasingly for over 30 years, as their power in the economy has radically increased, and with it their political power. That has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1%, while the rest increasingly become what is sometimes called “a precariat” — seeking to survive in a precarious existence. They also carry out these ugly activities with almost complete impunity — not only too big to fail, but also “too big to jail.”

The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course.

And now, if you still aren’t sufficiently riled, I suggest you put this on repeat, then follow these instructions to create your own shield of relative invulnerability. And if that doesn’t work, get a haircut, a briefcase, and a blue suit, and enjoy the sight of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave on its knees to you.

https://twitter.com/#!/AnonymousIRC/statuses/118147559352045568

For the visual learners among us, here are some instructions from those total slackers and hippies at MIT:

Cheers!

In related news, the Vancouver Philospher’s Cafe this Monday is on whether or not violence is a valid form of expression.

Is violence an appropriate medium of expression?

Our city recently witnessed a display of violence as an expression of disappointment over a lost hockey game. We also have seen societies unleashing collective violence to (presumably) contain further violence. So let’s talk about the morality of violence.

As always, I am hopeful our engagement would reflect the fundamental creed of our Café: any idea worthy of conception, is worthy of reflection, of examination, of analysis, of critique (and of even being laughed at, poked at or mocked provided of course if we can manage to do it respectfully or as deliciously as the late George Carlin would do.)

Many thanks. See you TOMORROW at the CAFÉ AMICI.