Goals

Let's talk goals. Here's what I recall so far:

• Climate change action on a national/global scale (Green New Deal/fossil fuel ban/conversion to renewable energy)
• End wars/military actions
• Medicare/health care for all
• Jobs guarantee and/or guaranteed basic income
• Free education (including college and graduate school)
• Abolition of private prisons
• Money out of politics
• Mandatory accountability/transparency for all US police forces, demilitarization of police, independent third-party investigations of all police shootings
• Increase of minimum wage to a living wage, pegged to inflation AND studies to determine new living wage standards
• Guaranteed affordable or free housing for all
• Crash project to provide safe, clean water for all Americans
• Immediate suspension of all fossil fuel pipeline projects
• Equal Federal funding for all public schools
• Reinstatement of right to organize/unionize nationwide

Some other possibilities:

• Free daycare
• Right to privacy
• National legalization of marijuana
• Nationwide project to modernize electric grid
• Nationwide project to provide affordable or free public transportation, restoration of light inter-city rail
• Reinstatement of Eisenhower-era tax brackets and rates (91% on top tier)
• Abolition of tax loopholes for the rich
• Elimination of protected status for inherited wealth, restoration of inheritance taxes
• LGBTQ rights
• Revocation of privatized water, parking, and other state/municipal/federal projects.
• Crash program of infrastructure repair.
• Breakup/nationalization of all "to big to fail" banks.
• Rigorous anti-monopoly enforcement.
• Nationalization of Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
• Rural internetification (broadband) program
• Reinstatement of Glass-Steagal
• Nationalization/globalization of the internet

Please add any others as comments to this post.

Next steps

Lately I've been thinking a lot about what we can actually do to save the world. Social media, I'm convinced, is NOT the way to bring down this toxic system. The elite don't fear social media, because they own and control it.

What the elite clearly fears is real-world organizing by the people. That's what the Occupy movement was starting to accomplish, and that's why the elite crushed that movement so blatantly. What can we do to duplicate or even exceed the potential of Occupy?

One option would be to simply revive Occupy. But what would stop the elite from crushing it again? It should be possible to develop some effective techniques for the movement to survive a nationwide police crackdown (and make no mistake, that's exactly what happened). But I would hope that the leaderless approach of Occupy would be retained. Because once you have leaders, you have targets for corruption and conscription by the 0.01%.

Another option: I've suggested starting local face-to-face groups for neighbors to support neighbors. I've written about that in more detail in other posts here. That sort of group might be most effective if combined with Occupy's public space approach; it would provide a fall-back option to continue organizing when the police crack down. Call it "Occupy the Neighborhood" if you like.

Here's a wilder thought: what about creating a new *religion*? That would offer certain legal protections which might prove more effective at protecting the movement from blatant use of force by the establishment. The core precept could be securing the survival of the human race, and the idea that human life and dignity are worth more than any amount of money. It could be the seed of a post-capitalist society.

So...what do you think?

What's going on

People aren't understanding what's happening here. If they did, they'd be marching in the streets. Wall Street - in this case Mitt "Corporations are People" Romney - used borrowed money to take over Toys R Us. He paid off the management to the tune of $200 million, forced Toys R Us to take out a business-killing loan for billions of dollars, and took that money. And then he took the retirement and severance pay of the people who'd been working there, some of them for decades.


Billionaire Romney legally robbed thousands of poor working people of their retirement and severance funds, and threw them onto unemployment. And he's going to do it again and again, unless someone stops him.

That "someone" won't be the Democrats. Three Democratic congressmen sent Romney a letter asking him to take pity on Toys R Us workers. And that was the sole extent of their efforts: hot air and posturing. Of course the Republicans have no interest in helping those workers, either. Both the Democrats and Republicans work for the same masters: people like Mitt Romney. The Republicans don't bother to figleaf it. And the sole concerns of the Democrats are to A) keep that big-donor cash rolling in, and B) to disguise the fact that they are the absolute servants of the financial elite.

That's all. Nothing else.

Heads need to roll. And if we don't do it, nobody will.

The E-Commerce Competition Lie

Lately, major and minor chain stores are going bankrupt at an ever-increasing rate. The usual explanation is that e-commerce is wiping them out - they simply couldn't handle the competition. But actually, competition from e-commerce is not the primary cause of these bankruptcies. Toy-R-Us, for example, was still profitable. The primary cause of the retail apocalypse is hedge funds.

They (Bain Capital, in the case of Toys-R-Us) borrow to acquire control of a retail chain, often in a hostile takeover. Once in control, they have the chain take out massive loans; in the case of Toys-R-Us, a loan for five billion dollars. Some of those funds are used to repay the very loan that the hedge fund took out to acquire them in the first place. The rest of those funds are taken by the hedge fund itself, along with anything else of value that they can loot from the company. I suspect that that usually includes as much of employees retirement funds as they can get.

Burdened with impossible debt, the chain struggles to avoid bankruptcy - but the debt is simply too high. Eventually the chain capitulates and declares bankruptcy. In the meantime, the hedge fund(s) move on to their next victims. Rinse, lather, and repeat.

We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg so far. Hedge funds have been doing this a LOT lately, and we’ve seen less than 5% of that debt come due thus far. In the next five years, there will be an enormous increase in hedge-fund-caused bankruptcies. America may well be left with more empty chain stores than open ones.

It’s worth noting that chains which are still in private hands are generally doing well. Costco, for example, has seen its profits skyrocket. Competition from e-commerce did kill off brick and mortar chains in some sectors, such as book shops and video stores. But in general, the destructive effect of e-commerce is more a myth than reality: a myth that conveniently ignores the fact that these retail deaths are deliberate murders, rather than failures to compete.

Which is exactly how the hedge funds and the oligarchs want it, of course. They'd much rather that Americans see the destruction of their economy as the result of business failure, rather than what it is: the inevitable result of crony capitalism run amok and cannibalizing everything it can get its hands on. With, of course, the eager cooperation of the political establishment - itself probably the most profitable buy-out that the hedge funds ever made, if not actually the most profitable investment in history.

Of course, it can only be considered profitable if we ignore the cost of losing the Earth as a human habitation. But that's not a cost that is figured on balance sheets - yet.

The Great America Robbery

Toys R Us went bankrupt today. I Heart Radio filed for Chapter 11. This is just another stage of what historians of the future (if there are any) might call The Great America Robbery.

Private equity firms - Bain Capital is one of them - have been taking out loans to buy control of many major retailers and other companies. Then they have their new acquisitions take out massive loans. The borrowed funds are used not only to pay off the loans that the equity companies took out to acquire the business - meaning that they effectively buy control of the business at the business’s expense - but the rest of the funds are taken by the equity company as profit.

The business is left with the debt, And even if it’s a profitable business (and they usually are, or they wouldn’t have been targeted in the first place) the debt they’ve been saddled with by the equity company is so huge that they simply cannot pay it off. So they go bankrupt.

Often the equity company still owns the real estate. So they’re left with massive profits and empty stores. You might think that they’d rent those stores out. But these are private equity companies. So they set the rent so high that NOBODY could possibly make a profit in those locations. And then they write them off as losses on their taxes.

The result? It's being called the Retail Apocalypse. More and more empty stores. Economic deserts, that can never be used for retail - and all at our expense. Deserts that will keep expanding, because the private equity companies just keep doing the same thing: taking out loans, buying companies, and destroying them. It won’t stop until there’s nothing left for them to take.

Or if the people wake up and stop them.

Q.E.D.

Facebook is LITERALLY owned by an oligarch. What makes anyone think that they'll be allowed to start a revolution there?

Shadow On The Land

In 1968 a TV movie was aired. It depicted a near-future America which had become a dictatorship. An underground of freedom fighters were depicted as terrorists by the media. The movie featured a false flag attack, and a new organization, the "Internal Security Forces" which acted as Federal secret police. Sound at all familiar?

That movie was never released on video or disc, and it was never remade. I searched for a decent copy for years, but all I could find was a 20th-generation copy that wasn't much more than patterned static. Someone posted a legible copy of the movie on YouTube recently. You may find it a bit prescient.You might also want to download a copy, because I wouldn't be surprised if it got taken down soon.

A modern remake would really be something, wouldn't it?

The Real Gun Problem

Right now people are in a frenzy over the recent school shootings. But that won't last.

You don't even need me to spell it out for you, do you? Something else will come up, and people will get distracted. There's only so long that you can maintain a state of outrage, after all. And there's always a new atrocity.

Then there will be another shooting, and it will all start over again. Some will advocate gun control, others will advocate arming teachers and students, people will talk about mental illness, and still others will come up with other approaches. But nothing will be done. The shootings will continue.

Here's the thing: These shootings don't occur in a vacuum. They're not isolated incidents. They are a symptom of a larger problem: a society that is having everything of value extracted by the oligarchy. A people who are isolated and afraid of each other, spending most of their lives looking at screens instead of interacting face-to-face with real human beings. The relentless squeezing of a nation to death.

The psychological pressure that is being put on Americans is deadly. Most just live lives of secret fear...but some are closer to the breaking point. In a sane, humane culture, they wouldn't be under such killing pressure. And there would be medical and psychological services available to them, to help them cope with their problems rather than be crushed under them.

But our leaders aren't interested in providing such services. So some of the people under pressure...snap. They make plans. They buy weapons (from which the oligarchy profits). They go on a killing spree. The people react with terror and anger, pulling away from each other (which benefits the oligarchs). The media swarms in, and again the oligarchy profits.

What's the common denominator? The oligarchy. The real problem isn't guns, although obviously there are many sensible restrictions that should be in place. It's not mental illness, either. Rather, it's that the oligarchy is creating the circumstances which inevitably lead to breakdowns FOR THEIR OWN PROFIT.

Both sides of the gun debate are being used.The reality is that the issue is one of profit and power. The elite makes money in many ways with guns and gun violence; first, they profit from the sale of arms. Second, they profit from the inevitable media frenzy when a mass shooting occurs. Third, they profit still more after a mass shooting, because renewed calls for gun control increase the sales of guns and ammunition.

Meanwhile, both political parties get increased fanaticism and devotion from their members; that benefits the oligarchs by increasing the general level of hatred by the rank and file of each side towards the other (and therefore, distracting them from the real beneficiaries of mass shootings: the oligarchy, of course). While people are screaming with hate at those on the other side of the issue, the elite quietly keep raking in money and consolidating their power. It's heads they win, tails we lose - over and over.

The solution is revolution. We need to join together and bring down the oligarchs. At this point, it's either them...or us.

A Proposal

Let's talk about what we can do about the current situation in America.

The oligarchs are squeezing the working class out of everything we have. There's no stopping point. They seem to believe that they can continue to take and take forever, and we'll just keep taking it. They're sure that we'll accept that fate passively. They think of us as cattle, domesticated animals whose only purpose is to passively wait for them to slaughter us. They expect us to quietly disappear from human history like the Neanderthal.

I think they're wrong. I believe that when the suffering gets bad enough, the people will wake up - and the Revolution will begin.

Strangely enough, the election of Donald Trump is one strong indicator that I'm right. And it's actually a hopeful sign for us! In 2016 the people were cheated out of their real choice. We were offered a choice between the corrupt status quo - Hillary - and a supposed agent of change, Trump.

The people chose Trump. He wasn't what they hoped, but he was ELECTED as an agent of change. That's what he ran as. And that means that a huge number of Americans are getting fed up. They're suffering. They're angry. Which means that our nation is moving inevitably toward revolution. You can only screw the People for so long, after all.

We can't know when it will come. What the breaking point will be. But when it comes, it's going to come FAST. And we need to be ready. Which means that we need to start preparing now.

Both DemEnter and third parties have failed. For DemEnter, progressives have been trying that for decades; it has never worked. The Democratic Party is a private entity, and as such it can make, change, or break its rules as it wishes. They've made it clear that they can and will cheat as much as they like to keep progressives out of power. And the courts are apparently powerless to stop them. As for third parties, the two major parties have locked the system down completely against any success by a third party. Even if a third party became extremely popular, the duopoly control our black-box voting machines - and again, there is every reason to believe that they have already used that power ruthlessly to maintain their positions. They will again, if they need to.

We need a new approach. Since traditional political avenues for change are closed to us, we need to go outside the usual paths altogether.

Recent history indicates that what the oligarchs seem to fear the most is direct personal interaction among the people. The Occupy movement terrified them, enough that they were willing to let the mask slip and show the iron fist beneath the velvet glove. They crushed Occupy all across the country in coordinated strikes, all within a week or two. At the same time that movement was, for a while, very effective. Ordinary Americans were beginning to get involved, which is exactly what the oligarchs dread.

We also need to consider the current social and economic environment. People are under enormous pressure, more than most of them have ever experienced before. At the same time, more and more people are living lives of terrible isolation. We evolved as social animals, spending much of the time interacting with family and neighbors on a daily basis - but our end-stage capitalistic society has replaced that human interaction with digital media, easier to monetize, monitor, and control. We spend our time staring at pixels on a screen (like you're doing right now). That's simply not an adequate replacement for the real, living, human interaction that we are emotionally and biologically evolved to require.

People are scared, broke, lonely, and angry. That's what the oligarchs want; it keeps us distracted and weak. And that offers US a huge window of opportunity.

Here's the situation:

The major political parties have sold out, heart and soul, to the oligarchs. They are in direct opposition to the concept of democracy and the common good. As such they are obstacles which must be brought down, not avenues for reform.

The media is likewise almost entirely owned by the oligarchy, and is effectively in thrall. Again, this is a matter of enormous amounts of money - money that we can't match.

The internet is not yet completely locked down. The oligarchs and politicians (their servants) are doing what they can to control the net, but the net was designed to survive nuclear attack - so the process is taking longer than they'd like. We have some time, I hope. But the net is still vulnerable to monitoring and control, particularly on social media sites. I would also argue that any effective movement cannot depend primarily on the internet, as it is insecure, monitored, and under the ultimate control of the oligarchy. If it comes down to a matter of their survival, they'll pull the plug - if they can.

On social media sites (particularly Facebook), progressives are also subject to near-constant harassment by trolls and the "useful idiots" who swim in their wake. There's a reason for that; the oligarchy recognizes that the web is a potential source of danger to them. They saw what happened when populations overseas suddenly woke up and overthrew tyrannical regimes. They're throwing millions into paying trolls to keep us helpless and disorganized. David Brock's ShareBlue, of course, is a prime beneficiary of those millions.

They're also frantically creating false "progressive" groups to divert, divide, and confuse us. Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress, Our Revolution...new ones appear all the time. You can recognize them by their sleek and pre-packaged quality (although I wouldn't be surprised to eventually see some deliberate "amateur" ones). And they're not neglecting older fronts, such as DailyKos, The Young Turks, and MoveOn! All of them have been bankrolled, subverted, or purchased by the oligarchs, and are in their service. They oppose the people.

The power of the oligarchs is money and corruption. They've leveraged that brilliantly. Every potential defender of the public interest has been bought out or corrupted: journalists, politicians, reform groups, identity groups, celebrities. They're all owned, now. Every branch of government has been purchased. We the people are being rendered for our fat, reduced to a state of learned helplessness, kept in chains of fear and debt. We are slated for the slaughterhouse by an elite that views us as nothing more than a resource.

Our power is numbers, although far too many of us fail to realize it. If a substantial percentage of the population wakes up, the oligarchs will face a reckoning. They know this. So keeping us asleep is their primary goal. And since online progressive groups have a relatively high number of "awake" members, they are subjected to near-constant attack by trolls. They're a potential nexus of danger to the elite.

Let's work to make their fears real.

I propose that we set up local face-to-face groups. This could be done via Meetup, local bulletin boards, fraternal organizations, informal groups of friends, houses of worship, clubs...there are all sorts of options, and there's no reason to limit ourselves to just one. The immediate purpose of these groups would be to help members to help each other by pooling knowledge, resources, and skills. They also need to be FUN. People these days are under pressure; they're scared and isolated. Our world has warped to the point that for many, interacting for more than a minute with other human beings (outside of immediate family) face-to-face is unusual. A basic human need is going unmet.

Clubs (call them what you will - Secret Parties, maybe?) that offer social interaction, mutual support, friendship, and fun could take off like wildfire. These organizations wouldn't be cookie-cutter or monolithic; each would be independent and self-run. But they would network. Potentially they could network across the world and be the seeds of a worldwide movement, because that's what we need.

These would not be overtly political groups. They would pool resources for various purposes, but they would not support any candidate or party (although individual members could choose to do so, of course). Rather, the underlying purpose of the groups would be to spread awareness, help more Americans to wake up, and to prepare.

In the meantime members can help each other in many ways:

• Parties
• Helping unemployed members find jobs
• Group outings to fun places and events
• Find ways to save money
• Sharing tips
• Research and sharing information
• Helping each other with transportation, babysitting, elder care
• Preparing for emergencies and times of instability to come
• Someone to talk to, a friendly ear
• Other? I'm sure there are many possibilities that I haven't considered!

We're social animals. The oligarchs took that away from us over the past forty years. These groups could help fulfill that basic human need...and help save the human race at the same time.

The oligarchs are continuing to turn the screws on the populace, relentlessly. They believe that there is no limit to the amount of suffering that the working class will endure. We're cattle, beaten, terrified, and propagandized into submission.

I think they're wrong. In fact, the insatiable greed of the elite is, paradoxically enough, our best chance.

If we were as hopeless as they believe, Hillary would have won. The election of Trump showed that people are suffering, and they aren't willing to accept the status quo - and as things continue to get worse, more and more will feel that way. There's a limit to how much people can suffer and lose. Eventually, the population flares into rage. They revolt. It has happened here before, and it can happen again. It happens all around the world.

We can't expect to control exactly when the people wake up. But we can prepare for that day, and pave the way for it. And when the time comes, we'll be there - to help, to try to guide, and to win freedom and equality for all of us. A better future. The one we've all been hoping for.

Thoughts?