The Outsider

If you asked me to tell you how many online "progressive" or "socialist" groups I've been kicked out of, I honestly couldn't tell you. It has been a dozen, at least, and could easily be more than twenty. Or thirty.


I haven't been kicked out of this one yet, but this is how it generally goes. The EarthStrike subreddit is supposed to be a group for a "rapidly growing movement to avoid irreversible climate change". Now that's definitely a goal that I support! There's no issue as important to humanity - in fact, there's never been an issue that's close to as important.

Which is why I responded when I saw a post asking if anyone would be interested in a leftist solidarity group, a place to organize and discuss and network. I'll paraphrase rather than quote anyone other than myself, but my own answers will be verbatim.

Me: What sort of leftism are you talking about?

The response was anti-capitalist, anti-oppression. After a bit more discussion, I said:

I was kicked out of r/socialism for saying that antifa people who want to initiate violence to silence people that they disagree with, have fascistic tendencies themselves.

I was kicked out of r/latestagecapitalism for questioning posts which promoted Hillary and the DNC.

And I pretty much quit r/occupywallstreet over a bunch of pro-DNC trolls that the moderators seem to be protecting.

That was just here on Reddit, of course. I couldn't tell you how many supposed progressive or revolutionary groups I was kicked out of on Facebook and other places. Of course, almost all of those groups were either attacked or bought out outright by David Brock and the DNC.

The answer I got from the OP was that those bans seemed unfair except for the first one.

More discussion ensued, and the responses I got from commenters got more and more hostile. The idea that the First Amendment should apply even to speech that we found abhorrent enraged almost every responder (except one, who was heaped with abuse for sharing my opinion). One guy even claimed that there was no evidence that the planet was becoming uninhabitable - in fairness, though, that response was downvoted.

My own comments began receiving a large number of downvotes. It was quite obvious that the same pattern I'd seen before was being repeated: if I wasn't about to be outright banned, I was clearly going to be persona non grata. So my last comment was:

Ah, such tolerance. I voice concern about initiating violence against others for their speech, and immediately receive many downvotes - and no doubt this post will be downvoted too.

The basic concept of the First Amendment appears to be beyond the understanding of the majority of Americans. Instead, it's "free speech for me, but not for thee" - the personal and political equivalent of American exceptionalism.

I don't support free speech for the people I disagree with because I actually agree with their opinions. I don't. I support free speech for everyone, because if it doesn't apply for everyone, it soon won't apply for anyone - except the people at the top.

People who truly cared about the Earth wouldn't be looking to fight poor and desperate people who have been suckered into right-wing ideology. They would be looking to convert them. In the end, they are in the same dead end trap as the rest of us. Advocating violence against them for their misguided and hateful opinions doesn't improve the situation. It only gladdens the hearts of the oligarchs who would rather see the underclasses fighting against each other instead of turning their sites on the real authors of our misery: the 0.01%.

And just because I know that it's going to be said: no, I'm not saying that right-wingers should be allowed to plan and carry out acts of mass violence without interference. Those are crimes, and should be treated as such. I am saying that once you give anyone the right to silence others for any reason when it comes to the expression of their opinions, you have just become an agent of fascism yourself.

If we are lucky, we have twelve years before the Earth is in a death spiral that will be beyond our power to divert. We don't have time to be fighting political battles with other people who are as much victims as we are. We should be finding ways to fight the real enemy. It's just horrifying that so many people on all sides would rather be fighting each other than fighting for a future for the world.

Okay, I'm done. Downvote away.

And that was the end of my participation in that group. The downvotes my responses received collapsed many of them out of view. That's a flaw with Reddit, I think; a few bad actors, shills, or trolls can downvote positive posts and comments and effectively hide them from the whole community. That makes it easier for DNC activists to drive real activists out of the group, and turn it into an echo chamber for DNC corporate propaganda.

It horrifies me that the majority of people don't understand that if a right doesn't apply to everyone, it's not a right - it's a privilege. They're perfectly comfortable with the idea of a First Amendment that protects them, but doesn't exist for any person or opinion that they dislike. What flaw is it in human nature that people can't get that if you have the power to silence those you dislike, it's just a short step to imprisoning or killing them?

Why don't they understand that once a government has the power to selectively silence citizens, it's inevitable that that power will be abused? And turned against the people themselves?

Sometimes the stupidity of the human race makes me shake my head.

As I responded to the commenter who claimed that there was no evidence for the ongoing global climate catastrophe:

Contra stultitia deos frustra contendere.

I wish I could think of something to do.

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?