Rioting-the unbeatable high
Adrenalin shoots your nerves to the sky
Everyone knows this town is gonna blow
And it's all gonna blow right now:.

Now you can smash all the windows that you want
All you really need are some friends and a rock
Throwing a brick never felt so damn good
Smash more glass
Scream with a laugh
And wallow with the crowds
Watch them kicking peoples' ass

But you get to the place
Where the real slavedrivers live
It's walled off by the riot squad
Aiming guns right at your head
So you turn right around
And play right into their hands
And set your own neighbourhood
Burning to the ground instead

Riot-the unbeatable high
Riot-shoots your nerves to the sky
Riot-playing into their hands
Tomorrow you're homeless
Tonight it's a blast

Get your kicks in quick
They're callin' the national guard
Now could be your only chance
To torch a police car

Climb the roof, kick the siren in
And jump and yelp for joy
Quickly-dive back in the crowd
Slip away, now don't get caught

Let's loot the spiffy hi-fi store
Grab as much as you can hold
Pray your full arms don't fall off
Here comes the owner with a gun


The barricades spring up from nowhere
Cops in helmets line the lines
Shotguns prod into your bellies
The trigger fingers want an excuse
Now

The raging mob has lost its nerve
There's more of us but who goes first
No one dares to cross the line
The cops know that they've won

It's all over but not quite
The pigs have just begun to fight
They club your heads, kick your teeth
Police can riot all that they please


Tomorrow you're homeless
Tonight it's a blast

Occupy Brisbane. Would Major-General The Honourable Sir William Glasgow approve?

quote:

Originally posted by Boogerhead:
Tomorrow you're homeless
Tonight it's a blast

You can call Jello crazy, but he's right a lot of the time. I always loved DK.

I called Jello "Sir", not crazy. He didn't like it too much, so we settled on "Mr. Biafra".

I think the problem is that you can't
legally differentiate between homeless camping in parks and protest activity. I mean you can by looking at them but how could you define it in terms that could be written as legislation? Tampa leadership is busy dismantling rules that might get it sued for the GOP con next year by those wishing to protest. No permits required, reduced limits on sleeping in public, and other changes. It kind of shows that we have a dem mayor and a lesbian police chief.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: editengine,

Maybe, in a country that espouses ideals and values of Christianity and altruism, homelessness should be designated a protest activity. It really points to their deepest fears, the main one being that they are hypocrites and liars.

Good point. It sucks when your parks are rendered useless to the families and kids though. We used to have that happen here before the city forbade sleeping in the parks. Downtown parks were nice but nobody would go near them, drug activity and homeless guys living in the pavilons was the norm in city oarks. It effectivley denied use of parks in the poorest neighborhoods to the kids that needed it the most. Parkspace in poor neighborhoods being rare anyway, and they can't make laws just for the homeless.... The city is now working with the ACLU, a former city coucilman is an ACLU lawyer, to revamp our laws in advance of the gop con, but it takes public hearings and votes to make these changes so they are starting now. Their goal is to allow easy access to protestors while still denying the ability of people to effectivley live in and occupy parks all over town, denying their use to everybody else.

"Not with a bang, but with a whimper."

Losing steam... Winter looms.

Well that was the plan though, this wasn't going to last into Winter. It COULD move to DC. Counter protests at Tea Party rallies.

Bank lobbies have heat, right?

Was in a little restaurant in New Orleans last Sunday where the singer waxed on nostalgically for all the things that were American. Somewhere between mom, apple pie, and the flag he worked in the glory of the Tea Party. Seriously, these people are out there. I almost choked on my overdone redfish. Seriously, its fucking New Orleans and they fucked up blackened redfish?

But winter time is put up or shut up for this thing, whatever it is. Executive orders are fine, I mean they did make the trains run on time, but the real pressure needs to be exerted on Congress. Until campaign finance is addressed that can't happen. Everything else is window dressing, street theater for the disenfranchised, masturbation by civil unrest. My hope is that this leads to a generation of politically active middle aged people willing to help make policy, the civil rights/anti-war period of the 50s and 60s lead to a generation of these folks. Maybe this movement will gel into a new class of achievers, spark an interest in public service in the minds of some very smart people that would have, were it the roaring 90s, be snapped up by a job market hungry for the creative intelligencia. I can tell you from what I am reading that nobody has any new answers, to many people are making too much money off the current system to allow it to change. China is about to have its own housing bubble within the next few years, they are simply repeating the pattern of Japan and the US in how they finance homes. Banks continue to find ways to lend money with as much government backing and as little regulation as they can, and in general the relentless push for 'smaller' government continues apace.

Well put.

Looks like Papandreou chose wisely here. More likely it’s the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of Greek workers and students who joined the general strike to flood Athens, encircle the capital like a noose, turn themselves into monkey wrenches jamming the Goldman-Morgan-Euro coup de tat papered over as the EFSF “bailout”, that ultimately forced Papandreou into the referendum corner. I mean, ‘ol Papa’s political light-cone of potential soundbites was narrowed by the (justified) Greek revolt down to, “Let Them Eat The Rich (Foreign Banksters)” or “Let Them Eat Cake”. Fortuitously for this Greek prime minister, unlike Marie Antoinette, he chose the right marquee to drape from the Hellenic Parliament Building. Perhaps this gambit – which is making the New World Order look like the US taxpayer circa 10/2008 -- will spare him the fate of being hunted down by his own pitchfork wielding people somewhere in the Pyrenees, smartbombed with predator drones, dragged out of a cave in a bloody Hefty bag like some terrorist mastermind/tulpa or Arab Spring dictator.

THIS is what democracy looks like. as John Locke said in 1793: If the social contract is broken, the people must revolt. The representative democracy has obviously failed, not only in Greece but in the US, and that is why we are seeing the upwellings of direct democracy across the globe. Papandreou, Obama, Cameron, these asshole-licking puppets will never do anything but the bidding of the 1% unless they are literally forced to by the 99.


Time for your FTA (Fucking Truth Administration) recommended daily dose of mind unscrambling with today’s Anti-Price-Propaganda Report:


“A Greek default could lead to the spread of a financial contagion”

TRANSLATION: “A Greek default could lead to the spread of a financial vaccine against the fraud-debt ebola, ultimately preventing the financial Black Plague 2.0 that is the cancerous current global banking system from killing a third of Europe again in the form of starvation, hospital cuts, and heroin ODs. This is bad news for my purse string holders over at BNP Paribas!”

Truth is, a global banking collapse would not be the end of the world, but rather the beginning; not some brimstone-and-Marshall Law Apocalypse as Paulson used to extort TARP from congress in 2008, as IMF is browbeating Greece and any other PIIGS junta attempting to insurrect against the tyranny of EuroTARP, and as “I can’t say the ‘f’ word” Paul Krugman continues to flap his mouth about like the clueless economist he and Bernanke are hired to be. Rbut a more sane and human-centric Age of Aquarius. An enlightenment in a Dark Age of suicidal shadow finance, and a return to sunlight and the real (economy). A floor-by-floor demolition of the falsely and criminally inflated glass skyscrapers, those castles built on clouds of subprime fraud, girded with Ponzi rebar, faced with one-way mirrors of financial agnotology and media disinformation that has us mindfucked into believing that boomsticking the Global Ponzi System megalodon that is eating us alive would be “catastrophic”. And it’s a proven formula: tobacco companies managed to convince people for half a century that smoking prolonged life, made you superman and cured cancer with 1/1000th the capital gains made by Barclays. Sure, it would hurt at first, just like surgery to remove a brain tumor hurts at first. You might lose your house in default, lose your equity atm machine (fake virulent wealth to begin with) but without the bubble-inflation and fabrication of demand via debt, you could actually *afford* the house you live in as the prices un-distort. Commodity bubbles would deflate but that would mean affordable milk and eggs again. The financial system would shrink like a melanoma in recession, but all that "growth" was subtracting from your net wealth via siphoning schemes and fiat inflation anyway. Hell, we might actually have some competition again as banks that did and do the right thing survive for being the fittest! Global banking collapse would be a bust for the 1% royalty but a roaring boom for the rest of us!

Thanks to Ben “Great Moderation” Bernanke’s zero interest rate policy, the Dimons, Blankfeins, Buffets, and other blowers of financial chimeras have a debt gas tank of infinite size with which to inflate their speculative Stay-Puff Godzilla to the tune of 1.5 QUADRILLION. Which they use to wreak havoc, crash silver, start wars in sub-Saharan African nations over shortsale-manufactured water bubbles. Threaten countries like Greece, demanding a ransom paid in bloody austerity. Clearly What the Greek people, the Irish, the Spanish, Iceland, Oakland, and the apostles of the Occupy Movement are discovering is that the GLOBAL ECONOMIC MELTDOWN! kracken waiting to swallow us is really just a blow-up doll, a bubble that needs to be popped if we’re to move on.

And honestly, it should be blatantly obvious that the solution proposed by our “Great Minds” is a joke to anyone who wasn’t in a coma during 8th grade math (huh what? Sorry I was too busy watching my sister’s cat’s demo for Dancing With The Stars under my desk). The “geniuses” Merkel, Sarkozy, Cameron, and their leash holders circlejerking at Geneva summits propose their solution to the problem of unsustainable debt loads: “jack (insert sovereign) up with more debt!”

I say bring on the tectonic cataclysm of the fraudulent, malignant maps that are consuming the territory – the hall of mirrors collateral debt obligations abstracted into CDOs of CDOs of CDOs, embedded into bilateral mark-to-model OTC holograms, themselves cloaked by phantasm derivatives. We have arrived at Baudrillard’s infinite regress of simulacra -- pointers pointing to symbols symbolizing references. It's obliteration of the concept of value illustrated poignantly by Andy Worhol's soup cans, where value in the art world is produced not through great work but through intentionally induced mass hysteria and fetishization of the mundane and the shitty. Where JP Morgan can take a shit into a duffle bag, take it to the Fed and get a hundred billion dollars (but if you or I do it, we get nothing but a tear gas grenade to the parietal lobe). Where Bank of America can package their magic-billions into a Hooter's girl's Beverley Hill mansion mortgage and sell that steaming shit-filled soup can off as 24 karot diamond via fabricated housing bubble hysteria. It's The Diamond Age but we don't need nanotech to obliterate economics by allowing protean transmutation of feces into big macs and big macs into platinum: bankers turn toxic waste into AAA gold (and con it into pensions and sovereigns) everyday with simple mass-disinfo and market distortion! It's The Dupery Age! But, as always, the future rhymes rather than repeating the forecasts of futurists and philosophers. Rather than the post-modernists' end of meaning and history and replacement with a mere global semiotic-madhouse where Rembrandt and lolcats are indistinguishable, we have a weaponization of the symbolic madness by the “symbolic analysts”, who instead of “adding value”, suck value out in negative-sum games and classocide half the planet in a gas chamber of food commodity speculation. Instead of Buadrillard’s “hypermediation” we have “hyperfinancialization”, wielded in the form of zero-interest, infinite securitization and high frequency trading that is used to loot the masses out of house home health and future and generally do what big brained monkies in million+ social structures have always done: fuck each other over.

We have no future: we have only pattern misrecognition, risk-mismanagement, the spinning of the given moment’s manufactured scenarios -- JP Morgan's distortion of gold and silver via their 78 trillion blow-up-doll in order to produce the alternate reality where the dollar is worth the holographic cotton its printed on so their holocaust-for-bonuses game can continue. The churning of Goldman Sach's supercomputer which singlehandedly generates thousand-point swings in the Dow via algorithmic sorcery and extort entire hemispheres (the REAL bazooka aimed at congress in 2008, and certainly at Merkel and Sarkozy today). We’re in end-game semiosis, we’ve got over-symbolized leukemia from smoking these Borgesian nightmares that ultimately signify nothing in reality, and we need HFT tax chemotherapy for these monstrosities whose sole purpose is the manipulation of markets and criminal extraction of blood and treasure from the poor, middle class, and white collar. White collars who are fading as we speak into the grey collar: the overeducated and terminally un/underemployed who curl up inside cardboard boxes to sleep in their once-starched interview suits, empty and valueless in the New World Plutonomy as their Weimar’d wads of dead president fiat paper, shredded and used as kindling to roast rat-kebobs. It’s time to kick the habit before the miasma devours us completely.

Though there's much to disagree with when it comes to Alex Jones, he's hitting the nail on the head with the "infowar". That's precisely what we've got, and the Occupy is an information H-Bomb on the side of the 99%. The fact that we're not still talking about "the left and right" but rather in class-based terms like "99%" and 1% is an astronomical victory, that's like a media Trafalgar right there. But I'd add it's also an "action war" in the sense that the 99% needs to get out there, not just physically but financially, economically, politically.

If you want some other concrete action: go out there, buy some silver and crash JP Morgan (massively short silver), and simultaneously ensure that your fiat currency stashed in your mattress doesn't turn into a wad of toilet paper when the dollar bubble finally pops and Bernanke turns us into Zimbabwe. Recommended above gold since it's hard to pay for oil changes and tomatoes in 0.1 gram flecks in the event of zombie bank apocalypse.

And if you must have a traditional campaign/vote-based solution:

Nader-Paul-Kucinich 2012.

(Prefer Bill Still to Ron Paul but either of these is preferable to the whores we have currently in place)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: TwiliteMinotaur,

quote:

the civil rights/anti-war period of the 50s and 60s lead to a generation of these folks

Yes and no. My mom often wonders what happened to them; it's like they disappeared.

I believe most of them are running banks.

quote:

Originally posted by lithos:
I believe most of them are running banks.

Not enough to explain it. If they're running banks, they're the 1%. Lots of the people who gave a damn in the 60s (and weren't in it for the drugs and sex) ended up working in government, but not in elected office: grunt work. Social work, mental health services, education. The shit jobs everyone seems to hate these days. The shit jobs you're too tired at the end of to get out and march after, I guess.

I much agree with Minotaur...

The current situation develops in two fronts:

• Financial institutions profit lending money to people (countries) they know won't be able to pay.
  
• Companies profit from uniform currency (meaning, for instance, people in Greece purchase iPhones at the same price they'd do in Paris or Frankfurt). They cannot really afford that but someone pays the difference. Same situation happens in most of Europe (Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy, etc).
  

What happens following a Greek default? Greeks will go back to their original currency (Dracmas) and will face several years of an extremely harsh situation. But that's not the point: the problem is that PIIS (without the G) will fall next and most French banks will bankrupt. The only countries able to survive the shock standing on their legs are UK and DE and there will be resentment all over. A situation dangerously similar to the interregnum between WW-1 and WW-2.

Reading comments regarding to Greek situation (published in Brazilian newspapers), it is possible to feel how people react to the situation. The press pictures Greek government and people like "irresponsible that spent money they didn't have and now refuse to tighten the belt in order to fix the situation". But that's a lie. That is the same lie told when Argentina bankrupted in 2001 (and many other countries after that). And clearly the problem is that financial system became a beast outside control.

But things are even more complicated because the financial crisis came together with a political crisis. A political crisis that make people wonder about the limitations of representative democracy. And an important part of discredit on such form of democracy grows in US. Nothing good can come out of this situation.

quote:

Originally posted by Justy:

quote:

Originally posted by lithos:
I believe most of them are running banks.

Not enough to explain it. If they're running banks, they're the 1%. Lots of the people who gave a damn in the 60s (and weren't in it for the drugs and sex) ended up working in government, but not in elected office: grunt work. Social work, mental health services, education. The shit jobs everyone seems to hate these days. The shit jobs you're too tired at the end of to get out and march after, I guess.

My dad was an anti-war activist in the 60s, attended protests and demostrations. Then he did 36 years with the Dept of Corrections, he helped develop ways to monitor sex offenders and protect kids, worked in drug court, when minor drug offenders are pushed toward treatment and out of the prison system, and after retirement he went to work couseling drug addicts.

I'd say he did quite well.

Party at Steven J Baum, lawfirm that forecloses on behalf of Goldman, JP Morgan, Citigroup, etc. Theme of the costume party is “mocking the homeless” that they create by fraudulently foreclosing on people and taking their homes. Yeah, psychopathy confirmation there.

Jump to 1:10.

quote:

Originally posted by editengine:

quote:

Originally posted by Justy:

quote:

Originally posted by lithos:
I believe most of them are running banks.

Not enough to explain it. If they're running banks, they're the 1%. Lots of the people who gave a damn in the 60s (and weren't in it for the drugs and sex) ended up working in government, but not in elected office: grunt work. Social work, mental health services, education. The shit jobs everyone seems to hate these days. The shit jobs you're too tired at the end of to get out and march after, I guess.

My dad was an anti-war activist in the 60s, attended protests and demostrations. Then he did 36 years with the Dept of Corrections, he helped develop ways to monitor sex offenders and protect kids, worked in drug court, when minor drug offenders are pushed toward treatment and out of the prison system, and after retirement he went to work couseling drug addicts.

I'd say he did quite well.

I don't doubt it. My mother worked for the department of mental health in San Bernardino, trying to make sure there were enough beds to get abused and mentally ill kids off the streets and into treatment. She started off in a methadone clinic as a case worker for trying-to-be ex-heroin-addicts. She also did quite well. But it's not necessarily a career (like your dad's) that challenges what something like OWS challenges (however honorable that career was).* That isn't to say that she hasn't paid attention (she's how I learned how to pay attention). But part of that attention is noticing how the rest of her generation either dropped the ball or ended up just as fucked up as previous generations when it came to money-grubbing.

*except, of course, that she fought for people, the kids especially, who don't have a political voice, through programs that seldom get enough money for their stated missions.