Image is Everything, and an Intro to the DDP

I ran into the top 20 most popular images on Reddit in 2011.  A couple grabbed my attention, shared here:

#4 High Speed Rail Map

#9 Christians Protecting Muslims While They Pray During Protests in Egypt.

Full Reddit article here
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Lastly, let me introduce you to DDP, or the "Decentralized Dance Party", which took Portland by storm tonight as the Vancouver, BC natives brought the magic as they embark on a monthlong tour of the USA. For a full schedule and plenty of pictures that remind us the true scope and meaning of  "awesomeness", visit:    http://www.decentralizeddanceparty.com/

The Mission Statement says it all:

"Tom and Gary are two lifelong friends who invented the Decentralized Dance Party and have sworn to deliver it to Every Single Country On The Face Of The Earth".

Dust off your old boombox, plug in the coppertop D cells, and don't miss it!

Occupy Portland Interviews OakFoSho

A great interview on Thursday with Oakland's premier citizen-journalist, OakFoSho.  Occupy Portland spends an hour with "Spencer for Hire", discussing topics ranging from the port shutdown to police brutality in Oakland to the evolving nature and practical uses of people-powered journalism.

A well-spoken, informed, and dedicated real-time documentarian, OakFoSho has been on the ground in the East Bay filming and livestreaming Occupy events since the Oakland encampment was first violently evicted by police in early November.  Spencer maintains a keen balance between investigative journalism, real-life interviews, and on-the-spot reporting.  He also plays roles unexpected for mainstream journalists: he helps maintain nonviolence in stressful social situations and actively assists in de-escalation when tensions run high.  He continuously creates and maintains relationships with the individuals whom he encounters, all the while engendering a positive, upbeat, can-do demeanor that is, well, enjoyable to watch.  He's a nice guys and a positive spirit on the front lines of today's fight for Democracy.
Follow him on Twitter @OakFoSho and watch his show sometime; it's the best reality TV you'll find.

Watch live streaming video from occupyptown at livestream.com

Classic Kiss

A new twist on a classic kiss... I love it!!

AP Photo/The Virginian-Pilot, Brian J. Clark

2 women share 1st kiss at US Navy ship's return

By BROCK VERGAKIS
Associated Press

Link to Full Article 

[Quoting AP]:  VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) -- A Navy tradition caught up with the repeal of the U.S. military's "don't ask, don't tell" rule on Wednesday when two women sailors became the first to share the coveted "first kiss" on the pier after one of them returned from 80 days at sea.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta of Placerville, Calif., descended from the USS Oak Hill amphibious landing ship and shared a quick kiss in the rain with her partner, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell of Los Angeles. Gaeta, 23, wore her Navy dress uniform while Snell, 22, wore a black leather jacket, scarf and blue jeans. The crowd screamed and waved flags around them. [Quoting AP]

...full article here

Damn Dirty Hippies

The new york writer Phil Rockstroh published an elegant piece on December 8th which has stayed on my mind continuously since I first read it a week ago.  I paste an excerpt here, but I highly recommend you read the full work.  Rockstroh chooses his words with uncanny precision, and his lyrical style is more poetic than prosaic, and all the more powerful for it.

He speaks to the resistance our culture and society has had to the Occupy movement and its powerful new messages. Certainly there has been State resistance, not the least of which has been epitomized by the now-ubiquitous use of force to remove physical encampments.  We have also witnessed the complicit and voluminous media resistance to Occupy; whether through slander, misrepresentation, or active deception.  But the distilled brilliance of Rockstroh's message, the core piece that has been working through my mind for seven days now, lies in his addressing the deeper core issues at the personal level.  Rockstroh takes us straight to the mat when he dares present the question: What is it in each of us that resists the messages of Occupy, and why do we resist so strongly? 

A difficult question, and likely an even more difficult answer.  Some believe that the dark parts of our lives helps direct us toward the light.  In this case, is it possible that by tackling the really tough questions, we might come to know better the true nature our own predicament?

Excerpt from "By Imbeciles Who Really Mean It": Lost Verities and Dirty Hippies - by Phil Rockstroh

"Yet, often within a declining empire, even as the quality of life grows increasingly degraded for the majority of the populace, questioning sacrosanct beliefs, such as, the myth that capitalism promotes societal progress and personal advancement, by means of the possibility of upward class migration, proves to be a difficult endeavor for many. The reason: Even given the degraded nature of life as lived under late capitalism, the act of taking stock of one’s situation–beginning to question how one arrived at one’s present station in life–will engender anxiety, anger and regret.

Apropos to the shame based Calvinism of the capitalist state: If I was duped in a rigged game, what does that say about me? The narrative of capitalism insists that if I work hard, applying savvy and diligence, at fulfilling my aspirations then I would, at some point, arrive in the rarified realm of life’s winners.

But if success proves elusive, then my flawed character must be the problem–not the dishonest economic setup–and miasmic shame descends upon me. Yet I can count on rightwing media to provide the type of provisional solace proffered by demagogues i.e., imparting the reason that folks like me can’t get ahead is because scheming socialists have hijacked my parcel of the American Dream and delivered it to the undeserving thereby transforming my shame into displaced outrage.

And that must be the case; otherwise, it would behoove me to make the painful admission that I have been conned…have co-signed the crimes committed against me. Worse, I would be compelled to question all my verities and beliefs–all the convictions I clutch, regarding, not only the notions that I possess about myself and the methods I’ve adopted in approaching life, but also, the social structure that influenced my character.
Imagine: If you had to re-imagine your life. Imagine, how the act would unnerve your loved ones, threaten friendships, even endanger your livelihood.

What an unnerving task that would prove to be…an ordeal certain to deliver heart-shaking anxiety, devastating regret and nettling dread directly into the besieged sanctuary of what is suppose to be the inviolable precincts of my comfort zone".

Excerpt By Phil Rockstroh - Full article here

$700 Billion, $7.77 Trillion... Who's Counting, Anyway?

The News You Can't Afford to Miss

I don't think it's possible to imagine a trillion dollars.  I'm not even sure most humans substantially understand the difference in order of magnitude once stats pass six or seven figures.  Honestly, what's the difference to most people between $100,000,000 (hundred million) and $1,000,000,000 (one billion)?  How about 100,000,000,000 (one-hundred billion)  and 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion)?  After awhile, it's all just a matter of zeros. 

The TARP bailout - the really big one in 2008 that everybody has been so upset about - was seven hundred billion dollars --- $700,000,000,000. 

Besides a really great bank bailout, what else costs $700 billion?

For one thing, it will buy one year of operation for the United States Armed Forces.  Yep, base Pentagon expenditures tally in at just under seven hundred billion bucks, (and that does not include the added cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, or Libya).  With this figure, the United States accounted for 43% of all military spending worldwide in 2010 - more than the next seventeen highest-spending countries combined (click for cool graphic); and more than six times the amount spent by the nearest rival, China.

As long as we're batting in the ballpark, why not pony up a paltry $300 billion more and bail out U.S. student debt in its entirety?  Outstanding student loans are now estimated to have cleared the $1 trillion mark - with a record $100 million in new debt taken on in 2010.

Yeah, yeah, I know: "Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!"  I heard it, too.

But that ain't even the half of it.

The really big number is the one thus far only floated in whispers and hushed rumors... the one the Fed and the largest banks worked hard to keep on the inside, the one they fought all the way to the Supreme Court until it finally leaked, oozing like the toxic credit default-swaps that so poisoned our economy:

$7.77 Trillion.  That's $7,770,000,000,000:  Seven-Thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy Billion Dollars.  The high side of Thirteen Figures.

According to a groundbreaking article published by Bloomberg News on November 27th:

  "It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year".

GDP - the value of all goods and services produced - in the United States in 2009 was $14.25 trillion. 
The U.S., of course, is the largest economy in the world.

Your reaction probably isn't all that outrageous.  In fact, I doubt you so much as batted an eye as your brain scanned past those numbers just now.

And that's the sad part.  Sad because when the real crooks and cronies start playing with large enough sums of our money, even we, the true creators of said wealth, simply tend to "tune out" the numbers.  And who can blame us?  It's precisely because of the true scope and severity that the mind fails to comprehend the unbelievable extent of the crime.  Even though this is quite possibly the largest single financial heist in American history, even though it is undisputedly documented, even though this "secret bailout" with public funds was enacted by private enterprise and kept entirely hidden from government officials, even though nearly all the same individuals and institutions responsible for the madness are still in power and still making profit, with nary a check nor balance...Even though.

If you haven't read it yet, please: read the story.  It's our money they're playing with, and if we ever stand a chance to take it back, we're gonna have to start thinking big.  Really big.

This Isn't the First Time Good Folks have Stood Up to Protect their Neighbors

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow provides an historical context to the rising tide of community-based resistance against illegal home forclosures by large corporate banks.  Maddow speaks of Depression-era solidarity among friends and neighbors to protect the vulnerable from losing their homes, and compares this practice to the burgeoning support increasingly offered by local Occupy movements today:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

More from OWS here

Occupy Democracy, and a Message from Cairo

Two related items I would like to share today.

First, Robert Reich, the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, delivers an excellent short speech regarding the real public nuisance at work today:



Following the spirit of "Occupy Democracy"  I have posted below several excerpts from a document published on the Occupy Wall Street website on October 25th.  Entitled "Solidarity Statement from Cairo", this work speaks directly to the similarities between conditions in Egypt and those we face here in the United States.  Note that in October police actions had not yet forcibly removed major Occupy encampments.  The message remains, I believe, no less striking - and is perhaps even more applicable today:

"To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it's our turn to pass on some advice. 
[...]
An entire generation across the globe has grown up realizing, rationally and emotionally, that we have no future in the current order of things. Living under structural adjustment policies and the supposed expertise of international organizations like the World Bank and IMF, we watched as our resources, industries and public services were sold off and dismantled as the “free market” pushed an addiction to foreign goods, to foreign food even. The profits and benefits of those freed markets went elsewhere, while Egypt and other countries in the South found their immiseration reinforced by a massive increase in police repression and torture.

The current crisis in America and Western Europe has begun to bring this reality home to you as well: that as things stand we will all work ourselves raw, our backs broken by personal debt and public austerity. Not content with carving out the remnants of the public sphere and the welfare state, capitalism and the austerity-state now even attack the private realm and people's right to decent dwelling as thousands of foreclosed-upon homeowners find themselves both homeless and indebted to the banks who have forced them on to the streets. 

So we stand with you not just in your attempts to bring down the old but to experiment with the new. We are not protesting. Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant? We are occupying. We are reclaiming those same spaces of public practice that have been commodified, privatized and locked into the hands of faceless bureaucracy , real estate portfolios, and police ‘protection’. Hold on to these spaces, nurture them, and let the boundaries of your occupations grow. After all, who built these parks, these plazas, these buildings? Whose labor made them real and livable? Why should it seem so natural that they should be withheld from us, policed and disciplined? Reclaiming these spaces and managing them justly and collectively is proof enough of our legitimacy. 
[...]
 What you do in these spaces is neither as grandiose and abstract nor as quotidian as “real democracy”; the nascent forms of praxis and social engagement being made in the occupations avoid the empty ideals and stale parliamentarianism that the term democracy has come to represent. And so the occupations must continue, because there is no one left to ask for reform. They must continue because we are creating what we can no longer wait for.
[...]
By way of concluding then, our only real advice to you is to continue, keep going and do not stop. Occupy more, find each other, build larger and larger networks and keep discovering new ways to experiment with social life, consensus, and democracy. Discover new ways to use these spaces, discover new ways to hold on to them and never give them up again. Resist fiercely when you are under attack, but otherwise take pleasure in what you are doing, let it be easy, fun even. We are all watching one another now, and from Cairo we want to say that we are in solidarity with you, and we love you all for what you are doing.

Comrades from Cairo.
24th of October, 2011."
full text here