A breif and crucial history of the United States Global Empire

Jason Read on the nature of parasitism and economics

#OWS protesters arrested at Grand Central Terminal for protesting #NDAA

via gothamist




Two protesters mic check about the loss of freedom brought about by the passage of the NDAA and both are promptly arrested and whisked out of public sight.

Sounds more like Communist Poland than the USA, land of the free, home of the brave.

The two protesters who were arrested were Lauren Digioia from OWS's sanitation working group, and her boyfriend Zach Kamel, who I have never met (but I assume is also on Sanitation working group.)

Says Zach Kamel to Gothamist via phone:

I find it extremely disturbing the way that protesters are being treated in the United States, especially considering how this country was founded. You have the founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson, who is always quoted as saying that if you don't like what the government is doing in America, you can change it. And when we try to do that, look what happens: we're getting beaten. Lauren was beaten by several police officers at Zuccotti Park on New Year's Eve, and she still has bruises.
I don't blame the officers, even though there are a lot of bad ones out there who are clearly enjoying this. I saw the look in one of the officer's eyes while I was in custody at Grand Central, and I could tell he was shaken. And I took that as an opportunity to talk to him, and I could see he was ashamed. I told him that I understood he has his family to feed and he's following orders, and he said, "You know I can't talk to you." So I said, "Just listen, then." Because I know it's not his fault; it's the fault of the white shirts, the higher-ranking officers like Lieutenant Lakeram, who you can see shoving me in that video. It's the fault of Ray Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg, who sees the police as his personal army.
Honestly, I'm scared for my unborn children and their unborn grandchildren, because the United States is no longer the bastion of freedom it's been purported to be. This American myth is all bullshit, and what's going to happen to our country as we start to turn into what we hate? I'm sure it's been happening for a long time, but now we're seeing it out there in the open, in places like Grand Central Station and Zuccotti Park. You can't turn away from things like this.

Chinese Authorities Lose Control as Village Revolts

via NDT

The over twenty-thousand residents of the village of Wukan in south China's Guangdong Province have expelled all local Communist Party authorities, including police, and blocked road access to the village.

The British newspaper The Telegraph was able to get a journalist on the ground in Wukan on Tuesday. Malcom Moore called the current incident the first time on record that the Party has "lost all control" in a situation of "open revolt." This marks the latest escalation in an ongoing confrontation between villagers and local Communist Party officials they've called corrupt and abusive.

For three months, Wukan residents have been staging occasional large-scale protests against a longstanding series of abuses committed by local Party officials. The villagers' biggest grievance was corrupt officials profiting from illegally selling the villagers' land.

The current intensified protest, including the expelling of all police and officials, came after the death in Party custody of Xue Jinbo. He was a Wukan resident who had served as a negotiator with authorities. Party officials claim Xue died of "cardiac failure." But Xue's family say there was evidence of torture on his body, including broken thumbs and bruises.

By Monday, locals had stopped an attempt by hundreds of police and security personnel to enter Wukan. Those forces retreated to a backup location three miles distant, and are now blocking all food and water from entering the town.

As of now, at the fifth day of what some are calling a rebellion, police remain blocked from entering, and some townspeople are making comments suggesting that the confrontation has become about more than just land seizures.

The Telegraph quoted one villager as saying "We are not sleeping. A hundred men are keeping watch. We do not know what the government's next move will be, but we know we cannot trust them ever again."

The situation in Wukan remains uncertain. Other media have managed to enter the village. But anything about Wukan is being quickly censored on the Chinese internet.

Capitalism: Abandoned Homes and Gardens Rot While the Homeless Starve

I love capitalism. The homeless starve without a roof over their head, while abandoned homes (that belong to the banks) grow bountiful gardens that go to waste.

That is until this liberal bleeding heart interloper decides to start stealing food from the banks! That's the bank's property lady! We're supposed to be teaching the poor how much it sucks to be poor! We can't do that if you feed them! Hunger is a positive motivator to work for subminimum wages! You're screwing the whole thing up!

From the New York Times:

ATLANTA — As she does every evening, Kelly Callahan walked her dogs through her East Atlanta neighborhood. As in many communities in a city with the 16th-highest foreclosure rate in the nation, there were plenty of empty, bank-owned properties for sale.

She noticed something else. Those forlorn yards were peppered with overgrown gardens and big fruit trees, all bulging with the kind of bounty that comes from the high heat and afternoon thunderstorms that have defined Atlanta’s summer.

So she began picking. First, there was a load of figs, which she intends to make into jam for a cafe that feeds homeless people. Then, for herself, she got five pounds of tomatoes, two kinds of squash and — the real prize — a Sugar Baby watermelon.

THAT IS THEFT! You're stealing from the banks! They were going to let that food sit there and rot to teach poor people a lesson, but then you had to go an steal it! You're messing the whole thing up! Capitalism can only work if there's scarcity! If we suddenly find that things are plentiful, why... the banks wouldn't be able to control all the capital... and then... yada yada yada, we'd be eating babies and so on!

“I don’t think of it as stealing,” she said. “These things were planted by a person who was going to harvest them. That person no longer has the ability to. It’s not like the bank people who sit in their offices are going to come out here and pick figs.”

Of course, a police officer who catches her might not agree with Ms. Callahan’s legal assessment. And it would be a rare bank official who would sign off.

And they shouldn't either! How else are we going to teach the poor how much it sucks to be poor? It's bad enough we have charities and a hole-ridden social safety net for crying out loud...

Over the last few years, in cities from Oakland, Calif., to Clemson, S.C., well-intentioned foraging enthusiasts have mapped public fruit trees and organized picking parties. Volunteers descend on generous homeowners who are happy to share their bounty, sometimes getting a few jars of preserves in return.

There are government efforts to turn abandoned land into food, too. In Multnomah County, Ore., officials offer property that has been seized for back taxes to community and governmental organizations for gardens.

They are advocating for COMMUNISM! We can't let the Rooskis win the cold war! That's exactly what they are doing! Unless we have starving homeless, the terrorists, er, the communists have won!

But with more and more properties in foreclosure and large stretches of vacant lots available in some cities, a new, guerrilla-style harvest is taking shape.

Robby Astrove works with Concrete Jungle, a fruit-foraging organization in Atlanta that in 2009 began building a database of untended fruit and nut trees on commercial and public land. The group donates most of the food to agencies that feed the hungry.

[...] “It’s a beautiful idea,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a neighbor’s tree or a vacant lot or a foreclosure or whatever. It’s you and that fruit tree right at that precise moment when the fruit is ready and you need to make something happen.”

Yeah, it's totally okay to tresspass on bank property and steal from them. This "whatever it takes" attitude is exactly the kind of attitude these communist socialists have. Whatever it takes, no matter who they have to steal from! And quit stealing perfectly good food out of the dumpsters at the grocery store too! Sure, that food technically is still perfectly fine to eat, contained in hermetically sealed packages, and still has a week until it expires... but without artificially created scarcity capital markets cannot function! Do you want to destroy capitalism or something? I'll remind you that Capitalism is the greatest best freest system of economics since feudalism!

The point, she and other urban fruit foragers say, is to keep food from going to waste. Ms. Callahan, who works for the Carter Center and lived in Africa for eight years, has seen true hunger and cannot bear to watch food rot.

“If food is going bad on the vine,” she said, that says something about us as a society. “It doesn’t matter if the bank owns it. We should be more communal than that.”

COMMUNAL?! Sounds like COMMUNISM TO ME!

Although urban foragers see no harm in picking the produce, one would be hard-pressed to find a real estate agent or a banker who would officially encourage the practice.

Still, a ripe fig is a ripe fig.

Typical liberal namby pamby, wishy washy leftist tripe from the New York Times. We're in a class war against the poor here! Pick a side!

A note to the Dissafected Non-Voters out there:

The reason our Government sucks, is because nobody participates.

To complain about not being "given" enough choices on the ballot reminds me of the Russian Folk Tale of the Little Red Hen:



Where she worked growing wheat, she could get no help from anyone.
She harvested it, and got no help from anyone.
She ground it to flour, and got no help.
She baked it into bread and got no help from anyone.
They all slept.

To make it a closer analog to our Democracy-- when the Democracy Bread was finally baked, everybody wanted a loaf of their own, and when the Little Red Hen said "no" they all bitched and whined that it wasn't fair. When she ate the bread herself, the Dog, the Cat, and the Mouse used this as an excuse to further justify their lack of participation. So they never got any bread, and were miserable.

The Mouse took up teaching linguistics at MIT, and wrote books about how the Little Red Hen was stupid for working to bake bread when the bread would likely go bad over time, or have small rocks in it from being ground at the miller, and how since the only REAL way to get bread is to plant seeds, nobody should participate in harvesting or grinding flour, and thusly the effort that goes into baking bread is a wasted effort.

The Cat went on to become an anarchist philosopher and would publish books decrying the Little Red Hen as a "slave of the system" and published books saying that bread would make itself all on it's own if we stopped participating in the making of bread.

The Dog muttered, "they're all crooks anyways" and went back to sleep.

The end.