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Music by ZEBU!

Tom Morello: This land is your land by Woody Guthrie

With the often cut-out verses no less!



via NoCureForThat

Why I'm a Democratic Socialist

The stories we tell ourselves are all essentially just lies that we tell ourselves so that we distract ourselves from noticing how shitty and meaningless our lives are.

I know that coming from me, a white male living in a 1st world nation, that sounds like I'm just being ignorant or bitchy about not having everything handed to me, but it's totally not the case.

I'm just recognizing what can only be described as a fact. Life is shitty. To be alive, no matter WHERE you live, is to suffer.

So let's get ethnocentric for a moment-- Here in the United States of America, we've got this narrative that we tell ourselves. That if you just work hard, do the right things, and you'll get ahead.

We go to school and school sucks, but we're told that we're supposed to endure being bored while being fed lies about Europeans who got lost and “discovered” places where people were already living, told a bunch of dates from history that have absolutely no meaning or relevance to our tiny myopic 10 year old universe, having dodgeballs hurled at our heads in gym class-- and with all of it done in shifts, like at a factory, which was designed to mentally prepare us for a life of working in all those factories that left the country 30 years ago. For our tests, we regurgitate answers without understanding them, and we accept things our teachers tell us without thinking about them. And we call that “learning.”

And it sucks, but we endure it all. In fact, we work really hard at doing well at this thing that sucks, because if we do well at this thing that sucks, it opens up this chain of possibilities for other things that suck, but supposedly lead to better things (but which in reality, also suck). If we do well in school, we're supposed to be able to get into a good university, and then we stress out and work really hard going to that university because if we do well, we supposed to be able to get a good job. And then you get a job, and you work really hard no matter how much you hate it, in the hopes of moving ahead in your career, so that eventually you'll get to a point in your life where your body is giving out, and your organs are failing, you can do all those fun things that you wanted to do in life.

But it's all a load of bullshit. We are constantly deferring our happiness today for this abstract happiness in the future which never materializes. And it's not going to either.

Well, I mean it could work out for you that you get your story book ending where you live happily ever after, but more likely than not, it's not going to work out that way. You're just going to keep suffering through the shit in front of you today, and then at the end, you just die, and it's all shit. It's just one long line of continuous shit from birth till death. Rather than getting ahead, you spend every day giving it your all just trying to keep what little you have, and then you're even losing ground, day after day, no matter how hard you work.

That procession of success we're all told to believe in is complete and utter bullshit. Some people have the right skills or the right connections and happen to be in the right spot at the right time and get lucky, but most people don't.

Some people don't go to college, walk into a street while drunk, get hit by a car, and end up with a huge settlement, and then invest it in something that makes them rich. Some people just happen to be born to the right parents. Some people just happen to be born to the wrong parents. There's just no fucking rhyme or reason to anything, and it's foolish to assume that anything in life is going to resemble ANYTHING like fairness.

Some people are able to amass huge amounts of wealth for no goddamned reason, and most people end up with little or nothing. That's how we currently organize our society. And part of that too, is that's just how life works-- some people get rewarded for doing the totally wrong thing, and some people get punished for doing everything right. Being successful in life seems to be a lot like winning the lottery-- it's just random chance, and it's totally out of your control.

Unless you happen to be born to the right parents, the parents of successful capitalists, and then you can use your money to do all your work for you. Then you can hire people to do other things for you. You can even hire people to do your hiring for you. You also get buy politicians, politicians who will change the laws to make it easier for you to do whatever the fuck you want to.

While there is abundance which can only be described as insane for a small few, that wealth is gathered by force from everybody else. And that is where poverty comes from.

So if we're living on a planet where odds are, you just happen to be born to the wrong parents, you know, parents with brown skin who live in a place without clean drinking water, how can we say, “well, there's some winners who profit from being born to rich people who use money to buy force to control natural resources and fuck other people over, and that's totally fine with me” and then call ourselves moral, or ethical?

If you subscribe to the theory that we live in a cold and uncaring universe, and that life on the planet earth is as fragile and meaningless as mold in a bathtub, you quickly realize that the world is filled with suffering FOR NO GODDAMNED REASON, and the very least that we can do is reduce the total amount of suffering on the planet by evening things out a little bit.

And that's why I'm a Democratic Socialist.

Obamacare is a Giveaway to Corporatism

Here is a video series that I made back in November of 2009

Paul Robeson School Walkout

via OccupyTVNY.org


On May 1, 2012, nearly 100 students walked out of Paul Robeson HS in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street's call for #MayDay and in protest of the DOE's policies at their school. They were joined by students at several other schools when they held a teach-in with community leaders at nearby Fort Greene Park.

This summer, public education advocates and recent graduates from the school are launching the Paul Robeson Freedom School: PaulRobesonFreedomSchool.org

Capitalism Isn't Working

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CAPITALISM ISN'T WORKING! (or it's working just fine, and this is how it's SUPPOSED to work).

So a couple years ago, about three years ago, I made a video called...
I actually don’t remember what it was called. I’ve deleted it. It was about Capitalism, and how I found the idea that we should be “smashing capitalism” to be infantile. One argument I made was: how would you get avocados for your vegan burrito? What would the incentive be to bringing food from that far away? Would you barter for a hemp necklace?

However, I had made a terrible mistake. Since the word “capitalism” is so propagandized, it’s come to be synonymous with a LOT of things that it has absolutely nothing to do with.

In the video I’m mentioning, I had conflated the term “capitalism” with “markets.”

In reality, capitalism actually has NOTHING TO DO WITH MARKETS. Capitalism simply means that we as a society think that it’s okay for some people who have a lot of money, to buy all the stuff, and then get even more rich simply through the fact that they own all the stuff. Capitalism necessitates abuse of labor. It is in the DNA of capitalism that labor is abused and exploited.

It is under capitalism, that a worker builds a house, and then has to pay the capitalist for the right to live in the house he built with his own hands.

It’s under capitalism that a worker makes hundreds of shoes all day, but is paid so little for his labor by the capitalist who owns the factory, that he cannot, in a day of labor, earn enough to buy a single pair of shoes for himself.

It’s under capitalism that a worker makes enough clothing in a day to clothe a neighborhood block, but is paid so little they would have to save for a month to purchase a single shirt they made through their own labor.

It’s under capitalism, that workers harvest every day from the fields the capitalist owns, enough food to feed a village, but the worker has to pay the capitalist their days wages for the right to eat a single meal’s worth.

You don’t have to think about this very hard to come to understand why so many of our brothers and sisters are homeless, shoeless, naked, and hungry. The game is rigged that way.

These things, the field, the farm, the factory, the financial institution, these are what people are talking about when they say “the means of production.”

What is the value that the capitalist provides in any of these aformentioned situations? The capitalist does no labor, and simply through owning the factory, owning the field, owning the bank, and therefore controlling the money, the capitalist is able to create even more wealth for himself by exploiting the labor of his fellow man.

At what point did we decide that THAT was a good way to organize our society?

Now, it’s often said that capitalism is an economic system. That’s a complete misnomer. Systems have closed loops and sustain themselves. Capitalism is a straight line. What do I mean by that?

Have you ever played the game monopoly? Well, monopoly and capitalism operate under very similar rules. So long as everybody has a fairly equal share of property, and the money keeps getting passed around the board equitably, the game can go on for what seems like forever. But eventually, somebody gets enough of an upper hand that you can see the game is already over. People start losing their homes in order to pay their bills. Sudden expenses come up that you can’t cover, and you start losing the very things that allowed you to participate in the game to begin with. Then slowly and surely, one person ends up owning everything, simply by the virtue of the fact that they own more stuff than anybody else to start with, and then the balance of power tips forever in their favor from that point onwards. And so eventually all the money and all the property ends up in the hands of one person. And that’s how you win Monopoly.

That’s also how you win capitalism. That’s where we’re at right now, on the precipice just before the super-wealthy end up owning every property on the game board, and all the money in the bank, while the rest of us are unable to play the game at all. To the 1%, to the Koch Brothers, I say, congratulations, you win at capitalism. Nobody else has anything. You win.
Another word that people use capitalism as a stand-in for is Democracy. Truly Capitalism and Democracy could not be further from each other in meaning.

Under capitalism, your workplace is organized in a hierarchical structure, in which one person, or a small cabal of people own everything, and reap all the profits from the labor of the workers. The workers have no input in the direction of the business, how it is run, how their fellow workers are treated, etc. If your average workplace were a government, we would readily call it fascism. So let’s call it what it is-- fascism.

Worker-owned autonomous workplaces, however, looks very different from Capitalism. Under worker-owned and operated cooperatives, the workers all share ownership of the means of production. They are all paid equally for their labor, they all share equally in the profits, they all share equally in the losses. Workers come to consensus how to run the business, and how their fellow workers are treated. If this workplace were a government, it would be called a “democracy.” Another word for democracy in the workplace, is “socialism.”

So Socialism and markets are not mutually exclusive. In fact there are many worker-owned cooperatives that you already know about and probably purchase their products regularly, like Land O Lakes butter.

Now, most workplaces are capitalist. Which means that there is little to no democracy in our economic sphere. Which means that a few are enriched through the exploitation of the labor of the many. And in a society where money is legally seen as equivalent to speech, and in practical terms is equivalent to power, it’s quite clear that capitalism CREATES a ruling class, and is the OPPOSITE of democracy.
The lack democracy in our workplaces is the ROOT CAUSE of why there is so little democracy in our governmental systems. For information how to to start your own worker’s cooperative, go to usworker.coop

The "crazy radical" that was censored by TED talks

Nick Hanauer in March of 2012:


Me, two years prior in November of 2010:


This isn't a new idea. It's just math. Capitalism is not sustainable.

Bernie Sanders - Student Loans

Dear Cenk, You don't get it.

Dear Cenk,
You don't get it.

The idea behind direct democracy is that nobody can represent you better than you.  Why should I be representing that woman in Florida?  She should represent her.  Send a person to her house, and interview her.  Tell her story.  We are all individuals.  I don't have a right to speak on her behalf.  She should speak on her behalf.

The idea that some people are able to speak better for us than ourselves, is part of the problem with our government, and with our media.  You are lazy.  If the news actually spent money looking into how bad shit was here at home, instead of just repeating what government officials said all day long, maybe this would be a non-issue.

But it's not a non-issue.  It's very much an issue.  Why should WE be the ones to do YOUR job?  We aren't the media, you are.  You should be coming to us to learn about our struggle.

The GA's held in lower Manhattan aren't meant to represent everybody in the world.  People can hold their own GAs in their own towns and self-organize.

Peace,
The Punk Patriot

RSA Animate= The Crisis Of Capitalism

3rd Party Presidential Debate, live now.

Watch live streaming video from greenpartyus at livestream.com

The Capitalism Story: The Whole Fucking Thing Is Coming Down

So I keep resharing this video on my facebook page.

There's a reason for that. I can't believe how close to being true this video is now.

Let me explain:

When I wrote this song, it was back in August of 2011. There had been a successful occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol building, but Scott Walker kicked everybody out. Paul LePage here in Maine had taken down the Labor Mural, and was pushing through anti-human legislation, such as lifting the ban on cancer-causing chemicals in toys and baby bottles, trying to make Maine a right-to-work (for less) state, cutting taxes on the wealthy, cutting services on the most needy, all in the name of being pro-business.

(hence the inspiration for this graphic)


Occupy Wall Street loomed on the horizon as an exciting protest, but I, like many, didn't think it was going to end up being much more than just a week long endeavor, and hoped that I would be able to get down there to attend before it was over, just to say I was there and did my part.

I was working in a factory between 40 and 50 hours a week as a "seasonal hire"-- just the latest of a series of jobs where I was working full time, but being compensated as a "part time seasonal employee" aka no benefits, no bonuses, nothing that isn't mandated by law. Except for maybe the occasional balsam fir scented car freshener, or corporate logo-emblazoned baseball cap. ("Cuz' here at the corporation, we're all on the corporation's team.")

The lyrics of the song were my life at the time. The refrain of the song "And the whole fucking thing is coming down" wasn't coming from optimism like it may seem to now. What it felt to me, is that eventually the working class were going to be so completely crushed, that Capitalism would finally and entirely eat itsself, plunging our country into chaos and civil war.

This had long been a feeling of mine. This sentiment inspired the following fable which I wrote in October of 2010:

They told us when they took our jobs overseas, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"
They told us when they destroyed our 401ks through gambling with our money, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"
They told us when we fell behind on our mortgage and foreclosed on our house, kicking us to the street, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"
As more and more people were forced on welfare, the government's budget started to look grim. When they cut welfare spending entirely so that they could enjoy bigger tax cuts to "stimulate the economy," they told us, "No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"

Then the poor had nothing left to eat, and no place to go.

So they had to kill and eat the rich.

They descended on Wall Street by the millions, stopping all traffic.

Their numbers were so large, the police couldn't do anything to stop the massive crowd of the disenfranchised. They flooded the buildings of Wall Street, the halls of DC, of the McMansions of Texas, and like a horde of zombies, they tore into the flesh of the horrified wealthy, who screamed and shat themselves, knowing that they were powerless to stop the oncoming mass of gnashing teeth and hungry mouths.

And as the poor picked the bones clean over the burning piles of money, the poor said to the bones:

"No hard feelings. It's just business, you know?"

And my youtube mentor Dennis Trainor Jr made this video in Dec 2010:


But back then, we were just pissing in the wind. Just frustrated, angry, and impotent, spewing our rage into the internet, and our message didn't really find purchase in the collective consciousness of the public.

So the refrain to my song

"The whole fucking thing is coming down, the whole fucking thing is coming down" that wasn't coming from a place of empowerment. That was coming from a place of complete and total desperation. It was coming from total hopelessness. It was coming from a place where too many people spend their ever dwindling paycheck at Wal*Mart, and too few people know how their State Budget works.

It came from a place where everything was fucked up, most were pissed, but most didn't bother trying to figure out WHY everything was fucked up, and just watched football instead.

But now... now that Occupy Wall Street has happened, and has been going for 7 months strong coming up on the 17th of this month, when you listen to the refrain of the song, "the whole fucking thing is coming down" imagine the alternative systems that will replace the systems that are around us now. Imagine the better ways we can organize our society- the better ways that those of us in the movement HAVE BEEN organizing our society.

It's been almost two years now that I've been feeling desperate and utterly hopeless; that something has got to give. And now something has given way.

Nobody knows the future anymore. Things that we once might have thought of as important aren't on our Radar-- Romney or Obama? Who gives a shit? They're both Wall Street Puppets. It doesn't matter.

With every incident of young and elderly women getting pepper sprayed, and Iraq War vets getting mortally wounded by police, the legitimacy of the plutocratic regime crumbles. It is a collapsing facade revealing behind it an ugly and terrible face, propped up only by combination of fraud and force. And when the majority of Americans see the regime for what it really is, they'll turn their backs, just like those of us in the movement already have.

The whole fucking thing REALLY IS coming down.

And it's beautiful.

This is an exciting time to be alive.

My take on the Affordable Care Act

So now that the Affordable Care Act is being discussed by the Supreme Court, these videos from 2009 are relevant again.

PART 1:


PART 2:


PART 3:


PART 4:

The Horatio Algers Lie

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A breif and crucial history of the United States Global Empire

Jason Read on the nature of parasitism and economics

Chris Hedges: Empire is Over; the Decent Will Be Terrifying.

January 01, 2012 C-SPAN
via MoxNews

I answer Viewer Mail!

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To those of you who buy t-shirts- THANK YOU.
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Cindy Sheehan - The Anti-war movement was co-opted by the DNC

Is Capitalism Unpatriotic?

I think it just might be...