Walmart Actions Today:

In Maine (collaboration between Occupy Maine + Southern Maine Worker's Center + Maine Green Independent Party):



In New York City(Occupy Wall Street:

Sequestration and the Death Machine

Will Hopkins of New Hampshire Peace Action asked me to do a video about sequestration. So this is that video.
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Poor America - BBC

Sometimes when you're in denial, a friend has to show you exactly how fucked up you are...

How Intellectuals Betrayed The Poor

October 2011, Why I Will Be There

I made this video in 2009:



Some stuff has happened since then.

I made this video earlier today:

Support Cheri Honkala for Sheriff of Philadelphia!

Cheri Honkala is a formerly homeless single mother who for the past 25 years has been the foremost activist for the poor and homeless in America. She is now the first woman to run for Sheriff of Philadelphia and the first Sheriff candidate refusing to throw families out of their homes.

She needs our support NOW! Donate $20 today!

More Info: CheriHonkala.com

POOR PEOPLE'S SOLIDARITY!

Working People vs Wall Street part 2

Now, I never aim to inspire defeatism, but today I aim to inspire disillusionment, which is a very different thing. I think we can all agree it’s a good thing to be without illusion, and right now there are far too many of us who believe in this illusion that the folks at the top got their through legitimate means, and maintain their position through legitimate means, that The Man’s game is a fair one.

The Man? Yeah. Normally, I don’t like abstractions like this, but for the sake of understanding our economic situation, I find it’s easier to understand if we lump the so called “captains of industry” together into one entity. If we lump the Wall Street Banks, the Globalist Chemical Companies, the Globalist Factory Farms, the Military Industrial Complex, everything that isn’t Labor, into one entity. Because it really is, us versus them.

Right now we’ve got a Republican President who is pretending to be a Democrat, and we’ve got a Republican Party who is trying to send our nation back to the time of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” We had a regressive corporate shill in Clinton who totally fucked working people of America over with NAFTA and the WTO. We had regressive corporate shills in GW Bush and Reagan who busted unions and rolled back labor protections, environmental protections, consumer safety protections, all in the name of the fuckers at the top making shit loads of money while you die of cancer because of their pollution in your air, water and soil.

An illusion we need to dispense with is that we all share equally in our nation's prosperity, that a rising tide lifts all boats, as it were.

Truth is, as the rich get richer, we get poorer, which is clearly demonstrated by this chart you can view over at StateOfWorkingAmerica.org

The lower 90% of Americans, by income bracket, have actually seen their mean wages decline since 1977, while the top 1% by income bracket, have seen their income balloon wildly, seeing their already absurdly high income triple, while our income has declined. We’re working more today, for less money.

Another illusion is that most people you know are middle class. This is bullshit, pure and simple.

Most people who think that they are middle class are actually working poor, and hover just above the poverty line.

I see the Tea Party protesters out there in Wisconsin, complaining that they don’t have a right to organize, or to strike, or to call in sick. Well, dipshits, it’s because you don’t have a fucking union. If you had one, YOU TOO could enjoy the right to strike, and would probably get higher wages. Instead of pissing and moaning about how the Union Labor gets all the bennies, why don’t you get off your lazy ass, risk getting fired, and through months and months of hard work, organize a union and get a better standard of living for yourself?

And to the Union Labor in WI, who is saying publicly that they’re willing to negotiate all their benefits away... This isn’t a time to be negotiating. This is a time to get aggressive. Shit is getting serious, people are losing their homes, the whole fucking economic system is collapsing, and people are suffering. This is the time to go for the whole goddamn cake.

Why? Well, there’s something you should know:
It was never in the plans for you to make any money, to make anything of yourself.
It was never in the plans for anybody but the rich, the REALLY rich, to get ahead in life.

That is an illusion started with the Horatio Algers stories of rags to riches. We love these stories here in America. They show real life examples once and a while as fluff peices on the nightly news. But these cases are extreme statistical outliers, you’re more likely to get rich playing the lotto than by working hard and keeping your head down. It doesn’t matter that it’s never going to fucking happen to you. The Rags to Riches story still a cornerstone of the American Dream. But Horatio Algers wrote fiction, and dreams are fantasies experienced while asleep.

You are poor. How do I know? I don’t. But by pure statistics alone, I’m certain you are. You might be in denial about this, but the truth remains, you’re poor.

You’re just one severe illness away from being homeless, and losing everything, but maybe you don’t know it. There are middle class people, people with insurance, who get cancer, cap out on their claims, lose everything, and die homeless. And with cancer rates rising every passing year, this is lottery game you’re far more likely to win.

Unless things begin to change, and I mean REALLY CHANGE, you're going to be poor FOREVER, too. And your kids are going to be poor. My generation is the first generation that will do worse than their parents. Not because we’re lazy, but because the free-market economic system is collapsing in on us, and we’re being forced to take shittier jobs, without union protection, without benefits, with lower wages. Thanks to NAFTA and the WTO, my generation has to compete with children in China who are literally working for rice. We have to compete with workers in Mexico who get paid 7 cents and hour. Unless we change things, we’re going to keep getting poorer and poorer.

When you get poorer, the rich get even richer.

How? That’s just the rules of the game. The game called “Free Market Capitalism.”

The Super Rich, the parasites down on Wall Street, they own the whole goddamn Monopoly game. They own the playing board, they own the shoe and the thimble and the scottish terrier, they own the dice, and they own the money. They are The Man. We all play by their rules. Don’t beleive me? Have you checked your credit score lately? Oh, it doesn’t look so good does it. Maybe that’s because you have too much credit card debt. Or not enough credit card debt. Or maybe you don’t pay your statements off fast enough. Or maybe you pay your balance off too fast. Or maybe it’s just all just fucking bullshit set up by the bankers on Wall Street to control your spending habits so they can steal even more of your goddamn money by making interest off of your debt.

So, What are the rules?

The rules go like this: you work for them your whole life, give up every waking moment to earn that money that you so desperately need to stay alive, and then when you get it, you pay rent back to your capitalist master for permission to keep living. So that you can keep living to do what? To keep working, until you get too old to work and become either social securities problem, or if social security is gone by then, you become your kids problem. And if your kids can’t support you because they’re competing against workers in Mexico who get 7 cents an hour, then you end up on the street curb with the rest of the trash that nobody wants.

You’re a fool to think that the money you earn is ever really yours. That money is owned by The Man, and he’s only lending it to you temporarily, so that you THINK you’re making progress. They’ll take it back from you soon enough. And no I’m not talking about taxes. The Man gives you just enough of their money so that you stay just happy enough, or just confused enough, that you don’t fully realize you’re being totally fucked every moment of your life.

Every breath you take, they are snatching their money back from you. You want to buy food so you don’t starve to death, you pay The Man. You pay Kraft Foods, Inc and you pay Con Agra and you pay Monsanto. You can’t get to your job by public transport so you have to buy a car. You get your loan to buy your from The Man.

The Man charges you interest on this new debt you just created, and The Man immediately begins to trade your debt with his buddies, as if it were money.

If time is money, it stands to reason that money is time, and when you are in debt, you owe your time on this earth to the Man. When the man is trading your debt like money, what he’s really doing is trading your life away. He is selling derivatives on his ownership of your every breath. He’s trading in futures of YOU, with the implicit guarantee that you’ll keep slaving your sorry ass to the bone so that The Man can turn more profits, because you promised to give The Man back all the money he just gave you and then some.

So now you’re working for The Man for free. How does it feel to be a slave? Shut up, go watch TV. Don’t talk politics. How dare you question America, the greatest best country on earth that god ever gave to man? Gave to man? Or gave to The Man?

Talking Points on Welfare #4

Talking Points on Welfare Part 4

Taxation is theft, why should I have my pay stolen to pay for a free ride for other people?

This one is going to take a while to unpack. It requires some knowlege of recent economic history, which is going to mean explaining. I hope I don't bore you.

In 1960, the average household worked half as many hours. Adjusted for inflation, the Cost of Living was a third of what it is today. Yet, the average household income for a person in the lower 85% of income brackets, in terms of real dollars, has remained stagnant for the past 40 years.

That’s right, 85% of the population has seen their cost of living triple, has had to double their hours they spend working, and as a reward for working twice as much have LESS expendable income than we did 40 years ago.
To recap really quickly- [drawings] the dollar cost of living has tripled, but the actual stuff we’re getting for that cost isn’t three times better. We’re still buying pretty much the same houses and the same wonderbread and the same Jif peanut butter as we did 40 years ago.
So we’re paying three times as much today for the same things we had in the 1960s.
The Average American household had one income earner working 40 hrs a week in 1960, and that was enough to maintain a comfortable standard of living.
For twice as much labor today, 85% of Americans still have an income gap of a third. That money has to come from somewhere. Some households have two adults working 80 hours a week, and still struggle to make ends meet.
For 85% of Americans, we’ve been slowly eased into a starvation diet over the past 40 years.
That income gap, for many people, who thought that going on welfare was irresponsible, had to borrow their wages. Where did they borrow their wages from? From the wealth they already had. We’ve borrowed against our houses, and we’ve used credit cards to fill our income gap. We were told that this was the responsible thing to do. The fiscal reality of it, is that we’ve been cannibalizing ourselves.
If you look at this through another lense, by indexing things to the value of labor-- the value of the labor you produce has been devalued by two thirds. You have essentially been getting paid a third of what your labor is actually worth. That income gap of a third should rightfully be paid by our employers. And where has all that money gone?
Check Wall Street. While the value of our labor has been cut to a third of what it was, the value of labor of the average CEO has skyrocketed, from just 30 times the lowest paid employee at their company to 300 times the lowest paid employee.
So while the 85% of Americans who work our asses off just to get by, we’ve seen the value of our labor be devalued, fraudulently, by 300%. We’ve seen the value of labor of CEOs increase, fraudulently, by 1000%. What are they doing differently that they need to be compensated at 1000% more than they were back in the 1960s? Well, there’s a short answer and a long answer:
The short answer: Nothing.
The Long answer: Absolutely NOTHING whatsoever, at all.
Now, who has been deciding what everybody’s labor is worth? The invisible hand of the market? Bullshit. It’s been those CEOs. Of course they are going to give themselves raises and reduce the value of our labor by 2/3rds. They’re greedy, shortsighted people. You would probably do the same. Right? No, actually you probably wouldn’t, because that would be THEFT, and THEFT is wrong.

So let’s get back to our initial conservative talking point: Why should you allow somebody else to get a free ride from your labor? You shouldn’t. Which is why we need a maximum wage.
Is taxation really theft? Well, if you’re taxing that top 15% of people who have increased the value of their own labor and decreased the value of everybody else’s labor, we’re not stealing from them by taxing them to pay for welfare. The lower 85% earned that income, but were not paid that income.
The *real* problem is that those richest 15% aren’t PAYING what the 85% is earning by their labor leaving an income gap. How the hell are people supposed to fill that gap through working more if their labor just keeps getting further and further devalued?
With welfare. Welfare is just the lower 85% of people getting what their labor earned them.
If we don’t reverse this trend of the rich getting richer, and the poor getting poorer, eventually there will be no way for the lower 85% of Americans to feed themselves by our own labor.
At which point, we will be forced to kill the top 15% and eat THEM.



One source: http://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-productivity-vacation/

Another one I didn't specifically use, but has a lot of the same info as a presentation given at the Commenwealth Club of California two years ago, by an economist whose name I can't remember:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

What about all the liberal rednecks?

They exist. Why aren't progressives talking to them?

Backstory: So I'm reading the book "No More Prisons" by League Of Pissed Off Voters (aka League of Indy Voters, aka League of Young Voters) founder William Upski Wimsatt.

It's all about hip-hop activism, inner city organizing, etc. And I think that's largely been the model that the league has followed. Which is great- If you live in a city.

I had an epiphany today, which is tied back to my training at the 1st annual Smackdown (aka organizer training session) in Columbus, Ohio back in 2004. After hearing story after story of how hard it is to be poor in a city like New York, I began to feel like, "well damn, I thought I was poor, but I've had it pretty good." But then after talking with the same people, I discovered that they had all sorts of opportunities that I never had, like specialty public schools for the arts, after school programs, they were cultivated for leadership by these like... community unions which served as like a parallel government.

Anyways, I'm not saying that living in a city doesn't suck-- like I said, I heard horror stories too, but I realized when talking with these kids, that rural folks like myself grew up in a different kind of poverty that sucked in different ways. I ate gov't cheese and gov't bologna growing up. Sometimes that and mustard was all we had to eat. My middle school almost folded because our property tax base wasn't enough to support it.
Arts program? Phht. Music program? HA! We barely had a gym program. Hell, we barely had a school.
What would the solution be? Bus us to another school? Where exactly might that school be at? We consolidated already to cut costs...

In the Boy Scouts, parents brought venison they'd hunted, killed, and cleaned themselves, for barbecues. They talked obliquely about factory farms and pollution, and how hunting connects us to the land. Hunters and fishermen are ready and available allies on environmental issues, but we dismiss them as rednecks. To our own peril.

Anyways, the long and the short of it is this:

The next breakthrough that progressives are going to have to make before we can effectively take our country back, is getting a foothold in areas of rural poverty.

The question we need to be asking is, "What about all the liberal rednecks?"

KILL & EAT THE RICH (video)

Much thanks to Davis Fleetwood for making this video about my "Kill & Eat the Rich" campaign:

---

So I have this fable:

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?"

---

Now, I want to explain, I don't actually advocate killing and eating the rich. It's just that, like Obama and Hillary talking about nuking Iran-- I just think we should "keep all options on the table."

Speaking of which, I recently saw an old advert for Scott Paper Towels, asking "is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?"
Which went on to say how harsh paper towels and unsanitary bathroom conditions pissed workers off, and made them more likely to unionize and join the communist party, which one can only assume means that they're going to crash the gates and kill you and all the other board members.

Yes! Once upon a time, people were so scared of the poor that they were willing to do the most basic things to keep them happy.
Like keep the bathroom clean, and buy soft toilet paper.

Just think what the corporate elite would be willing to do for the betterment of humanity if they thought they had to prevent us from killing and eating them?

You can buy the t-shirt here:
http://www.etsy.com/listing/59971127/tshirt-kill-and-eat-the-rich

Wear it proud!

Insurance Companies Pass Landmark Bill Part 2

Sorry that this took so long to upload. YouTube was refusing to allow me to upload it, so I uploaded it over at Blip.TV