The History & Evolution of the 99% Movement ~ Economic Elite Vs. The People: 2012 Anniversary Update

Originally published February 15th, 2012 on AmpedStatus.com.

The online series and call to action that helped launch the 99% Movement & Occupy Wall Street.

Editor’s Note, 2.15.12:
History should record that the birth of the 99% Movement was on September 17, 2011. That was when the movement became a household name known to the masses. However, the 99% Movement was conceived exactly two years ago, with the release of an online report and call to action titled “The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America.” The report was originally released as a six-part series. The first part was published on February 15, 2010 and the last part was published on February 27, 2010. To celebrate the two year anniversary, we are reissuing the report with a new introduction recapping the history and evolution of the movement, from the experience of researching and writing the original call to action, to building up the movement online and organizing occupations worldwide. At the end of the book, we feature statements from occupiers, organizers and supporters of the 99%.

2012 Introduction

I: Respect to the Leaders & Support the Troops
II: On Writing the 99% Call to Action: Economic Elite Vs. The People
III: Time for a Second American Revolution – The 99% Movement
IV: Decentralized Global Rebellion
V: A99 Operation Empire State Rebellion
VI: Occupy Wall Street 1.0
VII: Anonymous & Occupy Wall Street Leaders Exposed
VIII: Get Money Out of Politics & Bernanke Must Go
IX: Disclaimer On the Original Report & Call to Action
X: Mic Check: The People Speak

I: Respect to the Leaders & Support the Troops

Respect to the Leaders

The most important point for me to make clear in writing about my experience is that it obviously gives a limited view of all the incredible effort and hard work that many people have put into building this decentralized non-hierarchical crowdsourced movement. It is absurd to give too much credit to any individual or one particular group for its phenomenal growth. The fact of the matter is that this movement has become such a powerful force because millions of people have taken it upon themselves to stand up, be leaders and defend their family and country against global financial interests that have bought control of our government, economy and legal system.

This movement is built upon the courageous people that have sacrificed everything to occupy. All respect to the people on the frontlines, out in the streets; the people who continually show up day in and day out, fighting around the clock. They are the leaders! If it wasn’t for them, I would still be toiling in obscurity.

Support the Troops

I have had many encouraging conversations with very wealthy individuals and people who run large organizations that say that they want to support the movement and help it grow. Many people well within the economic top 1% fully understand that our political process is overrun with corruption and that we are on a critically unsustainable path. They view the 99% Movement and Occupy as our last best chance to turn things around. There are many people within the 1% who do not want to be associated with the “organized criminal class,” which technically only makes up 0.1% of the population, at most. I have a great deal of respect for these compassionate and conscious one percenters.

However, as of this writing, financial and resource support has been minimal. Every day I speak with organizers and occupiers throughout the country who have played a very significant role in building this movement and they can no longer afford to keep fighting fulltime. Just like everyone else, they have bills to pay and families to feed. Other than financially, the past five months have taken a serious physical toll on many of us. Many people have lost considerable weight, have had a nasty cold and cough, and have been getting four hours of sleep on a good night. This struggle is one that is shared by thousands of people who battle every single day. Something that people who are not on the frontlines don’t seem to understand is that we are currently fighting an all-out nonviolent war. This movement is a relentless battle that demands 24/7 commitment.

Since this movement has taken off, many organizations that cover our actions and operate on the periphery of the movement are now receiving large donations and funding, partly as a result of our efforts. They also deserve to be rewarded for their vital work. However, the people putting their bodies on the line daily and doing all the heavy lifting need to have their basic needs met as well. It’s incredibly disheartening to see career “activists,” that have failed for years to do what we have done, fundraise off our backs, while the real fighters and change-makers go hungry. Clearly, after the last five months of intense battle, I’m growing increasingly weary and frustrated by this lack of respect. We need to do a better job of raising funds ourselves. I admire and respect people who try to make the world a better place for a living, but your words of support mean little without substantive actions behind them. This is a nonviolent war, not yet another swanky gabfest conference filled with well-paid suits righteously yapping about someday creating the structural change that anyone with half a political clue knows we urgently need now. Enough with your comfortable talks, it’s time for ACTION! So stop hoarding funds and resources while the real fighters are out on the frontlines.

In other words…

“Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand…

The line it is drawn…

Keep your eyes wide
the chance won’t come again…

There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’…

If your time to you is worth savin’
You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone….

The order is rapidly fadin’…
And the first one now
will later be last…
As the present now
Will later be past…

Come gather ’round people
Please heed the call…”– Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’, #OccupyRemix, 10.24.63 – 2.15.12

II: On Writing the 99% Call to Action: Economic Elite Vs. The People

It was the last weekend of January 2010, and a heavy snowstorm had trapped us in the house. Not that it mattered much, I rarely stepped foot out of my apartment/home office. I had been working over 60 hours a week sitting in front of my laptop researching and analyzing economic news reports, and then posting excerpts and summaries of them to my independent news site AmpedStatus.com. I had posted thousands of excerpts over the past two years and was growing increasingly frustrated and depressed. The full scope of the economic devastation and trillions of dollars in fraudulent activity were still being ignored by the mainstream press. Even much of the so-called independent online press seemed to be missing the in-depth analysis that was needed for the average American to understand the gravity of the crisis that was now confronting the global economy.

After spending years as an online editor operating behind the scenes aggregating and editing the most hard-hitting news and information I could find, by mid-October 2009, I reached a point where I felt there wasn’t enough reporting adequately presenting vital information in a concise and urgent enough manner, so I decided to start writing my own reports. Within a few weeks I pounded out some commentaries. The first one was titled “How Much Longer Will You Remain Passive?” I created a graphic to go with the piece that showed the New York Stock Exchange with text over it that said, “If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Attention.” I followed that up with an extensive report titled “News Reports from Inside the Financial Coup.” Then, a commentary and video titled “The Wall Street Economic Death Squad.” Those three reports quickly earned me some critical acclaim and attention.

My first big viral report came in November: “The Critical Unraveling of U.S. Society.” That report was picked up by The Public Record and AlterNet, soon it spread to many sites and had over one million page views. In December, I released an extensive report on military spending titled “Af-Pak War Racket: The Obama Illusion Comes Crashing Down.” That report was also widely published and I was suddenly getting a lot of interview requests. Knowing that I now had solid attention, I needed to make sure that the next report could become an organizing tool. It couldn’t just be another news report or commentary, it had to be a call to action that directly engaged people.

However, I could barely afford to pay the rent anymore. I was on the verge of being broke and didn’t know how I could continue to work independently. Almost a year before, I was living in a nice apartment in the Financial District, a few blocks from Wall Street. In early 2009, I ran into financial problems and couldn’t afford the high cost of Manhattan rent anymore. I was working in nonprofit media and the financial crisis dried up key funding sources.

Moving out of Manhattan was a low point in my life. I remember my last night in the city before leaving. I walked down my street, John Street, hung a left on Broadway and walked down to Borders bookstore. I used to go to Borders, get a book and then walk up Broadway to the nearest park and sit on a stone bench with a cup of coffee. This was something of a ritual for me, so on my last night I headed for Borders. But I was too depressed to get a book, so I just headed for the nearby park on Broadway and sat on a stone bench. I sat there facing East, looking toward the NY Federal Reserve building, and Southeast toward Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange. I remember thinking about how tragically poetic it was that I was sitting by the two buildings that I felt were most responsible for driving me out of my home. I thought to myself, if the Fed and top Wall Street executives weren’t engaged in trillions of dollars of fraudulent activity and robbing the US public blind, I could probably still get funding for my work and wouldn’t have to move. Well, enough with the pity party digression. Back to that snowy weekend in January 2010.

I felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. I thought, “How am I going to afford to keep up the fight and keep working in independent media? How am I going to use the attention that I have been getting to rally the passive masses into action? If my next report doesn’t do well, I’m screwed.” After dinner, at around 7pm on Friday January 29th, I felt like I was on the verge of a breakdown. I was incredibly stressed out and depressed as I went into my room/office and closed the door. I didn’t come back out until Monday afternoon, 15,000 words later I had a solid first draft of what was initially called “It’s Time for 99% of Americans to Rise.” After spending hours over the next two weeks fact checking and editing the report, I decided to change the title to “The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America,” to have a more descriptive headline that would more effectively grab attention, and hopefully get more people to click on it. I then decided to use the 99% call as a bold tagline under the headline. The report was way too long to put into one post, so I decided to break it up into six parts. The entire report would be a call to action for a “99% Movement.” The last section of the report had a link to an online sign up form where we could begin to collect the email addresses of people who were ready to “take action against the 1% that have robbed our country and set our economic future on fire.”

The first part of the series was posted to AmpedStatus.com on February 15, 2010. Once again, The Public Record and AlterNet quickly picked up the report. AlterNet changed the headline of part one to “The Economic Elite Have Engineered an Extraordinary Coup, Threatening the Very Existence of the Middle Class.” They also edited out the bold tagline at the top of the piece that called for the 99% to unite and mobilize on common ground. I was upset about that, but their site was key in making that report and my previous two take off online. Once AlterNet posted part one, it instantly became their most popular report and quickly went viral, sections of the report ended up being published all over the internet. Across many sites, the series is estimated to have received over five million page views. Just before publishing the series online, I decided to turn it into a short book, more of a pamphlet inspired by the pamphleteers of the American Revolution, and made it available on AmpedStatus.com for a donation of $15 or more. Some people were generous enough to provide larger donations, so I could afford to give out many copies for free. The money I made off the book was enough to keep our rent paid over the next six months and keep me in the fight.

[I won't excerpt or go into the details of the Economic Elite report and 99% call to action here, as it is published in full starting on page 47.]

III: Time for a Second American Revolution – The 99% Movement

With a flood of interview requests and attention building around the 99% Movement throughout February and early March, I then released another extensive report and call to action to keep the momentum building. On March 31st, this radical essay with a headline asking a highly controversial question was posted: “Is It Time for Law Abiding American Citizens to Stop Paying Their Taxes and Start a New Government?

The teaser under the headline stated:

“The evidence is now overwhelming. The United States government has facilitated the theft of trillions of dollars of national wealth and 99% of the US population no longer has political representation.”

The introduction continued:

“I torturously spend 60 plus hours a week researching this and the torrent of devastating news and evidence is mounting by the minute. The staggering level of theft continues unabated. As I am watching this unfold, I am horrified thinking about the severe consequences that have only just begun to reap their toll. Our nation is being raped and pillaged. Our future is going up in flames and our government isn’t even making the slightest effort to put out the fire. In fact, they are purposely pouring gasoline all over it.”

The introduction ended with this famous quote from Mario Savio:

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that… the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

After extensively exposing information on the fraudulent activity of Wall Street and laying out the government’s complicity in the theft, the report ended with another call to action titled “Time for a Second American Revolution – The 99% Movement.” That section ended by saying:

“Our politicians won’t defend us and exercise the will of the people, so we must. It’s time to get moving, start organizing and to form a new government that is, as the Constitution states: of, by and for the people.

We will restore a rule of law. The second American Revolution has now begun!

We are US soldiers, police officers, firefighters, teachers, students, business owners, postal workers, transit workers, construction workers, union members, artists, journalists, doctors, nurses, lawyers, social service workers, factory workers, farmers, we are 99% of the population and we will not stand by and let our country be destroyed like this!

We are launching a 99% Movement and all the propaganda and labels that are used to divide us will fall to the wayside. We are not just Republicans and Democrats, or Tea Party and Coffee Party people, we are Americans and we are uniting against our common enemy.”

After that, I featured this quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “Mask of Anarchy”:

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains
to earth like dew
Which in sleep
had fallen on you
Ye are many
they are few”

Next came this quote from Trent Reznor’s song, “The Hand That Feeds”:

“Are you brave enough to see?
Do you want to change it?”

Then the call to action ended with another link to sign up for the 99% Movement.

Some websites that ran my previous reports felt this one was “too radical” and did not run it. However, many sites that were just becoming aware of my work and leaned toward a more radical approach jumped on it and the 99% Movement became viral amongst a new audience. The 99% meme was now spreading across the political spectrum.

While using the attention to get many interviews in support of the movement, an Anonymous person helped keep the momentum rolling by creating a music remix of my television interview clips and called it “The Road to Revolution: 99% Uprising.” It featured a bunch of sound bites of me ranting about the consolidation of wealth, financial terrorism, a rigged political system and the need for the 99% to unite on common ground and get into the streets. The song in the background of the video was the Muse anthem “Uprising.”

IV: Decentralized Global Rebellion

We were now focused on building the 99% Movement into an online army. We began to build an online network dedicated to creating a “decentralized global rebellion against neo-liberal economic domination.” After beginning to help organize people in the US and throughout Europe online, our attention shifted to Tunisia and Egypt where we first made contact with a “subgroup” within Anonymous that was helping revolutionaries organize online free from government surveillance and censorship.

In early January 2011, our site started to get hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and got knocked offline. The attacks kept escalating and on January 7th an attack took out our entire ISP network, which affected many other sites as well. Our hosting company was helpful at first, but as the attacks kept coming, they made it clear that they couldn’t host the site anymore, unless we moved to a very expensive system, which we couldn’t afford. In complete desperation, we put out a call for help. Several Anons (“members” of Anonymous) then stepped up and helped us out. Once we were back up and running, I released another extensive report in February 2011 titled “Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion – We Are Egypt [Revolution Roundup #3].”

Here’s the introduction to that report:

“If you think what’s happening in Egypt won’t happen within the United States, you’ve been watching too much TV. The statistics speak for themselves.

In previous Revolution Roundups, before we were knocked offline, we featured mass protests by the people of Ireland, Italy, Britain, Austria, Greece, France and Portugal, as the Global Insurrection contagion spread throughout Europe. And now, as we have seen over the past month, North African and Middle Eastern nations have joined the movement as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, Gabon, Mauritania, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria have taken to the streets en masse.

The connection between this latest round of uprisings and the prior protests throughout Europe is one the mainstream media is not making. We are witnessing a decentralized global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic imperialism. While each national uprising has its own internal characteristics, each one, at its core, is about the rising costs of living and lack of financial opportunity and security. Throughout the world the situation is the same: increasing levels of unemployment and poverty, as price inflation on food and basic necessities is soaring.

Whether national populations realize it or not, these uprisings are against systemic global economic policies that are strategically designed to exploit the working class, reduce living standards, increase personal debt and create severe inequalities of wealth. These global uprisings, which have only just begun, are the first wave of the inevitable reaction to the implementation of a centralized worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order.

The global banking cartel, centered at the IMF, World Bank and Federal Reserve, have paid off politicians and dictators the world over – from Washington to Greece to Egypt. In country after country, they have looted national economies at the expense of local populations, consolidating wealth in unprecedented fashion – the top economic one-tenth of one percent is currently holding over $40 trillion in investible wealth, not counting an equally significant amount of wealth hidden in offshore accounts.

IMF imperial operations designed to extract wealth and suppress populations have been ongoing for decades. As anyone researching economic imperialism will know, a centrally planned Neo-Liberal aristocracy controls the global economy.”

Section seven of the report, “A Recipe For Revolution: Tax Breaks for the Rich, Budget Cuts for the Poor,” stated:

“Republicans and Democrats, along with their Wall Street masters, are so arrogant, deluded with wealth, completely lacking perspective, shortsighted and, quite frankly, ignorant.

As the economic top one-tenth of one percent has more wealth than they have ever had, the middle class is quickly disappearing and poverty is soaring. As politicians ignore the needs of the suffering masses in favor of a Kleptocratic Oligarchy, which operates above the law, it is only a matter of time before an uprising takes hold.

After analyzing societal and economic indicators within the US, in comparison to rebelling countries, it is not a matter of whether people will revolt or not, it’s a matter of when.”

V: A99 Operation Empire State Rebellion

Section eight of the “Analysis of the Global Insurrection” report was titled “The Empire State Rebellion.” In that section, we posted a map of New York’s Financial District and called for millions of people to flood into lower Manhattan and camp out “from Wall Street to the NY Fed, spilling over to the corporate offices of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America.” As the report stated:

“Given all the data, due to New York’s geographical layout, population size and proximity to power, it is a prime candidate for insurrection…. One million people gathering in Cairo, Egypt sent shock waves throughout the world, and rightfully so, but just wait until millions of Americans begin flooding the streets. The revolution contagion will spread throughout the world like a category five hurricane.”

Several Anons loved the idea. Having just helped Egyptians Occupy Tahrir Square, they felt it was time to Occupy Wall Street.

The Anonymous subgroup and the 99% Movement then formed a collaborative effort called A99. On March 12, 2011, A99 issued their first video and announced “A99 Operation Empire State Rebellion, #OpESR, Communication #1.” As the video declared:

“We are a decentralized non-violent resistance movement, which seeks to restore the rule of law and fight back against the organized criminal class.

One-tenth of one percent of the population has consolidated wealth in unprecedented fashion and launched an all-out economic war against 99.9% of the population.

We are not affiliated with either wing of the two-party oligarchy. We seek an end to the corrupted two-party system by ending the campaign finance and lobbying racket.

Above all, we aim to break up the global banking cartel centered at the Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, Bank of International Settlements and World Bank.

We demand that the primary dealers within the Federal Reserve banking system be broken up and held accountable for rigging markets and destroying the global economy, effective immediately.

As a first sign of good faith, we demand Ben Bernanke step down as Federal Reserve chairman.

Until our demands are met and a rule of law is restored, we will engage in a relentless campaign of non-violent, peaceful, civil disobedience.”

The video ended with the famous Mario Savio quote that was used at the end of the “Second American Revolution – 99% Movement” call to action. That video instantly went viral and tore a hole through cyberspace with hundreds of thousands of views within a few days. Also on March 12th, to coincide with the A99 video release, I did an interview with Max Keiser to discuss the video and call for an occupation of Wall Street. An Anonymous member then released a rough edit dubstep music video of that interview and called it “Empire State Rebellion: An Idea Whose Time Has Come.” Here are some excerpts from the transcript:

“Mainstream media in the United States is the most efficient weapon of mass oppression….

… there is so much divide and conquer rhetoric – it goes from the mainstream media and it filters all the way down into independent media.

So it’s a matter of finding that place where you can overcome the divide and conquer propaganda. And where we can find that place is on Wall Street….

How would a million people clogging lower Manhattan’s financial district play out in the global media?

If we came down there and said: ‘We’re not leaving until we have commitments to break up the banks and end the campaign finance racket.’…

We have the highest, most severe inequality of wealth we have ever had, unlimited campaign spending, budget cuts for the poor, tax breaks for the rich – this is the ultimate recipe for revolution…

Decentralized global rebellion.
Decentralized resistance.
Decentralized revolutionaries.”

It was at this point where I learned from various Anons about their strategy of operating in three-month cycles. With the first video announcement in mid-March, it was then announced that on Flag Day, June 14th, 2011- three months later – they would launch their first offline US operation by holding protests in 23 cities. On June 1st, a call to action titled “Acts of Resistance: What Are You Going To Do To Rebel Against Economic Tyranny?” was released. It stated:

“The big banks have sold us out.
Democrats and Republicans have sold us out.

No one is defending our interests.
Our future is going up in flames.

It’s time for us to stand up and defend ourselves….

#OpESR is a decentralized non-violent resistance movement to end the system of political bribery (campaign finance and lobbying) and break up the big banks centered at the Federal Reserve…”

They were calling for people across the country to “Occupy Public Space.” Being that it was their first day of offline operations, we weren’t expecting much of a turnout, but as the 14th approached, there was an inspiring amount of online attention. On June 9th, I wrote, “Economic Rebellion Update – This Is What Decentralized Resistance Looks Like.”

“Exciting times over here, to say the least! The June 14th Flag Day Rebellion against economic tyranny is growing much stronger and more rapidly than anticipated. As a small part of a decentralized movement, it’s hard to measure the overall impact, but my email inbox is exploding with support and interest. This movement is definitely succeeding in uniting people from all over the political spectrum. Hardcore progressives and libertarians have found common cause. Liberals who are sick of ‘spineless Democrats.’ Conservatives who have had enough of ‘crony-capitalist and imperial Republicans.’ Apolitical people who are sick and tired of living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to get by. The foreclosed upon. The unemployed. People desperately surviving off of food stamps. And especially people who have been impoverished by medical bills. I’ve heard from so many people with horror stories from financial ruin as a result of health problems who are ‘ready to fight back.’ The anger throughout the population is much more intense than even I thought it was.

People who spent their career working on Wall Street are ‘done sitting idle while the market is rigged in favor of a handful of politically connected global banks and firms.’ The people who are taking it upon themselves to take action and spread the word come from all walks of life. Emails have come in from people in the military, veterans, police, firefighters, real estate brokers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, construction workers, accountants, Wal-Mart workers, union members, union haters – they’re all coming together on this. Teachers and students have been strong supporters. College students and recent graduates are feeling completely trapped in debt. Their awareness of their limited opportunities and lack of financial security moving forward is very evident. And, of course, the activists and hacktivists are coming out in force.”

On June 11th, A99 released “OpESR Communication #2: Ctrl+Alt+Bernanke.” This video stated:

“US Politicians have not taken action to break up the Federal Reserve and the ‘Too Big To Fail’ Banks.

US Politicians have not taken action to prosecute the people who caused our economic crisis.

US Politicians have not taken action to end the system of political bribery, the campaign finance and lobbying racket, which allows global bankers to control our political process….

We cannot remain passive while our future is going up in flames.

It is time for us to stand up for ourselves.
It is time for you to stand up for yourself.

We must restore the rule of law and fight back against the organized criminal class.

We must now launch Operation Empire State Rebellion.

The operation will commence on June 14th.

As a first step, we are calling upon you to occupy a public space…”

Once again, that video also instantly went viral and got hundreds of thousands of views. Once that happened, I thought we were on the verge of something big.

VI: Occupy Wall Street 1.0

A member of A99, going by the name of Gary Roland, researched potential Wall Street occupation sites. He told me that he thought a public-private park on Broadway, named Zuccotti Plaza, which was strategically located near the New York Federal Reserve building and Wall Street, was legally the best shot we had at holding a space. I said to him: “Zuccotti Plaza? You mean Liberty Park. I know that park very well. I used to live around the corner from there and go there all the time.” I immediately felt like it was destiny and fate: the very park that I spent my last depressing night at home as an NYC resident would be the place where we would return and the Empire State Rebellion would begin.

With only one day to go before the June 14th launch date, we put up a call for the protesters to “Occupy Liberty Park.” Not wanting to give the police too much lead time, it wasn’t until June 13th that we announced “Activists to Occupy Financial District’s Liberty Park Until Demands Are Met.” The release stated:

“On June 14th at 1pm EST, a group of activists will begin occupation of Liberty Park (recently renamed Zuccotti Park) in lower Manhattan’s Financial District, a few blocks from Wall Street (14971 Broadway, 10007)….

Gary Roland, an organizer of the action, says they will occupy the park ‘indefinitely, to express non-violent dissent to the further consolidation of wealth into the hands of international corporations by the corrupted two-party oligarchy. This is a non-violent action that seeks to express dissent and raise awareness of the failures of our current political discourse, until our demands are satisfied.’…

There are public protests taking place in at least 22 other cities on June 14th to help launch this movement…. This movement has inspired and united supporters from across a broad range of political opinion.”

On the night of June 13th, I packed a bag and sleeplessly waited for the sun to come up on Flag Day, June 14th, 2011. After originally thinking it was going to be a small turnout, I kept thinking: If only 300 people show up, given the attention we were getting throughout the media and the solidarity actions happening in 22 other cities, we might actually pull this off.

However, despite hundreds of thousands of people engaged online and the excitement buzzing around the day’s actions, with such little lead time in shifting the focus to our attempt at occupying Liberty Park, our first occupation attempt was a failed one. We ended up having just as many media cameras there as protesters. Only about 16 of us showed up. It was a humiliating and depressing disappointment. With our bags and folding chairs, we looked pretty pathetic sitting there surrounded by news reporters and cameras. As time went by, the occupation was quickly down to just four of us and one documentary filmmaker. The news crew from Al Jazeera was the last news outlet to leave, giving us a pat on the back, but shaking their heads while saying that they were not going to run a report on our actions. I was extraordinarily frustrated after all the hard work we put in and the attention we got online and throughout the media. I felt as if we just squandered a major opportunity to spark a “relentless nonviolent civil disobedience movement against the organized criminal class.”

Going into June 14th, we were already facing a lot of criticism and ridicule for calling for protests. A prominent journalist that I have a lot of respect for told me I was committing career suicide. People online were mocking us and saying that Americans were too propagandized and passive to take action. However, by the evening of June 14th, reports from protests in the other cities were coming in and people seemed excited. By this time, Gary, Kevin, Oren, me and the documentary filmmaker were the only people left in Zuccotti Park. Disappointed, but still determined, the five of us decided to march down to Wall Street. Standing across the street from the stock exchange, we began to strategize our return. Given the commitment to three-month cycles, mid-September would be the time to try it again.

After having a long discussion on Wall Street, Gary said that he was going to check out the protest that was happening that same day down the road by City Hall. They were calling their protest site Bloombergville. We were hoping to get them to join us at Liberty Park, but they wanted to be closer to City Hall and keep the focus on Bloomberg and his budget cuts. I told Gary that I had to go home to help recap the day’s actions in an online report. We discussed the importance of convincing the Bloomberg protesters that their real enemy is Wall Street. Gary gave his word that he would recruit them for our future actions. He spent the next two plus weeks occupying Bloombergville, spreading the message and rallying the troops for a return to Wall Street. As it turned out, the Bloombergville protesters didn’t need much convincing. They were ready to take on Wall Street next.

While Gary went to help start Bloombergville, I went home on the night of June 14th feeling very depressed, but determined as ever, and posted the following statement to the A99 social network:

“Back home from Liberty Park. It is nice to know that I will be sleeping in a comfortable bed tonight, but pretty depressing that we didn’t get enough people willing to stand up and occupy the park. Despite thousands of emails, tweets, comments and a video that already has 200,000 views, only four people in NYC were ready to put serious action behind their words. (At this point, I don’t know how all the other actions went, so I’ll hold off on commenting on them.)

It seems everyone is content just tweeting and writing strong comments, passively waiting and hoping that other people will do the hard work for them. Unfortunately, as most of you already know, we don’t have much time left to turn things around, some think it is already too late.

Hopefully, now that we have brought a lot of much needed attention to these issues and this movement we can keep building and most of the people who just found out about this, and sat on the sidelines this time, will realize that they actually need to take action next time.

The most frustrating part is that we had so much media attention on this, if only a few hundred people were willing to occupy the park this would have quickly escalated.

I would like to thank Gary Roland, Oren Clark and Kevin Dann – the only other people in all of NYC who were ready to answer this call today and take a stand. It was great spending time with you guys. I’m sure we will meet again very soon.

As disappointed as I am now, given the attention we were able to get online, which obviously doesn’t translate into action, I know that we are building awareness. Americans may not be ready yet, but it is just a matter of time before that awareness grows into the action we need. After all, this was just the first day of the Empire State Rebellion. That’s what we need to keep in perspective. Rome wasn’t built in a day and Rome will not be conquered in a day. We’re getting there, I just hope we can get there before it’s too late.”

The next morning, I posted a recap of #FlagDay actions to AmpedStatus that several A99 Anons wrote, “OpESR Status Update: Empire State Rebellion Day 1.” Here are some excerpts from their report:

“While we have launched this movement beyond expectations throughout Media and Online Operations, and have achieved success in Phase 1 of Cyber Operations, our first step in Ground Operations has been insufficient…. If we are to achieve success, you must take your own action and be a leader. We are confident in our numbers and strength online, but we must urgently evolve into a much stronger offline force as well….

The most ambitious ground operation launched on Day 1 was in New York City’s Financial District, just a few blocks from Wall Street, at Liberty Park. The protest only attracted 16 people in total, with only 4 people ready to occupy the park indefinitely…. Getting people to stand up in this way requires a very strong commitment that most people have not yet realized will be necessary and in their best interests. As we continue Awareness Operations and build momentum, we will reactivate this part of our Ground Operation at a future date. We have set up a social network group dedicated to planning this operation. If you are ready to peacefully occupy a public place, please join the planning group here.”

As you will read in the next section, after the June 14th actions we picked up a significant amount of help, both online and offline. Sure enough, after we spent another three months organizing people to Occupy Wall Street, we ended up back at that park in Manhattan across from the Federal Reserve building and Stock Exchange – exactly where I was on my last depressing night at home and had a humiliating failure in our first attempt at occupation. It was time for some redemption. And this time, on September 17th, 2011, thanks to the leadership, hard work and inspiring commitment of hundreds of others, including many of the people who occupied Bloombergville, the occupation of Wall Street was a success and the 99% Movement soon became a household name.

VII: Anonymous & Occupy Wall Street Leaders Exposed

When people ask me who I’m working for, or if I’m a leader of the movement, I realize that they don’t get it. As Bob Dylan once said: “You know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones?” In this movement, everyone is free and empowered to do what they want, when they want. No one leads by words or title, they lead by their actions, by putting in the hard work. If your actions are positive, constructive and empowering, a critical mass of people will gravitate toward them. If your actions are counterproductive, people will ignore and/or dismiss them. That’s what a decentralized non-hierarchical crowdsourced movement is all about.

The fact is we are all leaders. Unless everyone looks into the mirror and finds the leader within, this movement will not achieve the success that is necessary to create significant and meaningful change. In the early A99 days, people would always ask, “Who is your leader?” One of the Anons brilliantly posted a reply on the A99 social network with the bold headline “A99 Operation Empire State Rebellion Exposed, Leaders Revealed.” It stated:

“There have been many rumors surrounding A99 Operation Empire State Rebellion. Here we will reveal all you need to know.

We are a DECENTRALIZED non-violent movement. If you are looking to contact one of our leaders, go to the nearest mirror and peer deeply into it. It may take some time, but, eventually, one of our leaders will appear with answers to all of your questions.

Empire State Rebellion is an idea… an idea whose time has come!”

When I look back at all the events that I have witnessed, not to mention all the significant events that I’m unaware of, there are many things that make me think that if it wasn’t for that one particular action, maybe the movement would have never taken off and become as powerful as it is.

What if Anonymous hadn’t been there? Anonymous played such a pivotal role in getting the message out and developing the decentralized non-hierarchal strategy. They had three videos that each went viral in support of this movement. They also played a vital role in helping revolutionaries worldwide organize online free from government surveillance and censorship. After we first made contact with some Anons who were active in Tunisia and Egypt, they came to our defense and saved our site from being knocked off the internet. If they hadn’t done that, the 99% Movement may have been over before it began to gain traction. It was from that critical situation that the A99 collaborative effort began. Out of that relationship grew calls to Occupy Wall Street, Occupy the Federal Reserve and Occupy Public Space.

What if Adbusters hadn’t made the call? It was Adbusters who made the now historic call to #OccupyWallStreet on September 17th. It was also Adbusters who provided the highly controversial “What Is Our One Demand?” framing. We had our demands: Get money out of politics, break up the Federal Reserve and big banks, prosecute the banksters and tell Ben Bernanke to step down. However, it was Adbusters’ invitation for people to come and air their own grievances and demands that played a significant role in bringing people out. Adbusters also had a core group of committed people throughout the world who had admired and respected their work for years that were poised and ready to heed their call. I have been an avid reader of Adbusters since they put out their first issue. They’ve been fighting a media war since 1989, inspired by Situationist theories and tactics that I highly respect and admire.

What if Bloomberg hadn’t made his budget cuts and the Bloombergville camp had never been set up? The Bloombergville protest was pivotal. The group of organizations and people that made up Bloombergville were a driving force in making Occupy Wall Street successful. They had community based organizing and boots on the ground! It was also during Bloombergville that protesters were experimenting with The People’s General Assembly concept that was being used in other countries during occupation protests. Without that experience, the New York City General Assembly (NYCGA) probably wouldn’t be what it is today. The NYCGA was making so many key decisions throughout August and early September, before the occupation started, and many people and organizations that were not involved in Bloombergville were added into the mix during this time frame.

The NYCGA was a key factor in building the participatory direct democratic experience that made Liberty Park a vibrant community. Instead of just being a protest against Wall Street and our corrupted government, the NYCGA created an alternative, a new way of living were everyone’s voice could be heard and mattered. People across the country then wanted to have their own communities based around the GA concept. The GA was another very powerful meme that united people on common ground. And with the New York City rule against amplified sound; the human microphone, mic checks, twinkling fingers and hard blocks became the language of a new revolutionary generation.

What if Global Revolution hadn’t been there livestreaming? After taking part in the Spanish uprising and protests around the world, the Global Revolution team came to Zucotti with a wealth of experience and skill to provide internet video livestream coverage of the occupation as it unfolded. Many people that came to the park told me that they had seen what was happening on the livestream and decided to come down to help out and take part. Global Rev exploded the livestream concept, which became yet another very powerful meme and tool for organizing.

What if the “Stop the Machine” coalition hadn’t been organizing and building awareness for their October occupation of DC? The Stop the Machine coalition featured an amazing collection of veteran organizers who were planning an occupation of DC as we started planning the September 17th occupation. They had already built up awareness and momentum, and they threw their support behind OWS in the run up to September 17th in a significant way. I remember thinking, if we can just make the NY occupation last until October 6th, when the other occupation started in DC, we could really break through to mainstream consciousness. As it turned out, the DC occupation began just as many other occupations began to spring up around the country.

Going back even further, to February 2011, what if the Wisconsin state capital building hadn’t been occupied? As I wrote on February 20th, 2011:

“This battle in Madison, Wisconsin, between the American people and the global financial elite, represents the opening salvo, the awakening of an American resistance movement and a sign of what’s to come.”

You can even look back at some of the crucial individual actions. What if Chris hadn’t proposed making “We Are the 99%” the rally cry, and started the influential WeAreThe99Percent Tumblr blog that allowed people to upload their picture and tell their story? After much debate, the “We Are the 99%” rally cry achieved consensus. When we headed toward Wall Street on September 17th chanting “We Are the 99%,” the feeling I had was comparable to how I felt when I got married and when my son was born. The energy I felt that day was incredible! And once I found out that Chris and Priscilla had put up the Tumblr site, I instantly posted it to AmpedStatus and blasted it out to the 99% email list. That site was a stroke of genius. Priscilla then played another key role in starting the Occupied Wall Street Journal, giving the movement its first newspaper.

What if Justine had never put up OccupyWallSt.org? OccupyWallSt.org became the online voice of OWS. It quickly evolved into the go-to site for news on the occupation, with vital information on how people could get involved. What if Alexa hadn’t built the US Day of Rage Twitter army? What if Nathan hadn’t been covering the run up to September 17th for Waging Nonviolence? What if Ella hadn’t co-created OccupyTogether.org with amazing 99% graphic designs? Her designs spread all over the internet and throughout occupations worldwide. OccupyTogether.org became a key organizing platform where people could find and announce new occupations. These are just a few of many pivotal individual actions that helped build this movement.

What about the significant role of the New York Police Department (NYPD)?

What if some NYPD officers hadn’t committed acts of brutality against peaceful protesters? What if Tony Bologna hadn’t pepper sprayed defenseless women? I was nervous that Saturday, September 24th was going to be our last big day of action. And then, out of the blue, came a white-shirted police officer firing pepper spray at a group of defenseless and peaceful women that were already netted and trapped into a corner. It was one of many shocking and disgusting moments of police brutality. When video of that incident went viral, the movement instantly took off. This incident also demonstrates the power of internet video and citizen journalism. If people didn’t have the ability to share videos instantly and create the news themselves, this act of police violence would have gone unreported by mainstream media.

Then, the following Saturday, we had the Brooklyn Bridge incident where hundreds were arrested after a police officer told us to step off the sidewalk into one lane on the street after we were halfway across the bridge. A few weeks later came the tragic Scott Olsen incident. Then Dorli Rainey, an 84-year old woman who was a school teacher and ran for mayor, got pepper sprayed. Countless incidents of police brutality enraged and energized the movement in ways we could never have. What if Sergeant Shamar Thomas hadn’t been on the frontlines of Times Square to bravely stand up in his Marine uniform and call out the police?

What if small groups of people in cities and towns across the US hadn’t found the bravery within themselves to step up and start a local occupation in solidarity with their brothers and sisters in New York and throughout the world?

What if the courageous people of Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Spain, Chile and the many other millions of people in oppressed nations throughout the world hadn’t all stepped up and risked their lives protesting under harsh conditions?

All of these “what if” examples are just a few of many. There are so many examples that it is obvious that the birth and growth of this decentralized movement has been the result of many powerful forces standing up and coming together, in the right place, at the right time. Clearly, this movement is built on an idea whose time has come… and we all know that you cannot arrest, evict or kill an idea.

VIII: Get Money Out of Politics & Bernanke Must Go

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is guilty of crimes against humanity. The Fed’s policies have deliberately impoverished tens of millions of people. The Federal Reserve has been the central planning force behind our predatory economy and has played the most pivotal role in the criminal Wall Street mafia racket. To use just one of countless examples of how Ben Bernanke has implemented destructive policies that ultimately led to our current global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic domination, consider his Quantitative Easing (QE) policies and their contribution to rising food costs. As I wrote in February 2011:

Centrally Planned Economic Repression

To be clear, there are several significant factors contributing to rising food prices, such as extreme weather conditions, biofuel production and Wall Street speculation; but the Federal Reserve’s policies deliberately threw gasoline all over those brush fires. QE2 was another economic napalm bomb from the global banking cartel.

In a recent McClatchy news article titled ‘Egypt’s unrest may have roots in food prices, US Fed policy,’ Kevin Hall reports:

‘The truth of the matter is that when the Federal Reserve moved on the quantitative easing, it did export inflation to a lot of these emerging markets…. There’s no doubt that one of the side effects of the weak dollar and quantitative easing has been rising commodity prices. It helped create this bullish environment for commodities. This is a very delicate balancing act.’

‘It’s a view shared by Ed Yardeni, a veteran financial market analyst, who reached a similar conclusion in a research note to investors…. He joked that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke should be added to a list of revolutionaries, since his quantitative easing policy, unveiled last year in Wyoming, has provoked unrest and change in the developing world.

‘Since he first indicated his support for such a revolutionary monetary change… the prices of corn, soybeans and wheat have risen 53 percent, 37 percent and 24.4 percent through Friday’s close,’ Yardeni noted. ‘The price of crude oil rose 19.8 percent over this period from $75.17 to $90.09 this (Monday) morning. Soaring food and fuel prices are compounding anger attributable to widespread unemployment in the countries currently experiencing riots.’

The people throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa, on the fringe of the Neo-Liberal economic empire and most vulnerable to the Fed’s inflationary policies, are the first to rebel.”

It is important to point out that the people of countries like Tunisia and Egypt have long suffered from grotesquely exploitative International Monetary Fund economic policies under puppet dictators like Mubarak and Ben Ali. However, as stated above, it was Bernanke’s QE policies that ignited this global revolution. And the QE policies were yet another facet of the $29 TRILLION criminal bailout of the global banking cartel, centered on Wall Street, that caused the collapse of the global economic Ponzi scheme that enriches the world’s wealthiest one-tenth of 1%, at the expense and suffering of the 99%.

Due to Bernanke’s central role in all of this, when we held protests and attempted to occupy Liberty Park on Flag Day 2011, we came there, inspired by Egyptians that called for Mubarak’s resignation, to demand that the Mubarak of the global economy step down as well – that, of course, being Bernanke. Obviously, Bernanke is only a figurehead, an interchangeable puppet like Mubarak and Obama. The fact that President Obama supported Bernanke’s reconfirmation as chairman, and the fact that Obama has chosen people like Geithner, Summers, Dailey and Lew to run the economy and his administration, also shows that the President – whether it’s Obama or Romney – is ultimately a bankster propaganda puppet in a rigged system. The presidency of the United States has been reduced to a public relations operation. The president is an empty suit reading from a teleprompter designed to sell and deceive the American public into passively accepting whatever it is that the masters on Wall Street want.

When politicians talk about the need to have an “adult conversation” about fixing the problems that have put us into this severe crisis, if they were serious that conversation would be about getting money out of politics. No matter what your issues of concern are – healthcare, education, foreclosures, unemployment, the environment, war, debt, etc. – when you get to the root of that particular problem, it all boils down to the system of political bribery. Through campaign finance, lobbying and the revolving door between Washington and the most powerful global corporations, our government has been bought off. A stunning 94% of the time, the candidate who spends the most money on their campaign wins the election. Therefore, we have a country that is run by a Wall Street mafia that bribes and pays off politicians to do whatever they want at the expense of 99% of the population.

This is not some debatable opinion. If you pay attention to our current political system, it is common sense.

As a first step in fixing our problems, we need a Constitutional Amendment that clearly states that “corporations are not people” and “money is not speech.” Until we make this first common sense step to get money out of politics, all the changes we need to make urgently will not happen in a meaningful and significant way.

In my opinion, we need to create entirely new decentralized governmental and economic systems. However, to evolve our current obsolete system of rule to a point where that is possible, without bloodshed, we must engage in a relentless campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience until money is removed from our political process. And we cannot wait years and election cycles for this to happen! The damage has already been done and our crisis is too severe for anyone with an aware conscious to remain passive any longer.

Most of us who are active within this movement and fighting on the frontlines are not doing this because it’s fun. We are doing this because we are aware enough to know that we have to. We have no choice. You can remain passive and die a slow death while leaving future generations in catastrophe, or you can stand up for yourself and your family and fight a nonviolent war for a sustainable future.

Which side of history do you want to be on?

The choice is yours.

IX: Disclaimer On the Original Report & Call to Action

Since this movement has taken off and evolved far beyond our original conception, my opinions and sense of possibility have also evolved. After spending countless hours at Liberty Park in conversation and debate with people from across the world, I can see how I, too, was trapped in a certain type of groupthink when I originally wrote this call to action two years ago. However, I still firmly stand by the opinions expressed and the facts are still the facts.

The opinions expressed throughout the report are solely mine and are not endorsed by the overall movement.

So here it is… the exact original report and call to action as it was written two years ago.

(Read full original report here.)

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

See you on the frontlines,

David

X: Mic Check: The People Speak

In the last section of the book, we feature many statements from occupiers, organizers and supporters of the 99%. I do not agree with everything they say, nor do they agree with everything I say. This is what democracy looks like.

Book Features Statements from…

Abraham Heisler
Alexa O’Brien
Andrew Crook
Anons 4b_by & cr3w
Anon Fury
AnonymoUSA99
Benjamin F. Chavis Jr.
Carl Herman
Charles Hugh Smith
Chris Hedges
Chris, We Are the 99%
Chuck Banner
Dan Nowman Niswander
Danny Goldberg
Danny Schechter
David Swanson
Deepak Chopra
Dennis Trainor, Jr.
Derek Cressman
Dylan Ratigan
Ella Durham
Ellen Brown
Eric Nies
Gabrielle Price
Gary Roland
George Washington
Glen Ford
Goldi
Ian Escuela
Jason Leopold
Jay Ischinger
Jeff Vander Clute
Jessica Nuna
Jill Cohn
Joan Donovan
Karl Denninger
Kanene Holder
Kevin Dann
Kevin Zeese
Lee Camp
Linda Ricketts
Lisa Clapier
Lopi LaRoe
Lucas Vazquez
Margaret Flowers
Margot Paez
Mary Beth Fielder
Matt Prather
Max Fraad Wolff
Max Keiser
Michael C. Ruppert
Michael Hudson
Michael Perlman
Mikal Kamil
Mike Krieger
Mike Papantonio
Miles Mogulescu
Nathan Schneider
Nicki Morris
Noam Chomsky
Nomi Prins
Oren Clark
Priscilla Grim
Richard Rosenthal
Rita Jacobs
Russell Brand
Russell Cohn
Russell Simmons
Sandrine Orabona
Sarah Mason
Sgt. Shamar Thomas
Shepard Fairey
Simone Reyes
Stephen Marshall
Steven Starr
Terrence McNally
Tesha Miller
Tom Morello
William K. Black

The Economic Elite Vs. The People ~ Original 99% Movement Call to Action

This report was originally released as a six-part series on AmpedStatus.com. The first part was published on February 15, 2010. The last part was published on February 27, 2010.

I: Casualties of Economic Terrorism, Surveying the Damage
II: The Rise of the Economic Elite
III: Exposing Our Enemy: Meet the Economic Elite
IV: The Financial Coup d’Etat
V: Overcoming the Divide & Conquer Strategy
VI: How to Fight Back and Win: Common Ground Issues That Must Be Won

“The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist,
but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts
on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions
and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.”

– Michael Lind, To Have and to Have Not

It’s time for 99% of Americans to mobilize and aggressively move on common sense political reforms.

Yes, of course, we all have very strong differences of opinion on many issues. However, like our Founding Fathers before us, we must put aside our differences and unite to fight a common enemy.

It has now become evident to a critical mass that the Republican and Democratic parties, along with all three branches of our government, have been bought off by a well-organized Economic Elite who are tactically destroying our way of life. The harsh truth is that 99% of the US population no longer has political representation. The US economy, government and tax system are now blatantly rigged against us.

Current statistical societal indicators clearly demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched and an analysis of current governmental policies prove that conditions for 99% of Americans will continue to deteriorate. The Economic Elite have engineered a financial coup and have brought war to our doorstep. . . and make no mistake, they have launched a war to eliminate the US middle class.

To those who feel I am using extreme rhetoric, I ask you to please take a few minutes of your time to hear me out and research the evidence put forth. The facts are there for the unprejudiced, rational and reasoned mind to absorb. It is the unfortunate reality of our current crisis.

Unless we all unite and organize on common ground, our very way of life and the ideals that our country was founded upon will continue to unravel.

Before exposing exactly who the Economic Elite are, and discussing common sense ways in which we can defeat them, let’s take a look at how much damage they have already caused.

I: Casualties of Economic Terrorism, Surveying the Damage

The devastating numbers across-the-board on the economic front are staggering. I’ll go through some of them here, many we have already become all too familiar with. We hear some of these numbers all the time, so much so that it appears as if we have already begun “to normalize the unthinkable.” You may be sick of hearing them, but behind each number is an enormous amount of individual suffering, American lives and families who are struggling worse than they ever have.

America is the richest nation in history, yet we now have the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world with an unprecedented number of Americans living in dire straits and over 50 million citizens already living in poverty.

The government has come up with clever ways to downplay all of these numbers, but we have over 50 million people who need to use food stamps to eat, and a stunning 50% of US children will use a food stamp to eat at some point in their childhood. Approximately 20,000 people are added to this total every day. In 2009, one out of five US households didn’t have enough money to buy food. In households with children, this number rose to 24%, as the hunger rate among US citizens has now reached an all time high.

We also currently have over 50 million US citizens without healthcare. 1.4 million Americans filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a 32% increase from 2008. As bankruptcies continue to skyrocket, medical bankruptcies are responsible for over 60% of them, and over 75% of the medical bankruptcies filed are from people who have healthcare insurance. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world.

In total, Americans have lost $5 trillion from their pensions and savings since the economic crisis began and $13 trillion in the value of their homes. During the first full year of the crisis, workers between the age of 55 – 60, who have worked for 20 – 29 years, have lost an average of 25% off their 401k. “Personal debt has risen from 65% of income in 1980 to 125% today.” Over five million US families have already lost their homes, in total 13 million US families are expected to lose their home by 2014, with 25% of current mortgages underwater. Deutsche Bank has an even grimmer prediction: “The percentage of ‘underwater’ loans may rise to 48 percent, or 25 million homes.” Every day 10,000 US homes enter foreclosure. Statistics show that an increasing number of these people are not finding shelter elsewhere, there are now over 3 million homeless Americans, the fastest growing segment of the homeless population is single parents with children.

One place more and more Americans are finding a home is in prison. With a prison population of 2.3 million people, we now have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world – the per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000 citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000, France has 80 per 100,000, Saudi Arabia has 45 per 100,000. The prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over the next few years. A recent report from the Hartford Advocate titled “Incarceration Nation” revealed that “a new prison opens every week somewhere in America.”

Mass Unemployment

The government unemployment rate is deceptive on several levels. It doesn’t count people who are “involuntary part-time workers,” meaning workers who are working part-time but want to find full-time work. It also doesn’t count “discouraged workers,” meaning long-term unemployed people who lost hope and don’t consistently look for work. As time goes by, more and more people stop consistently looking for work and are discounted from the unemployment figure. For instance, in January, 1.1 million workers were eliminated from the unemployment total because they were “officially” labeled “discouraged workers.” So instead of the number rising, we will hear deceptive reports about unemployment leveling off.

On top of this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently discovered that 824,000 job losses were never accounted for due to a “modeling error” in their data. Even in their initial January data there appears to be a huge understating, with the newest report saying the economy lost 20,000 jobs. TrimTabs employment analysis, which has consistently provided more accurate data, “estimated that the U.S. economy shed 104,000 jobs in January.”

When you factor in all these uncounted workers — “involuntary part-time” and “discouraged workers” — the unemployment rate rises from 9.7% to over 20%. In total, we now have over 30 million US citizens who are unemployed or underemployed. The rarely cited “employment-participation” rate, which reveals the percentage of the population that is currently in the workforce, has now fallen to 64%.

Even based on the “official” unemployment rate, just to get back to the unemployment level of 4.6% that we had in 2007, we need to create over 10 million new jobs, and most every serious economist will tell you that these jobs are not coming back. In fact, we are still consistently shedding jobs, on just one day, January 27th, several companies announced new cuts of more than 60,000 jobs.

Due to the length of this crisis already, millions of Americans are reaching a point where the unemployment benefits that they have been surviving off of are coming to an end. More workers have already been out of work longer than at any point since statistics have been recorded, with over six million now unemployed for over six months. A record 20 million Americans qualified for unemployment insurance benefits last year, causing 27 states to run out of funds, with seven more also expected to go into the red within the next few months. In total, 40 state programs are expected to go broke.

Most economists believe that the unemployment rate will remain high for the foreseeable future. What will happen when we have millions of laid-off workers without any unemployment benefits to save them?

Working More for Less

The millions struggling to find work are just part of the story. Due to the fact that we now have a record high six people for every one job opening, companies have been able to further increase the workload on their remaining employees. They have been able to increase the amount of hours Americans are working, reduce wages and drastically cut back on benefits. Even though Americans were already the most productive workers in the world before the economic crisis, in the third quarter of 2009, average worker productivity increased by an annualized rate of 9.5%, at the same time unit labor cost decreased by 5.2%. This has led to record profits for many companies. Of the 220 companies in the S&P 500 who have reported fourth-quarter results thus far, 78% of them had “better-than-expected profits” with earnings 17% above expectations, “the highest for any quarter since Thomson Reuters began tracking data.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6% while the unemployment rate was 5.8%. With the unemployment rate now at 10%, median income has been falling at a 5% rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans’ job satisfaction level is now at an all time low.

There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today’s economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet.

A Crime Against Humanity

The mainstream news media will numb us to this horrifying reality by endlessly talking about the latest numbers, but they never piece them together to show you the whole devastating picture, and they rarely show you all the immense individual suffering behind them. This is how they “normalize the unthinkable” and make us become passive in the face of such a high casualty count.

Behind each of these numbers, is a tremendous amount of misery, the physical toll is only outdone by the severe psychological toll. Anyone who has had to put off medical care, or who couldn’t get medical care for one of their family members due to financial circumstances, can tell you about the psychological toll that is on top of the physical suffering. Anyone who has felt the stress of wondering how they were going to get their child’s next meal or their own, or the stress of not knowing how you are going to pay the mortgage, rent, electricity or heat bill, let alone the car payment, gas, phone, cable or internet bill.

There are now well over 150 million Americans who feel stress over these things on a consistent basis. Over 60% of Americans now live paycheck to paycheck.

These are all basic things that every person should be able to easily afford in a technologically advanced society such as ours. The reason why we struggle with these things is because the Economic Elite have robbed us all. This amount of suffering in the United States of America is literally a crime against humanity.

II: The Rise of the Economic Elite

Part II: The Rise of the Economic Elite -- Economic Elite Vs. The People“The war against working people should be understood to be a real war…. Specifically in the U.S., which happens to have a highly class-conscious business class…. And they have long seen themselves as fighting a bitter class war, except they don’t want anybody else to know about it.” — Noam Chomsky

As a record number of US citizens are struggling to get by, many of the largest corporations are experiencing record-breaking profits, and CEOs are receiving record-breaking bonuses. How could this be happening; how did we get to this point?

The Economic Elite have escalated their attack on US workers over the past few years; however, this attack began to build intensity in the 1970s. In 1970, CEOs made $25 for every $1 the average worker made. Due to technological advancements, production and profit levels exploded from 1970 – 2000. With the lion’s share of increased profits going to the CEOs, this pay ratio dramatically rose to $90 for CEOs to $1 for the average worker.

As ridiculous as that seems, an in-depth study in 2004 on the explosion of CEO pay revealed that, including stock options and other benefits, CEO pay is more accurately $500 to $1.

Paul Buchheit, from DePaul University, revealed, “From 1980 to 2006 the richest 1% of America tripled their after-tax percentage of our nation’s total income, while the bottom 90% have seen their share drop over 20%.” Robert Freeman added, “Between 2002 and 2006, it was even worse: an astounding three quarters of all the economy’s growth was captured by the top 1%.”

Due to this, the United States already had the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world prior to the financial crisis. Since the crisis, which has hit the average worker much harder than CEOs, the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99% of the US population has grown to a record high. The economic top one percent of the population now owns over 70% of all financial assets, an all-time record.

As mentioned before, just look at the first full year of the crisis when workers lost an average of 25 percent off their 401k. During the same time period, the wealth of the 400 richest Americans increased by $30 billion, bringing their total combined wealth to $1.57 trillion, which is more than the combined net worth of 50% of the US population. Just to make this point clear, 400 people have more wealth than 155 million people combined.

Meanwhile, 2009 was a record-breaking year for Wall Street bonuses, as firms issued $150 billion to their executives. 100% of these bonuses are a direct result of our tax dollars, so if we used this money to create jobs, instead of giving it to a handful of top executives, we could have paid an annual salary of $30,000 to 5 million people.

So while US workers are now working more hours and have become dramatically more productive and profitable, our pay is actually declining and all the dramatic increases in wealth are going straight into the pockets of the Economic Elite.

If our income had kept pace with compensation distribution rates established in the early 1970s, we would all be making at least three times as much as we are currently making. How different would your life be if you were making $120,000 a year, instead of $40,000?

So it should come as no surprise to see that we now have the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world and the highest inequality of wealth in our nation’s history. The backbone of America, a hard-working middle class that has made our country a world leader, has been devastated.

Now that we have a better understanding of how our income has been suppressed over the past forty years, let’s take a look at how the economy has been designed to take the limited money we receive and put it into the hands of the Economic Elite as well.

Costs of Living

Outside of the workplace, in almost all our costs of living the system is now blatantly rigged against us. Let’s take a look at it, starting with our tax system.

In total, the average US citizen is forced to give up approximately 30% of our income in taxes. This tax system is now strategically designed to flow straight into the hands of the Economic Elite. A huge percentage of our tax dollars ultimately ends up in their pockets. The past decade proves that — whether it’s the Republicans or the Democrats running the government — our tax money is not going into our community; it is going into the pockets of the billionaires who have bought off both parties – it is obscene.

For an example of how this system flows to the Economic Elite, just look at the Wall Street “bailout.” The real size of the bailout is estimated to be $14 trillion – and could end up costing trillions more than that. By now you are probably also sick of hearing about the bailout, but stop and think about this for a moment… Do you comprehend how much $14 trillion is?

What could be accomplished with this money is almost beyond common comprehension.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg that has hit us. On top of the trillions given to the Wall Street elite, we already have a record $12.3 trillion in national debt – and we now have to pay $500 billion in interest to the Economic Elite on this debt every year, yet another way they are milking us dry. When you add in unfunded liabilities owed, like social security payments, we actually owe a stunning $74 trillion. That adds up to a debt of $242,000 for every man, woman and child in America.

Trillions more, 25% of taxpayer dollars allocated to military spending goes unaccounted for every year, not to mention the billions spent on overcharging and outright fraud. During the War on Terror, the Economic Elite have used our tax money to build a private army that has more soldiers deployed than the US military – a congressional study revealed that 69% of the “US” fighting forces deployed throughout the world in our name are in fact private mercenaries, 80% of them are foreign nationals. Private contractors regularly get paid three to five times more than our soldiers, and have been repeatedly caught overcharging and committing fraud on a massive scale. A congressional investigation revealed this and strongly recommended that we seize wasting tax dollars on these private military contractors. However, under Obama, there has actually been a drastic increase in total tax dollars spent on them.

In 2009, just over $1 trillion tax dollars were spent on the military. It’s safe to say that at least $350 billion of that was needlessly wasted.

When you research our tax system you see an unprecedented level of waste and fraud rampant throughout most expenditures. Our tax system is a national disaster of epic proportions. It is literally an organized criminal operation that continues to rob us in broad daylight, with zero accountability.

Politicians and mainstream “news” outlets will not tell you this, but most every serious economist knows that due to so much theft and debt created in the tax system, the only way to fix things, other than stopping the theft and seizing the trillions that have been stolen, will be for the government to cut important social funding and drastically raise our taxes. Other than the record national debt, many states are running record deficits and “barreling toward economic disaster, raising the likelihood of higher taxes, more government layoffs and deep cuts in services.” Our nation’s biggest state economies, like California and New York, are the ones in most trouble.

To merely say that things will not be improving economically is to be a delusional optimist. The truth that you will not hear: we have been hit by an economic deathblow and the United States lays in ruins.

It’s not just this criminal tax system; the theft is now built into all our costs of living.

Trillions more in our spending on food and fuel have been stolen due to fraudulent stock transactions and overcharging. Just ten years ago, in 2000, American families paid 7% of our income on food and fuel. We now pay 20%. This drastic increase is primarily driven by fraudulent market manipulation that drives up stock prices. Congress uncovered this in 2006, as part of the Enron investigation. They found that companies manipulated the oil market to create major spikes in stock values, but then Congress didn’t do anything about it. Nothing to see here, just move on.

As mentioned before, we have the most expensive health care system in the world and we are forced to pay twice as much as other countries, and the overall care we get in return ranks 37th in the world. On average, US citizens are now paying a record high 8% of their income on medical care.

One of the reasons why foreclosure rates are so high is because the percentage of income Americans pay on their housing has risen to 34%.

So for these basic necessities – taxes, food, fuel, shelter and medical bills – we have already lost 92% of our limited income. Then factor in ever-increasing interest rates on credit cards, student loans, rising prices for cable, internet, phone, bank fees, etc., etc., etc…. We are being robbed and gouged in all costs of living, in every aspect of our life. No wonder bankruptcies are skyrocketing and the number of people suffering from psychological depression has reached an epidemic level.

The American worker is screwed over every step of the way, and it all starts with the explosion in the cost of a college education. This is one of the Economic Elite’s most devastating weapons. To have any chance of succeeding in this economy, it is commonly believed that you must attend the best college possible. With the rising costs involved, today’s students are graduating with record levels of debt from student loans. At the same time, the unemployment rate among recent college graduates has risen higher than the national average, and those who do find work are making significantly less than they expected to make. This combination of extreme debt and reduced pay has crippled an entire generation right from the start and has put them in a vicious cycle of spiraling debt that they will struggle with for the rest of their lives. The most recent college graduates are now known as a “lost generation.”

The American dream has turned into a nightmare. The economic system is a sophisticated prison cell; the indentured servant is now an indebted wage slave; whips and chains have evolved into debts.

“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by sword. The other is by debt.” — John Adams

Concealing National Wealth

“Liberty in the concrete signifies release from the impact of particular oppressive forces; emancipation from something once taken as a normal part of human life but now experienced as bondage…. Today, it signifies liberation from material insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that prevent multitudes from participation in the vast cultural resources that are at hand.” — John Dewey

When you take the time to research and analyze the wealth that has gone to the economic top one percent, you begin to realize just how much we have been robbed. Trillions upon trillions of dollars that could make the lives of all hard-working Americans much easier have been strategically funneled into the coffers of the Economic Elite. The denial of wealth is the key to the Economic Elite’s power. An entire generation of massive wealth creation has been strategically withheld from 99% of the US population.

The US public doesn’t have any understanding of how much wealth has been generated and concentrated into the hands of the Economic Elite over the past 40 years; there is no historical frame of reference. This withholding of wealth is truly the greatest crime against humanity in the history of civilization.

What could be done with all the money that has been hoarded by the Economic Elite is extraordinary!

Let’s consider what we could do with the money that has been stolen from us. On top of what should be our average six-figure yearly income, we could have:

* Free health care for every American,
* A free 4 bedroom home for every American family,
* 5% tax rate for 99% of Americans,
* Drastically improved public education and free college for all,
* Significantly improved public transportation and infrastructure,

The list goes on…

This is not some far-fetched fantasy. These are all things that Franklin D. Roosevelt talked about doing in the 1940s, long before the explosion of wealth creation in our technologically advanced global economy. The money for all this is already there, stashed into the claws of the Economic Elite. The denial of wealth to the masses is the key to the Economic Elite’s power. Outside of outdated and obsolete economic models and theories — and incredibly short-sighted greed — there is no reason why all this money should be kept in the hands of a few, at the immense suffering and expense of the many.

If Americans could just understand how much wealth is being withheld from us, we would have a massive uprising and the Economic Elite would be swept away, into the history books alongside the evil despots of the past.

“For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.” — George Orwell

Now that we have a better understanding of how the Economic Elite dominate our lives, let’s take a look at exactly who they are….

III: Exposing Our Enemy – Meet the Economic Elite

The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America: Part III: Exposing Our Enemy - Meet the Economic Elite

“The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes… As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.” – Abraham Lincoln

The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America: Part III: Exposing Our Enemy - Meet the Economic Elite


U.S. Elite
Institutions:

Federal Reserve
Business Council
Bilderberg Group
Conference Board
Brookings Institute
Advertising Council
Heritage Foundation
Trilateral Commission
Business Round Table
Chamber of Commerce
Federal Trade Commission
Council on Foreign Relations
American Petroleum Institute
American Enterprise Institute
American Bankers Association
Pharm Research & Manufacturers
Public Relations Society of America
American Psychological Association
Project for a New American Century
Securities and Exchange Commission
Committee for Economic Development
National Association of Manufacturers
Carnegie / Ford / Rockefeller foundations
Military / Media / Prison Industrial Complex

I don’t view the Economic Elite as a small group of men who meet in secrecy to control the world. They do feature elements of conspiracy and are clearly composed of secretive organizations like the Bilderberg Group – this is not a conspiracy theory, this is a conspiracy fact – but as a whole the Economic Elite are primarily united by ideology. They’re made up of thousands of individuals who subscribe to an ideology of exploitation and the belief that wealth and resources need to be concentrated into the fewest hands possible (theirs), at the expense of the many.

That being said, there are some definite lead players in this group and it is important that we are not too vague and expose the individuals who publicly lead them. Focusing on the fundamental structure of the US economy, we have people like Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, John Mack, Vikram Pandit, John Thain, Hank Greenberg, Ken Lewis, John J. Castellani, Edward Yingling and Tom Donohue.

In total, the Economic Elite are made up of about 0.5% of the US population. At the center of this group is the Business Roundtable, an organization representing Fortune 500 CEOs that is also interlocked with several lead elite organizations. Most Americans have never heard of the Business Roundtable. However, in my analysis, it is the most influential and powerful Economic Elite organization.

“The Business Roundtable joined the Business Council at the heart of both the corporate community and the policy-formation network and now has the most powerful role…. The Roundtable’s interlocks with other policy groups and with think tanks are presented [below].” -– G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America?

The Economic Elite Vs. The People of the United States of America: Part III: Exposing Our Enemy - Meet the Economic Elite

The Roundtable’s first year of operation was 1972, which coincided with the beginning of the CEO salary explosion, and has been the driving force behind the unprecedented concentration of wealth since their inception. Their dominance over the US economy and government is unparalleled. Their members are a Who’s Who of everything that is wrong with our economy. Here is a partial list of some of their lead members:

——-Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs
——-James Dimon, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
——-James P. Gorman, Morgan Stanley
——-Vikram S. Pandit, Citigroup, Inc.
——-Brian T. Moynihan, Bank of America
——-Brendan McDonagh, HSBC
——-Robert W. Selander, MasterCard Incorporated
——-Kenneth I. Chenault, American Express Company
——-Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation
——-Glenn A. Britt, Time Warner Cable Inc.
——-Philippe Dauman, Viacom, Inc.
——-Jeffrey R. Immelt, General Electric Company
——-Brian L. Roberts, Comcast Corporation
——-Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft Corporation
——-John T. Chambers, Cisco Systems, Inc.
——-Randall L. Stephenson, AT&T Inc.
——-Ivan G. Seidenberg, Verizon Communications
——-David G. DeWalt, McAfee, Inc.
——-Steven R. Loranger, ITT Corporation
——-Paul T. Hanrahan, AES Corporation, The
——-Riley P. Bechtel, Bechtel Group, Inc.
——-W. James McNerney , Boeing Company, The
——-Rex W. Tillerson, Exxon Mobil Corporation
——-Marvin E. Odum, Shell Oil Company
——-John S. Watson, Chevron Corporation
——-James J. Mulva, ConocoPhillips
——-John B. Hess, Hess Corporation
——-James E. Rogers Duke Energy Corporation
——-J. Larry Nichols, Devon Energy Corporation
——-Ronald A. Williams, Aetna Inc.
——-David Cordani, CIGNA
——-Jeffrey B. Kindler , Pfizer Inc.
——-Angela F. Braly, WellPoint, Inc.
——-John C. Lechleiter, Eli Lilly and Company
——-Edward B. Rust, Jr., State Farm
——-Andrew N. Liveris, Dow Chemical
——-James W. Owens, Caterpillar Inc.
——-Ellen J. Kullman, DuPont
——-Edward E. Whitacre Jr., General Motors Company
——-Michael T. Duke, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

The Business Roundtable is the most powerful activist organization in the United States. Their leaders regularly lobby members of Congress behind closed doors and often meet privately with the President and his administration. Any legislation that affects Roundtable members has almost zero possibility of passing without their support.

For three major examples, look at healthcare and financial reform, along with the military budget. The healthcare reform bill devolved into what amounts to an insurance industry bailout and was drastically altered by Roundtable lobbyists representing interests like WellPoint, Aetna, Cigna, Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson. Obama and Congress are trying to please the Roundtable with a bill that supports their interests. This led to the dropping of the public-option put forth in the House bill. However, when it came to finishing the bill, Roundtable members began to walk away from the process. That’s the real reason why the reform bill has stalled. Obama will be meeting with the Roundtable on February 24th, in hopes of getting healthcare reform back on track. After that meeting, he will then hold a bipartisan healthcare meeting with members of congress.

Also being addressed in Obama’s upcoming meeting with the Roundtable are issues concerning financial reform. Almost every aspect of financial reform has been D.O.A. thanks to Roundtable lobbyists representing the interests of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, Master Card and American Express. They even pushed to make sure Ben Bernanke was reconfirmed as the head of the Federal Reserve and they have also guided Obama into focusing on deficit reduction, now that their member companies are healthy again and making record profits after receiving trillions in government subsidies. The Roundtable played a pivotal role in the appointment of Hank Paulson, formerly the CEO of Roundtable member Goldman Sachs, who replaced Roundtable member John Snow as US Treasury Secretary. The Roundtable also strongly lobbied on behalf of current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and White House National Economic Council Director Larry Summers. Although there has been recent talk of Geithner being replaced at the Treasury, the lead choice to replace him is Jamie Dimon, Roundtable member and CEO of JP Morgan Chase.

The drastic rise in military spending is also a result of Roundtable lobbyists pushing the interests of large military companies like Boeing and Bechtel, along with the largest oil companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, Hess and Chevron.

The Roundtable tells politicians what they want done, and the politicians do it. At times, Roundtable members even write the laws themselves. On financial reform alone, those representing Wall Street firms gave “$42 million to lawmakers, mostly to members of the House and Senate banking committees and House and Senate leaders.” During the 2008 election cycle, they gave $155 million: $88 million to Democrats and $67 million to Republicans. Keep in mind, this is the spending on just their financial reform initiative. When it came to health reform, they gave even more.

When it comes to getting elected, over 90% of the time the candidate who simply spends more money on their campaign wins the election. The Roundtable and politicians recognize this fact, so the overwhelming majority of current elected officials relied heavily on campaign funding from Roundtable members, including President Obama.

Shortly after Obama’s inauguration he held a meeting with Roundtable members at the St. Regis Hotel. The president of the Business Roundtable is John J. Castellani. Throughout the first nine months of Obama’s presidency, Castellani met with him at the White House more than any other person, with the exception of Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue. If you look at the records of people who have spent the most time with Obama in the White House, other than these two, another frequent visitor is Edward Yingling, the president of the American Bankers Association.

These organizations – the Business Roundtable, Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association – along with the Federal Reserve, a secretive quasi-government private institution, form the center of the Economic Elite’s power structure. Since the bailout, the Federal Reserve has been working closely with private firm BlackRock. Due to this relationship, BlackRock has emerged as the world’s largest money manager and now manages more assets than the Federal Reserve. They also “manage many of the Treasury Department’s big investments.”

On a global level, you have economic institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and international treaties like NAFTA. These organizations already form a de facto world government that has rights beyond our constitutional rights and national sovereignty. If the WTO makes a ruling that goes against US law, the WTO ruling supersedes US law and wins out.

Here is how Global Exchange explains these global institutions:

“The World Trade Organization is the most powerful legislative and judicial body in the world. By promoting the ‘free trade’ agenda of multinational corporations above the interests of local communities, working families, and the environment, the WTO has systematically undermined democracy around the world…. Unlike United Nations treaties, the International Labor Organization conventions, or multilateral environmental agreements, WTO rules can be enforced through sanctions. This gives the WTO more power than any other international body. The WTO’s authority even eclipses national governments.

[World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)]

When the Bank and the Fund lend money to debtor countries, the money comes with strings attached. These strings come in the form of policy prescriptions called ‘structural adjustment policies.’ These policies—or SAPs, as they are sometimes called—require debtor governments to open their economies to penetration by foreign corporations, allowing access to the country’s workers and environment at bargain basement prices. Structural adjustment policies mean across-the-board privatization of public utilities and publicly owned industries. They mean the slashing of government budgets, leading to cutbacks in spending on health care and education…. And, as their imposition in country after country in Latin America, Africa, and Asia has shown, they lead to deeper inequality and environmental destruction.”

In addition to dominating our political and economic system, the Economic Elite have already created their own private military. Their private military is now more powerful than the US military. As mentioned earlier, private mercenaries now outnumber US soldiers and receive the lion’s share of military spending.

Corporations like SAIC, Blackwater, Bechtel, Raytheon and Halliburton are composed of the most elite worldwide intelligence and military officers. These are the highly profitable and powerful entities that the Economic Elite turn to when national militaries and intelligence agencies – like the CIA, FBI or other government run entities – can’t get the job done.

For instance, SAIC, a “stealth company” that most people have never heard of, is considered to be the brains of the entire US intelligence apparatus, more powerful than the much more popularly known CIA, NSA and FBI – all agencies that SAIC is deeply intertwined with. I urge you to research SAIC to get a crash course in how the true power structure functions. You can start by reading an excellent investigative report by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele titled, “Washington’s $8 billion shadow.”

The Economic Elite dominate US intelligence and military operations. Other than the obvious geo-strategic reasons, the never-ending and ever-expanding War on Terror’s objective is to drain the US population of more resources and further rob US taxpayers, while using our tax money to create a private military that is more powerful than the US military.

I think any logical person can see the ominous implications of having such a vast and powerful private military and intelligence complex, created for and used, in secrecy, by the Economic Elite. Outside of the blatant economic policy attacks, heavily armed and sophisticated covert powers led by small groups of Economic Elite are now a serious risk and present danger.

In conclusion, these economic and government policy forming organizations, along with their private military and intelligence corporations, form the core of the Economic Elite power structure.

“I think one has to say it’s not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems.” – Paul Wolfowitz

IV: The Financial Coup d’Etat

Part IV: The Financial Coup d'Etat -- Economic Elite Vs. The PeopleAlthough most of the Economic Elite live and operate inside the US, they are not concerned for our future. To them, the entire world is theirs and they work intimately with other elites throughout the world against the interests of the US public. Ever since the days of Henry Ford, the Economic Elite have needed a thriving US middle class to increase growth and profits, but now, in the global economy, they view the US middle class as obsolete. They increasingly look globally for profits and they would rather pay cheap labor in countries like China and India. On top of the millions of jobs they have already shipped overseas to increase profits at our expense, they are planning to ship an additional 25% of current US jobs overseas as well.

They now see us as the biggest obstacle to their continued consolidation of wealth and resources. This is why they have stepped up their attack on us.

If you want further proof of this, all one needs to do is study the Wall Street bailout. The entire bailout is strategically designed to eliminate the US middle class. Every time you hear the word “bailout,” you should think “coup d’état.” Here is the definition of coup d’état:

“A coup d’état or coup for short, is the sudden unconstitutional deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment… to replace the deposed government with another…. A coup d’état succeeds when the usurpers establish their legitimacy if the attacked government fail to thwart them, by allowing their (strategic, tactical, political) consolidation and then receiving the deposed government’s surrender; or the acquiescence of the populace and the non-participant military forces.

Typically, a coup d’état uses the extant government’s power to assume political control of the country. In Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, military historian Edward Luttwak says: ‘A coup consists of the infiltration of a small, but critical, segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder’, thus, armed force (either military or paramilitary) is not a defining feature of a coup d’état.”

The bailout was a financial coup, an intelligence operation to seize control of the US economy and tax system. It is similar to what the Economic Elite have done through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in many other countries throughout the world. It is clearly a case of economic imperialism. When financial coups are carried out in other countries, they call it a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP). The end result is the theft of working class wealth, the privatization of public functions and resources, rising unemployment, the elimination of the middle class and increasing taxation and debt that turns the overwhelming majority of the nation into a peasant class. This is exactly the track we are on now.

Just look at how they have already done this in many other countries, and then look at the “bailout.”

The success of the coup is clear by the control of the US Treasury by Goldman Sachs criminal masterminds Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, and the continued control of the Federal Reserve by Ben Bernanke.

Part IV: The Financial Coup d'Etat -- Economic Elite Vs. The PeopleIn 1970, Hank Paulson began his career in the Pentagon working for Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. In 1972, he then moved to the White House, where he worked for the Nixon Administration. He was “the assistant to John Ehrlichman during the events of the Watergate scandal for which Ehrlichman was convicted, and sentenced to prison.” After Paulson’s disgraced exit from the political world, he joined Goldman Sachs in 1974, eventually becoming CEO in 1999 when he led an effort to force out Goldman’s previous CEO John Corzine. While leading Goldman, Paulson developed very intimate relations with members of the Chinese elite, visiting the country over 70 times.

In 2004, during his time as Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Paulson personally led a successful effort to get the SEC to remove the “net capital rule,” which was a “requirement that their brokerages hold reserve capital that limited their leverage and risk exposure.” This was the biggest reason why the economic crisis happened. With the “net capital rule” out of the way, Goldman Sachs and other major Wall Street firms with over $5 billion in assets were free to engage in high risk/high reward behavior. This led to the housing bubble with the creation of high risk speculation, essentially rigged Ponzi-style scams like “mortgage-backed securities, credit derivatives, and credit default swaps… and other exotic structured finance instruments that only highly-trained mathematicians understand, based on models that are beyond the comprehension of most traders.”

After making over $700 million on these shady high risk activities that created a ticking time bomb in our economy, Paulson left Goldman Sachs to run the US Treasury. Shortly after that, the speculative trading scams blew up, and there was the man who played the most pivotal role in causing the economy to crash now running the US Treasury and in charge of “maneuvering” trillions of dollars in national wealth to “fix” the economy. It was time for Paulson, along with his close confidant Tim Geithner, then heading the NY Federal Reserve Bank, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, to engineer the greatest theft of wealth in history with the “bailout.”

Paulson quickly brought in several former Goldman Sachs partners to help him engineer the coup. A pivotal Paulson asset was former Goldman executive Dan Jester, who Paulson quickly hired as a “contractor.” As Robert E. Prasch recently reported, “Jester was never appointed by Congress or otherwise vetted before taking up his role as the Treasury’s de facto central player in the crucial decisions that marked that fall’s bailout of Wall Street.” Paulson’s most publicized move was the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). This was a blatant no-strings attached giveaway of taxpayer money, handed directly to Wall Street’s biggest players. To oversee the TARP operation, Paulson brought in Goldman Sachs Vice President Neel Kashkari.

Another egregious unilateral move by Paulson was installing Edward Liddy, one of his former board members at Goldman Sachs, as CEO of AIG. Liddy was the Chairman of Goldman’s Audit Committee, making him the most knowledgeable person regarding Goldman’s collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Paulson knew these CDOs would go bust because they were based on fraudulent activities, essentially a massive Ponzi scheme. So Paulson and Goldman Sachs covered their risk by insuring them through AIG, making it pivotal to save AIG and have one of his most trusted allies run the company. With Liddy in place, billions of taxpayer dollars were secretly funneled by the Geithner-led NY Federal Reserve through AIG to Goldman Sachs and several other Wall Street elite counterparties. Without the AIG bailout, Goldman Sachs would have collapsed as a result of their own Ponzi scheme.

The assassinations of Goldman rivals Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and the forced Bank of America acquisition of Merrill Lynch were all equally scandalous actions as well. Part IV: The Financial Coup d'Etat -- Economic Elite Vs. The PeopleThe hidden hand of the Bernanke-led Federal Reserve’s secret “black magic” tactics — which created and distributed trillions of dollars — turned Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs into bank holding companies overnight, which gave them access to trillions of dollars to further manipulate the market and create record setting profits.

Every step of the way, the economic terrorist organization led by Paulson, Geithner and Bernanke held our economy hostage by declaring that all their demands must be met or the entire economy would be destroyed, as a result of the very actions the players being rewarded had taken. (I don’t use the words “economic terrorists” as hyperbole. The threat posed by them and the amount of death, destruction and misery they have already caused the United States is much greater than that caused by Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda – it’s not even close.)

Through the crisis, the fundamental structure of the stock market has been proven to be a scam. The Ponzi scheme activities, outright market manipulation and massive worldwide fraud perpetrated by Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, AIG, the three major ratings agencies and several other Wall Street elite firms are blatant. Just in the housing and oil futures markets alone, the criminal activity and economic theft is in the multi-trillions.

By looking the other way, the SEC, Congress and Presidents Bush and Obama are complicit. An analysis of actions taken, or most often not taken, by the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties prove that they are now accomplices. They have not only let it happen; they continue to look the other way and have been stonewalling laws, investigations and prosecutions in what is clearly criminal activity.

If we had a nation of law, none of these things would have happened. This proves to anyone who cares to look that we now live in a Banana Republic. Our democracy has clearly become a farce.

The overwhelming majority of our politicians are now on the Economic Elite payroll. This financial coup started under Hank Paulson in the Bush Administration and has been carried through, without even the slightest hitch, under Geithner in the Obama Administration, and all along Ben Bernanke has been leading the Federal Reserve. Bernanke’s reconfirmation shows you who the co-conspirators are – just look at the members of Congress who voted for it.

All three branches of our government are now complicit in what is literally the greatest theft of wealth in history, along with a mainstream “news” media that keeps going about their “reporting,” as if this wasn’t a crime, business as usual. Nothing to see here…

Obama’s Role

As hard as it is for many Americans to admit, after a year in office it is now obvious, to those who study policy decisions, that Obama’s rhetoric is very far from the reality of his actions. Outside of the tough talk Obama gives concerning “Wall Street Bankers,” all evidence clearly demonstrates that he is their puppet. The list of decisions that he has made to support the Economic Elite at our expense is already extensive.

As mentioned before, the fact that the bailout started under Bush and went straight through without a hitch under Obama is proof enough. On top of this, Obama’s campaign was heavily financed by Goldman Sachs, and prior to the election Obama often spoke with Paulson. An analysis of phone records shows that Obama and Paulson engaged in 26 direct calls prior to the election. “Paulson placed more than twice as many individual outgoing calls to [candidate] Obama (14) as to President Bush (6).”

As soon as Obama was elected, he got rid of all the economic advisors he had during his campaign and replaced them with Wall Street insiders who were committed to “turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway.” He took the main players that caused the economic crisis to begin with, and put them in charge of economic policy.

Part IV: The Financial Coup d'Etat -- Economic Elite Vs. The PeopleRight from the start he appointed Tim Geithner, Paulson’s right-hand man, to run the US Treasury. Mark Patterson, a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, then became Geithner’s Chief of Staff with the direct approval of Obama. Geithner has surrounded himself with many aides that formerly worked for Goldman Sachs, “none of whom faced Senate confirmation.” Obama also allowed Adam Storch, a Goldman Sachs VP, to become “the first chief operating officer of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division.” Obama even “nominated Goldman Sachs executive Gary Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates futures markets.” Gensler was “a high-level Treasury official in a 2000,” when he helped create a “law that exempted the $58 trillion credit default swap market from oversight.” Another major player in the economic collapse was Larry Summers, who Obama quickly appointed as White House National Economic Council Director.

All of this is, in essence, the final stage of a coup d’état, with Obama now serving as their puppet.

Obama clearly has not held the thieves accountable. He has emboldened them in ways that led to record setting profits and bonuses – bonuses that are 100% a direct result of our tax money. He let them take the money, keep the money, and now he lets them continue to make even more money.

Even now, with all his new anti-Wall Street talk, his proposals are extremely misguided and weak.

Obama always deceptively frames the bailout discussion in relation to the $700 billion TARP program. He, along with the mainstream media, always seems to gloss over the fact that the bailout is much more than just the TARP program. TARP is a mere 2% of this multifaceted scam.

His proposal of a tax on Wall Street firms to get some of our tax money back is estimated to bring in $90 billion over the next ten years. That works out to $9 billion a year, compare that to the $150 billion in bonuses handed out by these same firms… just in the past year! The top Wall Street firms would no longer even exist if we didn’t bail them out. Their profits are a direct result of our tax money. If Obama is serious about getting our money back, 100% of the record-breaking bonus money that these thieves gave themselves should be going back into the tax system that it came from to pay down our national debt, lower our tax rates and create jobs.

The $150 billion in bonuses handed out this year cost you $500 of your hard-earned money. For a family of four, that’s $2000 that was taken from you and your family just this year and given directly to Wall Street bonuses. Think about that… Your personal money was taken from you and your family, and given directly to Goldman Sachs CEO Llyod Blankfein. In fact, your direct gift to Wall Street is much more than that; the $2000 your family lost was just for this year’s bonuses, much more of your money was given away in the bailout. The real size of the bailout is estimated to be $14 trillion, which works out to be $46,662 for every man, woman and child in America.

On top of being bailed out with our tax money, Goldman Sachs, which just had its most profitable quarter in its 140-year history, only paid 1% in taxes in 2008!

And now that Obama has given trillions of our dollars to Wall Street, he is all of a sudden so concerned about our national deficit. That is disgraceful! When it came to the Economic Elite he could give away trillions, but when it comes to the social infrastructure of the American public and creating job programs, we all of a sudden have to be tight with our tax money and make “painful choices.” When looking at Obama’s latest $100 billion jobs program, again, compare that to the $150 billion in bonuses. If you want to know if Obama is serious about creating jobs, just look at where he gave his big “Jobs Speech” – at the Business Roundtable affiliated Brookings Institution. Thus again, confirming where his true loyalties lie.

Obama’s sudden change of heart after the Massachusetts Senate election defeat is still more empty rhetoric. His new found support for Paul Volcker, and his proposals to bring back Glass-Steagall type laws to prevent another economic catastrophe sound great on the surface, but then you find out that Wall Street firms have already figured out ways around these proposed laws. While it would be great to have Volcker creating the rules over the Goldman Sachs-led team at the Treasury now, he is himself a former Federal Reserve Chairman who represents JP Morgan Chase interests. Jamie Dimon, current JP Morgan Chase CEO and Business Roundtable member, is considered by Obama to be a possible replacement for Geithner at the Treasury. Replacing Goldman Sachs interests with JP Morgan interests is hardly change for the 99% of Americans who have seen their interests ignored thus far. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are two heads of the same monster.

An analysis of the “Volcker Rules” shows you the essence of what Obama is all about. The “Volcker Rules” are just more propaganda. First off, the rules do not go far enough. Simon Johnson testified before the Senate Banking Committee and summed them up by saying: “while the principles behind these proposed rules are exactly on target… the specific rule changes would need to be much tougher if they are to have any effect.” Johnson earlier exposed the “Volcker Rules” to merely be a “marketing slogan.”

Jeff Madrick, writing for the Roosevelt Institute, rightly questioned if Obama’s economists even did their homework when putting together the rule. “What is disturbing is how poorly the Volcker rule has been thought through. When first announced, it sounded like a worthy and needed step in the right direction, and a suggestion the Obama team was waking up to reality. But I also expected more sophisticated details to come. So far, there are none… it looks like they didn’t give it much thought before announcing the plan. This is a critical error in judgment.” Even if the flawed laws make it to the Senate floor, the Banking Committee has come out strongly against them as being too little, too late. To sum this all up, this is another case of Obama trying to make it look like he’s doing something, when in reality, he isn’t doing anything.

This is similar to Obama’s $75 billion taxpayer funded foreclosure-prevention program that has been a spectacular failure in stemming the foreclosure crisis. The Obama Administration knew the program wasn’t working from the start, but they just sat back and let it continue to fail, wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in the process.

Even Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the TARP program, said the following in his January 30th report to Congress: “It is hard to see how any of the fundamental problems in the [financial] system have been addressed to date…. Even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.” Now that the “Too Big to Fail” Wall Street elite know that the government will come in to bail them out, they are engaging in even riskier behavior than before.

As President Theodore Roosevelt once declared in a situation much like our current crisis, “Corporation cunning has developed faster than the law of nation or state. Corporations have found ways to steal long before we have found that they were susceptible to punishment for theft. But sooner or later, unless there is a season of readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement…. These fools on Wall Street think that they can go on forever! They can’t!”

It is hard to face the fact that we have been so taken advantage of and abandoned by the very people we supported and had put our hope and faith into. Americans need to understand that Obama, along with most of the Democrats and Republicans are not looking out for our best interests.

V: Overcoming the Divide & Conquer Strategy

“The conflicting propaganda of opposing parties is essentially what leads to political abstention. But this is not the abstention of the free spirit which asserts itself; it is the result of resignation, the external symptom of a series of inhibitions. Such a man has not decided to abstain; under diverse pressures, subjected to shocks and distortions, he can no longer (even if he wanted to) perform a political act. What is even more serious is that this inhibition not only is political, but also progressively takes over the whole of his being and leads to a general attitude of surrender.” — Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes

Part V: Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategy -- Economic Elite Vs. The PeopleThe primary reason why the Economic Elite have gained such dominance is their commitment to psychological operations that divide-and-conquer the US public. They use their overwhelming influence over mainstream media outlets and political candidates in very clever ways to divide us.

It is known among political scientists that powerful forces always seek to gain control of pre-existing social and political institutions so they can usurp their powers. The Economic Elite gained control of both the Democratic and Republican political parties because they knew that hardworking Americans loyally followed these parties, and we believed these parties were looking out for our best interests. We have, for the most part, been lifelong Republicans or lifelong Democrats, but until we see that our favored party has been seized by power and greed addicted interests, we will all continue to lose. These are extremely hard truths to face, but until we face them, we will continue our decline.

With half the US population loyal to Democrats and the other half loyal to Republicans, gaining control of both these parties meant total control for them. The past decade is testament to their total control of both parties.

In manufactured public opinion, Obama represented a far left swing in US politics, and Bush represented a far right swing, and these two supposed polar opposites also had a Congress overwhelmingly run by members of their own party. Did we get drastically different policies? In what matters most, in both cases, the results were the same: more money and power for the Economic Elite and the continued decline of the US middle class. This fact is now undeniable.

Yes, there are definite differences in their rhetoric and on some social issues, but this is the key to the psychological operations, to the divide-and-conquer strategy that they use so effectively.

To distract and divide us, they use rhetoric on social issues like religion, gay marriage, abortion, etc., all serious and significant issues that we bitterly disagree on, but in the overall picture, these issues are secondary to the larger, more fundamental political and economic issues that lead to our wealth being stolen from us, and ultimately, our lives being increasingly dominated by a small few.

Bush appealed to conservative Republicans and then ran up the deficit to record levels. Obama appealed to liberal Democrats, but increased war spending and support for Wall Street billionaires. In both cases, the candidates severely divided the US middle class, but in the policy decisions that mattered most, they both sided with the economic top one percent at the expense of hardworking Americans.

Just look at the last few election cycles. In 2006 and 2008 US citizens rose up in record-breaking numbers to kick out the Republicans in power, whom they felt had betrayed them. Now, with the Democrats in power, the consensus seems to be that in the 2010 mid-term elections we will vote for Republicans and kick out the Democrats who have failed to deliver on the much needed and promised changes.

Do you not see the ridiculous nature of this divide-and-conquer strategy? This is a vicious cycle that will continue to lead to our destruction.

Psychological Operations 101: Obama Vs. Fox News

Part V: Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategy -- Economic Elite Vs. The PeopleFor those of us who are strong enough to see beyond our propaganda-induced preconceptions and prejudices, the insidious nature of the Economic Elite’s divide-and-conquer strategy is on full display in the feud between Obama and Fox News. About half of the country loves Obama and hates Fox News, and the other half loves Fox News but hates Obama. They both use very effective propaganda to seduce their followers. However, as hard as it is for people who love one of them to admit, they both serve the same masters.

Once again, let’s look at Goldman Sachs. They financed Obama’s campaign and he has rewarded them with policies that have led to them making record-breaking profits, instead of investigating them for the many illegal activities they participated in and continue to take part in.

On the other side of this psychological operation, you have Fox News. When was the last time you saw Fox News doing an investigation into the illegal practices of Goldman Sachs? Even the Obama-appointed Tim Geithner, the Economic Elite’s main man on the economy, escapes the significant focus of Fox News’ powerful attack force.

Looking at the Business Roundtable, a significant majority of Obama’s campaign funding came from Roundtable members and, as mentioned earlier, he frequently meets with Roundtable members. On the other hand, Fox News is owned by Roundtable member Rupert Murdoch, and Fox relies heavily on advertising money from Roundtable members. Rupert Murdoch even supported Obama over McCain. As someone who monitors Fox News, I can’t recall the last time I heard Fox reporting on the activities of the Business Roundtable, not that any mainstream “news” companies do.

The list of similarities between the two, when it comes to exposing and holding the Economic Elite accountable, is extensive. So here you have an excellent divide-and-conquer psychological operation. Fox News declares Obama the enemy, and Obama declares Fox the enemy, yet the Economic Elite remain in the shadows, behind the scenes, untouched and continuing their plunder.

Just think of all the misplaced outraged spent on these two puppets. Sure, people have many reasons to like and dislike both, but imagine if all the diehard Obama-haters focused their rage on the people who put Obama in power, and if the diehard Fox-haters stopped criticizing everything Fox says and focused on the Economic Elite who control the media environment in which Fox News operates.

If the Fox-haters and the Obama-haters united and focused their combined outrage on the common forces behind the both of them, we would all be much better off.

The most significant bias in the mainstream media is not the liberal or conservative views propagated to divide, distract, confuse and create apathy among the populace; the ultimate bias is in what is missing from the coverage. The investigative reporting on the most powerful forces within our society is left out of the discussion.

McClatchy, one of the few real journalism news organizations, has repeatedly reported on the illegal activities of Goldman Sachs and the crime syndicate they operate in. Yet, an overwhelming majority of mainstream news outlets ignore these reports and nothing is done to hold Goldman Sachs accountable. In fact, two of the leading figures in the outright theft of our money have recently been lauded in their propaganda press. When you see Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke become the Person of the Year in Time Magazine and Goldman Sachs CEO Llyod Blankfein become the Financial Times Man of the Year, you begin to see where the real media bias lies.

The main bias is in favor of the thieves who stole our country and economy, and own the mainstream media companies. The omni-present mainstream media is the greatest weapon of oppression humanity has ever known.

Although the Internet has had an impact, television news is still by far the most influential news medium. Despite all the new information platforms, this year we have set a new record by watching an average of four hours and 49 minutes of TV per day. We have been subjected to heavy doses of propaganda on a daily basis, for hours a day, every day of our lives.

The mainstream media creates what is known in mass psychology as the “spectrum of thinkable thought.” By constantly discussing and debating surface issues, they limit the range of debate. Having the Republican vs. Democrat paradigm leads us to never debating the underlying Economic Elite who control both of the parties, not to mention their ownership of the media platform on which this debate is taking shape. The more important underlying issues are never discussed, and therefore never enter public consciousness.

The censorship that is most prevalent today is the most dangerous form. Not the censorship of explicit words, sex, or violence, but the censorship of any thoughts outside of elite corporate ideology. Any debate that leads to critical thought on prevailing elite economic dominance is not allowed to enter into the mass media or mainstream public consciousness.

“We must conclude that a changeover is imminent and ineluctable in the co-opted caste who serve the interests of domination, and above all manage the protection of that domination. In such an affair, innovation will surely not be displayed [in the mainstream media]. It appears instead like lightning, which we know only when it strikes.” — Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

VI: How to Fight Back and Win: Common Ground Issues That Must Be Won -- Economic Elite Vs. The People

VI: How to Fight Back and Win: Common Ground Issues That Must Be Won

Throughout this report, I have presented statistical and fact-based evidence to demonstrate that a strategic attack has been launched against 99% of Americans. Despite the efforts of the mainstream media and most current politicians, awareness of this reality is spreading throughout the United States. VI: How to Fight Back and Win: Common Ground Issues That Must Be WonA recent Rasmussen poll found that only 21% of Americans think that the government has the consent of the governed. An Opinion Research Corp. survey revealed that 86% believe “the system of government is broken.”

An overwhelming majority of the population has come to the realization that our government doesn’t effectively represent us anymore. It is just a matter of time before people start taking it upon themselves to begin organizing on a mass scale. Our survival instinct will soon overwhelm our conditioned passivity and erupt into a powerful countervailing force. However, the longer we hesitate and delay action, the harder it will be to obtain economic and political justice.

We cannot continue to stand by and watch our nation be raped and pillaged like this. We can no longer remain idle and passive while our families’ futures are destroyed as we are sentenced to a slow death.

It’s time for 99% of Americans to mobilize and aggressively move on common sense political reforms.

We will obviously have many differences on how our country should be run, but we can all come together to dismantle the Economic Elite by making several pivotal political reforms. As long as the game is rigged in favor of the Economic Elite, we will all lose. So let’s find common ground and focus on several obvious battles that we need to win, and can win:

Election Reform

“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.” – Thomas Paine, Dissertation on the First Principles of Government

* Electronic Voting: First and foremost, no private corporation should be able to tell us who has won an election without providing an auditable paper trail. Many Democrats felt that Bush stole the 2000 and 2004 elections, and many Republicans felt Obama stole the 2008 election. Of course people are going to feel that elections are stolen when you have a private corporation secretly counting the votes; it is the inevitable result when you can’t verify the election results. In the past few years companies that count the votes have been consolidating, and one company, ES&S, now secretly controls the majority of all our votes. As voting watchdog Brad Friedman stated, “With the ES&S takeover of Diebold/Premier, their nearest competitor, the privately-run election Goliath now has an un-overseeable lock on virtually every election in the United States of America.” It is common sense to say that this is way too much power to be put into one private corporation.

* Campaign Finance: The stunning ruling by the Supreme Court to allow unlimited political spending by the Economic Elite has made a bad situation even worse. We must level the playing field by enacting laws to prevent the overwhelming influence of big money interests in controlling politicians who are forced to pander to them for the ever-increasing need to raise more and more money to have any shot at winning public office. Statistics show how much the Economic Elite already dominate this process: over 90% of the time the candidate who simply spends more money on their campaign wins the election.

* The Two-Party Oligarchy: We must end the two-party system by funding and voting for alternative parties. It is absurd and completely outdated to only have two dominant political parties in a technologically advanced nation of 309 million people. The two-party paradigm is obsolete and creates a system easily manipulated, as the past decade proves with the co-option of the Democratic and Republican parties. We can give our money and support to whomever we like – Libertarians, Tea Party, Progressives, Greens, Independents and the many soon-to-be-created political groups. However, it is pivotal that we immediately cease support for both the Republican and Democratic parties. We understand that there are representatives from both parties who are fighting for our interests, but they are very few and easily marginalized by paid-off party leaders.

* Getting on the Ballot: Republicans and Democrats have created rules to make it increasingly difficult for opposing political parties to even get on the voting ballot. We must make this process easier and invite new parties onto the ticket.

* Debate Commission: The Democratic and Republican control over who is allowed to participate in the nationally televised debates gives the two parties an insurmountable advantage over any other parties. If you are not even allowed to participate in them, you have no shot at winning. Along with this, all candidates should be given a fair share of television coverage.

* Voter Registration: If you are a citizen, you should be automatically registered to vote.

Governmental Policy Formation

* Secrecy, Transparency and Accountability: Government secrecy is at the root of most of our current societal and economic problems. When decisions are made in secrecy, corruption will most often be the result. By throwing light and investigation on the government policy process, we can easily expose the Economic Elite’s agenda and limit their influence. As part of this, all legislation and conference reports must be posted online prior to Congressional debate and vote.

* Lobbying: Along with campaign finance, political lobbying is another way the Economic Elite can easily manipulate our political process financially, in what amounts to legalized bribery. In 2009, a record amount of money was spent lobbying Congress, and now with the new Supreme Court ruling, lobbyists will have even more power to manipulate the political process with what amounts to buying the laws of our nation. Lobbying activities behind closed doors must cease entirely and equal time must be given, transparently, to all the parties directly affected by the law being written.

* Shutting the Revolving Door: No politician should be allowed to profit from government laws or policies which they have written or supported. The practice of leaving a major company to become a politician who then creates and/or supports laws that directly benefit the corporation he or she used to work for, or, conversely, politicians who leave public office to take a high-paying job for a company they have benefited, is a grotesque abuse and manipulation of the democratic process. The revolving door between politics and big business is worse than it has ever been and has corrupted the government like never before.

Information Platforms

* Media Concentration: Having a few large multinational corporations dominating the overwhelming majority of our news and information system will never lead to an informed citizenry. Only ten multinational corporations dominate our mainstream media system. These companies are run by 118 individuals who actively work to propagate Economic Elite rule. The people who run these media companies also sit on other corporate boards that often represent a major conflict of interest. Having only 118 people in ten companies dominating a system that creates public opinion for 309 million people is absurd. We must break up this information cartel and support a more diverse and vibrant independent press that fosters real investigative journalism.

* Net Neutrality: The free and open architecture of the Internet is vital to our success. Without an open Internet our most powerful medium for research and communication, and key organizing tool, will be lost. The Internet must be protected from growing forces that seek to control it by limiting our access to information and our ability to communicate on a mass scale.

Healthcare

* Medical Costs: We have disagreements on how to best provide healthcare, but we all agree that whatever the method, the result needs to be lower costs. We have the most expensive healthcare system in the world and we now pay twice as much as other nations. Other than creating huge salaries for health industry-related executives, there isn’t any reason why we should be forced to pay such outrageous sums of money for second-rate care. No American should die due to lack of money, or have to face bankruptcy in order to get life-sustaining treatments.

* Food and Water Supply: Our food and water supply systems have become a major health hazard. The amount of harmful chemicals found in both our food and water have reached record levels and is causing alarming levels of sickness in a growing number of people.

Real Economic Competition

* Most Americans Believe in Competition: If a person works hard, is productive and good at what they do, most everyone believes that they should make more than a person who sits around looking for handouts. However, just as in sports, to maintain a competitive environment you have to have rules in place that prevent people from having an unfair advantage. For those who believe in competition, in capitalism and free markets, you have to acknowledge that what we have now is not a free market based on fair competition. It is a rigged market, where larger institutions like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have an unfair advantage. We cannot allow them to be beyond the law, manipulate the market and then receive taxpayer funds to increase profits and risk-taking while smaller companies, outside of Economic Elite circles, have to play by a much stricter set of rules.

You can’t have free market capitalism when you have government policies favoring companies that have more political clout than others. What we have is socialism for the rich and trickle down economics for the rest of us. We have a market systemically designed to funnel money into the pockets of the richest. If the past few years have proved anything, they have proved that our economy is much more like a pyramid scheme than a free market, where the more money you have, the more money you make. So whatever your economic beliefs and theories might be, let’s all come together to admit that our “free market” is an illusion. We need to make the economic playing field fair so we that can have real competition.

* Redistribution of Wealth: Due to the rigging of our economic and political system, vast sums of wealth have been hoarded by the Economic Elite over the past 40 years. This money must be redistributed to the 99% of Americans who have been robbed and exploited. There will be much heated debate over how this money should be distributed, but we all need to agree that we must first hold the Economic Elite accountable and our wealth must be seized from them.

Restore the Rule of Law

* Investigations and Prosecutions: The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has the power to reveal the inner workings of the financial coup. We must apply intense public pressure and scrutiny to force the Commission into conducting a real investigation. Another urgent priority needs to be a much wider-ranging look at war profiteering. There has been some investigation, but not nearly enough and hardly any prosecution. These are just two of the many investigations that need to be launched. As long as we keep letting the Economic Elite get away with outright theft in broad daylight, we will never be able to restore a nation of law.

Part V: Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategy -- Economic Elite Vs. The PeopleThere are obviously other vital issues that need to be addressed, but these are the core common-ground issues that we must urgently rally around and support. Unless we organize and take decisive action on all these issues, we will all suffer the consequences of our collective inaction. Any politician who does not urgently move on these issues must be voted out of office and replaced by people who will aggressively fight on these fronts.

These are the core issues that keep the Economic Elite in power. As famed military strategist Carl von Clauswitz wrote in his study “On War,” it is pivotal to strike at this core structure, at “the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends.”

To those Americans who feel powerless to change things, I say that your feelings are only a result of your induced delusion. You have become so propagandized that you do not even understand the significant position that you are in. We are not peasants trapped in a Third World existence. We are still a mass of people who have the power to change the course of history. The Economic Elite realize this, which is why they are attacking us with an increased intensity.

Why We Must Take Mass Organized Action Now: The Devastation Ahead

Market Watch recently ran an article entitled, “Death of American Capitalism: The 10 final scenes.” The article references Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s long-time investment partner, stating: “Munger is warning us ‘It’s Over’ for America. Yes, ‘o-v-e-r,’ America’s in decline, at the end-of-days, coming to ‘financial ruin,’ says Munger.”

As a result of the Economic Elite’s attack on us, the inequality of wealth between the economic top one percent and the remaining 99% of the population is the highest it has ever been in our nation’s history. The Robber Barons of the Gilded Age have now been overtaken as America’s most depraved and despotic class.

As this attack continues, social safety nets and important public functions that are already reaching a breaking point will collapse under the weight of prolonged decline. With the national deficit now at an all-time high, economists are expecting major cutbacks in vital government programs and tax increases “that aren’t even imaginable.” President Obama has recently put together a “Deficit Commission” and is prepared to make “painful choices.” Many state economies are already running high deficits and preparing for deep cuts in Medicaid and retirement pensions. Major cuts in Social Security payments are also a real possibility.

On top of the 160 banks that have already failed in the past year, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has listed another 702 banks as being in danger of failing. These banks “collectively hold more than $400 billion in assets” and the FDIC is already operating at “a deficit of nearly $21 billion as of Dec. 31, or more than double the previous quarter.”

With 30 million Americans now unemployed and underemployed, over the next few months five million people will lose the unemployment benefits which they have been surviving off of. Unemployment benefits in 27 states have already gone into the red. In total 40 state programs are expected to go broke. Even the most optimistic economists believe high unemployment rates will continue for the foreseeable future.

Millions more will be added to the five million families who have already been kicked out of their homes, as the number of foreclosures is expected to reach 13 million within the next few years. Food and homeless shelters are already overwhelmed, and there will be millions more in need of these life-sustaining services. 50 million Americans are currently in need of food stamps for survival and approximately 20,000 new people are added to this total every day.

Despite all the healthcare reform talk, the bill still being discussed will do little to reduce costs and extend coverage to those who urgently need it, as insurance rates continue to rise. The number of Americans without health insurance continues to skyrocket to now well over 50 million, with 45,000 preventable US citizen deaths occurring per year. Due to economic hardship, the number of people suffering from psychological depression has hit an all-time high, as suicide rates keep rising.

With a prison population of 2.3 million people, we now have more people incarcerated than any other nation in the world. Our per capita rate of 700 people imprisoned per 100,000 citizens is higher than the darkest days of the Soviet Union. On top of this, the prison industry is expecting major growth over the next few years, as a “new prison opens every week somewhere in America” and Obama commits more tax dollars for the federal Bureau of Prisons.

All told, the death and destruction wrought by this economic crisis is equivalent to a 9/11 attack every single week! And the attacks continue unabated, with no significant measures taken to defend against them and hold those responsible accountable.

With almost 200 million Americans now living paycheck to paycheck, and over 50 million already living in poverty, people are quickly running out of options. The clock is ticking loudly for them, and time delayed is time closer to death.

At the same time, Americans are arming themselves at an alarming rate. The demand for guns and ammunition has hit a record high, and the gun industry cannot produce enough bullets to keep up with orders. In the past year, 100 new armed militia groups have been formed, as militia members have doubled in numbers. Federal authorities are gravely concerned about the “uptick in militia activities.” One federal authority recently said, “All it’s lacking is a spark. I think it’s only a matter of time before you see threats and violence.”

The recent suicide-bomber who hit the IRS building in Texas will be the first of many violent acts if we don’t demonstrate that justice and the rule of law can be restored in a non-violent manner. Suicide-bombers have already reeked havoc in many countries across the globe. As the last act of revenge and desperation, people throughout the world have increasingly resorted to this method of violence and terror.

Fate has placed us in our nation’s most pivotal moment. If we do not take it upon ourselves to lead in decisive non-violent mass action, our country will soon be torn apart by violence and destruction.

In our nation’s history, the stakes have never been higher. It is vital that we recognize the urgent gravity of the situation. What happens over the next few years will determine the fate of our very way of life, of our families’ very existence. We have been attacked, and we are now at war. This is the unfortunate reality of our current crisis.

Our enemy is extraordinarily powerful. However, we are 99% of the US population, and they are only 1%. If we fight, we win!

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.”
Frederick Douglass

“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency is great and unendurable. And oppression and robbery are organized, I say; let us not have such a machine any longer. I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.” – Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

“We have no choice left…. A concealed yes drives us that is stronger than all our no’s. Our strength itself will no longer endure us in the old decaying soil. We venture away, we venture ourselves! We know of a new world.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

GET INVOLVED: We are going to begin outreach to organizations that are working on the core common ground issues mentioned in this report. If you plan to take action on any of these issues or would like to be involved in this effort, please sign up here.

Read the 2012 updated version featuring the history and evolution of the 99% Movement & Occupy Wall Street.

Trews News Vs. Faux Nooze ~ Russell Brand Breaks Down Jihadi Propaganda

In the video below, Russell Brand brilliantly breaks down Faux Nooze jihadi propaganda. He exposes the cartoonish propaganda of old paradigm super hero Justice Judge Jeanine. In reality, Justice Judge Jeanine (dun, dun, dunnn) is actually an extremist super villain in drag. When you exit the matrix, expand your consciousness and pierce the veil of this teleprompter reading fembot's fancy facade, you'll see a gun in the background and it will look and sound exactly like those grainy low-budget "jihadi infidel terrorist" videos that US propaganda outlets play to pollute collective consciousness and terrify (terrorize) the American public.

All hyperbole aside, as Russell touches on, Fox News is, indeed, much more dangerous than the Iraqi ISIS militants. In fact, the mainstream media is the most effective weapon of mass oppression humanity has ever known. As my old friend Jacques Ellul concluded in his groundbreaking analysis of the social mind, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, “Propaganda is today a greater danger to mankind than any of the other more grandly advertised threats hanging over the human race."

Much more to say after you watch this video... take it away Russell, enlighten the masses with the Trews...

And what does a steady diet of this propaganda result in? Let's return to Jacques...

"Propaganda ruins not only democratic ideas but also democratic behavior – the foundation of democracy, the very quality without which it cannot exist…. Propaganda destroys its very foundations. It creates a man who is suited to a totalitarian society….

A man who lives in a democratic society and who is subjected to propaganda is being drained of the democratic content itself – of the style of democratic life, understanding of others… he is a ‘totalitarian man with democratic convictions,’ but those convictions do not change his behavior in the least. Such contradiction is in no way felt by the individual for whom democracy has become a myth and a set of democratic imperatives, merely stimuli that activate conditioned reflexives.

The word democracy, having become a simple incitation, no longer has anything to do with democratic behavior. And the citizen can repeat indefinitely ‘the sacred formulas of democracy’ while acting like a storm trooper.”

Did all of you totalitarian storm troopers get that? Does that compute?

Consider this recent poll from the NY Times: 56% of Americans want Obama to use drones to bomb ISIS in Iraq.

Bloody hell! As Russell tapped into, dropping bombs from drones all over the Middle East is what created these so-called "terrorists" to begin with. If drones started bombing your neighborhood and killing your family members, and this went on for years and years without any end in sight, what would all you FREEDOM FIGHTERS do?

ISIS is exactly what the Gods of Never-Ending War cooked up. They want the Middle East destabilized and divided into factions of people killing each other, so they can justify building huge Empire military bases, an utterly absurd military budget while poverty is running rampant, and the extraction of resources from the region. And, most importantly, this also creates a booming business bull market for the weapons manufactures / war profiteers... and makes the world LESS safe.

C'mon people!! I get so fired up over all this... #WarCrimes, #CrimesAgainstHumanity... let me take a breath while you read Chris Hedges' new riff on The Ghoulish Face of Empire:

"The black-clad fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, sweeping a collapsing army and terrified Iraqis before them as they advance toward Baghdad, reflect back to us the ghoulish face of American empire.

They are the specters of the hundreds of thousands of people we murdered in our deluded quest to remake the Middle East. They are ghosts from the innumerable roadsides and villages where U.S. soldiers and Marines, jolted by explosions of improvised explosive devices, responded with indiscriminate fire. They are the risen remains of the dismembered Iraqis left behind by blasts of Hellfire and cruise missiles, howitzers, grenade launchers and drone strikes.

They are the avengers of the gruesome torture and the sexual debasement that often came with being detained by American troops. They are the final answer to the collective humiliation of an occupied country, the logical outcome of Shock and Awe, the Frankenstein monster stitched together from the body parts we left scattered on the ground. They are what we get for the $4 trillion we wasted on the Iraq War....

Our jihadists—George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Thomas Friedman and Tommy Franks—who assured us that swift and overwhelming force in Iraq would transform the Middle East into an American outpost of progress, are no less demented than the jihadists approaching Baghdad. These two groups of killers mirror each other. This is what we have spawned."

Okay, now that you can see how repetitious war propaganda can literally turn us into totalitarian storm troopers, let's shift gears a bit and take a quick look at the Empire's censorship tactics...

Russell was recently at the UK People's Assembly austerity protest. The event drew an estimated 50,000 people and was held right in front of the BBC's office. Somehow, this massive rally was not worthy of "news" coverage. The BBC ignored, omitted and censored 50,000 people on their doorstep.

Tell me again, in this technologically advanced society that we toil in, how can economic inequality and poverty be at record levels? How can 67 people have as much wealth as 3.5 billion people, half of humanity? How is it that half of all of our tax dollars go to an out of control military complex that commits war crimes all over the planet?

I can hear a faint whisper from the ghost of Ellul echoing through cyberspace, “Propaganda is today a greater danger to mankind than any of the other more grandly advertised threats hanging over the human race."

So, in summation, the old shortsighted greed-addicted paradigm turn us into Totalitarian Storm Troopers, rapes and pillages the planet, while our debts further enslave us and the future goes up in flames, by drowning our consciousness in a relentless spewing torrent of propaganda.

Bullshit on repetition and censorship by omission... makes Joey Six-Pack a totalitarian storm trooper.

Rrrrrrrr... blood pressure check....

I could rant on this topic for hours, if you want to free your mind and take an in-depth deep dive, you can Transcend Conditioned Consciousness here.

Awe-some riff Russell. Much love & respect to you mate.

You cracked open a window, let in a beam of light and inspired me to send this cyberspace riff off into the constantly mutating cosmos ~*~

Cheers!


Advanced Truth ~ A Gonzo Ride Through the Noosphere

I'm contemplating a part-time return to my news editing roots. Here's an experimental news roundup. Let me know if you find this to be of value / worth your time. I don't want to just pump out cut and dry news, so let's pop a red pill & exit the matrix. Here's some mood music and atmospheric art to set the tone for this gonzo ride through the noosphere...

Advanced Truth, a digital hallucinogen courtesy of Gero Doll

Now for the nooze...

A wise person once said, "When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money." They didn't mention anything about breathing money. Can we breathe money? I certainly hope so...

Acid seas threaten creatures that supply half the world's oxygen

Ocean acidification is turning phytoplankton toxic. Bad news for the many species - us, included - that rely on them as a principal source of food and oxygen.

Fukushima is the nightmare that won't end, and keeps getting worse...

Fukushima’s Children are Dying

More than 48 percent of some 375,000 young people—nearly 200,000 kids—tested by the Fukushima Medical University near the smoldering reactors now suffer from pre-cancerous thyroid abnormalities, primarily nodules and cysts. The rate is accelerating.

From the "ya don't say" department...

Right Now We 'Grossly Underestimate' Economic Damage From Climate Change, New Paper Says

Right now lots of mainstream climate research, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), relies on versions of the “DICE model” to project the damage climate change will do to the global economy in computer simulations. And so far, the modeling done by IPCC has predicted relatively modest hits to world economic production from climate change if global carbon emissions continue on a business-as-usual path. But the DICE model also has several well-known limitations, including an overly simplistic model of how the economy grows, too little attention to climate sensitivity, and too little attention to certain extreme risks. When Stern and Simon Dietz — colleagues at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change — retooled the model to address this issues, they found the modest hits ballooned into massive reductions...

Dear Asteroid People,

Noam Chomsky, aka the American Socrates, has a message about climate change for you...

Climate change “may doom us all, and not in the distant future,” Chomsky said. “It may overwhelm everything. This is the first time in human history that we have the capacity to destroy the conditions for decent survival. It is already happening. Look at species destruction. It is estimated to be at about the level of 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the earth, ended the period of the dinosaurs and wiped out a huge number of species. It is the same level today. And we are the asteroid. If anyone could see us from outer space they would be astonished. There are sectors of the global population trying to impede the global catastrophe. There are other sectors trying to accelerate it. Take a look at whom they are. Those who are trying to impede it are the ones we call backward, indigenous populations—the First Nations in Canada, the aboriginals in Australia, the tribal people in India. Who is accelerating it? The most privileged, so-called advanced, educated populations of the world.”

No fear, Greenpeace will save us... WTF?!

Greenpeace loses more than $5 million in currency speculation

With an annual income of €72.9m in 2013, last year’s loss of €3.8m represents a significant hit for Greenpeace International, though the organisation said none of its current campaigns would be affected. With combined funds from over 40 national organisations, Greenpeace International has a global budget of around €300m. The most significant damage may be to the trust of its supporters: 90% of the organisation’s funding comes from small donations of under €100.

Maybe the women can save us... if they ever get off Facebook...

We’re failing the fight against climate change because women spend too much time on Facebook

Mashable’s Stephanie Buck is calling upon the women of the world to “dump Kimye” and “tackle climate change.” Her call to action is based largely on a talk given by attorney and media correspondent Lisa Bloom last week at the 92Y S.H.E. Summit, which describes itself as “a global conversation and celebration of female potential and possibility that is accessible and relevant to women everywhere.”

“No one ever said on her death bed, ‘I wish I’d spent more time on Facebook,’” says attorney and media correspondent Lisa Bloom. A more likely scenario: regret that she didn’t do more to save her grandchildren from rising carbon dioxide levels, because she was too busy scrolling her News Feed and flipping through Us Weekly.

Bloom believes Western society’s current preoccupation with trivial celebrity gossip and insipid social media — and the time we waste with it — will be its downfall. As our fascination for easy entertainment increases, our investment in global affairs decreases. In particular, women should do more to fight climate change; it is a uniquely women’s issue, she says. They are innately suited to battle climate problems, some would argue better than men.

As extreme weather becomes the new normal, a tsunami of another kind is heading our way...

The coming 'tsunami of debt' and financial crisis in America

... the debt held by American households is rising ominously. And unless our economic policies change, that debt balloon, powered by radical income inequality, is going to become the next bust.

Yes indeed, debt slavery is all the rage these days...

Half The Country Makes Less Than $27,520 A Year And 15 Other Signs The Middle Class Is Dying

If you make more than $27,520 a year at your job, you are doing better than half the country is... the American Dream is becoming a mirage for most people... here are some hard numbers to back that assertion up...

#1) According to a brand new CNN poll, 59 percent of Americans believe that it has become impossible for most people to achieve the American Dream.....

#4) 52 percent of Americans cannot even afford the house that they are living in right now....

#7) The labor force participation rate for Americans from the age of 25 to the age of 29 has fallen to an all-time record low.

#8) The number of working age Americans that are not employed has increased by 27 million since the year 2000.

#9) According to the government's own numbers, about 20 percent of the families in the entire country do not have a single member that is employed at this point.

#10) This may sound crazy, but 25 percent of all American adults do not even have a single penny saved up for retirement....

#14) According to one recent report, there are 49 million Americans that are dealing with food insecurity right now.

As the rich get richer...

CEO Pay Continues to Rise as Typical Workers Are Paid Less

Obama PowerAverage CEO compensation was $15.2 million in 2013, using a comprehensive measure of CEO pay that covers CEOs of the top 350 U.S. firms and includes the value of stock options exercised in a given year, up 2.8 percent since 2012 and 21.7 percent since 2010.

Longer-term trends in CEO compensation:

  • From 1978 to 2013, CEO compensation, inflation-adjusted, increased 937 percent, a rise more than double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.2 percent growth in a typical worker’s compensation over the same period.
  • The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 20-to-1 in 1965 and 29.9-to-1 in 1978, grew to 122.6-to-1 in 1995, peaked at 383.4-to-1 in 2000, and was 295.9-to-1 in 2013, far higher than it was in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.
  • If Facebook, which we exclude from our data due to its outlier high compensation numbers, were included in the sample, average CEO pay was $24.8 million in 2013, and the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 510.7-to-1.
  • None dare call it... class warfare...

    Fomenting a Revolution: Extreme Acts of Greed Against the American People

    $1,000,000,000,000,000 in Sales. Not One Cent for Sales Tax

    The trading volume on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) reached an incomprehensible $1 quadrillion in notional value in 2012. That's a thousand trillion dollars. In comparison, the entire U.S. GDP is $17 trillion.

    On that quadrillion dollars of sales CME imposes transfer fees, contract fees, brokerage fees, Globex fees, clearing fees, and contract surcharges, many of them on both the buyer's and seller's side. As a result, the company had a profit margin higher than any of the top 100 companies in the nation from 2008 to 2010, and it's gotten even higher since then.

    But not a penny in sales tax for the taxpayers who provide publicly-funded infrastructure, technology, systems of law, and security to help them process billions of financial transactions. Instead — incredibly — CME complained that its taxes were too high, and they demanded and received an $85 million tax break from the State of Illinois.

    Let them eat cake...

    Witness Wednesday Protests Launched In Washington To Highlight Tragedy of Longterm Unemployed

    In the sweltering mid-day Washington, DC heat yesterday, a small group of members of Congress and community leaders gathered outside of the capitol building. Solemnly, as if at a funeral, they read a handful of stories written by a few of the more than 3 million Americans who are longterm unemployed (a category defined as being unemployed for six months or more and still looking for work). Since December 2013, when Congress let emergency unemployment compensation, or EUC, expire—a program that offers minimal financial support to the longterm unemployed—they have been without the help they need to get back on their feet.

    Starbucks to the rescue... maybe not, just a great status quo PR stunt...

    Don’t Get Too Excited About the Starbucks College Deal

    It’s all smiles and pats on the back for Starbucks today over news that the coffee chain will cover tuition for employees who enroll in college courses through the Arizona State University (ASU) online program....

    Starbucks will pay an average of about $6,500 over two years for freshmen and sophomores who enroll full-time in ASU’s online program, which costs roughly $10,000 in annual tuition. To cover the $13,500 balance, students must apply for financial aid. Because their wages are low, many workers are expected to qualify for Pell Grants.... Make no mistake, behind the feel-good rhetoric lies a basely neoliberal reformist plan....

    Starbucks offers college tuition but graduates might still be baristas

    For many Americans, however, whether employed by Starbucks or currently working at another low-wage job, there is nowhere else to go. While Starbuck's efforts to help its employees gain access to higher education is admirable, higher education does not automatically guarantee a better job or economic independence. In fact, last year more than quarter of a million college graduates were working minimum wage jobs.

    Many jobs currently available to college graduates actually have no need for expensive higher education. For example, in 2010, half of college graduates ended up taking jobs that required less than a bachelor degree, according to the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Another 38% didn’t even need a high school diploma.... recent college graduates are still struggling to find jobs that will capitalize on their education – and pay a wage worthy of it. The current employment rate for those 20 to 24 year olds is 63.9%, according to the Department of Labor.

    Many of those college graduates who are employed are working low-wage jobs. In December 2013, the underemployment rate for college graduates was 18.3%, compared to 9.9% in 2007. In 2012, about 284,000 college graduates were working at or below the minimum wage, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s 70% higher than 10 years ago in 2002.

    Ah yes, the American dream: graduate from college and work off your debt as a Starbucks' barista. After all, things could be worse...

    Slave-Trade Supermarkets

    Walmart, Tesco, Aldi, Morrissons, Carrefour, Costco. What do they all have in common, apart from the fact that they are supermarkets? They all sell products that are produced under slavery....

    Have you ever seen a movie that depicts an apocalyptic future where poor people live underground? Beware, the Tunnel People...

    Inside the Tunnels Las Vegas's Homeless Population Calls Home

    In the 1990s, Las Vegas began building storm-drainage tunnels to protect the tourist destination from raging flash floods. The plan was to construct 1,000 miles of tunnels within 20 or 25 years. Today, the tunnels house the city’s homeless population.

    The scorpion-filled tunnels gained notoriety in 2002, when Timmy “T. J.” Weber used them to evade the police after he murdered his girlfriend, but the homeless people are neither murderers nor radioactive mole people—they’re normal American citizens who have lost their way. Las Vegas offers them little help, so they turn to the tunnels for shelter.

    Actually, forget it, don't even let them eat cake...

    In 33 U.S. Cities, Feeding the Homeless Has Been Criminalized

    ... many of the same places that are banning food-sharing are the same ones that have criminalized homelessness with harsh and punitive measures. Essentially, they’re designed to make being homeless within city limits so unpleasant that the downtrodden have no choice but to leave.... The UN even went so far as to single the U.S. out in a report on human rights, saying criminalization of homelessness in the U.S. “raises concerns of discrimination and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

    Speaking of cruel and inhuman, how about that US healthcare system? USA, USA, We are #1....

    The U.S. Has The Most Expensive And Least Effective Health Care In The Developed World

    For the fifth time in a row, the United States has been ranked last in a prominent think tank’s review of industrialized nation’s health care systems. Compared to other wealthy countries like Germany, France, Switzerland, and Australia, the U.S. lags far behind when it comes to ensuring health care access, efficiency, and equity....

    Among the nations included in the Commonwealth Fund’s survey, the highest percentage of U.S. residents skip out on the medical care they need because they can’t afford it. Thirty-seven percent of Americans said they didn’t fill a prescription, visit a doctor, or seek out recommended medical care because they were worried about the cost....

    Health Care: Let's Have People Over Profits Once and for All

    There are some things in this world that shouldn't be turned into profit-making machines, and health care is definitely one of them. Believe it or not, there was a time in America when in almost every state health insurance companies and hospitals were required to be nonprofits. Back then, Americans could actually get the health care and treatment they needed at affordable prices.

    I suppose this is what happens when you let corporations run your government...

    Bill Moyers, aka Mr. Dignified Outrage, delivers this riff on Wall Street’s secret weapon: Congress...

    These finance executives took part in “scandals that violate the most basic ethical norms,” as the head of the IMF Christine Lagarde put it last month, including illegal foreclosures, money laundering and the fixing of interest rate benchmarks. In fact, banking CEOs not only avoided prosecution but got average pay raises of 10 percent last year, taking home, on average, $13 million in compensation.

    New survey says... if you want to get elected in 2014, shout about "the crooks on wall street."

    It's a landslide... the government no longer has the consent of the governed...

    Key Midterm Election Indicators at or Near Historical Lows

    Approval of Congress at 16%; national satisfaction at 23%

    The election environment for congressional incumbents in 2014 will be challenging, with several key public opinion indicators as negative or nearly as negative as they have been in any recent midterm election year. This includes congressional job approval, which, at 16%, is on pace to be the lowest in a midterm election year since Gallup first measured it in 1974.

    Ut oh, the natives are getting restless, it's time to wag the dog... in classic Obama fashion...

    We will not send any troops...

    Obama Orders US Soldiers Back to Iraq

    Despite initial assurances to the contrary, new combat-ready troops already on the ground inside war-torn country.

    In remarks on Friday, Obama told the American people he would "not be sending U.S. troops back into combat in Iraq." Despite those assurances, the Associated Press reports that "nearly 300 armed American forces are being positioned in and around Iraq" as part of the president's military response to the deteriorating situation inside the country.

    But wait... we've had a new covert invasion of Iraq underway since February...

    Videos Americans Didn’t Get to See on Our Nightly News (Warning: Graphic Images)

    While the U.S. media obsess with the Iraq War that we created 11 years ago and can’t stop... they’re covering up our current invasion (overseen by our CIA and former Blackwater mercenaries), which Obama and more than $5 billion of U.S. taxpayer money started in February.

    And the mainstream media war propaganda complex is spewing out the same tired old war profiteers...

    Deja vu all over again...

    Stop treating war-crazy buffoons as experts! They got it wrong, remember?

    Wolfowitz, Kristol and the rest of the neocons should be pariahs. Instead they're on Sunday show round tables.

    In the name of national security...

    Reporting Live, from Post-Constitutional America...

    Peter Van Buren breaks down the breakdown of civil liberties...

    RIP, The Bill of Rights

    We are the first to see, in however shadowy a form, the outlines of what a Post-Constitutional America might look like. We could be the last who might be able to stop it.

    In Post-Constitutional America, however, the government strives to "control the message," to actively thwart efforts to maintain a citizenry informed about what’s done in its name, a concept that these days seems as quaint as Jefferson's powdered wig. There are far too many examples of the post-9/11 erosion of the First Amendment to list here. Let's just look at a few important ones that tell the tale of what we have lost since 9/11.

    The always spot on Charles Hugh Smith sums it up...

    The Most Destructive Presidencies in U.S. History: George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama

    The Bush and Obama presidencies have effectively dismantled the rule of law and the Constitution by invoking essentially unlimited executive powers in the name of "national security:" we the citizens of the U.S. can now be accused of violating secret laws, be indicted in secret, tried in secret and sentenced to life in prison based on evidence fabricated in secret, i.e. declaring unclassified documents classified after the fact to incriminate and imprison whistleblowers.

    How is this any different from totalitarian fascist regimes?

    This is absolutely contrary to basic civil liberties defined by the Constitution.

    And now, a message from our sponsors...

    Here's a rant for ya... from the Mighty Jim Quinn...

    FOURTH TURNING ACCELERATING

    Lies, misinformation, deception, propaganda, easy debt, cheap oil, endless commercial expansion, relentless marketing, never ending war, politicians selected by bankers and mega-corporations, tax code created to benefit the .01%, and laws written by the lobbyists for the oligarchs designed to control the plebs and enrich the modern aristocracy, made the world go round until 2008. Linear thinkers in government, business, banking and media have been perpetuating the falsehood of a return to normalcy, recovery....

    The 2008 global financial crash was the catalyst for this Fourth Turning and the next leg down will unleash the fury of the masses as their remaining wealth, along with their hopes and dreams are obliterated.... The extreme and growing wealth inequality driven by Federal Reserve policies, corporate lobbyist written government regulations and tax laws, and bankers controlling the political, economic, financial, and media levers has reached levels previously associated with collapse and revolution. The greed, hubris and arrogance of the .01% will lead to their downfall.

    With poverty and injustice like this, the aristocratic perpetrators are preparing for blowback...

    Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown

    Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements

    Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions." The project will determine "the critical mass (tipping point)" of social contagians by studying their "digital traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey."

    Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised."

    Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences." The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.

    OMG! The FBI is following you... on Twitter... #TRILL

    Here Is The FBI’s Official Guide to Twitter Slang

    The FBI knows what LMAO means. According to an internal manual released today under the Freedom of Information Act to the open-records website MuckRock, the bureau also knows what ANFAWFOS, EOTWAWKI, and IITYWTMWYBMAD stand for. So beware: The feds have cracked Twitter slang. Or think they have.

    Militarize the police...

    Sheriff: Local Cops Need MRAPs Because America Has Turned Into A War Zone

    Johnson County is one of eight Indiana law enforcement agencies to acquire MRAPs from military surplus since 2010, according to public records obtained by The Indianapolis Star. The vehicles are among a broad array of 4,400 items — everything from coats to computers to high-powered rifles — acquired by police and sheriff departments across the state.

    Law enforcement officials, especially those from agencies with small budgets, say they’re turning to military surplus equipment to take advantage of bargains and protect police officers. The MRAP has an added benefit, said Pulaski County Sheriff Michael Gayer, whose department also acquired one: “It’s a lot more intimidating than a Dodge.”

    Someday soon, the mega-rich will have personal security drones that hoover overhead on a digital leash and taze any poor people who get in their airspace. Here's an early version...

    Follow Me' Drones Will Hover By Your Side on a Digital 'Leash'

    With the AirDog, the drone will communicate directly with a wristband worn by the pilot, naturally called a "leash." The user can plug in the distance from the wristband, angle, and altitude that he or she wants the drone to fly, and the drone will automatically follow.

    In this Post-Constitutional Brave New World, Activism Is Terrorism...

    Lawyer: Military Employee Admitted He Was Paid by Army to Attend Private Activist Meetings in Homes

    An attorney pursuing a lawsuit against alleged domestic United States military spying says during depositions in the case a civilian employee who worked for the Army admitted he was paid to attend activist meetings at private homes in the state of Washington. And a fusion center intelligence employee, who coordinated with the military, also considered civil disobedience to be “terrorism.”

    If the government is going to treat all of us like terrorists, you might as well get yourself a blackphone...

    NSA-Proof? Super-Secure Blackphone Shipping by July

    If you wish your smartphone had more security and privacy features, you might soon be switching phones: pre-orders for the Blackphone, codeveloped by secure communications provider Silent Circle and hardware developer Geeksphone, will hit the market before the start of July.... It has a number of privacy and security features, including encrypted phone calls, texts and video chats, a custom Android-based operating system and a Virtual Private Network to anonymize users' Web traffic.

    Speaking of avoiding the surveillance state...

    Edward Snowden and John Perry Barlow, “A Conversation Across Cyberspace”

    The Powers That Be are also trying to kill the open internet... Stand up for media freedom and ride the #WaveOfAction to #SaveTheInternet...

    Open Letter To FCC Employees On Real Net Neutrality

    ... we want to invite you to the noon showing on July 1 of the musical: Which Side Are You On, Tom? The musical places Tom Wheeler between The People and the giant Telecom industries. Chairman Tom Wheeler can be a hero who will be remembered in history as a key person who saved the Internet for all humanity. We know Chairman Wheeler has strong industry ties, and has profited immensely from his alliance with telecoms and broadband providers, but we also know that the people he serves want the Internet to be free of discrimination.

    John Oliver: FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Is NOT A Dingo

    That laughter felt good, we need a comedic break...

    Sound the alarm, beat the war drums, yet again...

    Irrefutable proof that Iran is manufacturing nuclear weapons...

    Here are two nuclear fembots sent to destroy the minds of Americans...

    "Pelvic bones are the new nipples"???

    That, actually, hurt my mind...

    Let's rectify this, here's a heartwarming hit of divine comedic wisdom...

    Jim Carrey's Commencement Address at the 2014 MUM Graduation

    We can't do a news roundup without mentioning the World Cup of Inequality... (Forgive me footballers, I too enjoy a good ole football match to escape the dreary compulsion & tyranny of everyday life, don't mean to muddy up your spectacle of distraction.)

    Dave Zirin on the World Cup You Won’t See on TV: Protests, Tear Gas, Displaced Favela Residents

    Many Brazilians have expressed fury over Brazil spending an estimated $11 billion to host the cup while the country’s hospitals and schools remain woefully underfunded. In a video taken by the Associated Press, a police officer can be seen firing what appears to be a live pistol round at anti-World Cup protesters near Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã soccer stadium. Police have reportedly also used tear gas, rubber bullets and noise bombs to disperse demonstrators. We go to Rio to speak with sportswriter Dave Zirin, who was tear-gassed on Sunday while covering the protests. He is author of the new book, "Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics and the Fight for Democracy."

    EatFootballs

    Now feels like a good time to throw in a comment from the Pope... here's what he just said at a conference on "Investing in the Poor: How Impact Investing Can Serve the Common Good in Light of 'Evangelii Gaudium'"...

    pope

    Before we go... let me get up on my virtual cyber soapbox and riff a bit...

    As you can see from this flowing torrent of nooze, we need to take action & do something to fix this shit, and we need to do it now. As my wise & psychedelic old friend Terrence McKenna once said, "We are led by the least among us." The paid-off political puppets and Supremely corrupt Court jesters are NOT going to save us. You, my friend, have to step up and be a leader. If you're tapped in enough to be reading this right now, you're probably already active. Much love & respect to you! To the few of you who aren't in the choir, it's time to start singing: #BeTheChange in your personal life & ride the #WaveOfAction.

    For all the horrific news, there is an abundance of positive change happening right now. There is an unprecedented uprising underway! A wave of transformation is sweeping across this planet. The new paradigm is emerging, organically evolving, rising up from every crack in this godforsaken civilization. So start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone.

    Here's two actions that are striking at the root....

    Take A Step Forward ~ March For Democracy #M4D

    We began a 480-mile march from Los Angeles, over the mountains and valleys of California, to the state capitol in Sacramento. We will deliver a simple demand to the leaders of our nation’s largest state: publicly acknowledge the crisis of corruption and take immediate action to end it.

    [Join them in solidarity on June 22nd as they occupy the state capitol building.]

    And from one of my favorite co-conspirators...

    A Crowdfunded, Kickstarted SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs

    Government has failed us. More than 90% of Americans link that failure to the influence of money in politics. Yet the politicians do not talk about this influence. While our democracy decays, they spend endless time with their funders. These funders hold our democracy hostage. We want to pay the ransom and get it back. Here’s how we’ll do it...

    Ok, okay... that's it for today...

    Did your ever-shortening attention span hold out?

    You deserve a break, while we still have oxygen, go breathe in a sanity-elixir & get some rest...

    The Theology of Rest: A Modern Sermon About Living with Presence in the Age of Productivity

    “Busy is a decision,” a wise woman once once reminded us. I often think about how our modern obsession with productivity is blinding us to the fact that being productive can be the surest way of lulling ourselves into a trance of passivity, where we coast through our lives day after day after day, showing up but being absent. I’ve previously written about our culturally conditioned tendency to wear our ability to labor endless hours as a badge of honor that validates our work ethic, but what it really bespeaks is profound failure of priorities and self-respect. We treat rest like a sin, not like the sanity-elixir and ambrosia of creativity that is.

    What do you think? Should I keep pounding these out?