Nonviolently taking back our country – starting with the economy

(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

We, the disenfranchised citizenry of the United States of America, have been left with an economic version of the Augean stables by the fascist Bush regime. The Obama administration has the herculean task of cleaning up this horrific mess which reached it’s peak during the last administration, but which in fact has been decades and generations in the making.

No longer able to extort our labor or our buying power from us under the threat of conveniently timed and placed terrorism; no longer able to justify the existence of their contrived and corrupt police state; the supporters of the military/industrial complex are fighting desperately to keep their corporate feudal house of cards intact. Moles are embedded everywhere, monkeywrenching everything good that the new administration tries to do, already running around behind the brooms of those daunted stable cleaners and leaving as much new horse puckey as they possibly can.

We, the disenfranchised citizenry of the United States of America, have been led to believe by propagandists, liars and thieves that our only recourse is to suck it up and take it. While they continue to live large, well insulated from reality in the robber baron towers they have constructed on the backs of the poor and the middle class; our houses, if we can keep them, are cold. Our elderly are going hungry. Our children are going without medical care. Our cars are breaking down. While they revel in the best privacy, security, life, liberty and pursuit of privileged happiness that money can buy; our Constitution is in tatters. Our civil liberties have been shredded. Our opportunities have been criminally limited.

We have been consistently betrayed not only by Republicans but by complicit Democrats who are more interested in saving their own skins and pandering to their corporate-backed voter bases. We are not getting what we want from our government, and we have been led to believe that our only real alternative will lead to blood in the streets.

Wrong.

What they have stolen is money. Money that was overprinted by a completely off-the-rails Federal Reserve. Money that is easy to move, easy to hide, easy to play a worldwide shell game with via electronic networks that have not been properly monitored because no one has been watching the watchers.

Most of what they have stolen is actually worthless. It’s about as substantial and necessary to survival as cotton candy. We suffer because we BELIEVE the lie that it’s worth something – and we are letting someone else who can no longer be trusted tell us exactly how much.  

Who determines that a loaf of bread in the NYC area is worth $3.50? Who decrees that a half gallon of milk is $2.39? Who says we have to pay that much? Why are we settling for this? Have we learned nothing from the way that the entire world was price-gouged for gasoline and oil while the Bush regime was still in power?

It’s been documented elsewhere: we have too much “stuff”. We produce too much “stuff”.

Entire industries revolve around the production of nice to have, glitzy, faddish, fashionable “stuff”, much of which no one really needs to survive.

I worked for several years in my mom and dad’s card and candy store. They sold that kind of “stuff”. Nobody actually needs a candy bar, a birthday balloon, a Hallmark card, a lottery ticket or a little plastic hockey bobblehead to survive. Nothing they sold was a necessity, unless you count newspapers and the odd magazine – information IS a necessity. But when you get right down to it, they pulled in around $120,000 a year selling “stuff” that was completely unnecessary. And that’s just one example.

Pardon the brief foray into a Christian meme, it’s not usually my style as I have eschewed that faith as an adult, it simply does not work for me. However the story is appropriate. It’s about a group of people in hell and one in heaven, all of whom are hungry. They’re all sitting around a pot with soup in it, and the people in hell all have these spoons with handles too long to reach their own mouths. They are going hungry because all they could think about were feeding themselves. The folks in heaven have the same situation, but have figured out that by feeding EACH OTHER with the long spoons they can ameliorate the rumbly in their tumblies.

Freecycle is a form of trading that completely bypasses the ordinary flow of consumer goods. There’s so much “stuff” out there that it’s entirely possible to get what one is looking for for FREE, simply if you are willing to take a little time to look for it and are able to go get it. Over the years I have obtained an Ikea computer desk, a 4 drawer file cabinet, an HP All-In-One, empty wine bottles for my homebrewing hobby, a shop light for my studio, even coupons for groceries… I could go on but you get the idea.

Barter on CraigsList is another place where goods and, more importantly, SERVICES can be exchanged by agreeable parties. Here is where you can use your long-handled spoon to feed somebody else and get a bit of soup in return, entirely free from any Madison Avenue/ governmental / Wall Street corporate feudal state middlemen who might be shouting the lie that you’re stuck having to feed yourself with the long-handled spoon which is the only thing they have to sell.

Naturally you take your chances with these two avenues of endeavor. The free stuff you get might be broken or not in good shape or too obsolete for your purposes. Any exchange of services should really be done with a contract behind it to keep one or the other party from being messed over.

That said, barter of goods and services, and a means for freely disposing of unwanted “stuff” that helps both the economically disadvantaged AND the environment: THIS is how we can tell these monopolists, robber barons, con men, self-proclaimed Ayn Randian overlords and other useless parasites to take the entire prefabricated marketing maze they have tried to impose on “the rat race” with a high-voltage switch at the end attached to every food pellet AND SHOVE IT.

Another alternative if you’re resourceful enough and have the time and energy is just to make your own spoons. Go sustainable. Spring is coming – anyone with access to decent land and sun should be already planning their garden, and it shouldn’t just include flowers but food. Start networking with neighbors and friends NOW and plan ahead of time to trade what goods you grow. If you have the wherewithal, get your homes and/or businesses off the grid. Grab the reins. Control your own lives. Make informed choices about what you purchase and STOP giving your money to these thieves when and where you can do so. Don’t buy their long-handled spoons – make your own to the specs you like. Make some for other people too – and profit, going completely around the thieves in the process.

Your competition has proven itself to be incompetent, uncaring, neglectful. They have no pride in their “work” because what they’re doing ISN’T work, it’s THEFT. It’s a CON job. Get off the couch and show them how it’s done and you’ll beat them REAL bad. You want a job? TAKE THEIRS! THEY’RE NOT DOING IT!

This is how we, the disenfranchised citizenry of the United States, can eliminate monopolistic price gouging or fixing, corporate cronyism, white collar crime, and police-state-style extortion and middleman harassment from our economic equation. These con men do not have the monopoly that they think they do on our survival. We reject the world they are trying to build for us. It looks a bit too much like a cattle pen, and there are those of us who are well aware that there’s an already well-used killing floor just beyond that dark doorway in what looks like a barn.

Get cracking, America. Find someone you can help – and someone who is willing to help you. WE are out here, by the millions. We outnumber the thieves and the liars and the holders of their pretense of power, who want us to believe that they are all there is and that we are stuck with them and the fucked-up long-handled spoons they have sold us.

Let’s get ‘er done, and leave these greedhead bastards out in the cold as we do it – as they so richly deserve.