Get Up, Stand Up

Adbusters editor-at-large Micah White talks about social movements after Occupy with As It Happens co-host Carol Off onstage at GET UP! STAND UP! The event, hosted by CBC, took place May 4, 2013 at Convocation Hall in Toronto and also featured Chris Hedges, Margaret Atwood, Sean Atleo, John Ralston Saul, and Wade Davis.

Two ideologies that keep US going

There are therapists throughout the US, and they’re very important, because they pick up the refuse of the economic-political system.
We have mental health clinics all over the nation, in every city and county. And they all produce pamphlets about how to deal with the problems of addiction, battered wives, childhood disorders.  Someone has to pick these people up, and therapy does it. But therapy operates with an ideology – an individualistic, must-learn-to-cope ideology. The individual has to learn how to cope, and the therapist helps that person stay in control. This ideology is based on the idea of individual growth and potential.
Most schools of therapy share the idea that there’s an inner world that can be made to expand and grow, and that people are living short of their possibilities, and that they need help to… what she we call it? Fulfill their potential. Therapy has become a kind of individualistic, self-improvement philosophy, a romantic ideology that suggests each person can become fuller, better, wiser, richer, more effective.
I believe we now have two ideologies that run this country. One is economics, and the other is therapy. These are the basic, bottom-line beliefs that we return to in our private moments – these are what keeps us going.

I have no deviant desires - The American Dream

I am married and I live in the suburbs.

My street looks like every street you have seen in every commercial since 1957.Ever since I first came here, I couldn’t think of living anywhere else.

I have two children – both bright – a girl and a boy. I can’t wait to watch them grow up.

I love my car. My impeccable home. I love being fit, and I love a good day’s work. I love being straight and never confused about my sexual identity. I love my wife. I love being monogamous.

I love my neighbors who come out on Saturday mornings and cut their grass, and chitchat to me while we washdown our cars and driveways.

Every second Saturday, after the kids are safely off to bed, I take a Viagra. My wife and I will then finish watching our Saturday night crime drama, and then for the next 20 or so minutes I remind my wife of why she really married me in the first place. After which she usually takes a Sleep Eze-type product because she says she likes getting a good Saturday night sleep.

The kids are always up early on Sunday mornings, diligently doing their homework at the kitchen table, while Mom bakes cookies and makes bread in her new breadmaker. That’s when the kitchen really shines. We don’t go to church, except for the high holidays, but we still know we are blessed.

My wife booked us a trip to the Caribbean. She said we could get double airmiles if we put the entire trip on our VISA card.

When our neighbors ask how the trip was I tell them it was brilliant, just as theirs had been. It’s not a lie.

Sure, we all comb our hair the same way, and we are a little obsessed with dandelions and flossing our teeth. And so what if we all like to go to the same movies, watch the same TV, and eat the same popcorn. It’s a good life here.

Uncomplicated.

I’m not a complicated man.

I have no deviant desires.

Direct democracy in Zuccotti Park -new versions of democracy

”mental environmentalism,” is an antidote to the “pollution of our minds” by “infotoxins…commercial messaging and the…financial and ethical catastrophes that loom before humanity.”

“online flash mob” -this is a new way of demonstrating that labor unions and traditional political organizers know almost nothing about.

Protesters have spoken of the need to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act that, since 1933, had separated investment and commercial banking. (Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999 to facilitate the merger of Travelers Group and Citicorp, now Citigroup, setting off what many believe to be a decade of ruinous speculation. Some of the Glass-Steagall provisions are reflected in the Volcker Rule included in the Dodd-Frank Act.). But to argue for Glass-Steagall is to infer that the existing financial institutions are essentially acceptable, when in truth some of the Occupy Wall Street activists apparently don’t believe the current banking system should exist at all. The same is true of tax reform: a tax on Wall Street would go to politicians controlled by Wall Street.

Tunisia, Egypt... will the US be next?

Just how much our government lies to us

Do you believe that it is in Americans’ interest to allow a small group of U.S. leaders to unilaterally murder, maim, imprison and/or torture anyone they choose anywhere in the world, without the knowledge let alone oversight of their citizens or the international community? And, despite their proven record of failure to protect the U.S.A. – from Indochina to Iran to Iraq – do you believe they should be permitted to clandestinely expand their war-making without informed public debate? If so, you are betraying the principles upon which the U.S. was founded, endangering your nation, and displaying a distinctly “unamerican” subservience to unaccountable authority. But if you oppose autocratic power, you are called to support Wikileaks and others trying to limit U.S. Executive Branch mass murder abroad and failure to protect Americans at home.

Egypt. Omar Suleiman has blood on his hands.

hyper-managed, techno-authoritarian society

the possibility of a dramatic reduction in first world consumption without managerial fascism. leftist environmentalism has excluded all those who uphold the de-growth agenda. Instead, mainstream, reformist environmentalism promulgates the dangerous, pro-corporate illusion that consumption can continue to increase as long as it is “green”. With leftist, anti-authoritarian de-growth voices marginalized, the most persuasive ecologists today are authoritarians on the right.

Wikileaks signals a fundamental geopolitical shift.

The memes of transparency and the free flow of information, ideals that underpin the net, are finally beginning to have concrete political consequences.

Wikileaks have the potential to destabilize the West’s narrative and cultural hegemony.

France has already passed an Internet censorship law, and now there is talk that the UN is working to create a similar initiative on a global scale. In the weeks and months to come, we can expect a fight to the finish between the culture of the internet and the ancien régime. It is too early to know for certain who will come out the victor.

War on terror? War is terror.

Students who have never been involved in anything suddenly stood up and fought back

iHUMAN In what ways is immersion in digital technologies changing us as humans?

We will become considerably more networked, living mainly in terms of proxy encounters. Inevitably hive behaviors will supplant acts of individual initiative. We will become far more of a symbol-trading species than we already are.

What used to be a knowledge of facts and processes will become a knowledge of the most efficient ways to use those highly developed prosthetic resources. Subjective individualism, waning as an ideal for decades now, will become nearly extinct. We will tend toward electronic collectivism, a kind of electronically aggregated sense of identity.

How Investing in Corporate Banks Corrodes the Soul

… and what you can do about it.

Adbusters

“You hide in your offices, protected by your mathematical jargon, while in the real world, forests vanish, species perish and human lives are callously destroyed. We accuse you of gross negligence in the management of our planetary household.”

Between resistance and complicity