“Occupy the World” Revolution—And Solution

 

“2011 A Space Odyssey”

 

Putting a Face on the Crowds

 

And a Face on the Monster Stalking the Crowds

THE CAUSE AND SOLUTION (FORMULA) TO THE WORLD’S CURRENT CRISIS (REVOLUTION)

 

 

OWS VICTORY FORMULA:

 

OWS⁴⁰/C=RCA

 

Your challenge (as you read):

 

You already know “OWS” = “Occupy Wall Street”.

 

The solution (proof) of the formula comes at the

end (don’t cheat and peak).

 

Challenge yourself to figure out…

 

what the “40” stands for…

 

what the two “C’s” , the “R” and “A” stand for…

 

 knowing that this is in fact a formula for “victory”.

 

There’s a revolution under way, people, and it’s a world-wide revolution. The fearful conservatives (wealthy) in our midst (in our Fox Media faces) will tell you that the Wall Street “occupiers” have no “cause” they can articulate, and the same thing can be said of what is happening now in Greece, Rome, London, Taiwan, and pretty much everywhere around the globe newly wired by cell phones, IPODs, Twitter, Facebook and “The Cloud”.  The working classes of the world have finally united–at least temporally–and what is at stake is  cataclysmically important: The world’s economy could easily collapse under the combined factors of a global economic recession bordering on depression and an electronically-hyper-connected mass protest reacting to that collapse and demanding redress (and retribution) from those variously perceived as “causes” of that collapse.

 So here it is: The cause and the solution to the world’s current crisis:

Without the unifying power of a common cause, any revolution we begin is doomed to failure. Now you have an inkling of why I am writing. When I suggest “we” need to unite this revolution, I mean “we” in the  GLOBAL SENSE—because like it or no, the Wikileaked, Twittered, I-phoned, in-the-cloud planet of ours is now truly “ a single creature, clinging to the round warm stone, turning in the sun.” (Thanks for the gaia image, Lewis Thomas).

With the Thomas allusion, I’ll here lay some more (sorry) complex philosophical groundwork. I want you to understand the word, “Gaia”–what it means and why it is so important. It is what Lewis Thomas was referring to when he characterized our planet as being what it is in the macrocosmic sense—a single creature.  What we are ecologically we are economically. In the Gaia Principle sense, we are “one” with the trees and seas. We breathe out carbon dioxide and they (the trees and sea) breathe it in. The trees in turn (through chlorophyll and algae) breathe out the oxygen which every second keeps us animated creatures alive. As thanks for this symbiotic salvation, we (humans) clear-cut forests of trees and dump our toxic and plastic garbage into maternal oceans, but that’s collateral story and another travesty to deal with later. But the revolution of which I write today and our cutting of trees and pollution of seas have a single common denominator.  Stay with me.

The point in the preceding paragraph is that we can’t affect one part of an ecosystem without affecting the whole, because the world’s ecosystem is just that– a single, interdependent system. Humans have, as a single “tissue” in the world’s unitary Gaia body, become like a cancer…through overpopulation, recently topping 7 Billion.  If we were only a few million we could all drive SUV’s that get 6 miles a gallon and live in 20,000-square foot AC’d houses without killing the ozone or frying the planet. Change those millions to 7 billion, and we have changed the world’s smartest species into a virtual malignancy on the body of the unitary Gaia creature, which may be the only creature of its kind in the universe.

So what’s the relevance of the “Gaia” principle to the global protests—and burgeoning revolution—now going on literally all over the Gaia globe….?   It’s the SAME THING. That is: What we are doing to our planet by over populating and polluting it, is being done to us humans —and the planet–by another over-grown monster in the same eco-logical and eco-nomical macrocosm.

We need both a familiar and purposeful face for the crowd and a “make” on the monster stalking—and being stalked (albeit knowingly or inadvertently) by that crowd. I say we start by seeking the face of the monster, because it is with that monster that everyone in those crowds is attempting to contend.  It is the monster that is the seminal cause of all the only superficially-severable things they are protesting.  All the things of which they complain….from “no jobs” to burst real estate and stock bubbles and bailouts…are “different”—BUT THEY ARE ALL THE WORK OF A SINGLE MONSTER.  AND THE NAME OF THE MONSTER IS…………..

 

 CORPORATION

 

HERE’S WHAT WE ALL KNOW:

 

CORPORATIONS . . .  

 

. . . Out of Greed and the Need “To Survive” in the global economy….

 

• Own/are the banks and mortgage brokerages that inflated the housing bubble, then popped it, then got bailed out while Americans got tossed out in foreclosures and bankruptcies.

 

• Systematically exported (“downsized” their own labor forces and “off-shored”) America’s laboring and middle-class jobs to China and other

third-world slave-labor camps.  Adding insult to injury–The largest corporation in America—i.e., the one employing the most Americans, is Walmart.  Walmart is a sales agent and distributorship for Communist China, our most formidable and dedicated adversary in the world. Corporate off-shoring has placed America’s destiny in the hands of Communist China.  

   

• Bush-wacked (pun intended)  America’s healthcare system by buying up control of all the healthcare providers and their addictively co-dependent insurance providers : Doctors now work for corporate HMO’s instead of themselves and physicians are now converted from professional caring healers to assembly-line cyborgs allotted 3 to 10 minutes per patient, destroying physician-patient relationships and excluding all from treatment save those who either work for corporations and have corporate-funded health insurance or who own corporations and don’t need it.

 

• Own/are the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing the meds the majority of Americans are physically and/or mentally addicted to and can’t afford. The game they are playing and winning is “don’t make people well—make them addicted and pay.”  These are the wealthiest and most powerful corporations on the planet. They make the policy that doctors, the FDA and we—the addicted—follow, pay and often die for (by either taking it or not being able to afford taking it).  

 

• Own/are the petroleum and coal energy-producing companies which, in order to keep their obscene profits rolling in, have managed to convince forty percent of America (as opposed to 10 percent of the rest of the world) that global warming is a myth, fracking is safe,  and that seeking sustainable energy sources and going green to save the planet is un-American, in spite of BP’s recent rape of our American Gulf.

 

• Own/are the munitions companies that profit—perennially—from the wars they lobby to launch, supply and perpetuate. They do it for oil; they do it for munitions profits; they do it for mercenary soldier profits, and they’ll do it forever until they are stopped.  Without Halliburton there would have been no Cheney; without Cheney there would have been no wars in Afghanistan or Iraq.  The world (outside America) already knows this, and history will confirm it. So far, over a half million non-militants have perished in these two wars, and counting. Corporate PR-coached Congressmen call it “collateral damage”.  When other countries do it, the same foxy word spinners call it “terrorism”.

American terrorism abroad is known as terrorism. Domestically it is PR packaged,  “shock and awe”.  Corporate-funded “institutes” spin these

Orwellian distortions of truth (1984’s “Big Lies”).

 

• Elect freely both presidents and Congressmen through control of the media (not to mention the one they elected through control of the Supreme Court) and the newly-acquired right to campaign directly in presidential and Congressional elections without any restrictions on dollars spent on the TV and media commercials that clearly determine who wins elections.  

 

• Through lobbyists and control of Congress create laws that tax themselves at 35 percent but at the same time provide “loopholes” that exempt the most powerful and profitable corporations from paying any income tax.  [The COLLOSSAL and catastrophic irony of this shouldbe viewed in the context of  tax  history: Alexander Hamilton, observing a naturally stronger France be overtaken and passed—militarily and industrially– by a smaller but fiscally-responsible England, taught us that a nation can be no more successful than its fiscal policies are responsible. Financially, he taught us the axiom that a nation must maintain its financial credit and that taxing its citizenry is the only means of accomplishing that.  Whereas our country was founded on the revolution of “no taxation without representation”, the current OWS revolution is largely the result of the opposite— The financial giants among us (corporations) are demanding—and getting–representation without taxation.  The catastrophic result of this is corporations have converted America from the world’s strongest economy to the world’s greatest debtor nation…and our credit is now being questioned. When the answer to the question becomes “no”, the U.S. as a leader nation is history.

 

• Appoint freely and thereby control the U.S. Supreme Court whose decisions are now routinely 5-4 fiats dictated by corporate-controlled GOP-voting pseudo-jurists—the same jurists who in the past 4 years granted corporations the right to take your personal property and to insure the election of its chosen candidates for Congress through removing any restrictions on independently campaigning (disguised as “free speech”).

 

• Work together so all corporate-controlled banks, securities brokers (money lenders of all varieties) and Chinese sales representatives are viewed as “too big to fall”, so that tax-payer funded “bailouts” provide a failsafe means of perpetuating their already absolute power over us and our government and push our country further towards the brink of collapse through loss of creditability.

 

 

 

THE FALLOUT FROM CORPORATE CORRUPTION:

 

• All of the foregoing areas of unrestrained corporate power are leading to soaring unemployment, inflation, resource exhaustion, poverty, sickness, homelessness, bankruptcy, crime, insipient depression and the financial collapse of American and other formerly-thriving nations about the world and yet the corporate plutocrats are still thriving and  able to host tea parties and convince a simple but sizeable sector of unemployed, uninsured desperate people that taxing or otherwise inhibiting anything corporations are doing amounts to treason because corporations are now so powerful that they are able to peddle propaganda as  patriotism, proving  that Orwell’s 1984 story of Big Brother corporations one day running the world by propagation of the “Big Lies” was more prophesy than mythology—more future shocking  fact than fiction.

 

 

THE PAST WAS PRELUDE:

Corporate founders were made pariah and hated at the surge and ebbing of America’s first Depression—the Great One.  Rockefeller Center was built as a guilt offering by former “robber barons” of American greed. When the stock market crashed then and people were ruined, it was fleetingly recognized that a monster had arisen in our midst and we had obliviously bought into the monster, fed and nurtured it until it reared its ugly head and ate up the figments of our economic imaginations, effectively putting an abrupt end to the American Dream—at least for its working class. Back then, the Rockefeller’s Standard Oil entity was technically a “trust” rather than a corporation, but its cyborg essence and power were the same. The public outrage at the soulless greed of the monster trusts led to the splitting up of those judicially-deemed “monopolies”, but if the limbs of the monopolistic plants were trimmed, they were certainly not plowed under.

Unfortunately, the seeds of that economically tyrannic institution were not destroyed—but rather morphed into even more monstrous, ubiquitous and even less human entities called corporations. During America’s “recovery period”, these new hybrid legal “beings” were widely planted and permitted to thrive in a new economic environment where their survival was secured by another creation we simultaneously devised to insure that our corporate banks and securities-based economy could never again fall—a Federal Reserve “Bank” that—when the real value-based money ran out—was authorized to counterfeit money and thus enable the poor old failures of today to be bailed out by the poor indentured youth of tomorrow…. And yes—absolutely—I am saying to you that corrupt and morally-bankrupt financial “bailouts” are nothing new on the American scene. And what I am saying further is that the monster that brought America to its knees in the Great Depression is the same monster stalking—and being stalked by–every single one of those who are separately chanting protests about only seemingly-different things in the city squares of the world, right now.

If Corporations are “the problem”, then should the goal of the OWS Revolution be to eliminate corporations?  Clearly not.  Corporations still employ us, produce and provide us pretty much everything from gasoline to entertainment, and even manage the HMO’s and pharmaceutical companies that provide our personal physicians and pills. So, if we can’t reverse history and get “rid” of them, what should we—in revolutionary fashion—do?

 

As is often the case in human history, the answer is evident in the work of an American artist:

An artist who painted for us a portentous portrait of the face of this   monster—and the hero who “took him down” was a movie maker named Stanley Kubrick.  His “2001 A Space Odyssey” is being literally reprised in the reality now before us as “2011, A Space Odyssey”.   The monster is the same, by analogy.  Kubrick’s mythical computer (nicknamed “Hal”) — gone wild—was to story’s space ship (“Discovery One”) and mission (“Odyssey” to Jupiter) exactly what the corporation has become to America and its destiny.

 

In the Kubrick movie, we were given a prodigious parable that could save us today—the story of “Hal” – a computer amazingly programmed and supplied with the entire extant knowledge and hyper-driven intelligence of its human creators, and ceded thereafter complete control and steerage of its Jupiter-bound spaceship.  A solid-circuited-silicone-chipped machine-turned-monster and destroyer of both their shared spaceship and mission.

Where are the analogy and lesson?  Hal—the Odyssey’s spaceship’s (“Discovery One”) on-board computer was functionally for that mission and spaceship exactly the same as the American corporation is to America’s ship of state (our nation and our earth). Hal did literally everything for the spaceship’s crew and mission, from preparing their food to plotting their trek through space. Moreover, both Hal and the Corporation became monstrous for the same reason, and with the same effect.  That being the case, the solution –the remedy for Keir Dullea (Captain of Discovery One) and for our present-day revolutionary “occupiers” of Wall Street and other financial capitals of the Gaia-united globe—is the same

What went wrong in the creation of mythical  Hal went (really) wrong when we permitted our lawyers and our governments to create the first monstrous corporation.  The thing that is “wrong” with both is that they are both “cyborgs” and cyborgs built to accrete (rather than distribute) wealth and power.  That’s (“cyborg”) the other term (the prior being,“Gaia”) I contend is essential for us to master.  In the Kubrick movie, everything rational was built into that spaceship’s all-knowing, all-controlling computer except a …. soul.  “Soul” is a term none of us can define in the same way we can’t define “happiness”. We can’t define happiness but we know it when we feel it and we know the things we can to do enhance or diminish it.  The computer, Hal, was destined to become a monster because it was constructed devoid of soul.   When the computer learned that the humans who created it were in the process of shutting it down for repairs (Hal had made an error, you may recall….just as Corporations do when they invent and market things like Thalidomide …and cigarettes, and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) the computer—having no soul…and accordingly no empathy for the lives and souls of others, made a decision to “shut down” the life processes of all the humans aboard spaceship Discovery One. It made this decision because at the core of its cyber-self, it had—as corporations have—a single driving force and purpose—survival. Survival of the cyber-cyborg itself, that is—and not survival of either its human creators, components or collaborators.

By definition, a “cyborb” is an amalgamation of human and material (machine) elements to form a functional being bearing some—but not all– the attributes of both.  Cyborgs are common elements and characters in today’s Sci-Fi flicks and most of them (saving perhaps Star Wars’ R2-D2 and C-3PO) are made villains of the plots because, like Hal and today’s corporations, they lack that quality we call “soul”.

  Now, back to Kubric’s prophetic Space Odyssey story:

 

When computers were–as the original “Univac”–limited in function to perform a few tasks faster and more efficient than men, they were very useful “tools” for humans and their many varied purposes and missions.  When and as they were improved and evolved to the point their robotic progeny were infinitely faster and more powerful than their human creators… even to the point of assimilating men’s emotional tendencies, including (fatefully in the 2001 story) the will to survive, then the computer morphed from machine to MONSTER.  (This seldom-intended negative feature of modern inventiveness is the focus of Csikszentmihalyi’s cultural caveat as taught in his tome “The Evolving Self” where the author outlines the dangerous consequences of the fact that men’s inventions live and continue to evolve after the inventors die. When, for example,  Henry Ford I invented the auto assembly line, he had no idea that his invention (which Csikszentmihalyi terms “meme”) would live after him and move the world to pave its surface with concrete and asphalt to the point a cyborg-accelerated world was threatened with warming itself into extinction.

 

The precise thing that happened fictionally with computers in Space Odyssey happened in the real world with corporations. Conceived long ago as a means for citizens to get together and pool their money for a common business purpose, the equivalent of a useful “Univac” type tool was invented for the advancement of an industrial culture.   Accordingly, 50 or a hundred citizens of “our town” could each—in exchange for “stock”– contribute $50 to a local furniture artisan and thus provide  him the means of teaching ten others how to do what he did and make a profit for not only themselves but for their investors. The process became axiomatic and in terms of new capitalistic parlance became known as  “taking stock” in someone or someone’s business. The sinister flaw built into the corporate system is what is termed (by lawyers) its “veil”. Shareholders who own corporations are not responsible for corporate crimes and misdeeds. When Exxon and BP are sued for environmental crimes, the only thing the stockholders risk is shrinkage in their portfolio value. Moreover, the
“corporate veil” shields all its founders and officers from criminal charges where there is no evidence they “personally” knew what was going on. This anonymity and extensive immunity from responsibility is what enables the modern corporation to act and be perceived as what it in effect is—a “mob” with a government-granted license to plunder and pillage.

Initially then, corporations functioned as useful “tools” for their creators.  When Einstein first envisioned his formula E=mc2, he had in mind a means of converting Uranium into steam engine power for the world. In under 5 years that noble notion (meme) had evolved and snuffed the lives of over 246,000 human souls, and today the same notion threatens—every second—all life on earth. Mankind’s “memes” can become potentially cataclysmic.

Corporations have taken, unfortunately, the same route.  Initially a really quick and effective means of converting a solitary garage carpenter to an industrial magnate, the corporation is now a monster–actually thousands of them—in control of every single aspect of human existence, from crib to crypt.  The Supreme Court of the US has—because corporations elect and control the man (President) who appoints and controls them—calamitously  accomplished the same thing that computer programmer did when he converted 2001’s Hal into the monster that scuttled control of Kubric’s spaceship. In the decision of Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005) the Supreme Court decided that Corporations could now tell citizens to move out of their houses because corporations want to build a shopping center on the premises for their own profit.  In the decision of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, 558 U.S.2010 (2010, the corporation was by the Supreme Court finally converted into a monstrous cyborg political “decider”.  Before this case, we had a law (McCain-Feingold Act) limiting corporations’ contributions to the campaigns of specific candidates.  After Citizens United, corporations are permitted to skirt around the rule because they were in effect proclaimed entitled to human rights.   Corporations can now directly elect politicians without restraint because our corporate-controlled court has ruled (5 to 4) they have the right to “free speech” although they are by non-contestable construction deaf, dumb and soulless creatures.

Remember that other cyborg previously mentioned who was accorded the power of “free speech” and what he did with it?  Our corporations have become ….Hal.  From their initial purpose of permitting 100 citizens finically to enable one to hire more in order to make more value-added commodities, corporations are now empowered to elect our Congress,  control their votes on all issues, and finally to make war.

When corporations—as is the case today—elect our Congressmen and presidents through their now unfettered power to campaign on his and their behalf, we have succeeded in placing  cyborgs in control of spaceship America and due to the transnational nature of corporations today, the same cyborgs are insidiously in control of spaceship earth.

Get the Gaia connection yet?   The worst is yet to come.  Corporations are the ones today—making mega-billions in profits by drilling and selling oil. They are the same corporations which, with just a modicum of their profits, fund so-called “independent research institutes” (e.g. PNAC and the infamous war-mongering A.E.I) to publish the Orwellian (1984) Big Lies that  Iraq was in league with bin Laden and global warming is a liberal, “left wing” fiction.

Why would corporations put money in hired-gun phony think tanks to gainsay global warming when if the other 99.9 percent of the environmental scientists in the world are right—and global warming from carbon emissions is in fact occurring—then the corporations along with all God’s creatures and their planet, spaceship earth,  are to become …extinct?

The answer was and will remain the same—The corporation, (and Hal, the Odyssey’s all-powerful computer) have all the power and ….no soul—and they have as a “bottom line” raison d’etre only one driving force—survival. And, since corporations were never “alive” in the human sense, “survival” of course means material (i.e. monetary…bottom-line) survival. Not survival of their corporate creators, or ironically even their corporate workers—but rather their inanimate corporate carapaces- the soulless corporations themselves. Ironically—just as the Odyssey’s computer, Hal,  would have been destroyed had his cyborg compulsion to save himself succeeded,  the real  corporations  today will themselves perish in the same environmental cataclysm that will kill us non-cyborg humans, but that is the nature of the cyborg beasts…. They are doomed to machinate their own destruction, because as other axioms go, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and absolutely all absolute corruption ends in …destruction.

 

OK, I’ve painted the ugly clouds and the looming brooding storm of potentially-lethal revolution and destruction…..and  also implied (make that…promised) to wind up this essay with a rainbow for that storm. I promised to give a solution to the problem. So here it is. And again I’ll borrow from Kubrick’s movie: When it becomes apparent to the character played by handsome Kier Dullea that Hal is bent on killing all humans on board the Discovery One and taking over the journey into oblivion on his cyborg lonesome, Captain Dullea has to– in essence—“take care of” Hal— i.e., control without destroying him.  There is, unfortunately no human aboard who can do what Hal, the computer, does in calculating all that needs calculating to steer the spaceship around asteroids and black holes to safe landing on Neptune. So – “unplugging” or throwing a monkey wrench into Hal’s hard drive is out of the question. So what does Discovery’s heroic captain do?

 

He performs a lobotomy on Hal. He crawls—quite literally—into the man-size cyber-circuited corridors of Hal’s digital brain and one at a time pulls out memory circuit boards (computer hard-drive power) until Hal’s most powerful  capacities are rendered …benignly impotent…efficaciously handicapped.  In the process, we will recall feeling some contra-intuited compassion for the poor inanimate computer as Hal approaches the realization that  his most advanced cognitive regions are being deconstructed. His voice becomes first curious, then congenial, thereafter sweet and supplicating…and finally impotent, and in a child’s voice he is left singing a melody any 2^nd grader could master.  Game over. Sinister cyborg successfully converted back to useful computer (machine). Spaceship saved.  Humans survive. But this was in Kubrick’s mythical movie. What about our own, very-real and very odious corporate-cyborg-run and ruled world?

How can we do this with today’s conundrum of interrelated (trans-global) corporations?  We have corporations making the expensive medicines that now both drive and cripple our health industry. We have corporations making the weapons on which our country depends in order to maintain the balance of power (hegemony) our military/industrial complex of corporations have created around the globe. When we run out of volunteer regular Army ground troops, the Blackwater corporate cyborgs have in reserve and deploy limitless contingents of mercenaries to further the corporate-contrived war plans. We have corporations now privately running America’s prisons with the disastrous result that bottom-line profits have replaced “rehabilitation” as the prime purpose of incarceration, and to attain those bottom lines we see corporations—literally—delegating prisoner supervision and control to the gang leaders of the prisoners within the institutions. Corporate-run prisons are now gang-managed, gang-breeding, crime-teaching institutions. Difficult to believe?  Google “privatized prisons”, and prepare to be scared.

  We have corporations and their lobbies holding the purse strings of all the politicians, including Supreme Court Justices and our Oval Office C.E.O.  They are holding all the marbles. How can we get…peacefully…and efficaciously into the game of “lobotomizing” these corporations…i.e. reducing their presently unlimited power in order to convert them to their former status and function of helping American entrepreneurs and workers unite for the joint purpose of creating and marketing America’s ideas, products and services?

We use the tools at hand. Those tools now include the unique revolution of (presently) 900 world-wide “occupation” forces presently under way. We need to spread the word faster than Paul Revere’s pony that unless we unite and face our common monster foe together, our common monster foe will — like Hal in the Odyssey—continue to divide and conquer us.

We need to spread the alarm…to every commonplace village…… and farm… that we have seen the monster, and we know his face.  It is a cyborg of our own unwitting creation we have dubbed “Corporation.” It is the most powerful enemy in the world because he is our invited 5^th column horse of toppling Troy. He is on every corner in every town. He is our town.  Yes—Our very towns are corporations, too!  By definition and construction, corporations are predatory beasts, and the humans who construct them into their own cyborg image are, after their construction, no longer in control.  The soldiers…workers…employees and officers of those corporations are like those soldiers in the first wooden horse of Troy…They are still humans, but they are taken into places and constrained to perform acts dictated by the horse and its strategically-programmed mission and placement.

Those who saw the recent movie, “Up in the Air” will recall the epic revulsion of empathy shared by the audience with those (e.g. the character played by George Clooney) who were appointed to fly from corporate branch to remote corporate branch cutting away the human element of the corporate cyborg as it “down-sized, roboticized and off-shored” itself in order to survive in the increasingly-global arena of “to the death” cyborg competition. The parallels in the “Up in the Air” drama of firing corporate workers with robotic precision and programmed sympathy was uncannily reminiscent of Hal’s zombie-like serial shutting down the life support systems of his ship’s cryogenically-slumbering—and humanly trusting– crew.

When a corporation owns a ship–call it “Valdese”–and that ship dumps mega-tons of toxins in our sea, I would wager every single human (with a soul) in that corporation hates what has happened. But what will the corporation do about it?  As Hal, cyborg master of the spaceship Discover did, the corporate monster will do what is required to continue the life of the corporation. To hell with the humans within and without the corporate hull…The corporation must survive. How many decades did the cigarette corporations of the world know and deny knowing the lethally addicting quality of the products they were distributing to their human market? Because these corporate monsters still rule our government, they are still distributing addicting death to their human customers by the profitable bottle, syringe and pack (not to mention wars) with no end in sight.

Given the ubiquitous and seemingly limitless power of today’s corporate cyborgs, what can a crowd—even of millions—do to accomplish the equivalent of the “lobotomy” of power necessary to return to the people a semblance of the control and voice they once had in the conduct of their nation’s economic and political affairs?

THE SOLUTION

Unify the Banners and Rallying Cries

 

Chant a single chant. Raise a common flag. March under a common banner. Challenge a common foe—Tame the cyborgs in our midst by any and all means necessary, and yes, that includes everything espoused and prescribed in our own still very extant Declaration of Independence…. Including—especially– civil disobedience…but only if absolutely necessary, and I submit it is not.  

America has had one truly “real” tea party and it is high time for another. It is corporations controlling our nation’s healthcare and that should not be the case. It is corporations electing and controlling our politicians (on both sides of the aisle) and this should not be the case. It is corporations controlling the Pentagon when decisions are made to deploy our nation’s military to foreign lands to protect the interests of our corporations and this should not be the case. It is corporations deciding that jobs formerly performed by Americans should be exported to effectively third-world nations to be performed by essentially enslaved working classes, and this should not be the case.

Compassion and humanitarian empathy are clearly subordinate in the corporate entity and milieu to the prime mover of all such cyborgs—their own bottom-line survival. These worldwide urban “occupations” are our world’s long-overdue immune response to our presently malignant over-population of inflammatory corporate…monsters. So, what do we do about this contagion of cyborg corporate cancer? How do we propose to covert a discordant cacophony of protests around the globe to a melodious message—and march–of revolutionary prowess and promise?

CHANGING THE CHANTS

The first thing we do is obvious:  Become aware of the fact that at the karmic base of every economic and political problem in America there is a corporate cause.  Shout—no, scream—“Curb Corporations”!   Scream – “No more Corporate Lobbyists”. Do not scream this at the doors of Wall Street where only corporate puppets work. Scream it in the halls of legislatures where the Cyborg lobbyists are doing their cyborg work. Scream “No more (zero tolerance) corporate ads on TV for electoral candidates.  (Don’t scream this one in front of NationsBank—Scream this one on the steps of the Supreme Court, which is where corporate cyborgs derived their new pseudo-human rights and power.) Scream- Tax corporations! just as though they were humans…no more loopholes, and tax their foreign income.

 

Workers of the world unite. Wake up and behold the face of the enemy. There is a gap between the rich and poor today wider than at any time in history. But this is not the “fault” of the rich, but rather the “fault” of the monster corporations that made them so obscenely rich. In the secret, ivory high-rise towers of corporations there is multi-tiered life-saving money-grabbing autonomy and anonymity—a deadly combination.  It is within these unseen and  anonymous board rooms that telephones and checkbooks conspiratorially wed corporations and Congress and this is the epicenter of the conundrum we need to unwrap in order to attack (lobotomize) the soulless corporate cyborg monster. That monster is called “corporation”. It was made by humans, maintained by humans and represented by humans. But it is not itself human and never will be. And yet we have allowed it to take over complete control and steerage of our several ships of state and our planet…Spaceship Earth.

 

TAKE THE REVOLUTION INTO THE FIELD

 

 

There is only one field that makes sense, and it’s not Wall Street, and it’s not out front of the mansions of the .3 percent of the richest.  And, ironically it’s not Washington, D.C., either at the capital or on Pennsylvania Avenue.

No revolution fails, no war is lost, faster than one launched in the wrong theater of battle.The only way to lobotomize the corporate monster at the base of all our present global collapsing is in America’s State Capitals. So they—state capitals-are the natural “theater” of OWS operations and occupations. Here is why:

 

Both political parties running the show in our nation’s capital have long ago sold out to the corporate lobbyists who purchase their loyalty and obedience by placing them in office. The only solution, then is an end-run around Washington and a power play back in the home states of all our many heroic “occupiers” of Wall Street and the rest of the warriors carrying banners all over our country in search of a rallying point for their righteousness and their rage.

 

The solution is a set of constitutional amendments which effectively lobotomize the corporate brain not to the point of destruction, but to the point of rehabilitation.

 

Seeking Federal legislation to strengthen corporate “oversight” in D.C. today is a dream as rational as chasing rabbits down a hole to a Mad Hatter tea party.  It’s already been tried in fact: Behold a Palin horse.

 

Today, the only solution for securing control of corporate power, greed and collective oligarchy is an approach never before seriously sought, and never before accomplished –

 

A Fifth-Amendment state-mandated Constitutional Convention.

 

We need to take our collective and individual rage, flags, zeal and chants, and occupy our state capitals and their legislators until at least 3 of 4 of them have agreed to demand (of Congress) and  ratify serial amendments to the U.S. Constitution as follows:  (Note: only a two-thirds majority of states is required to mandate a  Constitutional Convention, but ultimately the amendments must be ratified by three-fourths of the states, so why wait. Let the goal be four fifths from the first, so that when ratification time comes around, there’s clearly a three-fourth’s majority still extant. )

 

CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS . . .

Collectively Needed to End Corporate Dominance of America and the World (Following as is expected, the American Paradigm and Model even in Revolution):

 

Prefatory Note:

 

Most all (10 of 13) of the amendments here proposed are negatives (prohibitions), and the logic for this is ancient- tried and true. The prosaic paradigm that springs to mind for illustration is that of the Zen Sculptor, perhaps the world’s greatest parable for proactive creativity and successful….revolution. We can’t always envision how things should be or will become in order to remedy the disorder or chaos we are presently facing. No, I cannot outline for you all the positive, efficacious and politically-functional measures we must as a culture and country take in order to restore America and the world to their former greatness and geo-political homeostasis. But I can—and with absolute certainty will–outline some of the things we can start eliminating and saying “no” to in order to keep things moving inexorably in the right direction. When and as things are kept moving in the “right direction”, important aspects of those things begin to take shape. Positive change is achieved by incrementally eliminating negatives…as in the parable of the Zen Sculptor:  In this sage story, the student approaches his master while the latter is carving a large stone and says: “Master, what will the sculpture be when it is finished?” The sage answers and in the process reveals the method in the strategic negations (prohibitions) that follow herein. The sage’s reply to his student is ours to adopt: “I do not know. But with each strike of the hammer and chisel I can determine absolutely what it is not.”

 

 

The 13 New State-Initiated and Ratified Revolutionary Amendments to the Constitution of the Liberated United States of No-Longer-Corporate-Controlled   America:

 

Preamble: The term “corporation” shall be deemed to include regular corporations, Subchapter S Corporations, Limited Liability Corporations, publicly and/or privately owned, and companies, partnerships,  charitable corporations, trusts, foundations, and any and all non-human entities recognized by state and/or federal law as entities chartered, licensed or otherwise authorized by state and federal authorities to transact business or provide services (including media broadcast and/or entertainment services) in, and/or outside the United States of America regardless of the country where the said entity was originally formed.

 

 

• No American federal politician shall serve more than two terms of 4 years in office.  

 

• No American candidate for federal or state office shall maintain any financial interest—vested, unvested or future– in any corporation with whom the U.S. or State governments transact any business, nor accept more than $1000 from any entity, either human or corporate as a campaign contribution.

 

• All communications between Congressmen (Representatives and Senators) and all lobbyists and other citizens shall be recorded and all recordings along with records of all visits and collaborations shall become public record. All communications between Congressmen and corporate lobbyists must be either written or transcribed into writing and made public records.

 

• The offering or acceptance of any gift (of money, services or material, present or prospective) to any Congressman from any person or corporation totaling over $5O  (in any calendar year) in value shall constitute a felony and cause for summary impeachment and criminal prosecution.  

 

• Corporations are prohibited from directly or indirectly contributing funds or support of any kind in the making, public airing or dissemination—by any means– of public relations information designed or reasonably calculated to influence any voters in any election, either State or Federal.

 

• No elected, appointed or hired official, State or Federal, shall, after serving his State or Federal Government, pursue or accept employment by any corporation with whom the said official had any official dealings  during the official’s term of office.

 

• No person shall serve as an employee or elected official of either State or Federal government while owning stock or any interest whatsoever (future, inchoate, option or derivative interest) in any corporation providing any goods or services to or transacting any business with the State or Federal governments.  

 

• All citizens of the United States, individual and corporate, shall be taxed for all income earned in the U.S. and abroad (outside the territorial limits of the United States of America) as if that income had been earned—as ordinary income–within the United States.

 

• All elected officials of the Federal Government shall be granted healthcare benefits for themselves and their families only while in office, and those healthcare benefits shall be equivalent to and not exceed the benefits currently received by citizens receiving either Medicare or Medicaid, which ever is greater.

 

• There will be no retirement pensions given Federal elected officials or retirement plans to any extent funded by the American government except social security or other benefits equivalent to those provided regular (all) American citizens by the Federal Government.  

 

• There will be no laws enacted by Congress which increase the pay levels of Congressmen during the remaining terms of their offices.

 

• Corporations are hereafter prohibited from producing and broadcasting media programs and/or publications tendered to the public as “news” programs or publications unless at the beginning and end of all such broadcasts or literary publishings, there is a clear and complete listing of the names (all) of the individuals and/or corporations who own, either directly or indirectly the broadcast stations and/or media syndicates which own and/or in any way control the broadcast/publishing content of said “news” programs and publications.   Any broadcast programs or publications which eschew the term “news” and publish a clear and cogent statement that they are expressing their own opinions and those of their named guests appearing on said broadcast shows, need not publish such a list of corporate or individual owners.

 

• All individuals and corporations will pay a graduated tax on all income, foreign and domestic,  varying from zero (defined as currently-calculated poverty-level subsistence), and ranging from 10 percent to 50 percent.  All “loopholes” are prohibited. A graduated inheritance tax will be imposed as well ranging from 10 to 75 percent excluding the first one-million dollars per individual (living at decedent’s death) lineal descendant, per stirpes.  

 

 

 

Now,  in the words of U.S. Airlines Flight 93, All-American hero,  Todd Beamer . . .

 

 

LET’S ROLL!

 

The Cardinal Rule of the OWS’ Revolution

must—of necessity—be and without exception remain -

Be nice, be legal and be THERE!

 

Translated: This means – Don’t give the establishment-controlled police the slightest justification for tear-gassing or otherwise running us off the lawns of the State Capitals!  Throw an empty milk carton or diaper on the lawn and they’ve got a reason. Sleep or camp out on public property in a manner contrary to law and they’ve got a reason. You need to drive yourself “to work” like all other capital city workers do, peacefully occupy the governmental facades and  promenades of your state while you chant the common rallying call to peaceful revolution by Constitutional resolution!  The OWS manual of “arms” refers to PEACEFUL arms carrying signs, banners, trumpets, babies, food and water for each other— arms that lift each other off the corporate-dominated dirt into the freedom of freshly-cleared American air.  

 

So, treat the Revolutionary Occupation as your 9-to-5 job (but be there at 7:45 before the law makers and their corporate bosses get to work—beat the legislative street walkers and their corporate lobbying pimps to work.)

 

Stand, sit, do your thing PEACEFULLY on the lawns and squares and clean up like Semper Fi Marines when the day is done and you go home. If you camp out on the lawns and malls of your state legislative summits,  take care not to give them cause to arrest you.  Our allies and marching soulmates in the towns of our own state capitals should provide us a bed, and hopefully some table and other bread to boot. We will be fighting their war as well, because their war is our war and our revolution their revolution.

 

Don’t give the corporate bullies what they want and require.  Give them what they can’t possibly deal with—a rational, legal, orderly, determined, righteous, relentless and constantly-accreting conspicuous occupation until the world rallies behind its peaceful revolutionary leaders and the revolutionary change is….achieved.

 

 

FINALLY— THE PROOF OF THE

 

OWS VICTORY FORMULA:

 

OWS⁴⁰/C=RCA

 

Now you know:

 

The “40” (as in “to the power of 40”) means the 40 sovereign states which OWS must occupy until they petition Congress for a Constitutional Convention under Article V of the U.S. Constitution and get those states to ratify the amendments by a 3/4ths majority (with a safety margin of 2.5 states).

 

 The first “C” stands for “Corporations”

 

The “R” stands for “Revolution”

 

The Second “C” stands for “Constitution”

 

And the “A” stands for “Amendments”

 

So now, with your 6^th grade algebra skills you can prove the OWS formula for VICTORY:

 

 OWS⁴⁰/C= RCA

 

OWS⁴⁰/C=RCA/1

 

(at this point the Corporate common denominator (“C”) on the “left” side of the equation is canceled out by the Constitution Numerator “C” on the “right” side, leaving:

 

OWS⁴⁰ = RA*

*(Revolution by Constitutional Amendment)

 

 

Let’s launch a new and courageous Odyssey of our own.Let us unify these scattered 900 points of stellar revolutionary luminescence and fashion them into fierce constellations of revolutionary warriors who together climb into the cyborg brain of the corporate beast and perform the needed lobotomy, so that once again, the cyborg corporate beast works for us…. we the people….we the old ones and bold ones, the young ones and done ones, the now united ones with  sinew and  soul.   

 

 

 

Robert R. (Dusty) Schoch

Founder, B.E.A. (“Barristers et al”, a N.C.-based peace-oriented            foreign policy think tank)

E-mail: Rschoch@triad.rr.com

Founding Editor: www.DeclaringIndependents.com

October 26, 2011

 

 

 

 

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Father’s Day Dreaming

 

An Open Letter to My Son, Demian

June 15, 2008

 

By: DI Foreign Policy Editor, Robert Rodes (Dusty) Schoch

 

 (With Trailing Contributions from

Virginia Attorney, Mike Murphy and

Notre Dame Law Professor Robert E. Rodes III)

 

I woke up today and made a mistake. I read the newspaper. It was supposed to be a day of quiet celebration for us …as fathers. But, reading the paper made me question whether I made a mistake 35-years ago helping to bring a child into this world…this world crumbling around me.

 

Don’t get me wrong – I hated that Armageddon story when I read it the first time – in the Bible’s “Revelations”.  But I suspect the author of that work was more than a little mad. He described seeing “visions” of things that clearly weren’t there.  What I’m dealing with this morning are visions of what IS.  I made the mistake of reading the news. With the paper now in the recycling bin, let me share with you my concerns with what … stuck – this Sunday, June 15, 2008:

 

A metaphorical image for what I see in the news today is America in the form of its prior NY Twin Towers – right at the moment the news casters showed us pictures of flames in the first tower. Because I know now what happened next back on 9/11, 2001, I see America now itself as those Twin Towers. The North tower in my metaphoric vision stands for American industry, and the South for its soul (it’s morality).  One is on fire and soon both will be, and soon thereafter both will come crashing to the ground. It’s not going to be slow, like with Rome. It’s going to be faster than anything that’s ever happened to the world’s strongest nation in any point in history.  The speed is evident in everything I saw today in the news.

 

I won’t give the stories in any preconceived or rationally-constructed sequence. I want my Father’s Day stream of consciousness simply to flow. Foremost in my newly-downloaded dad’s databank, is the picture of our bully President Bush, in the company of cohorts from Russia, France, Germany and even China plotting a war with Iran wholly oblivious of the fact they are simply kindling evil and danger by embodying evil and danger.  Of course Iran has just as much right to play with uranium as the already-nuke nations. Of course the mob of the strong justifies its bullying by conjuring the word “evil” to describe the weaker outsider (non-nuclear nation).  We already have 7 irresponsible nations armed with nuclear arsenals and yet are more concerned with proliferation than elimination. We want to secure our positions among the self-selected bullies with permission to walk about in the nuclear neighborhood.

 

Next I see our second largest brewery fixing to sell itself to Bavaria—casting thousands more American bread-winners into future bread lines.  Miller already belongs to England; so why shouldn’t Bud join the industrial bailout of America’s toppling twin towers. The twin towers epitomized, housed and  embodied American corporate industrial might. Since 9/11 I have watched the fat-cat corporate mongols (I used to honor them with “mogul” monikers, but they are clearly today’s barbarians…this time storming OUT of the gates to the city they set on fire) export its workers’ jobs to slave-driven third-world nations while “we the people” sit blithely by, condoning the treason by buying the exported product at Wallymart , a.k.a. The China Store. No more furniture made in High Point where furniture in America was born and raised. No more electronic hardware made in California’s silicon valley where it was conceived and fostered.  The North Tower of America – its industrial core is now pretty much up in flames; the fat cats of industry who are exporting her piecemeal to China and India are moving into new digs in the new global gangster hole in the Middle Eastern wall… a little vacation spot for escapee global billionaires called Dubai. A few feet off the coast of Dubai you’ll find them in an Arab-fabricated little archipelago called “The World”–the brave new world of the bandits who sold America and escaped to their new “water world”. The parallels in this and the  apocalyptic Costner movie are creepy scary.

 

As for America’s South tower…its morality…the newspaper was even more pregnant with pictures of flames that will fuel the on-coming collapse. In the midst of our oil crisis, our mortgage foreclosure crisis (one-tenth of our population will suffer the loss of their homes under the collapse of the mortgage bubble’s bursting), we still have featured in the auto section of our news a big spread on Mercedez Benz’ newest gas guzzler that gets 12 MPG and makes up for it by paying a “gas guzzler’s surtax” that puts money back into the tills of a government (America’s) more concerned with corporate profits than saving the Earth from globally-warmed extinction.  Shame on the corporate-owned newspapers that publish for profit that fat-cat car obscenity.  But how can there be “morality” without some vestige of intelligence?  The “conservative” pundit in my paper’s news today is blaming the whole problem of gas prices on liberals who keep Exxon-Mobile from drilling for more oil off our North Carolina shores.  As if more oil is  going to save us…when it was oil that motivated the toppling of the twin towers and literally oil that exploded them, and oil that is pumped and burned by 6 billion of us to the end that when the twin towers of America’s industry and soul are finally flush upon Earth’s ground zero, it will probably be curtain calling time not only for the world’s formerly foremost nation but for the world itself.  It is we who today say “yes” “yes” Yes!” to pornographic and sadistic reality TV in lieu of art; it is we who say yes to a leadership which has said no to earth-saving Kyoto protocols; It is we who have not insisted on the impeachment for the greatest candidate since Hitler for the moniker of “Anti-Christ”.

 

My father’s day ruminations were/are the result of my concern for the future of my 35-year old son who this morning came in and gave me a hug for having taken part in bringing him forth to this day.  I will probably be here when the twin towers of America’s former industry and morality resoundingly reach ground zero. That’s going to happen faster than anyone can imagine. The only reason our present stage of economic depression isn’t declared is that we’re living in a state of denial pretty much identical to the one we were in when we were gazing at the flames in both the North and South towers in NY  wondering how long it would take the NY firemen to put them out.

 

These fires I’ve cited in the news paper today aren’t going to be put out. America has allowed its corporate fat cats to sell its industrial heart to foreign slave traders; America has allowed its fear and greed to sell its soul to those who would invade nations and kill hundreds of thousands of people to preserve a status quo that puts America’s commercial interests and aspirations above the priority of preserving life on earth…the only life we know for sure exists in this universe of ours.

 

I wish my little sojourn into global circumspection this day might have ended on a happier note. I’m constrained to borrow my concluding surmise from Robert Frost –

 

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

 

By the way, Demian, my son: Thanks for the hug. I really needed it. I wish only I could be here when you’re 65 to return it, because I know you’ll be needing it  then much more than I now. So know now I’ll be thinking of you then, and if Einstein was right about the warping of time and space, you will still be feeling that hug if between now and then you’ve managed, as I know you will, to have hung on to your soul. It’s going to be a hell of a ride for you because of the choices made by your ancestors in their handling and husbandry of your earth.  And as clear as we can see the tsunami’s, tornadoes and apocalyptic horses  heading our way, it’s clear that there’s never a time to abandon either hope or your pursuit of happiness.  I wish I could give you a map to help you steer around the hurdles and pitfalls of your future. But at this point, I can only give you this, as a father’s day ray of hope:

 

    God has given us both a map and a compass to guide us. The map is the design and fabric of the earth and the universe beyond. The compass is the heart. The heart beats with the pulse of all life.  Our minds are free to choose the roads we take on our journey of life, and if we keep and follow the compass, it will be a good trip. 

 

Love, Dad.

 

 

Michael K. Murphy

DI Contributor and Virginia Attorney

Comments:

Dusty:

 

    I imagine that as 300 A.D. slid toward the 400s there were certain to be some Roman fathers who must have sat quietly with their thoughts outside their homes on many a warm summer’s evening, a glass of wine to sip and a bowl of olives and a bit of bread to pick at by their sides as warm Mediterranean breezes stirred their thoughts while their wives and children readied themselves for the night inside, secure for the moment.

 

    These fathers felt a powerful connection to the past greatness of the Roman Republic — as they were its natural and lineal heirs and as their children would be; yet they had become only mute witnesses to Rome’s evident decline from the legitimacy that the Republic had conferred upon Rome while the Republic was still alive.  Now, many years after the Empire had supplanted the Republic, the internal decay that the Empire brought would be evident, not at first, not for many years, but by now.  Maybe not all understood what was happening, but certainly some did; some could see very clearly that Rome’s days of glory and legitimacy had passed and what was left of it were only the old forms in society and government, for example, that many would desperately cling to for security.  Others, these men, would just sip their evening wine and pick at some food and smell the warm air off the Sea and dream of what might have been for their children but which they could no longer give them.   

 

Professor (of Law) Robert E. Rodes III

University of Notre Dame

(and Dusty’s esteemed cousin)

Conclude Dusty’s Father’s Day Lament with

Some back and forth discussion about

History and current events.

(Professor Rodes in Blue, Dusty in red)

 

 

Dusty:

 

Thanks for this. It is a pleasure to find you still fighting the good fight. But it came just after the Supreme Court Guantanamo case, so I see rather more glimmers of hope than you seem to. Indignation is simple, and rightly so, but history is complicated.

 

 I am simply indignant with that which is about to become history. History is complicated by the same process that makes religion subject to dogmatic debate: the myopias and dysgraphias of men as observers and reporters. With Guantanamo,little and late beats nothing at all. I concede it. But in the case of Guantanamo’s belated judicial scrutiny – it soothes me solely with the relief I feel when I cease smashing my toe with a hammer. Those poor souls have been in our torture chambers the better part of a decade. A decade of immutable and historically iconic disgrace. If all nine Justices drank world-transcending cool-aide  on the Supreme Court steps in a ritual show of collective American judicial contrition, I believe the scales of justice might tip again towards the horizontal.     

 

When your son was born 35 years ago, did you think you would live to see the end of apartheid in South Africa?

 

I did in fact, because I’d been to school and confidently debated the issue with sons of Africaners. All slaves eventually find freedom because their state is the most unnatural. What I didn’t expect is what I have since found – i.e. that the sequelae of that disease of disparities is—at least for an evolutionary period of adjustment– more malignant that the disease. But most healings come with crises.

 

Did I think I would live to see a black Catholic priest presiding over an all white congregation in the middle of Tennessee?

A book just surfaced in our motley collection, The Proud Tower, by Barbara Tuchman, which I hadn’t looked at for many years. It’s about the period from 1890 to the First World War. Things were bad then too. There were terrorist incidents then too. The suspects weren’t imprisoned; they were hanged. The fat cat industrialists didn’t outsource their work to cheap labor abroad; they kept a supply of cheap labor at home by busting unions. We fought a war with rather less justification than this one, and involved ourselves in a  similar fight to make the spoils safe for American business.

 

Our history as invasive genocidal self-righteous raiders of the lost arc of God began at Plymouth Rock, and at the same time I assert such, I salute you for your more moderate appreciation of the yin/yang  flow of everything. I suppose I’m simply “stuck” with the belief that our oscillations from yin to yang are now (with corporately-connived denials and continuities in globally-warming policy) are a quantum leap ahead of what has gone before. Before either of us were fathers, the nation’s # 1 sage said quite accurately, “Everybody talks about the weather but no one DOES anything about it.”  Twain would be blushing at his own shortsightedness. We were steaming down and ecologically damning rivers even in his day. But there were no corporations capable of dictating the global execution of their dollar-driven ethic/policy. Every civilization’s wealth has been derived from slavery. Plus ca change. What I rue is the death/dearth of America as a beacon/paradigm/template/model of perceived “good”. My father’s day lament was more for the loss of my country as a world lantern in the new dark age of environmental and economic Armageddon.  When the Euro and the crude barrel jointly displace the Dollar, the axis of the world will likely spin from eccentric to chaotic.  The “big brother” defender of the downtrodden and bullied is now the worst bully on the block. There’s nothing (quantitatively) like our taking over 660,000 Iraqi civilian lives in America’s history from Columbus. There were veritable villains in WWI. We were both victims and perps in the Civil War, saviors in WWII, justifiably (?) red scared in Korea and Nam, but without excuse…or even the pretense of it in Iraq. And an infinitely more circumspect and savy world knows it. And the world will never forget. And if we are able to get “philosophical” about having waged unprovoked wars of unadulterated acquisition and  aggression, we are building up momentum for another holocaust and justifying—in fascistic style– the first one in the process.  The dream of America as big-brother guardian of the meek and friend of the Earth is no more. It’s time for America to declare peace and mea culpa so that the healing process can begin. Scarred forever, we could confess, recover and make amends. Am I far off when I characterize the bottom line of your position as…”We’ve been bad before so… what’s the harm of  a little reprise of a perennial play” ?  Bob, I simply can’t get out of my own mind the historic fact that Hitler’s seminal battle cry was “Onward, Christian soldiers”. The Vatican has to this day never withdrawn its concordance with that proclamation. My fright on that account is revived today by the fundamentalist Christian Right currently continuing to condone the Bush war in Iraq as divine mission. When minds such as yours find philosophical (or theological) solace for our current sins in our past sins, my fright soars into a jet stream of awfulness. 

 

Happy Father’s Day…to all.

 

THE TRUTH ABOUT OIL PRICES:

 

 

The debate is like that  tale told by an idiot-

 full of “Sound and Fury” and signifying nothing.

 

The Answer is still “Blowing in the Wind”

 

Intro:  In the following article, DI Foreign Policy Editor, Dusty Schoch, and Staff Writer, Len Carrier, respond to DI’s In-House Neo-Conservative Republican Atlanta contributor and writer,  Foster Musgrove  regarding the price of oil. Foster has forwarded for our consideration an article captioned “The Truth About Oil Prices” as derived from recent debates in the Senate’s Judiciary Committee between Democrats and Republicans on the subject of oil prices in America. 

 

Foster Musgrove, on forwarding the (obviously Republican-spun reporting on the debate) offers:

 

 

“Heard this morning that gas is now $4/gal.  It is good that you have a sail boat and that the Government has not yet figured out how to tax the wind. I don’t know this guy, but it is interesting reading.”

 

 

DUSTY’S DISSENT (AN OPEN LETTER
TO FOSTER MUSGROVE) and LEN CARRIER’S
“CLINCHERS” TRAIL THE
FOLLOWING REPUBLICANS’ REPORTING

—– Original Message —–
From: <krwark@primusonline.com.au
Sent: Sunday, June 01, 2008 9:12 PM
Subject: FW: Fwd: Fw: THE TRUTH ABOUT OIL PRICES

It is interesting to have some reliable statistics and facts on the ‘Oil Industry’ who currently seem to be the party all Governments and consumers wish to blame for high Oil prices. Although the following pertains to the USA, some of the info is global, and there is a parallel in Australia, the difference being significantly higher government excise, tax and GST take. I know I am biased on this issue, however this info will provide a starting point for the next time I am asked for an explanation on ‘Oil Pricing’.

Kerry

May 21, 2008

Oil Executives Try to Educate Senate Democrats, But Democrats Appear Hopeless.

Earlier today, the Senate Judiciary Committee summoned top executives from the petroleum industry for what Chairman Pat Leahy thought would be a politically profitable inquisition. Leahy and his comrades showed up ready to blame American oil companies for the high price of gasoline, but the event wasn’t as satisfactory as the Democrats had hoped.

The industry lineup was formidable: Robert Malone, Chairman and President of BP America, Inc.; John Hofmeister, President, Shell Oil Company; Peter Robertson, Vice Chairman of the Board, Chevron Corporation; John Lowe, Executive Vice President, Conoco Philips Company; and Stephen Simon, Senior Vice President, Exxon Mobil Corporation. Not surprisingly, the petroleum executives stole the show, as they were far smarter, infinitely better informed, and much more public-spirited than the Senate Democrats.

One theme that emerged from the hearing was the surprisingly small role played by American oil companies in the global petroleum market. John Lowe pointed out:

I cannot overemphasize the access issue. Access to resources is severely restricted in the United States and abroad, and the American oil industry must compete with national oil companies who are often much larger and have the support of their governments.

We can only compete directly for 7 percent of the world’s available reserves while about 75 percent is completely controlled by national oil companies and is not accessible.

Stephen Simon amplified:

Exxon Mobil is the largest U.S. oil and gas company, but we account for only 2 percent of global energy production, only 3 percent of global oil production, only 6 percent of global refining capacity, and only 1 percent of global petroleum reserves. With respect to petroleum reserves, we rank 14th. Government-owned national oil companies dominate the top spots. For an American company to succeed in this competitive landscape and go head to head with huge government-backed national oil companies, it needs financial strength and scale to execute massive complex energy projects requiring enormous long-term investments.

To simply maintain our current operations and make needed capital investments, Exxon Mobil spends nearly $1 billion each day.

Because foreign companies and governments control the overwhelming majority of the world’s oil, most of the price you pay at the pump is the cost paid by the American oil company to acquire crude oil from someone else:

Last year, the average price in the United States of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline was around $2.80. On average in 2007, approximately 58 percent of the price reflected the amount paid for crude oil. Consumers pay for that crude oil, and so do we. Of the 2 million barrels per day Exxon Mobil refined in 2007 here in the United States , 90 percent were purchased from others.

Another theme of the day’s testimony was that, if anyone is “gouging” consumers through the high price of gasoline, it is federal and state governments, not American oil companies. On the average, 15% percent of the cost of gasoline at the pump goes for taxes, while only 4% represents oil company profits. These figures were repeated several times, but, strangely, not a single Democratic Senator proposed relieving consumers’ anxieties about gas prices by
reducing taxes.

The last theme that was sounded repeatedly was Congress’s responsibility for the fact that American companies have access to so little petroleum. Shell’s John Hofmeister explained, eloquently:

While all oil-importing nations buy oil at global prices, some, notably India and China , subsidize the cost of oil products to their nation’s consumers, feeding the demand for more oil despite record prices. They do this to speed economic growth and to ensure a competitive advantage relative to other nations.

Meanwhile, in the United States , access to our own oil and gas resources has been limited for the last 30 years, prohibiting companies such as Shell from exploring and developing resources for the benefit of the American people.

Senator Sessions, I agree, it is not a free market. According to the Department of the Interior, 62 percent of all on-shore federal lands are off limits to oil and gas developments, with restrictions applying to 92 percent of all federal lands. We have an outer continental shelf moratorium on the Atlantic Ocean, an outer continental shelf moratorium on the Pacific Ocean, an outer continental shelf moratorium on the eastern Gulf of Mexico, congressional bans on on-shore oil and gas activities in specific areas of the Rockies and Alaska, and even a congressional ban on doing an analysis of the resource potential for oil and gas in the Atlantic, Pacific and eastern Gulf of Mexico.

The Argonne National Laboratory did a report in 2004 that identified 40 specific federal policy areas that halt, limit, delay or restrict natural gas projects. I urge you to review it. It is a long list. If I may, I offer it today if you would like to include it in the record.

When many of these policies were implemented, oil was selling in the single digits, not the triple digits we see now. The cumulative effect of these policies has been to discourage U.S. investment and send U.S. companies outside the United States to produce new supplies.

 

As a result, U.S. production has declined so much that nearly 60 percent of daily consumption comes from foreign sources.

The problem of access can be solved in this country by the same government that has prohibited it. Congress could have chosen to lift some or all of the current restrictions on exportation and production of oil and gas. Congress could provide national policy to reverse the persistent decline of domestically secure natural resource development. Later in the hearing, Senator Orrin Hatch walked Hofmeister through the Democrats’ latest efforts to block energy independence:

HATCH: I want to get into that. In other words, we’re talking about Utah, Colorado and Wyoming . It’s fair to say that they’re not considered part of America ‘s $22 billion of proven reserves.

HOFMEISTER: Not at all.

HATCH: No, but experts agree that there’s between 800 billion to almost 2 trillion barrels of oil that could be recoverable there, and that’s good oil, isn’t it?

HOFMEISTER: That’s correct.

HATCH: It could be recovered at somewhere between $30 and $40 a barrel?

HOFMEISTER: I think those costs are probably a bit dated now, based upon what we’ve seen in the inflation…

HATCH: Well, somewhere in that area.

HOFMEISTER: I don’t know what the exact cost would be, but, you know, if there is more supply, I think inflation in the oil industry would be cracked. And we are facing severe inflation because of the limited amount of supply against the demand.

HATCH: I guess what I’m saying, though, is that if we started to develop the oil shale in those three states we could do it within this framework of over $100 a barrel and make a profit.

HOFMEISTER: I believe we could.

HATCH: And we could help our country alleviate its oil pressures.

HOFMEISTER: Yes.

HATCH: But they’re stopping us from doing that right here, as we sit here. We just had a hearing last week where Democrats had stopped the ability to do that, in at least Colorado.

HOFMEISTER: Well, as I said in my opening statement, I think the public policy constraints on the supply side in this country are a disservice to the American consumer.The committee’s Democrats attempted no response. They know that they are largely responsible for the current high price of gasoline, and they want the price to rise even further. Consequently, they have no intention of permitting the development of domestic oil and gas reserves that would both increase this country’s energy independence and give consumers a break from constantly increasing energy costs.

Every once in a while, Congressional hearings turn out to be informative.

 

Dusty’s Dissenting Opinion…

 

Foster-

 

For this “situation” of high gas prices, I can only say two things for sure: (1) Any one who thinks it’s our gasoline “tax” that’s causing the problem is…part of the problem and (2) We need to look at $6-a-gallon gas as a blessing rather than a curse.

 

$4 is apparently not nearly high enough to get America’s head out of the sand (of Arabia and oblivion).

$4 is getting Detroit’s notice (too little too late) as evidenced- thank god for small favors- by the obscene Humvees’ becoming history.

 

Foster, have you noticed the weather recently?  The 1000 percent increase in lightning and tornadoes are the tip of the globally-warming ice berg (melting poles). If we care about anything, why isn’t it the saving of the globe, which is a gone planet (as far as ecosystems go) in under 12 years unless Kyoto Protocols are literally adhered to by that time.  More recent models make that tipping time closer to 8 years.

 

When gas hits $6 to $10,  we’ll then have the situation we did when we started the “Manhattan” project. When our trucks stop, America will stop. We’re nearing that point now as evidenced by the price of tomatoes. Necessity is a mother. And dollar-driven necessity is the only thing that’s gotten this indolent, fast-food fed, fat-corporate-cat-dominated society of ours to remove its head from its lazy rear since Hiroshima.

 

This noise about Exxon Mobile execs being smarter than politicians on issues of energy and oil…What could be idler chatter?  Everyone knows they’ve pocketed greater profits in the precise period it took for oil to rise from $1.50 to $4 than ever before. If that’s not traitorous war-profiteering there’s never been any.  But, again, it’s all micro-trivia compared to the macro (global/survival)  issues:  US (and all industrial nations’) dependence on fossil fuel was doomsday dumb from the start. Today’s chapter is simply the final one in the  story of man’s wedding to oil.  It was an OK idea when there were fewer than a billion of us on the globe, but with over 6 billion, it’s a doomsday scenario. The sooner gas prices bring America to its knees the sooner America will rise. Giving those ignorant Arab sheiks the bulk of our nation’s wealth for the past half century has created the Armageddon scenario only a minor part of which is our twin towers’ toppling.  Now, from Dubai, they are running the international banks and multi-national corporations running the world. Hell, last year we sold them (unwittingly) our harbors.

 

All the trivial pursuits covered by the neo-con chant you forwarded in Republican ditto-headed reflex fashion will be mooted when (if) America gets focused on remedies instead of problems. Oil prices are a problem we need to make an end-run around. Bite the bullet and  pay the money until we eliminate the need. Don’t look for new places in pristine  and off-shore places to purloin the same globally-warming and culturally-addicting substance.   Put the Arab OPEC bastards out of world-dominating business.  Wind and solar power, with today’s technologies,  end the tyranny of oil and oil peddlers. Without oil as currency, there would be no problem (much less a U.S.- run wars) in the Middle East. We can steer India and China around the same problem we’re in only by example. We can’t demand- we can only lead.  The technology is here already (see my DI article here linked: “The Answer is Blowin’ in the Wind” –

 

Let’s quit staring at the hole our heads seem perennially stuck in and start working on the doughnut.

 

Best,

 

Dusty

6-9-08

 

 

Clinchers by Leonard Carrier

 

 

Dusty,

 

It really ticks me off when oil-company execs lay our gasoline-price increases at the door of government.  What they want to do is drill in the ANWR and in other off-shore locations–something that will bring them even more enormous profits, to the detriment of our environment. These companies are already being subsidized, while at the same time they are profiteering.  The solution to that is to eliminate all subsidies for oil companies and give them to alternative-energy companies–wind, solar, ocean, as well as to promote fuels that can be made from grasses and turkey guts. Also, raising the tax on gasoline and using the proceeds to repair our roads and bridges, as well as improving our public transportation system, is something that has worked in Europe, but has yet to be tried here.

 

Another annoying thing about Big Oil is that they refer to the “law of supply and demand” to justify the high prices for their products. This is arrant nonsense.  There is no such “law.”  Laws are physical necessities.  There is no necessity to engage in greed.  If these companies were interested in the well-being of our citizens, they would voluntarily cut their prices and therefore cut their profits.  “But the shareholders will complain,” might go their whinge.  I say, let them complain.  Tell the shareholders that part of their dividends are going toward the good of their fellow citizens, and toward our economy.  After all, if people can’t afford to drive their cars, the whole economy suffers, oil-company shareholders along with the rest.

 

I’ve said this before.  When you find yourself in a hole, the best thing to do is stop digging.  We were warned by Jimmy Carter back in 1973 that we should practice conservation and resort to alternative energy sources.  Big Oil and Big Coal didn’t listen, and they just kept drilling and digging.  And we listened to the Republican siren song that there was plenty of cheap oil to be had. Now that climate change has been shown, beyond a reasonable doubt, to be exacerbated by the burning of fossil fuels, we need to get off our addiction to oil and coal, and do it quickly.

 

Are these Big Oil execs so smart, as the article in question would have us believe?  No, they’re not so smart, because they want to continue doing what they’ve been doing for years:  keeping us addicted to fossil fuels as they turn a blind eye on the pollution of our atmosphere. This is not being smart.  It is sacrificing everything of value on the alter of “the bottom line.”

 

It is my hope that come this November there will be a Progressive Congress and President.  That means unseating Republican oil and coal lackeys such as James Inhofe and Mitch McConnell, and not letting John McCain, who promises to resurrect all of Bush’s failed policies, anywhere near the White House.

 

Best,

 

Len