Submitted by Staff on Sat, 04/12/2008 - 19:50.
I thought about this yesterday while playing Monopoly: money never "disappears" or "vanishes" as some people like to think, even if a country is in a severe depression. Money is merely transfered to new hands.
Consider this news item we posted earlier this week:
Poor and middle-class families are entering the recession in a precarious situation due in part to declining or stagnant income growth, a study released Wednesday has found.
Incomes, on average, have declined by 2.5% among the bottom fifth of families since the late 1990s, while inching up by just 1.3% for those in the middle fifth of households, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, two liberal think tanks.
The wealthiest slice of Americans, however, saw their incomes rise by 9%.
source
Surprised? While you're struggling to have food on the table, there are people who profit from everything around you: the cheap labour, the streamlining of media, the shopping malls, the ecodestruction and the globalization. It's all part of a larger financial system. The right doesn't "get it," because it defends the individual rights that motivate this system. It wants to cut down on government to make the exploitation easier. The left doesn't "get it" either, because it simply hides the same system behind a moral, dogmatic facade of "good will." Does it matter if your corporate neighbour exploits you "equally" or if he does it via the state?
Left-right politics is suicide. We live in a monopoly world where we justify our existence with producing and consuming goods. It kills our spirit, our culture and it destroys our ecology, all in the name of profit. It's not worth it. Corrupt is the only organization present today that fully realizes the root of the evil of this system. Opposed to most alternative and third positionist movements, we don't attack people or groups. We don't blame the white, the black, the rich or the poor. We blame the system; the set of values behind our society, and our plan is not to oppose any group but to oppose the system.
Some people will say that globalists comprise a group and that we need to attack them. Wrong. Globalists are not the root cause, they're the symptom. A society like ours will always breed globalists and internationalists, because it appeals to relatively smart people who realize they can make a big buck and become powerful by centralizing power and controlling it. Most people would do the same, if they were given the chance. That's why most people aren't fit for political leadership and why we don't want to attack them. We attack the design that allows the behaviour to flourish. And best of all: it doesn't produce the alienation that neo-nazism and extreme leftism do -- it doesn't say some group is "wrong" or "inferior." It simply points out a design flaw, like as if you'd highlight a sentence in computer code and say:
"You know what, I don't think the corrupt executions is the real problem here. It seems to me that the software you use is poorly coded from the beginning and that is why you receive all of these errors. You need to exchange X line of code with what I wrote here. It will execute the program correctly."
We want sanity back.
- A. Birch
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It is within the power of
It is within the power of ordinary people to voluntarily withhold the volume and frequency of their participation in this exploitive system. Mass non-participation is one route toward slowing the program's execution. The limitation I am seeing with my own thinking here, if I may extend the analogy, is that mass participation refers to the end users who operate the program and struggle with its errors. While some of them may stop using it briefly, and fewer still will independently pick a better program for the long term, this will not stop the dominant system from continuing its execution and spawning errors.
The people who continue to patch, copy and market the present broken program must be shown the error break point, to admit it is a failure and to accept a better replacement. We're missing three things:
1. Access the (millions of) programmers and marketers
2. The replacement line of code
3. Incentive (persuasion, end-user revolt) for the programmers to act
The design flaws in our
The design flaws in our society are self-perpetuating because they allow people like globablists to rise to positions where they continue to organize the world for their own selfish benefit, making "a big buck and become powerful by centralizing power and controlling it" - as correctly observed.
For example, consider inflation: printing money has always been an effective way to transfer funds into the pockets of the wealthy. By causing inflation, working people see their wages, savings, and purchasing power erode, while those that hold real estate, gold, and other such non-currency holdings profit.
Only by pointing out this corruption, as is our aim, can we hope to stimulate a mass will for a new design.
(I'm about to paraphrase
(I'm about to paraphrase things from an interview with Derrick Jensen that I watched recently. The entire interview, which is in six parts, is located here. "Modern-Day Slavery" is the part that contains what I'm getting at.)
It's not only that the system perpetuates itself, but it practically ensures it's perpetuation. One of the most brilliant things these policy makers and economic giants have done is create a system that safeguards itself by making dissent so difficult. If you don't go along with the actions of all of your fellow happy-citizens, you can easily lose your job, your home, your livelihood, be thrown in jail, be blacklisted, and so on. The brilliance lies in the fact that we're essentially given two choices: assimilation or death. Of course death isn't always necessarily literal, but for my purpose it fits. But when faced with that decision—living in a way we hate or dying—the decision, for most, is an overwhelmingly simply one to make. Nobody likes their jobs, everybody wants something different, but besides just not trying, it's really hard to live differently. At this junction in human history we don't really have the choice (on a large scale) between living in communal societies that aren't directly destroying the world around us and living in a techno-masturbatory society whose ultimate goal is "progress" and that destroys everything in sight; instead, the decision is made for us: We. Will. Destroy.
The best bet we have at avoiding complete and utter catastrophe is for as many people to diverge from the established norm as possible to do so at the same time. And that time is, obviously, now.