Hey Mike!

After last week, it seemed this entry would be a pep talk for disheartened Colorado Springs Occupiers. Instead it seems it will need to be my own mind meandering around in an attempt to make sense of the new dynamic rising from the ashes of the original manifestation we had going here, which has surely been destroyed. It feels something like a kids cabin made of Lincoln Logs or something after he knocks it over to build something else.

It's been over a week since the City shut our permit down and confiscated our ramshackle, wind-ragged tents down at Acacia Park. After a few days of curious and somewhat disconcerting quiet, Occupiers in Colorado Springs are reconnected, reinvigorated, and in many cases really pissed off. Yesterday a contingency of us made our way to the old Venetucci Farm south of CSprings to harass Colorado's Gov. Hickenlooper at the groundbreaking ceremony for a solar garden project of the city's publicly owned utilities company. About 20 Occupiers of Colorado Springs "mic-checked" the governor and briefly disrupted the speechifying before a group that was made up largely of Occupy's natural allies, raising the ire of some attendees, but most assuredly reminding Hickenlooper that he won't be allowed to ignore the movement simply by leaving Denver.

Some Occupiers present, including i, were ambivalent about our project. Hickenlooper is something of a liberal darling, having supported projects like the SunShare solar garden in the past, and the crowd at the event was populated by many of Colorado Springs's "liberal" elite. The business of interrupting at these proceedings is a little sticky, and may have cost some in support for Occupy among this crowd. On the other hand, some of the issues addressed by Occupy were aptly illustrated within the very brief span of our attendance. Jerry Forte, who wrangles close to $300,000 a year for himself without considering bonuses as CEO of Colorado Springs Utilities, spent a few smooth-talking minutes going on about how cool the city's utility non-profit is, noting the great advance the two or three dozen solar panels undergoing installation at Venetucci Farm toward his goal of deriving 20% of city power from renewable resources by 2020 represents. Gee whiz! At today's use rates, by 2020, the world's inhabitants, especially in the U.S., will be stabbing one another over firewood if we can survive the toxic byproducts of the petroleum industry, or the potentially nuclear wars we are preparing for our next trick in the Middle East. Hmm--wonder what gas prices will look like if the Levant and its environs are sealed under a "sea of glass."

Forte also sits on the board at the local branch of the United Way, where Bob Holmes's Homeward Pikes Peak brought in around $650,000 last year, and still can't figure out how to house or manage the low-ball, (and variable), estimate of around 1,100 homeless residents in Colorado Springs. Hickenlooper, a million dollar winner in the American sweepstakes who loves to project an aw-shucks, up-by-the-bootstrap, populist kind of image came to his ability to start restaurant empires via the petroleum industry. He presides over a state that panders shamelessly to the U.S. military and its attendant industrial complex, both of which entities these days seem to be no more than acquisition arms of the energy and financial elite about which you may have heard Occupiers railing in recent months. Mike Hannigan of the Pikes Peak Community Foundation was there, and i'm sure he was butt-hurt by the Occupiers implication by their mere presence that his organization might be elitist or something. The CC student i spoke with on the way off the farm grounds was perplexed and hurt herself, expressing solidarity with Occupy, but begging that we not "do it again," referring to our admittedly rather obnoxious interruption. She will likely go on from CC to join the cultured pseudo-liberal aristocracy of our guilt-laden Western catechism spinning its wheels till the Apocalypse. Hannigan manages some $50m in assets, and to be sure his foundation does some good work, but all the back-slapping and genteel coffee-sipping over a couple of ultimately meaningless solar panels sure feels a lot like John Rockefeller's habit of passing out dimes to street urchins late in his life.

I am not accusing Hannigan, Forte, or others of comparability with Rockefeller, who made his initial fortune by arson and murder. Consider this, though. No one seems interested in whether the numbers in the mix add up to anything substantive or not. None of the serious players mentioned above have ever questioned the 1,000% spread between some of the salaries involved at CS Utilities, and when and if they do it's generally to argue that we have to pay such ridiculous amounts to attract the "best and the brightest," even though recent history shows plainly enough that it's painfully obvious huge salaries hardly translate into top performance. No one scratches his head over the disconnect involved in the high-minded goal of CS Utilities for 20% renewable energy within minutes of the utter collapse of projected petroleum reserves. And aren't we Americans, including especially those of us with the clout big money wields, responsible for our own politics? Are we really a bastion of freedom and intelligent, realistically utilitarian process or is all that rhetoric just a roll of dimes to cover up our guilt every time we go down to Wal-Mart to perpetuate our slave economy, without which we have never lived? What's the disparity between Forte's salary and the annual income of the guy that made his spiffy shoes?

Occupiers love solar projects. But nothing's ever about just one thing, and it seems to me it's about as rarely mostly about the thing at the top of the presentation program. We Occupiers are often accused of stupidly purveying no solid agenda. It may be apparent that at least my Occupy agenda is complicated. The above connects Big Oil, Third World labor, charitable impulse, income disparity, under-girding Western guilt, competitive job markets, and spiritual malaise, among other things, including much that remains implied. Many Occupiers i have met personally are still perturbed at the scanty portion of the American Pie they find available on their own plate. We've brought this whole scenario upon ourselves, though, and the current program will remain fully unsustainable whether the polite society of charity in the Pikes Peak region dismisses us over our antics or not. That's why Occupy in general will be not so easily dislodged from its place in history.

The bitch about saying all this is i really, really like most of the people i recognized at Venetucci Farms yesterday. I like Americans in general--but man, we've got problems, just like the homeless guys Bob Holmes and his philosophical brethren like to try to control all the time. When i talk to those guys in line at the soup kitchen, i tell them, "Man, ya really ought to leave that dope alone a little." They know me, and they know i love them. Really. I do--and really, they know it. They know they're fucked up, too. Sometimes i'll tell the most torn down that they need to leave the dope alone completely, before it kills them. That's what i'm saying about our society here in Colorado Springs, in Colorado, the U.S.A., and the whole world. I really don't have a beef with the bankers, politicians, and half-assed, dime-roll charities of the world, or the foolish scrabblers grasping at the American Nightmare. They're working a system designed by haphazard evolutionary processes to favor ruthless competition. But i am saying that we need to get serious about fixing all these interwoven problems that stem from deep down in human souls, because we're running out of time. If we lose, and everything goes to Hell in a handbasket, if none of us learn a genuinely cooperative technique for living together with ourselves and with the Earth before she rejects us, we Occupiers will be able to tell our kids we fought the deadly processes that brought us down with everything at our disposal. Even if it's with our dying breaths. What will those of us that insist on competing our species to death be telling theirs?

Occupy is not going away, here in Colorado Springs, or anywhere else. We're planning more and escalating prodding at the fat, lazy system and its symbiotic remorae. We hope the World listens closely to what we're saying and its members genuinely look inward to find that bit of truth that remains, concealed behind layers of self-deception and avarice. Because, sure, we're pissed off about injustice--who wouldn't be? But we also really like humans, and other living things, and we don't want to see them all go away.

Occupying an Empty House

My friend Maureen gets frustrated with me because i keep slinging all this outlandish stuff at her, and as one might expect, she has a hard time getting it sometimes, and an even harder time imagining that any of it might be true or practical. I keep telling her that money is over, she keeps telling me that people use money for good things. I start hanging around Occupy Wall St. and its attendant movement and she feels alienated because she lives largely from Stock Exchange investments. Maureen is not the only one with this issue; a man appeared at our GA in CSpgs last week deeply troubled by the fact that we "haters" were trying to  force his grandma to eat cat food because as he noted, "Wall Street", that is, the package of various stock offerings available there, is owned diffusely by grandmas and retirees, penny-pinchers and wheeler-dealers all over the world. My friend and this guy are both put off by the extremely jarring nature of the realizations at hand that have precipitated huge crowds of traffic-clotting protesters into the streets. (Actually that stranger stayed for the GA and came around, while Maureen has an injury preventing her attendance, so this is kinda for her, as well as everyone else).

The issue with the money that's causing problems is closely associated with the Global nature of Occupy! and because of that, its fragmented nature. Both issues are rendered all the more discordant to many by their perceived urgency among occupiers. We want things to change right  now, not after the next bullshit election cycle, but rather before we all die when the food chain collapses. Many within the movement at hand will object to what i posit here, but there really is no way around it in my own mind, so i have no choice but to put it out there. The FED, the IMF, World Bank, Bank of England, Royal Dutch, Al Rajhi, etc, etc, and their intertwined financial/military/industrial destruction machine already exist as a very solid Global beast with utterly uncontrollable and ravenous hungers. We humans are equally as Global, and Occupy! is the same. The destructive elements in this conflict as well as the creative are out of the hands of nationalistic players, and our old notions of money and its production will not save us in time. Once again, if it were gonna, it woulda.

I've put this educational chart up before, and if you have no motivation to look any further then i hope you'll just go get another beer and stay out of the way. The World as we know it is a disaster, and we made it so. Don't give me that crap about global warming is caused by dinosaur farts. We've dumped more toxic shit into the ecosystem in the last century than can be said to have even existed, anywhere. If Humanity can't affect the world, like one hears on Rush or some of those other insane programs, where are all the American Bison? Passenger Pigeons? Pennsylvanians drinking tap water? Live, healthy corals? Why are so many of us completely, stubbornly ignorant of these obvious and urgent facts. It's the Fear, of course, and it's actually propagated deliberately by some, who fail in turn to recognize that they are trapped by it themselves. We'll move on to the business of the Fear another time.

Plenty of accusations fly around about who caused the money crisis, the environmental crisis, and any other crisis at hand. It really doesn't matter, and even though some players have obviously been behaving recklessly, some in succession with conspiratorial characters of some pedigree, we absolutely must give up the hatred and sort out solutions, if we want to live. There are a few links at the bottom to articles, (and one video--don't like 'em myself),  on financial and economic collapse. There are plenty more. The point is to assure you all that our monetary system, the means we've "developed" through haphazard mutual throat-slitting for trade and interaction among ourselves, is fucked. We can't fix it. The "money" we've been passing around isn't reflective of anything real. The "price" we pay for things has utterly nothing to do with their intrinsic worth or their scarcity in the world. This is our collective fault, not simply the fault of a couple Rothschilds, St. Clairs,  and Morgans. We all scrabbled to keep up appearances and grubbed around to buy stupid shit we never needed, or even used. The numbers involved down at the FED are so unrealistic they're meaningless, and trade imbalances and the like merely amount to spiffy terms for describing exported slavery, a kraken which is quickly coming home to roost for Westerners intent on prolonging the petro-economy for the sake of the god damn Fear. There is no money. Its value has been pilfered away by milquetoast pirates one Stewie Griffin party at a time.

The ends of the Dollar and the Euro represent terrific opportunity. Not for making more money, you dumb-ass! That's the thinking that's got us in this state in the first place. Some reasoned arguments exist that attempt to exonerate the financiers held up by many Occupiers as responsible for this mess. It really doesn't matter. The people playing this game, which are all of us, have all been working at competition together ever since we began to establish societies. We didn't know any better at the time. Now it's apparent that the approach we've been taking isn't working. If you are trapped in a mindset that insists on claiming a bigger slice of pie, or plaintively keens of the potential virtue of money if only it flows through the right hands, i'm sorry for you. Because when this all really hits the fan, you will be completely lost. We own nothing, except stuff that's really not worth much, if you figure it in money. At some future point it may be necessary to argue these points at a higher level, because financiers are fond of  obfuscation and bullshit in the literature, and hate to admit to themselves or anyone else how evilly they've been behaving, but soon enough the thing will collapse beyond the need to parse words.

So follow. The Earth is in the balance, because of the natural behavior of human beings when set loose to compete. Humans also have an innate drive to form societies and cooperate. The mechanisms of the old competitive game are worn, and the game is pretty much decided. We've already abandoned borders within the confines of the Game, only keeping nationalisms and "racial" distinctions in place when convenient to some other aspect of the Game, like the continued propagation of slavery, or the demonization of controllers of certain resources. Pull back and look a little. It's 100% game players causing all the wars in the world, all the food shortages, all the misery. Do we really give a shit what color or religion a thirsty guy in the desert may be? Am i really worried about Iraqi invaders pouring over the horizon? Please! Even if all the current unrest and destabilization isn't manipulated by people who thought George Orwell was writing textbooks, none of this is necessary. We don't need petroleum, (look it up yourself fer cryin' out loud). We don't need to hate a bunch of desert nomads just because our shitheads set them up in business as a part of a grand scam. We don't need to compete.

Cooperative living is so much easier and less troublesome you naysayers will be feeling really silly before this is over. It's OK, though. It's not so easy to see, at least for now. If it takes too long to avoid the pain you'll see soon enough. Come see us then. What we have isn't worth money but i am rich, rich rich! And this Manse won't collapse, with or without money. Stay with us....

http://economiccrisis.us/ http://www.naturalnews.com/032999_financial_collapse_Euro.html http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26756 http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16225 http://129.81.170.14/~dupre/SEEDS.pdf