Let the word go out, indeed. “Those are OUR streets, and we will always be there to demonstrate… people learned a lot… we are no longer that post ideological generation, we are no longer that generation that doesn’t care… we are now the generation that will stand with everyone who’s fighting back…” They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.
15 year old Tells Establishment to Stick-it.
Coalition of Resistence National Conference 27 November 2010 Camden UK
Not many know that GroupOn, Andrew Mason‘s initiative funded by Eric Lefkofsky, started as Policy Tree “Taking People Out of Politics”. Citizens were not interested in Policy Tree back then for two reasons: the outrage at mortgage fraud, Wall Street derivatives fraud, and Federal Reserve fraud had not peaked yet, and the power of GroupOn to move markets and nations had not been demonstrated. Now that GroupOn has turned down Google's offer of six billion, there is no doubt.
Put simply, GroupOn now has more power than George Soros, to take one example. GroupOn can:
1) Publish true costs for any product or service that is seriously harmful to all of us, and kill it.
2) Publicize a product or service that is good for the community, and make it a standard.
4) Organize citizens to do participatory legislation and participatory policy and participatory budgeting and participatory regulatory and propriety oversight in relation to specific issue areas, zip codes, countries, or states, and empower them as a group that cannot be ignored.
GroupOn has done what all others have failed to do: harnessed citizens in the aggregate. They have just begun. When combined with the emergence of digital natives as a political force whose outrage is now maturing (see Jon Lebkowsky's “The Kids Are All Right“), GroupOn is the game changer–not MoveOn.org, not No Labels, not Americans Elect, not IndependentVoting.org–all “old” models dominated by apparatchicks and not at all open to the collective. GroupOn. As in Group ON, dude!
When you think about who might topple a software giant like a Microsoft or a Google, you might be inclined to think of Goliaths like, well Google and Microsoft. The same is true of any industry, you probably think of a company of similar size or larger as being the type of company that would win a battle, or a war.
Actual battles and wars end up being an interesting analogy. If you think if big battles like World War I and World War II, that’s exactly what happened – giants fighting giants from big, knowable centralized points of command. But there are some other wars that have been fought where the little guy won (or hasn’t lost in the case of one ongoing war) and there’s a common element in all of them. No centralized physical location to “take out” to win. When everything is dispersed and there isn’t any one thing to take out, it’s hard to really know how big or how small opposing force is, and they can be substantially more agile. In this situation, an organization of any size can pose a major threat to an enormous organization. The war on terror is an ongoing war that fits this profile – it’s virtually impossible to know how big or small the opposition is, or where they are at any given time, so it’s very hard to be ready for an attack from them. Viet Nam was a tough one for the US to really stand a chance in because it was in unfamiliar territory and there was no central location to take out to declare victory. One could even make the same argument (at a high level) for why the British lost the American revolution.
So if you don’t know who Rovio or CCP are, I have already made significant progress on the path of making my point.
01 Do the American people deserve to know the truth regarding the on-going war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen?
02 Could a larger questions be how can an Army private gain access to so much secret information?
03 Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange the publisher and not our government's failure to protect classified information?
04 Are we getting our money's worth from the $80 billion dollars per year we are spending on intelligence gathering?
05 Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths? Lying us into war, or WikiLeaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
06 If Assange can be convicted of a crime for information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the First Amendment and the independence of the Internet?
07 Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
08 Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death, and corruption?
09 Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
Many Americans have come to the conclusion that nobody represents them in Washington anymore. They are right.
This situation is not the result of a sinister conspiracy by a single, unitary, all-powerful and diabolical elite. The origins of the disconnect are structural. The mass membership organizations that once represented ordinary Americans at the state and national level have been replaced by elite organizations that raise their money from a small number of billionaires rather than hundreds of thousands or millions of dues-paying members.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the first time we have seen this important idea presented so plainly. GroupOn might yet help solve the problem. What is clear is that the Internet has spawned the fragmentation of groups even further, without offering something like GroupOn that could bring them all back together issue by issue–this was the reason Earth Intelligence Network was created, to be a proponent for a World Brain and EarthGame that could connect all people with all relevant information, and in this way enable informed participatory democracy across multiple boundaries–Panarchy, the opposite of Anarchy. Electoral Reform is an important first step, but as the full article suggests, the public desperately needs some vehicle for representing all of the people all of the time.
I am sick to my stomach with “progressive” and “liberal” leaders hurling the insult of “hypocrites!” at the rich.
“Hypocrite” is a word used by men in suits and ties. “Hypocrite” is even used by people who think this Obama deal on the extension of unemployment benefits is one dandy mitigating factor, in the injustice of it all.
What about our Christian (etc.) Brothers and Sisters—the “99ers”–the American human beings who have reached the 99-week limit, and are now ruthlessly spit into poverty. Millions of them, thousands every day.
“Hypocrites” is a word that is used by rich people and Progressives who think that poor people are statistics. Too bad, we can’t take care of these devastated American souls… “After all,” many of employed think secretly or not, “They should go get a job.”
Do you understand this simple fucking fact—there used to be three men on a garbage truck. Two threw in the garbage and one drove. Now there’s a driver with an expensive, giant, robotic, steel, throwing arm. Those other two guys are out of work, and, now, out of luck. Tough nuggies.
What happened to the garbage men has happened to millions of people. It is called structural unemployment. Industry got more and more efficient with better machines and cheaper labor (from wherever). The structure of how we make things has changed. We use fewer citizens and more machines. We need educated people, not public high school drop-outs. Fuck ‘em.
