How many times have you heard that the top 1% own half of the USA’s wealth? Some people would say that’s because they earned it, that you don’t get anything for free. And I guess they’re right, if you consider trading stocks, stock options, derivatives, futures, future derivatives, manipulating the market, winning, losing, betting; if you consider that ‘earning’ the money, then earn it they certainly did.

But did any of that trading, did any of those money exchanges produce anything of value, in any direct fashion that could not have been achieved to the same degree, or even more effectively, without the existence of high level money exchange and expansion? That’s right, expansion… these people aren’t just **cough** ‘earning’ money, they are creating it. Well, maybe not all of them, not directly, but through their transactions with banks, they feed the on-going fractional reserve lending and money creating policies that do create most of the money, hence causing most of the inflation.

So while these people continue to make more and more money, it becomes worth less and less, especially as they hoard it in bank accounts, or worse, continue the money creation cycle by investing it, essentially gambling, as I say so eloquently in the title. But hey, right now, while it’s still worth something, these people could, feasibly, use some of it to feed the entire world.

So why don’t they? Well, like I said the future is uncertain. Money is constantly devaluing, and when you’re a real hardcore gambler like these guys, you’re always thinking of the next big win. Maybe someday, when they have ‘enough’, they’ll retire, give a few bucks to charity and live a comfortable life. And this essential mentality, of me-first, of capitalism in general, is exactly why me and the people who work on Wall Street aren’t marching down to Africa together, and building desalinization plants or irrigation systems. Or fully automated aquaponic multi-level gardening facilities that can continuously churn out fresh vegetables and operate in almost any weather conditions. The people on Wall Street can’t — and won’t — stop gambling. They are addicts. Money is their heroine, and they will fight just as hard as a crack-head to get their next fix.

Or, to say the exact same thing in more ‘proper’ terms, the people on Wall Street are trying to earn a profit.

And feeding the planet is not profitable. So it doesn’t get done. And whether we’re talking state-sponsored corporatism or laissez-fares free markets, profit is king. It is that thought — that the pursuit of profit will ultimately lead people to actions for the greater social good, because people will only buy things that are good for them, in the end — that wonderful idea that has underpinned our whole society for hundreds of years, that has now shown itself to be completely false.

Look around you. Not just your neighborhood or your country, but at your planet. THIS is the invisible hand, and it does not push people to perform for the greater social good. It simply pushes them to participate in any action by which a profit can be made.

Do I need to provide a list of arena’s of environmental life-support where profit and human well-being are not mutually compatible, often even at odds with each other? Ok fine, industrial waste, animal farm waste, air and water pollution, dirty, scarce energy sources, the systematic destruction of forests, the ‘buying’ of people’s and countries farmland for corporate purposes, depriving them of even more food, air pollution, media-induced consumption creating pollution, planetary health risks associated with the production of nukes, the spraying of pesticides, the injection of growth hormones, the introduction of poorly tested GMO foods, the outright lies and propaganda from the big food corporations on what a ‘healthy’ diet is… anyways, I could go on but I think it’s pretty clear that this de-coupling of profit interests and human interests is quite pervasive.

And that’s why Bill Hicks’ vision of a better ride could never really happen, not exactly. We can’t spend our way out of this problem, as much as the notion might grab our imagination. The people with the money to save the world are crippled, mentally. They are addicted to their money and power, and every dead human is just an externality as far as the profiteer is concerned. The profiteer cannot save the world until they give up that identity. Until we help them understand that the profit motive is not a humane motive, and the invisible hand is pushing us off a cliff.

I’m reading the new Dexter book (Dexter is Delicious), and I’ve always liked these books because they are amazingly written to show the emotionlessness of sociopaths. He’s much less emotional in the books.

It’s just funny to me that this is the authors description of sociopathic logic, yet it isn’t too far off from how many people view housing foreclosures. Maybe not so blatantly put, but I guess I just think it’s a great example of the cognitive dissonance required to accept that our system is working.

All credit to Seth Rosen — Original video (no seizures/music) can be found here: http://vimeo.com/13725496

song: Excision – Know You

Since this video was unjustly banned from youtube (they ignore parady fair use exemptions, apparantly), I fair-used it up some more with some fancy music and video effects. :)

They ended up banning it again but I won my fair use claim… :)

I’ve also started making videos for the TVPMusicProject. This is my first contribution. The song is… hectic, to say the least, and I tried to make a video to match. :)

song: TVP Planet Earth – Czar Gomez
video: Aaron Moritz (http://youtube.com/saydaysago2008)

This is a brief overview of representative democracy, it’s problems, monetary corruption, followed by the answer to these problems, simply put: using our planet as our government.

If you watched this video closely, and have no background in the material, you’ll probably have more questions than answers.

music: Shpongle – Star Shopngled Banner
Younger Brother – The Receptive

That snapshot taken an hour after I posted this tweet:

Strangely does not include any tweets that didn’t occur between 4 and 5 hours ago (except mine, in tiny writing, which only appears because it’s MY tweet, not as a search result). Nor does it include any tweets posted by people who had anything intelligent to say, or didn’t have 420 in their name…

And they say they “can’t bring up any older tweets”, but mine is not old. It’s new. Just strange.

Could be a coincidence, Twitter’s servers are constantly going down all over the place. It’s really unreliable sometimes, but this seems strange to me. Anyways, could be a lot of things (tech glitch, maybe nobody is using that hash tag… whatever), just thought it was interesting, and as my post title says, ironic.

a remixer’s manifesto:
1. culture always builds on the past.
2. the past always tried to control the future.
3. our future is becoming less free
4. to build free societies, we need to limit the control of the past.

visit my youtube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/saydaysago2008

visit their site: www.invisiblepeople.com to see more interviews.