Posts Tagged ‘occupy wall street’

#OWS + #NetNeutrality = #OccupyFCC

Posted: May 8, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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by @anarchyroll
5/8/2014

The most influential protest movement this side of the 1960s has now had it’s overly wide net cast over the battle for net neutrality. Although not formally part of the movement, an Occupy Wall Street style protest camp has emerged outside of the FCC headquarters.

  • Why? Because net neutrality is on the verge of extinction.
  • How? Verizon won a case against the FCC in federal court which has set the stage for tiered internet service based on payola.
  • When did this verdict happen/when will new internet rules & regulations be announced? The verdict was issued in January. May 15th is when the FCC is set to announce the path going forward.
  • What is net neutrality anyway? It means that all content on the internet is treated equal regardless of content or content provider. No content can be delivered faster or slower or censored for any reason just or unjust. It means that the internet is a truly open road or blank canvas or democratic communication tool.
  • Who wants net neutrality to end? Internet Service Providers (ISPs). They want to charge more for certain content like streaming video. They want people who are willing to pay more to have faster internet access. They want a tiered system. Not just a highway with tolls to pay for infrastructure and maintenance, but an entirely separate highway (not just a lane) for those with money and power to dictate the speed and content that is delivered.
  • Where is the battle for net neutrality taking place? FCC HQ in Washington DC. That is where the future of the internet is being discussed and legislated. That is where the #OccupyFCC movement has physically opened up camp.

You may be wondering or assuming that this is a case of David vs Goliath. That Verizon, Comcast, AT&T and the other internet providers are going to steamroll over the little guys (aka 99% of the population) and get everything that they want. However, in the battle against the ISP Godzilla, the little guys have a Mothra on their side. Yesterday a coalition of companies whose entire business model and fortunes have been made on the back of the open internet let their voice and lobbyists be heard to try to protect net neutrality.

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Amazon, Reddit and Google sent a letter to the FCC voicing their collective, formal support for net neutrality to remain the law of the land. They also backed the call of the common person, to change how broadband ISP’s like telecomm companies which would give the FCC more regulatory control.

You know a bill or potential law is bad if billionaires are on the same side as college students and common folk. The fact that all of these billion dollar companies think tiered internet is a bad idea, then there is likely fire behind that smoke. Net neutrality has allowed the internet to evolve into what it has become. Broadband providers trying to take net neutrality away is nothing more than a despicable money grab. Billionaires who wish to be trillionaires. The battle against net neutrality is greed at it’s worst. Contrary to what middle class white people use the internet for, an open internet is about more than cat videos, selfies, memes, and gifs.

The internet is a necessity at a level just under that of water, food, clothing, and shelter.

Forget the concept of the internet as an entertainment tool and time waster. Forget about social networks, You Tube, torrent sites, and porn. The fight for net neutrality has nothing to do with those. The fight for an open internet is about the internet as the greatest communication tool in the history of humanity. How many people NEED the internet to make a living? How many businesses rely on e-commerce? How big of a role is email in business and education? How many kids do their homework online? How many people around the world lift themselves out of poverty through the internet? How many inventions have been invented because of the internet?

The answer is to all of those is none. It’s not just the “internet” it is an OPEN INTERNET. The internet without network neutrality is not the internet. The death of network neutrality would fundamentally change the way the majority of human beings are able to access the internet. The end of network neutrality is the end of the internet as we know it. The internet will still exist, but in a new form that favors the rich and the powerful. A form that is detrimental to the common person. Ask yourself, who would want to do this to the internet and why?

Sign the petition.

 

 

Occupy Hope?

Posted: March 30, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Excess and Algorithms
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eanda logo

by @anarchyroll
10/19/2013

(I recently found this in my drafts section. Apparently I forgot to hit the send button last year.)

Ignorance is bliss says the ostrich with its head buried in the sand.  That is also a core principle of America’s middle class, don’t ask questions, just pay the mortgage.  This blind obedience and fear has bred generational conflict, the most obvious and colorful being the hippie revolution of the 1960s.  Occupy Wall Street hasn’t had the staying power as the hippies, mostly because the hippies grew up to be more selfish and greedy than their square parents could have ever imagined.  The infrastructure that the hippie turned yuppies put into place during the 1970s-80s were designed to suppress and silence rather than embolden and amplify the average person. The average person has in fact been rebranded as a second class citizen, in step with casino gambling being rebranded as the derivatives market.

During the Obama Hope era, another rebranding has occurred, journalism has been rebranded as espionage. More journalists have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 than every other previous president combined. Change we can believe in?  Well certainly for proponents of George Orwell’s 1984 becoming a nonfiction book it is.  People so blinded by red elephants and blue donkeys are so in the trenches of daily punditry that perspective and bigger picture of things has dissolved from their frames of reference.  Almost as if the job of pundits is to provoke the average person into debating with his/her peers rather than their superiors, elders, and elected officials.

The very reason that some people think the Occupy movement to be a failure is why it is a success.  Cynics I have talked to say they didn’t accomplish anything, often unaware there is an active branch still holding rallies and protests in their nearest major metropolitan city.  Occupy has connected the disenfranchised and given a worldwide platform to the voiceless.  Simply because the evening news doesn’t cover them, and the conspiracy theory forums tri labeled them, doesn’t mean the goals of the movement weren’t accomplished.

I could’ve swore that the initial goal of the people gathering in Zuccotti Park was to draw attention to inequality in terms of income and justice for those in the financial sector of America and its damaging effects at an unprecedented scale on the people, places, and things that make up 99% of the developed world.  Am I wrong?  Oh, they never stated an official, singular, vision or purpose? Well read between the fucking lines, or their blogs…whichever.

#QE = Economic Crack Part 2

Posted: January 28, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
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eanda logoby @anarchyroll
1/28/2014

Click Here for Part One

Getting high, if it wasn’t fun, why would so many people do it? The only problem is that the high doesn’t last forever. The come down is often a crash, back to reality, damnit there’s still the law of gravity. Oh no, the stash is gone. What to do? Face life and the world as it is? Okay, but only for as long as it takes to get the next hit.

The sky was falling in the fall of 2008.  Not just millions, not just billions, but TRILLIONS of dollars evaporated from the global economy.  The wound wasn’t just opened, it was hemorrhaging blood.  What to do? Let the free market run free until it corrected itself?  Use taxpayer money to try and plug the leak? Bomb another middle eastern country?

Desperation causes people to do things that they don’t fully understand. Under intense stress and scrutiny many human beings seek a temporary escape from reality in mind or mood altering chemical substances produced naturally or artificially known to many simply as drugs.  Coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, molly, mushrooms, lsd. cocaine, heroin, meth, crack.  Those who shake their head and thumb their nose at drug users often substitute adrenaline, food, binge screen watching, and other socially accepted mind altering reality escapes in place of the illicit stuff, but it’s all the same.

The federal government and federal reserve bank of the United States of America is run by human beings. Human beings susceptible to the same highs, lows, pros, cons, disciplines, and vices as you and me.  In the midst of panic, desperation, and catastrophe a series of steps were taken to stop the economic bleeding, stabilize the markets, and attempt to spur future growth.  However, the policies were all nothing more than reality escaping substances on a meta scale.

First came TARP. Then came the auto industry bailout.  Those got the headlines and the public ire or support depending if you’re a political elephant or jackass.  However another, much less sexy, but equally if not more important was the Federal Reserve Bank’s $85 billion per month bond buying program known as Quantitative Easing.

There have been three waves of QE from 2009 through present, it is expected to end in 2015.  But if it’s expected to end clean, at a predetermined time, why the drug analogy?

The problem, is that the markets have become dependent, on the fed flooding the market with cash, now there is a new bubble, that could bring the market(s) down in flames.

So the withdrawal pains, in the form of inflation and higher interest rates, could cause a relapse into recession or worse for both the US and global economy.  QE has been like an alcoholic going to rehab and starting a two pack a day cigarette habit.  Our recovery has been artificially enhanced by QE. We haven’t quit cold turkey, we’re on synthetic drugs. It isn’t until all the meds are out of our system that we’ll know if the economy has recovered or not.

Where does QE go from here?  I’ll cover that in part 3…

#OWS Shines Light on Dark Debt Market

Posted: January 14, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
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eanda logoby @anarchyroll
1/13/2014

Did you know what the secondary debt market was? I sure as hell didn’t. Now I do, thanks Occupy Wall Street and Strike Debt (an OWS offshoot).

Raising that question and answering it is precisely what the intention behind the action of buying and forgiving the debt, first $1 million, then $15 million. I hope this silences the movements critics (that aren’t members of the 1%). The debt they forgave was primarily medical debt, they said they will next be targeting student loan debt.

The movement is not as chic as it was a few years ago, and certainly doesn’t receive the news coverage it did during it’s initial run in Zuccotti Park, but that has been a blessing in disguise. Without national media attention and the inevitable ego boom that comes with it, they have been able to quietly do the work of the 99%.  Now the press only covers them when they make a big splash in the form of helping people, which is what any protest movement is supposed to be all about.