What's Right - and What's Wrong - with Occupy Wall Street

The Occupy Wall Street movement is now two months old and spread all around the planet. It's exciting stuff. This civilization of ours has been in the process of collapse for three decades but it's now accellerating rapidly... toward what I believe will be a much better way of life for at least half the people on the planet.

Unfortunately, because of misunderstanding of the system, it could quite possibly mean the end of life for many people. Those who die in this global revolution will have died uselessly. They will have died because they chose to fight the wrong battle against the wrong enemy.

Solidarity is awesome

Citizens are acting in solidarity around the world in protest of the power that money buys being consolidated in too few hands. The basic problem is that the citizens, forced to pay higher and higher prices for basic necessities of life, are funding giant bonuses and bailouts which are resulting in huge personal profits for owners of the international banking cartel.

That is, many are broke, more are headed that way, while a very few are grabbing vastly more than they need and telling the rest of us to bite it. Or, more accurately, ignoring our existence altogether.

Occupy Wall Street is an outcome of a process that is already well underway

This process has dramatically accellerated in the past four years and continues to accellerate. Yesterday, via the IMF's control and power, the American taxpayers funded a banker bonus in Europe, even though several economies there have already been decimated. This bailout does not help the citizens there. It helps the bankers there.

As long as there is money to be had, the members of the banking cartels will continue to take it. They created this system for their own benefit and the rest of us have assumed that it was created by us and for us and that is just not the truth.

Which is why it's not even against the law for them to do this. It's just how the system works.

Strong, widely-shared feelings are not proof of fact

The Occupy movement is the people's growing frustration against what, in the end, is a perfectly legal process of consolidating all the monetary wealth in the whole world into the hands of less than a thousand human beings. However, since most people don't understand how the system works, they're fundamentally barking up the wrong tree. 

The Jack Russell terrier can't help but bark at the mailman because of the threat posed when a strangely-garbed person stomps up to the doorway and drops a suspicious item in the box and then stomps away again. This little dog feels very strongly that the home must be defended against this oddly-behaving intruder. His whole system goes on full fight mode.

But it doesn't mean that the mailman is actually a threat.

Never mind the terms: with whom, exactly, is Occupy Wall Street negotiating? 

I learned a whole lot about society in the last few years by raising a child and spending a lot of time watching him and watching how he and others interact. I used to see this very interesting pattern that nobody else seemed to notice. 

What happens at early years centres and public libraries all around the civilized world is that parents arrive with their children and the parents sit quietly at the edge of the room while the kids go for the toys. Within about 40 seconds, two children want the same toy. One of them has it, and the other one attempts to grab it.

At this point, the mommy (almost always - dads are usually far more relaxed) of the child who is having her toy taken away by the other kid jumps in and says to her child "Be nice!" and "Share, please!" 

The young thief learns that he doesn't have to respect the other kid's rights, he just has to be cute and look at the other kid's mommy with a sad look in his eye. So the first kid moves on to a new toy and meanwhile forms some sort of ridiculous belief in her mind to make sense of this meaningless situation. Perhaps she'll come up with the toddler version of "If I am a good girl and never think about my own rights, I'll go to Heaven."

Forty seconds later the other little stinker comes to steal her new toy. She tries to hold onto this one. She has shared already, but now she wants to make sure she doesn't have the rights she thought she was born with. So she withholds the toy from him and he screams.

And they both look at their respective mommies to solve the situation. The mommies rush in, not speaking to or looking at one another or at one another's children, and each of them says, "Be nice! Share, please!" The kids don't want to share, they want a solution. So the mommies either come up with a duplicate or substitute toy to make things fair, or one or both of the children is distracted with another activity or a time out or some words that have been memorized straight out of a Dr. Sears book, like "Listen to my words, Johnny," or "We always share our things, Suzie."

This is total bullshit, of course, and does not remotely satisfy the children's need to learn to negotiate contract terms with one another. At home, when the kid wants something, she knows exactly how much of a tantrum to throw to manipulate mommy into doing what she wants. And mommy has no problem screaming "Put that toy back, you little brat!" when the kid steps out of line.

But it's different at the little community gathering places. Here, the mommies are busy putting on a show for each other. Each is showing the other that she's a better mommy. They are establishing a tenuous cartel. Whichever of them breaks this cartel is persona non grata in mommy circles. That's devastating to women who spend a lot of time with toddlers.

The children learn that they can't assert their rights with their equals; they must get the judgment of a higher authority. By the time they're three or four years old, when they have a difference of opinion between them, they don't do any sort of negotiation. They don't find solutions amongst themselves. They don't even look for solutions amongst themselves. They instantly look to their mothers. With empty, domesticated gazes.

This is taught into us at the very earliest ages. And then it's never untaught.

Occupy Wall Street: demanding favours from Mommy still doesn't work

We live in a culture of children. Raised to follow the authority of our parents and teachers until we are 18 years old and know how to earn and spend money in order for the overall system to function. Then we just replace "parents and teachers" with "government" as the authority in our lives. Now we are adult children, still following someone else's rules in order to have a room to stay in and food at the table. We still have to do chores for others, someone else still controls the finances, and we'll still be punished if we don't behave according to the rules of the authorities. 

As "citizens," we're defining ourselves as the corporate strawmen that are servants to the statutory system. In this role, we still only have the one tactic for getting our way within the strict confines of our parents' household: we respond to all of our problems by having tantrums. Or by looking to Mommy to get her to make a decision on our behalf when someone takes away our toys. 

Having grown up with this notion that it's not nice to assert our rights, that we have to look to the governments or the courts - to the legislation - to get what we rightly deserve, it doesn't even occur to us to simply defend our birthright when things start to go awry in the corporate world. Which is exactly what is going on in the world right now.

As children of the state, the only thing left to us when we don't get what we want is tantrums and looking to Mommy.

Mommy-government is telling us, "Share, darling. You can get another house/food supply/livelihood somewhere else." When we don't listen and keep demanding what we want, Mommy-government gives us a time-out. This is perfectly lawful.

the infamous pepper spray event 

What it means to be an adult instead of a citizen-child

When you beg for or demand privileges from an authority figure, you're doing two things: 

1. you're enslaving yourself because you require someone else make your contract negotiations for you
2. you're begging for something that you already own

The public trust - all the resources, labour, government services, and freedom - belongs to us, the human beings. Corporations - such as the Corporation of the U.S.A., the Corporation of the City of Toronto, or the Crown Corporation of London - are fictitious entities created for the purpose of carrying out the administration of the public trust. Everyone who works for these corporations is a trustee. They are all public servants. 

Who is the executive officer of these corporations? Who is the beneficiary of these corporations? 

Us. The human beings.

But we don't know this. We learned at the age of two to get our mommies to sort out all our problems for us. We never learned to do it for ourselves.

I'm a grownup now. All I had to do was spend a few weeks learning a little bit of law and civics. It wasn't difficult to figure this stuff out, because there are lots of people waking up to this and seeing how it all works. One hundred and fifty years ago, everyone learned this stuff. They learned how to be adults often without learning their letters. They learned figurin' and basic law and civics.

Most people just don't know this stuff. We think we have to go to Mommy for everything. It's a magnificent deception, all the more so because it's so easy to learn how the law really works. It really is.

But because we don't, we accept the role of corporate personhood, and this makes us servants to the system, not masters of it. As a result, our own public service - paid with our money - is serving the rich owners of the banking cartels, not us, the people. Not the "citizens."

Because the public service serves the executors and the beneficiaries, not the other servants.

As long as it's X vs. Y, the system remains

As long as we fight within the system, the system remains untouched

Occupy Wall Street is fundamentally about changing the system to something that serves the public instead of the cleverest of the corporate executives. But that system that we want already exists. It's existed for eight hundred years. All we have to do is claim our sovereignty, declare that we are adults, and require our public servants to serve us. Instead of throwing tantrums or begging them for privileges and benefits.

There is only one real law, and that is do not harm another. Everything else that's going on in this incredibly complicated modern legal and financial world...is just the terms of the cartel. And the cartel's a game very few can possibly win.

Growing up

On the whole, I am moved and greatly heartened by Occupy Wall Street. It is so important to me that millions of people around the world can unite peacefully and help one another to achieve a greater goal that involves fairness to all of humanity regardless of colour, gender or creed. This is crucial to our growing up as a global populace.

But in the Occupy Wall Street movement, we're still adolescents. We're still teenagers banded together demanding that our parents let us go to the parties we want to go to. We still need Mommy (or Daddy) to keep the fridge stocked with pizza and Coke. Or we'll starve.

I hope this thing keeps accellerating. When enough of us learn what our rights are and how to assert them, we will have a truly free society based on justice and the rule of law. We, as grownups living our own wild lives, will stop feeding 80% of our life energy over to the Powers that Be. And when the pigs who run the show stop getting our money, they will stop paying the sheepdogs and the sheepdogs will quit their jobs and peacefully join the sheep. The lion will lie down with the lamb. It's gonna be awesome.

The government will break down. The banking cartels will fall apart. Anyone who is still a citizen - a child of the state - at that point is in big trouble. 

So let's all keep working together. Solidarity, brothers and sisters!