295 - The World and It’s Double Part 1

Program Notes

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Culture denies experience. We all have had, and even a population of non-psychedelic people have had, prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of coincidences, all of these sort of things. These are all experiences, which cultures deny.”

“We live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism in its many guises.”

“We’re literally at the end of our rope. Reason and science and the practice of unbridled capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic realm.”

“So we’re in, essentially, a tragic situation. A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it.”

“Boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. People, meaning government institutions, become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other.”

“I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience, and the drug is technology.”

“We have packed more change into the last 10,000 years than the billion years which preceded it. And yet, as entities, as animals, meat, we have not changed at all in 10,000 years.”

“What psychedelics do, and I think this isn’t too challengeable, is they catalyze imagination. They drive you to think what you would not think otherwise.”

“Notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fallout created by strange ideas.”

“We have the tools that would allow us to sculpt paradise, but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of some sort.”

“Our entire psychology is characterized by a profound discontent.”

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST
What You Should Know About 2012: Answers to 13 Questions
Future Theater Radio – Interview with Lorenzo
TERENCE MCKENNA: BEYOND 2012
A one-day seminar celebrating the life and ideas of Terence McKenna and taking the next steps beyond 2012 with Bruce Damer and Lorenzo

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20 ►

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:24 ►

And today is day 111 of

00:00:27 ►

Occupy Wall Street and I want to begin by giving a shout out to my good friends at Occupy Scotland.

00:00:34 ►

Well it sure seems like it’s been a long time since you and I were last together here in the

00:00:39 ►

salon and I apologize for that but like several other people I know, this holiday season often

00:00:46 ►

brings on a rather deep melancholy for me and in turn that brings on a lethargy that’s kind of hard

00:00:52 ►

to overcome for me. So I decided to take a week or so off and about the time I was gearing back up

00:00:58 ►

for another podcast, well I came down with this bad cold which is only now just beginning to clear

00:01:03 ►

up. So I hope at least that the last few weeks have been a little more gentle on you.

00:01:09 ►

But anyway, here we are back again in the psychedelic salon for the first edition of podcast in the auspicious year of 2012.

00:01:18 ►

And before I forget it, if you’re looking for some actual facts about the Mayan connection to this year,

00:01:24 ►

rather than all of the pop culture stuff that’s floating around, there’s a truly excellent essay

00:01:29 ►

in psychology today by my friend and our fellow salonner, Dr. John Hoops, who also happens to be

00:01:35 ►

a scholar of the Maya. And I’ll link to that in the program notes for this podcast, which you can

00:01:40 ►

get to via psychedelicsalon.us. Another announcement I forgot to make in my last couple of podcasts

00:01:47 ►

is that friends of the salon, Bill and Nancy Burns,

00:01:50 ►

had me as a guest on their Future Theater radio broadcast,

00:01:54 ►

and it is now also available as a download on their website,

00:01:58 ►

which is futuretheater.com.

00:02:01 ►

So if you want to hear about my one and only UFO sighting,

00:02:04 ►

well, that’s the place you’ll

00:02:05 ►

find it. And I’ll put a link to that in the program notes as well. And yet another thing that I forgot

00:02:12 ►

to mention last time was that there still are some places available for the workshop that Bruce

00:02:17 ►

Dahmer and I are leading on the 28th of this month. As you know, the title of the workshop is

00:02:22 ►

Terrence McKenna Beyond 2012.

00:02:31 ►

And you can find out more about that on our workshop website, which is at matrixmasters.net slash beyond 2012 or at www.terrence2012.com.

00:02:40 ►

Now, as you can tell, I’ve decided to change the format to these podcasts just a little bit this year by putting the announcements first.

00:02:49 ►

And my final announcement is one that I hope you’ll understand, at least if you’ve made a recent donation to help offset some of the expenses here in the salon.

00:02:57 ►

What I’ve decided to do is, rather than read just the first name and last initial of the donors and of those who paid for a copy of my

00:03:05 ►

pay what you can audiobook edition of my novel the genesis generation i’m instead going to send a

00:03:10 ►

personal greeting to each one of you via email or in the case of those kind souls who sent something

00:03:16 ►

in the postal mail i’ll be sending you a letter now i realize that this may ruffle the feathers

00:03:21 ►

of a few of our fellow sauners who wanted to hear their name called out. But on the other hand, that just didn’t seem personal enough

00:03:27 ►

as a way to thank our supporters.

00:03:30 ►

So I’ll be getting those emails out to you and letters out sometime after tomorrow.

00:03:36 ►

I’ve got to finish up this podcast,

00:03:38 ►

and then the rest of the day is going to be a birthday celebration

00:03:43 ►

with one of my granddaughters.

00:03:45 ►

And then I’ll get the program notes done tomorrow and get those emails out after that.

00:03:51 ►

So anyway, hey, thank you all very much, not only for your donations,

00:03:55 ►

but also for your understanding about this change in format.

00:03:59 ►

Now that said, I’m going to start out by breaking my new rule

00:04:04 ►

and thank Theodore S

00:04:06 ►

who I first met at a MAPS conference last spring and who actually got me

00:04:10 ►

out of my lethargy and back into podcast mode with an over-the-top

00:04:14 ►

contribution that’s actually more of a grant than a donation

00:04:17 ►

and after receiving Theodore’s generous gift and exchanging an email of encouragement

00:04:22 ►

with him, I realized that this little hobby

00:04:25 ►

of mine has, maybe it’s doing more good than I even realized, and I thank him and you as

00:04:30 ►

well for helping me to feel good about what I’m doing.

00:04:34 ►

And so now let’s get on with the show.

00:04:37 ►

Now if you notice the title of today’s talk by Terrence McKenna, you most likely know

00:04:42 ►

that this talk has been floating around the net for a long time.

00:04:44 ►

Terrence McKenna, you most likely know that this talk has been floating around the net for a long time. In fact, there are over 30 versions of it just on YouTube alone, which is where I got this

00:04:51 ►

version. And so you might ask why I’m going to play it here in the salon if you can find it

00:04:55 ►

elsewhere. Well, there are several reasons. The first one is that I wanted to be able to listen

00:05:00 ►

to it myself without being tied to a YouTube computer screen.

00:05:10 ►

Secondly, since it’s already so widely available, I’m assuming that it’s in the public domain and therefore I’m not going to get in trouble for posting it yet again.

00:05:14 ►

But the most important reason is that, well, I really wanted to hear something from Terrence

00:05:18 ►

today and sadly my own stock of Terrence McKenna recordings that has been sent to me by several of our fellow salonners, well, it’s now been completely depleted.

00:05:30 ►

I’ve played them all.

00:05:31 ►

So, if you happen to have a recording of his that we haven’t heard yet here in the salon, I would be more than happy for you to send me a copy to play.

00:05:51 ►

And until that happens, I’m going to keep searching through some of the thousands of his recordings that are on YouTube and play them for you here whenever I feel the need to hear a few more words of wisdom from the Bard McKenna.

00:06:05 ►

And although I’d heard this talk some time ago, I was pleasantly surprised at how new it sounded to me when I heard it again when I was previewing it yesterday. I don’t know about you, but for me, listening to Terence McKenna rap eloquent on a range of topics that include such statements as,

00:06:10 ►

and I’m quoting,

00:06:11 ►

we’re literally at the end of our rope.

00:06:14 ►

Reason and science and practice of unbridled capitalism

00:06:17 ►

have not delivered us into an angelic realm.

00:06:20 ►

And then he goes on to say,

00:06:22 ►

so we’re in, essentially, a tragic situation.

00:06:26 ►

A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it.

00:06:30 ►

But why am I telling you this when we can be listening to it directly from the bard’s mouth instead?

00:06:36 ►

So here once again is the one and only Terrence McKenna.

00:06:42 ►

Well, the world and its double is how we styled this.

00:06:50 ►

This is simply a high visibility, flashy way of reminding people whose eyes fall upon that text

00:06:59 ►

that the world has a double. The world is not entirely or completely what it seems to be.

00:07:12 ►

Culture, and by culture I mean any culture, anywhere, anytime,

00:07:19 ►

gives you the message that everything is humdrum, everything is normal.

00:07:30 ►

In other words, culture denies experience.

00:07:35 ►

You know, we all have had, and even a population of non-psychedelic people

00:07:40 ►

have had prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of coincidences, all of these

00:07:51 ►

sort of things.

00:07:52 ►

These are experiences which cultures deny.

00:07:57 ►

Cultures put in place, I’m sure you’ve heard this word, a paradigm. And then what fits within the cultural paradigm is accentuated, stressed,

00:08:11 ►

and what doesn’t fit inside the cultural paradigm is denied, marginalized, argued against.

00:08:33 ►

And we live at the end of a thousand-year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism in its many guises. And the basic message of materialism is that the world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of matter and pretty much confined to its surface.

00:08:50 ►

The world is what it appears to be.

00:08:52 ►

Now, this on the face of it is a tremendously naive position

00:08:59 ►

because what it says is the animal body that you inhabit, the eyes you look through, the fingers you feel through, are somehow the ultimate instruments of metaphysical conjecture begins with the logic of the situation

00:09:28 ►

and then proceeds in whatever direction that logic will carry you.

00:09:35 ►

Well, if logic is true to experience, We have to make room in any theory for invisible connectedness between people,

00:09:49 ►

anticipation of a future that has not yet occurred, shared dreaming,

00:09:58 ►

all kinds of possibilities that materialism has denied. For approximately 500 years, the great era of the triumph of modern science, materialism

00:10:12 ►

has had the field all to itself.

00:10:17 ►

And its argument for its preeminence was the beautiful toys that it could create.

00:10:25 ►

Aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft.

00:10:32 ►

But that is a fool’s argument for truth.

00:10:38 ►

I mean, that’s after all how a medicine show operates, you know.

00:10:42 ►

The juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better. This is not an entirely rational way to proceed. And now, at the end of 500 years of the practice of rational, quote unquote, scientific culture, we’re literally at the end of our rope. Reason and science and the practice of unbridled

00:11:13 ►

capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic realm. Quite the contrary, they’ve delivered 3% of us into an angelic realm,

00:11:26 ►

completely overshadowed by guilt about what’s happening to the other 97% of us who are eating it.

00:11:33 ►

It’s not a pretty picture, modern civilization.

00:11:38 ►

Most people in the world today are quite miserable, actually.

00:11:43 ►

They have very little hope.

00:11:45 ►

Their religions, their traditional value systems are being eroded by Dallas and Hawaii Five-0,

00:11:54 ►

which are on the village television every night.

00:11:58 ►

Lifespans are being shortened by pesticides, chemicals, all kinds of things in the environment.

00:12:04 ►

shortened by pesticides, chemicals, all kinds of things in the environment. And there is very little political light on the horizon.

00:12:13 ►

So I believe that it’s reasonable, looking at this situation, to say that history failed

00:12:20 ►

and that the grand dream of western civilization has in fact failed.

00:12:29 ►

And now we are attempting with basically a carved wooden ore to turn a battleship around.

00:12:39 ►

And it’s a very frustrating undertaking. The momentum for catastrophe is enormous in this situation.

00:12:50 ►

But it’s not 100% certain that catastrophe is what we’re headed for

00:13:00 ►

because we are not 100% unconscious.

00:13:04 ►

There are people struggling to figure out how to control population,

00:13:09 ►

struggling to figure out how to balance the relationship between the masculine and the feminine,

00:13:16 ►

struggling to bring amelioration of hunger and disease to various parts of the world.

00:13:23 ►

So we’re in essentially a tragic situation.

00:13:28 ►

A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it, you see.

00:13:34 ►

And part of the Western impulse has been to subjugate all other cultural styles to our own.

00:13:46 ►

And this has taken the form of actually swallowing and digesting Native American culture.

00:13:57 ►

The ethnicity of European culture has been replaced by the megaculture of nouveau Europa, whatever that means.

00:14:08 ►

Cultures are melted down in the belly of the Western scientific beast,

00:14:16 ►

and then they become structural members in an ever-expanding edifice of Western scientism.

00:14:24 ►

in an ever-expanding edifice of Western scientism. However, the psychedelic experience,

00:14:29 ►

as practiced by shamans in many, many parts of the world,

00:14:34 ►

is apparently a bite too large to swallow.

00:14:40 ►

Psychedelics arrived on the Western agenda only about a hundred years ago

00:14:47 ►

when German chemists brought peyote to Berlin and extracted mescaline.

00:14:56 ►

And for the next 50 years up until about 1945, 55 years make it, very little happened.

00:15:08 ►

Mescaline did not, though it was taken by Havelock Ellis and William James and F. Weir Mitchell,

00:15:18 ►

it did not spawn a craze.

00:15:21 ►

It did not influence large numbers of intellectuals particularly.

00:15:27 ►

Then in the 40s LSD was discovered. In the 50s DMT and psilocybin were discovered.

00:15:36 ►

And then in 1966 all these things were made illegal.

00:15:43 ►

There was no real opportunity for Western science to grapple with these things before

00:15:50 ►

they were decided to be too hot to handle.

00:15:55 ►

Made not only unavailable to people such as you and I, ordinary people, but taken off

00:16:02 ►

the agenda of scientific research.

00:16:05 ►

In the Middle Ages, the church forbade dissection of human bodies,

00:16:11 ►

and medical students would visit battlefields and the gallows at night

00:16:19 ►

and steal the bodies of victims of war and executed prisoners in order to learn human physiology.

00:16:29 ►

Where that spirit of scientific courage has gone, I don’t know, but there’s very little of it left.

00:16:36 ►

Now people feed at the trough of government grants and enormous corporate research budgets,

00:16:46 ►

and enormous corporate research budgets, and the idea of actually pursuing truth or attempting to understand the phenomenon in an unbiased fashion,

00:16:52 ►

divorced from its commercial, social, and political dimensions, is unheard of.

00:17:00 ►

If you look at thousands of these experiences, is they dissolve boundaries.

00:17:08 ►

They dissolve boundaries between you and your past,

00:17:12 ►

you and the part of your unconscious you don’t want to look at,

00:17:16 ►

between you and your partner,

00:17:20 ►

between you and the feminine if you’re masculine and vice versa,

00:17:25 ►

between you and the world,

00:17:27 ►

all the boundaries that we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved.

00:17:37 ►

And boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society.

00:17:47 ►

People get very, people meaning government institutions,

00:17:51 ►

become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other.

00:17:57 ►

Yes, the whole name of the Western game is to create boundaries and maintain them.

00:18:03 ►

The church and the state,

00:18:05 ►

the poor and the wealthy,

00:18:07 ►

the black and the white,

00:18:08 ►

the male and the female,

00:18:10 ►

the young and the old,

00:18:12 ►

the gay and the straight,

00:18:13 ►

the living and the dead,

00:18:15 ►

the foreign and the familiar.

00:18:17 ►

All of these categorical divisions

00:18:21 ►

allow a kind of thinking

00:18:24 ►

that is completely cockamamie.

00:18:26 ►

After all, reality is in fact a seamless, unspeakable something.

00:18:33 ►

And we understand that to perceive it separately is a necessary adjunct to the act of understanding.

00:18:44 ►

But it is not the end of the program of understanding.

00:18:49 ►

The particulate data has to be recombined in a paradigm,

00:18:58 ►

a seamless overview of what is happening.

00:19:03 ►

And the drugs that Western society has traditionally favored

00:19:08 ►

have either been drugs which maintain boundaries

00:19:12 ►

or drugs which promote mindless, repetitious physical activity

00:19:20 ►

on the assembly line, in the slave galley,

00:19:27 ►

on the assembly line, in the slave galley, on the latifundia,

00:19:31 ►

the slave-driven agricultural project, whatever it is. In the corporate office.

00:19:33 ►

This is why every labor contract on this planet, at least in Western civilization,

00:19:41 ►

contains a provision that all workers shall be allowed to use drugs twice a day at designated times.

00:19:50 ►

But the drug shall be caffeine.

00:19:53 ►

Now, the reason caffeine is so welcome in the workplace is because the last three hours of the work day are utterly unproductive unless you goose everybody with two cups of coffee

00:20:07 ►

and then they can go back to the word processor, the widget tightening machine or whatever they’re doing

00:20:13 ►

and mindlessly and happily carry on.

00:20:18 ►

If it were suggested that there be a pot break twice a day, you know,

00:20:23 ►

you would think that civilization was striking the iceberg or something. So, and alcohol, our society is an alcohol, red meat, sugar, and tobacco culture. And all of these are forms of speed, basically, in the way that we use them.

00:20:49 ►

I mean, yes, you can tranquilize yourself on alcohol, but you’re pushing toward levels where a lifetime of tranquilizing yourself on alcohol will be a short lifetime if you use it that way. So there’s a lot of tension in society

00:21:06 ►

between the great exploring soul

00:21:12 ►

and the assembly line citizen.

00:21:18 ►

The citizen is defined by obligation

00:21:21 ►

and by the boundaries that define, you know, the next citizen,

00:21:29 ►

either because it’s neighbor or worker or employer or something like that.

00:21:36 ►

And the grand exploring soul is marginalized as an eccentric or, if necessary, more seriously marginalized as mad in some way.

00:21:48 ►

I mean, madness basically, up until the level of physical violence,

00:21:53 ►

means you are behaving in a way which makes me feel uncomfortable.

00:21:58 ►

Therefore, there’s something wrong with you.

00:22:13 ►

you. So, now, it’s interesting, and this is one of the points that’s dear to me, I mean,

00:22:25 ►

they arrive in different orders each time, but I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience. And the drug is technology.

00:22:28 ►

And as technology gets more and more perfected

00:22:35 ►

as a mirror of the human mind,

00:22:38 ►

the cultural experience becomes more and more hallucinatory.

00:22:44 ►

And for at least the past couple of hundred years, boundary dissolution has been underway

00:22:51 ►

at every level of Western civilization.

00:22:55 ►

I mean, you could push it further back.

00:22:58 ►

The Magna Carta, the fact that princes and lords of the realm would actually attempt to force the king’s signature on a document defining their privileges.

00:23:14 ►

They are, after all, ordinary human beings.

00:23:16 ►

The king is the divine appointed regent of God in heaven.

00:23:22 ►

regent of God in heaven.

00:23:26 ►

So this was a severe boundary dissolution within the context of the age in which it was taking place.

00:23:30 ►

They were actually saying,

00:23:31 ►

you as Christ’s representative on earth

00:23:34 ►

should cede some of this omnipotence to us,

00:23:39 ►

mere mortals suspended in the political process.

00:23:42 ►

Well, that leads then to broader demands for human rights,

00:23:48 ►

for the idea that a permanent and large segment of society

00:23:55 ►

kept in permanent poverty is unacceptable.

00:23:59 ►

We got rid of debtors’ prisons and things like this.

00:24:08 ►

prisons and things like this as our as the collectivity of our humaneness becomes an intellectual legacy for all of us there is a dissolving of

00:24:15 ►

boundaries of race class status language so forth and so on and the whole of the

00:24:23 ►

20th century has seen a massive acceleration of this.

00:24:28 ►

The breakdown of the Soviet Union was in fact simply, it was even so described,

00:24:35 ►

the lifting of the Iron Curtain, meaning a membrane has suddenly disappeared.

00:24:43 ►

And more and more of these membranes are disappearing.

00:24:48 ►

And what is emerging then is a more and more psychedelic experience,

00:24:55 ►

meaning a sense of acceleration of information flow,

00:25:00 ►

a sense of rising ambiguity about what it all means.

00:25:04 ►

a sense of rising ambiguity about what it all means.

00:25:11 ►

Everything seems to carry both a good facet and a detrimental facet.

00:25:14 ►

The ambiguity of everything is increasing.

00:25:18 ►

The connectedness of everything is increasing.

00:25:24 ►

And I will argue later in the day that this is a general tendency of the time and space in which we are embedded

00:25:29 ►

and that we ourselves are a reflection of this.

00:25:35 ►

Where is life carrying us?

00:25:38 ►

What is this all about?

00:25:49 ►

out? Is it carrying us toward extinction so that the rest of nature can heave an enormous sigh of relief and then get back to the business of nest building, mating flights and overposturing

00:25:58 ►

and whatever it is that they’re doing out there? or is it carrying us toward some kind of a transition?

00:26:10 ►

If you look back through the history of life, which is a long history,

00:26:15 ►

I mean, it reaches back a billion years,

00:26:30 ►

And every advance happens suddenly, unpredictably, and in a very short period of time.

00:26:37 ►

Some of you who stay tuned to the scientific literature may have noticed this series of articles that were around last week about what they’re calling the Big Bang of biology,

00:26:44 ►

what they’re calling the big bang of biology.

00:26:49 ►

That there was a period of time, incredibly brief,

00:26:52 ►

perhaps between a million and ten million years,

00:26:59 ►

when all the phyla of life on this planet radiated into existence. Sometime between 525 and 535 million years ago, just it all snapped into existence.

00:27:11 ►

The episode in which life left the sea is a similar highly confined transition event.

00:27:23 ►

People recently have written about what they call punctuated or punctuated evolution. Evolution is between, and then a new equilibrium state.

00:27:48 ►

So, history, I believe, is not an aberration any more than leaving the sea

00:27:58 ►

could be called an aberration of marine existence.

00:28:02 ►

I mean, obviously it is not marine existence. I mean, obviously, it is not marine existence,

00:28:05 ►

and obviously, we are not living in the same world

00:28:08 ►

as groundhogs and hummingbirds psychologically.

00:28:11 ►

But leaving the sea did not represent an ontological transition.

00:28:19 ►

It represented an extremely dramatic shift of modality.

00:28:25 ►

And this is what history is.

00:28:27 ►

History is characterized by its brevity, for one thing.

00:28:34 ►

I mean, we have packed more change into the last 10,000 years

00:28:40 ►

than the billion years which preceded it.

00:28:44 ►

than the billion years which preceded it.

00:28:50 ►

I mean, and yet as entities, as animals, meat,

00:28:55 ►

we have not changed at all in 10,000 years. If you were to go back to that era,

00:29:00 ►

the people would be exactly like people we see today.

00:29:04 ►

They wouldn’t be so racially heterogeneous

00:29:06 ►

because the great gene streamings and migrations that characterize history

00:29:12 ►

have not yet taken place, but essentially perfectly modern people.

00:29:19 ►

Well, then history is apparently, if we view it as a process that nature tolerates, if not encourages,

00:29:31 ►

then history is essentially, apparently, important enough to place, to jeopardize the stability

00:29:40 ►

of all the rest of the natural ecosystemic world.

00:29:47 ►

It’s as though nature is saying we are willing to place the entire planetary ecology in danger for 50,000 years

00:29:57 ►

in order for the opportunity to be explored of language using, technologically expressing intelligence

00:30:06 ►

carrying all of life to the next level.

00:30:11 ►

And it’s a terrifying enterprise

00:30:14 ►

because apparently to carry life to the next level,

00:30:20 ►

tremendous intellectual sophistication is required about the release and control of energy.

00:30:28 ►

The problem is energy can be used to destroy as well as build.

00:30:35 ►

So as the human enterprise has moved toward greater and greater power

00:30:41 ►

and ability to manipulate the environment, the stakes in the cosmic game have

00:30:49 ►

risen and now what we have is approximately a hundred billion dollars sitting in the center

00:30:55 ►

of the crap table and one roll of the dice more and we’re going to either win it or lose everything because intelligence, if we fail,

00:31:09 ►

will never again reach the kind of levels on this planet that we have reached.

00:31:16 ►

Why?

00:31:16 ►

Because we have extracted all the available metals near the surface of the Earth.

00:31:24 ►

all the available metals near the surface of the earth.

00:31:30 ►

An evolving species following after us will find the earth strangely depleted of usable materials

00:31:35 ►

down to the 1500 foot level.

00:31:39 ►

And so intelligence coming beyond us

00:31:43 ►

will find it just does not have the resources to make the leap to technical civilization.

00:31:49 ►

So it’s beginning to look like a one-shot deal.

00:31:54 ►

And the psychedelics are in there for two reasons. First of all, because they allow us as individuals to break out of the flat cultural illusion

00:32:07 ►

and to rise up and look at this situation.

00:32:13 ►

So it’s for us a tool to understand our predicament.

00:32:17 ►

But the psychedelics are also what has driven this circumstance to arise in part

00:32:27 ►

because what psychedelics do, and I think this isn’t too challengeable,

00:32:33 ►

is they catalyze imagination.

00:32:37 ►

They drive you to think what you would not think otherwise.

00:32:43 ►

Well, notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fallout created by strange ideas. You know, let’s build a pyramid, let’s build a windmill, let’s build a water wheel, you know, and then empires, philosophies, religions arise in the wake of these situations.

00:33:07 ►

I’ve argued in the past, and I’m going to try not to repeat it here today

00:33:11 ►

because I think you’ve all heard it, but I will just mention it in a sentence or two,

00:33:16 ►

that the critical catalyst propelling us out of the slowly evolving hominid line and caused us to take an orthogonal right-hand turn

00:33:28 ►

into culture, language, art, yearning,

00:33:32 ►

probably was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in our diet

00:33:38 ►

during that episodic moment

00:33:40 ►

when we went from being fruititarian canopy dwellers

00:33:44 ►

to omnivorous pack hunting

00:33:47 ►

creatures of the grassland. And it was the inclusion of psilocybin in our grassland diet

00:33:55 ►

that caused us to discover that there is a mind and you can perturb it. I mean, think about,

00:34:03 ►

I mean, I don’t think you could discover consciousness if you didn’t perturb it.

00:34:09 ►

Because as Marshall McLuhan said, whoever discovered water, it certainly wasn’t a fish.

00:34:16 ►

Well, we are fish swimming in consciousness, and yet we know it’s there.

00:34:23 ►

Well, the reason we know it’s there is because if you perturb it, then you see it and you perturb it by

00:34:31 ►

perturbing the engine which generates it, which is the mind-brain system resting behind your eyebrows. If you swap out the ordinary chemicals that are running that system in an invisible fashion,

00:34:48 ►

then you see it’s like dropping ink into a bowl of clear water.

00:34:55 ►

Suddenly the convection currents operating in the clear water become visible because you see the particles of ink tracing out the

00:35:06 ►

previously invisible dynamics of the standing water the mind is precisely

00:35:13 ►

like that and the psychedelic is like a dye marker being dropped into this

00:35:20 ►

aqueous system and then you say oh I see it works like this and like this.

00:35:27 ►

If psychedelics are a catalyst for the imagination,

00:35:30 ►

and if history is driven by the imagination,

00:35:35 ►

it is driven through the fallout from the imagination,

00:35:39 ►

which is technology and culture.

00:35:43 ►

which is technology and culture.

00:35:55 ►

Technology and culture are the consequences, the derivatives, of the ratiocination of the mind. And technology has, like biological life, but on a much faster or accelerated time frame,

00:36:07 ►

life but on a much faster accelerated time frame technology has this weird tendency to transcend itself to bootstrap itself you know if you have if you have

00:36:15 ►

a cart then it implies better wheels better bearings better structure and

00:36:21 ►

then higher speed more control more feedback from the machine.

00:36:28 ►

That means we need gas gauges, RPM readouts, so forth and so on.

00:36:34 ►

Technology, strangely enough, created by a biological creature, has itself this self-transcending quality but ever

00:36:46 ►

accelerating this is the important point because the ever accelerating accretion

00:36:56 ►

of technology means that history is strangely foreshortened at the future end because it happens faster and faster.

00:37:07 ►

It’s like a process that begins very slowly but once started has the quality of a cascade.

00:37:16 ►

Every, or, you know, the rate at which falling bodies move.

00:37:20 ►

32 and a half feet per second, per second.

00:37:24 ►

32.5 feet per second per second.

00:37:32 ►

Each second accelerates to twice the rate of infall that was occurring in the previous second. Technology is like this.

00:37:35 ►

And we now are in a domain where if we attempt to propagate technological development forward 50 years,

00:37:48 ►

it becomes unmanageable as an intellectual task.

00:37:55 ►

We can talk about the automobile, what it might look like 50 years from now.

00:38:01 ►

It would float. It would go 500 miles an hour. It would be guided

00:38:06 ►

by your mind, so

00:38:08 ►

forth and so on.

00:38:09 ►

These kinds of ideas.

00:38:11 ►

But when you think that

00:38:13 ►

every

00:38:15 ►

artifact of our

00:38:18 ►

world will undergo

00:38:20 ►

that kind of transformation

00:38:22 ►

and that the

00:38:23 ►

synergy among these transformed objects

00:38:27 ►

will create phenomena and situations that we can’t anticipate that’s the key

00:38:33 ►

thing our inability to anticipate the synergies between our technologies I I mean, the computer, LSD, spacecraft, holograms, organic superconductivity.

00:38:51 ►

Those are just six areas where the integration of those concerns will produce unimaginable consequences.

00:39:01 ►

The ultimate boundary dissolution is the dissolution of ego. I mean, we hope,

00:39:09 ►

we straight people hope that they never meet it except at death. Of course, they don’t

00:39:16 ►

realize going to sleep at night is a kind of ego dissolution. it the government is expressive of this dominator culture

00:39:29 ►

that we’re living in the ego is a very recent invention and its hold on reality

00:39:37 ►

is very tenuous and consequently it walks around imbued with fear.

00:39:45 ►

I mean, it feels itself to be a mouse in a world of dinosaurs.

00:39:50 ►

That’s because it’s a very recent development.

00:39:54 ►

I guess I have to go back to this scenario of human development

00:39:59 ►

and say just very briefly, here’s how I think this worked.

00:40:04 ►

say just very briefly, here’s how I think this worked.

00:40:11 ►

I’m not going to run through the whole evolutionary scenario, but this thing about ego.

00:40:28 ►

All primates have what are called dominance hierarchies that simply means that the hard-bodied long fanged young males kick everybody else around they control the females the children homosexuals the

00:40:38 ►

elderly everybody is taking orders from this dominance hierarchy. And this is true clear back into squirrel monkeys.

00:40:47 ►

It’s a generalized feature of primate behavior.

00:40:51 ►

And it’s an aspect of our behavior as we sit here.

00:40:57 ►

Women, the feminine is not honored.

00:41:00 ►

The elderly are marginalized.

00:41:03 ►

Homosexuals, that whole issue.

00:41:08 ►

Many of our social and political ills stem from this attitude.

00:41:15 ►

Well, but you see, I believe that when we left the trees and admitted psilocybin into our diet, that it has the effect of dissolving boundaries

00:41:29 ►

and making this maintenance of a dominance hierarchy very, very difficult.

00:41:37 ►

First of all, the key on one level to maintaining the dominance hierarchy, is monogamous pair bonding.

00:41:46 ►

That’s where it begins.

00:41:48 ►

If in a society taking a lot of psilocybin, monogamous pair bonding breaks down

00:41:56 ►

because of CNS activation and sexual arousal.

00:42:03 ►

and sexual arousal. So in a psilocybin-using culture,

00:42:06 ►

there will be a tendency to orgiastic sexual behavior

00:42:12 ►

rather than monogamous pair bonding.

00:42:15 ►

What that does is it causes an incredible social cohesion

00:42:22 ►

because in an orgiastic society men cannot trace lines of male paternity.

00:42:30 ►

So men’s attitude toward children is these children are all ours. We the group.

00:42:39 ►

It’s a glue that we in our paranoid social style with everybody having the deed to their

00:42:45 ►

property and their 11 hot foot high fence can hardly imagine but psilocybin

00:42:53 ►

was artificially suppressing this dominator behavior style in the primate

00:43:01 ►

the evolving proto hominid now hominid, now human being.

00:43:07 ►

When psilocybin was taken out of the diet, the old, old primate program was still there.

00:43:17 ►

It had not been bred out.

00:43:20 ►

The genes were always there.

00:43:22 ►

It’s just that for 50,000 or 100,000 years, we medicated ourselves, literally religiously.

00:43:30 ►

We religiously medicated ourselves every new and full moon, perhaps oftener.

00:43:37 ►

These orgies were happening, creating social cohesion, propagating everybody forward.

00:43:50 ►

The problem was when the psilocybin was taken away,

00:43:55 ►

we had been under its influence for perhaps half a million years. We had evolved language, rudimentary abstract philosophy, a sense of religion.

00:44:03 ►

We had invented technology in the form of using fire and shipping flint and all that.

00:44:08 ►

The psilocybin goes away and suddenly these skills, these tools, these technologies are in the hands of marauding apes, not any more cohesive, caring human social groups,

00:44:29 ►

but marauding territorial apes driven by the desire to control all weaker members of the social group.

00:44:40 ►

And that’s our circumstance.

00:44:43 ►

We have, you know, the tools that would allow us to sculpt paradise,

00:44:48 ►

but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of some sort.

00:44:57 ►

So the split between our conscious hopes, our best foot,

00:45:04 ►

and the bottom of the human scale is appalling.

00:45:10 ►

I mean, look at the spread.

00:45:13 ►

It’s a spread from Mother Teresa to serial killers.

00:45:21 ►

I mean, you don’t get serial killers in the chipmunk population

00:45:26 ►

or the grasshopper population.

00:45:29 ►

I mean, these animals are not so set at variance

00:45:34 ►

with their basic nature

00:45:36 ►

that these kinds of pathologies can erupt.

00:45:41 ►

We, on the other hand,

00:45:43 ►

are half angel, half pack hunting killer ape. I mean, we’re an object

00:45:50 ►

fetish society. I mean, our entire psychology is characterized by a profound discontent.

00:45:59 ►

That’s what we’re about. It doesn’t matter. No matter what’s going on, after a little while, we get restless and move on.

00:46:09 ►

Other animal species are embedded in a kind of world of endless genetic cycling. Fox grows bored with hunting, you know. And yet our thing is a profound dis-ease.

00:46:30 ►

And I believe it’s because, and slowly you forced me to do this whole rap,

00:46:35 ►

which I swore I wouldn’t do.

00:46:50 ►

the psilocybin led us halfway toward a kind of godhead.

00:46:57 ►

But then it disappeared and we are left in this very peculiar situation.

00:46:59 ►

This is the myth of the fall.

00:47:02 ►

You know, we are half angel, half beast.

00:47:06 ►

And these two natures are united in every one of us. And when you take psilocybin, you feel generally a great sense of community and ascent to a higher level.

00:47:26 ►

strict your intake of intoxicants of any sort,

00:47:30 ►

then you get the teetotaler type personality, which is characterized by incredible smugness,

00:47:36 ►

limited intellectual horizons,

00:47:39 ►

and an unbearable aura of self-congratulation

00:47:43 ►

that makes it pretty hard for the rest of us to put up with.

00:47:49 ►

So here is a unique chemical that at every dose level synergizes activity that leads to greater coherency and self-expression.

00:48:10 ►

The driving of the imagination, yes, in the question back here you said we can’t create what we can’t conceive of.

00:48:19 ►

This is why what the psychedelic experience does really is it stretches the envelope of the imaginable.

00:48:28 ►

I mean, what can be imagined can be created.

00:48:32 ►

What cannot be imagined is not part of the play.

00:48:37 ►

So psilocybin really was a stimulant for the production of intellectual product in the form of songs, rituals, dances, body painting, abstract ideas.

00:48:58 ►

All of these things are what we are most unique.

00:49:04 ►

Well, that’s how it seemed to me.

00:49:06 ►

It seemed to me culture is a shabby lie,

00:49:11 ►

or at least this culture is a shabby lie.

00:49:14 ►

I mean, if you work like a dog,

00:49:18 ►

you get 260 channels of bad television

00:49:23 ►

in a German automobile.

00:49:26 ►

You know, what kind of perfection is that?

00:49:29 ►

We have our secular society.

00:49:33 ►

Religion is completely devalued.

00:49:39 ►

And consumer object fetishism is the only kind of worth that we collectively recognize.

00:49:46 ►

I’m sure you’ve all seen the T-shirt that says,

00:49:49 ►

he, notice he, who dies with the most toys wins.

00:49:55 ►

That is in fact the banner under which we’re flying here.

00:50:00 ►

And the level of unhappiness is immense.

00:50:04 ►

I mean, the level of unhappiness among the poor,

00:50:07 ►

they’ve always been miserable.

00:50:09 ►

But we’ve managed to create something entirely new in human history,

00:50:13 ►

an utterly miserable ruling class.

00:50:17 ►

I mean, there seems no excuse for that.

00:50:23 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

00:50:25 ►

where people are changing their lives

00:50:27 ►

one thought at a time.

00:50:31 ►

You know,

00:50:31 ►

it’s really hard to argue with what

00:50:33 ►

Terence just said about the fact that

00:50:35 ►

even the ruling class is utterly

00:50:37 ►

miserable. As the great

00:50:39 ►

Gildersleeve often said, what a

00:50:41 ►

revolting development this is.

00:50:43 ►

But to ease our collective misery

00:50:46 ►

slightly, I’ll try my best to get the next part of this talk out before a week is up,

00:50:50 ►

and it looks like this will be maybe a three-part series, so we still have some more McKenna

00:50:55 ►

coming in the weeks ahead. And I’m sure that you would find me remiss if I didn’t at least

00:51:01 ►

point out what Terrence said about five minutes into this talk when he pointed out that in his opinion three percent of us are in an angelic realm while 97

00:51:11 ►

percent of us are not and that was in 1993 so I guess that an additional two percent slipped out

00:51:18 ►

of that realm and now we’re the 99 percent and how is that for a segue into today’s Occupy Movement segment?

00:51:26 ►

Which I’ll begin with two other things that Terrence mentioned just now.

00:51:31 ►

First of all, his comment about debtors’ prisons being a thing of the past is no longer true.

00:51:36 ►

Already there are some U.S. states where various legal subterfuges have been used

00:51:40 ►

to put people in jail for not paying a debt of some kind.

00:51:44 ►

And, of course, those people are then encouraged to do prison work,

00:51:49 ►

like making furniture for the nation’s bureaucrats while they’re only getting paid a few cents an hour.

00:51:54 ►

Not to mention the tens of thousands of college students who have taken out non-negotiable loans

00:51:59 ►

that can’t even be discharged in a bankruptcy proceeding.

00:52:03 ►

Try and tell them that they aren’t in a permanent debtor’s prison now.

00:52:07 ►

But the other thing that McKenna just said was, and I’m quoting again,

00:52:11 ►

Boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society.

00:52:16 ►

People, meaning government institutions,

00:52:18 ►

become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other.

00:52:22 ►

End quote.

00:52:23 ►

And if you think about that for just a moment,

00:52:26 ►

well, doesn’t it now make more sense that the newly militarized police departments in the United States

00:52:32 ►

are calling out hordes of stormtroopers to attack and disperse peaceful demonstrators

00:52:37 ►

who are simply attempting to exercise their right to get together

00:52:41 ►

and start talking about ways in which our societies can be improved?

00:52:44 ►

to get together and start talking about ways in which our societies can be improved.

00:52:50 ►

As you know, there’s been a lot of interaction already at the various Occupy sites where diverse opinions have been aired and where a common ground is being found

00:52:54 ►

between even the far left and the far right.

00:52:57 ►

And that, my friend, is why the 1% are calling out their mercenary forces

00:53:02 ►

to disband any group that makes visible the fact that,

00:53:06 ►

well, a great many people are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.

00:53:10 ►

But the physical occupations and the police attacks on them is only the tip of the Occupy Movement iceberg.

00:53:17 ►

It was and is only the first phase of a huge wave of actions that are already underway

00:53:22 ►

or are being planned for this pivotal year.

00:53:24 ►

huge wave of actions that are already underway or are being planned for this pivotal year.

00:53:29 ►

And so right now, I want to give you a little look into some of the more positive things that are taking place here in the United States with the Occupy Movement, which has already

00:53:33 ►

become a global phenomenon, as you well know.

00:53:37 ►

So what I’m going to do is to play a selection of sound bites that I’ve collected from various

00:53:41 ►

sources over the past few weeks, just to give you a little idea of some of the more positive things that are going on in the movement. And rather than play one

00:53:50 ►

and then make a comment and introduce the next clip, I’m going to first give you a quick listing

00:53:55 ►

of what you’re about to hear. And rather than just play one and then make a comment and then

00:53:59 ►

introduce and play another clip, I’m going to first give you a quick listing of what you’re

00:54:04 ►

about to hear,

00:54:08 ►

and then I’ll play them all in a row in order to keep from interrupting the flow.

00:54:14 ►

To begin with, I’m going to play a brief comment about the movement itself from my dear friend and a person I think of as my brother, a young man who goes by the handle Queer Ninja. And if you

00:54:21 ►

are also a fan of the podcast coming from the Cannabis Podcast Network over at dopefiend.co.uk,

00:54:27 ►

well, you are most likely already a fan of the Ninja.

00:54:31 ►

And you also know that it’s been a few years since we’ve heard from him here in the podcast land,

00:54:36 ►

where he became famous for his Sounds of Worldwide Weed podcast.

00:54:41 ►

But on Christmas Eve just past, he posted a new show titled Xmas Ninja 2011,

00:54:48 ►

which I highly recommend, particularly if you need a little pick-me-up to get you over the holiday

00:54:53 ►

blahs. I was about to say that this is not your grandfather’s kind of Christmas program, but

00:55:00 ►

since I’m probably old enough to be your grandfather, and since I happen to love it myself,

00:55:08 ►

well, maybe I should say it’s not your great-grandfather’s kind of show.

00:55:11 ►

Anyway, check it out if you get a chance.

00:55:16 ►

Now, after we hear from the ninja, I’ve included a bit by Noam Chomsky,

00:55:19 ►

who, if you don’t know who he is, well, you may want to Google him.

00:55:27 ►

And following Chomsky’s remarks, you’ll hear from some occupiers talking about the youth involvement and leadership of this movement.

00:55:30 ►

And they are followed by some farmers who are also involved.

00:55:38 ►

Next is a clip dealing with the civil justice aspects of what’s going on, followed by a clip from the Occupy Boston group.

00:55:42 ►

Then comes Tina Dupuy, who is a columnist and commentator and who points out how the Occupy movement is

00:55:45 ►

actually changing the shape of local news stories, as well as some things she points out about student

00:55:51 ►

debt that maybe you haven’t thought about before. And to close it out, you’ll be hearing about one

00:55:56 ►

of the successful Occupy Our Homes actions, where the home of a disabled Iraq vet was saved by the

00:56:02 ►

Occupy Atlanta people. And that segment ends with some words by the Reverend Dr. Joseph Lowry,

00:56:08 ►

who is a very prominent and well-respected veteran of the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s

00:56:12 ►

and who continues his work yet today.

00:56:15 ►

And he’s followed by the poet Teresa Bee,

00:56:18 ►

who is the neighbor of another family whose home was also saved by members of the Occupy Movement in New York.

00:56:25 ►

So, can you remember all that?

00:56:28 ►

Well, don’t worry. I think it’s going to be clear right now as we listen to this audio collage from the Occupy movement

00:56:35 ►

as it closed out 2011 and prepared for 2012 when things are going to get really interesting.

00:56:44 ►

I would strongly recommend that you look into the Occupy movement.

00:56:49 ►

Try to not see it as something like a political movement.

00:56:54 ►

Try to see it as a consciousness movement.

00:56:56 ►

And try to see the empowerment and the understanding of societal divisions and differences

00:57:04 ►

that we’re trying to work through is very difficult, you know.

00:57:09 ►

We’ve had hundreds of years of people telling us how to live

00:57:13 ►

and telling us where we fit into which particular box

00:57:18 ►

and all of that is coming crashing to an end.

00:57:22 ►

And hopefully Occupy will be there

00:57:25 ►

to kind of help everybody find their voice,

00:57:27 ►

their own voice.

00:57:30 ►

RT is sitting down with world-renowned scholar,

00:57:33 ►

linguist, author, and MIT professor Noam Chomsky.

00:57:37 ►

Professor Chomsky, thank you very much

00:57:39 ►

for taking time to speak with RT.

00:57:40 ►

Glad to be with you.

00:57:41 ►

The first issue I want to speak with you about

00:57:43 ►

is the recent

00:57:45 ►

clashes that have taken place on Wall Street between Americans who are turning out to demonstrate

00:57:51 ►

and police officers. From what I read, you recently sent a message to support the activists

00:58:00 ►

of this group called Occupy Wall Street. You’ve called them courageous and honorable.

00:58:05 ►

Can you talk to me about your take on Occupy Wall Street?

00:58:08 ►

Well, Wall Street was just a shorthand for the financial institutions.

00:58:12 ►

The banks are bigger and richer than before.

00:58:16 ►

Corporate profits are reaching record levels.

00:58:20 ►

And unemployment is about the level of the Great Depression, real unemployment.

00:58:25 ►

These people are saying, no, let’s blame the culture and the institutions behind them.

00:58:29 ►

So fiscal policies like taxation, rules of corporate governance, deregulation, and so on,

00:58:36 ►

it does set in motion a vicious cycle, which is getting worse and worse in New York.

00:58:42 ►

So walk down the streets and you can see it.

00:58:44 ►

Very serious poverty. On the other hand, phenomenal wealth right side by side.

00:58:50 ►

Very much like a third world country. It’s like you see if you go to sub-saharan

00:58:55 ►

Africa. Meanwhile infrastructure is collapsing, schools are collapsing and

00:59:00 ►

all of that increases the, it keeps the cycle going and in fact rising.

00:59:08 ►

Well, it’s about time for some protest.

00:59:11 ►

What may be new in the coming year for the 2012 election is that many, including yourself,

00:59:18 ►

have speculated and assumed that the campaign spending for the U election in 2012 will exceed one billion

00:59:27 ►

dollars for each candidate. That is a massive amount.

00:59:32 ►

It will probably be much bigger than that. And where does that come from?

00:59:35 ►

Well, you know, basically a lot of it comes from financial institutions.

00:59:39 ►

In fact, if you look at the 2008 election, what swung Obama, what gave him the election, was primarily financial

00:59:48 ►

institutions contributions.

00:59:50 ►

They preferred him to McCain.

00:59:52 ►

They expected to be paid back, and they were.

00:59:56 ►

And the next one will be even worse.

00:59:57 ►

And so that’s only a part of it.

00:59:59 ►

In parliamentary systems, including our own up until maybe 20 years ago,

01:00:08 ►

positions of influence in a functioning parliamentary

01:00:10 ►

system, let’s say a chair

01:00:12 ►

of a committee,

01:00:13 ►

comes from, principle at

01:00:16 ►

least, from experience,

01:00:18 ►

seniority,

01:00:19 ►

legislative contributions, and so on.

01:00:22 ►

That’s gone. Now they’re

01:00:24 ►

bought.

01:00:30 ►

If you want to become chair of a committee in the House or the Senate,

01:00:31 ►

you have to pay off the party.

01:00:33 ►

You have to pay for it.

01:00:35 ►

Where do you get the money to pay for it?

01:00:36 ►

Same pockets. So it provides even more influence to the already overwhelming influence

01:00:43 ►

of concentrated capital.

01:00:45 ►

So it’s harder and harder to distinguish between the elected officials and economic concentration.

01:00:53 ►

It never was easy to distinguish.

01:00:55 ►

I should say this is not something novel, but now it’s reaching an extreme level.

01:01:00 ►

Well, what’s left of America’s democratic system if this is the process that has been cemented in place?

01:01:07 ►

I mean, what is really left if from every angle there’s these financial influences?

01:01:12 ►

Just take a look at public opinion.

01:01:14 ►

They’ll tell you about two-thirds of the public thinks the entire Congress ought to be thrown out.

01:01:21 ►

But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen.

01:01:23 ►

No, but it means that the system isn’t working, and the public knows it.

01:01:28 ►

The popularity of favorability rating for Congress is in single digits,

01:01:34 ►

the president is not much higher, and the same runs across all other institutions.

01:01:38 ►

It’s a very widespread sense that everything is going wrong.

01:01:43 ►

That tells you the democratic system

01:01:45 ►

is just not functioning. Now in fact, I don’t want to suggest that this is totally new.

01:01:51 ►

So you go back a century and you can still predict throughout all this period pretty

01:01:56 ►

well the outcome of elections by campaign funding. But there are degrees and now it’s

01:02:03 ►

gotten extreme.

01:02:09 ►

This is just the culmination of a lot of frustration and it’s been building for a long time now.

01:02:12 ►

We’ve been heading down a path of some unbelievable wealth distribution

01:02:16 ►

like it’s never really been seen before since the Middle Ages

01:02:19 ►

and this is what happens.

01:02:22 ►

You drive people into a corner and they’re going to stand up and push back.

01:02:27 ►

My biggest thing is student debt because I go to an art school that’s like 55 plus a year.

01:02:33 ►

And I’m like investing in a future that I don’t know exists.

01:02:39 ►

Like I’m a writing major.

01:02:41 ►

What job can I get with that?

01:02:43 ►

And why should I sacrifice my dreams because of all this?

01:02:51 ►

I’m kind of worried about the future.

01:02:53 ►

I would like to be part of the movement as I see it to change the status quo, basically.

01:03:01 ►

Like, I’ve been saying for a long time that things aren’t right and that

01:03:05 ►

there needs to be something done about the way that things are owned and distributed.

01:03:11 ►

So that’s basically why I’m here.

01:03:14 ►

I’m from Vermont. I believe very strongly in this. I’ve been wanting this to happen

01:03:20 ►

for a long time, and I had to come down here to the, you know, ground zero,

01:03:25 ►

so to speak, of where it all started in a lot of ways, actually. And yeah, just had

01:03:31 ►

to come down here and show some support for as long as I could.

01:03:35 ►

The current state of the job market is pretty pathetic. The majority of my friends have

01:03:41 ►

various degrees and are unemployed.

01:03:44 ►

If you want to sell candy bars and stationery, you might be able to find a job if you want to work in a supermarket.

01:03:51 ►

But if you want to make it like our grandparents had a way of making it, it’s just you have to pay the price.

01:03:58 ►

You have to go get a $200,000 education in order to get a job.

01:04:02 ►

And if you don’t have that education, you are discriminated

01:04:07 ►

against by banks for loans. You’re discriminated in a lot of ways.

01:04:11 ►

We’re living in the worst time to find jobs, and I’m accumulating so much student debt

01:04:17 ►

that I don’t know what is left for me. My whole future is just a blank slate. It’s just

01:04:23 ►

one big question mark.

01:04:24 ►

is that for me? Like, my whole future is just a blank slate. Like, it’s just one big question mark.

01:04:30 ►

I think the government should actually be stimulating the economy and not bailing out the banks. You know, it’s, should have public roads projects, fixing our infrastructure,

01:04:36 ►

trying to make our infrastructure more modern so we can have a modern economy.

01:04:40 ►

You know, if that’s what the government is supposed to do, they should be regulating.

01:04:45 ►

You know, if they hadn’t completely deregulated the financial system, we would have never had the crash.

01:04:50 ►

We would have never had all those bad mortgages being sold overseas as securities,

01:04:53 ►

being packaged up and gambled on by Americans just to see what happens,

01:04:58 ►

see how much we can make money out of nothing.

01:05:00 ►

I would like to remove corporate interests from our political system. That would

01:05:05 ►

mean that corporations would not be able to fund politicians. Universal health care, meaning that

01:05:10 ►

the Medicaid cuts that just happened, would not go through. Do I think that reform is what we need?

01:05:16 ►

No, I think it’s a systemic problem. Systemic meaning they’re going to keep reproducing

01:05:20 ►

themselves until we get to the root of it, which is that our government is specifically set up to protect the upper class. There is no division between corporate and political

01:05:32 ►

interests now, but there should be. Yeah, I feel like the youth definitely are going

01:05:38 ►

to get involved because otherwise there’s not going to be anything for us. And I think

01:05:43 ►

that we realize that we are outnumbering the baby boomers,

01:05:48 ►

and they’re going to be retiring.

01:05:50 ►

So we need to step up and fill those roles, and we’re not just dumb kids.

01:05:54 ►

Like, we can do it.

01:05:56 ►

Well, if the youth doesn’t get involved, then it’s not a movement.

01:06:00 ►

That’s all there is to it.

01:06:02 ►

Because you need to have the rejuvenation every so often the majority

01:06:07 ►

of people here are under 35 the youth involvement is the involvement i wish that we had an elders

01:06:14 ►

council i wish that we had more experienced activists here we do have some i’ve been trained

01:06:21 ►

by 60 year old activists who have been doing this for a long time,

01:06:25 ►

but it is largely a youth movement.

01:06:28 ►

But that’s always, I feel.

01:06:30 ►

I would say that it’s never too early to start educating yourself

01:06:33 ►

and taking control of your own life because before you know it,

01:06:37 ►

you can be set on a path that you never intended and is out of your control,

01:06:42 ►

or at least feels like it.

01:06:44 ►

So the earlier that you realize that you’re in control of your own life,

01:06:48 ►

the better off you are, and nobody can push you around.

01:06:52 ►

When you’re that age, it’s so easy to just think that these problems are above you

01:06:56 ►

and that as an individual you have no choice

01:06:59 ►

and just almost feel powerless in all of this.

01:07:03 ►

But they’re the ones that are inheriting all of this.

01:07:07 ►

So I think it’s so important to just start young, do anything.

01:07:12 ►

It feels like we’re finally able to have a voice

01:07:15 ►

that is loud enough for everyone to hear,

01:07:17 ►

and it’s not just a few complaints.

01:07:22 ►

It’s now a movement.

01:07:25 ►

I’m Jim Gerritsen, and I’m a family farmer in Aroostook County, Maine.

01:07:30 ►

My family and I run Wood Prairie Farm, which is a farm that we’ve had for 35 years.

01:07:37 ►

Our goal is to produce the highest quality seed and food that tastes good, that performs well, that leaves the land in a better

01:07:46 ►

condition for our sons and daughters to farm in the next generation.

01:07:52 ►

Most organic farmers that I know, we work 80 to 100 hours a week, so getting away is

01:07:57 ►

something we don’t often do.

01:07:59 ►

When I came to hear about the Occupy Wall Street Farmers March, I immediately thought I needed to get

01:08:06 ►

down and to let our friends at Occupy Wall Street know that the American farmers are

01:08:13 ►

behind them.

01:08:16 ►

The Occupy Wall Street Farmers March began with a rally in the East Village.

01:08:21 ►

I’m Karen Washington and I’m an urban farmer.

01:08:25 ►

I grow food. I feed people, body and mind.

01:08:29 ►

We brought family farmers here today to stand with our urban allies

01:08:32 ►

and Occupy Wall Street to show people all across the country

01:08:36 ►

and across the world that family farmers stand with Occupy Wall Street

01:08:39 ►

and rural America stands with Occupy Wall Street.

01:08:42 ►

There was a real sense of community down there.

01:08:44 ►

These people are absolutely serious.

01:08:47 ►

They’re authentic.

01:08:49 ►

We have failed to enforce antitrust laws

01:08:52 ►

which prevent monopoly, the biggest threat

01:08:54 ►

to our freedom and our democracy.

01:08:58 ►

We’ve lost over 40% of our ranchers.

01:09:01 ►

We’ve lost over 80% of our dairymen

01:09:03 ►

because of big corporate abusive power. The

01:09:06 ►

problems that they describe are absolutely real. We have a situation now where family farmers,

01:09:13 ►

if we should be contaminated by GMO crops that come from Monsanto’s side of the fence

01:09:18 ►

onto our fence, not only do we lose the value of that crop as a contaminated crop,

01:09:27 ►

but the way that Monsanto looks at it,

01:09:32 ►

they think that we are holding their technology and we didn’t pay them royalty on it,

01:09:37 ►

so we are subject to patent infringement litigation because they’ve contaminated us and we may end up losing our farms through bankruptcy just trying to clear our name.

01:09:43 ►

Later in the afternoon,

01:09:53 ►

we began the march to Zuccotti Park. I encountered home gardeners both in rural America and urban America. There were food activists. There were people that worked in the food industry,

01:09:59 ►

people that simply were consumers that wanted to make sure that they had options for feeding good food to their families.

01:10:11 ►

We finished the evening with a seed swap where some of us that grow seed brought seed down to provide to the folks

01:10:18 ►

so they could take them home and plant the seed in their gardens.

01:10:21 ►

Plant check! Plant check!

01:10:23 ►

This is good wheat! This is good wheat!

01:10:25 ►

We can plant it! We can plant it!

01:10:27 ►

No one can control it! No one can control it!

01:10:30 ►

Except the people! Except the people!

01:10:33 ►

We are farmers! We are farmers!

01:10:36 ►

We grow food! We grow food!

01:10:38 ►

For the people! For the people!

01:10:40 ►

Too many commenters are saying that the Occupy movement is too vague about what the problems are.

01:10:50 ►

I couldn’t disagree anymore.

01:10:52 ►

The reality is that we have a corporate-dominated economy, a corporate-dominated government,

01:10:58 ►

and that these are squeezing family farmers and forcing them off the land.

01:11:02 ►

And this is something that we have to change. We need to have more family farmers and forcing them off the land. And this is something that we have to change. We need

01:11:05 ►

to have more family farmers. What we need to regain for our children’s sake is a true democracy

01:11:12 ►

in action as well as word. Well, as the CIA behind the intense Occupy Wall Street crackdown,

01:11:21 ►

we may never know for sure as the agency is not divulging any

01:11:25 ►

information on the subject. By law, the CIA is not allowed to be involved in domestic matters,

01:11:31 ►

only foreign intelligence issues. But after seeing the organized, almost military response

01:11:37 ►

to the demonstrations throughout the nation, some are raising eyebrows as to what is behind

01:11:41 ►

the crackdown and who exactly is involved. One agency, D.C.-based Partnership for Civil Justice, filed a request to the CIA to get some answers,

01:11:50 ►

but their request was denied.

01:11:53 ►

Now this raises many questions, and to help me answer them,

01:11:56 ►

I am joined by Mara Verhaden-Hillard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.

01:12:04 ►

Welcome, Mara.

01:12:05 ►

So when you requested this information from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act,

01:12:11 ►

what response did you get?

01:12:13 ►

Well, it’s Mara over Hayden Hilliard, but we had filed…

01:12:16 ►

Sorry about that.

01:12:16 ►

It’s fine. It happens.

01:12:18 ►

We filed, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund,

01:12:20 ►

filed a series of Freedom of Information Act demands against different government agencies when we saw this quick succession of evictions and crackdowns on Occupy encampments around the country.

01:12:31 ►

And the Central Intelligence Agency is one of the agencies that we ask that they release records

01:12:37 ►

that are in their possession related to the Occupy movement and any involvement that they may have.

01:12:42 ►

Now, there are a number of responses they could have given,

01:12:44 ►

but the response they gave us is extremely disturbing. They wrote back saying

01:12:49 ►

that they would refuse to process the request, basically on the grounds that if the CIA had any

01:12:55 ►

involvement, it would have been illegal for it to have involvement, and therefore their record

01:13:00 ►

system is not constructed in a way that they could possibly search for their involvement.

01:13:06 ►

And they refuse to process the request.

01:13:09 ►

But aren’t they, by law, under the Freedom of Information Act, required to come up with these documents?

01:13:17 ►

If they have them, yes.

01:13:18 ►

And they could have written back saying they were conducting a search.

01:13:21 ►

They could have written back saying they conducted a search and found nothing if there was nothing to find.

01:13:26 ►

But what is it that they have to hide?

01:13:28 ►

Instead, they wrote back, they cited their authorizations under the law

01:13:32 ►

and the fact that they’re not supposed to be engaged in domestic intelligence activity,

01:13:36 ►

and then responded by saying, therefore, we won’t process your request

01:13:40 ►

and that we are incapable of properly searching for any evidence of our activity.

01:13:44 ►

Now, I note that this is on the heels of the Associated Press reports that have come out

01:13:49 ►

where they did their own investigative reports into the CIA’s involvement with the NYPD.

01:13:54 ►

And the NYPD in New York City has been, as we know, ground zero for Occupy Wall Street.

01:13:59 ►

Now, after their response, they’re not giving you these documents.

01:14:04 ►

Do you think that they’re trying to hide these records?

01:14:06 ►

If they have them, apparently they are trying to hide them.

01:14:09 ►

I mean, why not write back and say that they’re conducting a search or that they conducted a search,

01:14:13 ►

and if they genuinely didn’t have anything, they didn’t have anything.

01:14:16 ►

But they wrote back and said they would refuse to process the request.

01:14:19 ►

So what indication, obviously something raised a suspicion where you wanted to get this information.

01:14:26 ►

What indication are we seeing that the CIA was in fact involved in the crackdown of these protests throughout the country?

01:14:33 ►

Well, what we have seen is around the country in quick succession,

01:14:35 ►

there are crackdowns and evictions all around the United States.

01:14:40 ►

We know that there’s been coordination because there’s been admissions from different government officials,

01:14:45 ►

that there was coordination among different mayors’ offices and police agencies,

01:14:48 ►

and they discussed talking points and tactics for dealing with the Occupy movement.

01:14:53 ►

And there’s a real question as to federal involvement.

01:14:55 ►

I mean, I don’t think anyone would credibly suggest that the federal government is not evaluating,

01:15:00 ►

is not looking at, is not considering how to deal with this massive movement

01:15:04 ►

taking over the United States and inspiring people worldwide.

01:15:07 ►

Of course they are.

01:15:08 ►

So we have simply asked the CIA and other federal agencies to turn over

01:15:12 ►

and make public their documents related to any coordination or involvement

01:15:17 ►

they have had in these crackdowns.

01:15:19 ►

And that’s what the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund is trying to obtain right now.

01:15:22 ►

So if the CIA is involved, that raises a lot of serious legal questions

01:15:27 ►

because that breaches both departmental code and national legislation.

01:15:33 ►

Could we talk about the legal implications of this?

01:15:36 ►

Sure. Well, the CIA has a very ugly history in the United States of domestic surveillance

01:15:41 ►

going from certainly throughout the Vietnam War era, the Civil Rights Movement, and it was exposed during the COINTELPRO period and the Church

01:15:49 ►

Committee hearings. And the CIA had Operation Chaos and other mechanisms where they were

01:15:54 ►

directly spying on people in the anti-war movement and the black liberation movement.

01:15:59 ►

And that conduct is barred by law. But as we’ve seen, obviously, the U.S. intelligence agencies have really run aggressively wild

01:16:10 ►

over people’s fundamental rights, both in the United States and worldwide in the last decade.

01:16:15 ►

And we’ve seen no effort from the government or this administration to restrain them.

01:16:19 ►

The fact that the CIA is operating in with the NYPD in New York City

01:16:24 ►

raises very significant issues as to

01:16:27 ►

whether or not they are currently at this moment in violation of fundamental laws restricting their

01:16:32 ►

conduct. And we want to know what role they have with the Occupy movement. Now, we are dealing with

01:16:37 ►

the CIA. So who would be tasked with investigating the CIA? Because obviously they can’t investigate

01:16:44 ►

themselves.

01:16:47 ►

So what would that look like?

01:16:48 ►

Well, this is always a problem.

01:16:52 ►

When agencies then turn to police themselves, they’re not very successful at it.

01:16:57 ►

One way to do it is what we’re doing, is for the public to make a demand and for the public and the population to insist that the government make public its records, that people have

01:17:02 ►

a right to know what the government of the United States is doing.

01:17:05 ►

And that’s the step that we’ve taken.

01:17:07 ►

That’s the first step to make these demands.

01:17:08 ►

If we need to go to court to obtain information

01:17:11 ►

and to try and get a judicial order forcing the government to open its records,

01:17:15 ►

then we will.

01:17:16 ►

We don’t think that the government of the United States

01:17:18 ►

has a right to keep secret books on the people of the United States.

01:17:21 ►

So you are prepared to take legal action against the CIA.

01:17:23 ►

Yes, we are.

01:17:24 ►

Now, I understand that you also filed similar requests with other agencies.

01:17:29 ►

Yes, we have filed requests with the Department of Homeland Security.

01:17:32 ►

We have filed them with the FBI, with the Park Service,

01:17:35 ►

and the Department of Justice as well.

01:17:36 ►

We’re also filing requests all around the United States

01:17:39 ►

with local municipalities and police agencies and mayors’ offices

01:17:43 ►

to get information on their coordination

01:17:45 ►

as well as their dealing with the federal law enforcement authorities.

01:17:48 ►

Any response yet from those agencies?

01:17:50 ►

We are actually getting some documents, we expect, shortly from the District of Columbia,

01:17:54 ►

and we expect others to also be producing or refusing to produce.

01:17:57 ►

And if they do, we are prepared to take legal action to get this material.

01:18:00 ►

And really quickly, I want to ask you, with the response that we are seeing

01:18:04 ►

from this Occupy Wall Street, the demonstrations, why the feds would get involved and why we saw

01:18:11 ►

such a strong, almost military response to the movement? Well, it’s true. We’re seeing a military,

01:18:17 ►

paramilitary response from police agencies in the United States. And as I said, this is a movement

01:18:22 ►

that’s really inspiring people. It’s putting front and center the fundamental injustices in society in the United States

01:18:28 ►

and around the world. And people are demanding change. And that’s when change happens. When

01:18:33 ►

you see huge numbers of people taking to the streets and refusing to take no for an answer,

01:18:37 ►

the government is really going to have to look at that and decide how they can handle

01:18:41 ►

it or if they can handle it. Because people have demands demands right now and those demands are not going to go away all right some important points here about the movement’s impact

01:18:50 ►

on public conversation and also on that spotlight now shined on police brutality in this country

01:18:56 ►

that has played a major role in drumming up more support not less we also can’t forget that

01:19:01 ►

occupy movements are taking place all around the country, not just New York. And despite police dismantling many of the occupations, the movement thrives in those other cities as well.

01:19:10 ►

I want to go now to Boston and speak to Joseph Ramsey.

01:19:13 ►

Joseph is with Occupy Boston.

01:19:17 ►

Hey there, Joseph.

01:19:18 ►

I guess kind of give us an update.

01:19:19 ►

What’s going on with the Occupy movement where you are?

01:19:23 ►

More than I can say. We’re obviously in a

01:19:28 ►

transitional period. We have also been evicted from Dewey Square. But I’d say at this moment in

01:19:34 ►

time, the Occupy Boston movement and the Occupy movement generally is in a transitional period,

01:19:40 ►

seeking new spaces for our, you know, for our politics, for our meeting, but also really trying to

01:19:50 ►

literalize and to concretize our ideas in the context of a system in crisis.

01:20:00 ►

We’ve been evicted.

01:20:01 ►

We are seeking to become the champion of the evicted. I mean, educational projects continue.

01:20:08 ►

There is lacking a space, a public space.

01:20:12 ►

It doesn’t mean that our mission is discontinued.

01:20:15 ►

You can’t evict an idea.

01:20:17 ►

I think it’s been one of the most kind of common refrains of the last couple of weeks.

01:20:21 ►

You can’t evict an idea.

01:20:23 ►

And we’re popping up all over.

01:20:25 ►

I don’t even know where to start.

01:20:26 ►

I mean, I can, you know, the suburbs of Boston, for instance,

01:20:30 ►

are percolating with Occupy.

01:20:32 ►

That’s what I’m wondering, Joseph.

01:20:33 ►

I mean, certainly occupations sort of came to embody the movement itself,

01:20:38 ►

just staying day and night in one place.

01:20:41 ►

But, you know, for one thing, winter has arrived.

01:20:44 ►

It’s much colder,

01:20:45 ►

I’m sure much colder even than Boston than it is here. But are the occupations still needed? I

01:20:51 ►

mean, could this possibly be just the next step, you say, a transition into planned actions,

01:20:57 ►

but not necessarily occupations, especially because, you know, we’ve got the internet,

01:21:00 ►

we’ve got Twitter, we’ve got Facebook. Talk to me a little bit about that.

01:21:04 ►

Yeah, I mean, I think there are basically two concepts that have united this movement. We’ve got the Internet. We’ve got Twitter. We’ve got Facebook. Talk to me a little bit about that.

01:21:12 ►

Yeah, I mean, I think there are basically two concepts that have united this movement across the U.S. at this point.

01:21:15 ►

One is the occupation tactic, right? I mean, which I think has some content.

01:21:17 ►

It’s not simply a means, which is to say it’s been about taking control of public space to assert public concern.

01:21:25 ►

It’s about asserting our right to protest regardless of whether or not the state respects that right.

01:21:33 ►

So the Occupy, I mean, but I don’t think that’s a set.

01:21:35 ►

I mean, that is not the essence of what’s going on.

01:21:37 ►

The other unifying trope, symbol of this movement has been the 99%, right?

01:21:43 ►

And I think that is really ultimately more fundamental. That’s really the content of this movement. What does the 99 percent right and i think that is really ultimately more fundamental that’s

01:21:45 ►

really the content of this movement what does the 99 percent mean i mean it means really what it

01:21:51 ►

does is it points a finger at the one percent we have a we have an economy we have a political

01:21:56 ►

system that essentially benefits the one percent or even maybe less than the one percent uh that

01:22:02 ►

means that um you know you have the wealth and the power of the society accruing to a

01:22:08 ►

very small number of people, and that essentially makes a mockery of democracy. I mean, that

01:22:13 ►

money is power in society. But the other thing about the 99% motif is that 99 to 1 are great

01:22:20 ►

odds. It’s not simply, in other words, the 99% isn’t simply saying we’re victimized

01:22:25 ►

by the 1%, but that it also implicitly, you know, suggests that we have power, that 99%

01:22:31 ►

of the population could overwhelm in one sense or another, you know, the 1%. So I think that’s

01:22:38 ►

the real truth. I mean, I think we need to find creative ways to embody that truth. That’s really

01:22:42 ►

what this is about, not simply the occupation of space. I think that’s a really good point. And I think that certainly when

01:22:47 ►

you talk about the 99% and the 1%, those are terms that roll off people’s tongue now. This

01:22:52 ►

is the regular lexicon now, for one, because of this movement. Let’s look back, though.

01:22:57 ►

I mean, the U.S. has had a history of protest movements. Just go back to the 1960s and the

01:23:02 ►

1970s. A lot was achieved in terms of civil rights and women’s rights.

01:23:06 ►

But those were, to an extent, liberal movements, as a lot of people call the Occupy Wall Street movement.

01:23:12 ►

And that changed, and things got quashed a little bit, when you saw more conservative people being elected into office.

01:23:19 ►

I’m wondering if you guys have spoken there in Boston about this.

01:23:22 ►

You know, how do you keep OWS from meeting the same fate?

01:23:28 ►

I don’t think there’s any magical solution.

01:23:31 ►

There are people in Boston, and I’ve actually been in conversation with a number of them,

01:23:35 ►

who would like us to pass a resolution kind of swearing off the two major parties.

01:23:41 ►

In a sense, I’m sympathetic with that.

01:23:43 ►

Insofar as I feel the Democrats and Republicans are both part of the problem,

01:23:47 ►

they’re institutionalized within the structures of oppression and exploitation.

01:23:51 ►

They take their orders, their marching orders from the 1%.

01:23:54 ►

Nonetheless, at Occupy Boston, simply passing a resolution against the two major parties isn’t going to guarantee that in advance.

01:24:12 ►

I think we need to build foundations and take this winter to really kind of sow the seeds for the spring by making contact with those who are being victimized by the system.

01:24:17 ►

I mean, I see activism within Occupy Boston is in two categories.

01:24:21 ►

One, exposing the 1%, and one is defending the 99%. And

01:24:26 ►

particularly those among the 99% who are most exposed to the violence of the system, people

01:24:34 ►

who are facing eviction, people who can’t pay their health care bills, people who are

01:24:40 ►

basically for whom these issues of inequality are actually life and death issues. Not only within this country, either, but worldwide.

01:24:48 ►

And so I don’t think there’s a magic, there’s no magic solution to avoid this.

01:24:51 ►

We need to work on a day-to-day basis to try to build power and to expose the 1% and organize the 99%,

01:24:59 ►

whether it’s in educational institutions, neighborhoods, workplaces, across the country.

01:25:04 ►

I’m hearing a lot, Joseph, of what you just talked about, of people who want to swear off the two-party system,

01:25:08 ►

of people who say, you know what, the system is too corrupt, we need a new system altogether.

01:25:13 ►

But, you know, just realistically speaking, in some ways you’ve got to work within the system first.

01:25:18 ►

And that’s what I’m wondering, is there talk, I mean, the Occupy Wall Street movement has loosely been compared in the past to the Tea Party movement.

01:25:25 ►

What did the Tea Party do?

01:25:26 ►

They went and they got people elected to then sort of carry out their fight where the fight happens.

01:25:32 ►

Are you hearing anything about this, about, you know, let’s get some candidates up and running here?

01:25:40 ►

I haven’t heard much about that.

01:25:43 ►

I’m not categorically opposed, but here would be my one requirement for any such move would be

01:25:49 ►

I would want any occupied candidate to come from our own ranks.

01:25:54 ►

I don’t think that our movement should be looking for people to spout our rhetoric, you know,

01:26:01 ►

and we should not hook our hopes to anyone who simply speaks the language.

01:26:07 ►

I mean, they should be someone who’s walked the walk, not someone who’s talked the talk.

01:26:11 ►

And frankly, I think that any electoral activity should be really contextualized within the context of the larger movement.

01:26:18 ►

It shouldn’t just be about getting a candidate elected, but what can that candidacy or what can that movement actually do to highlight these issues,

01:26:26 ►

to move the people’s struggle forward?

01:26:30 ►

I think we need to see electoral activism,

01:26:32 ►

if we decide to engage in it collectively, as a means to an end.

01:26:36 ►

It’s not the end, because in this society, the wealth and the power,

01:26:40 ►

the economics, which are the fundamental power of the system,

01:26:43 ►

is not a matter of a vote.

01:26:45 ►

You don’t get to vote, you know, who owns wealth in this society and who controls wealth.

01:26:50 ►

You know, the rhetoric that the Occupy movement has been able to successfully put on television.

01:26:58 ►

I wrote about this a couple weeks ago, that the reason why Americans are so ignorant

01:27:02 ►

and the reason why we’re having a lot of these issues

01:27:05 ►

is because 60% or more of Americans get all their news from local news,

01:27:11 ►

which means that the half an hour that we have for local news,

01:27:17 ►

10 minutes of those are spent on commercials,

01:27:20 ►

another two minutes just on teasers,

01:27:22 ►

and then they have time to recap Dancing with the Stars

01:27:24 ►

and maybe that there was a cat stuck in a tree in Germany. another two minutes just on teasers, and then they have time to recap Dancing with the Stars

01:27:25 ►

and maybe that there was a cat stuck in a tree in Germany.

01:27:28 ►

So we don’t have a real broad knowledge of issues that affect us,

01:27:35 ►

like the housing bubble, for example,

01:27:37 ►

or about what our local government is doing,

01:27:40 ►

what our national government is doing.

01:27:42 ►

We just don’t get into that stuff because we’re getting our, our must, uh, our must know information has a lot to do with

01:27:49 ►

dancing with the stars and not a lot to do with, you know, what the, what happened at

01:27:54 ►

the city council these days. And so, but with the local news, uh, is now at least showing signs, you know, I mean, like the protest signs of what economic justice is.

01:28:11 ►

And they’re being forced to cover these issues and cover these raids and cover the arrests and the encampments

01:28:20 ►

and go talk to these protesters and have the protesters on television talking about

01:28:25 ►

these issues. And it’s the first time probably ever, don’t, you know, quote me on this. I could

01:28:32 ►

be wrong. It’s probably, I’m probably not that the local news has covered these economic issues.

01:28:37 ►

So, so transparently, because we, you know, it’s, we have a ratings-driven local news industry,

01:28:49 ►

and they all want to be bigger, better, and shinier

01:28:53 ►

than the other people in their local market.

01:28:56 ►

And so what that competition does is it’s a race to the bottom.

01:29:00 ►

It’s like how can we book this psychic who’s talking to Michael Jackson about what it’s like to be dead,

01:29:07 ►

that kind of news, instead of the real economic, instead of the real issues.

01:29:12 ►

And that stuff is boring and it’s PBS and no one wants to run it.

01:29:16 ►

It takes too much time to write that stuff.

01:29:18 ►

It’s too much time to do investigative reporting.

01:29:20 ►

And time means expense.

01:29:23 ►

So we don’t hear it.

01:29:29 ►

reporting, and time means expense, so we don’t hear it. And now we’ve seen our local news talk about the homeless population, talk about people who’ve lost their homes, talk about people who

01:29:36 ►

are not able to find jobs, talk about students who are now sharecroppers to banks because they have $200,000. I’ve talked to

01:29:46 ►

people with $200,000

01:29:48 ►

in student loan debt

01:29:50 ►

and debt that will never go away

01:29:52 ►

if they go into bankruptcy.

01:29:55 ►

Debt that they can never

01:29:56 ►

renegotiate. $200,000

01:29:58 ►

is basically, that’s a

01:30:00 ►

really nice home in a lot of parts

01:30:02 ►

of this country and

01:30:04 ►

these people will never be able to buy homes.

01:30:09 ►

They’ll never be able to do anything other than pay off their student loans

01:30:12 ►

and pay off their education.

01:30:13 ►

I mean, that’s really demoralizing to kids now that are being able,

01:30:20 ►

or have been told that education is their key to the future,

01:30:24 ►

and it’s just

01:30:25 ►

not true.

01:30:27 ►

Okay, so here we are on the lawn of Bridget Walker’s home.

01:30:32 ►

We started our occupation on December 6th.

01:30:36 ►

Bridget had been trying to get a modification for years, had been denied six times. And her willingness to fight and occupy Atlanta’s campaign,

01:30:47 ►

which included press conferences, direct action on Chase,

01:30:52 ►

and a national pollen day,

01:30:54 ►

after four days here, Chase was on the phone.

01:30:57 ►

And because of Bridget’s willingness to fight,

01:31:01 ►

she now doesn’t have to worry about where she’s going to live as her home was

01:31:06 ►

scheduled to be auctioned on the Fulton County Courthouse steps January 3rd. Today Chase Bank

01:31:14 ►

has given her a deal that’s you know unbelievable and better than we asked for and she’s going to

01:31:20 ►

be able to stay in the home. We have the contract right here and today we see this

01:31:26 ►

as a victory for the people, for everybody that’s in the foreclosure eviction process

01:31:31 ►

and we challenge Chase Bank and other banks to give the same deal that they gave to Bridget

01:31:39 ►

Walker to the rest of the Americans that are struggling around the country.

01:31:45 ►

We have the contract here and I’d like to introduce Bridgette Walker who is going to

01:31:50 ►

say a few things and sign the contract.

01:31:53 ►

Can you write?

01:31:56 ►

Yes, sir.

01:31:58 ►

First, I want to thank everyone that was involved to make this happen.

01:32:10 ►

Senator Ford, Mr. Beasley, Josh Wood.

01:32:12 ►

If I don’t call your name, it’s just because I’m a little nervous right now.

01:32:17 ►

But I just want to thank everybody here that supported and made this happen.

01:32:20 ►

And it helped me keep my dream of homestead alive.

01:32:22 ►

And I’m very grateful.

01:32:24 ►

Words can’t express.

01:32:27 ►

I’ll try to use words, but I’ll forever be grateful for Occupy Atlanta and everyone else that’s been involved.

01:32:31 ►

Merry Christmas.

01:32:32 ►

Thank you.

01:32:33 ►

I don’t need none of the Christmas.

01:32:34 ►

This is my Christmas present right here.

01:32:35 ►

With that I’ll sign.

01:32:36 ►

She can’t run.

01:32:37 ►

She can’t run.

01:32:38 ►

She can’t run.

01:32:39 ►

She can’t run.

01:32:40 ►

She can’t run.

01:32:41 ►

She can’t run.

01:32:42 ►

She can’t run.

01:32:43 ►

She can’t run.

01:32:44 ►

She can’t run. She can’t run. She can’t run. She can’t run. She can’t run. sign

01:32:47 ►

camera

01:32:56 ►

thank you very much

01:32:58 ►

we’re here today because we are

01:33:02 ►

alarmed

01:33:04 ►

and saddened at the number of our citizens who are suffering because

01:33:10 ►

of the economic crisis.

01:33:12 ►

Because…

01:33:13 ►

Don’t talk to him.

01:33:16 ►

Get up there and start talking to him.

01:33:19 ►

People who own the power of this country are not sensitive to the needs of the poor and the least of these.

01:33:28 ►

It’s interesting to remember that at the beginning of this crisis,

01:33:34 ►

we all came to the aid of the banks and the banking community because they were hurting.

01:33:42 ►

Now our people are hurting.

01:33:47 ►

Thousands of our people are losing their homes every day.

01:33:52 ►

And we have come here today to give our support

01:33:55 ►

to Occupy Atlanta and Occupy America.

01:34:01 ►

Because we believe that justice ought to be served and we’re calling upon

01:34:08 ►

the banking community to take their turn at bat now and help people who need help.

01:34:17 ►

We believe that the banking community ought to declare a moratorium on foreclosures. We don’t think for the next

01:34:29 ►

six to nine months there ought to be any foreclosures on homes in this country. Let’s have a moratorium

01:34:38 ►

on foreclosures on homes. Let’s use that six to nine months to find ways to adjust and

01:34:49 ►

to modify the conditions and terms of the mortgages to enable people to pay their mortgage

01:34:58 ►

and keep their home. We want an end to foreclosed mortgages, want an end to evictions, want

01:35:08 ►

an end to poverty. We’re calling upon the banks to do their part. Just as this country

01:35:16 ►

came to the rescue of the banks, we’re asking now the banks to come to the rescue of God’s children. No more foreclosures, no more evictions for

01:35:28 ►

the next six to nine months while we modify and adjust the terms of the loans that we

01:35:35 ►

have so that people can meet their obligations. As many as will approve a moratorium of nine to six to nine months on foreclosed mortgages, say amen.

01:35:48 ►

Amen.

01:35:49 ►

Say amen again.

01:35:50 ►

Amen.

01:35:51 ►

I want to hear occupied Atlanta say amen.

01:35:53 ►

Amen.

01:35:54 ►

No more foreclosures.

01:35:56 ►

No more foreclosures.

01:35:57 ►

No more evictions.

01:35:58 ►

No more evictions.

01:36:00 ►

For at least six to nine months.

01:36:01 ►

For at least six to nine months.

01:36:03 ►

To give people an opportunity months to give people an opportunity

01:36:05 ►

to meet the conditions of their obligations.

01:36:11 ►

We call upon every bank we think

01:36:13 ►

in order to continue our support of the banks.

01:36:18 ►

The banks are going to have to help the poor people.

01:36:22 ►

If you don’t help the poor people,

01:36:24 ►

we’re not going to support the

01:36:25 ►

banks. Can I get an amen? Amen! God bless you and God keep you. Let’s see justice roll

01:36:35 ►

down like water. We want back no more foreclosures. No more foreclosures. No more evictions.

01:36:47 ►

No more foreclosures.

01:36:48 ►

No more evictions.

01:36:51 ►

Let the church say amen. Amen.

01:36:53 ►

Woo!

01:36:55 ►

Okay, my name is Teresa Bolton, and I’m a poet.

01:37:02 ►

And the reason why I wrote this poem, I wrote it for the movement Occupy

01:37:06 ►

Wall Street, Occupy Our Homes in Brooklyn. On December the 6th, Occupy Our Homes came

01:37:16 ►

and practically occupied my home. And I opened the door and I had so many people here, but

01:37:23 ►

they were all good people.

01:37:29 ►

Every one of them were good people, determined to get their message across.

01:37:34 ►

And I decided to write this poem that same night, right?

01:37:35 ►

Same night.

01:37:36 ►

Same night.

01:37:40 ►

It really doesn’t have a title, but I call it This Movement. And the movement is Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Our Homes. This movement is not

01:37:48 ►

just about occupying Wall Street. It’s about helping the homeless get on their feet. This

01:37:54 ►

movement is about the human family to raise awareness to us all in the community. It’s not

01:38:00 ►

for selfish reasons and I can tell you why. It’s for every man in this land to have a piece of the pie.

01:38:07 ►

This work that’s being done is strictly for the needy,

01:38:10 ►

and the spotlight is beaming brightly on the greedy.

01:38:13 ►

We’ll expose all the ugliness, and we’ll reveal the truth

01:38:16 ►

to change our policies for our future, for the youth.

01:38:20 ►

Our nation is badly wounded with an ill economy. Let’s remove the band-aid

01:38:27 ►

and perform surgery. With all the greed and selfishness it makes you want to scream, did

01:38:33 ►

we forget the promise of the American dream? Together we will heal the nation from the

01:38:38 ►

very core. Being homeless and unemployed it shall be no more. It is written on the dollar bill, in God we trust. The we on

01:38:47 ►

that dollar bill means all of us. Hopefully someday soon you’ll do us fair and just. Remember everything

01:38:53 ►

we do God is watching us. And you might wonder when this will be over and done, when the American

01:38:59 ►

dream is a reality for each and every one. Some folks might be wishing that we would go away.

01:39:05 ►

Until our mission is completed,

01:39:07 ►

we are here to stay.

01:39:10 ►

Until our mission is completed,

01:39:12 ►

we are here to stay.

01:39:14 ►

So says Sister Teresa,

01:39:16 ►

and I couldn’t agree with her more.

01:39:18 ►

And really,

01:39:20 ►

there’s not much more I can add to that right now.

01:39:22 ►

So, for now, this is Lorenzo

01:39:24 ►

signing off from Cyberdelic Space

01:39:26 ►

be well my friends

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

295 - The World and It’s Double Part 1

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:20 ► §

00:00:24 ► §

00:00:27 ► §

00:00:34 ► §

00:00:39 ► §

00:00:46 ► §

00:00:52 ► §

00:00:58 ► §

00:01:03 ► §

00:01:09 ► §

00:01:18 ► §

00:01:24 ► §

00:01:29 ► §

00:01:35 ► §

00:01:40 ► §

00:01:47 ► §

00:01:50 ► §

00:01:54 ► §

00:01:58 ► §

00:02:01 ► §

00:02:04 ► §

00:02:05 ► §

00:02:12 ► §

00:02:17 ► §

00:02:22 ► §

00:02:31 ► §

00:02:40 ► §

00:02:49 ► §

00:02:57 ► §

00:03:05 ► §

00:03:10 ► §

00:03:16 ► §

00:03:21 ► §

00:03:27 ► §

00:03:30 ► §

00:03:36 ► §

00:03:38 ► §

00:03:43 ► §

00:03:45 ► §

00:03:51 ► §

00:03:55 ► §

00:03:59 ► §

00:04:04 ► §

00:04:06 ► §

00:04:10 ► §

00:04:14 ► §

00:04:17 ► §

00:04:22 ► §

00:04:25 ► §

00:04:30 ► §

00:04:34 ► §

00:04:37 ► §

00:04:42 ► §

00:04:44 ► §

00:04:51 ► §

00:04:55 ► §

00:05:00 ► §

00:05:10 ► §

00:05:14 ► §

00:05:18 ► §

00:05:30 ► §

00:05:31 ► §

00:05:51 ► §

00:06:05 ► §

00:06:10 ► §

00:06:11 ► §

00:06:14 ► §

00:06:17 ► §

00:06:20 ► §

00:06:22 ► §

00:06:26 ► §

Program Notes

Previous Episode

Next Episode

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

00:00:20 ►

00:00:24 ►

00:00:27 ►

00:00:34 ►

00:00:39 ►

00:00:46 ►

00:00:52 ►

00:00:58 ►

00:01:03 ►

00:01:09 ►

00:01:18 ►

00:01:24 ►

00:01:29 ►

00:01:35 ►

00:01:40 ►

00:01:47 ►

00:01:50 ►

00:01:54 ►

00:01:58 ►

00:02:01 ►

00:02:04 ►

00:02:05 ►

00:02:12 ►

00:02:17 ►

00:02:22 ►

00:02:31 ►

00:02:40 ►

00:02:49 ►

00:02:57 ►

00:03:05 ►

00:03:10 ►

00:03:16 ►

00:03:21 ►

00:03:27 ►

00:03:30 ►

00:03:36 ►

00:03:38 ►

00:03:43 ►

00:03:45 ►

00:03:51 ►

00:03:55 ►

00:03:59 ►

00:04:04 ►

00:04:06 ►

00:04:10 ►

00:04:14 ►

00:04:17 ►

00:04:22 ►

00:04:25 ►

00:04:30 ►

00:04:34 ►

00:04:37 ►

00:04:42 ►

00:04:44 ►

00:04:51 ►

00:04:55 ►

00:05:00 ►

00:05:10 ►

00:05:14 ►

00:05:18 ►

00:05:30 ►

00:05:31 ►

00:05:51 ►

00:06:05 ►

00:06:10 ►

00:06:11 ►

00:06:14 ►

00:06:17 ►

00:06:20 ►

00:06:22 ►

00:06:26 ►

00:06:30 ►

00:06:36 ►

00:06:42 ►