RT @jaythepal: ThePete is uplo...

RT @jaythepal: ThePete is uploading a special mid-week Jay TheVlog at http://youtube.com/thepetecom 7.5 mins of my clips, man! YEAH!!

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Orignal From: RT @jaythepal: ThePete is uplo...

12seconds - Jay ThePal makes m...

12seconds - Jay ThePal makes me hungry! http://tiny12.tv/THHTW

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Orignal From: 12seconds - Jay ThePal makes m...

@siskita w/all of your excitem...

@siskita w/all of your excitement re: new Mythbusters & Red Dwarf, you forgot to brag about the Daily Show taping we're going to tomorrow.

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Orignal From: @siskita w/all of your excitem...

All of Your Paranoia about Government and Corporations is Accurate (and then some)

Above: money doesn't make the world go 'round--but it does keep the system moving.

Yeah, pretty sad when things in the real world happen like they would in a novel--you know when the people you trust betray you in a way you would never have expected? Let me get more specific.

Remember that thing called "government" that's supposed to protect your rights and help organize society in a way that allows humanity to have an easier, more enjoyable time?

How about corporations? Remember them? They're the groups of smaller businesses that team up to help better provide for the communities they exist in.

Well, that's the way both were originally supposed to work, anyway. Alas, they've supplanted those wonderful ideals with concerns only for themselves. Corporations have the same rights as we individuals and, while they can't vote, politicians make sure big businesses are more than equally represented in government.

Capitalism is dead and probably has been for years--it's only recently that we've discovered its body. See, Capitalism too, has been supplanted by the system of Corruptionism.

The basic idea is that our leaders (both political and corporate) tell us that they care about all humans, our rights, the environment and our morals, but all they really care about is taking from us and giving to themselves. We give our money to corporations in exchange for products and services we don't need (but are literally brainwashed to believe are necessary) and the corporations take that money and pay off politicians to make laws that make it easier for corporations to make even more money off of us.

Politicians are corrupt because they take money for favors. We are corrupt because our money comes from corporations that we then use for things we don't bother realizing we don't need. Corporations are corrupt because the people who run the corporations take money, ignore their own morals, and keep the corporate interests going.

Everyone is corrupt in this system.

Maybe the Corruptionist system (like most systems) can actually function to make life easier for us. However, take it to the extreme and we get what we have now.

Last month Matt Taibbi wrote an amazingly in-depth piece that you can find at RollingStone.com that covers the bail-out, the AIG mess, corrupt politicians and most importantly how this whole thing has functioned as a non-violent coup meant to wrest control of government (and therefore us) from our elected leaders. Of course, I'd suggest that our elected officials haven't had any substantive power for years. Regardless, the reality seems to be that now they don't. Here's a bit from Taibbi's article:

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

That article has been sitting in a tab in Firefox since last month and is so incredibly long I still haven't finished reading the whole thing. It's a pretty good read, so far, though.

As much as I'd like to be wrong about this, the moral of the story seems to be that, ultimately, every ounce of stereotypical paranoia any of us have had about politicians and businessmen being liars has been accurate.

Politicians and businessmen are all lying--all the time. They may not even be aware of their own dishonesty, but the reality sure seems to be that eventually, any corporation and every politician will sacrifice what ever it/he/she needs to in order to make as much money as it/he/she can.

Click here to see visit my Disgusting People (magazine) page which I set up just days after 911.

One good example of this is when People Magazine put out their 911 Memorial Issue, just a few days after 911. They ran ads opposite pictures of the disaster. My "favorite" was a picture of a man on his knees, mouth agape, seemingly staring across the gap between the page his picture was on and the page facing him which featured an ad for State Farm life insurance.

I emailed the editor and complained. She replied with a bunch of rationalizations and apologized only for my offense. Members of an email list I was subscribed to at the time seemed nonplussed by my offense at People Magazine's behavior.

"They have to make a living don't they?" said one person on the list.

Here we are 8 years later and things have only gotten worse. We're all just fodder for the machine of Corruptionism--we seem generally OK with that and so do our political leaders. So much so that, morals are put aside in favor of bringing in the cash so we can buy our iPods, pay our bills, and feed our kids. Our government takes our money (both directly through taxes and indirectly by having the Fed inject new cash into the system) and gives it to these corporations to keep them going and to quite literally reward them for their horrible behavior.

Just keep doing what you're doing, the government seems to be saying.

But "corruption" is the right word for it, isn't it?

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Orignal From: All of Your Paranoia about Government and Corporations is Accurate (and then some)

@KellyOlexa are you related to...

@KellyOlexa are you related to @Kjolexa ? (His first name is Keith.)

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Sadface--trying to subscribe t...

Sadface--trying to subscribe to Bill Moyers Journal podcast but it's all messed up and management doesn't seem to care much. Waaa.

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Orignal From: Sadface--trying to subscribe t...

Jay TheVlog for April 5, 2009

Lighter week for Jay, but we still shot 8 minutes worth of stuff including Jay's mini movie review of "Harvey" starring Jimmy Stewart! Check it out!!

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Orignal From: Jay TheVlog for April 5, 2009

http://twitpic.com/2w2ao - NYC...

http://twitpic.com/2w2ao - NYC-based Travelling Knife Sharpener

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Hack the Economy

Ben Bernanke, the real most powerful man on Earth (Photo Credit)

Finally a Solution to the Economic Mess I Can Get Behind...

Last month I came across an article on Arthurmag.com which presented a really great idea--
I have always admired hackers—computer hackers and social hackers. I'm just trying to expand the range of technologies and institutions we feel ready and willing to hack. We should hack money. We should hack banking. We should hack business. This doesn't necessarily mean hacking the dollar, which is just one kind of closed source currency. We should hack money by coding new kinds. Bank hacking has been around for a long time—it's just that credit unions and other local or community-based bank models were driven down by the anti-competitive practice of banking conglomerates. It's time for those institutions to be renewed, as well.

As a bohemian artist type, I've kinda been doing this off and on for years. Favors for friends repaid with favors in return, is usually what this looks like in the immediate here and now. Granted, I still need a job and I still need money, but it's important to understand that there are and have always been alternatives to the almighty USD.

Speaking of the US Dollar, you should know it's a product we are all forced to use and it represents the single most powerful monopoly that exists today. The Federal Reserve literally creates money and loans it to banks at interest. The chairman of the Fed recently said in a 60 Minutes interview (my emphasis added):

The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It's much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing.

So, why is it only the Fed that can print money? Because they are part of the government? No--because they're not part of the government. How do I know? Simple--ask yourself which member of the Fed board do we elect?

None of them.

We get to vote for the guy who names the chairman every four years in November (the POTUS) and the senators and congressmen which supposedly have oversight over the Fed, but have only once heard of Congress actually performing said oversight on the Federal Reserve. The reality is that most presidents don't get to name a chairman of the Fed because the chairmen of the Fed have terms of 14 years (yes, on paper the term is officially 4 years, but they're almost always reappointed).

So, how do we hack the economy?

That's a good question. I think the idea is to trade goods and services when ever you can. Stop going through the Dollar system for absolutely everything. Getting rid of a bookcase or couch? Don't sell it--trade it with someone. Or give it away. There are loads of sites online that help with this process. Whether it's Craigslist.org or, a site I use here in the Big Apple, NYCDailyDeals.com, there are alternatives to buying or selling everything. Another popular site is freecycle.org.

There are even people trying to get their own currency off the ground since owning gold and silver coins is still legal. LibertyDollar.org is a site that will tell you all about this new form of currency. It's legal, but no one really takes it as cash, just yet. Now, I don't approve of the Liberty Dollar because of a message engraved on each coin:

"Trust in God"

Yeah, so let's replace one BS currency with another? I think the Liberty Dollar folks are missing the point. It's not "liberty" until you're really free (to not believe if you choose).

But I digress.

The point here is ultimately this: Humanity has existed in it's current evolutionary state for something like 200,000 years. It's done most of that existing without Chase Manhattan or Citigroup or the Federal Reserve System.

We humans came up with the concept of money--why can't we come up with alternatives?

So, let's start thinking about ways around relying on money for everything. I know it's an uphill battle, but we've got to start somewhere.

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Orignal From: Hack the Economy

Mmm... Trader Joe's trip yield...

Mmm... Trader Joe's trip yielded Puffins cereal. All natch and yummy with sliced apples on. Eating healthy feels gooood.

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Orignal From: Mmm... Trader Joe's trip yield...