Without You, They don't Exist

Hey all you kids out there in TV land. It's not that I think you're necessarily ignorant, or uneducated, or unread, or misinformed. It's not that it matters what I think. What matters is what you think about what you do, and how you are. Do you feel good about living in America? Be honest. Did you ever wonder what it might be like on the Riviera or the French countryside or maybe Tokyo, or one of those European countries where the most used form of transportation is the bicycle? How about the cool high speed trains? Do you even know about real life in other countries? Not just to visit, but to live there now, in the 21st century. Or are the clashes between protesters and police reported in American media all you really "know"?

Are you actually voting for Romney or Obama because you really believe that between these two characters we have the best possible candidates there are? Or are you voting for one because you feel there is no other choice, and the system is rigged, and so you must pitifully stick your tail between your legs and vote for these guys. Do you have any integrity? Does this make you feel good about yourself? Has our government's leadership done anything to actually make things better in the last half century? What would that be? The build up of the greatest war machine ever known, ten times the greatest force of any other country, so unapproachable that it's a joke to say we actually have military enemies? And all this at the expense of our infrastructure, education, health care, economy, food quality, and housing; and more so under Obama than under "bring it on" Bush?

It doesn't matter if I think you have no integrity. It only matters that you think that of yourself. You can't help it if you've been brain drained by the Wall Street owned and operated media. And I know that, if you do believe that you only have two choices, then you do watch way too much TV.

TV watching, especially the news, is known to cause ill effects on society, as found in many scholastic studies. You probably think you have a lot of integrity because you do what you feel is right given the circumstances. What if you aren't aware of all the circumstances?

It's a running joke that people who watch the news everyday are less informed than people who watch none. Thomas Jefferson said this about newspapers. Do you believe everything you read and see in the news? What about what you don't see? What about the stuff that is blacked out in the name of nationalism? What about the stuff that is important to people but doesn't sell airtime? What about the agenda that the media has you on. The war is not on the agenda. Fluoride, GMOs, the cancer industry, foreclosures, the actual state of the American economy are all not on your agenda, because you watch the news.

There is research out there that strongly indicates that fluoride is a cause of cancer in this country, and even responsible for lowered IQ scores in children. Don't let you kids drink public water. Fluoride is placed into nearly every municipal water supply. GMOs are also known to be a huge cancer risk and found in nearly every non-organic American food. Food manufacturers spend tens of millions in campaigns to kill or degrade this information (as in your TV news). Why isn't it questioned? Because you don't care, or don't know about it, or didn't see it in the news.

The US cancer industry appreciates your valued support in keeping as many Americans as sick as possible, and as expensively as possible for as long as possible. And cancer is probably the most expensive, chronic sickness that humans can suffer from. The medical device, pharmaceutical, and "health care" insurance industries all join in thanking you for your continued support to their quest for sadistic greed. This is their American dream. Big money. May tens of thousands of Americans continue to suffer and die prolonged painful deaths so that the few of those who matter may live laughing in sadistic luxury.

So maybe if you like Obama, you're thinking that this kind of philosophy will give Romney more votes. So what? Did things really improve since Bush left office? You can't win by voting for these guys. You lose. You feed their expense accounts. Without you, they don't exist.

People are not Savings Accounts for Bankers

Whenever someone says money is the problem, someone else will invariably say, no it's not money, it's the way people deal with money. It's the people who abuse money. Wrong. It is money. If there were no money people wouldn't have an option to deal with it, right or wrong. It's not about people. I mean just look at all the upstanding (mostly white, mostly male) people on Wall Street.  They can't help it if the system works the way it does. They're just trying to survive on a minimum mid six figures. They're just giving their clients what they want. So right there we know it can't be the people who deal with the money. It's the money!

In this clip from Margin Call, Jeremy Irons, perched in his ivory tower, says that without money we'd kill each other for food. Bullshit.  The second I heard that line I suspected this film was Wall Street propaganda. But I haven't seen the whole thing yet so I'll limit my criticism to Iron's dialog here.


As long as money exists as a universal exchange for almost anything you need, even your own health, there will always be people who exploit it and hoard it. Money has only been around for a few thousand years. Humanity got along just fine with out it for many more thousands of years before that. You might look back at bartering and say, 'so am I supposed to trade cows for a living now?' No. People traded livestock because that's what they owned. People own many more things now; computers, cell phones, TVs, cameras, art, music. Barter today might not be so bad an idea. In fact EBay is just one step away from modern day barter, and Amazon and others have simialr operations were people sell all kinds of possessions on the open market.

Is it really so absurd to live without money? What would happen? Would people resort to crime to just take whatever they want, like how we see Wall Street taking people's lives at the rate of 45,000 annually for health insurance profits? Or how the military industry takes millions of innocent lives, devastates millions of American and foreign families, and proliferates and perturbs more wars just to make exorbitant profits?



I think we need to guarantee all people a minimum standard of living, even regardless of citizenship. If war profiteers didn't need to spend hundreds of trillions on useless wars, sucking up over half the federal budget, we could easily afford this. But without money, there would be no affording things. Everything would be resourced based. Do we have the resources to house, feed, educate, and maintain people's health? Of course we do. Do we have the resources to build war machinery and award padded contracts? Without money there is no padding. You provide your services in exchange for comforts and necessities of life. Maybe there could be incentives for more resources for people who earn them. But what would be eliminated is the making of money just for the sake of accumulating money.

Money is not wealth. Money is simply a medium of exchange. If we can't limit money to being only a medium and not a commodity in itself, then it no longer works as a medium, because it is hoarded. A phone line is a medium. If phones were commodities then they could be hoarded and only a very few could have a phone. People try to hoard phone lines by having monopoles. But it hasn't worked yet. There are still many competitive ways to have a phone line. A phone line also has limited value, while money has universal value as long as everyone accepts it.

There's no easy answer. I've heard about individual based currencies where people issue their own money in exchange for someone's goods or services. That currency would have limited value. If the person has a good reputation their money becomes valuable. But they control it. Not the government. And there is no making money on the exchange of money.

Another idea might be to remove interest charges, or at least to limit them to a flat rate and not an annuity. You borrow money for college, you pay it back when you can at a flat 5% interest rate that doesn't increase year after year. If you borrow $10,000 you pay back $10,500 forever. No interest accumulations. People are not savings accounts for bankers.

Enough! - Protesters at AIG in LA

Enough! - Protesters at AIG in LA from Jon Raymond on Vimeo.

Los Angeles, March 19, 2009, 5:PM - As part of a nationwide SEIU sponsored protest, LA protesters outside of AIG were just as concerned about the billions of bailout dollars to all Wall Street firms as they were about the $165 million in AIG bonuses. They listed three demands from Congress:

1) Pass the Employee Free Choice Act
2) Affordable Health Care for All (citing that 55 million Americans are uninsured)
3) Strong Banking Reform.

They then proceeded to the front doors to ask that the top AIG executives come down to accept their reality check, where they were held back by numerous AIG security personnel. They chanted: Bring them down, AIG you cant hide. We can see you greedy side, and AIG has got to go. They were then informed that the people in the building left early after hearing of the nationwide protests, and that no one was there to see them. They responded with a chant of Dock their pay, followed again with AIG you cant hide.

This film was made from concept to completion in 16 hours by me alone. I wired two lavs through my long sleeved t-shirt, with the mikes clipped to the wrist ends. This gave great stereo separation for the sound, and control over the wires. The camera was a one chip Cannon Optura Xi. Everything was hand held. The shoot was about an hour of almost non-stop recording, and the editing about 10 hours.

Jon Raymond - Filmmaker
Music - Improvisation by Tony Milosevic / Absynth & Orange

Rally Participants:
SEIU - Los Angeles
CodePinkAlert.com

From Out in the Street Films