My name is Todd Geist. This is my tumblog.
"Zeitgeist" is German for "spirit of the times". I thought that world make a much nicer title than the German translation of my name, "Tod(d) Geist", which happens to be "Death Spirit".
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Sara Chipps - http://girldeveloper.com/
Media accounts of OWS seem to spend a lot of time claiming that OWS lacks focus. I am not sure why this is. It seems very focused to me. I suppose I could be paranoid and suggest that this mis-representation is being directed from the highest places of power in our society. But I am not sure thats true. I just think the media is another part of the the problem OWS is rising up against.
The OWS movement is made up of people who are tired of large faceless political parties, lobbying groups, corporations and government bureaucracies calling all the shots. People who I suspect are a lot like me.
We are tired of having to send our kids to schools who can’t actually teach them and then feed them so much crappy food that about a 3rd of them will get diabetes.
We are tired of banks who almost bled the country dry, being bailed out and then having the audacity to raise fees.
We are tired of our political leaders spending more time engaged in petty power struggles then they are in solving problems.
We are tired of large corporations who see our towns, communities and people as just another form of resource that they can exploit. They come in, blow the mountain top of a neighborhood with with a big box store, and then abandon it when all the money is gone.
We are tired of a federal government who seems unable to preserve its most sacred promises: that we are a free people “with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
We are tired of a press who has abandoned its essential role as the fourth estate in favor of ratings and advertising dollars.
We are tired of watching our freedom being stripped away, piece by piece.
If the OWS movement seems to be taking aim in a lot of directions it is because the symptoms of the disease are everywhere. But the nature of the disease is quite obvious. Power is consolidated in the hands of relatively few people: people who either have their own wealth or control the wealth of others. If you are lucky enough to be in that group, you get to pull the levers and make our countries laws dance to your own tune. If you are not, then you are increasingly out of luck.
The people who come to OWS rallies simply want to see the balance of power shifted back in favor of more people; thats it! Seems pretty focused to me.
Agencies, departments, and organizations don’t do things - people do things. People’s names should be on things to foster both accountability and pride.
-Edward Tufte
As the income gap between the richest people on the planet and everyone else widens, so will the unrest. As they occur, each incident will seem to have its cause in some local relatively minor incident, but in fact they are all stemming from the same root cause. A very few people on the planet control most of the wealth.
The so called Arab Spring is just one example. Last year there were riots in France, this year it is London. How long before it happens in the US?
This is not a question of weather or not the rich folk of planet earth got their wealth legally or illegally; or weather or not anyone needs that much wealth. Those questions, while important, are completely unrelated.
When a relatively small group of anything, be they humans, ants or bacteria, control all the resources, there will be a reckoning.
Life, while never static, does not like it when things get too far out of balance. Eventually it will snap things back in the other direction. This is not a law of man. We can not stop it. All we can do is recognize it, and try to play along by the rules.
The wealth gap will be corrected. We have no choice about that. The only question is weather or not we can wise up enough to correct it without violence.
Lately, I have been leaning towards Libertarian, but the vast majority of my adult life has been spent in the liberal progressive camp, and many of my sympathies lie there. This article resonates with me. Not just in its description of what happened to Obama, but in its reasonable defense of the liberal agenda.
But the problem for me remains. If we truly want an activist and interventionists federal government then we must have one that actually works. And the sad truth is that it does not.
Our congress has shown itself to be mostly under the control of large special interests groups from the left and the right. Many of these groups, wether they be corporations or unions, have evolved to the point of being more concerned with the exercise of power for its own sake then for the good of the American people.
The result is that many laws that get passed do little more than protect the interests of those who already have the power. Until this basic flaw in how our government works is fixed, an activist federal government will cause at least as much problems as it solves, and potentially much more.
I have thought for a long time that a core problem in our economy may be that there are not enough jobs that produce real value. I have also felt that the huge complex systems we have put in place, i.e. corporations and government bureaucracies are a huge impediment to fixing this problem. This article by Umair Haque, starts to connect the dots. It is well worth the read.
You will need to completely sanitize your body with peaches and cream. Only then does the effect take hold!
Where’s a radio active spider when you need one!
