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How The Seeds Of Revolution Take Root

February 26, 2016

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How The Seeds Of Revolution Take Root

What motivates a populace to rebel against a regime?

That the dramatic upheavals of war, pestilence and environmental collapse can trigger social disorder and revolution is well-established. Indeed, this dynamic can be viewed as the standard model of social disorder/revolution: a large-scale crisis—often a bolt-from-the-blue externality—upends the status quo.

Another model identifies warring elites and imperial meddling as a source of revolution: a new elite forcibly replaces the current elite (known colloquially as meet the new boss, same as the old boss) or a dominant nation-state/empire arranges a political coup to replace the current leadership with a more compliant elite.

A third model was described by David Hackett Fischer in The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. By assembling price and wage data stretching back hundreds of years, Fischer found that cycles of economic growth spawn population growth, resulting in more workers entering the market economy. Their earnings trigger a demand-driven expansion of essential commodities such as grain and energy (wood, coal, oil, etc.).

In the initial phase, wages rise and commodity prices remain stable as supplies of essential goods expand and the demand for labor pushes up wages.

But this virtuous cycle reverses when the supply of essentials no longer keeps pace with rising population and demand: the price of essentials begin an inexorable rise even as an oversupply of labor drives down wages.

Fisher found that this wage/price cycle often ends in transformational social upheaval.

While proponents of these models have a wealth of historical examples to draw upon, these models miss a key factor: the vulnerability or resilience of the nation-state facing crises.

Some nations survive invasions, environmental catastrophes, epidemics and inflation without disintegrating into disorder. Something about these nation’s social/ economic /political order makes them more resilient than other nations.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

.01% always devolve republics into oligarchies, co-opt all revolutions; so how can this coming revolution create lasting victory of virtue?

February 16, 2016

.01% always devolve republics into oligarchies, co-opt all revolutions; so how can this coming revolution create lasting victory of virtue?

PuppetGov’s 6-minute video, We are the ones we’ve been waiting for:

I keep three coins in my pocket: a US silver Half-Dollar from 1839 that my grandfather also kept in his pocket, an American colonial copper Halfpenny from 1749, and a Roman Republic bronze Triens from 211/210 BC.

I carry them to connect me to family (biological and spiritual), and to the work of realizing Enlightenment and US founding ideals of truth, technology, and love.

Those ideals have never been realized on Earth for long. Human status of having every revolution and movement co-opted/recuperated by our .01% oligarchs is important to consider in light of Earth’s status of ending today’s .01% Emperor’s New Clothes obvious crimes centering in war, money, and lies.

I’ll use these three coins to illustrate status, and consider areas of strength for lasting victory of virtue.

1839: This coin was struck just 13 years after the death of Thomas Jefferson, when Abe Lincoln was 20, and seven years before Lincoln would prove US President Polk was a war-mongering and treaty-violating liar to steal half of Mexico in 1846. My grandfather who carried this coin told the story that as a boy he would shake hands with the old-timer who told stories of shaking Lincoln’s hand. Both of my grandfathers were lied-into WW1, which had nothing to do with promises of another US President to “make the world safe for democracy,” and a “war to end all wars.” In connection to wars for every generation, my father, father-in-law, and only uncle experienced horrific “war service” in WW2. My older brother would have been drafted into the illegal and lie-started Vietnam War had it continued another year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

COMPLETE The Coming European Revolution

January 12, 2016

COMPLETE The Coming European Revolution

I have warned that 2017 will be the political year from hell. What I am illustrating here is the link between a sovereign debt crisis and the Revolutionary Cycle. In 1933, Roosevelt came to power in the USA and turned the country toward socialism. That same year, 1933, brought Hitler and Mao to power. So 1934 was the revolutionary year. Such revolutions do not always bring blood in the streets. The next one is due in 2020 and we should see the system we currently live under go completely upside-down.

The revolutions of 1848 were essentially a democratic movement and an uprising against the political elite. In 1848, Karl Marx published “The Communist Manifesto” with Friedrich Engels, and was exiled to London as a result. In London, where he lived the remainder of his life, he wrote the first volume of “Das Kapital”. This undoubtedly influenced the revolutions that opened the door to communism/socialism. This also inspired the collapse of the old feudal structures and created independent national states. The revolutionary wave began in France in February 1848 when the French monarchy was overthrown. Communism actually began in France as a “commune” where people lived in one shared community with no individual property rights. It was the French who convinced Marx that communism would work better than just socialism, which he had advocated initially.

This 1848 revolution spread as a contagion, similar to what the American Revolution had done during the previous century. The contagion of 1848 spread to most of Europe and parts of Latin America. In total, it impacted over 50 countries. This was by no means a coordination or cooperation between various revolutionary trends around Europe.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Odds Are Never In Your Favour

December 28, 2015

The Odds Are Never In Your Favour

The irony of the phrase “may the odds be ever in your favor” is not lost on the readers of the Hunger Games trilogy of novels or the film adaption. Despite the grimness of the story, over 65 million copies of the books have been sold. The total box office take so far has exceeded $1.4 billion for the four movies. The dystopian series tackles real issues like severe poverty, starvation, torture, oppression, betrayal and the brutality of war. It doesn’t fit into the standard film making success recipe of feel good fluff, politically correct storylines and happy endings. Each film in the series gets progressively darker, with the final episode permeating doom and gloom. The books and the movies capture the deepening crisis mood engulfing the world today. And they realistically portray the world as a place where there are no good guys in positions of power. The ruling class, in all cases, is driven by a voracious appetite for supremacy, wealth, and control.

An Ambiguous, Confusing, Dangerous World

The world is a morally ambiguous place where those in power and those seeking power utilize the influence of media propaganda and PR campaigns built around “heroes” and “icons” to psychologically control the masses, while enriching themselves and their crony capitalist sponsors. Endless war against the latest “bad guys” further enriches the arms dealers and their political lackeys who joyfully use faux patriotism and nationalistic fervor to insist upon more boots on the ground, drones in the air, bombs dropped, and missiles launched.

War is good for business and keeps the masses distracted, while the Wall Street financiers harvest the wealth of the citizens.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

P2P Revolution and Commons Phase Transition

October 27, 2015

P2P Revolution and Commons Phase Transition

At the P2P Foundation, we don’t use the moniker ‘revolution’ with much frequency, preferring the concept of phase transition.

In this article, we would like to elucidate the relation between the two concepts.

In my experience, revolution is used in two quite different senses; in a generic sense, it just means a ‘big change’, like for example when we speak about the Industrial Revolution, this was a long and drawn out process, with many aspects and it would be really difficult to identify with one particular event. Yet at the same time, there is clearly a time when industrial changes emerged in a mostly agrarian context, and a time when it is the industrial processes and forms of organisation which are dominant, and the agrarian aspects subsumed under that domination. Clearly, between these two moments, a ‘phase transition’ has occurred.

Revolution is also used in a much more narrow fashion, which usually refers to a momentous series of concrete events, in which the very organisation of power in society changed fundamentally, leading to a wholesale replacement of human personnel, a new different balance of power between social classes, and the like. Paradigmatic examples would be the French and Russian revolutions.

Both types of revolutions occur throughout history, but for many people, at least for those that live more comfortably, the second notion is less attractive. Indeed, it is most often associated with violence, often directed against the very ‘leaders’ of the first phases of such revolutions, and to boot, usually leads to counter-revolutions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Resisting Socialism in early 20th Century Britain

October 14, 2015

Resisting Socialism in early 20th Century Britain

“The foundations of economic freedom are weakening around the world, according to the 2013 Index of Economic Freedom published by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. Particularly concerning are the rise of populist ‘democratic’ movements that use the coercive power of government to redistribute income and control economic activity,” wrote Ambassador Terry Miller, in The Wall Street Journal of 9 January 2013. Earlier this year, an article in the Economist, ‘Venezuela: The revolution at bay’ (14 February 2015), confirmed the truthfulness of that warning issued by the Heritage Foundation two years ago.

“Sixteen years after Hugo Chavez took power in Venezuela, and two years after he died,” said the report in the Economist, “ his ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ faces the gravest threats yet to its survival. The regime is running out of money to import necessities and pay its debts. There are shortages of basic goods, from milk and flour to shampoo and disposable nappies. Queues, often of several hundred people, form each day outside supermarkets. Ten patients of the University Hospital in Caracas died over the Christmas period because of a shortage of heart valves.”

Despite being the beneficiary of the greatest oil boom in history, receiving around $800 billion in oil revenue between 2000 and 2012, “or two-and-a-half times as much in real terms as in the previous 13 years,” the report continued, “He [Chavez] spent the money on ‘21st century socialism’…As well as rewarding supporters with State jobs (the public payroll has more than doubled in 16 years), Chavez expropriated or nationalised 1,200 companies, from steelworks to a maker of cleaning products. Most now lose money or require government loans just to meet their payroll, according to Victor Alvarez, Chavez’s industry minister in 2005-06. The State subjugates the still large private sector through price controls, which discourage investment and production. The result is that Venezuela imports much of the food and consumer goods it used to produce, though not enough to meet demand.”
– See more at: http://www.cobdencentre.org/2015/10/resisting-socialism-in-early-20th-century-britain/#sthash.URAsbwLC.dpuf

Austerity or Hyperinflation. Which is the Precursor to Revolution?

October 5, 2015

Austerity or Hyperinflation. Which is the Precursor to Revolution?

QUESTION: Mr, Armstrong;

I recently read an article claiming to be a case study that it was somehow the French hyperinflation that led to the revolution. It seems that as you say they are again mixing facts to support a rise in gold with hyperinflation. I am a collector of French monetary history and the paper money came after the revolution not before. Unquestionably, there was austerity prior to the revolution and that seems to be repeating in Europe once again. Would you care to comment on this issue for it seems they are distorting history once again to sell gold.

Your debut here in Paris was super. It has really made some impact starting a discussion.

ANSWER: Yes you are correct. The French hyperinflation came after the French Revolution for they defaulted on their national debts accumulated by the crown and then confiscated the property of the Catholic Church to try to back their post-revolutionary currency. The nation went into hyperinflation because the revolution defaulted on all prior debt and they were then hunting the rich, taking everything they had, and beheaded them. This was not an atmosphere that promotes CONFIDENCE.

These people try to claim the hyperinflation is caused by paper money rather than revolution which results in hunting the rich. The German hyperinflation was the same sequence. It was a communist revolution in 1918 which also defaulted on the national debt of the prior government. It is not the paper money, it is the default that distinguishes both hyperinflation events for CONFIDENCE simply collapses and the economy implodes. By attributing this to “fiat” paper they then assume that we must go into hyperinflation simply because we too have paper money. That is just an unsupported analysis which distorts the entire sequence of events. This analysis is highly dangerous and amounts to consumer fraud.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

You Will Soon Lose Everything You Own Unless You Act Now!

September 27, 2015

You Will Soon Lose Everything You Own Unless You Act Now!

“Conspiracy theorist”

Have you ever sat in a room and couldn’t figure out why people were laughing? They laughed and laughed and laughed as your curiosity grew and grew. And then, suddenly, you realized they were laughing at you! This is what is happening to all Americans. We have been robbed blind and we have scarcely noticed. Now, our very existence is being threatened and people laugh at you for talking about it as they call you a “conspiracy theorist”, “fear-monger” and “the purveyor of doom and gloom”.

I was roundly criticized when I said the Cyprus bail-in scenario was coming to the United States. I was told there would be a revolution if this happened and the government would be too afraid to try such a thing and that we would have 100 million Americans in the street who would be heavily armed.

Listening to these sheep is like listening to a country song played backwards. You know the song where the wife does not leave, the truck still runs and the cowboy stops drinking. Maybe it is all the fluoride in the water that is causing such widespread ignorance and apathy.

The globalists are preparing to steal everything you own, they have rehearsed for this day, they are on a timetable to carry this plot out and they are laughing at our collective stupidity!

The Beta Tests for the “Grand Theft of the American People” Are Complete

The American people have been through several beta tests related to our private wealth being confiscated and no resistance was offered by the sheep of this country.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Last Refuge of the Incompetent

August 20, 2015

The Last Refuge of the Incompetent

There are certain advantages to writing out the ideas central to this blog in weekly bursts. Back in the days before the internet, when a galaxy of weekly magazines provided the same free mix of ideas and opinions that fills the blogosphere today, plenty of writers kept themselves occupied turning out articles and essays for the weeklies, and the benefits weren’t just financial: feedback from readers, on the one hand, and the contributions of other writers in related fields, on the other, really do make it easier to keep slogging ahead at the writer’s lonely trade.

This week’s essay has benefited from that latter effect, in a somewhat unexpected way. In recent weeks, here and there in the corners of the internet I frequent, there’s been another round of essays and forum comments insisting that it’s time for the middle-class intellectuals who frequent the environmental and climate change movements to take up violence against the industrial system. That may not seem to have much to do with the theme of the current sequence of posts—the vacuum that currently occupies the place in our collective imagination where meaningful visions of the future used to be found—but there’s a connection, and following it out will help explain one of the core themes I want to discuss.

The science fiction author Isaac Asimov used to say that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. That’s a half-truth at best, for there are situations in which effective violence is the only tool that will do what needs to be done—we’ll get to that in a moment. It so happens, though, that a particular kind of incompetence does indeed tend to turn to violence when every other option has fallen flat, and goes down in a final outburst of pointless bloodshed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Freedom And Central Planning Can Never Coexist

August 13, 2015

Freedom And Central Planning Can Never Coexist

The average person is a statist, whether he realizes it or not. It is important that liberty activists recognize and accept this fact because the truth of our limitations as a movement determines the kinds of solutions into which we should ultimately put our time and energy. The fantasy of a final grand march of an awake and aware majority on the doorsteps of power is just that: a fantasy. Some people might argue that given more time, such an event could be organized or could happen spontaneously. But these people seem to forget that the immediacy of any crisis inspires awareness and cuts the bindings of complacency for only a certain percentage of any given population. With “more time” often comes more complacency, not less.

So, history becomes a kind of balancing act, with crisis generating the necessity of intelligent and moral action in some people but rarely, if ever, in most people (even during the American Revolution, in which patriots represented a stark minority). The reason that the culture of freedom consistently plateaus and remains stuck at underdog status is because human beings are, first, often acclimated to the idea that crises are things that only happen to other people, and, second, they are obsessed with the idea that governments should retain prohibitory and administrative power over the public as a means to “prevent” crisis from occurring (the sheepdog and sheep mentality).

Not all people necessarily “love” their current government, but many citizens tend to see the idea of government as an inevitability of a stable society. They assume pre-eminence of the state because they have never known anything else.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

So you say you don’t want a revolution?

July 21, 2015

So you say you don’t want a revolution?

Over the past few months we have been forced to bear witness to a humiliating farce unfolding in Europe. Greece, which was first accepted into the European Monetary Union under false pretenses, then saddled with excessive levels of debt, then crippled through the imposition of austerity, finally did something: the Greeks elected a government that promised to shake things up. The Syriza party platform had the following planks, which were quite revolutionary in spirit.

Put an end to austerity and put the Greek economy on a path toward recovery
Raise the income tax to 75% for all incomes over 500,000 euros, adopt a tax on financial transactions and a special tax on luxury goods.
Drastically cut military expenditures, close all foreign military bases on Greek soil and withdraw from NATO. End military cooperation with Israel and support the creation of a Palestinian State within the 1967 borders.
Nationalize the banks.
Enact constitutional reforms to guarantee the right to education, health care and the environment.
Hold referendums on treaties and other accords with the European Union.

Of these, only the last bullet point was acted on: there was a lot made of the referendum which returned a resounding “No!” to EU demands for more austerity and the dismantling and selling off of Greek public assets. But a lot less was made of the fact that the results of this referendum were then ignored.

But the trouble started before then. After being elected, Syriza representatives went to Brussels to negotiate. The negotiations generally went like this: Syriza would make an offer; the EU officials would reject it, and advance their own demands for more austerity; Syriza would make another offer, and the EU officials would reject it too and advance their own demands for even more austerity than in the last round; and so on, all the way until Greek capitulation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Revolution’s Matchstick

July 1, 2015

Revolution’s Matchstick

Fighting The Trans-Pacific Partnership

Rolling down the corporate-political assembly line is a trade deal so treasonous to the peoples of the world that it should serve as revolution’s matchstick. The treaty is secret, but one fact is well known: the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is being negotiated by transnational corporations without a single US legislator present. Each time I hear this, my eyes blink in disbelief. Without a single legislator present … without their presence at negotiations, without so much as seeing a draft of the deal, and most treacherously, without objection or outcry at their exclusion! President Obama has requested our legislators to “fast track the TPP”, which would allow him to sign the deal prior to sending it to Congress for approval or disapproval. If they agree to this, then Congress eschews its right – and its responsibility – to reject parts of the trade deal and reopen negotiations.

This complicity on the part of our legislators sinks an iron weight in my gut. It smacks not of exclusion, but of willing collusion with transnational corporations that have a proven track record of criminality, destruction, and abuse. In my short lifetime, large corporations have been responsible for poisoning two major gulfs with oil spills, blowing up more than five hundred mountains, destroying numerous watersheds, wrecking the food system with toxins, and causing one in six Americans to be evicted from their homes. They have used the media apparatus to deny the existence of climate change, fomented wars, and obstructed truth and justice so often that it is practically an “industry standard.” The list of grievances can be only partial here, but these abuses alone must sound the alarm bells of our conscience. The largest trade deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement is being written in secret by unelected entities that have consistently abused the global population for the sake of profit.

A single thought rings bell-like in my mind.

We must revolt.

Revolution and American Empire

May 30, 2015

Revolution and American Empire

When the Left Promotes the Political Economy of the Far-Right

The American preference for ideological, or ideologically based, explanations of world events frames them as both self-generated and inexplicable— self-generated because causal relations recover history and thereby clutter ideology and inexplicable in that ideology didn’t exist until it did, again recovering history. Through an ideological frame the American Revolution was driven by the desire for ‘freedom’ and the Russian and Cuban Revolutions were driven by Marxist ideology, the desire for socialist or communist political economy. When history is recovered the Russian and Cuban Revolutions were rejections of intolerable— factually unlivable, circumstances whereas the American Revolution was a plutocratic rebellion intended to formally install unlivable circumstances— slavery and genocide against indigenous populations, into local rule against distant colonial (British) economic extraction.

While three centuries of racist chatter leave some ambiguity around when kidnapped Africans (local societies, Africa is a continent, not a people) forced into slavery were considered human beings by White settlers, the political question was answered in 1787 with three-fifths a ‘political’ person assigned to slaves to accrue to the political representation of slaveholders. The indigenous population was excluded from Constitutional political representation entirely. This brief and greatly simplified history is presented for three reasons: 1) American ‘freedom’ as political privilege is the opposite of its generalized form as freedom from it; 2) its political meaning is tied through history to Western imperialism—U.S. history is of overthrowing democratic regimes to support U.S. economic interests and 3), ‘globalization’ presented in the present as historically unique is tied through this history to Western imperialism.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Will The Government Control The Enforcers?

May 27, 2015

How Will The Government Control The Enforcers?

The talk of FEMA camps and martial law has been almost nonstop for the past few years. The actions by the government have led us to the current predicament where the surreal has become the new norm. It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago to imagine we would actually be talking about the subversion and downfall of the United States with little outcry from the population in general.

Many articles have made the case that at least some of the military and police would follow orders to put the population into submission by force if necessary. This would include the forced detention and possible execution of many antigovernment protestors.

If even a small percentage of the enforcers revolted against the government orders it would provide a very large armed component that would add to the armed civilian population and would provide a serious impediment to government operations even if external forces were brought in.

In a serious event it has been noted that many enforcers would simply abandon their posts and go home to protect their families. This is an ever present problem for the government pundits giving the orders. They will want to maintain control over the enforcers at all times and must have sufficient controls in place to do so in a chaotic situation.

One way to maintain that control is to move the family members of those enforcers to “safe” locations where they can be protected while the enforcers do their job. These locations could be FEMA camps or secure military bases that could prevent persons from leaving once inside. This would not only provide safe harbor for those family members but would act as a control mechanism as well.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Are You Ready for the Coming Debt Revolution?

May 16, 2015

Are You Ready for the Coming Debt Revolution?

Gualfin (“End of the Road”), Argentina

Dear Diary,

There is a specter haunting America… and all the developed nations of the world.

It is the specter of a debt revolution.

We left off yesterday talking about how the economy of the last 30 years – and especially that of the last six years – has favored the old over the young.

“Rise up, ye young’uns,” we as much as said, “you have nothing to lose but your parents’ debts.”

We showed how the value of U.S. corporate equity, mainly held by older people, had multiplied by 28 times since 1981.

That was no honest bull market in stocks; it was a market sent soaring by an explosion of credit.

But what did it do for young people whose only assets are their time and their youthful energy?

Alas, the real economy has increased by only five times over the same period.

A Grim and Menacing Specter

And when you look more closely at work and wages, the specter grows grimmer and more menacing.

Average hourly wages have barely budged in the last 30 years. And average household incomes have fallen – from $57,000 to $52,000 – in the 21st century.

But as our fingers came to rest yesterday, there was one question hanging in the air, like the smoke from an exploded hand grenade: Why?

Was this huge shift – of trillions of dollars of wealth from young working people to old asset holders – an accident?

Was it just the maturing of a market economy in the electronic age?

Was it because China took the capitalist road in 1979?

Or because robots were competing with young people for jobs?

Nope… on all three counts.

First, old people, not young people, control government.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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