To: The Occupy Movement -- The 99% Own The Means of Consumption

Marx thought that Production was the answer: That wresting the means of production from the capitalist class and passing it to the worker would end the exploitation of the 99% But that was never going to happen, even with revolution and bloodshed.

Owning the means of Production: The factories producing, cars, TVs, furniture, and all the trappings of consumerism would set workers free. But it didn't happen.

But, I realized in 2003, we, the 99% own something far more powerful, and far more frightening to the 1% -

We Own the Means of Consumption.

We, the 99%, are the factory of debt. We, the 99%, control the very process of capital creation. We choose to create debt. We can choose not to repay debt. We choose when to purchase products. We can choose not to buy products.

Where we judge the behaviour of a corporate citizen to be antisocial, we can choose not to buy their products or refuse to repay debt.

The 99% Owns The Means Of Consumption. 
Even more powerful than withholding labour power, we have the power to control private capital by choosing not to purchase products or debt.

We Own The Means of Consumption.
What will we do with it?

The Marionette Unit

One of the reasons I have not been blogging frequently since arriving in Vancouver has been my involvement in a writing project called The Marionette Unit, which I co-wrote with director and good friend, Azhur Saleem and is produced by another good friend James Boyle.


I really enjoy co-writing, so long as the parties involved are on the "same page" creatively. Happily, that is the case with me and Azhur. We both have a passion for telling stories that are entertaining but have depth and something to say. As a writer, I tend to "see" the things I write before or as I write them. Even though I express my ideas in words, those words are painting a scene and the characters within it.

As a director, Azhur is also vert visual and brings so much to the story-telling process. Working with him is creatively very rewarding as we take the seed of an idea and bounce it back and forth. Like a snowball rolling downhill, it gathers shape and form in this process and we produce something that is greater than the sum of our individual efforts.

I have tried collaborations before, but egos have tended to destroy the ideas before they get a chance to take on their own creative lives.

With Azhur, we respect each others creativity and skill sets and we're not afraid to disagree, because the critique is for one purpose: to make the piece as good as it can get.

The Marionette Unit has just receive €10,000 of funding from the 5th Vevey European First Films Award and further funding is sure to be forthcoming. It will be my first screenplay to go into production and it will be an interesting experience. There will be something surreal watching an actor on the silver screen speak words I have conjured from the ether and written on the page. It will also be very humbling.

As I move forward with my other writing projects, some of them in collaboration with Azhur and James, I will remember this project with great affection, and know that along with creativity, tenacity and self-belief, a writer as needs the helping hand of serendipity.

Picture-card storyteller teams up to pass down the traditional art | The Japan Times Online

Past times in Japan to be preserved. The art of Picture-Card story telling:

Picture-card storyteller teams up to pass down the traditional art | The Japan Times Online

Change of place

I have left the UK and for the time being I am residing in Taos, New Mexico. This is a temporary state, but all states are.

The altitude is about 7000 feet and the humidity is low. I've spent the first 2 days acclimatising to the thin air and the drying effects of the desert: my lips are drying and cracking.

Taos had a lot of snow on Sunday and the street on which I'm staying is still covered with compacted snow. I walk slowly and deliberately. But the air is clear and clean and the light at this elevation is spectacular. The sunset leaves vivid colours on the mountains and it reminds me of the skies in Australia.

"Fast Change"

Although I reconcile myself to change in all its forms, when change happens in a geometric progression, an acceleration, it does leave me breathless. Today I leave my job at Apple Regent Street after a year and prepare for the changes ahead. I leave behind new friends, experiences and a rancid commute.

I keep coming back to the scene in "Lost in Translation" when Bill Murray's character is in the hotel bar and says to Scarlet Johansen: "I've got this idea: first we've got to get out of this bar, then this hotel, then the city and then the country. Are you in?"

It's going to be strange to leave the comfort of routine behind, but the uncertainty brings with it creativity and I feel ideas starting to stir.

I am eager to see what this new future holds.

What would you do for £100?

In these economically pressed times, what would you do for $202? 

Wal-Mart seems to be the epicentre of this herd mentality, that left one employee trampled to death. At another Wal-mart in Columbus, Ohio, Ms Nikki Nicely -- aged 19 -- was prepared to give and receive physical violence.

According to the The New York Times, Ms Nicely: "...jumped onto a man’s back and pounded his shoulders when he tried to take a 40-inch Samsung flat-screen television to which she had laid claim. “That’s my TV!” Ms. Nicely shouted. “That’s my TV!” A police officer and security guard intervened, but not before Ms. Nicely took an elbow in the face. In the end, she was the one with the $798 television, marked down from $1,000. “That’s right,” she cried as her adversary walked away. “This here is my TV!”"

What is our life for? What is it worth? 

About £100, it seems. 

Denying Reality: Financial Markets on the edge

It's not healthy to deny what is happening around you. Reality is more than just perception, it is what happens while you ignore it until some event forces you to reconsider that perception.

However, the financial markets are built on perception and that has given us the boom in property prices here in the UK and in the US, plus the dramatic "credit crunch" we are now experiencing. Northern Rock was the prelude, a little taster of what was to come. The real performance started this year on Wall Street: the collapse of Bear Sterns with its rescue with public money, the nationalisation ("Conservatorship") of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and now the imminent collapse of Lehman Brothers bank and perhaps the buyout of Merril Lynch.

All these institutions got in to their current predicaments by short term thinking, using massive bonus to reward investments with no long term viability. This was fuelled by irrational group psychology of the trading floors, which in turn is fuelled by testosterone. This clouds the perceptions of not only the dealers but the executives who control the organisations. As one investor has commented "Lehman tried to deny reality until the bitter end."

"Competition and growth" are the bywords of free market capitalism, not "co-operation and sustainability." Competition is a masculine mindset, the same testosterone fuelled psychology that bought us the zero-sum game.

Will it change? That depends on how cynical you are. Hope is normally lumped together with Idealism by those who prefer the status quo. But if the credit crunch tells us one thing, it is that if you live by the market; you die by the market.

When all we had was our labour-power to sell, we banded together to form labour unions. They worked so well that by the 1970s they were too powerful for the ruling elites. The pendulum has now swung back towards the property owners. Capital, the financial markets are all powerful and it seems there is no way we can change things. But we can: We own the means of consumption.

We can choose to borrow. We can choose what to spend our money on. We can even save it. If this financial crisis proves anything, it proves we can take control of the financial markets by withholding our participation within them. By choosing how and where we spend our money, we can starve the markets of what they need: financially ignorant players from whom they can fuel their cancer-like growth.

Change is in our hands. What will we do with it?

The morning commute

Five years ago my commute involved a bus and short train or ferry journey across Sydney harbour.

London is different. I live close to a tube station on the Piccadilly line, about 30 minutes from the centre of Town and the morning regimen goes something like this:

Get the tube before 8am or it looks like this:



People packed in so tight, face to face, clenched fists hang from rails and expressions universally devoid of emotion, too cowed to even show anger.

Most read free news papers, disposable entertainment and seething predigested anger, a proxy for their own disenchantment at their lives.

The train stops frequently and not just at stations. The "customers," as TFL management call this hot and sweaty cargo, sway and lurch. We arrive at Hammersmith.


Into the underground, as hot as hades, with companions that show few signs of life. No one talks. Not to themselves or to others. Both would be a sign of madness here. We are individuals, not a community. Everyone else here is to annoy "me," the identity constructed by advertising in The Metro.

By Earl's Court the carriage fills once more, the temporary relief of the quick-whitted jumping ship for the District line gone. There is nowhere to put your feet and arms are a cats-cradle reaching for a few inches of empty handhold.

Hyde park. A scramble for the doors. Space, room to breathe and perspire. Soon the scramble for the Bakerloo line. The urgent need for all the exiting passengers to be First through the doors causes a log jam. On the Bakerloo platform the train arrives promptly and once on board the competitors take up positions around the carriage door, ready for the running start for the escalators at the other end.

We swarm out of the train and jostle each other to be first on the escalators. Finally, outside in the morning air of London I can relax. Others reach for cigarettes and take needy gulps of smoke into their lungs to relieve their own tensions.

I savour the moments of space and relative peace, before turning my back on the London Underground experience and begin the working day.

Polly Toynbee and David Walker: an extract from their new book on the widening gap between rich and poor |

Polly Toynbee and David Walker: an extract from their new book on the widening gap between rich and poor |
Money |
The Guardian: "'We now live in a separate economy, we live on a separate level to the vast majority of people in the country. We don't send our kids to the same schools, we have more choice over schools, we have more choice over health, we have more choice over where we live, we have more choice over where we go on holiday and what we do for our jobs. And we live in a completely different world to the people we live next door to.'"

Youth crime: Greedy, rude adults 'fuelling teen violence'

"Sometimes as adults we don't model the behaviour we would want youngsters to follow. We live in a greedy culture, we are rude to each other in the street. Children follow that."

As we become more separated from others, as we become more dependent of material things to bring short-term gratification, we grow ever-more angry when we do not get the things we think we deserve.

Marketing sells us the idea that we deserve things, creating need from want. When that is not satisfied we become angry. Is it any wonder our children, who can only learn from example, begin to exhibit behaviour that we already possess.

Black Rain on the Thames

Umbrellas, hoods, designer jackets and shoddy rain macs. A steady
stream of amble past the Film cafe on the south bank. An woman stares
at me until I meet eye contact, the turns away. Blue, red, yellow,
white wheel held aloft to repel the rain that falls in steady circles
on the grey cobbles.

Summer in London. Crowds dispersed by elemental water. Peaceful as the
puddle on an abadonned table.

George Monbiot: Trawlermen cling on as oceans empty - and the ecosystem is gasping | Comment is free | The Guardian

George Monbiot: Trawlermen cling on as oceans empty - and the ecosystem is gasping | Comment is free | The Guardian: "ust as the oil price now seems to be all that stands between us and runaway climate change, it is also the only factor which offers a glimmer of hope to the world's marine ecosystems. No east Asian government was prepared to conserve the stocks of tuna; now one-third of the tuna boats in Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea will stay in dock for the next few months because they can't afford to sail. The unsustainable quotas set on the US Pacific seaboard won't be met this year, because the price of oil is rising faster than the price of fish. The indefinite strike called by Spanish fishermen is the best news European fisheries have had for years. Beam trawlermen - who trash the seafloor and scoop up a massive bycatch of unwanted species - warn that their industry could collapse within a year. Hurray to that too."

This is indeed excellent news. I come from an old fishing family and my father told me how the British fish stocks in the North Sea and English channel were on the verge of collapse in 1939. When WWII broke out, these sea areas were heavily mined and un-fish-able for nearly 8 years. This gave the stock time to recover and my mother tells me the size of fish caught in the late 1940s to the 1960s was amazing -- one filet of Plaice was like an entire fish now.

The best thing for the ecosystem would be a total ban on fishing. As that will never happen -- its not politically expedient -- the high price of oil is the next best thing.

The no's have it

Today's Britain is angry. We know that everyting is wrong. We
participate in the democratic process in negative: we vote against
everyting the government stands for, but what are we for? We don't
know, because to work that out requires original thought on our part.

We look to others to tell us what to think, under the guise of seeking
consensus with our point of view. Anything that challenges our
comfortable assumptions and received prejudices is other; alien and
threatening.

While in America, a movement grows around an idea of positive change,
something people with open minds can vote for, we have - what?

When there is a real chance of an African American becoming president,
it makes me wonder when we will have our first non-white prime
minister? 5 years? 10 years? 20?

Until Britain becomes comfortable with its own self-identity we will
not see a visible minority leader. This is the truth that remains
unspoken, tacit in every Daily Mail headline.

Until then we will remain against everything and for nothing except
personal gain.

The clock of the Long Now

On a recent trip to the London Science Museum, I made a pilgrimage to view the first prototype of the Clock of the Long Now. It sits in a quiet corner of the first floor hall where other items of the 20th Century gather dust. 

It was strange to see items from my life -- audio cassettes, a Sinclair ZX81, black & white TVs -- arrayed in sections and occasionally ogled at by passers by. 

As our lives accelerate further, how much more work-a-day ephemera will appear as history only after a few years?

Where did my Now Go?

When Google bought blogger they changed the security settings and I forgot my old ID and password. I tried to recover them but I had entered my email details wrong. For nearly 2.5 years I was locked out of this Blog, but if I am truthful with myself, I had nothing to write anyway.

So much has changed in my life and I have not always been living in the Now. I've found living a constant fight to and ignoring my awareness has helped me cope with the change.

I left Australia and returned to Britain. In the 4 years I had been away from the UK, either it had changed or I had. I suspect this country has always been hard to live in, it was I that has become aware and see it for its true self. There is little sense of community. People are isolated and materialistic. Londoners particularly are rude and passively angry.

I need to reopen my awareness. But that is so, so difficult when doing so leaves my sensitivity vulnerable to every thoughtless and petty selfish act on the street.

All I need do is capture my experiences here. The reconnection with this blog somehow gives me roots in a rootless, globalised world. When I regained control of this blog last night, I told my partner and burst into tears.

In some strange ways, picking this up again was like returning home.

I'm Back

I'm back.

After Blogger moved over to using Google Accounts, this blog was orphaned. Now, after many attempts at regain entry, I have finally regained access. I am once more able to contemplate The Long Now and share it with the rest of the internet.

So many years have passed. So much has changed. Much good, some bad. All experienced.

More soon.

I am back.

William A. Cook: Righteous Racism Running Rampant

William A. Cook: Righteous Racism Running Rampant

An economic aneurysm

Channelnewsasia.com: "Some view the rise of China as 'simply an economic threat to the advanced industrial economies' and sought protectionism against Chinese imports.

'But let us be clear that this is only a sterile attempt to stop the clock and resist inevitable change.

'China has been responsible for keeping the world economy growing as the advanced industrial economies went into a downturn.

'Indeed, without China, trade growth which slowed more than at any time in recent world downturns would have ground to a complete halt or gone into reverse,' he said"

China's prodigious growth has kept global growth going even through the major down turns of the last 10-15 years.

But what will happen when China has its first depression? When this bubble, this aneurysm, bursts, the rest of the world will suffer -- and it will hurt us all.

It is time to stop the pyramid scheme of capitalism. Stop the osmosis of exchange value. We need to stop excluding people from life and start including.

What price morals?

News: "'We argue that we don't carry out or instigate torture ourselves, but if information from it comes our way, we won't refuse it. But in criminal law, when a known thief asks you to buy a stolen TV for �10, it is no defence to say that I didn't ask him to steal it and I wasn't there when he stole it - I just bought the stolen goods.'"

My life's been transformed

My life's been transformed: model who survived tsunami - World - www.smh.com.au