| ******************************************************************* TURN ON YOUR COMPUTER TUNE IN TO THE FREE SPIRIT OF THE INTERNET, TAKE oVEr! (\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/) the UP//:-) 113 la - la - la - lap-toppling da system! (\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/) the great wired zippy hoax! p2. WORK SUCKS! PART THREE GOING ALL THE WAY: ZERO WORK p14. How Do I Stop Being Complicit? p6. LOG CABIN - WHITE HOUSE? NO MORE! Will Hutton p11. WOT IS GLOBALISATION ACTUALLY? & WOT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT? at end. “A special thanks to Fraser Clark - The Parallel YOUniversity - for the fantastic info they send us” - ting@poleshift.net U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U UP P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P The UPGRADEmag (or just the "UP") is a global edutainment round-up, ‘broadcast’ weekly to =[10,448]= Alternative// Activist// Zippy// Trance// New Age folks who’ve been recommended to the Parallel YOUniversity//Megatripolis Dance Dept as "showing signs of life". Since many recipients choose to forward it to their own lists, we estimate 28,000+ recipients. Further, because of its less 'specialist' content, it's increasingly being posted on a variety of sites worldwide, making a total weekly ‘readership’ of 275,000+ U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U UP P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * ASTRO ENERGY ANALYSIS MAY 9-14 * * * * * * * * * * *
UP-COMMUNICATE! Clear focus leads to an intense new creative cycle, beginning Friday. Sunday is New Moon in Taurus, the garden sign - Flowers for Mother’s Day! With Gemini dominating the skies, our challenge is to find the stable unity behind dualities. Clear communication, clear thinking, and correct choice are the keys to success. See Maya’s Daily Success Guide at www.daykeeperjournal.com * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * good work on the UP. it sets my brain off on all kinds of tangents, some of which I may share with you one day... :) cheerz, Matt / Paris UP- MILLION MARIJUANA MARCH we don’t have any word yet on the worldwide celebrations but the London Cannabis Festival had around 60,000 people in Brockwell Park on an overcast but dry day. i saw no trouble the whole day, and everybody was there. it got a couple of columns’ coverage in at least one Sunday paper, but the very next day 40,000 pro-israeli supporters grabbed national mainline tv news coverage. figure it out. FOTOS OF 60,000 POT SMOKING CAMPAIGNERS - http://www.guilfin.net/database/showevent.php3?ev_id=evINET1199#pix UP- "US foreign policy can be defined as follows: 'Kiss my arse or I'll kick your head in.'" Harold Pinter
http://www.freeburma.org/ UP- EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE A DJ! One in seven British men in their thirties dreams of becoming a DJ or buying a Scaletrix set, according to a new survey carried out by Barclaycard (Visa). 14% of the 1000 men surveyed revealed they’re planning on buying decks, the same proportion thinking about getting Scaletrix or Subbutteo. Two thirds of 30-somethings still go clubbing, while a further 80% continue buying “the latest trainers”. London Evening Standard. http://www.skrufff.com UP-
SO MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN FORWARDING ME THE MISSIVE BELOW THAT IT FEELS INCUMBENT ON ME O PUBLISH IT. FOR THOSE UNFAMILIAR WITH THIS EARLYISH PART OF RAVE HISTORY, THE ARTICLE SPEAKS FOR ITSELF. MY OWN COMMENT? I S’POSE THE MISTAKE IS TO THINK YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED. REF HESSE''S STEPPENWULF + BY MY RECKONING, DAVID’S CONCLUSIONS ARE 7 YEARS EARLY - 15 YEAR CANVASSES'N ALL THAT + A WAR IS FINALLY BEGINNING TO AWAKEN AMERICA :)
* the sneaking suspicion that others are conspiring behind your back to help yyou - and you them.THE GREAT WIRED ZIPPY HOAX THE ZIPPY PRONOIA* TOUR TO US by David Dei "I was one of the original four people who dreamt up and planned the Pronoia Tour from Fraser Clark's London flat... and I was there for all the successes and failures.... " John Bagby (the "official" Zippy Pronoia Tour to US website.) THE first time I came across John Bagby was deep in the Well Zippy Conference in 1995. Members of the elite Internet Bulletin Board in Sausalito, CA. had been ruminating for weeks about my involvement with Fraser Clark and Tim Leary's Intervasion of the UK. I am the "African" Zippy and one of the 14 Zippies associated with the "Pronoia Tour to US". My association with the "official" tour and its aftermath created some serious havoc in my life - 8 years later there remains nothing substantial to show for my time spent in the US. I now believe that the whole thing was an enormous media hoax, perpetrated by Wired Magazine. The hoax engineered by the then, new Wired magazine cover story of a "subculture" named the Zippies, began with readers buying into the idea that Zippies were something like "The next Beatles". Perhaps the media should have realised straight away that something was terribly wrong with painting a bunch of British ravers as the next best thing since sliced bread, but then milking the new emerging youth subculture for all it was worth made headlines, sold copy, and created the idea that something truly magical was happening Latching onto rave culture to promote seemingly progressive but off-beat ideas (including outdoor clubbing, Pronoia, psychedelics, The Internet, and Techno Trance), seemed alluring to a young audience peaking towards the new millennium. For promoters with an eye for attractive new markets, this was the holy grail of advertising. Admittedly Clark, like the Wired editors and other left-leaning techno magazines,already had an eye for raw talent, new beats, chilled-out music and so on, but that's pretty much where it ended. The tour was, unfortunately, not about the music, nor even the technology. Publicity became an end in itself - the Prime Mover behind the tour, anything to sell "Zippy" to the Media,and the Media to the Zippy Market. Journalists far outnumbered the small crew, andadherents of the original Zippy generation, even more so. The countless stories about the new Zippy tribe (Time, Newsweek, Village Voice etc) created the false impression that here was a totally new phenomenon, to be feted and promoted. Hold back your kids, this is it - The next Beatles. We should all have realized straight away there was something massively wrong with the very notion of an "official" Zippy tour, along with "official" Zippy tourers, ravers, promoters. The problem children behind the glossy photographs were being exploited to sell products, and worse still, a rampant drug-taking consumerism, matched only by an over-addiction to new technology, prevailed. Instead of Peace Love Unity and Respect (PLUR) what you had was heavy industry programming trips into the future. In fact it wasn't until things had gotten completely out of hand, with nothing less than a meltdown in San Francisco, (and my subsequent flight back to South Africa), that I realized the extent of the global rift between Clark, Bagby and would-be backer, Ray Navarra, had turned into a seriously problematic equation. Lets put a few things straight. I was never actually a part of the "official" tour. I only joined up with the posse right after the Grand Canyon Mega Rave, in San Francisco in late summer 1995. Naively, it was with the intention of helping Clark out with his trance dancing endeavors. Stupidly, I assumed that things would roll along like any Mega-Zippy production back in England. But this was not to be - my role had already been preordained - mapped out by Clark, some might say mystically, in London in August 1993, when I had stopped over at his club, Megatripolis, on a self-funded journey via the then emerging UK youth-culture. In South Africa, I was just a publisher and cultural activist. Like Clark, I published "underground" periodicals and paraphernalia, hosted non-racial events (including raves) and promoted new ideas. We had corresponded occasionally - there was always the suggestion of something big about to happen. Coming from the freshly liberated, but isolated South, I had no way of knowing what technologies like the World Wide Web existed. All of these interesting concepts were then new to me - Surfing the Net, Internet Cafes, Video Conferencing, E-Commerce, Dot.Coms, Digital Photography, and of course, Sampling Music using the very latest electronic equipment. Clark had, on the spur of the moment, simply invited me to come over with him to the US: "I'll introduce you to Tim Leary", he said, casually, when I dropped the name into our conversation. I told him I intended going to America anyway. By the time we managed to meet again, the Mega Rave had come and gone. In spite of this disadvantage I helped coax Tim Leary into launching the World's first global electronic vote against Margaret Thatcher’s Criminal Justice Act - The Intervasion of the UK via computer. As far as I was concerned, this was high art, and pure mischief on behalf of the newly liberated territory of cyberspace. Those who were a part of this event will know about "the law" that literally banned outdoor raves and "music with a repetitive beat" back in the UK. While media stories were still breaking, I found myself embroiled in a logistical (and absurd) nightmare, unhelped by the continuing rift between competing promoters,the enigmatic Bagby and the ageing Navarra; competing tours, and the assumption that the media, along with Wired executives had created and probably owned, a new techno tribe. Clark's intention, I suppose, was to keep the ball rolling while Navarra would somehow profit from all of this additional Zippy exposure. Without asking me if I considered myself a part of the new tour, I was handed $20 by a promoter and told to keep quiet. Without a cent to my name, I stupidly accepted this as yet another one of Clark's extraordinary antics. What happened next? Nobody really knows for sure. But, having been roped into what remained of the original "Zippy Tour" by Clark and his girlfriend Zana, and treated merely as one of the ordinary ravers carrying crates and cabinets, I was symbolically transformed into some kind of a mascot, a foil I guess, for the "official" Zippy cadets living in San Francisco. In reality I had fallen prey to the official hoax behind the Mega Rave - the so-called "official" Zippy Pronoia Tour To US had really nothing to do with the original Zippies, nor Zippy the Pinhead for that matter. What is more, events then emerging in San Francisco were without any form of substance control. Trance, Technology and Psychedelic Chaos reigned supreme, while Wired-up media executives took all the credit. If there had been any kind of real plan, so masterfully concocted by Bagby as to create a Zippy invasion of the US, along with all the repercussions of a Tour across America, and a subsequent Mission to SF, and Intervasion of the UK, then it really had nothing to do with me. Perceived as a Zippy late-comer, I was some kind of new age nobody - or worse still - a toy poodle eating cold scraps thrown by the media and "official" photographers like Peter Booth Lee who swarmed around the tour. The truth is sometimes hard to swallow - instead of coming clean about this deception and other startling realities, Clark and Bagby persisted in leading me, including my family, along the garden path, creating the false impression that everything was going according to some well-laid out Zippy corporate "mega-plan", of whose substance more would inevitably be dropped as the trip became clearer. Eventually I gave up waiting for Armageddon, or the Millennium or whatever, and moved on. "I work on a wide canvas, sometimes my ideas take fifteen years to pan out," posted Clark in a recent letter looking back at that period. Zippy Schmippy. Yea, right. Unfortunately, the canvas of my own life, down in the South, and across the Digital Divide, will never be up for grabs ever again. While I don't regret being a Zippy, or joining some kind of "Tour", I do have misgivings about allowing myself to get caught in an unnecessary and unfortunate media hoax. The whole thing could have been avoided by simply abandoning the idea of an "official" tour, and freeing the Zippy generation for the masses, instead I suffered the consequences of a "double reality." While seemingly an "African" member of the "official" Zippy Pronoia Tour to US - the official Zippy web-site owned by Bagby testifies to this fact - the truth is rather different. Of the original "13" official Zippies, and the addition of one original, myself, two ended up spending their time in San Francisco at soup kitchens or waiting in bread lines. The rest are probably still "on tour somewhere" in America. I languish at home and wonder if my UFO will ever land and take me back to France where it's much warmer. While I have kept up contact with Clark, and we remain friends, I no longer believe in the existence of John Bagby, Peter Booth Lee or Wired Magazine, nor in their chosen methods, some of which I find troubling and especially problematic now that the turn of the century has come and gone. David Robert Lewis (AKA David Dei) [Contact David at deity@iafrica.com or a self-addressed envelope to The UnOfficial Zippy Fan Club, PO Box 4398, Cape Town 8000, Rep. South Africa] UP- US foreign policy is run by a private business club: The Council on Foreign Relations --- http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2807 good guys bad guys? Having been an activist for years, it can be hard to move UPstream against the current when the current is comprised of those with whom I've identified for a long time. Well, I'm not liking the herd/current thing I'm seeing among progressives to take sides with the Palestinians, or rather, the Palestinian leadership. Like the Israeli people, the Palestinian people deserve much much more, from basic needs to delicious leisure time. Yes, they've been living under the Israeli government's boot for decades, but the situation is more complex than good guys, bad guys. The so-called Jenin massacre was a crock of shit. Not saying people didn't die and that it wasn't terrible, but even the Palestinian authority now admits that maybe 50 Palestinians were killed... about 15 more than the number of Israeli soldiers who were killed. But the publicity has been made, misinformation or not. Has the anti Israeli publicity been an excuse or a cause of a wave of anti semitic activity throughout Europe? Arafat is a lying sack and has, for years, supported incredibly anti-semitic (not just anti-Israeli) teaching throughout the school system, instilling in Palestinian children the desire to see a Jewish bloodbath. He's no hero and doesn't deserve to be seen as such. So...I urge you, and other conscious folks, to not follow the tide, even if it feels like it's about helping the under dog. The Palestinian authorities and the Arabic policies and interests that are clearly intertwined with them, are not innocent lambs. I've been following the relationship between US foreign policy and Israel for years. But I'm still looking for more balanced accounts, analysis and opinions. erick b, sunny LA - i still get the feeling u r taking sides and then blaming me for taking the opposite one. which i am not doing. try the following article, sent in by someone like yourself who’s reached a different conclusion on the same facts. UP- Please, Dad, How Do I Stop Being Complicit? Dear Dad, It was an enormously heavy responsibility you raised me with. You taught me that the Jews have been oppressed for centuries. You taught me that the holocaust could only happen because the Germans were silent. You taught me that Jews must never, never, never be silent when injustice occurs, because our silence makes us complicit. You taught me about history, and you taught me by your actions. As a rabbi, you preached against racism in the south, and had to leave a pulpit in Louisiana when they threatened to kill our family. You worked for open housing laws, insisting that there should be no ghettos in America like the ones your parents had lived in Europe. You counseled Jewish kids who were conscientious objectors, eliciting the hostility of many who believed that the Vietnam war was a valiant struggle for justice in our time. It is a heavy responsibility I carry now. Because now I am complicit. I have not stood in front of the tanks that are killing other mothers' children in refugee camps. I have not ridden in ambulances to help them get past checkpoints so that the injured could be cured. I have not laid in front of the bulldozers to prevent their destroying a family's shelter. What can I do about this injustice? You taught me Judaism's universal message. "I am a Jew because in all places where there are tears and suffering the Jew weeps." I believed Edmond Fleg's words, "I am a Jew because Israel places man and his unity above nations and above Israel itself." Dad, we have become the oppressors. One rabbinic student told me years ago when I lived in Israel that this was the meaning behind the warning to remember that we were slaves in the land of Egypt. We were warned to remember, because sometimes slaves want to become masters. We are the oppressors, and we are also the victims. Jews are being killed, and at the same time, the moral imperative that you taught me was part of being Jewish seems to be vanishing. I believe that Jews are being used by an American administration to accomplish its own ends, ends that have nothing to do with the ideals of Jews. We need to shout aloud that 80% of the billions that the US gives Israel in aid must be spent on weapons, and that more than half of those weapons are built in Texas. And Jews are being used by an Israeli government that has no interest except territorial expansion. Sharon is the ideological heir to Jabotinsky. Land for peace was never in that ideology. War makes conquest possible, and all the people of Israel and Palestine are being drawn, tragically and together, into that war. We must act, and we must act immediately. Jews are being used to legitimize the slaughter of Palestinians. Please, Dad, tell me how to be like you taught me to be. How do I stop being complicit? I love you. Sarah Shields [Sarah is an associate professor of Middle East history at UNC Chapel Hill] http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0410-01.htm UP- israel EXTRA! EXTRA! - WEST BANK OPENED UP Chekkout Eyal Weizman's revelatory series of articles and photo-essays on the three-dimensional conflict on the West Bank. It's in short, accessible sections, illustrated with a welter of images including aerial photographs, plans and maps. It's a totally new way of looking - as revealing as the first time we saw the inside of the human body, with all its sinews, organs and veins: TO DATE: 1. Maps and how they've shaped the territory 2. The hills and valleys of the West Bank 3. West Bank settlements 4. From water to shit (aquifers and sewage) 5. Excavating sacredness 6. Jerusalem 7. Roads - over and under 8. Control in the air http://www.opendemocracy.net/forum/document_details.asp?CatID=127&DocID=1253 UP- Hi Fraser it’s a long time since i've seen an UP in my inbox, well two weeks, it seems a long time. Are you OK? Maybe just having a week off - if so sorry for being pushy but i miss my weekly dose of edutainment. UPs are an important part of my week and i sometimes contribute, not receiving one for two weeks leaves me feeling a bit lost and concerned some dark force may have removed me from the HipList. What's going on brother - please assure me all is well and send any UPs that have come out since the 10th April. Thanks very much L&P Paul F / london UP- Tom Robbins “CAT ON A HOT TIN PARAGRAPH: OUR LIVES ARE NOVELS, REALITY’S MADE OF WORDS” “The tin can was invented in 1811. The can opener wasn’t invented until 1855. In the intervening 44 years, would-be consumers had to access their pork ‘n’ beans with a hammer and chisel. “Suspecting mainstream literature not to mention orthodox religion, psychoanalysis, Marxism, consumerism, academism, and 99 per cent of self-realization techniques to be a collection of dull chisels and rubber hammers, my aim (unrealistic perhaps) has been to try to write novels that might function as can openers in the supermarket of life. “Or (changing metaphors in midstream), I could say that my goal has been to twine ideas and images into big subversive pretzels of life, death and goofiness, on the chance that they might help keep the world lively and give it the flexibility to endure. “Some time ago, I reached the conclusion that we are in this existence to enlarge our souls, light up our brains and liberate our spirits. Pondering the role that language, imagination, humor, sexuality, risk, attitude, spirituality, and altered states of consciousness play in that process is what keeps the little feet running in my hamster cage.” UP- FOTOS FROM LONDON’S MAYDAY DEMO AND CARNIVAL - http://www.guilfin.net/database/showevent.php3?ev_id=evINET1395#pix hydrogen technology anyone? I recently spoke to a very knowledgeable insider who has never been wrong in the past. He gave me some disturbing information about plans for bringing out hydrogen technology in the mainstream. There are apparently plans, in the next 3 years,to gradually introduce vehicles which can run on a water based fuel BUT, and its a really big but, the main reason it has been delayed has been in order to develop a system with gismo in the water, an additive,something that cannot be reproduced easily. Engines will be powered by electricity generated by hydrogen on demand but with a slightly doped fuel. This will enable the manufacturers to sell this new fuel in a conventional way through filling stations. It will be sold slightly cheaper than conventional fuels and, yes, it will benefit the environment butwon't upset the status quo. The power base will remain the same. The Rayman / Manchester UP- “Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.” Horace 65-8 B.C. Molecules, Miracles, Passion and The Unity Field: Where Does Technology End and God Begin? Twenty-First-Century science is on the threshold of the single discovery that may, at last, bridge our two greatest sources of knowledge science and religion and solve the deepest mysteries of our species. For the first time in recorded history, we have at our fingertips the ability to change our genetic code, shift our planet’s weather, engineer new forms of life and duplicate existing ones - powers that have traditionally been left to God and the forces of nature. The controversy surrounding stem cells, atmospheric lenses and genetically modified foods suggests that our technologies may have outpaced our understanding of where such knowledge fits into our lives. Now, the same science that has unlocked creation’s innermost secrets must solve the deepest mysteries of all: the very nature of our consciousness, our soul and ultimately our creator. Three ground breaking experiments reported by leading research institutions of our day offer the foundation for precisely such understanding. Relegated to technical journals, and receiving little attention from mainstream media, these experiments unveil dramatic and undeniable evidence of a newly recognized form of energy. The existence of this matrix, suggests that: 1. We communicate with our world through a previously unrecognized form of energy that operates space and time. 2. DNA directly influences our physical world through this energy. 3. Emotions directly influence our DNA through this unconventional form of energy. Amidst the clarity of the genetic code of life and equations relating matter and energy, gaps and inconsistencies remain in our scientific worldview. At the same time, the spiritual history of humankind appears to hold the most complete record of our origins and capabilities. Interestingly, both science and religion continue to reference one another to fill the missing pieces of their respective traditions. The key to bridging these two empowering resources may be in recognizing that each is a fragment, of a much greater wisdom. While science describes the knowledge of “why” our world functions as it does, religious traditions have preserved the techniques of “how” to apply such understandings in our lives. Our ability to marry the sacred traditions of our past with the most sophisticated science of our future may yield nothing less than the greatest epoch of peace yet known to our kind - keys to our very survival. GREGG BRADEN (appearing at The Prophets Conference Santa Fe: Poets, Mystics, Magicians June 7-9) http://www.greatmystery.org/santafeconference.html UP-
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Now that campaign has seen a prestigious scientific journal become the latest casualty. Andy Rowell, The Big Issue, April 15-21 2002 UP- LOG CABIN TO WHITE HOUSE? NOT ANY MORE! In The World We're In, Will Hutton argues that the US can no longer lay claim to being the land of opportunity America is the most unequal society in the industrialised West. The richest 20% of Americans earn nine times more than the poorest 20%, a scale of inequality half as great again as in Japan, Germany and France. At the very top of American society, incomes and wealth have reached stupendous proportions. The country boasts some three million millionaires, and the richest 1% of the population hold 38 per cent of its wealth, a concentration more marked than in any comparable country. This inequality is the most brutal fact of American life. Nor is it excused by more mobility and opportunity than other societies, America's great conceit. The reality is that US society is polarising and its social arteries hardening. The sumptuousness and bleakness of the respective lifestyles of rich and poor represent a scale of difference in opportunity and wealth that is almost medireview - and a standing offence to the American expectation that everyone has the opportunity for life, liberty and happiness. The chief means by which contemporary Western societies offer their citizens a chance to reach reasonable living standards and move up the social and economic hierarchy is education. At first sight, the US does well. In the schooling system, its fourth-grade students (the fourth year of primary school) do better than their international counterparts, and 37% of its 18- to 21-year-olds go through higher education, one of the highest proportions in the industrialised West. Moreover, the US's university standards, especially in the top 50, are on average the best in the world. Salaries are high and the research record excellent. But take a closer look, using more stringent criteria. As a system that offers every American a chance for educational achievement and the acquisition of formal academic or vocational qualifications - the key instrument for social mobility - the US structure fails. By twelfth grade (the year after GCSE), American students are falling behind their international peers, especially in mathematics and science. And while in Germany, for example, 80% of school-leavers go on to receive either vocational training or a degree and all except 1% receive formal post-secondary education or training, in the US 46% of school-leavers gain no certificate or degree - and an extraordinary 31% have never received formal training or education after leaving school. The message is stark. Those Americans who do not get to college are pushed into the labour market with a poverty of skills, educational and vocational training. Those who do get to college are overwhelmingly students from the higher socio-economic backgrounds, just as they always have been; a study in 1965 found that two-thirds of the explanation for educational achievement was accounted for by family income; a study 30 years later found exactly the same figure. As inequality grows, the grip of the wealthy on educational advantage becomes ever more evident, for the cost of going to university over the last 25 years has exploded. The average cost of tuition fees and room and board has risen fourfold since 1977 to an average of $10,315 (£7,264) today; the overall average masks a stark contrast between the average cost of study at private universities at $17,613 (£12,403) and public universities at $7,013 (£4,938). Yet as costs have risen, federal and state support to help fund students' costs has both declined, and been refocused on the middle class. In 1965, the Pell grant, the largest federal programme for poor students, covered 85% of the cost of four years at a public university; in 2000, it covered just 39% of the bill. Meanwhile, the Hope Scholarship, introduced by President Clinton, provides up to $3,000 of tax credits to fund university education but it goes mainly to families earning between $30,000 and $90,000 (£21,126 to £63,380) whose children would have gone to college anyway. States have cut their support on average by 32% since 1979. The result of this vicious scissor movement - rising costs cutting against falling state and federal support - is a calamitous drop in the chances of a poor student acquiring a university degree, and this in an environment where there are negligible alternative forms of vocational and formal education. Borrowing money on the scale now needed to finance college is easier for students from better-off families with expectations of reasonable earnings than for students from low-income families. As Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, admits, the US 'is not doing a good job helping low-income students succeed'. In 1979, a student between 18 - 24 from the top income quartile was four times more likely to obtain a degree by 24 than a student from the bottom quartile. By 1994, the latest year for which we have figures, this was 10 times more likely. Given the trends in inequality, college costs and falling state support, this already disastrous ratio can only have got worse over the last eight years. American social mobility is set to decline below its already modest levels. The unease at the way the system benefits the well-off is captured by the decision of 120 billionaires, including Warren Buffet, America's fourth richest man, to found a pressure group to oppose the elimination of taxes on capital gains and inherited wealth. Buffet's argument is that the US is developing an aristocracy of the wealthy. Just as it would be absurd to select the US Olympics team for 2020 from the children of the winners of the Olympics in 2000, he says, so it is wrong to construct a society whose likely leaders tomorrow - given the advantages that wealth confers - will be the children of today's wealthy. This offends not merely the values of democracy and equality of opportunity on which the US is constructed, but will be economically disastrous. Buffett and his fellow-campaigners are right, but the pass has long been sold. The Bush, Gore and Kennedy families are only three of the more famous political examples of how wealth begets both more wealth and influence. Five generations of the Bushes, for example, have been 'tapped' to become members of the Skull and Bones Club at Yale, whose initiates retain a commitment to the lifelong scratching of each other's backs while never acknowledging they were members. In itself, there’s nothing too remarkable about private clubs of privileged insiders in private universities; it’s just that the country that boasts them should be more self-knowing about its pretensions to meritocracy. Meanwhile, for those at the bottom, the consequence of the new conservatism that dominates the US is to make life increasingly desperate - and with progressively less opportunity. Eligibility for income support and public assistance is being steadily withdrawn; cumulatively, it had halved by 1998/9 from the levels of 20 years ago. Poorly educated and with negligible access to training programmes, the poor are locked into their status: 54% of those in the bottom 20% in the 1960s were still there in the 1990s; only 1% had migrated to the top 20 per cent. Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich conducted her own social experiment, spending 1998 working in a series of low-wage jobs as a waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman, nursing home aide and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. The result of her year, documented in Nickel and Dimed, is an extraordinary Orwellian testimony to how tough American working life is for the bottom 20%. She had absolutely no financial margin beyond paying the rent and what she needed to survive; saving or finding the time for any training to upgrade her status was beyond her. 'Most civilised nations compensate for the inadequacy of wages by providing relatively generous public services such as health insurance, free or subsidised child care, subsidised housing and effective public transport,' she writes. 'But the United States, for all its wealth, leaves its citizens to fend for themselves - facing market-based rents on their wages alone. For millions of Americans, that $10 - or even $8 or $6 an hour - is all there is.' Conservatives excuse this inequality by arguing that American income and social mobility is uniquely high, as befits an exceptional civilisation. But it’s not; indeed it compares badly with the Europe about whom American conservatives are so patronising. Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and John Schmitt, the three authors of The State of Working America (described by the Financial Times as the most comprehensive independent analysis of the American labour market), compare the mobility of American workers with the 4 biggest European economies and 3 Scandinavian economies. They find that the US has the lowest share of workers moving from the bottom fifth of workers into the second fifth, the lowest share moving into the top 60% and the highest share of workers unable to sustain full-time employment. The most exhaustive study by the OECD confirms the poor rates of relative upward mobility for very low-paid American workers; it also found that full-time workers in Britain, Italy and Germany enjoy much more rapid growth in their earnings than those in the US, who rank roughly equal with the French. However, downward mobility was more marked in the US; American workers are more likely to suffer a reduction in their real earnings than workers in Europe - the log cabin to White House effect in reverse. The cumulative evidence since the Second World War is that measured mobility in the US is little different from Europe's, despite all the propaganda. Lipset and Bendix in their groundbreaking study in 1959, Social Mobility in Industrial Society, could find no evidence that American men were moving any more rapidly from manual to non-manual labour than in other industrial societies. Later studies comparing the income mobility of the US with the Nordic countries and Germany either find no difference or that the US is worse. The mystery, write leading sociologists Robert Erikson and John Goldthorpe, is that given there is no evidence of American exceptionalism or increased social mobility, why the myth persists. The answer is that nobody in the highly introverted society that the US has become can believe that foreigners might do it as well or better - and the conservative intellectual ascendancy is not going to disabuse them. The combination of reduced educational opportunity for low-income students and more advantages conferred on the rich - the great achievements of conservatism can only have one result. America is developing an aristocracy of the rich and serfdom of the poor and, in so doing, threatening its own economic vitality. The US itself is stirring. It is not just foreign critics who believe the US has not solved the age-old question about how to construct a just economic and social order - or operate an effective democracy. A growing number of Americans share the same view. The argument that Europe should copy the US is in important respects the wrong way round. It is European social outcomes from which the US now needs to borrow; nor is the European economy as sclerotic as US conservatives like to portray it. Yet it is the US, the country which has left so many of its citizens barren and ill at ease with themselves, and which is riven by internal concern and criticism, that is held up as a model for the world. It is time for Europeans to recognise the strength of their social outcomes and defend them. http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,706484,00.html UP- "One of the most durable features of the US culture is the inability or refusal to recognise US crimes.” Edward Herman. WORKING SUCKS, HOWEVER U LOOK ATTIT! PART THREE GOING ALL THE WAY: ZERO WORK After working less for a while, you’ll start to really enjoy the extra free time. You may find yourself not wanting to work at all. Who could blame you?) "Work is a social duty." The Grand Council of Fascism, 1927 If this is the case, you can go all the way and simply stop working. There isn't enough space here to discuss zero-work tactics other than to say it can be done. Zero- work tribes combine most of the living-cheap tactics and tips with squatting (living for free in abandoned buildings), shoplifting food, foraging for food, and using advanced dumpster diving techniques to live on practically no money at all. As you get more into the low-work scene in your town, you will probably meet some zero-work experts who can show you the tricks. Working less is great but working not at all is a blast. There's much more to learn about working less, but this should be plenty of information to get you started. As you go, you will pick up your own set of tactics and tips. What couldn't be included can be found in the books listed below. These are great books. Some of the titles may be hard to find. Try inter-library loans at your local library or ordering them directly from the publishers. Spread the word and have fun. The Abolition of Work and Other Essays by Bob Black. A classic, if there’s one book on this list you must read, this is it. Sadly it is recently out of print but you may still be able to special order it. The Overworked American by Juliet Schor. Where Bob Black is snotty and radical, Juliet Schor is measured and thorough. The Right To Be Lazy by Paul Lafargue. Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., PO Box 914, Chicago, Illinois, 60690. Also a classic. A little out of date after 100 years but still fun to read. Directory of Intentional Communities, Communities Directory, c/o Alpha Farm, Deadwood, OR, 97430. This book can be a lot of help in organizing a low-work group of friends. The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving by John Hoffman. Loompanics Unlimited, PO Box 1179, Port Townsend, WA, 98368. John has some foolish political ideas, but if you can get past that, the information is priceless. Future Primitive by John Zerzan. Autonomedia, PO Box 568, Williamsburgh Station, Brooklyn, NY, 11211. Hunter-gatherers were zero work experts, and this book will make you want to smash your TV and head for the hills. Edible Wild Plants by Lee Peterson. If you live in the country, there is free food under you feet! The New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook edited by Louis Hagler and Dorothy R. Bates. Book Publishing Co. This is a good book for beginners or try any vegetarian cookbook that looks good to you. Afterword "When work is a duty, life is slavery." - Maxim Gorky I stole most of the ideas and statistics from the books listed by Black, Schor, and Lefargue. Intellectual property is theft. Anything original comes from my experiences living in a low-work tribe of friends we called the "Mount Hood Collective" and from research at the Boston Public Library. I wrote this by combining some of Black's and Schor's ideas with my own, but using language that is accessible to high-school-aged Americans. As Schor and also Barbara Ehrenreich have pointed out, it's not that the poor are playing a different game from the middle class. Rather, the poor are playing the same produce-and-consume game, and losing. Finally, please, please, please, working less is not (gasp) a trend. The quickest way to kill a good radical idea is to let the vampiric corporate media get a hold of it. I can see it now: working less, neutered and de-clawed, appearing on the cover of "Newsweek" and "MTV NEWS," complete with a hairstyle and a soundtrack. I get shudders. So treat the media like a bad smell. Use community-access TV. Use pirate radio. Use truly independent publishers and record labels. But don't try to use the corporate media. You don't use them - they use you. Tim Righteous. Postscript Most of the people who’ve had problems with WORK SUX! tripped over the word work. We use work to describe a collection of very different things: I am working on a new painting. I work out at the gym on Wednesdays. That apple strudel we just ate was a piece of work! I work at McDonalds flipping burgers for $3.75/hr. When I write "Working Sux!" I am referring to the last meaning of the word work: time and effort exchanged on the labor market for a wage or a salary. As I point out in the text, working less doesn't mean being unproductive. Working less also doesn't mean leaching off your community. My low-work friends spend much of their free time volunteering and helping others; doing "work" that’s important to the community but that doesn't have any value on the labor market. For that matter, who can put a value on something like being with friends? Communities are built on friendship. What could be more important? But friendship doesn't pay. How will we eat if everyone refuses to work? We'll figure something out - we always have. Human beings are nothing if not inventive and adaptable. With imagination and courage, we can create any future we desire. Epitaph If the source is not deep, the stream will not be long; if the wisdom is not great, the discernment will not be far-reaching. - Yuan-wu (1063-1135) Distributing Working Sux over the last six years has been huge fun. I’ve traveled all over, given talks, and met tons of great people. The police detained me twice, I debated hundreds of people on street corners across the country, and I narrowly avoided several fistfights. Now I’m done. After distributing 15,000 copies, Working Sux! is threatening to become (ironically) a job, and you know I don't want that. Besides, the abolition of work, as an idea and a practice, must grow beyond the voices of a few "experts." Even if I continued distributing Working Sux! for the rest of my life, I wouldn't have much of an impact by myself. While 15,000 copies are a lot, that is still only one copy for every 25,000 Americans. Working Sux is out there. You know what I think. What do you think? Feel free to copy and distribute all or part of my pamphlet, hopefully combined with your own insights. If the wisdom of working less is great, the abolition of work will grow. If it is not, it won't. It's out of my hands and that’s good. World wide, particularly in Europe, there are signs that the abolition of work is slowly growing. This "movement" is outside the view of the main steam news media, and that is also good. Genuine revolts against work can't be co-opted by politicians or news goons. Trade unions, political parties, capitalism, industrialism, agriculture, all depend on ever-expanding labor. The abolition of work confronts the brutality that is that very cold, dark heart of civilization. The abolition of work will also look very different in different places. The U$A is a unique society and the richest country in the world. The revolt against work that I describe in Working Sucks would not be useful for people in Madagascar or Sierra Leon. Hopefully there will be Chilean, Malaysian, and Scottish versions of Working Sucks. If you are reading this in a country other than the U$A, please feel free to translate, adapt, and rewrite Working Sux! for your language and situations. That would be very exciting. Please send me a copy! If you do plan to write something, allow me to beat you over the head with my big fetish: write in simple language. Whenever possible, avoid academic gobble-de-gook or culty radical jargon. It is possible to express subtle, complex ideas in simple words and short sentences. Why not? People who don't are either trying to impress someone or are bad writers or both. In the process they shut out most of humanity from their ideas. What a waste of time! "Labor is a duty of all." - Constitution of the USSR, 1924 UP- oi fraser. a while ago i wrote a similar thing to the WORK SUX! article. its a Beginners Guide To Surviving in London on absolutely NO money at all, covering some of the same topics like bin-living and stuff. www.ukkult.de in the archives on the 7th of November. ukkult / germany UP- Fraser, Thanks for your open-minded attitude. I guessed that you were that kind of person. I wasn't aware that the UP newsletter only started being war-oriented since 911. For me it's all about solutions. How can we build and strengthen our culture so that our values have a powerful influence over the collective? We need to focus more on us, on pushing our personal and tribal evolution further. How many "rave culture" kids go home, watch TV, drink beer, have normal jobs and otherwise live normal lives?If we live like everyone else, are we really that different? Just because we occasionally take E and dance all night to electronic music? This is not enough of a different lifestyle to justify being called a tribe or a new culture. The battle for thinking differently starts with ourselves; our minds, our lifestyle, the products we consume and the people we support when we spend our money. dlight / california UP-
A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A ADVERTISINGG G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G
WOT IS GLOBALISATION ACTUALLY?
a change in some unusual, visual way to take part in a new BBC series. It’s about people who make a difference in their world. It’s about everyday revolutionary - no deed too small, no activity too dull. CHANGEMAKERS does not judge the morality or legal issues. CHANGEMAKERS gives people the opportunity to explain their stand without prejudice. If YOU are making a difference or challenging the status quo in UK, Europe, rest of world then this is for you (or anyone you know). Please contact gala on 07958 694122 or gala@ideallondon.com A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A ADVERTISINGG G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G G AND WOT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT? “Globalisation is high speed capitalism” Will Hutton The rise of the far-right across Europe and elsewhere - Le Pen being just the latest high-profile example - has met with a predictable barrage of outrage and political hand-wringing amongst Europe’s mainstream politicians. Tony Blair describes the policies of Le Pen’s Front National as "repellent". Says Tone, “it is vitally important that people who believe in democracy, who loathe those policies of racism and narrow-minded nationalism fight it at every level". BUT WHY are so many ordinary people in and outside France so concerned with rising crime and immigration? WHY do they feel so threatened? And WHY do mainstream politicians seem incapable of offering solutions? If support for Le Pen represents a "protest vote", it can only be because mainstream political parties are failing to adequately represent the poor, the unemployed, the threatened and the marginalised. And since this phenomenon is occurring right across Europe and further afield, it cannot simply be put down to some quirk of the French electoral system. Furthermore, voter apathy is equally a phenomenon which reaches well beyond European borders. But good news is at hand for our politicians if they will only look to see it! For there is an inextricable link between "voter apathy", the concerns of the marginalised who protest by seeking ‘simple’ far-right solutions, and those on the left who protest in the streets of Seattle, Genoa and elsewhere. Why? Quite simply because those sections of society are no longer represented since genuine democracy can no longer be said to exist. In short, they have been disenfranchised. TRAPPED IN A PSEUDO-DEMOCRACY Democracy implies not just the mechanics of free and fair elections but the ability of political parties to choose and, if elected, to implement their freely chosen manifestos. And the fact is that today’s competitive global economy subtly yet effectively reduces the span of feasible policy options open to political parties once they come to govern. In today’s largely borderless global economy, capital and transnational corporations freely move wherever profits are highest and costs lowest, and governments live in fear of the ‘reaction’ of global markets. No government can now impose significantly higher taxes or regulations on corporations for fear of them moving employment elsewhere. Similarly, governments seeking to impose protective environmental or labour legislation or higher taxes on corporations to help the unemployed or under-privileged in society are seen by global financial markets as ‘uncompetitive’, prompting instant punishment through devaluation, capital flight, inflation and unemployment. Even the mooting of such policies causes market traders to instantly move capital to some other economy offering an environment ‘more conducive to business needs’. DEMOCRACY V. ‘FREE MARKET’ CAPITALISM Globally competitive markets represent a sinister and significant anti-democratic force which squeezes the feasible policy parameters into a highly restricted, business-friendly band. The free movement of capital and corporations forces nation states into competition with one another to maintain inward investment and protect jobs. And in their quest to maintain their ‘international competitiveness’, they must progressively downscale social and environmental protection, increase privatisation, cut public services, compete in lowering taxes and so on to maintain an economic environment ‘conducive to business needs’. All of this translates into a deteriorating environment, a rapidly expanding gulf between rich and poor, an unraveling of social cohesion and, as Le Pen’s success demonstrates, a tendency for under-privileged sections of society to resort to far-right political parties. At the same time, traditional centre-left parties around the world such as Old Labour have been forced to abandon their traditional policies and re-position themselves - under the cover of ‘Third Way’ or other appropriate spin - more towards the right: just where the competitive dictates of global markets determine that they or any party seeking power must be. Blair, Schroder and other mainstream politicians, like poorly-disguised transvestite parodies of Margaret Thatcher, thus tout much the same business and market-oriented policies. And France’s left-wing, faced with Le Pen, are in the embarrassing position of having to call on voters to vote for their erstwhile centre-right enemy, Jacques Chirac. IT’S THE FAR RIGHT SHOW! In this right-shifted world, voters to the left of centre and the poor and unemployed who see their livelihoods under threat are effectively deprived of political statement and their democratic rights. Is it any wonder they take to the streets or to the Le Pens of this world in protest? And is it any wonder voters shun the ballot box in droves when global competition dictates that which ever party we vote for, the policies delivered inevitably end up being the same market and corporate-friendly measures ‘spun’ in different guises? That politicians implore citizens to defend democracy when it is politicians themselves who have sold it out by effectively surrendering it to the demands of globally mobile capital is surely the height of hypocrisy. If anyone is to blame for the rise of the far-right, it is our mainstream politicians: Blair, Jospin, Schroder and their ilk who continue to de-regulate global markets; and Reagan, Thatcher and Clinton before them. It is high time people spoke out and told our blind politicians that so-called "democracy" has become little more than a market and corporate-dominated pseudo-democracy. They have become the pseudo-democratic puppets of globally mobile capital; the pawns in a destructive global competition which no nation can win and - as growing problems such as global warming show we’re all likely to lose. HOW TO RESTORE DEMOCRACY If politicians want to halt and reverse the rise of the far-right and lead us according to genuine democratic principles, they must stop spinning and start co-operating with one another to expose and disarm the anti-democratic forces of transnational capital and corporations and the vicious circle of destructive competition their free movement has set in train. Politicians must co-operate to re-impose capital controls and higher taxes and environmental standards on corporations. They must co-operate to use the revenues raised to fund debt-free sustainable development and higher social and environmental standards in the South, as well as to help the poor and socially excluded in the North. They must cancel Third-World debt, co-operate to raise taxes on currency speculators and impose the necessary restraints on their industries to reduce emissions. They must co-operate to ensure mutual security for all the world’s nations and so remove the massive waste of the bulk of military spending. They must use the savings to help the Third World out of poverty and arrest rampant population growth, the spread of Aids and other deadly diseases. In so doing, they will remove the need for migration and so stem the flow of asylum seekers. That way they will successfully kill three birds with one stone by removing the grievances of both anti-corporate globalisation protestors and of those who protest by voting for the far-right. Furthermore, they’ll succeed in restoring genuine democracy and so bring peoples all over the world back to the ballot box. More details: www.simpol.org UP- U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U U UP P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P P the UP //:-) la - la - la - lap-toppling da system! 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