Greetings Friends and Citizens,

This is a time of awakening. Something new is in the air. To quote songwriter Joni Mitchell, “Maybe it's the time of year, or maybe it's the time of man...” I'll go with the latter, in spite of the deficiencies in using the word 'man' when one means 'humans.' 

For centuries the vast majority of humanity has suffered under the thumb of elitism, the system where powerful political and commercial interests collude to take advantage of the rest of us. They start wars, they create globalism, they call us consumers. The classic name for this is plutocracy. It’s a clear sign of the failure of government, serving the interests of elites instead of citizens.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Indeed, throughout the world we see insurrection and the rejection of nation-state colonialism and corporatism. 

These are curious times, to say the least. I doubt the handful of fed up citizens who decided to occupy Zuccotti Park in the NYC Financial District on September 17th, 2011 knew going in that within a month they’d have millions of supporters and thousands of occupations popping up across the Earth. They just knew the system was utterly broken, and felt compelled to take action. And here we are.

The Occupy Movement is an amazing phenomenon. In less than two months it’s has aggregated into a global movement, taking a strong stand again the financial forces that have taken over the U.S. and so many other governments. There are no indications of us going away.

We are in uncharted territory. This is like no time in our civilization’s history - global food shortages, climate crisis, unending war and violence, corporate domination, rampant systemic corruption, government collusion with corporations, abject poverty and homelessness, mass extinctions - it’s a long list barely begun here. It’s enough to leave one feeling hopeless in the face of such onslaughts. And yet there is hope.

The Occupy Movement is inspiring to many of us who have long awaited a new dynamic into our dysfunctional political system. It is a powerful cultural force, engaging citizen activists to promote substantive change to an unfair system. It has already reshaped political conversations with its focus on the corporate elitism and government collusion that has led to a system that profits the 1%. The Occupy Movement has also shown us that we don’t need to be perfectly organized or to have perfect messaging to have an effect.

We Americans are not the best at history. Because of the spin of corporate-controlled media, we are not reminded of the consistent pattern of deception exhibited by our government when the ‘power behind the wheel’ wants a new conflict. Nor are we reminded of the tremendous profitability of war for the corporations who count on such conflicts to inflate their bottom line. It’s a disturbing and disgusting business.

As the corruption in our system continues unabated and the interminable Republican Primary Season continues its buffoonery of ‘solutions’ for our failing state, there is some highly unusual behavior taking place independent of either. It’s the behavior of the weather for most of the country, an unprecedented string of warm days even before Spring officially began.

We Americans are prone to allowing our view of reality to be fed to us by mainstream [corporate-owned] media. We are quickly entranced by the talking heads who tell us what is going well and what is going poorly in our world, with the emphasis on what is going poorly. Yet there is no honest effort to get to the real reasons why things are going so poorly. That would be educational. Our lamestream media has no interest in educating us.