Anti-War Demonstrators Storm Pentagon,

If only people were this fired-up today. Everyone is afraid of getting their phone tapped and winding up losing their jobs if they step out of line. But soon enough there will be so many unemployed people with nothing to lose...

Let's set up an information campaign: What's the minimal set of DVD's we have to dump in our neighbours' mailboxes so they begin to grasp the situation? Kind of global justice Jehova witnesses.

Great idea. But what would you put on the DVD? How about Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story?"

Hi TooleMan!,
Have you seen 'A Love Story' already? I only saw MM's interview on DemocracyNow.

I've been thinking about the 'global justice witness' operation.
One would have to address a number of issues I guess:

- To determine what information we want to propagate
- To determine which people to address [those who don't watch this stuff already]
- To decide how to approach them
- To determine which docs would best fit the job [let's assume docs are effective]
- To finance the operation

=======================================

I thought the following therapy might be good for people that haven't seen anything:
It's something like 10-20 documentaries:

1. Combi package of:
a. The new rulers of the world
b. The story of stuff
[How the third world gets screwed: Annie Leonard shows the theory, John Pilger the practice].
2. Empire in the Andes
[War on drugs = war on unionization, and more illustration for The story of stuff]
3. We feed the world
[International food trade, tariff & subsidy policies lead to waste in rich countries and poverty in poor countries ]
4. Oil, smoke and mirrors
[Peak oil + 911 bonus]
5. The corporation
[The legal definition of corporations is undermining democracy and isn't as natural as it may look]
6. Why we fight.
[Military Keynsianism; Keeping people from boredom by keeping up senseless jobs in the military industry]
7. OutFoxed
[State-Media synchronization in the western world]
8. Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land
[Media and Israel-Palestine]
9. [Animals]:
a. Earthlings
b. easy-vegan
10. Arithmetic, Population and Energy
[Hopelessness of the growth delusion]
11.
a. The debt of dictators
b. Credit and Credibility
c. (Maybe something with John Perkins; I have a slight doubt there, 'cause he seems to be the only one with that story. One witness = No witness).
[Impossible aspects of debt]
12.
a. The end of America
b. Fuck the corporate media
[Western Slide into dictatorship]
13. Uncovered - The whole truth about the Iraq war.


========================================

As for the approach what do you think of some kind of viral-ponzi-pyramid game.
Not actually ponzi in the sense that we wouldn't want to generate profits at the top for losses at the bottom.
But we can have a pyramid game in the sense that once you're infected, you're supposed to infect more than one other, so it's more like religious recruitment.

So for example, one day you get two nice looking DVD's in your mailbox.
It says it's for free, with some pointer to www.globaljustice-ponzischeme.org, or if we want to avoid the web dependency, then just a letter.
It says something like you've been randomly chosen, that somebody payed money out of their own pockets to inform you. Over the course of a few weeks you receive the whole 'series'.
The only thing you're requested to do is to select a new victim and put the DVD's in their mailbox. If you have the financial means, to order more DVD's yourself and randomly choose even more people for further dissemination.
I presume that if you get good looking DVDs in your box, you're not going to throw them away.

A website would be nice to have, just to track where the operation goes.

=========================================

I guess the main problem of this plan is finance: Can people afford/ are they willing to buy an extra set of DVD's so as to get a chain reaction?
Do they get irritated by the intrusion?

It would be necessary to convince people of the importance of the message, and of the deficiency of the media, so that if they don't disseminate the message to the target group (the majority), nobody will.

=========================================


Hmm, let me stop here, curious what you think!
Ciao, Billy

I think what you just proposed is so fucking overwhelming it's no wonder we're all stuck in place - nobody can get their arms around the solution to the problem. Not to be discouraging; I'm just saying.

Maybe we should take a cue from this film footage from 40 years ago and march down the street in Washington and tie up traffic for a while. Get a bunch of people with no jobs to go and do it. Invade Congress and take over. What have they got to lose?

Hi TooleMan, you have probably just attracted all the NSA bots to join this discussion ...
If we're in the business of saving the planet we have to ask about the effectiveness
of storming congress. My first bet would be:
1. It would fail, just like storming the pentagon failed: You can't beat the security forces.
The jobless do have something to lose: Their life.
2. It would be used as a pretext to enforce the US police state
[NSA bot you can go to sleep now]

On the other hand a more regular demonstration blocking traffic doesn't necessarily produce
converts. Scientology [NSA bot back up] produces converts, I suspect demonstrations
are not so effective because of media spin of the type discussed in
https://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/2896/2003--pdx-indy-video-colective--fuck-the-corporate-media
No violence, no coverage; Violence, bad coverage.

Now you will say, where did the 1960 movements recruit? I think the students recruited on campus,
where there was time to discuss. MLK I'm not sure. Were his speeches broadcast at the time? So if
you organize a demonstration, and you have a great speech, and it gets broadcast, then your demonstration
will have made recruits. By the way at some point there was open information flow from the
front in Vietnam. We never get to see the drones dropping their bombs in Afghanistan.

The target should be political pressure. Either by huge, huge, huge massive long lasting demonstrations,
so the media can't wave them away as composed of fringe crackpot violent anarchist liberal unamerican commies.
Or by sheer voting majority. Oh yeah we also need a DVD on electronic vote rigging. Jeez we're in a mess.
Or large amounts of small demonstrations. Like I think Naomi Klein says somewhere that there were
something like 2 or 3 thousand strikes going on simultaneously when the new deal was introduced.

I have zero social networks, so I can't really help with the demonstration idea. But I can afford
say 20 DVD series. I live in an extremely affluent town even by western standards, so I can pick
a bunch of mailboxes in my neighborhood and start a delux spam campaign..

Oh yeah, nuclear stuff:
14. Hacking Democracy
15. The battle of chernobyl

There's an interesting article in the NY Times about the Obama administration vs. Fox News. A key point: putting messages on Fox News Channel gained absolutely no converts among undecided voters. Those people have their minds made up. I'm afraid sending persuasive DVD's to people is going to meet the same stubborn resistance. I keep thinking, "We need to get the word out," but it's like either preaching to the choir or to a stone wall. So I'm flummoxed. I haven't lost all hope... yet.

A friend of mine screened Century of the Self at a bar (or somewhere), it was a success. Maybe try finding someplace you can show films (even a church maybe), and then meet people.

On influencing random people, most of these films are likely too remote to be relevant to most people. Maybe if you were focused on a specific local issue. If you just want to promote films, put links on websites and forums visited by your target audience.

On protests, the only thing that I can see that really worked in the past was general strikes. But people have to be really fed up.

Another tactic is to use authority, rather than 'protest'. See the book Propaganda by Edward Bernays.

I'm going to watch "Empire of the Andes", but one of the best videos for convincing people on drug prohibition is Marijuana: It's Time for a Conversation by the ACLU.
http://www.marijuanaconversation.org/