Without Theory No Revolution

Glenn Maresca felt compelled to speak up and I am honored to make his views publicly available. He has a song that relates to this, The Quiet Revolution.

Glenn Maresca writes:

Here we have yet another phony food safety bill, which does NOTHING but grant the FDA massive new police powers without actual policy oversight. And it would do NOTHING to solve the actual problem, the stinking cesspools which call themselves “modern” factory farms, the SOLE source of whatever filth there is in our food supply. We don’t need burdensome new tracing regimes to drive small farmers out of business, we already know exactly where the problem is.

H.R. 2749 would give some FDA administrator (read self-serving corporate lobbyist) the power to dictate what farming practices must and must not be used nationwide (read enforced GMOs, growth hormones, and weird chemicals in our food). How can Congress make sane policy without identifying the specific problem and its source before empowering 10 year criminal sentences and $100,000 fines? It can’t. But only if we stop them from doing it, by speaking out now.

Stop HR 2749 Action Page

This hideously ill-conceived bill (unless you are a chemical food conglomerate) is so terminally vague about what its PURPOSE is, it can only do massive harm and no good whatsoever. Aren’t bills in Congress supposed to start with some kind of preamble, something like, “This is the problem we have identified, and this is what has to be done to fix it and WHY.” No such forethought in HR 2749, just unlimited and unaccountable new police state powers, while President Obama continues to appoint the WORST possible nominees for just about every administrative position.

It’s time to wake up folks. It’s just one corporate power grab hand over fist out there. Not ONE major bill has Congress passed yet since the last election that did ANYTHING to confront the actual real problem. Credit card so-called reform was some kind of sick joke on the American people, rejecting the only provision that actually mattered, constraining usurous interest rates. Has anybody seen any BIG savings on their credit card bills yet? Did we have to ask?

And they TRYING to do the same thing with health care reform, to do nothing to disturb the existing corporate medical industry gravy train. It is ONLY because of the alerts we have done on this already that single payer is actually getting a hearing. What kind of lunacy is it when the plan supported by a majority of the American people is not even allowed in the room? It’s the lunacy that happens when more of us do not speak out more often. And we’ll have another alert on that later in the week.

Stop HR 2749 Action Page

But for today, please speak out against HR 2749. Tell Congress to directly regulate factory farms and them ONLY. That’s all that has to be done. And anything else they do that does NOT do that by definition will only make the problem worse, by punishing those who are NOT huge, filthy, factory farms.

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CwF + RtB = $$$$

This video spells out the somewhat cryptic title as meaning Connect with Fans and give them a Reason to Buy to Make Serious Money through an explanation with examples by Mike Masnick. A suitable subtitle might be The Essence Of Marketing Reduced To A Simple Formula.

It really doesn’t get any more straightforward than this. While the formula tells you what to do, it does not tell you how to do it.

The examples Mike Masnick gives here, and in an earlier video where he used Trevor Reznik of Nine Inch Nails fame as an example, indicates that giving away valuable free stuff is one way how to do it. This is the same advice widely offered for Internet marketing in general.

Click here to view the embedded video.

NARM (the National Association of Recording Merchandisers) 2009 Keynote Interview presents Eliot Van Buskirk (WIRED) interviewing Ian Rogers (Topspin Media). A long time innovator in the online media scene, he feels that real progress is most likely on the creative side rather than on the consumer side and hence his move from Yahoo to Topspin.

Seth Godwin coined the phrase Permission Marketing over 10 years ago. It is just one more attempt to explain something that should never require explaining.

Intentional system controls implemented by monopolies preserve artificial scarcity. Monopolies maintain their control in part by paying politicians to legislate barriers to entry into monopolized industries.

Globalization and the Internet make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to maintain some monopolies. With this freedom from monopoly controlled markets, consumers can choose who to give their money to.

Without monopolies everything in the market eventually becomes a commodity distinguished only by private label branding. The private label brands survive only by becoming recognized and trusted by consumers.

Only when private label brands cannot be trusted do consumers default to making buying decisions based on the lowest price. Any place you go you will find many people who would prefer to give their business to someone they know and trust even if that means paying more.

People only know and trust their friends. If you want loyal customers who will buy your offerings time after time, even if they are more expensive, then you need to make them your friends.

Of course, because they are your friends, you will want to offer value added products. You will see more limited and signed editions, lots of additional posters, patches and such, as well as the unique opportunities to spend more time with the artists.

In industries with low barriers to entry, such as music and marketing, financial survival depends upon becoming friends with potential customers before you ask them for money. No one views an attempt to sell them something first as an invitation to friendship.

Since making friends seems to have become a lost art, especially in the United States, here is the number one way to make someone your friend. The number one way to make someone your friend is to give them something they value for free.

Do someone a favor, that is, help them out or solve a problem without setting a price and demanding payment. This is how people socialized for thousands of years but recently more and more of these social norms have been monetized.

The monetization of social norms, pricing and demanding payment for what was once freely shared, represents theft from the common wealth of all people. This theft from the common wealth of all people started over 10,000 years ago and has grown by fits and starts ever since.

Recently this practice of theft from the common wealth of all people through privatization has accelerated, especially in the United States. I can identify this dysfunctional practice as sociopathic at best but that serves little purpose now that it has permeated nearly every facet of modern life including all areas of public service.

Thoughtful feeling people feel repelled by this nearly ubiquitous trend, as well they should. Thoughtful feeling people instinctually avoid giving money to artificial monopolies by seeking out friends who can meet their needs, often even if their needs are more poorly met.

Celebrity status merely indicates that someone has more friends than they can personally directly respond to. It has become customary to call these friends, fans.

Make no mistake, every fan feels a personal connection to the celebrity. This feeling is the same as what someone feels for a friend, for someone who has helped them out far beyond any compensation that may have been offered.

The perceived need to obtain financial compensation for every act of aid and human kindness has become the single greatest impediment to business growth. Monopolies may be in the position to demand such payment anyway but they are not making friends and no one feels any trust or loyalty towards them.

So unless you run a monopoly, start making friends if you want your business to survive and prosper.

For anyone without income, a home or even hope, the collapse has already happened. The number of those people on the ropes certainly seems to be increasing daily.

On the other hand, in this personal sense, you may not experience collapse during your lifetime. Of course that is not what the doom and gloomers say.

I used to be a doom and gloomer, an authentic doomsday freak pointing out the failures of our system and its imminent collapse. I’ve learned to temper my fears simply by living long enough.

However, in a larger more empirical sense, we may ask what exactly constitutes a societal collapse. Here we are asking about the nature of the collapse of the Euro-American Empire indicated by the ongoing disintegration of its global hegemony.

If you are someone who does not want to read social criticism, stop now.

If you are worried about you head exploding when you are presented with new information, stop now.

OK, now that I know you are willing to deal with this, I will continue.

As a first step, we have to acknowledge certain conclusions by Karl Marx. I know he is widely disparaged in the mainstream media, at community colleges nationwide and in state universities structured to provide occupational training in technical fields.

Rest assured, at elite institutions training the nest generation of leaders Karl Marx is read and discussed. The children of the hegemonic elite destined to inherit the reigns of power over 99.5% of the rest us know and study his work.

Well, they do if they actually did the work and didn’t just have their families purchase their degrees with another endowment. But that is another issue.

Sure, Karl Marx gets a bad name because of the abuses of the word ‘communist‘ by authoritarian megalomaniacs. To be honest, the world has never seen an authentic communist system in operation.

Part of the problem is that in the day and age of Karl Marx communication was a problem for those living in rural areas. Most people living today cannot imagine the isolation experienced by those living outside of city limits.

Karl Marx proposed an urban workers’ vanguard party to represent those in the hinter lands. This idea of a vanguard party has been much abused by totalitarian regimes around the world that bear little resemblance to his proposed communal life.

He was spot on in exposing the fatal flaw in capitalism. Bear in mind that Karl Marx thought capitalism was a good thing at the time and a step in the right direction away from the manorial serfdom that was the previous norm.

Anyway, capitalism depends upon continuous growth.

The capitalistic system just does not function as a steady state model.

Growth is required to pay off the interest charged on the debt incurred during the capitalization of industry and business. Without growth, only enough profit is made to pay off the principle.

Karl Marx realized that the earth is finite and possesses limited non-renewable resources. Once capitalism went world-wide it was destined to collapse.

In the time of Karl Marx, world-wide pretty much meant Europe in the predominant narrow ethnocentric view. And there were those of his (and later) generations who just couldn’t wait.

Just like the early Christians who grew impatient with God’s promise to destroy the world and started setting fires to help God out, early adopters of the Communist Manifesto perceived revolution as the fast track to post-capitalism.

That turned out badly for all concerned, both Christians and communists.

Karl Marx merely pointed out that given the requirements of capitalism regarding growth, eventually it would hit the limits of growth. With this realization he predicted the certain collapse of capitalism and projected forward from there, betting on human intelligence to come up with something better.

Of course, he thought he was as smart as anyone and perhaps he was. Anyway, communism was merely his projection into the unknowable future and the actual shape of things to come is totally up for grabs.

It is understandable that capitalists the world over took offense. This became the primary driver for political acrimony and national conflict ever since, at least as far as the general public was concerned.

Anyway, capitalism did hit the wall in the early 1970s. China, the last big holdout market, joined in capitalist expansion and left capitalism with no place else to grow.

A whole slew of events indicate the truth in this. Not only did we see the abandonment of the gold standard in the U.S. and the free floating of the U.S. dollar but we also saw the beginning of the first giant debt bubbles.

I first ran away to the mountains in the 1970s believing the collapse was in motion. I was right about that but wrong about the timing regarding my personal situation in the U.S.

The capitalistic hegemons turned to their own populations and began capitalistically monetizing every aspect of personal life, expanding into spheres of influence long felt to be intrinsically off limits. They did this with the full support of governments indebted to their central banks.

The FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector of the economy merged to form the financial services industry once government regulations that previously prevented this were abandoned. We now live in the era when all biopolitical production falls under capitalist control through the monetization of the once common property of social networks.

Without real growth, growth that is only possible through capitalist expansion into new markets, debt accumulates with no possibility of ever being paid off. The ballooning consumer debt, commercial debt and government debt are merely symptoms of the current crisis of capitalism.

The global debt crisis is a symptom of capitalism reaching the limits of growth.

This largely financial crisis will predictably cause a great deal of needless pain, suffering and death but all by itself is something that the human race as a whole can overcome. History is full of examples of empires falling in part due to the debasement of their currency by corrupt politicians and their financial handlers yet people survived to prosper again.

However, in the effort to extract greater profits by depressing the price of labor through population overshoot to produce a surplus supply of labor, other limits have been quickly approached. Paid labor, after all, originated after the population collapsed during the Great Plague and is part of the foundation of capitalism itself.

History indicates that the loss of productive farm land through extractive agricultural methods and the resulting decrease in productivity, coupled with erosion, also contributed to the collapse of empires. Despite so-called advances in food production, decreasing food value and exploding populations drive us towards a Malthusian Catastrophe of global proportions.

The so-called advances in food production have literally been fueled by the extravagant use of non-renewable hydrocarbons. Not only that, but civilization itself, especially as we have experienced it, has been literally fueled by the extravagant use of non-renewable hydrocarbons.

The remaining hydrocarbon reserves are being used by the global hegemonic elite to maintain their positions of privilege and power rather than used to enable a transition to another form of civilization. The U.S. armed forces is the largest user of non-renewable hydrocarbons and it is a safe bet that they will use the last of the extractable reserves maintaining the privilege and power of the global hegemonic elite.

This greatly complicates things.

Empires have fallen due to financial collapse and agricultural collapse but none have faced the exhaustion of non-renewable hydrocarbons. This evokes the specter of peak oil.

All the statistics surrounding peak oil originate from within the oil industry itself. We simply cannot know if peak oil is real or simply a clever ploy to increase profits.

In any event, either actual or engineered scarcity will drive huge profits even higher until it is no longer economically viable to extract hydrocarbons from the earth. People just are not prepared for that and, in fact, the global hegemonic elite works against even the possibility of energy independence.

Then there is the issue of climate change as it seems no longer politically correct to refer to global warming. In the end it does not matter if it was caused by people or not because it is happening and the hegemonic elite refuse to risk their privilege and power to enable meaningful change.

Population overshoot, financial collapse, agricultural collapse, exhaustion of non-renewable hydrocarbons, climate change and the machinations of the global power structure to stay in power creates an environment ripe for rampant deadly new diseases. The next Great Plague is now overdue and the ability to globally respond to it with adequate measures simply degrades by the hour.

Plastic pollution, acidification of the oceans and the collapse of one fishery after another are all further symptoms of an impending global collapse of Biblical proportions. This situation is real and very few are even thinking about preparing for it.

Think about preparing for collapse now.

Do you really want to be dependent on society as it is currently structured?

It seems to me that in order to prepare, concerned people need to be reducing dependence upon the status quo. This is becoming increasingly difficult to do because every effort to disengage from the system will be perceived by the system as an act of rebellion, criminal and terroristic.

I believe some people will survive and a few will continue to live relatively well. But to be able to do so will involve becoming responsible for all aspects of your own life.

It may well be that it will be only the minority who actually does the work to prepare will become the few who survive. And eventually, as the facts of the case become irrefutable and obvious to many more people, the remaining carrying capacity of the planet will not support those who start too late.

As long as the system prevails, you will have access to the Internet. The Internet offers more possibilities for creating income independent of mainstream employment than any brick and mortar opportunity in the world.

Perhaps you should be thinking about creating your own Internet business sooner rather that later. Then you will have a measure of control over timing the collapse, at least as far as your personal life is concerned.

What do you think?

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Jury nullification is an effective way of countering prosecutorial abuse and limiting the power and intrusiveness of the legislature. The historical records indicate jury nullification played a major role in abolishing slavery, winning women’s suffrage, and the Repeal of Alcohol Prohibition.

Perhaps jury nullification will become the way the war on marijuana ends as happened in the Loren Swift case.

Juries are our last line of defense against the inappropriate use of power by the government.

Sam Smith wrote in What lawyers & judges won’t tell you about juries that according to the Yale Law Journal in 1964, during the first third of the 19th century judges did inform juries of the right, forcing lawyers to argue “the law — its interpretation and validity — to the jury.”

San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi noted that “jury nullification is a constitutional right that every individual person who is called for jury duty possesses, and unless we appreciate that right, we will lose it because the courts will take it from us.”

“I think jury nullification is going to be part of the answer regarding states’ rights in future cases,” said former jury foreman Charles Sackett.

Clay S. Conrad wrote the 1998 book Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine, that

Central to the history of trial by jury is the right of jurors to vote “not guilty” if the law is unjust or unjustly applied.

When jurors acquit a factually guilty defendant, we say that the jury “nullified” the law. The Founding Fathers believed that juries in criminal trials had a role to play as the “conscience of the community,” and relied on juries’ “nullifying” to hold the government to the principles of the Constitution.

Yet over the last century and a half, this power of jurors has been derided and ignored by American courts, to the point that today few jurors are aware that an important part of their role is, in the words of the Supreme Court, to “prevent oppression by the government.”

The Words of the Founding Fathers

Jurors should acquit, even against the judge’s instruction…
if exercising their judgement with discretion and honesty
they have a clear conviction the charge of the court is wrong.
– Alexander Hamilton, 1804

It is not only the juror’s right, but his duty to find the verdict
according to his own best understanding, judgement and conscience,
though in direct opposition to the instruction of the court.
–John Adams, 1771

I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man
by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
– Thomas Jefferson, 1789

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made
by men of their choice, if the laws are so voluminous that they
cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood;
if they… undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows
what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow
– James Madison

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My dad, 84 years old and counting, lifelong salesman, sales manager, sales trainer and independent representative speaks with open disdain about marketers. Yet, when you listen to him talk about his sales process it becomes clear that he takes a straight up marketing approach.

The first thing he does as a “salesman” is to identify companies ready to purchase in commercial volumes. Among marketers this is known as locating a market.

Next he connects with a decision maker and during the interview clarifies what problems they have. Marketers often use polls and questionnaires to discover a market’s needs, wants and desires.

Then, my dad works with one of the companies he represents, or even locates a company he has never represented before, to come up with a solution. Marketers follow the same process and if the solution is an information product either hires an expert, obtains the rights or creates the product themselves.

Finally, he goes back to the prospect company with the solution in hand complete with pricing and delivery information. It also works exactly this way for marketers.

When someone believes they have come up with what they perceive someone else needs, without their input or guidance, they then must attempt to sell it to them in order to regain their investment, personal  power and self esteem. Whenever you start with a product before you have a market you are faced with a sales proposition.

This is why marketing may be approached as a science but all sales initiatives originate in ideologies. I’ve lost count of how many people have approached me with their absolute need to sell something they just dreamed up or discovered in a bargain bin somewhere.

Science observes the natural world and creates mind maps to make sense of it. These scientific ideas never achieve closure and remain open to modification and obsolescence.

We create ideologies as mind maps to which the natural world is abused into conforming. These ideologies arrive as a package deal usually complete with a supportive all-encompassing world view.

The map is not the terrain.

Science knows the history of their mind maps and constantly compares them to the natural world so to modify the mind maps and increase their accuracy. Ideology acts as if their mind maps are the terrain while becoming proactive in manipulating the natural world to conform to the mind maps.

It speaks to the power of ideologies that this distinction between marketing and sales often seems to be the biggest conceptual challenge limiting my students. Indeed, they often insist upon just being delivered an ideology while ironically demanding that it accurately correspond to the natural world.

Offered the appearance of free choice, people seem to prefer ideologies which inevitably conflict with the natural world over science that never arrives at closure and always seems as work in progress. Ironically, successful ideologies often masquerade as science while science then comes under attack as ideology.

The weakness of science is the willingness to consider alternative solutions to real problems. In other words, the reluctance to become an ideology also becomes the weakness of science.

The strength of ideology is the high acceptance it finds for the quick and simple answers it provides to real world problems. Unfortunately, the answers are always wrong, regardless of first impressions or our desires for closure.

This problem manifests when a vendor becomes a consumer. Their consumer training to only accept the quick and easy, cheap and simple, silver bullet one-shot solution betrays them when they wish to provide products and services to consumers.

While consumers feel justified in thinking it is all about them this feeding of the ego sets up business people for failure if they cannot make the adjustment to the other side of the coin. This failure to adjust results in a selling ideology.

While a person’s ideas may be interesting and welcome as long as they are a consumer, once they become a vendor of products and services their ideas become irrelevant. The world is full of great ideas that few care about.

This ego driven need to see personal ideas accepted by other people, through deception, fraud and the threat of harm if need be, meets the definition of ideology. This also describes the underlying methodologies of many mainstream selling techniques.

Ideology and selling lack resilience.

The narrow point of view generated by a consumer perspective holds no more attractiveness to others than any other inflexible ideological opinion. This leads to the failures of businesses and the collapse of empires.

Resilience relies upon both the willingness to competently observe reality regardless of what we wish to see and the ability to modify activities accordingly regardless of how habitualized we may have become to them. A fixed belief in our own correctness, self-righteousness in other words, inevitably leads to both our unhappiness and the unhappiness of others.

That is why I do not accept students as clients who insist they have invented the next best thing, whether it be a business service, a physical device or social idea. They are always wrong and doomed to failure.

If you wish to make money, online or face-to-face, it is enough to start with that desire. When you bring your own preconceptions along you limit your resilience according to the strength of your beliefs.

Accordingly, my first question to you then is not concerning your product but concerning the market you wish to join. Identify a market first and the market will identify a successful product for you.