Working for Ourselves

"Get a job!" was a common insult hurled at the hippies back when I was a kid. I remember a few of them homesteading in the woods off the dirt road to my favorite swimming hole on Vancouver Island. I remember the homegrown vegetable gardens and the hastily assembled log cabins and the pungent odor of their strange cigarettes.

I wouldn't pay much attention if I was alone beyond noticing you could barely see their eyes under all that head and facial hair. But if my father was with me ... well, then I'd hear a few lectures on the long, windy drive back home. The values of work, the satisfaction of a job well done, the "I had to walk 5 miles to school - both ways" speech that all parents at that time seemed to pull out of their back pockets at times like these.

I appreciated my father's point actually ... especially as I got older. But I sympathized with the rebels, too.

But now I'm noticing the same "Get a job!" catchphrase going out from Wall St. to all the OWS occupiers. For sure, work is needed for the liberation of the people. But not the work the 1% is thinking we need.

Working for Ourselves, today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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Occupy the Media - Highlight Version

I was thinking that we're all pretty busy these days, and maybe you feel like there's not enough time to listen to a full Podcast. So ... here's a highlights version. Every week, I'll take one of the key points from our full program, and publish here for you who are busy. It's perfect for sending to your contact list, posting on your Facebook page, spreading out through your social media. Join us in getting the word out about Norberto Keppe's essential and important work!

Click here to listen to the Occupy Media Highlights Podcast.

Occupy the Media

There was a recent Occupy placard held aloft by a protester that caught my eye: "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" it said. And I thought, that's captured one of the key problems in our world today. There is so much corporate ownership of the media that it seems pretty inevitable that they would be pretty firmly on the side of the status quo.

This is not to denigrate the efforts of responsible and courageous journalists the world over, of course, who are fighting to expose the corruption of the systems where they live, but in most cases, our media only report news that favors those in power.

It's high time we held our media to some higher standards than just giving us what they think we want. They have a responsibility, after all, to defend the people's interests, and we are remiss in not demanding that of them.

So ... occupy the media is what we say. And what we'll explore on our Thinking with Somebody Else's Head program today.

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Click here to listen to just an excerpt.

Science for Revolutionaries

We are living in interesting times. Perhaps revolutionary times. The Arab Spring, Occupy Wall St., the scheduled Oct. 15 global protests. Is it possible we the people are waking from our long hibernation? Are we really saying "enough is enough" collectively?

This can give us hope as we analyze facts like 46% or our tax dollars here in Brazil going to pay interest on bank loans when this developing country's infrastructure needs are so great. This can help us to resonate with the fight of the 99% against the 1%, that powerful statistic from Michael Moore's documentary critique of capitalism.

But we should be cautiously wary as well because we have ample experience of how the naivete of popular protest can lead to an illusion of change while the power remains untouched. This is perhaps most urgent here: we need a clear vision of what's gone wrong at the roots if we're to fix it. We'd like to offer something in that spirit today.

Nothing gives us this vision as well as Norberto Keppe's science of Analytical Trilogy. It's an amazing science for revolutionaries, and we'll explore that today on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.

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