[00:11.780 --> 00:12.740]  How's this supposed to work?
[00:13.860 --> 00:14.800]  Is this thing on?
[00:16.500 --> 00:17.580]  Is this thing on?
[00:19.340 --> 00:20.060]  Hi, everybody.
[00:20.220 --> 00:21.000]  I'm Jello Biafra.
[00:27.550 --> 00:29.130]  Yeah, we tricked you all, didn't we?
[00:29.330 --> 00:33.370]  No, Jello is actually, he's in transit from a lower floor.
[00:33.770 --> 00:36.270]  And, well, he's in an elevator.
[00:36.390 --> 00:37.490]  That's why he's been delayed.
[00:38.290 --> 00:39.270]  But he'll be here.
[00:39.350 --> 00:40.850]  We're going to kick this off at one.
[00:40.990 --> 00:45.470]  So basically what that means is the whole thing is going to be pushed back by one hour, which...
[00:45.490 --> 00:46.990]  It just means it'll last longer.
[00:47.430 --> 00:48.990]  So please be a little patient.
[00:49.110 --> 00:50.510]  It won't be like last night, I promise.
[00:50.730 --> 00:56.010]  But we don't think... If you can see me in the other room, you can hear me in the other room, that means everything works.
[00:58.990 --> 00:59.850]  Except this microphone.
[01:00.010 --> 01:00.790]  I don't know if he's going to like this.
[01:01.150 --> 01:03.090]  If he can hold it in his hand, I think that'll be cool.
[01:03.910 --> 01:04.330]  All right.
[01:04.430 --> 01:05.930]  You just look like you're a pain leaning over.
[01:06.170 --> 01:06.410]  Yeah.
[01:06.730 --> 01:10.170]  So, yeah, if you could just amuse yourself for another few minutes.
[01:10.570 --> 01:11.790]  Jello will be here really soon.
[01:11.910 --> 01:12.110]  Thanks.
[01:56.650 --> 01:57.370]  Hello.
[01:58.810 --> 01:59.510]  Hello.
[01:59.590 --> 01:59.830]  Hello.
[02:02.010 --> 02:04.290]  That light is driving me nuts.
[02:04.510 --> 02:06.890]  It's like a truck light in my face.
[02:07.290 --> 02:08.410]  Oh, well.
[02:09.650 --> 02:16.030]  But at least you can get me to work quicker than the screen last night.
[02:16.850 --> 02:17.570]  Hopefully.
[02:25.710 --> 02:27.510]  You didn't get it right.
[02:27.770 --> 02:28.770]  It's sound check.
[02:29.050 --> 02:29.770]  You're fired.
[02:29.990 --> 02:30.970]  Call me manager.
[02:33.890 --> 02:36.250]  Anyway, thanks for your patience.
[02:36.650 --> 02:42.670]  I overslept since this is an ungodly hour, especially West Coast time to be doing anything.
[02:46.090 --> 02:50.050]  As did my wake-up call, I might add.
[02:51.370 --> 02:57.290]  In case you haven't noticed, we are living in very interesting times.
[02:57.830 --> 03:12.090]  I thought it would be years before a mass backlash, if not outright insurrection against the increasingly run amuck and arrogant corporate rule began.
[03:12.090 --> 03:20.250]  But it's already here and it seems to be growing and growing and growing like some sort of prairie fire.
[03:20.670 --> 03:43.450]  Not since people came out of the woodwork from all walks of life to just say no to the Vietnam War, fight for civil rights, the environment, and feminism, etc., have this many people banded together for one thing against the wishes of our rulers.
[03:44.210 --> 03:48.890]  And like Vietnam, right now it's advantaged the other side.
[03:49.130 --> 04:01.290]  You know, the corporate world order, the world trade organization, IMF, World Bank, etc., they have the money, they have the power, they have the guns, they have the media.
[04:02.110 --> 04:15.310]  But that was the same situation people faced when a few lonely voices in the wilderness put down their ra-ra-ra American flags and said, we should not be in Vietnam, we gotta stop this.
[04:15.650 --> 04:24.930]  And it took a long time and a lot of hard work, but eventually the American people did stop the Vietnam War.
[04:25.450 --> 04:34.250]  And this battle against corporate rule is at least as important and will probably be at least as tough to fight.
[04:34.250 --> 04:40.310]  But like Vietnam, I think percolating out there, the numbers are there.
[04:40.730 --> 04:47.050]  Even among people we don't necessarily agree with on a lot of things, the same wedge issue applies.
[04:47.450 --> 04:50.130]  Why can't I put food on the table anymore?
[04:50.990 --> 05:17.250]  It's no accident that it wasn't just... I mean, in Seattle, for example, one of the really cool things about that at the anti-WTO demonstrations last fall was that people who would normally be derided as tree-huggers or freaks or whatever were marching side-by-side people they would normally deride as rednecks or hardhats.
[05:17.830 --> 05:27.650]  Steelworkers, unions, teamsters, etc., who I might add were not marching with the protesters during all the protests against the Vietnam War.
[05:27.970 --> 05:31.090]  This is new and this is important.
[05:31.610 --> 05:41.110]  And this fight is going to go on like it has already both inside the system and outside the system.
[05:41.490 --> 05:50.490]  I think many people here have had at least some experience and inner glee fighting it from outside the system one way or another.
[05:51.510 --> 06:17.610]  And, you know, both with Seattle and interesting little online pranks and United Students Against Sweatshops, that's pretty cool, I would say, if people band together and pressure their universities to quit making the rah-rah school mascot shirts in places that not even Kathy Lee Crosby can stomach anymore.
[06:18.690 --> 06:27.610]  And I think it's going to be very, very interesting outside the Democratic and Republican conventions coming up real soon.
[06:27.890 --> 06:34.190]  Although I am biting my nails after the Philadelphia police were shown in all their glory.
[06:38.200 --> 06:43.180]  Well, yeah, another person from Philly told me, well, yeah, of course they're going to go wild.
[06:43.180 --> 06:47.160]  People here don't care if it tarnishes the image of the city.
[06:47.380 --> 06:49.200]  They just don't care.
[06:52.130 --> 07:06.140]  And from within the system, even the most pro-Bush and pro-Gore punditoids are predicting the lowest election turnout in our history this fall.
[07:06.680 --> 07:23.060]  And which actually opens the door for real alternative parties to come in and make a bigger impact than if every brainwashed Democrat and Republican actually showed up in Christian coalition Nazi actually showed up to vote.
[07:25.100 --> 07:28.700]  Well, Jello is not a candidate for president anymore.
[07:29.320 --> 07:36.180]  See, I'm a member of the Green Party and went to their convention last June and the Green Party nominated Ralph Nader.
[07:36.760 --> 07:41.960]  And there's a diverse group among the Greens, much more diverse than I expected actually.
[07:42.200 --> 07:53.040]  And if you're going to build a real alternative to the Republicans, you have to be willing to work with people you don't necessarily agree with on every single nitpicky issue.
[07:53.320 --> 08:00.620]  So now my job is to urge all of you to get off your butts and register and vote for Ralph Nader this fall.
[08:05.260 --> 08:20.520]  Probably the only candidate whose gut instinct is against complete corporatizing of e-commerce and the net and using it for almost nothing but fascistic and shopping purposes, if you will.
[08:21.220 --> 08:36.700]  And that means... another reason to draw people into it this way is because hopefully then people pay attention to the local elections too, where the more people like us show up, the more likely somebody cool can get on the city council, the state legislature,
[08:37.360 --> 08:45.980]  you know, and keep Christian coalition stealth candidates off school boards and things like that.
[08:46.160 --> 08:49.820]  They bank on us not showing up, but they're organized.
[08:49.820 --> 08:53.720]  They do show up and we can learn from that.
[08:54.120 --> 09:08.720]  And keep in mind nationally that if Nader gets five percent of the vote this fall, that's a hell of a victory in a way because the Green Party gets matching federal funds in 2004.
[09:10.020 --> 09:16.420]  Visualize the possibility if some of those funds are spent letting people like us design the ads.
[09:22.580 --> 09:33.380]  And I think the thing where this groundswell is really coming from is more and more people are realizing that, yes, corporations are going too damn far, too damn fast.
[09:33.440 --> 09:36.300]  I thought it was going to take years for this backlash to happen.
[09:36.540 --> 09:37.660]  Here it is.
[09:37.780 --> 09:41.620]  It's the galvanizing issue just as Vietnam, civil rights, etc.
[09:41.900 --> 09:48.100]  were in the 60s, early 70s.
[09:48.180 --> 09:52.200]  I mean, at this point, I mean, they say, oh, they're threatening the capitalist system.
[09:52.360 --> 09:53.460]  Oh, what do we do?
[09:53.540 --> 09:59.080]  Especially if we have to, like, let people go to a doctor without paying up the ass to HMOs.
[09:59.080 --> 09:59.980]  That's communism.
[10:00.340 --> 10:01.100]  That's socialism.
[10:01.540 --> 10:01.980]  Bullshit.
[10:02.000 --> 10:03.040]  It's a human right.
[10:03.040 --> 10:18.870]  I mean, what we have... In every other major industrialized country on earth, including Canada and all of Europe, access to a doctor is written into the law as a basic human right.
[10:19.290 --> 10:38.150]  Here we have a disease industry instead that likes to see how they can profit off of other people's misfortunes, and would rather spend billions and billions of dollars on the next Viagra than even bothering to manufacture stuff that cures malaria because there's not any money in that.
[10:38.310 --> 10:39.750]  Let those people die.
[10:40.590 --> 10:41.850]  That's the attitude.
[10:42.110 --> 10:44.430]  That's the corporate attitude of the drug companies.
[10:44.750 --> 10:56.530]  So basically, what we have now for the big folks signed into law by the GATT Treaty that created the WTO and the NAFTA Treaty, etc., this isn't even capitalism anymore.
[10:56.690 --> 10:58.570]  This is feudalism.
[10:59.310 --> 11:17.990]  You know, feudalism, barons and lords in the high castles with a big old moat around them and an army of knights while the peasants till the land on the other side and have to turn most of the food over hoping they don't get killed or run off their meager rental property or whatever.
[11:18.650 --> 11:33.450]  And how different is that from every time we go out and buy anything from Shell Oil or Microsoft or IBM or Sony or McDonald's or whatever, we are their serfs.
[11:34.510 --> 11:48.370]  And the only way to completely divorce oneself from corporate feudalism all the way in this day and age, I only know of one person pure and politically correct as a driven snow who ever pulled this off.
[11:48.890 --> 11:50.390]  The Unabomber.
[11:55.320 --> 12:00.520]  But Mr. Kaczynski kind of suffered for his art, didn't he?
[12:00.680 --> 12:08.680]  I mean, not everybody who wants to get away from corporate feudalism wants to live in a little cabin as big as this platform with one window in it.
[12:08.820 --> 12:16.220]  And because it gets so miserable that you spend all your time mailing bombs to people you've never met because you can't get laid.
[12:20.940 --> 12:24.480]  There's got to be a better way.
[12:25.000 --> 12:37.680]  You know, all of us who want to divorce ourselves from this sort of thing, you know, we each kind of have to decide, pick our own moral code that we not only can live with but can live up to.
[12:38.040 --> 12:51.580]  Because I've noticed some of the ones who go way, way, way over the line, militant, squat, vegan, everybody else is against me, etc, are some of the first to snap like rubber bands and go completely the other way because they see everything in black and white terms,
[12:51.760 --> 12:51.940]  right?
[12:52.080 --> 12:58.320]  So if I can't do this, well, hey, maybe I'll just go back to school and get a computer job and a BMW.
[12:58.680 --> 13:00.060]  I mean, I've seen this happen.
[13:00.420 --> 13:10.020]  I mean, if you don't go so far over this way, you're less likely to spring like a rubber band and turn into the very SUV parasite you hated in the first place.
[13:15.190 --> 13:30.990]  But of course, you never hear about this very much at all in the straight media, which, in my opinion, has gotten to the point where it's outright old Soviet evil empire style censorship.
[13:31.410 --> 13:42.490]  I mean, the worst kind of censorship going on now, in my opinion, is not necessarily what Tipper Gore or Jerry Falwell or any of them have done.
[13:42.830 --> 13:59.830]  It's CNN, USA Today, ABC, NBC, CBS News, Time, Newspeak, excuse me, Newsweek, etc, deliberately not reporting the major stories that actually affect our lives.
[14:00.010 --> 14:01.150]  Global warming?
[14:01.350 --> 14:02.570]  Who cares?
[14:03.110 --> 14:06.370]  NSYNC's album is the fastest selling one in all time.
[14:06.670 --> 14:07.910]  Everybody's buying it.
[14:08.030 --> 14:09.170]  Therefore, you should too.
[14:09.490 --> 14:11.430]  Buy, buy, buy.
[14:11.710 --> 14:13.310]  Shut up and shop.
[14:13.650 --> 14:15.170]  Shut up and shop.
[14:15.430 --> 14:18.770]  Shut up and shop is the mantra, if you will.
[14:19.070 --> 14:26.890]  It wasn't that long ago that there wasn't just three branches of our government, the President, the Congress, and the Supreme Court.
[14:27.210 --> 14:32.510]  The fourth branch that kept the others in check was the press.
[14:33.070 --> 14:43.370]  I mean, I remember part of what turned people against the Vietnam War was the raw footage of blown up American soldiers on primetime news every night.
[14:43.610 --> 14:46.690]  You don't see that now, do you?
[14:47.210 --> 14:51.350]  Oh, dear me, Meg Ryan's breaking up with her husband.
[14:51.350 --> 14:53.030]  Oh, my God, how important.
[14:53.910 --> 14:55.570]  That's what you get instead.
[14:56.390 --> 15:18.150]  I mean, same with, same with, you'll contrast the way they covered Watergate and brought down Nixon with the way they covered Contragate, which was a much bigger scandal involving government operatives running drugs into this country, assassinations, the mysterious death of a reporter who uncovered the Inslaw software scandal,
[15:18.150 --> 15:22.590]  if that rings a bell, but that doesn't get reported.
[15:22.590 --> 15:24.010]  And there's a reason for that.
[15:24.750 --> 15:52.270]  During the Reagan administration, part of the great swindle, the Reagan-Bush-Clinton swindle still going on, was deregulating business laws so that corporations had a much easier time merging with others or swallowing up others in hostile takeovers, which meant some of the very rogue corporations that used to be policed by this force branch of government through exposure of how horrible they were
[15:52.270 --> 15:55.190]  started buying up the media themselves.
[15:55.710 --> 16:06.010]  For example, how many of you know that NBC is owned by General Electric, one of the world's largest arms manufacturers.
[16:06.690 --> 16:11.990]  This gives General Electric editorial control over NBC News.
[16:12.550 --> 16:16.750]  So naturally, it's like, rah-rah, isn't the Gulf War great?
[16:16.910 --> 16:18.710]  Don't our missiles always work?
[16:18.870 --> 16:20.790]  After all, GE helped build them.
[16:20.990 --> 16:24.790]  Oh, this is great, yellow ribbons, rah-rah, George Bush, etc.
[16:25.150 --> 16:28.530]  We had no choice but to go blow up Kosovo.
[16:28.650 --> 16:33.890]  We just didn't have any choice because all the other choices we just omitted from the news.
[16:34.250 --> 16:43.010]  And then in the op-ed sections of the newspaper, you get right-wing versus extreme right-wing, and that's the only discourse you get.
[16:43.190 --> 16:52.010]  You do not see Ralph Nader or Jesse Jackson, let alone Noam Chomsky's voice on the editorial page, do you?
[16:55.180 --> 17:01.320]  But there's plenty of Pat Buchanan and George Will, etc.
[17:02.180 --> 17:04.520]  You know what I'm talking about there, I think.
[17:05.080 --> 17:17.580]  And so basically, with all these corporate buyouts, Westinghouse seizing CBS after a tobacco baron decided to unload it, and their CEO, when they snatched the network, saying, we are here to serve advertisers.
[17:18.200 --> 17:19.560]  Not the public.
[17:20.320 --> 17:25.140]  No, journalism, journalism, is to serve advertisers.
[17:25.660 --> 17:28.500]  The news must make a profit.
[17:28.940 --> 17:35.700]  And one person who's documented this over several different editions of a book called The Media Monopoly.
[17:37.500 --> 17:54.800]  It's Ben Begdikian, who in the early editions was sounding the alarm bells on over 80% of all mass media in the Western world, TV, radio, movies, record companies, books, school textbooks, were in the hands of little under four dozen corporations.
[17:55.020 --> 17:59.680]  A few years later, the second edition comes out, we're down to two dozen corporations.
[18:00.020 --> 18:05.380]  This year, the new revised edition comes out, and we're down to, what, six now?
[18:05.380 --> 18:31.680]  I mean, if the agenda of Time, Warner, AOL, Turner, or Mickey Mouse, Uber Alice, who owns ABC now, or, oh, who are some of the other ones, News Corporation, owned by that noted progressive humanitarian, Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox, their agenda certainly isn't to tell it like it is,
[18:31.680 --> 18:34.960]  let alone put interesting stuff on the air.
[18:35.320 --> 18:42.540]  You know, part of the way you get people to shut up and shop is to dumb down the news to help dumb down the people.
[18:42.860 --> 18:57.880]  Even in the late 80s, there were surveys pointing out, like from fairness and accuracy and reporting, who everybody here should support and get to know, among others, that even then, there had already been a 25% reduction in actual news on the news programs.
[18:58.220 --> 19:03.940]  And now what you get is, good evening, here's the news, 20 minutes of O.J.
[19:04.080 --> 19:09.360]  Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, JonBenet Ramsey, or Princess Diana, or whatever.
[19:10.060 --> 19:12.420]  Then a quick shot to the instant cam.
[19:12.560 --> 19:18.060]  Well, yeah, there was some weird-ass car wreck here about four hours ago, but the street does seem to be empty now.
[19:18.300 --> 19:19.360]  Now back to you.
[19:19.560 --> 19:22.540]  Well, now word from our sponsor, then weather, then sports.
[19:23.420 --> 19:28.380]  And that, you know, it's basically, that's all the news you need to know.
[19:29.700 --> 19:43.620]  Dumbing down the people and deliberately keeping them that uninformed is rather anti-democratic, if you ask me, because people can't make informed decisions if they don't know what the hell's going on.
[19:44.620 --> 20:01.100]  And, I mean, it's basically a way of just keeping people asleep, so it's better that, because it's after all, for the corporate world order, it's better that we function as livestock instead of active and proactive thinkers.
[20:01.540 --> 20:14.860]  It's like in the old Soviet evil empire and communist China, the way you control the masses and make them livestock, through advertising, is basically fear of not keeping up with the state.
[20:15.560 --> 20:19.520]  We're here, and, and, you know, give them as little information as possible.
[20:20.100 --> 20:27.500]  Here, we bombard people with so much information, they don't necessarily know where to begin to sift through it all.
[20:27.680 --> 20:32.940]  And it's fear of not keeping up with the Joneses instead.
[20:34.240 --> 20:39.160]  And so it's sort of a modern lobotomy through fear, if you will.
[20:39.420 --> 20:41.680]  It's like, oh my god, what's wrong with me?
[20:41.760 --> 20:45.380]  I'm not making a million dollars as a dot-com executive.
[20:45.780 --> 20:49.560]  Oh my god, who wants to be a millionaire without having to work?
[20:49.660 --> 20:50.740]  Who wants to be a millionaire?
[20:50.840 --> 20:51.940]  Who wants to be a millionaire?
[20:52.200 --> 20:56.120]  And of course, don't cover issues, cover icons.
[20:56.640 --> 21:01.520]  Cover celebrities instead, and omit some interesting stories.
[21:01.780 --> 21:17.460]  You know, here's an interesting one that turned up recently in the New Yorker magazine, written by Seymour Hirsch, who I think was the same guy who exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which did get all over TV years ago, in spite of efforts of, among others,
[21:17.600 --> 21:21.540]  a young army officer named Colin Powell to cover it up.
[21:22.520 --> 21:35.840]  Anyway, this article, point by point, pointed out that our current drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey, is a war criminal, for all practical purposes.
[21:36.560 --> 21:53.400]  Two days after the Iraq, according to this article, after the Iraqis surrendered in the Gulf War, he sent his unit up to the so-called Highway of Death, as the people who surrendered were retreating, and blew them to smithereens, because they hadn't been able to shoot anybody yet,
[21:53.540 --> 21:55.880]  killing men, women, and children.
[21:56.520 --> 22:02.700]  That, to me, is a much bigger scandal than Monica's magic orifice could ever hope to be.
[22:03.760 --> 22:10.980]  But was there one peep out about that in like the New York Times, or the USA Today, or Time, or Newspeak?
[22:11.300 --> 22:11.780]  No.
[22:12.660 --> 22:20.460]  Instead, what do you get on the cover of, I think it was Time this week was, uh, hey everybody, there's a new Harry Potter book out.
[22:21.940 --> 22:25.340]  Everybody's reading it, even though it hasn't quite come out yet.
[22:26.000 --> 22:27.340]  Everybody's reading it.
[22:28.000 --> 22:31.660]  Or another example is of the way these things are slanted.
[22:32.200 --> 22:37.500]  Rudolph Giuliani's marriage is a bigger scandal than Giuliani himself.
[22:43.580 --> 23:04.380]  And I'm sure some of you saw the Freedom Download movie last night, pointing out how all these, um, seems pretty obvious lies about Kevin Mitnick were printed on the front page of the New York Times, branding him as this horrible, dangerous terrorist because he cost corporations hundreds of millions of dollars.
[23:04.680 --> 23:11.660]  And, uh, it's turned out that none of that actually happened, but the Times doesn't retract the story.
[23:11.900 --> 23:17.400]  It's kind of a daisy chain now, as these corporations consolidate and buy up more and more things.
[23:17.760 --> 23:25.820]  The, you, the, the, the blurring between news and entertainment tonight, you can't really tell them apart in a lot of ways anymore.
[23:26.100 --> 23:30.660]  Nor can one tell election coverage from professional wrestling.
[23:32.640 --> 23:42.280]  Not who is right on this issue, what people need to know, but, uh, can King George II Trump over Prince Albert?
[23:42.580 --> 23:45.140]  Or will Prince Albert do an end around?
[23:45.380 --> 23:47.280]  It's all icon, icon, icon.
[23:47.600 --> 23:50.000]  Bill versus Newt on this issue.
[23:50.160 --> 23:50.700]  What issue?
[23:50.840 --> 23:53.200]  Oh, we don't know, and neither should you.
[23:53.860 --> 24:15.220]  And the same, it's like a daisy chain where, um, the, basically, say the, the, the company-owned publisher puts out a book, which is then promoted on the company network's talk shows, company-owned movie studio makes the movie, company-owned commercial rock bands are in the soundtrack,
[24:15.620 --> 24:28.400]  and the company-owned cookies and soda pop are prominently placed in the movie, possibly even in the, uh, music album, while the musicians do ads for the company-owned junk food.
[24:28.420 --> 24:32.220]  It all goes in a little circle now, basically.
[24:32.900 --> 24:35.140]  And now I lost my place.
[24:35.160 --> 24:35.780]  Here we are.
[24:36.360 --> 24:56.640]  And so, and this is even worse in the school system now, actually, as people become more and more greedy and assume that all taxes are bad and keep voting down tax increases to help fund our schools and keep them going in hopes, of course, that they get privatized and turned over to God Incorporated instead.
[24:57.980 --> 25:02.620]  The schools have no choice but to go with begging bowls to corporations.
[25:03.100 --> 25:14.080]  So in places like Colorado Springs, Colorado, now for a little, uh, quote-unquote donation, in high school gyms, you don't see pep banners, you see Pepsi banners.
[25:14.080 --> 25:27.620]  You also see advertising on the side of school buses and that swill known as Channel One pumped into the classroom 12 minutes a day, two of which is commercials.
[25:27.620 --> 25:38.080]  They charge as much for to the companies as you do on a major primetime TV show because this is a captive audience of kids who are forced to watch the commercials.
[25:38.420 --> 25:44.620]  Buy Snickers, buy Nikes, rah-rah McDonald's, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[25:44.860 --> 25:49.120]  Oh, and of course, the schools can't afford learning aids.
[25:49.280 --> 25:52.120]  Corporations are all too happy to comply.
[25:52.600 --> 26:12.920]  According to the New York Times, about, uh, there were at least 75,000 schools have been infiltrated by a Procter and Gamble science series called Decision Earth, which, among other two things, instructs the kids that clear-cutting removes all trees to create new habitat for wildlife
[26:16.890 --> 26:24.530]  and open the forest floor to sunshine, thus stimulating growth.
[26:24.530 --> 26:30.950]  You know, you gotta get the growth is good mantra in there one way or another.
[26:32.130 --> 26:43.370]  And I, I, I mean, it's more and more like, like corporate, like corporations, you get more and more people having to wear corporate logos on their clothes because it's the only clothes you can find at the store.
[26:43.670 --> 26:52.410]  In San Francisco, the new sports stadium for the baseball team is named after not Willie Mays or a famous silly civic figure.
[26:52.570 --> 26:55.330]  It is named after the phone corporation company.
[26:56.630 --> 26:59.770]  And, uh, oh, what are some of the other ones?
[26:59.910 --> 27:10.110]  Coors Field in Denver, across the highway from the Pepsi Center, where the, uh, basketball and hockey team plays, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[27:10.370 --> 27:13.130]  It's all named after corporations.
[27:13.630 --> 27:17.710]  And they get real heavy-handed about this sometimes, too.
[27:18.130 --> 27:28.030]  How many of you heard about, I guess it was two years ago now, a kid in a high school in Georgia was suspended for wearing a Pepsi t-shirt on Coca-Cola day?
[27:29.590 --> 27:32.810]  That's getting heavy-handed, if you ask me.
[27:33.230 --> 27:40.270]  And in this situation, for those of you who haven't heard about this, globalization has come to my house, too.
[27:40.710 --> 28:05.470]  The former members of my old band, Dead Kennedys, sued, sued me, clear through a trial and everything, claiming that they wrote all my songs and somehow didn't notice the credits on the record saying who really wrote the songs for 20 years, and claimed there was this huge conspiracy to hide money from them.
[28:05.670 --> 28:07.290]  Yes, there was an accounting error.
[28:07.450 --> 28:09.230]  I blew it there, but they were paid.
[28:09.470 --> 28:18.170]  The real motive being, I wouldn't let, or the real catalyst being, I wouldn't let them put Holiday in Cambodia in a Levi's commercial.
[28:19.670 --> 28:21.090]  Dockers, no less.
[28:29.100 --> 28:38.240]  The ugly part was that, to the astonishment of almost everyone in the courtroom, I think even them, the jury believed them on this.
[28:38.460 --> 28:56.440]  So if the ruling stands, they own my songs, and I owe them $200,000 damages for lack of promotion, if you can believe that, and being nearly broke on account of this, I may need some help getting out of it.
[28:56.740 --> 29:03.380]  That is the situation I'm in, rather than being able to concentrate on new music and all.
[29:03.800 --> 29:15.160]  Right at a time when our corporate lords and their little puppets and agents in government also have decided, you know, we better crack down and dumb down the internet.
[29:15.640 --> 29:20.860]  There's just too goddamn much pornography out there.
[29:24.500 --> 29:26.500]  What do we define as pornography?
[29:26.910 --> 29:30.100]  Things that criticize our owners, for example.
[29:30.360 --> 29:31.910]  We can't have that.
[29:32.140 --> 29:41.640]  And so the concept is, I don't know if this is even technologically possible in this day and age, and maybe it's your job to make sure it isn't.
[29:42.000 --> 29:46.340]  Al Gore is one of the leading lights or blights or whatever.
[29:47.170 --> 30:03.520]  To privatize the internet in the form of putting as many corporate toll booths on the information highway as possible, where in order to get to one place you're going to find something out, you have to pay up to the ass to this company or this company or this company that had it handed to them by Uncle Scam,
[30:03.690 --> 30:10.740]  just the way we gave away the fiber optic airwaves in the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
[30:11.710 --> 30:13.950]  Gore is one of the leaders in this.
[30:14.140 --> 30:15.140]  Be afraid.
[30:15.480 --> 30:16.840]  Be very afraid.
[30:17.210 --> 30:19.320]  And wait till you meet his wife.
[30:23.760 --> 30:32.160]  So for anybody who says, oh, I'm gonna have to vote for Gore because he's the lesser of two evils, how much difference is there really between Gore and Bush anyway?
[30:32.720 --> 30:45.840]  They're both pro-death penalty, pro-WTO, pro-drug war, pro-corporate rule, and really, really into reviving the arms race by putting missiles up in space against what?
[30:46.020 --> 30:46.940]  North Korea?
[30:47.400 --> 30:50.300]  Oh, I'm really scared of Kim Jong-il.
[30:50.300 --> 30:52.180]  I quake under my bed.
[30:52.180 --> 30:55.840]  Oh, let's read it.
[30:55.980 --> 30:56.580]  Oh, yeah, right.
[30:57.040 --> 31:04.020]  Cuba, that's the one who's gonna bomb us back into the Stone Age unless we can blow up the world another few thousand times.
[31:04.220 --> 31:08.820]  The danger being if any of those damn things crashes, it blows up us instead.
[31:08.920 --> 31:12.420]  But, hey, at least that's the second coming of the Lord.
[31:13.300 --> 31:14.840]  You know, that's a scary thing.
[31:15.240 --> 31:18.600]  Fundamentalist Christians into the rapture and high positions of the Pentagon.
[31:18.920 --> 31:21.520]  Don't even get me started on that one.
[31:23.780 --> 31:34.660]  Basically, the Gore mantra is freedom of speech online belongs to those selling something approved by our corporate government only.
[31:35.420 --> 31:41.180]  I mean, this is another example where technology is not necessarily such a bad thing.
[31:41.180 --> 31:45.520]  It's just that it keeps being used against the people it could help.
[31:45.780 --> 31:53.100]  I mean, I saw a recent quote from Are You Serious, one of the guys from Mondo 2000 and everything, early on.
[31:53.340 --> 31:59.100]  The net was a non-commercial space that has been colonized by e-commerce.
[31:59.840 --> 32:08.880]  You know, dot-com cowboys getting rich and tootling around in their SUVs and spitting money in everybody's face in San Francisco and all.
[32:09.100 --> 32:14.000]  They're getting the money while the people who actually supply the content are barely getting by.
[32:14.460 --> 32:19.300]  And of course, another way there this is being used against us is surveillance.
[32:19.900 --> 32:26.400]  All these, I guess it's cookies that you call them, where they can get information out of who you are, what you buy, etc.
[32:27.060 --> 32:33.180]  Compile it and then sell it to somebody else without you knowing this is even being done at all.
[32:33.420 --> 32:41.720]  One company called Toysmart.com was recently caught trying to sell information they'd compiled on little kids.
[32:42.280 --> 32:50.980]  Some other companies have been using cartoon characters to get kids to give them information on their parents' buying habits, even.
[32:51.520 --> 32:57.240]  I mean, all this abusive technology actually reminds me of one of my favorite quotes of Ayatollah Bahamani.
[32:57.540 --> 33:00.160]  All Western countries are bad.
[33:00.640 --> 33:03.600]  Nothing but evil comes from them.
[33:05.240 --> 33:26.380]  But on the other hand, the advent of the web and the net and even e-commerce has also somewhat at least democratized what corporations have swallowed up at the strip mall level, extending the punk style do-it-yourself DIY ethic, not just to music, but to publishing,
[33:27.060 --> 33:40.300]  film, pornography, and even being able to sell all those albums that made such a difference in your younger life before you became a dot-com worm on eBay.
[33:41.940 --> 34:00.940]  But not everyone owns a computer, so you're not going to reach everybody going strictly over the net, but it does mean more people can get out there and more importantly the only weird mutant in their school or their town can find others across the country and the world and feel like they're not alone anymore.
[34:07.480 --> 34:16.440]  But part of keeping the net free from restrictions from Al Gore incorporated is using it wisely.
[34:17.260 --> 34:23.480]  I mean, I'm sure everybody in this room knows a net wit or two who will be on there for hours on end.
[34:23.680 --> 34:30.700]  Even their lovely, voluptuous, significant other can't get them to come to bed till four in the morning because they're still on the net.
[34:30.860 --> 34:36.580]  We're treating it almost like TV for those who deem TV beneath them.
[34:37.320 --> 34:39.400]  You've probably seen that, haven't you?
[34:39.660 --> 34:41.140]  I mean, we get to that point.
[34:41.140 --> 34:45.500]  How different is that from the CB radio craze of the 1970s?
[34:45.540 --> 34:46.460]  Anybody remember that?
[34:46.820 --> 34:48.160]  Breaker, breaker, good buddy.
[34:48.240 --> 34:49.720]  Am I talking to a real trucker?
[34:50.080 --> 34:56.220]  I mean, how different is that from, wow, I'm online with Courtney right now?
[35:01.530 --> 35:05.490]  Be careful of the information and gossip you get on the net, too.
[35:05.610 --> 35:09.810]  I mean, if it sounds too good or too wild to be true, maybe it isn't.
[35:09.930 --> 35:11.550]  Maybe it helps to get a second opinion.
[35:11.810 --> 35:18.390]  For example, I think it was late 97 now, I found out on the internet I was dead.
[35:20.810 --> 35:28.330]  People from all over were trading all this net gossip and updates and the grisly details of my recent shooting death.
[35:28.510 --> 35:36.070]  And I mean, I looked in the shower and couldn't find the bullet holes, but if the net said I was dead, then it must be true, right?
[35:36.890 --> 35:38.490]  Be careful of stuff like that.
[35:38.550 --> 35:44.630]  And now what I've found out is somebody else, I guess, owns my name on the net now, too.
[35:44.790 --> 35:48.850]  Other people own jellobiafra.com or jellobiafra.org.
[35:48.870 --> 35:54.610]  And I don't know what they plan to do with her to try and extort money from me to buy back my own name.
[35:54.710 --> 35:56.830]  That seems a little weird to me, too.
[35:57.950 --> 36:02.590]  But there you go.
[36:02.830 --> 36:04.730]  We'll try diplomacy first.
[36:06.410 --> 36:19.110]  But my hope is that people who want to use the net for good reasons will also encourage others to help develop sharper and sharper bullshit detectors.
[36:19.510 --> 36:29.330]  As I said, if it is too wild or too interesting or too good to be true, maybe it's not true and hunt for a second opinion.
[36:29.610 --> 36:49.710]  Especially important because as the old saying goes, knowledge is power and that is the power to influence other people in a positive way and inspire them to do something besides giving up and being spectators in their own lives and putting up with horrible dot-com jobs just because they think they're going to get all these stock options.
[36:49.710 --> 36:51.090]  They often never do.
[36:52.110 --> 36:55.710]  You know, knowledge is power, but you got to have the right knowledge.
[36:56.010 --> 37:05.670]  And the only way you can really boil it down to is that tenuous walking on ice known as we all believe what we want to believe.
[37:06.350 --> 37:20.430]  So we got to be careful as to what we believe in order to make it more difficult for the corporations and those who want to dumb down the net as the e-commerce is great, e-communication must be stopped, etc.
[37:20.950 --> 37:38.130]  Make it more and more difficult for them to co-opt our culture through Taco Bell's extreme meals or a giant, I think it's a Nissan Swine Mobile's SUV being advertised as radical as we speak.
[37:38.710 --> 37:39.970]  Things like that.
[37:40.610 --> 37:54.010]  Make it more difficult for them to co-opt our culture by using the information highway to breed a generation of people who sees through corporate meat-bullshit and their dishonest media as never before.
[37:54.530 --> 37:58.750]  In other words, don't hate the media, become the media.
[38:05.590 --> 38:12.050]  This doesn't just mean digging, muckraking, learning, and regurgitating the knowledge via the net.
[38:12.070 --> 38:18.430]  It means not just supporting, but maybe helping create underground zines.
[38:18.630 --> 38:24.390]  You know, the whole underground zine culture may well be the most important thing punk rock ever gave the world.
[38:25.110 --> 38:27.670]  Even more so than all the cool music.
[38:29.110 --> 38:51.750]  And in this day and age, with corporate media being so dumbed down and censored, becoming the media means going one-on-one with people you know saying your family, at work, at school, and explaining to them in a non-condescending way when they spout Rush Limbaugh bullshit or hold their nose and say they're gonna vote for Al Gore,
[38:52.210 --> 38:54.470]  why that is wrong.
[38:54.730 --> 39:04.250]  And why it isn't the eco-terrorists and the feminazis and the welfare cheats who have screwed up our economy and made it harder and harder for you to put food on the table.
[39:04.530 --> 39:09.730]  It's the robber barons who have so much money they can't figure out how to spend it.
[39:10.130 --> 39:15.170]  So the only thing they have left to do is to try and screw more and more people to make more and more money.
[39:15.670 --> 39:22.850]  Wealth addiction in other words, which to me is a far more dangerous form of drug addiction than crack could ever hope to be.
[39:23.430 --> 39:26.550]  Certainly done more damage to the world.
[39:31.070 --> 39:35.250]  Becoming the media through pirate radio stations.
[39:38.410 --> 39:44.190]  And now we are seeing the dawn of pirate television as well.
[39:44.650 --> 39:51.250]  When I was in Italy clear back in 81 there were 70 pirate TV stations in Rome alone.
[39:51.650 --> 39:52.830]  But that's Italy.
[39:53.150 --> 40:12.730]  Here now we've got people like the Independent Media Coalition, which is at least nationwide, who among other things had enough cameras out in the streets of Seattle last fall, that when CNN said, oh the police are behaving reasonably, no rubber bullets are being fired,
[40:12.910 --> 40:24.770]  contrary to reports, they got a hold of footage of rubber bullets being fired, put it up on the net all over the world, and within one hour CNN had to change their story.
[40:31.830 --> 40:43.190]  Where would Rodney King or that guy near death in a hospital in Philadelphia be without somebody becoming the media and getting footage of police brutality?
[40:43.610 --> 40:52.170]  If Rodney King hadn't hit the networks on the front page, I doubt any of us would know who Amadou Diallo was at all.
[40:52.290 --> 40:55.310]  Because after all, crime is horrible.
[40:55.530 --> 41:00.150]  We must get rid of more and more constitutional rights and the police are our friends.
[41:00.150 --> 41:01.670]  We need to give them machine guns.
[41:01.850 --> 41:13.570]  We need SWAT teams in every town, which we practically have now too, with a lot of like gifts of high-tech military hardware from the Pentagon because they don't have the evil empire to fight anymore.
[41:13.570 --> 41:16.250]  So why not fight the American people instead?
[41:16.250 --> 41:23.830]  After all, privatized prisons are the fastest growing sector of our economy, even more than e-commerce.
[41:24.390 --> 41:32.270]  I mean, what does that say about family values when we're spending far more money on prisons than we are on schools?
[41:32.610 --> 41:37.310]  To the point where in California, a prison guard makes almost twice as much money as a teacher.
[41:41.980 --> 41:46.040]  You don't hear about that in the USA today.
[41:46.580 --> 41:52.380]  And that's why the online communication becoming the media is so damn important.
[41:52.740 --> 42:08.600]  You know, that maybe we don't need the drug war after all and could stop it right now without even having to go through the legislature if every sitting governor with a stroke of a pen commuted all non-violent drug offenses to time served and let everybody out.
[42:09.340 --> 42:13.080]  That can be done with a stroke of a pen right now.
[42:16.020 --> 42:33.800]  And let's not forget that part of the reason so many people who are so pissed off at run amok corporate rule showed up in Seattle and in DC on April 16th was online networking that wasn't possible before the web came into being.
[42:34.180 --> 42:47.700]  So it'll be interesting to see what happens in Philadelphia and Los Los Angeles during the Republican and Democratic conventions where those are two cities with some of the most notoriously violent and corrupt police departments in this city.
[42:48.000 --> 42:58.020]  I hope a lot of people going there show up with their camcorders just like Seattle and DC have a name for it now the camcorder truth jihad.
[43:00.340 --> 43:04.260]  And of course the beauty is anyone can join.
[43:05.440 --> 43:12.380]  As a kid my what I wanted to be when I grew up was a villain on Batman.
[43:14.380 --> 43:24.620]  I mean when others wanted to be cops or baseball stars or nurses I wanted to be the Penguin or the Riddler.
[43:24.880 --> 43:30.180]  And now with the camcorder truth jihad we all have our chance to be the Joker.
[43:32.200 --> 43:38.160]  And let out as hearty a laugh as Cesar Romero got to do on the TV version of Batman.
[43:38.580 --> 43:42.020]  That's what the camcorder truth jihad is all about.
[43:42.500 --> 43:52.420]  You know the Joker if you recall is the one who jammed the radio in the airwaves from time to time to broadcast his own news Captain Midnight style instead.
[43:53.400 --> 44:09.280]  And this this Joker tradition does go back a ways at least in Britain they figured out a way during protests to intercept the police radio frequencies and misdirect the cops to other parts of town away from the demonstrations.
[44:09.940 --> 44:16.120]  And as usual the British and the Europeans are a little ahead of us in the modern jokesterism as well.
[44:16.220 --> 44:42.820]  There's one UK group called the Electro Hippies if anybody's heard of them who have never even met each other except online who claim at least they got half a million people to swamp the WTO's website right around the time of their meeting in Seattle thus interfering with the WTO's ability to get anything done or tell people how wonderful they are as they loot the world.
[44:43.160 --> 44:53.600]  I mean the Electro Hippies model according to the article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian was in cyberspace everyone can hear you scream if you want them to.
[44:57.090 --> 45:19.510]  And then there's the Electronic Disturbance Theater who monkey wrenched the web page of Mexican dictator excuse me president Ernesto Zedillo and nailed him for human rights violations by among other things making it so if somebody else looked in there it would come back human rights not found on this server.
[45:20.070 --> 45:36.190]  And then in a real life case of ghosts in the machine they listed the names of people murdered by the Mexican army on the pages access log for Zedillo and his friends to find to their alarm.
[45:36.490 --> 45:41.630]  I mean this isn't mere hacking this is hacktivism.
[45:47.580 --> 46:09.660]  Not your frat boy animal house school of hacking of uh you know monkey wrenching a tiny little community web server just because uh you can show you can do it and ignoring the Nike website in the meantime or uh I just ran up twenty thousand dollars on somebody's credit card and I don't even know who they are.
[46:11.580 --> 46:13.380]  That's not hacktivism.
[46:13.940 --> 46:17.320]  That is uh the animal house school of it.
[46:18.800 --> 46:21.580]  It's not even not hacking says one person.
[46:21.700 --> 46:24.520]  I don't know what to call it instead then maybe greed.
[46:25.400 --> 46:28.460]  Another example was an entity called Bronc Buster.
[46:28.740 --> 46:46.600]  I was actually able to remove some of the filtering from some of the firewalls that separated China from the rest of the net allowing the Chinese unfiltered browsing over information their government didn't want them to know at least until the government spotted it.
[46:46.900 --> 46:55.160]  And I have to wonder if Al Gore's wet dream of a privatized net will also mean that kind of filtering over here.
[46:55.400 --> 47:05.540]  After all what if a little kid's in the library and finds out people have sex or finds out how to prevent the spread of AIDS or something like that.
[47:05.660 --> 47:06.780]  We can't have that.
[47:06.920 --> 47:09.260]  We must only have abstinence.
[47:12.260 --> 47:25.000]  I mean in other words hacktivism may now be very important as like becoming the media of becoming the new fourth branch of government to police the other three.
[47:25.760 --> 47:29.920]  Checking e-commerce via e-protest.
[47:30.280 --> 47:40.220]  And some of the other side says well you're so into freedom of speech that's censorship because when you monkey wrench a Nike site you're censoring what Nike has to say.
[47:40.980 --> 47:47.500]  Well I mean that's kind of like saying that white people are discriminated against in the United States of America.
[47:47.500 --> 47:47.640]  America.
[47:47.760 --> 47:53.400]  It doesn't fly when the deck is stacked so far on the other side.
[47:53.700 --> 47:57.860]  The new fourth branch is the way to keep people like that clean.
[47:58.320 --> 48:10.840]  I mean if it wasn't for global exchange going after Nike's sweatshop practices so hard even the incremental progress Nike had to do to try and save their public image never would have happened.
[48:11.900 --> 48:20.500]  And so now you hear more that the buzzword in the papers including those New York Times articles on Mitnick etc.
[48:21.140 --> 48:27.000]  This isn't mere monkey wrenching or vandalism it's terrorism.
[48:28.300 --> 48:40.060]  Terrorism on par with blowing up all those people in Oklahoma City or Palestine or Israel or Northern Ireland or whatever this is the same thing as terrorism.
[48:40.720 --> 48:43.120]  I mean I don't think so.
[48:43.440 --> 48:53.540]  I mean the little arms of our corporate government as far as I'm concerned hack into our personal lives and terrorize innocent people every day.
[48:58.510 --> 49:11.130]  The World Bank and the international monetary funds and the way they'll loan money to impoverish countries to build giant dams and oil pipelines so that Bechtel among others can get rich.
[49:11.310 --> 49:17.370]  In the meantime just totally screwing up the people in the area and taking away their meager welfare system.
[49:17.550 --> 49:18.590]  That's terrorism.
[49:19.510 --> 49:30.670]  Our continuing embargo on the Iraqi people that doesn't hit Saddam Hussein at all but is now estimated to have killed two million Iraqi civilians.
[49:31.410 --> 49:36.930]  Great many of them children because they can't get medicine in or fix their water supply or anything.
[49:37.250 --> 49:39.170]  That is certainly terrorism.
[49:43.810 --> 49:47.310]  The way we treat Cuba is certainly terrorism.
[49:49.730 --> 49:53.390]  The drug war is certainly terrorism.
[49:55.390 --> 50:06.750]  I mean there are many instances that the same corporate media is never going to f*cking tell you when SWAT teams crash into the wrong house and then kill somebody on suspicion of growing marijuana.
[50:07.050 --> 50:11.110]  Well, he sat up his bed so we just had to blow him to pieces in front of his family.
[50:11.410 --> 50:12.790]  This happened in New Hampshire.
[50:13.090 --> 50:33.270]  It happened to a blind rancher outside of Malibu, California where it was later uncovered that the reason he got raided was the local, I believe it was the Ventura County sheriff's sheriff's, among others, had been looking at property in the area to seize under drug war seizure rules and sell and his looked valuable so they just killed him.
[50:33.790 --> 50:35.650]  That is terrorism.
[50:36.050 --> 50:44.850]  And if that's not enough, new drug war terrorism is starting up in earnest kind of Bill Clinton's f*ck you gift as he leaves power.
[50:45.550 --> 50:50.730]  1.3 billion dollars in military aid to Colombia.
[50:51.690 --> 51:00.890]  Already one of the worst human rights violators in the world where you can't even tell all the death squads apart who sometimes shoot each other.
[51:01.670 --> 51:08.010]  And Colombia was already the third highest recipient of foreign aid behind Israel and Egypt, weirdly enough.
[51:08.150 --> 51:11.390]  And now they're getting even more to fight drugs.
[51:12.270 --> 51:25.530]  Well, the easy way to fight drugs, of course, is just to decriminalize them like they have in parts of Europe so people get them on prescription instead of having to rob and kill people to pay the mobs high drug prices.
[51:25.850 --> 51:28.890]  But CIA doesn't approve of that, I guess.
[51:33.880 --> 51:42.680]  Gentrification and bulldozing out low-income people and people who've rented their places for 30 years so some slime mold yuppie can move in.
[51:43.040 --> 51:44.740]  That's terrorism.
[51:49.100 --> 52:06.000]  Terrorizing and scarring generations of young girls with all these ads and hints that if you aren't exactly the same as Britney Spears and really, really skinny, there must be something wrong with you.
[52:06.300 --> 52:07.880]  So don't be yourself.
[52:08.080 --> 52:16.100]  Go on a diet again and again and buy lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of animal-tested goop to put on your face.
[52:17.480 --> 52:24.100]  And now, speaking of cyber-terrorism, how many people have heard of E-Watch?
[52:26.850 --> 52:40.730]  E-Watch, based in Dallas and sold through, among others, Edelman Interactive PR Agency and PR Newswire, basically allows corporations to hunt down their critics.
[52:41.110 --> 52:50.190]  And E-Watch charges about $5,000 to dig up their critics' screen name within 7 to 10 days.
[52:50.490 --> 52:55.910]  Or for an extra $2,000 or so, they can ID the person within 48 hours.
[52:56.770 --> 53:11.750]  And their national project manager, who ironically is named Skinner, was quoted as saying, well, companies will receive a dossier detailing all info gathered about the subject during inquiry.
[53:12.530 --> 53:23.450]  And this can be used, for example, Northwest Airlines hunted down the organizers of a sick-out protesting their labor policies and fired them all.
[53:23.790 --> 53:41.270]  And there's also proposals to use this kind of surveillance to then file suits against the people who criticized the company online, knowing full well that even if the critics are right, it's going to wipe them out financially in order to fight the lawsuit.
[53:41.530 --> 53:43.850]  These are called slap suits, by the way.
[53:44.090 --> 53:47.410]  Strategic lawsuits against public participation.
[53:48.350 --> 54:06.010]  And if that isn't unconstitutional enough, there's a new program called WAVE from the Pinkerton Security Company, who have over a hundred years experience beating the crap out of labor unions, among other things.
[54:06.250 --> 54:12.150]  And this one is to help students turn in weirdos.
[54:12.970 --> 54:15.370]  We don't want another Columbine.
[54:15.370 --> 54:31.590]  If you see a student who might be violent or suicidal or you just don't happen to like or they're a little too much of a geek and don't want to play football or be a cheerleader or whatever, turn them in and let the principal and the authorities deal with them.
[54:31.770 --> 54:38.110]  There might even be a reward for you in the another program like that called Mosaic 2000.
[54:38.790 --> 54:45.590]  And if that's not unconstitutional enough, how many of you know about what the DEA just got caught doing?
[54:46.170 --> 55:09.230]  Some people are calling this cookie gate, apparently, where they arrange so somebody is trying to even get information, positive or negative, about certain illegal drugs like marijuana, then an anti-drug ad will appear at the top of the search engine leading people to government anti-drug websites.
[55:09.230 --> 55:22.670]  And the reward is the cookie in your hard drive so that they can keep track later of every single person curious about drugs they can lay their little fascist Orwellian claws on.
[55:23.530 --> 55:36.150]  And in this light, with this level of corporate dictatorship slowly being eased in so we don't even realize a coup has been going on since before some of you were even born.
[55:36.610 --> 55:43.330]  Well, at this point, it means fighting back and resisting all this isn't just a hell of a lot of fun.
[55:43.690 --> 55:45.850]  It's our patriotic duty.
[55:52.160 --> 56:03.960]  Because our hijacked unconstitutional government of corpora- of the people by corporations for corporations must be overthrown.
[56:09.660 --> 56:14.660]  I've always had a soft spot in my heart for creative crime.
[56:15.260 --> 56:21.720]  I mean, in a way, crime is the last unspoiled art form left on earth.
[56:22.300 --> 56:28.220]  You don't go to art school or the fashion institute to learn how to do creative crime.
[56:28.380 --> 56:31.600]  People just crawl out of the woodwork and do it.
[56:31.840 --> 56:40.880]  And in the days where not only is all this surveillance for people wanting to learn about drugs going on, just wait till you meet the workplace, too.
[56:41.700 --> 56:53.460]  Where they now have, thanks to our computer age, the security people at the corporation can monitor how many keys in your keyboard click per hour.
[56:53.620 --> 56:55.700]  And if you're a little slow, boom, out.
[56:56.100 --> 57:09.600]  Can track you through your badge or pager or just know when nobody's clicking at your keyboard to know whether you might be going to the bathroom too often or taking a coffee break or talking to another worker or something.
[57:09.920 --> 57:11.200]  Boom, you're out.
[57:11.420 --> 57:13.340]  Kind of like an electronic plantation.
[57:13.720 --> 57:22.340]  But at least the cyber revolution has ushered in new frontiers of sabotage on the job.
[57:26.710 --> 57:43.950]  I mean, my personal dream of dreams would be that some patriotic citizen could find a way way to go into the defense department and DEA, FBI, et cetera's computers and erase everything they know.
[57:47.900 --> 57:55.920]  Another interesting one I heard about clear back in the early 90s was there was some kind of uh, factory in Savannah, Georgia with about 1500 employees.
[57:56.200 --> 58:00.220]  And somebody got in there so it came up on everybody's screen first thing in the morning.
[58:00.560 --> 58:03.600]  Half the workforce will be laid off at the end of today.
[58:03.600 --> 58:07.980]  And people stopped working all day just to talk about it.
[58:08.140 --> 58:12.720]  Thus costing the company precious company time and all.
[58:12.940 --> 58:19.080]  I mean, some of these are as easy to do as little putting little post-its on key pieces of equipment saying out of order on them.
[58:19.700 --> 58:28.020]  Another one I heard of was calling emergency supervisors meetings so the supervisors all show up and meet and nobody can figure out why they're there.
[58:28.800 --> 58:31.700]  wasting more precious company time.
[58:32.540 --> 58:38.760]  Or when people try to say no, you can't do this anymore, you can't say this on the net anymore.
[58:39.600 --> 58:43.720]  There's a friend of mine, who Johnny Risk, who later played a band called Anx.
[58:43.820 --> 58:49.300]  Clear back in high school he came up with the concept of not just Johnny Appleseed, but Johnny Potseed.
[58:49.600 --> 58:57.240]  Where you fight the drug war by just planting marijuana seeds and scattering them in city parks and on lawns.
[58:57.300 --> 59:06.800]  So there's so much weed growing, they can never get rid of it all, let alone throw everybody in a privately owned prison on drug charges.
[59:07.220 --> 59:14.900]  That could even be extended to all these like urine tests on the job to see if you're using drugs.
[59:15.100 --> 59:18.440]  I mean, you probably know you can already get clean pee mail order.
[59:18.440 --> 59:24.080]  Why not have everybody start getting drug tainted pp mail order?
[59:24.300 --> 59:35.280]  All turn it in at the same time, so they have a choice of either dropping the policy or firing everyone, because everyone tested positive for drugs.
[59:35.840 --> 59:50.260]  Same goes for the net when people flood various surveillance or anti-smut devices or these devices where if you say a key word, suddenly the NSA may be monitoring your email, flood them.
[59:50.500 --> 59:57.540]  So everybody's saying nothing but words Tipper Gore doesn't like until the whole program is rendered useless.
[01:00:01.700 --> 01:00:12.960]  But of course, the corporate world order is fighting back as well, labeling actions like this not vandalism, but terrorism.
[01:00:13.720 --> 01:00:17.740]  I mean, sneaking into somebody's cell phone is terrorism.
[01:00:18.440 --> 01:00:25.860]  Getting somebody's credit card number, which admittedly is kind of annoying, but then not using it is terrorism.
[01:00:26.340 --> 01:00:44.260]  I mean, if cyber sabotage is truly terrorism on part with on par with blowing up innocent people, then maybe our government has finally admitted that they define terrorism not as threatening or injuring someone else's life, but someone else's wealth or property.
[01:00:45.040 --> 01:01:02.320]  And we're already going through a rather extreme expansion of the definition of property rights, where the so-called wise use movement led by logging companies and mining companies saying, well, you pass a new environmental law where we can't pollute or strip mine as much,
[01:01:02.460 --> 01:01:07.880]  you automatically have to pay us for the money we're going to lose, or it's a property taking.
[01:01:08.720 --> 01:01:11.840]  The air less polluted is a property taking.
[01:01:12.460 --> 01:01:28.920]  Or starting with the Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992, our government position presented there by Dan Quayle, I might add, was that our corporations have the right to go into the Amazon jungle, take out exotic plants, and then patent their genes.
[01:01:29.140 --> 01:01:35.160]  So the indigenous people can't touch them because it's company property, but the company owns it.
[01:01:35.300 --> 01:01:39.680]  And now they've gone as far as to say that they're about to patent the human genome.
[01:01:40.860 --> 01:01:47.800]  Our own genes inside our own body are owned by somebody else, because they found it first.
[01:01:48.600 --> 01:01:52.420]  Is that like me going up to a car outside and saying, oh, look, I found this.
[01:01:52.480 --> 01:01:53.960]  I own the patent on it now.
[01:01:56.200 --> 01:02:02.040]  And the Reagan-Bush-Gore-Bush regime is letting people get away with that.
[01:02:02.260 --> 01:02:21.820]  But at least the beauty of the dawn of the computer age is, for every obstacle put in place to thwart free speech and squash non-corporate commerce and hacktivism on the net, everything they come up with, some bored teenager, somewhere of whatever age,
[01:02:22.000 --> 01:02:25.040]  is going to find a way to thwart them.
[01:02:29.760 --> 01:02:31.440]  Every time.
[01:02:32.160 --> 01:02:42.360]  As RU Serious put it, it is impossible to control non-physical property when it can be easily and nearly infinitely copied.
[01:02:43.120 --> 01:02:46.520]  Which brings us to Napster.
[01:02:50.720 --> 01:02:57.820]  For those of you cheering Napster, will you still cheer if in a few years it's the next Microsoft?
[01:02:59.340 --> 01:03:00.640]  We don't know.
[01:03:00.920 --> 01:03:08.180]  And I admit, I am not sure where I stand on the issue yet, because I kind of see both sides of it.
[01:03:08.300 --> 01:03:13.500]  I think Metallica's suit went way, way, way too far going after schools and kids.
[01:03:13.680 --> 01:03:18.240]  And that was like a real dumb PR maneuver, if you ask me.
[01:03:18.580 --> 01:03:28.760]  I mean, the major labels were already freaking out about MP3s, but that kind of reminded me of when the movie industry tried to get rid of video rentals.
[01:03:29.060 --> 01:03:33.320]  Which is now, if I'm not mistaken, their biggest source of revenue.
[01:03:34.000 --> 01:03:49.240]  And admittedly, it seems a bit weird to me, who's been like a record collector since I was in my early teens, that there would be a whole new group of people who have no interest in the hard goods, or the artwork that goes with the songs, or the whole albums.
[01:03:49.660 --> 01:03:57.880]  That seems weird to me, but obviously doesn't seem weird to a newer generation of people growing up strictly on digital downloading.
[01:03:57.880 --> 01:04:10.660]  And would something like Napster be no more harmful than Xeroxing part of a book for a term paper, or copying the rented video for later after you've paid the rental fee?
[01:04:10.780 --> 01:04:11.360]  I don't know.
[01:04:12.040 --> 01:04:22.080]  So now, it's sort of being framed in this all-too-black-and-white issues as major labels versus the little guy, the kids and the net.
[01:04:22.240 --> 01:04:23.400]  And it's not that simple.
[01:04:23.640 --> 01:04:27.540]  Major labels are an awfully easy target, we must admit.
[01:04:27.900 --> 01:04:39.340]  They put out really bad music for the most part, charge so much money for those CDs that they just lost an antitrust suit, and there may be a very big rebate soon.
[01:04:39.780 --> 01:05:03.460]  And now that they're finally getting hip to MP3, let alone Napster, generous old Sony has announced that they have 50 songs out of their catalog of hundreds of thousands of songs, probably none of them ones I'd want to hear, I might add, available for online purchase at $3.49 a piece.
[01:05:06.860 --> 01:05:19.500]  Which, which, if you multiply that by 10, which is the major label standard for the length of an album, that's $35 for a CD that isn't even a CD.
[01:05:20.420 --> 01:05:24.960]  Or $70 if it's one of these long ones that people put out now.
[01:05:25.500 --> 01:05:41.240]  And admittedly, I might not be too upset if the people I was once in a band with, who've now changed their tune and pissed on everything Dead Kennedy's ever stood for and sued me, you know, if they win and are able to steal my work and then use it to use my voice,
[01:05:41.480 --> 01:05:53.440]  my face, my songs to potentially sell Coors beer, I'm not going to be too upset if those songs get shared online instead of money going to people who treat others the way they do.
[01:05:57.640 --> 01:06:09.240]  But again, this is not as simple as the big bad major label corporations versus the little guy who can't afford Sony's price for CDs or online downloading.
[01:06:09.560 --> 01:06:14.600]  There's also a lot of people, including me, who aren't even caught in the middle.
[01:06:14.600 --> 01:06:18.540]  We're way, way down closer to the little guy.
[01:06:18.880 --> 01:06:34.080]  Where it's not easy to make a living and pay your bills when you deliberately operate outside the mainstream entertainment industry and the star system, as I have tried to do for over 20 years now.
[01:06:34.620 --> 01:06:40.400]  And I've been relatively lucky as far as being able to pay my bills, but I don't want that to run out.
[01:06:40.640 --> 01:06:47.680]  There's also a friend of mine in Matt Montford from a band called Ancient Future, which is like a world fusion band and all.
[01:06:47.880 --> 01:06:53.760]  I've known him since seventh grade and he's so gifted he could play Jimi Hendrix at age 12.
[01:06:54.560 --> 01:07:01.480]  He's dedicated his life to his music, but it's unusual music and nobody will sign him anymore.
[01:07:01.480 --> 01:07:15.560]  So now he he has a website for his band Ancient Future and he says he gets a lot of hits, but only one in 900 hits actually buy a CD from him where he can pay his bills.
[01:07:15.640 --> 01:07:31.610]  And here's somebody tremendously gifted who worries about getting kicked out of his rent control apartment he's lived in for almost two decades and not knowing where he's going to be able to go because he's stuck to his artistic guns.
[01:07:32.890 --> 01:07:33.630]  What's that?
[01:07:34.630 --> 01:07:39.610]  No lynching the landlord is not going to help somebody like that in this situation.
[01:07:40.750 --> 01:07:49.950]  I don't have an answer to that, but somehow people ought to think of what it means to be a struggling artist in this country.
[01:07:50.210 --> 01:08:03.130]  In an ideal world everybody who dedicates themselves to their craft to make something truly good and different without sucking up to Warner Brothers ought to get a subsidy like they often do in some European countries.
[01:08:04.730 --> 01:08:06.610]  But we don't have that here.
[01:08:07.090 --> 01:08:20.570]  And so if somebody works and saves at a shit job they really would rather quit and concentrate on their music to make a thousand CDs and loses two or three hundred sales on Napster, they're screwed.
[01:08:21.890 --> 01:08:24.810]  And I mean it's something to think about.
[01:08:24.990 --> 01:08:30.670]  I mean one solution proposed of course is not to charge three dollars and forty nine cents a song.
[01:08:31.250 --> 01:08:31.850]  Duh.
[01:08:32.350 --> 01:08:52.190]  I mean the axiom being if people want to support artists they're willing to pay when the price is reasonable and more damn our distribution for alternative tentacles my label which I do out of my own pocket I think is a dollar 14 a song at the moment which is uh about what a third or a quarter of the price of a seven inch single.
[01:08:52.710 --> 01:08:56.270]  So that's that's that's better in my opinion.
[01:08:56.530 --> 01:09:05.190]  But at least when you deal with Napster think about supporting the artists who generally who genuinely do need the money.
[01:09:05.510 --> 01:09:15.190]  Because a lot of people if they can't pay their bills to keep recording their music they're just going to give up and get a job they hate and you're not going to hear about them anymore.
[01:09:15.470 --> 01:09:17.810]  And I don't think we want that either.
[01:09:18.410 --> 01:09:23.470]  You know music should not be restricted to those wealthy enough that they can burn their own CDs.
[01:09:23.850 --> 01:09:24.830]  That ain't right either.
[01:09:26.930 --> 01:09:45.710]  And it also wouldn't surprise me if the major labels and the showbiz people retaliate against this eventually by saying well if we can't make all these millions on CDs we'll just jack ticket prices up for concerts for bands for people who really want to see for a hundred bucks.
[01:09:45.930 --> 01:09:51.570]  And you either pay the a hundred bucks or you don't see your favorite band and we'll just run off with your money that way.
[01:09:51.810 --> 01:09:58.210]  And if that doesn't work just concentrate only on the blockbusters even more than they do today.
[01:09:58.570 --> 01:10:06.750]  You know more pop pablum and prefab boy and girl clone bands who don't even write their own songs or care.
[01:10:07.470 --> 01:10:12.890]  And concentrate on all the merchandise that can generate that can't be shared online.
[01:10:13.170 --> 01:10:18.950]  I mean you can't download an NSYNC poster or a Britney Spears doll.
[01:10:19.250 --> 01:10:23.770]  And if that's where the money is why bother supporting somebody good?
[01:10:24.690 --> 01:10:27.370]  Those are some of the dangers I see in that.
[01:10:27.470 --> 01:10:32.010]  It's just something to think about because I haven't really made up my mind about Napster personally.
[01:10:33.550 --> 01:10:36.330]  So back to hacktivism.
[01:10:36.670 --> 01:10:40.770]  I mean there is an online entity called Buster who defines it this way.
[01:10:41.010 --> 01:10:46.430]  Using the net to blend activism and technology in a positive way.
[01:10:46.910 --> 01:10:50.990]  Not a frat boy way or a genuinely thieving way.
[01:10:51.310 --> 01:11:06.290]  I mean is flooding the WTO or Ernesto Zedillo's website or Nike an act of terrorism or a show of growing solidarity and unrest among the people against their terrorism.
[01:11:07.230 --> 01:11:22.610]  Breaking down the limits on freedom in order to make them harder to impose at a time when everything from Giuliani's cops to Al Gore's toll booths are efforts to impose greater and greater restrictions on freedom.
[01:11:22.870 --> 01:11:24.690]  And not just freedom of speech.
[01:11:24.990 --> 01:11:29.550]  I mean it's so simple and so important just to participate in this.
[01:11:29.730 --> 01:11:33.310]  Doing something is better than doing nothing.
[01:11:33.970 --> 01:11:38.330]  I mean wouldn't you rather help make history than watch it on TV?
[01:11:38.870 --> 01:11:41.690]  Or excuse me gossip about it on the net?
[01:11:43.150 --> 01:11:44.890]  So that's it.
[01:11:45.170 --> 01:11:46.170]  Thanks for listening.
[01:11:55.960 --> 01:12:07.150]  And to think that I've held your attention for damn near two hours without without ever having used a computer in my life.
[01:12:07.350 --> 01:12:08.170]  See ya.