Big Youth —

Manley Augustus Buchanan

to his mom – was born, like Robert Nesta Marley,

a sufferah, in Trenchtown, in Kingston, Jamaica, which was

about as low a birth as one could ask for on the planet Earth in the

late 1940′s. Him don’t have no advantages at first, nah,

so him work as a bus mechanic. But Manley

was a toaster, so him become

Big Yout’!

So sings

Big Youth in “Wolf in Sheep’s

Clothing”:  ”Time, time, time is what we need,

so they say — gimme a little more time, time! But time is runnin’

and passin’ and passin’ and runnin’ and runnin’ and passin’ / So you all better

get right and this time because there might be no next time… / His words

were soft were they high / But war was in his heart /

His hands were softer than butter

yet were they drawin’

sword”.

Hello,

sorry I’ve been quiet

for a few days, been thinkin’.

I’m repurposing this space from here on out.

I’m drawin’ sword, writing a new book, perhaps my last,

there’s a little something growing in me that isn’t supposed to be there.

The book will be entitled “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”.  It’s about

the history of the world, which is a history of the few living on

the backs of the many, without regard for the sufferahs,

the men and women and children of Trenchtown and

the world’s tens of thousands of other shantytowns,

for who they are, for what they suffer.

It’s about a plan to change

all that.

It’s about

this idea I have for

reversing that pattern of rapacious

injustice, the idea called EarthNationLive.

It’s about how long and how hard I’ve been trying to

get that idea funded by the richest people in the world (because

it’s a very expensive idea for the first few months, although it quickly

pays for itself many times over) and to what little avail.  It’s about my entreaties

to one special class of those people, the tech billionaires, who have the greatest

understanding of all how the web can change the world, and who sit on

their hands in the face of the possibility of a revolutionary shift

in the balance of justice, dignity, and

well-being for the people on

this troubled

planet.

And here’s

the fun part for readers

of this blog: to one degree or another,

time will tell, “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth” is going

to be written right here on the web, on this blog

and on eattherichandsharethewealth.com,

which is in the

works.

The book

is pointed a lickle bit,

without rancor or ill will,

at two billionaires in particular:

Pierre and Pam Omidyar.  Pierre founded

Ebay and is, according to the Forbes 400, the

4oth richest person in the world, with a fortune

estimated at $5.5 billion.  Pam is his lovely and by all

accounts genteel wife.  I had to pick someone because you

gotta have a foil in a story like this.  Read Roald Dahl’s altogether

essential-for-every-man-woman-and-child morality tale, Danny the Champion

of the World — for there to be a Danny and a Danny’s father, poaching

pheasants on the fenced-and-forbidden land of a rich man,

there has to be a Victor Hazell, living fat and high and

rich while regular folks struggle

all around

him.

And I’ve

chosen Pierre and Pam

a bit because of the lengths of my

communications with them — coming on seven years! —

and partly for the particularly deaf ear they’ve mostly turned to

those communications, and partly because they’re sympathetic characters.

Among the sickeningly rich, they’re on the conscientious end, maintaining

a handsome website about how much they want to help the little people

of the world (and perhaps make a little extra coin on the side).

They give some dough away, make nice speeches, and use

their Twitter accounts to encourage others to bid

on items on Ebay whose proceeds

will go to good

causes.

So they’re

about the best of the

sickeningly rich in the world,

as far as I can tell.  It would be too easy

for me to use a Larry Ellison, richer than Croesus

and interested in little but mergers and acquisitions, jets,

yachts, and young women.  It would be too easy to use a Bill Gates,

who made himself the richest man in the world by appropriating other

people’s ideas and (some say) code, badly executing them under his own brand,

rapaciously bullying everyone else out of his markets to eliminate competition,

and then crowning himself “World’s Swellest Guy” by turning around and

giving back some of what he stole through this program.  (“He who

desires the admiration of the world will do well to amass a great

fortune and then give it away. The world will respond with

admiration in proportion to the size of his treasure.

Of course, this is meaningless.” — Lao Tzu).

It would be too easy to pick a Wal Mart

heiress or Boonetard Pickens or

Lloyd “We’re Doing God’s

Work” Blankfein.

So Pam

and Pierre Omidyar it is,

for my principal foils.  (All billionaires will

be engaged, though, I promise — I have a particularly fun tale

to tell about Sergey and Larry).  At least they’ll have a fighting chance,

since they try to do some good when they’re not making love in the

Lincoln Bedroom and enjoying the spoils of billionairehood.

They’re attractive, smiling, relatively generous.  I aim

to give the greedy of the world

a fighting chance.

And here

is the fight: we have the

resources to feed, clothe, house, and

educate everyone on this planet, in comfort and

dignity and well-being, without fucking up the air and

water for all the other creatures that live here, even with the

ridiculous number of people we’ve accumulated here.  And we don’t

do that.  Billions of people live without fresh water.  There’s shit in their

water, or chemicals, or there’s no water at all because there isn’t $10 to drill

a well.  Billions die of hunger and starvation and diarrhea and malaria

because while billionaires have multiple private jets and multiple

yachts and multiple estates ever so grand, the poor don’t have a

meal or a mosquito net.  War motors on, the mass extinction

of species motors on, capitalism-without-conscience motors

on.  The greed of the sickeningly rich motors on.  It has

always been thus, and it’s always going to be thus,

until someone takes the fight directly

to the people who can

change it.

That’s what

this book is about.  In it, you’ll

learn a lot about the lives of these people,

what they do, where they go, what they enjoy, the crumbs

they cast off for others.  The law firms and private investigators

and inquisitions into my life of the tech billionaires, past and future,

will feature here.  I’ve set up a number of measures to track all that, and have

some other people working on that and communicating the results to me by

means non-electronic, and have an inside source or two, ditto.

They have, of course, every resource in the world at their

disposal — the smartest, meanest lawyers; politicians

bought many times over; law enforcement folks who

toady to the rich and powerful; so on.  It can

be fun to watch how they employ those

resources.  I expect it

will be in this

case.

You’ll

also learn some more

about me, either through my own

writing or their efforts to discredit me or

cast this book and conversation in a certain light.

Like any earnest spiritual seeker with fiery and resourceful

teachers and a fiery and resourceful self, I’ve been a little crazy at some

points in my life, and a little criminal at others.  I’ve known madness and

depression, have opened up my skull — both literally and figuratively –

and shaken out the contents and reassembled them again and again,

sometimes rather successfully, sometimes quite comically or

tragically.  It’s impossible to know the lay of the land of

consciousness without traveling over all of it, and

I have certainly done that.  You’ll be hearing

about some of it, no doubt, from me

or from someone pointing the

stinkeye at me.

Buncha folks

likely gonna threaten

to sue, or will sue, me soon.

Mayhaps they’ll find a way to jail me,

incommunicado.  Perhaps someone will

get peeved and hire one of the jillions of PTSD-demented

veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan who are rattling around in America

these days to put a bullet in my head.  Perhaps I’ll croak from the inside out.

Who knows?  Whatever happens, maybe one day, sooner or later, the

world will make use of the template written out at EarthNationLive

and spoken and visualized in the video at the bottom here.

I hope so.  I’d like to see this pearly blue planet

a lickle mo’ peaceful and prosperous

and just.

Along

the way here I’ll do my best,

time allowing, to toss in a cartoon and

a song, and — if past is prologue –

some dirty pictures

and wicked

talk.

As the

Lakota used to say,

and some still do, “It is a good

day to die!” So enjoy,

and viva, mi

amigos.

I have

been assured by a very

knowing American of my acquaintance

in London, that a young healthy child well nursed

is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome

food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and

I make no doubt that it will equally

serve in a fricassee or

a ragout.

Jonathan Swift

A Modest Proposal

We are

living in a troubled time

right now, and with all the rumours of war

and all the wickedness wha a gwaan, it’s time for the people

to just think for each other, and mek we still try

to be unified and see what we

can do to save our

children.

Big Youth