Soundtrack
Chris Hedges wrote about it.
The bankrupt corporate power elite, who continue to serve the dead ideas of unfettered corporate capitalism, globalization, profligate consumption and an economy dependent on fossil fuels, as well as endless war, have proven incapable of radically shifting course or responding to our altered reality. They react to the great unraveling by pretending it is not happening. They are desperately trying to maintain a doomed system of corporate capitalism. And the worse it gets the more they embrace, and seek to make us embrace, magical thinking. Dozens of members of Congress in the United States have announced that climate change does not exist and evolution is a hoax. They chant the mantra that the marketplace should determine human behavior, even as the unfettered and unregulated marketplace threw the global economy into a seizure and evaporated some $40 trillion in worldwide wealth. The corporate media retreats as swiftly from reality into endless mini-dramas revolving around celebrities or long discussions about the inane comments of a Donald Trump or a Sarah Palin. The real world – the one imploding in our faces – is ignored.
The deadly convergence of environmental and economic catastrophe is not coincidental. Corporations turn everything, from human beings to the natural world, into commodities they ruthlessly exploit until exhaustion or death. The race of doom is now between environmental collapse and global economic collapse. Which will get us first? Or will they get us at the same time?
It's long past time for an American Awakening and Uprising, a broader and deeper Awakening than the Arab Awakening the US Government is doing it's best to help quash.
There are 310 million Americans who, so far, are acting like they are outnumbered by a few thousand wall streeters, media moguls, insurance company and weapons manufacturer execs and other assorted 'plutocrats', 100 senators, 435 congresspeople, and maybe a couple of hundred in the US Administration.
So far....
"Most suddenly-popular Twitter hashtags refer to events or celebrities that currently are in the news", writes Muriel Kane at RawStory, "But every once in a while, one erupts out of nowhere to capture the mood of the Twitterverse."
The hashtag #fuckyouwashington is currently making the rounds in just that fashion. As explained in a post at tagdef.com, "Thousands of tweets erupted in a matter of hours on #Jul23 protesting the US's failed debt ceiling talks and general policies. Spurred by @JeffJarvis . Seen by some as part of #WorldRevolution or #USRevolution."
A second post helpfully adds, "Our discontent with the way things operate. It's gross."
Although the tag may have been inspired by the current impasse over raising the debt ceiling, it seems to have released a much wider sense of frustration. Within a few hours, message boards like Democratic Underground were gathering some of the best tweets using the tag.
"#FuckYouWashington For Forgetting WHO you represent, Families, Elderly,Moms,Kids, WORKERs..NOT the CoporatePigs who you cater to...#ShameOnU" one reads.
"#fuckyouwashington for sending our soldiers on 6, 7, 8 tours to combat zones yet thinking it's too much to ask the richest to pay taxes" say another.
And @YourAnonNews -- a Twitter account associated with Anonymous -- tweeted, "#FuckYouWashington for thinking activists are the same as terrorists."
[snip]
Jarvis is a journalism professor at the City University of New York, an expert on new media, and the author of What Would Google Do? Late on Saturday evening, he tweeted, "OK, my fellow citizens, it's up to you now," as though he felt content with what he had accomplished, but since then he has continued to promote use of the tag in his own tweets.
This screen shot was taken at about 5:45 AM this morning...