The Reverend Billy Talen is an Anti-Capitalist Hero: Resister, Demonstrator, Organizer and Preacher
The Reverend Billy Talen and his Church of Stop Shopping has been doing the work of pointing out the obvious problems caused by our consumer driven society. He is a tireless crusader, protester, evangelist and organizer starting in 2002 and building up not just a following, but also a dedicated group of activists, known as the Stop Shopping Choir. He is tireless in his work, organizing many off-site sermons with his Stop Shopping Choir, in addition to the weekly pulpit blasts from New York on Sundays. He is an author, vlogger, podcaster, singer/songwriter and also makes movies on the subject of consumerism, such as his starring role in the documentary What Would Jesus Buy from 2007 where “Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir are on a mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse”. The IMDB summary begins:
"An examination of the commercialization of Christmas in America while following Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the Shopocalypse (the end of humankind from consumerism, over-consumption and the fires of eternal debt.) The film also delves into issues such as the role sweatshops play in America's mass consumerism and Big-Box Culture...."
There is raw energy in Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping’s performances. They are often “tongue-in-cheek”, campy at times, kitschy at others, but always with a serious message. The sermons where he tears apart the status quo are the best parts. He also makes the Climate Crisis a main theme, speaking about the “Sixth Mass Extinction” and preaching his “Earthalujah!” religion.
They are also very familiar with arrest, and the good Rev has a long rap-sheet (over 70 arrests) which is the pride of the movement! He teaches in his "sermons" spouting out dates, events, numbers, and people from history to present day, and explains WHY he is so relentless. He often pays homage to the many warriors who helped to pave the road to equality and equity for all, some of the basic human rights called for in my book, “A Revolutionary Solution”. A great sample video of his work is The Last Televangelist: The Temple. From the good Rev's website:
“Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir is a New York City based Earth-defending performance community, Earthalujah! The Church of Stop Shopping has has[sic] 50 performing members and a congregation in the thousands. We resist extinction, but bring humor and music to the end of the world. And, we do get arrested a lot. Our street theater and concert stage shows always work in parallel. The activism is content for the play. Our director for both kinds of performances is Savitri D. Our music director is Nehemiah Luckett. We have won the OBIE, Alpert and Edwin Booth awards and The New York Historic Districts Council's Preservation Award (for leading protests to save Manhattan's Poe House).
We perform cash register exorcisms, retail interventions, and inside-the-corporation cell phone operas and weddings. We baptize babies into ‘a life beyond shopping.’ Outdoors, we have performed to tree-sitters in stands of redwoods, sung between cars in traffic jams at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, and held forth on the roof of Carnegie Hall in a snowstorm. We have achieved the status of temporary royalty at Burning Man, the Doo Dah Parade and the Mermaid Parade at Coney Island.”
He may seem corny at times, but his relentless crusade against capitalism and for equality for ALL for over 20 years is a true inspiration. If you have not heard of or seen his work I highly recommend checking him out - his website (above), FaceBook, Twitter and his new podcast. This part of today’s Anti-Capitalist Meetup is but a small token of the Good Reverend’s works.
Today's Installment from “A Revolutionary Solution”:
CHAPTER VII
BACK TO THE FUTURE
What I am talking about is a truly radical change to our common paradigm of a normal life on this planet as a human. At the beginning of my process of searching for solutions, I first started thinking of the concept of a world without countries as they were the obvious roadblocks to real climate change. I took out a three inch by five inch index card, drew a line down the center, and started listing all of the pros I could think of on one side and cons on the other. Only one single item was entered on the “cons” side: monetary collapse worldwide, causing unrest and panic. That will likely happen. Helping all 7.5 billion humans to truly understand and grasp that there is no need for panic will be extremely difficult. In fact, it is possible that some governments (especially dictatorships and authoritarian regimes) will try to avoid relinquishing their power and will likely attempt to suppress these ideas from reaching their populations.
On the “pro” side of the line, I ran out of space fairly quickly, even after flipping the index card over and writing on the other side. Most of the items on the “pro” side actually result from that one item listed in the cons: monetary collapse throughout the world. We’ve already established that a deficient amount of resources is a belief that currently has no foundation. There is an abundance of food, water, clothing, and shelter for all of us, but immediate action is required to secure future supplies. It is our stewardship, how we manage the resources that exist on our planet, which will save or destroy us. A healthy, sustainable, deliberate, and compassionate stewardship must be our primary focus and priority. It means our very survival.
Most people immediately jump to the idea that removing money means moving to a barter system. No, although bartering does technically take money out of the picture, it does not do so in a true sense. Money actually assists in making a barter system work better, and was an appropriate and logical evolution of bartering. No, bartering enables the accumulation of wealth as well as many of the other concerns the existence of money creates. But, how exactly will we conduct our daily lives without money? What is our incentive to contribute? How would society solve disputes and issues among the people? How are religious and personal freedoms addressed? What exactly does this solve?
I believe the best way to answer these questions is to imagine what society could look like a few years into the future, the future with newfound worldwide freedoms from money and the never-ending conflicts from imaginary lines that divide us. Let’s look into what we are missing out on right now, and why there is nothing to fear by removing these two deadly monsters from society.
CHAPTER VIII
A GOVERNING BODY AND COMMUNITY STANDARDS: GOOD NEWS FOR EVERYONE
The fact remains we will need some sort of governing body and enforcement, and a set of community standards. What follows is my idea for how this new global governing body might work to best serve everyone’s interests, and a set of community standards. Like all ideas presented here, they are up for review by you.
GOVERNING BODY:
• This new governing body will consist of citizen assemblies comprised of “Decision Makers”
• Decision Makers for the new global government are comprised of local, neighborhood “Level One Citizen Assemblies” made up from three members of the neighborhood, to the top “Level Five Citizen Assemblies”, whose global body of Decision Makers is comprised of people from all walks of life, all over the planet.
• All Level One Decision Makers are nominated and voted on by the local communities they serve.
• All Level Two through Level Four Citizen Assemblies’ Decision Makers are voted on by the communities they serve, their peers, and the Citizen Assembly one level above them, with 60 percent weighted by community vote.
• The Level Five Citizen Assembly is comprised of 10,001 Decision Makers, voted on by the existing Level Five Citizen Assembly and their regional voters, with 70 percent weighted by their region represented.
• The geographic region served is larger for each graduated level of Citizen Assembly.
• Level Three to Five Citizen Assembly members are the only individuals who may be nominated to serve as Peacekeepers (equivalent to today’s police).
• Peacekeepers must be confirmed by 80 percent vote split 60/40 between demographic served and their Level Four Citizen Assembly.
• All Citizen Assemblies are comprised of uneven numbers of Decision Makers in each governing body, with the smallest neighborhood groups consisting of three members. Level One = three members, Level Two = 15 members, Level Three = 51 members, Level Four = 501 members, Level Five = 10,001 members.
Next is the base list of community standards we will begin working from, although they will continue to evolve on the website to ensure freedoms for everyone.
COMMUNITY STANDARDS:
• ALL HUMANS, CREATED EQUAL, ARE. (This most important and basic community standard says that we are ALL equal, have equal rights, equal say, equal opportunity.)
• You are the most important decision-maker in your life. You can be who you want to be and choose your path through life.
• You have the right to plentiful and nutritious food.
• You have the right to clean and plentiful water.
• You have the right to comfortable, sanitary homes with electricity and indoor plumbing.
• You have the right to high-quality, durable, comfortable clothing.
• You have the right to high-quality education and access to all public information.
• You have the right to compassionate, attentive, and competent healthcare, preventative screening, wellness information and classes.
• You have the right to a safe community free from violence.
• You have the right to just and fair decisions made by impartial groups of decision-makers selected and promoted from all communities, sexes, races, based on their abilities to make fair and just decisions.
• You have the right to access to clean, safe, 100 percent renewable energy, localized for maximum efficiency.
• You have the right to access to autonomous electric transportation.
• All wildlife is to be respected. Hunting is not a sport.
• The hunting and killing of fish, birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles is illegal. Exceptions include those authorized and tasked to do so by Level 3 and above Decision Makers in order to control populations, extraterritorial migrations, disease, etc. Everything possible from these harvests is used and distributed to the population.
• Quality over quantity drives our work ethic.
• When in doubt, common sense prevails. When deciding anything, we ask, “Is this right and just for everyone, including future generations?”
• Human rights prevail.
• Jail will not be the first response to those who “act out”. Fellow humans in crisis who act out are often asking for help. It is everyone's responsibility to ensure they receive the help they need.
• Incarceration is a last resort for violent offenders who do not respond to other treatment options.
• The majority of those who receive “penal judgments” will be the ones to perform the least desirable or most needed jobs to serve their sentence.
• Whenever possible robots do the rote and/or dangerous work.
• No person has any rights over another person.
• There is no corporal punishment.
• Notwithstanding the community standards of our world, everyone enjoys religious freedom – free from religious persecution as well as freedom from religion. Religious freedoms do not, however, allow for the violation of any of the above community standards.
One thing most of us have all but overlooked due to focusing mainly on the climate crisis and discord between countries is the proximity of artificial intelligence potentially becoming the ultimate threat to our very survival. If A.I. comes to its “intelligence horizon” as the tool of a corporation, a government, or, worse yet, a single greedy person, it will likely understand almost instantly humans are causing the destruction of the planet and every living thing on it, including the A.I. itself. In turn, there’s a reasonable likelihood that A.I. will understand the need to eliminate the threat to the planet, and understand that since its intelligence exceeds ours, elimination of our species is the most responsible, ethical, and ecological choice.
Instead, if we eliminate money and countries, so we can address climate change, A.I. could turn out to be one of our most highly prized tools in combating and finding solutions for so many problems. Staggering breakthroughs in our transportation grid, energy grid and production, pollution reduction and climate change reversal might all be accelerated tremendously by A.I. It can also be used to enhance Level Five decision-making, running different scenarios by A.I. before making final decisions to help ensure we are always making the best global decisions we possibly can. Beside the potential breakthroughs offered by A.I., we have many solutions already available or being developed today including:
Plastics
• Micro plastics eating bacteria first developed in Japan in 2017.
• Use plastics themselves as the fuel in rockets so we might later use this to help propel plastics toward the sun for “final recycling”.
Soil
• Organic and sustainable farming practices such as regenerative agriculture, which rebuilds healthy soils and expands crop yields.
Human Existence
• Twenty two percent increase in the available global workforce as a direct result of resolving food, shelter, clothing, and healthcare insecurities throughout the world. Based on a 60 percent employment-to-population ratio that equates to over 900 million new workers for this population of over 1.5 billion previously under served.
• The number of jobs performed by robots instead of humans is expected to double by 2026. The most dangerous as well as the most repetitive, mundane, and boring jobs are targeted to be performed by robots first.
• Ending private ownership of transportation vehicles, as technologies that existed since 2018 are leveraged.
• “One study on melanoma has been published in the peer-reviewed literature that shows convincing evidence that cancer progression is substantially halted with [a plant-based] diet.”
Energy
• We already have the capability to source all of our energy needs with 100 percent renewable resources.
We could see the end to a (growing) list of issues:
• dictators/dictatorships
• poverty
• homelessness
• hunger, malnutrition, and starvation
• oppression
• CO2 emissions and climate change acceleration
• diseases of poverty including cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and measles
• soil deterioration
• road rage
• food waste (mostly)
• war
• news bias/news infotainment
• corrupt religious leaders driven by money and power
• greed
• immigration
• so much waste in manufacturing
• inferior products
• inferior service
• toll roads and associated congestion
• traffic congestion in general
• incarceration for mental illness
• incarceration for being poor
• incarceration for being uneducated
• incarceration for being oppressed
• corporate takeovers
• inequality of healthcare
• inequality of education (oppression through lack of access to education and through directing the underprivileged toward vocational education so they can serve the privileged with their labor)
• privatization, mismanagement, and destruction of public utilities such as water and sewer
• lack of affordable and available housing
• affluenza, an apparent newly discovered illness of the rich
• epidemics and pandemics of preventable disease
• lobbyists, political bias, and corruption
• money laundering
• hate groups rising from fear of others, perpetuated by those seeking power who manipulate others to propel themselves as saviors
• gangs
• deforestation and destruction of our rain forests
• political and economic red tape, and other roadblocks to innovation and cures for disease
• stress and related health issues caused by all of the above
• ...and so much more!
These two chapters are from my new book: "A Revolutionary Solution" and companion website: https://arevolutionarysolution.com where you can explore more on this topic, and download your free copy. For a free paperback copy please KosMail me.