This episode of It's the End of the World
As We Know it and I Feel Fine
was made possible by contributions
from slaves like you.
Spank you very much!
I'm a capitalist.
I'm simply following the law
of free enterprise.
What law is that?
Survival of the fittest.
Maybe some people don't see it that way.
Maybe they don't see it as survival
of the fittest.
Maybe they see it as survival
of the fattest!
Oh Katie... why are you so hard on me?
Because you're not nice.
Since when do you have to be nice
to be right?
You're not right.
You're what's happening.
One day we'll smarten up
and pass some laws and put you
out of business.
They can pass all the laws they want.
All they can do is change the rules,
they can never stop the game.
I don't go away. I adapt.
Goooooooooooood morning slaves
and welcome to another sedition of
It's the End of the World as we Know it
and I Feel Fine...
the show where head-shots
are worth 10 points!
EXCELLENT!
I am your host the Stimulator, and there's
a saying that in this world, nothing
is certain except for death and taxes.
And despite the round-the-clock efforts
of some of the world's top
biotech engineers, scientists,
and medical professionals,
it’s true that even the rich fucks
who rule the world still can't
buy their way out the inevitability
of ultimately becoming worm food.
Can I ask you a question?
What?
How can we all have died at the same time?
The salmon mousse.
Buuuuuuuuuut they sure as shit
don't pay fucking taxes.
Yachting and equestrian competitions aside
billionaires have one concern in life.
And that's how to hang onto what they've
got, and turn it into even fucking more.
Here.... one dollar.
And so it's no surprise that
the super rich motherfuckers who,
through their political puppets,
crafted the international banking system
made sure that it included an intricate
network of shady fucking tax havens
set up in countries all around the world.
This way, they can rest comfortably
in their mansions, secure in the knowledge
that their vast fortunes
won't be wasted on trivial things
like helping to fund roads,
What are you doing to the street?
We're fixing it!
What the hell does it look like?
clean drinking water,
and public schools
for all of us dirty proles.
Four years ago, a report was published
that estimated the total value of assets
stashed away in off-shore tax havens
at upwards of 32 TRILLION fucking dollars.
You could write off the world's debt
in a day... in an hour... in a minute.
That's around 42% of the combined GDP
of all the countries on mothafuckin earth.
Three quarters of the world's cash
is hidden away in places exactly
like this.
This incredible pool of
idle fucking wealth
is shielded from public scrutiny
by an army of corporate lawyers
through the accounting magic of
shell corporations, which are
fake fucking companies set up
to manage assets, and to hide
exactly who owns what.
An entire alternative economy
and the only entry qualification
is the services of a good tax lawyer.
Buuuuuuuuuuut on Saturday April 3rd
us lowly proles got a sneak peak
behind the gilded curtain
when 11.5 million confidential documents
were leaked from the corporate law firm
of Mossack Fonseca.
Welcome to Panama.
Casablanca without heroes.
The so-called Panama Papers exposed
the directors and shareholders of 214,000
off-shore shell corporations
- a list which directly implicated five
current heads of state
with forty more linked via
family members and close associates.
In Iceland, the country's Prime Minister
Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson
was the first casualty of the leak
when he was ambushed by
a Swedish journalist
who questioned him about his ties
to an off-shore shell corporation
Wintris Inc, which had a direct
financial interest in the Icelandish banks
that failed during the 2008
financial crisis.
What country you from?
Uhh... what's... what's it called... the..
WHAT ain't no country I ever heard of!
They speak English in What?
Uhh... if I recall correctly...
Go on!
Well... uhh... it's a...
The day after the crisis broke
peeps in Iceland took to the streets
in the largest protests the tiny nation
has ever seen.
Over 10,000 peeps surrounded parliament
in the country's capital Reykjavik,
hurling eggs and fruit, and demanding
that the Prime Minister resign.
And, in fact, he tendered his resignation
the next fucking day.
You're fired!
Protests have also taken place
in Argentina, after it was revealed
that the country's right-wing president,
Mauricio Macri, who was elected
on a platform of fighting corruption,
had failed to disclose his connections
to two off-shore companies
named in the leak.
He has too many off-shore companies,
which shows his interest has always
been money laundering.
And in Europe, Britain's posh
pig-fucking PM
Why would you call me a pig fucker?
Well.. let's see.
First of all... you fuck pigs!
Oh yeah!
found himself also in the hot seat
What country you from?
I think it's the wrong premise
of the question.
after leaked documents revealed
that his father, Ian Cameron,
used a shell corporation in
the British-administered Virgin Islands
to avoid paying tax
for more than 30 fucking years.
In a hilarious display of
tone-deaf arrogance,
and solemn fucking indignation that only
rich Brits are capable of pulling off,
Cameron responded to the scandal
One of the country's leading tax lawyers
Graham Erinson QC, has stated,
unequivocally, that this was, and I quote,
a perfectly normal type of collective
investment fund.
Englishmen - you're all so fucking pompous
On Saturday April 9th, thousands of
members of Britain's lower classes
held a protest outside 10 Downing Street
to demand Cameron's resignation,
which led to some minor clashes with the fuzz.
EXCELLENT!
Protestors have vowed to continue holding
protests until the pig-fucker resigns...
so it'll be interesting to see
where this goes.
The Panama Papers were just
a tiny fucking peak into the greasy world
of finance capitalism.
Buuuuuuuuuuuuut the reality is
that shell corporations and
off-shore banking are a completely
common fucking practice.
And while it's fun to watch
individual politicians squirm
as their personal connections to
this vast ponzi scheme are revealed,
at the end of the day it's just
a drop in the bucket.
Capitalism doesn't produce bad apples...
the whole fucking system is rotten
to its core.
I'm from a little place called
Great Britain.
But I don't know if I love
or hate Britain.
These words upon my page written
the things that make or break Britain.
You see I'm from a little place called
Great Britain
But I don't know if I love
or hate Britain.
These words upon my page written
the things that make and break Britain.
One inch... to the left to the left
coulda been the difference between
life and death
Knife wound to the heart
or the side of the chest.
Could have been one statistic less.
See sometimes Great Britain
ain't that great.
Kids get stabbed at an alarming rate.
Press with a passion to exaggerate
increasingly clueless heads of state.
You see knife crime
knife crime ain't about knives.
It's about young Britain and ways of life.
You don't solve knife crime
by taking knives to hand.
You solve it by instilling new hopes
and plans.
You've got positives though,
I swear it's true.
North, south, east, west
and the middle too.
Got diversity that shines right through.
Who makes the best music in the world?
We do!
Two weeks ago, me and my subMedia slaves
put out a brief report on
the insurrectionary fever gripping France,
where multiple flashpoints of resistance
had just converged into a massive
fucking general strike on March 31st.
Buuuuuuuuuuuut, it turns out
that shit was just getting started!
After more than a million fucking people
took to the streets of France
on the 31st, a sizable crew from
the Paris contingent decided to
keep the party going,
and launched an occupation of
the Place de la République,
dubbed Nuit Debout,
which in English roughly translates into
Rise up at Night.
Similar to the M15 plaza occupations
that swept across Spain in 2011
the Nuit Debout movement has transformed
public squares into vibrant hubs
of collective activity, where participants
hold general assemblies,
then spend the night debating politics,
and hosting free skill-sharing workshops,
film screenings and concerts.
In a cute fucking nod to
the French Revolution...
Nuit Debout participants have even adopted
a new revolutionary calendar,
with the second day of the occupations,
April 1st, rechristened as March 32nd...
and April 2nd renamed March 33rd...
and... uhhh.... you get the fucking idea.
Math problems.
Anyway, these occupations spread quickly
across France, and have since
hopped its fucking borders.
The evening of mmmmm.... March 40th?
saw Nuit Debout occupations in 33 cities
across France,
as well as cities in Belgium, Germany,
Portugal and Spain.
And while the occupation sites themselves
have so-far remained relatively
family friendly spaces of
collective revelry and
revolutionary joie de vivre,
the streets surrounding them
continue to be flashpoints of
militant fucking resistance.
Every...body... hates...the...police!
All across the country, rowdy night demos
have taken place, striking students
have blockaded their schools,
militants have choked railways,
occupied train stations,
smashed up banks and shops,
redecorated the offices of the
ruling Partie Socialiste,
barricaded roads, and fought
pitched street battles with
the French fucking po-po.
Masked street-fighters have made
excellent use of projectiles,
relentlessly pelting the pigs with bottles
rocks, and flares,
and have demonstrated an incredible
proficiency for pyrotechnics.
Check this shit out!
Yup... France has been throwing down
fucking hard for over a month now
much to the delight of revolutionaries
and riot porn junkies worldwide.
And the situation of generalized unrest
still shows shows no signs of stopping
anytime soon.
Much to the dismay of France's
mopey faced President, Francois Hollande,
whose government has been scrambling
to come up with the right mix
of repression and political concessions
to bring things back under control...
to no fucking avail!
While this movement first crystallized
around shared opposition to
the so-called Loi de Travail,
it has since transformed into
a generalized insurrection
against capitalism, the police,
and the entire political system
that upholds the miserable
status fucking quo.
And through their shining example
peeps in France have captured
the imagination of millions of pissed off
peeps around the world.
Je suis Paris.
Nous sommes unis.
Ensemble...
Je suis Paris.
Nous sommes touts Paris.
Soooo... to learn more about
just what the fuck is going down,
I recently caught up with the members of
Désaphilliation, a crew of autonomous
troublemakers currently occupying the
Phillia building at Nanterre University
west of Paris.
Hey y'all.. how the fuck are you?
We're fucking great!
Since the general strike of March 31st,
we've seen the spread of public occupation
and general assemblies known as
Nuits Debout, or Rise up at Night.
What’s the composition of the peeps
taking part in these occupations?
And what types of discussions
are taking place at these assemblies?
Well... peeps from all places,
social conditions and political opinions
from far left to far right.
The dynamics behind is very anticapitalist
but not essentially anti-authoritarian.
Mix of marxists and libertarians.
There's discussions about everything
but there's very little idea of developing
autonomy. It's mostly about how to
reform the State and our society
in general to fix all our problems.
Still, there's interesting connections
being built with squatter communities
and other militant collectives in general
to organize daily lives on the camp
- discussions, popular kitchens, etc...
Many peeps have pointed to the
Nuits Debout as France's version of
the Spanish Indignatos, or
North American Occupy movements.
Both of these earlier movements
were hampered by the widespread
pacifism of many of their participants.
That said, the occupations in France
grew out of a pre-existing movement
that has and continues to regularly engage
in direct action and
militant street tactics.
How has this affected the dynamics of
the occupations and assemblies themselves?
Are there still lots of arguments
taking place around violent
vs nonviolent tactics?
The question of so-called violent action
fully divides these occupations.
But this violence doesn't come
from nowhere.
For decades, police abuse has been growing
and targeting specific communities...
immigrants, women, people of colour...
Young people destroy banks
and police stations to protest
the dictat of money and police.
Many of the voices heard at #NuitDebout
- commenting livestreams
or talking at GAs - oppose these
violent protestors, but they are just
the talkative minority and most people
really don't have a problem
with burning banks and rental cars.
Also the division around violent action
is interesting in the case of
oppressed minorities.
In Lyon, for instance, a few days ago
for their first #NuitDebout,
women and non-binary peeps
tried to organize a safer place outside of
patriarchal domination,
but they faced a shitstorm of angry men
- but not only - who felt like they were
trying to divide the movement
and create new top-down systems,
when they were just trying to organize
against a system of domination
that we still find in
anticapitalist movements.
France has been living under
a state of emergency since last
November's terrorist attacks.
What effect has this had
on peeps' day-to-day lives?
The state of emergency barely
brings anything new.
It's about generalizing and normalizing
of practices that were already present
- mass surveillance, searching and
patting people on the streets,
controls based on the colour of
their skin, or their clothes.
Demonstrations are still illegal,
unless you declare people
responsible for them,
but the repression of spontaneous demos
has been accentuated.
It's not very common for peaceful protests
just hanging around to face teargas
and sticks,
and to be rounded up and all taken to the
police station for identity verification.
French youth have played a strong role
in the current movement
with tens of thousands of high school
students taking part.
What is driving teenagers in France
to take to the streets in such numbers...
and how has their participation affected
the tone and the orientation
of the broader movement?
It's a very French thing for young people
to be mobilized in social struggles.
This is reinforced by the French
scholar system, in which high school
is the last school with true social mix.
High schoolers are usually more aware
of the misery, chaos and repression
happening in France than the average
French workers.
The mobilized high-schoolers do not really
fight for a specific political
and social project, but they are
always among the first mobilized
to fight and tear down the existing
oppressive structures.
Regarding work law reform in particular
high schoolers usually see Work as
an oppressive institution and not
a tool for emancipation.
They have parents, or friends' parents
who suffer daily from their
working conditions, and they don't want
such situations to be generalized
and accepted by everyone.
I think it's very interesting to see that
the vast majority of them are not
organized or affiliated to any
political organization in particular.
There's small groups of very organized
young people making GAs
and protests happen, but when
the police come to beat everyone up,
a lot of high-schoolers just find it
very normal to throw stones and bottles
at the police,
without even masking their faces.
It's a very dangerous practice for them,
but it reveals something deeper
in French society.
Violence from the police is so deeply
entrenched in our daily lives
that fighting the cops doesn't require
any preparation
or extraordinary circumstances.
They just do it.
What roles have French trade
and student unions played
in the current wave of unrest?
Unions supposedly organize the struggle,
at least legally and mediatically.
But they barely do anything out of
their own little interest as the elite of
the workers and students movements.
They develop arguments against labour law
reform but refuse to see further,
as they fear their goal of massifying
the movement will be contradicted
by a coherent and complete list
of revendications:
abolition of wage slavery,
autonomy and cooperation.
Their only goal is to defend their own
political interests,
to just be part of the show
as long as they can.
In the end they're all about bureaucracy
and reform.
How has the recent situation in
the Calais jungle,
and the migrant crisis in general
affected the current unrest?
The migrant crisis has been a revelation
to those wanting to see the true nature of
the Socialist regime and its police state
that's just as terrible as what we had
with Sarkozy - similar to
the Obama administration in the US.
For years now, migrants have been
targeted by low-intensity
counterinsurrectionary measures.
They were not systematically
physically abused - although it is not
uncommon for migrants to be assaulted
and mugged by representatives of the State
- but every time they try to organize
and build camps to gather solidarity,
their tents and stuff are taken,
until they're all sleeping on the streets
without blankets again.
This is something we can particularly see
with the House of Refugees,
a squat where hundreds of migrants
were living in Paris.
There had been negotiations with
city officials under the supervision of
the Human Rights League.
The officials had promised to provide
housing to everyone regardless of their
administrative situation - refugees...
undocumented... and that the eviction
would be a voluntary evacuation
without any intervention by the police.
Two days before the legal date set
by the Judge during the trial,
hundreds of armed police officers,
riot police, civilian police
and anti-terrorist units, closed off the
whole square and rushed the building,
destroying much equipment
and making sure all the migrants
boarded buses without knowing
their destination.
The presence of the army in Calais,
the formation of special units of the
riot police to handle the migrant crisis,
and the fact that European
and Turkish military regularly attack
migrant boats on the sea to let them drown
is just symptomatic of the police state
emerging throughout European democracies
and of the way we treat people falling out
of the mold of the French white man
working and paying bills.
Thanks y'all. And that about does it
for this sedition of It’s the end of
the world as we know it and I feel fine.
In case you didn’t know, I post
a playlist of all the music I played
on the show on our fuckin website:
From there you can also
leave me a love poem,
subscribe to my podcast
and guacamail newsletter or drop me
a few bucks to help keep the tacos rolling
like the following wage slaves
who broke me off some in the last
couple of weeks. So big ups to....
Steven, Andrew, Jay, Karlis, Steve,
Nicodemus, Jonathan, Janne, Jan, John,
Jaime, SpikeonWater, Per, Kevin, Bear,
Flyn, Michael, Bruno, Sacha, William,
Sebastian, Gabriel, Nicolas, Liam, Carly,
Bunker Films, Juliano, Stephen, Sebastien,
Samantha, Coby, Dino, Brian, Mathieu,
Andrew, Lauren, Evan, Dylan, Harry, James,
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and Kirk.
Mezcal!
The following slaves are the newest
members of the Taconspiracy: Juliano, IDC
and Dylan
Pulque!
With that said, give em hell,
don’t stop believing and burn it all down!
Hasta la pasta mutherfuckers!