Feb 26, 2015

American Denial




      =========================>>>AMERICAN DENIAL<<<========================


(SOURCE)  In the wake of recent events that have sparked a national dialogue, American Denial explores the power of unconscious biases around race and class. Using Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 investigation of Jim Crow racism as a springboard, the film shows how unrecognized, unconscious attitudes continue to dominate racial dynamics in American life. 

Be the resistance....

OneLove

:::MME:::

Feb 24, 2015

Poet's Nook: "Attica Prison Uprising" by Muhammad Ali


 In July of 1972, Muhammad Ali traveled to Dublin to fight Alvin ‘Blue’ Lewis, During an interview, Ali brilliantly entertains a studio audience with an original poem which he recites from memory, one minute into clip above. Ali sets the scene for the viewers to the Attica Prison uprising, still the deadliest in U.S. history. He imagines himself in the shoes of a black prisoner, responding to the white warden issuing a final ultimatum. His reply is  a call to arms....

Better far from all I see
To die fighting to be free
What more fitting end could be?
Better surely than in some bed
Where in broken health I’m led
Lingering until I’m dead
Better than with prayers and pleas
Or in the clutch of some disease
Wasting slowly  by degrees
Better than of heart attack 
Or some dose of drug I lack 
Let me die by being Black 
Better far that I should go 
Standing here against the foe 
Is the sweeter death to know 
Better than the bloody stain 
On some highway where I’m lain 
Torn by flying glass and pane 
Better calling death to come
Than to die another dumb
Muted victim in the slum
Better than of this prison rot
If there’s any choice I’ve got
Kill me here on the spot
Better far my fight to wage
Now while my blood boils with rage
Lest it cool with ancient age
Better vowing for us to die
Than to Uncle Tom and try
Making peace just to live a lie
Better now that I say my sooth
I’m gonna die demanding truth
While I’m still akin to youth
Better now than later on
Now that fear of death is gone
Never mind another dawn.


OneLove

:::MME:::

MME's Jam of the Day


This classic recording "Sad Sweet Dreamer" by the British-based group Sweet Sensation was a  huge hit the world over in 1974. I remember hearing the song on the radio as a kid and thought it was the Jackson 5. This cut takes me back to a time when soul music was phenomenal with the likes of Earth, Wind & Fire, Heatwave, Bobby Caldwell, The Jackson 5 , Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes & The Isley Brothers  burning up the charts. The sweet innocence & contagious lyric, “Sad sweet dreamer, it’s just one of those things you put down to experience!” digs in deep.. Lead singer Marcel King’s soulful falsetto croons about missing his girl so much, he pines for her every night. This kind of vulnerability in today's music is rare. Somehow we lost that feel which is why 70s soul sounds so damn good!!

OneLove

::MME:::

Feb 23, 2015

Things Fall Apart



All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

-Ellen Glasgow


Every now and then I listen to the popular radio stations on my way to work, sometimes flipping between stations to get to a song I half-way like. Over the past decade or so, it has been quite a challenge to find a song I truly like on the radio which is why I make my own playlists and let them stream as I drive. Much of the music today is toxic trash offering nothing to nourish the mind & soul. It's Death with a catchy hook & lyrical turn of phrase. 

Of all the genres of music out there, the one that offends me the most right now is Hip Hop. This wasn't always the case. Most people in my generation got into Hip Hop with "Rappers Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang. From there we jammed to the pioneers from Public Enemy to De La Soul to Wu-Tang. The music was pulsating, oftentimes cutting edge & almost always thought-provoking. Even the harder-edged rap from the likes of Ice-T & BDP (Boogie Down Productions) wasn't solely about cultural stereotyping and gangster stylings. There was a lot of harsh, bitter truth in the music especially as it related to being young, black and stuck in an over-crowded & economically-challenging environment with few options. Ice-T, for example, would sometimes hype the gangsta life only to flip it in the end by saying things like, "That fast money leads to a fast life and a quick death" (check out his cut "High Rollers"). Hip Hop was an incredible tapestry of sounds, styles & communities, but it was the more powerful & progressive aspects of Hip Hop that catapulted it into a formidable cultural & political force to be reckoned with & this made a lot of people in high places pay attention, nervously.  Listen to Grand Master Flash's "The Message" or Public Enemy's "911 is a Joke". Even the controversial N.W.A resonated with the heat of a despised & hated people & lyrically brandished swords & decapitated, mercilessly. "Fuck Tha Police"was the anthem for a young generation who felt, at best, tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison or low-wage employment. It is this pathos of being black in America set to a tight, menacing rhythm which vacillated between amorality and conscious wisdom which describes Hip Hop in my day. It wasn't devoid of meaning in any way. The music was the message. In fact, Hip Hop was widely viewed at the time as the "black CNN". This is the reason Hip Hop from the mid-80s to the mid- 90sis considered to be the "Golden Age of Hip Hop".

From the mid-90s, things changed....

With the exception of lyrically-gifted, socially aware and politically insightful rappers such as Talib Kweli, M1, Mos Def, Lupe Fiasco & Q-tip, Hip-Hop is now a modern day Stepin Fetchit show. With gang references, glorification of prisons, objectification of women, big pimpin', celebration of the worst aspects of the ghetto, and odes to marijuana & alcohol which have become consistent themes within the genre, today's young generation has been blindsided. Although the aforementioned elements have always been present in the music, it has never been as emphasized/glorified. It almost seems intentional - like one big brainwashing operation meant to justify all the evils visited upon a group of people. It should come as no surprise that when it was discovered that a lot of money could be made from this art form, a handful of powerful corporations swooped in & now control the business, playing down to the lowest, most misogynistic, violent & racist stereotypes. It would do many a Hip Hop artist some good to research the history of Stepin Fetchit as way too many of them flirt with shameless, disreputable images. As the saying goes, "whoever controls the images, controls your self-esteem, self-respect and self-development"...

When you listen to much of today's rap music, think Minstrel Show/Stepin Fetchit/Jim Crow. The stereotypic images of Blacks were perpetuated in the minstrel show by Whites-in blackface in the 1800s-as a means of entertaining other Whites. Today, you have folks like Lil Wayne & Wiz Khalifah perpetuating false portrayals of Black life for the entertainment of a mostly white-suburbanite audience who download this music constantly (rap music’s consumer market in the United States is approximately 80 percent white). The funniest/saddest thing to me is witnessing young white folks wanting to "be black" by talking, acting and dressing like these stereotypic rappers. Sadly, it is these white folks who are getting the biggest checks in all of this.  They throw scraps at the struggling hip-hop artists who in turn proceed to boast of how much money they possess, but it's the mostly white-owned recording and distribution companies who are pimping the game. It's all spectacle with little substance to speak of...<<>><<>>And  you wonder why most rappers end up burned out & broke?

All of this goes against what our ancestors fought against during slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. What would Ida B. Wells & Ella Baker think of our dear, misguided Nikki Minaj? What would Martin Luther King & Malcolm X think of Drake & Future who choose to use their obvious talents & influence to make the most despised group in American society (the young black male) look even more hopeless & trivial? Like minstrels, they prance across the stage, oftentimes bare-chested, tatted & stoned for the money & notoriety. Damn a message & standing up for something meaningful. As a matter of fact, even if some of them wanted to, the rich, white, old men who run the industry would never allow such potent resistance in their “product”. Act like a fuckin' goon, dumb it down and we'll all get paid.....

We've come a long way from "Straight Outta Compton"(N.W.A), "Self-Destruction" (BDP) and "The Message" (Grand Master Flash & The Furious Five). Now we have "Truffle Butter" (Nicki Minaj Featuring Drake & Lil Wayne), "Drop That Kitty"(Ty Dolla $ign ft. Charli XCX & Tinashe) & "Amazing Amy" (Lil Wayne ft Migos). Not all of today's Hip Hop songs are bad, it's just the ones that are burning up the charts & getting the most air time/video rotations that I take issue with. The progressive voices are being drowned out and swept to the side. Listen to "Scar-Strangled Banner" (Dead Prez), "Caught In A Hustle"(Immortal Technique) & "Deliver" (Lupe Fiasco) to get a taste of the  revolutionary fervor that still bubbles below....

OneLove

:::MME:::

Feb 20, 2015

Poet's Nook: "My Call For Humanity" by Jamie Dunmore



Great stuff! He's the British version of Prince Ea.




So here I am, standing alone in the open. I’m here with a message hoping to repair what’s broken.

Nature is struggling, humanity’s not on track. We’ve got our heads in the sand and our pride intact.
We seek fulfillment through wealth but do we achieve it? We want prosperity through consumerism but is it worth it? 

Have we actually found freedom or have we lost it, because all we do is follow a system and never really challenge it.

Can you relate to that? Or is the world to blind to see? I’d always seek the truth but care what my peers thought of me.

I saw a different perspective and struggled by the hour. See I knew ignorance was bliss, but knowledge could give me power.

So now I call for humanity, not just for one nation; I’m opposing separation and standing up to segregation.

Whether Religious or Atheist, in essence we’re the same. Stereotypes are man-made and it was man who created the game.

But are we actually ready to accept this and wake up? Can we put our naivety on the line? Or are we always going to collide?

Are we ready to make a difference? Do we venture into the unknown? Or do we stay in our comfort zones and keep on taking the easy ride? 

Because at sea, it’s ships that are safest at shore, but no, that’s not what ships were made for.
So ask yourself this, why are you really here? You may find that deep but my question really is sincere.

For my generation, are we mislead as a youth? Do we rub off our true purpose due to false misleading truth?

Are we prone to propaganda? Are we prone to wrong information? Are we taught to judge each other based on religion, sex, race, culture, class, nation? The list goes on.

The moral of this poem may be hard to grasp, I know it’s not something usually heard and it’s not your average task.

But the point is to stop damaging what we cannot re-create. We shouldn’t prioritize selfish desires and let them decide our fate.

However let me tell you, in no way am I perfect and in no way am I better than you. I mean yes I wrote this message myself, but it applies to myself too.

So it’s time to start improving and it’s time to start speaking. Because resources are lowering and poverty is increasing. 

We allow cities to get larger, buildings to get taller, but trees to get shorter and forests to get smaller.
We’re an ingenious species, we could easily change everything, but we’re made to think different due to decades of conditioning.

We conform to education to confirm our own security, yet it’s a biased institution that makes wisdom hold obscurity.

Is it actually correct and does it actually judge intelligence? Or is it just listening to our elders and improving our obedience?

Are possessions an illusion of worth? Are we tricked in our thinking? Are we trying to buy wholeness and are we trying to buy meaning?

Do they always give joy? Do they distract us from reality? Do they determine our identity and do they alter our morality?

I mean what are our goals? This really isn’t a joke.

Can happiness be superficial and our routine a hoax?

Do we live for the wrong things, whilst the right things choke?

Is mainstream TV legit or can it dictate our attractions? Does it actually bring us together or does it separate us into factions? 

We categorize each other via a social hierarchy, but status is made by humans, so who really are we?

Is ego destroying Eco? Are the real problems disguised? Do we really know the truth or does our society feed us lies?

Are we actually filling our voids and does money hold any true weight? Could we drop our precious comforts, to renew our planet’s state?

It really is time to stop living our lives in shells cause nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves. 

We are all from the same source so lets see it for what its worth. We only have one home and that home is planet earth. 

So are our laws actually just? Or can power avoid the prison? Are our governments really innocent or are they flawed in their decisions?

Do they actually care for all life? Or only for their own health? Do their motives come from morals or do they just want power and wealth?

They try to justify a war on terror but it’s lasted for over a decade. It’s caused a million deaths so don’t you think they’ve overstayed?

Is patriotism necessary? Can’t we see it’s prejudicial? Have we forgotten our common grounds and have we forgotten what’s artificial?

I mean am I truthfully British? Am I really European? Am I actually a Western person or am I just a human being?

See the media highlight the smallest of tragedies in first world countries, but fail to cover that over 90 million worldwide have died from hunger in 12 years. So where do our priorities lie?

Britain, China, Russia, America, France. Syria, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Iraq.

Whether Western or Middle East, everyone deserves peace. No more national wars, no more bodies deceased.

Let’s come together as one and keep humanity in one piece!

So are we going to be responsible? Are we going to take a stand? 

Are we going to change our ways and play our cards on the other hand?

I’m not saying I have all the answers and I’m not trying to force any suggestions. 

I’m just saying it’s about time we see things differently and it’s about time we ask some questions. 

So what will you do? How much will you allow? This is my call for humanity to create a change, and the time to start is now.

OneLove

:::MME:::

Reading Rant: "Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs" by Johann Hari

This is utterly fascinating and tragic. It comes as no surprise that racism is at the very heart of the war on drugs. That fact has not been lost to those with eyes to see and ears to hear. As with mostly everything else in American society, race informs & justifies policy--from housing to education to wages to prison sentences, even if it is not explcitly stated. Johann Hari's book, 'Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs' is a must-read if anyone is interested in understanding the root of the so-called "War on Drugs". It's genocide any way you cut it. I would also recommend reading Michelle Alexander's devastating "The New Jim Crow" along with this fine work by Mr. Hari. 

Keep your eyes open, good people... 

OneLove

 :::MME:::

Feb 18, 2015

Chris Hedges: ‘Pornography Is What the End of the World Looks Like’




“Fifty Shades of Grey,” the book and the movie, is a celebration of the sadism that dominates nearly every aspect of American culture and lies at the core of pornography and global capitalism. It glorifies our dehumanization of women. It champions a world devoid of compassion, empathy and love. It eroticizes hypermasculine power that carries out the abuse, degradation, humiliation and torture of women whose personalities have been removed, whose only desire is to debase themselves in the service of male lust. The film, like “American Sniper,” unquestioningly accepts a predatory world where the weak and the vulnerable are objects to exploit while the powerful are narcissistic and violent demigods. It blesses this capitalist hell as natural and good.

“Pornography,” Robert Jensen writes, “is what the end of the world looks like.”

We are blinded by self-destructive fantasy. An array of amusements and spectacles, including TV “reality” shows, huge sporting events, social media, porn (which earns at least twice what Hollywood movies generate), alluring luxury products, drugs, alcohol and magic Jesus, offers enticing exit doors from reality. We yearn to be rich, powerful and celebrities. And those we must trample to build our pathetic little empires are seen as deserving their fate. That nearly all of us will never attain these ambitions is emblematic of our collective self-delusion and the effectiveness of a culture awash in manipulation and lies.

Porn seeks to eroticize this sadism. In porn women are paid to repeat the mantra “I am a cunt. I am a bitch. I am a whore. I am a slut. Fuck me hard with your big cock.” They plead to be physically abused. Porn caters to degrading racist stereotypes. Black men are sexually potent beasts stalking white women. Black women have a raw, primitive lust. Latin women are sultry and hotblooded. Asian women are meek, sexually submissive geishas. In porn, human imperfections do not exist. The oversized silicone breasts, the pouting, gel-inflated lips, the bodies sculpted by plastic surgeons, the drug-induced erections that never subside and the shaved pubic regions—which cater to porn’s pedophilia—turn performers into pieces of plastic. Smell, sweat, breath, heartbeats and touch are erased along with tenderness. Women in porn are packaged commodities. They are pleasure dolls and sexual puppets. They are stripped of true emotions. Porn is not about sex, if one defines sex as a mutual act between two partners, but about masturbation, a solitary auto-arousal devoid of intimacy and love. The cult of the self—that is the essence of porn—lies at the core of corporate culture. Porn, like global capitalism, is where human beings are sent to die.

There are few people on the left who grasp the immense danger of allowing pornography to replace intimacy, sex and love. Much of the left believes that pornography is about free speech, as if it is unacceptable to financially exploit and physically abuse a woman in a sweatshop in China but acceptable to do so on the set of a porn film, as if torture is wrong in Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were sexually humiliated and abused as if they were on a porn set, but permissible on commercial porn sites.

A new wave of feminists, who have betrayed the iconic work of radicals such as Andrea Dworkin, defends porn as a form of sexual liberation and self-empowerment. These “feminists,” grounded in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, are stunted products of neoliberalism and postmodernism.

Feminism, for them, is no longer about the liberation of women who are oppressed; it is defined by a handful of women who are successful, powerful and wealthy—or, as in the case of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” able to snag a rich and powerful man. A woman wrote the “Fifty Shades” book, as well as the screenplay. A woman directed the film. A woman studio head bought the movie. This collusion by women is part of the internalization of oppression and sexual violence that have their roots in porn. Dworkin understood. She wrote that “the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.”

I met Gail Dines, one of the most important radicals in the country, in a small cafe in Boston on Tuesday. She is the author of “Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality” and a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College. Dines, along with a handful of others including Jensen, fearlessly decry a culture that is as depraved as Caligula’s Rome.

“The porn industry has hijacked the sexuality of an entire culture and is laying waste to a whole generation of boys,” she warned. “And when you lay waste to a generation of boys, you lay waste to a generation of girls.”

“When you fight porn you fight global capitalism,” she said. “The venture capitalists, the banks, the credit card companies are all in this feeding chain. This is why you never see anti-porn stories. The media is implicated. It is financially in bed with these companies. Porn is part of this. Porn tells us we have nothing left as human beings—boundaries, integrity, desire, creativity and authenticity. Women are reduced to three orifices and two hands. Porn is woven into the corporate destruction of intimacy and connectedness, and this includes connectedness to the earth. If we were a society where we were whole, connected human beings in real communities, then we would not be able to look at porn. We would not be able to watch another human being tortured.”

“If you are going to give a tiny percent of the world the vast majority of the goodies, you better make sure you have a good ideological system in place that legitimizes why everyone else is suffering economically,” she said. “This is what porn does. Porn tells you that material inequality between women and men is not the result of an economic system. It is biologically based. And women, being whores and bitches and only good for sex, don’t deserve full equality. Porn is the ideological mouthpiece that legitimizes our material system of inequality. Porn is to patriarchy what the media is to capitalism.”

To keep the legions of easily bored male viewers aroused, porn makers produce videos that are increasingly violent and debasing. Extreme Associates, which specializes in graphic rape scenes, along with JM Productions, promotes the very real pain endured by women on its sets. JM Productions pioneered “aggressive throat fucking” or “face fucking” videos such as the “Gag Factor” series, in which women gag and often vomit. It ushered in “swirlies,” in which the male performer dunks the woman’s head into a toilet after sex and then flushes. The company promises, “Every whore gets the swirlies treatment. Fuck her, then flush her.” Repeated and violent anal penetration triggers anal prolapse, a condition in which the inner walls of a woman’s rectum collapse and protrude from her anus. This is called “rosebudding.” Some women, penetrated repeatedly by numerous men on porn shoots, often after taking handfuls of painkillers, require anal and vaginal reconstructive surgery. Female performers may suffer from sexually transmitted diseases and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And with porn mainstreamed—some porn video participants are treated like film celebrities by talk show hosts such as Oprah and Howard Stern—the behavior promoted by porn, including stripping, promiscuity, S&M and exhibitionism, has become chic. Porn also sets the standard for female beauty and female comportment. And this has had terrifying consequences for girls.

“Women are told in our society they have two choices,” Dines said. “They are either fuckable or invisible. To be fuckable means to conform to the porn culture, to look hot, be submissive and do what the man wants. That’s the only way you get visibility. You cannot ask adolescent girls, who are dying for visibility, to choose invisibility.”

None of this, Dines pointed out, was by accident. Porn grew out of the commodity culture, the need by corporate capitalists to sell products.

“In post-Second-World-War America you have the emergence of a middle class with a disposable income,” she said. “The only trouble is that this group was born to parents who had been through a depression and a war. They did not know how to spend. They only knew how to save. What [the capitalists] needed to jump-start the economy was to get people to spend money on stuff they did not need. For women they brought in the television soaps. One of the reasons the ranch house was developed was because [families] only had one television. The television was in the living room and women spent a lot of time in the kitchen. You had to devise a house where she could watch television from the kitchen. She was being taught.”

“But who was teaching the men how to spend money?” she went on. “It was Playboy [Magazine]. This was the brilliance of Hugh Hefner. He understood that you don’t just commodify sexuality, you sexualize commodities. The promise that Playboy held out was not the girls or the women, it was that if you buy at this level, if you consume at the level Playboy tells you to, then you will get the prize, which is the women. The step that was crucial to getting the prize was the consumption of commodities. He wrapped porn, which sexualized and commoditized women’s bodies, in an upper-middle-class blanket. He gave it a veneer of respectability.”

The VCR, the DVD and, later, the Internet allowed porn to be pumped into individual homes. The glossy, still images of Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler became tame, even quaint. America, and much of the rest of the world, became pornified. The income of the global porn industry is estimated at $96 billion, with the United States market worth about $13 billion. There are, Dines writes, “420 million Internet porn pages, 4.2 million porn Web sites, and 68 million search engine requests for porn daily.” [To see excerpts from Dines’ book, click here.]

Along with the rise of pornography there has been an explosion in sex-related violence, including domestic abuse, rape and gang rape. A rape is reported every 6.2 minutes in the United States, but the estimated total, taking into account unreported assaults, is perhaps five times higher, as Rebecca Solnit points out in her book “Men Explain Things to Me.”

“So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year—meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror,” Solnit writes.

Porn, meanwhile, is ever more accessible.

“With a mobile phone you can deliver porn to men who live in highly concentrated neighborhoods in Brazil and India,” Dines said. “If you have one laptop in the family, the man can’t sit in the middle of the room and jerk off to it. With a phone, porn becomes portable. The average kid gets his porn through the mobile phone.”

The old porn industry, which found its profits in movies, is dead. The points of production no longer generate profits. The distributors of porn make the money. And one distributor, MindGeek, a global IT company, dominates porn distribution. Free porn is used on the Internet as bait by MindGeek to lure viewers to pay-per-view porn sites. Most users are adolescent boys. It is, Dines said, “like handing out cigarettes outside of a middle school. You get them addicted.”

“Around the ages of 12 to 15 you are developing your sexual template,” she said. “You get [the boys] when they are beginning to construct their sexual identity. You get them for life. If you begin by jerking off to cruel, hardcore, violent porn then you are not going to want intimacy and connection. Studies are showing that boys are losing interest in sex with real women. They can’t sustain erections with real women. In porn there is no making love. It is about making hate. He despises her. He is revolted and disgusted by her. If you bleed out the love you have to fill it with something to make it interesting. They fill it with violence, degradation, cruelty and hate. And that also gets boring. So you have to keep ratcheting it up. Men get off in porn from women being submissive. Who is more submissive than children? The inevitable route of all porn is child porn. And this is why organizations that fight child porn and do not fight adult porn are making a huge mistake.”

The abuse inherent in pornography goes unquestioned in large part by both men and women. Look at the movie ticket sales for “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which opened the day before Valentine’s Day and is expected to take in up to $90 million over the four-day weekend (which includes Presidents Day on Monday).

“Pornography has socialized a generation of men into watching sexual torture,” Dines said. “You are not born with that capacity. You have to be trained into it. Just like you train soldiers to kill. If you are going to carry out violence against a group you have to dehumanize them. It is an old method. Jews become kikes. Blacks become niggers. Women become cunts. And no one turns women into cunts better than porn.”

                                                              ******************

OneLove

:::MME:::

We Are Going to Die




"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here." 

-Richard Dawkins 

OneLove

:::MME:::

Feb 17, 2015

Musings

OneLove

:::MME:::

Historical Erasure

Abby Martin hosts a discussion on the 'whitewashing' of the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking with Howard University Professor Dr. Wilmer J. Leon, and Morgan State University Professor Dr. Jared A. Ball, about the aspects of MLK's life that the corporate media overlooks. The time for being passive spectators to an ongoing dilution, elision & erasure of a culture is was past over. Wake your asses up, sleepwalkers!

OneLove

:::MME:::

Feb 15, 2015

Noam Chomsky: The World of Our Grandchildren




“The world that we’re creating for our grandchildren is grim. The major concern ought to be the one that was brought up in New York at the September 21 march. A couple hundred thousand people marched in New York calling for some serious action on global warming.
This is no joke. This is the first time in the history of the human species that we have to make decisions which will determine whether there will be decent survival for our grandchildren. That’s never happened before. Already we have made decisions which are wiping out species around the world at a phenomenal level.
The level of species destruction in the world today is about at the level of sixty-five million years ago, when a huge asteroid hit the earth and had horrifying ecological effects. It ended the age of the dinosaurs; they were wiped out. It kind of left a little opening for small mammals, who began to develop, and ultimately us. The same thing is happening now, except that we’re the asteroid. What we’re doing to the environment is already creating conditions like those of sixty-five million years ago. Human civilization is tottering at the edge of this. The picture doesn’t look pretty.”

                                                       ***************************

OneLove

:::MME:::

Police and Plunder by Peter Linebaugh





In December 2014 the discussion of “police” began to look at the roots of the institution. Peter Gelderloos concluded a three part study in CounterPunch flatly stating, “The police are a racist, authoritarian institution that exists to protect the powerful in an unequal system.[1] Sam Mitrani, a scholar of the Chicago police, concluded similarly, “The police were not created to protect and serve the population. They were not created to stop crime, at least not as most people understand it.” [2] Yet a physician in Ann Arbor, Catherine Wilkerson, caused a local stir when she stated “that neither racism nor racist police violence can be abolished under this economic system, i.e. under capitalism”.

On 21 January 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates in a speech in Ann Arbor argued persuasively that plunder is the leading social activity at the base of racist violence beginning with slavery days and continuing to now. Capitalism is such a social activity! It is relatively new in human history. It depends on the exploitation of those who don’t own the means of subsistence and production by those who do. It creates racist oppression in order to divide the exploited so that the Few may rule the Many.

Two sources of knowledge are especially pertinent. The first is the report called Lynching in America issued last week by the Equal Justice Initiative. It describes 3,959 lynchings in the American South between 1877 and 1950. The second is Stolen Lives which documents more than 2,000 people killed by law enforcement in the decade of the 1990s.[3] If we add the data of capital punishment to these data we can begin to understand that the resulting murderous pattern of terror is the punishment of capital.

Investigation into the history of police soon finds it to be inseparable from conquest, slavery, debt, industrial discipline, and social hierarchies. Armed settlers, “pioneers,” militia, army units, slave patrollers, Texas rangers, posse comitatus, slave catchers, factory guards, troopers, private security forces, vigilante groups, MPs, lynch mobs, Ford’s “service department,” death squads, night riders, and the KKK have all served police functions.

It may help to define police as armed, uniformed, salaried agents of government, part of the civil service, but it was not thus clear at the beginning.

Etymologically the word is related to “policy” and to the Greek polis, or city. “Police” was a new word in English gaining usage in the 18th century at the time of the sugar plantation, textile factories, racism, and mechanization. The thing itself was integral to city forces of merchant, manufacturer, banker, shipper, factor, and insurer, as well as to planter and landlord. It developed on the one hand in opposition to parochial forces of the civil power – the constables and the watch – and on the other hand it developed separately from the military – the army and navy.

As for capitalism let us go back to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations of 1776, because it connected the actual details of the labor process (exploitation) to the world market of commodities (globalization). He said “civil government, so far as it is instituted for the sanctity of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor.”  His student, Adam Ferguson, said plainly “wealth comes from inequality.” The “poor” created wealth, i.e. worked, labored.

These ideas first appeared as “police” as reported in Adam Smith’s Lectures on Police (c.1763) delivered in Glasgow, a new hub in the Atlantic economy for banking and commerce of tobacco plantations.  He defined police as “cleanliness, security, cheapness and plenty.” At first, then, “police” encompassed health, commodity, market, privatization, labor, and force. Already policy makers and profiteers were studying the intricate political relationship between low wages and high food prices. Although political economy and police violence were soon to separate as different limbs within the ruler’s body politics, they never lost their actual association with its heart. The goal was to make people work longer and harder.

Adam Smith’s contemporary wrote An Essay on Trade and Commerce (1770). “A multitude of people being drawn together in a small territory will raise the price of provisions; but, at the same time, if the police be good, it must keep down the price of labor.” The poor house must become “a house of terror.” The workers are “a many-headed monster which every one should oppose.” To establish the six-day working week, “a good police must be established.”

Divisions within this class were formalized by wage, geographic, gender, and racial differences, producing apparently permanent segments of that class of people without much of anything to call their own. So it comes as no surprise to learn that parallel to these “economic” developments was the development of racism. Carl Linneas, the Swedish biologist and deviser of binomial nomenclature in his Systema naturae (1758) created the term homo sapiens in a hierarchy of skin color. With spurious pretensions to science he identified four “races” describing white people as gentle, acute, quick, and governed by fixed laws and describing black people as crafty, indolent, careless, and capricious. These are not biological attributes but ones concerning obedience of interest to HR, bosses, foremen, overseers, in short, slavers!

Global commodity production entailed the enclosure of the commons, the fractionation of human beings, and the enslavement of women, children, and men, The social formation of Atlantic capitalism consisted of massive labor camps in America and the “Satanic mills” or factories of Britain.  The international political order had to change and did so creating new entities of power, the U.S.A. (1789) and the U.K. (1801).

Plantation (sugar, cotton) met factory (textiles) at the port (London, Liverpool).  The proletarian woman, the slave, the factory hand, the urban artisan, and the maritime worker, sailors, dockers. The port was where the first police were introduced. A new era of history commenced.  If you call it “industrialization,” or “modernization,” or even the “anthropocene” you are in danger of overlooking the demons at the center of it, Moloch and Mammon.

By the time of the Haitian slave revolt (1791) which brought the sugar system into crisis and at the time of the invention of the cotton ‘gin (1793) which brought the cotton system into expansion, the “pushing-system” began the transition of the most dynamic world commodity from sugar to cotton. Edward Baptist in the latest historical study of slavery and capitalism notes that the increased productivity of “the pushing system” depended on a decisive technology, “the whipping machine.”[4] The whip intensified labor to the limit of human endurance. It accompanied the expansion of slavery to new territories and the expansion of the internal slave trade from the Chesapeake to the Mississippi.

Economically speaking sugar began in the realm of production (slave plantation) and in Europe entered the realm of consumption (the tea cup, the rum bottle). In contrast, cotton began in the slave labor camp or plantation like sugar, but unlike sugar it became a means of exploitation on the other side of the Atlantic. Private property may belong to an individual for consumption, or it may be used as capital as an input of production. Police protect and serve the owners of these forms of property.

Capital exists in three modes or forms, as money (bank), as production (factory, plantation), as commodity (commerce, inventory). Capital as commodity sits in dockside warehouses. Capital as money sits in banks, insurance offices, and other counting houses. Capital as production will be in the field, the factory, and the ship. Thus the plantation, the docks, and the factory became three sites of a single economic system on either side of the Atlantic.

Glasgow (Scotland) was the city of Patrick Colquhoun (1745-1821). As a youth between 1760 and 1766 he lived on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. He was a planner of the trans-Atlantic cotton economy compiling stats of the workers, wages, factories, and imports in order to assist the prime minister and cabinet of England maximize profits from the cycle of capital in England, India, America, Ireland, Africa. That work was interrupted by the revolutions in France and Haiti.

In the 1790s he criminalized custom. [5] He led the hanging of those committing money crimes. He led the apprehension of those in textile labor who re-cycled waste products to their own use. He organized political surveillance by spies and snitches of those opposing slavery. In addition to his Virginia cotton interests he owned shares in Jamaican sugar plantations. Financed by West India merchants and planters in 1798 Colquhoun established the Police Office. In 1800 Parliament passes the Marine Police Bill expanding and making official the police as a centralized, armed, and uniformed cadre of the state. His treatises on police inspired the foundation of police in Dublin (Ireland), Sydney (Australia), and New York (USA).

To summarize, then, in two points. First, at the time of the independence of America (1776) “police” (intellectually, theoretically, and politically) meant the social and economic relations between the rich and the poor in the governance and planning of world-wide empire. Second, at the time of the creation of the U.S.A. (1787-1791) the actual institution of police simultaneously criminalized the urban commons and efficiently linked plantation and factory, the U.S.A. and the U.K., into a temporary Atlantic system, call it capitalism.

Finally, there is no ‘moving forward’ without reckoning with this past. If it took more than a century (a blink in history’s eye) to produce this unsustainable amalgam of production and police, work and violence, wealth and terror, we must expect that our efforts to eliminate effectively the one must be accompanied by the restoration or reparation of the other. There is no reason, historically-speaking, why this can’t be done in a hurry. The ideal of justice is indefeasible and undivided; it is a unity and does not wait.

Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo

                                                            *******

OneLove

::::MME::::

Feb 14, 2015

Reading Rant: "The Globalization of War, America’s 'Long War' against Humanity" by Michel Chossudovsky



The Globalization of War    by Michel Chossudovsky is undoubtedly one of the most important books on the contemporary global situation produced in recent years. In his latest masterpiece, Professor Michel Chossudovsky shows how the various conflicts we are witnessing today in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and Palestine are in fact inter-linked and inter-locked through a single-minded agenda in pursuit of global hegemony helmed by the United States and buttressed by its allies in the West and in other regions of the world.

Open your eyes...

OneLove

:::MME:::

Feb 12, 2015

Wealth of Nations Pt II




Ever wondered how they do it? Guinea, and many other African countries, will never rise out of poverty if this continues to happen... Please watch the video and then sign the petition: http://chn.ge/1tEcGsZ

See Wealth of Nations Pt 1

OneLove

:::MME:::

Finding Understanding with the Other




The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather what he does not say. 
Kahlil Gibran 

OneLove

:::MME:::

Unremitting Pain: The Careless, Astonishing Cruelty of Barack Obama’s Government by George Monbiot


Let me introduce you to the world’s most powerful terrorist recruiting sergeant: a US federal agency called the office of the comptroller of the currency. Its decision to cause a humanitarian catastrophe in one of the poorest, most troubled places on Earth could resonate around the world for decades.

Last Friday, after the OCC had sent it a cease-and-desist order, the last bank in the United States still processing money transfers to Somalia closed its service. The agency, which reports to the US treasury, reasoned that some of this money might find its way into the hands of the Somali terrorist group al-Shabaab. It’s true that some of it might, just as some resources in any nation will find their way into the hands of criminals (ask HSBC). So why don’t we shut down the phone networks to hamper terrorism? Why don’t we ban agriculture in case fertiliser is used to make explosives? Why don’t we stop all the clocks to prevent armed gangs from planning their next atrocity?

Ridiculous? In fact it’s not far off. Remittances from the Somalian diaspora amount to $1.2bn-$1.6bn a year, which is roughly 50% of the country’s gross national income, and on which 40% of the population relies for survival. Over the past 10 years the money known to have been transferred to suspected terrorists in Somalia amounts to a few thousand dollars. Cutting off remittances is likely to kill more people than terrorists will ever manage.


During the 2011 famine in Somalia, according to a British government report, “British Somalis saved hundreds of thousands of lives by remitting money ... reaching family members before aid agencies could mobilise”. Government aid agencies then used the same informal banking system – the hawala – to send money to 1.5 million people, saving hundreds of thousands more. Today, roughly 3 million of Somalia’s 7 million people are short of food. Shut off the funds and the results are likely to be terrible.

Money transfers from abroad also pay for schooling, housing, business start-ups and all the means by which a country can lift itself out of dependency and chaos. Yes, banking has its uses, as well as its abuses.

Somalia might be one of the poorest nations in the world, but its remittance system is widely seen as a model for other nations. Shifting e-money via the mobile phone network, hawala brokers charge only 5% interest, against a global average of 9% and an African average of 12%. In a nation held to ransom by well-armed thugs, and lacking almost all infrastructure, these remarkable people – often motivated as much by a desire to keep their country alive as to make money – supply tiny desert settlements all over the nation with scarcely any losses.

Hawala is one of Africa’s great success stories. But it can’t work unless banks in donor nations are permitted to transfer funds to Somalia. The US treasury’s paranoid rules threaten remittances from all over the world, as no bank wants to lose American business.

No one suffers more from al-Shabaab than the Somalis. It epitomises that combination of menace and absurdity satirised in Chris Morris’s film Four Lions. In the areas these few thousand men control, they have tried to ban samosas on the grounds that their triangular shape invokes the holy trinity. They whip women for wearing bras; have pledged to prohibit the internet; have imposed fundamentalist Wahhabi doctrines on a largely Sufi population; have tried to stop food aid; and have waged war on vaccination programmes, causing outbreaks of polio and measles. Yesterday they murdered another MP.

So you take a country suffering from terrorism, massive youth unemployment and the threat of famine, and seek to shut off half its earnings. You force money transfers underground where they are more likely to be captured by terrorists. You destroy hope, making young men more susceptible to recruitment by an organisation promising loot and status. Through an iniquitous mass punishment, you mobilise the anger and grievance on which terrorist organisations thrive. You help al-Shabaab to destroy Somalia’s economic life.

Compare this pointless destruction with the US government’s continued licensing of HSBC. In 2012 the bank was condemned by a Senate committee for circumventing safeguards “designed to block transactions involving terrorists, drug lords, and rogue regimes”. It processed billions of dollars for Mexican drug barons, and provided services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked with the financing of terrorists. But there was no criminal prosecution because, the attorney general’s office argued, too many jobs were at stake. The outrageous practices revealed this week will doubtless be treated with the same leniency.

So in order to protect American jobs, the US government fails to take action over the illegal transfer of billions of dollars, while sentencing people in the Horn of Africa to death because of the illegal transfer of a few thousand. There is a word for these double standards: racism.

By contrast, the British government comes through this surprisingly well. While recognising that money could be transferred to terrorists in Somalia, its response is not to ban the remittance system but to try to make it more transparent. In 2014, working with people throughout the money chain, it ran a pilot project to improve the system’s security.

But the US has simply shut the door and walked away. It offers no alternatives (why can’t the Federal Reserve be used for transfers?), and no useful guidance about how existing remittances could meet its exacting standards. The OCC remarks that “the Somali situation is a terrible human tragedy that cannot be solved by bank regulators. Perhaps not. But they can exacerbate it. The solution, it says, is “humanitarian assistance”.

Just two problems: the US isn’t offering any more than before; and replacing an autonomous system with state aid contradicts everything the government says about African development. If the result is a mountain of corpses, the OCC will neither know nor care.

Somalis, like many of the world’s people, are significant only when they are considered a threat. And if US policies make that threat more likely, well, that will be another administration’s problem. Until then, they count for nothing.

George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books The Age of Consent: a manifesto 
for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper. Visit his website at www.monbiot.com


                                                               ************

OneLove

:::MME:::

Feb 11, 2015

Robert Reich: 'America is headed full speed back to the 19th century'




My recent column about the growth of on-demand jobs like Uber making life less predictable and secure for workers unleashed a small barrage of criticism that workers get what they’re worth in the market.

Forbes Magazine contributor, for example, writes that jobs exist only  “when both employer and employee are happy with the deal being made.” So if the new jobs are low-paying and irregular, too bad.

Much the same argument was voiced in the late nineteenth century over alleged “freedom of contract.” Any deal between employees and workers was assumed to be fine if both sides voluntarily agreed to it.

It was an era when many workers were “happy” to toil twelve-hour days in sweat shops for lack of any better alternative.

It was also a time of great wealth for a few and squalor for many. And of corruption, as the lackeys of robber barons deposited sacks of cash on the desks of pliant legislators.
Finally, after decades of labor strife and political tumult, the twentieth century brought an understanding that capitalism requires minimum standards of decency and fairness – workplace safety, a minimum wage, maximum hours (and time-and-a-half for overtime), and a ban on child labor.

We also learned that capitalism needs a fair balance of power between big corporations and workers.

We achieved that through antitrust laws that reduced the capacity of giant corporations to impose their will, and labor laws that allowed workers to organize and bargain collectively.

By the 1950s, when 35 percent of private-sector workers belonged to a labor union, they were able to negotiate higher wages and better working conditions than employers would otherwise have been “happy” to provide.

But now we seem to be heading back to nineteenth century.
 
Corporations are shifting full-time work onto temps, free-lancers, and contract workers who fall outside the labor protections established decades ago.

The nation’s biggest corporations and Wall Street banks are larger and more potent than ever.
And labor union membership has shrunk to less than 6 percent of the private-sector workforce.
So it’s not surprising we’re once again hearing that workers are worth no more than what they can get in the market.

But as we should have learned a century ago, markets don’t exist in nature. They’re created by human beings. The real question is how they’re organized and for whose benefit.

In the late nineteenth century they were organized for the benefit of a few at the top.
But by the middle of the twentieth century they were organized for the vast majority.
During the thirty years after the end of World War II, as the economy doubled in size, so did the wages of most Americans — along with improved hours and working conditions.
Yet since around 1980, even though the economy has doubled once again (the Great Recession notwithstanding), the wages most Americans have stagnated. And their benefits and working conditions have deteriorated.

This isn’t because most Americans are worth less. In fact, worker productivity is higher than ever.

It’s because big corporations, Wall Street, and some enormously rich individuals have gained political power to organize the market in ways that have enhanced their wealth while leaving most Americans behind.

That includes trade agreements protecting the intellectual property of large corporations and Wall Street’s financial assets, but not American jobs and wages.

Bailouts of big Wall Street banks and their executives and shareholders when they can’t pay what they owe, but not of homeowners who can’t meet their mortgage payments.

Bankruptcy protection for big corporations, allowing them  to shed their debts, including labor contracts. But no bankruptcy protection for college graduates over-burdened with student debts.

Antitrust leniency toward a vast swathe of American industry – including Big Cable (Comcast, AT&T, Time-Warner), Big Tech (Amazon, Google), Big Pharma, the largest Wall Street banks, and giant retailers (Walmart).

But less tolerance toward labor unions — as workers trying to form unions are fired with impunity, and more states adopt so-called “right-to-work” laws that undermine unions.

We seem to be heading full speed back to the late nineteenth century.

So what will be the galvanizing force for change this time?

                                             **************

OneLove

:::MME:::

Feb 10, 2015

Rekindling 'Black Prophetic Fire' w/ Cornel West

Brilliant & inspiring speech! Dr West is our 21st century Socrates (only funkier!). 

OneLove

:::MME:::

Feb 9, 2015

MME's Jam of the Day




The 2015 Grammy Awards had its moments. For me, this fantastic cover of the Stevie Wonder classic If It's Magic by Usher was the highlight of the evening. Usher captured the melancholic, probing intensity of the original song & seemed to channel Stevie who emerged from the shadows to add his signature harmonica licks to end the song. Sheer brilliance!

OneLove

:::MME:::

Feb 8, 2015

White Like Me:Race, Racism & White Privilege in America





White Like Me, based on the work of acclaimed anti-racist educator and author Tim Wise, explores race and racism in the US through the lens of whiteness and white privilege. In a stunning reassessment of the American ideal of meritocracy and claims that we've entered a post-racial society, Wise offers a fascinating look back at the race-based white entitlement programs that built the American middle class, and argues that our failure as a society to come to terms with this legacy of white privilege continues to perpetuate racial inequality and race-driven political resentments today. For years, Tim Wise's bestselling books and spellbinding lectures have challenged some of our most basic assumptions about race in America. White Like Me is the first film to bring the full range of his work to the screen -- to show how white privilege continues to shape individual attitudes, electoral politics, and government policy in ways too many white people never stop to think about. 

OneLove

:::MME:::

The New Corporation

  The New Corporation ​is a 2020 documentary directed by Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, law professor at the University of British Columb...