themoodofthepeople

Yes, yes, get down.

Sun, 19 May 2013 03:19:07 -0400

Yes, yes, get down.

goodmemory: My Favorite Things - John Coltrane Great way to...

Sat, 18 May 2013 11:22:08 -0400

goodmemory:

My Favorite Things - John Coltrane

Great way to start a Saturday.

: “A writer’s moral obligation is to tell the truth, how things actually...

Sat, 18 May 2013 11:19:53 -0400

: “A writer’s moral obligation is to tell the truth, how things actually...:

narrativemag:

“A writer’s moral obligation is to tell the truth, how things actually were, or are. It is interesting how many young people have no trouble reading about or watching depicted suicides, murders, slaughters, all sorts of brutality and cruelty toward their own kind but are stopped or cowed by…

Yes!

Five major scandals the media isn't obsessing about

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:19:45 -0400

think-progress:

Are these things more important than edits to talking points? Judge for yourself.

1. Carbon pollution reaches historic highs, threatening human existence

2. The devastating impact of sequestration on kids, cancer patients and first responders.

3. Massive cuts to food stamps for the most vulnerable.

4. 1,100 workers die in a Bangladesh factory collapse, and American retailers continue business as usual.

5. 4,150 gun deaths from gun violence since Newtown.

"In the most comprehensive survey of its kind to date, a team of two dozen volunteers from the..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:03:06 -0400

“In the most comprehensive survey of its kind to date, a team of two dozen volunteers from the climate science website Skeptical Science has found a 97 per cent consensus in the peer-reviewed scientific literature that humans are causing global warming.”

- An Australian Broadcasting Corporation piece on how the science is, in fact, “settled” on whether humans are causing climate change. (via poptech)

sugahsrevolution: infinite amounts of yes

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:04:34 -0400

sugahsrevolution:

infinite amounts of yes

"If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 17:25:08 -0400

“If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one’s very own.”

- Yu Hua, “China in Ten Words” (via limegreensaliva)

hipsterlibertarian: I have this bumper sticker on my car, and I...

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:57:19 -0400

hipsterlibertarian:

I have this bumper sticker on my car, and I was reminded of it while reading this wise article from Steve Horwitz, published by the Future of Freedom Foundation. Here’s an excerpt:

[B]laming the failures of government on the “bad guys” who had power also ignores that the same failures are likely even if the “good guys” have the power. If the problem is with the institutions and rules, then it doesn’t matter which team the players are on. They will produce bad consequences either way.

What matters is what sorts of interactions the rules of the game permit. Where the rules protect rights and promote peaceful exchange as the means to our ends, even the most self-interested of people will have no choice but to trade for mutual benefit. Where the rules fail at this task, predation, both public and private, will dominate.

Rooting for your team or your favorite player is a recipe for social disaster; it encourages the creation of institutions of power that undermine progress now and that will be available to the “other guys” later, with equally unpleasant results. If we want to end the growth of the state and the erosion of our freedoms, we need to stop waiting for the star player to win the game and start talking about the need to change the rules.

"For the sake of a line of poetry one must see many cities, people, and things, one must know..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 01:06:57 -0400

“For the sake of a line of poetry one must see many cities, people, and things, one must know animals, must feel how the birds fly, and know the gestures with which small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to paths in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one long saw coming; to childhood days that are still not understood, to parents one had to hurt when they brought one a joy and one did not understand it (it was a joy to someone else); to childhood illnesses that set in so strangely with so many profound and heavy transformations, to days in quiet, muted rooms and to mornings by the sea, the sea altogether, to nights travelling that rushed up and away and flew with all the stars; and if one can think of all that, it is still not enough.”

- Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. by Burton Pike (via mythologyofblue)

thepeoplesrecord: These are all available for sharing on...

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:48:44 -0400

thepeoplesrecord:

These are all available for sharing on Facebook individually, via our Facebook photo-stream. Check ‘em out, like our page, ‘add to interests’ to see more content & share.

The People’s Record: Facebook | Twitter | Tumblr

The quotes ( feel free to delete the long-form when reblogging if it cramps your sleek-dash style):

“Twitter was like a poem. It was rich, real and spontaneous. It really fit my style. In a year and a half, I tweeted 60,000 tweets, over 100,000 words. I spent a minimum eight hours a day on it, sometimes 24 hours.”

“I call on people to be ‘obsessed citizens,’ forever questioning and asking for accountability. That’s the only chance we have today of a healthy and happy life.”

“Censorship is saying: ‘I’m the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine.’ But the internet is like a tree that is growing. The people will always have the last word - even if someone has a very weak, quiet voice. Such power will collapse because of a whisper.”

“To work in architecture you are so much involved with society, with politics, with bureaucrats. It’s a very complicated process to do large projects. You start to see the society, how it functions, how it works. Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.”

“Today, the West feels very shy about human rights and the political situation. They’re in need of money. But every penny they borrowed or made from China has really come as a result of how this nation sacrificed everybody’s rights. With globalization and the Internet, we all know it. Don’t pretend you don’t know it. The Western politicians—shame on them if they say they’re not responsible for this. It’s getting worse, and it will keep getting worse.”

“If my art has nothing to do with people’s pain and sorrow, what is ‘art’ for?”

“I don’t believe in the so-called Olympic spirit. I speak from personal experience. When China hosted the Games, it failed to include the people. The event was constructed without regard for their joy.”

“Historically, China is not a nation of sportsmen. We traditionally put more emphasis on being close to nature than pushing endlessly to excel. A philosophy that values tranquil contemplation of the landscape cannot easily be adapted to the Olympic slogan of ‘higher, stronger, faster.’”

“I am not for a kind of Olympics that forces the migrants out of the city, to tell the ordinary citizens they should not participate.”

“For all the tough talk about China during the presidential debates, Romney and Obama evaded any mention of China’s suspect human rights record, corruption, and rule of law. By not tackling these controversial topics, the candidates are protecting a strategic partnership with China at the expense of essential human values and beliefs.”

“Since the global economic crisis began, the change in global attitudes is clear to see - and I think it is pitiful. Barack Obama came to China and he is probably the only president of the United States never to mention the words ‘human rights’ in public.”

“The internet is a wild land with its own games, languages and gestures through which we are starting to share common feelings.”

Ai Wei Wei

thepeoplesrecord: Sister Assata - This is what American...

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:08:33 -0400

thepeoplesrecord:

Sister Assata - This is what American history looks like
By Alice Walker

I don’t know why, given where we are with dronefare, but I didn’t expect the man making the announcement about Assata Shakur being the first woman “terrorist” to appear on the FBI’s most wanted list to be black. That was a blow. I was reminded of the world of “trackers” we sometimes get glimpses of in history books and old movies on TV. In Australia the tracker who hunts down other aboriginals who have, because of the rape and murder, genocide and enslavement of the indigenous (aboriginal) people, run away into the outback. He shows up again in cowboy and Indian films: jogging along in the hot sun, way ahead of the white men on horseback, bending on his knees to get a better look at a bruised leaf or a bent twig, while they curse and spit and complain about how long he’s taking to come up with a clue. And then there were the “trackers” who helped the pattyrollers during our four hundred years of enslavement. When pattyrollers (or patrols) caught run-away slaves in those days they frequently beat them to death. I’ve often thought of the black men whose expertise at tracking fugitives helped bring these terrors, humiliations and deaths about. When I was younger I would have been in a rage against them; not understanding the reality of invisible coercion, and mind and spirit control, that I do now. Today, only a few years older than Assata Shakur, and marveling at the unenviable state of humanity’s character worldwide, I find I can only pray for all of us. That we should be sinking even below the abysmal standard early “trackers” have set for us: that the US government can now offer two million dollars for the capture of a very small, not young, black woman who was brutally abused, even shot, over three decades ago, as if we don’t need that money to buy people food, clothes, medicine, and decent places to live.

What is most distressing about the times we live in, in my view, is our ever accelerating tolerance for cruelty. Prisoners held indefinitely in orange suits, hooded, chained and on their knees. Like the hunger strikers of Guantanamo, I would certainly prefer death to this. People shot and bombed from planes they never see until it is too late to get up from the table or place the baby under the bed. Poor people terrorized daily, driven insane really, from fear. People on the streets with no food and no place to sleep. People under bridges everywhere you go, holding out their desperate signs: a recent one held by a very young man, perhaps a veteran, under my local bridge: I Want To Live. But nothing seems as cruel to me as this: that our big, muscular, macho country would go after so tiny a woman as Assata who is given sanctuary in a country smaller than many of our states.

The first time I met Assata Shakur we talked for a long time. We were in Havana, where I had gone with a delegation to offer humanitarian aid during Cuba’s “special period” of hunger and despair, and I’d wanted to hear her side of the story from her. She described the incident with the New Jersey Highway Patrol, and assured me she was shot up so badly that even if she’d wanted to, she would not have been able to fire a gun. Though shot in the back (with her arms raised), she managed to live through two years of solitary confinement, in a men’s prison, chained to her bed. Then, in what must surely have been a miraculous coming together of people of courageous compassion, she was helped to escape and to find refuge in Cuba. One of the people who helped Assata escape, a white radical named Marilyn Buck, was kept in prison for thirty years and released only one month before her death from uterine cancer. She was a poet, and I have been reading her book, Inside/Out, Selected Poems, which a friend gave me just last week. There is also a remarkable video of her, shot in prison, that I highly recommend.

This is what solidarity can look like.

The second time I saw Assata, years later, I was in Havana for the Havana Book Fair. Cuba has a very high literacy rate, thanks to the Cuban revolution, and my novel, Meridian, had recently been translated and published there. However, this time we did not talk about the past. We talked about meditation. Seeing her interest, and that of Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly, and others, I decided to offer a class. There under a large tree off a quiet street in Havana, I demonstrated my own practice of meditation to some of the most attentive students I have ever encountered. The mantra: Breathing in: “In,” breathing out: “Peace.”

I believe Assata Shakur to be a good and decent, a kind and compassionate person. True revolutionaries often are. Physically she is beautiful, and her spirit is also. She appears to hold the respect, love and friendship of all the people who surround her. Like Marilyn Buck they have risked much for her freedom, and appear to believe her version of the story as I do.

That she did not wish to live as an imprisoned creature and a slave is understood.

What to do? Since we are not, in fact, helpless. Nor are we ever alone.

I call on the Ancestors
by whose blood
and DNA
we exist
to accompany us
as always
through this lengthening
sorrow.
And to bear witness
within us
to all that we are
aware.

waylonebuen: Kanye West | Hey Mama

Sun, 12 May 2013 21:04:48 -0400

waylonebuen:

Kanye West | Hey Mama

Agreed Pablo, agreed. amores gitano (gypsy loves) by Roberto...

Sun, 12 May 2013 19:38:26 -0400

Agreed Pablo, agreed.

amores gitano (gypsy loves)

by Roberto Carlos Garcia

Cervena Barva Press

7$ 30pgs

Order Here:

http://www.thelostbookshelf.com/

Photo

Sun, 12 May 2013 16:53:40 -0400

thetuesdayafter: Barbara Kruger

Sun, 12 May 2013 12:23:22 -0400

thetuesdayafter:

Barbara Kruger

I'll Always Love My Mama by The Intruders - YouTube

Sun, 12 May 2013 10:44:52 -0400

I'll Always Love My Mama by The Intruders - YouTube:

Happy Mother’s Day!!

"As Americans, we have this naïve assumption that people all over the world are struggling and way..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 22:01:16 -0400

“As Americans, we have this naïve assumption that people all over the world are struggling and way behind us. They’re not. Sweden and South Korea have more advanced high speed internet networks. Japan has the most advanced trains and transportation systems. Norwegians make more money. The biggest and most advanced plane in the world is flown out of Singapore. The tallest buildings in the world are now in Dubai and Shanghai. Meanwhile, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.”

- 10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America http://bananenplanet.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/10-things-most-americans-dont-know-about-america/ (via curlycherie)

There are two areas where the USA is way out in front of the rest of the world: war and prison. The technology of killing is the main investment of US national energy, and of course the semi-public semi-private incarceration economy is flourishing while schools and roads crumble. In many other quality-of-life terms — housing, healthcare, public transportation, public access to technology, mental health support, support for people with disabilities, childcare, primary education, maternity support, social safety net — I think a lot of US Americans personally know that things are not exactly rosy but see no options for fixing it.

(via zuky)

And in many cases, rather than bother, given the shitty system we currently have, we’d rather just gtfo to another country where things aren’t so terrifying.

(via kiranirvanna)

Truth.
(via ambivalium)

thepeoplesrecord: The American Dream of upward mobility is...

Fri, 10 May 2013 20:41:06 -0400

thepeoplesrecord:

The American Dream of upward mobility is dead, thanks to the neoliberal ministrations of capital and government. But a new dream could rise from the mess left by globalization, off-shoring and austerity.
May 10, 2013

The continuation of the economic crisis of 2008 up to the present has driven home a social trend that has been evident since the late 1970s, the decline of what is usually called “the middle class” and the accompanying American Dream.

As Richard Wolff has pointed out in Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to do About it, this upward mobility was a reality for most citizens of the United States for several generations, from 1820 to 1970. For 150 years, real wages rose. In the quarter century from 1947 to 1973, average real wages rose an astounding 75 percent. But that shared prosperity came to a halt in the mid ’70s. In the next 25 years, from 1979 to 2005, wages and benefits rose less than 4 percent. The sustained rise in standards of living had been made possible by a conjunction of historical circumstances, circumstances that began to reach exhaustion by the mid 1970s.

In recent decades, the economy has grown, and there was a gain in total wealth. But where did it go? From 1983 to 2008, total GDP grew from $6.1 trillion to $13.2 trillion in constant 2005 dollars. The unequal distribution of the total wealth gain during this period is revealing. The wealthiest 5 percent of American households captured 81.7 percent of the gain. The bottom 60 percent of households not only failed to share in the overall increase, they suffered a 7.5 percent loss. Some of what the top 1 percent gained came directly from that bottom 60 percent.

Downward mobility
Between 2001 and 2008, entry level wages declined 7 percent for college graduates and 4 percent for high school graduates. Entry into middle-level incomes is becoming more difficult.

With the offshoring of manufacturing, the industrial regions of the northeast and the Great Lakes were transformed into a Rust Belt. United States manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 at almost 20 million and fell under neoliberalism to about 11.5 million in 2010. Today, 80 percent of the world’s industrial workforce is now in the global South. Most of it used to be in the United States. This is in no small measure the result of corporate policies over the last 30 years - policies encouraged by our political leaders - to offshore those low-skilled industrial jobs that used to be the entry point to the middle “class” for many. As less-skilled industrial jobs were offshored, at first, in the ’90s, we were told by Robert Reich, labor secretary in the first Clinton administration, that to remain competitive in the global economy, US workers needed to upgrade their skills. We were told the new economy would be the new road to the American Dream. We are still being told that. But offshoring of jobs has not been limited to low-skilled assembly line work. Corporate capital has discovered that any job that can be done by computers can be done anywhere in the world and consequently will be done wherever the cheapest workers with the requisite knowledge can be found. So the knowledge-economy jobs are now also being offshored to countries like India. The knowledge workers there will work for far less than in the United States. And many of our college graduates today are saddled with heavy debt and unable to find work.

As a result of corporate policies and public policies purchased by corporations, there has been wage stagnation for the past 30 years, even as worker productivity rose sharply. This is shown clearly in the above graph. Capital took the bulk of productivity gains (shown by the upper pink line) over the 1993-2006 period by holding wages down (shown by the lower blue line). But then with the 2008 financial crisis, median family income declined further, by nearly 10 percent. Overall, as incomes have declined, corporate profits have soared.

For a while, wealth appeared to increase for average citizens because of inflating real estate values. But the financial crisis of 2008 wiped out that fictitious wealth. Median family wealth in 2010 was the same as it had been 20 years earlier.

It is corporate capital’s unquenchable thirst for profit and political leaders’ easy purchasability under capitalism that is destroying what was once called ‘the American dream’ (of upward mobility). Political leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike, embrace Charles Wilson’s adage that “what’s good for General Motors is good for America.”

Corporate-led neoliberal globalization has transformed nation-states into what I call globalized states, that is, states that serve the interests of transnational capital above the interests of national populations. This has resulted in a limitation of sovereignty and of the possibility for democratically-shaped national policies. Increasingly, the countries’ fates depend more on powerful transnational corporations rather than on their own people.

Support for neoliberalism bipartisan
In the United States, there has long been bipartisan consensus behind globalization and the neoliberal policies that promote it. Both parties have long embraced basic public policies that undermine the economic security of millions of working people. Both parties favor no-strings Wall Street bailouts, expanded unregulated trade, weakened unions and fiscal austerity as an economic priority, with its concomitant shredding of social programs. There may be some difference in degree on these issues, but both parties are in basic agreement.

One-third of all working families are now poor; their annual income, for a family of four, is below the $45,622 poverty threshold - an income insufficient to meet basic needs.

This bipartisan consensus is illustrated by Senate approval this last year of free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. While all politicians were calling for more jobs, they approved a free-trade agreement that they knew would destroy jobs. This was evident in the fact that approval of the free-trade agreement was accompanied by extended unemployment benefits for displaced workers. They just can’t help themselves when an opportunity arises to favor transnational corporations. And now the Obama administration is set to expand this folly even further with the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Legitimacy of systems questioned
With the growing downward mobility now being experienced, the social contract is unraveling. The legitimacy of the dominant institutions is being questioned. Public confidence in Congress as well as government is at an all-time low; large banks are viewed (correctly) as criminal; blind faith in market magic has been dispelled - and corporations are even seen as having betrayed the nation. The legitimacy of the system of capitalism is in crisis as sizable percentages now have a positive view of socialism as an alternative, particularly among the young (who have not known the rabid anticommunism of the Cold War era). As the national elections in 2008 and 2012 have shown, the people of the United States are asking for far-reaching changes, more change than the political elite is willing or even able to deliver.

Without new major innovations to offer opportunities for profitable investment, where is all the accumulated capital to go? Here again we have a classic over-accumulation crisis. One fix that has been deployed by the corporate wealthy is to reduce their tax burden, shifting it to the popular classes below. This has been the agenda of their sector of the political elite for decades. That has been combined with the neoliberal offensive against social programs, again at the expense of the popular classes. In effect, the plutocracy has come to understand that growth of their wealth will no longer come mainly from productive investment, but must come out of the hides of those below them. That requires imposing austerity on others so they can continue to prosper.

Thomas B. Edsall, author of The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics, sums up the situation as follows:

Affluent Republicans - the donor and policy base of the conservative movement - are on red alert. They want to protect and enhance their position in a future of diminished resources. What really provokes the ferocity with which the right currently fights for regressive tax and spending policies is a deeply pessimistic vision premised on a future of hard times. This vision has prompted the Republican Party to adopt a preemptive strategy that anticipates the end of growth and the onset of sustained austerity - a strategy to make sure that the size of their slice of the pie doesn’t get smaller as the pie shrinks.

It is in this light that we can understand the death march the Republican Party has set out on. Its survival and that of its patrons is at stake. It leads them to adopt scorched-earth policies that ought to spell certain electoral defeat were it not for their gerrymandering, voter suppression, election rigging and other antidemocratic measures needed to maintain political power within the existing political duopoly. What they are so desperate to protect is not only their own political careers, but the insatiable hunger of capital.

For its part, the Democratic Party is also beholden to the interests of transnational capital, as I pointed out earlier. As Jeff Faux has documented, as early as the Carter administration, the Democratic Party embraced the neoliberal ideology. New Democrat Bill Clinton extended the Reagan-Bush I program of globalization with free trade and deregulation of finance capital. The Obama administration has continued on the same course. The political elite is united on its basic priorities. As Faux remarks, the United States is no longer rich enough to continue to finance America’s three principal national dreams:

1. The dream of the business elite for subsidized, unregulated capitalism.

2. The dream of the political elite for global hegemony.

3. The dream of the people for a steadily rising standard of living.

We can certainly continue to have one out of three, and perhaps even two out of three. But three out of three? No.

It is the dream of the US people that will have to go. That is the reality that no US politician dares to utter. If he did, it might spark popular demands that dreams 1. and 2. be sacrificed instead. The hard truth is that none of the three can be sustained indefinitely. Capitalism is in crisis. The military costs of global hegemony have become more than a debt-burdened state can sustain, as well as more than much of the world will continue to tolerate.

As for rising living standards, even if the dreams of Wall Street and Washington did not trump those of the people, are they really sustainable? With only a small portion of the world’s population, the United States consumes an immensely disproportionate share of the world’s resources. The current rate of use of world resources globally would be sustainable if we had one and one-half planet Earths. But guess what? We have only one. And the rest of the world’s peoples also have dreams of rising standards of living. If all the people in the entire world enjoyed US standards with the same per capita ecological footprint, five Earths would be needed.

My favorite slogan from the Occupy movement was “Wake up from the American Dream. Create a livable American reality.” That is the challenge We the People face in the 21st century. And we have to face it with little help from our political elite and none from capital. We have to do it ourselves. It will take social movements and prolonged struggle. It will take courage and bold experimentation. And for starters, it will take speaking the truth: The American Dream is over. For good or ill, history will move on without it.

Postscript: Besides this dominant American Dream, there is an alternative one in the background. It has its roots in the 18th century Enlightenment and was expressed in the French Revolution with the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” That was the dream of a society in which all could live in community, a society of mutual support among equals, where each individual was free to develop his/her human capacities supported by the community. The basic values of that vision are deeply rooted in the American culture. It can be the basis of an alternative - sustainable - American Dream.

Source (I heavily reduced weaker/less-engaging paragraphs so read the full thing if you’re interested)

Upper photo for sharing

Cara Armstrong - Watershed - CSU, Chico

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:28:54 -0400

Cara Armstrong - Watershed - CSU, Chico:

A beautiful poem at Watershed Review by my friend Cara Armstrong.

Check check it out!

Why do students pay more to borrow from the gov’t than...

Thu, 09 May 2013 23:58:58 -0400

Why do students pay more to borrow from the gov’t than banks?
msn.com

Banks pay much lower interest rates to borrow money from the federal government than students do. Chris Hayes talks to Senator Elizabeth Warren about her new bill to end this disparity.

Damn straight you need to be talking about this.