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This diary should more rightly be titled ‘Radical Black and Other Radicals History Month’, as it would reflect not only its contents, but the contributing catalysts that led to its almost inadvertent creation. I hope they’re of interest to you, but if not, and you’d rather look at my bird or four-legged photos, help yourself, but don’t say there weren’t alternatives. ;o)
It may be that I’m a bit obsessed by drones, though the military prefers to call them ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’, and torture myself a bit by keeping current. Since Wired’s danger room keeps up with the latest police state and war technology, I peeked in recently and first saw and read their exclusive: ‘U.N.’s Drone Investigator Backs Brennan for Top CIA Job’. For those of you who were tickled that the Special Rapporteur would look without bias or preconception into the ‘legality’ of the Obomba/Brennan program, never fear; it’s all good:
It’s an unlikely endorsement. Emmerson, a British lawyer, has put the U.S. on notice that he won’t hesitate to investigate U.S. “war crimes” if he uncovers evidence of them.
But aha; I did find ‘5 Homeland Security ‘Bots Coming to Spy on You (If They Aren’t Already)’. On the right side of the page was a link to a ‘Batman and Occupy Comics’ piece; as a major fan of the Democracy Movement, I read and liked it. An excerpt:
Matt Pizzolo’s new project, Occupy Comics, is an arty protestation of similar mind built around the movement that has spread from New York City to the rest of the nation, shining a spotlight on widespread unemployment, government bailouts for banks and other toxic issues.
“It’s a great conversation to be having,” he said. “The Occupy movement is a paradigm-buster. Anyone who tries to impose a left-right paradigm on it winds up looking out of touch and irrelevant.
Comics as progenitors of illuminated thought; I love it. On the cover of one of the issues was artist Anna Muckraker’s red-haired-lioness-heroine protester holding a black flag with this message:
“It isn’t the rebels
who cause the troubles of the world;
it’s the troubles
that cause the rebels.”
~ Carl Oglesby, SDS
Wow. Think about the relevance of that truth across the decades of the last century. Not remembering Oglesby, I went a-searching, and found this trailer for the 2002 Rebel with a Cause documentary.
From the blurb under the video:
“At its peak in 1968, SDS had over 100,000 members and 400 chapters — but in 1960 there were just a few dozen members, inspired by the civil rights movement and initially concerned with equality, economic justice, peace, and participatory democracy. Then came the war in Vietnam, and SDS grew rapidly as young people protested the destruction being wrought by the US government and military. Although most activity focused on the war, SDS members were also involved in organizing in local communities around economic and social issues, were early activists in the women’s movement, and helped start many of the ‘counter-institutions’ that flourished in that period and since.”
The full length version of the film can be seen on youtube (1:49:19); Tom Hayden’s scary long Port Huron statement is here. But at it’s finest, it sounded like OWS, no? And…the more things change, tra la la…
But back to Oglesby; it turns out that he’s a Kent State alum, and in 1968, he was asked by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver to serve as his running mate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in that year’s presidential election, although he declined the offer. He was reportedly thrown out of SDS in 1969 for being too stuck in a bourgeois mentality and not embracing a Marxist-Leninist perspective.
Yow; Eldridge Cleaver, early leader of the Black Panthers turned Mormon. Zing to: February is Black History month. That’s why the LUV newsletter sent this Keith Feldman piece, , ‘A Haunting Echo: W.E.B. Du Bois in a Time of Permanent War’.
Feldman asks us to look deeper than the March on Washington and its archives, and cites the vast amount of ink given to Du Bois’ life’s work, and the path it took past what he later saw as ‘the foreshortened horizon of liberal integration’ as per his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, and:
“…his persistent commitment to effectively understand the meaning of race, blackness, freedom and democracy, inclined always towards justice for the “world’s darker peoples”. He resolutely refused America’s Cold War limitations on forms of political thought that described freedom solely through US capitalism’s market-based lexicon, drawing instead on the thick political vocabularies of African and Asian anti-colonialism and Soviet communism. (In the preface to the 1953 reprisal of Souls) Du Bois underscores the deep cleavages around who has access to conditions of peace and who is subjected to conditions of war. Such divisions draw on, even as they transform, those lacerating circuits of oppression, dispossession and dehumanisation that centuries of European imperial violence and trans-Atlantic chattel slavery have carved into the world. (Again, more is here.)
A friend sent me this piece on Du Bois’ relationship to communism and his views on capitalism; here is his essay, Socialism and the Negro Problem, one line of which is: “No recent convention of Socialists has dared to face fairly the Negro problem and make a straightforward declaration that they regard Negroes as men in the same sense that other persons are.”
In this recent piece, Ron Jacobs extols the need to look past the well-meaning, acceptable themes and heroes of Black History Month, and synopsizes two new books on the Panthers, and states their importance as ‘objective and radical’:
Despite the efforts of historians to obfuscate and obliterate the party from history, describing it as a hate group and gun-obsessed when mentioning it at all, the fact is the Panthers legacy is unique and important to not only the history of Black America, but to the history of the entire United States. It is best described in the words of Mumia Abu Jamal: “we didn’t preach to the people, we worked with them. “The relationship between the primarily white New Left and Panthers is explored in a fair-minded and realistic manner, as is the relationship between the Panthers and other Third World revolutionary organizations both in the United States and around the world.
Discussing Black Against Empire, Jacob notes:
The book concludes with a chapter speculating as to why the Black Panthers developed when they did, why they commanded the support they did, and why their influence waned so quickly. Of course, the role of the government counterinsurgency program called COINTELPRO is discussed; the frameups, misinformation, jacketing and murders. In light of current concerns about domestic “terrorists”, one wonders if the Panthers would be considered drone assassination targets under the current Justice Department guidelines if they were around today?
And in another bit of sublime synchronicity, came Louis Proyect published ‘Dancing to Ferllinghetti’s Beat’, subtitled America‘s Revolutionary Poet, and includes a few of the author’s memories of the heady days of the beat poets.
As you watch the 93-year-old Lawrence Ferlinghetti with shoulders squared back like a 21-year-old athlete striding briskly through the streets of San Francisco in the marvelous new documentary “Ferlinghetti: a Rebirth of Wonder”, it might occur to you that poetry and radical politics are the magic elixir that Ponce De Leon was searching for in vain.
As a seminal figure of the Beat Generation, Ferlinghetti is still going strong as are a number of other poets who pay tribute to him throughout the film, including Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Amiri Baraka (who started out as a beat poet named LeRoi Jones.) Though having departed to higher spiritual realms, Allen Ginsberg makes a striking appearance as well, sitting side by side with Ferlinghetti as they are interviewed on art and politics. The connection between the two is particularly intimate since Ferlinghetti risked prison time for publishing “Howl” back in 1956 through the auspices of City Lights Books, an offshoot of the bookstore he had launched a few years earlier.
A portion of a poem from Ferlinghetti’s ‘Coney Island of the Mind’:
In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’
They writhe upon the page
in a veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
bent statues bats wings and beaks
slippery gibbets
cadavers and carnivorous cocks
and all the final hollering monsters
of the
‘imagination of disaster’
they are so bloody real
it is as if they really still existed
There are so many others, like Richard Wright; feel free to name them, and your experiences with them. But over and over the message has been the same:
It’s all connected. The colour lines ‘n class lines; exclusion from democracy; unrelieved poverty; who gets the peace, who gets the war…who gets the fruits of our labor? Who gets to live, who gets to die, and does anyone care to know?
Sigh. From today in a piece by George Ciccariello-Maher and Mike King, The Execution of Christopher Dorner, this quote from Malcolm X, speaking of when the Master’s house was on fire:
“But that field negro, remember, they were in the majority, and they hated their master. When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try to put it out, that field negro prayed for a wind.”
It may be cheating a li’l bit, but no essay on Radical Black History Month should leave out poet, activist, and songster Boots Riley, cuz: history really starts yesterday, doesn’t it? ;o)
40 Comments
Rec’d. Bringing back memories. Will comment tomorrow.
Stealth rec’d, with a promise to comment in the morning.
Thanks for recalling the history, wd, especially on Ferlinghetti, who has always been one of my heroes in the matter of publishing Howl. (I was across the Bay at Berkeley at the time.) I also like Coney Island of the Mind, although it is undoubtedly Ginsberg who was the greatest American poet of the second half of the 20th century (whatever the Modern Language Association might think).
Let’s go with ‘War Profit Litany‘, then. Again: It’s all connected.
On the first reading of your wonderful diary, this stuck out for me:
And it reminded me of the first time I heard Mumia’s voice on the radio. I didn’t know who he was but I stopped in my tracks and listened to every second. Free Mumia! and Free Angela & All Political Prisoners (a new documentary coming to theaters on April 5th, according to facebook.com/freeangelafilm.
We’ve seen how the police state reacts to Occupy; those last few minutes of the Rebels with a Cause video sure seemed familiar. It remains to be seen how they will react to the Black Riders Liberation Party, who are following in the footsteps of the Panthers – not just by keeping an eye on the cops in their neighborhood and protecting their right to be heard, but also by feeding people (haven’t figured out to link to a Facebook video, but a recent event apparently included Bobby Seale). All Power to the People!
I didn’t know that one and I love it! Thanks so much, wd.
BTW I notice that the rhythm of
and separate listed, those who drop Amphetamine with
military, gossip, argue, and persuade
recalls the classic opening of Howl
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked
(In an early draft the words in the continuation line were actually set off by commas.)
Also, if you will indulge me a bit further, Ginsberg was influenced by Whitman, who was influenced by Hesiod. Here is the latter on what it will be like at the end of the iron age when people turn on each other:
Envy will accompany all miserable humans,
ill-sounding, delighting-in-evil, hate-faced.
(Works and Days 195-196, my translation; in the Greek the last three terms are single words)
[N.B. It seems that FDL won't let me indent the continuation lines, but you get the idea.]
Your video link wouldn’t play for me, but here’s the trailer on youtube. Mr. wd had told me that Amy had Mumia on last week; here’s that interview (haven’t watched it yet) speaking on ‘Long Distance Revolutionary’.
Didn’t know about BRLP, but all I could find googling (besides Facebook, can’t see if ya don’t join, no thanks) was a forum connected to black hair media.
Yes, yes, yes, Paul Potter’s words at the end resonate remarkably to OWS, and the fact that: All the issues are connected.
Seale! Reminds me of a Lenny Bruce bit in which, from the Oval Office, some Prez says over the intercom: “Seale; send in Nixon”, lol.
Added: the ‘connected’ theme I wanted to convey even with how minds can go ping, ping, ping, KAPOW! with these little prompts in our consciousness-streamings.
Howl I knew; the other I found and liked. Ginsberg was in Boulder at Naropa Institute when I was there for massage therapy school.
Translated it from Greek, eh? ;o) Nice catch on the rhythms, too. I’ve been reading Whitman, but have mislaid my buckram-covered copy of Leaves of Grass, bugger all. Hoped free verse might be a way to get more of the poet in me-own-self. ;o) Never even heard of Hesiod, but yes: contribute away. That’s the best part of threads, the sharing, the additional pings, connections, both in memory and real life (whatever that is).
My own copy got left on a bus some time ago, but like so much that is in the public domain you can find it on the internet here (if without the buckram).
The Greek is really no big deal: it’s what I do professionally as summarized here. Hesiod was a contemporary of Homer (although both names may only refer to schools that existed for a period of time, the poems being composed by committee, as it were).
But we should probably get back to our own world, yes?
Radical acts are contextual. Do they the nail the root of the issue or not? Radical analysis frames the hypothesis of what act will release change. Radical acts are the experiments that falsify radical analysis. Or not. At least that’s my perspective.
It’s interesting that you’ve brought together several of the writers/activists who propeled my journey from a conventional Southern white male Goldwater supporter to my current polyglot political views. But there is one subversive influence that brought them all together that has gone unnoticed in histories of the 1960s. The publication was the official publication for college students of the United Methodist Church. It’s editor was B. J. Stiles and its art editor was Margaret Rigg. Dana Robert at Boston University is a scholar who has been studying its role during the 1960s. Articles in motive magazine during the 1960s were by a wide range of writers including Todd Gitlin, Ross Terrill, and Carl Oglesby writing on the Vietnam War. In 1967, Oglesby and theologian Richard Schaull (unfortunately Anglo-America is trying to forget Schaull) collaborated on Containment and Change, an examination of American foreign policy.
Poets published in motive included an occasional Ferlighetti poem, frequent Kenneth Patchen, and John L’Heureux.
motive was the means by which many white Southerners found their way into the Civil Rights movement and affiliation with SNCC, Freedom Summer, and the Southern Student Organizing Committee. Members of SSOC went on to create the The Great Speckled Bird (Atlanta GA) alternative newspaper and the still operating Institute of Southern Studies.
So bracket all that. Those are white folks.
The first radical black action I heard about was Jackie Robinson desegregating the Greenville SC Municipal Airport restaurant in 1961.
The next was a local black dentist, who organized a sit-in to happen at the Greenville (SC) County Library; it never happened; the rumor caused the library board to desegregate the library system.
Radical action is contextual to the times; that was the sort of radical action that could get one killed.
Eva Jefferson Paterson is another black radical from the period of turmoil in 1970. As president of the Northwestern University undergraduate student body in 1970, she led a strike following the Kent State murders. The strike encompassed undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and university employees. The university administration tried to co-opt the strike by canceling school classes and activities for five days. She forced a university-wide election that kept the university shut down for another ten days. She successfully persuaded the SDS chapter not to burn down the Navy ROTC building on the first day, preserving a nonviolent strike.
There are lots of folks like these out there scattered over America, who might not pass everyone’s radical litmus test but who have contributed to the movement in American society that has occurred since World War II.
Footnote: The United Methodist Church canceled funding for motive magazine in 1972 in response to a special issue on Gay Liberation. This followed special issues in previous years on Women’s Liberation and the American Indian Movement.
Silly, man; I do read poetry online, and almost everything else now that I can’t read dead tree much. I’d made an exception in his case since I love the smell of dusty buckram and slightly foxed pages. (Been reading and squinting at a few other poetry books I still have, as well.)
Nice web bio and links. Physics, too?
As you’re in DeeCee, listen up for our friend Ryan Brown’s productions: Opera Lafayette. He and his family now live there and were actually invited to play at Versailles, OMG. In any event, he comes to Mancos to care for his family’s original homestead throughout the year, and brings us his most recent CDs, hoping to eddjycate us toward liking opera, particularly 18th century opera.
No, if all time is happening at once, we never need be in this time, nor do we ever hafta grow up. I got that part right, anyhoo. ;o)
That’s a nice supplement to wd’s diary, TD.
Not that there were no inter-racial tensions in those days. The late, great Dave Brubeck was a pioneer in refusing to play where they wouldn’t treat his African-American bass player Eugene Wright with respect. Yet at one point Amiri Baraka attacked him for usurping the “Black art form” of jazz. In my perspective, Baraka had a point in that DB’s piano riffs tended to be classical-music oriented.
It’s a good perspective if I understand what you mean. Radical thought and writing used to be extremely important, but it’s far less clear to me that most of it hasn’t tunneled too far; we’ll see, I guess. As in past writing, song, theatre:
“If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak then unto me.” ~ Will S.
Interesting on Stiles; I came across his name reading for this post, and can’t remember where, even looking at my unused links. I’d thought maybe he was in the long version of ‘Rebels with a cause, but only Bernardine Dohrn, Billy Ayers, Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin, Carl Oglesby, Sue Klonsky, Al Haber, Carl Davidson, Jeff Shero, Mike Spiegel, Bob Ross, and Casey Hayden are, according to the video’s page.
As to your Richard Schaull link: I cannae read Spanish, and only a modicum of Klingon. ;o) I’ll wiki-English him later when I have time; sounds interesting.
Thank you, THD, for bring more poets, more black unsung activists (and white), but especially for the Jackie Robinson memories. We can’t sing enough praises for him, imo.
Social gospel was powerful in the ’60s.
Another one from the religious left of the 1960s, Charlotte Bunch, who was president of the short-lived ecumenical University Christian Movement.
The Malcolm X quote from the counterpunch article made me think of Django Unchained, which I saw recently. The movie is funny in an intensely uncomfortable sort of way; also offensive and ridiculous and violent and way too long. But Malcolm immediately brought to mind Samuel L. Jackson’s character, who remains loyal to his master and ends up being killed by Django and left in the burning remains of the plantation house. Tarantino has been rightly criticized for re-imagining black history. But we do keep going back to these same archetypes, don’t we.
I’ve read some of Rita Mae’s books, but didn’t know Bunche was her partner (or had forgotten). I think it was Nader, writing at Counterpunch recently, who said recently how hypocritical Hillary Clinton is about claiming to advocate for women (Bunche’s award) given her comments and deeds as she ‘militarized the State Dept.’.
I added the quote to my diary a bit ago, it was soooo relevant. Nice on the Jackson role comparison, and it also makes ya think of the captured Black Caucus. Compradors, lol.
And St. Ralph missed her husband’s feminizing the military so that today after the progress that Barack Obama has put into place, women can serve in combat. (Of course that is the traditional “path to citizenship” in America.)
Nothing like litmus tests to divide the 99%. Truman knew that, which is why there is not left left to speak of in the US. For the past 66 years, the liberals, progressive, and left have seen fit to do that to themselves. Seems to always undercut the rising mass movement at the appropriate moment to reconsolidate the 1%’s fortunes. It’s a human failing rather than a conspiracy. Although there are folks who like to humor it along. It’s obvious that political parties play this game intentionally–it’s part of campaigning. But anyone, high or low, rich or poor, can play.
Saint Ralph is what the Occupy movement meant by privilege in speaking. But so is Saint Hillary. Just one voice. Just one data point. Like you and me.
Of course you knew I would argue against over-personalizing what goes on in institutions. Sometimes it would help for some of these folks to take a turn at the wheel just to see if they could move the ocean liner in a different direction. I’ve had enough experience trying to move organizations forward or in a different direction to have a big dose of humility about what it takes. Even little itsy-bitsy organizations. I can’t imagine moving 38,400 employees in a different direction even if my heart was in the right place (which is what Nader is questioning). And since World War II, the State Department budget is one place where parts of the “black budget” (covert operations) is hidden.
One other biggie to remember is Bob Moses.
Another white guy that influenced me is Charles Allen Lingo Jr. (yes, that is an Alabama police report), a UMC minister who is now a Buddhist lay teacher in the Atlanta area.
Which led me to the Alabama list of persons active in civil disturbances. It might be considered a roll of honor now except that they were also tracking the Nazi Party and KKK.
Well, yes, more female cannon fodder and feminine authoritarians is always a good thing, but I think you knew I’d snark about that. ;o)
And I think you know that I’ll say that *not* personalizing those steering the institutions is akin to Tom Englehardt’s railing against simply trying to dodge accountability by claiming that the assholes live in ‘bubbles’ of some sort, as though the atmospherics inside them are so monolithic and permeating that their very thoughts become synchronous, and their personal collusions with the MICC, multinational corporations and assassinations are thus, impersonal, and therefore not culpable, or less culpable. Don’t buy it for a minute, my friend.
That Hillary is the most popular political figure in the US right now shrivels my soul. But then the fact that 75% of Americans (USians) are in favor of drone assassinations abroad does, too.
Great on Bob Moses; I hadn’t remembered his name, even though he was so very central to the Freedom Summer Project. Heh. I had an online friend who was there that summer, and sent me a piece he’d written about a few of them finally arming themselves and sitting inside screen doors at people’s houses, brandishing their firearms at the armed white thugs who came in packs to kill both those ‘agitators’ and likely, the black families they were staying with.
I remember he said something akin to what Angela Davis said in her famous interview, “Violence?? You’re asking me about violence??
‘Civil disturbances’; another term I’d forgotten.
Re: Kent State. I just happened to be back there on the one year anniversary of the shootings, and went to the ceremonies. Not a dry on on the commons. I never met Oglesby, and got lost trying to discover if our times over-lapped, not that it matters. Guys in dark suits used to stand above us and take our photos while we held anti-war vigils at the student union. ;o)
On the failure of personalizing. Large organizations are networks of relationships. The guys at the top of the organization prune those relationships so that they don’t have to deal with more than a couple dozen people. The guy at the top sets 40,000 foot-level agendas and delegates the details unless there are issues. The guy at the top is a workaholic 60+ hour-a-week guy to justify to himself that he deserves the power, money, and glory. Screened calls, abstracted memos,…Nothing gets to that guy unfiltered, and if anything does it’s a major issue for the person who let it through. So the main personal failing one can charge is setting up your operation like all the big guys with total control. Have you noticed that Obama is a control freak? No surprises. No drama. That’s the environment that he created and that’s where the criticism should go–and to Congress as well because they have completely insulated themselves from ordinary constituents and their opinions (except for market research purposes–i.e. summarized spreadsheets for the top guy). And any corporation with 1000 or more employees tends to work the same way unless the top guy works extra hard to break those habits. Any IT analyst who has spend any length of time in a large organization will verify the symptoms.
Guess what. Any person you replace in that position will operate the same way unless they take specific steps to break it because that’s the way that the permanent government (the civil service employees) expect things to work. And unless they buy into process changes, they can slow down the wheels of government to a crawl. That is, there is a huge amount of reverse delegation going on in large organizations. And because most large organizations today are highly matrixed, that reverse delegation becomes a competition of the boss’s attention. The best players get their ideas heard, regardless of their competence and because their ideas get heard they gain legitimacy even if their ideas are catastrophic.
In addition, most organizations are being constantly reshuffled to respond to new projects and missions dictated from on high. In a federal agency “the White House says” can be used to argue changes until it runs into “Senator so-and-so of our committee called today and he was not a happy camper”. And all agencies make a point to be on good terms with everyone on their committees because those guys will be around longer than any two-term President.
So Brennan in his White House staff role acts as the ambassador from all of the national security community of agencies, all of whom are competing to get additional budget and head count and all the office politics games. Unless the President asks him on particular occasion to get something of interest to the President, what Brennan does is reverse delegate the President’s time on National Security issues, picking which he thinks are important and which are not and presenting the opinions from the agencies that support his own views.
We know that Obama will push back if he is concerned enough. Obama did that in the creation of the Afghanistan strategy. He pushed Petraeus and the JCS to create a practical plan. They fed him BS, which he did not like. He created his own plan of a temporary surge (letting the generals have their way) but imposed his own criteria for success expected in 18 months. McChrystal couldn’t make it happen and tried to bully the President into sending more troops by going to the media; McChrystal got effectively cashiered. The fact that that happened without murmur from the rest of the military or protest from Republicans in Congress gave Obama more control over the military bureaucracy than he had when he arrived. So that he could instruct Gates to dismantle don’t ask-don’t tell, which undercut Congressional opposition to changing the law. Petraeus couldn’t perform and apparently used CIA intelligence as a scapegoat; so he was sent to the CIA to fix it. What Petraeus did was try to militarize the CIA, causing a silent mutiny among the analysts (if a new book is to be believed) and they birddogged the FBI to pursue the breach of email security that exposed his affair. (One wonders what hand John Brennan had in these unfortunate events, Brennan being from the analyst side of the agency.)
So now Obama has control of CIA (well as much as any President can have given its secrecy). With Panetta having been at both CIA and DoD, Obama pretty well knows where the opportune cuts are in those agencies. Not that those cuts will affect America’s push for a restored hegemony–you heard the SOTU.
Now, given that sort of system imagine someone elected as President who tried from the get-go to rein in the military industrial complex and adopt a less hegemonic foreign policy. Might they see a few unexpected crises that someone failed to notify them about? That forced them to war or look weak. That’s the box that the permananent government can put Presidents in. Sometimes it’s for the good: EPA still exists and still has technical libraries in spite of George W. Bush; some instructions get slow walked to the next administration.
But my main objection to personalization is that it becomes a distraction from seeing where the maneuvering is going and where activists can interject themselves to gain their objectives.
You’ve convinced me just how badly we are fucked, unless an activist interjects herself in such as way to as to flip this system, as Boots Riley says in Strange Arithmetic. That link goes to the song; below are the lyrics.
History has taught me some strange arithmetic
Using swords, prison bars, and pistol grips
English is the art of bombing towns
While assuring that you really only blessed the ground
Science is that honorable, useful study
Where you contort the molecules and then you make that money
In mathematics, dead children don’t get added
But they count the cost of bullets comin out the automatic
[Hook]
Teacher
My hands up
Please, don’t make me a victim
Teachers
Stand up
You need to tell us how to flip this system
[Verse 2]
Economics is the symphony of hunger and theft
Mortar shells often echo out the cashing of checks
In Geography class, it’s borders, mountains and rivers
But they will never show the line between the takers and givers
Algebra is that unique occasion
In which a school can say that there should be a balanced equation
And then Statistics is the tool of the complicit
To say everybody’s with it and that you’re the only critic
[Hook]
[Verse 3]
Social Studies, the goliath to tackle
Which turns into a sermon on simplicity of shackles
Physics is to school you on the science of force
‘Cept for how to break the hell out the ghetto, of course
Home Ec can teach you how to make a few sauces
And accept low pay from your Walmart bosses
If your school won’t show you how to fight for what’s needed
Then they’re training you to go through life and get cheated
Yep, pretty much. As a nation we are indeed in some pretty deep molasses. And that song is right on target.
I’ve told this story before. I watched a major multinational essentially destroy itself right before and during the IT bubble burst at the beginning of the naughts because the management did not have the will or the smarts to put together an accounting system that would allow the CEO to know exactly how much money was coming in and going out. They started the project three times, and cancelled three times because it cost too much. In the process they burned $100 million and got nothing to show for it. Not only that, when the downturn in sales came, the CEO was well behind the curve, and then he got canned because the CFO was faking the figures trying to get his report in on time. The CFO was canned too. The stock price fell from $45 a share to under a dollar a share in less than three months. The new CEO started chopping. The number of employees went from 90,000 to 10,000 in three years. And now they’ve pretty much disappeared from the market.
I tell this because this corporation is not unique. Most corporations are in the same shape and do not know it and are not finding out because so far they’ve been lucky enough to rig profits each quarter without getting caught by reality.
The other thing to note is that he boundary between criminal enterprise and business is very porous. Of course, we know this in the way that all major banks launder drug money.
Greed + stupidity = the end of the empire. It has to, eventually.
Remember it took 400 years for Rome to unwind. Even given the faster pace, the end of empire is a ways away in my estimation. Unless we really can bring about that transformation.
I think climate change and food availability are going to force a lot of issues whether we are ready to rumble or not.
Uh-oh; too much to understand by now. I’ll try to answer in the morning if I can. Yes, I know you see all of this through a wider angle, but I don’t quite even agree with your characterization of Obomba and Afghanistan. Thanks for the long reply.
Can’t wait to read the lyrics when my eyes can focus better, but look at THD’s second paragraph at #23. It has some of the same rhythms as Boot’s Arithmetic.
Thanks for keeping up, Mz. Firecracker. G’night.
Dunno whether you’ll be back, but this piece by Russ Baker and friend digs into the nuts, bolts and emails of the Petraeus affair (so to speak). The wrap-up was a bit disappointingly simplistic, but other than that… ;o)
I’m glad that I included Boots in this diary, hfc, and am envious that you’re his friend. ;o)
Sorry for the delay, wd. I had to go home from the library, with grocery shopping on the way, and by the time I got back on the net (I don’t have a smart phone) it seemed that the thread had died. But I see it’s on again this morning.
I just want to say that, yes, I know of Opera Lafeyette. It’s well regarded here; for example, here is a review of a 2010 performance by WaPo’s chief music critic (who is very good, unlike the paper’s editorial columnists). I haven’t seen the group yet, since although I’m certainly a classical music person (and I worked on the Washington Opera’s subscription phone bank for two seasons in the 1990s), 18th century French opera is not quite my favorite genre. I probably should, though: They play in the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, which is a nice, intimate venue. And it’s neat that you are friends with the director.
Although you say “all time is happening at once,” I see that the later entries in the thread are indeed back in the present.
Fascinating. So someone wanted Petraeus out of control of Yemen (Centcom) about the same time that McChrystal flamed out. Just another reason to use Petraeus to backfill McChrystal. Petraeus must have developed a lot of enemies with his politicking an showboating; his departure is another in many things that seem to be overdetermined. Did Brennan want him out of Yemen (because of his good friend Saleh or a few key Saudis)? Which meant the some faction in the CIA wanted him out long before he became CIA Director. There’s some interesting office politics over the control of US foreign policy being played out here.
LOL! I said that, but…then I totally forgot to check back here (addlepated before my years). It *is* a nice review, and I’ve liked the comedies better.
Ryan’s great, and I laughed awhile back when he and his wonderful Carmel auntie came for dinner cuz he’d grown his hair longer (‘All the better to toss while conducting’, the wise-ass wendy chortled).
As I said, he may be making a few inroads in educating us. No, really, I keep a few compilations of well-known arias around.
Sorry to be so late; got overly-fascinated with the Dorner manhunt and bullshit the cops were handing out to the self-kettled MSM reporters. Meanwhile, the world turned… ;o)
I’m guessing that you think their reporting hold water, then? I gave it to eCAHNomics, she read it, and her only objections were akin to mine: that the conclusion saying it was ‘about oil’ was facile; she reckoned it’s about finance, Citigroup (Lew) muscling out Goldman Sachs (Libya, God knows where else), Big Pharma…
If the leaked language of the TPP is so (likely), and all signatory nations receive a US military base, my stars, what a reach that will be.
Petraeus must have had some fooking stellar PR firm, given how many failures and lies were spun as his Stardom. But yes, if they’re right, the plan’s been in da woiks for some time.
Thanks for your take; you know (and remember) a lot of the puzzle pieces and how they might fit together.
If you’re still there, as to hirsute conductors check out this video that fatster provides for today’s roundup.
As to Dormer and the cops’ whitewash, it goes beyond the MSM: I was watching al-Jazeera last night and they bought it too.
Holy Rhapsody, Batman! Standing ovation! My stars, Gershwin tossed us into the heavens, then offered not only cautionary tales, but then portended actual doom as well…unless we…they…
Holy hell, that first chair clarinet, *and* the slush-pump player…well, hell, the whole LA symphony orchestra…my stars. Herbie’s dramatic embellishments, I dunno; I could have lived without.
But that could anchor a diary easily, if ya could get folks to listen while they read (I never know, really).
Thank you, thank you, E.F. Beall. Such exhilaration to wrap up an evening. ;o)
Nope on most of the article, but I found the bit about Yemen and Petraeus interesting in light of the fact that surfaced last week about Brennan being buddy-buddy with Saleh and the Saudis as station chief in Riyadh.
As I look at the TPP and the new TPA, I see the dollar and the euro circling the wagons against the possibility of an international yuan (renminbi). The dollar zone includes Latin America, but the euro has complicated the currencies of Africa. Might explain the focus on Africa. It’s not just the resources, it’s the ability to trade to make money off those resources and then move that money to where it can make money. Scott Reynolds Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats: And Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters has made me aware of that trade emphasis–especially as it describes US-British trade relations when Britain was the global hegemon. A good historical companion piece to Zinn’s Peoples History.
AJE’s American coverage is very much tied into the Village mentality. And in the past two years they’ve become more tightly controlled by the Qatar royal family. Expect more convergence with MSM. I suppose it’s the price to get on US cable, one which Al Gore and CurrentTV did not fully pay.
And you say that why?
Why would you say that? Can you actually play this piece? I can, as a matter of fact.
Never ceases to amaze me what non-musicians will make out of performances, ability to perform, and opinions about the piece itself without any actual knowledge about any of the preceding.
I understand zip about currencies, but that’s interesting. And yes, it’s about all the ways multinationals can extract profits. The TPP signatory
nations’ 99% won’t even have recourse before the law to file lawsuits against any of them, according to what’s been leaked so far.
Was AJE mentioned in Russ’s piece? My main unease was about Stratfor; so many people have mentioned that it’s been found either unreliable or worse. But yes to AJE being heavily captured; their agenda over Libya was evident. But there are still a few good writers at the site, and some occassional videos, imo. Like RT, which on our teevee is mainly creepy crap, heterodox economists, whistle-blowers, can get interview time, so caution is key.
Unfortunately, for complicated reasons, I can’t read dead tree any longer, so…I’ll have to wait for the online Cliff Notes versions. ;o)
Nope, I’m embarrassed to say: I never read Zinn’s book. Matt Damon said he grew up next door to him, and his book literally ordered his worldview.