No, this cannot be tolerated. You cannot have libraries, schools and things that people need for a basic standard of living taken away while George Osborne is making deals with companies to allow them to make better use of tax havens because they are threatening to take their business elsewhere. There are alternatives. We are not all in this together.
I’m all in favour of anti-cuts demonstrations. And it’s always very pleasing to see so many V for Vendetta masks in the crowd. I’m very proud of those boys and girls.
The takeover of Torre de David began four years ago when 300 people forced their way into the derelict building. “The night we came in, I was scared, but I was also excited to finally have my own home,” says Jhonny Jimenez, 31, a member of the founding group and now one of the tower’s main co-ordinators. “We organised people according to their needs: the elderly who can’t go up flights of stairs would go in the lower floors and large families would get more space.”
Street politics have lost their relevance in many former Soviet countries, as the political opposition has withered away. But innovative forms of protest are popping up. None of them has managed to mobilize large numbers or pose any real threat to the ruling elites. They do, however, attract young people in free-form, often social-media-directed alternatives to the picketing and chants their elders employ. And the participants are proving very difficult to punish.
Russia has the “blue buckets,” activists who affix plastic sand toys to their cars (or their heads) in a protest against the traffic privileges accorded to government officials, whose cars are equipped with flashing blue lights. In Azerbaijan, where protesters are hustled away so quickly that even gathering is nearly impossible, small flash mobs have appeared out of nowhere to perform sword fights or folk dances.
Worst of all for News Corp, the FBI has launched an investigation into accusations that NoW journalists asked a former New York police officer for the phone records of relatives of 9/11 victims. If that toxic allegation is shown to have been true, one thing is certain: Fox News is finished. The emotional supercharge of 9/11 in the US is many times greater than Milly Dowler in the UK – and look what happened here. In the US, even Republicans would join the clamour for News Corp to be stripped of the 27 federal licences it holds under the banner of the Fox Broadcasting Company network.
It isn’t any secret, I think Curren$y is the best emcee doing his thing right now.
Here is my short list of why y’all should embrace the Curren$y Spitta and buy his new record Weekend at Burnies.
Vancouver rioters after the NHL loss. Gotta admit these guys would look a lot more cool flashing the 'jet plane' hand sign, right?
1. Awkward hip hop fans need something better to do with their hands. We know that most people who listen to hip hop are really awkward rather than cool (myself included). (Hop hop artists, on the other hand, are quite cool). Hip hop offered many non-gang affiliates the chance to have something to do with their hands. Almost all of the ‘west coast,’ ‘east coast,’ pistol signs, or mimicking of supposed crip twisting of fingers is a terrible look.
Admittedly, most of us know Curren$y’s hand sign (which mimics the flying jet) as the ‘hang loose’ hand sign. In Hawaii, it’s known as shaka — a polycultural vaguely corporate ‘greeting with the aloha spirit.” Hey, there are worse things to throw up.
2. Curren$y and his crew seem to be working hard to get better.
I love the arrogant rappers, but it is refreshing to hear someone simply confident in their abilities. Curren$y writes rhymes that don’t alienate the listener with cleverness. He models working at his craft — practicing writing better smooth rhymes. As a result of their work, he and his jets crew: Young Roddy and Trademark the Skydiver, are getting better at not only rhyming, but also sounding better. Witness the enjoyable punch lines and nicely timed pause in Trademark’s verse on “Still” above.
3. Weed songs vs. coke songs or representations of wealth in a depression. Curren$y rhymes about smoking pot. A lot. Living in Humboldt county, this isn’t all that strange to me. Lets put Curren$y’s rhymes about cannabis in the context of the prevailing hip hop culture for self-expression about substances.
You could argue that expressing love for particular substances is part of selling yourself as an emcee. Most commercially successful artists have identified substance use as part of their image through lyrics and album covers. In the case of most so-called gangsta rappers, the discussion is often tied to cocaine trafficking (Gucci Mane, Clipse, Young Jeezy, Dipset, Jay-Z, E-40, Eazy-E, Ghostface Killah, and so on.) This creates a fascinating language used most often to communicate wealth. Lifestyles of the rich and famous articulated in bricks, kilos, birds, scales, Tony Montana . . .
In the artificially inflated economy of the early 2000s, these cocaine rhymes matched up nicely with the garish wealth of a society manifested in colonial wars and represented by an expressly “business-friendly” government. Those years also meant the rise of a massive police state, prisons, and new laws against gang offenses. One reason we keep alive the stories of outlaw dope dealers in rapping is because we live in a society that is increasingly controlled and policed — the idea that some people get to get away with it is immensely reassuring to non-outlaw folks.
Don’t get me wrong — Curren$y is still selling status, wealth and power in his rhymes. Curren$y isn’t rapping about selling drugs, instead he rhymes about how much he has to smoke. I think he has adjusted to the economic realities of a society in a depression and provided a slightly more inviting series of symbols for that power.
4. He sounds good, and has a back catalog worth examining. If you get Weekend at Burnies and find it works for you, here are the rest of my Curren$y recommendations in order.
First –> mixtape: Independence day
Second –> mixtape: Covert Coup
Third –> album Pilot Talk II
Fourth –> mixtape Fear and Loathing in New Orleans
Fifth –> mixtape return to the winners circle
sixth –> mixtape Smokee Robinson
seventh –> album Pilot talk I
You can easily add in the other affiliated projects, I like the “Jet Life to the next life” mixtape, and the wiz/Curren$y mixtape “How fly.”
ATHENS — They are the crown jewels of Greece’s socialist state, and they are now likely to go to the highest bidder: the ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki; prime Mediterranean real estate; the national lottery; Greek Telecom; the postal bank and the national railway system.
“The collector is the true resident of the interior. He makes his concern the transfiguration of things. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he bestows on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value. The collector dreams his way not only into a distant or bygone world but also into a better one — one in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the everyday world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful.”
– Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of it’s technological reproducibility. p. 104
These “bail-outs” are in fact a high finance form of loan-sharking, which “structurally adjust” an entire country’s economy in order to strip the country of its assets. The debt in Greece incurred by last year’s bail-out is enormous and exponentially growing already–meaning that another “bail-out” would simply add more fuel to the fire–and it is this, and not austerity cuts themselves–that the agnaktismenoi (“outraged”) are resisting.
For real. The damage of the IMF loans should be evident to every living citizen of the planet at this point. And as Vijay Prashad made fairly clear to me, the rich nations who lend the money use the trumped up interest rates to anchor their own out-of-control debt. Loan sharking is right. More at the ol ‘beatdown.
The simplistic blame-game associated with over-population is ridiculous. The dynamics of what happens when people have children are more complicated than the traditional privileged environmentalists articulate in their ‘more babies mean more trees get cut down.’
Consumption of things that are made out of trees is why trees are cut down.
I almost always credit Betsy Hartmann whose insights have helped me to better understand population and consumption issues. Here is Betsy explaining the distinction:
Don’t get me wrong. I support the provision of contraception and abortion as a fundamental reproductive right and as part of comprehensive health services. What I’m against is turning family planning into a tool of top-down social engineering. There’s a long and sordid history of population control programs violating women’s rights and harming their health. That’s why feminist reformers in the international family planning field have fought hard to make programs responsive to women’s — and men’s — real reproductive and sexual health needs. A world of difference exists between services that treat women as population targets, and those based on a feminist model of respectful, holistic, high-quality care.
Of course, the enthusiasm for reducing population translated into devistating programs of sterilization around the world. Most recently this history of sterilization is impacting the election in Peru. Paid for with United States Agency for International development money, the Peruvian dictator Fujimori sterilized almost 300,000 women against their will.
The sterilisation program came about as a poverty reduction strategy. In the early 90s Peru had, under Fujimori, put in practice one of the most aggressive structural adjustment policies ever implemented. It was so forceful that even the World Bank advised the Peruvian government to slow down. As a result of prolonged economic crisis and neoliberal reform, 50% of Peruvians lived under the poverty line and population control was an ideal to aspire to. The UN population conference in Cairo in 1994 and the women’s Beijing conference of 1995 provided Fujimori with inspiration, and his government received funding from USAid to undertake the ambitious project.
That’s right. We have to lay some of the responsibility for this systemic violence against women at the feet of the United Nations and the leaders of first world nations. The forced structural adjustment policies, and the US-funded United nations overpopulation projects also deserve blame.
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Life of refinement 