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.
via Some Greeks Fear Government Is Selling Nation – NYTimes.com.
Filed under capitalism, colonialism
“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
Filed under art, capitalism
Pharoahe Monch’s new album We Are Renegades is excellent. Go buy it. If you’ve ever listened to Monch, then you know that he doesn’t fake his rhymes. As is visible above, the back cover of his most recent album is littered with asthma inhalers. Here is Pharoahe on the impact that his breathing struggles have had on his rhyming style.
“The asthma forced me to really go against the issue and push the envelope in terms of breath control and doing runs that I wouldn’t probably try if I didn’t have asthma,” he explained. “If I didn’t have asthma, I’d probably rhyme like the Hip Hop rock-the-spot [style]. But the fact that that shit is an element that I was fighting against, I was like, ‘Fuck that, let me make that battle, lyrically [speaking].'”
Filed under disability, health, hip hop
photo by david grey, reuters
“The public announcement of his release signals that the Chinese government has had to respond to international pressure and that the cost/benefit ratio of continuing to detain him was no longer tenable,” Phelim Kine, an Asia researcher with the organization, said in a statement. “Sadly, other Chinese citizens less well-known than Ai Weiwei who have been forcibly disappeared since mid-February remain incommunicado, whereabouts unknown and at high risk of torture.”
via Ai Weiwei: China frees dissident artist Ai Weiwei – latimes.com.
Trust Tigerbeatdown.
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.
via Tiger Beatdown › Loan-sharking Greece.
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.
Filed under capitalism, protest
RALEIGH, North Carolina (AP) — Nearly 35 years after ending the country’s most active post-war sterilization program, North Carolina is the only state trying to make amends to thousands of people who cannot have children because of eugenics-inspired theories about social improvement.
Next week, victims and their relatives will tell their stories to a state task force considering compensation to victims of sterilizations that continued into 1974. Roughly 85 percent of victims were women or girls, some as young as 10. North Carolina has more victims living than any other state because a majority was sterilized after World War II, said Charmaine Fuller Cooper, director of the state Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation.
via North Carolina grapples with sterilization program legacy.
Filed under colonialism, feminism, health
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.
Filed under capitalism, colonialism, human rights
I rode my bicycle for a couple of hours today. It was beautiful. Respect to all the cyclists.
I tend to be a safe cyclist — obeying the traffic rules. In New York City a guy got a ticket for riding outside of the bicycle lane. Which seems out-of-control bogus to me. In my community there aren’t enough bike lanes to get you everywhere you need and the bike lanes are often blocked. You occasionally have to deal with traffic, and they write a whole section of laws for cyclists to do this safely.
If you drive an automobile or a bicycle, you should know what these laws and rules are. And if any of you know me, I am not generally an advocate of rules and laws.
It seems to me like the ticket for being outside of the cycling lanes represents some of the short-sighted anti-bicycle sentiment in our society. The notion that the bicycle rather than the car is the nuisance.
So Casey Neistat, the cat who got the ticket made a video of him scrupulously following the absolutist cop advice. Yowza! Watch til the end, it’s worth it.
Filed under documentary, protest
I have taught the ideas of Carol Adams connecting feminism to vegetarianism for the last fifteen years. I believe Carol Adams and other ethical vegetarian thinkers provide important insight into the most persuasive articulation of compassion and for animal rights. These thinkers provide help exploring the questions associated with ethics, violence and killing.
One key insight I’ve drawn from Carol Adams is to scrutinize the language of representation. How living animals are re-articulated to become advertisements for their own obliteration. Unpacking the driving justification for violence itself involves interrogating the artifacts that sooth the conscience of human animals.
Suicide food is a humorous attempt to pinpoint images which represent animals as happily giving their lives for human consumption. Here is the commentary on the angelic pig advertisement above:
If we could hear the thoughts of this pig, this newly minted angel, he might say, “At last! I am delivered at last from the stinking life into which I was born, and which was bequeathed to me as a necessary precondition for my ascendance into blissful eternity!” (Getting killed and grilled really brings out the poetry in a pig.) “Ill will? I bear the humans—my betters from their soles to their souls—no malice, for they have engineered my deliverance! And the only cost was a brief—so, so very brief—lifetime of worthlessness!”
Which is why the haloed food wears a beatific smile. Through his suffering and utter abnegation, he is clarified into his essence. And now, on ornamental wings, he soars to his last and best destination, and the life beyond life that his death and consumption made possible.
via Suicide Food.
I like the concept of suicide food — the term itself. It provides a moment of critique to those who eat meat without reflection. It also mockingly brings forward the image of the tools (confined animals, slaughterhouses, butchers) used to actually produce meat.
Smart and useful. Thanks to Lisa Wade at Sociological Images for the connect.
Life of refinement 