Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Chomsky: Wealthiest 1% Rule Our Politics: At the same time, for the majority of the population, incomes have pretty much stagnated, working hours have increased, benefits have declined - and people are angry, hostile, and very upset"
Chomsky: Wealthiest 1% Rule Our Politics -- But There's Hope in the Fight Against Global Capital
Michael Lerner (ML): You have made many excellent analyses of the power of global capital and its capacity to undermine ordinary citizens’ efforts to transform the global reality toward a more humane and generous world. If there were a serious movement in the U.S. ready to challenge global capital, what should such a movement do? Or is it, as many believe, hopeless, given the power of capital to control the media, undermine democratic movements, and use the police/military power and the co-optive power of mass entertainment, endless spectacle, and financial compensations for many of the smartest people coming up through working-class and middle-income routes? What path is rational for a movement seeking to build a world of environmental sanity, social justice, and peace, yet facing such a sophisticated, powerful, and well-organized social order?
Noam Chomsky (NC): There is no doubt that concentrated private capital closely linked to the state has substantial resources, but on the other hand we shouldn’t overlook the fact that quite a bit has been achieved through public struggles in the U.S. over the years. In many respects this remains an unusually free country. The state has limited power to coerce, compared with many other countries, which is a very good thing. Many rights have been won, even in the past generation, and that provides a legacy from which we can move on. Struggling for freedom and justice has never been easy, but it has achieved progress; I don’t think we should assume that there are any particular limits.
At the moment we can’t realistically talk about challenging global capital, because the movements that might undertake such a task are far too scattered and atomized and focused on particular issues. But we can try to confront directly what global capital is doing right now and, on the basis of that, move on to further achievements. For example, it’s no big secret that in the past thirty years there has been enormous concentration of wealth in a very tiny part of the population, 1 percent or even one-tenth of 1 percent, and that has conferred extraordinary political power on a very tiny minority, primarily [those who control] financial capital, but also more broadly on the executive and managerial classes. At the same time, for the majority of the population, incomes have pretty much stagnated, working hours have increased, benefits have declined -- they were never very good -- and people are angry, hostile, and very upset. Many people distrust institutions, all of them; it’s a volatile period, and it’s a period which could move in a very dangerous direction -- there are analogues, after all -- but it could also provide opportunities to educate and organize and carry things forward. One may have a long-term goal of confronting global capital, but there have to be small steps along the way before you could even think of undertaking a challenge of that magnitude in a realistic way.
ML: Do you see any strategy for overcoming the fragmentation that exists among social movements to help people recognize an overriding shared agenda?
NC: One failing of the social movements that I’ve noticed over many years is that while they are focusing on extremely crucial and important social issues like women’s rights, environmental protections, and so on, they have tended to ignore or downplay the economic and social crises faced by working people. It’s not that they are completely ignored, but they are downplayed. And that has to be overcome, and there are ways to do it. So, to take a concrete example right near where I live, right now there is a town near Boston where a multinational corporation is closing down a local plant because it’s not profitable enough from the point of view of the multinational. Members of the workforce have offered to purchase the plant and the equipment, and the multinational doesn’t want to do that; it would rather lose money than offer the opportunity for a worker self-managed plant that might well become successful. And the multinational has the power to do what it wants, of course. But sufficient popular support -- community support, activist support, and so on -- could swing the balance. Things like that are happening all over the country.
Take Obama’s virtual takeover of the auto industry. There were several options at that point. One option, which the Obama administration chose, was to restore the old order, assist in the closing of plants, the shifting of production abroad and so on, and maybe get a functioning auto industry again. Another option would have been to take over those plants -- plants that are being dismantled -- and convert them to things that are very badly needed in the country, like high-speed rail -- it’s a scandal that the United States doesn’t have this kind of infrastructure, which many other countries have developed. In fact at the very time that Obama was closing down plants in the Midwest, his transportation secretary was in Europe trying to get contracts from Spain for high-speed rail construction, which could have been done in those very plants that were being dismantled.
To move in the direction that I suggest would take substantial organization, community support, national support, and recognition that worker self-managed production aimed at real social needs is an option that can be pursued; if it is pursued, you move to a pretty radical stage of consciousness, and it could go on and on from there. Unfortunately, that was not even discussed.
Chomsky: Wealthiest 1% Rule Our Politics -- But There's Hope in the Fight Against Global Capital | Economy | AlterNetIn Concert: The John Butler Trio
The John Butler Trio, from Australia, led by guitarist and vocalist John Butler. They formed in Fremantle in 1998 with Jason McGann on drums and Gavin Shoesmith on bass guitar. By 2009, the trio was Butler with Nicky Bomba on drums and percussion, and Byron Luiters on bass guitar.
The band's second studio album, Three (2001) reached the top 30 in the Australian album charts and achieved platinum sales. The band's subsequent studio albums: Sunrise Over Sea (2004); Grand National (2007); and April Uprising (2010) all debuted at the number one position on the Australian album charts, with all three albums reaching platinum sales status. Living 2001–2002 (2003), the band's first live album, reached the top ten and also achieved platinum status in Australia. The band's second live album, Live at St. Gallen (2005) also achieved gold record status. The band's releases since 2002 have been marketed independently by Jarrah Records, which Butler co-owns with West Australian folk band The Waifs and manager of both acts, Philip Stevens.
John Butler Trio, Paléo Festival Nyon 2010... by paleo
How slaves were shipped
An estimated 15 million Africans were transported to the Americas between 1540 and 1850. To maximize their profits slave merchants carried as many slaves as was physically possible on their ships. By the 17th century slaves could be purchased in Africa for about $25 and sold in the Americas for about $150. After the slave-trade was declared illegal, prices went much higher. Even with a death-rate of 50 per cent, merchants could expect to make tremendous profits from the trade.
4XgQU.jpg (JPEG Image, 1028x1280 pixels)
Tupac Shakur Shooter Allegedly Confesses
In November 1994, Tupac Shakur was shot at Manhattan's Quad Studios. That shooting set off a horrific chain reaction when, as legend has it, Tupac blamed the Notorious B.I.G. for the shooting. The two had a bitter public falling-out, which led to the storied East Coast/West Coast rap feud of the 90s. Within a few years, both Tupac and Biggie were dead, and their murders remain unsolved. But a new development could shed a whole lot more light on what, exactly, happened in that 1994 shooting.
None of this is confirmed as of yet, but according to AllHipHop.com, a man named Dexter Isaac has admitted to shooting Tupac at Quad Studios in November 1994. Isaac claims that music-business figure James "Jimmy Henchman" Rosemond-- currently the CEO of Czar Entertainment and manager of rapper the Game-- paid him $2,500 for the shooting. Isaac is currently serving a life prison sentence for murder and other offenses. In a statement to AllHipHop, Isaac says, "I want to apologize to [Tupac's] family and for the mistake I did for that sucker [Rosemond]. I am trying to clean it up to give [Tupac and Biggie's] mothers some closure." He indicated that he's stepping forward to confess because the statute of limitations for an assault charge has passed and he can't be charged with the shooting.
In a 2008 story, the Los Angeles Times reported that Rosemond, along with a few associates, arranged the assault on behalf of Biggie's label boss Sean "Diddy" Combs "because they were angry that he had rejected signing with Combs' Bad Boy Records." The newspaper retracted the story soon afterward when they learned that FBI reports cited in the story had been fabricated.
According to the Smoking Gun, Rosemond is currently a fugitive from justice; he's wanted by the DEA and federal marshals in connection with his alleged leadership of a cocaine trafficking ring.
Pitchfork: Tupac Shakur Shooter Allegedly Confesses
More than 60,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized for being poor, epileptic or otherwise "feeble-minded", or of "undesirable ethnicity" as recently as 1979
Sterilisation: North Carolina grapples with legacy
 |
| Ms Riddick, now 57, suffered decades of depression and illness |
More than 60,000 Americans were sterilised, many against their will, as part of a eugenics movement that finished in 1979, aimed at keeping the poor and mentally ill from having children. Now, decades on, one state is considering compensation.
She was 13, the daughter of violent and abusive parents in the desperately poor country town of Winfall, in the US state of North Carolina.
While she was in hospital giving birth, the state violated her a second time, she says.
A social worker who had deemed her "feeble-minded" petitioned the state Eugenics Board to have her sterilised.
Officials coerced her illiterate grandmother into signing an "x" on an authorisation form. After performing a Caesarean section, doctors sterilised her "just like cutting a hog", she says.
"They killed my kids," Ms Riddick says. "They killed mine before they got to me. They stopped it."
Nearly four decades after the last person was sterilised under North Carolina's eugenics programme, a state task force is seeking the 2,900 victims of sterilisation officials estimate are still alive.
The group hopes to gather their stories and ultimately to recommend the state award them restitution. But with public coffers under severe pressure amid a flagging recovery, it is not clear the legislature will agree."I know I can't make it right but at least I can address it," said North Carolina state legislator Larry Womble. He hopes "to let the world know what a horrendous thing the government has perpetrated on these young boys and girls".
America's sterilisation movement was part of a broad effort to cleanse the country's population of characteristics and social groups deemed unwanted, an effort that included anti-race mixing and strict immigration quotas aimed at Eastern Europeans, Jews and Italians.
Beginning with Indiana in 1907, 32 states eventually passed laws allowing authorities to order the sterilisation of people deemed unfit to breed. The last programme ended in 1979.
The victims were criminals and juvenile delinquents, women deemed sexual deviants, homosexual men, poor people on welfare, people who were mentally ill or suffered from epilepsy. African Americans and Hispanic Americans were disproportionately targeted in some states.
'Coerced'
"In general it was the dispossessed of society," said Paul Lombardo, a historian and legal scholar at Georgia State University and editor of A Century of Eugenics in America.
The laws were plainly coercive, scholars say, though some incorporated a veneer of consent - illiterate farmhands given forms to sign, institutional inmates told they would not be released with their bodies intact, poor parents told they would be denied public assistance if they did not approve the removal of a wayward daughter's fallopian tubes.
Motivating the laws, Prof Lombardo said, was indignation at the thought that people who had violated sexual mores would subsequently end up needing public assistance."We have in this country have always been extremely sensitive to notions of public stories of inappropriate sexuality," he said.
"We exercise that most dramatically when it comes to times in which we think we're spending individual tax money to support people who violate those social norms. It's our puritanical background, running up against our sense of individualism."
Supreme Court approval
The racial context was inescapable as well.
"The fewer black babies we have the better, that's what some people said," Prof Lombardo said. "'They're just going to end up on welfare.'"
Also implicated in American sterilisation laws was the classical eugenic notion that as with horses, authorities could use genetic principles to improve society through selective breeding.
In a 1927 US Supreme Court decision that upheld the laws, storied jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: "It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."All told, scholars estimate more than 60,000 Americans were sterilised under eugenics laws in the 20th Century.
North Carolina's law stood out for the wide net it cast.
Telling their stories
Most states would only order sterilisation of institutional inmates or patients, North Carolina's allowed for people within the community - typically social workers - to petition the state to have someone sterilised.
 |
| Rep Womble says the eugenics programme "borders on genocide" |
North Carolina did so in 2003, but Mr Womble has continued to push for monetary compensation to the victims.
This month, a state task force created by his legislation will hold a public session at which surviving victims are expected to tell their stories.
The group will eventually make a recommendation for compensation to the governor - $20,000 per person has been suggested.
But the state is facing a $2.5bn (£1.5bn) budget shortfall. The conservative Republicans in control of the state legislature are already poised to slash transport, healthcare and education funds, so it seems unlikely lawmakers will authorise as much as $58m in reparations.
 |
| Some illiterate patients signed an X on forms consenting to be sterilised |
Among those expected to testify is Ms Riddick, who now lives in Atlanta. She describes the prospect of a $20,000 payment as an insult.
"I am very angry," she says. "God said be fruitful and multiply. They did not only sin against me, they sinned against God."
Sterilisation petitions
- An 18-year-old girl, separated from her husband who had "manifested anti-social behaviour"
- A black 25-year-old rape victim who showed "abnormal sexual tendencies"
- A 16-year-old girl who had earlier been committed to a state institution for "sexual delinquency" and whose aunt "signed consent"
- A white married mother of three, whose family had been "finally dependent for many years" and has "a history of inter-marriage with Indian and Negro"
- A 15-year girl deemed "feebleminded"; parents reportedly consented
BBC News - Sterilisation: North Carolina grapples with legacy
Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a passage denouncing the slave trade.
First Draft, Best Draft
by Greg Ross |
| Thomas Jefferson |
Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a passage denouncing the slave trade:
He [George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.Congress removed it.
First Draft, Best Draft | Futility Closet
Roman gladiators were fat vegetarians
Roman gladiators were fat vegetarians
by Robert Koch
Roman gladiators were overweight vegetarians and not the muscle-bound men protrayed by actors like Russell Crowe, anthropologists say.
Austrian scientists analysed the skeletons of two different types of gladiators, the myrmillos and retiariae, found at the ancient site of Ephesus, near Selsuk in Turkey.
"Tests performed on bits of bone taken from the skeletons of some 70 gladiators buried at Ephesus seem to prove that they ate mainly barley, beans and dried fruit," said Dr Karl Grossschmidt, who took part in the study by the Austrian Archaeological Institute
"This diet, which has been mentioned in the oral history, is rather sad but it gave the gladiators a lot of strength even if it made them fat," said Grossschmidt who is a member of the University of Vienna's Institute of Histology and Embryology.
The Austrian palaeoanthropologists relied on a method known as elementary microanalysis that allows scientists to determine what a human being ate during his or her lifetime.
With the help of a sonar, they could establish the chemical concentrations inside cells in the bone samples taken from the skeletons at Ephesus.
From this, they could deduce how much meat, fish, grains and fruit made up the diet of the Roman fighting machines.
A balanced diet of meat and vegetables leaves equal amounts of zinc and strontium in the cells, while a mainly vegetarian diet would leave high levels of strontium and little zinc, Grossschmidt said.
Fabian Kanz, from the university's department of analytical chemistry, said the gladiators' bone density gave us clues to how they lived.
"The bone density here was higher than usual, as is the case with modern athletes," he said.
This line of testing allowed the scientists to debunk another myth, that gladiators wore strappy Sparticus sandals in the arena.
"The bone density is particularly high in samples taken from the feet, which would suggest that the gladiators fought with their bare feet in sand," Kanz said.
He believed that because some gladiators fought with little more than their bare hands, they could have "cultivated layers of fat to protect their vital organs from the cutting blows of their opponents".
A gladiator's life
In ancient Rome, the classical battle of gladiators usually pitted a myrmillo armed with a sword, a helmet and a round shield, against the lightly armed retiarius who carried only a net and a dagger, or a samnite who wore a visor and a leather sheath protecting his right arm.
They were mostly slaves who volunteered to fight because sometimes the victor would be freed as a reward, or poor Romans who fought for pay.
The Austrian scientists are still carrying out further tests, but if their initial findings are confirmed it would change the glamorous image of the men immortalised in Spartacus, the 1960 movie starring a young Kirk Douglas, and the more recent Gladiator with Crowe in the main role.
"It seems that the gladiators tried to put on some weight before their battles," Kanz said.
"But this does not mean that they did not work hard to lose it again once they stepped out of the ring," he added.
The archeological site of Ephesus is one of the most important in Turkey.
The Greeks founded the city but it was the Romans who made it the capital of their Asian province and turned it into one of the wealthiest cities of their empire.
Ancient Worlds News - Roman gladiators were fat vegetarians - 05/04/2004
by Robert Koch
Austrian scientists analysed the skeletons of two different types of gladiators, the myrmillos and retiariae, found at the ancient site of Ephesus, near Selsuk in Turkey.
"Tests performed on bits of bone taken from the skeletons of some 70 gladiators buried at Ephesus seem to prove that they ate mainly barley, beans and dried fruit," said Dr Karl Grossschmidt, who took part in the study by the Austrian Archaeological Institute
"This diet, which has been mentioned in the oral history, is rather sad but it gave the gladiators a lot of strength even if it made them fat," said Grossschmidt who is a member of the University of Vienna's Institute of Histology and Embryology.
The Austrian palaeoanthropologists relied on a method known as elementary microanalysis that allows scientists to determine what a human being ate during his or her lifetime.
With the help of a sonar, they could establish the chemical concentrations inside cells in the bone samples taken from the skeletons at Ephesus.
From this, they could deduce how much meat, fish, grains and fruit made up the diet of the Roman fighting machines.
A balanced diet of meat and vegetables leaves equal amounts of zinc and strontium in the cells, while a mainly vegetarian diet would leave high levels of strontium and little zinc, Grossschmidt said.
Fabian Kanz, from the university's department of analytical chemistry, said the gladiators' bone density gave us clues to how they lived.
"The bone density here was higher than usual, as is the case with modern athletes," he said.
This line of testing allowed the scientists to debunk another myth, that gladiators wore strappy Sparticus sandals in the arena.
"The bone density is particularly high in samples taken from the feet, which would suggest that the gladiators fought with their bare feet in sand," Kanz said.
He believed that because some gladiators fought with little more than their bare hands, they could have "cultivated layers of fat to protect their vital organs from the cutting blows of their opponents".
A gladiator's life
In ancient Rome, the classical battle of gladiators usually pitted a myrmillo armed with a sword, a helmet and a round shield, against the lightly armed retiarius who carried only a net and a dagger, or a samnite who wore a visor and a leather sheath protecting his right arm.
They were mostly slaves who volunteered to fight because sometimes the victor would be freed as a reward, or poor Romans who fought for pay.
The Austrian scientists are still carrying out further tests, but if their initial findings are confirmed it would change the glamorous image of the men immortalised in Spartacus, the 1960 movie starring a young Kirk Douglas, and the more recent Gladiator with Crowe in the main role.
"It seems that the gladiators tried to put on some weight before their battles," Kanz said.
"But this does not mean that they did not work hard to lose it again once they stepped out of the ring," he added.
The archeological site of Ephesus is one of the most important in Turkey.
The Greeks founded the city but it was the Romans who made it the capital of their Asian province and turned it into one of the wealthiest cities of their empire.
Ancient Worlds News - Roman gladiators were fat vegetarians - 05/04/2004
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)