Archive | October, 2011

Come Together, Right NOW! Music on the March

18 Oct

Yeah, Dylan was cool. But today we have marchin’ music that would burn his protestin’ butt.

Last Saturday Salon published an article by Stephen Deusner on protest music: Will a new Dylan emerge from Occupy Wall Street? For better or worse it struck me as a bit of a lament for the Good Old Days when they had Good Old/New Protest songs, but, alas, kids today don’t write ‘em like they used to:

As Occupy Wall Street has gained momentum, it has been compared to the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 1960s by commentators as diverse as comedian Dick Gregory, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and scores of newspaper columnists. Yet, as Mangum’s performance demonstrates, they are very different in at least one regard, however minor: Music is not quite the central force today that it was 40 and 50 years ago, when a song like “We Shall Overcome” or “Fixin’ to Die Rag” could communicate certain motivating ideals and reinforce solidarity among a great throng of participants. Instead, it remains peripheral.

Things get moderated toward the end:

The lesson of the 2000s seems to be to approach politics obliquely instead of head-on, to make it one concern among many. If protest songs are largely absent from Occupy Wall Street, it’s not that they aren’t being written. It’s that they no longer serve the same purpose they once did — and are so spread out across genres and audiences that they don’t register as broadly as they once did. …

On the other hand, protests inspire music, not vice versa. Perhaps the artists participating in or even just witnessing the Occupy Wall Street gatherings will be moved to write about their experiences. Perhaps the next great wave of radicalized pop is just a few months or years away.

Well, maybe.

People’s Music

But I have a somewhat different take on the whole business. Back in the day the most important music was the music sung in black churches, mostly traditional hymns and gospel. That’s the music that summoned, organized and energized the civil rights movement. The anti-war movement was a different group of people and, of course, a different issue, but it emerged in a public arena that had been activated by the civil rights movement. Continue reading →

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Bloomberg Says Occupy Wall Street Tent City Is Not Covered By Freedom Of Speech

18 Oct

Bloomberg is 100% in favor of CYA.

“I’m 100 percent in favor of protecting — 1,000 percent in favor — of giving people rights to say things, but also we have to protect those who don’t want to say anything,” he said according to Bloomberg News. “There are places where I think it’s appropriate to express yourself and then there are other places that are appropriate to set up a tent city, and they don’t necessarily have to be one and the same.”…

Two-in-three New Yorkers back the protests, with an even larger majority supporting the continuation of the protests, according to a Quinnipiac Poll released Monday.

via Bloomberg Says Occupy Wall Street Tent City Is Not Covered By Freedom Of Speech.

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He Made It on Wall St. and Used It to Help Start Protests – NYTimes.com

17 Oct

But Mr. Halper, a 52-year-old Brooklyn native, never reveals two facts about himself: he is a former vice chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange and the largest single donor to the nonprofit magazine that ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“The whole thing is very surreal to me — the fact that I spent my whole career right across the street,” he said in an interview last week on a marble bench near the park. “It makes me a little anxious, to tell you the truth. It could go anywhere. I just pray that it ends peaceful.”

via He Made It on Wall St. and Used It to Help Start Protests – NYTimes.com.

The Republican war on science is un-American – Salon.com

17 Oct

… but you can see the 19th century as the century of engineering, the 20th century as the century of physics. Historically, biology has been mostly descriptive: You go out into the woods and you categorize the flora and fauna. But now we’re actually mucking around with the basic building blocks. We’re in the information age: This all creates the opportunity for vast new sources of knowledge, wealth, power. We’re talking everything from industry to national security, but it also has a symbolic weight that engineering and physical sciences don’t have, because it is about life itself.

Why all these right-wing statements of science denial?

But let’s understand the function of these statements first. They are not really statements about science or fact. They are statements about group identification — it’s a way of saying who you are. We have to grasp that, or we spin our wheels a lot.

via The Republican war on science is un-American – Salon.com.

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The recession that never left – U.S. Economy – Salon.com

17 Oct

On Monday, Citigroup reported its seventh consecutive quarterly profit, registering $3.8 billion in net revenue, a 74 percent increase over its numbers a year ago. CEO Vikram Pandit has been well-rewarded for the post-bailout turnaround — in May, Citigroup’s board gave him a $23.2 million “retention package” of stock options and cash payments.

Meanwhile, Gallup reports that its Basic Access Index — a measurement of how many Americans can afford “basic life necessities” — fell back in September to the lowest point registered during the depths of the recession.

via The recession that never left – U.S. Economy – Salon.com.

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A State of Nature

17 Oct

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Occupy Economics, and the Sustainable Finance Lab — Crooked Timber

17 Oct

in the Netherlands a very interesting initiative started a few weeks ago (independent of Occupy Wall Street, but obviously not independent of the same global problems in the financial sector): the Sustainable Finance Lab. It’s an initiative by an eclectic group of academics, mostly economists (some more mainstream, some more heterodox), and one small ‘green’ bank (Triodos), to bring together people interests in debating what the real problems are with the financial sector and what needs to be changed. … it’s been very, very interesting – in fact, on issues of economics I haven’t seen anything as interesting so close to home for a long time, and that’s probably because people who normally don’t speak to each other are sitting in the same room and sharing their views. Bankers, academics, students, ex-investment bankers, journalists—they all share their views in a respectful atmosphere, but it’s clear they do not quite have the same perception of how urgent change is needed, and indeed what type of change is needed, or what the causes of the problems are.

via Occupy Philosophy, Occupy Economics, and the Sustainable Finance Lab — Crooked Timber.

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Amazing Charts Show How 90% Of The Country Has Gotten Shafted Over The Past 30 Years…

16 Oct

Basically, the charts show that, starting in the early 1980s, a 60-year trend changed, and most of the country’s wealth gains started going to the top 10% of the population. In other words, the charts show how 90% of the country has gotten shafted over the past 30 years, and especially over the past 10.

via Amazing Charts Show How 90% Of The Country Has Gotten Shafted Over The Past 30 Years….

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Wall Street Protest Shows Power of Place – NYTimes.com

16 Oct

We tend to underestimate the political power of physical places. Then Tahrir Square comes along. Now it’s Zuccotti Park, until four weeks ago an utterly obscure city-block-size downtown plaza with a few trees and concrete benches, around the corner from ground zero and two blocks north of Wall Street on Broadway. A few hundred people with ponchos and sleeping bags have put it on the map.

Kent State, Tiananmen Square, the Berlin Wall: we clearly use locales, edifices, architecture to house our memories and political energy. Politics troubles our consciences. But places haunt our imaginations.

So we check in on Facebook and Twitter, but make pilgrimages to Antietam, Auschwitz and to the Acropolis, to gaze at rubble from the days of Pericles and Aristotle.

via Wall Street Protest Shows Power of Place – NYTimes.com.

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A Push to Return Transit Manufacturing to New York – NYTimes.com

16 Oct

At the conference, John Samuelsen, the president of Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, who eight days later would deliver a rousing speech at the Occupy Wall Street protest on behalf of working families, made the simple but meaningful case that people using the transit system should be the people making the transit system. “We have the talent to do to this; we have full-blown engineers now doing signal work because they can’t find jobs,” he said.

via A Push to Return Transit Manufacturing to New York – NYTimes.com.

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