A paradigm shift is taking place. It is coming from the awareness that all of our crises are connected to an economy rigged for the wealthiest. The symptoms of big finance capitalism create the poverty, low wages, economic insecurity and environmental destruction so a handful can profit. While these facts have been hidden by political leaders and corporate mass media, now people are seeing them and understand the task we have before us.
The Radical Dr. King
And here we go again! It is January 2014, but somehow it all feels like last year, or the year before last… or ten years ago. Jakarta is under water; people are trying to save all they can, but their houses are being ruined… some men, women and children are dying… Tens of thousands are sick, suffering from typhoid, and diarrhea.
As I plunged into flooded areas, my friend, a medical expert from Yogyakarta, sent me a text message: “Please be careful in Jakarta… Leptospirosis, typhoid and other infectious diseases…”
“I’m telling you, this place is the most racist place I’ve ever been to. September 10, it was Latinos and Blacks. And then September 11 came, and it’s Muslims. It’s a list. I top the list.” That’s Vera, student in the USA, in the film, If These Halls Could Talk.
Scholar John Gerassi recalls in one of his books a meeting that took between Jean-Paul Sartre and Herbert Marcuse in a Paris café at the height of the 60s student movements of the 1960s. As a member of the professorate for the past 15 years, I have been thinking about these two philosophers a great deal lately, and how far we have retreated from the educational goals and values of that era. Some of the pedagogical and curricular reforms of that era have been severely watered down, or in some cases abandoned altogether.
It’s been a bit of a gap week or two, since pining in with this sort of catharsis, but some of us schmucks have to make some really lousy money and attend to some really rotten job hunting in a time of pure delusion, all the while that white noise buzzing, the white static noise of the mush of NPR and mainstream mindlessness and the BS of labor stats and economists who deserve what the SEALs and Obama said what happened to Osama (right, US punk prez, directs US amped-up murder incorporated to shoot to kill, ask no questions later, I don’t need no stinking badge, and then burial at sea, hea
Since last December, Brazilian shopping malls1 have become the stage for a new style of youth gathering: the rolezinho. Roughly translated as “little excursions” or outings, the rolezinhos can be characterized as planned meetings (via social network) of a large group of youth from poor neighborhoods, with the intent of seeing each other, flirting, eating and drinking at McDonald’s, taking pictures to post on Facebook, and simply having fun.
During the first half of the 20th century, socially conscious Jews in the United States organized a large network of solidarity and charity associations financed mostly through small donations, raffles, and dues by working and lower middle class supporters. Many of these associations dealt with the everyday needs of Jewish workers, immigrants, and families in need. Some were linked to labor unions, social democratic, and leftist parties. Their leaders were, in many cases, individuals who worked long hours engaged in resolving problems and intervening in local crises.
It will be a bitter pill for people to swallow–the idea of having less so that big business can have more. Nothing that this nation or any other nation has done in modern history compares with the selling job that must be done to make people accept the new reality.
— Business Week editorial, October 12, 1974
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
— Martin Luther King, in his famous speech at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967
