May 9th, 2008 by Donagh
Will Oldham is playing in Vicar Street on the 15th of June. I’m going because Sean Baith can’t and someone has to shout ‘Sean Nós’ at him.
I’ve put this up before but its worth showing again: the great Jeffrey Lewis singing a song about thinking he’s seen Will Oldham on the L-train in New York.
All artists are pussys/…./but if I’m a pussy that’s okay/because maybe in a few months I’ll put out something good
May 9th, 2008 by Donagh
I’ve recently become a fan of Jerry Haber’s blog Magnes Zionist. Jerry is an academic and Orthodox Jew who works in the US and Israel and takes grave exception to how the Israeli government are treating Palestinians.
The Magnes of the title refers to Judah Magnes, a Reform Rabbi, who originally worked in the US with a number of Jewish organizations, but moved to Palestine in 1922 and founded the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. According to his wikipedia entry he believed ‘that the land of Israel should be built in a “decent manner”, or not built at all’ and this seemed to inform his opinion right up to the end of his life, which coincided with the formation of the State of Israel.
In a post written a couple of days ago, Jerry referred to a recent Haaretz article, which discusses Magnes efforts at the end of his life to try to ensure that the new Israeli state wasn’t a Zionist state, but a United States of Israel.
Continue Reading »
May 7th, 2008 by Donagh
On Monday the New York Times reported on protests and violence in Bolivia, following from Sunday’s referendum which would give Santa Cruz greater autonomy and allow it to have control over the natural resources located in the region, which currently accounts for 30% of Bolivia’s GDP.
The move for greater autonomy, however, should be seen in the context of the new draft constitution that would limit large land holdings. The Santa Cruz vote, which was passed by 80% although voter turnout was low, would mean the region might be able to bypass the new constitutional arrangements and control land distribution itself, as well as retain rights to negotiate royalty agreements for oil and gas reserves with energy companies.
As the New York Times reports:
The statute would give Santa Cruz the ability to elect its own legislature, create its own police force and raise new taxes for public works. It is expected to allow the province to negotiate its own royalty agreements with energy companies.
Or from BoRev’s perspective:
If you haven’t been paying attention, the rich white folk in the rich white state of Santa Cruz are holding a referendum on Sunday to declare “autonomy” from the majority redskins. And while the sponsors are a bunch of scary racists, they wrap their arguments up with declarations of economic efficiency and “states rights.” Sound familiar?
Morales is trying to redress the balance a little and use some of the cash from the country’s natural resources to provide better living conditions for the majority who happen to be impoverished Indians and not the elite Santa Cruz minority, who still use impoverished Indians as indentured slaves.
But such moves by a region for greater automomy from central government are often couched in the language of secession; calling for the freedom of a people to control their own destiny etc etc. However, as Nikolas Kozloff points out in a Counter Punch article published yesterday such moves in South America by a region rich in natural resources is often supported by US Oil and Gas interests.
“In an effort to rollback social and political change in Bolivia, the U.S has funneled millions of dollars to opposition groups through USAID and The National Endowment for Democracy. What’s more, USAID explicitly supports demands of the right wing for greater regional autonomy in the east.
It’s not the first time, however, that the U.S. has sought to encourage secessionist sentiment within South American regions possessing rich natural resources.”
Kozloff describes in some detail what happened in Venezuela in the early part of the 20th Century, when the US, who were beginning to aggressively tap all available oil resources, encouraged the State of Zulia to cede from the strong, centralized government controlled by the dictator by Juan Vicente Gómez. The irony of it is that Gómez came to power in 1908 as a result of a successful coup d’etat, which was supported by the US.
It’s a very interesting historical perspective, but the point being that if US oil interests conspired against Gómez, a stolid anti-communist dictator who they helped to bring to power in the first place, what do those interests think of Morales and his efforts to redistribute some of his countries wealth?
Update:
The Real News Network has a good report on this. Pepe Escobar mentions that 85% of the Santa Cruz electorate were in favour but that the turn out was only 45%, which is considerably lower than usual. This suggests that many of those who were against autonomy boycotted the polls.
May 7th, 2008 by Sean Baite
Take a look at the wee family spat over here on the Guardian’s site, classic ‘Little House on the Prairie’ stuff I think you’ll all agree : Houllebecq’s Darlin’ Mother
:->
May 6th, 2008 by Donagh
Capitalism has had an incredible run — politically and culturally as well as economically — since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. The resolution of that crisis required, as economists put it at the time, “reducing expectations” of the kind nurtured by the trade union militancy and welfare state gains of the 1960s. This was accomplished via the defeats suffered by trade unionism and the welfare state since the 1980s at the hands of what might properly be called capitalist militancy. This was accompanied by dramatic technological change, massive industrial restructuring, labor market flexibility and the overall discipline provided by “competitiveness.”
It was also accompanied, of course, by massive economic inequality. But this did not mean capitalism was no longer able to integrate the bulk of the population. On the contrary, this was now achieved through the private pension funds that mobilized workers savings, on the one hand, and through the mortgage and credit markets that loaned them the money to sustain high levels of consumer spending on the other.
From an excellent essay by Leo Panitch in the Monthly Review magazine.
At another point he mentions the race issue:
That the fault line [i.e. the current credit crisis] should have appeared in “sub-prime” mortgage loans to African-Americans is hardly surprising — this has always been the Achilles heel of working-class incorporation into the American capitalist dream.
Michael Blim writing in 3quarksdaily suggests that there are 7.2 million American households at risk of losing their homes:
The 7.2 million households comprise 28% of all American households with mortgages. They owe $332 billion in loans, and 2.2 million have lost or will lose their houses without a federal remedy, according to the Center for Responsible Lending. A majority is white, but a disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos are vulnerable too. For instance, among whites, 17% have sub-prime mortgages; the figure is 55% for blacks.
Arthur Silber of Once Upon a Time is on about race and economics too. But mainly he’s talking about how the attacks on Jeremiah Wright and the way he is unfavourably compared to Martin Luther King shows how cack-handed the debate on race is in the US Election. He links to an interesting interview in Salon with Jonathon Walton about King, and the way he is being contrasted to Wright.
Let’s talk about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Martin Luther King. Some of Wright’s critics have contrasted his approach to that of King, who they portray as using reconciliation rather than confrontation. Is that an accurate portrayal of King? Is that an accurate portrayal of Wright?
No to both. It’s a mythic portrayal of King, a nostalgic portrayal of King — because King was accused and vilified for being controversial, actually more controversial than Jeremiah Wright.
Didn’t King become more radical in the course of his career, in the period leading up to his assassination?
It was largely because of the fact that he moved from civil rights to human rights. One of King’s famous quotes after desegregation laws had been passed was that he began to find out that it mattered little if African-Americans — he said Negroes, of course — have the right to eat at the counter if they don’t have a dollar to spend at the lunch counter.
But there is little discussion about the connection between race and the economy, or about how the majority of the working poor are Black in all the comment about race in America.
The Real News Network has a series of reports discussing the US economy with Panitch. In one he makes the point that the need for a more radical approach to the economy – he calls it economic democracy – is not even being mentioned in the debates or the media coverage surrounding the US election. This is hardly surprising, he argues, because the notion of economic democracy has been sidelined since the New Deal:
The issue of economic democracy that had been placed on the political agenda alongside the New Deal’s public infrastructure projects was set aside for the remainder of the century after the FDR’s administration’s self-described “grand truce with capital” in the late 1930s.
I did not know that.
May 6th, 2008 by Jim Kennedy
Tom Waits has announced his US summer tour dates, but check out what he says at 3:06 on the video. The ending’s a kicker too…
Apr 30th, 2008 by Donagh
“The point about a free press as presided over by O’Reilly’s INM is that editorial content is a matter for journalists, not proprietors.”
So says Eamon Dunphy in his April 12th Irish Times article about battle between Denis O’Brien and Tony O’Reilly for the ownership of Independent News and Media. The article has raised the heckles of Vincent Browne in the latest edition of Village magazine and with good reason. The article, Browne argues is a ‘characteristically sycophantic peon of praise for Tony O’Reilly’s stewardship of Independent Newspapers’.
It seems that whenever anyone wants to cite a benchmark for journalistic integrity or demonstrate the existence of a press free from the tyranny of government they look to Woodward and Bernstein. And so, it is no different with Dunphy.
I’ve finally written an article for ILR…
Apr 30th, 2008 by Donagh
The Simpsons prides itself on its stated ambition to offend everyone in the World. The Brazilians gave out about how their country was depicted a couple of years ago and news comes to us that Argentina are a bit fecked off that it suggested in a recent episode that the legacy of ‘disappearing’ people occurred during the Presidency of Peron, whereas it happened several years afterwards when the country was controlled by a military ‘Junta’.
Mainstream media in the US was also rife not so long ago with ill-informed nonsense about how Venezuelan TV had ‘banned’ the Simpsons, replacing it with the much less ‘malign’ Baywatch (although in many stories it was described as an order from Chavez himself).
This morning while talking about a school trip my daughter is going on today she mentioned that the bus they are going on has seat belts.
She brought it up, in fact. Obviously I asked her if her teacher had told them that the bus they were going on had seat belts and she said that she had. I jumped to the conclusion that the teacher mentioned it not to reassure the kids, but to inform the parents that the bus they using complies with new regulations.
However, my daughter was wondering why some buses have seat belts and some don’t.
Hmmm, I thought, I’m not going to explain that the regulations were brought in because of the accidents that lead to the deaths of school children, so I said that its only school buses that have seat belts.
‘But the school bus in the Simpsons doesn’t have any seat belts’, she replied.
Quite so, I said, quite so.
Apr 29th, 2008 by Donagh
In the depths of an excellent review of Gordon Burn’s Born Yesterday: The News As A Novel Mark of K-punk, having already suggested how the political existence of Gordon Brown and modern political life have been anticipated by Philip K. Dick, supplies this quote from John Newsinger’s Brown’s Journey from Reformism to Neoliberalism:
Brown told the Confederation of British Industry conference that “business is in my blood”. His mother had been a company director and “I was brought up in an atmosphere where I knew exactly what was happening as far as business was concerned”. He was, indeed he had always been, one of them. The only problem is that it was not true. As his mother subsequently admitted, she would never have called herself “a business woman”: she had only ever done some “light administrative duties” for “a small family firm” and had given up the job when she married, three years before young Gordon was even born. While there have been Labour politicians who have tried to invent working class backgrounds for themselves before, Brown is the first to try and invent a capitalist background.
Ha! We will remember your formative years for you wholesale, Mr. Brown.
I’ve been a fan of Dick ever since I read Conor’s copy of Valis, but I’ve only ever read four or five of his books. Typically, Mark makes the connection between the political bubble that is Gordon Brown’s world and a Dick novel I’ve yet to read, The Simulacra.
Gordon Brown’s appearance on American Idol a couple of weeks ago brings us ever closer to the situation described in Philip K Dick’s The Simulacra, in which advancement into the elite is achieved through talent shows held in the White House. It increasingly seems as if Dick did not so much predict the future as dream it in advance. The world of The Simulacra - in which politics has merged with talent competitions, in which drugs are the mandatory treatment for mental illness (the novel begins with the outlawing of psychoanalysis), and in which affective-telepathic aliens called papula are put in the service of salesmen of every type to directly manipulate the emotions of customers – looks eerily like our world, subjected to oneiric distortion, displacement and condensation.
Burns apparently makes a passing reference to Philip K Dick while discussing how Kate McCann’s demeanor implicated her in the disappearance of her daughter. Because she appeared so cool and controlled, and kept herself neat and tidy it was imagined that she lacked empathy, that quality that makes us human. As any reader of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep knows, androids don’t do empathy. Kate was well turned out at every press conference (rather than being a miserable, sobbing heap) therefore she’s a robot.
I didn’t hear Nuala O’Faolain’s interview with Marian Finucane but reading the Susan McKay account in the latest edition of Village magazine it seems shocking how she was told she had cancer.
According to McKay she went to the New York hospital alone, not expecting bad news. Sitting in the waiting area a doctor breezed by her and said she had two brain tumours. A little while later he passed by again, mentioning that she had two in her lungs as well. I guess he was a robot too.
In the case of Gordon Brown however, it is not that he lacks empathy, so much as he seems incapable of eliciting any. The general public simply can’t warm to him, with some going as far as suggesting that he’s autistic.
This concentration on political personalities is a bit sickening really, and the thinking underlying Born Yesterday is old news anyway:
Dick’s fleeting appearance in Born Yesterday belies a deeper affinity between Burn’s methodology and Dick’s preoccupations. Born Yesterday had been framed in advance by Guardianistas as a commentary on the replacement of news with entertainment; very old news indeed to a reader of Dick or Baudrillard.
Great, another book I don’t have to bother reading.
Apr 25th, 2008 by Donagh
Patrick Cockburn who has recently published Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq being interviewed by Pepe Escobar on the Real News Network.
