POLITICAL COMMENTARY: “Top U.S. and World Headlines — June 2, 2016” / Democracy Now! / Amy Goodman ☮
Reply
Category Archives: Politics
POLITICAL COMMENTARY: “California Governor Endorses Hillary Over Bernie (With Bad Arguments)” / Secular Talk / Kyle Kulinski ☮
POLITICAL COMMENTARY: “Top U.S. and World Headlines — June 1, 2016” / Democracy Now! / Amy Goodman ☮
CORPORATE OPPRESSION: “Lock Up the Men, Evict the Women and Children” / Chris Hedges ☮
…
Being poor in America is one long emergency. You teeter on the edge of bankruptcy, homelessness and hunger. You endure cataclysmic levels of stress, harassment and anxiety and long bouts of depression. Rent strips you of half your income—one in four families spend 70 percent of their income on rent—until you and your children are evicted, often into homeless shelters or abandoned buildings, when you fall behind on payments. A financial crisis—a medical emergency, a reduction in hours at work or the loss of a job, funeral expenses or car repairs—can lead inexorably to an eviction. Creditors, payday lenders and collection agencies hound you. You are often forced to declare bankruptcy. You cope with endemic violence, gangs, drugs and a judicial system that permits brutal police abuse and ships you to jail, or slaps you with huge fines, for minor offenses. You live for weeks or months with no heat, water or electricity because you cannot pay the utility bills, especially since fuel and utility rates have risen by more than 50 percent since 2000. Single mothers and their children usually endure this hell alone, because the men in these communities are locked up. Millions of families are tossed into the street every year.
We have 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its prison population. More than 60 percent of the 2.2 million incarcerated are people of color. If these poor people were not locked in cages for decades, if they were not given probationary status once they were freed, if they had stable communities, there would be massive unrest in the streets. Mass incarceration, along with debt peonage, evictions, police violence and a judicial system that holds up property rights, rather than justice, as the highest good and that denies nearly all of the poor a trial, forcing them to accept plea bargains, is one of the many tools of corporate oppression.
POETRY – FREE VERSE: “Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass” / Freedom From Religion Foundation ☮
I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self contain’d,. . . .
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.
~ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1891 edition
On this date in 1819, Walt Whitman [May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892] was born on Long Island. After working as clerk, teacher, journalist and laborer, Whitman wrote his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, pioneering free verse poetry in a humanistic celebration of humanity, in 1855. Emerson, whom Whitman revered, said of Leaves of Grass that it held “incomparable things incomparably said.” During the Civil War, Whitman worked as an army nurse, later writing Drum Taps (1865) and Memoranda During the War (1867). His health compromised by the experience, he was given work at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. After a stroke in 1873, which left him partially paralyzed, Whitman lived his next 20 years with his brother, writing mainly prose, such as Democratic Vistas (1870). Leaves of Grass was published in nine editions, with Whitman elaborating on it in each successive edition. In the preface of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote, “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God.” In 1881, the book had the compliment of being banned by the commonwealth of Massachusetts on charges of immorality.
Whitman was at most a Deist who scorned religion (see several samples of his views below). D. 1892.
POLITICAL COMMENTARY: “How to Turn Trump Fans? Show Them a Greek Tragedy” ☮
Times are hard for democracy. Trump wants a wall. Senators refuse to question judicial nominees. And anti-Hillary liberals seriously contend that she is “as bad as” the opposing party’s presumptive nominee, vowing not to vote if she wins the nomination.
But when were they ever other than hard? Democracy has always been vulnerable to extreme opinions and dogmatic certainties. Sometimes the price of free speech is listening to things you don’t want to hear.
Theater holds a possible remedy, though, to some of our worst tendencies. It’s pretty simple. We need more tragedy.
Of course, tragedy might seem remote and irrelevant. To many it is dimly remembered as something to do with hubris, catharsis and tragic flaws. We hear the word tragedy in the news mainly when it’s misapplied to some disaster — natural or otherwise. But it needn’t be either irrelevant or misappropriated. Tragedy is not just the stuff of English tests. It has a long and illustrious history as a salve for self-government. It’s no coincidence that democracy and tragedy arose around the same time in ancient Athens.
While scholars disagree about exactly how tragedy arose, we are certain that it evolved alongside Athenian democracy. Athenians understood that what they saw onstage taught them truths and ways of thinking vital for their roles as citizens. Like the law courts, tragedy was a civic institution. Funded by the state, it was perhaps the greatest citizenship class ever.
SOCIAL HISTORY: “Bill Moyers Essay: Memorial Day” ☮
May 22, 2009, Updated March 25, 2015
SOCIAL HISTORY: “It’s Time We Have a Holiday to Honor Those Who Try to Stop Wars Too” / Vox ☮
Eugene V. Debs, who went to jail for opposing World War I. (Buyenlarge/Getty Images)
Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day often get equated, but there is an essential distinction between the two. Veteran’s Day honors all who have served the American military in wars. Memorial Day honors those who’ve perished. It’s an annual reminder that wars have grave human costs, which must be both recognized and minimized.
Those costs are not inevitable. We ought to also set aside time to remember those throughout American history who have tried hardest to reduce them, to prevent unnecessary loss of life both American and foreign: war resisters.
SOCIAL HISTORY: “The Revolutionary Origins of Memorial Day and its Political Hijacking” / Ben Becker
The way the Civil War became officially remembered — through Memorial Day celebrations— was based on the erasure of the Black veteran and the liberated slave.
A day celebrating Black liberation utilized for white supremacy
What we now know as Memorial Day began as “Decoration Day” in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. It was a tradition initiated by former slaves to celebrate emancipation and commemorate those who died for that cause.
These days, Memorial Day is arranged as a day “without politics”—a general patriotic celebration of all soldiers and veterans, regardless of the nature of the wars in which they participated. This is the opposite of how the day emerged, with explicitly partisan motivations, to celebrate those who fought for justice and liberation.
The concept that the population must “remember the sacrifice” of U.S. service members, without a critical reflection on the wars themselves, did not emerge by accident. It came about in the Jim Crow period as the Northern and Southern ruling classes sought to reunite the country around apolitical mourning, which required erasing the “divisive” issues of slavery and Black citizenship. These issues had been at the heart of the struggles of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
To truly honor Memorial Day means putting the politics back in. It means reviving the visions of emancipation and liberation that animated the first Decoration Days. It means celebrating those who have fought for justice, while exposing the cruel manipulation of hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members who have been sent to fight and die in wars for conquest and empire.
POLITICAL COMMENTARY: “Attacking Police Now a Hate Crime” / The Young Turks / Cenk Uygur, and John Iadarola ☮
In Louisiana, it will soon be considered a hate crime to attack a police officer. The “Blue Lives Matter Bill” is expected to be signed into law by the governor. Cenk Uygur and John Iadarola, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
“Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards is set to sign a bill into law that would classify any violent attack on police officers, firefighters, and EMS personnel a hate crime. According to The Root, the so-called Blue Lives Matter bill is the first of its kind.
State Representative Lance Harris authored the bill after Texas sheriff’s deputy Darren Goforth was shot and killed last year. “It looked like it was strictly done because someone didn’t like police officers, like a hate crime,” Harris told CNN.”
Always Question Authority 