posted : Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013

reblogged from : The American Bear

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“ What really prevents a real dialogue with Moravia, but more so with Firpo, for example, is that somehow we are not seeing the same scene, we don¹t know the same people, and that we do not hear the same voices. For you and them, things happen when it¹s news, beautifully written, formatted, cut and titled. But what¹s underneath it all? What is missing is a surgeon who has the courage to examine the tissue and declare: gentlemen, this is cancer, and it is not benign ….. Is a cancer patient who dreams the same healthy body that he had before nostalgic, even if before he was stupid and unlucky? Before the cancer, I mean. First of all, one would have to make quite an effort to re-establish the same image. I listen to all the politicians and their little formulas, and it drives me insane. They don¹t seem to know what country they are talking about; they are as distant as the Moon. And the same goes for the writers, sociologists and experts of all sorts.
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posted : Friday, March 22nd, 2013

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In Tarantino’s vision, slavery’s definitive injustice was its gratuitous and sadistic brutalization and sexualized degradation. Malevolent, ludicrously arrogant whites owned slaves most conspicuously to degrade and torture them. Apart from serving a formal dinner in a plantation house—and Tarantino, the Chance the Gardener of American filmmakers (and Best Original Screenplay? Really?) seems to draw his images of plantation life from Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, as well as old Warner Brothers cartoons—and the Mandingo fighters and comfort girls, Tarantino’s slaves do no actual work at all; they’re present only to be brutalized….

Django Unchained trivializes slavery by reducing it to its most barbaric and lurid excesses. Slavery also was fundamentally a labor relation. It was a form of forced labor regulated—systematized, enforced and sustained—through a political and institutional order that specified it as a civil relationship granting owners absolute control over the life, liberty, and fortunes of others defined as eligible for enslavement, including most of all control of the conditions of their labor and appropriation of its product. Historian Kenneth M. Stampp quotes a slaveholder’s succinct explanation: “‘For what purpose does the master hold the servant?’ asked an ante-bellum Southerner. ‘Is it not that by his labor, he, the master, may accumulate wealth?’”
That absolute control permitted horrible, unthinkable brutality, to be sure, but perpetrating such brutality was neither the point of slavery nor its essential injustice. The master-slave relationship could, and did, exist without brutality, and certainly without sadism and sexual degradation. In Tarantino’s depiction, however, it is not clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of brutality would be objectionable. It does not diminish the historical injustice and horror of slavery to note that it was not the product of sui generis, transcendent Evil but a terminus on a continuum of bound labor that was more norm than exception in the Anglo-American world until well into the eighteenth century, if not later. As legal historian Robert Steinfeld points out, it is not so much slavery, but the emergence of the notion of free labor—as the absolute control of a worker over her person—that is the historical anomaly that needs to be explained. Django Unchained sanitizes the essential injustice of slavery by not problematizing it and by focusing instead on the extremes of brutality and degradation it permitted, to the extent of making some of them up, just as does The Help regarding Jim Crow.

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posted : Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

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“ Simply put, the job creators are now not creating jobs. They have no intention of creating jobs now or in the future. They don’t have to create jobs and there’s nobody out there to make them do it. They simply will reduce the number of jobs they have now and grind the remaining employees, most of whom have no recourse any more, either to the government or to organized labor. The job creators thereupon will get rich not creating jobs, and they will continue to get rich not creating jobs, because creating jobs costs them money. Any politician who says anything else is lying to you.

So there’s that.

(via towerofsleep)

Yo, but for how fucking long has this been painfully evident and repeated ad nauseum? 30 years?

(Source: theawl)

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posted : Monday, March 4th, 2013

reblogged from : DROP OUT. HANG OUT. SPACE OUT.

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chrismcmahon:

☭ FIGHT YOUR LOCAL TORIES 

Fight Labour too:

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posted : Friday, February 15th, 2013

reblogged from : My Habitus is Better Than Urs

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Did we ever figure out a Most Useless And Boring Tumblr “Politics” Blogger?

I know that’s pulling from a pretty pathetic pool, but there’s gotta be a creme de la crap, right? I’m guessing it’s either Ari Kohen or Squashed.

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posted : Thursday, January 31st, 2013

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andrewfm:

A map produced by the Chicago Teachers’ Union of the areas targeted for school closings by the city’s administration.

oh Rahm Emanuel, you NeoLiberal piece of literal scum.

andrewfm:

A map produced by the Chicago Teachers’ Union of the areas targeted for school closings by the city’s administration.

oh Rahm Emanuel, you NeoLiberal piece of literal scum.

posted : Friday, January 18th, 2013

reblogged from : Andrew Foltz-Morrison

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“ Yup, under Bush, the 1% captured a disproportionate share of the income gains from the Bush boom of 2002-2007. They got 65 cents of every dollar created in that boom, up 20 cents from when Clinton was President. Under Obama, the 1% got 93 cents of every dollar created in that boom. That’s not only more than under Bush, up 28 cents. In the transition from Bush to Obama, inequality got worse, faster, than under the transition from Clinton to Bush. Obama accelerated the growth of inequality.

Growth of Income Inequality Is Worse Under Obama than Bush

Listen, electoral politics is horseshit, I’ve grown to despise talking about it even tangentially, but this is a pretty decent reminder of why that’s so. It’s just so you know/Keep in mind that this is what underlies all that “The Economy is recovering/showing good signs” talk and why “Vote for X because Y is bad for the economy” talking points are for suckers.

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posted : Friday, June 22nd, 2012

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