Tag Archives: politics

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Tell Congress: Support pregnant workers … a repost


by Emily J. Martin

Mother’s Day is quickly approaching — but for some moms, celebrating is the last thing on their minds.

Because Congress has failed to act, some pregnant women might be spending this holiday facing an impossible choice between risking their health and risking their family’s economic security.

Tell Your Members of Congress
to Support Pregnant Workers

No mom-to-be should be forced to choose between risking her health and risking her family’s economic security this Mother’s Day. Write to your Members of Congress now.

Lots of pregnant women don’t need any changes on the job, but some do, and for them the stakes are high. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is commonsense legislation that would require employers to make reasonable accommodations when workers have a medical need for them because of pregnancy, childbirth, or related conditions — just as employers are already required to do for people with disabilities.

Over the next several weeks, we’re turning the pressure up to raise awareness and take action in support of pregnant workers. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act will be re-introduced in Congress soon. But to give it a strong start, we need to make sure we have as many co-sponsors on the bill as possible.

It’s time we turn it up a notch and push for what moms really need. Please take a minute to honor the mothers in your life by supporting the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Thanks for all that you do.

Sincerely,
Emily J. Martin
Vice President and General Counsel
National Women’s Law Center

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Too many Black families … a repost


 It’s a time of celebration and joy, but every year there are too many Black families who have empty seats around their holiday dinners.

Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Tanesha Anderson, John Crawford, and many, many more.

But there’s a vibrant movement on the streets demanding that our country value and protect Black lives, and it’s forcing many Americans — particularly our elected officials — to wake up to the realities of everyday violence against Black people.  

We’re in the middle of a transformative moment, and ColorOfChange has bold plans for 2015.

We are going to:

  1. Strengthen the police accountability work we’ve spear-headed throughout 2014. From ensuring Darren Wilson, Daniel Pantaleo, and other police officers are held fully accountable, to securing nationwide structural reforms addressing discriminatory police violence, there’s a lot to be done.
  2. Lift up the voices of our 1 million members to fight back against the new right-wing Congress. The Republicans who now control both houses are determined to pass legislation that will put our communities in harms way. And we’re determined to hold them accountable.
  3. Continue to combat toxic media representations of Black folks and the movements for justice springing up everywhere.
  4. Keep our fingers on the country’s pulse, ready to jump on rapid response moments and influence the national dialogue.

…and there’s a lot more in the pipeline.

Make a $1 holiday donation today to strengthen ColorOfChange’s civil rights campaigns this coming year. (Or give whatever you can.)

Every donation you make, every dollar you give, makes a BIG difference. Our small staff will stretch it out and ensure it has a real impact in 2015.

Thanks and peace,

–Rashad, Arisha, Matt, Bhavik, and the ColorOfChange team

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Indigenous voices lead largest climate march ever ~~ a repost


“The protection of nature, forests, and ecosystems is the responsibility of everyone.
What happens will ultimately affect us all. We are standing up for our lives, yours, the entire world and for the lives of future generations!”
– Patricia Gualinga, Kichwa leader from the Ecuadorian Amazon
 a small group made big waves in New York City. Amazonian indigenous spokespeople and social movement leaders led more than 400,000 others at the People’s Climate March. Amazon Watch joined front-line indigenous communities and representatives in demanding that humanity keep the oil in the ground as a fundamental solution to climate chaos. From the Arctic to the Amazon, leadership ofindigenouspeoples in climate solutions was on full display.

Read the rest and see videos and photos on Eye on the Amazon »

posted 9/27/2014
~ In the Library

In the Library: … La Société du spectacle“ a Book by Debord


Some of the information below is from wiki the other is from a website solely devoted to Debord’s book La Société du Spectacle

La Société du Spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) is a black and white 1973 film by the Situationist Guy Debord based on his 1967 book of the same name. It was Debord’s first feature-length film. It uses found footage and detournement in a radical criticism of mass marketing and its role in the alienation of modern society.

With the term spectacle, Debord defines the system that is a confluence of advanced capitalism, the mass media, and the types of governments who favor those phenomena: “the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of ‘mass media’ which are its most glaring superficial manifestation”.[4] The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity”.

“The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes, “rather; it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”

Degradation of human life

Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.”[1] Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.”[2] This condition, according to Debord, is the “historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life.”[3]

In his analysis of the spectacular society, Debord notes that quality of life is impoverished,[6] with such lack of authenticity, human perceptions are affected, and there’s also a degradation of knowledge, with the hindering of critical thought.[7] Debord analyzes the use of knowledge to assuage reality: the spectacle obfuscates the past, imploding it with the future into an undifferentiated mass, a type of never-ending present; in this way the spectacle prevents individuals from realizing that the society of spectacle is only a moment in history, one that can be overturned through revolution.[8][9]

Debord’s aim and proposal is “to wake up the spectator who has been drugged by spectacular images,” “through radical action in the form of the construction of situations,” “situations that bring a revolutionary reordering of life, politics, and art”. In the situationist view, situations are actively created moments characterized by “a sense of self-consciousness of existence within a particular environment or ambience”.[10]

Debord encouraged the use of détournement, “which involves using spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle.”

Mass media and commodity fetishism

The Society of the Spectacle is a critique of contemporary consumer culture and commodity fetishism. Before the term “globalization” was popularized, Debord was arguing about issues such as class alienation, cultural homogenization, and the mass media.

When Debord says that “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,” he is referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society. Images, Debord says, have supplanted genuine human interaction.[1]

Thus, Debord’s fourth thesis is: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”[11]

In a consumer society, social life is not about living, but about having; the spectacle uses the image to convey what people need and must have. Consequently, social life moves further, leaving a state of “having” and proceeding into a state of “appearing”; namely the appearance of the image.[12]

“In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.”[13]

 Comparison between religion and marketing

Debord also draws an equivalence between the role of mass media marketing in the present and the role of religions in the past.[14][15] The spread of commodity-images by the mass media, produces “waves of enthusiasm for a given product” resulting in “moments of fervent exaltation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old religious fetishism”.[16][17]

Other observations Debord makes on religion: “The remains of religion and of the family (the principal relic of the heritage of class power) and the moral repression they assure, merge whenever the enjoyment of this world is affirmed–this world being nothing other than repressive pseudo-enjoyment.”[18] “The monotheistic religions were a compromise between myth and history, … These religions arose on the soil of history, and established themselves there. But there they still preserve themselves in radical opposition to history.” Debord defines them as Semi-historical religion.[19] “The growth of knowledge about society, which includes the understanding of history as the heart of culture, derives from itself an irreversible knowledge, which is expressed by the destruction of God.”[20]

wiki