Tag Archives: politics

~ 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

~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

Walker And Rubio’s ACA Replacement Plans, By The Numbers


By

GOP Presidential Candidates Scott Walker And Marco Rubio Release Plans to Repeal And Replace The Affordable Care Act

For the last five years, Republicans have been attacking the Affordable Care Act in word and deed. Despite the fact that a majority of Americans oppose repeal efforts, conservatives have promised to “repeal and replace” the law, and congressional Republicans have voted more than 50 times to repeal it. Yet in these five years, no Republican lawmaker has offered a real plan to provide affordable health coverage to Americans. Scott Walker and Marco Rubio’s replacement plans, released today, are no different.

Unsurprisingly, both Walker and Rubio’s plans would repeal the ACA, which would wreak havoc on the entire health care industry. Here are just a few examples showing the effect of repealing the ACA:

  • 19 million: the number of people who would lose coverage, including those enrolled in marketplace plans and through Medicaid.
  • 129 million: the number of people with pre-existing conditions who will no longer be protected from discrimination.
  • $137 billion: the estimated increase in federal budget deficit over ten years.
  • 8.7 million: the number of people receiving premium tax credits, who would lose them if the law were repealed.

Walker actually proposes giving Americans some form of tax credit to pay for health care coverage, but rather than basing tax credits on income—like the Affordable Care Act does—Walker’s plan would base tax credits on age. This could significantly hurt low-income people who could see a substantial cut to their tax credits based on Walker’s system. Not to mention the fact that, at the proposed level, Walker’s credit system would not come close to covering the cost of decent coverage. Rubio’s plan also gives no indication that his proposed tax credit would be sufficient to pay for good health care coverage.

Neither Walker nor Rubio’s plan contains new ideas. Instead, each rehashes the same old, stale conservative mantra. For instance, both support block granting Medicaid, an idea that Rep. Paul Ryan has proposed in his budget for years and which Gov. Romney endorsed in his unsuccessful 2012 bid for president. Block granting Medicaid would cripple a vital program that has provided health coverage to 80 million Americans in 2014. Although neither Walker nor Rubio provides much detail on their block grant proposals, the amount of money provided to states through block grants typically increase each year more slowly than the growth in health care costs, so block granting funding would mean Medicaid would get squeezed more and more. As a result, Paul Ryan’s Medicaid block grant proposal would lead to 14-20 million low-income people losing their health coverage.

BOTTOM LINE: The American people support the ACA, the Supreme Court upheld it, and the GOP’s continued efforts to undermine it only serve to show how out-of-touch Republican lawmakers are. The Affordable Care Act has been woven into the fabric of our health care system, repealing the law and replacing it with old, failed policies will have a devastating impact on hard working Americans.