Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://www.thestar.com/living/article/1 ... ul-message

Rihanna, Chris Brown sending “dreadful” message
Published On Fri Feb 24 2012


Even if whispers of a romantic reunion between Rihanna and Chris Brown are false, the fact relations have normalized while
Brown is serving his five-year probation sentence for felony assault is the kind of slippery slope experts could have predicted.


By Vinay Menon
Staff Reporter

Rihanna and Chris Brown did more than just flirt on Twitter or release new duets this week. They also sent a dangerous message to the world.

Three years after a horrifying incident, in which he savagely punched her, bit her, put her in a headlock and threatened to kill her, all seems to be forgiven and forgotten. In the glitzy melodrama of their willfully entangled lives, both are eager to scrub the ugly past from their shared history.

On Monday, the ex-couple unleashed remixes of two songs: Brown’s “Turn Up The Volume” and Rihanna’s “Birthday Cake.” The marketing-driven collaborations arrived in the wake of the Grammy Awards, during which Brown performed and won a trophy, suggesting the besieged music industry is also eager to forgive and forget.

But for fans of the stars, including some young women who tweeted unsettling proclamations while Brown was gyrating on the Grammy stage — “chris brown can punch me whenever he wants!” — this rekindled spark has created a harmful blind spot to the issue of domestic violence.



http://boingboing.net/2012/02/24/video- ... hanna.html

Video: Chris Brown+Rihanna's "Birthday Cake" remixed with lyrics from police report for 2009 beating
By Xeni Jardin at 3:33 pm Friday, Feb 24




A quickie remix parody of "Birthday Cake" by Rihanna ft. Chris Brown. Lyrics quoted directly from the police report (PDF). What is this about? Created by Andrea James and Calpernia Addams. Here's a related analysis that's worth a read.

[Allegro]

.
The introduction as seen in the video…

“Visiting the little museum you shall admire the love of the people for the Infant Jesus. The Entrance is Free. You are welcome!”

Let’s add a carver’s mighty workmanship and layers of fine gold and a doll, and, of course, a cash drop box “for the infant Jesus.”

il Bambino

POST 2033

[American Dream]

Factory-Farmed Humans





MAY BE TRIGGERING!

[American Dream]

http://www.prole.info/texts/malatesta_defence.html

DEFENCE OF THE REVOLUTION

by Errico Malatesta
taken from "Malatesta: His Life & Ideas"
ed. Vernon Richards. London: Freedom Press, 1993.



The revolution we want consists in depriving the present holders of their power and wealth and in putting the land and the means of production and all existing wealth at the disposal of the workers, that is of everybody, since those who are not, will have to become, workers, And the revolutionaries must defend this revolution by seeing to it that no individual, party or class finds the means' to constitute a government and restore privilege in favour of new or old bosses...

To defend, to save the revolution there is only one means: that of pushing the revolution as far as it will go. So long as there are those who will be in a position to oblige others to work for them; so long as there are those who are in a position to violate the freedom of others, the revolution will not be complete, and we will be still in a state of legitimate defence and to the violence which oppresses we will oppose the violence that liberates.

Do you fear that the dispossessed bourgeoisie may hire soldiers of fortune to restore the old regime? Dispossess them completely and you will see that without money you can employ no one.

Do you fear a military coup? Arm all the population, ensure that they really arc in possession of all wealth so that every person will have to defend his own freedom and the means which can ensure his well-being, and you will see whether the generals seeking adventures will find who to follow them: But if after that, the people in arms, in possession of the land, the factories and all the natural wealth wexe incapable of defending themselves, and allowed themselves once again to be brought under the yoke, it would mean that they were still not capable of enjoying freedom. The revolution would have failed and the work of education and preparation would have to be resumed for another attempt which would have greater chances of success because it would benefit from the seeds that had been sown at the previous attempt. (Fede, November 25)



The dangers with which a revolution is faced do not come solely or principally from the reactionaries conspiring for a restoration and calling for foreign intervention; they also come from the possibility of degeneration of the revolution itself; and from the arrivistes who, though revolutionaries, nevertheless retain a mentality and sympathies which are bourgeois and seek to direct the revolution towards ends which are anything but equalitarian and libertarian.' (Umanità Nova, August 27, 1920)



Once the situation is reached whereby no one could impose his wishes on others by force, nor take away from any man the product of his labour, anarchists could then only act through propaganda and by example.

Destroy the institutions and the machinery of existing social organisations? Yes, certainly, if it is a question of repressive institutions; but these are, after all, only a small part of the complex of social life. The police, the army, the prisons and the judiciary are potent institutions for evil, which exercise a parasitic function. Other institutions and organisations manage, for better or for worse, to guarantee life to mankind; and these institutions cannot be usefully destroyed without replacing them by something better.

The exchange of raw materials and goods, the distribution of foodstuffs, the railways, postal services and all public services administered by the State or by private companies, have been organised to serve monopolistic and capitalist interests, but they also serve real needs of the population. We cannot disrupt them (and in any case the people would not in their own interests allow us to) without reorganising them in a better way. And this cannot be achieved in a day; nor as things stand, have we the necessary abilities to do so. We are delighted therefore if in the meantime, others act, even with dillcrent criteria from our own.

Social life does not admit of interruptions, and the people want to live on the day of the revolution, on the morrow and always.' (Umanità Nova, October 7, 1922)



There are still many people who are fascinated by the idea of "terror." For them it seems that the guillotine, firing squads, massacres, deportations and jails are powerful and indispensable arms of the revolution, and observe that if so many revolutions have been defeated and have not produced the results hoped for, it is the fault of the goodness, and" weakness" of the revolutionaries, who have not persecuted, repressed and killed on a large enough scale.

It is a prejudice current in some revolutionary circles which had its origins in the rhetoric and historic falsification of the apologists of the Great French Revolution and has been revived in recent years by the bolsheviks in their propaganda. But the truth is just the opposite; Terror has always been the instrument of tyranny. In France it served the grim tyranny of Robespierre and paved the way for Napoleon and the subsequent reaction. In Russia it persecuted and killed anarchists and socialists, and massacred rebellious workers and peasants, and has halted the development of a revolution which really might have ushered in a new era for mankind. Those who believe in the liberating and revolutionary efficacy of repression and savagery have the same kind of backward mentality as the jurists who believe that crimes can be prevented and the world morally improved by the imposition of stiff punishments.

The Terror, like war, awakens atavistic and bellicose sentiments, still barely covered by a cloak of civilization, and raises to the highest posts the worse elements of the population. And far from serving to defend the revolution it discredits it, makes it repellent to the masses and after a period of fierce struggles, gives rise, of necessity, to what they would today call "a return to normality." that is, to the legalisation and perpetuation of tyranny. Whichever side wins, one always arrives at the creation of a strong government, which assures peace to some at the price of freedom, and to others domination without too many risks...

Certainly the revolution must be defended and developed with an inexorable logic; but one must not and cannot defend it with means which contradict its ends.

The most powerful means for defending the revolution remains always that of taking away from the bourgeoisie the economic means on which their power is based, and of arming everybody (until such time as one will have managed to persuade everybody to throwaway their arms as useless and dangerous toys), and of interesting the mass of the population in the victory of the revolution.

If in order to win it were necessary to erect the gallows in the public square, then I would prefer to lose.' (Pensiero e Volontà, October 1, 1924)



And after the revolution, that is, after the defeat of the existing powers and the overwhelming victory of the forces of insurrection, what then?

It is then that gradualism really comes into operation. We shall have to study all the practical problems of life: production, exchange, the means of communication, relations between anarchist groupings and those living under some kind of authority, between communist collectives and those living in an individualistic way; relations between town and country, the utilisation for the benefit of everybody of all natural sources of power and of raw materials; distribution of industries and. cultivation according to the natural resources of the different regions; public education, care of children and the aged, health services, protection against common criminals and the more dangerous ones who might again try to suppress the freedom of others for the benefit of individuals or parties -and so on. And in every problem [anarchists] should prefer the solutions which not only are economically superior but which satisfy the need for justice and freedom and leave the way open for future improvements, which other solutions might not.

In the event justice, liberty and solidarity should override economic advantages. One must not think of destroying everything in the belief that later things will look after themselves. Present civilisation is the result of development extending over thousands of years, and has solved, in a way, the problem of large concentrations of population, often crowded into small territories, and of satisfying their ever-increasing and complex needs. Its benefits have decreased-because development has been taking place under the pressure of authority in the interests of the ruling classes; but even if one takes away authority and privilege, the advantages acquired, the triumphs of man over the adverse forces of nature, the accumulated experience of past generations, sociability learned through cohabitation throughout the ages and by the proven benefits of mutual aid-all these advantages will remain, and it would be foolish, and in any case impossible, to give up all these things.

We must therefore fight authority and privilege, but take advantage of all the benefits of civilisation; and nothing must be destroyed which satisfies, even badly, a human need until we have something better to put in its place. We must be intransigent in our opposition to all capitalist imposition and exploitation, and tolerant of all social concepts which prevail in different human groupings, so long as they do not threaten the equal rights and freedom of others; and content ourselves with advancing gradually in step with the moral development of the people and as the available material and intellectua1 means increase--doing all we can, of course, by study, work and propaganda to hasten the development towards ever more advanced ideals. (Pensiero e Volontà, October I, 1925)



But after the successful insurrection, when the government has fallen, what must be done?

We anarchists would wish that in every district the workers, or, more accurately, those among them who are more socially conscious and have a spirit of initiative, should take possession of all the means of production, of all the wealth--land, raw materials, houses, machines, food stocks, etc... and to the best of their ability, initiate new forms of social life. We would wish that the land workers who today work for masters should no longer recognise the landowners' property rights but continue and intensify production on their own account, establishing direct contacts with workers in industry and transport for the exchange of goods and services; that industrial workers, including engineers and technicians, should take possession of the factories and continue and intensify production for their own benefit and that of the whole community; immediately switching production in those factories which today turn out useless or harmful goods to supplying the articles most urgently required to satisfy the needs of the public; that the railwaymen should continue to operate the railways but in the service of the community; that committees composed of volunteers or elected by the people should take over, under the direct control of the population, all available accommodation to house, as well as is possible in the circumstances, those most in need; that other committees, always under the direct control of the people, should deal with provisioning and the distribution of consumer goods; that all the members of the bourgeoisie should of necessity have to "muck in" with those who were the proletarian masses and work like everybody else in order to enjoy the same benefits as everybody else. And all this must be done immediately, on the very day, or the morrow of the successful insurrection, without waiting for orders from central committees or from any other kind of authority.

This is what the anarchists want, and it is in fact what would naturally happen if the revolution were to be a truly social revolution and not just a political change, which after a few convulsions would lead things back to what they were formerly. For, if one did not deprive the bourgeoisie of its economic power at once, it would in a short time recapture the political power which the insurrection had torn from its grasp. And in order to take away economic power from the bourgeoisie, it is necessary to organise immediately a new economic structure based on justice and equality. Economic needs, at least the most essential ones, cannot be interrupted; they must be satisfied immediately. "Central Committees" either do nothing or act when their services are no longer required. (Umanità Nova, August 12. 1920)

[American Dream]

http://dissidentvoice.org/2012/02/missing-foundations/

Missing Foundations
by Linh Dinh / February 25th, 2012


Americans are living on borrowed time, economically. Like air conditioners, copper pipes and aluminum siding of a foreclosed home, what remains of our prosperity will be violently stripped away. There is no economic recovery because the foundations for such are simply not there. Jobs still leave the country, and the only way we can compete with foreign slaves is to become slaves ourselves, and don’t think for a moment that this isn’t by design.

We fancy ourselves indebted middle-class, but this mirage is quickly evaporating. Most of us are indebted slaves. Banks conjure money out of thin air to enslave most of us for life. We must go into debt to buy a house, a car or go to school. Many of us go into debt just to eat. Like you, you and you, I will carry my shitty credit score to a mass paupers’ grave, with my hearse a U-Haul. There is a renewed emphasis on going to college as a means to success, but in this economy, a degree will likely only impoverish you further, since you will be in hock to the banksters even as you work a job completely unrelated to your dubious education. If you can even get a job, that is. Joining winos and bag ladies with smudgy and off-target makeup will be legions of useless scholars.

Still, there are perks to being house slaves of the empire, since even homeless Americans sport brand name shoes, and our poor are generally the most obese, meaning they have enough to eat, even if what they’re ingesting may shorten their lives by decades. We are unique in having thousands of fat people moving about on so-called mobility scooters, though their only handicap is overeating. Some of our grossest even star on TV, where they can sob in self-pity while competing to lose tonnage.

Though we may be stuffed and surrounded by stuff, our lives are not quite secure, because few of us own outright the roofs over our heads, as in many other countries, even if theirs are of tin or even grass. And since most of us owe more than we own, any financial slippage can mean an instant catastrophe. Surrounded by gadgets, an American can go from wealthy, by global standards, to being worse off than a Third-World slum dweller, if this Yank suddenly finds himself sleeping on a sidewalk, under a bridge or in a tent, when he’s not being shooed away by cops. With no floor under us, what good are our cumbersome arrays of possessions?

In Philly, there is an elegant and homeless woman of about 55. Since shelters don’t let you in until evening, if they accept you at all, and promptly kick you out by dawn, this woman has to spend all of her waking hours outside, like most homeless folks. What makes her unusual is the amount of stuff she’s still trying to hang onto to, and I’ve seen her outside for nearly three years now. With a dozen or so boxes and bags, and an odd suitcase, she can only walk about 30 feet at a time, shifting each container one by one without losing sight of any of them.

Like individual Americans, America also spends more than it earns, a situation made possible only because this is an empire with military bases worldwide and war ships off every shore. We are an extortion racket the world is trying to shake off, and when that happens, our living standards will truly plummet. Many Americans like to depict themselves as the oppressed 99%, but from the world’s perspective, we are an insufferable 5% that are milking the world dry when not bombing it into submission. As long as we partake in the ill-gotten fruit of empire, we are complicit in its crimes. We! Are! The 5% that will pulverize you if we don’t get our ways!

Foot soldiers of empire, we do our share to prop it up, everyone from the poor who enlist to kill foreigners for bogus reasons, to spineless academics who stay clear of political taboos, to cynical journalists who mouth obvious nonsense daily. The Obama-voting liberal who drives an SUV and frets about gas price is a clear beneficiary of empire, but so am I, though I attack its bloody policies and own next to nothing. What I do buy would cost a lot more, however, if America withdrew all of its overseas goons. Without American missiles pointed at the world’s temple, the dollar would become asswipe overnight. That’s why even domestic foes of Bellum Americanum should be prepared to suffer personally for its cessation.

There are those who think that we can power down, trim our holdings and lose weight gracefully, that as this murderous edifice crumples, a saner arrangement will rise up, and I, too, hope that a humane revolution is in the offing, though I suspect that as the physical empire goes down, its worst mental aspects will blossom. Its ideology will harden and shoot. Deprived of their toys, many Americans will demand that their government does whatever is necessary to restore the good old days, so there will be more desperate wars, and more repression of those who oppose this American way of life. Meanwhile, the media will serve up opulent fantasies to feed a nostalgia for this lost and glorious past. The poorer we become, the richer we will look on television.

Americans will have less, and our lives will be harder, but no one wants to talk about this decline, least of all politicians, since that would be the quickest way to not get elected, but even if we had a wise and ethical leadership, our country will still go into decline, because the resources for infinite growth are simply not there. They never were, of course, since this is a finite planet, after all, where natural limits must be reached sooner or later. That moment is now, unfortunately.

Don’t kid yourself that the fiery anger burning through Greece, Spain and elsewhere won’t be but a tame prelude to what will happen here, what with our robust sense of entitlement, deep alienation and trigger happy ways. Our government seems to anticipate as much, for it has put into place all of the physical and legal means to clamp down on us hard, when things do explode.


Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a just released novel, Love Like Hate. He's tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.

[American Dream]

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... -behavior/

CONFLATING GENDER, SEX, AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION
by Lisa Wade, May 18, 2008

Watch how this 60 Minutes clip from August 2006 manages to completely confuse three very different things: sex identity (believing you are biologically female or male), gendered behavior (conforming to cultural rules about girls/women and boys/men are supposed to do and like), and sexual orientation (which sex you are attracted to sexually). For examples, you know your boy is going to grow up wanting to have sex with men because he likes to “help out in the kitchen” or thinks he’s a girl. These are all very different things. It also includes some wretched study design.

Part I



Part II




By the way, funny story: When my nephew was about 2 years old he loved brooms and vacuums.
My parents told me that it was because he liked “tools."

[American Dream]

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... ideo-game/

BORDER PATROL VIDEO GAME
by Gwen Sharp from Sociological Images, Apr 18, 2009

Ryan sent in a story about the video game Border Patrol, in which you try to keep three types of Mexicans from crossing the border: drug dealers, Mexican nationalists, and “breeders,” who are of course pregnant women on their way to the welfare office:




According to Kotaku, a city representative in Georgia emailed it to colleagues with the following note:

THIS IS WAY TOO MUCH FUN!!!!!!!!!!!! Makes you feel better anyway, I did my part today, I kept a few from coming over!!! GET READY —- THEY ARE FAAAST! ! !

Classy.

And the Star of David on the American flag is a nice touch.

NOTE: A number of commenters have made various suggestions about what the Star of David might mean–support for Israel, a conflation of Jewish and Christian values as “American,” etc. I don’t know for sure, but my best guess is that it’s an added little bit of racism. If a few of my relatives are any indication, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiments often seem to go well together. One of my relatives who is virulently anti-immigrant also once gave my mom a video to watch and when she turned it on she realized it was this anti-Semitic thing about how Jews are trying to institute a New World Order. So I tend to think it’s supposed to indicate, as one commenter said, that the U.S. has been weakened and taken over by ineffectual liberalized Jews who are letting all the immigrants in as part of their master plan to….well, I don’t really know what the master plan is. I will see if I can find out when I visit my family members and let you know so we can all prepare. Or, for our Jewish readers, take part, I guess. Oh, wait, duh. Our Jewish readers already know. I forgot. One of my long-lost relatives from Arkansas explained to my mom how Jews communicate through all the symbols on packaging (you know, like TM, (R), and so on) to spread instructions for…well, again, since I don’t know the Mysterious Master Plan, I don’t know what the instructions are about. My poor mother has asked me on multiple occasions why people seem to think she’d want to hear bad things about Jewish people. My mother has her faults, but anti-Semitism isn’t one of them, so I’m going to have to chalk it up to the bad luck of being related to a lot of crazy racist people.

Anyway, that was my rambling way of saying I don’t think the Star of David on the flag is a pro-Israel thing.

[American Dream]

http://postpomonuyorican.blogspot.com/2008/08/beyonces-blanqueamiento.html

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Beyonce's Blanqueamiento

Exhibit A: Beyonce at last night's Kayne West Glow in the Dark Tour concert at Madison Sq. Garden in NYC




Exhibit B: Beyonce looking damn near transparent in her new L'Oreal ad




Now since it is obvious that Beyonce has not undergone a radical skin bleaching procedure from last night's photos (courtesy of Bossip.com) can someone explain to me why the hell L'Oreal photoshopped her to make her look whiter?

http://shesamarxist.wordpress.com/2011/ ... -feminism/

Rebuttal to Beyonce-Fake-Feminism
Posted: May 25, 2011 | Author: Sycorax |


Have you seen the new Beyonce video “girls run the world”? Its a classically post-feminist, or pseudo feminist co-optation of feminist ideals, in other words– it is the cultural co-optation of feminist packaging to promote capitalist consumerism and fake empowerment.

Below I am posting a video made by a womyn who is critiquing Beyonce’s “feminist message”. I hope you check it out, it is super dope! Although I think the critique is sharp, I would definitely “problematize” or argue for a little bit more of a complicated view of gender progress than the womyn in the video does, (one that acknowledges the way that certain womyn do objectively have power on par with men, womyn of a particular class and race, and how those womyn could have only progressed on the backs of other womyn being exploited as womyn). For example, it is telling that Beyonce is more blonde and white-womyn looking than ever before in this video. It is never just an empowered womyn, it is an empowered woman of a particular race. Womyn like Beyonce can get access to power to the extent that they are able to successfully mix elements of black-culture approved-for-cultural appropriation, with elements of feminist-culture approved-for-cultural-appropriation, all enacted in the medium of whiteness and white standards of beauty (and therefore is automatically a classed standard of beauty, a ruling-classed index of power).

At the end of the day, the question raised by Marxist feminists remains, what is the nature of patriarchy and why does it cut across class? I think having a racial analysis can bring us closer to the answer to this question, as I will be explaining in subsequent posts.

That said, overall the critique is right on and altogether dope. Find it below,




The original Beyonce video being critiqued is below:

[American Dream]

http://gatheringforces.org/2009/12/07/c ... n-on-race/

Critique of Liberal Anti-Racism: A Way Forward or Regression on Race?
2009 DECEMBER 7

The following essay by Walter Benn Michaels appeared in the London Review of Books.

Here are some excerpts:

“My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics.”

and

“Thus the primacy of anti-discrimination not only performs the economic function of making markets more efficient, it also performs the therapeutic function of making those of us who have benefited from those markets sleep better at night. And, perhaps more important, it has, ‘for a long time’, as Wendy Bottero says in her contribution to the recent Runnymede Trust collection Who Cares about the White Working Class?, also performed the intellectual function of focusing social analysis on what she calls ‘questions of racial or sexual identity’ and on ‘cultural differences’ instead of on ‘the way in which capitalist economies create large numbers of low-wage, low-skill jobs with poor job security’. The message of Who Cares about the White Working Class?, however, is that class has re-emerged: ‘What we learn here’, according to the collection’s editor, Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, is that ‘life chances for today’s children are overwhelmingly linked to parental income, occupations and educational qualifications – in other words, class.’”

Read the essay over at the London Review of Books.

[American Dream]

Rick Santorum and the Sexual Counter-Revolution

February 26, 2012

By Laurie Penny
Source: New Statesman


Almost a century ago this month, women's rights activist Emma Goldman was arrested in New York for distributing "obscene, lewd, or lascivious articles". What she was doing was handing out pamphlets about birth control, with the aim of freeing women sexually and socially from the burden of unwanted pregnancy, and she got a spell in a prison workhouse for her trouble.

Walk around Lower Manhattan today, as I did this morning, and you'd think that history had vindicated Goldman's long campaign for sexual freedom.

Pop songs promising a catalogue of horizontal delights pump out of the doorways of shops selling dildos and cheap knickers in the early mornings. Men hold hands with their husbands in SoHo. Wall Street workers in skirt suits jostle on the subway with excited teenagers in tiny shorts defying their parents and the winter chill.

Everywhere, on billboards and bus-stops and hoardings a hundred feet high, images of female sexual availability bulge and shine and flutter their perfect airbrushed eyelashes. Thighs glisten, legs spread and giant red lips open wetly for the latest low-calorie yoghurt. Surely, you'd think, this is a sweaty shangri-la of erotic liberty. Surely this is one place where the sexual revolution of the 1960s was allowed to reach its logical conclusion.

Step into any coffee shop or diner that carries the rolling news, however, and you'll find that in the land of the free not everything is as free as it seems. Over the past few weeks, right-wing politicians have launched an all-out assault on women's sexual and reproductive freedom and LGBT rights, attacking not just gay marriage and abortion but contraception, too.

In 2012, the morality of hormonal birth control is now a serious hot-button issue in the Republican presidential race. Last week, not a single woman was allowed to testify before a Washington hearing on reproductive rights and "religious freedom" -- which includes allowing bosses to deny their female employees contraceptive health coverage on moral grounds.

Meanwhile, the state of Virginia debated whether or not to force every women seeking an abortion to submit to vaginal probing with an ultrasound device, a policy that campaigners called "state-sponsored rape" -- one state representative commented that he couldn't see what the problem was, as these women had already consented to being penetrated when they got pregnant.

As panels of terrifying old men gather on national television to debate whether and how far women should be punished for having sex outside marriage one could be forgiven for thinking that American politics had temporarily been scripted by Margaret Atwood. As the recession crunches down, the country is awash with anti-erotic, anti-queer, anti-woman rhetoric that goes beyond 'culture war' into the territory of sexual counter- revolution.

The Republicans know that contraception in particular is a losing issue for them - a New York Times poll found that two thirds of voters, including 67 per cent of Catholics, support requiring employee health care plans to cover the cost of birth control, and Obama is up ten points with women from August - but they can't help themselves. One whiff of an uncontrolled pudenda and they start scrapping like housedogs who have been sprayed with pheromones, which makes for such classic TV moments as candidate Newt Gingrich, currently America's most famous serial adulterer, seriously participating in a debate about sexual continence.

To call this backlash a culture war would be to imply that more than one side is fighting.

This is far from the case. Compared to the pageant of homophobic and misogynist pants-wetting going on on the American right, all the Democrats need to do to make themselves look like a sane and useful political outfit is to sit back and watch the Republicans engage in auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Americans have short memories, particularly in election years, and most seem to have forgotten that it is barely two months since President Obama stepped in to restrict the sale of the morning-after-pill -- to girls under 17 -- a move seemingly designed to reassure the increasingly suspicious, sexist American centre-right that he hates sexual freedom a little bit, too. Just not as much as those crazy Republicans.

Curiously enough, precisely the same arguments seem to be at play when British conservatives attack abortion rights and sexual health - they might be gradually reintroducing fear of female sexuality into mainstream public life, but at least they're not as bad as those crazy Americans. Meanwhile, the public conversation about women's rights and sexual freedom is creeping back, inch by inch, towards conservative censoriousness.

This new sexual counter-revolution is bigger than America. The rhetoric of god, marriage, morality and little girls learning to keep their legs closed has crossed the pond with all the tooth-aching tenacity of a Katy Perry song. Last week, we had Baroness Warsi going to the Vatican to announce that Europe needs to be more 'confident in its Christianity'.

This week, it's a campaign by the Telegraph to remind women, their doctors and the government that abortions are not available 'on demand', a move that follows two years of attacks on sex education and the legal right to choose in parliament. Just like in the United States, the effect of this mission creep of legislative misogyny is to chip away at public support for women's right to control our bodies and our destinies.

It's worth reminding ourselves what birth control and abortion actually mean in political terms. The hormonal birth control pill was the first step in a technological revolution that, within living memory, liberated one half of the human race from functional dependency on the other. With legal abortion as the other side of the equation should birth control fail, women can finally be the mistresses of our own reproductive systems, rather than the slaves of it.

We can choose when, if and how many children we want, we can be sexually active without fear of pregnancy, and we can participate, at least in theory, in every area of public and professional life - we can have, in short, all the advantages that men have always enjoyed through accident of biology.

Pro-choice campaigners speak of a woman's right to "control her own body", rather than have it controlled for her by her husband, the church or the state, as if that right were a social given rather than something that our mothers and grandmothers fought and went to prison to win.

When conservative head-bangers like Rick Santorum complain that birth control encourages women and girls to have sex outside marriage, the appropriate response should be "yes, and?". Of course we want to have sex outside marriage without fear of social or economic punishment. Of course we want to control our fertility and, with it, our future.

These are precisely the technological advances that make real equality a possibility, and they are precisely the advances that players in the big boys' throwback club of modern politics wish to curtail when they complain of "moral decline" in public life.

The sexual counter-revolution is all about control. It's about control of women, control of desire, and control of political space at a time when elected representatives have nothing to offer voters beyond sops to our most fearful prejudices. As for those dirty billboards, they are part of the equation. A culture of objectification is part of managing and monetising the social fact of desire.

Anglo-American culture has never had a problem with sex as long as it is carefully managed -- as long as it is enjoyed only by straight men and endured by women, guiltily, in the dark.



From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://zcommunications.org/rick-santoru ... urie-penny

[American Dream]

.
The introduction as seen in the video…

“Visiting the little museum you shall admire the love of the people for the Infant Jesus. The Entrance is Free. You are welcome!”

Let’s add a carver’s mighty workmanship and layers of fine gold and a doll, and, of course, a cash drop box “for the infant Jesus.”

il Bambino

POST 2033

[American Dream]

A Woman's Place

"I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man I keep his house."
--Zsa Zsa Gabor

Not all relations in a capitalist society are value relations. The construction and sale of commodities presupposes and interacts with relationships that have very little to do with production for exchange. The economy develops on top of these relationships, creates the context in which they develop and puts pressure on them to develop in certain ways. The house is a central place where these two kinds of relationships come together.

In Medieval Europe, the household was a very different thing than it is today. Most people were small peasant farmers, who lived on or near the land they farmed and produced most of what they needed at home. The craftsmen in the cities would usually live above their workshops. Apprentices lived with journeymen or both lived as part of the household of master craftsmen. And aristocratic households were even larger. They were based around a noble family but included as members of the household cooks, laundry women, stable hands, maids, and a number of other live-in servants. There was a market, money lending, merchants, and labor was even sometimes done in exchange for a wage. But production had not been taken over by the market, and turned into production for exchange. The basic production unit of society was the household. Home and work were usually the same place.

Medieval Europe was patriarchal. Male heads of households were in charge, and women had very limited property, inheritance, and other legal rights. Still, because production was centered in the household, women participated in productive activity. Aristocratic women were usually under the control of their husbands and fathers, sometimes married away for political purposes, but they also had a central role in managing the household and the servants. Wives and daughters of craftsmen were usually excluded from guilds, but it was assumed that they would take part in the trade practiced in their household (and sometimes wives took over the running of the trade if the husband died). Peasant women may not have done the hard labor in the fields, but they picked up the extra tasks that needed to be done--taking care of the vegetable or herb garden and the poultry, shearing the sheep, milking the cow or the goat, making butter, cheese or bread, brewing ale, making and mending clothes, and taking anything extra to market. Women's work filled in and backed up the productive activity in the household.

As the capitalist mode of production developed, all this changed. Things were increasingly made outside the home. Instead of peasant women using spinning wheels at home, or weavers using hand looms in the home-workshop, the process of making cloth was broken down into its different parts, each done by different weaving workers in a factory using mechanical looms--water powered, then steam powered. Production became more and more production for the growing market--production of value. The traditional class relations between peasants or servants and their lords, between apprentices, journeymen and master craftsmen were eroded as the market expanded. Productive activity was increasingly disentangled from other activities and the ability to work became everywhere a commodity. A new class relationship was created--the relationship between wage workers and capitalists. Wherever it was imposed, capitalism created these same relationships. Work separated itself from the rest of life in time and space. The people you ate dinner with were no longer the people you worked with, and the two were done in increasingly distant places.

By separating the workplace from the home, capitalism invented the commute. As property prices in newly industrialized cities climbed, workers were forced to walk further and further to get to work. Early company housing was one response to this. By buying up land around the factory and housing the workers there, workers could spend more time working and less time walking to work. As state-subsidized mass transit systems were created, streetcars and subways moved wage workers quickly from home to work and back. This reduced the need for employer housing and increased the distance between home and work. The mass-production of the private automobile pushed this even further.

For thousands of years, women in Western civilization had not had an equal place in society to men. A woman's place was in the home. So long as the basic units of production in society were households, though, women participated in production, and inequality was somewhat lessened. As more and more things were manufactured outside the home, the capitalist firm replaced the household as the basic unit of production. The household was hollowed out. A strict dividing line between work and housework developed and a new capitalist household began to form. To the extent that women were stuck at home and did not participate in wage labor or the running of businesses, they were increasingly isolated, unequal and cut off from public life.

The capitalist household is a unit of consumption. Commodities that are produced and bought elsewhere are taken home to be consumed together as a household. And the house itself is a commodity that is collectively consumed by the household. Housework may be individual, lonely, hard, tiring, but it is also direct. When meals are cooked for the family, they get from the people who make them to the people who need them without having to be exchanged. They have no value. Cooking, cleaning, washing, doing the laundry, are done for what they produce, not in order to create surplus value and profit. Serving a meal to house guests is like serving food to customers in a restaurant in only the most superficial way--the same way that knitting a pair of socks for a family member is like working in a sock factory operating computerized circular knitting machines. Housework is, by definition, unproductive under capitalism. It does not produce value, and no one profits off it.

Capitalism creates divisions between mental and manual work, between skilled and unskilled work, between agricultural, manufacturing and service work, between work and unwaged activities. These divisions of labor interact with all the other differences already existing in society, and different jobs get associated with different kinds of people, based on their sex, ethnicity, immigration status, etc... This creates attitudes of superiority and fear or resentment and anger dividing working people against each other. To the extent that being a woman means staying at home and being a specialist in unpaid activity, the rift between home and work is the basis for inequality. As more and more activities leave the household, being isolated in the house becomes more and more crippling and oppressive.

Like many of the ideals that circulate in capitalist society, "traditional" family values are constantly undermined by the circulation of value. Under capitalism, family life is expensive. The more children a common medieval family had, the more farm hands or apprentices there were to help out. A wage worker can't bring his children to work with him to cut down on the amount of work he has to do. To the modern worker, children and housewives are extra mouths to feed. The guys working three jobs and always looking for overtime are inevitably the ones with big families. Supporting a full-time housewife is a bit of a luxury, and the further down the income scale, the less possible it becomes. Low wages and long work hours can easily cause family life to disintegrate. And the poorest, homeless parents can sometimes have their children taken away by government social services on economic grounds alone. "Traditional" family values perpetuate inequality, but they are popular exactly because they are constantly under attack by capital.

The authority of the head of the household is no longer essential to the system. Now it's workers at work who need to be controlled. The rich woman and the poor women both may suffer from isolation and exclusion, but there is no sisterhood. Working class women have always had to work--often at low wage jobs and often dealing with the housework after work. For the rich, housework can be dumped on the hired help. What improves the situation of working women and the situation of businesswomen are not the same things. Only the most narrow-minded feminist could imagine that increasing the number of female CEOs and politicians is somehow a gain for working women. Having limited options to participate in exploitation is a completely different exclusion from being exploited for low pay. Margaret Thatcher was not a step forward for the working women of England.

The market has to keep expanding. Direct relationships have to be commodified. The housewife who used to bake bread, more likely buys it from a bakery. More expensive, canned beans replace dried beans that need to be cooked for hours. With restaurants, cooking is moved completely out of the house. What used to be housework is now someone's job. Productive work is work that creates surplus value for a boss--and there is constant pressure to make everything productive. People aren't born and don't die at home anymore except by accident. No one but eccentric hippies and religious fundamentalists educates their children at home anymore. The cases where work reenters the house, it is an invasion. The woman who assembles plastic toys at home for a piece wage while she watches her children, or the internet sex worker who sets up a camera in her bedroom are not doing housework.

To oppose value relationships from the point of view of the wholesome household is incoherent. The privacy, intimacy and isolation of the household only exist in contrast to the public, impersonal, contact of the market. When we begin to fight for our class interests, we come into conflict with both worlds.


Excerpted from:

THE HOUSING MONSTER

http://www.prole.info/thm.html

[American Dream]

Donatella Versace talks backstage before the Versace autumn/winter 2012 show in Milan



http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/galle ... 43&index=0

[American Dream]

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... ropaganda/

TORCHES OF FREEDOM: WOMEN AND SMOKING PROPAGANDA
by Wendy Christensen

Edward Bernays (1891-1995) is largely considered the founder of public relations (or “engineering consent,” as he called it) but is not known very well outside of the marketing and advertising fields. A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays was the first to theorize that people could be made to want things they don’t need by appealing to unconscious desires (to be free, to be successful etc.). Bernays, and propaganda theorist Walter Lippman, were members of the U.S. Government’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), which successfully convinced formally isolationist Americans to support entrance into World War I. While propaganda was commonly thought of as a negative way of manipulating the masses that should be avoided, Bernays believed that it was necessary for the functioning of a society, as otherwise people would be overwhelmed with too many choices. In his words:

Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.

[Source: Bernays, Propaganda, 1928, p. 52; available here.]

After WWI, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to encourage women to start smoking. While men smoked cigarettes, it was not publicly acceptable for women to smoke. Bernays staged a dramatic public display of women smoking during the Easter Day Parade in New York City. He then told the press to expect that women suffragists would light up “torches of freedom” during the parade to show they were equal to men. Like the “You’ve come a long way, baby” ads, this campaign commodified women’s progress and desire to be considered equal to men (relevant clip starts at 3:00):



“Cigarettes were a symbol of the penis and of male sexual power…Women would smoke because it was then that they’d have their own penises.”

Here are some of the news photographs of women smoking publicly during the Easter Parade:








[Photos via.]

The campaign was considered successful as sales to women increased afterward. Cigarette companies followed Bernays’s lead and created ad campaigns that targeted women. Lucky Brand Cigarettes capitalized on recent fashions for skinny women by telling women to “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”:









Marlboro, in stark contrast to the Marlboro Man ads we’re familiar with today, started the “Mild as May” campaign to encourage women to take up smoking cigarettes that were appropriately mild and easier to smoke:








Chesterfield, in a 1930s ad, argued that “women started to smoke…just about the time they began to vote”:



A later ad for Phillip Morris tells women to “Believe in yourself!”



Cigarette makers also worked to teach women how to smoke properly. Ads often depicted women in the act of smoking. Some companies, like Philip Morris, even held smoking demonstrations for women:



[Via.]

The article describes how a “pretty registered nurse” is touring the country to teach women proper smoking etiquette. The article also lists “men’s pet peeves” and “women’s pet peeves” for men and women smokers. (Full text after the jump below.)

Together, these efforts to conflate smoking with freedom and make smoking acceptable for women created a new set of consumers and reinforced Bernays’s argument that demand could be created.



(more…)

[American Dream]

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/50157

The Yes Men respond to WikiLeaks’ Stratfor email release

Monday, February 27, 2012


The Yes Men. Photo: Wikipedia

The Yes Men released the statement below on February 27.

* * *

WikiLeaks begins to publish today over five million e-mails obtained by Anonymous from “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The emails, which reveal everything from sinister spy tactics to an insider trading scheme with Goldman Sachs (see below), also include several discussions of the Yes Men and Bhopal activists.

(Bhopal activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India, that led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage.)

Many of the Bhopal-related emails, addressed from Stratfor to Dow and Union Carbide public relations directors, reveal concern that, in the lead-up to the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, the Bhopal issue might be expanded into an effective systemic critique of corporate rule, and speculate at length about why this hasn’t yet happened — providing a fascinating window onto what at least some corporate types fear most from activists.

“[Bhopal activists] have made a slight nod toward expanded activity, but never followed through on it — the idea of ‘other Bhopals’ that were the fault of Dow or others,” mused Joseph de Feo, who is listed in one online source as a “Briefer” for Stratfor.

“Maybe the Yes Men were the pinnacle. They made an argument in their way on their terms — that this is a corporate problem and a part of the a [sic] larger whole,” wrote Kathleen Morson, Stratfor’s Director of Policy Analysis.

“With less than a month to go [until the 25th anniversary], you'd think that the major players — especially Amnesty — would have branched out from Bhopal to make a broader set of issues. I don't see any evidence of it,” wrote Bart Mongoven, Stratfor’s Vice President, in November 2004. “If they can’t manage to use the 25th anniversary to broaden the issue, they probably won't be able to.”

Mongoven even speculates on coordination between various activist campaigns that had nothing to do with each other. “The Chevron campaign [in Ecuador]is remarkably similar [to the Dow campaign] in its unrealistic demand. Is it a follow up or an admission that the first thrust failed? Am I missing a node of activity or a major campaign that is to come? Has the Dow campaign been more successful than I think?”

It's almost as if Mongoven assumes the two campaigns were directed from the same central activist headquarters.

Just as Wall Street has at times let slip their fear of the Occupy Wall Street movement, these leaks seem to show that corporate power is most afraid of whatever reveals “the larger whole” and “broader issues,” i.e. whatever brings systemic criminal behavior to light. “Systemic critique could lead to policy changes that would challenge corporate power and profits in a really major way,” noted Joseph Huff-Hannon, recently-promoted Director of Policy Analysis for the Yes Lab.

Among the millions of other leaked Stratfor emails are some that reveal dubious financial practices, including an apparent insider trading scheme with Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz, who joined Stratfor's board of directors and invested “substantially” more than $4 million in the scheme, called StratCap.

“What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor’s intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments,” wrote Stratfor CEO George Friedman in September 2011.

StratCap was designed through a complex offshore share structure to appear legally independent, but Friedman assured Stratfor staff otherwise: “Do not think of StratCap as an outside organisation. It will be integral ... It will be useful to you... We are already working on mock portfolios and trades.” (StratCap has been due to launch in 2012, though that could now change.)

Other emails show Stratfor techniques of a truly creepy Spy vs. Spy sort: “[Y]ou have to take control of him. Control means financial, sexual or psychological control,” wrote CEO Friedman recently to an employee, Reva Bhalla, on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant providing information on Chavez’s cancer. (Stratfor’s “confidential intelligence services” clients include, besides Dow and Union Carbide, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines, the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.)

Perhaps most entertainingly of all, the email trove reveals that Stratfor's “Confederation Partners” — an unethical alliance between Stratfor and a number of mainstream journalists — are referred to informally within Stratfor as its “Confed Fuck House.”

(Another discovery: Coca Cola was spying on PETA. More such gems are sure to surface as operatives sift through the 5.5 million emails.)

A number of the remaining Yes Men-related emails take the form of reports on public appearances by the Yes Men, such as one that describes one audience comprised of “art students on class assignments and free entertainment.”

Another notes that “The Yes Men tweeted about the US Chamber of Commerce ‘plotting forged emails, documents to trick (AND smear) opponents,’” a reference to an apparent plot to discredit Chamber opponents using forged documents, as revealed when thousands of emails were recently leaked by Anonymous from cyber-security firm HB Gary.

Yet another discusses Alessio Rastani, the Wall Street traderwidely mistaken for Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum, who proclaimed, live on the BBC, that “governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world.”

“Rastani was right,” said the real Andy Bichlbaum five months later. “But it’s now very clear that it doesn’t have to be that way anymore.”

The Yes Men and representatives from the Bhopal Medical Appeal will join Julian Assange of Wikileaks at a press conference at noon today, Feb. 27, at the Frontline Club in London.

***


The Yes Men were answered for their very good work: