You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2016.
If they would only stick to leaves, life would be so much better.
It takes dedicated effort to remove these sorts of fiery speeches from the history of women. Oratory like this somehow doesn’t make it into the classrooms, or history lectures. So the lessons need to be discovered, theorized, and fought for in each generation of women making progress glacially slow. Yet we have helpful mnemonics for the British Monarchy, US presidents and Canadian PM’s that we teach to children. Yet nothing for the bold female speakers of the 60’s and 70’s who set their minds to one of the most important projects facing humankind – the dismantling of patriarchy.
Unless you seek information like this out, you won’t be told about it by your choice of news station, you most likely won’t hear it on the radio and I’m almost certain you wont get this in secondary school. The exclusion of feminist history in the mainstream is not an accidental omission, but a tactical choice.
– [Source:Notes from the Third Year]
Let’s work together on this one folks. We should be done this by now.
Did you want to get the gist of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s master work ‘Manufacturing Consent’ but not have to read that long, dryly informative tomb? Have I got the book for you. ‘Why are we the Good Guys?’ by David Cromwell runs on essentially the same thesis but is many more times engaging and yet at the same time, marginally less academically verbose than Manufacturing Consent. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire work and would like to share a pertinent excerpt on how media coverage perpetuates the destructive cycles (the financial meltdown of 2008 et cetera) we see in our society.
“All the media samples we’ve seen so far in this chapter are indicative of the narrow spectrum of permitted corporate and political opinion on the financial and economic crisis. Viewpoints are heavily biased toward the status quo, with only occasional fig leave of mild dissent. This spectrum of news reporting and commentary is systemically biased; it avoids scrutiny of an economic system that is both fundamentally flawed and stacked against the majority of humanity.
As Shutt notes, one of the most striking features of the ongoing crisis is: “the uniformly superficial nature of the analysis of its causes presented by mainstream observers, whether government officials, academics or business representatives. Thus it is commonly stated that the crisis was caused by a combination of imprudent investment by bankers and others […] and unduly lax official regulation and supervision of markets. Yet the obvious question begged by such explanations – of how or why such a dysfunctional climate came to be created – is never addressed in any serious fashion”. Shutt continued: ” The inescapable conclusion […] is that the crisis was the product of a conscious process of facilitating ever greater risk of massive systemic failure.”
With a few ruffled feathers here and there, Western leaders and their faithful retinue in the media and academia continue to deceive the public about the global economic crisis and its root causes; because power and profits demand it. Otherwise these elites run the serious risk of a huge slump in public confidence in the current system and even in what passes for democratic policies. As it turned out, the chair of the prestigious US law firm Sullivan & Cromwell was not far off in his prediction that ‘Wall Street, after getting billions of taxpayer dollars, will emerge from the financial crisis looking much the same as before the markets collapsed.’ Indeed it was strengthened, as explained by Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF: ‘Throughout the crisis the [US] government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here.’ Moreover, the ‘elite business interests … [who] played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse … are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive’ while ‘the government seems helpless, or unwilling to act against them.’ As Chomsky notes: this is ‘no surprise, at least to those who remember their Adam Smith,’ and adds, ‘The outcome was nicely captured by two adjacent front-page stores in the New York Times, headlined “$3.4 Billion Profit at Goldman Revives Gilded Pay Packages” and “In Recession, a Bleaker Path for Workers to Slog.”‘
-David Cromwell. Why Are We The Good Guys? pp 174 – 175
Cheery stuff I realize, but its good to know who is doing what to who. Perhaps during the next collapse we’ll hold the bastards accountable.
Wouldn’t it be nice if people, for once, didn’t decide to make money of the misery of others? (I know, I know. Capitalism would collapse the End Times would start, et cetera). One news story that caught my eye was the tomfoolery going on with some Immigration Consultants and their business of getting Syrian refugees to Canada.
“CBC News has learned about a troubling aspect of the drive to bring Syrians to Canada: professional immigration consultants, in partnership with some refugee sponsorship groups, are charging refugees thousands of dollars in arrangements that critics say are unethical and violate federal rules on sponsorship.
The immigration consultants have been targeting Syrians living in the Gulf states, many of whom are there on work permits and are able to earn a living. In that sense, they are potentially a more lucrative client base than those in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey.”
Well so far, not bad. I’m sure unethical people wouldn’t try to game the system to rich themselves based on the misery of others…
In the case of one such agency, information available online and documents obtained by CBC News reveal that the consultant is not only charging prospective refugees thousands of dollars to process their applications but also asking them to pay the full cost of their resettlement up front, which violates the financial guidelines of the Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program.
Whoops, there we go. The dark side of what humans are capable of has come front and centre once again. Would more people be left in trouble without these private companies working their magic? Would it be wrong to legislate them out of the picture?
I understand that the entrepreneurial spirit thrives in conditions such as these, but I think in the case of refugees we should prioritize their safety rather than the profits of these so called ‘Immigration Consultants’. Let’s close with what Jackie Swaisland has to say on the issue, as she frames the problem quite concisely:
“There are still people who are incredibly vulnerable. There are still people who don’t know what tomorrow holds for them, or they are in dire circumstances,” she said.”So, to sort of charge those individuals, even if they can technically afford to pay for it, a large fee for your services, I think that becomes unethical.”
Unethical, indeed.
[Source:cbc.ca]
As I have a headache instead of a pithy comment, we get a pithy picture instead. And really, with Star Wars and Game of Thrones stepping up, how could the christian magic book lose?
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…