Taking Stockman:

How Nixon, Reagan, Bush

and their GOP

Demolished the Economy

 

FlaglerLive | August 1, 2010

 

 

Horsemen of Stockman's apocalypse.

 

Back in 1981 David Stockman was the wonderkid of the Reagan administration–the director of the Office of Management and Budget who’d craft in actual budgets the trickle-down miracle Reagan had promised on the campaign trail: lower budgets, lower spending, higher tax revenue. But trickle-down economics was a wish, not a reality. It’s never worked. Lower taxes don’t generate more revenue. They generate deficits.

 

 Reagan knew it. So did Stockman. So did their guru, Friederich von Hayek. The deficits were intentional all along. They were edsigned to “starve the beast,” meaning intentionally cut revenue as a way of pressuring Congress to cut the New Deal programs Reagan wanted to demolish. “The plan,” Stockman told Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the time, ” was to have a strategic deficit that would give you an argument for cutting back the programs that weren’t desired. It got out of hand.”

A 1985 interview with von Hayek in the March 25, 1985 issue of Profil 13, the Austrian journal, was just as revealing. Von Hayek sat for the interview while wearing a set of cuff links Reagan had presented him as a gift. “I really believe Reagan is fundamentally a decent and honest man,” von Hayek told his interviewer. “His politics? When the government of the United States borrows a large part of the savings of the world, the consequence is that capital must become scarce and expensive in the whole world. That’s a problem.” And in reference to Stockman, von Hayek said: “You see, one of Reagan’s advisers told me why the president has permitted that to happen, which makes the matter partly excusable: Reagan thinks it is impossible to persuade Congress that expenditures must be reduced unless one creates deficits so large that absolutely everyone becomes convinced that no more money can be spent.” Thus, he went on, it was up to Reagan to “persuade Congress of the necessity of spending reductions by means of an immense deficit. Unfortunately, he has not succeeded!!!” Those three exclamation points, unusually effusive for an economist, are in the original.

Keep in mind: Hayek is speaking his disillusion with the GOP’s misapplication of his theories in 1985. To this day he remains a favored mask of budget-wreckers pretending to be fiscally conservative while pushing for more tax cuts. Those wreckers are at work in Congress today as they argue for an extension of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which were far larger than Reagan’s of 1981 and 1986 (in 1986, Reagan agreed to some tax increases, but mostly in the Social Security payroll tax, meaning on the middle and lower classes).

 

David Stockman

Stockman resigned from the Reagan administration in 1985, himself disillusioned. Today in The New York Times, he writes a damning piece that sums up Republican duplicity on budgets and fiscal responsibility going back to the Nixon administration. “IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians,” Stockman begins, “the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase. More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy.”

In a piece entitled “Four Deformations of the Apocalypse,” a clever play on the biblical image of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Stockman outlines four major Republican breaks with discipline that set the stage, then compounded, American bankruptcy, beginning with Milton Friedman convincing Nixon to  default “on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. Now, since we have lived beyond our means as a nation for nearly 40 years, our cumulative current-account deficit — the combined shortfall on our trade in goods, services and income — has reached nearly $8 trillion. That’s borrowed prosperity on an epic scale.”

Friedman, a Nobel laureate also worshiped like von Hayek by free-marketeers, , had promised Nixon that markets would do what governments couldn’t–help deficits self-correct. They never did. “In fact,” Stockman writes, “since chronic current-account deficits result from a nation spending more than it earns, stringent domestic belt-tightening is the only cure. When the dollar was tied to fixed exchange rates, politicians were willing to administer the needed castor oil, because the alternative was to make up for the trade shortfall by paying out reserves, and this would cause immediate economic pain — from high interest rates, for example. But now there is no discipline, only global monetary chaos as foreign central banks run their own printing presses at ever faster speeds to sop up the tidal wave of dollars coming from the Federal Reserve.”

 

 

And that was before the great recession.

The second change was America’s shrugging off its public debt, which was just 40 percent of the size of the economy in 1970 (or $425 billion). It was more than 25 times that size by the time the second Bush left office, with the consequences of his tax-cutting policies and an even larger embrace of “the welfare state and the warfare state” not yet accounted for. Obama had his share of considerable deficit spending, but nowhere near the cumulative wrecks of his predecessors, who had the benefits of growing economies to bank on as Obama does not. “This debt explosion,” Stockman writes, “has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.”

By 2009, the tax-cutting ideology had reduced federal revenues to 15 percent of the size of the economy, the lowest level since the 1940s. “Then, after rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures, George W. Bush surrendered on domestic spending cuts, too — signing into law $420 billion in non-defense appropriations, a 65 percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier. Republicans thus joined the Democrats in a shameless embrace of a free-lunch fiscal policy.”

That’s  before accounting for the third major change–the deregulation of financial markets and government’s complete abandonment of oversight for the largest ponzi-scheming institutions in the nation’s (and the world’s) history–on taxpayers’ backs. “As a result,” Stockman writes, “the combined assets of conventional banks and the so-called shadow banking system (including investment banks and finance companies) grew from a mere $500 billion in 1970 to $30 trillion by September 2008. But the trillion-dollar conglomerates that inhabit this new financial world are not free enterprises. They are rather wards of the state, extracting billions from the economy with a lot of pointless speculation in stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives. They could never have survived, much less thrived, if their deposits had not been government-guaranteed and if they hadn’t been able to obtain virtually free money from the Fed’s discount window to cover their bad bets.”

Fourth destructive change, and the one most familiar to those who lengthen unemployment lines these days: the off-shoring of high-value jobs in trades, transportation, technology and professions, a sector that’s shrunk from 77 million jobs to 68 million jobs. “The only reason we have not experienced a severe reduction in nonfarm payrolls since 2000,” Stockman writes, “is that there has been a gain in low-paying, often part-time positions in places like bars, hotels and nursing homes.” That’s the Floridanization of the American economy.

“It is not surprising, then,” Stockman concludes, “that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1 percent of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90 percent — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12 percent. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.”

And still, Republicans in Congress and across the country are staking their fortunes on more tax cuts, including–and especially–for the richest. That’s sacrifice. That’s fiscal responsibility. They know they have a winning platform because their voters want the free money, too. That’s the American economy of the past 40 years, an economy living so far beyond its means that it wouldn’t recognize a day of reckoning if it was baking it brighter and hotter than Florida’s noonday sun.

Pierre Tristam is FlaglerLive’s editor. Reach him by email here.

__________________________

 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Who Watts Why

By Kim Levin Posted 08/16/12

The untold history of the Black Arts Movement

in Los Angeles

David Hammons, Black Mohair Spirit, 1971, body print and mixed media. Hammons’s groundbreaking work resonated far beyond L.A.

COURTESY TILTON GALLERY, NEW YORK

 

While Los Angeles was summing up its own local history with “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980,” this hefty tome, L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints, countered with an alternate view of the city’s art, showing it as tough, profound, and not the least bit dated. This compelling book about the city’s Black Arts Movement fills an astounding gap. The nine separate but overlapping essays and excerpts from oral histories —by artists, art historians, curators, and moonlighting artists like Dale and Alonzo Davis (who founded the multicultural Brockman Gallery in 1967) and Greg Pitts (a.k.a. Angaza Het-Heru), who offers a linguistic taste of the 1960s and ’70s—plus wonderful photographic documentation, add up to a revision of a time and place we thought we knew. Edited by Connie Rogers Tilton and Lindsay Charlwood, the texts reveal stunning evidence of unknown or forgotten African American artists in Los Angeles at the time, who were doing groundbreaking assemblage work that shifted the course of history, and not only in L.A.

Duchamp and Schwitters had their first U.S. museum retrospectives in L.A., thanks to Walter Hopps; so did Joseph Cornell. Warhol had his first-ever solo there. These shows obviously influenced emerging black artists. As John Outterbridge points out, “We just had a network of spies that were on staff” doing security and installation work. Together, these essays provide a context for David Hammons’s early body prints and “Spade” series (1971–79) as well as for Outterbridge’s “Rag Man” series (1970), Mel Edwards’s “Lynch Fragments,” Betye Saar’s rebel “Jemimas,” and Senga Nengudi’s pantyhose-and-sand sculpture—all strategies for the re-representation of blackness.

Southern California art may have seemed to veer from Light and Space and Finish Fetish sculpture (the surfer variant of Minimalism) to the Zen-inflected, Hollywood stuntman–infected Conceptualism of Baldessari, Ruscha, Burden, and Nauman. But this book provides indisputable grounds for a gritty, more engaged, and influential history of that moment. The Black Arts Movement was provoked by what art historian Kellie Jones describes here as “a militant intellectual culture” of black power and pride—a separatist, vernacular, confrontational, performative, and populist art made by blacks for blacks, to be understood not by the art world but by “the street.” It was largely provoked by the Watts riots of 1965, which French theorist Guy Debord called “a potlatch of destruction” and “a rebellion against the commodity.” Outterbridge describes it less metaphorically: black artists, he says, “would be working art processes out of the debris of the revolt itself.” A central figure was Noah Purifoy, former modernist furniture designer and first director of the Watts Towers Arts Center. He collected three tons of debris from the Watts riots and turned it into “66 Signs of Neon,” a 1966 exhibition in a junior-high-school gym that took its name from the melted neon signs he’d recycled.

Who knew that Thomas Pynchon, who saw the show, would write in amazement about the art? Or that Purifoy, who had given away all his possessions, would then reinstall “66 Signs of Neon” in the Annual Los Angeles Home Show, that year, as a calculated critique? Ideas about readymades and assemblage had ricocheted from Europe to L.A., and then back to Paris. And, though Joseph Beuys was then barely known out West, these African American artists seemed to manifest his vision of art as social practice. But they did it independently, before the fact.

Kim Levin is an independent art critic and curator.

Copyright 2012, ARTnews LLC, 48 West 38th St 9th FL NY NY 10018. All rights reserved.

Mon Sep 03, 2012

 

A Labor Day tribute

to work and workers 

 

by Denise Oliver Velez for Daily Kos

Each year on Labor Day, I have a soundtrack in my head. Songs about working people, and labor, and unions. Many of the images that accompany that soundtrack are from WPA Federal Art Project murals that fascinated me as a child. I grew up listening to a lot of folk music, and songs that celebrated struggle. The man whose voice I can still hear is Paul Robeson. So I'll open with his version of Joe Hill.  

I hear echoes of Joe Hill's music in John Lennon's Working Class Hero.

Though for many, labor day weekend means the last gasp of summer, or a time to cash in on sales, for me it will always be about work—whether in the fields, or factories, on chain gangs or in cafeterias and offices.  

So join me today in celebrating work and workers, and feel free to post your favorite songs that epitomize this day for you.

Alert: This post will be very video heavy. Most will be below the fold.

I first saw the artwork of Charles Henry Alston at Harlem Hospital, in New York City.

Labor Day, 1942, by Charles Henry Alston, the first African American supervisor for the WPA Federal Art Project

Alston painted murals throughout Harlem, including depression-era murals as part of the WPA. One of his best-known murals was created by Alston and other Harlem artists for the Harlem Hospital Center. Despite some opposition to the murals because of the numbers of African-Americans prominent in the design sketches, the project moved forward with the financial support of Louis T. Wright, the first African-American physician to serve on the hospital's staff, and community support. Artists who worked on the murals included Georgette Seabrooke, Vertis Hayes, Alfred Crimi, Beauford Delaney, and photographer Morgan Smith.

Labor history mural, painted by Kari Sandhaas. Bloomington, Illinois

"Talking Union" opens with lyrics most of us can relate to.

If you want higher wages, let me tell you what to do;
You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you;
You got to build you a union, got to make it strong,
But if you all stick together, now, ‘twont he long.
You'll get shorter hours,
Better working conditions.
Vacations with pay,
Take your kids to the seashore.

It ain’t quite this simple, so I better explain
Just why you got to ride on the union train;
‘Cause if you wait for the boss to raise your pay,
We’ll all be waiting till Judgment Day;
We’ll all be buried - gone to Heaven -
Saint Peter’ll be the straw boss then.

No song-list on unions and worker movements would be complete without Woody Guthrie. Here are Pete Seeger, and Woody's son Arlo Guthrie talking about, and singing Union Maid.

We should all remember, that joining a union was not merely a matter of going to a union hall and paying dues.  It could mean being beaten, jailed or losing your life.

I think of "Which Side Are You On?" by Florence Reece.

Reece was the wife of Sam Reece, a union organizer for the United Mine Workers in Harlan County, Kentucky. In 1931, the miners of that region were locked in a bitter and violent struggle with the mine owners called the Harlan County War. In an attempt to intimidate the Reece family, Sheriff J. H. Blair and his men (hired by the mining company) illegally entered their family home in search of Sam Reece. Sam had been warned in advance and escaped, but Florence and their children were terrorized in his place. That night, after the men had gone, Florence wrote the lyrics to "Which Side Are You On?" on a calendar that hung in the kitchen of her home.

Here's Natalie Merchant's version:

 

 

I also like Rebel Diaz rapping their version, recorded during the Bush years.

Laborers the U.S. didn't always get paid.  Many were enslaved. After the emancipation of slaves, a new form of slavery arose- the chain gang.

Oscar Brown Jr. and Sam Cooke both have versions.

The blues, and country music in the US have so many songs about work, and workers it would be impossible to try to list them. As a kid, I remember hearing "Sixteen tons" on the radio, and thinking about coal mines, and coal miners.

"Sixteen Tons" is a song about the life of a coal miner, first recorded in 1946 by American country singer Merle Travis and released on his box set album Folk Songs of the Hills the following year. A 1955 version recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford reached number one in the Billboard charts.

Loretta Lynn, Sheryl Crow and Miranda Lambert recently released a new version of Lynn's Coal Miner's Daughter.

Mississippi John Hurt sings one of my favorite versions of songs about John Henry.

The legend of John Henry has been compared to that of other American "Big Men", such as Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill. John Henry's heroism is associated with several elements: his strength and grit as a working-class common man, his status as a hero to African American laborers, and his allegorical depiction of "the tragedy of man versus machine" and other aspects of modernization.

There are many versions of John Henry's story. In almost all versions of the story, John Henry is a black man of exceptional physical gifts, a former slave, possibly born in Tennessee. Henry becomes the greatest "steel-driver" in the mid-nineteenth-century push to expand railroads from the East Coast of the United States, across and through the mountains, to the frontier West. However, the owner of the railroad buys a steam-powered hammer to do the work of his mostly black steel-driving crew. To save his job and the jobs of his men, John Henry challenges the owner to a contest: Henry will race the steam-powered hammer.

 

Builders, lithograph by Harry Sternberg, WPA

From railroad worker's swinging hammers, the music moved on to steel workers, and Billy Joel's anthem "Allentown".

Growing up during the 50's, I saw street peddlers, knife grinders, and fruit wagons in the streets of Brooklyn and when we lived down south.

 

 

Often, when I eat a banana, I hear Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat Song in my head, reminding me of the labor it takes to put fruit on my table.

Both of my grandmother's were domestics. My white grandmother worked as a laundress, and my black grandmother worked as a maid, and a cook.

Tuesday-Othelia by Meyer Wolfe

I've worked in quite a few jobs that were traditionally "women's work", including waiting tables. The advent of the women's movement saw the rise of musical anthem's about women and work. I have two favorites, by Dolly Parton and Donna Summer.

 

 

 

I'll add this ode to waitressing, "Nickled and Dimed" from the movie “The American Ruling Class”.

I remember, growing up during the days of "doo-wop", R&B, and early rock and roll, songs about finding and getting jobs.

 

Some history, about why we celebrate in September.

In 1882, Matthew Maguire, a machinist, first proposed the holiday while serving as secretary of the CLU (Central Labor Union) of New York. Others argue that it was first proposed by Peter J. McGuire of the American Federation of Labor in May 1882, after witnessing the annual labor festival held in Toronto, Canada.

Oregon was the first state to make it a holiday in 1887. By the time it became a federal holiday in 1894, thirty states officially celebrated Labor Day. Following the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland reconciled with Reyes, leader of the labor movement. Fearing further conflict, the United States Congress unanimously voted to approve rush legislation that made Labor Day a national holiday; Cleveland signed it into law a mere six days after the end of the strike. The September date originally chosen by the CLU of New York and observed by many of the nation's trade unions for the past several years was selected rather than the more widespread International Workers' Day because Cleveland was concerned that observance of the latter would be associated with the nascent Communist, Syndicalist and Anarchist movements that, though distinct from one another, had rallied to commemorate the Haymarket Affair in International Workers' Day. All U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and the territories have made it a statutory holiday.

Even though this is our US labor day, I want to close with an international song, Plegaria a un labrador (Prayer to a Worker) by Victor Jara.

I could sit here all day listing and posting songs, but will stop. Time to go outside and check the grill. Thank you for listening, and when I come back in, I am looking forward to hearing what's on your Labor Day music list.

Originally posted to Daily Kos on Mon Sep 03, 2012 at 07:45 AM PDT.

Also republished by J Town, In Support of Labor and Unions, Rebel Songwriters, Barriers and Bridges, and DKOMA.

Yasiin Bey (FKA Mos Def)

x Mannie Fresh

hit the studio to create

“OMFGOD”

[Video]

September 1, 2012

I love the way you can never EVER predict the next move the artist formerly known as Mos Def will make musically.

While in his new stomping grounds in New Orleans, the enigmatic Brooklyn, New York born emcee now known as Yasiin Bey hit the studio with the production legend Mannie Fresh to create something brand new in the form of “OMFGOD”.

Although this isn’t 100% out of the blue, as Black Dante has always professed love for creator of the original Cash Money sound’s beats, it’s definitely a pleasant surprise to see them actually make magic. Take a peek at the creative process below.

Stay locked for the finished song and music video.

SoulCulture TV Bonus: Mannie Fresh on Kanye’s ‘Cruel Summer’, Lil Wayne’s work ethic, Hip Hop Diversity and More

 

Hip-hop artist Mia X

weaves family recipes

and personal tales

into cookbook

Published: Sunday, September 02, 2012

By Alison Fensterstock, The Times-Picayune 

NOLA.com

New Orleans rapper Mia X’s 61,000-odd Twitter followers may have signed up for her feed because of her status as a bona fide American rap icon — but many check it frequently for a different sort of “feed.”

Matthew Hinton/The Times-PicayuneNew Orleans born Hip-Hop artist Mia Young, aka Mia X, has released an excerpt from her soon-to-be-released memoir and cookbook, 'Things My Grandma Told Me, Things My Grandma Showed Me.'  

The MC, raised Mia Young in New Orleans’ 7th Ward, released several top-selling albums in the ’90’s for the No Limit label notable for her top-notch lyrics and straight-talking lady-gangsta attitude.

(Not for nothing, as a teen she also gave New Orleans its first straight-up feminist bounce classic, “Da Payback.”)

In 2009 and 2010, Mia X was a co-owner of the now-shuttered St. Bernard Avenue restaurant, True Friends, which served up soul food often cooked by the rapper herself. And on Twitter, at her request during Sunday dinner times, hundreds of followers use her #TeamWhipDemPots hashtag to share what’s on their own stoves.

For at least a year, buzz has been building for the rapper’s upcoming memoir and cookbook, “Things My Grandma Told Me, Things My Grandma Showed Me,” which will weave her family recipes into a narrative of her own fascinating life; masking as a Yellow Pocahontas Mardi Gras Indian, signing with No Limit Records as a teenager, and rebelling against, learning from and cooking with the strong women in her family.

Recently, Allhiphop.com posted the first extensive excerpt from the forthcoming book, and though no release date is yet available, other sites that cover the urban music scene are ramping up promotion. According to the online magazine Stacks, the cookbook will also be accompanied by a CD and DVD.

Check out this meaty excerpt that recounts a heart-to-heart with the rapper’s mamaw over a stove full of cabbage, smothered potatoes, chicken and red beans and rice.

For recipe suggestions from Mia X, check the “favorites” section of her Twitter feed @TheRealMiaX, or the hashtag #TeamWhipDemPots.

 

__________________________

BOOK TEASER:

Mia X’s “Things My Grandma

Told Me, Things

My Grandma Showed Me”

The 2012 Caketrain

Chapbook Competition

is now open to entries

in the fiction genre.

Deadline

October 1, 2012

Final Judge

Michael Kimball

Awards

publication, $250, and 25 contributor copies to winner

publication and 25 contributor copies to runner-up

Eligibility

This competition is open to English language fiction manuscripts (both novellas and collections of shorter works are acceptable). While previously-published stand-alone pieces or excerpts may be included in a manuscript, the manuscript as a whole must be an unpublished work. Translations and previously self-published collections are ineligible. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable; please note, however, that reading fees are non-refundable, and Caketrain is to be notified as soon as possible if a manuscript is accepted elsewhere. Manuscript revisions will not be considered during the reading period. Please do not include cover artwork or photographs with your submission. The author must not have a close personal or professional relationship with Michael Kimball or any Caketrain Journal and Press staff member; if an author is unsure whether this policy applies to him or her, Caketrain will gladly address inquiries.

Reading Fee

Entrants may choose between two reading fee amounts: either $15 for consideration or $20 for consideration and a copy of the winning book upon its release in May 2013. (The $20 option is available to domestic U.S. entrants only.)

Guidelines (for print submissions)

Print entries must be postmarked no later than October 1, 2012. Please submit 40 to 80 pages of typed fiction (approximately 12,000 to 26,000 words). Include page numbers, table of contents and, if applicable, an acknowledgments page. Submissions should include two cover pages: one with the manuscript’s title, the other with the title, author’s name, postal address, and email address. The author’s name should not appear anywhere else in the manuscript. Print manuscripts will be recycled at competition conclusion. Please submit manuscripts through the United States Postal Service. A reading fee of either $15 or $20 (entrant’s choice, as detailed above) must accompany each submission, made payable to Caketrain Journal and Press. Submissions may include an SASE for notification of competition results. Results will also be announced via email and posted at www.caketrain.org in January 2013. Submit print entries to Caketrain Journal and Press, Box 82588, Pittsburgh, PA 15218.

Guidelines (for Electronic Submissions)

Electronic entries must be received no later than October 1, 2012. Please submit 40 to 80 pages of typed fiction (approximately 12,000 to 26,000 words) as an email attachment in either DOC, PDF, or RTF format. Include page numbers, table of contents, and, if applicable, an acknowledgments page. Submissions should include two cover pages as the first two pages of the attached document: one with the manuscript’s title, the other with the title, author’s name, address, and email address. The author’s name should not appear anywhere else in the manuscript. Once the manuscript has been sent, the reading fee of either $15 or $20 (entrant’s choice, as detailed above) can be paid by credit card through Paypal by using the following links: $15 reading fee, $20 reading fee with copy of winner. A reply email will be sent once the manuscript is downloaded and verified intact. Results will be announced via email and posted at www.caketrain.org in January 2013. Submit electronic entries to editors@caketrain.org.

Third Edition of the International

Flash Fiction Competition

 

“Museum of Words”

First Prize: $ 20,000 Second, Third and Fourth Prizes: $ 1,000

 

The Third Edition of the International Award for “Museum of Words” Microfiction has opened. Writers from anywhere in the world are welcome to participate. Entries can be written in written in any of the following languages: Hebrew, English, Arabic, or Spanish.

 

Word limit: 100 words (maximum). Entries must be submitted on or before 23 November, 2012 via any of the Foundation’s websites: www.fundacioncesaregidoserrano.com or www.museodelapalabra.com. Submissions must be original and unpublished flash fiction works.

 

First prize winner will be awarded the sum of $ 20,000 and $ 1,000 will be awarded to three runners up

Deadline: November 23^rd, 2012 GMT+1, on the International Day of Words as a Bond of Humankind.

 The official advert says, “As one of the objectives of the Foundation is to value the ability that dialogue and words has to unite peoples, the slogan of this contest edition will be “Words and freedom”.  

 

The list of finalist’s titles will be published on the website of the Fundación César Egido Serrano. Results will be publicized in 2013.

 

Learning How to Dance

in the Rain

By Dr. Andre M. Perry

The recovery phase of Gulf Coast hurricanes means more than cleaning up debris caused by intense winds and torrential downpours. Recovery also means addressing insistent questions of “why do you choose to live in New Orleans?” While askers obviously have not thought deeply about this question, I do think it’s philosophical in nature. So, I offer a philosophical response with special considerations for lukewarm transplants, newbies and temporary residents who have not embraced the idea of being New Orleanian.

Living is less a question of where than how. I make a plot in New Orleans because living with storms is a way of being that I trust leads to peace. Being New Orleanian means actively deciding to live with the inevitable. I’ve reached this conclusion because the psychological concept of denial never worked well for me (or for anyone else for that matter). When one accepts the idea that storms are inevitable, a more operative and important question I wish skeptics would ask is “how do you prepare?”

Whether its hurricanes, divorce, getting fired or death, storms leave with much less fan fare than their anticipated arrivals. Life is horribly anticlimactic. Most storms come and go like Isaac. Yes, there are days-long power outages, but you struggle through it. Troubled times are eventually replaced by joyful ones.

Living with the good and the bad is about acceptance. It’s about learning how to ride out a storm. The day before Isaac’s landfall, my friend in D.C. asked, “Why don’t you leave?” I replied, “If another storm comes next week and the week after, do you leave again and again?” The social and fiscal costs are clearly impractical. Likewise with the storms in our lives, do we pack up and leave every time there’s trouble?

Certainly, there are events when no amount of personal preparation will do. Evacuation is often necessary. However while it was the anniversary of the U.S. worst natural disaster, Isaac was not Katrina. We shouldn’t equate all hurricanes to Katrina, whose devastation should have been avoided. Her disaster revealed our policy and social inadequacies. Bad education, housing and levee systems hurt us more than Katrina.

In the hours before Hurricane Isaac’s landfall, I didn’t ask myself “why am I here” because my city and family were better prepared. In fact, my day of preparation ended with a nighttime hurricane party. After a day of securing yard stuff, filling gas tanks, and completing other practical chores, my wife and I went to Irvin Mayfield’s I-Club. You know it’s a hurricane party when Soledad Obrien, Anderson Cooper and Dee Dee Bridgewater are watching the band take shots a day before landfall.

But that’s what we do in New Orleans. We’ve learned how to accept and prepare for the inevitable challenges of life. One of my favorite sayings is, “Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass; It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.” That’s what it means to be New Orleanian. So when asked, why do you live in New Orleans, share that learning to live with the inevitable is a lot more fun than denying it exists.

__________________________

Katrina Pain Index 2012:

7 Years After

Tue, 08/28/2012

 

by Bill Quigley and Davida Finger

 

Racists and land-grabbers were celebrating the inundation of New Orleans even before the dead had been counted. A “new” New Orleans, they predicted, would rise out of the floodwaters. Seven years later, it is a city of excruciating pain – as indexed by the authors.

 

Katrina Pain Index 2012: 7 Years After

“One of every seven black men is in prison, on parole or on probation.”

 

1 Rank of New Orleans in fastest growing US cities between 2010 and 2011. Source: Census Bureau.

 

1 Rank of New Orleans, Louisiana in world prison rate. Louisiana imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of the other 50 states. Louisiana rate is five times higher than Iran, 13 times higher than China and 20 times Germany. In Louisiana, one in 86 adults is in prison. In New Orleans, one in 14 black men is behind bars. In New Orleans, one of every seven black men is in prison, on parole or on probation. Source: Times-Picayune.

 

2 Rank of New Orleans in rate of homelessness among US cities. Source: 2012 Report of National Alliance to End Homelessness.

 

2 Rank of New Orleans in highest income inequality for cities of over 10,000 Source: Census.

 

3 Days a week the New Orleans daily paper, the Times-Picayune, will start publishing and delivering the paper this fall and switch to internet only on other days. (See 44 below). Source: The Times-Picayune.

 

10 Rate that New Orleans murders occur compared to US average. According to FBI reports, the national average is 5 murders per 100,000. The Louisiana average is 12 per 100,000. New Orleans reported 175 murders last year or 50 murders per 100,000 residents. Source: WWL TV.

 

13 Rank of New Orleans in FBI overall crime rate rankings. Source: Congressional Quarterly.

 

15 Number of police officer-involved shootings in New Orleans so far in 2012. In all of 2011 there were 16. Source: Independent Police Monitor.

 

21 Percent of all residential addresses in New Orleans that are abandoned or blighted. There were 35,700 abandoned or blighted homes and empty lots in New Orleans (21% of all residential addresses), a reduction from 43,755 in 2010 (when it was 34% of all addresses). Compare to Detroit (24%), Cleveland (19%), and Baltimore (14%). Source: Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC).

 

27 Percent of people in New Orleans live in poverty. The national rate is 15%. Among African American families the rate is 30% and for white families it is 8%. Source: Corporation for Enterprise Development (CEFD) and Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC) Assets & Opportunity Profile: New Orleans (August 2012).

 

“50 murders per 100,000 residents.”

 

33 Percent of low income mothers in New Orleans study who were still suffering Post Traumatic Stress symptoms five years after Katrina. Source: Princeton University Study.

 

34 Bus routes in New Orleans now. There were 89 before Katrina. Source: RTA data.

 

37 Percent of New Orleans families that are “asset poor” or lack enough assets to survive for three months without income. The rate is 50% for black households, 40% for Latino household, 24% for Asian household and 22% for white households. Source: Corporation for Enterprise Development (CEFD) and Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC) Assets & Opportunity Profile: New Orleans (August 2012

 

40 Percent of poor adults in New Orleans region that work. One quarter of these people work full-time and still remain poor. Source: GNOCDC.

 

42 Percent of the children in New Orleans who live in poverty. The rate for black children is 65 percent compared to less than 1 percent for whites. Source: Census.

 

44 Rank of Louisiana among the 50 states in broadband internet access. New Orleans has 40 to 60 percent access. Source: The Lens.

 

60 Percent of New Orleans which is African American. Before Katrina the number was 67. Source: GNOCDC.

 

60 Percent of renters in New Orleans are paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities, up from 51 percent in 2004. Source: GNOCDC.

 

68 Percent of public school children in New Orleans who attend schools that pass state standards. In 2003-2004 it was 28 percent. Source: GNOCDC.

 

75 Percent of public school students in New Orleans who are enrolled in charter schools. Source: Wall Street Journal. This is the highest percentage in the US by far, with District of Columbia coming in second at 39 percent. Sources: Wall Street Journal and National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

 

76 Number of homes rebuilt by Make It Right Foundation. Source: New York Times.

 

123,934 Fewer people in New Orleans now than in 2000. The Census reported the 2011 population of New Orleans source as 360,740. The 2000 population was 484,674. Source: Census.

 

Bill and Davida teach at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. A version of this article with complete sources is available. The authors give special thanks to Allison Plyer of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. You can reach Bill at quigley77@gmail.com

>via: http://blackagendareport.com/content/katrina-pain-index-2012-7-years-after

__________________________

 

Melissa Harris-Perry's

New Home Destroyed

By Hurricane Isaac

(VIDEO)

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Posted: 08/29/2012

The Huffington Post  |  By Rebecca Shapiro 

Hours after Hurricane Isaac hammered its way through New Orleans on the seven-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Melissa Harris-Perry tweeted that her new home had been destroyed by the storm.

Harris-Perry and her husband closed on the purchase of what one could fondly describe as a "fixer-upper" (the house lacked all four walls) just last month. She excitedly announced that she and her family planned to restore the New Orleans property that was destroyed and abandoned during Katrina.

On her Sunday MSNBC show, Harris-Perry acknowledged the anniversary of Katrina by giving viewers a tour of what she called her "extreme home makeover." Harris-Perry described the ripped-apart home as a safety concern and the "site of crime" in the neighborhood.

"To try to address that, we have purchased this house with the goal of completely renovating it, bringing it back to life, and contributing ultimately to the safety and security of this neighborhood," she said. "For me, this house is representative of New Orleans and what we are facing since [Katrina]." She later called the property "just a physical thing" but "also a symbol of hope."

On Wednesday, Harris-Perry tweeted a photograph of the damage done by Isaac. A substantial portion of the house was destroyed. She wrote that she was "feeling sad," but that everyone was safe. "House was vacant except for my dreams," she wrote.

PHOTO: 

>via: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/29/melissa-harris-perry-new-home-hurric...

 

Friday, August 31, 2012

South Africa's Great

Advertising [Creative] Divide

 

Over @ the Daily Maverick, Mandy de Waal has a much discussed piece about South Africa’s extremely white advertising industry, and why she thinks it continues as "a colonial enclave where racial polarisation is rife and the best profits are being creamed by a handful of foreign-owned advertising companies." But it is the quote from the Association of Black Communications Practitioners' spokesperson, Taelo Immanuel, that sets up the video clip below:

 For the most part, Immanuel explained, black creatives have to deal with white creative directors who just can’t get where they’re coming from. “I’ve been a creative director at a big agency. I was at TBWA,” said Immanuel, adding that most of his peers echo his sentiments about this “creative divide”. “There’s a white creative director and a black team, and when they try and talk to each other there’s that chasm because of their respective upbringing. The references are vastly different. As a result there’s a cult of viewing life in an American way through hip hop, movies and music videos,” said Immanuel, who maintained that because of this the advertising mirror that reflects black culture back to South Africans is warped. What we’re seeing isn’t a true reflection of real South African life, but a perversion of its peoples and culture. “In terms of advertising work that speaks to your everyday black South African—say, for instance, my own parents—it is very difficult to find creative work like that. You just don’t get work that has real insight into the South African condition. Instead agencies and brands go to film, and there are black people singing and dancing and they slap in whatever product they want to sell,” said Immanuel. 

One of those American references for white South Africans Immanuel was referring to above was the Cosby Show. Watch the first 3 mins of the 2009 interview with South African director Gavin Hood to get an idea of how huge, for white South Africans, the Huxtables were and the gratitude owed to Bill Cosby.

 

 

 

__________________________

South Africa's

great advertising divide

Mandy de Waal

Mandy de Waal is a writer who reports on technology, corruption, science, the media and whatever else she finds interesting. She loves small stories and human narratives, and dislikes persistent evangelists, bad poetry and the insane logic that currently passes for political rhetoric. Back in journalism after spending time in the corridors of corporate greed, de Waal has written for Mail & Guardian, Noseweek, City Press, Rapport, MoneyWeb, Brandchannel (New York) and a number of other good titles. She now writes for The Daily Maverick because it’s the smart thing to do.

•  MANDY DE WAAL
•  SOUTH AFRICA 
•  
•  
•  
• 
• 16 AUGUST 2012 00:43 (SOUTH AFRICA)

While the Association for Communication and Advertising is doing its best to convince government and South Africa that the local advertising landscape is transformed, the Association of Black Communications Practitioners claims there’s a whole lot that’s rotten in the state of adland. MANDY DE WAAL investigates.

South Africa’s advertising industry is a colonial enclave where racial polarisation is rife and the best profits are being creamed by a handful of foreign-owned advertising companies. That’s the view of Taelo Immanuel, a former agency creative director and self-styled “moral activist” lobbying government to promote black advancement in the marketing sector.

Immanuel is not alone. He’s part of the Association of Black Communications Practitioners (ABCP), a group that’s lobbying to get government to look at the “real” state of advertising. It’s a landscape the black independents said is dominated by multinationals that are sending profits offshore while not advancing local empowerment.

The ABCP has already petitioned the DTI and Competition Commission without success. The association lobbies for the advancement of black people in the marketing sector in order to promote a more equitable and competitive climate in the SA ad industry. Its aim is to keep profits at home, stimulate true job creation and grow the local economy.

The association’s next step is lobbying Jabu Mabuza of Business Unity South Africa (Busa) and Malusi Gigaba, Minister of Public Enterprises. In open letters to both, Immanuel wrote that SA’s big advertising business is going to four foreign-owned marketing multinationals.

The big four are WPP (UK), Omnicom (USA), Publicis (France) and Interpublic (USA), which Immanuel said own all the multinational agencies represented locally. “At face value, our industry appears to embrace competition but beneath the surface it is only four players passing accounts amongst themselves through their multinational representatives,” he said.

Immanuel maintained that in this environment, instead of aiding smaller black players, the BBBEE Act has become something of an albatross. “Instead of aiding smaller black players to enter the game it acts as an insurmountable barrier to entry and empowers multinationals to dominate the local industry landscape.” Immanuel admitted that black equity partners on multinational boards guarantee more profits, but pointed out that the lion’s share of these revenues is shipped offshore.

“Local participation is very low in our industry. These four media groups bleed about 70% of local industry profits overseas and only a small percentage stays at home, benefiting only a few individuals,” he declared, adding that the Big Four get their revenue from home-grown brands like MTN, Vodacom, Tiger Brands, Famous Brands, SABMiller, Pick ‘n Pay and Checkers.

The Association for Communication and Advertising (ACA) has hit back at Immanuel, saying the industry is in fact transformed. The ACA said a charter for the sector’s transformation has been gazetted and the process to have the Marketing, Advertising and Communication South Africa Charter written into law is well underway.

“Among the targets set out for the sector was a target for black management of 30% by 2009 and 50% by 2016. Employment equity for black employees was to reach 30% by 2009 and 60% by 2016. These targets are, incidentally, more stringent than the generic scorecard set by the government,” the ACA responded in a recent newspaper article.

“Today, the percentage of black employees in the profession has escalated from 23.3(%) in 1998 to 42.7(%) in 2010—well on track to achieving our 2016 goal. The target for black management was already at 58.1(%) in 2010,” the ACA stated, stressing that it was meeting and delivering on transformation targets.

Immanuel’s response is that while the BEE codes look great on paper, the lived reality is another story altogether, a view that’s echoed by free market champion Ivo Vegter, an opinionista at Daily Maverick.

Vegter said that while a policy of redress had a great deal of merit in undoing the injustices of the past, his impression of late has been that it suffers from diminishing returns and a growing tendency to empower only the lucky few, many of whom are already thoroughly empowered economically.

“For all the talk, we too often see the same beneficiaries pop up in empowerment deals. Identifying true and reliable empowerment partners, as well as accounting for them to receive formal certification, adds considerably to the bureaucratic cost of doing business. This cost has a direct impact on prices and service quality, affecting all South Africans,” he said.

Immanuel stressed that the issue of meaningful transformation is not the only problem facing the ad industry, which he said is still racially polarised: the marketing sector landscape is largely populated by white creative directors who manage black teams.

“Black people have only really been allowed to be a part of mainstream advertising as fully fledged creatives since about 1997. Before that, black people weren’t a part of creative departments. They didn’t really work as people who would engineer creative work. You didn’t have black copywriters or artists, let alone have black creative directors. It just didn’t happen. People were only used as translators or as a sounding board. They were not really allowed to handle brands,” he said.

In a telephone interview with Daily Maverick, Immanuel continued: “The revolution started after 1997 when we started to see an influx of black people into creative departments, and they started to win awards from 2000 or so.”  But despite this “revolution” there’s still a massive divide in creative departments, he said, maintaining that this schism is expressed in race.

For the most part, Immanuel explained, black creatives have to deal with white creative directors who just can’t get where they’re coming from. “I’ve been a creative director at a big agency. I was at TBWA,” said Immanuel, adding that most of his peers echo his sentiments about this “creative divide”.

“There’s a white creative director and a black team, and when they try and talk to each other there’s that chasm because of their respective upbringing. The references are vastly different. As a result there’s a cult of viewing life in an American way through hip hop, movies and music videos,” said Immanuel, who maintained that because of this the advertising mirror that reflects black culture back to South Africans is warped. What we’re seeing isn’t a true reflection of real South African life, but a perversion of its peoples and culture.

“In terms of advertising work that speaks to your everyday black South African—say, for instance, my own parents—it is very difficult to find creative work like that. You just don’t get work that has real insight into the South African condition. Instead agencies and brands go to film, and there are black people singing and dancing and they slap in whatever product they want to sell,” said Immanuel.

The situation described by Immanuel sounds a lot like a transformed twist on the “old boys” network, where getting ahead in advertising is more dependent on who you know than what you know. Vegter made a similar point when he said some empowerment deals were accompanied by complaints of crony corruption or outright fronting.

“One also hears increasingly often of the stigma associated with being a black manager or shareholder when outsiders think they merely have empowerment preferences to thank for their position. This undermines those people who fairly merit their positions of authority or wealth, and perpetuates stereotypes,” he said.

This was certainly the case earlier this year when feuds between massive ad agencies and their BEE partners bled out into the media. In March, Africa Advertising & Communication accused McCann of treating the empowerment company as a black “front” by not enabling AAC to get its hands dirty in the business. After a damaging battle in the media, a truce was called.

A similar spat played out at Young & Rubicam SA when its consortium of empowerment partners, Memeza QRX, wrote to the DTI to complain about fronting.

With smaller, local agency owners like Immanuel and the Association of Black Communications Practitioners petitioning government because transformation’s not working and big BEE deals are fraying at the seams (McCann has been through a number of empowerment partners) perhaps the ACA needs to take a harder look at the advertising landscape.

Or perhaps they’d do well to consider Vegter’s take on empowerment. “There comes a point, logically and inevitably, at which the diminishing returns and unintended socio-economic costs of empowerment policies must begin to exceed the value of redressing the remaining consequences of apartheid. Almost two decades after the advent of freedom and democracy, we ought to ask ourselves whether or not that point has been reached, and whether South Africa would not benefit more from less red tape and less potential for crony corruption.”

Vegter continues: “Sadly, this view will appeal to the unreconstructed racists among us because of the suggestion that meritocratic efficiency might be harmed by empowerment. However, the same people will find ammunition in perpetuating the stigma that black appointees are merely the beneficiaries of preferential treatment. Neither pursuing nor ending empowerment will silence committed racists. I would hope that the majority of South Africans of all races can ignore them, look beyond adversarial identity politics, and choose an economic policy that will truly benefit all citizens.”

The bottom line is that despite the protestations by the ACA, empowerment seems to be right in the numbers and wrong in terms of the lived reality. Will that be enough cause for them to pause and look at who’s really benefitting in SA’s adland? DM

+++++++++++++

 

Photo: Taelo Immanuel.