Category: History
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To the victor go the spoils…
The record producer Joe Boyd visited a studio in a former eastern block country shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The engineers there proudly showed off what they thought was a state of the art newly acquired reverb unit they had acquired from some western engineers who visited their studio. When Boyd asked…
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Muffled in Miami.2
As a post script to my post on the censure of Ozzie Guilllen for his comments on Cuba, I’m posting today stories from The Real News Network and Democracy Now on the isolation of the US and Canada at the just-concluded Summit of the Americas because of their refusal to allow Cuba to participate. As…
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Muffled in Miami
previous My expectations fof the sports world when it comes to politics are pretty low. So I wasn’t surprised when a sports radio station I tuned into spent nearly the whole day bashing Ozzie Guillen over the comments he made about his “love” for Fidel Castro. I am not a Communist or a Castro…
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Debt.3: South Dakota
Ever wonder why you get so many credit card offers from banks in South Dakota? You know, those loud envelopes with low introductory APR’s that turn around and clobber you with 25% interest rates a few months later? Rates that bury folks in debt, just like the arid storms that buried much of South Dakota…
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Debt.2
“We’re used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but as the great French historian Fernand Braudel (at left in this post) pointed out, in many ways they could equally be conceived as opposites. While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money…capitalism is first and foremost the art…
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Debt.1
Last week I finished a book I really liked called Debt by David Graeber, (Melville Press.) The author is an anthropologist and an activist who has been involved with the “anti-globalization” movement in general, and the Industrial Workers of the World and Occupy Wall Street in particular. He used to teach at Yale but moved…
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MLK Day: What I Didn’t Learn About Jim Crow in School
Today on the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., I would like to recommend two books that helped me view his work in a larger context. The first is Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon, and the second is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. The former taught me a lot about the…
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Who Really Wins on Super Bowl Sunday?
“America has succeeded in forcing other nations to pay for its wars on a systematic basis, something never before accomplished by any nation in history .” – Michael Hudson I’d like to recommend two books I just finished reading, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson and Super Imperialism: The Origins…
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Subliminal Messages
Every once in a while I try and find something weird having to do with my past on the internet as a lark. This is a YouTube video some young women in Prague made of a shopping trip to Ikea, using Free to Go by the Folk Implosion as a soundtrack. Their conclusion at the…
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He’s got 48 pages
I recently finished reading Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which features the longest run-on sentence I’ve ever read. It takes up the entire final chapter of the novel. It is 48 pages long. In Lorrie Moore’s novel A Gate at the Stairs, a student at the University of Wisconsin is smitten by…
johnhdavis / inundation records 