Category: Politics
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Top 40 Over 40.7: Egypt by Youssou N’Dour
This album was one of a few that made me want to try putting strings on my next record. I don’t like how strings are often used in western pop as a soft bed of sound in the background. I do like how they carry the lead parts on much of this album. The Egyptian…
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Debt.4: What’s good for General Motors and what’s good for America
Sometimes the mark of a good book is how it crops back up in your mind a few months or years or even many years after you first read it. I wrote 3 posts about the book Debt by David Graeber back in February & March. There have been several occasions since then when the…
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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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Dear IRS,
Please consider changing the name of the 1040 tax return form to WD40. I think the company would surely be willing to pay the government to name the form after their product, much as firms like Citibank currently pay for the naming rights for sports stadiums. I mean, what’s more visible, the standard annual tax…
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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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Halftime
Madonna is scheduled to perform shortly after the conclusion of the second quarter of today’s Super Bowl between the New England Patriots and the New York Giants. I saw Truth or Dare when I was in 8th grade and remember all the controversy surrounding her persona when she first came out, most of which had…