OCCUPY

Thu

08

Mar

2012

Obama at Harvard Law School diversity protest in 1991

The Washington Post - The Fix

 

BuzzFeed has unearthed video of President Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, speaking at a protest for more diversity on campus in 1991:

 

 

It’s a short video but an interesting glimpse at the president as a young student. His public speaking style appears to have changed little over the years.

 

In his remarks, Obama praised Professor Derrick Bell, who had decided to take an unpaid leave of absence until a woman of color was given tenure at the school.

 

Bell, who Obama called “the Rosa Parks of legal education,” died last year. He is credited with developing “critical race theory” — the idea that bias against African Americans and other minorities is ingrained in the legal system. He never returned to Harvard, and an African American woman did not become a tenured professor there until 1998.


2 Comments

Thu

23

Feb

2012

Anniversary of the Great Railway Strike of 1877

Samuel Jones Tilden - 25th Governor of New York
Samuel Jones Tilden - 25th Governor of New York
FEBRUARY 21, 2012 12:45PM

The Great Worker Revolt of 1877

Salon, Toritto's Blog:  1877 Worker's Revolt

 

Not  too many folks know much about the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, put down by Federal troops. It’s one of those now obscure labor disputes of ancient times; useless information which bears no resemblance to modern day America.  Certainly nothing mentioned in American History class in high school.

 

Au contraire mon frere!

 

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Mon

17

Oct

2011

Occupy Detroit! A report from my home area

This is a story about how some areas in this country were able to keep the peace, but I put it here because it is very close to my home - in more than one way.  It might helpful for those of you who know me to remember my last name and for those of you who don't know me that well to learn that Cuneo is my family name.

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Sun

16

Oct

2011

Buoyed by Wall St. Protests, Rallies Sweep the Globe

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
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Mon

10

Oct

2011

Occupywallstreet

Ambiguous UpSparkles From the Heart of the Park and other articles as well as videos all related to and reporting on the Protests on WallStreet.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler/ambiguous-upsparkles-from_b_1003908.html

0 Comments

Sat

08

Oct

2011

Ongoing Occupation of Wall Street: 99% Uprising in Full Effect

September 22nd, 2011 

 

As day five comes to an end and we move into day six, #OccupyWallStreet has been a tremendous success. Despite the corporate mainstream media blackout, the movement is growing in significance and getting support from a very diverse range of people and organizations. Much respect to all the people who have set up camp in Liberty Park. Your leadership just sparked a legit movement in the USA. It’s About time!

 

The 99% Movement has begun!

 

Here's the latest roundup:  http://ampedstatus.org/ongoing-occupation-of-wall-street-99-uprising-in-full-effect-day-5-roundup-videos-photos/

 

0 Comments

Sat

08

Oct

2011

"We Are the 99 Percent" Creators Revealed

"We Are the 99 Percent" Creators Revealed  

Mother Jones Fri Oct. 7, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

 

It began as a simple little idea, just another blog among millions. The Occupy Wall Street protest was scheduled to begin on September 17, and launching We Are the 99 Percent on Tumblr seemed like a good way to promote it. Its creator had no clue that it would go viral and become a touchstone for a protest movement soon tospread nationwide.

 

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Tue

22

Feb

2011

Indiana lawmakers boycott hearing on union-rights bill

CNN News Blogs

The vast majority of Democrats in the Indiana House have not showed up at a House hearing Tuesday which, in effect, blocks a Republican-supported bill that would reduce private-sector union rights.

 

Republicans - who make up 60 of 100 House seats - lacked the two-thirds majority needed for a quorum. Sixty-three lawmakers attended Tuesday's hearing.

 

Democratic state senators in Wisconsin similarly boycotted their legislature last week to prevent a quorum from passing a budget bill that would increase the costs of benefits to public employees and curb their collective bargaining rights.

 

1 Comments

Tue

22

Feb

2011

Wisconsin Power Play

New York Times

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 20, 2011

 

Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”...


Some background: Wisconsin is indeed facing a budget crunch, although its difficulties are less severe than those facing many other states. Revenue has fallen in the face of a weak economy, while stimulus funds, which helped close the gap in 2009 and 2010, have faded away.

 

In this situation, it makes sense to call for shared sacrifice, including monetary concessions from state workers. And union leaders have signaled that they are, in fact, willing to make such concessions.

 

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain.

 

Click here for the rest of the article

0 Comments

Tue

22

Feb

2011

Ohio Unions Protest Collective Bargaining Bill

10TVNews

Tuesday,  February 22, 2011 12:21 PM

Updated: Tuesday,  February 22, 2011 1:55 PM

WBNS-10TV

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A hearing on a bill that could strip public employees of collective bargaining rights drew thousands of protesters to the Statehouse on Tuesday afternoon. 
      
Union leaders said their members and supporters will rally at the state capitol, as lawmakers continue hearings on Senate Bill 5, 10TV's Danielle Elias reported. 
      
The Republican-backed measure would end collective bargaining rights for state workers and restrict teachers, firefighters, police, and university employees.

 

The bill was proposed by Sen. Shannon Jones, and is supported by Gov. John Kasich. 
      
If the bill passes, it would end collective bargaining rights for state workers, and set up a merit-based pay system.

 

For the rest of the story click here

 


 

0 Comments

Fri

18

Feb

2011

Wisconsin Crowds Swell to 30,000; Key GOP Legislators Waver

Protesters demonstrate at the Capitol Square in Madison, Wisconsin, on February 16, 2011. (Photo: Narayan Mahon / The New York Times)
Protesters demonstrate at the Capitol Square in Madison, Wisconsin, on February 16, 2011. (Photo: Narayan Mahon / The New York Times)

"I have never been prouder of our movement than I am at this moment," shouted Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Phil Neuenfeldt, as he surveyed the crowds of union members and their supporters that surged around the state Capitol and into the streets of Madison Wednesday, literally closing the downtown as tens of thousands of Wisconsinites protested their Republican governor’s attempt to strip public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights.

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Fri

18

Feb

2011

Wisconsin Union Vote On Hold After Democrats Leave State

Andy Manis / AP Protestors of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's bill to eliminate collective bargaining rights for many state workers pack the rotunda at the State Capitol in Madison, Wis. on Feb. 17, 2011.
Andy Manis / AP Protestors of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's bill to eliminate collective bargaining rights for many state workers pack the rotunda at the State Capitol in Madison, Wis. on Feb. 17, 2011.

Associated Press  By SCOTT BAUER

 

The Wisconsin Senate adjourned for the day after minority Democrats blocked an attempt by Republicans to vote on an anti-union bill by leaving the state.

 

As some 25,000 protesters filled the Capitol for a third day, the 14 Democrats disappeared around midday, just as the Senate was about to begin debating the measure, which would eliminate collective bargaining for most public employees.

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Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

 

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

 

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

 

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

 

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

 

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

 

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

 

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

 

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

 

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

 

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

 

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

 

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

 

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

 

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

 

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

 

________________________________

 

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

 

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

1 Comments

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

Read More 0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

Read More 1 Comments