Cultural Synergy: 2013

Saturday 28 December 2013

You will set the world on fire

Somewhere in Shoreditch, 26.05.2013

David Bowie | The Next Day

Midnight in the Village
Seeger lights the candles
From Bitter End to Gaslight
Baez leaves the stage
Ochs takes notes
When the black girl and guitar
Burn together hot in rage
You’ve got what it takes

You say too much
You will set the world babe
You will set the world on fire
I can work the scene babe
I can see the magazines
l can hear the nation
I can hear the nation cry
You will set the world babe
You will set the world on fire
You will set it on fire

Kennedy would kill
For the lines that you’ve written
Van Ronk says to Bobby
She’s the next real thing
Crouched in the half light
Screaming like a banshee
You’re in the boat, babe
We’re in the water
You say too much

You will set the world babe
You will set the world on fire
I can work the scene babe
I can see the magazines
l can hear the nation
I can hear the nation cry
You will set the world babe
You will set the world on fire
You will set it on fire

[last.fm]

Sunday 22 December 2013

Democracy and the eurozone crisis: quotes #17

[Overpass Light Brigade]

"Many governments in Europe imposing austerity measures have forgotten about their human rights obligations, especially the social and economic rights of the most vulnerable, the need to ensure access to justice, and the right to equal treatment. Regrettably, international lenders have also neglected to incorporate human rights considerations into many of their assistance programmes," said today Nils Muižnieks, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, while releasing a research paper about the impact of the economic crisis on the protection of human rights.

The Commissioner points out that austerity measures have undermined human rights in several ways: "National decisions on austerity measures and international rescue packages have lacked transparency, public participation and democratic accountability. In some cases, onerous conditionalities have prevented governments from investing in essential social protection, health and education programmes. When the EU as a central actor in the crisis makes decisions about economic governance in member states and when the Troika sets conditions for rescue packages and loan agreements, the impact on human rights should be better taken into account."

"The economic crisis has had dire consequences on vulnerable groups, in particular on children and young persons. Youth unemployment in Europe has reached record levels, with millions of young people unemployed with scarred futures. Cuts in child and family benefits, health care and education have also added a strain on millions of families. An increasing number of children are dropping out of school to find employment and support their families, risking life-long setbacks in educational achievement, and providing the conditions for job insecurity coupled with the re-emergence of child labour and exploitation."

The Commissioner stresses the urgent need to reinvigorate the European social model based on the foundations of human dignity, intergenerational solidarity and access to justice for all. "Governments should focus on reducing youth and long-term unemployment as a priority and on upholding social protection floors for basic income and health care during the crisis. Effective access to justice for all must be guaranteed during economic downturns by maintaining the judiciary and the legal aid system." Furthermore, governments should carry out systematic human rights and equality impact assessments of social and economic policies and budgets, especially as regards vulnerable groups of people. "Positive measures in favour of disadvantaged groups, including people with disabilities, Roma and women, are needed to address disproportionate and compound effects of the crisis and austerity measures."

Finally, the Commissioner highlights the essential role ombudsmen, human rights institutions and equality bodies play in identifying human rights compliant responses to the crisis and protecting people in need. Demand for services of these national human rights structures has increased, while many institutions have simultaneously experienced budget and staff cuts, the closure of regional offices or mergers into less focused structures. "Governments should strengthen the effectiveness of these structures to handle complaints about social and economic rights while seeking their independent advice in decision making about austerity measures and budgets to better gauge their impact on human rights and equality."

Austerity measures across Europe have undermined human rights

Commissioner for Human Rights, Council of Europe

Saturday 14 December 2013

Fortress Europe: the precarious lives of refugees

Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli. AFP/Getty [www.vancouversun.com]

European leaders should hang their heads in shame over the pitifully low numbers of refugees from Syria they are prepared to resettle, said Amnesty International.

In a briefing published today, An international failure: The Syrian refugee crisis, the organization details how European Union (EU) member states have only offered to open their doors to around 12,000 of the most vulnerable refugees from Syria: just 0.5 per cent of the 2.3 million people who have fled the country.

“The EU has miserably failed to play its part in providing a safe haven to the refugees who have lost all but their lives. The number of those it’s prepared to resettle is truly pitiful. Across the board European leaders should hang their heads in shame,” said Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

[...]

Only 10 EU member states offered resettlement or humanitarian admission places to refugees from Syria.

Germany is by far the most generous – pledging to take 10,000 refugees or 80 per cent of total EU pledges.

Excluding Germany, the remaining 27 EU member states have offered to take a mere 2,340 refugees from Syria.

France offered just 500 places or 0.02 per cent of the total number of people who have fled Syria.

Spain agreed to take just 30 or 0.001 per cent of refugees from Syria.

Eighteen EU member states – including the UK and Italy – offered no places at all.

[...]

The journey to Italy by sea

Hundreds of people die attempting to cross the Mediterranean every year. In October it is estimated that as many as 650 refugees and migrants died when three boats sank attempting to reach Europe from North Africa.

More than 10,000 refugees from Syria are reported to have arrived along Italy’s coast in the first 10 months of this year.

Amnesty International’s briefing gives first-hand accounts of those who have attempted to reach Europe by sea.

Awad, a 17-year-old boy from Damascus, described how he managed to escape through a window of a sinking boat and swim to the surface. There were reportedly 400 people on board. He saw people clinging to dead bodies and boat wreckage to stay afloat, while others fought over life jackets. Awad lost his mother as well as other family members.

“I have no idea where my family are… I used to have ambition but now I have lost my mother, I don't want anything, I just want stability, everything else is second to that.”

Another boy from Syria lost both his father and nine-year-old brother in the accident.

“My experience didn’t just destroy my dreams; it destroyed my family’s dreams. I am destroyed completely.”

Fortress Europe

In two of the main gateways to the EU, Bulgaria and Greece, refugees from Syria are met with deplorable treatment, including life threatening push-back operations along the Greek coast, and detention for weeks in poor conditions in Bulgaria.

Greece: pushed back into the sea

Refugees have told Amnesty International how Greek police or coastguards, wielding guns and wearing full face hoods, ill-treat them, strip them of their belongings and eventually push them back to Turkey.

A 32-year-old man from Syria described how he and his mother were confronted by the Greek coastguard near the island of Samos in October. They were part of a group of 35 people including women and young children pushed back to Turkey.

“They put all the men lying on the boat; they stepped on us and hit us with their weapons for three hours. Then at around 10 in the morning, after removing the motor, they put us back to our plastic boat and drove us back to the Turkish waters and left us in the middle of the sea.’’

The number of unlawful push-back operations from Greece is not known; however, Amnesty International believes hundreds have been affected.

In the last two years the European Commission has provided €228 million to bolster border controls.

In comparison, for the same time period, just €12 million was allocated to Greece under the European Refugee Fund, which supports efforts in receiving refugees.

Bulgaria: detained and contained

In Bulgaria, an estimated 5,000 refugees from Syria arrived between January and November 2013. The majority are housed in emergency centres, the largest of which is in the town of Harmanli. It is effectively a closed detention centre.

Amnesty International found refugees living in squalid conditions in containers, a dilapidated building and in tents. There was a lack of adequate sanitary facilities with limited access to food, bedding or medicine.

A large number of people were in need of medical care, including some injured in conflict, individuals suffering chronic diseases and those with mental health problems.

Some of the refugees in Harmanli told Amnesty International that they had been detained for over a month.

“Tens of thousands are risking perilous journeys by boat or land to try and reach Europe. We have seen hundreds lose their lives in the Mediterranean. It is deplorable that many of those that who have risked life and limb to get here, are either forced back or detained in truly squalid conditions with insufficient food, water or medical care,” said Salil Shetty.

[...]

Amnesty International is calling on European member states to:

Significantly increase the number of resettlement and humanitarian admission places for refugees from Syria;

Strengthen search and rescue capacity in the Mediterranean to identify boats in distress and assist those on board;

Ensure that those rescued are treated with dignity and have access to asylum procedures;

Ensure that unlawful push-back operations are ended;

Provide legal safe passage for Syrian asylum seekers wishing to travel to European member states.

The EU, its member states, and the international community should continue to provide support to countries hosting the largest numbers of refugees, particularly Jordan and Lebanon.

Fortress Europe: Syrian refugee shame exposed

Amnesty International, 13.12.2013

Italy: More than a 100 migrants die in second horrific shipreck this week

Tuesday 10 December 2013

A day in the life: Franz Marc, #1

Blue Fox, 1911 [Wikipaintings]

Franz Marc

Franz Marc Website | Franz Marc Museum

The Athenaeum | Museum of Modern Art | Guggenheim Museum

Horse In A Landscape, 1910 [Wikipaintings]

Thursday 5 December 2013

Intellectual proletarians, by Emma Goldman

[Wikimedia Commons]

The proletarization of our time reaches far beyond the field of manual labor; indeed, in the larger sense all those who work for their living, whether with hand or brain, all those who must sell their skill, knowledge, experience and ability, are proletarians. From this point of view, our entire system, excepting a very limited class, has been proletarianized.

Our whole social fabric is maintained by the efforts of mental and physical labor. In return for that, the intellectual proletarians, even as the workers in shop and mine, eke out an insecure and pitiful existence, and are more dependent upon the masters than those who work with their hands.

[...]

Success achieved by the most contemptible means cannot but destroy the soul. Yet that is the goal of our day. It helps to cover up the inner corruption and gradually dulls one's scruples, so that those who begin with some high ambition cannot, even if they would, create anything out of themselves.

In other words, those who are placed in positions which demand the surrender of personality, which insist on strict conformity to definite political policies and opinions, must deteriorate, must become mechanical, must lose all capacity to give anything really vital. The world is full of such unfortunate cripples. Their dream is to "arrive," no matter at what cost. If only we would stop to consider what it means to "arrive," we would pity the unfortunate victim. Instead of that, we look to the artist, the poet, the writer, the dramatist and thinker who have "arrived," as the final authority on all matters, whereas in reality their "arrival" is synonymous with mediocrity, with the denial and betrayal of what might in the beginning have meant something real and ideal. The "arrived" artists are dead souls upon the intellectual horizon. The uncompromising and daring spirits never "arrive." Their life represents an endless battle with the stupidity and the dullness of their time. They must remain what Nietzsche calls "untimely," because everything that strives for new form, new expression or new values, is always doomed to be untimely.

The real pioneers in ideas, in art and in literature have remained aliens to their time, misunderstood and repudiated. And if, as in the case of Zola, Ibsen and Tolstoy, they compelled their time to accept them, it was due to their extraordinary genius and even more so to the awakening and seeking of a small minority for new truths, to whom these men were the inspiration and intellectual support. Yet even to this day Ibsen is unpopular, while Poe, Whitman and Strindberg have never "arrived."

The logical conclusion is this: those who will not worship at the shrine of money, need not hope for recognition. On the other hand, they will also not have to think other people's thoughts or wear other people's political clothes. They will not have to proclaim as true that which is false, nor praise that as humanitarian which is brutal. I realize that those who have the courage to defy the economic and social whip are among the few, and we have to deal with the many.

Intellectual Proletarians (excerpt), 1914
Libertarian Labyrinth via Eagainst.com

Poster by David Lester, 1977 [davidlesterblog]

Sunday 1 December 2013

Ruins: chronicle of an HIV witch-hunt

[ruins-documentary.com]

RUINS: Chronicle of an HIV witch-hunt

Website | Facebook | Twitter

I chose to chronicle this case because I believe it encompasses everything that is wrong with our country [Greece] in this time of deep crisis: our growing collective panic, the ineptitude of our institutions, the servility of our mass media to the presumed sanctity of authority, the self-righteousness of our politicians and our emerging police state.

More importantly, I believe that it reflects a fundamental deficit of empathy for those among us who have been hardest hit by austerity, the people roaming silently among the ruins of our society.

Zoe Mavroudi, director's statement (excerpt), 08.09.2013

Friday 29 November 2013

Something about him that makes people dream

[illustrationartgallery.com]

Hugo Pratt | Corto Maltese

[Corto Maltese] was born at a particular moment, in 1967 [...] [Ε]veryone was in search for freedom, contested the official culture, was on a quest for change. So, Corto Maltese had something libertarian about him that made people dream.

Hugo Pratt

cortomaltese.com | English

corto-maltese.org | Italian

The Hugo Pratt Archives

Website | Blog | Facebook

The Ballad of the Salt Sea, 1967 [flipflopfrontier.tumblr.com]

Click on the image to enlarge

[corto-maltese.org]

Tuesday 26 November 2013

Capitalism, crisis, and the politics of austerity

'Neither slaves, nor masters' (top left side), Photograph: Dimitris Messinis [seattlepi.com]

The working class’ wages have been attacked by neoliberal policies. The resulting profits were invested in finance because capital is driven by the need to accumulate ever more profits and financial speculation promised high returns. The volatility of the economy steadily increased, which resulted in a big explosion in 2008. The result was more of the same: hyperneoliberalism, which means the intensification of neoliberalism. Banks were bailed out with taxpayers’ money, which means a bailout by taxes predominantly paid by employees because companies hardly pay taxes. The discourse of austerity wants to make people believe that they have lived beyond their means, that austerity is necessary because states have spent too much money, etc. The circumstance that profits have been growing, wages shrinking and that companies have hardly paid taxes is not mentioned in the dominant ideology. The working class was first exploited by capital and the reaction to the crisis is an intensification of exploitation and the attempt to legitimize this form of exploitation, which works by redistribution from workers to companies, cuts of public expenditures, wage cuts, tax support for banks and companies. The working class is constantly being dispossessed of the wealth it produces. Austerity measures bring much more of the same.

Fuchs, Christian, and Sandoval, Marisol (2014) Introduction: Critique, Social Media and the Information Society in the Age of Capitalist Crisis, in Fuchs, Christian, and Sandoval, Marisol (eds.) Critique, Social Media and the Information Society, London: Routledge, p. 29

Saturday 23 November 2013

A day in the life: Marianne von Werefkin, #1

Ave Maria, 1927 [berkshirereview.net]

Marianne von Werefkin

The Berskshire Review | Weimar | Cultured | Artcyclopedia

Der Blau Reiter: Wikipedia | Museum of Modern Art | La Peinture du XXe Siècle

Police Sentinel in Vilnius, 1914 [azukarillo]

Tuesday 19 November 2013

Esperanza Spalding: close Guantánamo

[allaboutjazz.tumblr.com]

Why did Esperanza Spalding record a song about Guantánamo?
Josefina Salomon, Amnesty International

Esperanza Spalding - We Are America from ESP Media on Vimeo.

Monday 18 November 2013

Another summer: Arthur Leipzig | David Hockney

[jacksonfineart.com]

Arthur Leipzig | Divers, East River

A Bigger Splash | David Hockney

[aseriesofsmallthings.com]

Friday 15 November 2013

David Harvey: production, consumption, crisis

Photograph: Thanassis Stavrakis/AP [The Guardian]

One of the big issues [in capitalism] is keeping an adequate market demand, so that you can absorb whatever it is that capital is producing. The other is creating the conditions under which capital can produce profitably.

Those conditions of profitable production usually mean suppressing labour. To the degree that you engage in wage repression – paying lower and lower wages – the profit rate goes up. So, from the production side, you want to squeeze labour down as much as you possibly can. That gives you high profits. But then the question arises, who is going to buy the product? If labour is being squeezed, where is your market? If you squeeze labour too much you end up with a crisis because there’s not enough demand in the market to absorb the product.

It was broadly interpreted after a while that the problem in the crisis of the 1930s was lack of demand. There was therefore a shift to state-led investments in building new roads, the WPA [public works under the New Deal] and all that. They said ‘we will revitalise the economy by debt-financed demand’ and, in doing so, turned to Keynesian theory. So you came out of the 1930s with a very strong capacity for managing demand with a lot of state involvement in the economy. As a result of that you get very high growth rates, but the high growth rates are accompanied by an empowerment of the working-class with rising wages and stronger unions.

Strong unions and high wages mean the profit rate starts to come down. Capital is in crisis because it’s not repressing labour enough, and so you get the switch. In the 1970s they turned to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. That became dominant in economic theory and people began paying attention to the supply-side – particularly wages. You get wage repression, which begins in the 1970s. Ronald Reagan attacks the air traffic controllers, Margaret Thatcher goes after the miners, Pinochet kills people on the left. You get an attack on labour – which raises the profit rate. By the time you get to the 1980s the profit rate has jumped up because wages are being repressed and capital is doing well. But then there comes the problem of where are you going to sell the stuff.

In the 1990s that is really covered by the debt economy. You started to encourage people to borrow a lot – you started to create a credit card economy and a high mortgage-financed economy in housing. That covered the fact that there wasn’t real demand out there. But eventually that blows up in 2007-8.

Capital has this question, ‘do you work on the supply side or the demand side?’ My view of an anticapitalist world is that you should unify that. We should return to use value. What use values do people need and how to we organise production in such a way that it matches these?

David Harvey interview: the importance of postcapitalist imagination | Red Pepper

Monday 11 November 2013

Remembering the Haymarket Martyrs: 11.11.1887

[illinoislabourhistory.org]

The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voice you are throttling today.

Quote by August Spies inscripted on the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument

[Wikipedia]

A short history of May Day | libcom.org

Haymarket affair | Wikipedia

Thursday 7 November 2013

The beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us

[loureed.com]

Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us.

— Laurie Anderson
his loving wife and eternal friend

The East Hampton Star

Monday 4 November 2013

Against the ethnic profiling of the Roma

[Third Eye Photography Workshops]

Roma families have been in the media spotlight [...], as child removal cases continue to hit the headlines. In two cases in Ireland, Romani children were removed and returned to their parents after their relationship was established.

Authorities must take a proportionate, responsible approach to child protection, based on facts and evidence, not on racial profiling. As a matter of principle, police action based on perceived difference in physical appearance between parents and children constitutes racial profiling.

Roma have been unfairly demonised and scapegoated for centuries. We call on all national authorities to act in line with their own child protection procedures, and to show responsibility and restraint.

Factsheets from European Roma Rights Centre on Child Removal and International Standards

European Roma Rights Centre

Romany journalist and former Travellers' Times editor Jake Bowers was interviewed on a number of programmes, including BBC News, regarding the outcry. He said that he was worried the alleged abduction scandal would fuel "yet another stereotype that Romani people will be beaten with.

"It's astounding the way that it's been reported, that there's a shock and horror that a blonde child has been found within a Romani community. It's amazing because I'm blonde, I'm blue eyed, I'm from the Roma community, and there are blonde and blue eyed people throughout the Romani community."

He continued: "But the shock there is in the media is that this child, a blonde child, is being raised in a poverty-stricken, destitute environment. Yet there is no shock and there is no horror about the fact that there are millions of Romani children across Europe that live in ghettos, that live far below the European poverty line, and that receives no media coverage at all."

"We ask the media to act responsibly in reporting this"

Damian Le Bas, Travellers' Times

Trying to nail the myth that Gypsies steal children from Jake Bowers on Vimeo.

[T]he stereotype of the child-stealing Gypsy was reawakened in recent days when a Roma couple in Greece were jailed on accusations that they had abducted a blond, green-eyed girl called Maria — or “the blond angel” in the Greek news media. This week, two blond, blue-eyed Roma children were taken from their parents in Ireland after suspicions that they had been abducted, too.

The children in Ireland were quickly returned to their families after DNA testing confirmed that the Roma were their parents. In Greece, the police confirmed on Friday that Maria was the child of a Roma couple from Bulgaria. An investigation continues into whether Maria was sold, adopted or given to the couple as they have claimed.

[...]

“Imagine if the situation were reversed and the children were brown and the parents were white, would they have ever been taken away?” said Dezideriu Gergely, the executive director of the European Roma Rights Center, based in Budapest. “The most dangerous consequence of the hysteria is that now we have to live in fear that our children can be removed from us on the basis of a wrong perception. No one should be profiled on the basis of their ethnicity.”

[...]

Despite such warnings, anti-Roma sentiment appears to be spreading. Serbian news media reported this week that a group of skinheads in Novi Sad, Serbia, tried to abduct a Roma child in front of his house last weekend because his skin was fairer than that of his father, Stefan Nikolic.

In Italy, the anti-immigrant Northern League responded to news of Maria’s supposed abduction this week by demanding inspections of all Roma communities to check for missing children.

[...]

Even before the cases, rights groups say, violence and intimidation against the Roma were intensifying. Earlier this month, a woman threw acid at a 2-year-old Roma boy and his mother in Naples, according to the European Roma Rights Center. In Hungary, at least seven Roma were killed between 2008 and 2010, and Roma leaders have counted dozens of firebomb attacks in the past.

[...] [T]he head of the Greek Union of Roma, Yiannis Halilopoulos, said the sensational coverage in the Greek news media and the racial profiling that followed the removal of Maria had “taken us back 100 years.”

“For the first time in years, I hear people shouting ‘Gypsies, thieves!’ when I walk down the street,” he said. He said he had also noticed more aggressive reactions to Roma who beg in the street: “Sometimes they shove them out of the way. I haven’t seen that in a long time.”

[...]

In the Czech Republic, ultraright parties and their neo-Nazi supporters this year have organized about 30 anti-Roma marches, where some have chanted, “Gypsies to the gas chambers,” rights groups said.

In France, where the Roma issue has flared amid a debate over immigration, the far-right National Front has made the Roma a central issue ahead of municipal elections in March. [...]

This month, President François Hollande intervened after a 15-year-old Roma girl, whose family was living illegally in France for five years, was pulled off a bus by the authorities and expelled to Kosovo. After loud protests, Mr. Hollande agreed to allow the girl to return, but only if she left her family behind.

[...]

Livia Jaroka, 39, an anthropologist who has studied the Roma and is the only Roma member of the European Parliament, noted that many Roma were blighted by poor access to education and difficult health conditions. According to the European Commission, the life expectancy for Roma men in the European Union is 10 years less than the average of 76. Ms. Jaroka, who was born in Hungary, further noted that among the roughly 40 million people who were the most impoverished in Europe, the Roma were disproportionally represented.

Roma, Feared as Kidnappers, See Their Own Children at Risk

Dan Bilefski, The New York Times | Part 1 | Part 2 |

Cultural Synergy

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