Saturday Catchup 2018-03-03


After a long absence, Saturday Catchup is back!

Social democracy is all the rage in the U.S. (and neoliberalism under assault) since Sen. Bernie Sanders' late run for president. In this video, radical journalist, author and film-maker Paul Mason; Dr. Faiza Shaheen, economist, writer, activist and director of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies; writer Anthony Barnett, co-founder of openDemocracy; economist Dr. Johnna Montgomerie; and Laurie Macfarlane, senior economist at the New Economics Foundation discuss whether radical social democracy offers a way out of the crisis of neoliberalism, and what this means for economic policy over the next decade. The debate is part of a new series of essays by Paul Mason exploring what radical social democracy means during the next decade:
Extra credit:
The word has become a rhetorical weapon, but neoliberal properly names the reigning ideology of our era -- one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human: Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world by Stephen Metcalf (Guardian).
The mission of radical social democracy must be to rekindle hope in a simple idea -- that life in your community will get better: Neoliberalism has destroyed social mobility. Together we must rebuild it by Paul Mason.
I’m not a neoliberal. Maybe you aren’t either. by Laurie Macfarlane (Medium).

Eljeer Hawkins is a community, labor and antiwar organizer, and for 23 years has been a member of Socialist Alternative, the US affiliate of the Committee for a Workers' International, a global Trotskyist
organization fighting economic exploitation and oppression based on race, gender, sexual orientation and national identity. Hawkins writes regularly on race, the criminal legal system, Black Lives Matter and the historic Black freedom movement, and lectures widely, including at Harvard, Hunter College, Oberlin and University of Toronto. In this interview, Hawkins discusses how he came to believe in the socialist cause and how a socialist society can be realized in the US: Inspiring a Socialist Alternative: An Interview With Eljeer Hawkins with Bryant William Sculos (Truthout).

A palate cleanser from the New York Times: Reporter Carla Correa travels to the lair of "The Bachelor" so you won't have to. "There are two ways to watch 'The Bachelor.' The first is, in 'Bachelor' parlance, to be swept away on the 'journey' and suspend any disbelief that suitors are 'here for the right reasons.' For most viewers, though, the only way to sit through a two-hour episode is to accept the polyamorous spectacle as one big social experiment. 24 Hours in Bachelor Nation by Carla Correa (New York Times)

Aestheticist Adolph Hitler doesn't care for gentrification:




"The right to be heard is crucially important. But I want to think more generally about how we have learned to look at women who exercise power, or try to; I want to explore the cultural underpinnings of misogyny in politics or the workplace, and its forms (what kind of misogyny, aimed at what or whom, using what words or images, and with what effects); and I want to think harder about how and why the conventional definitions of ‘power’ (or for that matter of ‘knowledge’, ‘expertise’ and ‘authority’) that we carry round in our heads have tended to exclude women." -- Mary Beard, Women in Power.
 
For the text of this talk, go to Women in Power by Mary Beard (London Review of Books).

The resemblance of zoos to prisons aside: At the Stock Island Detention Center, a jail in Florida, prisoners care for a zoo of their own. Curator Jeanne Selander  runs the prison zoo with the inmates, who benefit not only from the responsibility, but also from experiencing reciprocal love and care --often for the first time. Operations like this one shouldn't be news, they should be standard.

Sign up for a weekly email from 60 Second Docs, for videos that are uplifting without recourse to freak accidents or weird animal friendships.

A song-story from country singer-songwriter Paul Overstreet

Finally, in a spirit of resistance not nostalgia, here is the last installment of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, never broadcast at the time. The brothers, Tommy and Dick Smothers, waged a war against network censorship for a couple of years in the late 1960s, a fight they lost when they were fired for inviting comedian David Steinberg back on the show, despite complaints from some viewers over a previous booking. Nancy Wilson and Dan Rowan were also guests.

No comments:

 
Related Posts with Thumbnails