Saturday Morning.  10 am.  No content.  Brain fried from petrol.  Time for Video that makes you think.

Cyndi Lauper lost her voice and was told by at least 3 doctors (that would be Hartnell, Troughton, and Pertwee) she would never sing again.  In all her original work she has been a great champion of LGBT causes though she’s relentlessly ‘tro.

I invite you to populate the comments with your favorite performances, I always liked her more than Louise Ciccone (whom I have developed a certain grudging respect for).  Her current artistic effort is the Broadway Musical Kinky Boots, nominated for 13 Tonys (named after a woman) and summarized thusly-

(A) struggling, family-owned English shoe factory … avoids bankruptcy when its young boss, Charlie, develops a plan to produce custom fetish-type footwear for drag artists rather than the men’s dress shoes that his firm is known for.

So it seems the reluctance of some U.S. Garment Companies to sign on to improve conditions at Bangladeshi Sweatshops (where over 1000 have died recently in building collapses and fires) is that they may be exposed to law suits by former slaves employees about the inhumane conditions they previously worked under.

Actually I take that back.  This is exactly like the arguments made by Slaveholders about their “human” assets that represented over 50% of the entire wealth of the United States at the time of the War of Southern Rebellion.

U.S. Retailers See Big Risk in Safety Plan for Factories in Bangladesh

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE, The New York Times

Published: May 22, 2013

American retailers remain sharply opposed to joining an international plan to improve safety conditions at garment factories in Bangladesh as their European counterparts and consumer and labor groups dismiss the companies’ concerns about legal liability.

A few shareholders at Gap’s annual meeting this week questioned the company’s refusal to sign on to a plan that commits retailers to help finance safety upgrades in Bangladesh, where 1,127 workers died when the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed on April 24.

“In the United States, there’s maybe a bigger legal risk than there is in Europe,” Gap’s chief executive, Glenn Murphy, responded. “If we were to sign onto something that had unlimited legal liability and risk, I think our shareholders should care about that.”

…

Matthew Shay, president of the National Retail Federation, gave another reason for opposing the Bangladesh plan, saying it “seeks to advance a narrow agenda driven by special interests,” a reference to the labor unions that helped shape the plan and then pressed retailers to sign on.

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In rejecting the accord, Wal-Mart outlined its own proposals that it said would meet or exceed the accord’s goals. The company, the world’s largest retailer, predicted quicker results, saying it would inspect all of the 279 factories it uses in Bangladesh over the next six months.

While Wal-Mart, voicing concern about potential liability, said the plan “introduces requirements, including governance and dispute resolution mechanisms, on supply chain matters that are appropriately left to retailers, suppliers and government.”

Totally in keeping with our history of subjugating brown people long after the “civilized” world has moved on.

Jeremy Scahill & Noam Chomsky on Secret U.S. Dirty Wars From Yemen to Pakistan to Laos

Transcript

Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery

By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

Monday, 20 May 2013 10:16

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s current attempt to close down 54 public schools largely inhabited by poor minorities is one more example of a savage, racist neoliberal system at work that uses the politics of austerity and consolidation to further disenfranchise the unskilled young of the inner city. The hidden curriculum in this instance is not so invisible. Closing schools will result in massive layoffs, weakening the teachers unions. It will free up land that can be gentrified to attract middle-class voters, and it will once again prove that poor minority students, regardless of the hardships, if not danger, they will face as a result of such closings, are viewed as disposable – human waste to be relegated to the zones of terminal exclusion.  Not only are many teachers and parents concerned about displacing thousands of students to schools that do not offer any hope of educational improvement, but they are also concerned about the safety of the displaced children, many of whom “will have to walk through violent neighborhoods and go to school with other students who are considered enemies.”

This is not simply misguided policy, it is a racist script that makes clear that poor black youth are disposable and that their safety is irrelevant.  How else to explain the mayor’s plan to produce a Safe Passage Plan in which firefighters would be asked to patrol the new routes, even though they have made it clear that they are not trained for this type of special duty. That many of these children are poor black children trapped in under-resourced schools appears irrelevant to a mayor who takes his lead from politicians such as Barack Obama and Arnie Duncan, two educators who have simply reproduced the Bush educational reform playbook, i.e., more testing, demonize teachers, weaken unions, advocate for choice and charter schools, and turn public schools over to corporate hedge-fund managers and billionaires such as Bill Gates. Emanuel’s passionate zeal to downsize schools in impoverished black neighborhoods is matched only by his misdirected enthusiasm to lay out $195 million “on a basketball arena for DePaul University, a private Chicago university.”

…

What these three days of demonstrations must address is that without power over the conditions of their labor, teachers become pawns in a neoliberal politics in which they are deskilled, reduced to security guards, and work under conditions that transform education into a form of training.  High-stakes testing and its corresponding tactic of promoting cheating among administrators, putting into play the most degrading forms of competition, and its killing of the civic imagination is both a debased form of instrumental rationality and a reification of method – put another way, a kind of methodological madness.

…

The war being waged against Chicago Public schools, teachers and students is the product of a corporate ideology and pedagogy that numbs the mind and the soul, emphasizing repressive modes of learning that promote winning at all costs, learning how not to question authority, and disdaining the hard work of learning how to be thoughtful, critical, and attentive to the power relations that shape everyday life and the larger world. As learning is privatized, depoliticized, and reduced to teaching students how to be good consumers, any viable notions of the social, public values, citizenship and democracy wither and die.

Pressure building on OFA over Keystone Pipeline betrayal

by Gaius Publius, Americablog

5/20/2013 10:00am

Last week we wrote about Obama’s back-pocket “grassroots” organizing group, OFA, refusing to help progressive activists challenge the Obama administration on the Keystone XL Pipeline battle.

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President Obama’s organizing operation is warning its volunteers that they may be the target of progressive protests and urging its membership to stress their “mission of changing the conversation on climate!” in any confrontations with environmentalists. Organizing for Action – Obama’s outside grassroots organizing group designed to put Republicans’ feet to the fire on behalf of the administration – has found itself on the receiving end of late for its refusal to take a position on the Keystone XL pipeline.

Why would OFA get into a “confrontation with environmentalists” if their mission is to “change the conversation on climate”? Only if the second statement were untrue, of course. Or, more generously, if all OFA wants to change about climate is … the conversation (as opposed to the actual climate).

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OFA circulated a set of talking points to its members for use in dealing with unruly activists. The document, obtained by BuzzFeed, includes information on the science behind climate change and the president’s environmental positions, and ends with a section titled “Keystone Talking Points.” … The talking points come with a warning: “Volunteers from Credo Action or other organizations may attend your planning session and want to demand that we work on the Keystone XL pipeline.“

…

OFA is on the bad side of the news in part because CREDO is organizing resistance and directing it where it can do some damage, at Obama’s OFA. Excellent.

Action opportunity

CREDO is just one of many, but right now they’re leading the charge. I’ll bring up other actions opportunities as they evolve. There will be many; McKibben’s just getting started. In the meantime, if you’re interested in what CREDO is doing, click here.

(And if you want a fun read, go back to the article I quoted and read the full leaked OFA talking points doc appended to the bottom. As you do, ask yourself which part of it does Keystone-ignoring OFA actually believe. As I say, a fun read.)