HA! (Thanx Paul!)

A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting
at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it.
The CEO takes 11 cookies, turns to the tea partier and says,
'Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.'

W.A.R. Women Art Revolution with Lynn Hershman Leeson (2011-02-12)

Interview and discussion with artist and filmmaker, Lynn Hershman Leeson & Film producer Alexandra Chowaniec about feminist art practice and the film "Women Art Revolution." On the Mic: Diana McCarty & Barbara Muerdter.
"Through intimate interviews, art, and rarely seen archival film and video footage, !Women Art Revolution reveals how the Feminist Art Movement fused free speech and politics into an art that radically transformed the art and culture of our times."

Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. in 1941 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American artist and filmmaker. She was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, and an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She is Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. Hershman studied at the University of California Berkeley in the late 60's.
Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds.

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http://www.womenartrevolution.com

http://lynnhershman.com/livingblog/

http://www.lynnhershman.com/

Left Behind? American Youth and the Global Fight for Democracy

One has no choice but to do all in one's power to change that fate and at no matter what risk - eviction, imprisonment, torture, death. For the sake of one's children, in order to minimize the bill that they must pay, one must be careful not to take refuge in any delusion. - James Baldwin(1)

The people have awakened. If change had happened through elites, there wouldn't have been real change. Now people understand their rights and know how to demand them. They realized their own power. -Ahmed Mahir, leader of the Egyptian Youth April 6th Movement

Within the last few months, we have seen an outpouring of student protests from all over the globe. Fifty thousand students took to the streets in London to protest tuition hikes, while "thousands of young people in Puerto Rico and Ireland are marching against cuts to student funding and fee increases."(2) Students in France and Greece are demonstrating with their bodies, confronting the police and registering their outrage over the imposition of severe austerity measures. In Spain and Italy, youth are challenging unemployment rates that have soared to 40 and 30 percent respectively. In Tunisia and Egypt, students have been at the forefront of uprisings that eventually led to the overthrow of authoritarian societies, which for too long forced young people to linger in a liminal space in which there were no jobs, no hope for the future and far too few freedoms. This general sense of frustration among young people is widespread in Europe and the Middle East. For instance, students marching in Rome "shouted, 'We don't want to pay for the crisis,' referring to the financial crisis that has turned ... labor market[s] from bad to worse. 'Where do I see my future? Certainly not in this country,' said protester, Morgana Proietti, expressing a common sentiment."(3)

Counterpublic spheres and modes of resistance that we once did not think young people could mount have erupted in a rush of emotional and political expressions and scattered demonstrations. Mass demonstrations have been organized through the emergent screen cultures of a generation well versed in new technologically assisted forms of social networking and political exchange. Governments complicit with a lethal combination of massive inequality, joblessness and ongoing cutbacks in social services are now the object of righteous youthful aggression in which buildings are occupied, pitched battles are waged in the streets and banners are dropped from national symbols like the Leaning Tower of Pisa and once impregnable governmental institutions. Shared sufferings, pent up repressions, ideological longings and emotional attachments have flared up in a massive collective demand by young people to be part of a future in which justice, democratic values and politics once again matter. Forging collective spaces of resistance, young people are expressing their long simmering anger and indignation against harsh injustices, growing inequalities and insufferable injuries in both totalitarian and allegedly democratic countries. The fear of political transgression that kept individual actors in check has given way to a politics in which dissent is amplified, multiplied and seized upon with vigor and moral courage that has seldom found such thunderous expression among young people since the late 1970s. Democracy is no longer being defended. It is being reinvented as a kind of shared existence that makes the political possible.(4)

Moral outrage infused by a complex of affective connections, social despair and a deeply held sense of shared possibilities has created a spontaneous tsunami of collective protests, strikes, rallies and demonstrations that have toppled governments, prompted shameless retaliatory outbursts of state terrorism and further fueled the possibilities for a global sense of resistance among repressed youth everywhere...

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Henry A. Giroux @'Truth-out'

Fear and Loathing in Coal Seam Gas Debate

Simmering tensions between landholders, mining companies and the State Government have reignited after ABC Television’s Four Corners program showed shocking images of coal seam gas (CSG) mining.
The heat of the CSG debate has barely cooled within the pages of this newspaper in the past three years, but the intense rage gripping southern Queensland landholders has now reached fever pitch, escalating within 24 hours of the current affairs program going to air on Monday.
Among the harrowing scenes striking fear into rural and regional landholders across the state were:

Faulty gas wells polluting bores and pumping potentially lethal toxins into underground aquifers.
Worrying assessments by environmental scientists that damage to the Great Artesian Basin will not be repaired for another 1000 years.
Heavy-handed tactics by mining companies to access private land.
The inability of Mines Minister Stephen Robertson to answer direct questions. So far, developments dominating the fallout include:
Landholders aligned to the Coal4 Breakfast group are mobilising in their hundreds to protest at a Community Cabinet meeting in Toowoomba on March 13 in what could be the district’s biggest rally yet against CSG mining.
Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association (APPEA) chief executive Belinda Robinson goes on the attack, calling anti-CSG campaigners a “noisy and misleading minority” and claiming Australia’s CSG industry is the most carefully scrutinised and heavily regulated in the country.
AgForce president Brent Finlay slams Premier Anna Bligh for her recent Cabinet reshuffle that has seen government responsibility for the issue withdrawn from the seasoned Stephen Robertson and transferred to two new ministers who must now be briefed on the run.
Australian Lot Feeders Association president Jim Cudmore reveals that feedlots have experienced significant reductions in groundwater levels since the CSG industry began operating in their areas, while others have bores leaking gas due to CSG development despite Queensland Government guarantees that such bores would be fixed.
Basin Sustainability Alliance chairman Ian Hayllor fears a raft of environmental impact statements provided to the State Government may have been shelved, saying their repeated warnings verified by independent analysis have not been paid due attention by the government or the mining companies at the centre of the storm.
The overwhelming condemnation of CSG mining operations and the State Government’s role in drafting legislation that has allowed a handful of energy companies to ride roughshod over prime agricultural land is now in the mainstream public spotlight.
It has also left the Government scrambling to defend its environmental and economic credentials – both taking a hammering – as it walks a tightrope to appease anxious landholders, agitated miners and a fragile alliance with shadowy green groups.
But there’s also trouble looming for the Opposition, with veteran hard-man Jeff Seeney reaffirming his position that CSG and liquid natural gas mining can coexist with farming, isolating him further colleagues and the LNP’s rural con-stituency that Labor will be key to exploit in the state election countdown...

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Debbi Orr @'Western Downs Alliance'

As Regimes Fall in Arab World, Al Qaeda Sees History Fly By

iankatz1000
Guardian and NYT ombudsmen reach opposite conclusions on ethics of publishing Raymond Davis's CIA link http://j.mp/gjcgLG http://j.mp/gDNCyA