Sold Out in America

Another great week for Corporate America!

The economy is flatlining. Global financial markets are in turmoil. Your stock price is down about 15 percent in three weeks. Your customers have lost all confidence in the economy. Your employees, at least the American ones, are cynical and demoralized. Your government is paralyzed.

Want to know who is to blame, Mr. Big Shot Chief Executive? Just look in the mirror because the culprit is staring you in the face.

J’accuse, dude. J’accuse.

You helped create the monsters that are rampaging through the political and economic countryside, wreaking havoc and sucking the lifeblood out of the global economy...

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Steven Pearlstein @'The Washington Post'

The Corporations have their very own political party now with the so-called grassroots Tea Party. The concoction of unlimited funding for anonymous attack ads, passive-aggressive racism, and a smoke screen of social conservative concern is a heady mix indeed that has poisoned otherwise good hard working Americans into a state of fear that convinces them to vote against their own best interests.

charltonbrooker Charlie Brooker

Am actually rather alarmed by number of ppl who think I'm genuinely in favour of sealing looters in Perspex boxes.

Hunter S. Thompson on Letterman (11/25/88)

Warren Buffett: Stop Coddling the Super-Rich

Kids' medical records abandoned in Melbourne office

The Elusive Big Idea

Girlz With Gunz #152

(Thanx Mark!)

Via

warrenellis Warren Ellis

Ever see Godzilla do that Highland victory dance in the old Toho films? Radioactive AND Glaswegian: it explained so much.

First Listen: Stephen Malkmus And The Jicks 'Mirror Traffic'

While many '90s bands have reunited in recent years, it's important to note that Pavement's Stephen Malkmus never truly went away. Easy as it's been to pine for Pavement, it's also easy to have forgotten that Malkmus continues to evolve and experiment, toying with synthesizers and electronics and with shape-shifting prog-rock, both solo and with his band The Jicks. So, while Pavement fans may have to wait a little longer (if not forever) for new songs following last year's reunion, Malkmus' latest Jicks record, Mirror Traffic, is among his best post-Pavement offerings to date. It's certainly the most mature.
That's a credit to Malkmus and fellow "slacker" iconoclast Beck — who produced the album — because the former's music is not always an easy listen. While his songs are often impeccably arranged with catchy, sing-song melodies, there's always been an off-kilter quality to his music, making it feel like it's about to fall apart. Chord progressions don't resolve where you want them to, he regularly changes keys mid-stream — often only for a few bars — and there's enough dissonance and squawks of guitar noise to give the songs a sneering edge.
Malkmus' lyrics are constructed to be elusive. His oblique stream-of-consciousness songs, with their sardonic wit and hyper-literate descriptions of mundane observations, ask willing fans to parse the lyrics themselves. Malkmus writes lines as much for their encrypted meanings as for the way the words sound rhythmically against his abrupt melodies and messy guitar riffs.
Still, while Mirror Traffic's punchy urgency has the feeling of being loose and unruly, Malkmus and his Jicks are deceivingly turn-on-a-dime tight as a band, thanks to stellar musicianship from Mike Clark, Joanna Bolme and especially Janet Weiss, whose drums give every song a throttling pulse. (Weiss has since left the band to form WILD FLAG.)
Malkmus has said that he and The Jicks were looking for a like-minded ally like Beck for Mirror Traffic. But of all the artists with whom Beck has collaborated recently (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Thurston Moore), here he leaves the smallest musical footprint. Beck practically sits back and lets Malkmus and The Jicks play; there are very few of the production flourishes that have become Beck's calling card, though he likely played a small part in reining in Malkmus' jammier side, and in sweetening the songs along the way. If anything, Beck's influence shows in Mirror Traffic's sonic focus, even as the album presents a variety of microstyles: fuzzy garage rockers like "Tune Grief" and "Tigers," intimate tunes like the solemn folk song "No One Is (As I Are Be)," or the warbling, buzzed-out ballad "Asking Price."
One of the major overarching themes of Mirror Traffic seems to be a reflexive coming to terms with nostalgia and the boredom of adulthood. But "Forever 28" also references a crumbling relationship — "I can see the mystery of you and me will never quite add up / No one is your perfect fit, I do not believe in that s—-" — while "All Over Gently" includes the kiss-off line, "Stay if you want, but don't forget we're through."
Mirror Traffic is about as brutally forward and honest as Malkmus has ever sounded, revealing a new side to the enigmatic songwriter. But it's also an album with plenty of hooks and lyrical surprises.
Michael Katzif @'npr'

Hear 'Mirror Traffic' In Its Entirety

Prepostorous ideas in a time of tension don’t work

Squelching social media after riots a dangerous idea

In an emergency session of Parliament on Thursday, British Prime Minister David Cameron said that the violence, looting and arson sweeping his country "were organized via social media." He said his government is now considering how and whether to "stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."
On Friday, China's state-run Xinhua news agency published a commentary contrasting Cameron's latest statements with his Arab Spring-inspired speech earlier this year, in which he loftily proclaimed that freedom of expression should be respected in Tahrir Square as much as in London's Trafalgar Square.
"We may wonder why Western leaders, on the one hand, tend to indiscriminately accuse other nations of monitoring, but on the other take for granted their steps to monitor and control the Internet," Xinhua said. "For the benefit of the general public, proper Web-monitoring is legitimate and necessary."
The Chinese government has been making similar arguments since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered her first speech declaring Internet freedom to be a core pillar of American foreign policy in January 2010. For example, here is Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu responding to a foreign correspondent's question in May about heightened Internet censorship and surveillance: "The Chinese government's legal management of the Internet is in line with international practice."
While perpetrators of crime and violence, such as the kind we've witnessed this past week in Britain, must of course be pursued and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, it is critical that both the British government and Internet companies that operate in the U.K. or serve British users proceed responsibly.
Any new legal measures, or cooperative arrangements between government and companies meant to keep people from organizing violence or criminal actions, must not be carried out in ways that erode due process, rule of law and the protection of innocent citizens' political and civil rights...

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Rebecca MacKinnon @'CNN'

London riots: the limits of Left and Right

Torture in the US Prison System: The Endless Punishment of Leonard Peltier

Leonard Peltier, a great-grandfather, artist, writer, and indigenous rights activist, is a citizen of the Anishinabe and Dakota/Lakota Nations and has been imprisoned since 1976. (Photo: Leonard Peltier Defense Committee)

Your visit to one of America's prisons may last only a few hours, but once you pass the first steel threshold, your perception of humanity is altered. The slammed doors, metal detectors and body frisks introduce you to life on the inside, but the glaring hatred from the guards and officials make it a reality. When you creep back into your own world afterward, you wonder what is really happening to the people who permanently languish behind bars.

In June 2006, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons released "Confronting Confinement," a 126-page report summarizing its 12-month inquiry into the prison systems. The commission follows up the analysis based on its findings with a list of recommendations. Topping the list of needed improvements is better enforcement of inmates' right to proper health care and limitations on solitary confinement. Five years after the report's release and despite its detailed and well-researched studies, inmate abuse continues. More recently, news reports from California's Pelican Bay Prison amplified the need for change, but after the three-week inmate hunger strike ended, the torture of solitary confinement continues nationwide.

More than 20,000 inmates are caged in isolation in the United States at any one time. Originally designed as a temporary disciplinary action, solitary confinement has drifted into use as a long-term punishment. This act of inhumanity is a clear contradiction of the Eighth Amendment. During the Pelican Bay hunger strike that rippled into prisons across the country, a 66-year-old man with extreme medical needs, Leonard Peltier, was forced into "the hole" at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania...