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Hey! Good Evening!
Tonight's music is something of a ramble through history. I started out intending to put together a few videos featuring some of the founders of the Chicago blues style, people like Tampa Red and Big Bill Broonzy, but I got waylaid. I started out with Big Bill's version of "Hey Hey," which led to "Baby Please Don't Go," and I heard the lyric about Parchman's Farm, and well, that reminded me of some other songs. More about Parchman's Farm below.
I found some echoes of the way that Parchman's Farm was set up as a part of a program to maintain control and exploit a group of Americans in Barbara Ehrenreich's article at the top of the News Section, "How Corporations and Local Governments Rob the Poor Blind." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Some people think that America invented the blues
And few people doubt that America is the home of the blues
As the bluesicians have gone all over the world carrying the blues message
And the world has snapped its fingers and tapped its feet right along with the blues folks
But, the blues has always been totally American
As American as apple pie
As American as the blues
As American as apple pie
The question is why?
Why should the blues be so at home here
Well, America provided the atmosphere
-- Gil Scott-Heron (from Bicentennial Blues)
News
Ehrenreich: How Corporations and Local Governments Rob the Poor Blind
Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.
The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.
Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest. When supplemented with late fees (themselves subject to interest), the resulting effective interest rate can be as high as 600% a year, which is perfectly legal in many states.
It’s not just the private sector that’s preying on the poor. Local governments are discovering that they can partially make up for declining tax revenues through fines, fees, and other costs imposed on indigent defendants, often for crimes no more dastardly than driving with a suspended license. And if that seems like an inefficient way to make money, given the high cost of locking people up, a growing number of jurisdictions have taken to charging defendants for their court costs and even the price of occupying a jail cell.
Payday Loans Scrutinized
Payday Lenders: How Wall Street's "Undercover Brothers" Exploit Minorities
All the major banking institutions say the right things about race and equality. They all have diversity programs. A few financial industry leaders, like Robert Rubin and Jamie Dimon, even support socially liberal causes. Yet the banking industry covertly uses payday lenders as a "front," a way to prey on minority neighborhoods without getting their hands dirty.
It's a classic Rigged Game: The banks deny normal credit to lower-income people, then profit from usurious forms of alternative credit (or as it's known in economic circles, "fringe banking"). Fortunately, efforts to draw attention to these practices are beginning to have having some effect.
Payday loans hurt all their customers, of course, not just minorities. But studies have shown that payday lenders disproportionately exploit minority neighborhoods with loans that are issued at an average annual interest rate of 455%. The average number of loan each borrower takes out is nine pre year, according to one study, as these high rates lead to a cycle of indebtedness. The loans are secured with the borrower's next paycheck, so only people with jobs qualify. It's a vicious circle, designed by the banking industry to maximize profits at the expense of the economically vulnerable.
German 'hypocrisy' over Greek military spending has critics up in arms
Athens' fondness for weaponry, and willingness of Germany and France to feed it, under fire as Greece struggles with debt crisis
Behind the frequent exhortations that Greece rein in spending after living "beyond its means" – admonishments made most loudly by Merkel and her finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble – there is another reality that paints Germany in a less than flattering light, according to MPs, military experts, economists and scholars. ...
"As a proportion of GDP, Greece spends twice as much as any other EU member on defence," said Papadimoulis, who is also a former MEP.
"Well after the economic crisis had begun, Germany and France were trying to seal lucrative weapons deals even as they were pushing us to make deep cuts in areas like health." ...
Speculation is rife that international aid was dependent on Greece following through on agreements to buy military hardware from Germany and France.
Will the New York Times' Reporters ever admit that European Austerity is the Problem?
Economists have known for roughly 75 years that adopting austerity in response to recession or depression will make the economic crisis grow and last far longer. Austerity is to economics as bleeding was to medicine.
Germany, however, has insisted that the European Union ("EU") adopt increased austerity in response to the Great Recession. It is a measure of Germany’s dominance of the EU and the collapse of democracy within the EU that Germany’s self-destructive policy demands that European leaders recently agreed to the Berlin Consensus – adopting more severe austerity even as it became indisputable that austerity was causing economic, social, and political disasters in the euro zone. The citizens of Europe, however, are increasingly rejecting austerity and the Berlin Consensus. ...
The game that Berlin designed required the Greek to agree (1) to drive their economy off a cliff into a deepening Great Depression through increased austerity, (2) to force an enormous reduction in working class wages, (3) to sell Greek islands to private parties, and (4) to give up other aspects of sovereignty so that hostile, foreign, and private entities such as the IMF and the ECB could monitor its governmental actions. The Greeks are now refusing to commit economic, political, and social suicide. The Germans are demanding that they drive off the cliff because “a deal is a deal.”
Activists Drop By Timothy Geithner's Home For a Chat
Shell under fire over Arctic plans
Environmental campaigners and shareholders clashed with Royal Dutch Shell at an annual meeting dominated by concerns over exploration in Alaska, slow progress tackling oil leakages in Nigeria, dividend policy and executive pay. ...
Shell said it was still in talks with the Nigerian government and other parties about how best to proceed with proposals to spend $1-billion (U.S.) on a clean-up and rehabilitation of the polluted areas of Ogoniland in the Niger Delta. ...
The abandonment of operations in Ogoniland in 1993 by Shell and its partners followed a campaign against production in the region led by activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was later executed by Nigeria’s then military government. ...
Mr. Ollila also defended Shell’s ability to develop oilfields safely in Arctic waters as it prepares for exploratory drilling this summer, in the face of arguments from a representative of local native Americans that the project ran a substantial risk of ecological devastation.
Quebec student protests not just about tuition but battle against ‘greedy elites’
How is it that so many people are so worked up about a relatively minor increase in tuition fees? In spending time talking to protesters, one thing becomes clear. This movement, if it ever was, is no longer just about tuition.
Véronique Boulanger-Vaugeois, 30, had ducked out of the rain for an espresso before the march began. She has a degree in social work from Université du Québec à Montréal but is currently unemployed. She recently decided to take a more active part in the student protests after recognizing its potential for broader societal change.
“For me the student movement, the student strike is just one part of everything we have to resolve,” she said. “The student movement is one in which the youth give us the energy, give us the power to refuse what is going on right now.”
Specifically that includes the tuition increases — she has fought for free university since her own student days — and the Liberal government’s northern development plan known as Plan Nord. But there is more. She also sees the protest as a refusal of “the entire capitalist, neo-liberal context that over time ends up having a very harmful impact, both locally and internationally, on the environment and on humanity.”
Blog Posts of Interest
Here are diaries and selected blog posts of interest on DailyKos and other blogs.
There are more stories and blog posts listed in today's What's Happenin' which is published M-F at 8:30AM (EST) and at 10:30AM (EST) on weekends.
You have a right to remain recording; Carlos Miller’s crusade for freedom of photography
On Police Violence
Favorite Songs - Former Artists/Groups Edition
A Little Night Music
Big Bill Broonzy - Baby Please Don't Go
Here's an article about Parchman's Farm, based on David M. Oshinsky's "Worse Than Slavery": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. Here's a taste of it:
During the Cold War years an article of faith that distinguished the West from the "Evil Empire" of Soviet Communism was the latter's Siberian Gulag, a vast network of prison camps where inmates faced unspeakable brutality and horrors from both nature and man. Of course, nothing of that kind could flourish here. According to David Oshinsky, the U.S. did indeed have its own gulag, and it went by the name of Mississippi. Parchman Farm was its "first circle."
The Parchman Farm story begins with the Reconstruction era. Determined to overthrow Republican regimes, Mississipians devised what would become the model for Democratic redemption elsewhere, the so-called "Mississippi Plan." It elements were straightforward enough. Use whatever means necessary, from fraud to murderous violence, to regain political control. It worked, and by 1875 Democratic legislatures were back in control and immediately set out to resolve what they considered to be two key problems: a shortage of labor, and the need to restore white supremacy. Criminal statutes were enacted such as the "Pig Law" in which theft of a farm animal worth more than ten dollars was punishable by up to five years in prison. Along with laws such as these, which were almost always aimed at the thousands of poor freedmen, was the "Leasing Act." This statute allowed convicts to be leased out if their sentences were less than ten years. Since whites were usually only charged and convicted for the most serious of crimes, their sentences entitled them to the relative safety of the state penitentiary at Jackson.
As it developed in Mississippi, convict leasing successfully replaced racial bondage with a system of racial castes while at the same time fueling the economic development of the late 19th century "New South." The use of convicts for everything from raising cotton, to building railroads, to extracting turpentine gum spread rapidly. It solved the problem of high fixed labor costs, since minimal expenses for food, clothing, and shelter were necessary. Moreover, there was always a ready supply of replacement labor, so incentives against the mistreatment of convict workers were non-existent.
An assortment of bluesmen were treated to the tender ministrations of the correctional system at Parchman's including Bukka White and Son House. Elvis' father was also incarcerated there and the first known picture of Elvis was taken inside Parchman's.
Bukka White - Parchman Farm Blues
Bukka White - Aberdeen Blues
I was reminded by this about another bluesman, Hambone Willie Newbern, who is most famous for his song, "Rolling and Tumbling" (also known as the Roll and Tumble Blues) a blues standard. Hambone Willie Newbern only got around to recording a few songs including this one, he was beaten to death in jail, some say for refusing to work.
Hambone Willie Newbern - Rollin' and Tumblin'
Here are a couple of other versions of Rollin' and Tumblin'
Cream
Muddy Waters
Son House - Levee Camp Blues
Here's some further listening:
Leadbelly - Midnight Special
Big Bill Broonzy - Black, Brown and White