IT'S FEBRUARY: LET'S CONFRONT BLACK / WHITE HISTORY MONTH!

NEW MOVIE...
"C.S.A.:
THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA" 

"TO BE SOLD"
Artist: Larry Richardson

Let's roust the sleeping groundhogs outta their holes - it's February - time to confront Black/White History in America!

Oh Boy! Like the Holocaust deniers, the mostly white Americans who deny that our nation was conceived - if not in slavery - by slaveholders.
Kevin Willmott, who teaches film at the University of Kansas, has produced a "mockumentary" entitled: "C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America": A story of what-if, or of what actually is?

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir interviews the film maker: Another thing that comes up in your film is the question of blood ties between whites and blacks, mostly unacknowledged ones. We pretty much know about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson now. We've acknowledged that Jefferson has generations of black descendants.

"Black people always knew. [Laughter.] And there are also white people who have black ancestors and don't know it. It's a huge part of the American story and we're just now starting to uncover it. When you create a country within slavery -- and it's central to every major event in the founding of the country -- the intertwining of the two is just fascinating. The people who made the major decisions were all slave owners; they were managing their slaves as they tried to build a democracy. We're just now learning how Martha Washington had a half-black sister. [That half-sister, a slave named Mary Dandridge, is believed to have borne a child by her own white nephew, one of the incidents that may have turned George Washington against slavery.]

There's so much of this intermingling, and that's the way slavery worked. If I own a human being, I certainly have access to having sex with them when I want to. That was part of how it functioned. We're just now starting to admit all that and discover the details. It's been there for years, but we've not publicly said it."

Here's Wilmott's telling metaphor that should make an impression on even the most thickheaded of today's Confederate apologists:

"We tried to make choices that would make slavery real to people, because it is difficult to get your head around it. One statistic I use in the film is the idea that a slave is worth as much as a luxury car would be today. To me, that's not something people understand. OK, a slave is worth some money -- in fact, it's a lot of money. Think of it as a Lexus. If this guy has got 50 Lexuses outside and somebody says, "I want your Lexuses," well, there's gonna be a fight. Salon

READING ABOUT HYBRIDS
MAKES MY HAIR HURT!
I can't get my head around it. 

I scored poorly in science classes - all of 'em. So please be gentle with me as I wonder aloud if we should be putting SO MUCH of our working and thinking capital into potential technologies that would replace the burning of oil, a finite, polluting, fossil fuel with the burning of coal, a finite, polluting fossil fuel?

 

I know it's inefficient to expend more energy to derive ethanol from corn or bio-diesel (Willie-juice) from waste fryer fat. In the long view is this sound policy from an economic or ecologic view? I dunno. Maybe if Willie records a song about it, I'll understand.

 

What do we have to burn to harness hydrogen to our pony carts or Hummers? Yes, we've got WOOD (blush) - I mean, the renewable resource that we can burn - but surely, there must be downside(s) to expanding our exploitation of it. (I can see the encroachment of managed forestlands encroaching upon the habitat of the McMansion dwellers in the suburbs and exurbs across America and the world.)

The big squeeze on LABOR... 

From Salon  HOW THE WORLD WORKS -  by Andrew Leonard

Today's globalization must-read comes to us courtesy of a link from the New Economist, from Morgan Stanley's chief economist, Stephen Roach. Already dubbed by one Salon reader as her favorite "gloomy economist," Roach has been making dire predictions about the U.S. economy for some time. But his latest missive is one of the most on-the-money dissections of the impact globalization is having on worker wages in the developed world that I've seen yet.

Some highlights:

"In the big industrialized economies of the developed world, the squeeze on labor could well be the singular macro development of our lifetime."

"In the U.S., for example, inflation-adjusted worker compensation in the private sector -- which includes wages, salaries, and benefits and is, by far, the biggest piece of overall personal income in the U.S. -- has risen only 12 percent in the 49-month time span of the current expansion. By our calculations, this falls about $365 billion short (in real terms) of the 20 percent increase that occurred, on average, over comparable intervals of the past four expansions."

"In an increasingly integrated global economy, a failure to rationalize the excesses of bloated cost structures in the high-wage developed economies is tantamount to capitulation of market share."

"The political implications of the global labor arbitrage could well be the most vexing of all. The immediate risks are heightened trade frictions, with an outside chance of protectionism. Why else would Washington-led China bashing continue to get traction as the U.S. unemployment rate slips below 5 percent? Once jobless, now wageless, the current economic recovery is not going well for beleaguered middle-class workers in the United States."

Roach paints a dark picture, certainly one far grimmer than most economists employed by major Wall Street financial firms are wont to do. But he's not really saying anything that left-wing critics of globalization haven't been declaring for years. So the real question is, as always, what does he think should be done about this?

And on that point, Roach and How the World Works converge. Protectionism, says Roach, is not the answer. Globalization must be treated as a competitive challenge. "This puts the onus on educational reform, the training of more engineers and scientists, research and development incentives, and innovation. The problem with these proposals is that they offer no instant gratification for a body politic that is used to the quick fix. But that takes us to the biggest challenge of all posed by the global labor arbitrage -- it has only just begun."

OFFAL?!?

I recall when I toiled in the slaughterhouse that management could only turn a small profit (1-3% net) AND they "marketed every part of the pig but the squeal"! A lot of pork (and beef) pieces-parts are so unappetizing to some - they can't be sold without special labelling noting, "Contents Offal".

Offal encompasses everything from the heart, liver, lungs, and entrails of an animal, to the tail, feet, and head, each part with its own unique and yes, delicious, flavors. Haven't you ever eaten headcheese? Or blood and tongue pudding? Sweetbreads? Hah! They're sometimes described as "variety meats" and best tried BEFORE you learn that they are edible glands of an animal, such as the thymus or pituitary! PATOOEY!
It's OFFAL! Or awful, as is your taste. Check it out!  Eat this - it's offal!

 

Even this low end Studebaker draws admiring stares with a pair of fender skirts...

Good fortune. COMMENT!! Please spread the meme. Don't smoke in bed...