The ‘Land Of The Free’ Is A Farce

The Article: The myth of freedom in the land of the free by John Stoer in Al-Jazeera.

The Text: In 1893, a massive financial panic sent demand for the Pullman Palace Car Company into a downward spiral. The luxury rail car company reacted by slashing workers’ wages and increasing their work load. After negotiations with ownership broke down the following year, the American Railway Union, in solidarity with Pullman factory workers, launched a boycott that eventually shut down railroads across the US. It was a full-scale insurrection, as the late historian Howard Zinn put it, that soon “met with the full force of the capitalist state”.

The US Attorney General won a court order to stop the strike, but the union and its leader, Eugene V Debs, refused to quit. President Grover Cleveland, over the objections of Illinois’ governor, ordered federal troops to Chicago under the pretense of maintaining public safety. Soldiers fired their bayoneted rifles into the crowd of 5,000, killing 13 strike sympathisers. Seven hundred, including Debs, were arrested. Debs wasn’t a socialist before the strike, but he was after. The event radicalised him. “In the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle,” Debs said later on, “the class struggle was revealed”.

I imagine a similar revelation for the tens of thousands of Americans who participated in last fall’s Occupy Wall Street protests. As you know, the movement began in New York City and spread quickly, inspiring activists in the biggest cities and the smallest hamlets. Outraged by the broken promise of the US and inspired by democratic revolts of Egypt and Tunisia, they assembled to protest economic injustice and corrupt corporate power in Washington.

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Same As I’ve Ever Been, But I’m The Only One Who Hasn’t Noticed

‘Brothers’ off Tanlines’ new album Mixed Emotions.

A Tiny Radical

Doubt that this little girl understands the poster she’s holding, but it does provide for hours of pondering what kind of cookies the military would make to acquire weapons.

Why Austerity Measures Are Failing The UK’s Economy

The Article: U.K. Conservatives Come Up Short in Austerity Experiment by Clive Crook in Bloomberg News.

The Text: Since 2010 Britain has been a laboratory for an important experiment in economic policy. The question: When economies slump and public borrowing soars, can fiscal restraint speed the recovery? Preliminary findings: No, and whatever made you think it could?

The unemployed weren’t asked whether it was all right with them, but Britain was a good place for the experiment. For a start, its government actually controls fiscal policy. On Wednesday, Finance Minister George Osborne will set out his new budget in the House of Commons and, strange as it seems in Washington, that will be that. Osborne won’t call for Parliament to change tax rates or urge it (perhaps seriously, perhaps not) to do one thing or another. He will set policy, period.

As a place for this test, Britain had another advantage. Like the U.S. but unlike France or Germany, it has its own currency and runs its own monetary policy. Osborne doesn’t have to frame his budgets knowing, as governments in the euro area know, that interest rates will be set somewhere else according to somebody else’s needs.

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Underneath This Hood You Kiss, I Tick Like A Bomb

Perfume Genius’ short yet rather dark ‘Hood’ off their album Put Yr Back N 2 It.