#GOP , #tcot , #Conservative #race card…h/t Jay Branscomb #p2 #uniteblue #racism #hate pic.twitter.com/WR5fMYYfuQ
— James Music RN, BSN (@JamesM_BSN) February 28, 2014
Monthly Archives: February 2014
China’s Trade Success
The way you protect workers is by capturing markets, Both supply and demand. China does this. America does not.
Expanding sales, etc. is not quite the same focus. It’s just enough to miss the future. It’s not price or wages alone, it’s not quality alone (they matter but are not absolute!), it’s strategy; and right now, despite it’s currency issues, quality lag, and other faults, China has a better strategy that makes nations and markets close the deals.
The better ideas for advancing national economic production, expanding markets, and increasing wages are found in China. China repeats its formula, but so many use China as a foil or stereotype, or of fear, to trash its spectacular success.
China focuses on long term agreements for strategically important resources, from money (US) and food (Brasil) to oil (#1 globally!) and rare earth (home).
China created a $10 billion currency swap with Argentina between central banks, giving Argentina access to credit-neutral reserves, bypassing its 24% inflation–a brilliant use of a central bank in foreign policy; policy the US cannot copy.
China is Brasil’s biggest trading partner ($75.5 billion, 2012) and seeks a dominant role in Africa’s energy producing countries.
China offered Trinidad and Tobago $3.1 billion in concessionary loans for the island nation’s energy industry. It pledged $1 billion for an island hospital and committed 100 medical professionals.
China partners with stable countries, its industries and workers (in Brasil, Ghana, Angola for example), and puts its agenda first.
US policy lacks strategy, and coordination, and doesn’t focus on public-private partnerships, or key global components like credit and transportation (especially rail).
The lack of focus trades the future away and results in losing ground.
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The AudioVisual File – February 28, 2014 ~ Crimea, Oscar Micheaux’s Classic: “Swing!”
Annise Parker, Mayor of Houston, Texas’ largest city. In her 3rd term, she’s openly gay and married with 2 adopted children.
No audio today.
Links:
Putin Pledges Aid to Ukraine but Leaves Steps Unclear
Armed Men Take Position at Two Airports in Crimea http://nyti.ms/1pBPWKe
Tamron Hall Becomes First Black Woman To Co-Anchor ‘Today’ Show | The Chicago Defender http://bit.ly/1dHckJX
Hagel Explains Pay and Benefit Cuts to Troops | Military.com http://mil-com.me/1cfaa9A
Kenya Rhino-Poaching Doubled Last Year http://huff.to/1ht78xd
Spirituals Verse
I‘ve a robe in the Kingdom
Ain’t that Good News
Music Feature
Minnesota’s Dessa: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert:
http://youtu.be/GwN-WixHkAw
Movie Feature
Swing! (1938) An Oscar Micheaux Film. A well known classic by one of the first black American independent film makers. A plot of betrayal, recovery, and morality, with music and dancing–including an amazing tap dance sequence, A favorite of audiences, than and now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjrd2C3f6Y0&list=PLfZwup8hkNz5nT0BqDElzfoYwdhJl0Q2V&feature=share&index=3
See Black Orpheus, 1st international black movie!
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Is Arizona The New Mississippi?
This latest Arizona law seemed a little creepy and paranoid. It substituted personal preference for faith principle. Under the law’s hallelujah principle, it allowed everybody to set the tenets of their own belief.
We are back in the looking glass zone.
In that bright tunnel, elaborated personal beliefs are the source of faith. Freedom is no longer a social promise mutually defended,
But if my freedom results in injury to you by debasement, missed economic opportunity, the denial of services and goods, I have not paid freedom forward. I have discriminated. I have sinned.
Arizona wanted to make that sin a legal right.
In the looking glass zone, a person seizes this new subjective grant of rights. In fact, the trend is toward more subjective grants.
Second Amendment grants that loudly insist on a one-way private street. More guns, fewer checks, no bans, higher deaths. Stand Your Ground laws replacing self-defense with limited and often impaired self-reflection. Defending corporations as people with unlimited political expense accounts. Filing suits to exempt people from a health care mandate so they can die uninsured.
This is Arizona’s America.
All supposedly tied to Moses’ tablets, enshrined in a law that neither Moses nor Paul would recognize; both wrestled with sin and faith in their day but never thought to drive those with whom they disagreed out of the tribe. There’s not a single market in the Bible where gay people are stoned.
~~walterrhett, Thank you Sir, For such a wise and educated commentary regarding the “craziness” that abounds in this situation. If this is “Arizona’s America” I surely hope it is contained quickly to dismantle it from spreading to other states. But I’m also quite certain, the same results would happen in other states as well. To that…I say we are on a better path to individual freedoms that are part of our constitution and the rights of the good common sense approach that has moved this country through the past up to the present day of Arizona’s defeat of this bill. Thank goodness for such common sense, and may it long be the determining factor in all future endeavors to maintain America, land of the free!
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Setting the Record Straight: The Legacy of Denmark Vesey
The Times published an Op-Ed on Denmark Vesey; in 7 comments, I added Charleston facts. /wr
I (Main)
The memorial at “Mother” Emanuel AME Church to Denmark Vesey, after the cherubs of Raphael, depicts 4 faces of black youths; I have polished their stone. The inscription says Vesey “struck a blow for liberation.” The city’s enslaved knew well freedom’s path.
In 1817, over 3,000 black Methodists, enslaved/free, walked out of Sunday services and founded the Bethel circuit; led by Morris Brown. that congregation by published accounts, gathered 3,000 for night worship. Bethel burned after Vesey’s plot, but the city’s mayor (Hutchinson) helped Brown and others reach Philadelphia. By 1849, within eyesight of the Citadel, defending the city after Vesey, Zion Presbyterian, built for an all-African congregation–had the largest sanctuary in the city.
In Avery’s archives, by letter, the mayor requests meetings with Mr. Holloway, a black leader; blacks wrote to protest a lost burial site. They established burial societies (The Brown Fellowship/the Brotherhood) and schools (Daniel A Payne bio, Anson St.) before freedom, and ample evidence shows Charleston’s urban enslaved ran businesses, worked and received wages!
Weekly, the newspaper advertises for “Negro hires” in all crafts and jobs–mixed with the ads for runaways. An enslaved of Nathaniel Russell, a leading merchant, ran a blacksmith shop and hired whites! Enslaved women ran the city’s fish market; those in the country sold vegetables to the city. All kept their proceeds.
And Vesey was no more violent than Colin Powell.
II,
Vesey’s son sat on the podium among the honored guests at Ft. Sumpter in 1865 (Good Friday, later that day Lincoln was assassinated in Washington), when the Union/US flag was raised again over the fort.
Later, he was the architect for Emanuel AME, completed within a year of the flag raising.
The plan called for each African ethnic group to join under their own leaders, and each was assigned a specific task. 8,000 to 10,000 were to join from the countryside, virtually all black; whites lived in town. Once the men and women gathered, the powder magazine was to be blown up, the arsenal captured, weapons distributed and ships commandeered (Vesey was a skilled sailor; the city had many patroons (African-American ship captains, who sailed 20 ton rice schooners on the coastal waters) to sail to Haiti.
The plot was never to “kill” all whites; it was no a plan for vengeance, but for freedom by escape, using skills from within the community.
III.
You would have to live here to understand, but I will say the professor fails to make the important distinction between “come ya’s” and “been ya’s.” Been ya’s (been here’s) know better. It is the come ya’s (new influx of clueless snow birds and northern immigrants!) my experience tells me were in the audience that day!
That don’t know what it means when we say, “fix your plate.” They think it broken!
But the professor does improperly frame the question. Vesey was a freedom fighter. Less successful than Nelson Mandela, but of the same visionary ilk.
IV.
The Hopkins professor, like others, overlooked key evidence of the plot, found in the behavior of the 36 enslaved who were hanged. Peter Poyas, a leader with Vesey, told all imprisoned, “Be silent. Die like men.” All gave no testimony or made no remarks or pleas or defense in their turn; they went silently to the rope. Without involvement, few men would be willing to hang innocently. (I would be banging the bars to meet with authorities and say not me! And several slaves were banished and not hung.) That demonstrated bond of behavior when facing death (they were not all hung at once), is telling evidence of an incontrovertible bond among these men; their allegiance to each other and their intended plan.
Too many scholars look at the “records,” and ignore the responses of the enslaved!
Charleston was evolving its own standards of conduct and thought. A slave-holding colonial port (like Boston, New York, Newport, and Salem), its plantation system for growing rice made it a world capital of wealth, consumption, law and diplomacy, and high taste. Its silver handcrafted by English smiths, its field hoes forged from Swedish steel, its rum distilled in Rhode Island from Jamaican molasses, its elms transplanted from China, its Africans from Senegal to Angola sold in public auctions marched along its streets in coffles, Charleston’s code of social graces was bounded by a new freedom and a blind eye, a rough hewn optimism whose elegance reveled in rough edges.
V.
I gotta tell you about Quash, the son of a major property owner, who owned half of Kiawah Island after the War, Arnoldus Vanderhorst IV, whose family were considered to set Charleston’s finest table. (Their house still stands in town!) When he died, the legitimate sons were passed over by the family, who selected Quash to lead the rebuilding and put him in charge of widely scattered holdings. His aunt called Quash, the Cassique of Kiawah! (Cassique was the term for the leader of the Kiawah native Americans, the islands namesake.)
Many of Quash’s letters survive. He gives an account to the widow, “Ms. Adele” of the progress, asks after everyone’s health, reports on current affairs (hot topics!), lays out his plans and steps–and once admonishes his brother for failing to deliver the items in the quantities he requested!
Quash’s grandson later became a judge in New York. He is a noted local ghost, often seen walking the grounds with “he pa” (his daddy)!
VI.
Regarding audience questions, the best anecdote I recall is from a civil rights conference sponsored by the Citadel here in Charleston, when a speaker pointed out the enslaved really brought the skills for growing rice, the main SC plantation crop, with them, from several regions of Africa (see the book, Black Rice). Rice was hard work and labor intensive. An audience member, both sincere and naive, asked: “Was it hard, since they were slaves, to convince the masters, to let them grow rice?”
Modern white supremacist code always notes the buzz phrase, “they got free meals and place to stay.”
Lastly, a staff member of the National Trust has been sleeping a night in remaining slave cabins across the country, to call attention to the need for their preservation. He has boxes of letters, often handwritten, by those who can not bear the legacy of slavery’s breach of humanity and deny it by revision.
VII.
A portion of the official trial transcript from the court proceedings that sentenced Vesey, Peter Poyas, Gullah Jack Pritchard and 32 others to hang, and then be buried unmarked graves is available at:
“A Glory Over Everything:” History’s Invisible Veil: [http://wp.me/p1mBVu-Rl], beginning at p. 24. (Scroll down to embedded scribd document, then enlarge.)
The overall ebook describes several Charleston families headed by black women, enslaved and free, whose children rose to prominence: the Cordoza brothers, Thomas and Francis, one who founded public education in Mississippi, the other whose name is on a DC high school; the Grimke brothers, nephews of the Grimke sisters (Sarah and Angelina), one who attended Harvard, the other Princeton Seminary, both forceful leaders.
It also details the overlooked story of one of the greatest and most engaged black abolitionist, Robert Purvis, born in Charleston during slavery, who became President of Pennsylvania’s Anti-Slavery Society and a prominent contemporary of Garrison and others, and using his own house, helping more than 9,000 enslaved to escape along the Underground Railroad.
In the cruelty of slavery, many marriages existed across plantations; movement was permitted for family time.
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That Rare Writer’s Zone
Michael Powell has entered that rare zone where craft turns to art for writers, and his letters are like the brush strokes of fine painters, leaving the right touch, sound, and image on the page. The Dutch Masters could paint the roar of the wave. Mr. Powell can find the silent heart of the story within its details; by reference, developing its meaning within the narrative of politics and personalities, moving his own voice out of the way to let the story speak.
Finding the narrative is never easy and always elusive, but writers–and readers–know when the task is done well. Almost daily, in feature after feature, Mr. Powell is creating unique narrative voices.
These voices have become some of the Times best tools; clear, tight rhythms echo through his work. Together, they work to drive the story’s message and make reading his work an entry into a world that is the high art of print–a visual world of print that has voices with a clarion’s power that lift the obscure into the real time of light and sound.
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Building Structures of Moral Intelligence
One of the of the unrecognized declines last century has been in moral intelligence. Chemical gases, global genocides, conflict rapes, serial and single murders, environmental destruction and poisoning, the sharp curtailment of civil liberties and democracies, global economic bubbles, the cover-up of harmful effects of dangerous drugs, experiments without permission on human subjects, sterilizations, the squalid abortions of Dr. Kermit Gosnell are images that undercut the mind and heart.
For moral intelligence we need not only firewalls and institutional protections against the forces of science and evil, but an inner understanding and recognition within ourselves. That absence seems to be the growing threat.
When a Virginia politician calls a pregnant woman a “host” and places the idea of mother on the periphery of gestation, moral intelligence is misrepresented to attack the family. But a Columbia University professor notes 1175 gene patents were granted between 1985 and 1991 (not all human!).
We have no structures in place for the debate and exercise of authority on issues of moral intelligence. Neither the law or medical guidelines are adequate; profit nor purpose should bind us.
In the cases of fertilization and changes in genetic birth material, information should be uniform and perhaps decisions should be individual, as a place to begin. Closely watched, let science proceed.
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The AudioVisual File — February 25, 2014; China Television, Brazil and Angola
With English subtitles, China’s highly popular dating show, “If You Are The One.” It has broken rating records in China and is watched each weekend by more than 50 million people. The producers describe as a look at “what China is thinking and chasing after.” One contestant said she would rather cry in the back of a BMW than laugh on the back of a motorcycle!
From the opening of the show, following the German contestant, at the 1: 20 mark, see the responses of the wildly popular African student, Debucada Sanca, from Guinea Bissau, known as the African Princess for her well received appearances on the show. She was embraced by Chinese audiences and has a huge national following!
Links:
Brazil, Europe plan undersea cable to skirt U.S. spying
Housing for Oil Workers A Boom Market in Angola
Spirituals Verse
I’ve been ‘buked and I’ve been scorned
Tryin’ to make this journey all alone
Music Feature
Valerie June: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, Amazing Tennessee Traditional Talent.
Movie Feature
See Black Orpheus, 1st international black movie!
Black History 360* 