This is an excerpt from a documentary called “Playing For Change: Peace Through Music”. Thanks to Doug Ramsey for the link.
Leave a CommentJason Crane Posts
We went back to Five Rivers Nature Center today for our first winter visit. Here’s proof:
We’ve been there two other times, too:
Leave a CommentMy very good friend Satoru Ohashi is playing trumpet in this video, recorded Nov. 30, 2008 in New York City:
Leave a CommentLast night, Jen and the boys and I went to see some percussion ensembles from the Albany Youth Symphony Orchestra. The concert was at the Massry Center for the Arts at the College of St. Rose. The Massry Center is a brand new performance and rehearsal building with state-of-the-art facilities.
Unfortunately, it also has one major design flaw. The light switches that control every light in the auditorium are located about three feet up on the wall outside the auditorium, and the switches blink.
How do I know this? Because while the theater was filling up and the final ensemble was finishing its rehearsal, my two-year-old son, John, saw the pretty blinking light and pressed all the switches, turning off every light in the auditorium. Some people started leaving. My wife overheard one patron say, “They must not want us in there now.”
I saw what John had done and turned the lights back on. The rehearsal finished, and the rest of the show went off without a hitch. But some architect ought to be giving the college a refund for that part of the design. Or they should have a “no two-year-old boys” policy.
Leave a CommentThe current issue of The Nation has a very disturbing report on white vigilantism in New Orleans after Katrina. Here’s a description along with a link to pressure the NoLa authorities to investigate these crimes:
A new report in The Nation[1] documents what many have claimed for years — for some Black New Orleanians the threat of being killed by White vigilantes in Katrina’s aftermath became a bigger threat than the storm itself.
After the storm, White vigilantes roamed Algiers Point shooting and, according to their own accounts, killing Black men at will — with no threat of a police response. For the last three years, the shootings and the police force’s role in them have been an open secret to many New Orleanians. To date, no one has been charged with a crime and law enforcement officials have refused to investigate.
The report is helpful, but given Lousiana’s horrible record on protecting its Black citizens, justice will only come if we demand it.
I’ve joined ColorOfChange in calling on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Louisiana’s Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, and the U.S. Department of Justice–to conduct a full investigation of these crimes and any police cover-up. Will you join me? It takes only a moment:
In the two weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, the media created a climate of fear with trumped-up stories of Black lawlessness. Meanwhile, an armed group of White vigilantes took over the Algiers Point neighborhood in New Orleans and mercilessly hunted down Black people. “It was great!” said one vigilante. “It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.”
“The Nation’s” article tells the story of Donnell Herrington, Marcel Alexander, and Chris Collins–a group of friends who were attacked by shotgun-wielding White men as they entered Algiers Point on September
1, 2005. As they tried to escape, Herrington recalls, their attackers shouted, “Get him! Get that nigger!” He managed to get away. Alexander and Collins were told that they would be allowed to live on the condition
that they told other Black folks not to come to Algiers Point. Herrington, shot in the neck, barely survived.And there’s the story of Henry Glover, who didn’t survive after being shot by an unknown assailant.[2] Glover’s brother flagged down a stranger for help, and the two men brought Glover to a police station. But instead of receiving aid, they were beaten by officers while Henry Glover bled to death in the back seat of the stranger’s car. A police officer drove off in the car soon afterward. Both Glover’s body and the car were found burnt to cinders a week later. It took DNA analysis to identify the body.
These are only a few of the stories of Black folks who were accosted in Algiers Point, and you can read more in The Nation. But unless you speak out, we may never learn the full extent of the violence. Journalists have encountered a wall of silence on the part of the authorities. The coroner had to be sued to turn over autopsy records. When he finally complied, the records were incomplete, with files on several suspicious deaths suddenly empty. The New Orleans police and the District Attorney repeatedly refused to talk to journalists about Algiers Point. And according to “The Nation” journalist A.C. Thompson, “the city has in nearly every case refused to investigate or prosecute people for assaults and murders committed in the wake of the storm.”
The Nation article is important, but it’s just a start. For more than three years now, these racist criminals have by their own admission gotten away with murder while officials in New Orleans have systematically evaded any kind of accountability. We have to demand it.
Please join us in calling on state and federal officials to investigate these brutal attacks and the conduct of Orleans Parish law enforcement agencies, and please ask your friends and family to do the same.
Thanks.
—-
1. “Katrina’s Hidden Race War,” The Nation, 12-18-2008
2. “Body of Evidence,” The Nation, 12-18-2008
Leave a Comment
If comedic-philosophical-absurdist-hip-hop-opera poetry is your thing, you’re going to dig DJ Spinoza. I picked this up on the advice of a blog. It’s a fast read, and one that I think will reward repeated attention. This first edition is limited to 1,500 copies, and I’d get one if I were you.
Leave a Comment
Labor writer and activist Jonathan Tasini
Jonathan Tasini has written a simple and compelling piece about NY Gov. David Paterson’s call for pension givebacks for state employees. Here’s the core of Tasini’s argument:
We could wipe out the budget deficit–or, certainly trim it down to something trivial–by raising taxes on the very wealthy and going back to a more progressive taxation system that we had in the 1970s. You know this: if the state replaced the existing rate structure (consisting of 5 brackets with rates ranging from 4.0 to 6.85%) with one consisting of 14 brackets with rates ranging from 2.0 to 15.0%, we could bring in $6-7 billion more, and perhaps as high as $11 billion.
Under this plan, 95 percent of the state’s taxpayers—95 percent of the people—would receive a tax cut. Like the proposals championed by President-elect Barack Obama, a more progressive taxation system would be easing the burden on the people who are the most at risk in our economically troubled times. The top one percent of taxpayers—whose average income is $2.685 million—would see their taxes go up about 5.4 percent. The four percent below that top one percent—those people whose average income is $326,000—would have their taxes rise 1.4 percent.In fact, the top five percent would have their dues burden slightly reduced because higher state taxes would lower their federal obligations.
Everyone else would realize a reduction in their taxes.
I highly recommend the rest of the article, too.
Leave a CommentThe Four Families get together for a holiday shindig:
Leave a CommentNew Orleans
Fifty People, One Question: New Orleans from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.
New York
h
Fifty People, One Question: New York from Crush & Lovely on Vimeo.
This week, Obama takes another cue from FDR as he calls for “action and action now” in his weekly address.
There’s a great exhibit at the FDR Library & Museum called “Action And Action Now” that I highly recommend.
Leave a CommentI highly recommend my friend Jeff Vrabel’s account of his son Jake’s nocturnal adventures:
Read The Adventure Of The Wandering Pajama-Clad Toddler.
When you’ve finished that, dig back into the archives for my own story, The Great Escape.
Leave a CommentFrom today’s New York Times:
Leave a CommentMr. Summers has spent much of his career tweaking fellow liberals with arguments he considers unpleasant truths — on the dangers of budget deficits, the benefits of capitalism and other subjects. But he seems to have decided that conservative orthodoxies have become a vastly bigger threat to good economic policy than liberal ones. His favorite argument today is one that instead drives some conservatives nuts.
It goes like this: To undo the rise in income inequality since the late ’70s, every household in the top 1 percent of the distribution, which makes $1.7 million on average, would need to write a check for $800,000. This money could then be pooled and used to send out a $10,000 check to every household in the bottom 80 percent of the distribution, those making less than $120,000. Only then would the country be as economically equal as it was three decades ago.