resipiscent recording artists on the Free Music Archive

Five years since resipiscent hoisted our trowels to exhume the most criminally overlooked artists in music. Behold... they is risen!

This is part one, subsequent parts will dig deeplier.

http://freemusicarchive.org/label/Resipiscent/

Pokemones Sex Rebellion

Dancing was interrupted for a “slapping” contest onstage in which a boy, pulled randomly from the crowd, was blindfolded and had his arms held behind his back. A lineup of girls and boys took turns slapping him, with the final blow delivered by a heavyset D.J. that sent the slender boy flying across the stage. As he rubbed his reddened face, the boy got his reward: the chance to make out with the girl of his choice in public to the screams of other teenagers.

The place is a tangle of lips and tongues and hands, all groping and exploring. About 800 teenagers sway and bounce to lyrics imploring them to “Poncea! Poncea!”: make out with as many people as they can.

And make out they do — with stranger after stranger, vying for the honor of being known as the “ponceo,” the one who pairs up the most.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/world/americas/13chile.html

Chile's disaffected 'Pokemones' don't care much about politics. They're too busy having sex

http://www.newsweek.com/id/124098

Anyone remember how to make sutures out of beef jerky?

Careful what you wish for, kids!

Now that conspiracy theories (once so cool!) are the new suburban self-righteousness, anyone planning to rethink good vs evil, or is taking up arms with libertarians just what you've been waiting for all along? Smash the state right? Welcome to a glimpse of what that will look like, not as RPG, but fur real.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/us/politics/16teaparty.html

And what a coinkydink that these ideas should align so perfectly with racism and xenophobia. Screw social institutions, it's lawn vs lawn from here on out. So, end all healthcare!! Anyone remember how to make sutures out of beef jerky?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/us/politics/16teaparty.html

"Tea Party gatherings are full of people who say they would do away with the Federal Reserve, the federal income tax and countless agencies, not to mention bailouts and stimulus packages. Nor is it unusual to hear calls to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A remarkable number say this despite having recently lost jobs or health coverage. Some of the prescriptions they are debating — secession, tax boycotts, states “nullifying” federal laws, forming citizen militias — are outside the mainstream, too."

"Many describe emerging from their research as if reborn to a new reality. Some have gone so far as to stock up on ammunition, gold and survival food in anticipation of the worst. For others, though, transformation seems to amount to trying on a new ideological outfit — embracing the rhetoric and buying the books."

Ideas this friction-free can only mean trouble, these are fear-loving survivalists happy to excuse themselves for having elected Bush TWICE. The Republicans set this fire and seem content to sift through ashes looking for their next move.

Bigger than the Marshall Plan, Moon Landing, LA Purchase, S&L bailout, Korean War, and NASA budget combined

The federal government's financial bailouts bill could easily top $4.6 trillion.

How much money is that, anyway? Brace yourself. That number, Mr. Lanchester writes, paraphrasing one expert, is bigger than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Apollo moon landings, the 1980s savings and loan crisis, the Korean War and the total cost of NASA s space flights, all added together repeat, added together (and yes, the old figures are adjusted upward for inflation).

That excerpt appears in the NYTimes review of "I.O.U.: How Everyone Owes Everyone But No One Can Pay" by John Lanchester, a novelist rather than an economist.

For once I'm in agreement with Bush who remarked

: "This sucker could go down."

With the U.S. legislative branch in total catalepsy (as threat of filibuster now requires supermajority for passage of any legislation) no federal regulation will successfully address the current, much less reign in the next, hyper-bubble.

Schwarzenegger is proposing to end Calworks completely (if the Fed doesn’t cough up $7B) That would trigger thousands of homeless families who would become dependent on county services… the funds for which do not exist.

All this because Reagan taught us taxes are evil, even when disparity of wealth rockets out of sight? Apparently the wealthy need to actually see the streets littered with working class families before they’ll consent to new taxes. Will we also need Hugo, Dickens, and Steinbeck to rise from the dustbin and explain famine to us in storybook form?

I keep wanting to doubt that the world's vanguard of representative government has become a morally decrepit society of hoarders and war mongers.

What will it take: earthquake? Depression era failures of social services? Right/Libertarian propaganda about "self reliance" must be exposed as empty idealism. Crippling of the legislative branch through filibuster has defeated representative government. As American democracy subsides to oligarchy, class riots become an ever increasing possibility. How will the markets “factor” that in?

Cough up a buck! Every hospital is either abandoned or in ruins in Haiti's capital.

"Every third building is in ruins" in the capital of Haiti including the UN building and the presidential palace. Every hospital is either abandoned or in ruins.

Thousands of bodies are stacked in the streets.

Give a few bucks for rescue efforts in the single porest nation of the western hemisphere. It's tough not to give something, especially after the US government deposed their elected leader, and far worse:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200106/grann

But we'll save arguments for another disaster... this one happened last night.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/01/earthquake_in_haiti.html

Hilltop video looking across the entire city.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8456393.stm?ls

.<|KICK IN A FEW BUCKS|>.

But, BEWARE...

• Some cell phone carriers deduct a 50 percent from SMS donations.
• Without a presence already on-the-ground, a non-profit can't delivering post-quake aid

The most effective NGOs working in Haiti appear below with links to their Haiti-specific donations:

• Partners in Health is the NGO founded in Haiti in 1987 by Dr. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician and anthropologist who focuses on international social justice. The group’s emergency response focuses on delivering medical supplies and staff. Louise Ivers, PIH’s clinical director in the country, sent the message, “Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. SOS. SOS.” Donate here http://bit.ly/5ZA7Zm

• MADRE, the international women’s rights NGO, partners with the Zanmi Lasante Clinic on the ground in Haiti. “The most urgent needs right now are bandages, broad-spectrum antibiotics and other medical supplies, as well as water tablets to prevent cholera outbreaks,” MADRE reports. Donate here: http://bit.ly/6eKeDd

• Action Against Hunger has had a team in Haiti since 1985, and is ready to fly planeloads of emergency supplies from Paris to Port-au-Prince. Food is one necessity, but so is sanitation; in some Haitian towns, 70 percent of homes do not have plumbing. Donate here: http://bit.ly/7Gndqt

• UNICEF, the United Nations Fund focusing on children, has worked on the ground in Haiti since 1949, so has the expertise to make a difference. You can donate here. Donate here: http://bit.ly/8RT4CQ

• Doctors Without Borders is also present in-country. One senior staff member reports, “The situation is chaotic. I visited five medical centers, including a major hospital, and most of them were not functioning.” Donate here:http://bit.ly/7CQtMC

Baby Eisenstein

Disney recalls Baby Einstein merch http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/education/24baby.html

Paving the way for baby Eisenstein http://faculty.cua.edu/johnsong/hitchcock/pages/montage/montage-1.html

Too Big

Hair raising true-crime meets history meets today's news in this firsthand account of events preceeding the collapse of the mortgage markets. I found it very helpful for its perspective on how banking changed when investments banks went public. Plus its full of cussing, high stakes, and intellectual intrigue without getting preachy or conspiratorial.
http://tinyurl.com/66yhto

Also, this worthwhile bit of history from Harvard's Richard Parker, I abridged his intro for quicker reading. Well before Minsky explained the instablity inherent to capitalism, Berle (Harvard's youngest graduate) described the danger of Corporations too powerful to be regulated (in current parlance, "too big to fail")
Full text:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Parker-t.html?_r=1&sq=berle&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=1&pagewanted=all

[Adolf Augustus Berle wrote “The Modern Corporation & Private Property” in 1932.] The book succeeded in persuading Americans to see their economic system in a new way — and helped set the stage for the most fundamental realignment of power since abolition. [...] Berle used data compiled by his co-author, the economist Gardiner Means, to examine how markets had become concentrated in just a few hundred firms and how senior managers had wrested power from the companies’ legal owners, the shareholders.

No radical, Berle was eager to preserve the corporate system, which he called “the flower of our industrial organization.” But he now believed that new controls would have to balance “a variety of claims by various groups in the community” — not just its managers or shareholders — and assign “to each a portion of the income stream on the basis of public policy rather than private cupidity.”In 1932, as in our own moment of financial crisis, most Americans could see that something needed to be done because these new behemoths — which had turned America from a nation of farmers into the world’s largest industrial power — were on the verge of collapse, poised like Samson to pull the entire economy down with them. Berle’s genius in “The Modern Corporation” was to align his professional insights with the public’s fears, and its anger. As he starkly put it in his preface, “Between a political organization of society and an economic organization of society, which will be the dominant form?”

In Theodore Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s era, reformers like Brandeis had argued that strict anti­monopoly and anti-collusion laws could return America to a place of small firms and farms, the beau ideal of Adam Smith’s market model. But Americans continued rushing to the cities, spurring an explosion in mass consumption, financed by a boom in cheap consumer credit and easy home loans. Then, in 1929, the markets crashed.

The crash for a time reinvigorated not only the anti-monopolists, but also union organizers, socialists, agrarian populists and crackpot utopians. It also brought forth “forward looking” chief executives like Gerald Swope of General Electric, who supported progressive corporatism — a world of government-mandated business cartels in exchange for higher wages, improved working conditions, and corporate-based workers’ compensation, pension and unemployment plans. Berle, however, was keen on none of these solutions. In his book, he explained that giant corporations were not “natural” economic institutions but recent inventions of the law, cobbled together on the remains of the medieval corporation, a quite different institution. What the Depression showed, he argued, was that modern corporations had failed not only stockholders, but the public — and would do so again, if left unregulated.

But what sort of regulation was required? On details, Berle was maddeningly but deliberately vague. What he did say clearly was that government needed to bear final responsibility for the economy by using its powers to balance supply and demand. It would also need to require corporate directors to manage the managers, not just for shareholders’ benefit but in accordance with new rules codifying the collective rights of stakeholders and the broader social responsibilities of corporations.

The impact of Berle’s ideas was no doubt enhanced by his decidedly nonradical biography. The son of a reform-minded Congregational minister and his wealthy wife, he had entered Harvard at 14 and finished Harvard Law School at 21 — at the time its youngest graduate ever. (Arrogant as well as gifted, he once showed up in Felix Frankfurter’s class the semester after completing it. Puzzled, Frankfurter asked him why he was back. “Oh,” Berle replied, “I wanted to see if you’d learned anything since last year.”) After a year at Louis Brandeis’s firm, he briefly did public-­interest legal work before marrying well and settling down to a prosperous career in Wall Street corporate law. As clients flocked to him, however, he began questioning the very system that was making them (and him) rich. In 1923, alarmed by the venality, the chicanery and frequently the stupidity of Wall Street, he started writing articles that over the next several years would virtually invent the modern field of corporate finance law, emphasizing moderate solutions. After Columbia Law School offered him a job in 1927, he began cycling between his lucrative practice downtown and his teaching uptown.

But the Great Crash — and the subsequent revelations of market manipulation, fraud and reckless risk-taking — forced Berle to change sides. He was a Mugwump Republican, but the economic chaos of the Depression, and the threat it posed to American democracy, convinced him a new sort of regulation was now unavoidable.

In late 1931, Franklin Roosevelt, then governor of New York, called on the Columbia political scientist Raymond Moley. Roosevelt was weighing a run for president and was looking for fresh ideas. Moley quickly approached Berle and connected the two ambitious Harvard men. A month after “The Modern Corporation” appeared, Berle drafted Roosevelt’s famous Commonwealth Club address, delivered in September 1932. Proclaiming that “the day of enlightened administration has come,” Roosevelt articulated the rationale for much of the New Deal’s financial and corporate reforms, including deposit insurance and securities regulation. He defended the coming government interventions as protecting individualism and private property against concentrated economic power. Calling for a new “economic constitutional order,” he declared it our common duty to “build toward the time when a major depression cannot occur again.”“None of Roosevelt’s speeches,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. later wrote, “caught up more poignantly the intellectual moods of the early Depression than this one.” It helped assure his landslide victory — and earned Berle a series of ever more important posts in the administration. America began an unprecedented 40-year expansion.

By the Reagan era, however, a new philosophy would take hold, and the public oversight of markets that Berle helped pioneer would over time be swept aside, in confident belief that markets could self-regulate and that government was the problem, not the solution. Today, that era itself seems to be coming to end, and the question Berle posed — will democracy rule the corporations, or will the corporations rule democracy? — seems a profoundly important one worth asking again.

Richard Parker, an economist, teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is the author of “John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics.”http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Parker-t.html?_r=1&sq=berle&st=cse&oref=slogin&scp=1&pagewanted=all