Jimmy Heath--Jazz: A Democratic Art Form

Digital Diaspora Family Reunion:

Jimmy Heath embodies the history of jazz.  In his 60 years on the jazz scene, the saxophone great has appeared on more than 125 records as both a composer and player. Heath grew up in Philadelphia alongside brothers Percy and Tootie, both renowned jazz players in their own right.  He has played with trumpeter Howard McGhee; Dizzy Gillespie’s sextet and big band; the Miles Davis Quintet; Art Farmer, Cannonball Adderley, Chet Baker, James Moody, Clark Terry, and others.

Woody Guthrie Centennial: Celebrating Life, Politics and Music of the "Dust Bowl Troubadour"

Democracy Now:

Today a Democracy Now! special on the life, politics and music of Woody Guthrie, the "Dust Bowl Troubadour." Born a hundred years ago on July 14, 1912, in Oklahoma, Guthrie wrote hundreds of folk songs and became a major influence on countless musicians, including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs. While Guthrie is best remembered as a musician, he also had a deeply political side, speaking out for labor and civil rights at the height of McCarthyism.

Amidst commemorations across the country marking Woody Guthrie's centennial, we're joined by Guthrie's daughter, Nora Guthrie, author of the book "My Name is New York: Ramblin' Around Woody Guthrie's Town"; his granddaughter Anna Canoni; and musician Steve Earle. We hear stories from Woody Guthrie's family life and his time in New York City, where he lived from 1940 until his death in 1967 after a long battle with Huntington's Disease. Guthrie's wife, Marjorie, later dedicated her life to finding a cure for the disease, inspiring young doctors to pursue genetic research and founding what became the Huntington's Disease Society of America. Earle, a three-time Grammy winner, performs two of Guthrie's songs and discusses how the singer inspired him as a musician and activist. "I never separated music and politics, which [I] kept bringing back to Woody over and over again," Earle says. "I still don't consider myself to be a political artist. I'm just an artist that -- I think like Woody was -- lives in really politically charged times."

"A lot of people don't think of him as a New Yorker, but that was really his home town, for most of his life actually," says Nora Guthrie, president of both the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, and Woody Guthrie Publications. Her new book, "My Name is New York: Ramblin' Around Woody Guthrie's Town," documents many of the places Woody lived and wrote his most popular songs, including "This Land Is Your Land." "It's really a New York song, its about the result, the culmination of that journey," she says. "I'm constantly learning about Woody, I feel like he's constantly evolving because we're still learning more and more about him," says Canoni. "He had something to say that was very important."

See the first installment of the Woody Guthrie special in the Democracy Now! archive, http://www.democracynow.org/2012/7/4/woody_guthrie_at_100_pete_seeger

Moyers & Company: Big Money, Big Media, Big Trouble

Marty Kaplan on Big Money's Effect on Big Media from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Moyers & Company:

Big money and big media have coupled to create a ‘Disney World’ of democracy in which TV shows, televised debates, even news coverage is being dumbed down, just as the volume is being turned up. The result is a public certainly more entertained, but less informed and personally involved than they should be, says Marty Kaplan, director of USC’s Norman Lear Center and an entertainment industry veteran. Bill Moyers talks with Kaplan about how taking news out of the journalism box and placing it in the entertainment box is hurting democracy and allowing special interest groups to manipulate the system.

This is What Democracy Looks Like: The Occupy Movement Will Reinvent Itself

This is What Democracy Looks Like:   

The Occupy Movement Will Reinvent Itself

by Mark Naison | NewBlackMan

The tent cities have been bulldozed and the parks have been cleared.  Big city mayors see clean spaces, washed and sanitized, and hope that the Occupations were a bad dream. Obama supporters hope that the three months of protest represented a brief detour in a progressive movement that will ultimately come to its senses and concentrate on re-electing the president and campaigning for Democratic candidates for congress, realizing- with the help of a collection of bizarre and frighteningly ill informed Republican presidential aspirants--, that the most important initiatives to achieve a more just society take place at the polls, not in the streets.

It’s a plausible scenario, to be sure, neat and rational. As many liberal pundits have pointed out, taking practical steps to address the economic inequality issues Occupy Wall street has raised- such as shifting the tax burden from the working class and middle class to the very wealthy- can only be done by creating electoral majorities in favor of such policies that don’t currently exist, and that can only be achieved through the “grunt work” of voter registration an organizing election campaigns in behalf of progressive candidates. And there is no question that many constituencies who were uneasily allied with the Occupy movements, particularly labor unions, plan to do just that in coming months and coming years.

But I am not sure that the experience of the last three months can be nearly excised from the national consciousness and the energy of Occupy supporters nearly directed into electoral activity.

First of all, the experience of direct democracy in the Occupy movement has had a profound, even transformative effect, on those who have participated; one that will not be so easy to persuade those who have experienced it to relinquish.  The young people in this movement—part of an entire generation facing a stagnant job market and crippling debt—discovered  they had the power to make the whole world pay attention to what they were saying by occupying public spaces, working outside normal political channels and refusing to anoint leaders to speak for them. 

But it was more than the reaction of the outside world that was transformative. It was the transformation of the Occupy spaces themselves into places where free discussion and debate could flourish in ways that existed nowhere else in the society, certainly not in increasingly corporatized and bureaucratized universities, stressed filled public schools under pressure to deliver higher test scores, or workplaces ruled by dictatorial managers cognizant that a tight job market assured them of worker compliance.  

When Occupiers chanted “This is what democracy looks like,” they were proclaiming what few people have been willing to acknowledge—that lived democracy and freedom of expression have been eroding in the United States for some time, as institutions become more hierarchical and wealth has been more concentrated at the top.  What the Occupy movement created was a space for a no holds bar discussion of a huge array of issues where people, thanks to the mic check method of repeating comments, actually listened to one another.  Do such free zones exist in our schools,  universities and workplaces?  If they did, the Occupy movements would not have generated the levels of participation they did!  There is a reason why Occupy movements sprung up in over 300 towns and cities and that is because they embodied a deeply felt need for freedom of expressions as well as a hunger to address issues of economic inequality and the mal-distribution of wealth.

Which brings us to the next point about why this movement is likely to persist and that is the reaction of authorities, whether mayors, or college presidents, to its emergence. The size, technological sophistication, and at times the astonishing violence of police mobilizations against Occupy protests dramatized to the nation, and the world, the degree to which the United States has become a police/national security state willing to go to extraordinary attempts to intimidate its own citizens.  To immigrants, and to people living in minority and working class communities, particularly young men, this insight is nothing new—they have experienced intimidation by police forces and other government authorities on an almost daily basis, not only in their neighborhoods, but in prisons and detention centers. But until the Occupy movement, most middle class Americans including college educated youth, could ignore abuses of police power or pretend that the most extreme examples (the police murder of an unarmed Sean Bell in Queens NY) were more the exception than the rule.

But now, for three months, the people of the United States have been exposed to a steady array of images of police forces using helicopters, bulldozers, sound cannons, tear gas and pepper spray not only against protesters peacefully assembling in universities and public parks, but against representatives of the press covering these events, and doing so with the collusion of the federal office of Homeland Security.  Not only were such police tactics borrowed from the playbook used by police in gentrifying cities to intimidate and contain minority youth, they drew upon post 9/11 National Security protocols used to combat terrorism such as closing bridges and subways and placing limits on what photographs might appear in the press.

In the repression of the Occupy movement, images of free speech under attack were created that cannot be neatly excised from the national imagination any more than pictures of Bull Connor unleashing police dogs and water hoses on teenage marchers  in Birmingham in 1963.

If the Occupy movement’s showed us, in words and deeds, “This is What Democracy Looks Like” those attacking the Occupations showed the world, albeit unintentionally “This is What a Police State Looks Like.”

It would be nice, our liberal friends tell us, if we could forget all of this unpleasantness and go back to the days of the first Obama presidential campaign when youth idealism and energy were directed to electing the first black president. Now, they say, it’s time to give him a second term, with a strong Democratic congress, so he can finish the job he started.

But the given what is happened in the last three months, I don’t think that is likely to happen. The genie has been let out of the bottle. Young people who have had a tasted of lived democracy of a kind they had never experienced and then watched it snuffed out by highly militarized police units using war on terror tactics will not become obedient doorbell ringers for a president who ignored their protest and may have secretly encouraged its suppression.

The Occupy movement may not take the same form as it did this fall, but it is very likely to reinvent itself in forms that will not please its liberal would be controllers, or its conservative critics.

And that is a very good thing for the country.

***

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depressionand White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.

#OccupyWallStreet as a Fight for "Real Democracy"

Occupy Wall Street as a Fight for "Real Democracy"

by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri | CNN

Demonstrations under the banner of Occupy Wall Street resonate with so many people not only because they give voice to a widespread sense of economic injustice but also, and perhaps more important, because they express political grievances and aspirations.

As protests have spread from Lower Manhattan to cities and towns across the country, they have made clear that indignation against corporate greed and economic inequality is real and deep. But at least equally important is the protest against the lack - or failure - of political representation.

It is not so much a question of whether this or that politician, or this or that party, is ineffective or corrupt (although that, too, is true) but whether the representational political system more generally is inadequate. This protest movement could, and perhaps must, transform into a genuine, democratic constituent process.

The political face of the Occupy Wall Street protests comes into view when we situate it alongside the other "encampments" of the past year. Together, they form an emerging cycle of struggles. In many cases, the lines of influence are explicit. Occupy Wall Street takes inspiration from the encampments of central squares in Spain, which began on May 15 and followed the occupation of Cairo's Tahrir Square earlier last spring.

To this succession of demonstrations, one should add a series of parallel events, such as the extended protests at the Wisconsin statehouse, the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, and the Israeli tent encampments for economic justice. The context of these various protests are very different, of course, and they are not simply iterations of what happened elsewhere. Rather each of these movements has managed to translate a few common elements into their own situation.

In Tahrir Square, the political nature of the encampment and the fact that the protesters could not be represented in any sense by the current regime was obvious. The demand that "Mubarak must go" proved powerful enough to encompass all other issues. In the subsequent encampments of Madrid's Puerta del Sol and Barcelona's Plaça Catalunya, the critique of political representation was more complex.

The Spanish protests brought together a wide array of social and economic complaints - regarding debt, housing, and education, among others - but their "indignation," which the Spanish press early on identified as their defining affect, was clearly directed at a political system incapable of addressing these issues. Against the pretense of democracy offered by the current representational system, the protesters posed as one of their central slogans, "Democracia real ya," or "Real democracy now."

Occupy Wall Street should be understood, then, as a further development or permutation of these political demands. One obvious and clear message of the protests, of course, is that the bankers and finance industries in no way represent us: What is good for Wall Street is certainly not good for the country (or the world).

A more significant failure of representation, though, must be attributed to the politicians and political parties charged with representing the people's interests but in fact more clearly represent the banks and the creditors. Such a recognition leads to a seemingly naive, basic question: Is democracy not supposed to be the rule of the people over the polis - that is, the entirety of social and economic life? Instead, it seems that politics has become subservient to economic and financial interests.

By insisting on the political nature of the Occupy Wall Street protests we do not mean to cast them merely in terms of the quarrels between Republicans and Democrats, or the fortunes of the Obama administration. If the movement does continue and grow, of course, it may force the White House or Congress to take new action, and it may even become a significant point of contention during the next presidential election cycle. But the Obama and the George W. Bush administrations are both authors of the bank bailouts; the lack of representation highlighted by the protests applies to both parties. In this context, the Spanish call for "real democracy now" sounds both urgent and challenging.

If together these different protest encampments - from Cairo and Tel Aviv to Athens, Madison, Madrid, and now New York - express a dissatisfaction with the existing structures of political representation, then what do they offer as an alternative? What is the "real democracy" they propose?

The clearest clues lie in the internal organization of the movements themselves - specifically, the way the encampments experiment with new democratic practices. These movements have all developed according to what we call a "multitude form" and are characterized by frequent assemblies and participatory decision-making structures. (And it is worth recognizing in this regard that Occupy Wall Street and many of these other demonstrations also have deep roots in the globalization protest movements that stretched at least from Seattle in 1999 to Genoa in 2001.)

Much has been made of the way social media such as Facebook and Twitter have been employed in these encampments. Such network instruments do not create the movements, of course, but they are convenient tools, because they correspond in some sense to the horizontal network structure and democratic experiments of the movements themselves. Twitter, in other words, is useful not only for announcing an event but for polling the views of a large assembly on a specific decision in real time.

Do not wait for the encampments, then, to develop leaders or political representatives. No Martin Luther King, Jr. will emerge from the occupations of Wall Street and beyond. For better or worse - and we are certainly among those who find this a promising development - this emerging cycle of movements will express itself through horizontal participatory structures, without representatives. Such small-scale experiments in democratic organizing would have to be developed much further, of course, before they could articulate effective models for a social alternative, but they are already powerfully expressing the aspiration for a "real democracy."

Confronting the crisis and seeing clearly the way it is being managed by the current political system, young people populating the various encampments are, with an unexpected maturity, beginning to pose a challenging question: If democracy - that is, the democracy we have been given - is staggering under the blows of the economic crisis and is powerless to assert the will and interests of the multitude, then is now perhaps the moment to consider that form of democracy obsolete?

If the forces of wealth and finance have come to dominate supposedly democratic constitutions, including the U.S. Constitution, is it not possible and even necessary today to propose and construct new constitutional figures that can open avenues to again take up the project of the pursuit of collective happiness? With such reasoning and such demands, which were already very alive in the Mediterranean and European encampments, the protests spreading from Wall Street across the United States pose the need for a new democratic constituent process.

***

Michael Hardt is Professor of Literature at Duke University. Antonio Negri is former Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua and the University of Paris 8. They are the authors of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth.