The Community Avengers are a team of residents from Miami who are standing up in these trying times, calling out the criminal bankers, and inspiring action. They have been spotted tumbling out of a van at a recent Miami Dade County budget hearing, moving into the seething crowd and taking to task politicians with their lively chants and street theater. After mixing with all those malcontented with proposed cuts to the Miami Dade County budget, the Community Avengers did a double header and headed over to a health care town hall for a show down with the riled up right wing.

Just this week the Community Avengers joined forces with residents and pastors from Miami Gardens to fight back against banks bent on eviction rather than loan modification.
Always on call to do battle with the villains of bad government and corporate greed, the Community Avengers rallied to support an ordinance that would sanction foreclosing banks.

Click here to read more about this action: http://tinyurl.com/Communityavengers

It is time for progressive people everywhere to learn a lesson from the Community Avengers. Let’s creatively mobilize and call out the culprits across the country. Where right wing pundits play on irrational fears, we will be there. Where greedy bankers rob our people, we will be there. Where government bows to a marginal and maniac minority, we will be there.

You too can be a Community Avenger!

- Joseph Phelan, Miami Workers Center

Emotions vs. Rationality in decision making.

Artists need to embrace the emotional influence their work has in decision making.

The Democrats were able to snatch the mantle of newness from the neo-cons by running a candidate that the Republicans simply couldn’t. Nothing could be more unique, more new, and therefore more suited to the End of History word view than a black man with a very global-sounding name.

You can get this as a life size cardboard cutout

Thanks to You Tube and hip celebrity initiative, Obama was not just a presidential candidate, we was part of Will.i.am’s posse, he was sang about by hot chicks on the internet, and we was the subject of a super cool/patriotic (but not the old fuddy duddy patriotic, the new fashionable patriotic) Shepard Fairey poster. Obey. Vote Obama. Never before has a politician’s mug been emblazoned on more baby tees, baby bibs, and urban-chic stickers. You could be radical, fight the system, and be part of the greatest wave of youthful idealism to break on the shores of the US since the hippies. Without having to really do that much. Ah, and this is the challenge for people who want change beyond just a new member of the two-party establishment every 8 years.

He's even on skateboards

Real change requires people to alter how they live, not just what buttons they wear, and what levers they pull twice a decade. How to make people swoon over local produce, bike to work, and become tax resistors is an entirely more difficult proposition. But one that’s infinitely more important than which candidate to Obey Giant.

The Brand Called Obama

Life in the Post Political Age

Moving to the Center of Elite Consensus

Obey Giant Vote for Change
(embeddable videos of celebrity endorsements)

This weekend was the first big test, a kickoff for the so-called Great Schlep, and so far, momentum has been building with the pace of a nice brisket. Though about seven million people have watched Ms. Silverman’s four-minute Web video explaining why “visiting your grandparents could change the world,” the schlep remains mostly virtual.

Mik Moore, 34, co-director of Jewish Council for Education and Research, the nonprofit group behind the project, said 100 people visited Florida this weekend to convince older Jewish voters that Mr. Obama should be president, while about 100 more visited relatives in other swing states.

Declaring it “a really good start,” Mr. Moore said he hoped that dozens more would officially schlep before Election Day.

read more:

Laugh at a Campaign Pitch? Sure. Visit the Grandparents? Not So Much. – NYTimes.com

It’s hard to predict what will stick. ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ was a hand-scrawled sign hung in Little Rock.

When NEWSWEEK reported earlier this summer that the McCain family owns at least seven houses, few outside the hothouse of politics noticed. Voters assume that all politicians are rich and didn’t seem to care that John McCain’s wife, Cindy, is worth $100 million and owed back taxes on one of the properties. But when Politico asked McCain last week in New Mexico how many residences he and his wife owned and he answered, “I think—I’ll have my staff get [back] to you,” the story suddenly took off, fueled by the impression that McCain is old and out of touch with Americans struggling to pay their mortgages. Will it do his campaign real damage? Depends on the “stickiness.”

The same goes for Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver. The buzz of 70,000 people screaming for him at Invesco Field will wear off if he doesn’t frame his economic message in a way that otherwise inattentive Americans can recall. Without an indelible metaphor, all of his policy speeches are written in invisible ink.

Modern campaigns are about flinging 10 things against the wall every day and hoping something sticks. Everything else, from fund-raising to advertising (paid for by the fund-raising) to speechmaking to Web strategy, is in the service of applying that adhesive, either to cement the candidate’s message or muck up the opponent’s engine with sludge.

That’s because memorable lines, images, gaffes and monikers act like a piece of gum on the bottom of your shoe. They get your attention and may even shape your voting behavior. In the world of marketing, “sticky branding” means intentionally creating an emotional attachment to a consumer product. In the blogosphere, a “meme” (a word coined by the science writer Richard Dawkins in 1976) is an idea that spreads virally, beyond anyone’s control. Political campaigns often try to add gobs of glue (as Obama did on the seven-house story), but why some stories stick and others don’t remains something of a mystery.

Pop-culture references help. Ronald Reagan used a Clint Eastwood line, “Go ahead, make my day,” to great effect. When Walter Mondale wanted to stigmatize Gary Hart for lacking substance in 1984, he quoted from an ad for Wendy’s: “Where’s the beef?” The political spot that made the biggest splash this summer aired only briefly on TV. But the use of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton helped McCain label Obama as just another celebrity. If big names cut through the clutter, so does name-calling. GOP hit men like to refer to “Barack Hussein Obama,” the better to brand him as a foreigner. And Democratic polemicists are already referring to “Exxon John” and “another four years of John McSame.”

There’s nothing fair about the process. McCain can be excused for not knowing exactly how many rental properties his wife owns. Al Gore never actually said, “I invented the Internet.” (He was talking about his role as a legislator in providing the government funding that allowed it to grow.) In 1988, Michael Dukakis took a ride in a tank. It wasn’t his fault that the picture made him look like Snoopy. To his dying day, George H.W. Bush will insist that in 1992 he knew perfectly well what a supermarket scanner was; he was just commenting about some new technology. But the image helped sink him.

The most common standard for stickiness is whether it fits into a pre-existing impression. “Heck of a job, Brownie,” stuck because it perfectly captured President Bush’s failures during Hurricane Katrina. And Bill Clinton’s finger-wagging always gets him in trouble because it reminds people of when he lied about Monica Lewinsky. But Joe Biden’s stereotyping Indian-Americans at a convenience store or calling Obama “clean” and “articulate” did no lasting harm because no one ever accused Biden of being a racist. Stories don’t grow in barren soil.

Of course, sometimes fertile soil—the congruent context—is itself a concoction. Dan Quayle’s spelling “potato” with an “e” resonated because of superficial media judgments that he was somehow dumber than the average vice president. After Obama’s gaffe about “bitter” voters “clinging” to guns and religion, McCain operatives worked overtime trying to tag the Democratic candidate as an elitist, down to the brand of iced tea he drinks. This despite the fact that Obama was raised by a single mother (who sometimes relied on food stamps) and attended top universities on scholarships and loans. The most persistent meme of this campaign season, that Obama is a Muslim, is a lie based on his foreign-sounding name and brief attendance at a public elementary school in Indonesia. In politics, like war, truth is the first casualty.

It’s hard to predict what will stick. The “New Covenant” Bill Clinton offered in 1992 went nowhere, but a hand-scrawled sign that James Carville hung in the Little Rock war room that year, “It’s the economy, stupid,” entered the language. Campaigns spend vast amounts of time and money coming up with slogans (“Change We Can Believe In,” “Country First”) instead of finding the quirky expression or colorful figure of speech that someone might actually remember.

And all the efforts to fan the flames of the other guy’s gaffe might be counterproductive. Flaps fade. The “story of the day” rarely lasts two. Truly harmful memes work more insidiously. Gore’s Internet misquote was never a headline; it never sucked up all the media oxygen. But it ate away at his credibility because it played on an impression that he sometimes inflated his own importance.

The same might be true this year of McCain’s “I’m [computer] illiterate and have to rely on my wife for assistance” line. When he said it to Yahoo News in January, hardly anyone took note. But the prospect of a 21st-century president largely unfamiliar with the dominant technology of our time has a way of lingering in the mind. It crystallizes the age issue without referencing it directly. Should McCain lose in November, that offhand admission could be one reason why. If it sticks.

Play is one of the earliest and most important activities of mammals; helping adolescents learn the skills they need to survive. Games take the free play of the animal kingdom and apply rules and constraints, which have the ability to teach and develop the values and beliefs of a culture. The chess queen developed as a dominant piece during a period of strong European matriarchs. Monopoly is an altered version of The Landlord Game–a model of the Marxist critique of property. Today, some videogame designers are creating tools for critical play.

The Values At Play project is a collaboration between Hunter College’s Tiltfactor Lab and New York University. The project began as an investigation into how values are, and could be intentionally embedded in the design of technology. Studying values in video games, it became clear that the project’s title is more accurate than it was even intended. Wheelchair access ramps at a library embody the value of equality by facilitating equal access. For decades, military aircraft cockpits were designed for pilots over six feet tall, inherently discriminating against most women and shorter men. Games, however, don’t hold values like a vessel. Games put values at play. While games rules manifest the values of the game designers, players interact with those rules in unpredictable ways that prevent didactism.

Gonzolo Frasca is a game designer who wrote the influential manifesto “Videogames of the Oppressed” adopting Agusto Boal’s principles from “Theater of the Oppressed” to videogame design. One of the best applications of his theories is “September 12“–a game that critiques US millitarism as a solution to terrorism. In the game (it’s a simulation really) the player looks down on a bustling cartoon Middle Eastern market full or terrorists and civilians. The cursor is a bomb sight and all the player can do is aim and fire. There is no way to kill terrorists without killing civilians, and every terrorist and civilian killed is replaced with another terrorist. The game is unwinnable–that’s the point.

I work with high school students using serious games to explore global issues. While having the class play September 12 I was shocked to hear one student call out, “I beat it!” Incredulously, I asked, “How?” and Daniel explained that he simply didn’t shoot anybody. No one looked threatening so he didn’t drop the bombs. He had beaten the unwinnable scenerio by changing the rules (not unlike Captain Kirk in “Kobayashi Maru“). In the real world war games and game theory political economies run on rules designed to keep oligarchs in power. What would the world look like with more games that encourage players to rewrite the rules?

via: Time

When the culture began to change in the late 1960s — when the old one-liner comics on the Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the War in Vietnam — George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it’s hard to think of Carlin as one of America’s most radical and courageous popular artists. But he was.

Carlin started doing stand-up comedy in the early ’60s and had fashioned a successful career by the middle of the decade: a short-haired performer with skinny ties, well known to TV audiences for his sharp parodies of commercials and fast-talking DJs and a “hippy dippy weatherman.” But as he watched the protest marches of the late ’60s and absorbed the new spirit of the counterculture, Carlin decided that he was talking to the wrong audience, that he need to change his act and his whole attitude.

So he grew long hair and a beard and began doing different kinds of material — about drugs and Vietnam and America’s uptight attitude toward language and sex. Fans of the old George Carlin weren’t ready for it. Carlin got thrown out of Las Vegas twice for material that today would seem tame (one offending routine was about his own “skinny ass”). At the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wis., he so riled up a conservative crowd with his jokes about Vietnam that he nearly caused an audience riot. Even Johnny Carson banned him as a Tonight show guest for a time because of his reputation as a drug abuser.

But by the early ’70s Carlin had completed a remarkable change, opened up a new audience for stand-up comedy and helped redefine an art form. Like Lenny Bruce — whom he idolized and who helped him get his first agent — Carlin saw the stand-up comic as a social commentator, rebel and truthteller. He challenged conventional wisdom and tweaked the hypocrisies of middle-class America. He made fun of society’s outrage over drugs, for example, pointing out that the “drug problem” extends to middle-class America as well, from coffee freaks at the office to housewives hooked on diet pills. He talked about the injustice of Muhammad Ali’s banishment from boxing for avoiding the draft — a man whose job was beating people up losing his livelihood because he wouldn’t kill people: “He said, ‘No, that’s where I draw the line. I’ll beat ‘em up, but I don’t want to kill ‘em.’ And the government said, ‘Well, if you won’t kill people, we won’t let you beat ‘em up.’”

Most famously, he talked about the “seven words you can never say on television,” foisting the verboten few into his audience’s face with the glee of a classroom cut-up and the scrupulousness of a social linguist. While his brazen repeating of the “dirty” words caused a sensation (and prompted a lawsuit that eventually made it to the Supreme Court, resulting in the creation of the “family hour” on network television), his intention was not just to shock; it was to question our irrational fear of language “There are no bad words,” said Carlin. “Bad thoughts. Bad intentions. And woooords.”

Fuzzy language and fuzzy thinking were always among Carlin’s favorite topics. He marveled at oxymorons like “jumbo shrimp” and “military intelligence,” and pointed out the social uses of euphemism: “When did ‘toilet paper’ become bathroom tissue’? When did house trailers become ‘mobile homes’?” He reminisced about his class-clown antics and Catholic upbringing in the rough Morningside Heights section of New York City. He took on all the taboos, even the biggest one, God. How could the Almighty be all-powerful, mused Carlin, since “everything he ever makes … dies.”

In the 1970s Carlin was selling out college concerts, releasing bestselling records (his breakthrough 1972 album, FM & AM, spent 35 weeks on the Billboard pop charts, revitalizing a comedy-record business that had fallen on hard times). When NBC introduced a new late-night comedy show in 1975 called Saturday Night Live, Carlin was the comedian they turned to as the first guest host. And when HBO began rolling out its influential series of “On Location” comedy concerts, Carlin was among its most popular stars, headlining a record 14 one-man shows for the network, the last just a few months ago.

Carlin was a product of the counterculture era in lifestyle as well as comedy. His drug use became so heavy in the mid-’70s that it began to affect his health (he had a heart attack in 1978, the start of heart problems that eventually killed him) and his career as well. “I really wasn’t being as creative,” Carlin admitted years later. “I lost years. I could have been a pole vaulter in those years, and instead I was kind of like doing hurdles.”

But in the early ’80s, after kicking his drug habit, he revived his career, becoming a kind of curmudgeonly uncle, with small-bore “observational” humor and an aphoristic style. Then, in the ’90s, he tacked back to harder-edged political material, railing against everything from the environmental movement to the middle-class obsession with golf. Even in his late ’60s, Carlin could be as perceptive on the cliches and buzzwords of the era as ever: “I’ve been uplinked and downloaded. I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech lowlife. A cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, bicoastal multitasker, and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond…”

Carlin’s material grew increasingly dark in later years, to the point where he was cheerleading (with only a trace of irony) for mass suicide and ecological disaster. “I sort of gave up on this whole human adventure a long time ago,” he said a couple of years ago. “Divorced myself from it emotionally. I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise. I think people in America sold out very cheaply, for sneakers and cheeseburgers. And I don’t think it’s fixable.”

But Carlin’s career, and his comedy, was anything but a downer. He was unique among stand-ups of his era in remaining a top-drawing comedian for more than 40 years, with virtually no help from movies or TV sitcoms. His influence can be seen everywhere from the political rants of Lewis Black to the “observational” comedy of Jerry Seinfeld. He showed that nothing — not the most sensitive social issues or the most trivial annoyances of everyday life — was off-limits for smart comedy. And he helped bring stand-up comedy to the very center of American culture. It has never left.

Richard Zoglin’s book Comedy on the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America was published earlier this year by Bloomsbury.

This is great speech by journalist John Pilger on the powers and dangers of corporate media. I think what’s most interesting about it is that he breaks from the Left/Right dialectic that plagues social change movements and takes liberalism to task for some of its crimes. The liberal Clinton administration increased the size of the prison-industrial complex and justified the Iraq sanctions and bombing campaign as a humane method of dealing with a dictator. The parents of the 500,000 children who died as a result of those sanctions (according to the UN) would disagree, I think.

Pilger’s point here is not simply to criticise the dominant ideology of the intelligentsia, but to stress that no action is inherently just or good by nature of the beliefs that support it. Again and again the liberal media has supported wars of empire, and liberal Democrats like Truman, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton have instigated and supported violent oppression around the world. The responsibility to prevent tyranny then falls to the public, and if I have any criticism for Pilger’s speech it’s that his conclusion suggests few solutions beyond vigilance and a citizen fifth estate to watch the watchers. Valid, sure, but the real issue is how do we inspire people to want to be the fifth estate?. Still, it’s an educational, sobering, thought provoking speech that’s definitely worth watching.