Here's some more guitar music. This is "Tribute to Lonnie Johnson," another arrangement from Stefan Grossman. Lonnie Johnson was an influential blues and jazz musician from New Orleans whose career spanned from the 1920's through the blues-folk revival of the 1960's. His guitar playing was extremely influential, and he is credited by some with pioneering the rock and blues solo guitar styles that are so common today, including a lot of string bending and vibrato. This is a multi-section instrumental played in dropped-D tuning, where the low E string is lowered a full step to D. I really like the lick which closes out each section.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Saturday, September 3, 2011
"Burglary Tools to Criminals"
Occasionally a right winger will go "off script" and we get a rare treat, we get a peek at what some of these folks really think, and more often than not it isn't pretty. Such is the case with this hate-fest from the pen of unrepentant fascist Matthew Vadum, and excerpted here at Talking Points Memo.
While suppression of the voting rights of their political opposition remains a persistent right wing goal--Republican "dirty tricks" prior to elections have been a commonplace, including the recent attempts to suppress and confuse Democratic voters during the recent Wisconsin recall elections--such overt anti-democratic sentiment has typically been couched in the rhetoric of trying to reduce voter fraud. But perhaps worrying that such tactics are yielding diminishing returns, we now have this vile screed from Vadum which dispenses completely with any pretense of trying to stop fraud and just gets right to the heart of the matter. Vadum has the following to say about poor people, "... registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country." And, according to Vadum, "... the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery." Well, at least he's not shy about telling us what he thinks of democracy. Apparently it's un-American to allow a certain segment of the American citizenry to vote, the "wrong" segment that is. While he's not completely explicit about who the real target of his ire is, with references to ACORN, Obama's ostensible support for welfare recipients and a quote from an NAACP official, it's not that hard to connect the dots. Not only is this a vile screed, it's a vile racist screed to boot.
In the remainder of the piece Vadum then goes on to lay out the "infamous" Cloward - Piven conspiracy. According to Vadum, this is how the poor will "... destroy the country ..." You see, a modest, reserved liberal academic (Frances Fox Piven) who has done activist work in the past in support of poor, disenfranchised communities is pulling the strings of a vast, evil, liberal conspiracy that will bring down America. This fantasy, made famous by the ravings of none other than Glenn Beck, ostensibly came within a hairs breadth of bringing down capitalist western civilization and seemingly all the good in the world to boot, and will no doubt succeed next time if we let our guard down and fall into such traps as, say, letting the poor vote. Or so Vadum would have us believe.
What a pile of excrement. Vadum's hatred of the poor is apparently only eclipsed by his hatred of poor welfare recipients. This is just classic fascist scapegoating, nothing less. Not surprisingly, the piece is shot through with distortion and hypocrisy. For example, one might be tempted to ask if Vadum harbors a similar hostility for those myriad other kinds of welfare recipients, like bank CEOs and their corporate clients who had to be rescued and bailed out with serious multi-trillion dollar welfare, or the oil company CEOs and board members whose annual take in corporate welfare is in the tens of billions of dollars. But Vadum is presumably happy to see these folks keep their voting privileges, because their redistributionist politicians are shoveling it to the "right" folks. Wing-nuts like Vadum just love to have their cake and eat it too.
Of course the majority of the poor are productive working people and are not poor by choice. Why should they not have the right to vote? They are for the most part kept poor by a system that the insipid Vadum and those of his ilk worship, that values the rights of money over the rights of human beings to a decent living. But Vadum is on the wrong side of history and knows it, and that explains much of the fear-mongering from his crowd. These folks hate democracy because it is an avenue by which the will of the majority may be implemented and some measure of economic justice ensured for all. Now that's worth voting for.
While suppression of the voting rights of their political opposition remains a persistent right wing goal--Republican "dirty tricks" prior to elections have been a commonplace, including the recent attempts to suppress and confuse Democratic voters during the recent Wisconsin recall elections--such overt anti-democratic sentiment has typically been couched in the rhetoric of trying to reduce voter fraud. But perhaps worrying that such tactics are yielding diminishing returns, we now have this vile screed from Vadum which dispenses completely with any pretense of trying to stop fraud and just gets right to the heart of the matter. Vadum has the following to say about poor people, "... registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country." And, according to Vadum, "... the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery." Well, at least he's not shy about telling us what he thinks of democracy. Apparently it's un-American to allow a certain segment of the American citizenry to vote, the "wrong" segment that is. While he's not completely explicit about who the real target of his ire is, with references to ACORN, Obama's ostensible support for welfare recipients and a quote from an NAACP official, it's not that hard to connect the dots. Not only is this a vile screed, it's a vile racist screed to boot.
In the remainder of the piece Vadum then goes on to lay out the "infamous" Cloward - Piven conspiracy. According to Vadum, this is how the poor will "... destroy the country ..." You see, a modest, reserved liberal academic (Frances Fox Piven) who has done activist work in the past in support of poor, disenfranchised communities is pulling the strings of a vast, evil, liberal conspiracy that will bring down America. This fantasy, made famous by the ravings of none other than Glenn Beck, ostensibly came within a hairs breadth of bringing down capitalist western civilization and seemingly all the good in the world to boot, and will no doubt succeed next time if we let our guard down and fall into such traps as, say, letting the poor vote. Or so Vadum would have us believe.
What a pile of excrement. Vadum's hatred of the poor is apparently only eclipsed by his hatred of poor welfare recipients. This is just classic fascist scapegoating, nothing less. Not surprisingly, the piece is shot through with distortion and hypocrisy. For example, one might be tempted to ask if Vadum harbors a similar hostility for those myriad other kinds of welfare recipients, like bank CEOs and their corporate clients who had to be rescued and bailed out with serious multi-trillion dollar welfare, or the oil company CEOs and board members whose annual take in corporate welfare is in the tens of billions of dollars. But Vadum is presumably happy to see these folks keep their voting privileges, because their redistributionist politicians are shoveling it to the "right" folks. Wing-nuts like Vadum just love to have their cake and eat it too.
Of course the majority of the poor are productive working people and are not poor by choice. Why should they not have the right to vote? They are for the most part kept poor by a system that the insipid Vadum and those of his ilk worship, that values the rights of money over the rights of human beings to a decent living. But Vadum is on the wrong side of history and knows it, and that explains much of the fear-mongering from his crowd. These folks hate democracy because it is an avenue by which the will of the majority may be implemented and some measure of economic justice ensured for all. Now that's worth voting for.
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