Haiti/Martin Luther/illdoctrine

What Martin Luther King Would Say About Haiti On His Birthday

Today is Martin Luther King’s birthday. Today a horrific tragedy is going on in Haiti. While some men of the cloth are using the incident to spread their twisted world views, Martin surely would’ve used the occasion to spread wisdom and good will and encourage his fellow man to help out our Haitian brothers and sisters in need. But still what happened in Haiti is deeper than that.

For King, giving money to Haiti would not be enough. In order to be good citizens of the world, it is not good enough to just to give money, we must make sure to end the economic and social climate that led to the disaster. Here’s an excerpt from his speech “Beyond Vietnam.”

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

King goes on, addressing America’s foreign policy and how it is destructive to the Third World.

With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

King also condemns countries that spend more money on wars than social program. The USA has pledged $100 million in aid to Haiti, while pledging upwards of $30 billion to add 30,000 troops in Afghanistan.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

So on Martin Luther King’s birthday, let us reflect on our fellow human beings in Haiti. Let us help them out with our donations, but also let’s fight so third world people do not have to suffer through the poverty that has inflamed this natural disaster. Let us be reminded of how what goes on in our own country affects the rest of the world.

Martin Luther King “Beyond Vietnam”

"Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire."

- Slavoj Zizek

Forest from Guernica Magazine on Vimeo.

Drawing from film, music, cartoons, and dance, I like to blend earthly fact, blatant fiction, and lots of oil paint to form a stage of tragedy, farce, and raw, ominous beauty—at times capturing otherworld buffoonery, and other times presenting a simple earthly dignified moment.

“Hobo Clown” and “Forest” are two recently completed clay-mation videos by Allison Schulnik. Forest is also a music video for the world renowned and critically acclaimed band Grizzly Bear.

Allison Schulnik is a painter, sculptor, and filmmaker who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her paintings have been exhibited in galleries internationally and at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. She was recently selected as one of the “Ones to Watch” by Art Review. She is scheduled for her next major solo exhibition of new work in Los Angeles at Mark Moore Gallery from January 9 to February 6, 2010.

Making Globalization Work

MAKING GLOBALIZATION WORK

By Joseph E. Stiglitz.

358 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.

NYT Book Review

Stiglitz walks the reader through a series of issues, from trade and intellectual property rights to global warming and the role of the multinational corporation. Each of the book’s chapters frames a problem, provides some analysis and proposes solutions. On page after page, Stiglitz argues that globalization holds out great promise as a force for good, but that the rules of the present international economic order are designed and enforced by the rich nations to serve their interests. As a result, they are inequitable and inefficient.

Developed countries manipulate international trade rules to protect their factories and farmers from more efficient producers in the developing world, Stiglitz tells us. Multinational corporations evade responsibility for the damage they do. Meanwhile, the international financial system, led by the I.M.F., rewards improvident lenders (the wealthy) and penalizes hapless debtors (the poor).

Stiglitz often invokes the concept of negative externalities: the costs that some individuals, firms or nations impose on others. A factory that skimps on pollution control, for instance, may increase its profits, but it harms the rest of society. The polluter is responding to incentives without having to pay the cost of its activities. Similarly, interest groups in developed nations benefit from favorable treatment by their governments, but these favors victimize people in developing nations who are trying to compete. It is bad enough, Stiglitz says, that thousands of wealthy American cotton farmers get billions of dollars in government subsidies; it is even worse that this depresses the world price of cotton, further impoverishing millions of African cotton farmers.

“Making Globalization Work” is an optimistic book, offering the hope that global society has the will or the ability to address global problems and that international economic integration will ultimately prove a force for good. Certainly Stiglitz is right that the world would benefit from a concerted effort to address problems of the environment, poverty and disease. However, his proposals are almost utopian in their reliance upon good will, enlightened public opinion and moral imperatives to overcome selfish but deeply entrenched private or national interests that do not share his goal of making globalization work for as many countries and as many people as possible.

juxtapositions

Catch

For Dina, the comic books are both medium and inspiration. “I use the artworks or images of previous generations as conceptual and formal techniques in order to create a new one by making fun of the images, twisting it and injecting humorous juxtapositions," she says. "To be ugly in some way. Like a cult film, I choose my work to remain in the 'so bad it’s good' variety. I want it raw, bad, and tough yet funny.”

YouTube - Haiti's history of hardship

YouTube - Haiti's history of hardship

social media, social change?

As I read about Haiti on my twitter feed, I wonder what kind of impact the outpouring of information provided by personalized social media is having on society... can it serve to bridge the north south divide in politics and perspective? Or do we merely become desensitized? Is it pushing the boundaries of what the global north can ignore, hearkening back to the days of Vietnam, where televised battle inspired widespread resistance to war in the US? Through the uncoupling of media from global capitalism, can we create news sources which challenge the oppressive nature of globalization? I sure hope so, because if Copenhagen was any marker of where multilateral governmental co-operation will be heading in the coming decade, we are going to need something else to help us out of this heap of environmental and social troubles...

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Haiti Earthquake: Twitter Pictures Sweep Across the Web [PHOTOS]

An outpouring of well wishes and support for the Haitian people has swept the web in the wake of a devastating 7.0 earthquake in Haiti. And just like during the Eureka earthquake, tweets have quickly spread moving and gut-wrenching TwitPics of the disaster.

Photos taken by journalist @CarelPedre on his mobile phone are providing a glimpse into the devastation that has slammed the Caribbean nation. Another Twitter user, @MarvinAdy, shared those pictures through TwitPic (Twitpic), resulting in tens of thousands of views and countless retweets.

There are also thousands of Facebook (Facebook) and Twitter (Twitter) updates on the disaster appearing every minute. The web has been moved by the plight of the Haitian people. Social media has quickly become the first place where millions react to large-scale catastrophes.

Our best wishes go out to the victims of this devastating natural disaster, as well as their families. Below is a collection of the most retweeted pictures coming out of Haiti, courtesy of TwitPic.