#the equivocation of ‘’professional’’ to ‘’white collar’’

[j-esbian]

so so so fucking tired of people who perceive working in an office as the only “”real”” jobs

[antoine-roquentin]

First, take a look at the very equivocal position of the Democratic leadership. One little noted detail is important. An amendment inserted in the lame-duck legislation that enshrined the “Swaps Pushout” weakening of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in January 2015, made it easier for big donors to funnel much larger sums of money to the national party committees. This has, I think, made it even easier for blocs of big donors to control those committees, even as small contributions sometimes surge. Not only in 2018, but in the 2020 primaries, I think this mattered.

As a result, the Democratic National Committee has not been subordinated to the Biden campaign, at least not yet. The surge in the southern Democratic primaries that destroyed the Sanders boom involved many big Democratic donors along with many black congressmen and women, together with the political and financial networks of former president Barack Obama and the Clintons. It was a coming together of the entire Democratic establishment to stop Sanders. Congressional black leaders were thus heavily identified with the “Stop Sanders” movement, too.

But with the combined economic collapse and the pandemic revealing the bankruptcy of the traditional establishment, the whole top of the party has had to scramble. How they have responded is very interesting. Thanks to the dissemination of so many videos, the realization about the racism that black Americans face — and not just by so many police — is very widespread. The revulsion is deep and real.

In response, the Democratic establishment is taking a leaf from the past — not the late ’60s, when groups highly critical of the Democrats became prominent, but the early ’60s. Joel Rogers and I described the process in our book Right Turn. When the civil rights movement emerged, major foundations, prominent business leaders of major multinationals, and foundations allied to them heavily supported that groundswell. John F. Kennedy famously called Martin Luther King in jail, while prominent Wall Street lawyers flew down south or otherwise helped represent civil rights campaigners who were under legal attack. That’s what’s happening right now, with groups closely allied with the Democratic Party helping to raise money. There will be tensions now, as there were then, between the party and the movement, but that’s the basic direction things are taking.                

So how does this play into the election?                                   

I think the basic script each party is following is evident. Democrats are hoping for a repeat of 2008. In that election, policy was hopelessly bungled by the Republican leadership. After Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, nobody in opposition had to say very much. Democrats could just sit and watch John McCain flail helplessly.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is clearly copying the Nixon playbook, though because he’s in power, 1972 is closer to the mark than 1968. His administration’s heavy-handed appeals to “law and order” are obvious, and so are the ways he tries to bait protesters. The “law and order” mantra is looking a bit thin, though, partly because the videos and protests so clearly touch a chord with many members of the public. But it is also apparent that the US military wants no part in quelling domestic protests, so that the best Trump is likely to be able to do is to try to irritate protesters and hope for strong public reactions. Attorney general William Barr is also pitching in, in spectacular fashion.

The other thing the White House is bent on doing is finding a way to levitate the economy. In 1972, Richard Nixon famously relied on Arthur Burns at the Fed to engineer a legendary political business cycle. Today’s Fed certainly reacts to pressures from Trump, but the drastically different world situation severely limits its room for maneuver. It can hardly do more than it has even if it wanted to.

This is why the president and the vice president are trying so desperately to downplay the pandemic. They want to drive people back to work and push up the GDP. Vice president Mike Pence is plainly encouraging state leaders to talk up their successes and downplay bad news, including spiking COVID-19 cases in the South and West. The White House thinks they have to get the economy moving again or Trump will be toast in November.           

How different is this from what the administration was doing earlier?  

It represents a doubling down on policies that Trump and his camp wanted to promote earlier and did for a while. As the pandemic hit, all over the developed world, prominent business figures and conservative economists warned about the dangers of a long lockdown. Some, including an occasional central banker, even talked sotto voce about how such policies would reduce state pension obligations. In the United States, the UK, and other European countries, advocates talked up the idea of “herd immunity.” Trump’s “kitchen cabinet” of business figures, including prominent private equity managers, were repeatedly cited as pushing the president to take a “go slow” attitude on lockdowns.

After the publication of the Imperial College estimates of the death rates such policies would entail, though, enthusiasm waned. The UK changed policy. The switch definitely affected the Trump administration’s attitudes. It helped, along with the ghastly reality of what was happening on the ground, especially on the East and West coasts of the United States, to force the administration to accept lockdowns and sheltering in place. Both in the United States and in the UK, though, pressures from business groups for rapid reopening remained very strong. Conservative groups have even urged reopening without establishing a viable testing regime, which is exactly what the administration has now done.

Clear camps are forming within business, and those look to be seeping into politics. Many small companies whose business models rest on low wages, along with financiers — meaning private equity first and foremost — whose strategies depend on buying and breaking up firms, continue to plump for rapid reopening.

By contrast, many firms in the rest of finance, and especially in high-tech and capital-intensive industries whose strategies do not rest on low wages, are less heedless of the dangers of quick opening. Many tech firms enthusiastically promote their products as solutions to the problems the pandemic creates — as is obvious with many internet and software companies. Robert Rubin called for joint panels of medical professionals and economists to decide when reopening was feasible and for contact tracing; even robotic assistance has been touted.

Where the rubber meets the road, though, is the critical question of worker safety. Trump gutted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Not only is the number of inspectors way down, but key appointees are plainly uninterested in regulating on the issue at all.

It seems to me that this is a potentially fateful intersection between the movement growing out of Minneapolis and the Democrats. Calls to reopen quickly are basically demands by affluent white-collar managers who can work at home. They want to send blue-collar workers back to work under conditions the senior executives would not accept for themselves. Many of the blue-collar workers are, it is important to add, black or Latino. Though you would never know from reading any major newspaper, wildcat and other strikes have soared since Minneapolis. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of them, as Mike Elk’s Payday Report website is documenting. It seems clear that the protests have inspired many black and Latino workers to demand safe working conditions.

I don’t have much to say for the classic financial bailouts the United States has pursued — they protect the wealth of those that have it, while the government does something, but not much, to protect the livelihood of average citizens. But it would make a great deal of sense to move onto the national balance sheet the costs of redesigning work to make it safe. That would be a really good use of public resources.                              

So how does this play out in the election?                                                   

Right now, COVID-19 cases are soaring in many Southern and Western states, whose Republican governors had followed the White House lead and pretended the pandemic was over or would somehow never reach them. As a result, you can feel a seismic tremor in Trump’s support: the fabled 40 percent or so base level for him that people thought could never be breached is being broken.

But I remember 1988 very well, when Michael Dukakis was almost 20 points ahead of George H. W. Bush in late summer. A lot can happen to change what looks like an all but insurmountable advantage. One needs to remember that Biden looks good mostly next to Trump; the Democratic candidate doesn’t generate much enthusiasm from voters on his own. How the Biden campaign can tap the energy that fueled Sanders, and, to some extent, Warren, is not clear yet. The terms of trade between the camps are still being worked out, and the effort could fail. If Democratic elites are dumb enough to believe the claims so many have made that 2016 had nothing to do with economics, they could repeat that disaster.

I have a hard time believing that people who are out of work and watching how the government is allowing insurers to slip out of covering the costs of COVID tests will be inspired to vote for Biden without something far stronger than a “public option” for health care instead of Medicare for All, for example.

Plenty else can go wrong, too. Let’s just bracket the possibility of some foreign crisis, especially in the South China Sea, since it’s also clear Trump right now is still hoping that a big trade deal with China might come through. Otherwise, there are the old reliables for the GOP: efforts to hold down voter turnout and giant flows of big money.

This year, though, there’s a wrinkle to the first one. Trump’s campaign against the Post Office may have started out as a fight with Amazon, but right now, it’s clearly turned into something else. Empirical evidence from the Wisconsin primary is clear that voting in person led to several waves of new COVID infections.

As a result, interest in mail balloting is way up. Of course, Republicans are mostly opposed to that, though empirical evidence up to now does not suggest that mail ballots have strong partisan advantages one way or the other. But, of course, a broke Post Office won’t be delivering much of anything. My guess is that you’ll see Trump dig in ever more obdurately on this issue as election day approaches.

Which brings us to the money question. Here, I don’t have much to add to what my colleagues Paul Jorgensen, Jie Chen, and I wrote earlier in the year. In 2016, we found that Trump floated to victory on a big wave of late money from large private equity firms, among others. We also conjectured that the perfect correlation for the first time in American history between Republican success in Senate elections and the outcome of the presidential vote in states was not an accident. That turned out to be true. Trump did a bit better in states with Senate races. We’ve now shown how late money turned around those Senate races, when prospects just weeks before the election looked hopeless. That example is instructive. Democratic candidates who lost elections in those final days have told me how they watched the inflow of money turn around what had seemed a favorable situation. Problems with even counting ballots are, I think, likely to make 2020 very tense, no matter what polls say now or even the day before. Whether we live in a pre- or a post-apocalyptic era might be tested.

[pedestrianessay]

Listening to spaces through our feet

I had been considering what makes space a field of research. It is possible to approach it as an accidental encounter that brings fascination or perhaps a serendipitous meeting that opens new imaginations or the familial location where you grew up and contains many stories. 

I am puzzled by the space for this project. It has been such a new encounter, not much depth into it because I arrive there by chance, walking with three guest walkers speaking French. Thus I am still translating the layers that I still can’t figure. It is good to intervene in that space with an art project and contribute with gentrification or be loyal to the first walk impression. 

My first impression of the neighborhood of Little Italy is that it has a specific diversity, densely populated by middle-class families and young white-collar professionals. The market Jean-Talon brings mesmerizing soundscapes, and it seems that it is one of the main tourist attractions. 

I don´t want to be one of the many artists contributing to its development as a cultural spot in the city. Indeed many of these projects naively start as a great idea but unwillingly turn into a commodity. 

My project doesn’t speak about gentrification, neither is displacement then not going to contribute to a critical dialogue about this issue.

I walked from Jean-Talon Avenue and Saint-Hubert street, where I could see diversity in the population. I heard at least five different languages and saw other Afro Caribbean businesses. For some reason, I felt familiar and then more accessible in that location. I listened to bachata music and some not as familiar tunes but not in French or English. However, I am still uneasy about driving the itinerary of the AR audio walk based on the cultural attractions of a space not integrating the voices of the residents in a cohesive way. I am familiar with creating cultural capital, departing from a good intention but creating unwanted promotions. 

Listen to the soundwalk at Little Italy here: 

https://www.mixcloud.com/cadadosis/soundwalk-little-italy-montreal/

As an adult, I grew up in Pilsen a Mexican neighborhood in the city of Chicago that became popular for its cultural richness. The culture industry and real state market took over the neighborhood and displaced working-class immigrant families living there. The Mexican community created their own urban identity, which later became famous for the tourist industry, showcasing their family gardens, markets, food, community schools, celebrations, parks, etc. It was so intrusive to experience the presence of the tourist buses parking in front of my home looking at my backyard as a nuance. I felt that I was part of a nonconsensual urban Safari.  

I left Pilsen when the Mexican immigrant population was suffering a massive displacement. The earlier soundscapes that brought me there: the paletas cart, the mariachis evening, the children playing, the Spanish buzzing, the processions with traditional Mexican bands were almost gone by 2020 but still resilient as a community that settled in the early 70´s.  Therefore, in this case, I don’t wish to be part of the same pattern of artists arriving and making a place hot spot, attractive, and therefore opening the door to the speculative real estate market along with the “Welcome to Montreal” tourist website. 

I am struggling to define a space because Montreal is a new home, and most of my site-specific projects need a lot of time to be walked, start a dialogue, and find my positionality in the space. I guess feeling lost will take me to find a better location. 

For the project that I am currently developing, the location has to speak to the concept of gender violence or inaccessibility in the public space by appropriating it and talking through the collages in the walls. I guess that could be anywhere in Montreal. Still, perhaps it could be better if the AR walk speaks as space of conflict by turning into a “shadow place”, or by being a location that generates critical dialogues instead of entertainment. (1)

I had been walking in several neighborhoods this week, hoping to find the place, I went to Verdun, Saint Henry, West Montreal, and the Village (where I currently live), learning through walking and listening the different echoes that each space has. However, the space that speaks about gender and its resistance still unclear to me. 

I attended a soundwalk organized by CESSA at Concordia University, titled "A Soundwalk with Samuel Thulin.” It allowed me to immerse myself in the experience of knowing through my ears the city. Specifically in the neighborhood of Little Burgundy, the soundwalk made me think about the embodiment of the experience of listening in a group of people. I noticed that a group as a procession always calls attention, especially if everyone goes silent and shares the same path. Secondly, I noticed that I had a feeling of safety among a group. Even if everyone in the walk were strangers, I had the sensation to be walking with, which helped me to be focus into the aural experience. That fact open the possibility to start a sounding walk, which can be heard halfway through the recording. I used my keys to interact with the metal objects, fences rhythmically, and the best part was under a bridge, where the resonance of the sounds echoed into the direction of the walkers ahead. These reflections helped me see the importance of the sounding walk as a form of sensing and connecting with others. I recalled this during the group talk after the walk, which is an essential part of the reflective process of listening. Walking but reflecting afterwards through a collective dialogue. 

Listen to the soundwalk at Little Burgundy here: 

https://soundcloud.com/cadadosis/soundwalk-arwater

However, there might be potential in these places that should be considered with the collectives Collages Féministes and Féminicides Montréal. Since this project speaks and is in partnership with them. 

The space that I am considering needs to convey a sense of conflict and resistance. When we sense and perceive space through physical navigation, we can define our boundaries and embody memory associations. Therefore I decided to reconsider the itinerary to visit an area where the gendered presence is evident and can create a point on the perception of this fact. 

I thought about my embodied memories in Montreal, I asked Lola if she knew that space...the skatepark. The place where the skate boards make such a loud noise that reflects all over the asphaltic walls of the bridge. The place where I remember seeing many teenagers, kids, youth, but most of them were cis-men. Therefore I returned with two more members of the collective explore. 

On collectivity and walking 

Collective walking has many forms and shapes, and it takes us many ways of approaches to inform joint walking as a process of creative practices. Cristina Moretti, in her essay Walking, describes the act of walking as a collaborative activity where local participants are the guides that open the city as a readable book, and  she describes it as follows: 

“Appearing and circulating in public spaces entails negotiating one’s identity and place in the world. As an embodied, social, and imaginary practice, walking can be a way of telling, commenting on, performing, and creating both stories and places. This action requires us to pay attention to imagination as it helps generate understanding, connections, and questions.” (2)

To this extent I opened an invitation to a member of CFM to visit that skatepark as a possible location to detonate reflections on embodied gender. In the case through a walk, and an audio walk that pretends to be executed as an aural intervention. Performativity is the right concept that describes this intersection. Walking to share one, the historical and personal approach of space and the city, and secondly to understand the relations between the concepts and subjects of the research. 

In this soundwalk I analyzed the new possible location, which is going to be the periphery of the Mile End Van Horne Skatepark, starting from the elevated bridge at Saint-Denis avenue and going down into the stairs to Gaspe Avenue, then into the rail tracks. I enjoyed sensing and speaking aloud, which also brought important points about pedestrian accessibility in the urban design.  

https://www.mixcloud.com/cadadosis/soundwalk-mile-end-skatepark/

Two members of the Collage Féministes Montréal collective walked with me to scout the itinerary and to sense the space as a possible space for the AR piece. The reflections allowed us to go deep into other sites around the Skatepark and the surroundings, considering the topics, gendered relations in the public space and as Judith Butler expresses “the right to appear”. 

Visit this interactive map with the list of places and conversations made during our 360 video recording walk. 

https://www.thinglink.com/scene/1455949717048393729

Allowing other perceptions and forms of knowing, their implications into the place dialogue and its social connections. To me, the process of talking together in space comes with the reflection of alliance that Judith Butler had expressed in her book, Gender Politics and the Right to Appear. 

"If performa­tivity has often been associated with individual performance, it may prove important to reconsider those forms of performativity that only operate through forms of coordinated action, whose condition and the aim is the reconstitution of plural forms of agency and social practices of resistance. So this movement or stillness, this parking of my body in the middle of another's action, is nei­ther my act nor yours, but something that happens by virtue of the relation between us, arising from that relation, equivocating between the I and we, seeking at once to preserve and dis­seminate the generative value of that equivocation, an active and deliberately sustained relation, a collaboration distinct from hallucinatory merging or confusion." (3)

Each of us in this walk formulated an important question of gender, inclusivity and tactics that we can apply to make the message clear. In connection with AR technology, which still a new platform for me but I am still considering that the individual experience of headphone audio guide must be expanded. The use of the speakers to disseminate these voices and sounds in masculine spaces as the skatepark, would be an important approximation of resistance and conflict, since that space is what actually resonates with the theme and in the intersection of the written collages in the space. 

I ask myself, why resistance and conflict are such important topics to find different modes of listening?

I think is because through these two forms, I experience space. I had learned to be vigilant, observing my surroundings to survive as a woman. I feel safe in Montreal but I imagine and want to include other realities and perspectives. 

I wonder about other forms of listening to collective walking. 

Notes:

1-A Shadow Place is a contested site that has been under social or  environmental forces compromised by memorization or touristification. To learn more visit the work of  Plumwood, V. (2008) ‘Shadow places and the politics of dwelling,’ Australian Humanities Review 44: n.p.

2-Moretti, Cristina. Walking Chapter 5, A Different Kind of Ethnography, Imaginative Practices and Creative Methodologies. Ed. Elliot, Danielle and Culhane, Dara. University Toronto Press 2017. P. 97

3- Butler, J. (2015) Gender Politics and the Right to Appear (Chapter 1) in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard University Press. Pp. 9

[hhiandreas370-blog]

How Healthy Is Consuming Liver?

I am actually a legal professional as well as financial advisor who's devoted over three many years to encouraging clients on complicated corporate money management, disclosure as well as reporting, and corporate control concerns. I indicate, allow me just to begin with point out that, again, we have actually - our experts're bought one more two years, 2 years, three months and I'm repetitiving myself coming from it looks like every 90 times today, however individuals do not re-contract 2 years out at whatever rates. Depending on our expectation for the 1st fourth of 2018, our experts forecast an altered EPS from $0.57 to $0.59. In relations to our 2018 initial one-fourth purchases foresight, please note that the first quarter 2017 natural sales standard would be $6.15 billion which, as our team commented previously, omits purchases coming from our past clinical optics as well as vascular fastener organisations which we sold in the course of the 1st one-fourth from in 2013. Back in 2000, when I cofounded Clean Side, lots of people I consulted with really did not however comprehend, or in specialist parlance "grok," the clean-tech wave to come. Permit me suspect you possess a positive opportunity when visiting my blog as well as you choose to get here one more time to discover additional details on the concern of weird boobs and gals with large pussy. While that holds true that any person can keep a collection from prejudices from any person else, racial discrimination specifically implies injustice - as well as white colored people in its entirety are not maltreated. I carry out typically acquire the opinion that unless you are a person from different colors at that point you carry out not know bigotry completely.

In fact, at drifted average of 270,000 barrels every day for the third quarter and also finally TEP's significant capital are actually incredibly conventional flexible annual report with lesser make use of, really healthy and balanced circulation insurance coverage and extremely appealing development customers. In addition, they are actually made unnoticeable neighborhood as powerful homophobia causes some feeling they are actually not invited there certainly, either. Alleged dark males like Thomas think that if they tear dark women to items in the eyes from white-run America, that this are going to construct all of them up in the eyes of non-blacks. Eating extra fruits and vegetables, a staple on the clean-eating diet regimen, might aid increase your weight-loss end results, according to a research released in April 2008 in "Nourishment Investigation." Vegetables and fruit products are actually a low-calorie means to fill out. They tend to have high amounts from water as well as thread, making all of them low in energy density, or even calories every gram, therefore you could consume a sizable offering without reviewing your encouraged regular fats. They failed to need to think about because a lot of dark individuals, as qualified as were they, were actually overlooked for work and also could possibly not deal with their households. If blogaboutdiets.Info even more people realized what an essential role they intend in their own health and wellness, they might alter the top quality from their life forever. Those who are bigots - white colored or even otherwise - nonsense on regarding accountability and negative habits (valid issues frequently inapplicable), discuss false equivocations camouflaged as true purpose; raise their fists or even dispute their banners to declare excellence or even victimhood, relying on point of view. And while various other members continued to contact Brucato out on his racism, homophobia, as well as white colored privilege, he had a virtually obsessive focus to always keep condemning me. He could not relax until that was created that I was bad or incorrect in some capability. The masses of what the media gets in touch with "ignorant white individuals," blue-collar white folks without any college to their debt were trivial to the Realm Best. People of shade have something to mention, and till you can easily hear that without writing it off due to the fact that their adventure from life doesn't match your own, you have nothing at all of value to result in this conversation.