“Mary Allin Travers was born on Nov. 9, 1936, in Louisville, Ky. When she was 2 her parents, both writers, moved to New York. Almost unique among the folk musicians who emerged from the Greenwich Village scene in the early 1960s, Ms. Travers actually came from the neighborhood. She attended progressive private schools there, studied singing while still in kindergarten and became part of the folk-music revival as it took shape around her. Mary Travers brought a powerful voice and an unfeigned urgency to music that resonated with mainstream listeners. With her straight blond hair and willowy figure and two bearded guitar players by her side, she looked exactly like what she was, a Greenwich Villager directly from the clubs and the coffeehouses that nourished the folk-music revival. Ms. Travers, onstage, drew all eyes as she shook her hair, bobbed her head in time to the music and clenched a fist when the lyrics took a dramatic turn.” Link@nytimes.com

“This is a story that goes a lot further back than Lehman Brothers, or Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, to the glory days when America’s leading manufacturing companies were the envy of the world. It’s the story of how this great corporate heritage was squandered, and what this all has to do with the rise of a comparatively new social figure: the professional manager. There’s no doubt that American business has relied heavily on the Masters of Business Administration as a credential. Some say too heavily: 100,000 new MBAs pour out of American business schools each year, and more than 40% of them go into the financial services sector. But now they’re being called the Masters of Disaster. As you’ll hear in this program, some of the leading critics of the MBA culture are actually business school professors who have been raising the alarm for some time.” Stephen Crittenden@abc.net.au

“A standard feature of the post-Communist, tourist-friendly Central European city is the nostalgia pub. Stylized Soviet-era hero-workers or soldiers exhort the postmodern traveler to enter and drink. Inside, portraits of Communist leaders look down on the scene, while ancien regime marches can be heard interspersed with contemporary pop songs. It’s all very arch — the Communist period has left us with much to ridicule. But as much as this commercialization of the anticapitalists must offend those who were persecuted in Communist jails or saw their aspirations strangled by the dead hand of Communist repression, it also fails on aesthetic grounds. What exactly is the point in experiencing a faux Communist landscape in a post-Communist environment?” link@modernpainters.com

“Since the 1930s the non-communist world has experienced two shifts in international economic norms and rules substantial enough to be called ‘regime changes’. They were separated by an interval of roughly thirty years: the first regime, characterized by Keynesianism and governed by the international Bretton Woods arrangements, lasted from about 1945 to 1975; the second began after the breakdown of Bretton Woods, and prevailed until the First World debt crisis of 2007–08. This latter regime, known variously as neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus or the globalization consensus, centred on the notion that all governments should liberalize, privatize, deregulate, prescriptions that have been so dominant at the level of global economic policy as to constitute, in John Stuart Mill’s phrase, ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’.” Link

“The Manifesto makes for quaint reading today. All that talk about “production,” for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last two outcomes are what Marx called “immiseration,” which, in translation, is the process you’re undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.” Article@thenation.com

“On January 31 1949, when the People’s Liberation Army came marching into Beijing – heralding the imminent demise of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang regime in mainland China – Sidney Shapiro, a bespectacled 33-year-old lawyer from Brooklyn, New York, rode his bicycle up to Xizhimen, the city’s north-west gate, to take a look at the soldiers. There, he remembered years later, he saw a parade of “clean, smartly stepping, smiling young men” being welcomed by cheering crowds, and a line of American-made vehicles that the Communists had captured from Guomindang forces. Shapiro, who had spent the last year and a half in China but had been in Beijing for only a couple of months, was enchanted. “Parents held their kids higher on their shoulders for a better view,” he later wrote. “The streets were gay with flags and bunting.” The Mao era had arrived.”

“Will shared resources always be misused and overused? Is community ownership of land, forests, and fisheries a guaranteed road to ecological disaster? Is privatization the only way to protect the environment and end Third World poverty? Most economists and development planners will answer “yes” — and for proof they will point to the most influential article ever written on those important questions. Since its publication in Science in December 1968, “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been anthologized in at least 111 books, making it one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal.” Article@monthlyreview.org

“My boyfriend and I went to join the revolution. Nicaragua had the best revolution, he and I agreed. There were several other revolutions in the area—in El Salvador and in Guatemala, in Honduras, in Panama (sort of). My boyfriend said we should get shots and malaria pills and that we would ride the bus there. I knew my mother and father were not going to go for this so I didn’t tell them. I wrote them a letter from Mexico. Actually I wrote the letter in Nogales on the American side of the border, then I crossed the border and mailed it from the Nogales post office on the Mexican side.” Part One@mcsweeneys.net

“Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: ‘Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.’ Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.” Bertrand Rusell@zpub.com

“Anybody who is confident of the outcome of Spain’s election on March 9th should recal March 14th 2004. Three days after Islamist terrorists bombed four Madrid trains, killing 191 people, voters unexpectedly handed victory to the Socialists’ José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. This weekend Mr Zapatero faces the electorate once again. Sober flags showing Mr Zapatero and his People’s Party (PP) rival, Mariano Rajoy, flutter decorously along the two sides of Madrid’s Castellana avenue, belying the bitter tensions between the two parties that have persisted since 2004. Opinion polls suggest Mr Zapatero will win—but the margin may be narrow.” The Pain In Spain@economist.com

PSOE – Bases Ideológicas
Spain Statistics@OECD.org

“Mao still has at least a symbolic hold over the Chinese economy, even though it began to blossom only after death removed his suffocating hand. His portrait is emblazoned on China’s currency, on bags, shirts, pins, watches and whatever else can be sold by the innumerable entrepreneurial capitalists that he ground beneath his heel when in power. No other recent leader of a viable country (outside North Korea, in other words) is so honoured—not even ones that did a good job. It was not a nurturing management style that won Mao this adulation. According to Jung Chang’s and Jon Halliday’s “Mao, the Unknown Story”, admittedly an unsympathetic portrait, he was responsible for “70m deaths, more than any other 20th-century leader”. But why stop at the 20th century? . . .” Link@economist.com

January 20, 2016, Master Strategy Memo
Subject: The Coming Year—and Beyond

Sir:

It is time to think carefully about the next year. Our position is uniquely promising—and uniquely difficult. The promise lies in the fact that you are going to win the election. Nothing is guaranteed in politics, but based on everything we know, and barring an act of God or a disastrous error on our side, one year from today you will be sworn in as the forty-sixth president of the United States. Countdown@theatlantic.com

If 1967 saw the Summer of Love, the following year could not have been more different. As riots swept the streets of Paris, President de Gaulle fled to Germany, seemingly impotent in the face of radical student leaders like Daniel Cohn-Bendit – Dany le Rouge.

Across the Channel 25,000 students marched on the American Embassy in London in a violent outburst against the Vietnam war. At their head the moustachioed Tariq Ali, blessed with film-star good looks, urged the masses on to revolution. TariqAli.org

One–Everything is made of opposing forces/opposing sides.

Two–Gradual changes lead to turning points, where one opposite overcomes the other.

Three–Change moves in spirals, not circles.

These are the three laws of dialectics according to Frederick Engels, in his book Dialectics of Nature. Engels believed that dialectics was “A very simple process which is taking place everywhere and every day, which any child can understand.”

Dialectics For Kids@icg.org
Dialectics Of Nature@marxists.org
What is Dialectical Materialism?@marxist.org

* 850 towns are flooded.
* An estimated 80,000 households have lost all personal property.
* Nearly 30,000 people were housed in 269 shelters.
* More rain is expected in the coming days.

Cuenta De Acopio Cruz Roja Mexicana
A nombre de: Cruz Roja Mexicana
Banco: Bancomer
Número de cuenta: 0401010115

Cruz Roja Mexicana Website

MADRID.- Los hijos y nietos de exiliados españoles podrán obtener la nacionalidad española aunque sus progenitores la hubieran perdido o hubieran tenido que renunciar a ella por razones políticas.

Los descendientes de emigrantes podrán también acceder a la nacionalidad española sin necesidad de que sus progenitores hayan nacido en España, como ahora exige la ley.

Según publicó en exclusiva el diario El País, esta medida que afectará a cerca de un millón de personas de acuerdo con fuentes gubernamentales, será incluida en la Ley de Memoria Histórica que se está discutiendo en el Parlamento español y cuya aprobación se prevé para el 31 de octubre.

“Naturism began as a self-help reform movement in reaction to the debilitating aspects of industrialization and urbanization during the nineteenth century. At a time when medicine could neither explain nor cure disease, many people believed that crowded and unsanitary cities, tenement housing, restrictive victorian clothing, and oppressive working conditions all led to poor health and rampant illness. Some observers concluded that what people needed was exposure to the natural world.”

Brief History Of Naturism@Federation Of Canadian Naturists
What Is Naturism?@British Naturism

“Black Monday, October 19th 1987, was the day stockmarkets plunged; and Alan Greenspan, who won his central-banking spurs in that crisis, was the Fed chairman (see article). Two decades on, in the wake of this summer’s subprime squeeze, stockmarkets are showing similar faith in Ben Bernanke, Mr Greenspan’s successor. Despite bad news from the housing market and warnings from the treasury secretary, America’s equity markets are still higher than they were in May. Amazingly, investors have been buying both on good news (don’t worry, the economy is fine) and on bad (don’t worry, the Fed will come to the rescue by cutting rates).” Link@economist