I just got back from an early morning harvesting trek in Harlem and Morningside Heights, bringing home a couple of pounds of ginkgo seeds, or ginkgo kernels to be more exact.
I was turned on to these little pistachio-looking treats years ago by my friend Iz, who recommends toasting and eating four or five of the innermost nutmeats a day—far better than the health food store ginkgo preparations which are made from the leaves of the gingko tree, says she. Better for what? Memory, it seems, though it’s kinda hard to tell how well they work since most years I forget to go collect some before the late autumn season is over.
Another friend, Chip, provides a different reason to lay in a stash. When his wife Kim’s mother visits the States—the family is Malaysian of Chinese origin—she can’t believe that people just leave this delicacy lying around on the lawns and sidewalks. She collects bagsful and uses them as the base for tasty soups.
One reason you may never have considered a ginkgo seed-based dish is that the soft outer part of the seed (often called the fruit although that’s not botanically correct), stanks! In fact, gentrification is making the ginkgo scarcer in Manhattan even though their dense foliage, long leaf season, longevity and general hardiness makes them a splendid street tree. But the yupwardly mobile object to the occasional autumnal whiff of ginkgo seeds and demand that the city cut them down and replace them with cloned male ginkgos, which don’t bear seeds, or something “nicer.”
Well, gingko seeds don’t stink half as bad as the economy these days, and I felt a little rush of righteousness as I was out harvesting. The fact is that in a depression, the reliance of US cities on food supplies from far across the country and around the world is going to become a real pinch point.
We have to start thinking more seriously about urban agriculture (and about building real human to human ties between city consumers and family farmers) as this crisis deepens.
It comes as no surprise to me that Robert Biel, whose prescient 2000 book The New Imperialism (summary review here) exposed some of the contradictions in global capitalism before they started ripping the world asunder, is ahead of the curve on this front too. The following video introduces an organized effort to create a model of permaculture, intensive agriculture, in a block of flats (projects, we call ‘em here) in the South London neighborhood Brixton.
It is clear even to some bourgeois economists that any hope the capitalist system has of recovery from the growing depression we are in will require a newer, “greener” system of accumulation, different from both post-Great Depression Keynesianism and the last three decades of neo-liberal market worship. This is an early look at one first step from the side of the working class, not the think tanks of capital.
October 23, 2008
Meltdown Message for City Folk: Get Green Or Go Hungry
October 20, 2008
When the chickens get privatized,
it's vultures that come home to roost.
The subprime mortgage crisis isn't over. Neither is the global credit freeze it sparked. The stock market crash that followed hasn't hit bottom yet either. But the main thing to worry about now, and for a long time to come, is the depression we are rolling and tumbling into.
The media has started reporting on one increasingly visible aspect of the depression: the budget crunch facing states and municipalities, and the resulting cutbacks in public services. News stories have detailed the end of the shuttle program Phoenix, AZ ran to take seniors grocery shopping, Mayor Daley's elimination of 2250 Chicago city jobs--900 by layoffs, warnings of unsalted roads in rural Wisconsin this winter, and on and on. And it's early days yet.
The service cuts I want to highlight today are a little different. Let me direct your attention briefly to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which serves 1.5 million rail and bus passengers every day. Yep, even in auto-centric L.A., a lot of folks, especially poor folks, can't make it without public transportation.
Terry Matsamuto, the MTA's chief financial officer is predicting massive service cuts soon. It seems that like many local governments around the country, L.A. County went for the okey-doke. They sold much of their system to private investors in "lease-back" deals. Companies like Wells Fargo and Philip Morris bought the rail system, 1000 buses and parking and maintenance facilities. The Tranist Authority gets a one shot injection of needed cash, the financiers get a steady annual cash flow bled out of the system.
The rail cars and locomotives of the Metrolink commuter rail system were also sold, and guess who financed and insured these deals?
American International Group.
Yep, AIG. And when AIG started going into cardiac arrest, their credit ratings were revised downwards before the Fed even applied the paddles.The lower credit ratings triggered a clause in the lease-back agreements that require the MTA to either find a new firm to guarantee the deals or reimburse investors for their down payments and lost tax benefits, a scenario that could cost the transit agency between $100 million and $300 million.
For one thing, forget about finding a replacement lender--credit is still frozen, static. Second, once other clauses in the deal kick in, the MTA could be on the hook for $1.8 billion this year, more than half its total annual budget.
All those investors have to be made good somehow. So the service cuts commence.
I can't wait to see what L.A.'s Bus Riders Union does about this...
October 16, 2008
As The Economic Meltdown Deepens...
The ongoing economic meltdown is terrifying, but at the same time many of us have no real idea of what’s rolling down the pike at us.
There are many aspects of the crisis and the coming recession which are impossible to predict. One impact though, will be unavoidable: crippling budget crises at the state and municipal levels, driven by falling real estate values, layoffs, business closings, increased borrowing costs and recession.
What Happens When the Banks Don’t Lend
To get a sense of what this could look like, it is instructive to look at what happened to New York City starting in 1975, when bank credit dried up and a fiscal crisis that lasted more than a decade kicked in. Remember that this was a budget crisis isolated to one city, rather than the generalized collapse of the banking system we are seeing now.
The immediate background is that by the early ‘70s, the City’s budget was deep in the red, kept going with fiscal jiggery-pokery especially in Mayor Lindsay’s second administration and under his successor, Mayor Beame. The back story is more complex of course, having much to do with federal policy since the Eisenhower administration which directed resources to suburbanization at the expense of city and country—money for interstates, not mass transit and railroads, subsidizing vast auto-dependent tracts of single houses on what had been farmland—you know the deal.
What plunged the City into crisis was the large banks refusing, collectively, in March, 1975 to extend credit to New York any longer, declining to roll over loans and boycotting the City’s bond auctions. The Beame administration moved to lay off 25,000 city workers and defer contractual raises for others, cut services, increase the transit fare and institute tuition in the City College of New York system.
For months there was a political war over how things would get resolved,, with highway workers, cops and other city employees staging militant demonstrations and threatening an October general strike. The NY State government stepped in with aid but the federal government refused until massive pressure from the financial industry was brought to bear.
With everyone staring into the abyss of bankruptcy (and the possibility of a judge writing off the bonds the banks still held or canceling union contracts), the municipal unions made a devil’s pact with the banks, the details of which I leave for another post.
"The Bronx Is Burning"
What I want to remind people of is what happened to NYC once the austerity, service cuts, layoffs, tighter credit, tax hikes and the rest of the bank-sponsored “rescue package” kicked in.
Garbage piled up in the streets, and law enforcement abandoned whole neighborhoods. The public education system, already jolted by the refusal in the ‘60s of Blacks and Latina/os to accept a two-tier, heavily segregated system, now faced serious cuts. Class sizes ballooned. “Non-essential” programs like art and music education and vocational training disappeared.
The Transit Authority adopted a policy of “deferred maintenance”—only fixing things when they broke down completely. One leader of the militant opposition within Transport Workers Union, Local 100 at the time, Arnold Cherry, pointed out whenever he spoke that every housewife knows that if you don’t empty the crumbs out of the toaster, eventually it stops working. Not TA management, though—the system veered toward total collapse in the early ‘80s.
Meanwhile, landlords in “bad neighborhoods” emulated the Transit Authority, milking their aging apartment buildings for every dime in rent they could collect while "deferring” maintenance, laying off supers, ignoring heating oil bills, and finally abandoning the buildings themselves rather than pay city taxes. Or, given a chance, burning them down to collect the insurance.
This was seared into the national consciousness in the famous blimp shot of a five alarm fire in the South Bronx during the 1977 World Series while Howard Cosell intoned, "There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning." As much as 40% of the housing stock in the borough was destroyed during these years, increasing an impossible-to-ignore homeless population and pumping up rents for vacant apartments in surviving buildings. (The City, meanwhile, was closing firehouses as a money-saving measure.)
Huge cuts in the NYC medical system on top of deteriorating social conditions laid the ground work for what Nick Freudenberg and his co-authors identify as a deadly “syndemic”: the three interlinked epidemics of TB, murder and HIV infection.
Even after the emergency financial aid was paid back, and the City’s budget was balanced and the banks decided they would once again buy long term bonds issued by the city (1981) , the Emergency Financial Control Board kept austerity policies in place and the damage they did to millions of people reverberated through the decade and up to the present. To cite only one example, the City College system which had boasted free tuition for NYC residents before the crisis, now costs upwards of $2000 a semester.
What It Means
I could go on. There are a lot of particular lessons to learn from the New York City fiscal crisis, and how various social forces responded and what kinds of popular resistance developed and worked.
But lesson number one is that this kind of crisis is on the agenda right now, in cities around the country, and once it erupts, there is no quick bounceback. Start trying to size up the situation where you live and figure out who your allies are going to be in the coming years.
October 9, 2008
Capitalism Can’t Help Showing Its Ass These Days
I hadn’t been to an AIDS demonstration so far this year (my bad) but the prerecorded announcement from the ACT-UP phone tree last night haunted my sleep and got me out of bed and headed for midtown this morning. The demo here in NYC was part of an international week of actions (including Arizona, Thailand, France, Switzerland and more) targetting pharmaceutical giant Roche. The demand was simple: Roche must negotiate with the South Korean government to lower prices on bulk orders of lifesaving AIDS drug Fuzeon for its national healthcare system.
What got me going was hearing the quote from Urs Fluekiger, marketing director for Roche Korea, who explained the company’s refusal to budge on their $22,000 price tag for one patient/year of this vital medication:
We do not do business for saving lives but for making money. Saving lives is none of our business.
I thought to myself, okay, that tears it. It’s getting harder and harder to find anyone saying a kind word about good old freemarket capitalism, what with the mounting wreckage that is the global economy these days and the hurt that will be put on everyday working people here in the US and around the world in order to rescue the bloodsuckers who have benefited from this system.
There’s every reason we should make a point of kicking ‘em while they’re down.
So I did my little bit today, leafleting at a characteristically lively and imaginative action by ACT-UP’s New York and Philly locals and other AIDS groups. Scores of people grabbed fliers as they rushed to work in the skyscraper housing LifeBrands, Inc., the ad agency that Roche employs to promote Fuzeon.
There’s plenty more detail to deepen your rage at Roche--how they bought out the company that was given the rights to this drug by the government, which sponsored the original research, how their executives have shut down all AIDS and HIV research, how their profits last year exceeded 30%. But that one quote tells the story, about Roche and about the whole system they have made themselves such a success in.
We do not do business for saving lives but for making money. Saving lives is none of our business.
Read more!
September 28, 2008
Black NJ: Bail Out Homeowners, Not Bankers!
So Saturday at one, a couple of dozen POP members wearing their trademark yellow t-shirts rolled out at Broad & Market, the historic and commercial center of Newark, to say "Save Our Houses, Don't Bail Out Billionaires."
Folks clambering off NJ Transit buses took in the scene and stopped for a bit to hold a sign, join the line, chant for a time, before heading off to do their weekend shopping. A television crew showed up to film it and the Newark Star Ledger featured it in a story on their website.
The plan for the protest was settled only two days earlier at the weekly Thursday night General Assembly of POP, as members expressed outrage at the bailout. After watching--and protesting--as hospital after hospital in north Jersey closed for lack of funds in recent years, they were already mad. Now, just let the big banks and finance companies get in trouble and the government ponies up $700 billion in a few days. Members also highlighted the additional hundreds of billions pumped into the war since 2002.
To see more pictures from this important event, check out this photopage.Read more!
September 5, 2008
Take Five--"Stack-O-Lee" Videos!
[From time to time Fire on the Mountain features, on Fridays, Take Five--a list of five cool things in some semi-random category. It's not supposed to be the only five, best five, top five or anything, just five items worthy of attention. The idea is you can chip in your own suggestions for the list in the comments sections below.]
This edition of Take 5 is for Hank Williams.
This song, this legend, looms large in African American culture and literature, Hank's stomping ground. I've slipped him a bunch of recorded versions of "Stack-O-Lee" (or "Stack O'Lee" or "Stackerlee" or "Staggerlee" or "Stagger Lee" or "Stagolee"--ya pays yer money and ya takes your pick) over the last few years, and there are some mighty cool ones out there. There's Julius Lester's long version from the Civil Rights days, and the Michael Hill Blues Mob take, Black Rock Coalition-stylee. There's David Bromberg's comic "Mrs. Delion's Lament" and Robert Hunter's feminist revenge tale "Delia DeLyon And Staggerlee." Some are disquieting--the casual lynching imagery in the 45 rpm single that Tennessee Ernie Ford and Joe "Fingers" Carr cut in the '50s is scarier than the casual sadism in many versions, though Ike & Tina Turner somehow manage to make Stack-O-Lee the victim of it in theirs.
There's an extensive literature on the Stack-O-Lee question, including a whole scholarly book which I've not had a chance to read. I recommend the Sly Stone section of Greil Marcus's Mystery Train for a nice taste, and I should direct attention to Tom Morgan's extensive listing of recorded versions here.
Meanwhile here are some videos, following my usual standard--live footage if at all possible (5 for 5) and short (3 are pretty tight). As a result, what I consider the four standard variants all appear as covers. Pretty fucking sweet covers, though.
Wilson Pickett
What the Wicked Mr. Pickett gives us here is based on the one Lloyd Price took to number one on the rock and roll charts for four weeks straight in early 1959. This is the rock and roll standard and most of the variants you're likely to hear are, like this, based on Price's. Few can challenge the energy of the original. Pickett does.
Professor Arturo
This is a poem, read by a New Orleans-based elder who cut his cultural teeth with the Broadside poets in the '60s. This is in a sense a cover version, too. The second "standard" version of Stack-O-Lee and possibly the oldest isn't even a song. It's a toast, a pre-poetry-slam form of epic Black spoken word. Rudy Ray Moore--Dolomite, for those who remember Blaxpoitation flicks--recorded a fairly straightforward version of the traditional toast, but this retains that spirit and adds additional depth.
Piedmont Project
Some consider the canonical version to be the one cut by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928. I couldn't find a video of him doing it during his early 1960s "rediscovery" though they must exist. There are a bunch of versions on YouTube highlighting his finger-picking style on the guitar, but I picked this bunch of Swedes to showcase that tradition because they are having fun and displaying respect, not reverence.
Collins Kids
Man, I love this. It's a contemporary cover of Lloyd Price's gold standard by the Collins Kids, a wonderful rockabilly brother/sister act from the '50s. Again, energy that can stand up to Lloyd Price with ease.
Dave Van Ronk
And finally to take us out, the fourth and final standard version in my personal typology, the one Memphis bluesman and songster Furry Lewis recorded as "Billy Lyons And Stack O'Lee" a year before the John Hurt version. His emphasizes the gambling aspect, with its memorable refrain, "If you lose your money, learn to lose." I apologize for the length of this Dave Van Ronk video; the song itself starts about 2:30 in, and you can just push the little slider there and start to listen, but he does have a few interesting things to say in his opening tribute to Furry Lewis. And some of us miss him.
Read more!
August 26, 2008
Before There Was Hip Hop...
My brother Steve recently laid a copy of a book on me that I hadn't seen in almost 40 years, A Panther Is A Black Cat by Reginald Majors. Thumbing through it, I found a description of a "Free Huey" rally where Baby D read a poem by Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter (gunned down by members of the US organization in L.A., January 17, 1969). Struck by the excerpt Majors included, I dug up the whole thing here, as printed in the Black Panther newspaper, January 3, 1970.
NIGGER TOWN
In Nigger Town
In Nigger Town
The streets are made of mud
Infested with rats and bats and bugs
In Nigger Town
In Nigger Town
The streets are made of brick
Ask any swinging dick that happens past
Why won't he get off his big, fat, black, funky ass
A grumbling snitch
A shot of shit for a dope fiend bitch
Hid behind the cemetery in the fog
A leg, a hog, a short dog of Elderberry
Misery spreads and brothers dead
Cause Charlie's runnin' in the reds
In Nigger Town one day
Four little children kneeled to pray
in Jesus name
Boom!
Four little children gone
And Jesus never came
Now you say, you're tired of all this shit
You suck-a-pawed son-of-a-bitch
If you was, you'd ball you mitt
DO SOMETHING nigger! if you only spit
Tell the truth snaggle-tooth
I know you're scared you mother goose
With niggers in Nigger Town
I'm fed up to my neck
About a drunk, a thief, a punk
I wouldn't give a husky heck
In Nigger Town.
"Bunchy"
Check the language, the attitude, the rhymes. If this ain't hip hop, I'm Barry Manilow.
Read more!
