The RCJ provides RSS
feeds from well-respected news organizations, giving
our readers a convenient
portal through which to stay abreast of world
events and issues. Use the links provided. The
following are on the RCJ Front Page Report homepage
(scroll both columns to the right).
ATWOOD - "A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliverance"-AVAILABLE
NOW FOR KINDLE (INCLUDING KINDLE COMPUTER APPS) FROM
AMAZON.COM.Use
this link.
CCJ Publisher Rick Alan Rice dissects
the building of America in a trilogy of novels
collectively calledATWOOD. Book One explores
the development of the American West through the
lens of public policy, land planning, municipal
development, and governance as it played out in one
of the new counties of Kansas in the latter half of
the 19th Century. The novel focuses on the religious
and cultural traditions that imbued the American
Midwest with a special character that continues to
have a profound effect on American politics to this
day. Book One creates an understanding about
America's cultural foundations that is further
explored in books two and three that further trace
the historical-cultural-spiritual development of one
isolated county on the Great Plains that stands as
an icon in the development of a certain brand of
American character. That's the serious stuff viewed
from high altitude. The story itself gets down and
dirty with the supernatural, which inATWOOD
- A Toiler's Weird Odyssey of Deliveranceis the
outfall of misfires in human interactions, from the
monumental to the sublime.The
book features the epic poem"The
Toiler"as
well as artwork by New Mexico artist Richard
Padilla.
Elmore Leonard Meets Larry McMurtry
Western Crime Novel
I am
offering another novel through Amazon's Kindle
Direct Publishing service. Cooksin is the story of a criminal
syndicate that sets its sights on a ranching/farming
community in Weld County, Colorado, 1950. The
perpetrators of the criminal enterprise steal farm
equipment, slaughter cattle, and rob the personal
property of individuals whose assets have been
inventoried in advance and distributed through a
vast system of illegal commerce.
It is a ripping good
yarn, filled with suspense and intrigue. This was
designed intentionally to pay homage to the type of
creative works being produced in 1950, when the
story is set. Richard
Padilla has done his usually brilliant
work in capturing the look and feel of a certain
type of crime fiction being produced in that era.
The whole thing has the feel of those black & white
films you see on Turner Movie Classics, and the
writing will remind you a little of Elmore Leonard,
whose earliest works were westerns.
Use this link.
EXPLORE THE KINDLE
BOOK LIBRARY
If you have not explored the books
available from Amazon.com's Kindle Publishing
division you would do yourself a favor to do so. You
will find classic literature there, as well as tons
of privately published books of every kind. A lot of
it is awful, like a lot of traditionally published
books are awful, but some are truly classics. You
can get the entire collection of Shakespeare's works
for two bucks.
Amazon is the largest,
but far from the only digital publisher. You can
find similar treasure troves at
NOOK Press(the
Barnes & Noble site),Lulu,
and others.
OCCUPY
WALL STREET
Can small bands of committed
warriors against greed and corruption turn a nationwide network of
"be-ins" into a new American Revolution?
OWS May Be Working, if...
MSNBC's Chris Hayes released a memo
from a Wall Street consulting group this week expressing concern
about political sentiment should Democrats exploit the anti-bank
Occupy Wall Street movement as the Republicans have the Tea
Party. See Hayes report below. The Tea Party connection has
created all sorts of complexities for Republican lawmakers. Does
the future include the same sort of extreme policy politics on
the Democratic side should OWS-supported candidates be elected?
And would that move any legislation?
Best
Zuccotti Insight
Yet
NYC Police Ignore Court Order
NYC
Police provided the best ammunition the Occupy Wall Street
movement could possibly hope to receive in their bull-headed
determination to ignore a court order that would allow
Zuccotti Park protesters back into the park with their
camping gear. Watch the clip below.
This video is excellent in all
kinds of ways, depicting: New York City police officials who
are determined in their violation of a legal order and come
off like thugs; police using willful destruction of personal
property to undermine the protesters; youthful protesters
whose stake in the movement seems more about being a part of
what is going on than anything specific about what
OWS is trying to be; and the vulnerable, possibly mentally
ill and homeless, who have gravitated to the OWS encampments
because it is a place where they can go and rest in relative
security.
The disconnect between who the
OWS protesters are and what it is they are protesting is
staggering. These are not, it seems, the people who have
been the victims of the derivative and credit swap schemes
that have been at the heart of the housing debacle and
attendant credit catastrophes.
The faces that need to be seen
as associated with the OWS movement should include the
almost 30 percent of mortgage holders in the U.S. who are
"underwater" on their home investments, owing far more money
than their properties are worth; properties whose values
were grossly inflated as part of a package that put
unqualified buyers into mortgages on the promise that their
adjustable rate mortgages could be renegotiated once they
had signed on the dotted line. They were convinced to accept
unsustainable payment burdens on the promise that they were
temporary, just a way to "get into the game", and then it
could all be fixed. Accept that the fix was in because all
of this baloney created a housing bubble that burst on
everyone. Those who took the gamble and signed up for a
mortgage could just write it off as an unfortunate loss if
they weren't then doubly-troubled by being the only parties
in these transactions to get left out in the cold. The
financial institutions all got bailed out on the backs of
each and every American taxpayer, but all the underwater
mortgage holders got was evicted.
There is a world of stuff to
work with in that narrative line, but what continues to be
missing from the OWS movement are the voices and the faces
of leaders to run with that storyline, because the movement
has wanted to be a horizontal structure - and anyone who has
ever worked in an organization that commits itself to this
flat-earth model has found it to be artificial.
Decision-making processes are inherently vertical. There is
no such thing as a forward-lateral movement, nor is there a
north star to guide by in a horizontal model as that type of
useful 3D imagery is nullified by the approach.
Navigating political waters is
not different than navigating on the open sea or through a
dense forest. If you just look around and survey the
horizon, you are not likely to have a great sense of
directional orientation. You need to establish a fixed pivot
to steer by and to gauge your progress. In the case of a
political or social movement, you need a guiding policy
directive coupled to objectives.
Sans a well-executed
communications strategy fixed to a plan of action with
clearly defined goals, the OWS movement, and particularly
the Zuccotti Park flagship group, looks a lot like people
pretending at something, literally role playing as policy
makers and strategists without any real output. This may be
only a perception, which is possible given that this
movement is only two months old, but it is one that the OWS
leaders, whoever they are, had better get a handle on right
now or the moment will be lost to the diminution of us all.
- RAR
NYC Police
Clear Zuccotti
"You are required to immediately
remove all property, including tents, sleeping bags and
tarps from Zuccotti Park. That means you must remove the
property now. You will be allowed to return to the park in
several hours, when this work is complete. If you decide to
return, you will not be permitted to bring your tents,
sleeping bags, tarps and similar materials with you."
Zuccotti
Park protesters were without camping supplies
this morning, after NYC Police launched a surprise 1 a.m.
eviction of occupants of the park. Protesters were given the
option of leaving or being arrested, but either way the
message was that the encampment is finished. This mirrors a
number of other high profile police activities regarding OWS
sites in Oakland, Boston, Chicago and elsewhere. What this
will mean for the OWS movement remains to be seen, but a
group committed to a horizontal management structure will
likely have trouble determining and executing next steps.
Stay tuned... - RAR(11/15/11)
Hunkering Down for Winter
Denver Police Make OWS Arrests
Police Remove OWS
Oakland Camp
10/25/11
NYC's White Shirts
So what brand of thuggery is
this?
Photograph by
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
The
images that surfaced at the Occupy Wall
Street protests last week, of "White Shirt" Police
Officers roughing up protesters and pepper-spraying corralled
demonstrators, were more than a little unsettling to viewers who
had been watching the disciplined restraint of the "Blue Shirt"
Police with some admiration. Depending upon your politics, it
was either a clear demonstration that "Dad is home" or that the
NYC Police force exists on at least two levels of behavioral and
ethical justice. The New York Times quoted one Commander
- and that's who the White Shirts are, i.e., guys higher up the
chain of Police command - as saying: "There are those of us who wear white shirts, who, I won’t say
are afraid of the street, but who never really put their hands
on anyone, but took tests and got promoted. Then there are those
of us who were good cops to begin with and then got promoted,
and we are not afraid to put our hands on people when we have
to.”
Wow, dialogue right out of the 10
p.m. network TV police-procedural time slot.
On the other hand, viewers may have
watched the chaos unfold, when the White Shirts arrived, and
thought about previous events of the so-called "Arab Spring",
where authority groups divided into squads of passive control
and aggressive disbursement.
To Americans, this double-edged
sword of law enforcement and government control carried the odd
symbol of class distinction in the form of these blue collar
cops and their white collar commanders. Is that not what the
Occupy Wall Street protests are at heart all about, the daily
control of working class people to the benefit of a select group
of white collar thugs? That may not be a precise description of
the malfeasances executed by the big banks of Wall Street, but
it most certainly captures the feeling of those camped out in
the park.
The other symbolic problem is that
the most prominent model in recent history that Americans have
for white people oppressing other white people is Nazi Germany,
where the "White Shirts" could just as easily have been the
Gestapo. They had special uniforms, too.
This revelation about the NYC
Police, which is no doubt mirrored in every other major police
force in the U.S., contributes to the Occupy Wall Street story as another layer of societal facade being peeled away to
reveal something that seems against the grain of America's inner
myth, and makes it harder for the underlying structure to
survive.
The underlying structure in this
story is the belief than Americans have traditionally had in
their country; that if you just work hard and pay your taxes
that you will eventually be rewarded with a middle class life.
When the economics of the country have become so badly out of
skew and tilted away from basic fairness, the government so
divided and beholding to the narrow band of wealthy interests,
and the street-level layer of authority so willing to do
violence against its own people, what belief is left on which to
hold?
This may be a developing storyline
in the Occupy Wall Street story, as demonstrators meet daily in
workshops and policy groups to try to imagine something better
to replace the social-political-economic disaster that literally
has them in the streets. - RAR
_______________________
FOR INFORMATION ON
OCCUPY WALL STREET,
including the NYC daily agenda, and how to get involved with
the broader movement through Facebook (see links once
inside):
Revolution Culture Journal offers a
video tour of organized resistance, from the creation of a
Manifesto to change we can believe in. Available on YouTube,
the three part video series is also provided below.
Part One: Revolution -
Introduction and Overview
Part Two: Money - Going Deeper into
the Plan
Part Three: Life During Wartime -
Expose and Replace
Russian Media Examines Occupy
Wall Street
Something Distinctly Red About this People's
Movement