Undercurrents

First HRC attempts to marginalize the Transgender Community and now Metroline is quick on their heels of Trans Oppression! The current issue of Metroline has an Editorial by the Editor Joseph DaBrow that revises Stonewall History (4th paragraph) by stating that at Stonewall “there were no drag queens there at all. It was gay human beings simply standing up for being who they were.” Has Mr. DaBrow and the publisher of Metroline John Crowley never heard of Sylvia Rivera or Marsha P. Johnson both well know and prominent Stonewall Veterans? Perhaps if Mr. DaBrow and Crowley attended our New England Trans Pride, they would have heard Miss Majors, a Stonewall Veteran, as well as many other speakers remember the critical participation of our Transgender (i.e. Drag Queens or Transvestites in 1969 vernacular) comrades at Stonewall. Or to learn that the theme of this first ever New England Trans Pride was: “Remember Stonewall? That was us!” Or perhaps they never listened to Pacifica Radio’s excellent audio documentary: “Remembering Stonewall.” (more…)

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I guess the verdict is in: we who live in Hartford are hideous. Look away!!

There is a dissenting voice though, here and there.

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I just watched the infamous Park Street hit-and-run video and I didn’t reach the conclusion that the victim was ignored by bystanders. Less than a minute after the man was hit, several bystanders walked out into the road towards him. Less than ninety seconds after the accident a police car drove to the scene and he was attended to. It is true that several cars continued to drive by. You have to wonder what they were thinking. I chalk it up to the fact that some people have the notion that someone else will make the 911 call. But to me, the video clearly shows that a group of people walked out into the road to help this man before the police car pulled up.

What I would like to know is how did this incident take on the spin of callous city dwellers ignoring someone in distress? I see this more as the media creating a story where there was none. And then there are the wingnuts who take the distortion and add their own coat of slime. To call the hit-and-run accident a “Genovese moment” is breathtakingly stupid.

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References on National Public Radio to the section of Baghdad known as Sadr City seldom fail to mention that it is a “Shia slum.” They don’t call it an impoverished neighborhood or its residents a disadvantaged minority. Rather, they employ a slur–they did it again repeatedly this week–and a particularly disparaging one at that. (more…)

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I’m always curious to read discussions of hybrid cars in the mainstream press.  The following story came from Yahoo! News, and it was one of the featured stories for Yahoo! email users today.  Part of the fixation with the anti-fuel efficiency perspective is on cost, especially relatively short term cost like what you’ll pay in a year or over 5 years.  This article is no exception.   What’s more aggravating is that when the environmental reasons are mentioned, they are done so with such tokenism in a way that’s really insulting or patronizing to the reader.  In this article, the writer dedicates all of two and a half sentences to the really important reasons to buy more fuel efficient vehicles, only to ultimately leave the reader with the importance of a “bottom-line” analysis.

What’s most demeaning about this article and others like it is that it states the obvious as if it’s some grand discovery worthy of our attention: new hybrid cars cost a lot of money. Of course, so do new conventional fuel cars.  In an analysis of a new hybrid versus a new conventional car of the same type or class, the financial benefits of the hybrid would likely shine.  But instead of focusing on this comparison, idiot writers, like Terry Jackson from Bankrate.com, focus on ridiculous menial mental exercises that perpetuate our snail’s pace in the world of automotive fuel efficiency.
Click here to read “Trading in Gas Guzzler May Cost You.”

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This is too good not to share.  It comes from the youtubes:

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The gang rape committed by the embedded mass media on Jeremiah Wright will never be acknowledged, but history will record it as a sample of 21st Century racism. Wright is the hapless victim of neobigots, paid promoters of a popular racism that proceeds not from the presumed superiority of the white race but from its presumed inferiority. (more…)

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Between Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, the designated inquisitors, not a single intelligent question was put to either candidate during ABC News’ so-called “debate” in Pennsylvania last night. (more…)

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This week HIMC presents audio testimony from Winter Soldier 2008. This week’s segment comes from the panel Racism and War: the Dehumanization of the Enemy, Part One. The Winter Soldier panels were largely censored by the mainstream media. In the coming weeks, RadioActive will rebroadcast some of these testimonies to help disseminate these eyewitness accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan. For more information go to www.ivaw.org

Tune to WWUH 91.3 fm Wednesday April 16 at noon, then again on WESU 88.1 fm Tuesday April 22 at 1pm.

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Progressives are often heard to complain that the corporate-owned media fails to carry news about campaigns for human rights or struggles against police repression, much less news of developments in revolutionary struggles. This “self-censorship” really shouldn’t be a big surprise: only a handful of huge corporations control most of the print and network news media and they obviously have a stake in the class struggle that puts them on the other side of the fence from most liberation fighters.

But as we are now learning, there is one thing even more nauseating than the corporate media remaining silent . . . and that’s when it decides to speak out. Just look at the drumbeat of media coverage about Tibetan “resistance” to China’s “occupation.” (more…)

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