The Evening Blues - 9-4-17



eb1pt12


No news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Labor Day music

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features Labor Day music. Enjoy!

John Lennon - Working Class Hero


Happy Labor Day!


A Little Night Music

Woodie Guthrie - Workin Hard Blues

Bob Dylan - Maggie's Farm

Merle Haggard - Working Man Blues

They'll Never Keep Us Down (Hazel Dickens)

Doyle Lawson - Poor Boy Working Blues

Jimmy Reed - Big Boss Man

Joe Louis Walker - Workin' Blues

Nina Simone - Work Song

Merle Travis - Sixteen Tons

James McMurtry - We Can't Make It Here Anymore

The Clash - Career Opportunities

Maddy Prior - Honest work


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earthling1's picture

Perfect for day.
Thanks.

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Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.

joe shikspack's picture

@earthling1

thanks, i hope that you had a great holiday weekend.

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Azazello's picture

alive as you and me.
But joe, says I, you're ten years dead.
I never died, says he.

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We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.

joe shikspack's picture

@Azazello

heh, if you can tell me if joe had tools in his hands and was doing projects outside the house or if he was sitting at his computer searching youtube for tunes, i can tell you roughly what time you saw him last night. Smile

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Meteor Man's picture

Is Working At The Car Wash

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

joe shikspack's picture

@Meteor Man

i suppose that if jim is now working at the car wash, he was ironically probably hoping for better. Smile

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karl pearson's picture

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joe shikspack's picture

@karl pearson

heh, here's pete with a word or two about that song...

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A buddy was telling me about the chain gang songs. Basically they came out of the South jailing large numbers of African Americas to build up alot of the infrastructure. It wasn't a matter of giving criminals what they deserve, but pure out economic exploitation. In many ways, neo-slavery.

I realized the same happened to a aunt in the Soviet Union. She was given seven years in basically a slave labor camp for being caught with moonshine. My aunt was sent to work on building canals off the Volga from what I can tell. And yes, Stalin was very socially progressive. The camps had both genders. It did have a section for political prisoners though--my aunt was considered a common petty criminal. She got off early when Stalin died.

The slave model of work seems to coming back.

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joe shikspack's picture

@MrWebster

yep, the loss of all of that slave labor (not to mention the economic value tied up in the ownership of a slave) left the south in a bad way economically. all sorts of means to press blacks into unpaid prisoner labor (which is allowed by the 13th amendment) was resorted to.

hambone willie newbern is reputed to have been beaten to death in jail because, when captured and imprisoned for vagrancy he refused to work. he was an excellent musician that gave the world one of the standards of the blues:

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@joe shikspack So many lives destroyed.

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Not Henry Kissinger's picture

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The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?

joe shikspack's picture

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John Handy. Hard work getting the vid to post on this machine...

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joe shikspack's picture

@QMS

here ya go. great tune!

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snoopydawg's picture

Blind Alfred Reed wrote this in 1929 during the Great Depression.

I got the link to his song from this article:
Death and the Workplace: How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live

When Blind Alfred Reed wrote “How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live” at the beginning of The Great Depression, he was singing about the hopelessness of poverty when there were no jobs available. Great advancements among the work force were made over the following decades, only to see them trickle away again over the last 40 years. Sure – the labor reports state very low levels of unemployment these days. But wages in real terms are fading.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

joe shikspack's picture

@snoopydawg

an excellent tune!

my favorite version of it is by ry cooder:

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@joe shikspack Thanks Joe. And the Nina Simone and the Clash too. They speak for us.

The artists of the human race are the best of us.

How to make that emerge before we're all gone?

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big victory

With a sudden lunge through jihadist lines, the Syrian army and its allies on Monday came to within 3 km of relieving the Euphrates city of Deir al-Zor, where Islamic State has besieged 93,000 civilians and an army garrison for years.

and in Raqqa

U.S.-backed forces in Syria have captured the Old City of Raqqa, the latest milestone in their ongoing assault against the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State’s rapidly shrinking territories, according to a U.S. military statement on Monday.

Kurdish and Arab fighters with the Syrian Democratic Forces secured the neighborhood over the weekend after vanquishing a last pocket of resistance in the city’s historic Great Mosque, the statement said.

The capture followed a grinding two-month battle for the neighborhood that has proved the toughest challenge yet of a three-month-old offensive for Raqqa, launched in June and still far from over.

Unlike in Mosul, the Old City does not lie at the heart of Raqqa and its seizure does not signify an imminent end to the fighting, said a U.S. military spokesman, Col. Ryan Dillon.

The SDF now controls about 60 percent of Raqqa, said Dillon, who would not put a timeline on how long it would take to claim the rest but predicted that weeks of fighting lie ahead.

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joe shikspack's picture

@gjohnsit

it will be interesting to see what happens when isis is defeated in syria and the various contestants have to decide whether to fight it out amongst themselves or cede the country back to bashar al-assad.

steffan mistura from the un, last week said that he expected isis to be defeated in october. that will leave the us and its allies (chief among them the kurds) in possession of a great deal of syria and israel still holds a piece of the golan heights.

it looks like the wild card might be israel. netanyahu is in deep trouble, with corruption investigations looking like they might lead to serious legal actions. netanyahu might very much like to wag the dog about this time and he has been making noises like this is in the works.

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Unabashed Liberal's picture

and yours had a nice long weekend. Still enjoying ours for a bit; then, I'll have my hands full for a couple months, trying to navigate and (hopefully) wrap up a couple of business matters.

I've bookmarked a couple of pieces about so-called 'tax reform' that I plan to post. It's really worrisome (to me) that Dems are going to distract from all the fiscal matters to be decided before 1 October--the debt limit, CHIPs funding, Harvey funding, the so-called 'discussion' about tax reform, and the 'bipartisan' debate over saving the 'O' Care/ACA Exchanges by funding CSRs, etc. After all, a 'public option' bill doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell to pass [anytime soon]--which even Bernie is careful to point out.

Have a good one!

Bye

Mollie


"If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went."--Will Rogers

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Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong.

mimi's picture

[I redacted all those comments which would hurt your ... feelings.]

[video:https://youtu.be/3OxHXupqY-c]

Walmart Produces Jaw Dropping Anti Union Video. TC 9:32. Man, I hate that.

Where I am right now, food is so expensive that you really, really have to know where you can afford to buy what. The whole island lives off Cosco. But what if you don't have a need for buying bulk?

Ok there is Whole Foods, Safeway, Foodland ... and Walmart (selling food here) aside from Down to Earth. On the mainland I have never bought food at Wholefood (gimmicky), stopped buying at Safeway (too expensive), Foodland wasnt on my horizon in MD and I had no idea that Walmart was selling food. (May be that's only here on the island). I never have sat a foot into Walmart before. Nor into Target. On the mainland I was left with Aldi and Cosco and independent little stores.

Here on the island that's not possible. It's unaffordable.

And don't gimme all those "organic" stupidities. Never have seen so many overweight (poor brownish and rich whitish) people than on this island, where all you can buy is "organic' and "healthy".

Unionless is 'healthy' and 'organic', did you know that? /s

So, how about Aldi, Lidl, Cosco, Target etc...?

ok, now I have to find a way to boycott Walmart, Target and Lidl. Sigh.

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