December 2-3 marks the anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement occupation of Sproul Hall in 1964. Nearly 800 students took over the administration building at Cal demanding an end to campus restrictions on political expression and advocacy. The mass arrests there led to a massive strike and ended in victory. These events culminated months of protest that electrified students acrosss the world. The steps of Sproul Hall were officially named the Savio Steps after Mario Savio, eloquent FSM leader, died in 1996. A couple of weeks ago, Occupy UC Berkeley protesters were brutally attacked on these very steps and the ramifications of that, coupled with the pepper spray at Davis has helped fuel a new era of student protest.
This podcast commemorates the FSM anniversary with the sounds of protest from 1964, including Mario Savio's famous speech calling his fellow students to put their bodies on the gears of the machine to win their freedom. LISTEN TO IT HERE.
culture of protest thurs 12/1/11 6-7pm pt kcsb 91.9fm www.kcsb.org
Tags: Berkeley FSM, Mario Savio, Savio Steps, #occupy UC Berkeley
We're near the end of the KCSB fund drive.Thanks to all who have taken part--and there's still time to help!!!
You can make a pledge by sending me an email at rflacks@igc.org providing your name, address, phone and donation amount. The basic membership levels are $25 for UCSB students and $50 for non-students. For a basic pledge, you can request one of the following:
Songs of the Depression I or Songs of the Depression II: these shows done at the start of the bank crisis 3 years ago are compilations of old and new interpretations of songs about banks, hard times, financial panic etc from the 1930s.
Songs for #OWS: a recent show featuring songs right off the streets of the Wall st. Occupation and some new and old songs about banksterism.
"You're Getting Sleepy" Master political song satirist Roy Zmmerman has donated his brand new CD of highly pertinent pieces hilariously advancing 'de-mock-crasy"
We'll play samples from all of these on the air this Thursday and next @ 6-7pm pst 91.9fm (www.kcsb.org)
Pick any one of these for a basic membership--3 for $75, and a $100 donation will get you all of them.
Send me an email pledge (include name address phone and choice of gift). Or...please call Thursday between 6-7pm at 893-2424 to make a phone pledge
KCSB launches its annual fund drive today. The station is celebrating its 50th anniversary providing an astonishing variety of musics and cultures and public affairs programming. We carry Amy Goodman and Al-Jazeera news, and a lot of good locally based reportage. And I've been on the air with the Culture of Protest for almost 30 years. It's been a great chance for me to learn a lot about the inter-relating of the musical and the political and to share songs of struggle from the past and the immediate present. I hope you'll participate in the fund drive. In return, I'm offering copies of some shows that may be of interest...and a brand new album of political satire by Roy Zimmerman.
You can make a pledge by sending me an email at rflacks@igc.org providing your name, address, phone and donation amount. The basic membership levels are $25 for UCSB students and $50 for non-students. For a basic pledge, you can request one of the following:
Songs of the Depression I or Songs of the Depression II: these shows done at the start of the bank crisis 3 years ago are compilations of old and new interpretations of songs about banks, hard times, financial panic etc from the 1930s.
Songs for #OWS: a recent show featuring songs right off the streets of the Wall st. Occupation and some new and old songs about banksterism.
"You're Getting Sleepy" Master political song satirist Roy Zmmerman has donated his brand new CD of highly pertinent pieces hilariously advancing 'de-mock-crasy"
We'll play samples from all of these on the air this Thursday and next @ 6-7pm pst 91.9fm (www.kcsb.org)
Pick any one of these for a basic membership--3 for $75, and a $100 donation will get you all of them.
Send me an email pledge (include name address phone and choice of gift). Or...please call Thursday betwseen 6-7pm at 893-2424 to make a phone pledge
Tags: kcsb, community radio, culture of protest pledge drive
Have you voted yet in the Santa Barbara city council race? I hope you’ve used the mail ballot you were sent some time ago.
Don’t forget. And I say this not simply to support good citizenship in general but because there’s a lot at stake.
Right now, the city council has a ‘Republican’ majority. That’s in quotes because city councils here are elected in non-partisan contests.Non-partisanship has always been a bit of a fiction, since historically the parties have often mobilized their base to support particular candidates in local elections. I think this was typically true of the local GOP. And in a town which in recent decades has voted pretty overwhelmingly for Democrats in national elections, Republican discipline has helped the conservative side overcome their natural deficit. In the last few years, such discipline has paid off a lot—even as the ‘Democratic’ majority has grown. Candidates supported by various liberal groups and constituencies have tended to split their base. Meanwhile, the Republican side has quite brilliantly exploited some wedge issues.
This year, as you hopefully are well aware, there’s a slate endorsed by the county Democratic central committee and related organizations. It’s a strong trio of women, including former councilmember Iya Falcone, planning commissioner Deborah Schwartz and popular local journalist Cathy Murillo. This election offers a very good chance to shift the council in a more progressive direction—that is, in the direction of rational planning for the future, concern for sustainable values, and for some degree of concern for the needs of all social classes in the community.
I’m moved to write this just now because I’m struck by the fact that the Republican slate (incumbents Francisco, Self and Rowse) have based their campaign on a surprising degree of myth and delusion—just as the national GOP presidential candidates have been doing. I find this surprising because Francisco and Rowse seem like sensible people with some ability to grasp reality. (Michael Self, not so much).
Here’s what I mean:
They are campaigning on the claim that we need more police on the street, suggesting that crime is an increasing problem downtown. This is despite the fact that crime rates in the city have sharply dropped inrecent years. I heard Randy Rowse say, at a public forum, that many people won’t go downtown anymore because they ‘perceive’ that it’s threatening or dangerous. I’d hoped that Randy would have tried to disabuse people who say this of their perception, but he seems to want to pander to their subjectivity rather than challenge it. And one consequence of all this pandering is to distort the budget priorities of the city to pretend to be fighting the crime ‘problem’.
The second big issue of the GOP team is the threat of ‘density’. Proponents of what is called ‘smart growth’ (which include my wife and me and the organizations we support) have been pushing for downtown rezoning In the long debated general plan update—rezoning that would provide for downtown housing that would be affordable to the city’s workforce. Since there is very little subsidy in our society for middle class housing, one way to encourage such housing is to allow for small size apartments to be developed. Putting these within easy walking and biking to workplaces would help overcome the huge commuter problem Santa Barbara is confronting. These proposals are strongly resisted by those who claim to want to preserve the ‘small town feel’ of Santa Barbara—and this argument is largely rooted in the fact that a couple of large apartment buildings appeared a few years ago on Chapala which seemed out of scale. But a recent creative charette led by local architects with much community participation, demonstrated how affordable downtown housing that was esthetically and humanly appropriate can be designed.
Mickey and I live in the heart of the old downtown residential west side. If this is the part of town that represents the ‘small town feel’, I recommend folks walk around the area west of Alice Keck park and surroundings. You will see a level of density that is higher than what has been proposed by the ‘smart growth’ coalition, with duplexes and multiple structures as well as apartment buildings of many styles. I just can’t take seriously the ‘density’ issue in the face of what Santa Barbara has actually looked like for many decades. Not to mention the troubling references to ‘small town feel’ in a town that abuts a major university, has a $55 million dollar performing arts center, and a wide variety of other amenities and institutions that are not ‘small town’. The real nature of the place I think is that it’s a city but one that has rather successfully maintained size and a design that is at a human scale. Without downtown affordable housing, we will drift inexorably toward being a place for the elderly rich and their servants. And then the ‘feel’ of the community will have been lost forever.
The oddest issue of the Francisco-Self-Rowse campaign has to do with the automobile. They (especially Ms. Self) are champions of the idea that ‘cars are basic’ and that efforts to discourage auto use in favor of alternatives should be resisted—presumably because they are futile and annoying to boot. The big focus has been on ‘bulb-outs’ which people are said to despise. Maybe many do. But again—personal experience makes us wonder. We live on the corner of an intersection that is a prime example of ‘bulb outing’. For 15 years or so we were able from our living room window to observe at least monthly collisions and near-collisions, and hear the squealing of brakes on a regular basis. Since the bulb outs were developed, such incidents have become very rare. Presumably the new configuration allows drivers to see oncoming traffic at stop signs, while providing a shorter distance for pedestrian crossings. I’m not saying that investment in traffic quieting and reconfiguring of streets is a high priority in a time of budget stringency. But one hopes that the future of the city isn’t to be determined by anti-bulb outism.
The trio has voted pretty consistently against environmental concerns (but they campaign as if they are environmentalists). The delusory aspect of this is their repeated questioning of climate change as a reality and their opposition to sustainability as a key principle in planning. So crime in the city is real, but global warming is not.
There is a strategy behind the mythologizing. The strategy is to appeal to that part of the electorate that is opposed to change, that wants to keep things as they are.
We are and have been for decades a town with a large, vocal, affluent and politically conscious senior citizenry. The Flackses are examples. But one problem with the senior ‘class’ is this resistance to change…WE don’t want to have to figure out new traffic patterns and the bulb outs are damned annoying. We’re pretty happy with the demographics of the town right now. We don’t like going downtown and seeing one or another sort of ‘those people’ (panhandlers? Teenage ruffians? People talking foreign tongues?) We like our property values and our prop13 era property taxes..
So age intersects with class and race and that intersection is a big factor in the electoral scene.
But some of us elderly do want a town that can be home to younger folk with families—the people who teach, and do the healthcare, and the public safety and all the other work that makes life so comfortable for the ‘retirees’.
Don’t forget to vote.
Tags: santa barbara elections, issues in SB, smart growth, gop
Saturday is national move your money day. There will be public events in Santa Barbara and Isla vista that day, and so on the radio we'll have a full hour of classic and new songs that come out of past and present struggles with the banksters and plutocrats. These are songs you can use to help you make the transition to community banking--songs to fuel your spirit and as background music as you do the necessary paperwork.
...and on Saturday: join the action at De La Guerra Plaza at noon to march over to the downtown Bank of America. And at 3 the launch of Occupy Isla Vista at Perfect Park starts at 3 with talks by several UCSB profs, including yours truly.
culture of protest thurs 11/3/11 6-7pm pt kcsb 91.9fm www.kcsb.org
Tags: move your money, #occupy Isla vista, songs for occupying
Dick Flacks here...sociology professor emeritus at UCSB. Budget cuts mean that I can't continue my annual course on political sociology. Maybe a blog will be a space for me to continue to ruminate and pontificate. And maybe (as a veteran teacher on these matters) I can offer some ways of thinking about what's happening nationally and locally that will be useful, as we struggle to make sense of the tortured complexities of these times.
I've been a leftwing activist for more than 50 years. What we've been struggling for all these years is full democracy--to increase the opportunities for people to have real voice in the decisions that affect them. Step by step over these years we've made some gain...but it is a long march, and one that never ends. The big barrier to democracy in our society is the concentrated power of corporations. At the same time, democracy is undermined by the felt powerlessness of people in their daily lives--the persistent belief that our problems are only our own personal concern. It's a strong cultural theme--such individualism--constantlly reinforced by mass media and everyday circumstance. But the current big crisis of the economy maybe makes it more possible for more people to understand that we've got to have social reform and economic reform. So my writing here is aimed at helping us figure out what to think and act on that so that we can hope for new democratic possibilities. WE'll be talking about the local and the national.
The blog name comes from an old labor union hymn:
Step by step the longest march can be won. Many stones can form an arch...singly none. And by union what we will can be accomplished still. Drops of water turn a mill, singly none, singly none.
For 27 years I've had a weekly radio show on KCSB (91.9 fm. www.kcsb.org) It's called the Culture of Protest. It's comes from my fascination with music and social movements. I collect 'political' and 'protest' music and that's what we play each week (Thursdays 6-7 pm). So sometimes here we'll share and talk about that.
I'm worried about one thing about the blogosphere. And that's the way that some people use the blog comment space for anonymous nastiness. I'm sick of the kind of political blather that assaults the motives of others, and sees dark conspiracy behind every thing one doesn't like. This kind of stuff is helping to poison the political atmosphere. So I'm going to strive for a civil tone to whatever interaction may happen on this blogsite.
