Now that the three topics of my blog are balanced, I can chose my favourite to write the next post. Now I’m going to tell you about Howard Zinn, another social critic that I really like. 

“Howard Zinn (born August 24, 1922) is an American political scientist, historian, social critic, socialist, activist and professor.

Zinn has been active in the movements for Civil Rights, Civil Liberties and the anti-war movements in the United States. He has written extensively on all three subjects. The author of some 20 books, Zinn is Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Boston University.”

I really like him because, like Noam Chomsky, he writes what most people don’t write and he always questions things we all take for granted.

If we all read truthful writings like Chomsky and Zinn, and don’t conceive them as “radicals”, whatever that means, we all would have a more informed, conscious and better opinion.

Check him out:

Howard Zinn’s website

Howard Zinn’s Wikipedia article

To honor him, the MTV’s show “Pimp My Ride” offered him to “pimp his ride”. Today, the biggest newspaper in Mexico informed that the truck is already on its way back to Mexico to be delivered to the brave man. The truck was named: “Angel”, a bit corny but a great gift to a man who did a great thing.

Here are the pictures of the truck before and after:

To view the complete story on the incident click here.

Most people here in Europe have never heard of Monterrey, even though it is a very important city in Latin America, so I thought it was a good idea to introduce you to it.

“Monterrey is the capital city of the northeastern Mexican state of Nuevo León and a municipality of the same name. It is Mexico’s third largest city after Mexico City and Guadalajara. Also known as “Sultana del Norte” (Northern Sultan), Monterrey is an important industrial and business center. The city proper has population of 1.1 million, and the metropolitan area of Monterrey has a population of 3.8 million. (Wikipedia.org)”

I think it is worth mentioning the comercial and business value of the city, taking into account the fact that most of you are business students; “Monterrey is a major industrial center in northern Mexico , producing a GDP of 78.5 billion US dollars (2006). The city’s GDP per capita in 2007 was 21,788 US dollars. The city was ranked second-best to do business in Mexico in 2005 and is currently ranked as the third best by the América Economía magazine. Because of its strong steel industry, it is often called “the Pittsburgh of Mexico”. The city has prominent positions in sectors such as steel, cement, glass, auto parts, and brewing. In 1999 Fortune magazine recognized Monterrey as the best city in Latin America in which to do business. The magazine attributes its economic wealth in part to its proximity with the United States-Mexican border and mentions Monterrey as a significant city with economic links to the United States.”(Wikipediq.org)”

This was a rather short introduction to my hometown, but if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can visit these two sites:

official website (spanish)

tourist information (english)

Level 1 – A very funny list

Level 2 – Compilation (be ready to laugh)

Level 3 – (Extreme frustration, even for the viewer)

To keep the topic on the same track, I thought it would be interesting to post this video called “The Story of Stuff”. This is not a very political video in the way that the past videos have been. It appeals more to the everyday life and gives us an easy and entertaining explanation about our behaviour as consumers.

Please tell me what you think about it.

Story of Stuff Official Website

“Most everybody I see know the truth but they just don’t know that they know it.” – Woody Guthrie

The British Victorian liberal thinker John Stuart Mill tells us that we “are not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treadling on each other’s heels which form the existing type of social life are the most desirable lot of human beings”.

The American social critic Noam Chomsky says he “would like to believe that people have an instinct for freedom, that they really want to control their own affairs. They don’t wan to be pushed around, ordered, apressed, etc., and they want a chance to do things that make sense like constructive work in a way they can control, or maybe control together with others”.

As an unstatisfied citizen with the way current things are, I believe it is very important to consider new alternatives. In this case, I will explain a new alternative to the actual economic/social system, which is capitalism.

“Participatory economics, often abbreviated parecon, is a proposed economic system that uses participatory decision making as an economic mechanism to guide the production, consumption and allocation of resources in a given society. Proposed as an alternative to contemporary capitalist market economies and also an alternative to centrally planned socialism or coordinatorism, it is described as “an anarchistic economic vision”,[1] and it could be considered a form of socialism as under parecon, the means of production are owned by the workers. It emerged from the work of activist and political theorist Michael Albert and of radical economist Robin Hahnel, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s.

The underlying values that parecon seeks to implement are equity, solidarity, diversity, workers’ self-management and efficiency. (Efficiency here means accomplishing goals without wasting valued assets.) It proposes to attain these ends mainly through the following principles and institutions:

* workers’ and consumers’ councils utilizing self-managerial methods for decision making,

* balanced job complexes,

* remuneration according to effort and sacrifice, and

* participatory planning.

Albert and Hahnel stress that parecon is only meant to address an alternative economic theory and must be accompanied by equally important alternative visions in the fields of politics, culture and kinship. The authors have also discussed elements of anarchism in the field of politics, polyculturalism in the field of culture, and feminism in the field of family and gender relations as being possible foundations for future alternative visions in these other spheres of society. Stephen R. Shalom has begun work on a participatory political vision he calls “parpolity”.”(Wikipedia.org)

There is a sea of documentation on Parecon.

Parecon’s Z Site

Buy the book from Amazon.com

Parecon’s article on Wikipedia

I have the book but I have to admit I haven’t finished reading it because it is sometimes too tedious and technical. Still, I believe it is, right now, the most rational and humane proposal (right now) for correcting this system (capitalism) which is thankfully in crisis.

This is the trailer of the film. I will leave you guys the link to watch the full version.

>>>WATCH FULL VERSION<<<

If any of you do watch the full version, please leave me a comment telling me what you thought about it.

Source:

The Corporation Film. Retrieved on May 29th from http://www.thecorporation.com/

I was thinking about what should I post next. Enough funny stuff for the moment, and I wasn’t feeling like writing about Mexico, so I asked myself, “who do you admire?”, and Noam Chomsky popped into my mind immediately.

Noam Chomsky “is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident, an anarchist, and a libertarian socialist intellectual.” (Wikipedia.org)

I am not really much into linguistics so I am more familiarized with his political writings. As an introduction to him, I will make a list of his most known works in the fields of politics and I will also share with you a video.

A list of my favorite works of Noam Chomsky:

Amazon.com Review
Understanding Power is a wide-ranging collection of transcribed and previously unpublished discussions and seminars (from 1989 to 1999) with sociopolitical analyst Noam Chomsky.

The chapters, each covering discrete sessions with Chomsky, arrive in a question-and-answer format that at times becomes delightfully contentious. Chomsky holds forth on such disparate topics as American third-party politics, the stifling of true dissent, the illusion of a muscular media, heavy-handed American imperialism (from Southeast Asia to Mexico), a dysfunctional and self-destructing United States political left, the gilding of the Kennedy and Carter administrations, and the impotent state of labor unions.

The relatively accessibility of Understanding Power is a welcome balance to Chomsky’s often formidable scholarly writings. This is a book best taken in doses: a sort of bedside reader. –H. O’Billovitch

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Forget Iraq and Sudan–America is the foremost failed state, argues the latest polemic from America’s most controversial Left intellectual. Chomsky (Imperial Ambitions) contends the U.S. government wallows in lawless military aggression (the Iraq war is merely the latest example); ignores public opinion on everything from global warming to social spending and foreign policy; and jeopardizes domestic security by under-funding homeland defense in favor of tax cuts for the rich and by provoking hatred and instability abroad that may lead to terrorist blowback or nuclear conflict. Ranging haphazardly from the Seminole War forward, Chomsky’s jeremiad views American interventionism as a pageant of imperialist power-plays motivated by crass business interests. Disdaining euphemisms, he denounces American “terror” and “war crimes,” castigates the public-bamboozling “government-media propaganda campaign” and floats comparisons to Mongols and Nazis. Chomsky’s fans will love it, but even mainstream critics are catching up to the substance of his take on Bush Administration policies; meanwhile his uncompromising moral sensibility, icy logic and withering sarcasm remain in a class by themselves. Required reading for every thoughtful citizen.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Amazon.com Review
An absolutely brilliant analysis of the ways in which individuals and organizations of the media are influenced to shape the social agendas of knowledge and, therefore, belief. Contrary to the popular conception of members of the press as hard-bitten realists doggedly pursuing unpopular truths, Herman and Chomsky prove conclusively that the free-market economics model of media leads inevitably to normative and narrow reporting.  –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

If you are interested in knowing more about him, I really reccomend visiting this website: www.zcommunications.org, which is a community of journalists, academics, and regular people who prefer a much more rational opinion about what is going on in the world than the one that we are easily offered by the mainstream media.

A funny mock-up of rappers. a classic.

A different commercial

About the legendary video

Jon La Joie’s YouTube profile