Operating a Front for The Left in the Arts since 1991 » Events

20th Anniversary Lumpen Magazine #117 Released

lumpenmagazine — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 05:59:36 +0000

We are pleased to announce the release of our 20th anniversary issue of Lumpen Magazine! It’s hard to believe it’s been going on this long. For this special issue Plural Design created an overview of 20 years and 116 issues of the publication. It features an 80 page magazine with a 24 page BONUS publication inside. The magazine is printed entirely in full color and features spreads, articles and images from previous issues. Here are some sneak peeks at the two covers. The mgazine will be released on Friday, October 21, at several art shows and venues in Bridgeport. Please join us and pick one up a the MDW Fair vernissage at the Geolofts; at the opening of Judy Natal’s exhibition at the Co-Prosperity Sphere; at the opening for Thad Kellstadt at Eastern Expansion; and at Maria’s Packaged Goods & Community Bar, where we will be partying until 2am..

Issues will be available throughout the city during the next week.

World Collapse Explained in 3 Minutes

lumpenmagazine — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 07:25:57 +0000

“It’s not a riot. It’s an insurrection”

lumpenmagazine — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 19:36:34 +0000

12 Things You Need to Know About the Uprising in Wisconsin

lumpenmagazine — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 06:39:22 +0000

Public workers and supporters picketing the mansion of Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, February 13, 2011

What’s happening in Wisconsin is not complicated. At the beginning of this year, the state was on course to end 2011 with a budget surplus of $120 million. As Ezra Klein explained, newly elected GOP Governor Scott Walker then ” signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit.” (Update: please see this note for more detail on the cause of the budget gap.)

Walker then used the deficit he’d created as the justification for assaulting his state’s public employees. He used a law cooked up by a right-wing advocacy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC likes to fly beneath the radar, but I described the organization in a 2005 article as “the connective tissue that links state legislators with right-wing think tanks, leading anti-tax activists and corporate money.” Similar laws are on the table in Ohio and Indiana.

Walker’s bill would strip public employees of the right to bargain collectively for anything but higher pay (and would cap the amount of wage hikes they might end up gaining in negotiations). His intentions are clear — before assuming office, Walker threatened to decertify the state’s employees’ unions (until he discovered that the governor doesn’t have that power).

But he’s spinning the measure as something else — a bitter pill state workers must swallow in order to save Wisconsin’s government. So the first things you need to know are:

1. Wisconsin’s public workers have already “made sacrifices to help balance the budget, through 16 unpaid furlough days and no pay increases the past two years,” according to the Associated Press. The unions know their members are going to have to make concessions on benefits, but they rightly see the assault on their fundamental right to negotiate as an act of war.

2. There are already 13 states that restrict public workers’ bargaining rights and it hasn’t helped their bottom lines. As Ed Kilgore notes, “eight non-collective-bargaining states face larger budget shortfalls than either Wisconsin or Ohio,” and ” three of the 13 non-collective bargaining states are among the eleven states facing budget shortfalls at or above 20%.”

3. This isn’t just about public employees. What even a majority of the protesters don’t know is that Walker’s law would also place all of the state’s Medicaid funding in the hands of the governor. State senator Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton — one of the Dem law-makers who fled the state to block a vote on the bill – told local media that this amounted to “substantial Medicaid changes” that put “the governor, all of a sudden… in charge of Medicaid, which is SeniorCare, which is BadgerCare …and he has never once said what he intends to do” with those programs. But the provision led journalist Suzie Madrak to conclude that “the end game for all this is to defund state Medicaid programs and make it impossible to serve as part of the new health care safety net.”

4. Health-care costs, rather than workers’ greed, are what has driven up the price of employees’ benefits. But generally speaking, those public sector health-care costs have grown at a slower clip than in the private sector.

5. Public employees’ pensions account for just 6 percent of state budgets.

This has nothing to do with the state’s fiscal picture. Aside from potentially undermining Wisconsin’s public health-care system, it’s really about destroying the last bastion of unionism in the American economy: public employees. As Addie Stan wrote on AlterNet’s front page:

Walker is carrying out the wishes of his corporate master, David Koch, who calls the tune these days for Wisconsin Republicans. Walker is just one among many Wisconsin Republicans supported by Koch Industries — run by David Koch and his brother, Charles — and Americans For Prosperity, the astroturf group founded and funded by David Koch. The Koch brothers are hell-bent on destroying the labor movement once and for all.

Consider these facts:

6. Last year, more working people belonged to a union in the public sector (7.9 million) than in the private (7.4 million), despite the fact that corporate America employs five times the number of wage-earners. 37 percent of government workers belong to a union, compared with just 7 percent of private-sector employees.

7. Whether in the public or private sector, union workers earn, on average, 20 percent more than their non-unionized counterparts. They also have richer retirement and health benefits — the “union compensation premium” rises to almost 30 percent when you include those bennies.

That workers can still negotiate from a position of strength somewhere in the US is simply unacceptable to the right, and that’s what this is about. As you might expect, the tool they’re using in their campaign is a pack full of lies and distortions about public employees. Here are some answers to those falsehoods:

8. Public sector workers have, on average, more experience and higher levels of education than their counterparts in the private sector (they are twice as likely to have a college degree).

9. When you adjust for those factors, they make, on average, 4 percent less than their private-sector counterparts.

10. Like any group of workers with a high union density, they have better benefits, on average. But even including those benefits, state and local employees still make less in total compensation than they would doing the same work in the private sector.

11. In 2007, the average pension for a public sector worker was $22,000. Not exactly caviar dreams.

12. Many public employees are not eligible for Social Security — those pensions, and whatever they can put away on their own, is all that they’ll have in their golden years.

(Unless otherwise indicated, you can find links to the data for all of the above in my piece, “Right-Wingers Using Public Employees as 21st-Century Welfare Queens.”)

The Right has made great political progress getting Americans to ask the question: “How come that guy’s getting what I don’t have?” It’s the crux of the politics of grievance. Progressives need to get Americans to ask a different question: “What’s keeping me from getting what that guy has?” At least part of the answer is the Right’s decades-long assault on private sector workers’ ability to organize, and the latest battle is being waged in Wisconsin.

By Joshua Holland | Sourced from AlterNet

Posted at February 18, 2011, 1:12 pm

William Upski in Chicago this Weekend

lumpenmagazine — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:29:57 +0000

Upski is the Chicago born activist who wrote Bomb the Suburbs and No More Prisons, two influential books that helped shape turn of the century thinking about hip hop, cultural identity, and youth issues in America.

He is coming back to town to promote his new book, Please Don’t Bomb The Suburbs which will hopefully kick-start a new generation of activism in America. An excerpt from the book will be featured in a forthcoming issue of Lumpen. And an interview with Bill will be featured in the fall issue of Proximity magazine.

tour dates below:

Chicago, IL. Wednesday, September 8, 7pm. Quimby’s Bookstore, More info. RSVP on Facebook.

Chicago, IL. Thursday, September 9, 6:30pm. 57th Street Books, More info. RSVP on Facebook.

Chicago, IL. Friday, September 10, 6pm. Chicago Urban Art Society, More info. RSVP on Facebook.

ANOTHER PARADISE LOST! A Surrealist Program of Demands on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster

lumpenmagazine — Mon, 24 May 2010 22:09:15 +0000

ANOTHER PARADISE LOST!
A Surrealist Program of Demands on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster

O octopus, with your silken look! whose soul is inseparable from mine…

-The Songs of Maldoror

We are through with the rational, reasonable, realistic and scientific solutions of faith-based positivism. Instead, we make the following demands and dedicate them to Judi Bari, an Earth First! liberator and lover of old-growth trees who was car-bombed by the forces of law-’n'-order twenty years ago on May 24th. Long live Judi Bari! Solidarity with Marie Mason, Oso Blanco Chubbock, Mumia Abu Jamal, and the Tarnac 9!

1. CLARIFICATION: It needs to be made clear that this is not an “oil spill.” This is a manmade disaster. Depending on which official version you chose to believe, millions of gallons of oil have been gushing into the ocean every day since April 22, 2010. A “spill” is what happens when a drinking glass of water tips over; this is and always has been an unstoppable, unpluggable, uncleanable, uncontrollable, unleashed man-made geyser of toxic disaster.

2. PEOPLE’S TRIBUNALS FOR ECOTERRORISTS: An injury to one is an injury to all! We charge every BP America executive and governmental overseer of offshore oil drilling with manslaughter and ecocide. The mansions, yachts, and private jets seized from these executives and bureaucrats will be converted into sandboxes, tree forts, rain gardens, greenhouses, and amusement parks. The accused must face a people’s tribunal and stand trial in the Gulf Shore communities that their actions (and inactions) have affected, particularly the families of those eleven workers killed when the BP rig exploded. Bussed in from the cities, the underground, and the countryside, members of Earth Liberation Front and Earth First! should be on hand to witness the proceedings, especially those who are currently serving harsh prison sentences for their work in defense of the natural world. The least that we can hope for as an outcome is that the accused will be tarred with their own petroleum wastes and feathered with the soiled plumage of murdered birds.

3. DISMANTLING OF ALL OIL, COAL, AND NUCLEAR POWER COMPANIES: The obscene perpetuation of environmental devastation and endless wars in the name of energy company profits cannot be tolerated any longer. In the name of brown pelicans, shrimp, frigate birds, marlins, sea bass, laughing gulls, octopi, and piping plovers, we demand an immediate and total cessation of the violent industrialized extraction of oil and coal from the Earth. We also call for the shutting down of all nuclear power facilities whose foul radioactive wastes threaten ecologies everywhere.

4. DISSOLUTION OF ALL MEDIA CORPORATIONS: Our friend in New Orleans, Max Cafard, reports that monstrous tentacles of oil measuring ten miles long and three miles wide continue to grow beneath the waves, yet tellingly the media industry remains focused on the multicolored “sheen” on the sea’s surface. News outlets dutifully parrot the oil company’s party line of official estimates and explanations. When one BP official said that this disaster was a good opportunity to experiment with pollution containment strategies, no news agency explored the implications of an industry that can trigger a catastrophe and then grope around in the dark for a way out of it. In another interview with a BP spokesman, the CNN reporter concluded the report with the sympathetic assurance that “We’re all praying” for the corporation. Clearly, the media serve only the interests of their stockholders and the State in their coverage of this atrocity. Therefore we call for all equipment and broadcast network technology currently used to disseminate these outrageous lies and propaganda (“We’re glad that you’re on the job, Admiral”; “Don’t worry-warm water microbes break down the oil”) to be collectivized and re-distributed on street corners in order to encourage more participation and free expression in the report and analysis of such tragedies.

5. EMERGENCY MASS ACTION: We call upon everyone to defend your homes, your loved ones, and the Earth from destruction. We have seen the graffiti in Mobile, Alabama: “When life gives you oil spills, make Molotovs!”

The Surrealist Movement in the United States

www.surrealism-usa.org

Download Issue 114 as a PDF

lumpenmagazine — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:47:17 +0000

It is located here:
http://www.lumpen.com/magazine/Lumpen_114.pdf

Massive Blow to Democracy

lumpenmagazine — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:49:00 +0000

The Supreme Court just made Corporations even happier, by giving them unlimited opportunity to pour money into politicians coffers.

“With its ruling today,” he said, “the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”
- Justices Overturn Key Term Limits, NYT, 1/21/10

Obummer

lumpenmagazine — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:04:24 +0000

We knew it was probable but its incredibly lame that our President has to continue the debacle and charade thrust upon him by his corporate masters. Talks about withdrawl in three years and an “Afgan Surge” are fantasies. No one will ever be able to occupy Afganistan. Are American soldiers any different than the Taliban in the eyes of the Afganistaniis? Do we really need 100,000 troops to find 100 supposed Al Queada terrorists? Instead of spending a trillion dollars a year on the this Bankers War lets spend the money in the US and wage a war on poverty here at home.

Obama Sets Faster Troop Deployment to Afghanistan

Human Terrain Systems, Anthropologists and the War in Afghanistan

A “Necessary War” — for a Gas Pipeline: It’s Obama’s War Now

Finishing the Job at Home: How About a War on Poverty Instead?

Yes Men Coming to Chicago

lumpenmagazine — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:15:53 +0000

The Yes Men will be in Chicago for the premier of their new film The Yes Men Fix the World. Lumpen Magazine will be hosting an event for them at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 7:30pm.

There will be a presentation of their recent work and a workshop for an action will be planned for Friday October 30, 2009 after the premier of their new film at the Music Box Theater.

We will be planning actions. Come by and and help us decide what they might be.

Recent news of their actions:
Fake Reporters Part of Climate Pranksters’ ‘Theater’
Interview with Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men
Survivorballs take Manhattan and Pittsburgh