"Sustenance" Exhibition

. . . opened at 11am today in the blue building at 337 Singleton Blvd., Dallas, and will stay open 'til 10pm tonite (and the show will be up for a month or so; see the Sustenance FB page or blog for more details).

Congrats to Stephen Lapthisophon, Anne Lawrence, and all the artists on an exciting show. (The pic at right is what you might see as you enter Brian Fridge's installation.)

Notes from Anne about the opening today:

Shannon Brunskill and Courtney Brown will start their performance around 11 a.m.
Linnea Glatt and Jim Cinquemani will start the "Social Circle: Watermelon Social" around 6 p.m.
Devin King will be performing in his space on the 2nd floor around 9 p.m.

There is plenty of parking around the building. You can turn into the lot before the building, closest to the bridge or park in the large open lot across the street. Be careful crossing Continental! The cars are fast.

The exhibition includes a small installation of ART WORK newspapers and related materials. These are truly the LAST of what I've got, so come 'n get 'em.

The World Came to Worley's

I'm not perfectly objective here, since Cris Worley is my homey; but. She opened her new space on Monitor in Dallas, TX last night, and it looked great, and everyone was there.

Cris had planned just to consult, and she'll be doing plenty of that; but she missed having a space in which to show work. She found a great location in the Design District, sharing a building with Gallery Urbane. The space will be open Saturdays 11-5 and weekdays by appointment; see crisworley.com for more info.

Photos of many of the people and most though not all of the art work at the opening here (apologies to the people I missed shooting and esp. to those I didn't miss – none of the usual fixes have been made).

The Teletron: Mind-Controlled Music

Seriously. From Robert Schneider of Apples in Stereo (red print in honor of the Apples).

Great Poster Explaining Net Neutrality:

Click on the image for a larger version, or go to OnlineMBA for an even bigger version.

$12.8 Trillion for Banks vs. . . . ?

Bloomberg reporter Bob Ivry has confirmed, U.S. taxpayers didn't just fork out $700 billion for TARP; they're also on the hook for $12.8 trillion for other assistance to the banks (see the PBS interview excerpt here).

Exactly who's gotten the benefit of our largesse? The Federal Reserve refuses to tell, despite being hauled into court. The reporter who led in pursuing this story – to the point of suing the Fed for the info and winning – was Mark Pittman.

Pittman died in 2009 at only 52. The precise cause of death is unknown. The Fed's appeal of the case is still pending.

(Per Bloomberg, at the time of Pittman's death, his outgoing messages bore a link to the photo of Woody Guthrie at left.)

Next time someone tells you we have to cut Social Security (even though it's fully funded through 2037 and could be brought into balance for another fifty years beyond that with an adjustment of less than one percent to contribution amounts – see Social Security Works), or that we can't afford $50 billion for jobs, tell them about the more than $12.8 trillion we've afforded to banks and suggest we take back some of that instead.

Mel Chin's "Fundred Dollar Bill" Project

You may remember the first pic, right, from my 2008 post on Prospect.1 New Orleans.

What I should also have mentioned is that this "safe house," created by artist Mel Chin, was the launching pad for a massive art project, Operation Paydirt, in which we're all invited to collaborate.

Chin visited New Orleans after Katrina and learned that not only had the city been decimated by the disaster, but thousands of its kids were struggling with severe learning disabilities and behavioral problems because dangerous levels of lead had been allowed to accumulate in the local soil. He discovered that lead contamination is pervasive in many U.S. cities, and he determined to do something about it.

Chin developed a template that can be used to make "FUNdred Dollar Bills," and using this template, kids and others across the nation have created thousands of unique artworks and sent them to Chin's collaborative. Their goal is to amass three million FUNdred bucks by the end of the 2010-2011 school year and deliver them by armored truck to Congress, to help bring attention to the problem.

They want you to become part of the collaborative by making and contributing your own Fundred buck(s). You can download the template and find lots more info here, including where to send your bucks.

We included the template in the Non-Profit Margin exhibition at CentralTrak, as one of several examples of socially-engaged, participatory art projects in the vein contemplated by Temporary Services' ART WORK newspaper, and we solicited people to make and contribute their own FUNdred Dollar Bills. You can see a few more examples here (the two shown in this post are by Gabe Dawe and moi).

Please consider making this a project for your family, students, or drinking buddies. Here's a video about Operation Paydirt:

For Translations of Business Jargon

click to unsuck

Why the "Stimulus" Didn't Work as Well as Hoped

Most experts without a horse in the race agree it did work, but not nearly as well as it might have, because most of the money went to the wrong people – those at the top, who are hoarding it rather than spending it. Now those same hoarders and their muppets claim we must cut public entitlements like Social Security in order to address the deficit. But as Corrente explains:

"Jamie Galbraith is 100% correct . . . ; modern money is a spreadsheet:

[M]oney is a spreadsheet! It works by computer! When government spends or lends, it does so by adding numbers to private bank accounts. When it taxes, it marks those same accounts down. When it borrows, it shifts funds from a demand deposit (called a reserve account) to savings (called a securities account). And that for practical purposes is all there is. The money government spends doesn't come from anywhere, and it doesn't cost anything to produce. The government therefore cannot run out.

"(So much, therefore, for the ideology underlying the Cat Food Commission [the Deficit Commission appointed by Pres. Obama and headed by Alan Simpson, notorious opponent of Social Security], which is, in short form, that 'We're running out of money ZOMG!' and so the [Masters of the Universe, a.k.a. the "MOTU"], in order to continue to live the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed, must -- Must, I tell you! Must! -- strategically default on their obligations to elders under Social Security, and use that money for themselves.)

So, was Julie's program a success? The answer, too, NPR hides in plain sight, right in the lead:

In the face of the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve decided to buy $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed bonds as part of its effort to prop up the economy . . .

Whenever you read "the economy," ask yourself "Whose economy?" And the answer to that question couldn't be more clear. [See chart at right {and click on it for a larger version}; via The Big Picture; sorry, no link provided to the exact post.]

"The stack on the right is money used for public purpose: The New Deal, for example. The stack on the left is money handed to the banksters in the bailouts. Different, aren't they? Like, the public stack is a lot smaller, and spread over 200 (two hundred) years. And the bankster stack is a lot bigger, and took place all in 1 (one) year. Any questions? [And the stack on the right gets a lot smaller if you consider the wars to have been more for the benefit of the military-industrial-oil complex than for a "public" purpose.]

"So, indeed, the program was a 'success.' The banksters and the MOTU put the rest of us peasants on the hook for $22 trillion dollars, kept their jobs, kept their bonuses, never did the perp walk in orange jumpsuits on the teebee for accounting control fraud, and are still too big to fail. Mission accomplished!"

The Big Picture's also got a great post-with-charts on the Bush tax cuts, showing just how much more massively the rich would benefit from extending the cuts than the rest of us would.