I am by no means an expert on the U.S. prison system or economy for that matter, but does anyone else find this article tremendously disturbing?
articles.latimes.com/2010/may/03/business/la-fi-0503-prisons-20100503
How is it that for a town that has a 41% unemployment rate, the best solution for saving the economy is to build a prison that will employ 350 people in order to imprison 1100 inmates?  Is this the best that America can do?  Rarely am I left speechless, but words to describe the perverse logic within this have escaped me.

It's that time of year again.  For the past week or so,  everywhere I turn I hear and see ads for Black Friday "door busters."  I hear people talking about it work and on facebook.  It seems Black Friday is everywhere.  Every year people wait in lines all night, wake up at ungodly hours, and trample others in Walmart stampededs, just to get a  "good deal."   Meanwhile, the capitalist, corporate machine steamrolls on leaving mayhem in its wake.
 

Last Monday on my three hour drive home from NYC to Boston after Joe’s memorial celebration, I was speeding through the dark, iPod blaring through my car stereo, bouncing from one ambient yet upbeat song to another and trying to make sense of my experiences with Joe and the critical pedagogy world, not just from that night, but over the past months and years.  I kept fixing on and then shifting from the word “closure,” which just felt so… wrong.  There was a certain lingering sense of security from being able to share my memories and grief with others, but by no means did I feel, “closure.”  This wasn’t an ending; it wasn’t a book being shut and re-shelved or a letter being sealed; it was something else.

With the U.S. presidential election a mere 48 hours away, I want to take the opportunity to reclaim a piece of language that I feel has been wrongly taken from the American vocabulary by neo-liberals and neo-conservatives alike and used for the purposes of dividing people and closing conversations.  This kind of double-speak is not uncommon in U.S. society, and one need only consider the new connotations of words such as “freedom,” “patriotism,” and “democracy” to get the gist of how words can be distorted and appropriated by power-wielders for unethical purposes.  Lately, the word “bitter,” the focus of today’s blog, has gotten a bad rap in American society.  I find its recent appropriation to be similar to the ways in which “freedom” and “patriotism” have been distorted into terms that discourage folks from questioning the U.S.

Last Friday, while visiting my parents in New York, I made a quick stop at my favorite clothing store (Ann Taylor Loft) while I was waiting for my folks to get home from work. Luckily, ATL was having one of its fabulous sales, and I found a beautiful, turquoise, empire waist dress that fit me perfectly AND had been marked down from $79.99 to $29.99. What a find! I brought it up to the register, the sales woman rang it up, and to my wonderous surprise, the dress rang up at only $11.19—BONUS!

Critical Pedagogy: Consciousness, Double-speak, and Contradictions in Daily Life

Greetings everyone! I’m so excited to be blogging among such a brilliant group of scholars. What an honor! Thank you Joe and Shirley for inviting me to pitch in my two cents.