All OUT N30

Remember the public sector workers strike will cost economy 1/10th of the royal wedding.
Cameron seems to think people are going to  take what he is doin to this country lying down, well its clear that the people are not,  it is he who is unwilling to compromise, still talking to the public like their idiots, he'd rather spin the media, he critisises the unions when he himself is on a sticky electoral mandate, ordinary people did not make this economic crisis. Up in  the North at moment, joining Manchester's people in their time of struggle.
A total of 29 unions will be walking out across the U.K, the biggest Industrial action in Britain since the 1970's.
The tories protect their own, up to 3 million workers are trying to protect the future.

Solidarity with all those out tomorrow.

United we stand
Divided we fall.

Cecil Collins (23/4/01- 4/6/89) - Fool and Flower

Fool & Flower
(1944)
Private collection

Some whimsy, why not.  Cecil Collins  an artist of transcendent imagination, was born in Plymouth , he became influenced by the Surrealist Movement, he had two paintings exhibited at the Surrealist Exhibition in 1936.He had won a schorship at 15 to the Plymouth School of Art from 1923 -1927 and then onto the Royal College of Art until 1931. He fell in love with a Elizabeth Ramsden  a fellow student who inspired him to create a series of visionary paintings celebrating her beauty.
He departed with surrealism  however and subsequently he said:" I turned my back on it and went into the country and started to think..... and meditate on what I wanted to do."  And this is what most of his subsequent work were about,  they were both  meditative and gentle.
In this picture a fool reaches out to a single flower to a backdrop of an empty sky. A sense of wonder occurs, a moment in time suspended, the earth reaching back , a symbol of unity, a balancing act. The present or the future perhaps offering possibilities providing a link between what is visible and under the ground the roots, that we cannot see. An image of ceremony, an image of ritual beyond mere materialism, a touch of Zenarchy.Connecting us to an aesthetic window. Sometimes what binds us is both outside and in.

More on Cecil Collins here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Collins



( For Ervine

space bard

r.i.p )
.

Thanksgiving: A Native American View

Today at a time of poverty, recession, unemployment, occupation and discontentment, a little revisit to the less than benevolent beginnings of the good old  U.S.A.Thanksgiving day a whitewashing of genocide, colonialism and racism is celebrated. Hey ho.
To any American visitors of this blog hope your fox New relatives try not to season too much of  their thanksgiving dinner with to much pepper spray and I thank goodness I'm not a turkey.





More  info
here

http://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/

John Trudell - The voices said.

The Workers: Let's Work Together

The workers are a group of 14 public service staff from around the country, who have come together to record the classic song ' Let's work Together ' .Please help get some solidarity in the charts on the day of action on November 30th, by watching the video, buying the song, and spreading the word. On November the 30th millions of workers across the country will be taking action in support of a fair deal on public service pensions. Up the workers, even though I don't at moment, solidarity is the keyword word. Always thought music and politics make healthy bedfellows, depending I guess on which side. Yes charts are rigged, like the economy is rigged, just like banking is rigged, the system and the government used against the interests of the whole, so we have to try out different methods.Power concedes nothing without a demand.

More info on single and campaign
here.

http://action.goingtowork.org.uk/page/share/the-workers

 to download

 http://www.theworkers.org.uk/download-the-single/

Edward Thomas (3/3/1878 - 3/4/17) - November

November's' days are thirty:
November's earth is dirty,
Those thirty days, from first to last;
And the prettiest things on grounds are the paths
With morning and evening hobnails dinted,
With foot and wing-tip overprinted
Or seperately charactered,
Of little beast and little bird.
The fields are mashed by sheep, the roads
Make the worst going, the best the woods
Where dead leaves upwards and downward scatter.
Few care for the mixture of earth and water,
Twig, leaf, flint, thorn,
Straw, feather, all that men scorn,
Pounded up and sodden by flood,
Condemned as mud.

But of all the months when earth is greener
Not one has clean skies that are cleaner.
Clean and clear and sweet and cold,
They shine above the earth so old,
While the after-tempest cloud
Sails over in silence though winds are loud,
Till the full moon in the east
Looks at the planet in the west
And earth os silent as it is black,
Yet not unhappy for its lack.
Up from the dirty  earth men stare:
One imagines a refuge there
Above the mud, in the pure bright
Of the cloudless heavenly light:
Another loves earth and November more dearly
Because without them, he sees clearly
The sky would be nothing more to his eye
Than he, in any case, is to the sky:
He loves even the mud whose dyes
Renounce all brightness to the skies.

Jackie Leven ( 18/6/50 - 14/11/11) Spiritual Soul Warrior R.I.P

It is with great sadness that I found out that the great Jackie Leven had passed away. I feel numb and will try to explain in a bit. I knew the man had been ill,suffering from cancer but thought he'd get through it, like he had got past many other demons.
An idiosyncratic outsider with a magical voice, a poet who saw the world through his rich different eyes, he sang songs fron the heart of lifes deep experiences. If you have never heard of him his songs typically described hard drinking loners and often their lost lovers, with a rich deep resonant voice that used to soothe me, when I too was lost, like a dark chocolate laced with something bad.
His was a wild Scottish spirit redolant of a fire within. Never fashionable or cool but that did not stop him being admired by many.Born to Gypsy Blood in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland with a London Irish father and a Northumbriam mother. A loner in childhood, he led a life of an intinerent wanderer. He found his way to London by the mid 70s forming the band Doll by Doll whose records had a certain rawness but ones I still reach out too.

Doll by Doll - Main Travelled Roads

By 1982, they'd split and in 1983 he was nearly murdered by a group of strangers severely damaging his larynx and unable to play guitar or sing. He sank into a despondent place , cutting himself adrift, finding heroin and alcohol , and so perhaps it might have ended. But he reemerged stonger founding the CORE trust which helped fellow addicts. His songs have rescued me from many a dark hour, soothed me with their raw tenderness. His work took on a soulful, spritual intensity, redemptive , haunted,becomming prolific in his journey, releasing for me a series of staggering dazzling solo records, full of tragedy, but resonating with warmth that somehow I connected to. Other friends of mine, never quite got him, but that did not matter, his records became like certain books, ones to treasure. Live I was lucky to catch him twice he dislayed his honesty, mixed with humour and candour.Always a brooding intensity, you got what you got, what must of us wanted, never an encore and never fake.
Tonight on the way home from the library I'll raise a small miniature bottle of whiskey to the night air. A True original voice has been lost, but some of us will continue to remember him.Such beautiful music, burning vision. Goodnight Jackie, R.I.P


Jackie Leven- Hidden World of She

Jackie Leven- Call Mother a Lonely Field

Jackie Leven - Revenge of Memory

Jackie Levem -  I Say a little Prayer

http://www.coretrust.co.uk/

http://www.jackieleven.co.uk/

Rejected Crumb !

A lot of posts on the net on this subject already, but what the eck.
Famed Cartoonist and someone else whose work I admire, ( don't really do hero's , not enough room in my head) has had a proposed cover for the New Yorker rejected.  They commissioned him, back in 2009 to  do them a cover on the subject of 'gay marriage', so he drew them this. They subsequently rejected it but gave Mr Crumb no reason. The story would possibly have gathered no moss had it not been unearthed at the VeniceArt Biennale recently.
What possible reasons did the magazine come to this descision? It's fairly common knowledge  that Robert Crumb is  known for pushing the boundaries a bit and is not everybody's cup of tea. His work has been attached to the 'underground' and the words 'cult artist' have often been bandied about, so his appeal was never one for the mainstream, what with his repetative style and his obsession with an exaggerated sense of the female form. He has a rather twisted way of looking at certain things. Another possible reason is that the New Yorker is majorly concerned with political correctness, and they must have suddenly realised this work might upset some of their friends, nevermind the artist in question, who has stated he will never work for them again. I for one don't know how it could offend anyone who appreciates  Crumb's  work, it is  kind of to be expected, this one for instance, after all  seems to have been done in all the best possible ( Crumb) taste. If the New Yorker doesn't want it, I would be happy enough to put it up on my living room wall, where it would be lovingly appreciated , I don't suppose it will bother him too much though, he will continue to illustrate the world as he sees it and I believe it's simply too late in the day for his fixations to simply dissapear, and despite criticisms will remain, one of the most important and influential graphic artists of  contemporary America.

More on this story below

http://www.vice.com/read/the-gayest-story-ever-told-0000048-v18n11

Crumb by Crumb

Palestinian Freedom Riders and Wales Residual waste.

50 years ago the US Freedom riders staged mixed-race bus rides through the roads of the segregated American South, Palestinian Freedom riders will be asserting their own right for liberty and dignity by disrupting the military regime of the Israeli Occupation through peaceful civil disobedience, this will take place on Tuesday 15th as all over the West Bank they will attempt to board buses that discriminate against them. They will attempt to board segregated Israeli settler publlic transport headed to occupied East Jerusalem.
Meanwhile 5 North Wales Councils are considering the notorious French company Veolia for their Residual Waste Treatment Project. Personally I think they should reconsider.
The Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR) which veolia has subsequently built in the West Bank serves the Jewish-only Israeli settlement. Remember that Britain has declared, through the UN Human Rights Council, that the JLR's operation is a breach by Israel of international law.
Veolia at the moment is trying to sell its LJR shares to a company called Egged, that seems to let Veolia of the hook and North Wales project in the clear.M'mm Egged is the same company that until January 2011 also operated gender-segregated lines, commonly called " mehadrin" buses, mainly running in and/or between major Haredi population centers. In these sex segregated buses women are expected to sit the in the back of the bus and wear so called modest dress. Sounds like gender discrimination to me, it is interesting how companies that violate international laws reappear in disgiuse so to speak. Welsh councils in a spirit of solidarity I feel should have nothing to do with either company. But sometimes transparency can get buried in the search of deals.
50 years apart 2 symbolic journeys, different locations but apartheid is apartheid , no matter where it rears its ugly head, so this week I  hope the world stands in solidarity with the modern freedom riders. An old tradition awakened .Who knows perhaps the future will let justice and freedom prevail .

http://palsolidarity.org/2011/11/palestinian-freedom-riders-to-ride-settler-buses-to-jerusalem/

Anthem for Doomed Youth - Wilfred Owen

POETIC PILGRIMAGE - NO MORE WAR

Occupy Cardiff

Democracy in action

Cocaine Unwrapped Trailer 13 03 2011

Lupe Fiasco - Words I Never Said ft. Skylar Grey

It's so loud inside my head
With words that I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can't take back the words I never said
I can't take back the words I never said

I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit
just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets
How much money does it make to really make a full clip
9/11 building 7 did they really pull it
Uhh, and a bunch of other cover ups
Your childs future was the first to go with budget cuts
If you think that hurts, then, wait here comes the uppercut
The school was garbage in the first place, thats on the up and up
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the uppercrust
You get it then they move you so you never keeping up enough
If you turn on TV all you see's a bunch of "what the fucks"
Dude is dating so and so blabbering bout such and such
And that aint Jersey Shore, homie tha's the news
And these the same people that supposed to be telling the truth
Limbaugh is a racist, Glen Beck is a racist
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn't say shit
That's why I aint vote for  him, next one either
I'ma part of the problem, my problem is I'm peaceful
And I believe in the people.

It's so loud inside my head
With words thay I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can't take back the words I never said
I can't take back the words I never said

Now you say it aint our fault if we never heard it
But if we know better than we probably deserve it
Jihad is not a holy war, where's that in the worship?
Murdering is not Islam!
And you are not observant
And you  are not a muslim
Israel don't take my side cause look how far you've pushed them
Walk with me into the ghetto, this is where all the Kush went
Compain about the liqour store but what you drinking liqour for?
Complain about the gloom but when'd you pick a broom up?
Just listening to Pac aint gone make it stop
A rebel in your thoughts, aint gon make it halt
If you don't become an actor you'll never be a factor
Pills with million side effects
Take em when the pain felt
Wash them down with Diet soda!
Killin off your brain cells
Crooked banks around the World
Would gladly give a loan today
So if you ever miss a payment
They can take your home away!

It's so loud in my head
With words that I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can't take back the words I never said, never said
I can't take back the words I never said

I think all the silence is worse than all the violence
Fear is such a weak emotion that's why I despise it
We scared of almost eveything, afraid to tell the truth
So scared of what you think of me, I'm scared of even telling you
Sometimes I'm like the only person I feel safe to tell it to
I'm locked inside a cell in me, I know that there's a jail in you
Consider this your bailing out, so take a breath, inhale a few
My screams is finally getting free, my thoughts is finally yelling through

It's so loud inside my head
With words that I should have said!
As I drown in my regrets
I can't take back the words I never said

Roger Waters - The Tide Is Turning (Re: Occupy)

Occupy - Roger Waters

Being treated fairly and with dignity

At the heart of human rights is the belief that everybody should be treated equally and with dignity - no matter what their circumstances.
This means that nobody should be tortured or treated in a inhuman or degrading way.
It also means that nobody has the right to 'own another person or force them to work under threat of punishment.
And it means that eveybody should have access to public services and the right to be treated fairly by those services. This applies to all public services, including the criminal justice system. For example, if you are arrested and charged tou should not be treated with prejudice and your trial should be fair.
UK law includes a range of human rights which protect you from poor treatment, and which require you to have equal and fair treatment from publc authorities.

http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/what-are-human-rights/being-treated-fairly-and-with-dignity/

Sadly up and down this country people on incapacity benefit are being forced to take assessments that are not only impersonal, they are mechanistic and lack any kind of empathy. Many people are being injustly treated and left in distress.But this is what happens in a Tory led Britain, stigmatise a group, seek to dissimate and destroy.Basic sensitivities ignored!! The B.B.C themselves have recently been adding to the flames with blinkered sensationalist programmes on benefit cheats straight out of the Daily Mail. John Humprey's recent programme " The future state Of Benefit"  was an absolute shocker, a right wing thesis playing loosely with the facts, as if witten by some governmental department.
New tests designed to stigmatise the diadvantaged, the disabled , the mentally ill in order to save money. Taking from many who are already impoverished.
Is this the future for all, look to America and follow their flawed policies and agendas.Human dignity and fairness overiden, justice and human rights denied.
As for the cold, it's bloody freezing!!

A PAGAN PHILOSOPHER ON THE USE OF IMAGES

( Maximus of Tyre,' Oration,' V111, 10)

Maximus of Trye (ca.A.D 125 -185) was a Sophist and eclectic philosopher who reavelled widely and lectured both at Athens and at Rome.

For the God who is the Father and Creator of all that is, older than the sun, older than the sky, greater than time and eternity and the whole continual flow of nature, is not to be named by any lawgiver is not to be uttered by any voice, is not to be seen by any eye. But we, being unable to grasp his essence, makes use of sounds and names and pictures, of beaten gold and ivory and silver, of plants and rivers, of mountains peaks and torrents, yearning for the knowledge of him, and in our weakness  naming all that is beautiful in the world after his nature. The same thing happens to those who love others, to them the sweetest sight will be the actual figure of their children, but sweet also will be their memory - they will be happy at ( the sight of) a lyre, a little spear, or a chair , perhaps, or  a running ground, or anything whatever that wakens  the memory of the beloved. Why should I go any further in examining and passing judgement about images? Let all men know what is divine; let them know, that is all. If Greeks are stirred to the rememberance of God by the art of Phidias, or the Egyptians by paying worship to animals, or others by a river, or others by fire, I will not quarrel with their differences. Only let them know, let them love, let them remember.

Translation by Frederick C. Grant, in his Hellenistic Religions ( New York , 1953)

Revealed - the capitalist network that runs the world

 Graphic: The 1318 transitional companies that form the core of the economy

Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot pepresents revenue ( Image: PLos One)

by Andy Coghlan and  Debora Mackenzie

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protestors' worst fears. An analysis of the relationship between 43,000 transnational cororations has identified a small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysrs contacted by New Scientist say iy is a unique effort to untangle control in the global econony. Pushing the analysis further, they say could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters rlsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex system theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empyeically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics longused to model systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

" Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. " Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownership, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more stable or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships owning them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work to be published in PLoS One , revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 has ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 percent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to colectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent og global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity"
of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the superentity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JP Morgan Chase & Co, and the Gold man Sachs Group.

John Driffil of the University of London, a maroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather it's insights into economic stability.

Concentration of poer is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one (company) suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propogates."

" It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are." agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar -Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is nor always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could hep make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading throgh the entire economy. Glattfelder says we need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivitity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Nwecomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECS1: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the waelth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is ehether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning "Crucially by identifying the achitecure of global economic power..." was misattributed.

The  top 50 of the 147  superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Plc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellingtom Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Mank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Societe Generale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brother Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depositary Trust Company
40. Massachussetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

Republication from Newscientisthttp://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed--the-capitalistnetwork-that-runs-world.html

Occupy Cardiff.

Cardiff plans demonstration in solidarity with the global Occupy Movement.

A demonstration has been called in Cardiff on Friday 11 November 2011 - the date set for a global day of action in solidarity with the international Occupy Movement.

The current Occupy Movement began in the US with Occupy Wall Street and has spread internationally taking inspiration from the US movement as well as similar occupations about social ineqality in Spain and the Arab Spring.

Here in the UK there has been an  inspiring occupation at St Paul's Cathedral in London since Saturday 15th October 2011, a location close to the London Stock Exchange, and there  have also been occupations and protests up and down the country.

The Cardiff demo will gather at the Aneurin Bevan statue on a time to be confirmed.
Find out mire about the Cardiff event on Facebook below.

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=192221504188896 

There seems to be something happening here , there and eveywhere.
What it is aint exactly clear.The rulers cannot simply go on ruling 
in the old way, and the important thing is , the people refuse to 
go on the old way.....

to be continued.

" We know what happens to people who stay in the middle  of the road. They get run down."

- Aneurin Bevan.

Riot Granny

After Loukanikas the Riot Dog, Athens, Greece gets a new symbol of hope and global resistance that makes's its way into the limelight, the riot Granny......
Long may she have the power.