Sodastream presents...How to profit from Occupation, Oppression and Apartheid

Sodastream's factory is an illegal Israeli settlement built on land stolen from the Palestinians. Each and everypackage contains human rights abuses and violations of international law. Boycott Sodasream.
For more infomation:
http://www.bdsmovement.net/tag/sodastream

http://www.whoprofits.org/content/production-settlements-case-sodastream

http://www.sodastream.com/

Lateral Navigations

These are supposed to be the days of our lives
but after many years shaking tears of branches,
we have become a perfect foil for tonques that bark
all of us have maddening faces now, causes to love,
lighting  up corners waiting to be fed
beyond the terminus of  governments stealth,
one of the most singular weaknesses of the human spirit.
is how those in powers persuade us to like what they choose.
A lot of us though who  have been forgotten,
still able to sting, beyond their schemes
with our cracked lips, we contain the storm
tomorrow, we will smother all their words. 

Bring Shaker home from Guantanamo

Yesterday marked eleven years since the first men were taken to Guantanamo Bay.This is 3 years since President Obama promised to bring this to an end. Many of the remaining detainess left languishing in this prison camp   have been cleared for release years ago, never in a court of law have  any been condemned  for committing any crime. The only lasting legacy I see at the moment is one of shame.
One such detainee is British resident Shaker Aamer who has  been held without charge or trial for nearly eleven years. He has been cleared for release by the U.S administration but remains in prison. He is now 44 years old, thousands of miles away from his family who have not seen him for over a decade. He is riddled with arthritis and other medical complaints, the result - he and his lawyers claim of brutal torture and solitary confinement, and the ongoing denial of adequate medical attention.Our Government has failed to honour promises to free him, denying him the justice that he deserves.
Hopefully this will be the year that Guantanemo finally closes, it is time to reunite Mr Aamer with his family too.
Please join thousands in signing amnesty internationals petition calling on his freedom, along with others held in Guantanamo, in order to show that they have not been forgotten

. http://action.amnesty.org.uk/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1194&ea.campaign.id=18208

Close Guantanamo

Herbert Huncke (9/1/15 -8/8/96) - Original Beat

Legendary Herbert Huncke was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts,on  January 9, 1915 and raised in Chicago .He  ran  away from home as a teenager after his parents divorced. As a teenager he was drawn to the underbelly of city life, and quickly began learning how to support himself as a small-time thief and began living as a hobo, jumping trains throughout the United States and bonding with other vagrants through shared destitution and common experience. Huncke hitchhiked to New York City in 1939. 

Herbert Huncke is little remembered these days, but he would become  a pivotal figure in the development of beat literature. A charismatic individual he  was considered a muse to other poets and writers of his group, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.A small and unthreatening lawbreaker, he embodied a certain honest-criminal ethic so purely that Burroughs and his friends came to love him for it. 

Huncke's use of the carny term beat in his stories of riding the rails in the thirties inspired Jack Kerouac to chronicle his own tale of rootless wandering in his 1957 classic, On the Road which Kerouac put him in  as Elmo Hassel. He  also shows up as "Junkey" in Kerouac's "The Town and the City" and as "Huck" in his "Visions of Cody" and "Book of Dreams."

He turned William Burroughs on to heroin, and appears as a character in Burroughs Junky, the first step in an immersion in addict culture that would produce Naked Lunch, and the image of Huncke's shoes filled with blood trailing 42nd Street gave Allen Ginsberg the very model of the angel-headed hipster in his seminal poem Howl. 

He worked with Alfred Kinsey in his research studies  and was also known for his roles as hustler, prostitute and drug peddler, who managed to  get to the ripe old age of 81, before dying  on August 8, 1996 of congestive heart failure at Beth Israel Hospital,in a New York City.

 "I always followed the road of least resistance," he said in a 1992 interview. "I just continued to do what I wanted. I didn't weigh or balance things. I started out this way and I never really changed."

I recommend any of his books, if you can get hold of them, seminal and in my opinion the work of genius.They include  'Huncke's Journal' (1965), 'The Evening Sun Turned Crimson' (1980), and a memoir 'Guilty of Everything' (1990)  A  collection of Huncke’s best writings, ‘The Herbert Huncke Reader,’ was published by William Morrow in September 1997,

MORE HERE

http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/herbert-hunckes-birthday.html

Vote for G4S as worst company of the year!

G4s is up for the Public Eye People's Award 2013, the 'name and shame' award no company wants to win. G4S, the world's largest Private Military and Security Company, is complicit in Israel's occupation of Palestine and is profiting from conflict and insecurity across the world.
War on Want (with allies) has nominated G4S for the awards which help to "shine an international spotlight on corporate scandals." The company has been shortlisted and is now up for the public vote .They have  been up to now one of our governments favourites, with contracts of over £ 600 million being awarded to them. But  their record is far from spotless. The firm lost their previous 'forcible deportation' contract last September after recieving 773 complaints of abuse - both verbal and physical, it profits from imprisoning  refugees while it abuses families and children in their care. In October 2010, an Angolan asylum seeker died as a result of his forced deportation by G4S guards.A truly appalling record.
http://notog4s.blogspot.co.uk/


Please take a minute to vote for G4S at http://www.publiceye.ch/en/vote/g4s/

Online voting is underway. Their are 6 other villainous corporations that you could vote for too.

1. Alstom (FR)

2.Coal India (IN)

3. Goldman Sachs (USA)

4. Lonmin (ZA)

5. Repower (CH)

6.Shell (NL)

At the end of January, within sight of the World Economic Forum (WEF) the Berne Declaration and Greenpeace will then confer the Public Eye Awards for the worst cases of contempt for the environment and human rights.

Jayne Cortez (10/5/34 -28/12/12) Revolutionary Jazz Poet R.I.P

It is with sadness that I have discovered that poet and spoken word performer and civil rights activist Jayne Cortez has died aged 76.
An activist in the Civil Rights movement, she was an organiser of the Watts writing and dance workshop. She was also the founder of the Watts Repositary Theatre, Bola Press and co-founder of the Organisation of Women Writers of Africa.
In her poetry, she spoke of revolution, which she believed could be used to heal us all, using her voice in a powerful incantory way, using the rythyms of blues and jazz to deliver her messages of fierce, biting, social criticism to be used as imperatives of personal responsibility and change. A devotee of the artistic impulse that is jazz and blues, its impulses were to become a constant theme, using its rythyms as sparks and she became a close friend to many of the jazz greats and members of the avant garde fraternity.
I first discovered her through my own love of jazz, she was married to Ornette Coleman from 1954 until she divorced him in 1964 and I subsequently used to have some of her work on a compilation of freejazz, with her voice used as a bridge between tracks, wish I still had to it. She is best listened  to when heard, rather than directly from the page, a precursor to what is now known as hip hop.She and  Ornette had a son together, jazz drummer Denardo Coleman who she collaberated with on a number of occasions in his firespitters band. She later remarried in 1976 to sculptor Mel Edwards.
Her work has since been translated into many languages and I am widely used to seeing her name published in various anthologies over the years. Using her voice to challenge and the travesties and injustices of our world. Her voice is celebrated for its political, surrealistic pulse and dynamic innovation, with her use of lyricism and visceral sound. Using her voice to represent to the world the perspectives of an African-American feminist, revolutionary in an oral tradition stretching back centuries. Remaining independent, determined, with her singular strong voice, her spirit and ideas savaged silence and the conformity of the masses, raging against the excessives of man and all his brutality.In all her rage she spoke of survival too.
Long may her voice sing with all its energy and passion and its force hit with vivid intention.
Jayne Cortez - Artist on the Cutting edge

Jayne Cortez as she appeared in the 1982 film 'Poetry in Motion'

Jazz Fan Looks back - Jayne Cortez

I crisscrossed with  Monk
Walked with Bud
Counted every star with Stitt
Sang "Don't Blame Me" with Sarah
Wore a flower like Billie
Screamed in the range of Dinah
& scatted "How High the Moon" with Ella Fitzgerald
as she blwe roof off the Shrine Auditorium
                             Jazz at the Philarmonic

I cut my hair into a permanrnt tam
Made my feet rebellious metronomes
Embedded record needles in paint on paper
Talked bopology talk
Laughed in high-pitched saxophone phrases
Became keeper of every Bird riff
every Lester lick
as Hawk melodicized my ear of infatuated tonques
& Blakey drummed militant messages in
soul of my applauding teeth
& Ray hit bass notes to the last love scene in my bones
I moved in triple time with Max
Grooved High with Diz
Perddoed with Pettiford
Flew home with Hamp
Shuffled in Dexter's Deck
Squatty-rooed with Peterson
Dreamed a "52nd Street Theme" with Fats
& scatted "Lady Be Good" with Ella Fitzgerald
as she blew roof off the Shrine Auditorium
                             Jazz at the Philarmonic


There it Is - Jayne Cortez

And if we don't fight
if we don't resist
if we don't organise and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exagerrated look of captivity
the stylized look of suicide
the dehumanised look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
forever and ever and ever
And there it is


If the Drum is a Woman - Jayne Cortez

If the drum is a woman
why are you pounding your drum into an insane
babble
why are you pistol shooting through the head of your drum
and making a drum tragedy of drums
if the drum is a woman
don't abuse your drum don't abuse your drum
don't abuse your drum
I know the night is full of displaced persons
I see skins striped with flames
I know the ugly disposition of underpaid clerks they constantly menstruate through the eyes
I know bitterness embedded in flesh
the itching alone can drive you crazy
I know that this is America and chicken are coming home to roost
on the MX missile
But if the drum is a woman
why are you choking your drum
why are you raping your drum
why are you saying disrespectful things
to your mother drum your sister drum
your wife drum and your infant daughter drum
if the drum is a woman
then understand your drum
your drum is not docile
your drum is not invisible
your drum is not inferior to you
your drum is a woman
so don't reject your drum don't try to dominate your drum
don't become weak and cold and desert your drum
don't  be forced into the position
as an oppressor of drums and make a drum tragedy of drums
if the drum is a woman
don't abuse your drum don't abuse your drum
don't abuse our drum.....


 .

Emma Goldman (27/6/1869 -14/5/40) - Free Love

From

Marriage and love

Anarchism and other Essays

1911

perhaps 2013, will be the year of Love and unity

and staying free.