White Fungus News

2009-06-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

Pepe Escobar Talks Live With The Real News' Paul Jay About The Outcome Of The Iranian Election

2009-06-15T04:33:00.001-07:00

2009-06-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

It's useless to wait—for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality the me must choose sides.

The Coming Insurrection

“Two centuries of capitalism and market nihilism have brought us to the most extreme alienations—from ourselves, from others, from worlds. The fiction of the individual has decomposed with the same speed that it once became real. Children of the metropolis, we offer this wager: that it’s in the most profound deprivation of existence—perpetually stifled, perpetually conjured away—that the possibility of communism resides.”—

The Coming Insurrection, Introduction to the English edition

The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as "the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality."

The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to "spread anarchy and live communism Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the "war on terror." Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.

The Invisible Committee is a collective and anonymous penname

http://semiotexte.com/authors/invisible.html

2009-06-03T21:23:00.000-07:00

http://tortureaccountability.webs.com/

2009-06-02T04:41:00.000-07:00

Sunday, June 7th – 7:00 pm
THE REVOLUTION OF DESIRE SCREENING AND PERFORMANCES

Please join us in celebrating the closing of the show Screwball Asses at the Company in Chinatown featuring artworks by Gene Barnes AKA Portia Manson, Sheyla Baykal, Gary Lee Boas, Robert Alan Hyde, Hedi El Kholti, Matt Fishbeck, Mark Flores, Paul Gellman, David Jones, William E. Jones, Brian Kenny, Slava Mogutin, and Donnie & Travis; and the upcoming release by Semiotext(e) of Guy Hocquenghem's pamphlet, The Screwball Asses.

Perfomances at The Company at 7:30 PM by Tall Paul + Mare, and Alex Black + Samuel Vasquez.

The Company

946 Yale Street, Los Angeles, Ca, 90012

http://www.thecompanyart.com/pages/home/

Screening at the Mountain Bar at 8:30 PM of The Revolution of Desire by Alessandro Avellis & Gabriele Ferluga, 2006 (52 mn).

The Revolution of Desire explores the nebulous post-'68 circumstances that birthed the sexual liberation movement in France, and interrogates its transformation from a grassroots rebellion to an effort to normalize homosexuals. Referencing the work of impassioned activists and intriguingly titled essays Le rapport contre la normalité (“A Report Against Normalcy”) and Trois milliards de pervers (“Three Billion Perverts”) , the film sketches the lives of Guy Hocquenghem and Françoise d’Eaubonne, brilliant intellectuals and unconditional supporters of the “revolution of desire.” We meet philosopher René Schérer, MLF photographer Catherine Deudon, militant filmmaker Carole Roussopoulos, Guy’s brother Joani Hocquenghem, historian Marie-Jo Bonnet, the Panthères roses and numerous other key players. The Revolution of Desire is a rare and valuable document that explores the past but more importantly questions the present.

The Mountain Bar

473 Gin Ling Way, Los Angeles, Ca, 90012

http://themountainbar.com/

2009-06-01T06:06:00.000-07:00

comic by Tim Bollinger

Pecha Kucha at Wellington Overseas Terminal

Dear Pecha Kucha Fans

First of all a big thank you to all of you for supporting our Pecha Kucha Nights in Wellington and for telling all your friends about the one coming up!

I am delighted to announce the current line-up for our next Pecha Kucha Night at the wonderful Overseas Terminal venue on 9 June. We will start at 7.30 pm sharp with the first presentation so come early to grab a seat. There will be a great bar, a brilliant wood burner and some food too. Door sales cash only, $9.

The line up so far confirmed is:

Ralph Johns // landscape architect // Isthmus Group Limited // about new
sea land
Stacey Childs // about discounderworld
Sam Trubridge // Director & Designer // about Sleep/Wake
Mervin Singham // Artist // about his inspiration for his work
Edward Lynden-Bell // Writer & Filmmaker // about the Drake Equation
Tim Bollinger // Cartoonist // about his cartoons
Joshua Judkins // about playing "The Lost Ring" and Ponoko
Jared Forbes // Creative Director // Lumen Digital Ltd
Emma Knight // Experience Design Consultant/Snowboarder
Luke Pittar // on travel sketching as an educational experience
Chris Jackson // industrial designer // 2000 years in 20 chairs
Maurice Bennett // the toastman//
Tao Wells // unemployed

http://pechakucha.co.nz/

2009-05-26T07:02:00.000-07:00

2009-05-19T02:33:00.000-07:00

2009-05-15T20:15:00.000-07:00

Killing them softly with air strikes

Don't Be Fooled by the Taliban Hysteria in Pakistan: They Aren't Going to Take Over

By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times. Posted May 1, 2009.

The fear being stoked of Taliban taking over nuclear-armed Pakistan are a ruse to legitimize Obama's expanding Af-Pak war.

Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack Obama administration and United States corporate media - from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to The New York Times. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat to the security of Britain.

But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won't fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.

Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan's 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There's no evidence they are about to embraceTalibanistan; they are essentially Shi'ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis - faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari's centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People's Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces - amounting to 85% of Pakistan's population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class - are an infinitesimal minority.

The Pakistan-based Taliban - subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles - are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.

To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional 550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world, which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous proposition.

Moreover, there's no evidence the Taliban, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, have any capability to hit a target outside of "Af-Pak"(Afghanistan and Pakistan). That's mythical al-Qaeda's privileged territory. As for the nuclear hysteria of the Taliban being able to crack the Pakistani army codes for the country's nuclear arsenal (most of the Taliban, by the way, are semi-literate), even Obama, at his 100-day news conference, stressed the nuclear arsenal was safe.

Of course, there's a smatter of junior Pashtun army officers who sympathize with the Taliban - as well as significant sections of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But the military institution itself is backed by none other than the American army - with which it has been closely intertwined since the 1970s. Zardari would be a fool to unleash a mass killing of Pakistani Pashtuns; on the contrary, Pashtuns can be very useful for Islamabad's own designs.

Zardari's government this week had to send in troops and the air force to deal with the Buner problem, in the Malakand district of NWFP, which shares a border with Kunar province in Afghanistan and thus is relatively close to US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. They are fighting less than 500 members of the Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan (TTP). But for the Pakistani army, the possibility of the area joining Talibanistan is a great asset - because this skyrockets Pakistani control of Pashtun southern Afghanistan, ever in accordance to the eternal "strategic depth" doctrine prevailing in Islamabad.

Read the rest at Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/story/139228/don%27t_be_fooled_by_the_taliban_hysteria_in_pakistan%3A_they_aren%27t_going_to_take_over/

2009-05-14T18:22:00.000-07:00

www.ppowgallery.com

2009-05-03T03:05:00.000-07:00

Greg Malcolm plays on 2 May 2009, at the White Fungus relocation party at Enjoy Gallery, Wellington.

2009-04-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

2009-04-28T22:50:00.000-07:00

Greg Malcolm and Peter Trevelyan at White Fungus Relocation Party

Come to Enjoy this Saturday evening for a one night only performance by Greg Malcolm and a temporary light installation by Peter Trevelyan as White Fungus celebrates four-and-a-half years and ten issues in Wellington and its upcoming move to Taiwan.

White Fungus will be returning to Taichung City where its founders spent four years before beginning the magazine in 2004.

White Fungus Editor Ron Hanson says the team is looking forward to a new adventure and a chance to re-engage with Taiwan.

"Taiwan's a dynamic place and we're all about cross-cultural communication," Hanson says. "We look forward to getting involved in the local art scene and producing the next issue of the magazine."

White Fungus's Trip To Taiwan Is Kindly Supported by Asia New Zealand Foundation.

White Fungus Relocation Party
Greg Malcolm
Peter Trevelyan
DJ Powerfull and the Lost Weekend

Enjoy
Level 1, 147 Cuba St
Wellington
6:30-8:30
Saturday
May 2 Free

2009-04-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

www.para-site.org.hk

2009-04-14T16:45:00.000-07:00

DISCUSSION

Is less more? Debating Apple on Moore

One Day Sculpture discussion
von Kohorn Room, Museum of Wellington
Thursday
23 April 2009
5.30-7pm
Free entry, all welcome.

Following on from Billy Apple’s One Day Sculpture, this discussion will pick up on Apple’s project, to assess the validity of his proposition “Less is Moore ” and canvass the history of Moore ’s sculpture and its place in his oeuvre. In association with the Museum of Wellington , this public forum will provide an opportunity for a range of key stakeholders to share their points of view and involve the public in debating the issues raised.

Panel speakers will include: Christina Barton (Director of the Adam Art Gallery and curator of the exhibition Billy Apple New York 1969-1973), Vikki Muxlow (Parks and Gardens, Wellington City Council); Jack Fry (Freelance conservator); Neil Plimmer (Wellington Sculpture Trust); Jeanne Macaskill (artist), Carolina Izzo (art conservator) chaired by David Cross (Litmus Research Initiative Director, Massey University ).

One Day Sculpture is led by the Litmus Research Initiative, Massey University with UK curator Claire Doherty and realised in partnership with arts organisations across New Zealand .
Billy Apple’s One Day Sculpture project Less is Moore was commissioned by the Adam Art Gallery , Victoria University of Wellington.

//

ARTIST’S TALK
Billy Apple on New York
Adam Art Gallery
Friday 24 April
12-1pm

Billy Apple is a conceptual artist who is known for his rigorous investigation of the sites, systems and social relations that structure the art world. After studying graphic design in London and contributing to early pop art in Britain he left for New York in 1964. Apple lived there until 1990 before returning to New Zealand , where he continues to work and exhibit widely. Over a career spanning 50 years he has produced objects, text pieces, photographs, installations and undertaken actions that test definitions of art, challenge the structuring suppositions of artistic identity, expose the workings of the art system and demonstrate art’s permeability to larger social, political and economic forces.

Join artist Billy Apple and exhibition curator and Director of the Adam Art Gallery , Christina Barton , for a tour of the exhibition Billy Apple New York 1969-1973, which focuses on the short but intense period in which Apple ran a small not-for-profit gallery at 161 West 23rd Street as a venue for his own work and for others who shared his ambition to test the definitions of art making and find new models that would serve as an alternative to the commercial gallery system. This will be a rare opportunity to hear first-hand what it was like to be in New York at this time and to gain insights into the alternative art scene that fostered the radical practices that were galvanising the art scene in New York in the early 1970s.

//

2009-04-13T21:26:00.000-07:00

comic by terry bag

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White Fungus Reviewed At Lumiere Reader

Reviewed by Thomasin Sleigh

THE RECENT White Fungus is a big box of words. Good words. All arranged well and clearly and in tidy lines for ease of reading. It is great to see this publication reach issue number ten given the difficulties involved in sustaining niche publications in New Zealand. Part of its charm I guess is that White Fungus isn’t that ‘niche’ and actually caters to many tastes – Issue 10 includes poetry, prose, political critique, page works, historical snippets, art criticism and a tasty little run down on the 300BC cynic Diogenes to finish. Like a Greek after dinner mint.

The first article of White Fungus is often the best. This issue starts with a sensationalist story of early zoological collecting in colonial New Zealand. It is a deft account of the intrepid amateur zoologists who trekked around New Zealand in the mid 1800s hunting for remnants of the mythical bird, ‘the moa’. The story has a pleasing arc to it, and is made all the more potent by the almost stereotypical characters described by writer Terry Bag. There is the evil scientist back in England bent on fame and fortune who lies, schemes and belittles his colleagues. To balance the scales there is also the earnest, dedicated zoologist who faithfully retains specimens sent back to him from his son tramping around the wilds of New Zealand. It’s riveting stuff, a science soap opera with interesting conflations of fact, science, colonialist ideology and mythology.

Other highlights include some pointedly grotesque page works by Judy Darragh. Common visual tropes – a black panther, a naked woman, a still life of food – have been coated by the artist in trickles of twinky paint which pool and obscure the images. I was reminded of Dan Arps’ similarly subversive posters in recent shows; suggestive takes on romantic urban signs.

Read the rest at Lumiere Reader: http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/arts.php/item/2082

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2009-04-12T17:04:00.000-07:00

Obama tops Bush's Record Military Budget By 20 Billion

Obama's Top Economic Adviser Is Greedy and Highly Compromised

By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant.

Among the payoffs Larry Summers received: $45K from Merrill Lynch days before he joined Obama's team. And it gets worse.

"But Summers, a leading architect of the administration's economic policies and response to the global recession, appears to have collected the most income. Financial institutions including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form." -- Washingtonpost.com

So I guess that $45,000 speaking fee from Merrill Lynch wasn't technically a bribe because Summers wasn't named to Obama's economic transition team until Nov. 24 — a full 12 days later. I'm sure Larry Summers had absolutely no inkling whatsoever that he was going to be one of the key advisers to the new administration on Nov. 12.

It likewise makes perfect sense that Merrill Lynch, a company just months removed from having to be rescued from bankruptcy by an 11th-hour, pseudo-state-subsidized buyout by Bank of America, would decide to spend $45,000 on a speaking appearance by Summers because, well, they really valued his economic expertise and his proven ability to rally the troops with his stirring rhetoric.

It certainly had nothing to do with the fact that a) it was eight days after a Democrat was elected to the presidency; b) Summers had a long history of being one of the key policymakers in Democratic Party politics; and c) Merrill was absolutely not going to survive more than a few more months unless taxpayers forked over another 20 billion or so to cover the giant hole in Merrill's balance sheet that was, at that time, still being hidden from Bank of America and its shareholders.

And how about that $135,000 appearance for Goldman Sachs in April, when Summers was already involved with Democratic Party politics again? That wasn't a surreptitious campaign contribution at all!

But you have to give Goldman credit: it sure is thorough. It literally leaves no stone unturned.
One has to love the sequence of events here. Back in 2004, Goldman chief Hank Paulson goes to SEC chief William Donaldson and petitions to have lending restrictions relaxed for the top five investment banks. Donaldson rolls over, the restrictions are relaxed, and it's a disaster, as the top five banks immediately overleverage themselves — two of the five, Bear Stearns and Lehman, would actually collapse, at least partially as a result of being insanely overleveraged.
In the midst of this disaster, Paulson is named Treasury secretary. He does nothing about the worsening financial crisis until it is far too late, then allows one of Goldman's biggest competitors, Lehman, to fail while at the same time intervening on a huge scale to save AIG, which just happens to owe Goldman a ton of money.

When AIG is bailed out, its government regulator is not in the room, but the new chief of Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein, is. In fact, Goldman Sachs ultimately receives about $13 billion of the money paid to AIG by the government in the bailout, reportedly getting paid 100 cents on the dollar for its AIG exposure, despite the fact that the bank claimed it wasn't going to suffer severe losses if AIG collapsed.

Later, another former Goldman executive, Ed Liddy, is installed as head of AIG -- which just happens to get bailed out twice more, the last time to the tune of $30 billion.

The last two bailouts of AIG take place after a former Goldman chief, Robert Rubin (who, incidentally, helped start this mess by ramming through a series of i-banker wet-dream deregulatory moves as Treasury secretary for Clinton in the 1990s), is named to the Obama transition team, joining Summers (who had already taken $135,000 from Goldman that year) and Timothy Geithner (a protege of another Goldman alum, John Thain, former president and chief operating officer and notorious scumbag).

When it comes time for new Treasury Secretary Geithner to name a chief of staff, he chooses Mark Patterson, who is less than a year removed from working as a lobbyist for … Goldman Sachs. Patterson's great contribution to society as a Goldman lobbyist was opposing a 2007 measure introduced in the Senate by presidential candidate Barack Obama to rein in executive compensation.

I remember watching Obama the presidential candidate give a speech in Mason City, Iowa, in 2007. Obama had made a big show of not having registered lobbyists working for his campaign, and he promised that lobbyists "won't work in my White House." The line was a hit and became part of Obama's stump speech. I must have heard it two dozen times.

A little over a year later, he put a registered lobbyist of a bailed-out investment bank into a job whose primary responsibility is administering bailout money.

It gets worse. According to a Glenn Greenwald piece I just read, even Gary Gensler is a former Goldman employee. That absolutely blows my mind. Genlser is Obama's choice to head the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, whose purview is the derivatives market. The CFTC was the battleground where ages ago Rubin, Summers, and then-Rubin aide Gensler teamed up to whack CFTC chief Brooksley Born, who had serious concerns about the burgeoning derivatives market, in particular the credit-default swap market. Rubin overturned Born's recommendations, and derivatives were freed from most regulation. That economic Alamo led almost directly to the AIG disaster.

Read the rest at Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/democracy/136008/obama%27s_top_economic_adviser_is_greedy_and_highly_compromised/

http://trueslant.com/

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2009-04-06T21:43:00.000-07:00

William K. Black Says American Economy Brought Down By "Fraud"

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2009-04-06T21:32:00.000-07:00

Pogus releases Source Records 1-6 Music of the Avant Garde, 1968-1971: The digital reissue of the Source LP's on 3 CDs

Pogus is extremely proud to reissue the recordings included in the seminal new music journal, Source: Music of the Avant Garde, Vols. 1-6, Issues 1-11, Source Records 1-6, 1967-1973. The original six ten-inch LP Source Records contained some of the most important experimental music of the nineteen-sixties to mid nineteen-seventies and they have now been reissued as a 3 CD set. Source ended publication in 1973, having published, since 1967, contemporary musical materials, scores, articles, interviews, photo essays and recordings over seven years, with up to 2000 subscribers to the semiannual journal: the subscribers avidly anticipated receiving two new and critically acclaimed issues each year during that period.

Most of the original tape masters for the records, after over forty years, have vanished or have seriously deteriorated; hence, we have carefully transferred, noise-reduced, and crackle-removed all the actual LP record tracks to the digital medium, then mastered to the compact disc format for this reissue: the result is an authentic recreation of the original LP, characteristic sound.

CD One - Source Records 1 and 2 Robert Ashley, The Wolfman; David Behrman, Wave Train; Larry Austin, Accidents; Allan Bryant, Pitch Out

CD Two - Source Records 3 and 4 Alvin Lucier, I am sitting in a room; Arthur Woodbury, Velox; Mark Riener, Phlegethon; Larry Austin, Caritas; Stanley Lunetta, moosack machine

CD Three - Source Records 5 and 6 Lowell Cross, Video II (B)/(C)/(L); Arrigo Lora-Totino, english phonemes; Alvin Curran, Magic Carpet; Annea Lockwood, Tiger Balm

http://www.pogus.com/

2009-04-06T03:03:00.000-07:00

Hard Times for A-Rod

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYwqXy831-A

2009-04-05T21:17:00.000-07:00

GuteSeiten - A New Kiosk of Independent Publications Starts in Hamburg

We are just crazy about magazines and fanzines - and we want to share our passion with you. The pabulum of the mainstream media industry is driving us crazy. Where is the spirit, the passion or at least some innovation? That’s the reason why we founded our own kiosk - a curated kiosk and magazine club for inspiring, creative and fascinating magazines and fanzines from all over the world. We believe that the only innovative and revolutionary spirit in new magazines is coming from the underground. Made by people with passion, and not by bureaucrats, analysts and all the other media whores. And there are still reams of amazing magazines out there. But you won’t find them at your local newspaper kiosk. Perhaps you’re lucky and have a well equipped bookstore near you. But mostly you have no chance to find these magazines. The aim of GuteSeiten is to promote, distribute, award, exhibit and finance these magazines.

Have a look at all the MAGAZINES, that we collected for you from all over the world. And if you like them, you can also order them immediately (free global shipping & handling for an order +40 Euro). But if you don’t want to buy them: just rent and read them! Subscribe to our ZINOTHEK and get new magazines and “classics” that are out of stock every month - delivered directly to your door! And there is even an “All you can read”-flatrate (but unfortunately currently only available in Germany).

And if you’re also a publisher: Participate in our annual AWARD - and contribute your magazine to our fast growing archive. Or get connected with other publishers, editorial designers, photographers, editors and zine lovers at our MEMBER section - because together we’re stronger!

Or just enjoy and get inspired by the creative force of independent media. Please let us know what you think, if something is missing and how we can improve. And by the way: Big props to our friends from the design studio gebrauchsgrafikundso who supported us from the first minute, designed and programmed this great website and helped to realize GuteSeiten. We almost worked one year on this project - and we really hope you like it!

http://www.gute-seiten.net/

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2009-03-31T01:01:00.000-07:00

Christian Peet Releases New Novel 'Big American Trip'

Assuming the form of postcards authored by an "alien" of unknown nationality, ethnicity, and gender, addressing a variety of people and organizations (political figures, multinational corporations, people in public toilets, John Barr, et al), Big American Trip is a startling document of fear and loneliness in the 21st century U.S. Whether deconstructing road signs, a failed relationship, or the state of contemporary poetry, the voice behind these texts is at once familiar and strange, determined to be free, and desperate to communicate with anyone who has ever felt at odds with the Language of a Nation.

Also: The companion YouTube project, involving a diverse group of activists, actors, artists, musicians, and writers performing video readings / interpretations of individual postcards, may be seen here: http://bigamericantrip.blogspot.com/

Some responses to Big American Trip:

In Big American Trip, Christian Peet rejects the idyllic dream of a post-national freedom, instead going back to those two archaic, fundamental tools of American nation building—the highway system and the postcard—not to find an imagined national community but to reveal the strangeness, violence and noise that results from the U.S. clashing with other cultures, languages and nations, and—just as importantly—clashing with itself.

—Johannes Göransson, author of A New Quarantine Will Take My Place and Pilot, co-editor of Action Books and Action, Yes

The complexities of alienation hybridize the mouth, double the tongue. Derrida writes, “What does a post card want to say to you? On what conditions is it possible? Its destination traverses you, you no longer know who you are…instead of reaching you it divides you…it leaves you, it gives you.” Christian Peet’s Big American Trip embodies the enigma of the postcard—writing that is at once private and public—and like all letters, these maintain a sense of internal drifting that requires us to question our own sense of identity and location. The logic of Peet’s syntax and juxtapositions gives us the poetry of the divided tongue: in the space between multiple languages, we are invited to trespass our own borders that we might hear (and learn to speak) radical loss. A whole new spin on the classic postcard message: “wish you were here,” Big American Trip is a remarkable, necessary book, and a wonderful achievement.

—Selah Saterstrom, author of The Meat & Spirit Plan and The Pink Institution

Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Pamela is a sad and hilarious book full of devastating social commentary about money, power, sex and British social mores. A couple centuries later, Christian Peet has updated poor Pamela's well behaved letters into blistering postcards dashed off by a nervy, distraught human being of indeterminate gender who is both losing and finding him/herself in and across a terrifying pre-Obama America. Stamp this one with approval.

—Rebecca Brown, author of The Last Time I Saw You, The End of Youth, Excerpts From A Family Medical Dictionary The Gifts of the Body, The Terrible Girls, and others

The author of these postcards has transcribed this alien’s heart. Peet drives through the US landscape (circa early 21st century), offers us the hijacked language of a nation, and through this text asks: and what words have been left for you to use, honestly?

—Elena Georgiou, author of Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrant and mercy mercy me

Big American Trip
Christian Peet
Shearsman Books,
March 2009
Paperback, 80 pp.,
9x6ins, $15 / £8.95
ISBN 9781848610156

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2009-03-30T22:15:00.000-07:00

Nobel Laurette Paul Krugman Left With Feeling of "Despair" Over Obama's Economic Measures

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9 Reasons Obama's Fiscal Plan Fails Both Markets and Taxpayers. By Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate. Posted March 26, 2009.

The real failings in the Obama recovery program lie not in the stimulus package, but in its efforts to revive financial markets.

Let's be clear: President Barack Obama inherited an economy in freefall and could not possibly have turned things around in the short time since his election. Unfortunately, what he is doing is not enough.

The real failings in the Obama recovery program lie not in the stimulus package -- though it is too heavily weighted toward tax cuts, and much of it merely offsets cutbacks by states -- but in its efforts to revive financial markets. America's failures provide important lessons to countries around the world that are or will be facing increasing problems with their banks:

1. Delaying bank restructuring is costly, in terms of both the eventual bailout costs and the damage to the overall economy in the interim.

2. Governments do not like to admit the full costs of the problem, so they give the banking system just enough to survive, but not enough to return it to health.

3. Confidence is important, but it must rest on sound fundamentals. Policies must not be based on the fiction that good loans were made, and that the business acumen of financial-market leaders and regulators will be validated once confidence is restored.

4. Bankers can be expected to act in their self-interest on the basis of incentives. Perverse incentives fueled excessive risk-taking, and banks that are near collapse but are too big to fail will engage in even more of it. Knowing that the government will pick up the pieces if necessary, they will postpone resolving mortgages and pay out billions in bonuses and dividends.

5. Socializing losses while privatizing gains is more worrisome than the consequences of nationalizing banks. American taxpayers are getting an increasingly bad deal. In the first round of cash infusions, they got about 67 cents in assets for every dollar they gave (though the assets were almost surely overvalued, and quickly fell in value). But in the recent cash infusions, it is estimated that Americans are getting 25 cents, or less, for every dollar. Bad terms mean a large national debt in the future.

6. Don't confuse saving bankers and shareholders with saving banks. America could have saved its banks, but let the shareholders go, for far less than it has spent.

7. Trickle-down economics almost never works. Throwing money at the banks hasn't helped homeowners: foreclosures continue to increase. Letting AIG fail might have hurt some systemically important institutions, but dealing with that would have been better than to gamble upwards of $150 billion and hope that some of it might stick where it is important. One of the reasons we may be getting bad terms is that if we got fair value for our money, we would by now be the dominant shareholder in at least one of the major banks.

8. Lack of transparency got America's financial system into this trouble. Lack of transparency will not get it out. The Obama administration is promising to pick up losses to persuade hedge funds and other private investors to buy out banks' bad assets. But this will not establish ''market prices,'' as the administration claims. Banks' losses have already occurred, and their gains must now come at taxpayers' expense. Bringing in hedge funds as third parties will simply increase the cost.

9. Better to be forward looking than backward looking, focusing on reducing the risk of new loans and ensuring that funds create new lending capacity.

There is no ''mystique'' in finance: The era of believing that something can be created out of nothing should be over. Short-sighted responses by politicians -- who hope to get by with a deal that is small enough to please taxpayers and large enough to please the banks -- will merely prolong the problem.

An impasse is looming. More money will be needed, but Americans are in no mood to provide it -- certainly not on the terms that we have seen. The well of money may be running dry, and so, too, may be America's legendary optimism and hope.

From Project Syndicate: http://www.project-syndicate.org/

2009-03-22T13:46:00.000-07:00

De La Soul To Play Wellington's San Francisco Bath House

2009 sees hip hop pioneers De La Soul mark the 20th anniversary of their career, and to celebrate the group are undertaking their most comprehensive NZ tour to date. The groups vibe is to perform the classic tracks live, but more importantly, and more than ever, De la Soul are stamping the presence and truth that's defined their sound across two decades. The trio from Long Island, formed De La Soul in the 80s, quickly etching themselves into the psyche of global hip hop culture with their seminal debut, 3 Feet High and Rising (1989) and the dance floor addiction ‘The Magic Number’ Since the groups last tour to NZ in 2006 the the group have won a Grammy for their collaboration with the Gorillaz on the single "Feel Good Inc"

There will be an exclusive and invite only media workshop with De la Soul to be held at the mighty Red Bull studios in Auckland on May 15. Details TBC. Punctuating their enduring career is an impressive list of collaborators feeling the De La Soul tip: Mos Def, Beastie Boys, Common, Chaka Khan, Busta Rhymes and Redman among others. And we know that De La Soul's peace and positivity can be heard in the music of many other artists.

MAY 12 - WELLINGTON - SFBH
MAY 13 - WANAKA – LAKE WANAKA CENTRE
MAY 14 - CHRISTCHURCH - THE BEDFORD
MAY 15 - AUCKLAND- THE POWERSTATION

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2009-03-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

Billy Apple, Negative condition situation: cleaning: windowpane, 28 April 1973161 West 23rd St , New York (photo: David Troy)

Billy Apple at Adam Art Gallery

Billy AppleNew York
1969-197328 March – 17 May 2009

Opening 28 March, a new Adam Art Gallery exhibition documents activities undertaken by artist Billy Apple in New York between 1969 and 1973, including works never before seen in New Zealand .

The exhibition focuses on a short but intense period in the artist's career, when he operated a small not-for-profit gallery at 161 West 23rd Street . Over the course of four years he created a venue for artists to produce works that tested and re-defined the nature of sculpture, at a time when the art scene in New York was beginning to be galvanised by such radical gestures.

Curator Christina Barton says the exhibition documents an important period in Apple’s career and recognises the vital contribution he made to the history of art in New York .

“It also addresses the relation between ‘live’ action and documentation, setting out to offer various solutions to the problem of how to re-present ephemeral, site-specific work at the same time as exploring how this was already a concern of the artist at the time of his work’s production,” says Christina.

Significant works on show will include a re-staging of an iconic window cleaning action originally undertaken with the assistance of Geoff Hendricks at 112 Greene St in 1971, the 1968 film Gaseous discharge phenomena with soundtrack by artist Nam June Paik, and a large-scale installation of arranged coloured neon tubes reconstructed to address the remarkable architecture of the Adam Art Gallery .

These works will be shown alongside other reconstructions, artefacts, photo-documentation and archival material relating to the Apple space and its programmes.

The exhibition opening is timed to coincide with a major international symposium organised in conjunction with One Day Sculpture, a New Zealand-wide series of temporary public art works, conceived by British curator Claire Doherty for the Litmus Initiative at Massey University.

It also provides the context for Apple’s contribution to the One Day Sculpture series. The Adam Art Gallery has commissioned Apple to undertake a new work over one 24-hour period on Saturday 28 March 2009. This will translate his 70s’ activities to a new time and place, enabling Apple’s conceptual practice to confront an iconic work of public sculpture: Henry Moore’s Bronze Form (1985-6) which is located on Salamanca Lawn in Wellington ’s Botanic Gardens.

Billy Apple studied graphic design in London and made a contribution to early pop art in Britain before leaving for New York in 1964. He lived in New York between 1964 and 1990 before returning to New Zealand where he continues to work and exhibit internationally. He has consistently devoted himself to testing the boundaries between art and life, exploring the social, economic and architectural contexts within which art is made and circulates.

The exhibition is accompanied by a public programme of discussion, performance and a film screening. For a full programme please check the gallery’s website: www.victoria.ac.nz/adamartgallery

OPENING Friday 27 March 2009, 6-8pm All welcome

ONE DAY SCULPTUREBilly Apple®LESS IS MOORESaturday 28 March 2009, 00.00–23.59Salamanca Lawn, Botanic Gardens, Wellingtonhttp://www.onedaysculpture.org.nz/

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2009-03-16T22:00:00.000-07:00

Magazine Library in Tokyo Finishes

http://www.magazinelibrary.jp

2009-03-14T22:53:00.000-07:00

Evil Ocean Performing at the White Fungus Issue 10 Launch Party at ARTSPACE, Auckland

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2009-03-11T16:07:00.000-07:00

2009-03-10T03:21:00.000-07:00

THE BORDERLINE BALLROOM
in association with the Audio Foundation

celebrates the release of Dirt Beneath the Daydream
with performances by

Greg Malcolm & Bruce Russell
Grunge Genesis
Stanier Black-Five

with DJ I-Rory
Saturday March 14th - 8pm - $5
at Neibelheim (under SoFA Gallery, South Quad of the Arts Centre)

Christchurch artists featured on Dirt Beneath the Daydream CD celebrate its release with an evening of performances that include collaborations between local legends Bruce Russell and Greg Malcolm, folk noise alchemists Richard Neave, Adam Willetts and LA Lakers as Grunge Genesis, plus solo work from audio trainspotter Stanier Black-Five.

Dirt Beneath the Daydream is a New Zealand compilation given away to subscribers of the internationally respected experimental music magazine, The Wire, as well as with the current edition of New Zealand’s White Fungus magazine, which will be available at the event. Christchurch artists have a strong presence on the CD, with tracks from LA Lakers, Demarnia Lloyd (with Stuart Harris), Greg Malcolm, Richard Neave (with Lee Noyes), Bruce Russell, Stanier Black-Five and Adam Willetts.

Greg Malcolm

Greg Malcolm is has established an international reputation for his work with “solo simultaneously played multiple guitar performances” (SSPMGP) and his critically acclaimed releases. In his SSMGP, Greg uses no processing or effects (except a fuzz box occasionally), just a selection of guitars. Some are contact miked, some have extra strings and springs and things: one of these is at his side, one is played with his feet and one lies in his lap.

Richard Neave

Richard Neave plays a noise guitar… or at least he plays the guitar in a noisily fashion, as well as an array of Japanese instruments. His work includes the solo album release You're Not Welcome, on the Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label, as well as collaborations as part of the legendary James Last Appreciation Squad, CM Ensemble, Grunge Genesis and with Dunedin percussionist Lee Noyes, with whom he has recently finished an as yet unreleased album, UnRepent. Neave describes his approach as “trying to create an intensity of genuine expression that tries to circumvent or consume and override the contrivance and meekness of self-satisfied and staid song structures… although the gap between the intention and the result is often bathetic”.

Bruce Russell

Bruce Russell is an improvising sound artist, who since 1987 has been a member of the Dead C. This genre-dissolving New Zealand trio mixes rock, electro-acoustics and noise. He has also been active as a solo artist, and directed two independent labels, Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum. He writes essays and criticism for The Wire, artists’ catalogues, and other publications. He is currently studying at RMIT towards a doctorate in sound in the School of Fine Art.

Stanier Black-Five

Stanier Black-Five’s audio work regularly fuses electronics with environmental recordings and found sounds: from mesmerising aircraft drones to the pounding rhythms of trains. As well as playing in New Zealand, she has performed across the UK and Europe, taking part in events such as the London Musicians’ Collective’s annual festival of experimental music and makes sporadic releases that include those on her self-run Argot Records label. She also writes on music and sound art for various publications worldwide.

Adam Willetts

Adam Willetts plays blissed-out noise pop using synthesizers to create rich, expansive fields of sound with a fragile yet propulsive sense of momentum, and through the sparseness of his approach allows space for subtle details and blemishes to drift into the foreground. Well known in the New Zealand noise and sound art community for his highly conceptual improvised work with self-sampling laptop, electromagnetic fields, wii remotes and other gamepads, Adam has been steadily transforming his practice since relocating from Auckland to Christchurch early last year, ditching his computer, picking up his soldering iron and building a less conceptual, more musical foundation for his work.

The Borderline Ballroom is a Christchurch-based voluntary collective aiming to provide a relaxed space for challenging listening, and a regular live venue for performative audio experimentation that supports local practitioners working on the peripheries of music and sound, while offering a resource for national and international performers touring New Zealand's South Island.

Forthcoming Borderline Ballroom events:
20th March – Mr Sterile Assembly (Wtgn) & AS AT (Chc) @ The Wunderbar
30th March – PITS (Australia), Tim Coster (Akl), Alex MacKinnon (Dun) @ The Physics Room

For more information, contact the Borderline Ballroom at: http://nz.mc1113.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=borderlineballroom@gmail.com

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2009-02-26T16:35:00.000-08:00

White Fungus Releases Issue 10

White Fungus is about to release its 10th issue with launches at Adam Art Gallery in Wellington, Friday, March 6 and ARTSPACE in Auckland, Wednesday, March 11.Both launches will run from 6-9pm.

The Adam Art Gallery event will feature performances by Aotearoa Hip Hop pioneers Upper Hutt Posse, Our Love Will Destroy the World(Campbell Kneale), Peter Wright (recently returned from the UK) and Tao Wells. At ARTSPACE local band Evil Ocean will perform along with Empirical, Tao Wells and poet Iain Britton.

Number 10 is White Fungus’ biggest issue to date with 24 more pages. The new issue includes a new short story, Sewer Rat Debacle, by Duncan Sarkies and in an in-depth history article by Tim Bollinger, The Bone Collectors: Walter Mantel and the early days of New Zealand zoological discovery. It also includes a colour comic by Auckland artist Barry Linton and a reflection on the life of Diogenes by Richard Meros.

White Fungus has the pleasure of re-publishing, in this issue, classic artworks by Auckland iconoclastic feminist Judy Darragh along with work by Nick Austin from his 2006 show at ARTSPACE, On appetitb. There are articles on Brisbane artist Richard Bell, Berlin-based Marcin Cienski and Hong Kong artist Lee Kit. There is work by Andrew McLeod accompanied by two stories by Chris Cudby.

Music features include articles on Detroit Noise group Wolf Eyes, New York ‘hyperrealist’ composer Noah Creshevsky and interviews with musician Cristian Amigo and Australian sound artist Jodi Rose. Plus White Fungus talks to Te Kupu of Upper Hutt Posse about the group 20 years on from producing the first-ever Rap record in New Zealand, E Tu in 1988.

Simon Wickham-Smith writes about Mongolia’s most subversive poet, Baatarin Galsansuh. And the issue features poems by Cyril Wong, winner of the 2006 Singapore Literature Prize and the epic Jena: An Other Cartography by enigmatic Washington DC poet Francis Raven.

Based in Wellington, New Zealand White Fungus was started by the Hanson brothers Ron and Mark after a four-year sojourn in Taiwan. “’White Fungus’ says exciting cultural confusion to us,” Mark Hanson says. The name comes from a canned foodstuff found at a local supermarket in the industrial zone of Taichung City.

White Fungus is distributed by Disticor in the US and Canada. White Fungus is the New Zealand media partner to this year’s international magazine symposium Colophon2009 in Luxembourg. It has been selected for MOOH – The Magazine of Omotesando Hills Library in Tokyo.

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2009-02-20T01:13:00.000-08:00

Former chief economist of the IMF Simon Johnson talks about taking on the banking elites

High Noon: Geithner v. The American Oligarchs
By Simon Johnson

There comes a time in every economic crisis or, more specifically, in every struggle to recover from a crisis, when someone steps up to the podium to promise the policies that - they say - will deliver you back to growth. The person has political support, a strong track record, and every incentive to enter the history books. But one nagging question remains.

Can this person, your new economic strategist, really break with the vested elites that got you into this much trouble? The form of these vested interests, of course, varies substantially across situations, but they are always still strong, despite the downward spiral which they did so much to bring about. And fully escaping the grip of crisis really means breaking their power.

Not only is this a standard way of thinking about crisis resolution in many developing and post-communist countries, it also turns out to be a good guide to thinking about the US today. We have a powerful banking industry that has mismanaged its way into deep trouble. Yet these banks obtained an initial bailout - the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP - on generous terms, and have consistently failed to use the opportunity provided by this government support to turn their operations around. Not only that, but they have flaunted their power - and their arrogance - through paying themselves large and largely inappropriate bonuses.

We come now, this week, to the podium. And Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner takes the stand (on Tuesday), to tell us how he proposes to use the remainder of the TARP funds, support from the Federal Reserve, and other policies to turn around the financial system and pull us out of recession. We previously posed relevant technical questions for this week; answers (or lack of answers) to these should determine if Geithner’s approach is likely to succeed. Think of that as a framework for reasonable technocratic assessment. But there is also the key political dimension to emphasize.

The elites who run the US banking industry have had a great run of economic good fortune. They used this wealth to further strengthen their political power, both through donations to politicians of almost all stripes and more broadly through taking positions of formal and informal influence throughout the executive and legislative branches.

Our unsustainable debt-fuelled boom, in other words, produced both the conditions for a major global financial disaster, and a political strengthening of the people who benefited most from the risk-taking and associated compensation packages that made this disaster possible. Ending the financial crisis is relatively straightforward - a forced recapitalization and change of ownership/management in the banking system - although this will not immediately lead to an economic recovery (more on that here). But seen in deeper political terms, decisive action to restructure large banks is almost impossible. Such action would require overcoming perhaps the single strongest interest group in the United States today.

How can you do it? The answer must be by splitting this powerful interest group into competing factions, and taking them on one by one. Can this be done? Definitely, yes. In particular, bank recapitalization - if implemented right - can use private equity interests against the powerful large bank insiders. Then you need to force the new private equity owners of banks to break them up so they are no longer too big to fail. And then… there is always more to do to contain the power of a lobby that is boosted by any boom and which, the more it succeeds, the more likely it is to ruin us all.

From The Baseline Scenario: http://baselinescenario.com/2009/02/08/high-noon-geithner-v-the-american-oligarchs/

2009-02-15T16:38:00.000-08:00

Paul Jay challenges The Nation Editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel on not being critical enough of Obama and his foreign policy.

Obama and Liberals: A Counter-Productive Relationship

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon.

There's a lot of harm that comes from a political faction being beholden to a leader rather than to any actual ideas or political principles.

The New Republic's John Judis today has an excellent analysis of the politics behind the stimulus package -- one which applies equally to most other political controversies. Judis argues that the stimulus package ended up being far inferior to what it could have been and points to this reason why that happened:

But I think the main reason that Obama is having trouble is that there is not a popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond where he would even ideally like to go. Sure, there are leftwing intellectuals like Paul Krugman who are beating the drums for nationalizing the banks and for a $1 trillion-plus stimulus. But I am not referring to intellectuals, but to movements that stir up trouble among voters and get people really angry. Instead, what exists of a popular left is either incapable of action or in Obama's pocket. . . .

A member of one liberal group, Campaign for America's Future, pronounced the stimulus bill "a darn good first step." MoveOn -- as far as I can tell -- has attacked conservative Republicans for opposing the bill, while lamely urging Democrats to back it. Of course, all these groups may have thought the stimulus bill and the bailout were ideal, but I doubt it. I bet they had the same criticisms of these measures that Krugman or The American Prospect's Ezra Klein or my own colleagues had, but they made the mistake that political groups often make: subordinating their concern about issues to their support for the party and its leading politician.

By extremely stark contrast, Paul Krugman today explains why Republicans are so unified in their opposition to this bill and their willingness to uphold the principles of their supporters:
One might have expected Republicans to act at least slightly chastened in these early days of the Obama administration, given both their drubbing in the last two elections and the economic debacle of the past eight years. But it's now clear that the party's commitment to deep voodoo - enforced, in part, by pressure groups that stand ready to run primary challengers against heretics - is as strong as ever.

[Though I agree with Krugman's principal point here, I dislike his use of the word "heretics" here. It invokes one of the worst myths in our political discourse: the idea that there's something wrong, intolerant or "Stalinist" about pressuring or even campaigning against incumbents "from one's own party" who advocate positions that you think are bad and wrong. That activity happens to be the essence of democracy, and we need more, not less, of it. If anything is Stalinist, it's the sky-high incumbent re-election rates and the sense of entitlement in our political class that incumbents should not ever face primary challenges even if they support policies which the base of the party reviles. Why shouldn't GOP voters who love tax cuts and hate government domestic spending, regardless of whether they're right or wrong, demand that their elected representatives support those views (in exactly the same way that Democratic incumbents who supported the Iraq war and/or Bush's lawless surveillance state should have been targeted for defeat)?]

But Krugman's larger point is correct: Republican groups demand from politicians support for their beliefs. By contrast, as Judis describes, Democratic groups -- including (perhaps especially) liberal activist groups -- now (with some exceptions) lend their allegiance to the party and its leader regardless of how faithful the party leadership is to their beliefs. That disparity means that there is often great popular agitation and political pressure exerted from the Right, but almost none from the Left (I'm using the terms "Left" and "Right" here in their conventional sense: "Right" being the core of the GOP and "Left" being those who most consistently and vigorously opposed Bush's foreign and domestic policies).

Read the rest at Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/126867/obama_and_liberals%3A_a_counter-productive_relationship/

2009-02-15T16:36:00.000-08:00

2009-02-01T21:07:00.000-08:00

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Justice Yeldham and Toecutter Hit Wellington

Two of Sydney’s most experimental and ferocious musicians - Justice Yeldham and the Dynamic Ribbon Device and Toecutter – are about to grace our shores culminating in a performance this Thursday, February 5 at Happy in Wellington. The night will also be an opportunity to catch a final gig by The Stumps before Antony Milton takes off for South America.

Formerly a turntablist – "in the loosest sense" -Justice Yeldham, aka Lucas Abela, is known world wide for his miced-up performances of triangular sheets of glass - wired to a super utility belt of effects pedals - which he plays with his mouth, hyperventilating and getting some of the freakiest industrial sounds you’ll hear in modern music, which, despite their nightmarish variety, Yeldham plays with practiced precision. Performances are intensely physical or ‘neo-brutalist’ and not for the faint-hearted.

Also a wayward turntablist, Toecutter joins Yeldham in his first trip to New Zealand. A veteran of the Sydney underground, Toecutter splices together unpredictable and hyperactive dance music as a euphoric yet oddball foil to the bloody savagery of Yeldham. Also playing will be Public Toilet, DJ Powerfull and The Lost Weekend. Installation by Tao.

2009-01-28T00:05:00.001-08:00

2009-01-23T17:31:00.000-08:00

"Fuck Hope!" - George Carlin

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Obama, King and Kennedy: Empire and the “End” of Racism
An interview with Juan Santos

“King spoke Truth to Power, while Obama spoke Lies to get in Power.

One might say that other than that, and other than the fact that King stood up to end Black people’s suffering while Obama stood silent in the face of it, they’re just alike.”

Juan Santos is a member of the Aztlan Mexica Nation Harmony Keepers/American Indian Movement, and author of the essays Barack Obama and the “End” of Racism, and Obama's Denial: The Fear of a Black Messiah.

Andrea Luchetta interviewed him for a feature piece on Obama’s inauguration for the Italian daily Il Manifesto. The following is the full text of that interview.
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Luchetta: I‘ve interviewed Ms. Makeeba Lloyd, of the "Harlem4Obama Commitee". According to her, racism is nowadays a minor problem. The main conflict, for her, is of a class nature, rather than racial in nature. The social dividing line, she says, is now between the rich and the poor, not between the white and the black. What do you think of this position?

Santos: This is nonsense, Lloyd’s claim is in line with Barack Obama’s utterly false claim that peoples of color are “90% of the way to equality” with whites in the US.

Ms. Lloyd is wrong. The poverty line is a race line. Race determines who is poor and who is not. Roughly a quarter of black and brown people in the US live in poverty, while less than 1/10th of Euro-Americans live in poverty. A black person in the US is 3 times more likely to be poor than a white person.

That’s 90% of the way to “equality”?

No. The very best thing I can say about the idea that peoples of color are approaching equality with whites in the US is that it is an example of extremely bad math, or of people promoting an illusion in hopes that it will come true.

Black unemployment in the US is currently at 11.1% - almost double the average for white people, whose rate of unemployment is 5.9%. Among the general population, - by which I mean those outside of the reservation system that imprisons Native Americans on the remnants of their lands - Blacks have the highest rate of unemployment in the US, followed by Latinos, at 8.8%. Among Black youth unemployment reaches a stunning 32.3 %. From 1976 through today, a new study shows, Latino unemployment rates typically exceeded that of the white population by some 65%. The absolute rate of unemployment for Native Americans on the reservations is, however, roughly SEVENTY PER CENT.

50% of Native American reservation homes have no phones and 1/5 of the homes lack complete kitchen facilities.

It might be interesting to show these figures to Ms. Lloyd to see if, reading them, she is still willing to claim a distinction between a race divide and a class divide in the US.

But economics is by no means the only measure of equality.

Race also determines who is imprisoned and who is not.

Black people in the US are 8.5 times more likely than whites to be imprisoned.

On any given day 1 in 9 young Black men are in prison.

Latinos are 4 times more likely to go to prison than white people.

68% of all U.S. prisoners are people of color, although Black, Latinos and officially recognized Native Americans together make up slightly less than 25% of the overall population of the U.S.

The US has the highest rate of imprisonment in the world. It is a system of mass imprisonment aimed at the control of people of color, who, the elites fear, have the potential to violently and politically rebel again as they did in the 1960s. People in other parts of the world simply cannot begin to imagine the conditions that exist here; the US holds 25% of the world’s prisoners – a Gulag comprised mostly of prisoners from the minority populations of African and Native American descent – Blacks and Latinos.

This is no “minor problem,” contrary to what Ms. Lloyd suggests. It is a form of mass social control of potentially dissident and rebellious populations based on race and class status. Ms. Lloyd has missed the point entirely.

It’s not a matter of race versus class – race and class are in many ways one thing here in the US.
Usually that kind of system is called a caste system. Despite a few exceptions, like Obama himself, that’s exactly what exists in the US: a caste system.

What the white ruling class did here was this: following the mass rebellions and the burning of major US cities in the 1960s, the white ruling class decided on a strategy of divide and conquer. They created a Black middle class almost overnight, largely using government employment to do so, while at the same time they found another way to deal with the millions of people of color who could not fit into the system; mass imprisonment. These developments are 2 sides of the same coin. Ms. Lloyd’s failure to see this is why she can make the kind of mistakes of analysis she’s making.

Interview continues at The Fourth World: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/2009/01/obama-king-and-kennedy-empire-and-end.html
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2009-01-21T17:25:00.000-08:00

EUGENE CHADBOURNE at Happy

Described as a direct threat to the American way of life by the White House spokesman for president Reagan, Eugene Chadbourne now threatens our shores with his electric toilet plunger, and a mixture of improvised and folk banjo playing.

Un/Equal parts polymath, autodidact, inventor, scene-mongrelizing underground cult anti-hero and true Maverick of modern North American music, Eugene Chadbourne strikes Christchurch [and the rest of the COUNTRY!] with his eclectically singular and incendiary brand of electrified be-bop hillbilly improv.

While sharing a not-too-dissimilar profile to that of now-popular compatriot Daniel Johnston, Chadbourne has infiltrated contemporary rock music more as a true polemicist than a mere eccentric, a familiar icon of momentous experimentation, particularly in the New York 'loft scene' of the 1970s and beyond, where he has appeared alongside luminaries such as John Zorn, Bob Ostertag, Marc Ribot, Fred Frith, Steve Beresford, Henry Kaiser and Cellist Tom Cora.

With well-known producer and grunge guru Mark Kramer, Chadbourne later founded Shockabilly, who, after releases on Rough Trade and New York's Knitting Factory, were deemed the East Coast reply to The Residents.

Chadbourne has also appeared alongside Elliot Sharp, Violent Femmes and Sun City Girls on a CD called Jesse Helms Busted for Pornography, which shows where his humorous political targets lie. A top official in Ronald Reagan's administration once referred to Chadbourne as 'the biggest threat to the American way of life' and his G.O.I.N. (Get Out of Iraq Now) Band has
eloquently and satirically told the more recent administration where to go.

Mixed up with his raconteur wizardry, it will be a persuasive combustion. As Pumice put it recently, "Chadbourne issues forth scrambled LSD & whiskey country & western, free range plink plonk Ayler tunes on the banjo that went on uncomfortably long, fierce rake racket. He's totally fearless, reckless, and squirmy. I'll be there."

EUGENE CHADBOURNE (!)Thurs January 22, 2009HAPPY$10with Sign of the Hag, Basketcase and Manimanima! EUGENE CHADBOURNE (!)Fri January 23, 2009Happy$10with Secretaries on Standby and the BAD BLUES BAND

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SHAVE AN ARTIST

3rd FEBRUARY 2009

BACKGROUND TO THE EVENT: A number of months ago I was suddenly inspired to shave my long hair off to raise money for the Leukaemia and Blood Foundation of New Zealand as part of www.shaveforacure.co.nz. As a full-time painter, I felt that putting a Visual Arts twist on this shave event would make it of greater personal significance, would attract a wider audience, and would raise even more money. I immediately contacted Sophia Elise, the extraordinarily hard-working manager of the New Zealand Art Guild, in the hopes that she would come on board. Fortune smiled on us! Now together with the help of the Bruce Mason Centre and the Leukaemia and Blood Foundation, we are putting on an exciting, creative event, which will help support New Zealand cancer sufferers and their families.

“SHAVE AN ARTIST” EVENT DESCRIPTION: Tuesday 3rd February 2009, Artists from all over Aotearoa will shave their heads to raise money and help support the 6 New Zealand children and adults who are diagnosed with blood cancers like leukaemia and lymphoma every day. The Leukaemia & Blood Foundation provides essential support for those patients and their families - support that can last months, even years.

Top New Zealand Artists have donated 13 artworks, which will be auctioned off at this one-of-a-kind charity event. The audience will watch while 13 artists and friends have their heads shaved alongside their artworks being auctioned.

North Shore City Mayor Andrew Williams will open this shave/auction evening. The event will also launch a month long exhibition at the Bruce Mason Centre consisting of artworks depicting "LIFE" in all its facets by 41 talented artists from around Aotearoa.

100% of the proceeds from the art auction and head shaves will be donated to the Leukaemia and Blood Foundation. 20% of all artwork sales from the month long exhibition will be donated also.

CALL FOR SUPPORT:
Support our shavees by sponsoring them at www.shaveforacure.co.nz keyword “Shave an Artist”.

Come to the opening night and support these brave, generous people in person 3rd February 2009, 6:30pm at the Bruce Mason Centre, Cnr Promenade and Hurstmere Rd, Takapuna Beach, North Shore City, Auckland. Entry is free - All welcome.

Buy an Artwork at the LIFE Exhibition 3rd - 28th February 2009. Open Mon - Fri - 9am - 5pm and Sat 10am - 4pm. Bruce Mason Centre, Cnr Promenade and Hurstmere Rd, Takapuna Beach, North Shore City, Auckland

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2009-01-15T01:06:00.000-08:00

Who and what is Hamas?

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The History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing

Real Estate War in Gaza http://www.counterpunch.com/buch01062009.html

By VICTORIA BUCH

I arrived in Israel 40 years ago. It took me many years to understand that the very existence of my country, as it is today, is based on an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The project started many years ago. Its seed can be traced to the basic fallacy of the Zionist movement, which set out to establish a Jewish-national state in a location already inhabited by another nation. Under these conditions, one has, at most, a moral right to strive for a bi-national state; establishing a national state implies, more or less by definition, ethnic cleansing of the previous inhabitants.

Albert Einstein grasped this fallacy a long time ago. A short time after WWI "Einstein complained that the Zionists were not doing enough to reach agreement with the Palestinian Arabs…He favored a binational solution in Palestine and warned Chaim Weizmann against `Prussian style` nationalism"[1]

But such warnings passed un-heeded by the Zionist movement. So here we are, nearly a century later, with a Jewish national state dominated by militaristic and militant nationalists, who diligently pursue colonization and "judaization" of the land under Israeli control, on both sides of the Green Line (1967 border). The project has been pursued continuously and relentlessly under the different Israeli governments, recently under the cover of bogus "negotiations" with President Abbas. Most of the Israeli institutions participate in it. Young Israelis, generation after generation, join the army to provide the military cover. The young folks have been brain-washed to honestly believe that the army pursues Israel 's "fight for existence". However it seems evident to the author of this article, as to many others, that the survival of the Jewish community in this country depends on establishing viable mechanisms of coexistence with the Palestinians. Thus, under the slogan of "fight for existence", the State of Israel is pursuing an essentially suicidal project.

This long-standing outlook of the Israeli governing classes was summarized succinctly in a recent book `Palestine Inside Out` by Saree Makdisi, an American academic. His book "suggests that occupation is merely a feature of an ongoing Israeli policy of slow transfer of the native Palestinian population from their lands. This policy predates the founding of the state, and all of the various practices of the occupier: illegal settlement, land confiscation, home demolition and so on, serve this ultimate purpose."[2]

If you do not believe the above assessment, consider several statements by David Ben Gurion himself, from the time before the establishment of the State of Israel (Ben Gurion was the leader of the Zionist movement before 1948 and the first Israeli Prime Minister after 1948):

"The compulsory transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the first and second Temples…We are given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is more than a state, government and sovereignty, this is national consolidation in a free homeland." [3]

"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]…I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it."[3]

During the 1948 war, about two-thirds of the Palestinians who would become refugees were in fact expelled from their homes by the nascent Israeli army, and one-third became refugees while escaping the dangers of war. All these people, 0.75-1 million of them, were prevented from returning to Israel after the armistice agreement, while their homes and property were demolished or appropriated by the State of Israel.

Among the common mantras provided to the Israelis to justify the above is the following: " Israel accepted the UN partition plan, and Arabs did not, so what happened afterwards is their own fault". What is conveniently overlooked is that Palestinian Arabs constituted between one third and one half of the population of that designated Jewish homeland (according to various UN reports). Why should these people, whose ancestors lived there for generations, accept living in somebody else's designated homeland? Imagine, for example, the reaction of French Belgians if their country were designated as a "Flemish homeland" by the UN.

But the main mantra drummed into the conscience of an Israeli citizen from kindergarten, is that in 1948 "it was either them or us", "Arabs would have thrown us into the sea if we did not establish a Jewish majority state with a strong army", etc. I have my doubts about that line, too, but let us suppose for the moment that in fact, it was so. And then came the year 1967, and the Six Day War. Another chapter in the Israeli "fight for existence" against recalcitrant Arabs who just keep trying to throw us into the sea. On the face of it, that is how it seemed. I together with most of my compatriots believed for years that 1967 was in fact a moment of existential danger for Israel . Until I stumbled upon some telling quotes, uttered by our very own leaders [4]:

"(a) The New York Times quoted Prime Minister Menachem Begin`s (1977 - 83) August, 1982 speech saying: `In June, 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that (President Gamal Abdel) Nasser (1956 - 70) was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.`

(b) Two-time Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1974 - 77 and 1992 - 95) told French newspaper Le Monde in February, 1968: `I do not believe Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel . He knew it and we knew it.`

(c) General Mordechai Hod, Commander of the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War said in 1978: `Sixteen years of planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it.`

(d) General Haim Barlev, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief told Ma`ariv in April 1972: `We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the six-day war, and we had never thought of such a possibility.`"

So: instead of "thwarting an existential danger", in 1967 the State of Israel carried out an effective military operation to acquire some real estate. There is nothing new about that "existential danger" propaganda. Acquisition of real estate by conquest has been already called pleasing names by various other conquerors and occupiers, throughout the old and new history: such as "manifest destiny", "white man's burden", "spreading true religion / culture / democracy", whatnot.

The reader may like to know that the 1967 real estate acquisition by the State of Israel was anticipated some twenty years earlier by Ben-Gurion, at the time of the partition plan (which was supposedly accepted by the Zionist leadership). See the following quotes of Ben-Gurion, which can be found in the book by an Israeli historian[5]:

"Just as I do not see the proposed Jewish state as a final solution to the problems of the Jewish people, so I do not see partition as the final solution of the Palestine question. Those who reject partition are right in their claim that this country cannot be partitioned because it constitutes one unit, not only from a historical point of view but also from that of nature and economy".
"After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the [Jewish] state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of the Palestine ".

I wonder if at any point in history there was any association of people who acquired goodies by brute force, and who viewed themselves candidly as such. Times and again, conquerors considered themselves unwilling victims of circumstances, and the barbarians (their own victims!) against whom they have to regretfully protect their rights. Consider the following pronouncements of Benny Morris, a historian who documented the 1948 ethnic cleansing. In a 2004 interview with Morris which was published in Haaretz one reads[6]:

Q: The title of the book you are now publishing in Hebrew is "Victims." In the end, then, your argument is that of the two victims of this conflict, we [Israelis] are the bigger one.
Morris: "Yes. Exactly. We are the greater victims in the course of history and we are also the greater potential victim. Even though we are oppressing the Palestinians, we are the weaker side here. We are a small minority in a large sea of hostile Arabs who want to eliminate us.
The above opinion is representative of the Israeli mainstream. It has been raised to the status of axiom over the years, and no reasonable peace offers (such as the latest Saudi one) are likely to put a dent in it. Israelis are using this slogan to exempt themselves from normal human decency towards Palestinians. Most Israeli Jews have convinced themselves that they have a moral right to expropriate and expel Palestinians because Palestinians are such barbarians, who did not respond to Israel 's"generous peace offers" and "only wanted to throw us to the sea". Because we are a nation of Holocaust survivors. My compatriots imagined themselves starring in a modern version of Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" - starring as beautiful elves, of course, who were forced by sad fate to fight ugly goblins the Palestinians (goblins = "terrorists"). Human mercy does not apply to "terrorists". You do not make territorial compromises or peace agreements with "terrorists".

The above explains the mass participation of otherwise normal and more-or-less decent Israelis in the ongoing ethnic-cleansing projects. How else can you account for a dying elderly man and his wife being dragged out of their east Jerusalem apartment to make space for Jewish settlers. Building the Jerusalem " Museum of Tolerance " on the site of an ancient Muslim graveyard. Onslaught on West Bank orphanages supported by Islamic charities. State-subsidized Jewish settler-thugs conducting pogroms against Palestinians in Hebron and elsewhere in the Occupied Territories . Widespread sadism practiced by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian detainees. Trashing of Palestinian homes during nightly military incursions in Palestinian towns and villages. Demolitions of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem under the brazen pretext of "illegal construction". Extensive land grab for settlers. And much more.[7]

The Gaza Strip is the place where the self-righteous Israeli sadism has reached new heights. The Strip is densely populated, mostly by descendants of Palestinians expelled in 1948. Well before the Second Intifada, choice Gazan real estate along the beach (about ¼ of the Strip land) was confiscated for a few thousand Jewish settlers. Still, a million and a half Gazan Palestinians had a sort of normal life (under the Israeli occupation) – growing fruits and vegetables, making construction materials and other products for Israeli markets, and working as laborers within the Green Line. Before the second Intifada, very little terror was coming from there to Israel .

However, since the beginning of the Intifada (a year and a half before the first Palestinian rocket landing across the border) the Israeli army embarked on the systematic destruction of the Strip. Incursions were carried out every few weeks and included the destruction of factories and workshops, roads, agricultural land, homes, and whatnot. Access to the Israeli economy was closed. Eventually, desperate Palestinians resorted to shooting Qassam rockets which rarely caused casualties or real damage but served as an excellent pretext for Israeli military "action".

And then Sharon carried out his brilliant propaganda move of "disengagement" from Gaza . The whole operation was marketed as a demonstration of Israeli good will. The Israeli settlements in Gaza were in fact removed, but the army was redeployed around the Strip, and the Strip was converted to a large scale prison. The economic strangulation of Gaza was tightened to a draconian extent, especially after the Hamas government suppressed the Israel-cum-USA sponsored Fatah putsch. (I am no fan of Hamas but their government was democratically elected by the Palestinians) Hamas offered several times to conduct negotiations with Israel , based on 1967 borders, but the offers were under-reported and ignored. It is likely that such negotiations would have stopped the Qassams, but Israeli leaders appeared interested in continuation of the violence. The Qassams created a great opportunity for more "poor little us" propaganda, and a great pretext to wiggle out of legitimate international requests to stop the massive colonization of the West Bank .

Finally, a truce with Hamas was negotiated. Since the beginning of the truce defense minister Barak commenced preparations for a massive attack on Gaza [8]. On November 14th the working truce with Hamas was deliberately broken on Barak's orders, by killing several Hamas fighters. A totally predictable Palestinian response ensued - cancellation of the truce and a barrage of rockets. The barrage was used by Barak as a pretext for that large-scale operation, including the slaughter of hundreds of people in Gaza with missiles deployed from airplanes. This muscle-flexing is an obvious part of Barak's and Livni's forthcoming election campaign, at the price of hundreds of Palestinian casualties, and several Israeli ones (as meanwhile Palestinians have improved their aim). In a forthcoming ground operation Israeli soldiers are also likely to pay with their lives for this form of electioneering.

Do you know what mainstream Israelis make of the above? 'We, Israelis, in an act of self-sacrifice, removed poor Jewish settlers from their "homes" in the Gaza Strip and gave Palestinians a chance for free and happy existence. But the Palestinians spurned our peace efforts and preferred instead to pursue their addiction to "throwing Jews to the sea." Gaza could have become a new Singapore , but the Gazans chose instead to shoot rockets at Israelis.'

The disengagement was thus an act of brilliance on part of that evil genius, Sharon. He provided mainstream Israelis with a sweeping moral absolution. Palestinians "disappointed" them. Now the Israeli leaders can do anything they wish to Palestinians. Do not expect a squeak of public protest from the Israeli Jewish public, except for a tiny minority of "self hating Jews" like yours truly.

Believe me, these Jewish-Israeli mainstreamers are not natural-born monsters. They just do not know any better. Alas, I used to be one of them. Then one day I stumbled, more or less by chance, into the West Bank with a group of activists. I acquired some Palestinian friends and finally understood the criminality of the treatment of the Palestinians by my country. And I learned to ignore the daily portion of preposterous propaganda which is provided to my compatriots by the media in lieu of "news". But how to convince my compatriots not to listen to this propaganda? I do not know.

Then again, it does not have to be so. In addition to four million or so stateless Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories , there are about a million Palestinians living within the Green Line and carrying Israeli citizenship. Despite the very considerable internal racism, many of these Palestinian citizens are deeply involved in Israeli society. You meet Arab doctors and nurses in Israeli hospitals, Arab students in Israeli universities etc. There is quite an element of coexistence and cooperation between Jews and Arabs there. But a mainstream Jewish-Israeli colleague who might treat his or her Arab co-worker perfectly decently would still be proud of a soldier son who is "serving the country" in the Occupied Territories . He or she would still repeat racist propaganda about the "demographic danger" to the State of Israel from its Arab citizens, and believe the bloodthirsty speeches of generals and ex-generals on the TV. And vote for any of the three major Zionist parties, Likud, Kadima and Labour, whose leaders have been dedicated ethnic cleansers over the years.

For the sake of both nations living in this country, this outrage must be stopped. It must be stopped by pressure from outside, because at present within Israel there are no significant political forces to oppose it. Please do something, my friends, and do it urgently. And kindly ignore the endless "negotiations" between our government and the powerless Palestinian Authority, they are just a cover for more ethnic cleansing. If you do not believe me, come and see the massive settlement construction in East Jerusalem and West Bank . And the walls of the Palestinian ghettos.

Victoria Buch is an Israeli academic and anti-Occupation activist.

[1] From "The Pity of It All", a book by Amos Elon on German Jews.
[2] From a review of Makdisi's book: `Palestine Inside Out`, by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, IMEU 2008.
[3] From "Righteous Victims" by Benny Morris
[4] Collected by Stephen Lendman, see http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/15348)
[5] >From The Birth of Israel : Myths and Realities,by Simha Flapan
[6] The full text of the interview can be found in the Counterpunch website
[7] *Information can be found, e.g., in the Occupation Magazine, the website of Israeli anti-Occupation activists.
[8] "Disinformation, secrecy and lies: How the Gaza offensive came about" By Barak Ravid, Haaretz http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1050426.html

2009-01-03T21:56:00.000-08:00

Father Guido Sarducci on the Benefits of Being an Artist

2009-01-01T20:27:00.000-08:00

CreativeFreedom.org.nz Launches With Campaign Against Guilt Upon Accusation Laws In NZ

The Creative Freedom Foundation launches today in New Zealand to unite artists who are against the removal of New Zealander's rights through proposed changes in Copyright law, done in the name of protecting creativity.

The Creative Freedom Foundation's first campaign is against a proposed law in New Zealand: Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act. S92 assumes 'Guilt Upon Accusation' – cutting off internet connections and websites based on accusations of Copyright infringement, without evidence or even a trial.

Foundation Co-Founder and Director, Bronwyn Holloway-Smith says: "The result of this law could be that one rogue employee or even one virus infected computer could bring down a whole organisation's internet and it's highly likely that schools, businesses, hospitals, and phone services will be harmed by this."

On 28 February 2009, S92 will come into effect in New Zealand if there is no positive action on the part of the Government to change it. To date the Government has shown support for the bill and, unless there is major public protest against it, it will "roll over" in to law.

Although the Creative Freedom Foundation has just launched, it is already gathering steady support. Artist, Curator, and PHD Candidate Dan Untitled says: "25% of computers are infected with viruses that download and distribute material without the owners knowledge. What if that owner is a school or hospital? Clearly, this situation is ridiculous. Laws like this are outrageous, and as an artist I don't want them done in my name. For me, the decision to support the CFF was clear cut. What they are doing is fantastic – I fully endorse it, and encourage others to as well."

A petition against Guilt Upon Accusation laws in New Zealand has been started by the Foundation. It can be signed on their website: http://www.creativefreedom.org.nz/

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2009-01-01T20:10:00.000-08:00

Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal #15

Dear Friends & Readers,

Ringing in the new year / new govt., we are extra pleased to announce the release of Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal #15 Print Issue #27

With cover art by Brandon Downing and featuring new work by Aidan Thompson, Amber Nelson,Andrew Michael Roberts, Bernard Noël, Blake Butler, Brian Henry, BrigitteByrd, Cal Freeman, Corey Mesler, Dan Thomas-Glass, Erin Lyndal Martin,George Kalamaras , Gregory Howard, Heather Green , Jamey Dunham, JessNeiweem, Jill Magi, Joanna Ruocco, Jonah Winter, Kim Gek Lin Short, KristenE. Nelson, Kristi Maxwell, Laynie Browne, Mark Cunningham, Megan Martin,Michael Clearwater, Michael Rerick, Patrick Morrissey, Peter Davis, RaeGouirand, Rauan Klassnik, Richard Froude, Rob Cook, Sara Veglahn, and Tim Roberts.

Cheers, Editors, Tarpaulin Sky Press

http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/

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2009-01-01T19:58:00.000-08:00

Epiphany

By David Swanson

Congress will be greeted on day 1 this year by a march of war dead on Capitol Hill.

The word epiphany comes from a Greek word meaning to manifest or to show. In Christian tradition the Feast of Epiphany is celebrated on January 6th, marking the day when the three wise men from three foreign lands visited the baby Jesus, the last of the 12 days of Christmas. Epiphany is also used to mean a sudden realization, comprehension, or inspiration.

This January 6th may be the 12th day of Christmas, but it is also the 1st day of Congress. I encourage you to join those of us who plan to greet Congress with a March of the Dead, making manifest and showing to those responsible the hidden meaning of wars in three foreign lands: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. Perhaps a few members of Congress will even have an epiphany.

Long-distance genocide rarely results in so much as a shoe thrown in someone's face, and the dead are by definition unheard from, and by the U.S. corporate media unheard of. We have killed over 1.2 million people in Iraq alone in the past six years alone, and their presence is almost never felt on Capitol Hill. We aim to change that, beginning on the first day of the new year. We plan to march with death masks and carrying the names of those killed during the illegal U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and those killed with U.S. weapons during Israel's illegal assault on Gaza.

We will demand that the 111th Congress end the terror of war, remove U.S. troops and mercenaries from Iraq and Afghanistan, stay out of Iran, Pakistan, and Syria, and cease providing weapons for the destruction of Palestine. We will create a presence on Capitol Hill that it will be impossible to ignore. Perhaps we'll even bring 12 drummers drumming.

Of course, we could stay home, watch football, and assume that on January 20th a new president will end all the wars. But there are a couple of problems with that. First, presidents are very reluctant to end wars and do not legitimately and should not have the power to make war, which belongs to Congress. Second, the incoming president has refused to commit to exiting Iraq, has proposed escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has maintained silence in the face of Israel's assault on Gaza. While President Elect Obama endlessly promised to end the war in Iraq when he was a candidate, he also made clear that he would only commit to a partial withdrawal to be completed over 16 months, he would not specify how large that withdrawal would be, and he would back off it if military commanders told him to.

Obama intends to keep on at the Pentagon the same Secretary of War who worked for President Bush. Bush negotiated an unconstitutional treaty with Iraq committing to a withdrawal from all cities, towns, and localities by July 2009, and complete withdrawal from Iraq by the end of 2011. Bush's (and soon to be Obama's) top military commanders have already said publicly that they will violate those and other requirements of the treaty. Obama's only comments on the treaty have been in favor of it, but he has never expressed support for actually adhering to it.

So, by all means have hope, and believe in change. But believing in change is not nearly as important as changing our beliefs and aligning our beliefs with meaningful action. Most actions are more meaningful the more people who join in them.

To join the March of the Dead on January 6, write to arrestbush@gmail.com and visit http://afterdowningstreet.org/marchofthedead

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2008-12-28T03:55:00.000-08:00

NICK CAVE

Recent Soundsuits

January 8 - February 7, 2009

Opening Reception: Thursday, January 8, 2009, 6:00 - 8:00 PM

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Recent Soundsuits, Nick Cave's second solo exhibition at the gallery. A diverse selection of the highly imaginative, mixed-media, wearable sculptures, Soundsuits, for which Cave has become well-known, are on view starting January 8th.

A row of suits of woven hair in vibrant colors, from fluorescent orange and lime green to royal blue, lines one wall in the back gallery. These creatures with their amorphous and undefined bodies are apparitions hovering between a human form and an abstract painting. A U-shaped runway situated opposite these figures features another diverse group of Soundsuits, some with sleeker, formfitting bodysuits comprised of found fabrics and materials including buttons, sequins and beads that are combined and sewn together into intricate patterns and designs. Metal armatures adorned with a range of objects including painted ceramic birds, flowers, brass ornaments, and strands of beads, top the figures and serve as headdresses that activate the sculpture and provide a visual and textural contrast to the soft bodysuit.

Soundsuits, named for the sounds made when the sculptures are worn, are as reminiscent of African and religious ceremonial costumes as they are of haute couture. A multitude of references bring to mind not only disparate cultural traditions but they also highlight Cave's diverse background and artistic training. Cave studied and danced with Alvin Alley and created his own clothing line which he featured in a shop he opened and ran for ten years. He is as interested in fashion and cultural, ritualistic and ceremonial concepts as he is in politics, a domain that has always been part of his work as demonstrated by acts of collecting and reconfiguring elements and concealing the identity, race, and gender, of those who wear his suits. Rendering them faceless and anonymous the suits help these individuals transcend the political realm in order to enter the realm of dreams and fantasy.

Here Cave also presents a number of new sculptures that break from his traditional form, the Soundsuit. Comprised of recognizable ready-made objects these sculptures are overt political statements in themselves.

http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001ssQUlpZbqETJUDRT7kbrCuITN9QDkPGtmLbtnpaN3gJ95yXkg8Ew-yMxdMmz3ht8kOCiYb4LzdKwJx38v8rmgtIh9S-AzK8NeTpXFtZY1ZhP3ymR-abq4A==

2008-12-16T01:57:00.000-08:00

White Fungus Recommends The Real News

White Fungus would like to take the opportunity to wish everyone a merry Xmas and to recommend The Real News. Started by veteran Canadian documentary and television producer Paul Jay in 2007, The Real News is the flagship show for Jay's vastly ambitious news network, Independent World Television (IWT). Fed-up with the standard of television news in post-911 America, Jay launched the network in 2005 to directly challenge the existing structure and economic model of daily newsgathering. IWT and The Real News are 100% audience funded and refuse any corporate or government money.

Jay wants to one day take on media giants like Fox or CNN and says he could launch a global independent news network for $25 million made up of $50 donations from 500, 000 subscribers. It's a mountainous task but Jay and IWT have already raised more that $5 million, enough to set-up headquarters in Toronto and New York with four satellites, including an AP news feed, beaming in news stations from around the world.

The Real News is now being broadcasted daily, available on the Internet and, thanks to various deals with cable networks, soon to be seen in millions of homes throughout North America. Featuring in-depth analysis by its team of seasoned journalists, on-the ground reports from international hot spots by local journalists and interviews with luminaries including Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, The Real News is riveting and essential viewing for anyone interested in world politics.

Check out some clips...

Empire Classic or Empire Lite?

Pepe Escobar is a journalist based in Sao Paulo, Brazil who is an analyst and correspondent for The Real News. He also writes a column for Asia Times Online titled The Roving Eye. His prescient article Get Osama! Now! Or else... was published less than two weeks before the 911 attacks. In this clip Escobar discusses the imperialistic leanings of Obama's foreign policy.

Naomi Klein on China and the Olympics

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, talks to Paul Jay about China's Super Capitalism.

Gore Vidal On The US Media and Society

Legendary author Gore Vidal is key advisor to The Real News. In this clip Vidal talks to Paul Jay about the relationship between media and society in the US.

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2008-12-12T04:06:00.000-08:00

Tamas Revesz, Reflections, 2004

Hungarian Cultural Center presents

Random Utterness 2

an exhibition presenting works by Mara Bodis-Wollner, Andras Borocz, Andrea Dezso, Shandor Hassan, Thomas Lendvai, Anna Pasztor and Tamas Revesz

Curated by Agnes Berecz

December 11, 2008 – February 6, 2009

Opening reception on Thursday, December 11, 6-9pm

The Hungarian Cultural Center is pleased to present Random Utterness 2, the second installment of a group exhibition featuring the recent work of New York-based artists of Hungarian origin. The exhibition brings together photographs, videos, artist’s books, photo-based installations, and objects.

Appearing in the interiors of homes, the female protagonists of Mara Bodis-Wollner’s videos reenact socially conditioned rituals of intimacy and perform the everyday rituals of domesticity. Fragments of conversation appear in moving images that are evocative of classical still-life painting and propose a cinematic reclamation of the patriarchal order of painting.

Anna Pasztor’s video, Why didn’t you trust me?, reflects her interest in dance, movement and choreography. The rhythm of New York and the pace of female bodies create a visual and physical montage, both contrasting and connecting the bodies and the urban environment they inhabit.

Andrea Dezso, Retreat, McSweeney’s cover, Issue 23András Böröcz’s book, Home Sweet Home, is based on his recent series of the meticulously executed Outhouse Drawings. Böröcz uses the profane motif of the outhouse as an allegory to reflect on the collective, historical memories of Eastern Europe. Merging fiction and reality, his outhouses replace objects and humans. They appropriate images as disparate as Auschwitz or TV-watching couples, bringing together the banal and the traumatic.

As Borocz’s Eastern European fables, Andrea Dezso’s much-acclaimed embroideries, "Lessons From My Mother", also play on traditions of allegory. Her absurd texts, fusing maternal warnings, superstitions, and proverbial wisdoms, are accompanied by diagrammatical drawings and sign-like fragments. The color embroidered texts and images act as emblems of culture stereotypes, and recall the moralizing tradition of allegorical representation. Dezso’s cover design for the 23rd issue of McSweeney’s demonstrates her commitment to handmade craft as well as her interest in design and visual patterns. Using paper cutouts, embroidery, drawing, painting, collage, and calligraphy, Dezso explores the relationship between text and image, the handmade and the digitally reproduced.

Thomas Lendvai’s objects and installations use practices iof architecture and construction. Revising the agenda of Minimalism, Lendvai’s large-scale installations and serial, geometric sculptures reconfigure the spatial perception of the viewer as a constantly shifting experience. His site-specific installation, created for the space of the Hungarian Cultural Center, slants two mobile walls to construct an architectural form which appears to be in a state of collapse and disintegration.

Shandor Hassan’s photo-based installation presents a selection from his photographic project, Collection of Objects. Based on the sterile-looking studio photographs of Hassan’s personal collection of objects found on the street, the installation satirically explores the obsessive practice of collecting, the often arbitrary taxonomies of archives, and the alienating effects of object display. The phantom-like afterimages appearing within the frames of Tamás Révész’s photographs explore the medium of photography as a screen that both exposes and conceals its subject. Révész’s most recent Colors of Spirit, a digitalized sequence of photographs of kaleidoscopic images—through its references to 19th century visual devices—historicizes his current explorations of visual spectacle and optical illusion.

www.culturehungary.org

2008-12-10T16:20:00.000-08:00

Image: photo of a spread from Current featuring a work by Richard Killeen,

The temptation of Saint Anthony, 2007

New Book Of Australian And New Zealand Contemporary Art

Recently edited by Art & Australia is Current: Contemporary Art from Australia and New Zealand, a mammoth tomb of recent art sure to entertain, enliven and enrage with its selection of artists - a necessary pitfall for any project seeking to be definitive. But it’s nice to see a big book with New Zealand artists in it and it’s encouraging to see so many of these artists making traction in Australia. Parochialism aside, the book is a useful tool for entering into Australian art for the non-jet setters amongst us in the arts community. Many of the Australian artists will be familiar to audiences here from recent shows including Mikala Dwyer, Hany Armanious and Tracey Moffatt. As well as including a large selection of New Zealand artists – including Richard Killeen, Peter Robinson, et al, Michael Stevenson, Yvonne Todd, Andrew McLeod and Michael Parekowhai - there are articles by Justin Patton and Robert Leonard, who’s kept up his involvement in New Zealand art since moving to Brisbane to become Director of the IMA.

To find out more about Current check out:

http://www.artandaustralia.com.au/current.asp

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2008-12-04T17:54:00.000-08:00

US prepares for "continuity of government"

Why Robert Gates is a Terrible Pick

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation.

The appointment of Robert Gates -- a vocal critic of Obama's Iraq withdrawal plan who will undoubtedly shape policy-- is alarming.

Barack Obama not only had the good judgment to oppose the war in Iraq but , as he told us earlier this year, "I want to end the mindset that got us into war." So it is troubling that a man of such good judgment has asked Robert Gates to stay on as Secretary of Defense -- and assembled a national security team of such narrow bandwidth. It is true that President Obama will set the policy. But this team makes it more difficult to seize the extraordinary opportunity Obama's election has offered to reengage the world and reset America's priorities. Maybe being right about the greatest foreign policy disaster in U.S. history doesn't mean much inside the Beltway? How else to explain that not a single top member of Obama's foreign policy/national security team opposed the war -- or the dubious claims leading up to it?

The appointment of Hillary Clinton, who failed to oppose the war, has worried many. But I am more concerned about Gates. I spent the holiday weekend reading many of the speeches Hillary Clinton gave in her trips abroad as First Lady, especially those delivered at the UN Beijing Women's Conference and the Vital Voices Conferences, and I believe she will carve out an important role as Secretary of State through elevating women's (and girl's) rights as human rights. As she said in Belfast in 1998, "Human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights." That is not to diminish her hawkish record on several issues, but as head of State she is in a position to put diplomacy back at the center of U.S. foreign policy role -- and reduce the Pentagon's role.

It's the appointment of Gates which has a dispiriting, stay-the-course feel to it. Some will argue, and I've engaged in my fair share of such arguments, that Gates will simply be carrying out Obama's policies and vision. And a look at history shows that other great reform Presidents -- Lincoln and Roosevelt -- brought people into their cabinets who were old Washington hands or people they believed to be effective managers. Like Obama, they confronted historic challenges that compelled (and enabled) them to make fundamental change. But Gates will undoubtedly help to shape policy and determine which issues are given priority. And while Gates has denounced "the gutting" of America's "soft power," he has been vocally opposed to Obama's Iraq withdrawal plan. And at a time when people like Henry Kissinger and George Shultz are calling for steps toward a nuclear weapons free world (a position Obama has adopted), Gates has been calling for a new generation of nuclear weapons.

For Obama, who's said he wants to be challenged by his advisors, wouldn't it have made sense to include at least one person on the foreign policy/national security team who would challenge him with some new and fresh thinking about security in the 21st century? Isn't the idea of a broader bandwidth of ideas also at the heart of this ballyhooed "team of rivals" stuff?

Powerful establishment voices have been quick to praise the continuity, expertise and competence of Obama's team. But if President-elect Obama is really serious about changing the global perception of the U.S. -- not just in Paris, London, Tokyo and Berlin but in the Middle East, the global South and the developing world -- he would worry less about reassuring establishment stakeholders and the representatives of the tried, the true and the failed, and make some appointments that represent some genuinely new departures and new directions. Instead, as one longtime observer of U.S.-Russian relations reminded me the other day, in Gates, a veteran Cold Warrior, you have "an establishment figure with the longest institutional involvement in our failed Russia policies of anyone in DC."

And with all the talk about the importance of foreign policy experience, why is there so little attention paid to the quality of that experience? (Let's not forget, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had quite a bit of Washington experience.) What we need after eight ruinous years is experience informed by good judgment. What is gained by bringing in people who traffic in conventional wisdom and who have shown the kind of foreign policy timidity that acquiesced to disasters like the Iraq war?

Obama may believe that Gates will give him the cover and continuity he needs to carry out his planned withdrawal from Iraq. But so could many others, including Republicans like Chuck Hagel who, at least, opposed the Iraq war. By keeping Gates on Obama worsens the Democratic image on national security -- sending the message that even Democrats agree that Democrats can't run the military. And even more troubling for our future security, Gates has sounded ominous notes about how more U.S. troops can pacify Afghanistan. Speaking only days after a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the U.S. was caught in a "downward spiral" there, Gates asserted that there is "no reason to be defeatist or underestimate the opportunity to be successful in the long run." Extricating the U.S. from one disastrous war to head into another will drain resources needed to fulfill Obama's hopes and promises for economic growth, health care, energy independence and crowd out other international initiatives.

Of course, Obama still has an opportunity to change the mindset that got us into Iraq and, more important, he has a popular mandate to challenge and change failed policies and craft a smarter security policy for this century. But he's sure making his work tougher by bringing people like Robert Gates on board.

From Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/109298/why_robert_gates_is_a_terrible_pick/

2008-12-04T17:22:00.000-08:00

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greetings all! The 3rd Annual Hamilton Underground Film Festival Begins 11th and 13th December 2008

YOU ARE INVITED!

11th December 2008
Waikato Museum
1 Granthen Street
6pm -7:30pm

First programme screenings of films
$5 or $10 with DVD
13th December 2008
Auteur House
555 Victoria Street

8pm-10pm +10pm onwards @ Dreadnought Spitoon and
Platform 01 Gallery at 467 Victoria street
free event

8pm Film screening (part two of the museum selections)
9pm The Parasitic Fantasy Band
Live expanded cinema;16mm film manipulations and projections
www.thedustpalace.co.nz/

BLUE TIDE, BLACK WATER is an investigation into the world's minute reactions. One of the most basic of chemical interactions, heat applied to liquids, is transformed from a scientific investigation to a study of the intricate details of the natural world. The resulting microcosmic environment seems a lush, rich primordial soup.

Then at the Dreadnought Spitoon and Platform 01 Gallery at 467 Victoria street...(AFTER 10PM TIL LATE)

The Trons -HAMILTON'S PREMIER ROBOT BAND-W/LIVE ROBOT MADE VIDEOS http://www.myspace.com/thtrons

Der Kranks -28 STRINGED WONDERS OF THE EASTERN SECTORS-MUSIC http://66.51.114.213/

Internet link with Cataluña HUFF at 12 pm (Midnight hahhahahhhahhaaa!!!!!)
simultaneous screening of the 4TH Hamilton Underground Film Festivals in Cataluña, Europe.
http://www.prioratcentredart.cat/

Live streaming of a selection of HUFF films + INTERNET LINK SITE
www.mogulus.com/huff

Huff website-
www.circuit47.com/hufffilms included in the museum screening:Passion by Peter Caldwel- a super 8 mini-epic documenting a controversial crucifixion which actually took place in Hamilton's own garden placeCampbell Farquhar's fantastic and surreal Moth UfOs from Jed Towne's Cloudscapes of Aoteaoa http://www.digitalwallpaper.net/Tinkernicks by Mike Crook & Rosie Percival Blue Tide, Black Water Eve Gorden & Sam Hamilton (Parasitic Fantasy Band - http://www.thedustpalace.co.nz/the-parasitic-fantasy-band/eve-gordon+++++++++++++++MANY MANY MORE -SCREENING DURATION APPROX 1 HOUR-STARTS AT 6PM PROMPT as do the Auteur house events -

2008-11-26T14:55:00.000-08:00

Noam Chomsky On What Next After The Election

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This Is Change?
20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama's White House

By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet

A who's who guide to the people poised to shape Obama's foreign policy.

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton's White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama's team.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn't lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."

Amid the euphoria over Obama's election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton's boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.

Under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled as part of what Noam Chomsky described as the "New Military Humanism." Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and "free trade" deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing countries. Clinton accelerated the militarization of the so-called War on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the East Timorese.

The prospect of Obama's foreign policy being, at least in part, an extension of the Clinton Doctrine is real. Even more disturbing, several of the individuals at the center of Obama's transition and emerging foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama has already charted out several hawkish stances. Among them:

-- His plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan;

-- An Iraq plan that could turn into a downsized and rebranded occupation that keeps U.S. forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future;

-- His labeling of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist organization;"

-- His pledge to use unilateral force inside of Pakistan to defend U.S. interests;

-- His position, presented before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that Jerusalem "must remain undivided" -- a remark that infuriated Palestinian officials and which he later attempted to reframe;

-- His plan to continue the War on Drugs, a backdoor U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Central and Latin America;

-- His refusal to "rule out" using Blackwater and other armed private forces in U.S. war zones, despite previously introducing legislation to regulate these companies and bring them under U.S. law.

Obama did not arrive at these positions in a vacuum. They were carefully crafted in consultation with his foreign policy team. While the verdict is still out on a few people, many members of his inner foreign policy circle -- including some who have received or are bound to receive Cabinet posts -- supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Some promoted the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. A few have worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, whose radical agenda was adopted by the Bush/Cheney administration. And most have proven track records of supporting or implementing militaristic, offensive U.S. foreign policy. "After a masterful campaign, Barack Obama seems headed toward some fateful mistakes as he assembles his administration by heeding the advice of Washington's Democratic insider community, a collective group that represents little 'change you can believe in,'" notes veteran journalist Robert Parry, the former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter who broke many of the stories in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

Read the rest at Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/audits/107666/this_is_change_20_hawks%2C_clintonites_and_neocons_to_watch_for_in_obama%27s_white_house/

2008-11-26T14:46:00.000-08:00

Image: Fiona Connor Outside In 2008

In Breaking News...

Currently transforming the Open window space at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery , is Fiona Connor’s project Outside In.

Connor instigated three actions for Outside In: the daily delivery and display of front pages from the Taranaki Daily News, The New Zealand Herald and The Dominion Post; the extension of the terracotta tiles from the adjacent footpath into the space and the removal of the door that usually separates the window space from the gallery café entrance.

Together these gestures enhance the permeability of the space, engaging with a conversation about the relationship an institution like the Govett Brewster Art Gallery has with the outside world.

As Connor describes, “Again and again when I get invited to show in a space I just want to bring the outside in, fill the gallery with the streets that surround it.”

Open Window curator Melanie Oliver says “Outside In is being enacted over an opportune time - that of the build up, resolution and subsequent discourse around both the American and New Zealand elections.”

Connor is a practicing artist who lives and works in Auckland . She is a founding member of Gambia Castle a gallery co-operative located on K Rd.

Open window is the site of a series of contemporary art projects featuring a range of emerging artists offering art to the public 24/7. The works engage with the commercial nature of the shop-front window and the attributes particular to window gazing.

Outside in is the sixth installation in the Open window series and will continue until 30 November.

http://www.govettbrewster.com/

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2008-11-19T15:13:00.000-08:00

Electronic Super Highway - Nam June Paik

Pecha Kucha Night Wellington #04

PKN_WGN_04 // 25 November 2008 // Paramount Cinema, 25 Courtenay Place, Wellington City // doors open 7.30pm / start 8.20pm // $9 on the door (cash only)

Come and join us for our last Pecha Kucha Night in Wellington for the year 2008.

Pecha Kucha - which originated in Tokyo - is a unique, rapid-fire format in which each speaker shows 20 images, each for 20 seconds. With each presentation lasting just 6 minutes and 40 seconds, the audience experiences an exhilarating variety of ideas and projects.

We put together a great line-up of speakers for you to enjoy:

Craig Stevens // Scientist // Environmental turbulence - or how to capture ephemera for a living
Suzanne Tamaki // Fashion designer // about natives in fabulous frocks
Heather Galbraith // Curator // A wish list for an exhibition which may never happen (here)
Roger Walker // Architect // 'IRREVERENT INSERTIONS' ?
Simon Hames // Prop maker // about making props and world of wearable art costumes
Duncan Sarkies // Writer
Natalie Robinson // Oceanographer // A life on ice
Christopher Kelly // Architect // the coral reef -the aggregation of an architecture culture
Dick Whyte // Musician
Rhys Morgan // Animator // The Gravy: making a TV show about creative New Zealanders
Andy Morley-Hall // Photographer // Witnessing The Woolshed
Tim Bollinger // Writer/Cartoonist // On the life and philosophy of W.B. Sutch
Ron Hanson // Writer // Nam June Paik the legendary Korean multi media artist
Kent Blechynden // Photographer // capturing musicians

check out our website for updates:
http://www.pechakucha.co.nz/

Check out The Life and Times of Walter Benjamin from the last Wellington Pecha Kucha at the City Gallery....

2008-11-15T19:52:00.000-08:00

DENNIS KUCINICH GRILLS NEEL KASHKARI ON BAILOUT

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Wall Street's Bailout is a Trillion-Dollar Crime Scene -- Why Aren't the Dems Doing Something About It?

by Naomi Klein, The Nation.

Washington's handling of the bailout is not merely incompetent. It may well be illegal.

The more details emerge, the clearer it becomes that Washington's handling of the Wall Street bailout is not merely incompetent. It is borderline criminal.

In a moment of high panic in late September, the U.S. Treasury unilaterally pushed through a radical change in how bank mergers are taxed -- a change long sought by the industry. Despite the fact that this move will deprive the government of as much as $140 billion in tax revenue, lawmakers found out only after the fact. According to the Washington Post, more than a dozen tax attorneys agree that "Treasury had no authority to issue the [tax change] notice."

Of equally dubious legality are the equity deals Treasury has negotiated with many of the country's banks. According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals, "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending -- for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc. -- is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used.

Then there is the nearly $2 trillion the Federal Reserve has handed out in emergency loans. Incredibly, the Fed will not reveal which corporations have received these loans or what it has accepted as collateral. Bloomberg News believes that this secrecy violates the law and has filed a federal suit demanding full disclosure.

Despite all of this potential lawlessness, the Democrats are either openly defending the administration or refusing to intervene. "There is only one president at a time," we hear from Barack Obama. That's true. But every sweetheart deal the lame-duck Bush administration makes threatens to hobble Obama's ability to make good on his promise of change. To cite just one example, that $140 billion in missing tax revenue is almost the same sum as Obama's renewable energy program. Obama owes it to the people who elected him to call this what it is: an attempt to undermine the electoral process by stealth.

Yes, there is only one president at a time, but that president needed the support of powerful Democrats, including Obama, to get the bailout passed. Now that it is clear that the Bush administration is violating the terms to which both parties agreed, the Democrats have not just the right but a grave responsibility to intervene forcefully.

I suspect that the real reason the Democrats are so far failing to act has less to do with presidential protocol than with fear: fear that the stock market, which has the temperament of an overindulged 2-year-old, will throw one of its world-shaking tantrums. Disclosing the truth about who is receiving federal loans, we are told, could cause the cranky market to bet against those banks. Question the legality of equity deals and the same thing will happen. Challenge the $140 billion tax giveaway and mergers could fall through. "None of us wants to be blamed for ruining these mergers and creating a new Great Depression," explained one unnamed Congressional aide.

More than that, the Democrats, including Obama, appear to believe that the need to soothe the market should govern all key economic decisions in the transition period. Which is why, just days after a euphoric victory for "change," the mantra abruptly shifted to "smooth transition" and "continuity."

Read the rest at Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/107000/wall_street%27s_bailout_is_a_trillion-dollar_crime_scene_--_why_aren%27t_the_dems_doing_something_about_it_/

2008-11-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

Australia Responds to the New Zealand Election

Jill Singer in the Herald Sun

New Zealand Change As Good As A Holiday

NEW Zealanders have voted for change - a leap from Left to Right - with all the enthusiasm and reasoning power of a doped slug.

As the rest of the world struggles with the excesses of capitalism and free-market worship, our dearly beloved neighbours suddenly think a former investment banker can make them ruch, as well as thuck.

Think of the dazzling US election - then think of its antithesis, and you have the Kiwis' "defining moment".

You might not have noticed their election campaign, let alone Saturday's "historic" and "fascinating" (as claimed by Sky News) election.

Don't feel guilty -- it resembled a domestic squabble over whose turn it was to put out the garbage, only without the heat and sense of urgency.

New National Party PM John Key managed to oust Labour's Helen Clark without offering any major policy differences.

Come his victory speech though, and the inevitable conservative patois heated up - John Key had been a poor little boy who became very, very rich all on his own as an individual.

As John Key beamed with unbridled self-satisfaction, and thanked those who voted for him, his wife and two children were left to shuffle nervously at the back of the stage like shags on a rock; his young son endearingly clad in shorts and runners, his daughter the image of a teenager on the verge of rebellion.

No doubt this self-important squillionaire eventually remembered them, but it was well after TV broadcasts had exhausted any manufactured interest in the smug one's lacklustre vision for NZ's future.

Bring Barack Obama to mind -- strip him of charisma and vision, then douse him in White King -- and you've got NZ's new PM.

This wasn't about desperately needed change, as in the US, but change for change's sake.
New Zealanders just got bored.

Instead of doing the sensible thing about it, like reading a good book or moving to Australia (which 11 per cent of Kiwis have already done) they decided to turn out in their tens and vote for a new government.

The leader of the NZ Maori Party had a stab at analysing his country's collective thinking by suggesting the nice weather (mild and dry with a light breeze) got people off their sofas and into voting booths.

Apparently it rained last election and so they "just stayed home and swutched chunnels on their tullys".

Such passion.

Outgoing PM Helen Clark warns that NZ could now "go up in flames in a bonfire ignited by the Right wing of politics".

Her concern is justified. The global financial crisis is yet to swamp New Zealand, but a hard rain is surely coming.

When it does, New Zealanders will be demanding more, rather than less, government intervention in their vulnerable economy.

They might well come to miss Helen Clark, the woman who gave them nine years of relative economic and social stability (steady growth and improved family benefits), and who made her small nation's voice heard (no to invading Iraq, yes to tackling climate change) on the international stage.

I might be proved wrong. I hope I am.

taken from the Herald Sun: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24625807-5000117,00.html

2008-11-10T17:24:00.000-08:00

Invisible scapes

An exhibition by Ai Sasaki, Wellington Asia Residency Exchange Programme artist-in-residence

20–28 November 2008, Toi Pōneke Gallery

Watch Ai Sasaki at work from 1–3pm and 4–7pm from 20–21 November and 10-4pm on 24 November. All welcome.

Toi Pōneke Arts Centre
61 Abel Smith Street
Te Aro, Wellington

Gallery hours: 9am–7pm, Monday–Friday

About the exhibition:

Invisible scape is a series of landscapes influenced by the plants and patterns that Ai has discovered during her time in New Zealand. Using royal icing, a hard white icing made with icing sugar and egg whites, Ai makes intricate landscapes made all the more astonishing to the viewer when the medium of their construction is revealed. After a work is completed, it is erased and vanishes, so that the landscape returns into the memories of the people who viewed it. Ai is interested in the way in which our daily surroundings are informed by things invisible to the eye: the air, time and temperature but also the energy of other living things. In Invisible scape, Ai attempts to preserve, albeit momentarily, those landscapes that cannot be seen.

About the artist:

Born in 1976, Ai Sasaki graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Design from Kanazawa College of Art in 2001 and has had a number of solo exhibitions in Osaka. Ai Sasaki was selected for the WARE programme on the advice of Japanese curator Hisako Hara.

About the residency:

During her three month stay (8 September – 4 December 2008), Ai has been living at the Bolton Street Cottage and working each day in her studio at Toi Pōneke. WARE is an exciting new initiative which is forging important creative and cultural links between Wellington and the Asian region. Japanese artist Ai Sasaki is the third artist in the Wellington Asia Residency Exchange (WARE) programme. WARE programme organised by Wellington City Council in partnership with Asia New Zealand Foundation.

For more information please contact Frances Speer, Arts Advisor, City Arts, Wellington City Council, frances.speer@wcc.govt.nz or 803 8711

2008-11-10T02:29:00.001-08:00

2008-11-10T02:10:00.000-08:00

Rose Beauchamp and Helen Moulder

The Legend Returns and CYNTHIA'S CHRISTMAS AT CIRCA

Circa Theatre is pleased to announce that Miss Cynthia Fortitude and Miss Gertrude Rallentando will be gracing our stage in Circa Two this Christmas with not ONE, but TWO presentations - The Legend Returns and A Vote for Cynthia, under the banner of CYNTHIA’S CHRISTMAS AT CIRCA. This is the fifth time that Miss Fortitude, described by the Mongolian Morning Tribune as “the greatest living soprano of all time” has returned to us. In The Legend Returns she will be accompanied on the piano by her indefatigable and long-time companion Miss Gertrude Rallentando, but Miss Rallentando will not appear in A Vote for Cynthia - Miss Fortitude’s enthusiastic bid to become Prime Minister one day.

CYNTHIA’S CHRISTMAS AT CIRCA is a unique opportunity for theatre goers to experience Miss Fortitude as an opera singer AND aspiring prime minister and although the longsuffering Miss Rallentando only appears in one show, she has a great influence on the happenings of the other. Every week from Thursday to Sunday, The Legend Returns and A Vote for Cynthia will have two nights each, but alternating each week, so fans will need to check the dates.

This is the first time in the history of Circa Theatre, that two completely different shows involving the same character will be played in repertory. In 1983 King Lear and The Dresser were presented on alternate nights, but although some of the actors were the same, the characters in each play were quite different.

Helen Moulder and Rose Beauchamp have been touring New Zealand with The Legend Returns for over ten years now, in fact this could be seen as their tenth anniversary celebration. They have even taken the show to San Francisco and an hilarious recording of the show is often broadcast on National Radio. A Vote for Cynthia on the other hand is a new piece, first presented this year at Circa on three Sunday nights in July. Since then it has been touring the country, playing in theatres, country halls, wineries and other small spaces.

The Legend Returns

A heartwarming and wickedly funny look at a fading opera diva and her longsuffering accompanist

This double-act, written by Helen Moulder in collaboration with Rose Beauchamp and Michael Wilson, who also directed the piece, defies description. The celebrated opera singer and musical snob, Cynthia Fortitude, with her expressively silent and long suffering companion/accompanist, Gertrude Rallentando, devote their lives, so Cynthia says, to "taking our concerts of serious music to all corners of the globe …. mainly third world countries." After tumbling their way through snippets of arias, anthems to virgins and other vocal meanderings, they premiere their triumphant first and unfinished opera - "Stan" - with all its gods, goddesses, atomic particles, cloned sheep and Pinus Radiata forests. This is Monty Python, Edna Everidge, Hinge & Bracket and Victor Borge - all rolled into one.

The Legend Returns, premiered at Circa at the 1998 Fringe Festival. The show arose from the characters Helen and Rose developed over many years in Hens’ Teeth. Since the premiere, The Legend Returns has toured New Zealand with Arts on Tour, played at various festivals, been broadcast many times on Radio NZ, (in fact is one of their most popular requests) has had seasons at Josie's Cabaret (San Francisco) 1999, Centrepoint Theatre 2001, the Court Theatre 2002, a return sell-out season at Circa 2003, and in 2004, played in Taupo, Hastings and Hamilton. It has just returned from a tour of Nelson and Marlborough.

LENGTH One hour 20 mins. No interval.

A VOTE for CYNTHIA
Cynthia Fortitude for Prime Minister!

With Helen Moulder as Cynthia. After an illuminating experience on Paekakariki Beach, Miss Fortitude has decided to form a political party and stand for parliament. Come and hear for yourself Cynthia’s Five Point Plan for the Glorious Transformation of New Zealand Culture and Society. With Operatic Highlights by Verdi, Handel, Puccini, Haydn, Donizetti, Sullivan and Miss Fortitude herself. Written by Helen Moulder and Alison Holcroft and directed by Jeff Kingsford-Brown, A Vote for Cynthia will be available in 2009 for homes, halls, libraries, shearing sheds, galleries, fundraisers etc. Call Helen in 0274 987 580 or email: opera@xtra.co.nz

WILLOW PRODUCTIONS

Supported by Creative New Zealand, Willow Productions was formed in 2002 by Helen Moulder, Sue Rider and Sir Jon Trimmer for the creation of Meeting Karpovksy, which opened at the Court Theatre in November 2002. This was followed by a season at Circa in 2003 and a tour of New Zealand in 2004. In 2006 they wrote and produced Playing Miss Havisham, a solo piece for Helen Moulder, which has toured NZ extensively and has recently returned from a tour of Queensland. In 2007 Willow Productions created Cynthia Fortitude’s Farewell – her first, with the Wellington Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Michael Vinten with Helen Moulder and Jeff Kingsford-Brown. They also tour The Legend Returns.

DATES:
NOVEMBER
Thur 20 7pm A Vote for Cynthia
Fri 21 7pm A Vote for Cynthia
Sat 22 7pm The Legend Returns
Sun 23 4.30pm The Legend Returns
Thur 27 7pm The Legend Returns
Fri 28 7pm The Legend Returns
Sat 29 7pm A Vote for Cynthia
Sun 30 4.30pm A Vote for Cynthia

DECEMBER
Thur 4 6pm A Vote for Cynthia
Fri 5 7pm A Vote for Cynthia
Sat 6 7pm The Legend Returns
Sun 7 4.30pm The Legend Returns
Thur 11 7pm The Legend Returns
Fri 12 7pm The Legend Returns
Sat 13 7pm A Vote for Cynthia
Sun 14 4.30pm A Vote for Cynthia
Thur 18 7pm A Vote for Cynthia
Fri 19 7pm A Vote for Cynthia
Sat 20 7pm The Legend Returns
Sun 21 4.30pm The Legend Returns

2008-11-10T01:58:00.000-08:00

Gerry Fialka In Wellington

Howdy! Lorenzo's old buddy Gerry Fialka will be in Wellington to do some film workshops at BlowFest.

Years ago he founded the club that supports film makers who use PXL cameras... and using them to create mischief of all sorts.

He's asked us to spread the word. I have yet to meet him but i'm going to try to stop by at least one of the workshops.

Take care

Kedron

American media ecologist Gerry Fialka presents an interactive workshop and screening of films by subversive artists and pranksters who inflict brand damage to expose corporate manipulation of America’s mediascape. Fialka probes Marshall McLuhan’s Laws of Media in correlation with revolutionary artists (including Craig Baldwin, Barbie Liberation Organization, Billboard Liberation Front and Bob Dobbs) providing new critical perspectives with surprise, humour and the thrill of transgression. Join this agitprop examination of the motives and consequences of the jammer’s collaboration with the jammee.

Includes: Includes: JAM Z JAMMERZ: SEE, REAPPEAR & BREATHE (14 minutes, 2008) - As agitprop archaeologists, Mark X Farina & Gerry Fialka’s provocative video probes how the 50’s music/comedy icons John Cage (noise as music, side effects in silence), Korla Pandit (the Hammond Organ as drum, fake identity) and others laid the groundwork for contemporary culture jammers.

WHO'S JAMMIN' THE JAMMERS?
DATE: Sat 15 November TIME: 1:30pm - 3:00pm
LOCATION: Museum Building Theatrette

2008-11-05T13:45:00.000-08:00

2008-11-05T12:52:00.000-08:00

Tim Robbins Has To See A Judge To Be Able To Vote

Real Change Depends on Stopping the Bailout Profiteers

Naomi Klein

To understand the meaning of the U.S. election results, it is worth looking back to the moment when everything changed for the Obama campaign. It was, without question, the moment when the economic crisis hit Wall Street.

Up to that point, things weren't looking all that good for Barack Obama. The Democratic National Convention barely delivered a bump, while the appointment of Sarah Palin seemed to have shifted the momentum decisively over to John McCain.

Then, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed, followed by insurance giant AIG, then Lehman Brothers. It was in this moment of economic vertigo that Obama found a new language. With tremendous clarity, he turned his campaign into a referendum into the deregulation and trickle down policies that have dominated mainstream economic discourse since Ronald Reagan. He said his opponent represented more of the same while he stood for a new direction, one that would rebuild the economy from the ground up, rather than the top down. Obama stayed on this message for the rest of the campaign and, as we just saw, it worked.

The question is now whether Obama will have the courage to take the ideas that won him this election and turn them into policy. Or, alternately, whether he will use the financial crisis to rationalize a move to what pundits call "the middle" (if there is one thing this election has proved, it is that the real middle is far to the left of its previously advertised address). Predictably, Obama is already coming under enormous pressure to break his election promises, particularly those relating to raising taxes on the wealthy and imposing real environmental regulations on polluters. All day on the business networks, we hear that, in light of the economic crisis, corporations need lower taxes, and fewer regulations - in other words, more of the same.

The new president's only hope of resisting this campaign being waged by the elites is if the remarkable grassroots movement that carried him to victory can somehow stay energized, networked, mobilized - and most of all, critical. Now that the election has been won, this movement's new mission should be clear: loudly holding Obama to his campaign promises, and letting the Democrats know that there will be consequences for betrayal.

The first order of business - and one that cannot wait until inauguration - must be halting the robbery-in-progress known as the "economic bailout." I have spent the past month examining the loopholes and conflicts of interest embedded in the U.S. Treasury Department's plans. The results of that research can be found in a just published feature article in Rolling Stone, The Bailout Profiteers as well as my most recent Nation column, Bush's Final Pillage.

Both these pieces argue that the $700-billion "rescue plan" should be regarded as the Bush Administration's final heist. Not only does it transfer billions of dollars of public wealth into the hands of politically connected corporations (a Bush specialty), but it passes on such an enormous debt burden to the next administration that it will make real investments in green infrastructure and universal health care close to impossible. If this final looting is not stopped (and yes, there is still time), we can forget about Obama making good on the more progressive aspects of his campaign platform, let alone the hope that he will offer the country some kind of grand Green New Deal.

Readers of The Shock Doctrine know that terrible thefts have a habit of taking place during periods of dramatic political transition. When societies are changing quickly, the media and the people are naturally focused on big "P" politics - who gets the top appointments, what was said in the most recent speech. Meanwhile, safe from public scrutiny, far reaching pro-corporate policies are locked into place, dramatically restricting future possibilities for real change.

It's not too late to halt the robbery in progress, but it cannot wait until inauguration. Several great initiatives to shift the nature of the bailout are already underway, including bailoutmainstreet.com. I added my name to the "Call to Action: Time for a 21st Century Green America" and invite you to do the same.

Stopping the bailout profiteers is about more than money. It is about democracy. Specifically, it is about whether Americans will be able to afford the change they have just voted for so conclusively.

Naomi Klein is the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, now out in paperback. To read all her latest writing visit http://www.naomiklein.org/

Taken from Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-klein/real-change-depends-on-st_b_141122.html

2008-11-04T02:21:00.000-08:00

Prank Call On Sarah Palin In Which She Believes She's Talking To Nicholas Sarkozy

2008-11-04T00:54:00.000-08:00

Is The Voting System Ready? - Mark Crispin Miller on Democracy Now

Part One

Part Two

Tell John McCain to FIRE MIKE CONNELL!

by Mark Crispin Miller

Mike Connell, whom Stephen Spoonamore has named as Karl Rove's top election fixer,has been trying desperately to forestall a deposition in Ohio, using an expensive troika of GOP lawyers to quash the subpoena ordering him to sit down, under oath, and answer questions about how he's helped Bush/Cheney "win" since Florida 2000.

Connell's vigorous resistance only reconfirms what Spoonamore has said: that he's the man who (among other things) built and ran the system whereby Bush & Co. stole Ohio in 2004.

And Connell is now working for McCain, once more putting his peculiar talents at the service of the GOP, so as to force Bush/Cheney 2.0 on a national majority that doesn't want it. Word is that Connell has already set things up in six swing states, and has been tasked with running the subversive work there on Election Day.

Here, below, is a new call from Velvet Revolution, calling for McCain to fire Mike Connell, and to do it now.

Surely this is a no-brainer, since McPalin's team has lately pledged itself to honor an ideal of "honest and open elections," even setting up a sort of board of (seemingly) respectable "advisers," mostly (clueless) academics, to provide themselves (McPlain's team) with what looks like a civic seal of approval.

All kidding aside, it's absolutely crucial that we spread the word, right now, about Mike Connell's work for John McCain--because the Bush Repubs have just launched a big propaganda push to charge the Democrats with planning to steal this election.

Here's a piece on FOX News, re: the (non-existent) threat of "voter fraud" among Ohio's early voters:

http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/10/07/campaign-dynamics-fraud-potential-impacted-early-voting/comments/#AddComments

And here's a good example of the new Republican attempt to cast ACORN as a major perpetrator of such "fraud":

http://www.thebulletin.us/site/index.cfm?newsid=20128338&BRD=2737&PAG=461&dept_id=576361&rfi=8

(As noted yesterday, this effort just got helped along by the Democratic SoS in Nevada, who seems to want to see Obama lose.)

As I've been saying for years (that's no exaggeration, sadly), such pre-emptive and projective jive by the Republicans ought to have been disabled long ago, and would have been, if the Democrats had only told the truth about, and made an effort to confront, the vast election fraud and vote suppression by the Bush machine. But they did not; and so the GOP is trying
now to fill the gap with tons of perfect bullshit.

So let's get out the word about Mike Connell, and McCain's dependence on him for a "victory" next month--and that way we can put McBush's bull about Obama's "voter fraud" plot in its proper context, and thereby completely wipe it out.

MCM

Taken from OpEdNews: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Tell-John-McCain-to-FIRE-M-by-Mark-Crispin-Mille-081009-51.html

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Gore Vidal to Obama: DO NOT CONCEDE!

Gore Vidal et al to Obama: Do Not Concede!

An Open Letter to Senator Obama and the Democratic Leadership:On Election Night, DO NOT CONCEDE!

"Eight years is too much" is how Barack Obama explained why we must win the coming election and begin to restore America. But, even if we receive the most votes, will we win the election?DO NOT CONCEDE!

Both of the last two elections were conceded by the Democratic presidential candidate. The 2004 election was handed to George Bush while votes were still being counted in closely-fought Ohio. While the 2000 election was contested to the Supreme Court, it too was ultimately conceded to Bush "for the good of the country."Some good.

Numerous politicians, investigators and authors, including Robert Kennedy, Jr., agree the 2004 election was stolen, not only in Ohio but in several other battleground states. Tactics included purging of legitimate voters and the use of nefarious voting software--but when even these actions did not yield the required numbers, Republican election officials simply changed the vote tallies in several states, all without a peep from the Democratic Party.DO NOT CONCEDE!

In the time since the last general election the public has learned much about these scandals, which have led some states to reject electronic touchscreen voting (and which caused the infamous Diebold voting machines corporation to hide behind a new corporate name,) yet the Democratic Party seems to have learned nothing.THREE STRIKES AND WE'RE OUT!If we cannot afford another Republican administration, we cannot afford a third concession in the face of election fraud. Already there is evidence of massive fraud such as voter purging and caging of Democratic voters, and "flipping" of votes in early voting on electronic touchscreen machines. It is reasonable to once againexpect further manipulation on election night by some Republican operatives and election officials, as was seen in 2004; should we also expect our Democratic Party leaders and candidates to repeat history, by once again conceding in the face of such blatant fraud?Senator Obama, we need you, our Party and all candidates to stand firm, come what may on election night. You ask us to work for you, contribute to you--and to have your back; we ask that you promise to have our back: We ask that you PLEDGE TO STAND FIRM, AND NOT CONCEDE THE COMING ELECTION in the face of election irregularities, no matter how long it takes to contest such fraud, while there remains any doubt as to any part of the process. Be assured, Democratic voters will be more--not less--energized if we see you promise to stand firm.

Senator Obama, if there is any reason to contest the election, DO NOT CONCEDE!

Signed: (Titles for identification purposes only)
Gore Vidal, Author
Bob Fitrakis, Professor of Political Science, Columbus State Community College, Attorney; Editor of The Free Press (freepress.org)
Harvey Wasserman, Senior Editor, FreePress.org, Author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth
Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, Author of Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Election
Tim Carpenter, Director, Progressive Democrats of America
Mimi Kennedy, Chair, National Advisory Board, Progressive Democrats of America
David Swanson, Co-Founder, After Downing Street
Eric Bauman, Chair, Los Angeles County Democratic Party
Garry S. Shay, Member, Democratic National Committee (CA) Lead Chair, Rules Committee, California Democratic Party
Jo Olson, MD, Co-Chair, Progressive Caucus, California Democratic Party
Mal Burnstein, Co-Chair, Progressive Caucus, California Democratic Party
Marcy Winograd, Executive Board representative, California Democratic Party, 41st AD, Former Chair, Progressive Democrats of Los Angeles
David Earnhardt, Filmmaker, "Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections"
Don Goldmacher, Chair, Election Integrity, Progressive Caucus, California Democratic Party
Michael Jay, Progressive Democrats of America, Special Projects, Former Delegate, California Democratic Party, 42nd AD
Sheri Myers, Director, "Wake Up and Save Your Country"
Robert A. Feuer, Former Chairman, Stockbridge, MA Town Democratic Committee
Thomas Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Region 3 Vice Chair, Los Angeles County Democratic Party Chair, Irish American Caucus, California Democratic Party
Howard Jennings, PDA-Virginia, State Co-Coordinator
Sarah Stott, Chapter Chair, PDA-Virginia
Lisa Pease, Co-editor, "The Assassinations: Probe Magazine on JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X"
Cindy Asner, Former Delegate, California Democratic Party, Member, National Advisory Board, Progressive Democrats of America
Julie Lopez Dad, President, Santa Monica Democratic Club, Chair, 41st AD Committee, Los Angeles County Democratic Party
Dr. Bill Honigman, PDA California State Coordinator and Orange County Chapter Leader, Delegate, California Democratic Party, 73rd AD
Linda Milazzo, Senior Editor, OpEdNews.com, Blogger, Huffington Post
Rady Ananda, Senior Editor, OpEdNews.com
Jan Baumgartner, Managing Editor, OpEdNews.com
Cheryl Biren-Wright, Managing Editor, OpEdNews.com
Sherry Healy, Co-Founder California Election Protection Network, Coordinator, Election Defense Alliance
Laura Bonham, Summit County, UT Democratic Party Chairperson
Albert E. Fairchild, Retired Foreign Service Officer
Dorathea Peters, Precinct Captain, Alexandria, VA Democratic Committee

Sign the Petition
http://afterdowningstreet.org/donotconcede

2008-11-02T01:23:00.001-07:00

Gambia Castle presents:

smashed to pieces(in the still of the night)gestures towards habitual actions while leaving the location vague and the event unpredictable

Amit CharanFrancis AlÿsMichael Stevenson

Curated by Laura Preston

7 - 29 November 2008

Opening: Thursday 6 November 6 – 8pmScreening and talk at 6pm / musical entertainment afterwards

Lawrence Weiner has recently commented that for him the concept of being an artist is to be 'perplexed in public'. Taking images from the world, photographic and still, cinematic and moving collude to take the form of a belief that reality can be indexically traced and knowable. These traces become more insightful and in turn more perplexing when an understanding of the image as a concept in time is conveyed, particularly when the serial nature of the event is emphasised and its sequential experience confused. Looking back to the man who stopped time in pictures, the motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge act as instants systematically subtracting duration from the event. These early studies of the medium’s potential were based on photographing the same activity from various angles simultaneously. By setting up an alternative reading of the event as a visually discontinuous sequence he presented a fragmented perception of the world, in what musician Karlheinz Stockhausen would later consider a ‘directionless time-field’. Muybridge’s technique in this sense can be read as symptomatic of an early modernity. Stockhausen was also interested in utilising the exponential perplexity of modernity by breaking up and dissecting duration to show it as a malleable material, in this case how sound can undergo a series of transformations independent of its starting point. An extension of this, and what Stockhausen and Muybridge’s work suggests, is that the indexical nature of the image enables reflection on the contradictions of modernity’s workings. In technology’s ability to capture reality, or rather our unreflexive want to innocently believe in its trace of truth, it both realises and captures the failure to perceive the irreducibility of the moment. This paradox signals the collapse of modernity’s ideal for progression towards certainty.

It is also here that the image can be seen as a placeholder creating a space to recognise that all is fiction. It is only in building up arbitrary signs, using short-cut codes, putting frames in motion that objectivity or rather a resemblance of it is formed. For Ludwig Wittgenstein the photographic image was a departure point for many of his philosophical ideas, and at the same time practical proof that for an object to be based in the world and linked to it as perceptual fact then it is reliant on serial or frequently repeated images. To connect Wittgenstein and Weiner then is to consider that the indexical quality of the image produced by the camera is similar to the malleable, sculptural workings of language, in that these signifying systems can only make comparisons to, extrapolate on, fragment what is experienced and what might possibly be seen. There is much to be puzzled by in images that narrate the concept of time. These images operate reflexively like interruptions in the scale and form of an event, de-familiarising what is understood or anticipated about a moment in time. The artists in the exhibition consider the fiction that arises, pausing to lend images the multi-sided, multi-directional dimensions of the event. This series of small yet expansive works draws on the historical ideas and temporal perplexities that can come from a state of process, rehearsal and reoccurrence. In narrating history as a multi-directional sequence of images emphasis is placed on dis-covering the simultaneous workings of time, and implicating the role of the artist as the perplexing narrator. The stories within each work connect through their traces of undermining modernity’s valuing of economic progression and political probabilities, which in turn reveals the disparate yet extensive links between art, political history and social happening. Reflecting upon their status as images, placeholders generating an act of retelling, the works in the exhibition leave the event unresolved, in a fictional state of constant rehearsal. Like the striptease its come-on is never consummated. Though if it were, what indexical image would be captured if we have the power to continually see things differently?

http://www.gambiacastle.net/

2008-10-30T19:31:00.000-07:00

Bill Moyers on the "Real News" Being Lost In The Spectacle of The Election

STOLEN ELECTIONS AND MEDIA BLACKOUTS
An Interview With Mark Crispin Miller

by Carolyn Baker

(Burlington, Vermont: October 24, 2008) Shortly before a public lecture presented at Champlain College, I sat down with Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Studies at New York University, to ask him a number of questions regarding stolen elections-a subject Miller has researched and written about extensively. Greg Palast, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Bev Harris, Steve Rosenfeld, Bob Fitrakis, and Lynne Landes, have provided monumental contributions to the subject of election fraud, each with their own unique styles and methods of targeting the issue. Mark Crispin Miller's 2005 book Fooled Again, impeccably documents the stealing of the 2004 election, and Loser Take All, a 2008 collection of essays on stolen elections incorporates the research of other investigators of election fraud such as Robert Kennedy, Jr; Bob Fitrakis, and Steve Rosenfeld.

Generously, Professor Miller gave me both time and disturbing insights regarding the upcoming election of 2008.

CB: In progressive circles there are countless issues that attract people, and I'm curious about what drew you to fight for clean, legitimate, democratic elections in the United States as opposed to some other issue.

MCM: What immediately drew my interest was the overwhelmingly obvious fact that the 2004 election was stolen. We already know the 2000 election was stolen because the Supreme Court intervened so flagrantly, but I think the 2004 election was stolen on an even grander scale. What struck me was not just that fact, but no less, the general refusal to admit it which was evident not only throughout the corporate media but on the left as well. Even now I can't quite get over how the left fell into line and dismissed the evidence as "conspiracy theory" on the basis of very sloppy reporting by very good reporters in progressive circles.

So the immediate reason why I got into it was because of this staggering miscarriage of proper civic procedure and a betrayal of democracy. The more I thought about it, the more I also came to believe that this is the most important issue, precisely because we can make no progress on any other front if we don't have the right to pick our representatives, and more importantly, reject those who don't represent our interests. That's vital, so I often say in my talks that regardless of what your issue is, you're kidding yourself if you think you can get anywhere when government is able to act with impunity.

CB: So what are the maybe top half-dozen pieces of evidence that the 2004 election was stolen?

MCM: Well primarily, there is the audit of the vote in 18 counties of Ohio that was carried out by Richard Hayes Phillips who published Witness To A Crime which is the result of three years labor by Richard and his researchers who literally scrutinized every single ballot that was cast in 18 Ohio counties. This book is scrupulous, precise, and explicit-fully illustrated and comes with a

CD with illustrations of ballots and how they were tampered with.

CB: Who published this?

MCM: Well this is an interesting story. This book was supposed to be published by Kent State University Press, but when Phillips handed in the manuscript, they told him that it was twice as long as it should be and that they couldn't afford illustrations. This was not their original agreement. Phillips told them that without illustrations, the book isn't convincing, and he then decided to self-publish. Nevertheless, it's a superb book, beautifully written, but it has sold to date, 900 copies. He put his life savings into it and he's been trying to promote it, and as you can see, it's highly specific and technical. Therefore, it's a sort of an unwieldy smoking gun, but it is a smoking gun because they discovered that John Kerry was variously robbed of two hundred thousand votes in those 18 counties alone. There's no argument with this. In the illustrations you can see ballots with stickers placed over the square beside John Kerry's name, thousands of ballots that were marked so that they would be over-votes when people voted on them. The range and the ingenuity of the fraud tactics are astonishing. After Phillips did his research, 55 boards of election out of 86 counties in Ohio, in defiance of a court order, destroyed all or part of their ballots-that is 1.5 million ballots. That was a malicious destruction of evidence.

CB: Where can one purchase this book?

MCM: You can only get it on Phillips' website.

CB: What evidence do we have currently, in addition to the voluminous evidence that you've provided in your books, that the 2008 election may already be stolen?

MCM: I do resist putting it that way with all due respect to Greg (Greg Palast) and Bobbie (Kennedy). I don't like to say that it's already been stolen because it's demoralizing, but I will say that they (the Republicans) have made enormous strides toward a McCain victory already.

CB: In what way?

MCM: Well, election theft is a two-part process. On the one hand is vote suppression. The purpose of vote suppression is to shrink the electorate before the fact. In the last four years or so they have moved somewhat away from fraudulent manipulation of ballots cast toward grand pre-emptive tactics meant to prevent people from voting in the first place. So within the realm of vote suppression, they have managed to purge literally millions of names from the voter roles. In New York state alone, we learned last week, 1.5 million voters have been purged without their knowledge. That's New York; it's not even a swing state.

There was a report, I think on Daily Kos, that the Justice Department has managed to effect the purge of 13 million votes. I don't know how many of those are legitimate purges because a lot of peoples' names shouldn't be on the list because they're dead or something. But between legal purges conducted by the Department of Justice and illegal purges of the electronic voter roles carried out by various partisan secretaries of state, and voter caging and other tactics, they've managed to do a great deal to shrink the pool of voters who would vote against McCain. That kind of thing will require a lot of fighting and amassing evidence which means that there's got to be a lot of video interviews, polls, phone calls placed to the hotlines-what I'm saying is that this grand stroke of dis-enfranchisement before election day has to be exposed and evidence thereof collected and made available.

But that's not the only thing you do when you steal an election. You also engage in electronic fraud. Here, we have the testimony of an incredibly important person named Stephen Spoonamore who is the star witness in a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation in Ohio. He's a conservative Republican and a former McCain supporter, but most importantly, he is a prominent expert in the detection of computer fraud.

CB: Yes, Spoonamore and his testimony are featured in Lynn Landes newly released documentary "Stealing America Vote By Vote" which I recently watched and for which you, Professor Miller, were a consultant.

MCM: Yes, and Spoonamore has named the principal players in the Bush-Cheney election fraud conspiracy. Specifically, he has named Mike Connell, who has been helping Karl Rove steal elections since Florida, 2000. Connell is the head of a company called GOVTECH Solutions. If you check out a piece by Rebecca Abrahams on the destruction of White House emails, which is actually about much more than that, you'll learn that there's a list made up by Spoonamore that he composed after a very troubling meeting of all the online entities and companies that Connell runs or is involved with. It's a huge menu of partisan and theocratic [Christianist, pro-life] outfits-all part of the same terrifying matrix of disinformation, subversion, and sabotage. Connell told Spoonamore that his motive for helping Bush-Cheney steal elections was "to save the babies". As progressives, this is something we have to wrap our minds around because it turns out that most of the people who are involved in the management of high-tech fraud are Christianists. These people are fanatics who hate the majority. The majority doesn't buy their pro-life agenda; the majority isn't going to sit still for bans on contraception. The only way around that, in their eyes, is to subvert the electorate.
There's an enormous corporate component to this too. One of the defendants in the RICO suit is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because they have spent to date $400 million on front organizations to defeat candidates for the judicial bench nationwide who have an insufficiently pro-business agenda. So we have a really unholy marriage here of theocratic extremists and ruthless corporate interests.

CB: Hmmm. So how do you spell "fascism"?
Both your website, News From The Underground and Truth to Power recently reported the October 4 interview with Naomi Wolf in which she noted that police departments are mobilizing around the country for unrest in relation to the economic crisis and the election, and of course she mentioned what is now common knowledge, namely, that a brigade of troops has returned from Iraq to assist with "crowd control." In the light of this and your research on stolen elections, I'm wondering how obvious you think a stolen election would have to be in order for massive unrest to erupt.

MCM: I think at this point it would be quite obvious just because Obama's lead is so big, and McCain is doing so poorly. All the standard indicators suggest that the race is over and should be over. I think, and I believe Naomi would agree with this, that all this terrifying preparation for crackdown can only fail if there's a sufficiently widespread mass resistance movement. I have always thought that there's a lot more dissatisfaction and distrust around our last few elections than we think there is. The press and the Democratic Party are so blind to it that we tend to think that nobody cares. I don't think that's true; I think a good half of the country is suspicious.

CB: Well, that reminds me that I saw you recently on Free Speech TV presenting a lecture at University of California at Santa Barbara discussing stolen elections, and you suggested that there's kind of an addiction in this society to voting even when we know our vote may be meaningless as if we have a hopeless attachment to the belief that we have legitimate, democratic elections in the United States. Would you say more about that?

MCM: Yes, in all this talk about voting, it's important to acknowledge that we have fettishized the ballot box and overestimated voting as if it were the only instrument available to us for democratic action. It's not the only instrument-there are all kinds of things we can and should do; however, I do think that voting is a fundamental and necessary instrument, but it's not really a democratic action if there isn't popular control and oversight. We have a long way to go before we have a democratic voting system. What we actually have is a ritual-the same as in Iraq. People voted there too!

Precisely because we have fettishized voting we are often that much less able to face the fact that the whole process has been subverted just as surely as it is subverted in closed societies. It's very hard for Americans to wrap their minds around this because it's a tremendous blow to our self-image and our exceptionalism. I don't think that the general public has as much trouble facing that as the establishment and media do.

CB: Last week CNN reported the story of former GOP operative, Allen Raymond who wrote the book How To Rig An Election. What do you think about CNN's reporting of the story?

MCM: The book is actually about vote suppression in New Hampshire in 2002. The context for this is that Republicans had lost control of the Senate in 2002 as a result of the defection of Jim Jeffords. There's strong evidence that they then stole a number of Congressional elections as in Colorado, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. One of the things they got caught for doing was a phone-jamming scheme in the four cities of Southern New Hampshire which prevented the unions from getting out the Democratic vote. Allen Raymond was a hired gun and became a patsy who went to prison. After doing his time, he wrote the book, but he doesn't really talk about election rigging, and all he ends up saying is that he was part of a culture that would do anything to win and that both parties are guilty of such behavior-perfectly harmless stuff. He doesn't mention, for example, that the phone-jamming operations were paid for by Jack Abramoff with two checks from the Choctaw Indians. That's interesting because it ties the two scandals together.

The reason he gets to go on CNN is that he's a much more palatable witness to wrongdoing than I would be. Raymond's book is worth reading, but it certainly doesn't compare with Richard Phillip Hayes' book.

CB: You've just released Loser Take All: Election Fraud And The Subversion Of Democracy which is a compilation of essays on stolen elections, edited by you. In that book you offer a Twelve-Step Program for taking back the American election process. First, I'm wondering what inspired you to compile and edit this book, and I'd like to hear your twelve steps.

MCM: I was simply tired of hearing people say that there's no evidence of election fraud. There were essays out there that constitute strong evidence as well as studies that could be done to make this case, so I collected a number of pieces and asked the authors to polish them up because I wanted to make available a collection of these writings within six months of the election because I wanted it all to be in one place.

The overall effect of the collection was necessarily kind of harrowing and possibly demoralizing as this kind of analysis is for people who haven't heard of this stuff which is pretty much everybody because the press hasn't reported it. So I wanted something at the end of the book that would give people a sense of constructive possibility-of what they might fight for to fix the problem.

But the problem can't be solved unless we acknowledge that there is a problem.
Summary: Mark Crispin Miller's Twelve Step Program can be viewed at his News From the Undergroud website. I am deeply grateful to him for his generosity in giving this interview in the midst of a very busy schedule. Subsequently, we discussed our differences regarding our willingness to participate in a rigged election system, my sharing with him my unwillingness, for a plethora of reasons, to cast a vote for a president on November 4. Professor Miller and I have differences on a number of issues, perhaps the most fundamental, although we did not discuss it, my contention that the values of Western civilization itself have created not only irreparable corruption in the American election system, but have contributed to planet earth's triple threat: Climate change, energy depletion, and global financial catastrophe and my belief that without the total collapse of empire, humanity will continue to annihilate itself and the earth community. Election fraud, from my perspective, is only one aspect of a planetary affliction that is both ubiquitous and daunting.

Is that a potentially "demoralizing" perspective? Indeed it is if one feels that a solution within the current paradigm of empire is possible. Nevertheless, while I do not believe that the issue of stolen elections trumps all others, I do believe that understanding the scope and severity of electoral corruption is necessary for any individual in pursuit of unmitigated truth-telling. Awakening to the reality of rigged elections in the United States is as essential for inhabiting adult reality as parting with one's belief in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Moreover, awakening from our denial about rigged elections may enable us to penetrate other and more frightening chimeras inherent in empire that not only provide illusions of choice, but threaten to extinguish life on this planet as all of its species have known it.

Mark Crispin Miller is professor of media studies at New York University and the author of the book: Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections. He is known for his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform. His books include Boxed In: The Culture of TV, Seeing Through Movies, and Mad Scientists, a study of war propaganda.

Take from Global Research: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10745

2008-10-23T02:18:00.000-07:00

Republican Cyber Security Expert Talks to Velvet Revolution About How Easily Hackable The US Election Is

It's A Network People....

McCain By....

Here, in this shattering new interview, Stephen Spoonamore goes into harrowing detail about the Bush regime’s election fraud, past, present and–if we don’t spread the word right now–to come. Since he’s the only whistle-blower out there who knows the perps themselves, and how they operate, we have to send this new piece far and wide.

Here Spoonamore tells us that McBush’s team–i.e., Karl Rove and his henchpersons– have their plan in place to steal this next election: by 51.2% of the popular vote, and three electoral votes.
He also talks about the major role played by the Christianist far right in the electronic rigging of the vote.

And he defines our electronic voting system as a major threat to US national security, calling for it to be junked ASAP, in favor of hand-counted paper ballots.

Since Spoonamoore is a Republican and erstwhile McCain supporter, as well as a noted specialist in nosing out computer fraud, his testimony is essential–not only for its expertise, but, no less, for the impact that his views will surely have on those Republicans who have been loath to see what Bush & Co. has done to our election system.

That whole story’s just about to break. In fact, tomorrow there will be a number of articles appearing, on a recent breakthrough in the lawsuit that Spoonamoore’s testimony has enabled, and on other aspects of that all-important case.

Spoonamore says that the GOP wanted e-voting to steal elections but now foreign governments will be hacking and the winner will be determined by the best hackers. He says that if the GOP wins the hacking competition, McCain will win 51.2 percent with three electoral votes over Obama, and it will be a stolen election.

Spoonamoore also makes a crucial point about the people who have been implicated in much of the election theft: “They are religious extremists.” He names those who know about stolen elections, and he insists that the only way to protect this election is with paper ballots, hand-counted.

From News From Underground: http://markcrispinmiller.blogspot.com/

2008-10-23T01:31:00.000-07:00

www.velvetrevolution.us

2008-10-22T19:35:00.000-07:00

Mark Amery’s Weekly Art Column Axed by the Dominion

In line with the continuing decline in arts coverage by New Zealand’s corporate mainstream media, The Dominion has axed Mark Amery’s excellent weekly column. Amery, who is Director of Playmarket, has provided a rare critical voice on art in the capital city these past few years. In fact for many of us in the arts, his column was the only reason to ever pick up The Dominion at all. Amery’s level of local engagement and his willingness to engage in important sometimes controversial issues has made his column instrumental in propelling an arts dialogue forward in this city. This axing not only deprives us of a quality local voice but sends an ominous sign in terms of the future of mainstream arts coverage in this country as our media’s corporate owners continue to look for new ways to cut costs and lower our expectations.

Support Mark and our right to arts coverage in Wellington by writing an angry letter to The Dominion at letters@dompost.co.nz

Or write directly to Tom Cardy tom.cardy@dompost.co.nz and copy to Dominion editor Tim

Pankhurst editor@dompost.co.nz

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2008-10-22T03:12:00.000-07:00

Obama Campaign Accuses McCain, Republicans and the Justice Department of Colluding to Suppress Voters

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America Not Ready to Vote, Says Survey

October 16, 2008 1:35 PM
by Josh Katz

As a highly anticipated Election Day nears, many polling places won’t be able to cope with voting machine breakdowns and other potential problems.

Many States Unprepared for Election Day Problems

The Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause and Verified Voting have released a 190-page report that concludes that “Most states have not adopted laws and procedures that would allow them to effectively address all of the most common election system meltdowns.”

“Is America Ready to Vote? State Preparations for Voting Machine Problems in 2008,” analyzed the performance of all 50 states and the District of Columbia on a five-score scale ranging from “inadequate” to “excellent.” The states were judged on “polling place contingency plans,” “ballot reconciliation,” “paper records,” and “post election audits.”

This year’s tight election races could heighten voting difficulties for a number of states, in addition to the usual suspects of Florida and Ohio, according to Politico. Some experts warn that Colorado, Virginia and Georgia may become possible trouble spots on Election Day. Even though federal and state governments have taken steps since the controversial election of 2000 to prevent a similar occurrence, county election boards are still in charge of most state voting, and their “competence and equipment vary wildly,” Politico writes.

New machines could be problematic in states like Florida, but delays may also be an issue. “To me it's the possibility of the long lines that's the issue,” said Susan McManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

“Is America Ready to Vote?” indicates that the most prepared states overall for the 2008 election are Alaska, California, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina and Oregon. They all received marks of “generally good,” “good,” or “excellent” in most categories. The report gave ten states the worst general overall ratings: Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia. In at least three of the four categories, these states received ratings of “inadequate” or “needs improvement.”

Read the rest at Finding Dulcinea: http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/politics/September-October-08/Many-States-Unprepared-for-Election-Day-Problems.html

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Voter Registration Flashpoints

posted by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 10/20/2008 @ 12:40pm

As we head into the final stretch of the election season, alarming reports of dysfunctional voter registration, purges of the rolls, and possible voter suppression are surfacing weekly, if not daily. The National Campaign for Fair Elections' hotline (866.OUR.VOTE / 866.687.8683) is already receiving roughly a thousand calls a day; while the majority of these are requests for information, some concern problems with registration. The New York Times reports that tens of thousands of voters may have been illegally purged from the rolls in swing states. Other news sources speculate there are 600,000 voters at risk of disenfranchisement in Ohio alone. What goes unreported upon amid all this turmoil is how effective the response has been, and what can still be done.

Take Montana. On October 8th, US District Court Judge Donald Molloy issued a scathing ruling denouncing the state Republican Party's effort to challenge the registration of 6,000 voters: "The timing of the challenges is so transparent it defies common sense to believe the purpose is anything but political chicanery." The Montana Republican Party and its leaders, he wrote, "are abusing the process."

The real danger is that the process itself is flawed. "We have an election system that's exquisitely designed for low rates of participation," says Tova Wang, Vice President of Research for Common Cause. "We're expecting increased turnout and we have a system that's not designed to handle it." While these problems are endemic throughout our fractured electoral system, three states--Virginia, Florida, and Ohio--present both the challenges we face and the measures we might take to solve them. All three are closely contested, and an Obama victory will require every one.

Read the rest at the Nation: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/374010/voter_registration_flashpoints?rel=hpbox

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Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.Posted Jun 01, 2006 5:02 PM

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush — and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in "tinfoil hats," while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as "conspiracy theories1," and The New York Times declared that "there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale2."

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad3 never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote4 — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations5. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states6, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations7. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes8, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots9. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast10.

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. "We didn't have one election for president in 2004," says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. "We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities."

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 200412 — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes13. (See

Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots14. And that doesn't even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House15.

Read the rest at Rolling Stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

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2008-10-21T23:46:00.000-07:00

2008-10-21T04:24:00.000-07:00

Mark Crispin Miller Talks To Bill Moyers About Voter Fraud And The Election

___________________________________________
The Republican voter fraud hoax

by Brad Friedman from the Guardian

Barack Obama and the Democrats are stealing the election. Massive voter fraud is being carried out, even as we speak, by their henchmen, known by the innocuous sounding Association for Community Organisations for Reform Now, or Acorn. Clever bastards.

The only problem? Despite the screaming wall-to-wall coverage of "Democratic voter fraud in 11 swing states" as seen on Fox News and even the once-respectable CNN, none of it's true. None of it.

In just the last week, we've had a phoney stunt raid in swing state Nevada (where Acorn had been cooperating with officials for months, concerning problem canvassers they'd long ago fired); a Republican election official in swing state Missouri tell Fox News that she's being beseiged with fraudulent registration forms from Acorn (in a county where they've not done any registration work since August); a Republican sheriff in swing state Ohio, who, the very next day, suddenly requested the names and addresses of hundreds of early voters (with evidence of exactly zero wrong doing, but lots of Democratic-leaning college student in the particular county, and John McCain's state campaign chair as a partner in the investigation); and a screaming front page headline in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post about a guy who claims he was somehow tricked by Acorn into registering 72 times (but read the article closely to note he by which elections are won, the number of people wrongfully purged can make a difference. We should not tolerate purges that are conducted behind closed doors, without public scrutiny, and without adequate recourse for affected voters," said Wendy Weiser, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center.

Read the rest at Brennan Center For Justice: http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/study_finds_states_purging_millions_of_voters_in_secret_often_erroneously/ says he registered at the same address each time, which, even if true, would allow him - you guessed it - precisely one legal vote.)

It's an old Republican scam, but it's never been carried out with more zeal than this year. The Republicans have been putting so much time, money and resources into the propaganda leading up to this over the last four years, we should have expected no less.

Read the rest at the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/oct/13/election-acorn-voter-fraud

Study Finds States Purging Millions of Voters in Secret, Often Erroneously

Brennan Center Reveals Wild Inconsistencies in Maintenance of Voter Registration Lists—Issues Public Records Requests in 12 States with Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
New York – Today the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law released one of the first systematic examinations of voter purging, a practice—often controversial—of removing voters from registration lists in order to update state registration rolls—click here for report. After a detailed study of the purge practices of 12 states, Voter Purges reveals that election officials across the country are routinely striking millions of voters from the rolls through a process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation. Upon the release of Voter Purges, today the Brennan Center and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law began filing public records requests with election officials in 12 states in order to expose the purges that happened this year.

"Purges can be an important way to ensure that voter rolls are dependable, accurate and up-to-date," said Myrna Pérez, counsel at the Brennan Center and the author of the report. "Far too frequently, however, eligible, registered citizens show up to vote and discover their names have been removed from the voter lists because election officials are maintaining their voter rolls with little accountability and wildly varying standards," Myrna Pérez stated.

According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, between 2004 and 2006, thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia reported purging more than 13 million voters from registration rolls. While the secret and inconsistent manner in which purges are conducted make it difficult to know exactly how many voters have been stricken from voting lists erroneously, Voter Purges finds four problematic practices with voter purges that continue to threaten voters in 2008: purges rely on error-ridden lists; voters are purged secretly and without notice; bad "matching" criteria mean that thousands of eligible voters will be caught up in purges; and insufficient oversight leaves voters vulnerable to erroneous or manipulated purges. The report reveals that purge practices vary dramatically from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, that there is a lack of consistent protections for voters, and that there are often opportunities for mischief and mistakes in the purge process.

"The voter rolls are the gateway to voting, and a citizen typically cannot cast a vote that will count unless his or her name appears on the rolls. Purges remove names from the voter rolls, typically preventing wrongfully purged voters from having their votes counted. Given the close margins

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2008-10-20T03:09:00.000-07:00

28 Million Anti Islam Propaganda Films Distributed In The US

Swing-State newspapers distribute 'terror' videos

Diane Sweet
Published: Saturday September 13, 2008

A 60-minute DVD, titled "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West," is being distributed in millions of newspapers across the country this week primarily in swing states through an advertising purchase by a shadowy group called the Clarion Fund.

Editor & Publisher reports:

"Despite some protests from Muslim and liberal activists, the newspapers -- all hard hit by drops in ad revenue in recent months -- have explained that the DVD does not violate their usual standards; see our exchange with The New York Times below. A spokesperson there said the Times last Sunday inserted 145,000 DVDs in its papers delivered in the following markets: Denver, Miami/Palm Beach, Tampa, Orlando, Detroit, Kansas City, St Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee/Madison. Note: These are all in swing states.

The documentary showcases scenes of Muslim children being encouraged to become suicide bombers, interspersed with shots of Nazi rallies. 'The threat of Radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today,'' reads the sleeve of the DVD. ''But it's a topic that neither the presidential candidates nor the media are discussing openly. It's our responsibility to ensure we can all make an informed vote in November.''

It was shown on Fox News just before the 2006 mid-term elections, and conservative activist David Horowitz screened the film on college campuses during 2007. An article at the group's site, www.radicalislam.org, endorsed John McCain as the strongest candidate this past week, then was pulled down. The DVD carries on-screen text near the outset that it is not indicting most Muslims."

Via Eric Ose, here's a state-by-state list of most of the other 70 newspapers in swing states that have agreed to deliver this dvd to their subscribers:

Colorado - Boulder Daily Camera, Centennial Citizen, Denver Post, Fort Collins Coloradoan, Greeley Tribune

Iowa - Daily Nonpareil, Des Moines Register, Iowa City Press Citizen, Quad City Times, Sioux City Journal

Indiana - South Bend Tribune

Florida - Daily Commercial, Florida Times-Union, Ft. Lauderdale El Sentinel, Ft. Myers News Press, Miami Herald, Ocala Star Banner, Orlando Sun Sentinel, Palm Beach Post, Tampa Tribune, Tallahassee Democrat, St. Petersburg Times, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Michigan - Detroit Free-Press, Flint Journal, Grand Rapids Press, Lansing State Journal

Missouri - Springfield News-Leader

Nevada - Las Vegas Review-Journal/Sun, Nevada Appeal, Reno Gazette-Journal

New Hampshire - Portsmouth Herald News, Union Leader

New Mexico - Clovis News Journal, Hobbs News-Sun, Rio Rancho Observer

Ohio - Columbus Dispatch, Dayton Daily News, Middletown Journal, Morning Journal, Toledo Blade, Youngstown Vindicator

North Carolina - Charlotte Observer, Raleigh News & Observer

Pennsylvania - Bucks Co. Courier Times, Erie Times-News, Morning Call, Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Reading Eagle, The Patriot-News

Virginia - Sun-Gazette, Virginian-PilotWisconsin - Green Bay Press-Gazette, Janesville Gazette, Journal Times, La Crosse Tribune, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Taken from Raw Story: http://rawstory.com/news/2008/SwingState_newspapers_distribute_terror_videos_0913.html

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Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West 'free DVD in the Oregonian

author: flapdoodle

The Oregonian distributes hate-speech DVD.

Re: 'Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West'

The following is a letter I sent to the Oregonian today in response to the Obsession hate video they sent out with the Sunday paper. I encourage others to voice their outrage, provided you too are outraged by this garbage:

'On Sunday, September 28, a free DVD came with the subscription copy of the Sunday Oregonian. The title of the DVD was 'Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West'.

Normally, when a free item, such as a packet of fabric softener or hair conditioner, comes with my newspaper, I make no judgment against the publisher. But this is different.

The free DVD that your newspaper distributed is the most irresponsible, vile, bigoted, dishonest, hate-mongering and ultimately war-mongering piece of propaganda I have seen in many years. You cannot distribute pure hate-speech and pretend that it is the moral equivalent of fabric softener.

In terms of lies, distortions, and race-baiting, this DVD ranks alongside 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' 'Birth of a Nation,' 'Mien Kampf' and 'The Turner Diaries.' To distribute this toxic filth inside a normally responsible family-oriented newspaper is the single most atrocious affront to public decency I have ever seen Portland media.

I will take a moment to address one of the biggest lies contained in this DVD: The U.S toppled the government of Islamic Iran, and installed our own, hand-picked dictator in the 1950's, despite the fact that the Iranians had never threatened or attacked us. Countless thousands of Muslims have been killed by Israel and other U.S. proxies using weapons made and paid for by U.S., in countless Middle-Eastern wars. A minimum of 500,000 Muslim civilians have been killed by our invasions and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which nation ever attacked the U.S. [The 9/11 hijackers were mostly from Saudi Arabia, and none were from Iraq or Afghanistan.]

It is, sadly, the U.S. that is making war against Islam, not the other way around.

There are many, many other untruths within this DVD, but time and space prohibit me from addressing them at this time. Shame on you for promoting ethnic and religious hatred. Unless the Oregonian publishes an apology within the week, please cancel my subscription.'

Taken from Portland Independent Media Center: http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2008/09/380105.shtml

2008-10-19T18:59:00.000-07:00

Came a Hot Sundae: A Ronald Hugh Morrieson Festival

A ONE DAY SCULPTURE Project by Liz Allan

Looking for an art excursion this Labour Weekend? The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and ONE DAY SCULPTURE have the answer.

New Zealand artist Liz Allan is set to commemorate the life and literary works of one of South Taranaki ’s most colourful characters - Ronald Hugh Morrieson.

On Sunday 26 October, Came a Hot Sundae: A Ronald Hugh Morrieson Festival will be a day-long festival held in Hawera, South Taranaki . Featuring films, readings, music, entertainment, an award ceremony and further festivities, the day promises to offer something for everyone.

A renowned author and musician, Ronald Hugh Morrieson lived his entire life in Hawera. He was attributed with forging the genre of Taranaki Gothic through his books The Scarecrow, Came a Hot Friday, Predicament and Pallet on the Floor, all of which except Predicament were made into films in the 1980s.

Morrieson’s novels echo the people, livelihood and milieu of South Taranaki and although he died in 1972, he remains a contentious figure in the region.

The stigma of this uneasy relationship was revealed in 1992 when the author’s family home was demolished to make way for a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.

Curator Melanie Oliver says that for this one day Morrieson becomes the lens through which the stories and shifting identities of the South Taranaki region can be celebrated.

“Morrieson found his characters in the places where people dally – bars, parties, dances, marae – and in this way his approach is perhaps similar to Liz Allan’s own, addressing notions of community, value and exchange.”

By drawing together a range of community groups Allan hopes to provide a space for sharing the stories of South Taranaki people, mingling the real with memories and the fictional.

Allan says “From small town New Zealand to little city Wellington Morrieson’s reputation stretched across the lands, the festival promises to be a celebration of his artistic legacy in all its myriad forms – ONE DAY for all.”

Allan is coordinating this festival as part of ONE DAY SCULPTURE, a New Zealand-wide series of 24 hour, temporary public artworks. ONE DAY SCULPTURE is a Massey University College of Creative Arts, School of Fine Arts , Litmus Research Initiative.

Allan is also the 2008 Govett-Brewster New Zealand Artist in Residence, a partnership with Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki supported by Creative New Zealand.

The festival will include:

Screenings of The Scarecrow at Hawera Cinema 2 (12.40pm and 7.05pm, tickets $7.50)

Music and entertainment in the Hawera Town Square (12 noon – 5pm)

The opportunity to visit the attic where Morrieson’s books were scribed (11am – 3pm)

Readings from Morrieson’s novels at KFC, Hawera (3pm)

Scarecrow dress up competition (1pm in the Hawera Town Square )

A Hawera walking tour map plotting features from the town and Morrieson’s books (available from the Hawera Town Square , 9am – 5pm)

21st anniversary celebration and award ceremony for the Ronald Hugh Morrieson Literary Awards 2008 (7pm at St Joseph ’s Hall, RSVP to pamela.jones@stdc.govt.nz)

Further festivities at Morrieson’s Café and Bar (from 9pm)

Information and maps will be available at the Hawera Town Square on the day.

http://www.govettbrewster.com/

2008-10-18T04:38:00.000-07:00

Naomi Klein talks about the Shock Doctrine at Seattle Town Hall.

2008-10-18T04:32:00.000-07:00

Published on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 by Minnesota Daily
University Student To Plead Not Guilty To Terrorism Charges
by Jon Collins and Alex Robinson

A University student arrested preemptively before the Republican National Convention will be one of the first people prosecuted under a terrorism clause in the Minnesota Patriot Act since it was passed in 2002.

Cultural studies junior Max Specktor smiles Monday after a hearing for the RNC 8 at the Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center in St. Paul. Specktor, along with the rest of the eight, plans to plead not guilty to unprecedented terrorism charges. (Photo: Minnesota Daily)Cultural studies junior Max Specktor is charged with conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.
Monday, Specktor's hearing was postponed until at least November.

Specktor and seven other defendants facing the same charge will be heard together, and face a maximum of seven and a half years of jail time.

The eight suspects, calling themselves the RNC 8, plan to plead not guilty to the charges, defendant Nathanael Secor said.

Max Specktor

As a housemate fried long strips of sweet potato in the kitchen, Specktor sat on the front stairs of his Minneapolis house and dwelled on the prospect of seven-and-a-half years in jail, and the guarantee of cost and worry from a yearlong trial.

Specktor, a graduate of Minneapolis South High School, got involved with activism by planning protests against the Iraq War.

"After doing that kind of work in high school, I was kind of burned out on trying to change something with a big protest," Specktor said. "I was getting into local community work."
He got involved with a now-closed Jackpine Community Center on Lake Street in Minneapolis, where many people were planning protests with the RNC Welcoming Committee, an anti-authoritarian activist group.

"The RNC, obviously I didn't want it to come to my town," he said. "I thought, ‘Wow, maybe this is a chance to learn some skills and build community.' "

The group, which typically fluctuated between 20 and 30 people, took inspiration from mass mobilizations from the "anti-globalization movement" of the late 1990s, like the protests that helped shut down the World Trade Organization's conference in Seattle in 1999.

"I got a lot of inspiration from that," he said. "Our movement, especially the radical anti-war and social justice, needs a big event to keep it going."

The RNC Welcoming Committee wasn't planning any illegal actions, Specktor said; instead they set up housing, meals and legal support for other protesters, some of whom might engage in civil disobedience.

"Basically, we provided the infrastructure for people to survive in the city while they're protesting," he said.

But authorities pointed to the group's website, which urged a strategy called "swarm, seize, and stay" that used civil disobedience to try to shut down the convention.

Civil disobedience, while illegal, can be traced back to the foundation of the United States and is very different from terrorism, Specktor said.

"[Civil disobedience is] consciously making a decision to disobey for a higher purpose," he said. "It's a time-honored tradition that we celebrate in our history books, the people in the civil rights era who sat in at the lunch counters and wouldn't get out of their seats."

Preemptive raids

The weekend before the protests, activists' houses, including Specktor's, were raided by the Ramsey County Sheriff's Department and other law enforcement agencies.

Six members of the RNC Welcoming Committee were arrested Saturday, Aug. 30, while Specktor and another man were arrested the following Monday morning - Sept. 1, the first day of the RNC. Protesters had yet to unfurl the first banner during protests in St. Paul.

During raids, police said they found throwing-style knives, fireworks, a box containing gas masks and lock picking kits, according to the criminal complaint. They also seized activist literature concerning the RNC, maps of St. Paul, paint and electronics, the complaint stated.

After Specktor's arrest, police found a backpack containing a plastic bottle of Mylanta, black gloves, and a paper entitled: "St. Paul and the RNC burn 9/1/08."

In Specktor's vehicle, police found a pry bar, two boxes of firecrackers, five assorted black helmets and a roll of unused caution tape, the police complaint stated. The actions police and authorities took were ridiculous, said Ted Dooley , one of the lawyers representing the RNC 8.

"Anything is a weapon if it is used as a weapon," he said.

The Ramsey County Sheriff's department spokesperson did not return multiple phone calls requesting comment.

After the raids, Specktor was the only one of the RNC 8 who was held in the psychiatric ward of the Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center, he said.

"I was in a cell by myself; the whole time I was only released for an hour to walk along this short hallway and make a few phone calls," he said. "I felt powerless, but I didn't feel threatened."

After three days, he was released after being charged with conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.

read the rest at Common Dreams http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/10/14-0

2008-10-18T04:24:00.000-07:00

Rose Marie Salmon At Daf

Rose Marie Salmon is making these beguiling "sewing machine drawings" using a household sewing machine and has a solo show opening 23 October at Daf106 in Aro Valley

Least said, soonest mended
Daf 109
109 Aro Valley
23 October - 16 November

Here's the blurb....hope to see you at the opening for a beer! This show is a complete group of works which I have had floating around inmy head for a while now. The show is an extension of other work I have donein the past. Mostly I just enjoy making them.I studied painting at Cashmere High School under Ross Gray and MargaretHudson-Ware. Later

I studied printmaking at Hagley Community College.I then figured Fine Arts and university were not for me and went off andstudied Organic Horticulture. I remained interested in making things andhave always had a sewing machine.

I have always worked steadily as an artist I have participated in variousgroup shows and have had five solo shows.In 2004 I was highly commended in the Anthony Harper Award for Contemporaryart at COCA gallery in Christchurch.

I use a household sewing machine to draw the images onto the canvas.I use the qualities of the thread to create areas of sharp line juxtaposedwith chaotic loose hanging thread, which allows the images to be veryformal, and also tumultuous.

I like playing with the idea of traditional Œwomen¹s work¹ which has becomeunhinged in these works.

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2008-10-16T04:26:00.000-07:00

Aldous Huxley interviewed by Mike Wallace (1958)

2008-10-16T04:19:00.001-07:00

America’s Political Cannibalism

By Chris Hedges

It is no longer our economy but our democracy that is in peril. It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class, glimpsed at John McCain rallies, presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash.

As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal and abuse by our ruling class, as the Democratic and Republican parties are exposed as craven tools of our corporate state, as savings accounts, college funds and retirement plans become worthless, as unemployment skyrockets and as home values go up in smoke, we must prepare for the political resurgence of a reinvigorated radical Christian right. The engine of this mass movement—as is true for all radical movements—is personal and economic despair. And despair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus commodities.

Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political system—which is a good description of the American government under George W. Bush. Polanyi wrote that a self-regulating market, the kind bequeathed to us since Ronald Reagan, turned human beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. He decried the free market’s belief that nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market. He reminded us that a society that no longer recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value, ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the foundation for a continued prosperity.

We face an environmental meltdown as well as an economic meltdown. This would not have surprised Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and eventually taught at Columbia University. Russia’s northern coastline has begun producing huge qualities of toxic methane gas. Scientists with the International Siberian Shelf Study 2008 describe what they saw along the coastline recently as “methane chimneys” reaching from the sea floor to the ocean’s surface. Methane, locked in the permafrost of Arctic landmasses, is being released at an alarming rate as average Arctic temperatures rise. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The release of millions of tons of it will dramatically accelerate the rate of global warming.

Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible, as Polanyi predicted, for our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. The continued release of large quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could actually asphyxiate the human species.

The corporate con artists and criminals who have hijacked our state and rigged our financial system still speak to us in the obscure and incomprehensible language coined by specialists at elite business schools. They use terms like securitization, deleveraging, structured investment vehicles and credit default swaps. The reality, once you throw out their obnoxious jargon, is not hard to grasp. Banks lent too much money to people and financial institutions that could not pay it back. These banks are now going broke. The government is frantically giving taxpayer dollars to banks so they can be solvent and again lend money. It is not working. Bank lending remains frozen. There are ominous signs that the government may not be able to hand over enough of our money because the losses incurred by these speculators are too massive. If credit markets remain in a deep freeze, corporations such as AT&T, Ford and General Motors might go bankrupt. The downward spiral could spread like a tidal wave across the country, especially since our corporate elite, including Barack Obama, seem to have no real intention of bailing out families who can no longer pay their mortgages or credit card debts.

Lenin said that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch its currency. If our financial disaster continues there will be a widespread loss of faith in the mechanisms that regulate society. If our money becomes worthless, so does our government. All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators amass millions. Look at Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld. He walks away from his bankrupt investment house after pocketing $485 million. His investors are wiped out. An economic collapse does not only mean the degradation of trade and commerce, food shortages, bankruptcies and unemployment; it means the systematic dynamiting of the foundations of a society. I watched this happen in Yugoslavia. I fear I am watching it happen here in the United States.

Read the rest at Truthdig: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081013_americas_political_cannibalism/

2008-10-15T03:13:00.000-07:00

21st Century Fascism

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2008-10-15T03:09:00.000-07:00

Thousands of Troops Are Deployed on U.S. Streets Ready to Carry Out "Crowd Control"

By Naomi Wolf,

Members of Congress were told they could face martial law if they didn't pass the bailout bill. This will not be the last time.

Background: the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, three to four thousand soldiers, has been deployed in the United States as of October 1. Their stated mission is the form of crowd control they practiced in Iraq, subduing "unruly individuals," and the management of a national emergency. I am in Seattle and heard from the brother of one of the soldiers that they are engaged in exercises now. Amy Goodman reported that an Army spokesperson confirmed that they will have access to lethal and non lethal crowd control technologies and tanks.

George Bush struck down Posse Comitatus, thus making it legal for military to patrol the U.S. He has also legally established that in the "War on Terror," the U.S. is at war around the globe and thus the whole world is a battlefield. Thus the U.S. is also a battlefield.

He also led change to the 1807 Insurrection Act to give him far broader powers in the event of a loosely defined "insurrection" or many other "conditions" he has the power to identify. The Constitution allows the suspension of habeas corpus -- habeas corpus prevents us from being seized by the state and held without trial -- in the event of an "insurrection." With his own army force now, his power to call a group of protesters or angry voters "insurgents" staging an "insurrection" is strengthened.

U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman of California said to Congress, captured on C-Span and viewable on YouTube, that individual members of the House were threatened with martial law within a week if they did not pass the bailout bill:

"The only way they can pass this bill is by creating and sustaining a panic atmosphere. … Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day and a couple of thousand on the second day, and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no."

If this is true and Rep. Sherman is not delusional, I ask you to consider that if they are willing to threaten martial law now, it is foolish to assume they will never use that threat again. It is also foolish to trust in an orderly election process to resolve this threat. And why deploy the First Brigade? One thing the deployment accomplishes is to put teeth into such a threat.

Read the rest at Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/rights/101958/thousands_of_troops_are_deployed_on_u.s._streets_ready_to_carry_out_%22crowd_control%22/

2008-10-15T02:23:00.000-07:00

I, HERE, NOW
Vivian Lynn
25 October 2008 – 15 March 2009

The Adam Art Gallery is proud to present a long-overdue survey of the work of artist Vivian Lynn . Curated by Christina Barton and Laura Preston , this exhibition canvasses the diversity of Lynn ’s practice and brings to light works that have not been seen for many years.

Vivian Lynn will be well known to many as the artist who used human hair in a series of large-scale installations in the 1980s, such as Guarden Gates (1982) and The Gates of Goddess: A Southern Crossing attended by the Goddess (1986). These are landmark works in New Zealand ’s art history for their trenchant re-coding of materials and subjects that aimed to expose the binary logic of western patriarchal culture and its consequences.

Perhaps less well known is the fact that Vivian Lynn has been a practising artist since the late 1950s, working across a range of media – painting, drawing, printmaking, book-making, and installation – to develop a complex body of work that asks fundamental questions about the nature of being and the problematics of representation, especially if one is a woman.

Curator Christina Barton believes that Lynn ’s work should be better known, both for its technical virtuosity and its critical examination of the beliefs, values, ideas and assumptions that structure society and inform how women and the environment are treated.

“In refusing to develop a signature style and in her continual attempt to develop new modes of socially engaged practice, Lynn is an artist for our times,” she says.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a public programme of talks, readings and a film screening to expand on the issues raised by Lynn ’s practice. This programme begins with an exhibition floor talk and conversation between the artist Vivian Lynn and Adam Art Gallery Director and curator, Christina Barton , on Saturday 8 November at 2pm. All welcome.

OPENING
Friday 24 October 2008, 6-8pm

www.victoria.ac.nz/adamartgallery

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2008-10-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

McCain's & Palin's Politics of Hatred

2008-10-14T15:14:00.000-07:00

McCain's attacks fuel dangerous hatred

By Frank Schaeffer
October 10, 2008

John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us," I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.

At a Sarah Palin rally, someone called out, "Kill him!" At one of your rallies, someone called out, "Terrorist!" Neither was answered or denounced by you or your running mate, as the crowd laughed and cheered. At your campaign event Wednesday in Bethlehem, Pa., the crowd was seething with hatred for the Democratic nominee - an attitude encouraged in speeches there by you, your running mate, your wife and the local Republican chairman.

Shame!

John McCain: In 2000, as a lifelong Republican, I worked to get you elected instead of George W. Bush. In return, you wrote an endorsement of one of my books about military service. You seemed to be a man who put principle ahead of mere political gain.

You have changed. You have a choice: Go down in history as a decent senator and an honorable military man with many successes, or go down in history as the latest abettor of right-wing extremist hate.

John McCain, you are no fool, and you understand the depths of hatred that surround the issue of race in this country. You also know that, post- 9/11, to call someone a friend of a terrorist is a very serious matter. You also know we are a bitterly divided country on many other issues. You know that, sadly, in America, violence is always just a moment away. You know that there are plenty of crazy people out there.

Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.

John McCain, you're walking a perilous line. If you do not stand up for all that is good in America and declare that Senator Obama is a patriot, fit for office, and denounce your hate-filled supporters when they scream out "Terrorist" or "Kill him," history will hold you responsible for all that follows.

John McCain and Sarah Palin, you are playing with fire, and you know it. You are unleashing the monster of American hatred and prejudice, to the peril of all of us. You are doing this in wartime. You are doing this as our economy collapses. You are doing this in a country with a history of assassinations.

Change the atmosphere of your campaign. Talk about the issues at hand. Make your case. But stop stirring up the lunatic fringe of haters, or risk suffering the judgment of history and the loathing of the American people - forever.

We will hold you responsible.---

Frank Schaeffer is the author of "Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back." His e-mail is frankaschaeffer@aol.com.

Taken from Balitmore Sun: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.mccain10oct10,0,7557571.story

2008-10-13T04:13:00.001-07:00

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