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August 2009

Travelin’

I woke up in Montana and am now going to sleep in Minnesota. On my way back to where I lived. Learned some things this trip, for instance that Montana is indeed a state that is very, very, wide, and that North Dakota is actually more settled and hospitable than South Dakota, for some reason. Yesterday I played The Damned's album "Machine Gun Etiquette" for five hours straight on the drive. I

Bloggy Tuesday

one loon pond is the name of a blog that has come to replace The Michael Duffy Files. loon is a) entertaining and b) informative — the two purposive categories into which all writing may be classified (if I remember my high skool English classes correctly). For the benefit of any law-talking guys who may be reading [...]

Continue reading at slackbastard …

Categories: State / Politics
Tagged with: ,

Molly’sBlog 2009-08-31 21:30:00

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS-CANADA/ICELAND:MAGMA ENERGY WANTS STAKE IN ICELAND GEOTHERMAL ENERGY:One has to say that Magma Holdings have hardly been slowed down by our present recession. One acquisition after another, some of them bargain hunting amongst th…

Continue reading at Molly'sBlog …

Update

So somehow i let the entire month of august slide by without a blog post. There isn't a whole lot new to share really. Things continue to develope in Toledo. At some point i'll make up another report on that.

Living at the black cherry has been mostly great. This past week i spent a good chunk of my time preparring for and working at the german american festival in oregon, ohio. It was a really great time, by all accounts. The only things i would of changed would be that i wished i made some better contacts at the festival and i wish i would have vollunteered for limited and set hours instead of an ambigous amount of time over the entire event.

A friend of mine from chicago is looking to go back out to the old country at some point in the not so distant future...and it may work out that i'd go too. Not really sure what the chances are of that happening are though, so i won't really go too much into that unless it looks to be a more likely prospect.

I've been thinking a bit lately on how to make an income despite not having real work. I've come up with some ideas, but havn't set on any of them yet.

Molly’sBlog 2009-08-31 19:21:00


CANADIAN LABOUR-MONTRÉAL:
CITY OF MONTRÉAL BLUE COLLAR WORKERS STAGE ONE DAY STRIKE:
After two years without a contract blue collar employees of the city of Montréal have staged a one day walkout today. Like other civic employees across the country the Montréal workers are facing increasingly intransigent city management. Here`s the story from the Montréal CTV outlet.
CLCLCLCLCLCLCL
Montreal blue-collars staging one-day strike:
Montreal's blue-collar workers walked off the job at midnight for a 24-hour strike.
The 5,000 workers have not had a contract since August 2007. The main issues are salaries and subcontracting.

Union president Michel Parent says they have been waiting for the city to make its latest offer since last June.

The city says it will wait until the union makes all its demands before making a counter-offer.
Monday's one-day strike will affect garbage and recycling collection, road repair, and other construction projects, although a skeleton crew will be on call in case urgent repairs are needed for sewers or roads.

Employees will return to work, and resume their normal duties, at the stroke of midnight on Monday night.

The majority of boroughs won't be affected by the strike because the garbage collection and recycling pickup will be carried out by private contractors as usual.

However, services will be affected in the following boroughs:
*Ahuntsic-Cartierville, Plateau-Mont-Royal Southwest: recycling will be picked up on Sept. 7
*Villeray-Saint-Michel-Park-Extension: recycling will be picked up on Sept. 1
*Cote-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grace, Rosemont-La-Petite-Patrie: garbage collection will be delayed until Sept. 2
*Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Rivière-des-Praires-Pointe-aux-Trembles: garbage will not be collected on Aug. 31, and residents should put out garbage later in the week, for the usual second pickup
For more details, check out the city of Montreal's official, French-only notice.
CLCLCLCLCLCLCL
The Montréal workers in question are represented by Local 301 of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). Here is the way that CUPE describes the situation.
CLCLCLCLCLCLCL
Montreal "cols bleus" on 24-hour strike:
Montreal's blue collar city workers, members of CUPE 301, have laid down their tools for a 24-hour strike. They are not launching a full-scale strike, and do not want the people of Montreal to have to pay for failed negotiations - and are making sure that all essential services continue to be provided.
However, two years of negotiations have failed to reach a settlement. And over those years, while the number of workers on the Island of Montreal have been decreasing, the number of layers of management and organizational structures has exploded - resulting in poor coordination of services, disorganization, and poorer public services.
This round of negotiations provides an opportunity to improve Montreal's infrastructure by committing strongly to quality public services, rather than allowing those services to be sold off piecemeal to the private sector.
This short work stoppage is a warning cry, drawing attention to the failure of elected officials to take their responsibility to the City of Montreal seriously.

The Picket Line — 1 September 2009

Excerpts from Duncan MacLaren’s “History of the Resistance to the Annuity Tax” (1836), showing how as the title of “official” state church of Scotland changed hands, those who promoted and denounced resistance to taxes to prop up the state church flip-flopped right along.

Continue reading at The Picket Line …

Direct Action for Independent Living, Birmingham, 14th September 2009

PLEASE FORWARD AS WIDELY AS POSSIBLE:

The Disabled People's Direct Action Network (DAN) is once again taking action against Birmingham City Council (BCC) on Monday 14th September for the rights of disabled people in Birmingham and everywhere to life, liberty and the choice and control over our own lives that most non-disabled people take for granted, but which we can be denied at the whim of a local authority.

BCC promised to work with DAN towards establishing genuine independent living for disabled people in Birmingham after our last action in March (see report at http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/04/425854.html) won us a meeting with Peter Hay (Director of Health and Social Care) and other Council officials, but has not delivered on that promise, and 6 months later there has been no apparent change in BCC's treatment of disabled people.

Yesterday (30th August 2009), a disabled service user and DAN supporter, for whom members of Birmingham DAN had been advocating in the "social care" system, died in hospital in Birmingham following BCC's refusal, only a few weeks before, to provide him with any care or support to live independently.

Disabled people in Birmingham are still being refused assessments for direct payments to employ Personal Assistants (which is breaking the legal obligation of all Local Authorities under the 1990 Community Care Act), being told by social workers that they do not have any needs or being bullied by council officials into signing agreements they do not want to sign, simply to save the council money.

Other disabled people are still homeless, living in totally inaccessible housing, trapped against their will in nursing homes where they have no choice and control over their own lives, or living in total social isolation and disgustingly filthy conditions, not because of a lack of funding for accessible housing and social support services, but because of the absence of the political will to use council funding for those purposes.

How many more disabled people will have to die and how many more lives will be put at risk before BCC gives us our human rights?

The action on September 14th will start at 1pm and will be in Birmingham city centre. For further information contact Steve on 07931 421947 or soulrebel@riseup.net or Tom on 07816 275985 or tomcomdan@hotmail.co.uk.

Please forward this message to as many disabled people (or anyone else who you think may be interested in taking part in the action) as possible.

FREE OUR PEOPLE!
Categories: activism

Milton Nascimento Sings the Jet Samba

Brazil’s Milton Nascimento sings Anton Carlos Jobim’s musical celebration of Rio de Janeiro, Samba do Avaio (The Jet Samba) . The lyrics reference the statue of Christ the Redeemer that towers over the city and the Guanabara. Minha alma canta (My soul sings) Vejo o Rio de Janeiro (Seeing Rio de Janeiro) Estou morrendo de saudade Rio, teu mar, praias [...]

Tagged with: ,

Reclaim the Streets… or, um, Patriotism

It’s time to reclaim patriotism from the racist narcissists
Tim Soutphommasane
The Age
September 1, 2009

NOT all that long ago, ”Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” was just an innocuous, if inane, chant at sporting events. Commemoration of Anzac Day was greeted with indifference. And the idea of tattooing sunburnt flesh with the Southern Cross was, well, strange. Not today…

    Previously on Patriot Street Blues:

‘Reclaim’ patriotism from the Right
Peter Wilson
The Australian
August 5, 2009

TIM Soutphommasane has spent more time than most people thinking about what it means to be Australian.

Growing up in Sydney’s western suburbs as the son of Chinese and Lao migrants, he built his own sense of national identity among friends from more than a dozen ethnic backgrounds.

As a political philosopher at Oxford University, he has spent much of the past five years examining the concepts of patriotism and nationalism in 21st century Australia.

When he travelled back to Sydney this year he was shaken to see ethnic clashes in that city’s seaside suburbs even while the city was celebrating Australia Day with a relaxed, friendly and newly confident pride.

The result is that Soutphommasane, an ALP member since the age of 15, is urging Kevin Rudd and others on the Left of politics to mount what he sees as a long-overdue campaign to reclaim the notion of nationalism from John HoWARd and the political Right…

Book: Reclaiming Patriotism

Affronted by the xenophobic nationalists who stalked the land during the HoWARd years, many progressive Australians have rejected a love of country, forgetting that there is a patriotism of the liberal left that at different times has advanced liberty, egalitarianism, and democratic citizenship.

Tim Soutphommasane, a first-generation Australian and political theorist who has journeyed from Sydney’s southwest suburbs to Oxford University, re-imagines patriotism as a generous sentiment of democratic renewal and national belonging. In accessible prose he explains why our political leaders will need to draw upon the better angels of patriotism if they hope to inspire citizens for nation-building, and indeed persuade them to make sacrifices in the hard times ahead. As we debate the twenty-first century challenges of reconciliation and a republic, citizenship and climate change, Reclaiming Patriotism proposes a narrative we have to have.

Reclaiming Patriotism is published by Cambridge University Press in September 2009. It is the lead title of the new Australian Encounters series published by Cambridge in partnership with the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University.

“It is fitting that Tim Soutphommasane makes the case for progressive politics in defining Australian patriotism. When right-wingers claim the national story as their own - white picket fences, Don Bradman, Gallipoli - we need books like this to remind us that Australian citizenship belongs to us all.” ~ Bob Carr, former Premier of New South Wales

Whose cuisine will reign supreme? See also : George Orwell on democracy, nationalism, patriotism and socialism.

NB. Tim also has some thoughts on ‘Democracy’ in the August edition of The Monthly, in the form of a review of John Keane’s latest magnum opus The Life and Death of Democracy. On ‘Democracy’, see also : Cornelius Castoriadis Agora International Website | On ‘radical democracy’, see :

In Motion Magazine: What is radical democracy?

Gustavo Esteva: We are still using the word “democracy” because it has still a beautiful tradition. For some time, I used the expression “radical democracy” to re-claim the original meaning of the word: that is “people’s power”. Among the Greeks, that was the meaning.

Radical democracy implies two things. One, is a very radical critique of representative democracy and here I would like to mention the enlightenment of Douglas Lummis who published a book “Radical Democracy” and who gave to me a lot of elements of historical and theoretical critique of representative democracy and offered a clue for some alternatives within the framework of democratic thinking.

Douglas is a very interesting guy from California who has been teaching for twenty years in Japan. He is a brilliant thinker and his book, this book, I find particularly interesting as a very enlightened critique of representative democracy and an opening to other forms of thinking.

The second source for my radicality is in the sense of “radical” in Spanish which means to come back to the roots, the root of the things. Our roots here is what we describe as democracy in the villages. Meaning that they don’t have vertical authority and a structure of government. They are governing themselves.

Anarchy alive! Anti-authoritarian politics from practice to theory, Uri Gordon, Pluto Press, 2008 (review by Tom Jennings, Freedom, Vol.70, No.3, February 2009; review by Lawrence Jarach, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed; and elsewhere… except the arse-end of the world, Australia, where the book isn’t even on the bloodyfuckingshelves unless yous wanna pay an arm and a leg and order it in from o/s goddamnit).

The Home of the Green Arrow (& Paul Morris)

Huh.

That’s odd.

I’ve been linked to by a fascist blog in the UK called ‘The Green Arrow’ (State Supported Terror groups, Mister Fox, August 20, 2009):

After the BNP’s Euro election victory, UAF thugs attacked a BNP press conference outside Parliament, pelting the media and party officials with eggs, placards and bottles. Several of the UAF thugs punched and kicked members of the BNP, including deputy leader Simon Darby who was repeatedly kicked in the back.
http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=1284

http://isupporttheresistance.blogspot.com/2009/08/state-supported-terror-groups.html

I’m not sure why the post in question has been linked to, as there are numerous other accounts of the argy-bargy outside the British Parliament. The incident took place at a BNP press conference in London in June of this year; the conference called immediately after BNP Fuehrer Nick Gri££in was elected to the European Parliament.

It reminded one of a similar incident in Brunswick in the ’90s, when ‘National Action’ Fuehrer Michael (De) Brander expertly caught an egg in his mouth, and later featured on that week’s edition of The Footy Show

To resume.

I can remember coming across the name of The Green Arrow (apparently some bloke called Paul Morris) before, I think ’cause Darrin ‘Sleeping Dragon’ Hodges was wont to reference it as being a suitable alternative to sites devoted to ‘adult shopping’.

Anyway, it so happens that Denise has just recently written a little more about Snakes and Arrows (Norfolk Unity, August 29, 2009), prompted, in part, by the closure of a forum at the BNP website:

And so the dispossessed, muttering darkly about “egos” and “dictatorships”, move on to posting pastures new, but carry with them their unfailing loyalty to the very man who caused their discomfiture.

The closure of the BNP forum has led to a migration to the hitherto moribund Green Arrow forum – but if anybody thinks voicing an opinion there is a good idea, the spousally-challenged drink-loving Paul Morris has news for them, making it clear that nothing less than wholehearted support for Griffin and the Griffinite BNP is expected.

Now the pompous Morris is as much of a standing joke to his own fascist brethren as he is to the anti-fascist community. The online Colonel Blimpish persona and the over-frequent use of military metaphors are rather belied by his real-world persona as a vicious hater prone to subject his neighbours to drunken rants, and who urinated against his caravan while screaming and shouting at the now estranged wife who had locked him out of his own house.

Speaking of Darrin, his ♥ has recently been broken by ‘Terrible’ Terrie-Anne Verney, but he’s nothing if not determined — see : Oh, Darrin!, September 30, 2008.