Chris Drew: The First Amendment And The Right To Survive

[Occupy Rogers Park had no question about how it wanted to highlight the beginning of its "Chicago Spring" campaign: we decided to honor Chris Drew, Rogers Park resident and courageous artist, who has uncompromisingly fought for free speech rights for artists.  The unusual thing about Chris Drew is that he identified the right of the artist to survive (by his/her art) and the right of free speech, and thus began to challenge the restrictive peddler's licensing procedure that limits artists' abilities to pursue their craft and hence their speech.  He recorded his own arrest for violating this ordinance, and when the police discovered this they dropped that charge and instead charged him with felony eavesdropping.   The ACLU took up his case and in March, 2012 the trial judge threw the case out on constitutional grounds.  The Illinois eavesdropping law may be on its way out. 

What many may not know is that for the last year Chris has been fighting this case and fighting his own serious health issues at the same time. His indomitable will and his connection with and belief in those marginalized artists with whom he has worked for so many years sustained him.  But as his health is failing (for the past year he has been fighting lung cancer),  he was determined  to accept the award and to make his remarks, which appear below unedited.  In addition you will see the remarks I made to introduce Chris;  having worked with him since my arrival in Chicago has been a distinct honor;  and in making these remarks I wanted to add something that perhaps no one else was in a position to do.  When Chris and I had a few moments after we had dropped him off at home, we talked for a moment about how overwhelmed he was by the honors accorded him, and about the difference between the movements we had both seen as young people and the movement of today.  We talked about the slogan, often repeated on Occupy posters, "It Isn't One Thing,  It's Everything!"  Our experience is so tied up with this demand or that issue.  This piece of the pie or that piece.  But this is about the whole pie.  The whole thing.  And Chris responded: "What most people see is small and unconnectedness. But it is connected.  It’s about the whole thing, and art is the key.  It’s all connected it is the key to our freedom.  We use the art patch to illustrate how to fight for freedom, demonstrate that [artists] have tools to fight for that freedom.”    –  Lew Rosenbaum] (The April 7th program, including Chris Drew’s remarks can be seen here).

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The Art Patch Project: The First Amendment And The Right To Survive – Chris Drew

This expanded lecture needs to be repeated at graduate gatherings of the Arts Teaching Institutes in Chicago.

Community Arts Concept

Art for change vs. art for art’s sake:  Art is always both, because the act of art is self-expression, which is the act of expressing the self in flux – in change.

The economic system that developed around art – art for collectors, for curators and art as an investment separated itself from art for change when desirable.  “Change art” being feared by the moneyed classes had to be discouraged during its dangerous lifetime. This is done at the institutional level.

Community art keeps rearing its beautiful head, generation after generation, by different names, movements and artists. In the 60’s and 70’s tradition I am from, it was known as “Community Art,” and resulted in opening up institutions to minority artists as well as a call for the ambitious artist to establish small institutions in community locations, securing the self-esteem needs of community segments.

Our initial Art of the T-shirt and its presently evolved Art Patch Project is the fruition of this in our 25 year long arts activity.

Stolen Rights –the Right to Survive by Art

We are talking about the real First Amendment right to survive by selling our art in public spaces that is required for change art to exist and build a public audience. This is the right above all that should be defended by our lives. In Chicago and too many other locations it has been abandoned as useless, a move that has marginalized artists and dwarfed our art scenes in public.

I have written on the legal basis and significance of this on my blog (http://www.c-drew.com/blog/) and in e-mails available on

Chris Drew asks “WHO WILL WORK?”

line.  Here I hope to describe a vision shortly and hook a few dedicated individuals.  Every movement is only as great as the art that informs it.  We need a core of workers to re-awaken the Art Patch Project to change Chicago – to create survival opportunities as an arts change base for Chicago.  WHO WILL WORK?

Art Patch Project

Please use the Art Patch Project to make Chicago Change.  Bluntly put, I am dying and the Art Patch Project needs new energy.  I pray some of you are that new energy.

Why the Art Patch Project?

We must teach citizens of Chicago to stand up for their rights and demonstrate the central role art has in this process.  We must employ win-win strategies to do so.  Using art we have changed the eavesdropping law.  Let’s extend this to artists’ rights and set an example of using art to fight for First Amendment Rights.

The Art Patch Project is a win-win concept.  Artists submit designs and are encouraged to promote their art on line on the art patch.  The Art Patch Project promotes artists’ rights on line on the patch.  Volunteers print and give away the many flavored art patches over time educating the public to the variety of artists missing in public.  The movement regenerates an art movement to sustain its needs in public. Activities take place in low-tech one or two day a week activities sustainable by a core of dedicated artists at costs affordable to a volunteer movement that takes place in public.

In 2006 Chris Drew set up “shop” on Michigan Ave., ironically in front of the Chicago Tribune Freedom Museum

This concept is already underway, demonstrable today. You may have an art patch in your hand right now.  These patches are sewn on clothes, pinned up in a creative variety of ways. They have a life that goes on promoting your voice.  This is a solution.

Artists have been using the Art Patch Project to protect our stolen rights with growing awareness, establishing a foundation to build on.  The fact is we have less right to survive by our art in Chicago in public than most places of the world.

The fact is we have less right to survive by our art in Chicago in public than most places of the world. And we have a first amendment guarantee in this right.  And we are not fighting for it.  We have given it up. We have given up our most basic right.  It is your duty to change this.

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Sue Ying, an advocate of the Harold Washington Cultural plan, founder of Artists Against Homelessness, a strong woman and revolutionary artist for fifty years, introduced me to Chris Drew shortly after I arrived in Chicago in 1987.  Chris had come to Chicago’s uptown as a homeless expatriate from Minnesota.  He’d set up a gallery on Clark Street and began a career devoted to advocating for and with artists, recognizing that suppression of the artists’ voices is key to suppressing any revolutionary discontent in society.  

She told me he was someone I needed to know, to work with, and to learn from. What he was doing was important and powerful and it went to the heart of understanding what it meant to be a revolutionary and to have clarity about the content of our time. 

He was opening the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center, which is still housed in the American Indian Center. Recognizing that Chris’s work was important to the youth in Uptown, especially the American Indian youth, the American Indian Center gave Chris a space, rent-free, to run the workshops that were open to anyone– ANYONE — who wanted to take them. Chris started a free screen print workshop, which pulled young taggers and graffiti writers in to learn how to put their drawings onto t-shirts.  He taught them the process and then engaged them to help teach others.  He never charged for what he taught and he always encouraged people of all ages to honor their creativity. Even if they could not sell to a gallery or get published, they could make art, they could make t-shirts for themselves; for their friends; to sell at pow-wows and to display and sell at the Art of the T-shirt exhibits that Chris arranged in libraries, at the Cultural Center one year, and at Daley Center another year.  But more than anything, Chris adhered what his mentor Carlos Cortez used to teach us: “Do not expect to become an artist to make a living; become an artist to make a life.”

For 20 years, Chris has run UMCAC on a shoestring — he always said he operated very low to the ground.  And while it is true that famous artists such as Carlos Cortez have worked closely with Chris, the thousands of other artists he has touched and helped to show that they have a voice are at least as important.  Chris’ gift to the community is translated into his vision that everyone is an artist, a vision that he shared with that other mentor, Sue Ying.  That there can be no revolution without a revolutionary culture.

As times changed, Chris added more weapons to his artistic arsenal: art shows, computer skills workshops, an artists’ co-op, a web campaign to revive the Harold Washington Cultural Plan that had been abandoned, the annual Art of the Tee Shirt Harvest Festival and the web based ART-ACT or Anti Racist T-Shirt-Artist Contest Tour.  From the ashes of the Washington Cultural Plan, Chris began the project that evolved as Free SAM or Free Speech Artists Movement.  

Chris passionately wanted artists to be able to display, and sell, their artwork in the parks and on the lakefront. That led to questioning the peddler’s license process. and that then led to his art patch project and to the Artists’ Free Speech Movement.  He was arrested in 2009, initially for selling his art patches for $1, but that charge was dropped and he was instead indicted for felony eavesdropping because he had audio recorded his arrest for selling the patches.  

This only scratches the surface, but I have to stop now.  I have to stop now by thanking Mayor Richard M. Daley.  I thought I would never thank Richard Daley, but I am doing it now.  Because King Richard and his minions thought they would pick a fight with a defenseless artist who would go quickly into oblivion.  Instead they picked on a tiger, who seized the opportunity and whose merit is that he wants us to continue to seize the opportunity, not to give up the fight for freedom until we are all free. 

Now, Occupy is not in the habit of petitioning the Mayor for actions.  In various parts of the city, organizations petition the mayor through their alderman for an street to be named in honor of one of the neighborhood’s distinguished citizens.  Instead of begging the Mayor of the 1%, we decided to confer that honor on one of Rogers Parks most distinguished citizens.  And so  Morse Ave. will be re-christened Honorary Chris Drew Way. And we are presenting this commemorative proclamation recognizing why the street will bear his name.  It’s especially appropriate for Occupy Rogers Park to be give this proclamation to Chris, because it is precisely the question of defending the “99%” to which Chris has devoted himself.  That is the content of our time: “Everything or nothing all of us or none. ” (Bertolt Brecht)

Chris Drew prints and gives away art patches at the Glenwood Ave. Arts Festival, August 2010

So now, I want to ask you, as Chris begins to talk, remember the felony charge that Chris has been fighting and take out your video cameras, your cell phones, any recording devices you have for video and audio, and record what you are about to hear, to post it far and wide on FB or any other medium you have at your disposal, to celebrate the fight for which Chris has dedicated the majority of his life, the battle which is for your freedom and the freedom of us all.  Pull those phones out and please help me welcome Diana Berek, a long time cohort of Chris Drew to present our Occupy Rogers Park award !!! — introductory remarks by Lew Rosenbaum]

Capitalism, a New Poem by Matt Sedillo

 

Matt Sedillo

Capitalism

by Matt Sedillo

Edgar
One of seven
Third born
Parents poor
Seen two younger die
Bed ridden
Mother crying
Father’s time
Fleeting
Man has
Something to say
Has an opinion
About everything
By sick child’s bed side
Pain reads in his eyes
Yet says next to nothing
Father rendered silent
London
Is full of dying children
Sheets carry
The stench
Father’s coat
Smells of factory smoke
Of the ash
That fell upon it
Mother sings sweetly
But the truth rings in her eyes
Edgar is going to die
And they both know it
Jenny

Jenny Marx, Karl Marx' wife

Pawn shoes
Pawn rings
Pawns linen
Has already lost
Two children
To the squalor
Of the east end
Does her shopping
Stepping over
Beggars lying in sewage
Lying in shit and piss
And third child
Her only son
Her precious boy
Her sweet angel
Edgar
Is dying
Victorian England
The world’s most
Powerful nation
Is full of dying children
Streets run flooded
With the tears
Of the women
Forced to bury them
Husband

Karl Marx

Some kind of genius
Beloved
Celebrated
Studied
The toast of a town
That will do nothing
To help feed his children
Edgar is going to die
And the whole family knows it
Karl
Spends more time
In the library
Than he does
With family
There are questions
To be answered
Momentum
To be conquered
There is talk
In intellectual circles
That his
Is the most brilliant mind
In all of London
His ideas are spreading
As his child lays dying
Walks the streets
That lead
To hallowed
Halls of knowledge
That lead to ladies in parlors
That lead to lords in parliament
On the same stretch of sidewalk
Of whores and beggers
Karl immerses his mind
In political economy
Some say his ideas
Will be the ones
That will shape history
He says the point is not to simply
Interpret the world
But to change it
Because he knows
Knowledge is not power
Only power is power
And kings queens
Clergy
Industrialists
And moneyed interests
See to it their critics
Are not rewarded
For their efforts
And Karl knows
That a man with ideas alone
Right as they may be
Cannot salvage a single

Edgar Marx, son of Jenny & Karl Marx, died in 1855. "Der arme Musch ist nicht mehr. Er entschlief (im wörtlichen Sinne) in meinen Armen"(Jenny Marx)

Solitary child
Not even
His own
The industrial revolution
Is full of dying children
Edgar
One of seven
Third born
Parents poor
Seen two younger die
Will not survive
The night
And there is nothing
The boy’s father
The most brilliant political mind
In all of Germany
France or Great Britain
The specter that haunts Europe
The writer
The philosopher
The journalist
The political economist
The revolutionary
The boy’s father
History’s most famous communist
No there was not a damn thing
Karl Marx
Poor as he was
Could have done about it

In memory of Edgar Marx and all the child victims of the industrial revolution

<mailto:mattsedillo1981@gmail.com>mattsedillo1981@gmail.com

Chris Mahin Writes On The Anniversary Of The Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King

[Chris Mahin, whose writing appears on this blog often, contributes the following on the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King.]

April 4 is the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Below you will find the text of an article I wrote in 2006 about the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968 during the Memphis sanitation workers strike. It was written for the regional website of the union I worked for at the time. It describes what happened in the sanitation workers’ strike, the role played by AFSCME, and the attempts of the FBI to slander and isolate Dr. King. I thought it might be useful background material for anyone involved in events commemorating the anniversary of the assassination.
Thanks,
Chris
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April 1968:
Dr. King Is Killed Defending Labor’s Rights

Murder in Memphis: Life Magazine Cover

April 4 is one of the saddest days of the year. On that day in 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. While many events are held each year to honor Dr. King’s memory, too often people forget – or have never learned — why he was in Memphis that spring. Dr. King went to Memphis to help striking sanitation workers – and paid for his stand with his life. That makes April 4 an important anniversary not only in African American history (and in U.S. history in general), but in the history of the labor movement as well.

On February 12, 1968, hundreds of Memphis sanitation workers went on strike. At the time, they were making less than $1 an hour and were eligible for welfare. They decided that they had had enough of poor wages, terrible working conditions, and a viciously anti-union mayor.

The workers were members of Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The strike was the culmination of years of mistreatment. The workers worked 12 hours a day carrying garbage with busted, leaking pails. Some of the pails were infested with flies and maggots, and the workers had no place to wash up in the yard when they had to leave the trucks. Some of the workers had no running water when they returned home after work. The workers had no real benefits of any kind.

This dire situation came to a crisis point on Feb. 1, 1968, when the accidental activation of a packer blade in the back of a garbage truck fatally crushed workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker.

"I Am a Man" became emblematic of the strike

Almost 1,400 sanitation workers joined the strike. They shut the city down.

The workers and their supporters marched daily to pressure the mayor and the city council to recognize the sanitation unit under AFSCME Local 1733. The men wore signs which read “I AM a Man,” a slogan that was eventually recognized around the world.

Tension grew in the city as Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb called the strike illegal and threatened to hire new workers unless the strikers returned to work. On February 14, the mayor issued a back-to-work ultimatum for 7 a.m. on Feb. 15. The police escorted the few garbage trucks in operation. Negotiations broke off. The newspapers began to report that more than 10,000 tons of garbage was piling up.

It was in that tense environment that AFSCME organizers appealed to Dr. King to come to Memphis to speak to the workers. Initially, King was reluctant. He was immersed in work preparing for the Poor People’s Campaign. This was a huge undertaking, an effort to bring poor people of all ethnicities to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1968 to protest poverty. But when AFSCME organizer Jesse Epps pointed out that the fight of the sanitation workers in Memphis was part of the same struggle as the Poor People’s Campaign, King agreed.

Once in Memphis, King immediately grasped the importance of what was unfolding there. On his first visit to the city, March 18, he spoke to a crowd of 17,000 people, and called for a citywide march.

On Thursday, March 28, King led a march from the Clayborn Temple, the strike’s headquarters. The march was interrupted by window breaking at the back of the demonstration. The police moved into the crowd, using nightsticks, Mace, tear gas – and guns. A 16-year-old, Larry Payne, was shot dead. The police arrested 280 people, and reported about 60 injuries. The state legislature authorized a 7 p.m. curfew and 4,000 National Guardsmen moved in.

On Friday, March 29, some 300 sanitation workers and ministers marched peacefully and silently from Clayborn Temple to City Hall – escorted by five armored personnel carriers, five jeeps, three huge military trucks, and dozens of National Guardsmen with their bayonets fixed.

In the last days of March, King cancelled a planned trip to Africa and made preparations to lead a peaceful march in Memphis. Organizers working on preparations for the Poor People’s Campaign in other cities were directed to leave those cities and come to Memphis, for it was clear that the Poor People’s Campaign could not be won without winning the fight in Memphis.

On April 3, 1968, Dr. King returned to Memphis. That evening, he gave an extraordinary speech to hundreds of people at Mason Temple. The speech has gone down in history as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. Anyone who reads it today will notice that it is an eloquent statement of support for the sanitation workers. (That night, King called them “thirteen hundred of God’s children here suffering.”) But it is also a farewell speech, the oration of a man who knew he might not have long to live, and who was searching his soul to make sense of his life, and his place in history.

In the speech, King emphatically rejected the calls not to march again because of an injunction:

“[S]omewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right!”

At the end of his remarks he referred indirectly to the underhanded attempts by racists, the FBI, and other forces to sabotage his leadership and destroy the movement, declaring:

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like everybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

Murder at the Lorraine Motel

Less than 24 hours after uttering those words, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Urban rebellions broke out in more than 60 cities. In response to pressure from all over the country, the federal government sent Labor Department officials to Memphis to mediate a settlement to the strike.

On Tuesday, April 16, AFSCME leaders announced that an agreement had been reached.  The agreement included union recognition, better pay, and benefits. The strikers voted to accept the agreement.

It was a bittersweet end to a long battle. The strike ended in victory, but at a terrible cost, the death of one of the foremost symbols of the fight for justice in that (or any) era. AFSCME’s victory in Memphis inspired other workers in Memphis to join unions, and other employees throughout the South to join AFSCME. The Poor People’s Campaign which Dr. King had been
working on when he went to Memphis did take place later in the tumultuous year 1968. As King had hoped, it brought together poor people of all ethnicities to demonstrate in Washington, D.C. – African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and whites.

Given Dr. King’s role in the Memphis sanitation strike and the tremendous community support that the strikers received, perhaps

Carrying on Dr. King's Legacy

the month of April ought to be a time to remember that not all labor leaders have an official position with a union — and that labor comes in all colors, and includes both employed and unemployed people. If we hold on to those lessons, we will honor what was won with such great sacrifice in Memphis in April 1968.

# # #

I’m New Here: How Music Helps Imagine The Past Year

Reflecting on the terrain of the last 12 months,  I’m bringing a lot of baggage and experience with me, but the terrain is really new.  I am new here.  For 20 years or so I’ve been saying something about the economic revolution taking place independently of anyone’s will.  About the new kind of automation that electronics, globalization and robotics has wrought.  About the irreconcilable conflict created between the growing number of people who cannot meet their survival needs within the system of profiteering called capitalism.  About how Wall Street bankers and politics have become intertwined into a system that requires force to maintain itself.  And then came last year, and all of these are on the agenda.  Each of the last twenty years has seemed to last 20 years;  and then, in one year, we seem to have experienced at least 20 years, things have moved so swiftly.  This mix on CD is an ode to that motion. After each selection where I could find a comparable you tube video, that selection is linked.

I’m New Here – Gil Scott-Heron (I’m New Here) – opens this mix because, as the year opened, anyone who had eyes and ears knew that, though we may have been around for over 60 years, we were on a different terrain.  And no matter how far wrong you may have gone, you can always turn around . . . (Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir, The Last Holiday, is scheduled to be released mid-January 2012).  He died May 27, 2011 and I can’t help imagining the serene smile in his voice (on his face in the video) comes from foreknowledge of this year’s events.

“I’m New Here”  — the official video is here:

Africa Must Wake Up – Nas & Damian Marley (Distant Relatives) – the “sleeping sons of Jacob,”  exhorted in this record, have in fact begun to awake.  The allusion could relate to the Jacob’s ladder theme, we are climbing Jacob’s ladder to freedom.

“Africa Must Wake Up” 

A Night in Tunisia – Charlie Parker (composed in 1942 by Dizzy Gillespie)  and it started in Tunisia.  To say that what started resulted from the self immolation of a disgruntled worker is the least insightful sense of what causality means.  In some sense, both Africa Must Wake Up (with its reference to “Yesterday we were Kings”) and this 70 year old jazz standard help us understand that the events of the last year were many years in the brewing.
“A Night In Tunisia” – Charley Parker Septet (live at Town Hall, 1945)

• The next three tunes come from the streets of the cities of northern Africa, in the midst of what we have called the “Arab Spring”:

El Général ft. Mr. Shooma – Ta7ya Tounes  (Tunisia)   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7npf7vO9Hs

Wa2t El Thawrageya  – Revolution Records  (Egypt) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Xr9OS7o48
and an Egyptian Protester singing the same song on Wall Street:

7oukouma By Lotfi double Kanon DK (Algeria)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdQksrlLOlU

(I wanted to put Concierto de Aranjuez – Miles Davis/Gil Evans (Sketches of Spain) in here, in this spot, as a reference to Spain and the Indignados movement.  There was no space on the disc, and I had to cut other tunes for the same reason)

“Concierto de Aranjuez,”  Miles Davis Sextet (Sketches of Spain)

 

• American enters the fray: What is wrong in America?

Who Will Survive in America -  Kanye West/Gil Scott-Heron (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy).  This was first recorded in 1970 as Commentary #1 By Gil Scott-Heron.  It was a biting poem that challenged the “rainbow left coalition” of the SDS, Black Panthers and Young Lords.  In the original piece, Gil suggests that SDS might consider digging a tunnel to China, probably at that time a reference to the growing connections between the New Left and the Chinese revolution, rather than conditions in America.  For this recording Kanye West sampled only part of the original, eliminating the section dealing with SDS.    A first description of what is wrong with America – “America is now Blood and Tears instead of Milk and Honey” — what the rest of the world is challenging us to deal with.  Kanye/Gil says “All I want is a home, a wife and a children and some food to feed them every night.”  When he concludes with the suggestion to “build a new route to China if they’ll have you,” he could be challenging the what became known as the 1% (and the 99%): Who Will survive?

“Comment #1″ — original version (1970)

“Who Will Survive in America (Gil Scott-Heron sampled by Kanye West)

Love Me, I’m a Liberal – Phil Ochs (Phil Ochs in Concert) – This is a classic in the voice of what we now label as “Democrats.”  We’ve seen so many of them approaching the Occupiers attempting to either co-opt or to shame us.  They tell us they are really on our side; or they tell us that our real enemy is “the right.”  And yet year after year we have gotten sucker-punched by the same liberals who promise us the good life and then figure out out to take the goods.

“Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” Phil Ochs.

Rich Man’s World – Immortal Technique (The Martyr)– When the liberal is unable to convince us, then comes the voice of the 1% directly.  ‘I am the 1% . . .politicians in my pocket for a few hundred thousand G’s. . .”  If the language is explicit, the actions of the 1% are at least as explicit: there is nothing here that isn’t being done to us and around the world many times over.

“Rich Man’s World” — Immortal Technique — This video made especially for Occupy is extraordinary, one cut I actually prefer to the audio only CD.

No Pay Day – Vasti Jackson (Stimulus Man) –What is wrong with America is there is no pay day this Friday, and the bills mount up regardless.  Somebody tell me, “if there is a bailout for AT&T, why isn’t there a bailout for you and me.”  This is what has brought the many thousands into the street world wide, this feature of a system gone awry, that cannot make the pay days.

(No you tube version)

Housewife’s Prayer – Pistol Annies  (Hell on Wheels) — What brings many to the street is the end of the job, the end of money, the end of hopes and aspirations and food to feed the children, even, in this case, “my man can’t get no overtime.”  There is no other way . . . Thinking of setting my house on fire.  This could be suicide (as in “going off the deep end”), but it could also be destroying the edifice in order to build something new.

“Housewife’s Prayer” – Pistol Annies

Union Town –Tom Morello (Union Town) Morello, as “The Nightwatchman,” celebrates the battles in Wisconsin, which he locates directly in the strength of the union movement (historically as well as in Madison).  “This is a union town. . . if they come to strip our rights  away we’ll give ‘em hell every time.”  There is a history here that is important:  not that the union is the model for the future, or even the organized expression of the resistance.  The union was the organization established to fight the employer, and as such has always had to fight defensive battles.  How can we divide  “fairly” the spoils between me and “my capitalist”?  The unions of public workers are in a direct contest with the state, and consequently find themselves in a precarious position – one where the right to strike is even more grudgingly accepted by the governmental employer;  where the right to strike may even appear a political question.  And what happens when so much of the public sector is turned over to the private (here in Chicago the battleground is now education)?  How can we go beyond giving them hell every time?  This was composed for and performed in Madison and taken around the country, with Morello on the “Justice Tour.”

“Union Town” — Tom Morello   Use this one to check out some of the many other versions on youtube:

• Occupy Tunes there are so many of them, many downloadable for free and/or visible on youtube.  This is  a small sample.  Plus there are so many artists who have responded to the movement (nationally and locally) that there is no way to encompass them.  Within the last few days I’ve actually gotten Rise Like Lions, a documentary of Occupy footage from around the country that is over an hour long, and introduced by this, the last lines from  “The Mask of Anarchy,” a poem by Shelley written  after a  massacre carried out by the British government at St. Peter’s Field,   Manchester, 1819 but not published until after Shelley’s death. Some 60,000 people, protesting poor economic conditions in the wake of the end of the Napoleonic wars as well as the lack of the right to vote were attacked by the British cavalry.  15 people were killed, 4-700 were injured in what was ironically referred to as the Battle of Peterloo, a sarcastic comparison to Waterloo:

Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you –

Ye are many – they are few.

#OccupyWallStreet – (celestino Anthony?)

(No youtube)

Occupy Wall Street Anthem – DJ Mackboogaloo: this is a Chicago “House Music” version with a repeating background lyric:   “Public Enemy #1:  Wall Street.”

There are so many versions of an anthem, you have a lot to choose from, none of which comes even close to the kind of “house music” of the anthem on the CD.  Here are three: (1) Doodlebug of Digable Planet – (2) DJ Mackboogaloo’s house music accompaniment to Alex Jones “911 was an inside job” “End the Fed” video (includes a little occupy wall street snippet in the title) otherwise a conspiracy fantasy promo; (3) Called a HipHop Anthem, seems to plod too much to be in that genre:

Occupy (We the 99) – Jasiri X  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oxv9kIFJh5Y

We are the 99% – La Guardia  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIV9vTiZsCU

• Where do we go from here?

Color – Mary J Blige (Soundtrack for the film Precious) – until she was about 30, Mary J Blige said, in introducing the song, it seemed to her that she saw in black and white;  and then, with a new vision of where she had been and what was possible, she could now see in color. That experience is what she brought to the process of writing this song for the film. Hence the exclamatory “I can see in color. I never knew I could.”  The old order cannot persist when the rulers cannot rule in the same way and when the ruled begin to envision other possibilities.  Many people are beginning to see in color.  Perhaps they are pastels and not quite vivid yet.  Perhaps they are emerging from what Saramago called blindness and seeing, or even blind while seeing.  The metaphors are many, the truth is deep.

“Color” Mary J Blige: this is a live version in which she explains why the name of the song; and this, in which the sound is much better, but the visuals are nowhere nearly as compelling:

Burn It Down — Los Lobos (Tin Can Trust) “I couldn’t say a word, it’s only dignity I heard, and once I go there is no coming back . . . I’ll burn it down.”   There is only one thing you can do with a system that strips your dignity.  In the metaphoric sense, burn it all down and start anew.  There is no going back. This is finally a move to a society where people care for each other rather than a system that thrives on commodities and profits.

“Burn It Down” — Los Lobos  performed at the Santa Monica studios of KCRW for “Morning Becomes Eclectic.”

I CAN see color.  I always knew I could.

Lew Rosenbaum, December 27, 2011

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What I wanted to put on the disc, but what I couldn’t for space reasons”

Money Craving Blues Blind Alfred Reed        (no you tube)

We Are the Workers   Fisticuffs    (You’ll Not Take Us Alive)  (no you tube)

Our Generation (The Hope Of The World)     John Legend & The Roots  (Wake Up!)

Against All Odds    The Generators  (The Last of the Pariahs)  (no you tube, but this is You Against You from the same album http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ijmZbx1zA
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Radium Girls Statue Dedicated in Ottawa, Illinois

Radium Girls Statue Dedication Is the Place to Be This Labor Day Weekend –  Friday, September 2nd, 11:00 AM, Ottawa, Illinois

On Friday, September 2, at 11:00 a.m. at the corner of Clinton and Jefferson streets in Ottawa, Illinois, a statue of a young woman holding flowers in one hand and paintbrushes in the other will be unveiled. She is the symbol of the Radium Girls, the young women who worked in the clock and watch factories dotting the Illinois Valley in the first half of the 20th century. This was the era of “glow in the dark” watch and clock dials, painted with deadly radium. Many of these workers died from the effects of putting their brushes in their mouths countless times a day to sharpen the points, as the companies trained them to do.

The statue will stand on the site of the Luminous Processes factory in Ottawa at Clinton and Jefferson. The City of Ottawa, community groups and local unions worked together to raise the funds and assure the successful completion of this project. Laborers Local 393, an affiliate union of the ILHS, has donated many member volunteer hours to prep the site where the statue will be placed.

It all started when student Madeline Piller made the Radium Girls the subject of her junior high history fair project, and then never forgot their story. Her father Bill Piller is a sculptor and she enlisted his help to honor these women, many of whom were laid to rest after their untimely deaths in the Catholic cemetery just outside of Ottawa. A Geiger counter passed over these graves will still register the presence of the deadly radium poison that took their lives.

The Ottawa Radium Girls were not alone. Radium-painting factories were also operating in New Jersey and Connecticut. In her book Radium Girls, Woman and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935, Central Michigan University historian Claudia Clark extensively documents the suffering of these young women and the fight they and their families mounted to obtain proper compensation from their employers.

On July 7, 1937, the Chicago Daily Times covered one such legal battle. Reporter John Main wrote: “Fifteen living dead women will appear before the Illinois Industrial Commission here on July 25. It will be the next-to-last act of what lawyers say is the biggest and most pitiful miscarriage of justice in the history of Illinois. The last act will be these women’s death – sure, tortured, horrible.”

These efforts for justice helped spark needed legislation concerning occupational diseases’ and workers compensation laws throughout the country. This Labor Day weekend, we commemorate the contribution made by the struggle of these young women to the health and safety protection of all working people.

The video Radium City (excerpt) movingly recounts this tragedy.  For the complete video (almost 2 hr documentary), click here.

Philip Levine: Voice of the Workingman to Be Poet Laureate – New York Times

Voice of the Workingman to Be Poet Laureate

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: August 9, 2011 in the New York Times

The Library of Congress will announce on Wednesday that Philip Levine, best known for his big-hearted, Whitmanesque poems about working-class Detroit, is to be the next poet laureate, succeeding W. S. Merwin.

Enlarge This Image

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

“It’s like winning the Pulitzer. If you take it too seriously, you’re an idiot. But if you look at the names of the other poets who have won it, most of them are damn good.” — Philip Levine

• A Selection of Poems by Philip Levine (August 10, 2011)

• Times Topic: Philip Levine

He was selected from a long list of nominees by James Billington, the librarian of Congress, who said on Monday, “I find him an extraordinary discovery because he introduced me to a whole new world I hadn’t connected to in poetry before.”

“He’s the laureate, if you like, of the industrial heartland,” Mr. Billington added. “It’s a very, very American voice. I don’t know that in other countries you get poetry of that quality about the ordinary workingman.” Referring to Mr. Levine’s ironic and self-effacing nature, he said: “This wasn’t really a factor in the choice, but he doesn’t seem to have that element of posing that I suppose we all suffer from to one degree or another. He has that well under control.”

The author of some 20 collections of poems and the winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for his book “The Simple Truth,” Mr. Levine is 83, making him one of the oldest laureates. But speaking on the phone the other day from his home in Fresno, Calif., he sounded much younger. “I feel pretty good,” he said, adding that he was still writing and that he found great inspiration these days in the poetry of Thomas Hardy. “There’s this unbelievable humility in his work,” he said. “He kept writing right up until he died, when he was almost 90.”

“But I’m not as good as ever,” Mr. Levine went on, referring to the writing that he had done in the last year or so. In an e-mail he said he thought he had begun doing his best work in the early 1990s, but on the phone he added: “I find more energy in my earlier work. More dash, more anger. Anger was a major engine in my poetry then. It’s been replaced by irony, I guess, and by love.”

Mr. Levine grew up in Detroit, back when it was still a “vital city,” he said. His parents were emigrants from Russia, but for some reason they told him he was of Spanish ancestry ,and as a young man he became fascinated with Spanish anarchism and the Spanish Civil War, which still turn up in his poems. Mr. Levine’s father died when he was 5, leaving the family hard up, and before embracing poetry he held a succession of what he has called “stupid jobs.” He built transmissions for Cadillac, worked in the Chevrolet gear and axle factory, drove a truck for Railway Express. His early poems, often written in narrow, seven-syllable lines, were gritty, hard-nosed evocations of the lives of working people and their neighborhoods.

Over the years Mr. Levine’s subject matter hasn’t changed much — he remains a distinctly urban poet — but his line has lengthened, and his edge has softened. Many of his poems these days are narrative, anecdotal elegies for that vanished working-class world, and as in the title poem of his Pulitzer-winning volume, he finds depths of beauty in the simplest of pleasures — food, for example:

Can you taste
what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong …

Mr. Levine’s early poems were more formal than the ones he writes now, doubtless because as a young man he studied with eminent formalists like Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Yvor Winters, but also, he suggested, to compensate for the formlessness of his own life back then.

“I don’t know why it took so long,” he said. “That looseness and freedom took place when I brought order to my life. I got married, got a job — not a good job but a job.” (He taught English and writing at California State University, Fresno.) Sometime in his 40s, he added, he was struck by the tenderness in the poetry of others and thought, “Why isn’t there more tenderness in my own work?”

His late poems are full of that tenderness and also of a Hardyesque humbleness in which, while still enthralled by poetry, he hesitates to make too great claims for it. A 1999 poem by Mr. Levine is called “He Would Never Use One Word Where None Would Do” and ends:

Fact is, silence is the perfect water:
unlike rain it falls from no clouds
to wash our minds, to ease our tired eyes,
to give heart to the thin blades of grass
fighting through the concrete for even air
dirtied by our endless stream of words.

Strictly speaking, the poet laureate has few official duties during the one-year term, but lately the laureates have tended to take on projects intended to broaden the audience for poetry. Robert Pinsky started his Favorite Poem Project, encouraging Americans to share their selections at readings and in audio and video projects. Ted Kooser created a free weekly newspaper column in which he introduced a poem by a contemporary American poet.

Mr. Levine said he had thought of proposing a project in which people would be asked to name the ugliest poem they could think of. “I knew they wouldn’t go for it,” he added, referring to the Library of Congress. “But I was trying to think of something a little light and humorous, to encourage people to think of poetry not quite so seriously.”

He said he might try to get 5- or 10-minute spots for poets to read their work on the radio and hoped to help resurrect what he called “the enormous number of forgotten poets out there.”

“I know a great many poems that I love and that most people have never heard of,” he said. “Some of them are quite magnificent.”

He hadn’t particularly aspired to be poet laureate, Mr. Levine said, but he was pleased that after a long career, the honor had come his way. “How can I put it? It’s like winning the Pulitzer,” he explained. “If you take it too seriously, you’re an idiot. But if you look at the names of the other poets who have won it, most of them are damn good. Not all of them — I’m not going to name names — but most. My editor was thrilled, and my wife jumped for joy. She hasn’t done that in a while.”

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work
You know what work is — if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

— From “What Work Is,” by Philip Levine (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).

Listen to Philip Levine read “What Work Is” here.

China Automates, Robots Replace Workers

Global Exchange, in the Toronto Globe and Mail

Foxconn looks to a robotic future

Kathrin Hille

The Financial Times

Posted on Tuesday, August 2, 2011 8:36AM EDT

Kathrin Hille is an FT correspondent in Beijing

Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer by revenue, plans to have as many robots as workers in its China factories within three years, according to Terry Gou, chairman and chief executive.

Foxconn, China’s biggest employer, produced Apple’s iPad and other electronic gadgets. The group currently employs one million workers but has just 10,000 robots on its production lines.

Mr. Gou outlined the company’s ambitious automation plans at a Foxconn gathering late last week in Shenzhen, a coastal manufacturing centre in southern China. According to people who attended the function, the chief executive said the group would have up to 300,000 robots next year and one million by 2013, highlighting the drastic changes China-based manufacturers are making as competition for labour increases.

“This is part of a broad automation push among China-based manufacturers,” said Alvin Kwock, head of hardware technology research at JPMorgan. “It signals that the cost of labour is no longer lower than the cost of capital.”

Salaries for migrant workers, the mainstay of Foxconn’s China work force rose 30-40 per cent last year and are expected to increase by another 20-30 per cent annually until at least 2013, according to Dong Tao, chief regional economist at Credit Suisse.

Last year, a series of worker suicides at Foxconn’s Shenzhen factories preceded an outbreak of larger scale industrial unrest at Japanese automotive components factories across southern China. The Foxconn deaths were a tragic expression of young workers’ frustration with chronically low wages, and also the often robotic nature of their work.

Foxconn declined to confirm the figures Mr. Gou cited in his speech, but stressed it wants employees to move “higher up the value chain beyond basic manufacturing work”.

Many local governments are hoping that Foxconn will create large-scale employment in their backyards, and the group is building several large new factories in inland cities where labour costs are lower.

Analysts, however, believe the group’s automation plans were likely to be an important part of its inland expansion strategy. “Foxconn has been comparatively slow when it comes to automation,” said Mr. Kwock. “Automating an old factory is difficult because you then have to redesign the floor plan, so you want to introduce automation as part of a new plant.”

In Chengdu, where one of the group’s large new factories is located, government officials say Foxconn is expected to employ 100,000 workers by the end of the year and eventually reach a headcount of 300,000.

Susan Ohanian Is Not Entirely Pleased By The Save Our Schools Rally: Sex, Lies & SOS

” Teachers aren’t going to be stirred to save themselves unless and until they understand why these terrible things are happening to them and the children they teach. Teachers need to understand the corporate plan progressing since the Business Roundtable first outlined it in 1988.”

Sex, Lies, and SOS Publication Date: 2011-08-05 By Susan Ohanian For all the music and praise of teachers, the SOS march had a more troubling side. We all know that Superman isn’t going to rescue public schoolchildren. But let’s face it: Neither is Action Hero Matt Damon. At his educator mom’s request, Damon traveled from a movie set in Vancouver, British Columbia to speak out for public schools at the SOS march in Washington, D. C. on July 30. Inexplicably, most of the D. C. area teachers stayed home. Longtime educator Gary Stager, who red-eyed from California, asked an important question : “Washington D.C. is less than a day’s drive from hundreds of thousands of teachers. Why was Matt Damon fighting for their profession while they stayed home?” A subway ride away and they couldn’t make it? Please don’t say these hundreds of thousands of teachers were scared. What should scare them is the reality of their profession being systematically destroyed. I’m naive enough to have been stunned by the low turnout at the SOS march, but I think I’ve figured it out. Both the NEA and the AFT made a show of donating $25,000 for necessary basics like lots of water, a medical station, and so on. But union leaders didn’t come and they didn’t bother to mobilize teachers to show up. A dozen or so people worked the crowd handing out souvenir fans (compliments of WTU/AFT Local No. 6 AFL-CIO) but there was no mobilization of DC teachers. I didn’t see thousands of New York City teachers either. I hung out with GEM (Grassroots Education Movement) a dissident activist group within UFT. They made the film “Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman” which got a great reception Friday night before the march. I met Norm Scott, one of the GEM leaders eight years ago when we were in a group traveling to Birmingham, AL to pay tribute to the World of Opportunity (The WOO). I mention this because I also met my SOS roommate Juanita Doyon, the WA state mother who is national Button Queen, at the WOO in Birmingham. And John Lawhead, who rode his bike from New York City to the DC march. And Nancy Creech from Michigan who has had two salary cuts of $9,000 each in the last two years was also at the WOO. She told me, “Now they are after our pensions.” With the price of gold up, Nancy sold jewelry to finance her trip to D. C. I mention this WOO connection just to show the commitment of teachers and parents who showed up at SOS. It was very good to mingle with them and with new friends–a teacher who came alone from Norman, Oklahoma, a Colorado mom whose children were kicked out of charter school when she insisted on opting out of the state test (people on a very small discussion each donated $50 to get her there), two teachers from North Carolina, a Florida activist who is neither a teacher nor the parent of a school age child–but someone who knows that public schools are vital to democracy. And many many more. I now kick myself for not writing down names. And here’s a shout out to those young GEM teachers who recognized how hot this old lady got during the march itself. Where they got it I don’t know, but they kept bringing me bags of chipped ice. The march itself was short. Before that, I walked around for 4 hours at SOS, talking with earnest, hopeful, angry teachers and parents from across the country–people thinking they were going to an event that would be start of a resistance movement. They didn’t realize the unions had sold them out from the get-go. They didn’t realize the featured speakers had a limited agenda, speaking passionately but not moving beyond equitable funding, an end to high stakes testing, a richer curriculum. Seems like we’ve heard this a few hundred times before. Those speeches from the podium didn’t clarify things, didn’t even mention the deliberate and systematic plan in progress to destroy social and educational contracts made over the past decades. Teachers aren’t going to be stirred to save themselves unless and until they understand why these terrible things are happening to them and the children they teach. Teachers need to understand the corporate plan progressing since the Business Roundtable first outlined it in 1988. Why didn’t anybody at the podium call out Barack Obama, whom Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford describes as the corporate Democratic Trojan Horse? Not only is Obama setting in motion “a rolling implosion of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society,” he’s data bombing the principles of John Dewey, Paulo Freire, John Holt. . . and every thoughtful practitioner in the country today. If you think that’s harsh, take a look at this: U.S. President Barack Obama is singularly the most dangerous, anti-democratic president in the history of this nation. He has used his pigmentation as as a shield for corporate fascism and the emaciation of everyday, ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this nation and around the world. –Larry Pinkney, BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board, Obama’s Bait and Switch Game: Otherwise Known As B. S. Aug. 4, 2011 Maybe this is way over-the-top, but why did Obama get a pass at SOS? Ask the NEA. Ask the AFT. Ask the SOS speakers. Maybe it’s to be expected at an event underwritten by a union that has already endorsed Barack Obama for a second term that the only visible criticism of Obama at SOS was provided by someone in the crowd from LaRouche who showed up with a poster depicting the President with a Hitler mustache. D. C. union (WTU) president Nathan Saunders welcomed the crowd to the SOS march. Last December, soon after his election, he told the Washington Post: “I’ve got more skills to solve problems than practically any president that’s ever run WTU. I also have formalized training in problem resolution. My masters is in negotiation and management….Part of the Harvard Trade Union Program is conflict management. And so I think I have some unique skills to solve problems.” He added that he absolutely does not believe in confrontation.” He added that ” confrontation is not the first order business.” How many teachers’ careers have to be destroyed before confrontation does become the first order of business– in DC– and across the country? Confrontation will be difficult. Teachers are by their nature people pleasers. We don’t like to say “No.” We like to cooperate. But to save the profession, teachers will have to be willing to ramp up the rhetoric a thousandfold from what they heard at the SOS. Ramp up the rhetoric and the collective action, too. Teachers must be willing to strike; they must refuse to give the tests. I’m not talking individual heroic acts here. I’m talking mass action, hundreds of thousands of teachers standing up and shouting that they’re mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

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For Matt Damon’s comments at SOS click here.

People’s Tribune: July On Line and PDF Versions

The July People’s Tribune is now on line.  Click here to read.  Filled with articles about the confrontation between the states an the people they are supposed to be serving, featuring articles on the education crisis, it may be the July issue but it is up to date and ready for use!  Also available in pdf :July_PT

The Artist And The Strike

Published in April, James Dennis’ new biography of a painting, The Strike, explores in a marvelous way the confluence of art and labor.

Robert Koehler’s The Strike is the book title.  Click the link to read more.