The DISH
Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use
Vol. 11 Issue 11…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…March 14, 2008
Where Have All the
Flowers Gone
Pete Seeger
Where have all the
flowers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the
flowers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the
flowers gone?
Girls have picked
them every one
When will they ever
learn?
When will they ever
learn?
Where have all the
young girls gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the
young girls gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the
young girls gone?
Taken husbands every
one
When will they ever
learn?
When will they ever
learn?
Where have all the
young men gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the
young men gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the
young men gone?
Gone for soldiers
every one
When will they ever
learn?
When will they ever
learn?
Where have all the
soldiers gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the
soldiers gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the
soldiers gone?
Gone to graveyards
every one
When will they ever
learn?
When will they ever
learn?
Where have all the
graveyards gone?
Long time passing
Where have all the
graveyards gone?
Long time ago
Where have all the
graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers
every one
When will we ever
learn?
When will we ever
learn?
Peter R. Seeger
"I knew it wasn't a quick
way to get jobs--to sing for the Communist Party. It was something that you do,
because you think it's the right thing at the time. And in the long run, you
realize the value in doing what you think is right." Pete Seeger
Instrumental in popularizing both the five-string banjo and the songs of
populist America, the indomitable Peter R. Seeger has weathered a number of
storms to become, eighty-nine, the most influential folk artist in America.
Seeger was born on May 3, 1919 in Patterson, New York. His father, Charles, was
a conductor, musicologist and educator; his mother, Constance de Clyver, was
also an educator and concert violinist. Seeger was destined to be as much a
radical as his father a pacifist, who, while a professor at the University of
California at Berkeley, was forced by his enemies to resign his teaching post
the year before Pete was born in 1918.
Pete heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Folk Song and Dance
Festival in Asheville, North Carolina in 1936 and his life changed forever. He
attended Harvard for two years but left before final exams in 1938. A job with
the Archives of American Folk Music exploded his budding love; Seeger spent
1939 and 1940 traveling the country seeking out folk singers like legendary
blues singer, Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, and labor militant Aunt
Molly Jackson. He met Woody Guthrie at a "Grapes of Wrath"
migrant-worker benefit concert. Later in 1940, the duo helped form the Almanac
Singers, a musical collective that included Lee Hays, Millard Lampell, Sis
Cunningham, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and others.
While opposed to war, Seeger accepted being drafted in 1942 and entertained
troops during his service. He married Tashi Ohta on his first leave from the
Army.
Although never a member of the Communist Party, Seeger accompanied Progressive
Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace, a socialist, as he toured the South
in 1948. Following a Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York, on September
4, 1949, Seeger and other concert goers were attacked by rock throwing
anti-communists, as riot police looked on. The incident inspired Seeger and Lee
Hays to write "If I Had a Hammer," and with the addition of Fred
Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert, they formed a collective that became the Weavers
in1950
Seeger helped organize the prestigious Newport Folk Festival, during the
changing political and musical climate in America. Sensitized by folk music's
simplicity and passion, young people embraced its counter culture heroes.
During the McCarthy Era's communist scare, blacklisting and Red-baiting, Seeger
was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee but refused to
discuss his political views and associates, because he believed it violated his
First Amendment rights. Undaunted by his indictment and conviction for that
refusal, Seeger stuck to his principles, while serving a year in prison. Once
released, he was a constant target of the FBI, which forced cancellation of his
concerts and banned Pete from appearing on television. Enduring it all in his
classic stoic fashion, Pete remained a favorite at outdoor festivals,
coffeehouses and on college campuses. He taught children to love music by
singing and playing at summer camps.
Seeger launched a campaign to save the environment, especially the filthy
Hudson River in 1965. With a cadre of friends, he organized a series of
"sloop concerts," and donated the proceeds to a foundation that built
the sloop "Clearwater." Sailing the Hudson, with environmental
messages while cleaning it up, was one of Pete's finest hours.
Preferring to call his music "aurally-transmitted music," the kind
learned "by ear," Seeger says, "The modern world has a tendency
to say, 'Just pay your money and let the experts do it for you. Or, let the
machines do it for you.' My father used to tell me that one must not judge the
musicality of a nation by the number of its virtuosos, but by the number of
people in the general population who are playing for themselves."
The accolades Seeger has received--National Medal of the Arts, 1994; Kennedy
Center Honors, 1994; induction, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1996; Grammy Award,
Best Traditional Folk Album, 1996, as well as the many songs he's written and
sang, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, Wimoweh, Goodnight Irene, Waist Deep in
the Big Muddy, Turn Turn Turn (To Everything There Is a Season), We Shall
Overcome to name a few, or the books he's written, Where Have All the Flowers
Gone: A Singer's Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies 1993, and Pete Seeger's
Storytelling Book --do not begin to measure the man -- Pete Seeger. Considering
all he's given America and the world, his most endearing gift has been all the
opportunities he's given others to sing along with him. Sources: (www.rollingstone.com www.writing.upenn.edu http://folkmusic.about.com http://shopping.yahoo.com)
Venue for an Artist
Archangel: Hope and
Black People
By John Burl Smith
Hope in men and what they say is necessary, but not necessarily
sufficient. Hope in God's eternal love is unfailing. That hope emanates from
the faith that somehow God will make a way!
This sentiment was my prime
motivation for writing Archangel: A Hip Hop Vision of Love and the Battle of
Good Verses Evil. My first novel, Archangel is a story about the struggles of
the black family. That saga began as free souls kidnapped in Africa and sold
into bondage. The storyline is an allegory symbolic of Joseph's journey into
Egypt. This journey is one of denial and separation from everything familiar -
culture, religion, family and a sense of self. Africans, like Joseph, had to
create a world that sustained them on their benighted journey from servitude to
economic slavery which continues today. Rising up from slavery, all black
people had to sustain them was the belief that somehow God's love would enable
them to endure.
Captured from many different places in Africa, without a common language,
culture, religion or point of identification, slaves still developed kinships
and familiar connections in defiance of the slave masters' rules. Although
forbidden to practice religious ceremonies, slaves hid in swamps and woods to
hold onto their faith in God. Denied marital rites, slaves jumped brooms to
symbolize their commitment to each other. A love story shrouded in mystery, Archangel
dramatizes the centrality of family and faith in God to reveal the essential
nature of hope in black people's survival. Hope nourished generation after
generation, as it helped build a sense of oneness.
Archangel's hip hop reference brings the black struggle into the new
millennium. Technological change hides an insidious evil that has enslaved the
black community in a crab barrel existence. This metaphor highlights today's
illusion of progress by blacks. The problems facing the present generation of
young blacks are centuries old. For the vast majority of black people, hope is
all that sustained them. When young blacks view their prospects today, compared
to their grandparents, it is clear, they too are living on hope of a better
tomorrow to sustain them today.
Archangel's hero and heroine must chose between neo-slavery in a high-tech
world -- the first black or the hired gun, who keeps other blacks in line or
get kicked back into the crab barrel with the rest. Dressed in business suits,
powerful whites from the corporate world are today's four horsemen of the
apocalypse, choosing who succeeds and who remains trapped in poverty. Success
in the real world, as in Archangel's corporate nexus, depends on how willing
blacks are to be "Judas goats." A gripping tale, Archangel's hero and
heroine are locked in a life and death struggle to save their community from
blacks, like Adolf Hitler, a Jew, yet he killed "6 million Jews."
Writers must decide what they will use their words to communicate. I decided
early in life to tell the great and heroic story of black people. There is no
story more powerful, exciting, endearing and courageous than their surviving
slavery, lifting themselves up after emancipation and Reconstruction, and then
enduring the dark days of the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. Today, the bloody and
deadly civil rights era is celebrated as by-gone glory days, even though George
W. Bush has turned back the clock on all that black blood shed supposedly
accomplished.
However, Archangel's premise that the indomitable spirit of black people nourished
by an undying hope that our faith in God as our redeemer will carry us over the
river Jordan is based on love centuries old. It is true in life, as it is in Archangel,
love always finds a way!
To order a copy of Archangel: A Hip Hop Vision of Love and the Battle of Good
Verses Evil go to www.Archangelworld.com,
visit the Tennessee Regular Baptist Book Store at 1055 South Belleview Blvd.,
Memphis, Tennessee 38106, or Afrobooks at 871 Ralph D. Abernathy Blvd. SW,
Atlanta, Georgia 30310
About
Me: Hope has nourished my writing and kept my dreams alive, even through
the dark and deadly days of the FBI/Co-Intel-Pro death squads. Most Americans,
particularly most blacks, find it difficult to believe that the US government
singles out citizens because of their beliefs and works tirelessly to destroy
their careers. Although there have been seven different administrations in the
White House, I have remained the victim of a government vendetta since 1968 and
my days as an Invader. Nevertheless, I have continued to tell the audacious
story of the world's most despised people -- descendants of American slavery. I
wrote Archangel as a tribute to the hope exemplified by black people's
willingness to keep starting families, having children and maintaining their
faith that somehow God will make a way!
Health Hazards of
GMOs
"Genetically engineered
foods saturate our diet today. In the US alone, over 80% of all processed foods
contain them. Others include grains like rice, corn and wheat; legumes like
soybeans and soy products; vegetable oils, soft drinks; salad dressings;
vegetables and fruits; dairy products including eggs; meat, chicken, pork and
other animal products; and even infant formula plus a vast array of hidden
additives and ingredients in processed foods (like in tomato sauce, ice cream,
margarine and peanut butter). Consumers don't know what they're eating because
labeling is prohibited, yet the danger is clear. Independently conducted studies
show the more of these foods we eat, the greater the potential harm to our
health.
Today, consumers are kept in the dark and are part of an uncontrolled,
unregulated mass human experiment the results of which are unknown. Yet, the
risks are enormous, it will take years to learn them, and when we finally know
it'll be too late to reverse the damage if it's proved conclusively that
genetically engineered foods harm human health as growing numbers of
independent experts believe. Once GM seeds are introduced to an area, the genie
is out of the bottle for keeps. There is nothing known to science today to
reverse the contamination already spread over two-thirds of arable US farmland
and heading everywhere unless checked."
The above is the opening salvo of Stephen Lendman's "Health Hazards of
Genetically Engineered Foods," which can be found at http://sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Lendman's lengthy essay catalogues the health hazards posed by genetically
modified organisms (GMOs) that have been introduced into the human food supply.
Dovetailing concerns about human health, scientists and the agribusiness have
been grappling with the question "where have all the bees gone?" Bees
are needed to pollinate crops, but their numbers are precipitously declining.
Some blame pesticides for the collapse of so many bee colonies, while others
are raising the possibility that GM crops are the real culprits in what seems
to be a war against bees and butterflies, which also pollinate crops.
Lendman's essay and other scientific research, which address a host of
environmental issues and are readily available on websites such as www.panna.org, should be require reading for everyone
concerned about the foods we eat and the consequences to human health.
On Recession!
By Dot
In the fourth quarter of 2007,
foreclosures reached an historic rate; the number of families losing homes
continues to rise in the first quarter of 2008. Unfortunately, homeowners'
share of equity also declined to its lowest level since World War II. Rising
prices and the falling value of the dollar have dampened consumer confidence,
putting at risk consumer spending, which makes up nearly three-quarters of US
economic activity. While consumers continue to spend, the data show they
frequent discount stores, such as Wal-Mart and Cosco.
On Friday, March 7, 2008, the US Labor Department issued a somber jobs report
for the month of February that showed a weakening job market; payrolls declined
by 63,000 jobs. In addition, the Department revised downward by 22,000 the
number of jobs lost in January. Despite the loss of an additional 85,000 jobs
over the two-month period, the unemployment rate fell from 4.9 to 4.8 percent.
Apparently, more people were too discouraged to actively seek employment,
dragging down the labor force participation rate. Pessimistic about their
prospect of finding a job, these idle workers did not do the things necessary
to ensure they were counted in the unemployment number, such as register with
the local employment office. So, in reality, the employment situation is much
worse than the low unemployment rate indicates.
In an interview on CNBC, Warren Buffett, the richest man in the US, declared
the economy is in a recession. He has been joined in this assessment by a
growing number of economists. Notoriously late in identifying past recessions,
the National Bureau of Economic Research, the academic research group that
dates recessions, has still not officially called the current downturn a
recession. Technically, a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative
growth in the nation's gross domestic product. However, given the crisis in
financial markets, falling dollar and home prices, rising food and fuel prices,
etc., the nation is in unchartered waters and may well need to revise that
definition.
Those that view the US economy from a bottom up perspective have long declared
the nation was in a serious economic downturn and have called on policymakers
to do more than pay lip-service to the resiliency of the US economy. So, while
politicians and others responsible for declaring recessions, including the Bush
administration, debate whether or not the country is experiencing one, some
segments of the nation, especially poor and black Americans, are in a state of
depression.
Disgruntled wants to know: Some smart
scientist likened draining the earth of its oil to a vampire sucking blood from
the human body. You can imagine then this lighter sphere spinning faster and
being pulled by gravity nearer to the sun and grower warmer in the process, or its
shifting tectonic plates creating friction with nothing to serve as
lubrication, sort of like bone rubbing against bone. Each of these scenarios suggests
global warming, which some believe is a conspiracy theory, even in the face of
dramatic changes in weather patterns. In the USA, the public is fed a steady
diet of propaganda to promote a consumer society; this may well serve the
interests of big business, but it leaves a lot to be desired for human beings.
Consider if you will, the long term impact on world hunger of growing food to
fuel cars rather than feed people, o, the implications for human health of
consuming aspartame. Based on credible research, aspartame is a poison, yet it
is being marketed as an alternative to sugar. Plagued with obesity, which may
be a result of what is in our food, rather than the amount consumed, for
example growth hormones in meat, this poison is advertised as a way to lose
weight. It is an incredibly sad situation. How do mainstream media justify
promoting this deadly diet aid while relegating peer-reviewed scientific data
to the trash heap of conspiracy theories or doomsday scenarios not worthy of
consideration?
Disgruntled
says: As usual, the latest breaking "news" scandal is sucking
the air out of everything newsworthy. Rather than report on drugs found in
drinking water, the rapidly declining US economic situation, which includes a
falling dollar and rising prices, bank failures and missed margin calls at
over-leveraged private equity firms, such as the Carlyle Group, problems with
genetically modified foods/crops and disappearing bees and butterflies and
synthetic poisons in the food supply, including aspartame, which is being
consumed by adults and children, soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
criminal in the White House's embrace of torture and illegal wiretaps, etc.,
talking heads and pundits are hyper-ventilating over the revelation that New
York Governor Eliot Spitzer, a holier-than-thou ex-prosecutor, was caught on a
court-ordered wiretap soliciting an assignation with a high-priced prostitute,
presumably for sex. Admittedly, Spitzer, a Democrat, made serious enemies on
Wall Street. And, since big money owns US mainstream media and controls the
government, he was driven from office in no time flat. While Spitzer is rightly
called a hypocrite, the more dangerous hypocrisy is being practiced by the news
people and politicians doing nothing to hold the crook in the White House
accountable for far more serious crimes than those committed by Spitzer and
their failure to report the real news that Spitzer-gate will suffocate.
Disgruntled
feels: Hopeless! In a true democracy, leaders, who are elected by the
people, respond to the needs of the electorate, since, ideally, it is empowered
to kick an unresponsive government out of office. George W. Bush has never
responded to the needs of the majority. Unlike the vast majority of Americans,
he understands the USA is not a democracy; it is a republic created to serve
the interests of a few - members of the nation's riches families. It is these
families and their interests he pledges allegiance and vows to use the powers
of his office and the US military to serve and protect. This is probably why he
is so dispassionate about the plight of the nation's poor and middle-class
families, the vast majority of the US population and segment of the economy
that suffers most during any economic downturn. Bush can pay lip-service to
giving the economy a booster shot to prevent a recession, while many of these
folks are experiencing a depression. Given the nation's leaders are so far
removed from the plight of the people, sometimes the situation seems hopeless.
Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and Telephone Calls
Email tim.sampson@soulsvillefoundation.org
The Soulsville Foundation is happy to announce that its Stax Music Academy's
Soul School Spring Break Concert will be held Wednesday, March 19th, at Buckman
Performing Arts Center at 7 PM. Stax Music Academy students will be joined in
concert by visiting Music Directors from Berklee College of Music and
Internationally Renowned artist Kirk Whalum. Admission is $5!
Email www.capitalpress.com APHIS Sued Over
"Franken-Seeds"...The Organic Seed Alliance (O.S.A.), Center for Food
Safety, and Sierra Club have sued the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal
Plant Health Inspection Service (A.P.H.I.S.) to block commercial release of the
sugar beet seeds genetically engineered to tolerate Roundup Ready (glyphosate)
herbicide. The seeds, currently slated for commercial release this spring, were
developed by Monsanto. Roundup is Monsanto's dominant pesticide. The suit
charges that A.P.H.I.S. failed to thoroughly investigate whether a three-mile
buffer zone between G.E. and natural crops will be sufficient to "thwart
the spread of glyphosate-tolerant genes" to fields of organic beets and
chard.
Email www.americanprogress.org USDA Says
It's None of Public's Business Who Ate Recalled Meat... At least 10,000 food
distributors sold recalled meat from the shuttered Hallmark slaughterhouse in Chino,
CA including ConAgra, General Foods, Nestle and H.J. Heinz and it could still
be on store shelves. But Richard Raymond, USDA undersecretary for food safety,
told an incredulous House Appropriation's agriculture panel this week the
information is "proprietary", would not be released."
Email gailgal@gmail.com The Bush
administration has consistently claimed the US does not engage in torture. This
week, Bush vetoed a bill banning torture. What Bush is and has done send a
hypocritical message to the world, plus torture is a crime. Congress did not
override the veto!