okay, i'm going to try the first one right now.
1. Democracy Now on Charlie Haden
2. CIA's New Spying Mission In Venezuela
3. Small-Mart vs. Wal-Mart
4. US Army's Kill-Kill Ethos Under Fire
5. View the ad that raised $225,000 in a day - against Arctic drilling
6. Recycle your old fishing line
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 16:38:36 -1000 (HST)
From: Gabrielle Welford
Subject: democracy now on charlie haden
Friday, September 1st, 2006
Jazz Legend Charlie Haden on His Life, His Music and His Politics
We speak with legendary bass player and composer, Charlie Haden, one of
the most politically outspoken jazz musicians of his time. During the
middle of the Vietnam War, Haden formed the Liberation Music Orchestra
that mixed songs from the Spanish Civil War, anti-war songs and a tribute
to Che Guevera. He recently re-formed the group to respond to the Bush
administration and the invasion of Iraq. He titled the new album "Not In
Our Name." [includes rush transcript]
Join Charlie Haden and Amy Goodman for Democracy Now's 10th Anniversary.
We speak with legendary bass player, composer and political activist,
Charlie Haden. In the late 1950s he played in Ornette Coleman's
groundbreaking quartet which changed the shape and sound of jazz.
Over the years, Haden has won countless music awards, including two
Grammys. And he has played with many other jazz greats including John
Coltrane, Don Cherry and Archie Shepp.
Charlie Haden has also been one of the most politically outspoken jazz
musicians. During the middle of the Vietnam War, he and Carla Bley formed
the Liberation Music Orchestra. The group's debut album mixed songs from
the Spanish Civil War, anti-war songs and a tribute to Che Guevera. In
1971 he was jailed in Portugal for dedicating a song to the black
liberation movements of Mozambique and Angola.
Last year Haden re-formed the Liberation Music Orchestra to respond to the
Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq. He titled the new album "Not
In Our Name." Charlie Haden recently joined us in our Firehouse Studio to
talk about his music and politics.
* Charlie Haden, legendary jazz bassist and composer.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us
provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV
broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Haden recently joined us in our Firehouse studio to
talk about his music and politics. I asked him to talk about how he began
playing music.
CHARLIE HADEN: My parents were on the Grand Ole Opry. They traveled
all over the country singing hillbilly music. Thats what they called it
back then. They were friends with Roy Acuff and the Delmore Brothers and
the Carter Family. And all of my brothers and sisters who were older than
me started on the show, after they were big enough to hold a guitar and
sing.
And I was born in Shenandoah, Iowa. I was being rocked to sleep by
my mother, humming folksongs to me, and all of a sudden I started humming
the harmony. I was 22 months old. And she said, Charlie, when you started
humming the harmony with me, I knew you were ready for the show. And so I
started on the show at 22 months old as Cowboy Charlie, and I sang every
day. On the radio we had two shows a week, in the morning and in the
afternoon. And I did that up until the time I was fifteen years old.
AMY GOODMAN: From when you were before two years old --
CHARLIE HADEN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: -- to 15.
CHARLIE HADEN: Right. And I yodeled and I sang, and you know. And we
all sang harmony.
AMY GOODMAN: How many of you were there?
CHARLIE HADEN: Well, there was I had two older brothers and an
older sister that were on the main show. And later, I had a younger
brother and a younger sister, but --
AMY GOODMAN: Did this bring together family or divide you?
CHARLIE HADEN: What was that?
AMY GOODMAN: Singing, playing music.
CHARLIE HADEN: Oh, that brought us together. That was one of the
most wonderful things about bringing our family together. We all got
together every morning to decide what the songs were that we were going to
sing for the radio show. Just like you prepare your show, thats the way we
prepared our show. And my dad would pick out the songs that were going to
sing. And sometimes we had a radio studio in whatever house we were in,
and he would crank the crank that would go into the radio stations, and
that would let them know we were ready to go on the air. And sometimes we
would go into the studio in Springfield, Missouri at KWTO -- Keep Watching
the Ozarks -- and we would do the show from the studio. My dad was the MC.
He gave all the commercials -- you know, Waits Green Mountain cough syrup,
Sparkalite cereal, Allstate Insurance. I mean, we had all kinds of
sponsors. We got mailbags from all over the country. And it was really a
great experience for me, not only musically, but being close to my family
and devoted to this music. And my life was filled with music, and I
learned so much about harmony and melody doing those shows.
AMY GOODMAN: You were singing then, but you dont sing now.
CHARLIE HADEN: Well, I dont sing now, because I had polio when I was
15, bulbar polio. This was when the epidemic was happening. And I was
lucky that it didnt affect my lungs or my legs. It went to my face and
kind of paralyzed my vocal chords, and I wasnt able to sing. And they said
I was very lucky that I would get over it, which I did. But at the same
time my dad had decided to retire from entertainment and start a fishing
lodge down in Lake Bull Shoals in the Ozarks. He was a fisherman, so he
built this fishing lodge.
And, you know, in the meantime I had been listening to a lot of --
this was before TV. Radio was the big deal. Everyone listened to the
radio. I never went away from the radio. I listened to classical music. I
listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming
interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the
Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker
play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I
said, Thats what I want to do. And I started working toward that goal and
turned down a scholarship to Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio and decided to
go to Los Angeles and attend a school there. It was called Westlake
College of Modern Music. This was 1956, and they supposedly had jazz
there. Thats why I wanted to go. But why I really wanted to go to LA was
to find my favorite pianist. His name was Hampton Hawes, and he lived in
LA.
AMY GOODMAN: Did you find him?
CHARLIE HADEN: I found him. I was doing my homework one night --
early one morning at 3:00 in the morning at Tiny Naylors on La Brea and
Sunset Boulevard with carhops and everything, and a guy walked in that I
knew to be Red Mitchell, who was the bass player with Hampton Hawes. So I
got to know him. I went up to him, and he said, Come over to my house, and
lets hang out. And I went over to his house. And one day he called me, and
he said, Im working this gig with Art Pepper, and could you come and sit
in, because I got a recording session. I cant finish the gig, and I know
hell hire you if he hears you. So thats what I did. Sonny Clark, legendary
pianist, was playing that night. Art hired me. I came the next night, and
Hampton Hawes was playing piano. And that was like a thrill.
AMY GOODMAN: Youve had a long relationship with Ornette Coleman
right up until today, the time of this interview. Youve just spent two
evenings with him.
CHARLIE HADEN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how you met and the kind of work, the music
that youve played together.
CHARLIE HADEN: I heard Ornette play the first time at a club called
the Hague. I was on a night off. I was playing at the Hillcrest with Paul
Bley, and Carla Bley was his wife. Thats how I met Carla. And I went to
the Hague. Gerry Mulligan was playing there with his band, and this guy
comes up to the stage and asks to sit in. They tell him to come up, and he
got his alto. It was a plastic -- white plastic alto saxophone. And he
starts to play, and the whole room lit up for me. It was so brilliant. And
as soon as he started to play, they asked him to stop. So he put the horn
back in the case and started out the back door.
AMY GOODMAN: Why did they ask him to stop?
CHARLIE HADEN: Well, you know, Ornettes music was completely
different than traditional jazz. It was free improvisation. It was his way
of improvising. It was improvising and creating a new chord structure to
the song that you were playing. Thats the way he played, and a lot of
musicians didnt feel close to that, and it was new to them. And so, they
asked him to stop playing. And so, I missed him. He would disappear into
the night.
I found out the next night at the Hillcrest from my drummer, from
Paul Bleys drummer, Lennie McBrowne. I said, I heard this guy play, who
was brilliant, and played like the human voice. And he said, Was he
playing a plastic horn? And I said, Yeah. He said, That was Ornette
Coleman. Ill introduce you to him. He brought him in.
We met, and I told him how great he played. And he said, Thank you.
He said, Not many people tell me that. I mean, he said, Lets go play. And
we went over to his house, and we played for three days. And then we
started rehearsing with Don Cherry and Billy Higgins. And then a guy from
Atlantic Records came to one of the rehearsals, Nesuhi Ertegun, and wanted
us to make a record. And we made two albums: The Shape of Jazz to Come and
Tomorrow Is the Question! and Change of the Century.
AMY GOODMAN: So all these very future-looking -- The Shape of Jazz
to Come.
CHARLIE HADEN: And Change of the Century.
AMY GOODMAN: What did you mean -- The Shape of Jazz to Come?
CHARLIE HADEN: Well, that was Ornettes title, and he always had this
-- you know, this vision. Hes a real visionary in his music. And he has
these great titles to his songs and to his albums. And so, The Shape of
Jazz to Come, thats what it was. There were several revolutions, changes
in the world of jazz, you know. Louis Armstrong and some other people
started it out. And then there was the swing era with the big bands. And
then Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie came along and created bebop on
52nd Street in the 40s. That was a revolution in the language of jazz. And
then, when Ornette and Don and I and Billy came to New York, that was the
next one.
AMY GOODMAN: You have four records/CDs out with the Liberation Music
Orchestra. Can you talk about the first one, how it all began, how you
established this orchestra, why its name?
CHARLIE HADEN: I established it from my concerns about what was
going on in the world because of the Nixon administration and the war in
Vietnam, and I started thinking about, Ive gotta do something about this.
And I had some music from the Spanish Civil War that was in my collection,
and I started thinking about -- maybe I can do -- I mean, I had never done
this before, you know? And maybe I could do something where I can play
some political songs from the Spanish Civil War. I can write a song about
my hero Che Guevara and call it Song for Che. I can write a piece about
the Chicago Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, where people were,
you know, beaten on the street and jailed.
And so, I called up a colleague of mine, Carla Bley, who I had known
since 1957 and whos a great arranger and great composer, and I said, I
want to do this, and will you write arrangements? And she said, Lets go
over the music. And we got together. I played her all the music. She wrote
some pieces. I wrote some pieces. And we wanted to voice it like the old
recordings from the Spanish Republican Band. They had like this brass
band, where they did all these songs, and it had French horn, tuba,
trumpets, saxophones. So thats what we did. And I got all of my guys that
I played jazz with, you know, for many years -- Don Cherry, Dewey Redman,
Paul Motian, a great -- Roswell Rudd -- and we asked them if they wanted
to do this, and they said yes. And so, you know, Carla wrote the
arrangements.
We had a little rehearsal at -- first of all, I had to find a record
company, because every company I went to with this idea said no, because
of the politics. And I finally found a guy. His name was Bob Thiele, and
he had been producing a lot of John Coltrane on Impulse. He worked for
Impulse, which was ABC. And I went up to his office, and I said, This is
what I want to do. And he said, Well, its a great, you know, project. He
said, Lets do it. I dont know if itll be released, but lets do it. And so,
he rented Judson Hall on 57th Street in New York, and I knew some Abraham
Lincoln vets that had fought in Spain --
AMY GOODMAN: And you write in the record, the album I have here --
thanks to our producer, Mike Burke, who is a real connoisseur of all youve
done -- you write about the Spanish Civil War, and you talk about how
approximately 1,600 of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade came back alive. You
invited survivors to you concert?
CHARLIE HADEN: That lived in the New York area. And I called one of
the men that I knew, and he got in touch with everybody else, and they
brought their wives. And it was a very mind-opening experience for me to
read about the Spanish Civil War, because, you know, Chamberlain and
Roosevelt remained neutral when Franco was the dictator in Spain and there
was a revolution, and they didnt help the Spanish Republic to fight
Franco. And so, as a result, people from all over the world, countries
from all over the world volunteered to come help the Spanish Republic
fight fascism. And they lost. And if they hadnt lost, fascism would have
been defeated, and there probably wouldnt have been a World War II. You
know, Hitler had the opportunity to try out all of his new weapons during
the Spanish Civil War.
And the thing that really moved me, too, was the music that came out
of that. You know, when you have people fighting to survive a life
struggle, you know, you hear music from those people thats very deep and
very moving. And in this case, they were all Spanish folksongs, that new
words were added to them for the wartime.
AMY GOODMAN: So this record was released, your first.
CHARLIE HADEN: After I went to Los Angeles -- I lived in New York
then, and I flew to LA -- and I presented one of the executives with some
information that was kind of misleading, but he didnt know it. And I said,
you know -- they were worried about the word liberation, because of the
Liberation Front in Vietnam and all the things that were associated with
that, you know, at the time. And I said, You know, this is a very hip
word, liberation. Thats what the United States is built on, you know. And
I said, And if you dont let me release this record, a rock group is going
to steal this title. He said, Oh, God! I never thought of that. Okay! So,
it was that easy. You know, it was plane fare all the way to LA. And then
I had got them to release the album. After it was released, there was a
lot of controversy about it, and a lot of the jazz critics, the
conservative jazz critics, put it down. And it was kind of lost in the
shuffle. But it became a cult kind of classic.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about playing in Portugal? When was that?
71?
CHARLIE HADEN: It was 1971. I had just had triplet daughters. And --
AMY GOODMAN: Their names?
CHARLIE HADEN: Rachel, Petra and Tanya.
AMY GOODMAN: Theyre all musicians?
CHARLIE HADEN: Theyre all musicians now. And my son Josh was three
years old. And --
AMY GOODMAN: Arent you going to be recording -- going back to
country music and playing with all of them?
CHARLIE HADEN: Im going down to Nashville and doing a country
record, back to, you know, where I came from. And theyre all going to come
with me.
AMY GOODMAN: With the triplets and your son?
CHARLIE HADEN: And my wife Ruth is coming.
AMY GOODMAN: Whos a great singer.
CHARLIE HADEN: Whos a great singer and producer. She produces
everything I do, with me. And theres a lot of people in Nashville that
know about my family that really want to be a part of this. And its going
to be great. Ive been wanting to do this for so long.
AMY GOODMAN: So Petra, shes with the Foo Fighters.
CHARLIE HADEN: Shes with the Foo Fighters. And Rachel is with a band
called the Rentals. Shes on tour now. And the three of them sing together
better than the Dixie Chicks. You know, theyre great. But Tanya right now
is taking care of my brand new grandson, but they still sing, and theyre
really looking forward to going to Nashville.
AMY GOODMAN: And Tanyas married to Jack Black. They went to high
school together?
CHARLIE HADEN: Thats right. And they have a new baby, Sam Haden
Black. And Ruth and I are going to see them in just a minute.
AMY GOODMAN: I dont want to keep you, but I also do want to keep
you. And your son is with Spain?
CHARLIE HADEN: My son had a band called Spain, which made four
recordings and was really critically acclaimed all over the world. When he
goes -- even here, his concerts are sold out. And now, then, he just did a
solo record. And, you know, the record business, because of downloading,
etc., is really at a low right now, and its really hard for artists to get
their music out. And so, now hes going to put it out himself. And its
really, really beautiful.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, now I want to go back to you. 1971, had you had
your kids yet?
CHARLIE HADEN: Yes. They were born October 11, and Ornette called
and said we have a chance to go on this Newport Jazz Festival tour of
Europe with Duke Ellingtons band; Miles Daviss band; Dexter Gordon; the
Giants of Jazz, which included Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Sonny
Stitt, Al McKibben, Art Blakey. I mean, I cant believe that we were all on
tour together. And I was with Ornettes quartet, which was Ornette, and
Dewey Redman was playing tenor saxophone, and Ed Blackwell was playing
drums. And I said, Well, you know, we just had these girls, man. And I
gotta stay here and help, you know. And --
AMY GOODMAN: Not just girls. Triplets.
CHARLIE HADEN: Triplets, yeah. But anyway --
AMY GOODMAN: Did you know you were having triplets?
CHARLIE HADEN: We did, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: From early on?
CHARLIE HADEN: My ex-wife, their mother, we -- back then, they didnt
have ultrasound. And there was an x-ray, which we were very concerned
about, but they saw three, and they said, Youve got three.
AMY GOODMAN: How late into the pregnancy?
CHARLIE HADEN: This was eight months.
AMY GOODMAN: Eight months into the pregnancy, you learned you were
having triplets?
CHARLIE HADEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, Ornette said, Well, can her
mother come out and help, because this tour is really important, you know?
And I said, Okay. So we got it all fixed up, and I went to Europe. But I
saw on the itinerary before we left that we were playing in Portugal, and
I didnt agree with the government there. It was a kind of a fascist
government. They had colonies in Guinea-Bissau, in Angola and Mozambique,
and they were systematically wiping out the Black race, you know? And so I
called Ornette, and I said, You know, I dont want to play in Portugal. And
he said, Charlie, weve already signed the contract. Weve gotta play. Its
the last country on the concert tour. Figure out -- maybe you can do
something to protest it, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: The Caetano regime.
CHARLIE HADEN: Yeah. And so, during the tour we were playing one of
my songs, Song for Che, and I decided that when we played my song, because
it was connected to me, because I was the guy that was going to do it, you
know, I would dedicate that song to the Black peoples liberation movements
in Mozambique and Angola and Guinea-Bissau. And I asked -- I think we were
in Bulgaria, and we were doing a jazz festival there. Or Romania, we were
in Bucharest, and I asked one of the journalists there, who was from
Portugal, I said, Im planning on -- because he knew about the Liberation
Music Orchestra. He says, What are you going to do? And I said, Im going
to dedicate -- what would happen if I did this?
He said, Well, three or four different things. You can either be
shot on the spot, or they could pull you off the stage, or they could
arrest you on the stage. They could arrest you in your dressing room. Or
they can arrest you later. But youre going to be arrested. And I thought,
you know, I dont think theyll arrest me, man. Im an American jazz
musician. This is a jazz festival. It has nothing to do with politics. I
think Im safe.
So I made the dedication, and I wasnt arrested immediately, but, you
know, when I did the dedication there were young people there, students,
that were in the cheaper seats in front, and they all started cheering so
loud that you couldnt hear the music. And a lot of police were running
around with automatic weapons, and they, right after we finished our set,
they stopped down the festival, and they closed down in Cascais this big
stadium that we were playing in. And we went back to the hotel, and so I
was starting to get concerned about what was going to happen.
The next day, we went to the airport, and at the airport, I was
trying to get my bass on the plane to make sure I could get the bass on
the plane. And there were hundreds and hundreds of people in front of the
airlines counters. And finally, one of the people from TWA came around the
counter and said, There was a man over there who wanted to interview you,
and you have to stay here. And I said, I dont want to be interviewed. And
Ornette came over and said, Whats going on? And they say, They want to
interview Mr. Haden, and you guys are going to get on the plane. And hes
staying here. And Ornette said, No, were not going on the plane. Were
going to stay here with him. And they said, No, youre not. Youre getting
on the plane. They took them by the arms, and they led them on the
aircraft. And I stayed there, and they took me down a winding staircase to
an interrogation room and started pumping me with questions. They said,
Were going to transfer you over to the PIDE headquarters.
AMY GOODMAN: The police?
CHARLIE HADEN: It was the political police of Portugal. And so I
said, you know, Im a United States citizen with a United States passport.
I demand to be able to call the embassy. And the guy who worked for TWA
looked at me and smiled and said, Its Sunday, Mr. Haden. You cant call the
embassy. You shouldnt mix politics with music.
AMY GOODMAN: Jazz legend Charlie Haden. We'll be back with him in a
minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: "Song for Che" by Charlie Haden, the song he dedicated to the
Black liberation movements of Mozambique and Angola that got him arrested
in Portugal in 1971. Charlie Haden describes what happened once the
Portuguese police got him.
CHARLIE HADEN: And the next thing I know, Im in a car, and were
traveling to a prison. And Im thrown into a dark room with no lights, and
I stay there for I dont know how long. A long, long time. And finally -- I
mean, I was traumatized. You know, I thought Id never get to see my kids.
I thought it was over. I didnt know what they were going to do.
And they finally came and got me from the room and took me up to an
interrogation room with really, really bright lights. I couldnt see
anything. And there was one guy who spoke English that started pumping
questions at me right and left, and one of the questions, which I was kind
of prepared for, because I thought I would kind of try to fool them. He
said, Why did you make this dedication? And I said, Well, Ive been making
a dedication at every country we went to. I dedicated something in Germany
to the German people. I dedicated something in France. And he said, Do you
expect us to believe that? You know, anyway, they brought a statement to
me to sign. I refused to sign it, and they started to look -- one guy had
a trunch, and in his hand he was doing like this. And --
AMY GOODMAN: Hitting it against his other hand.
CHARLIE HADEN: Hitting it against his other hand. And as soon as I
thought like everything is over with, there was a guy that came down and
whispered something in the head policemans ear. And all of a sudden he
completely changed. He says, Mr. Haden, youre going upstairs. Someone from
the American embassy is here to retrieve you.
And I went up to this real plush room, which was really different
from where I had been, and the guy said, Hey, Charlie, whatd you say the
other night that caused all that commotion? He says, Wow! He said, Well,
my names Bob Jones, and Im from Chicago. Im the cultural attach here. Come
along with me and, you know, we can get you out of this place. You know, I
said, Oh, great! Anyway, I went to his villa and went to the airport and
got --
AMY GOODMAN: This was Nixons cultural attach to Portugal.
CHARLIE HADEN: This was Nixons cultural attach. I found out later
from Ornette, too, and from other people that they werent going to do --
the United States wasnt going to do anything, because they were very
embarrassed by what I did, because of NATO. And they didnt want to have
anything to do with it. And finally, I guess Ornette helped, too, and one
of the promoters in Lisbon was kind enough to help, and they said, You
know, this guys a famous jazz musician, and you better let him go, you
know, because its not going to look good for you. And they let me go, and
I was very happy.
AMY GOODMAN: Were talking to the legendary musician, bassist and
political activist, Charlie Haden. After this, did it change your thoughts
about speaking out? Did it make you radioactive for other jazz musicians?
Did musicians support you in what you had done?
CHARLIE HADEN: Most of the musicians that I performed and played and
recorded with all supported me. You know, its such a struggle for jazz
musicians in this country to get their music played and to the people. And
in that struggle, they dont really have time -- or, you know, theyre
struggling to play their music, and I think that thats the reason that
more musicians dont speak out politically.
But I started getting worried when the FBI came to my apartment, and
they had been watching the house. I saw cars out in front on 97th Street,
where we lived, and I knew plain-clothes cars when I saw it, you know. And
they finally came up to the door and rang the doorbell, and they said,
Were FBI. We want to talk to you. And I said, Well, why should I let you
in? They said, Well, were asking you if we can come in and talk to you. So
I said, I dont have anything to hide. Come in. So, they asked me, you
know, Why did you do that? And I told them. I said, I dont agree with the
policies of the Portuguese government, and thats why I did that. And they
had a whole dossier on me. I couldnt believe it.
Anyway, but I thought about it afterwards, and if I had it to do
again, I would do it again. And as a result, I think, of what I did,
because nobody had ever done that in Portugal, my wife Ruth and I later
learned that they put it into the school books of the schools in Portugal,
what I did. And there was a revolution in 1974 of the young enlisted
officers, and they overthrew Caetano. He fled the country. And I think it
was a gentleman named Duarte [Soares] that took over, socialist
government. They invited me to come back, and I came back and I played.
And there were 40,000 people in this big meadow in Lisbon, and they were
all chanting, Charlie! Charlie! Charlie! And I had goose bumps all over.
It made me feel so good.
And then, my wife Ruth and I were invited back, because I met, while
I was there, Carlos Paredes, who was this famous fado player, and I loved
his playing, and so I said, I want to play with you. He had been arrested
under Salazar. And we came back and did a film with him, and they took me
back to the stadium where I was arrested in 71. And they did a little
documentary. It was all in Portuguese. And it was really nice to go back.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about speaking out and how easy or hard
it is, and if you think that as a white jazz musician, you were able to
speak out more than Black jazz musicians, if it matters. I mean, Louis
Armstrong, for example, not known for speaking out, but when it came to
the Little Rock Nine, to the kids not being able to get in school, he did
speak out fiercely and actually talked about President Eisenhower -- why
wasnt he taking the hand of the children and walking into school? -- and
took great risk in speaking out. Do you think theres a difference?
CHARLIE HADEN: No, I dont think theres a difference. I think its a
commitment to equality and to humanism and compassion in the world. Its a
commitment. I mean, when youre a sensitive human being and you see the
things that are going on around you that arent human, you know, you have
to speak out and do something about it. And I think thats what Louis
Armstrong did. And, you know, Max Roach and Charlie Mingus did the same
thing when they made the recordings they made about racism. And Archie
Shepp. Theres a lot of African American musicians that spoke out about
racism, and Im happy about that.
AMY GOODMAN: Youve won a lot of awards, Charlie Haden. You won the
Downbeat critics and readers polls for unprecedented 14 consecutive years
as number one acoustic bassist. Youve won Grammy after Grammy. But your
latest CD, your latest Liberation Music Orchestra CD, called Not in My
Name [sic] didnt win a Grammy.
CHARLIE HADEN: Not in Our Name.
AMY GOODMAN: Not in Our Name.
CHARLIE HADEN: And, you know, I was on tour with Pat Metheny in
2003, and we did an album called Beyond the Missouri Sky. It was a duet.
Were both from Missouri. And it was all these beautiful Americana songs
and really well received. And so we were doing a tour for this music, and
we were in Italy and in Spain, especially. We were walking down streets in
different cities, and we would see unfurled from balconies of the
apartment houses, Not In Our Name. And thats when Iraq had been attacked.
People talk about a war in Iraq. Theres no war in Iraq. It was an invasion
and an occupation. And the people in Europe really cared, you know. And
when I saw all these banners from the balconies saying, Not In Our Name,
that stuck with me. And when I did this record, thats what I called it.
AMY GOODMAN: Not in Our Name.
CHARLIE HADEN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And in Not in Our Name, you have this medley of songs
you call America the Beautiful.
CHARLIE HADEN: There were so many songs that we wanted to do. And
Carla composed a song. I composed a song. And the medley was America the
Beautiful combined with Lift Every Voice and Sing, which is the African
American national anthem in the United States, very famous song and
beautiful song. And then we did Ornette Colemans Skies of America. And we
did -- you know, there was another guy, Gary McFarland, who was a jazz
composer/arranger back in the late 60s, who made an album called America
the Beautiful. He was one of the guys that spoke out, you know. And we
patterned one of the arrangements after his arrangement. And we did Adagio
for Strings. I wanted to do all American composers. This Is Not America by
Pat Metheny, which was in the movie, The Falcon and the Snowman, and David
Bowie sings it at the end. And then we did Carlas song, Blue Anthem, my
song, Not in Our Name. We did Amazing Grace, which I used to sing, you
know, in church. And we did Goin Home, which has become kind of like a
folksong in the United States, which was actually from the Largo from the
New World Symphony by Dvorak. And Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the title being Not in Our Name had an
effect on its reception, in terms of the conventional, you know, awards?
CHARLIE HADEN: Well, you know, I really dont have time to even dwell
on those things. I know that a lot of those things happen, and I have so
much to do that I dont really think about that. I know that it probably
wasnt nominated for a Grammy because of its politics. But, you know, who
am I to say? You know, I make the music, and what happens after I make the
music, I hope, is a positive thing for people and causes them to start
thinking about, this shouldnt be in our name either. But Ive had, you
know, many people come up to me and say, Its really great that you did
this, and Thank you for doing this. And thats rewarding to me.
We were just in South Africa playing at the Cape Town Festival, and
I was there with my wife Ruth and Quartet West. And there was a gentleman
there that was in the parliament, and he came up to me. He says, Can I
have coffee with you? And so we went and had coffee, and he said, You
know, you politicized me when I was a young man. I listened to your first
Liberation Orchestra recording, and I started reading about Che Guevara,
and I started reading about the Spanish Civil War. I started reading about
all these different things. And he said, And I was living in a one-room
shack with my family. Eleven kids, no running water, whatever, back in
apartheid, you know. And he said, Then I joined the ANC, and I was
arrested, put in solitary confinement, and I thought about your music. It
kept me going. And when I was released and Nelson Mandela freed me -- and
he said, I play your music all the time. He said, Its because of you that
I was politicized.
He said, I had to come and thank you for this, because youre here in
Cape Town. And he said, I wanted you to know what you did for my life. And
he said, I want you -- to Ruth and I, he said, I want you and your wife to
meet my wife and my sons. And it was so great, you know, and tears came to
our eyes when he was talking about his confinement and what he had to go
through. And he says, Now I go to parliament every day, and I listen to
your record with Hank Jones called Steal Away every morning at five. And
that just knocked me out. So its things like that that make everything
worthwhile, all the sacrifices, all of the, whatever, criticism. But, you
know, theres more enjoyment and theres more fulfillment than there is
criticism, and thats what Im happy about.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Charlie, 50 years of making music and many
years to come, is there anything you wish you had done, and do you plan to
do it now?
CHARLIE HADEN: Ive been so lucky to play with great musicians, most
of whom I wanted to play with and I sought out when I was in my younger
stages, and, you know, I wouldnt do anything different, except I would
seek out as many musicians to life the way I am and dedicated to beauty
the way I am, because its not really about categories, like jazz, its
about beautiful music and playing music from all over the world with other
musicians who are dedicated, because its up to us to bring beauty back
into this world. Its up to people in the arts, the painters, the writers,
the composers, the dance troupes, everybody, the actors, the people who
write poetry. You know, its up to us to try to make a difference in this
world and try to make this planet a better to live for all the human
beings and stop the cruelty and the devastation thats going on, you know,
and have a great place.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think you can do that with your music?
CHARLIE HADEN: Im going to try.
AMY GOODMAN: And do you think jazz is going to continue?
CHARLIE HADEN: Jazz will always continue. Its an art form thats
very, very powerful, very, very powerful, and has a powerful message of
improvisation and spontaneity. And theres a lot of young people dedicated
to it, and theyre being born every day, you know. And its not just in
jazz. Its in all different kinds of music that young people want to
express themselves in the language of whatever art form theyre in. And
thats the most important thing. I started the Jazz Studies out at
California Institute of the Arts in 1982, and thats a campus that has all
of the arts, you know, and I tell my students -- I mean, theres young
people from all over the world that come to study with me about the
spirituality of improvisation.
AMY GOODMAN: Jazz legend Charlie Haden. On September 11th, he and his
Liberation Music Orchestra will join us here in New York at the historic
Cooper Union Great Hall at Astor Place to launch Democracy Now!'s 10th
anniversary 80-city tour.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2006 19:36:04 -0500
From: atlantis
Subject: CIA's New Spying Mission In Venezuela
>> >
> http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=GOL20060820&
> articleId=3015
>> > CIA Announces New Mission in Venezuela and Cuba
>> > by Eva Golinger
>> > August 20, 2006
>> > Venezuelanalysis.com
>> > Caracas, August 19, 2006-John Negroponte, Director of National
>> > Intelligence for the United States, announced on Friday, August 18,
>> > 2006, the creation of a new special CIA mission to oversee
>> > intelligence activities in Venezuela and Cuba. Negroponte, who
>> > coordinates the entire intelligence community in the United States
>> > and reports directly to President George W. Bush, named CIA veteran
>> > J. Patrick Maher as Acting Mission Manager of this new important
>> > division.
>> >
>> > According to a Press Release from the Directorate of National
>> > Intelligence, Maher will be responsible for integrating collection
>> > and analysis on Cuba and Venezuela across the Intelligence Community,
>> > identifying and filling gaps in intelligence, and ensuring the
>> > implementation of strategies, among other duties; According to
>> > Negroponte, ;such efforts are critical today, as policymakers have
>> > increasingly focused on the challenges that Cuba and Venezuela pose
>> > to American foreign policy
>> >
>> > Since early 2005, the CIA has named Venezuela as one of the Top 5
>> > Unstable Countries in Latin America and has increased its
>> > intelligence personnel within the country by fifty percent.
>> >
>> > The new CIA Mission Manager for Cuba and Venezuela will be
>> > responsible for ensuring that policymakers have a full range of
>> > timely and accurate intelligence on which to base their decisions.
>> > This implies a further increase in actual ground agents and field
>> > officers in both nations.
>> >
>> > During the past two years, the Venezuelan Government has discovered
>> > and expelled four U.S. officials engaged in espionage activities. Two
>> > of these individuals were military attaches, Capitan John Correa and
Lieutenant Humberto Rodriguez, and had been actively recruiting
>> > members of the Venezuelan armed forces to provide strategic and
>> > secret information about internal Venezuelan affairs to the U.S.
>> > government.
>> >
>> > The other two accused spies are not publicly known, though President
>> > Hugo Chávez recently made reference to a beautiful woman caught
>> > taking photographs in the city of Valencia, indicating she was a CIA
>> > operative who had been detained and turned over to the U.S. Embassy.
>> >
>> > J. Patrick Maher has been the National Intelligence Officer for the
>> > Western Hemisphere since August 2005. He will remain in that capacity
>> > as well as assume the role of Acting Mission Manager until a more
>> > permanent replacement is named. Maher was the Deputy Director of the
>> > CIA's Directorate of Intelligence's Office of Policy Support from
>> > 2003 to August 2005, and previously oversaw different CIA divisions
>> > in Latin America, including the Colombia Working Group, the Mexico
>> > Working Group and he served as Chief of the Latin America Branch's
>> > Middle-Caribbean Division. He joined the CIA in 1974 after a two-year
>> > stint as a volunteer in the Peace Corp, where he was stationed in
>> > Colombia. The Peace Corp has often been viewed as a first step trial
>> > period for young perspective CIA officers.
>> >
>> > The Mission Manager for Cuba and Venezuela is a position recommended
>> > by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission of the Directorate of
>> > National Intelligence and has been endorsed by President George W.
>> > Bush. The Cuba and Venezuela Mission becomes the sixth of its kind,
>> > though the only other nations with such specific missions are Iran
>> > and North Korea. The other missions include one for counterterrorism,
>> > one for counter-proliferation and one for counterintelligence. The
>> > Missions are aimed at leading the intelligence community on a
>> > strategic and analytical level.
>> >
>> > This latest development in the growing hostilities between Venezuela
>> > and the United States Government indicates the importance the Bush
>> > Administration is now placing on monitoring activities within
>> > Venezuela and developing new strategies of intervention. Despite
>> > excellent commercial relations between the two nations, the verbal
>> > rhetoric and behind the scenes preparations for a direct conflict are
>> > increasing. Top Secret CIA documents obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act in 2004 revealed the in-depth role the Agency played
>> > in the coup d'etat against President Hugo Chávez in April 2002.
>> > Subsequently, direct U.S. intervention in Venezuela has grown through
>> > multi-million dollar funding to opposition groups via the National
>> > Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Agency for International
>> > Development (USAID).
>> >
>> > It was long known that the CIA and other intelligence bodies were
>> > active in Venezuela, yet this latest confirmation from the Director
>> > of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, affirms that Venezuela has
>> > taken a top priority role in the Bush administration's intelligence
>> > and strategic defense planning.
>> >
>> > Venezuela has presidential elections coming up on December 3, 2006,
>> > and is concerned that this new special CIA Mission will attempt to
>> > interfere with the electoral process.
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2006 15:48:21 -1000
From: mike reitz
Subject: Small-Mart vs. Wal-Mart
MOM AND POP STORES TAKE ON WAL-MART
By Michael H. Shuman, AlterNet
Posted on September 6, 2006, Printed on September 6, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/39484/
Editor's Note: This article is excerpted from The Small-Mart Revolution:
How Local Businesses are Beating the Global Competition
(Berrett-Koehler), by Michael H. Shuman.
Today is the one day each year I permit myself to be a petty thief. As my
childhood shoplifter buddies used to explain, there's a thrill in being
bad, plus there's cheap stuff to be had. Let me clarify - I don't plan on
breaking any laws. My indulgence is perfectly legal, and many would even
consider it smart shopping. But I shouldn't mince words. What I'm
planning on doing ought to be called "community lifting." I'm going to
make my annual summertime sneakers shopping run at Wal-Mart, even if it
means snatching just a little bit of well-being from my neighbors.
Why am I doing this? Because for fifteen dollars I can get basic footwear
that lasts a year. After twelve months of regular deployment, these
puppies smell so bad they just might qualify as weapons of mass
destruction. It's high time to bury the old pair and replace them with
fresh rubber. And I don't want to spend a penny more than necessary.
Using the WalMart.com online directory, I discover that there are ten
stores in the vicinity of my home in Washington, DC - not exactly your
typical rural area targeted by the retailing giant. The closest one is in
Alexandria, Virginia, sixteen miles away. Following directions from
MapQuest, I wind my way through the region's sprawling suburbs, at one
point ominously passing the reconstructed side of the Pentagon where
terrorists crashed a plane in 2001. My mind flashes on the image of
Mohammad Atta, leader of the 9/11 gang, caught on videotape on 9/10
buying his infamous box cutters at a Wal-Mart in Portland, Maine.
Forty-five minutes later I arrive. The parking lot is jammed.
Even though the Fairfax store seems larger than a typical National Park
and few staff are in the aisles to help, I quickly find my sneakers, the
exact same kind I bought last year. A perfect fit! Off to the checkout
line.
As I snake my way triumphantly through the aisles, I notice a few other
items I could use. We just ran out of Crispix cereal and Chips Ahoy
cookies. There's a great horse toy for my daughter Rachel, two years old,
and some AA-batteries to fire it up. Hmmm, now I have to come back with
something for Adam, my six-year-old, who's apprehensive about beginning
kindergarten. Whew, there's a Back to School video, featuring Franklin
the Turtle. He'll also like this new Jump Start computer program to help
with his math and spelling, and a new folding chair to sit at the
computer. And there's the Guinness Book of World Records book he and I
were talking about the other night - got to get that. Bill Clinton's
book, My Life, for only twenty-two dollars? What a steal!
And all this other stuff: a 120-foot extension cord to vacuum my car, a
new plastic box for my loose files, a halogen reading lamp for bedside
table, four new glasses for end-of-the-day drinks, a gigantic bottle of
Tide, cheap bottles of Advil and Aleve for my chronic back pain that's
going to get worse when I carry this load to the car. Enough!
I tag the checkout line as if it were home base and finally catch my
breath. I consider asking the clerk to put me in a straitjacket so that I
won't buy anything else.
It's the week before school opens, so long lines of exasperated parents
and their screaming children make the nearly half-hour wait compare
unfavorably to my experience squatting in a New Delhi bus station a
decade earlier. My own checkout line is so long that by the time I reach
the front the brain-dead clerk is relieved halfway through scanning my
items. The new clerk begins by ringing me up again for the chair, a
mistake to which I politely draw his attention. A bit grudgingly, he
removes the extra charge. As I'm about to walk away, I look again at the
receipt and discover that I have just parted with $275; I also realize
that the new clerk double-charged me for the one item I came to buy in
the first place - those damn sneakers
Show Me the Bargains
What kinds of deals did I secure during my whirlwind community-lifting
experience? Research shows that the "savings" from shopping at chain
stores generally turn out to be vastly overestimated. A 2002 survey by
the Maine Department of Human Services, for example, found that local
drugstores actually provided better deals than the pharmacies at Rite Aid
and CVS. Wal-Mart prescription prices, which fell roughly in the middle
of the group surveyed, also varied significantly from place to place,
depending on the degree of local competition.
In the days that followed my shopping spree, I decided to do some
comparative shopping at various stores in my neighborhood in northwest
Washington, DC. It is true that for most of the generic items, Wal-Mart
offered prices about 5 to 10 percent less than what I could find locally.
Applying the upper end, I "saved" about $27.50.5
But recall that I was overcharged forty-six dollars on two items. Had I
not caught these errors in the chaotic checkout process, I would have
lost money. Okay, to be fair, Wal-Mart fixed the errors once I brought
them to the irritated clerk's attention. Later, however, I learn that an
NBC undercover team found that deep discounters like Wal-Mart are
overcharging 10 to 25 percent of the time and that these mistakes are
three to one against the consumer. I had assumed that the error was not
deliberate dishonesty, just poor training and low morale. But several
recent academic studies have found Wal-Mart scanners yield error rates as
high as 8.3 percent of the time, four times the federal standard,
prompting investigations by several state attorneys general.
Next, consider the time and money it took me to get to the Alexandria
store. That year the Internal Revenue Service allowed businesses to write
off about 40.5 cents per mile for auto wear and tear, gas, insurance, and
other incidentals. The thirty-two-mile round trip thus cost fourteen
dollars. I spent ninety minutes driving round trip and thirty minutes in
a checkout line. Assuming I'm worth at least a living wage of ten dollars
per hour, that's twenty dollars of my time. The transaction cost of this
trip was thirty-four dollars, again, greater than my savings.
When I returned home my wife, whose instincts for taste and quality are
far more trustworthy than my own, took one look at my four discount
scotch glasses and told me that she was promptly dispatching them to the
local recycling facility. She declared the reading lamp too ugly to gain
admittance into our bedroom. Rachel's horse toy lasted about a week
before it broke, and the pieces scattered to the far corners of the
house. The cheap 120-foot extension cord turned out to lack the third
safety prong most of our appliances now require, so it now sits on a
shelf in the basement gathering dust.
What about the pure joy of shopping, of gliding from department to
department while humming Muzak versions of old Top 40 hits? Not. Rather
than bump into my neighbors and trade some gossip, I wound up shopping in
a sea of strangers who were all as agitated as I was and unwilling to
kibitz.
And the biggest loss was this: I never expected to buy most of this stuff
in the first place. I came to buy $15 sneakers, and wound up spending
$275 on a half-dozen bags of junk. Caught up in the superficial frenzy of
discounts and deals, I wound up spending nearly twenty times more money
than I intended, much of it on goods of shoddy quality in a shopping
excursion that wasted two hours of my time and gave me an enormous
headache. Even more embarrassing, the sneakers I came to buy, which wound
up not having a price tag, actually cost twenty-six dollars, about the
same price I would have paid at a dozen other stores in Washington.
Yes, crime doesn't pay.
The Dark Side
Why use terms like "crime" and "community lifting"? Why should I feel bad
about doing what millions of Americans do every day with no reservations
whatsoever? Because the reality is that every dollar I decide not to
spend at my local businesses and instead surrender to Wal-Mart saps just
a little bit of vitality from my community, all for bargains that turn
out to be largely illusory. Had I spent my $275 at locally owned stores
like Rodman's or Strosniders, many more of my dollars would have remained
circulating in my local economy and boosting the area's income, wealth,
and jobs. My personal gain, which proved illusory, was my neighbors'
loss.
But doesn't Wal-Mart at least provide a bunch of decent jobs for my
neighbors? In fact, the average pay of a sales clerk at Wal-Mart is $8.50
per hour. The company keeps many employees working in part-time positions
to avoid paying health care and other benefits. So many workers live
below the poverty line that in 2004 Wal-Mart workers qualified for $2.5
billion in federal welfare assistance, according to a recent
congressional report. The U.S. government is shelling out as much as
$2,103 per employee for children's health care, low-income tax credits,
and housing assistance. State welfare agencies are making similarly steep
outlays. One in four Wal-Mart employees in Georgia has a child in the
state's program for needy children. This crazy quilt of public policies
means that every taxpayer, including those businesses paying their
workers decent wages, is effectively footing the bill for Wal-Mart's low
prices.
Wal-Mart is arguably the greatest destroyer of communities on the planet.
Vampirelike, it sucks retail transactions out of existing businesses and
decimates once-vibrant downtowns. But dwelling on Wal-Mart is, frankly, a
distraction. The only real difference between Wal-Mart and thousands of
other chain stores is its degree of success and its take-no-prisoners
tactics. I begrudge its methods and mission, not its success. The
fundamental challenge for communities struggling to revive their
economies is not to destroy Wal-Mart, because a Target or a Sears or a
hundred other chains stand ready to take its place. The challenge is,
instead, to find ways to nurture competitive local alternatives to
Wal-Mart that can revitalize our local economies and our communities.
The Small-Mart Revolution
When you think about "Small-Marts," the first things that come to mind
are the mom-and-pops and neighborhood stores that have been struggling
and disappearing in recent years. Through business tactics that have
been, depending on your perspective, brilliant or ruthless, chain stores
like Costco and major Internet retailers like Amazon have steamrolled
almost every community's homegrown businesses. Five supermarket chains
sell 42 percent of all our groceries, Home Depot and Lowe's account for
45 percent of hardware and building supplies, and Barnes & Noble and
Borders control half of all bookstore sales.
"Most striking of all," writes Stacy Mitchell, a researcher for the
Institute for Local Self-Reliance and an astute observer of these trends,
"Wal-Mart now captures nearly 10 percent of all U.S. retail spending.
Wal-Mart is the largest grocer in the country, the largest music seller,
the largest jeweler, the largest furniture dealer, and the largest toy
seller."
The increasing visual and financial presence of these powerful chains on
our streetscapes, however, can be misleading. Retail is just one of the
many sectors that produce wealth for a community, typically representing
only about 7 percent of a local economy, and chain stores just half of
that. Every box of corn flakes contains the labor and resources of
farmers who grow the corn, manufacturers who produce the flakes,
accountants and lawyers who support corporate management, utility
dispatchers who provide the power and lights, wholesalers who connect the
retailers with the manufacturer, and shippers who bring the cereal to the
store. The Small-Mart Revolution is about supporting independent and
local businesses in all of these sectors.
The Small-Mart Revolution is against one thing - the vast web of laws and
public policies that directly disadvantage small and local businesses.
Currently, nearly all business subsidies in this country go to nonlocal
firms. These exceed $50 billion per year at the state and local level,
and $63 billion per year at the national level. The capital markets, as
we'll see, also are heavily rigged against small business. Just these two
factors alone have suffocated what could have been the Small-Mart
Revolution over the past decade. Despite all the hype about
globalization, if we manage to level the playing fields in subsidies and
capital access, the next decade might well see a Small-Mart Renaissance.
A capitalist alternative
When the Berlin Wall fell after the Velvet Revolution more than a decade
ago, a young political scientist named Francis Fukuyama captured the
spirit of the moment in an article audaciously titled "The End of
History." Fukuyama argued that now that capitalism had triumphed over
state socialism, only a few minor questions about the future of humanity
remain. Even if Fukuyama's thesis turns out to be right - and a decade
later, with Chinese Communists still ruling a fifth of humanity and
thriving as Wal-Mart's biggest suppliers, his pronouncements seem a bit
premature - he erred in a more fundamental way. We are now witnessing an
epochal struggle between two dramatically different visions of
capitalism, the outcome of which will define many interesting and
important years of history to come.
One vision can be summarized by former British Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher's declaration that "there is no alternative" to globalization
and its neoliberal tenets of free markets and free trade. All over the
world, conventional economic developers have embraced the logic of "there
is no alternative" - or TINA - in the form of two imperatives: get Toyota
to locate in your backyard, and export your goods as far and widely as
possible. These ideas are so widely accepted by politicians, economists,
and policymakers across the political spectrum that even to question them
is tantamount to heresy.
There is a capitalist alternative gaining acceptance across the United
States and throughout the world: economic development rooted in local
ownership and import substitution, or LOIS for short. Local ownership
means that working control of a business resides within a geographically
defined community. And import substitution means that, whenever it's
cost-effective to produce goods and services locally, a community should
do so. Together these principles suggest - as such intellectual pioneers
as E. F. Schumacher and Jane Jacobs have argued over the last two
generations - the virtues of an economy that takes full advantage of
local talent, local capital, and local markets.
Why should it matter exactly who owns a business? And why should we care
whether a business serves local or global markets? After all, don't all
businesses contribute to a community's well-being, no matter what their
ownership and no matter where their markets? Sure, nearly all kinds of
businesses offer a community the benefits of jobs, tax dollars,
charitable contributions, and local economic stimulus. LOIS firms,
however, deliver these benefits more reliably, more robustly, and more
sustainably than the nonlocal alternatives do. That means our choices -
as consumers, as investors, as entrepreneurs, as policymakers - can make
a huge difference in how well our communities prosper.
Few of us believe the old saying that what's good for General Motors is
good for America, because too little of GM remains in America, too many
shares of GM stock are publicly traded worldwide, too few Americans
actually work for GM (fewer every day it seems), and too many of the
benefits are distributed in so many unexpected ways (in hidden Cayman
Island bank accounts, for example). The little goodwill we might have
once had for the automotive giant has been largely exhausted by its
Neanderthal attachment to gas-guzzling SUVs that have resulted in poor
sales, plant closures, and massive layoffs. Most of us suspect -
correctly it turns out - that local businesses in our community are more
directly connected to our well-being. The assets of these small firms
are, by definition, sited in the community and owned by people residing
there. They almost exclusively hire neighbors. The benefits of their
success and the fallout of their failure are experienced directly by
residents.
Small-Mart Nation
If the Small-Mart Revolution succeeds in seeding, growing, and spreading
LOIS businesses, how might your life be different? Let's look ahead
twenty-five years, and see what a Small-Mart world looks like.
Your Economy. The first thing you'll notice is how many of your neighbors
are running their own businesses, many out of their own homes. Almost
everyone else is working for these local firms, enjoying shorter commutes
and more time with their families. The idea of a one-company town is
obsolete. Even rural communities with a few thousand residents now have
twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred companies. Most of these businesses
serve local needs, but some also have robust export markets. All these
businesses, physically anchored through local ownership, have become
powerful gushers of wealth as well as resilient hedges against the kinds
of disasters that used to occur when a major, distantly owned employer,
moved - or threatened to move - overseas.
Your Purchasing. You're now spending most of your hard-earned money on
competitively priced and locally produced high-quality goods and
services, where each dollar gets recycled many times within your
community. You're buying fresh fruits, vegetables, and chickens grown by
nearby farmers, shopping at a small market or co-op (some of which home
deliver), and eating out at locally owned restaurants. You're driving
less and filling the tank with locally made biodiesel or hydrogen.
You own your home, rent from a local landlord, or hold a mortgage from a
local bank. Your residence is built from locally available stone and
lumber and filled with locally made furniture and household accessories
like locally made flatware, plates, and plants. You're using electricity
generated by local windpower, hydropower, or solar cells, and bringing
down your municipal utility bill through local efficiency measures. (In
fact, you may be making money from some of these energy devices by
selling surplus power to your neighbors.) You're donating to local
churches and charities. You're sampling emerging local fashions, jewelry,
shoes, art, theater, newspapers, books, music, beer and wine, shampoos,
and soaps. You're seeing local doctors, dentists, and therapists, using
local lawyers and accountants, supporting local schools and public
services.
Thanks to information distributed by a Local First Campaign, you're
confident that very little of this costs more than the nonlocal
alternatives and ebullient that some of these choices are actually saving
you money. The only real cost is the extra time and attentiveness
required to shop carefully, to filter out the allure of false bargains
from chain stores, and to deprogram yourself from the appealing but
misleading bombast of global advertising.
Your Investing. Some of your savings sits in a local bank or credit
union, the only entities you are confident will loan out or reinvest this
money locally. If you have extra money, you might invest in a neighbor's
business you're excited about. Or you might buy stock in one of the many
local companies being traded on your local stock exchange. Most of your
retirement sits in an IRA, SEP, 401(k), or other vehicle run by a local
mutual fund with a diversified portfolio of local businesses. And no
matter what your income, you're enjoying the local benefits of a totally
revamped Social Security system that places responsibility for trust fund
management in state and local hands.
Your Entrepreneurship. For those who ever dreamed of running their own
business, this is one of the most exciting moments in U.S. history. The
changes in everyone's purchasing habits, outlined above, are opening up
all kinds of new niches for locally produced goods and locally provided
services. You and other entrepreneurs in the community are now working
together to maintain your competitive edge against global giants through
local business alliances and national producers' cooperatives that
undertake joint advertising, procurement, warehousing, and distribution.
You might take advantage of a new generation of "incubators" that support
local start-ups with training and capital, or you might accept local
credit and debit cards that promote local purchasing.
Your Policymaking. The era of wasting millions of local dollars on luring
outside businesses is thankfully over. Your community doesn't stand in
the way of nonlocal retailers or manufacturers coming in, but in the name
of the free market, you no longer pay them any financial tribute. One
reason the small businesses in your community are thriving is that your
city government has systematically eliminated dozens of laws and policies
concerned with zoning, policing, schools, business practices, government
procurement, and pension investment that were once tilted toward nonlocal
business. Those few dollars spent on business development are now
focused, laser-like, on supporting various elements of the Small-Mart
Revolution, like entrepreneurship training and local stock markets.
Your Community. Years earlier, the Small-Mart Revolution got rolling when
key members of your community decided to participate in a yearlong
"visioning" process. They pinpointed unnecessary "leaks" of dollars from
your local economy, identified promising local business opportunities
that could plug those leaks, and mobilized consumers, investors,
entrepreneurs, and policymakers to support those businesses.
Your World. Even though the Small-Mart Revolution began in your backyard,
your community and thousands of others like it around the world have
gradually come to appreciate that their well-being depends on the
participation of every community in every country. The revolutionary
step, you realized, was not to increase global trade per se, but to
increase global self-reliance. You now generously and freely share
technology, business designs, and public policies with partners in the
world's poorest communities. A growing number of communities worldwide
producing more of their own goods and services means a significant growth
in global wealth, investment, and spending, with fewer environmental
problems. Paradoxically, global trade is expanding in absolute terms,
even as trade is becoming a diminishing percentage of every community's
economy.
The more we nurture and support Small-Marts, the more likely we will
bring prosperity to all Americans - rich and poor, black and white, male
and female, rural and urban, young and old. With greater prosperity for
so many diverse groups, we also have a better shot at solving hundreds of
other knotty problems bedeviling our society. If we are smart enough to
globally share everything we learn about how LOIS businesses can succeed
and modest enough to learn about successful LOIS business designs and
strategies elsewhere, we can make major strides toward relieving global
poverty and saving global ecosystems.
(C) 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 17:33:05 -1000
From: MarshaRose
Subject: US Army's Kill-Kill Ethos Under Fire
Published on Sunday, September 24, 2006 by The Sunday Times of London
US Army^Òs Kill-Kill Ethos Under Fire
by Sarah Baxter in Washington
THE American army should scrap the Warrior Ethos, a martial creed that
urges soldiers to demonstrate their fighting spirit by destroying the
enemies of the United States at close quarter rather than winning the
trust of local populations, according to senior US officers and
counter-insurgency experts.
Soldiers are instructed to live by the creed, which evokes the warrior
spirit of the modern US army. It begins with the stirring vow, ^ÓI am an
American soldier^Ô, and goes on to affirm that ^ÓI will never accept
defeat. I will never quit . . . I stand ready to deploy, engage and
destroy the enemies of the United States of America in close combat^Ô.
Admirable though this may be in the heat of battle, the Warrior Ethos^Òs
emphasis on annihilating the enemy is inimical to the type of patient,
confidence-building counter-insurgency warfare in which America is engaged
in the Middle East, according to Lieutenant-General Gregory Newbold,
former director of operations to the joint chiefs of staff at the
Pentagon.
^ÓThe future crises that relate to Iraq and Afghanistan will be a struggle
for hearts and minds,^Ô Newbold said. ^ÓWe^Òre in a different environment
now and that requires different techniques.^Ô
The Warrior Ethos replaced the Soldier^Òs Creed drawn up in the
post-Vietnam era which stated: ^ÓI am an American soldier . . . No matter
what situation I am in, I will never do anything for pleasure, profit or
personal safety, which will disgrace my uniform. I will use every means I
have, even beyond the line of duty, to restrain my army comrades from
actions disgraceful to themselves and the uniform.^Ô
The degrading treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and atrocities such as
the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl in Mahmudiya have
highlighted the conduct of individual American servicemen.
^ÓA strategic corporal can have a lot more impact on the course of the war
than a general, so it^Òs critical that soldiers and marines appreciate the
consequences of their actions,^Ô Newbold said. ^ÓThe old Soldier^Òs Creed
came down to ^Ñdoing the right thing^Ò. I like that.^Ô
Andrew Garfield, senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in
Philadelphia and former British intelligence officer, believes that the
Warrior Ethos has encouraged American soldiers to respond to threats with
overwhelming force, so creating new enemies, not friends.
^ÓThe United States army is phenomenal at conventional warfare, but
soldiering ^× even in a Victorian sense ^× meant building roads and
bridges, forging links with tribal leaders and very occasionally killing
them,^Ô said Garfield, who travelled to Iraq to canvass the views of more
than 100 British officers and officials about American tactics.
In a paper published by the institute last week, British Perspectives on
the US Effort to Stabilise and Reconstruct Iraq, he notes: ^ÓThe
perception of the British military, many independent observers and almost
every Iraqi interviewed is that the US military continues to employ
excessive force in Iraq.^Ô
Many British interviewees complained that ^Óthe vast majority of the
American military personnel . . . viewed their job as to kill the enemies
of the United States^Ô. They believed ^Ópeacekeeping was for wimps^Ô,
prided themselves on their aggression and ^Óopenly expressed the desire .
. . to destroy the enemy^Ô.
In their eagerness to hunt down insurgents, they would ^Óclear the homes
and businesses of the innocent as well as the guilty^Ô and place
bystanders at risk in firefights.
Garfield added: ^ÓIn contrast, the British consider themselves first and
foremost soldiers and recognised that the business of soldiering includes
many essential tasks, most of which do not involve fighting.^Ô
The Warrior Ethos was introduced in November 2003 after General Peter
Schoomaker, the army chief of staff, expressed alarm that soldiers in Iraq
considered themselves to be support troops ^× cooks, mechanics and supply
staff ^× rather than fighters. Schoomaker insisted that no matter what
their job, every soldier should be a ^Órifleman first^Ô. Soldiers now
affirm that ^ÓI am trained and proficient in my warrior tasks and drills.
I always maintain my arms, my equipment and myself . . . I am an expert
and a professional^Ô.
However, the shock and awe period of the Iraq war gave way three years ago
to the long slog of winning the trust of the Iraqi people. British
Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, in a controversial article in the US
journal Military Review last year, noted that the Warrior Ethos enjoined
the soldier ^Óto have just one type of interaction with his enemy ^× to
^Ñengage and destroy^Ò him: not defeat, which could permit a number of
other politically attuned options, but destroy^Ô.
Aylwin-Foster^Òs criticism has influenced a new counter-insurgency
doctrine, which is being drawn up by General David Petraeus. It will state
that ^ÓUS military leaders must be nation-builders as well as warriors^Ô,
but will not call for the Warrior Ethos to be ditched.
A spokesman for Petraeus said the Warrior Ethos was consistent with
winning hearts and minds because the creed also states that ^ÓI will
always put the mission first^Ô. If the mission is counter-insurgency, then
there is no contradiction, he argued.
General John Batiste, a leading critic of US defence secretary Donald
Rumsfeld^Òs conduct of the war, said there was no need to change the
creed: ^ÓWhen I first read the Warrior Ethos, I thought: yes, good. It
concludes with, ^ÑI am a guardian of freedom and the American way of
life^Ò and to me, that says it all.^Ô
© Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.
###------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 11:08:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Frances Beinecke, NRDC Action Fund"
Subject: View the ad that raised $225,000 in a day
Dear NRDC Action Fund Supporter,
What an incredible vote of support! We've already raised $225,000 of the
$300,000 we need to put our new TV ad on the air and stop Big Oil's attack
on the Arctic Refuge.
Watch the ad and you'll see why.
Once you've seen it, I know you'll want to help us raise the last $75,000
and beam this ad into millions of homes across America.
Your contribution could put us over the top!
If 1,500 supporters like you chip in $50 each, we can be on the air later
this week with a hard-hitting message that will stop the Bush
Administration in its tracks.
The latest oil spills in Alaska prove beyond a doubt that drilling is a
dirty business that has no place in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
But unless we sound the alarm and mobilize nationwide opposition, the
Senate could rush through a bill this month that hands the Arctic Refuge
to the oil industry before Election Day.
That's why our national TV ad is so critical. It will broadcast the truth
about the oil industry's disastrous environmental record . . . and light
up the switchboard of all 100 Senators before the next make-or-break vote.
You can make it happen!
Please go to the NRDC site right now (www.nrdcactionfund.org)and make a
donation that will rally millions of Americans against this latest scheme
to destroy the Arctic Refuge for the benefit of the oil industry. Thank
you for doing your part.
Sincerely,
Frances
Frances Beinecke
President
NRDC Action Fund
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Maui Tomorrow"
Sent: Monday, September 25, 2006 8:48 AM
Subject: Recycle your old fishing line
The following article is provided as an electronic news clipping service,
and does not necessarily represent the position of Maui Tomorrow Foundation,
Inc., nor do we guarantee the accuracy of the information reported.
----------
http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060925/COLUMN
ISTS03/609250339/1121/NEWS
The Honolulu Advertiser
Monday, September 25, 2006
HAWAI'I'S ENVIRONMENT
Recycle your old fishing line
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Columnist
If you've clambered along rocky coastlines where ulua anglers go, you've
seen tangles of bluish white discarded fishing line.
If you've snorkeled along popular angling shores, you've seen monofilament
snagged on coral heads, with bits of it drifting sinuously in the current.
At the high water line, you may have seen tangles of pale nylon netting,
twisted up with chunks of rope and swatches of cargo and trawl netting.
Monofilament is a very specific kind of fishing line. It's often bluish or
greenish, and comes as a single strand, as the name implies - not woven or
twisted like rope or many kinds of cord. It is a remarkably effective bit
of fishing gear, nearly invisible in the water. It's very strong, and it
survives a long time in the environment.
You've seen it, but if you pick it up, what to do with it?
Rodney Izuo, of the fishing supplies wholesaler Izuo Brothers, made
contact some years ago with a Mainland firm that recycles nylon line,
Berkley Pure Fishing. On learning of the Iowa sportfishing tackle firm's
environmental protection program, Izuo began providing his fishing supply
retailer clients with the firm's postage-paid monofilament recycling
boxes.
Hawai'i companies on four islands now have boxes where you can drop off
old fishing line for recycling. They are Brian's Fishing Supplies, Hanapaa
Hawaii, Lihu'e Fishing Supply, Maui Sporting Goods, McCully Bicycle,
Melton International Kona, New Maui Fishing Supplies, Pacific Ocean
Producers, Roy's Fishing Supply, S. Tokunaga Store and Waipahu Bicycle.
Izuo said much of the recycled material that ends up in the recycling
boxes comes from the line on old fishing reels when anglers strip it off
at the fishing supply store to replace it with new line.
The recycling program ships filled boxes of line to Pure Fishing, which
cleans it and then melts it and recycles it into - among other things -
plastic shapes that can be sunk to serve as fish habitat.
"It's just a great program," Izuo said.
A good resource on the dangers of monofilament, and how and why to recycle
it, is online at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Web
site, MyFWC.com/mrrp/faq.htm.
If for some reason you can't get to one of the places that accepts the
line, the Web site suggests you cut monofilament into short lengths before
tossing it into the trash - so it can't entangle anything even if it gets
back into the environment.
If you have a question or concern about the Hawaiian environment, drop a
note to Jan TenBruggencate at P.O. Box 524, Lihu'e, HI 96766 or
jant@honoluluadvertiser.com. Or call him at (808) 245-3074.
© COPYRIGHT 2006 The Honolulu Advertiser, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Maui Tomorrow
P.O. Box 299, Makawao, Hawaii 96768 808-579-9802
aina@maui-tomorrow.org http://maui-tomorrow.org
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