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Hey! How is stuff? Nice weekend, still struggling with Taxes. Never ending…
I turned Rowan on to V for Vendetta in the original printed cartoon book (The original came out in bi-weekly comics) He kinda just flew through it. If you haven’t seen the film, well do. Recommended…
Had some good feedback for DJ Kykeon and our friend Mauricios’ new music (The Obscure Project) featured on the Sunday Show. It is still in rotation if you want to give it a listen!
Todays entry turned out completely different than it started… stripped it down and restarted on Sunday night… I had crafted the original since Friday… and it didn’t work. It just goes that way at times…
Still at work on the top secret project, which still seems like it is a distance away, but it is moving by increments…
Todays Blog revolves around in part with Kahlil Gibran. Either my Mother or my friend Fat Harry, “the Buddha” introduced me to him. Kinda of a mainstay for the Metaphysical Circus of those times back when. I read his stuff though preparing for this entry, and think it is worth sharing and going over again. Really, he was a genius. Even if his paintings have a heavy Blakeian influence, they still sing. His poetry is right up there as well.
So I dedicate this Entry to my Mother, whose birthday it would have been in a couple of days, (April 20th). She loved Gibran. Mom, this one is for you!
Gwyllm
On The Menu:
Show Announcement for Mauricio and his band, The Obscure Project
The Links…
The Article: Coke Is Death
The Poetry: Kahlil Gibran
The Art: Kahlil Gibran, except for the last one and please don’t ask me who did it… (I suspect Goodward, but don’t hold me to it!)
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Show Announcement For Portland
Thursday, 04/20/2006 08:00 PM (Doors Open 6:00 pm)
Loveland Downstairs: 320 SE 3rd Ave. $7 for 5 bands:
The OBSCURE PROJECT LIVE (Listen: TheObscureProject.com)
Lander (Listen: http://www.myspace.com/rhetorictuesday)
Atomic Midnight
Black September
Throw the Starfish Back (Listen: Throw The Starfish Back)
Each ticket purchased in person through “The Obscure Project” will receive an Obscure Project demo CD with our tracks “Gritty” and “Turn on the Light”.
Tickets (with CD) will be available for pickup at MediaFreq Printing Solutions (http://www.MediaFreq.com) from Noon till 7:00 pm until day of show. Cash only please.
[MediaFreq is located @ 2839 SE Milwaukie Ave Portland, OR 97202 – its a non-descript office w/o sign, so please lookup on mapquest before coming… its about a block and a half north of the Alladin theatre on Milwaukie].
I you have any questions or need to purchase after hours: please contact me @ mauricio@chaosexistence.com
Thanks for your support!
Aside from anything else i can say about my project, Rachel’s voice is angelic and you must see her LIVE! 
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The Links:
‘Speak softly, don’t argue and slow down’
President Bush listens to THE ARCHIES
Proposed Nigerian Law Would Criminalize Gay Rights Groups, Screenings of Brokeback Mountain
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The softdrink giant’s abysmal human rights record is finally catching up with it.
The ballroom at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware, is the picture of opulence. Paintings of Greek gods and goddesses peer down from the walls, lit by two crystal chandeliers the size of Mini Coopers. Its here in April that the Coca-Cola Company will hold its stockholders meeting, an annual exercise designed to boost the confidence of investors. If the meeting is anything like last years, however, it may do the opposite.
As stockholders filed into the room in April 2005, news hadnt been good for Coke, which has steadily lost market share to rivals. Investors were eager for reassurance from CEO Neville Isdell, a patrician Irishman who had recently assumed the top job. Few in the room, however, were prepared for what happened next. As Isdell stood at the podium, two long lines formed at the microphones. When he opened the floor, the first to speak was Ray Rogers, a veteran union organizer and head of the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke. I want to know what [Coke is] going to do to regain the trust and credibility in order to stop the growing movement worldwide banning Coke products, boomed the 62-year-old.
That was just the beginning of a ninety-minute slugfest that the Financial Times later said felt more like a student protest rally than a stockholders meeting. One after another, students, labor activists and environmentalists blasted Cokes international human rights record. Many focused on Colombia, where Coke has been accused of conspiring with paramilitary death squads to torture and kill union activists. Others highlighted India, where Coke has allegedly polluted and depleted water supplies. Still others called the company to task for causing obesity through aggressive marketing to children.
In the past two years the Coke campaign has grown into the largest anticorporate movement since the campaign against Nike for sweatshop abuses. Around the world, dozens of unions and more than twenty universities have banned Coke from their facilities, while activists have dogged the company from World Cup events in London to the Winter Olympics in Torino. More than just the re-emergence of the corporate boycott, however, the fight against Coke is a leap forward in international cooperation. Coke, with its red-and-white swoosh recognizable everywhere from Beijing to Baghdad, is perhaps the quintessential symbol of the US-dominated global economy. The fight to hold it accountable has, in turn, broadly connected issues across continents to become a truly globalized grassroots movement.
Coke shrugs off the protests as coming from a small segment of the student population, says Ed Potter, the companys director of global labor relations. What I see are largely well-meaning attempts to put a spotlight on some reprehensible thingsbut which are unrelated to our workplaces. Nevertheless, Coke has fought back with ads on TV and in student newspapers, part of a mammoth advertising budget that has increased 30 percent in the past two years, to a staggering $2.4 billion. However, as evidence against the company mounts ahead of this years annual stockholders meeting, so does the pressure for Coke to address its growing international image of exploitation and brutality.
On the morning of December 5, 1996, union leader Isidro Segundo Gil was standing at the gate of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia, when two paramilitaries drove up on a motorcycle and shot him dead. A week later, unionists say, paramilitaries lined up all the workers inside the plant and forced them to sign a letter resigning from the beverage union SINALTRAINAL, spelling the end of the union at the plant.
Violence against union members is a fact of life in Colombia, where nearly 4,000 have been killed by paramilitaries in the past two decades. But Gils murder was different, say his union brothers; two months earlier, they observed the plant manager meeting with a paramilitary commander in the company cafeteria. And just a week before he was killed Gil had been negotiating with the company over a new contract. Workers see these events as an example of the collusion of bottling executives with the paramilitaries. From the beginning, Coca-Cola took a stand to not only eliminate the union but to destroy its workers, said SINALTRAINAL president Javier Correa in a recent speaking appearance in the United States.
Nor was Gils murder a unique occurrence, says Correa. In all, eight union members and a friendly plant manager were killed between 1989 and 2002. Even today, union leaders routinely receive death threats and attempts on their lives. In 2003 paramilitaries kidnapped and tortured the 15-year-old son of one union leader and killed the brother-in-law of SINALTRAINALs vice president. This past January, says Correa, managers at the Coca-Cola plant in Bogota attempted to get workers to sign a statement saying Coke did not violate human rights; a week later the leader of the union received a death threat against himself and his family.
Coke has a long history of being a virulently antiunion company, says Lesley Gill, an anthropology professor at American University who has twice been to Colombia to document the violence. It has been calculated and targeted, and it usually takes place during periods of contract negotiations. A 2004 investigation directed by New York City Councilman Hiram Monserrate documented 179 major human rights violations against Coke workers, along with numerous allegations that paramilitary violence against workers was done with the knowledge of and likely under the direction of company managers. The violence has taken a toll on the union. In the past decade, SINALTRAINALs Coke membership has fallen from about 1,400 to less than 400.
Coca-Cola representatives deny involvement of the company or its bottling partners, contending that the murders are a byproduct of the countrys civil war. In response, the company touts the security measures it offers union leaders, including loans for home security systems and reassignment for those in danger. Furthermore, Coke points out that it has been exonerated in several cases in Colombian courts. However, charging those courts as ineffectiveonly five paramilitaries have been found guilty of murder, despite 4,000 killingsSINALTRAINAL reached out in 2001 to the International Labor Rights Fund, a Washington-based solidarity organization. Using a US law called the Alien Tort Claims Act, the ILRF and the United Steelworkers filed suit against Coke and its bottlers in Miami later that year. In 2003 a judge ruled that Coca-Cola couldnt be held responsible for the actions of its bottlers and dropped it from the case, even while allowing the case against the bottlers to go forward. ILRF lawyer Terry Collingsworth finds that decision preposterous, noting that Coke has ownership shares in its Colombian bottlers and highly detailed bottling agreements. Im 100 percent sure that if Coca-Cola in Atlanta ordered them to change their uniform color from red to blue, they would do it, says Collingsworth. They could stop these activities in a minute.
While the ILRF has appealed the decision, procedural rules require it to wait until the case against the bottlers is over before the case against Coke can be taken up againa process that could take years. We needed to figure out a way that Coke sees delay as bad, says Collingsworth. In 2003 SINALTRAINAL put out a call for an international boycott of Coke products. At the same time, the ILRF contacted Ray Rogers, head of Corporate Campaign, Inc., an organization that consults with unions to win contracts through unorthodox methods. Over the past three decades, Rogers has forced concessions from a dozen companiesincluding American Airlines, Campbells Soup and New Yorks Metropolitan Transportation Authoritynot through strikes or negotiations but through an aggressive strategy of publicly embarrassing anyone associated with his targets.
Rogers immediately saw Cokes weakness: its brand. They are right at the top of the worst companies in the world, and yet theyve created an image like they are American pie, he says. When people think of Coca-Cola, they should think about great hardship and despair for people and communities around the world. From the beginning, Rogers appropriated Cokes trademark red script to make the Killer Coke logo, and tweaked its advertising campaign with slogans like The Drink That Represses and MurderIts the Real Thing. He made a dramatic first appearance at a Coke annual meeting two years ago, when police wrestled Rogers away from the mike and forcibly dragged him out of the hall.
Early on, Rogers rejected SINALTRAINALs call for a consumer boycott of Coke products, fearing it would be ineffective and might alienate unions working with Coke. He focused on cutting out markets by going after larger institutional ties. He convinced several unions, including the American Postal Workers, several large locals of the Service Employees International, and UNISON, the largest union in Britain, to ban Coke from their facilities and functions, and he induced pension-fund managers, including the City of New York, to pass resolutions threatening to withdraw hundreds of millions in Coke stock investments unless Coke investigated the Colombia abuses. He persuaded not only the SEIU but the largest US union of Cokes own employees, the Teamsters, to pass a resolution in support of the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke and to speak out at last years annual meeting (the Teamsters stopped short of banning Coke from their own facilities). Its horrendous what were hearing, says David Laughton, secretary-treasurer of the unions beverage division. The companys lack of action is having a ripple effect all over the country in school and college, and that means reductions in jobs for us. Its time for them to wake up and admit their errors.
The campaigns greatest success has come at colleges and universities. Rogers set up a website with a step-by-step guide for students looking to convince their institutions to cut multimillion-dollar Coke contracts, and hes traveled to schools to hold rallies and advise students. One by one, more than a dozen schools in the United States, as well as a handful more in Ireland, Italy and Canada, have decided to cut lucrative beverage contracts or otherwise ban Coke from campuses. The effort accelerated after it was joined by United Students Against Sweatshopsone of the main groups behind the Nike boycott of the 1990swhich helped organize its own chapters. Anti-Coke campaigns are now active at some 130 campuses worldwide. This campaign against Coke has politicized a new generation of students, says Camilo Romero, a national organizer with USAS. Its something that students feel personally connected to, because its something they can hold in their hand, says Aviva Chomsky, a professor at Salem State College in Massachusetts, which severed ties two years ago. Its too easy to say, There are so many bad things in the world, Im just going to concentrate on my own life. Its the concreteness of this thats appealing.
While student campaigns have mostly focused on the abuses in Colombia, some have included demands from other countries as well. Few companies have the kind of global reach of Coca-Cola, which has set up a network of bottling partners around the world that allows it to maximize profits by keeping distribution costs down and exploiting lax environmental and labor laws abroad. The first rumblings came from India, where villagers near several Coke bottling plants reported that their wells were dropping, sometimes more than fifty feet; meanwhile, the water they were able to get was tainted by foul-smelling chemicals. Starting in 2002 villagers near Plachimada, in the southern state of Kerala, began a permanent vigil outside the local plant. They finally won an indefinite closure in March 2004, although the case remains an issue in the Kerala High Court.
Villagers started another vigil, at Mehdiganj in central India, this past March. Escalating protests there and at a third plant, in the desert state of Rajasthan, have ended in police attacks on villagers employing Gandhian tactics of nonviolence, which Amit Srivastava of the India Resource Center (IRC) lays at Cokes feet. We know the company has the power to stop the police from resorting to violence, he says, but it has let this go on without saying a word.
The IRC has been joined in its mission by Corporate Accountability International (CAI), which has attacked Coke on its aggressive push to sell bottled water. If water becomes a branded product, its clearly going to undermine the demand and support for publicly managed water systems, says CAI executive director Kathryn Mulvey. The people who lose out are those who dont have the means to pay top dollar for their water. As a veteran anticorporate campaigner, Mulvey sees the Coke campaign as a new model. People are taking these abuses that are happening all over the world and bringing them to Cokes headquarters, she says. Transnational corporations are really surpassing the nation-state as the dominant economic and political institutions. Social change movements need to find ways to come together across borders and strategize.
The broad attack against the company has been a strength for the campaign, allowing diverse groups to share information and recruit greater numbers at protests, as well as making a more difficult target for counterattacks. The company cant control it, says Rogers. They realize they cant get rid of one person or group and hope the thing will die. At the same time, the sheer number of charges against Coke raises the question of how and when the campaign can declare victory. On that score, the different groups are clear about their specific goals. The Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, for example, has adopted seven demands by SINALTRAINAL, which include a human rights policy for bottling companies and compensation for families of slain workers. The campaign in India calls for closure of certain plants, cleanup of others and compensation for affected villagers.
Many student campaigns have made their top demand an independent investigation into the Colombia abuses. At last years annual meeting, Coke tried to mollify critics by releasing the results of a company-funded study, which was rejected by students as woefully biased. Still facing the prospect of boycotts at several universitiesamong them Rutgers, NYU and MichiganCoke put together a commission of students, school administrators and labor leaders to come up with a protocol for an independent inquiry. I was honestly hopeful, perhaps naively, says USASs Romero. It seemed like they were putting this new investment into making things work. From the beginning, however, the company insisted it had a right to be on the commission; even after Coke was booted by the students, it kept putting strictures on the investigation, such as a moratorium on investigating past abuses. The final straw was Cokes insistence that anything uncovered be inadmissible in the court case in Miami, which Collingsworth says is against legal ethics. We cannot prejudice our clients by agreeing to bury evidence that would support their claims, he wrote in an angry letter to Cokes Ed Potter.
At around the same time, new evidence of Cokes antilabor tactics emerged in Indonesia, where, according to USAS, workers were intimidated when they attempted to unionize; and in Turkey, where more than 100 union members were fired and then clubbed and tear-gassed by police during a protest. This past November the ILRF filed another lawsuit against Coca-Cola, based on the claims of the Turkish workers. By that point, students had had enough; all but one left the commission.
With the failure of the investigation commission, administrators at some schools ran out of excuses to keep the Coke contracts. Both NYU and Michigan suspended contracts in December. NYUs status as the countrys largest private university earned the campaign national and international press. We knew if we were to ban Coca-Cola, our statement would resound around the world, says Crystal Yakacki, a recent NYU graduate who helped lead the campaign while she was a student.
As this years annual meeting nears, Coke has gone on the offensive, announcing a plan to draft a new set of workplace standards. At the same time, the company has asked the UNs International Labor Organization to perform a workplace evaluation of the Colombia bottling plants. Rogers and Collingsworth have already cried foul, pointing out that Potter has been the US employer representative to the ILO for the past fifteen years. Either they know something we dont know, says Collingsworth, or they believe the ILO moves so slowly and bureaucratically that they can delay. In response, Potter claims the organization is so large that no one person can influence it. Regardless, the gambit is having some effect: In April Michigan, citing the reputation and track record of ILO, rescinded its ban.
At the Hotel du Pont on April 19, organizers hope to stage a repeat of last years grilling, with an even larger contingent of activists in attendance. Schools debating Coke contracts this spring include Michigan State, UCLA, the University of Illinois, DePaul and several campuses of the City University of New York. In Britain, the campaign lost a close vote in April to convince the National Union of Studentswhich represents 750 campusesto cut a multimillion-pound contract. Many British universities, however, are continuing individual boycotts, as are campuses in Italy, Ireland, Germany and Canada. This is a moment in history that is very rare, where students have the power to change one of the largest corporations in the world, says Romero. After recent campus victories, momentum seems to be on the side of the campaign. Coke has a contracting market; we have an expanding market, says Rogers. I want Coke to come to the realization that there is a lot more for them to lose by continuing to do what they do. They have to be made to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
Until they do, say activists, the violence against Cokes workers will continue. Its very difficult for me to convince my family that they have to live with the worries, and that they will one day maybe have to receive bad news, says SINALTRAINALs Correa. My kids say that walking with Dad is like walking with a time bomb. But I cant leave this struggle seeing these violations happening all around me. The reality of the situation is that its better being with a union than without one.
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Poetry: Kahlil Gibran
Beauty
And a poet said, ‘Speak to us of Beauty.’
Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she herself be your way and your guide?
And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?
The aggrieved and the injured say, ‘Beauty is kind and gentle.
Like a young mother half-shy of her own glory she walks among us.’
And the passionate say, ‘Nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread.
Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us.’
The tired and the weary say, ‘beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.
Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow.’
But the restless say, ‘We have heard her shouting among the mountains,
And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions.’
At night the watchmen of the city say, ‘Beauty shall rise with the dawn from the east.’
And at noontide the toilers and the wayfarers say, ‘we have seen her leaning over the earth from the windows of the sunset.’
In winter say the snow-bound, ‘She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills.’
And in the summer heat the reapers say, ‘We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair.’
All these things have you said of beauty.
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.
People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
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Marriage
Then Almitra spoke again and said, ‘And what of Marriage, master?’
And he answered saying:
You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when white wings of death scatter your days.
Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together, yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
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Pleasure
Then a hermit, who visited the city once a year, came forth and said, ‘Speak to us of Pleasure.’
And he answered, saying:
Pleasure is a freedom song,
But it is not freedom.
It is the blossoming of your desires,
But it is not their fruit.
It is a depth calling unto a height,
But it is not the deep nor the high.
It is the caged taking wing,
But it is not space encompassed.
Ay, in very truth, pleasure is a freedom-song.
And I fain would have you sing it with fullness of heart; yet I would not have you lose your hearts in the singing.
Some of your youth seek pleasure as if it were all, and they are judged and rebuked.
I would not judge nor rebuke them. I would have them seek.
For they shall find pleasure, but not her alone:
Seven are her sisters, and the least of them is more beautiful than pleasure.
Have you not heard of the man who was digging in the earth for roots and found a treasure?
And some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs committed in drunkenness.
But regret is the beclouding of the mind and not its chastisement.
They should remember their pleasures with gratitude, as they would the harvest of a summer.
Yet if it comforts them to regret, let them be comforted.
And there are among you those who are neither young to seek nor old to remember;
And in their fear of seeking and remembering they shun all pleasures, lest they neglect the spirit or offend against it.
But even in their foregoing is their pleasure.
And thus they too find a treasure though they dig for roots with quivering hands.
But tell me, who is he that can offend the spirit?
Shall the nightingale offend the stillness of the night, or the firefly the stars?
And shall your flame or your smoke burden the wind?
Think you the spirit is a still pool which you can trouble with a staff?
Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being.
Who knows but that which seems omitted today, waits for tomorrow?
Even your body knows its heritage and its rightful need and will not be deceived.
And your body is the harp of your soul,
And it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.
And now you ask in your heart, ‘How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?’
Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.
People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.
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Gibran At 13 years old…
Kahlil Gibran 1883-1931
Poet, philosopher, and artist, was born in Lebanon, a land that has produced many prophets.
The millions of Arabic-speaking peoples familiar with his writings in that language consider him the genius of his age.
But he was a man whose fame and influence spread far beyond the Near East. His poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages.
His drawings and paintings have been exhibited in the great capitals of the world and compared by Auguste Rodin to the work of William Blake.
In the United States, which he made his home during the last twenty years of his life, he began to write in English.
The Prophet and his other books of poetry, illustrated with his mystical drawings, are known and loved by innumerable Americans who find in them an expression of the deepest impulses of man’s heart and mind.
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