ANTIQUIET – Music does not exist in a vacuum. As a tool of protest, of affection, of the myriad complexities of the human condition, music plays just an important role now as ever before in its ability to connect, inform and find grounds of empathy in a world of increased personal isolation as “social networking” becomes a term of digital prowess rather than genuine human interaction.

Some of those responsible for delivering personal-revolution street philosophy through song often have far more to say than even the malleable, undefined borders of music will allow, as we learned with Serj Tankian last Summer. In these moments, we excitedly set the music aside to dig into the heart of what drives the artist, with unfailingly fascinating result.

This was the case in our latest interview with Brother Ali. Over the span of six remarkable albums and an archive of underground material, Brother Ali’s one-love sermonizing has relentlessly rejected posturing and self-aggrandizing lyricism, opting instead for a unifying theme that’s delivered as a survivalist mandate in a world of championed disconnect.

The Minneapolis rapper and Rhymesayers crew’s spiritual anchor has had a metamorphic year on the heels of his landmark Us album, with the loss of dear friend and label mate Michael Larsen, aka Eyedea, his pilgrimage to Mecca and a barrage of new changes, both personally and professionally. Almost two years after our last interview we caught up with the man to discuss the American perception of Islam, government seizures of music-site domains, the power of propaganda and much more.

In America, the broad-stroke perception of Islam and its practitioners is still held in a deeply unfavorable light. How does one counter the Fox News narrative with your own truth, when the other side is excitedly stoking the fires of anti-Muslim extremism?

There’s a propaganda machine that exists in our society. If you look at World War II times, the way that Japanese and German people were vilified in the media, all the way down to kids cartoons. Any group of people that were considered to be enemies of the society they would demonize, through news and movies and kids programs. Whether it’s Native Americans or Japanese, or the Russians in the ’80s, there was always a caricaturization built around an agenda. And then immediately after the Cold War, they started preparing us through the media to attack a new target. Suddenly Arnold Schwarzenegger’s onscreen going up against these terribly cold Arab Muslims who are taking hostages and all that stuff, creating this atmosphere where suddenly these are the new Hollywood bad guys. These are the new face of evil to Americans, and it’s a picture that’s deliberately painted.

Then 9/11 happened, and the line of reality and truth began to blur.

Then you have this obviously terrible, tragic event of 9/11. The unbelievable sadness to it, the loss of life and love, and there’s so much questionable stuff around it. I’m not one of these people who pretends to know what happened or didn’t happen, but there’s definitely a lot of seriously questionable circumstances around the whole thing. There’s clearly a campaign underway, that’s been going on for a while by the people in power, to negate Islam and Muslims. Usually that’s used to justify some type of injustice they’re planning, whether it be taking over Muslim countries and occupying them, taking control of their politics and their resources. That’s a really unfortunate reality in the world.

How is that negating impression countered, when the narrative’s already written and enthusiastically parroted by the biggest news outlet in the nation? Passivity rules the day…

Being good people, having a responsibility to look for and spread truth in every way, not just our own. Progressing a community by caring about truth and justice and fairness. Part of the social decline we’re facing is that we’re very, very passive about everything. It’s been by design. We’ve been bred to be very passive about the things that we eat, the things that we buy and the things that we use. It comes down to the way that we live, the information we take in. We don’t actively seek out information, we just allow whatever’s the loudest to dictate the narrative. In most major cities we’re down to one or two major newspapers, which are owned by the same conglomerates. Radio stations are all owned by the same parent companies, news stations are owned by two or three companies. It’s just really unfortunate, but that’s just one of a plethora of topics where we’re all just deeply uninformed on all of it, and it’s causing something of a subconscious bridge where we get all this information that Muslims are bad, and Islam is against us and our way of life, and Muslims hate our freedom and all that. It’s diametrically opposed to America’s values, they’re not the same kind of people we are, so on and so forth. It causes an unconscious acceptance of treating people bad, of denying people justice and due process and all these things that we say we believe in as Americans.

Now you see it on our soil too, where Muslims that are citizens of America aren’t granted the same basic rights of faith. But that’s nothing new, that’s something they did when they came and called the native people Indians and savages and did everything in their power to establish dominance. Then the slaves came over and they had ugly names for them too. Every group of people, it seems, falls into a necessary place or role when the power structure decides to prepare us mentally and spiritually to adjust to this injustice. To be okay with these things being done in our name, this oppression contracted out in the name of American values.

Given the government and media’s campaign of bullshit on the Wikileaks ordeal, it’s frightening how well that model of behavior commutes to other areas of focus. We’re in an amazing time in history, where the unification of the media seems so big and so scary, but public awareness is hitting an all-time high, and people are increasingly questioning the margin of truth in the reality being served to us. What’s your perspective on selective free speech, like the fact that Mastercard will still do business with the KKK, yet cuts ties with Wikileaks, people bringing the real light of truth to some of the most important world affairs – and lies – of our time?

Obviously I support people’s rights to speak and have access to the truth, and to promote it. There’s a really big fight going on with the net neutrality bill, and we’re facing the potential of control over the internet where everyday people don’t have the same platform on the internet as corporations. It’s interesting, with this whole thing there’s been a big sweep of websites by the Department of Homeland Security for those they consider to be criminal. With no warning, no communication, no due process. They seized their domains and shut down their sites, and it’s interesting that it happened to three major Hip-Hop blogs. It had nothing to do with anything political or anything like that, but the RIAA had them shut down because they helped artists leak materials and videos and such that’s not released yet. So the Department of Homeland Security, which is supposed to protect us from terrorism, seized a website called OnSmash.com. They leaked a new 50 Cent song and the new Joel Ortiz record, but what does that have to do with homeland security? How is that terrorism? The precedent that’s set by that is really amazing, really terrifying.

That’s terrorism in its own right.

Right. I had to file with the Department of Homeland Security when I went to Australia on tour. Our Australian show promoter wire transferred money for our shows to our bank accounts in Minneapolis, and the Department of Homeland Security froze that bank account and stopped the transfer. I had to register with them, give them my information, who I am & what I was doing, everybody that worked for me, my schedule, social security numbers, addresses, bank accounts, more things than you could believe. The froze everything up.

They told me that it was random. That the words Brother and Ali were red flag words, but I was made aware at the end of the whole ordeal that they were aware of the Uncle Sam Goddamn video.

Right around the time that video hit a million views, after I performed it on TV, that’s when that happened. I got kicked off a tour for that song, because it was sponsored by a big company. Got a lot of hate mail from guys named Chad, writing private MySpace messages back in the day. Guys with no shirts on and white baseball hats on backwards telling me “I’m gonna come to your show tonight and beat your ass.” I got a lot of that for probably about a year. And at my shows I’m always at the merch table… no ass kickings ever happened.

The thing is, nothing I say is really even that dangerous. I’m not even saying shit compared to like…

Zach De La Rocha, Immortal Technique…

Yeah, not to mention Dead Prez, people who have bigger platforms and say a lot more than I do. I don’t consider myself a political artist, I haven’t made that my mission. I just have a few songs where I stated some things.

Speaking of statements, Cornel West made a comment that I’d like to expand on: “To embark on a quest for wisdom, one has to be open to the voice, viewpoint, and vision of others.” In a world geared more than ever to the me me me society, how does one not only lean against that tide, but radiate that to others?

It’s interesting, that’s something that’s actually been on my mind a lot lately. One of the people that Eyedea put me up on was this this philosopher Krishnamurti, who really dealt a lot with putting the ego aside to truly experience things. When you listen through the lens of your ego you’re not really listening, you’re not really experiencing. And that’s huge to me… it ties in well with Cornell West’s quote. I love Cornell West. I think with what I’m doing, I just try to communicate that way and listen that way, especially on the Us album. That was the first album that really wasn’t about me, it was more about the people that I know, and trying to tell their stories.

Religious individualism and the art of people truly listening to each other is dying.

A major problem, as you pointed out, is that we are not actively participating in solutions.

Everything is passive in our society. For the majority of people, there’s a few activist, but even the majority of them may not be as informed or as pure in direction as they would have us believe. Like the Tea Party scene. It appears to be a group of activists, but there’s two brothers that essentially own that movement…

The Koch brothers…

Yeah. They’re funding the movement, and these Tea Party activists are just sheepishly repeating this narrative that somebody’s given them, talking points meant to mislead and start fires of anger. Not very much is active in our society – we’re very passive, very inactive. I definitely agree with what you’re saying, in social media being a platform for people to narcissistically splatter out whatever feelings they have in that moment, and really feel like something’s being done with a Facebook update or a tweet.

That’s the problem with clicktivism – it creates a dangerous false sense of contribution, a momentum based on parroting points for social status rather than planting a real flag of truth and living the truth you’re seeking. That stifles progress on all meaningful fronts.

We’ve been programmed that way over the last few generations. That’s not a mistake and that’s not a coincidence. It’s not something that’s happened on its own. It was a very deliberate effort on behalf of those who really control things. And it’s undoubtedly an intimidating factor when you can watch the sponsorship money and general attention will shift away, go elsewhere when there’s any sign of going against that tide.

You tweeted about the Best MCs argument, saying “Best For who? Best for the people is Chuck D.” That’s one musical revolutionary who’s paved the way for bands like Rage Against The Machine, helped set the groundwork for people like you and Immortal Technique. In a very real way, he’s passed the torch on to you on record by doing the introduction track on Us. Do you see the direct lineage between Public Enemy’s activist mentality and your own?

Definitely. Being fortunate enough to become friends with him gave me confirmation of that. I got to hear him say “You’re doing what you can to continue what we were doing.” Those men are the ones that made me serious about this music and made me realize what the possibilities it held were. Not that I went into this thinking that I was going to be a part of some social movement, but I know that they affected the way that I thought, the way I wanted to live, my aspirations and what kind of person I am.

I remember being a kid in a 99% white Michigan suburb, getting absolutely floored by Public Enemy’s Can’t Truss It song. That one track blew the doors open for me in terms of what it means to tell a truly powerful, incendiary story through song and apply it to real social issues. The way Chuck draws a direct line between the injustice and oppressed rage of slaves from long ago and the racial struggles that still exist today was an inspiring and humbling eye-opener about the real power of music.

That’s what it’s about, connecting just like that and giving people new eyes on something they might only have a certain familiarity with at the moment. Chuck, KRS-One, even people I look back on as an adult, these other guys who were on something really deep and special back when I was 14. Back then it was just kind of a bunch of cool words. But those words hit me, they made me want to know what they were talking about. It made me read, it made me research, it inspired me to dig deeper. That stuff showed me the real power of what this culture can be and what this art form can be.

Interview by JohnnyFirecloud

© COPYRIGHT ANTIQUIET, 2011

THE TIMES-PICAYUNE – The president’s Oil Spill Commission has concluded that systemic failures, not a rogue BP management style, caused the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout in April.

“The blowout was not the product of a series of aberrational decisions made by rogue industry or government officials that could not have been anticipated or expected to occur again,” says the commission’s final report, released late Wednesday. “Rather, the root causes are systemic and, absent significant reform in both industry practices and government policies, might well recur.”

That conclusion could prove devastating to the oil and gas industry, which is waiting with bated breath to see whether a new regulatory agency will issue new drilling permits in time for idle rigs currently under contract through the spring to return to work in the Gulf of Mexico.

The chapter of the report focusing on what caused the April 20 blowout makes it clear that poor management, mostly by BP, doomed the rig, leading to the death of 11 rig workers and considerable damage to the Gulf from nearly 5 million barrels of spilled oil.

But the chapter also raises serious questions about the actions of Halliburton, a leading provider of cement to seal wells, and also takes aim at rig owner Transocean for a December 2009 “near-miss” in the North Sea that had nothing to do with BP.

Click to continue reading the full article on the Oil Spill Commission’s findings.

Article by David Hammer

©COPYRIGHT THE TIMES-PICAYUNE, 2011

Photograph by Flicker user: Deepwater Horizon Response

TRUTHDIG –  Ralph Nader in a CNN poll a few days before the 2008 presidential election had an estimated 3 percent of the electorate, or about 4 million people, behind his candidacy. But once the votes were counted, his support dwindled to a little over 700,000. Nader believes that many of his supporters entered the polling booth and could not bring themselves to challenge the Democrats and Barack Obama. I suspect Nader is right. And this retreat is another example of the lack of nerve we must overcome if we are going to battle back against the corporate state. A vote for Nader or Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney in 2008 was an act of defiance. A vote for Obama and the Democrats was an act of submission. We cannot afford to be submissive anymore.

“The more outrageous the Republicans become, the weaker the left becomes,” Nader said when I reached him at his home in Connecticut on Sunday. “The more outrageous they become, the more the left has to accept the slightly less outrageous corporate Democrats.”

Nader fears a repeat of the left’s cowardice in the next election, a cowardice that has further empowered the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, maintained the role of the Democratic Party as a lackey for corporations, and accelerated the reconfiguration of the country into a neo-feudalist state. Either we begin to practice a fierce moral autonomy and rise up in multiple acts of physical defiance that have no discernable short-term benefit, or we accept the inevitability of corporate slavery. The choice is that grim. The age of the practical is over. It is the impractical, those who stand fast around core moral imperatives, figures like Nader or groups such as Veterans for Peace, which organized the recent anti-war rally in Lafayette Park in Washington, which give us hope. If you were one of the millions who backed down in the voting booth in 2008, don’t do it again. If you were one of those who thought about joining the Washington protests against the war where 131 of us were arrested and did not, don’t fail us next time. The closure of the mechanisms within the power system that once made democratic reform possible means we stand together as the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration. If we do not engage in open acts of defiance, we will empower a radical right-wing opposition that will replicate the violence and paranoia of the state. To refuse to defy in every way possible the corporate state is to be complicit in our strangulation.

“The left has nowhere to go,” Nader said. “Obama knows it. The corporate Democrats know it. There will be criticism by the left of Obama this year and then next year they will all close ranks and say ‘Do you want Mitt Romney? Do you want Sarah Palin? Do you want Newt Gingrich?’ It’s very predictable. There will be a year of criticism and then it will all be muted. They don’t understand that even if they do not have any place to go, they ought to fake it. They should fake going somewhere else or staying home to increase the receptivity to their demands. But because they do not make any demands, they are complicit with corporate power.

“Corporate power makes demands all the time,” Nader went on. “It pulls on the Democrats and the Republicans in one direction. By having this nowhere-to-go mentality and without insisting on demands as the price of your vote, or energy to get out the vote, they have reduced themselves to a cipher. They vote. The vote totals up. But it means nothing.”

There is no major difference between a McCain administration, a Bush and an Obama administration. Obama, in fact, is in many ways worse. McCain, like Bush, exposes the naked face of corporate power. Obama, who professes to support core liberal values while carrying out policies that mock these values, mutes and disempowers liberals, progressives and leftists. Environmental and anti-war groups, who plead with Obama to address their issues, are little more than ineffectual supplicants.

Obama, like Bush and McCain, funds and backs our unending and unwinnable wars. He does nothing to halt the accumulation of the largest deficits in human history. The drones murder thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as they did under Bush and would have done under McCain. The private military contractors, along with the predatory banks and investment houses, suck trillions out of the U.S. Treasury as efficiently under Obama. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus, have not been restored. The public option is dead. The continuation of the Bush tax cuts, adding some $900 billion to the deficit, along with the reduction of individual contributions to Social Security, furthers a debt peonage that will be the excuse to privatize Social Security, slash social services and break the back of public service unions. Obama does not intercede as tens of millions of impoverished Americans face foreclosures and bankruptcies. The Democrats provide better cover. But the corporate assault is the same.

“Obama has the formula now,” Nader said. “You give the Republicans a lot of what they want. Many of them vote for you. You get your Democrat percentage. You weave a hybrid victory. That is what he learned in the lame-duck session. He gets praised as being a statesman and a leader and getting things done. Think of all the rewards he can contemplate while he is in Hawaii compared to what they were saying about him on Nov. 5. All the columnists and pundits say that now he can work with John Boehner. But once you take a broader view, it is the difference in the mph of corporatism. McCain is 50 miles per hour and Obama is 40 miles per hour.

“The left has disemboweled itself,” Nader said. “It doesn’t even have a strategy every four years like a good poker player. The best example is Richard Trumka and the AFL-CIO. Obama has given them nothing. Therefore, they are demanding nothing. They huff and puff. They make tough speeches. But Trumka hasn’t even made Obama’s campaign pledge of a $9.50 minimum wage by this year an issue. If you want to increase consumer demand, what better way to do it than to unleash $300 billion in wages? The card check for unionization, which Obama pledged as his No. 1 sop to the labor unions, is dead. The unions do not even demand a hearing. And now wait till you see what they will do to the public employee unions. Part of it is their own fault. They are going to be crushed. Everybody is ganging up on them. You have new class warfare. It is non-unionized lower income and middle class taking it out on the unionized middle-income public employees. It is a classic example of oligarchic manipulation. It will start playing out big time in New York State with Andrew Cuomo and others. They will start saying, ‘Why are you getting this? Most workers who pay the taxes, who pay your salaries, are not getting this.’ This plays.”

The banishment from the corporate media, Nader argues, has been one of the major contributors to the demoralization and weakening of the left. Protests by the left, which get little national or local coverage, have steadily dwindled in strength across the country. The first protest gets little or no coverage and this leads to movements, as well as the voices of activists, being diminished and finally suffocated.

“The so-called liberal media, along with Fox, is touting the tea party and publicizing Palin,” Nader said. “There was an editorial on Dec. 27 in The New York Times on the Repeal Amendment, the right-wing constitutional amendment to allow states to overturn federal law. The editorial writer at the end had the nerve to say there is no progressive champion. The editorial said that the liberals and progressives have faded out to let the tea party make history. And yet, for months, all The New York Times has done is promote Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. They promote Newt Gingrich and the neocons on the Op-Ed pages. The book pages of the newspaper ignore progressive authors and pump all the right-wing authors.

“If we don’t raise hell, we won’t get any media,” Nader said. “If we don’t get any media, the perception will be that the tea party is the big deal.

“On one notorious Sunday, Oct. 10, two of The New York Times’ segments led with a big story about Ann Coulter and how she will change her strategy because she is being outflanked by others,” Nader said. “There was also a huge article on this anti-Semite against Arabs, this Islamaphobe, Pam Geller. Do you know how many pictures they had of Geller? Twenty on this front-page segment. The number of anti-war Op-Eds in The Washington Post over nine months in 2009 was 6-to-1 pro-war. We don’t raise hell. We don’t say Terry Gross is a censor. We don’t say that Charlie Rose is a censor. We have got to blast publicly. We have got to hammer them, because they are the tribune of right-wing fascist forces.

“Three thousand people rallied to protest the invasion and massacre in Gaza two years ago,” Nader said. “It was held four blocks from The Washington Post. It did not get a single paragraph. People should march over to the Post and say ‘Fuck you! What are you doing here? You cover every little blip by the right-wing and you don’t cover us?’

“They are afraid of the right-wing because the right-wing bellows, and they have become right-wing,” Nader said of the commercial press. “They have become fascinated by the bias of Fox. And they publicize what Fox is biased on. The coverage of O’Reilly and Beck and their fights is insane. In the heyday of coverage in the 1960s of what we were doing, it was always less than it should have been, but now it is almost zero. Why do we take this? Why do we accept this? Why isn’t Chris Hedges three times a year in the Op-Ed? Why is it always Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams and all these homicidal maniacs? Why are they there? Why is John Bolton constantly published in The Washington Post and The New York Times? Where is Andrew Bacevich? Bacevich told me he has had five straight Op-Eds rejected by the Post and the Times in the last two years. And he said he is not inclined to send anymore. How many times do you hear Hoover Institution? American Enterprise Institute? Manhattan Institute. These goddamned newspapers should be picketed.”

The timidity and silencing of the left fuels the steady impoverishment of a dispossessed working class and a beleaguered middle class. It solidifies a corporate oligarchy that is dismantling the anemic regulatory agencies that once protected citizens from predatory corporations. The economic system is designed to bail out Wall Street rather than replace the trillions of dollars and millions of jobs lost by workers. And the only hope left, Nader argues, is if the conservatives in the right-wing movement break from the corporatists. If the big banks again start going to the cliff and calling for new bailouts, Nader says, this may provoke a schism between conservative groups embodied by figures such as Ron Paul, and corporate lackeys.

“Every major movement starts with field organizers, the farmers, unions, and the civil rights movement,” Nader said. “But there is nothing out there. We need to start learning from what was done in the past. All over the country people are pissed off. They hate Wall Street. They know they are being gouged. They know they are slipping behind. They know their kids will not be as well off as they were, and they were not that well off. But no one is putting it together. Who could put a thousand organizers in the field, besides George Soros? The labor unions. They have the money. They have a lot of cash. These idiots are going down. The UAW is a paradigm of a suicidal, supplicant labor union. It is disgusting. They are a puppy dog of GM, Ford and Chrysler. They have huge reserves. The labor unions could organize the country, but they are into their own emoluments and high salaries. The union leadership has so distanced itself from the rank and file that it is ashamed to do anything controversial. These union leaders will not go on TV on Labor Day because they do not want someone saying ‘Why are you making $500,000 a year with a pension that is six times your rank and file?’ There is corruption at the top. The only way the union leaders can continue is to be in the shadows. And you don’t build a strong movement in the shadows.

“The black swan question is whether something will erupt that is rare, extreme and unpredictable,” Nader said. “It is amazing that it hasn’t happened in any pockets of the country. How much more can the oppressed take before they revolt? And can they revolt without organizers? These are the two important questions. You have got to have organizers, and as of now we don’t.”

© 2011 Truthdig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. 

Photograph by Flickr User: Nick Bygon

LOS ANGELES TIMES – Another big California health insurer has stunned individual policyholders with huge rate increases — this time it’s Blue Shield of California seeking cumulative hikes of as much as 59% for tens of thousands of customers March 1.

Blue Shield’s action comes less than a year after Anthem Blue Cross tried and failed to raise rates as much as 39% for about 700,000 California customers.

GUARDIAN.CO.UK – The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday 5 January 2011

The story below reported the authors of a study as saying that birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults in 2004, and added by way of background that this suggestion might add to the dispute over whether rounds containing depleted uranium have residual effects. But a line of explanation went wrong in saying that such rounds “contain ionising radiation to burst through armour”. As readers with expertise in this area noted, it is not the radiation emitted by this substance that makes it penetrate armour. Rather, depleted uranium is used because of its density and its melting point, one of whose effects is to produce heat and therefore fires or explosions upon high-speed impact.

A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.

The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year – a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports.

The findings, which will be published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, come prior to a much-anticipated World Health Organisation study of Falluja’s genetic health. They follow two alarming earlier studies, one of which found a distortion in the sex ratio of newborns since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a 15% drop in births of boys.

Click to read full article on link between rise in Falluja birth defects and cancer, and US assault.

Article by Martin Chulov

Photograph by US Army/Flickr

© COPYRIGHT GUARDIAN.CO.UK, 2010