ExiledOne Commentary

Unique View of An African from America

France And The Shakes (Exile 2013)
Aspirations, Aaron Douglas, 1936
exiledun


Christiane Taubira b. 1952
Minister Of Justice of France




Vibrations have a way of changing things. When the shaking in a house is constant and appears to be destructive, what rattles off of shelves is surprising-or can be expected in the crashing sounds of something treasured.

France is in the middle of plenty of such trembling and uproar. Internally, the disgust of the registered voters who turn up on the specified day is one reason. The farm country leader, Hollande, hailing from an area between two southern cities, Bordeaux and Lyon, is a year after his campaigning as Monsieur Normal, admitting major cracks in the structure. Besides the crevasse now open and gaping, between Germany's state and France within the EU, it is obvious to the population that globalizing powers, some call it an Empire of the One Percent, has France in it's monstrous grip. Enormous have been the social strictures in the first decade of the 21st century. Combined, Paris and Marseille, accounting as important twin metropolises,  have one fifth of the country's masses. Roads are crumbling like they are in the overseas départements and former colonies such as Madagascar which has the Chinese stepping up  to pave the local lanes for rickshaws to pull Western tourists.  Strikes by workers, an anemic economic slide and the exit of close to 90 billion euros in the last two years (bank accounts and investments put significantly into German banks) to another EU country. As in Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and other European nation states, the people able to have gotten their money out of France. The regular piggy bank is getting a shake. Part of the rearrangements, as in the USA, has been catapulting political figures of African descent into the high reaches of government. In France's case, a woman born in tiny Guyane (French Guyana of Devil's Island notoriety) became minister of justice of France in 2012.








Paris, like London, is expecting mass social unrest in 2013

The ordinary French trail of negative forces are out in the open. The script, as in all countries of Europe, regardless of higher and higher percentages of 'foreign blood', is written and broadcast by Whites controlling the corporate media. Xenophobia and racism is not a headliner in newspapers as much as the line that Muslims, Africans, Turks, even the French gay people testing 'tradition' in France. The difficulty with such a view is that the excuses for oppression have been a part of the culture since élan has been French. In 2013, the posting of François Hollande has only magnified the hallowed French trend of second tier empire building, based on a method of shaking up the world with finesse. French military and no doubt intelligence agencies, have been hard at work in the last few decades. As part of the funding and political maneuvering to help the neoliberal Palestine Authority, France has invested heavily but also been opposed on points by other EU forces like Germany. With a heavy Muslim population, many descended from anticolonial Algeria and the Mahgreb, to say little of West Africa,  France has no choice than to appease the Muslim world in ways that most of Europe would not. The two way tension of abandoning ideas of a French global circuit and the tendency to expand as a multi diplomatic player geopolitically is not a small dilemma. This can be measured not only in an unbroken stretch of French at the helm of UN 'peacekeeping' operations. This makes for a  world quaking  geopolitical shudder when the invasions of Libya and Mali by France and other systems  self ordained to control Africa are considered. The Central African Republic, not on too many minds in the West, is in the throes of French meddling and intrigue. Viet Nam and southeast Asia, once a French domain, has been 'lost' to economic competitors Beijing and Washington.  Chad and Mauritania are not just places that French people happen to be hostages. French operatives are paying off military figures and chessboarding their way across North, Central and West Africa.  Syria was a former French colony. In Syria and Lebanon, the French Code Of Military Justice, or just plain torture with no right to legal counsel did grave damage over the decades. 355 Syrians were 'tried' and executed without legal representation in 1926. This was the order of the day a hundred years ago and armies Paris planted in colonial times became repressive systems still to be addressed fully in Hums and Damascus. The senior Assad was a 1940s officer that passed the wheel to the current dictator. Iran has long been a valuable business partner (oil and French cars made-or labelled-actually made in Turkey) that cannot be lost outright to USA , Italy, southern Korea or Japan much less the UAE.





Hums (Homs), Syria

France is not a front running economy any longer. It's down there with the USA and others. Across the border, Brussels, Belgium the European Union seat is mired in any number of quicksand pits, not the least a far right political party bloc spanning almost thirty countries including the Le Pen clan of France. Neighbor Germany haunted by new nazi power is busy trying to get it's gold back from the Americans and tiny rich border countries such as Luxembourg and Switzerland have their own problems with the long arm of the IRS searching for USA tax evaders. Some capitalist analysts, adjusting their focus see Paris and not Berlin as the key to another EU arising--or the devolution of the monetary union and the dense bureacratic experiment gone sideways.


France needs to  find a way out but that will take some doing.



A good shake out is the only way but it is what pops out which may be a surprise.






18 May 2013
From Exile,
Bankole






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A Rare Peek (Exile 2013)
Aspirations, Aaron Douglas, 1936
exiledun
From the ExiledOne Commentary Archives…here’s a current article on USA prisons with excerpts from a lengthy piece I wrote about Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl eight years ago. Three years before that, in 2002, I began corresponding with him. He was in the Michigan City Indiana state prison then and I was in Sweden. On 'death row', Obadyah had a credible fear and insight into what many people don't realize is common in the USA: the penalty of death is used often and illegally by government to eliminate mostly impoverished Black and Brown men and women. From country to country in Europe, we got people involved to change the situation of  'the lockdown'.


An Illusion Is Intoxicating

Some more current facts...




26 per 100,000 black youth serve in adult prisons.

2.2 per 100,000 white youth serve in adult prisons.

Over 30% of all women prisoners were African 'American' women in USA (2010)



A Will To Live Free (2005)

During September snow days at the 65th parallel in northern Sweden, I have thought about my friend. In Stockholm I called upon Swedish lawyers and officials to use their personal and political clout to end the suffering.In the peat bog mist of County Leitrim, in awkward solidarity embraces in Paris, France bookstores and while warily pondering a storm tossed night ferry ride from England's white cliffs of Dover to the port of Calais, I have tried to will his good welfare. On rickety trains from Preston to Liverpool, exhausted and edgy after after a countryside journey, on walks through the green moisture drenched mountain pines of mid Wales, in the cold cobblestone march through old towns of Belgium, and the Netherlands I kept him in mind, his situation as a Brother, on my tongue and inside my brain. Among hearty young Dutch activists in a warm Amsterdam pub, I have advocated Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl's freedom.
To Nigerians, Ghanaians and other Continental Africans, I have challenged and insisted we work to help free him. Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl has languished on Indiana, USA death row for a decade and a half.


Obadyah, who will be 37 soon, has a lot in common with me, besides our identity as Africans born in America. Through our letters since 2002 we have written each other, sharing our backgrounds, fears, dreams and a strong will to resist. With uncommon flair for the English language, Obadyah has articulated his fight for himself, the collective group he calls comrades in prison and what he sees right or wrong with human society.


excerpt, Indiana: Obadyah's Mission 

From ExiledOne Commentary 2005



What goes on in the prisons after the internationally condemned practices such as Forced Confessions, All White Juries, Destroyed Evidence and use of Informants, Solitary Confinement?

In a word, slavery, which once built the foundation of the capitalist system. Only conditioned blind eyes cannot see the new replacement of a globalized network going on. Just as capitalists glory in developing 'the rule of law', factory growth and Industrial Revolutions, etc while never mentioning millions of Africans, Asians and Indigenous people forced to create the wealth.


Economy Booster


Prisoners work for anywhere between
93¢ and $4.73 for A DAY'S WORK. Jobs are 'coming home' from China, Mexico, etc, the politicians boast. 'Citizens' are finding employment...these people filling up the prisons in effect have no rights and are not 'citizens' who get to vote or participate in society except by crude control that is defined in no other way than slavery. In the parlance of the corporate media, this is a 'boost to the economy', adds to the numbers 'as the recovery continues'.Shoes, computers are made. Hotel reservations, airline reservations once done by taxpaying citizens now unemployed, homeless, losing their pensions, etc are now done by Prison Nation laborers and servicepersons. Corporations get back 40% or more for their participation. The loyal taxpayer is, like the prison laborer/customer service agent controlled by the cost and profit maximizing corporation.


If you buy goods from these major corporate giants you fund USA prison labor at slave wages:



AT & T

Caterpillar

Chevron


Eddie Bauer

Fruit of the Loom

Hewlett Packard


JC Penney

Johnson & Johnson


K-Mart


Mary Kay

Microsoft

Motorola

Nintendo

Proctor & Gamble

Quaker Oats


Sara Lee

Starbucks

Wal-Mart

Wendy’s


Victoria’s Secret


On their release, the ex prisoner will likely be unable to find a company to hire her/him!

4000 And Counting

The fact is established that Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl, Reggie Clemons and thousands of other men and women remain in prison for decades because of illegalities of the so called justice system of the USA state. Both Obadyah and Reggie were 19 years old during the early 1990s arrests for allegedly murdering Whites and nonAfrican people.

The growth of corporate prisons has been front and center before the public for some time now. It is plain that bed and cell filling, strategic profit making has overrun any facsimile of justice for the accused. When the May 2013 sentencing of former Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella resulted in his being ordered to prison for 28 years, the negative magnitude of the Prison Nation was on display for the world to see. This law school graduate and 'civil servant' in northeastern USA had various other lawyers bringing cases before his court and youth as young as ten years old were being imprisoned by the thousands. Mark Ciavarella put almost $1 Million dollars in his pocket because his lawyer friends even included a Pennsylvania private juvenile prison owner. 4000 convictions have been reversed after Mark Ciavarella and his cronies were investigated for their 'Kids For Cash' violations of Human Rights during 2003-2008.


A rare peek at the engine driving the USA economy,
if only briefly.


13 May 2013
From Exile,
Bankole




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Du Bois: Sharp In Hindsight (Exile 2013)
Aspirations, Aaron Douglas, 1936
exiledun
The law has no meaning if it isn't enforced.



WE Du Bois (1868-1963)


100+ years ago, as is common (the cycle of time varies) the powers that be mounted pulpits made of the skin and bone of the suffering of millions to give lofty speeches. These were little changed in form from what we hear today. Freedom. Democracy. Rights Of All Men. What was new then was just amplification. Electric wires and loudspeakers made it so that the White men speaking didn't have to shout so much. But they shouted anyway, to get points across, deliver the emotion that was needed to emphasize their mission. Racism as a core of capital growth was about to become a global issue. 50 years ago, WE Du Bois passed on.


Where are the people? Technology has made money but at what cost?




Others, too, had a lot to say about the direction the world was being shoved into. That this small percentage of Whites could do such damage was a testament to not only warfare but strategic dehumanizing of most of the world's people. But in every corner of the world Indigenous, Asian, African and their intermixed peoples created and continued action against what is called colonialism. Assassination, or crippling censorship awaited the African people in America. Those on the wing, determined to defeat the dragon were, like freedom fighter Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) exiled time and again. The drum, the pen, the gun and the voice were all lifted to resist this rich White men's supremacy, which drove even other human evils to fuel it.


The Narrative Of Resistance
Lived
On...Geronimo ji Jaga (1947-2011) Endured 27 Years As A USA Political Prisoner Like Nelson Mandela



Propulsion of their ideas, defended and driven like spearpoint in brutal edged fury fell to Whites of the middle and lower classes. The fine details of oppression as well as the bloodsoaked horrors were the task of the educated Whites and the ones embracing the 'redneck' identity. In the USA where it has always been a crime to be poor, they at least had the skin advantage. Or so they thought.

Below, one of the articulate voices who spoke against the nightmare when empires of European led nationstates almost destroyed the earth trying to remain dominant. Of African, Indigenous, Dutch, French and English heritage, W.E. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, USA in 1868. He passed on in Accra, Ghana in 1963. By the period of his last years, he concluded what the 20th century had produced in his examination of European power. His narrative was, in hindsight, sharp.



What are the real causes back of the collapse of Europe in the twentieth century? What was the real European imperialism pictured in the Paris Exposition of 1900? France did not stand purely for art. There was much imitation, convention, suppression, and sale of genius; and France wanted wealth and power at any price. Germany did not stand solely for science. I remember when a German professor at whose home I was staying in 1890 expressed his contempt for the rising businessmen. He had heard them conversing as he drank in a Bierstube at Eisenach beneath the shade of Luther’s Wartburg. Their conversation, he sneered, was lauter Geschäft! He did not realize that a new Germany was rising which wanted German science for one main purposes—wealth and power. America wanted freedom, but freedom to get rich by any method short of anarchy; and freedom to get rid of the democracy which allowed laborers to dictate to managers and investors.

All these centers of civilization envied England the wealth and power built upon her imperial colonial system. One looking at European imperialism in 1900, therefore, should have looked first at the depressed peoples. One would have found them also among the laboring classes in Europe and America, living in slums behind a façade of democracy, nourished on a false education which lauded the triumphs of the industrial undertaker, made the millionaire the hero of modern life, and taught youth that success was wealth. The slums of England emphasized class differences; slum dwellers and British aristocracy spoke different tongues, had different manners and ideals. The goal of human life was illustrated in the nineteenth-century English novel: the aristocrat of independent income surrounded by a herd of obsequious and carefully trained servants. Even today the British butler is a personage in the literary world.

Out of this emerged the doctrine of the Superior Race: the theory that a minority of the people of Europe are by birth and natural gift the rulers of mankind; rulers of their own suppressed labor classes and, without doubt, heaven-sent rulers of yellow, brown, and black people.

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote The World And Africa.
It was published in  1965






9 May 2013
From Exile,
Bankole






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Putting In Work Can Be Rewarding......
After The Blisters Turn To Callouses


Getting there first. If you don't someone else will. In more than a few articles I have written, I have tried to push an idea. I have also given talks and most importantly, spelled out actions I have taken, emphasized thinking for yourself.

Can you get to your own brain before someone else does? It's humorous on one level but at the same moment, serious. Once this is secure (being able to back up words with action) there's the real challenge. Taking others with you to make a true impact can't be on your schedule. Success will not be measured the way you thought it would. The peoples' gratitude is hard won, sweet like juice hand squeezed from fruit you thought was ugly and delivered at the time that you finally fell asleep after a trying day defending your life.

It takes some determination to be yourself and stand for your own worldview. Despite myths, this is a nonverbal activity in that the committment relies not on what you say but what you do.

Years ago, if it didn't involve 'elbow grease', it wasn't really considered an effort.



5 May 2013
From Exile,
Bankole



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Failed Youth, Power And Succession (Exile 2007)
Aspirations, Aaron Douglas, 1936
exiledun
From The ExiledOne Commentary Archives...It's not now and then anymore. Perception has given way to reality-political and similar type 'leaders' are desperate to continue a strange experiment that has most of us in a fix. As the 21st century moves along, it is best if there is an examination of mistakes made and currently being made in not questioning those who demand obedience. This article was written in 2007.






In Texas military uniform, American president George Bush, with his father. The father, as a US congressman in 1964 was a lesser known Texan than US president and ‘DixiecratLyndon Baines Johnson. He stood for racial inequality (Mexicans, Native Americans and Africans) and state’s rights over federal power and the family’s international and domestic oil Fortunes.

By 1988, George H. Bush was president and had given up his job as CIA chief. This was the same year that the US government finally had ratified and signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

There is often the idea that we are indestructible.

This point of departure is many times emblematic of youth.

Naturally, a desire to free oneself from childhood appeals to the teenager. Accordingly, the teen wants to hurry towards adulthood. In the rush to reach maturity, as pleasant or disturbing as it is, we can learn much.

Or we can take on thoughts and actions – let’s call this behavior-that can bring a lifetime of paybacks. Success means satisfying prosperity in health, a balance in economics and ability to handle the sure to be faced ups and downs of relating to other people. Pushing ahead into self interested supremacy almost always can be guided by or halted by older persons.

In the event that the notion of being super dominant takes over the young mind, the fantasy will sooner or later be punctured.

Quite an explosion will be heard and felt by all who are affected by the petty one.

7 October 2007
From Exile,
Bankole






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Another King George Pt2 (Exile 2006)
Aspirations, Aaron Douglas, 1936
exiledun
From The ExiledOne Commentary Archives...In the intervening years since 2001 invasions have been the standard Modus Operandi by corporate/imperialist powers. Yet within these same fortresses of military stockpiling and launching of misery for the world (one head of the snake is in Washington DC) are Prison Nations. Devising new and perfecting old ways to manage the masses has led to outrage.  Here is part 2 of 2, Another King George.  Human Rights violations no less deadly than those unleashed overseas have been regularly used against prisoners 'at home'. Jon Burge is in prison today in Pennsylvania and has been linked to torture of at least 120 men and then conspiring to hide the facts since he became a police officer in Chicago in 1970. Former governor of Illinois George Ryan was released from prison in early 2013.



Not Just Guantanamo...



The Western World Must Awaken



Bribes, extending from statehouse to the motor vehicle division when he was deputy to governor and his white collar crime network (75 other convictions) speak to a "rule breaker". "King George" Ryan the former pharmacist from Kankakee ruled then fell.

Yet, IIlinois and Chicago specifically have been known to the world to be the benchmark for political criminality--and the Ryan sentencing of 6 September 2006 has changed little. He got sentenced to a long stretch of years for a man in ill health-6 1/2 and may be jailed without bond before the term begins in December, 2006.


Jon Burge the notorious torturer of the Chicago Police Department remains free from arrest.  Aaron Patterson (re imprisoned in recent years on political targeting), Madison Hobley, Stanley Howard and Leroy Orange, all African so called Americans had been forced into confessing crimes that they did not do by Burge and his blue mob in the 1970s and 1980s and faced the electric chair before Ryan's pardon. Many "first Black" officials of the era, too, escaped into the governmental forest. Burge lives on and though he resigned in the early 1990s under the cloud of his horrible crimes against humanity, collects Chicago police pension money in Florida.

Aaron Patterson is in prison again. He tried after his release to motivate the communities to fight injustice--internationally as well. Is he being tortured with electric prods to his genitals as he may have been and others once were? Who will address this Guantanamo, this Abu Ghraib that systematically happened decades ago? (and if it is happening now in America? The UN in Geneva, Switzerland issued stern words on Burge and Chicago during summer 2006 and that is all.  American domination of the international community is feared greatly.



The three others are just symbols of the hundreds of men that are striving through their lawyers to gain compensation from the state for it ruining their lives. For now, forced confessions, a hallmark of Human Rights violators worldwide, continues in the United States of America. Whether the bloody Abu Ghraib type or beaten-without -bruises kind, the rushing off to prisons of impoverished women and men continues. 1,000 mostly Black and Brown men fill the buses, trains and planes bound for US prisons each week.


Few people recall 6 September for the George Ryan jury trial ending and sentencing. More may note that George Bush declared that the CIA does in fact boldly have secret prisons across the world.

But the story of the other "King George" remains crucial to realizing how American machines of injustice operate, in the heartland.





7 September 2006
From Exile,
Bankole






End Part 2 and Article



From ExiledOne Commentary 2006





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Nat's Song (Exile 2013)
Aspirations, Aaron Douglas, 1936
exiledun
Nat Adderley

(1931-2000)

Nat was the other Adderley, brother of Julian 'Cannonball' Adderley (1928-1975). These were grandchildren of Africans in the Bahama islands a few hundred kilometers east of the Florida Key islands and north of Cuba. The people had transited back and forth from the peninsula over the centuries. From that fertile exchange of cultures in the subtropics came a music part African and part Indigenous under the constraints of an imposed European structure. A long history of Seminole Nation and other group interaction with Africans displayed no loyalty to colonial Spanish, English, French or American control politically in the Caribbean subregion.  To the north, a more well known African culture preserved until the present day is the Gullah or Geechie of the coastal Georgia and South Carolina sea islands where Africans traditionally were a 15 to 1 majority compared to the Europeans. Physical captivity was relative in this case and West African nations salvaged cultural ways and began to form new developments in dance, language, craftwork and of course, music.


Today, just about 100 years after the massive journey of a people out of the US South, it is clear that an assessment of the currents of culture is in order. Musicians, and artists in general known as the transporters who pass/possess the knowledge of the new and old ways among African people in the USA have had their roles shifted. The blues players, rebels and pathfinders are not well understood today and neither are the African classical musicians such as the Adderleys. To some people their tremendous contributions are just 'samples' in a computer world of 'beats'. But the culture has roots and the cleanest and most direct road to getting the point is to know the context in which people created expressions of the world in which they lived.



Wayne, Ron, Miles, Tony (unseen Herbie) 1960s



"The lack of camaraderie and community among the players...that's either gone or being blocked."

Dr Billy Taylor, piano giant and educator (1921-2010)


Quarter Notes

Along with older brother Julian, born in 1928, who settled in on a saxophone (after choosing trumpet initially), the younger Nat Adderley, born in west coast Tampa in 1931, played a cornet as a child. As a youth in Tallahassee, the capital, Nat and Julian had good music teachers. The first quarter of the 20th century had ended but Human Rights progress was in the balance. In the panhandle of the state of Florida the family was exposed to but protected from vicious state enforced racism due to their middle class upbringing as children of college professors. Less than 50 years earlier the bravery of African people had shocked the Whites who had ruled as part of the Confederacy's reach into the Gulf of Mexico. Centuries of domination of Indigenous and African people had not ended when the US North soldiers eventually beat back the Confederate army. But the determination of US North units such as the Massachusetts 54th in defeating 'good ole boys' to break Dixie power was the cause of many Whites to flee Florida, some as far away as Venezuela, Colombia and Argentina. Rigid racial dehumanization in the form of Ku Klux Klan terror and Jim Crow policies of degradation was what the Adderley brothers, future music all star brothers like slightly older trumpeter Tommy Turrentine and his brother Stanley in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania had to endure. The difference in Florida was harsh slavery camps managed by Florida's rich and their relations in the statehouse: turpentine camps and swamp clearing crews, road builders and railroad 'gandy dancers' were virtual captives as in the 1700s and 1800s. These were families that had just after the period of captivity become landowners, farmers and as self sufficient as  possible.  African women, if allowed paid work were almost universally taking home White families' laundry to wash, maids in White homes and nannies. For African people in Florida and the US South, one of the most sorrowful sights was the chain gang, groups of African men chained together doing heavy labor with iron balls connected to their ankles. The opposition of US South  political and social machinery to African peoples' advancement extended beyond the tyrannical White first Democratic party. The Whites in the Socialist Party of Mississippi openly stated that 1860s post war "Negro domination" made the KKK actions necessary: "to make matters in their own hands and save their women, their homes and their country" (Ida M Raymond, state secretary SP in 1912). St Croix born scholar activist Hubert Harrison cut down this argument in a letter to the Socialists by noting that the KKK had been in existence and lynching African people as early as 1865. The 1868 constitutional right for African people to vote was effectively operating to help elect the briefly instrumental Reconstruction politicians three years later.




ZORA NEALE HURSTON


F olklorist and award winning writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was raised in a rare Florida town of self determining Africans, Eatonville, outside of Orlando. She would use her skills as in investigative journalism (Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail) to aid an African woman who shot down her White sexual abuser, a Florida senator in 1952. After Ruby's gag order by the judge, the book by Zora and William Bradford Huie was banned in Florida but still is useful today to uncover many illegalities in the case.

Legendary Civil Rights organizer Septima Clark (1898-1987) emanated from Charleston, South Carolina and the Sea Islands. Her mother, during the war between the US South and US North was taken by White 'masters' to Haiti.



Freedom Time

Julian had been nicknamed 'Cannibal' for being eager at dinnertime. Developing into a refined orator like his teacher father, he had his name corrupted to 'Cannonball' for his large body size. But long before that, the young sax player was a professional musician, an alto sax legend in the US South by the early 1950s. Nat had been through the paces as a high school band performer on trumpet and cornet. He had to learn to play beyond the stock arrangements and recorded solos. The dynamism of the players on the edge, such as John Birks 'Dizzy' Gillespie of Cheraw, near the African resistance area of the Pee Dee river in South Carolina, was a revolution. Harmony was being devised in ways new to Western music and combined with African/Indigenous rhythms and tones.  The entire popular and even European classical music panorama had to take notice, even as the new music was condemned. Nat Adderley, like much of the world was astounded when Dizzy had his music published in 1946. Nat was 15 years old at this point and though he didn't know it, in another fifteen years he would be author of his own classic, Work Song. The success, financially and creatively of the Adderleys happened in the midst of a freedom surge.


Nat had by the early 1960s mastered 'bop' and begun to improvise freely. He had found his voice besides being trying to emulate Dizzy, Miles Davis and Clark Terry, influences of a towering stature along with the late Clifford Brown. Playing with organizations run by Ray Charles, Lionel Hampton and other legends in bandleading rubbed off on Nat and he excelled there as well. In addition, the shorter man, less well known Nat had given his brother's famous band a huge hit in Work Song. Before long, it was a recorded tune with lyrics and sung by Oscar Brown Jr, Lou Rawls, Nina Simone and others. A childhood memory of stopping his play around the front yard and seeing a chain gang inspired him to compose this tribute to those who endured the tragedy of forced labor and servitude in Florida.





29 April 2013
From Exile,
Bankole





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From The ExiledOne Commentary Archives...Jon Burge. A name that can't be forgotten by some people. Slipping under the corporate newsrag radar are made in USA violators of Human Rights. George Bush included. In 2013, during the 45th year since the assassination of Martin Luther King, the blind eyes towards the condition of African so called Americans focus on mental distortions planted and cultivated by powerful forces. Below is Another King George, Part 1, written in 2006.




W hile many children begin entering school in September 2006, politicians return to the parliamentary activities that shape much of our lives. One, "King George" Bush and his Republican party face defeat in the American congress.

This is the case in the West and with additional internal friction among the feuding US and UK speechmakers and corporate lobby kings on the rise, there is rumbling about forced retirements and failed historical legacies. Sweden, sometimes a model of efficiency and cultured fairness throughout European politics, has it's own scandals as the rightward avalanche shifts: one party (Liberals) is accused of spying on another (ruling Social Democrats) party.

But in the interior state of Illinois in the US realm, former governor George Ryan is not going to the statehouse in Springfield this time, not for gladhanding another deal. He has done his share and successfully, like most Americans reaching that strata of influence, profited well. He is a conservative--meaning he wants to conserve the status quo--advance it if at all possible. The greasy deals and those that have made a positive impact for ordinary people can be seen for what they are: Ryan, A Republican born in 1934, is ending over a half year of trials for his career of considerable weight throwing. He is facing charges of racketeering in September, 2006 and the eight years of federal investigations and lawyer duels is now about over.




But in the early 21st century, then Illinois top lawman George Ryan triggered an earthquake in America, ordering clemency hearings in close to 200 cases in which people were sentenced to the penalty of death. Although the US loudly trumpets the pursuit of justice, getting into sticky blades of finding for the facts is against the grain in domestic realities. Death penalty proponents and families of people they allegedly murdered and the prisoners themselves were in uncharted waters. George Ryan, rich, White, connected and at least able to keep most other political wolves at bay did something forbidden in the highly racist and classicist America, post September 11 2001. He declared a moratorium on the death penalty in the state of Illinois. Everyone was taken off the death row and a handful of the men were released right away from prison.

" I just want you all to remember the other innocents who are still in prison. Not only are there other innocents on death row, there are other innocents that have been executed."

Leroy Orange, 2003 (released after 19 years on death row)

This white haired elderly veteran of the vile chessboard called US politics has had a change of heart late in the game.

Is he sincere?







End Part 1



From ExiledOne Commentary 2006






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When It Comes To Health, I Don't Play



Years ago when I worked at a retail establishment that I won't name, the management had the feeling that they were a deity.  Like a lot of these oufits in the health food business, profits were held in an esteem that the customers' health should have had. To make matters plain, I questioned vigorously what I witnessed. There matters such as not getting rid of insects who had made homes in product to be sold to unsuspecting shoppers. After a time, naturally, an agreement was made between myself and the wage paying combine. I've rarely met a naked emperor that didn't need at least the threat of a parade.

To underline the supposed supremacy of the bosses, we the employees knew that our welfare was estimated to be just a fraction above the public: with no health insurance on the job, only a good work record and deft persuasion could winch loose 25 dollars or so each year for a trip to the dentist. That was about one tenth of what might be required for one time treatment. Those days are long gone but a lingering memory of another system that was supposed to be the best.


For myself and my wife there isn't so much a promised land in exile as there has been a foundation reached for good basic health.

I'm always going to cloak myself and my wife in the best natural health possible.









20 April 2013
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1943 Mussolini falls from power. A Year Earlier Churchill Of England Declines Bombing Benito Mussolini's Headquarters After
Il Duce Threatened To Take Egypt.


MUSSOLINI AND HITLER
.....Before They Fell


North Africa was the scene of European battles from the 1930s to the mid '40s. During my youth in the northeast coast American city Philadelphia, I never would have imagined Italy as a colonial power. Italians were the second large group of Whites after the Irish/Scottish in the neighborhoods known for their proximity to the massive USA Navy Yard. In my earliest memory of 1960s corporate media beginning large scale drowning of cultures, there was a fellow on television called Caesar Romero, doing his funny-weird Joker bit versus the proper spoken English men in tights and masks, Batman and Robin. Besides the Italians at catholic school, this was my only reference to Italians via tv, the prime educator in the USA. They alternately boasted about their pride but also claimed Columbus as the founder of the country we lived in. Amusing to me as a second grade student were weeping mothers and grandmothers at the school's high gates almost day, as if their precious little waifs were being delivered to a tragic end. Soon enough though, I learned that their pungent foods, garlic, olive oil, vinegar and tomato sauces, not mention a variety of baked goods were the cultural 'soul foods' of Napoli, Roma and islands like Sicily. Some years later, when introduced to the despots of history, and reasoning that Julius Caesar was a villian who shows up in the Christian bible, I had a lot on my eight year old mind. Was he Italian too, why would anyone name themselves Caesar?

What are the causes of the love affair of Italy and Greece with fascism? These twin economic snails of the EU have populations of 61 million and 11 million respectively. Italy, a massive financial system globally has a tiny pulse growthwise. Greece, exposed as a weak eurozone member on all the corporate newscasts, is in the throes of severe social, economic and political upheaval. Neither of these coastal Mediterranean countries has ever had a closing of the wealth gap: Athens boasts the famous Onassis dynasty and little introduction is necessary for Berlusconi, who seems to own everything, including the courts. If that seems like a generalizing remark, so be it. If Italy was an African nation, he would be called a dictator. With it's hundreds of government collapses and reforms after the 1950s Roman resurgence, Italy would be called a failed state. Now, Italy like it's former colony, Libya, is a sectarian battleground for the hungry and the dispossessed, local or foreigners, most Africans and Asians, Arabs too, fleeing Western 'democratic' inroads. Ethiopia, too has been destabilized by Rome.

Wait a minute, a major political party, Chrysi Agvi (translates as Golden Dawn in English) has it's youth members tracking down and beating Africans and other nonGreeks in broad daylight? Facing Turkey and the most distant linguistically and geographically from the shaky Brussels union, historical political iconoclast Greece may be months from autonomy, wanted or not. Greeks and Italians, wealthy or just youth determined to make a new life, have been seeking other national borders for decades though the pace has increased since the global crisis of bank hijinks destroyed the workingclass dreams of the post 1940s. Fascism, formally in 'democratic' politics since the 1930s, like it has been in Italy, is the unspoken crisis afflicting this nation of archipelagoes and beautiful sun soaked islands. In truth, the whisper has become a scream.

The gains of politicians, increasingly multimillonaires with strong links to the biggest of companies, are always just a reflection of the people-their apathy or their engagement with political issues. Gangs with suits on that uphold the 'banned' racist and xenophobic ideals of yesteryear are bringing fear and loathing of the other as money problems mount. These forces are tech savvy and know how to tap into insecure minds. Anders Breivik in Norway proclaimed his views with mass murder. Beatings and murder of the 'unwanted' are in no way solely a Greek or Italian trend. From Sweden to Finland and down into Belgium and France not to mention Austria and Germany, the lurch to the right has been severe since the year 2000. There is an Italian revival of Mussolini, his ideas (National Fascist Party effectively on scene about 90 years ago) and the storyline is part tourist kiosk, part cult remembrance. Let's say his resurrection, if that isn't too much for those who feel Italy and the Vatican state are holy is currently upon the world. If Greece has the label of 'birthplace of democracy' why is there so much denial of migrants to Greece the basic Human Rights, packing ten thousand into one filth filled prison like warehouse?


Will Coliseums and other famous structures soon be the scene of rounding up the undesirables?

This can't be a joke!


Great Caesar's ghost!





19 April 2013
From Exile,
Bankole





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