Damian Marley & Nas (Distant Relatives) - Live @ Mile High Festival, Denver 8-14-10
Posted on August 19th, 2010 by HighVoltage in Damian Marley, Distant Relatives, Nas
Damian Marley and Nas have been touring all over the globe as of late in support of their Distant Relatives album. Last weekend they touched down at the Mile High Festival in Denver to rock for a packed crowd. Luckily for us, Cricket sponsored a live webcast of the show, so here is our full soundboard audio rip of the show.
Damian Marley & Nas (Distant Relatives) - Live @ Mile High Festival, 8-14-10 (Download)
2011 Georgetown Review Contest
$1,000 and publication to the winning short story, poem, or essay on any theme or subject. All genres welcome.
Submissions must be postmarked by on or before October 1, 2010.
Entry fee is $10 for the first entry, $5 for each entry thereafter. One poem, story, or essay counts as one entry. Please make out checks or money orders to "Georgetown Review."
If you want your work returned or want to receive a notice about the winner and runners-up, you must send us a stamped, self-addressed envelope. However, we will post a list of the work we choose on our website after the contest is judged, and we will do our best to have this list up by February 2011.
The magazine’s editors will judge.
Simultaneous and multiple submissions are okay. Your name can appear on your work as well, and in fact, we prefer that your name, address and email address appear on your entries. We have a small editorial staff and would not award the prize to any colleagues, students, or friends. You do not need a cover sheet.
All entries are considered for publication. In the 2010 contest, 16 runner-up works were selected for publication. If your work is published, Georgetown Review acquires first North American rights, which means that after we publish the piece the rights to it revert back to you.
Send entries to:
2011 Contest
Georgetown Review
400 East College Street
Box 227
Georgetown, KY 40324
Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers
We are happy to announce that the winner of the 2009 Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers is Lauren Foss Goodman's story "Don't Hide Your Light Under A Bushel." Her story will be published in the upcoming Fall 2010 issue.
$1,500 and publication in Boulevard awarded to the winning story by a writer who has not yet published a book of fiction, poetry, or creative non-fiction with a nationally distributed press.
RULESAll entries must be postmarked by December 31, 2010. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but previously accepted or published work is ineligible. Entries will be judged by the editors of Boulevard magazine. Send typed, double-spaced manuscript(s) and SAS post card for acknowledgement of receipt to: Boulevard Emerging Writers Contest, PMB 325, 6614 Clayton Road, Richmond Heights, MO 63117. No manuscripts will be returned.
Entry fee is $15 for each individual story, with no limit per author. Entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Boulevard (one per author). Make check payable to Boulevard.
We accept fiction works up to 8,000 words. Author's name, address, and telephone number, in addition to the story's title and "Boulevard Emerging Writers Contest," should appear on page one. Cover sheets are not necessary.
The winning story will be published in the Spring or Fall 2010 issue of Boulevard.
These are the complete guidelines.
Firewheel Editions Announces the Third Sentence Book Award
And the Fifth Firewheel Chapbook Award.
The Firewheel Chapbook Award is given to a collection of no more than 20 manuscript pages in any genre. Preference is for innovative work (liberally interpreted), work that crosses genres, work that combines images and text, work in formats other than the traditionally bound book, or work that may have difficulty finding publication elsewhere due to the nature, typography, or format of the work. The recipient of the award will receive 50 copies out of a limited edition. Entry fee: $15 by check to Firewheel Editions or by PayPal.
Checks and submissions may be mailed to: Firewheel Chapbook Award, Box 7, WCSU, 181 White St., Danbury, CT 06810.
Electronic submissions may be sent to chapbook@firewheel-editions.org. Postmark/Timestamp Deadline for submissions and fees: November 17, 2010, 11:59 pm PST.
Click the button above to submit your $15 entry fee via PayPal.
The Sentence Book Award will be given to a book-length manuscript of prose poems or a book-length manuscript consisting substantially of prose poems (for example, a book that is half prose poems and half free-verse, or a book-length sequence that mixes passages of prose poetry with other modes). The recipient of the award will receive publication in a trade paper edition with a standard royalty contract and 50 copies of the book. All entrants will receive Sentence #8 (entrants who are already subscribers will have their subscription extended by one issue). Entry fee: $25 by check to Firewheel Editions or by PayPal.Checks and submissions may be mailed to: Sentence Book Award, Box 7, WCSU, 181 White St., Danbury, CT 06810.
Electronic submissions may be sent to sentence@firewheel-editions.org. Postmark/Timestamp Deadline for submissions and fees: November 17, 2010, 11:59 pm PST.
Click the button above to submit your $25 entry fee via PayPal.
Firewheel Editions subscribes to the CLMP Code of Ethics:
"CLMP's community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to
This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically. We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage."
The recipient of the Sentence Award will be selected by Brian Clements, Editor of Sentence and Firewheel Editions; the recipient of the Firewheel Chapbook Award will be selected by Brian Clements and Tom Nackid, Design Manager for Firewheel Editions. In the event that no recipient is chosen for either award, entry fees will be returned to all of the award's entrants. Authors who have published a chapbook or book with Firewheel Editions, authors who have served on the Board of Contributing Editors of Sentence, graduate or undergraduate students and relatives of Brian Clements and Tom Nackid, and all past and current staff members of Sentence and Firewheel Editions are ineligible. All manuscripts will come to the editors anonymously after screening and preparation by Firewheel staff.
Submission guidelines:
format.For more information on Sentence and Firewheel Editions, email info@firewheel-editions.org.
Jamie Monson. Africa's Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. xii + 199 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35271-2.
Reviewed by Leander Schneider (Concordia University)
Published on H-Africa (June, 2010)
Commissioned by Brett L. ShadleTanzania on the Move: A Chinese Railroad Project and Its Impact
Jamie Monson’s book on the 1970-74 construction and subsequent impact of the TAZARA railroad connecting Dar es Salaam on Tanzania’s coast with Kapiri Mposhi in Zambia is bound to garner considerable attention. For many readers, the entry point will likely be the fact that the railway was the product of China’s most visible foray into Africa prior to the much more recent reemergence and intensification of Sino-African relations. While the book’s first seventy pages cater to an interest in this dimension of the story, Monson’s exploration, in the second half of the book, of the railway’s travails since its construction offers the reader a more broad-ranging look at rural livelihood strategies and patterns of mobility in the area around TAZARA’s middle section on the Tanzanian side between the rural centers of Msolwa and Makambako.
Drawing on existing accounts, press reports, Zambian archival materials, and interviews with Tanzanians and some Chinese who worked on the railway, the book assembles an informative account of the project’s history. Especially noteworthy--and noted--are the railway’s prominent political dimensions. On the one hand, the “Freedom Railway” would free Zambia from the transportation stranglehold non-liberated southern Africa held over it. On the other, it was the quintessential showcase project in Africa of South-South cooperation--with a nonaligned, socialist flavor. Referring back to Zhou Enlai’s “Eight Principles” of foreign aid (reproduced in an appendix), Monson documents that the project was supposed to exemplify “China’s unique” and “alternative” approach to development (pp. 34, 37). It bears noting that, sans socialism, this framing of course also acutely resonates with how China’s contemporary engagement with Africa is often officially cast. The title of a 1972 story Monson quotes from the Chinese newspaper Renmin Ribao vividly illustrates the intended image: “They Are True Friends: Stories of Chinese and Tanzanian Workers in Rescuing Each Other” (p. 40).
The magazine’s suspiciously boilerplate account of two workers who save one another’s lives after sequentially encountering an unspecified “danger” and falling into equally unspecified “trouble”--and similarly generic affirmations that emerge from interviews of “friendship” between Chinese and Tanzanian workers and the “modernizing” and “civilizing” impact of railway work on Tanzanian workers’ lives--would perhaps benefit from a more head-on interrogation than the book subjects them to (pp. 8, 68). Monson does note that press stories about solidarity and friendship were in part produced for Chinese domestic consumption. But what more can be said about these framings and their effects in terms of creating an image of China (and Africa)? The book also offers evidence that relations between the Chinese and Tanzanians working on the railway were not typically close--or always smooth. But here too it would be nice to see a deeper exploration and thematic development of such phenomena as segregated living arrangements and separate seating at film screenings in construction camps, an apparently official ban on sexual relations between Chinese and Tanzanians, labor troubles due to mixed Tanzanian reactions to the expectation of “Chinese” work ethic on the project, and Chinese supervisors’ frustrations with Tanzanian workers who they judged to be “lazy, disobedient, or incompetent” (pp. 58, 57, 62, 37, 51-53, 56). In the end, how “alternative” was China’s approach and practice in development? And what can be said about the structures that shaped the Sino-African encounters around this major infrastructure project? Did the difference with other foreign-funded infrastructure projects largely hinge on the extraordinarily large number of low-wage Chinese workers (estimates show that between thirty thousand and forty thousand Chinese workers supplemented a somewhat greater number of local hires over the duration of the project)--and did this feature make it a (good) “alternative” model? Asking such questions more explicitly would be particularly rewarding because they are often ignored in official discourse on current Chinese “development” assistance in Africa, which is still asserted to be “different” and unencumbered by (neo)colonial and hierarchical relations.
The railway’s subsequent history is one of ups and downs. Plagued by technical and economic problems, the railway never reached its intended cargo or passenger capacity and its performance fluctuated significantly, requiring boosters in the form of Chinese, American, and Swedish aid packages at various points. Monson’s main interest, however, is in how the presence of TAZARA affected the surrounding areas in the railway’s Tanzanian middle section, the “passenger belt.” Here, TAZARA interacted with other significant developments: the author highlights Tanzania’s “villagization” program of the early 1970s and economic liberalization from the late 1980s. The former project sought to make use of the new transportation infrastructure by establishing a number of new settlements and expanding others along the railway; in the mid-1970s, such population concentrations around the railway could also serve the purpose of guarding the line against feared acts of sabotage from southern African counter-liberation forces. From the late 1980s, economic liberalization contributed to rural de-agrarianization and diversification of livelihood strategies in Tanzania as elsewhere: the railway, argues Monson, afforded people the mobility increasingly necessary in such circumstances, and hence made its corridor attractive for in-migration.
This point is well taken and nicely illustrated through the life stories Monson reports. It is difficult, however, to gauge the scale and dimensions of TAZARA’s impact on this front. In terms of migration, Monson shows local ward population growth rates that seem to indicate a positive correlation of population growth rates and proximity to the railroad (a map would have been helpful here to illustrate this correlation). But what did this translate to in terms of absolute numbers of people who moved near the railroad? In terms of the railway’s economic significance for small-scale commerce in the passenger belt, the book’s central evidence, besides several life stories, is “parcel receipts” that record the movement of smaller bundles of goods on the railway (the book is less interested in large, commercial shipments). While the figures reported offer only a 1998-2000 snapshot, they seem to suggest that the railway was, at least in the late 1990s, an important means of transport in the corridor: a total of 33,829 parcels were shipped from five stations over the period. But this evidence is again hard to read with respect to the importance of such movements of goods without population figures that would provide a context. Indeed, these numbers are less impressive when one realizes that some of the population centers at the stations in question were quite large: the three largest of the five that Monson reports on recently had official populations of 54,000, 48,300, and 34,800.
Looking at the data in some more detail, it is also striking just how many of the shipments originating in the corridor were destined for Dar es Salaam and, to a lesser extent, the major transportation hub of Makambako where the railway meets the Dar-Songea road and TAZARA’s competitor project, the American-built TANZAM highway. The only exception to this pattern is goods shipped from Makambako (i.e., the road access point) to other settlements in the corridor (with the exception of tomatoes, very little is shipped from Makambako to Dar). Insofar as Monson stresses TAZARA’s importance in terms of facilitating livelihood strategies that did not just target the large market of Dar es Salaam, but were built on intra-regional mobility, flexibility, and exchange, these data do not support her thesis. Indeed, intra-corridor shipments of thirteen different categories of goods from the five stations other than Makambako for which figures are reported are most frequently zero, with only a handful of exceptions in the double digits. Even if we take one of the larger numbers, twenty “small parcels” of maize shipped from Ifakara (recent population of 48,300) to Mlimba (recent population of 34,800) over the 1998-2000 period, it does not, on the face of it, suggest very intense small-scale, intra-regional trading networks. The point that these data do suggest is that where there is a road, little moves on the railway. The vast majority of movements of goods on the train fall into two categories: goods moving to Dar es Salaam from stations that do not have a good road connection; and goods moving from Makambako (with good road access) to other stations that have no road access. Notwithstanding the increased mobility and access to transport that the railway did then provide within its corridor, is this a vindication of those 1960s studies that declared the railway to be uneconomical and prompted Western donors to withdraw their support? Would roads have served the rural areas better? While Monson’s study of how TAZARA affected local lives in its corridor does not set out to address this evaluative question, the reader wonders whether the aid and effort expended on TAZARA in the end created something of a white elephant lumbering from Dar through the Selous Game Reserve all the way into Zambia’s interior.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Leander Schneider. Review of Monson, Jamie, Africa's Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. June, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25748
via h-net.org
Mark Anthony Neal on the Michael Eric Dyson Show
The Michael Eric Dyson Show
Thursday August 19, 2010
WEAA-FM Baltimore
CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting)He can offer insightful critical analysis on everything from bebop to hip-hop; from Black Power to “post-racial Obama.” Our guest as we continue our Open Mike series featuring some of the most powerful voices in America is Mark Anthony Neal, professor of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. Neal has authored four books, including Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic, Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation, and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity—he continues a blog of the same name. Neal’s considerable scholarship focuses on Black popular culture as a profound contributor to societal and cultural norms, and examining its impact within the context of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity. He joins us to talk politics, pop culture, and whatever else we can get ourselves into.
Listen Here
Our justice system requires us to punish wrongdoers, what if there were a better way?
Criminal Justice, Featured — By Mikhail Lyubansky on August 19, 2010 at 1:39 pm
Image by PPCC Antifa via Flickr
The banner says “No justice. No Peace.”
We think we know what it means — that we who want justice are willing to fight for it.
The words have a deeper meaning, of course. They are intended to remind us that that it is an impossibility to have a peaceful society as long as there is injustice, because inevitably those who are oppressed will rise up.
As slogans go, this one is pretty clever, so clever, in fact, that it’s easy to get caught up in the words and forget to think about what they actually mean.
What is it that we really want when we say we want justice?
A year ago I would have easily answered “true equality under the law” — as opposed to our current criminal (in)justice system, in which race clearly plays a major role. More to the point, I would have said that I wanted the determination of guilt and the administration of punishment to not be correlated to race or any other demographic characteristic.
Today, I’m no longer satisfied with that.
For those of us living in the United States, “doing justice” is mostly synonymous with administering punishment. We may not literally follow the Biblical edict of “an eye for an eye”, but most of us still believe that “the punishment must fit the crime”. Indeed, many of us would be hard pressed to even come up with an alternative justice system.
Yet alternatives abound in the form of restorative justice.
There are many restorative justice systems. The one I’ve been studying is Restorative Circles (RC), a system developed by Dominic Barter in the shanty towns of urban Brazil and now spreading across the world as a means of promoting and facilitating social justice, group cohesion, resilient relationships and personal healing.
Restorative Circles provide a way for individuals and communities to handle conflicts, including racial conflicts, compassionately rather than punitively, as well as to heal and learn from these conflicts. These days when I say I want justice, this is the kind of justice system I have in mind — a system that values everyone’s needs and is designed to address those needs without either blame or compromise1.
To the uninitiated, restorative processes may appear idealistic and naive. After all, they reject the two core aspects of the traditional justice system: the assignment of blame and the administration of punishment. Instead, the goal of the Circle is for the parties involved in the conflict to first gain mutual understanding of the others’ experiences and needs and then to restore or build a mutually satisfying relationship.
Talking is involved, so is listening. Lots of listening. But it’s a decidedly different type of talk than people usually engage in2, and it’s not just talk.
The restorative process is designed to lead to voluntary (and they really are voluntary!) acts offered to repair or restore the relationship. The two words are not synonymous. Reparative acts have to do with compensation — paying for a broken window is a reparative act — while restorative acts are those whose value is largely symbolic, a heart-felt apology may qualify, or a basket of vegetables from one’s garden, or an invitation to dinner. It’s certainly not surprising that people prefer to have both, but it turns out, Barter explains, that if they can only have one, there is a strong preference for acts that are restorative.
And yet, restorative processes aren’t, at the heart of it, about apologies or even about restorative acts more generally. They’re about mutual understanding and connection. Too often racial conflict is addressed with (legitimate) accusations. Denial ensues. Feelings are hurt. At the end, no one feels good about what happened.
Restorative processes offer an alternative, one that connects people by allowing them to not just understand each other but experience each other’s humanity. That’s why restorative acts are offered. That’s why they are experienced as restorative. There is nothing like it in our current ways of doing justice.
In his trainings, Barter weaves in multiple examples from a variety of contexts. In one, a masked thief enters a small convenience store and robs the owner at gunpoint. He is apprehended a short while later and agrees to a restorative process. In that process, he explains that he did what he did because he was pressured to do so by a gang in order to demonstrate his commitment. The store owner shares how, weeks later, he still felt traumatized by the incident. It takes more than an hour to work through the nuances of understanding each other. When they finally reach the action phase of the process, the store owner offers the would-be-thief a job in the store.
Skeptical? I was too. And I wasn’t about to be be convinced by testimonials and personal anecdotes. I wanted hard data, and I knew how to find it. What I found was one empirical study after another that demonstrated the effectiveness of restorative systems. Indeed, a review of research on restorative justice across multiple continents showed that restorative systems reduce recidivism in both violent and property crime in comparison to traditional justice systems and provide a variety of benefits to the “victims”, including improved mental health and greater satisfaction with the justice process (Sherman & Strang, 2007).
Such a profound process should be difficult to facilitate, intimidating to even contemplate. It isn’t. Part of the reason is that Barter has whittled the RC process to the bare essentials, which are few and relatively easy to learn, if not master. Another part is that Barter encourages a minimalist approach. “When I facilitate a circle,” he says, “I intensely desire everyone’s well-being and that’s why I try to do nothing to help them.” The statement seems paradoxical, but Barter is making an important point: The power of RC rests in the process, and it is the structure of the process that creates change, not the facilitator, whose job is merely to create and hold the space for the process to unfold.
Barter says the facilitators he enjoys observing most are those under the age of 10. Why not? In Dominic Barter’s world, schoolchildren spontaneously break out into a restorative circle during recess. It seems downright inconceivable at first, but after a few days with Barter, the message sinks in: Facilitating a circle is child’s play. Anyone can do it.
Given the level of conflict and injustice in our world, I wish everyone would.
Footnotes:
1. In regard to the “No Justice. No Peace” banner, in the context of restorative justice, the two concepts are not just interdependent, they are indistinguishable from each other. That is, justice is a way of resolving conflict compassionately by addressing everyone’s needs, while peace is a way of living with conflict by engaging it effectively and compassionately.
2. Describing the actual process is beyond the scope of this particular piece, but interested readers should visit the restorative circles website.
____________________________________________________________
For more racial analysis of news and popular culture, join the | Between The Lines | Facebook page and follow Mikhail on Twitter.
via race-talk.org
For black Road Homers, a hollow victory: Jarvis DeBerry
Published: Friday, August 20, 2010, 9:00 AM Updated: Friday, August 20, 2010, 9:06 AM
Moral victories stink.
That’s what five black New Orleans homeowners discovered this week when a federal judge in Washington ruled that Louisiana’s Road Home Program did indeed give them less money than they’d have received had their houses been destroyed in a white neighborhood — but that he couldn’t do anything about it.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers say they’ll appeal U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy’s position that he’s powerless to grant them relief, but as it stands now, Gloria Burns, Rhonda Dents, Almarie Ford, Daphne Jones and Edward Randolph derive no benefits at all from getting a judge to see it their way.
No matter. State officials are still planning to appeal Kennedy’s finding and his order that the state use a different formula to calculate grants for the 179 people who, almost five years after Hurricane Katrina, have yet to get rebuilding money from Road Home.
Road Home, a program administered by the Louisiana Recovery Authority with money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, took the determined value of the home and subtracted from it any insurance and FEMA money homeowners received. The difference, capped at a maximum $150,000, was then granted to eligible applicants.
Sounds simple. It might even sound fair. Until you consider that value isn’t the same as cost and that two houses identical in every way but location could get disparate grants — even if the money needed to repair them is exactly the same.
Generally speaking, homes in black neighborhoods aren’t valued as highly as homes in white neighborhoods — and not because the bricks, drywall, flooring and roofing materials used in their construction necessarily cost less. They are often considered of lower value simply because of what they are: homes in a black neighborhood.
If you base a rebuilding grant on a home’s value and not its cost, and thousands get less money than others to buy an identical amount of Sheetrock, then your goal of rebuilding storm-ravaged cities and parishes hasn’t been met. And according to Kennedy, it’s likely you’ve violated the law.
“The Court does not take lightly that some African-American homeowners received lower awards than they would have if their homes were in predominantly white neighborhoods,” Kennedy wrote in a July memorandum opinion. “And although the Court appreciates that all of the parties are committed to the rebuilding of a city that has suffered greatly, it is regrettable that this effort to do so appears to have proceeded in a manner that disadvantaged African-American homeowners who wish to repair their homes.” However, he said law prevents the federal government from telling a state how it should have handled money already spent. But he can order Louisiana to use a different calculation for the remaining 179 people in line.
Damon Hewitt, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund & Educational Fund and a New Orleans native, said Thursday that plaintiffs were seeking relief for everybody who got shorted by the Road Home’s formula, not just the black applicants. Though the five plaintiffs are all black, a white or Vietnamese person living in one of their neighborhoods would be equally harmed by such a formula. The formula would likely give a white homeowner in St. Bernard Parish less money than the owner of an identical house in Lakeview. “It’s difficult when you have a claim that says race, race, race” to get people to see that it’s not an exclusively racial issue, he said, but that approach was necessary.
The plaintiffs’ original complaint estimates that 20,000 black New Orleans homeowners got less than they should have, but Hewitt said that number becomes larger if all races in all parishes are included.
“We have a race claim, but there really wasn’t another claim to bring,” Hewitt said. “The law doesn’t often give you a way to address complex problems.” Addressing black homeowners’ complaints, he said, would mean the state “would essentially have to fix this for everyone. We would love to see recalculation of grants for every homeowner in the state. We brought it on behalf of African-American homeowners,” but we were hoping for a “LRA/HUD settlement that would lift all boats.”
“There’s no one lawsuit that could have addressed all the problems” with the Road Home Program, Hewitt said.
Apparently not. This lawsuit was theoretically successful. And essentially it does nothing.
Jarvis DeBerry is an editorial writer. He can be reached at jdeberry@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3355. Follow him at http://connect.nola.com/user/jdeberry/index.html and at twitter.com/jarvisdeberrytp.
via nola.com
Mississippi Shrimpers Refuse to Trawl, Fearing Oil, Dispersants
By Dahr Jamail
"We come out and catch all our Mississippi oysters right here," James "Catfish" Miller, a commercial shrimper in Mississippi, told IPS. Pointing to the area in the Mississippi Sound from his shrimp boat, he added, "It's the only place in Mississippi to catch oysters, and there is oil and dispersants all over the top of it."
On Aug. 6, Mississippi's Department of Marine Resources (DMR) and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, in coordination with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, ordered the reopening of all Mississippi territorial waters to all commercial and recreational finfish and shrimp fishing activities that were part of the precautionary closures following the BP oil rig disaster in April. At least five million barrels flowed into the Gulf before the well was shut earlier this month.
But Miller, along with many other commercial shrimpers, refuses to trawl.
Miller took IPS out on his shrimp boat, along with commercial shrimper Mark Stewart, and Jonathan Henderson of the Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental group working to document and alleviate the effects of BP's oil disaster.
The goal was to prove to the public that their fishing grounds are contaminated with both oil and dispersants. Their method was simple – they tied an absorbent rag to a weighted hook, dropped it overboard for a short duration of time, then pulled it up to find the results. The rags were covered in a brown oily substance that the fishermen identified as a mix of BP's crude oil and toxic dispersants.
Miller and Stewart, who were both in BP's Vessels of Opportunity programme and were trained in identifying oil and dispersants, have been accused by some members of Mississippi's state government of lying about their findings.
"Why would we lie about oil and dispersant in our waters, when our livelihoods depend on our being able to fish here?" Miller asked IPS. "I want this to be cleaned up so we can get back to how we used to live. But it doesn't make sense for us or anyone else to fish if our waters are toxified. I don't know why people are angry at us for speaking the truth. We're not the ones who put the oil in the water."
IPS watched Miller and Stewart conduct eight tests in various places around Mississippi Sound. One of them was less than a quarter mile from the mouth of Pass Christian Harbor, and another was less than one mile from a public beach. Every single test found the absorbent rags stained with brown oil.
During an earlier test round, the two fishermen brought out scientist Dr. Ed Cake of Gulf Environmental Associates.
Dr. Cake wrote of the experience: "When the vessel was stopped for sampling, small, 0.5- to 1.0-inch-diameter bubbles would periodically rise to the surface and shortly thereafter they would pop leaving a small oil sheen. According to the fishermen, several of BP's Vessels-of- Opportunity (Carolina Skiffs with tanks of dispersants [Corexit?]) were hand spraying in Mississippi Sound off the Pass Christian Harbor in prior days/nights. It appears to this observer that the dispersants are still in the area and are continuing to react with oil in the waters off Pass Christian Harbor."
Shortly thereafter, Miller took the samples to a community meeting in nearby D'Iberville to show fishermen and families. At the meeting, fishermen unanimously supported a petition calling for the firing of Dr. Bill Walker, the head of Mississippi's DMR, who is responsible for opening the fishing grounds.
On Monday, Aug. 9, Walker, despite ongoing reports of tar balls, oil, and dispersants being found in Mississippi waters, declared "there should be no new threats" and issued an order for all local coast governments to halt ongoing oil disaster work being funded by BP money that was granted to the state.
Recent days in Mississippi waters have found fishermen and scientists finding oil in Garden Pond on Horn Island, massive fish kills near Cat Island and Biloxi, "black water" in Mississippi Sound, oil inside Pass Christian Harbor, and submerged oil in Pass Christian, in addition to what Miller and Stewart showed IPS and others with their testing.
"We've sent samples to all the news media we know, here in Mississippi and in [Washington] D.C.," Stewart, a third generation fisherman from Ocean Springs, told IPS. "We had Ray Mabus's people on this boat, and we sent them away with contaminated samples they watched us take, and we haven't heard back from them."
Raymond Mabus is the United States secretary of the Navy and a former governor of Mississippi. President Barack Obama tasked him with developing "a long-term Gulf Coast Restoration Plan as soon as possible."
Mabus has been accused by many Gulf Coast fishermen of not living up to his task.
Stewart told IPS, "Normally we have a lot of white shrimp in the Sound right now. You can catch 500 to 800 pounds a night, but right now, there are very few people shrimping, and those that are, are catching nothing or maybe 200 pounds per night. You can't even pay your expenses on 200 pounds per night."
"We think they opened shrimp season prematurely," Miller told IPS, "How can we put our product back on the market when everybody in America knows what happened down here? I have seen so many dead animals in the last few months I can't even keep count."
On Thursday, several commercial shrimpers, including Miller and Stewart, held a press conference at the Biloxi Marina. Other fishermen there were not fishing because they feared making people sick with seafood they might catch.
"I don't want people to get sick," Danny Ross, a commercial fisherman from Biloxi told IPS, "We want the government and BP to have transparency with the Corexit dispersants."
Ross said he has watched horseshoe crabs trying to crawl out of the water, and other marine life like stingrays and flounder trying to escape the water as well. He believes this is because the water is hypoxic due to the toxicity of the toxic dispersants, of which BP admits to using at least 1.9 million gallons.
"I will not wet a net and catch shrimp until I know it's safe to do so," Ross added. "I have no way of life now. I can't shrimp and others are calling the shots. For the next 20 years, what am I supposed to do? Because that's how long it's going to take for our waters to be safe again."
David Wallis, another fisherman from Biloxi, attended the press conference.
"We don't feel our seafood is safe, and we demand more testing be done," Wallis told IPS. "I've seen crabs crawling out of the water in the middle of the day. This is going to be affecting us far into the future."
"A lot of fishermen feel as we do. Most of them I talk to don't want the season opened, for our safety as well as others," Wallis added, "Right now there's barely any shrimp out there to catch. We should be overloaded with shrimp right now. That's not normal. I won't eat any seafood that comes out of these waters, because it's not safe."
via ipsnews.net
John Legend x The Roots ft. Common x Melanie Fiona – “Wake Up Everybody” (Official Video)
August 19, 2010 by M. Gosho Oakes
Here’s the official video for John Legend and The Roots collaboration “Wake Up Everybody,” featuring Common and Melanie Fiona.
“Wake Up Everybody” is the first single from the forthcoming joint album by John Legend x The Roots, titled Wake Up! [click for tracklist].
Each of the four verses on ‘Wake Up Everybody’ tackles a different issue, as outlined by John Legend: “The first one is a general statement, the second is about education, third is about health care, and the fourth is about making a better environment.”
Featuring 11 tracks inspired by the Soul of the ’60s and ’70s and incorporating elements of gospel, rock, reggae and Hip Hop, Wake Up! is due for release on September 21st through Sony Music.
