of nasty women poets and funky women poets

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  I guess nasty women poets are only white?

  
  

  Genny 😁

   
  Other women poets are funky. LOL
  marvin x
    
  
  

  I'll go with that Marv! 

  LOL

  Genny 

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Sunday October 15th, 2017 - 2pm Fergie's Pub, 1214 Sansom Street Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse by Grace Bauer (Editor) and Julie Kane (Editor) An anthology of poems from women who proudly celebrate their own nastiness and that of other women who have served as nasty role models; poems by and about women defying limitations and lady-like expectations; women refusing to be "nice girls;" women embracing their inner bitch when the situation demands it; women being formidable and funny; women speaking to power and singing for the good of their souls; women being strong, sexy, strident, super-smart, and stupendous; women who want to encourage little girls to keep dreaming. This timely collection of poems speaks not just to the current political climate and the man who is responsible for its title, but to the stereotypes and expectations women have faced dating back to Eve, and to the long history of women resisting those limitations. The nasty women poets included here talk back to the men who created those limitations, honor foremothers who offered models of resistance and survival, rewrite myths, celebrate their own sexuality and bodies, and the girlhoods they survived. They sing, swear, swagger, and celebrate, and stake claim to life and art on their own terms. With Grace Bauer, Kim Bridgeford, Emari DiGiorgio, Corie Feiner, Ona Gritz, Harriet Levin, Lynn Levin, Carolina Morales & Nancy Reddy Each participant will read her own poem and at least one poem by another contributor not in attendance. Books will be available for purchase   GRACE BAUER's history of resistance began when a nun told her that the greatest thing a girl could grow up to be was a virgin. Having failed at that particular life goal, she became a poet instead. She hates being called Miss, Ma’am, or Little Lady, but these days, takes nasty as a compliment. The idea for this anthology came to her in the shower. Her books include MEAN/TIME, The Women at the Well, Nowhere All At Once, Retreats & Recognitions. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Arts & Letters, the Colorado Review, Poetry, Rattle, and the Southern Poetry Review. Her awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, Individual Artist’s Grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Nebraska Arts Council, and fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. Bauer is currently a senior book prize reader for Prairie Schooner and teaches at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.   KIM BRIDGFORD is an award-winning poet, editor, college professor, fiction writer, and critic. She writes primarily in traditional forms, of which the sonnet is her form of choice. She is the director of Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference. She is editor-in-chief at Mezzo Cammin, a journal of poetry by women and was formerly the editor of Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose. She received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry and a poetry fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Her book In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records received the 2007 Donald Justice Poetry Award.   EMARI DIGIORGIO is the author of Girl Torpedo (Agape, 2018), the winner of the 2017 Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She's the recipient of the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She's received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy of the Arts, and Rivendell Writers' Colony. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ. ONA GRITZ is the author of the poetry collections, Geode, (Main Street Rag 2014), and Left Standing, (Finishing Line Press, 2005). Together with her husband Daniel Simpson, she is co-author of Border Songs: A Conversation in Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and co-editor of More Challenges For the Delusional: Prompts, Poetry, and Prose Celebrating 25 Years of Murphy Writing Workshops (forthcoming, Diode Editions). She is also an essayist, memoirist and children's author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.   COROE FEINER is an award-winning poet, performer, and educator. Called, “wonderful” by The New York Times, and “stunning,” by Backstage Magazine, she is the author of the poetry collection, Radishes into Roses, and the children's book, Who Was Born at Home? Corie is the former poetry editor of The Washington Square Review, and the esteemed Bellevue Literary Review. She was the 2011 Poet Laureate of Bucks County, PA..   HARRIET LEVIN is the author of Girl in Cap and Gown, which was a National Poetry Series finalist, and The Christmas Show, which was chosen for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She is coeditor of Creativity and Writing Pedagogy: Linking Creative Writers, Researchers and Teachers. Levin’s honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Catagnola Award, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize, and a PEW Fellowship in the. She currently teaches and directs the Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing at Drexel University. Her debut novel, How Fast Can You Run is an IPPY and Living Now Awards winner.   LYNN LEVIN is a poet, writer, translator, and the author of six books. Her most recent collection of poems is Miss Plastique, a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry. She is the co-author of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets, a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in education/academic. Levin has received 13 Pushcart Prize nominations, two grants from the Leeway Foundation, and is a Bucks County, Pennsylvania poet laureate. She teaches at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania.   CAROLINA MORALES is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman (2015), Dear Monster (2012), In Nancy Drew’s Shadow (2010), Bride of Frankenstein and other poems (2008) each published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in the Journal of New Jersey Poets, Nimrod, Paterson Literary Review, Poet Lore, Presence, Spoon River Poetry Review and other journals. Awards include scholarships from the summer program at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA along with honorable mentions for an Allen Ginsberg Award and a Mill Wills Fellowship. Her one-act plays have been produced/staged in California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. NANCY REDDY is the author of Double Jinx, selected by Alex Lemon for the National Poetry Series and her chapbook Acadiana won the Black River Chapbook. Her poems have appeared in Linebreak, Memorious, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a Walter E Dakin Fellowship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a New Jersey Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship. She is Assistant Professor of Writing and First Year Studies at Stockton University in southern New Jersey.

resistance upends liberal politics

 ‘Resistance,’ Raising Big Money, Upends Liberal Politics

www.nytimes.com

Supporters of Indivisible, an anti-Trump group, in Olympia, Wash., last month. The so-called resistance is attracting six- and seven-figure checks from major liberal donors. Credit Steve Bloom/The Olympian, via Associated Press

WASHINGTON — It started as a scrappy grass-roots protest movement against President Trump, but now the so-called resistance is attracting six- and seven-figure checks from major liberal donors, posing an insurgent challenge to some of the left’s most venerable institutions — and the Democratic Party itself.

The jockeying between groups, donors and operatives for cash and turf is occurring mostly behind the scenes. But it has grown acrimonious at times, with upstarts complaining they are being boxed out by a liberal establishment that they say enables the sort of Democratic timidity that paved the way for the Trump presidency.

The tug of war — more than the lingering squabbles between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont — foreshadows a once-in-a-generation reorganization of the American left that could dictate the tactics and ideology of the Democratic Party for years to come. If the newcomers prevail, they could pull the party further to the left, leading it to embrace policy positions like those advocated by Mr. Sanders, including single-payer health care and free tuition at public colleges.

The upending of the left comes amid a broader realignment in American politics, with the Republican Party establishment also contending with a rising rebellion, driven by pro-Trump populists. Just as the new forces on the right are threatening primary challenges to establishment Republicans, some groups on the left have begun talking about targeting Democratic incumbents in the 2018 midterm elections.

Entrenched Democratic groups are facing growing questions about the return on the hundreds of millions of dollars they have spent over the years. Groups affiliated with Mrs. Clinton “spent so much money based on a bad strategy in this last cycle that they should step aside and let others lead in this moment,” said Quentin James, a founder of a political committee called the Collective PAC that supports African-American candidates.

Mr. James’s committee is among more than three dozen outfits that have started or reconfigured themselves since the election to try to harness the surge in anti-Trump activism. In addition to political committees, grass-roots mobilization nonprofits and legal watchdog groups, there are for-profit companies providing technological help to the new groups — essentially forming a new liberal ecosystem outside the confines of the Democratic Party.

While the new groups gained early traction mostly on the strength of grass-roots volunteers and small donations — and with relatively meager overall budgets — they are beginning to attract attention from the left’s most generous benefactors.

“We’re in a disruptive period, and when we get through it, the progressive infrastructure landscape may look different,” said Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy liberals who donate at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups. “There may be groups that have been around that don’t rise to the challenge, and there may be some new groups that do rise to the challenge, while others fade away.”

The Democracy Alliance has helped shape the institutional left, steering more than $600 million since its inception in 2005 to a portfolio of carefully selected groups, including pillars of the Clinton-aligned establishment like the think tank Center for American Progress and the media watchdog Media Matters.

But this year, the Democracy Alliance hired Archana Sahgal, a former Obama White House official, to help the new anti-Trump groups, and it suspended its intensive vetting and approval process to recommend donations to a host of groups created since last fall’s election.

The Democracy Alliance distributed a “resistance map” to its donors in July including new groups focused on converting the anti-Trump energy into electoral wins, such as Flippable, Swing Left and Sister District, as well as legal watchdog groups and others focused on mobilizing protesters, such as Women’s March and Indivisible.

Perhaps no group epitomizes the differences between the legacy left and the grass-roots resistance like Indivisible. Started as a Google document detailing techniques for opposing the Republican agenda under Mr. Trump, the group now has a mostly Washington-based staff of about 40 people, with more than 6,000 volunteer chapters across the country. The national Indivisible hub, which consists of a pair of nonprofit groups, has raised nearly $6 million since its start, primarily through small-dollar donations made through its website.

Yet Indivisible has also received funding from the tech entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, as well as foundations or coalitions tied to Democracy Alliance donors, including the San Francisco mortgage billionaire Herbert Sandler, the New York real estate heiress Patricia Bauman and the oil heiress Leah Hunt-Hendrix.

And an advocacy group funded by the billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros, a founding member of the Democracy Alliance and one of the most influential donors on the left, is considering a donation in the low six figures to Indivisible. Mr. Soros has already donated to a host of nonprofit groups playing key roles in the anti-Trump movement, including the Center for Community Change, Color of Change and Local Progress.

Indivisible would “gladly” accept a check from Mr. Soros or his foundation, said an official with the group, Sarah Dohl. But, she added, the group is committed to ensuring that money from major donors does not become a majority of the group’s revenue “because we want to maintain our independence both from the funders and from the party.”

The group may start a political committee that could support primary challenges in 2018 against Democratic incumbents, Ms. Dohl said.

“It’s not a secret that we would like to move the Democratic Party further left,” she said, adding that “the party will only get to where it needs to go if it has groups like ours pushing them to do the right thing.” She cited her group’s aggressive opposition to Republicans’ initial efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act at a time when she said Democratic congressional leaders “didn’t really have a strategy.”

Established liberal groups like the Center for American Progress haven’t always been as forceful, Ms. Dohl said, though she added that the think tank “has gotten better at calling on Democrats to stand up and speak more boldly than they have in the past.”

The think tank, known as CAP, has engendered resentment from others on the left for casting itself as a leader of the anti-Trump movement and raising money off the resistance nomenclature. Within a few weeks of the election, CAP’s sister organization, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, was offering T-shirts emblazoned with the word “Resist” in exchange for donations of $40 or more. The campaign raised about $450,000 for ThinkProgress, the journalism arm of the action fund, which had its lawyers look into trademarking the iconography.

Daniella Leger, a CAP official, explained in a statement that the group’s legal team was merely exploring “a standard question” about whether to trademark the logo. “The immediate response was no — resistance belongs to everyone,” she said.

But the embrace by CAP has some anti-Trump activists complaining privately that the group is anathema to the anti-establishment fervor animating the resistance, and it is siphoning away resources from the new groups.

The divisions have sometimes spilled into public view.

The leader of a group founded by Mr. Sanders called Our Revolution castigated the Democratic establishment as arrogant “dictators” who want to control the “terms of unity” after her group’s activists were met by barricades outside the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee when they visited in July to deliver petitions supporting a liberal policy platform.

And Ms. Hunt-Hendrix has urged progressive donors to boycott Democratic establishment-aligned groups like the centrist think tank Third Way and the nonprofits spearheaded by David Brock, the former conservative journalist who became a leading Clinton supporter and founded Media Matters and the opposition research outfit American Bridge.

Those groups represent a “neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party” that embraces “broken tactics” and an “uninspiring” agenda “more focused on defeating the right than on creating an economy and society that lifts up all people,” Ms. Hunt-Hendrix wrote in an op-ed article this year for Politico.

Matt Bennett, an official at Third Way, challenged predictions that the new wave of resistance activism would substantially shift the axis of the party. “The idea that all the energy in the Democratic Party is on the far left is premature, and is going to turn out to be the worst prediction of the 2020 cycle,” he said.

Mr. Brock and Ms. Leger both said that their groups have been providing research, polling, training and other resources to the new groups, which they cast as a boon to the left, rather than a threat to more established groups.

“The resistance is strongest when everyone has access to our resources,” Mr. Brock said. Ms. Leger said, “These grass-roots groups play a different, unique role, and their energy is something the progressive movement hadn’t seen in decades.” And a D.N.C. spokeswoman, Xochitl Hinojosa, praised the new groups for their work to “bring about progressive change and elect Democrats.”

Yet one major Democratic donor, the Virginia real estate developer Albert J. Dwoskin, said the fluidity in the universe of liberal groups would cause some donors to sit on the sidelines “to wait to see which ones have any legs whatsoever.” And veteran Democratic operatives are concerned that the proliferation could further fracture the left, widening ideological divisions and leaving groups fighting for resources.

That doesn’t bother Dmitri Mehlhorn, a political adviser to Mr. Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, who has brought a venture capital approach to politics, seeding a wide array of new groups on the left.

“The Democratic Party has been fractured,” Mr. Mehlhorn said. “We believe that by investing in different people and groups to try different techniques that good ideas will emerge.”

Among Mr. Hoffman’s donations are at least $1 million each to two of the groups suing Mr. Trump’s campaign, his administration, businesses and associates — United to Protect Democracy, started this year by a former Obama White House lawyer, and Integrity First for America, which will be unveiled later this year by the pioneering New York trial lawyer Roberta A. Kaplan.

A Silicon Valley-like competition between start-ups might not be the best thing for the left right now, warned Rob Stein, a longtime Democratic strategist who helped create the Democracy Alliance to provide structure to the institutional left.

“Having a thousand flowers blooming at the beginning of a new era is generally a good thing,” Mr. Stein said. “But when you’ve got your back against the wall, too many new blooms can cause message and operational cacophony.”

He warned that the combination of ideological and structural divisions, along with a national party weakened by changes in campaign finance laws, could “make it very, very difficult for progressives and Democrats to drive a coherent message in 2018, and to align behind a single candidate in 2020.”

the evil of corporate agribusiness and the dred scott decision

Note: In 2005, I posted this article on Counterpunch.org. The article took on a life of its own all over the world, including some bodies at the United Nations in research initiatives. This is likely because of the article's reference to war, food, profit and exploitation that prevails in the midst of violent confrontations and when the stage is set for corporate agribusiness to arrogantly intrude in war torn and militarized zones. In that we have recently experienced some exceptionally dangerous and violent hurricanes of late, and, as mentioned, that corporate entities generally use this as an opportunity to destroy and take over locally controlled enterprises, I thought I would share again this perspective on the devastating impact of corporate agribusiness anywhere in the world. Author Naomi Klein appropriately refers to these corporate takeovers after disasters as, in the title of her book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism". Much of the agriculture in Puerto Rico and in the Virgin Islands has been destroyed because of the recent hurricanes. All of us need to assist the small farmers in each of the countries and do what we can to prevent corporate agribusiness from invading and taking advantage of this disaster. Believe me - America's corporate agribusiness is drooling over this opportunity!!!   I wrote this article in consultation with the late Al Krebs who was a mentor of mine and the author of "The Corporate Reapers: the Book of Agribusiness".    Home Grown Axis of Evil Corporate Agribusiness, the Occupation of Iraq and the Dred Scott Decision   The Agriculture Ministry in March installed a solar-powered irrigation pump in Karbala province in a bid to encourage the use of renewable energy technologies. Above, Iraqi farmers sort through a pile of date fruit during a harvest at a palm grove some 10 kilometres east of Karbala. [Mohammed Sawaf/AFP] http://mawtani.al-shorfa.com/en_GB/articles/iii/features/2014/04/01/feature-02 by HEATHER GRAY Counterpunch.org Justice Initiative International October 8, 2017    In 2005, I attended the National Media Reform Conference in St. Louis, Missouri. While there I visited the historic St. Louis courthouse and the huge Gateway Arch by the Mississippi River that symbolizes St. Louis as the gateway to the west. It was here that US corporate agribusiness, the US occupation of Iraq and the Dred Scott decision intersected in reality as well as symbolically.   The St. Louis courthouse is famous for the deliberations of Dred Scott in the mid-1800's and displays in the courthouse feature the historic documents of this renowned court case. Scott was a slave and sued for his freedom, which was denied by the Missouri Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision in 1857. The court ruled that Scott was not a citizen and therefore could not bring a case to a federal court. In the same case, the court also ruled that the Missouri Compromise that forbade slavery in new territories was unconstitutional as it denied the rights of slave property owners. The decision had sweeping consequences, not the least of which being yet another catalyst for the initiation of the Civil War. Interestingly, two months after Supreme Court decision, Scott's present owner freed him anyway.    Standing under the Gateway Arch, and looking west, one sees the old St. Louis courthouse, and to the east, the Mississippi River. As I looked across the river there was, to my amazement, a warehouse-like building with a huge rather crass sign reading "Cargill". It was obviously a decadent marketing ploy by the agribusiness giant, the Cargill Corporation, that is the largest grain trader in the world. The Cargill sign was, therefore, in a direct path, underneath the arch, to the courthouse. I mentioned this disturbing image across the river to one of the park stewards. She said, "Yes, there are times I would like to bomb East St. Louis." I thought that was a rather interesting comment.   As is now well known, oil is but one of the major interests the US has in Iraq. Because wars are invariably a pretext for economic expansion and opportunities for corporate greed, I knew that US corporate agribusiness was not about to be left out of the picture. My concerns were realized when, in April of 2003, Bush's Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman appointed Daniel Amstutz, formerly an executive of the Cargill Corporation, to oversee the "rehabilitation" of agriculture in Iraq. With Cargill having the reputation of being one the worst violators of the rights and independence of family farmers throughout the world, I knew Iraqi farmers were doomed.   Cargill is massive. This corporate agribusiness grain trader has 800 locations in 60 countries and more than 15 lines of business. It is the largest private company in the US and the 11th largest public or private company in terms of sales.   Cargill is renowned for receiving huge subsidies from the US government to then dump vast amounts of grains in poorer countries where Cargill is trading. This process, in effect, undermines small farmers, helps to destroy the local food production systems and forces dependence of small farmers and local rural economies on corporate agribusiness.   Amstutz, however, brought additional corporate and international trade qualifications to the table. He was undersecretary for international affairs and commodity programs from 1983 to 1987 for the Reagan administration; ambassador and chief negotiator for agriculture during the Uruguay Round General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks 1987-1989; and past president of the North American Grain Export Association. None of these qualifications were encouraging for the well being of the small family farmers in Iraq.   Oxfam's policy director Kevin Watkins said:    "Putting Dan Amstutz in charge of agriculture reconstruction in Iraq is like putting Saddam Hussein in the chair of a human rights commission. This guy is uniquely well placed to advance the commercial interests of American grain companies and bust open the Iraqi market, but singularly ill equipped to lead a reconstruction effort in a developing country."   I also knew that, as the US was poised to invade Iraq, US corporate agribusiness companies engaged in producing and promoting genetically modified organisms (GMO's) throughout the world would be salivating.   Why would corporate agribusiness be salivating??? Some history here. It is thought that agriculture started 13,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent - in the area now called Iraq - where the Tigress and the Euphrates rivers intersect. The Iraqi ancestral farmers and this fertile land brought us major crops such as wheat, barley, dates and pulses (see Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies"). The area is hugely important in world history. Given they are considered the initiators, for thousands of years the contributions of the Iraqi farmers to the world's agriculture production system have been unquestionably profound. Iraqi Irrigation. Published: 13 Jan 2011 Short URL: http://farmlandgrab.org/18001 It is also likely that women were the initiators of agriculture. Women were the gatherers in hunting and gathering pre-agricultural societies. As women were the ones gathering nuts and roots for their communities, they would have been the observers of seeds and their growth patterns. This is likely why the majority of the African farmers today are women and throughout our human history the world's farmers have largely been women.   Now comes the corporate connection. Food is something everyone needs. There is no question about this and no need for a survey - the market is a given. Huge profits are in the offing.     Controlling all aspects of food - ­ its production, packaging, distribution and commodity markets - is the dream world of corporate agribusiness.   The major impediment to corporate agribusiness controlling all aspects of food and then reaping all of the profits, however, is competition from the independent family farmer in the US and throughout the world.   Throughout our history, the family farmer's controlling interest has been protected by two of the most important components of agriculture - ­ the two "s'" ­ - soil and seeds.   Soil is not monolithic. It is amazingly and thankfully diverse. It's components and minerals differ everywhere and farmers historically have always adjusted to this through crop rotations that will add or remove certain nutrients to the soil, and/or farmers will let the soil rest and lay fallow for a specified time. Traditional farmers will also use natural nutrients like compost and manure to replenish the soil. In this way, the soil remains "alive" with organic nutrients, earthworms and the like. Seeds and plants are also selected for the type of soil and farmers themselves have performed, and still perform, this selection since the beginning of agriculture.   Seeds are also not monolithic, of course, even within the same plant family. They are amazingly diverse and the diversity of seeds is our lifeblood. Like humans, plants are vulnerable to disease. The more diverse our plants, the safer we humans are. The more diverse our plants, the less vulnerable they will be to an all-encompassing disease that could and has wiped out some crops within days or less. Without diversity there is virtually no resistance to disease. The great Irish potato famine in 1845, for example, resulted from a uniform potato production that had no resistance to the potato blight.   How have farmers maintained this diversity and therefore protected our food supply? As mentioned, they have always adjusted seeds to the type of soil in their area by selecting and saving the seeds of successful plants. This is a very "local" process. By doing so, for thousands of years, farmers have thankfully maintained the diversity of our food chain. As Martin Teitel and Kimberly Wilson note in their excellent book "Genetically Engineered Food: Changing the Nature of Nature" (1999):   "Appreciation of the importance of biodiversity dates back a hundred centuries to the beginning of the agriculture process.Farmers remained powerless, however, when it came to the interaction between crops and their environments. No one could predict whether a season would be wet or dry. Consequently, farmers quickly learned the importance of diversity: maintenance of various crops that thrived under a variety of conditions to avoid entire crop failures and starvation."   Also, farmers have always historically saved seeds for next year's crop. Most farmers in the world don't go to the store and supply warehouse to buy seeds. The seeds are their on their farm and their grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great grandparents likely grew versions of the same seed stock.   The mission of farmers historically and around the world has always been to grow food for family and community sustenance, and not competition against each other - a mission that is much to the ire of western capitalists. Invariably, farmers will also share their seeds with their neighboring farmers. This collective and cooperative spirit of the farming community is legendary.   Vandana Shiva refers to the importance of local agriculture production in a sustainable environment and the threat of removing it from local control in her book "Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development " (1989) where she writes:   "The existence of the feminine principle is linked with diversity and sharing. Its destruction through homogenization and privatization leads to the destruction of diversity and the commons. The sustenance economy is based on a creative and organic nature, on local knowledge, on locally recycled inputs that maintain the integrity of nature, on local consumption for local needs, and on marketing of surplus beyond the imperatives of equity and ecology.."   It is well known and documented that small farmers everywhere are the best stewards and sustainers of the land. They are closer to it - they know what it takes to feed it and care for it. I've seen farmers lift soil in their hands and know exactly what is needed in the soil. In this sense, small family farmers are also the most efficient farmers in terms of crop yields, as virtually every foot on that farm is known to them. To be sure, millions of farm families - ­ women, men and children - throughout the world from the Philippines to the US are sophisticated homegrown agronomists who work the fields.   I can easily be accused of romanticizing the farming profession, but I've seen farmers with a glow in their eye when talking about being involved in one of the most sacred of all professions ­ the practice of nurturing and witnessing the flowering of crops from small seeds and, consequently, sustaining all of us through the production of food.   The world's family farmers now and historically are our unsung heroes!   So what has corporate agribusiness done to disrupt the powerful soil-seed mantra and erode the independence of family farmers? Chemicals were employed that neutralize and invariably have polluted and poisoned our soil, which destroys its diversity. Seed patents have been intensified, coupled with the development of genetically modified organisms (GMO's). Corporations have attempted to make farmers dependent on all of these interventions.   After WWII there were vast amounts of nitrogen left over from making bombs. Dow, Shell and Dupont decided they could sell the nitrogen to farmers for profit and thus began the now infamous "green revolution" leading to huge amounts of chemical poisons in agriculture. The complicity of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the green revolution is also a major factor. The result has been a devastating farmer dependency on chemical poisons along with the destruction of our soil and leading to us humans ingesting more chemicals (read Al Krebs' excellent "The Corporate Reapers: the Book of Agribusiness" - 1992). The chemical and poison additives in soil make it easier for seed business' to disregard the diversity of our fertile soil which then paves the way for less diverse and genetically altered seed stocks.   Farmers who have used these poisons, and are now attempting to veer away from this dependency, describe their soil as "dead". It can become alive again, but it takes a few years. GMO's are seeds composed of DNA from an altogether different species. Historically, when we have bred our plants we have done so with the same plant family. The long-term health consequences of the GMO produced crops that we now ingest are unknown at this point, yet we do know that this science leads to an irreversible erosion of genetics and encourages monoculture. As Teitel and Wilson explain:   "The genetic engineering of our food is the most radical transformation in our diet since the invention of agriculture (thousands of years ago). Genetic engineering has allowed scientists to splice fish genes into tomatoes, to put virus genes in squash, bacterium genes in corn, and human genes in tobacco (to"grow" pharmaceuticals). Normally the boundaries between species are set by nature. Until recently, those biological barriers have never been crossed. Genetic engineering allows these limits to be exceeded ­ with results that no one can predict."   Companies will then patent the GMO seeds and encourage farmers to grow them. Once seeds are purchased farmers are required to sign contracts specifying they what cannot do with these seeds, such as save them or share them. To further complicate matters, companies, citing legal priorities due to patent rights, will prosecute farmers who save seeds rather than purchase the seeds from the seed company the next year. The major GMO crops grown since GMO soy was first commercialized in 1996 are corn, soy, cotton and canola. According to the Center for Food Safety, the Monsanto corporation, headquartered in St. Louis, "provides the seed technology for 90 percent of the world's genetically engineered crops."   There's a vicious war against family farmers right now that is relentless. Companies will even sue if farmer's non-GMO crops have been polluted by GMO pollen and are planted without permission (see the 2005 report by the Center for Food Safety entitled "Monsanto vs. U.S. Farmers").   What corporate agribusiness is attempting to do to independent family farmers is not quite slavery but becoming close. It is attempting to take away the independence of farmers through basically contract farming. This harkens back to the oppressive sharecropping or tenant farmer relationships set up by southern plantation owners for freed slaves and poor white farmers in the South.   Plantation owners wanted to keep freed slaves under their yoke and make use of their labor. So they set up a sharecropping and tenant systems of farming with various types of contractual arrangements that invariably benefited the plantation owners rather than the aspiring freed slaves. So, too, it's the consolidated corporate agribusiness companies that benefit in today's scenario rather than the farmers.   Throughout southeast Asia, destabilization of traditional farming practices from corporate agribusiness intervention has been rampant. In the late 1980s, for example, I spent time with rice farmers in the Philippines. They told me that they were encouraged to grow a new higher yielding rice plant developed by the International Rice Institute, and it's affiliated corporate agribusiness companies. They were excited about growing and potentially exporting more rice. It made no sense to them that they could not set the seed aside for next year's crop, as Filipino farmers have done for hundreds of years. It also made no sense that the only way the crop would be fertile was through use of fertilizers supplied by agribusiness companies. Such chemical use was also an unknown practice for these farmers.   The next year, hundreds of the small rice farmers went out of business because they couldn't afford to purchase the seed or fertilizer. I asked them why they didn't go back to planting their old rice crops. They told me they couldn't because they didn't have the seeds anymore as the seed had always been set aside for the next year's crop. As a result they were dependent on agribusiness for their seeds ­ there was no option. Most of the traditional Filipino rice seeds are now in U.S. seed banks.   In the late 1990s there were reports of some 4,000 Filipino rice farmers who died due to pesticide (chemical poison) use. The speculation, I was told by Food First in California, was that the higher yielding rice plant attracted a pest the farmers had never before encountered and they were then told to use chemical poisons that they also had never used. It's thought that either they didn't know how to use the poisons or they used it to commit suicide.   Most of the world has resisted, in some way, the wholesale invasion of GMO crops. No country in their right mind would turn over their food sovereignty to US corporate agribusiness. Not to be defeated, corporate agribusiness has sought loopholes in vulnerable areas in the world. They seek regions where the implementation of their insidious schemes is virtually a given and from which they can force the world to accept their devastating and destabilizing agricultural model. Currently, the US military occupied Iraq is a prime area and the continent of Africa is another.   Corporate agribusiness is enormously dangerous and the increased, sometimes forced, dependency of the world's farmers on corporate agribusiness is a threat of major proportions. Think of it! ­ Virtually all of our ancestors were farmers and for 13,000 years we humans have fed ourselves quite well without the likes of Cargill and Monsanto that evolved just decades ago. We don't need them! To further exacerbate the problem, they make us all vulnerable for their short-term corporate greed. As Jim Hightower, the populist and former Agriculture Commissioner of Texas, once said, "We need to place our nation's growth not on the Rockefellers but on the little fellers because is we do it will be based on genius and not greed." This should be the message for every nation!   Of necessity, most agriculture advocates would agree that agriculture should remain primarily local and not global. This is the essence of food security - locally controlled and produced food.   The symbolism, much less the reality, of making Iraq's fertile crescent into one of the major areas for GMO production would be altogether too tantalizing for corporate agribusiness companies like Cargill and Monsanto. Dan Amstutz obviously had input into the disastrous "transfer of sovereignty" policies developed by the former Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) administrator L. Paul Bremer III in Iraq. Of the 100 orders left by Bremer, one is Order 81 on "Patent, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety". Most are saying that this order, if implemented, is a declaration of war against the Iraqi farmers.   As the Grain and Focus on the Global South (www.grain.org) reported in October 2004 "For generations, small farmers in Iraq operated in an essentially unregulated, informal seed supply system.This is now history. The CPA has made it illegal for Iraqi farmers to re-use seeds harvested from new varieties registered under the law. Iraqis may continue to use and save from their traditional seed stocks or what's left of them after the years of war and drought, but that is not the agenda for reconstruction embedded in the ruling. The purpose of the law is to facilitate the establishment of a new seed market in Iraq, modified or not, which farmers would have to purchase afresh every single cropping season. Eliminating competition from farmers is a prerequisite for these companies (i.e. major international corporate seed traders such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and Dow Chemical). The new patent law also explicitly promotes the commercialization of genetically modified seeds in Iraq."   Upon reflection, I decided this lineup of US corporate agribusiness and the Dred Scott decision is appropriate. It is appropriate that they face each other as they are obviously in league. To combine this with the US military occupation of Iraq and the attempts at corporate agribusiness abuse and control of Iraqi agriculture is mind-boggling. All three represent a combination of greed, unjust ownership (humans, seeds etc.) and violations of immense dimensions that impact the integrity and safety of the planet and its inhabitants.   We managed to legally end slavery in the United States but it took a war to do so. Today, the world's independent farmers also need to be freed from the oppressive yoke of corporate agribusiness and the on-going efforts to intensify and expand this control.   Regarding our food system overall, it is too important to be handed over to unfettered capitalists and food should not be treated like any other commodity. Agriculture and small farmers are just too important to us. Let the corporate capitalists perhaps make shoes or combs or computers, although they are probably making a mess of that as well by destroying competition. But by all means we need to keep their slimy hands off the substance of life - the world's agriculture production system.   HEATHER GRAY produces "Just Peace" on WRFG-Atlanta 89.3 FM covering local, regional, national and international news. She has been a part of the food security movement for 25 years in Africa, Asia and the United States. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia and can be reached at hmcgray@earthlink.net.

hapi 50 years, third world press

Haki Madhubuti, the Book Publisher on the South Side

By JULIE BOSMANSEPT. 29, 2017

new york times

Haki Madhubuti, the owner of Third World Press, at his office in Chicago. Credit Joshua Lott for The New York Times

CHICAGO — In 1956, when Haki R. Madhubuti was 14 years old and living in Detroit, his mother gave him a firm order: Go down to the public library and check out “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, the seminal memoir on growing up African-American in the segregated South.

“I refused at first because I hated myself,” Dr. Madhubuti, a poet and book publisher who is now 75, said in an interview this week at his office on the South Side of Chicago. “I didn’t want to go to a white library and ask for that book. But she persisted.”

So he did what he was told, found the book on a shelf and was immediately rapt, reading nearly half of it in one sitting. After finishing the rest at home, he came back the next day and checked out everything Wright had ever written.

It was an intellectual awakening, Dr. Madhubuti said, the first leap on a path that took him from reading in the library to writing his own poetry to founding Third World Press, one of the oldest and most prestigious black presses in the country.

“All these ideas” were “jamming my head at such a young age,” he said, sitting in the art-filled converted rectory that he uses as an office. “For the first time in my life,” he recalled thinking, “there’s something positive: Now I’m a reader, I’m a thinker at another level.”

Dr. Madhubuti, tall and elegant in a dark suit with a white pouf of a pocket square, was in a reflective mood one afternoon this week. Third World Press has just turned 50, an anniversary that will be celebrated with a week of festivities in Chicago, beginning on Saturday with an appearance by the author Ta-Nehisi Coates and his father, W. Paul Coates, a publisher of Afrocentric books in Baltimore.

That half-century has been spent at the heart of black intellectual life in Chicago, far away from mainstream, and mostly white, publishing circles in Manhattan. Third World Press has released hundreds of books of poetry, nonfiction and memoir reflecting on the black experience in America, many written by people whose work would not have been accepted by bigger, corporate-owned publishers.

Haki R. Madhubuti during a newspaper interview in Chicago in the late 1960s. Credit Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images

Third World Press published much of Gwendolyn Brooks’s later work; a best-selling guidebook of sorts for African-Americans called “The Covenant With Black America,” by Tavis Smiley, the columnist and commentator; and more than 20 of Dr. Madhubuti’s own books.

“He has told the hard truths,” said Nora Brooks Blakely, Ms. Brooks’s daughter. “He has addressed not only the relationships between blacks and other cultures here in this country and beyond, but he has also dealt with some of the more uneasy-making interrelationships between blacks: How blacks have seen each other, what expectations blacks have of other blacks, whether those are positive and uplifting or disparaging expectations.”

It was a teenage interaction in 1960 with an African-American stranger that helped lead Dr. Madhubuti to his own education and career as a poet, publisher and academic.

Going door to door selling magazines, Dr. Madhubuti — then known as Don L. Lee, his birth name — knocked at a home in Springfield, Ill.

A very sophisticated African-American man answered the door, he recalled, and invited him inside, offering him a sandwich and advice.

“He said, ‘Young man, the one thing no one can take away from you is an education,’” Dr. Madhubuti said. He urged him to enroll in community college. Then he gave him $20, which would be about $160 today, and sent him on his way.

“Tears came to my eyes,” he said. “That was the first time a black man had done anything for me.”

Dr. Madhubuti returned to Chicago determined to build something of his own.

He changed his name in 1974 to one that he felt better reflected his identity, then started Third World Press out of his basement apartment in Englewood, a neighborhood on the South Side, printing chapbooks with a mimeograph machine and selling them on the street. Working from Chicago, rather than New York, was an ingredient to his early success, he said.

“Being in the middle of the continent was critical because we had access to both sides of the nation,” Dr. Madhubuti said. “I remember taking books out to the West Coast in a van and selling them. I would just travel with our inventory.”

These days, he publishes about two dozen books each year. After the recession in 2008, the press’s financial situation faltered, so Dr. Madhubuti converted it to a nonprofit, Third World Press Foundation, and now he is breaking even. He has tried to seize on the cultural moment in 2017, planning to release an anthology on the Trump era this fall.

The 50^th anniversary has pushed Dr. Madhubuti to think about what will come next for Third World Press, which is a beloved cultural institution in Chicago but is not widely known elsewhere, even among publishing insiders.

Getting the word out about the books he publishes has become more difficult. A bookstore he used to operate in the South Side’s Chatham neighborhood has long closed, pushed out by a nearby Borders store, which didn’t last either. He has spent little time on self-promotion and has no team of marketers and publicists that other publishers consider essential.

“Publishing independently in America is very difficult,” said Chris Calhoun, a literary agent who recently sold Dr. Madhubuti’s and the press’s archive to the University of Illinois. “There aren’t many left. For a black independent to have survived, to have contributed to the culture as he has for 50 years now, is just a remarkable achievement.”

Dr. Madhubuti’s own plan is to begin another memoir, picking up after his first one, “YellowBlack: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet’s Life.” The weeklong festival, beginning Saturday, will draw Cornel West, Father Michael Pfleger and others.

“I’m going to use that time to reflect and put it out there that it may be time for me to move on,” Dr. Madhubuti said. “My problem now is that I need to write.”

habi b day AB, HEM and Queen Mother Nisa Ra

 Amiri Baraka and Marvin X enjoyed 47 years of friendship and revolutionary cultural work. "Amiri was my brother, mentor, comrade, associate, elder, mentor, but, most of all, a brother like no other.Thank you, Baraka family, for allowing me to share your love and revolutionary consciousness."

 Marvin X, daughter Muhammida El Muhajir, Dr. Julia Hare, Nisa Ra, mother of Muhammida, and Dr. Nathan Hare. Nisa Ra's film project Black Love Lives interviewed the Hares who enjoyed 60 years of marriage and Black LOVE! Hapi b day, Nisa Ra, 7 October, 2017. Love you and appreciate you!--Marvin X

The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Black Man in America. Yes, my leader and teacher who raised me up from being deaf, dumb and blind, as he did for so many others, yes, the million X's you never heard about. Of those you heard about, let us mention Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Muhammad Ali, Warith Din, and the millions of X's he raised from the grave of ignorance and their severe condition of deaf, dumb and blind to knowledge of self and kind. Elijah said, "Self first!Do for self and kind first, then help others."