From The Half-Red House

I just want to remind anyone who lives nearby that although the big end-the-war action is in Washington DC, there is lots going on right around here. We will have our regular peace vigil in Peterborough NH, in front of the Town House, from noon to 1:00 pm tomorrow (Jan 27, 2007). In Nashua NH, the action starts at 11:00 a.m., and in Lowell, MA, the rally will start in front of Congressman Meehan’s office at 11:00 am. and tonight you can help make signs for the rally after work, from 5:00 on, at Coalition for a Better Acre (CBA), 517 Moody Street, Lowell, 3rd floor.

According to the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL)
The US has spent over 360 billion dollars and the lives of more than 3000 US military people on the war in Iraq. The president has called for sending about 20,000 more troops to Iraq and implied that the US must be ready to bomb or invade Iran (and maybe Syria as well). It’s time to call or write our Congressfolk and let them know in no uncertain terms that we should not send more military people or cash into this disaster, and that we must work with other nations, including Iran and Syria, to strengthen the forces for peace and stability in the region. If you’re able to pick up and go to Washington this weekend, that would be great, but if you can just dash off a line or two to your senatos and congress people,  that will help.

A Friend tells me that sending a letter to the editor in which the name of your senator or congress person is mentioned is the best way to get the notice of your reps in Washington, because their clipping services will pick up th eletter and make it a part of the daily briefing. There seems to be a major battle going on within the administration and within both the Democratic and Republican parties over whether to escalate the war and attack other countries or to cooperate internationally to reduce tensions. Now is the time to come down squarely against further aggression and in favor of diplomacy.

Listen to Congressman and presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich,
who has proposed legislation to set a timetable for withdrawal and stabilize the region. And to help our empathy extend outward into the world a little farther (where an estimated 600,000 Iraqis have died in this war so far), we might listen to the artists like Tracey Curtis
whose song, “Letters to Mr. Bush” and “Shell Shock” give other perspectives, and Leon Rosselson
whose song “The Enemy’s Poised to Attack” exposes the fact that we’re more like our “enemies” than like our “leaders”.
 

My fellow UML Grad student Della
has a video posted on her myspace site that everybody ought to see. It shows how the inflated prices of participating in the enetertainment industry in the Rich World compare with the price of providing desperately-needed necessities in the Majority World. The cost of a musician “getting her work out there” through the mainstream distribution channels. can be thousands of dollars, and the same amount could cure river-blindness in whole African countries or provide safe drinking water to hundreds of thousands of poor people.

I think it’s important to make a distinction between the musicians and poets who are trying to make a liviing by doing their work and the industry that thas grown up around marketing that work. The latter is an extractive industry like Oil, Coal and Lumber: it sells the actual work of artists at an inflated price to consumers who, in a market-driven context, demand it.

In my opinion, the work of a musician or poet is infinitely valuable to the souls of the producers and the users of the music and poetry, and needs to be made possible in all parts of the world. At the same time, the basic survival needs of the majority of the world’s people are lacking or in jeopardy. These things do not need to be balanced as if songs, diamonds and cassava were the same sort of stuff, but that’s the way the system works now.

As long as there is no universal indy revolution of artists against the entertainment industry in the works, the next best thing is for creators and users of songs to  pressure the industry to  share its profits with the needy, and to foster the development of viable culture-based ways of earning a living in the Majority World.

Calabash Music
, a California music distribution company that bills istelf as the first “Fair Trade”  music distributor has a new program calling for everymusic buyer in the  Rich World to buy 10 songs by African artists.  Proceeds from Calabash sales go largely to the African musicians and  NGOs that do the necessary infrastructure work in the communities where they live and work.

Biblio.com, an online bookseller (books are largely seen as part of the entertainment industry these days, and they are promoted the same way) with which I am affiliated has established a nonprofit BiblioWorks
which matches donations from its customers and affiliated booksellers to provide libraries and schools in impoverished Bolivian villages.

Musicians’ coops and similar organizations, such as Pond Life Studios
of Glasonbury England, help musicians market their work to targetted audiences without excessive overhead.

These are just a few small-scale efforts to redistribute the entertainment industry’s profits to the neediest people in the Majority World adn to the artists who actually produce the music, etc. More to follow  when time permits.