by Noaman G. Ali
“We said we would be willing—and this was just dialogue, wasn’t offers passed back and forth—that we’d take this,” Bob Kinnear makes a zero with his fingers, “provided that the Toronto Transit Commission maintains the level of service.”
But according to Kinnear, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 (ATU 113), which represents over 10,000 TTC workers, the City’s negotiators rejected the proposition during bargaining last year.
“You know why? Because for Mayor Ford it’s all about an ideology that they have.” Rob Ford and his crew would rather give a pay increase, so that in the end they can blame tax increases on the workers.
On today’s show (9 Jan 2012), Steve da Silva interviews Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya of GlobalResearch.ca on the U.S.-Israeli war preparations with Iran.
For our second feature interview, we talk with Canadian Auto Workers Local 27 President Tim Carrie about the situation of locked-out Caterpillar workers in London, Ontario.Featuring music from the Consumer Goods – ‘Hockey Night in Afghanada’ off their 2008 album, The Anti-imperial Cabaret.
Click here to link to podcast or listen to the interview directly from the Mp3 player at the bottom of your BASICSnews.ca window.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is a research associate with the Centre for Research on Globalization, (GlobalResearch.ca) an independent research and media institute organization and one of the world’s leading sources of news and analysis for geopolitics. Nazemroaya is also a sociologist and an award-winning writer, specializing on the Middle East and Central Asia, with numerous contributions to ALJazeera, Russian TV, and Press TV. Nazemroaya was also on the ground in Libya reporting live for multiple media outlets as NATO conducted its merciless bombing of that country’s civilians and infrastructure. Nazemroaya has published numerous pieces on the geopolitics of the looming U.S. war against Iran.
On this episode of Radio Basics (December 19, 2011), Steve da Silva and Kabir Joshi-Vijayan interview Russell Diabo, the spokesperson of Defenders of the Land and the Editor/Publisher of First Nations Strategic Bulletin.
Diabo talks to us about the struggle of indigenous peoples against the Indian Act, lands claims processes, and the puppet governments.
Click here to link to podcast or listen to the interview directly from the Mp3 player at the bottom of your BASICSnews.ca window.
An Interview with D’Bi Young, creator of The Sankofa Trilogy
by Corrie Sakaluk
D’Bi Young’s powerful Sankofa Trilogy played at Tarragon Theatre between October 22 and December 4. This interview was originally conducted for The Dialog, reproduced for BASICS at the request of the author.
What were the seeds from which the Sankofa Trilogy first started to grow?
I think the seed was seeing my mother perform when I was about 5 years old in Jamaica, at the Jamaica School of Drama, which is the school that is at the centre of Word!Sound!Powah. My mother was doing a one-woman show directed by Honor Ford Smith, who is actually now a professor at York University teaching community arts. So Honor Ford Smith was in Jamaica at the time teaching at the Jamaica School of Drama, and my mother was one of the students there between 1982 and 1985. I will never forget being in the audience and watching my mom, only my mom, on stage. It was a silent play about a woman living alone in her apartment, her routine and how she experienced her aloneness, and it had such a profound effect on me. That’s one thing that pops up to me.
The next thing that pops up to me is that I watched this film called The Three Faces of Eve, I must have been 8 years old. That film was a black and white film about a woman who was schizophrenic and she had three personalities, and I don’t know why that stuck with me, but for some reasons I’ve never gotten that film out of my mind. That film always comes back to me. So those two experiences were seeds that were planted in my young impressionable mind long ago. Read more…
On Monday, November 7, BASICS correspondent Steve da Silva linked up with the Filipino-American MC Bambu for an interview after the Blue Scholars show in downtown Toronto. Bambu is from Los Angeles and has been producing for almost a decade with the likes of MC Kiwi, DJ Phatrick, Power Struggle and many others. In the Fall of 2010, Bambu, through Soul Assassins, released the “Los Angeles, Philippines” mixtape with the legendary DJ Muggs (Cypress Hill). Before 2011, the mixtape had already hit over 100,000 downloads. His LPs include ‘self entitled’, ‘exact change’, ‘i scream bars for the people’, and ‘paper cuts’. Here’s what the ‘Kasama’ [comrade in Tagalog] had to say to BASICS…
Steve da Silva / BASICS: How does the national liberation movement in the Philippines relate to the music you’re producing in America?
Bambu: There’s a clear line between the two. Like I said on stage, all my music really does is raise the awareness of the people and the consciousness of the masses. It’s a tool used to organize. The goal is to get those people who like the music to actually go out and organize. That’s where I separate myself from the actual work that’s going on.
Now, if you wanna talk about my organizing, then yeah, I am also doing work in organizing and educating folks, especially within the youth sector, basically building a bridge between what’s going on here and what’s going on back in the Philippines. What we like to say is connecting the ‘micro’ to the ‘macro’. We’re trying to get the youth we’re working with – youth of colour, Filipino youth – to bridge what’s going on in the community with what’s going on back at home and around the globe. Read more…
On Saturday, November 19, 2011, BASICS caught up with John ‘Mac’ Gaskins, the Minister of Information of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party (NABPP)‡, at a speaking event at Burning Books in Buffalo, New York. After spending nearly half his life in prison, the young Panther is now out on the streets and is part of a new generation of young revolutionaries carrying forward the legacy of the original Black Panther Party in the present. (Radio Basics also interviewed John ‘Mac’ Gaskins back on October 3, 2011 about ongoing practices of torture that he and others have experienced at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia. To download that interview, click here). Steve da Silva / BASICS: You were telling us tonight how you spent half of your life in prison – after catching some cases when you were younger. Here you are now, 31 years of age and on the outside as revolutionary and a New Afrikan Black Panther. Can you briefly recount how you arrived at where you’re at today?“What’s Mao’s little Red Book gonna mean to a mother who can’t put food in her children’s stomachs tonight?”
John ‘Mac’ Gaskins: Well, my story doesn’t differ much from most guys raised in urban settings. I’m from Richmond, Virginia, and born into a single-parent home. My mother is from the bottom of the working-class. As a kid, I would watch my mother go to work, working two jobs that were never enough to secure the basic necessities for me and my sister. So early on I decided that I had a distinct role to fulfill. At about the age of ten, I had this friend who taught me how to go into stores, open up the food products and eat and drink until we got full and exited the store. But eventually, I realized that this wasn’t doing anything to help my family. So I actually started stealing products, bringing them out of the store and to my family so we could prepare meals. As this went on, the activity just progressed until I got into robberies. But I had certain moral compunctions from the start though. I never robbed a common working-class person, old ladies, anything like that. It was drug dealers, commercial establishments, and people that I felt like they were criminals themselves, either pumping poison into the community or people who have these commercial establishments in the community but don’t live in our communities and are only extracting funds from us. Ultimately, over time though I would take on some traits of an illegitimate capitalist, and this would ultimately lead me to prison at the age of 17.
My incarceration would actually begin before this though. I started going to jail when I was about 14, I spent about 2 ½ years in “Juvie” (Juvenile Detention). So that was preppin’ me for what was coming in the future, these 14 years that I would spend in prison. So ultimately I went to prison and I would endure all the practices that take place there, everything from having my fingers broken to being bit by dogs, to being strapped to a bed for days and being forced to defecate and urinate on myself. I would go without meals for days at a time, my mail was being hindered. Not having access to a telephone. I was at these “Supermax” prisons out in the mountains and I didn’t get visits. My family couldn’t afford to come visit me. I was feeling every ounce of the weight of this system and this was for me where the political education began. Read more…
D’bi Young on new album 333 and the Sankofa Trilogy plays, with updates on Black Liberation Army P.O.W. Robert “Seth” Hayes from Nate Buckley of the National Confederation to Free all Political Prisoners and End Unjust Incarceration
Click the link above for podcast, or listen to this episode in the mp3 player at the bottom of your browser at basicsnews.ca.
On today’s show, we talk to dub poet and mono dramatist African-Jamaican-Canadian D’bi Young about her forthcoming album 333 and the Sankofa Trilogy of plays that are currently being staged at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto. Check her out at http://dbiyoung.com/.
Robert "Seth" Hayes, political prisoner / prisoner of war since 1973, and former member of the Black Liberation Army
In our feature discussion, we talk to Nate Buckley, organizer with the National Confederation to Free all Political Prisoners and the End Unjust Incarceration about the current status of prisoner of war / political prisoner Robert “Seth” Hayes former member of the Black Liberation Army and Black Panther Party.
On our October 3, 2011 show of Radio Basics, we talk with former inmate John Gaskins, Minister of Information of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter, about the “finger-bending technique” torture being practiced at Red Onion State Supermax Facility, the same facility housing Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson, Minister of Defense, NABPP-PC.
Listen to this show here, or click the bottom of your BASICSnews.ca browser to listen to the show streaming directly from our website.
Also in this show, short audio segment on solitary confinement, headline news and music from Filipino-American hip-hop group, Power Struggle.
DONATE TO CHRY DURING THE 2011 FUNDRAISING DRIVE – CHECK THIS OUT
BASICS Community News Service - Published Sep. 2011
“The national oppression of indigenous people in the Cordillera has reached ethnocidal proportions” - Simon 'Ka Filiw' Naogsan, Spokesperson of the Cordillera People's Democratic Front (Image of Ka Filiw with Steve da Silva of BASICS, in Mountain Province).
On August 1, 2011, journalist Steve da Silva with the people’s media organizations BASICS Community News Service (Toronto, Canada) interviewed Simon ‘Ka Filiw’ Naogson, the Chairperson of the Cordillera People’s Democratic Front (CPDF), an underground and revolutionary mass alliance of indigenous people and organizations in the Cordillera region and a member organization of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines.
Ka Filiw discussed the increasing militarization, mining plunder, and national oppression facing the indigenous people of the Cordillera as the US-Aquino regime approves more mining concessions for the region and consequently intensifies its Oplan Bayanihan counter-insurgency campaign to repress the revolutionary movement.
The interview with Ka Filiw was conducted in the western region of Mountain Province, Cordillera in an undisclosed location, given the underground status of Ka Filiw’s activities. It was conducted as part of a forthcoming book by Steve da Silva, People’s War in the Cordillera, an in-depth look at the people’s resistance and revolutionary struggle in from the vantage point of one region in Mountain Province, Cordillera within the overall context of the revolutionary movement in the Philippines.
Art from 'Ka Libre' of the Leonardo Pacsi Command (Mountain Province) of the New People's Army. The eight spears of the CPDF logo represents the eight ethno-linguistic tribes that make up the Igorot indigenous people.
Steve da Silva / BASICS: Can you tell us what Cordillera People’s Democratic Front (CPDF) is, including its relationship to the people’s struggles in Cordillera, and to the broader revolutionary movement in the Philippines?
Ka Filiw / CPDF: The CPDF was founded in 1981, it launched its Political Congress in 1987, and its Organizational Congress in 1989 and ever since then it has been in operation. The CPDF is the revolutionary united front of all the national minorities and non-minorities in the Cordillera. There are three features of the CPDF. First, it stands as the National Democratic Front in the Cordillera. Second, it as an alliance of all revolutionary mass organizations in the Cordillera. Third, it acts as the people’s revolutionary government in areas where the revolutionary movement is building and consolidating.
The revolutionary struggles being launched by the CPDF in the Cordillera is closely linked with the National Democratic Revolution. First and foremost, because we are all Filipinos. We cannot detach the struggles of the Cordillera peoples and the indigenous peoples from the struggles of the Filipino peoples. Such being the case, our revolutionary struggle here in the Cordillera is directly linked with the National Democratic Revolution. Of course, secondarily, we are waging a struggle to address the historical national oppression suffered by the national minorities and indigenous people here in the Cordillera. Read more…
by Steve da Silva, BASICS Community News Service (Published September 2011) www.basicsnews.ca
On August 13, 2011, BASICS interviewed Gwendolyn Longid, an indigenous Igorot activist and a leading organizer with the Cordillera People’s Alliance in Sagada, Mountain Province. We discussed the struggles of the Cordillera people against imperialist mining plunder and the U.S.-Aquino regime’s militarization of the region under the banner of its ‘Oplan Bayanihan’ counter-insurgency scheme. Longid also explained the difference between the bogus ‘autonomy’ that the national government is trying to impose upon indigenous people versus the genuine self-determination and defense of ancestral domain that the peoples of the Cordillera are struggling for.
This interview is part of the research for a forthcoming book by Steve da Silva, People’s War in the Cordillera, an in-depth look at the people’s resistance and revolutionary movement in the Cordillera within the overall context of the revolutionary movement in the Philippines.
Steve da Silva / BASICS: Can you briefly describe the structure and political work of the Cordillera People’s Alliance?
Gwendoyln Longid / CPA: We have a General Assembly that is made up of members from different provinces and chapters and it elects our Executive Committee. We also have chapters in Kalinga, Benguet, Baguio City, Mountain Province, and Abra, each of which also has its own Executive Committees. We are both a mass organization and an alliance, since we have not only organizations who are part of the CPA but also individuals. CPA Mountain Province has a membership of 37 people’s organization in over 10 municipalities, as well as several other IP [indigenous people's] advocates.
The political work of the CPA is for the defense of our ancestral land and our self-determination. Since the early 1960s when ‘national minorities’ of the Cordillera first faced the threats of the Chico River Dam Projects under the US-Marcos Dictatorship, the CPA has been working to empower indigenous peoples.
Aerial view of the Sagada rice terraces. The rice terraces of the Cordillera are recognized UNESCO world heritage sites for their masterful feats in engineering and agricultural.
From the point of view of the national government, all land with a slope of over 18% or 10.2º degrees is declared public land, making 81.4% of the land in the Cordillera state-owned, or at least that’s their claim. Of course, the indigenous people have a very different point of view on this, considering this is their ancestral land. So the CPA is struggling to defend this ancestral lands. Read more…
