IF YOU open today’s paper (Saturday) or scroll through online, around 9.30 this morning you can think of me at Northbourne Centre in Shoreham rolling up my sleeve for my first NHS dose of anti-Covid hope. I’m sure many of you have had yours already.
The incredible success of the vaccine rollout is proof of what people working together in the common interest can achieve when profit margins and shareholder dividends are taken out of the equation.|
When contrasted with the corporate Tory chums’ snouts-in-the-trough fiasco of test and trace and PPE provision, it is testament to the infinite superiority of compassion over cash as a motivation for efficiency in medical provision.
by Jasmin Ramsey / July 25th, 2009
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. Victor Hugo
I meet David Rovics outside his host’s apartment building. I recognize him immediately from the pictures I’ve seen of him. He is tall and slender with closely cropped hair. He is dressed in casual attire with a black t-shirt that says “Gaza on my Mind” on it.
It’s June 2009 and images of the Iranian protesters are being broadcast everywhere on Facebook, through Twitter, BBC, CNN, Fox News. Rovics can tell that I’m Iranian: “Tell me your take.”
by Paul Haeder / January 22nd, 2021
The tables were turned David Rovics interviewed me in a wide-ranging, tangentially themed hour a few days ago. Here is what one
Dissident Voice article has to say about Portland, OR-based Rovics
He is not one to wait for his turn to talk. He listens intently and when I’m finished asks another question. After all that Rovics has seen and heard during more than 20 years as a singer-song writer who has performed all over the world, he has yet to act like a self-proclaimed expert on anything. “The Social Significance of David Rovics” by Jasmin Ramsey, July 25th, 2009
by David Rovics / January 13th, 2021
After seeing some very strange, amnesiac discussion threads on social media, I have a few words to consign to the screen.
Naturally, social media and the media media are all going nuts since the more or less successful far right siege of the Capitol. There are a variety of talking points that I’ve been hearing that I have some thoughts on.
First of all, in one of Trump’s various post-siege missives, he assured his followers that the “our incredible journey is only just beginning,” meaning his political ambitions, and the future of the far right. He’s getting on in years and evidently not in the greatest health, but if he lives long enough, my guess is he’ll start a TV network, a social media network, and a new political party, which will soon eclipse the Republican Party, and become the main competition for the Democrats. Whoever planted explosives at the headquarters of both the RNC and the DNC during the event clearly agrees
BEFORE 1992 and open borders I always toured mainland Europe solo as a poet and acoustic performer, although I had long thought of forming a band to play my songs.
My experiences crossing borders with other bands the ludicrous, petty nonsense to which we were subjected for no good reason whatsoever, simply because we were punk musicians meant that I stuck to my solo poems and songs and the minimal, though constant, nonsense I experienced travelling alone with a hand-held mandola and a rucksack full of merch.
The irony about border checks is that I have never taken illegal drugs. I have never smoked and hate pills and injections. I prefer beer.