Game of Drones: The President and the White House Fly (Handsome Dog Productions, 2013). Investigative poem on topical issue of ‘Unmanned Aerial Vehicles’. Written by Heathcote Williams; Narration and Montage by Alan Cox; produced by Margaret Cox. Screening will be introduced by anti-Drone campaigner John from Bath Activist Network. About Heathcote Williams: "I'd say the overwhelming feature of these poems and perhaps of Williams' whole oeuvre is a sense of the development of an argument, either […]
Over the last year or so we have been bombarded with allegations and cases of sexual abuse involving Radio DJ's, TV producers, Comedians, TV personalities and pop stars who were all at their height of fame in the 1970s. Amongst the alleged perpetrators were Dave Lee Travis, Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Stewart Hall, Garry Glitter, Freddie Starr, Jim Davidson, Max Clifford and Jimmy Tarbuck. Nearly 600 victims of sexual abuse have come forward as part of the Operation Yew Tree investigation, which […]
On Wednesday the 16th October, Bristol will be hosting Jonina Abron-Ervin and Lorenzo Ervin as they give talks on their involvement in the US Black Power Movement and struggles that continue to this day. Jonina is the author of Driven by the Movement: Activists of the Black Power Era and will speak about her interviews with some 20 Black Power Activists as well as her own activity in the Black Panthers, where she became editor of the Black Panther Newspaper. She will detail the experiences of […]
Karl Marx remarked that the only way to write about the origins of capitalism is in the letters of blood and fire used to drive workers from the common lands, forests, and waters in the sixteenth century. In this collection of essays, George Caffentzis argues that the same is true for the annals of twenty-first-century capitalism. Information technology, immaterial production, financialization, and globalization have been trumpeted as inaugurating a new phase of capitalism that puts it beyond […]
Using everyone’s favourite bank manager Captain Mainwaring of Dad’s Army fame, Alan explains where all the bailout money went in the 2008 meltdown and current economic crisis. Neoliberal myths, lies and statistics about the public deficit such as the commodity theory of money, supply and demand, ‘rational’ consumer choices and ‘alternatives within capitalism’ are de-bunked using sources from the Guardian to the President of the EU Central Bank.
So (finally) the UK government has been legally forced to pay £19.9 million compensation to 5,228 victims of torture, rape, sexual abuse and maiming by British colonial forces during the ‘Mau Mau’ rebellion in Keyna in the 1950s. The compensation works out be a pitiful ‘£3,000 per victim and applies only to the living survivors of the abuses that took place’. The pure number of victims suggests that the argument normally trotted out by the British state in these situations, that is, ‘a bad […]
Last night I bought a copy of the Daily Mail (for the first time in my life) as I am into surrealism in a big way. I just had to do it. There several headlines which took my fancy: "BBC 'Witch' Song Insult to Maggie" (front page) "....and now even a police sergeant tweets meassages of hate" (front page) "I hope Thatcher's death was degrading and painful, tweets sick Scotland Yard sergeant" (page 7) ...and unbelievably on their website headlines: "'They danced in the streets when Hitler died […]
