Street Sweeper Social Club
"The Ghetto-Blaster E.P."
By Geordie Pleathur
(SugarBuzz Nation)
SugarBuzz Magazine
“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” (-Albert Einstein)
"In a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction, and the prisoners of envy." (-Ivan Illich)
"If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them." (-Paul Wellstone)
“Fascism is a politico-economic system in which there is: total executive
branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; the massive and regular use of hate, fear, racial and religious prejudice, the Big Lie technique, mob psychology and mob actions to achieve political and economic ends; and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy.” (-Steven Jonas)
"If President Obama continues this war, if he expands the war, if he doesn't put the clamp down on Wall Street and we go through another crash in these next two years — if he doesn't do the job he was elected to do, I can almost guarantee there will be a challenge from the left — a Naderesque-style challenge ..." (-Michael Moore)
"The explicit and declared motive of the [Afghanistan] war was to compel the Taliban to turn over to the United States, the people
who they accused of having been involved in World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist acts. The Taliban…they requested evidence…and the Bush administration refused to provide any... We later discovered one of the reasons why they did not bring evidence: they did not have any.” (-Noam Chomsky)
"The full body scanners are manufactured by Rapiscan Systems, a firm represented by the Chertoff Group. The Chertoff Group is Michael Chertoff, a dual Israeli/US citizen appointed Secretary of Homeland Security, in 2005, by Puppet President George W. Bush. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) used Obama’s economic stimulus, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to purchase 150 Rapiscan machines. Much larger purchases are in the works.
Chertoff has been a federal judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit
and a federal prosecutor who convicted and destroyed the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, apparently illegally as the conviction was overturned by the US Supreme Court. But, of course, the firm and the careers of its employees were already destroyed by Chertoff.
Chertoff was also appointed Assistant Attorney General of the Department of Justice by George W. Bush. Chertoff supervised the 9/11 investigation or non-investigation.
Chertoff is also the co-author of the USA PATRIOT Act, a piece of fascist legislation that destroys American civil liberties." (-Paul Craig Roberts)
http://wewontfly.com/ PROTEST RADIATION AND MOLESTATION!
"It's not hard to understand why people are starting to believe the age old stories about a reptilian race enslaving humanity. A people with no conscious that see us as meat to serve. A group that is not like us , only in appearance. The things we are told to accept and the behavior of a certain strata of people is beyond explanation. They lie a whole country into war and kill millions, mostly women and children... but oh we are Christian and wholesome because ours is the right God.
The bankers send millions into the street where they parish 
and the families become irreversibly broken. The old and sick are simply turned out to to die I guess. You know the houses I see most people live in are mostly cracker boxes with bad plumbing. It is not the property the bankers want, it is to squeeze every last drop from every last resource a person has and then throw them out like the rind of squeezed fruit.
Our president tells the rich oh, we will give you tax cuts when the poor are punished without mercy for every infraction and weakness and human frailty. It's a jungle out here and in the American jungle, the two tongued rule. I am not proud to be an American. I was once. I thought once the people of this country believed in humanity and belonging to it. There are some but the culture, the leaders, those that say what is and what isn't are duplicitous, merciless, ridiculously inferior in character and consuming us and our every resource with impunity and zero accountability." (-from Michael Moore message board...)
REVOLUTION IS THE NEW FUCK YOU....
It's the day AFTER "Black Tuesday"--election day, when the billionaire shysters, arms dealers, oil companies, secret societies, multi-national corporate elites, and other special interest groups (big oil, big-pharma, insurance companies, etc.) with their world-slavery and depopulation agendas, used their fake front-groups, media-misinformation-monopolies, billions in slanderous and misleading campaign ads, and around-the-clock, "populist" fraudcasting, in which the false prophets of corporate profits, use the airwaves, to dupe lower middle 
class white people, or at least, the dwindling few, who still own homes, and have jobs, into voting against their own best interests.
The 5-4 Supreme Court who selected Bush, and ruled in favor of limitless campaign-funding, is obviously, fixed. Rove and Cheney, Ashcroft and Rusmsfeld, and W. still roam free, in spite of killing a million people in Iraq. Starting wars, all over. Afganistan, Yemen, Pakistan. Torturing. Falsely demonizing and bankrupting ACORN, for organizing and empowering poor people to vote. Their blabbermouth, cigar-chomping, fat, puppet-pundits are already spinning this cycle's latest election-rigging, and undisclosed-overfunding, as a supposedly-populist "call to conservatism". When, in fact, much of the clamor was actually a call for Obama to merely keep his campaign promises. Close the torture camps, stop waging needless genocide on Muslims nations. He ought to be holding the white-collar, and mega-corporation criminals accountable for their crimes, putting people back to work, and ending the predatory-bank foreclosures, here at home. He's not working for us, though, is he? He's working for THEM.
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of "Slate" noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United 
States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
Please do take notice, rockers, that the phony Democrats have supposedly been in power for two years, and yet, no one repealed the Patriot Act, prosecuted the Bush administration and all their shadowy cronies with the top-secret, no-bid, sweetheart deals, like Blackwater and Haliburton-for crimes against humanity....or impeached the justices who ruled that corporations have rights, that we the people, do not. Donahue, Helen Thomas, Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher, Dan Rather, Wiki-Leaks, and the Dixie Chicks have all been punished by the war-mongers and fawning corporate media execs in the government's propaganda-wing, for reporting facts, about the criminal occupations, psy-ops, false-flag attacks, and war-crimes. There are dangerous backscatter x-ray machines in all our air-ports. The N.S.A. monitors all our phone calls and e-mail transmissions. Even Republican, Ron Paul, says the C.I.A. controls the drug trade in this country, and needs to be dismantled, and that the Fed needs audited and abolished. In this hopelessly slanted election, we sadly, lost both progressive, anti-war hero, Alan Grayson, and Russ Feinstein-the only dude who voted against the Patriot Act.
Today, I went to the thrift store, where my brood usually purchases most all of our used paperbacks, cassette tapes, and old vhs videos, to find the prices had been TRIPLED in the week, since we last visited. The library, where I used to read magazines I can no longer afford to buy over the counter; no longer allows anyone to check out their publications, since City Hall cut a million dollars from the
parks and libraries, to give it to "policing downtown". Now, we see poor people, and anyone on a bicycle, or skateboard, or with a backpack, or wearing black, being frisked by overzealous law enforcement, on every corner. They TOTALLY profile anyone who isn't driving in a brand new, over-sized vehicle. I live in a poorer neighborhood, full of nervous old people, like the post-retirement-aged, lonely lady, next door, who, endearingly, passes out chocolates to all the passerby, on the front sidewalk, and at the mailbox. She told me her only friend is her grief-counselor, since she had to put her 15-year-old cat to sleep. Lots of sad widows, who lost their homes, when their mates died. Elderly folks, abandoned, or neglected, by their grown children. Heartbreaking stuff. Right? Well, one of these eavesdropping, Eleanor Rigby-type, house-coated neighbors of mine, apparently overheard, and clearly misunderstood, a minor family squabble, like a scene torn right from the Ropers, on some vintage "Three's Company" episode, and preposterously, called the cops(!!!) on us, so four guys(!!!!) showed up, and made me get down on the floor, out in the hallway, while my old lady, persuasively, explained there had been no real feud, we just seem loud, because they're old, the walls are thin, and poorly insulated, plus, the front door has a two inch gap at the bottom, and we're sorry if our voices were raised on a Friday night, in the apartment we pay to rent, but whatever the nosey neighbors imagined they heard was most likely way out of context, and eventually, they left 
us alone, but now, since the neighbors all gossiped and drooled about two patrol-cars(!!) coming to our door, my ruthless landlord's leaving notes, threatening to have us evicted, for playing loud (not) music, and arguing. It's absurd. We're fierce debaters, long-winded coversationalists. Readers. We like to drink coffee and chat...AND listen to music. We ARE louder than the old ladies who mourn their cats, silently, in front of televisions.
The cops are out on the prowl, just looking to find someone willing to be "non-compliant". It's frightening. There are homeless folks everywhere, outside--white people, holding cardboard signs, who used to be middle class, in the early nineties. The prison industry THRIVES on these American's misfortune. The jails of neighboring cities are rented by our city-hall, to warehouse the overflow of homeless people, busted for skin-tone, mohawks, vagrancy, or panhandling. The people of color are segregated into other neighborhoods, and also, corralled into these crowded, for-profit jails. The neighborhoods "where the ragged people go", are a quaint, fading memory from the Simon And Garfunkel era. No wonder all the corrupt, middle-class lawyers, functionaries, bureaucrats, and middle-managers are on the take. There's no legal way out of obscene poverty in America, anymore, unless you work in marketing, or "security" for the
fascist TSA/NSA/DEA/FEMA/Evil empire, misinforming the masses, or tightening the screws.
NAFTA was diabolicol-not only did these evil C.E.O.'s send eighty percent of our manufacturing jobs to the child-labor, swet-shops, in communist China, they sent many of our old jobs to their own for-profit prisons, where Americans labor for twenty cents a day. Mostly, people of color:non-violent "drug offenders". The corporations are occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, for fun and profit, killing millions, torturing, stealing oil, controlling opium, and the government's Amen-Chorus, in the big media, continue pretending they're "on the hunt" for scary, Muslim, boogeymen, with box-cutters. Some people in the midwest, cable television watchers, still believe these wholesale lies. Obama was one big fraud. He was elected, by the people, with a clear mandate to reverse Bush policies, and end the occupations. Instead, he expanded them, gave billions to Wall Street hustlers, and endless war-contactors, and continues grovelling to these loathsome generals, oil-baron judges, dastardly banksters, C.I.A. torturers, and hardright, military, Republicans. This guy was supposedly a Constitutional lawyer. He's done NOTHING to repair the Constitution. The rightwing crazies keep moaning about the deficit. Here is how you fix the deficit. Tax the Super-Rich. Stop The Occupations, and reel in the domestic spying/police-state apparatus. Simple.
I campaigned for certain establishment progressives, mainly Grayson, but the Democrats are clearly, a lost cause. Ralph Nader's been telling people, like me and Michael Moore this, for years. They 
aren't really an opposition party, at all-they're Republicans, too. Obviously! I'm a little disheartened by all these facts. The cover-up of the oil catastrophe in the Gulf. The ongoing cover-up of the three buildings that were blown up in NYC. Not one of these slimy politicians will talk, on the record, about whatever it is they're spraying us with. The needless groping and x-ray machine radiation of high-paying passengers at U.S. air-ports, is not keeping any of us safer-ask the pilots. It's just conditioning the populace to accept more fascism as "normal". TV liberals who like Will Smith action movies, and watch a lot of "Ellen" and "Project Runway", are seemingly, still comforted by the notion that Obama is part black. Meanwhile, Glen Ford from the www.blackagendareport.com notes that Obama's military and Blackwater mercenaries kill Muslim babies "like flies".
Those Diebold touch-screen voting machines were still in use for this election. The openly for-rent, ceremonial-Congress has now ushered-in a brand new class of wing-nuts and crackpots, who take their marching orders from the globalists, and banksters, and secret-societies-just like Obama. Those Koch brothers and Karl Rove-funded rallies, with all the big screens and busses, that are supposed to be "grass roots" have all those angry tea-people crying about "Socialism", but Obama has merely advanced longstanding Bush and Clinton globalist-policies, of cooking the books for the banking elites, by privatizing the profits, and socializing the losses. Steal a sandwich-go to jail! Steal trillions, kill millions=be a best-selling author/talkshow-circuit celebrity. The Bush people have all the best public relations 
men, hard at work, "rehabilitating" his image. Building him libraries, ghost-writing books, spin-doctoring, white-washing. He's "too big to jail".
How can we ever hope to educate that racist/fascist class of rightwingers who listen to Hate Radio all day? It's all seemingly hopeless, but no one wants to discuss it, not even the former liberals, or former punks, at least not now, while "Dancing With The Stars" is on. Everybody I used to know is stoned on prescription meds, watching "reality tv". Congratulating themselves. Texting while driving. Texting while shopping. ESPECIALLY, the lower class, women-folk, conditioned, from childhood, to pretend they're wealthier than they really are. Complimenting one another for being apolitical, craven slaves of consumerist acquisition, "I got more than you". Even the slave-class willingly trade, in "will to conquer", and "might makes right". Field slaves, versus house slaves. All of us, under the whip. What lengths are you willing to go to, how many heads are you willing to crush under heel, to satisfy your Mother's vicarious living, and demonstrate to your sisters how you are the "girl with the most cake"? By age forty, most white trash girls are expected to have at least two men supporting them, financing their diet-pills, spray-tans, vacations, True Religion bluejeans, magazines, plane tickets, pilates classes, and plastic-surgeries.
It's hard to forgive one's self for being poor in America. One's middle class former associates
will not forgive one for being poor, either. They like all that macho, Bill O'Reilly hyperbole, about bootstraps, John Wayne, college, Grandpa's military-service, and virtue. All of their self-made fortunes they just happened to be so virtuous as to have inherited, or married in-to. The hardships! "I worked my way up from the bottom of my father's business, while attending college paid for by my parents, before investing their start-up capital, into my first rental properties, DAMMIT!" That's been the Republican strategy, all along: Blame The Poor. They've GOT to distact the voters by demonizing somebody. Nixon realized "crime" was a highly-effective, "wedge-issue", plus, there's always homophobia, and women's rights, to divide the illiterate population. Most people I grew up with, now, have an attitude of, "Yeah, I know it's bad, but it's better for me, than for you, and since I don't like to think about it, I've just written you, and all the truths you hold to be self-evident, out of my life story." Some have turned to sports. Others can't even speak to me, since they turned to the dark side. Ciao.
I was watching my thrift-store copy of "Frida", again, this evening. I always liked Salma Hayek, until she married that billionaire. I do not like billionaires, nor women who sleep with them. I've gotten to know way, way too many good hearted, righteous, and deserving, homeless people to consort with their evil oppressors. Yeah, my beloved Rolling Stones wrote that Anti-Bush Junta song about "Neo-Cons" on their last album, and their fellow billionaire, David Bowie, inspired the other half of my whole scene, before selling-out to an evil, union-crushing operation like Target, but when
I see Paul McCartney partying at the White House, INSTEAD OF pressuring anybody to stop the mass-murdering of innocent civilians in wars of occupation, I gotta think, all those rich former-hippies are part of the problem. The old rockstars only seem to speak-out for the trendy animals. They're all Peta-pimping, Buddahist vegetarians, but where are the artists with a conscience about something besides Fluffy? At least R.E.M. took a stand against torture. You know what the Brains, and "The Apprentice" co-star, Cyndi Lauper, once sang: "Money Changes Everything."
In many lower-class neighborhoods, you don't have to rob convenience stores, or sell crack, to get arrested, by alarmingly militarized, over-funded police-forces, you just have to be profiled as an undesirable, a symbolic other. The po-po recruit these lonely, single, wheel-chair bound, old spinsters, who have no social outlet, other than the McGruff Crime Dog neighborhood-watch meetings, to spy out their peep-holes, peek through their curtains, and snitch on anyone who "dresses funny", plays music in their rental, or seems "suspicious". Burroughs predicted this was gonna happen. Snitch-Nation. It's a crazy world, when listening to J.Geils, Eddy Grant, Van Halen, and Jim Croce tapes, on a tiny cassette-player, in one's kitchen, on a Friday night, at eight thirty, while having a loud discussion, brings four armed cops to your door.
Meanwhile, some of my old associates, even family members, belligerently, continue to apologize for Brand Obama. Sibel Edmond's website, Boiling
Frogs, even reports that his campaign strategy in the 2,012 election, is to feign naievete, and appeal to his willingly-blind apologists, with a message of "incremental change" and blaming the generals and banksters. They'll have him playing the vaguely likable rube, some more: "I didn't know what I was doing...they made me...Change takes time..." Aw, shucks, and gee willikers, and by gosh, oh, golly. John Pilger reports that Obama's not merely a marketing creation, but a Kissinger/C.I.A. marketing creation. Someone else, online, calls him "Obomber". An apt nickname, as he's relentlessly expanded drone attacks and "kill teams" into Yemen, and Pakistan. Don't apologize for a war-monger. There's no excuse for what he's done. Democrats should have recognized he was a plant, as soon as he and Eric Holder announced they were "turning the page", rather than prosecuting the war criminals from the previous administration.
There really are two Americas, now. The users and the used. One of my closest friends confides, "I went to law school, thinking I could change the system from within. Well, the change to be made within, is not to be made
within the system; it is within the person." At least HE gets it. I'm trying to soundproof the apartment, as much as I can, tonight, so we don't end up back on the streets. We made little "Quiet" reminder signs to help remember that there are strangers listening, in our building, we have to whisper. Americans are doomed, in part, because they'd rather suck up to the lazy, immoral rich, than ever make a stand...for anything, besides, you know, a quicker bacon burger, bigger screens to watch more reruns of "COPS", "JERSEY SHORE", etc., bigger vehicles, as they get fatter on all that High Fructose Corn Syrup Sam's Club/Fast-Food...their own vanity, petty rivalries, and convenience. "Feeling Popular". America has more prisoners than any dictatorship in the world.
I loved RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE'S messages, even if their music's too thrashy/aggressive for my tastes, I can still see why it's important, and I'm grateful it appeals to younger audiences. Zack de la Rocha is clearly, an ally in our struggle for justice, and equality, and to putting an end to all these evil and inhumane wars of occupation. I never heard the AUDIOSLAVE corporate-rawk thing, guitarist, Tom Morrello, did with the blustery, bellowing Soundgarden
guy-cos, again, it's just not my thing, fuck grunge. Grunge still sucks....but someone sent me some links to these tunes by STREET SWEEPER SOCIAL CLUB, and I am sincerely amazed by them. Their lyrics are so cutting-edge, important, poignant, potent, and right-on, right-now alive. They might be one of the most important groups since Manic Street Preachers, Public Enemy, the Clash, Sinead O'Connor, or Tupac Shakur. I look into all the trendy kid groups who've copped both mine, and the punk generation's fave looks, moves, influences, but they seldom have anything to say, it's usually all just adolescent sex bravado and fashion bratting. Commercials for Tim Burton and Hot Topic. Look at my pants, see my furry coat. Okay? Fake new wave by self-obsessed rich kids with gigantic production budgets, ripping-off eighties New Order? No thanks. Regurgitated Nine Inch Nails? Keep it. As Phoebe Legere says, "I'm sick of aggressive, machine-generated militaristic disco march music." ....So I keep an ear out for the new hip-hop with some depth, or heart, or insight...Again...I'm so often bored, instantly, with the same old shit. Dope-smoke, cars, bitches. Right. Okay, so what? Nothing's worse than the disgusting designer label-whore, no 
soul, "greed is good", shallow, money-worshipping, Diddy-Jay Z-Kanye, yachts and helicopters, cigars and champagne-spilling, social climbing, Top Forty payola, black capitalist shit. Not my thing, at all. So, sometimes, I'll tune in to public radio, to see if anything's simmering amidst the rich, college educated folkies, or alternative-country studs. I'm lookin' for some heart...some wit...some humanity...real blues, genuine torch music...simple human emotions...or some honest PROTEST MUSIC, y'know? Anti-war songs. Music opposing torture and the incarceration-nation, injustice system, and the open-season, class war being waged, by the murderous billionaires, upon all the rest of us. Crickets chirping, something. Nope. Nothin' happenin' at all. I keep waiting for somebody to say something true, take some risk, make some music that matters, speak out about the cops indiscriminately tasering pregnant ladies, children, handicapped citizens. Make mention when a cop murders an unarmed man and suddenly, prosecutors have forgotten how to do their jobs, and hundreds more people get arrested for protesting it. Today's so-called artists have no conscience. Where's the
music with SOUL?
Here's some right here, mods and rockers...the first band I've discovered since Strummer died, probably, who are really bucking the system, telling the truth, producing work of lasting value. These guys are the only group I've heard, lately, sounding like they still give a shit, except for maybe a few songs by Carbon/Silicon. This cat (leader of THE COUP), Boots Riley's lyrics are on fire, as scathing and important as vintage Stiv Bators, Chuck D., Joe Strummer, or Richey James Edwards. These guys stand-up, and deliver honest outrage, guts, pure poetry....If you're thirsty for truth, and soul, wit and humor, courage and compassion, and "revolutionary party jams", turn-on to the STREET SWEEPER SOCIAL CLUB. I think the Red Hot Chili Peppers may have sorta wanted to be like the STREET SWEEPER SOCIAL CLUB, years and years ago, but they just didn't have the brains. This is the shit, kids. The music is relentlessly funky and hard, like old P-FUNK, and "Let's Work"-era Prince...mixed with the righteous anger of MC5, N.W.A, Warrior Soul, and the Last Poets, but the words are really the thing. TRUTH AND SOUL. LISTEN TO THE WORDS, brothers and sisters. BOOTS RILEY is the new Bob Dylan. The Street Sweeper Social Club are the new punk. DIG IT! (Even if you have to use headphones, Cuz McGruff the Crime Dog's listening...)
SOUNDTRACK TO THE MOTHERFUCKING RESISTANCE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWEp-xUp1bw
www.submedia.tv
"DONCHU KNOW IT IS WRONG TO CHEAT THE CRYING MAN?":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or-1GVknJjo&feature=player_embedded
http://www.pixiq.com/article/the-airport-security-grope
http://www.democratunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x522466
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEFpfm0icdo&feature=player_embedded
http://rense.com/general92/bpfish.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130833741
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/video-former-bush-chairman-joint-chiefs-staff-iraq-war-based-lies
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Elliot%20D.%20Cohen/21
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9373549
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/07/26/prison-brewer/
http://harikunzru.com/archive/statement-arundhati-roy-re-possible-sedition-charge-october-26th-2010
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/the-insane-prelude-to-the-corporate-takeover-of-the-planet-by-siv-o%e2%80%99neall/
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x521225
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cJqM2tFOxLQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaH-lGafwtE&feature=player_embedded
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/beforeyoureyes/4
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976.