Mullen is an Alternative Rock musician from Australia. He writes songs that are politically charged, socially aware and have an intelligence that will challenge you to delve into your rebellious side.
Mullen’s debut album “intox”, which is due to be released in early 2017, exploits political corruption and government brainwashing. It also deals with sensitive topics such as mental illness, social equality and his personal battle with addiction. Mullen passionately believes that everyone has a responsibility to make the world a place that is fair and equal. To Mullen, the time for awareness is over; it is time for action.
Mullen’s music is best described by imagining Biffy Clyro and the Foo Fighters sitting in a bathtub reading John Lennon poetry. What would happen if QOTSA poured a scalding hot bucket of water into the bath? You guessed it, Mullen’s music! His devilish guitar riffs, infectious drums, Beatle-esque melodies and strong song writing sensibilities enable Mullen to be dangerous and thought provoking.
If you would like to hear more of Mullen’s music, please visit his website and signup for exclusive and FREE access to his debut album.
So for a while now I’ve been watching events in Dakota unfold. Protests against a massive pipeline for crude oil to travel across the United States, Canada and First Peoples Nations.
My brother had a girlfriend from Vancouver, she was from the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe and shared lots of great and wise stories with our family. My brother stayed in her lands too, and an elder honoured him with a spirit fire. I have nothing but admiration and respect for native American tribes.
I see these images and videos of the protest against the pipeline, and my heart weeps. How can police officers, dressed like they are about to launch a military assault, actively hurt these peaceful water protectors? How can they walk up to a group of innocents standing in a prayer circle and spray them, point blank in the face with fire extinguisher sized cans of pepper spray? The beautiful clear waters turned murky and foamy from all the chemicals. How can they fire beanbags and rubber bullets to folk just beating a drum? How can they shoot horses? What is going on? What on earth is happening?
There’s a song from one of my favourite movies as a kid, “…take me back to the black hills, the black hills of Dakota. Where the pines are so high, they kiss the sky above. Left my heart in the black hills, the black hills of Dakota…”
Now this was a film about a white woman, playing a cowboy who shot native Americans, singing about a place she decided was hers. I didn’t realise the implications of Calamity Jane when I was wee, I don’t think the Sioux folk of Standing Rock will think much has changed.
Land that was stolen from under ancestral feet centuries ago, was then sold on to corporations. These corporations exploit the natural resources of these ancient and sacred lands. The Dakota Access Pipeline actively cuts through burial sites and life giving rivers.
The people protesting this destructive act are reliving what their forefathers had to go through. The level of brutality from law enforcement is despicable. It’s horrid and unwarranted. Water is the life blood of every living thing. Without it we cannot survive. We must stand with Standing Rock and support the water protectors. We must condemn the actions of the capitalist corporations. We must call out the authorities who huckle away native folk to hold them in a chain link cage, like an animal at a dog shelter. We must condemn the police who write numbers on the arms of traumatised and tearful protestors when they have been detained. We must shout loudly about these wrongs!
The company behind the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners has links to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the man himself also, apparently, owns shares in ETP. We know this guy has beef with everyone but he seems to have a real issue with the Native American casino business’, maybe something to do with his own casinos failing so drastically? Something to raise an eyebrow at and keep an eye on.
The different tribes across United States of America govern themselves, they also have a “government to government relationship with federal authorities” however the Sioux people say these provisions were ignored regarding the pipeline construction. The Sacred Stone camp “reclaims land stolen by the US government in direct violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, which affirmed it as sovereign unceded territory of the Great Sioux Nation.”
Indigenous tribes across the globe agree that on this planet there is one air, one ocean connected and only man makes borders. The black hills of Dakota is seen as the sacred heart, the coral reef in Australia seen as the blood filtration system and Scotland could easily be the water well of this world. Water is precious, the corporations know this and have forecast that in the very near future, H2O will be the most priceless commodity on the planet. There’s one thing though, water shouldn’t be a commodity or classed as a cash value resource. Water is life.
Jagdeesh Singh is 46 years old, born in the UK in 1970 to Panjaabi-Sikh migrant parents. Like his father before him, and grandfather and more, Jagdeesh has been a passionate campaigner on multi-global issues like the rights of small nations to free statehood to the global environmental crisis brought about by insensitive human rampage to mass, systemised cruelty on animals and nature.
As a person of Panjaabi-Sikh heritage, he has a strong connection to the enduring injustices being committed on Panjaab (neighbouring Kashmir), over the preceding 150 years. He describes both Panjaab and Kashmir as ‘forgotten Palestines’, and says they epitomise the global wide struggle of small, grassroot nations which are stateless fighting against the gruesome oppression and subjugation of big, repressive superstates like India, China, Russia, Pakistan, Turkey, Iraq, etc.
As a Panjaabi, he speaks passionately and agonisingly of the enduring repression, genocide and economic and ecological sabotage that the Indian state is committing on Panjaab, and replicating in neighbouring Kashmir and other dissenting regions of the mass Indian state like Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, etc.
Jagdeesh describes himself as radical and anti-establishment. He draws his inspiration from ‘sikhi’ (‘Sikhism’) as a radical, liberating philosophy of individual and global life, and from prolific radical writers like John Papworth – ‘small is beautiful’.
Jagdeesh’s favourite quotes include: “It is dangerous to be right, when those in power are wrong” from Voltaire; and, “You can imprison our bodies, but you cannot imprison our minds!” from Sukha & Jinda (two radical Panjaabi freedom-fighters, executed by the Indian state in the 1990s).
I have been writing now in earnest for around 25 years. I started writing TV and film scripts, and then moved to playwriting before – a little over a year ago – I found myself inexplicably returning to poetry (where in truth it all began) – this time, however, I found I had a fully-formed voice and since that day I have dedicated my writing almost exclusively to poetry.
A few months back I had my first collection published: Thamesmead by Steve McAuliffe (available on Amazon now).
My poetry is a mixture of political-polemic and spiritual liberation, with a healthy disdain for the State and all its soulless machinations thrown in for good measure. In this I more than occasionally feel the influence of William Blake:
No, there was no Grand Tour for poor old William, And how was he to know his Arcadian Jerusalem would be appropriated By fat-faced Tories in their elite drinking clubs up in Oxford? Those heirs to the Satanic Mills he so abhorred They flipped the mills for a profit before the bubble-burst, And floated mythical Albion on the market as Jerusalem PLC. I must, I really must… I must create something
However, it’s the politics of the individual that truly concerns me; the possibility of liberation once the individual’s enormous potential has been rediscovered. Thus in many of poems, liberation occurs in the most mundane and soul-less of environments: concrete sprawling estates; old people’s homes; the trees of Peckham Rye…
I believe that in order to create Jerusalem we must first reject all the artificial limitations imposed-upon-us. After all, it is the firing of our imaginations and the articulation of our determination to see real change that will finally free us of those pesky mind-forged manacles. The revolution begins inside of us.
No more waxing waning moon for me it seems No more marking down allotted time in artificial markers For there are new eternal tales to tell
New myths to weave from out of stardust Truths formerly forbidden under Time’s totalitarian stranglehold
Well, somebody has to say it, so it might as well be me. Privatisation is very probably the biggest financial scam of all time. It dwarves anything else I can think of. LIBOR? Fiddling small change. The original Charles Ponzi? Amateur! There has been renewed talk of privatisation recently, as the coalition government seek to use it to help balance the books, the Royal Mail and the NHS being the principle targets. It has become an issue in the Scottish referendum campaign, so it’s important to understand what it’s really all about.
It’s a scam, and here’s why: not only does it not always do what it says on the tin, it’s actually impossible for it to do what it says on the tin. I call it ‘magic pudding economics.’ Here’s the theory: You take a publicly owned organisation that is providing a service, let’s just take the example of a utility company, and you sell it off. Now of course that means you get the proceeds of that sale now. Which makes this year’s figures look better. But this is when, we have been told, the magic happens.
We are expected to believe that after the sale, the magic of private enterprise, the wonders of competition, will deliver a better, more efficient service. At a lower price. Not only has this never actually happened, if you think about it for five minutes it’s clear that it cannot possibly happen. Because the new owners are taking essentially the same organisation and extracting from it not only the grossly-inflated boardroom salaries and bonuses we’re now all so familiar with, but also profits for their shareholders. The salaries and bonuses might be scandalous, but the shareholder profits represent a vastly bigger impost.
But what about the magic? Well, we’ve been told for years that the public sector is somehow by its very nature bloated and inefficient. That the private sector is intrinsically efficient, and that they will find efficiencies which will allow this financial alchemy to occur. But I have to tell you, I’ve worked in both the private and public sectors over the years, and there really isn’t that much difference. In the public sector we hired all the same management consultants, did the same courses, probably more of them. If anything the public sector was a bit better planned and structured, with the private sector more chaotic. By far the greatest boost to efficiency, and consequently to productivity, in my lifetime has been computerisation, and that has benefited us all, has it not?
So in the quest for these mythical ‘efficiencies’ the first thing the new owners usually look to do is to cut the workforce. Now if you’ve bought the pitch, this should be fine, right? Because being a public sector organisation it must have more staff than it needs. Well, if that was ever true, it hasn’t been for a long time. So although this will save the privatised entity money, it will categorically mean a decline in service standards. In the worst cases this can manifest in a collapse in safety standards, or in a condition known as ‘corporate anorexia,’ where the obsession with becoming ‘lean and mean’ results in a workforce so emaciated that it is no longer capable of fulfilling its core functions. But even with these savings, they’re still not making enough to satisfy the shareholders. There’s only one other thing to be done, and that is of course to raise prices.
Now, we’ve been using the example of a utility company, perhaps an electricity supplier. Everybody knows how much electricity prices have risen in recent years, and whilst rival companies may offer you a few pennies discount on your tariff if you choose them over their competitors, you’re still paying twice as much, as a proportion of your income, for electricity than you were when it was publicly owned. Even with the energy saving light bulbs. Aren’t you?
Now in some specific cases this produces a very perverse outcome. Some public enterprises make money, and others don’t. If they do it’s not usually much, because there are no shareholders to suck it up, so prices are set to slightly above break even levels. But I want to consider those which don’t make money. Like public transport for instance. Public transport never makes money. It’s not really meant to. It’s infrastructure, it’s there so everyone else can make money, so that people can get to work, goods can get delivered and the rest of the economy can function. So what happens when you privatise say a railway company which costs millions to run? Well, nobody is going to buy a loss-making concern, are they? That would be silly. So governments are forced to offer guaranteed profits, in the form of subsidies, otherwise they simply couldn’t be privatised. The new owners do their usual tricks of cutting staff and raising prices, but due to the need to suck more cash out in profits than can possibly be saved that way, they still come up well short of the revenues the government has guaranteed them. So we see the bizarre spectacle of privately owned enterprises costing us, the taxpayers, more in subsidies than they used to cost us to run when we owned them!
So what is the true purpose of doing all this, if it’s not about efficiency, better services and lower prices? Lloyd George used to say that there was one question which should be asked of any enterprise: Who does this benefit? Well, that is clear. Certainly not the customers. The only beneficiaries are the owners of these privatised entities. Therefore there is only one possible explanation – it is the deliberate transfer of literally trillions of pounds worth of assets from the public sector (which is you and I) to the private sector (which isn’t). Often at prices which turn out to grossly undervalue those assets. And they’re doing it again. They’re not even bothering to hide the fact that Westminster politicians, and very often their relatives, are positioning themselves to profit from the creeping NHS privatisation that threatens to engulf the English part of what might arguably be described as the UK’s greatest social achievement.
So now that you’ve thought it through, you may be wondering how it was that we were all persuaded to accept for so many years something so patently illogical. Well, strangely enough, that’s the easy bit. It’s known as ‘The Big Lie.’ The bigger the better. The more ridiculous, the more credible it becomes, because people think that nobody would make up something so counter-intuitive. And if you tell it often enough, people will inevitably begin to accept it. The Bush II administration in the US spent a little over two years consistently and deliberately mentioning Iraq and al Q’aeda in the same sentences, over and over and over again. By the time the invasion of Iraq came, over 60% of Americans polled believed that Iraq had attacked the US on 9/11. That’s all it takes. With privatisation we have had 35 years of the lie being repeated. A bit longer if you’re an academic economist, but for most people it dates from when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. That’s long enough not only for people to start believing it, but for it to become something that goes without saying. It’s just accepted. It’s not even questioned.
Well today I am asking you to question it. More than that, I’m asking you to become, with me, the little boy who points out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes. Because it’s true, he’s stark, bollock naked, and it’s not a pretty sight. And we Scots will have a chance, a unique opportunity, in just over 100 days, to start again, with a blank sheet, empty of this discredited ideology. But, some will ask, what about everything we’ve got to lose? Well, I think it’s about time we thought about that too:
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