Jello Biafra Spoken Word in Philadelphia
Following R2K Conference
Introduction and Transcription by Bill Todd

At the recent Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia, police action was extremely heavy-handed and, according to ACLU lawyers, a "civil rights disaster." This country’s longstanding tradition of harassment of activist groups by the local police and government is very much alive and well. Philadelphia authorities were quite successful in creating an atmosphere of fear that a person might be arrested for their beliefs, regardless of whether they choose to engage in civil disobedience or illegal activity or not.
Not since our founding fathers departed Philadelphia has there been much enthusiasm for progressive politics. The massive arrests and record-setting bails (clearly designed to inhibit political expression) have been cited as evidence that these protests were a failure. Ironically, the aggressive prosecuting of protestors is making cities realize that hosting a political convention or World Bank summit means that they will have to spend a lot on security ($10 million and counting in Philadelphia). That is a price they are going to have to accept if they choose to give these events a venue, and perhaps it will make them think twice in the future.

The police in Philadelphia are guilty of infiltrating and monitoring activist groups and photographing anyone who frequents their meetings. A government spokesperson denied this for weeks before the authorities were forced to admit it. There were also suspicious visits by Philadelphia’s Department of Licensing and Inspection to "activist" spaces, as they attempted to shut them down. In one specific example, the city is allegedly guilty of pressuring the landlord of local music venue 4040 to shut down because they were incorrectly suspected of being affiliated with Philadelphia Direct Action Group. 4040 was forced to close under suspicious circumstances on the day before Jello Biafra’s scheduled spoken-word performance. But, after several hours of suspense, 4040 miraculously dug up the three months of pre-payed rent that their landlord was demanding, allowing them to reopen in time for Jello’s show to go on as scheduled.

Thanks go to Jello Biafra for the section that follows: a printing of highlights from his spoken word performance in Philadelphia, on August 6, 2000 that followed the Republican National Convention. As he said, it’s about "spreading the message." I have distilled the performance down to the parts that are most relevant to the recent protests and to the upcoming elections.

Begin Jello Biafra Spoken Word
This (movement) has been building, especially in Europe, for years. The first outbreak, as we all know, that not even the straight media could keep a lid on and pretend didn’t happen, was in Seattle last fall, when people who had about "zero interest in how high finance actually works," suddenly showed up in the tens of thousands to vent their opinion about the World Trade Organization. Then we fought the corporate agenda on April 16th, against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, with their white collar genocide policies that put third world countries further and further into debt. The people who have been demonstrating against the World Bank and the IMF for years usually get a dozen to 200 people for the gathering. This year they got what? 20,000 to 30,000. Obviously something is up.

Like the Vietnam War, the civil rights trouble and the dawn of the environmental movement before, corporate power and the rampant abuse thereof is the galvanizing force this time. More and more people are beginning to notice that government at all levels is often bought and paid for, they have nothing to say about policies.

Americans seem to choose their presidents by which of the two options they can stomach to look at on TV for four to eight years and that’s as far as it seems to go these days. I dutifully voted for Jimmy Carter when I was eighteen, and regardless of the halo around him now, he was a conservative President. He was one of the leaders that tried to reverse the progress made by George McGovern and get the Democratic Party more corporate and conservative. Then, Reagan and Mondale, what kind of choice is that? The voters actually thought they were making their own choice the whole time, or they thought that was the only choice.

In this election, Bush comes across as a spoiled frat boy trying out amongst his friends for the college debate team. And the vice presidential candidate, Dick Cheney, was secretary of defense under King George the first, and ordered Colin Powell to draw up plans to nuke Baghdad. Thankfully they were not used. Cheney’s wife makes Tipper Gore look like somebody you’d actually trust. She was head of the National Endowment for the Humanities under part Reagan and Bush’s term for seven years and denied grants to any education project that looked like it might be too political. Especially ones that might invite any multi-culturalism into the curriculum that didn’t say America is great, and weren’t we wonderful for killing the Indians, etc. In other words more of the so-called politically correct, to bring back and entrench the patriotically correct.

Texas also has the worst education budget and the worst environmental record. Clinton was the worst sitting governor on those two issues when he got elected, by the way. So with King George the second, we basically have a cross between Dan Quayle and the Dukes of Hazard, with the guy who wanted to nuke Baghdad telling him what to do behind the scenes.

But is Gore any better? "Well, we better get behind Gore then to make sure that Bush doesn’t get in, and we’ll have a better Supreme Court that way." Even though the two most liberal Justices left were appointed by Gerald Ford and King George the first, and Clinton is only appointing pro-choice right-wingers. The "fear of Bush" signs that are being held up certainly have a point, but how different is Prince Albert really?
The reason that I bestow them these titles is because they both come from old money, very wealthy families who have been monkeying with politics, and screwing the rest of us for generations. The Gores date back to the Civil War, and their job is to try and fix things, lead us to a new tomorrow, or come up with "a new beginning." Their job is to protect old money--period. Gore is also pro-death penalty, pro-drug war, pro-star wars, which I can’t believe their trying to bring back. There’s nobody to even fight anymore. It’s not going to scare Osama Bin Laden and his crazy nerve gas cult, no more than it’s going to scare Baghdad or
Korea one bit. Gore is also pro-WTO, that sham of a free trade scam going down right now.

And wait till you meet his wife. She, I believe, was probably the back door in the Clinton administration for the religious right, because of the Parent Music Resource Center that she helped found with Susan Baker, who was the wife of George Bush’s secretary of state. She was directly connected to the religious right, and is perfectly comfortable with these people. Tipper and Susan and others appeared before a senate commerce committee shared by Al Gore to talk about the "wicked evils" of Ozzy Osbourne and AC/DC, etc. The expert witnesses that Tipper brought in were directly linked to fundamentalist Christianity. And, at the time, Tipper was demanding warning labels on albums if the music even mentioned suicide, or homosexuality.

I encountered Tipper twice on the Oprah Winfrey show. The first time Oprah didn’t let me talk very much at all, she has off-camera hand gestures that she uses to give people floor.

Then Tipper Gore was interviewed in Nashville Tennessee were she was asked about the obscenity trial that came down on myself. I can laugh at it now, but its not fun when you have charges or a lawsuit hanging over your head, so Tipper said in this interview--after she told the Philadelphia Inquirer that she respected me--that "I’d like to take credit for the trial." So, imagine my surprise when Oprah's producer called back and wanted me on the show again after she was so hostile to me the first time and kept giving the floor to Tipper Gore whenever I tried to say anything. I did actually get a chance to talk this time before Oprah realized "Oh my god, it’s him again." So, I pointed out that the PMRC is tied to people who think that Jews are Satanic and won’t get into heaven, and lambasted Tipper for being connected to the Religious Right and not admitting it, and for appearing at Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum convention to talk about "evil music". She denied that and then denied that she ever said she wanted to take credit for my trial, so I pulled the article out and read her own words to her. The audience started booing and hissing, and then Oprah quickly comes up to me with the same dagger eyes she had the first time, "You know you’ve been misquoted before, haven’t you Jello?" The end of my talking on Oprah.

Back when the Reagan regime came in, which I now refer to as the Reagan, Bush, Clinton regime, because they’re all pursuing basically the same policy, Reagan and Bush could have never gotten away with gutting the welfare system, let alone ramming through NAFTA and the GATT treaty that gave us the World Trade Organization. But, you get a fuzzy wuzzy yuppie pseudo-liberal in the White House, and you don’t pay as much attention, at least not until Seattle and Philadelphia and all. So Reagan and crew got in and didn’t put much regulation on business, "they just can’t function today, unless we let them function any way they want to and get rid of this pesky big government." So instead of big government on our back, we now have big business on our back. They deregulated the laws governing hostile takeovers of companies and mergers etc., so all of a sudden the mass media that used to be at least independently owned isn’t. The mass media used to function as the fourth branch of government, policing the other three by exposing what jackasses they were, but not anymore, now that they have been bought out.

NBC was independently owned, but now it’s owned by General Electric, one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers. This gives GE editorial control over NBC news. Watch NBC news with that in mind the next time there is a military action. Back in the gulf war, NBC and all the rest of them were "rah rah! Those patriot missiles are accurate every time! Isn’t this just like a video game?" (GE manufactures the Patriot missile.) And there were never any protests--according to the news--but actually there were some huge ones, huge enough that they got that war over with, quick.

A good book out on the subject is The Media Monopoly. When the first (edition) came out, it sounded the alarm that 80% of all mass media in the western world--from school books on to movies, music, news broadcasts etc.--was in the hands of about four dozen corporations. Now it is down to just six. So instead of them telling you what's going on, they tell you "shut up and shop." This also leads to lots of news about O.J. Simpson, Jon-Benet Ramsey, Monica Lewinsky, Elian Gonzalez, etc. and not a damn thing about homeless families with less money than Elian's dad in Cuba.

If the My Lai massacre happened today, you wouldn’t even hear about it. Seymour Hirst, who exposed the My Lai massacre, which allegedly Colin Powell helped try and cover up while he was in the Pentagon, exposed another massacre during the Gulf War, only on a bigger scale. A certain General, according to an article in a recent New Yorker magazine, crept up on and fired on people who already surrendered and were marching back to Baghdad on the Highway of Death, two days after the cease fire. They killed hundreds, and possibly thousands of people who had surrendered and were trying to go home. The alleged Generals name is Barry McAfree, who was chosen by Clinton to be our drug czar and is now engineering the 1.3 billion dollars being sent in for military aid to Columbia. Columbia already ranks third in the amount of so-called foreign aid we pour into countries, behind Israel, and Egypt, but now that we’re putting that much money in, it smells like Vietnam or El Salvador at least.

So, basically, the news has been dumbed down by the corporations that bought it out because they don’t want a fourth branch. They don’t want the news showing what the other three branches, let alone their board of directors, is doing. ABC must answer to Mickey Mouse, and CBS is owned by Westinghouse. FOX is owned by "right wing media mogul megalomaniac" from Australia, Rupert Murdoch. The worst form of censorship I think is not Tipper Gore, but what we are deliberately not being told about the corporate media these days. For example, the spin going on at CNN is that the Philadelphia police are doing so great at remaining calm under fire, but not a thing has been mentioned about the 300 people (on August, 5th) still in jail right now and the allegations coming out about physical and mental abuse.
The biggest thing to watch out for now is they’ve got it in for the leaders, or anyone who seems to know what some of the plans are. The head of the Ruckus Society, the ones who train in non-violence and civil disobedience, and hang the big signs on buildings, was pulled off the street by Philly cops while he was walking on a sidewalk alone, and (was) being held for one million dollars bail without one single felony charge being filed. They know damn well that it’s going to take a while to wind back through the courts and be proven unconstitutional and, by then, the head of the Ruckus Society is kept out of the LA protests as well. On top of that, they performed a (very questionable and most likely illegal) preemptive strike against puppet making.

So, it’s no surprise they’re predicting the lowest voter turnout per capita in American History. This is where we come in: there is a strong reason to vote in this election, and there is actually somebody to vote for at the National level, Ralph Nader. I’ve been registered Green for quite awhile because I’m down with what they stand for, and what they’ve accomplished in Europe. Even though they’re not the majority party in Germany, they are part of the ruling coalition in the parliamentary system. So now the social democrats have to adopt some Green ideas, among which, they’re shutting down every nuclear power plant, and by around 2005 all German car manufacturers will be required to take back old cars they’ve made and recycle all the parts. Needless to say, they don’t waste all their tax money on drug wars, star wars, or whatever and that’s part of what the green party stands for.

So imagine my surprise when I got a call in January asking, "do you want to run for president?" (as a Green Party candidate). I was in the middle of being sued by former band members who took me to trial and won damages off me, which I suspect was all started and caused by my refusal to put "Holiday in Cambodia" in a Levis Dockers commercial. But, due to a discrepancy in accounting, which was technically my fault and despite reconciliation, it snowballed into a threat letter from a lawyer. Using this as an opening, they claimed there was a long conspiracy by me, to deny money to the band members, and so they wanted damages for lack of promotion. And guess who’s been hovering around behind the wings: Epitaph.

With that shit going on, I didn’t have time, I couldn’t campaign. Although I decided to leave my name on the ballot of NY and let it go out that I was one of the Green candidates in hopes of drawing more people who had no idea what Ralph Nader and the Green party were, into getting off their butts and voting for badly needed radical change in this country. We had the Green Party convention, and Nader of course got the nomination, but we were both on C-SPAN, and they actually let me give a speech. So, I spoke not on things that are already part of the Green agenda but things that could maybe be added. Like amnesty on all student loans, "If you want to go to school you’ve got to get in debt with student loans so you have no choice but to be a corporate lawyer instead of a radical lawyer, or you better work in a dot com office or you’re never going to pay back your student loans." Also, every sitting governor and every sitting president for the federal offenses can commute all small time non-violent drug offenses to time served and let out over half the prisoners. As well as legalizing a system to eradicate sport utility vehicles.

Now I don’t agree 100% with every single thing every single Green stands for, some of them want to even ban porno for example, and I’m not down with that. But the Greens are the most logical and best chance we’ve got at a powerful electoral alarm to accomplish the same goals that people have been in the streets for in Seattle, D.C., and Philadelphia. After the Reform party faltered by nominating Pat Buchanan, the Greens are in a position to be THE third party, and are not the kind to forget about it after the election. This is a much deeper party spanning several generations, and, if everyone gets off their butts, registers to vote, shows up in the fall and votes Green, that’s it. If they get five percent of the vote, the Greens get matching funds in 2004. This is an example of why if somebody you believe in or a valid issue loses the first time, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost, you’ve expanded the base of the pyramid and that’s your bait to expand the party further next time.

Unfortunately the people most aware of how this works is the religious right, that’s why school vouchers keep appearing on the ballot again, again, and again. Granted public schools often suck, this is just a ploy to get taxpayers to fund religious schools period. But when people like us show up, then ballot issues like medical marijuana pass, rent control passes, and living wage passes. Because I’m down with electoral action and direct action, I think we’re going to need both.

There are other things we can do to counteract corporate power, such as trying to cooperate with their agenda as little as humanly possible. Give them as little money as possible. Stop patronizing chain stores, support music stores run and owned by people who like music, and bookstores owned by people who can read. Fighting corporate power also means not being fundamentalist about it. The problem is that some people get so into being pure and fundamentalist and militant, they see everything in such black and white terms that there only alternative is to go back to what they were in the first place. If you figure out that things always change and find a moral and ethical code that you can actually live with and live up to, you’re less likely to snap a like a rubber band.

Part of what ‘becoming the media’ means is when you find someone spouting Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura or Pat Buchanan, don’t just give up, or dismiss people as stupid rednecks or something. A lot of these people are concerned with the exact same thing we are; this isn’t just Green Party it’s a much wider thing I call the Green Wedge. A wedge issue that everyone is concerned about isn’t left or right it’s top versus the bottom. "Why can’t I put food on the table?" That’s something that everyone is concerned about. The economic boom is a myth in this country. Only half the people in the country can afford to own stock, and only about 1% of those people are really making a killing off the stock market and it’s not trickling down to everybody else its putting more people on the street as welfare benefits get cut. The government’s own statistics say that 80% of the American People haven’t seen anything from this supposed economic boom. Their real income has either stagnated or gone totally down the toilet.

Another important things about voting is to get progressive people on city councils, school boards, and state legislatures. Imagine if the Green Party had just enough people in the legislature that neither the Democrats or Republicans would have a majority, and in order to get anything passed they had to talk turkey to the people who actually gave a damn. That could be in the state legislature, or the congress and that’s possible now without having to switch the Constitution around to a parliamentary system of government, which might be a lot better for us than we’ve got now.

This election cycle is for the shot heard around the world for Greens to get Green people and good people into state legislatures. The people of the radical left are so used to not being listened to that they just bitch to each other and talk down to everyone else because they’re not radical left progressives. But that doesn’t communicate. So let’s not be condescending or talk down to people who are concerned about the same things we are but don’t know it or are channeling it into the wrong direction. As Michael Moore says, "Radicals should get off their high horse and get down with the people and go line dancing."