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Books by Louis Reyes Rivera
Who Pays The Cost (1978) /
This One For You (1983) /
Scattered
Scripture
Bum Rush the Page
(co-editor) /
The Bandana Republic (co-editor)
Sancocho: A Book of Nuyorican Poetry by Shaggy Flores
(edited by Louis Reyes Rivera)
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Support the WGA Strike
New York, Nov. 12, 2007 – The New York Chapter of the
National Writers Union (NWU Local 1981 UAW) calls
upon its members to support and join the picket lines of
the Writers Guild of America (WGA). As well, we urge all
artists and creative cultural workers across the board
to join us in solidarity with the WGA.
The U.S. Constitution originally provided for the
establishment of a federal copyright and patent office
(Article 6, Section 2) that would record (and in
recording, protect) claims of origination regarding the
intellectual and creative property of its citizens .
This specific inclusion into the Constitution was not an
afterthought (as was the Bill of Rights), but an
integral part of this nation's founding principles,
however flawed.
This factor is at the very heart of the current strike
called for by Writers Guild of America (WGA, East and
West). The strike, now entering its second week,
essentially boils down to this – that writers should
receive minimum compensation (residuals, royalties, et
al) whenever and however their original material is used
and/or adapted into other forms of media beyond the one
for which they were initially commissioned to create (be
it play, screenplay, television script, short story,
novel, article, essay, poem, etc.).
In creating any written work, every writer must
consider how best to protect his/her interests in the
process of negotiating (a) exclusive ownership of the
copyright for the given work, (b) the limited leasing of
its inherent production rights (i.e., he dissemination
of the given work), and, (c) the manner in which all
subsidiary rights are to be shared between the creator
and the producer.
Subsidiary rights include every imaginable manner in
which the work is adapted from its original format or
genre into other mediums. That's always been a key
component to published books being translated or adapted
to stage and screen, as it has for musical compositions
being performed, recorded and sold (say, from the
initial live engagement to a 78rpm record to a 33 vinyl
-- and today, to a re-released CD, DVD, iPOD, YouTube,
etc.). At every point, writers must protect their right
to compensatory payments for their works and in relation
to new markets. Thus, not only must writers protect
themselves when negotiating for an adequate advance, but
as well for corresponding payments as royalty and
residual. That's exactly why the NWU was founded. That's
why we
include Contract Advisement as a mainstay.
Today, we
see corporate producers engaging new technologies in
order to repackage and resell a given work (book, song,
performance, television episode, film, etc.). Their
monetary returns are inestimable. And yet, the creator
of the work is not being paid a rightful share of that
surplus income. That's what's at issue here. Those who
create the work must be equitably compensated. It was
their sweat, their creativity that led to
the marketability and the profiteering of that work.
Because we believe that all workers are due their
hire, the NY Chapter of the National Writers Union
stands in solidarity with the Writers Guild of America
in its efforts to reassert that which was long ago
intended into law— the right to claim ownership over our
respective work and, by extension, to be justly
compensated for its use and reuse. We urge our members
to join the picket lines by logging on to
http://www.wgaeast.org/ for daily updates on
picket sites and to join the NWU national letter
campaign to all print and blogsite venues. We further
urge all creative workers across the board to enjoin the
WGA at this most crucial juncture in our history. All of
our potential income is at stake here.
Interested parties should note that WGA picket lines for
Tuesday, November 13, 2007, will set up at the northeast
corner of State Street and Bowling Green, in Manhattan's
Battery Park, from 10am to 2pm, inclusive.
In Solidarity
Louis Reyes Rivera
Chair, New York Chapter, National Writers Union
Louisreyesrivera@aol.com
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Bill Moyers and James Cone (Interview) /
A Conversation with James Cone
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John
Coltrane, "Alabama" /
Kalamu ya Salaam, "Alabama"
/
A Love Supreme
A Blues for the Birmingham Four
/ Eulogy for the Young Victims
/ Six Dead After Church
Bombing
Audio:
My Story, My Song (Featuring blues guitarist Walter Wolfman Washington)
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 16 November 2007
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