Black Slam Style

blackfoxx:

One day we are going to talk about how everyone uses the poetry reciting Slam Style of Black folks for effect and punch. Like that is pretty much the standard now…. I dont know if I have a problem with it persay… But much like everything thing else I feel like that will be forgotten and folks will be talking about its universal and American. I need it to be known that that style comes from Black pain, rage, and triumph….

Politicians have a slightly different information diet. They spend more time gleaning information from lobbyists and rich donors whose concerns and opinions graft themselves onto representatives as easily as the pithiest economists’ opinions attach themselves to me. If politicians naturally gravitate to the issues rich folks want to talk about, it doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them normal people in a broken system that elevates polarization — both between parties and between the priorities of high-income and low-income families — while subtly concealing the issues that most affect Americans who cannot afford a lobbyists’ luncheon or a number on a congresswoman’s speed-dial. The centrality of big money in politics makes it nearly impossible for an issue like long-term unemployment to buy a sliver of mindshare. Our priorities are shaped not only by the stories we choose to believe, but also the stories we happen to hear, from the ideas we give a hearing …
Why Washington Saved the Economy, Then Permanently Destroyed the Labor Market (via azspot)

“There is a divide within the [Republican] party,” says Samuel Thernstrom, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality and is now a scholar of environmental policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “The position that climate change is a hoax is untenable.”

A concerted push has begun within the party—in conservative think tanks and grassroots groups, and even in backroom, off-the-record conversations on Capitol Hill—to persuade Republicans to acknowledge and address climate change in their own terms. The effort will surely add heat to the deep internal conflict in the years ahead.

Republicans have been struggling with an identity crisis since the 2012 presidential election. In particular, the nation’s rapid demographic changes are forcing the GOP to come to terms with the newly powerful influence of Hispanic voters and to confront the issue of immigration. For now, climate change isn’t getting anywhere close to that kind of urgent scrutiny from Republicans, at least not in public. GOP strategists say that Republican candidates hoping to win primary races, where the electorate tends to be older and more ideologically driven, are still best served to deny, ignore, or dismiss climate change.

Today, a Republican candidate “wouldn’t be able to win a primary with a Jon Huntsman position on this,” says strategist Glen Bolger.

The problem is, as polling data and the changing demographics of the American electorate show, it’s likely that the position that can win voters in a primary will lose voters in a general election. Some day, though, the facts—both scientific and demographic—will force GOP candidates to confront climate change whether they want to or not.

The Coming GOP Civil War Over Climate Change: Science, storms, and demographics are starting to change minds among the rank and file | Coral Davenport | National Journal 

Last week I canvassed with OSPIRG for a day to promote ending subsides for agribusinesses like Monsanto. While doing so I had the chance to meet with what had to have been several die hard Republicans, one of which told me his idea of what best to do with the Eco-movement was to ‘nuke the whales.’ Over the past four decades the reputation of the Green Left has been successfully painted as more ideological than sensible. Those before you and I were radical hippies and treehuggers, all dismissed as conspiracists or lazy anti-business commies. That image lingers on today. In fact it remains a huge obstacle to what has always been sensible logic—you don’t shit where you eat. Polluting the planet is outright suicide, maybe not for our generation but indeed for our children.

Well hindsight is 20/20, or it’s supposed to be. After thousands upon thousands of studies confirming our species’ impact on our planetary ecosystem, it is now the Right that panders to outdated, uncompromising ideology without any regard the sensible. As the article above illustrates, those Republicans willing to recognize the science of climate change are the start of a deepening fissure within their party because climate change flies in the face of how the Christian Right and the irrationally pro-business alike view the planet. For the Christian Right it means deviating from the narrative that Earth and all within it was purposely placed here for the service of our species. For the latter it means relenting on profit, which translates into the loss of growth and income, and therefor power for the few who have it.

israelfacts:

A Health Ministry inspector poured bleach over pots full of food in a Sudanese restaurant in Tel Aviv Sunday night.

The inspector, from the ministry’s district office for Tel Aviv, was participating in a raid by police and municipal inspectors on illegal businesses owned by African migrants. Altogether, the raid shut down 10 businesses in the city’s Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood, confiscating their equipment and welding the doors shut. The equipment was then loaded onto vans by other African migrants who had been hired as contract workers.

Many diners saw the inspector pouring bleach on the food, and one, asylum-seeker Aladin Abaker from Sudan’s Darfur region, posted photos of the incident on his Facebook page. He also described his feelings of humiliation.

“Everyone − except the destroyers − was in tears from the humiliation,” he wrote. “The waitress told us, ‘I’ve seen very harsh things in my life, like torture in Sinai, but this humiliated me more than what happened to me in Sinai.”

Abaker accused the inspector of “insensitivity to people and their culture, which sees food as a sacred thing that must be respected,” and said the raid was aimed at “embittering our lives so we’ll return to Africa ‘voluntarily.’”

Altogether, he said, more than 200 kilograms of meat, chicken and fish and over 500 prepared meals were destroyed.

The inspectors said they didn’t know where the meat came from and therefore feared for the diners’ health, Abaker wrote. “We told them: But this is the only place we’ve eaten all our meals for four years now, and none of us ever had stomach problems. Even whites eat here.”

The Health Ministry responded that inspectors had discovered “deplorable sanitary conditions, food stored under unsuitable conditions and temperatures, and food from unknown sources. In order to preserve the public’s health and that of the diners themselves, it was decided to destroy the food immediately. As part of the process of destroying the food, chemicals suitable to this purpose are used. It should be noted that this was a routine process of food destruction that is no different from other destructions of food/meat.”

Tel Aviv’s deputy city manager, Ruby Zelof, said the raids were carried out “to eradicate the undesirable phenomenon of businesses operating illegally, with sanitation and safety problems and illegal connections to electricity and water, and sales of alcoholic beverages without permits.”

Haaretz | Photo credit: Aladin Abaker

Israel is deporting Africans and also planning to put tens of thousands into detention camps.

Knesset Member Miri Regev — a member of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party — called the refugees “a cancer in our body” and Danny Danon — also a Likud Knesset Member — wrote on his Facebook page referring to the Africans as “infiltrators”. Interior Minister Eli Yishai said the African asylum seekers threaten “the Zionist dream,” adding, “Jobs will root them here.”

See also:

israelfacts

The IRS is under siege for investigating conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status. But the real problem wasn’t that the IRS was too aggressive. It was that the agency focused on the wrong people—“none of those groups were big spenders on political advertising; most were local Tea Party organizations with shoestring budgets,” writes The New York Times—and wasn’t aggressive enough. The outrage that Washington should be talking about—what my colleague Chris Hayes calls “the scandal behind the scandal”—is how the Citizens United decision has unleashed a flood of secret spending in US elections that the IRS and other regulatory agencies in Washington, like the Federal Election Commission, have been unwilling or unable to stem.


501c4 “social welfare” groups like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform—which don’t have to disclose their donors—spent more than $250 million during the last election. “Of outside spending reported to the FEC, 31 percent was ‘secret spending,’ coming from organizations that are not required to disclose the original sources of their funds,” writes Demos. “Further analysis shows that dark money groups accounted for 58 percent of funds spent by outside groups on presidential television ads [$328 million in total].”

IRS guidelines for 501c4 groups state that “the promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office…a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity.” It’s ludicrous for groups like Crossroads GPS—which spent at least $70 million during the last election—to claim that its primary purpose is not political activity. Only the likes of Karl Rove would believe that running attack ads against President Obama qualifies as social welfare.

IRS Fallout: The Real Scandal Is Secret Money Influencing US Elections

(via jayaprada)

mohandasgandhi:

mochente:

Bill Maher is taken apart by Glenn Greenwald for trying to absolve the US from any responsibility for the mass slaughter and destruction in Muslim countries, blaming it on Islamic fundamentalism, as if the Afghanistan and Iraq wars never happened, as if the US wasn’t pushing for more war in Iran, as if it isn’t intervening in Somalia and Yemen.

Wow, what a great week. Bill Maher is being humiliated left and right. Maybe there is some justice in the world…

mochente

If we don’t create a solution to the enormous potential gap between our inherent demand for energy and the availability of energy we will have the nastiest and last war we’ll ever fight.
Matthew Simmons, An oil man reconsiders the future of black gold (via perscientiamlibertas)

vivelecanada.ca

amodernmanifesto: Made rebloggable Solidarity.

amodernmanifesto:

Made rebloggable

Solidarity.

Humans, the dumbest smart species on Earth.

Humans, the dumbest smart species on Earth.

There were 74 schools that showed a return of $1 million or more on the investment in an education, while 30 schools had a negative return on investment—meaning the cost of attending was more than what the students would make up with increased wages, even over a 30-year period.
Is college worth it? It depends on where you go. (via pacificstand)

pacificstand

nuestrahermana:

Malcolm X: Make It Plain (Full PBS Documentary) 

anarcho-queer: America Only Gets Outraged About Gun Violence In White Neighborhoods On 24 April in the town where I live, a wonderful town that I love, a woman was shot to death in front of her four-year-old son, Joshua. According to authorities, she was a college student. A young woman, obviously invested in education, undoubtedly with dreams of a good life for herself and her child, struck down. It’s a sad story, a tragedy worthy of deep sorrow and serious reflection about gun violence and gun policy, especially when added to the fact that it was the fourth fatal shooting in my town in a week. Despite the obvious potential of such a story to poke at the hearts and minds of anyone who hears about it, most people won’t hear about it. It won’t get in the 24-hour news cycle. And it certainly will not spark a national debate about gun control. Why? Because the woman who was killed, Donitra Henderson, was a black woman and she died on a street corner in Oakland, a predominantly black and Latino town, in front of her black child. Gun violence affects black and Latino people in poor, inner-city neighborhoods on a regular basis. As The Washington Post reported, black people are 10 times more likely to be killed by a gun crime, and yet our deaths by gun are much less likely to result in national conversations in which liberals and conservatives duke it out over the second amendment. We become statistics, just one more added to the number of gun deaths in the US in a particular year, and that’s all. As I wrote in my recent blog post, “Hey, White liberals: A Word On the Boston Bombings, the Suffering of White children, and the Erosion of Empathy,” if you’re not white, your tragic death doesn’t feel quite as tragic to the American media or the collective American conscience, which are inextricably linked. It does not inspire the kind of national outrage and grief that white deaths, and especially middle-class and affluent white deaths, inspire. There is a certain level of indifference in this country to the deaths of people of color. But there is also a double standard in the narrative around gun violence, depending on where it takes place and who is affected by it. When it happens to wealthy white folks in the suburbs, it’s a tragedy visited upon those who didn’t deserve it. When it happens to black and Latino people in a city, it’s our own fault. Take, for example, President Obama’s speech in Chicago about gun violence where he talked about policy change, but also focused a lot on the structure of the black family, saying: “There’s no more important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families – which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood.” Compare that to speeches he made following the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, a predominantly white area, where a gunman murdered 26 people, including 20 children. The president never connected the violence there with the structure of anybody’s family or with the failure of any white parents. Even though the shooter, Adam Lanza, was raised by a single mother. Instead, he promised the people of Newtown that lawmakers would stand beside them and create policy to protect them. Those are two very different messages. One reason this double standard is so easy to apply is that the question of why gun violence happens so much in inner cities is brushed over or ignored. There are many factors: the effects of racism on individuals and communities, failed education systems, high unemployment, etc. These are rarely discussed in connection to gun violence on a national level. Without that connection, and thus with no greater social ills to help explain it, it’s seen simply as the fault of the people who live in those places, as if they have some inherent defect in their families and their communities. And because it’s our fault and not, as in the case of violence against middle-class white people, a national tragedy, it does not warrant a national conversation. This double standard leads to the further devaluing of black and Latino lives. It also contributes to the sporadic nature of the national gun control conversation itself. Because gun control is only talked about on a national level when multiple murders happen in affluent white places, it’s talked about a few times a year at most. If the conversation were shifted to include the tragedies of people in the inner city, if our lives were valued enough by the American media and the collective US conscience to warrant that conversation, it would be an ongoing debate. Maybe then it would at least have a chance at leading to some actual change. Which would be great. Especially for those of us who are most often affected by it.

anarcho-queer:

America Only Gets Outraged About Gun Violence In White Neighborhoods

On 24 April in the town where I live, a wonderful town that I love, a woman was shot to death in front of her four-year-old son, Joshua. According to authorities, she was a college student.

A young woman, obviously invested in education, undoubtedly with dreams of a good life for herself and her child, struck down. It’s a sad story, a tragedy worthy of deep sorrow and serious reflection about gun violence and gun policy, especially when added to the fact that it was the fourth fatal shooting in my town in a week. Despite the obvious potential of such a story to poke at the hearts and minds of anyone who hears about it, most people won’t hear about it. It won’t get in the 24-hour news cycle. And it certainly will not spark a national debate about gun control. Why? Because the woman who was killed, Donitra Henderson, was a black woman and she died on a street corner in Oakland, a predominantly black and Latino town, in front of her black child.

Gun violence affects black and Latino people in poor, inner-city neighborhoods on a regular basis. As The Washington Post reported, black people are 10 times more likely to be killed by a gun crime, and yet our deaths by gun are much less likely to result in national conversations in which liberals and conservatives duke it out over the second amendment. We become statistics, just one more added to the number of gun deaths in the US in a particular year, and that’s all.

As I wrote in my recent blog post, “Hey, White liberals: A Word On the Boston Bombings, the Suffering of White children, and the Erosion of Empathy,” if you’re not white, your tragic death doesn’t feel quite as tragic to the American media or the collective American conscience, which are inextricably linked. It does not inspire the kind of national outrage and grief that white deaths, and especially middle-class and affluent white deaths, inspire.

There is a certain level of indifference in this country to the deaths of people of color. But there is also a double standard in the narrative around gun violence, depending on where it takes place and who is affected by it. When it happens to wealthy white folks in the suburbs, it’s a tragedy visited upon those who didn’t deserve it. When it happens to black and Latino people in a city, it’s our own fault.

Take, for example, President Obama’s speech in Chicago about gun violence where he talked about policy change, but also focused a lot on the structure of the black family, saying:

“There’s no more important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families – which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood.”

Compare that to speeches he made following the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, a predominantly white area, where a gunman murdered 26 people, including 20 children. The president never connected the violence there with the structure of anybody’s family or with the failure of any white parents. Even though the shooter, Adam Lanza, was raised by a single mother. Instead, he promised the people of Newtown that lawmakers would stand beside them and create policy to protect them. Those are two very different messages.

One reason this double standard is so easy to apply is that the question of why gun violence happens so much in inner cities is brushed over or ignored. There are many factors: the effects of racism on individuals and communities, failed education systems, high unemployment, etc. These are rarely discussed in connection to gun violence on a national level.

Without that connection, and thus with no greater social ills to help explain it, it’s seen simply as the fault of the people who live in those places, as if they have some inherent defect in their families and their communities. And because it’s our fault and not, as in the case of violence against middle-class white people, a national tragedy, it does not warrant a national conversation.

This double standard leads to the further devaluing of black and Latino lives. It also contributes to the sporadic nature of the national gun control conversation itself. Because gun control is only talked about on a national level when multiple murders happen in affluent white places, it’s talked about a few times a year at most.

If the conversation were shifted to include the tragedies of people in the inner city, if our lives were valued enough by the American media and the collective US conscience to warrant that conversation, it would be an ongoing debate. Maybe then it would at least have a chance at leading to some actual change. Which would be great. Especially for those of us who are most often affected by it.

anarcho-queer

Identifying as a person of color in solidarity with other people of color says ‘hey, my people have been oppressed by White people, maybe in a different time and space than your people, but we can work in solidarity.’ The identification needs to carry some degree of humility, and a deeper commitment to allyship . The POC umbrella is not an excuse to disavow the ways we benefit from various racial structures and sit idly by as our communities reap advantages from racism towards other people of color.

Black-Asian solidarity in the US, for instance, is hard to find and it will continue to be difficult to build if we continue to use the uncritical ‘POC’ label. Rather, we can use ‘POC’ as a way of reflecting on our different racial histories and building coalitions in our struggles and their difference. POC is a term for building solidarity between movements, not a movement in itself. That distinction is important.

Janani, Assistant Editor, Black Girl Dangerous. Read the whole thing here. (via filnana)

“How do we, as politicized people of color, acknowledge the very limits of the term ‘people of color’ and the way it can mask our actual racial situations?  For example, why do we keep using the phrase ‘communities of color’ as targets of police and state violence when we primarily mean Black and Latino folks?  What races are we trying to contain in the word ‘brown’?  Why are we afraid to point to the specificities of racism?  Do we think it will divide us?  Do we think we are really not capable of understanding and working from the different ways we experience racism?” (via nepantlastrategies)

filnana

sulitati: I know I made a post about this a while ago, but I’m going to make it again since we’re getting into the hottest time of the year. If you’re out in the Sonoran Desert in AZ and you see any of these [bottles with insults], please pick them up and throw them away. Vigilante groups are leaving intentionally empty gallon jugs in popular crossing points and that is the last thing that somebody needs to see as they’re trying to cross. If you can, carry clean and full jugs with you and leave them where you see these. Gatorade or Electrolit are also really good for re-hydration. Contact Humane Borders if you meet anyone in need of medical attention.

sulitati:

I know I made a post about this a while ago, but I’m going to make it again since we’re getting into the hottest time of the year.

If you’re out in the Sonoran Desert in AZ and you see any of these [bottles with insults], please pick them up and throw them away. Vigilante groups are leaving intentionally empty gallon jugs in popular crossing points and that is the last thing that somebody needs to see as they’re trying to cross.

If you can, carry clean and full jugs with you and leave them where you see these. Gatorade or Electrolit are also really good for re-hydration.

Contact Humane Borders if you meet anyone in need of medical attention.

sulitati

safercampus

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