Past Featured Post
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| According to the popular narrative, hip-hop grew out of gang culture in the South Bronx. One of its pioneers - gang leader Afrika Bambaataa, who had turned his life around - used hip-hop to get people out of gangs and into something more positive. Bambaataa had led the Black Spades in the Bronx River Houses project before deciding to take his followers in a new direction, first by forming "the Organization. " Later, after learning about the Zulus of South Africa, who fought colonial rule, Bambaataa transformed the Organization into the Mighty Zulu Nation, now known as the Universal Zulu Nation. It remains not only the oldest but the largest hip-hop organization, with chapters on every continent and tens of thousands of members. |
| What brought the democratic era to an end was a split between the communists and the social democrats, i.e., the left and the near left and the liberals, which permitted Hitler’s National Socialists in a coalition with the conservatives and nationalists to win the election, even though the left-center coalition had more voters objectively. It was the split which allowed the right to consolidate power. There is no way Obama is even in the presidential race condemning Israel or embracing Cuba. Not to know this is not to know where you are or where you have been for the last 40 years. |
| Times are tougher economically in this country than perhaps they've been for quite a long time. We've all seen the stats -- median income has declined by almost $2,500 over the past seven years, we have a zero personal savings rate in America for the first time since the Great Depression, and 5 million people have slipped below the poverty level since the beginning of the decade. And stats aside, most everyone out there knows what the deal is. |
| "Today's reality is harsh. But what's even harder for many to accept and admit is that our quality of life today is the making of the Democratic and Republican Parties. What our country has become through their public policy is reflective of their values. We will never get a United States that is reflective of different values if we continue to do the same thing. Those who delivered us into this mess cannot be trusted to get us out of it. That's why I signed up to do something I've never done before so I can have something I've never had before: My country, made in the likeness of the values of the Green Party." |
| Helms' death Friday, at age 86, brings America a small step closer to the end of the post-antebellum era in our politics that saw the men who had battled to deny the franchise to millions of Americans because of the color of their skin -- and who fought even more aggressively to deny adequate education, nutrition and health care to African-American children -- make the easy transition to leadership positions in the "modern" Republican Party. |
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