Join the Till Family, Emmett Till Legacy Foundation and others in grassroots Campaign for Justice for Trayvon Martin - TheBlackList Pub

Join the Till Family, Emmett Till Legacy Foundation and others in grassroots Campaign for Justice for Trayvon Martin - TheBlackList Pub

vintage photograph

You Need to Know about—C O I N T E L P R O—The FBI's War on Black America

Through a secret program called the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), there was a concerted effort to subvert the will of the people to avoid the rise "of a black Messiah" that would mobilize the African-American community into a meaningful political force.


This documentary establishes historical perspective on the measures initiated by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI which aimed to discredit black political figures and forces of the late 1960′s and early 1970′s.


Combining declassified documents, interviews, rare footage and exhaustive research, it investigates the government's role in the assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Martin Luther King Jr. Were the murders the result of this concerted effort to avoid "a black Messiah"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwdx1ewLBYA

O C C U P Y D C

For the latest news and info about what's happening in McPherson Square http://occupydc.org/

Courtland Milloy's Take on Red Tails

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/red-tails-a-disservice-to-tuskegee-airmen/2012/01/29/gIQAEkHwaQ_story.html

Courtland Milloy stated the movie Red Tails was cartoonish and was a disservice to the Tuskegee airmen. I haven't seen the movie yet, I have, however, posted my reservations about the movie previously (here). But I also stated I would definitely support the movie because of my love and appreciation for black history and because I wanted to celebrate the all black cast in the movie. 


I sort of feel were Milloy's coming from because I kind of had the same reservations initially... Yes it's honorable that Lucas would put up a lot of his own money to get this very important information out to our public, and its a great thing to do, but he's trying to get paid too, don't forget. Money is always the bottom line in America. 


So, I've followed and loved Milloy's smart and insightful commentary for many years on BET news but I've noticed he's been on a steady course going off track in my opinion... and he's starting to sound like a sad, ranting race fool instead. Check out some of the comparisons he made in his article and how he compared the previous roles of the actors in the film and basically made the statement that because of these previous roles, they aren't deemed serious enough for a role in Red Tails. For instance, when he starts to speak of the actors and roles they previously played like say in The Wire:

"...two of whom played street-corner killers and one who was a heroin addict...."

Why should it matter these actors played street corner killers or heroin addicts—does this mean they should be barred from taking other types of roles? or should they just get stereotyped. Tristan Wilds, the character who played Mike—the new Avon Barksdale, one of the street corner killers, also has a recurring role on the updated Beverly Hills 90210 show. Instead of complaining about what types of characters these actors previously played, just focus on how they played their roles in the movie... He did the same thing with Terrance Howard by comparing his performance in Hustle and Flow (which I thought was one of his best roles) with his role as Benjamin Davis

"...Davis stood 6-foot-4 and weighed in at a trim 200 pounds. Terrence Howard, who sang “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” in the movie “Hustle and Flow,” hardly fills those shoes..."

If Terrence Howard can play a pimp with a mid-life crisis like Djay, and knock that out of the park, and then turn around and play a such disciplined and precise man like Benjamin Davis that should be a credit to his versatility, and he should be commended rather than written off in such a way. 

Yes, while it's true we still have issues of race yet to be resolved in this country, but it's really more of an issue of the economically challenged vs the top percent who earns a large majority of the wealth. Especially nowadays in light of this recession which doesn't discriminate at all, the middle class is quickly shrinking, people who once had economic stability are forced to eat regularly at fast food restaurants. I'm not denying racism like it no longer exists, I'm just saying it isn't as cut dry or as black and white as it used to be. There are a lot of gray areas that Milloy ought to consider.


It's very upsetting to me when people have to put down their own just to prove their point. You don't have to step on your brother's or sister's shoulders to outshine them. It ought to be about unity and working together. You may have the same agenda, and may just have different roads to getting to the same destination. 


It reminds me of Tavis Smiley and Professor Cornell West and how they have a wonderful agenda of eradicating poverty in the US, but they do this at the expense of and by belittling the President of the United States. It's been going on forever; whether you're speaking of opposing ideologies to the same solution; WEB DuBois and Frederick Douglass, Dr. King and El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, or the present-day tag team ofTavis/Cornell and President Obama. IT NEEDS TO STOP!

Miami Dolphin Shines at Pro Bowl

Yeah Brandon! Read this article about the Fintastic performance last nite: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/30/pro-bowl-2012-brandon-marshall-shines-video_n_1241060.html?ref=sports

Don't Be Like Humpty.. Be the Little Train That Could...

Taken from: http://hannahkaty.com/2010/04/23/it-is-days-like-these-that-make-wish-humpty-had-a-formspring/

I spent years of my life skipping over the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme to get to little Miss Muffet. To me, Humpty was pretty weak. Let’s be real, the egg man (or whatever you want to call him) fell off of a wall but then no one, absolutely no one, could put him back together again. Where is the happy ending in that one? What could I possibly learn from good ol’ Humpty?Don’t fall?

Up until just this afternoon was I quite content with erasing him from the nursery rhyme gang altogether. It was not until I fell into the broken shoes of Humpty and fell off my own wall that I realized why he was never put back together again. And so this the question that I would pose to him if we were sitting down for a coffee date: Do you ever make any effort yourself to put yourself back together again? Do you think you deserve to be whole?

Many of us are lucky to have friends and family members who support us. They arrive with tissues and good advice, they leave with wet shoulders and a coffee order that they pulled out of us in between our sobs and wails. They are rarely ever given enough credit for spending countless hours attempting to put as back together again even when we all know the task is impossible. They are the ones who hate to see us hurting and more than that they hate seeing us fall off the same wall over and over again. Each Time More Broken But Swearing We Are Fine. Of course they don’t believe our invincibility but they let us figure things out for ourselves. After all, it is no secret that this is only way.

If advice we were given by the cheerleaders in our lives was actually taken, well then each day would be a sweet and easy piece of strawberry shortcake. Humpty would have been put back together and would have never dared to climb that wall again, Jack and Jill would never think to fetch another pail of water, Miss Muffet, well, she would have learned to get over her arachnophobia. But healing is essential inside of our own selves first before others can make us whole again.

I get Humpty now. I bet he was lying on that ground, his frown still intact, begging all those King’s horses and men to kindly back off. “Guys, let’s be real, you know I am just going to climb up this wall once more and fall off all over again,” he said with a moan, contemplating just how he might climb back on his wall and NOT fall this time. He, like us, needed to learn the lessons on his own, to experience the pain on his own, to come to a realization on his own that he was never meant to be hanging out on such a treacherous wall all along. And when we come to this realization, that not everything goes our way, that we sometimes fight to lose, that life does not always grant us a happy ending in all cases, then we can finally accept our fall and make a decision to piece ourselves back together.

It would be impossible without our friends and our family. They can certainly help us up after the great fall. But not until we make the decision that we want to get off the ground, that we want to stop climbing the wall, that we would prefer to stay put together as opposed to stumbling and shattering once more. And that takes bravery. That Takes Courage. That takes us making the decision that we are better off and that we are worth more than situations that will continually break our hearts or wear us out.

So today is in memory of poor Humpty for he never came to the same great realization. He never decided that he was worth it enough to be put back together and for that reason no one could help him enough. But you won’t find me today placing flowers down by his wall in memory of him. But you can find me if you need me, I swear, sitting down next to my friends and finally helping them assemble my own pieces.

Grand Taxonomy of RAP NAMES

The link is also provided so you can take a closer look.

http://blog.kobayashi.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/poster_rappers_1300.jpg

This poster is baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad as hell and very creative, it had to have taken a long time for the designer to research the info and lay this out.... very dope indeed.

The Father of Community Organizing in the U.S.

Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) read about him here: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky

Year of the DRAGON 2012

Happy New Year to all my Chinese kinfolk!

The Road Not Taken

The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

What to Expect in the Upcoming State of the Union Address

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/obama-2012-election_b_1222598.html

Many Democrats are congratulating themselves that the final two in the 2012 Republican field are a stuffed shirt who can't motivate his own base and a wild man who seems to inspire only fundamentalists and Tea Party fanatics. But let's not pop the champagne quite yet.

According to a video sent to supporters Saturday, President Obama is planning to strike a "populist" note in his Tuesday State of the Union Address and in the themes he sounds in his re-election campaign. Obama will pledge "an America where everybody gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share and everybody plays by the same set of rules."

"We can go in two directions. One is towards less opportunity and less fairness," Obama declared in the video, "Or we can fight for where I think we need to go: building an economy that works for everyone, not just a wealthy few."

Obama, say widely reported White House leaks, will double down on promises of tax breaks for manufacturing, job training and education initiatives, other help for the unemployed, and stronger efforts to deal with the foreclosure crisis. All of these, except for the tax breaks, by definition require activist government.

So despite Obama's fervent desire throughout his presidency to surmount ideological divisions, 2012 promises to be a great ideological debate.

If the Republican nominee is Mitt Romney, the general election will pit a president invoking the interests of the 99 percent against a man who for Democratic purposes is the ideal face of the one percent.

Alternatively, if the Republicans nominate Newt Gingrich, we will have a less predictable and more volatile far-right populist invoking cultural resentments to challenge a rather feeble center-left economic populism that seems to be reserved for electoral emergencies.

God knows, we need to re-elect Barack Obama. If the Republican nominee wins, he will probably take with him the House and Senate, as well as the Supreme Court. Today's Republican Party is more reckless, ruthless, and nihilist than anything we've seen in mainstream U.S. politics perhaps ever.

But Obama's new-found economic populism would be a lot more credible if it had been the consistent message and program of his presidency.

Since populism is used to mean different things, including jingoism, let me be clear about how I mean it. To me, populism represents the activist use of government to help the non-rich get a foot on the economic ladder. Populism entails a constructive politics of class, so that the broad majority is mobilized as a counterweight to the political influence of concentrated wealth. In policy terms, economic populism offers a managed form of capitalism necessary to keep a market economy on the rails. Progressive populism, as both a successful economics and politics, was epitomized by Franklin Roosevelt.

Obama's election-year populism is a confession that a message that champions the 99 over the one is good politics. But we needed populist deeds as well as words, beginning January 20, 2009. Instead, we got a continuation of policies to prop up and bail out the banks that caused the financial collapse.

Obama's original team of economic advisers, including Paul Volcker, was shoved aside in favor of set of protégés of Robert Rubin. His newly appointed treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, had worked intimately with Republican Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Republican treasury secretary Hank Paulson to design the bank bailout and put off fundamental bank reform. Imagine Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 turning to Herbert Hoover's economic team, and you get the idea.

Once the key decision was made to bail out rather than break up Wall Street, it became impossible to provide the necessary relief for the mortgage crisis, for fear that bank balance sheets would have to acknowledge their true losses. The economy was condemned to a slow bleed.

As the result of his failure to embrace the reality of economic populism from day one, Obama's election-year rhetorical populism is now in danger of falling flat. Obama would have much more credibility as a populist now if he hadn't surrounded himself with Wall Street advisers and done so much of Wall Street's bidding.

To be sure, there is massive dishonesty and demagoguery in the rhetoric of Gingrich and Romney branding Obama a food-stamp president or blaming Obama for the huge job losses set in motion under George W. Bush. But with the economy still stuck in second gear, this rhetoric will nonetheless resonate with a lot of voters. All it will take is a deepening of the crisis of the Euro, or a spike in the price of oil, and the economic "green shoots" that are finally appearing will be crushed.

Republicans in Congress will block whatever Obama offers. But even if they were to let his program become law, tax breaks, job training programs and greater investment in education are not likely to alter fundamentally what ails the economy and the economic horizons of ordinary people.

Take the case of the crisis in defaults, foreclosures, and housing prices. The administration has lately been working with several state attorneys general to trade a contribution of mortgage relief from the banks in the range of $20-25 billion for a one-time cleanup of the legal mess made by the same banks when they were on their subprime binge. The problem is that the amount of mortgage relief needed to put a floor under the collapse in housing prices is well into the hundreds of billions.

To solve the problem would require a New Deal-scale break-up and recapitalization of several large banks. But the people making economic policy for this administration will not touch that idea with a rake.

Or consider the real manufacturing crisis. As a must-read piece in Sunday's New York Times reports, Apple does nearly all of its manufacturing in Asia because the United States has lost the capacity to provide many of the advanced industrial processes that Apple needs. This is not about education or even about wages, but about entire production systems.

If those jobs were done in the United States at decent wages, according to the Times, the shift would cost consumers about $65 more in the price of an iPhone. But each manufacturing job would generate more than twelve other jobs, and the country would be that much richer.

If the U.S. government were serious about manufacturing, it would be exploring a strategy to bring manufacturing back. China has been taking the United States to the cleaners, with government subsidy of factories, repression of labor, coercion on U.S. companies to transfer sensitive technologies. Companies like GE are only too happy to oblige, thanks to the subsidies and the captive labor force. The administration has belatedly identified China as a potential geo-political threat, but resists acknowledging the economic threat.

Instead, the Administration has proposed a Trans-Pacific Partnership with nine mostly smaller Pacific nations such as Malaysia and Vietnam -- which on balance would make it easier for American companies to outsource production to law-wage countries, easier to ship those products back to the United States, and harder for all participating countries to regulate finance.

China does not figure in the proposed deal, which is modeled on NAFTA. This is a politics in which government serves economic elites and blows off the national interest. It is about as far from economic populism as you can get.

Obama's sometime populism reminds me of the old joke about the man who
prays to the Lord, asking: Why can't I ever win the lottery? And the Lord sends back a message: It would help if maybe you bought a ticket.

This president would be far more believable with a populist message if he had been walking the talk since he first took office.

We are all the political hostages of Obama's mixed messages. We have no choice but to go all out for his re-election. If he fails to win, we will inherit a country in which the Right completes the destruction begun under Reagan and furthered under both presidents Bush. We will have a country with less liberty, less social justice, more extremes of inequality, and democracy itself will be increasingly at risk.

But we also need Obama to win and to govern as a true economic progressive. His failure to do so thus far not only denies the country the broad-based recovery that we need, but blunts a populist appeal that is a natural public response to the hosing that regular people have taken from financial elites. That failure permits cultural anxieties to displace economic ones. As a result, Obama's re-election is only a 50-50 proposition, even against an unstable carnival pitchman like Newt Gingrich or a glass-jawed fraud like Mitt Romney.

Be Responsible is an Understatement!

Jewish American Publisher Faces Criticism for Suggesting Netanyahu Assassinate President Obama


Terrible! Here's what I posted on my FB timeline about this: In a recent interview the author said he had written the piece just to “see what kind of reaction I would get from readers.” That only means he wouldn't have issued an apology if the right people didn't agree with the statement.

It's a crime to threaten the POTUS...
Threatening the President of the United States is a class D felony under United States Code Title 18, Section 871. It consists of knowingly and willfully mailing or otherwise making "any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States."

http://moroccoworldnews.com/2012/01/jewish-american-publisher-faces-criticism-for-suggesting-netanyahu-consider-the-assassination-of-president-obama/23929

Phenomenal Woman (Maya Angelou)

Phenomenal Woman
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And the joy in my feet.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I'm a woman

Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me. 

Woman Work (Maya Angelou)

Woman Work
I've got the children to tend
The clothes to mend
The floor to mop
The food to shop
Then the chicken to fry
The baby to dry
I got company to feed
The garden to weed
I've got shirts to press
The tots to dress
The can to be cut
I gotta clean up this hut
Then see about the sick
And the cotton to pick.

Shine on me, sunshine 
Rain on me, rain
Fall softly, dewdrops
And cool my brow again.

Storm, blow me from here
With your fiercest wind
Let me float across the sky
'Til I can rest again.

Fall gently, snowflakes
Cover me with white
Cold icy kisses and
Let me rest tonight.

Sun, rain, curving sky
Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone
Star shine, moon glow
You're all that I can call my own. 

Still I Rise (Maya Angelou)

Still I Rise
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise