"I don't battle anymore! I uplift motherfuckers!" - GZA
Tuesday, April 12, 2005,1:32 PM
Bankrupt America
Privatization of social security is a road to government abdication, the cause of failed statehood.”
– Henry C.K. Liu, “The Business of Private Security,” AsiaTimes.
Too often lately in Black America, political discourse has become so parochial – so steeped in petty assessments of marginal advantages that might accrue to some portion of “The Race” through tactical slickness or posturing – that it sounds like a discussion of what to wear to the beach when the tsunami hits. The very fact that the question of Black alignment with Republicans is entertained under any circumstances at this historical juncture, is proof that much of the Black leadership class has lost its moorings. While African Americans are diverted by actuarial tables (falsely) purporting to show the merits of privatized Social Security, the Pirates at the helm of the GOP relentlessly pursue their larger agenda: to destroy every structure of government that has usefulness to the public – especially, Black people – in order to clear the way for corporate governance.
If this process is allowed to advance much further, the sea will have truly changed, smashing every mechanism for Black progress and redress of historical grievance, swamping every ancestor-cleared pathway to effective exercise of our collective political will, and rendering our
vaunted solidarity a disconnected impulse with no means of expression.
Of what use is a congressional or state Black political caucus, or Black mayors and city councils, if the state is so enfeebled that it cannot deliver the goods? That’s precisely the strategic objective of those who would “Starve the Beast” – poison the fiscal well with deficits and tax cuts until the federal government cannot deliver popularly desired political goods such as health care, much less help the states and cities provide basic services. Corporations then step into the void – or as much of the needs-market as is profitable – to sell vital services. Elected officials are made superfluous. Black power – or the dream of it – becomes a dead letter.
Social Security – a public prize too fabulously rich to destroy, outright – is to be milked dry by Wall Street under one or another of the privatizing proposals floating around Republican and Democratic Leadership Council circles. “All these proposals have one thing in common,” writes Henry C.K. Liu, Asia Times contributor and chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group, in his series, “World Order, Failed States and Terrorism.” “They all try to change Social Security into social risk. The only party to benefit will be the financial-services industry that provides the investment advice and trades.”
Once entrenched in the system, it will be near-impossible to disentanglement corporations from Social Security without trillions of dollars in indemnification by the federal treasury against corporate “losses.” This is part of what “social risk” – as opposed to private, corporate risk – is all about, and how the public sphere is swallowed whole and irrevocably. Don’t write your congressperson, after-the-fact. She won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.
No goods to deliver
We are witnessing the domestic version of a phenomenon well known in the Third World: the deliberate creation of “failed states,” national governments that have been maneuvered or coerced into impotence by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, trade agreements with the United States – any combination of capital and military coercion. These states have become irrelevant to the needs of their own people and, therefore, in a very real sense, illegitimate. As Henry C..K. Liu explains, such states cannot deliver the goods:
“Failed states provide only substandard political goods, if any at all. Weak failed states involuntarily forfeit, and strong failed states do so voluntarily, the responsibility for delivering political goods, and leave it to non-state actors, i.e. the private sector through the market mechanism. Privatization of the public sector is more than the outsourcing of state functions. It is the selling off of state prerogatives.”
The Bush regime has summoned the failed state chicken home to roost, with a vengeance, as it attempts to strip away every social obligation of the state to the people. However, the legitimacy of American governments at all levels has long been eroding, as defined by their capacity to provide political goods to the citizenry. For decades, heavily Black cities have busily sold off their “prerogatives” – their assets, tax bases and sovereign powers – to corporations or regional authorities. (See the five-part series, “A Plan for the Cities to Save Themselves,” beginning August 14, 2003.) Forty years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, the act of voting becomes ever more irrelevant to people’s everyday lives.
Even the coercive organs of the state – prisons, policing, the military – pass rapidly into private hands, evidence of advanced state failure. And no one should doubt that the American Gulag, comprising one quarter of the world’s prison inmates, half of them Black, is prima facie proof of massive state failure – a government that delivers incarceration, rather than liberty, to a huge portion of its citizens.
“Another political good,” writes Liu, “is the provision of universal health care and education, the maintenance of a vibrant economy of full employment at living wages that will allow workers to afford decent housing and secure retirement, and a clean environment, without which all rhetoric about liberty becomes irrelevant.” These are, in fact, fundamental attributes and aspirations of civilization as it has evolved in modern times. Add a heavy emphasis on justice and the right to self-determination, and one arrives at a general description of the historical Black Political Agenda, now under massive assault by the Bush regime.
The Black Agenda has always required state (federal) intervention to redress the harms inflicted on African Americans by both public and private tormentors. It is through the public sphere – our ceaseless struggle to forge a more just society – that African Americans have developed a unique world view and political consensus. Ours was the vision that brought two revolutions in the national life – post-Civil War Reconstruction and the reluctant 1960s leap into modern civilization. Arrayed against us, were the forces of private power: first, the private power of the slave master, which almost caused the United States to fail, then white supremacist “states’ rights,” which severed African Americans from the protections of the federal government and Constitution, exposing southern Blacks to every exploitive and terrorist whim of any white man.
Projects of Black “self-help” were inevitably circumscribed – penned in and shrunken – in the absence of state enforced norms of justice and equality. When the state is caused to fail we are left naked to the Beast. American history teaches us that.
African Americans have always strived for “a more perfect union” – a national state that achieves legitimacy by exercising its “prerogatives” and powers in service of the populace. Our gift to the southern states was enormous. “For both races, Reconstruction laid the foundation for public schooling in the South,” says the Digital History site. “Before the Civil War, only North Carolina among Southern states had established a comprehensive system of education for white children. During Reconstruction, public education came to the South.”
Today, corrupt and mercenary Black voucher advocates assist in the final failure of public education, an indispensable pillar of state legitimacy. Their guru is rightwing economist Milton Friedman, who plots a different kind of Reconstruction. “Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system – i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools.”
Friedman’s (and Bush’s) “failed state” intentions are clear: “Vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system,” he wrote in 1995, the period when corporate money made the strategic decision to intervene massively in internal Black politics. The current GOP offensive among African Americans – attacking public education with vouchers, bribing preachers with faith-based funding, and undermining Social Security with the specter of prematurely dead Black men – is a product of that historical moment. Republicans seek Black recruits in their project to “fail” the American state.
BET founder Bob Johnson, the first African American billionaire, is an eager propagandist for his class interest, which is totally inimical to the historical Black Political Agenda. After all, what’s a billionaire need a state for, other than to lock up those who might try to rob him? “I take my money, I take my chances,” Johnson told a Capitol Hill hearing on Social Security, urging other Blacks to do the same by endorsing privatized Social Security accounts. “If I hit big over a 30-year period…it’s my money, I get to deal with it… My advocacy is, let there be risk, let there be a reward opportunity.”
Why is the billionaire even in this conversation? What stake does he have in maintaining the bare minimums of a national social contract among citizens, now that he has negotiated his own contract with his corporate fellows – “my money.”
Bob Johnson will be on high ground when the tsunami bears down on us. We don’t have time to waste. The American state is failing.
---------------------------------------------------------------
So what does this report mean for you and me? Basically it means we can no longer rely on our upper class Brothas and Sistas to maintain their supposed integrity when it comes the helping raise the standard of living as a whole for us colored people. The same critisim that Nas displayed for Kobe and Cuban Gooding (aka sellout Coons) can be applied to many of our cultural and economic leaders. The green eyed devil which runs the lives of our oppressors, has deeply penetrated the souls of our unelected interim leaders, making them just as much a part of the problem as the police. To make things worse their has never been a worse time for the working poor (aka most of the Latino/Black population) since "good old senile" Reagan. We cannot support the Republicans! but the Democrats are by default of weakness just as worthless to us!
So what can we do you ask? All we can do is learn our history, forgive our elders for not realizing that civil rights was not the end all of our struggles as a people, and show the same strength they did when it comes to demanding or freedoms and rights denied us now for economic reasons instead of racial ones
Until next time
Peace
-R J Noriega
– Henry C.K. Liu, “The Business of Private Security,” AsiaTimes.
Too often lately in Black America, political discourse has become so parochial – so steeped in petty assessments of marginal advantages that might accrue to some portion of “The Race” through tactical slickness or posturing – that it sounds like a discussion of what to wear to the beach when the tsunami hits. The very fact that the question of Black alignment with Republicans is entertained under any circumstances at this historical juncture, is proof that much of the Black leadership class has lost its moorings. While African Americans are diverted by actuarial tables (falsely) purporting to show the merits of privatized Social Security, the Pirates at the helm of the GOP relentlessly pursue their larger agenda: to destroy every structure of government that has usefulness to the public – especially, Black people – in order to clear the way for corporate governance.
If this process is allowed to advance much further, the sea will have truly changed, smashing every mechanism for Black progress and redress of historical grievance, swamping every ancestor-cleared pathway to effective exercise of our collective political will, and rendering our
vaunted solidarity a disconnected impulse with no means of expression.
Of what use is a congressional or state Black political caucus, or Black mayors and city councils, if the state is so enfeebled that it cannot deliver the goods? That’s precisely the strategic objective of those who would “Starve the Beast” – poison the fiscal well with deficits and tax cuts until the federal government cannot deliver popularly desired political goods such as health care, much less help the states and cities provide basic services. Corporations then step into the void – or as much of the needs-market as is profitable – to sell vital services. Elected officials are made superfluous. Black power – or the dream of it – becomes a dead letter.
Social Security – a public prize too fabulously rich to destroy, outright – is to be milked dry by Wall Street under one or another of the privatizing proposals floating around Republican and Democratic Leadership Council circles. “All these proposals have one thing in common,” writes Henry C.K. Liu, Asia Times contributor and chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group, in his series, “World Order, Failed States and Terrorism.” “They all try to change Social Security into social risk. The only party to benefit will be the financial-services industry that provides the investment advice and trades.”
Once entrenched in the system, it will be near-impossible to disentanglement corporations from Social Security without trillions of dollars in indemnification by the federal treasury against corporate “losses.” This is part of what “social risk” – as opposed to private, corporate risk – is all about, and how the public sphere is swallowed whole and irrevocably. Don’t write your congressperson, after-the-fact. She won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.
No goods to deliver
We are witnessing the domestic version of a phenomenon well known in the Third World: the deliberate creation of “failed states,” national governments that have been maneuvered or coerced into impotence by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, trade agreements with the United States – any combination of capital and military coercion. These states have become irrelevant to the needs of their own people and, therefore, in a very real sense, illegitimate. As Henry C..K. Liu explains, such states cannot deliver the goods:
“Failed states provide only substandard political goods, if any at all. Weak failed states involuntarily forfeit, and strong failed states do so voluntarily, the responsibility for delivering political goods, and leave it to non-state actors, i.e. the private sector through the market mechanism. Privatization of the public sector is more than the outsourcing of state functions. It is the selling off of state prerogatives.”
The Bush regime has summoned the failed state chicken home to roost, with a vengeance, as it attempts to strip away every social obligation of the state to the people. However, the legitimacy of American governments at all levels has long been eroding, as defined by their capacity to provide political goods to the citizenry. For decades, heavily Black cities have busily sold off their “prerogatives” – their assets, tax bases and sovereign powers – to corporations or regional authorities. (See the five-part series, “A Plan for the Cities to Save Themselves,” beginning August 14, 2003.) Forty years after passage of the Voting Rights Act, the act of voting becomes ever more irrelevant to people’s everyday lives.
Even the coercive organs of the state – prisons, policing, the military – pass rapidly into private hands, evidence of advanced state failure. And no one should doubt that the American Gulag, comprising one quarter of the world’s prison inmates, half of them Black, is prima facie proof of massive state failure – a government that delivers incarceration, rather than liberty, to a huge portion of its citizens.
“Another political good,” writes Liu, “is the provision of universal health care and education, the maintenance of a vibrant economy of full employment at living wages that will allow workers to afford decent housing and secure retirement, and a clean environment, without which all rhetoric about liberty becomes irrelevant.” These are, in fact, fundamental attributes and aspirations of civilization as it has evolved in modern times. Add a heavy emphasis on justice and the right to self-determination, and one arrives at a general description of the historical Black Political Agenda, now under massive assault by the Bush regime.
The Black Agenda has always required state (federal) intervention to redress the harms inflicted on African Americans by both public and private tormentors. It is through the public sphere – our ceaseless struggle to forge a more just society – that African Americans have developed a unique world view and political consensus. Ours was the vision that brought two revolutions in the national life – post-Civil War Reconstruction and the reluctant 1960s leap into modern civilization. Arrayed against us, were the forces of private power: first, the private power of the slave master, which almost caused the United States to fail, then white supremacist “states’ rights,” which severed African Americans from the protections of the federal government and Constitution, exposing southern Blacks to every exploitive and terrorist whim of any white man.
Projects of Black “self-help” were inevitably circumscribed – penned in and shrunken – in the absence of state enforced norms of justice and equality. When the state is caused to fail we are left naked to the Beast. American history teaches us that.
African Americans have always strived for “a more perfect union” – a national state that achieves legitimacy by exercising its “prerogatives” and powers in service of the populace. Our gift to the southern states was enormous. “For both races, Reconstruction laid the foundation for public schooling in the South,” says the Digital History site. “Before the Civil War, only North Carolina among Southern states had established a comprehensive system of education for white children. During Reconstruction, public education came to the South.”
Today, corrupt and mercenary Black voucher advocates assist in the final failure of public education, an indispensable pillar of state legitimacy. Their guru is rightwing economist Milton Friedman, who plots a different kind of Reconstruction. “Such a reconstruction can be achieved only by privatizing a major segment of the educational system – i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools.”
Friedman’s (and Bush’s) “failed state” intentions are clear: “Vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system,” he wrote in 1995, the period when corporate money made the strategic decision to intervene massively in internal Black politics. The current GOP offensive among African Americans – attacking public education with vouchers, bribing preachers with faith-based funding, and undermining Social Security with the specter of prematurely dead Black men – is a product of that historical moment. Republicans seek Black recruits in their project to “fail” the American state.
BET founder Bob Johnson, the first African American billionaire, is an eager propagandist for his class interest, which is totally inimical to the historical Black Political Agenda. After all, what’s a billionaire need a state for, other than to lock up those who might try to rob him? “I take my money, I take my chances,” Johnson told a Capitol Hill hearing on Social Security, urging other Blacks to do the same by endorsing privatized Social Security accounts. “If I hit big over a 30-year period…it’s my money, I get to deal with it… My advocacy is, let there be risk, let there be a reward opportunity.”
Why is the billionaire even in this conversation? What stake does he have in maintaining the bare minimums of a national social contract among citizens, now that he has negotiated his own contract with his corporate fellows – “my money.”
Bob Johnson will be on high ground when the tsunami bears down on us. We don’t have time to waste. The American state is failing.
---------------------------------------------------------------
So what does this report mean for you and me? Basically it means we can no longer rely on our upper class Brothas and Sistas to maintain their supposed integrity when it comes the helping raise the standard of living as a whole for us colored people. The same critisim that Nas displayed for Kobe and Cuban Gooding (aka sellout Coons) can be applied to many of our cultural and economic leaders. The green eyed devil which runs the lives of our oppressors, has deeply penetrated the souls of our unelected interim leaders, making them just as much a part of the problem as the police. To make things worse their has never been a worse time for the working poor (aka most of the Latino/Black population) since "good old senile" Reagan. We cannot support the Republicans! but the Democrats are by default of weakness just as worthless to us!
So what can we do you ask? All we can do is learn our history, forgive our elders for not realizing that civil rights was not the end all of our struggles as a people, and show the same strength they did when it comes to demanding or freedoms and rights denied us now for economic reasons instead of racial ones
Until next time
Peace
-R J Noriega
Sunday, April 10, 2005,6:44 PM
Originally written by Amiri Baraka about his feelings on Thearte it was denied publishing both by the New York Times and the Village Voice. It has been edited by myself to be more of a mirror of current times mores and values so as to reach a broader audience...........hopefully it will do the original work justice.
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The Revolutionary Music should force change, it should be change. (All their faces turned into the lights and you work on them black nigger magic, and cleanse them at having seen the ugliness and if the beautiful see themselves, they will love themselves.) We are preaching virtue again, but by that to mean NOW, what seems the most contructive uses of the world.
The Revolutionary Music must EXPOSE! Show up the insides of these humans, look into black skulls. Because they have been trained to hate. The Revolutionary Music must hate them for hating. For presuming with their technology to deny the supremacy of the Spirit. They will all die because of this.
The Revolutionary Music must teach them their deaths. It must crack their faces open to the mad cries of the poor. It must teach them about silence and the truths lodged there. It must kill any God anyone names except common Sense. The Revolutionary Music should flush the fags and murders out of Lincoln's face.
It should stagger through our universe correcting, insulting, preaching, spitting craziness . . . but a craziness taught to us in our most rational moments. People must be taught to trust true scientists (knowers, diggers, oddballs) and that the holiness of life is the constant possibility of widening the consciousness. And they must be incited to strike back against any agency that attempts to prevent this widening.
The Revolutionary Music must Accuse and Attack anything that can be accused and attacked. It must Accuse and Attack because it is a theatre of Victims. It looks at the sky with the victims' eyes, and moves the victims to look at the strength in their minds and their bodies.
KRS in "I got Next", Public Enemy in "it takes a Nation", to Immortal Technique "Revolutionarys Part II" are all victims. In the Western sense they could be heroes. But the Revolutionary Music, even if it is Western, must be anti-Western. It must show horrible coming attractions of The Crumbling of The West. Even as Artaud designed The Conquest of Mexico, so we must design The Conquest of White Eye, and show the missionaries and wiggly Liberals dying under blasts of concrete. For sound effects, wild screams of joy, from all the peoples of the world.
The Revolutionary Music must take dreams and give them a reality. It must isolate the ritual and historical cycles of reality. But it must be food for all these who need food, and daring propaganda for the beauty of the Human Mind. But it is a political Music, a weapon to help in the slaughter of these dimwitted fat-bellied white guys who somehow believe that the rest of the world is here for them to slobber on.
This should be a Music of World Spirit. Where the spirit can be shown to be the most competent force in the world. Force. Spirit. Feeling. The language will be anybody's, but tightened by the poet's backbone. And even the language must show what the facts are in this consciousness epic, what's happening. We will talk about the world, and the preciseness with which we are able to summon the world, will be our art. Art is method. And art, "like any ashtray or senator" remains in the world. Wittgenstein said ethics and aesthetics are one. I believe this. So the Hot 97 and MTV2 is a Music provider of reaction whose ethics like its aesthetics reflects the spiritual values of this unholy society, which sends young crackers all over the world blowing off colored peoples heads. (In some of these flippy southern towns they even shoot up the immigrants' Favorite Son, be it Michael Schwerner or J.F. Kennedy.)
The Revolutionary Music is shaped by the world, and moves to reshape the world, using as its force the natural force and perpetual vibrations of the mind in the world. We are history and desire, what we are, and what any experience can make us.
is a social Music, but all Music is social Music. But we will change the drawing rooms into places where real things can be said about a real world, or into smoky rooms where the destruction of Washington can be plotted. The Revolutionary Music must function like an incendiary pencil planted in Chuck D's cap. So that when the final curtain goes down brains are splattered over the seats and the floor, and bleeding nuns must wire SOS's to Belgians with gold teeth.
What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our "problems." The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as "things." Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, and use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image's use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.
The popular white man's Music like the popular white man's novel shows tired white lives, and the problems of eating white sugar, or else it herds big caboosed blondes onto huge stages in rhinestones and makes believe they are dancing or singing. WHITE BUSINESSMEN OF THE WORLD, DO YOU WANT TO SEE PEOPLE REALLY DANCING AND SINGING??? ALL OF YOU GO UP IN HARLEM AND GET YOURSELF KILLED. THERE WILL BE DANCING AND SINGING, THEN, FOR REAL! (In The Slave, Walker Vessels, the black revolutionary, wears an armband, which is the insignia of the attacking army . . . a big redlipped minstrel, grinning like crazy.)
The liberal white man's objection to the Music of the revolution (if he is "hip" enough) will be on aesthetic grounds. Most white Western artists do not need to be "political," since usually, whether they know it or not, they are in complete sympathy with the most repressive social forces in the world today. There are more junior birdmen fascists running around the West today disguised as Artists than there are disguised as fascists. (But then, that word, Fascist, and with it, Fascism, has been made obsolete by the word America, and Americanism. The American Artist usually turns out to be just a super-Bourgeois, because, finally, all he has to show for his sojourn through the world is "better taste" than the Bourgeois . . . many times not even that.
Americans will hate the revolutionary Music because it will be out to destroy them and whatever they believe is real. American cops will try to close the Music where such nakedness of the human spirit is paraded. American producers will say the revolutionary Music are filth, usually because they will treat human life as if it was actually happening. American Music Critics will say that the white guys in the Music Videos are too abstract and cowardly ("don't get me wrong . . . I mean aesthetically . . .") and they will be right.
The force we want is of twenty million spooks storming America with furious cries and unstoppable weapons. We want actual explosions and actual brutality; AN EPOCH IS CRUMBLING and we must give it the space and hugeness of its actual demise. The Revolutionary Music, which is now peopled with victims, will soon begin to be peopled with new kinds of heroes . . . not the weak Hamlets debating whether or not they are ready to die for what's on their minds, but men and women (and minds) digging out from under a thousand years of "high art" and weakfaced dalliance. We must make an art that will function as to call down the actual wrath of world spirit. We are witchdoctors, and assassins, but we will open a place for the true scientists to expand our consciousness. This is a Music of assault. The Sound that will split the heavens for us will be called THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA. The heroes will be Crazy Horse, Denmark Vessey, Patrice Lumumba, but not history, not memory, not sad sentimental groping for a warmth in our despair; these will be new men, new heroes, and their enemies most of you who are reading this.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is a link to the actual essay that was written by Baraka himself
http://www.umich.edu/~eng499/documents/baraka1.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Revolutionary Music should force change, it should be change. (All their faces turned into the lights and you work on them black nigger magic, and cleanse them at having seen the ugliness and if the beautiful see themselves, they will love themselves.) We are preaching virtue again, but by that to mean NOW, what seems the most contructive uses of the world.
The Revolutionary Music must EXPOSE! Show up the insides of these humans, look into black skulls. Because they have been trained to hate. The Revolutionary Music must hate them for hating. For presuming with their technology to deny the supremacy of the Spirit. They will all die because of this.
The Revolutionary Music must teach them their deaths. It must crack their faces open to the mad cries of the poor. It must teach them about silence and the truths lodged there. It must kill any God anyone names except common Sense. The Revolutionary Music should flush the fags and murders out of Lincoln's face.
It should stagger through our universe correcting, insulting, preaching, spitting craziness . . . but a craziness taught to us in our most rational moments. People must be taught to trust true scientists (knowers, diggers, oddballs) and that the holiness of life is the constant possibility of widening the consciousness. And they must be incited to strike back against any agency that attempts to prevent this widening.
The Revolutionary Music must Accuse and Attack anything that can be accused and attacked. It must Accuse and Attack because it is a theatre of Victims. It looks at the sky with the victims' eyes, and moves the victims to look at the strength in their minds and their bodies.
KRS in "I got Next", Public Enemy in "it takes a Nation", to Immortal Technique "Revolutionarys Part II" are all victims. In the Western sense they could be heroes. But the Revolutionary Music, even if it is Western, must be anti-Western. It must show horrible coming attractions of The Crumbling of The West. Even as Artaud designed The Conquest of Mexico, so we must design The Conquest of White Eye, and show the missionaries and wiggly Liberals dying under blasts of concrete. For sound effects, wild screams of joy, from all the peoples of the world.
The Revolutionary Music must take dreams and give them a reality. It must isolate the ritual and historical cycles of reality. But it must be food for all these who need food, and daring propaganda for the beauty of the Human Mind. But it is a political Music, a weapon to help in the slaughter of these dimwitted fat-bellied white guys who somehow believe that the rest of the world is here for them to slobber on.
This should be a Music of World Spirit. Where the spirit can be shown to be the most competent force in the world. Force. Spirit. Feeling. The language will be anybody's, but tightened by the poet's backbone. And even the language must show what the facts are in this consciousness epic, what's happening. We will talk about the world, and the preciseness with which we are able to summon the world, will be our art. Art is method. And art, "like any ashtray or senator" remains in the world. Wittgenstein said ethics and aesthetics are one. I believe this. So the Hot 97 and MTV2 is a Music provider of reaction whose ethics like its aesthetics reflects the spiritual values of this unholy society, which sends young crackers all over the world blowing off colored peoples heads. (In some of these flippy southern towns they even shoot up the immigrants' Favorite Son, be it Michael Schwerner or J.F. Kennedy.)
The Revolutionary Music is shaped by the world, and moves to reshape the world, using as its force the natural force and perpetual vibrations of the mind in the world. We are history and desire, what we are, and what any experience can make us.
is a social Music, but all Music is social Music. But we will change the drawing rooms into places where real things can be said about a real world, or into smoky rooms where the destruction of Washington can be plotted. The Revolutionary Music must function like an incendiary pencil planted in Chuck D's cap. So that when the final curtain goes down brains are splattered over the seats and the floor, and bleeding nuns must wire SOS's to Belgians with gold teeth.
What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our "problems." The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as "things." Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, and use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image's use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.
The popular white man's Music like the popular white man's novel shows tired white lives, and the problems of eating white sugar, or else it herds big caboosed blondes onto huge stages in rhinestones and makes believe they are dancing or singing. WHITE BUSINESSMEN OF THE WORLD, DO YOU WANT TO SEE PEOPLE REALLY DANCING AND SINGING??? ALL OF YOU GO UP IN HARLEM AND GET YOURSELF KILLED. THERE WILL BE DANCING AND SINGING, THEN, FOR REAL! (In The Slave, Walker Vessels, the black revolutionary, wears an armband, which is the insignia of the attacking army . . . a big redlipped minstrel, grinning like crazy.)
The liberal white man's objection to the Music of the revolution (if he is "hip" enough) will be on aesthetic grounds. Most white Western artists do not need to be "political," since usually, whether they know it or not, they are in complete sympathy with the most repressive social forces in the world today. There are more junior birdmen fascists running around the West today disguised as Artists than there are disguised as fascists. (But then, that word, Fascist, and with it, Fascism, has been made obsolete by the word America, and Americanism. The American Artist usually turns out to be just a super-Bourgeois, because, finally, all he has to show for his sojourn through the world is "better taste" than the Bourgeois . . . many times not even that.
Americans will hate the revolutionary Music because it will be out to destroy them and whatever they believe is real. American cops will try to close the Music where such nakedness of the human spirit is paraded. American producers will say the revolutionary Music are filth, usually because they will treat human life as if it was actually happening. American Music Critics will say that the white guys in the Music Videos are too abstract and cowardly ("don't get me wrong . . . I mean aesthetically . . .") and they will be right.
The force we want is of twenty million spooks storming America with furious cries and unstoppable weapons. We want actual explosions and actual brutality; AN EPOCH IS CRUMBLING and we must give it the space and hugeness of its actual demise. The Revolutionary Music, which is now peopled with victims, will soon begin to be peopled with new kinds of heroes . . . not the weak Hamlets debating whether or not they are ready to die for what's on their minds, but men and women (and minds) digging out from under a thousand years of "high art" and weakfaced dalliance. We must make an art that will function as to call down the actual wrath of world spirit. We are witchdoctors, and assassins, but we will open a place for the true scientists to expand our consciousness. This is a Music of assault. The Sound that will split the heavens for us will be called THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA. The heroes will be Crazy Horse, Denmark Vessey, Patrice Lumumba, but not history, not memory, not sad sentimental groping for a warmth in our despair; these will be new men, new heroes, and their enemies most of you who are reading this.
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Here is a link to the actual essay that was written by Baraka himself
http://www.umich.edu/~eng499/documents/baraka1.html
,6:42 PM
soulful contemplation
In the Funk World
If Elvis Presley/ is King
Who is James Brown,God?
-Amiri Baraka
If Elvis Presley/ is King
Who is James Brown,God?
-Amiri Baraka
Saturday, April 09, 2005,5:08 AM
carnival of blood
Massacre in Rio!
Writer Unknown
Violence is a part of life in this slum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Shootings are common and death squads of former and off-duty police officers, funded by local businessmen, are known to knock off undesirables.
But even by the brutal standards of Nova Iguacu, last week's massacre of 30 people apparently by a band of rogue policemen was shocking, starting with the severed head thrown over the gate of a police station.
"It's beyond shocking really," said Tim Cahill, a researcher from the London office of the human rights group Amnesty International who arrived to investigate the slayings. "It just shows how cheap human life has become." And yet the March 31 bloodbath failed to create much of a stir in Rio, partly because it was eclipsed by the pope's death _ Brazil is predominantly Roman Catholic _ and partly because people are accustomed to bad news coming out of trash-strewn slums like Nova Iguacu, which is in the poor, gritty Baixada Fluminense section of the city, a full 20 miles away from Rio's picturesque beaches.
"Without a doubt, the news of the death of the pope took on such vast proportions that this horrible fact was somewhat forgotten," said Rev. Luciano Bergamin, bishop of Nova Iguacu. "We have to forget the death of the pope a little and make sure these facts don't repeat themselves."
So-called police death squads have been operating with impunity in Baixada for 25 years, locals and human rights groups say. "Everybody knows death squads operate here, most people even know the names of the people associated with them," Lindbergh Farias, mayor of Nova Iguacu, said in a radio interview following the killings.
So far, 12 current or former police officers have been arrested and eight of them have been charged with murder. Four allegedly did the shooting; the others provided backup. According to State Security Secretary Marcelo Itagiba, they were upset over the arrest of eight fellow officers caught on video dumping the bodies of two men, both suspected criminals, outside a police station and throwing the head of one decapitated victim over the gate.
The first shots were fired at a sidewalk bar, killing nine people, including several shirtless teens left lying in a pool of blood around a video game machine. Most of the victims were shot in the head and chest at relatively close range, medical examiners said.
The killers next chased two men who ran across the street down a dead end alley and finished them off there. Then they picked off two men riding bicycles on their way to the neighboring town of Queimados, where they killed 12 more people in two different spots, apparently at random. "The first incident didn't really surprise me. That's the kind of thing death squads do," said Inacio Cano, who teaches at the Laboratory for Violence Analysis at Rio de Janeiro's Federal University.
"But for them to imagine they could kill 30 people and get away with it. They must have killed so many people over the years that they lost track of scale." Just miles away, in Rio's wealthier suburbs, residents seemed largely unconcerned about the tragedy, reflecting the deep divide between the rich and poor. Few affluent residents ever set foot in the mostly black community of Baixada, where the murder rate is about 50 percent higher than the state average.
Residents endure three-hour bus and train rides to work at low-paying jobs on Rio's upscale south side. Two police massacres in 1993 _ the Candelaria massacre, in which police killed eight people when they opened fire on at least 40 street children sleeping in front of a cathedral, and the Vigario Geral massacre that left 21 people dead _ generated far more attention because they occurred in downtown Rio.
Rio Mayor Cesar Maia said he didn't believe the brutality would harm the city's image or have any impact on its hosting of the 2007 Pan American Games because they were unprecedented and "because there is no reasonable expectation they will be repeated." "
The barbarous crimes cause indignation and revulsion but they don't create a sense of everyday risk," Maia told the Associated Press. Among the victims was 19-year-old Jonas Lima da Silva, who had popped out to get some cigarettes and never came home. Standing over his grave, Silva's grief-stricken mother seemed to say that poverty was to blame. "If this was a middle-class kid, I wouldn't be here," wailed his mother, Rosa Maria da Silva. "If this were the governor's son, they would have already caught the killers."
------------------------------------------------------------------
How can these death squads operate with no scrutiny by the global community. The movie "City Of God" was truly artful because it showed films immitating life. Which is all the more relevent because of one simple fact. It could of been any neighborhood in any country where these gang wars could of erupted. The ultimate result of what these "conservative" anti social assistance ideologies.
- R J Noriega
Writer Unknown
Violence is a part of life in this slum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Shootings are common and death squads of former and off-duty police officers, funded by local businessmen, are known to knock off undesirables.
But even by the brutal standards of Nova Iguacu, last week's massacre of 30 people apparently by a band of rogue policemen was shocking, starting with the severed head thrown over the gate of a police station.
"It's beyond shocking really," said Tim Cahill, a researcher from the London office of the human rights group Amnesty International who arrived to investigate the slayings. "It just shows how cheap human life has become." And yet the March 31 bloodbath failed to create much of a stir in Rio, partly because it was eclipsed by the pope's death _ Brazil is predominantly Roman Catholic _ and partly because people are accustomed to bad news coming out of trash-strewn slums like Nova Iguacu, which is in the poor, gritty Baixada Fluminense section of the city, a full 20 miles away from Rio's picturesque beaches.
"Without a doubt, the news of the death of the pope took on such vast proportions that this horrible fact was somewhat forgotten," said Rev. Luciano Bergamin, bishop of Nova Iguacu. "We have to forget the death of the pope a little and make sure these facts don't repeat themselves."
So-called police death squads have been operating with impunity in Baixada for 25 years, locals and human rights groups say. "Everybody knows death squads operate here, most people even know the names of the people associated with them," Lindbergh Farias, mayor of Nova Iguacu, said in a radio interview following the killings.
So far, 12 current or former police officers have been arrested and eight of them have been charged with murder. Four allegedly did the shooting; the others provided backup. According to State Security Secretary Marcelo Itagiba, they were upset over the arrest of eight fellow officers caught on video dumping the bodies of two men, both suspected criminals, outside a police station and throwing the head of one decapitated victim over the gate.
The first shots were fired at a sidewalk bar, killing nine people, including several shirtless teens left lying in a pool of blood around a video game machine. Most of the victims were shot in the head and chest at relatively close range, medical examiners said.
The killers next chased two men who ran across the street down a dead end alley and finished them off there. Then they picked off two men riding bicycles on their way to the neighboring town of Queimados, where they killed 12 more people in two different spots, apparently at random. "The first incident didn't really surprise me. That's the kind of thing death squads do," said Inacio Cano, who teaches at the Laboratory for Violence Analysis at Rio de Janeiro's Federal University.
"But for them to imagine they could kill 30 people and get away with it. They must have killed so many people over the years that they lost track of scale." Just miles away, in Rio's wealthier suburbs, residents seemed largely unconcerned about the tragedy, reflecting the deep divide between the rich and poor. Few affluent residents ever set foot in the mostly black community of Baixada, where the murder rate is about 50 percent higher than the state average.
Residents endure three-hour bus and train rides to work at low-paying jobs on Rio's upscale south side. Two police massacres in 1993 _ the Candelaria massacre, in which police killed eight people when they opened fire on at least 40 street children sleeping in front of a cathedral, and the Vigario Geral massacre that left 21 people dead _ generated far more attention because they occurred in downtown Rio.
Rio Mayor Cesar Maia said he didn't believe the brutality would harm the city's image or have any impact on its hosting of the 2007 Pan American Games because they were unprecedented and "because there is no reasonable expectation they will be repeated." "
The barbarous crimes cause indignation and revulsion but they don't create a sense of everyday risk," Maia told the Associated Press. Among the victims was 19-year-old Jonas Lima da Silva, who had popped out to get some cigarettes and never came home. Standing over his grave, Silva's grief-stricken mother seemed to say that poverty was to blame. "If this was a middle-class kid, I wouldn't be here," wailed his mother, Rosa Maria da Silva. "If this were the governor's son, they would have already caught the killers."
------------------------------------------------------------------
How can these death squads operate with no scrutiny by the global community. The movie "City Of God" was truly artful because it showed films immitating life. Which is all the more relevent because of one simple fact. It could of been any neighborhood in any country where these gang wars could of erupted. The ultimate result of what these "conservative" anti social assistance ideologies.
- R J Noriega
Wednesday, April 06, 2005,11:13 AM
their is powers in labels
C-Murder Changes Name, NAACP Files Lawsuit
By Remmie Fresh and Nolan Strong
Much has been made of C-Murder’s (Corey Miller) suggestive name, but the rapper has adjusted the moniker after being convicted in the shooting death of a 16 year old. He will now be called C. Miller, based on his real name.
While he’s proclaimed his innocence, he said that the general public has never known the true meaning behind his rap handle. "I am not a murderer," he said in a statement.
"From the beginning, I have been a target because of who I am, my stage name and for my success as an entertainer and the success of my siblings. People hear the name C-Murder and they don't realize that the name simply means that I have seen many murders in my native Calliope projects neighborhood,” said the rapper.
A retrial of Miller’s murder case was recently overturned and he now faces a mandatory life sentence. He and his lawyer, Ron Rakosky, are in the process of appealing the decision according to the Associated Press.
Additionally, the NAACP is plotting a federal lawsuit for Miller, because they say his lack of a retrial violates his civil and constitutional rights.
"Corey Miller is entitled to a new trial. The fact of the matter is Corey Miller was tried, found guilty and sentenced based on the testimony of witnesses who admittedly perjured themselves," Miller's attorney, Ron Rokosky said. "There is no physical evidence in this case. We requested a new trial. A judge reviewed the case finding countless legal errors and in the interest of justice she ordered a new trial ultimately overturning his conviction. Even though this judge acted properly, the Appellate Court is still denying Miller a new trial, which has never been done before in the history of Louisiana law and is a clear violation of Miller's civil and constitutional rights."
Millers lawyers and the NAACP will announce what step to take next, while Miller once again denied the murder charges.
"I formally change my stage name to C Miller, the first initial of my name and my legal last name, in hopes that I can finally receive justice," Miller said. "I am not asking for any special treatment or favors, I just want what is due to me... a fair and impartial trial."
C Miller's latest album release THE TRUEST S*** I EVER SAID debuted at #1 on the Billboard Independent Chart.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What no one is mentioning is the fact that C Murder's older brother is Multi-Millionaire
Master P whose monetary resources can afford his brother the legal counsel to force the government to treat him fairly. If C Murder (who choice of stage name is without a doubt one of the most self incriminating rap tag's in history) was without his older brother's money would he receive this help in getting a second chance. America's Criminal System is still not functioning on a fair scale when it comes to people of lower class minority backgrounds!
By Remmie Fresh and Nolan Strong
Much has been made of C-Murder’s (Corey Miller) suggestive name, but the rapper has adjusted the moniker after being convicted in the shooting death of a 16 year old. He will now be called C. Miller, based on his real name.
While he’s proclaimed his innocence, he said that the general public has never known the true meaning behind his rap handle. "I am not a murderer," he said in a statement.
"From the beginning, I have been a target because of who I am, my stage name and for my success as an entertainer and the success of my siblings. People hear the name C-Murder and they don't realize that the name simply means that I have seen many murders in my native Calliope projects neighborhood,” said the rapper.
A retrial of Miller’s murder case was recently overturned and he now faces a mandatory life sentence. He and his lawyer, Ron Rakosky, are in the process of appealing the decision according to the Associated Press.
Additionally, the NAACP is plotting a federal lawsuit for Miller, because they say his lack of a retrial violates his civil and constitutional rights.
"Corey Miller is entitled to a new trial. The fact of the matter is Corey Miller was tried, found guilty and sentenced based on the testimony of witnesses who admittedly perjured themselves," Miller's attorney, Ron Rokosky said. "There is no physical evidence in this case. We requested a new trial. A judge reviewed the case finding countless legal errors and in the interest of justice she ordered a new trial ultimately overturning his conviction. Even though this judge acted properly, the Appellate Court is still denying Miller a new trial, which has never been done before in the history of Louisiana law and is a clear violation of Miller's civil and constitutional rights."
Millers lawyers and the NAACP will announce what step to take next, while Miller once again denied the murder charges.
"I formally change my stage name to C Miller, the first initial of my name and my legal last name, in hopes that I can finally receive justice," Miller said. "I am not asking for any special treatment or favors, I just want what is due to me... a fair and impartial trial."
C Miller's latest album release THE TRUEST S*** I EVER SAID debuted at #1 on the Billboard Independent Chart.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What no one is mentioning is the fact that C Murder's older brother is Multi-Millionaire
Master P whose monetary resources can afford his brother the legal counsel to force the government to treat him fairly. If C Murder (who choice of stage name is without a doubt one of the most self incriminating rap tag's in history) was without his older brother's money would he receive this help in getting a second chance. America's Criminal System is still not functioning on a fair scale when it comes to people of lower class minority backgrounds!