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marvin x experience ona move

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2nd Annual Passion Africa Fashion Show, Friday, June 9, 7:30PM, Berkeley Technology Academy, 2701 MLK, Jr. Way


Berkeley World Music Festival, Friday, June 9, La Pena's, 8pm
Saturday,June 10,MLK Jr. Civic Center Park, noon --6pm
Sunday, June 11, People's Park, 1-6pm





Lola's African Night and fashion Show, June 17, 9pm., Miliki Restaurant, Oakland
 Male, Female and Child Models are needed for the Lola's African Apparel Fashion Show in Oakland at Miliki Restaurant on Saturday June 17th. 




Berkeley Juneteenth, Sunday, June 18, 11AM-7PM, Alcatraz and Adeline, Berkeley. 

for more information: www.blackbirdpressnews.blogspot.com 
See The Movement www.bambd.org




This event is to honor and uplift our Black and African community. We will be showcasing the richness and diversity of the Black and African culture through food, dance, music, and fashion. We will be collaborating with Black and African businesses to help give them a platform in the community while encouraging people to purchase products and services from them. This event as a whole will unify and bring together communities who may feel that they are alone or marginalized in this era of gentrification. We will encourage standing together, standing tall, and working together to make our community flourish.


call to oakland city hall: increase arts and culture funding

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Dear OCNC Members:

Two weeks ago OCNC members along with with the Refund Coalition showed up strong and prepared to tell our elected officials how they should invest in arts, housing, and jobs - budget for the town. We waited until 12AM to get in front of our city councilmembers. Exhausted and frustrated the process we stood firm on our demands to prioritize communities. We have another chance to make our voices heard. They need to keep feeling our energy!!
FRIDAY, JUNE 9TH --
THUNDERCLAP ACTION!!
Let your voice be heard!
 
FRIDAYJUNE 9TH -- OCNC will be using THUNDERCLAP to amplify our message nationwide around arts and culture as a racial and economic justice strategy. We will be sending out details this Friday asking you to join our campaign.

What is Thunderclap? - Thunderclap is the first-ever crowdspeaking platform that helps people be heard by saying something together, ALL AT ONCE. It allows a single message to be mass-shared, flash mob-style, so it rises above the noise of your social networks.
 
TOOLKIT for Friday, June 9th:
Sign Up for our Thunderclap Campaign by Friday (6/9), 12 noon (email to come with more details). These talking points can be used to drive more personal posts on FB, Twitter, IG, etc.
MONDAY, JUNE 12TH --
SPECIAL BUDGET MEETING!!

MONDAY, JUNE 12th -- a day of action, performances and civic engagement at City Hall's Special Budget Meeting at City Hall. We are asking supporters and members to come to City Hall at 4pm for a rally and participate in the meeting’s open forum.
AGENDA for Monday, June 12th:
4:00-4:45pm
  • Rally outside of City Hall - Lineup of performances and speakers take place.
4:45-5:30pm
  • Enter City Hall to pack chambers and sign up for Open Forum and additional agenda items as people's time permits.
5:30pm
  • Special Budget meeting begins. Open Forum starts (first 15 people who are signed up get called up first!)
6:00pm
  • Agenda items begin.

We are asking all members to turn out in big numbers at Monday's City Council meeting!RSVP on Facebook and invite all of your friends and family!

We have a few t-shirts left so arrive on time to get one!

If you haven't already done so, fill out a speaker card.
For a speaker card, go to 
https://solar.oaklandnet.com/Speaker/form.
1) Put  "Open Forum" in as the agenda item you wish to speak on.
2) Don't forget to check YES in the form under "Wish to speak"
3) Remember, even if you can't speak, you can cede your time to others who can!

 
Use these Talking Points to drive home the point that during this time of crisis, we NEED MORE INVESTMENT IN OAKLAND'S PEOPLE #FORTHECULTURE

Make your elected officials say YES to more
arts and culture funding to 
#KeepOaklandCreative!
FIRESIDE CHAT WITH #REGULARSONLY
OCNC had the pressure of meeting with some of Oakland's local tastemakers this past Saturday. We teamed up with @RegularsOnly to host a Fireside chat where we broke  bread and discussed ways we can share effort to ensure we have a voice in the future of Oakland's art scene, and beyond.

We are currently working on a social media strategy that we'll be sharing with you in the coming weeks. Please be on the look out!

Take a look at OCNC's budget policy memo here. We have be sharing this with Oakland’s elected officials.
 
If you have any questions, please send an email to keepoaklandcreative@gmail.com
  
Be on the look out for regular reminders and updates on developments with the budget process.
  
Until soon!
#KEEPOAKLANDCREATIVE





all eyez on me

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The Fanfare and National Scope to Support the Challenges of Tupac Movie by  Bennie Boom


By Maurice Brian Henderson 


Not often has there been a clarion call, a hearkening and lyceum for people, viewers and patrons to proceed with action.  Bennie Boom's soon to be released movie on Tupac Shakur entitled "All Eyez on Me" is surely the suggest to do so. 
The value proposition is that it is important to support this film as the opus reconsideration of Black males as Endangered Species and America Most Wanted.  I know that this is the period of enlightenment which warrants a film like this as a social paradigm  shifting.  It is the circumstance of work left undone  

I stress the belief that Black Lives Matter and "All Eyez on Me" is the summation that Hip Hop has, still and will always matter as a fact floundering and missing pages of black males as a species and gender.  

I have known Bennie Boom from his student enrollment at Temple University and his Philly tenure which included a peer group of prominent figures such as Grammy Award winner Jill Scott and Tony Awardwinner Black Ice.  As a faculty member in Temple University's Pan-African Studies/ Community Education Program, I was blessed to have a leading role in his senior year film  project that also featured Lois Moses, bestselling, awardwinning and critically acclaimed writer of books, films, plays and spoken recordings. The need assessment is for everybody, everyplace, elsewhere and anyhow of local, national and abroad to become talking heads and agent provocateurs for this purposeful film that will be released on June 16th which is three days before the annual emancipation celebration of Juneteenth dateline of June 19th.  This film should not be referred to as the refrain and lasting namesake of failure such as the most recent Broadway play that mainstream and hip hop generational audiences refused to attend during its brief theatrical stint on the Great White Way of New York.

Let all of us  be diligent, dutiful and participatory in contacting all of our friends, family members, constituents, neighbors, comrades, colleagues, associates, co-workers, siblings, relatives and offspring about the importance of this literary and cinematography expression presented by Bennie Boom. You still have time to make a call, text, email and even go the official website and download promotional material to post in the hangouts of bars, barbershops, beauty salons, laundromats, supermarkets, pool halls and other frequent and routine gathering places. The internet is the distinctive factor to explore the significance of this film especially through the footnotes provided in social media analysis "7 Revelations about the Tupac Shakur Biopic from Director Bennie Boom." Lets make sure that we put the word out as most importance through social fabrics of tweet, facebook, instagram and all other connectors to listserves, websites, chat sites, meet-up groups, etc.

Lets use all of our current strands of outreach to motivate those contingent of groups, organizations, facilities, centers, secret societies, institutions and bodies of socialization to put the word out about this landmark and pivotal historical event when Bennie Boom's film "All Eyez on Me"is released on June 16, 2017.  Check the internet and go to the official website of the film or its director and keep them posted of your progressive intentions

******************************************************


Maurice Henderson is a Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Public Health Initiatives and a nationally syndicated columnist. As the Founder of the National Black Arts Spoken Word Tour, he created and produced the critically acclaimed national touring production entitled "To Be Young, Black and Gifted with Rap." He can be reached at (267) 230-0317 or mauricebrianhenderson@yahoo.com

black arts movement events calendar

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The Black Arts and Culture Calendar is back!
6/1-6/17- Hela- The Live Oak Theater- Time Varies
6/1-6/3- The 10th annual Rafiki Coalition Black Health and Healing Summit- 601 Cesar Chavez Street- Time Varies
6/2- LyricsLounge 510- MLK Cafe- 9 PM
6/3- Take Back our Streets: Community Breakfast- 9 AM
6/3- Father Daughter Dinner Dance-Geoffrey's Inner Circle- 6PM
6/3- Oakland Carnival and Wellness Festival- Mosswood Park- 12 PM
6/3- Millsmont Farmers Market -7700 Mountain blvd- 9 AM
6/6- Speak Easy- Berkeley Repertory- 7PM (Every Tuesday)
6/6- The Oakland Queer+ Trans Open Mic-440 Grand Ave- 6PM
6/8- Black Fatherhood Film: Oakland Screening- Oakstop- 6PM
6/11- Talk of the Town: NLC Oakland's Community Building Forum- Greenlining Institute- 10 am
6/14- Nights at the Libertine- The Libertine Oakland- 8PM
6/14- Take Back Our Streets: Speaking Against Violence- Youth Uprising- 5 PM
6/16- Diner Maison Noire: Dinner + Conversation w/ Mame-Fatou Niang- Bissap Baobab Oakland - 7PM
6/17- African Nights- Miliki Restaurant- 9PM
6/17- Juneteenth Celebration: Friends of the Negro Spirituals- West Oakland Public African American Museum and Library at Oakland- 1 PM
6/17- 1st Annual Oaktown Reggae Festival
6/17- Soulful 70’s Party- Geoffrey's Inner Circle- 8 PM
6/17- 6/18- Zuvaa Pop up Shop- Oakstop- Time Varies
6/18- 30th Annual Berkeley Juneteenth Festival- 11 AM
6/24- The Oakland African Initiative Expo- Omni Community Center- 6 PM
6/25- Oakland Juneteenth- 3233 Market st- 11 AM
*All events are subject to change, check directly on sites for cost, update in location and times*
Did we miss your event? Don't let it happen again!

we love africa

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This event is to honor and uplift our Black and African community. We will be showcasing the richness and diversity of the Black and African culture through food, dance, music, and fashion. We will be collaborating with Black and African businesses to help give them a platform in the community while encouraging people to purchase products and services from them. This event as a whole will unify and bring together communities who may feel that they are alone or marginalized in this era of gentrification. We will encourage standing together, standing tall, and working together to make our community flourish.

All Eyez on Me Trailer #1 (2017) | Movieclips Trailers


Demetrius Shipp Jr on Playing Tupac in Movie “All Eyez On Me” And More! ...

2pac Shakur died broke says Afeni Shakur Interview

FINALLY TUPAC SHAKURS MURDERERS CONFESSES

Hell No, We STILL Ain't Going: 50 Years of Peace and Pan-African Coalitions

Black Bird Press News & Review: Hurriyah Asar at Black Love Lives Conference

James Brown and Dr. Nathan Hare on the Good Foot

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Marvin,

To answer your question, that’s part of what messed us up. Say you’re orthodox, as most people are, that means you dance or box or do anything with the right foot (we’re not talking of the wrong fit just now) backing you up, leading with the other. For most people they are starting with or pivoting off their left foot, for others it’s just the reverse but no matter, because they are doomed to comply or deal with other people coming from an orthodox approach, meaning they’re doubly challenged (as they say of people retarded). So you think of your right foot as your good foot, but for many of us it’s injured or sore, so we think of the other one as our good (not injured or sore) foot; and some of us don’t have a good foot at all, and ain’t had it for years, many injured in childhood without access to adequate medical care; so all of that just goes double. Then we might get to using the other foot as our good foot, i.e., our backup foot, until the other one heals; and just thinking of which foot is good (if neither is) confuses us again. So getting on the good foot gives us pause, so the scramble to get on the good foot becomes a syncopated frenzy of confusion James Brown called a dance (all the more if we don’t know what syncopated is, on account of our edjumacation), don’t care what it is. Like we be grinning all the time because we hurting somewhere in our self, but expected to thank God and put on a good face; so speaking of feet we can get turned upside down.   

Don’t start me to talking cause I’ll tell everything I know.








chokwe antar lumumba likely next mayor of jackson, mississippi

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 Jackson,Mississippi

just Nominated Radical Activist Chokwe Antar Lumumba to Be the Next Mayor

A fresh model for economic and social-justice politics is emerging in the South.

By John NicholsTwitter

MAY 3, 2017

Chokwe Antar Lumumba
Chokwe Antar Lumumba (Lumumba for Mayor)
When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, NAACP president Cornell Williams Brooks, and actor Danny Glover joined thousands of Mississippians in marching for labor rights two months ago, economic and social justice activist Chokwe Antar Lumumba was in the thick of it. “I stand for workers’ rights,” Lumumba said, as the marchers converged on a Nissan plant where workers have been organizing for union protections.“[The] struggle does not cease and so we’re constantly in the battle of how we create self-determined lives for people. And we believe in human rights for human beings and you cannot support human rights if you’re not prepared to support workers’ rights. And so, we live in a world where you have so many with so little and so few with so much. And so, we’re trying to change that dynamic right here [in Mississippi]—we want to change the order of the world.”

what the hell is rosa parks' house doing in berlin, germany?????????????????

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BLACK VOICES 
04/10/2017 03:27 am ET | Updated Apr 10, 2017

What Is Rosa Parks’ House Doing In Berlin?

Detroit planned to demolish the home, so now it’s in an artist’s yard in 

Germany.


If you want to visit the home where civil rights legend Rosa Parks lived, you have 
a trip ahead of you — all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. That’s because her 
home is in the backyard of an American artist living in Germany.
It seems like back-of-the-bus treatment for the black woman who had the guts in 
1955 to refuse to give up her seat to a white man in Alabama and go to the back 
of the bus. Instead, she gave birth to the civil rights movement.
Why is her home in Berlin? The short answer is that Detroit planned to destroy it.
When Parks’ niece Rhea McCauley found out, she paid $500 for the home, which 
Parks moved to in 1957, and cast around for ways to save it. She reached out to 
artist Ryan Mendoza, who happened to be in Detroit at the time and had previously moved a house from the city to Europe for an art project.
Though they both appealed to Detroit’s mayor to protect the building, they said the mayor had no interest. So Mendoza and volunteers disassembled the home, 
packed it in shipping containers, transported it to Germany, and put it back together in an expensive operation that took several months, reported Deutsche Welle.
“It is something that is precious,” McCauley told The Associated Press. “It is priceless, yet it is being mistreated. That’s what I saw and that’s how it felt. So 
when I met Ryan and he said, ‘Let’s bring it to Berlin and restore it,’ I said yes.”
Mendoza, who was born in New York, is stunned that Germany ended up with 
what he considers a treasure. “The Rosa Parks house should actually be a 
national monument and not a demolition project,” he told Deutsche Welle.
“The basic question, the fundamental question I ask myself: ‘Is the house 
worthless or is the house  priceless?’ For the American institutions so far the 
house has been deemed worthless,” he told Agence France-Presse. “It was put 
on a demolition list; that’s not a detail.”
Mendoza believes it’s apt that the house now stands in a country that tore down 
a wall and was removed from a nation that plans to build a wall.

SEAN GALLUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Rosa Parks’ niece Rhea McCauley (right) stands outside her aunt’s home, now in Berlin.

Hundreds of people turned out to see the official unveiling of the home in Berlin 
last week. The interior still needs some work, but Mendoza has installed a sound 
exhibit for the home including a telephone interview with Parks.
McCauley said she hopes one day the U.S. will “grow up” and ask for its treasure 
back.

MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA, POLICE DEPARTMENT

the department of bribery

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Bribe department: How Brazil's Odebrecht organized graft

  • A security guard walks up a ramp leading to the Brazilian National Congress, in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, April 13, 2017. Though the deals were often sealed over dinners and coffees, there was nothing casual about the massive corruption scheme that Brazilian prosecutors are investigating involving bribes and kickbacks paid to hundreds of politicians. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)
    A security guard walks up a ramp leading to the Brazilian National Congress, in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, April 13, 2017. Though the deals were often sealed over dinners and coffees, there was nothing casual about the massive corruption scheme that Brazilian prosecutors are investigating involving bribes and kickbacks paid to hundreds of politicians. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)  (The Associated Press)
A secret communications system was used to discuss and arrange the payments of bribes. A detailed spreadsheet mapped out who got what, all veiled under a system of codenames. And overseeing it all, there was an entire department at the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht whose only purpose was to ensure the graft ran smoothly.
Though deals were often sealed over dinners and coffees, there was nothing casual about the massive corruption scheme that Brazilian prosecutors are investigating involving bribes and kickbacks paid to hundreds of politicians in exchange for state contracts, beneficial legislation and other favors.
The Supreme Court opened investigations into about 100 politicians this week, based on testimony provided by current and former executives at Odebrecht. Their testimony describes how bribery and kickbacks were simply part of doing business.
"There was a rule: Either we don't contribute to anyone, or we contribute to everyone," explained Emilio Odebrecht, chairman of the board, referring to payments to politicians.
Odebrecht appears to have opted for the latter. Court documents released this week and prosecutors' statements offer a peek into the highly organized way the company managed millions of dollars in bribes.
The scheme was overseen by the blandly named Division of Structured Operations, which investigators refer to as simply "the bribe department." It had its own hierarchy and its own accountants. It also used its own off-the-books communications system, called Drousys, to communicate about the bribes both internally and externally.
The payments were detailed in spreadsheets, held in the Drousys system, according to testimony and the judge's decision released this week. On those spreadsheets, politicians who received bribes and the intermediaries who delivered them were referred to by nicknames.
The man who is now President Michel Temer's chief of staff, Eliseu Padilha, was called "cousin." Former Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes was "little nervous one." Others were "decrepit,"''Viagra,"''little boy of the forest" and "Dracula."
One congressman even protested on his Facebook page when his nickname — "totally ugly"— was reported in the Brazilian press last year.
The employees at Odebrecht may have had some fun with the nicknames, but their revelations so far show that they took corruption very seriously.
Prosecutors are investigating the testimony and deciding whether to bring charges. The politicians have denied wrongdoing, with many saying the funds they received from Odebrecht were legal campaign contributions.

Dr. Nathan Hare, Fritz Pointer , Marvin X and James Brown - Get on the Good Foot

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Dr. Nathan Hare comments on Fritz Pointer's book review of Blue Jeans in High Places

Sounds like Fritz is an equal opportunity finger pointer, but he’s got a point.
Thank you,

Nathan Hare

...Just don’t try to turn it into a religion like our prople tend to do. Struggle is its own excuse for being; and we don’t need another ideology that doesn’t know it’s left foot from its right.

Thank you,
Nathan Hare

Marvin X replies to Dr. Hare

Do the foots know right from wrong?
--Marvin X

Naw. That’s how come they be getting off on the wrong foot.

Thank you,
Nathan Hare

Marvin X replies

JB say get on the good foot. Which one is that?



Marvin,

To answer your question, that’s part of what messed us up. Say you’re orthodox, as most people are, that means you dance or box or do anything with the right foot (we’re not talking of the wrong fit just now) backing you up, leading with the other. For most people they are starting with or pivoting off their left foot, for others it’s just the reverse but no matter, because they are doomed to comply or deal with other people coming from an orthodox approach, meaning they’re doubly challenged (as they say of people retarded). So you think of your right foot as your good foot, but for many of us it’s injured or sore, so we think of the other one as our good (not injured or sore) foot; and some of us don’t have a good foot at all, and ain’t had it for years, many injured in childhood without access to adequate medical care; so all of that just goes double. Then we might get to using the other foot as our good foot, i.e., our backup foot, until the other one heals; and just thinking of which foot is good (if neither is) confuses us again. So getting on the good foot gives us pause, so the scramble to get on the good foot becomes a syncopated frenzy of confusion James Brown called a dance (all the more if we don’t know what syncopated is, on account of our edjumacation), don’t care what it is. Like we be grinning all the time because we hurting somewhere in our self, but expected to thank God and put on a good face; so speaking of feet we can get turned upside down.   

Don’t start me to talking cause I’ll tell everything I know.




Fritz Pointer comments on Dr. Nathan Hare

Dr. Fritz Pointer

Marvin,
I am humbled and proud to read Dr. Nathan Hare's comment on my book review of Blue Jeans in High Places.  It was Dr. Hare who wrote in the second edition of Black Anglo Saxons (1991), quoting Carter G. Woodson who "warned us (Black people) that any race that had remained in the same political party for 50 years (speaking then, circa 1932, of the Republican party) and hadn't gotten anything out of it deserved to be oppressed.  By now we have been in rotation trapped within the Democratic Party also for more than 50 some-odd years." Perhaps, I'm not the only one who is "an equal opportunity finger pointer." As V.I. Lenin would ask: What is to be done?  

Fritz



Blue Jeans in High Places
“The Coming Makeover of American Politics”
by Mike McCabe
 A review by Fritz Pointer 6/4/17

    Dear friends suggested this book to me, Drs. Ralph and Nancy Knudson, retired MD’s, from La Crosse, Wisconsin. Last week, in Madison, Wisconsin, on a trip to “Unveil” my wife’s father’s tombstone, Prof. Daniel Kunene, a customary South African tradition that must be fulfilled no later than one year after the passing of a relative or loved one, Ralph told me that Mike McCabe will possibly be running for Governor of Wisconsin and he and Nancy may support him.

    For the past 15 years, Mike McCabe, Director and founder of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, has followed the money in American politics.  He believes that the inheritance of American democracy has been squandered, “largely because we have allowed bribery to become legal again.”  Of course old-fashioned bribery remains a crime, but “Today’s legal bribes aren’t called bribes.  Now they’re called campaign contributions.” So, what is bribery sounds charitable, philanthropic.
And, with the 2010 Supreme Court promulgating Citizens United, one of the dumbest rulings ever concocted, standing democracy on its head, by allowing corporations and other powerful groups to spend unlimited sums on elections with the simplistic logic: if people could be property, then property can be people, McCabe finds appalling, and accelerating America’s plunge into the abyss of oligarchy.

 Indicative of this is the 2012 election when, according to McCabe: “32 donors of Super PACs matched all of the money raised from small donors by President Obama and his rival Mitt Romney combined. Yep…the top 32 Super PAC donors – giving nearly $10 million apiece – contributed a total of $313 million to finance election advertising by these special interest committees.”  Oh, yes, we have “freedom of speech,” but If money is speech, then who is being heard?
    McCabe asks us to question why and how “in the span of a single generation, Wisconsin (like many other states) has gone from a place where it was possible to run successfully for statewide office for $145 (Bill Proxmire, 1982) to one that has seen $81 million spent to decide who sits in the governor’s office.”   He reminds us that in 1897 and again in 1905 Wisconsin took a stand “banning corporate campaign contributions and election spending,” and (the nation) should do this again.
    “Where are the voices” McCabe asks, “saying it’s time to extend the promise of free public education beyond high school?  Where are the voices saying higher education and advanced vocational training needs to be as accessible and affordable in the twenty-first century as elementary and secondary education were made in the twentieth?”  They are not saying it, he says, because they are not being paid to say it.  Instead, not a single new state university campus has been created in Wisconsin since 1968.  But since 1994, eight new prisons have been built and a ninth purchased.

    Like “Fighting Bob” La Follette, who called himself a “Progressive Republican” McCabe believes: “the business of government is not business, but service to the common people”…. and, that “the will of the people is the law of the land.” And, with that, he recognizes that, “More and more every day, our country is becoming less white, less male-dominated, less Christian, less ‘traditional’,” hence, Citizens United.

So, Mike McCabe reminds us that The Founders wanted a wall between not only church and state, but also between business and state.

Whether we realize it or not he says, “the political spectrum has been turned on its head.  It is vertical, not horizontal.  The definitive question in today’s politics is not whether you are standing with those on the left, right or middle; it is whether you are with those on the top or bottom or somewhere in between.”  Who are the Democrats and Republicans standing with?  Who are they working for: Those on the top or those on the bottom?

     “One party is scary and the other is scared” McCabe repeats, and we know what he’s talking about.  “Both parties belong at or near the top because both are catering to wealthy special interests and neither major party is listening to ordinary people or reliably acting on their behalf… The horizontal spectrum continues to foster the illusion of two parties with separate and distinct masters.” Rather, we might want to begin to talk about “royals” and “commoners.”

    McCabe makes clear, “I am not talking about creating a third party.  I am talking about having at least one that truly owes its allegiance to the people.”  We need, he believes, a new political identity, thinking, vocabulary and new symbols.  Liberal and Conservative, for example boxes us into horizontal thinking.  We refer to politicians as leaders, yet “With a few impressive exceptions, politicians are  consummate followers.  They don’t move a muscle without getting marching orders from their key supporters.”  The current symbols for the Democratic and Republican parties are the donkey and the elephant. When giving lectures, McCabe begins by asking: “How many of you own a donkey?”  No hands go up.  Then he asks, “How many of you own an elephant?” Of course no hands go up.  Then he asks, “How many of you own a pair of blue jeans?”  And, every hand goes up.  So, “what would better represent people, an elephant or donkey or pair of blue jeans?”

    What would better distinguish us from the suits on Wall Street or on K Street where all the lobbyists hang out or the suits on Capitol Hill whose pockets are lined?  “What” he asks, “could better symbolize the political identity of the masses than blue jeans? “  Overall, the book is as refreshing as Mike’s speeches.  He leaves us with  hope: “We face nothing today that hasn’t been faced – and defeated – before.  Right on this soil.”  He gives us strategies, things we can do, starting locally and thinking globally.

Marvin X reads "Dope" by Amiri Baraka

BLACK MOTION live house set in The Lab LDN

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