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Rev. Yearwood: Restore Honor to America: Glenn Beck’s Way or the Gulf Coast’s Way
July 30th, 2010
by admin
Cross Posted on Jack and Jill Politics
Yesterday I introduced you and the JJP community to the Hip Hop Caucus movement. Today I invite you to get involved…
Hurricane Katrina was the first moment when the Hip Hop Caucus movement filled a major void in our civil rights movement of today.It is really when our momentum got going, and our relevancy was made clear. Our work organizing and mobilizing in response to Hurricane Katrina is why the Hip Hop Caucus Education Fund is now a member of the Black Leadership Forum and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Â It is also the reason why we have worked so hard to more deeply connect the African American community to the climate and environmental movement, (some examples here and here).
The 5 Year Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is this August 29th. What you probably already know is that Katrina survivors still remain displaced, and there is still rebuilding and restoration that needs to happen. Â Yet you may not know that some of the Road Home Recovery dollars remain sitting in government bank accounts, not yet spent.
This brings me to why I really wanted to reach out to you today. Â Despite the focus on the BP Oil Spill and the upcoming 5 Year Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the civil and human rights community, the labor community, and the progressive community, have mostly moved away from the injustices from the Hurricane Katrina experience.
Sometimes, you've got to go backwards to go forward!
On August 28, 1955, Emmitt Till was killed in Mississippi, and the shocking photos published in JET Magazine of his open casket funeral catalyzed the civil rights movement. On August 28, 1963, at the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his I have a Dreamatic speech. Â On August 28, 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit the shores of the Gulf Coast, and in the morning of the 29th, the levees broke flooding the lower 9th Ward and other areas of the city.
This year Glenn Beck, a Fox News commentator who consistently spreads lies and misinformation through lightly-veiled coded words of hate, announced that on August 28, 2010 he will lead a rally at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. This rally is to, in his words, restore honor to America. In no reality could Glenn Beck ever co-opt the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for his odious purposes.
Let Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Fox News have Washington, DC on August 28th this year. We shall respond with morality, faith, and love for our country. We will not respond to hate with more hate.
AllHipHop: Wyclef Jean To Run For President Of Haiti; Announcement August 5th
July 30th, 2010
by admin
(AllHipHop News) Hip-Hop star Wyclef Jean will announce his bid for the President of Haiti, a source has confirmed with AllHipHop.com exclusively.
Sources close to Wyclef confirmed with AllHipHop.com that the rapper will announce his bid for the country’s highest office next Thursday, on August 5th.
The 37-year-old was born in Haiti, but immigrated to the United States at the age of 9-years-old, when he landed in Brooklyn, before settling in South Orange, New Jersey.
As a member of The Fugees and as a solo artist, Wyclef has sold millions of records, in addition to collaborating with artists like Paul Simon, Gloria Estefen, Destiny’s Child, Carlos Santana and others.
The rapper sprung into action on January 12th, when his native land was leveled by a 7.0 earthquake that left 300,000 people dead over a million others displaced.
Even prior to the earthquake, Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti organization raised funds for the country, but after the deadly earthquake, the rapper helped raise over $10 million dollars in less than three months.
The rapper will make his official announcement just two days prior to the country’s August 7th deadline to submit his plan for running for President.
Analysts are predicting that Wyclef Jean will easily win the race with his financial connections, influence among the Haitian youth and his political influence around the world.
Remember This???
BILOXI, Miss. — BP's incoming CEO said Friday that it's time for a "scaleback" of the massive effort to clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but stressed the commitment to make things right is the same as ever.
Tens of thousands of people – many of them idled fishermen – have been involved in the cleanup, but more than two weeks after the leak was stopped there is relatively little oil on the surface, leaving less work for oil skimmers to do.
Bob Dudley, who heads BP's oil spill recovery and will take over as CEO in October, said it's "not too soon for a scaleback" in the cleanup, and in areas where there is no oil, "you probably don't need to see people in hazmat suits on the beach."
He added, however, that there is "no pullback" in BP's commitment to clean up the spill. Dudley was in Biloxi to announce that former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief James Lee Witt will be supporting BP's Gulf restoration work.
By Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. 
On August 28, 1955, Emmitt Till was killed in Mississippi, and the shocking photos published in JET Magazine of his open casket funeral catalyzed the civil rights movement. On August 28, 1963, at the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I have a Dream" speech. On August 28, 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit the shores of the Gulf Coast, and in the morning of the 29th, the levees broke flooding the city of New Orleans.
This year Glenn Beck, a Fox News commentator who consistently spreads lies and misinformation through lightly-veiled coded words of hate, announced that on August 28, 2010 he will lead a rally at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. This rally is to, in his words, "restore honor to America." In no reality could Glenn Beck ever co-opt the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for his odious purposes.
Let Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Fox News have Washington, DC on August 28th this year. We shall respond with morality, faith, and love for our country. We will not respond to hate with more hate.
Continue reading HERE
By the Grio
The city of New York has agreed to pay more than $7 million to settle a civil lawsuit stemming from the fatal 50-bullet police shooting of an unarmed man on his wedding day.
The settlement filed in Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday pays $3.25 million to the estate of Sean Bell, who was killed in 2006 outside a strip club in Queens while leaving his bachelor party. As part of the settlement, the city agreed to pay $3 million to Joseph Guzman and $900,000 to Trent Benefield, both of whom were wounded in the shooting that killed their friend.
The lawsuit had accused the city of wrongful death, negligence, assault and civil rights violations.
Continue reading HERE
The federal government is rapidly expanding a program to identify illegal immigrants using fingerprints from arrests, drawing opposition from local authorities and advocates who argue the initiative amounts to an excessive dragnet.
The program has gotten less attention than Arizona's new immigration law, but it may end up having a bigger impact because of its potential to round up and deport so many immigrants nationwide.
The San Francisco sheriff wanted nothing to do with the program, and the City Council in Washington, D.C., blocked use of the fingerprint plan in the nation's capital. Colorado is the latest to debate the program, called Secure Communities, and immigrant groups have begun to speak up, telling the governor in a letter last week that the initiative will make crime victims reluctant to cooperate with police "due to fear of being drawn into the immigration regime."
Continue reading HERE
By Monique W. Morris for theGrio
I woke up the other day and noticed that everyone was a so-called "racist"--or so it would seem. The problem with this analysis is that it isn't true. Over the past few weeks, a flurry of "racism" charges have been swirling around the public sphere, misinforming the American public about what racism is, and how we might address it. Bigotry is being confused with racism. Prejudice is being mistaken for discrimination. This misguided discourse is so popular because most Americans don't know what racism looks like today--in the "post-racial" society that claims to celebrate "colorblind" or race-neutral policies that supposedly have erased all systemic barriers to equal participation and justice in American society.
Gone is legal segregation. Gone are color barriers to the most powerful political position in the country. African-Americans don't have to march with signs that read, "I am a man" to be treated with dignity in restaurants or other public spaces. But just because people aren't carrying the signs, doesn't mean the signs aren't there.
Talking about race and racism in America has always been difficult--in private and in the public sphere. Over 100 years ago, W.E.B. DuBois prophetically claimed that the problem of the 20th Century would be the problem of the "color line." However, in the 21st Century, we're challenged to cross a color line we're not even supposed to see, even if the vestiges of racial bias, discrimination, and bigotry are still visible to any naked eye that's actually paying attention.
Continue readign HERE
By John Vidal for The Guardian
British, American and Norwegian engineers are in a race to design and build the holy grail of wind turbines – giant, 10MW offshore machines twice the size and power of anything seen before – that could transform the global energy market because of their economies of scale.
Today, a revolutionary British design that mimics a spinning sycamore leaf and which was inspired by floating oil platform technology, entered the race. Leading engineering firm Arup is to work with an academic consortium backed by blue-chip companies including Rolls Royce, Shell and BP to create detailed designs for the "Aerogenerator", a machine that rotates on its axis and would stretch nearly 275m from blade tip to tip. It is thought that the first machines will be built in 2013-14 following two years of testing.
But the all-British team of designers and engineers, which includes Eden project architects Grimshaw, is in stiff competition with other groups. Earlier this year US wind company Clipper, which has close ties with the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, announced plans to build 10MW "Britannia" turbines in north-east England.
Continue reading HERE
For Reuters U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will unveil as early as Monday a slimmed-down energy bill seeking to make offshore drilling safer and convert trucks to run on domestic natural gas. The full Senate could begin consideration of Reid's bill on Tuesday and Democrats would like to pass it by the early part of the following week. With time running short ahead of a month-long recess starting Aug 6, Democrats abandoned efforts last week to put climate-control measures in the bill. Reid said then that he had no Republican votes for items such as carbon caps and mandates requiring utilities to generate some of their power from alternatives sources such as wind and solar. Continue reading HERE
Tune in at 12pm PST / 3pm EST to watch the Keynote Panel below!
Civil Rights in the Modern Era
When Barack Obama took office, pundits across the country were predicting a transition to a post-racial America.
And while Obama's win was historic in many ways, the issue of race and discrimination hasn't been solved. If anything, it's gotten worse.
From countering racism from Tea Party leaders to fighting Arizona's discriminatory SB 1070 law to battling for marriage equality from state to state, activists across the country fight every day for equal rights. But it's not enough. For too long these have been seen as separate issues instead of different manifestations of the same problem.
National Center for Lesbian Rights Executive Director Kate Kendell, SEIU's Eliseo Medina, writer and activist Tim Wise, and Hip-Hop Caucus President Rev. Lennox Yearwood will join us for a panel discussion. Open Left's Mike Lux will moderate.
During the ’50s and ’60s, the civil rights fight resulted in an incredible amount of activism and movement building. That work has continued for decades but is far from finished.
During this lunchtime session, we'll look at some of today's civil rights battles -- from immigration to LGBT equality to traditional civil rights issues -- and talk about ways to unify our efforts and continue the fight for equality for all.
It may require re-examining some of our assumptions and going outside of our respective comfort zones. It's a discussion we have to have -- openly and honestly -- if we're ever going to break down the walls that exist in our country.
By Tim Gaynor for Reuters
A U.S. judge grilled lawyers for the Obama administration and Arizona on Thursday over the legality of the state's tough, new immigration law set to take effect next week, but gave no timetable for a ruling. The Obama administration is seeking a preliminary injunction blocking implementation of the law that requires state and local police, during lawful contact, to investigate the immigration status of anyone they reasonably suspect of being an illegal immigrant. U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton peppered lawyers for both sides during a 90-minute hearing over whether the state law contravenes federal authority over immigration law, and if predictions by critics that it will lead to racial profiling were overstated and unwarranted. Continue reading HERE
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson for theGrio
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was direct, forceful and blunt when he said that the USDA does not tolerate racial discrimination. This was Vilsack's widely circulated public explanation for firing Shirley Sherrod. There are two problems with this. One, the world now knows that Sherrod did not do or say anything to merit being branded a bigot and sacked. Vilsack and President Obama subsequently apologized to Sherrod and offered her her job back.
The second problem is more troubling. Vilsack should have been talking about the shameful and disgraceful treatment of black farmers by his agency, and the equally shameful and disgraceful treatment of the farmers by Congress. The day after Vilsack issued his lofty pronouncement about zero tolerance for racial discrimination, Gary Grant, President of the 20,000 member Black Farmer & Agriculturalists Association, flatly called Vilsack's statement "a complete lie." He had good reason. During the past quarter century, tens of thousands of black farmers have lost their land, homes, and livestock, due to the blatant refusal by the USDA to make or guarantee loans to them.
Continue reading HERE
by Stacy Feldman for SolveClimate
Federal law that would require utilities to generate a portion of their power from renewable sources has been put on the backburner until fall 2010 at the earliest, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) conceded on Thursday.
Industry groups were outraged, saying the delay in passing a renewable electricity standard (RES) endangers thousands of existing and potential jobs and billions of dollars.
Denise Bode, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, called the decision "beyond comprehension."
Continue reading HERE
By Ruben Navarrette Jr for CNN
What does the rhetorical feud between the Tea Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have to do with the case of Shirley Sherrod, a black former Agriculture Department employee who resigned this week under pressure from the Obama administration?
Everything, if you ask Sherrod.
"[The NAACP] is the reason why this happened," Sherrod told CNN's Tony Harris. "They got into a fight with the Tea Party, and all of this came out as a result of that."
Before we get to "all of this," props to Attorney General Eric Holder. Last year, in a speech during Black History Month, Holder argued that the United States is "a nation of cowards" that can't talk about race. He was right. And now it turns out Americans are even more cowardly when it comes to talking about racism -- real or alleged.
Continue reading HERE
By CNN
The executive board of the International Monetary Fund approved Wednesday the cancellation of Haiti's $268 million debt to the fund.
The board also approved a three-year request by authorities to support Haiti's reconstruction and growth program.
The decisions are part of an effort to support Haiti's longer-term reconstruction plans after the January 12 earthquake, which killed more than 220,000 people, destroyed 60 percent of government infrastructure and left more than 180,000 homes uninhabitable.
Six months later, more than 1.5 million remain in overcrowded displacement camps.
Continue reading HERE
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