Southern Strategy
For Immediate Release
Please post and include in your blasts!
Hip Hop Congress Announces its 7th Annual Conference to be hosted by the Mississippi Artists and Producers Coalition
Energize, Organize, Revolutionize: Taking it back to the Roots
The 7TH Annual National Hip Hop Congress Conference will take place in Biloxi, MS from July 24th through the 27th at the Treasure Bay Hotel and Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi.
This year the conference will focus on building internal capacity and direction of the organization with a goal of improved service, clarified action and plans to further influence local communities where we have a presence as well as national. Special addresses will be also be given by Bakari Kitwana of Rapsessions and Cheri Honkala, National Coordinator of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign.
This conference will include a variety of activities and workshops in the elements of hip hop, use and development of media coalitions, direct action, digital distribution, music industry knowledge and detailed plans for HHC in the next two years. Hip Hop Congress will also be announcing the roll out of several new initiatives including increased resources for artists through the website and cultural services for schools, after school programs, and communities. Individuals and organizations interested in learning more about HHC are welcome to attend, enjoy the activities and learn more about HHC without any obligation to join. As always, there will be shows every night featuring artists on the cutting edge of Independent music as well as a headliner yet to be named.Previous artists who have performed at the National Conference are Blueprint, OneBeLo, Zion I, Jurassic 5, and Brother Ali.
Shamako Noble, HHC President, stated, "Last year we gave an open invitation to Hip Hop organizations, partners and interested folks to attend in an effort to expand our bases. This year, we want to focus on refining our strengths while addressing our weaknesses. We've been able to survive conditions as an organization that many said shouldn't have allowed us to exist. Our hope is that at this conference we can return to the formula that has allowed is to survive for so long, while troubleshooting issues that could hinder our development . This means refocusing on the mission, streamlining our communication, and redefining our programs. We are also very excited to be in the South, where a lot of Hip Hop Organizations either don't go, are afraid to go, or only go when it's convenient. We're looking to build something lasting here, and connect it to the rest of the practical Hip Hop movement."
Cheri Honkala commented, "I'm honored to be a part of this event. I attended my first HHC conference in 2004 and we've been developing a relationship ever since. This year, our collaborative focus is in Minneapolis at the March for Our Lives where HHC is taking a clear stand on Housing, Health Care, money and programs for the poor and not for this ridiculous war in Iraq. I think that anybody that is serious about utilizing the potential of Hip Hop at a grassroots level should be looking at HHC."
When President of the Southern Progressives, Southern Regional Director, and top flight artist Kamikaze was asked to comment, he replied, "The Mississippi Artists and Producers coalition is proud to be hosting this year's annual conference. I personally lobbied for Hip Hop Congress to be here and connect with the South in an organic way that we hadn't really seen in Mississippi. As the defender and protector of all things Mississippi, I expect nothing but the best results from this conference."
For more information on the conference including performing, presentations, schedule and travel please visit http://www.hiphopcongress.com/Direct Link-- Aaron Berkowitz
Thursday, June 19, 2008
The Problem No Politician Will Tackle--
WHAT IS A LIFE WORTH? HEALTH CARE IS A HUMAN RIGHT!
Today, June 19th, PPEHRC members across the US will participate in the National Day of Protest Against Health Insurance Companies.
We encourage other members, friends and supporters of the PPEHRC across the US to join in your local event and to call your congressperson in support of HR 676, the Single Payer Health Care Legislation by Rep. John Conyers. Join us in the fight to make Health Care a Human Right in the United States!
National Day of Protest Against Health Insurance Corporations
38,000 Health Insurance Executives will be in San Francisco. Health care activists around the country are organizing demonstrations at insurance companies with patients, nurses, doctors, social workers, and Americans of every stripe to protest the National Health Insurance industry to say:
Health Care YES! Health Insurance NO!
See www.healthcare-now.org for a listing of local events across the US today.
WHAT IS A LIFE WORTH? HEALTH CARE IS A HUMAN RIGHT!
Today, June 19th, PPEHRC members across the US will participate in the National Day of Protest Against Health Insurance Companies.
We encourage other members, friends and supporters of the PPEHRC across the US to join in your local event and to call your congressperson in support of HR 676, the Single Payer Health Care Legislation by Rep. John Conyers. Join us in the fight to make Health Care a Human Right in the United States!
National Day of Protest Against Health Insurance Corporations
38,000 Health Insurance Executives will be in San Francisco. Health care activists around the country are organizing demonstrations at insurance companies with patients, nurses, doctors, social workers, and Americans of every stripe to protest the National Health Insurance industry to say:
Health Care YES! Health Insurance NO!
See www.healthcare-now.org for a listing of local events across the US today.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Humanity As A Commodity
As some of you may have noticed, I started another blog simply focused on paraphrasing and reflecting on Karl Marx's Capital. The value of that analysis has only grown more clear to me over the past 15 years since I first grappled with it, but I've also become very concerned with how to reconcile the clarity of Marx's analysis with the rapidly changing world we live in today. In more than one place, both he and Engels described today's world (at the end of Wage, Labor & Capital and Utopian and Scientific Socialism, for instance), and the big picture remains remarkably accurate. But the advances of technology have upped the stakes so high that we need to analyze the specifics that couldn't have been foreseen 150 years ago. Laborless production is foreseen in Marx, but the ability of the market to function with as much as we have was all but unimaginable. Anyway, I found the following article from the People's Tribune to be particularly thought-provoking in terms of this work. --Danny
We’re NOT For Sale!
Protesting plans for water privatization in Detroit.PHOTO/MICHIGAN WELFARE RIGHTS
By Steven Miller
Every time Humanity reaches a critical juncture, the nature of property starts to destabilize and transform. All forms of property are transforming today, including personal, public and private property (1). One form of property—corporate property, the most toxic form of private property—is beginning to devour all the others. Global corporations now dwarf the economies of virtually every country.
Personal property, in the form of homes, for example, is disintegrating in the Mortgage crisis. National wealth, in the form of the vast infrastructures, from ports to public universities to telecommunications that were built in the last 50 years, is being turned over to corporations worldwide. Even the US government has been mostly privatized since 2001. Public space and therefore public access is vanishing, even as income is polarizing faster than ever before in human history.
Up through the 20th Century, most human relationships flowed from our sense of community and culture, our recognition of our common humanity. Now the process of Globalization, under corporate domination, is systematically dissolving all previous social relations and commodifying every aspect of everyday life and what it means to be human.
All the traditional ways that people have used to define themselves are being altered by corporations. These concepts include the ideas of nationality, citizenship, race, class, language, health, human rights, gender, career, family and virtually every relationship between human beings. Every human need is being driven into the marketplace to be bought and sold. Then our humanity is sold back to us at a profit.
Jeremy Rifkin describes the process this way: “Imagine a world where virtually every activity outside the confines of family relations is a paid-for experience, a world where traditional reciprocal obligations and expectations mediated by feelings of faith, empathy, and solidarity are replaced by contractual relations in the form of paid memberships, subscriptions, admission charges, retainers and fees.” (2)The future of global capitalism is that each individual is a lone production unit in a pay-as-you-go global marketplace where everyone is an atomized consumer. Then you get to pay to experience life; the more you pay, the better it is! No more human or inalienable rights here.
However there is a fly in this ointment. When the vast majority is bankrupted and dispossessed, who is left to be a consumer?Corporate power over human affairs flows from the simple fact that they claim technology as their private property. Then they proclaim that no one can have access unless they can pay for it. Demanding the right to exploit and profit from human misery, corporations are now creating billions of sick and miserable humans just as they are creating a planet riddled with escalating environmental disasters.
The technology to produce true human abundance now exists, but it is owned by the wrong class of people. In fact the only guarantee today of personal property is to guarantee public property and abolish corporate private property.The US is putting $2.5 billion a week into privatizing Iraq. Imagine what would happen if we spent $2.5 billion a week on ending hunger and homelessness, creating free health care, providing education so that every single human on earth could realize their true creative potential? This is what a cooperative society means.
The profound world-historic step that confronts humanity today demands, among other things, that human beings once again alter our self-concept beyond all measure! Corporations are certainly working to change it their way. Let’s just finish the job and do it right. Just as people fought for centuries not to be slaves, we can fight not to be commodities. Humans can be so much better than this.
(1)Many observers discuss the current transformations of property as well as the implications for human access and for society:
Mike Davis. Planet of Slums
Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine
Jeremy Rifkin. The Age of Access
William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism
Dan Schiller. How To Think About Information
Gary Teeple. Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform
(2) Rfikin, p 9
As some of you may have noticed, I started another blog simply focused on paraphrasing and reflecting on Karl Marx's Capital. The value of that analysis has only grown more clear to me over the past 15 years since I first grappled with it, but I've also become very concerned with how to reconcile the clarity of Marx's analysis with the rapidly changing world we live in today. In more than one place, both he and Engels described today's world (at the end of Wage, Labor & Capital and Utopian and Scientific Socialism, for instance), and the big picture remains remarkably accurate. But the advances of technology have upped the stakes so high that we need to analyze the specifics that couldn't have been foreseen 150 years ago. Laborless production is foreseen in Marx, but the ability of the market to function with as much as we have was all but unimaginable. Anyway, I found the following article from the People's Tribune to be particularly thought-provoking in terms of this work. --Danny
We’re NOT For Sale!
Protesting plans for water privatization in Detroit.PHOTO/MICHIGAN WELFARE RIGHTS
By Steven Miller
Every time Humanity reaches a critical juncture, the nature of property starts to destabilize and transform. All forms of property are transforming today, including personal, public and private property (1). One form of property—corporate property, the most toxic form of private property—is beginning to devour all the others. Global corporations now dwarf the economies of virtually every country.
Personal property, in the form of homes, for example, is disintegrating in the Mortgage crisis. National wealth, in the form of the vast infrastructures, from ports to public universities to telecommunications that were built in the last 50 years, is being turned over to corporations worldwide. Even the US government has been mostly privatized since 2001. Public space and therefore public access is vanishing, even as income is polarizing faster than ever before in human history.
Up through the 20th Century, most human relationships flowed from our sense of community and culture, our recognition of our common humanity. Now the process of Globalization, under corporate domination, is systematically dissolving all previous social relations and commodifying every aspect of everyday life and what it means to be human.
All the traditional ways that people have used to define themselves are being altered by corporations. These concepts include the ideas of nationality, citizenship, race, class, language, health, human rights, gender, career, family and virtually every relationship between human beings. Every human need is being driven into the marketplace to be bought and sold. Then our humanity is sold back to us at a profit.
Jeremy Rifkin describes the process this way: “Imagine a world where virtually every activity outside the confines of family relations is a paid-for experience, a world where traditional reciprocal obligations and expectations mediated by feelings of faith, empathy, and solidarity are replaced by contractual relations in the form of paid memberships, subscriptions, admission charges, retainers and fees.” (2)The future of global capitalism is that each individual is a lone production unit in a pay-as-you-go global marketplace where everyone is an atomized consumer. Then you get to pay to experience life; the more you pay, the better it is! No more human or inalienable rights here.
However there is a fly in this ointment. When the vast majority is bankrupted and dispossessed, who is left to be a consumer?Corporate power over human affairs flows from the simple fact that they claim technology as their private property. Then they proclaim that no one can have access unless they can pay for it. Demanding the right to exploit and profit from human misery, corporations are now creating billions of sick and miserable humans just as they are creating a planet riddled with escalating environmental disasters.
The technology to produce true human abundance now exists, but it is owned by the wrong class of people. In fact the only guarantee today of personal property is to guarantee public property and abolish corporate private property.The US is putting $2.5 billion a week into privatizing Iraq. Imagine what would happen if we spent $2.5 billion a week on ending hunger and homelessness, creating free health care, providing education so that every single human on earth could realize their true creative potential? This is what a cooperative society means.
The profound world-historic step that confronts humanity today demands, among other things, that human beings once again alter our self-concept beyond all measure! Corporations are certainly working to change it their way. Let’s just finish the job and do it right. Just as people fought for centuries not to be slaves, we can fight not to be commodities. Humans can be so much better than this.
(1)Many observers discuss the current transformations of property as well as the implications for human access and for society:
Mike Davis. Planet of Slums
Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine
Jeremy Rifkin. The Age of Access
William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism
Dan Schiller. How To Think About Information
Gary Teeple. Globalization and the Decline of Social Reform
(2) Rfikin, p 9
Monday, May 19, 2008
A Word from My Rock
We live in a world of corrupt radio, concert ticket price-gouging, product placement in songs, Wal-Mart censorship—not to mention war, poverty, and the collapse of our health care system.
Music keeps us going through it all. Music makes us feel good. Music carries us past the stress. Music inspires us. Music makes the connections between people that give us hope for the future. Music insists that a better world is possible and music makes us believe that this can be true.
Rock & Rap Confidential is in the middle of all this, not just reporting but making those connections. We can do this because our musical taste has no boundaries and we have a foot in every camp. We—RRC’s staff and its readers—are on this journey together. Our love for music and our desire for a better world bind us together.
RRC has never accepted advertising. Now we don’t even charge for the publication, which has enabled us to reach a broader and steadily growing audience. Every once in a while, we could use a little help.
Won’t you please contribute what you can to RRC? $25, $50, $100, $250, $1000 (or any amount). You can make your contribution via PayPal.com (send to rockrap@aol.com) or send by regular mail to RRC, P.O. Box 341305, Los Angeles CA 90034.
Thanks for your support. Thanks for our past, our present, our future. We really appreciate it.
We live in a world of corrupt radio, concert ticket price-gouging, product placement in songs, Wal-Mart censorship—not to mention war, poverty, and the collapse of our health care system.
Music keeps us going through it all. Music makes us feel good. Music carries us past the stress. Music inspires us. Music makes the connections between people that give us hope for the future. Music insists that a better world is possible and music makes us believe that this can be true.
Rock & Rap Confidential is in the middle of all this, not just reporting but making those connections. We can do this because our musical taste has no boundaries and we have a foot in every camp. We—RRC’s staff and its readers—are on this journey together. Our love for music and our desire for a better world bind us together.
RRC has never accepted advertising. Now we don’t even charge for the publication, which has enabled us to reach a broader and steadily growing audience. Every once in a while, we could use a little help.
Won’t you please contribute what you can to RRC? $25, $50, $100, $250, $1000 (or any amount). You can make your contribution via PayPal.com (send to rockrap@aol.com) or send by regular mail to RRC, P.O. Box 341305, Los Angeles CA 90034.
Thanks for your support. Thanks for our past, our present, our future. We really appreciate it.
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