Long time XXL editor-in-chief Elliott Wilson was suddenly fired from
his post at the rap magazine today (Jan. 7).

FULL STORY: http://www.sohh.com/articles/article.php/13381

Join CYMC and POCC Block Report Radio in a
screening of

“Audio Rebellion”

CYMC is proud to join POCC Block Report Radio
in presenting “Audio Rebellion,”
a revolutionary independent documentary about the movement and political work
of the POCC: Block Report Radio show. With major buzz in political circles
around the country, Audio Rebellion has been shown in Washington DC, Los
Angeles, Oakland, San
Francisco, New York, Memphis, Chicago, New
Orleans, and Philadelphia.

For more information call 510-395-2341

Friday | March 16 | 2007



Screening 6:00 pm



1337 mission street, 3rd floor

san francisco, ca 94103

Pre-screening short “Straight Pistol Play“

Straight Pistol Play shares real youth perspectives on why kids feel the need
to carry a gun in violence-ridden neighborhoods. Hear from one youngster who
faces the dangers of guns on a daily basis.

The filmmakers will be present for a
post-screening Q&A.

For more information on AUDIO REBELLION visit the BLOCK
REPORT MYSPACE

For more info about CYMC, check out our web
site at consciousyouthmediacrew.org
e-mail us at cymc2000@yahoo.com
or call 415.621.5353.

This event is free and open to the public

by Janeé Bolden | SOHH.com

Atlanta rapper Ludacris is being honored by the National Runaway Switchboard (NRS) for his work with American youth.

On February
26, during a NRS event in Chicago, the organization announced they will
be giving Luda’s non profit group, The Ludacris Foundation, the “Spirit of Youth” award.

The award follows The Ludacris Foundation’s partnership with
the NRS, an alliance that was forged after Luda released his single
“Runaway Love” featuring Mary J. Blige. The song addresses a number of situations that youth face every day, often leading them to running away.

“The timing could not have been better with November’s
National Runaway Prevention Month,” Maureen Blaha, NRS executive
director, said via statement. “Since the release of “Runaway Love”
Ludacris’ and The Foundation’s commitment to helping runaway youth and
letting people know about the help they can receive by calling
1-800-RUNAWAY has only increased.”

The oldest hotline of its kind, the National Runaway
Switchboard provides crisis intervention, referrals to local resources
and education
and prevention services to youth and families throughout the country.
According to NRS records, the organization has received a 17% increase
in hotline calls in 2006, while the NRS website has received nearly
twice as many visitors this month as last year at this time, with the
most significant increases reflected since NRS partnered with the
Ludacris Foundation.

Ludacris and President of the Ludacris Foundation, Roberta Shields, will be honored with the Spirit of Youth awards on Thursday, November 1 in Chicago.

For more information, visit http://www.1800RUNAWAY.org.

Sudhir Venkatesh’s new book unravels the mystery of the underground economy.
By Patrick Radden Keefe

America’s underground economy stubbornly resists reliable study or measurement. Its overall size may be anywhere from 5 percent to 10 percent of America’s GDP. Estimates of annual unpaid taxes range from $200 billion to $500 billion. Even the low ballparks are high. So, why do the dynamics remain so mysterious?

One answer is that under-the-table deals are by their nature surreptitious, and whether you’re paying an undocumented immigrant to rake your lawn, underreporting the money your restaurant made on a Saturday night, or dealing crack in a schoolyard, you’re not likely to expound on those activities to an academic (much less an IRS investigator). It doesn’t help that social scientists tend to employ the bluntest of tools. In their best-seller Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner tell the story of a grad student, Sudhir Venkatesh, who entered poor black Chicago neighborhoods armed with a wonky questionnaire while studying urban poverty in the late 1980s. The typical response to questions like, “How do you feel about being poor and black?” was so contemptuous that Venkatesh wondered whether, in addition to the multiple choice answers ranging from a) Very Bad to e) Very Good, he should perhaps have appended f) for Fuck You.

Eventually, Venkatesh jettisoned the survey and adopted a less orthodox methodology. He calls it “hanging out.” He spent years in a 10-square-block neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side observing the clandestine work of gangbangers and mechanics, prostitutes and pastors. The result, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, suggests that in some American neighborhoods, the underground economy is a source not just of sustenance but of order, and that while shady transactions may be illegal, they adhere to a distinctive and sophisticated set of laws.

Off the Books differs from most studies of underground economies in both scope and perspective. Venkatesh goes micro. His statistics are based on tiny areas: Only two of the 21 families on one residential block are traditional nuclear families; only 10 percent of the shop owners along one commercial strip have good credit. Eschewing the objective distance often prized in the social sciences, he gains the trust of the people he is hanging out with, sometimes by mediating their disputes. (He’s a little sheepish about this, saying he remains “not entirely comfortable” with his involvement.)

On that one residential block, Venkatesh focuses on three women: Bird, a prostitute; Eunice, an office cleaner who sells home-cooked meals on the side; and Marlene, a nanny who is president of the block’s neighborhood association. (All the names in the book are pseudonyms.) The women share tart observations about their respective livelihoods: Bird thinks gangsters should “let the pimps show them how to run a business.” Through them, we come to meet a diverse cast of locals, “nearly all linked together,” Venkatesh writes, “in a vast, often invisible web that girded their neighborhood. This web was the underground economy.”

Licit and illicit economies tend to be entwined, and in a closely knit urban neighborhood, this mutual dependence means that public-minded civilians and hardened criminals are regularly forced to negotiate. In the spring of 2000, an entrepreneurial gang leader, Big Cat, was elevating the criminal activity in a local park. Marlene and a preacher, Pastor Wilkins, arranged a tense summit with the kingpin in a church basement. Venkatesh talked his way into the room and watched as Big Cat agreed to stop peddling drugs in the park during after-school hours. For this concession, Pastor Wilkins promised to persuade a nearby store owner to allow Big Cat’s gang to deal in his parking lot, and Marlene agreed to ask the cops to leave the dealers unmolested in their new location.

“I can’t figure out who’s crazier,” Big Cat chuckles, once the deal is struck. “Me, or you niggers.”

The people in Off the Books are struggling, and their many informal transactions represent a kind of adaptive strategy —and often an indigenous social safety net. Private property is a luxury in the neighborhood, so for $300 a pop, a restaurant doubles as a gambling hall on the weekends; prostitutes use the back room of the dollar store; the currency exchange sells fake Social Security cards obtained by a local pastor. All of this gives new meaning to the urban planning notion of “mixed use.”

Similarly, neighborhood residents get around bad credit by borrowing what money they need within the community. Debts aren’t always repaid with money. Venkatesh charts the degree to which promises and payments in kind substitute for cash. Small businesses give homeless people a place to sleep in exchange for food because it’s cheaper than paying a night watchman; a prostitute and a grocer transact business without ever opening their wallets. Leroy, a mechanic, eventually gets rid of his cash register, because “his customers seemed unable to pay with our nation’s legal tender.”

In his efforts to demonstrate that this shadow economy is anything but the desperate Hobbesian scramble an outsider might assume, Venkatesh can at times sound like Jane Jacobs extolling the civic merits of Manhattan’s West Village. “Beneath the closed storefronts, burned-out buildings, potholed boulevards, and empty lots, there is an intricate, fertile web of exchange, tied together by people with tremendous human capital and craftsmanship,” he writes. In this view, even Big Cat is a “stakeholder” in the neighborhood, with an interest in seeing norms adhered to and order preserved. “It’s not a crack house,” as an old Onion headline had it. “It’s a crack home.”

But these very bonds of mutual dependence that hold the neighborhood together can breed severe dysfunction and seriously compromise pillars of the licit establishment. Eunice, who sells soul food for a living, pays a teacher $20 a week to let her grandchildren out of school to make deliveries. Cops take bribes and enforce justice selectively.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Venkatesh’s account is the role of neighborhood ministers. Clergy resolve disputes, but they don’t do it for free. Numerous ministers accept “contributions” from gangs and drug dealers for their services. They take other forms of payment, as well; Bird, the prostitute, has serviced “most of the preachers in this community.” Other ministers have been known to hide guns, drugs, and stolen property for a fee. Nannies rely on preachers for referrals to families but must pay a 10 percent commission. The residents are unshocked by all of this. They conclude that it would be impossible to navigate the community without making certain allowances. “We are poor people. And so are our ministers,” one congregant says. “We need to be our leader, not perfect or without sin.”

If Venkatesh sometimes marvels at the ingenuity of the people he writes about, he does not overlook the essentially tragic nature of the story he is telling. The depredations of daily life mean that for many residents, what Venkatesh calls the “perceptual horizon” does not extend beyond the neighborhood. Sadder still, it doesn’t reach beyond the struggles of the day to day. Bird, Eunice, and Marlene each envision a leisurely future of comfortable retirement. But none is clear on precisely when and how that future will come to pass. In the meantime, they hustle to get by, and the hustle means relying on one another. “You have to do things shady,” one local businessman tells Venkatesh. “Well, maybe not shady like committing a crime, but shady like you depend on each other.”

Recently on Hot 97, Papoose responded to the Sean Bell shooting in Queens.

Listen: [audio:http://www.razorapple.com/wp-content/uploads/music/papoose-50-shots.mp3]

Courtesy of www.nahright.com

NYC Police Are Out Of Control!

Read rest of story…

January 6th:

World Up Benefit Party and PreRelease Party for the first World Up mixtape! The Party will benefit World Up and help us with raising money for our festival and educational programming in 2007. It will also be a chance to celebrate the release of the first World Up mixtape which will have a January release. Holding things down for the Party and the DJ behind the mixtape, will be our good friend Dj Maga Bo, a DJ/Producer based in Brazil. Maga Bo has collaborated with MCs and musicians from all over the globe and is fantastic example of how people all over the world are redefining Hip-Hop for themselves. While heavily influenced by Brazil, he has worked and recorded in Senegal, Morocco, South Africa, and India (to name a few) and is sure to blow some minds with his mix.

January 6th
Henry Winston Unity Center
235 W 23rd St, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10011

9pm- 2am
$5-$10 sliding scale, no one will be turned away

Maybe not, but still:

“I never thought I’d sell diamonds, but we’re actually working with De Beers to create schools in Africa, to make De Beers create better investments.” - Russell Simmons / Complex Magazine

Complex Magazine: There’s something to be said for gradual progress…

Really?

Choose for yoursef, read more about it:
[Defuse More]

‘Beginning of the end of America’
Keith Olbermann addresses the Military Commissions Act in a special comment

We have lived as if in a trance.

We have lived as people in fear.

And now—our rights and our freedoms in peril—we slowly awaken to learn that we have been afraid of the wrong thing.

Therefore, tonight have we truly become the inheritors of our American legacy.

For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering:

A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.

We have been here before—and we have been here before, led here by men better and wiser
and nobler than George W. Bush.

[Watch The Video]

The Source sexual harassment trial vindicates Kim Osorio to the tune of $15.5 million
by Rosa Clemente

On October 24, Kimberly Osorio, The Source’s editor in chief from 2002 to 2005, won $15.5 million in a workplace lawsuit against the hip-hop monthly. Along with colleague Michelle Joyce, she’d filed a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission shortly after being fired for poor performance; she alleged constant, pervasive sexual harassment and insisted she was fired for speaking out. A Manhattan jury threw out her discrimination and sexual-harassment complaints, but found that Osorio was indeed fired in retaliation for complaining to and about her bosses, David Mays and Raymond “Benzino” Scott. The jury also ruled that Benzino defamed Osorio in a radio interview he gave days after her firing. (The Source recently filed for bankruptcy, and Benzino and Mays plan to appeal.) A few days after the verdict was announced, Osorio sat down with The Village Voice.