Memorial Day Holiday Mix: the Military & The Monetary-We Gotta Have Peace!

Hard Knock Radio 94.1 FM: In honor of Memorial Day we dropped a nice Memorial Day Mix that features everyone from Paris to Digital Underground to Goapele to Gil Scott-Heron to Michael Franti to Dilated Peoples and Saul Williams just to name a few.. Click the link below to listen..

As you listen, keep in mind the importance of us taking all the steps we can on a diplomatic bases to find solutions to conflict.. We must find ways to stop the Military Industrial Conflict where we have scores of multi- national corporations that profit insanely off of war and potential conflict…

On another note.. as we reflect on Memorial day, Folks may wanna reflect on its ‘lost origins’..Here’s an excerpt from Yale History professor David W. Blight ..You can peep the entire article at http://www.davidwblight.com/memorial.htm

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VySYI7dALug

This Memorial Day Honor the Troops by bringing them Home: Our Intv w/ Iraq War Vet Matt Howard

Hard Knock Radio 94.1 FM: This Memorial Day we can best honor our troops by working our butts off to make sure they are returned home.. We should work to get our soldiers out of Afghanistan, out of Iraq and out of various countries in Africa..ala Africom… We should also be making sure our soldiers are nowhere near Iran…

In honor of Memorial Day we dropped a nice Memorial Day Mix that features everyone from Paris to Digital Underground to Goapele to Gil Scott-Heron just to name a few.. Click the link below to listen…

We can spend trillions of dollars on making weapons and coming up w/ advanced military strategies, but we can’t seem to put all those resources and bright minds to work toward finding peaceful and diplomatic solutions..

We currently have in our military divisions that work on psychological profiling and manipulation.. it’s a Psy Ops division that recently deployed its methods on US senators including Al Franken to extend the war in Afghanistan.. You can read about that HERE . If we can do that why not use those methods to have lasting peace?

A few days ago we sat down with Iraqi Vet (Iraq Veterans Against the War) Matt Howard who along with hundreds of his fellow soldiers showed in Chicago at the NATO Summit and gave back their medals. He saw the futility of War and how the Military Industrial Complex is working overtime to tank the economy and keep the world upended. And when I say tank the economy, that’s no exaggeration.. Today the military is a major economic windfall for all these private companies who make billions of everything from providing meals where they charge $30 a plate, per meal person to charging $50 per load of laundry..

This is our tax dollars going into the coffers of companies like Halliburton, Boeing and Bechtel.. Not much of that money comes back to our community in reinvestment or even jobs above the few they hire as contractors.  Here’s our insightful interview w/ Matt Howard

Below is a classic cut from the late Gil Scott heron that sums it all up..The Military and the Monetary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCb7YKqQUq4