Charles Rangel
When I first read these quotes posted below from Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel in response to President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela calling George Bush a ‘Devil’ and later an ‘alcoholic’, I had to keep asking myself; ‘Did this fool forget about the all the voter disenfranchisement that took place in Florida during the 2000 election’? Has he forgotten President Bush was backing a coup attempt against Chavez? If I tried to kill your family or career and you survive the attack wouldn’t you be calling me a Devil?
I guess if we follow Rangel’s logic, then all the leaders of those countries that wished to criticize, any US President about unfair and unjust wars and foreign policy or our one time support of Apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow Laws against Blacks in this country had better shut their mouths.
Wasn’t it outside pressure and criticism that help loosen up some of the wrong doings that took place against oppressed people here? In addition hasn’t Bush and other US leaders been running around calling other countries evil (Iran and North Korea) and cowardly(France)?
Hugo Chavez
But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.. At the end of the day, he’s the same Charles Rangel that wants to reinstate the draft. What a sell out. The only conclusion I come to is that Bush has pictures of Rangel in some sort of compromising position and hence he felt a need to defend the President. Who knows, maybe there’s a wide-angle shot that we don’t know about that show’s our ‘distinguished’ Harlem Congressman in the infamous R. Kelly sex tape video.
Peep his ass kissing quotes..Holla Back
“You don’t come into my country; you don’t come into my congressional district and you don’t condemn my president,” Rep. Charles Rangel, D-NewYork, scolded Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
“If there’s any criticism of President Bush, it should be restricted to Americans, whether they voted for him or not,” Rangel said at a Washington news conference.
“I just want to make it abundantly clear to Hugo Chavez or any other president: Don’t come to the United States and think, because we have problems with our president, that any foreigner can come to our country and not think that Americans do not feel offended when you offend our chief of state,” Rangel said.
Here’s our response to this..Its called Charles Rangel vs the Field Negro
****any thoughts?
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This past Monday, Spinderella of Salt-N-Pepa, Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park and myself among others, participated in a panel discussion at UCLA that focused on the business workings and current state of Hip Hop. Before we launched into Q&A from the audience all of us were asked ‘What CD we were listening to in our ride?’ The audience seemed a bit surprised when I mentioned that in my CD deck was the 1981 album ‘JuJu’ by new wave/punk act Siouxsie & the Banshees. Songs like ‘Spellbound, ‘Monitor’ and ‘Into the Light’ brought back fond memories. More importantly the whole early new wave/punk scene was a very much apart of my early Hip Hop experience.
It’s one sided in the sense that you have rock oriented outlets with a predominantly white audience embracing Hip Hop. Yes, you can tune into a radio station like KROQ and hear rap alongside the usual rock offerings and lastly we have all the mash up projects, with the most noticeable being Collision Course with Linkin Park and Jay-Z. However, you will not see similar attempts in many urban outlets that target African American audiences. Yes believe it or not groups like Linkin Park as popular as they are are still relatively unknown in many Black circles where BET and commercial radio are the main conduits to things outside the community. I’m not sure what needs to be done to change that or if it even needs to be changed.
Much of it centered around artists like George Clinton, Bootsy Collins George Duke and Roger & Zapp to name a few. Simply put, brothers out west brought p-funk to the hip hop round table.
Shock G pointed that funk was heavy all around the country except New York where he spent a lot of time growing up. He went on to explain that there were two things going on in New York City..”First of all, disco had taken off in a big way and hip hop was starting to become big among the younger people. The result of this activity was that New York missed out on the P-funk”.
OGs of the Bay Area hip hop scene will recall that C-Funk an East Palo Alto native started out with the name Captain Crunch, but a certain cereal company came forth with some court orders forcing him to change. However, C-Funk along with his partner Mozilla the Funk Dragon have definitely made some noise around town.
the Black Panther of hip hop, CEO of Scarface Records and producers for the hit group Conscious Daughters , is himself no stranger to the funk. On his last album… ‘
En Vogue producers Foster & McElroy, George Clinton collaborator and long time funkateer Dave Kaos and SF rap start JT The Bigga Figga. All have come to the hip hop roundtable with funk in their back pocket.
PEACE AND BLESSING TO All of Our Family of Warriors, Thinkers and Leaders:
I suspect the reason that more rap artist get in trouble with guns is part glorification and part geography. Hip-hop developed in New York and was initially an inner city phenomenon. New York and other urban centers are more restrictive about gun ownership. Primarily because places like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia etc had instances where the people revolted against their oppressive conditions and took to the streets. Historians usually refer to these instances as riots. However the point is that resistance in urban areas like the aforementioned places almost always results in “guerilla warfare“. Having to do battle up close and personal, door-to-door, shootouts in tight spaces like project buildings makes for a great equalizer, even when going up against a better-trained force. So the Federal 
Race-based “gun control” has existed ever since the second amendment was established. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale read 
Williams and fellow vets made a defense plan at the local barbershop. When the Klan motorcade pulled up in front of the Harris Funeral Home, 40 black men leveled their rifles, taking aim at the line of cars. Not a shot was fired; the Klansmen simply weighed their chances and drove away. That was one of the 1st incidents that got them realizing about resistance in groups. Their would be many more incidents of self defense and finally ten years later Williams would organize a permanent defense group, an “organized militia” for self defense. The NAACP at the time did not believe in self-defense and would vilify him and reduce his chapter temporarily to just him. It would not matter though, he was effective in self-defense and black people throughout the country were becoming more aware and ready to follow him. The best way for many blacks to really understand self defense tactics would be from Williams, so he wrote “Negroes with Guns“, and in later years, groups like the Black Panther Party helped make self defense a national issue.
The message was self- defense and Huey was right the world got a visual message that was powerful and planned. Huey told a fellow panther. “Call the television stations and tell them we’re the Black Panthers,” Huey Newton had instructed. “We’re coming from Oakland, we’ve got our leather jackets on, we ‘ve got our rifles, and we’re going to walk into the legislature with guns. See what happens.” What happened was eventful on two fronts. First – the carefully orchestrated public display attracted international media attention on the local and national levels, capturing the imagination of everybody. Second – J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI got both, pissed off and frightened. Hoover described the Panthers as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” and in November 1968 ordered the FBI to employ “hard-hitting counter-intelligence measures to cripple the Black Panthers”. (These COINTELPRO operations are still at work today disguised under different names.) As history goes, Hoover was largely successful.
As I write this, I’m sure that there are legions of good natured God Loving folks who’ve had this or similar incidents happen to them. So the other day I rolled up to 
s a key ingredient in Better Sausages™ , pork plays an important role in delivering on our promise of “Better Taste” and “Better Health”. Better Foods™ began with hand cut lean pork to ensure our sausages have that mouth-watering taste you expect from the finest bistro. Like many foods, pork, in moderation provides many health benefits. Better Foods™ sausages provide the perfect balance of pork and soy to provide this moderation, delivering on both “Better Taste” and “Better Health”.
To support the exclusion of Gangsta rap from a hip hop museum is like the act of excluding the mention of African Americans in the development process of America. His erroneous
An Open Letter to the NY Daily News About KRS-One
My name is Tony Muhammad, President and founder of Urban America Enterprises, Inc. and publisher of Urban America Newspaper, the first ever urban community newspaper, based in South Florida. I am responding to the inflammatory commentary made about one of the most respected teachers and leaders in Hip-Hop, KRS-ONE. The commentary appeared very recently in The New York Daily News in an article entitled KRS-One, decency zero. The article itself pertained to statements made by KRS-ONE at a recent panel lecture concerning the Hip-Hop community’s response to the 9-11 terror attacks. After careful analysis of both the article published in The New York Daily News and KRS-ONE’s response, which is currently being circulated on several sites on the internet, I can very much say that your brand of journalism is not only irresponsible, but it is “choppy” and insulting both to KRS-ONE and the Hip-Hop community. According to your biography, Mr. Rush, you have a Masters degree in Journalism from Columbia University and have been published in various magazines as well as publishing a book yourself. Tell me, how this can be true? As an experienced educator I can safely say that I have seen greater detail in 3rd grade level essays about “favorite things to do” than in your “high status” New York Daily News article about what KRS-ONE supposedly said.
His statements, I admit, would be considered “controversial” to people such as yourselves, considering your backgrounds. However, just because you did not fully understand what he said, does that give you a right to twist his words around according to your own paranoid view of reality (a syndrome from which a large percentage of Americans today suffer from thanks to the Bush Administration’s terror alert campaigns)?
If you considered KRS-ONE’s statements so shocking or feel that you may have misinterpreted something he said, why did you not take the opportunity to ask a question to receive more clarity? Even if you did not have the opportunity to ask questions, perhaps you would have done better justice by printing more fully what the man actually said. To automatically and “officially” declare “his solidarity with Al Qaeda,” the group linked with the murder of over two thousand people is repulsively sick. You are speaking of a man who has organized with his Temple of Hiphop annual days of mourning to the victims of the 9-11 terror attacks. Not only this, since 1987, I have religiously heard the man’s music, which has frequently contained lyrics emphasizing “world peace.” KRS-ONE’s statement about how “Hiphoppas” (not merely African-Americans as you put it) cheered and said “justice” when they saw the World Trade Center being attacked is indeed scary but it is very much a real view that much of today’s youth hold. Trust me. It is no coincidence that soon after this horrible act was broadcasted on television, many of my own students at the time were theorizing that the Bush Administration was responsible (Not that I believe or disbelieve this myself, but, in effect, posing the question as to why they would automatically think this way).
Why do you believe there was so much support for Jadakiss’ controversial song Why? (this song itself includes a question pertaining to why Bush blew up the towers – a song aired uncensored and highly requested on New York FM radio). Many of our inner-city youth may not know how to express themselves fully on such topics as the 9-11 terror attacks, largely due to their own lack of study. Yet and still, they are harassed enough by police to identify a common threat. Yet and still, they are annoyingly tested like genie pigs in the public schools enough to identify a common threat. This is not to mention that anger on the part of the poor world wide has built up immensely thanks to the World Trade Organization. In America we are constantly losing jobs which are being transported overseas. The result? The decrease of legal inner-city economies has led to the rise of illegal economies, which many youths participate in. The high neglect of such communities in America has left them in conditions similar to those of 3rd World Countries. In Third World Countries, as I am sure you are aware, youth are employed in factories owned by the same companies that left the inner-cities of America, where they produced products such as Nike shoes; laboring for, in some cases, two cents a day. The Hip-Hop youth of America, in turn, purchase such products twenty to thirty times more than what they are actually worth. This is partially why KRS-ONE identifies such corporate entities as “oppressors” – as you are so quick to mention.
Do you not understand now why such anger would exist in the hearts and minds of the youth? Perhaps you need to live the experience of a youth that embraces Hip-Hop culture to fully understand what I am saying. Especially ask those who grew up embracing Hip-Hop culture during the crack filled 80s what their views regarding the government were (and most likely still are). It has only been recently that we have been targeted by more “liberal” factions of U.S. politics to, for the first time, vote in a presidential election just as the Kennedy Administration targeted highly neglected African-Americans to vote for the first time (in a long time) in the 1960s. Your slanderous and abominable statements about KRS-ONE sharply resemble the way the media has historically repeatedly lashed out against African-American leaders, such as Malcolm X and countless others, who have spoken on what have been considered unexplored realities to white America.
As a note, I am certain that the anger among the Hip-Hop youth is destined to get worse once they realize fully how they are being targeted to be sent and slaughtered in a war that most do not agree with. Just take a look at where the armed forces is advertising: on BET during Rap City, in The Source and XXL Magazines; presenting the armed forces as being a party-filled experience where all the guys are rich and all drive wrapped Hummers (you know, the kind that recruiters drive up to inner-city schools in with the intent to attract attention). I don’t see such targeting towards white non-Hip-Hop youth on any form of television programming or print media. If you are to expose any scandals (or how your column puts it “gossip”) why don’t you investigate things along the lines of this matter? I am sure the experience will be like opening a Pandora’s box.
In respects to the mention of this country “must commit suicide if the world is to be a better place,” KRS-ONE was in a philosophical sense saying that the negative or “corrupt” characteristics of the United States, both in its foreign and domestic policies, must end. Taking chopped up “tidbits” of what KRS-ONE had to say and twisting them to make it seem as if he is the epitome of evil have me question your motives which may be regarded as “evil” in and of themselves. You alluding that KRS-ONE is opposed to voting is flawed. At his concerts he emphasizes the familiar phrase “Voting is the least you can do” to show and prove the type of power the Hip-Hop community has. You quoting him in saying “Voting in a corrupt society adds more corruption” must obviously be expressed in a totally wrong context.
One final note, just because KRS-ONE is not currently signed to what would be regarded a “major record label,” it absolutely does not mean that his music career is in a “downward-spiraling” motion as you put it. In fact, he has expressed much joy in being free from any corporate entities pinning him down to a recording contract. Anywhere in this country, from what I have experienced and know, he still packs concerts – mainly filled with Hip-Hop youth who are eager to know the truth as he expresses it. His career as a leader and teacher to the Hip-Hop nation is not over. It has just begun. It is not his career that is “bent on self-destruction,” as you put it, but our very lives as Americans if we do not take the time to listen to others with alternative perspectives of reality who seek nothing less than for humanity to be steered on the right path. In fact, for all readers on the internet who have the opportunity to read this and maintain an “open mind” may they “KEEP RIGHT!” I hope that you take this message as serious as many politicians have taken the Hip-Hop community serious in this up-coming election.
If you seek clarification on any of the matters presented above, you may contact me at 305-472-2566 or via e-mail at urbanamericainfo@yahoo.com. Trust me. I have much more on my mind to express on this matter and I can share it with you if you so request it. I pray that this message reaches you in the best of health, both physically and mentally to inspire drastic change in your way of thinking. I urge you to repair the damage by publicly apologizing to KRS-ONE and the Hip-Hop community.
Sincerely,
Tony Muhammad
Urban America Enterprises, Inc.