- Gil Scott-Heron, peoples' poet and musician, has died at the age of 62.
"You can go into the beat poets and [Allen] Ginsberg and [Bob] Dylan, but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern world. He and the Last Poets set the stage for everyone else. In what way necessary? Well, if you try and make pancakes and you ain't got the water, the milk or the eggs, you're trying to do something you can't. In combining music with the word, from the voice on down, you follow the template he laid out. His rapping is rhythmic. Some of it's songs. It's punchy, and all those qualities are still used today." - Chuck D
Even though he tackles very weighty problems, Thomas Naylor skillfully manages to find the humor and the irony in the dark side of life. His latest book, Crass Struggle: Greed, Glitz, and Gluttony in a Wanna-Have World, is no exception to the rule.
Crass Struggle is about how the ultra-rich respond to the human condition, namely, separation, meaninglessness, powerlessness, and fear of death, as well as the devastating global social, economic, and environmental consequences of their behavior. For those in the top 1 percent of the world’s population who own 50 percent of the world’s wealth, life is all about having – owning, possessing, manipulating and controlling money, power, people, and things – very expensive things such as precious metals, gemstones, diamonds, art objects, historical artifacts, rare coins, fine wines, Cuban cigars, scarce fish, exotic birds, wild animals, and elephant tusks. read more
Former Honduran President Zelaya's return home today has important implications for the Western Hemisphere that, we can predict, will be widely overlooked. Zelaya was ousted from the presidency when he was kidnapped at gunpoint by the military on June 28, 2009. Although no hard evidence has yet emerged that the U.S. government was directly involved in his overthrow, the Obama administration did everything it could do to help the coup government survive and then to legitimate itself through elections that most of the rest of the hemisphere, and the world, rejected as neither free nor fair. read more
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