As you may have guessed, Polow Da Don upset quite a few peoplep with his recent comments on AllHipHop.com about the differences between Black and White women. When asked if he stood by his comments, the self-described “King of the White Girls” replied:

Oh definitely. It has nothing to do with me, these effects. I didn’t make this stuff up. Only thing where people got misled is that I said I prefer a White woman, and that’s not the case at all. Really, I date all types of women. It was a stage in my life when I started dating a lot of White women- that was just a stage in my life. Right now, I date girls I like. I don’t base it off of any shade or color when I meet a girl now. They linked my comments about the Black family and Black women with the “King of the White Girls” and [the fact that] I dated White girls. That’s where it all went wrong. So when I was comparing Black women to White women, that has zero to do with me dating White women. What I was saying was factual though. Ladies and gentlemen agreed, niggas and bitches got mad.

Feel better now?

Neoliberalism demands minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security and union busting to make the elite even richer, while leaving everyone else to sink or swim.

Neoliberalism Dismantles Services to Make Elites Even Richer
By George Monbiot 

For the first time the UK’s consumer debt exceeds the total of its gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion. Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into the Mississippi. Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings. As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles.

These problems appear unrelated, but they all have something in common. They arise in large part from a meeting that took place 60 years ago in a Swiss spa resort. It laid the foundations for a philosophy of government that is responsible for many, perhaps most, of our contemporary crises.

When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its political project did not have a name. But it knew where it was going. The society’s founder, Friedrich von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would take at least a generation to win, but he knew that his intellectual army would attract powerful backers. Its philosophy, which later came to be known as neoliberalism, accorded with the interests of the ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would pay for it.

Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to supply essential services. By this means, enterprise is liberated, rational decisions are made and citizens are freed from the dehumanizing hand of the state.

This, at any rate, is the theory. But as David Harvey proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal program has been implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth not just to the top 1%, but to the top tenth of the top 1%. In the US, for instance, the upper 0.1% has already regained the position it held at the beginning of the 1920s. The conditions that neoliberalism demands in order to free human beings from the slavery of the state – minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security, deregulation, the breaking of the unions – just happen to be the conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving everyone else to sink or swim. In practice the philosophy developed at Mont Pelerin is little but an elaborate disguise for a wealth grab.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

The chances that Congress will allow the expansion of low power FM broadcast radio stations to exist in big radio markets offers a huge opportunity for citizens to communicate outside of the corporate airwaves.

The Promise of Low Power FM
By Michelle Chen 

The movement to develop alternatives to mainstream corporate-owned radio got a boost recently with a bi-partisan congressional bill to expand low-power FM (LPFM), a class of frequencies devoted to non-commercial community groups. Though LPFM stations only broadcast a radius of three-and-a-half miles, they offer the chance to bring seldom-heard voices on the air.

Media activists and reform groups see LPFM as a cheap, accessible medium that counterbalances the formulaic music and news of conglomerates like Clear Channel, while offering ownership and control to underrepresented groups. A recent study by the media-policy think tank Free Press found that women own 6 percent of the country’s full-power commercial radio stations; people of color and ethnic minorities control just 7.7 percent. It can cost as little as $5,000 to launch a no-frills LPFM station. About 800 stations have been established since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began licensing them in 2000.

The voices aired on low-power stations include evangelists, social critics, tomato pickers and indie rockers — all linked by the credo that radio should reflect the heterogeneity of the communities it serves.

Low-power broadcasters “are only able to succeed because they are authorized by the local community,” says Hannah Sassaman, an organizer with the Prometheus Radio Project, a Philadelphia-based radio advocacy group.

Prometheus has led the grassroots push for LPFM and is now building support for the Local Community Radio Act of 2007, introduced in June by Reps. Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) and Lee Terry (R-Neb.) in the House, and Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the Senate.

The bill would repeal strictures that have stunted LPFM’s growth. In 2000, lawmakers passed rules that in effect restricted LPFM to rural areas, after industry interests alleged that their “interference” would impinge on full-power broadcasters. But new research from the FCC shows that expanding low-power radio, even in denser markets, would not disrupt existing stations. Nonetheless, the National Association of Broadcasters recently reprised its warnings of “inevitable interference,” while opposing the bill.

For the rest of the story, click here. 

Attorney General Gonzales Resigns

After mounting controversy, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned from office. What do you think?

Doug Harford,
Systems Analyst
“Congrats, Dirk Kempthorne! You’re now my favorite current cabinet member!”

Leslie Doniacz,
Plumbing Apprentice
“How am I supposed to explain this to my kids? That the attorney general is just on a business trip for a while? That he’ll be back in a little bit? Think of the children!”

William Kern,
Gem Cutter
“Good. Maybe now we can restore some dignity to the attorney general’s office and get a classy singer-songwriter type like John Ashcroft.”

From TheOnion.com

Today’s photo of the day comes from American Lawyer magazine, where an editor from Glamour Magazine weighed in on natural hair in the workplace.