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Your Black Education: Obama Chooses Basketball Crony As Sec. Of Education
Obama Slam-Duncans Education
By: Greg Palast
Today, President-elect Barack Obama stuck it to you. He’s chosen Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.
Who? Duncan is most decidedly NOT an educator. He’s a lawyer. But Duncan has this extraordinary qualification: He’s Obama’s pick-up basketball buddy from Hyde Park.
I can’t make this up.
Not that Duncan hasn’t mucked about in the educational system. Chicago Boss Richie Daley put this guy in charge of the horror show called Chicago Public Schools where Duncan turned a bad system into a REALLY bad system.
And Obama knows it. Indeed, although he plays roundball with Duncan (who was captain of the Harvard basketball team), State Senator Obama was one of the only local Chicago officials who refused to send his kids to Duncan’s public schools. [...]
So, if The One won’t trust his kids to Duncan, why is he handing Duncan ours?
More At Your Black Education
Your Black Hip-Hop: Jasiri X Weekly Newscast — Hip-Hop Style!
Hip-Hop Emcee/Newscaster, Jasiri X, returns with his weekly Hip-Hop newscasts. For this week, current events include the failing economy, George Bush’s confessions, the ongoing Plaxico Burress fiasco, the Detroit 3 Auto-Bailout, Chicago workers sit-in, Clarence “Tom Us” questioning President-Elect Obama’s citizenship, and more:
Your Black News: Obama Lends Support To Workers Protest
CHICAGO – Gov. Rod Blagojevich ordered all state agencies Monday to stop doing business with Bank of America to try to pressure the bank into helping laid-off workers staging a sit-in at their shuttered factory. [...]
The sit-in began Friday and has fast become a symbol of the sour economy’s impact on labor. The workers have promised to remain inside the plant in shifts until they get assurances they will receive severance and vacation pay. [...]
Their plight has drawn support from President-elect Barack Obama, the 
Rev. Jesse Jackson and others. [...]
The laid-off workers are occupying the plant around-the-clock in eight-hour shifts, Fried said. About 60 were inside early Monday.
Obama said Sunday the company should honor its commitments to the laid-off employees.
“The workers who are asking for the benefits and payments that they have earned, I think they’re absolutely right and understand that what’s happening to them is reflective of what’s happening across this economy,” Obama said.
Your Black News: Jesse Jackson Pays Visit To Workers Sit-In
Workers at Republic Windows and Doors crowded into the small company lobby to hear the Rev. Jesse Jackson speak in support of their sit-in, which began three days ago.
“These workers are to this struggle perhaps what Rosa Parks was to social justice 50 years ago,” Jackson says. “This, in many ways, is the beginning of a larger movement for mass action to resist economic violence.”
Jackson says he came to the factory to show his solidarity for the workers, who were laid off Friday as their company closed its doors. Company officials say they had to close because the Bank of America denied the company’s request for $5 million credit. [...]
Bank of America received $25 billion in federal bailout cash, which Republic workers say obligates it to support the company.
“We’re going to have a self induced depression because we are trying to change our economy from the top down,” says Jackson. “It must be changed from the bottom up.”
Jackson says if the change doesn’t happen soon, the consequences will be dire [...]
Your Black News: How Black America Shaped Michelle Obama
Michelle Obama may be the pride of the South Side, but her undergraduate years at Princeton also helped shape her worldview.
A new biography, Michelle (Simon & Schuster), by Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy, delves into Obama’s years at the elite university, in particular Obama’s senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.”
“The question of what upper-income blacks owe to the less fortunate was a major preoccupation,” Mundy writes. [...]
Her thesis found that when African Americans are at Princeton as students, they tended to identify more with their race, but after graduating, less so. Obama, now 44, pledged not to forget the black underclass [...]
More At Your Black News
Your Black Celebrities: Jennifer Hudson Mother Killed, Nephew Missing
CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) — Police are questioning a suspect in the killings of Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Hudson’s mother and brother, according to published reports, and are searching for a boy missing from the scene.
Hudson’s mother, Darnell Donerson, and brother Jason Hudson were found slain Friday in their home on Chicago’s South Side, according to police. An Amber Alert has been issued for Hudson’s 7-year-old nephew Julian King.
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, William Balfour, 27, has been taken into custody.
On his MySpace page, Balfour says he is married to Jennifer Hudson’s sister Julia Hudson and has a stepson.
[...]
The Associated Press reports that Balfour is on parole and spent nearly seven years in prison for attempted murder, vehicular hijacking and possessing a stolen vehicle.
Julian, the missing boy, is 4 feet 11 inches tall and weighs 130 pounds. He was wearing a brown polo shirt with stripes and khaki pants when last seen, authorities said in the Amber Alert [...]
Your Black Politics: Organizing the Community: Understanding The GOP’s Fear
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer – YourBlackWorld.com
“Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” except that you have actual responsibilities.”
- Republican V.P. Nominee, Sarah Palin, in her acceptance speech at the RNC.
“On the other hand, you have a resume from a gifted man with an Ivy League education. He worked as a community organizer. What? He worked – I said – I said, OK, OK, maybe this is the first problem on the resume. He worked as a community organizer.“
- Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani giving Keynote Address at the RNC.
When the enemy of the state is community organizing, it is sufficient to acknowledge that the world as we know it is, indeed, coming to an end. To arrive at such a conclusion, one would have to deliberately skip over the Public Enemies of the 21st century – corrupt government, predatory mortgage lenders, failing schools, poverty, imperialism, neo-colonialism, drug-trafficking, inequality – and claim that the oppositional forces of good are the Taliban equivalent in the war against “domestic terrorism.” Terrorism, described as “the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes,” is clearly more in sync with the two big-name political parties’ attempt to cage dissent (at their pricy conventions), than the very factors which try to make the world safer for the most vulnerable. The unadulterated buffoonery of the GOP was unmasked last week, as their effort to give community-organizing a bad rep fell flat on its face – just as their lame attempt to be re-branded as the party of “change…”
Your Black News: Chicago Man Falsely Accused Of Killing Cop Freed
Authorities made the gut-wrenching decision Tuesday to release their sole suspect in the slaying of Chicago Police Officer Robert Soto.
Prosecutors are expected to seek the dismissal of murder and robbery charges against Jason Austin, 26, in court today. “We’re faced with witnesses recanting because they fear retaliation. The integrity of the investigation is solid. We’re going to continue to follow the evidence,” one police official said.
Detectives were trying to prove a pattern of intimidation after witnesses started changing their stories, a source said. Police and prosecutors held a tense, high-level meeting at police headquarters Tuesday before deciding to release Austin, the Sun-Times first reported on its Web site.
“I am elated because the kid didn’t do it,” said Austin’s attorney, David Wiener. “There is just no question in my mind. He said, ‘I didn’t do it.’ “
Wiener praised State’s Attorney Dick Devine and his office, saying, “They told me two weeks ago if I proved my client did not commit that crime, they would throw the case out.”
Spokesmen for the police and the state’s attorney’s office declined comment.
Officers who investigated the killing were “sick to their stomach” about the decision, a source said. “Rotten,” was how another high-ranking police official put it…
Your Black Life: Gov. Blagojevich Caught In ‘The Wire’ — Sen. Clay Davis
CHICAGO (AP) – In an unwavering statement of innocence, Gov. Rod Blagojevich said Friday he will be vindicated of criminal corruption charges and has no intention of letting what he called a “political lynch mob” force him from his job.
“I will fight. I will fight. I will fight until I take my last breath. I have done nothing wrong,” Blagojevich said, speaking for about three minutes in his first substantial public comments since his arrest last week on federal corruption charges.
The Democrat is accused, among other things, of plotting to sell or trade President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat in secretly recorded phone conversations.
“I’m not going to quit a job the people hired me to do because of false accusations and a political lynch mob,” Blagojevich said.
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