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I don’t mind helping some of you out with ads regarding your businesses. But when I see there is no comment about the article I’ve wrote but just a lot of spam, it will be deleted immediately period. So think about what you are responding or commenting on. Some of the comments have nothing to do with said articles. Thank you advance.
As I stood holding family members of Zurana Horton this week, my tears turned to anger as I replayed the imagery in my mind of the mother of 12 being gunned down as she used herself as a shield from the bullets that were flying at the kids being let out of school in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Here I was in the home of a mother who had already lost two other children to gun violence and now she had to raise grandchildren that would surely be forever scarred by the brutal gun violence that took their mother’s life. I looked around at photos of Zurana and thought about the state of emergency in the Black community and how we won’t turn each other in because it’s “working with the man,” but will instead allow our people to kill each other while our streets are the “Wild Wild West.” I lost my son’s father to gun violence 10-years-ago and I’m so tired of watching more innocent victims like him and Zurana get their lives cut short. Thankfully an arrest has been made in this case but that won’t bring Zurana’s life back.
National Action Network held a press conference and the media asked the same old questions: Whether the elected officials have been accountable and what more the community can do. It makes me want to vomit when I think about how we have to beg people to care about the loss of Black life, and then we have to beg the community to take care of itself and quit the taking of lives.
Why is it that we don’t know where these illegal guns are coming from? Why are we unable to get weapons off our streets? And why on earth is it so damn hard to get our politicians to do something about it?
If Zurana’s tragic death occurred on the upper east side of Manhattan and not Brownsville, Brooklyn, you better believe elected officials and those in power would be singing a different tune. If young white men and women were dropping like flies from bullets in their neighborhood, I can guarantee you all of society would come to a halt until some sort of resolution could be achieved. Now, some people may say that we in the Black community need to speak up and do something to protect ourselves. But after generations of systematically being put down, the post-traumatic slavery syndrome is still affecting us whereby we as a collective think we somehow don’t deserve better.
Well, I’m here to say it’s time we demand better. It is nothing short of a travesty that we continue to watch men, women and children in our community get taken out by senseless violence on a daily basis. The simple act of picking up your children from school should not cost a person his/her life.
People keep people keep asking me why I continue to write about the issue of gun violence. The truth is, every single time someone dies from gun violence I feel like I’m living in the moment when I got the call that my son’s father was murdered, and they had found his body in the bushes where it had been for two weeks. I will never stop talking about the issue of gun violence and nor should we as a community until it ceases to exist.
Cable companies said Wednesday that they will offer Internet service for $9.95 per month to homes with children that are eligible for free school lunches.
The offer will start next summer and is part of an initiative the Federal Communications Commission cobbled together to get more U.S. homes connected to broadband.
One third, or about 35 million homes, don’t have broadband. That affects people’s ability to educate themselves and find and apply for jobs, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said.
“The broadband adoption gap in the U.S. is very large, and the costs of digital exclusion are high and getting higher,” Genachowski said.
The initiative, called Connect-to-Compete, also includes Microsoft Corp., which pledges to sell PCs with its Office software suite for $250 to low-income families. A firm called Redemtech is offering to sell refurbished computers for $150, including shipping.
For those who can’t afford those prices, Morgan Stanley is pledging to develop a microfinance lending program for community-based financial institutions.
People are still signing up for broadband, but growth has slowed in recent years. For those who still haven’t signed up, cost is a minor factor. Most say they’re simply not interested or don’t need it, according to a report by the Commerce Department based on Census Bureau data from last year.
To help address the lack of interest and computer skills, Best Buy Co., Microsoft and nonprofits such as America’s Promise Alliance and United Way are promising to support the initiative with training.
All major cable companies are standing behind the $9.95 offer, which will be valid for two years. The price doesn’t include taxes, but the companies are pledging to charge nothing for installation or modem rental.
The minimum download speed will be 1 megabit per second, less than one tenth of average cable speeds. Brian Dietz, a spokesman for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, said it will be up to the individual cable companies to decide what speeds they provide.
The NCTA estimates that about 5.5 million homes that don’t have broadband will be eligible for the offer. According to the Commerce Department study, 78 percent of households with school-age children already have broadband, making them far more likely to be connected than the average household.
The big broadband gap is between younger and older households: Only 45 percent of people older than 64 have broadband. Black and Hispanic households were less likely to have broadband, even when adjusting for income, according to the study.
Comcast Corp., the largest cable company and the country’s largest Internet service provider, is already offering broadband to $9.95 to low-income families, with a 1.5 megabit per second download speed. It offered to do that to get regulators to approve its acquisition of NBC Universal approved.
We don’t have all the details, but he was rushed to an L.A. hospital around noon today and was pronounced dead at the hospital at 1 PM.
He was 44 years old.
Heavy recently performed at the BET Awards in October
real name: Dwight Meyers
Short Description
When debt-ridden Highland Park, Michigan could no longer afford its monthly electric bill, elected officials had 1,000 streetlights ripped out.
Description
HIGHLAND PARK, Mich. (AP) — As the sun dips below the rooftops each evening, parts of this Detroit enclave turn to pitch black, the only illumination coming from a few streetlights at the end of the block or from glowing yellow yard globes.
It wasn’t always this way. But when the debt-ridden community could no longer afford its monthly electric bill, elected officials not only turned off 1,000 streetlights. They had them ripped out — bulbs, poles and all. Now nightfall cloaks most neighborhoods in inky darkness.
“How can you darken any city?” asked Victoria Dowdell, standing in the halo of a light in her front yard. “I think that was a disgrace. She said the decision endangers everyone, especially people who have to walk around at night or catch the bus.
Highland Park’s decision is one of the nation’s most extreme austerity measures, even among the scores of communities that can no longer afford to provide basic services.
Other towns have postponed roadwork, cut back on trash collection and closed libraries, for example. But to people left in the dark night after night, removing streetlights seems more drastic. And unlike many other cutbacks that can easily be reversed, this one appears to be permanent.
The city is $58 million in debt and has many more people than jobs, plus dozens of burned-out or vacant houses and buildings. With fewer than 12,000 residents, its population has dwindled to half the level from 20 years ago.
Faced with a $4 million electric bill that required $60,000 monthly payments, Mayor Hubert Yopp asked the City Council to consider reducing lighting. Council members reluctantly approved it, even in an election year.
“We knew it was going to hurt,” Councilman Christopher Woodard said. “We’re all hurting.”
In late August, contractors from DTE Energy began rolling through the streets, taking out two-thirds of the light poles.
“It is a winning proposition, but that doesn’t make it a winner with the citizens who find themselves in the dark,” Woodard added. “We had to watch our backs when we got out of our cars before. Now we have to watch them even more closely.”
Unless the government gets an unexpected infusion of cash or sees an uptick in its dying tax base, many parts of Highland Park will remain beneath a shroud every night.
The city’s monthly electric bill has been cut by 80 percent. The amount owed DTE Energy goes back about a decade, but utility executives hesitated to turn off the juice.
“We are extremely concerned with public safety,” said Trevor Lauer, vice president of marketing and renewables for the Detroit-based utility. “We recognize that street lighting is something that contributes to public safety.”
Now, he said, the company has “a municipal lighting customer I’m confident can pay its monthly bill.”
Most of the 500 streetlights still shining in Highland Park are along major streets and on corners in residential areas. DTE Energy has listed the city’s overdue bill as an uncollectable expense.
The leader of a nonprofit group that works to reduce energy costs for low-income families said he’s not heard of any other communities becoming so desperate to save money that they turned off streetlights. It might be a sign of things to come.
“If it works in Highland Park, I could not imagine other cities not looking at that as one option,” said David Fox, executive director of the National Low Income Energy Consortium in Alexandria, Va.
In its heyday, Highland Park was one of Michigan’s urban jewels, with large yards, spacious homes and tree-lined streets.
Henry Ford put his first moving assembly line here, and his factory eventually churned out a car every minute. By 1930, the city had grown to 50,000 people.
Ford later moved his primary manufacturing operations to River Rouge, southwest of Detroit, in search of room to expand. Highland Park survived that loss. But it never recovered from Chrysler’s decision in the 1990s to move its world headquarters 50 miles north to Oakland County.
“That took away $6 million” in taxes, Woodard said. “That was a lot of money to not have anymore. It was a major industrial operation moving out of here. When Chrysler moved out, things started to happen.”
Small businesses catering to Chrysler workers began to fail, and the city struggled to pay its bills. And like Detroit, which lost 250,000 residents from 2000 to 2010, people moved out, leaving hundreds of abandoned houses.
In 1980, the census counted 27,000 people living in Highland Park. By 2010, that number had fallen to 11,776.
The median household income is $18,700, compared with $48,700 statewide. And 42 percent of the city’s residents live in poverty.
“It’s pretty ghetto,” Cassandra Cabil said from her front yard. Voices drift in the darkness from down the street, but the speakers can’t be seen.
The 31-year-old short-order cook works odd hours and sometimes makes it home late at night. She watched recently as crews removed the streetlight and pole from in front of her rented home.
“It’s really dark unless people have their lights on,” she said. “There’s a lot of vandalism going on, people breaking into these houses.”
Eugenics was a scientific theory that grew in popularity during the 1920s. Eugenicists believed that poverty, promiscuity and alcoholism were traits that were inherited. Some of America’s wealthiest citizens of the time were eugenicists including Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Procter and Gamble fortune and James Hanes of the hosiery fortune. Hanes helped found the Human Betterment League which promoted the cause of eugenicists.
Eugenics was practiced in the United States many years before eugenics programs in Nazi Germany[4] and actually, U.S. programs provided much of the inspiration for the latter.[5][6][7] Stefan Kühl has stated the Consensus between Nazi Race Politicians and Eugenicists in Other Countries, including the United States, and pointed that eugenecist understood Nazi policies and measures as the realization of their goals and demands.
Who Gets Your Social Security When You Die?????
As the Sister Says, Wake up!!!!!!
—KEEP PASSING THIS AROUND UNTIL EVERY ONE HAS READ IT…..
… SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT….
THE ONLY THING WRONG WITH THIS CALCULATION IS THEY FORGOT TO FIGURE IN
THE PEOPLE WHO DIED BEFORE THEY COLLECTED THEIR SOCIAL SECURITY!!!!
WHERE DID THAT MONEY GO?????????????
This was sent to me, I am forwarding it because it does touch a nerve
in me. This is another example of what Rick Perry called
“TREASON in high places” !!! Get angry and pass this on!
Remember, not only did you contribute to Social Security but your
employer did too. It totaled 15% of your income before taxes. If you
averaged only $30K over your working life, that’s close to $220,500.
If you calculate the future value of $4,500 per year (yours & your
employer’s contribution) at a simple 5% (less than what the govt. pays
on the money that it borrows), after 49 years of working you’d have
$892,919.98.
If you took out only 3% per year, you’d receive $26,787.60 per year and
it would last better than 30 years (until you’re 95 if you retire at
age 65) and that’s with no interest paid on that final amount on
deposit! If you bought an annuity and it paid 4% per year, you’d have a
lifetime income of $2,976.40 per month.
The folks in Washington have pulled off a bigger Ponzi scheme than
Bernie Madhoff ever had.
Entitlement my ass, I paid cash for my social security insurance!!!!
Just because they borrowed the money, doesn’t make my benefits some
kind of charity or handout!!
Congressional benefits —- free healthcare, outrageous retirement
packages, 67 paid holidays, three weeks paid vacation, unlimited paid
sick days, now that’s welfare, and they have the nerve to call my
social security retirement entitlements?
We’re “broke” and can’t help our own Seniors, Veterans, Orphans,
Homeless
In the last months we have provided aid to Haiti, Chile , and Turkey, Japan,
And now Pakistan ……home of bin Laden. Literally, BILLIONS of
DOLLARS!!!
Our retired seniors living on a ‘fixed income’ receive no aid nor do
they get any breaks while our government and religious organizations
pour Hundreds of Billions of $$$$$$’s and Tons of Food to Foreign
Countries!
They call Social Security and Medicare an entitlement even though most
of us have been paying for it all our working lives and now when it’s
time for us to collect, the government is running out of money. Why did
the government borrow from it in the first place? Imagine if the
*GOVERNMENT* gave ‘US’ the same support they give to other countries.
Sad isn’t it?