I know a caper
we can get some government paper
ya' know food stamps, can we really do that
hell yeah right there for the takin'
fuck welfare we say reparations
Ya' know the grind
get up early get on the line and just wait
everybody on break
that's part of the game and when they call your name
Miss caseworker lemme state my claim
I'm homeless, jobless, time is hard
about hopeless, but I gotta eat regardless
no family to run to I'm 22
now tell me what the fuck am I supposed to do
my sad story made her feel close to me
I made her feel like it was in emergency
and when I came to the crib niggas couldn't believe
I came back with a big bag of groceries
The song suggests that people struggling to feed their families in this country are better off committing petty crime (against retail stores, credit card companies, and the government, never against other poor people) than they are playing along with the System. This song follows in a long line of Hip Hop songs that will blow you away illustrating the social and economic origins of crime. The line “now tell me what the fuck am I supposed to do” is lifted directly from one of the first such songs, “Loves Gonna Get’cha” by KRS-One
Just before eight-thirty this morning, I arrived at the compound of the Connecticut Hospital Association in Wallingford. My coworker, who drove us there in her boxy black SUV, wondered sarcastically how the “nonprofit” federation of the state’s medical establishment would find itself in possession of a thick-carpeted, air-conditioned, convention center. The place looks like a sterile cross between the Marriot and the dentist’s office, but compared to some of the Spartan hell-holes that have passed for office space in my time in the trenches of nonprofit advocacy, this place was like the Pentagon. Our own one-room (we used to rent the adjacent office but stopped in order to save money) office back in New Haven, at Student Health Outreach, looks more like your average “nonprofit.”
With Bush attempting to claim credit in recent months for the apparent 'wave of democracic movements' sweeping from Egypt to Kyrgyzstan, I have been dissatisfied with the Left's relative silence on the issue. The trouble is that we progressives have been struggling to come up with a good, serious intelectual challenge to the assertion that Bush gambled and won on the idea that democracy would flourish in the Middle East and Central Asia as a result of the occupation of Iraq.
In April, I got a chance to make a minor contribution to this debate.The Hippolytic sponsored a public debate between me and Al Jiwa, the president of the Yale College Republicans. One of the speeches I gave, on foreign policy, developed, with the help of the rest of the Hippo crew, into a bullet-pointed list of ways that Bush is actively making the World less safe for democracy:
6.) The War in Iraq has been a setback for the cause of Democracy in the Muslim World and around the World. The recent Pew Trust Poll shows that significant majorities of people in countries from Pakistan to Morocco actually support violence against American forces in Iraq. Indeed, the rhetoric of democracy is surprisingly weak next to the images of Iraqi civilians at Abu Grhaib, naked, shackled, being raped and urinated upon. Because “democracy” is the slogan of the American occupiers of Iraq, we have, in the words of Richard Clark said, closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region.
7.) Under Bush’s leadership, the US continues to actively support brutal, authoritarian regimes around the world.
a. We embrace Uzbekistan as an Ally in the war on terrorism. Political prisoners and religious dissidents in Uzbekistan are routinely tortured, even boiled alive.
b. We continue to Support the deeply conservative monarchy in Saudi Arabia, and the Pakistani Autocrat Pervez Musharraf. We give a great deal of military aid to the authoritarian government of Egypt.
c. The Bush government supported a coup to over through Hugo Chavez, the Democratically elected president of Venezuela
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