hip hop
Venezuelan Youth Street Culture Festival

Venezuelan Youth Street Culture Festival

The brim of a young hip-hop artist’s beige beanie hides a quarter of his face as his peers observe cross-legged from the concrete below. His cheek and lips grip the microphone intensely. The timid posture of his thinly adolescent frame can barely contain the newly found power and energy budding from each stomp he plants on the rickety stage in a weedy university parking lot in Mérida, Venezuela.

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The Future of the Anti-War Movement

The Future of the Anti-War Movement

Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr., president and CEO of the Hip Hop Caucus talks about the anti-war movement and where we stand today on the cusp of the 4th anniversary of the war. Listen to this interview : mp3 or Windows Media Player Q: March 19th will be the 4th anniversary of the war. Where has the anti-war movement gone since the February 2003 demonstrations which brought out nearly one million people in New York City and around the globe to say no to war with Iraq? Rev. Yearwood: We’ve come in different directions. First thing we recognize is since that day 3,150 Americans have lost their lives in Iraq. There are reports of between 500,000-600,000 Iraqis who have died. There are reports that we’ve spent a half-trillion dollars so far fighting this war. We are at a point now where we see a sense of urgency in the anti-war community from the academics to the activists from the street heat to the revolutionary bloggers. There is a sense that if we do not do something at this juncture, especially as we reach the fourth anniversary, that humanity is on line. I’m sure others have felt that way when our world has been at war, in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and others. But this war is different because America is the only superpower. The stakes are raised putting mankind and humankind on the line.

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Al-Ahram Interview of Tom Barry

What do you reckon will be Bush’s mantra in the second term? Will prompting democracy be his new ideology? Do you think that the Bush administration is genuinely pursuing the establishment of democratic systems in ME or is it just a rhetoric to conceal the real U.S. goals and schemes?

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