Thursday, December 15, 2011

Advertising Porno @ The Gas Pump



Getting gas is enough of a pain without Doritos telling me where to put my tongue!! Gross!! Gas pump porno ads!

New Beer - Baying Hound Aleworks - Mild Pale Ale

I have read about Baying Hound Aleworks a "nano-brewery" in Rockville, Maryland, but had yet to see or sample any of their brews. At Rodman's last week I found their Mild Pale Ale in a 22oz bottle. Most flavorful mild pale ale I have ever had. Not sure how often I would drink this but I will buy it again.
http://www.baying-hound.com/






Monday, December 12, 2011

Privacy For Sale

Trade in surveillance technology raises worries

By , Shyamantha Asokan and , Published: December 1

Northern Virginia technology entrepreneur Jerry Lucas hosted his first trade show for makers of surveillance gear at the McLean Hilton in May 2002. Thirty-five people attended.

Nine years later, Lucas holds five events annually around the world, drawing hundreds of vendors and thousands of potential buyers for an industry that he estimates sells $5 billion of the latest tracking, monitoring and eavesdropping technology each year. Along the way, these events have earned an evocative nickname: the Wiretappers’ Ball.

The products of what Lucas calls the “lawful intercept” industry are developed mainly in Western nations such as the United States but are sold all over the world with few restrictions. This burgeoning trade has alarmed human rights activists and privacy advocates, who call for greater regulation because the technology has ended up in the hands of repressive governments such as those of Syria, Iran and China.

“You need two things for a ­dictatorship to survive: propa­ganda and secret police,” said Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), who has proposed bills to restrict the sale of surveillance technology overseas. “Both of those are enabled in a huge way by the high-tech companies involved.”

But the overwhelming U.S. government response has been to engage in the event not as a potential regulator but as a customer.

The list of attendees for this year’s local Wiretappers’ Ball, held in October at the North Bethesda Marriott Hotel and Conference Center, included more than 35 federal agencies, Lucas said. The list, he added, included the FBI, the Secret Service and every branch of the military, along with the IRS, the Agriculture Department and the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service. None would comment on their participation in the event.

Representatives of 43 countries also were there, Lucas said, as were many people from state and local law enforcement agencies. Journalists and members of the public were excluded.

On offer were products that allow users to track hundreds of cellphones at once, read e-mails by the tens of thousands, even get a computer to snap a picture of its owner and send the image to police — or anyone else who buys the software. One product uses phony updates for iTunes and other popular programs to infiltrate personal computers.

Many monitoring systems work by cloning e-mails or making records of Web traffic, allowing police or other users to track the use of key words. Others use stand-alone hardware to eavesdrop on nearby cellphone or WiFi signals.

The Commerce Department regulates exports of surveillance technology, but its ability to restrict the trade is limited. Inter­mediaries sometimes redirect sales to foreign governments, even those that are subject to economic sanctions, once products leave the United States. The State Department, which has spent $70 million in recent years to promote Internet freedom abroad, has expressed rising alarm over such transactions but has no enforcement authority.

U.S. law generally requires law enforcement agencies to obtain court orders when intercepting domestic Internet or phone communications. But such restrictions do not follow products when they are sold overseas.

Industry officials say their products are designed for legitimate purposes, such as tracking terrorists, investigating crimes and allowing employers to block pornographic and other restricted Web sites at their offices.

“This technology is absolutely vital for civilization,” said Lucas, president of TeleStrategies, which hosts the events, officially called Intelligent Support Systems World Conferences. “You can’t have a situation where bad guys can communicate and you bar interception.”

But the surveillance products themselves make no distinction between bad guys and good guys, only users and targets. Several years of industry sales brochures provided to The Washington Post by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, and released publicly Thursday, reveal that many companies are selling sophisticated tools capable of going far beyond conventional investigative techniques.

“People are morally outraged by the traditional arms trade, but they don’t realize that the sale of software and equipment that allows oppressive regimes to monitor the movements, communications and Internet activity of entire populations is just as dangerous,” said Eric King of Privacy International, a London-based group that seeks to limit government surveillance. Sophisticated technology “is facilitating detention, torture and execution,” he said, “and potentially smothering the flames of another Arab Spring.”

Surging demand worldwide

Demand for surveillance tools surged after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as rising security concerns coincided with the spread of cellphones, Skype, social media and other technologies that made it easier for people to communicate — and easier for governments and companies to eavesdrop on a mass scale.

The surveillance industry conferences are in Prague, Dubai, Brasilia, the Washington area and Kuala Lumpur, whose event starts Tuesday. They are invitation-only affairs, and Lucas said he bars Syria, Iran and North Korea, which are under sanctions, from participating.

The most popular conference, with about 1,300 attendees, was in Dubai this year. Middle Eastern governments, for whom the Arab Spring was “a wake-up call,” are the most avid buyers of surveillance software and equipment, Lucas said. Any customers who come to the event are free to buy the products there.

“When you’re selling to a government, you lose control of what the government is going to do with it,” Lucas said. “It’s like selling guns to people. Some are going to defend themselves. Some are going to commit crimes.”

The suppliers are global as well. About 15 of the vendors for the conference in Bethesda were based in the United States, Lucas said. Others were from Germany, Italy, Israel, South Africa and Britain; many of these also have U.S. offices targeting the market for law enforcement agencies and other government buyers.

Of the 51 companies whose sales brochures and other materials were obtained and released by WikiLeaks, 17 have secured U.S. government contracts in the past five years for agencies such as the FBI, the State Department and the National Security Agency, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal procurement documents.

Federal agencies declined to comment on the use of surveillance technology. But Lucas said the Fish and Wildlife Service uses monitoring gear to catch poachers, the Agriculture Department to investigate abuse of grants and the IRS to search for evidence that tax filers have understated their income.

“The IRS loves to find people filing zero income on their tax returns with photos of Ferraris on their Facebook pages,” Lucas said.

An IRS spokesman declined to comment.

Privacy experts say that the legal framework governing the industry has not kept up with its growth and that products sold for legitimate purposes, such as blocking access to certain Web sites or investigating sexual predators, can easily be adapted for broader surveillance.

Far-reaching tools

The brochures collected by WikiLeaks make clear that few forms of electronic communication are beyond the reach of available surveillance tools. Although some simple products cost just a few hundred dollars and can be bought on eBay, the technology sold at the trade shows often costs hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Customization and on-site training can provide years of revenue for companies.

One German company, DigiTask, offers a suitcase-size device capable of monitoring Web use on public WiFi networks, such as those at cafes, airports and hotels. A lawyer representing the company, Winfried Seibert, declined to elaborate on its products. “They won’t answer questions about what is offered,” he said. “That’s a secret. That’s a secret between the company and the customer.”

Another German firm, Elaman, touts in its government security brochure the capacity to “identify an individual’s location, their associates and members of a group, such as political opponents.”

A British company, Cobham, creates bogus cellphone towers that let users track phones up to three miles away and listen to some calls, according to its brochure. A spokesman confirmed it provides cellular tracking devices for “bona fide law enforcement agencies worldwide.”

The FinFisher program, which creates fake updates for iTunes, Adobe Acrobat and other programs, was produced by a British company, Gamma International. The Wall Street Journal reported on this product, and several other surveillance tools described in sales brochures, in an article last month. Apple said that on Nov. 14 it altered iTunes to block Fin­Fisher intrusions.

A lawyer who represents Gamma, Peter Lloyd, said that Fin­Fisher is a vital investigative tool for law enforcement agencies and that the company complies with British law. “Gamma does not approve or encourage any misuse of its products and is not aware of any such misuse,” he said.

The WikiLeaks documents, which the group also provided to several European news organizations and one in India, do not reveal the names of buyers. But when Arab Spring revolutionaries took control of state security agencies in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, they found that Western surveillance technology had been used to monitor political activists.

“We are seeing a growing number of repressive regimes get hold of the latest, greatest Western technologies and use them to spy on their own citizens for the purpose of quashing peaceful political dissent or even information that would allow citizens to know what is happening in their communities,” Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for human rights, said in a speech last month in California. “We are monitoring this issue very closely.”

In Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad’s efforts to crush an uprising have left 3,500 people dead, by U.N. calculations, police have reportedly been using surveillance technology to eavesdrop on electronic communications and block access to Web sites.

Syrian activist Rami Nakhle said that after he set up an online newspaper and started blogging about human rights, Syria’s secret police last year began summoning him for regular interrogations that involved threats of torture and a day in solitary confinement. Officers made it clear that they had watched him online despite his efforts to conceal his identity.

Police also hacked into fellow activists’ Facebook accounts, said Nakhle, 29. “Before, they were not very good at this, but now they are getting more advanced,” he said.

Nakhle fled to Lebanon in January and now lives in suburban Washington as a political exile. Many of his friends are still in Syrian prisons. “I am not that idealistic. I know that companies need money, but this is about people’s lives,” he said.

A Syrian Embassy spokesman did not respond to messages seeking comment on the government’s use of surveillance technology.

Getting past sanctions

The Commerce Department is investigating how monitoring devices made by Blue Coat Systems, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., reached Syria despite sanctions, according to several U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. Blue Coat Systems has said it didn’t know its products were being used by Syria and that the devices in question were intended for the Iraqi communications ministry. A distributor, the company said, shipped the products to a reseller in Dubai late last year.

In a statement last month, Blue Coat said it was cooperating with government agencies probing “this unlawful diversion” and conducting its own internal review. A spokesman for the company declined to comment further.

NetApp, also of Sunnyvale, produced hardware and software that the Syrian government was using to build a system to intercept and catalogue vast amounts of e-mail, according to Bloomberg News. Net­App has denied selling equipment to Syria. The project, which was never finished, also included computer equipment from another California company and two European businesses.

The technology’s spread is not limited to the Middle East. A federal lawsuit filed in May accuses Cisco Systems of helping China monitor the Falun Gong group.

The lawsuit, filed by the U.S.-based Human Rights Law Foundation, alleges that Cisco helped design and provide equipment for China’s “Golden Shield,” a firewall that censors the Internet and tracks government opponents. Cisco has acknowledged that it sells routers, which are standard building blocks for any Internet connection, to China. But it denies the allegations in the suit, saying that it has not customized any items for use in censorship.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy did not respond to messages seeking comment. U.S. companies that want to export devices “primarily useful for the surreptitious interception of wire, oral or electronic communications” must apply to the Commerce Department for a license to sell to overseas buyers under the department’s Export Administration Regulations.

But it can be hard to prove that an export is “primarily useful” for surveillance. Some products need to be used in combination with other equipment in order to eavesdrop. Even standard anti-virus software can be retooled to read e-mails and attachments.

Daniel Minutillo, a Silicon Valley-based lawyer who advises technology companies, said that in most cases his clients can show that their products have multiple uses, making them exempt from export licensing rules.

Human rights groups want this exemption ended. “As long as the market is increasing and there is a lack of regulation, it’s a perfect mix,” said Arvind Ganesan, who studies online surveillance for Human Rights Watch. “The Obama administration has not led in this regard, and there are only a few voices in Congress talking about this. It’s a massive oversight.”

Smith’s bill, which has stalled in committee several times in recent years, would prevent sales to countries, such as China and Syria, that restrict Internet freedom. Yet more aggressive U.S. laws might push the industry overseas if other nations don’t impose similar restrictions. Indian and Chinese vendors have attended Wiretappers’ Balls in recent years.

A State Department official who attended the event in October was pessimistic that government regulation could curb a fast-changing technology sector. “We’ve lost,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “If the technology people are selling at these conferences gets into the hands of bad people, all we can do is raise the costs. We can’t completely protect activists or anyone from this.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trade-in-surveillance-technology-raises-worries/2011/11/22/gIQAFFZOGO_story.html

DEA Should Reclassify Marijuana

Washington and Rhode Island Governors Want DEA to Reclassify Marijuana

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire and Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee have filed a petition with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration asking the agency to reclassify marijuana so doctors can prescribe it and pharmacists can fill the prescription.

The governors said Wednesday they want the federal government to list marijuana as a Schedule 2 drug, allowing it to be used for medical treatment. Marijuana is currently classified a Schedule 1 drug, meaning it's not accepted for medical treatment and can't be prescribed, administered or dispensed.

Washington and Rhode Island are two of 16 states, and the District of Columbia, that have laws allowing the medical use of marijuana.

"Each of these jurisdictions is struggling with managing safe access to medical cannabis for patients with serious medical conditions," the 99-page petition and report reads. "Our work with the federal agencies has not resolved the matter."

Gregoire said that the conflict between state and federal laws means legitimate patients lack a regulated and safe system to obtain marijuana.

"It is time to show compassion and time to show common sense," she said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.

Washington voters approved a medical marijuana law in 1998 that gives doctors the right to recommend -- but not prescribe -- marijuana for people suffering from cancer and other conditions that cause "intractable pain."

Earlier this year, Gregoire vetoed most of a bill that made major reforms to the state's medical marijuana law, saying state workers could be prosecuted under federal law the way the measure was written.

The legislation was passed to set clearer regulations on medical marijuana use and to establish a licensing system and patient registry to protect qualifying patients, doctors and providers from criminal liability. Gregoire vetoed provisions of the bill that would have licensed and regulated medical marijuana dispensaries and producers. She also nixed a provision for a patient registry under the Department of Health.

"There's chaos and conflict between what the states are doing and what the Justice Department is threatening to do," said Chafee, who was on Wednesday's conference call with Gregoire.

A DEA spokeswoman said officials at the agency had heard of the petition but could not comment.

Earlier this month, the DEA raided 10 storefront dispensaries in Washington state, including several in Seattle, where law enforcement officials have taken a lenient view of medical marijuana grows and dispensaries. Search warrant affidavits suggested the shops were fronts for illicit drug dealing and revealed that agents were looking for evidence of drug conspiracies, money laundering and guns. Similar raids occurred in Montana and California as well.

Morgan Fox of the Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project said the petition was a "good first step" but reclassifying the drug will not "change the federal penalties for possessing, cultivating or distributing medical marijuana."

"That is the change we really need," Fox wrote in a news release. "These governors should be insisting that the federal government allow them to run their medical marijuana operations the ways they see fit, which in these cases includes allowing regulated distribution centers to provide patients with safe access to their medicine and not force them to turn to illicit dealers."

The DEA has rejected prior petitions seeking to reclassify marijuana, but Gregoire noted that this is the first petition signed by governors.

Gregoire also said the science on the issue has changed. The American Medical Association reversed its position two years ago and now supports investigation and clinical research of cannabis for medicinal use.

Gregoire said she was on a phone call in August with other governors in medical marijuana states and said that there was a "huge volume" of interest.

Asked why no other governors have signed onto the initial petition, Gregoire said she and Chafee wanted to take the lead on the initiative.

"I have every expectation that you will see other governors join us," she said.

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin plans to sign the petition and write a letter in support of the proposed change, said spokeswoman Susan Allen. Gil Duran, a spokesman for California Gov. Jerry Brown, did not have an immediate comment when asked about the petition Wednesday. Other governors did not immediately respond to requests from The Associated Press.

"The governors in Washington and Rhode Island raise a valid conflict that needs to be resolved," said Eric Brown, a spokesman for Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper. "Colorado law requires we make a similar ask of the federal government by Jan. 1. We will do that. We will also continue to consult with other governors on this issue and with Colorado's attorney general before deciding whether anything else will be done."

There is currently an effort in Washington state to decriminalize and tax recreational marijuana sales for adults. Initiative 502, which has been endorsed by two former Seattle U.S. attorneys and the former head of the FBI in Washington state, would create a system of state-licensed growers, processors and stores, and would impose a 25 percent excise tax at each stage. Adults 21 and over could buy up to an ounce of dried marijuana; one pound of marijuana-infused product in solid form, such as brownies; or 72 ounces of marijuana-infused liquids. It would be illegal to drive with more than 5 nanograms of THC, the active ingredient of cannabis, per milliliter of blood.

Sponsors need to collect more than 240,000 valid signatures by Dec. 30 to place the measure before the Legislature early next year. If the Legislature doesn't take up the issue, it automatically goes to the November ballot.

When asked about the initiative, Gregoire said her focus was on medical marijuana, and how to "get relief that is safe and readily available to these patients."


http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/01/washington-and-rhode-island-governors-want-dea-to-reclassify-marijuana/

Whose Convenience?

Facebook changes will help advertisers, while leaving users more exposed

By , Published: September 29

In Japan, the philosophy of “kaizen” refers to a state of continuous improvement. It’s a management catchword implying that nothing is ever good enough. Change, in other words, is essential.

The folks at Facebook are clearly “kaizen” believers.

Over the nearly eight years of its life, the technology company seems to exist in a constant state of transition, rolling out changes with increasing regularity. Every time Facebook changes, users protest. The new features are tweaked , then just as as the dust settles, a new change is rolled out.

At some point, though, this continual flux merits scrutiny: Just who is Facebook making these improvements for? The company says it’s all for users. Founder Mark Zuckerberg touts the ease of sharing in the latest iteration. And it’s true that the site has always been easy. While Twitter, with its 80 million users, has a secret code of @ and # signs, Facebook, with its 800 million, relies on our given names, schools and jobs.

The latest changes include instant sharing. Facebook, with clients such as Hulu, Spotify and The Washington Post, can see what you are reading, listening to and watching, and will let your friends know, too. There’s also a page with all your Facebook activity called Timeline, which tracks what you’re doing.

While Facebook says the changes will make it easier for users to keep their friends informed about their lives, the truth is that Facebook is making improvements for its clients — and I don’t mean us. All this information gathered by Facebook will be very beneficial to advertising companies.

Nick O’Neill, the founder of the news site All Facebook, said after the most recent changes rolled out, “I’ve been covering the site for four years, and using it for longer. I can definitely say it’s the first time I’ve reconsidered whether or not being on there is a good idea. The company’s interest is not aligned with my own.”

To O’Neill and others, the changes seem to suggest Facebook is in a race to expose as much information about its users as possible. For example, Nik Cubrilovic, an Australian blogger, found that Facebook never really logs you out until you shut down your computer. A Facebook engineer responded on Cubrilovic’s blog, writing that the company never sells information about users to any ad network and uses the tracking information for safety reasons.

Still, many of us share a sense that we lack control over Facebook and the personal details we share on the site. There is little to stop Facebook from giving our information to advertisers — or governments, or employers, or anyone else.

Even so, millions of us continue to stick around.

The reason? It’s that soft word “friend,” with its promise of trust and intimacy. Facebook has always grasped the human connection we seek online.

Eric Leist, a social media watcher and a huge fan of the most recent Facebook changes, made a mash-up video promoting Facebook’s new Timeline. The video uses a scene from the popular television series “Mad Men” in which the main character, 1960s ad man Don Draper, is pitching Kodachrome’s slideshow carousel.

Draper’s sonorous voice talks about what makes great advertising. It’s about creating “a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent,” Draper says. Over images of moments of his own life displayed on Timeline, Draper says, “It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”

That successful advertising pitch fits with Facebook’s promise. Our lives are important, and if we show them to the world via a computer screen, Facebook lures us into believing. The past does have meaning.

And millions of us have invested so much of ourselves in that promise that our lack of control seems a small-enough price to pay.




http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/facebook-changes-will-help-advertisers-while-leaving-users-more-exposed/2011/09/27/gIQAQAiQ7K_story.html

American Musical Roots

‘The Chitlin’ Circuit’ by Preston Lauterbach, about pre-rock black music.

By , Published: July 8

The fancy name for them is chitterlings: the intestines of hogs — the leavings, after all the prime meat has been carved away — cooked and served as an essential ingredient of soul food. In addition to their important culinary function, they gave their name to an equally important American musical phenomenon: the “chitlin’ circuit,” which flourished throughout the South for about two decades beginning in the late 1930s. The circuit first provided venues in big cities and minuscule crossroads for black-run dance bands — the most famous, and the best, being Jimmie Lunceford’s — and then venues for the pioneers in what was first known as the blues, then as rhythm and blues, then as rock and roll: B.B. King, Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris, T-Bone Walker, Little Richard, James Brown, Ray Charles, et al.

The chitlin’ circuit was more than just music — it nurtured comedians and was championed in the plays of August Wilson — but Preston Lauterbach’s focus is on “how the chitlin’ circuit for live music developed from the late 1930s and nurtured rock ’n’ roll from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s.” Lauterbach, a freelance writer based in Memphis, got more than he bargained for when he decided to write a book about it:

“The chitlin’ circuit story that unfolded through old newspapers, interviews with aged jitterbugs, torn scrapbooks, and city directories crossed unexpected backroads: the numbers racket, hair straighteners, multiple murders, human catastrophe, commercial sex, bootlegging, international scandal, female impersonation, and a real female who could screw a light bulb into herself — and turn it on. . . . These are the intertwined stories of booking agents, show promoters, and nightclub owners, the moguls who controlled wealth throughout the black music business. Until records eclipsed live shows as the top moneymakers, new sounds grew on the road and in nightclubs, through the dance business rather than in the recording studio. Though the moguls’ names are not recognized among the important producers of American culture, their numbers rackets, dice parlors, dance halls, and bootleg liquor and prostitution rings financed the artistic development of breakthrough performers.”

Though the circuit operated primarily in the South, its origins were in neighborhoods known as “Bronzevilles”: “black towns within white cities throughout the segregated North.” Lauterbach gives particular attention to the Bronzeville in Indianapolis, presided over by Denver Ferguson, the prosperous operator of a numbers game, whose other holdings included “a busy printing shop, a service uniform factory, and bits of real estate, including the Sunset Terrace and Sunset Cafe.” At the end of 1941, he and his brother Sea incorporated a company “to engage in the business of booking agent, promoter, sponsor and artists’ representative for bands, orchestras, shows, revues, sporting, theatrical and athletic acts, concerts, games, contests, dances, shows, and all other kinds of amusement enterprises.”

It was a long-winded way of saying that Denver Ferguson had gotten in on the ground floor as the chitlin’ circuit formed alliances with the burgeoning record business: “Bookers needed records to promote their bands, and record companies needed personal appearance tours to promote records.” Ferguson hooked up with Bluebird, which “recorded hard blues, which didn’t fly with the white audience” but were becoming bigger and bigger on the circuit, so “pushing Bluebird’s nationally known blues artists through Deep South blues country” was a natural for Ferguson. He had already been booking swing bands in the South, but there as elsewhere the big bands were dying: Wartime gas rationing made it prohibitively expensive to run large buses, and in any event popular taste was shifting to vocalists.

Lauterbach identifies Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five as the harbingers of change. His group was small and thus economically manageable, and his exuberant style — “he embraced the funny, confusing, violent reality of farm folk in the city” — played well in the small towns on the circuit. His first hit records, “Knock Me a Jug” and “(I’m Gonna Move to the) Outskirts of Town,” were made in the fall of 1941. The immense popularity he enjoyed has long since faded, but he was “the key role model to virtually every black performer for the next fifteen years.”

Jordan’s ascent “pushed the vocalist into the limelight” and made the band “an afterthought.” By the late 1940s “the sound Louis Jordan pioneered and popularized in the early part of the decade had all but pushed jazz out of the black pop picture,” though it needs to be noted that, with the emergence of bop at the same time, jazz began to move away from a popular audience and was becoming a form of art music, for better or for worse.

Though the artists who were shaping their music and their careers on the chitlin’ circuit during the late 1940s and early ’50s eventually became known to a national audience that crossed and transcended racial lines, at the time they worked in an almost entirely black world that was virtually unknown to the “pop” (i.e., white) world. When Billboard magazine in 1949 “renamed its African-American music bestseller list from ‘Race Records’ to ‘Rhythm and Blues Records,’ ” however, it was a sign of change. Still, Lauterbach makes an important point:

“Influential gatekeepers have tended to treat ‘rhythm and blues’ as a genre-defining term rather than what it was, a marketing phrase, shorthand for black popular music in whatever form happened to be selling. The standardized definitions of rock ’n’ roll, courtesy of institutions such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Rolling Stone magazine, emphasize a fusion of black rhythm and blues and white country-western sounds, as if the two styles brought distinct elements to a new mixture. While that certainly applies to Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, some of the first rock ’n’ roll stars as such, it implies a shared primacy that simply didn’t exist at the true dawn of rock ’n’ roll. While black music was clearly rockin’ by 1949, country and western fans delighted to the sounds of yodels, waltzes, accordions, fiddle, and steel guitars — great stuff, but not the stuff of rock ’n’ roll.”

What happened to the music that was nurtured on the chitlin’ circuit was, of course, what has happened to black music throughout American history: Whites discovered it, fell in love with it and adapted it — “covered” it, to use the music-business term — to suit their own gifts and tastes. The great musical wave that brought rock and roll into being in the mid-’50s certainly profited many black musicians, among them Little Richard, James Brown, B.B. King and Ray Charles, but the greatest attention and financial rewards mostly went to whites. After the rise of rock and roll, black music moved into the mainstream as it never had before, but the music business then, as now, was owned and operated by whites for whites.

Lauterbach reports that a few bits and pieces of the chitlin’ circuit can still be found, but it faded away as segregation began to loosen its grip on the South and paying black customers began to be welcomed in venues previously restricted to whites. On the whole this is a good thing, but the circuit was a vital part of black culture during its heyday, and its disappearance is to be mourned. It brought a lot of joy to people who didn’t have much, and it brought splendid music to all of us. Lauterbach’s tribute to it is welcome and overdue.

Jonathan Yardley is the author of “Second Readings: Notable and Neglected Books Revisited.” The contents first ran as a series of essays in The Washington Post.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-chitlin-circuit-by-preston-lauterbach-about-pre-rock-black-music/2011/06/27/gIQAyjy73H_story.html

Class Is Colorblind So Long As You Got The Money

Have African Americans escaped inequality? Not even close.

By Ellis Cose, Published: July 7, 2011

The Obama presidency notwithstanding, America has not become post-racial. But it has become post-caste.

This is a colossal achievement that places us awfully close to that world imagined by Martin Luther King Jr. in which “little black boys and black girls . . . join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” For there are plenty of places in today’s America where children of various hues bond and play together, happily oblivious to the differences that might once have kept them apart.

But the realization of that dream does not mean America has reached true equality. King understood this difference, as his later anti-poverty crusade made clear. Financial fragility, he realized, could be even more crippling than segregation, especially when undergirded by a history of economic discrimination that left many blacks only marginally better off than lower caste members in India. So he died fighting to level — or at least make more even — the economic playing field.

King’s legendary “I have a dream” speech focused on ending American apartheid for one simple reason: Racism loomed so large, and its clasp was so suffocating, that for African Americans of the era, it was the great, inescapable evil, and one that made it hard to focus on much of anything else. But even as the uglier forms of racism receded with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, blacks of all classes, including those with Ivy League degrees, despaired of escaping the confines of race. It was that hopelessness festering among the black elite that led me, in the early 1990s, to write a book, “The Rage of a Privileged Class,” about African Americans frustrated by their inability to shatter the glass ceiling.

Yet, in a remarkably short time, the ceiling began to crack. Corporate chief executives, the whitest cohort in America, suddenly got some color. Richard Parsons became president of Time Warner in 1995, and in 2002, he was named chief executive. Kenneth Chenault landed the top job at American Express in 2001. Oprah Winfrey became not only one of the world’s richest women, but the arbiter of middle-American taste. Meanwhile, black actors such as Denzel Washington, Will Smith and Halle Berry ascended to the top ranks of Hollywood. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice became secretaries of state. Then, of course, came the stunning rise of Barack Obama.

On the eve of Obama’s inauguration, a CNN poll found that two-thirds of blacks believed that King’s dream had been “fulfilled.” In a narrow sense, it had been. If Obama’s election proved nothing else, it proved that the previously impermeable American caste system was at long last dead. Dark skin could no longer bar someone from the nation’s positions of power — not even from the most powerful job in the land.

The end of caste has had a huge impact on a rising generation of black achievers, a cohort that I studied extensively for my new book, “The End of Anger.” In my research, I surveyed 200 black alumni of Harvard Business School and more than 300 alumni of A Better Chance, a New York City-based program founded in 1963 that sends minority children to selective high schools across the country.

I found a massive generation gap: Many of those under age 40 had boundless faith in their ability to crash through, navigate around or simply disregard barriers that bedeviled talented blacks of earlier generations. Their outlook struck many older black respondents as naive, yet it reflected their experience of coming up in a world where African Americans are no longer imprisoned in a subordinate caste.

But of course, the reality of these highly educated young people is not the reality of the poor and unlettered. In the less privileged America, blatant racism may be forbidden, but brutal unfairness remains a fact of life.

The percentage of black men with jobs, always lower than that for whites, has dropped to its lowest level since the Labor Department began keeping such records in the early 1970s. Even before the Great Recession, the wealth gap between blacks and whites was growing. That gap, excluding home equity, stood at $20,000 in 2007 dollars in 1984; by 2007, it had increased to $95,000, according to Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy. And the subprime mortgage meltdown made things much worse, hitting with particular force many communities occupied largely by blacks and Latinos. The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, estimated that property depreciation related to foreclosures between 2009 and 2012 would end up costing black communities $194 billion and Latino communities $177 billion. The center also concluded that “nearly 8 percent of both African Americans and Latinos have lost their homes to foreclosures, compared to 4.5 percent of whites.”

How could such things happen at the very time the nation’s racial caste system was collapsing? Because the end of American apartheid did not erase the caste system’s effects. America’s history of economic discrimination left most blacks unable to accumulate the intergenerational wealth — trust funds, mortgage-free property and unencumbered cash — that would have permitted them to weather the economic storm. And residential segregation made Zip codes largely inhabited by blacks and Latinos easy to target for subprime loans.

During a visit to India a couple of years ago, I spent time with Martin Macwan, a lawyer born in a small village to Dalits, or “untouchables,” who has made the elimination of untouchability his life’s work. He has started schools for young Dalits shunned in their home villages; created programs to provide alternatives to the menial jobs normally reserved for lower castes; and fought for Dalit rights in the courts, although untouchability was outlawed by the Indian constitution in 1950. The “social system,” Macwan told me, “is more powerful than the law.”

The United States is discovering something similar. The caste system has officially ended, particularly (as in India) in cosmopolitan circles. Yet its legacy hasn’t vanished. Even though formally sanctioned racism may have effectively disappeared, racism’s effects linger.

There is no term to describe this new reality — a world where the economic system, culture and customs conspire to keep many people trapped in what seems very much like the old caste system, even as we celebrate the collapse of the caste system. Neither the old rhetoric of racism nor the new talk of post-racialism remotely captures where we are. Nor does the oft-used phrase “structural racism” really sum it up. “Structural inequality” comes closer, but even that inelegant term does not adequately describe how history and present-day hurdles to achievement come together to keep certain communities down.

Perhaps it is time to put such language aside and to recognize that the struggle for equality was never just about race. And it was certainly not just about expanding the circle of opportunity so that privileged blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans could enjoy the same prerogatives as privileged whites. It was about expanding that circle for the underprivileged, period.

Ellis Cose, formerly a columnist for Newsweek, is the author of “The End of Anger: A New Generation’s Take on Race and Rage.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/post-racial-no-post-caste-sure-post-inequality-not-even-close/2011/06/27/gIQA2QtS2H_story.html