The paramount beneficiaries of Katrina relief aid have been the giant engineering firms KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) and the Shaw Group, which enjoy the services of lobbyist Joe Allbaugh (a former FEMA director and Bush's 2000 campaign manager). FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, while unable to explain to Governor Blanco last fall exactly how they were spending money in Louisiana, have tolerated levels of profiteering that would raise eyebrows even on the war-torn Euphrates. (Some of this largesse, of course, is guaranteed to be recycled as GOP campaign contributions.) FEMA, for example, has paid the Shaw Group $175 per square (100 square feet) to install tarps on storm-damaged roofs in New Orleans. Yet the actual installers earn as little as $2 per square, and the tarps are provided by FEMA. Similarly, the Army Corps pays prime contractors about $20 per cubic yard of storm debris removed, yet some bulldozer operators receive only $1. Every level of the contracting food chain, in other words, is grotesquely overfed except the bottom rung, where the actual work is carried out. While the Friends of Bush mine gold from the wreckage of New Orleans, many disappointed recovery workers--often Mexican or Salvadoran immigrants camped out in city parks and derelict shopping centers--can barely make ends meet...

The Republican hostility to New Orleans, of course, runs deeper and is nastier than mere concern with civic probity (America's most corrupt city, after all, is located on the Potomac, not the Mississippi). Underlying all the circumlocutions are the same antediluvian prejudices and stereotypes that were used to justify the violent overthrow of Reconstruction 130 years ago. Usually it is the poor who are invisible in the aftermath of urban disasters, but in the case of New Orleans it has been the African-American professional middle class and skilled working class. In the confusion and suffering of Katrina--a Rorschach test of the American racial unconscious--most white politicians and media pundits have chosen to see only the demons of their prejudices. The city's complex history and social geography have been reduced to a cartoon of a vast slum inhabited by an alternately criminal or helpless underclass, whose salvation is the kindness of strangers in other, whiter cities. Inconvenient realities like Gentilly's red-brick normalcy--or, for that matter, the pride of homeownership and the exuberance of civic activism in the blue-collar Lower Ninth Ward--have not been allowed to interfere with the belief, embraced by New Democrats as well as old Republicans, that black urban culture is inherently pathological.

Slavery and colonialism are gone, but Jamaica's 1962 independence masked the economic abandonment of an absentee plantation worked past profitability. The queen gifted her former colony, though, bequeathing Jamaica her church, Bible, and buggery laws. That little-old-lady-in-the-Cotswolds mentality is more recent, and therefore, more vivid in the Jamaican consciousness than any dim genetic recollections of pre-colonial Africa. Even the Rastaman who rejects church as part of the Babylonian West is not immune. Folded into his message of black self-reliance (and for some, separatism) and an African utopia is good old-fashioned King Jamesian fire and brimstone for Babylonian abominations like homosexuality. Yet mounting academic research suggests that the West's legacy to Africa is homophobia, not homosexuality.

On March 17, 2006 hip-hop culture lost a pioneer and a front line general. Lumumba Carson, aka Professor X of the X-Clan/ founder of the Blackwatch Movement, passed away from spinal meningitis in Brooklyn, NY. For those not in the know, X-Clan’s mission was always to spread and influence pride in Black culture by fusing the freedom fighter mentality of the Black Nationalist Movement with the power of hip-hop. And while X-Clan – consisting of rapper Brother J, DJ Sugar Shaft and producers/elders Professor X and Grand Architect Paradise – released only two albums, both To The East, Blackwards (1990) and Xodus (1992) are considered hip-hop classics.

With the passing of Professor X, Grand Verbalizer Funkinlesson "Brother J" and X-Clan, consisting of Ultraman Ra Hanna, ACL, DJ FatJack, Kumu M. Haynes, Master China and Grand Arkutect Paradise, will carry forward the message into the next generation of X-Clan.

“With regret, Professor X’s appearance was not previously recorded to include his energy on the project, but the blueprint to resurrect the efforts of the Blackwatch Movement of this millennium will be carried out,” emphasized Brother J. “We of the X- Clan sincerely hope that the efforts of Professor X will not be overlooked as the history of the original X-Clan has been.”

Professor X’s history in hip-hop reaches back further than the X-Clan messenger group. PX has been responsible for show promotion and management for many groups in Hip Hop’s golden era, including Whodini. His Blackwatch Movement was and is a powerful influence to many of the musicians, poets and producers that use hip-hop and the freedom of speech wisely. The signature phrase of Professor X is truly legendary in hip-hop history; “Vanglorious! this is protected by the Red, the Black and the Green with a key sissiieeeeeeeee!”

Our prayers go out to Lumumba’s family; he has done much work for the upliftment of oppressed people worldwide. We salute the life of our Brother Eternally.