![odinsblog:
A Bronx bus company is offering tours billed as a “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO,’” the New York Post reports.
The company, Real Bronx Tours, has taken largely white foreign tourists around the Bronx. The tour guide was caught mocking the Bronx by Post reporter Candice Giove.
Three times a week, Real Bronx Tours takes riders — mainly white Europeans and Australians — on a trip that includes stops at food-pantry lines and a “pickpocket” park.
“Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard,” reports Giove.“‘Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?’ she teased a couple from Paris.”
The tour also included a drive near a food pantry at a church. Battaglia wondered out loud, “I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it. We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.
The tour guide warned of the dangers of going to a park in the Bronx and also gave inaccurate information about the origin of the word “pig” to describe a police officer. While Battaglia claimed the word came from the Bronx, in reality it originated in London.
The Bronx borough president harshly criticized the guide and the tour.
The guide is “the biggest fool on the planet,” said Ruben Diaz, the borough president. “To have foreigners come and gawk at a long line of people who are less fortunate than they are and to make money off of that and to view them as they are some sort of entertainment is pretty disgusting.” [emphasis mine]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/995add3e56895037dae65ed18f79e55b/tumblr_mn7z87RZ0C1rncbh7o1_400.jpg)
A Bronx bus company is offering tours billed as a “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO,’” the New York Post reports.
The company, Real Bronx Tours, has taken largely white foreign tourists around the Bronx. The tour guide was caught mocking the Bronx by Post reporter Candice Giove.
Three times a week, Real Bronx Tours takes riders — mainly white Europeans and Australians — on a trip that includes stops at food-pantry lines and a “pickpocket” park.
“Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard,” reports Giove.“‘Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?’ she teased a couple from Paris.”
The tour also included a drive near a food pantry at a church. Battaglia wondered out loud, “I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it. We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.
Mr. T. (Laurence Tureaud), homecoming, senior year, Dunbar Vocational High School, 1970
[@snakkle h/t The Museum of UnCut Funk]
I put together this mix for Laid Back Radio, to showcase some of the Detroit artists who have inspired me the most.
Tall Black Guy Make Life Better (“Nights Over Egypt” Re-Blap Up)
“Night’s Over Egypt” is like one of my favorite tunes. So I had to see if I could recreate it.
“A white woman bakes a chocolate cake. She turns her back & her lil boy takes some chocolate and rubs it on his face, says ‘Look mommy, I’m black.’ She slaps the shit outta him and says ‘Go tell your father what you did!!’ He goes to his dad ‘Look daddy I’m black’, he took that belt & beat his ass and said ‘Go show your grandfather what you did!!’ ‘Look grandpa, I’m black.’ He took a switch out and beat his ass, ‘Now go back to your mama!!’ He goes back to his mom and she says ‘Now what did you learn today?’ and the little boy says ‘I learned that, I’ve been black for 5 minutes and I already hate you white motha fuckas!” — Paul Mooney
Prison Labor Exposed: From Starbucks to Microsoft - A sampling of what US prisoners make & for whom
May 21, 2013Tens of thousands of US inmates are paid from pennies to minimum wage—minus fines and victim compensation—for everything from grunt work to firefighting to specialized labor.
The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the UnionCorrectional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”
And Each month, California inmates process more than 680,000 pounds of beef, 400,000 pounds of chicken products, 450,000 gallons of milk, 280,000 loaves of bread, and 2.9 million eggs (from 160,000 inmate-raised hens).Starbucks subcontractor Signature Packaging Solutions has hired Washington prisoners to package holiday coffees (as well as Nintendo Game Boys). Confronted by a reporter in 2001, a Starbucks rep called the setup “entirely consistent with our mission statement.”
Texas inmates produce brooms and brushes, bedding and mattresses, toilets, sinks, showers, and bullwhips.
In Texas, prisoners make officers’ duty belts, handcuff cases, and prison-cell accessories. California convicts make gun containers, creepers (to peek under vehicles), and human-silhouette targets.
A stitch in time: California inmates sew their own garb. In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria’s Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace “Made in Honduras” labels on garments with “Made in the usa.”
Open wide: At California’s prison dental laboratory, inmates produce a complete prosthesis selection, including custom trays, try-ins, bite blocks, and dentures.
Constructive criticism: Prisoners in for burglary, battery, drug and gun charges, and escape helped build a Wal-Mart distribution center in Wisconsin in 2005, until community uproar halted the program. (Company policy says, “Forced or prison labor will not be tolerated by Wal-Mart.”)
On call: Its inmate call centers are the “best kept secret in outsourcing,” Unicor boasts. In 1994, a contractor for gop congressional hopeful Jack Metcalf hired Washington state prisoners to call and remind voters he was pro-death penalty. Metcalf, who prevailed, said he never knew.
Federal Prison Industries, a.k.a. Unicor, says that in addition to soldiers’ uniforms, bedding, shoes, helmets, and flak vests, inmates have “produced missile cables (including those used on the Patriot missiles during the Gulf War)” and “wiring harnesses for jets and tanks.” In 1997, according to Prison Legal News, Boeing subcontractor MicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane components, paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages of $30 on the outside.
(via anomaly1)
