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It is easier for me to answer your question by starting with who would want Jeb Bush as president. (I added an update at the end about what may happen now that Jeb! has left the race). There are two principal types of voters who would like to see George Bush's younger brother (or someone in his mold) elected:(1) A significant number of the wealthiest Americans (roughly the top .01%) and(2) The surprisingly large number of mostly older white (and disproportionately male) citizens who have been manipulated into voting against their own economic interests by the highly effective propaganda paid for by the first group, but who can't go so far as to vote for Trump.That sounds cynical, but the facts bear it out. Let me break it down.The first group wants Jeb or any mainstream Republican (though they are terrified of Trump) for entirely rational, if greedy, reasons. The United States today has the type of extreme concentration of wealth that characterized the Robber Baron-Gilded Age (1890s) and just before the Great Depression (late 1920s). The ultra-rich achieved this ascendancy in large part by controlling the politicians of both parties who make tax policy and who direct government spending. They have directed government policies toward increasing the concentration of wealth, sadly at the expense of the American dream.There have been a number of interesting studies done about how social mobility is now much easier in "old" Europe than in the United States. The SuperPACS funded by extremely wealthy men like the Koch brothers hold enormous sway, leaving non-wealthy individual voters vritually powerless. The extremely rich have effectively bought the government through campaign contributions that translate into votes (see Citizens United, a 5-4 decision where all 5 were Republican appointees).They have won and they want to hold onto their victory.Tax policy is illustrative. Let's start with how roughly 99% of all Americans pay federal taxes:The working poor, the shrinking middle class and even the very comfortable professional class (doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers -- some whose incomes pace them into the 1% -- but not the .01%) live off of their wages and salaries, as opposed to living off of investments or inheritances. They mostly earn "ordinary income," which is taxed progressively at up to 39.6%, on top of other taxes.Truly poor people, whose income falls below the minimum threshold for paying federal income tax, nonetheless pay a federal tax on their income (despite the Fox "news" propaganda that millions pay "no income tax"). It is called the "payroll tax" and it is a substantial part of poorer people's paychecks.If you are tempted to believe the Republican/Fox "news" line about 47% of the country not paying income tax, please research it from objective sources. Here is one good link:Misconceptions and Realities About Who Pays TaxesThe poor and middle class cannot build wealth in these times of outsourced jobs, absurdly low minimum wages, still-high (though improving) unemployment, part-time work, and automation. When good economic times come, the poor and middle are passed by entirely. A rising tide does not lift all boats any longer, but only lifts the mega-yachts. This is a relatively new phenomonen, and corrosive to the economy. Before the "Reagan revolution" and its tax cuts tilted toward the very wealthy, an improving economy did in fact lift people from all income levels, which made for better recoveries for all.Today, fortunate people making $200,000 and more -- and even those well into the top 1% of incomes -- cannot accumulate wealth like the very wealthy .01% can. They are taxed at progressive rates and they spend their income on food, shelter, transportation and at the higher end, expensive private schools (necessitated in their minds by how poorly public schools have fared under the low-tax, low-service model of government that "conservatives" insist on).In contrast, think about how the ultra-rich are taxed. Their income is largely passive: it comes from capital gains, dividends, interest on bonds, and other investment income. It is also "tax managed." The capital gains tax rate is significantly lower than the top income tax brackets. Billionaires pay 20% on their income from capital gains; their accountants pay top rates of 35% or 39.6% (depending onwhich bracket they are in) on their regular income. Interest income on municipal bonds is taxed at zero. Have you heard of "1031 exchanges?" Anyone can sell one piece of real estate and put the gains in different real estate -- and pay zero tax on the gain realized, under Section 1031 of the Tax Code (the tax is "deferred", and can be deferred until extinguished upon death). This is NOT the sale-of-primary-residence exemption that common folks can do once -- this is a special IRS rules that allows tax to be "deferred" on gains made on unlimited sales of real estate. So while a few average folks might do it once in a lifetime and pocket some small-potatoes gains tax free on a rent house or other investment property, a Donald Trump can make $100 million in profit on sale of a casino and pay zero tax on that gain. Then he can do it again -- and again. There is no cap.These are just some of the tax code provisions the ultra-rich use to reduce their tax rates. Look up the hedge fund manager's special tax break called the "carried interest rule" for an especially absurd example of how the very rich own the system. Even Mr. Trump has denounced this one!A Wal-Mart heir (or George Soros or Warren Buffett for that matter) can invest his or her billions entirely in U.S. municipal bonds -- and live utterly tax free, entirely legally, on many millions of dollars in annual income. How can this be fair, in a country where the infrastructure that carries goods to markets, the court system that enforces property rights and the defense complex that protects us from foreign powers or terror -- all paid for by tax dollars -- is what allowed these extremely wealthy people or the ancestors they inherited from to accumulate such fortunes?Apologists for the Republicans cannot factually challenge the fact that the very wealthy, who earn millions a year, pay a far lower tax rate than people earning a few hundred grand a year. Facts are a vexing thing for today's GOP... See global warming, evolution, well the list is long, and off topic.The skewing of the tax code to favor the extremely wealthy is how Mitt Romney paid 13.9% in tax on his fabulous income in the single year he released his tax returns to the public (And does anyone believe it wasn't his highest year? Or maybe the only year he paid any income tax at all?) -- while his staff members, pilots, drivers, and even landscapers paid at higher rates. How can this be fair, or even rational? The parallels to Rome before the fall are irresitable.The IRS code says what it says. Politicians wrote it. Contributions to politicians are unlimited. (see Citizens United) Connect the dots.In short, the system is rigged. The rich have been getting richer and the wealth gap has been increasing since the tax cutting began under Reagan and accelerated under George W. Bush. While Obama was able to raise the top income tax rate back to the level before the Bush tax cuts, he has been unable to do more to address inequality due to obstinate Republican opposition.Republican candidates are required by big donors to sponsor even more tax cuts for the rich and block any attempts at making taxation more fair. Jeb Bush has repeatedly stated that he support his party's stance on taxation. Marco Rubio has embraced it enthusiastically as well, as have Christie and all the even less successful candidates. Ted Cruz, a US senator running as an "outsider" because he has insulted all the "establishment" Republicans, proposes reducing taxes to a "tithe" of 10% -- with a regressive VAT to make up some of the lost trillions in revenue. It is hard to take some of this seriously (after all, are we going to stop having a defense department? Default on military pensions? We have to have some revenues, don't we?). But whether it makes sense or not, the very wealthy dictate what the Republican politicians say.Do you recall what happened when Obama proposed a modest temporary surcharge only on incomes above $1 million (starting at the million and first dollar) to address the deficit caused by the recession? Unanimous Republican opposition blocked it. What percentage of citizens earn over $1 million a year in ordinary income?Look up the current GOP platform on the party's official website and ask yourself who these proposals help. They want to repeal the estate tax entirely -- even though it only applies after the first $5.43 million passes to heirs, tax free. How many estates are worth over $5.43 million?The fact you will never hear from a Republican, or on one of the media outlets that does their bidding, is that 99.8% of all estates pay no estate tax at all. The so-called "death tax" is largely a myth.Ten Facts You Should Know About the Federal Estate TaxAnd no, the estate tax does not threaten "family farms." Here is a quote from a recent news story you can look up:Neil Harl, an Iowa State University economist whose tax advice has made him a household name among Midwest farmers, said he had searched far and wide but had never found a case in which a farm was lost because of estate taxes. ''It's a myth,'' Mr. Harl said. Even one of the leading advocates for repeal of estate taxes, the American Farm Bureau Federation, said it could not cite a single example of a farm lost because of estate taxes.Look into Paul Ryan's much-praised (by the Murdoch-owned press) budget proposals. Their main feature is yet another big tax cut for the rich.All Republicans are bound to this policy of coddling the extremely rich. If any candidate deviates, even slightly, Republican fundraisers suddenly find a more compliant challenger to run against them in their own primary. Anyone who doesn't "stay hitched" to the platform is labeled a RINO, a Republican In Name Only, and is promptly drummed out of office.What happens when Republicans win the presidency? We have a very recent case study: the presidency of George W. Bush. He inherited a budget surplus (the first in decades, and the result of some good luck and compromises with Gingrich) from Bill Clinton in 2001. What did Bush-Cheney do with it? They immediately (well before 9/11) squandered it, putting the nation's budget back into structural deficit with a big tax cut that mainly benefited the very rich. His first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, a lifelong Republican and former chairman of Alcoa, complained about going back into deficit spending to Cheney and was promptly fired. The book he wrote with co-author Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, is worth reading.Dick Cheney famously said at the time "It's our turn," in talking about the tax cuts -- and "Deficits don't matter" in response to the fact that the tax cuts would turn surpluses into deficits. You won't find these quotes mentioned in the WSJ or on Fox "news," but you can Google them. More inconvenient facts.Tax policy is just one example of the rigged system and how the GOP favors the ultra-rich. Other examples include lax pollution enforcement under Republicans, big breaks that amount to corporate welfare for the oil and gas industry, and of course the ritual repetition of the "all regulation is bad" mantra that justifies letting the biggest financial institutions gamble with taxpayer money. These gigantic financial institutions, whose recklessness magnified the housing bust into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, have only grow larger. Their "Too Big To Fail" status exempts them from the discipline of the marketplace, resulting in socializing their losses, lest they bring down the whole economy with them.Republicans are also reqired by their mega-donors to try to keep the poor from gaining any ground. They oppose any rise in the grossly inadequate minimum wage, claiming it would harm corporate profits. Corporate profits are soaring while workers subsist on minimum wages so low that nobody could live on them without public support. Wal-Mart was at one point handing out forms to its workers about how to get welfare and other forms of public assistance, acknowledging that nobody coud live on what it pays.The wealthiest Americans have become far wealthier since the Reagan Revolution reduced taxes and regulations. Yet real wages for most Americans have stagnated since the 1970s:For most workers, real wages have barely budged for decadesThus the subset of .01% who want a Republican president have a vested interest in electing one of their own, someone who will preserve and add to the preferences and privileges the super-rich enjoy. They prefer Jeb Bush, above all the candidates. He is one of their own. But they will take any mainstream Republican and are furiously trying to derail Donald Trump as the nominee, knowing Trump would be trounced.The ultra-rich who wanted Jeb (but will now take any "mainstream" Republican) have the most fear of Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who see through the rigged system and wants to change it. They are quiet aboutit but far less fearful of the Clintons, Chuck Schumer, and other Democrats who have had a cozy relationship with the Wall Street elite -- just not as cozy as Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Interestingly, the Uber-Rich fear one of their own, Donald Trump, far more than they fear Hillary. Hillary can beat them in an election or two, but Trump could ruin the party that has so reliably done their bidding for decades. His nomination could turn the party into a Eurpoean-style anti-immigrant fringe party, like the Le Pen movement in France.Now turn to the second, far more numerous, group who want Jeb Bush or another Republican: the people who have bought the elaborate web of lies spun by the ultra-rich through their media outlets. This propaganda machine includes Fox "News", The Wall Street Journal (both owned by Murdoch), the Limbaugh-Savage-Hannity talk shows, and largely untraceable dark money campaigns funded by the Kochs and Karl Rove's list of contributors.Some of the propaganda is crude and would be laughable -- had it not worked so well in some demographics: Obama's a Kenyan. His birth certificate is a fake. He's not a citizen. He's Muslim. He's a socialist (and he's coming for your guns!) Big Republican money paid for these lies to be spread in places where some ignorant people believe every word. Look up what Ted Cruz's father said about Obama. Read what Donald Trump said about him. Michelle Bachman recently said Obama was going to bring about the biblical rapture and Sara Palin blamed Obama for her son's girlfriend-beating arrest!There have been many overtly racist attacks too -- like saying Obama's a monkey, and far worse.Racially-Charged ‘Witch Doctor Obama’ T-Shirt Popular At South Carolina Tea Party ConventionRacism Is Alive And Well: 35 Incredibly Racist Anti-Obama ImagesThe GOP has embraced racism and anti-immigrant rhetoric in order to pander to a part of the population who respond well to those issues, at the expense of their own very real economic issues. This has been Republican strategy since Nixon's "Southern strategy," and it has worked. Recall Reagan's "welfare Cadillac" remark and Bush Sr's Willie Horton ads. Now the most racist propaganda is handled with untraceable dark money so the candidates can maintain plausible deniability.The GOP has also used and manipulated the religious right. Their dark money ads claim Obama is "ruining the institution of marriage" -- code for he doesn't think it's right to have government discrimination against gay people. Do you really think the Koch brothers or Karl Rove care if a couple of lesbians have a wedding? Of course not! But they will see to it that millions of dollars are spent against Democratic candidates with "dark money" and PAC money that emphasizes attacks on candidates who support "gay marriage."Some Republican-controlled states have passed "religious freedom" laws, making it lawful to discriminate against gay people and in effect turn them away at the door at public places. The Texas attorney general has told county clerks that they do not have to obey the U. S. Supreme Court on granting marriage licenses for gay marriage... They know better. They are doing this to manipulate people through fear and misinformation -- and as part of a plan to tag Democrats as being pro-gay, or anti-marriage. The Big Money people behind these campaigns use gay marriage as a wedge issue to convince religious voters to vote against their own economic interests, to keep politicians in office who will do the bidding of the .01%, many of whom chuckle at the gullibility of the people they are manipulating.Sadly, a large number of Republican voters believe the propaganda, even its most extreme (and ridiculous) points:Poll: 51 percent of GOP primary voters think Obama born abroad - Andy Barr1 In 5 Republicans Still Think Obama The Antichrist: PollThe creators of this Big Lie propaganda machine -- Fox, the radio shows, the "dark money" internet campaigns -- thought they were making the angry white male much easier to manipulate into voting for a Republican "establishment" candidate like Jeb, who would continue to favor the ultra-rich with policy. But they have been hoisted on their own petard. Donald Trump emerged to hijack all the ignorance and anger created by the propaganda -- and now threatens to derail the Rove-Koch-SuperPAC plan to capture the presidency after Obama. Trump (who is probably as liberal as most mainstream Democrates on most issues) has deftly captured the anger and channeled it into his column. The "establishment" Republican donor class, who thought Jeb Buch would take the nomination in a cakewalk, is shocked -- and petrified. They can't control Trump (nobody can) and so they are scrambling to find a way to stop him. They detest Ted Cruz, but may end up having to hold their noses and support him as a way to block Trump's path to the nomination. Cruz has brilliantly played his hand as well, carefully coddling the Trump voter so they will slide into his column of Trump drops out, while tapping into the Religious Right's core issues with his angry message.The extremely wealthy backers of the Republican party have also funded a web of lies designed to ensnare somewhat more sophisticated voters into thinking Republicans will be "fiscal conservatives" who will soundly manage the economy. Often, this propaganda is not-so-subtly mixed with the racial messages, implying that Democrats favor "tax and spend" policies to coddle the "lazy" lower class. They brazenly claim -- against all the objective evidence -- that the GOP is the party of balanced budgets and "small government."But what's the reality? The last Republican president (Jeb's brother) orchestrated a massive swing from budget surplus to deficit (well before any justifications about spending to combat terror), started a needless and poorly conceived war in Iraq that ended up benefitting only Iran and Republican contributors like Halliburton, gave Big Pharma a HUGE new program of direct-pay of our tax dollars to the drug manufacturers under the so-called prescription drug benefits plan, an expansion of Medicare, and coddled the "too big to fail" financial institutions whose imprudent gambling led to the Great Recession -- allowing them to keep their profits, while socializing their losses.The rich got their big tax cut, but millions of jobs were lost, not created.Republicans have in fact been the party of "big government," directing taxpayer dollars to people and corporations who contributed heavily to the GOP. Look up what President Bush did with the bailouts -- $182 billion to AIG alone, the largest seller of the credit default swaps, the toxic insurance-like instruments that multiplied many times the effects of the crash of housing prices. AIG in turn paid it out on claims filed by as required to pay the Too Big To Fail institutions like Goldman Sachs, who had (imprudently) purchased the credit default swaps from AIG as insurance against the collapse of the stinking piles of sub-prime loans these same TBTF institutions packaged up into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). The TBTF institutions like Goldman Sachs did not bother to inquire whether AIG had the reserves to pay out on these insurance products before buying the swaps. Had they looked, they would have seen that AIG did not have such reserves -- and was not required to by regulators because "all regulation is bad" and the "free market" will regulate businesses. That turned out to be yet another lie -- thus the need for massive bailouts. Even Alan Greenspan has admitted that it was a huge mistake to not regulate these exotic finincial instruments that turned into what he labeled the "contagion" that spread a subprime morgage bust into a massive recession. Yet those who want Jeb or his clones press for even less regulation of Wall Street.Non-wealthy Americans lost their jobs and homes in the Great Recession. The bankers and titans of industry who supported Bush got tax cuts, bonuses and bailouts. They kept their jobs of course.JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs Chiefs to Get a Sweeter Pay PackageFox "news" and the GOP propaganda machine routinely blame Obama for the recession and unemployment -- but the Great Recession of 2008-2011 (caused in large part by the culmination of politicians adopting the conservative manta that "all regulation is bad") happened on Bush's watch. The government bailouts themselves that followed were also put in place under Bush, well before Obama was elected. Obama was elected in time to try to clean up the mess -- only to find that the Republicans in Congress would fight him every step of the way.In the aftermath of the financial collapse, when newly-elected Obama tried to pass real financial reforms to prevent the same thing from happening again (like FDR did in 1933, when Glass-Steagall was passed and the SEC was created), Republicans blocked any meaningful reforms. They watered down Dodd-Frank -- and now want to repeal the few real reforms made. Their slavish devotion to the TBTF banks and Wall Street titans has even angered some of their own party members, though these "tea party" types are quickly shut down when it comes time to state the party's platform and nominate its candidate.Enraged that Obama won despite the huge money poured into demonizing him, the GOP turned purely obstuctionist. It torpedoed the president's plan for infrastructure spending that would have accelerated the recovery by employing millions to rebuild the nation's crumbling roads, bridges, ports, dams and other infrastucture. This was an act of economic treason done in a failed attempt to prolong and even deepen the recession so the Republicans could blame it on the man in office and take over the presidency once more. Mitch McConnell famously said that his number one priority was not jobs or ending the recession -- but was defeating Obama in 2012. He pursued this priority by systematically blocking meansures that could have accelerated the recovery. The GOP lost in 2012 too -- but the damage they did to the economy by trying to make Obama look bad is still being felt.Anyone who doubts that economic treason was official Republican policy should read the letter John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and others wrote to the Fed to try to stop the Fed from helping the country out of recession. Having blocked any more stimulus spending, they sought to choke off the fledgling recovery completley by also eliminating the Fed's bond-buying program known as QE:Republicans’ Letter to Bernanke Questioning More Fed Action.The Republican leadership wrote that QE would cause runaway inflation and weaken the dollar. Bernanke, a Republican and hardly a liberal, is a master economist whose life work was study of the Great Depression. He refused the GOP entreaty. The Fed went forward and did what it could in the face of the gridlock caused by GOP opposition to stimulus spending. The Fed's steady hand helped the economy crawl out of the deep recession. Bernanke is very much a hero.The Republicans' cry that Fed action would cause "runaway inflation" and kill the dollar proved to be (as Bernanke knew it would be) completely false. The economy was in such bad shape that deflation was a far more serious threat than inflation. Today, several years after the dire warnings by McConnell, Boehner and their fellow travelers, inflation remains extremely low. The dollar is soaring Mortgage interest rates are the lowest in decades. These are unassailable facts that the GOP doesn't like to talk about.It is baffling that President Obama doesn't use his bully pulpit to educate the public as to what the Republicans did and tried to do.Democrats Saved The Economy. Republicans Tried To Kill It.Republicans do not balance budgets; they expand deficits while giving away tax cuts and benefits to their largest financial supporters. That is not an opinion. It is fact.Yet enough people have been manipulated by prejudice, lies and dark-money propaganda to make the Republican party viable. The smart guys who run things at the GOP (like Karl Rove) know they cannot win elections in the long run on these methods alone, so they employ voter suppression and other anti-democratic tactics to stop likely emocratic voters from being able to vote. Thus the "voter ID" laws (again, only in Republican-run states), the long lines to vote in a single voting booth provided to poor precincts -- but short lines with scores of booths in rich precincts, the disenfranchisement of a significant portion of the black population through biased prosecutions, as felons cannot vote, etc. The Republican smart guys know they cannot win fair and square on the issues (given their slavish devotion to the super-rich, their slaps at Hispanics, their alienation of young people and most women), so they hide their intentions, put out propaganda and try to keep poorer people from voting.Who does not want Jeb Bush as president? Two main categories:(1) Angry Donald Trump voters who were stirred up by the very proganda machine put in place to elect a guy like Bush, which is beautiful to me in terms of poetic justice; and(2) Those of us who:(a) think the very fortunate should pay at least as much as their secretaries in taxes (rate wise), to support the system that allowed them or their ancestors to accumulate such massive wealth,(b) want to build up budget surpluses in good economic times, so we have a cushion and can use it on deficit spending to temper the bad times,(c) want good economic times to be shared across the income and wealth spectrum -- not just gobbled up by the top .01%(d) want reasonable people appointed to the Supreme Court instead of more right wing ideologues, hopefully leading to the overturning of Citizens United and allowing Congress to reform the way that big money dictates political results.We do not want Jeb. But believe me, there are powerful people who do.Update: Now that Jeb! has dropped out, The Republican establishment's best chance is a brokered convention, where they can make back room deals and try to steal the nomination from the near-winner. They hate Cruz and cannot really bypass Trump for someone Trump has beat handily in every primary. My bet is that they will try to hand the nomination to unscathed, fresh-faced Paul Ryan. He is a well-spoken figure and completely loyal to the billionaire donors who back the Establishment. Ryan's vaunted budget features more tax cuts for the super rich and unspecified cuts that amount to Flint water for the rest of us. He hasn't been skewered by Trump, lied about by Cruz or lambasted by Christi, so he is relatively undamaged. Watch for him to emerge in coming weeks.Republican establishment types (think Karl Rove) are well acquainted with the kind of shennanigans needed to wrest the nomination from Trump at the last minute. They are experts at stealing elections: by frustrating the right of students and minorities to vote, by limiting the hours polls are open, by creating long, long lines in poor neighborhoods (by providing fewer ballot boxes) while making it easy for people in Republican-leaning precincts to vote in short lines with abundant ballot boxes. Don't get me started on "Voter ID" laws, which were blatantly passed by Republican legislatures to hold down the vote in minority communities.They are experts at stealing elections -- and I think there is a strong chance they will steal the nomination from Donald Trump. If so, he will be enraged and will bolt the party and run anyway. A reverse Nader effect is my hope.

Jump to navigationJump to searchFor other uses, see A cappella (disambiguation).A cappellaStylistic originsChurch musicGregorian chantingmadrigalsCultural originsJewish and Christian worshipTypical instrumentsVocalsvocal percussionbeatboxingbody percussionlive loopinginstrument mimicrySubgenresBarbershop musiccollegiate a cappellapuirt à beulA cappella (/ˌækəˈpɛlə/ US: /ˌɑːkə-/,Italian:[a kapˈpɛlla]; Italian for "in the manner of the chapel")[1]music is specifically group or solo singing without instrumental accompaniment, or a piece intended to be performed in this way. It contrasts with cantata, which is usually accompanied singing. The term "a cappella" was originally intended to differentiate between Renaissance polyphony and Baroque concertato style. In the 19th century, a renewed interest in Renaissance polyphony coupled with an ignorance of the fact that vocal parts were often doubled by instrumentalists led to the term coming to mean unaccompanied vocal music.[1]The term is also used, albeit rarely, as a synonym for alla breve.[2]Contents1Religious origins1.1Christian1.1.1Byzantine Rite1.1.2Opposition to instruments in worship1.1.3Acceptance of instruments in worship1.2Jewish2In the United States2.1Recording artists2.2Musical theatre2.3Barbershop style2.4Amateur and high school3In other countries3.1Pakistan3.2Sri Lanka3.3Sweden3.4United Kingdom4Collegiate5Emulating instruments6See also7Notes8Footnotes9References10External linksReligious origins[edit]A cappella music was originally used in religious music, especially church music as well as anasheed and zemirot. Gregorian chant is an example of a cappella singing, as is the majority of secular vocal music from the Renaissance. The madrigal, up until its development in the early Baroque into an instrumentally-accompanied form, is also usually in a cappella form. Jewish and Early Christian music was largely a cappella,[3]although as noted by the Psalms some songs were accompanied by string instruments[4][citation needed]and this practice has continued in both of these religions as well as in Islam.Christian[edit]The polyphony of Christian a cappella music began to develop in Europe around the late 15th century AD, with compositions by Josquin des Prez.[5]The early a cappella polyphonies may have had an accompanying instrument, although this instrument would merely double the singers' parts and was not independent. By the 16th century, a cappella polyphony had further developed, but gradually, the cantata began to take the place of a cappella forms.[5]16th century a cappella polyphony, nonetheless, continued to influence church composers throughout this period and to the present day. Recent evidence has shown that some of the early pieces by Palestrina, such as what was written for the Sistine Chapel was intended to be accompanied by an organ "doubling" some or all of the voices.[5]Such is seen in the life of Palestrina becoming a major influence on Bach, most notably in the Mass in B Minor.Other composers that utilized the a cappella style, if only for the occasional piece, were Claudio Monteverdi and his masterpiece, Lagrime d'amante al sepolcro dell'amata (A lover's tears at his beloved's grave), which was composed in 1610,[6]and Andrea Gabrieli when upon his death it was discovered many choral pieces, one of which was in the unaccompanied style.[7]Learning from the preceding two composeres, Heinrich Schütz utilized the a cappella style in numerous pieces, chief among these were the pieces in the oratorio style, which were traditionally performed during the Easter week and dealt with the religious subject matter of that week, such as Christ's suffering and the Passion. Five of Schutz's Historien were Easter pieces, and of these the latter three, which dealt with the passion from three different viewpoints, those of Matthew, Luke and John, were all done a cappella style. This was a near requirement for this type of piece, and the parts of the crowd were sung while the solo parts which were the quoted parts from either Christ or the authors were performed in a plainchant.[8]Byzantine Rite[edit]In the Byzantine Rite of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Eastern Catholic Churches, the music performed in the liturgies is exclusively sung without instrumental accompaniment. Bishop Kallistos Ware says, "The service is sung, even though there may be no choir... In the Orthodox Church today, as in the early Church, singing is unaccompanied and instrumental music is not found."[9]This a cappella behavior arises from strict interpretation of Psalms 150, which states, Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.[10]In keeping with this philosophy, early Russian musika which started appearing in the late 17th century, in what was known as khorovïye kontsertï (choral concertos) made a cappella adaptations of Venetian-styled pieces, such as the treatise, Grammatika musikiyskaya (1675), by Nikolai Diletsky.[11]Divine Liturgies and Western Rite masses composed by famous composers such as Peter Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Arkhangelsky, and Mykola Leontovych are fine examples of this.Opposition to instruments in worship[edit]Present-day Christian religious bodies known for conducting their worship services without musical accompaniment include some Presbyterian churches devoted to the regulative principle of worship, Old Regular Baptists, Primitive Baptists, Plymouth Brethren, Churches of Christ, Church of God (Guthrie, Oklahoma), the Old German Baptist Brethren, Doukhobors the Byzantine Rite and the Amish, Old Order Mennonites and Conservative Mennonites. Certain high church services and other musical events in liturgical churches (such as the Roman Catholic Mass and the Lutheran Divine Service) may be a cappella, a practice remaining from apostolic times. Many Mennonites also conduct some or all of their services without instruments. Sacred Harp, a type of folk music, is an a cappella style of religious singing with shape notes, usually sung at singing conventions.Opponents of musical instruments in the Christian worship believe that such opposition is supported by the Christian scriptures and Church history. The scriptures typically referenced are Matthew 26:30; Acts 16:25; Romans 15:9; 1 Corinthians 14:15; Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16; Hebrews 2:12, 13:15; James 5:13, which show examples and exhortations for Christians to sing.[12]There is no reference to instrumental music in early church worship in the New Testament, or in the worship of churches for the first six centuries.[13][14]Several reasons have been posited throughout church history for the absence of instrumental music in church worship.[nb 1]Christians who believe in a cappella music today believe that in the Israelite worship assembly during Temple worship only the Priests of Levi sang, played, and offered animal sacrifices, whereas in the church era, all Christians are commanded to sing praises to God. They believe that if God wanted instrumental music in New Testament worship, He would have commanded not just singing, but singing and playing like he did in the Hebrew scriptures.The first recorded example of a musical instrument in Roman Catholic worship was a pipe organ introduced by Pope Vitalian into a cathedral in Rome around 670.[16][nb 2]Instruments have divided Christendom since their introduction into worship. They were considered a Catholic innovation, not widely practiced until the 18th century, and were opposed vigorously in worship by a number of Protestant Reformers, including Martin Luther (1483–1546),[18]Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin (1509–1564)[19]and John Wesley (1703–1791).[20]Alexander Campbell referred to the use of an instrument in worship as "a cow bell in a concert".[21]In Sir Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian, the heroine, Jeanie Deans, a Scottish Presbyterian, writes to her father about the church situation she has found in England (bold added):The folk here are civil, and, like the barbarians unto the holy apostle, have shown me much kindness; and there are a sort of chosen people in the land, for they have some kirks without organs that are like ours, and are called meeting-houses, where the minister preaches without a gown.[22]Acceptance of instruments in worship[edit]Those who do not adhere to the regulative principle of interpreting Christian scripture, believe that limiting praise to the unaccompanied chant of the early church is not commanded in scripture, and that churches in any age are free to offer their songs with or without musical instruments.Those who subscribe to this interpretation believe that since the Christian scriptures never counter instrumental language with any negative judgment on instruments, opposition to instruments instead comes from an interpretation of history. There is no written opposition to musical instruments in any setting in the first century and a half of Christian churches (AD 33 to 180).[23]The use of instruments for Christian worship during this period is also undocumented. Toward the end of the 2nd century, Christians began condemning the instruments themselves.[24]Those who oppose instruments today believe these Church Fathers had a better understanding of God's desire for the church,[citation needed]but there are significant differences between the teachings of these Church Fathers and Christian opposition to instruments today.Modern Christians typically believe it is acceptable to play instruments or to attend weddings, funerals, banquets, etc., where instruments are heard playing religious music. The Church Fathers made no exceptions.[24] Since the New Testament never condemns instruments themselves, much less in any of these settings, it is believed that "the church Fathers go beyond the New Testament in pronouncing a negative judgment on musical instruments."[25]Written opposition to instruments in worship began near the turn of the 5th century.[26] Modern opponents of instruments typically do not make the same assessment of instruments as these writers,[nb 3] who argued that God had allowed David the "evil" of using musical instruments in praise.[29] While the Old Testament teaches that God specifically asked for musical instruments,[30] modern concern is for worship based on the New Testament.Since "a cappella" singing brought a new polyphony (more than one note at a time) with instrumental accompaniment, it is not surprising that Protestant reformers who opposed the instruments (such as Calvin and Zwingli) also opposed the polyphony.[31]While Zwingli was destroying organs in Switzerland – Luther called him a fanatic – the Church of England was burning books of polyphony.[32]Some Holiness Churches such as the Free Methodist Church opposed the use of musical instruments in church worship until the mid-20th century. The Free Methodist Church allowed for local church decision on the use of either an organ or piano in the 1943 Conference before lifting the ban entirely in 1955.Jewish[edit]While worship in the Temple in Jerusalem included musical instruments (2 Chronicles 29:25–29:27), traditional Jewish religious services in the Synagogue, both before and after the last destruction of the Temple, did not include musical instruments[33]given the practice of scriptural cantillation.[34]The use of musical instruments is traditionally forbidden on the Sabbath out of concern that players would be tempted to repair (or tune) their instruments, which is forbidden on those days. (This prohibition has been relaxed in many Reform and some Conservative congregations.) Similarly, when Jewish families and larger groups sing traditional Sabbath songs known as zemirot outside the context of formal religious services, they usually do so a cappella, and Bar and Bat Mitzvah celebrations on the Sabbath sometimes feature entertainment by a cappella ensembles. During the Three Weeks musical instruments are prohibited. Many Jews consider a portion of the 49-day period of the counting of the omer between Passover and Shavuot to be a time of semi-mourning and instrumental music is not allowed during that time.[35]This has led to a tradition of a cappella singing sometimes known as sefirah music.[36]The popularization of the Jewish chant may be found in the writings of the Jewish philosopher Philo, born 20 BC. Weaving together Jewish and Greek thought, Philo promoted praise without instruments, and taught that "silent singing" (without even vocal chords) was better still.[37]This view parted with the Jewish scriptures, where Israel offered praise with instruments by God's own command (2 Chronicles 29:25). The shofar is the only temple instrument still being used today in the synagogue,[38]and it is only used from Rosh Chodesh Elul through the end of Yom Kippur. The shofar is used by itself, without any vocal accompaniment, and is limited to a very strictly defined set of sounds and specific places in the synagogue service.[39]However, silver trumpets, as described in Numbers 10:1-10, have been made in recent years and used in prayer services at the Western Wall.[40]In the United States[edit]This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.Find sources: "A cappella" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR(May 2013)(Learn how and when to remove this template message)The Hullabahoos, an a cappella group at the University of Virginia, were featured in the movie Pitch PerfectPeter Christian Lutkin, dean of the Northwestern University School of Music, helped popularize a cappella music in the United States by founding the Northwestern A Cappella Choir in 1906. The A Cappella Choir was "the first permanent organization of its kind in America."[41][42]An a cappella tradition was begun in 1911 by F. Melius Christiansen, a music faculty member at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.[43]The St. Olaf College Choir was established as an outgrowth of the local St. John's Lutheran Church, where Christiansen was organist and the choir was composed, at least partially, of students from the nearby St. Olaf campus. The success of the ensemble was emulated by other regional conductors, and a tradition of a cappella choral music was born in the region at colleges like Concordia College (Moorhead, Minnesota), Augustana College (Rock Island, Illinois), Wartburg College(Waverly, Iowa), Luther College (Decorah, Iowa), Gustavus Adolphus College (St. Peter, Minnesota), Augustana College (Sioux Falls, South Dakota), and Augsburg University (Minneapolis, Minnesota). The choirs typically range from 40 to 80 singers and are recognized for their efforts to perfect blend, intonation, phrasing and pitch in a large choral setting.[44][45]Movements in modern a cappella over the past century include barbershop and doo wop. The Barbershop Harmony Society, Sweet Adelines International, and Harmony Inc. host educational events including Harmony University, Directors University, and the International Educational Symposium, and international contests and conventions, recognizing international champion choruses and quartets.Many a cappella groups can be found in high schools and colleges. There are amateur Barbershop Harmony Society and professional groups that sing a cappella exclusively. Although a cappella is technically defined as singing without instrumental accompaniment, some groups use their voices to emulate instruments; others are more traditional and focus on harmonizing. A cappella styles range from gospel music to contemporary to barbershop quartets and choruses.The Contemporary A Cappella Society (CASA) is a membership option for former students, whose funds support hosted competitions and events.[46][47]A cappella music was popularized between the late 2000s and the early to mid-2010s with media hits such as the 2009–2014 TV show The Sing-Off and the musical comedy film series Pitch Perfect.Recording artists[edit]This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.Find sources: "A cappella" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR(May 2014)(Learn how and when to remove this template message)In July 1943, as a result of the American Federation of Musicians boycott of US recording studios, the a cappella vocal group The Song Spinners had a best-seller with "Comin' In On A Wing And A Prayer". In the 1950s, several recording groups, notably The Hi-Los and the Four Freshmen, introduced complex jazz harmonies to a cappella performances. The King's Singers are credited with promoting interest in small-group a cappella performances in the 1960s. Frank Zappa loves Doo wop and A cappella, so Zappa released The Persuasions' first album from his label in 1970.[48]In 1983, an a cappella group known as The Flying Pickets had a Christmas 'number one' in the UK with a cover of Yazoo's (known in the US as Yaz) "Only You". A cappella music attained renewed prominence from the late 1980s onward, spurred by the success of Top 40 recordings by artists such as The Manhattan Transfer, Bobby McFerrin, Huey Lewis and the News, All-4-One, The Nylons, Backstreet Boys, Boyz II Men, and *NSYNC.[citation needed]Contemporary a cappella includes many vocal groups and bands who add vocal percussion or beatboxing to create a pop/rock/gospel sound, in some cases very similar to bands with instruments. Examples of such professional groups include Straight No Chaser, Pentatonix, The House Jacks, Rockapella, Mosaic, Home Freeand M-pact. There also remains a strong a cappella presence within Christian music, as some denominations purposefully do not use instruments during worship. Examples of such groups are Take 6, Glad and Acappella. Arrangements of popular music for small a cappella ensembles typically include one voice singing the lead melody, one singing a rhythmic bass line, and the remaining voices contributing chordal or polyphonic accompaniment.A cappella can also describe the isolated vocal track(s) from a multitrack recording that originally included instrumentation.[citation needed]These vocal tracks may be remixed or put onto vinyl records for DJs, or released to the public so that fans can remix them. One such example is the a cappella release of Jay-Z's Black Album, which Danger Mouse mixed with The Beatles' White Album to create The Grey Album.On their 1966 album titled Album, Peter, Paul and Mary included the song "Norman Normal." All the sounds on that song, both vocals and instruments, were created by Paul's voice, with no actual instruments used.[49]In 2013, an artist by the name Smooth McGroove rose to prominence with his style of a cappella music.[50]He is best known for his a cappella covers of video gamemusic tracks on YouTube.[51]in 2015, an a cappella version of Jerusalem by multi-instrumentalist Jacob Collier was selected for Beats by Dre "The Game Starts Here" for the England Rugby World Cup campaign.[52][53]Musical theatre[edit]A cappella has been used as the sole orchestration for original works of musical theatre that have had commercial runs Off-Broadway (theatres in New York City with 99 to 500 seats) only four times. The first was Avenue X which opened on 28 January 1994 and ran for 77 performances. It was produced by Playwrights Horizons with book by John Jiler, music and lyrics by Ray Leslee. The musical style of the show's score was primarily Doo-Wop as the plot revolved around Doo-Wop group singers of the 1960s.[54][55]In 2001, The Kinsey Sicks, produced and starred in the critically acclaimed off-Broadway hit, "DRAGAPELLA! Starring the Kinsey Sicks" at New York's legendary Studio 54. That production received a nomination for a Lucille Lortel award as Best Musical and a Drama Desk nomination for Best Lyrics. It was directed by Glenn Casale with original music and lyrics by Ben Schatz.[56]The a cappella musical Perfect Harmony, a comedy about two high school a cappella groups vying to win the National championship, made its Off Broadway debut at Theatre Row's Acorn Theatre on 42nd Street in New York City in October, 2010 after a successful out-of-town run at the Stoneham Theatre, in Stoneham, Massachusetts. Perfect Harmony features the hit music of The Jackson 5, Pat Benatar, Billy Idol, Marvin Gaye, Scandal, Tiffany, The Romantics, The Pretenders, The Temptations, The Contours, The Commodores, Tommy James & the Shondells and The Partridge Family, and has been compared to a cross between Altar Boyz and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.[57][58]The fourth a cappella musical to appear Off-Broadway, In Transit, premiered 5 October 2010 and was produced by Primary Stages with book, music, and lyrics by Kristen Anderson-Lopez, James-Allen Ford, Russ Kaplan, and Sara Wordsworth. Set primarily in the New York City subway system its score features an eclectic mix of musical genres (including jazz, hip hop, Latin, rock, and country). In Transit incorporates vocal beat boxing into its contemporary a cappella arrangements through the use of a subway beat boxer character. Beat boxer and actor Chesney Snow performed this role for the 2010 Primary Stages production.[59]According to the show's website, it is scheduled to reopen for an open-ended commercial run in the Fall of 2011. In 2011, the production received four Lucille Lortel Award nominations including Outstanding Musical, Outer Critics Circle and Drama League nominations, as well as five Drama Desk nominations including Outstanding Musical and won for Outstanding Ensemble Performance.In December 2016, In Transit became the first a cappella musical on Broadway.[60]Barbershop style[edit]Main article: Barbershop musicThis section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.Find sources: "A cappella" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR(May 2018)(Learn how and when to remove this template message)Barbershop music is one of several uniquely American art forms. The earliest reports of this style of a cappella music involved African Americans. The earliest documented quartets all began in barber shops. In 1938, the first formal men's barbershop organization was formed, known as the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A), and in 2004 rebranded itself and officially changed its public name to the Barbershop Harmony Society (BHS). Today the BHS has about 22,000 members in approximately 800 chapters across the United States and Canada,[61][62]and the barbershop style has spread around the world with organizations in many other countries.[63]The Barbershop Harmony Society provides a highly organized competition structure for a cappella quartets and choruses singing in the barbershop style.In 1945, the first formal women's barbershop organization, Sweet Adelines, was formed. In 1953, Sweet Adelines became an international organization, although it didn't change its name to Sweet Adelines International until 1991. The membership of nearly 25,000 women, all singing in English, includes choruses in most of the fifty United States as well as in Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the organization encompasses more than 1,200 registered quartets and 600 choruses.In 1959, a second women's barbershop organization started as a break off from Sweet Adelines due to ideological differences. Based on democratic principles which continue to this day, Harmony, Inc. is smaller than its counterpart, but has an atmosphere of friendship and competition. With about 2,500 members in the United States and Canada, Harmony, Inc. uses the same rules in contest that the Barbershop Harmony Society uses. Harmony, Inc. is registered in Providence, Rhode Island.Amateur and high school[edit]The popularity of a cappella among high schools and amateurs was revived by television shows and movies such as Glee and Pitch Perfect. High school groups have conductors or student leaders who keep the tempo for the group.In other countries[edit]This section needs expansion.You can help by adding to it.(May 2013)Pakistan[edit]The musical show Strepsils Stereo is credited for introducing the art of a cappella in Pakistan.[64]Sri Lanka[edit]Composer Dinesh Subasinghe became the first Sri Lankan to write a cappella pieces for SATB choirs. He wrote "The Princes of the Lost Tribe" and "Ancient Queen of Somawathee" for Menaka De Shabandu and Bridget Halpe's choirs, respectively, based on historical incidents in ancient Sri Lanka.[65][66][67]Voice Print is also a professional a cappella music group in Sri Lanka.[68]Sweden[edit]This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.Find sources: "A cappella" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR(May 2014)(Learn how and when to remove this template message)The European a cappella tradition is especially strong in the countries around the Baltic and perhaps most so in Sweden as described by Richard Sparks in his doctoral thesis The Swedish Choral Miracle in 2000.[69]Swedish a cappella choirs have over the last 25 years won around 25% of the annual prestigious European Grand Prix for Choral Singing (EGP) that despite its name is open to choirs from all over the world (see list of laureates in the Wikipedia article on the EGP competition).The reasons for the strong Swedish dominance are as explained by Richard Sparks manifold; suffice to say here that there is a long-standing tradition, an unsusually large proportion of the populations (5% is often cited) regularly sing in choirs, the Swedish choral director Eric Ericson had an enormous impact on a cappella choral development not only in Sweden but around the world, and finally there are a large number of very popular primary and secondary schools ('music schools') with high admission standards based on auditions that combine a rigid academic regimen with high level choral singing on every school day, a system that started with Adolf Fredrik's Music School in Stockholm in 1939 but has spread over the country.United Kingdom[edit]The Oxford Alternotives, the oldest a cappella group at the University of Oxford in the UKThis section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.(May 2014)(Learn how and when to remove this template message)The Sweet Nothings are one of the University of Exeter's eight a cappella groups. They are one of the oldest and most successful girl groups in the UKA cappella has gained attention in the UK in recent years, with many groups forming at British universities by students seeking an alternative singing pursuit to traditional choral and chapel singing. This movement has been bolstered by organisations such as The Voice Festival UK.Collegiate[edit]Main articles: Collegiate a cappella, List of collegiate a cappella groups, and List of collegiate a cappella groups in the UKThis section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.Find sources: "A cappella" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR(May 2014)(Learn how and when to remove this template message)It is not clear exactly where collegiate a cappella began. The Rensselyrics of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (formerly known as the RPI Glee Club), established in 1873 is perhaps the oldest known collegiate a cappella group.[70][additional citation(s) needed]However the longest continuously-singing group is probably The Whiffenpoofs of Yale University,[71]which was formed in 1909 and once included Cole Porter as a member.[71]Collegiate a cappella groups grew throughout the 20th century. Some notable historical groups formed along the way include Colgate University's The Colgate 13 (1942), Dartmouth College's Aires (1946), Cornell University's Cayuga's Waiters (1949) and The Hangovers (1968), the University of Maine Maine Steiners (1958), the Columbia University Kingsmen (1949), the Jabberwocks of Brown University (1949), and the University of RochesterYellowJackets (1956).All-women a cappella groups followed shortly, frequently as a parody of the men's groups: the Smiffenpoofs of Smith College(1936), The Shwiffs of Connecticut College (The She-Whiffenpoofs, 1944), and The Chattertocks of Brown University (1951). A cappella groups exploded in popularity beginning in the 1990s, fueled in part by a change in style popularized by the Tufts University Beelzebubs and the Boston University Dear Abbeys. The new style used voices to emulate modern rock instruments, including vocal percussion/"beatboxing". Some larger universities now have multiple groups. Groups often join one another in on-campus concerts, such as the Georgetown Chimes' Cherry Tree Massacre, a 3-weekend a cappella festival held each February since 1975, where over a hundred collegiate groups have appeared, as well as International Quartet Champions The Boston Common and the contemporary commercial a cappella group Rockapella. Co-ed groups have produced many up-and-coming and major artists, including John Legend, an alumnus of the Counterparts at the University of Pennsylvania, and Sara Bareilles, an alumna of Awaken A Cappella at University of California, Los Angeles. Mira Sorvino is an alumna of the Harvard-Radcliffe Veritones of Harvard College, where she had the solo on Only You by Yaz.A cappella is gaining popularity among South Asians with the emergence of primarily Hindi-English College groups. The first South Asian a cappella group was Penn Masala, founded in 1996 at the University of Pennsylvania. Co-ed South Asian a cappella groups are also gaining in popularity. The first co-ed south Asian a cappella was Anokha, from the University of Maryland, formed in 2001. Also, Dil se, another co-ed a cappella from UC Berkeley, hosts the "Anahat" competition at the University of California, Berkeley annually. Maize Mirchi, the co-ed a cappella group from the University of Michigan hosts "Sa Re Ga Ma Pella", an annual South Asian a cappella invitational with various groups from the Midwest. Another South Asian group from the Midwest is Chai Town who is based in the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign.Jewish-interest groups such as Queens College's Tizmoret, Tufts University's Shir Appeal, University of Chicago's Rhythm and Jews, Binghamton University's Kaskeset, Ohio State University's Meshuganotes, Rutgers University's Kol Halayla, New York University's Ani V'Ata and Yale University's Magevet are also gaining popularity across the U.S.[72][73][74]Increased interest in modern a cappella (particularly collegiate a cappella) can be seen in the growth of awards such as the Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards (overseen by the Contemporary A Cappella Society) and competitions such as the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella for college groups and the Harmony Sweepstakes for all groups. In December 2009, a new television competition series called The Sing-Off aired on NBC. The show featured eight a cappella groups from the United States and Puerto Rico vying for the prize of $100,000 and a recording contract with Epic Records/Sony Music. The show was judged by Ben Folds, Shawn Stockman, and Nicole Scherzinger and was won by an all-male group from Puerto Rico called Nota. The show returned for a second, third and fourth season, won by Committed, Pentatonix and Home Free respectively.Each year, hundreds of Collegiate a cappella groups submit their strongest songs in a competition to be on The Best of College A Cappella (BOCA), an album compilation of tracks from the best college a cappella groups around the world. The album is produced by Varsity Vocals – which also produces the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella – and Deke Sharon. ). According to ethnomusicologist Joshua S. Dunchan, "BOCA carries considerable cache and respect within the field despite the appearance of other compilations in part, perhaps, because of its longevity and the prestige of the individuals behind it."[75]Collegiate a cappella groups may also submit their tracks to Voices Only, a two-disc series released at the beginning of each school year. A Voices Only album has been released every year since 2005.[76]In addition, all women's a cappella groups can send their strongest song tracks to the Women's A Cappella Association (WACA) for its annual best of women's a cappella album. WACA offers another medium for women's voices to receive recognition and has released an album every year since 2014, featuring women's groups from across the United States.[77]Emulating instruments[edit]This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.(May 2014)(Learn how and when to remove this template message)In addition to singing words, some a cappella singers also emulate instrumentation by reproducing instrumental sounds with their vocal cords and mouth, often pitched using specialised pitch pipes. One of the earliest 20th century practitioners of this method were The Mills Brothers whose early recordings of the 1930s clearly stated on the label that all instrumentation was done vocally. More recently, "Twilight Zone" by 2 Unlimited was sung a cappella to the instrumentation on the comedy television series Tompkins Square. Another famous example of emulating instrumentation instead of singing the words is the theme song for The New Addams Familyseries on Fox Family Channel (now ABC Family). Groups such as Vocal Sampling and Undivided emulate Latin rhythms a cappella. In the 1960s, the Swingle Singers used their voices to emulate musical instruments to Baroque and Classical music. Vocal artist Bobby McFerrin is famous for his instrumental emulation. A cappella group Naturally Seven recreates entire songs using vocal tones for every instrument.The Swingle Singers used nonsense words to sound like instruments, but have been known to produce non-verbal versions of musical instruments. Beatboxing, more accurately known as vocal percussion, is a technique used in a cappella music popularized by the hip-hop community, where rap is often performed a cappella also. The advent of vocal percussion added new dimensions to the a cappella genre and has become very prevalent in modern arrangements.[78]Jazz vocalist Petra Hadenused a four-track recorder to produce an a cappella version of The Who Sell Out including the instruments and fake advertisements on her album Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out in 2005. Haden has also released a cappella versions of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'", The Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" and Michael Jackson's "Thriller".Christian rock group Relient K recorded the song "Plead the Fifth" a cappella on its album Five Score and Seven Years Ago. The group recorded lead singer Matt Thiessen making drum noises and played them with an electronic drum machine to record the song.See also[edit]Look up a cappella in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.Barbershop music – four-part a cappella (in close harmony)Collegiate a cappellaThe Contemporary A Cappella SocietyHarmony Sweepstakes A Cappella FestivalHome Free – quintet, winners of NBC's Sing-Off Season 4List of collegiate a cappella groupsList of professional a cappella groupsList of university a cappella groups in the United KingdomStraight No Chaser – 10 man a cappella ground founded at Indiana UniversitySweet Adelines InternationalNotes[edit]^ The absence of instrumental music is rooted in various hermeneutic principles (ways of interpreting the Bible) which determine what is appropriate for worship. Among such principles are the regulative principle of worship (Ulrich Zwingli), Sola scriptura (Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli), and the history of hymn in "Christianity". Dispensationalism emphasizes the differences between the old (Law of Moses) and the new (Jesus and the Apostles) covenants, emphasizing that the majority of the practices from the Law of Moses were replaced by the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles. The absence of instrumental music in early church worship is significant given the abundance of Hebrew Bible references and commands to worship God with harp, lyre and cymbal. After several hundred years of Tabernacle worship without references to instrumental music, King David (ca 1500 BC) introduced musical instruments into Temple worship reportedly because of a commandment from God, complete with who was to sing, who was to play, and what instruments were to be used.[15]^ McKinnon maintained that the organ was the first instrument to be introduced into worship and the next was the trumpet. He noted accounts of an organ being sent from Byzantium to Pippin in 757, and another to Charlemagne in 812.[17]^ Rather than calling the use of instruments "evil", modern opposition typically uses terms like "unspiritual"[27] or an Old Testament "shadow".[28]

The Air Force would put perfectly good ovens on the loading dock then they would buy new ones that were not as good as the older ones!The logic was if we don’t spend our alotment we will not get it next year!The comuter components they threw away were in full sized dumpsters!Mean while back at the ranch one in six children in the UNITED STATES go to bed hungry.24 VETERANS COMMIT SUICIDE EVERY DAY ,40,000 VETERANS ARE HOMELES!US WARS AND MILITARY ACTIONDEFENSE SPENDINGFEATUREJANUARY 7, 2019, ISSUEExclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud ExposedHow US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit.By Dave LindorffNOVEMBER 27, 2018fbtwmailPrintIllustration by Victor Juhasz.Ready To Fight Back?Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest discretionary cost center—the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations—after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible.Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan tried to put the best face on things, telling reporters, “We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it.” Shanahan suggested that the DoD should get credit for attempting an audit, saying, “It was an audit on a $2.7 trillion organization, so the fact that we did the audit is substantial.” The truth, though, is that the DoD was dragged kicking and screaming to this audit by bipartisan frustration in Congress, and the result, had this been a major corporation, likely would have been a crashed stock.As Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, a frequent critic of the DoD’s financial practices, said on the Senate floor in September 2017, the Pentagon’s long-standing failure to conduct a proper audit reflects “twenty-six years of hard-core foot-dragging” on the part of the DoD, where “internal resistance to auditing the books runs deep.” In 1990, Congress passed the Chief Financial Officers Act, which required all departments and agencies of the federal government to develop auditable accounting systems and submit to annual audits. Since then, every department and agency has come into compliance—except the Pentagon.ADVERTISINGYOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORKTHE PENTAGON SENT $500 MILLION ABROAD FOR INTERNATIONAL DRUG WARS. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT IS A MYSTERY.Nick TurseMEET THE NEW, SUPER-EXPENSIVE STEALTH BOMBER THE US DOESN’T NEEDWilliam J. AstoreA GUIDE TO TRUMP’S $1 TRILLION DEFENSE BILLWilliam D. HartungNow, a Nation investigation has uncovered an explanation for the Pentagon’s foot-dragging: For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military necessity. DoD has literally been making up numbers in its annual financial reports to Congress—representing trillions of dollars’ worth of seemingly nonexistent transactions—knowing that Congress would rely on those misleading reports when deciding how much money to give the DoD the following year, according to government records and interviews with current and former DoD officials, congressional sources, and independent experts.“If the DOD were being honest, they would go to Congress and say, ‘All these proposed budgets we’ve been presenting to you are a bunch of garbage,’ ” said Jack Armstrong, who spent more than five years in the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General as a supervisory director of audits before retiring in 2011.The fraud works like this. When the DoD submits its annual budget requests to Congress, it sends along the prior year’s financial reports, which contain fabricated numbers. The fabricated numbers disguise the fact that the DoD does not always spend all of the money Congress allocates in a given year. However, instead of returning such unspent funds to the US Treasury, as the law requires, the Pentagon sometimes launders and shifts such moneys to other parts of the DoD’s budget.Veteran Pentagon staffers say that this practice violates Article I Section 9 of the US Constitution, which stipulates thatNo Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.CURRENT ISSUEView our current issueSubscribe today and Save up to $129.Among the laundering tactics the Pentagon uses: So-called “one-year money”—funds that Congress intends to be spent in a single fiscal year—gets shifted into a pool of five-year money. This maneuver exploits the fact that federal law does not require the return of unspent “five-year money” during that five-year allocation period.The phony numbers are referred to inside the Pentagon as “plugs,” as in plugging a hole, said current and former officials. “Nippering,” a reference to a sharp-nosed tool used to snip off bits of wire or metal, is Pentagon slang for shifting money from its congressionally authorized purpose to a different purpose. Such nippering can be repeated multiple times “until the funds become virtually untraceable,” says one Pentagon-budgeting veteran who insisted on anonymity in order to keep his job as a lobbyist at the Pentagon.The plugs can be staggering in size. In fiscal year 2015, for example, Congress appropriated $122 billion for the US Army. Yet DoD financial records for the Army’s 2015 budget included a whopping $6.5 trillion (yes, trillion) in plugs. Most of these plugs “lack[ed] supporting documentation,” in the bland phrasing of the department’s internal watchdog, the Office of Inspector General. In other words, there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent. Indeed, more than 16,000 records that might reveal either the source or the destination of some of that $6.5 trillion had been “removed,” the inspector general’s office reported.SUPPORT PROGRESSIVE JOURNALISMIf you like this article, please give today to help fund The Nation’s work.In this way, the DoD propels US military spending higher year after year, even when the country is not fighting any major wars, says Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, a former Pentagon whistle-blower. Spinney’s revelations to Congress and the news media about wildly inflated Pentagon spending helped spark public outrage in the 1980s. “They’re making up the numbers and then just asking for more money each year,” Spinney told The Nation. The funds the Pentagon has been amassing over the years through its bogus bookkeeping maneuvers “could easily be as much as $100 billion,” Spinney estimated.THE DOD'S MANUFACTURED CONSENTTHE PENTAGON WANTS YOU TO GO SHOPPING WHILE THE EXPERTS GO TO WARWilliam J. AstoreIndeed, Congress appropriated a record amount—$716 billion—for the DoD in the current fiscal year of 2019. That was up $24 billion from fiscal year 2018’s $692 billion, which itself was up $6 billion from fiscal year 2017’s $686 billion. Such largesse is what drives US military spending higher than the next ten highest-spending countries combined, added Spinney. Meanwhile, the closest thing to a full-scale war the United States is currently fighting is in Afghanistan, where approximately 15,000 US troops are deployed—only 2.8 percent as many as were in Vietnam at the height of that war.The DoD’s accounting practices appear to be an intentional effort to avoid accountability, says Armstrong. “A lot of the plugs—not all, but a substantial portion—are used to force general-ledger receipts to agree with the general budget reports, so what’s in the budget reports is basically left up to people’s imagination,” Armstrong says, adding, “Did the DoD improperly spend funds from one appropriated purpose on another? Who can tell?”“The United States government collects trillions of dollars each year for the purpose of funding essential functions, including national-security efforts at the Defense Department,” Senator Grassley told The Nation. “When unelected bureaucrats misuse, mismanage and misallocate taxpayer funds, it not only takes resources away from vital government functions, it weakens citizens’ faith and trust in their government.”This Pentagon accounting fraud is déjà vu all over again for Spinney. Back in the 1980s, he and a handful of other reform-minded colleagues exposed how the DoD used a similar accounting trick to inflate Pentagon spending—and to accumulate money for “off-the-books” programs. “DoD routinely over-estimated inflation rates for weapons systems,” Spinney recalled. “When actual inflation turned out to be lower than the estimates, they did not return the excess funds to the Treasury, as required by law, but slipped them into something called a ‘Merged Surplus Account,'” he said.“In that way, the Pentagon was able to build up a slush fund of almost $50 billion” (about $120 billion in today’s money), Spinney added. He believes that similar tricks are being used today to fund secret programs, possibly including US Special Forces activity in Niger. That program appears to have been undertaken without Congress’s knowledge of its true nature, which only came to light when a Special Forces unit was ambushed there last year, resulting in the deaths of four US soldiers.AMERICA AT NEVER-ENDING WARTHE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX IS ON CORPORATE WELFAREWilliam D. Hartung“Because of the plugs, there is no auditable way to track Pentagon funding and spending,” explains Asif Khan of the Government Accountability Office, the Congress’s watchdog on the federal bureaucracy. “It’s crucial in auditing to have a reliable financial record for prior years in order to audit the books for a current year,” notes Khan, the head of the National Security Asset Management unit at GAO. Plugs and other irregularities help explain why the Pentagon has long been at or near the top of the GAO’s list of “high risk” agencies prone to significant fraud, waste, and abuse, he adds.The Nation submitted detailed written questions and requested interviews with senior officials in the Defense Department before publishing this article. Only public-affairs staff would speak on the record. In an e-mailed response, Christopher Sherwood of the DoD’s Public Affairs office denied any accounting impropriety. Any transfer of funds between one budgetary account and another “requires a reprogramming action” by Congress, Sherwood wrote, adding that any such transfers amounting to more than 1 percent of the official DoD budget would require approval by “all four defense congressional committees.”The scale and workings of the Pentagon’s accounting fraud began to be ferreted out last year by a dogged research team led by Mark Skidmore, a professor of economics specializing in state and local government finance at Michigan State University. Skidmore and two graduate students spent months poring over DoD financial statement reviews done by the department’s Office of Inspector General. Digging deep into the OIG’s report on the Army’s 2015 financial statement, the researchers found some peculiar information. Appendix C, page 27, reported that Congress had appropriated $122 billion for the US Army that year. But the appendix also seems to report that the Army had received a cash deposit from the US Treasury of $794.8 billion. That sum was more than six times larger than Congress had appropriated—indeed, it was larger than the entire Pentagon budget for the year. The same appendix showed that the Army had accounts payable (accounting lingo for bills due) totaling $929.3 billion.SUBSCRIBE TO THE NATION FOR $2 A MONTH.Get unlimited digital access to the best independent news and analysis.“I wondered how you could possibly get those kinds of adjustments out of a $122 billion budget,” Skidmore recalled. “I thought, initially, ‘This is absurd!’ And yet all the [Office of Inspector General] seemed to do was say, ‘Here are these plugs.’ Then, nothing. Even though this kind of thing should be a red flag, it just died. So we decided to look further into it.”To make sure that fiscal year 2015 was not an anomaly, Skidmore and his graduate students expanded their inquiry, examining OIG reports on Pentagon financial records stretching back to 1998. Time and again, they found that the amounts of money reported as having flowed into and out of the Defense Department were gargantuan, often dwarfing the amounts Congress had appropriated: $1.7 trillion in 1998, $2.3 trillion in 1999, $1.1 trillion in 2000, $1.1 trillion in 2007, $875 billion in 2010, and $1.7 trillion in 2012, plus amounts in the hundreds of billions in other years.In all, at least a mind-boggling $21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions between 1998 and 2015 could not be traced, documented, or explained, concluded Skidmore. To convey the vastness of that sum, $21 trillion is roughly five times more than the entire federal government spends in a year. It is greater than the US Gross National Product, the world’s largest at an estimated $18.8 trillion. And that $21 trillion includes only plugs that were disclosed in reports by the Office of Inspector General, which does not review all of the Pentagon’s spending.To be clear, Skidmore, in a report coauthored with Catherine Austin Fitts, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development who complained about similar plugs in HUD financial statements, does not contend that all of this $21 trillion was secret or misused funding. And indeed, the plugs are found on both the positive and the negative sides of the ledger, thus potentially netting each other out. But the Pentagon’s bookkeeping is so obtuse, Skidmore and Fitts added, that it is impossible to trace the actual sources and destinations of the $21 trillion. The disappearance of thousands of records adds further uncertainty. The upshot is that no one can know for sure how much of that $21 trillion was, or was not, being spent legitimately.THE COST OF OUR ENDLESS WARSAMERICA’S POST-9/11 WARS HAVE COST $5.9 TRILLIONWilliam D. HartungThat may even apply to the Pentagon’s senior leadership. A good example of this was Donald Rumsfeld, the notorious micromanaging secretary of defense during the Bush/Cheney administration. On September 10, 2001 Rumsfeld called a dramatic press conference at the Pentagon to make a startling announcement. Referring to the huge military budget that was his official responsibility, he said, “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” This shocking news that an amount more than five times as large as the Pentagon’s FY 2001 budget of an estimated $313 billion was lost or even just “untrackable” was—at least for one 24-hour news cycle—a big national story, as was Secretary Rumsfeld’s comment that America’s adversary was not China or Russia, but rather was “closer to home: It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.” Equally stunning was Rumsfeld’s warning that the tracking down of those missing transactions “could be…a matter of life and death.” No Pentagon leader had ever before said such a thing, nor has anyone done so since then. But Rumsfeld’s exposé died quickly as, the following morning on September 11, four hijacked commercial jet planes plowed full speed into the two World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Since that time, there has been no follow-up and no effort made to find the missing money, either.Recalling his decades inside the Pentagon, Spinney emphasized that the slippery bookkeeping and resulting fraudulent financial statements are not a result of lazy DoD accountants. “You can’t look at this as an aberration,” he said. “It’s business as usual. The goal is to paralyze Congress.”That has certainly been the effect. As one congressional staffer with long experience investigating Pentagon budgets, speaking on background because of the need to continue working with DoD officials, told The Nation, “We don’t know how the Pentagon’s money is being spent. We know what the total appropriated funding is for each year, but we don’t know how much of that funding gets spent on the intended programs, what things actually cost, whether payments are going to the proper accounts. If this kind of stuff were happening in the private sector, people would be fired and prosecuted.”DoD officials have long insisted that their accounting and financial practices are proper. For example, the Office of Inspector General has attempted to explain away the absurdly huge plugs in DoD’s financial statements as being a common, widely accepted accounting practice in the private sector.When this reporter asked Bridget Serchak, at the time a press spokesperson for the inspector general’s office, about the Army’s $6.5 trillion in plugs for fiscal year 2015, she replied, “Adjustments are made to the Army General Fund financial statement data…for various reasons such as correcting errors, reclassifying amounts and reconciling balances between systems…. For example, there was a net unsupported adjustment of $99.8 billion made to the $0.2 billion balance reported for Accounts Receivable.”SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONHOW BIG WIRELESS MADE US THINK THAT CELL PHONES ARE SAFE: A SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONMark Hertsgaard and Mark DowieThere is a grain of truth in Serchak’s explanation, but only a grain.As an expert in government budgeting, Skidmore confirmed that it is accepted practice to insert adjustments into budget reports to make both sides of a ledger agree. Such adjustments can be deployed in cases where receipts have been lost—in a fire, for example—or where funds were incorrectly classified as belonging to one division within a company rather than another. “But those kinds of adjustments should be the exception, not the rule, and should amount to only a small percentage of the overall budget,” Skidmore said.For its part, the inspector general’s office has blamed the fake numbers found in many DoD financial statements on the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), a huge DoD accounting operation based in Indianapolis, Indiana. In review after review, the inspector general’s office has charged that DFAS has been making up “unsupported” figures to plug into DoD’s financial statements, inventing ledger entries to back up those invented numbers, and sometimes even “removing” transaction records that could document such entries. Nevertheless, the inspector general has never advocated punitive steps against DFAS officials—a failure that suggests DoD higher-ups tacitly approve of the deceptions.Skidmore repeatedly requested explanations for these bookkeeping practices, he says, but the Pentagon response was stonewalling and concealment. Even the inspector general’s office, whose publicly available reports had been criticizing these practices for years, refused to answer the professor’s questions. Instead, that office began removing archived reports from its website. (Skidmore and his grad students, anticipating that possibility, had already downloaded the documents, which were eventually were restored to public access under different URLs.)Click to open the heavily redacted DoD OIG report on a US Navy financial statement for FY 2017.Nation inquiries have met with similar resistance. Case in point: A recent DoD OIG report on a US Navy financial statement for FY 2017. Although OIG audit reports in previous years were always made available online without restriction or censorship, this particular report suddenly appeared in heavily redacted form—not just the numbers it contained, but even its title! Only bureaucratic sloppiness enabled one to see that the report concerned Navy finances: Censors missed some of the references to the Navy in the body of the report, as shown in the passages reproduced here.A request to the Office of Inspector General to have the document uncensored was met with the response: “It was the Navy’s decision to censor it, and we can’t do anything about that.” At The Nation’s request, Senator Grassley’s office also asked the OIG to uncensor the report. Again, the OIG refused. A Freedom Of Information Act request by The Nation to obtain the uncensored document awaits a response.The GAO’s Khan was not surprised by the failure of this year’s independent audit of the Pentagon. Success, he points out, would have required “a good-faith effort from DoD officials, but to date that has not been forthcoming.” He added, “As a result of partial audits that were done in 2016, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have over 1,000 findings from auditors about things requiring remediation. The partial audits of the 2017 budget were pretty much a repeat. So far, hardly anything has been fixed.”Let that sink in for a moment: As things stand, no one knows for sure how the biggest single-line item in the US federal budget is actually being spent. What’s more, Congress as a whole has shown little interest in investigating this epic scandal. The absurdly huge plugs never even get asked about at Armed Services and Budget Committee hearings.One interested party has taken action—but it is action that’s likely to perpetuate the fraud. The normally obscure Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board sets the accounting standards for all federal agencies. Earlier this year, the board proposed a new guideline saying that agencies that operate classified programs should be permitted to falsify figures in financial statements and shift the accounting of funds to conceal the agency’s classified operations. (No government agency operates more classified programs than the Department of Defense, which includes the National Security Agency.) The new guideline became effective on October 4, just in time for this year’s end-of-year financial statements.SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONSPECIAL INVESTIGATION: THE DIRTY SECRET BEHIND WARREN BUFFETT’S BILLIONSDavid DayenSo here’s the situation: We have a Pentagon budget that a former DOD internal-audit supervisor, Jack Armstrong, bluntly labels “garbage.” We have a Congress unable to evaluate each new fiscal year’s proposed Pentagon budget because it cannot know how much money was actually spent during prior years. And we have a Department of Defense that gives only lip service to fixing any of this. Why should it? The status quo has been generating ever-higher DoD budgets for decades, not to mention bigger profits for Boeing, Lockheed, and other military contractors.The losers in this situation are everyone else. The Pentagon’s accounting fraud diverts many billions of dollars that could be devoted to other national needs: health care, education, job creation, climate action, infrastructure modernization, and more. Indeed, the Pentagon’s accounting fraud amounts to theft on a grand scale—theft not only from America’s taxpayers, but also from the nation’s well-being and its future.As President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who retired from the military as a five-star general after leading Allied forces to victory in World War II, said in a 1953 speech, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” What would Eisenhower say today about a Pentagon that deliberately misleads the people’s representatives in Congress in order to grab more money for itself while hunger, want, climate breakdown, and other ills increasingly afflict the nation?Correction: An earlier version of this article included a mention of $6.5 billion in plugs in 2015. In fact, as cited elsewhere in the story, the correct figure is $6.5 trillion. The article also cited an inaccurate figure for the percentage of federal tax dollars received by the Pentagon. In fact, the Pentagon receives more than half of every dollar of federal discretionary spending, not two out of every three federal tax dollars. The text has been corrected.MOST POPULAR1THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S WHITE WOMEN PROBLEM2IN A MAJOR SHIFT, SOUTH KOREA DEFIES ITS ALLIANCE WITH JAPAN3INDIVISIBLE IS WORKING HARD TO LIVE UP TO ITS NAME4BLACK SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA IS PUTTING ANTI-CAPITALISM ON THE MAP5A SOCCER GAME BECOMES AN ANTI-FASCIST DEMONSTRATION IN PORTLANDDave LindorffNation contributor Dave Lindorff also writes for Salon, London Review of Books, and Counterpunch. He is founder of ThisCantBeHappening.net. Author of four books, he was a 1990s Hong Kong/China correspondent for Business Week.