Another year, another one of these damn Forbes magazine lists of the top moneymakers in hip-hop. Let's take a look at this year's list and see what significance, if any, we might be able to glean.

First of all, you'll notice there's been a shakeup in the top two. Jay-Z, who came in first last year, has now been bumped down to second. Fiddy Cent, who was second last year, is now in first, mainly due to the windfall he received from the sale of Vitamin Water to Coca Cola.

Which I'm sure was convenient for the good people at Forbes. They didn't have to sweat doing another feature on Jay-Z. As if anyone needs to read another feature on Jay-Z again, evar. Instead, they've done a big feature on Fiddy, detailing his rise from a lowly crack dealer in the ghettos (as opposed to the nice parts) of Queens, to the point where he's now apparently about to open up his own platinum mine in South Africa.

Word?

I wish the story in Forbes, which is, after all, a business magazine, would have gotten into what Fiddy Cent has got to offer the precious metals industry, other than the fact that he's obviously got some money to invest. But if this guy Fiddy's supposedly going into business with, Patrice Motsepe, is worth like twice as much as Oprah, what does he need with Fiddy's paltry $100 million, or whatever?

You'd think he'd be able to afford his own equipment at this point..

And yet, this guy somehow feels the need to go into business with Fiddy Cent. Hmm... I wonder if this just a matter of him trying to spread some Marcus Garvey-style Pan Africanism with his gold tooth-clad brothers here in the states, or if there isn't some deeper fuckery going on.

Of course, I'm assuming it's the latter, though I couldn't any really good evidence using Google, i.e. the extent of the effort I'm willing to exert with regard to investigative journalism. I did find some interesting leads though.

I started by doing what any reasonable person would do. That is, I typed this guy Motsepe's name into Google along with the name of Lev Leviev, the Israeli diamond mining, settlement building billionaire scumfuck (you'll recall that I did a post on him here a while back), to see if the two of them are in business together.

It turns out there's hundreds of results with both of their names - but mostly just because they both happen to be billionaires, and they both work in more or less the same industry. I notice, though, that the very first result is a list, with both of their names on it, of participants in something called... wait for it, the World Economic Forum Russia CEO Roundtable. (Oh, really?)

So we know they've at least met.

I did some further investigating of just this guy Patrice Motsepe, and I found an interview of him on the red carpert of some event he was attending with Russell Simmons, here in the States, in which he mentioned that the two of them have been in business together. Aww dang...

Granted, he didn't say for a fact that him and Rush were involved with some sort of plot by the TIs to strip Africa of its natural resources and have the vast majority of the wealth, less whatever token they give Rush and Fiddy (which I'm sure we'll be reading about in another issue of Forbes), go to fund the apartheid state in Israel. But did he have to?

I mean, Russell Simmons is involved. What else could this be?

In retrospect, this all should have been obvious back when it was announced that Fiddy had received $400 million (or however much it was) from the sale of Vitamin Water to Coca-Cola, despite the fact that he hardly even did anything other than lend part of his nom de rap to one of their flavors. (Grape, natch.) The few commercials I even saw him do for them were after the shit had already sold to Coca Cola.

And yet, Fiddy Cent got $100 million or whatever out of that deal? In America, home of the motherfucking prison-industrial complex? Get the fuck out of here! There's no way in the world the TIs would let some shit like that go down, without their being some sort of ulterior motive involved.

Most likely, Coca Cola was in on this shit as well. (Do the knowledge. Coca Coal has been involved in all kinds of fuckery over the years.) The TIs probably arranged for him to receive $100 million from Coca Cola, just so he'd have the money to invest in this mining venture. But don't get it twisted - that's been the TI's money all along. Fiddy Cent is just the black front for TI interests. Just like the rest of these clowns.

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