Table of Contents

There are 15 chapters in this issue

About BlackCommentator.com

Cover Story - What Is On Trial In The Trayvon Martin Murder Case" George Zimmerman or “Stand Your Ground”? - Between The Lines - By Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, PhD - BC Columnist

Quote to Ponder: "With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting…." - Edward Snowden

Fighting For the Right to Kill - The Other Side of the Tracks - By Perry Redd - BC Columnist

George Zimmerman and all America Sits on Pins n’ Needles - Sharp n’ Blunt - By Desi Cortez - BC Columnist

What is a Black Conservative - BC Political Cartoon By Chuck Siler

Sequestration Just Another Word for “Cut People Adrift” - Solidarity America - By John Funiciello - BC Columnist

‘The Banality of Evil’: Conciliation in the Face of Terrorism - Represent Our Resistance - By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD - BC Editorial Board

PRISM Snooping - Political Cartoon By Carlos Latuff, Rio de Janeiro Brazil

Drug Money By Larry Matthews, BC Guest Commentator

The Lautenberg Amendment By Guest Commentator Dr. Jeffrey B. Perry, PhD

Whole Foods English - Political Cartoon By Eric Garcia, Chicago IL

Obama’s Promise of Transparency and His Reality of Treachery, Subterfuge and Betrayal - Keeping it Real - By Larry Pinkney - BC Editorial Board

To My African American Graduates - Worrill’s World - By Dr. Conrad W. Worrill, PhD - BC Columnist

B. B. King - Art By Jim Alexander Photography, Atlanta GA

This is an eBook version of BlackCommentator.com - An independent weekly internet magazine dedicated to the movement for economic justice, social justice and peace.

BC Provides commentary, analysis and investigations on issues affecting African Americans and the African world.

BC was established April 5, 2002 and is published weekly on Thursday.

This is Issue 520 which was published Jun 13, 2013.

Executive Editor: David A. Love, JD - Managing Editor: Nancy Littlefield, MBA - Publisher: Peter Gamble

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

Members of the BC Editorial Board represent African Americans and the African world. They are dedicated activists, thinkers and writers. The BC Editorial Board includes the following in alphabetical order by last name:

Lola Adesioye, Carl Bloice, Julian Bond, Rose Brewer PhD, Horace Campbell PhD, Imani Countess, Lenore Jean Daniels PhD, Bill Fletcher Jr., James Jennings PhD, Badili Jones, Martin Kilson PhD, Sharon Kyle JD, David A. Love JD, Julianne Malveaux PhD, Manning Marable PhD, Syreeta McFadden, The Reverend Irene Monroe, Leith Mullings PhD, Jacqui Patterson, Larry Pinkney, Steven Pitts PhD, Barbara Ransby PhD, Jamala Rogers, Ethel Long-Scott, Amy V. Simmons, William L. (Bill) Strickland, Chuck Turner, Nathaniel Turner, Ron Walters PhD, Emira Woods, Jeanne Woods JD.

Jun 13, 2013 - Issue 520

The case that shocked the nation, the Trayvon Martin Murder Case, has finally come to trial. The case has everything that intrigues, or is, America: xenophobia, race (or racism), guns, liberties debate and media hysteria. It also has many of the conflictions that Americana brings about; self-defense, rights, free speech, public opinion, protest, fair trial, innocence before guilt, guilt before conviction, right winged rhetoric, left winged rhetoric, intelligent analysis, anti-intelligent debate, coherent prosecution, incoherent defense… all making for what will be a highly watched trial. Will Trayvon’s death be vindicated? Or, will the gun culture rationalize social fear as an acceptable defense? - Will race, or media hype, takeover the case? Will George Zimmerman get off for acting within “the law” (a weak law, but the law, none the less)? The real two questions here are, did Zimmerman purposely exploit the law? And, will he be able to receive a “fair trial” because of “the taint” all “the noise” has directed toward the case?

I know…some people don’t think he deserves a fair trial. Vigilante justice has a rich history in the United States, and it mostly worked to the detriment of black people (and Native Americans). We most certainly can’t become part of the “hang ’em” politic, as we ended up on the wrong end of the noose more times than the nation ever cares to remember. Without justice or justification. Just because… “Just because” justice never works because it undermines the justice system. George Zimmerman will not be convicted “just because…” The prosecution will have to prove he broke the law. That’s where things are going to get really fuzzy, because the law loves justice and justice loves the law. The system is set up to “uphold the law” - a system that has never been perfect, but now works much of the time (the past sixty years), given the many external variables that tend to influence it. But let’s face it; it is a stacked deck, and we know it.

Black people always have to worry about the system failing us, whether it’s in the 19th Century, 20th Century or the 21st Century, largely because the system is set up to fail us. The biases are build into the system, otherwise blacks wouldn’t be disproportionately convicted, or whites disproportionately exonerated in race cases (and make no mistake, the Trayvon Martin case is a race case). That’s why black people celebrate so hard when they finally win one, which isn’t often. They are the literal exceptions of that infamous moniker, “beating the system.”

In the Trayvon Martin case, George Zimmerman is poised to beat the system. Why do I say this? Because everybody and everything will be on trial, except George Zimmerman. The “Stand Your Ground” law is going to be put on trial, and the whole nation is watching-because if it wins, it will be the law in all 50 states. Trayvon Martin, may God rest his soul, will be on trial, as the three hundred stereotype of the “angry black man,” that maniacal, violence craved, unpredictable beast of a human being, will be resurrected from the grave for the ga-zillionth time. Though Trayvon Martin was just a boy, he will be cast as a beast in the making. His Skittles will be the weapon of choice and his hoodie will be his indictment. “The system” will have to work overtime to convict George Zimmerman. Here’s why:

First, race. Everything in America is about race. The nation sees race in everything. Those who thought we were in a “post-racial” period in America - even black people were saying that nonsense - only have to look at five years of the Obama Presidency to see that’s just not the case. They will try to make this a black and white issue, even though Zimmerman is Hispanic. He will “play white” in this trial. The jury will see more imagines of Trayvon Martin, in a hoodie - out of a hoodie, in a dehumanizing nature that we won’t recognize who they’re talking about. Trayvon Martin will be put on trial…from the grave.

Second, the law. - The judge and the jury have the utmost respect for the law. If Zimmerman’s attorney can make a case that Zimmerman was only following the law, it’s a wrap. Never mind that Zimmerman fits the profile of your typical “toy cop” of some overzealous cop “wannabe,” on the prowl trying to impose his authority on somebody, “looking for some action,” code words for looking for a chance to shoot their gun. Whether he confronted Martin or not, once he “feared for his life,” according to the law, he was allowed to “stand his ground.” Martin is not alive to testify, so his word and the neighborhood watch “cop’s” word are the only things that will stand. Trouble for the prosecution.

Third, the intersection of guns and fear. Don’t underestimate this with a largely white, or all-white jury. We don’t know the composition yet since jury selection is still taking place - but we can estimate what we think it will be. Then just ask yourself (or this jury) one question; what would I do if confronted by a black male in a hoodie, knowing what society has said about black males. Combine that with the random shooting and the very highly polarized “gun debate,” where we found out that anybody, or anything, that goes up against guns will lose…including Congress. So, his right to carry and his right to use his gun come into play.

Fourth, the jury. Finding and convincing a jury - in Florida - to go against the law and to go against their racial sensibilities, is a reach. Plain and simple. You might find one, but it will be a needle in a haystack.

Fifth, media distortion. The media has distorted this case so badly that finding a jury that hasn’t been tainted is a problem. Moreover, the prosecution still has to worry about the case being misreported - as many high profile cases are. Where is Court TV when you need it? That’s what got Ray Lewis and O.J. off. Everybody tends to “act right” when the camera is in the courtroom. But in this instance, Court TV would put a human face on Zimmerman. Trouble…

In conclusion, the variables to a fair trial are many, but the conclusions as to how the case will be tried are few. The law is on trial, and black men will be on trial (again). Zimmerman is the by-product of the latest episode of “America on trial,” starring race, guns and fear.

Hopefully, justice for Trayvon will be fulfilled and the system will work in his favor.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, is a national columnist, managing director of the Urban Issues Forum and author of REAL EYEZ: Race, Reality and Politics In 21st Century Popular Culture and Saving The Race: Empowerment Through Wisdom. His Website is AnthonySamad.com. Click here to contact Dr. Samad.

Jun 13, 2013 - Issue 520

Edward Snowden: How the spy story of the age leaked out

Jun 13, 2013 - Issue 520

It makes no sense, no matter how you cut it. Gun rights advocates vehemently fight tooth-and-nail to protect the right to own, carry and use guns, but never fight for the rights of those who want to be protected from the terror and tragedy that guns cause. All guns are for is killing - killing something, anything.

Every week during preparation for my radio show, I lengthen the thread of documentation on instances of gun violence. - No matter how horrific, gun proponents paint them as a lack of mental health evaluations or a need to get guns out of the hands of felons. Once you scrutinize the events one-by-one, you find that neither is commonplace. But this is the defense - and excuse - for the right to kill.

We’re told that mental illness or criminal past are the common factors that precipitate gun violence; facts on the ground dictate otherwise. The reality is that guns are the common thread to gun deaths. People with guns - whether mentally ill or visually sane - are the cause of gun deaths. People without guns find it really hard to shoot anyone…don’t you?

Sure, people without guns kill, murder and maim, yet their effective murder rate is exponentially less than the American emboldened by a gun. It’s funny how guns give people the kind of courage - “liquid courage” - that people get from alcohol. We see that courage dramatized in Hollywood movies. People act it out in real life.

But more to the point, guns do nothing but kill. They rarely save. Gun advocates argue that guns save people from gun-wielding maniacs who might’ve killed more if not for a law-abiding gun carrier who stopped them. But when you cut straight to the truth, there would be no need for the law-abiding gun carrier if there was no gun violence to begin with… and that all began with a gun.

Whether assault rifles or handguns, they’re all meant to kill. - What makes that a plus for a “civil” society? Hand guns figured in the Virginia Tech shootings, Binghamton massacre, Fort Hood massacre, Oikos University shooting, and 2011 Tucson shooting. Assailants with multiple weapons committed the Aurora Theater shooting, and the Columbine High School massacre. In 2010, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm; that’s a majority.

Though those were high-profile cases I listed, the low-profile shooting is just as tragic. A man was fatally wounded when his 4-year-old son fired a gun he found while they were visiting a residence in Prescott Valley, Arizona. Justin Stanfield Thomas, 35, and his son made an unannounced trip to the home of a former roommate. Moments after arriving at the home, the boy picked up the small-caliber handgun and asked his father and other adults in the room what it was he was holding. Seconds later he pulled the trigger.

Officers and emergency crews arrived and found Thomas, of Phoenix, with a single gunshot wound to the chest. He was transported to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. I just can’t find the good that that gun served. The four-year old was neither mentally ill, nor a previously convicted felon, neither of which have anything to do with gun violence.

Guns are like drugs: once in hand, the effect is intoxicating power. I recount the recent case of the Arlington, Virginia deputy sheriff who was arrested and charged with murder by Alexandria police in the shooting death of a 22-year-old man named Julian Dawkins. Police arrested the off-duty officer, Craig Patterson, 44, for fatally shooting Dawkins, a shuttle driver for “PBS NewsHour.”. Patterson reportedly was arguing with the younger man, got mad, left the scene and returned with his gun. Now, he’s facing a life sentence. A gun emboldened this man to do this; a good old-fashioned argument just isn’t enough anymore.

By the way, that off-duty officer was not a previously-convicted felon, but I do argue that anyone who has a gun is subject to mental illness. It’s crazy to even want to kill someone! But who can diagnose that condition beforehand? Day after day, there are shootings by the very people the gun lobby neglects to target - white males. They paint the mental image of Black and Latino folks as criminals, or bad guys and the only ones to rescue the rest of us are white males. It’s over the top and highly inaccurate.

We must stay vigilant to ward off this guise of fighting for the Second Amendment. It’s simply people arguing for the right to kill…just ask George Zimmerman.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Perry Redd, longtime activist & organizer, is the Executive Director of the workers rights advocacy, Sincere Seven, and author of the soon-to-be-released on-line book, “As A Condition of Your Freedom”. He is also the host of the internet-based talk radio show, Socially Speaking in Washington, DC. Click here to contact Mr. Redd.

Jun 13, 2013 - Issue 520

A town, a state , a region, an entire nation... sitting on “pins n’ needles.”

Good God...

Paint if you will, a picture, a polarized-picture, in stark, naked Black n’ White of a stacked n’ packed Southern courtroom. In it a man, a White man, (White enough) - one George Zimmerman - son of a Virginia Magistrate, - who’s been begrudgingly and reluctantly arrested and charged with the murder of an innocent, but hooded Black mancub - Trayvon Martin - of course allegedly a hood.

Aren’t all of them...?

“The evidence is overwhelming,” said Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Martin’s family. “Trayvon was yelling and screaming for help, and he was shot and killed by George Zimmerman.”

Martin’s bereaved parents are saying, before the trial even begins, “we want justice, and we want everyone to remain calm.”

Remain calm?

Few wordsmith’s will want to focus on the parents plea for calmness to prevail over the land, but how can you not, I ask?

And of all the folks in America, over the next few weeks Blacks ought be focused in on this case, and not the Braxton Family Buffoons.

Let’s move-on and compare n’ contrast the defendants brother’s pre-fight statement; “I’ll be attending to support George and to support the truth,” George Zimmerman’s brother, Robert Zimmerman, told USA TODAY. “This trial will not just exonerate George. It will be an indictment of the people who deceived the public, filed a criminal affidavit and presented half-truths to get someone charged.”

Zimmerman’s lawyer, Mark O’Mara, says he’s confident that once a jury hears the facts, they will realize the case that’s garnered the nation’s attention is a straightforward self-defense case.“My guy was trying to do what he thought was right when he got attacked,” O’Mara said “Trayvon Martin overreacted and got aggressive. That’s what happened. Color had nothing to do with that night.”

Well, talk about different versions of the truth. - as opposite and contradicting as Black and White, up n’ down, Left n’ Right.

For me to characterize this legal bout as anything but a good ol’ Southern slugfest, a well-below-the-Mason-Dixon-Line, back-alley brawl would be to ask I write a fictional Disney tale.

I was in my local suburban Wal-Mart a few days ago buying paint - my endless summer honey-dos. The guy mixing my paint was also manning the guns n’ ammo counter, and he was informing a customer on the phone the store was out of bullets...

Not butter, milk or bread... but lead - it’s flying off the shelves in South suburban Denver...

Attribute the bare Mother Hubbard shelves to White America’s “Hillbilly Fever.” Set aside the pins n’ needles - we’re sittin’ atop a powder keg, a bomb, a.k.a., - T N T.

Trust me, it’s not Blacks and Mexicans buying up all the ammo, turning their homes into individual little Alamos and Fort Apaches; it’s White men who fear the sky is falling, or at least the demographics are inverting and their clearly dominant majority, which became the silent majority is, as we speak, morphing into the angry minority.

The Trayvon Martin case may serve as a Canary in the mine case.

Please, lest we forget, America was once a place where a White man could kill a Black person on a whim. - today it’s a crime, thanks to “progress” men like Rand Paul deplore.

If there’s a conviction, there could be a White backlash, an eruption of sorts, between the laundry list of scandals the Right is trying to drape around this President’s neck and the talk of tyranny instead of liberty coming out of Washington, Secession is on the table in more than a few states, and now White men are forced to go to jail for just killing a...

On the other hand...

I can’t speak for the millions of Black, Brown, Red or Yellow folks, but if George Zimmerman walks, some might suggest George Zimmerman is a dead man. If George walks, it had better be to Peru, from where his mother’s family hails, or some place like Idaho or Mississippi. Zimmerman’s release would incite the masses of 3rd class American citizens... which I think is precisely what a large chunk of the Right in this country is waiting for, preparing for.

It’ll be “Open Season On Niggers!”

No, they - won’t be - saying - “Blacks.”

If Mr. Zimmerman is found not guilty, somehow justified in the murder of a kid... by a jury strictly of his own peers.... that verdict will go down like the Rodney King verdict went down.

Burn Baby Burn.

Now please note - it won’t - be merely - locally-centered and situated in Sanford Florida. No, instead the verdict will go national, coast-to-coast... global instantly. Instantly - mind-you.

Cities of all sizes across the nation will be sittin’ on pins n’ needles - their White population sitting in fear, locked n’ cocked, “don’t shoot till you see the Black of their skin Betsy...!” Anywhere there’s a significant Black population which has been treated in the customary disrespectful form n’ fashion by police and the legal/judicial system, you’ve got a potentially combustible situation on your hands.

Gee that means... everywhere?

What seems inevitable, probable and even Mickey Mouse Clubhouse logical is conflict - a little people’s rebellion will be met with overwhelming violence - a widespread force.

Don’t fool yourself, there’s a slice of the White Establishment as eager as their forefathers were (so it’s no great leap on my part...) to “cleanse” America, to purge from its ranks those who remind them of just how far their forefathers went to build a bloody empire... We are the malcontents and ingrates who keep complaining and aren’t grateful we were allowed to stay after we were freed.

I well understand I’m consistent with this theme of Rosewood or Tulsa... on a national level - but only because, my friend, it seems to be obvious to those few of us who, let us say, have our fingers on the pulse of Rush Limbaugh.

Burn a few businesses down, flip some cop cars... and between the US Air Force Drone force and the Para-Military police, National Guard and Redneck Vigilante Militias... you’ve got an out-of-control, bloody mess.

No, we scouts aren’t glued-to-the-tube watching the Sapphires from St. Louie or King James being anointed, we’re over at the big table, listening in on the decision-makers plotting n’ planning... creating history. As the Last Poets told us all a half-century ago, Wake up Niggers, the revolution will not be televised...

My serious suggestion to my fellow Afro-Americans, Latinos, American Natives, and even the idea minority group – Asians: in the shadow of the Trayvon Martin case and the racial hostility it could release, either get a passport for everyone in your family, or make sure each has their fair share of bullets.

Young Mr Martin is dead; Zimmerman’s conviction won’t bring him back. Martin’s killer is a folk hero, and his imprisonment - or death - will only endear Zimmerman to millions. He’ll be a martyr, so understand I see no good coming out of Sanford Florida...

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Desi Cortez, was hatched in the heart of Dixie, circa 1961, at the dawning of the age of Aquarius, the by-product of four dynamic individuals, Raised in South-Central LA, the 213, at age 14 transplanted to the base of the Rockies, Denver. Still a Mile-Hi. Sat at the feet of scholars for many, many moons, emerging with a desire and direction… if not a sheep-skin. "Meandered thru life; gone a-lot places, done a-lot of things, raised a man-cub into a good, strong man, produced a beautiful baby-girl with my lover/woman/soul-mate… aired my mind on the airwaves and wrote some stuff along the way." Click here to contact Mr. Cortez.

Jun 13, 2013 -Issue 520

BlackCommentator.com artist/cartoonist Charles E. "Chuck" Siler's works feature a variety of themes ranging from New Orleans' lively and unique jazz scene to its lively and equally unique political scene. He uses his art and political cartoons to comment on life's complexities, warts and beauty marks.

His creations include fine watercolors and acrylics and pen and ink cartoons. His cartoons are featured on a regular basis in The Louisiana Weekly.

A Katrina evacuee, Siler has spoken on New Orleans history across the USA at universities and culural events.

Click here to contact Mr. Siler

Jun 13, 2013 - Issue 520

A dictionary definition of sequestration says that sequestration is “the action of taking legal possession of assets until a debt has been paid or other claims have been met.” It sounds simple, but the way it is being used in Washington masks what is being done in the name of “saving” the country from its wild-spending self.

It is just another in a long line of actions by the politicians and bureaucrats in charge to make your government smaller and to make sure that it will only be allowed to do less and less to provide for the general welfare. And, the general welfare is one of the important functions of government, according to the Constitution.

Often enough, we are told that there is “gridlock in Washington,” and that’s the reason nothing is being done to solve our problems, but it’s worth taking another look at the word and what happens as a result of that word. It is not truly gridlock at all, but a continuing effort by Republicans and others on the right to bring government to its knees, along with the feeble efforts of the Democrats to save what remains of New Deal policies and programs.

But, before our eyes, the programs benefiting people, developed over generations, have been hacked and chopped until they are barely recognizable. What has been cut is not enough for them, so the cutters want more and the “sequester” has been just the opportunity to make further deep cuts in things like Medicaid, education, low-cost housing, job creation, and assistance like food stamps (a $4 billion cut proposed for food stamps in the Farm Bill, just this week).

There is some question about who coined the term “sequester,” and some say it was the Obama White House, but the term goes back farther than that, at least back to the mid-1980s, when a senator from Texas named Phil Gramm put a claim on the word. Earlier this year, the Huffington Post said of Gramm, he “dismantled the Glass-Steagall Act and made sure complex derivatives went largely unregulated, setting the stage for the financial crisis. Also on his dubious record of achievement was the idea of ‘sequestration,’ or the use of harsh, automatic spending cuts to force policy makers to pass budget laws.”

Proud of his accomplishments in releasing the dogs of finance, he noted that not much damage has been done by any sequester…he didn’t have to suffer the consequences. The country still stood and business continued as usual, according to his analysis. Gramm, though, is the man who, when he was asked why he routinely supported legislation that benefited the rich and powerful, but not the poor, replied that it was because no poor person had ever given him a job. In a sentence, he explained his animus toward working men and women and his lifelong deference to the rich.

But, years ago, the late Lars-Erik Nelson nailed Gramm in a brilliant newspaper column, which pointed out that, starting way back to the time of FDR, Gramm was a beneficiary of the work of the many. He pointed out that Gramm had his living standard raised by the New Deal’s minimum wage law, because his mother was a low-wage worker, he went to public schools, he graduated from a public university, he taught at a public university, and then he became a politician. Throughout his entire life, Nelson pointed out, Gramm had “had a job” paid for by poor people or, at least, working people.

Although Gramm is gone from the Congress, there are still too many who carry his hostility toward poor people and working people. From that attitude, we have the sequester and we have an unremitting effort to further slash social programs, in favor of more tax cuts for Corporate America and the rich. These are the politicians who believe there is such a thing as “the deserving poor.” They don’t give a hint who might qualify, because they really believe that there are few to no deserving poor, so programs that provide for them could be cut or eliminated.

From time to time, we talk about hunger, but there is no broad debate in Congress or elsewhere, about the reason that 50 million Americans are either hungry or are experiencing what is called food insecurity. That is, a family may have eaten today, but they literally don’t know where their next meal is coming from. A large percentage of those hungry or food insecure families are single mothers with one or two children. Mostly, it is the children who suffer the most, since their bodies need good nutrition to grow straight and strong and to ensure proper brain development.

A young mother with two children is shown in a recent documentary, “A Place at the Table,” as she searches for work that might lead to a good job. Though it is not much, she gets some of the help that is available. Her children are still hungry. Then, she finally gets a fulltime job. The result? She makes a few dollars more than is allowed for the assistance program, so she is cut off. Her children are still hungry, and she is working full time. Who pays for childcare? Who pays for a good diet? Children do not learn when they are hungry. How are her children to learn? Isn’t anybody responsible to see how these programs are working, or if they are working?

These are the kinds of programs that are cut in the time of sequester. The social programs are the “assets” of a nation and the politicians, in a time of austerity, are taking “legal possession” of those assets and, in this case, they are eliminating them or reducing them, so they do very few people any good.

Decision makers are looking at the social “assets” as something to be seized as if the 50 million Americans who are hungry or are food insecure are debtors and something has to be done to teach them a lesson. There are no debtors’ prisons yet, so the next best thing is to take away social programs and that will help them learn how important it is not to be poor.

Gramm and others like him in and around Congress have taken legal possession of the social assets, so that their true masters, the corporations and the rich, will get a continuous flow of tax cuts and subsidies, which have filled their pockets for the past half century.

Among those beneficiaries of the “sequester” are those in the military-industrial complex, the sinkhole of taxpayer money, year after year. The military budget takes up some 58 percent of the money that comes into Washington. Committees in charge of the budget in both houses of Congress will continue to preach austerity, cut programs that might make the nation’s people healthier and stronger, and all the while they are funneling money into the maw of the military and to the giant corporations of finance and retailing. No one should be surprised, because they see the nation as a big business and they try to handle it that way. If there are budget or financial problems, find the culprits and make them pay and take “legal possession of the assets,” and that’s what they are doing.

Through the “sequester,” they are taking care of their very rich friends and their other friends, the corporations. It’s why the word sequester rolls so easily off their tongues. On a grand scale, they are managing the business called the U.S.A., as good merchants do.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a long-time former newspaper reporter and labor organizer, who lives in the Mohawk Valley of New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.

Jun 13, 2013 - Issue 520

...American self-evasion...is all that this country has as history...

- James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

When an event places the most extreme demands on us, one ought not to peak of banality.

-Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.

-William Faulkner

Of Jean Amery’s account of surviving Auschwitz, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by A Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, the late German writer W.G. Sebald offers this observation. He states that what set Amery’s work “above the activity surrounding it,” and by this Sebald means the effort of the post-Fascist German government to practice “usurping the victims’ cause” (On the Natural History of Destruction), was the way in which Amery tires “to break through the silence imposed on him by terrorism.”

Terrorism limited to a particular set of concentration camps, chambers of horrors, or prison cells. “The horrible can make no claim to singularity,” Amery writes (At the Mind’s Limits, 1966). One can survive the physical aspects of terrorism, if one survives at all. But terrorism is more than the physical application of violence.

There is a form of terrorism that, too, survives long after particular perpetrators are arrested and particular camps and chambers become defunct. Torture, terrorism, as an “institution and method,” writes Amery was supposedly eliminated in the eighteenth century, and yet, there are victims of torture alive today(his time and ours).

There it is again, years after the fall of fascism, in the photos Amery views, photos in which he sees South Vietnamese troops “torturing captured Vietcong rebels.” He recalls a letter writer Graham Greene sent to the Daily Telegraph in which Greene questioned the motivation for what appears to be government transparency: an admission that torture is still practiced.

The strange new features about the photographs of torture now appearing in the British and American press is that they have been taken with the approval of the torturers and are published over captions that contain no hint of condemnation. They might have come out of a book on insect life...Does this mean that the American authorities sanction torture as a means of interrogation? The photographs certainly are a mark of honesty, a sign that the authorities do not shut their eyes to what is going on, but I wonder if this kind of honesty without conscience is really to be preferred to the old hypocrisy. (Greene, cited in At the Mind’s Limits)

Is this really transparency or yet another function of the apparatus of terrorism?

Everything a state that employs torture, terrorism presents for public consumption must be questioned as Greene did, Amery argues. Why now, while the terrorism is still practiced? What are we meant to see?

And Amery’s experience, his memory of terrorism, freed him to see in those photos the continuation of the lie surrounding terrorism, for, as he writes, in this admission of torture by the Americans and the British, “the boldness...of coming forward with such photos,” is possible and “explicable only if it is assumed that a revolt of public conscience is not longer to be feared.”

The photos, in other words, have a targeted audience and a specific tasks. The release of evidence, whether photos or documents, is part of a calculated, if not staged, performance constructed by any regime who simultaneously practices violence, torture, terrorism while also manipulating violence, torture, terrorism to deaden the public conscience so the American public, in particular, cannot see beyond what is shown.

What else is expected from a government committed to the use of violence?

As Amery writes, the fascist regime “hated the word ‘humanity.’” Its practitioners “tortured with the good conscience of depravity...they tortured because they were torturers. They placed torture in their service. But even more fervently they were its servants.”

Torture was not “an accidental quality” of the Third Reich, but its “essence.” How does an individual or a community of people engage in conciliation with the essence of terrorism? Is conciliation another name for evasion?

***

I am Adolph Hitler, and as Fuehrer, head of state, on behalf of the German citizens, and for the purposes of national security, declare Jewish, communists, members of the gay and lesbian communities, dissents, Germans in liaisons with the above, enemies of the State, and I have ordered my army and domestic security forces to round up - anywhere - such people, to confiscate their newspapers, to gather their correspondence and financial records, and I encourage all Aryan German citizens to corporate and actively support the efforts of their government.

How could Amery, as Sebald notes, offer a “conciliatory” discussion on the German Reich’s pogrom of “persecution and extermination of a largely assimilated minority?” How can one speak of conciliation and healing when trust in the legal and social contracts, in one’s fellow human being, no longer exist?

Before you receive the first blow from a Gestapo guard, writes Amery, you realize you had come to expect, to trust in those “written or unwritten social contracts” about freedom and human rights. The other would acknowledge such contracts, yes? The other would spare you, would respect “your physical” as well as your “metaphysical being.” But “at the first blow this trust in the world breaks down” 77

You realize you have been lied to - and any expectation of help is not forthcoming. And “if no help can be expected, this physical overwhelming by the other then becomes an existential consummation of destruction altogether.” The “minimal prospect of resistance” looks hopeless. Only when you think from the perspective of terrorists and accept talk about “the banality of evil” do you accept terrorism as some vague, abstract development that appears without an historical antecedent, here or there and is, as if magically, wiped away by an army of soldiers. No residue.

There is a residue of terrorism for its targeted victims, and not all of it is represented by physical scars. “Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world...That one’s fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror...It is fear that henceforth reigns over him.”

For this reason, Amery declares - one ought not talk about “the banality of evil.”

Terrorism is the concrete manifestation of “evil.” It has a face, plenty of faces, and not only of fear exhibited in its victims. Its destructive powers are not easily remedied by governmental announcements of an end to hostilities. Mission accomplished.

Look to “the other” - the Gestapo, Amery writes. Look at their costumes, to the arrogant posture.

Amery remembers: These were the “men in leather coats,” with pistols “pointed at their victim.” Not monsters or extraterrestrial beings but men (and women) who were also not “‘Gestapo faces’ with twisted noses, hypertrophied chins, pockmarks, and knife scars, as might appear in a book.” The Gestapo looked like anyone else. “Plain, ordinary faces” - like anyone else - “became Gestapo faces.”

These plain and ordinary faces, “with heart and soul,” “went about their business,” and “the name of it was power, dominion over spirit and flesh, orgy of unchecked self-expansion.”

“The banality of evil” is the terrorism and the lie, the cover-up narrative about bad apples. Innocent dupes!

“Evil overlays and exceeds banality,” writes Amery, “for there is no ‘banality of evil,’ and Hannah Arendt, who wrote about it in her Eichmann book, Amery continues, knew the enemy of mankind only from hearsay, saw him only through the glass cage.”

***

Captured in Argentina (1960) to stand trial in Jerusalem, Adolph Eichmann presented himself to the world as an ordinary worker for the government - the National Socialist government, under Adolph Hitler. Eichmann pled not guilty.

Born in Germany, Hannah Arendt was a political theorist and, as a Jew, she was subject to Gestapo interrogation before becoming a naturalized citizen of the U.S. In 1961, The New Yorker hired Arendt to cover the trial of the man she saw through a glass cage and offers the thesis, “the banality of evil.” As Fred Kaplan states, this thesis “rests on the premise that Eichmann committed his deeds with no awareness of their evil, not even with virulent anti-Semitism (“The Woman Who Saw Banality of Evil,” New York Times, May 24, 2013).

A series of articles culminates in a book-length report titled, A Report On The Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem in which it could be argued Eichmann speaks. He was simply a bored young man. “Bored to distraction.”

Arendt’s Eichmann “had been an ambitious young man who was fed up with his job as traveling salesman even before the Vacuum Oil Company was fed up with him.” He saw himself as a failure to his social class and to his family. He could make a career yet. So when he discovered that the Security Service of the Reichsfuhrer S.S. (Himmler’s Sicherheitsdienst, or S.D)....had jobs open, [he] applied immediately.”

Despite the orders to carry out the Final Solution, Eichmann stayed focused on the “emigration” not the liquidation of Jews.

On the contrary, Eichmann joined the S.S., becoming a member of the “higher ups,” becoming privy to Hitler’s “intentions” for the Jewish populations in Germany and Europe at large, even though he denied his importance in the Nazi Party, and insisted he had “never been told more than he needed to know in order to do a specific, limited job” (“The Woman Who Saw Banality of Evil”).

From behind this glass cage, Eichmann, for a time, played his role as a simple worker following orders quite well. His performance must have been mesmerizing: there he sat, Adolph Eichmann of the submissive, countless foot soldiers, “a clown,” Arendt writes, (“The Woman Who Saw Banality of Evil”), forced to bow before the powerful. But, there must have been, too, the Adolph Eichmann of the Schutzstaffel, a former member of the powerful fascist regime - all behind him now.

Eichmann’s “superiors” were bad, but he did not know it!

Distinctions of this sort thrive, as Amery understood, when the observer fails to remember.

Arendt’s Eichmann was simply a confused young man: Why not join the S.S.? And he replied, Why not? That was how it had happened, and that was about all there was to it” (my emphasis, A Report on the Banality of Evil).

But this was not all there was to it.

We know now that Arendt left the trial before the real Eichmann appeared!

When Eichmann (and the operation of terrorism) was most transparent, Arendt was not there. When she was there, looking at Eichmann through his glass cage, she could not see. Captured! Enslaved! Silenced!

The magnetism of deception!

Evidence has been “unearthed” since the trial and certainly during to indicated that “Eichmann very much knew what he was doing” (“The Woman Who Saw Banality of Evil”). In fact, the historical Eichmann (as opposed to Arendt’s) was a man “who was well aware of what he was doing and was proud of his murderous ‘achievements,’” according to S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher in “Questioning the Banality of Evil,” http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk, January 2008). He “identified strongly with anti-semitism and Nazi ideology.” He did not simply “follow orders,” but, in fact, “pioneered creative new policies.”

Recent studies now reveal that Arendt was at best, “naive.”

The studies Haslam and Reicher refer to in the article mentioned above challenge to the theory held by psychologists as well as historians that individuals, as one study suggested, in an “agentic state” “suspend their capacity to make informed moral judgments and relinquish responsibility for what they do to those in authority” (Milgram in “Questioning”). We have become accustomed to believing that individuals “conform blindly to what is expected,” that the most “thoughtful and humane individual will become a brutal zombie if put in the wrong sort of group.”

Historically and fortunately, this is not always the case. There are countless known and unknown white Americans who took risks to help Blacks escape enslavement, for example. Many Europeans, including Aryan Germans, risked encampment or death, to save Jewish from extermination. And, today, we have only to note someone like Pvt. Bradley Manning, risking his freedom because he released to Wikileaks selective information about the brutality of our current wars, including a video tape of American military personnel firing on journalists, Good Samaritans and children from their high-tech helicopters. It should not escape our attention that it is someone like Pvt. Manning, captured, imprisoned and tortured, sitting before the law, on trial for believing, contrary to an ideology that enforces tyranny, in principles and practices of inclusion rather than exclusion.

Manning could have taken a different course of action; he could have moved up the ranks becoming a career officer; he could have become an American hero with coveted medals dangling from his lapel. But that would not be Pvt. Manning. Some others, but not Manning. Evasion is not an option. Manning, too, broke through “the silence imposed on him by terrorism.”

Haslam and Reicher:

As Ian Kershaw notes, Nazi didn’t obey Hitler, they worked towards him, seeking to surpass each other in their efforts. By the same token, they also had a large degree of discretion. Indeed, as Laurence Rees (2005) notes in his recent book on Auschwitz and the ‘final solution’, it was this that made the Nazi system so dynamic. Even in the most brutal of circumstances, people did not have to kill and only some choose to do so. So, far from simply ‘finding themselves’ in inhumane situations or inhumane groups, the murderers actively committed themselves to such groups. They actively created inhumane situations and placed themselves at their epicentre.

“They actively created inhumane situations and placed themselves at their epicentre.”

Far from blindly conforming and “following orders,” men (and women) such as Eichmann came to their tasks already influenced by an ideology whose essence is the practice of torture/terrorism. As Haslam and Reicher write, these studies suggests “that brutality occurs when people identify strongly with groups that have a brutal ideology. This leads them to advance that ideology knowingly, creatively and even proudly.”

Before a Hitler or an Eichmann, secret and not so secret societies, fashionable social clubs, with charismatic leaders such as Guido von List and Georg Schonerer, for example, galvanized like-minded people with the “dogma about the ‘German people’s’ alleged natural superiority to all other peoples” (Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship).

Eichmann: “‘I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals” (“The Woman Who Saw Banality of Evil”).

Eichmann did not resist fascist policies nor did he ever consider turning whistleblower. Instead, he tapped into the Germany-to-Argentina-pipeline for terrorists fleeing accountability. He fled Argentina while behind glass cage. Eichmann knew he was an embodiment of terrorism and he knew why. He offered the narrative of banality, expressing no remorse.

“There was less and less talk of remorse,” as Amery recalls, following the collapse of the Nazi regime. “The pariah Germany was accepted into the community of nations.” Then “it was courted,” until “finally it had to be dispassionately reckoned with in the power game” (At the Mind’s Limits).

Amery would agree with Faulkner: “maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished.” Terrorism has become a popular tool for the imperialist agenda among corporate/capitalists.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

Jun 13, 2013 -Issue 520

Carlos Latuff, a cartoonist, artist and activist based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Latuff has spent the last 15 plus years crafting a style that can best be described as “populist cartooning.” He has touched on issues like Apartheid in South Africa, the plight of Native Americans in the US and the oppression of Tibetans in China.

But perhaps his most controversial series to date is “We are all Palestinians,” in which he compares the actions taken by the Israeli government towards Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip directly to the Nazi’s treatment of Jews.

Click here to contact Mr. Latuff

Jun 13, 2013 - Issue 520

Every now and then I learn something that’s like a smack on the head. It happened a few days ago. What I learned was something many people already understand but somehow it got by me until a friend mentioned that the people who make the most money from the illegal drug trade are the ones who run the nation’s private prisons. These folks make the cartels look like penny-ante players.

I am a novelist. I make up stories. I could never get away with a story like this. We taxpayers are shelling out something north of 40 billion dollars a year to lock up the world’s largest prison population. We lock up more youth than any other country on Earth. Blacks and Hispanics are over-represented by a wide margin. Over half of them are behind bars on drug charges, many for simple possession of marijuana. A black kid with a joint is several times more likely to be locked up than a white kid with the same joint. We have so many men and women, boys and girls locked up that can’t find enough beds.

Who do we call? Our friends in what politicians in Washington like to call “the private sector.” For-profit companies that make all kinds of claims about efficiency, savings, and so on. They would rather we didn’t pay much attention to the stories about abuse of inmates.

Here’s where the story gets really creepy. These for-profit prison companies spend tens of millions of dollars each year to lobby for more business. In a very real sense, they point at black and Hispanic kids and see dollars. They don’t support legalizing drugs and cite all kinds of research, the same old well-worn “drug fiends and ruined lives” stuff we’ve seen for decades. They discount the evidence from other countries that have loosened drug laws and watched drug problems recede. The top three private prison companies are lobbying for tougher laws and longer sentences. We already have sentencing laws that shock other advanced countries.

It’s one thing to lobby to sell more cars to the government and it’s quite another to lobby to ruin human lives.

Here’s another number. It is estimated that Americans spend $40 billion a year on cocaine. Oddly, that’s what we spend on corrections. South of the border, the profits go to the cartels. North of the border, the profits go to the private prisons. No objective observer would say this is a system that is working or that the so-called “war on drugs” is anything but a slogan.

Now let’s move the creep meter even more. There’s gold, not just in the illegal drug business, but in illegal immigrants. Private prisons rake in over $5 billion by locking up the “illegals” who are rounded up by federal immigration agents. And I’m sure you will not be shocked to learn that private prisons are spending big dollars to lobby against immigration reform that would legalize the residency of many men and women and offer them a path to citizenship.

And so we have an industry that makes obscene amounts of money - taxpayer money - by locking up black kids and even more money by locking up Hispanics who come here to improve their lives by doing the work that we won’t do, like cutting grass and roofing.

How is it that we as a nation have turned our people - and others - into criminals for profit? Are we at a stage in our national life where we see our legal system as nothing more than a profit center for a few influential businessmen and women who slurp at the taxpayers’ trough for funds that are needed to keep our bridges from falling down?

Why do we have twenty-five per cent of the world’s prisoners and only five per cent of the world’s population?

It would be nice to think this is a new problem. But it’s not. Let us consider the words of Woody Guthrie’s song “Deportee:”

Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,

Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;

Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,

They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Larry Matthews, is a veteran broadcast journalist. He is the recipient of The George Foster Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcast for his reporting on Vietnam veterans. He is also the recipient of a Columbia/DuPont Citation, Society of Professional Journalists, Associated Press, and other awards for investigative reporting. He is the author of five books including, I Used To Be In Radio: a Memoir. Click here to reach Mr. Matthews.

Jun 13, 2013 - Issue 520

Adam Clymer’s New York Times article on the death of New Jersey Senator Frank R. Lautenberg (June 4, 2013) briefly mentions a “Lautenberg measure [that] gave refugee status to people from historically persecuted groups without requiring them to show that they had been singled out” and noted that the senator “estimated that 350,000 to 400,000 Jews entered the United States under the 1990 law” and that Evangelical Christians from the former Soviet Union also benefited fromthe law.”

The article does not mention some of the most significant aspects of the little-known Lautenberg Amendment, Public Law 101-167, which was enacted November 21, 1989 and has been renewed annually by the U.S.Congress.

According to the Congressional Research Service (report on “Refugee Admissions and Resettlement Policy”) the Lautenberg Amendment allows those groups covered by the legislation (nationals from the former Soviet Union, Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania who are Jews, Evangelical Christians, Ukrainian Catholics or Ukrainian Orthodox; nationals of Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia; and Jews, Christians, Baha’is and other religious minorities from Iran) to prove they are eligible for special refugee status “with a credible, but not necessarily individual, fear of persecution.” By contrast, the Immigration and Nationality Act“ requires prospective refugees to establish a well-founded fear of persecution on a case-by-case basis.” Those covered by the Lautenberg Amendment are eligible for Special Cash Assistance and for Federal Public Assistance Programs including, but not limited to, Social Security, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

CRS statistics indicate that over 370,000 refugees were admitted from the Former Soviet Union in the first ten years of the Lautenberg Amendment. In October 2002 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that “The Lautenberg Amendment allowed some 350,000 to 400,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union to gain entry into the United States without having to prove they were individually persecuted.” In 2010 the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society cited Eric Rubin, Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow stating that the amendment had resulted in almost 440,000 refugees from the former Soviet Union and other regions of the world.

In the year 1992, according to an article in The Christian Science Monitor, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that there were 16 to 17 million refugees worldwide of whom the U.S. planned to fund the admission of 122,000, half of whom were to come from the Commonwealth of Independent States (states of the former Soviet Union), with approximately eighty percent of that number being Jewish applicants. The UNHCR pointed out at that time that almost no one emigrating from the CIS was a refugee as defined by the U.N., but that “once an individual asserts that he is a member of the covered class and asserts that he has been persecuted or has a fear of persecution, that individual shall be deemed a refugee.”

Of particular interest in this regard was Senator Lautenberg’s statement in his December 17, 2011, Press Release that “I created this program to allow religious minorities to come live safely in the United States and I am proud that it helped hundreds of thousands of people.” Although Lautenberg maintained that his amendment was religion-related, the UJA-Federation of New York’s Jewish Community Study of New York: 2011 Community Report indicates that “almost a fourth” of Russian-speaking Jews in New York “consider themselves belonging to no religion.”

Charles Kamasaki, Executive Vice-President of the National Council of La Raza, in an article in the American Jewish Committee publication Latinos and Jews pointed out that “the admission of former Soviet Jews” under this “special” status meant that “former Soviet Jews were eligible for eventual permanent resident status as well as access to cash assistance, language courses, and job-training programs normally provided only to bona fide refugees.” He added, “To some Hispanic advocates, the inequity was obvious.”

Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness describes how “Mass incarceration marginalizes large segments of the African-American community,... and then authorizes discrimination against them in voting, employment, housing education, public benefits, and jury service.” Here too, the contrast with the treatment afforded to those covered by the Lautenberg amendment is “obvious.”

A brief look at the Lautenberg Amendment on immigration reveals disparities in classification and treatment between those who are covered and those not covered by the amendment and related special programs and assistance. A much closer look at the disparities in classification and treatment can provide important information for those struggling for more equal and just immigration, refugee, and domestic policies.

-0-

For those interested in further investigation of the LautenbergAmendment on Immigration, the following information was provided by the Public Service Division of the Law Library of Congress:

The Lautenberg Amendment on immigration is part of Pub. L. 101-167 and 8 CFR 245.7.

8 CFR 245.7 is a Federal regulation on the “Adjustment of status of certain Soviet and Indochinese parolees under the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 1990” (Pub. L. 101-167). Federal regulations are issued by federal agencies and the issuing agency has authority to make the regulation under laws issued by Congress. This authority can be very direct as in the case of this regulation or more indirect.

Pub. L. 101-167 can be found on the Law Library of Congress’ website THOMAS at < http://thomas.loc.gov>. Select the option “Public Laws” under the heading “More Legislative Information.” At the next screen select the 101st Congress and then select the range that includes 167. At the following screen scroll down to 167 and click on H.R. 3743 which is the original bill number. At the following screen you will get Bill Summary & Status information with links to additional information. You can access the final text of the legislation by clicking on “Text of Legislation.” The final version of the bill is the enrolled version, version 2 in this case. The legislative history of the bill can be found under “All Congressional Actions with Amendments.”

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator Guest Commentator Dr. Jeffrey B. Perry, PhD is an independent, working-class scholar formally educated at Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, and Columbia. For almost forty years he has been active in the working class movement as a rank-and-file worker and as a union shop steward, officer, editor, and retiree. He has also been involved in domestic and international social justice issues including affirmative action, union democracy, and anti-apartheid, anti-war, and anti-imperialist work. His Website is www.jeffreybperry.net. Contact Dr. Perry.

Jun 13, 2013 -Issue 520

Whole Foods Slammed For ‘English-Only' Policy As Petition Gathers Signatures

BlackCommentator.com cartoonist/artist Eric Garcia produces "historically based, politically charged criticism, with the goal of creating dialogue about contemporary issues”. That’s how Garcia describes his artwork. A versatile artist working in an assortment of media, from paintings, to hand-printed posters, to sculpture installations, Garcia’s art has a common goal of educating and challenging. Click here to contact brother Eric. His website is southvalleyart.com.

Jun 13, 2013 - Issue 520

“To me, the thing that is worse than death is betrayal.”

-Malcolm X [el-Hajj Malik el Shabazz]

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”

-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In this 21st century, Mr. ‘hope and change’ - drone man Barack Obama has ushered in an unprecedented surveillance police state inside this nation even as he and his corporate-owned Democratic and Republican party cohorts bomb, murder, and maim children, women, and men in sovereign nations throughout Africa, the ‘Middle East,’ and elsewhere on Mother Earth.

The U.S. continues to be, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “the greatest purveyor of violence” subterfuge, entrapment, and misery in the world. Barack Obama’s FBI, CIA, and NSA false flag and entrapment activities in this nation, and throughout the planet, have increased and perpetuated ‘terrorism’ and brought the peoples of the world to the brink of annihilation.

The recent tip-of-the-iceberg revelations pertaining to Obama’s dragnet of police-state surveillance of millions of everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow U.S. citizens, combined with his repression and persecution of whistle-blowers, environmentalists, peace and justice activists, and political prisoners in the U.S. have made an utter mockery of even the de facto myth of democracy in this nation. The enormity of Barack Obama’s national police-state surveillance and entrapment system in this year of 2013, makes the spying and invasion of privacy components of the infamous U.S. government COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) of the 1960s and 1970s pale by comparison.

This is now the year 2013, but back in the October 30, 2008, Black Commentator article titled, ‘An Obama Presidency: More of the Same – Only Worse’ I wrote, “After the Democratic Party Republicrats so-called election euphoria and celebrating is over, the Obama / Biden Republicrat regime will get down to the business of placing the ongoing exploitation of the everyday people of this nation on fast track. The masses of Black Americans, along with the oppressed and exploited Brown, Red, Yellow, and White peoples of this nation will learn firsthand that, notwithstanding the deceptive Obama rhetoric, exploitation nationally and internationally will be intensified.” The “clash between those who want freedom, justice [and] equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation” about which Malcolm X referred, will be intensified under Barack Obama, with Obama representing the interests of the oppressors. The political contradictions in this regard will also be increasingly obvious.” [Reference:http://blackcommentator.com/297/297_kir_obama_presidency_pt1.html] The above analysis and prediction from October 2008 was obviously absolutely and chillingly accurate.

With the complicity of his Democratic and Republican cohorts, and the corporate-stream (and much of the so-called ‘alternative’) media, not only has Barack Obama continued the unjust, hypocritical, bloody and unconstitutional policies of the previous Bush / Cheney regime, these policies, nationally and globally, have been exacerbated and broadened by Barack Obama. This represents the height of treachery, subterfuge, and betrayal against not only the people of this nation but also against the peoples of the entire world.

The only effective way to stop and reverse this treachery, subterfuge, and betrayal is for everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people to unequivocally stop supporting the corporate-owned Democratic and Republican parties. We everyday ordinary people must recognize that our salvation emanates from we ourselves – collectively.

Is Obama Alone In His Treachery & Betrayal?

Barack Obama is by no means alone in his treachery and betrayal of everyday ordinary people.

The misleadership on the part of many so-called ‘liberals,’ ‘progressives,’ ‘leftists’ and the supposed black intelligentsia in this nation is, in very large measure, directly responsible for the ongoing bloody U.S. perpetual wars abroad and the very real police surveillance state at home. These persons knew full well, or should have known, back in 2008, that Barack Obama’s rhetoric was a Trojan Horse smokescreen for the national power elite’s corporate-owned political system. Their treachery and betrayal must always be remembered.

Some of these (above referred to persons) in this year of 2013, now pretend that they have had a miraculous epiphany. They have not. Others of these persons persist in supporting drone man Barack Obama (and his Democratic and Republican cohorts) while hypocritically claiming that they simultaneously oppose, for example, the U.S. torture chamber known as Guantanamo, or perpetual U.S. wars and/or military incursions abroad, etc. They urge everyday people to sign petitions against various forms of injustice (of which there are many) while simultaneously supporting the single most insidious and powerful chief purveyor of injustice – Barack Obama! Beware this variety of so-called ‘progressives’ and/or ‘leftists.’ They are, in fact, systemic gatekeepers and very dangerous to the collective interests, needs, and aspirations of everyday ordinary people. They do not want real systemic change. They want to maintain their systemic privilege by continuing to pimp the pain of struggling everyday people all in the fallacious name of informing and/or helping them/us. These persons are no more genuine than is drone man Barack Obama’s undeserved Nobel ‘Peace’ Prize. Like Barack Obama himself, they are betrayers of humankind collectively.

It’s Time to End Our Silence

In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.” That time is NOW. It is time to break our silence!

We everyday ordinary people have already been repeatedly betrayed by the active systemic complicity and/or silence of many so-called ‘progressives’ and leftists. It is up to just plain ordinary everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people to break our silence and to strongly support those courageous women and men who have already broken their silence. We must do this for ourselves and for one another.

Let us remember that there also comes a time when silence is complicity – complicity in our own continuing political, economic, and social bondage. Only WE can break this bondage. And we have nothing to lose but our chains. The people of this nation, in conjunction with the rainbow of humanity throughout our precious Mother Earth, must collectively resist and reverse the force-fed psychological and political servitude and impending annihilation of ourselves and the vast majority of our human family. Turn OFF the corporate-stream media and turn on your minds and let your creative juices flow. Do it NOW!

Let us NOT be silent! And yes, while there is yet time, there is so much work to be done! In the words of Joe Hill, “Don’t Mourn. ORGANIZE!”

Remember: Each one, reach one. Each one, teach one. Onward, then, my sisters and brothers. Onward...!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil / political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to view Larry’s interview of October 26, 2012. Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.

Jun 13, 2013 - Issue 520

Once again, I am sharing my annual graduation speech in hopes that it will help African people in America understand the real meaning of these rites of passage for thousands of our young people who will be participating in commencement exercises, affirming their graduation from elementary, middle school, high school, and college in the next few weeks.

Your life has just begun today, brothers and sisters. This is probably one of the most important days in your life as you make this transition, this rite of passage, in moving toward another stage in your development as young Africans in America.

I’d like to congratulate your teachers, parents, guardians, and extended family members who are with you today and who have supported you in reaching this critical stage of your life at this critical hour in history.

I want to have a brief but serious talk with you today, brothers and sisters. It has been predicted that within the 21st century, if current trends continue, 70% of African men in America between the ages of 16 and 28 will be either in jail or addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. Increasingly, this same trend is occurring with African females in America. One of the purposes of our educational pursuits is to turn this devastating trend around.

What does all this mean today as you graduate from this educational institution that professes to be dedicated to the academic and cultural development of young people like you? As young Black people, or Africans in America, about to enter a new stage in life, let me define what being Black and African really means.

First, it is color - your African ancestry.

Second, it is culture: practicing a lifestyle that recognizes the importance of our African and African in American heritage and traditions. I am speaking of an African culture that is geared to the values that will facilitate the present and future development of our people.

Third, it is consciousness. We should always be conscious of our strength, beauty, and potential as African people. In this connection, we should always interpret all situations from the standpoint of the greatest good for the greatest number of Africans in the world. This is called the African principle.

Fourth and finally, Black or being African means commitment. It means a willingness to work tirelessly in the interests of African people and all oppressed humanity.

So it is, today, that I am challenging you to continue on the path of becoming independent African people who are not dependent on others outside our communities for the things we can do for ourselves.

I am challenging you, as you make this rite of passage, to prepare yourselves to become committed to the struggle for the just and common cause for the liberation and redemption of African people worldwide.

This dedication to the common cause goes beyond the resources of one generation. It means we must always learn from previous generations. We must always learn from the wisdom of our ancestors, using this knowledge as a way of seeking and struggling for a better way of life for African people, based on goals and objectives in our own best interests.

In other words, we must stop killing each other over bruised egos, over material items and drugs that other people manufacture and bring into our communities. We must stop the killing!

We must seek to prepare the generations to come to develop the skills and resources for making our ultimate freedom and liberation a reality. As Malcolm X always said, “education is the passport to freedom.”

As the late, renowned, African in American educator, psychologist, and historian, Dr. Asa G. Hilliard, III writes in SBA: The Reawakening of the African Mind, “We Africans… have not viewed our problems holistically. After years of living under conditions of extreme oppression, we have settled for limited definitions of our problem.”

Dr. Hilliard explains; “A classic example may be taken from the period of the Civil Rights Movement. The evil and gross injustice of slavery and segregation violated the civil rights of African people and had to be addressed. However, the necessary task of fighting for civil rights was insufficient to allow for the healing of a people. Our healing requires a greater conceptual frame than that provided by civil rights.”

Dr. Hilliard continues with this insight: “First we must see ourselves as an African people, or we will be unable to develop this critical frame. Second, we must understand not only the role that white supremacy has played in our subjugation, but also the role that we ourselves have played by not practicing self determination in our struggle to counter the MAAFA (this is a KiSwahili term that means disaster or as Marimba Ani has conceptualized it to mean the African holocaust of Eurasian enslavement / colonialism).”

Remember parents, teachers, and students - as our esteemed ancestor Dr. John Henrik Clarke repeatedly warned, “Powerful people never teach powerless people how to take power from them. Education is one of the most sensitive arenas in the life of a people. Its role is to be honest and true and to tell people where they have been and what they are.” Most importantly, Dr. Clarke points out that the role of education and history is to “tell a people where they still must go.”

This is a great day for you who have make this step in your rite of passage and transition. We congratulate you in the name of all of our ancestors and send you forward to the next stage of your development in the cycle of life.

A Luta Continua - the struggle continues and we will conquer without a doubt. Hotep (peace)!

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Conrad W. Worrill, PhD, is the National Chairman Emeritus of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Click here to contact Dr. Worrill.

Jun 13, 2013 - Issue 520

The Art of Documentary...

Jim Alexander Photography

JimAlexanderPhotography.com

All photographs are signed and numbered in editions of 100

Iris Giclee prints are made on Epson printers with Epson archival papers and inks.

Silver Gelatin photographs are hand produced on archival fiber based papers.

For purchasing, publishing rights, exhibits or other information please contact Jim Alexander Photography directly via his Website.

Represented by BlackCommentator.com

What is a Giclee?

A Giclee (pronounced Zhee-Clay) is a very high end digitally produced archival quality print. Giclees are printed on archival substrates, such as Arches Cold Press watercolor papers, Somerset watercolor papers or specially prepared canvases, with archival, light fast inks, at a very high resolution. Depending on the medium of the original work, giclees are printed on paper or canvas. Watercolor paintings render very well on the watercolor papers, and oil paintings printed as canvas giclees have the rich tonal quality of original oil paintings. Canvas giclees are also coated with a special finishing media to protect the surface. Canvas giclees are stretched and framed as one would display an original oil painting. Watercolor giclees are typically framed behind glass, as one would do with an original watercolor painting.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Jim Alexander has spent over forty years refining his art of documentary photography. A photojournalist, teacher, activist, entrepreneur and media consultant, Mr. Alexander has been on the scene -- at festivals, concerts, cultural events, rallies, demonstrations, meetings and marches, photographing events that guided the course of history.