Greed comes in all colors and perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of “landlord”/property owners and the concomitant plight of apartment unit tenants.

This is being witnessed throughout the United States, including in the state of Minnesota, which unfortunately is in addition to being “the land of 10,000 lakes,” is rapidly becoming a haven for greedy landlords whose sole motivation is profit, at the expense of common decency and the human rights of tenants.

There are an increasing number of people in this nation losing their homes and their hopes to the unscrupulous and avaricious purveyors of mortgage scams. Additionally, apartment unit tenants are the constant victims of greedy and unprincipled so-called “landlords” and their ever willing legal counselors, who like street corner pimps and hustlers, eagerly serve the profit interests of their landlord clients. These unsavory “landlord” activities are becoming increasingly vicious, with tenants as the victims.

The most vulnerable tenant victims of landlord greed are the economically poor, the disabled, the elderly, and/or those who suffer from life-threatening medical problems. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, for example, there are certain Somali, Vietnamese, and Ecuadoran landlords all of whom are naturalized U.S. citizens, but who are also blood sucking vultures upon economically poor and disabled tenants, and who are landlords that violate housing codes, and who collect rent without first having obtained rental licenses, etc. Any tenant who dares stand up legally to these greedy, vulture-like landlords is retaliated against, often with the able assistance of well paid lawyers who are the double-talking mouth pieces for the wealthy. Greed knows no color lines, and the systemic terrorism against the poor does not adhere to decency or human rights.  

Homelessness is not a natural phenomenon. It is in fact aided and abetted by the greedy wealthy elite “landlords” of all colors, and their surrogates. These are persons who have no substantive or real concern for the “health, safety, and security” of tenants. Their primary motivation is profit.

The time is here and now for home owners who are losing their homes, and for apartment unit tenants who are being blood sucked by unscrupulous “landlords,” to stand up and fight against this despicable, avaricious exploitation.

Homelessness in America is aided and abetted by greed. It is the greed of the few against the many.

We must insist that our humanity and human rights be substantively respected by this society and nation, and this includes the right to having a decent place to live.

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The Obama Presidency: A Nightmare Fulfilled

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

                                                                 ---James Joyce—

Not too very long ago, in the 1960s, the United States Government, as documented in many pages of the infamous and bloody COINTELPRO [Counter Intelligence Program] files, made it crystal clear that the likes of Malcolm X and Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. would never be allowed to become political “messiah[s];” and that if ever a Black so called “messiah” came into being he would have to have been manufactured and “created” by the U.S, Government itself. As some readers already know, COINTELPRO was (and no doubt still is in one form or another) a despicable internal U.S. Government program to “discredit, frame, imprison and murder” and thereby “neutralize” U.S. citizens, particularly Black (and yes, even some White) political activists who stood (and stand) in opposition to certain unjust and hypocritical policies of the U.S. Government at home and abroad.

There are some, indeed far too many in this nation, who tout Barack Obama (this latest incarnation of U.S. oppression, imperialism, Zionism, and hegemony) as some kind of “messiah” when in reality he is a de facto Judas, a shameless creation of the U.S. corporate/military apparatus, supported by its ever eager lap dogs and cronies—the U.S. corporate media. As the relatively recent top cabinet appointments by emperor-elect Barack Obama clearly demonstrate, the Obama presidency represents continuity of empire and a gigantic nightmare come true for Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow peoples both inside and outside of the United States. Yes, a nightmare, “a dream deferred” yet again.

Not only is Barack Obama not politically akin in any real sense whatsoever to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he is the actual antithesis to all that Dr. King struggled and died for. He is the ultimate cynical opportunist. Presently, the same U.S. corporate “news” media that despised both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. are championing Barack Obama. Yet, this is the very same slimy U.S. corporate media that continues to be purveyors of massive disinformation and misinformation, just as it was doing in Malcolm and Martin’s day.

Barack Obama’s deafening and overwhelming public silence and lack of a clear and strong condemnation pertaining to the recent intensified slaughter and genocide by the Israeli apartheid (U.S. supplied) Zionist military machine of the Palestinian people in Gaza and elsewhere, is wholly reprehensible yet very informative. In this case, the East African Swahili adage, “Much silence makes a mighty noise;” is most applicable. What better way to ensure continued war and mayhem than by Obama’s tactical and strategic public silence, at the very time that public condemnation is so strongly necessary and called for?!

The extremely important appointments by Barack Obama of Rahm Emanuel and Robert Gates, etc., leave absolutely no doubt as to the Obama presidency’s proclivity for the continuation of U.S. empire and perpetual war. These aforementioned appointments were a deliberate signal to the apartheid Zionist to step up their illegal and inhuman offensive against the Palestinian people. As two well honed political observers, who happen to be Jewish, poignantly and correctly wrote to this writer re the real objectives of the Obama presidency: “…the real goal is to strengthen Hamas…who (and whose allies) will predictably strike back with suicide missions inside of Israel, and...a massive attack against the USA, which will be exactly what Obama/Rahm/Gates/Clinton WANT …Obama can then with deep apologies install unfortunate but necessary policies.” Their analysis is quite correct. It’s time to remove our heads from the proverbial sand.

This writer vividly recalls the not too distant past (in the 1960s and 1970s) when the political nation state of Israel boldly, and with contempt for international law and human rights, openly and secretly militarily and economically supported the racist, murderous, apartheid Government of South Africa. In reality little of substance has changed, except that the apartheid Zionists have now managed to actually install the pro apartheid Zionist Barack Obama as the emperor-elect of the U.S. Empire.

And what of conditions under the Obama presidency inside the United States itself?

For a certainty, the U.S. corporate mass media of disinformation will continue to shamelessly swoon on behalf of Barack Obama - the U.S. empire’s latest double-talking chameleon in Black face. Unfortunately, for the masses of every day Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow peoples in this nation, the Obama presidency will be all about what Obama himself has always been all about: opportunism and smoke & mirror politics.

To be sure, the Obama presidency will put forth a number of so-called “stimulus” incentive packages for the U.S. economy, but they will ultimately fail. They will fail, despite the swooning U.S. corporate media support, because like Barack Obama, they are fake. The people of the United States will need to closely study the fine print of these so-called stimulus packages and they/we will inevitably find that “five, ten, fifteen, or twenty percent” of the money in these so-called stimulus packages will in fact be going to prop up Obama’s real constituency, the U.S. corporate/military apparatus. It was and is no mere coincidence that among Barack Obama’s biggest corporate financial supporters are Goldman Saks and Lockheed  corporations. These are corporate/military money making enterprises whose primary concern is about profit at the expense of the every day health and welfare of people of this nation.

“Americans” will see no universal, single payer health care system under the Barack Obama presidency, but they will get more Obama rhetoric, and more smoke and mirrors from Barack Obama and his minions.

Under the Obama presidency the peoples of this nation will experience increasing and enormous job losses and corporate welfare [i.e. welfare for the rich].

Under the Obama presidency the peoples of this nation will lose their homes at an ever increasing rate while his officials attempt to cover over and down play the increasing pain and suffering of the people in this country.

The issue of the millions upon millions of wrongly imprisoned people in this nation will not be seriously addressed and get better under Barack Obama. It will get worse.

It should be borne in mind that what compelled Barack Obama to become the latest U.S. emperor is a love for power and his own ego, not a love for the suffering peoples of the United States and the world. He shamelessly used “hope” against the people of this nation like a dope dealer uses drugs against the addict that he has hooked. This colored emperor is the fulfillment of a well planned and executed nightmare upon the peoples of this nation and world.

This man, Barack Obama, is the ultimate personification of F. Tupper Saussy’s words: “Since governments live by virtue of helpless people, governments invest in keeping people helpless.”  The Obama rhetoric of “hope” is not new or profound. It is however, a cheap and pathetic investment “in keeping people helpless” in the very name of  fake “change.”  

Our task is to not be fooled again. We must organize against oppression and oppressors whether such oppression emanates from male or female, be they Black, White, or an off shade of turquoise.

As the late, great poet Langston Hughes so aptly put it, “What happens to a dream deferred…Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?”

Onward then…All Power To The People.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member, 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 NewsHour, formerly known as The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. 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 contact Mr. Pinkney.