Apartheid Is Here and So Is the Revolution – By Suzanne Brooks – Women of Color

President Obama is accommodating other communities that deserve accommodations and justice. It appears there are only two groups denied any accommodation or consideration at all: African Americans, for whom he says the answer is that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” which has never been true for African Americans; and women of color, whom he refuses to recognize as having any issues at all or even existing. Yet, he expects us all to vote for him in the same nearly-unanimous numbers as in 2008. African Americans and women of color who accept this kind of treatment are fooling themselves that Republicans will be worse. There is nothing worse than what we are getting. We are at the bottom under the Obama administration. I suggest writing in Barbara Lee for President and Dennis Kucinich for Vice President in the primaries on both Republican and Democratic tickets. If Obama doesn’t get the message and deliver more than symbols and promises before November, we should write in Lee and Kucinich then, too.

The Obama Jobs Plan robs Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts to recipients began a year ago and are ongoing, quietly, as if the majority of the public will not find out. The Martin Luther King, Jr. statue, which had jobs associated with it, were jobs that went to the Chinese who designed and built it. The 911 Memorial was built by Germany and China which also provided all the materials. US steel mills lack work, while the US bought steel from Germany for this. No wonder there are problems with the Post Office, which buys its vehicles from Europe.

Since corporations are now, according to the Supreme Court, to be considered persons for the purpose of donating to campaign contributions, shouldn’t they also then be persons under the IRS code which requires all Americans to pay income taxes on their worldwide income? The rest of us can’t hide money offshore or in Swiss banks to escape paying taxes. Instead, Obama is working on a permanent low tax rate for the rich and corporations.

Incidentally, despite all the complaining about US corporate tax rates, less than half of US corporations pay any taxes at all, regardless of the rate. Instead, most receive subsidies from a US government that refuses adequate support of medical care, food subsidies, education, schools and other needs of the majority of the people.

Republicans, Democrats and the Obama administration just made major changes in Patent law. Among other things, US companies are roaming the world and patenting plants used by indigenous people for medicines in order to take control of medicines worldwide. This often bars the indigenous people from continuing their medical traditions with nothing to replace it. It also guarantees high prices and control to the drug companies indefinitely – the same drug companies that have ceased manufacturing drugs within the US because they want to pay slave wages in countries with no safety requirements for the drugs produced. Neither aspirin nor flu vaccines are manufactured here anymore, but in countries where contamination is frequent.

A few days ago, Mayor Bloomberg of New York City stated that if there is no help for the hungry, homeless, uneducated and unemployed in New York soon, there will be riots in the streets, including race riots. Thousands are now protesting in the streets of Poland because of conditions similar to those in the US – information left out of the news by mainstreet media. The US is like a ticking time bomb, with no substantive leadership working for anything more than increasing their personal enrichment at the price of the loss of freedom, health and lives of 80% of the people who are being reduced to subsistence. Republicans are openly calling for people without insurance to be allowed to die. Michele Bachmann has proposed the elimination of the current minimum wage and reducing pay rates to the levels of other countries, those where the people work as serfs and slaves without medical care, clean water, housing, education and adequate food.

While claiming to follow the constitution, politicians refer to the original version which denied citizenship and humanity to people of African and Indigenous descent, supported slavery and kept immigration almost totally for European whites. What I don’t get is the passivity of the people being led to slaughter. Constant fear mongering, especially on the anniversary of 911 has begun the process of people in this country accepting the presence of armed soldiers on our streets, in schools and government buildings. Whether you look at the German, Indian, Australian, Israeli, South African or early US models which slaughtered millions of Jews, Muslims and Hindus of India, Aborigines, Palestinians, South African Blacks, the US Indigenous people and the enslaved African people. Apartheid is here. So is the revolution.