Table of Contents

There are 17 chapters in this issue

About BlackCommentator.com

Cover Story: The Uprising in Egypt Is Not Over - The African World - By Bill Fletcher, Jr. - BC Editorial Board

Egypt - Free at Last? - Political Cartoon By Carlos Latuff, Rio de Janeiro Brazil

A Nearly Hidden Horror of the Sequester - Left Margin - By Carl Bloice - BC Editorial Board

China: There They Go Again - Solidarity America - By John Funiciello - BC Columnist

How Can a Black Man Love a Nation That Defends George Zimmerman? - Sharp n’ Blunt - By Desi Cortez - BC Columnist

Prop 8 Personal Injury - Animated Political Cartoon By Mark Fiore, San Francisco CA

Black, Gay and Living in a Voting Rights, NO! Gay Marriage, YES! World – Inclusion - By The Reverend Irene Monroe - BC Editorial Board

Contextualizing Obama’s June 2013 Visit to Africa - Emancipation from Mental Slavery - By Dr. Horace Campbell, PhD - BC Editorial Board

Somebody “Fixin’ to be Killed” - A review of We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement - A View from the Battlefield - By Jamala Rogers - BC Editorial Board

No Outrage for Christine Calderon: What Do You Say About a Society That Allows Someone’s Life to be Taken for a Dollar? - Between The Lines - By Dr. Anthony Asadullah Samad, PhD - BC Columnist

Checks and Balances - Political Cartoon By Eric Garcia, Chicago IL

Studying Our History Throughout the Year - Worrill’s World - By Dr. Conrad W. Worrill, PhD - BC Columnist

Rosa Luxemburg: Letter Writing and the Road to Freedom - Represent Our Resistance - By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD - BC Editorial Board

Thankfully - Political Cartoon By Mr. Fish, Philadelphia PA

Surveillance, Obama's Guantanamo, and Political Prisoners in the U.S. - Keeping it Real By Larry Pinkney, BC Editorial Board

Quote to Ponder: "The US justifies everything as being part of the fight against terrorism…" - Luxembourgian Foreign Minister Jean Asselbor

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 524 which was published Jul 11, 2013.

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

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

Members of the BEditorial Board represent African Americans and the African world. Theyare 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.

Jul 11, 2013 - Issue 524

I have remained very cautious in responding to the events in Egypt. To this day it remains unclear to me whether what has unfolded is a popular uprising which drew in the military or whether it was a coup to forestall the success of a popular uprising. In either case my sense of Egyptian history has been to say that the military is completely untrustworthy and the Muslim Brotherhood is quite reactionary.

That said, a few points. First, the overthrow of Mubarak ultimately led to a democratic election. Morsi and the Brotherhood came out on top. It was not a slam-dunk and had the progressive forces been better organized, there might have been a more progressive outcome. But that is water under the bridge. Morsi's success appears to have led to overreach by the Brotherhood and a steady move in the direction of authoritarianism, including a crackdown on the Coptics, women and labor unions. Increasing repression, even after some concessions by Morsi, appears to have pushed forward the mass movement that we saw...in its millions.

The Egyptian military is an unreformed institution. There has been no purge. It is not led by revolutionary elements. It is both a military and economic institution that has been central to the stability of the Egyptian State. It has shown no interest in a progressive, democratic transformation of Egypt.

Whatever one concluded about the military's intervention in what I am calling an "uprising," it is clear that there have been serious consequences and we have not yet seen the end of it. Morsi supporters, predictably, protested, demonstrating that while there were millions calling for the end of the Morsi administration, the Morsi administration continues to have a very significant mass base.

And then came the massacre. While the Egyptian military claims that they were fired upon, as of this writing at least 51 protesters were killed, hundreds injured and perhaps one soldier killed. The military claims that they were attacked and, therefore, defended themselves. There has been no evidence presented of such an attack. By killing the protesters, the military has now weakened the anti-Morsi coalition. They may have also sent the country toward civil war.

Over the days I have been reading various commentaries from Egyptians on the situation. Many progressive individuals have upheld the involvement of the military in the uprising. I am not in Egypt and I am not an Egyptian. I am clear that this situation is quite complicated. But what I believe that I can suggest from this side of the ocean is that the Egyptian military needs to withdraw. There is little good that will be gained by their continued involvement. This massacre may have set in motion events that cannot be controlled, along the lines of Qaddafi's repression of dissent in Libya and Assad's repression in Syria. It may be that some Islamists will decide that the time has come for an armed solution. This is certainly what many jihaddists are suggesting at the moment.

The massacre must be condemned. The Egyptian military is further discrediting itself. A political solution must be found and it is likely that at least some wing of the Islamists will need to be included in that political solution. And, it should go without saying, that the USA should stay out of the internal affairs of Egypt. If the Egyptians need assistance in mediating an end to this conflict, the USA is far from being an honest broker. As I have argued in the context of the increasing US intervention in Syria, the slogan for the USA should be: "First, do no harm." In this case, stay out of Egypt.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfricaForum, and the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” - And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. He is also the co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice, which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Other Bill Fletcher, Jr. writing can be found at billfletcherjr.com. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.

Jul 11, 2013 -Issue 524

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

Jul 11, 2013 - Issue 524

The story is being spread that the “sequester,” has not turned out as harmful as had been expected, indeed, that it is causing very little harm. Don’t believe it.

On June 30, the Washington Post, a predictable outlet for arguments for gutting critical social services, carried a misleading, ill-informed article by David A. Fahrenthold and Lisa Rein. It alleged that the ongoing federal budget cut “may not be as draconian in its economic impact as some (such as the President) had predicted.” Sequester “wasn’t a cleaver,” it concluded. “It wasn’t a scalpel. It was more like liposuction — carefully removing the things that would be missed the least.”

Like rental housing assistance for the poor and disabled?

The sequester refers to a section of the Budget Control Act of 2011 that went into effect March 1. As part of a deal between the White House and the Congress resulting from a deadlock over the federal budget, it reduces approximately $85.4 billion in federal spending this year, with similar cuts for years 2014 through 2021.

As a result of this ungodly political deal a whole lot of people are going to suffer needlessly.

According to the The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, African Americans received 43 percent of housing vouchers to while whites received 36 percent “Without the vouchers, these families would see those costs skyrocket. Other families will lose counseling services that help distressed homeowners navigate foreclosure proceedings,” it said.

“Housing vouchers are essential for preventing homelessness, and for helping families in emergency shelters or other temporary housing move into more permanent stable housing,” wrote blogger msmolly on FireDogLake. “Often communities prioritize homeless individuals and families for receipt of these vouchers. But many housing agencies now are ‘shelving’ vouchers — not reissuing vouchers to families on the waiting list when other families leave the program. As agencies shelve vouchers because of sequestration’s cuts, the number of vouchers available to families that are homeless or at imminent risk of homelessness will shrink dramatically. This lengthens the amount of time that families remain homeless and causes other homeless families to be turned away from emergency shelters because they are full. Some agencies also are withdrawing vouchers from families that have recently received them but are still searching for a suitable apartment, and thus have not yet begun to use them. (Agencies can shelve or withdraw vouchers without notice to, or permission from, HUD.)”

Last week, housing activist Lynda Carson reported in the San Francisco Bay View community newspaper that, “a survey conducted by the Public Housing Authorities Directors Association involving 300 housing agencies from 41 states, the situation looks very grim for the poor. At least 51 agencies reported that they will terminate vouchers during the next six months, and an additional 75 agencies have reported that the budget cuts known as sequestration will result in higher rents for voucher holders throughout their jurisdictions.”

What’s more, this threat to render more people homeless is taking place under a shroud of relative silence. By and large the major mass media appears to be unaware that this is going on or reticent about delving into it. Some newspapers noted back in March that there would be severe cuts to the rental assistance programs when the sequester kicked in but not many have had much to say about it since it did – with a few notable exceptions.

“That's because so much of what the government does affects the nation in local, decentralized ways,” economist Robert Reich wrote last April. “Federal funds find their way to community housing authorities, state unemployment offices, local school districts, private universities and companies. So it's hard for most Americans to see that the sequestration is responsible for the lost funding, lost jobs or just plain inconvenience.

“These cuts - and thousands like them - are so particular and localized; they don't feel as if they're the result of a change in national policy.”

“A second reason the sequestration hasn't been visible is that a large share of the cuts are in programs for the poor - and America's poor are often invisible,” Reich added. “Bear in mind, finally, that the sequestration is just starting. The sheer scale of it is guaranteed to make it far more apparent in coming months.”

Funds are allotted to local communities for rental assistance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development through the Section 8 voucher designed to helps low-income families, the elderly and the disabled find affordable housing. Those who receive these vouchers pay rent amounts between 30 and 40 percent of their income. Government officials estimate that as many as 125,000 families could lose assistance from the housing choice voucher program due to the sequestration cuts.

“These cuts, which housing agencies have already begun to implement (primarily by failing to reissue vouchers to families on waiting lists when other families leave the program), will fall heavily on vulnerable people,” wrote Douglas Rice for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities back in April. “Half of the households in the voucher program include seniors or people with disabilities, while most of the rest are families with children. These households typically have incomes well below the poverty line and cannot afford housing without assistance. Some who will go without assistance face extreme hardship, such as living in homeless shelters.”

“The cuts come at a time when the number of low-income families in need of housing assistance has been rising substantially, there are long waiting lists for vouchers in almost every community, and homelessness remains a persistent problem,” Rice continued.

In Fairfax, Va., as many as 150 homeless individuals or families, and others on the long voucher waiting list, are expected to be turned down this year. “We have already seen the effects of sequestration in the lack of housing choice vouchers,” said DC Coalition for the Homeless executive director Mike Ferrell, who presented the results of the annual homeless survey at the May meeting of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments board of directors. Ferrell attributed much of the region’s progress in addressing homelessness to the use of permanent supportive housing and rental assistance programs. The freeze could impact those efforts, he said.

Penelope Gross, a board member at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, told Huffington Post May 31, “We had 50 families that were about to receive vouchers. We said ‘Oops. The funding has dried up from the federal government. You can’t have them.’ ”

“They were getting ready to be successful and suddenly they got the legs cut out from under them,” said Gross.

About 1,700 poor families in and around Sacramento, Ca. are said to face losing housing vouchers. According to Crain’s, agencies that administer Section 8 in New York City will not issue as many as 6,000 new vouchers that had been planned for this year, while thousands in the system face subsidy cuts. KCVTV in Kansas City, Missouri recently reported that 33 families there have recently faced eviction because of the sequester cuts.

Housing for the poor in Greater Cincinnati will take a huge hit in the coming months when federal budget cuts eliminate financial help for about 1,000 needy families and force layoffs at the city’s housing authority.

Officials at the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority said last week the cuts mandated by the sequester represent a massive blow to the agency, which serves more than 15,000 low-income families throughout Hamilton County. No families will be removed from the program, but no new families will be added for at least the next nine months. The agency estimates that will reduce the number of families receiving rent vouchers to 10,200 by next March, down from more than 11,200 in January. “It’s safe to say our voucher program will be reduced,” Gregory Johnson, the agency’s executive director, told cincinnati.com. “It’s unfortunate because we have a high waiting list. There are folks that definitely need help.”

The sequester means that most federal budgets must be reduced by as much as five percent. For the city of Houston, for instance, that means a reduction of $7 million in federal assistance. "One way to get rid of the $7 million cut would be to serve 888 less households for an entire year," Tory Gunsolley, president and CEO of the Houston Housing Authority, which provides rental assistance to 15,000 households a year, told the Houston Chronicle. "Do we serve less people, or do we serve people less well?"

“Some families could see additional rent increases as the city and county end most exemptions to a rule requiring two people per bedroom, regardless of age and gender,” reported the Chronicle. “Sequestration also could slow a countywide effort to end chronic homelessness, as it becomes more difficult to use a portion of the vouchers to move homeless people into stable housing and as the increased rents for current recipients may threaten their stability.”

Sean Rogan, executive director of the county Los Angeles Community Development Commission/Housing Authority, told the Daily News in March, ” "If it comes down to us having to terminate vouchers, we've exempted seniors, the homeless and our special needs population," he added. "We would terminate those who've been on the program the longest and have received the greatest benefit."

Santa Clara, Ca. County official say they have lost $21 million in funding and “desperately is searching for ways to avoid the worst-case scenario -- pulling vouchers from some of the 17,000 households it serves."

“We're being put in an untenable position of having to decide winners and losers among the most vulnerable," Alex Sanchez, executive director of the Santa Clara County Housing Authority told the San Jose Mercury News. "We're forced to pit one group of poor people against another group. Seniors versus the disabled. Homeless versus working-poor families. It's an impossible choice with terrible consequences."

That’s in Silicon Valley, where high tech moguls build mansions and rents are outrageously high.

Another exception to the dearth of media attention to the sequester rent subsidy crisis is in Berkeley, Ca. where the campus newspaper the Daily Californian reports “Looming sequester cuts pose grim challenges for city officials.” There, staff writer Mary Zhou wrote June 22, “Due to March’s federal budget cuts, known as the sequester, Berkeley Housing Authority has cut 14 subsidized housing vouchers from low-income individuals while also suspending about 200 households in the final stages of applications.”

“Low-income families who are really struggling in this economy don’t have the resources to mount a huge campaign to bombard Capitol Hill,” says Amelia Kegan, senior policy analyst at Bread for the World. “They are most likely to be left out of any legislative attempts to mitigate the impact of sequestration. Congress needs to replace sequestration and deal with the entire thing and take a much more balance approach.”

Kegan added: “We don’t want to see a situation where those who are the most vulnerable are the ones left bearing the brunt of deficit reduction.”

I’ve been stewing about it for days now. I want to ask the important people in Washington – starting with the one in the White House – how could they let something like this happen? How, in the richest, most powerful country on the planet, could they visit such cruelty on people?

“With the sequestration, America has adopted austerity economics,” wrote Reich, a former U.S. secretary of labor. “Yet austerity economics is the wrong medicine at exactly the wrong time. Look what it's done to Europe.”

And look what it’s doing to unemployed, low income and people with disabilities right here at home.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. Bloice is one of the moderators of Portside. Other Carl Bloice writing can be found at leftmargin.wordpress.com. Click here to contact Mr. Bloice.

Jul 11, 2013 - Issue 524

About 40 years ago, news reached the U.S. that Mao Zedong instructed his people that he wanted Chinese agriculture to be more like that of the West, that is, industrial agriculture.

It was a time in the U.S. that organic farming and gardening was just beginning to take hold and those who were practitioners of the method of growing food had just one question about the Great Leader: Is he nuts?

The Peoples Republic of China was still a fairly insular society at that time and the general American public did not read much about it in the newspapers or see news programs about it on television, so Mao’s wish was somewhat of a shock to those who were becoming alarmed about the way Americans’ food was being grown, processed, and sold in supermarkets.

The things that worried the Americans concerned about the quality of their food were mostly the same things that worry them today: the mechanization of farming and the gradual increase in the size of farms which required giant machinery, the increasing heavy use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, depopulation of rural communities, the control of the entire food system by a small number of corporations, and, not least, the depletion of the soil through monoculture on monumental acreages that has become the dominant form of agriculture in America.

There were those in the U.S. who saw the direction of the country’s agriculture and began working on ways to change it to make it more sustainable. Those were the people who could not understand the inclination of Mao to force his country into the same kind of farming methods that were beginning to fray the edges of the food system in the U.S. The likely answer is that he saw the end result (the per-acre productivity) of the industrial method and wanted the same result for China. It is very likely that he did not, however, consider what industrial agriculture required to get all of that productivity: huge amounts of petroleum for the fertilizer, the manufacture of the giant equipment, the use of the farm machinery that made possible the working of farms the size of which could be measured in square miles. And, there were (and are) the barrels of potent chemicals that were sprayed on the land to control disease and insect pests.

Very simply, Mao did it because he could. He could order that a nation of some 826 million people immediately begin the change to a new form of agriculture. Although he was ailing at the time (he died in 1976 of Parkinson’s disease), there is not much evidence that he had much, if any, opposition to his new approach. The power of one individual was on display because ancient methods of farming had been followed for some four thousand years and it was about to change without much debate. He alone decided that the modern methods were better and more productive, so the old ways would be discarded eventually and the new ways would take hold.

In his classic book on agricultural practices in China, Japan, and Korea, published in 1911, Farmers of Forty Centuries, Dr. F.H. King, former chief of the Soil Division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, visited the region and described how the peoples there farmed the same fields for four thousand years without destroying the fertility of the land and without using petroleum-based fertilizers and chemical herbicides and pesticides. Dr. L.H. Bailey, in the preface of the book, wrote, “We in North America are wont to think that we may instruct all the world in agriculture, because our agricultural wealth is great and our exports to less favored peoples have been heavy; but this wealth is great because our soil is fertile and new, and in large acreage for every person. We have really only begun to farm well.”

Have we farmed well since? Since Bailey wrote that passage, the U.S. has plunged headlong into a kind of farming that some, like the old Soviet Union, only dreamed about. They tried to perfect collective farms that would employ tens of thousands of farmers and workers. Try as they might, they were unable to do it and, in the end, collapse of their empire overtook their efforts, but the U.S. has its “farms” that are so big that some would make collective farms look rather small.

The problems of industrial agricultural practices persist and there is no end of examples to show the shortcomings. A prime example is the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River that is attributed to all of the chemicals and fertilizers used on crop fields straight up the river through the heartland of America. There are similar dead zones in other rivers and bays in many parts of the country. To be fair, some of the damaging material comes from industrial and home use (lawn chemicals, for example), but the millions of pounds of chemicals used each year in industrial agriculture has to end up somewhere and it is usually in our waterways.

Over the past 150 years, alarming quantities of the nation’s topsoil has disappeared, much of it likely in the dead zones of the rivers and estuaries throughout the country, and the nutrients have disappeared with the flow. We have tried to make up for the loss of nutrients (and, therefore, lack of nutrients in the food grown on that soil) by adding increasing amounts of petroleum-based fertilizer.

This model is what Mao wanted his nation to emulate and now, four decades later, it has been reported widely that China is poised to force 250 million of its citizens from the countryside to the cities. At least part of the reason is because the intent of Mao to industrialize agriculture has come to pass and no longer are the same millions of workers needed to produce the food for the nation. Rather, they might be useful as industrial workers and workers in the manufacturing sector in the urban areas that are growing like mushrooms across China.

For many years, analysts and scholars have pointed out that “Third World” countries, which we now call “developing countries,” have encouraged or forced peasants and indigenous peoples from the land and moved them to urban areas, a process that is continuing. China, disregarding its millennia-old farming and food system is intentionally moving the equivalent of three-quarters of the population of the U.S. to its cities, which already are bursting at the seams. As a result of these policies, many of the great cities in the world have seen the growth of monumental slums, where residents are reduced to dump-picking for a living or working at any kind of job for pennies a day.

Probably, government planners in China are expecting that there will be employment for all who move to the cities, because they are beginning to change the national economy from one that is producing for an export market (think virtually every consumer product that is sold by retailers in the U.S.), to one that will aim at selling consumer goods within the domestic market.

Once again, China is not examining carefully the results of similar experimentation in the developed world, such as the U.S., where the process of urbanization has been occurring since shortly after World War II. Citizens, forced by economics to leave rural areas, have produced what has been called an “army of the unemployed,” who are so desperate for any kind of work that they take a minimum wage job, no matter their experience or education. That’s a major cause of U.S. economic woes today, and that will be a cause of China’s economic woes in the future, maybe distant future, but maybe near future. Who knows?

Because a command economic system like China’s has done so well, by allowing a segment of it to follow a capitalist course, perhaps the rulers there think that the problems the U.S. faces will not happen in China and, if they do appear, China’s leaders will do a better job of handling them.

The U.S. does not have as long a history as China. At only 250 years or so, it has had its place as a leader of nations and the 20th Century was called by some scholars “The American Century.” But, this is a new century and it is time for some adjustments in the American experiment. By consulting the people, as was envisioned by the founders (at least in theory), the U.S. might be able to stretch out its leadership among nations, but it will take an unprecedented, unified effort by the people to bring the politicians and Corporate America to heel, forcing them to begin to observe the tenets of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

As for China, changing four thousand years of traditional rural life and agriculture in just 40 years is like a train that has jumped the tracks, trying to head off in a different direction without looking to see if there is another set of rails that will head off the wreck.

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.

Jul 11, 2013 - Issue 524

Let me see if I’ve got this whole “Love America” thing straight.

As George Zimmerman smugly sits in a Land-Of-Dixie courtroom, perhaps but only moments away from lifelong freedom, from becoming a folks hero like Bernard Goetz and Timothy McVeigh from joining scores of other White men who “got away”with gunning down a Black kid yes, another crazy-ass cracker who got away with murdering a Black person - I, as a Black man, was suppose to celebrate last week’s “Independence Day” where all Americans pay some form of homage to the fact we live in a nation of freedom, liberty and equality.

Ain’t that a bitch?!

Could someone please open my brown-eyes as to “how” I do that? How do black people set-aside the harsh reality that is America to praise a system that does not work for us on so many different levels?

If I understand it correctly, the “Uns” have Black folks by the throat; Unemployment, Uneducated, uninsured, undereducated, underemployed, unemployable etc., etc... Black Americans are without question still the last hired n’ first fired. And in every profession out there you’ll discover all indicators are that Blacks receive inferior care from doctors, teachers, nurses, bankers, salespeople, police.

Take away those facts and we’ve still got the reality that this Black President has, by his mere presence, set-off a White backlash not seen since the early parts of the 20th century. The sales of guns, bazookas, flame throwers, tanks, anti-aircraft guns and ropes have soared since this nation fairly elected a half-black man.

Good God, what would we be witnessing had this empire placed a Black woman at the head of state?

Set that reality aside and consider the White Flight we see: the WASP establishment has exported breadwinner jobs to the four corners of the globe, and the byproduct of that is a bankrupt Detroit, Oakland, Peoria, Birmingham, Toledo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland - cities that have no industry, no trade n’ commerce to fuel a prosperous city. And now, as the “little people” have no ladder to climb up and out of despair and misery - and they resort to hustling, robbin’ n’ stealin’ from each other to make it. Conservatives, i.e., 75% of White America want to shred FDR’s n’ LBJ’s social safety nets.

Let those Black devils eat cake.

The “Right” Brands MLK, still today, a Socialist/Marxist Communist. Go ask Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Ron/Rand Paul. And they’ve now branded President Obama the same, if not worse - he’s Hitler, double-dipped in caramel.

Speaking of caramel people, as a Black cat I can’t help but watch the manipulation of Mexicans and other Latinos. On one hand, the Republican TEA Party wants to stock Sharks and piranhas in the Rio Grande and erect gun turrets along the river shore. However, on the flip side, they want to utilize Latinos to break the back of organized labor and undercut worker wages and rights for all Americans.

Ponder this perplexing point: forget the ever volatile Middle East - few want to discuss it. Let South Africa crumble after the iconic Nelson Mandela passes into the afterlife, which despite what my “co-hearts” say, is possible. If CNN’s bringing into your home nightly, Highly Defined streaming video of White South Africans under assault by the sea of Black masses, gee, do you think that’ll impact and inflame White Americans who are already, already I say, bracing/preparing for race wars?

Open Season On Blacks.

Here, let me be blunt, brutally blunt. As my 4th of July activities and festivities have concluded. I can say to you nobody, and I do mean nobody, I spoke with over the extended holiday, who was Black and I’m talkin ‘bout Veterans, police ladies, firemen. politicians n’ preachers (I get around) and none of them spoke of our precious freedoms. No, instead, they spoke of how the Right, i.e, White men who are stoking the flames of civil war.

From Affirmative Action to Abortion Rights to voting rights and societal inclusion for Gays to states desiring to leave the union - there’s a calculated assault being waged against the progress achieved over the last half-century. While concurrently, White America wants you to drop your head in gratitude and appreciation, we were permitted to stay here upon the land stolen from Natives and Mexicans.

This murder case and America, both are so twisted n’ contorted, the delusional demands angry white men carry around on the inside pocket of their invisible sheets n’ hoods are all so contrived, convoluted and contradictory it’s enough to make you holler.

We’ve all just seen the lawyers for George Zimmerman employ all the Redneck codes and phrases to depict young Treyvon Martin as just another Nigger. Which translates into the only good Nigger is a dead Nigger historical good ol’ boy themes.

Or is that the only good injun' is a dead injun'?

The audacity of the All-White Right to demand the direct-descendants of 4th class Americans, “victims” of the United States, jump up n’ down, do cartwheels and cry tears of joy for having endured in a land of exclusion and discrimination - to demand that is insane, and to do so in the shadow of a dead Black boy is insulting.

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.

Jul 11, 2013 -Issue 524

view the animation

Pulitzer Prize-winner, Mark Fiore, who the Wall Street Journal has called “the undisputed guru of the form,” creates animated political cartoons in San Francisco, where his work has been featured on the San Francisco Chronicle’s web site, SFGate.com, for over ten years. His work also appears on Newsweek.com, Slate.com, CBSNews.com, MotherJones.com and NPR’s web site. Fiore’s political animation has appeared on CNN, Frontline, Bill Moyers Journal, Salon.com and cable and broadcast outlets across the globe.

Click here to contact Mark

Jul 11, 2013 -Issue 524

I now have had ample time to recover - from both shock and in awe - from the Supreme Courts historic decisions announced in the final week of June.

My awe moment is Wednesday, June 26. It was a great day for me as a lesbian American. Historic decisions in both Windsor v. United States and Hollingsworth v. Perry were announced. Not only was DOMA finally struck down, but, so too, the anti-gay proponents of Proposition 8.

In a 5–4 decision the progressive and moderate justices of the Supreme Court ruled Section 3 of DOMA to be unconstitutional, declaring it as “a deprivation of the liberty of the person protected by the Fifth Amendment.” Finally, all same-gender married couples will be afforded the same 1,000 plus federal protections and benefits as opposite-gender couples.

The proponents of Prop. 8 were finally told to cease and desist, meaning they no longer legally have a homophobic leg to stand on in terms of their anti-gay and obstructionist antics to appeal lower court rulings. California same-gender couples no longer have to do an anxious and cautious walk to the alter, worrying about state rulings yo-yoing them around.

My shock moments are Monday, June 24 and Tuesday, June 25.

On Monday, the Court, in a surprising 7-1 ruling, sidestepped the hot-button issue of race in America by throwing the Fisher v. University of Texas back to the lower courts for reconsideration.

The present-day argument against employing race-conscious admission policies as a pedagogical benefit for diversity is being usurped, at least in Texas, with debates that class-conscious admission policies would best achieve racial diversity. The Texas Top Ten Percent Plan purports to accept 10 percent of all high school graduating class to their universities. This policy works well, so alleges the state. But Texas omits in telling you why: their neighborhoods and high schools are as unabashedly segregated in 2013 as they were in 1954 when the historic Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Ed. ruling, deemed segregated schools unconstitutional.

On Tuesday, the Court hit with another hard blow. In a 5-4 vote from a glaringly ideologically divided court, the lifeline and heart and soul of the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act was gutted.

The Court ruled that Section 4 of the VRA is outdated. Section 4 historically protected African Americans and other disenfranchised people of color. The ruling contests a fictive post-racial premise that racial minorities, especially in the South, no longer confront discriminatory barriers voting. At the time, the 1965 VRA applied to nine states in South - Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

But voter suppression is alive and well today.

Just last year, Florida deliberately reduced days available for early voting, making it difficulty for voters who had relocated to different counties within the state to cast their ballots.

And in Maryland, the 2010 gubernatorial Republican candidate, Bob Ehrlich, “hired a consultant who advised that ‘the first and most desired outcome is voter suppression,’ in the form of having ‘African-American voters stay home.’”

As a member of one of the early generations to benefit from the gains of the African American civil rights movement of the last century, these rulings hit hard. Many of us in the LGBTQ community are outraged. But a GLAD board member and beloved ally to Greater Boston knows the reality of voter suppression first hand.

“This ruling was an enormous setback for the hard fought for civil rights gains of the past. My home state of Alabama is one of those states that continues to try and block voting access, but those efforts has been substantially hampered by the provisions contained in the VRA” Jo Davis wrote in an email blast.

While many of us would like to think voter suppression only happens in the South, let me disabuse you of the notion with the scores of counties and municipalities in the North, like NYC, the Bronx and my borough of Brooklyn that was also covered in the 1965 VRA, and will now be greatly impacted.

If the Court thinks the VRA is outdated it only needs to read Huffington Post blogger Judith Brown Dianis’ “Top 10 Voter Suppression Moments of 2012” that overwhelming affected people of color.

The Supreme Court rulings force LGBTQ people of color, like myself, to reside in a bifurcated reality in terms of full civil rights protections.

With advances such as hate crime laws, the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the legalization of same-sex marriage in many states, DOMA struck down, Prop. 8 overturned, and with homophobia viewed as a national concern, the LGBTQ movement has come a long way since the first Pride marches four plus decades ago. Many note the perceived distance the LGBTQ community has traveled in such a short historic time - from a disenfranchised group on the fringe of America’s mainstream to a community now on the verge of full equality. But not all members of our community have crossed the finish line.

Will the LGBTQ community help those of us, like me, left behind?

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, the Rev. Irene Monroe, is a religion columnist, theologian, and public speaker. She is the Coordinator of the African-American Roundtable of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (CLGS) at the Pacific School of Religion. A native of Brooklyn, Rev. Monroe is a graduate from Wellesley College and Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University, and served as a pastor at an African-American church before coming to Harvard Divinity School for her doctorate as a Ford Fellow. She was recently named to MSNBC’s list of 10 Black Women You Should Know. Reverend Monroe is the author of Let Your Light Shine Like a Rainbow Always: Meditations on Bible Prayers for Not’So’Everyday Moments. As an African-American feminist theologian, she speaks for a sector of society that is frequently invisible. Her website is irenemonroe.com. Click here to contact the Rev. Monroe.

Jul 11, 2013 - Issue 524

Introduction

In recent years, the United States has increasingly been sidelined in areas of deep economic transformation in Africa because US engagement with Africa has been primarily through militarism and military relations. The visit of US President Barack Obama to Africa should be viewed against this background.

On June 26, 2013 through July 3, 2013, for the third time in his presidency, Obama will be visiting Africa; specifically Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania. According to the White House Press Release, “The President will reinforce the importance that the United States places on our deep and growing ties with countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including through expanding economic growth, investment, and trade; strengthening democratic institutions; and investing in the next generation of African leaders.” [1] However, apart from this vague press release there is no clarity on why this trip is taking place at this particular moment.[2]

President Obama’s visit comes at a moment when the world is gripped with the spectacle of a young American, Edward Snowden, fleeing the United States because he was promoting information freedom, against the militaristic and police state in America. With all the problems facing him at home – sequestration, unemployment, drums for escalating wars in Syria and divisions over immigration laws – Obama’s trip to Africa lacks substance and definition. What can he offer the continent? What does he bring to the table to justify his visit?

Both former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush visited Africa during their second terms in office. When Clinton and Bush made their journeys to Africa, the US foreign policy establishment had been guided by a three-pronged mantra. These were: (a) the notion that Africa was facing a “threat” from international terrorists, (b) that the United States had strategic interests in Africa (especially with the flow of petroleum resources), and (c) the emerging competition with China. The crisis of capitalism since 2008 and the hype about petroleum and gas self-sufficiency as a result of shale oil and new gas finds in the United States have added another layer to all. More importantly, the US plans for confronting China in Africa have been tempered by the reality that the US policy makers have to beseech China to continue to purchase US Treasury Bills.[3]

In previous commentaries I have critiqued the imperial merits of Clinton’s and Bush’s reasons for visiting the continent. They were at least arguably more substantive and better articulated than Obama’s. The lack of specificity of Obama’s upcoming visit supports the argument advanced by some that as the first Black president of the United States, he has to visit the Africa. After all, he has visited Europe numerous times. This argument renders his visit nothing more than an item to be checked off his overarching presidential agenda. But in the context of the sidelining of US economic interests in Africa by other key players like China, Obama’s visit could be seen as one effort to boost support for US capitalists on the continent. Giving credence to this argument is the fact that Obama is visiting two of the countries also visited by the President of China, Xi Jinping, a few weeks ago – Tanzania and South Africa.

Past presidential visits had the paternalistic agenda of lecturing Africans on governmental transparency, democracy, human rights, fight against corruption, freedom of speech, etcetera. Yet, given the current climate of scandals orchestrated by the media in the U.S, Obama would appear hypocritical in making these panned statements about supporting democracy in Africa. While that has not stopped past presidents, this time the cat’s out of the bag. The multiple scandals surrounding the banks and the extent of the corruption of Wall Street exposed by Matt Taibbi and others have dwarfed any discussion of corruption in Africa. America’s inability to rein in the mafia-style activities of the bankers is open and in full view of the world audience. In this commentary I want to place President Obama’s African trip in the context of the depth of the political and economic crisis in the United States. Starting with the efforts of the G8 in calling for the western mining companies to follow laws and pay taxes, this commentary will reference the success of the Pan African opposition to Africom and US militarism that has predisposed the Obama administration to retreat from the perpetual Global War on Terror as conceived by the neo-conservatives. The conclusion will again call for the peace and justice forces to support reparative justice so that the relations between the citizens of the United States and the citizens of Africa can move in a new direction.

Beyond the Looting of African Resources

Barack Obama won a convincing victory for a second term in November 2012. However, despite the mandate he received from the electorate to break from the policies that enrich the one per cent, this second term has been bogged down because Obama has refused to take bold steps to join with the majority to confront the Wall Street moguls. Since Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, the question of which section of the US government directs policy towards Africa has swirled at home and abroad. These questions have taken on added importance in the face of the insurrections in Tunisia and Egypt and the instability unleashed by the NATO intervention in Libya. Faced with new energies for change and unity in Africa (most manifest in the recent African Union gatherings by many forces in Addis Ababa this past May),[4] the US foreign policy establishment has reached a fork in the road. The main drivers of US foreign policy: Wall Street Bankers, petroleum and the military planners (along with the private military/intelligence contractors) have now been overtaken by a sharp shift in the engine of the global economy coming out of Asia. As more news of the corruption of the rigged financial architecture is revealed, all of the states of the G77 are looking for an alternative financial system that can protect them from the predators of Wall Street.[5]

With the details that traders of the biggest banks manipulated the benchmark foreign exchange rates involving $4.7 trillion dollars per day[6] coming on the heels of the LIBOR interest rate scandals after the energy price manipulation,[7] the peoples of Africa along with the rest of the world are finding out that under the current financial and political system there is no price that the big banks cannot exploit. It is the nature of the corrupted financial system to save the U.S. dollar that has driven societies such as South Africa into BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and is hastening the evolution of an alternative financial architecture. The organizational thrust of the economic formation called BRICS, along with the creation of the BRICS Development Bank, pose a serious challenge to the US dollar and the International Monetary Fund. Obama is following the example of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, by visiting South Africa to assess firsthand the political and social climate at a moment when all and sundry are looking for ways to get into Africa’s changing economic dynamic.

The nervousness and anxiety of the West over the future of the U.S. financial dominance was quite clear from the communiqué issued after the recent 2013 G8 meeting in Ireland. Most of the points in the communiqué issued by the White House (the Lough Erne Declaration) dealt with the challenges coming out of Africa and the role of transnational corporations plundering African resources without paying taxes.[8] Prior to the G8 meeting, the 2013 Report of the Africa Progress Panel headed by former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Anan called on the same G8 leaders to police their corporations. The Panel had called for inter alia:

· The G8 and the G20 to establish common rules requiring full public disclosure of the beneficial ownership of companies, with no exceptions.

· Companies bidding for natural resource concessions to disclose the names of the people who own and control them.[9]

The destructive extraction of resources from Africa is old and has taken new forms, as Patrick Bond reminds us in Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation.[10] For the past six decades the World Bank domination of economic arrangements in Africa has been the period of dramatic capital flight from Africa.[11] The multi-billion dollar enterprise of looting Africa was at the foundation of an international system that increasingly worked on the basis of speculative capital. The World Bank and the IMF understood that the real foundations of actual resources were to be found in Africa. To conceal the looting and plunder, the West disguised the reality that Africa is a net creditor to the advanced capitalist countries (termed “donors” in neo-liberal parlance). For this reason (and to perpetuate the myths of “spurring economic growth and investment”), the United States government has been caught in a losing battle where new rising forces such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, Turkey, South Korea and other states offer alternatives to the structural adjustment and austerity packages. Barack Obama is going to Africa to boost the armaments culture of the United States at a moment when details of the massive corporate-government spy operations has exposed the surveillance of citizens in all parts of the world in the name of fighting extremism. Citizens are finding out that the gathering of intelligence ultimately serves the interests of capital equity groups such as the Carlyle group that is involved in armaments, intelligence and the stock market.[12]

In a period when there were frequent scandals surrounding the manipulations of Wall Street bankers and speculators, the US government was dragged into the NATO led intervention that carried out regime change in Libya. The execution of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi reminded Africans of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and countless other leaders of Africa.

Fallout from the Intervention in Libya

The fallout from the Libyan intervention has created insecurity and violence in all parts of North Africa and the Sahel, with racist elements within this Libyan uprising persecuting Africans as mercenaries. I have detailed the experiences of this intervention in the book, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya.[13] From the writers in the US academic establishment, the NATO intervention was a success. [14] However, decent peoples in all parts of the world have been outraged by the continued violence and the support for the murderous militias by Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The persecution of the citizens of Tawergha stands as a permanent repudiation to the NATO intervention in Libya. U.S policy makers are treating the Libyan intervention the same way they treated the US alliance with the apartheid system for forty years. The media and the intellectual establishment in the United States would like all to forget that the hated apartheid system had been propped up by the United States and her cold war allies in Europe, Saudi Arabia and Japan. African intellectuals and policy makers have not forgotten the support of the US foreign policy establishment for apartheid, for Mobutu Sese Seko in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and for Jonas Savimbi in Angola.

The disinformation on the operations of US supported militias had been covered up in the press until the ambassador of the United States to Libya and three others were consumed by intra-militia fighting in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. On June 22, 2013 the New York Times featured a lengthy article on the flow of arms to Syria from Libya but the writers from the Times omitted to outline the infrastructure of support for the Jihadists in Syria that had been established by David Petraeus when he was the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. [15] We have Paula Broadwell to thank for exposing the fact that David Petraeus had the largest CIA station in North Africa in Benghazi after the NATO intervention.

US Policy in Africa in Disarray

The previous justifications for US engagement had been part of the logic for the establishment of the US Africa Command. For a while there was the fiction that the United States was supporting growth and trade (via the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)), but the militarization of the engagement with Africa intensified after then Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force had designated African petroleum as “strategic” and colluded with Donald Rumsfeld to establish the Africa Command (AFRICOM). However, there was never any support for the idea of an African military command. It was universally opposed in Africa (except for the client state of Liberia). Within the United States, progressive scholars in the Association of Concerned African Scholars (ACAS) called for the dismantling of AFRICOM. Since the debacle in Libya, the word AFRICOM has rarely been uttered publicly by the Obama White House. The fact that the Obama administration is retreating from perpetual war and is disguising the militaristic activities of the Wall Street cabal is one more testament to the power of popular organizing to oppose militarism.

In June 2012, the White House issued a new policy statement on Africa. What was striking about this new White House Statement was that here was no mention of the US Africa Command. The document was titled, “Policy towards Sub-Saharan Africa.”[16]

Many Africans did not pay much attention to this old ruse of seeking to divide Africa between so called sub- Saharan Africa and North Africa. The reality of the African Union is something that the US policy makers do not want to recognize; hence the State Department maintains the nomenclature of sub-Sahara Africa. In the new document of June 2012, the Obama White House spelt out four pillars of US policy towards Africa, repeating the talking points of George W. Bush minus the Global War on Terror language. “The United States will partner with sub-Saharan African countries to pursue the following interdependent and mutually reinforcing objectives: (1) strengthen democratic institutions; (2) spur economic growth, trade, and investment; (3) advance peace and security; and (4) promote opportunity and development.” In the midst of the exposures by Edward Snowden of the massive “architecture of oppression” that is embodied in the surveillance programs of the U.S., the country’s policy makers are now on the defensive as diplomats all over the world absorb the extent of the electronic surveillance program operated by the United States National Security Agency.

When John Kerry spoke at the 50th anniversary of African Unity in Addis Ababa in May 2013, the U.S. Secretary of State did not mention the U.S. Africa Command or the War on Terror. Instead John Kerry spoke of the fact that his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, was part of the anti-apartheid struggles in Southern Africa when she was a student at the University of Witwatersrand. The Obama White House sought to build on the cultural capital of the U.S university system by the launch of Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI). According to the Obama White House the “Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI) is a long-term effort to invest in the next generation of African leaders and strengthen partnerships between the United States and Africa. This wide-ranging effort has been led by the White House and the U.S. Department of State in partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Peace Corps. The next phase of YALI will develop a prestigious network of leaders across critical sectors, cement stronger ties to the United States, and offer follow-on leadership opportunities in Africa, with the goal of strengthening democratic institutions and spurring economic growth.” [17]

Despite these nice words, in the era of sequestration, the Obama administration could not find the funds to support this Initiative and the State Department has been calling on American universities to bear the costs of the summer programs that are planned under the YALI. This further reveals disinterest and lack of resources by the American Congress to support any form of U.S. policy towards Africa on matters not related to militarism. While there are no funds to support educational exchange, in the week of June 19, 2013, the US Senate under the initiative of Republican Senator James Inhofe authorized, “the Department of Defense to obligate up to $90 million to provide logistical support to the national military forces of Uganda to mitigate or eliminate the threat posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and bring an end to the murderous campaign of LRA leader Joseph Kony.”[18] This clear support of the conservatives in the United States for the Yoweri Museveni government in Kampala, under the guise of fighting Kony, comes at a moment when the Museveni leadership is being challenged, even from its own officer corps. [19] More importantly, Republican Senator James Inhofe and the conservatives who initiated this new authorization are bent on supporting a regime where there are elements who believe that same-gender loving persons should be put to death.

Jihadists from the Sahel, Kony in East Africa and Al Shabab of Somalia are the elements mentioned when there is talk from the foreign policy establishment that Africa is being overrun by terrorists and that the US need to deploy AFRICOM. These forces have been pressuring the United States government to brand Boko Haram, the extreme Islamic fundamentalists in Nigeria, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. There has been so much opposition to this designation that the White House has recoiled from making this decision, and instead has designated three of the leaders of this organization as terrorists.

There were enough concerned scholars and activists who understood that naming the organization as terrorists would have been counterproductive with far-reaching negative consequences for Africa and for future relations between the United States and Africans. The experiences of the up and down relationship with groups in North Africa designated as terrorists has meant that many activists have been wary of way that the terrorism label has been deployed in Africa. In the past two years, there have been numerous press reports of heightened US military engagement in Africa. Reports in the Washington Post on the rising pressures of militarization carry the views of sections of the Pentagon with little reference to the actual balance of forces on the ground in the particular African societies where the US military and Central Intelligence Agency are supposed to be operating.[20]

Obama as Commander in Chief of an Imperial State

While the novelty of the fact that Obama is the first African American President is wearing off, the reality has sunk in that Obama has been trapped by the power of the corporate bankers and entrenched imperial interests that must be safeguarded in order for the US to maintain its empire. When U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the corruption of the banks he stated, “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them.” Prosecutors, he said, must confront the problem that “if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”[21]

When Obama entered the White House in January 2009, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner advised him that prosecuting the banks would have a negative impact on the world economy. Since that time, instead of nationalizing the banks, Barack Obama has been prisoner to the alliance between two of the least regulated sectors of the U.S. society: the banks and the military. In the light of the massive surveillance by the US government, Special Forces fomenting instability, secret prisons and targeted killings by drones, there have been some in the peace and justice forces who have proclaimed that Obama is worse than his predecessors, and some are now comparing Obama to former President Richard Nixon. In fact, some of the Republicans have ventured to say that George W. Bush had a friendlier foreign policy towards Africa.

Gary Yonge in the Guardian made the excellent argument in pointing out that Barack Obama is the Commander in Chief of the United States and is captive to US imperial power. In the article titled, “Is Obama Worse than Bush? That's Beside the Point,”[22] Yonge traced the statements of Obama the candidate to the realities of Obama as the President of the United States. His argument, that it is beside the point whether Obama is worse than Bush, is worth considering in light of the reality that the capitalist crisis facing the United States is far worse than when Bush was President 2001-2009. I will agree that the conditions of the repressive nature of the state have intensified in the midst of the global insecurity of capital, but where I would differ with Yonge would be for the progressive forces to intensify the efforts to hold the bankers accountable so that the militarists and the bankers do not take the world into other military catastrophes.

No doubt, conceptually and as a matter of principles and worldview, Obama is no Bush or Nixon and is different from the neo-cons. But his job description as President of the United States is to preserve the same American empire that Bush and the hawkish beneficiaries of the country’s

military-financial-information complex have sought to protect by every means necessary. So Obama is trapped between his liberal worldview/principles and the demands of his job as the preserver-in-chief of the American empire.

When Obama was a presidential candidate for the first time, he was fond of saying that he understands Africa. He found out clearly in the debacle of Libya and Benghazi that whatever his understanding, it will only go so far unless he stands up to the foreign policy establishment. This he has refused to do and has surrounded himself with those elements of the intellectual and academic circuits that had supported apartheid.

Recently, Obama appointed Susan Rice as the National Security Adviser. Rice had been groomed in anti-communism by the Madeline Albright and Clinton factions of the establishment. When Susan Rice was student at Oxford in the 1980s, she reputedly looked the other way when students such as Tajudeen Abdul Raheem were opposing apartheid. She was a member of the ignominious Bill Clinton national security team that pressured the United Nations not to intervene at the time of the Rwanda genocide in 1994. Yet, this same Susan Rice along with Hilary Clinton and Samantha Powers were at the forefront of pushing for the US engagement with France and Britain to destroy Libya in 2011. This same Obama has appointed Samantha Powers to be the ambassador of the United States to the United Nations. Obama is again showing that the US policies towards Africa are in disarray. The old pseudo humanitarianism of Powers and Rice has been overtaken by the hothouse of investors trekking to Africa rolling out projects to change Africa.

In his first trip to Africa in 2009, Obama had travelled to Cairo where he spoke of the linkages between all peoples, paying attention to the fact that “as a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam.”[23] One month after that speech, Barack Obama spoke in Accra, Ghana about his links to Africa and the heritage of the struggles for freedom in all parts of Africa. Since those two journeys in June and July 2009, Obama has had to hide his understanding of Africa because he has been faced with a racist group called the Birthers who claim that he was born in Kenya and is therefore illegitimate as a President. There is another strong constituency that alleges Obama is a Muslim. Obama can rightly claim his Irish heritage from his mother’s side, but is mortally afraid of making any statement that may suggest that he is familiar with the political struggles in Africa.

We know from the book by Richard Wolffe, Renegade: The Making of a President, that during the height of the Democratic Party primary battles in Iowa in January 2008, Obama had invited his sister, Auma Obama, to Iowa so that he could be kept abreast of the social forces behind the violence in Kenya at the time. When he drove around Iowa, his sister was briefing him on the issues that sparked the opposition to the theft of the elections. While preoccupied with the Iowa caucuses he was calling Kenya, reaching out to Desmond Tutu and taking an active role in seeking an end to the incredible violence that took hundreds of lives.[24]

Since 2009 the Kenyans have been building a massive airport at Kisumu so that Air Force One could land in Western Kenya. This was in anticipation of the visit of Obama to visit his relatives. All of the planning for a Kenyan visit has had to be put on hold because of the outstanding questions of the initiators of the chilling violence that overtook Kenya in January 2008. Obama has instead opted to visit neighboring Tanzania.

Struggles within the Obama Administration over the Militarization of Africa

I have written extensively elsewhere about the statements of the Obama administration over ending perpetual war. In December of last year I commented on the debates within the military and foreign policy establishment. [25] On May 23, 2012 Obama gave his own speech at the National Defense University where he was carrying forward the line of Jeh Johnson after Johnson was pushed out of the Pentagon. But by the time of the May 23 speech, the Obama administration had been overtaken by the details of the massive police state apparatus that had been overseen by the National Security Agency (NSA). Hence, in the May 23 speech Obama attempted to defend the targeted killings with drones while also calling for a scaling back on the War on Terror. Exposing the weakness of his administration in failing to close down the dreaded Guantanamo prison, Obama stated, “History will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism and those of us who fail to end it. Imagine a future 10 years from now or 20 years from now when the United States of America is still holding people who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not part of our country … Is this who we are?... Is that the America we want to leave our children?”

The hawks within the foreign policy establishment who had pushed the Obama administration into the Libyan intervention understand full well that Obama has yielded his capacity to provide leadership out of this current crisis of the system and the attendant militarism. The peace and social justice forces have not yet fully grasped the fact that it is up to the peace movement to delegitimize the militarism that is now engulfing the United States as the Obama administration cave in to John McCain, Bill Clinton and the military-financial-information complex to support the Jihadists in Syria. It is no news that Al Qaeda forms the bulk of the Jihadists in Syria, and only on June 21, 2013 it was reported that authorities in Spain had arrested Al Qaeda elements recruiting fighters for the Jihadist cause in Syria.[26] It was more than 8 years ago when Seymour Hersh revealed the advanced plans for the war against Iran. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson has stated more than once that the arming of Syrian rebels will be a backdoor to the war against Iran.[27] Barack Obama had opposed this plan for immediate war with Iran and fired James Mattis as the head of the US Central Command. In the absence of a robust peace movement, the private equity forces want to keep the order books going for military contracting so the expansion of wars in the Middle East will be the answer for the winding down of an unpopular war in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama is travelling to Africa at a moment when African progressives are completely opposed to the support for the Jihadists in Syria. As Samir Amin rightly expressed, one cannot be opposed to terrorists in Mali and support the same elements in Aleppo. Obama’s remarks on May 23 were characterized by a basic contradiction. He sought to defend drone assassinations worldwide, while at the same time essentially acknowledging their illegality and the illegality of much of what the American government has done over the past decade. Obama is travelling to Africa without resolving the outstanding contradictions of repudiating US militarization of Africa.

Foreign policy and domestic policies

It is important to restate the obvious that the thrust of US foreign policy towards Africa will be shaped by its domestic policies towards Africans inside the United States. It remains a truism that the foreign policy of any society is a reflection of its domestic policies. Currently, the US policy towards Africa is not different from the racist and militaristic position inside the urban areas of the United States where the majority of African descendants reside. Unemployment in the United States is highest inside the black and brown communities. Africans inside the United States are warehoused in the massive prison industrial complex which is one sub set of the military financial complex. While the banks are being rescued and given a handsome US $85 billion every month as part of a stimulus package, the poor are bearing the costs of the crisis, schools are being closed, and hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on more prison construction.[28] The lesson of the complete takeover of the city of Detroit shows that the capitalists have no respect for democracy. Obama cannot go to support democracy in Africa when there is no democracy in Detroit.

The Obama administration has been trapped by the history and practices of financial industry, the military intelligence corporations and the petroleum companies. From very early in 2009, the Obama administration understood that financial innovation was not socially valuable. Slowly it was being revealed in books and in commentaries that much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless.[29] These same books and economists have been warning that the current neo-liberal forms of financialization will lead to another financial meltdown.[30] It is now becoming clear that the World Bank is itself inextricably linked to this web of finance and that when the White House writes that the US will be “Expanding African Capacity to Effectively Access and Benefit from Global Markets,” this is a code for the private equity industry.

Despite this knowledge of the socially worthless basis of the market driven polices, the intellectual infrastructures of the Africanist enterprise have written reams of papers seeking to divert attention from the exploitation, joblessness, homelessness and brutalities that sparked the popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. Strategic think tanks in the United States have been reflecting on the implications of the revolutionary processes underway in Africa. The intellectuals and consultants have drawn up “stress tests” to measure the susceptibility of particular African societies to revolutionary insurrections. Those conjuring the “stress tests” are quite aware of the scholarly output as well as the activists who are now standing up for Africa.[31] It is in this context of the African Awakening where the same intellectuals and consultants who have never questioned the assassination of leaders such as Patrice Lumumba are putting forward stress tests for certain African governments. Reporters from the mainstream media such as the Washington Post who are unfamiliar with the recent history of Africa would not know that the heightened US intelligence operations are precisely in those societies where the strategic thinkers were placing stress tests.[32] I have argued that the social forces in the United States who support peace cannot be carried away by the number of articles and Congressional subventions for the US military and the Africom.

Official statements from the US Africa Command about peacekeeping and humanitarianism in Africa have been silent on the warfare and plunder in the Eastern Congo where the military allies of the United States, Rwanda and Uganda have been indicted for looting the natural resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This week John Kerry as the Secretary of State appointed former Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin as the Special Envoy to the DRC. However, this is too little and too late because the AU has made a clear decision to upset the planning of those external forces who want to dismember the DRC. Compared with countries such as Brazil, South Korea, Australia and China that are engaging with Africa for substantive economic relations and infrastructural development, the realities of US policy toward Africa seem to suggest that the US has nothing to offer, other than military relations. The United States is peripheral to the major plans for the unification of Africa that are being rolled out in every region and coordinated by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). In a changed world situation, the United States will continue to be sidelined in areas of deep economic transformation in Africa in so far as US engagement with Africa is primarily through military relations. It is the task of serious peace activists to bring out the contradictions of US military engagement with Africa so that the Obama White House will be explicit in its position on the US Africa command.

Reparative Justice for Africans at Home and Abroad

The legacies of enslavement, colonialism and apartheid dominate the social landscape in Africa. Recent scholarship on the health impacts of enslavement have pointed out the contemporary health questions in the African community in the West that emanate directly from slavery. [33] Harriet Washington in the excellent book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present [34] has deepened our understanding of how many of the health practices of contemporary western medicine can be traced back to the era of enslavement. For the past thirty years Africans at home and abroad have made it clear that there can be no genuine engagement with the West until there is a clear apology for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and until real efforts are made for repair. When Africans and their allies made the case for the apology at the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2011, the West intervened and pressured Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal to repudiate the call for reparations, and instead push for a program called New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). The so called Millennium Development Goals were also placed as a diversion from the calls of the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) for the western history books to accept that the slave trade constituted a crime against humanity. The Obama administration in 2009 cooperated with the old State Department hands to undermine the efforts of the 2009 U.N. Durban Review Conference, which was a follow-Up to the 2001 U.N. World Conference against Racism. However, Africans in every part of the planet remain tenacious that this matter of the slave trade will forever hold back humanity.

Kenyans have also shown the same tenacity by their efforts to hold the British government responsible for the crimes carried out by the British army when they attempted to crush the struggles against colonialism.

Inopportune Time for Obama’s Visit

It is time for the dismantling of AFRICOM and for Africans to redefine the relations where the US will start from apologizing for the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the associated acts of destabilization of Africa over the past fifty years. In those fifty years, the US undermined the processes of self-determination, supported the apartheid regimes in Southern Africa (Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe along with the Portuguese colonial forces in Angola and Mozambique), supported Jonas Savimbi for over twenty years, intervened in Somalia, destabilized the DRC by supporting Mobutu Sese Seko or thirty years, and most recently supported NATO to create havoc in Libya. At the most recent meeting of the African Union in Addis Ababa in May 2013, there were clear statements from the grassroots for the immediate unification of Africa. The confidence of the Global Pan African Family was clearly on display. The Obama administration understands the deep desires for change in Africa. Many of the current leaders who occupy office in Africa are teetering on the brink of extinction. There must be a break from the old US policy towards Africa that propped up tyrants and looters. While the media is complaining about the cost of the trip, the progressive intellectuals and activists in the US and in Africa must organize to oppose militarism and plunder in Africa. This is an inopportune moment for Obama to travel to Africa unless he is going to repudiate the growing police state that he is supervising. The mainstream establishment of the United States of America has nothing substantial other than militarism to offer Africa. This trip to Africa is a PR effort to solidify his legacy and garner waning support from his base in the United States.

Ultimately, President Obama must understand that in a changed world situation where the international system is being reconfigured by the awakening caused by the youths’ revolutionary energy and the emergence of China and other key players in Africa, to become relevant on the continent, the US must change its policy from that of militarism to one that supports the aspirations of ordinary Africans: education, healthcare, infrastructure, environmental repair, and decent livelihoods.

Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by the Press Secretary on the President’s Travel to Africa,” May 20, 2013 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/20/statement-press-secretary-president-s-travel-africa.

[2] Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by the Press Secretary on the President’s Travel to Africa,” May 20, 2013 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/20/statement-press-secretary-president-s-travel-africa.

[3] Wayne M. Morrison & Marc Labonte, China’s Holdings of U.S. Securities: Implications for the U.S. Economy, December 6, 2012 http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL34314.pdf.

[4] “Panafricanism & African Renaissance: Twenty-First African Union Summit,” May 19-27, 2013. http://summits.au.int/en/21stsummit

[5] Matt Taibbi, “Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever,” Rolling Stone, April 25, 2013. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/. See also Charles H. Ferguson, Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption and the Hijacking of America, Crown Publishers, New York, 2012.

[6] Liam Vaughan, Gavin Finch & Ambereen Choudhury, “Traders Said to Rig Currency Rates to Profit Off Clients,” Bloomberg News, June 12, 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-11/traders-said-to-rig-currency-rates-to-profit-off-clients.html

[7] “Libor Scandal Explained and What Rate-Rigging Means to You.” July 18, 2012, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/perfi/credit/story/2012-07-18/libor-interest-rate-scandal/56322230/1

[8] http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/18/lough-erne-declaration

[9] The 2013 Africa Progress Report, “Equity in Extractives”, was launched by Kofi Annan and the Panel on 10 May 2013 at the World Economic Forum on Africa in Cape Town, South Africa.

[10] Patrick Bond,Looting Africa:The Politics of Exploitation, Zed Books, London, 2005

[11] James K. Boyce and Léonce Ndikumana, Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent, Zed Books, London 2011.

[12] Drake Bennett and Michael Riley, “Booz Allen, the World's Most Profitable Spy Organization,” Bloomberg News, June 20,2013, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-20/booz-allen-the-worlds-most-profitable-spy-organization

[13] Horace Campbell, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya, Monthly Review Press, New York 2013

[14] Dirk Vanderwalle, “After Qaddafi: The Surprising Success of the New Libya,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2012

[15] C. J. CHIVERS, ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI, In Turnabout, Syria Rebels Get Libyan Weapons, New York Times, June 21, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/22/world/africa/in-a-turnabout-syria-rebels-get-libyan-weapons.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[16] The White House, “US Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa,” June 2012. http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/africa_strategy_2.pdf.

[17] Department of State, Young African leaders Initiative, http://www.state.gov/p/af/rt/pyali/

[18] “Inhofe Completes Successful Markup of National Defense Authorization Act,” June 14, 2013. http://www.inhofe.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/inhofe-completes-successful-markup-of-national-defense-authorization-act

[19] BBC, “Uganda's David Sejusa: 'Oppose Museveni's monarchy', June 18, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-22957712

[20] Craig Whitlock, U.S. expands secret intelligence operations in Africa, Washington Post, June 13, 2012, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-06-13/world/35462541_1_burkina-faso-air-bases-sahara

[21] “Holder, Banks may be too large to prosecute,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2013, http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/03/06/holder-banks-may-be-too-large-to-prosecute/

[22] Gary Yonge, “Is Obama Worse than Bush? That's Beside the Point,” Guardian, UK, June 21, 2013. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/21/obama-worse-than-bush.

[23] “Remarks by the President on a New Beginning”, Cairo University, June 4, 2009. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6-04-09

[24] Richard Wolffe, Renegade: The Making of a President, Crown Publishers, 2009, page 246.

[25] Horace Campbell, War on Terror Not Endless? A Pan-Africa View, Pambazuka News, December 6, 2012. http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/85698.

[26] “Spain Arrests 8 Suspected Al Qaeda Recruiters in Ceuta Enclave,” Huffington Post, June 21, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/21/spain-arrests-8-suspected-al-qaeda_n_3478043.html.

[27] “The Backdoor War with Iran,” The Real News, April 10, 2013. http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=9799.

[28] See for example, Matt Stroud, “Philadelphia Schools Closing While A New $400 Million Prison Is Under Construction: Could It Be Worse Than It Sounds?” Forbes, June 17, 2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/mattstroud/2013/06/17/philadelphia-schools-closing-while-new-400-million-prison-under-construction/.

[29] John Cassidy, “What Good Is Wall Street?” New Yorker, November 28, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_cassidy?currentPage=all.

[30] Simon Johnson and James Kwak, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown, Pantheon Books, New York, 2010.

[31] Firoze Manji and Sokari Ekine, African Awakening: Emerging Revolutions, Fahamu Books, Oxford, 2012.

[32]Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Stress-testing African States, June 2011, http://csis.org/program/stress-testing-african-states.

[33] Hilary Beckles, Britain's Black Debt: Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide, University of the West Indies Press, 2013

[34] Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present,Anchor Books, New York 2008

BlackCommentator.com EditorialBoard memberand Columnist, Dr.Horace Campbell, PhD, is Professor of African AmericanStudies and Political Science at Syracuse University in Syracuse New York.He is the author of BarackObama and Twenty-first Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in theUSA, and a contributing author to AfricanAwakening:The Emerging revolutions. His latestbook, Global NATO andthe Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is currently a VisitingProfessor in the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Hiswebsite is horacecampbell.net. Click here to contact Dr. Campbell.

Jul 11, 2013 - Issue 524

Mississippi: Armed SNCC members abduct white night riders and release them after giving them a warning. A white cop gets knocked unconscious by a black man for slapping a 14-year-old black girl. Armed brothers do a citizens’ arrest when ambushed by the Klan and deliver one of the attackers to his father, the chief of police.

Before you start to romanticize about the good ole days, I should remind you that life in the South for black folks was dangerous and volatile. Any challenge to the traditions and system of white supremacy was met with raw violence. And Mississippi? Well, there’s a poignant reason why Nina Simone penned a song titled, “Mississippi Goddam.” People - mostly black - lost their lives in the freedom struggle as they fought to break down barriers to voting, employment, public accommodations and other aspects of life that were forbidden to African Americans because of racism. This is the backdrop for We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement by Dr. Akinyele Umoja.

We Will Shoot Back informs us that blacks were not the only ones who had to be in fear of their lives. Racist whites who got between armed black men and women and their struggle for civil and human rights apparently got a lesson in fear.

Though not intended by the author, the book came out in the heat of the gun control debate. In some segments of the black and brown communities, the notion of disarmament is seen as making them vulnerable to attacks by the state or white supremacist groups. Particularly in black communities where the carnage of young men is becoming the norm, We Will Shoot Back could elevate the public discourse on guns in the context of self-defense as opposed to the primary way people should resolve conflicts.

Most of us have heard about the legendary Deacons for Defense. Through exhaustive research and interviews, Umoja introduced us to many other unsung heroes and sheroes (although not surprising the historical documentation was scant on women’s contribution to armed resistance in the south). Men and women like Hartman Turnbow, Rudy Shields, Robert “Fat Daddy” Davis, C.O.Chin, Ora “Miss Dago” Bryant, Luella Hazelwood and many more. Their inspirational stories affirmed that black folks stood with dignity, unflinchingly looking in the face of pure hatred and forged on to re-define their futures.

In We Will Shoot Back, Akinyele Umoja goes further than dispelling a long held myth that black Mississippians were too paralyzed in fear to defend themselves and actively participate in the freedom struggle. And that the omnipotent Klu Klux Klan kept the black community in check. He confronts head-on the stereotype that black southerners were docile, head-hanging, cheek-turning second class citizens.

Umoja takes the reader to the time when black Mississippians were forced to embrace armed resistance for their own survival; blacks faced the realization that their government offered no pretense of protection and could not be relied upon. In many cases, local government officials, along with law enforcement, were part of the same white mobs terrorizing black communities. Umoja chronicles the inextricable and critical role of armed resistance in the advancement of the southern freedom strategy that ultimately led to the passage of the historic Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Boycotts and armed resistance were the primary means of effectively organizing for change during this period.

Umoja documents a sophisticated labyrinth of disciplined, well-organized communication networks, safe houses, haven towns and armed residents who, much to the chagrin of local authorities, used local gun laws to their advantage. The special expertise of Vietnam veterans was also tapped.

These armed organizers and citizens did not sell wolf tickets and their threats were not idle ones. Sometimes the brothers were moved to publicly display their arms as a deterrent or to telegraph their sentiments as when Deacon of Defense member, Claude Brown, told white officials that “some peoples fixin’ to be killed…ain’t all of them going to be Black”. Vintage photographs in the book illustrate the armed sentries set up for round-the-clock duties. It was not uncommon for the armed resisters to rough up blacks who dishonored the boycotts.

The protection was extended to courageous residents who dared associate themselves with these forces who were bringing down the walls of white supremacy. When families opened their homes to freedom fighters, it automatically put them in the crosshairs of racist terrorists. Cattle was poisoned, property destroyed, loans denied and a host of other intimidating tactics were used first before escalating to the more life-threatening tactics. Communities were organized not just for their own self defense but to defend any freedom fighter who came into southern towns and cities to support them in their struggle for democracy and equality.

Everyone wasn’t especially excited about this new model of defense. The book highlights an example about how the Deacons of Defense provided protection for the major civil rights groups who vowed to continue James Meredith’s “March against Fear” after he was shot trying to integrate Ole Miss University. Dr. King, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young were opposed to the Deacons participating in the march. Dr. King conceded to the idea once it was clear the march would maintain its nonviolent character. Wilkins and Young would have none of this and high-tailed it back to New York. The pragmatist that he was, Dr. King went on to make the distinction between “defensive violence and retaliatory violence.”

The armed resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement continued under the Black Power era. Its intensity had changed with the two major pieces of civil rights legislation and the decline of the KKK. We Will Shoot Back takes us through the period of Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA) establishing it boundaries and program and through the demise of the United League. For almost twenty years, blacks understood the ugly period of segregation and terror and organized themselves to live another day and prepare for the next battle in the war against white supremacy and racism.

Whether it’s poetic justice or karma, one circle is complete. A young, lanky attorney with a big afro was part of the Republic of New African delegation who came to organize Mississippi in the early 1970s. He was Chokwe Lumumba. Lumumba was recently sworn in as mayor of Jackson, MS.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Jamala Rogers, founder and Chair Emeritus of the Organization for Black Struggle in St. Louis. She is an organizer, trainer and speaker. She is the author of The Best of the Way I See It – A Chronicle of Struggle. Click here to contact Ms. Rogers.

Jul 11, 2013 - Issue 524

One of the most outrageous and egregious events ever occurred in Los Angeles last week. It was troubling, not because it was a function of society’s breakdown in the law and policy. Last week, Ms. Christine Calderon, a 23-year-old Afro-Latina, walking the tourist strip in Hollywood, had her life taken because she took a photo of a sign being held by a panhandler and refused his demand to give him a dollar. A dollar. Christine Calderon lost her life for one dollar.

This is only where the outrage begins. On one of the city’s busiest tourist attractions, Hollywood & Vine to Hollywood & Highland, where people watching is the attraction, a recently released prisoner of the state’s prison realignment program was able to blend into the oddities of a tourist space. Then he was able to hold up a sign that said, “F#ck You. Give Me A Dollar Please.” Now think about that. This is not about free speech because every state and city has permitted restrictions to free speech and obscenity is not protected by free speech. Let me put it to you this way… would someone be able to hold up such a sign outside of, say, Disneyland? The answer is, He-ELL naw.

More troubling is that we witnessed a convergence of cultural issues that nobody seems to want to talk about. We have become an irreverent society. Irreverence is a staple of a society in rebellion. It’s expressed in our language and in our cultural expression. The fact that Calderon’s alleged killer could post up on the corner of Hollywood and Vine with such an irreverent sign is an active demonstration of our cultural irreverence by the simple fact that his presence was simply viewed as part of the character of the tourist attraction. He was part of the scenery. People walked past him without a second thought. I saw him on the Saturday before Calderon’s death on my way to the jazz festival at the Hollywood Bowl. I said, “That’s the devil, right there and kept going.” Others stopped and took a picture - that’s the whole reason he was there, to be seen - some tipped, some didn’t. This is where the clash comes in. We are now an “Instragram” society. We take pictures of everything and tweet ’em, post ’em, share them without regard for permission or commission. We believe we own what we see. Calderon believed she was taking a photo of the cultural tourist scenery. Her alleged killer thought he was entitled to charge for being part of the scenery. This was a classic culture clash.

It is most troubling because literally nobody noticed. Beyond a few mentions on the evening news, nobody has demanded any justice, questioned the motives, called into question why the circumstances existed or even called for assistance for the family. No black press ran the story. No “press conferences” were called to demand accountability of government. No candle light vigil to pray for justice. Not a single word from any of the so-called civil rights groups - who tend to call out the obvious anyway - on the civil liberty and civil rights violations of the event. Not a peep. No politicians (except one) called for any investigation.

More disturbing than the killing of Calderon, is the continued perpetuation of fake advocacy that misses the issues that impact our communities the most and waits for a bell to ring or a camera to show up before they speak. It is this kind of absence of sophistication in the advocacy - driven by anti-intellectualism, of course, that robs us of legitimate awareness in exchange for faux notoriety. Waiting for “monkey see-monkey do,” we are also robbed of our outrage - waiting for people asleep at the switch to give us the signal. Our community missed the bell on this. Why? The so-called activists slept through it. The Calderon shooting proves it.

How can you not be outraged by this tragedy and circumstances that surround it?

L.A. Police Chief Charlie Beck responded with more suppression in the area but the politic here is not just about policing. It’s about flawed policy smacking us in the face. The County Board of Supervisors (thank you Supervisors Ridley-Thomas and Yaroslavsky) have called for an investigation as to how Dustin James Kinnear was released early and what County mechanisms supervised that release. The state released another 9,000 this month to meet the court ordered mandate of reducing the state’s prison population by June, 1913. This is the opening of Pandora’s box, as the complexities of how parolees find work and merge civilly into the society become real. In the meantime, how does the city and county address the obscenity and panhandling issues that have become more pervasive in our increasingly irreverence society?

We can’t let Christine Calderon die for a dollar and say nothing about the circumstances that brought about her death. The absence of advocacy will not equate to an absence of outrage.

I’m deeply disturbed by this and will not feed into ignorant silence. In the cause of cultural irreverence to stop obscene signage and panhandler aggression, take a picture of this… (My middle finger)

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. Twitter @dranthonysamad. Click here to contact Dr. Samad.

Jul 11, 2013 -Issue 524

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.

Jul 11, 2013 - Issue 524

The African Centered Education Movement has brought a new meaning to the annual African American History Month celebrations that have become so popular. That new meaning of African Centered thought, as defined by Dr. Wade Nobles, “is nothing more than a term categorizing a quality of thought and practice which is rooted in the cultural image and interest of African people and which represents and reflects the life experiences, history and traditions of African people as the center of analyses.” With this definition, the challenges before us become clearer as we continue the struggle for the liberation of African people.

Through the African Centered Education Movement, African American History Month has now become the catalyst for the intense study of Africa and the history of African people throughout the world 365 days a year.

Dr. Carter G. Woodson, who founded in February of 1926 what at that time was called “Negro History Week,” would indeed be inspired by the continuing discussion and debate over the infusion of the contributions of African people in all subjects. Dr. Woodson was deeply concerned that the contributions of African people to this society and the world were not given their proper recognition.

Dr. Woodson’s great book The Mis-Education of the Negro, written in 1933, described in the first chapter titled, “The Seat of the Trouble,” the essence of what the African Centered Curriculum Movement is battling against today - 80 years later.

Dr. Woodson explained that, “Of the hundreds of Negro high schools recently examined (1933) by an expert in the United States Bureau of Education only eighteen offer a course taking up the history of the Negro, and in most of the Negro colleges and universities where the Negro is thought of, the race is studied only as a problem or dismissed as of little consequence.”

Continuing on, Dr. Woodson gave an example of, “an officer of a Negro university, thinking that an additional course on the Negro should be given there, called upon a Negro Doctor of Philosophy on the faculty to offer such work. He promptly informed the officer that he knew nothing about the Negro. He did not go to school to waste his time that way. He went to be educated in a system which dismissed the Negro as a nonentity.”

Obviously, since the writing of this great book, we have come a long way in our battle against challenging the white supremacy foundation of the American public school curriculum. However, we still have a long way to go!

The Black Movement of the 1960s gave us an impetus to reexamine our history and its impact on this country and the world. This movement brought on renewed interest, on the part of our people, to study our history.

We moved from the use of the term “Negro” in referring to ourselves and began to use “Black” as the more appropriate way to describe who we are. We went from Black History Week to Black History Month. In fact, some of us began to refer to the month of February as Black Liberation Month.

It was through the movement of the 1960s, particularly the Black Power Phase that we began to re-identify with our homeland - Africa, and the interconnection of African people throughout the world.

The Black student movement of the 1960s sparked demands for courses in Black Studies that lead the famous strike at San Francisco State University.

After a long battle with the administration at the university, the students finally won a victory for the first Black Studies Program to be established at an American college or university. As a result, a movement for Black Studies erupted all over America and stimulated at the elementary and secondary levels demands from courses dealing with Black History.

As we have come full circle today in our general acceptance of being African People, whose ancestral homeland is Africa, we are also beginning to recognize that African American History Month celebrations and activities are great, but the contributions of African people must be emphasized throughout the year.

There is no question that the setting aside of the month of February, as an extension of Dr. Woodson’s original idea of “Negro History Week” is something that we need to continue to support and institutionalize vigorously.

However, we are quite clear that the real meaning of African American History Month in this era, is to take the spirit from all the celebrations, great speeches, great entertainment and festive events to establish as a major agenda item in our movement, the serious study of the contributions of African people 365 days a year.

This is the basis of the current African Centered Education Movement, whose objective is to take control of the education of African people in America as we struggle to insure that the truth is taught in all institutions, in our communities and particularly in our schools.

We must take the spirit of the African American History Month to another level. Our history must be studied throughout the year. Our history is 365 days a year. BLACK POWER!

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.

Jul 11, 2013 - Issue 524

She was born in Poland, lived in Germany. She dedicated her life to social revolution, right up to the day at the beginning of 1919 when the guardian angels of German capitalism broke her skull with their rifle butts.

Not long before, Rosa Luxemburg wrote an article on the first years of the Russian Revolution. The article, penned in her German jail cell, opposed the divorce of socialism and democracy.

[from the article]

On freedom:

Freedom for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party - however numerous they may be - is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

-Rosa,” Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone, Eduardo Galeano

I doubt if anyone remembers, all these 94 years since she was murdered in Germany, what Rosa Luxemburg wore on such and such a day or on some special occasion during her days as a thinker, activist, and writer in Poland, in Paris, and then in Germany. Pictures of her show Luxemburg wore the appropriate attire for a woman in those days. In her correspondence, she writes of negotiating with printers, for example, Adolf Reiff, for the least expensive paper for pamphlets. To her comrade and lover, Leo Jogiches, she writes:

“I’m sending you, finally, the bill from Reiff for the pamphlet. It will definitely give you a shock.” She had refused to pay. “A furious fight” ensued. Reiff had to pay his workers. “I inquired among the workers whether he had really paid them so much.” He had, “with a few exceptions.” She was able to get “5 francs off the price” (Paris, March 29, 1894, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, eds., Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza).

In the same letter, Luxemburg thanks Jogiches for “the brassiere and the underclothes.”

When her “home” was not a cell in prison, as it often was, it was often among the cheapest, but bearable, places to work in Berlin.

All day yesterday and today,” she writes to Jogiches, “I’ve been running around with ’the little cousin’ in search of a place to live. You have no inkling what it means, in Berlin, to search for a place to live...the dimension of things here are such that you spend hours on a couple of streets, especially because you have to run way up, many storeys high, one building after another, depending on what’s said on the notice on the front door - and it’s mostly all in vain. The rooms are generally dreadfully expensive everywhere. Here in Charlottenburg the cheapest room that would be at all acceptable to me cost 28 marks [per month]. There is no sense in dreaming, not even for a moment, of having a separate bedroom. What we generally run into is a single room that doubles as a bedroom. (Berlin, May 17, 1898).

Needless to say, Luxemburg lived within a tight budget, cognizant of the privilege to even have the constraints of a limited budget, and she did not permit her productivity as a revolutionary to be constrained by her financial status or any desire to be safe and “free” with the chains of capitalism around her neck.

We do remember Rosa Luxemburg for daring to be free!

To be free is an occupation and not a mindless occupation. Thanks to the allure of capitalism’s attractiveness, the road to freedom is “the one less traveled by” (“The Road Not Taken,” Frost).

Hers was not a fast break out the gate, rah-rah-revolution for a young Jewish woman in a Russian occupied part of Poland. But Luxemburg’s motives were not invested with the commonplace path to “freedom.” Accepting the status quo and leaning to shuffle before those in control would not suit someone with an independent mind. She becomes politically active as a teenager with the Proletariat, “one of the first organizations of Polish Marxists” (The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, eds., Peter Hudis and Kevin B. Anderson). By 1897, Luxemburg has earned a doctorate (writing The Industrial Development of Poland) from the University of Zurich, the first woman in Europe to do so.

Yet, the following year, Luxemburg questions her purpose in The Struggle. What does all this work (the degree, the articles published in the Neue Zeit, the activism) amount to? Are her efforts leading somewhere beyond the chains of enslavement?

Living in Berlin now, she resumes her correspondence, and, in the Adler, Hudis, and Laschitza collection of Luxemburg’s correspondence, one of the early and most telling letters was written to Jogiches (The Letters, Berlin, June 24, 1898). Rosa Luxemburg’s letters, to be clear, are a form of work, the exercising of freedom against group think, and as such, we can remember and learn.

Previously, Jogiches had written to Luxemburg to express his grief at the death of his mother. In a very long letter, Luxemburg responds first by discussing the galleys of her book, The Industrial Development of Poland. There is still much to be done, “proofreading,” and did Jogiches note the “improved” passages? She has articles written for the Leipziger Volkszeitung, and her speaking engagements keep her a pretty busy woman - but, in all this hectic movement from one thing to the next, there is little time for self-reflection on her personal goals and her commitment to revolutionary change, little time to assess the connection between her goals and her commitment, to come to terms with the struggle, small “s”, and to confront the doubts and uncertainties and desires.

Finally, the writer becomes introspective:

I cannot write much about me personally. I would like to restate what I wrote to you already, but again you won’t understand me, and it will be unpleasant for you. ’I feel cold and calm.’ You took that as a statement related to you, when I was simply complaining to you about my own state of mind, which still persists.

She is experiencing “a kind of apathy.” She sees herself doing things, “even those that only involve thinking,” as if she were an “automation,” someone else.

What is that? Explain to me.

She feels as if something “had died” inside her.

I experience neither anxiety nor pain, not even loneliness, exactly like a corpse. It is as though I am an entirely different person from the one I was in Zurich, and I look back on myself as I was then as though I’m looking at someone else.

The “terrible pain” Jogiches feels, she too experienced when her mother died. It neither stops nor leaves her. “This feeling of shuddering horror does not let go of me,” particularly at night, when lying awake, “this fact [of my mother’s death] immediately arises again.”

I don’t know how it is with you but I don’t suffer mainly from longing anymore and I don’t suffer on my own account, but what makes me shudder every time is this one thought: what kind of life was that! What has this person lived through, what is the point of a life like that! (translator’s use of bold print to “indicate Luxemburg’s emphatic type”)

What is the point of a life lie that! It is this thought that catches her at any time, and she cannot hold back the tears.

I’m writing this myself not out of egotism, but only so that you will now that I understand very well what such a simple three-word phrase means which you wrote me [feeling the loss of one’s mother]. I don’t know any longer how that [realization] came to me all of a sudden.

The “fields of grain” and “Polish landscape” where Jogiches lives in contrast to the “not real” “Berlin landscape” she calls her home. Why Jogiches has not “answered” her letter, the letter in which she visualized “wandering though the fields of grain?”

But where is she now? The sadness and loss has he, dreaming of the idyllic! Is she really meant to exist among the lost? The apathetic? The “dead?”

The letter takes an abrupt turn and Luxemburg’s own question immediately reminds of her “financial matters.” Let us return to the road to freedom. “So I will take them up right here and now.” It is not easy, but what is the alternative?

The situation stands as follows: the remainder of all that I had will now last only until the first of the month...because I have to pay a lot for milk (one liter daily! and three eggs for each supper) and also a lot is spent on stamps...

The millions and millions of humanity that corporate/capitalism does not serve are but stepping stones towards its imperialist dream of global domination.

Anyone can follow the crowd. The decision to be free is the decision to reject the injustice and inequality, the violence, of those bent on expanding global franchises of the enslaved.

How else to see a vision of freedom converge on that historical road paved by those courageous enough to think of us here and now, in our time?

This is what Rosa Luxemburg left us to remember!

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.

Jul 11, 2013 -Issue 524

Mr. Fish is a cartoonist and writer who lives in Philadelphia, PA. He says never asked to be born. Occasionally, he laughs his head off. His mother has no idea what he's up to. She cries easily. His Website is clowncrack.com. Click here to contact Mr. Fish.

Jul 11, 2013 - Issue 524

“The only way we'll get freedom for ourselves is to identify ourselves with every oppressed people in the world. We are blood brothers to the people of Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba – yes Cuba too... I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”

- Malcolm X [el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz]

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

- Albert Camus

It is stunning, almost beyond belief, that the hypocrisy and brutality of the corporate-owned U.S. government have become so hideously obvious to all critically-thinking people in this year of 2013.

The recent revelations pertaining to the Obama/Biden regime's massive NSA/CIA, spying on and invasion of, the privacy of ordinary everyday Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people in this nation and throughout the world is now a matter of irrefutable fact. Yet, even this horror, virtually pales by comparison to this government's ongoing internal and external hypocrisy and brutality.

As Barack Obama's deadly predator drones have snuffed out the lives of countless children, women, and men in Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere throughout Mother Earth, this nation's government is deeply complicit in the incremental and daily genocide being carried out by the apartheid Zionist Israeli state against the Palestinian people. The horror of this is only surpassed by its insanity, coupled with the concomitant incessant complicity, on the part of the U.S. corporate-stream media.

However, none of these despicable realities should come as a surprise, in view of the fact that they emanate from an irretrievably corrupt, corporate-owned government that imprisons myriads of political prisoners of all colors within the sadistic confines of the U.S. prison gulag system inside this nation itself.

The unspeakable psychological and physical atrocities, that have been and are being committed, by this government against the prisoners at Obama's Guantanamo prison gulag (in Cuba), not only serves to actually reinforce hatred and a cycle of 'terrorism' worldwide, but are in fact a direct reflection of the daily sadism and hypocrisy, practiced by the U.S. government and its judicial system of injustice, against U.S. citizens themselves who are prisoners inside this nation's massive prison gulag system. It is imperative to make this connection.

It would have been naive to have expected Barack Obama and his Democrat and Republican corporate/military elite minions to have honestly, expeditiously, and forthrightly corrected the outrageous debacle at Guantanamo especially when the terrible plight of political prisoners and other poor and disenfranchised prisoners right here in this nation is officially and overwhelmingly swept under the rug and ignored.

Even now, many prisoners throughout the state of California, and other parts of this nation, have been on prolonged hunger strikes in protest of the inhumane, torturous, and sadistic conditions that they are forced to endure, but of course the U.S. corporate-stream media reports virtually nothing about this. The hypocrisy of this nation's so-called 'democracy' begins right here at home and stretches around the globe.

The massive spying and surveillance (so-called 'intelligence' gathering) by Barack Obama's government against many millions of everyday ordinary people nationally and internationally (including supposed allied governments and diplomats) is not merely about the gathering of information and the destruction of personal privacy – it is about using the 'private' details of people's lives to intimidate, coerce, and blackmail the ordinary people of this nation and world into total submission in a de facto police state. This is also about the utter destruction of the fourth amendment of the U.S. Constitution, not to mention international law. The nightmare of the infamous COINTELPRO activities of the U.S. government have now come full circle both nationally and internationally under the auspices of Mr. 'hope and change,' drone man, 'kill list' Barack Obama and his Democrat and Republican corporate-owned minions. It must be reversed. It cannot be tolerated.

In a sense, everyday ordinary people of this nation and world have ALL been placed in a kind of Guantanamo of sorts by Barack Obama and his cohorts. The time has come for genuine systemic change. Wake up! We must collectively, say and actualize, a resounding NO to these blood suckers and their outrages – while there is yet time for humanity and our precious Mother Earth! Times are perilous and we must act!

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.

Jul 11, 2013 - Issue 524

More about American Internet and telephone surveillance