Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by PufPuf93 » Thu Aug 01, 2019 10:09 pm
by Belligerent Savant » Thu Aug 01, 2019 10:36 pm
by Grizzly » Thu Aug 01, 2019 10:51 pm
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
― Frank Zappa
by RocketMan » Fri Aug 02, 2019 9:24 am
CORNEL WEST: Well I just want to affirm what my dear sister Dolores said about the deportation, out of control. It goes beyond political parties, it was under the Obama administration as well. We have to be very candid about that and it's very difficult, I think, to have a robust and candid conversation about a number of these structural issues that have to do with misery and oppression without somehow being open to the ways in which both parties have been complicitous to not staying in contact with the rich humanity of our precious Mexican brothers and sisters, chicanos in my own language. But it also relates to this larger issue of how does the Democratic party come to terms with Obama and his legacy. Because it's clear that hardly anyone wants to critically examine it. So you can't say too much about the Wall Street bailout explicitly, you can't say too much about the drones, you can't say too much about the wars in Libya and Somalia, and the bombs in Yemen. You can't say too much about the very ugly Israeli occupation, you can't say too much about the ugly Egyptian authoritarianism, though they are tied to the Obama administration.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 02, 2019 9:40 am
by RocketMan » Fri Aug 02, 2019 9:58 am
by RocketMan » Fri Aug 02, 2019 10:02 am
Nobody wants to talk about the 128 countries of special operations, the over 586 military units of the U.S. military in all around the world, and the 4,800 that we have throughout the United States and the world. Corporate media won’t touch that with a 10-foot pole.
And so you end up with this very narrow, deodorized, truncated conversation that denies the reality of the U.S. presence in the world. And as Brother Martin Luther King used to say, those bombs that are dropped in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, they land—indigenous peoples’ reservations. We are not a nation of immigrants; we’re a nation with immigrants, with indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans in our origin. Those bombs drop in hoods, black hoods. They drop in barrios. They drop in white working-class and white poor communities. Sixty cents of every $1 of U.S. budget goes to the military-industrial complex, Trump’s $750 billion military budget. Who voted for that? Democrats as well as Republicans. That’s part of the imperial extension, that makes it difficult for us to speak to issues of healthcare, jobs with a living wage. It suffocates the domestic agenda. And Martin Luther King Jr., our dear Sister Dolores and Cesar Chavez and others, those grand exemplars of the social movements of the past, they understood that. And I think that’s part of the challenge that we have to bring.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 02, 2019 10:29 am
So that in that regard, I mean, I have respect for my dear sister Elizabeth Warren. I’ve got love for Cory. I’ve known brother Cory Booker for 20 some, 25 years or so. And he’s a liberal and I, you know, I’m more than a liberal but I can still love my brother. Elizabeth Warren is very progressive. I respect my dear sister. But Bernie Sanders is the best that we have of this group and he’s the real thing in terms of being consistent. I have my own critiques of Bernie too, you know that.
CW: I’m never optimistic or pessimistic about any empire. I’m a prisoner of hope. That’s something different. And hope is not something to talk about. It’s something to be. You got to be a hope. You got to fight. You got to struggle. You got to swing. It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing, brother. That’s Duke. That’s Ella Fitzgerald. And that swing has to do with intellectual, moral, spiritual weaponry. Tell the truth, bear witness, live and be willing to die. That’s my tradition.
Dr. Cornel West, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed.
CW: Thank you. I salute you. You’re a force for good, my brother.
MH: Appreciate it. Great to have you on the show finally. I’ve been waiting to have you on. Bernie Sanders formally announced his candidacy for president of the United States near his birthplace in Brooklyn this past weekend. You, Dr. West, famously endorsed brother Bernie over Hillary Clinton back in 2016. Will you be backing him again this time around?
CW: Well, as you know, I was blessed to do over a hundred events for my dear brother. And this is the first time I’ve had a chance to publicly endorse him again, but yes, indeed. I’ll be in his corner that we’re going to win this time. And it has to do with the Martin Luther King like criteria of assessing a candidate namely the issues of militarism, poverty, materialism, and racism, xenophobia in all of its forms that includes any kind of racism as you know against black people, brown people, yellow people, anybody, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, Kashmirians, Tibetans and so forth. So that there’s no doubt that the my dear brother Bernie stands shoulders above any of the other candidates running in the Democratic primary when it comes to that Martin Luther King-like standards or criteria.
MH: And that’s to do with the man himself. You’re endorsing him as a person, as your brother. In terms of policies, is there a particular policy that you think is crucial to his campaign that makes him stand out from the rest?
CW: No, the policies have to do — policies against militarism, policies against poverty, the critiques of Wall Street, the consistency of his call for Democratic accountability of corporate elites and financial elites and basically the greed that we see among so many of those elites. And the same is true about racism. I want to hit this issue head-on because there’s been some talk about reparations and it’s true. I’ve supported reparations. I’ve been struggling for reparations for over 40 years, but I don’t see an endorsement of reparations as the only precondition of fighting against white supremacy. There’s no doubt that his policies will benefit poor and working people and poor and working black people and brown people more than any other candidate. And so, yes, when it comes to just reparations as a whole and larger dialogue certainly, I’m for it, but I hope that a lot of black folk don’t get confused and sit back on this issue of reparations.
MH: You think you can get him to move on reparations? Because he was asked on ABC’s The View about whether he backed it and he said well, you know, we’ve got crises in our communities and there’s other better ways to address that than by “just writing out a check.” A lot of people criticized him for that as you say, do you think he can move on that like he’s moved on other issues? That people like you persuade him to a different position?
CW: No doubt about that, but the core is ensuring that there’s fundamental transformation in the racist system under which we live so that the lives of black and brown and yellow peoples are much better. And so, that’s the real issue. And so, it seems to me I don’t want reparations to be an issue that gets us away from him taking a stand on those issues so much better than any other of the other candidates.
MH: So you say he takes a takes a better position on those issues than other candidates.
CW: Oh, no doubt about it.
MH: A lot of those liberal critics, as you know, have said for a long time, especially in recent days that he’s not good on race issues. They say he has a blind spot when it comes to race both in terms of his rhetoric, in terms of the people he surrounded himself with in the past. What do you say to those liberal critics as someone who has been writing and thinking about race and racism your whole life and yet is a Bernie supporter?
CW: Well, one, it’s a matter of his heart. He’s an anti-racist in his heart. Two, he’s old-school. He’s like me. He doesn’t know the buzzwords. He doesn’t endorse reparations, one moment in the last 30 years, silent on it. He has the consistency over the years decade after decade and therefore it’s true in his language, in his rhetoric. There are times in which he doesn’t, he doesn’t say the right thing. He doesn’t use the same kind of buzzwords. But when it comes to his fight against racism, going to jail in Chicago as a younger brother and he would go to jail again. He and I would go to jail together again in terms of fighting against police brutality. So in that sense, I would just tell my brothers and sisters, but especially my chocolate ones that they shouldn’t be blinded by certain kinds of words they’re looking for, that in the end, he is a long distance runner in the struggle against white supremacy.
MH: Why do you think, as you put it, your chocolate brothers and sisters, why do you think so many of them voted for Hillary over him in 2016? It did look in 2016 like he had “a problem with black voters.”
CW: Well one was you had the Hillary, the Clinton machine. The Clinton machine was in place before he even announced. Two, he had limited name recognition. So people didn’t realize. He’s from vanilla state, Vermont. Vermont is not known to being on the cutting edge of fighting against white supremacy. But once black people got a chance to discover who he was and we see that now in the polls.
MH: Yeah, now he has the highest approval ratings. One of the highest approval ratings, with Biden.
CW: Absolutely, because they’ve seen the deed. They’ve seen the action. They’ve seen the sincerity. They’ve seen the genuine conviction and commitment that he has against racism.
MH: We live in an age, Dr. West, in which many on the right and even some on the left referred to dismissively as identity politics. A lot of other people say no it’s a fight for equality, for diversity, for representation. Given that backdrop to this debate, do you think the Democrats can go into the next presidential election with either an all-white or an all-male ticket or is that off the table in 2020?
CW: Well in the end it’s got to do with the integrity of the person over the identity of the person. It’s got to do with the policies over identity. The criteria has to be a moral and political one.
MH: Yeah, and I agree with you that policy at the end of the day, ideology has to matter more than anything else. But at the same time you you know, you know as well as anyone else does that for minority communities, representation does matter. For women, representation does matter. If the Democrats were to have an all white, all male ticket, that would be hugely controversial given it’s the most diverse group of people ever running for presidency this time around. If it ended up with two white men surely, that would be a problem regardless of what policies they advocate.
CW: No, I think in terms of just realpolitik, but when Bernie Sanders wins the presidency, you can rest assured it’s not going to be with another vanilla brother. There’s no doubt about that.
MH: I suspect you’re right. I think you’re right there.
CW: I don’t worry about that brother Bernie.
MH: When you look at the current field of candidates who’ve declared and are yet to declare, a lot of them have moved to the left thanks to Bernie Sanders.
CW: That’s right.
MH: — Over the last few years. A lot of them are now saying “yes, inequality is a problem. Yes, medicare-for-all should be on the table, should be —” Do you worry that Bernie this time around won’t stand out in the way he stood out in 2016 because a lot of them are now singing from his hymn sheet..
CW: Yeah, but they’re newcomers, you know, and they’re latecomers. Bernie is the real thing. Bernie has been a thermostat. He has shaped the climate of opinion. Too many of them are thermometers. They reflect the climate of opinion. When you’re a thermostat, you are consistent. You are speaking your truth. You are bearing your witness and there’s no doubt that Bernie and he would say, of course the whole movement from Occupy, especially in the younger generation, multiracial to the core, that they have been thermostats. They have shaped the climate of opinion and I think many of us in our own small ways really we can celebrate the fact that people now have to talk about grotesque wealth inequality as a result of social movements, as a result of organizing and mobilizing. The Black Lives movement, that’s part of that too. The Black Lives movement has a critique of grotesque wealth inequality just as they have a critique of militarism. All of these things go hand in hand.
So that in that regard, I mean, I have respect for my dear sister Elizabeth Warren. I’ve got love for Cory. I’ve known brother Cory Booker for 20 some, 25 years or so. And he’s a liberal and I, you know, I’m more than a liberal but I can still love my brother. Elizabeth Warren is very progressive. I respect my dear sister. But Bernie Sanders is the best that we have of this group and he’s the real thing in terms of being consistent. I have my own critiques of Bernie too, you know that.
MH: Tell us one of them. What’s your top critique of Senator Sanders? What do you think you could do better on?
CW: Well, you know, in 2016, we put a lot of pressure on our brother in regard to foreign policy. He has been moving in a very progressive, morally ladened, wise direction. Again, it’s in his heart. And so, that would be one of the things that I’m concerned about, the militarism. You see the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. has as much to do with militarism as it does with materialism, racism, and poverty. He and Ro Khanna, Ro Khanna, I have great respect for. I just met recently, deeply impressed with him. They’re talking about the War Powers Act of 1973 and the use of that thing in regard to the Saudi Arabia war against our precious brothers and sisters in Yemen, and the U.S. arms used. I mean, this is very important, very significant in terms of the fight against militarism, the fight against American imperialism.
MH: Yeah, and Bernie has moved and you want to see him move more as do we all.
CW: Absolutely, absolutely, but I mean, but I’m not running for president, you see. I’m his brother running in a different lane, you see. My calling is not to be a politician. It’s to be a truth teller free of political considerations.
MH: I think a lot of us prefer you in that lane. Well, I’ve got to ask the age — I’ve got to ask the age question. What do you say to critics who say Bernie Sanders is too old to be present? You can’t have a president who’s 79 at the start of his first term and 83 at the start of his second. What’s your response to them?
CW: Now, I say Bernie Sanders, he’s full of fire, full of energy, in good health, and there’s no doubt that he can put in four, if not eight, actually.
MH: Let me just move the conversation to a slightly broader subject. Just looking at the big picture, do you think people in the U.S. right now, even on the left, do you think they recognize the severity, the danger of the situation that we’re in right now? You were in Charlottesville you were there, you know that white nationalism is on the march. It has a friend, a protector, a supporter in the White House. Trump is no ordinary Republican president, is he?
CW: Oh, not at all. Trump, Trump is an authoritarian figure. He’s got deep neo-fascist sensibility. He’s got neo-fascists in his corner. I mean, we’re talking about whether there’s going to actually be anything like an American democracy in the next few years and decade. That’s really what’s at stake here. And I think this is a very important issue that we have to have a candidate who can inspire at the deepest level the best values and instincts of the American people. That’s why I’m convinced that brother Bernie Sanders is the only person who can beat Donald Trump, just like I was convinced he could have actually won in 2016. I just hope that the Democratic party could be.
MH: You think Trump could beat the other Democrats?
CW: I don’t know.
MH: I think a lot of the Democrats would beat Trump, personally. I think maybe 2016, Bernie could have beaten him the way that Clinton didn’t. I think Trump is more vulnerable than we think. Although, we shouldn’t be complacent. Of course, he could get a, of course, he could get a second term.
CW: I don’t know about that, brother. I just don’t think that a neoliberal centrist can generate any of the deep fire hat we need among the best of our, the best fire or the best sensibilities among our citizens. You’re going to have to have somebody who’s got a long history and longevity of integrity.
MH: You’ve served — one other interesting aspect of the current politics is the rise of the left, the rise of socialism — you’ve served, I believe, as chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.
CW: That’s right.
MH: When you hear Republicans now obsessing over socialism — the s-word is mentioned on Fox News with horror almost day in day out. Trump went out of his way to attack socialism in his State of the Union. What’s your reaction? Does it amuse you to see how worried people on the right and even the center seem to be these days by the rise of socialism, by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
CW: Well, I salute my dear sister AOC and all the others who are fundamentally committed to the lives of poor and working people of all colors here in this country. It’s a good thing to see a right-wing fellow citizens afraid of the word socialism because that word signifies human beings who are fundamentally concerned with the plight and predicament of ordinary people, of everyday people and want to ensure they have access, a right to healthcare, quality education, a right to raise their voices and shape their destinies without big money and big military standing in the way in terms of money spent on the budget. So in that sense, it’s really a sign that the awakening on the left is concrete younger generations in polls say they prefer socialism over capitalism. Not in the abstract —
MH: Those are revealing polling results, but the polling also shows that while most Americans like socialist policies, they still don’t like socialism the word, the name, the ideology. Most Americans still call themselves capitalists. It’s still a bit of an uphill struggle, right?
CW: No it is. It is. As you know, I mean, in the end, it’s not going to be a matter of a word. I mean, I’m a revolutionary Christian before I’m a Democratic Socialist, right. My understanding of what it is to be a Christian means I embrace my comrades. I embrace my fellow citizens and fellow human beings who are fighting against forms of injustice that lose sight of the dignity of poor and working people. And the same is true, you got a whole host of — Malcolm X was first and foremost a Muslim before he was a revolutionary socialist, but he was in the same orientation, even with stronger critique of empire, as we know. So, a lot of people get there in a lot of different ways.
MH: Just before we finish I do want to ask: you were a supporter of Barack Obama before he was elected in 2008, the last Democratic president. You campaigned for him, then you fell out with him, big time. You called him a fake progressive. You said he did ugly deeds. He left behind a sad legacy. Now, I’m no blind defender of the Obama presidency, far from it. I’ve criticized many aspects of it, as you have, including on this show. But just to be devil’s advocate, when you look at what Trump is doing now, trying to undo a lot of the few good things that Obama did — healthcare, financial regulation, protecting the Dreamers, the Iran deal, the Paris Climate Change Accords — it kind of paints Obama in a much more positive light now, doesn’t it? Given, looking at Trump’s trying to undo?
CW: I think most U.S. presidents look pretty good when you look at a gangster called Donald Trump, so that’s a pretty low bar.
MH: That’s true.
CW: But no, but my question for my dear brother Barack Obama was precisely the one that I raised for brother Bernie Sanders — and it was true even with my dear brother, Bill Bradley and others who I’ve supported — it’s not that I look for full agreement. I’m always going to be a critic. My calling is to be as socratic as I can be, to try to be as prophetic as I can be. So, I’m always going to be a critic after they move into power. But when it comes to those fundamental issues that I raised before when you’re friendly to Wall Street, if you’re going to bring in Tim Geithner, you’re going to get my critique. If you’re dropping drones on precious folk in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, you’re going to get my critique. If you have a national security and national surveillance state that’ keeping track, it’s violating rights and liberties, if you’re engaging in the killing of U.S. citizens without due process, you’re going to get my critique. That’s true for any president. I don’t care what color. I don’t care what gender. I don’t care what sexual orientation. So yes, Barack Obama looks very good. He was the brilliant black face of the American empire with all of its ugly militarism and racism and materialism and poverty. And Donald Trump is the know-nothing white face of the American empire with the same things and much worse. He’s got neo-fascist sensibilities that needs to be called into question.
MH: I’m glad we agree, much worse.
CW: Much, much worse.
MH: I’m just going to ask you one thing before we do finish, you’ve been attacked in the past for your strong support for the occupied Palestinian people and you’re pretty blunt in your criticisms of Israel and supporters of Israel. What do you make of the attacks on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar who was on the show last week, who is young, female, black but is saying things about Israel that many of her critics say sounds anti-Semitic?
CW: Well, I think they’re wrong but I think, I’ll say to you what I said when I was a member of the democratic platform committee. I said my tradition was the tradition of John Coltrane’s Love Supreme, is a two love affair. We got to fall in love with the Palestinian people, fall in love with the Jewish people, acknowledge that a Palestinian baby has exactly the same status of the Jewish baby and therefore, when you love folk, you hate the fact they’re being occupied, hate the fact they’re being dominated, hate the fact they’re being demonized. Now, if the Palestinians were engaged in an occupation of Jews, it would be exactly the same thing. When Jewish innocent people are killed you got a love affair with Jewish people. It’s wrong. That’s a crime against humanity. When Palestinian innocent people are killed, when Palestinian innocent people are being occupied, dominated, it’s wrong. It’s a crime against humanity. You have to have a moral consistency across the board.
MH: So how much of the attacks on Ilhan Omar do you think are about the fact that she is a black woman in a headscarf?
CW: Well, one, she’s a courageous sister and so she’s shattering taboos, you know, she’s like any other critic. She’s cutting against the grain. Five or ten years from now it will be normal. In 1982, Edward Said and I were marching in front of the New York Times just trying to get them to use the word occupation. Now, it’s mainstream. Now, it’s normal. So, that any time you look back to people who are willing to speak the truth, but what I would say to my dear sister is always keep the moral and spiritual consistency and content up front, that there’s no space whatsoever for any kind of anti-Jewish sentiment, no space for anti-Palestinian sentiment. This is a human thing. And it has to do with the fact that each and every one of us deserve a certain kind of dignity no matter who we are and it’s impossible under occupation. There can be no Jewish security with occupation. There can be no Palestinian justice with occupation.
MH: And last, last question Dr. West: you’ve talked about the need to be a prophetic voice. You’ve written about the history of black revolutionary figures being optimistic versus being pessimistic. When you look at the America of today of Donald Trump, are you optimistic or are you pessimistic about the future?
CW: I’m never optimistic or pessimistic about any empire. I’m a prisoner of hope. That’s something different. And hope is not something to talk about. It’s something to be. You got to be a hope. You got to fight. You got to struggle. You got to swing. It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing, brother. That’s Duke. That’s Ella Fitzgerald. And that swing has to do with intellectual, moral, spiritual weaponry. Tell the truth, bear witness, live and be willing to die. That’s my tradition.
MH: Dr. West, keep bearing witness. We need you. Thank you so much for joining me on Deconstructed.
CW: I salute you, my dear brother. Stay strong and God bless your loved ones, man.
[Music interlude.]
MH: That was Dr. Cornel West speaking to me from Harvard. You heard him endorse Bernie Sanders there for the first time in this campaign, and point out how Bernie stands head and shoulders above the other candidates when it comes to a lifelong commitment to progressive causes — and I think he’s right about that. You also heard Dr. West say that Bernie is the only candidate who can beat Donald Trump in 2020. I think he’s wrong about that. I think Trump is a much weaker candidate than some on the left assume, and more importantly: I hope and pray he’s wrong about that because whoever the Democratic candidate is in 2020, whether it’s Bernie or anyone else, they have to beat Trump or we are genuinely screwed.
[Music interlude.]
That’s our show! Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. Dina Sayedahmed is our production assistant. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Leital Molad is our executive producer. Our theme music is composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.
I’m Mehdi Hasan. You can follow me on Twitter @mehdirhasan. If you haven’t already, please do subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. Go to theintercept.com/deconstructed to subscribe from your podcast platform of choice, iPhone, Android, whatever. If you’re subscribed already, please do leave us a rating or review. It helps people find the show. And if you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much! See you next week.
https://theintercept.com/2019/03/07/cor ... nd-racism/
by RocketMan » Fri Aug 02, 2019 11:50 am
by seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 02, 2019 12:24 pm
the critical analysis
I’m never optimistic or pessimistic about any empire. I’m a prisoner of hope. That’s something different. And hope is not something to talk about. It’s something to be. You got to be a hope. You got to fight. You got to struggle
- Cornel West
seemslikeadream » Mon Sep 09, 2013 4:17 am wrote:Cornel West and the Fight to Save the Black Prophetic Tradition
Posted on Sep 9, 2013
AP/Bebeto Matthews
Princeton University Professor Cornel West, left, hugs a protester while marching with Occupy Wall Street protesters to Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York.
By Chris Hedges
There is an insidious and largely unseen effort by the White House to silence the handful of voices that remain true to the black prophetic tradition. This tradition, which stretches back to Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, has consistently named and damned the cruelty of imperialism and white supremacy. It has done so with a clarity and moral force that have eluded most other critics of American capitalism. President Barack Obama first displayed his fear of this tradition when he betrayed his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, abetting the brutal character assassination of one of the church’s most prophetic voices. And he has sustained this assault, largely through black surrogates such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, Tom Joyner and Steve Harvey, in vicious attacks on Cornel West.
“Jeremiah Wright was the canary in the mine,” West said when we met a few days ago in Princeton, N.J. “The black prophetic tradition has been emptied out. Its leaders have either been murdered or incarcerated. ... A lot of political prisoners who represent the black prophetic tradition [are] in jail. They have been in there for decades. Or we have leaders who have completely sold out. They have been co-opted. And these are the three major developments. With sold-out leaders you get a pacified followership or people who are scared.”
“The black prophetic tradition has been the leaven in the American democratic loaf,” West said. “What has kept American democracy from going fascist or authoritarian or autocratic has been the legacy of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Martin King, Fannie Lou Hamer. This is not because black people have a monopoly on truth, goodness or beauty. It is because the black freedom movement puts pressure on the American empire in the name of integrity, decency, honesty and virtue.”
The tradition is sustained by a handful of beleaguered writers and intellectuals, including Glen Ford and his Black Agenda Report, James Cone, Carl Dix, Bruce Dixon, Boyce Watkins, Yvette Carnell, Robin Kelley, Margaret Kimberley, Nellie Bailey, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, Maulana Karenga, Ajamu Baraka and Wright, but none have the public profile of West, who is routinely attacked by Obama’s black supporters as a “race traitor,” the equivalent of a “self-hating Jew” to hard-line supporters of Israel. It is understandable why this tradition frightens Obama. It exposes him as the ideological heir of Booker T. Washington, a black accommodationist whose core message to black people was, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, “adjustment and submission.” The wide swath of destruction Obama has overseen on behalf of the corporate state includes the eradication of most of our civil liberties and our privacy, the expansion of imperial war, the use of kill lists, abject subservience to Wall Street’s criminal class and the military-industrial complex, the relentless persecution of whistle-blowers, mass incarceration of poor people of color and the failure to ameliorate the increasing distress of the poor and the working class. His message to the black underclass in the midst of the corporate rape of the nation is drawn verbatim from the Booker T. Washington playbook. He tells them to work harder—as if anyone works harder than the working poor in this country—and obey the law.
“Obama is the highest manifestation of the co-optation that took place,” West said. “It shifted to the black political class. The black political class, more and more, found itself unable to tell the truth, or if they began to tell some of the truth they were [put] under surveillance, attacked and demonized. Forty percent of our babies are living in poverty, living without enough food, and Obama comes to us and says quit whining. He doesn’t say that to the Business Roundtable. He doesn’t say that to the corporate elites. He doesn’t say that to AIPAC, the conservative Jewish brothers and sisters who will do anything to support the Israeli occupation against Palestinians. This kind of neglect in policy is coupled with disrespect in his speeches to black folk, which the mainstream calls tough love.”
“He is a shell of a man,” West said of Obama. “There is no deep conviction. There is no connection to something bigger than him. It is a sad spectacle, sad if he were not the head of an empire that is in such decline and so dangerous. This is a nadir. William Trotter and Du Bois, along with Ida B. Wells-Barnett, were going at Book T tooth and nail. Look at the fights between [Marcus] Garvey and Du Bois, or Garvey and A. Philip Randolph. But now if you criticize Obama the way Randolph criticized Garvey, you become a race traitor and an Uncle Tom. A lot of that comes out of the Obama machine, the Obama plantation.”
“The most pernicious development is the incorporation of the black prophetic tradition into the Obama imperial project,” West said. “Obama used [Martin Luther] King’s Bible during his inauguration, but under the National Defense Authorization Act King would be detained without due process. He would be under surveillance every day because of his association with Nelson Mandela, who was the head of a ‘terrorist’ organization, the African National Congress. We see the richest prophetic tradition in America desecrated in the name of a neoliberal worldview, a worldview King would be in direct opposition to. Martin would be against Obama because of his neglect of the poor and the working class and because of the [aerial] drones, because he is a war president, because he draws up kill lists. And Martin King would have nothing to do with that.”
“We are talking about crimes against humanity—Wall Street crimes, war crimes, the crimes of the criminal justice system in the form of Jim Crow, the crimes against our working poor that have their backs pushed against the wall because of stagnant wages and corporate profits going up,” West said. “Abraham Heschel said that the distinctive feature of any empire in decline is its indifference to criminality. That is a fundamental feature of our time, an indifference to criminality, especially on top, wickedness in high places.”
“This is not personal,” West said. “This was true for [George W.] Bush. It was true for [Bill] Clinton. We are talking about an imperial system, manifest in Obama’s robust effort to bomb Syria. War crimes against Syrian children do not justify U.S. war crimes. We are talking about a corporate state and a massive surveillance and national security state. It operates according to its own logic. Profit on the one hand, and secrecy to hide imperial policy on the other. Jesse [Jackson] was the head house Negro on the Clinton plantation, just as Sharpton is the head house Negro on the Obama plantation. But there is a difference. Jesse was willing to oppose Clinton on a variety of issues. He marched, for example, against the welfare bill. But Sharpton loves the plantation. He will not say a critical word. It is sad and pathetic. We are living in the age of the sellout.”
“Garvey used to say that as long as black people were in America the masses of black people, the poor and the working class, would never be treated with respect, decency or fairness,” West said. “That has always been a skeleton in the closet, the fundamental challenge to the black prophetic tradition. It may very well be that black people will never be free in America. But I believe, and the black prophetic tradition believes, that we proceed because black people are worthy of being free, just as poor people of all colors are worthy of being free, even if they never will be free. That is the existential leap of faith. There is no doubt that with a black president the black masses are still treated unfairly, from stop and frisk to high unemployment, indecent housing and decrepit education.”
“It is a spiritual issue,” West said. “What kind of person do you choose to be? People say, ‘Well, Brother West, since the mass of black folk will never be free then let me just get mine.’ That is the dominant response. ‘I am wasting my time fighting a battle that can’t be won.’ But that is not what the black prophetic tradition is about. History is a mystery. Yes, it doesn’t look good. But the masses of black folk must be respected. Malcolm X used to say as long as they are not respected you could show me all the individual respect you want but I know it’s empty. That is the fundamental divide between the prophetic tradition and the sellouts.”
The tradition has been diminished by what West called the “emaciation” of the black press that once amplified the voices of black radicals. The decline of the black press and the consolidation of the media, especially the electronic media, into the hands of a few corporations means that those who remain faithful to this tradition have been shut out. West does not appear on MSNBC, where the black and white hosts serve as giddy cheerleaders for Obama, and was abruptly dropped as a scheduled guest on an edition of CBS’ “Face the Nation” that aired after the 50 anniversary of the march on Washington. The black prophetic tradition is rarely taught in schools, including primarily African-American schools, and West said that this deterioration threatens to extinguish the tradition.
“It no longer has a legitimacy or significant foothold in the minds of the black masses,” West said. “With corporate media and the narrowing of the imagination of all Americans, including black people, there is an erasure of memory. This is the near death of the black prophetic tradition. It is a grave issue. It is a matter of life and death. It means that the major roadblock to American fascism, which has been the black prophetic tradition, is gone. To imagine America without the black prophetic tradition, from Frederick Douglass to Fannie Lou Hamer, means an American authoritarian regime, American fascism. We already have the infrastructure in place for the police state.”
“Black intelligence and black suspicion is still there among the masses,” West said. “Black people are not stupid. We are not completely duped. We are just scared. We don’t think there is any alternative. This is re-niggerization of the black professional class. They have big money, nice positions, comfort and convenience, but are scared, intimidated, afraid to tell the truth and will not bear witness to justice. Those who are incorporated into the black professional and political class are willing to tolerate disrespect for the black masses and sip their tea and accept their checks and gain access to power. That is what niggerization is—keeping people afraid and intimidated.”Oh Prophesy fullfill
Know the right thing and heed not
Shall be spanked with many stripes
Weeping and wailing and moaning
You've got yourself to blame
I tell you
seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 02, 2015 8:30 am wrote:Chris Hedges
Malcolm X Was Right About America
Posted on Feb 1, 2015
By Chris Hedges
NEW YORK—Malcolm X, unlike Martin Luther King Jr., did not believe America had a conscience. For him there was no great tension between the lofty ideals of the nation—which he said were a sham—and the failure to deliver justice to blacks. He, perhaps better than King, understood the inner workings of empire. He had no hope that those who managed empire would ever get in touch with their better selves to build a country free of exploitation and injustice. He argued that from the arrival of the first slave ship to the appearance of our vast archipelago of prisons and our squalid, urban internal colonies where the poor are trapped and abused, the American empire was unrelentingly hostile to those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” This, Malcolm knew, would not change until the empire was destroyed.
“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck,” Malcolm said. “Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.”
King was able to achieve a legal victory through the civil rights movement, portrayed in the new film “Selma.” But he failed to bring about economic justice and thwart the rapacious appetite of the war machine that he was acutely aware was responsible for empire’s abuse of the oppressed at home and abroad. And 50 years after Malcolm X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem by hit men from the Nation of Islam, it is clear that he, not King, was right. We are the nation Malcolm knew us to be. Human beings can be redeemed. Empires cannot. Our refusal to face the truth about empire, our refusal to defy the multitudinous crimes and atrocities of empire, has brought about the nightmare Malcolm predicted. And as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed.
“Sometimes, I have dared to dream … that one day, history may even say that my voice—which disturbed the white man’s smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency—that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even fatal catastrophe,” Malcolm wrote.
The integration of elites of color, including Barack Obama, into the upper echelons of institutional and political structures has done nothing to blunt the predatory nature of empire. Identity and gender politics—we are about to be sold a woman president in the form of Hillary Clinton—have fostered, as Malcolm understood, fraud and theft by Wall Street, the evisceration of our civil liberties, the misery of an underclass in which half of all public school children live in poverty, the expansion of our imperial wars and the deep and perhaps fatal exploitation of the ecosystem. And until we heed Malcolm X, until we grapple with the truth about the self-destruction that lies at the heart of empire, the victims, at home and abroad, will mount. Malcolm, like James Baldwin, understood that only by facing the truth about who we are as members of an imperial power can people of color, along with whites, be liberated. This truth is bitter and painful. It requires an acknowledgment of our capacity for evil, injustice and exploitation, and it demands repentance. But we cling like giddy children to the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. We refuse to grow up. And because of these lies, perpetrated across the cultural and political spectrum, liberation has not taken place. Empire devours us all.
“We’re anti-evil, anti-oppression, anti-lynching,” Malcolm said. “You can’t be anti- those things unless you’re also anti- the oppressor and the lyncher. You can’t be anti-slavery and pro-slavemaster; you can’t be anti-crime and pro-criminal. In fact, Mr. Muhammad teaches that if the present generation of whites would study their own race in the light of true history, they would be anti-white themselves.”
Malcolm once said that, had he been a middle-class black who was encouraged to go to law school, rather than a poor child in a detention home who dropped out of school at 15, “I would today probably be among some city’s professional black bourgeoisie, sipping cocktails and palming myself off as a community spokesman for and leader of the suffering black masses, while my primary concern would be to grab a few more crumbs from the groaning board of the two-faced whites with whom they’re begging to ‘integrate.’ ”
Malcolm’s family, struggling and poor, was callously ripped apart by state agencies in a pattern that remains unchanged. The courts, substandard schooling, roach-filled apartments, fear, humiliation, despair, poverty, greedy bankers, abusive employers, police, jails and probation officers did their work then as they do it now. Malcolm saw racial integration as a politically sterile game, one played by a black middle class anxious to sell its soul as an enabler of empire and capitalism. “The man who tosses worms in the river,” Malcolm said, “isn’t necessarily a friend of the fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm’s got no hook on it, usually end up in the frying pan.” He related to the apocalyptic battles in the Book of Revelation where the persecuted rise up in revolt against the wicked.
“Martin [Luther King Jr.] doesn’t have the revolutionary fire that Malcolm had until the very end of his life,” Cornel West says in his book with Christa Buschendorf, “Black Prophetic Fire.” “And by revolutionary fire I mean understanding the system under which we live, the capitalist system, the imperial tentacles, the American empire, the disregard for life, the willingness to violate law, be it international law or domestic law. Malcolm understood that from very early on, and it hit Martin so hard that he does become a revolutionary in his own moral way later in his short life, whereas Malcolm had the revolutionary fire so early in his life.”
There are three great books on Malcolm X: “The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley,” “The Death and Life of Malcolm X” by Peter Goldman and “Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare” by James H. Cone.
On Friday I met Goldman—who as a reporter for a St. Louis newspaper and later for Newsweek knew and covered Malcolm—in a New York City cafe. Goldman was part of a tiny circle of white reporters Malcolm respected, including Charles Silberman of Fortune and M.S. “Mike” Handler of The New York Times, who Malcolm once said had “none of the usual prejudices or sentimentalities about black people.”
Goldman and his wife, Helen Dudar, who also was a reporter, first met Malcolm in 1962 at the Shabazz Frosti Kreem, a Black Muslim luncheonette in St. Louis’ north-side ghetto. At that meeting Malcolm poured some cream into his coffee. “Coffee is the only thing I liked integrated,” he commented. He went on: “The average Negro doesn’t even let another Negro know what he thinks, he’s so mistrusting. He’s an acrobat. He had to be to survive in this civilization. But by me being a Muslim, I’m black first—my sympathies are black, my allegiance is black, my whole objectives are black. By me being a Muslim, I’m not interested in being American, because America has never been interested in me.”
He told Goldman and Dudar: “We don’t hate. The white man has a guilt complex—he knows he’s done wrong. He knows that if he had undergone at our hands what we have undergone at his, he would hate us.” When Goldman told Malcolm he believed in a single society in which race did not matter Malcolm said sharply: “You’re dealing in fantasy. You’ve got to deal in facts.”
Goldman remembered, “He was the messenger who brought us the bad news, and nobody wanted to hear it.” Despite the “bad news” at that first meeting, Goldman would go on to have several more interviews with him, interviews that often lasted two or three hours. The writer now credits Malcolm for his “re-education.”
Goldman was struck from the beginning by Malcolm’s unfailing courtesy, his dazzling smile, his moral probity, his courage and, surprisingly, his gentleness. Goldman mentions the day that psychologist and writer Kenneth B. Clark and his wife escorted a group of high school students, most of them white, to meet Malcolm. They arrived to find him surrounded by reporters. Mrs. Clark, feeling that meeting with reporters was probably more important, told Malcolm the teenagers would wait. “The important thing is these kids,” Malcolm said to the Clarks as he called the students forward. “He didn’t see a difference between white kids and kids,” Kenneth Clark is quoted as saying in Goldman’s book.
James Baldwin too wrote of Malcolm’s deep sensitivity. He and Malcolm were on a radio program in 1961 with a young civil rights activist who had just returned from the South. “If you are an American citizen,” Baldwin remembered Malcolm asking the young man, “why have you got to fight for your rights as a citizen? To be a citizen means that you have the rights of a citizen. If you haven’t got the rights of a citizen, then you’re not a citizen.” “It’s not as simple as that,” the young man answered. “Why not?” Malcolm asked.
During the exchange, Baldwin wrote, “Malcolm understood that child and talked to him as though he was talking to a younger brother, and with that same watchful attention. What most struck me was that he was not at all trying to proselytize the child: he was trying to make him think. ... I will never forget Malcolm and that child facing each other, and Malcolm’s extraordinary gentleness. And that’s the truth about Malcolm: he was one of the gentlest people I have ever met.”
“One of Malcolm’s many lines that I liked was ‘I am the man you think you are,’ ” Goldman said. “What he meant by that was if you hit me I would hit you back. But over the period of my acquaintance with him I came to believe it also meant if you respect me I will respect you back.”
Cone amplifies this point in “Martin & Malcolm & America”:
Malcolm X is the best medicine against genocide. He showed us by example and prophetic preaching that one does not have to stay in the mud. We can wake up; we can stand up; and we can take that long walk toward freedom. Freedom is first and foremost an inner recognition of self-respect, a knowledge that one was not put on this earth to be a nobody. Using drugs and killing each other are the worst forms of nobodyness. Our forefathers fought against great odds (slavery, lynching, and segregation), but they did not self-destruct. Some died fighting, and others, inspired by their example, kept moving toward the promised land of freedom, singing ‘we ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around.’ African-Americans can do the same today. We can fight for our dignity and self-respect. To be proud to be black does not mean being against white people, unless whites are against respecting the humanity of blacks. Malcolm was not against whites; he was for blacks and against their exploitation.
Goldman lamented the loss of voices such as Malcolm’s, voices steeped in an understanding of our historical and cultural truths and endowed with the courage to speak these truths in public.
“We don’t read anymore,” Goldman said. “We don’t learn anymore. History is disappearing. People talk about living in the moment as if it is a virtue. It is a horrible vice. Between the twitterverse and the 24-hour cable news cycle our history keeps disappearing. History is something boring that you had to endure in high school and then you are rid of it. Then you go to college and study finance, accounting, business management or computer science. There are damn few liberal arts majors left. And this has erased our history. The larger figure in the ’60s was, of course, King. But what the huge majority of Americans know about King is [only] that he made a speech where he said ‘I have a dream’ and that his name is attached to a day off.”
Malcolm, like King, understood the cost of being a prophet. The two men daily faced down this cost.
Malcolm, as Goldman writes, met with the reporter Claude Lewis not long before his Feb. 21, 1965, murder. He had already experienced several attempts on his life.
“This is an era of hypocrisy,” he told Lewis. “When white folks pretend that they want Negroes to be free, and Negroes pretend to white folks that they really believe that white folks want ’em to be free, it’s an era of hypocrisy, brother. You fool me and I fool you. You pretend that you’re my brother, and I pretend that I really believe you believe you’re my brother.”
He told Lewis he would never reach old age. “If you read, you’ll find that very few people who think like I think live long enough to get old. When I say by any means necessary, I mean it with all my heart, my mind and my soul. A black man should give his life to be free, and he should also be able, be willing to take the life of those who want to take his. When you really think like that, you don’t live long.”
Lewis asked him how he wanted to be remembered. “Sincere,” Malcolm said. “In whatever I did or do. Even if I made mistakes, they were made in sincerity. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong in sincerity. I think that the best thing that a person can be is sincere.”
“The price of freedom,” Malcolm said shortly before he was killed, “is death.”
seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 28, 2015 8:14 am wrote:It will be a long, hot and violent summer.Rise of the New Black Radicals
Posted on Apr 26, 2015
By Chris Hedges
The almost daily murders of young black men and women by police in the United States—a crisis undiminished by the protests of groups such as Black Lives Matter and by the empty rhetoric of black political elites—have given birth to a new young black militant.
This militant, rising off the bloody streets of cities such as Ferguson, Mo., understands that the beast is not simply white supremacy, chronic poverty and the many faces of racism but the destructive energy of corporate capitalism. This militant has given up on electoral politics, the courts and legislative reform, loathes the corporate press and rejects established black leaders such as Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Michael Eric Dyson. This militant believes it is only in the streets and in acts of civil disobedience that change is possible. And given the refusal of the corporate state to address the mounting suffering of the poor and working poor, draconian state repression and indiscriminate use of lethal state violence against unarmed people of color, I think the new black radical is right. It will be a long, hot and violent summer.
The world’s hundreds of millions of disenfranchised youths—in America this group is dominated by the black and brown underclass—come out of the surplus labor created by our system of corporate neofeudalism. These young men and women have been discarded as human refuse and are preyed upon by a legal system that criminalizes poverty. In the United States they constitute the bulk of the 2.3 million human beings locked in jails and prisons. The discontent in Ferguson, Athens, Cairo, Madrid and Ayotzinapa is one discontent. And the emerging revolt, although it comes in many colors, speaks many languages and has many belief systems, is united around a common enemy. Bonds of solidarity and consciousness are swiftly uniting the wretched of the earth against our corporate masters.
Corporate power, which knows what is coming, has put in place sophisticated systems of control that include militarized police, elaborate propaganda campaigns that seek to make us fearful and therefore passive, wholesale surveillance of every citizen and a court system that has stripped legal protection from the poor and any who dissent. The masses are to be kept in bondage. But the masses, especially the young, understand the game. There is a word for what is bubbling up from below—revolution. It can’t begin soon enough.
The global leadership for this revolt comes not from the institutions of privilege, elite universities where ambitious and self-centered young men and women jockey to become part of the ruling 1 percent, but from the squalid internal colonies that house the poor and usually people of color. The next great revolutionary in America won’t look like Thomas Jefferson. He or she will look like Lupe Fiasco.
T-Dubb-O is a hip-hop artist from St. Louis. He is one of the founders, along with Tef Poe, Tory Russell, Tara Thompson and Rika Tyler, of Hands Up United. The organization was formed in the wake of the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson. It has built close alliances with radical organizations in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin American, in Europe and in Palestine.
“I honestly think it’s going to be worse than last year, this summer,” T-Dubb-O said when I met with him and Tyler at Princeton University, where they had gone to speak to students. “People have become more radical,” he said. “They’ve realized the power that they have. They’re no longer afraid of the police, the state, but also you have a police and a military force that’s been training for a year to deal with this type of circumstance. So I honestly think this summer is gonna be worse. More violence from the police, and this time you won’t have a group of people who is just gonna sit there and let it happen to ’em—you’re gonna have people that are actually gonna fight back instead of just continue to be peaceful protesters. Right now everybody is just on edge. I mean, it’s the same situation we was in before Mike Brown. People that don’t have jobs, there’s crime everywhere, there’s drugs everywhere, there’s predator policing. It’s the same circumstances, it’s just no cameras.”
“In my city every day, police is pulling somebody over, harassing them, extorting them,” he said. “Because that’s what it is—it’s legal extortion. When a government is making 30 to 40 percent of their yearly budget off of tickets, fines and imprisonment, it’s extortion. It’s the same thing the mob did in the ’20s. So we fight. We can’t go back to normal lives. We get followed, harassed, death threats, phones tapped, social media watched, they hack into our emails, hack into our social media account, we all got FBI files. They know we here right now. So I mean it’s not a game, but it’s either continue to deal with not being able to just live like a regular person, and dream, and have an opportunity, or get up and do something about it. And we decided to do something.”
Tyler said she was propelled into the movement by seeing the body of Michael Brown, which the Ferguson police left lying in the street for more than four hours.
“I went to Canfield [Drive, where Brown was killed],” she said when we spoke. “I saw the body. I saw the blood. I just broke down. And ever since then I’ve just been out there [as an activist] every day.”
“They left [Brown] in the street for four and a half hours in the hot sun on concrete, just for display,” she said. “That reminded me of a modern-day lynching. Because you know, they used to lynch slaves and then have it displayed. And that’s basically showing us that this system is not built for us. It made me wake up a little bit more.”
“Just envision a debtor’s prison being run by a collusion between city officials, police and court judges, who treated our community like an ATM machine,” Tyler said. “Because that’s all they did. Ferguson is in St. Louis County. It’s 21,000 people living in 8,100 households. So it’s a small town. Sixty-seven percent of the residents are African-American. Twenty-two percent live below poverty level. A total of $2.6 million [were paid in fines to city officials, the courts and the police] in 2013. The Ferguson Municipal Court disposed of 24,532 warrants and 12,018 cases. That’s about three warrants per household. One and a half cases for each household. You don’t get $321 in fines and fees and three warrants per household from an average crime rate. You get numbers like this from racist bullshit, arrests from jaywalking, and constant low-level harassment involving traffic stops, court appearances, high fines and the threat of jail for failure to pay.”
“For an example,” she went on, “I got pulled over. I turned a left [illegally] and my car was searched. I was met with three different officers, two detectives. I got a traffic ticket. I had a ticket because I didn’t have my license on me. So I had a ticket for not having my license, and then I got a ticket from turning the wrong way. I did not go to court because I was out of town. However, I called them and told them I will not appear to court and my lawyer would handle it from there. I got a letter in the mail that said failure to appear to court, and they have a warrant out for my arrest. They’re threatening to take my license and suspend it because I didn’t appear to court. So these are just the things that had happened in St. Louis right now. You can get a ticket from walking across the street, or a ticket from not cutting your grass, and then you’re stuck in this system that they put us in, that is oppressed, and keeps us oppressed.”
“I was arrested when I was pregnant, I was 37 weeks and I was arrested in St. Charles County by four white officers,” she said. “They took me into custody when I had this big-ass stomach. And I’m like, I’m pregnant. I had a traffic ticket for parking in the wrong meter. And they wrote me a ticket and I never paid it, so they took me. I had a warrant out for my arrest. I sat in jail, pregnant, had my baby a week early because I was stressed out and crying my eyes out in jail.”
“No person should have to go through this,” T-Dubb-O said, “whether it’s in America, Palestine, Mexico, Brazil, Canada. Nobody should have to go through this. You look at a bunch of young people [in Ferguson], their age ranges anywhere from 12 to 28 or 29, that went against the most powerful military force in this world. That’s pretty much what happened. … That’s not what’s explained, but that’s what it was. It was tanks on every corner, our phones tapped, they follow us. Every day we was out there we thought we were gonna die. At one point in time they said they were gonna kill us. ‘We’re not shooting rubber bullets tonight, we’re shooting live ammunition.’ And these are the things that you don’t see on the news. It was just because we was tired of being treated as less than people. Just for opportunity to be able to walk the streets and live and breathe and do what everybody else does. And that’s pretty much what we was fighting for. I mean, the level of oppression, it’s kind of hard to fathom, and believe that it’s actually true in America, especially the middle of America. But it’s real, where you have people that are judged off the neighborhoods they come from and the color of their skin and they’re denied certain opportunities.”
“In St. Louis if you’ve been arrested and you’re facing a misdemeanor or felony charges, you’re not allowed a Pell Grant to go to college,” he said. “So if you can’t afford to pay to go to college you’re just stuck. If you’re on probation and you’re trying to get a job, it’s a right-to-work state, they have the right to deny you employment because of your past. They don’t have to give you an opportunity to work. Where do they leave you, back in the same system that puts you in the same position where you made the first mistake. It’s all set up like this.”
“I’ve been tear-gassed six times,” Tyler said. “I’ve been put on the car, had different guns to my head. I’ve been shot at with rubber bullets, live ammo, wooden bullets, bean bag bullets, sound cannons, everything you can think of. I’ve went up against militarized police, and they did different things like a five-second rule, like I would get arrested if I stood still for longer than five seconds. I would get arrested if I didn’t walk longer than five seconds. It was just different things. They don’t wear their name badges. They don’t tell us who they are. They’re not transparent at all. They harass us. Women have been hogtied, beaten. I got arrested for standing on the sidewalk, just recording them.”
T-Dubb-O after the murder of Brown and the unrest in Ferguson was invited with other community leaders to meet with President Barack Obama in the White House. The president, he said, spoke “in clichés” about black-on-black crime, the necessity of staying in school, working hard and the importance of voting.
“He asked me did I vote for him,” he said, “I told him no. I didn’t vote for him either time, because I didn’t want to vote for him just because he was black. I felt like that would have been shallow on my end. Because he’s never honestly spoken and touched and said he was going to do anything for my community or the issues that we face on a daily basis, so why would I vote for somebody like that, whether you white, black, male, female, so on and so forth?”
As president he is proof that the system works, Obama told T-Dubb-O. The hip-hop artist said this statement shows how out of touch Obama is with the reality faced by poor people of color.
“When you have an 11-year-old boy whose mother is single, or has a single father who’s working two or three jobs just to put food on the table, he has to wake up at 5:30 in the morning, catch public transportation to school,” T-Dubb-O said. “Everything around him is damnation. You can’t expect an 11-year-old to have the mental capacity of an adult, to say I’m going to make the mature decisions and not get into trouble. So I don’t care about black-on-black crime. I don’t care about the normal cliché of working hard, you can do anything, you can accomplish, because that’s bullshit. And excuse my language, but I can’t tell a little boy up the street in my neighborhood, where over a hundred murders happened last year, that he can be an astronaut if he wants to be, because that’s not possible.”
“I think D.C. is a perfect example of what America is,” he said. “You have this big white house representing the government, that was built by slaves, that’s beautiful, excellent manicured lawns, and right outside the gate you have 50 homeless people sleeping in a park. Right outside of the gate of the White House. That perfectly describes America.”
“The difference between us and those leaders is that we aren’t doing it for fame, we aren’t doing it for political gain, we aren’t doing it for money,” he said, speaking of Obama, Sharpton, Jackson, Dyson and the other establishment black leaders. “We’re doing it because every day that we’ve lived we’ve been denied normal human rights, and we could have lost our life. We don’t believe those leaders are properly representing our community. Because they are no longer a part of the community, they don’t speak for the community, and honestly they don’t do much for it. They do some things, because they have to, being 501(c)3s, but they don’t speak for the people.”
Jackson and Sharpton have been heckled by crowds in Ferguson and told to leave, along with crews from CNN. Tyler described CNN and other major news outlets, which steadfastly parrot back the official narrative, as “worse than politicians, worse than police.”
“So people in Ferguson is basically like, fuck Al Sharpton, and fuck Jesse Jackson, for real,” Tyler said. “And that’s the best way I can put it, for real, because they are co-opted, first off. They had their own movement. They were co-opted. Their movement got destroyed. Now they want to come to the new leaders and try to come in our movement and give guidance and stuff, but it’s a totally different generation. They marched with suits and ties and sung ‘Kumbaya’ and stuff. It’s people out there that look like him,” she said, motioning to T-Dubb-O, “shirtless, tattoos, like Bloods, Crips, whatever, out there just mad, because they was pissed off and they was passionate about it.”
“Jesse Jackson came, actually we were in the middle of a prayer for Michael Brown’s mother, and we were at the memorial site in Canfield Apartments, where he was killed and laid down in the street for four and a half hours,” Tyler said. “Everyone has their heads bowed and he comes over and starts shouting ‘No justice, no peace’ in the middle of a prayer. So instantly the community is pissed the fuck off—like who the hell is this? I finally recognized his face. I went over to him, because the guys were ready to fight him. Like, you don’t come over here and, this mother’s grieving, we’re all upset, and break up our prayer. And he’s all like ‘No justice, no peace!’ He has his bullhorn, and his sign and everything, just for a photo op. So I went over and I said to him, you probably should leave, because they’re really angry and they’re gonna get you out of here. And he was like ‘No justice, no peace!’ and he just kept chanting. So I moved out of the way, and the dudes told him, like ‘Hey bro, if you don’t back the fuck up we’re gonna make you leave.’ And he’s like, ‘This is what’s wrong with us!’ and ‘generational divide!’ and everything like that. And you know the community wasn’t taking for it, so he got scared, and him and the people he came with, like his best-dressed suit on and everything, and everybody was out there shirtless, or tank tops, or just in their normal clothes. And he came out there with a cameraman and everything, like this is just a frenzy or a freaking parade or something to film. So people were pissed off and he instantly left, and he hasn’t really been back since.”
“Every national organization you can think of is in St. Louis, Mo.,” T-Dubb-O said. “We have Urban League. We have the NAACP. We have all these different organizations. But yet for the last two decades we’ve always had one of the three top murder rates, one of the three highest crime rates. Poverty level is crazy, unemployment, you have all these mission statements on your website saying you do this and you do that, yet those programs aren’t available in our city. But you have offices here. You’re getting grants. But you’re not doing anything. And the community sees that now. So it’s gonna come a point in time to where all 501(c)3s, and all organizations, have to actually be active in the communities that they’re representing.”
The young Ferguson activists respect only the few national black leaders who do not try to speak for the movement or use the unrest as a media backdrop to promote themselves. Among those they admire is Cornel West.
“He was kind of like a big brother or father of the movement,” Tyler said of West. “Instead of stepping up, he always brought me with him. He always uplifted us. They’ll try to put him in front of the camera, he’d always bring somebody with him. He would say, ‘These are the people, these are the new leaders of the world, and you guys need to talk to them.’ He’s very transparent. He always voices and uplifts our name.”
The activists are preparing for increased unrest. And they are preparing for increased state repression and violence.
“As far as politics,” T-Dubb-O said, “it’s going to go either one of two ways. Right now we have a window that’s closing pretty fast, to where we can either re-create this system for something that’s going to actually be equal for all people, or they’re going to re-create the system to where we’ll never be able to punch it in the mouth like we did in Ferguson again.”
“We don’t know what it’s gonna look like, honestly,” he said of the coming unrest. “It’s been legal to kill a black man in this country. Just since Mike Brown, 11 more people has been killed by police in St. Louis alone, one being a woman who was raped then hung in jail. But none of the other murders got national coverage. It was just two standoffs with police yesterday. So I mean, we don’t know what that’s going to look like. We know we’re dedicated. We’re going to continue to fight. It’s going to take full-fledged revolution to make a change. The worst of the worst would be civil war. That’s just where my mind is.”
“I don’t see them pulling back,” he said of the state and its security forces. “They have no problem killing people. They have no problem shooting gas at babies, pregnant people, old people. They don’t have an issue with it. And our politicians are just standing around with their arms folded.”
“As long as the powers that be are in control, the oppression isn’t going to go anywhere,” he said. “It’s really going to take people to unite worldwide, not just in America, not just in St. Louis, not just in one particular city or state. It’s gonna have to be people identifying their struggles with each other worldwide, internationally, and say enough is enough. That’s the only way oppression will ever leave.”
seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 22, 2017 11:36 am wrote:Translating Trump’s inaugural Speech from the original German
By Juan Cole | Jan. 21, 2017 |
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, like the candidate himself, was a chain of falsehoods, saber-rattling and scary Neofascist uber-nationalism. But it could be difficult to follow because so much of it seemed stolen from the mass politics of the 1930s in central and southern Europe. So here is a plain English translation of some key passages.
Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning because today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the people.
You may be confused, as an English speaker. Trump, a billionaire real estate developer and serial grifter who founded a phony university that defrauded thousands, has appointed a cabinet of billionaires and multi-millionaires, the wealthiest and most elite cabinet in American history, which even includes the CEO of petroleum giant Exxon-Mobil.
How, you might ask, can he represent this coup by the super-rich as ‘giving’ power ‘back to’ ‘the people’? The people wouldn’t even be allowed on the grounds of the gated communities where Trump’s officials live.
The confusion arises from thinking in English instead of 1930s German. “Das Volk” or the people was a mystical conception for the German far right. It comprised the German people as an organic whole, uniting great landlord and lowly peasant. The great German corporations, too, were said to be expressions of “the people” (Hence the German automobile company Volkswagen, now led by perfectly nice people but not so much in the 1930s). The phrase comes into focus if you understand “the people” as “white Protestants and some lately admitted ethnic Catholics” who are united across social class (though of course led by their billionaire betters), and who stand in contrast to the cosmopolitans, the mixed-race people, infiltrating minorities, the socialists and others bent on diluting “the people” and subverting its prosperity and power by kowtowing to foreigners.
Trump also used the typical 1930s diction of the traitor within:
“For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.”
The traitors to das Volk, the people, are the intellectuals and persons with an international outlook, and socialists secretly working for an international cabal, and the peacemakers and diplomats– who were seen as weak and feckless. There are also religious and ethnic groups who polluted the integrity of the bodily fluids of the White body politic; for Trump these especially include Mexican-Americans and Muslims, though some people around him think that high-placed liberal Democratic Jews are manipulating the Fed against American interests. Obama was one of these infiltrators, the faux American born in Kenya who is secretly a Muslim or maybe a Muslim-Communist. These treasonous bureaucrats and artists and thinkers and soft businessmen ultimately make a pretty penny and gain social prestige and power by betraying the helpless Volk and reducing them to weakness and poverty. They may even be in the pay of foreign Powers.
The Volk are helpless before these traitors unless the natural leaders within the White community take charge and reestablish the mystical union between working class whites and corporate whites. The policy? Economic protectionism and monopoly capital inside one country. The enemy? International competitors like Chinese firms.
“But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
The United States has 5% of the world’s population. But its gross domestic product (GDP), at $18.5 trillion, is 22.5% of the GDP of the entire world in nominal terms! The US economy is the largest in the world and is substantially larger than that of its nearest competitor, China (at $11.5 trillion), which, however, has about 4 times as many people as the United States. That is, on a per person basis, Chinese are positively poverty-stricken compared to Americans. Trump has taken the most flourishing economy in the world, which admittedly has large internal inequalities, and made it an economic graveyard by his gloomy rhetoric. (He in fact intends to increase the inequalities). Only by proclaiming a crisis and obscuring the US success story and US prosperity can he hope to convince das Volk that they need a great leader to restore them to their previous glory. Note that abandoned factories are highlighted here, mostly caused by mechanization and robotification of labor so that the big corporations don’t need as many American workers. The actual blight on the landscape of oil spills and mercury dumps and coal-fired plants– the pollution caused by corporate malfeasance– is not mentioned, since, of course, the corporations are The People.
Crime, too, has dramatically fallen in the United States in the past 20 years, but Trump wants people to believe the opposite. Again, only if there is a crisis of brown and black crime will das Volk be willing to surrender their rights to the Great White Trump.
By the way, those gangs he alleges are laying waste to our cities? He isn’t talking about skinheads or white supremacists or neo-Nazis. They, of course, are an essential part of das Volk, perhaps even the shock troops of The People.
Likewise, US education is not the vast wasteland Trump depicts. The US ranks in the middle of industrialized countries on math and reading. But much of the shortfall is because of the lack of funding for schools in poor districts (since local schools are funded by local taxes, the school system reflects America’s vast class and racial inequalities). Trump’s idea of fixing these schools is not to pump Federal money into the poorer districts to even the playing field but to privatize the school system so that the poor can’t even afford schooling at all. That is the kind of thing Betsy DeVoss, who wants to use the government to indoctrinate children into extremist forms of Christianity, promotes.
I could go on analyzing Trump’s lies and his Neofascist code words. But you get the picture. He and his billionaire cabinet are the natural leaders of the white Volk of Amerika, so much so that they are The People. Unlike the racialists of the 1930s, he will allow some individuals from the minorities along for the ride if they are ideologically aligned with the real Americans. He is going to kick out the cosmopolitan, half-breed traitors in the name of America First (not being a historian of the United States, it was only about a decade ago that I discovered how ugly this seemingly admirable phrase is). And he is going to run down all of America’s beauty and achievements and causes for pride so as to pull the wool over the eyes of The People and get them to back him in a new, authoritarian coup government for the United States– one where de facto most of the Bill of Rights are abolished except for the Second Amendment.
—–
Related video added by Juan Cole:
Democracy Now! “Cornel West on Donald Trump: This is What Neo-Fascism Looks Like”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpuCv3cc5_o
http://www.juancole.com/2017/01/transla ... ginal.html
by RocketMan » Fri Aug 02, 2019 3:15 pm
In a ruling published late Tuesday, Judge John Koeltl of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York delivered a devastating blow to the US-led conspiracy against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
In his ruling, Judge Koeltl, a Bill Clinton nominee and former assistant special prosecutor for the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, dismissed “with prejudice” a civil lawsuit filed in April 2018 by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) alleging WikiLeaks was civilly liable for conspiring with the Russian government to steal DNC emails and data and leak them to the public.
Jennifer Robinson, a leading lawyer for Assange, and other WikiLeaks attorneys welcomed the ruling as “an important win for free speech.”
The decision exposes the Democratic Party in a conspiracy of its own to attack free speech and cover up the crimes of US imperialism and the corrupt activities of the two parties of Wall Street. Judge Koeltl stated:
If WikiLeaks could be held liable for publishing documents concerning the DNC’s political financial and voter-engagement strategies simply because the DNC labels them ‘secret’ and trade secrets, then so could any newspaper or other media outlet. But that would impermissibly elevate a purely private privacy interest to override the First Amendment interest in the publication of matters of the highest public concern. The DNC’s published internal communications allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of one of the two major political parties in the United States during a presidential election. This type of information is plainly of the type entitled to the strongest protection that the First Amendment offers.
The ruling exposes the illegality of the conspiracy by the US government, backed by the governments of Britain, Ecuador, Australia and Sweden and the entire corporate media and political establishment, to extradite Assange to the US, where he faces 175 years in federal prison on charges including espionage.
The plaintiff in the civil case—the Democratic Party—has also served as Assange’s chief prosecutor within the state apparatus for over a decade. During the Obama administration, Democratic Party Justice Department officials, as well as career Democratic holdovers under the Trump administration, prepared the criminal case against him.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 02, 2019 3:46 pm
Judge tosses Democratic Party lawsuit against Trump campaign, Russia, WikiLeaks
PUBLISHED WED, JUL 31 2019 3:33 PM EDTUPDATED WED, JUL 31 2019 4:23 PM EDT
Dan Mangan
@_DANMANGAN
KEY POINTS
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by the Democratic National Committee against President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, its leaders, Russia, WikiLeaks and others related to hacking of Democratic party computers and dissemination of electronic material stolen to help Trump’s election prospects.
Judge John Koetl said that although the “primary wrongdoer in this alleged criminal enterprise is undoubtedly the Russian Federation,” a lawsuit against that government is barred by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
The DNC had claimed that Russia, whose intelligence operatives in 2016 infiltrated the computers of the Democratic party and the campaign of its eventual presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, had found in the Trump campaign “a willing and active partner in its effort.”
......
“The Russian Federation cannot be sued in the courts of the United States for governmental actions, subject to certain limited exceptions not present in this case, just as the United States government generally cannot be sued in courts abroad for its actions,” Koetl wrote in his ruling in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/31/judge-t ... leaks.html
by PufPuf93 » Fri Aug 02, 2019 4:41 pm
RocketMan » Fri Aug 02, 2019 8:50 am wrote:Yeah, and he will not be silenced about the criminality that the Democratic party is complicit in, the discussion of which you strive to tamp down, silence, minimize and drown out here, playing some sort of whack-a-mole from thread to thread.
Someone criticizing the Democratic party? Here you are with the mile-long posts, complete with ample photos of partisan harmony... Someone mention Cornel West? Well here you are with your pages and pages of transcript from some other Cornel West interview. And hell, you epitomize how difficult it is to have exactly the sorts of conversations about the Democratic party that West describes.
If I need to hear how wonderful the Democratic party is, I will gladly watch MSNBC clips on YouTube or read Washington Post, New York Times or Vox. I come here for the critical analysis, thank you very much.
by seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 02, 2019 6:13 pm
by Grizzly » Fri Aug 02, 2019 9:04 pm
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